461: Re-tend That Garden
16 Dec 2021One host floods a closet, another hot-swaps a RAID-0 disk, and the third endorses American cheese. (Any guesses on who’s who?)
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Why would one deliberately launch
TextEdit‽ - The flood 😱
- Why would one deliberately launch
- Follow-up:
- Andrew shares a Consumer Reports link regarding lithium batteries in smoke detectors
- LG Screen Manager (App Store Link) now supports M1 Macs (via Dave Stachowiak)
- Casey’s LG UltraFine adventures continue
- LG non-UltraFine 4K and 60Hz HDMI
- 24UD58-B 24” IPS Monitor with Freesync, Black
Menu→Picture→Picture Adjust→HDMI ULTRA HD Deep Color
- Casey’s new desk setup
- Potential Magic Mouse fixes
- Monterey 12.1
- Suggestion from Charity Majors
- LG is working on three new monitors?
#askatp:- Tips for Android → iPhone converts? (via Steve Wellington)
- Do any of us use Finder replacements like PathFinder? (via Sam)
- Do we use Swift for anything other than iOS/macOS apps? (via Jan de Geest)
- Post-show: A Synology Adventure
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Chapters
- Preflight
- The flood
- Sponsor: Linode
- Lithium 9Vs in smoke alarms
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- Casey’s Corner 🖼️
- Life’s Good 🖼️
- Apple-display rumors
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: First-iPhone tips
- #askatp: Finder alternatives
- #askatp: Swift for scripting, etc.
- Ending theme
- A Synology adventure
Preflight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright. And then if we don’t have a better post-show, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a Synology Adventure a week or two back that you will, that both of you will find quite humorous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I almost died again. But we don’t have to do that if we end up on something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we might leave there a little bit earlier. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That scares me. I don’t know. I don’t like where this is going at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long is your pre-show going to be? If your pre-show is going to be an hour long, maybe think of it as a topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, I’m very scared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, what is that movie? I mean, I think The Fugitive Desert, a few other ones. Todd tweets about it sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John where like, the title card for the movie comes up like 40 minutes in. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the other one is like, when does the last credit appear on the screen? Some of those are like, you know, 40, 50 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John into the movie, the last like, it says, you know, directed by whatever, like 50 minutes of the movie is ridiculous. So. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be one of those days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh wait, I need to open IRC, shoot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t have it open either. I kind of dislike textual, because textual is taking over
⏹️ ▶️ John the TEX shortcut, you know what I mean? Because I don’t want to launch text edit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, wait, you launch text edit? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John For what? Sometimes I need styled text. For what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need fonts, you know? Yeah, but if you’re, I mean, anything I would use rich text for, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would do in pages, because it’s probably something I’m printing out. Pages, come on. Why else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would I use rich text?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I kind of agree with Markle on this one, to be honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, all plain text documents open up in TextMate, and for you I’m sure it’s BBEdit, and for Casey I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure it’s some kind of garbage thing made by Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John non-native app. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never actually used it, I don’t even know how good it is. I’m sure it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, TextEdit launches real fast, and if you just want to do some style text, like, let’s say you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to print a label or something, I just want to launch an app that launches real quick I can open up the launchers real quick
⏹️ ▶️ John and print some style text.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No way I would launch pages, you kidding? I guess I
⏹️ ▶️ John would just use pages for that. Oh, text edit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launches instantly. Maybe you’re so accustomed to using a 12 year old computer that now that you have a fast one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you don’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, pages also launches instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, let’s see how long pages takes. Three, four, five, six,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey six bounces. All right, now the text came up.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, now let’s see text edit. Text edit, one, done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s six times faster. As counted, it bounces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, fair enough.
The flood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before the show, John has instituted over the last, I don’t know, six months, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year, something that he likes to call pre-flight, where we kind of run through what we’re going to talk about. And it’s actually very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helpful as much as I give him grief for it. And Marco just kind of slid in in the midst of pre-flight. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a pre-show, which is fine. That’s not entirely unusual. And then as we keep talking, I said, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I have an after show about how I had a heart attack about my sonology. And Marco said, well, that might come up before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the after show. I’m getting really nervous and I would like to end my misery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quickly as possible. So what’s going on Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, let me start by saying That my Mac mini flooded my closet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? What are you talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think what kind of things involving water does the Mac mini control? the ice machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s Here’s what happened listeners When I moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from the Mac Mini as my desktop, when the Pro laptops came out, I switched, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to my desktop laptop, which I’m still extremely happy with. And in fact, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini and TIFF’s old Intel MacBook Pro are both, as we speak, sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their traded-in boxes waiting to be shipped out. The Mac Mini is no longer gonna be used as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a home server. Because what I was using it for, so here, backing up a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I got the new laptop, I figured I have some uses for a home server here and there, pretty light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses if I’m honest, but I could use one here and there. Network storage is probably the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use case. And then I was thinking like, in the past I’ve used my Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in the other house, I used an old Intel Mac mini to run the crappy software for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my scanner and stuff like that that I didn’t want cluttering up my main Mac. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I had the Synology back at home, I would run the iSCSI terminator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that Mac Mini because iSCSI is such a garbage fire on Mac OS. But I was using iSCSI so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the backplates could back it up, remember that whole thing. So anyway, so I thought, I have some uses for a home server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the idea. And I had two eight terabyte external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSDs that were serving as massive storage for both me and TIFF.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were serving as time machine hosting as well as archive storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because they were mounted on a Mac, the archive storage was also being backed up to Backblaze. So I figured that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a really good solution overall. And I originally got the SSDs so that it could live in my office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they don’t make any noise and I don’t allow fans in my office. So it was fine in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office, but my office here is kind of small and I wanted to get it out of my office because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it’s operating as a server, a Mac Mini doesn’t really need to be next to you. It can be anywhere in your network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it serves the same purpose. So I happen to have a closet nearby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hosts the router and the switch. I figured I can put the Mac mini in this closet. It’s perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. There’s plenty of room for it on this high up shelf. All the networking gear is right there. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought the Mac mini in there, you know, about a month ago. And I also brought with it the two eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabyte external SSDs. And each one of those is just in like a $15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cable Matters enclosure from Amazon where like, you know, one side is metal the bottom plate is plastic and just like you know basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C external enclosure. I did run into a couple of issues there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The M1 Mac Mini is actually kind of a crappy server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems to require a keyboard to be connected to it to boot. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried from previous Mac Minis I knew that if you were gonna run a Mac Mini headless that you would want one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those little HDMI dummy port dongle things, that way it thinks there’s a hardware monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged in. That was the first thing I got. But the M1 series of Mac minis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is more complicated than that to run headless. You actually need a keyboard connected, otherwise it will not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boot headless. And I had mixed luck getting it to boot or not boot with a password.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It ended up being complicated. So that was kind of crappy, and I didn’t love that. Other than that, it seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work okay. But I did notice that every so often I would open up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that closet and it would be really warm in there. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m thinking like is it is all I’ve changed recently is I put this Mac Mini there. Well I reached up and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco felt and I noticed that those SSDs run pretty hot actually. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason an SSD that is idle most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever reason these things run really hot. I imagine not all SSDs are like this, but these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big eight terabyte cheapo micron ones were definitely like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why Sony requires a heatsink on SSDs that if you buy like a third party M.2 SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John for your PlayStation 5, you must use a heatsink with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Interesting, yeah, I mean, I never really thought about whether SSDs run hot, because I always assumed they wouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, I mean, I’m sure it depends a lot on what they are and how they’re controlled and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these definitely run pretty hot. I also noticed that the surface of the Mac mini itself was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it’s in a warm closet, it actually was kind of warm as well. I kind of made a mental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco note, like I should probably move these somewhere else sometime. Well, the other day I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working in that closet a little bit we have a printer in there too, as I was trying to feed some stuff into the printer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I noticed that the shelf was wet. What? Because one other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I keep in that closet, it will kept in that closet. Oh no, blocks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ice. is a gallon of distilled water for putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into my rowing machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, is this distilled water? So then it shouldn’t conduct electricity as easily right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a theoretical. I hope yeah, so I noticed that the gallon of distilled water that was back there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was about half filled and kind of imploded slightly like as if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there had been some thermal contraction.
⏹️ ▶️ John no is the the gallon of whatever water that’s on the floor right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No it’s up on the shelf along with everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, imagine that. You put a thing of water high up on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that. Imagine. It could just happen to you. It could just happen to you, John. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John happens. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy. Don’t you want it on the ground? You don’t want to reach up to a high shelf and pull down a big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of water. It’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shelf. The weight wasn’t a problem. Calum, what are weights? What, like seven pounds? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John learn putting water up high is called a water tower, and it’s to get water pressure to places
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in the Midwest, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t do that in your house unless you’re trying to create a miniature water tower for a tiny Lego village that you have on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, anyway, most of the water, well, about half of that gallon of water had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaked out over some time period. It sure looks like it was due to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some thermal issues that were happening nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it got so hot that it melted or weakened the wall of a plastic container containing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seemed to have weakened the wall of it enough to make a tiny little hole somewhere on like one of the seams.
⏹️ ▶️ John What kind of container is this coming? Can you describe? Like what is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like a gallon of milk, you know, that big plastic…
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly like a gallon of milk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like that big plastic thing with a handle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, okay. Yeah, no, do not put jugs full of milk high up on shelves near electronics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you doing? It’s distilled water. It’s not conducting. Anyway, I’d never seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this happen before! It’s right next to the mineral oil!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, fortunately nothing was damaged and the water didn’t escape the shelf and stain the floor or anything. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. And it didn’t even seem to stain the shelf somehow. I guess it’s a good shelf. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides a couple of sheets of printer paper that got wet and got ruined, and a few cardboard boxes for things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t need anymore, including this Mac Mini, nothing else seemed to have been damaged by this. fortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, are you going to trade in this Mac Mini now that’s been in the water?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mac Mini was not in the water. It was on, it was one shelf above. Alright. Same closet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one shelf above. Anyway, so I realized I need to, I need to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, get rid of the situation now. I mean also I need to stop collecting water in my closet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that, that’s, that problem just solved itself. There is now no more water left in my closet.
⏹️ ▶️ John My closet has good drainage. Did it just leak out of your house?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it just it sat on the shelf like it wasn’t it didn’t have enough surface tension or there wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough volume of water to overcome the surface tension make it go over the edge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was just like a like a shallow layer of water on the shelf but I got it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not the point of the story.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have photo we need even if you don’t post them just we need some private photos of. Yes, concur.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t take I was busy freaking out and getting paper towels.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. I’m just going to say to the listeners, in general, I know you hear the idea of like a server closet
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but closets are terrible places for anything that produces heat. Unless you
⏹️ ▶️ John ventilated closet, a closet that has airflow going into and out of it, don’t put things
⏹️ ▶️ John in closets or media cabinets for that matter, if they’re entirely enclosed. You need some source of fresh,
⏹️ ▶️ John cool air for your electronics to be healthy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Turns out. So anyway, and yeah, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ventilated closet. Although the networking gear does fine in there. You know, it’s the Ubiquiti Dream Machine, a big switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it does fine because it’s more tolerant, but it’s not great for that either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I’ve never, I’ve literally like, with the exception of since I’m with a Mac mini in there, I’ve never opened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up that closet and felt it noticeably warm. And it’s an interior closet to the house, so it doesn’t get too hot in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer or too cold in the winter either. So anyway, I realized I have to adjust my Mac mini setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have a couple of places around the house, I could put it, that are like somewhat enclosed, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better thermally controlled. Like there’s a utility closet on the outside that has electrical stuff in it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fairly controlled. So I’m like, all right, I could put it in there. But I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing all this, you know, this Mac Mini, I looked up the trade-in price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the trade-in price was like $800.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With Apple or with someone else? With Apple. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was like, all right, I could trade this in. What do I actually need this for?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Could I get away with less? Is there something else that I could spend the $800 on that might solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my needs in a better way? And or, you know, something like, this is not a great solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have here. It seems like both a waste of a perfectly good M1 workstation computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could be used in other ways. And also, you know, this is not a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage solution physically or logically, like as I mentioned, it’s kind of a crappy home server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I thought, all right, let me think about some other options here. As much as I hated to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco admit this, I thought maybe some kind of network attached storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would probably solve this need better. The main thing I needed it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Time Machine. Tiff and I now both have large laptop internal storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we can fit almost all of our archive files on our laptops. All we really need something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else for is Time Machine. The time machine does have to be fairly large though. Tiff’s laptop is eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes minus four. I need a lot of terabytes of time machine and not much else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I basically just need like, what were those time capsules? I need a time capsule, but like for the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would be best solved by a network attached storage device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, putting storage on the network would indeed be best solved by a network attached
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage device. I agree. that you
⏹️ ▶️ John do not store in a closet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what did you buy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you buy a Synology?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a Synology. I got another one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Attaboy. Which one did you get?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here, I’m not even sure I should tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Honestly, I’m not up to date on the newest Synology stuff. In fact, I was just discussing this with a friend via text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other day. My Synology, my primary Synology that I use probably more than either of you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still the original one that Synology sent us in like 2013. It’s almost 10 years old. Now granted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the ship of Theseus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 1813 plus, right? Yeah, yeah, yep, yep, the 1813 plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John upgraded the RAM on mine, did I tell you that? No, you didn’t, was that easy? When Synology’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 7 came out, they said, oh, you know, you can get by with as much RAM or we recommend that much. I’m like, huh, I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John how hard it is to upgrade the RAM on Synology. Turns out it’s not hard at all. It’s super cheap, I bought a little RAM expansion
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, opened it up, shoved it on. While I was in there, I sprayed out some of the dust, slapped it back together. It’s got like double the
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM that it had before.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, still going strong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we put that in the parking lot and talk about it later, please? Because I genuinely would like to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that, but we can take that offline. So yeah, so anyway, very briefly, so I have this 1813
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus that’s sitting here now, despite my tale of woe that I’ll hopefully get to later, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running really well, but I know the clock is ticking. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, as listeners have really found out last couple of weeks. I am a little bit on the frugal side and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to buy another 8-bay Synology and then the proper answer is probably to fill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it with all new hard drives rather than to just extract the ones in the current Synology and punt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them over to the new one. So that’s like a several thousand dollar expenditure that I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right now. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much space are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you using? I think I’m using around 11 terabytes at the moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, I can tell you exactly how much it would cost to replace that because I I just did that. Good, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well tell me more. Okay. But then Marco gave the one that’s all SSDs. Yeah, that’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I thought about it. So first I thought, all right, if I get, they made a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, I don’t think any of them are still made, but they made some that only took 2 1⁄2 inch disks. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, you don’t want that, that’s gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a little tiny six bay. Oh, I bet that was adorable. It was, yeah, there’s a six bay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s called the DS620 Slim. It doesn’t seem like it’s currently made, but you can still find a couple of them sale here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there, but it’s like a little tiny 6 bay SSD only one which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought was kind of cool, but I realized like okay for my actual needs here, A, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have six SSD size discs, I don’t really need to or want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have those, and also I want this to be very large storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it can be very large, very cheap, you know, and so I’m looking at three and a half inch drives, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also realize like I also don’t want like my needs here while they are large they are also simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not running Plex on this thing. I’m not going to get into like the Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fest and running apps and having it download pirated movies for me everything I’m not gonna do any of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just needs to host time machine. A Raspberry Pi could possibly have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this you know it with more work. So it’s it’s really it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway so I decided I’m just going to get a small one. Now I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Merlin would kill me if I got a 2 bay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is correct, by the way. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really only want two disks. If all I’m doing is Time Machine, theoretically I could get a 1 bay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John just get a single 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabyte hard drive and be fine. Like that’s all I would really need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in your defense, when we had first gotten these synologies almost a decade ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and I were talking, maybe it was all three of us, but I remember particularly you and Marco were talking about how to allocate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these eight drives. And what you had said you were going to do, and I agreed with it, and still am doing to this day, is you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said you were going to, what is it, raid zero, two of the physical drives, which is to say, make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as though it’s virtually one large drive. But the only thing that gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put on that drive is Time Machine. Because that’s redundant. And yes, I’m sure John is fuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. But I concur with you, Marco, that for something that is already redundant, it is not the end of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the earth if it poops the bed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you have time machine and backblaze, you’re pretty well covered and you can put that time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a single disk or a raid zero or whatever. It’s fine. If you like to live
⏹️ ▶️ John dangerously, I’ll cross that bridge when I eventually run out of storage, because, you know, that’s like the last bridge. Like, how do I
⏹️ ▶️ John get more storage back? Well, I’ll break that raid array.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You know, break that raid five array and then
⏹️ ▶️ John put it into raid zero. Voila! You’ve like doubled yours. And that’s the way I run out of storage. Like, you know, because we
⏹️ ▶️ John back up everything to time machine to that all the laptops in the house, all the desktops, everything, and that adds up after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while. Yeah. So anyway, I realized my actual storage needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, you know, they’re large in the sense of, you know, we have roughly 12 terabytes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe 13 of time machine data that I want to back up. That’s a lot. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also modern hard drives go up to 18 terabytes. So in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sense, it is a lot like in absolute terms. But relative to modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drives, if you’re buying new equipment, it kind of isn’t a lot. That’s why I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could get away with a one or two bay one, because really I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need one drive worth of storage. So I looked at my options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ended up going with one called the DS420J. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four bays, and it has otherwise pretty minimal features. Nothing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot swappable on it. It doesn’t have, I don’t think it has any of the like fancy media encoding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features or anything like that. But what’s nice about the 420J is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is compact and quiet and low powered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you’re going to put it in a closet or something, those are pretty attractive qualities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not that expensive. It’s $300 empty. That’s really not bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a four base Synology, that’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by the way, looking at the official site for this device, DS420J
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a 4-Bay desktop NAS designed for home data backup, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re barking up the correct tree, I would say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But is it rated for outdoor use? Oh, gosh. As
⏹️ ▶️ John long as there’s a roof over it, it’ll be fine, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, theoretically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Totally, totally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The rain doesn’t get to that area. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I got it. I set it up today. and I put into it only two drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far. I figure if I really need expansion later, I can expand later. I probably never will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s good to have the four bays for flexibility in the future if need be, given that the price was so good on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the drives I got were two Seagate, whatever, whatever, 18 terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives that for some reason are on sale right now for like $350 each. Where, how do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the drives in this thing? You actually like unscrew the butt. It’s like those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old overalls where you’d unbutton things for the butt access panel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I saw the back panel, I see two big openings for fans. So you open that up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You see those giant black thumbscrews on the corners of the fan panel? You unscrew all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those and the whole back hinges down. And then does it flap down like
⏹️ ▶️ John a door? Yeah, I see it. Do the fans come with it when it hinges down? Yes. And then it’s just four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vertically stacked. And then yeah, you have these four trays you pull out and stick the hard drives in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it’s fine. I did the new setup, like I mean, the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I set up a Synology was 2013. They’ve come a long way since then. I did it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from an iPhone app to start, like the whole finding your IP and setting up your admin password and stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did like the rest of the setup via the web interface, like when I had to enable time machine shares. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally fine to set up. It was a very quick and easy process. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. So overall, I’m satisfied so far. We’ll see how it goes, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will be a really good solution. And I’ve decided here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past, I have had issues, as talked on the show, about how the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heck do you back up a Synology? You can’t use Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any good cloud backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use B2. Well, right, but you can’t have unlimited capacity. You gotta pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per gig, and you can use various services to pay per gig. Backblaze B2 is one of those services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you could do S3 or whatever else. So those options exist. I don’t love those options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I decided to do with this is because we now both have these large laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because of Synology, we mostly just need it for Time Machine, I decided to only use it for Time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Machine, effectively. Maybe I’ll, like, you know, if I have some kind of weird app I wanna run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, maybe I’ll do that in the future. Again, I don’t think it’s very likely, but what I really want here is for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computers themselves that we’re using to be the primary storage and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the network attach thing only be for backup. And that way I never have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about how the heck I back up this analogy. I
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend eventually, like it’s hard for me to believe that you’re gonna have this four base analogy that you only have two bays filled on,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re only ever gonna use it for Time Machine. Eventually, inevitably, you’re gonna fill those other two bays, then you’re gonna have more storage
⏹️ ▶️ John than you need, then you’re gonna put files on it, and then you’re gonna think about backing it up. And when you do that, several years from now, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John here to tell you, like using the native or whatever, the Synology B2 backup thing and just
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing it not at your time machine volume, but at your other volume. It’s really simple, it’s pretty darn cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as cheap as like the $5 flat rate per month, whatever Backblaze is now, you pay per,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, byte that you store, but to give an example, you know what I back up from my
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology there? Yes, there’s a smattering of files that are only on the Synology for storage or whatever. And of course they get backed
⏹️ ▶️ John up through B2. I back up my media library, which I don’t need any of that. I can reconstitute
⏹️ ▶️ John that at any time from other sources, but I don’t want to, so I pay to back it up to B2. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about things like rip Blu-rays and stuff? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s gotta be a fortune. It’s not, it’s like $8 a month. No, B2’s really cheap. Yeah, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying, it’s not that much money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked at this and for 10 terabytes, it was not cheap at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I also have two Synologies, and I’m back up one Synology to the other Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ John A subset of it, right? So I’ve got the big Synology, and then a subset of the big Synology syncs again through
⏹️ ▶️ John built-in software that comes with the Synology, I can sync a subset of it to the other Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s five terabyte, five dollars per terabyte per month. So that’s, you know, 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks a month for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have like a giant media library.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, that’s the problem with having a giant media library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I’ve decided for that, like, I mean, look, I’ve, I ripped a lot of Blu-rays and DVDs in my time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided like, you know, I have all those sitting on my, my other Synology. I have all those sitting there and I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch them. Most of the movies that I’ve bought on physical media,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either I never watch or when I want to watch them, I can watch them on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever iTunes is called now because I hooked up that Movies Anywhere thing years back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all those purchases, I redeemed all the Blu-ray codes for all the discs I had. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every movie I own on physical media in any modern format like Blu-ray, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have access to that for free or for no additional cost through iTunes. So I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always just go and watch those whenever I want. And yeah, the quality is not going to be as good streaming, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, playing off of the Apple Store compared to a much higher bitrate Blu-ray, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also just don’t care anymore. And I’ve decided like the simplicity of that setup is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much nicer than having to maintain my own like physical copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, physical or digital copy of this thing, like sitting on a disc I own somewhere and having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about things like file management and backups and data integrity, like all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve just decided like I, there’s so much in my life that I care so deeply about and that I nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out about. I had to get rid of some stuff and that’s one of the things I got rid of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, and that makes sense, especially if you’re only consuming media that’s easily replaceable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buyable, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we’ve talked about a lot, and I don’t need to belabor the point, that I tend to track down, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t necessarily, that’s not like a tongue-in-cheek way of saying pirate, although occasionally that might happen. But generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m able to track down or, you know, YouTube DL or something, something that doesn’t exist anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else or doesn’t exist in a way that’s easily replaceable and so on and so forth. So I think for your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purposes, and I don’t mean to sound dismissive, I apologize if I do, but for your purposes, I agree with you. What you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the right approach. For me, it’s not quite so simple because not only do I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of media that’s not easy to replace, but I’m often tweaking that media. So I’m adding chapters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or doing this or doing that. And so that’s part of the reason why I am going through this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous amount of administrivia and headache to maintain my Plex library, because as ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it probably seems and maybe is, it does provide me an immense amount of joy and it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy for me to just replace. Like John, you said a minute ago, oh, I can just get this stuff back from other sources. A lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff I have in Plex I could, but not all of it. And I would be devastated if I lost it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not so much that I can’t get the stuff back. It’s that I do tend my Plex library a little bit. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John put custom artwork on some things because I didn’t like the default ones. I messed with the metadata. I have 17 versions of Star
⏹️ ▶️ John Wars that I kind of have to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hand roll because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Plex just knows about Star Wars, but then I got all the different versions and I want them labeled and, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if it went away and I lost that, it’s like, oh, well, you can get those things back.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now I have to go and retent that garden. I have to remember where did I find
⏹️ ▶️ John that good artwork that I like this? Did I save a little subfolder of like Synology custom artwork on my Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or did I not do that? You know, how did I set up the metadata for these different versions of Star Wars so they’re all set
⏹️ ▶️ John up correctly? You know, just how do I recreate the folder structure the right way? Like it’s not just the data. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the it’s the tending to it. The same thing with my photo library. Worst case scenario, like I have my photos backed up
⏹️ ▶️ John a million times, including to Google Photos again. but Google Photos doesn’t have any of my metadata about it and I would be devastated
⏹️ ▶️ John to lose all that metadata. So part of me backing up my, you know, iCloud photo library a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John times is because I never wanna lose all of the work that I have poured into tending that particular
⏹️ ▶️ John garden of, you know, tagging photos and editing them and cropping them and putting them into albums
⏹️ ▶️ John and sub albums and the smart folders and like, you know, keywords and like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John time I’ve invested into this library. It’s not a lot of data. That metadata is probably like, you know, less than 100
⏹️ ▶️ John megabytes or something, but that is the most important part of it. Yes, obviously you want the photos themselves, which is why in the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, my backstop against my backstop against my backstop is, you know, oh, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John I still have the photos and that’s better than, you know, that’s what you really want. But the real thing that would devastate
⏹️ ▶️ John me if I still had the photos is if I lost all that metadata. I do less tweaking to Plex. There’s probably enough customization that
⏹️ ▶️ John one day worth of banging my head against it, I could get it back to the way I wanted it, but I don’t wanna spend that day. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I just back it all up. Yeah, and the good thing about network attack storage is for me anyway, it’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John noisy thing, but it’s in my basement. I never hear it. I never see it. It backs up the B2 with me having not
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do anything and it just runs and it’s been running for 10 years with no problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I cannot say enough good things about Synology. And that’s why as cheap as I am, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point either because I’ll be forced to or because I’m finally being proactive, I will be buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another one. Now, maybe it won’t be 8 bay, maybe it’ll be 6 because you know, drives are getting bigger, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know. I haven’t really looked into it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the thing I’m telling you, my setup here was about $1,000 total for 18 terabytes of RAID 1. That’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. And I have two extra bays for the future if I really need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But the drives are so big, the days of any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the three of us needing a six bay NAS are over.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well. I don’t know, when I look at them, I also look at new Synologies and I think because storage
⏹️ ▶️ John is so cheap, I think both Casey and I are of the mind that if we had like 10
⏹️ ▶️ John times more space, we could think of things to use it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco heck yes. That’s the thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really can’t. Like that’s why I went this direction. Like I looked at, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my personal slice of the archive drive? Like, you know, Tiff’s is a little bit bigger because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she has more of the family photos like from big events and stuff. But my slice of the archive drive is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and a half terabytes. So I just copied those files onto my laptop in a folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called archive. And it fit, you know, I have less free space now, but I still,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still fit just fine. And so now that’s okay, this is just primary storage. Now, archive is simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, you know, a filing system as opposed to, not a file system, a filing system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concept as opposed to like, you know, a physical distinction of how it is stored.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I, again, I don’t mean to sound dismissive. I think for the purposes that you are talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, I think you made the exact right choice. And I’m glad that hashtag Casey was right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that you should have indeed eventually end up with a sonology. So what we’re learning over the last month or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so on ETP is that I need to listen to you more, you need to listen to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably neither of those things is going to end up happening. That’s okay. Alright, so now that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re 40 minutes in, you want to start the show?
⏹️ ▶️ John Directed by Marco Arment.
Sponsor: Linode
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Lithium 9Vs in smoke alarms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you have the XDR yet? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. I do have a new desk setup, though, which we can talk about and will talk about in just a few minutes. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I do not have an XDR yet. I have not purchased an XDR yet. My desk setup is ever-changing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no, nothing yet. But we have to start with a little bit of housekeeping,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suppose. And one of you would like to talk about lithium batteries and smoke detectors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, Andrew on Twitter pointed us to a Consumer Reports article counteracting our
⏹️ ▶️ John advice from past shows that say you can use these really cheap lithium 9-volt batteries, really long-lasting
⏹️ ▶️ John 9-volt batteries in your smoke detectors because they last much longer than alkalines, and you don’t have to change them
⏹️ ▶️ John as often. Here’s what Consumer Reports has to say. Lithium 9-volts aren’t recommended for smoke detectors
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you follow a strict battery replacement schedule. Those batteries maintain a high voltage until the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John their usable life, so they provide a much shorter low battery warning to alert you that it’s time to swap in a fresh one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alkaline batteries, by comparison, have a more gradual voltage drop-off, prolonging the low battery alert
⏹️ ▶️ John and greatly increasing the odds that you’ll be nearby to get the alert. So here’s Consumer Reports doing a very bad
⏹️ ▶️ John job of what is their basic job. All right, so this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is their advice. Hey, just don’t use lithium-9 volts.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, and here’s why, right? But there is no sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John quantifiable information. Okay, so you’ll have less time to to hear the beeping. The whole idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the smoke alarms beep when the voltage gets too low, right? So if you can graph the voltage of a battery over time,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some threshold after which the smoke detector starts beeping and you can imagine lots of differently shaped curves.
⏹️ ▶️ John The question is, like how long if you don’t, if you ignore an alkaline battery, you know, in your smoke
⏹️ ▶️ John detector and it starts beeping, how long would it beep? Say you’re on vacation for a month,
⏹️ ▶️ John it starts beeping, beeping the second you walk out the door. When you come back a month from now, is it still beeping? How long does
⏹️ ▶️ John an alkaline battery beep in your smoke detector? A day, a week, a month, two months? We don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, how long does a lithium beep in your smoke detector? 30 seconds? One minute?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it beep once and never again? Or does it beep for one week instead of two? I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t make an informed decision about whether or not I should use lithium 9-volt batteries in my smoke detectors without knowing how short
⏹️ ▶️ John is the low battery warning. Yes, you might be out of the house when it beeps, but I would like to know, does it beep for 30
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds? Or does it beep for three days instead of two days? Or instead of two weeks or whatever? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an important question. And they do touch on, okay, if you have a battery replacement schedule and you just put a reminder
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, every year replace all the smoke detector batteries on, you know, whenever we set the clocks back
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you won’t have a problem with this. But this advice, I wanted to put on the show because
⏹️ ▶️ John we did recommend the use of these lithium nine volts and we want you to know that apparently there is a potential problem, but I can’t quantify
⏹️ ▶️ John that problem or know how seriously to take it because A, it’s consumer reports and have weird opinions on stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And B, they don’t tell me how much shorter it’s going to be, because that is the most important fact
⏹️ ▶️ John in deciding whether this is important advice that I should definitely follow or advice that I can ignore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because there’s an obvious trade-off. If a lithium battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lasts two or three times longer than an alkaline battery, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimizing for time the smoke alarm is working, then that’s a pretty big benefit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then so you have to weigh that. depending on how, as you’re always saying, we don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much shorter is the beeping window. Who knows? There’s no data here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sounds like the kind of thing that, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco established people with established mindsets have a hard time adjusting to new things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try to immediately disregard or discredit some kind of new option as, ah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t do that, it’s not safe, or it’s not the way we used to do it. And that kind of attitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often is the cause of myths and quote wisdom that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true spreading around. And this sounds a lot like that kind of thing to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is actual science that in the sense that lithium-based batteries do have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher nominal voltages than alkalines. I think they’re slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above 1.5 and like things that try to detect their battery level based on the assumptions of alkaline battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voltages will often not detect it correctly in either lithiums or going the other direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you put in rechargeables. Like the rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries that everybody uses in most things, like rechargeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AA’s and everything, those have a lower nominal voltage than AA’s. So when you put those in something, I think those are 1.2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 1.3 volts instead of 1.5. Off the top of my head, I could be wrong, but it’s lower. And so when you put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those in something, oftentimes it will think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have a low battery, even when you don’t. And then those also have a different kind of curve of like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they fall off. like alkaline batteries fall off kind of gradually, nickel metal hydride I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a little bit flatter of a curve, and then lithium has a much flatter curve, where lithium will stay at a high voltage level until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty close to the end, which is the problem they’re citing here. But anyway, this claim about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safety issue with lithiums I think needs more information to be backed up here. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re actually that concerned about your smoke alarm safety, you should get the ones that have the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco permanent built-in 10-year lithium batteries, And then when they die,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re designed for lithiums, so they probably have the correct voltage curve adjusted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for in their beepiness, when they die, you replace the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s the currently best recommended practice for smoke alarms in your house, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way you get all new sensors and everything in addition to a new battery when you get a new unit. So if you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that concerned about safety, do that. And otherwise, if you’re gonna replace your nine volts in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existing smoke alarms, I still think lithiums are fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, you should probably replace the whole smoke detector, especially if it’s in like an area like near the kitchen where like greasy smoke
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff can accumulate. After 10 years, even if the battery’s not dead, It’s probably a good idea to get a new one.
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Casey’s Corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s go to Casey’s Corner, and I’m not talking about the restaurant at Walt Disney World. I have a whole bunch of hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, there’s a restaurant at Disney called Casey’s Corner?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. There sure is. They serve hot dogs and other things of the like. It’s delicious.
⏹️ ▶️ John They serve like Velveeta. Boar’s Head American cheese, white American, yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey now, you know, can you return to our puzzle? That would be
⏹️ ▶️ John incredible. Velveeta shells and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheese. I actually have several pictures of me in front of it, which if I remember, which I I won’t. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you one for this chapter of the show notes, but I will surely forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nevertheless. You inspired my wife to get Borset white American cheese at the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey store the other week. It’s good. And?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always liked it. I’ve liked it my whole life. It’s good. I ate it. Good. See?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I’m still a yellow American person, but otherwise, I admit the white American is very good as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. See? Now that is useful follow-up. That is what I like to hear. All right. So let’s talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about- Is this the only food and drink opinion that the three of us share?
⏹️ ▶️ John actually. We all find Boris Head American cheese acceptable. Thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. No, actually, really, truly, I think you might be onto something. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John water too? Not distilled, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Too soon. Too soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two of you have a fraught relationship with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water. We do. so the mark of the both of us now
Life’s Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So hey, the LG Screen Manager app, which is this piece of garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that you can install on a Mac in order to update the firmware on your LG UltraFine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K, as we discussed a show or two ago, that only successfully worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Intel Macs. And as of the last day or two, it now works on M1 Macs, which is great. And that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Dave Stachowiak via Twitter. So we’ll put that link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the show notes if you have an LG 5k or presumably 4k you can check that out if you have an M1 Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now let’s talk about my LG. It is no longer in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey After nine days of pestering LG I have finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten a RMA and it is finally on its way back to LG. Thankfully the repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center is super close. Let me see where it is. Oh, City of Industry California.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now this thing is going to probably go in a truck all the way the way to California to probably sit for three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks until someone is available to look at it, only to probably tell me that the thing is backordered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then eventually in a month or two or seven, I might have my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultrafine 5K back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it might even work then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it might even work then. So that’ll be the test. What will be over first? My monitor drama
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the pandemic? I’m probably gonna go in favor of the pandemic at this point and I realize how bold that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nevertheless. You can end your monitor drama tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, stop, stop. Well, I sort of have, and we’ll get there in a second. So just to show you how great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG’s service is, I had an online chat with them on Monday the 6th, which actually was fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy and delightful. I didn’t get a lot of flack about what I wanted. I didn’t have to like ensure them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ve plugged it in and blah, blah, blah. Like, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pretty straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t have to take a video of your monitor? No, no, no, didn’t have to take a video of my monitor, nothing like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they said, hey, here’s the deal, and I think I spoke about this last week. We need $150 from you in order to do the repair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John gonna collect that via an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey online check. So in order to do the repair, they wanted 150 bucks up front. I think I said this last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco week. So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spending even more money on the LG now? Correct, yes. You might as well buy a boat. It’s like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey throwing more money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re not wrong, but no, I really, I have faith. I truly, honestly have faith that sometime between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now and when I’m dead, this thing will come back to me and work properly, but nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will agree that it will most likely come back to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh gosh, I’m gonna be so furious. In fact, if I’m smart, I won’t bring it up if it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back and it’s not working. Please, future Casey, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco say anything to Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling you, the LG 5K is like the butterfly keyboard. They can maybe repair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and send it back to you, but it’s not gonna be flawless in a reliable way for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an indefinite amount of time. There’s a high chance that something about it will flake out again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see, hopefully not, but nevertheless, so very quickly, on Monday the 6th, have an online chat they say okay we’re gonna call you in two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to three days so we can take your money I said great on Friday the 10th they haven’t called yet so I had another online chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh yes yes yes we will absolutely call you as soon as possible to take your money great on Tuesday the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 14th I said guys please can we please call me and take my money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco all I want in the world is for you to take my money and please and thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we all buy you an XDR so we can stop talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes if you want to buy me an XDR I will gladly accept it I am not buying.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not volunteering for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If Marco would like to volunteer his tribute, so be it. So anyway, so on the 14th, I get on the online
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat again. So finally, I speak to the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person that I end up speaking to, and that individual who was very kind, said in so many words,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m the person that’s in charge of like scheduling refrigerator in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV repairs. There is no chance I’m going to be taking $150 of your money over the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get a monitor repaired. I don’t even know why they sent me to you or sent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to me. But anyways, so I was like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself through this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Because now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to see it through. I’m not a goddamn quitter, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Quit this monitor. You have to quit this monitor. This is sunk cost fallacy. Come on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey out of this situation. No, it’s going to be okay. Run from this monitor. It’s not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was so nice when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t your time worth anything? Well, apparently not. So eventually I do get a call back from a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delightful lady who said, I will take $150 of your money, please. I said, yes, absolutely. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so she immediately sent me a shipping label and I dropped the LG 5K off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at FedEx this morning to go to City of Industry to hopefully get repaired. So she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, in a best case scenario, it’s probably gonna be like a week to get there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or so getting repaired and a week back, which say I didn’t look to the calendar but that’s like what the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half of January. I will bet that there is a 50-50 shot I see this thing before Valentine’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Day and even that I’m not particularly confident in obviously. So we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So just for the record, I know the XDR is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive. I know I’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no it looks back at expensive and says, ha, remember how cheap expensive was? I’m ludicrous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair enough, however, LG’s service is awful. It has always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been awful. And one of the things you get when you buy something nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple is most of the time, and they’re not perfect all the time, but most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way better service experience if you need it. This is ridiculous. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the hoops that you’re jumping through to try to get what is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in absolute terms still a pretty premium priced monitor to get warranty serviced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s out of warranty, which is part of the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, to get serviced by its manufacturer. That’s still a ridiculous amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoops to jump through and a huge amount of time to be without it. People buy tools for their work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they need them to work. This is one of the things, when I was younger and didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have money and I thought I was you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hotshot who knew everything and everything I didn’t understand was stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought that? That stopped?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being smart in 20, you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that feeling is. And so, you know, I would look at things like, you know, enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grade servers and stuff like that. And I’d be like, my God, those computers are so expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What idiot would pay that premium price for for like that Dell workstation, when I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build a very similar or identically performing computer for less money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I did. And God, I spent and wasted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much time building and then repairing and fixing and trying to get to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom-built computers for me and my friends, like throughout all of high school and college. So many hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the drain. But we didn’t have much money, and so that trade-off made sense. but I never understood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why people would buy the expensive things. Well, now that I’m like a business and an adult,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes sense. If I’m using this thing as a tool for all of my income,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can spend a little bit more, you know, this is where the phrase like, throw money at the problem to make it go away, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I can throw money at this problem and make it totally go away, that is often worth doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because these problems are not worth the massive amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hassle and potential risk of like, this thing might just die
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one day when you really need it to be working. You know, if you’re working on something really important, this thing might just die and you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screwed. And if when something does die, it takes you like a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of effort to even get them to start the repair, and then you might see it back again in a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not suitable for professional use. Simple as that. Like, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why professionals in professional environments, when they can afford it, get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer gear that has better support, better reliability, and better service when you need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in this case, you’re just making the case for the XDR over and over again, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John single week.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s making the case against the LG 5K, not necessarily for a $6,000 monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s been surpassed by the laptop monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It pained me so much to order this goddamn expensive monitor, it really did. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my monitor problem has been totally gone since then. Zero issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m totally happy with it. Regardless of what John says, and we’ll talk about the rumors in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not at all feeling FOMO about, oh God, what if I’m gonna miss the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John thing? No, we bought
⏹️ ▶️ John ours at the right time. We bought them when their price made the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it never made that much sense, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you bought yours at the best time when it was brand new.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you look at the slope of how much sense does this monitor make at this price, it’s going down real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I wouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast, but anyway. So the point is, one of the reasons it’s so expensive, yeah, it is a ridiculous price and it is a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but you do get a lot for that. Whether it’s worth it to you or not, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to you and everyone else. But, like for me, if my LG monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was depending on every day, if it died one day, I wouldn’t even bother contacting them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I’ve dealt with LG warranty support in the past. It’s always been terrible. As far as I’m concerned, if the LG monitor dies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just put it in a closet, forget about it forever, and just get it. I would overnight myself a replacement and keep working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I understand what you’re saying. And that’s the other thing actually, is even if I wanted a brand new LG, they’re back ordered for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a month or two. Why? Because there’s no other options. Well, there’s one. Nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. So I’ve settled on a new desk setup, which will hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey persist until and when and if I ever get that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K back. And so I have the 24 inch 4K not ultra fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG monitor that I was using literally four years ago, or no, three years ago at work, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had borrowed from my good friend at my old job. And then I don’t know if I mentioned it on the air or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I actually ordered one of those as well before I even spoke to the friend, because I figured, oh, there’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s just gonna let me buy, or much less borrow one of these monitors. So I’m just gonna order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one and I’ll use, you know, one of these 24 inch 4Ks and the onboard laptop screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of orders, didn’t you order a new LG 5K and you’re like, oh, I don’t think I’m gonna cancel that order yet, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the last we heard of it. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cancel that order?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did cancel it, I think around the time that the LG, the one that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John had. Do you regret
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A little bit, yes, but that’s neither here nor there. So anyway, so I have, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what’s better than one mediocre finicky monitor? two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new one that maybe would be less finicky, but who knows why. And by the way, you’re talking about it. Here’s my new desk setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I would petition for a photo to be shoved into the Slack, so at least we can
⏹️ ▶️ John see it. And so I can also point out all the liquids that are threatening your setup. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, you know what? I will do it right now. So now you’re gonna have to vamp, because I will do it right now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will not touch the water. I will show you exactly what my situation is. So hold on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you two vamp for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John have plenty of time, Marco. Marco will edit this out, then we can, while you do that, we can discuss which part of Marco’s adult
⏹️ ▶️ John businessman brain decided, I’m going to start a jug of water next to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco computers in my closet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In my defense, those were stored there at very different times.
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re an important businessman, you realize don’t do risky things like make your own computer. It could cause
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I have a jug of water.
⏹️ ▶️ John What should I do with it? How about up high in the electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John You need some adult supervision over there. I don’t know what you’re doing in that office. You’re probably on wifi right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did this with a wide angle lens, so it’s probably not the crispest or brightest, but it should be going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgot you said in darkness. No, actually, the overhead light is on. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a great thing with your glass desk that we can see the cable mess right through it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, there’s my bad cable management. Yep, still there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an absolute disaster. I’ll be the first to tell you. But yeah, so what I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco now. Wait, hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all. If he does have a watered… What are you doing? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the side. You’ve learned nothing!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve learned nothing! You have an on air sign, but it’s off and we’re on the air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s still, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the USB pre-2 is right there, which is like a $700 box that does not like water. The keyboard is there, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you already said there’s like a hundred and something, right? The laptop is up on a little stand, but it’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John learned its lesson, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco afraid of the water. It’s on an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iMac stand? Yes it is, it is actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John At least it’s on
⏹️ ▶️ John something. It’s like someone, you know, scared of a mouse in a kitchen going up on a stool. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the side by like four inches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, well, all right, nobody’s perfect. So here’s the thing. So what I’ve got, I do have my glass desk, which eventually I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will replace, but have we mentioned I’m cheap? So directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in front of me. Where’s the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this Apple Pencil belongs to? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charging behind me. I don’t know, I think one of the kids removed the pencil and dropped it on my desk and I haven’t had a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put it back on the iPad. But all right, so let me describe this picture that I took that you will probably not see because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my whole situation is a mess, but I’ll describe it to you. So I have my glass desk centered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly in front of me is one of these LG 24-inch 4K monitors. This is the one that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually bought and I told myself I was going to return. Like I’d never opened it for a week and a half or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And I said, you know, I’ll just return it because I’ll just live off of the borrowed monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until the LG comes in. This thing was like 300 bucks, which is not a small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of money, but it’s really not that much money in the grand scheme of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s 27 inches at 4K? 24 inches at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K, which strictly speaking isn’t retina, if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number, like the PPI numbers, but for my crap eyes, it is absolutely retina, without question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say that is like the upper edge, because back in the olden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, 24-inch monitors, when they first came out, were 1920 by 1200.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And 4K is, roughly, depending on some details, but roughly double that. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly retina version of that. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later on, you know, towards the tail end of 1X monitors being normal in Mac land they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get more dense and that 1920 across resolution shrunk down to like 21 and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inches for the iMac in the same way that like the 2560 across was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first in the 30 inch Apple monitor and then later on was put in 27s. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say going, you know, quote back to the 1920
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point across monitor at 24 inches. While it is not today’s version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Retina, it is like close enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within the realm of what we expect as Mac users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Absolutely, so that’s centered in front of me. And then to my right, that, you know, at like a 45 degree angle, is the borrowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equivalent. It’s the exact same monitor, just the borrowed version. And that’s off to the right. And then to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left, on a riser that was designed for the base of the iMac and is obviously, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thus a little too small for the MacBook Pro, but nonetheless, here it is. On the riser is my MacBook Pro in clamshell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the moment. And so I’ve got two identical 4K monitors basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly in front of me. For the record, my water is all the way to the right, as far away from my hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it can possibly be.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what water can do across a flat surface, especially when made of glass? It can travel, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s all the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level. But it’s an Aquafina bottle that’s been, you know, recycled in the sense that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have Aquafina water it has tap water in it now, but it has a lid on it. And the lid always stays on it unless I’m actively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drinking. So, you know, I’m doing the best I can here, fellas. But…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if maybe the solution to John’s water anxiety is sloped desks. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And that’s going to cause more problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or what if you use an air hockey table as a desk? Now you’ve got stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John sliding out. It’s not that difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, but you have the holes.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the drain holes. You just need a surface around that same place that is like three inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My next desk is going to be an air hockey table.
⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop being on the iMac stand, none of the feet of that laptop are in contact with the stand,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Correct. So it’s just metal on metal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no! No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The stand has like a little pad on it. There’s some metal on metal, but the stand does have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little pad on the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, God. You’re killing us. You could do like a tray table. You have tray tables in your house? Just put a tray table
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to your computer. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, I’ll get right on that. And you can put like a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whole meal on
⏹️ ▶️ John that tray table, and when it spills, it just goes to the floor, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing on your desk gets any of the liquid. Well, you can’t really see in this picture, because it’s terrible, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a filing cabinet directly to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left of the- Yeah, just roll that out a little. Yeah, well, I could, but I always put junk on there. That’s like my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey landing area. As you can tell in this picture, it’s my landing area
⏹️ ▶️ John for the office. Nevertheless- I get some lights in this room next time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, I bring all this up to say, right now my setup is two of these identical, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put the model number in the show notes, I forget what it is offhand, but two of these identical 4K monitors. Each of them is $300 on Amazon, which again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not cheap, but given what you’re getting is actually really not that bad. The monitors are not great. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are fine. They’re too low on this desk. I’ll be the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell you they’re too low. I was thinking about that earlier today. I need to figure out a way to raise them up because in typical LG fashion, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand sucks, but it’s fine. And the thing is, and the reason I bring all this up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because to my eyes and to my wallet, 600, like even if I bought both of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $600 for two 4K monitors, it is not what I would prefer, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely not 10 times worse than the 10 times more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Display XDR. Like I just can’t get, I don’t think I would get 10X the, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t think of the word I’m looking for, joy, the return out of a $6,000 Pro Display XDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I am off of this not perfect, but ultimately pretty serviceable $600 setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s why I keep digging my heels because it just, I can’t justify 10X what I’ve got right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just can’t. Now, if somebody else wants to literally buy me one, I will absolutely accept your Pro Display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey XDR. But I, and if it was like a couple thousand dollars, I probably would, but at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four or five or $6,000, I just can’t bring myself to do it. And I actually don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disagree with you, Marco. I really truly don’t. Like everything you said, logically, I 1000% agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just cannot bring myself to open my wallet for $6,000. I just can’t do it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is my new desk set up. And related to that, one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve noticed is that Now I’m running out of ports on this computer, which I actually have a dock coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from someone, coming my way in the next few days. But with that said, I currently have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugged in one of the monitors via HDMI, one via USB-C to display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port. I have the MixPre3, I have a ethernet adapter, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have MagSafe. So I am using every one of the ports on this computer right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’m glad that this computer has as many ports as it does. And that brings me to a tip. I forget who it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wrote in, but I had read a few nights ago, and then somebody wrote in the next morning, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can actually do 60 Hertz via HDMI, which I previously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey erroneously said was not possible on these monitors. The thing is you have to engage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color, because when I think of refresh rate, I think deep color.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that screw with their color reproduction? Because a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey displays- You think I noticed?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, televisions and some displays have a mode in which they can
⏹️ ▶️ John accept your signal and say, but actually we, like the color gamut of the monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John is wider in some areas than the color gamut of whatever this thing is supposed to be displayed. It’s more important for TVs, because
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs, like things are mastered in a certain color space. And for accurate reproduction, that color space should be shown on
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV within the color space that the thing is mastered at. But the TV is like, but actually
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got more colors than that. Don’t you want me to just take that image and expand it to fill the whole color space? And it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes everything look all like candy colored when it shouldn’t be. And the only reason that’s relevant to your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John is if you’re looking at pictures and you’re trying to like adjust them and everything looks all candy colored
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, I gotta try to dim it down, but then you look at it on an actual device that shows it within whatever color space
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, photo like SRGB or Adobe, you know, whatever RGB.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you see it accurate, you just realized you’ve changed your picture in a way that you don’t like. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that you care like super duper professional, but if you’d ever doing anything with photos on it, you want what you see on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John to reflect the reality and not to be some, you know, ultra HD deep
⏹️ ▶️ John color thing where the monitor is disregarding the color space or expanding the color space for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I can’t say I’ve noticed one way or the other, but again, I do have a discerning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eye about some things and clearly a discerning ear because I can tell you all about how great vinyl is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is not one of those things. And so if you happen to have one of these monitors, for what it’s worth, menu, picture,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture adjust, HDMI Ultra Deep Color, and if you do that, you can use an HDMI cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do 60 Hertz at 4K. I will say, not about color, but I could swear, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something about the anti-aliasing is different. I couldn’t tell you what, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re running it at native resolution, so there wouldn’t be any-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree, I just, something felt different to me, but I can’t put my finger on it. I’m probably bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the sub-pixel arrangement different on these monitors?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, possibly, but I, well, no, no, no, Because what I was doing was I was switching between DisplayPort and HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the same actual monitor. And I felt like it looked different, but there was enough delay between the switching
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the signaling, someone just wrote in about this. They were saying how you
⏹️ ▶️ John were complaining that using DisplayPort had made you feel like it was a gross and ancient. But I think what you meant is you were using an older DisplayPort
⏹️ ▶️ John connector and that felt old. But the DisplayPort protocol is more modern and more computer
⏹️ ▶️ John focused than HDMI. Can you find that email so I don’t just make this up? Talking about HDMI,
⏹️ ▶️ John mixing chroma and luminance in the thing would, DisplayPort has them more cleanly separated, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Anyway, that could explain the difference in that like you’re getting worse picture quality because
⏹️ ▶️ John of some HDMI thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, it’s certainly within the realm of acceptable. Like it’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is, I felt like I was noticing something, although I couldn’t really put my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finger on exactly what it was. And nevertheless, this is workable. This is what I think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna stick with at least until the 5K comes back or until somebody literally donates a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 560R to me, which I’m not actually advocating for the love of all that is good and holy. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey afford one if I really wanted to. I just really, really, really don’t want to. And for the record, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an LG 24UD58-B, 24-inch 4K UHD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IPS monitor with FreeSync, black, as per Amazon. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s only 16 left in stock, so go fast. But anyways, so that’s what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also one other quick bit of follow-up. I’d been complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little while ago about my Magic Mouse, my brand new Magic Mouse feeling weird with my brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 Macs, MacBook Pro. And it felt like, I think I’d said a week or two ago, it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, almost as though the Bluetooth connection was sleeping too soon. I have no evidence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prove my theory, but it felt like it was going into some sort of like low power mode too quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Monterey 12.1 has come out since I last spoke about it. And I think it has made it mostly better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s also been, I forget who pointed this out to me, but somebody pointed out a tweet from Charity Majors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has a defaults write that you can try that apparently disables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse acceleration. I have not tried this yet because I think it’s workable for me now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don’t have to plug in the mouse to make it feel like it’s okay. But it is something that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might try if I feel like it gets worse. So we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I found the tweet. It doesn’t have much more detail. But Andreas Hartl says about you talking about DisplayPort
⏹️ ▶️ John versus HDMI. He says, HDMI is based on DVI and mushes together all data
⏹️ ▶️ John in a stream that still has the concept of blanking intervals. DisplayPort is more modern and packet-based.
⏹️ ▶️ John Video over Thunderbolt uses the DisplayPort protocol. So that doesn’t have much more information, sorry. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I was trying to remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, I appreciate the try.
Apple-display rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, that’s all for follow up now for SKT. My goodness, this went this one a little longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John than we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor item. And now it’s, you know, ostensibly a topic, but sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes, that’s right. We do have that one more monitor item. How could I forget? So you are welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of you. Every single one of you. What can I say but you’re welcome because we heard a rumor today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was a short tweet thread, and then we’ll put in a Mac rumors post about it. That says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per user Twitter user Dylan something or other I don’t know that they really have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a last name. But nevertheless, there are three LG-made displays, right, Dylan, encased in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbranded enclosures for usage as external monitors that are in early development, two of which have the same specifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the upcoming 27-inch and current 24-inch iMac displays. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display seems to be an improved 32-inch Pro Display XDR. Despite the lack of branding, it can be assumed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the very least that this display will be Apple-branded. Okay, I mean, it’s a little bit bold, but I’ll go with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dylan continues, interestingly enough, there seems to be a reference to custom silicon powering the 32-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display. Sadly, no such references were found for the 27-inch or 24-inch displays with regards to custom silicon.”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Dylan continues, “…finally, this of course does not rule out the possibility of custom silicon for these displays. It simply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means that there’s not sufficient data proving otherwise. Finally, the 32-inch and 27-inch monitors seem to have mini-LED displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 120 Hz variable refresh rate.” This is very exciting, except for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one key word. Did you catch the key word that is making me very sad?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That does not make me happy at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t it weird that like, according to this rumor, again, this is just, I don’t think there’s much more in these rumors than we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen in the past, because we’ve seen rumors for months now about Apple’s making an external display with like a
⏹️ ▶️ John system on a chip and it’s an A something inside there, whatever. But the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these displays is the same as the one in the current 24 inch iMac, correct me if I’m wrong, the
⏹️ ▶️ John current 24 inch iMac screen is not high refresh and is not HDR, right? I don’t know about HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s definitely not high refresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It probably is HDR, at least in the old way, like before the micro LED things that all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous MacBook Pros and stuff had, where like they would just kind of overdrive the screen brightness. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it not mini LED as well? No, as far as I know, the current like M1 iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s 500 nits, yeah, just looked it up. 24 inch IMAX or 500 nits, that is not HDR. Right, so all this being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this information is correct about the products that are in development, that sounds perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. I’m actually kind of surprised they would sell a smaller monitor, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly the 27 inch, and assuming that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the updated XDR is, is probably gonna be similarly priced. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we talked before about the 27 inch, If they do 27 inch, 120 Hertz and mini LED,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna be probably a fairly expensive display. And so it would be nice then to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also have that 24 inch option, although honestly, I would want it to be bigger. I’d rather have a 27 inch that doesn’t have 120 Hertz and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini LED in the lineup. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see why they would do all three of these things, although I would also see why they would only choose to do the top two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, this is also, you know, this is a random person on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And random people on Twitter who tweet Apple rumors don’t have a strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco track record. I’m not familiar with this particular person’s track record, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not read this as gospel. Like, until we have somebody who is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable with this kind of thing, somebody like Ming-Chi Kuo, Mark Gurman,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when they start claiming specifics and timelines, those are way more reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than Twitter leakers and YouTube leakers have been so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think both of those people did have a external display with some kind of chip inside it, rumor from many months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. Right, so, and the, like having the chip inside of it, they don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say what kind of chip it is. It’s just a custom Apple chip. That could be a lot of things. That could be a timing controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That could be a display controller. That could, like, that could be a lot of things that is not like an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro running in the display. Like it could be a lot of things. So I don’t think that necessarily means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much with the information or lack thereof that we have. But the part of that about it being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early development, that again, that could be true. German said a display was in early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development like a year ago. Well, when did they receive the information? Where did this information come from?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they received old information or maybe they only saw evidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of early development because the evidence of the current development didn’t leak out in that same way, through the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco channel. Getting any kind of timeline argument from this, I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weak and unreliable. Like, you know, it sounds like a lot of the, a lot of this information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is being derived from like software support somewhere or references that are in a library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere to different displays. So I wouldn’t read too much into this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have heard from multiple places for about a year that Apple is working on an external display,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least one that is going to sit below the XDR in the lineup. There is a lot of smoke to that fire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s probably going to happen. We, I don’t think this information from this person today gives us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything really concrete to work to, to work with that we didn’t already have. I wouldn’t assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the, that the, you know, the, the 24 inch proves to be a thing. I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume that anything this person said that wasn’t backed up by other sources over the last year would be a sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. It’s all maybe. if this is true, that’d be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the timeline is not gonna be what Casey wants, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey be a great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, again, typical Apple fashion, they basically stopped working on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from 2016 until about 2018. Like, they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did like almost nothing for the Mac in that time, for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. History will eventually maybe tell us, and some tell all books from time, but it certainly seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they basically, like turned off Mac development, hardware-wise, for that time. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was this giant hole in the lineup, and they decided to fill it, sometime in the last couple of years, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, as from what we can derive so far, and it takes some time to make stuff. And an external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display is gonna be way lower priority than things like, you know, fixing the Mac Pro fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they made for themselves, and fixing the laptop fire they made for themselves. Like, these things are all more important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you only have a certain amount of engineering resources that you’re willing to devote to the Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain teams you’re gonna move around to do it, like the monitor is gonna be last priority.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you say that, but all the other fires are out at this point, right? Like, yes, yes, yes, Mac Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually legitimately the 27-inch iMac, but other than those two, which I would argue the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a smaller fire, what else is left, right? Like in terms of Mac stuff, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. This is what they gotta fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agreed, and I think that this is very likely to be a problem that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has decided to solve. when they decided to solve it is, you know, that’s a question mark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And how quickly the result of that will come onto the market is another question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mark. Whether the result will solve it is a third question mark. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like they are making an external monitor, at least one that is gonna be lower than the XDR in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the product line. But other than that, I don’t think this gives us any new information at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One quibble with what you had said earlier, I personally am not familiar with Dylan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is this, DylanDKT is the Twitter user. I have never seen this person before, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per the summary on MacRumors, they write, according to Twitter account, you know, DylanDKT,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has a mostly accurate track record with Apple-related rumors. I have no earthly idea what that track
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record is based on, what rumors this person has leaked, but according to MacRumors, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to think that this person is not a complete dope. So take that for what you will.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem with this rumor, it says, we found three displays, and you can explain the use of those displays
⏹️ ▶️ John all in a context other than a new external display, because a 24 inch, he already says it’s the one they use in 24
⏹️ ▶️ John inch iMac. Great, well, so why do we care about that? Yes, there’s a display
⏹️ ▶️ John used in the 24 inch iMac. Okay, maybe that’s for a 24 inch iMac. Then there’s a 27 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John one for the upcoming iMac. Okay, maybe that’s display for the upcoming iMac, which is also not an external
⏹️ ▶️ John display. And then finally, 32 inch for the replacement for their one existing extremely high priced
⏹️ ▶️ John external monitor. So none of those, you know, hey, we found these display panels. None of those things necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John say that there will be a new display that is not the XDR. All it says is we found one that might
⏹️ ▶️ John be for the new XDR and we found two other ones that are going into IMAX.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great. The other thing is that, you know, this says that, you know, LG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is developing these things. And to some degree, you know, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as bad as it sounds because LG makes the panels that Apple often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses in their large display
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually two different companies. So there’s LG Display and LG Electronics. And the company you hate is LG Electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John because they make the monitor. LG Display makes the panels that like, for example, LG Display makes the OLED panels
⏹️ ▶️ John that every single OLED TV maker uses. Sony uses them, Panasonic uses them. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know that. Right? And LG Display sells their panels to LG Electronics. And the relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John between LG Electronics LG display is surprisingly contentious considering it’s like same team.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like for example, LG display versus LG electronics have disagreements about
⏹️ ▶️ John whether or not we should, you know, move on to display technology X, Y, Z. Like what should we
⏹️ ▶️ John do next after OLED? Should we use QD OLED? Should we use, go back to some weird LCD thing or whatever? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very often debates between them as to what they actually want for their next television. So it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John weird over there. So when, but when Apple’s talking about, Apple is buying things from LG
⏹️ ▶️ John Display. They’re not buying things from LG Electronics. But of course, Apple does have some kind of relationship with LG Electronics,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think they kind of like essentially cajoled them into making the stupid 5K that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all love. Totally, and Apple does that, at least they did, that kind of relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with lots of companies before. Especially in the last few years, Belkin has been the recipient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a lot of those kind of like seemingly like Apple contracts, possibly, where Apple kind of just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, work it out with either Belkin or LG or somebody like that, like, hey, we don’t wanna make USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Ethernet adapters anymore, just please you make one that follows these specs and we’ll sell it in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stores and we’ll promote it. And that’s probably the arrangement they have with LG, probably something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, LG Electronics, for the ultra fines. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that LG in this rumor only refers to LG display because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope that Apple has realized, and I think they probably have, that outsourcing those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco essential items to LG or Belkin or companies like that doesn’t usually result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the quality that Apple wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get a monitor that doesn’t work when it’s near wifi, remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah, first version, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like real basic kind of like, hey, so your job is to take this panel from LG display and make
⏹️ ▶️ John a monitor out of it, can you do that? It’s like, it won’t be near wifi, right? We didn’t really test
⏹️ ▶️ John it near wifi, we were just surprised as you when we shipped this product out to customers and their thing turns off when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And you know what also is pretty mediocre? The Belkin USB-C to Ethernet adapter. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things, Apple should make these things if they matter. And the monitor matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is definitely an area where it matters. And I hope Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned that. And again, given how good their recent releases have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, it really does seem like there was this bad period with the Mac for a few years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have since turned it around, and it has just taken a while for the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff to really come out, as part of that turnaround, I would expect current day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to be making these monitors themselves, not to have LG Electronics give them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another crappy ultrafine solution. I would expect whatever comes out is gonna be Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco branded with an Apple price tag, sold in Apple stores, and hopefully with Apple quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sure hope so. And I mean, obviously I’m burned by this ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine experience. So burned that I bought a different $300 LG monitor, but nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You don’t see that burn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LG so much, I’m gonna buy two more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing, like when you look at, again, looking for gaming monitors and stuff, most of, a lot of the top choices are
⏹️ ▶️ John often by LG, because of course LG makes the panels, and LG Electronics often packages those panels
⏹️ ▶️ John in a reasonable thing, like, you know, Asus and Razer and whatever, all these other
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming companies also package them, but they’re all, they’ll have like RGB lights and these weird pointy things all over them. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just want, just give me the LG display inside, like a black rectangular thing, LG electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John and their monitors, they have lots of different options for them. And it’s, you know, they’re, they’re one of the better
⏹️ ▶️ John sources to get those things because it’s not like you’re gonna buy an Apple monitor for your PlayStation or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But I mean, I, I am really hopeful that this rumor comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true in some way, in some way, shape or form. And I really hope it’s sooner rather than later, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a perfect world, I will have my 5k back soon and it will actually work and it will stay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working for a little while in a worst case scenario, I will have one or, you know, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of these 4k monitors that I can fall back on if necessary. Um, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love, I would love to be able to retire this LG ultra fine 5k.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and buy an Apple branded, or even if it was an LG electronics display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that actually worked better. And if they’ve learned their lesson from the 5K, I would be okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that. I just, I would really love to start fresh and try again. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really think that, you know, a 1300, I think the 5K is $1,300 new right now or something like that. That is an expensive monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is very expensive. Arguably not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thousand dollar premium over the monitors that are sitting in front of me right now, or one of the monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting in front of me right now. But I would do it because I really love having that 5K in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, and so I think an Apple branded version of that, like I would probably pay two grand for an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple equivalent of an LG Ultrafine 5K that actually worked reliably. I would probably pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple thousand dollars for that. It’s just, there’s such a gap between, there’s a pretty big gap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the $300 monitor that I’ve come to like and the Ultrafine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K. And there’s just this phenomenal gap between the Ultrafine 5K and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey XDR. And I really feel like there’s a place for at least one, if not a couple of options in that space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, kind of tangentially related, I don’t trust myself to do this mental math
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this hour, much less, probably at any point, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there was a 5K, 120 hertz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDR monitor. We don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a port that can support that without some sort of compression, right? I feel like the three of us have talked about this in
⏹️ ▶️ John think we went through this before. I think it’s plausible with display stream compression, which gets used for
⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR as well in many scenarios.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we think we could do it on today’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Jonathan needs to go through the math again, but yeah, I think it’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I mean, I would, and that’s the thing is, I think Marco has been saying this as well, and I agree with Marco. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, if I couldn’t run at 120 Hertz on an external display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, on the computer that’s sitting on my desk right now, I’d be okay with that. If I didn’t have HDR, that would,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would bail me out too, but I’d be okay with that. Like I just want a reliable 5k display that works. That’s all I want is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reliable 5k display that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works. And until we have those in the market, HDR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 120 hertz are just nice to have in the future bonuses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but until those basics are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey covered, we’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, just give us the basics, that’s what we need. The rest of the stuff, you can deliver that
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it’s starting to be table stakes. I mean, we just assume the big iMac’s gonna have all that stuff, we know the laptops have it,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s kind of, I know you don’t need it to code, Like I know you don’t need HDR or 120 Hertz to code it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll be fine, but eventually it just becomes kind of the baseline and you feel disappointed if you don’t get it. Kind of like 24-bit color.
⏹️ ▶️ John For, I think you PC losers spent decades being like, 24-bit colors, who needs all those colors? That’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco eventually it
⏹️ ▶️ John just becomes the baseline and now we’d never go to the, you know, system preferences to a color and pick,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what is it? 4, 8, 16, 256, thousands and millions. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John are something like that used to be the choices in Mac OS. that doesn’t exist anymore. 24 bit is just
⏹️ ▶️ John the baseline. I don’t need all those colors, it’s ridiculous. Eventually I feel like HDR, and
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact, improving HDR in terms of like, you know, what is the maximum brightness? Can you do it full screen
⏹️ ▶️ John versus a 10% window or whatever? Not this year maybe, but like in a few years, just
⏹️ ▶️ John like retina eventually became the floor and we made fun of the remaining non-retina monitors, HDR and high refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John will be the floor eventually too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed, I just don’t know how long that infinite or really ultimately finite timescale
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, this is the year when I feel like every single Mac that Apple sells that has a monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John or can attach to a monitor is probably going to be HDR and a high refresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re probably right. Like that is probably what’s going to happen. But I also agree with Casey that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t need that. At like, I’m perfectly, like the other day, I noticed 120
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hertz on my laptop, I think for the first time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I was scrolling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was scrolling something, I think a tweet bot list and that happened to be whatever combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, of, you know, conditions makes it run at one 20 Hertz. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s pretty smooth. But then I instantly forgot about it once I did anything else and it’s fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I have one 20 Hertz everywhere, I’m not really going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice its absence. I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So I do think this is, you know, Let’s try to put a positive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spin on this. I do think this is great news that there’s at least some amount of smoke that there is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fire being built within Apple to make some sort of new monitor. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really hope that this comes true. And I know the Apple way—maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in the last six months to a year, but for a long time the Apple way was, you know, here’s our $6,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 6K monitor, and if you don’t want that, and kindly piss off and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get one of these pedestrian $300 ones that only losers use. And I really think that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room for, I think there’s room for a 24 inch and a 27 inch and a 32 inch. I would love to see all three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those. And we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that if they’re making a 24, that probably means the 27 is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really expensive and that’s why they have to make a 24.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, maybe. And obviously, again, I have my hopes for a 5K, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I had a 4K that was 100% rock solid, which is so far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m looking at right now, that wouldn’t be so bad. So we’ll see, I don’t know. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really hopeful that this will be a springtime surprise sometime next year, although I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually expect it to be by any stretch of the imagination.
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#askatp: First-iPhone tips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to do some Ask ATP. We need to clear some of this out. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was added to Ask ATP possibly six months ago, which is relevant when you hear me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read that Steve Wellington writes, I’m getting my first iPhone this Friday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John after a decade on Android.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are your favorite things that I should know? Tips, apps, obscure settings, etc. You You know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have done homework on this. It’s been so long since I’ve had a new iPhone. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t even know what people don’t know these days. I don’t think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put this in. So, I don’t know. Whoever put this in, you’ve got to have some idea of some good tips and maybe that’ll spur my memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and make me think of others. What do you guys got?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suggest Overcast for your podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually, yeah. So, use Overcast. That’s a good idea. You sure you didn’t put this in, Casey? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did I? Well, it was so darn long ago, I’d forgotten whatever I was going to say then.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Here’s my main tip. Like part of the reason all of us don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have, like what were the tips? I don’t remember what it was like to have a new phone is because Apple’s system for sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of setting up your new phone like your old one is pretty good, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John so there are things that we set about the iPhone, you know, some of us in 2007,
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have just never thought about or looked at again. But if we suddenly got a factory fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and all those settings were off, we’d be like, what’s weird about this phone? This doesn’t work the way I want it to, right? So my first
⏹️ ▶️ John suggestion is to, when you get the iPhone, spend a long amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John in the settings app, just going through every single screen. We can’t tell you which exact settings you’re gonna wanna change or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And also it’s organized in a really Byzantine way, so we can’t even tell you, look in this section, look in that section, although
⏹️ ▶️ John I will say, do not skip the accessibility section because there’s lots of good stuff in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just wander through the settings. This is a thing that might sound dumb or boring, but I think for most
⏹️ ▶️ John computer enthusiasts, let’s say, going through the settings or the preference screen is like the first thing we do
⏹️ ▶️ John in any application, right? What can this thing do? What can I change about it, right? What are
⏹️ ▶️ John the options that I have available? How can I customize it to be the way that I like it? And just go through literally
⏹️ ▶️ John every single setting screen, just for the phone, not for every single app, because apps also put their settings in settings, which is dumb and
⏹️ ▶️ John weird, but whatever. And you will find things in there that
⏹️ ▶️ John pique your interest. And maybe you’ll change your mind about them, you know, whatever, but like, Key clicks on or key clicks
⏹️ ▶️ John off, right? How big do you want the text? Oh, I can change it to make it easier to read. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you can change the screen resolution. I don’t even know if that’s still in there. Like make everything bigger or smaller on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe display zoom is still offered.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like there’s so many things in there, you know, reduce motion, higher contrast, again, not just accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Sound, what sounds do various things make? Oh, I did, you know, you can make different sounds for
⏹️ ▶️ John different notifications for, you know, different people who text you and messages or whatever. And when I say the Apple stuff, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean like the built-in Apple apps as well. Like don’t, I’m just saying, just don’t go through every third third party apps setting screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Settings will bubble up to the top, like the important first party apps, like Safari messages, camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. And just spend some time there getting set up and trust that the time
⏹️ ▶️ John you spend setting that crap up will be well spent because the next phone that you get, you won’t have to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John all again. It will just carry the stuff over for you, which is why we don’t know what any of these settings are. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the final thing I’ll suggest, just because this is the way I run my phone and a surprising number of people do is, On
⏹️ ▶️ John the side of your iPhone, there is shockingly, surprisingly, a tiny little physical switch called,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s the silent button, the ring silence button. What the hell is that button called? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think it’s just called
⏹️ ▶️ John the mute switch. The mute switch, anyway, it’s a physical switch. And when you put that switch
⏹️ ▶️ John so that the red part is showing, your phone is in like silent mode. Back from the old days when we had feature phones, it was like, basically it turned
⏹️ ▶️ John the ringer off, right? If you do that, it’s not that nothing on
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone will ever make a sound, it’s that the phone won’t make a sound
⏹️ ▶️ John from its speaker when you’re not using it for the most part. And so I think a lot of people, if you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what that is or don’t think about it, you’re like, well, I want audio to come out of my phone, why would I make it
⏹️ ▶️ John silent? Like, I need to hear things. I wanna watch a YouTube video and hear stuff, right? Why would
⏹️ ▶️ John I put the silent switch on? Turning that silent switch on does not stop you from watching a
⏹️ ▶️ John movie on your phone and hearing the audio of that movie out of the phone speakers, right? That will still work.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it does mean is when your phone is off and someone texts you, it will not make a bading sound. It will vibrate
⏹️ ▶️ John instead, right? It will like, you know, just use the vibration motor or whatever the haptic thing in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to say a few times that I’ve turned that off and my phone has started bleeping and blooping at me. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the, oh, I somehow, you know, I must’ve been cleaning it and I switched the sound switch back to on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am a strong proponent of just leaving that sound switch on silent for the life of your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I, and a surprising number of people who are long-time iPhone users do that. And it does not really
⏹️ ▶️ John impair your ability to use it or be notified. Because again, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John vibrating iPhone on a hard surface, you’ll hear that from across the room. Don’t think you won’t notice that you got texted.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s on a pillow, no, you won’t hear it and the ding would be better, right? But it’s a physical switch. It’s really, really
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to change your mind about that. Oh, I’m about to put my phone down on this pillow and go to the other room. But if I
⏹️ ▶️ John get texted, I wanna hear it. Put the switch on, go in the other room. Like you don’t have to go launch into a screen. You don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ John to unlock your phone. It’s a physical button. It’s amazing, amazing feature they have. It’s a button on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John of your phone that you don’t need to use the screen to access. Take advantage of that button. Decide how
⏹️ ▶️ John you want it to be set and don’t be afraid to move that switch up and down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a very good fidget device, which you shouldn’t use it for, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John kind of- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t stress test the switch. It’s probably only good for like, you know, 30,000 switches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nonetheless, and as it turns out, I think you were right. This was apparently sent in in September and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said I was going to add it to the list. And I actually apologized in advance that we probably wouldn’t get to it for quote, a month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off there, but nevertheless, at least I knew us well enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey awesome. And
⏹️ ▶️ John someone puts on the chat room, like when you have that silent thing on and you’re sleeping and you set the alarm and the clock app,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a built-in app or whatever, the alarm will still go off too. Like it will wake you up. Like don’t worry that the silent
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is going to stop you from, like I guess this thing you just learned from experience, what does the sound thing
⏹️ ▶️ John stop versus what does it not stop for them? but for the most part, it does smart stuff. Like if you forget you have that
⏹️ ▶️ John silent switch on, but you set an alarm to wake you up at 5 a.m. and you put your phone to sleep and plug it in and put it on your nightstand,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure that alarm will still go off and make sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, alarms will always bypass the mute switch. And there are even certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps can register for a special entitlement that will allow them to do the same thing. So there are certain like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like custom apps from other people who are not Apple that are like important alerts of some type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can do that as well. And the only thing, I would add a couple of small things to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question. Number one, I would suggest turning down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sensitivity of Face ID’s security in one key way. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch under Face ID and Passcode, require attention for Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This means basically like, require you to be looking at it to actually count as Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say this is not necessary for many people. evaluate your own security needs, and if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not necessary for you, that’s fine to turn off. I would also turn off the switch right below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, attention aware features, which should have a hyphen between attention and aware, but doesn’t because I guess they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive in California. And it shows that you have a notification on the lock screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but until you look at it and unlock it with your face, it doesn’t show you the contents of the notification. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again is a level of security that I personally don’t need, many people don’t need. I love that feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so evaluate your own security needs. If you don’t need that feature, don’t use it. And beyond that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would kind of go a little bit extending what John was saying. I would say use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in apps first before you seek out a replacement in most cases. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you use Apple’s built-in apps for things like notes and reminders and stuff like that, mail,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Safari, when you use the built-in apps, a lot of things about the system work better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or are more convenient or are less of a pain in your butt or enable certain kind of integrated features that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might enjoy. And that’s part of the big benefit of Apple stuff is when you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in further into Apple stuff, when you use more of their integration, more of their first party apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get a lot more of those cool features. And over time, as they add more of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those features, you know, every day we see that they announced some new thing, I was like, well, this is gonna be great, but I don’t use reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And then you’re disappointed. It’s good to minimize those areas that are unnecessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using third party apps where the first party app actually would cover your needs just fine. So by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco default, I would say try Apple’s built in stuff in most cases, except for the podcast app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is garbage, she’s overcast.
#askatp: Finder alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sam writes, do any of you use a Finder alternative? Pathfinder, for one example, proudly declares the one John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siracusa, the name sounds familiar, reviewed it and called it a, quote, tour de force.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things change over the years, so I wonder whether you have any opinions on these apps these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you use a Finder app replacement?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that Pathfinder review was, gotta be over a decade ago, right? I don’t even wanna look up how many years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago it was. But Pathfinder still exists. In fact, I just recently bought the latest version of it as part of some big app bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I found myself buying. So the problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John Finder alternatives, it’s kind of like what Marco was just talking about, Apple does not make it particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to supplant a lot of its built-in apps. So part of the reason why using Safari is so
⏹️ ▶️ John convenient is, well, I don’t know, is this still true? They let you replace your mail
⏹️ ▶️ John app and your web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on iOS now? Yeah, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to handle like mail to and URL
⏹️ ▶️ John So I need another example, but like Apple has been slow on iOS in letting you replace all
⏹️ ▶️ John the built-in apps with custom versions of like Reminder, I think still can’t be replaced as the default, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is correct. Yeah, Reminders, certainly things like Notes and- Or
⏹️ ▶️ John things like Siri, you can’t replace Siri with-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Music, Maps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So that’s an annoyance. And on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Finder is not easy to replace. Yes, there are ways. You can obviously, you can quit the Finder. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing you can do pretty easily, and you can run another app instead of the Finder, but lots of other apps, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John in the olden days, maybe less now, but like would send Apple events to the Finder to have it do something. They just expect
⏹️ ▶️ John the Finder to be there and they expect the Finder to be the thing that they talk to to do file management. So if you try to use a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party one, you are swimming against the tide. Lots of things in the system
⏹️ ▶️ John will try to relaunch the Finder or try to do things with the Finder and Pathfinder is not the Finder.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use a Finder alternative partly for that reason and also partly because Pathfinder, which is I think the best Finder
⏹️ ▶️ John alternative, is an extremely powerful browser style file manager.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want a browser style file manager if I want to run pathfinders there and you can use it you can use it in addition
⏹️ ▶️ John to the finder which you know if you want a better cooler browser that does more stuff just run pathfinder
⏹️ ▶️ John all day but then also run the finder and just don’t open any windows in it. I want a spatial finder nobody really makes one of
⏹️ ▶️ John those and even if they did like part of the benefit of the finder that I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to see is it has to be the actual finder the default one the one that everybody uses and not
⏹️ ▶️ John some third-party thing that I’m constantly trying to run but being chucked back into the other one. So the answer is no
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use it but Pathfinder is super cool you should check it out it may appeal to you but keep in mind that you will be
⏹️ ▶️ John fighting against the entire operating system and the entire Apple corporation that wants you to just use the
#askatp: Swift for scripting, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yandiji writes, Swift can be used in the command line. I expect that you can also use it for automation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like what people do with Python. I also read that you apparently can also run Swift with Linux and Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you guys have experience in using Swift for other purposes in creating iOS and macOS apps?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do a little bit. My bespoke, I’ll call it a script, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s probably more of a command line app, that I use to file away my pictures, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a Swift command line app. That’s the only thing I can think of off the top of my head,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift, you know, Lattner, I think on this very program, Lattner has said, and he’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said in other places that he envisions Swift to, you know, its goal is world domination. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it, you know, for super, super important low-level stuff and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it for scripts. And yes, one could use Swift for that sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing, but I wouldn’t say it’s terribly well positioned for that sort of a thing since it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really is designed to be compiled and it just doesn’t feel to me like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the right fit. That’s just my experience. Again, a command line app is a little bit different, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something more along the lines of what I would turn to, like Python or, I guess, if I was an old man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perl, or if I really liked weird technology, PHP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could use one of those things. Honestly, if it were me, if I wasn’t going to use Bash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or just a Phish script or something like that, then I would probably turn to Python myself. Marco, what’s your thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pretty much agree. Swift, while I’m developing an appreciation for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as I use it more and more in my app development, what you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of that kind of language, out of a command line utilities kind of language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a little more quick and dirty of a style of a language. And Swift is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rigid and unforgiving. The type strictness, I can understand the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value of it when building a larger app for public distribution, for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a shell script or something that is a quick little command line utility, Swift is just too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cumbersome and too picky. The other thing I would say about Swift is that its string handling sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of can’t believe that a language developed so recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has such bad string handling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, now hold on, hold on. Let me quickly jump in. First of all, string
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handling sucks in Swift. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. But I think the reason is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s too academic, and it tries to be too pedantically correct in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too many cases. And that’s at the cost of an easy to use API surface, or just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an easy to use API. So I understand why it sucks. And I agree with you, it sucks. I agree with you, it shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suck. But there is at least a reason behind it. but it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And like there’s, I mean, so much of modern programming is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco string processing on in many ways. Like it’s string processing is just everywhere. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s so generally like good and friendly in most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web development languages because the web uses tons of string processing and modern programming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general uses tons of string processing. And when you’re dealing with command line stuff, you’re probably dealing with a lot of string processing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why Perl is so often used in this way, because Perl, for all of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird little faults, it’s pretty good at string processing. Python, from what I understand, I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience with Python, really. But I understand it’s pretty good at it, too. And Swift is just terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at string processing. It’s just so cumbersome to use with strings. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like the API was designed, as Casey said, for academic perfection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than the actual practical needs of most programmers doing string processing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those reasons, it’s just, I could use Swift for this kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but other tools are usually better and I will reach for them almost every time in this kind of context.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m gonna agree with your conclusion, but not for the exact reasons that you stated. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the main problem that Swift has as a kind of like, have you used it for something that’s not an iOS or a Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John app? Like the type strictness is an issue, right? And like, that’s just the type of language it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. But most of the things you do from
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, like just a command line program or something that’s not a GUI app or whatever, or just basic
⏹️ ▶️ John scripting, you only ever really need to deal with like one or two types. You need to deal with string,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ve talked about and I’ll get back to in a second, and then some kind of numbers, right? Or if
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanted, you can just treat the numbers of strings and have some convertible thing that works in some scripting mode or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s basically it. Like, especially in one off little scripty things, you’re not defining a bunch of new types and whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, if you just deal with the built-in types and easy conversion between them, even if you get into
⏹️ ▶️ John things like URLs and dates, you’re probably okay with the type,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the type system is not gonna kill you, right? What’s gonna kill you is the API. And
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, before I get to that, it’s not the compiled nature either. Perl is a compiled language as well. Having a compilation
⏹️ ▶️ John phase is fine, as long as that compilation phase is fast enough. Perl’s compilation phase is so fast, people don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John it exists. But Perl is a compiled language, it goes through your whole program loads all of it and
⏹️ ▶️ John all the files that it includes and all the other things, and has a compile phase in which it compiles it before it
⏹️ ▶️ John runs it. It’s a little more complicated than that. But it is not an interpreted language where it goes a line by line and doesn’t, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, doesn’t even know what the next line is going to be before it executes it, it compiles it. So being a compiled language
⏹️ ▶️ John is no barriers. And I’m assuming Python and PHP are similar in that way that they have a compile phase. Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John has a compile phase, you can use a you can write a command line script swift thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when it runs with the little, you know, hash exclamation point, whatever, user bin Swift, it compiles
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the fly for you and runs it. You don’t have to compile it and make, you know, like a C program and make your A.out
⏹️ ▶️ John executable and run that. It does it for you, right? So that’s not the barrier. The real barrier is
⏹️ ▶️ John its API is not good for those common things that I just said. Strings, dates,
⏹️ ▶️ John URLs. And it’s not because they’re like, oh, they’re academically correct and it’s a hard problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will point to Perl. Perl has academically correct string handling. Right, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl has academically correct string handling with all that Unicode crap in it. And it is complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you care about the nuances of Unicode normalization and all that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that all in Perl and fast by the way. But if you don’t care about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl’s API and interface to dealing with strings does not make you care about it. And Swift’s API
⏹️ ▶️ John makes you not only have to care about it, like it just shoves it in your face. We were just talking in the chat room, the thing we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Slack is, I wanna extract a substring from a string. Swift’s API is defined a substring
⏹️ ▶️ John type that is not a string, and because Swift is type safe, you can’t take a substring and pass it to a
⏹️ ▶️ John function that wants a string because it’s a substring. You have to construct a new string by using the string constructor on the substring you
⏹️ ▶️ John just got from a string. Nobody expects that. Nobody expects that to happen. And it’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest deal in the world. It’s like, oh, once you just know that, you just do it. It’s like, yeah, but it’s inconvenient. That throws the type
⏹️ ▶️ John system in my face in a way that I don’t want to. Or just, you know, I mean, regular expressions are coming to Swift, see
⏹️ ▶️ John the Swift forums and the discussion of it. I participated in a little bit trying to say that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Pearl motto from ages ago, easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible. Easy things are not
⏹️ ▶️ John easy in Swift. And it’s not because it’s a compiled language. It’s not because it’s a type safe language. It’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John the API is to do easy things is not easy. Like it’s not convenient, right? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’ll just do the first thing I think and it’ll probably work. If you if you have never programmed in like, if you program
⏹️ ▶️ John just in one of these language and you hop into PHP and you hop into JavaScript, you hop into Pearl, you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to guess right like more than 50% of the time about how to do stuff related to strings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if you don’t, you just look it up. And it’s like, oh, they spell it a little bit differently. None of that knowledge transfers
⏹️ ▶️ John to Swift. You’re like, how the hell do I find you know, do I replace a substring and a string? How do
⏹️ ▶️ John I construct a URL and get its components? It was just today a big proposal and say, oh, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you pass a string to the URL constructor, if you just did URL double quote and then like a
⏹️ ▶️ John string, because of the, you know, a string convertible thing that they built in or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s like http://www.apple.com, it’ll construct
⏹️ ▶️ John a file URL for you out of that because the string got literal converted
⏹️ ▶️ John to a file URL and then that file URL got passed to the constructor, right? And so they wanna make a change.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, if I pass HTTP, like shouldn’t it just look at the HTTP and realize this is not a file URL?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the change they’re proposing. That means for years now, this behavior has gone on. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John were doing a script, you never want that to happen. You don’t want to be surprised by stuff like that. Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John just does not have an API that lends itself to, let me just write 15 lines of code and not be
⏹️ ▶️ John surprised, right? And arguably all those same things make it more annoying to use in quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote, real apps too, but it’s more tolerable in real apps because it’s like, well, this is a more serious endeavor. I should think
⏹️ ▶️ John more about my types or whatever. When you’re doing a one-off script, it’s not that you don’t want to deal with the types at all or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just want the obvious thing to work and you want easy things to be easy. And that’s where Swift is falling
⏹️ ▶️ John down as a scripting language. And then the final thing on that is all three of us, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, maybe not Casey, probably still Casey. I think we all know
⏹️ ▶️ John some other language better than we know Swift that is better at this job. Marco knows PHP better
⏹️ ▶️ John than he knows Swift. I know Perl better than I know Swift. Maybe Casey knows Python or something better than
⏹️ ▶️ John he knows Swift for these purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey’s using C sharp for all of his shell
⏹️ ▶️ John Or C sharp. The thing is, when you want to bang something
⏹️ ▶️ John out and you’re an experienced programmer who has deep experience with even just one language
⏹️ ▶️ John that is vaguely suited to the task, it is so much more efficient to just say, even though there’s a better tool for this job,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this tool like the back of my hand. So I’m gonna ignore the supposedly better tools and just bang out what I know will
⏹️ ▶️ John work. It’s why my stupid CMS site generator is written in Perl and why Marcos is written in PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because those are the languages we know best and we could bang it out now, we don’t have to think about it and it works fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s why for a lot of things, I’ll turn to Python, which I know okay. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it were an actual spoken language, it would probably be a bit of a stretch to say I am conversational
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Python, but I feel like that’s kind of where I’m at. But, and I would turn to Python for these sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things, even though I don’t know it super well, but because it feels like a much better tool for the job than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Mack Weldon, and Linode. And thanks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will talk to you all 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, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, oh it’s accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tech podcasts, so long.
A Synology adventure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve been alluding to, or kind of casually hinting at, I had a Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adventure a little while ago, which I’d like to briefly go through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s always the first mention, Marco, come on. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a little one. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so in any case, so again, I have an 8-bay Synology. The first two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives are Time Machine, RAID 0. The remaining six drives are Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hybrid RAID, which is their version of some other flavor of RAID. I forget which one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like what Drobos do. Like, that’s, it’s their version of, it’s like, it’s a dynamically expandable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, kind of software-based RAID that abstracts away a lot of the details. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a straight RAID 1 or straight RAID 5 or anything like that. But it’s just like their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic thing that has some redundancy, depending on how you set it, and is kind of managed in software so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be expanded over time without breaking the whole array.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in speaking of that Marco quick aside what file system did you pick for your technology?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did what it did by default through the iOS app which I was curious what the heck it did because I was intending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raid 1 because I got to it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raid the file system. Oh I have no idea. Whatever’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PTR now or butter or whatever. It’s called, isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Yeah, that’s what I was gonna suggest that if you didn’t pick that now is a good time to maybe change that decision because BTR
⏹️ ▶️ John FS is is the I think the best choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I’ll check it I mean, it’s whatever, whatever was default. And I thought it was interesting that by default,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just did SHR as the raid setup. So even though I only had two disks, it didn’t even ask me, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just set them up as a SHR, which in theory, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a little bit upset by that because I’m like, raid one would be faster, probably. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also think like, in the grand scheme of things, like I’m probably only ever gonna have two drives in here and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might want expansion. And you don’t wanna have to match the size. Exactly. So like I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the expansion down the road. So I figure that’s fine for my purposes here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in my raid zero array of two drives that is used only for a time machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rado. My Rado array with the two drives, one of them was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dying. And that wasn’t great, but wasn’t the biggest deal because it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time machine, you know, volume, I don’t use it for for anything else, it’s not the end of the earth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I tried to play this smart instead of fast and loose. And I decided to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until my periodic time comes when I back up the entire Synology to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a single physical external drive, which then gets plugged into my Mac mini server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it can go up to Backblaze. So I waited the week and a half because I do this every couple of weeks. And I waited the week and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it was until the Backblaze backup was completed. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went to, I set about to replace drive two. This is a three terabyte drive. I think it had been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the machine since, you know, when, when I got it in 2013, it’s not unreasonable that it was time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to replace it. And since I don’t need a ton of time machine space, and I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care that much about time machine, to be honest, I don’t know that I’ve used it in literally years, but I like having it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as yet another backup. So I bought a, basically the exact same drive to put back in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I got another three terabyte drive to put in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They still sell those?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even remember how much it was to be honest with you, but yes, they do. So, I decide to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think to myself, well, I’m pretty sure this DS1813 Plus can hot swap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why don’t I just do that? I always used to shut it down when I was doing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John drive swap. What
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think, hot swapping to you just means I didn’t have to turn the power off to the thing to take out the drive? But it’s RAID 0,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you can’t take out one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives. drives. No, no, totally. I knew I was going to have to, I knew I was going to lose everything. I knew I was going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to recreate the volume and so on and so forth. But could I just hot swap the physical drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have the Synology understandably freak out and then tell it, you know, just put everything back, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John To be kinder to the thing, what I would have done is destroyed the volume, destroyed the RAID zero volume and just said, now you
⏹️ ▶️ John just have two empty disks. And then if you want to do a hot swap experiment, leave the thing on and yank out the drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That, see, this is why you’re smarter than me, because that didn’t even cross my mind. It It didn’t even cross my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, one question I have is like, how do you know which volume Synology’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS is installed on? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John You can look this up, but yeah, my main question is how do you make sure that the one you’re yanking out is the bad one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they all look the same from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the front. Well, so they actually… Left to right or right to left? They number from left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive one? They number from left to right. And there is actually a feature, I forget where it is, in I think Storage Manager,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a feature that where they where you can go in and I think they call it identify and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can have it identify that drive. It’ll play music on the voice coils inside the hard drive. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop it. So it plays the Imperial March, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it should play doo doo doo doo doo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. It’ll play the one of the washing machine or the freezer thing. So no, what it does is it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the light on that particular drive amber instead of green. And because at this point it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dying, it was not dead. So it was still showing green. What
⏹️ ▶️ John made you think that it was dying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the way? Because it said, I got emails about it literally every day or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying… All right, what did it say? I forget. I could dig it up. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think it said… Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I get periodic emails about my drive health too. And…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it said it kept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reconnecting or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like that. I forget exactly what it was. Oh, all right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t gotten that message. So anyway, so I decided to hot swap. And you two are a thousand percent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct. I should have destroyed the volume first and so on and so forth. But I didn’t, I just hot swapped it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything took a dump. Everything took a real big dump. So I tried to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and suddenly the web interface kind of stops responding, which was not entirely surprising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m thinking this is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was it the OS drive?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, I don’t even know, to be honest with you. Still to this day, I don’t know. This would be a thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John check before, again, before yanking drives out of your computer. Perhaps, perhaps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, probably not the best to have the OS on a RAID 0. How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I even know how to move it? Like, even if that’s true, listener, if that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not about moving it. It’s about not creating, like when you do like volume groups, don’t create any
⏹️ ▶️ John new volumes in the volume group that has the OS on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. No, I mean, it’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it, gentlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so everything takes a dump. You know, the web interface isn’t really working or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of working. It’s like I’m on a, like a, you know, 1400 baud modem. Occasionally, it’ll work a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit, then just kind of crash. Or I shouldn’t say crash. It just doesn’t really do anything. I try entering my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey username and password, and that doesn’t really work. And so eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was able to request a shutdown. I forget how I did that. I don’t remember if it was through the web or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by an iPhone app or something. And it started to shut down, but it didn’t succeed after literally 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. And so I said, ah, screw it. I’m just going to force the damn thing to shut down, which I know I shouldn’t do. But at this point, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have a Synology for all intents and purposes, so I need to do something. So I force a shutdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I boot it back up and it’s very, very upset. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wants me to enter a username and password and I try entering my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey username and password and it doesn’t accept, I tried entering my username and password and it accepts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but it refuses to accept my one-time password, you know, the little six digit thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I try that and I try that and I keep trying that and it’s still not working. And now I’m running out of chances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before it locks my entire account out. So then I think to myself, all right, well, surely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will try to use, all right, surely I can use the admin account, you know, the out-of-the-box administrative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account, which I know I’ve changed the password for, and there’s only three or four options of passwords I would likely use for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ll try that. And that doesn’t work. So let’s recap. I have a Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has eventually booted itself, and it is literally beeping because the volume has crashed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it wants my attention. It is booted, but I can’t log in using the login I usually use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I have any other administrative logins, except the actual administrator account,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which it won’t accept the password for that either. So I literally cannot log into my Synology. What do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Quick real-time follow-up, by the way, about the operating system. Someone in the chat room said, and I just did a quick Google
⏹️ ▶️ John that found at least some supporting evidence, that Synology stores the OS and all of the data related to
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS on all of the hard drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, that’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John As long as you have one disk that still works, you should, in theory, have your OS and all your settings. That
⏹️ ▶️ John does not necessarily mean that Casey hasn’t hosed himself. So continue your story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so PopQuiz Hotshot, you can’t log in with your username, password, and one-time password. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey log in with an administrator account. What do
⏹️ ▶️ John you do? You have physical access to the machine. You can boot in with the firmware mode and go into a single-user
⏹️ ▶️ John mode. You know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? Yeah, isn’t there a reset hole in the back?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a reset hole.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, just single-user mode. Back in the old days, in regular Unix, you could boot into single user mode where it’s not in multi-user
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one, because you have physical access and there’s some, you know, thing you have to press to make that happen, but then you are essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John root on the thing and you can fix whatever’s broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what you can do, and double check me on this if you’re listening, for the love of all that is good and holy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey double check me on this, because I Googled to figure out the right answer. But there is a reset hole with a button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within it in the back of the machine. And if you, I forget the details, but it’s like if you press it for a small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of time, it will basically reset like the administrative password
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, if I remember right. But if you hold it for a really long time, it will straight up reset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything. And if you hold it long enough, it will straight up reset everything to the point that you lose your data. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s like two or three stages of reset. And so I did the littlest bit of reset.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that got me into the administrator account with the default password.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That just like resets the wallpaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, basically. I got into the administrator account with the default password and then I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restore my account. Well, I shouldn’t even say restore it. I think I know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem is. What would cause my username and password,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is one of the few passwords I have memorized, and my one-time password, which is stored in one password, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work? What would cause that to not work?
⏹️ ▶️ John Date and time error?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and time got out of whack. And that’s why the one-time password wouldn’t work. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if my limited understanding of how one-time passwords work is they have some sort of seed value, jump in gentlemen when you’re ready, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some sort of seed value and they know they compare the time to like some reference and can compute via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey algorithm what these six digits should be at this time. And if the time isn’t agreed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upon between your device and the device you’re trying to log into, that will cause it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoopsie-dupsy. So So I did a update to the time, I was able to get back into my account. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was putting everything back and trying to restore everything, it was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angry at me that the administrative account was enabled at all. Because to their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyes, that’s very ripe for a dictionary attack or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so they really, really, really don’t want you to have the administrative account active. But the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re a single person company and a single person Synology user, I only had the administrative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account, which I surely had disabled, you know, because I did what they told me to do, and my own account. It’s not like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could go to Bob down the hall and say, hey, Bob, can you log in with your administrative account and get us all squared away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again? So I think that really kind of hosed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. But the good news is I was able to not only, you know, get my normal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account back with very minimal loss of data or settings or anything like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was eventually able to set up a administrative account that is not my normal account, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not use the username admin. And I was able to set all that up. And I have a ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strong password for that that’s stored in 1Password. But I decided not to turn on the one-time password for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this way, I will never have that particular problem again. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a brief window of time, again, I thought that I had lost everything on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology, which was not delightful. And thankfully, I had been smart enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to wait until everything was confirmed to be in Backblaze before I did all this dance. But wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was a very tense like two hours while I was trying to figure all this out, and it was not fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You have some,
⏹️ ▶️ John like your impulse control when it comes to technology. Like when we’re talking to you now, you’re like, oh yeah, no, I probably should have destroyed the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John first or whatever. But in the moment, you’re so excited about hot swapping, you’re just like, let’s see what happens when I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yank this out. Yeah, why
⏹️ ▶️ John not, man? You’re not projecting forward in time and saying, well, what’s the worst that could happen if I yank this out? And you almost
⏹️ ▶️ John saw what the worst thing happen if you yanked it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so now Drive 2 is back up and running, and the Time Machine volume is back up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and running. I did lose, of course, everything on that volume, but that’s fine. But yeah, what a nightmare. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a self-created nightmare, but what a nightmare that was. And I was so thankful that Synologies have this like multi-tier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reset paradigm, wherein I could get myself logged in because I have physical access to the machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could get myself logged in without having to reset all my settings and all that jazz.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, physical access usually means if there’s working stuff inside there, you can get to it. That’s the whole point of physical
⏹️ ▶️ John access. It’s something you have to hold down or press or do, but you can get back in. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if this, I’ll have to look more into this, but like the idea that Synology puts the OS in every single drive is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting and clever and another reason to like how they do things.
⏹️ ▶️ John was just thinking of that with Marco, was like, oh, I’d only need, you know, I just have two drives or whatever. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, especially if you just have a single volume, you’re like, if one of them goes bad, who cares? I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll have to reset up your whole OS, right? Because if you destroy that volume and it’s the only volume, you’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ John destroyed all your settings and stuff if like a disk went bad, like if you RAID zero it is what I’m saying. Like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have a second place for the OS to be you have a single RAID zero volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s on all these individual hard drives, I don’t know, I don’t know quite how it works, but I would not
⏹️ ▶️ John try, like, I always feel better having, you know, at least three drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you bought a four bay thing, but you only put two drives in it, maybe get a small third one and throw
⏹️ ▶️ John it in there just to be like your OS backup boot drive so that the other two can be totally hosed and you won’t lose all
⏹️ ▶️ John your settings. Then again, you probably don’t have too many settings, but it is annoying to go back through and reset up the time machine volume and set up
⏹️ ▶️ John quotas for people or whatever you did, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, I couldn’t even do the quotas because the quota for TIFF’s computer needs to be eight terabytes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the most it’ll let you enter is four terabytes, presumably for some kind of integer limit somewhere. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, I literally, so I’m just like, well, I guess I just won’t use quotas then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t use quotas and it takes care of itself and then whoever’s filling the thing, you’ll see their poor
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac say cleaning up like or free, you know, freeing up space. Like if you look in the time machine menu bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John it says like freeing up space and it will do that for a long time. But what it’s doing is saying, oh, well, the disk is running
⏹️ ▶️ John out of room and I’m in the middle of doing a backup and I know that I can’t do my next backup unless I clean up space
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will delete like a whole bunch of old backups and they’ll all just fight with each other over that last scrap of space.
⏹️ ▶️ John It also is a good idea to change, like Synology will email you if like
⏹️ ▶️ John a volume is getting low in space and you can choose what threshold it will email you. If you have the threshold
⏹️ ▶️ John set like too high, like if you have it set, please email me when you have 20% space left, you will be emailed forever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because Time Machine will never leave 20% free, but Time Machine will leave,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 8% free. So if you set the threshold to be like 5%, then you’ll only get the email when like something has
⏹️ ▶️ John gone wrong, you know, with the time machine and it hasn’t been able to free up space or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the only reason I ever want the Synology to email me is a hard drive has died.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to know that. I want no other emails from this device that
⏹️ ▶️ John you like the health report ones that tell you how many bad sectors all your hard drives have?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I turn those off after a while, or they stop working. One of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John somehow they were turned off. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives you the pre-warning of like, if you get an email and it says there’s one bad sector, right, and then the next week you get an
⏹️ ▶️ John email since there’s 10 bad sectors, maybe start shopping for a new hard drive, right? But I still
⏹️ ▶️ John get the emails, I think monthly, and I’ve had a hard drive that’s had one bad sector for like six years,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that’s fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drives have bad sectors, and it just keeps emailing me, I just look at that number, and if it’s still one, I’m like, everything’s fine.