467: The Strain Provider
28 Jan 2022Once your USB-C setup finally works, never touch anything again.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s Baking Hangover
- Follow-up:
- Casey’s Desk Update
- Simon Webster on QD-OLED and Blue LEDs
- Jon Mason on how big Sony is
- Xbox Gamepass and Series S
- iMessage and SMS (via Olivier Ruoy)
- Piracy, Warez, and The Scene (via Colin Weir)
- Netherlands Tells Apple “lol nope”
- Dropbox and OneDrive kexts no longer supported in macOS 12.3 beta
- Universal Control Mac → iPad in 12.3 & 15.4 betas
- iOS 15.4 beta supports FaceID unlock with mask without an Apple Watch
- USB Garbage from Amazon
- Post-show:
- Web time capsules
- John’s automotive plans
Sponsored by:
- Lutron Caseta: Smart lighting at the switch.
- Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
- Iodyne: Introducing the all-new Pro Data, the fastest Thunderbolt storage for M1 Macs.
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Chapters
- We’re a mess
- It’s back, baby!
- Sponsor: Iodyne Pro Data
- Don’t touch anything
- Follow-up: QD-OLED & blue photons
- Follow-up: How big is Sony?
- Xbox Series S + Game Pass 🖼️
- Messaging-app interop
- Sponsor: Memberful
- How warez works
- Netherlands vs. Apple
- macOS 12.3 vs. Dropbox, OneDrive
- Sponsor: Caséta by Lutron
- Universal Control finally in beta
- OBS contribution by Apple
- FaceID + masks in 15.4 beta
- USB garbage from Amazon
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Electricity in cars
We’re a mess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am ever so slightly sick. I have a little bit of a cold. I did an at-home test this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Wait, you realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have Omicron, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I did an at-home test this morning and said no. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here’s a couple things to know. Number one, the symptom profile for Omicron is different than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous variants. It is much more common to get cold-like symptoms like stuffy nose than previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco variants were. Number two, it’s the at-home rapid tests that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all have, hopefully, are less sensitive to Omicron than previous variants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically, I know so many people who in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of weeks have gotten minor cold symptoms, and then later got a PCR test, and it turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out it was COVID. Basically if you have a minor cold in the US right now, you probably have Omicron.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s much more likely than not. vaccinated and boosted, the vaccine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and boost basically means that you’re far less likely to die or go to the hospital, and you’re probably going to have mild cold symptoms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, and I, the thought, so it’s funny you say this, because I was talking to Erin about it, and I was like, do you think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the real thing? And she’s like, nah, I don’t think so. And then I was like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Jared Polin So I took an at-home test. Dr. Justin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marchegiani Assume that it is. Like, take the precautions as if it is that, because it probably is. Dr.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jared Polin Well, so I took my at-home test just to see, And that said, no, I understand. I understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t have to email me. I understand. That doesn’t guarantee it’s not by any stretch of the imagination. But anyway, I say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bring all this up to say I’m a little snotty and a little in every sense of the word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a little nasally. So I apologize if I sound a little funky. It’s not anything wrong with what Marco did because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know people, anytime any of us sound weird, it’s a testament to how good a job you do, Marco, that people immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounce on it and like, wait, what happened? Why is this wrong? And so it’s not Marco, it’s me. I’ve got a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of a little bit of snots. So I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a mild cold all winter, every winter, for my entire life. So I don’t know what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ve had cold, you’re typhoid married. I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, what else is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on? I’m still, I’m so tired from my baking adventure yesterday. Because like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a, okay, so I make Tiff’s birthday cake every year. She, it’s our tradition that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make whatever she wants. And she sometimes asks for simple things, sometimes complex things. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she asks for something simple and I make it complex and I want to make it fancy. That’s what happened this year. I made it like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancy pistachio cake that was kind of a hybrid of a bunch of recipes I found online. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good deal of work. I would imagine if you are a professional cakeologist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably would have taken you the morning at most, but because I am not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I bake once a year, everything takes me longer because I’m like being extra careful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like certain, sometimes I have to like remake the frosting because it doesn’t come together or something. So like, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a lot and I am still, a day later, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, so keep in mind, I went to bed on time, like a little after 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco woke up, that’s like 6.30, like my regular bedtime amount. I didn’t have any alcohol
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yesterday and I had the regular amount of caffeine, which is just like one cup of coffee in the morning and a small green tea in the afternoon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And today, I still feel hungover. Like somehow, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I think it’s just from like, doing a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John yesterday. You have a baking hangover? You baked one cake. I know! It’s not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John got a baking hangover. Maybe it’s not the baking, maybe it’s like the stress of like, I hope this comes out well, like the pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, your once a year baking performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think it could also be that, like we don’t have a ton of like, strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sugar most of the time. And all day I’m like, oh let me taste a little bit of this, make sure it’s right. So all day I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having little tiny bits very strong sugary things culminating at the end with a slice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this cake you know it in you know right after dinner so that’s a lot of sugar right there
⏹️ ▶️ John did you have it for breakfast the next morning as this tradition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sure did I had a breakfast morning and felt awful all morning
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re already feeling bad and you feel like I had too much sugar having it for breakfast the next morning is probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the the hair of the cake that bit you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we see yeah we all all three of us including Adam all three of us this morning afterwards you’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this wasn’t a good idea to have all this sugar for breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Adam’s probably fine though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. Oh yeah, kids can definitely do it more than we can, that’s for sure. But yeah, it’s like now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’m turning 40 this year and I’m not feeling great about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fact. And I, one of the areas in which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is becoming real to me is just how many things that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t or shouldn’t eat or drink anymore. Like that, that list keeps getting larger. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems to have happened fairly quickly. Like I feel like at 35 I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could eat and drink almost anything. And between 35 and now I’m like 39 and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gotten cut way back just because like, Oh this, you know, if I, if I eat or drink this thing, I’m going to have a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night or morning or whatever. Oh man, it’s, they don’t tell you this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. But as the joke is, you know, the alternative is much worse. You know, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being around anymore is much worse than getting old and not being able to eat like you used to. Yes. Bye.
It’s back, baby!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know what is good news, though? And we can start with some follow up. I’m back and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than ever, baby, because guess what showed up this week? The five K
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s back, baby. Did they even tell you it was coming back? Did it just arrive at your doorstep unannounced?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or did they say, Hey, we finished your repair. It’s on its way or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you have to ask me that question, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have to ask me this? So a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have many wonderful qualities, and I have a couple of not as wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey qualities. That’s never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a good introduction. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a great intro. And one of my less desirable qualities is that I may not be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most patient human in the entire world. In a rare case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me deleting a tweet, when I was waiting for my MacBook Pro to show up just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of months back, I was getting increasingly impatient and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increasingly petulant about the fact that my beloved computer hadn’t shown up when I wanted it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, in the middle of a pandemic when shipping is a mess and everything around the world is a mess, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damn it, it’s my computer and I want it now. So I whined about it on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what people do when they’re whiny, and a few people in various ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, stop being an idiot. And so I was like, you know what, I am being an idiot and I deleted that tweet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found out that, or I realized that I had dispatched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the monitor just a few days before Christmas. And this, I think I shipped it on the 20th of December or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the 21st. And it was now the 20th or 21st of January. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought, okay, it is about time for me to start poking about trying to figure out where this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. Now, I have had a tab open Johnstile for a month now with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG, you know, track your repair status page thing. And it’s told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me for a month that it’s pending. Well, that’s not fair. I think before they acknowledged its arrival,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said, you know, we’re waiting on it. And then, you know, after a few days of it having been in city of industry, California,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they eventually said, okay, we’re going to get to it at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does city of industry sound like a parody place name from the Simpsons to anyone else? It absolutely does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it sounds like something from like a Disney movie,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey City of Industry. It very much does. It has a big like Epcot feel to it, right? Experimental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prototype community of tomorrow. Well, anyways, sorry, go. During the process of me begging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG, I don’t remember how much we got into this, but during the process of me begging LG to take 150 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars of my money, so they would repair it, I eventually, and now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of regret having gone down this whole road. This is all your fault, John. You had to ask. I eventually used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the email the president form on the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John website. This was weeks ago. Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you say, do you know who I am? No, no. It’s so tempting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but no. No, please never do that. Because nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey cares who I am. You will regret it. Nobody cares who I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am. Take heed from Merlin’s bad experience. You will regret this. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Right. So I sent that. And then actually, to their credit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within a few hours, I believe I got a phone call from one of the president’s peons, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this very, very kind woman was like, all right, I’m going to get you squared away. And she followed up via phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of times over the span of a week. This is when I was trying to just get the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to them in the first place. She was awesome. She was like the only ray of sunshine in this entire repair process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was this woman at the president’s office. And so I emailed her because we had exchanged a couple of emails because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she had actually asked me for something at some point. And so I said, hey, and I was very kind. I truly was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind. I’m not going to dig up the email because I’m too lazy, but I was kind. I was like, hey, it’s been a month. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we figure out what’s going on here? And I sent that, I think it was like Tuesday morning or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. And we exchanged a couple emails back and forth and she was like, look, I’m going on vacation next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, but I super promise that when I get back, I’ll check in. I was, no, no, no, that’s fine. That’s fine. That’s fine. I’ll talk to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you after you get back from your vacation. No worries. And I had raised a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a stink about it, again, very politely. And then I went out to go for a walk that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey afternoon, and there was a large box on my front porch. A large box on my front porch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I did not expect to see. And on the side of that box on the front porch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it said, Repair OK. And it was an LG box. And I was like, oh my God, it’s here!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here it was, literally the day that I’m blowing up this poor woman at the president of LG Electronics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey office or whatever they are, saying, please can you find my monitor? I’m a very needy, very spoiled white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boy in Virginia. Please find my monitor. And sure enough, it showed up. So that’s how talented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she is, is that she made it show up immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was gonna, how do you know that she didn’t somehow make that happen? Yeah, exactly. Like, she flew her own personal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey to your house to drop it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They droned the 30 pound or whatever LG display. So anyway, so it showed up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there was absolutely zero documentation. There was a packing slip that had my address and whatnot, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was it. No documentation. Nothing that indicated that they had done anything other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the sticker on the outside that said repair OK. But I had faith,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I plugged it in, and I’ve unplugged it on the computer side a couple times. I haven’t unplugged it on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other side yet. But so far, so good, baby. I’m back and better than ever. So I am excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And all jokes aside, so I’d been rocking two 4K LG displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All in all, I actually didn’t mind it. I kind of liked it. And now having the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K display back, leaving aside, like I know we all, including me to some degree, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate this particular 5K display, but having a large monitor in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you is particularly delightful. And I can only fathom how delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey additional K would be. Like, I’m sure it would be quite nice. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am all ready to go. I’ve got, I’m looking at the 5K right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet is plugged into the 5K, and that hasn’t died yet, so that’s good. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m using my, whatever this breakout box is. I already forgot who makes it. But I’m using the breakout box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, actually, I think they sponsored today. Iodine sent me a unit of theirs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was very kind of them, which is very cool. This thing is extremely fast. It is super neat, and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will talk about that later. And I have that connected to the breakout box. I’ve got the mix pre connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the breakout box. So basically, everything about this setup has changed since last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. And it’ll be anyone’s guess which one of these 74 components causes problems if problems happen later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is when Marco gets real angry at me. but uh… but hopefully it’ll work out all
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Don’t touch anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to say, sitting here now before everything collapses on me shortly during the recording of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this very episode, once you’re willing to basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn your life upside down and spend heinous amounts of money on things you probably shouldn’t need to buy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the USB-C lifestyle is pretty good. Being able to plug in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MixPre 3, two Thunderbolt cables to to this iodine box, Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, let’s see, I’ve got a stand, a 12 south or whatever it is, stand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my iPhone that’s plugged in. I’ve got ethernet plugged in. I’ve got all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different things, probably like four or five different connections to this computer that are all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey riding through two USB-C connections. One of them is to the breakout box, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C Thunderbolt hub, and one of them to the LG 5K. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, if I were to plug all of these things individually, first of all, I couldn’t because I’d run out of ports, but second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be quite a few more cables. So I didn’t mention, oh, I’ve kept the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4K that I purchased, and remember I had borrowed one for my last job, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keeping the other one, the other LG 4K that I purchased, and that’s currently off to my right-hand side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My laptop display is off to my left-hand side, so I’ve got a triumvirate, a trio of monitors, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is extremely overkill, and I’m kind of loving it. but the 4K is also hooked into the breakout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box. So I’ve got all this different stuff hooked into all these different places, but as long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they can find a way back to my computer, it’s pretty great. And so if I wanna go into like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-on business mode or whatever, then I plug in the breakout box and that gives me the second monitor, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gives me the MixPre and all that jazz. But if I’m just rolling simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only have to plug in the LG 5K and I still have ethernet on there and the one 5K monitor and I can go clamshell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever and it’s fine. And so it stinks that I needed to get like a bunch of different cables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and gosh, do I ever hate the ambiguity around what USB-C cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handles what bandwidth and so on and so forth. But once you get yourself squared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away with the right cables and the right $300 breakout box and so on and so forth and the right $1,500 monitor plus $150 for repair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once you get it all squared away, it actually is pretty nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But gosh, if this didn’t take me like two months to get this situation squared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away to the point I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, if you trade two months for about $4,000 more, that’s basically the Pro Display XDR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story. It’s a ton of money, but if you’re willing and able to drop that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then this lifestyle can be very nice. Like, this is why I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the XDR. It’s not because I needed a reference grade display for whatever, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, having the slightly dim edge problem that it has still does bother me a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s a really giant monitor which hits upon Casey Happiness Factor number one at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning of the episode. And it’s my main USB-C hub. Like, at my desk, I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB-C hub because the monitor itself has downstream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports, the computer has downstream ports, and I have my old USB-A devices plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different hub that I already had, had just you know a USB hub it’s not like a USB C or Thunderbolt hub and so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great once you have this setup it’s awesome it cost a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of money but it is fantastic if you can swing it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this is why like it this really does make me very very happy to use this is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remains by far my favorite computer setup I’ve ever used I love the desktop laptop lifestyle still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just fantastic. And USB-C is part of that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing with USB, it’s still, it’s kind of like your audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup, not you Casey, but it’s kind of like one’s audio setup. The golden rule of audio setups is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you get it working, never touch anything. Because if you touch anything, you’ll change it in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, you’ll be in a world of hell for weeks and you won’t know why. USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Thunderbolt and everything is like that. So I have so many weird conditions that I’ve had in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in different setups in the present where I’ll plug something in that should work, some setup that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that should work, and it just randomly doesn’t. Like I have this problem with our game streaming setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’m running all of these USB capture devices and USB webcams
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the CalDigit Thunderbolt Hub and into my MacBook Pro, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason, like one of the capture things, like we have three computers that we capture, So we have three little legato
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB thingies to capture them, and one of them, for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t work through the Thunderbolt hub sometimes. And if I plug it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into my computer, directly, like into a different port, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. Now, if I disconnect the computer that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged into it, like the input gaming PC, if I put this one particular gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC on a different USB capture device, then that capture device will start having the same problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it seems to be like whatever PC, or whatever capture device is connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this particular PC, can’t work all the time from the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port in the Thunderbolt Hub, but will work every time, directly through it. And like weird stuff, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my, I have a Sound Devices Mix Pre that powers the audio for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that setup, that’s also plugged into the USB hub. And that works all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asterisk. Well, most of the time. Occasionally, very occasionally, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blip out for a second and blip back in. Why? I don’t know. But this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promise of so much of technology that we have today. It’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertise, oh, you can plug in X number of devices, or it’ll have X number of ports, and you can support all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’ll see pictures all over the manufacturer websites of all these things. the devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer manufacturers, the Thunderbolt Hub manufacturers, and you’ll see these wonderful pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like some laptops surrounded by a million different peripherals all put into this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one magical box and everything. And in practice, in real life, if you do that, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a 50-50 shot of it actually working. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it actually does work, that’s why I’m saying like never touch it again. And right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, Casey, you have a setup that right now seems to probably maybe work. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been using such a setup and it’s glorious. And so I hope that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works for you because having been on the other side of it so often, having tried to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the equipment in the way that it claims to be able to be used and something just doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often, that when it does work, it is so, so glorious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and that’s where I am. And to be clear, you don’t need a $1,500 LG 5K, you don’t need a $6,000 Pro Display XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can get one of the couple of hundred dollar USB Thunderbolt hubs or whatever they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s still ridiculously expensive, a couple hundred dollars for what is basically four ports. Like that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absurd. But, but when it does work, like you said, when it does work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is pretty great. That, you know, with two cables, I’ve got power, I’ve got ethernet, I’ve got a USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mic interface, I’ve got two different displays. I’ve got two connections,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two parallel connections to this 12 terabyte iodine thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s seven, eight, seven, eight, I don’t know, I can’t count, something like that, off of just two cables connected to my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is pretty excellent. And so when it does work, when you are a HDMI CEC unicorn, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 unicorn, it is pretty excellent. John, I think we kind of railroaded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you there. It sounded like you were gonna say something.
⏹️ ▶️ John fine to hear about your exciting USB-C life, although I still think the ultimate move is the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John life, because no matter how weird ass your setup is, if you have a desk, you can spend the time to get it set up the way
⏹️ ▶️ John you want and then just never change it, because it never goes anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but that’s the thing, it never goes anywhere. So if you want to move your butt or work somewhere else, you
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never leave in my comfy chair, my giant screen and my keyboard tray and my nice mouse. Why would I go anywhere else?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A nice mouse, your $10, 40 year old mouse? No, we got through
⏹️ ▶️ John this. This is my second replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft mouse thing, remember?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should move on. I apologize for kind of railroading follow-up copyright 2011
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Syracuse. So.
Follow-up: QD-OLED & blue photons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of John Syracuse, tell me about QD OLED and blue LEDs, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is actually two things about the blue LEDs. I gave myself a correction on the past show where I
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about QD OLED and QD OLED is the one with the blue backlight. And I said I wasn’t sure why it was blue,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I do know it’s easier to make them like bright and high power or whatever. But there is another reason specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John for QD OLEDs to have blue LEDs in them producing
⏹️ ▶️ John the light. That’s from Simon Webster. He says, the reason blue LEDs are using QD
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs is that blue photons have the highest energy. A single blue photon can make a red photon
⏹️ ▶️ John but energetically you need multiple red photons to make a single blue photon. Again, this has to do with the way quantum dots
⏹️ ▶️ John work. See that video that we linked in a couple shows back that it’s the photons coming out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the LED. It’s not a backlight but it’s because it’s behind every pixel right coming out of the little LED
⏹️ ▶️ John goes into the quantum dot layer and knocks a bunch of electrons around at different energy levels and if you
⏹️ ▶️ John send in a blue one it’s got the most energy so you can make all the other colors from the blue one again this is not filtering
⏹️ ▶️ John or canceling out wavelengths this is converting the blue it’s not converting anyway it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated it’s quantum whatever but yeah blue they’re easy to make they can
⏹️ ▶️ John be really bright and also they have the highest energy so you can get the other colors from them.
Follow-up: How big is Sony?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, John Mason writes, apparently Sony Interactive Entertainment, without the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rest of Sony, is still much higher revenue than Activision Blizzard. This is because we were talking about how big is Sony,
⏹️ ▶️ John some guff for saying like, oh, Microsoft will be the third biggest company, but Sony was number one. I’m like, oh, well, Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John makes tons of stuff. They don’t just do video games. So apparently just the video game part. And this was in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue. So obviously, Sony sells consoles as well as getting margins in the games. But then again, so does Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I guess it was more of a fair comparison than I had thought and Sony Interactive Entertainment is actually really, really big.
Xbox Series S + Game Pass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a lot of feedback which I thought was reasonable from what little I know about this world With
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to Xbox game pass in the series s. Can you explain this to me, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this should have been factored into I think we’d touch on a little bit of the Activision Blizzard
⏹️ ▶️ John Thing when Microsoft buying them, what do they get from that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and also this this came from an ask ATP I think with regard to what should that which system should
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was but it was tied into the Activision Blizzard discussion because it’s like why why does Microsoft want to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy? buy all these games and everything. Obviously you can get platform exclusives to sell more of your
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox consoles, but also Microsoft has been pushing heavily into
⏹️ ▶️ John selling, instead of selling people a console box and then selling people games for 60 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John each, instead trying to get them on a subscription to say every month you pay a certain amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ John and in exchange for that, you get access to many, many games. Sort of a Netflix style thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much more like Netflix than it is like Spotify or Apple Music, because I think with music streaming services,
⏹️ ▶️ John the assumption is that if you pay a monthly fee, you get access to essentially all music. Not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Like if you want Neil Young, you can’t get it on Spotify anymore. But for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John you expect every music streaming service to have the most popular
⏹️ ▶️ John music. Almost all music will be there or whatever. But Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John or a streaming service like HBO Max or Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John or Apple TV Plus or whatever, you know they’re not gonna have everything, but they have a lot of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you had to buy every movie that you can watch on Netflix or whatever, it’d cost you a ton, but if you pay
⏹️ ▶️ John a small amount per month, Netflix will give you access to all its original content plus any other stuff they have or whatever. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea behind these Xbox Game Pass things is you pay a fee per month
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get access to a lot of games. And you can get many, many more people paying that fee
⏹️ ▶️ John if you add lots of popular games to the Game Pass. Now, that flies
⏹️ ▶️ John in the face a little bit of business models like World of Warcraft, where people are already paying every month for World of Warcraft. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how they could put that into Game Pass, because Game Pass alone costs about the same or less, I think, as World of
⏹️ ▶️ John Warcraft does per month. But still, it’s a different way to run
⏹️ ▶️ John that business. PlayStation’s winning this generation, and so they’re, Microsoft trying
⏹️ ▶️ John different things because they want to find the best way they can to get a steady revenue stream from you.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, Microsoft will go as far as to, we talked about renting game consoles from Blockbuster, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John will rent you a game console for no money down. You just pay them X number of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John a month. And part of that X number of dollars a month is they will give you a lesser
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox without you having to pay, you know, you pay the first month’s 30 bucks or whatever, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John get an Xbox and you get access to a whole bunch of games. And then you just keep paying that over and over. So it’s, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if that business model is going to win or not, but it is definitely attractive. And the reason that goes into the SKDP
⏹️ ▶️ John thing a lot of people were saying, look at this great deal you get. You can find the lesser Xboxes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox Series S. You can actually find them because they don’t use as fancy parts as the other ones. You can go to a store right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John go into a Target and buy one off the shelf. Easy to find, right? You don’t even have to put down money up front
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t want to, if you sign up for the Game Pass. And then once you’re signed up for the Game Pass, you have access to this
⏹️ ▶️ John big catalog of games and you didn’t have to buy any of them. So the financial risk to find out what kind of game
⏹️ ▶️ John you like is low. Unfortunately, like I said, with the streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John service versus game service, Game Pass does not give you access to all the games in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t even give you access to a very big subset of them. The types of games that are on Game Pass
⏹️ ▶️ John may not actually even be representative of the world of games that’s available, even just across PC
⏹️ ▶️ John games and Xbox games, because as you can imagine, the very, very best games
⏹️ ▶️ John have some motivation to be $60 individual purchases for the length of time that they can
⏹️ ▶️ John do that before sort of being relegated to Game Pass. Of course, if Microsoft owns them,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can choose to take the hit, quote unquote, not really, because Microsoft would
⏹️ ▶️ John much rather have you pay $30 a month for five years than to buy one $60 game. Like, the math is very
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to do there. But if Microsoft owns the game, they can put it into Game Pass and crank up that service’s
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue. So I think it was worth mentioning if people didn’t know how console gaming has changed, you do have
⏹️ ▶️ John options now other than just buying a console for a couple hundred bucks and then and then buying $60, paying for each
⏹️ ▶️ John game for $60. Sony is also rumored to be working on a Game Pass style subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this may be the future of console gaming. Kind of sucks for me because I don’t want to do that at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. I’d much rather buy the console, buy Destiny, and then just use it for five years without having to pay again. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not really true because Destiny sells you expansions every year for probably another 60 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I always get the fancy version and then I buy horse armor in the game and you know how it goes. Horse
⏹️ ▶️ John a gamer joke. People will get it who are not you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it armor for horses or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John armor made for
⏹️ ▶️ John horses? It’s armor for horses. You don’t know that from back in the day? No. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a big thing in the gaming world. It was like when the first game company decided,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what? We can sell things inside the game, but for real money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John people are like, what are you talking about? You can’t do that. It’s like, no, but boy, what if we found a way take
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they would give us money and then in exchange we’d be like, voila, your character has this
⏹️ ▶️ John item and the first thing they sold was armor for your horse. It was horse armor
⏹️ ▶️ John and people paid real money for it and they’re like you paid real money for thing in a video game and now that’s what’s what video games
⏹️ ▶️ John are. Like that’s all video games are. Like mobile gaming is paying real real money for things
⏹️ ▶️ John inside a video game. Often the thing you’re paying for is just a chance to play the game again sooner. You’re not not even getting horse
⏹️ ▶️ John armor. So yeah, the first ever DLC, downloadable content,
⏹️ ▶️ John but downloadable is one word. So why is it DL? It’s so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. All right, let’s move on. Wait, but before we get, so this actually does change my recommendation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, so this came up as cases from the Ask ATP question from a person who had said like, hey, I’m just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back into gaming after a long time away. I don’t really know where to start. What system should I get? You know, I didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know like what kind of games they wanted. And I had said get a Switch because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a Switch and I came to it from a similar point and I really enjoy it and my family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really enjoys it. But I will say I have bought a lot of games that were a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money that I ended up playing for a few minutes and realizing, oh actually I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really like this after all. But it’s all just download purchases that I made on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Switch and you can’t really, some of them have demos but a lot of them don’t. Most, I would say most don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the idea of try before you buy in that kind of context doesn’t really exist very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much on the Switch. And so to know that the Xbox Series S,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, you know, for a casual person like me and probably this person writing in, the difference between the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series S and the Series X, whatever the impossible one is to get, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter to us so much. But like, the idea of being able to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero to $300 for the system, and then just pay some reasonable monthly fee to have access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lots of games, even if they’re like kind of older, you know, second tier, you know, Netflix quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of games. Like, that’s fine because that’s kind of what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. Like people who are not into the cutting edge of everything, that’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. And so this changed my recommendation. I had no idea this even existed. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got such an overwhelming number of people writing in to say how great it was, that yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so now I now recommend to this person, anybody in a similar situation, that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you should try first. Because the idea of being able to try a whole bunch of like, you know, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good quality games, even if it’s not everything, a whole bunch of really good quality games for a flat fee every month,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that’s very attractive compared to buy this game for 60 bucks that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might like, and you have no recourse if you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t change my recommendation, but like I said, it’s not that these aren’t top tier games, there are absolutely top tier
⏹️ ▶️ John games in Game Pass. Like super duper top tier, the best of the best, but it’s just not every kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of game. And it’s because I didn’t, if you don’t know what kind of game you’re into, if you’re into games that are only on PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John Game Pass is gonna do nothing for you because you’re not gonna like any of the games and you’re gonna have a crappy console on top of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like it is important to know what you like first. Now that leads to the question, okay, how the hell am I supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to know what I like? Unless I’m gonna be plunking down 60 bucks for games. That is the hard part. My suggestion last time was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John find a game you think you like, play it over at a friend’s house, see if you do like it. A lot of people mentioned the person played Halo and liked it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve decided that Halo is the game for you, then actually this is the solution because you can buy an Xbox and play Halo on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll work great. But if you don’t know, like I was trying to like not fence people out of essentially PC games
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are a lot of games that are really only on PC or best on PC. Like if you want to use, I’m trying to think
⏹️ ▶️ John of an example, like a tank simulator, like World of Tanks. World of Tanks on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Scorched Earth? Is that, is it still,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John hey, are we still gonna make that? I’m thinking of all the franchises. I was gonna say flight simulator, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s on Xbox too. It’s not even a French, game from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ago. Anyway, like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you if it turns out that you’re super into games that are only on PC and you have any console you’re going to be sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it turns out that the game you like best is Super Mario Brothers you’re going to be really sad on Xbox. So you know like
⏹️ ▶️ John if possible find out what you like. But if you really don’t know and you’re desperate now this seems like a good deal. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John not big on the Xbox Series S. I don’t think I kind of wish that they did Game Pass
⏹️ ▶️ John with the better console and just charged you a little bit more per month? I don’t know, though, maybe they’d
⏹️ ▶️ John make you send it back if you didn’t go through. I don’t even know how that works. Can you pay for one month and say, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John changed my mind, I cancel the service and send it back to them? Or do they make you buy out the rest of the console? Not sure what the deal
⏹️ ▶️ John is. But anyway, like I said, Sony is almost certainly going to come up with a similar program, so this may be the future of consoles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and honestly, I don’t think that’s that bad of a thing, because I look at the games I play, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are certain games like Minecraft or Stardew Valley that I paid, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, 20 or 30 bucks for once, like five years ago or something. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten hours and hours and hours out of those games. I love them so much. And then other games that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid 60 bucks for and played very little. If there was some way for me to more easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reward the games I’m actually playing over time in a more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direct way and not be out the 60 bucks for something I played for 5 minutes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that would be more… not only more, I think, fair, but it would also be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little more, like, consumer-friendly in a lot of ways. I should buy some horse armor in Stardew. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the game developers… I actually have a horse. It’s adorable. You would buy armor for it, I bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ever attacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And that would just make it slower, which would get rid of the point of the horse. But anyway…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I feel like, you know, obviously there’s this kind of business model has its ups and downs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. But if something was based more on the time that you spent on something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you just paid a flat rate and then the service behind the scenes dealt out the money based on what people were playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, That, I think, is probably a better way to go long term.
Messaging-app interop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Olivier Rui writes, you mentioned SMS interoperability bugs as a key problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iMessage, but it’s a question only Apple gets asked because they’ve merged their own messaging system with the SMS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. I’ve never heard of a WhatsApp or Signal user complaining that they can’t interact with SMS. Everyone just assumes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a separate world. This merge with SMS was a great way to jumpstart the iMessage platform, but the downside becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increasingly difficult to hide as the two systems diverge.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, Apple does get the benefit of that merge. I mean, obviously, the iPhone launched without iMessage, message
⏹️ ▶️ John so it only had SMS and when rolling out iMessage since it was from Apple I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John would have been kind of weird to say the SMS app is still there but now it’s also an iMessage app
⏹️ ▶️ John and like the interoperability was a feature and it still is a feature it’s just it
⏹️ ▶️ John should work better right and then as SMS I’m gonna say as SMS ages but obviously SMS
⏹️ ▶️ John is not getting is staying the same but what’s happening is that as iMessage evolves
⏹️ ▶️ John And as the competitive services evolved, the distance between SMS, which is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John unchanging and these modern messages service becomes greater and greater. And then you get sort of these disparities
⏹️ ▶️ John between them. So yes, Apple did sort of sign up for this by merging them. But I think the merge was a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think I don’t think we would prefer to be bouncing back and forth between two separate apps if we
⏹️ ▶️ John could help it. Although at a certain point, Casey probably would have done that in his fresh out of frustration alone,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because like, look, does it work in the SMS only app, then I will do that for for when I’m communicating with my family. That’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people have sent feedback. They’re like, I have seven messaging apps and I just jump between them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco guess that works,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not ideal. They’re keeping track of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, work people are in this app and you know, and we all do that for various things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But one hopes that with the exception of what you are forced to do with work,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have like five different apps of the same type, like five different email apps, unless you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John Mike Hurley or something. Five different instant message apps. Like, are you in Slack, Teams,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Discord all at the same time for three different sets of people? Maybe because of the Discord gaming angle or whatever, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John less ideal than saying, okay, sometimes I’m in Slack, sometimes I’m in Messages, sometimes I’m in email, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I’m in Twitter. Those are all slightly different. The idea of having five
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that are all just essentially instant messaging, as we used to call it back in the day, is not what I prefer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why apps like ADM were created, right? Where it was all the instant
⏹️ ▶️ John messaging, people don’t remember, but there used to be tons and tons of instant messaging services, all of which had
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of users. And they made one meta app that could speak to them all.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you could do Google Talk, ICQ, AIM, I think IRC, didn’t ADM
⏹️ ▶️ John do IRC as well? I thought it did. Yeah, it did like everything you could possibly imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John in a single app because all the protocols were more or less open and or packed. Those were the days. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the reason that app exists is because who wants to run all those separate apps? But if you can put them on one app and
⏹️ ▶️ John do a decent job of it, that’s preferable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything now is its own little garden and everybody wants their own garden for everyone to join. Like this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, you know, TV apps are like this. The streaming services are all like this. We are trying very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make podcasts not like this, but the reality is they are becoming like this. You know, this is just how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody wants, Nobody wants to work on open standards anymore. Nobody wants to interoperate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. Everybody’s making their own gardens and everybody wants it to be all theirs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only theirs, owned by them, controlled by them, owning the whole stack, cutting up distribution, taking all the money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the modern way to do business in the tech world. So I feel like this is just kind of a reality that we’re stuck with in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas. Like yeah, you’re gonna have five different apps to watch TV. You’re gonna have at least two or three different apps to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your podcast or whatever, audio books, whatever else. You’re gonna have 10 different chat apps, different collaboration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, 10 different messaging apps. That’s just how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not like them is the messaging platforms were magnanimous back in the day. It’s just that, you know, apps like
⏹️ ▶️ John a DM were able to figure out how to make it work. Like there were third party Slack clients, for example, to
⏹️ ▶️ John slack technically has an API. But these days, a an individual or small group of developers
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to ride that bear in Steve Ballmer Parliament parlance is just so much harder,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the degree of difficulty has gone up If you tried to make a meta messaging app that worked,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when encryption is involved, you probably can’t do it with iMessage through the end-to-end encryption stuff and the integration.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was just easier to do back then. It was plausible to do back in the day that a small dev
⏹️ ▶️ John team could make an app like ADIM, but it wasn’t because AOL was super into people making their own
⏹️ ▶️ John clients, right? or ICQ, or, you know, I guess IRC doesn’t care.
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How warez works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I made a offhanded comment last week about how I was wondering how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episodes or movies that are released only to Netflix or only to Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus, how do they end up falling off the back of trucks and what was the story there? And we got,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we touched, the three of us touched on it very, very briefly. And one of the things I think John brought up was industry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screener DVDs that so what what’ll happen is people in the industry will get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pre-release copies of movies on DVD or perhaps Blu-ray, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody could rip that and then upload it, and then it’ll start falling off the back of trucks. Well, Matt Rigby writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indiscretion screener DVDs are still very much a thing. I’ve gotten dozens this year alone. Not Blu-rays,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey traditional standard definition DVDs, all but one of them for content available in streaming platforms that I pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in beautiful 4K resolution. It is, and I’m still quoting. It is freaking annoying and wasteful and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish they’d go away, just email me a code. So I thought that was kind of funny. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a handful of people sent in but I first saw it through Colin Weir. This is an article from 2019,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Scene, Pirates Ripping Content from Amazon and Netflix. And it’s a really, really good article. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not terribly long and it’ll be in the show notes but I’d like to read just a few excerpts from it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the article. Whenever you stream a video online, you are downloading chunks of a video file to your computer. Screeners simply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey save that content and attempt to decrypt it for non-DRM playback later, an informant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tells the author of the article. When accessing the content, legitimate premium accounts are used, often paid for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using prepaid credit cards supported by bogus identities. It takes just a few minutes to download a video file since they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey served by CDNs with gigabits of bandwidth. Once the files are downloaded from the streaming platform, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are encrypted in the MP4 container. Attempting to view such video will usually result in a blank screen, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. Streams from these sites are protected by DRM. The most common and hard to crack DRM is called Widevine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The way the scene handles web releases is by using specialized tools coded by the scene
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the scene. These tools are extremely private and only a handful of people in the world have access to the latest version, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source notes. Continuing, without these tools, releasing Widevine content is extremely difficult, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impossible for most. These tools work by downloading the encrypted video stream from the streaming site
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reverse engineering the encryption. Our contact says that the decryption is a surprisingly quick process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking just a few minutes. I did not know about Widevine before now. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is very much a thing and I probably should have known about it. But nevertheless, I found this entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article fascinating and I’ve kind of given you the TLDR just now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But it is- They cracked the encryption, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John just from the movies. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey break the DRM,
⏹️ ▶️ John the world is yours. Yep. It’s kind of amazing to me that like the
⏹️ ▶️ John crack is not as apparently as of 2019, like not widely distributed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree. I don’t quite understand. There’s probably some motivation for keeping that private,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like a… Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they talk about in the article that… So the scene is kind of, to the best I understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might get the particulars wrong. The scene is like the broad kind of name for all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these different subgroups that are all like trying to compete to be the first one to release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a particular thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know about the scene. Well, okay. So I’m just saying, so if you’re one of these, if you’re one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these groups, you’re going to want to have your own proprietary software that gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the DRM cracked so you can upload stuff and pre-release before anyone else. And you don’t want any other knuckleheads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having your software that you worked and you put blood, sweat, and tears into. You’re going to hoard that for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but I feel like this type of thing, it’s hard to keep a secret.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you don’t want to tell everybody. And then once it gets out, shouldn’t it just be everywhere? Like, not maybe the specific
⏹️ ▶️ John software, but very least, like, here’s how we cracked it. here are the secret keys that we extracted from some hardware device
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever or some insider at Netflix leaked this private key and you know and maybe the motivation is if the Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John find out what thing has been leaked they can do some kind of key rotation or something I don’t know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point is DRM it prevents things from being pirated so that’s why you can’t take screenshots.
Netherlands vs. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then this is we’re kind of getting into the gray area between follow-up and topic the Netherlands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has told Apple Nope. So what has happened is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Netherlands has said that for dating apps Users in the Netherlands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to be able to provide payment via alternate mechanisms, you know not going through the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so Apple came up with a scheme to to satisfy that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and their official group, the ACM, I forget what that stands for now, shoot, ACM has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, no, that’s not enough. In fact, they said, quote, “‘Apple has failed to satisfy the requirements on several points.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The most important one is that Apple has failed to adjust its conditions as a result of which dating app providers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are still unable to use other payment systems. At the moment, dating app providers can merely express their quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interest.’” And so this is the authority for consumers and markets from the Netherlands.
⏹️ ▶️ John such an Apple move. They’re like, OK, all right, well, you dinky little country with a population the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of two big US cities has decided that dating apps specifically have to be allowed to use third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John payment methods. So we’ll begin exploring a program which may allow you
⏹️ ▶️ John to use a special as-yet-unreleased Apple API through which we will extract our percentage to allow you
⏹️ ▶️ John to use third-party payment systems. Please fill out this form to express your permission in participating in this program at our discretion.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Dutch authorities said, OK, well, time’s up,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re not complying. So it’s time for you to, the penalty has been initiated. And the penalty is $5
⏹️ ▶️ John million a day. Not $5 million a day. What is it? $5 million? 5 million euros a week, I believe. 5 million,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Not dollars. 5 million euros a week, but it’s up to a maximum of 50 million euros. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber snarked. It’s like, well, Apple could just find that 50. Why doesn’t Apple just send them the 50 million now that
⏹️ ▶️ John they could find in loose change in their couch cushions? And then just not have to think about it again, because
⏹️ ▶️ John as the old saying goes, for the very wealthy, a fine is just a fee.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can do something illegal and all you have to do is pay 50 million euros, if you’re a multi-trillion dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John company, okay, apparently the price of us doing whatever we want in the app store is 50
⏹️ ▶️ John million euros. Done and done. That’s the easiest 50 million euros I’ve ever spent. Now I don’t have to follow
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. That’s the difficulty of trying to find what the, like what is an appropriate penalty for
⏹️ ▶️ John violating a law. Like you’re living in a country, you have your own laws, you pass laws and you say, okay, well, if you do business in this country,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to follow these laws. And it’s like, okay, well, what if I don’t? What happens to me then? And it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not gonna send you to jail because your company is based in another country.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re probably not gonna ban your products because people do like Apple products in our country. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we’ll fine you? What’s an appropriate fine for not following this law?
⏹️ ▶️ John 5 million euros a week for a maximum of 50 million? I mean, if you’re a dinky company, that
⏹️ ▶️ John puts you out of business. If you’re Apple, you might not notice. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t know. I mean, weekly subscription billing can be very misleading. I don’t know if Apple is familiar with this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it caps out at 50 million. This weekly subscriptions don’t cap out. That’s the whole thing. They just keep getting
⏹️ ▶️ John charged. So anyway, I like, this is difficult because the Netherlands
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have a lot of weight here. Like Apple can just say, okay, no more App Store in the Netherlands.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you like me now? Right, like Apple kind of holds a lot of the cards here. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting to see a country not dealing with Apple’s BS, not giving them seven
⏹️ ▶️ John years to comply, not waiting for the appeals court to go through and blah, blah, blah, and just saying, just playing this
⏹️ ▶️ John little game of chicken with Apple, which they’re going to lose because Netherlands, right? Sorry, but-
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. I mean, like Apple just fine, no more Apple products in the Netherlands. Is that gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John show up on Apple’s? I mean, I guess it would probably be bad for them, but like no more dating apps in the App Store in
⏹️ ▶️ John Netherlands. There’s many solutions that Apple can do that hurt people in this country
⏹️ ▶️ John way more than it hurts Apple because just because they’re small. It’s not easy being small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But John, Apple, I’m sure, has the greatest respect for the laws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of the Netherlands. No, they didn’t say that. They have the greatest
⏹️ ▶️ John respect for the laws of South Korea, which has way more people and spends way more money. They do not have the greatest respect
⏹️ ▶️ John for the laws of the Netherlands. Oh, my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, I mean, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, we’re going to see this play out over and over again as various places regulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to various degrees, Apple is going to drag their feet like crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re gonna do the bare minimum they need to do to comply with any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these regulations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not complying is so relatively inexpensive and problem-free for them that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably better for them not to comply unless the Dutch authority is gonna somehow get some more teeth. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John was saying, their bargaining position is not great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas Apple can kind of just do whatever it wants here, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Dutch lawmaker is gonna say, no more iPhones for our people? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be a pretty unpopular decision among their voters. So, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be, Apple’s gonna just walk right through this and pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much nothing’s going to happen. And it sucks that Apple can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco From the point of view of consumer welfare and respecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sovereignty of nations and things like that, it’s not a good thing that Apple can do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the reality is they have way more leverage in this relationship and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they know they don’t have to do much and so they won’t do it. Apple will do absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing optional in this area. area. They will only do what is 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco required, and in this case, it’s not. Now, China passes some new law?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can bet Apple’s going to bend over backwards to do everything possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throwing all morals and ethics and strategy out the window to bend over backwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for China. But the Netherlands just don’t hold that kind of sway for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do want to point out, Francisco Tomaschi tweeted, which I thought was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very well done. They wrote, it must be really frustrating to roll out an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan only to be completely at the whim of a reviewer, a regulator, to find out whether it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sufficiently meets a set of vague criteria. Well done. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matzko, Ph.D.: Although the thing is, I don’t think they are particularly annoyed. The thing is, Apple did something and they did like, maybe this will satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John them or or whatever, you know, but is this, is this good enough? And the answer was, no, it wasn’t good enough. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, even just banning dating apps saying, okay, no more dating apps in the Netherlands, right? Even
⏹️ ▶️ John that is probably not going to be popular because presumably people in the Netherlands have iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John and use dating apps. And if the next day they said, oh, all the dating apps are gone, that would be bad. It’s like, well, you still
⏹️ ▶️ John have your iPhone and you still have access to all sorts of Apple stuff, but no dating apps. It doesn’t seem like it’s the end of the world, but it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy. And people in the chat room were saying, it’s like, okay, well, no one cares if the Netherlands because they have like 18 million people, but what if
⏹️ ▶️ John every country does it? Well, you know, things like this are happening in each country, but it’s, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not coordinated. This is not some global effort. It’s more kind of like a, a building
⏹️ ▶️ John storm of regulation and stuff. But as Marcus said, Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging their feet every step of the way. So it’s, if, and when this gets to critical mass, yes, Apple will have to do something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for now they’re just being, you know, crossing their arms and saying, we will, we will fight, we will fight
⏹️ ▶️ John this as much much as we possibly can. And they just better hope that China doesn’t do anything, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to go as far as Margot to say that they will throw away all their morals and principles. But
⏹️ ▶️ John not all of them. They try as hard as they can. It’s the thing we talked about in the past shows of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the correct strategy to deal with China? One is to just say, F you, China. We’re out of here. But the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one is to say, engagement with China is better than isolating them for the world, not just for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. And in engaging with them, Apple is using all the power that has available to it to
⏹️ ▶️ John try to get its way versus China, but that is a much more even match than the Netherlands versus
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. So the way it ends up is China ends up getting more of what they want than Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John because in the end, China has the people with the money and Apple wants to sell them the stuff. And by the way, China makes all of Apple’s stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Apple is kind of over a barrel a little bit in the whole China situation, which is why they should get
⏹️ ▶️ John all their manufacturing out of China, but that is way easier said than done. So it’s a difficult situation. Apple fights
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the best they can, the best they can is not great in China.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still maintain that the reliance that Apple still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has on China and the lack of movement in that area away from the status quo will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be looked back upon as Tim Cook’s largest strategic error in his career.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s also going to be his greatest victory because all of the growth and amazing things that he’s done has been because
⏹️ ▶️ John of how heavily they invested in China. All the things Apple is able to do is because of the massive investment
⏹️ ▶️ John in China manufacturing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say some, some of their growth and some of their success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is from that. And that’s not a small amount, but it’s far from all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but who else, who else could have done the manufacturing, the scale that Apple needed building up anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else, including the U.S. to do what China does for the amount of money that they do it with the precision
⏹️ ▶️ John that they do it. I’m not sure what the second choice would have even been because China
⏹️ ▶️ John was well on its way. It’s not like the China came out of nowhere with Tim Cook. Like he chose to invest heavily in China because they
⏹️ ▶️ John were already in the lead, right? So we’ll see how this goes. Like Tim Cook is not gonna live long enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to see, just from not because he’s gonna be assassinated or anything, but just like he will die of old age, the ripe
⏹️ ▶️ John old age of 111, before Apple’s able to move all their manufacturing out of China
⏹️ ▶️ John and into some other country. And like, say now China doesn’t have that, because it’s just, you don’t turn
⏹️ ▶️ John that ship that quick. This is decades and decades and decades of development and huge amounts of money from the Chinese government
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything being invested into exactly the kind of manufacturing that Apple wants done. So
⏹️ ▶️ John moving that manufacturing anywhere else, you know, yeah, it will, especially if it comes to a
⏹️ ▶️ John crisis, it’ll be like, oh, Tim Cook’s folly. He got us so invested in China and now we’re stuck and we can’t get out and like
⏹️ ▶️ John half destroyed the company, right? But also it is impossible for Tim Cook to get out now because
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t have enough time left on this earth to turn that around. Well, but he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t even started
⏹️ ▶️ John turning the wheel. Yeah, he might be like, we don’t know how, you know, If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to start getting out of China, it’s probably good for China not to know that you’re doing that. So we don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going, you know, and what the second or third choice might be and how that’s all working
⏹️ ▶️ John out. But I don’t think it’s something that Apple would announce. Hey, by the way, we’re investing in a 50-year plan to get
⏹️ ▶️ John out of China. By the way, China, let’s negotiate something now. I don’t think it’s the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you announce, but I’m hoping that like, he’s got an envelope that he’s gonna give to his successor
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, step one, get out of China.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My bad for that one, but you should fix my mistake. Aye yi yi.
macOS 12.3 vs. Dropbox, OneDrive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So moving right along. So this is going to get a little bit confusing because even as I was reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes, I was getting myself confused. So as we record today on Thursday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it? The 27th. Today, macOS Monterey 12.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was released and I have installed it and so far so good. And also the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new betas have come out for both macOS and iOS. So the current shipping version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again of Mac OS is 12.2. The current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipping version of iOS is 15.3. So that’s unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the same, you know, tense place, but we’ll make it work. So with that in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox and OneDrive kernel extensions or kex are no longer supported Mac OS 12.3. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to recap, that’s the beta, not the one that came out today, but the beta. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Dropbox and OneDrive, kernel extensions that let them do all sorts of fancy, well, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a varying definition of fancy, things are no longer supported in 12.3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of surprised these were still supported up until this point. Yeah. Like it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, with the transition to Apple Silicon and with, you know, the ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further securing of the OS in the last, you know, few years, I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of surprised these Keck still worked at all. And to clarify, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure John has much more much better information on this than I do, but to clarify, I believe the the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area is not just you know the the files that sync. The problem area is things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their layer where you can have a file that’s not downloaded all the time but kind of gets downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and edited upon request so you can like partially sync your Dropbox and WinDrive contents but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have everything on your computer all the time but still have it still show up in the file system and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be editable like locally just through this translation layer of being network based. So I think that specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the part that’s being targeted here. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, no, you got you basically got it. But like, the whole idea is that, you know, kernel extensions, like the concept
⏹️ ▶️ John that third parties can write code that runs inside the kernel on your Mac, have been
⏹️ ▶️ John going away for a very, very long time for years and years at every WWDC, every session you went through with kernel extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John was explaining to you how things that used to be able to do you’re you’re going to have to jump through more hoops to do, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they would eventually start saying, and by the way, kernel extensions themselves are going away. And why is that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John code that runs inside the kernel can do terrible things, including, obviously, very trivially crash
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer. Because, hey, if you have a bug in your kernel code and you segfault and you’re inside the kernel, it’s bye bye. And there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John protection against that. And then, obviously, for security reasons, if you’re inside the kernel, you have access to more
⏹️ ▶️ John types of things. So they don’t want any non-Apple code running inside the kernel if they can possibly help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. To build on that, to build on that, the kernel is kind of the core of the operating system. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re running around in there, you can do this is like what you said, you can do whatever you want, kind of whenever you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some degree. And so what Apple’s been doing is trying to provide new APIs that move.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like Dropbox doesn’t need to get all the way down deep, deep, deep into the kernel, into kind of the foundation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the OS. They can stay up in, they can stay up in the regular living areas of the house, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will, and not have to go digging into the basement in order to do what they need to do. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, like you’ve said, John, has been trying to push people, push companies away from kernel extensions because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less secure when random other people’s code can run inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kernel. Because when you’re in the kernel, you can, kind of all bets are off.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple’s been doing that itself with Apple’s own code. Apple used to have stuff that used to be inside the kernel that Apple has moved
⏹️ ▶️ John to user space, as they call it. And user space has its own memory protection. If you crash in user space, your program
⏹️ ▶️ John crashes, but the computer keeps running because the kernel is still running or whatever. Now, obviously, you know, some things like the Windows server
⏹️ ▶️ John crashes, your computer is still running and you don’t have to reboot, but everything you’re doing is gone because the Windows server
⏹️ ▶️ John runs all the UI and everything. So there’s a limit to that, but still, user space is better than kernel space.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, and Apple’s been dogfooding, same thing with sandboxing. Apple’s sandboxed a lot of its stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s moving stuff out of the kernel into user space, and it’s been doing that for third parties as well. And to Apple’s credit,
⏹️ ▶️ John What they’ve done is that they’ve looked at what popular applications do our users run on the Mac that currently
⏹️ ▶️ John have kernel extensions and how can we provide a facility for those applications
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep doing what it is they do but to get out of the kernel, like Dropbox and OneDrive or whatever. And even in the case
⏹️ ▶️ John of things like Dropbox where Dropbox was doing not a kernel extension but a thing where they would sort of invade
⏹️ ▶️ John the memory space of the finder or otherwise hack the finder to put the little badges
⏹️ ▶️ John on the finder icons. so that it would show a little green badge with a check mark when the file is synced to Dropbox or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The original implementation or two of that in Dropbox was very hacky and sort of screwed with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Finder at a root level. And Apple, you know, getting enough clout to be a popular application
⏹️ ▶️ John means that Apple didn’t just like ban Dropbox or like cause it to stop running. What
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple did instead is saw the need for some way for third party applications to put
⏹️ ▶️ John little badges on icons in the Finder. and they made a public API that any third party
⏹️ ▶️ John can use to put little badges on icons in the Finder and then tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John convince Dropbox to convert their code to use it. I think Dropbox did convert to that. It’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple, you know, these companies will say, well, we already have a way that works. We just hack the Finder and it works fine. I don’t wanna use your
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid third party API because now I get to change my app. But eventually Apple, I think, has been able to negotiate with these people and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, please use our official supported public API for badging icons. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then you won’t have to have weird hacks and we promise we’ll support it better even though it’s a little bit buggier in the beginning. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with the API they provided to say
⏹️ ▶️ John the file might not be on your Mac but it totally looks like it’s on your Mac and we will transparently make it seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on your Mac even though when things try to open it we pull it from the network just like you were doing behind the scenes and you don’t need your kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John extension anymore. We’ll do it all for you. Just use our public API and Dropbox and
⏹️ ▶️ John OneDrive. Both have had a long time to know that this day was coming
⏹️ ▶️ John And now they have that, like, it’s kind of amazing that they’re able to announce, you know, like a press release,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as of Mac OS 12.3. If you mention Mac OS 12.3 in your Mac App Store app,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll get rejected because you can’t talk about future offerings. And who says there will ever be a Mac OS 12.3? How dare
⏹️ ▶️ John How dare you even mention that name? But they’re able to say, it almost got me confused for a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait a second, it’s like, is 12.3 out? Like, no, 12.3 is not out. 12.2 just came out. 12.3 will eventually come out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when it does, that Dropbox stuff will stop working. Unfortunately, Dropbox being the
⏹️ ▶️ John very agile company it is, will not, doesn’t look like they’ll be ready on day one when 12.3 comes out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they just said, yeah, Dropbox might work a little funny until we figure this out, but we do plan to support
⏹️ ▶️ John the new public API. Because guess what? We have no choice because our kernel extension, we’re literally not
⏹️ ▶️ John running anymore. So, no, look forward to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does anybody still work on the Dropbox Mac app?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, they got to put all those reminders in to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all those little hacks to try to integrate and get you to give you their accessibility password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your root password. And hey, you just plugged in a device. You want us to back this up and take the photos off of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all the time? Should we keep asking? That’s right, when you take
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshots, do you want them to go into Dropbox?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you should give us full access to your entire system just so you can post everything that you want to Dropbox. And we can start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking more and more of your system resources and yeah, it’ll be fine. But oh, we’re gonna do all this through Rosetta because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna actually make an Apple Silicon client. Why would we do that? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I feel like the Apple Silicon version probably got tied up in whatever branch they’ve been working on to
⏹️ ▶️ John not use the kernel extension. And maybe they became inseparable and they can’t ship one without the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they thought they would be done sooner, but they’re not. And you know, anyway, software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is hard. Given their engineering priorities, it would not surprise me if an Apple Silicon version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t actually been started yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, it’s in beta. Where have you been, man? It’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, okay. No, there’s a lot of good reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big companies have been dragging their feet with supporting Mac native apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many ways. You know, we’ve had the electron discussions in the past and everything, but so much of that mentality, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, could lead to the conclusion, like why don’t we just keep building for Intel because it runs fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we do this, and then that’s like one less support thing to have to think about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wouldn’t surprise, like, you know, all these same development teams and companies who are deciding, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what, it’s not worth writing good code, let’s just write electron code and we’ll bloat up our apps on everyone’s system and take up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundreds of megs in every single copy of our app that’s installed because it benefits us and it’s more convenient for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that same logic could also apply, like, hey, why don’t we just keep doing Intel only? Because that’s also more convenient for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us and it benefits us and it does cost our users in terms of their system efficiencies and everything like that, but we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they were always gonna do an M1 version. It’s just taking them longer than they thought, geez.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like you’re the Dropbox apologist of the three of us, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, as far as I’m aware, I’ve never done whatever you do to
⏹️ ▶️ John enable the thing that makes the files look like they’re on your Mac but aren’t really on your Mac. Like I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John using it in the old style where all the files are literally on my Mac, even though they’re also in Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that if I just turn off Dropbox, everything is still just there. I don’t know if that means I’m not running the kernel extension,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if I am running it, it has never caused me any problems. And you know, I’m not really an apologist
⏹️ ▶️ John because I do quit Dropbox when I know I’m gonna be doing something hits the file system because it’s just like this low level
⏹️ ▶️ John drag on the system that I have to deal with. Like if I’m doing a time machine backup and it’s taking too long,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I quit Dropbox just sort of as a just-in-case type of thing. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s wonderful but I do like the ability to quit it when I want to quit it and know that it’s not running
⏹️ ▶️ John and when I launch it it always syncs things and so, you know, I have other things to worry about.
Sponsor: Caséta by Lutron
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Caseta by Lutron. Smart
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes every light control by that switch smart. And there’s so many benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to doing it this way. First of all, you can use whatever light bulbs you want. You don’t need to buy smart bulbs to enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart lighting. Each dimmer switch can obviously control multiple bulbs too. So you get a lot more control over a
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you have to tape over the switch on the wall because if somebody turns that switch off, the bulb’s no longer smart. That
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you don’t have to worry about somebody accidentally turning off the smartness of your smart light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And anybody can use it. So anybody walks into the room, if they don’t have the app, or they don’t know how
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Universal Control finally in beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of betas, in 12.3 beta and 15.4 beta, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally try out universal control between Macs and iPads. And initial impressions are this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is pretty cool. I haven’t tried it myself. I’m just saying based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on- I was hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco try. No, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. I oversold a little bit there. No, I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve seen like, Vatiki
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a video, I’ll try to dig up the tweet and put it in the show I was made a video of it and it looked pretty slick
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I’m not sure when I would have occasion to use this like the times I’ve had my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John next to my Mac I’ve been using it as a second monitor with sidecar and that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John this is about this is you know bringing your cursor over to the iPad, but I do wonder like
⏹️ ▶️ John Having a you know Having a mouse cursor on my iPad and having it still be iPad running iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John things might be useful if I have if there was ever An iPad thing that I needed to have but yeah, I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m ergonomically set up for it but I’m still, I’m so firmly in the one big monitor camp, I don’t really like the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of having to look elsewhere at a different monitor. But it’s cool, it’s cool that they’re finally shipping this feature at
⏹️ ▶️ John least. And I, you know, as we’ve said many times in the past, it’s annoying when features are late, but it’s better than shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John buggy. So, you know, kudos on knowing when it’s not ready and hopefully when it comes out, it will actually be ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, I’ve been using not the continuity feature, which just apparently started existing. I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad as a monitor feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Mac. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sidecar. Yeah, yeah, not as not on my main desktop laptop setup, but in the game streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup, where basically I use it as to mirror my laptop screens. My laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is running the OBS capture software, and it’s running all the webcams and everything. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I use my iPad as a second screen so that Tiff and Adam can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves in the webcam view and see the stream view like in front of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then my laptop’s in front of me, and so that way we can all see the same screen. And it’s the kind of thing like, you know, any,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, any cheap screen could do this, but I didn’t have to buy one because I already had an iPad that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting around doing relatively little. And so it works. And just like every other part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both Apple’s modern software and USB stuff, it works most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, not all the time, but most of the time it works. And when it works, it’s great.
OBS contribution by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are you running OBS on a Mac then? Am I understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I run OBS on the 14-inch MacBook Pro and all the USB things plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that. So all the capture devices plug into that. The gaming PCs are only outputting HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sound into the capture thingies. So the gaming PCs are not running any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture software themselves. And I’m not using their built-in webcams because it’s just easier not to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We just have these little clip-on Logitech cheapo ones that go on each one. And then those are all plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in via USB to the Mac and running OBS. So that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gaming PCs don’t have to think about capture software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ask because earlier today actually, it was brought to my attention that there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GitHub user, developer-ecosystem-engineering, which I had not heard of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But apparently this is Apple’s like open source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contribution contribution like pseudo person, like GitHub account for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issuing pull requests and things. And I presume that in the past, they would just like throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a patch over the wall and say, hey, you know, we fixed this, have fun. But now it looks like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to maybe do it in the open. And I was looking at this earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the most recent pull request that they made is to OBS Studio, and they made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 274 changed file pull request where they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, hey, the way in which you’re doing capture in macOS sucks, but we fixed it for you. Here you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. And if you click through onto this pull request, they actually have in the PR,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like videos showing like memory and CPU utilization
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they’re doing a capture, you know, specifically on a particular window versus like generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capturing the whole screen or something along those lines. I’m getting a little out of my depth because I’ve never used OBS. But my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point is, it’s just funny you bring that up because Apple is apparently going and trying to make it better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for OBS. And I guess for you, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and actually, and this particular thing won’t affect me because this is only about screen capture, where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey not doing any screen capture. Oh, yeah, that’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true. Yep, yep, yep, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that is still a really cool thing. Yeah, I had no idea that this account was a thing. So it was news to me.
FaceID + masks in 15.4 beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, so in the 15.4 beta of iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can unlock using Face ID with your mask on. And this is where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone starts firing up their email and saying, oh, contrary, you can do that already with the watch. Well, now in 15.4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have to have a watch. You can just do it with the phone and nothing else. And I guess it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does much more specific inspection of the area around your eyes in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to confirm that it’s you. I haven’t I’ve tried this, I wear a watch pretty much always,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so this isn’t a big deal for me, I don’t think, but it is cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the one thing that is different about this though, is that with the watch-based unlock,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone is a little bit cavalier about unlocking for basically any face it sees in front of it, and it taps your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch saying, okay, I just unlocked myself. And on the watch, there’s a button that you can use to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relock your phone to the point that you would have to enter the password physically on the phone. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this, it appears that it will be much more specific about unlocking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only for your face, which is kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is interesting because like, obviously if you’re covering up half your face, the security of it seems like it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John less than seeing your whole face because you just have less data points to confirm a match. And it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of revealing like a little bit of the way face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John may work because Apple doesn’t really talk about this too much, probably for security reasons, probably for competition reasons. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when you choose to do this, when you say, yeah, I want it to work with the mask, like you have to opt into
⏹️ ▶️ John it, or it gives you the choice, do you wanna use it with the mask or not with the mask? Because it is kind of a security choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you do it, you also have the option to add glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which you’re like, what do you mean add glasses? Face ID works with and without my glasses now. Why is there some separate step
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to teach Face ID about my glasses? And so the
⏹️ ▶️ John text that I will put on the screen here is using Face ID while wearing a mask works best when it’s set up to recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John each pair of glasses you wear regularly. Face ID with a mask doesn’t support sunglasses, right? So because
⏹️ ▶️ John sunglasses, like it uses IR dots or whatever, so sunglasses can block them and screw it up. But it’s like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to register multiple glasses now. I myself have two pair of glasses, one for close up and one for like driving,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I never needed to register those glasses separately. Why would I need to do that now? And the best I can come up with is that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do Face ID on your full face, no mask or anything, and you’re wearing glasses, Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you trained face ID without your glasses what it says is okay for the top part of the face around the
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes I can more or less get a read But there’s a bunch of crap there that looks to me like glasses and I can’t really confirm one
⏹️ ▶️ John way or the other whether this Is the same person because maybe it’s a person with different glasses or whatever But thankfully I have the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the person’s face to confirm and so I can say yeah It looks like it’s probably matched so
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up But if you take away the bottom of the face because they’re wearing a mask and the masks all lumping and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know different or whatever If you take away the bottom of the face and they just look at the top of the face and they’re like I can kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of see the shape of this person’s face around their eyes But the glasses are screwing it up for me And so like you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have anything to fall back on so maybe what this is saying is that we didn’t know But everyone who wears glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John is getting slightly less security It’s relying heavily on the bottom part of our face To make up for it and now
⏹️ ▶️ John with that taken away Now we have to register the glasses to say i’m going to train you that these are my glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John I have two pairs and one looks like this and one looks like that So when you check me with my glasses on the glasses aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John interfering the glasses are actually new data points um and this would explain why you know it takes like two years into
⏹️ ▶️ John the pandemic for us to get this feature because This stuff’s complicated and maybe more complicated than we think it is. We
⏹️ ▶️ John just think it’s magic We look at our phone and it opens for us but in order for the security to be good and
⏹️ ▶️ John not able to be fooled as they emphasize by like a picture of you or A fake model of your face.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not easy to do But anyway, I look forward to this because I am
⏹️ ▶️ John sick of paying with passcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco As they say, every
⏹️ ▶️ John time I go to a store, of course, I’ve been wearing masks for a long time now, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying typing that in. Honestly, it’s not that I’m hassled to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It feels less secure to me because it’s a giant light-up screen that other people can see, and it’s really easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to shoulder someone’s passcode. passcode and I don’t have like a 75 digit alphanumeric code
⏹️ ▶️ John to type in because I’d never be able to buy anything. So I don’t like you know the idea of people seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John me type in my unlock code in public. Face ID, it’ll be great to
⏹️ ▶️ John use Face ID. I will very quickly enable this feature so I can do with a mask on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I’m very much looking forward to this because you know not only does it cover people who don’t have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch which is you know nerds like to think that oh everyone has one. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assure you it’s far from it. A lot of people have it. It’s a very successful and widespread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product. But like you know to give you some I put up my analytics here for Overcast. Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an app used by a lot of nerds. I mean not not all nerds but a lot of nerds. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have about 35 percent of Overcast users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a watch paired to their phone. And that’s that’s among nerds like the number among
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the average people is probably lower than 30. And so that’s, you know, think about at least 70%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iPhone owners don’t have an Apple Watch. So this brings the convenience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we, you know, watch people have all been enjoying for the last, whatever, 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months or so that we’ve had the watch unlock with mask feature. This brings that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to way more people and in a better way. Like as John was just saying, even now, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the feature we’ve had for most of the last year, If you have a mask on, it’ll unlock your phone, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work with Apple Pay. So if you’re paying at a pay terminal, you still have to type in the passcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I do that when I go to the grocery store, and it sucks. And so to have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work this way is very, very nice. I haven’t tried it yet, because it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out a few hours ago. I haven’t had a chance to install it yet, but I’m looking forward to this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is very, very sensitive to anything that would potentially reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the security of their phones, especially in this area. Yeah, we make fun of various security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes they have sometimes, like in the software, but when it comes to this kind of thing, the phone unlock process,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do a really good job and they are extremely secure compared to the rest of the industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever there’s a new Samsung, whatever, gadget, feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it usually has abysmal security and no one ever talks about it. Like, you know, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody, some Android person, and it’s like, here, here’s a new, like, you just hover your palm over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone and it unlocks it, or, you know, some BS like that, inevitably, like, once the reviews come out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone realizes, A, it doesn’t work most of the time, and B, it’s very easily fooled and can be cracked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily. That kind of stuff never happens to Touch ID and Face ID. Never. That, like, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never had, as far as I know, major security problems with Touch ID and Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, Apple takes a, oh, and Watch Unlock, and all the other things. So Apple takes this stuff very, very seriously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they do a very good job of it. So to have something like this, where they are effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reducing the security of Face ID in some way for this massive practical benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’re all demanding, that is, as John said, not only a large undertaking, but I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust them to have done it pretty well. And I trust that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life, like I don’t need even like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half the security that face ID offers like no one ever has my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I just in my life, like I never lose physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to my phone. It just doesn’t happen. I’m very lucky. I live in a place, an environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a situation where that doesn’t really happen. Like until- It’s not like it’s your bike, I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like until Touch ID came out, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use passcodes on my phone. Like at all. didn’t use one because I didn’t need one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was when I worked in Manhattan. But it’s like, it’s still like, I just never, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I am happy to make the trade-off to enable this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it is reduced security by only judging, you know, the shape around my eyes and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am totally happy to make that trade-off because I so often have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, had to type the passcode in because either, you know, the mask unlock thing with the watch either didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I hadn’t done it recently, so it re-locked, or it tried a few times too many and then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally locked down, or as John was saying, having to pay at the credit card terminal and having to type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the passcode for that every time. So I am happy to take the slightly reduced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security because knowing Apple, this is probably still a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of security for most people. And I can certainly say it’s way more than I probably need.
USB garbage from Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In this week’s episode of Funny Things Casey Finds in the Show Notes, it says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following, Marcos mini segment, USB garbage from Amazon. And I am very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited to hear what this is about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is about two product categories that I have discovered on Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them has turned out pretty well, the other one not as well. But there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive world of cheap USB crap on Amazon, some of which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very useful, Luxorbooks does not, but it does kind of amaze me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a broad category, like quite how much really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inexpensive stuff that is vaguely USB-related there is on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon. And it’s all from these no-name companies that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just like some random manufacturer, probably in China,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had some random person on Amazon set up an account, and you could tell There’s 17 different companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all selling the same manufacturer’s products. All the names of the companies are all capitals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It contained way more vowels than consonants. The product names
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and company names change so often that you can’t even ever usually buy the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing twice if you wanted to, if it’s separated by more than a few weeks. So, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this whole world, and some of this stuff is actually pretty useful, and some of it is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have these two products I’m gonna talk about now, because I’ve just been using them recently. Because of the nature of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this market, I’m not even gonna name them or link to them. I’ll just tell you what they are and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can find your own because by the time you hear this, the ones I bought won’t even be available anymore. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, cool. Probably. So anyway, so the first one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as you know, my kid uses an iPad mini. He’s now on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his, I think, third one? Some second or third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, it’s the previous, it isn’t the current iPad Mini, it’s the previous generation with the home button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the lightning port. And this USB, this iPad Mini has already been replaced once under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warranty, the warranty has since expired. The original time it was replaced was because the charging port was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing out. And when I first tweeted about this forever ago asking for suggestions, I got a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people explaining to me that basically, that what happens when, especially when kids use iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very heavily, that when you use an iPad as heavily as a typical kid does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially with typical kid charging discipline, it tends to basically be at 5%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery all the time. So they’re often using it with the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable plugged in, charging while they’re using it, because out of necessity or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And kids also wiggle a lot, so they’re constantly in slight motion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bending around.
⏹️ ▶️ John not the wiggling, It’s like the kids have zero empathy for the machine. They do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not care that that cable is
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly under pressure. Strain relief is made because they are like the strain, what’s the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ John of relief? They’re the strain provider.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They do not care how much
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re kinking the end of that cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you ever, have you seen this? I bet you’ve seen it if you’re watching. People who have kids know this. So take any iOS device, plug
⏹️ ▶️ John a lightning cable or whatever into the bottom of it. Then they rest it on the lightning cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like vertically, like using that one cable So the cable comes down and then it turns at 90 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ John and they rest it on that. It’s like, how much more strain can I provide? Well, I could just pull on it at a weird angle, but how
⏹️ ▶️ John about I rest the entire iPad’s weight on top of the lightning connector? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No empathy for the machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. But anyway, so, you know, kids are hard on devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially in this area of just like, you know, constantly like operating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad or an iPhone, but in this case an iPad, Operating it when it’s plugged in is not something Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to have really designed for. That’s like the charging port, if you hold the iPad in landscape,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the charging port is right where your hand goes. So I understand why, like, you know, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kid’s fault if they try, if they’re holding near the cable because that’s where they put it. Like that’s where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed it. So, you know, it’s not in a great spot for that already. So already we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem. So anyway, over time, this tends to wear out the ports in various ways and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s hard on the ports. And so, as this is happening again to this iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was just replaced by Apple, I think about a year ago for this problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s happening again, we’re now out of warranty, and we don’t want the new iPad mini. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting for the next iPad Air to upgrade into that instead. But in the meantime, we need this iPad to last a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit longer, and it’s just not. It’s dying quickly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead, I temporarily gave him my iPad, I’m hardly using it anymore as I said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So he now has my 2018 11 inch iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until we figure out what the heck to get him when a good option comes along. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, as I’m giving him this, my iPad, I kinda want it back at the end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of whatever this time period is. I want it to still work. I’d rather it not be destroyed if possible because I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a new one for myself. So I asked on Twitter, like, hey, what do people recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve this problem? And I got a number of, a huge number of responses with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same two suggestions. Number one, use right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle charging plugs, which actually makes a lot of sense when you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. If they’re gonna be holding the plug against the device, if there’s one that has a right angle plug,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it kind of rests along the device and doesn’t protrude out so much. And there’s even some that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will like form a U shape and go behind the device. And this by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was probably the most practical solution. But it’s not the one I took.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m taking it now. I’m still waiting on that delivery from Amazon. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other much more numerous suggestion I got was for magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging cables. And this is what you’d expect. It’s like basically little mag safes for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB charging things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t mentioned that on the show. I do that for all my kids’ laptops. Oh yeah, I don’t think I knew that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have since the day MagSafe went away, I’ve done it on all the laptops. I did find a flaw
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. I mean, you can, I don’t wanna spoil it for you, but like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John do this and you do this magnetic livestock, cause I always like MagSafe, I’m like, I’m not giving it up for things
⏹️ ▶️ John my computer uses. A little USB-C that you put in, it has a little MagSafe thing, lots of people make them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if your kids then take that laptop to school, they have found a way to destroy it. And that way
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I’m going to ignore the case she gave me her laptop dad and put it in my backpack, just
⏹️ ▶️ John loose, and I’m gonna put it with the little USB magnetic nub facing down. And
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna drop my backpack from a great height so that it essentially crushes
⏹️ ▶️ John the hard plastic inner thing that sticks out a millimeter until it smears
⏹️ ▶️ John that plastic into like a form that the magnetic thing can no longer make contact.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should show you, I think I have a picture of it. I’ll see if I can dig it up on my phone. picture of what it looked like after they did this. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it took a couple of years, but you did it. You defeated this MagSafe ripoff thing. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John why I can’t wait for MagSafe to come back and why like MagSafe, the Puck MagSafe, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the other kind of MagSafe. Puck MagSafe coming to the iPad, that whole rumor that maybe we’ll talk about in a future
⏹️ ▶️ John show actually is somewhat appealing. Anyway, continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m excited for it for the same reason. Although it’s so far, the rumor’s rolling that it was coming to the iPad Pro, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not promising. But maybe eventually it’ll make it the lower end models. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yeah, so I decided, you know what, let me try this magnetic plug thing, because the magnetic plugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a bunch of them out there, and many of them have these, not only 90 degree heads, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like automatically rotating heads. You just twist them around, in any orientation they’ll twist around, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure that is perfect, because then any way the iPad is gonna be held
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or moved around, it’ll be fine, because this cable will bend around, and it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a reasonable position, and not be super stressed on the port. So, awesome. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got one that was well recommended, and I got like three or four cables and a whole bunch of tips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all came in a set for like 25 bucks. Great, like typical, you know, awesome Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap USB garbage stuff, awesome. And overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does work, but there’s a couple of reasons why I can’t recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least the one I got. So number one is, this is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow charging. It’s USB-A on the other end. This kind didn’t seem to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any USB-C on the other end. And it seems like to get USB-C on the source end, you need to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some that have like many different pins in them, because some of them try to actually do like data transfer and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and higher wattage charging. This one is a very simple one. It’s like two conductors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, you know, outside, inside, like a barrel connector, but flat. So it was very, very simple. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons it was so cheap. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so durable. The cables are nice and thin. So that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, but because of those limitations, it only does very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow charging. It’s like the 2.4 amp old 10 watt iPad charging,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not anything, not like USB-C, PD stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine for like a phone or low draw devices, and it would be fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for somebody with really good battery hygiene, But for a typical kid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using an iPad Pro, 10-inch iPad Pro or 11-inch iPad Pro temporarily, that’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery to keep charged and it’s very, very slow to charge this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s kind of a problem. Second problem is that there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no universal standard for these things. So like you kind of have to like pick one brand and just stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their stuff. Sometimes they will coincidentally have the same brand do more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than one copy of these cables or the same connectors, but usually it’s like, you know, you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy one brand stuff. And because of the nature of this weird Amazon cheap USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem, it’s very hard to buy the same stuff twice sometimes. So that I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like is kind of a problem. And then finally, these cables,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they’re not connected to a device, constantly glow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the ends with blue LEDs. Lovely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The world has not yet gotten my memo that blue LEDs should require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a license to deploy in products like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have the highest energy photons.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make the other colors from them. Yeah. And so like with quantum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dots. Yeah. And I just I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is our blue LED is is really cool to everyone else, and I’m just, like, anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a problem, these are just always glowing. So that’s kind of annoying. So I’m probably not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep using these for a long time. So that was kind of a flop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and on this topic of these type of devices, I should mention also that I think both of my parents
⏹️ ▶️ John also use these devices, not because they’re not careful with their stuff, because they’re very careful old people, but because
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomically, it’s hard to, especially if you have bad vision, especially important for my mother, I have really bad vision,
⏹️ ▶️ John to line up the lightning connector with the little tiny slot in the thing in your iPad. Whereas if it’s magnetic,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just kind of throw it in the direction of the connector. My mother’s even got it on her phone, like
⏹️ ▶️ John her dinky little phone. She’s got like the five size SE with a little nubbin sticking out of it
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just easy for her to stick on the charger and take off the charger. Yes, you should definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John look into these. I put, by the way, in the Slack, you can see the picture of the- Oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ John one that my kids destroyed and how it’s supposed to look. That is very crushed.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John can we just take a moment to admire my fingernails?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Very well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John As someone who chewed his nails obsessively down to the quick for 21 years
⏹️ ▶️ John of my life, every time I see a picture of my fingernails, I go, look at those fingernails. Look at those long, healthy,
⏹️ ▶️ John good, non-chewed fingernails. Nicely
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco done. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I quit chewing my fingernails, cold turkey at age 21 and haven’t gotten back
⏹️ ▶️ John How? How? I’ve told this story before, but I blame it all on MFC. I was working
⏹️ ▶️ John on my senior project at college, which involved writing an application, a Windows application
⏹️ ▶️ John using MFC, which I hated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, what I would pay to be able to see. Oh, you must have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John intolerable. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I still have the source code printed out. I still have the source code printed out somewhere if you want to see it. And yes, I did win
⏹️ ▶️ John Best Senior Design Project in my engineering school. We have to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey see this. Yeah, anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screenshots of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, probably it looks like Windows 95 shockingly and And when
⏹️ ▶️ John I was writing that code I was like up all night in the stupid computer lab sitting on a backless wooden
⏹️ ▶️ John stool that was way too high typing away the terrible Windows PC and Hitting f5 to compile
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know visual studio What the hell I was doing and chewing my nails constantly because I was like, oh I gotta get this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing done I was my senior project is super important or whatever and I chewed my nails like so far down it became
⏹️ ▶️ John so painful then to like type with my chewed nails. Just something just snapped in my mind as if, that’s it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not doing this anymore. I’m chewing my own nails so much that it hurts my fingers. No more.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it just stopped. That was it. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it was exciting. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John my cuticles look terrible. Don’t look at those, but my fingernails look pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I had to use the bad tasting stuff to stop at like age 30 or something. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey much more recent. I’m still working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, I’m still working on it. The bad smelling stuff, or the bad tasting stuff really works well.
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly too. Yeah, I think we used that on my younger brother and it did nothing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, anyway, so the, you know, USB magnetic charging cable experiment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t work out so well for me. There’s other problems too, but like I could see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it seemed like there’s promise in this world because if like having one universal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of charging cables that you can just buy like 10 of and put them all over everywhere you would need a charging cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have all all your devices charge the same way is kind of amazing. That would be great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think maybe I need to find like a better standard for that. And it also does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like certain devices, having the little nub sticking out of them does kind of suck. Like for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad, iPads are so thin that the little like rim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around this connector actually protruded past the bounds of the iPad. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just makes it like thicker and you catch your hand on it when you’re holding it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of like, ideally we wouldn’t need any of these things. Ideally everything would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use USB-C or magnetic stuff and we’d be fine. But that’s not the world we live in. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t work out super well, but I can see possible promise there
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think we’ll talk about it in future shows when we talk about all the rumors for portless things and MagSafe coming to the
⏹️ ▶️ John an area that could be improved. and third-party solutions are not ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that being said, I was very happy that this whole world existed that clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people use, and I just never even considered it. So, you know, maybe it’ll be useful for somebody out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, the good part of my USB garbage story, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently discovered, thanks in part to comments made, I think over the last few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, by our friend Alex Cox on the Dubai Friday podcast, the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of USB hand warmers. Are you familiar with these?
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing, but that’s all I know. It’s called your iPhone when you play Pokemon Go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so these are, they’re just USB batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happen to have heating coils or whatever in them. And so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to use the stored battery power as a hand warmer that you’re holding in cold weather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for years we’ve had those hot hands, packs, it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a little sack of rust powder and it reacts with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air, it oxidizes and generates heat for a few hours and then you throw them away. Like we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had those forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say about those by the way, I had occasion to use those recently and we had some old ones in the
⏹️ ▶️ John closet. It was just like the ones that go on the small ear back but it’s the same idea, right? We had some old ones in the closet and I use one or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, we ran out, we should get some new ones. the new ones are rated for twice the length of time as the
⏹️ ▶️ John old ones. So apparently in the four years that’s been sitting in our closet, they went from less up to eight hours to
⏹️ ▶️ John last up to 16 hours and they are not kidding. The 16 hour one lasts 16 hours. So like what has
⏹️ ▶️ John happened? Cause it’s not any bigger, it’s the same size. So that crappy rust technology has really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it seems like the main issue is just regulating the amount of airflow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can like control the reaction. so it doesn’t get too hot and burn out too fast. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe just like differences in like the materials they’re using around it, like for the fabric layer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I mean, it was on my small of my back, stuck to my back under two layers of clothes, but whatever they did worked
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was pleasantly warm for a full 16 hours. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the thing is like, I have been on a quest for years to find really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice warm gloves for the winter. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get me started.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m convinced these don’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m convinced not only- They exist, they don’t make them anymore though. I have five
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pairs of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And they’re all worn out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey talk about it in another pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Next year, cheese graters and your
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards. I could search so hard for these gloves. I took them for granted. I bought maybe five
⏹️ ▶️ John pairs of these gloves. I’m like, they’re always gonna make these gloves. They’re awesome. Every year I’ll just buy a new pair. And then I went to look for them
⏹️ ▶️ John one year and they were gone. And so now I’m wearing crappy LL Bean gloves and they’re not as good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so sorry. I have never found great gloves. I found a number of gloves that are decent when it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cold. I have never found great gloves when it’s really cold. My hands are always cold. And here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both at the beach and also just having a dog, my lifestyle requires that I go outside a lot year round.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, my hands are always really cold in the winter because a lot of times I can’t put it in my pocket. Sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them might be holding a dog leash in a way that I can’t easily pocket, or I might be pulling a wagon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. So, my hands are always cold in the winter. It’s very cold here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, I figure, I always want good gloves. It’s not actually very cold there, just FYI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It was like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degrees. Well, I know, OK, Boston, I know. OK, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, or people in Canada. But still, my brief suggestion on hands-off was I’m in the same situation. My hands
⏹️ ▶️ John are always cold. Obviously, you do need to wear gloves. So get some gloves and wear them, even if they’re crappy. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when your extremities are cold, making sure the core of your body is warm can help your extremities
⏹️ ▶️ John not get cold. Because your body’s reducing circulation to your extremities is trying to keep the core of your body temperature up.
⏹️ ▶️ John if you sort of over insulate the core of your body by wearing thermal underwear like I do and being a weirdo,
⏹️ ▶️ John your hands will actually be slightly warmer, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider that. Well, that might work for a lot of people. That’s not my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I walked back today from the post office with my coat unzipped, but still with gloves and hat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. Neck warmer, everything. Anyway, so…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, actually, I joined the neck warmer lifestyle as well. The world of people using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those neck gaiters instead of masks when they thought they would actually do something, introduced me to the concept that neck gaiters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist, which I never even knew. And so now I’m using this winter fleece one. It’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like a fleece tube that I put over my head and put around my neck. Because I’ve never been a scarf person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They always just kind of dangle and get in the way. I never got into
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta get you on board with the scarf thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was a gaiter. We
⏹️ ▶️ John call them gaiters, because that’s what you call them when you’re skiing. I was a gaiter person my whole life, and only when I moved up to Boston did I
⏹️ ▶️ John convert from gaiters to scarves. Mostly because I didn’t want to take a thing and put it over my head and take it on. like, Oh, scarf. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to put it over my head. I just wrap it around. Um, so I’m, I’m heavily into the fleece scarf, uh, lifestyle
⏹️ ▶️ John now, but you have to get a good one. You can’t get like a fancy scarf that looks nice. You have to get one that
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t, does not look nice, but yeah, fleece gators, if you don’t mind, bring, put them, I guess you don’t have any hair to mess up. So that’s one advantage,
⏹️ ▶️ John one advantage you have going for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s great. They’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re very comfy and I still wear them when skiing, not that I’ve been skiing in ages, but when I did go skiing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So anyway, so, um, yeah, so gloves have always failed me and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even briefly tried heated gloves a couple years back. Like I did the research, found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people thought were the best ones and they were garbage. And the problem with heated gloves is that you have these giant battery packs that have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go somewhere around your wrist. They have these huge cuffs and these thick wires and they don’t really work that well. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I decided let me let me look at hand warmers and the problem with the disposable ones, I love the disposable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones for like the toe boot warmers. Those are great. You put them in there, you have like if you’re gonna like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be out for a while, those are awesome, and I haven’t found any better solution for feet yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the hand warmer is like, most of the time, I’m just doing like a 15 minute or 30 minute dog walk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna bust open one of those pairs of disposable hand warmers for a 15 or 30 minute walk. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels wasteful to me, because I know it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John hot for like. It’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be heating up for 16 hours,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re gonna just.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right, and that seems ridiculous. And so the reality is, even though I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a box of those from Amazon forever ago, So I have probably 25 pairs of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready to go. And the reality is I almost never use them because every time I would use them would feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a waste of them. And so instead, I recently discovered these USB hand warmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a bunch of them out there. Also, again, all sorts of brands, shapes, sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all around the like, you know, $25-ish range. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, well, how well could these really work? work and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how long could they possibly last, how much warmth could they possibly generate, like are they going to be a pain in the butt? And the pair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got is, it’s a pair of them, two of them together and they magnetically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick together for storage, which I don’t know. Oh, that’s cool. I thought it was cool. In practice, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping them in my jacket pockets when not in use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m keeping them separate anyway. So maybe it’s less cool than I thought, but I thought I thought it was a cool idea. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, they’re just two 5,000 milliamp hour USB batteries. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have USB-C in, they have USB-A out. So they are also USB batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They function as USB batteries if you need them to be, which is nice. And they’re, because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only 5,000 milliamp hours, they’re not that big, and they, to be the hand warmers, they’re only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely bigger than a 5,000 milliamp hour battery would be. Like, they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, you know, log-shaped. shaped kind of like the bottom half of a hot dog. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can hold them in your hand without it being too big and bulky, but it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not so super skinny that you can’t get good contact on it. So it’s nice. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I walk outside with my dog in the morning and it’s 15 degrees and I got my neck tube on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I reach in my pockets and I hold down the buttons with my gloved hands. I can turn them on easily and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they warm up within 20 seconds. Maybe they’re nice and warm. Like they warm up quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can go for a dog walk. I’m holding these, my hands are nice and warm. And then I get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I approach my house to end the walk, I just reach for the buttons, holding the buttons for a few seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They turn off, walk inside, I’m done. It’s so nice. They work so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Like I would say they work actually better than the disposable ones because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they cover more area and they heat up faster. And then of course you can control the heat. They never get too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot, because there’s like three settings. So like if it’s starting to get too warm, you can turn it off, you can turn it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when you’re ready again, turn it back on or turn it back up. It’s fantastic. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you, Alex Cox at Do It By Friday for recommending this, friend of the show, Alex Cox. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also thank you to the random Amazon corporations who are making these things, because they’re really good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, because they’re just USB batteries, and so, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not much bigger than a battery of that capacity would normally be, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this useful thing, even if, even in the summertime, I’m gonna keep this in my backpack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I just occasionally need a USB battery. And so it’s just, I’m very happy with this product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s such a simple little thing, and solving a need that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far modern technology and fabrics and fashion and things have done a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poor job of solving. Like, why are my hands cold in the winter? What can I do about that? That’s been a very hard problem for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s like we can send satellites and stuff. We can send robots to Mars, but we can’t make good gloves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or hats. Yeah, or hats, apparently. But yeah, this is actually really, really good. I strongly recommend USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand warmers. And it doesn’t really matter which one you get. They’re probably all the same. But yeah, fantastic product.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still contend that if you wore thermal underwear had had a scarf on and zipped your jacket and wore
⏹️ ▶️ John warm things on all your extremities, you would eventually get so hot that you would have to take your gloves off to use your hands as radiators
⏹️ ▶️ John to cool your body down.
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work that way. You’re just not dressing warm enough on the rest of your body. I know because I’m the same. My hands
⏹️ ▶️ John are always cold. Ask anybody. Ask my wife. My hands are always cold, but I can occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John overdress because I am an overdresser. You can ask her about that. Overdress for the weather and
⏹️ ▶️ John be out for a dog walk because I’m in the same situation. I’m out for the dog walk and we’re walking up the big hill in the park
⏹️ ▶️ John and I get to the top of the hill and my hands are burning and that never happens to me. And so I take
⏹️ ▶️ John off my gloves and I radiate all the heat out of my body through my hands and 30 seconds later, put the gloves back on and I’m fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is possible if you sufficiently dress the rest of your body, including potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John wearing wristies, you should try that. I wear them when I type, obviously, because my hands are always cold in the house. Do you know what wristies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it like one of those like 80s armbands before your wrist?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s just a it’s just a fleece tube. You know, the tube you put on your neck. Imagine a tube like that shaped like your forearm with
⏹️ ▶️ John one hole in the side for your thumb to go through.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, that’s a wristy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So you wear wristies and you also wear gloves. It’s like thermal underwear for your hands. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, my God, consider that as well. And you will eventually find the amount of clothing you need to wear
⏹️ ▶️ John to be incredibly sweating hot. And then you’ll back it off one notch from that and you’ll be OK.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But here’s the thing, the problem with good gloves also, it’s like I also want touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensitivity on the glove. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my warmest gloves, well, my least cold gloves that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have now, are not, they’re too thick for that. And they’re just also some random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon gloves also. But I’ve tried the nice ones, I’ve tried the ones from big brands, I’ve tried Hestras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried so many gloves that everyone’s like, oh, these are the best. And I try them and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not warm either. But-
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who don’t know, the ones that I wore for years and years and years of my life until I stopped making them,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were Combi, K-O-M-B-I, Gore-Tex. Combi still makes Gore-Tex gloves,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do not make the gloves that I used for years. They make lots of other gloves that are not as
⏹️ ▶️ John warm and are more annoying. But the secret to the Combi Gore-Tex gloves is, well, the first secret is buy
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the largest possible size, way bigger than you think you need, because the secret to the gloves was they were
⏹️ ▶️ John like down comforters for your hands. Mittens are a lot easier. Obviously mittens, it’s when your fingers are all
⏹️ ▶️ John together. Mittens are way warmer than gloves, but then of course you have no finger, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Dexterity, right? So making warm gloves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Making warm gloves is difficult, but the secret of these ones is they were like huge and pillowy.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were just like, you know, the big like puffy jackets that like the hip hop stars used to wear when that was in fashion,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They were like that for your hands, but not shiny. Just a huge amount of fluffiness
⏹️ ▶️ John around them. They were just, and you’d get them a size bigger than you thought because any gloves that are tight will make your
⏹️ ▶️ John hands cold. And so you had, it was, there was enough sort of like down comforter wrapping around every one of
⏹️ ▶️ John your fingers and your entire hand and your wrist that it would actually keep the heat in
⏹️ ▶️ John and not let you lose it. And those are the only, and these gloves were time-tested by me skiing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like skiing up in Vermont. And when it’s like two degrees with the wind whipping through the chair lift as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting there, you know, for the, I forget what they call them. Like they started
⏹️ ▶️ John by calling, oh, the high speed quad. They used to be, they usually not talk about the ski lift speed. It was just like the speed the ski
⏹️ ▶️ John lift is. But then they came up with a high speed ski lift, which meant that it’s faster than the low speed
⏹️ ▶️ John ski lift. It would disconnect from the thing and you would sit down on it and then it would reconnect to the faster moving cable and you’d go
⏹️ ▶️ John fast, right? But no, I would be on the slow speed triple going up Mount Snow
⏹️ ▶️ John in three degree weather in the fog with the wind whipping. And that’s the crucible in which these gloves
⏹️ ▶️ John were tested. Say, can it keep my hands from being cold when I am sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John suspended in the air, in the middle of the wind, not moving my body at all. And these were the only
⏹️ ▶️ John gloves that kept up with that. I kept buying them year after year until they stopped making them. Story of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think somewhere there’s another person who is stockpiling these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gloves, your cheese grater, your chicken
⏹️ ▶️ John the person who’s stockpiling my cheese grater.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, do you think, is there someone else who’s stockpiling the same items you are and just like- No, but
⏹️ ▶️ John again, well, if they were, I keep buying them from them. I have so many freaking cheese graters now. This is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be my legacy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe did they buy that spatula for $70 that you didn’t wanna buy? Was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Was it a spatula?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, that spatula I’m not really stockpiling. I’m okay with that. Although I feel like I’m gonna, sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John my retirement plan is to sell Gruber my collection of Apple Extended Keyboard 2s that I have in my attic.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ve got a lot of those. I don’t think he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stockpiling them, but I got a lot. Unfortunately, they seem to last a pretty long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think it might be a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s gotta do what I did. The only Apple extended keyboard two I ever broke is because I accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John knocked my Swiss Army knife from with that had the blade open, because I’m a teenager,
⏹️ ▶️ John from my shelf above where my computer was. It fell off the shelf onto
⏹️ ▶️ John my keyboard, like blade point down and hit like the F5 key and like dug into
⏹️ ▶️ John the key and snapped it off. Wait, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did you get rid of the whole keyboard just for F5? Like whoever uses that?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s upstairs with a broken F5 key right now. But I have new Gruber. I have new ones that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not damaged anyway. I’ve got a stash, just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. Besides Windows people who needs to use that for like their browser refresh, is that still a thing or does like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Control R work there, like the way Command R works
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re probably hitting F5.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re still hitting
⏹️ ▶️ John F5. My daughter said she needs to hit Control C to copy something. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Control C? I didn’t raise you to use
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Control C to copy. What’s going on? Like, how did this happen? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve literally never had a PC in this house, but you know how it happened, dude. Can you guess? school I
⏹️ ▶️ John would assume. Chromebooks. Oh. Chromebooks. You don’t think about it. You’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Windows uses control and Mac uses command. What does Chromebook use? Control.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco monsters. Control
⏹️ ▶️ John C. Control V. Copy and paste.
⏹️ ▶️ John A whole lifetime of only ever seeing and using Macs destroyed as soon as she gets a Chromebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She can convert as an adult. It’ll happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, she doesn’t prefer the Chromebook, but it’s just to have
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is for her whole life being around Macs, she never used cut, copy and paste because she was little. But
⏹️ ▶️ John once she got old enough to use cut, copy and paste, the first thing she actually did it on was a Chromebook. And so control C
⏹️ ▶️ John is copy. It’s like, oh, terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Iodine, Lutron Caseta and Memberful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join atv.fm slash join. We will talk to
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John to. Accidental, accidental, tech podcast
Neutral: Electricity in cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so John, what are you going to do about a car the next time you need to buy one?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m assuming by then there’ll be more affordable electric choices,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s probably what I’ll go with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So no more stick for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is it. I mean, it depends. Like, obviously, like, as we mentioned, as we were discussing before,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t really joking about you were saying like, oh, the Civic may be your only choice because you can get a Civic with the stick, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get the Accord with the stick anymore. and then new Civic is very nice and blah, blah, blah. So maybe the next time you get a car, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a Civic. And I said, by the time I have to get a new car, the Civic will be the size of my current Accord. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John both the Accord and the Civic have been growing in proportions, like constantly for the past several decades.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Civic today is way bigger than the Accord from like a couple of decades ago, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, if this trend continues, I don’t think that the Accord is gonna get bigger without Bound because it would just be gigantic,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the Civic will probably get bigger up to and including the limit of the size of the current Accord. So yes, maybe I will get
⏹️ ▶️ John a Civic if it’s the one that still comes with a stick. Maybe, uh, you know, Honda will come to its senses and make another record
⏹️ ▶️ John with the stick, like a sporty version for like, you know, a niche thing or whatever. Uh, but much more likely I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be looking at electrics, um, when that time comes. So that’s going to be a while for now. Like as we discussed in past shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John my car is a 2014 and it has 27,000 miles on it. My goodness. And I plan
⏹️ ▶️ John to sinking a hell of a lot of money into it before I give up on it. So. What is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is Tina embracing her future life as a two-pedal driver, or is she even more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angry about it than you?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, she doesn’t care as much about it as I do, but I think she’ll be sad. She does not like automatics, though. We test drove various
⏹️ ▶️ John automatic things, and she does not prefer it. But I think she will happily take an electric. So she’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely to get an electric before I am because she is less picky and more excited about the idea of an electric.
⏹️ ▶️ John She’ll still miss it a little bit, but not as much as I will. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there a human that is more picky than you, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure. That’s the one who’s also hoarding the cheese graters. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John all the cheese graters. I have the market cornered on those suckers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So speaking of car stuff, I have a quick question. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been, of course, as mentioned, very cold here. And I recently went back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mainland to go some grocery shopping. And there was a, every time I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, I currently have the FJ Cruiser parked in the ferry parking lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to my car. And every time I go back, I just like start it up and drive it around a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit just to, you know, make sure everything still works. And I think you’re supposed to do that for gas cars, right? Like start them up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every so often. It’s usually not a bad idea. Yes. Right. So anyway, when I went back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the very cold weather this last time, when I went to start the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say it was not super willing to start. It’s cold weather for you. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so I want you to tell me, I’m going to describe the situation. I want you to tell me what I need to get serviced or looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, if anything. So the situation is I go to the car after it’s been sitting there for probably, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, two weeks, I turn it’s very cold weather, I turn the key, and it goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery and then eventually starts up. Okay. Now, I thought battery possibly to event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so eventually it does start after some some reluctance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I you know, go to a store go in for a while come back out, start the car again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly the same thing. Well, it does that every time I’m starting it within a day’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth of errands, not just the first start.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but slow down though, because depending on how long you’re driving in between stops,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re probably not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that much charge. 15 minutes? No, it’s plenty. I mean, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John healthy car, like this is something I didn’t know until I moved to Boston, but like, when you’re, if you haven’t driven your car for a
⏹️ ▶️ John while, then it’s been really, really cold. when you try to start it, it will be like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John prefer not to do this, but we’ll eventually start. But if you drive for any amount of time, even a five minute
⏹️ ▶️ John trip down to the corner to like, you know, go to the convenience store and you turn it off or to get gas or whatever, it
⏹️ ▶️ John should start up better than it did with the total cold start. Even just five minutes of running should do it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go somewhere to run an errand, you go into the store for five minutes, come back out, and still it’s just as
⏹️ ▶️ John bad as it was when you first tried to start it, the problem is not just that your car was cold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and that’s the symptom. But a month ago, when I bought the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was much warmer, it would start up instantly. Like no delay. How old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is your battery? I don’t know, I asked the previous owner of that when I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. It’s got the
⏹️ ▶️ John year printed on it, you can just open it up and look. I don’t think I’ve ever opened the hood. Yeah, that would be a good
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. Find out where the battery is and look for the year on the battery and see how old it is, and if it’s older than like
⏹️ ▶️ John four or five years, just get a new battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have one of those like jumpstart battery things, but I didn’t, it was so cold and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was in such a rush because of the weird winter ferry schedule, I didn’t even want to try it unless I had to. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the time to like pop the hood, connect this thing, try that, even that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of time would have eaten into my shopping time too much. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do that. It’s not like we’re in like the wilds of Canada.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need a battery warmer, as people are suggesting. You live on freaking Long Island, you’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fine. I don’t live on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fricking lawn. I live next to a fricking lawn. You do.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just get a new battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should get a new battery every few years. I’m surprised that cars don’t do this. Probably the fancier cars do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like cars will warn you about all sorts of stuff, but batteries last, and cars last a certain amount of time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it should like after five years or whatever, put a little light on your dashboard that says, hey, your battery seems okay now, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s been X number of years. You should consider getting a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because of my reality of like, you know, how hard it is to get off here and the very quick amounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time I have to do errands out on the mainland with the ferry, I figure like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can bring this to like go get service somewhere but I can’t leave it there all day and I can’t leave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it there overnight. And so like it’s kind of, I need like faster solutions than that, something that could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done like in an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can do the battery yourself. Just find the battery and order it and go pick it up in your little wagon and you can just do it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I’m not gonna do that. Yes, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John absolutely can. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had to, I already could. I’m not going to.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, this is, I can’t think of an easier, I think washing your car is harder than changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery in your car, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can’t do that either. It’s the easiest thing you could possibly do. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assure you Marco cannot wash his own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco car. In case you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guys see me try, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not a pretty scene. It’s a battery, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John electronics. Like, especially if you don’t care about losing all your codes or whatever and don’t do the weird thing that I do where
⏹️ ▶️ John I never let the current flow stop to the thing, you just disconnect the terminals, you take the old battery
⏹️ ▶️ John out, you unscrew some screws, take the old battery out, put the new one in, screw it back in, put the terminals on. That’s it, that’s the whole procedure.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even need to buy any dielectric grease. You can just, just no tools needed except for a screwdriver and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like look in your car of like what little, you know, socket or nut you need to unscrew the little holder.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, you can do this. You do not need to pay someone to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you know what? Right there, what you just said, that tells me, so first of all- You don’t have any tools?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I didn’t even consider the fact that I might even need dielectric grease for this. I don’t even know what that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t, you don’t. I was just, that’s just. So secondly, secondly, you said the bolt, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a beach vehicle. Every piece of metal in it is corroded or rusted. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is, I guarantee you, whatever’s holding the battery down is rusted. And if I try to use my crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools on it, it’s gonna strip immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can hold the battery down with a zip tie. Like the only thing it’s doing is literally keeping the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery from like jumping out of your car. It is not a structural member. You will not, like you just
⏹️ ▶️ John need something to hold the battery inside the car so it doesn’t go flying out. And there is something that does that now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even if that thing is rusted out, put a big zip tie around it, it will be fine. It’s not a structural member.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I believe in you. Second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, is this the kind of thing that I could drive up to any service place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get done quickly, or are they special batteries?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll charge you a million dollars if you try to buy a battery through somebody because they’re gonna put their profit margin on it. If you go to
⏹️ ▶️ John the dealer, they’re gonna charge you $400 for the battery, just buy a battery yourself at an auto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts store. They’re that much from dealers? What are they new, like 150 bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything is that much a dealer. Do not buy tires at a car dealer, do not buy a car battery at a car dealer,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will cost you way more.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, it depends on the car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a Honda, when I buy, I actually bought an official OEM Honda car battery just because the Honda parts place
⏹️ ▶️ John near me has them at like a reasonable price. But in general, you don’t want to buy things like that through a dealer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I was always, even before my leasing days, I was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dealer service person because I was so scared of doing something wrong. And growing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, we had relatively little money growing up, And so we would go to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-dealer mechanics for all of our car services. And we had very mixed experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way. Not everything went well there. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve kind of always been a dealer person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m big on going to the dealer. The main reason I heavily endorse a dealer for doing maintenance and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is because I want someone from my specific car, I want someone who has worked on 1,000 Accords, like exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like mine. They know every- That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I want. Right, they know every single, every little part that is weird, the thing you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be careful of, or whatever, and the highest chance of getting that is the dealer. But certain things you never get at the dealer, and those are things that
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t require any expertise to install, and that you can get way cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere. Tires are probably the biggest one, because if you try to buy tires, even at the Honda dealer, they’re literally twice the price
⏹️ ▶️ John of buying tires elsewhere, right? Batteries are often hilariously expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John more so on fancy cars. Like if you try to get the battery changed on your M5,
⏹️ ▶️ John that battery is probably $600. Like I kid you not, you know? Well, they have to figure out where the hell it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s in the trunk. And aftermarket ones will cost you much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but with a BMW, you absolutely need to have it done at a dealer because then they need to tell the computer it’s a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John battery. They have to reset all the codes
⏹️ ▶️ John with the computer thingy and do all the- And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the kind of thing I’d be a little bit afraid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John dealing with. But you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to do that on your 1990s Toyota FJ or whatever that you have.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It is a standard size battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just go to AutoZone, enter in the year, make, and model of your car. It’ll say we have these three batteries to choose from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pick the second most expensive one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure they’ll do it for you, actually, even at an AutoZone. I don’t know that for sure, but I thought they would. I want Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this himself, just so he knows that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey he can. Oh, that’s not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen. There’s no chance of that
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. Let Adam do it. It is so easy. I don’t do anything to my car.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not change the oil. I don’t change brake pads. I do not do any car repair. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have changed so many car batteries. It is a thing you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a thing you can do. Again, can and will are different things. It’s a thing that I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not do, but I probably could if I really had to.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s so inconvenient for you to drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere to do it, though. But it’s even more inconvenient for me to try to do it myself in the ferry parking lot in 17 degree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weather in five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re gonna be going there anyway to bring whatever your next haul of shipment goods are to
⏹️ ▶️ John back to your house, so. Groceries, they’re called
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco groceries. Well, whatever it is, you’re always ordering things
⏹️ ▶️ John from Amazon and stuff. The battery will just be one more. You’ve got a wagon. It’s like bags of kale
⏹️ ▶️ John and coconuts. Also, just throw a car battery on the stack. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here we go. Member perk. He will record the FaceTime call between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you two. He’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John record himself doing it. Someone with warmer hands than him just record with his phone and says, here’s Marco. He’s opening up
⏹️ ▶️ John the hood. He’s trying to find where the battery is. And now he’s realizing you can’t just pull the terminals off, but they have this little thing on
⏹️ ▶️ John it that’s shaped like an octagon. And how do I get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably totally rusted out.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much rust is there on it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How much rust could an FJ rust if a FJ could rust rust?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John At least take
⏹️ ▶️ John picture of the car battery so we can see what condition the terminals are in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to figure out how to open the hood.
⏹️ ▶️ John That I also believe you can
⏹️ ▶️ John Sit in the driver’s seat and probably look down to your left for a thing that you can pull that shows like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John outline of a car with a hood opening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but there’s gonna be some weird latch I have to actually then find under the actual hood lip. That’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be corroded. You can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. If only you had read the owner’s manual.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to watch more end of the world media, like movies and TV shows
⏹️ ▶️ John where the world has ended, just to see, just to get you up to speed on all the things you’re gonna have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Like figure out how to open the hood of your car when no one else is there to do it for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just walk away at that point. I’ll just be like, well, I guess I don’t have a car anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This one won’t start. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna turn to dust. Margo’s definitely big on the bicycle apocalypse.