483: The Faceless Knob
19 May 2022Why run copper wires through your walls when you can run fiber?
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Two is one, one is none.
- Follow-up:
- Cleaning apps and “launch services”
- A hint more on Casey’s frivoLiss ethernet project
- Many recommendations for Monoprice slim 6A patch cables
- Jonathan Litt reminds us about fire stops
- PoE “medusa” cables exist, for USB-C and barrel plugs
- Why bother with ethernet at all? (via Andrew Larson)
- On USB-C KVMs and the Studio Display (via Alex)
- GSuite is now free for “personal use”
- Apple Fitness+ “Studio Tour”
- Quinn Nelson’s Rivian and bad controls
- Quinn’s Instagram video (seek to 1h10m47s)
- 2001 Buick
- Apple Pre-Announces Accessibility Enhancements
#askatp:- Is there any bespoke music app for listening to concerts? (via Bill Steinbach)
- What Safari extensions are we running and recommend? (via Robert Bateau)
- John
- Marco
- Casey
- Noir (App Store link)
- StopTheMadness
- Super Agent
- Vinegar (App Store link)
- How does one remember how one enrolled in a service? (via Brian Hamilton)
- Post-show: Casey’s Ethernet adventure continues
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Chapters
- Recording? 🖼️
- Follow-up: Mac-“cleaning” apps
- Casey’s Ethernet project
- Home 5G
- IPv6
- Sponsor: Linode
- Follow-up: USB-C KVMs
- Fastmail vs. Legacy G Suite
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Fitness+ PR tour
- Rivian: physical vs. touch controls
- Apple’s new accessibility features
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Music app for concert albums
- #askatp: Safari extensions
- #askatp: Remembering sign-in providers
- Ending theme
- Casey’s fiber trunk 🖼️
Recording?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we recording? Everyone? I am. Is your computer? Maybe that’s what we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be asking. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah. So what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the latest with that, actually? Because you were kicking around doing some sort of like external recording as well, weren’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or am I making this up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am actually doing that right now. So I learned through some experimentation that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latency that I hear with with using something like the sound devices mix pre line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I measured to be something like 3.2 milliseconds of input latency to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone jack, that is relative to the sample rate, which makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense. Whatever the ADC that’s going on there and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back through the DAC after the routing and stuff, whatever is happening on inside there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes some number of samples of the sampled audio. And if you run at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a higher sample rate, so I usually run my stuff at 44.1 kilohertz but if you run it like 192
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it shrinks it down quite a bit like it could because it just it seems to be a fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of samples so if you just run the sample rate really high then it will take less time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I did learn that I am fine with the way all these things sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 192 unfortunately I don’t want to run my interface at 192 because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that involves like making absolutely massive files and my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire processing pipeline afterwards all my my templates for logic and everything the final output file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s 44.1 so that’s not a great solution so what I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come upon is you know what I love the way I sound from a USB pre 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to keep using it what I have is this little zoom f3 which is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny recorder right now I am running through it and using my headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through it at 192 kilohertz. So it sounds like almost no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latency or if there is audible latency at 192 I can’t hear it through this zoom f3 whereas I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could hear it at 44.1. So anyway, so I’m running the output of the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free which is what my computer is recording from. So my computer is getting 44.1 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m running the output of that into the zoom and using the headphone monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the zoom. That’s a temporary solution until I get my full-time solution,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is going to be either using the headphone outs on the USB Pre-2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down… Currently, I’m in separated left and right mode so that I’m on track one and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are on track two. But my eventual goal here is going to be to either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco split my microphone into two before it even goes into the input and run one of my microphone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input branches into a recorder and the other one into the USB pre to and then just listen to that straight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I’m going to take the output of the USB pre to which is separated left and right for recording. Split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that put the separated version of the recorder and take the other branch run into a mono
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer to re mono eyes it and then listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that through my headphone app. So these things are in progress. I’m waiting on some of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts to arrive from Amazon, you know, over the next couple of days. But that’s that’s what I’m doing right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I give you an alternative approach? You could just learn to get used to the mixed pre three latency, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what I did because I did notice like this is one of those times where I really want to say, Oh, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are so silly. This is, this is not a thing. It’s not real. No, it’s real. It definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy to hear you say that. Honestly, no one else has ever admitted this, everyone else is like, you don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t possibly hear three milliseconds of latency. I hear it. It sounds different. Trust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s just barely noticeable, but it’s enough that it’s annoying. And eventually, over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally months, because it took a while, I did get used to it. Now I’m sure it would come roaring back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I plugged the MixPre 2 in again, but since I’m used to it, since I’ve got like two years of the Pre 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, I don’t really notice it anymore. And that would be a much simpler solution to your problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to just get used to this latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By far and away, you are correct. That is the absolute right answer, is for me to just suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up and just use one of these modern interfaces that has built-in recording like the sound devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mix pre line or like the zoom f3 that I literally just bought it’s sitting like it is an also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface I could totally do that with that that is the right answer I don’t want to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to use my USB pre to I like the USB pre to both for its totally analog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ness of the input path to the headphones I also like the way it’s limit its limiters sound and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work better than any other limiters that I’ve that I found so I just I just I just like it better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because I have the ability to be a picky jerk with this, I’m going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all right. In just a few moments during follow-up, I will be telling you all the dumb ideas I have that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are genuinely the incorrect answer, but I don’t care. It’s what I think I wanna do. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Follow-up: Mac-“cleaning” apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But before we get there, we should start with some other follow up, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cleaning apps and quote unquote launch services. Tell me about this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just me misspeaking on the past episode. We had a I think it was an ask ATP question about like
⏹️ ▶️ John tools that clean your Mac and do I need one of those tools? We were talking about like uninstalling
⏹️ ▶️ John applications and how on the Mac applications may put things on your disk in places
⏹️ ▶️ John other than inside their little bundle in the application folder or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what I said was the only thing you really have to, you know, potentially worry about for residue
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s left by apps are, um, I kept saying things that are, uh, in launch services,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think I had launched services on the brain cause I’d been mentioned earlier in the episode. And I said it a bunch of times, and I just
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to clarify what you’re looking for are things that are run by launch D launch
⏹️ ▶️ John D is, uh, if you’re familiar with Unix, it’s kind of like a replacement for the
⏹️ ▶️ John init process and for it’s kind of like XinetD if you’re an old school Unix user, if you don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John any of those things are, basically it also replaces Cron kind of, but not really, because Cron is still there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will run programs for you either according to a schedule or on demand.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so applications can add their own things to LaunchD. You can make a launch
⏹️ ▶️ John agent or a launch daemon. Distinctions don’t really matter that much, but like it’s a thing, it’s basically like a
⏹️ ▶️ John plist that they put in there that has rules that say, hey, when someone connects to port 123, launch
⏹️ ▶️ John my program, or like at 12 a.m. every day,
⏹️ ▶️ John run this script or whatever. You can really put anything you want there. It’s very flexible. I think you can even
⏹️ ▶️ John run things in response to devices being connected, or maybe even volumes being mounted. LaunchDuty does tons of stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the point is, if an application has an installer, or if it prompts you to install something or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s possible that an application may add something to like a job or
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple jobs to launch the app. Lots of applications do this. So when you throw your application in the trash,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t care about like, oh, it left a preferences file around. I don’t want that preference file. And even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re Marco and can’t stand the two kilobytes that’s taking in your disk or four, because that’s the minimum block size or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that big a deal. And by the way, I would argue that it’s good to leave the preferences file around because if you ever reinstall
⏹️ ▶️ John that program, it will remember your preferences from the last time you had it installed. And if it’s assuming it can still read that preference file format,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to not lose your preferences, right? So stuff like that, you don’t really care too much about or if cache files, those will get cleaned
⏹️ ▶️ John out eventually too but if the application left a job, like a job is run by launch D around,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of weird things could happen. So first, it could be that that launch D job referenced a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, an executable inside the app bundle but you threw out the app bundle but the launch D
⏹️ ▶️ John job is still there and every once in a while launch D is like, oh, I gotta run this thing and it tries to run it. It’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t run it. I couldn’t find the executable because it’s looking for like slash application slash my cool app dot app
⏹️ ▶️ John slash whatever blah blah blah. It’s not there. It’s not that big of a deal, but like every single day
⏹️ ▶️ John or every 10 minutes or every one hour, or every time something tries to connect to a particular port, this job
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to run and getting an error. That’s kind of silly. The other thing you could do is it could put an executable somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could have like on first launch, ask you to authenticate and it shoved the file into user local bin. And that’s some daemon
⏹️ ▶️ John process or whatever. And then it has a launch D job that runs that daemon process in response to something happening, or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe just runs it on a schedule, maybe just tries to keep it running all the time. And you uninstall the application, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of that application is still running somewhere. And hopefully that piece of the application running isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that big of a deal, but if you were to look in activity monitor or look in one of these tools lets you look at the launch D
⏹️ ▶️ John jobs, you’d be like, what is this? I deleted this application and yet some piece of this application is still either
⏹️ ▶️ John running or trying to run on my computer. And as harmless as it might be, if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ever, if that happens too much, you could end up with dozens of these things sort of running
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background on your computer doing nothing. And I can tell you from practice of having done this, since
⏹️ ▶️ John I install a lot of software and I delete a lot of software, it’s not usually the cause of any problems. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ John they just try to run and fail or run and just do nothing. They don’t usually take up a lot of memory. Failing
⏹️ ▶️ John to run is not that big of a deal. You probably won’t notice it. But if there’s any category of cruft that you
⏹️ ▶️ John might want to look into, it would be things run by LaunchD because that can be an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John real running thing on your computer that serves no purpose after the application
⏹️ ▶️ John has gone. Few applications do this. The ones that do it are probably big names
⏹️ ▶️ John that you already know and they have their own uninstallers. For example, Adobe runs tons of crap like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft runs tons of crap. But Adobe has its own installer and uninstaller. And Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have a good uninstaller that gets rid of stuff like that. So I wouldn’t go around saying like, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John delete all the, I know Marco probably does this, but I’m going to delete all the processes that I don’t like from Adobe.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do. There’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be there’ll be no negative consequences for that. And then like their Adobe programs crash or do something weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, in my defense, Adobe programs always crash into something weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, what I’m saying is like, if you’re going to use an Adobe program, just let it run what it wants to run. And if you’re not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John use it, uninstall it. And especially with Adobe subscription model, they make it pretty easy to be like, if you just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if an Adobe program is annoying to you, install it, use it for a week, uninstall it, right? You can pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for it for a month or whatever for 30 bucks and then uninstall it when you’re done with it. It’s one of the advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John of the subscription model. You don’t have to sort of keep a copy of the program around or keep it installed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can even, you know, Creative Cloud always wants to run. You don’t have to let that run. Take it out of your startup items, quit
⏹️ ▶️ John it. They don’t make it easy to do this, but if you launch Creative Cloud and hit Command Q, it’ll be like, are you sure you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John quit Creative Cloud? Yes, you’re sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But how will you collaborate with all of your behancements?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like their auto updaters don’t run. Like, I think that stuff still all runs in the background. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John on my computer. I guess this is a good place to recommend a LaunchD.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, I don’t use these cleaner apps, but I do have an application that lets me look at jobs that are running in LaunchD.
⏹️ ▶️ John And every once in a while, I would look at that list of jobs and be like, is there anything here that I know is associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with an application that I no longer use that I can delete? And the good thing about the LaunchD tools is
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just disable the job. You don’t have to delete it. and just say let me just turn it off and see if anything breaks and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you turn it off and nothing breaks and you’re Sure, it’s associated with something you uninstalled then you can delete
⏹️ ▶️ John the job. So I’ll find a link for the show notes for Launch control, which is my preferred application
⏹️ ▶️ John for doing stuff like that warning If you use launch control, you can totally script your computer Sometimes things that are run as launch agents
⏹️ ▶️ John and launch demons are important for the operation of your system if you don’t know what it is, don’t blindly delete it.
Casey’s Ethernet project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, I have a few quick notes about my Ethernet project. There’s been no real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motion. There’s been a lot of thinking about it and we might talk about that a little bit later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s been no real motion. However, I did get a lot of feedback that I wanted to quickly point out. First of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, a lot of people, a lot, a lot of people recommended the Monoprice Slim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cat6a patch cables. I don’t have much to say about this other than if you’re looking for an Ethernet patch cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently this is where you need to go because a lot, a lot of people recommended it. Secondly, Jonathan Litt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reminded me that fire stops may be a thing. So if you’re going down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a wall on the interior, I don’t recall exactly when this happened, it doesn’t really matter, but at least here in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the States, at some point about 10-20 years ago, they started putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horizontal pieces of wood in between the vertical studs in your wall. And my very limited understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this is that it’s in order to prevent fires from spreading or something along those lines. Honestly, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay if I’ve got that slightly wrong. But nevertheless, that can be a thing. So if you’re coming up from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the floor, going up to, or maybe not the floor, but going up from like a box toward the ceiling or perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down from the ceiling to toward the bottom of the wall where the box will be, that your ethernet drop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be, a lot of times what you’ll need is like a four-foot long drill bit that’s bendy so you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drill a hole through this fire stop. Now what nobody ever mentions is whether you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should plug that hole or try to put like caulk in that hole or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John once the inside of wall. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I guess not. I guess people just say, well, I guess this, this is where the fire is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John going to go. Yeah. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Our walls is usually not even any insulation anyway. So it’s just an empty cavity. And that’s true. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I, I will point out that regardless of when this, when this code is for the fire stop things, if you have an
⏹️ ▶️ John older house, what you may have, like many stud bays in my house is sort of like a little X, like
⏹️ ▶️ John cross bracing of two, like smaller pieces of wood and little X’s up the wall. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure what the purpose was, I guess maybe for stability or like structural stability, but they don’t, it’s like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner than an entire stud. So it’s not, it’s not, you know, you could in theory fish the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John around the little X, but it’s going to mess you up. Like there is a way to get the wire around and through the little
⏹️ ▶️ John X, but. Since you can’t see it and it’s way down in the middle of the wall. If you have a very old house, you may
⏹️ ▶️ John also find interesting things inside the stud base.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or razors. You never know. Uh, but anyways, so fire stops might be a thing. Uh, I’m pretty sure that my house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey built in the late nineties, it does not have fire stops. I’m not 100% sure about this, but I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in the neighborhood, there’s a really genuinely crummy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey About a year and a half ago, something like that, a house got struck by lightning and almost burnt down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it was, in car terms, it was pretty well totaled and like the top floor was absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey destroyed, and the bottom floor was not in good shape. And they’ve been rebuilding it over the last year and a half very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slowly, much to my surprise. Thankfully, the family was not in the house when it caught on fire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were actually on vacation, which is a crummy way to come home, but it’s better than the alternative I suppose. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was looking as I was occasionally going on a long walk for exercise and as I was walking by recently, I thought, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should see if that house has fire stops, which obviously isn’t apples to apples, but you would think if it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t have fire stops, then mine certainly shouldn’t either. And it did not have fire stops from what I could tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t think that’ll be a problem for me, but famous last words. We’ll never know. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll find out. Also, this is only tangentially related, but shoot, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Daniel Nelson that pointed this out to me. I might have that attribution wrong. I’m sorry. But somebody pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that there are what I’m going to call power over Ethernet Medusa cables. That is not a technical term.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what these things can do is, let’s say you have power over Ethernet. So you have an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet line that also carries power. Well, there’s these little dongles that you plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Ethernet port, or your Ethernet cord, your RJ45 jack into this little dongle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then out of the dongle comes not only Ethernet, but now only data,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but power in a different form. So for example, you could get one that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet and USB-C coming out the other end. So you plug Ethernet, power over Ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powered Ethernet, you know what I mean, into the dongle. Coming out of the dongle is regular Ethernet, RJ45, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powered USB-C connection. So for like an Eero, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even though Eero’s don’t support power over ethernet, you can get one of these $15 dongles and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug power over ethernet into the dongle, dongle into the Eero in both the RJ45 slot and the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slot, and suddenly you’ve got a PoE Eero. Obviously, there’s a lot of complications here that I’m kind of glossing over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I had no idea these were a thing, and I think this is super cool. And they have it for USB-C connections, for barrel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pins, or whatever they’re called. You know, the not coaxial, but kind of coaxial looking things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, DC barrel plugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. Thank you. There are apparently lots of these. I had no idea this was a thing. I don’t have PoE in the house right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. But I thought this was super neat and something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of wish I was aware of just in principle. So I don’t know, maybe you two knew about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For whatever, not only did I know about it, I actually almost bought these last summer because they’re very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commonly used to do things like power security cameras. If you have a camera that’s not PoE,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you happen to have ethernet running around in various places, you can, you know, branch off one of these power plugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and plug in like a USB camera or something like that. So yeah, actually I think I might’ve even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought one. I might have it behind me. I’m not gonna look now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I actually might already own one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, again, nothing that really helps me right now, but if I were in the listener’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoes, I would wanna know that this is a thing because I didn’t know. So now you know. And then finally, if we have interest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this, let’s leave it for the after show, but my scope creep is a creepin’ And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started to convince myself that maybe I should put fiber in the walls. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, no, but there’s reasons behind it. There’s reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John behind it. You never
⏹️ ▶️ John actually does this project in his head. It can be as complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as he wants. Yeah, right. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly right. Uh, so anyway, I, I genuinely, I have no problem talking about this. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think now is the right moment to talk about it. So if you have, if you two have interest, I am happy to bring this up in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after show, but if you have run Fiber in any capacity and have experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it and would like to reach out to me, please let me know. I would love to hear your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco experience. So you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complaining about the cost and complexity of running Ethernet in the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now imagine something that’s, I would assume, probably more expensive per foot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey likely… No, not really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh really? Well, anyway, it’s at least… It’s surprisingly cheap. It’s at least most likely more delicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and harder to work with. Definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You probably can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just cut it to whatever length you need it, but there’s a process
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Yeah, the bend radius
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limits. Yep, yep. So I would imagine this is not going to make your project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably right. And also, why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and again, I’m happy to talk about this. Let’s leave it for… Let’s put it in the parking lot, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Okay. Because I think…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have reasons, and they may or may not make sense, but I’ve convinced myself they do, and we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about it in the after show if we remember. But nevertheless, I am having bad thoughts.
Home 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes, you are. We also had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew Larson write in, which I thought was very interesting. I’m going to read most of Andrew’s email. Being the T-Mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fanboy that I am, says Andrew, I use T-Mobile’s home internet solution for $50 a month. It’s not millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wave, but mid-band and yet another user on the 2.4 gigahertz band. Speeds are fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the price, I think. Speeds are up to 650 megabits down and consistently 120 megabits up. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just interject my favorite story in the world, which I’ve told on this podcast a hundred times. When we bought the house in 2008,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was overjoyed to switch from Comcast to Fios. And at the time, I was overjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have 15 megabits symmetric service. This was blazing fast at the time, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for home internet. Andrew was talking about getting 650 megabits down and 125
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megabits up from the freaking air. Technology is so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t believe that this is a thing. It’s bananas. Anyway, carrying on with what Andrew had said. You might think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that since my internet comes from the air, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to put everything on Wi-Fi. I found this to be an incorrect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assumption. As it turns out, the Spectrum licenses that the big wireless companies spend billions of dollars on are superior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Wi-Fi. I have an Aero 6 Pro and still run all the big bandwidth devices and the things that don’t move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off of a wired gigabit switch. Why? Because of congestion of Wi-Fi in my apartment complex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even over wireless, wired still has its place. So I mean, everyone’s mileage may vary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously, but I thought this was a really good summary of where you would think that wired Ethernet would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be silly, but actually it ended up, specifically in Andrew’s circumstance, to be really, really powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and worthwhile. So I just thought it was a neat counterpoint.
⏹️ ▶️ John The wireless Internet future that we want is still a little bit out of our reach.
⏹️ ▶️ John The scenario we were spinning up last time was like, what if you were near one of those like 5G millimeter wave things, because you know the speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John you get from those are ridiculous. Like what if it’s outside the window of your apartment complex? Wouldn’t that be great, right? that’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John great if you also throw in another piece of technology that exists but
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, like kind of like 5G, it exists, but is not particularly widespread, and that’s IPv6. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John with IPv6, you don’t have to run Wi-Fi in your apartment because literally every device you own could have its own IP address and
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t need to do any NAT stuff. And, you know, I guess you still might wanna do some kind of filtering or whatever, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, with the magic of IPv6, the average person might, and you know, and a good
⏹️ ▶️ John ISP that uses sort of millimeter wave 5G technology, everything could be wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wouldn’t have to have wifi in your house. And if it had, it actually had those millimeter wave speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John and you didn’t have like deeply nested rooms that the millimeter waves couldn’t get to, you’d get amazing speeds having literally
⏹️ ▶️ John no like equipment in your house to deal with. Kind of like you don’t have any equipment in your house, probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to make cell phone calls or use cell data because it’s just, it’s magically in the air, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we are obviously not there yet. And in addition to the problems of like, you know, being in an apartment complex and everybody having
⏹️ ▶️ John a wifi network and it also being 2.4 gigahertz, which apparently the T-Mobile thing is as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be better if people could just,
⏹️ ▶️ John if people could just use the wireless stuff that comes over the air without having to,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone run their own network. Kind of reminds me of the WDC, was it WDC? Or Macworld
⏹️ ▶️ John Keynote where everyone was using the Mifis in the room.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It was causing like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like everyone just wants wireless. And if one, this is another tragedy of the commons thing, I guess, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I have a MiFi and this is a great solution for me, but when everybody has a MiFi, It’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John great for anybody, so.
IPv6
⏹️ ▶️ John And IPv6, we haven’t really talked about this on the show, but I think if most
⏹️ ▶️ John people are aware of IPv6, it’s only because they were probably asked to disable it at some point while debugging
⏹️ ▶️ John their network issues. It’s another promise from
⏹️ ▶️ John many years ago that hasn’t come to pass for lots of complicated technical and political reasons, so it’s kind of sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So can I ask the two of you, and possibly listeners, a question about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As you know, I run servers. I’m also, you know, a member of the Internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do I need to understand IPv6? Because I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t do anything to set it up or to use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to enable it or to disable it. I just kind of pretend like it’s not there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have DNS records for IPv6 for any of the sites I run. I don’t, as far as I know, listen on IPv6,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that would even mean. Because when they were designing IPv6, what they probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have done is just take the IP addresses we know and love and just make them longer and what they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead was make it way more complicated and not just do that and so as a result you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just start using you know more bits like you have to change the way things are done completely and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never bothered to fully learn it do I have to?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not running a service like you know google.com or amazon.com Those companies
⏹️ ▶️ John probably do need to understand IPv6 because there are efficiencies of
⏹️ ▶️ John IPv6 that they might want to take advantage of and customers might want to connect to them. But your
⏹️ ▶️ John customers for your server is the client software that you write. And as long as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John overcast on iOS doesn’t expect to connect through IPv6, I think you’re probably fine. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem. The backwards compatibility of IPv4 and the ability to connect with IPv4 is
⏹️ ▶️ John just so pervasive that so many servers just don’t support IPv6 at all. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t cause a problem because they know like, well, if anyone tries to connect with IPv6, anyone living in that world
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do that probably has an expectation of it. Well, if it fails, I’ll just connect through IPv4. Or if there’s no DNS
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, I’ll, you know, I’ll connect through IPv4. But there are advantages IPv6. So if you are a big network
⏹️ ▶️ John provider trying to provide the best service possible to a world of clients that you don’t control, yeah, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John have to support it. But, or you should support it. But, and right now, you may support whether you know it or not, because it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be that, like, Linode or something is running an IPv6 gateway that nats everything down to IPv4 for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t even know it. Like, there’s all sorts of stuff that could be happening in the network layer that, you know, unbeknownst
⏹️ ▶️ John to you that allows this to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only time that I’ve found that I really needed to figure out IPv6, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another story I may have told on the podcast before. When I was running a piehole on Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Synology, if I remember right, that was my first real foray into Docker. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noticed that all of a sudden, all of the ads were coming back on like Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, and particularly like AdWords and whatnot. And I’m not 100% sure, but I believe what happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Google had started to support IPv6 for all their ad paraphernalia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to Docker, I didn’t have my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Docker container instance, whatever, configured for IPv6. And I think there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a real struggle to get it configured for IPv6 on the Synology as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey host in any case. And so that was the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impetus for me getting a Raspberry Pi. We probably need a different musical instrument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A Raspberry Pi triangle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to have a whole orchestra over there soon. We need Plex, we need vinyl. It’s a mess. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, so that was the impetus for getting the original Raspberry Pi was moving into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a dedicated device such that I could use IPv6. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I did that, I noticed that I wasn’t seeing nearly as many ads anymore. And I think that’s because all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these IPv6 lookups were now failing as design. That’s the whole point of PiHole,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is all of them were failing. And so it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John working as I wanted it to be. That’s never gonna stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being a funny name to me. It’s so great. It’s so great. It really is. I don’t care what anyone says. It’s so great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so that’s the only time I really had to interact with IPv6. It certainly sounds great in the sense that if I understand things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly, and I think this is what you were saying, John, anything can be addressed from anywhere to anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that also, of course, scares me because how do you protect things and does everything need to run its own
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that they can be addressed, there’s enough addresses to go around. So we’re used to the idea that the things inside
⏹️ ▶️ John our houses have private IP addresses that are not publicly routable, right? And we feel like that is an extra
⏹️ ▶️ John layer of security, but that’s not why it’s like that. It’s like that because there aren’t enough IPv4 addresses
⏹️ ▶️ John to go around and it has to be this way. and it doesn’t actually provide any particular additional security
⏹️ ▶️ John if your router is configured wrong. Like, you know, it feels good to us, it’s like, aha, this
⏹️ ▶️ John IP address doesn’t exist to the outside world, but we’re all connected to some sort of, like, you know, PNP router thing that NAT stuff to that
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, and it’s like, are you sure about that? Because, you know, anyway, I know
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels scary to be like, what? Do you mean like my random light bulb would have a publicly routable
⏹️ ▶️ John address? That’s the IPv6 world, and it seems scary because it seems like it’s less secure, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s any less secure. And it is certainly more straightforward. Like that just, you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re in the very early days of the internet. Before it was clear that
⏹️ ▶️ John there weren’t going to be enough IP addresses, before NAT was literally everywhere, everything had an IP
⏹️ ▶️ John address and you know, well not everything, NAT existed for a long time. But like the expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that a device would have a publicly routable IP address wasn’t ridiculous. You’d sit at something at a university
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d look at what its IP address was And it would have like an actual publicly routable IP address.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wouldn’t be 192.168. It wouldn’t be 10 dot whatever. It would be like somewhere under the class C that your
⏹️ ▶️ John university owned. And that doesn’t mean from outside
⏹️ ▶️ John the university you could just connect to it, because you probably couldn’t because there’s so many layers of networking between. But it did mean that it
⏹️ ▶️ John had and it doesn’t even mean that it was a static IP. It could have been DHCP. And it gets a different IP every time or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was a regular real IP. And it just simplified everything. now with all
⏹️ ▶️ John the NAT stuff. I mean, with modern technology and with good routers and everything, it’s not that big of a deal, but it is an additional complication
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m sure, you know, I shouldn’t be frustrated with this because I know so little
⏹️ ▶️ John about networking, but like network administrators, like especially the people who were like, were brought up as network admins
⏹️ ▶️ John in the days that IPv6 was being rolled out to think, soon this will be so much simpler. And then 20 years later in their
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, nope, still not simpler.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visit linode.com slash ATP to see for yourself. Linode is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web host to run servers. I run a lot of servers myself, and they are all at Linode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve slowly moved there over the years because it’s just a great host. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have amazing capabilities. This is whatever you’re, you know, whatever kind of cloud service you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start, they probably support it there. They have of course, the compute instances, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what used to be called VPS is they’re not called you know, cloud compute instances. They have special GPU accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plans. They have a block storage product they can offer their Kubernetes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upcoming bare metal release. They have an amazing API that you can script things with. I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few scripts myself to do things like set up a new server. And it’s super easy to write against their API. It’s just fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a one click app marketplace. They support tools like terraform. It’s just everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want capability wise, they have it and they back this up with incredible support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s award winning. It’s offered 24 7365 and you get that same amazing support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you’re paying them five bucks a month or 5000 bucks a month. It’s everyone gets the same support. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really great. And there’s no like, let me elevate you to a different person like none of that. People who answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your tickets know what they’re talking about. And that’s it. You don’t get passed around. It’s great. And finally, the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love Linode so much, besides their great capabilities, their good control panel, their great support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it is an incredible value. If you look at around the industry, look at what you’re getting for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your money, Linode, it beats them all. It’s great. I don’t know how they do it, but they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it consistently for almost a decade that I’ve been there. So visit linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, create a free account there, and you get $100 in credit to explore this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing host for yourself. again, Linode.com slash ATP, create a free account to get $100 in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Follow-up: USB-C KVMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, we got some really interesting feedback from Alex with regard to USB-C KVMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the studio display specifically. So Alex writes that on the show you called out a bidirectional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C switch as a way to share the studio display between two Macs. I’d like to have two displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared by three computers, two Macs and one PC, so this didn’t cover my use case. After much searching,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally found a single cable that takes, get this, takes DisplayPort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1.4 and USB-A and that goes into a single USB-C on the other end. This was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey missing link in my prior email. With this you can run a studio display with webcam, speakers, and microphone all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working. This is great for using the display with PCs, but more importantly with KVMs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unfortunately this does not appear to be sold in North America, but I was able to find listings forward on eBay, AliExpress, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve ordered it for my setup,” says Alex. So this is, I think it’s like a VR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems cable or something like that. It’s a Belkin, what is this? Getting to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Belkin charge and sync cable for the Huawei VR Glass. And so again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on one end it’s USB-C, on the other end it’s display port into USB-A.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if I I understand right, Alex is saying plug the USB-C into the studio display,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug the two USB-A in the display port into your KVM or switch or what have you, and then suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve got the equivalent of your one cable going between the studio display and your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac, but instead it’s one cable with three ends on the other side. This is so weird and kind of confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but apparently it works. And Alex actually provided a YouTube timestamp link, which we’ll put in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, with video evidence of some other fellow trying this, and it clearly working, unless it’s movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magic. So I just thought this was super neat and kind of fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not want to debug this setup. I can tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Certainly not. But cool that it exists. Another one on the list of things that if I were a listener, I’d want to know it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exists, if I didn’t need it.
Fastmail vs. Legacy G Suite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of people wanted me to comment on what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on with Google today. And yesterday, I think as we record, Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came to us hat in hand and said, oh, no, we were just kidding. If you’re using Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apps for your domain, whatever it’s called now, G Suite or what have you, if you’re using it for personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use, then we’ll let you keep it for no cost, maybe forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until we change our minds again. You get another 16 years. How long was it? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So, yeah, so that is apparently a thing, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good for me because I didn’t want to lose like Google Docs, for example, not because I rely heavily on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than show notes, but it would be a pain in the butt if I had to like, you know, move all this to a Gmail account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And so I’m happy and I did sign up for keeping this forever, but I have already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long since moved to Fastmail and I’m super happy at Fastmail. So if this had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been the case originally, like if they had split off the business people and said, oh, business people, you got to pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal people, we’re cool, then I don’t think I would have moved to FastMail and I would’ve been just fine staying there. But now that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve done the work of moving to FastMail, which if you recall was almost no work at all, it was stunningly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simple, now I’m super happy with it and I don’t think I want to change anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. I’m not planning on going back to Gmail or anything like that. I like the fact that I have a direct relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with FastMail. I give fast mail a little bit of money each month and they give me email. That’s the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works. Like I’m happy with that. And I’m not saying anyone else has to feel this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, John, I know your primary email address is still a Gmail address. Um, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I like that. I have divorced myself a little bit, just a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Google. And obviously I’m hypocritical in a bunch of ways. I still have an Alexa in the house, even though we barely use it. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not perfect, but I am satisfied with where this has ended up. And I’m, and I’m kind of happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with where this has ended up because Fastmail has been super great so far. I’ve only been on it like a month, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s incredibly good. The iOS apps are actually surprisingly good too. They’re a little busy for my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tastes, but you can do basically everything, including a bunch of like rule
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting and other things that I would expect to be only on the web. You can do like everything in the Fastmail iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, which is super cool. Uh, and, and again, the website is blazing fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have easy push email, which when you don’t have work email anymore, getting push
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And logging into FastMail on an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device is super easy because they just have you scan a QR code. And then it’s a profile that you download, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re in. So I am super happy with FastMail. I’ll put my referral link in the show notes one more time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s why this is coming up. Yeah, there we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they are a prior and probably future sponsor, to be honest with you. But they didn’t pay me to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of that, not this episode anyway. So it really is true, hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to God, it really is true. I really am enjoying it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s worked out fine for me, but if you’re in this boat and you were kicking the can down the road as long as possible, that’s what I thought I was doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be honest, but turns out I didn’t wait quite long enough. This is why I didn’t follow Marco’s lead of procrastinating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until the last possible moment. Procrastination pays off again. Exactly, I procrastinated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot, but I didn’t procrastinate enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m glad to hear that you’re doing so with FastMail because this is how I’ve been for, I mean, God, 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years or whatever it’s been that I’ve been on FastMail. You know, I figured out email hosting once a long time ago and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just haven’t touched it because I haven’t had to because email is boring and doesn’t deserve that much thought. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s just one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that just works. You know, in the same way, I haven’t revisited my home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ISP journey anytime recently because we got files and it’s great and it works and I don’t want to touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I have my wonderful USB pre-2 for my microphone interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there might be better ones out there now, I don’t know. But I have it now and I don’t wanna touch it, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. And that’s a great place for things to get. You know, and things that are really boring and don’t really move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward that frequently, if at all. It’s not worth investing tons of your time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in trying out all the different options and constantly being on the lookout for different things. Like, no, you find something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works, that’s something boring like email, You stick with it and move on to more interesting things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, a couple of pieces of real-time follow-up based on the chat room. CMF asks, you don’t set the rules on the website and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use mail.app? Odd. No, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco generally what I do. I’ve never installed their apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, and I did just on a lark, just because I was curious. And I, generally speaking, do not use the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast mail apps. Generally speaking, I use mail.app. Well, I absolutely use mail.app on my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But on iOS, my primary and almost effectively only app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mail.app. The thing that I really like about Fastmail’s app, other than being able to tweak settings, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s really, really fast if you want to delete versus archive. Like with iOS, you have to hold down on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Archive button, and then you can swipe up to delete. And if I’m just trying to triage email really quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fastmail’s app makes it really, really nice because there’s a button for archive and a button for delete right there in the bottom, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is super great. And then Jared H. asked, how does Fastmail handle multiple tags per message? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are there like n duplicate copies of the message in IMAP folders? It can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be like that. So if you recall, if you’re not a Gmail user, I should say, the way Gmail works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it only works with labels. It doesn’t really have a concept of folders. I’m sure there’s a gotcha there. But for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this conversation, it only works with labels. And so if you translate that to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an IMAP world, then basically every place that a message,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or every label that a message has, that message will be copied into that folder. So let’s say, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tagged something as limitless, which is my business, and masquerade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, then there would be two copies. There would be a limitless folder that has a copy of that message and a masquerade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder that had a second copy of that message. That’s the way FastMail works by default and the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IMAP works by default and the way almost every mail server works by default. But FastMail, being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FastMail and being super awesome, they optionally let you switch into a label mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is basically, for all intents and purposes, a Gmail mode. And then it works like Gmail, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a label and so on and so forth. Now, if you’re working with a mail app like mail.app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that only speaks IMAP, then yeah, you’ll see duplicates everywhere. But as far as the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source of truth on FastMail side, it’s labels just like it would be. It’s the same experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Gmail. Like with Gmail, if you’re using mail.app, it’s the same exact thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you certainly can go that route. And I tried going back to folders for like a week or two when I first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jumped on FastMail. And then I realized, for better or worse, I am so invested in this whole label lifestyle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey title that I decided to just switch fast mail over to labels and I haven’t looked back.
Sponsor: Trade Coffee
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Fitness+ PR tour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to quickly talk about something I noticed over the last few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed that iJustine, who is a very very famous and popular YouTuber, had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple Fitness Plus Studio Tour. Now I am not presently in the midst of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Fitness Plus workouts, but I am probably going to go back to that soon. I was going through a different program for a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while. And for the longest time I’ve really, really wanted to know, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of curiosity sake, like where, well not where is the studio? It sounds like I’m trying to visit or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And plus I tell you it’s in Santa Monica, like every exercise. But like what makes the studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tick? And I know nothing about, you know, production or making videos, as Casey Onkars can show you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I just find it interesting. Like how do they do this and what are they doing and what does it look like? And especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what does it look like from the trainer’s perspective? Like, if you’re, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the view that a consumer would see, but I’d love to see a behind the scenes tour and look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flip side, look at the cameras and look at what they see. And so I just did, whose work is generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good, did this 10 minute, you know, Fitness Plus press
⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio tour. And I watched it and it was fine. So then I go looking and I thought, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, knowing Apple, this is probably some sort of press tour that they’re doing. And sure enough, it is. So some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other channel, eTalk, which I think might be Canadian, they talk- It’s pronounced A-talk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then. Nicely done. So on eTalk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they spoke to a couple of the Canadian trainers, one of whom is actually one of my favorite trainers. But it was the same thing. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 5 to 10 minute puff piece and nothing else. Then I also noticed that KCAU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV from Sioux City, apparently, got access to this as well. I have no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea how or why. As I am recording this, their video of behind the scenes at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fitness from May 6, 2022 has 38 views. So we’re gonna give them a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bump potentially, but nevertheless, all of these though, they were total puff pieces. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so silly. Like we didn’t get any view of what it looks like from the trainer’s perspective. They all seem to be fed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same like five second pan shot of the control room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like they were all dumb. Like, and I’m not trying to make fun of the creators. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure I just seen all these other people did the best they could with what they were allowed to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But like if you’re gonna do this do it properly like let us see some stuff It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just so frustrating that we didn’t get to see squat It’s so it’s just so Apple like let’s put J Blahnik
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever his name is and some of these trainers in front of somebody Usually a youtuber and they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheer and rah-rah-rah about what Apple Fitness Plus is doing for people Which is all admirable and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth celebrating I guess but you know if you could have called a studio tour, the door to the freaking studio, like
⏹️ ▶️ John were you hoping to see? I mean, like it’s a bunch of cameras pointed at people, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean like, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are there secrets? It’s a TV studio plus some sweat. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true, but like when you’re recording, when you’re recording one of these programs, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of times they will start an exercise, like when the music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beat drops, which granted you can change the music a little bit to time it against the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video, but it’s not often the case. It seems like they just organically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or that’s the way they make it. I guess they’re doing their job right because they make it seem that way. I’m sure it probably isn’t that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they make it seem like they organically happen to be saying, okay, three, two, one, go. Boom, yo, and the beat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drops, whatever. And it’s just like, how does that work? How do they know how many reps they’re doing or how much time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is left? And yes, I’m sure this could just be as simple as an iPad with a countdown timer, but like, I wanna see it. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re calling it a studio tour, let me tour the damn studio. Like I just wanna see, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that stuff is fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And- I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re confusing a marketing video with
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sort of informative
⏹️ ▶️ John education thing. They’re two very different things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, but that’s what I wanted though. I wanted the studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John tour. There’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of like in the 38 view KCAU TV one, they show like the control room.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. That shows all the different views in the thing. And I don’t know enough about Apple Fitness Plus or television
⏹️ ▶️ John production to know if this is custom for Apple, but a couple of the monitors have outlines on
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And I’m assuming they’re, I mean, in the old days, they’d be showing you whatever it was called, like the title safe
⏹️ ▶️ John area, basically, that wasn’t covered by the, you know, back in the days of standard definition television and CRTs, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John an area around the edge of the CRT that all video production assumed
⏹️ ▶️ John was potentially not visible to people because of like the plastic bezel that was surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey televisions. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John even when they didn’t have plastic there, it was just like, look, don’t put anything in this area. So the quote unquote title safe
⏹️ ▶️ John area or whatever Here’s where you can actually put content. Yes, the picture will go to the edge, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put anything you want people to see there So for an example, don’t put text that high or that low or that far
⏹️ ▶️ John to the right or that far to the left Well, and so many cameras would have the title safe area with
⏹️ ▶️ John a little outline So if you’re in production, you could say okay I got it Even though I this is what the camera sees
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure that anything I care about is inside this white box Well in this behind-the-scenes thing They have a white box
⏹️ ▶️ John which doesn’t make that much sense for HDTV. And I’ve ranted about this on past shows where the first round or the first several
⏹️ ▶️ John rounds of high definition televisions also assumed you had overscan and they would take the 1080p signal and they would stretch
⏹️ ▶️ John it slightly, making it basically non-native and cutting off the edges. Because anyway, most TVs don’t do that anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think. But so it’s got an outline like that, but it also has like gutters on the left
⏹️ ▶️ John and the right side. And I’m wondering if that is the area that they’re reserving for like the little heart rate monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John things or stuff. Is there stuff that appears
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there, Casey? There is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. And now that you say that, I wouldn’t have picked it out until you said something, but yes, I bet you’re right. In the upper left and upper right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hand corners, on the upper right, it shows your rings, in the upper left, it shows the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time in that particular set, the time in the entire workout, if I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then your current heart rate. I haven’t done one of these in a couple of weeks, so that’s all off the top of my head, but I think that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s got gutters down the whole right and left, so maybe that’s just a standard part of TV production, I don’t know what it is, but what it made me think
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe they have custom things that are saying, hey, when you’re filming Apple, fitness, whatever, be aware these parts of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen should be reserved for HUD and, you know, for future HUD stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe if they’re going to put more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey stuff. Well, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also as I’m as I’m looking at this KCAU video once again, and I’m looking at 40 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in of the minute and 50 second video. But sure enough, I didn’t notice this the first time I watched before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we recorded. But but sure enough, in the upper right hand corner there, the video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the control room, courtesy colon Apple. So they didn’t even let them in the control room, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes sense. Like, I’m not surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a marketing there, just trying to advertise Apple Fitness, like this is basically an ad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know it is, but I wanted more. I wanted more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, we learned today is that Casey has a burning desire to see the internal workings of the production of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do, I really do. I find this fascinating. And I had a listener
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write in who does work for the company that I do other exercise videos with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they didn’t provide me any particular state secrets, But I found what little they could and did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provide utterly fascinating. So I don’t know. I just, it bums me out. Like if you’re going to call the studio tour, give me a tour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the studio. Otherwise just call it the Apple fitness plus. They invited me in and nobody else gets to go. So I went,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what they should have called it. That’s all right, though.
Rivian: physical vs. touch controls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Tell me about the Rivian and how it sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so the Rivian, the embargo on Rivian reviews dropped,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey past week, I think?
⏹️ ▶️ John So everyone who got there, the Rivian, people know it’s a big electric pickup truck. And they’re delivered to people now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people are reviewing them. And you see tons of videos about them. And one of the videos I was watching
⏹️ ▶️ John was a very long, I don’t know what it’s called. Is it Instagram story, Instagram reel, whatever, the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where you do a very long vertical video on Instagram. And Quinn Nelson of the Snazzy
⏹️ ▶️ John Labs YouTube channel got a review and he’s super excited about it. And he did
⏹️ ▶️ John a really long video of him just like taking his phone around the truck and looking at all the different things. And at one
⏹️ ▶️ John point he was showing like how the controls work like around the steering wheel, like the stock controls or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was watching it and something occurred to me that should have occurred to me a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John sooner. And I was like, huh, that explains so much. I’m going to definitely think about that as I as
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about more, you know, car stuff in the future. And then, you know, and then I didn’t think about it much anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then later that same week, somebody was a Jason, I think Jason’s now in one of our slacks,
⏹️ ▶️ John posted a video of something that made me think like this is this is an issue worth sharing. So I’m going to I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to share this this thing that occurred to me, which
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, it’s it’s obvious and maybe it occurred to everyone else, but it’s the first time I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John of it as an actionable thing that should be added to the bucket of things that car manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John Think about when designing interior So the focus is on the left-hand stalk the Rivian does
⏹️ ▶️ John have stalks in the steering wheel And the one on the left has controls for your lights and wipers
⏹️ ▶️ John and windshield wiper squirter thing, right? And Quinn was showing off it in his video
⏹️ ▶️ John You if you want to look at it, you can see it starts it one hour ten minutes and 47 seconds into the video I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to do a timestamp link, but we’ll provide you the link and the timestamps you can scrub to it
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is a physical stock and on it are physical controls and he was demonstrating
⏹️ ▶️ John how the wipers work like it like most Wipers and cars they have different speeds slow fast
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever depending on how heavily it’s raining and he was praising these pieces like it’s not a touch Control
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not all on the touchscreen or whatever. There’s there is a stock and on the stock There is a physical thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you press the thing that you press though I don’t know how to describe it. It’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a it’s like a little toggle switch that goes up and down on the stalk, but when you press
⏹️ ▶️ John it if you press it up and Take your finger off of it. It springs back to the center position
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not like a light switch where you goes on and it stays on it goes off and it stays off this thing You can either press up or press down,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whichever direction you press it It’s spring-loaded and as soon as you take your finger off of it It just springs back to the middle right
⏹️ ▶️ John and the way it works is You if you do that on the one that’s wiper and you press like up up up or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John On the touch, not the touch screen, on the LCD display that is the instrument cluster that’s right
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of the steering wheel, you will see a little display on the left side that shows
⏹️ ▶️ John one raindrop, two raindrops, three raindrops, and as you hit up, up, up, the selection state
⏹️ ▶️ John will go, okay, you’ve selected one raindrop, now you’ve selected two raindrops, now you’ve selected three raindrops, so you can go up, up, up, down, down,
⏹️ ▶️ John down with this little thing. It might as well be a D-pad, but it’s not, it’s a little toggle switch, but either way. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how you pick how fast you want the wipers to be going And I was looking at that
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know in Quinn’s praising it was like I he doesn’t like he’s had many electric cars Including Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John and he doesn’t like the fact that to change the wipers you have to go through a touchscreen He loves having it on the stock because it’s near your hands and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John mess with it But I was like boy, but it’s such a shame like why wouldn’t they just do a regular? wiper
⏹️ ▶️ John control instead of having this up up up down down down with the touchscreen display like what a what a fumble there
⏹️ ▶️ John and And then it immediately occurred to me like, no, of course, they have to do it this way. Like, no car from
⏹️ ▶️ John decades ago would ever put a wiper control like this intentionally. In fact, if you think about a car that you have that’s decades
⏹️ ▶️ John old or whatever, the wipers are usually like, either you twist something on the knob, or you press
⏹️ ▶️ John the stalk up or down. But the difference is in all those type of things, if it’s a twist thing, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you twist it a little bit, and that’s position one. Twist it a little bit more, position two. Twist a little bit more, position
⏹️ ▶️ John three. Whatever position you twist it to, there’s probably like on the knob, there’s like a marking,
⏹️ ▶️ John and on the other part of the knob, there’s like the one and two and three raindrops or whatever. It stays there, right? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a knob where like, if I press down, that’s the wipers on slow, I push down a little bit more, that’s faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John push down a little bit more, it’s faster still, and there’s like three different places where it can stop. And if you press it
⏹️ ▶️ John down to the middle place, it stays there. The stock stays there, right? But that’s not how these work at all. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a little toggle switch that always re-centers. And the reason it does that and the reason this whole because
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like a worse experience now I gotta look to see what settings it on. I can’t just feel where it is. I can’t look at my stock and tell what position
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in. I have to like flick the whole thing. But the reason it does it is obvious is that
⏹️ ▶️ John wipers are potentially controllable. Anything that is potentially controllable through a touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John can have a physical control in the old style. Because think of what would happen if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John a twisty physical control where it’s like, oh, I twist to the two raindrop setting, right? Then what if you went to the touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John change it to 3-randrop setting. Now there’s a conflict between what the wipers are actually doing and what your
⏹️ ▶️ John little twisty thing is doing. So any physical control in a car with a touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John where that same functionality is controllable by the touchscreen, which basically includes every kind of control,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be a control that moves to a position and stays there. And that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for a physical control because for a physical control moving to a position and staying there provides information.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell that my Blinker is on because the stock is down and yes It’s a blinking light in a noise
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever I can tell how fast the wipers are based on the position of the stock I can tell if my lights are on off based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John position of the twisty thing which has a flat spot on it I could tell by feel I can tell by glancing at it
⏹️ ▶️ John the physical state of a regular physical control is used conveys useful information
⏹️ ▶️ John But in a car with touchscreens you can’t do that because it has to always sort of return
⏹️ ▶️ John to center You can’t look at any of the like you can’t look at this wiper stock and know if your wipers are even on
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at it, you just see a bunch of switches that are in the middle position And they don’t tell you anything about the state of the wipers
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t tell you if they’re on what speed they’re on nothing it might as well just be another interface to the touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John again because of that conflict and And I was thinking of all is such a shame that explains why so many
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all explains partially why so many of these electronic cards don’t have physical controls part of it is
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously cost savings where once You have a screen and some software why not just put everything on it and Tesla loves to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John But the other thing is that if you make a physical control It’s got to be a crappier physical control
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can’t have that physical control be Like manifest state in its physical
⏹️ ▶️ John state you can’t have its position or anything about it convey information because now you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a potential conflict with what someone would do with the touchscreen and what Jason brought up was like a
⏹️ ▶️ John video of a Buick from 2001 and this Buick had volume controls
⏹️ ▶️ John on the steering wheel which is something I think we you know most people are familiar with in vaguely modern cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Up and down volume on the steering wheel, super convenient, right? And you may be thinking, oh, but isn’t that run counter
⏹️ ▶️ John what you say? Like, normally, you have up and down volume on the steering wheel, but in the days before touchscreens, you also
⏹️ ▶️ John had a volume knob. And the way they got around this, once
⏹️ ▶️ John you think to look for this, you’ll see it everywhere, is sometime, I don’t know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John decade or two ago, all of the knobs on electronics lost the little marking
⏹️ ▶️ John that would tell you where it’s pointing, right? There used to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John like a black knob and they used to have a little notch on it and if the notch was pointing down, that was off and if the notch was
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way, you’d rotate it around. If it was up at 12 o’clock, it would be halfway, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not all of them, John, not all of them because remember that I have volume controls on my steering wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yet my stupid volume button on my car, which I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am happy to have, it has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, but it has a stupid vertical line on it. So I have to keep it centered and never touch it. Otherwise it drives me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas. I need to get one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of those little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey black stickers to stick over it so I don’t ever look at it
⏹️ ▶️ John But what, how does, all right, well, I’ll ask you more about that because I’m interested to know how that works and how that doesn’t end
⏹️ ▶️ John up causing conflicts. But the way they dealt, well, to get back to what I was saying, like the reason you don’t see that
⏹️ ▶️ John notch anymore in lots of things is because there’s some other way to change the volume. So for example, a remote control,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a receiver. Once receivers got remote controls, and maybe if you’re old enough, you remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John receivers didn’t always have remote controls. You’d have to go up to them and turn the knob to change the volume on your record player,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, receiver thing, right? Once you got a remote control, now you have a way to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the volume, but it’s different than the knob. And so if the knob had a marking on it and you change
⏹️ ▶️ John the volume, now there’s a conflict between where the knob is on the thing and what the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually outputting. And so what they did was they made the knobs essentially spin forever with no markings. So you could rotate
⏹️ ▶️ John the knob, but you could just rotate it forever and ever and ever, right? And there was no marking anywhere on it. So if you did it clockwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would get louder counterclockwise it will get quieter, but there was no notch to say here’s maximum, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John minimum, here’s 1 through 10, and that lets you have the remote and go volume up up up down down down
⏹️ ▶️ John and not have any sort of physical conflict because the knob was just faceless and just a sphere and
⏹️ ▶️ John you never knew which way it was pointing. The faceless knob. Yeah. The Buick and also many fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John AV receivers did the same thing and probably still do. What the Buick did was when you hit the volume controls on
⏹️ ▶️ John the steering wheel, up up up volume, it would make the knob with a marking on it on the dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John on the radio turn So you’d press up a button on the steering wheel and you’d see the little knob turn like
⏹️ ▶️ John a like a ghost was turning It right and in that way they could keep the knob in sync with the actual volume
⏹️ ▶️ John as inputted in the button Basically making physical controls whose state conveyed information because there’s a little notch
⏹️ ▶️ John on it But also having an alternative way to do it on the steering wheel and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know stereos did the same thing For the ones that kept a marking on their volume knob, you’d hit
⏹️ ▶️ John volume up up up on your remote And you’d see the volume knob on the AV receiver move on
⏹️ ▶️ John its own I’m not necessarily saying this is the solution to having
⏹️ ▶️ John good physical controls in cars because as you can imagine Doing that is expensive Delicate
⏹️ ▶️ John finicky like it’s way more complicated than just having like a wiper stalk that you move up
⏹️ ▶️ John and down through various positions, right? But as cars increasingly have touchscreens, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the thing that’s causing car interiors to get so much worse. Because you want
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality to be accessible on the touchscreen, but every single thing you put on that touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John basically makes the physical control alternative to it worse or non-existent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Non-existent is easiest, because then you don’t have to worry about any conflict, but if there is a physical control,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think people are gonna wanna put little motors in there to sort of, you know, motorize every other part of the thing. I mean, it’s neat that this
⏹️ ▶️ John Buick did it for the volume knob and some fancy Nakamichi stereo receiver probably does the same thing. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, is Nakamichi still a brand? It was fancy in the 80s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very fancy in the 80s. I don’t think it’s still a brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bang and Olufsen, I don’t know. I don’t know what fancy AV brands are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’ve seen the motorized volume knob on receivers before and like, you know, earlier in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at that time, there’d be no reason for me to ever see a very expensive piece of equipment. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are, like, I think it made it down to like more reasonably priced options.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the Buick is, I don’t know what Buick model is, this is what they don’t say, but it doesn’t look like that fancy of a car. It looks pretty darn plasticky.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco technology- It’s a Buick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that fancy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the technology is within reach, but it is probably more finicky and delicate, especially if you’re thinking of putting little motors
⏹️ ▶️ John in stocks and everything like that. And it would be weird to do something on the touchscreen and have one of the stocks next
⏹️ ▶️ John to the steering wheel move, also potentially dangerous to have parts of the car near the steering wheel move without you touching
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So I understand why this is not a great idea, But
⏹️ ▶️ John when I saw this video, it’s the first time that it occurred to me that there is a real concrete reason
⏹️ ▶️ John why car interiors are getting worse with the advent of touchscreens. And it’s not just cost savings.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not just ill-advised leaning too heavily into tech. There is actually an
⏹️ ▶️ John issue here, an unresolvable, not unresolvable, but a not easily resolvable
⏹️ ▶️ John issue between functionality on screens and functionality in physical controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the same issue that has faced us in all these other devices that have knobs in them, like AV
⏹️ ▶️ John receivers and other things that are in our house. Probably not as big a deal with AV receivers, because honestly, the remote is better. We don’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John to get up off the couch, right? But when you’re driving the car, your hands are already on the steering wheel. Physical controls and stalks are great.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are superior in terms of ergonomics and efficiency to having to go to the touchscreen for something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s also on the touchscreen, suddenly your stalks are crapping, you’re going up, up, up, and looking at a little graphic change on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, but the thing that I find so distasteful about this, even though the Rivian looks so freaking cool and I really don’t like pickups.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the thing that I find so distasteful about this is why do we need to control the wipers via the touchscreen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why do we need a second control surface for windshield wipers? What’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s what I was saying. Like, it’s so irresistible to put the control on the touchscreen. And once you
⏹️ ▶️ John do, you have that problem. But like, for someone to come into the meeting and say exactly what you said, it’s like, how about we just not
⏹️ ▶️ John have that control on the touchscreen? You’re like, what? You mean our comprehensive whole car control system?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would we not have the touchscreen? It’s the best thing. It’s the most flexible. We can put ads under it if we want. Sometime in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to make money. Like just the resistance to like, and I kind of understand
⏹️ ▶️ John the philosophy. Like shouldn’t the touchscreen be able to do everything? Like it’s software. Why should we limit certain things to only physical
⏹️ ▶️ John controls? But like, you know, I don’t agree with that, but I can imagine someone saying that. And if I had to throw
⏹️ ▶️ John something back in their face, and it’s like, well, why don’t we let them steer during on the touchscreen as well?
⏹️ ▶️ John Shouldn’t everything be on the touchscreen? Why do I have to use the wheel to steer? But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that obviously- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently Apple’s going to ship a car with no windows and no steering wheel and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so on. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ive doesn’t quite understand computers. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so another thing I want to bring up is my dad, as I’ve mentioned several times in the past, has some very fancy stereo equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Atonal Denim in the chat reminded me that his equipment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like his preamp and stuff like that, it does have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey massive physical volume control. And it has a remote control. But what it does is it has a series of LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encircling the spinner, such that as you spin, say you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increasing the volume, there’ll be more and more and more of these LEDs lit clockwise. And as you decrease
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the volume, then fewer and fewer of them are lit, or it’ll look like it’s falling counterclockwise. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s another mechanism by which you can solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like another screen. Or you can imagine doing it with ink if you wanted to get fancy and stuff like that. You can even imagine little electronic
⏹️ ▶️ John stops in the wheel. But as what we’ve seen, if you have a modern car,
⏹️ ▶️ John your volume knob spins forever. Like that’s the way they’ve been for so long. Even before touchscreens, they were like that, just because
⏹️ ▶️ John it allows you to have basically the steering wheel volume controls. Like steering wheel volume controls have been around
⏹️ ▶️ John for probably decade before any car had a touchscreen in. But once they put those steering wheel volume controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody’s stereo volume knobs just spin forever and don’t have marks on them. And we all just get used to it and it’s fine. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably people don’t much think about it, but like that’s, and I think that’s reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not like you’re glancing at the volume knob to know what volume level you’re at, but for things like wipers or whatever, it is nice to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to feel like how fast the wipers are going and do I need to go one more level up or one more
⏹️ ▶️ John level down or whatever. Again, probably not that big deal for wipers, but just the
⏹️ ▶️ John Rivian’s controls really brought this home for me because it’s clear that Rivian is trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to not be like Tesla in this way, trying to have everything be as physical control, but they can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John they haven’t gone whole hog and said we’re gonna put tiny little motors in our stocks, and honestly, I don’t blame them. We’re gonna put tiny little motors
⏹️ ▶️ John in our stocks to make it like it’s a Honda stock and it will rotate the stock for you or whatever.
Apple’s new accessibility features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Apple has pre-announced some accessibility enhancements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they did this, it was either yesterday or today as we record. There was a post in the newsroom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m going to read just a handful of excerpts. People who are blind or low vision can use their iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iPad to navigate the last few feet to their destination with door detection. Door detection can help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users locate a door upon arriving at a new destination, understand how far they are from it, and describe the door attributes, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it is open or closed, and when it’s closed, whether it can be opened by pushing, turning a knob, or pulling a handle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Door detection can also read signs and symbols around the door, like the room number at an office or the presence of an accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entrance symbol. They have on their newsroom page a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of very, very short videos or gifts or something, I guess they’re videos, which demonstrate this nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 15, 20 seconds. And the door detection one in particular was super cool, because it’s a woman that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appears to be blind walking up to a door and it says, you know, there’s a closed door
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight feet away, text, meaning there’s text written on it, text, muffin to write home about bakery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by the way is a very good name, muffin to write home about bakery. And then, you know, and so it’s helping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her figure out exactly where she needs to go in order to enter the bakery. I just think that’s super neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing right along, users with physical motor disabilities who may rely on assistive features like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voice control and switch control can fully control Apple Watch from their iPhone with Apple Watch mirroring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch Mirroring uses hardware and software integration, including advances built on AirPlay to help ensure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users who rely on these mobility features can benefit from unique Apple Watch apps like blood oxygen, heart rate, mindfulness,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more. So that kind of answers the question, wait, what? Why would you wear an Apple Watch if you can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operate the Apple Watch? So yeah, apparently it’s so you can get, you know, detection of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey workouts and exercise and your rings and blood oxygen and things like that. So that’s pretty neat.
⏹️ ▶️ John This kind of reminds me of when you could use iTunes to rearrange the icons on your home
⏹️ ▶️ John would I ever use a desktop app to rearrange icons on my home screen? But we all know the answer to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Cause it’s a super
⏹️ ▶️ John pain to do it on your phone. So for like this, this quote unquote disability feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to control your watch on a phone with a bigger screen, I would like to use that. Cause I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you want to do something on the watch or with the watch, but you don’t want to use the tiny little screen. If you’ve got your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, why not? Let me use my phone to essentially VNC control. Like it’s a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. it’s a better input device. I don’t necessarily have to, and it’s important, you know, to your point, it has to be on your
⏹️ ▶️ John wrist to get like your pulse and your blood oxygen, like it’s still serving its purpose, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John very often would not want to use the tiniest little screen that I have, and you know, hold my wrist up
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to use my fat little fingers on the things. Please let me, this is, you know, again, accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John is for everybody. And I would like a feature like this, because I think, you know, this type of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you have something that’s difficult to use, whether it be rearranging icons on the springboard, which Apple doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be this hard, please improve this, or using a very tiny screen, which has to be tiny because it’s on your wrist,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me do it in a larger interface, whether that be changing springboard around on a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, which I still wish you had a way to do, or using your watch from your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Deaf and hard of hearing community can follow live captions on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. So that doesn’t sound like much at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first, but then here again, you look at the demo video and it’s two people talking over FaceTime. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the woman on the other end of the call is talking, there’s a little overlay with exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s saying on the screen, which is super duper cool. And I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how that would be super useful. I mean, imagine that here’s an example of accessibility for everyone. What if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to receive a FaceTime call, but you’re in a place where having the audio play is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unwise? You just want to hear somebody talk to you, and you don’t have to contribute much. Or you can just shake your head yes or no, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can turn the volume all the way down, read what they’re saying. I know this is a little bit of a contrived example, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a thing that could happen. As another example, I will sometimes watch video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in bed when Erin is either asleep or nearly asleep, and maybe I’m watching something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short so I don’t want to pop in an AirPod. If I can’t turn on closed captions or if it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t have closed captions on it, then I’m missing most of the video, or I’ll just not watch the video at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s part of the reason why when I was doing Casey on Cars, I always put in the closed captions, And they weren’t perfect, but I at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried to make them just about right. So yeah, accessibility is for everyone. Just like you said, John,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, YouTube has, uh, auto captions and, you know, this is kind of catch up for Apple because most streaming services
⏹️ ▶️ John have some form of auto captions and auto captions aren’t always great. And it’s kind of funny to watch how they try to
⏹️ ▶️ John proper nouns and turn them into like, you know, the example is going around for all the, uh, television
⏹️ ▶️ John review channels that I watch is they very often say C U T I E like something that is very cute,
⏹️ ▶️ John cutie. They say cutie OLED, right? They get OLED,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right, because I guess it’s been added to the dictionary,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it says OLED for organic light-emitting diode, right? But it’s such a cutie OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but it’s, you know, this Apple, Apple playing catch-up here is important and related
⏹️ ▶️ John to this, we didn’t cover this, we usually don’t, but Google had its I-O conference thing, and one of the demos in Google I-O
⏹️ ▶️ John was another easy to criticize as vaporware, but still interesting technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it was showing like glasses or whatever, but the glasses aren’t really the point, of doing real-time translation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So rather than just, we’re going to transcribe what the person is saying in the form of text, which is super
⏹️ ▶️ John useful and, you know, it’s coming to all of our devices and I think we’re all gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoy it. But what if you could talk to somebody who didn’t speak your language and see
⏹️ ▶️ John text of what they were saying in your language below their face? And again, the glasses are like, well, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John just look right at them, but in the glasses, I see what they’re saying. But even if you had to hold up your phone or whatever, again, live
⏹️ ▶️ John translation apps have existed for years. This is the type of thing that Google is usually very good at, like translate.google.com
⏹️ ▶️ John is extremely impressive. And Google’s been working on it for years and years. And obviously, they’re well-positioned
⏹️ ▶️ John to integrate this technology. A lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John this supposed accessibility features are like, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John they are accessibility features, but not like, every single one of them, people look at it and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s for AR and VR. Because a lot of the things that make our regular devices accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John are needed when your interface to it is I’m looking through glasses or a headset or whatever because you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t really have a way to get this information you don’t have a mouse you’re not touching a screen you
⏹️ ▶️ John need like you know maybe not door detection but the ability for the AR VR
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to understand the world around it to augment it augmented reality needs to first know what reality is before
⏹️ ▶️ John I can augment it so before it can put the name of the person underneath their face so you remember their name it needs to identify
⏹️ ▶️ John where the person is person detection which is an accessibility feature they introduced a while ago. And it needs to know
⏹️ ▶️ John who they are, face recognition, something they added ages ago in photos, right? And putting them all together,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus a magic pair of glasses, now as I walk around in either a family reunion
⏹️ ▶️ John or a work meeting or whatever it is, I can see people’s names above their heads. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t forget people’s names, or maybe I’ll just have a different form of embarrassing mistake, depending on how good the technology is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the door detection, as far as what I read, uses LiDAR sensors. So it works on the iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John with LiDAR sensors and works on the iPhones with LIDAR sensors, you would imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ John a fancy future AR headset would also maybe have LIDAR on it so it could make sense
⏹️ ▶️ John of the world and be able to augment it. So these accessibility features, you’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about accessibility. I’m young and healthy and everything’s awesome for me. Like every one of these technologies is
⏹️ ▶️ John a future amazing technology that everyone is going to love and use. And I think the live captions are
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them because again, from what I’ve read about this, There was a write up in Six Colors about it
⏹️ ▶️ John that if I’m remembering correctly, it was saying basically like any audio that plays in iOS in any
⏹️ ▶️ John app, you can tell iOS, hey, if audio is playing, try to do that auto captions thing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like the app has to support auto captions as far as I’m aware, it’s kind of like a system level service, I’m not sure how this would
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Is it a control center thing or whatever? But it’s exciting because it’s the type of thing you usually don’t get an iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the Mac, we’re used to having sort of system level things like, oh, install this, you know, install Text Sniper and you can extract
⏹️ ▶️ John text from images anywhere. and obviously Apple kind of added that as a system service, but before Apple added it,
⏹️ ▶️ John TechSniper had it. And you could have been using that and your app didn’t need to support it. TechSniper would just
⏹️ ▶️ John snipe that text from anywhere, right? I would love to be able to do auto captions on any single,
⏹️ ▶️ John any app that plays video for exactly the reasons that Katie said. Sometimes you’re in an environment, you don’t wanna take out the headphones and put them
⏹️ ▶️ John on, or you’re someplace that’s super noisy and you can’t understand what they’re saying even with
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods in, even with AirPods with noise canceling in is it super noisy or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John Try the captions, right? Like, especially if you’re talking to somebody, if they say something weird, you can ask them to say it again or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Eventually the auto captions will be good enough that you’ll be able to understand what they’re saying. So I’m actually very
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about these features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, there’s a couple of others real quickly. Apple’s also expanding support for its industry leading screen reader
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voiceover with over 20 new languages and locales. And this might be interesting for you, John. With Buddy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Controller, users can ask a care provider or friend to help them play a game. Buddy Controller combines any two game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey controllers into one. So multiple controllers can drive the input for a single player.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s kind of like, this is a thing we used to do when Apple Desktop Bus came out, ADB.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the thing that Macs used to connect keyboards and mice before USB existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And ADB was, it was Apple Desktop Bus, and it was, you know, it was a cool fancy thing where you could, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John chain multiple devices. You’d have one ADB port, but then you’d go from that ADB port into your big Apple extended keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And then your Apple extended keyboard would have another ADB port and then you can connect the mouse to that. So you didn’t have to connect everything
⏹️ ▶️ John together. I know this doesn’t sound exciting to people who live in the world of USB, but at the time this was
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting and novel because the alternative was your mouse would connect to the back of your computer and your keyboard would connect to the back of your computer but not
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple desktop bus, right? And the neat thing about it was you could connect two mice to
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac. Neat. And they both worked at the same time. And so this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what this sounds like. Buddy controller, the two game controllers that can drive the input for a single player. You could
⏹️ ▶️ John have, like in a school computer, you’d have a mouse on the left and a mouse on the right and each person would be trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John drive the mouse at the same time, sort of. I mean, we didn’t have many games back in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is how we used to
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like mouse wars, right? Because if you were fast with the mouse, when the person would hit the edge of the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John pad and then have to pick it up to move it or whatever, you could quickly go and do and click on the thing that you wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, PlayStation and I think Nintendo also have a sort of like share
⏹️ ▶️ John play type thing where people can help you through difficult parts of games. But the idea of both inputs playing
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time, I think it could work, but it’s also a
⏹️ ▶️ John ripe for conflict. It’s my experience of connecting to ADB mice. If you have two kids trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this, even if one is supposedly trying to help the other, uh, there is the potential for sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I guess kind of like, if you’re trying to steer a ship either to the left or the right of a, of a fork,
⏹️ ▶️ John having the ship go straight into the middle of it and everyone dies because the left and the right were both pressing at the same time and
⏹️ ▶️ John the net force is balanced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is all good stuff from Apple. And I can’t stress enough that the longer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the more time you spend on the planet, the more likely that one of these accessibility features will end up being useful for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in some way, shape or form. And not necessarily because something changes about your body, it’s just like John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have said, it could be a situation that you’re in that it just leads itself to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or a situation where you didn’t realize this would be handy. I think once live captions appear and people, if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John implemented in a way that people can find them, so many people are gonna use them. Because in contexts where
⏹️ ▶️ John computers have allowed more people to discover captions, I think captions are being used
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more now than they were decades ago, just because people like them.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many people do you know who always watch, this is like a secret weird things people do, but it’s not even that weird. How many people do you know who
⏹️ ▶️ John watch television with captions on all the time? Not because they’re hard of hearing or anything like that, They just
⏹️ ▶️ John like it because, oh, characters whisper too much, or it’s hard to tell with the sound mixer, it’s just easier for me
⏹️ ▶️ John to glance at, or I can read faster than I can listen. Some people just do this all the time. And having
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to essentially caption any audio that plays on your device, again, if it’s implemented in a way that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John discoverable, I think a lot of people are gonna use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the kind of stuff that Apple does not because, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook’s famous quote here, not because there is a good return on investment here, like monetarily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not, they don’t do this for cynical business or financial reasons. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lead the world, I think, the technologically world, I think they lead the world on accessibility features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they truly believe it’s the right thing to do and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they get immense satisfaction out of the ways they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can help. Because it’s amazing, like, you know, if you have some kind of need for any of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features and you go from not having that need served by any technology to all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sudden this existing, that’s a massive difference in your life. And to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help people that much, for the normally abled people out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you buy an Apple product or not, probably, it’s not gonna make a life-changing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference to you. It’s not gonna be like, wow, before I couldn’t speak to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any way, and now that I bought this Apple product, I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you could have bought an Android phone, or you had other options. Whereas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a certain type of disability or special need, in many cases, if Apple didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, there literally wouldn’t be anything else out there for you to be able to do the same kind of things, or you would have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get different sorts of assistive technology, or different methods of getting assistance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it really is like, it’s not a large number of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world that this will benefit, but it benefits them in an outsized way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And Apple really cares about that. And you can tell, I’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some of the people in the company who work on accessibility stuff, like they really do care a lot because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they believe it’s the right thing to do. And you know, we, you know, we will call out Apple on any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their cynical BS when it’s present. We will, we see right through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all their cynical BS when they’re doing something for, you know, for cynical reasons. but their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessibility efforts are not that kind of thing at all. They, they really do an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job and they do it really for the right reasons, you know, really to help people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, sure. Those people are going to buy their products and they’re going to make money from them, but that, you know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing it just for that reason alone. There’s, if that was, if it was the purely financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision, they would probably decide, Oh, it’s not worth investing all this money in this kind of stuff. But they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do because it’s the right thing to do. And that’s really admirable. And for a company that, you know, they rightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get criticized a lot for not having a ton of those areas anymore where they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of doing it for the good of everything. This is one area that they always have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done that and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like a lot of sort of, you know, pure science research science types of things like
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things like this or the space program is the example you see trotted out doing
⏹️ ▶️ John things like this. It seemed like it’s like, okay, well, that’s one good. What if I don’t care about space? What if I don’t care about accessibility?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are dividends from doing this because this work drives basic technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and research that is useful more broadly. From the space program, you get like, you know, Velcro
⏹️ ▶️ John and the microwave oven and all sorts of stuff, right? And it’s because someone was faced with a problem where
⏹️ ▶️ John this ended up being the solution and oh, it turns out the solution is applicable outside
⏹️ ▶️ John the space program, right? So I’m not sure which part of Apple is driving
⏹️ ▶️ John which, whether it’s the accessibility team driving the creation of the live captioning or whether it’s live captioning being
⏹️ ▶️ John created elsewhere and the accessibility team adopting it, but I have to imagine there’s sort of a virtuous cycle of
⏹️ ▶️ John the need to do better in accessibility drives technology
⏹️ ▶️ John forward in a way that benefits all of Apple. And I don’t think that’s why they’re doing it, but having an accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John team is like having a well-funded space program in your country. It’s huge dividends
⏹️ ▶️ John that you may not realize. And it’s not why you have a space program, but it sure is a nice side effect. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who are like, well, you’re putting all this money into the space program. What’s the point? You
⏹️ ▶️ John at least have something to say to them and say, look, aside from all the awesome things that the space program does have having to do with space,
⏹️ ▶️ John How do you like your microwave oven?
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#askatp: Music app for concert albums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP, and let’s start with Bill Steinbach, who writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are there any iOS apps that you use to listen to concert albums like Fish or Dave Matthews Band?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, jam bands. With little kids at home, I keep getting interrupted and having to switch my listening from DMB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Baby Shark or Doc McStuffins. There must be an app that treats concert albums almost like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio books. Here would be my suggested requirements. It keeps track of your placement in the album. which shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only albums that I deem as a concert, some smart filter or something, and it has to be compatible with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music. This is a great idea. I have precisely zero recommendations, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start learning Swift, I guess. You know, that’s Marco. Marco, you might know something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would fix this, but I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t actually. You know, there are a lot of Apple Music playing apps out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of them, as far as I know, don’t have like a Mac and iPhone version, which is, you know, every time we’ve talked about this in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s been kind of my holdup is like, I want to use the same app on the Mac and on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I do a lot of music listening in both of those places. And, and so that’s, that’s been one problem for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, but ultimately I, I, this is the kind of thing I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to do this. I would love to build one of these because I don’t know if I would ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really find that fit me right. But the problem is whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would build, it kind of has the to-do list problem, whatever I would build, if I build it really to fit my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs and wants, it wouldn’t really satisfy a lot of other people. So the market for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think would be very, very small. But that’s what I would actually want, would be something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I wouldn’t want it to just play concerts. I would just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to be my new music player. And so now we we have cases, you’ve done an ethernet problem, you have scope creep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna just run, you know, cat5 through my music player. I want to run Fiber. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would want to just, you know, basically rebuild iTunes, like, but the good version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, when it was just music, like, rebuild iTunes for the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, but then you get into questions of, you know, what’s feeding it? Is it compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your streaming service of choice? And then, if it is, then that limits what you can do with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio because you generally can’t get raw sample access if you’re playing DRM music files through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of the supported APIs and things like that. So like there’s all sorts of considerations here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the result is there’s definitely demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of different music players but I don’t think I don’t think that demand is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consolidated on anything that like it’s like these features are what we have demand for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, like everybody demands like 60% of the possible features out there and it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different 60% for each person. So this kind of thing I think would be very very difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever build for anyone or to sell in any context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than a passion project you’re making just for yourself that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be like exactly what you want and it would be a labor of love because you’d never make any money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. Um, so that being said, I literally have thought about doing this and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday I will, but I, that’s, I don’t think it’s very likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it should be a web app because that saves you from having to make it all the different platforms that all the people want to listen to it
⏹️ ▶️ John on and dealing with the conventions of the different platforms. Whereas if you just make it a web app, you can implement it once everybody can
⏹️ ▶️ John use it. Audio as well within the realm of dealing with web apps. And yeah, it would still be a pain, but you can imagine a band with a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of money would say, I’m going to make an awesome, you know, let’s say fish where they’re, uh, you you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, concerts are their big thing. We’re going to hire somebody to make an awesome web based concert
⏹️ ▶️ John listening experience that we think fish fans will like, and it will be the fish concert
⏹️ ▶️ John listening thing because they don’t need any other music because they just listen to fish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that actually already exists, and I don’t like it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they. Well, I mean, yeah, this is a great example
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they act because it is a band that produces a large volume of concerts, has a large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan base, many of whom, you know, are are young and want modern ways to play music and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. So it’s you would think it would be a perfect market for that. And there is an app called Live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fish through their like officially sanctioned service to sell all the content. That’s where I buy the concerts from.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can you can pay for their streaming subscription to be able to stream the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco catalog whenever you want. And they have an app to do it. And it’s frankly not very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used it before and it’s it’s not something that that I want to use again.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it was good, people would use it and it would be accessible to everybody. You wouldn’t have to have seven people
⏹️ ▶️ John implement their own passion project, one for Windows, one for Mac, one for iPad, one for the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John all this, just use the web version. But I mean, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not good because as we know, making good software
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a lot of money and time and dedication and I imagine a band is not in a position to do much more than to throw
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of money to someone to make a thing and then once it works they go away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. mostly a web view, the app is very much not super native,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all web crap and it’s not super reliable and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kinda clunky. So yeah, but you’re right, the money is not in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to have a team of people making really good native apps for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any particular band, even one as large as them. But the problem is, the money’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really in it for people to make one in general, like even if it plays every band’s concerts. I mean, look at the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at how many iTunes alternatives slash Apple Music alternatives there are. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we talked about, they exist, but they’re not numerous, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there’s not a lot of must-haves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would agree there’s not a lot of must-haves, but the chat room has brought up, who is this, Barrowclift?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know who this is, John Barrowclift, something like that, somebody Barrowclift. Anyway, they go through, and every year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do a music player showcase, and it’s a very interesting post, and I at least glance at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it every year. And maybe one of these would do what Bill wants, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, but there’s a fairly robust third-party music player ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly against Apple Music. There’s more than one would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, I mean, if anything, I think the odds of it being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable to create one of these are actually better now than ever because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now have the advent of Swift UI and Catalyst making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it easier to make the same code run on Mac and iOS. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these never make for great Mac apps, but that being said, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Music app on the Mac is not a great app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey For so many, in so many ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music app is piss poor on every platform as far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even the part of it that used to be iTunes, like the part that just plays your local collection if you still maintain one of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an old person like me, even that part is so poor. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, every time I launch the app, it acts as though it’s never been launched before. Like, it instantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loses your place. Like, why? Like, there’s no state restoration of where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were, what, you know, what artist you were in, what song you were playing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s constant bugs where now, I think the bug is still there, where if you change the star
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rating of a track about a second and a half later, it jumps to the bottom of the scroll view for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason. Like there’s just so many little bugs and it just gets worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, Apple’s clearly not paying attention much to this market either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think this market exists, but it’s very, very, very small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s going to result only in passion projects and kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of half-assed things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a bummer.
#askatp: Safari extensions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Robert Bateau writes, what Safari extensions are you running or recommend?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t pulled this up yet, so I will stall by asking John, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you recommend?
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, my most important Safari extension is the one I wrote, the ever important
⏹️ ▶️ John It reloads web pages, high tech, very sophisticated, available for free at my website.
⏹️ ▶️ John We will provide a link. And I will not go over the silly story of why I have it, but it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do run that. I also, the other one that is kind of indispensable to me is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s come under various names and there’ve been various iterations, but the current one is a keyword search, Safari keyword search.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just an extension that lets you define sets of characters that you can write. So if you write, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever, like W space a word, it’ll do a Wikipedia search for that word. It comes with a bunch of predefined ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John like G space a word, and it’ll search for that in Google. That may seem silly, you could just like, hey, if you type any word in there, it’ll search
⏹️ ▶️ John Google for it. if you have Google as your default search engine, but you can add any search engine you want. You can search
⏹️ ▶️ John any website that has a way to run a search. You can put a little keyboard shortcut in there and it’s just a convenient way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. I know lots of people use like LaunchBar or Quicksilver. There’s tons of different ways to do it, but I kind of like to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it in the address bar of the browser and so Keyword Search provides that. I use the Instapaper extension
⏹️ ▶️ John that just lets me add things to Instapaper, not too complicated. And then I just looked at my list here. I’m kind of surprised I have a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John extensions that I mostly leave disabled, but when I want them, I enable them. So for example, these
⏹️ ▶️ John are things that are part of app bundles, right? So the way Safari extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John work these days is you get a Mac app and inside the Mac app bundle, there’s a little nested
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari extension and Mac OS finds that and tells Safari about it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have here in my Safari extensions list the Downy Safari extension. Downy is a thing that downloads
⏹️ ▶️ John video from YouTube and lots of other places. And inside the Downy app, I’m assuming, is this Downy Safari extension.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s in the list. And if I want, you know, I have it disabled, but if I want to download something and I’m in Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ John all I have to do is enable it, download it and then disable it. And the main reason I leave a lot of stuff disabled is because I
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t want stuff cluttering up like my toolbar or any of my menus, or sometimes they have scary security
⏹️ ▶️ John things where they need to see every single webpage you visit or whatever, and I don’t wanna deal with that, right? Let’s see,
⏹️ ▶️ John what else do I have? I have Hush installed, but I don’t have it active that like
⏹️ ▶️ John blocks like cookie notices and crap like that. I have Fixerific installed, which is an icon
⏹️ ▶️ John factory extension that makes the Twitter website less obnoxious in a few interesting ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the NetNewswire subscribe to feed thing installed. I think it’s just part of NetNewswire. It lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you do a thing that browsers used to do natively, browsers used to back in the day, be able to find the RSS feed for a website
⏹️ ▶️ John and feed it to your RSS reader or whatever. Now there’s an extension
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that for you. You will notice that nowhere on this list do I have ad
⏹️ ▶️ John blockers, which may surprise you. I run blockers on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John in Safari. And I don’t think that’s what this question is asking about because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if the people, I guess they called Safari on their phone. So I always wonder if when people say Safari, do they just
⏹️ ▶️ John mean the Mac version or do they just think of like, and my phone has a web browser too, but what is it even called, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the phone, I think it’s much more important to run an ad blocker just because bandwidth is limited and screen space and
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and battery and all those things are limited. On the Mac, for the most part, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John more annoyed when some web app is failing and I realize it’s failing because
⏹️ ▶️ John of some kind of content blocker. And so, you know, my Mac’s plugged into the wall and it’s big and powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John and has lots of memory. And so, no, in Safari, I don’t run any ad blocker. So if a website doesn’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s not because some ad blocker’s screwing it up. And that’s the trade-off we all have to choose. Are you more annoyed by
⏹️ ▶️ John ads bothering you or are you more annoyed by the five minutes you spend trying to get something to work on a website
⏹️ ▶️ John when the reason it’s not working is because of a content blocker that you just realized you need to disable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco. The only extension I run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Safari, well, I guess I run two. I run one password, and which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve, I’m still running both one password and Apple password stuff, but I just turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the one password thing where it automatically pops itself up. So that way I’m only having one pop itself up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the Apple one, that has I think mostly solved my problem. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad blocker, OneBlocker. And OneBlocker actually is like seven extensions for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various categories of things it’s blocking. Now, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really frustrating when something breaks in Safari. I have, however, found that Safari’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own built-in weirdness and privacy protection features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to break sites about as often as one blocker does. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m doing something in Safari, and it’s not working for some reason, or something weird about it is not working,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will just launch a different browser on my on my desktop laptop, it’s brave. On my laptop laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s Firefox. I don’t know why it’s different. I just tried different browsers. And it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither one of them. It makes me care enough to change the other one over to that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re having a compatibility problem with the website, by the way, I would suggest I know Marcos I
⏹️ ▶️ John just use Chrome because Chrome is the new IE in a couple of interesting ways and one of those ways
⏹️ ▶️ John is if a website Works anywhere probably works in Chrome So if I have a site that doesn’t work in Safari, even though I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John running any blockers. I just go right to Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well and to me, you know, that’s where Brave is is a good choice because brave is one of those browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like based on chromium open source project So without any of Google’s crap in it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then but it’s so it’s it’s kind of Chrome but
⏹️ ▶️ John quite though. That’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well anyway So all I do is adblocker stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. And really, you know, judgments aside, I mean, I think we’re probably past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the point where anybody cares if you’re on an adblocker or not, but just in case you’re not, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsing the web is a battle these days. It’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it used to be. It’s not like, oh, I’m not supporting, you know, John Gruber by visiting his site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an adblocker. Like, it’s not like that anymore. Now browsing the web, it’s literally, it’s like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus the world. And the entire web is constantly trying to attack you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all times and sell all your crap and track all your crap and burn all your resources. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so incredibly offensive and full of garbage now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think, you know, Safari’s built-in protection is very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the tracking prevention and stuff, but I think you need to go further in most cases. And so my default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser in its default state has fairly aggressive ad blocking settings, and I’m happier for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t blame you. I run, apparently, way more than either of you guys, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that many in the grand scheme of things, but certainly more. So of course I have 1Password. I also have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think a lot of these are actually recommendations from Gruber, I have Noir, which basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lets you force a kind of computed dark mode. I’m a believer that when it’s nighttime,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use dark mode, when it’s daytime, you use, what is it? It’s light mode, I guess. It’s just called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. It’s just mode. Mode or dark mode. So when I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dark mode, then Noir will do its best to try to figure out a dark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode for whatever I’m looking at, which I quite like. I run that on pretty much all my
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it know when a site has a dark mode? Does it do some detection and then leaves it alone? Correct. That’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stop the Madness, which basically stops some really annoying JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. I mean, it does other things too, but it stops really annoying JavaScript stuff. So as an example, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a service that Michaela’s preschool uses in order to, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let the teachers send like pictures to the class or the parents of the class and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, send messages back and forth and stuff. And when they send pictures to, uh, you know, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the parents, I’d like to save a copy of those pictures, but the website disables right clicks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know? So you, so you’d have to dive into the like inspector and do all this other junk and it’s a real big pain in the butt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, Stop the Madness stops that website from blocking right clicks. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just allows a right click just like it should. And it does a bunch of other stuff too. That’s just an illustrative example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Super Agent for Safari, which is, I think you mentioned one, John, that does this thing, Hush.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically just shuts up cookie consent forms because the EU, well-meaning, often screws
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things up for all of us, particularly Americans. And so that’s an example of that. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vinegar, which I really love, this does an incredibly good job of replacing the totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proprietary YouTube player with just a regular HTML video tag, which among other things makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super easy to put it into picture-in-picture mode, which I really dig.
⏹️ ▶️ John that kill the chapter support though?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the question. It might, actually. I never pay close attention to chapters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in YouTube. I think it might kill chapter support. I’d have to look again though. I’m not 100% sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John As much as I like the idea of those extensions, and I just saw them the other day, I was like, oh, I should get that. But then I realized, no, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I watch so much YouTube, and as YouTube enhances its HDMI5
⏹️ ▶️ John player or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s got its own
⏹️ ▶️ John media player that it built itself. As it enhances that with features, I like the features. So they recently
⏹️ ▶️ John added Chapter Support, and then they added Chapter Support to the timeline, so you could see where the chapters begin and end with little breaks
⏹️ ▶️ John in the bar. And when you watch hour and a half car rebuilding videos,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to be able to know where the different markers and chapters are and everything like that. Or the auto captions that
⏹️ ▶️ John we mentioned earlier that came however many years ago. And so yeah, an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s native player doesn’t have those features because it doesn’t understand YouTube, right? It just thinks it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a video. And so I understand the appeal of it, especially if the YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John one has poor performance on your Mac, but I don’t run one of those extensions because I want all the neat features that YouTube adds.
#askatp: Remembering sign-in providers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Brian Hamilton writes, how do you remember if you’ve used email, sign in with Apple, Google, or probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not Facebook when you log into a service? For me, I extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rarely use sign in with Apple. I know I’ve done it, and I can’t even think of a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example of one I’ve used sign in with Apple for. If it’s something that I consider to be vaguely ephemeral, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I just want to try something real quick, and I doubt I will ever spend meaningful time here, then I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use sign in with Apple. never used Google, and I absolutely never use Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s pretty much, you know, email password with a couple of very rare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey examples. Marco, how do you handle this, particularly in this weird new world where you’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switching up your password manager? Marc Thiessen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pretty much the same way you do. I really don’t use anything besides email and password.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I never if it offers sign in with Apple or Google, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never use any of those options. If it has an email-based login, I always use that.
⏹️ ▶️ John John? Yeah, that’s my instinct as well. Not that I am against the platform logins, but when you use a
⏹️ ▶️ John platform login, you are now tying yourself to that platform. And
⏹️ ▶️ John all the people who use like, you know, sign in with Facebook everywhere and then came to hate Facebook, now you’re kind of in a
⏹️ ▶️ John situation where you’re a little bit stuck and it’s annoying to deal with. It’s not that I think these platforms are gonna go
⏹️ ▶️ John away or anything, or that I’m gonna lose allegiance to them, It’s just that it’s the most flexible to
⏹️ ▶️ John use your own email address that you control for your sign in and not tie it to any other platform. So that’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John default. So I don’t have to remember because like 99.999% of the time it’s email
⏹️ ▶️ John and password. I do use sign in with Apple occasionally, like Casey said for like essentially throwaway stuff where
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not important. It’s not even important enough for me to like generate a password
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. Or like, it’s just like, I just, I wanna try this thing and if I’m actually serious about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I will then make a real account using whatever, but it’s really nice to be able to use Sign-in with Apple for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously I never use Sign-in with Facebook or anything. And even Sign-in with Google, I don’t use that either
⏹️ ▶️ John just because I don’t, like Google’s got enough information on me. I don’t need even
⏹️ ▶️ John more, more ties to Google. The other reason I would say we’re from Sign-in with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally is because my Apple ID, or I have multiple Apple IDs, but my main email address
⏹️ ▶️ John is not any one of my multiple Apple IDs. So there is kind of a disconnect there. And so it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John weird for me to sign in with Apple using an Apple ID that’s an email address that is different
⏹️ ▶️ John than the email address I use as my main email address. So there’s a little bit of legacy stuff there. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John having a default, and that default being email address and password, has served me well over the
⏹️ ▶️ John decades and I think I’m gonna be sticking with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is like, you know, in all the different online platforms that I’ve worked on, you know, the topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often comes up of like, oh, should we offer sign on option XYZ? you know, assignment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple is obviously the newest one. And when we launched the ATP membership thing and that whole CMS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we talked about, should we offer a sign-in with Apple? Because, you know, we’re all Apple-y here. We have Apple Pay, should we do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the problem is, when you offer any of these services, as long as you have any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, like if it’s not your only way to log in, now you’re asking people to remember two things. Now you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember which service you logged in with. And then also, secondarily, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your password or whatever if the answer there was email. And so you think you’re making it easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you give people these options of like, oh, you can just breeze right through with your Facebook or your Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco login. You think you’re making something easier for people, but you’re actually causing problems down the road because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they come back to that in six months or a year, are they gonna remember which option they picked?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer from support email, if you ever see one of these, is no, they don’t. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’ll happen is they’ll possibly guess wrong. And then they’ll say, Wait a minute, I don’t have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account here, or they’ll, they’ll inadvertently create a new account. And then we’ll wonder where all their stuff went.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s, there’s so many problems when you have like multiple login options, it’s better just to offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And the one that everybody can use is the email and password. So that that’s, that’s always like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best one to do, even though the other ones offer certain benefits, I know, I know, but it just causes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more problems and confusion. And you know, when you’re actually doing it,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re like a big service, I think it’s a good idea to offer all of them because you can afford a big support staff to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with the inevitable support things. And especially if you’re like a free service, because like dealing with billing is the worst. Oh, I created
⏹️ ▶️ John a second account and now I’m being double billed. And you know, like those are all the complications. And you could, if you are
⏹️ ▶️ John a small site, one thing you can choose, if it’s appropriate for your small site, you can just have one thing. And that one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John could be say, signing with Apple, right? Like if that’s appropriate for your audience, that would be simplifying
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would be a pretty good system. But you know, most even small sites can’t do that because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, email is the default. And it occurred to me, like, the changes
⏹️ ▶️ John in the environment of creating accounts on things, because I’ve been dealing with lots of accounts and life stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John lately. And I’m shocked. I shouldn’t be shocked. Like, at these websites
⏹️ ▶️ John for, let’s say, slower moving industries, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey health care and
⏹️ ▶️ John insurance, you know, and I go to them. And I have to set
⏹️ ▶️ John up an account or whatever. And they want me to pick a username. I’m like, are you kidding me?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m picking a username in 2022. And of course, Syracuse is taken. Jay Syracuse is taken.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, you just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s no like, not only you’re making me pick a username, but also still all the good usernames
⏹️ ▶️ John are taken. It’s like, I don’t, that used to be the problem for kids who don’t remember. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John website you had an account on, they made you make a username and you had to remember what the username was.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re lucky on website, you got Jay Smith or whatever, or you got Smith on a website, And the other one you had to
⏹️ ▶️ John be Smith 123, right? And then other people were just, you know, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John shiny diamond 97854 go bulls, right? But they were that everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s because the username would be the same everywhere. Like, it was so hard to remember, like, if you can’t remember like, oh, what
⏹️ ▶️ John was my, you wouldn’t even remember your username. And then those sites had to implement flows that were like,
⏹️ ▶️ John forgot my password, but also forgot my username was a flow they had to support. This was
⏹️ ▶️ John the bad old days of the web before everyone finally decided. First, they had this medium battle
⏹️ ▶️ John days where they decided, oh, your username is your email address. It’s like, please stop, you’re confusing people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Email address, password, and we all figured that out. I don’t know how many decades ago, except for healthcare,
⏹️ ▶️ John insurance, and other backwards facing industries. It’s like, come on, don’t make me, and they make
⏹️ ▶️ John you enter your email address anyway, but they make you pick a username. And so the real question should be,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you remember your username on sites that still remember your username? And the answer is it’s in Keychain, I really hope, because
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise I have no freaking idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Comically, I was not the person who put this in the show notes, I don’t think, but Ashley Bischoff wrote, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used a platform-level login, the approach that I take is to create a stub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entry within one password just to let future me know. That’s a very good idea. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’ll take that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I do that occasionally, too, of like, you know, entering a secure note in iCloud Keychain or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, just remember, for this stupid website, here’s a bunch of information about it. And so when I in desperation
⏹️ ▶️ John try to search for something later in keychain, I will find that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Linode and Squarespace. Thanks for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join atv.fm slash join and we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
Casey’s fiber trunk
⏹️ ▶️ John It was another one of those episodes where I laid a little trap for people. If you sent an email
⏹️ ▶️ John or a tweet during the episode telling me that NASA didn’t really invent Velcro or microwave oven,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can resend that email. If you use the undo feature in Gmail, maybe see if you can pull
⏹️ ▶️ John that one back. Because yes, technically those things were invented either outside of NASA or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe sometimes decades earlier, but NASA did use them in its space
⏹️ ▶️ John flight work. And that helped advance technology to the point where it was easier to commercialize, whether it is
⏹️ ▶️ John the government paying Raytheon to make something or somebody making something in some other country and then NASA adopting it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever. So yes, I do know that we don’t need that follow up for next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s real time follow up in the program with a little nerd snipe trap. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John says, NASA didn’t invent the microwave. I’m going to write into ATB and tell them this. We know it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, kind of simplifying for the sake of the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t wrong. were wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s just that it’s about it’s about a nuance and a detail that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. And the main point
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, hey, putting money into NASA made it so that microwave ovens could be in our houses sooner
⏹️ ▶️ John and better. And that is true. And that was the point not that Oh, but NASA didn’t invent the microwave. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if we didn’t put money into NASA and having microwaves on Skylab or whatever, it would have taken much longer
⏹️ ▶️ John for the microwave to appear in people’s kitchens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, please feel free not to email an apology about falling into the trap. Just let it go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not really a
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what nerd sniping is either. By the way, nerd sniping is when you pose a problem and then you get, people are so excited
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve the problem that they solve it for you. So it’s a slightly different thing. That is also true. We’re talking about your fiber trunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we really want to go there? I’m going to get so much email. All right. So I was thinking, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is dangerous. I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if doing some sort of hybrid approach where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some but not all or maybe all of my maybe forthcoming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet situation should be fiber. Now, before you jump all over me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me make an opening statement. I recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is probably overkill. I see that, I understand that, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to potentially march forward anyway because it intrigues me, because I think it’s interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s something to learn, because I know very little about it, and because I’m telling myself, perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrongly, that this may help future-proof things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So, maybe. What future?
⏹️ ▶️ John Tell me of this future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A future where maybe I want more than 10 gigabit Ethernet. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Ethernet goes up to what’s the fastest Ethernet over copper? Someone like I honestly don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it’s 10 gig.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thought it was sure. I thought you
⏹️ ▶️ John do over copper. Let me see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe. I don’t know. But my thought was. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me and here again, maybe my fundamentals are all wrong here, but it seems to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that fiber seems to be the the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most likely physical medium, even though it’s not really a physical medium, but you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, to last the longest and be able to be current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s just a tube with light in it and then I can change the ends or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can change what that light tube is plugged into to make it better and faster and stronger and so on. Maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not how it works, but that’s my assumption. How is it not physical? You said it was not physical? Well, I mean, it’s just, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like wires or anything. It’s just an empty tube with light going through it, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mean, isn’t that- That’s a wire kind of, anyway, all right. But here’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John though. What you’re proposing is, I’m going to have like fiber on a trunk and then it will branch out to be
⏹️ ▶️ John regular like copper ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so hold on. So I’ve got a couple of different things rolling around in my head. So the hybrid approach is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. So if we take the garage to be the new hub of the network, which it is not today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if it would be, then maybe what I do is I go fiber into the attic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fiber into the crawl space, you know, maybe even at 10 gigabit. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I spider many single gigabit lines off of that 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabit trunk, then I have got oodles and oodles of bandwidth and it should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be pretty much future proof,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Because… It’s present proof. You presently can’t use it or do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes and no. I mean, I can’t use… I mean, I wouldn’t use 10 gigabit on any individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device, but having the trunk at 10 gigabit seems like it may not be a terrible idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then so yeah, so I would go into the attic, into the crawl space with fiber potentially, have you know, like a small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiber to Ethernet hub or switch I should say, in either of those locations, and then spider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off of the that switch into whatever rooms I think is pertinent to receive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Ethernet connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can do 10 gig with a copper trunk. Like, why does fiber have to enter this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because what if I want more than 10 gig? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what if I don’t? Can you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just run two? I mean, like, Well, fair. amount of effort and cost and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error-proneness and fragility.
⏹️ ▶️ John And debugging, like trying to debug your copper to optical transition
⏹️ ▶️ John at all the various points. I can imagine you doing this big expensive thing and then getting worse than one gigabit because of
⏹️ ▶️ John some weird thing you’ve never encountered
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey before because you don’t know how to set up fiber. And
⏹️ ▶️ John neither does anybody you know, because it’s not a thing for people’s homes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s fair. But it also comes with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially reduced complexity and also increased complexity. So I’m trading complexities,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, in the end. But it also may be a considerably cheaper—well, maybe not considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheaper, but cheaper or equivalent money. Because if you think about it, I’m in for—and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s debate over whether or not I should use the path I want to use to get into the attic. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I commit to doing that, it seems clear to me that the most prudent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to do is to use plenum rated Cat 6A, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we discussed, I think, last episode, is it seems like the best or the best happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey medium. And it is not cheap to get. I forget if I can get 500 feet or 1000 feet of it, but it’s like $300 or $400 just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the cable. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the wire is not the major cost center here. Yeah, maybe the fiber wire
⏹️ ▶️ John would be cheaper, but the things you plug the fiber wires into are not going to be cheaper. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why do you say that? Because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I found- Because the only
⏹️ ▶️ John people who buy there are people who do stuff in data centers and they don’t, they charge a lot of money for that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there is, I’m going to get the details wrong because I don’t have it pulled up in front of me, but I’ve been looking into this quite a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the switch that I would use to go from optical to, from fiber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ethernet is like 120 bucks and I would need potentially two of them. And then somebody also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t mention actually, somebody has a whole, a listener, a very kind listener whose name I don’t have in front of me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has offered to send me for the cost of shipping an old Hewlett Packard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch that they have, like a rack mount switch that they have, that has something like five or ten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiber connections and then a whole buttload of Ethernet connections. So I could get that for almost no money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get a couple of the switches, one for the attic, one for the crawl space, for a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundred bucks total. And I’m still probably—at this point, I’ve spent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that much money, and it wouldn’t be that different necessarily than I guess it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit more than than getting Ethernet but it’s probably it’s not that much
⏹️ ▶️ John more exciting buying an 8 port Ethernet switch does not cost $100.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But I would need something for the command center in the garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and I would probably want something that is bigger than this unremarkable 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ports which I have in the in the office right now. I mean, I guess I could continue to use this but I want something like rack mounted, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, and additionally, one of the things that also appeals to me about fiber is that I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be terminating anything, because that’s a recipe for disaster. So I would just get, you know, I would measure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get the appropriate sized fiber, and that would be that. Now, I’m not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing any of my own crimping or terminating or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do that with Ethernet cables, though, much more cheaply and easily. Well, but can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get like 300-foot Ethernet cables? Yeah. but like, you know, 100 or 200. I’ve got 100 foot one, so I know you can do that at
⏹️ ▶️ John No, fair. Maybe I should look into that a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more. But, and the other thing that scares
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a little bit is that I’ve heard several people say to me, like, oh, cat six, a is the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, not as bad as seven, but it’s almost as bad as seven. It’s so difficult. Oh, it’s so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, that’s the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we make. Yeah, exactly right. So, I feel like, honestly, the right-est
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer, and maybe that’s what I’m I’m really backing myself into is just not touch anything. Like why fix what ain’t broken? Just figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out a new outlet for this information, or for this nervous energy. But I don’t know, it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like fiber is not that unapproachable these days, either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey financially or from just a regular schmo. I don’t think it’s necessary, but I don’t think it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unapproachable. And potentially, I don’t think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially if I go a hybrid route, I don’t think it would be that many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiber runs. Like it would be one to the attic, one to the crawl space. Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I could go into like the office and the future office with additional runs, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that wouldn’t be absolutely necessary. So I don’t know. I feel like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing that is clear to me that makes it an utterly terrible idea other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than not a lot of people have done it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have two devices that would be on wired ethernet they could take advantage of your greater than one gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ John per second trunk? Like they would communicate with each other, you know what I mean? Like are you doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a file transfer from a plugged in Ethernet Mac to a plugged in Ethernet device somewhere else in the house?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, from the Mac to the Synology constantly, or vice versa. Isn’t the Synology and the Mac in the same room?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, right now they are, but hopefully they wouldn’t be. Hopefully they would be, the Synology would be potentially in the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ John just two devices. So you’re still, say you’re maxing out one gigabit, so fine. but now you need
⏹️ ▶️ John something else that also wants to do a gigabit over the trunk between it and some other device
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to need more than a gigabit on your trunk, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Potentially, yeah. And no, to answer your question, I don’t think I have that. Not today.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you have enough wired devices. Like everyone else is going to be sipping through the Wi-Fi straw to get to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I have enough. I have enough wired devices for sure. I mean, I have a Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John But wired devices that need to talk to each other over a gigabit. I mean, you’re watching video from the Synology is like 10 megabits,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like 100 gigabits. Or 1 gigabit, sorry, I’m getting my gigs into this stuff, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s surprisingly difficult unless you’re doing literal file transfers to saturate
⏹️ ▶️ John a 1 gigabit trunk in your house unless you actually have a lot of devices that are on wired Ethernet or
⏹️ ▶️ John on very fast Wi-Fi that need to do these big transfers to each other at the same time and are running
⏹️ ▶️ John into traffic jams. And to Marco’s point, if that’s really the case, run three more ethernet cables.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now you’ve solved that problem, right? Because then they can have their own dedicated cables going to wherever they want to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the more you waffle about this, the more you waffle about things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the cost of a spool of cable, the more I think the better approach here is to just buy some pre-made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables that are the right lengths and just shove them through the walls as whatever way you can and just call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day. Well, and to be clear, It’s not that I necessarily have a problem with using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keystone jacks or anything, or crimping if the need arises, although it sounds like it probably wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I went the pure Ethernet route. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the work of it. It’s just, I don’t, I need, and part of the thing is, I tried to make time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this tonight, or earlier today, and I just didn’t have the time to do it, but I need to properly sit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down, so to speak, and figure out, okay, how much cable do I really need? Because I have this vision that I need like a couple hundred feet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Ethernet cable, and it may be that I need, you know, 900 feet or something like that. I doubt it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you never know. Like, maybe I need 900 feet and a thousand foot spool wouldn’t be so bad. But I have this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gut feeling that I need many, many hundreds of feet less than a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, and so it seems silly to me to buy a thousand foot spool, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost the only thing I can find. No, don’t, do not buy a thousand foot
⏹️ ▶️ John spool. Where do you think you live? live
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this. No, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying. Do the actual measurements. Do it like the actual route the wires would take. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way fewer feet than you think it is. We agree. And that’s why I think I need to stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hand-waving and start actually putting numbers down. I started to do this a little bit, but I haven’t done it properly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the other thing to think about, though, is, again, if I’m petulantly insisting on plenum-rated cable, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better or worse, I mean, I don’t think it’s for worse, but if If I’m petulantly insisting on plenum-rated cable, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a taller order to find Cat6a plenum-rated at exactly 100 feet, you know, already precooked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, than it is just riser-rated Cat6a, which is what everyone else in the entire world wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you considered the fact that perhaps researching this project
⏹️ ▶️ John is in fact the project
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that keeps you busy? Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John just wanted to find something to keep you busy. You don’t actually, and this will make Aaron happy, you don’t actually have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything to your house. your hobby could simply be exhaustively researching and modeling
⏹️ ▶️ John a potential, you know, house spanning fiber optic network. You can get a 3D program and
⏹️ ▶️ John make CAD files and really model it out and do a fly through. And we could fly through the plenum and
⏹️ ▶️ John watch the plenum rating table and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Modeling you say, I’m putting something in Slack right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. So I did this earlier today, I think it was. I put this in Slack. I don’t have it easily accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the live people. I’m sorry. I used monodraw to diagram out. This is not the hybrid approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This would be the full fiber approach. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John diagrammed this out for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is the project. You are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey succeeding in finding something to occupy your time. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just that the project isn’t what you thought it was. You thought the project was wire my house for ethernet. The project is really plan
⏹️ ▶️ John to wire my house for ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why don’t you make a new iOS app full of emoji and lots of text that’s all about letting people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan out their network upgrades for their house.