468: You Got Your Non-Money's Worth
03 Feb 2022It’s 2022 and we still haven’t solved email, batteries, or sharing files between two computers.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco enters winter luxury
- Follow-up:
- Google ships tapback parsing
- Regarding “Screeners”
- Xbox Game Pass
- Apple and the Netherlands
- New beta bits
- Face ID unlock and glasses from Ryan Booker
- Notes on Universal Control from Carlos Carpio Carcía
- Sony buys Bungie for $3.6B
- Google tells legacy Gmail account holders to “pay up”
- Ars Technica’s coverage
- Google information
- Amazon Simple Email Service
- Using a custom domain with iCloud email
- Mimestream
- Fastmail (former sponsor)
- Hey (former sponsor)
- Zimbra
#askatp:- How do we back up shared photo albums? (via Carlos Moffat)
- How do we manage power (and battery) for desktop laptops? (via Anirudh Coontoor)
Settings→Battery→Battery(in sidebar) →Optimized battery charging
- What security steps do we take for family devices? (via Lars Bekkema)
- Post-show:
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Chapters
- Winter luxury
- Google parsing iMessage reactions
- Follow-up: Academy screeners
- Sponsor: Linode
- More on Game Pass
- Follow-up: Apple vs. Netherlands
- Masked Face ID for apps
- Universal Control
- Network file shares still suck
- Sponsor: New Relic
- Sony + Bungie
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Casey’s email problem
- #askatp: Backing up shared albums
- #askatp: Desktop-laptop battery management
- #askatp: Theft of an unlocked iPhone
- Ending theme
- A post-show in three parts
Winter luxury
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have entered the world of winter luxury.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you get new gloves or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did get new gloves. They’re okay, but like all gloves, they’re at best okay. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, you know, we did get a lot of glove recommendations. The recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were all over the map and there was no consensus whatsoever on like what might be good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think there were two strong themes, both of which we, well, one of which we definitely touched on in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other one that was, we should have touched on more. One was, hey, mittens are warmer than gloves.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people said that, right? And we did mention that on the show, although it was so fast you might’ve missed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second one was layers. Like, you know, wear a thing underneath a thing. Right on
⏹️ ▶️ John your hands. In fact, some of those things that were suggested were these all-in-one things where like it’s a glove on the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a mitten on the outside, and you can unzip the mitten and get the glove, but you can do that yourself with glove liners.
⏹️ ▶️ John Back in the 80s slash 90s, we had these sparkly glove liners. They looked like, kind of like a Michael
⏹️ ▶️ John Jackson glove. Of course. For skiing, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey idea is like, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John reflect the heat. Honestly, I don’t know, because I was young. And it’s just like, here, these are glove liners. You wear them underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John your gloves. I was like, all right, whatever. I didn’t really question why they were sparkly, but they were sparkly, but you can buy ones that are not sparkly
⏹️ ▶️ John or silky or whatever. So I feel like those are the two big themes. Then after that, it was just, here’s the favorite glove that I’ve tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I feel like part of the problem here is that this category, literally, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole category is bad in some way. And another part of the problem is that people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vastly different needs. Like, you know, my needs, like, it’s so funny. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often will recommend gloves that, like, I have tried either that glove or something very similar to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and it works great when it’s 40 degrees, but you need very different things when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s 20 degrees, and you need very different things when it’s 10 degrees. And like, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like people, people just think that cold is cold, and you don’t realize, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 20 degrees makes a pretty big difference. Like you wouldn’t wear the same clothing between a 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree day and an 80 degree day. Like those are, that’s two very different needs. Well, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason people think like, oh, these gloves that work when it’s 30 will work fine when it’s 10. Nope, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work that way. So I got some more gloves, they’re okay. And they continue my parade of okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gloves, none of which I’m extremely happy with. See also like, you know, to-do apps, weather apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many things like that in life, right? You know, you’re like 80% happy with something at any given time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gloves are definitely one of those things. But that is not the luxury I have entered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am podcasting right now from atop a new
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a thing? I was gonna say. I really thought you were gonna say you got silk thermal underwear. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then when you said sitting atop, I’m like, did you get like a heating pad for your butt? But no, it’s the rug that’s heated?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so a place I used to live had radiant floor heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my office and I loved that so much because it’s amazing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have to have a home built for winter weather or configured for winter weather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust me, you want heated floors. It is by far the best form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of heat for a house for almost any needs. Right up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can also get electric heated floors, but hydronic heated floors are very hard to leak when they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re good right up until they’re not. Because then you have a bunch of tubes going through
⏹️ ▶️ John concrete that you have to break up. And the modern ones, they usually take aluminum stuff and they nail the tubes to the
⏹️ ▶️ John underside of the subfloor. So at least if it leaks, you have access to it. But yeah, those things last a good 20
⏹️ ▶️ John to 50 years and then it’s someone else’s problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, fair, but I mean, that’s true of many large construction projects and houses. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not that unreasonable. But
⏹️ ▶️ John usually not heating. Like, I mean, if you think about the stupid radiators in my house put in here in the 30s and
⏹️ ▶️ John still going strong, like there’s the burying stuff in the floor is A, not accessible and B,
⏹️ ▶️ John subject to all sorts of things that just bear pipes going through the wall, not subject to it. But your point stands,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna be out of the house by the time this happens. So yes, if you’re getting a house and you have a choice,
⏹️ ▶️ John put the heating in the floor. And then when you die or move out, someone else will deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and so I don’t have that here, and I missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it dearly, and I’ve tried, you know, like last winter I tried, oh, let me just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turning the heat up a few more degrees in the room, and that doesn’t really solve the problem. Like my feet and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legs would be kind of cold, or my hands would be kind of cold, but like the rest of me would be fine. Are you not wearing slippers?
⏹️ ▶️ John wearing slippers. What kind of slippers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not technically slippers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are what the website described, I believe, as driving moccasins. Like, they’re slippers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re just, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey slippers that have a rubber.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we get a link to this so we can have a ruling? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna find a link to what I’m wearing right now, which is the latest in a long line of
⏹️ ▶️ John mildly satisfactory slippers. Can you guess that the ones I normally get, they don’t make them anymore? Can you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco guess that? You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say. I’m so surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, no, it’s not true. They make them, but they don’t make them in wide anymore. I’m like, seriously, you still make them, but you don’t make them in wide?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing about your body that has ever in its entire existence been wide. You claim you have wide
⏹️ ▶️ John feet, with slippers, I like the gloves, I like them to be oversized for extra warmth. These are the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that I’m currently wearing right now. I’ve got complaints about them, but lack of warmth
⏹️ ▶️ John is not one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See these giant, the ones that have basically an entire rabbit stuffed inside of them, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this fuzz coming out, that to me is, it’s too fuzzy. It’ll keep your feet warm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s too warm. That doesn’t make my feet too warm. So what I wear is basically like uninsulated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to put the link, it’s these Duluth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, these are nowhere near slippers. They’re not even in the vicinity of slippers.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re called slippers right there in the title. I don’t know how these aren’t slippers. I know what you’re talking about. You can’t slip your feet into them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, he’s talking about mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You can. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m talking about Marco’s. I haven’t even looked. Oh yeah, yours are preposterous. I’ve seen these in action. They’re ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t doubt that they’re incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve seen similar ones. Yeah, I see what you yeah Those are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re driving shoes. Yeah, these are not slippers mark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never driven in
⏹️ ▶️ John them. That’s stupid I do I do let me just say I do like the fact that they have rubber Uh bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John things on because that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John people miss about slippers when buying if you’re going to buy Uh, you know half year, you know six month slippers
⏹️ ▶️ John like I do it is good to have a soul in them that you can walk outside in to like
⏹️ ▶️ John go get the mail or take the dog out for a brief walk or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. Hard agree, hard agree on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, I do that all the time. If it’s clean and dry outside, yeah, I’ll take the trash out wearing these, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, I do wear slippers, however, I was not, I just wasn’t getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of warmth that I knew that a heat floor could offer. And so first, I looked at, should I get one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those little panel heaters and put it under my desk for supplemental heating?
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you mean by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel heater? It’s basically a radiant space heater, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole category of them that are made to go under desks, and it’s a vertical panel that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radiates heat onto your legs. The reviews were all really mediocre, and they looked like they sucked, and I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want that under my desk. And I tried, at first, I tried this little tiny $40 heat mat that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the size of, I don’t know, it’s like an 11 by 17 piece of paper, like that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John To keep your feet directly on the little piece of paper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I tried that, And it did work in the sense that it was pleasant and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kept my feet warm, but it was first of all really like cheap and crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking like it’s not something I was proud to show my office and it just was such a tiny little area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it’s like I want something bigger. So I started looking for like, do they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger versions of that? And it turns out there’s this whole category of basically heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pads that you put under rugs that are made to heat rugs. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my office didn’t have a rug, so I went through the process of finding a rug I liked. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s the thing. Can we
⏹️ ▶️ John see the rug too? Put some links in this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a ruggable thing, it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John have like a racetrack on the rug or no? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, it kind of does. If you could, you know, get out some
⏹️ ▶️ John cars and, you know. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually not that far from the design. Hold on, I’ll find the design.
⏹️ ▶️ John A racetrack, you know, you could have like a town where you have roads, but then there’s like a post office and like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the farm. Yeah, yeah, like the kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you have them in your kids’ rooms? That was actually the rug we had in our downstairs den
⏹️ ▶️ John area for the longest time. I think Ikea still makes those. The kids grew out of it, and we still have
⏹️ ▶️ John the rug there. And I guess one of it eventually occurred to us when the kids are both approaching teenagers that
⏹️ ▶️ John we probably don’t need that rug anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you actually kept something for a long time in your house, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, surely not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we still got a lot of baby clothes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m surprised it only lasted one generation so far. That’s the bigger surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that rug is an erratic, at least I hope it isn’t, but if it is, throw it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, here’s my rug. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Metro Slate Blue Rug. Instagram victim. But this is a racetrack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I told you, it kind of is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. All right, no, that’s cute. How big is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Five by seven. Because that’s enough to go under the whole area that I put my feet, plus to go under my chair, that way I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to run the chair over the rug to floor transition. It’s kind of hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run the chair over this rug now, because it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like the ruggable rug itself, because it’s a thin rug with a thin like liner behind it that keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from scooting around. Then the heat pad, which is like a giant foil thing. Then under the heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pad is the insulation mat as well. So it’s like four layers of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rug stuff, but my God, is it nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when your house goes up, this will be good for insurance purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s done in a fairly, you know, conservative way. conservative way. Everything is pretty conservative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. So it’s like very well guarded and it’s only like 300 watts. It’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much power. So yeah, so it’s glorious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you ever put a link to the heating thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, hold on, let me, I’ll dig that up too. Hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a lot of bad reviews. When I first got assaulted by Ruggable ads on Instagram, I looked up some YouTube reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John and they, there were a lot of complaints about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, here, so here, the ones on Amazon all seem to have really wacky reviews and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon ones seem to be based on either Asian or European rug sizes. And so I couldn’t find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that would fit under any size rug that Ruggable sold. And I wanted one of their rugs, I knew they were okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were pretty cheap. And so here, so the one I got is from cozywinters.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Rug Heat brand is the mat. And this brand did not appear to be reliably available on Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I got it through here, it was great. And yeah, five by seven, it’s glorious.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a little hairdryer GFCI thing or something in the wire, which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like a giant, it’s basically a giant GFI thing on the…
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say? Oh, what I need, speaking of things underneath rugs, is I need something with
⏹️ ▶️ John more traction because when people are in front of our house, my dog is very upset about it and she runs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey back and forth from
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one rug to the other and each time
⏹️ ▶️ John she changes direction on the rug, she shifts it and I always have a rug in front of my door so when you come into the house,
⏹️ ▶️ John the first thing you step onto is not a hardwood floor, I just put onto this rug, and she’s constantly, forever
⏹️ ▶️ John moving that rug by little bits at a time, and I’m constantly moving it back. And it’s got one of those traction pads underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John it, one of those kind of mesh rubbery things, but when it’s only a small
⏹️ ▶️ John area rug for just the front of the door, it just doesn’t have enough weight to get traction.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s a little bit. Well, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you what, on this page it says, note you must use a non-slip rug pad. That rug pad, that’s the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got for under it, it is extraordinarily non-slip. you actually might want to
⏹️ ▶️ John a small one. What’s the, what is it made out of? I mean, the problem is the rug size. Like, I mean, because if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine if you made a three inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John cut it. A three inch by three inch rug, no amount of like non-slip stuff would work unless it was
⏹️ ▶️ John literally sticky like tape, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I would imagine after a while, if it was moving frequently, then it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick up enough dust that it might like lose its grippiness. But it’s pretty, like it was grippy enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like once it’s down, you really can’t scoot it around. unless
⏹️ ▶️ John a dog runs at it and then changes direction suddenly while on the rug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, and if you have a very small rug, that’s gonna be obviously more likely to happen. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you, if you somehow put a five by seven rug in that area, it’s not going anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can get those like 3M tacky stuff underneath. There’s lots of things I can do, but instead I just resigned to moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yeah, what’s the, not microfiber, the micro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco suction stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Micro suction tape? Yeah, like something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s actually sticky would probably help. then you need it to stick to the underside of the rug as well, which is often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, man. You know, it’s funny hearing you talk about, you know, the difference between 60 and 80 degrees and 30 and 10 degrees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m just reminded how much better Fahrenheit is for ambient air temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything else. Because what’s the difference between 60 and 80 and Celsius? Like 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 17 or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like one degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It’s an entire 20 degrees in Fahrenheit because you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the difference in Fahrenheit between just a degree or two. But in Celsius, it’s like a degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to cover that entire delta.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, how do they, do all thermostats have fractional, they must have fractional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. It’s barbaric. Yeah. Can you imagine going through life saying, oh, it’s 16.5? Like, come on. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to wake up at, you know, 17.35.
Google parsing iMessage reactions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up. Google has shipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tapback parsing. That’s a tongue twister. So we talked about this, I think it was just last week or the week before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we were lamenting how you can see, like, Jason liked blah, blah, blah in iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and SMS group chats, or I guess SMS, or really, MMS group chat, strictly speaking. It’s pronounced mms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the mms group chat. And yes, this is where everyone that’s not American says, why are you using iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever for this? I understand because we’re weird, that’s why. We’re not weird because of Fahrenheit, mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, we’re right about that, but maybe we’re a little wrong about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be fair, the metric system is superior in pretty much every other way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s pretty much, in every other way. In literally every other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except when describing ambient air temperature for humans. Like that is clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fahrenheit superior. I will give you the metric system for literally everything else. Yeah, I’ll use it for cooking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I do, yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always like, well first of all, I’m sorry for the tension. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was doing my bake-off last week, one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I sought out when looking for a recipe was a recipe that gave me the ingredients in weights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because for the love of God, I don’t need, like, don’t tell me to add a cup of pistachios.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What does that mean? Like, give me grams. How many grams?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a kitchen scale that weighs in grams. Give me grams. Like, that’s what I want. And yeah, so metric is great for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cooking by weight is wonderful and so much better than volumetric measurements for things that are not liquids. It’s fantastic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We get everything wrong. We get everything wrong except Fahrenheit. That’s the only thing we’ve got, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we gotta cling to it. Because we do dates wrong, like month, day, year? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco YMD is the only way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It depends on the context, but it’s either YMD or DMY, one or the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what did I come across recently that had dates? Oh, I think it was the, I was scanning pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had the little burned in dates, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I transcribed the first maybe 20 or 30 of them wrong until I hit something where I said, wait a
⏹️ ▶️ John second, there’s no month 29. Wait a second. Cause it was two
⏹️ ▶️ John digit day, two digit month, two digit year. And that is just wrong, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, for normal like colloquial use, I’ll do day, month, year, because it’s unusual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like scheduling things that you’re gonna worry about another year. Now, if you’re sorting stuff, then absolutely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, what is it, year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John month, day. You misspoke,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean month, day, year. Oh, no, he doesn’t. So you’re saying like 25th January, like that’s. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh yeah. Oh God. Because I’m that jerk. Because we get it wrong, we get it wrong. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid. The only way that’s defensible is if you’re European, in which case you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charming and it’s not your fault, but if you are actually using the month name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or abbreviation instead of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John number. Yeah, no, we’re just talking about numbers here.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re writing out the words, there’s an obvious way to do it. But if you’re not writing out words and you’re just doing numbers, it’s either
⏹️ ▶️ John ISO, whatever that thing is where it’s year, month, day,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John understands and sorts and is nice and everybody loves it right up until the year 9999 moment when the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John planet, if they’re still around, is gonna curse us all, right? Fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in this country, it’s month, day, month, day, year.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you just use numbers, that’s the rule. And I know it’s bad and people don’t like it, it doesn’t make sense and so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has a lot of utility. And if you’re in this country, Casey, Do not do day month year with digits. You’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it depends. If it’s for myself, I’ll do day month year. If it’s for other people, then yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’ll have no idea except for when the day is past the number of months. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, I always know. For the
⏹️ ▶️ John first 12 days of the month, it’ll be ambiguous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s for yourself, it’s YMD, because then you’re a programmer and you can sort things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no. See, here’s the thing. We’re getting sidetracked. I was really having fun making fun of how stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Celsius is for ambient air temperature, because it’s so bad. Agreed. And we get everything else wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so funny how dug in the entire planet is on Celsius for ambient air temperature.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so stupid and wrong. It’s preposterous how wrong it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we screwed up the calendar, too, with, I forget what the historical reason of. I think it was like some, was it
⏹️ ▶️ John Greek or Roman people shoved in some months themselves and screwed up the numbering. So oct isn’t the eighth month, and dec isn’t the 10th
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all messed up now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually also print the, so we have a printed family calendar on the fridge, just for a quick reference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that, we start the week on Monday, because the Europeans get that right too. The weekend should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be together on the end of the line. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t necessarily agree on that one. Not down with that, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, you guys can be wrong all by yourself. There’s a Robo out of 9 episode about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s get back to what we were trying to talk about. Google shipped tap back parsing. So instead of saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey likes this message, Casey likes this message about how Celsius is dumb,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then apparently it will say something different. So let me read a quote from, I believe this is Macworld. Instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of quote, Jason liked this message, Quote, when an iPhone user selects a tap back, Android users will see a small emoji under the message
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than above it, but otherwise they function just like they would if they were using an iPhone. As a result, iPhone users won’t have their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversations cluttered with tap back texts, and Android users won’t feel like second class citizens. It’s a true win-win,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the smartest messaging feature Google’s implemented in years, which isn’t saying much because how many messaging protocols
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and things have they canned in the last 10 years?
⏹️ ▶️ John number, I forgot, someone did an article about it. I think it was double digits, right? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently, and to be clear, this is shipping as of I think today or yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then continuing very briefly, tapping the emoji brings up a banner at the bottom of the screen that says translated from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone with the appropriate emoji. Responses come in as quickly as a text and even have a nice bit of animation that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels incredibly natural as per Macworld. So I think this is excellent. I wish, like we had said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an episode or two ago, I wish there was the same on the incoming side because if you’re in a group chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with part iPhones and part Android phones, you’ll see like, Katie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey liked blah, blah, blah. And I wish that Apple just parsed those. I understand why it isn’t entirely reliable a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thousand percent of the time, but I don’t care. So that’s shipping now. And so I sent this link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my brother-in-law who is the lone Android person on a four-person group chat between Aaron, me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him, and his wife. And do you want to guess what his response was?
⏹️ ▶️ John He can’t update his phone to that version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very, very good guess. That is not correct, though. Excellent guess, though. I award you full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points, even though that is not the correct answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. Too bad I don’t use Google’s message app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, of course. You know what? Android people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have the world you’ve made for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like to have a diversity of messaging apps and be able to use iMessage from third party clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fair. That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry for doing another tangent here, but this continues to just boggle my mind. And I don’t actually talk to the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who I see do this cause I don’t want to bother them. But here on my podcast, I’m going to say it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time I see somebody who I know or someone who I know is like a tech nerd or whatever, just
⏹️ ▶️ John complain on a podcast about how annoyed they are about being assaulted by
⏹️ ▶️ John ads in Twitter and the trending tweets and promoted tweets and all the ads they see on Twitter. And I just go like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are you doing? Why? Why are you ever seeing ads on Twitter? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, like, don’t say that to them, because they know, it’s not like they don’t know. There must be something about the official client
⏹️ ▶️ John that is part of how they do it. And I go through this whole thing, I’m like, maybe they’re really into, like, trending topics, or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t, they follow 800 people, so they can’t use their timeline normally, so all they can ever
⏹️ ▶️ John do is look at hashtags and trending things, like, is there something, because third-party clients don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have access to all the stuff the official client has, and I’m like, what is keeping you on the official client? for people that
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, if you use a third party Twitter client, you don’t see any ads on Twitter. You never see a promoted tweet.
⏹️ ▶️ John You never see an ad ever, ever, ever, right? You also don’t get trending topics promoted,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like there’s a whole bunch of features you don’t get, but if you don’t care about that, if you just want a time ordered set of lists of tweets
⏹️ ▶️ John from people you follow, right? Like third party clients can give you that. And all these tech nerds I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they know this. They know this. Sometimes they have these third party clients installed and they use them sometimes, but then they
⏹️ ▶️ John come on and say, oh, every fourth tweet is an ad. And you’re like, what’s, what are you doing? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I’m sure everyone has their reasons. There must be something about the official client
⏹️ ▶️ John that third-party clients don’t have. It just kills me though. If you’re annoyed by Twitter ads
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t care about any of the features that are only in the official Twitter client, please use a third-party Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John client on your iPhone. I don’t know what the situation is on Android. I’m sure there’s a bunch of things you can get. And then you just
⏹️ ▶️ John never see an ad again. It’s great, try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know real honest to goodness nerds, like people in our social circles that use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the official client and swear by it. And for the life of me, I do not understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it. I don’t get it. It’s gotta be one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John features that we don’t use in third-party clients that only exists in the official one. Like that they don’t browse their
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline or they only look at trending topics. I don’t even know what all the features are, but there’s surely some features that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t do for a third-party client that are only in the first party, and that’s how they use Twitter. So if you don’t have that feature, it’s pointless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t get it.
Follow-up: Academy screeners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you tell me about a friend of ours who is an Academy member?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. Feedback about screeners. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
⏹️ ▶️ John has an app for a few years that provides streaming screeners. And this is the first year where they were prohibited from physical
⏹️ ▶️ John screeners to be sent to its members. So that’s cool. If you think about all the different things that have screeners,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, probably going to be the top tier.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have the most money, the most ability to move away from silly plastic discs. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John continuing this feedback, slowly, other guilds and groups are following the Academy’s lead. Physical screeners are environmentally
⏹️ ▶️ John wasteful and are much more expensive to create and ship than digital streamers and much easier to pirate, and are also more
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult for small studios to produce and send out. That’s another thing I hadn’t thought of, like, that if you’re like a small independent
⏹️ ▶️ John movie studio, now you have to like get a bunch of plastic discs printed, which is probably hard to do now because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as common as it used to be, whereas you just upload a digital file to something, it’d be way easier. Anyway, continuing.
⏹️ ▶️ John As of right now, 162 movies are available to stream on the Academy app.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I guess everyone can’t be an Academy member, but it’s good to know that even that part of the industry is slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John moving into the modern age.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, you know, this is a nerdy show. I’m a nerd, you’re probably a nerd, and nerds sometimes just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to run servers. And Linode is by far my favorite place to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been with them personally since long before they were a sponsor, I think for about eight, ten years now, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And I picked them initially because they had the best, you know, bang
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the buck, basically. They had amazing value, they had great, you know, everything you’d expect, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resizable, basically Linux virtual hosts, and you know, you can move them around to different physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosts, and have all the backup tools, and the resizing, and everything else. And they have only, not only have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they kept all those features for the entire, that entire, you know, eight or 10 years I’ve been with them, but they have only gotten better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. So they have, of course, great support, great control panel, a great API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great tools, great capabilities. They now have specialty capabilities they’ve added in the meantime, things like GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compute plans, high memory plans, dedicated CPU plans, a whole block storage offering, Kubernetes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support, an upcoming bare metal release, and they have all sorts of stuff. A one-click app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketplace. They support centralized tools like Terraform. There is so much at Linode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of that is with amazing support, amazing value, amazing control panel, like all that stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need from a host. I’m just so happy with Linode. I host a lot of servers there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re listening to this show from our members feed, that’s hosted on Linode. If you’ve visited our website, that’s hosted on Linode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have ever used Overcast or if you’re using it now, that’s hosted on Linode. So much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have so much experience with Linode and I just keep going back there because it is just the greatest place I’ve found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run servers. So visit linode.com slash ATP, create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a free account there and you get $100 in credit. Once again, linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, create a free account and you get $100 in credit. Thank you so much to Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for hosting all my servers and for sponsoring our show.
More on Game Pass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then John, tell me more about Game Pass because apparently we still haven’t quite gotten this 100% right. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the main thing we got wrong last show was talking about how Game Pass is no good to you if you’re into PC games.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there is a Game Pass for PCs. It’s called like whatever, Game
⏹️ ▶️ John Pass PC for just for PC games, right? And on top of that, there is also a Game Pass
⏹️ ▶️ John for more money that will give you access to to PC and Xbox games for, I think it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular one is like $10 a month. So you can choose, do I want Game Pass for my console? $10 a month. Do I want it for my PC? $10 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month. Or do I want Game Pass Ultimate, which everyone insists on abbreviating as GPU, which I feel like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little overloaded in the gaming space. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Game Pass Ultimate for only $15
⏹️ ▶️ John a month gives you access to both PC and Xbox games. And in addition to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I said it would be great if you could pay a little bit more to get an Xbox Series X as part of your
⏹️ ▶️ John Game Pass subscription, because you can get like the cheaper Xbox, a Series S. You can, you can pay more money and they will give
⏹️ ▶️ John you a Series X. And from what people tell me, it’s more like a 0% interest
⏹️ ▶️ John loan than a rental. So it’s not like you can have it for one month and just return it and just stop paying. Like you’re basically signing
⏹️ ▶️ John up to buy the console, but there’s no interest on it. And it’s actually a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John good deal if you actually do want the console and the games. Of course, the problem with getting,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can in theory get the Xbox Series X console part of Game Pass, but good luck getting that
⏹️ ▶️ John because supplies are limited because COVID supply chain and so on and so forth. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John finally, don’t forget that we talked about this in past shows, Xbox cloud gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can play any of these games on xbox.com
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Xbox app on your PC, in the Xbox Game Pass mobile app on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your iPhone, because because Apple doesn’t like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also on Xbox consoles. The fact that you can play on Xbox consoles is wild, right? So you have an Xbox console,
⏹️ ▶️ John but rather than playing the game on the Xbox, you can stream it. It’s actually running, the game is actually running in a data center somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re streaming it. I guess maybe that lets lesser consoles play better games, but fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, this, SirTekker, he had a good interview with the Microsoft gaming guy, what’s his name, Phil Spencer,
⏹️ ▶️ John a while back. And he talks all about Microsoft’s strategy of like, we just want you to be able to play your
⏹️ ▶️ John game everywhere. Of course, it’s nice for Microsoft to say that because they essentially own two of the platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have a console and they also essentially own the entire PC space. So they seem so, we’re so magnanimous. We
⏹️ ▶️ John want you to play anywhere on our platform A and on our other platform B. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have Windows phone anymore. So they’re being nice letting it be on Android
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s being mean not letting them have it on iPhone. But anyway, Game Pass, it’s a pretty good deal if you are interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in the games that are available on Game Pass, which are not all the games in the world, but a lot of really good ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you don’t want to pay for individual games.
Follow-up: Apple vs. Netherlands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So moving right along we got a fair bit of feedback and a lot of it was really really good about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple in the Netherlands And they’re fine, which we had described is basically just a fee, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, because Apple is more money than God So, why don’t they just pay this fine treated as a fee and move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on with their lives?
⏹️ ▶️ John I add one thing to that by the way, though The the fine is just a fee as a saying common
⏹️ ▶️ John saying of like if you have enough money if the only penalty for doing something wrong is a fine and then you basically
⏹️ ▶️ John get to do it whenever you want because the money means nothing to you and you just get to go do it. A lot of people were pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John out, just in general, before we get to the specifics of the Netherlands, that most places
⏹️ ▶️ John that have a fine, it’s not just you get a fine and then you’re allowed to break the law forever. Either that fine repeats or
⏹️ ▶️ John that fine increases or something else bad happens that escalates. And we’ll talk about the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John escalations over the Netherlands situation in a second. But I do want to point out that the reason a fine is just
⏹️ ▶️ John a fee saying is so common is is because if you are wealthy, very often you’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten to do the thing and reap the benefits of it. So yeah, maybe after you are fined,
⏹️ ▶️ John then the next level up, the fine gets bigger, the next level up, you go out of business or whatever like the next level of like punishment
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you already got to do the thing and only had to pay the fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s simply a fee for you getting to do the thing. So say the thing that you were getting to do is this obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly relevant to Apple’s example, but it’s the most egregious example. Say you’re dumping chemicals
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere where you’re not supposed to be dumping them. You’ve already dumped them. You can’t get the chemicals back out. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if they say there’s no process to like extract it or like remove it or clean it up, it’s like dispersed into the environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, oh, well, shrug, I guess I’ll just pay the fine. You already did the bad thing. You already
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have to pay to dispose of your whatever. And now it’s just dispersed in the whole, and you just pay the fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in that case, there is no escalation because maybe you get fined more the next time you do it, but maybe you just need
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this one time. I don’t want to pay all these millions of dollars to clean up this factory. So I’m just going to dump this all into a dispersant
⏹️ ▶️ John of the atmosphere and I’ll pay the fine. That is the worst case of the fine is just a fee. In the case
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple, you know, they’re doing a thing and you can say, well, they got to impose
⏹️ ▶️ John these unfair app store rules for years and years. And then this fine comes along and they pay
⏹️ ▶️ John it and they get to do it for an extra three or four weeks. Apple getting to control the app store in the way it is accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ John for an extra few weeks or months or even years is not that big a deal. but I just want to explain the saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t necessarily mean that like, you know, Oh, well it’s not just a, you know, a fine isn’t just a fee
⏹️ ▶️ John because eventually you’re gonna have to stop doing it. Very often getting away with it for some period of time
⏹️ ▶️ John is the whole ball game and then you just pay the money and then you’re good after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we had said last week, you know, that, Oh, well the Netherlands is a thou, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a thousand, like 3 million people or something like that. I forget what the number was. 18 million, two big cities, two New York cities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe. Okay. So it’s two New York cities. What, what, What are they really going to do to Apple? So Rene Zwisterloot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote, and there were several others that wrote, but I like this one a whole lot. So let me read what Rene wrote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If Apple just pays the fines, then the ACM, that’s the Dutch authorities, will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sue again, will win, and will get three zeros appended to the penalties. Neither the ACM nor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey judges are political, and they do not need to be elected. So Apple can’t simply rely on a horde of angry voters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix this problem. If they threaten to pull the App Store, then the ACM will simply tell them to go right ahead. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the ACM will take their case to the European court to get the App Store banned for all of the EU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s more or less the point of the EU. Whilst the EU is wildly at odds with itself about what the EU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is and is not supposed to stand for, the one thing that all member state rulers and governments generally all agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on is that they won’t stand for individual member states to be bullied by non-governmental entities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Surely Apple is not willing to pull all products from the entire EU, which means they will lose if they decide to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey die on this hill. I thought that was a really great summary of the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s, of course, the question is, will it escalate up to the level of the whole EU thing, or
⏹️ ▶️ John would Apple do whatever it takes to appease them, and that what they’re doing now is flouting it and paying
⏹️ ▶️ John their fee, or they’re fine, and they’ll do that for as long as they can until it seems like things might
⏹️ ▶️ John escalate, and then they’ll say, okay, okay, what do you really want us to do? We’ll see how it shakes out. I’m assuming Apple wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be stupid enough to, you know, antagonistically escalate this to all of the EU, but that is a possibility,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is, of course, what the EU stands for, and the EU, it is union. But the UK can go
⏹️ ▶️ John after themselves, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh. Too soon. Tuesday.
Masked Face ID for apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So a couple of things about new beta bits, starting with the new Face ID unlock. Ryan Booker writes, Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a mask asks you to scan with and without glasses if you’re wearing glasses, and you can add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extra glasses, which is kind of cool. And you guys haven’t tried this, right? You’re not on the betas?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just installed it this morning and have not tried it once.
⏹️ ▶️ John like to try it. I’m excited to scan my glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Co-team. And then Carlos Carpio Garcia writes, new Face ID works within apps, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re masked, which I think they talked about this on? Was it upgrade this week? I think there was more discussion about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But basically, if you think about, say, Apple Pay, for example, or 1Password,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re using the Apple Watch based mask unlock, you still have to enter your passcode for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1Password, for Apple Pay, things like that. And apparently, the new eye-only face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID scan, when you have a mask on, it actually will work for 1Password, Apple Pay, so on and so forth. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth looking into. And I will definitely check that out when the beta is no longer a beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when it’s released.
Universal Control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Carlos continues, also unrelated, well actually this is me saying also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in unrelated, apparently universal control works from Wi-Fi to cellular. I have not tried this myself because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again I’m not on the betas, but this is what Carlos wrote. But universal control is a big advantage over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sidecar. As expected, my school, Carlos is a teacher, my school’s network has several resources and web pages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restricted, but sometimes I have to access them. They usually meant disconnecting sidecar and using the cellular capabilities of my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to access the web I wanted. Universal Control works even when the MacBook and the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in different networks. I can use the MacBook Air to disable the iPad Wi-Fi and continue controlling it to freely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey browse the web from the iPad while the MacBook Air is stuck in the school Wi-Fi. This is the only place I’ve heard this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea if it’s accurate or not, but I have no reason not to believe it. How freaking cool is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it use like, does an error drop use like a ad hoc local Wi-Fi network? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John uses the same thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It could be. I don’t know. I just thought that was super cool though, and that was the first I’d heard of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen a lot of demos of the universal control and you know as delayed it is as it has been I can imagine it’s Tricky to
⏹️ ▶️ John pull off, but boy it looks really neat when you see it done. It’s got to be some kind of like Persistent
⏹️ ▶️ John you know whether whether it’s the same thing is there same technologies airdrop or not It’s not like there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a waiting cursor for some kind of connecting thing and I don’t know I like
Network file shares still suck
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes me think of a recent complaint recent a decades long complaint that I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m in I’m in I can my computer room here. My computer is here, you know, the over the other side of the room is my wife’s
⏹️ ▶️ John computer on that Desk, they’re both connected to the same Ethernet network Very often I want to copy files from one Mac to
⏹️ ▶️ John the other and I’m cursed to use the finder to do that And it’s just so hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just so slow so painful Like it’s just it’s just bad like I would be better
⏹️ ▶️ John off you and using FTP honestly, because FTP clients can be persistent. They always work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when I try to, what I want to do is like, can you put your receipts into the expenses folder? Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing taxes stuff, right? I need to connect to her computer as her, which I can do because I know her password.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in my key chain and everything, right? We’re all in the family here. But whenever I connect to that
⏹️ ▶️ John server, command K or whatever, it connects as me. Even if I connect to SMB colon slash slash
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife’s name at her computer name, like I’m doing the syntax. that says don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John connect as me finder and finder’s like, I’m gonna ignore that crap before the at sign. I mean finder successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John connects, but it connects as me. So I have to do that race where you have to click the connect as thing, right? Where it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco opens up in the finder and then it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s connecting. You click connect as, like disconnect then connect as and then you get to type in your name and it has a checkbox
⏹️ ▶️ John to remember the password but it literally never ever ever does, right? Maybe it’s because I’m using the dot
⏹️ ▶️ John local, you know, bonjour, rendezvous names, who knows. But it is so painful. I’m like, these are two computers
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same room on the same wired network and I just can’t have a persistent folder that I can just double click and it will open, why
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you just make an alias of it? Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that? I’ve tried all these things, they’re just so unreliable. And yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently, two devices, not even on the same wifi network, you can drag your cursor between them seamlessly
⏹️ ▶️ John and drag files between them. Like, why does that work? Why does that work? And why can’t I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so painful. Honestly, I should just use, I should literally just use like transmit or some FTP client, because that will always work.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will never like connect as the wrong user. It will just, it’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I’m the only one who has this problem. Maybe it’s because I’m not using the IP address, but I’m using a dot
⏹️ ▶️ John local name, and if I just use an IP address, the stupid alias would work. The latest thing in Monterey is the alias gets a generic
⏹️ ▶️ John document icon. Right, it’s an alias to a folder on my wife’s computer. But now
⏹️ ▶️ John it just looks like a blank white document with a little dog-eared corner of the page on it. Why? God
⏹️ ▶️ John If I double-click it, it will usually connect and change back into a folder icon, but not always. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco derail. I get the feeling, you know, like whenever, Apple is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great at maintaining things that they don’t seem to use themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems to me every time I use like any kind of Finder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like network share feature of any kind, like this, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would venture a guess Apple does not use this kind of function internally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it just seems like it always has been mediocre at best,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it almost never changes, except in the direction of gradually breaking more. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so- Yeah, what do you all use for this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when you need to drag things between your, two different Macs that are on your home network, how do you do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually do that connect as thing if I have to, but more often than not, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we have to send files together, we’ll just airdrop them, because that works much more reliably than network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shares, which is annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I’m the only person in the house, though, I would have to go over to the other computer and click accept, you know what I mean? Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John file transfer, I just, you know, I don’t wanna keep getting up and going back and forth when I’m doing a bunch of stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, to be clear, AirDrop is totally the wrong solution for this. I mean, especially because, like, you know, if I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of those computers would probably have wired ethernet, it would be ridiculous to use AirDrop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this purpose, and it would be slower to use AirDrop for this purpose. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not how things work. People are still emailing files to themselves because that often is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best way to transfer something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, John, what I would recommend is what Aaron and I do is we have a shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox folder. And even though I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John use Dropbox anymore. That’s such a long way to go. It is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works every time. Like, do you care?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, once you get connected, it works fine. I’m just frustrated with how cumbersome it is to initiate that connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once I’m connected and it’s a Finder window open, it’s fine, it just files transfer, it does all the things, right? But it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like it, the reason I’m contrasting with Universal Control is like, look how seamlessly these
⏹️ ▶️ John two completely independent devices running different OSs can be. Like you can drag your cursor between them seamlessly. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John drag a file from one to the other and it just instantly appeared. I’m talking about all the demos I’ve seen. Universal Control is so
⏹️ ▶️ John impressive. How can that be so seamless with no setup, no configuration, no dialogues, no password
⏹️ ▶️ John login or whatever, it’s just so seamless. And yet, you know, getting
⏹️ ▶️ John that other Finder window that is a folder on my wife’s computer to appear in my computer, in my Finder,
⏹️ ▶️ John that sort of hurdle that you have to overcome each time is just, has just enough little stumbling blocks that it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish it was seamless and I wish it was way faster. Because even if everything goes perfectly and you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, double-click the alias, the amount of time it takes before that Finder window appears and you can drag stuff into it,
⏹️ ▶️ John is so long compared to, again, slamming your cursor against the edge of your Mac screen and having it appear on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, another couple of things you might want to at least consider, Synology Drive, if you wanted a faux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox that doesn’t leave your network, like that would be presumably much quicker. And it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a concept of like a team folder or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know if it does. And you leave that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, it operates much like Dropbox. So think of it as like a fake Dropbox. And so you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, so you need to run an app on your Mac then?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you can stop running.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can stop running the Dropbox app because you can put your Dropbox within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John your small drive. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John running a Dropbox app now. Dropbox is an on-demand launch for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you are a weirdo. But nevertheless, you could SCP. And then why wouldn’t you just try a VMCing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or remote desktoping or whatever? Because that supports file transfer between Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it? No, I wouldn’t want to go there. I don’t want her entire screen on my Mac. Just, plus sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey she’s in here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m answering your question. Well, anyway, Neil underscore underscore in the chat swears that if you use.home instead of.local,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magic happens. I don’t know why, but that’s what, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, maybe there’s some particular thing that I’m doing that makes it cumbersome, but you know, the two
⏹️ ▶️ John basically bugs are that the finder insists on connecting as me instead of my wife, even though I put the username in
⏹️ ▶️ John the URL. And that the other one is it just takes a long time. It just takes a long time to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, when it is in the process of connecting, it’s like the computer’s right over there. They’re both, these are two idle, very
⏹️ ▶️ John fast computers, like literally feet from each other connected to the same ethernet switch, it should
⏹️ ▶️ John be like instant, Kind of like universal control.
Sponsor: New Relic
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Sony + Bungie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Nintendo hasn’t been purchased yet, but apparently everyone else has. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sony has bought Bungie for $3.6 billion. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m hoping against all hope that that means that we don’t have to hear you to speaking in other languages about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey destiny anymore. Is that how this works?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how is that not going to happen? Of course, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to happen. We’re not that lucky. No. I know. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John on topic. Although I have to tell you, when this happened, I thought of our long running joke of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we won’t record another episode until X time in the future, unless of course Apple buys Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. And that has been a joke for years. And at this point, it’s becoming a lot less of a joke, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like everybody’s buying these big gaming companies that were not previously
⏹️ ▶️ John thought of as being for sale. You know, Activision Blizzard obviously was 70 billion and Activision,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, bought Blizzard before that. And then what was it? Take two bought Zynga.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now Sony’s buying Bungie. And it’s just, it’s a free-for-all in the gaming world. And so Apple buying, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that, I think we’ve talked about this on, I don’t want Apple to buy Nintendo. I think that would be bad for the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think Nintendo is particularly for sale, but geez, that’s scaring me with how close it’s come.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, for the record, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. For lots of reasons. I mean, without getting too far into it, the big ones are that Apple undervalues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming and Nintendo’s probably worth a lot so I don’t think they’d come together on a price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also Apple I can’t imagine Apple ever buying a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sizable company that is itself opinionated because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is extremely opinionated and I can’t see them buying an opinionated company in a way that wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destroy that entire company or or clash heavily, because Apple wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever’s being the opinion holder in that company now continue to do that role, because Apple can’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that under them. Like, they would be the opinion directors of whatever they’re buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have the idea that Nintendo would be absorbed by Apple in any kind of graceful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fashion, I think is a fantasy. And so even if they can come together on price, which they probably wouldn’t, because Apple undervalues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming, I can’t see that culture ever blend together.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think Nintendo would ever be for sale at any price at this point, but stranger
⏹️ ▶️ John things have happened and time marches on and Apple’s attitudes change and
⏹️ ▶️ John the culture fit between Nintendo and Apple actually is closer than maybe any other
⏹️ ▶️ John purchaser in terms of this sort of happy, shiny, user-friendly type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just because it would be terrible doesn’t mean some future Apple management wouldn’t do it anyway and destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo in the process, which is why I keep saying it’d be bad for the world because I agree that this, it would not be
⏹️ ▶️ John healthy. It wouldn’t be healthy for either company because to the extent that Nintendo stays Nintendo, that would be unhealthy to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s culture and vice versa, very strongly. If Apple started to screw with Nintendo, it would just crush the company. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future, a future Apple could somehow discover the technology of how to acquire someone
⏹️ ▶️ John and not screw with their culture because that has occasionally, not commonly, but occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John it has happened in the past in the entire world of business where someone buys someone and doesn’t immediately screw them up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, it’s not likely. But anyway, I mean, and you know, getting back to the story,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this has a chance of happening. Other companies are better about acquiring
⏹️ ▶️ John certain kinds of other companies and not immediately screwing them up, right? So Sony’s buying Bungie
⏹️ ▶️ John for a pittance, 3.6 billion. It looks like a pittance compared to 70 billion
⏹️ ▶️ John for Activision Blizzard, but there’s a lot of IP under that 70 billion umbrella, whereas Bungie is just one company.
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of size this up, Star Wars was bought for $4 billion. So Bungie is worth almost as much as a Star
⏹️ ▶️ John Wars. Good grief. Which, again, gaming is bigger than movies has been for a long time. People don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John realize it, but yeah. But the reason this is extra significant to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, is because the game I play all the time is from Bungie. And of course, Bungie is a long time game developer, close to my heart,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they were a Mac game developer first, and Halo was supposed to ship on the Mac, and then Microsoft bought them, and they went independent, and now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. You’re still bitter about this. How many years ago was that, 20?
⏹️ ▶️ John bitter about it, yes I am.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, why is Sony doing this? As a lot of people are saying, this looks somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ John defensive because, hey, everyone’s buying everything. You know, it’s good for us to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a popular gaming company with a popular gaming franchise in our pocket because
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft, our big competitor in the console space, has a lot of things in their pocket now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John interestingly, both companies, with Microsoft and Sony, are saying, I know we just
⏹️ ▶️ John bought a bunch of games, right? Or gaming companies or developers or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry game players out there. We’re not going to make these games exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John to our platforms because that’s not what we do anymore. And for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I think they are believable. Like that is a plausible thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the best strategy anymore. So right out of the gate, Bungie has said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, Sony bought us, but just to reassure everybody, Destiny, which is currently available on many platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox, PlayStation, Stadia and still exists. PC, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John will continue to be on all those platforms. Our future expansions will continue to be on all those platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not even going to differentiate the platforms like for Destiny back in the day and back in Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I think even a little bit in Destiny two actually had PlayStation exclusives. Like if you got Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John one, there was like a weapon that you could only get if you had a PlayStation or like a PVP map that
⏹️ ▶️ John was only available on PlayStation. And that wasn’t, you know, that wasn’t because Sony owned Bungie. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was just, you know, Sony did a deal with Bungie and said, hey, if we pay you some extra money or
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the deal was behind the scenes, but give our players something extra. So there’ll be a
⏹️ ▶️ John reason that Destiny on PlayStation is ever so slightly better than Destiny on Xbox, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t even do that anymore, right? So Destiny now is, everything’s the same for everybody. I think they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done bungee to that back when they were with Activision as well, because Activision probably broke that deal. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have a game like this that. Gets like the more people that play it, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John money you make, because the more people play it, the more people buy the expansions, the more people buy horse armor. We talked about that in the past show.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want as many players as you can playing your game. And if you limit it to certain platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re giving up players who could potentially be giving you money. So Bungie says, don’t worry, Sony bought
⏹️ ▶️ John us, but Destiny will stay on all platforms. But of course, Bungie has been for I think
⏹️ ▶️ John at least one year, possibly multiple years been working on the next big thing because game development takes a long time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as destiny is quote unquote winding down, right, destiny was conceived of as a 10
⏹️ ▶️ John year game, a decade game, it came out in 2014, I think, and they’re just about going to hit that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Bungie has announced the future of destiny, the expansions they’re going to have up through
⏹️ ▶️ John 2024. So that would be a 10 year game, right? But you got to start working on your next thing. So Bungie has been
⏹️ ▶️ John working on, in secret, whatever the heck its next thing is, or its next two things or whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John For a while now, well before this acquisition. And so the question is, okay, Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be available on all platforms, because it already is, and you’re not going to take it away from people, because, you know, why would you give that up? You
⏹️ ▶️ John already paid the money to make Destiny on PC to make sure it runs well on Xbox, to make sure it
⏹️ ▶️ John runs on PlayStation, you already paid that money. Of course, you’re going to leave it on those platforms, because you’d be losing money by sacrificing
⏹️ ▶️ John those people who play on those platforms. But for your next game, surely that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be PlayStation exclusive because Sony’s big strategy is all these PlayStation exclusive games like
⏹️ ▶️ John The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m just naming games that I like, but I’m sure there’s lots of other exclusives
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation as well. What about those next games? But on the day of the acquisition
⏹️ ▶️ John In little bungees a little fact that we’ll put in the show notes They put in an item that
⏹️ ▶️ John says in their fact question bungee has future games in development Will they now
⏹️ ▶️ John become playstation exclusives? Answer no period
⏹️ ▶️ John We want and then they expand we want the worlds we are creating to extend to anywhere people play games We will continue to be self-published
⏹️ ▶️ John creatively independent. We will continue to drive one unified bungee community That is pretty unequivocal now just because you
⏹️ ▶️ John say something in a fact item doesn’t mean that four years from now things won’t change. Because that’s the whole deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with acquisitions. You see it all the time. Usually it’s more like, more dire. Like there’s an acquisition
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there’s some press release that says, don’t worry, everything you love about Company X will remain the same. And then like two
⏹️ ▶️ John months into it, it’s like, yeah, they fired everybody and they changed everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have a new owner, you can say whatever you want, but you can’t really, it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to put anything into the agreement that says, you are acquiring me, you
⏹️ ▶️ John will be in charge of me, but you agree not to be a bad parent. Like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John real way to enforce that because they’re like, what if we just fire you all? Now we can do whatever we want. Like you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like a partnership. It is an acquisition. So anything can happen
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future. But this is I think the first time I have ever seen such a strong statement on day
⏹️ ▶️ John one that not only will our current games not change, but even the things that we’re working on that
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t gonna be ready for three years, those will be multi-platform too. And that speaks to the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the gaming market today, though exclusives are beneficial for driving
⏹️ ▶️ John differentiation to your platform, certain kinds of games, particularly what they call live games, where
⏹️ ▶️ John a game runs for years and years and they just give you new content and new content. The best way
⏹️ ▶️ John to make money from that game and the best way to get the most number of customers is to make sure it is available everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John that people can conceivably want to play it. Microsoft is obviously going to an extreme by letting you play it on your cell
⏹️ ▶️ John phone through their cloud gaming thing. But, and you know, Sony doesn’t even have a subscription program
⏹️ ▶️ John yet to rival Game Pass. Like I said last week, they are rumored to have something like that. But that seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the future of these type of games. And Sony talked about, we acquired Bungie because they
⏹️ ▶️ John have shown they know how to run a live game. They’ve been running Destiny since 2014, Destiny slash Destiny 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that there’s one and two is a accident,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco an unfortunate accident in history. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was neither here nor there. But that is a type of game. Not all games are like that. Obviously Candy
⏹️ ▶️ John Crush isn’t necessarily like that. It’s a different thing. But live games where,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, millions of people play it for years and years and every year they give you money and also they buy horse
⏹️ ▶️ John armor inside the game and the whales buy tons of horse armor across
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple platforms, that is a very viable business model. It doesn’t matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome that game is, you shouldn’t use a live game to differentiate your platform. You should use single player games. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John again, The Last of Us or something. When that’s on your platform, I can get people to buy it because like, well, if I have to buy a platform to pay destiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to buy the one that has the next last of us game. Cause I love that franchise or something. So you pick a PlayStation,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that could be why PlayStation is winning this generation. But this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say that I mostly believe the statements here. There’s also statements
⏹️ ▶️ John about like creative freedom and the fact that they will continue to be self-published, right? That Bungie
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to retain as much of its independence as possible while still being owned by Sony. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Sony is the type of company that has shown that it is plausible that it could acquire
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer and not ruin them by screwing it up because Sony has done it before. They have bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of developers and they’ve generally not screwed them up. Sometimes the developers themselves screw
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but like, you know, that’s not Sony’s fault. But, you know, they they buy these game developers and they become
⏹️ ▶️ John owned by Sony and they put out another hit game in a hit driven business. Nothing is guaranteed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So you get, you know, the biggest names to direct your new movie for your stream platform and maybe the movie Stinker, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t, but the best odds are by buying a company that’s made a lot of hits. And Bungie made a bunch of awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John games on the Mac that nobody knew about, but that I played, right? And then they made Halo, which is the whole reason the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John exists and is still a viable platform, in my opinion. And then you’re like, okay, well, that’s great. You had one great hit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they made Destiny, another great hit. So they have a track record, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s mostly a lot of the same people there, and there’s some continuity of culture. So it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John implausible to say whatever Bungie is working on next for their next decade long game that it will launch
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2024 2025 or something might also be a hit and even if it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John you just bought a company that has years and years of experience running a live game and Sony if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to have Popular live games that run really well on your platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that are a defense against the ones that Microsoft just bought It’s good to have Bungie in your pocket because
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is if the Cold War becomes hot You know many years in the future and they say well guess Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John says well guess what Sony call of duty? You can’t have that anymore because we own that and we’re taking it away because we’re angry at you
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’d be like, okay Well, we’ll take away whatever the hell the name of the game after destiny is gonna be right So it
⏹️ ▶️ John is good to have some extra weapons in your pocket But in the meantime, they bought a really good game developer. They
⏹️ ▶️ John probably won’t screw it up and from Bundy’s perspective This is super important to the game of destiny because bungee’s problem
⏹️ ▶️ John has been lately that they don’t have enough money or people to keep up with the voracious
⏹️ ▶️ John hunger of the people who pay for their live game. When they were in a publishing deal with Activision, Activision
⏹️ ▶️ John gave them an influx of money and said, here you go, here’s a bunch of money. Make the next expansion
⏹️ ▶️ John to Destiny really awesome. So we’ll make lots of money from it. And by the way, I know you can’t hire
⏹️ ▶️ John people with this money. So you can contract out to what are they called vicarious visions. I think they they contracted
⏹️ ▶️ John out to another developer to say, please help us make this expansion to destiny because we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough bungee employees and we can’t hire them fast enough. And Activision gave us a bunch of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was the best recent expansion when they had help from other people. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when bungee split from Activision said we didn’t like Activision, Activision was a crappy company and
⏹️ ▶️ John they were all mean there and turned out to be true. Uh, and uh, uh, and they made us do
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb things in the game. And Activision did arguably make bungee do dumb things in the game that nobody liked or whatever. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a fraught relationship. So Bungie split from them and said, we are independent. Now we have creative freedom and we can, we’re finally
⏹️ ▶️ John free to make our game better in the ways that we want. Because Activision did screw with Bungie’s creative vision and made
⏹️ ▶️ John the game worse. And when Bungie got split from them, they got to fix all those problems and that really helped.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they didn’t have all that Activision money. So post Activision, most of the content
⏹️ ▶️ John for Destiny was a little bit smaller, not as big, not as much stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And actually that third party developer they got to help them was really good and added a lot of their own flair and panache
⏹️ ▶️ John to the content. Now they got Sony money. And Sony has a lot of money. So hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John Bungie will have a bunch of cash and maybe be able to contract out if they can’t hire people fast enough or
⏹️ ▶️ John use some of Sony’s other gaming talent to make the next few expansions of Destiny. We’re more likely that
⏹️ ▶️ John money will be funneled into whatever the game after Destiny is and they retain their creative freedom. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it was Sony that bought Bungie and not Microsoft and so I give a cautious thumbs up to this
⏹️ ▶️ John acquisition. I hope that Destiny does continue through 2024 and is everything
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be and I hope the next franchise is good too. Cool. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re all going to get Playstations and play Destiny with me for the big member special, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John have this gaming streaming setup. Marco’s got it over there. We just we’re so close. We just got to
⏹️ ▶️ John shift over a little bit to get a console streaming setup going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this setup can actually capture consoles just fine, because it’s all based on HDMI capture. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how easy it is to get a PlayStation right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. Yeah, I mean, that’s like I said about the Xbox Series X, you can get it as part of Game Pass if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re willing to wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I would entertain playing Destiny on some sort of streaming setup, even if that required
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting a PlayStation, but I would need to get the PlayStation, like you said. I mean, it’s- I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mean, you can get a
⏹️ ▶️ John PS4 technically, but that’d be gross. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. That’s right. I don’t want to have to fish another damn HDMI cable to you. othe
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Casey’s email problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got a problem. So back in 2006, Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered this thing called Google Apps for your domain. And at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google, man, there’s so many problems with Google. But one of the things is they like changing the names of things 85
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times and just keep throwing things against the wall until something sticks. And back in 2006,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was called Google Apps for your domain. And then it became something else, something else, something else. G Suite for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while. Is it still G Suite? I don’t even know. It’s like Google Workspace now or something. I don’t even… I can’t keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it straight. But one way or another, in 2006, you get Google Apps for your domain. If you were a nonprofit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or basically just a family, you could get Gmail and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things associated with it with a custom domain for free. And I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how long they said this was going to last. Some people have said lifetime. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was free at the And they cut that off six years later in December 2012.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at that point, they were not accepting new free accounts anymore. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and had and have one of these free accounts. My personal email is one of these accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s gmail under the hood, but it’s, you know, at caseylist.com. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as of a couple of weeks ago, they’ve said, hey, guess what? If you want to hold on to that, you’re going to have to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. And there’s been a little bit of update since then, but they had said basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to sometime in the next couple of months, I forget exactly when it is, I want to say it’s July,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to have to go ahead and start paying us. And I think it’s something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five or six bucks a month per account. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously, everyone who has these accounts got very, very upset about it. So as of just a week or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so ago, Google relented slightly and they said legacy G Suite users would be able to migrate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to free accounts. So reading from an Ars Technical article we’ll put in the show notes. First, Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is launching a survey of affected G Suite users. Apparently, the company’s surprised by how many people this change affected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Second, it’s promising a data migration option, including your content purchases to a consumer account before the shutdown hits.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Google said, in the coming months, we’ll provide an option for you to move your non-Google workspace paid content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and most of your data to a no-cost option. This new option won’t include premium features like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey custom email or multi-account management. You’ll be able to evaluate this option prior to July 1, 2022,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or should I say 1 July 2022, and prior to account suspension. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update this article with details in the coming months. So first, I would like some advice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but John in particular, since I know that you use Gmail, do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have anything to add about the story so far?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this, so the idea that you could get email with a custom
⏹️ ▶️ John domain for free from Google definitely falls into the category
⏹️ ▶️ John of if you think you’re getting something of value, but you’re not paying for it, you’re obviously subject to the whims
⏹️ ▶️ John of the company that’s running it that one day they might decide to charge you or they might just decide to make it go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have to say that whatever this was called when you started it, what was it like Google Apps for your domain or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I believe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Yeah. run. Oh, it has. 2006. It’s not like they use this for a
⏹️ ▶️ John year and then, uh, and then like turn the screws in you. Ha ha. Once I got you addicted to it, now I’m going to start charging you a year
⏹️ ▶️ John later. What is it? I can’t do the math in my head. Uh, like 15 years. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it got, you know, I don’t, I got to do the math. It’s very difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s 15 and a half, isn’t it? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I just, I’m always afraid that I’m getting math wrong on the fly. Anyway, it lasted a really long time
⏹️ ▶️ John and I feel like you got your non money’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, it is disappointing that it seems like, you know, like some people say, I want them to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John money, so then I know it won’t go away. But sometimes when they charge money, and I’m assuming this is the case here,
⏹️ ▶️ John in case you can tell me for sure, sometimes they decide that the customer for this is not you. Like, yes, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna charge money for it, but they’re gonna charge so much money that it’s clearly meant for businesses, small
⏹️ ▶️ John businesses, big businesses, and not for individual people who just like the head of any domain. Now, is that the case?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you chose to pay for this, how much would it cost?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s the shtick, right? Or that’s the thing, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to figure something out. And so just to say, I will answer your question, but just to set some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understanding between all of us. So I have almost 20 gigs worth of email. I don’t know how, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why, but that’s the case. And I think part of the reason is because my earliest email, I looked this up last week, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my earliest email was the 16th of July, 2004. So that’s 17 years, six months, and 17 days ago. Do you have a lot of attachments?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John you said that casually like in a chat or something, and I looked at the size of my email, and I’m not using that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And ATP gets a preposterous amount of email, but almost no attachments, so it must not amount
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you just email yourself like MP3s for a few decades?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so. I mean, anything
⏹️ ▶️ John is possible, but I don’t think so. I mean, my earliest email is from 1997. Well. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John technically have one from 1969, but everyone who knows Unix knows what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep, yep, yep, yep. So anyway, so I have 17 years of history, 17 and a half years of history.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, also on Google is the shared family calendar. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way I’ve done this, and I will be the first to tell you, this was a kludgy, silly way to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is the way I did it. And I’ve done it for years is that I would sign into my Google account on Aaron’s phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the only thing I would turn on is the calendar. So I mean, yes, she could go in there and flip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my e-mail if she really wanted to, but she would never do that. So our shared calendar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is effectively my calendar. It’s just that both of us have access to it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to do something for both e-mail so I can keep my custom domain, because I would like to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, and something about calendaring. Now maybe, and we’ll get to calendaring in a minute, maybe that’s iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something, I don’t know. But we need to do something about that. Additionally, I should note that as of just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of months ago, I’m now paying $20 a year, or a little under $2 a month, for 100 gigabytes in Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive, specifically for email. Like, I don’t use Google Drive for anything else. It’s specifically to handle my preposterous
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, quick update. I was just misreading the thing at the bottom of the page. I have 14 gigs of mail.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I thought I was reading it as 1.4
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs, and I just, there was comma versus period.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway, I have 14 gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ John mail, so 20 gigs has not seen that ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continue. Thank you. So I’m not sure exactly what to do. And I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so here are my options. So Gmail, to answer your question from 20 minutes ago, Gmail appears to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be $6 a month for one account that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my caselist.com account, plus the $2 a month for storage, potentially. So that’s a total of $8 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s not awful, especially for something as critical as email.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, for a custom
⏹️ ▶️ John domain, that sounds like a good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not bad, but I don’t know if that’s what I really wanna do. And at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of feel like I should just divorce myself from Google entirely because I’m not using Google Photos anymore. Like I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really doing anything Google anymore. So I wonder if I should just divorce myself from it. You’re using Google Calendar. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, but I mean, I feel like I think that would be a reasonably straightforward thing to replace.
⏹️ ▶️ John As someone who uses Google Calendar as a family calendar, but also for whatever reason, Continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the Apple calendar as well. I can tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know, cuz I and I have notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John on for both of them Google wins it is more reliable Apple’s calendar thing. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no friggin idea what it’s doing. I can’t understand it I can’t control it. Whereas Google calendar just works
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll have better luck than I do. I tried fantastic. I tried Apple’s calendar tried all sorts of things
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google’s calendar Just functions all the time. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I would be As much as I love Gmail, I would probably give up Gmail before I would give up a Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s interesting. I did not expect you to say that. That’s very interesting. We don’t have particularly complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs from our calendar at this point anyway. So I feel like that’s a conquerable problem, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my head’s in the sand. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, they all have the same features in theory. Like I think a Google Calendar really has come
⏹️ ▶️ John through with us at the point where our kids yelled enough for them to have their own calendars. We made them their own
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail accounts with their own Google calendars. And now I can see, I can put events on their calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John and so, and they’ll get notifications on their thing. So like it becomes a family calendar where it’s not just you and
⏹️ ▶️ John your wife, but also your kids’ events when they’re gonna go to practice or, you know, go to this thing or gonna be over
⏹️ ▶️ John their friend’s house or stay late on it. Like, it’s so nice to have that in all one unified calendar. And yes, Apple calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John can do that just as well. In theory, in practice, I find Google much more reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I got to look into the calendaring, But leaving aside the calendaring just for a moment, like what do I do? So I told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you it’s about eight bucks a month to stick with what I’ve got. And that would have the advantage of, I’ve actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently, we haven’t talked about it on the show, but after hearing about it from several different people on various podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot, I’ve been trying Mimestream, which is a hilariously bad, although I understand where it came from, a hilariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad name for what is actually a very good email client, but it’s specifically made it, at least right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Gmail or, you know, Gmail equivalents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Welcome to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, Casey. No one has made a good email app for non-Gmail email hosts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in probably a decade or more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And truth be told, up until literally a month or two ago, I was using Apple Mail and it was fine. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t love it, but it’s sufficient for my needs. So I could perfectly well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go back to Apple Mail and I’d be fine with it. But I do like MimeStream. There’s a lot to like about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, you know, if I go to any other provider other than just sticking with Gmail, then I would have to give up Mimestream, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, and Google Calendar, which I think is fine. So let’s take it as fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which it isn’t, but let’s take it as fact that I want to switch to something. Well, what do I do? I could do iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a custom domain, but how do I get my archive up to iCloud? Do I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to push another 20 gigs to iCloud? I don’t think that’s really tenable on several different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey levels. Plus, even though I’m so hilariously in bed with Apple at this point, it defies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey description. Do I really want to add one more thing and something as critical as email to that list?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would let I would add to my list of not trusting Apple that I would have found Apple’s email service
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether it has been itools.com me.com iCloud.com
⏹️ ▶️ John under all of its various names has been Has worked in the least not the
⏹️ ▶️ John least reliable, but at least straightforward way, for example Apple’s approach to
⏹️ ▶️ John spam filtering has very often made it so that that sometimes email sent to
⏹️ ▶️ John their email service will just not arrive in a way that is 100% invisible to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you really wanted to pursue it. Sounds like Apple. Cool. Yeah, if you really wanted to pursue it, you could go through
⏹️ ▶️ John all the tech support things and eventually it’ll come down to like, yeah, we filter out certain email and your thing got caught in there, but you don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John visibility into it, right? It’s not like it ends up in the spam folder, it just literally doesn’t arrive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that that has ever happened in the past makes me incredibly wary of using mail for my main
⏹️ ▶️ John mail. I do have, now, iCloud.com, I do have Apple email
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts, and I do get mail on them, but I would never want to use them as my main,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the idea that I’m waiting for an email that never comes, and I have to go through that dance, because you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that dance happens sometimes, and when that dance happens, one of the variables I don’t want to be, well, maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John did send it, but Apple threw it into dev null before it sent it to me, and there’s no way for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John find that out without like six months of pursuing this. Yeah, maybe, yeah. And then that’s before
⏹️ ▶️ John you get to the idea of like, oh, and you’re gonna import 20 gigs of mail? Good luck with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that whole, like hosting everyone’s email, dealing with like the spam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filtering problems, and that’s not the kind of stuff that Apple’s really great at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think that’s ever going to change. So to me, look, here’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s what you should do, what you really should do, and what you will do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do want to hear your recommendations, but let me set another couple of options in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve got iCloud with custom domain. I agree with everything that you said, John. I don’t think I want to do that for several different
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, and the custom domain part, I forgot all about that. It’s a new feature that Apple provides. It’s kind of cool, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that adds one more thing. Like, do I want Apple to control DNS related things? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John anytime DNS gets screwed with, if that MX record is screwed up for any short period of time, talk about email going into Dev, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just, there’s so many ways you can mess that up. And just, even within
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, there’s been many reports, including I think from you, that like the fancy one,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one with custom domains is worse than like the free one because it’s different and all of the attention
⏹️ ▶️ John and bug fixes and everything go on the free one and sometimes you get weird behavior from the one with the custom domain. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really, you know, and then Apple adds that feature. I just don’t think of Apple in that way
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything they’ve done that’s been close to that has made me wary of giving
⏹️ ▶️ John them that kind of thing. Like they’re not a hosting company. They don’t have tools about, you know, they’re not all about,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, Apple will let you create your own identity on the web with your own domain name, which we as tech nerds are always recommending
⏹️ ▶️ John people do, whether or not we all completely follow that advice. If you want to be completely portable,
⏹️ ▶️ John own your own domain, use one of our sponsors or something to get it, and then move
⏹️ ▶️ John that domain around with you from different email providers, then you’ll always be the master of your own destiny in exchange for managing
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo. But hey, you’re a tech nerd, you’re listening to a tech podcast, you have the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this, and lots of hosting providers make it easier and nicer to do that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not one of those companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John of neither is Google at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I could do iCloud with custom domain. So two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more options, both of which are former sponsors. I could use Hay, which I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we, we had a little bit of drama about that a few months ago, but I did try it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a little while as like an accessory email. And I actually do really like it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here again, like similarly to what happens with Apple, like do I really want to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in on their completely proprietary setup? Maybe I do because there’s a lot to like about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know if I do. And that’s a hundred bucks a year. The thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John I would trust them more than Apple because 37
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey signals slash base
⏹️ ▶️ John slash Basecamp, slash whatever they’re called, has many, many years experience
⏹️ ▶️ John supporting web applications, and they have shown under current management a willingness to
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to support stuff long after it stops making them money. Like I think like the original version of Basecamp,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still running it for the tiny amount of people who still wanna use it. That is above and beyond anything you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John ever see a company like Google or Apple do. Totally. And so if you’re worried, like if I put them
⏹️ ▶️ John all in eggs in this basket, am I gonna get screwed? I mean, eventually, yeah, Like the founders will retire and
⏹️ ▶️ John then some private equity company will own it and they’ll screw the whole business up, right? But for the lifetime of the people who are currently
⏹️ ▶️ John running the company, assuming they continue to run it, they have a track record of continuing to support
⏹️ ▶️ John their customers way beyond what you would expect from other companies. Now, and Hay also
⏹️ ▶️ John offers custom domains. So you could have your own domain, which again is the big out where it’s like, oh, if they get evil, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just move elsewhere and I don’t have to change my email address. So, but I think Hay
⏹️ ▶️ John is very opinionated in terms of how they do email. So you have to kind of buy into that part of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this just shows how little I trust Apple, is that I would trust a tiny little company
⏹️ ▶️ John like Basecamp way more than Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I agree, again, with all of your points there. And that’s the thing, is that even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I genuinely do like the opinions that Hay has, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if I want to commit to that. I mean, I don’t have to commit to it forever. But you know what I mean? I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commit to it forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a different approach to email. Like it may, I use, still use Hey for one of my email accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you want that approach to your email, it works, but I don’t want that approach. I don’t personally want that approach for
⏹️ ▶️ John like my main like fire hose email address. It’s more, it’s better for like a personal email
⏹️ ▶️ John address of someone who doesn’t want to or expect to get a lot of email. Hey excels there I feel like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see. It’s funny you say that because I actually think it would be good on a fire hose email, but we can argue that another time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a hundred bucks a year. And here again, I have the problem of, well, what do I do with the last 17 or whatever years of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email that I have. Like it isn’t absolutely required that that ends up online
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere, but I would like it to be because I do search my email relatively frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Granted not for 17 year old emails,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google does that search
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really well. I have to Google does it really well.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a reminder to like put a note on your calendar every six months, every year, whatever until you feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it to use the Google checkout feature or whatever, where they give you a data dump of all your email.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they give it to you in a format that is, in theory, portable. So if and when my Google
⏹️ ▶️ John account gets totally locked and my life is destroyed, I will at least have my legacy of email as of on average
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. So then the final option that I’m aware of anyway is former sponsor, Fastmail. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the code is still valid for what it’s worth, even though they haven’t sponsored in a little while. But fastmail.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash ATP, 10% off your first year, not a sponsor for this episode, but hey, here we are. Hey, here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s five bucks a month. And what’s super appealing about Fastmail, other than the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they sponsor us, other than the fact that I’ve heard incredibly good things from a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think we’re about to hear more, is that they specifically have a Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey import thing. So apparently on the server side, they will go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crawling through all your email and just slurp it all up and suck it all in. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current theory, calendaring notwithstanding, is why wouldn’t I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just go ahead and use fast mail and just switch everything over there because I’ve got all my archive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypothetically anyway, I’ve got my archive, I’ve got my custom domain. They might even do calendaring for all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I haven’t looked into this yet. And I’ve got everything I want and it’s five bucks a month. And granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t particularly want to pay any amount of money for my email because I haven’t for 17 years, six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months and 17 days. But like you said, John, I’ve been freeloading long enough. It seems reasonable. I’m an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adult now. So it seems like a reasonable thing to do. So, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of cut you off earlier. I’d like to hear your opinion as to what I should do first, and then John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to hear yours as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, there’s… What you should do for the maximum comedy value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our show is try to host your own email on your Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no, no. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t actually do that for practical reasons. Nobody should do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, just to quickly interrupt you, there was a time that I think I was doing that like years and years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and years before this knowledge, years ago. And what I found even then, like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago, is that to get around like spam filter, and I don’t know anything about this world, but to get around like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spam filtering and rules and so on and so forth, it is like genuinely difficult to, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was then, I presume it still is now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s probably worse now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. To host your own email. I remember there being some like for pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software as a service thing, or maybe it was installable software that was like a really good web,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gosh, I wish I remember the name of it, but it was like a really, really, really good web-like email app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, shoot, it ran on Linux or something like that, like the server was on Linux. And I remember wanting to install it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so bad and use it so badly. But it was hard to get your emails to reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get delivered because they would see whatever domain that you were serving from and the recipient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers would be like, no. And so, I know you’re joking, Marco. I totally get that you’re joking. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the thought did briefly cross my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I realized, no, this is a terrible idea. And just to elaborate on it, to explain to people
⏹️ ▶️ John why would it be a bad idea to host your own email, a lot of people probably think like, oh, but if you have a server
⏹️ ▶️ John in your house hosting your email, then you have a power outage. You missed email. Well, email is storing forward. So it’s not because you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John miss email necessarily, although obviously if you really screw things up, yes, your email can go away in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t get it back. But the real problem is what Casey was getting at. Email is a protocol based on
⏹️ ▶️ John the hippy dippy days of the internet where everybody trusted everyone else and
⏹️ ▶️ John was encrypted and everybody will just behave themselves. And as we learned, that’s not the case. Spam is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is essentially free to send email. And so in the modern internet, if you would like to be
⏹️ ▶️ John on the internet and send and receive email, technically
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody can start a mail server and start sending and receiving emails as long as they have all the DNS records set up. But practically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, all of the real things that send and receive
⏹️ ▶️ John email that trust each other, that are not known spammers, have a trust relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John based on sometimes cryptography, sometimes paying money to do a thing, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John various handshake protocols. But in general, if you just pop up on the internet on the IP address vended by your ISP
⏹️ ▶️ John and start trying to send mail, everyone will look at you and say, get the hell out of here because you
⏹️ ▶️ John look a lot like a spammer. Because it used to be anybody could do that and you could run your
⏹️ ▶️ John Linux server in your basement and send your email from it Everyone just accept that mail, but those days are long
⏹️ ▶️ John over That’s one of the main tools against spam is saying I’m not just gonna trust any old random
⏹️ ▶️ John computer on the internet and accept email From it. We’re gonna have to do a thing and like and all these people who provide
⏹️ ▶️ John email whether it’s Google Apple fastmail They have teams of people whose only job
⏹️ ▶️ John is to make sure that a they’re not overwhelmed with spam which is like someone was on the chat we’re talking about graylisting
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. When I was talking about mail going into Apple and then Apple would just throw it away. Everybody’s throwing away a lot of mail.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just that Apple was more aggressive about it and didn’t give you any recourse and didn’t tell you they were doing it, right? But everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do that. Otherwise we would all be overwhelmed by spam. If you think you’re getting a lot of spam now, you have to see how much
⏹️ ▶️ John email your email provider is throwing away and not allowing to get to you. And then B, there’s all sorts of other complicated relationships
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t know all the acronyms for that make it so that you are a super duper trusted, no really it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, you’re not a spammer type of authentication. So people will make sure your email is delivered
⏹️ ▶️ John reliably. And that’s a problem for people running services. You can talk to Marco about the services he runs that sometimes have to
⏹️ ▶️ John send email. And that’s a difficult thing to do, which is why AWS and other services like that have
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of trusted mail delivery services where they say don’t try to send email yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John send it through. I don’t know what the AWS one is called, like send grid or something. No, I’m mixing up things. But anyway, send
⏹️ ▶️ John through this managed service because we have a team of people whose only job is to make sure that that
⏹️ ▶️ John mail system is not used by spammers and make and is still trusted by all
⏹️ ▶️ John the other trustworthy people. It’s the only way that the email system works at all. You will never want
⏹️ ▶️ John to put in that amount of work for the server running out of your house and having emails not arrive
⏹️ ▶️ John or having to fight with deliverability and being overwhelmed by spam are two things you don’t want to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so so what you should do for comedy is hosting your sonology, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that would be the only There would be no other value to that besides comedy for our show. And even just making the joke right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’ve gotten most of the value out of it, so let’s move on from that idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The most pragmatic thing you should do is stop worrying about this and just pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google what they want and keep going with your life and change nothing else. But the ideal thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would do if you can get over the value of that pragmatism is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try Fast Mail. It’s really good. So just to give you some idea, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit under 15 gigs of email. My plan allows 100 gigs. That’s the $90
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year professional plan, which is about, what is that, $8 a month? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re in the similar price ballpark here. In practice, I haven’t paid fast mail in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long time. Because a couple times I posted referral links on my blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my account, because I have a referral program. And I currently have a referral balance of $2,600. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you send some of that my way then? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it just goes up over time slowly. So I haven’t actually paid a fast amount. Like, it just deducts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that every year when it renews. So I haven’t paid in a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-level marketing scheme.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even need your referrals now. I can’t use all this. It would take me 100 years to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John still so annoyed that I didn’t do that with my Dropbox referral
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco code back in the day. Everyone who
⏹️ ▶️ John bought AdSense keywords for Dropbox and just got unlimited money. I did get a bunch of Dropbox referrals.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I was on the free Dropbox plan for just years and years and years, but eventually I filled it up and had to start paying, and I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of bitter about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, anyway, so yeah, so what’s great about the Fastmail option is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, it is a standard host. Like, when I was looking for this, whatever it was, a million years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, I wanted a regular IMAP email host because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could move to and from it freely because that’s the wonderful nature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of email standards. And, you know, Fastmail, again, yes, previous sponsor, possibly future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsor. Some of this is in their ads, I’m not trying to give them a free ad here or anything, I’m just genuinely talking about how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I enjoy their service. This is a great host if what you want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a basic but good email host, which there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God, there is so much to be said for that. In this world of tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to be everything to everyone and trying to make ever increasing, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, giant walled gardens that lock you in in all sorts of ways and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to shove more and more enterprise crap onto you all the time. I really appreciate companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just do a basic thing really well and that’s what this is. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a lot of features I don’t use. Like, I never use the web interface at all. Like, I just use Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mail on all platforms and it’s fine. They do have a web interface if you want it. One area that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be as good as Gmail is search. It’s just, Gmail is really good at search. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know anybody who’s good at Gmail search. One area that FastMail is great is spam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve never actually used Gmail regularly so I don’t really know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about it but I will frequently hear my friends complaining about how Gmail spam filtering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is possibly not working so well sometimes or working too well other times. One thing about Fastmail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spam is that it is customizable. And you can do something like, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set certain folders to be your spam learning folders for your personal spam filter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, whenever I get an email from somebody I would rather never hear from again, like some terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PR list that somehow I got put on, I just drag it to my learn spam folder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it learns it, and that’s it. And I have it set to learn from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the junk folder. and then put its filed spam into a different folder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way it’s not learning from its own poop or whatever. Basically, that allows me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the move to junk shortcut buttons in mail clients, and that’s basically a learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spam button for my fast mail setup. So that’s a nice little trick. But otherwise, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this because it is just, as I said, it’s just an email host. And I am not an email power user. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want all those advanced features that all the cool Gmail trendy apps have done over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like snoozing and all, like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want any of that. You can do that on Fastmail apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you can? Well, maybe not through my Apple Mail, I don’t know. But like, I love just using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Mail, using the boring Apple Mail client for my boring email in my boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way and it just works, I don’t have to think about it. Now, again, they offer calendars, I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used them. They offer like synced notes and stuff, I’ve never used any of that stuff. I just use Fastmail for email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I use it only through Apple’s mail apps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. And it has worked rock solid reliably for, what, a decade? Whatever it’s been?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been so good that entire time, I just never have to think about it. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of effort and focus that your email hosting choices deserve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should never be thinking about them. It shouldn’t matter because email is boring and stupid, and you should just get done with it as quickly as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, what do you think I should do?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, when I sort of put all my eggs in the Gmail basket back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the day, and you know, imported all my mail, whatever, over the years I’ve sometimes regret
⏹️ ▶️ John that I didn’t do a custom domain, for the reasons that I said, like you should have your custom domain, it makes you portable, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to change your email address. Like my email address that I use is my firehose, it ends in gmail.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, oh, you’re gonna regret that, because eventually something’s gonna change, and Gmail’s gonna shut down or whatever, and you’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have to change all your accounts, I think this would be a giant headache. But like I said about
⏹️ ▶️ John this Google Apps for your domain, it’s been a lot of years now, right? Like I’ve got, I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like I’ve already got my non-money’s worth out of Gmail, even if they shut down tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I say, well, that was a good run, you know. When did Gmail launch in like 2000? It was 2004, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco 2004, yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was my last year of college.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so 17 years. Like I’m gonna, I’m just gonna give that a thumbs up long to say I’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John got my money’s worth, right? but I basically trusted that Google as a company would be around for a long time and that they would continue to run Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. And if they did start to charge for it, I would pay. Like this, with this whole thing of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get to continue to use it for free because they’re not charging for the gmail.com ones, right? But for you, they are charging.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think if it was in your situation, I would just start paying because I would, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I wouldn’t be in, I would be, it wouldn’t be in a situation where I regretted not having custom domain because you did,
⏹️ ▶️ John you were smart enough to do the custom domain thing and that’s the email address you use. And I wouldn’t want to give that up. And I also
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t wanna do anything that could disrupt email. And the least disruptive thing is to just start
⏹️ ▶️ John paying. So that’s what I would do. But Fastmail sounds fine. It’s just like, do you want to put in the work to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John For me personally, I like the Gmail web interface. It’s the main way I use email.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t exist in Fastmail. So that would be a big hang up for me because then I’d have to pick another client, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’m just using the web interface. So I would definitely stay. And I think for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John the least disruption option is to stay. Because I think Google is still a good
⏹️ ▶️ John mail hosting provider. Complaints about the spam thing are valid,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can try to train it and correct it or whatever. It’s a little bit annoying. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the search is amazing, and the reliability has been very, very solid. So that’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John advice. My number one choice, stay where you are. Number two, fast mail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Real time follow up. a buddy of mine who was also obsessed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this random email thing that I think he had brought to me. I think he had found it. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still exists. It’s called Zimbra, Z-I-M-B-R-A. And it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can do it on-prem, you can do it in the cloud. I’ll probably look at it for three seconds just to remind myself what it—well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s surely totally different than it was 15 years ago. But anyways, that is also an option. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t imagine me deciding to go with it, but I guess I could run that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my own server. Maybe I could put it in Docker on the Synology. How about that, Marco? Is that sufficient?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. Anyway, I could do that. But I’m sitting here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco now… Can you somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involve RX Swift? No, at this point, I haven’t written RX… Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I haven’t written RX in a long time. Still doing Combine here and there, but no RX in a long time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, that would be a Greatest Hits album for sure. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think sitting here now, what I’m probably going to do is sometime in the next couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months, I’m going to sign up for Fastmail and I’m going to try to get it to suck in all my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email from Gmail and just take it for a spin for a month or so. And if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decide it’s sufficient, then I’ll stick with it. And if it’s for some reason garbage, then I’ll go back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gmail and give them my money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you say what email client you use?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I use Mimestream on the Mac, which is where I do most of my email.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you won’t be able to do that with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Fastmail. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be able to do that with Fastmail. Although, isn’t Mimestream promising support for non-Gmail accounts?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, hypothetically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me tell you something, Casey. As a non-Gmail user, every email app always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promises that. It’s always coming in a few months. It never comes, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get bought or they shut down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco agree. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco count on that. If you’re going to if you’re going to jump into any non gmail host for your email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options, get used to apple mail or the web interface to that host. That’s it like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there will be or I guess you could use like thunderbird, but like there you’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John stuck with very few. It does still exist. Use
⏹️ ▶️ John outlook still right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John well and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah it’s funny you bring that up because what I’m not sure of I do not have an office 365 account, nor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I particularly want one, but if somebody wrote to me and said you know oh my gosh, outlook.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, you know, does custom domains and it’s the best thing since sliced bread. I would at least take a moment to look at it, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t imagine I would actually go for it. But yeah, I agree with to come back to your point. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do agree with what you’re saying that I fully expect that Mimestream will go away forever for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. And that’s fine. Like I, it’s only the last month or two I’ve been using Mimestream and I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I’m not like hell bent on it. So if I need to go back to Apple mail, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t stress enough, I know I’ve said it like three times, but I just stopped using Apple Mail like two or three months ago at most, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month or two ago, then that’s fine. I’ll go back to what I’ve been using for the last, what, 12, 13, 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years or something like that. So I’m not too worried about it. And there is something to be said for using fast mail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a traditional IMAP server. And this is what you were saying, Marco, because, you know, Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does a reasonable job of mapping like labels to folders and things like that and trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to play nice with IMAP, but it’s not perfect. It’s not stupendous. And
⏹️ ▶️ John why Mimestream is so great. It doesn’t try to treat Gmail as an IMAP client, right? It uses a sort of native Gmail interface
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s just way better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I think, again, the more I think about it, the more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sitting here today, the more I think about it, the more I think I want to just divorce myself from Google and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just go and get a fast mail account and then try to use Apple for calendaring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hope for the best. The thing is, if I start making these moves in the next month or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some time to say, oh, just kidding. But if I wait until May or June or July
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whenever it is that Google starts terminating me, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to be in a real bad place. So hopefully in the next few weeks, I’ll be making moves on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ll have something to report.
#askatp: Backing up shared albums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do at least a little bit of Ask ATP. And let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start with Carlos Moffitt, who writes, any advice on how to backup shared albums? I recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discovered in a painful way that if you delete one, they are basically unrecoverable, as they are not included in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud backups. The photos and video files can be recovered, I think, from a local backup, but I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if all the files on a shared album are included if a machine is set up to download all iCloud photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Carlos doesn’t mention, but I believe to be true, Isn’t it a thing or wasn’t it a thing that iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, album, shared albums do not upload in full resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do not. So that’s what I was going to say. Like if you’re, if you think the only place a photo exists is in a shared album, that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s recompressed, smaller, crappier version of that. Just because you put something in a shared
⏹️ ▶️ John album, don’t delete it from your photo library. The photo library is the real copy of the shared album is crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution, which is, which is kind of dumb. I kind of understand why they did it, but it seems like in today’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, storage and power of phone devices or whatever, that they should just be full resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just Apple should just have better on-demand downloading. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John my advice for how to deal with this is annoying, like I think it should
⏹️ ▶️ John be recoverable and Apple should back it up, especially since what Apple should probably
⏹️ ▶️ John do is like, I mean there’s lots of different ways that Apple would do this, but yeah, make them full resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John and also make it so that if you try to delete a picture that’s in a shared album, it would yell at you and say, you know, this is in
⏹️ ▶️ John a shared album, you sure you wanna delete it? It’ll be deleted from the shared albums too, right? That would be a nice way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it and so that it could just maintain a bunch of metadata and back it up, but they don’t. So the way to do it is
⏹️ ▶️ John you start on the other end when you’re, and I know this is hard retroactively, but when you’re creating a shared
⏹️ ▶️ John album, I would recommend this just not just for backup purposes because it’s a nice way to do it. When you’re creating a shared
⏹️ ▶️ John album, make an album in photos, I’m coming from Mac-centric viewpoint here, I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea how to do this on your phone, just use a Mac. And call that album,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, but you can make a folder hierarchy in the sidebar in photos. So just have a folder hierarchy that says like shared
⏹️ ▶️ John albums or something. If that name’s taken, just use a different name. And then make an album called
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever your shared, you know, library’s gonna be. Not shared library, shared album’s gonna be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then drag all your photos into that album. So you’re basically making the shared album as a plain local
⏹️ ▶️ John album. Because Apple does back up the plain local albums, right? Once you have
⏹️ ▶️ John that local album done, just select all and then go and make a shared album out of that. There’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of weird stuff in terms of what order they appear in the shared album versus what order they appear in the,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, in the local album. But as long as you’re not too picky about that, or you just figure out the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John incantation to do it, what it means is that if you accidentally delete the shared album, all you have to do is go back to that local
⏹️ ▶️ John album folder, select all and make a new shared album with the same name. And now you’ve got all the same photos in it again. And that will also remind
⏹️ ▶️ John you, by the way, don’t delete those photos because because if you delete them, they would be deleted from the local album as well, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You do end up with a lot of folders if you make a lot of shared albums. Apple’s limit on shared albums, I think, is 5,000 pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John which might not seem like a lot, but we’ve had a bunch of family members who used to have a shared album for like pictures of their kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they realized that if you just keep having kids and years keep passing, eventually you hit 5,000 photos, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to have a picture of your kids too, and then eventually some people just go with an annual shared album or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, the limits might’ve made sense a decade ago, but now are kind of silly, but they do exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John But because you can have folders within folders in the sidebar, you can hide all this clutter and then you’ll always
⏹️ ▶️ John have sort of a backup of the contents of your folder. What you’re missing is the comments from Aunt Sue who
⏹️ ▶️ John says how cute the baby is. Like you’re not backing that stuff up, which is kind of a shame. Are we really missing them, Bob?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. At the very least, if you have, if what you’re trying to save is I have
⏹️ ▶️ John this carefully curated collection of images, I picked the best 15 images that I shared with my family.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that’s what you want to back up, use a local album. If you want to back up the likes and the comments, there’s no good way
#askatp: Desktop-laptop battery management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anirudh Kuntur writes, when using the MacBook Pro as a laptop desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you keep the charger always plugged in? Does that spoil the battery life? Are there any tips to maintain the battery health of the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when using it that way? So as of a release or two ago, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will try, or optionally, I believe, try to take care of this for you. So if you go into system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferences, battery, and then choose battery in the sidebar, optimized battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging is an option. And it says to reduce battery aging, and your Mac learns from your daily charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey routine, so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need to use it on battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like this a lot, I have this on, and generally speaking, I think it works pretty well. The one thing that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love is I kind of wish it took a page out of, I guess Tesla’s and a lot of other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric vehicles playbook, where I wish there was a way to say, no, no, no, I want all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and I want it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay, so I presume that just unchecking this checkbox is the way to do it, but is there a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to tell my Mac, hey, I know tomorrow or later today or whatever, I’m gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away from power for hours and hours and hours, I want everything you can give me. How do you do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so this is one of the wonderful handful of features that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on macOS should be in the system prep pane, but only appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you happen to add to your menu bar. Here, I’ll paste a link, a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into our chat, I’ll make this the chapter art for this chapter. This is what happens for a desktop laptop. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it looks. So it’ll, you know, it says from the menu, if you have the battery enabled in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco menu bar, it’ll say charging on hold, parentheses, rarely used on battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s an item right below that, that you can select that says charge to full now.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like you’re an amateur Mac user. You’re always holding on the option key when you click the menu bar icons. Have we not learned that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t even with, this isn’t even with option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John This is just, you just- This
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco option? No. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use laptops. So the people that don’t know, by the way, hold down the option key and click on various menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar icons, you see all sorts of fun stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this is how it works. And this is by default, I didn’t change anything from the defaults here, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is by default, it keeps the battery at 80% when it is plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in as a desktop laptop, where you almost never take it off. And it notices that, it says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rarely used on battery, and it gives you the menu item that you can just click to say charge to full now if you happen to need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That’s it. So I do keep it connected all the time. it’s being powered by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the XDR. In fact, I don’t think there’s a way to connect it to the XDR without having it be powered by the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Unless you’d like use some kind of hub.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can maybe use a hub between it, but then the hub would try to power the MacBook Pro. Like they all do that. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if there’s actually a way to refuse power while using any Thunderbolt display.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But regardless, yeah, you don’t have to. It manages it for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, even when it didn’t, even when the best we did, I think Apple’s laptops used to like hover around 98 to 100 and
⏹️ ▶️ John they would oscillate around that range, right? Which is better than just being cranked 100 all the time, but 80% is even better. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John still say, like if it’s gonna be plugged in all the time, like
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry, yes, you are destroying your battery if it was in the bad old days when it was oscillating between 98 and 100,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re using your computer. And if the way you use your laptop is almost
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time it’s plugged in, then just use it almost all the time plugged in, right? If you’re worried that like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I’m destroying my battery and I wanna go on a road trip, it’s gonna be crappy, buy big external
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries. Like there’s no free lunch here. So even the 80% thing, 80% is not
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the ideal charge for the most longevity of a battery. The last time we looked this up a few years ago, I think 40%
⏹️ ▶️ John charge for lithium ion batteries, like the best storage sort of thing. If you just want the battery to not wear out
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re not really using it. But yeah, just don’t worry about it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice that macOS has this feature. If you do want to do the thing where like I
⏹️ ▶️ John needed to be at a hundred percent, Now you have to remember to pick the charge to full thing. You know, like it’s a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John extra bother, but honestly, if you can’t, if you feel like, oh, I’m never gonna remember
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that charge to full thing and now I’m only gonna have 80% power, then just turn off optimized battery charging and just
⏹️ ▶️ John sacrifice, sacrifice your batteries. You bought this computer to use it. And yes, the battery is gonna wear out as you use it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will wear out faster if you don’t optimize battery charging. But if you really can’t remember to ever do the charge to full now option,
⏹️ ▶️ John just wing it, right? Like just like people, I always talk about empathy with the machine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy these machines to use them. There’s no way you’re going to like, there’s no prize for having a
⏹️ ▶️ John battery that’s in pristine condition when you’re done with that computer. Like it’s a waste, it’s there for you to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, and also lithium batteries degrade slowly over time, whether you’re charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them or not. You know, they degrade faster under certain charge patterns, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you’re not gonna like have this laptop plugged in on your desktop for three or four years and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell it and it’s gonna be in perfect battery condition. Like that’s just, batteries degrade over time, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones we have in laptops these days. Like they just, it’s not as bad as it used to be, but they degrade over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how you use them. So yeah, I’m with John. Use it however you want. That being said, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people, leaving the setting on by default is fine because if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco truly not bringing your laptop up very many places most of the time, if it’s mostly on the desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the very first time you take it off the desktop, you only have 80% battery. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a lot and the battery life on these is really good. And so that’s not that bad of a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I didn’t even realize this feature was on for the first couple times I took it away because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, you know, I got where I was going like for Thanksgiving and Christmas travel. I got where I was going and opened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my laptop and yeah, it’s fine. It was down, you know, quote down to probably somewhere in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high 70s by that point, but who cares? That’s still really great. This has awesome battery life. And if I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that I know that this feature is there, if I’m like, you know, gonna be on a cross-country flight or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I’ll charge it to full. But until that happens, I’m not really in
⏹️ ▶️ John And this, the thing you just read, Casey, this is saying that it does the same thing as the phone does, where it tries to learn your patterns, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe that’s right, yeah. So like, your iPhone is doing this too, we’ve talked about in the past, things like your iPhone, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you plug it in and you’re on your nightstand before you go to sleep, it doesn’t immediately charge to 100% and then sit
⏹️ ▶️ John at 100% until you wake up in the morning. Instead, based on when you’ve woken up in past mornings, it waits until
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour or two before you wake up and then it charges to 100%. You can look at the little battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graph. Yeah, it goes to 80 first, and then it holds it at 80 until like 6 a.m. or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it pushes it up. And it’s much more important for a phone because obviously the battery in a phone is so much smaller than the battery in a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re really kind of on the ragged edge with the phone and phones are so important that batteries that they
⏹️ ▶️ John do want your phone to be 100% when you’re ready for it because you’re not gonna be using your phone plugged in all day at a desk unless you’re a developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the Mac is probably trying to do the same thing. But like Marco said, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the 40% charge thing, that is in theory, based on, again, years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago or reading this, the best charge level, if you’re just gonna sit it in a drawer, but no charge
⏹️ ▶️ John level stops degradation. It’s just how can we make the degradation as small as possible?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you leave it at 100%, leave it at zero, leave it at 40, A, it won’t stay there, and B, time will slowly damage the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John just because of the way current battery chemistry stuff works. So use it or lose it. Use it and lose
⏹️ ▶️ John it. There you go. Yeah.
#askatp: Theft of an unlocked iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Lars Beckham writes, my partner’s phone was stolen out of her hands while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walking. So yes, the phone was unlocked the other day. Unfortunately and unexplainably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Find My was not enabled on her new iPhone 13 Pro. Completely erasing and blocking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone remotely was out of the question because of this. Out of curiosity, what do you do to make sure Find My is always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enabled on all of your family members’ devices? And if this ever happened to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or any of your family members, how would you make sure any sensitive data would not be exposed or used in a harmful way. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking of certain apps like Gmail notes and photos, which can, which can contain sensitive data and which do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not require passcodes or face ID to open the app. Uh, I don’t know how find my wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on because I swear that you have to like bend over backwards to prevent it from coming on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s for good reason because it should be on as far as I’m concerned. Uh, in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of protecting stuff, like honestly, I don’t because, uh, well, Well, first of all, we’d never leave the house anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because COVID, but beyond that, we are not in a situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our lives do not put us in a place where this is a thing that is likely to happen while the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actively unlocked. So I don’t have any good advice on this one, to be
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the good thing is that if someone steals your phone like this, unless you’re being targeted
⏹️ ▶️ John for some specific reason, because you’re like a senator or like the CEO of some big company
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and they want what’s on your phone, probably they just want your phone. And so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be like, oh, this sucker left it unlocked, I’ll go and try to steal some credit cards or maybe they’ll do that too,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you probably 50-50 chance they just want the phone and they just want to erase it and resell it or whatever. So you have
⏹️ ▶️ John that going for you. But if someone does get your phone and it’s unlocked and they have access to all your stuff, almost
⏹️ ▶️ John every one of these services and things has some way to
⏹️ ▶️ John individually lock it. Like so in Google, you can go to like the accounts.google.com in your web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, revoke all access for all devices immediately, right? Log out of
⏹️ ▶️ John all devices, those types of things. For your Apple ID, I think you can forcibly lock it, right? Even if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just by putting in the wrong password a bunch of times to lock your Apple ID. It’s a race against time
⏹️ ▶️ John because obviously if they just got your phone, they probably, you know, if someone really did wanna get at your sensitive stuff, they probably
⏹️ ▶️ John already got it. But if they’re just running, you know, with your phone and then eventually they’ll look at it later
⏹️ ▶️ John that night, maybe by then you will have locked all your stuff. So yeah, if somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John you managed to have FiMyNot enabled and couldn’t do a remote wipe or remote lock or lock this device or any of the cool things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do, you do have a certain period of time where you can frantically go through all the
⏹️ ▶️ John services you care about and try to lock them down from a web browser or another device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you know what, that reminded me too, for people that do the bring your own device thing for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your employer, a lot of times, particularly if you’re connecting to like Exchange or Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suite, G suite, whatever it’s called today. A lot of times, whether or not you realize it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your workplace could lock your device because by connecting to their email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and their domain and all of this stuff, oftentimes they have the right to lock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either a subset of your device or your entire device. So you could ask your work to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you a solid and do what they probably would wanna do anyway and lock or erase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your device on your behalf. So it’s something you could try as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can also, by the way, someone mentioned two-factor in the thing. If your phone was your two-factor device, you can revoke
⏹️ ▶️ John two-factor device access from various services that you’re worried about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, what if I can’t log into that service because my phone was two-factor? That’s what backup codes are for. When you
⏹️ ▶️ John set up two-factor, most good services will give you backup codes that you should keep like in a safe or something
⏹️ ▶️ John in a physical location. Again, it’s a race against time and it’s a super hassle and you’ll probably lose this race.
⏹️ ▶️ John but technically speaking, you can sort of have a, hey, if my unlock phone is stolen by an inattentive
⏹️ ▶️ John person, here’s a list of things I have to do. And it’s a long, annoying list, but it is possible, even if your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John was your one and only two-factor device, which I don’t particularly recommend, but there usually is a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John solve that. Get your backup codes, go to the services, deauthorize all accounts, log out of all devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John change a two-factor to be something different than it was, log in with one of your backup codes so you can get in. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John technically it is possible. You just, it’s just like a movie. you’re just gonna be doing it as fast as you can. Maybe get
⏹️ ▶️ John your friend to type on the keyboard at the same time as you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the reality is, like what John said at first, like chances are, you know, phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thieves are wanting your phone, not your data most of the time, because most people’s data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worthless to them. And like, you know, if the phone they grabbed at your hand happened to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be unlocked at the time they grabbed it, like how far could they get, and how long could they have access to that
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re gonna look for nudes. Like, it’s a thing that we don’t think about, because no one wants to see naked pictures of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you are someone who people would want to see naked pictures of, they will absolutely look through your pictures and
⏹️ ▶️ John get all naked pictures and post them and everything, which is terrible. But that is, I feel like, the most likely thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who grabs your unlock phone is going to do. So I don’t even think about that. I know. We don’t think about it because no one wants to see us naked.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not true of everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, anyway, besides risks like that, a lot of things, like you don’t have to worry so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about them opening up your password manager or being able to access certain things, is those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are already blocked by additional passcode or face ID checks. You know, making payments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not going to be possible without you there. So like there’s a lot of a lot of that surface area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of possible risks is not really there in this scenario. Again, also keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mind, like it’s it’s kind of difficult to keep an iPhone unlocked for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, especially if you are in motion while doing this. Like it’s, you know, It would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very likely that this person would either intentionally or inadvertently relock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone fairly soon after the theft. And chances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are what they want to do is erase it and turn it off as quickly as possible so that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t find them. And they can then get some money for it somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they don’t know Find My is off on your phone because it’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most phones. Right, this is the whole point of it. But I would guess what they want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is get that phone erased and powered down as quickly as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, we don’t know what we’re talking about because we’re not phone thieves, but fortunately we don’t have to be. Because of our wonderful sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, thank you to them, Squarespace, Linode, and New Relic. And thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly. You can join at atv.fm slash join. We will talk to
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, accidental Tech
A post-show in three parts
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon SES, Simple Email Service, is the name I couldn’t think of of their way to
⏹️ ▶️ John send email in a way that presumably Amazon runs and makes sure is not going to be flagged as a spammer.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Although I bet AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John has a harder time of it than most, because if you wanted to send a bunch of spam, signing up for a quick free AWS account, paying some
⏹️ ▶️ John money and having it spam is probably a very common thing, but that’s Amazon’s job to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure that email from their service does not get rejected as spam.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was that during the Gmail segment, or did we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that earlier?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s about how hard it is to be on the internet as a sender and a receiver of email
⏹️ ▶️ John and to be recognized as legitimate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thanks. Oh, I want an update on Marco’s car battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I don’t have an update yet. Everyone wrote in and told me what to do. I haven’t been to the car yet because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve had this bit of a problem called a giant snowstorm like everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I literally have not even been able to get to it, even by boat if I wanted to, until like yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My plan is to, I got some errands to run probably next week, so ask me again next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me go to the auto store and have the cashier install it for you. This is wild when people are telling me that the cashier wouldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I guess it’s just like an auto store employee. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, you spent like an hour telling me how easy it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It is, I’m saying it is easy, but it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t the cashier have to stay there and check out the next customer? Like if they leave the store and just be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, oh, yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, anyway. No, but my plan is to just go to whatever nearby like auto parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store is near here and just go buy a battery. Even if the battery’s not the problem, I’ll just go buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a battery anyway because they’re not that expensive and it probably is the problem. And yeah, then I’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it ends up being something more complex like the alternator, I’ll deal with that later.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was interesting that some people suggested lithium ion batteries for cars and I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was it lithium or was it those glass sponge ones?
⏹️ ▶️ John In any case, I feel like I would need to do research about that because we know battery technology has moved
⏹️ ▶️ John on very much since the lead acid batteries of the Mac portable, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John specific application of a car, especially in a place with winter, is very different than what you
⏹️ ▶️ John might use in your phone or a laptop, because as we know, phones and laptops tend not to do well once they are freezing,
⏹️ ▶️ John or very hot for that matter. But cars get very cold and very hot all the time, and lead-acid batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m an old flutty-dutty, they’re a known quantity. I know in where I live, I don’t need a battery
⏹️ ▶️ John heater, because I don’t live in like, you know, the wilds of Canada or the Arctic or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John every place that I’ve lived has been the type of temperature where a healthy car battery
⏹️ ▶️ John will continue to function correctly. I don’t know if that’s true of a lithium ion battery. Would I need to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a battery heater with a second battery to keep my other battery warm? Or do lithium ion batteries do better
⏹️ ▶️ John than lead acid batteries in New England style temperatures? I don’t know. And so just go with the
⏹️ ▶️ John default, which is, well, you know, I know what quote unquote car batteries work like and I’ll just buy a new
⏹️ ▶️ John one when my old one gets bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did I tell you about my Jumpstart batteries that I have?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you mentioned on the show you talked
⏹️ ▶️ John And your USB hand warmers, yeah. Just big USB batteries to start your car when it needs it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to pump up the tires, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, yeah, well, yeah. One of them is the lithium type. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is the super cap type. I haven’t had a chance to use them yet, but the lithium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type I kept in the car. I thought I was being a genius. I’m like, I’m buying an older car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s gonna have to operate in a lot of cold weather and it’s gonna be sitting around for a while so I should probably get a battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumpstart thing just in case and keep it in the car because I’m now in the age of lithium batteries, they’ve come a long
⏹️ ▶️ John way. What about a battery tender or a solar thing which is something everyone suggested? Rather than having a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John jumpstarts it when it dies, something to just trickle charge your battery all the time so it’s always okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might look at that at some point but right now it’s not really in a controlled environment where I would have any kind of, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. So at some point I might look at that but hopefully that won’t be necessary. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so I thought, I have an idea. Since the car, you know, since it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old style car, if I have something plugged into the 12 volt port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the car, it’s not gonna constantly drain the battery when it’s off, like some modern car might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird thing that does that. It’s only gonna operate that 12 volt port when the car is running. So I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave something plugged in there all the time, and it would only charge the thing when it’s running. So I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, I’ll use one of the ports on the USB dongle in that 12-volt plug to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I’m driving the car, to trickle charge this giant lithium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumpstart battery. And that way it’ll be ready in all likelihood whenever I would need it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least it’d be close enough to ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll see the caveats about how well lithium battery survives extremes of temperature, especially if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the sun or freezing
⏹️ ▶️ John there in the winter. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I went to the car, you know, like the, you know, last time I ran some errands and I was talking about this battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. Well, I, as I was struggling to start the car the first time I thought, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s okay. I have this lithium battery thing here. What could go wrong? Uh, and I turned the lithium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery, the jump start thing on and it shows like an error light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to call for me. Yeah. And I’m like, okay, well, maybe I need something, not this. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a battery. You need
⏹️ ▶️ John a battery to power the warmer for your other battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes, exactly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To augment that, or to possibly replace it, I ordered the super cap type,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was, when I was ordering this, I was waffling between these two types. Well, there’s this other kind that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses super caps, like super capacitors, instead of lithium batteries. And it has its own trade-offs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has the wonderful upside that you don’t really keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it charged the time, so you don’t have to worry about that. And it works in more temperature extremes.
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you need some electricity to go into the super cap. And if you don’t have any electricity, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John SOL. I think we had the solution to this problem last show. You just need those
⏹️ ▶️ John oxygen activated rust hand warmers. And then so when you get into the car, you’re like, don’t worry, I have a lithium battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the lithium battery says it’s too cold. Well, let me just open up these packets, shake them up, wrap them around my lithium battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John warm that sucker up, and then it’ll make a happy face and boot up, and then I can start my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the good thing is, so the super cap thing, this is, I actually, I tested this. It actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works, the SuperCap thing, I can charge it with my laptop, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it charges via, it has a USB input option as well. So, okay, so the way they work normally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, the idea is if the battery has too low of a charge to start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car, it probably at least still has some voltage. And so what the SuperCap does is, you connect it to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery, it takes like two minutes to basically suck as much power as it can out of the car battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it can deliver it all at once to start the car. So if the battery has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some charge, which it usually does, then you can turn that into a short burst of a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of charge to start it. That’s the idea. However, it also supports, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge it via USB over about maybe 20 or 30 minutes. Well, it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how long the ferry ride is. So my plan is to just charge it from my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop on the ferry when I’m going to the car, and that way I’ll show up to my car with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fully charged Super Cap in case I need it, and that will work in any conditions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you just charge the super cap instead of on the ferry ride from your outlet in your house?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m never gonna remember to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The good thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ John having an EV for so many years has prepared you for long periods of slow charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, here’s what would happen. I would plug it into my house, and then I would leave, and I would forget it. It would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be sitting here plugged into my house instead of in my backpack where it should stay forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They can collaborate
⏹️ ▶️ John with your heated rug to start a fire.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the confusion with the cup of pistachios? Because pistachio size is pretty regular. Like, there’s not a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of variation. You just fill the cup until the pistachios fill the cup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first, there’s some ambiguity. Are you volumetrically measuring them with the shells or without?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know granted it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John without. It’s absolutely without. But if the recipe says a cup of chopped pistachios, you might have a point because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the the size you chop them really dictates how many will pack in. And yes, weight is better, obviously, but if they say a cup
⏹️ ▶️ John of pistachios and they don’t say chopped, they mean no shells and they mean just pour them into a cup measure. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so imprecise. And with baking, precision is pretty important. I think it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty precise because of the law of averages of pistachio size. It’s not like you’re going to, it’s like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a particularly large batch of pistachios and it screwed up the average. No, like, I think they’re very regular
⏹️ ▶️ John in size. It evens out over the course of a cup. And if you were to count how many pistachios or how much
⏹️ ▶️ John weight there is, if you just took cup after cup of pistachios and measured them the same way, I think you’d see they really
⏹️ ▶️ John hover around the same amount. Well, anyway, I mean, if you did a cup of mixed
⏹️ ▶️ John nuts, it would be a problem. Someone did their PhD thesis.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah, that’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone did a PhD thesis about like, if you, you know, you get like those planters, mixed nuts or whatever, like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the cylindrical jar that’s about as tall as it is wide, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it has like, mostly the crappy nuts you don’t want and like two cashews and one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John one with the
⏹️ ▶️ John statue. And so the PhD thesis was trying to explain, it’s one of those things that like, a thing that no one
⏹️ ▶️ John cares about, but you can get your PhD if you figure out how it actually works. If you take one of those mixed nuts things and you just shake
⏹️ ▶️ John it with the lid on, and you shake, shake, shake, shake, shake it, and you open it up, what you will find is all the big nuts are on top.
⏹️ ▶️ John And someone did a PhD, I’m like, why is that? It seems weird that the big nuts would come up, you’d think the big nuts
⏹️ ▶️ John would go to the bottom, the little ones would go to the top, but they explained it, they figured it out. Science.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that works, Get a thing of mixed nuts and shake it and you will watch the stupid Brazil nuts that nobody wants will be on top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then everybody would have to get mixed, mixed nuts like those like planters, tubs, they’re so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the nuts that you get in there are, first of all, grossly over-oiled and salted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the nuts themselves are somehow stale and like it’s just, oh, they’re the worst nuts. I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, nuts.com, I’m telling you. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John never got nuts.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re the best, they’re so good. They’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John much fresher than anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Not a porn site. Oh my God, no, no, no, that’s something else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, at least planters has a good like they’re mixed nuts. Yeah, they just all the ones nobody wants right but they do
⏹️ ▶️ John sell like mixed nuts and it’s only two kinds of nuts and they’re both ones you want so they’ll have like
⏹️ ▶️ John cashews and they never do cashews and macadamias but they would
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do it. No, it’s way too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but anyway, it’s just like two good kinds of nuts and there’s the only kind in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and because when you do mixed nuts, you know, it’s all going to be the cheap ones that nobody likes and with one or two good but you can buy them with just
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re called mix this whatever they’re called you just get two kinds of nuts and if you like both those kinds of nuts you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John golden you know unless you like one way more than the other and then it’s probably not gonna be they would call it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two nuts I tell you what the we were joking earlier in our house here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the best response we ever got from Siri so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were at dinner early you know me my wife and my son were talking about God knows what and somehow the the topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the seven seas came up and we asked our cylinder, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the seven Cs? Because I knew the concept, but I don’t know, what are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Atlantic, Pacific, what counts? So we asked, hey, what are the seven Cs? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri responded, I only know of two testes, the left teste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the right teste.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Google would have gotten that one if you had asked. I mean, setting aside the mishearing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s something. Yeah. Testes, one, two, three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other day, like, you know, we, every morning we, you know, we go upstairs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we start making breakfast and the routine usually is like, you know, as I start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing all the morning routine stuff, I will usually, or whichever one of us is up there first, we’ll ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the HomePod to start playing some kind of music. So I had this cool idea that I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, why don’t we, every day, we listen to one year of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that year’s top hits and we go like one year at a time, per like one year per day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we started out this week, or last week, we started off with 1960. Top
⏹️ ▶️ John hits as in like the top 40? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just, we asked the HomePod, play the top hits of 1960. and then the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, 1961, next day, 1962, and so on. And I figured this would be a cool thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do to like hear all the, you know, the music. So first of all, I don’t know what the HomePod is using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when you ask for that, at least we’re up to 65 now, I don’t know what happens as you get closer, maybe there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco billboard charts later on or something, but in the 1960s at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just says, you know, okay, playing the top 25 hits from 1960, whatever, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it says. Now, granted, songs from the 60s are very short, but I feel like in a half hour,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’re getting through 25 of them. And oftentimes it will do the thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after maybe 10, 12 songs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll play something and we’ll be like, that’s not from the 60s. Like it will jump forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 20 years. It’ll do the thing that most modern Apple music things do where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after it hits the end of whatever it was told to play, it’ll just play something else that it deems relevant to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s obviously doing this. So I went to look and I was like, all right, first, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me just check to see like what is it playing this list from to answer John’s question. And if you search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Music for, you know, the top 25 hits of 1964 or whatever, I didn’t find any.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t know where it’s getting this from. There is no playlist in Apple Music named this. If you search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the year, it doesn’t show it as an option. I don’t know where it’s getting this from, but whatever it’s getting this from does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show up in any way I could find on Apple Music. So that’s problem number one.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just ask Siri to list them, because I think maybe this is like Siri knowledge and not Apple Music knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, I guess. I don’t know what kind of mess they have going on over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, so problem number one is that it occasionally forgets what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked it to play and just like, all of a sudden we’re playing like, you know, Audio Slave. Pretty sure that wasn’t around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the 60s. And then, so there’s that issue of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then there’s the typical Siri thing of like, you’ll hear the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same song repeated within 15 minutes. Not always,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like sometimes it’ll play, you know, oh great, I wanna hold my hand, that finally came out. And then like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four songs later, I wanna hold my hand again. It’s like, really? Like, do you have any short-term memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all? Like, we literally just heard this song. Like, I, ah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why, why is Siri so bad? Why doesn’t this work? Like, we’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voice-activated music cylinders now in the world of tech for, what, eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years? Like, when did the first Amazon Echo come out? It’s been a while. And why are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still so bad? And why can’t Apple make theirs, like, passably okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. Like, I, oh, I’m so sad. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what else am I going to do? Like, I’m not going to use Spotify for lots of reasons, but like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience of using it on a HomePod is not great already. Even if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get past all the recent BS they’re going through. And then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other music service on the HomePod is going to be difficult to use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least. I don’t want non-HomePod speakers there because like all the, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon Echoes have a lot of their own problems recently, like a lot. Like they’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diving into mediocrity very quickly. And even those don’t sound great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t necessarily think I want a Google ball in my house, even if it did sound great, which so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing I’ve heard ever would indicate that. What am I supposed to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I just launched the Google app. First I asked Siri what are the top songs of 1960 and I got
⏹️ ▶️ John a one line answer that was like, this was the most popular song of 1960. I’m like, that’s not a list. So I asked
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact same question, what are the top songs of 1960? And I’m doing it in the Google app on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure enough, it gave me a list of, what, 50, 47 songs or whatever. And at the top, it has little
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons for 1960s rock, pop, R&B. So you could narrow it down further. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it seems like Google can give you the list. And then if you just played it,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I could play it from here, make this a playlist and like Google play music or whatever, and then just airplay it to your
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePods? I guess you have to have the phone there and it’s kind of annoying and you don’t get to use the, I can control it from any of my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John devices thing, but at the very least it can come up with a song list. And if you really wanted to pre-do it, you could use Google to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the lists and then pre-make them all in Apple Music and then just put them as playlists. And then you get to fight with the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to get it to understand the playlist you’re trying to refer to. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, that’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially if your playlist includes a year name, it would constantly say, well, you said a year, so I’m gonna try to do that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I did before and I’m not gonna look for a playlist by that name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, maybe the solution is to just like, you know, run an app on the iPad from some other service and then AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but that’s, it’s so, I don’t know. Like, and I also, I don’t want to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the list ahead of time. I want to be surprised. That’s part of the cool factor of this. I mean, if you just do all the lists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a time, you’ll forget about them, right? I guess that’s fair, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John 1960 Top Song, the twist, Chubby Checker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, the 60s, like, so again, we’ve only gotten through 65 so far, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, wow. things move fast. The songs in 1960
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a very different thing from the songs in 1965. Like it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short time where a lot changed. It’s really, this is why I wanted to do this. It’s really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear these changes happen over time. Like it’s actually very cool when it works. It’s just hard