495: Five Points for Smell
11 Aug 2022This year, the birds were different.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Android totally copying Java was fair use (via Rob Sayre)
- Branded tires (via TK & Sam Abuelsamid)
- John’s TV updates
- Geoff C’s theory
- Justin Winchester’s theory
- Bravia Core
- Cable Matters Plug & Play USB Ethernet Adapter (USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet, Ethernet to USB, Ethernet Adapter for Laptop) Supporting 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet Network in Black
- RTFU: TiVo code search codes
- Channels
- SiliconDust HDHomeRun PRIME Cable HDTV 3-Tuner
- The solution to the box mystery
- Vacation Tech Retrospective
- Post-show Neutral: Marco’s Car Charcuterie
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Chapters
- S3 API follow-up
- Apple tire follow-up
- TV follow-up
- Sponsor: Stack Overflow Podcast
- TV & TiVo follow-up
- TV box follow-up
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Vacation tech: Casey
- Sponsor: Memberful
- Vacation tech: John
- Ending theme
- Neutral
S3 API follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I’m going to end up disappointed by the end of the night, but sitting here now, where ignorance is LIS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so excited for the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve been on fire with the LIS puns recently. They’ve been… Well, I don’t know if fire is really… Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encourage him. You’ve been on this mud waterfall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Rob Sayer writes, Casey mentioned the Oracle Android Java case in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S3 API conversation. So to back up a half step, we were talking about is it OK to copy another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey party’s API. Is that cool? Is that not cool? And I’d said, oh, well, there’s a big lawsuit between Oracle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Android, who had basically copied but re-implemented the Java APIs, or at least that’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vague understanding of it. So anyway, Rob continues, the Supreme Court said that this was fair use. I’ve always found this case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny, because Oracle, in fact, copies the S3 API. So here it was, Oracle took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google and Android and so on to court, saying, oh, you copied our stuff. And then Oracle turned right around and said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, We’re going to copy the S3 API. That sounds great. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure what Oracle would say is that, well, APIs are not all the same. We’re talking about a programming
⏹️ ▶️ John interface or a local code in a machine. And this is a network protocol, HTTP requests
⏹️ ▶️ John for certain paths and parameters and so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on. And that’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John different. These days, we think of them all as APIs. But there is a case to be made that
⏹️ ▶️ John if there were to be some kind of law coming out of that Java Oracle thing, it
⏹️ ▶️ John might not apply to network APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a fair point.
Apple tire follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And with regard to Marco’s tear, which I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was justified at the time about Apple in the hypothetical Apple car, they wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to put any branding on the tires. They would want a completely flat tire. You didn’t go so far as to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say white walls, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco If Johnny’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still contracting, it could be. He loves his white rooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what Johnny would do? All white tires and just pretend like they don’t get dirty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right. That’s the same with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s never a power record in their product photography. Like, just, you know what? We’re just gonna have this white car driving on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this white storefront, you know, this white, like Apple store floor as the demo with white tires. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget what it looks like in the real world. It’ll always look like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, they’d have a space gray option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it’s all white with white tires and I’m am I like contractually obligated to buy one? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just happen to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It just, that’s what happens with white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars. It would just happen. Anyway, so with regard to Apple wanting a brand free tires,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CK wrote to us to point out an article about how Ford apparently demanded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Goodyear remove the Wrangler branding for tires installed on Broncos, which I thought was very
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, although they didn’t, as far as I could tell, they’re not removing the word Goodyear. And when they removed
⏹️ ▶️ John Wrangler, they only removed it from one side. It’s like, if you’re gonna remove Wrangler, remove
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like they only removed it from the outside side so it’s still on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John seems kind of half-hearted all around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’m sure there’s probably practical reasons, like maybe when they stock these tires in the warehouse, they could more easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what they are or whatever, who knows, but yeah, it’s kind of funny that there’s this weird fluke that a popular line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of off-road capable Goodyear tires is called the Wrangler, while also elsewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the car business is a popular vehicle called the Wrangler by a different company, which is kind of this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failure of trademark law. These two should never have been allowed to coexist in the same industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John A tire in a car, I mean, you can drive your Bronco while wearing Wrangler jeans probably. Yeah, that’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John different industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ John industry. I know it’s a different, but tires in an entire car, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, regardless, friend of the show, Sam Welsamid, who you might remember from a recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode of Upgrade, which was very good. Anyway, Sam writes to say, Apple doesn’t have to be stubborn about unbranded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tires, they just have to specify it and probably pay a premium, but any tire maker would build them whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they want, even when they leave the branding on, the tires that are supplied from the factory are almost always unique to that specific model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OEMs frequently spec unique compounds or other characteristics to meet their performance requirements for handling, braking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey etc. If you look up tires on, say, Tire Rack, you will often see tires labeled as OEM or aftermarket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They look identical, but they may have different rubber compounds or even different internal construction. The aftermarket ones are the generic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version. I had no idea this was the case, so I thought that was fascinating.
TV follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on John tell me about your TV. Do you have any updates for us, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have a handful of updates So first on the whole Wi-Fi front my television wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John connect to Wi-Fi. We had some ideas from folks out there First is from Jeff
⏹️ ▶️ John see you said Asked if your date and time is set correctly on the TV says my Sony TV wouldn’t connect
⏹️ ▶️ John to Wi-Fi When the date time was incorrect That is a common thing also a common thing for SSL certificates if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re connecting to websites and telling you the certificates invalid make sure your date and time are set correctly. Now most modern
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, especially ones that connect to the internet, connect to some kind of network time service. You don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John really do this manually, like in the old days, and on some very behind the times electronic
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. The very first thing you do when you turn it on, it would ask you to set the date and time, but these days, if there’s an expectation that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll have a network connection, they don’t ask you to do that. So it should be set correctly, but it’s worth looking into the maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John NTP server, you can’t get to it on your network for some reason, or there’s some kind of problem, or it thinks it’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong time zone or something. So that’s worth checking that was not the problem with my television. However, Justin Winchester
⏹️ ▶️ John says make sure you have limit IP address tracking turned on Of your home turned off for your home Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John or your phone Also, make sure local access is turned on for the app This is so when you you do something
⏹️ ▶️ John on the TV and it says hey just launch the YouTube app and press a button And we’ll sign you in right
⏹️ ▶️ John limit. He says the limit IP address tracking Should be turned off on your phone and on
⏹️ ▶️ John your Wi-Fi. I don’t think that’s the problem. I double-checked it to make sure I I don’t have that turned
⏹️ ▶️ John on, I don’t think, on any of my devices. And also the local
⏹️ ▶️ John access thing for the app, that’s when you launch an app and it prompts you and it says whatever app wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to access the local network and you’re not sure what it means so you just say okay. I always just say okay too.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think either one of those were the problem. Unfortunately I haven’t had an opportunity to set up another app
⏹️ ▶️ John since I already did all my setup. So I haven’t tested these theories but it’s two more things for people to
⏹️ ▶️ John check if you’re are having problems with this. None of these helped my, obviously, get
⏹️ ▶️ John my television on Wi-Fi. The thing I was thinking of when I was messing with it, the very
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious first thing to try is, how about you just unplug the ethernet? Because maybe it just gets cranky that you have ethernet and
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi at the same time and it can’t handle it, just wants there to be one network connection, it’s not sophisticated enough to handle both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just unplug the ethernet. And the reason I didn’t do that immediately is, oh, I gotta crawl behind the TV again, I gotta pull off that
⏹️ ▶️ John unplug the cable. Like just, I thought I could get it to work and I didn’t want to go crawl behind there. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I did crawl behind there because I was behind there for other reasons, which we’ll get to in a minute. And yeah, if you unplug
⏹️ ▶️ John the ethernet, it connects to wifi just fine. So that’s a pretty cruddy limitation of whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Android, Google TV thing this is running that it just can’t handle ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John and wifi. If you have ethernet plugged in, wifi will never ever connect. But as soon as you unplug the internet, it
⏹️ ▶️ John connects just fine. And the reason I was interested in that is something I discovered
⏹️ ▶️ John about my television that I should have known, but maybe it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John concern me. All right, so there’s an app that comes with the TV. It’s called Bravia Core. Lots of listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ John state DP, wrote in to tell me, hey, I’ve got a Sony TV too. Make sure you don’t ignore the Bravia
⏹️ ▶️ John Core app. It’s a terrible name. Bravia is Sony’s brand name for their televisions. Technically,
⏹️ ▶️ John my television is the Bravia XR, blah, blah, blah. The Bravia Core app,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a movie app. Sony is also a movie studio and they have a bunch of movies, right? so you can
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for, download, or stream movies from the Sony movie collection. Maybe others, I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the advantage of the Bravia Core app is one, when you buy the super expensive TV, it comes with like 10
⏹️ ▶️ John credits to get movies. So hey, free movies. You know, I think each movie is like one credit or something so
⏹️ ▶️ John I can get 10 movies if I want, as long as they’re Sony movies. And two, apparently, Bravia Core
⏹️ ▶️ John movies let you either stream or download or both movies in much
⏹️ ▶️ John higher quality than even the iTunes store. like that they’re 4K, full
⏹️ ▶️ John res, high bit rate, maybe not as high as Blu-ray, because Blu-rays are like 60 gigs a movie or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, but much higher than you would get on a typical streaming service. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, okay, that’s cool. I should check that out. But then I heard from other people and they said, oh yeah, I tried to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John Bravia Core app, but I couldn’t play the movies back at the high bit rate
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would like stutter. My network connection wasn’t fast enough to keep up. And I was like, well, I won’t have that problem. I’m plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John into ethernet. But then some people were saying, yo, yeah, I’m on ethernet too and I also couldn’t get my wifi to connect.
⏹️ ▶️ John But by the way, I was trying to play movies from Broadview Core and they were stuttering even when I was on ethernet. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason for that is that the ethernet is a hundred megabits.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what century this is, but I mean, you would think a hundred megabits is plenty for a movie, because most things that are on
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming services are like single digit megabits. Like it’s heavily compressed video, you know, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John magic of modern compression algorithms. You can watch the movie and it doesn’t take up, You know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need huge amounts of bandwidth. That’s why people can get away with it on wifi. Cause even though the theoretical bandwidth on wifi is very high,
⏹️ ▶️ John from wherever people’s televisions are to wherever their routers are with interference from walls and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’re only getting 10, 20 megabits at your television. Heck, maybe you’re getting nine megabits.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s still enough to stream most things, especially if it’s not 4k content, right? So it was a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John megabits. And apparently a hundred megabit ethernet is not enough to stream
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the bigger, chunkier movies that are there. And so, well, the first thing I did is I wanted to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, check what kind of speeds I’m getting on WiFi, because people saying, oh, you know, don’t use Ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should use WiFi because you can get higher than 100 megabits on WiFi. So that’s why I unplugged the Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John cable connected to WiFi, and then I had to figure out how fast the WiFi is. So I needed to get a speed test
⏹️ ▶️ John application, and I had to get it from like the Sony app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because I can’t do it on my Apple TV or something, because that wouldn’t be testing the TV’s Ethernet connection, we’d just be testing the Apple TV’s
⏹️ ▶️ John internet connection. Which by the way, the Apple TV was 100 megabits for years and years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not, and I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think the modern ones are. I think once it went to 4K, I believe that’s when they updated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yep, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s right. Although I’m not sure there’s any content that I watch on my Apple TV that exceeds 100 megabits
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. But yeah, so I have to download it from the Sony App Store. So I go to the Sony App Store, I search for speed test,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s just the usual suspects lineup of
⏹️ ▶️ John sketchy looking applications that all claim to be speed tests, you know? None of them are recognizable brands
⏹️ ▶️ John of any kind of thing. They all just look like generic speed tests. Like, hmm, which one of these is least likely to destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John my television? So I downloaded a couple of them. One of them didn’t work at all. One of them looks
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit janky, but one of them did actually run a speed test. And on my Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ John from the position of all my routers and everything, I was getting like, you know, 70, 80 gigabits. Not gigabits,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco 70, 80 megabits per
⏹️ ▶️ John second, which is less than the ethernet. So I plugged the ethernet bit in and tried that and sure enough
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets like 99, 100 megabits, like just like you would expect. So my wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John in my position in my television where all my routers are in my house is not faster than 100 megabits.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what am I supposed to do? I want faster than 100 megabits into this television
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t know, I wanna watch a Broadview core, I wanna see the fancy stuff. Granted I have a Blu-ray player for all that too,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have these 10 free movie credits and I’d like to see the full quality. I asked this to Merlin
⏹️ ▶️ John last night on a Rectus recording, which will come out sometime in the future, but I’ll ask you two, what should I do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DFU restore your TV?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Well, what would that, because like it’s a hundred megabit ethernet port. That’s never getting any faster, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And my wifi is not fast enough, given my router location. So I want to get more than 100 megabits
⏹️ ▶️ John of data into my television.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get you, could you put another Eero connected via ethernet, like directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to like is there any way to otherwise pipe in ethernet like I assume like what a what a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB three ethernet adapter work? Probably not. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the way I think I pursued. All right. So there are if you search, you will find plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of USB a two ethernet adapters that claim gigabit ethernet speeds. This television
⏹️ ▶️ John does has a USB ports on it. Most modern televisions do. And from other Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John people out there have Sony televisions, older Sony televisions. They said yeah, I got a USB to Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter and it let me get faster speeds, right? Unfortunately since this television is so new I had trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John finding people who had this television and had done that successfully So people like oh, I’ve got an 80 J or an
⏹️ ▶️ John a 90 J and I did this and that worked I was like, well, I don’t know, you know things change. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS version is different This is a brand new TV. I’m not sure what will work if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the USB to Ethernet adapters that you will see for sale you know, Amazon or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s tons of them, but there’s nothing to really distinguish them other than the price and some branding. They all kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John look the same. But this is not a computer, right? I don’t know. I can’t install drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I know to make this adapter work. So it’s either going to work or it’s not going to work. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I ordered one and I ordered, I picked a name brand. I ordered the anchor one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, I’ve heard of them. I have their power adapters or whatever. This seems like a, you know, reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John quality product. Let me try it. TV didn’t see it at all. Plug it in, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John happens. It’s totally invisible to television. There’s no way to make it detected as far as I can tell. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t work at all. In the time that it took to ship that, I had been doing more Google searching.
⏹️ ▶️ John I found someone with an actual A95K and they said I use this specific adapter and it works. So I just bought
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact one that they had. We’ll put a link in the show notes. It is one of those Amazon products with a giant name that I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to read right now, but it’s from Cable Matters. It looks exactly the same as the Anker one, but like a different
⏹️ ▶️ John color. And this one works. Apparently, the theory is that you have to have the RTL8153
⏹️ ▶️ John chipset inside the adapter, and that, you know, the Google TV OS will recognize.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, so you plug it in, it recognizes it, it works. I did a speed test. I wasn’t getting any gigabit, but I was peaking
⏹️ ▶️ John around seven or 800 megabits. So pretty good. And that’s much more convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John than getting a whole other Eero thing and putting the Wi-Fi two inches away. And I, you know, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since all my like top end Euro 6 Pro or whatever things
⏹️ ▶️ John are in use in the house. I would have to either buy another fancy one to get the maximum Wi-Fi speed or use
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my older, lesser ones that can’t even do the most modern Wi-Fi standards. And I also don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John what Wi-Fi standards the television supports. I don’t even know what the most modern one is. What is
⏹️ ▶️ John the top end one now? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco AC anymore. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even know. Six, yeah, they just went to numbers. Anyway, or six e I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Anyway, the USB to ethernet adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little weird and janky, and you might not think of it, but it worked. And so now that’s how my television is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected. Even though that’s a stupid thing, you shouldn’t even have to do that. I’m glad that was the answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Wi-Fi right next to it thing just kind of seemed dirty. It’s like it’s like when you wanted to, like, record stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a cassette when you were younger, before you knew anything and had anything. And it’s like, all right, I can hold my boombox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to the speaker of another radio and hit record and maybe it’ll work. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does kind of work, but not well, and it seems wrong, and it’s not the right way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m glad you found the correct way among the limited options that were available
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, honestly, it’s pretty shameful. If Sony’s gonna have this service, and the selling point is we have super high quality movies, what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John get good at ethernet porting a TV? It mostly has to do with, I think, the fact that even though the panel
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 895K is this fancy new Samsung Quantum.OLED thing, the guts of the TV
⏹️ ▶️ John are not substantially different in terms of like the decoding hardware and everything than they were on like last year’s model
⏹️ ▶️ John of Sony television. So that’s part of why the limit has the limitations in gaming and stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John the LG one doesn’t because LG is just ahead of them on their, sort of in the computer that is inside the television.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, that’s a shame, but seriously, you know, for a television this price is no reason it should
⏹️ ▶️ John have a hundred megabit ethernet port or at least it should warn you about it. Say, don’t use this, it’s bad. The fact that the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John port to the rescue, Geez, what a world.
Sponsor: Stack Overflow Podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by the Stack Overflow podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow podcast has been exploring what it means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a developer and how the art and practice of software programming is changing our world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have personally listened to the Stack Overflow podcast for most of that time, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to on a regular basis. Back of really, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been doing it for more than 12 years. I remember listening to it on my way back when I was working in the city working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Tumblr every day in like 2007 2008 kind of timeframe. I was listening to
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TV & TiVo follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ John So, in terms of the TiVo remote codes, I was trying to get my TiVo remote to control the power and the volume and everything on
⏹️ ▶️ John my television and first the codes weren’t working, then I swapped the batteries and then the codes were kind of working but it was janky,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially for like volume up and down. You’d hit the all volume up button and nothing would happen. You’d hit it again and it would go up three notches.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was not quite working right. So I actually did contact TiVo support, which
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently still exists, and said, hey, I’ve got this new TV. I tried entering in remote codes. None of them quite
⏹️ ▶️ John work the way I want them to. What should I do? And they replied and pointed me to the article that I had already
⏹️ ▶️ John seen that many other people pointed me to was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s how you can make the remote scan through all the codes with this, you know, point, you know, enter in 0999 and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will just go through all the codes and press the channel up button every two seconds to keep going through the codes.
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, that article tells you to do that. Like I understand what it’s saying, like, oh, it’s 10,000 codes. You’re not gonna type them all in yourself. So just let
⏹️ ▶️ John the remote do it for you. It never said what happens, what should happen. All it said is every two seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, allow at least two seconds between presses and then press channel up. First of all, why am I doing that? Why doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it just go through all the codes? And second of all, what is supposed to happen during this process? Like when it finds
⏹️ ▶️ John the code? Will it stop when it finds the code? How does it know when it finds coach I be watching for something
⏹️ ▶️ John that happens? Should I be watching for the tower to turn off and then I should hit a button to say, Hey, you found it. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John in the article doesn’t tell you what you should do. So either this doesn’t work at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John or I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do because I entered I tried it like three times and nothing happens the
⏹️ ▶️ John television just sits there showing whatever it’s showing the remote sits there and nothing ever happens
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t I don’t understand it at all but anyway they said that and that wasn’t helpful
⏹️ ▶️ John and they said uh if you have any other problems contact Sony so they passed the buck
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t know what I’m gonna do because contacting Sony seems like it will not be be fruitful. At least Tivo replied and had,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a suggestion, but not, not a great support experience
⏹️ ▶️ John because I feel like in the good old days of Tivo, it would be like, it’s their job to
⏹️ ▶️ John know all like they put these codes in the UI. It’s part of the Tivo experience is like, don’t worry, we’ll figure this out for you here. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a Sony television, here are the codes. We figured them all out. And when there’s a new code, we put the new code in the UI, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is a brand new TV and you would think, oh, we’re going to be on top of this new TV. We’ll have the new codes for our driver. But nope, they just said
⏹️ ▶️ John if it still doesn’t work, this is all we know, if it still doesn’t work, contact Sony.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m sorry, you said that you mash on the channel up button repeatedly, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so far, so good. Channel up is an interesting choice. But you said there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to indicate that it has worked? Because my expectation is, I’ve done this with remotes before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, we’ll talk about that later. And what you would typically do is do power or volume or something like that, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s generic across any sort of input. And then when you’ve hit the right one, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the volume changes or the TV turns off or what have you, then you hit a different button on the remote to say to the remote, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that was that last one, that was the one, save it. And you’re saying that there’s no option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that in the TiVo? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John all I’m saying is the support document didn’t say that. It just said, enter this code and then
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing at least two seconds between presses, keep pressing the channel up button and it will try all sorts of codes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The way you do it normally is, you hold down some buttons for five seconds, You enter a four digit code, and then you try
⏹️ ▶️ John the power button. Like entering the four digit code says, I’m going to be this kind of universal remote, this universal remote
⏹️ ▶️ John code, right? So as soon as, if you try the power button, it works, you’re done, because you don’t have to enter any more codes. Like that configuration
⏹️ ▶️ John process, hold down the button so the light turns on and type in the four digit code, that’s it, you’re done. There’s no other step.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the whole point of this other thing is it’s going to cycle through the codes. And I don’t, it didn’t say like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, when the television turns off, the remote will just magically know and it will stop cycling. Or when the television turns off, quick
⏹️ ▶️ John hit this button to tell the remote, hey, you found it. say that in the support article. So I don’t understand the support article says, Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, hold down the buttons that enter 0999. And then every two seconds, it channel up and then just live there for the rest of your
⏹️ ▶️ John life hitting channel up every two seconds. No idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real time follow up. RIP Mac, I guess rip Mac says in the chat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At the very bottom, it says, quote, if you press channel up and your TV turns off, press enter to select the code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Press the TV power button to test the code. If your TV turns on, you’ve successfully programmed the remote.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is interesting. This is a different document than the one I had because the one I was pointed to was
⏹️ ▶️ John At a different URL and it have the 099 I go not the one nine I guess the one nine nine ones for AV you stir receivers,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah All right, so I mean I can try that next time if it’s see if it’ll go through all the codes But I do wonder if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually using all Thousand of them the other thing is How many codes is it going through and
⏹️ ▶️ John how long gonna be? Sitting there hitting channel up because I know a couple of them were at least work for the power button and kind of work for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems to me like it’s just time to abandon that piece of crap Tivo. Am I right? No, still
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. Except for not 4k obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s got to be something that would serve these purposes without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually being a Tivo. And somebody wrote in to scold me justifiably, and I don’t have your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name in front of me, I’m sorry, but to say, you know, channels, which sponsored us once in the past, and one of the co
⏹️ ▶️ Casey founders is a personal friend of mine, but channels does darn near everything that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TiVo does and arguably does it better. So now I’m not a TiVo person. I’ve never been a TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person, so maybe, maybe I’m overselling here, but it is worth thinking about. Maybe it is time to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rid of the TiVo, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John And lots of people promoted the channels UI, especially as a way to not have to use the YouTube TV UI,
⏹️ ▶️ John which other YouTube TV users also complained about, like the guide thing only going one item at a time. I said, well, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about that because if you use channels, you don’t use the their UI. You can use the channels UI, which is really nice. Lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John raves for that. Problem with me for channels, at least right now, is the product that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have, like the hardware product that they have that accepts cable cards, they don’t manufacture anymore and haven’t manufactured it in a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. On their website, they say, oh, just go on eBay and get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not what I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for. I’m almost sure, I’m not gonna search for it while we’re live, but I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down this road just a couple of months ago to see if I could get the HD Home Run that takes a cable card.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am pretty sure Amazon had some in stock at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the channel, getchannels.com website links to eBay now. So, but the whole point is it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a product they make anymore. The website, they say, we don’t, we don’t make that anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m- No, I’m looking, actually, I’m looking at it right now. It’s Silicon Dust HD Home Run Prime Cable TV 3 Tuner. It takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cable card, 150 bucks on Amazon. Available right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but they don’t, they don’t make it anymore. Like it’s a dead product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t, and TiVo isn’t? Like, first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of all, TiVo is TiVo. No, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no TiVo. You can buy one right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, first of all, I don’t understand why you think it’s a dead product. If I’m looking at it, it’s- I know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t make it. They don’t make it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s true, John. I really honestly, I understand what Channel says. I’m not arguing that, but- One,
⏹️ ▶️ John this model is no longer manufactured. You can still find them on eBay though. That’s what it says
⏹️ ▶️ John on the getchannels.com website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but why wouldn’t you trust Silicon Dust? Like I’m pretty sure-
⏹️ ▶️ John But why don’t they make it anymore? Why is there no replacement for it? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, I think they do. I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John their website they don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but you’re getting confused. Channels doesn’t make the hardware. Channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about Silicon Dust’s hardware. Channels is software only. So they’re not the arbiter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what Silicon Dust is or is not doing. And so if you go to Silicon Dust’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website, it’s so busted and ancient, it says that it’s actually in development, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s available on Amazon right now. You can buy it right now. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tempted to send it to you right now, but I’m too cheap. So it is available. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a dead product. I really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it the same product they’re talking about? Cause then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why? Yes! I’m pretty sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the HD Home Run Prime?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, that’s what’s on it. Let me put the link in the show notes here.
⏹️ ▶️ John does Get Channel say, this model is no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey manufactured?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand what you’re saying. I get it. I really do. I can’t put an affiliate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link in, that’s annoying. Anyway, I just sent you the link.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, Amazon has plenty of things that aren’t manufactured anymore. But anyway, I mean, the real problem with the Get Channel
⏹️ ▶️ John thing from my perspective, aside from the sketchiness of getting something that works with cable card. And by the way, it only has three
⏹️ ▶️ John tuners instead of six, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. How often do you need to record more than three things at once?
⏹️ ▶️ John A surprising amount of time, because I’ve had six tuners for many, many years, and you just get used to not having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you have time to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John all of this TV? Yes, seriously. It’s just sometimes, it’s not that there’s so much TV, it’s just like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a popular times for shows to be on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you watch every, so you’re recording like ABC, CBS, Fox, in all, I can’t even,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NBC. I’m not network TV, come on, I’m like this and
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s madness.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John On cable shows, there are popular times where there’s multiple things on and then you might want to be watching something else. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think I need six, but three is pushing. Cause I think I had a three tuner TiVo and sometimes you would bump into limits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then get two of them. No, no, I mean, it starts to add up. Anyway, the other thing about the, you know, so that thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the cable cards is the cable
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco card box thing
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t actually record anything. It is just to ferry the signal. So
⏹️ ▶️ John then you need to run the channel software on some device. And to its credit, the channel thing runs on tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of things. It runs on Synology, you can run it on a PC, I think you can run it on a bunch of Apple devices, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that means that you need to have a hard drive that you’re gonna dedicate to this, or at least have enough hard drive space to store stuff, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have as much space as you want, but bad in that now you have to buy and build this thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I did look, I’m so kind of-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, Sean, I have it running on a Mac mini, the Mac, the Reefer Mac mini that I just bought like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month ago. And you know where it saves all of its stuff? To the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because why wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think you can run it on the Synology. You don’t even need a Mac Mini. Potentially, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe when my TiVo finally dies, I will probably look into this. I mean, what I really want to do is not have the cable card either,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is kind of the direction they’re going. You can do the whatever TV Anywhere thing where it uses the API to get the stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it still kind of seems like on the fringes even more so than TiVo, because TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John for all its wonkiness has a very established tech stack. There’s nothing in the tech
⏹️ ▶️ John stack that is imminently going to be destroyed, other than cable card being essentially discontinued, which is a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But aside from that, no sort of streaming service is angry that TiVo is recording
⏹️ ▶️ John channels and stuff like that, whereas I can imagine the various streaming services, even the ones that do currently support whatever API
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using to scrape video from the web, might decide that it’s not in their best interest to support that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Already, some of them don’t support it. So it just seems, it seems like more moving parts
⏹️ ▶️ John and more stuff to deal with. Now, that said, I’m kind of interested in just using it just to see the interface and just
⏹️ ▶️ John connecting it to streaming services because you don’t have to use Cable Card or do any cable. You can just point it, like sign in with your
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming service credentials or also sign in with like your cable credentials and it will try to pull them from the web too
⏹️ ▶️ John because you don’t need to use a Cable Card to use this. So I’m gonna look into that to see how that goes because if I
⏹️ ▶️ John can get YouTube TV-ish 4K content for regular shows through,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, without Cable Card, which is what I want kind of also a dead end. I may be interested in that. But really, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to see what the UI looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So real-time follow-up from John Maddox, who is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aforementioned co-founder of channels. I said, is this still being manufactured,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey linking him what I did on Amazon? And he said, they found more of the chips last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’ve been selling it again for a year.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a box in the back
⏹️ ▶️ John had some more chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in it. And so he said, having Fios, which you do, John, you’re silly for not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one for channels. It’s hands down the best setup. And he said, yeah, they weren’t for sale for a while. And I told him, you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very worked up about the website. And he said he would change it for you tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the time you look at this, listener, if you look in the show notes, you may not see what John saw,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it will be updated soon. Anyway, John Maddox, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey co-founder, said it’s not a dead product or it’s not any more dead than Cable Card is as a whole.
⏹️ ▶️ John go. So the co-founder of the company says that you should get this product. Got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. John, again, he doesn’t care whether you, he doesn’t get a cut from HD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Run. It’s a different entire company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I get it. That’s also kind of part of the problem. It doesn’t sound like you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it though, because channels is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John software. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John reading their website that said it was no longer manufactured, and that made, and they also didn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John information about another cable card model. And I was like, okay, well fine, this one isn’t manufactured, but I’ll just buy the new one, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t have a link to that either. So that makes me think I mean, I know I was saying like I said, cable card itself
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, not really going to be going concern for much longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it kind of isn’t anymore either. But it’s what I’m currently using and Tivo supported.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I would and you can buy a brand new Tivo today that supports a model that is still manufactured.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Tivo still got that one up there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I hear you. And as much as I love poking fun at you for using this ancient ass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piece of technology, I really genuinely think that you would probably be better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey served by using channels and and this one of these boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to take it, what I would suggest to channels is like for someone like me, who’s like a Mac person, like
⏹️ ▶️ John suggest a build like I would build myself a little PC or, you know, suggest like what is the best
⏹️ ▶️ John experience? Should I use my Synology or is mine too old and weak? Should I use a Mac Mini like you? That seems
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty expensive way to do this, right? And you have that pressure if there was like a little Oh, here’s, you know, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to build yourself a PC that works great with this setup, here’s a cheap way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Because I don’t want to go through the research of building my own PC that does all this stuff and I’m not quite ready to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a new Synology yet, I don’t want to spend a thousand plus dollars on a Mac Mini to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So faced with that kind of situation where, oh, they don’t even make it, it’s a different company, it’s all different people
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the things they want, but if I just want to go in and say, I don’t want to deal with any of this, I just want something that’s as easy as TiVo or as
⏹️ ▶️ John close as I can get, they’re still a little far from that in terms of the setup. If that’s not what you want, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to customize it, you can build the way you want, you can put the storage that you want, then channels is great. And apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody loves the UI, which is the main reason I’m looking into it. But if you’re just looking for that TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John type experience, now that TiVo is slowly fading away, no one is there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear what you’re saying. But consider that I use a Mac mini because I don’t want to deal with supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And you have a Mac mini. Like if I had one, I would use it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I wasn’t doing any of this, I believe they have a build for Raspberry Pis. And of course, if I’m not gonna solve a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem with the Synology, then I’ll solve it with the Raspberry Pi. But I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you’re making this out to be much harder than it really is. I understand what you’re saying. I really honestly do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you got one of these tuner things, these HD home runs, which again, completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and utterly different company than channels. If you got one of these and put your cable card that was currently in the TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into this and hooked it up to any computer in the house. You have so many computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that house. I mean, any computer that’s running 24-7 or really running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John any time that you- I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna get up, I would have to be in the basement. This stuff, that type of thing can’t be in the upstairs with the people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What thing? What thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not in the, like, you know, any computer that’s, unless it’s completely silent,
⏹️ ▶️ John any other computer doesn’t stay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, is Tina’s iMac on 24-7? It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John not an iMac. She has a Mac Studio and it’s under the desk it’s on 24-7 and it’s silent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then, so run, run the channel software on the Mac Studio. You’ve already got your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John problems. Oh, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to do that. Why? Because I don’t know. You’re restarting the computer while someone’s watching TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? How often do you restart the computer? I don’t know what she does in her computer. It’s her computer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John she does not want, and I don’t want the state of her computer to affect people watching television.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unacceptable entanglement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are being incredibly difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I run the Plex server on her thing, but Plex, I don’t have. Oh my god, John! Why is that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it different?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I don’t have an SLA on my Plex server and I’m the only person who knows how to use Plex so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s not like it has anyone else’s stuff on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Holy smokes, my dude. Am
⏹️ ▶️ John I also run the Plex server on the Synology too. So if the Plex server is- I have so many Plex servers in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hit that Plex server and you can go to the one on- I have it on two Synologies. So you can go to either one. And yes, they all point
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t even have two Plex servers running in this house, and I’m obsessed with Plex. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should, it’s handy. I have everything being mirrored, right? So I have that her
⏹️ ▶️ John Plex server points to the Synology with just an SMB mount of the Synology, right? Yeah, that’s the way mine works.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Synology obviously runs Plex with its local storage. And then I have a second Synology
⏹️ ▶️ John that I clone the first Synology to, and that runs its own copy of Plex on the clone of data, which is kept in
⏹️ ▶️ John sync with that synchronization service that we couldn’t remember the name of that at the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, all I’m saying is this doesn’t have to be as difficult as you’re making it out to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand how you got to where you are, but you are making this way harder than it needs to be. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John say what I really just want is a 4K TiVo. Do you have the co-founder of TiVo on the phone with you? Oh no, they’re long gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but I can tell you this, I don’t know if actually channels does do 4K, but I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you if anything could feed at 4K, I would be surprised if it didn’t accept it and eat it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think to get 4K, it would have, I mean, I don’t know, but I don’t think Cable Car can even handle that. I think it would have to be the
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming service thing because GetChannels can just pull stuff from your streaming service and any of the various streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John service. That’s how it works with YouTube TV and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although I think that’s 720, which is not channels’ fault. I think that’s what the streaming service
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gives you via TV everywhere, but I could be wrong about that. All, I don’t know. All I’m saying is the software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is super easy to install. Migrating it is hilariously, when I migrated from the old Mac mini to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Mac mini, doing the Plex migration was not a nightmare, but was not fun. And doing the channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey migration was basically install the channel software and then point it at the right folder and then magic happens. And it’s as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though it was on that machine forever. So it really is really, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, John, the other John, is a friend of mine. I’m a little bit biased, but I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kicking and screaming into using channels. He kept beating me up about it, like, why are you using Plex? Why are you using Plex? Use this, use this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think channels is a reasonable replacement for Plex, although you could do that. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will say as a DVR, channels really is fantastic. Plus you can set it up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do fun things like make a virtual channel that just plays Letterkenny 24-7, which I have done,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever your particular vice may be. So genuinely, I mean, they are a former sponsor. The guy is a friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mine. So take all this with as much salt as you desire, but hand to God, it really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is great software and it’s worth trying out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I will try as much of it as I can without changing any hardware setups and just to see if I like the
⏹️ ▶️ John UI or whatever, and then I’ll see where I go. Kind of like I did with YouTube TV. I knew when I got the new setup, I was going to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I got, I stumbled on the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would definitely give it a roll.
TV box follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ John The final TV thing the mystery of the box How does that box work?
⏹️ ▶️ John The top and the bottom halves don’t seem to stay together and yet somehow it got into my house the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John was that apparently I blacked out when the TV was delivered because When it was delivered to my house
⏹️ ▶️ John it had two of those like Thin plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John mesh straps that come on packages wrapped around the thing So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll put it up on a tweet in the show notes. You can see exactly what it looks like. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I cut those off and that’s what was holding the top to the bottom. But I totally forgot that I had cut those off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, sweet. I mean, no, I mean, you can’t. They’re not like you have to cut them off to open the box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to properly disconnect those and throw them away without cutting your hand?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you just gotta be careful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally every time I operate those plastic strap things like, all right, careful, get like don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a cut like it’s like a paper cut. Easy, easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sliding it through your hands or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, somehow I do that and I always cut my finger like it’s like a big paper cut. It’s terrible. It’s like the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have I have never operated those things and successfully gotten them from the box to the trash can all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way without getting a cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, those things are a nightmare. All right, anything else about your TV or you are you solid?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s it for now. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are you enjoying it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh yeah, we watch some stuff on it. I mean you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey having a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’ve been podcasting a lot, but so other people have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco been watching it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John having a fancy TV really, you know, now it was easier before when I could be like, oh, this show is in 1080.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this is an HDR. Like all the things that I never noticed
⏹️ ▶️ John about before. Now there’s this hierarchy of like, you’re more excited
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch shows that take advantage of the features of your new TV and less excited to do ones that, because
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, like a 1080 SDR show, it looks better than it did on my old TV, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not wow you better, because it’s 1080 and it’s SDR and it’s being upscaled. And you know, so.
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Vacation tech: Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The two of you went on vacation recently, and I was curious to hear your respective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech experiences. You know, every year when John does this trip, we get a camera report of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the camera situation has changed and evolved and how it performed. And Casey, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you take your vacation, usually I know you take good drone photos, and you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected at least four or five Apple TVs to a hotel or rental TV at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through your various HDMI cables that you keep in your travel pack. So I’m wondering what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of tech experiences do you have on your vacations?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, let me start, because I don’t think I have that much, to be honest with you. The big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to-do with regard to my travel a couple of weeks back was the aforementioned issues with HomeKit and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV, and the Apple TV being convinced that my home was actually now in Cape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charles rather than in Richmond, which was super fun. But other than that, not that much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that different. Having my desktop computer come with me was kind of neat because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only have a laptop now and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that is my only computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Desktop laptop. Yep, yep, yep. So that was kind of neat. I kind of liked that. It was nice to be able to process photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as I do with my Kakumimi setup. And then because I was connected to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VPN at home, I could copy and upload all of those photos to the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as though I was at home from the beach. So I didn’t have to do like, you know, several hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of going through all of them when I got home. I just did a little bit each day with the pictures I had taken and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just uploaded them just like I always do. Granted, it was a little bit slower from the beach because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were on a, you know, a cable connection with not a particularly strong upload side connection,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco nevertheless-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You couldn’t find a really fast bench there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, exactly. No, unfortunately not. But nevertheless, you know, it’s nice having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your desktop with you, which I enjoy. And then I wrote a blog post about this a week ago, and I’ll put this in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes, but I have, as Marco mentioned, a GoPack. And what I mean by that is, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a—it’s actually a Harry’s, former sponsor Harry’s Shaving—I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a Harry’s toiletry kit that just so happens to be like a perfect size to carry all of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey travel cables and things and whatnot. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it used to be that I had just an obscene amount of cables in there. And in short,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I did was I had one of those plug-it-into-the-wall boxes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it had five USB-A connections on it. And so I would typically use four of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the very least. I would use one for Aaron’s phone, one for Aaron’s watch, one for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone, one for my watch. And then I would have some USB-A extension cables so that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the box would be on my side of the bed, but I could put a couple extensions and then a lightning cable on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of those extensions so I could get the, you know, connection all the way to Erin’s side of the bed so she can put her phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down when she’s ready rather than having to hand it to me for me to plug in. And it was just cables upon cables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upon cables upon cables and it was annoying. And what I ended up doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we spoke about, you know, a few episodes ago is getting these absurdly overpriced Mophie things and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was super nice because all I had to do was plug in two of those. And then they have MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have, you know, the Apple Watch chargers on them. And that worked out real well, and I liked that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did bring the Apple TV and connected that via HDMI. I connected the Switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Switch dock via HDMI. And oh, and the other thing I did was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Merlin turned me onto this idea. I brought with me, I don’t remember the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model name, but it’s on the blog post that I’ll link in the show notes. I brought my own universal remote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I use now when I go to hotels or Airbnbs and whatnot. Because people say, and maybe this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BS, but people say that remote controls are some of the most disgusting things in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hotel room or what have you. And because of that, I’ve decided, yep, no thanks, I’ll just bring my own, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit tinfoil hat, I’ll be the first to tell you. But I did that and that lets you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey program in what TV or whatever you’re using based on a four or five digit code. And it also does the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scanny dance like we were talking about earlier. But I brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and used that on the TV there and that worked great. And unlike last year, I didn’t lose one of the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remotes in the house, so I didn’t have to spend $70 when I got home. So that was good. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco an expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really pissed. And this was right after it came out too. I was really, really pissed about it. But nonetheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now it worked out real well. The drone, I didn’t use it quite as much. It was really windy when we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were there. And windier than my little Mavic Mini, or DJI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini 2 could handle. But I did take a few shots. And I gotta tell you, even though I don’t use the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drone that often, about a year and change on, maybe a year and a half on, I am still glad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bought it and I still do enjoy using it. And I still think aerial photography is super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun, partially because it’s just not something that a lot of people are capable of doing in the sense that they haven’t spent obscene
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of money on a drone. But I do enjoy it quite a bit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish I had had the opportunity to get out more, but like I said, it was just the weather was super crummy in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms of wind, like it was fine in human terms, But for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drone, it was really bad. And that was unfortunate. But I think that was mostly it. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only problem I had was when we’re driving up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like to use my GoPro as kind of a poor man’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dash cam. And what I’ll do is I’ll put the GoPro pointed out the front of Aaron’s car, and I’ll put it on time-lapse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode so it takes a picture, a still, every second. And my theory is it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than nothing if God forbid we get in some sort of accident, I’ll have some sort of documentation of what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the problem with that, though, is that on a two and a half hour trip, which in this case ended up being three and a half hours because of traffic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the GoPro will deplete its battery during the span of that time. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically use a battery pack that I keep in my laptop bag, which is also mentioned in this blog post. I’ll connect that to the GoPro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’ll keep the GoPro charged fine. But in this case, I thought to myself, I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I could use my travel computer charger,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a very unremarkable, what is it, GAN, with GAN, I don’t remember, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gallium nitride? Something like that, yeah, yeah. So basically, it’s a physically small charger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought, man, I wonder if I could use that to plug in, so it’s an AC adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wonder if I could plug in the GoPro in my iPad, which I was using for most of the trip, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe even my computer if I felt it, plug both of those into the AC adapter, and then we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very, very old inverter. So this is a thing, you plug it into the cigarette lighter, and it has an AC outlet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the other end. And I thought, well, I wonder if I could plug this in and power the GoPro off of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car rather than this battery pack, and then plug in my iPad as well, which would be kind of nice, because my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, since my switch to Verizon, it has cellular service. And I gotta tell you, you know, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you known how wonderful it is to have cellular service on a device other than your phone? Imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, how freaking great it would be to have that on your desktop laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are we, are you talking about Verizon’s ultra-fast worldwide 5G network?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s exactly right. But seriously, I really wish I had the option for that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a computer, because I know it would be obscenely expensive and I would grumble about it for months, but I would be so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it. No, it wouldn’t have to be. It’s only like $129 premium on the iPad. Yeah, but you know they would charge 250 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a Mac. Well, of course they would, but it doesn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. I feel like we do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a slight disservice whenever we make it seem like this is some huge reach to add cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a Mac. It’s not. It’s been done on PCs forever, and you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on Macs with those USB dongle modem things that they’ve had forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do those still exist? I used to use those back in the day. I don’t know if they still exist. I don’t even know. They probably do, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like this is a hard thing to add cellular to laptops. It can be done. And yeah, there’s a couple of minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I have to do with Mac OS to make it aware of like, hey, maybe don’t download the latest episode of Mad Men
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey over cellular and burn up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey usage. Not that you’ve ever done that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, definitely not. But you know, they already have almost all of that infrastructure in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place in the, you know, recent URL session and URL connection APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All that stuff is already there for detecting metered connections and limited connections and stuff like that. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that much work to add cellular to the laptops. Just like, what are we waiting for? Just do it. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, please. But anyway, so I wanted to power all this via my inverter and the inverter, we haven’t used that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in years. It still works, but I think the last thing that was plugged into it was a breast pump when Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was breastfeeding. So it hasn’t been used in a while. But nevertheless, I tried plugging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this, I don’t know, 80, 90 watt GAN charger and the inverter was like, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope, that’s way too much. And so none of this was a problem, but I have since purchased, and I’ll put a link in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes, a pure sine wave inverter, which is very cool. And that has two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AC outlets on it and supposedly is up to 300 watts. And actually, it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a 60 watt USB-C PD port on it in and of itself. So I may not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even need to plug in my GaN charger if I’m only plugging in one device. But anyway, I’m going to try that out next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time we’re on a longer trip and see if that works because that would be kind of cool. I don’t know, for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part it was basically same old stuff, but I tell you when you do have your travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup locked in and squared away, which I feel like I do pretty well now, it is super nice. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I preach the gospel of the GoPack. Just have a package or packet or a bag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you that has cables that you never, ever use for anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You never, ever use for anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One more time, you never use it for anything else. And then, you know at a moment’s notice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all you have to do is grab that bag. You don’t have to worry about, oh, I gotta undo the thing by the bed, or oh, I gotta do this, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotta do that. No, you just grab the bag. You grab the bag and you’re set. I cannot preach this gospel loudly enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I too do that. So first of all, I used to be a little bit more of a backpack nerd,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had three or four different bags. I would watch Chase Reeves’ reviews on YouTube and get all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cool bags he recommended, and I loved how cool the different ones were. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I realized over time that it was kind of a pain in the butt to have a bunch of different bags to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to like keep stuff shuffled between or never quite have the stuff you think you have or have to maintain duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copies of everything. So I went down to just having one backpack and that’s the backpack I bring to everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in that backpack are is what you’re what you’re talking about like a complete set of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables, chargers, adapters, and those things are only used outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my home. They are never used in the home. are never taken out of the backpack because then they will never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back into the backpack. And then when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m out somewhere, I won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them. So that’s, I do the same thing and it is so, so worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s expensive. Like a lot of these things like Apple dongles are super expensive. These freaking $150
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mophie things that I do love, but obviously that’s silly expensive. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do genuinely think as frugal as I am spending the money on having a complete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go pack that is redundant for things that you would use in the house. I can’t speak it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highly enough. I mean, and the good thing is too, like over time we need fewer of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, and this is, by the way, this is part of the reason why I push so hard on getting rid of lightning, because if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of lightning, I need even fewer of these things, but you know, like now that everything is USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere, you know, we have USB-C multi-port chargers, as you mentioned, like the new generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of GAN chargers is even smaller and can fit even more ports and even more wattage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we have this amazing abundance of great charging equipment and technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, and it’s really just kind of waiting for Apple to make it simpler. Like, you know, the thorns on my side are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, are lightning and the Apple Watch. Like those, those things needing their own special charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are annoying, but otherwise like so many things that we used to need in the past, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need. And with this new generation of laptops, you don’t even need most of the dongles anymore. Like you need a way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB-A sometimes, but that’s about it. Like, you know, I have my SD card now built in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDMI is built in if I ever need it, although I probably won’t, but you know, you do, you know, other people use it. So a lot of that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went away now, it’s a new generation. So, you know, hopefully we’ll keep moving this direction and get more and more standardized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more USB-C stuff, you know, fewer custom chargers from Apple and fewer reasons to carry around like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mini USB adapters for other crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, yep, yep. John, how was your trip?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna comment on the travel bag thing first, because you guys talk about this a lot and Merlin talks about it a lot and you know, But
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s a thing that makes you feel good to have, which obviously it does for both of you,
⏹️ ▶️ John then fine. But I would say, practically speaking, I don’t think either one of you travels enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a requirement in your life. You’re not a spy that the CIA is gonna call you until your
⏹️ ▶️ John identity is burned and you have to leave in a moment’s notice and you wanna make sure you have all the adapters. Like it’s just a fun
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you’re doing, either to keep Dave and dogs at bay or just because it’s a fun convenience that you can spend a little bit extra
⏹️ ▶️ John money for and it gives Marco something to put in his backpacks. but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I certainly don’t travel. Backpack, singular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m sorry. Backpack monogamous now. I’ve given up my old ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John I travel so little, and when I do travel, I bring the stuff that I need. It’s not a big
⏹️ ▶️ John deal, but you know, if this is a thing that you’re into and you wanna have a go bag, you can have a go bag. I do not have
⏹️ ▶️ John a go bag. When I go, I put things in a bag. It’s a little bit different. Boo. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cool, it’s fun. I’m just saying, like, if you’re listening to this, and we preach the same gospel, like, oh, you really need backups or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna say this is a different category of things. Like back up your family photos, but if you don’t have a go bag, you’ll probably be fine. Unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like a frequent business travel, in which case you should definitely have this because you will forget stuff. But none
⏹️ ▶️ John of us are frequent business travelers. By the way, I travel more than both of you. I know, you go back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But when you do that, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing your go bag because you’ve got stuff in both places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’m bringing my backpack every time. You know what’s also in my backpack? The car key, the house key,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an inhaler. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, do you have to have a special go bag keep your wallet and car keys in. No, everyone just puts them in, brings them
⏹️ ▶️ John with them when they go. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, but you know, if I’m going to, like, you know, take a boat across the bay first, like I want to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sure that that you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing like make sure you have adapters to connect to your iPad and your phone and your watch charger like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not essential for you to bring with you because there is a watch charger and an iPad charger
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that stuff at both places you’re going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I can take the exact same bag with me, whether I’m just going to Westchester or whether I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flying across the country. Like I know I can take that same bag and have the things I need. And the things you’re talking about are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a massive amount of size or weight or cost. You’re talking about like three cables, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John just feel like you could also pack that bag when you need to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But why would you, why wouldn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone who I think, and I am a very nervous traveler, but I think of the three of us, you are the worst. For someone who was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a nervous traveler, just cross this off the list.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never travel anywhere. Not traveling is the most relaxing. Yeah.
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Vacation tech: John
⏹️ ▶️ John So speaking of traveling, one, I mean, you know, I’ve been going to Long Island every summer for many, many years now.
⏹️ ▶️ John We rent places down there. We used to have, we had like two steady places that we rented.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them we outgrew and the other one, the people stopped renting it basically, which was kind of a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But and so we’ve rented in many other places in between. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re listening to this and you have a rental house, please make sure that in this day and age,
⏹️ ▶️ John your internet stuff works. It amazes me how many places,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never been in a place with good internet. And I’m like, do people ever live in this house? And one case I
⏹️ ▶️ John knew they did. This was someone’s actual house where they lived. They just rented it out for the summer. But how do they tolerate not
⏹️ ▶️ John having good internet in their house? And maybe it’s like they make it bad
⏹️ ▶️ John when the summer renters come and then they make it good again and how would they make it bad and good? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John there seems to be this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing with people- Why do they make it back? Well, I’ll explain it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John There seems to be this thing that every place that I’ve ever rented, like they let
⏹️ ▶️ John you use their house. You’re in there, you’re using their house. You know, if you ever had a rental house, there’s usually some part of the house or some
⏹️ ▶️ John part was like locked up that has like the owner’s stuff that you’re not supposed to go into, right? That makes sense. Like, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John touch the good China. Like, this is where the stuff from our bedroom is. Don’t go in there. That’s fine. That all makes sense, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But 100% of the time, in all the rental houses I’ve ever been in, the internet router,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, internet connection stuff is one of those things that they lock up. Oh, really? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever seen that. Always. No, I’ve always seen it like, you know, shoved behind the TV. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah. All the rental houses have been, it is locked up somewhere. It’s locked in a basement, it’s locked in
⏹️ ▶️ John a cabinet, it’s just all locked up. And you would think, okay, well, that’s so like the renters don’t screw it up
⏹️ ▶️ John because non-techie people are gonna come in and they’re gonna, something’s not gonna work and they’re like, I can fix it and they’ll screw it up
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they’re gonna call the owners and say, hey, the internet doesn’t work and then it’s just a big hassle. so lock it up so they can’t screw
⏹️ ▶️ John it up, right? That would be fine, except it’s pretty screwed up almost all the time. And the second
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is where they lock it up is often someplace that doesn’t acknowledge the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that, hey, do you realize that’s where your wifi is coming from? You’ve put it in the basement in a locked room in the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think I’m gonna get that wifi in the living room on the other side of the house anymore? No, you buried the router. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the source of your wifi. Oh, just put it like a repeater. No, the repeater doesn’t help when it’s on the other side of the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a hundred feet and three floors from the actual source of the wifi. And I know this because what I always do when I go into these houses
⏹️ ▶️ John is I say, where the hell is this people’s internet stuff? Like, what are they using and let me find it. Like, let me set
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s always locked up. So this year we went to a house, the same house we went to last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s internet is so bad, just it might as well be useless. A lot of the time it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t load any web pages, it’s just down. And you know, is that because like the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John internet is down from their provider? I don’t think so. Part of it might have to do with the fact where they lock
⏹️ ▶️ John up their stuff, right? The clue, if you search the house and you’re like, where the hell is it
⏹️ ▶️ John locked up? Because there are sections of it that are closed off. Like it must be in there, I guess. But no, based on signal strength, that doesn’t seem like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where it is. They use Eero, so you can find an Eero. So like, I found an Eero, but it’s just a, you know, it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the satellite things. It’s not the thing. Like there’s no ethernet cable going into it, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using Eero, and the wifi signal strength is good everywhere because Eero is good at blanking you with wifi. But where
⏹️ ▶️ John is the actual, where does the internet come from? And if you pick up that eero and turn it over, you see
⏹️ ▶️ John the ominous word in Sharpie written on the bottom of this eero, which is shed.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? So their internet stuff was in their backyard in a
⏹️ ▶️ John locked shed, far from the house. It’s a wooden shed, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John locked up, it’s got a padlock on it. And that’s where their internet, how does,
⏹️ ▶️ John is cable buried under the ground? Is cable internet, like how does the internet get to there? But either
⏹️ ▶️ John way, when it goes down and the light on the arrow turns red and you can’t get anywhere, there’s nothing you can do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when it’s up, it’s just the speeds are awful. Like I would do the thing you’re, speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, like reviewing photos on vacation. That’s what I do. You take pictures during the day. I load them onto my laptop that
⏹️ ▶️ John I brought with me. I sort through them or whatever. Usually have a slideshow at night showing the day’s photos to the family, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John also the other function I’m doing is I load them onto the computer and then I usually leave the computer like plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John in and on so it can shove them up the iCloud photo library, right? In this house, if you leave this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing open while you’re asleep, it will upload like three photos. Like the upload speeds and the connection
⏹️ ▶️ John is so bad that it’s like, it’s pointless, right? You know, so when we go there, this is the house that we’re in, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of my family’s in another house that’s like a couple blocks away. Their internet connection at least works well
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to upload. So what I would do is I would go over their house, plug my laptop in, shove it in a corner and let it upload, because
⏹️ ▶️ John at least, you know, it would progress over time. So that continues to be a frustration. People locking
⏹️ ▶️ John their internet stuff in obscure locations because I mean, again, I get it. I understand they don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John people screwing with it, but it just plain doesn’t work half the time. And then you get kids there and they’re all on their devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they’re complaining the internet doesn’t work. Luckily, they both have phones, so worst case scenario, you just drop back to 5G, which is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John what they did. And now you just hope you don’t burn through all your data because the kids just give up on WiFi because it never works
⏹️ ▶️ John and the cellular is faster anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was it the Verizon nationwide ultra?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, on all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t ultra wide band like the bench though. So it was just at least web pages
⏹️ ▶️ John will load And of course, my daughter’s always on Spotify, so that’s all streaming all the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we are using a lot of bandwidth, but yeah, the Wi-Fi is just grim. And at the other house, the Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John is better, but still not good. I’m not sure where their router is locked up. I didn’t go searching for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, every house has bad Wi-Fi. I don’t know how people live like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I’m surprised, because like, so I live in a vacation town, and so almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house here gets rented on a regular basis in the summertime. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear standard here is that people usually make the Wi-Fi router easily accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of the house, by whatever the primary TV is in the living room. And the reason why, first of all, it’s there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s where they installed it. Because that’s where Verizon usually, this is a Fios town. That’s where Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always defaults to installing it. And it’s accessible because what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more often happens than people messing it up is that they get there doesn’t work like what happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you and they call the owner or management company like hey the wi-fi doesn’t work and somebody has to go reboot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and it’s much easier and more practical for them to just tell the renter just unplug it and plug it back in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can like kind of fix it themselves rather than having to send somebody out there who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has access to the owner’s shed or whatever so like that’s i’m surprised yours have done that way because if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s rented like every summer it’s a different piece or at least to a bunch of people i’m surprised that issue hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been bothersome enough to them that they haven’t just been like, hey, fix it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, well, part of the thing is when the eero light turns red and it’s like, I have no interconnection. I didn’t do anything to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It eventually fixed itself and it went back to its normal, terrible speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know what caused that. And maybe something is rebooting inside the shed or whatever. At the previous house,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a habit of bringing a Wi-Fi extender with me. This is in the days before eero. I would bring a Wi-Fi extender
⏹️ ▶️ John so I could get the Wi-Fi signal from where I knew it was locked up and I would sort of daisy chain these cheap Wi-Fi extenders.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my gosh. Not a mesh network, not like Eero, but just like a repeater to get the signal. And that would
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so, because it was so bad in that house that in the main sort of living room, the one with this big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John 80s sectional sofa, like the biggest sofa I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ll just show you a picture over to Slayer. It’s very 80s. This house
⏹️ ▶️ John was super 80s. Like it was so 80s that it had, I think I’ve talked about it before, like the in-wall intercoms that
⏹️ ▶️ John rich people houses had in the 80s. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like the new tone, like radio, so you could pump radio and a cassette player to play through all the speakers throughout the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Super 80s. Welcome to Long Island. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John It was such a time capsule. It was amazing. But in the main room with a giant sectional and what was originally a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John rear projection television, again, total 80s rich people house, right? There was zero wifi. You just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you couldn’t do anything, right? So I had
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where we wanted to be hanging out. And like, as we got more and more devices, it would be like, well, you could be on the comfortable couches talking with people,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you could be in this room on like, sitting on this uncomfortable wicker thing, but you can get wifi. And people would slowly migrate in that
⏹️ ▶️ John direction because they just wanted to be able to use their phones. Anyway, so that’s what I used to do there.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this house, what I considered, because I’ve watched a lot of YouTube, I’ve watched enough lock picking
⏹️ ▶️ John channels to know how to pick those combination
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey padlocks. Oh my word. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know the combination
⏹️ ▶️ John padlocks? Like most of those things where you have a wheel where you turn the zero through nine numbers, right, on each one.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s pretty simple ways, if you watch YouTube videos, how to open those locks with nothing more
⏹️ ▶️ John than your fingers and feel. It’s not as easy as they make it look, especially when the lock is outdoors and rusted. But I considered
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that, but I’m like, you know how you’re breaking and entering? Don’t, just go to the other house. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s what I did. I went to their house to do my uploading. So I did manage to get everything uploaded. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about, did I talk about photography stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know about that. No, you talked very briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Rec Tips about it, but not here yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, so I brought the two cameras this year. I brought the camera that Marco gave me, a 7 III. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cursed gift, yes, thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, which I was cursed to buy very expensive lenses for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was literally laughing out loud when I heard that. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John delightful. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I bought my previous year’s camera, the a6600, with,
⏹️ ▶️ John and my plan this year was to not change lenses at the beach, which is something I had done in past years and I’m pretty good at doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s always nerve wracking. You know, there’s wind, there’s sand, there’s water, there’s kids running around,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the area where you’re sitting, kicking up stuff, like, yeah. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to change lenses at the beach, but I always have to, my super long lens to get the kids out in the waves and I’ve got,
⏹️ ▶️ John when everyone’s back on the blanket, you can’t be using a really long zoom because they’re two inches away from you and you know, playing on the beach, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. So my plan was to use my really long zoom lens on my
⏹️ ▶️ John a6600 and then use a more reasonable length
⏹️ ▶️ John on the a7 because I don’t have a really long zoom for the a7. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to get a decent quality, really long zoom lens for a full frame camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John A, they’re as big as a truck and B, they’re really expensive, right? So I don’t have one of those. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John have it on the small one. I’ll put the links in the show notes, but the small one I have is the Sony 70-350. So it’s 70-350, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an ABS-C sensor, so that 350 is actually whatever the equivalent is, probably like 400, 500. And it’s a good lens.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s the most expensive lens I have for my small camera. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John ABS-C is not a big deal, because it’s super sunny at the beach, like you don’t need extra light gathering or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that setup served me pretty well. And then on the, on Marco’s camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the horrendously expensive Sony 24 to 70 GM2,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is smaller and lighter than the original GM, which is why I got it, which is why they got it to liberate
⏹️ ▶️ John that money from my wallet, because I wasn’t gonna buy the other one because it’s like, oh, it’s kind of an old lens and it’s big and it’s heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they said, but wait, here’s exactly the lens you wanted, but now it’s smaller and it’s lighter and it’s brand new. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John got that and it was very expensive, but it’s also very- It probably cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than the camera. It
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also have, I got a used 85 millimeter 1.8. I think I talked about it on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I didn’t really use that on vacation. So these are the two lenses I used. It was great not having to swap
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses, but I did find myself in the slightly awkward situation
⏹️ ▶️ John of now I have to swap cameras. Usually not a big deal, because hey, if you’re down by
⏹️ ▶️ John the waves, you have the one camera, right? But very often, if you’re not familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with the ways of Long Island beaches, There are lifeguards sitting in chairs trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep you alive. But in general, on the Long Island beaches, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John use surfboards or boogie boards, you’re not allowed to use them where the lifeguards are. I always wondered about that. It’s been that way
⏹️ ▶️ John since I was a kid. Like, I guess, you know, you’re more likely to drown when you’re using them. Does it make harder for the lifeguard to see? I don’t actually know
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasoning behind that. It’s just something I never questioned because it’s just been part of my life. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my best guess is a combination of like, if you’re going to do stuff like far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out on floating devices, they don’t want to be responsible for you. And then secondarily, maybe that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re in their zone, you know, they have to keep watch over the water constantly. And if it’s probably hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to watch a couple of people way out there and also a whole bunch of people like really close to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, it’s not really a distance thing because they don’t let you use a boogie boards even if you use it two feet from the shore. Right. They just no boogie boards
⏹️ ▶️ John loud, no surfboards loud. I’m sure there’s very good reasons for it, but I’ve really never questioned it because it’s just been an obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John law. And as I explain this, it probably seems weird. So, you know, it doesn’t seem weird to me because I
⏹️ ▶️ John grew up like this. But so they have flags in the sand saying, here is the area where if you swim, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John extend those lines out into the water, if you swim between these flags and they move the flags, more lifeguards come or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John between these flags, lifeguards are in theory watching you and may save you, right? But if you’re outside those flags,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on your own. And so you’re like, well, if they’re worried about people dying or it’s a safety
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, forcing them to go far away from the lifeguards where no one is watching them,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the ostensibly more dangerous thing doesn’t seem to make sense, So that’s exactly what happens, right? So we go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the beach, we bring boogie boards and sometimes surfboards. And then sometimes we basically take
⏹️ ▶️ John a trek to, or we’re gonna go down the beach, we’re gonna go boogie boarding, we’re gonna go surfboarding or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you bring all your stuff and you go down the beach. It’s away from, you know, our blanket is by the way lifeguards are and that’s where everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going in the water mostly, but we’re gonna do that, you go down the beach. When I go down the beach, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to take both cameras with me. One for the long lens for the people who are out surfing, but also for the people, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, or collecting shells or going into little tidal pools on the other side and doing that stuff. Like I need both cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now I’ve got two cameras around my neck, walking down the beach and I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ John swapping between them. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did I get arrested?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, seriously. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going with a family group. You know, it’s obvious what I’m, you know, I have occasionally had people come up to me and give me dirty looks
⏹️ ▶️ John or say stuff about like, tell you, who are you taking a picture of? I’m like, that’s my daughter. They’re like, oh, okay. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my gosh. But you know, it’s not that big. Anyway, so I got two cameras around my neck
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got pretty good at swapping between them But it was a little bit awkward and heavy at dealing with that now
⏹️ ▶️ John Doing it the other way where I have one camera in a backpack with lenses that I get down and swap was probably worse
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah the two camera system Overall, I give it mostly a thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John up. I did kind of miss using primes because both of these are zooms I did kind of miss
⏹️ ▶️ John using primes because I wasn’t gonna swap to them I had them with me at all my lenses with me if I wanted them, but in in
⏹️ ▶️ John practice I just didn’t I I never thought I needed to prime enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John Deal with having to change it on the beach. The other thing it was we had a bunch of days that were Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John ish. So a lot of my pictures, you know, it’s nice here when it’s sunny, but rain was
⏹️ ▶️ John Predicted for a lot of days rain may so it mostly held off which is good But the light wasn’t great on a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the days so that kind of made my pictures more dull than usual Um, the final thing this is not really
⏹️ ▶️ John tech related, but it is well It kind of is I like to take pictures of birds at the beach. The birds are always
⏹️ ▶️ John there. They’re fun to take pictures of. It’s fun to mess with the camera. If you follow any of my things on
⏹️ ▶️ John Instagram, you can see lots of pictures of birds. That’s me usually using the super really long lens to get them far away and
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull them real close in. Sometimes planes fly over the beach. I get pictures of them. That’s fun to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that this year, too. I don’t know what the deal is because we were on Long Island last
⏹️ ▶️ John year, right? Like I did this trip last year, I think. So I can’t really blame it on like
⏹️ ▶️ John COVID. like, oh, you know, the so many people hadn’t been going to the vacation, but now the people are back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But this year, the birds were different. This year, the
⏹️ ▶️ John birds were way more aggressive than I had seen them
⏹️ ▶️ John on these beaches in my entire history of going to these specific beaches at this time of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, goals on the beach are always they want your potato chips. Let’s face it. They want anything you’re eating. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just what the goals are like on the beach, it’s just, you know, something you accept, right? But normally
⏹️ ▶️ John they do the bird thing, which is they just kind of hang back or whatever. And then like some kid throws a
⏹️ ▶️ John chip because he thinks it’ll be fun and a thousand birds descend out of nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant thing or whatever. And then the parents say, don’t throw things to the birds, right? Cause it just gets them all, you know, riled up.
⏹️ ▶️ John This year, they weren’t waiting for anybody to throw anything. They weren’t waiting for a kid to drop
⏹️ ▶️ John a sandwich. They would walk by, they’d walk by and they’d give you this little side eye and they’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at what you’re eating. And you’d be looking at them, you’re like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t throw anything at them, it’ll be fine. And they just kinda get a little closer,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and get a little
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe one or two of them would see somebody who like, oh, someone went to the water, and then someone else went to the water, and now no one is
⏹️ ▶️ John at their blanket. They’d go over to that blanket and say, hmm, a backpack. And I stick my nose in that backpack. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ John got in here? Oh, I got a bag of chips. Oh, they go in and pulls the bag of chips out of the backpack, and a hundred birds come down and they tear the bag of
⏹️ ▶️ John chips open. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then the people come back from the
⏹️ ▶️ John water and it was just their bag of chips is gone and there’s a mess by their thing or whatever. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John so aggressive this year. They were pulling things out of people’s bags, pulling bags
⏹️ ▶️ John that I posted on Instagram. You can see one pulling a bag of pistachios out. It must be expensive bag of pistachios, it was pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would just go into your stuff and get your food. They weren’t waiting for you to throw it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing is, so we’d all be there, like it’s lunchtime, everyone comes back to the blanket, they’re all wet, they got their wet hair,
⏹️ ▶️ John they got the towels around them or sitting under our umbrellas. All the kids are eating their sandwiches, reading the stuff or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the birds are looking at you and they know you got stuff. Whatever, we’re experienced. We’re not gonna throw them food. Even the little kids know you don’t throw
⏹️ ▶️ John food to the birds, it gets them all riled up. Keep your food to yourself, right? But they keep walking by. And then like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we had our like chairs in like a U shape. And you could see if you’re on one side of the U, you could see on the other side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John U, they’re walking behind the other people over there. And you’d be like, psst, there’s a bird behind you. And you turn around and look at it. And you think, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I turn and look, and it’s gonna fly away. the bird would just look at you and say, what? I’m just walking here. Don’t mind me. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, aside from getting pooped on, which should happen once occasionally, they’ll fly over
⏹️ ▶️ John your head and poop on you. I’m there with the camera going
⏹️ ▶️ John these birds, these birds are real close. I can get lots of pictures of them. And they were, there was really windy and they were doing a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John low level flying, like back and forth over the blanket area, which was good for, you know, taking pictures of them
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever. But they were also doing a lot of low level flying. I’m like, Hmm, you got the walkers and you got the flyers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at one point I wasn’t paying attention. I was just talking to the people on my side of the thing. And then one of the little,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my little nephews started crying on the other side. And they’re like, you know, what happened? What happened? It’s like, oh, a
⏹️ ▶️ John bird, the bird tried to like grab his sandwich or something like that. I don’t think anyone saw it happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he was very upset. And he said that a bird had tried to grab something that he was eating, right? Not that
⏹️ ▶️ John he was throwing food or the bird was pulling something from a bag, but it was trying to get the thing that he was eating. He was very
⏹️ ▶️ John upset by it. And they’re all going and comforting the little boy and everything, right? While this is happening, I’m eating
⏹️ ▶️ John my sandwich, like, you know, we make our own little sandwiches and bring them to the beach. I’m eating my
⏹️ ▶️ John sandwich and a bird comes from behind me in the air and takes
⏹️ ▶️ John a bite of my sandwich that is in my hands.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh my gosh. And I’m in the process of eating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t, he didn’t get the sandwich because my grip, I grabbed it as they went away, but he took a bite
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it. And of course, now I got to throw out the whole sandwich, it’s got bird bite on it, right? I don’t want the bird slobber that
⏹️ ▶️ John on this thing. but I’m like, it’s in my hands, right? And that happened, I think once again, to one other
⏹️ ▶️ John person. So the new move was like, when we’re eating lunch, hold your food close to your chest and be aware that the
⏹️ ▶️ John nearest bird may be behind you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right? Like we’re watching in front of us, we’re watching all those
⏹️ ▶️ John birds, we’re watching them, whatever, like I thought I was covered. And there was an umbrella too, the thing flew like under
⏹️ ▶️ John the umbrella, over my shoulder, over the back of the seat. And you know, while still flying, went
⏹️ ▶️ John a chomp and tried to grab the sandwich out of my hand. These birds are out of control. I don’t know what has
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten into them, They don’t, they’re not afraid anymore and they’re pooping on us and they’re stealing
⏹️ ▶️ John our food out of our hands while we eat it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That does not happen here. Well, we, I mean, here we, we actually don’t allow eating on the beach because we have a very small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very densely populated beach and that would cause too much litter. Um, wait, are you serious? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What kind of, we have a very large volume of people that come to a very small section of the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we have a lot more rules than most of the surrounding communities because if we didn’t it would be ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you go to this beach, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t have lunch on the beach? Correct. That is the dumbest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I’ve ever heard in my life. And everyone tells us that. But trust me, if you see like the number of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that come to a very small area, you would see why. Like it makes sense when you see it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the idea of it angers everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll go on faith, but it’s not making sense right now. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things they added at our the beach that we go to is they have little baskets. I said, hey, if you want to pick up litter on the beach, you can use one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John baskets like in practice. I don’t I mean, maybe the people who run the beach, the county or whatever cleans up the
⏹️ ▶️ John beach. But people are usually good about litter or good enough that you don’t find litter on the beach from those. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John find anything, it’s stuff that came from the ocean, not stuff that was left on the beach. But that’s probably because they have a big staff of people cleaning it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as you know, like I would suggest for your community, not letting people eat is
⏹️ ▶️ John one way to do it. But another way is to pay people to clean everything up. I mean, probably why you don’t have aggressive birds is like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing here. People don’t have food.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have aggressive teenagers who leave white claws everywhere, but I think if the birds drank those, they’d have different
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this beach, there’s nothing changed about this beach. And it’s not any different than any other sort of South Shore beach that I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John to my whole life. The birds are there, they go nuts if someone throws them a potato chip or whatever. But this year, this year, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I don’t know, they’ve become more intelligent. The hive mind has,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I put a link in the-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny, actually, what we do have is people will, they’ll park their wagons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or oftentimes a baby stroller at the bottom of the staircase that goes up and over the dune.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will often see deer eating whatever was left.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they pack a lunch and it’ll be in a stroller, you’ll see a deer eating out of a stroller, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks hilarious. And I can’t even imagine the people coming back to whatever mess that creates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the deer just ate their sandwich while they were at the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a deer photo this year, too. We don’t see as many of them as you do, obviously, on fire. But this was this was
⏹️ ▶️ John just just on our beach. It was just hanging out in the long lens. Let me reel it in.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put a link in the show notes to the the picture. So I put all these pictures of birds on my Instagram,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I also put a final sequence of birds and saying, let me show you what they’re really up to, which is stealing your food.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you can see in that one a picture of a bird standing on someone’s backpack about to get into it
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bird pulling a bag of pistachios out of someone’s bag. Oh, and that other bird, the previous one, the
⏹️ ▶️ John bird is like looking under a seat. That’s in our little circle. I just walk right into the circle like, oh, there’s no one in the seat. Let me check under here. There
⏹️ ▶️ John might be some potato chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. We have a bit of a long after show special this week, so we’re going to call it here. Thanks, everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for listening. Thanks to our sponsors, Trade Coffee, Memberful and Stack Overflow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP. FM slash join. and we will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech podcast So long
Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting my driving permit for driving on the sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sand driving permit, that is very exciting. I will confess that I knew this already, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is extremely exciting. I’m very, very excited for you. And so you will finally be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the FJ as it has been intended.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this will make a massive difference in the quality of my life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the things we are able to do in the winter. you know we live on Fire Island the only way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get here normally is by ferry the ferry does run in the winter but they only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run like a few boats a day and it’s such that you can you can go off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco island to go shopping or you know go to the doctor whatever for either 90 minutes or 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours and the way the schedule works and the last boat leaves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mainland at like 4 p.m. or 3 30 p.m. so you can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything off the island that would take longer than you know 3 30 p.m. otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you cannot get back to your house that night cool so this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year we will have the driving permit and that makes so much difference because then you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive yourself off in the winter you can’t you can’t drive in the summer because it’s full of people and you don’t need to because there’s tons of ferries in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer so it’s fine but yeah in the winter finally we will have this and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to like get glasses probably I have to go to the eye doctor And I just, it’s hard to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like there’s so much stuff like that, that just we’ve kind of been putting off for the last couple of years because it was very difficult to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year-round. So, oh man, I’m so, so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so to be clear, in the future you can take the FJ and you can, and the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that the particular town you’re in in Fire Island, the streets, as you would call them, are not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streets at all. Or, I mean, I guess you said, I’ve never been, but my understanding is you maybe could put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car on it if you really, really tried, but it’s certainly not meant for that, whether or not it’s legal. And so the issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that you have to drive on the sand to get to the end of the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car streets, and then once you’re on the car streets, then you can go to like a bridge or a causeway or what have you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get to the mainland. Is that all fair?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty much, yeah. I mean, there isn’t even a road that has no sand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes the whole way, even if I want to try. So the roads on a fire round are basically wide sidewalks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are just wide enough that one car or truck can fit down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And they’re so narrow that, you know, if you’re driving your car or truck down them, your mirrors will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be brushing against everyone’s bushes the whole way down. Like that’s how narrow it is. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly wide enough to fit a truck or a car and that’s it. And so this has a number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of challenges when you’re driving on these quote roads. So one is, obviously cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t pass each other. So if someone’s coming the other way, somebody has to like stop and back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up into a side street to let the other person pass. So there’s a lot of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backing up around these corners and everything, and you gotta have very good visibility. You have to really know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your vehicle. It has to be hopefully as like small of a footprint as you can get it while still being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have very good four-wheel drive capability to go over the sand to get there in the first place. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of houses that all have, you know, landscaping and stuff that butt right up against the walk sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you really have to be very careful. It’s a very, like, slow, careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way of driving here. And again, visibility, you know, vehicle maneuverability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and footprint are very important. But everyone’s driving trucks and SUVs so they can actually get them here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, that’s the situation. For me to drive off of the island, I basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to either drive this, what we call the inland route, which is through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the towns, on all these very, very narrow walks, or I can drive a short distance on narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walks and then get myself onto the sand and drive about, I think it’s about three miles on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand and then cut back in at the last minute and go off onto a bridge or
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even think there was an inland route. There’s a way you could do this without going on the sand? It just has less sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, right. It’s like, yeah, you don’t drive on the beach, but you have to drive on the inland route the inland
⏹️ ▶️ Marco road has a few sections in it that are just extremely loose like sugar sand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is very it’s even harder to drive on the beach so anyway that situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so now that it came in right at this time right between two school years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the amount of time that we are planning on continuing to live here is measured in school years and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is going to be most likely either one or two more school years so the timing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this was like wait a minute if we now need a car for either one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two years for this role. Maybe I should trade in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FJ Cruiser for something new that would, you know, be nicer for this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ll tell you some things that went into this decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, before you go on from that, why is it that there’s a one or two year thing suddenly that means you need a
⏹️ ▶️ John new car? I don’t make this connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s Marco! I have two clear paths here. Path number one, just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the FJ Cruiser and don’t touch it. just like just don’t change anything, keep what I have. So there are some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantages. Obviously, that’s the cheapest solution that is the least hassle. And the advantage of owning something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outright, as opposed to like a lease or anything like that, is flexibility, too. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know exactly how long I’m going to need or want this vehicle. When I move back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco civilization, I’m probably not going to want to be driving an off-road SUV as my main car. I won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it really for that. So I’m probably going to need this car for two years. That’s the most likely
⏹️ ▶️ John But you already have a car that you could keep for exactly two years. Right. You already have it. Correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, the long-term reliability of this car is a big question mark because… Of a Toyota.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Well, it has almost 100,000 miles, and it’s been driven very hard on the beach for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those miles. The previous owner of this car would drive it back and forth to the mainland a few times a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least. That’s a lot of mileage for sand miles, because you don’t understand what this does dust of cars, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the underside all rusted out, like the frame, tons of rust everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a little concerned because the other FJ Cruisers that have been in this island of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar vintage have been dropping like flies in the last year. They’ve been replaced because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they keep rusting out in critical like you know frame ways and when that happens your trade-in value goes through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the floor and it’s a big pain in the butt etc. So anyway, so that’s one factor is I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerned about reliability for two years of regular use in this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I mentioned the maneuverability and stuff around the town. The visibility in the FJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cruiser is horrendous. It’s really bad visibility for a couple of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mainly, it has those wide body color C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pillars, I guess, would they be? Or B pillars, whatever they are. It has these big blind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot blockages in its frame design. And also, while it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a backup camera, as I mentioned when I got it, it’s the tiny little display in the rear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view mirror that has the approximate resolution of a QuickTime video in 1996. Like, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very small and low resolution and you can’t see crap at night. So one thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought was, okay, well maybe I just keep the FJ and install like a new CarPlay radio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an aftermarket backup camera has a nice new backup camera. So that’s one option I could do. But visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general in the car, that’s something that’s harder to change. There is a lot of, as I mentioned, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of undercarriage wear and rust and so much. When I went to install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the license plate, the license plate mount is all rusted out. So I had to go buy my own license plate mount,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screw it on with some screws into something that might work. I got a tow hitch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shackle so I could be pulled out if I had to. I tried to remove that tow hitch shackle recently, and I just can’t. Like, it just…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s… the new piece of metal that I put into the old tow hitch receiver is now rusted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, so… This… the amount of rust that I’m hitting here is… substantial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um… Also, driving the FJ Cruiser, there are certain things about it that are convenient, you know, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these, like, nice old-style controls, everything’s all, like, manual. Um, but that’s also a downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that It lacks a lot of modern things that I am accustomed to that I really miss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I don’t have them. So, one thing, Bluetooth. It has Bluetooth, but it’s very limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I found it to be very unreliable. It doesn’t have modern conveniences like proximity keys,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, climate control. I like having big manual knobs when I want to adjust things manually, but I hate having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to then constantly tweak, alright, wait, turn the temperature up a little bit, wait, turn it, turn it, turn the fan speed down a little bit, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I did this forever when I was learning how to drive on older regular cars for my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco youth, but I also know that now climate control is nice. It’s one less thing to worry about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Automatic headlights. Great feature. And I have it on the Tesla, so that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Having to turn on and off the headlights manually. It’s like one more thing I have to now think about and possibly fail at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some point to do. Other things that I’ve gotten used to. A speed limit display on the dash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, the car is using some kind of camera to recognize speed limit signs, and displaying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speed limit on the dash. I love this feature, because I don’t have to keep a lookout for the signs constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I happen to miss one, and I wonder, hey, am I going to speed up? I can just glance down, and it’s right there on the display.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a nice feature. I’m now accustomed to that. I know I could drive without it. I have, with the F-DRIVE, driven without it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sucks to drive without it once you’re used to it. The brake hold, where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push the brake to stop the car, and then when you’re stopped you can let go of the brake and the car holds itself there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that feature in the Tesla and many other modern nice cars. I really love that feature and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course the FJ doesn’t have it so it makes it feel more like an automatic where as soon as you lift off the brake slightly you start creeping forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty quickly actually and it’s like, wait hold on I don’t want to go yet! And then other modern safety features like the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blind spot warning lights on rear view or on side view mirrors rather. Stuff like that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like that kind of stuff. I like having modern safety features. And then finally, you know, obviously car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play would be nice to have it could be added aftermarket though. So that’s that’s that’s thing but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other factors that played into my decision here the parking situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Has proven to be more burdensome than I expected because the ferry lot we have to pay for permits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re very expensive And so it’s not really worth paying for two permits to park two vehicles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then having to move two vehicles Have a shuffle them around and everything Ideally, I would love a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could, that one vehicle could just be my car to be four-wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive and be able to drive back and forth from Westchester to the ferry. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FJ, the amount of rust and wear and tear on this car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I would trust it to be reliable in that role, to be doing those long-distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives as well as the four-wheel drive stuff. Not to mention, you know, I would miss all that modern tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, the comfort of of Mark from the Book of Evils, but what finally kind of pushed me to look at something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else is that I made the mistake of looking up what it’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the FJ Cruiser is worth more than I paid for it. Oh my gosh!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You bought it like six months ago, right? Or a year ago?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got it like last, I think like last November, so almost a year ago. But after less than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year, it is worth more than I paid for it and more enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to even cover things like that I had to pay the sales tax to register it and all that other stuff. Like it even covers all that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s worth a lot more.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure that motivates you, but as we get to the later part of this segment here, I’m going to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John in no way does getting rid of the FJ result in you eventually saving money, as we will see.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, of course not. I mean, none of these options,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is It’s very much like, I mean, for people who are long-time listeners of the program, Marco often
⏹️ ▶️ John does this with Macs. He will get a Mac that he thinks is going to be the Mac that is going to serve his needs. But then, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, three months later, he’ll be like, you know what, I got this Mac expecting to X and Y, but really Z. And so he sells it and
⏹️ ▶️ John gets a different Mac. This is exactly like that, but much bigger. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a perfect analogy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and yeah, no part of this is about, is about like, you know, I’m not, I’m not pretending like I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save money by getting a new car. No, it’s more like I have this car that I, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, quote, just bought really, but it is now worth so much more than what I paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it that I can kind of see that as like, okay, I can keep this, or I can basically use it as a credit towards
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully whoever you sell it to doesn’t hear the part where about all the rust underneath.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty visually obvious if they even take a cursory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look. It’s on the underside, maybe they don’t check. You can’t miss, no, you can see it from the side. Like you can’t miss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. you’re driving it, can
⏹️ ▶️ John you see the road below
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you? Not yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Wouldn’t surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So so Marco, at this point, you’ve decided in a very Marco way that you would like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solve a problem that may or may not even be a problem in the first place by throwing money at it. So correct. Welcome new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listeners. This is this is the same as it ever was. But But anyway, so you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car that you said has great visibility. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy to to know the edges of the car. And it’s very good on sand. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re saying is you want something that’s got very, very short overhangs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You, I think you left out one item
⏹️ ▶️ John from the bullet list, which is comfortable to drive back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So like I said, you want you want a car that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short overhangs, you want a car that has short overhangs that is extremely capable off road
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and can do both of those things reasonably So what you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you want a Wrangler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I decided I did some research and I asked some friends like hey you know what should I be looking at here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know watched a bunch of YouTube car reviews and off-road tests and everything like that. What I came to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a shortlist. I wanted to look at the Toyota 4Runner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Jeep Wrangler and in particular the 4xe, the plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler, and the Land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rover Defender. I will say towards the end I was tipped off I should look at the Ford
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bronco. This came kind of too late for me to plan to see it, but based on reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I knew the Bronco was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John just a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Towards the end, we’ve been yelling Bronco at you for like a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was about to say, we’ve been saying this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Both of us have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco been saying this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ignoring us. I know, I get it. Well, and I also thought, based on just not listening very closely, I guess, I thought they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were impossible to get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that was true too in your defense, and that does not seem to be true, but I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought that they were hard to come by.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should also say, I have been on the wait list for a Rivian for a while now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My current estimated delivery for the for the and I’m looking particularly the R1S, the SUV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model, because if you want an R1T and you’re willing to pay a premium, you can there’s a whole bunch of them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sale nationwide now, like people who are just who are flipping them. And you can you can can get a lightly used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian truck model, the R1T, for a lot of money, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get it. The R1S, the SUV, seems like it is just barely starting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be trickled out and there are currently none for sale anywhere as far as I can find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my reservation would hold, which was like, you know, a year from now, which is like, well, I probably at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point I’m not even gonna really need this car that much after one more year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, that’s that’s probably not a good option. Also, I mean, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. That’s even more money than everything else I’m looking at. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had this kind of break in the summer between like summer camp for Adam and this other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was doing. And so we kind of had nothing to do for a week. I mean, wouldn’t it be fun to take my kid for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car shopping? Because I know when I was a kid, you know, we only I think we only got two cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my entire childhood. But I loved the shopping process. Like, It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much fun for me to go to. Whenever anyone else, whenever family friends would buy cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d wanna go with them to their car buying experiences. It’s just fun, you know? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t sure if Adam would like it or not. So he’s 10, so that’s right at the age where I think you start thinking this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is cool. So anyway, I decided, all right, we’re gonna go off. I planned this whole trip. We’re gonna go off and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to Toyota, Jeep, Land Rover, drive all three, and I’m gonna have Adam actually rank them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well to see what he thinks Because I never sit in the backseat. I don’t know what’s what’s important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for backseat passengers the way he does. And he had a lot of fun doing it. And so he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developed a 25 point review scale for the cars. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were 10 points allocated for what he first called comfortability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I later taught him the word comfort. And that’s the word you look for. So he corrected it. So 10 points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for rear seat comfort. points for rear seat visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and five points for smell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He also ranked the dealers themselves separately from the vehicles. He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have a point scale for the dealers themselves but he wanted to rank things like how comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the chairs that he was forced to sit in while I was talking to the salespeople. So we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first went to Toyota because most likely thing I would pick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I maintain, I still think, leaving aside the fact, which is a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside, I’m coming back to it, leaving aside the fact that the on-road manners of a Jeep Wrangler are not stupendous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will concede that, I still think, all things considered, the Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the best option. And for the purposes of the show, if nothing else, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somehow end up with a freaking Wrangler when I don’t, that would be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I stand by, I think the Wrangler is the most correct answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, however, that if you do any of these terrible ideas, and the Wrangler is also a terrible idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in its own way, I think you’re going to end up in the Defender because it is the most Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer possible. With that said, John, I would like your opinion and then please, I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the blow by blow in excruciating detail of all these visits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I’m against the Wrangler for many reasons. And now when I’m thinking about the comfortability score of that Wrangler,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey good. I really don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John those back seats are going to be Adam pleasing. I would I would lobby for
⏹️ ▶️ John excluding the comfort of the chair. Adam had to sit in while you talk to the dealer from your decision making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matrix. Fair enough. And also, I’ve been not not massively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drawn to Wranglers so far, but the four by being a plug in hybrid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like a 20 mile battery only range and by all accounts, a very good plug in hybrid. That really got my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention. And that’s why I started looking at Jeep again, because I love electric so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. That is the only even electric ish off road option besides Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And therefore, it’s the only electric ish option you can get for, you know, a nice off road vehicle that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can actually buy today. And it’s actually available to buy. So that’s what got me looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it. But I admit I had low expectations of the rest of it. But I thought electric is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really compelling to me. So let me give that a really, a really good look.
⏹️ ▶️ John And before people send things in, there are a lot of electric SUVs. It’s just that the offer
⏹️ ▶️ John demands, or at least according to Marcos criteria, like we need more than something like the Solterra
⏹️ ▶️ John from Subaru and the Toyota twin to that. There’s lots of like sort of small SUVs that are full electric or even
⏹️ ▶️ John something like the the Mustang Mach-E that are basically tall wagons. Those apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have the off road chops to do what needs to be done. Only the Rivian and something like a true dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John off road thing like a Wrangler or Defender or 4Runner or something, can handle the sand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, those vehicles really, they mostly lack in ground clearance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what really kills them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if an F-150 Lightning would have done the trick, but I don’t think you can get your hands on one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, trucks would for sure. Most people out here drive either these off-roaders or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very large SUVs or trucks. But I just, I didn’t wanna drive a truck. Like they’re a little bit longer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think makes the maneuverability a little bit more difficult on these streets, especially for a truck novice like me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, that’s not the kind of cargo allotment that I want. Because I wanted this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to go back and forth to Westchester, it needs to hold a lot too. And trucks can hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot in the bed unless it’s raining or snowing, and then you get some covers and all this other, and I didn’t want to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any of that. I just wanted a large vehicle. That’s fine. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, I think it’s hard to get lightning still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agree, I agree. I would expect that to be very difficult. I didn’t even look, but yeah, I expect that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so first went to it because everyone here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all the year-round residents here who had FJ Cruisers have replaced them with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either 4Runners or Wranglers. So I figured, all right, the 4Runner, and the 4Runner, as soon as you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, if you do any research at all, or if you see both vehicles, it’s clear that the 4Runner is like, it has taken up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the crown of the FJ Cruiser. I know it probably existed at the same time, but it is clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is like the same kind of vehicle with many of the same kinds of appeal. Okay, so Toyota,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dealer was very convenient, it’s in a great location, giant dealer. Adam said it was the best chair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he ever sat in up to that point. However, buying a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mid-2022 is not normal. Obviously we are in the midst of a supply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chain crunch with the world and cars in particular have gotten very hard hit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to give you some example of the situation, The Toyota dealership, the dealer website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listed they had 16 new 4Runners in inventory. When I got there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had zero. What? Also, every new 4Runner they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a $7,000 quote dealer adjustment added to the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh, get out of here with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you didn’t spend very long in Toyota then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they did have a couple of used ones that were like a couple of years old. And the thing about the 4Runner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it basically has not changed in like 10 years or something. It’s been a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a very, it’s a very like old model line that is waiting for an upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is supposed to be updated, I think next year. But the current one is very old.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s also very ugly. What happened to the 4Runner? I remember it back from, you know, when I was a kid, it did not look this ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but anyway, so I did get to drive a 20, I think it was a 2020 model. It was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of years old and there aren’t really major differences between that the new ones except the new ones have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a slightly bigger media screen and they have a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side camera view which I really like a lot and I wish I got to see it but I couldn’t. Compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the other vehicles I was looking at, the 4Runner is the cheapest but this is again this is relative and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is with today’s market. The off-road premium model that I’d be looking at as a minimum would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like $56,000 with the dealer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But keep in mind I have a a very highly valued trade in. And by the way, not only is the FJ Cruiser worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot, they want it. It’s a rare car that people love and it’s in high demand. They know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they can flip it instantly. So anyway, I show up at that thing and I got a lot of salesperson attention. Hey, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we get you into today? But you know, the 4Runner, it has the worst colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the bunch. It is the oldest looking. It is the most boring looking. The interior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is exactly what you’d expect from Toyota. It is ultra fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know those feels it is functional and it is totally forgettable. That being said, it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest trunk space that I saw that day by a lot. It has a very big trunk driving,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco felt a lot like the FJ Cruiser, but bigger. It feels like you’re driving a giant box and that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a great thing. Um, visibility is okay. Not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, backup camera and screen are still very old, low resolution. You know, as I mentioned, the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones are improved, but not massively. So, and it has, because it’s such an old platform, it has an old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engine and a five-speed automatic transmission. And that really, they really hold it back and they make it feel old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when you step on the gas and it has to wait, wait, wait, and then upshift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like, to like this very different gear from the one it was in. Like you kind of feel like, okay, now I, now I understand why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These like eight and 10 speed automatic transmissions are better than the old five-speed ones, because you have a lot more gears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle that it can shift to and get, you know, be more responsive and more efficient and everything. But you know, ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, the forerunner didn’t make me feel excited because it, it felt like an old car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being sold as new. It’s like if you bought one of those, like one of the non retina Mac book airs brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new in like 2018, like it felt like that, like overall the four,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I came out of the forerunner experience thinking like, okay, I’m probably going to end up buying this, but I’m not excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it. You know, this is a vehicle, it serves a function, it take me where I’m going and I will feel nothing.”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the function this vehicle serves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s a Toyota. It gets you where you’re going and you feel nothing along the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Then we went over to Jeep. I wanted to drive the 4xe. So the Jeep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dealer, it was not a great… It was like this terrible location. Adam did appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it had balloons inside the dealer room. Everything was like all red, white, and blue, flag balloons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was super over the top with yeah America you know he rated the chairs as medium. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dealer listed that they had eight new Wrangler 4xe’s in inventory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s better than zero. Yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they seem to be selling it for MSRP so not adding on weird things to the price which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so impressive. Yeah very. So we went out for a test drive the battery was totally dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a surprise of course. Great dealer guys great good job you’re selling an electric car, you don’t plug it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. Thanks a lot. So I could not test any electric driving at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve watched enough reviews and stuff that I knew they have these different modes. You can, you can push this button on the side for electric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only or hybrid or this thing called e-save where it basically won’t use the battery at all, but we’ll charge it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as possible with like regen breaking and stuff like that. So I did the whole test drive in e-save mode and did a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of like intentional, like speed up and then let it regen break for a little while and then speed up and just doing a lot of regen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoping that I could at least at the end of the drive get a little bit of electric anything. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got no electric experience at all. And it’s the only one they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had. And I’m not I’m not going to sit there all day waiting for them to try to charge it. You know, I have I have a 10 year old and I have other stuff to do. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, but I will say so and the Wrangler, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a decent four by e. We’re looking at like $70,000. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just real quick. Wranglers are absurdly expensive. Like I understand they hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their value blah blah blah, But they are ridiculously expensive. Part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason I’m in a Golf R right now and not a Wrangler is because I started pricing out Wranglers and even getting like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a beater Wrangler and optioning it with what I consider to be the bare minimum amount of options, this is what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four years ago now? It was still like 50, $55,000 four years ago. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so expensive, it’s preposterous that you could spend $70,000 on a Wrangler and not even blink an eye. Yeah, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cars in general right now are very expensive, but the Wrangler, you’re right, The Wrangler has kind of always been like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I will say, so it was, it kind of surprised me actually. I’d never actually driven a Jeep before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was much smaller inside than the others. Now it’s interesting, it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much smaller outside. They’re big vehicles, like they are full-size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SUVs basically. Between the 4Runner, the Wrangler, and the Defender, they’re all about the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size. They’re within a couple of inches here and there, but they’re all approximately the same size. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was very cramped inside because the Jeep like it has the like it kind of flares out the body from the doors and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. And so the insides kind of like it’s like it’s like somebody applied padding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a margin. They like inset the whole inside compared to the footprint. So you have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less space in the Wrangler than the others, both the trunk space. And I hated the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way the trunk opens where you have to like pull the bottom out and then lift the glass up because like I that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I did not like that at all. But everything is cramped in the Jeep. Even the controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are cramped, because since you can remove the doors, they don’t put any controls on the doors. So everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just shoved into the middle in this giant, this wall of like switches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that’s fair, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But at least you have switches. I mean, it’s more than we can say for your damn Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true, that’s true. Also, because the Jeep is convertible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have those giant, what are they? Like the C pillars, the big diagonal pillars that run from the backseat into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trunk. you have these giant like pillars that are eating into the inside space even more. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like you’re, you’re in like a, like a roll cage for a race car inside your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, you are, I mean, that is what you’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you literally are. So everything kind of just felt cramped. Niceness wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this does not feel like a $70,000 car, even at today’s prices. And Adam did not appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the comfortability of the back seat. Um, he, the headrest in particular, he said like it was tilting his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head at a weird angle. It was not getting good reviews from either of us. That being said, when I drove it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even without the electric drivetrain working, stupid dealers, it was surprisingly fast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nimble. I was very pleasantly surprised by that, much more so than the others.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 4Runner just felt like a big slow box. The Wrangler really felt almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car-like in its weight and nimbleness. Nimbility? Whatever. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I was very impressed by how it felt, how it handled. If I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had electric to help me out, it would have been even better. I totally see why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people buy them. And in fact, I would even say it did not seem less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortable on the road than the 4Runner or the FJ Cruiser. So sorry, John. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. I consider this a moral and personal victory. I know you’re not going to buy a Wrangler.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you didn’t hit any potholes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, stop it, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, hitting a pothole in any of these vehicles is not fun, But the other ones have independent suspension, don’t they?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so. Yeah. But I was expecting it to be way more rough than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what it was. Thank you very much. I would say it is exactly as comfortable in at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for like, you know, a 10 or 15 minute test drive. It was exactly as comfortable as the 4Runner, in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, Adam disagrees. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, though, I think I think the Jeep would be low on my list. Also, because I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then that that electric range of 20 miles or so On the sand, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be more like four, maybe? Twenty yards, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You said you only need three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re good. Yeah, but okay, so I can power off one way and then not be able to use electric on the way back at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not great. The appeal is less so when it’s that short. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being said, as they have things like, they have a Cherokee 4xe that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of out, but nobody has them yet. So that might become something in the future, who knows. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I totally appreciate the Wrangler now that I’ve driven one. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not for me though. It has a lot of personality that the four runner doesn’t have. You drive that car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you feel something. Um, but it’s not what I want to feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And that’s, that’s fair. I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like I get why people like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I consider this a victory in, in the, in the Casey camp. I, I just wanted you to understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this isn’t a rolling piece of crap. I totally understand and sympathize that it may not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be for you. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you were to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the chats that the three of us and a few other people on the Relay Slack were having, according to John and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before Marco drove it, that thing was like driving on wheels shaped like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey squares. Like that’s how rough apparently it
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, did you take it like on the highway, like 70 miles an hour? I mean, it’s not. John, when was the last time
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, but they don’t get good reviews. Like I said, the phrase that rings in my mind when I
⏹️ ▶️ John see these things, and granted, this is a fancy Wrangler and it’s you know, it’s not like a two-door tiny thing with a short wheelbase or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was we said this in past programs like driving a grand piano with the door open
⏹️ ▶️ John With the lid open. Sorry driving like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the lid open I will say to this the model the one we were test driving had the electrically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retractable soft top roof and Boy, that thing leaks a lot of sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably temperature as well if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I had to get
⏹️ ▶️ John it So you did you drive it on the highway or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, we were on like, you know, Long Island, you know car dealer neighborhoods So they were these, you know, you could go like 55
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some of the bigger roads for a little while and then you stop and turn and, you know, go down some side streets, then go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the bigger roads, you know, that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Because I have to imagine that the 4Runner is going to be smoother and quieter at highway speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. Well, and also I should point out too, with the FJ and with the way I drive these things, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these trips begin and end on sand, you don’t keep very much tire pressure. When you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-ish tire pressure, you don’t want to be driving that fast on the highway or taking, you know, really fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns or anything. So I drive these vehicles very gently and on the highway. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t usually go above like, you know 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John read and play it after getting off the sand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I was going to Westchester I would but if I’m just going like to the grocery store, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s so therefore I keep it, you know, keep it slow and gentle for sure Anyway, the Jeep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I again I get it now much more than I did before but it’s not it’s not for me Like it’s clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you give up so much for it to be convertible and disassembled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I those are things I don’t want to give up because I don’t need that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went over to Land Rover. It was across the street conveniently, Long Island. Adam’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chair rating was medium, although he later found the large leather cube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chair. Like after the test drive, he found that and then he upgraded his rating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the best chairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He also, he was, this was getting in mid-afternoon, we’re getting a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hungry and bored by this point, so I found the little push-button coffee machine in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting area, and it had a hot chocolate option. He gave solid marks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. He did suggest, next to the coffee push-button maker thing, there was another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push-button machine for dispensing all sorts of garbage chemical sweeteners to your coffee. He suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should add marshmallows to the dispenser for the hot chocolate users, which I think was a good suggestion. Anyway, nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The dealer website here listed four new Defenders available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zero of the four were actually there. Oh, cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why did you settle on the Defender, by the way, of all the vehicles that they offer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seemed like the most direct competitor for these things. I don’t know. I didn’t look that much into it, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honest. But like their other ones are seen like they’re both more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know that you give a bit on stuff like ground clearance and a little bit of the off-road
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abilities. So anyway, they had no new defenders available despite listing for them on the website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new models on the website, they listed a quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessories charge on each one that was between twelve and nineteen thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you it would say what it was for and it was for vague things like the protector package
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that it’s like they’re obviously this is just what this is just their dealer markup but they just for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason didn’t want to say that or couldn’t say that anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did however have one used defender from last year the 2021 model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the lot and there was a customer owned one parked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the lot that was a different color that I could compare. I could test drive the one used one they had and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had most of what I wanted anyway so anyways I’m like alright let me see this and it was like it was you know it’s one year old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know 10,000 miles great. Overall the interior space was very kind of medium you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 4Runner was the most space by far the Jeep was the least space by far this was right in the middle medium-sized trunk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason massively tall headroom even John I think would feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortable with his perfect hair in this
⏹️ ▶️ John Land Defender Rovers are always very tall cars. They look tall, and I guess they are tall in real life. They’re just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John better to tip over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, people in chat are asking which size Defender, the four-door 110 model. They,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently they have a 130 coming out now that’s even bigger, that’s like Casey’s SUV size, because it has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit more people in it, but no, this is the 110, the kind of medium-sized four-door one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so we went for a test drive on that. I will say also, after the test drive, this was fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s one of these dealers that has like this little mini off-road demo course, like in the parking lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s cool. That’s not fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the salesman took us on this. I thought I was gonna die. Adam thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was the most amazing thing ever. Where, you know, the car, you drive the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up on this like 45 degree angle and you’re like, how is it not tipping over? I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should, why is it not? How, like, it should be tipping over and it doesn’t. It was really fun, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the most off-road use that most of the cars they sell are ever going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is this parking lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re actually going to use it off road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most people are like that. Exactly. Um, but anyway, so yeah, everything inside was, you know, medium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sized by far the nicest interior, not even close. There’s a surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even a little bit close, like by far the nicest interior. Also by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far the nicest drive. I was surprised how car like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was in handling, not in size. You know, It felt like a big car, very big car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of these cars, like when I’m driving them, because I’m used to driving car cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m used to sitting much lower, and all of these feel like I’m sitting in the sky. You know, not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it an SUV, it’s an off-road SUV. So you’re looking down into other SUVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you’re even higher than most SUVs are by like six or seven inches. So like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking down at it, like it’s the weirdest thing for me because I don’t usually drive these kinds of vehicles. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, it’s good to feel tall. Yeah. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Land Rover easily won the Adam vote with its many USB charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports everywhere. He was amazed that his backseat had three USB charging ports available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within his reach by far the nicest screen like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big media screen. It has this really nice 360 degree camera system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It uses multiple cameras to simulate an actual 360, like swoop around view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the car. So you have both the top down view and you can like back it out and like look around. It’s, look up YouTube videos
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t your Tesla do that too?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it doesn’t. Tesla has backup camera and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s right. Yeah, all the big Lux brands have the swoop around the camera, the car thing now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Aaron’s car does. Oh my God, it was so nice. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey other two- Your M5 had that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey had top down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it had top down. It only had sides and back, it didn’t have a front camera, so it was a little bit limited. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, and the Forerunner has the side cameras and sort of a front one now, and it’s a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of camera arrangement, but they don’t like composite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it together into anything cool, but it does have that for reference. But when I saw that in like YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews, I’m like, oh my God, to have that on the streets here, when I have to like back up and not crush
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody’s lawn or break their fence, or if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back up into somebody’s side street to let a car pass, like, oh my God, to have that over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’ve been doing with the FJ is very different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also has, I’ve never seen this before. Maybe you guys know about these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has an option that if you flip the rear view mirror so that normally you’d like flip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to turn on the polarizer or whatever, it uses a camera in the rear fin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the roof and gives you a screen as your rear view mirror.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m familiar with this as a thing. I don’t know of any models off the top of my head other than this that have it, but I’m familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this as a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the thing. I spent on supercars where there’s no rear visibility, there’s only a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, the ones that switch between regular and screen. And you know, honestly, like, I understand why they have both and
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones where you have both, because screen technology is such that there are situations where the mirror is
⏹️ ▶️ John superior to the screen, but that gap is shrinking real quick. I do wonder how long, because the advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of the camera has is it’s unobstructed view, right? It doesn’t have to go through people’s heads or headrests or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or the spare tire mounted on the back trunk lid, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Exactly, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the car or the cargo, if you’ve packed the thing with cargo, you can’t see anything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the rear visibility outside of all these vehicles is compromised because there is a wheel stuck to the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them and you’re going through, like, the visibility with this camera mirror
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was better than the visibility out of any car I’ve ever seen. Like, it’s better than my Tesla because it has the headrest in the way and like the shape of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trunk. Oh my God, massive like game changer to see that kind of mirror. That was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, Adam said it had the nicest smell. So by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nicest option of all the contenders, but also the most expensive. So it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple, you know, slash Marco choice, right? It was the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that I actually felt something about and I actually wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the test drive the other ones. I’m like walked away. I’m like, okay, fine. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, me feeling like I wanted an SUV is like John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanting a laptop. That doesn’t happen. Like, this is a category of things that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I ever want. I actually wanted this. Even though it was more money than the others,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t even that much more. Like, when you compare, you know, it was like the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco economy and first class on a plane, but if first class only costs like 30% more instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three times more. And if you were committed to your choice for like years instead of hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it was a huge difference in niceness and features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and comfort for not a huge price increase. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the used one? Yep. Oh, well, congratulations. So to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear, you decided to replace a admittedly old, old but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still a Toyota which will probably run until the end of time. You decided to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that with a British SUV. Godspeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Toyota’s engine would run until the end of time. Yeah, fair, fair. Did you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or did you lease it? I bought it because, I mean, I don’t, can you believe in lease a used car?
⏹️ ▶️ John What happened to the whole leasing plan? The whole idea was you got the two-year window, you don’t want the car that’s gonna be damaged by salt,
⏹️ ▶️ John you do the lease, you give it back, it’s someone else’s problem. What happened to that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, the prices of the new ones, especially being so inflated by the dealers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are way more than the prices of the used ones. The difference is even bigger than it usually is between new and used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know if I’m going to need this car for one year, two years, or maybe even three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. So to have the flexibility is actually nice, plus to apply a trade-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that covered half the cost was very, very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know how you would have done that because I think trade in value would have covered all of the lease payments. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know if that would even function that way. Anyway, so that’s why I did that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the condition of the frame and stuff on the FJ and the amount of rust trading into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dealer was the way to go. And they saw it, they knew what it was, but they also they also know the market. They did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same research I did, found that they could probably flip it to some auction for X dollars and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they gave me a really good price. I negotiated at a very good price for the trade and everything. So yeah, that was good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what color is it? It is the blue. All right. And that’s part of the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the used one actually. I had located, there was a new one coming in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the green color, coming into a different dealer sometime soon, but I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the front of this, they had a used one in the lot and they had a customer’s car that was owned so I couldn’t drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. The customer’s car was the green color. And I parked it right next to each other And I looked at it, I’m like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like the green actually. Like in person, it’s much lighter than you think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks almost like a, like a green tinted silver and like the interior trim of the one that I, that I had located
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was all like green trim, also like green leather and stuff. And I’m like, it looked very military
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a lot of black trim on them. And the combination of the green with all the black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trim, I didn’t, I didn’t think it looked as nice in person as I wanted it to, whereas the blue, I was like, Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, I have to have that. It was so, the blue is so nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John This website is so terrible I cannot for the life of me go to a configurator and ask me to change the color to blue. It’s like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John this trim level is only available in these two colors, just show me a blue one. Can you have a picture?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make the window narrow. The whole website’s broken, but if you make the window narrow, it changes the whole layout and you get a thing on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the side and it works. It’s like a medium, it’s called Tazman blue, it’s like a medium blue, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, I don’t know if like a dusk kind of, I don’t know. It’s a really nice blue. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw that and I looked at other inventory And like, you know, and the used one had almost all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exact features I wanted, but it was way less money and it was only very lightly used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to address cases, reliability question, I’m probably not going to own it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long enough for the manufacturer warranty, which is the first four years to be over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that covers all the stuff that at least would cover. So I, I did the research on the, you know, what, what does it cover? Does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover things like corrosion? Yes. It was a pretty great fit and based on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options of what’s actually available anywhere in the region, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was an obvious choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, congratulations. That’s exciting. It’s the most Marko-y of Marko answers.
⏹️ ▶️ John a very predictable result.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. It’s surprising nobody. I will say, like, you know, and, you know, so I drove it, you know, bought it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did all that, you know, drove it back to the ferry and everything. It is really nice. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is still a very big car and, and. Part of it is just that I don’t, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not used to driving vehicles this size or height in the sky. Um, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep thinking it’s bigger than it is. Like I’ll, you know, I’ll park it in a spot using the amazing camera system. And I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like, Oh my God, like I feel like I’m just barely fitting here. And then I get out and I’m like, Oh my God, I have like four feet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s fine. The instrument cluster has a bunch of like customization options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. None of them are amazing, but some are okay. I love having a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunglasses holder on the roof. Like many cars do. One thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Tesla sucks at is there’s never anywhere in a Tesla to put your sunglasses. You should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a Honda Accord. Sunglasses
⏹️ ▶️ John holder right on the roof. Golf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R. I have two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, every car has a place to put sunglasses except Tesla. Except Tesla, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is. Like they, don’t they have sun in California? Like I’m pretty sure they’re known for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s always foggy, remember? Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. But yeah, so love the, you know, the lots of little details of the interior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it has CarPlay, right? Yes, it does. Wireless CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey welcome to the new world. Your Tesla is now ruined, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The, I will say the center, like array of buttons and knobs that is like the main control area for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, HVAC and some of the off-roading features and everything. It is a bit confusing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I just have to get used to it. There’s a lot of good controls everywhere. I love, one of the things I really love about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CarPlay, it’s something I never have had before, I love that you can use the steering wheel button for Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that it works instantly. Like before, I would just like hold the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button on my phone going over regular Bluetooth in a Tesla or whatever. And when you do that, you have to kind of wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second or two for the phone to tell the car, hey, I’m on phone call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, so turn on your microphone. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of beeps and you might hear the doo-doo, or it might get cut off weirdly, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you end up having to retry or fail with Siri a lot, because you have this weird delay to take care of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas here, when you have a native Siri button on the wheel, you just push it, done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was really nice. And otherwise, the rest I don’t really know yet. I haven’t driven on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand yet, because you’re not allowed to during the summer. I don’t know how it’ll go on the sand yet, but by all the reviews and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very optimistic. It seems like it’s extremely capable off-road. And that’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John So where is it? It’s in the ferry parking lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now? Yeah, I have parked my Tesla in Westchester and I’m going to leave it there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while. Because I mean, it’s a paid off Tesla that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs no maintenance basically ever. And so it’s gonna sit there for a while and I’m gonna figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether I’m going to keep it for the next two years and resume using it when I move back there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether I say, you know what, the Defender is good enough to serve this role for me for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while, and then maybe I’ll sell the Tesla. But I don’t know, that decision remains to be seen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t forget to have someone go and start the engine on a Tesla at least once a week. You
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t answer the most important question. So Adam, I was hungry for food and you gave him hot chocolate. Did you go to my pizza place that
⏹️ ▶️ John I recommended? Sounds like you didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, instead, part of the agreement with Adam was that if he was gonna come with me to these car dealerships,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we were gonna go to Shake Shack afterwards. So that’s what we did.
⏹️ ▶️ John You went to Shake Shack instead of my favorite pizza place in the entire world that you were like
⏹️ ▶️ John five minutes from. Sorry. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco shame. Well, when you go there,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the land for reverse service. You can check it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, which you will be doing sooner than you think, I’m quite sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I literally am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I ordered the rear recovery loops, and they’re going to put them in sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon, and I have to bring it in for that. So yeah, I’m going to be back there probably in a few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Has Tiff even seen it yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. She declared, because you know, when I’m in car buying mode, I get really annoying. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what about this? Or what do you think about this? Should we do this? Should we do this? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey eventually she’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she’s just like, just shut up and just get whatever you want. I don’t care. This sounds familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She left it to you and Adam to figure out. Yes. And Adam had, he had such a blast. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t know how that would go, you know, because I was worried he’d be bored or, you know, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved it. He absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey loved it. That’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s really awesome. It was, it was almost worth buying a new car just for that wonderful bonding experience. He was like, this is my favorite trip we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken in months. He was so happy. Oh, that’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John great. Can we buy a new car next month? You should say, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If it’s anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the good thing is the novelty will have worn off after this for a while. So he’s not going to care about cars again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until it’s actually time to get a new one years from now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’ll probably, like maybe it was in high school, you can finally succumb to, we know where this is going,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can finally succumb to the pull and go boat shopping with him. Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s true. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s way off in the distance of Marcos future. No, not a boat person. It’s like a giant black hole