catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

496: One of My Lesser TiVos

18 Aug 2022

More on TV-recording options, the state of System Settings, and how to get a non-coffee-drinker really, really fired up.

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. COVID strikes again
  2. Follow-up: Surfboards & lifeguards
  3. More on Channels & TiVo
  4. Sponsor: Kolide
  5. TV audio sync 🖼️
  6. Sponsor: Linode
  7. Ventura’s System Settings app
  8. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  9. Filing Apple bug reports
  10. #askatp: DNS for local devices
  11. #askatp: Advice for new parents
  12. #askatp: Work vs. family time
  13. Ending theme
  14. Neutral: John rents a car 🖼️

COVID strikes again

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I sound like this now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Got COVID again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fun. You know, and I thought I had managed to escape it. So the rest of my family

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got it a few weeks ago. I’m like super boosted. I’ve had four vaccinations total.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last one was in May, so pretty recent. But of course, you know, the new variants are not as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well protected by the vaccines as the original variants were. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, my whole family got it and I thought I had escaped. As soon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they got it, we all started staying far apart from each other. We would eat, and our house

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is very breezy, so we keep all the windows open, eat all the meals outside at opposite ends

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the long table, like Dr. Evil’s lair, super long. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were sleeping in separate rooms, everything, just to hope that…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had it for like an hour. Tiff had it for like, you know, three or four days. And I was like, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I think I dodged it. And sure enough, I did dodge it from them. You know, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the timing, there’s pretty much no way I got it from that. But whatever, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going around the island. And there were a lot of like big community events, all of which were outdoors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last weekend. But at some point, I got unlucky. And here we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I dodged it when it was in my house, but was not able to dodge it for the following

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks afterwards.

⏹️ ▶️ John I blame the test drives.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, even that was too long ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right now it’s like a three day incubation? How long ago were the test drives?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it would have had to be this past weekend. You know, over the last couple of days I had a bit of a scratchy throat and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, oh no. But I had no other symptoms. It is, there’s like a lot of flowers, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, blowing around outside. I thought maybe, maybe it’s allergies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I kept taking tests every morning because I was scared I might have it and negative negative

⏹️ ▶️ Marco negative so I thought great okay well hey this is weird but oh well let’s let’s keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoping that it’s just allergies and a weird August timeline which never happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but okay you know denial is very powerful and so sure enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this morning I take one more test because my throat’s still scratchy and my voice is going and and it turned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco positive. So I would say, I reiterate my statement that if anybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there is getting a weird sniffly cold this summer, summer is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not typically cold season, and if you have a weird sniffly cold this summer or a scratchy throat,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco odds are it’s probably this. Even if you test negative once or twice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. So we’ll all see whether or not the, what does it speak or say? What’s the command line

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you have the computer talk. We’ll see if we end up going back to that like we did a few years ago. Hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, but we shall see. But if the episode is a little bit shorter, it’s because we have sympathy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Marco’s destroyed vocal cords, and that would be why.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you guys could just talk about TVs and sonologies and stuff, and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have much to say there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Spoiler

⏹️ ▶️ Casey alert, we’re getting there, we’re getting there.

Follow-up: Surfboards & lifeguards

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, John, where do you boogie board and surf and whatnot if you’re down under

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Australia?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of weird that, uh, you know, we mentioned, uh, stuff about the lifeguards and the flags they

⏹️ ▶️ John put on the beach and where you’re allowed to swim and where you’re allowed to use boogie boards in the context of my Long Island vacation.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like 90 something percent of the feedback was from Australians. I don’t know why.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that beach is everywhere. Uh, we don’t have a particularly big listenership in Australia,

⏹️ ▶️ John but everybody from Australia I wanted us to know how it works down there. So here’s Ross Poulton with

⏹️ ▶️ John one bit of follow-up on that. He says, I used to be a lifeguard here in Australia. Boards are

⏹️ ▶️ John not permitted, quote unquote, between the flags, i.e. in the safe swimming area, as they’re often dangerous to other

⏹️ ▶️ John swimmers. You wouldn’t believe how many people lose control of them. So that was the predominant suggestion

⏹️ ▶️ John from the Australians, is basically people get hit with boards. So you don’t let surfers be where the swimmers are.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t let boogie bars be where the swimmers are, because both of those things can bonk people in the head, and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John dangerous. Some of the Australians said that boogie boards are allowed, like if you just

⏹️ ▶️ John use them, like little kids in the surf, you know, and the little, just after the waves have crashed, just little kids tooling around on them.

⏹️ ▶️ John On Long Island, it’s no boogie boards anywhere, period. They don’t have this nuance of like, oh, it’s okay if you’re just in the

⏹️ ▶️ John edge of the surf, but not bad when you’re out farther.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, Long Islanders are not known for their appreciation of nuance. They’re very blunt people.

⏹️ ▶️ John Lifeguards would have to be making a judgment call, like is that boogie board too far out or too far in? It would just be constant whistling

⏹️ ▶️ John and yelling at people to bring their boogie boards in. So it makes some sense. The other thing is the Australians were

⏹️ ▶️ John telling us that the flag placement, that what they would do is the lifeguards in Australia would put the flags

⏹️ ▶️ John where the safest area to swim was. Even this follow-up says the safe swimming area. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the lifeguards would understand the various rip currents and everything and know, like, oh, today, this is the

⏹️ ▶️ John safe place to swim. And today, right now, this is the safe place to swim. In my experience on Long Island,

⏹️ ▶️ John both in my childhood and in my adult life going on vacation, that’s not, mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John not how it works on Long Island beaches I go to. The flags are basically placed like where, you know, the entrance

⏹️ ▶️ John to the beach. The flags are centered on the entrance to the beach. They will close it and

⏹️ ▶️ John say, you can’t swim if there’s a riptide, or you know, or I’ll advise against you depending on the conditions.

⏹️ ▶️ John They, you know, so the lifeguards are performing that function, but it’s not as if they will take the flags and move 300

⏹️ ▶️ John yards, move the flags 300 yards down the beach because of the rip current. No, they won’t because the lifeguard chairs,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, they could pick up and move them. But in practice, they don’t because there’s the big pile of sand in front of them that they would have to re-dig

⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t want to carry the things. It’s different on different beaches. Like some beaches have multiple fields

⏹️ ▶️ John that have their own separate parking lots, their own sets of chairs. And I think that’s probably different. But for the smaller South

⏹️ ▶️ John Shore’s beaches that I’m going to on the east end of Long Island, they don’t move the flags. They

⏹️ ▶️ John just close and keep it open. I’m not sure the way it is on where you are, Margaret,

⏹️ ▶️ John they ever move the flags or do they just, the flags are just fixed and it’s yes, no, you can go in the water.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They move the flags daily, but they always are the same center point. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, the width of the space between the flags changes with conditions. So if it’s a, you know, green

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flag day where the water is calm, they will, they’ll have them pretty far spaced out. If it’s a, you know, yellow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or red flag day, they’ll move them, they’ll scoot, scoot them in and make a narrower area. So I think it’s less about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where in particular the riptide might be, if they can tell that somehow, and more about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just how wide of an area do we want to be covering. And that’s based on conditions.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s based on staffing as well. So there’s usually multiple lifeguard stands, but sometimes they don’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ John staff for all of them. So the ones that aren’t occupied will be pushed over or just unoccupied, and they will narrow

⏹️ ▶️ John the flags based on staffing, because if they don’t have enough lifeguards to populate all of the little lifeguard chairs,

⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t watch those parts. And so they will definitely move the flags in and out like that, but they’ll never do like, oh, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the rip current over here. We’re going to go half a mile down the beach where there’s no rip current. I’ve never seen that done,

⏹️ ▶️ John at least on the smaller beaches that I’m going to. So there you go. All you want to know about beaches and boogie

⏹️ ▶️ John boards and rip currents and flags.

More on Channels & TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the follow-up I’ve been waiting for is, have you tried channels and is this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moment in which you tell me how right I am?

⏹️ ▶️ John So I listened back to last week’s episode and it’s still not entirely clear to me what

⏹️ ▶️ John your pitch is. So could you just briefly re-summarize what your pitch to me is

⏹️ ▶️ John on this topic?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think if you’re looking to get rid of your TiVo, which I know you’re actually not,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in this hypothetical world, which I know is your favorite thing, If you’re looking to get rid of the TiVo, I would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey argue that Channels is a, maybe not, I was going to say better, that’s probably a bit dramatic or a bit over the top,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey given how much I know you’re obsessed with your TiVo, but it is quote unquote a better TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than TiVo insofar as you can have, it can have effectively infinite storage because you can just, you know, have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it store things onto your Synology. It’s very responsive because it’s running on a, you know, proper computer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypothetically, unless you put it on something really underpowered, and you can watch your stuff anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now maybe that’s true of TiVo, I’m not sure, but certainly it’s true of channels. So you can be somewhere else and you can watch live

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, you can watch your recordings, whatever you wanna do. And what’s nice about channels is it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, you are better set up for channels even than I am because I don’t have a cable card in the house. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do connect it to your TiVo. And I know that it would be a big ass to take your beloved TiVo and make it, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey neuter it for a little while. But it is possible for you to just get a new box, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still being produced, whether or not it’s because they found chips, who knows. There are boxes still being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey made, or at least still available for sale. And you could buy one of those $150 boxes, you could stick it on your network, put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your cable card in it, connect it to coax, and you can have what is arguably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best possible setup for channels, which is to say you’re pulling in almost every Fios TV

⏹️ ▶️ Casey channel that you have access to. I think some of them are DRM encumbered and channels can’t get to them, but almost all of them are not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can pull in all of your Fios TV, and you can pull in, I think you can pull in Hulu,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you can pull in TV Everywhere, which among other things, YouTube TV supports, Vyos supports it as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can get all these things and you can aggregate them all into one spot. Plus, if you want to, if you have a robust TV library,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can do fun things like make a 24-7 LetterCaddy channel or a 24-7, I don’t know, Studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ghibli channel or whatever the case you might want. And so one way- Ghibli. Sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never seen any of them, so what do I know? So anyways- I watched the first 15 minutes of all of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Merlin.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You go back to- You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John giving me ideas here, no spoilers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I know we are, I know we are. So anyway, so I think it could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fit your needs pretty well. And the only downside to it as compared to TiVo is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, like TiVo, is largely reliant on a dead technology in order to work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey insofar as it relies on cable card. Now we could get into an argument whether or not the cable card box, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey HD Home Run thing, was actually a Home Run Prime. We can make an argument or get into an argument whether

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not the HD Home Run has any shelf life or longevity, but we can all agree

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that cable card does not. So there will come a time that cable card is just not supported, but that’ll kill your TiVo just as much as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll kill channels. So I just think it’s one of those things where I feel like it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something I would like you to try, especially because the guide and the user interface is really, really well done. And what’s nice

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about channels is it does pretty well in ways that Swift aims to, but does not with progressive disclosure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it can be fairly straightforward. It’s still fiddly, you know, for sure. a lot more fiddly than a TiVo.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But at first glance, it can be fairly straightforward. And then as you wish, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper and just tweak it to your heart’s content. Now, you may not have interest in that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is totally fine, but that’s something you could do. So I don’t know, I just, it feels like something I want you to try. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me, hey, you know, I gave it an honest shake and it’s not for me, that’s fine. Like Marco did with the Wrangler. Like, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. But I feel like it’s something you should give it, at least give it a shot.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you were much more emphatic last week that you needed me to get rid of my TiVos because

⏹️ ▶️ John they were bad. It’s not just hypothetical if you were getting rid of your TiVos, it was more like you have to get rid of your TiVos

⏹️ ▶️ John for you’re bad, because they’re bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because they’re dead. They’re dead technology walking. They are absolutely dead technology walking. I can’t believe anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey works in those TiVos.

⏹️ ▶️ John But are they more dead than the HD Home Run Prime that they just found new chips

⏹️ ▶️ John for?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s a fair question. And I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like they are. And that’s what I kept saying last week, can buy a brand new TiVo right now. They sell multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John models.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally think that they are more dead because I just don’t see how TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has any longevity. I really don’t. Whereas you always find nerds that are interested in doing nerdy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, which I guess maybe that applies to TiVo too now that I say that out loud. But I don’t know. I just I personally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that it is silly for you to continue to harp on TiVo as the one true savior of television

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I think there there are other options that may work better. But I’ll be the first to tell you there’s some caveats. So as an example,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the caveats to channels is that TV everywhere, which is what channels use to kind of, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if scrape is the right word, record, I guess, but to get access to traditional

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrestrial television, that is limited at 720p. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s not channels as well. No, it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not. Oh, is it not?

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was. It is not. It’s not limited to 720p. All right, so let me tell you, well, let

⏹️ ▶️ John me start by saying your pitch remains unconvincing, because I already

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco own

⏹️ ▶️ John Divos, and I’m not looking to get rid of them. Well, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fair, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John fair. But I think you’re also losing sight of, and I realize I didn’t, like, you’d have to rewind two episodes to figure this out,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, what is my goal in messing with this stuff? Like, why am I even looking into this? Do you remember the origin of, like, why

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at this stuff at all? It’s because I got a fancy new TV, and my fancy new TV is

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K and HDR. That’s why I started down the road of saying, let me reconsider all the things that are giving input

⏹️ ▶️ John to my television to make sure I’m getting the highest quality, because, you know, now my television can display

⏹️ ▶️ John better. So now when I just say, you know, standard definition, 1080, which used to be the limit of my previous television.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now I feel like, oh, if I can get that content better in a better format and 4K and HDR

⏹️ ▶️ John and both, that would be good. Right. And television is a big source of a lot of the stuff that I get. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John why I was looking into, for example, YouTube TV, because people had told me before I got my new television that, hey, YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John TV has some like regular channels that are in 4K or HDR or both.

⏹️ ▶️ John So check that out and that’s why I looked into that and the guide was crappy and I was like, oh this is bad And that’s kind of how we got into

⏹️ ▶️ John channels because the people said oh, well, yeah the YouTube TV Interface and apps aren’t great.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you use channels, you can use the channels UI to get a YouTube TV And

⏹️ ▶️ John you know as you described through TV everywhere interface, so that’s why I started going into channels, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John Everything you just said about channels is it’s that’s like what I said last week. It’s like Tevo but instead of it being

⏹️ ▶️ John an all-in-one box, it’s distributed into pieces. And that’s more fiddly, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John also more flexible, because then you can decide, for this piece, I’m going to use this, for that piece, I’m going to use that.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s componentized, right? And to answer your question about watching TiVo stuff elsewhere, yes, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can. You can watch TiVo stuff. And they’ve had that feature for years, right? So that’s not, you know. So Channels

⏹️ ▶️ John is really just a different TiVo with a different set of trade-offs. It doesn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately, help me at all with my question of how do I get better content into my television?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because although TV Everywhere isn’t limited to 720, you’re still limited by

⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of content will be on TV Everywhere for your particular channel. So let me tell you what I’ve done in

⏹️ ▶️ John this regard since last week. So first off, anonymous listener

⏹️ ▶️ John Ben, no last name, or listener Ben, last name withheld,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sent me

⏹️ ▶️ John an HD Home Run Prime. Oh man, good for Ben. Great, and that arrived pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John quickly, And by the way, speaking of dead technologies and Tivo feeling old or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John the HD Home Run Prime as a product is two years older than my oldest Tivo.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, they are still making and selling them because they found chips, but they canceled the six tuner when there was supposed to be a six

⏹️ ▶️ John tuner HD Home Run Prime, HD Home Run Prime six. And they canceled that project back in like 2020

⏹️ ▶️ John or whenever the FCC said, yeah, cable cards not going to be a thing anymore. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this whole product line seems super dead because they had planned to make a six tuner one, which I would probably buy

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way. They just canceled that whole thing. They say they are going to make another cable card

⏹️ ▶️ John product, but I can’t find anything concrete on that. So, and they had stopped making the HD Home Run Prime for

⏹️ ▶️ John a long time, but then they found new chips and are making them again. But anyway, either way, this is not irrelevant to me because I got one.

⏹️ ▶️ John The listener sent it to me. Thank you very much, listener Ben. Very nice of you, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I took a cable card out of one of my lesser TiVos

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and shoved it

⏹️ ▶️ John into the HD Home Run Prime and hooked it up. So here’s where I learned the limits of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff based on what I’m trying to do. And again, to reiterate, what I’m trying to do is to get

⏹️ ▶️ John better quality versions of like, the television shows that I pay for, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So, FiOS is good, FiOS especially in Massachusetts is good in that they don’t flip whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John bit that you flip to make it so like the channels are DRM protected. They don’t flip that

⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere except on the channels that force them to do it. So I think it’s only like HBO or maybe one or two other

⏹️ ▶️ John ones that force Fios to say, you have to put on the DRM

⏹️ ▶️ John bit. When you put that bit on, it means that channels can’t get those channels

⏹️ ▶️ John through the HD Home Run Prime, right? They’re just like, it doesn’t even see them, right? My TiVo can get them. So

⏹️ ▶️ John another notch in the column for TiVo, right? No, that’s totally fair. Totally fair. But it’s just like one channel who cares. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John have HBO screening. So that would not stop me, but just FYI, lots of other cable providers Don’t aren’t as nice as

⏹️ ▶️ John Verizon. They like check in on every single channel and then it makes a thing useless, which is really crappy.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then the next limitation is when Fios sends its television channels to

⏹️ ▶️ John my house, regardless, forget about the equipment that’s in my house, just as they come into my house, even if you had like the Fios

⏹️ ▶️ John first party equipment, if you have a cable card, if you have any other stuff, almost all the channels

⏹️ ▶️ John are not 4K. Fios in Massachusetts has like four or five 4K channels

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re just like holding bin channels where there’s nothing on them except when there’s special

⏹️ ▶️ John events. So for example, apparently the Olympics the past whatever, one or two times, they would put

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K versions of the Olympics into one or two of those channels. There’s one for like

⏹️ ▶️ John Red Sox games or other sports events, special events. But most of the day, if you go to those channels, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing on them except for like a standby or off air or just like a static graphic.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the extent of 4K content as traditional television channels coming

⏹️ ▶️ John into your house from Fios. There is apparently a Fios TV

⏹️ ▶️ John streaming thing that you can do where there’s like a Fios TV app for Apple TV and just like, you know, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John use the internet to get you the television that you pay for. But, you know, take cable companies

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, typically being annoying, I can’t even use that app unless I have in my home some of their

⏹️ ▶️ John first party cable box things and also use their stupid first party router thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m never doing that because I don’t allow any cable company equipment in my house if I can help it, except

⏹️ ▶️ John for the cable cards, right? Now the cable cards, the other channels that are not 4K, some

⏹️ ▶️ John of them are 1080. Most of them are not, but some of them are. I was going through the channels and using the little info thing on channels

⏹️ ▶️ John to see, and you will find 1080 ones. But that’s like, that’s exactly the same that is on

⏹️ ▶️ John my TiVo, if I go through the thing. Channels is more flexible in this manner. TiVo,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think, will just run at whatever resolution that you set it to,

⏹️ ▶️ John And then it just upscales everything. Channels, you can set it to like match content, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of annoying because then it like blacks out the TV when it goes between channels, but you can go between a 1080 channel and a 720 channel and it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John like change modes and everything. So anyway, there are 1080 channels, there are 720 channels,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re not getting any increase in quality. All you’re doing with channels is the same thing

⏹️ ▶️ John you could do on TiVo minus the VRM-predicted channels, but with the addition of the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John match content, which I don’t think you would ever do, especially on my setup. The delay of like, you know, switching modes from

⏹️ ▶️ John like 720 to 1080 is not worth it. It’s better to just keep it in, especially for live TV, maybe for recorded

⏹️ ▶️ John things, it’s fine. And channels lets you change that on like a per source basis, which is convenient.

⏹️ ▶️ John In terms of the channel setup, I’m running it on my wife’s computer, which she strongly

⏹️ ▶️ John objected to. In fact, just before we started recording, she told me to reiterate to you in particular cases that

⏹️ ▶️ John she does not want this running on her computer. The only reason I was allowed to do it because,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s for the show. I told her it was temporary. Wait, but is Plex still running on that computer?

⏹️ ▶️ John It is. But as I said on the last show, this is, there is no contradiction in this. It is exactly the explanation I gave,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is nobody cares about Plex. If Plex is down, nobody cares. I’m the only person who uses it and I can manage,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, dealing with the thing being up or down. It is not an essential part.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a different issue though. What is her gripe with channels?

⏹️ ▶️ John She doesn’t want things running on her computer that affect her television. is exactly what I said last week. She like, it doesn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, my ideal matches her ideal, which is things related to watching television should have

⏹️ ▶️ John no connection to the computers that are in our office. They can have connection to things that are in the basement that no

⏹️ ▶️ John one ever touches, but not to the stuff that’s in their office.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, if that’s the way she feels, who am I to tell her that she’s wrong, but she’s wrong. Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand what difference it makes where within the house, this device, this mythical device

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is connected to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John network.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because like, she wants the flexibility to be able to restart her computer or do anything with it, put it to sleep or

⏹️ ▶️ John shut it down or whatever without worrying that she’s messing up something related to television. In particular, doing things like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you’re using it as DVR, maybe it’s recording shows while you sleep, you know, like it just is, it’s something,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, she doesn’t want that entanglement. And I don’t blame her. I don’t want that entanglement either. So even if it wasn’t her opinion, it would also

⏹️ ▶️ John be my opinion. So we are unified as a family in this and there is no contradiction in Plex running on it. Because like I said,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you really are desperate to run Plex, it’s also on the Synology and that’s always up because it’s in the basement.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I guess, again, I can’t, as much as I joke, I can’t tell you that either of you are wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that whole line of reasoning does not compute to me, because… Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John either way, like, the point is, channels can run almost anywhere. Like, it’s very flexible. Like, the whole point of this being flexible is I could

⏹️ ▶️ John run it on my Synology, I could buy a little computer to run it. If I was serious about the setup, I would, in fact, get another little computer

⏹️ ▶️ John to run. It’s not difficult. This is not a dig against channels. Channels is very flexible, most of the time. In fact, that’s the reason

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d want to use channels because of its flexibility. So when I, but anyway, I’m just doing this temporarily.

⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with the, with the, with the cable card, that’s going back into the TiVo. I, you know, I got her permission to take it out of her TiVo.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when I took it out, like what I was trying to do is like, okay, I need to, I need to exercise it to get it to do

⏹️ ▶️ John things. So what I did was I looked at her season pass list on her TiVo that I was taking out of and I said, let me try

⏹️ ▶️ John to reproduce these season passes in channels. Just A, to build up shows and B, just to see what the experience

⏹️ ▶️ John is like. copies a lot of the TiVo interface in terms of the terminology and the way things

⏹️ ▶️ John are well mostly just terminology the way things are arranged is a little bit different. So I went

⏹️ ▶️ John and tried to add the season passes and found the first limitation

⏹️ ▶️ John of channels as compared to TiVo if you’re just used to the TiVo way of doing things

⏹️ ▶️ John which is on TiVo if you set up a season pass and you go like search for it or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John you can find the the show, even if it’s not currently airing. One example, survivor. So I ever comes in seasons

⏹️ ▶️ John and like each season is basically treated as an independent show. It’s like survivor colon, some subtitle

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, even though survivors not on right now, you can find it and set up a season password. Same

⏹️ ▶️ John thing for, you know, so the first thing I did was one of her shows was something she watches on, um, I forget what channels is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I did a search for it, uh, and it doesn’t come up in channels because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John currently airing at all. So I can’t add the season pass. And just to confirm, it’s like, maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it’s not visible on

⏹️ ▶️ John Tivo either. I did a search on Tivo like on my other Tivo, the downstairs one where that show doesn’t have seen in the past and Tivo

⏹️ ▶️ John does find it. So Tivo’s depth of understanding which shows may be airing in the future

⏹️ ▶️ John is vastly better than channels. I think it’s mostly because channels gets his guide info from like me to it. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John 1414 days worth of guide info from the cable thing. If you can tell me, is there some other way to

⏹️ ▶️ John tell channels, hey, get additional info about television shows from this other source

⏹️ ▶️ John so you know about shows that might be airing in six months? There

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. Now, I am talking way outside my comfort zone, so I might be telling you some lies by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accident, but my limited understanding is you absolutely can tell it to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go and get guide data, more guide data. And additionally, I believe that there are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some, um, like guide data providers that explicitly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you considerably more guide data. As an example, a friend of mine,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Justin Williams, is really into professional wrestling that, you know, Hey, what do you, you like what you like, but I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he subscribes, I believe he subscribes to a particular service that gives what is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, EPG or something like that. I forget the acronym, but it’s something like that, that gives guide data that is hyper

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurate for professional wrestling shows because you know, what little I know, professional wrestling is you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have different fights or bouts or what have you. And so, you know, maybe the, the, the regular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guide data says WWE Raw. And that’s all it says. Whereas this, you know, phantom,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever thing that he subscribes to and pays money for says WWE raw, it’s, you know, the rock versus so-and-so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this versus that, and this versus that, and, you know, featuring the death match of doom or whatever they do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in professional wrestling. And so I think there is, there is a way not only to pay for that data,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I, I’m 99% sure he is doing, he’s using channels to suck in that data

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. Off the top of my head, I’m not specifically sure where to do that, but but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am pretty sure that it is possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another example of things that TiVo rolls in. For the fee that you pay for TiVo, and you can pay TiVo monthly,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think annually, but also what I tend to do is, because I’m such a long-term TiVo user, you buy the lifetime thing, where you just

⏹️ ▶️ John pay one amount and that’s it forever. And TiVo, of course, gives you, wherever TiVo gets its guide

⏹️ ▶️ John data from, probably from one of these services or something, that’s all bundled with the service. Another thing that I noticed

⏹️ ▶️ John about TiVo versus channels, I mean, well, it depends on what mode you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John things. So I did try the TV Everywhere without the cable card first because before I had this cable card, I was using channels.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even last week I was using channels by itself. And TV Everywhere, it’s a web API. It’s not really web scraping,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an officially supported API. And if your services support it, you can view the stuff with it. And as far

⏹️ ▶️ John as I can tell, it’s the same quality as I’m getting with the cable card. So I compared, like, let me look at Discovery

⏹️ ▶️ John on TV Everywhere. Let me look at Discovery through my HD Home Run Prime. I think it’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John the same, at least in my case. I think it varies by channel maybe varies by service that you’re sucking

⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff from, but it’s not, it may be lesser quality, but in my case, it didn’t look like it was. It was 1080 in both places,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t think there’s 4K available in any of these things anyway, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s reasonable, but when you’re using TV Everywhere, because it’s a web thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John it starts slower. It starts slower than tuning to something on the tuner,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the three tuners that’s in the HD Home Run Prime. Part of that is buffering. You can set a configurable

⏹️ ▶️ John buffer size of how much you want to buffer, but like, and I played with that a little bit, but you’re going to wait

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit longer when quote unquote changing channels with the TV everywhere. You might see a spinner before it

⏹️ ▶️ John spools up and there might be one or two hitches. Hitches like that never happened with TiVo.

⏹️ ▶️ John Never, like it’s just like cable. That’s one of the advantages of TiVo and the HD Home Run Prime

⏹️ ▶️ John also no hitches because it’s just, it’s like a tuner. Like the video is just there and ready

⏹️ ▶️ John as instantly as you can switch between tuners, or switch one tuner to a different channel.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that is a big advantage of cable card over the TV Everywhere. And again, I feel like I’m in

⏹️ ▶️ John an ideal scenario. Everything is on gigabit ethernet. I have symmetric gigabit up and down. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s anything more I could do. It’s just the nature of the beast. The coaxial

⏹️ ▶️ John cable that’s sending the quote unquote television to my house is just blasting everything all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is a shame that there’s only three tuners. I did exhaust the three tuners pretty quickly with recording shows

⏹️ ▶️ John and then when the three tuners are used up you can’t even go watch another show because it says all tuners are in use. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to watch another show you have to stop one of the recordings and go to it. So again I think for my purposes

⏹️ ▶️ John three is probably a little low, six is probably overkill but six is certainly nice and if I

⏹️ ▶️ John have two TiVos with six tuners each so I can do 12 at once it’s we’ve never run out of tuners on the TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ John it is possible to pretty easily run out of them on three which is why I wish there was an HD Homer on Prime 6 but they they canceled that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But again, they said there, the Silicon Dust says they are going to make another cable card product, and I wonder what that will be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but you could, one of the things to speak about flexibility, as you had said earlier, one of the things you could do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you could get a second HD Home Run box and put a second cable card in it. Now you have six

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tuners. You’re not gonna do that because A, you’re giving up on it, and B, I’m gonna make you ship me that one that Ben shipped to you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s neither here nor there. But it is something that you could.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not shipping it to you. Like I might still use it, but here’s the problem. I mean the cable is a problem with cable

⏹️ ▶️ John card, right? If you get another one Chances are good and is definitely true in the case

⏹️ ▶️ John of Verizon Fios that you will have to pay per Per month per cable card I do

⏹️ ▶️ John each cable card I have in my house that make they make you pay for like cuz you’re not I’m not paying them for any other cable box

⏹️ ▶️ John Crap because they don’t have any of that. I don’t use their router and use any of that but for each cable card It’s like five bucks a month

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that So I have to pay an additional five on the month just to get the cable card the hardware itself is cheap I think the

⏹️ ▶️ John HD horn prime again, this is a product introduced in 2011

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a hundred and something bucks 150

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bucks, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah If you can find one new and use the probably even less than that But it’s a very simple device

⏹️ ▶️ John like to understand what this device is. In fact, it’s a little bit too simple It’s a plastic box that you plug a

⏹️ ▶️ John coaxial cable into a cable card into Ethernet and power and it doesn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ John anything It doesn’t decode any video. It doesn’t like it just accepts what’s coming in on the coax

⏹️ ▶️ John uses the cable card to tune to one of three possible channels. It supports three tuners

⏹️ ▶️ John and makes that content available through ethernet. And then, you know, it has power thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so light and Coraxio cables are so thick that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s hard to make it

⏹️ ▶️ John lay like on a flat surface because it always like tilts up because the cables. That was another problem. I had

⏹️ ▶️ John to go buy a cable splitter. When’s the last time anyone’s done that? I had to buy a two-way cable splitter because I realized

⏹️ ▶️ John when I was going to hook it up, the back of my television area just has one coax that

⏹️ ▶️ John goes to the TiVo. I don’t have another one, so I had to buy a splitter and two very short cables to split that

⏹️ ▶️ John into one going to my TiVo and one going to the HD Homer and Prime. It is small box, but it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John really lay flat. And dealing with cable cards, if you’ve never dealt with them before, is a pain. Not because of anything having to do with the HD Homer

⏹️ ▶️ John and Prime, but just having to do with cable cards being a pain. Like I don’t endorse cable cards, but it’ll be sad when they

⏹️ ▶️ John go away, because this same cable card works with a six tuner TiVo. I don’t know what the limit is, but the

⏹️ ▶️ John number of tuners is not in the card. it’s a multi-stream card, it’s like inherent in the box itself. So that’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of a shame. Um, so yeah, like using the interface,

⏹️ ▶️ John the, my main complaint is that it’s less information dense than Tevo. Tevo was an older interface where it’s, you know, it’s kind of like Gmail

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can go to the compact view, which is the view I use where you just have like line items. Whereas channels is more modern.

⏹️ ▶️ John It looks more like Plex. Like they want to show you a large poster images of

⏹️ ▶️ John the things that you’re watching. Right. But when you record the amount of content I do, having

⏹️ ▶️ John the list of things that you’ve recorded be more information dense and just like a list view instead of an icon view really helps.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there is a list view in channels, but even the list view is tall because they show the thumbnail images and a bunch of other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John about it. There’s other things where it’s like trickier to get it to the feature that you want from the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re on, so you have to go back or whatever, but mostly it’s just what you’re used to. I’m definitely used to TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m, I have both TiVo interfaces, both the old one, which in my opinion was better, but of course it looks old,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the new one, which is worse but looks more modern. Both of those interfaces, I think, are

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit better, especially in the recording list, than Channels. Channels has an enhanced library view that lets you

⏹️ ▶️ John sort things if you have lots of content, but that’s more for like if you, if you point

⏹️ ▶️ John it to your Plex library, which is the thing that you can do as well. You can just say, hey, by the way, Channels, this is the advantage of Channels.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not only do I have an HDL1 Prime, but also you can get these channels on my over-the-air thing, and also I have a bunch of crap in

⏹️ ▶️ John my, in a, you know, Synology over here, and it will just merge it into one giant thing and

⏹️ ▶️ John just eat it all up, right? And if you have that much content, things like the enhanced library view and virtual channels and everything

⏹️ ▶️ John help you organize things. But like I said in the beginning, my goal is to get better quality

⏹️ ▶️ John television content and channels is not helping with that because Fios only gives me a certain quality. It seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like the result of all my experimentation here is almost nobody

⏹️ ▶️ John gives you any of those channels in better than 1080 content. My quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote cable provider does not. like except for those few 4K channels, YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John TV is the only thing that does, and even YouTube TV does not have a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K channels. Like I found one or two of them and they were like HGTV or Discovery or something, like stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that I mostly don’t watch. I was just looking at them to see the 4K content, but I would have to go through every single

⏹️ ▶️ John channel on YouTube TV and see like what, you know, what fraction of a percent actually provide 4K

⏹️ ▶️ John content. And I think if I did TV Everywhere to YouTube TV, if I had subscribed

⏹️ ▶️ John to it, it would not be 4K. Now I say I think because

⏹️ ▶️ John I foolishly used up my like free trial of YouTube TV last time when I tried it because it said,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know, sign up for a free trial. And I did, and I played with it, and I didn’t like the interface and whatever I talked about on the show.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I canceled the free trial because it’s really expensive. It was like $84, you know, because it’s like 60 bucks plus,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 11 bucks for the 4K thing or whatever. Like it would have been 80 something dollars if I had paid for

⏹️ ▶️ John even just one month of it. And that’s too much for an experiment. So I canceled it right but now it

⏹️ ▶️ John won’t let me or apparently anyone in my household sign up for the free trial It’s I

⏹️ ▶️ John can do the free for 20 minutes thing Like you can always do the free for 20 minutes thing if you go into the web UI and says

⏹️ ▶️ John try it free for 20 Minutes, but that just lets you use the web UI to use it with channels You have to have a login that works

⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way No limitation of channels if you have two-factor you can’t use TV everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John with YouTube TV So the suggestion is to make a family group and then make a new account in the family group doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have two-factor turn down and use that to authenticate them but anyway I couldn’t do any of that because I just can’t sign up for

⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube TV unless I pay 80-something bucks or I can’t sign up for YouTube TV with 4k

⏹️ ▶️ John unless I pay 80-something bucks and I wasn’t willing to do that but from everything that I’ve heard even though YouTube TV does have

⏹️ ▶️ John channels in 4k it doesn’t have a lot of those channels and channel and channels

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t can’t get those channels in 4k through the TV Ever interface due to the limitations

⏹️ ▶️ John of what is vended by YouTube TV. Um, so I still haven’t hooked up to my TV. I’m still,

⏹️ ▶️ John I did a couple of season passes with it. Oh, the reason I still have hooked up is because one of the advantages

⏹️ ▶️ John that channels has over TiVo is, has a commercial auto skip.

⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo still makes you hit a button, a single button granted, but a button to skip over all the channels. And I think TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ John has like, I don’t know what they have doing this. They have something server side and they’re in marking the beginning

⏹️ ▶️ John of the end of the channels. But with

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco channels,

⏹️ ▶️ John I keep, I should call it get channels because that’s what I’m like Googling. I always have Google for get channels. So I was, you know, find anything cause

⏹️ ▶️ John get channels.com is a website. Anyway, with channels, the service,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the TV, the commercial skipping happens because they run a little command line thing on your server to find

⏹️ ▶️ John the channels for you. It’s called calm, skip. And I ran it from the command line a few times to see what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s like.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You keep conflating channels and commercials. You keep saying you hit to skip the channels for you

⏹️ ▶️ John to skip the commercials. Sorry. Yes. Um, calm, skip for skipping commercials. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s handy because you’re not then dependent on, you know, TiVo to find the commercials for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now TiVo does a really good job of finding the commercials, but if they didn’t do a good job or if you’re watching some really obscure thing that they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mark the channels in, or the commercials in, you, uh, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John out of luck. Whereas again, the flexibility of channels, uh, it just runs that command on everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if it doesn’t find the commercials for you, you can tweak the parameters, tweak the any file to find the commercials or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And then when you’re watching, you can configure it to auto skip the commercials for you instead having you hit a

⏹️ ▶️ John button. You can also configure it to hit a button or whatever. So anyway, I threw some season passes into channels for

⏹️ ▶️ John some shows that I would normally watch on my TiVo, and it is kind of annoying to have to remember

⏹️ ▶️ John to skip the channels with the remote. It’s nicer to just sit there and have it skip over them. So I’m gonna leave it connected for

⏹️ ▶️ John a while and try that out. I’ve already paid for one month of channels, which is like eight bucks or something, so it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John a big commitment. I didn’t… you can get a savings if you pay for the annual thing, but I didn’t. So that’s what I’m doing

⏹️ ▶️ John so far. I’m, you know, I’m gonna play with channels for for as long as I

⏹️ ▶️ John can until my wife demands that her cable car goes back into her TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ John or demands that I get the server off of her device. But my quest continues

⏹️ ▶️ John for superior quality content for my television. I’m assuming that what will happen,

⏹️ ▶️ John as all of these cable car things slowly fade away, is that someday I will be able to stop paying

⏹️ ▶️ John for cable television, which may not lower my bill as much as you would think because I get one of those big

⏹️ ▶️ John packages as does telephone, television, and my internet. And I love my internet. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna stop paying for that. But they really want you to buy the other stuff from them as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe someday it will no longer be worth it to me to buy the big television

⏹️ ▶️ John package, but it’s gonna be a while I think, because if I downgraded my TV service

⏹️ ▶️ John to like the minimum or discontinued it entirely, and then individually paid

⏹️ ▶️ John for Showtime, AMC, HBO, like all that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John with their individual service plans, I think it would still end up being more expensive than the

⏹️ ▶️ John current bundle that I pay for due to all of the bundling discounts, but we’ll see. But anyway, when that happens,

⏹️ ▶️ John presumably the streaming services will start sending 4K content to me. And then in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of DVR solutions, I don’t know, because channels reliant on that TV Everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it just seems like an API kind of like cable card that these people, these companies don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John to keep supporting if they don’t have to. So I’m not sure what the future of DVRing stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ John in the streaming-only world. If it’s streaming, you don’t need to DVR most of the time, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, maybe for live content or local channels that will, you know. Anyway, as always, TV is a big giant

⏹️ ▶️ John mess, but now I have one more potential tool in my arsenal if and when my TiVos ever die. Oh, and as part of this

⏹️ ▶️ John whole experience, I was looking again, taking a harder look at the current crop of TiVos,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re still… my ancient TiVo is still…

⏹️ ▶️ John still holds more stuff in it, and I kind of still like the fact that it’s running the old UI instead of

⏹️ ▶️ John the new one, because I don’t like the new UI as much. I would like it if TiVo continued to survive,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I would like it if they introduced a new TiVo device that is better than the one I have, but so far the… if I was

⏹️ ▶️ John to buy the brand new one now it has one terabyte less storage, which is annoying to expand.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can expand it, but it’s annoying to expand internally and externally it’s big and clunky to expand.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they use 2.5 inch drives now, whereas my current one uses a 3.5 inch, which sounds old and clunky to you,

⏹️ ▶️ John but reliability-wise the 3.5 inches are, in my experience, have been better than a 2.5. I have a TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ John Bolt with a 2.5, the drive already died once, I’ve never lost 3.5 inch drive in any of my TiVos,

⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m not sure what I’m gonna do there. But anyway, it was a fun experiment. The experiment is still running. I will

⏹️ ▶️ John update you on How things go but it is continue to be slightly disappointed that I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John find That not only I can’t find but basically it doesn’t exist higher quality versions

⏹️ ▶️ John of most of the regular television channels Oh, and I’ll add that the 720 and 1080 ones are

⏹️ ▶️ John just always so massively compressed and gross looking That’s another reason people recommend a YouTube DVD. They said even if you’re just looking at stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John in 720 or 1080 It’s less compressed than it is on Fios because in Fios they have to jam

⏹️ ▶️ John all the channels into these little slivers of their bandwidth to your house.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I am just so happy that I don’t care nearly as much as you do about TV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the fidelity of the TV shows that you’re watching on TV. Because to me, this entire setup,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds like, it’s like, I want to read a lot of articles. So what I do is I have every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco magazine ever published mailed to my house. to my house. And then I have an array of six scanners. Oh, wait, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want me to go down to three scanners? That’s not gonna be enough. I need six scanners running in parallel to scan all these magazines coming into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my house all the time so I can digitize them to put them on my computer so I can read them, you know, where I want to read them and how I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to read them. But I can’t just go to their websites because, you know, that’s it’s like slightly different in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, that’s the nature of broadcast. But yeah, it is annoying. Like I said, if we go all streaming, everything is available

⏹️ ▶️ John on demand and at higher quality whenever you that’s ideal. Um, very often, like when I watch HBO,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, we usually just go to the app on Apple TV, uh, rather than the Tevo, which may have also recorded the show

⏹️ ▶️ John just because it’s more convenient, faster, and often seems like it’s in higher quality than what you, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if it is, but it seems like it is with it, whether it’s bit rate or if it’s 4k or HDR,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I would prefer to use the app over that, but not everything has an app. Uh, and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially for local things and it’s not relevant to me, but especially for things like local sports and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll get there eventually. But again, I think there’s another advantage, potential advantage for channels

⏹️ ▶️ John if they can ever cross this divide, which is it will take input from anywhere that it

⏹️ ▶️ John can get it in the best quality that it can get it. The question is the last part in the best quality that can get it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Will channels and other third party things be able to get content in good quality or will be

⏹️ ▶️ John will be be forced to use, you know, this giant constellation

⏹️ ▶️ John of streaming apps to get stuff. I mean, it was, I was at Christina Warren had a good tweet where she was quoting Jim

⏹️ ▶️ John Barksdale, I think the guy from Netscape or maybe son, saying that there are only two

⏹️ ▶️ John business models, bundling and unbundling. And we are currently in the process of

⏹️ ▶️ John going out of unbundling and back into bundling. When we paid for cable and it was like, oh, I got to pay for this to a bundle of channels. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John care about ESPN, but it adds $15 to our monthly fee or whatever. That was a giant bundle. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great if I could just pick and choose the services that I wanted. I think we had that discussion on this very show many years ago. Now I can

⏹️ ▶️ John just pay for what I want. Well, I want HBO and I want Showtime. That was the unbundling, right? You’d get you’d pay for a streaming

⏹️ ▶️ John service. You just pay for HBO now or HBO go or whichever the hell one it is. And you pay for Showtime

⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere or whatever the hell that thing is called. And so you didn’t have to pay for the big package.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the individual bundles ended up being really expensive. And now those individual bundle companies are consolidating.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it was like Warner Brothers, HBO, Discovery are combining into one app and you got Paramount Plus

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So now we’re in the, it seems like we’re going towards unbundling where we’re going to end up with a series

⏹️ ▶️ John of larger packages. And so instead of paying for a bunch of individual quote unquote channels,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll pay for Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, Discovery slash HBO Plus,

⏹️ ▶️ John Paramount Plus. And each one of those things will have tons of content, not equivalent to just one channel in

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Will they ever go into a super bundle where Fios will sell you a package where

⏹️ ▶️ John You pay a monthly fee to Verizon and then you get access to the HBO app the Showtime

⏹️ ▶️ John app the discovery app or whatever Who knows but it seems like that’s what phase are in Eventually when we get over that hump

⏹️ ▶️ John Then we can use the power of the internet to get 4k versions of all this stuff and no one will ever need to

⏹️ ▶️ John DV Quote-unquote DVR anything because everything will be available on demand with a smattering of live streams, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John over the air and 4k I don’t know. That’s another thing. I didn’t try it in dry over the air I think over there content does have more 4k

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but I really don’t want to deal with antennas And I mostly don’t care about Live sports or anything

⏹️ ▶️ John like that, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealing with antennas is not bad You just get a different HD home run box, which this would be irrelevant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you because you’ve got the cable card one I’m saying if if this was something you you or a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey listener wants to explore this is what I have done actually is I have a HD home run box

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is not with a cable card It just has coax ethernet and power and by the way I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you couldn’t hear me because I was muted But I was laughing when you said it is impossible to get this thing to sit on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit flush because mine is Also is tilted at like a 45 degree angle for the exact same reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John or a lightweight box.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but anyways the over-the-air antennas are Really inexpensive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re well under $100 unless you want to get one That’s super fancy, and I don’t remember how much I paid for this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey HD home run box I think it was also like $100 or less and then that would give you over-the-air stuff again

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your situation John I don’t think that’s useful at all because

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think the over-the-air might be higher quality than those same channels that I’m Getting through files though. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John that is a possibility Possible. I mean, I don’t actually care about those channels So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not really relevant to me because I just I don’t watch those channels But I think over-the-air might actually be higher quality than the

⏹️ ▶️ John sliver of the coax that they give those channels on files

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair Also, I would love it if you could try or maybe you mentioned this and I just blacked out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a second but I would love it if you could try to record any of the 4K Fios channels

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the cable card and the HDR,

⏹️ ▶️ John the HL1. I would have tried, but there’s nothing airing on them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I hear you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but is there even a 4K sized, not right now screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what I mean? Cause you could see if what channel saves.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I could try that. I think, yeah, I think one of the, I think the one with the little Red Sox logo, first of all, it

⏹️ ▶️ John had a day and a time that the Red Sox game was going to be on, but I don’t remember what day that was, but I could wait for that. second, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John that might be 4K. I’ll double check on it to see like what it produces.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would love to know if channels would successfully record in 4K. I genuinely have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no idea if it would or not. But I think it’s a fun experiment that you should definitely try.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it should, like it doesn’t care about it. They’re just files and streams.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. And I think that the and what this I think more boils down to is HD home run

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than it does channels. I would assume the HD home run is just basically using the cable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey card and I again I’m outside my comfort zone now using the cable card to decrypt decode whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the the stuff that’s coming in over coax and then just basically dump those bits right to desk or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John network

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah it has no idea what the content is right so I think I think that is true and I believe my

⏹️ ▶️ John cable cars uh from the research that like the cable card itself is capable of handling 4k

⏹️ ▶️ John content I think that’s how the Verizon channels work it’s just a question of like what downstream of that can handle it so

⏹️ ▶️ John for For example, my TiVo can’t handle 4K content. It’s just too old. It predates 4K. So

⏹️ ▶️ John even though my cable card could put that out, the TiVo is just going to show you 1080 no matter what. If you’ve got one of the

⏹️ ▶️ John newer TiVos, the newer TiVos say they are 4K capable, but I’m pretty sure what they mean is

⏹️ ▶️ John we support streaming apps. If your streaming service supports 4K, our apps can show it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you could use the Netflix app on the TiVo to show 4K content and it would work. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it means that we can show 4K content your cable car, but I’m not going to buy one of those to find out.

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TV audio sync

Chapter TV audio sync image.

⏹️ ▶️ John One final thing on televisions, another TV setup thing that I was doing recently is

⏹️ ▶️ John audio sync and audio delay. Maybe I did this on my past TV, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John remember it being quite as painful. Right? So to get an idea of what I’m talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ John have you ever watched something on television and it seems like the person’s lips are not in sync with what

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re saying? And no, not because it’s dubbed into a different length. That’s the situation I was feeling

⏹️ ▶️ John when I was watching television on something. I’m like, Oh, I should set the audio sync up

⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m using a receiver. Pretty much every receiver has a setting where you can

⏹️ ▶️ John adjust the audio delay to match the video. And I don’t remember how I did this last time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe last time I just did it by eyeball, but I find it incredibly difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John to use a setting to go to increase and decrease the delay to get

⏹️ ▶️ John the audio to match someone’s lips. It’s way harder than you think it is. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John going to give some tips for what I am doing. So my first tip is use a documentary.

⏹️ ▶️ John You cannot use a movie or a television show to do this because there’s so much ADR, additional

⏹️ ▶️ John dialogue recording or whatever. So much of the time the audio you hear coming out of someone’s mouth is not

⏹️ ▶️ John what the actor said in that moment that they are being recorded on video. It is later they came in and

⏹️ ▶️ John re-recorded the audio. So use a documentary, because they tend not to do ADR in documentaries. At least I really

⏹️ ▶️ John hope they don’t. Have the people come in later and try to match what they said earlier, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So what I was using was the, what is it called? Light and Magic, the ILM documentaries

⏹️ ▶️ John on Disney+. There’s lots of interviews with talking heads and people sitting there. And I figured

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gotta be like live audio because it’s all just interviewing people.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then I tried to do it by eye, and I just can’t do it. Sometimes I can’t even

⏹️ ▶️ John tell which direction should I be going. Should I be going negative delay or positive delay? I can

⏹️ ▶️ John tell when it looks wrong, but I can’t convince myself that it looks right. So I needed a better

⏹️ ▶️ John tool for this. I was hoping there’d be some automated tool that would do it, but I didn’t find any.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if you Google for this, you will find various applications that will,

⏹️ ▶️ John not applications, videos that will help you with this. So here’s the one I use. I will put this link in the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes. Maybe Margot can make it the chapter art. This is a video available on YouTube.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of ones like this. And it just shows an animation with like

⏹️ ▶️ John a bar across the screen with a little highlight that goes from left to right. It goes, zoop, zoop,

⏹️ ▶️ John left and right. And when the little highlight hits exactly in the middle, there’s a beep.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s got a bunch of things. It’s got four circles that appear on the lower left. It’s got a bar graph that

⏹️ ▶️ John hits the top. But the main important thing is the little white highlight and the bar

⏹️ ▶️ John that hits the zero point when the beep goes, right? And it’s got little millisecond markings, right? And what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to do is just play this looping video. I mean, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think they want you to eyeball it. They say you should hear the beep when the highlight is in the middle. Even this I found

⏹️ ▶️ John so hard to do because it goes by so fast and I’m staring at it and I’m like, is it beeping when

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in the middle? You can convince yourself that it is beeping when it’s in the middle. But

⏹️ ▶️ John then when I did it, okay, like I was like, okay, I think it’s in the middle. But then I would look at a bar that’s like five bars

⏹️ ▶️ John to the left. And I can convince myself that it’s beeping when it hits the fifth bar to the left. And I can also convince

⏹️ ▶️ John myself that it’s beeping when it’s the fifth bar to the right. It’s just too fast for my eyeballs to handle. Maybe we need a young person

⏹️ ▶️ John or a Jedi. I don’t know. I could not do it. So this screenshot that I

⏹️ ▶️ John just put in the chat and then we’ll put in the show notes, here’s what I actually did. I used

⏹️ ▶️ John the 240 frames per second slow-mo video recording on my iPhone to record a video

⏹️ ▶️ John of the video playing on my TV. And then I brought it into iMovie so I could see the

⏹️ ▶️ John waveform of the audio. And if you see in the screenshot, what I would do is I would say like, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna trust my ears to tell me when the beep is going. I want the highlight to be on zero

⏹️ ▶️ John when the beep, you know, when the beep is playing. And then I had to make a judgment call because if you see

⏹️ ▶️ John a beep in an audio waveform, it’s not just a single spike, especially at 240 frames per second. It’s like a plateau. So if you

⏹️ ▶️ John look at the waveform, it’s like it has an attack and then like a, what is it called? Decay. Decay.

⏹️ ▶️ John I had to decide at what point do I want to align the zero? I could have aligned

⏹️ ▶️ John the zero the first time the, like the waveform comes off silence. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ John second the beep begins, but I’m like, that’s probably not how this video is done. They probably have the

⏹️ ▶️ John beep time to trigger at zero for it to peak at zero maybe. So I kind of split the

⏹️ ▶️ John difference. So if you look at the screenshot, this is what I decided to do. I said, I want the

⏹️ ▶️ John highlight to be on zero when the sound has sort of just

⏹️ ▶️ John began and is near its peak before it starts to decay. And you would think it wouldn’t make that

⏹️ ▶️ John much of a difference, but if you adjust the delay by a tiny amount, You can target the beginning of the waveform,

⏹️ ▶️ John the middle of the waveform, the end of the waveform. Again, this is naturally stretched out because it’s 240 frames per second, but I got

⏹️ ▶️ John it as close as I could. And also in this screenshot, you’ll see the interface I was talking about last time where it blacks out the screen and shows this

⏹️ ▶️ John like ugly text. That’s my receiver’s sound delay input thing. And of course you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John configure this per input because it varies. The good thing is that every single thing in my stack

⏹️ ▶️ John has a YouTube app. So I can play this YouTube video on all of them. What I’m hoping is that the

⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube app has the same delay as anything else, which I think it probably does because

⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, the receiver doesn’t know what app you’re running, the receiver is just receiving audio and the thing is just showing video.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I did individual delays for all of my things. They all had slightly

⏹️ ▶️ John different delays and I did it graphically by taking lots and lots of high resolution

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco videos,

⏹️ ▶️ John high speed videos and lining them up and then I would go back and adjust the delay and then pull the

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff into iMovie and look at it again, adjust the delay and go on and on and on. And eventually I got them all lined up

⏹️ ▶️ John to my satisfaction. And then I watched, you know, documentary again. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John get so inside your head about this. You can be like, are their lips matching? How do people’s lips move when they

⏹️ ▶️ John talk? Some people’s lips move differently than others when saying the same words. Some people don’t move their lips a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John when they talk. Some people do. So I’d look for plosives, because you’d know when they would, you know, lips would come together

⏹️ ▶️ John and then pop out with a P sound. Anyway, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got it dialed in to be as close as humanly possible using all the tools available to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John But boy, would I love it if there was a tool that would do this for you. If you have wireless

⏹️ ▶️ John speakers, Apple TV has a speech that says I will do audio sync for your wireless speakers

⏹️ ▶️ John and they want you to hold your phone up and do whatever. But it only does it for wireless speakers, as far as I can tell. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John other advice I’ll give to anyone who is going down this road is sound travels not that fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you try to do this calibration right next to your television, it will be wrong on your couch. If

⏹️ ▶️ John your couch like mine is 10 feet away. Because like every foot is like, I didn’t do the math on this, but every foot is like a millisecond or

⏹️ ▶️ John something. Like it’s- I think it’s about every meter. Yeah, or anyway, if your couch is 10, you know, 10

⏹️ ▶️ John feet away from your television like mine, sit on the couch when you do it. Because you get different numbers than

⏹️ ▶️ John if you were like an inch from the television, right? And I found that out the hard way

⏹️ ▶️ John because I did the first one really close to it. And then did the second one back. I’m like, wait a second, these numbers are all

⏹️ ▶️ John different. And so I had to redo them all from the couch position. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember going through all this pain with my television earlier, but that was so many years ago, maybe I did. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just more sensitive to it because I was watching documentaries where the lip sync should have been perfect. But

⏹️ ▶️ John now as far as I can tell, it is perfect and hopefully it won’t drift over time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one reason why I’m so happy that I work with audio and not video. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so many more things that can break you in video or things you have to worry about. It’s just audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only is so nice. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I wish the television or the receiver had a way to do this visually, because expecting

⏹️ ▶️ John humans, people should play this game on your own. If you don’t have a receiver, you probably won’t be able to play it. No.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, people should not play this. Ignorance is bliss. No. No. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have a receiver, everything should be in sync anyway. Because remember, the delay I’m adjusting is on the receiver

⏹️ ▶️ John itself. Oh, yeah, one other thing. HDMI 2.1 supposedly has auto latency

⏹️ ▶️ John adjustment built into the protocol. And there is a setting on my receiver that says, do you want me to adjust the latency

⏹️ ▶️ John automatically? But it’s on, it’s on by default, right? So it thinks it’s doing that. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John I had to decide, should I leave that setting on and also do the audio delay? Or should I turn it off and do the audio

⏹️ ▶️ John delay? In the end, I left it on and did the audio delay. But I can tell you with that feature on, that doesn’t fix the delay.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s getting closer or maybe it’s screwing it up. Either way, I left it on and dialed in the audio delay

⏹️ ▶️ John on top of that. So I don’t know what the deal with that feature is. Maybe it varies by receiver, But

⏹️ ▶️ John just be aware that that is a thing. And in theory, maybe it’s not necessary in your setup. But even if you just have something as simple

⏹️ ▶️ John as a sound bar or any kind of receiver that is sort of decoding signals or doing anything like that,

⏹️ ▶️ John you could experience this. And all of my delays were positive.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think that’s basically adding a delay to say, yes, I didn’t run out of receiver. You got

⏹️ ▶️ John the audio, and you’re ready to play it right now. But just hold back 120 milliseconds and then play that

⏹️ ▶️ John audio, because then you’ll be in sync with the television. And it also may be related to the delays in the television.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re doing lots of processing on the television and it’s slow, that may be inducing a delay. So dial in your TV

⏹️ ▶️ John settings before you do this. Make sure it’s configured the way you want with whatever features you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John to use on your television, and then do the audio delay with whatever those video processing things are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And wait, it’s 120 milliseconds, that’s a lot. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I don’t, again, I couldn’t even tell whether it was positive or negative doing it by hand, but doing it graphically,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no lying about the waveforms, like there it is, 240 frames per second. They were all positive. They were positive somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John around the low 100 milliseconds. Wow.

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Ventura’s System Settings app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One more piece of follow-up. This has been fascinating. But it’s gone on longer than I expected.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This has been going around a little while. You’re welcome, Marco. This Twitter thread has been going around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a little while. This is by Nikki Tonski. And it starts with, OK, thread of weird stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey found in the redesigned macOS Ventura system settings app. And it’s a series

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of images and videos and screen captures whatnot about how freaking broken

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the system setting app is in Ventura and it’s rough y’all. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was going to I wanted to see if this actually changed in beta. I think it was beta 5 that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco released. So I updated my Macbook Air to that earlier today. And I was poking around settings and I had the that little thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that says you have 27 days left or whatever to add AppleCare. And so I clicked on that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and took a very long time to load it loaded a different screen in the meantime, then it eventually popped in,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I clicked the Remind Me Later button, and that has now frozen the System Settings app in such a way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I cannot quit it. The whole thing is dimmed, and it’s dimmed as if it’s showing a modal, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s no longer showing a modal, and it’s dimmed, and I’m stuck on the Wi-Fi pain forever, and I can’t quit it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s the state

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is just one of so many tiny ways this is broken. This app, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, look, this is the one that, people are complaining a lot about the design, which is, I think, a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco valid complaint to make. It is all based on SwiftUI, and people are blaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SwiftUI, and I think that is partly responsible, but not entirely responsible. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very possible to make great designs and great apps with SwiftUI. This is just not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them. But ultimately, this app, it feels really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sloppy. It feels half-baked and incomplete and buggy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the layouts are oftentimes very difficult to understand. They oftentimes are very unattractive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They look unpolished. This is not what you expect from Apple. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something that you expect from Windows, or worse. Windows has actually gotten better than this recently. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not to Apple standards, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite frankly, this in beta five might be acceptable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was beta one, but it’s not. Like, we’re too far along now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t think this is salvageable. And I think the only way Apple should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go forward with this is to, for this release for Ventura,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco revert back to the old settings app and work on this for the next year or two and then ship it when it’s ready.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not ready yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s unclear what they’re gonna do about this because by the time we get a beta

⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple, it’s gone much farther forward. But like you said, it’s like, this is beta five, it’s not beta one.

⏹️ ▶️ John People always complain like, stop, what are you talking about? It’s a beta, of course things are broken or whatever. Like there is a cadence to betas.

⏹️ ▶️ John Things are most broken in the first beta and then they supposed to get better over time. And there’s a time horizon. You can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John leave something in a super duper broken state and then it’ll be all fixed in the very last beta. Maybe if it’s some minor

⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever, but this is, you know, there’s a lot of things having to do with opinion and usability and stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there are things that are just not opinion based. Like for example, the confirmation button

⏹️ ▶️ John on a screen being cut off so you can’t read the text and there’s no way you can change that, that’s not an opinion-based

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And that’s just not finished software. And if that’s in beta one, fine. But if five betas go

⏹️ ▶️ John by and it still looks like that, it’s like, what’s the holdup on making the confirmation button visible

⏹️ ▶️ John on this screen? Have they just not gotten to it yet? I think it’s salvageable in that

⏹️ ▶️ John you can look at this and say, okay, setting aside the usability thing, setting aside appearance, aesthetics,

⏹️ ▶️ John setting all that aside, can we just fix the things where things are just plain broken, where you can’t click

⏹️ ▶️ John or see a button, where a label overlaps with another thing, that’s not opinion. That is just something you

⏹️ ▶️ John need to fix. All of those are fixable. You can look at them and say, I’m gonna make a punch list. Here are all

⏹️ ▶️ John the things we need to do. Can’t see this button, this label overlaps this thing. This window is too short. This window is too tall.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just fix them, right? Those are all fixable. But you start to ask questions

⏹️ ▶️ John on the outside. Why haven’t they been fixed in five betas? Are they saving all that for the end? Because it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John so easy for them to fix that, oh, we’ll just go through in the end to make sure all the buttons are visible, right? Why would they save

⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? Or is there something about the framework they’re using or something that makes it difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John to change that? They’re trying to fix it, but they haven’t come up with a good way to do it. Or maybe it’s like, it’s not our fix to make,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re doing the right thing, but this SwiftUI widget, the team needs to fix it and we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for them to ship us the fix. So we here on the system setting teams, nothing we can do, we just got to sit around and wait. And when

⏹️ ▶️ John the SwiftUI team gets around to fixing that control or fixing their metrics on this particular thing, our stuff will just magically

⏹️ ▶️ John work. And that will come in the final beta and fix everything, right? So we can’t know from the outside which

⏹️ ▶️ John of those things is true. But what we can know from the outside is this is unshippable

⏹️ ▶️ John and plenty of betas are unshippable. That’s why you don’t ship the beta. They’re by definition unshippable, but this is

⏹️ ▶️ John unshippable for reasons like not like, oh, this is buggy or slow or is ugly or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they literally can’t ship this because people won’t be able to read the text on the

⏹️ ▶️ John button that they have to click to dismiss a window, right? You just can’t ship that. So

⏹️ ▶️ John if they don’t fix that before the release version, they have to decide what to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John They could discovery do this and say, well, we couldn’t fix it in time. We don’t know why they couldn’t fix it. We

⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t fix it because again, maybe the framework is broken or whatever. We don’t have time. So we’re just going to revert.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if they revert, are there any new preferences in Venture that they would then have to re-implement in the old version?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because this shares no UI with the old one. So I feel kind of like, kind of like how

⏹️ ▶️ John they ship discovery D. This may not be that easy to revert. If they added any new preferences, I don’t think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to spend any time adding those new preferences back to the old preference panes.

⏹️ ▶️ John It could be that there are no new preferences, so this is an issue. But I think, I mean, to give one example, someone

⏹️ ▶️ John was, I think it was Jason Stel who wrote up something about this. Network locations are gone in Ventura and someone

⏹️ ▶️ John filed the bug against it and the bug was closed as works correctly. Now, in

⏹️ ▶️ John theory, you could, you know, because you could see that and say, Oh, well that means Apple is telling

⏹️ ▶️ John me that they’re not going to support network locations anymore. But I don’t trust the close reason for bugs

⏹️ ▶️ John long enough to say that definitively. But based on the information that we have, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is saying network locations are not a thing in Ventura. But if you revert to the old system settings

⏹️ ▶️ John app, it’ll have network locations again. So will that UI not work because it’s not connected to anything or

⏹️ ▶️ John will it just work because they didn’t actually remove the functionality, they’re just removing the UI? Too many questions.

⏹️ ▶️ John But for it to be this far along and still have these kind of fundamental errors

⏹️ ▶️ John is not reassuring. Now granted, it’s only August. This thing is gonna ship in the fall, maybe in October or November.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s still calendar-wise lots of time for them to fix this. But from the outside,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s starting to look a little bit concerning that really, really basic functional stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ John not working. And I would encourage everyone who thinks we’re overreacting to look at the thread. They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John hard to fix. Oh, just make the window bigger. Just move the button knock. just move the label. They seem like they’re not hard to

⏹️ ▶️ John fix. And if you’re having that reaction, you’re like, why is everyone overreaction? These are all easy to fix. Ask yourself why they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John fixed yet then. That’s what we don’t understand on the outside. Again, there’s lots of plausible reasons for it, but Apple’s not gonna tell

⏹️ ▶️ John us what the real reasons are. So we’re just out here waiting patiently, hoping one day a beta will come,

⏹️ ▶️ John all these layout issues will be fixed, and then we’ll be back to our earlier complaints, which is even though everything works, we

⏹️ ▶️ John still don’t like it for reasons X, Y, and Z that are more opinion-based and less your UI is truncated

⏹️ ▶️ John based.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but see, it just, it seems it using this feels like this has been a,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has been a failure of the process somewhere along the way. Like w when you see what the settings app is and how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works, it feels like an early demo that you might’ve brought to a design meeting inside Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and said, Hey, we should, we should do something like this for the next version of MacOS. And then the team would have like evaluated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, scheduled it. And we would have seen it after it was done and polished. And you know, beta

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one would have had very few issues. that’s how Apple usually does most of their features. You know, beta 1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of almost anything is never as broken as this app is, let alone beta 5,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. And so it seems like this, somehow this design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is pretty rough, got approved or shoved through

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the implementation, which is also really rough, got scheduled for a release

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it can’t make. Like, there’s, look, we know how this is going to go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know that Apple’s current design team does not take feedback well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And look, Apple as a company culture is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thin-skinned. They cannot take criticism and they think they are right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John They did roll back the Safari changes though, let’s be fair. That’s very recent history.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was kind of at the last minute and I think that was kind of reluctantly, but.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that gets me back to the question of how easy is it to roll back? Apparently, Safari was pretty easy to roll back. How easy is this to roll

⏹️ ▶️ John back?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also the Safari changes mostly happened on the iPhone, where there were a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a large outcry among iPhone beta users, even non developers, because a lot of a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the iPhone betas on the Mac. They seem to take feedback even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less so and even slower and even worse. I mean, look, look at how bad the notifications have messed up since Big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sur and they’re still that messed up, like they haven’t. They haven’t fixed them or tweet them at all as far as we can tell. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very broken

⏹️ ▶️ John design. OK, notifications is a good example because there’s both kinds of feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t like it because it’s harder to get it features or there’s less information available or things only appear in mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John over. That’s, you know, that’s sort of more design based. Right. But there are also things

⏹️ ▶️ John like I think we posted the video a while back. Functional features where when you go to click the

⏹️ ▶️ John button, it disappears from under your cursor. That’s not opinion based. That’s just that’s just plain a bug. It’s just not supposed to work

⏹️ ▶️ John that way. You know and now granted there’s a workaround in that case whereas in some some of these cases in systems I think there’s no workaround

⏹️ ▶️ John But if I can’t mouse over the button that I’m supposed to click and click it that there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John opinion about that That’s just plain broken and there are features like that in notifications that haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John gotten fixed But they didn’t roll back the notification design because I think they like the design to your point Marco They

⏹️ ▶️ John think the design is better. They disagree with us about that. But also the bugs which are not opinion-based.

⏹️ ▶️ John They still haven’t fixed Maybe that’s a framework thing I’m pretty sure the notification is a Swift UI to maybe that’s a framework

⏹️ ▶️ John thing as well. And the notification team can’t fix that because it’s not their bug. It’s a Swift UI bug. But

⏹️ ▶️ John either way, lots of lots of things are falling down in Mac OS these days, right? And it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like the feedback loop is broken in some way, like, like, these things should not be getting out here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the state they’re in. And what will probably happen here, we’ve seen what happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Mac efforts recently, the hardware is amazing, the software is kind of half

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assed. when things are a little bit buggy or a little bit broken, they basically never get fixed. Like when this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ships, and this will ship when this ships in October, November, whenever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever problems and shortcomings it has, it’s probably going to have for a long time because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does not give themselves enough time or bandwidth or priority to fix Mac OS bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Very often, Mac OS bugs tend to stick around and Mac OS design shortcomings stick ground even longer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I like this is so disheartening to see because I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know they’re gonna just half-ass this out there and then just never touch it again.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know I think if they can’t get the the basic layout features

⏹️ ▶️ John fixed in time for their target ship date in the fall that they will roll this back because they they

⏹️ ▶️ John literally can’t ship a thing where you bring up a screen and you can’t click the button like they just they will not

⏹️ ▶️ John ship that I’ve never or they will not ship a thing where you’d have to know that there’s a button that you can’t see

⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to hit return to activate it or something. They’re just not gonna ship that period, right? So if they can’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John just that one screen on that one thing, like there’s a tweet for one of those things

⏹️ ▶️ John where it says the, you know, the button, the confirm button is not visible. They won’t ship that, they just won’t, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so if they can’t, that one screen could hold up the entire design. Because it’s not like they can revert

⏹️ ▶️ John one preference pane to the all one as far as I know. I think it’s like all or nothing. So if they get to

⏹️ ▶️ John October and this one screen, just to give one example, they can’t find

⏹️ ▶️ John a way to fix it, they literally can’t do it, they have to roll the whole thing back. And I’m not entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John convinced that they won’t be faced with that decision. Now, granted, it’s only August, October’s a long way away.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like we don’t need to be, you know, paranoid about it or whatever, but as the months wear on,

⏹️ ▶️ John watch these things. See how they go. Because it only takes one of them to make it unshippable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Some people want, whatever this screen is, some people want to use it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t dismiss the window because the button isn’t anywhere visible for you to click on, you can’t ship that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, what do you do? Just quit the app at that point? Like, well, there’s a modal dialogue up that I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John dismiss because I can’t see the button. So game over. So I’ll, you know, I will continue to watch

⏹️ ▶️ John the betas. I hope there will be a future beta where the basic layout bugs are all fixed. And then we can

⏹️ ▶️ John go back to complaining about the more nuanced things. I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, but frankly, I don’t trust them to make that call. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the clear and persistent quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems that Apple allows to ship in Mac OS, I don’t trust

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to make that call the way you say they will.

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope we get an email from Apple saying, you know, as I said, the inside Apple, we’re using a build

⏹️ ▶️ John from like a month ago, right? Maybe all this is fixed already inside Apple. And so Apple people who are working on system

⏹️ ▶️ John settings know about it, please send us an email and say, Oh, don’t worry. Uh, that stuff that you’re looking at that was fixed three

⏹️ ▶️ John weeks ago, and it’s all going to be good in the next bit. I would love for that to be true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here, here’s what I think might happen instead in, you know, so macOS is going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding back the release of some hardware, whatever max are going to be released at that October or November

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever event those are going to require the newest version of macOS. And so they’re going to declare the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship date of macOS to coincide with that hardware launch. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they have at this point, they’re gonna ship it then. Like, that’s it. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they will tolerate a lot of bugs to hit that hardware ship date, and then they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, oh, we’ll fix it in 0.1. Yep.

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Filing Apple bug reports

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’ll permit me to change subject ever so slightly, can we talk about feedback with Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God, I’m so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey mad right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m grumpy, fellas. I’m grumpy again. I’m grumpy. So, I did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what third-party developers are told to do, and I filed bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me rephrase that. I wasted my time. I’m sorry. No, I’m being too cruel. I filed bugs, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I filed a few bugs against various SwiftUI things, both old and new, knew.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And those bugs went into slash dev slash null as they always do. But because I’m a turd,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and because I know people on the inside, I asked a friend on the inside, hey, for this feedback

⏹️ ▶️ Casey number, can you tell me what the hell’s going on? And this friend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, oh, you filed that really late, didn’t you? I’m sorry, what now? I filed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this like a month or two ago. Oh, yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, that’s way too late. What? I’m sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what now? I thought, and we were always told, and I’m not sure what the genesis of this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really was, but we were always told as third-party developers, you gotta file these bugs early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the new beta’s come out so we have time to fix them. Okay, that’s a little bit crummy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that our world has to stop in order to serve as your external QA, but fine, okay, fine,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, that’s what I’ll do. Again, maybe this is my misunderstanding. I don’t want to say that this is like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, casey list reports, you know, or anything like that. I’m just telling you a casual conversation I had.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But apparently filing things in July, mid-July, or even early August

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not really leaving enough time. And that’s just not cool to begin with.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But leaving that aside for a minute, I said, okay, well, is there any action on this, on a couple of these?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He said, oh, yeah, this one’s been duped to such and such. It won’t land for a while. This one’s been duped to that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that won’t land for a while. And they said, you know, oh, oh, and but there’s a workaround for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one. Sorry, what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a workaround. And this individual pasted the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey text that was clearly written for me to see. It was absolutely clear that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was written for me to see and said, yeah, this is what it says at the bottom of that feedback. Huh.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I open up feedback assistant and I’ll give you one guess. What is not at the bottom of my feedback? Any of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that text, because it just never made it to me. So, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey play this back. What Apple wants is for me to spend a not insignificant amount of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my time generating a sample project for all of these bugs that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey calling to their attention. Then I need to include them in a bug report that’s clear and succinct,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey explaining exactly what I expected and what actually happened. Then I need to throw it across the wall. I need to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this really, really, really soon after WWDC. if I want to have even a prayer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of getting a fix in. And then what I need to do is talk to somebody on the inside to get the feedback

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my feedback. How f**king broken is this? How broken

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this? This is not okay. I don’t, well, you know what? Actually, I take that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back. It’s okay, because documentation is flawless

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and tells me everything I need to know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco about all of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these different pieces and bits and bobs. This is not okay. It makes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me so angry. It is not okay that this is what Apple expects

⏹️ ▶️ Casey third party developers to deal with. This is broken and it’s broken from top to bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so frigging angry about this. It is not okay, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that nobody is gonna listen to this because apparently providing feedback to Apple never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey works if you do it in audio form. So I’m probably gonna have to write a frigging blog post about this, which I also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t wanna have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. No, you gotta make a YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ Casey video. Oh, you’re right, actually, that is what I should do. You know what, I should just set up in my backyard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just rant about this, because then it may actually work. It makes me so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey angry that I have put in all of this work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have put in a not insignificant amount of time putting this together. Let’s say, I don’t even know what an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hourly rate is for an iOS developer these days, but several years ago, it was like 150, 200 bucks an hour.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s charitably call it 150 bucks an hour. I’m gonna send a f**king bill to Apple for the like 300, 500, $600,000 of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time that I’ve spent doing their QA

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only for them to give me nothing in return. I am so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey angry about this and I need to chill out and maybe I need to go downstairs and grab myself a Tito’s but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just not fair. It’s not fair to us. And maybe that’s whiny and maybe I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big baby But I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not fair that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put in all this work to try to tell them exactly what’s wrong, how it’s wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I think it’s wrong. Here’s a sample project that demonstrates how it’s wrong, and I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey crickets in response. Their own feedback, they didn’t even,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the feedback they put in, which by the way actually was helpful, didn’t even make it to me. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t even get here. It’s so broken and I hate it. and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate it from top to bottom and it makes me so mad.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if that feedback is gonna appear like two weeks from now. Cause I would imagine, you know, whatever weird

⏹️ ▶️ John system of indirection, like they added this indirection recently where we do feedbacks and those become radars and

⏹️ ▶️ John we used to be able to submit radars directly, but now there’s this, you know, this second stage and

⏹️ ▶️ John this workflow. I wonder if that feedback is slowly winding its way to you. And then like a week and a half after,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, iOS 16 is released, that feedback will appear and you’ll get a notification that says, Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have some additional, you know, reply to your feedback and then you’ll see the workaround.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, maybe it could be, but even if, okay, let’s charitably assume that’s the case. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t helpful to me today. It isn’t helpful to me. So like as an example, a specific

⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, Masquerade is currently broken in iOS 16. The reason is, and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some degree, maybe this is a Casey problem. I’m not saying that I am not at fault at all, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me tell you the facts of the situation. In iOS 15, the way Masquerade works is There’s a parent view.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s almost exclusively SwiftUI. There’s a parent view that will either show one of two different subviews,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey depending on where you are in the app, whether you’ve loaded an image or not. If you haven’t loaded an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey image, you get the quick help and all that jazz. There is no bottom toolbar at that juncture.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once you load an image, the same parent view is throwing away the landing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey view and putting in the standard editing view, which has a bottom toolbar. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t work in iOS 16. So I’ve had a handful of people say to me, dude, what the hell happened to Masquerade? It’s broken.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m like, what? I can’t share anything. What? It turns out there’s no bottom toolbar.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because apparently, subbing a view that didn’t have a toolbar, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey replacing it with one that does have a toolbar, that does not work in iOS 16. That is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, a regression. There’s no reason that that shouldn’t work as far as I’m aware. That is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey regression. Now, what does that mean? I have to figure out a way to fix this before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 16 comes out or just not give a crap that my app doesn’t work. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, maybe I’m just being a baby. Me, I don’t know. Now, now I’m feeling bad that I got angry, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is this fair to me? That I have gotten zero feedback as to what to do about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether they’ve seen it, whether they care, whether it’ll get fixed, if it’ll get fixed, when will it get fixed, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling me at release time, like you’re saying, John, that very well maybe what’s about to happen,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that doesn’t help me because I’ve got to get it fixed by the time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 16 is released. This is not good. This is not good and it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. It’s not fair to me. It’s not fair to my users. It’s not fair. I would say my customers, but let’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be honest, they’re Apple’s customers, aren’t they? It’s not fair and I hate it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, you should never feel bad about your feelings, Casey. Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Feel your feelings. Second of all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after our wonderfully brief discussion about TV processing, this probably woke everybody up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thank you for that. But no, this, I mean, look, if it makes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you feel any better, I did get a response to the main bug I’ve been tracking for the last few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks. And I think I was happier before I got the response.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think your response is kind of an example of what I was going to say about Casey’s thing. For the second one, where Casey, you had one behavior

⏹️ ▶️ John in 15 and it changes in 16. It’s kind of like the situation. Well, not as bad as situation

⏹️ ▶️ John here in Marco, but like this is part of doing app development, any platform, especially a platform with not great documentation,

⏹️ ▶️ John and especially especially a platform with not great documentation, where you can’t even see the source code.

⏹️ ▶️ John Making a complicated application, you’re sometimes you’re not sure whether your app works

⏹️ ▶️ John because of a bug, or you’re using a framework correctly. And so when you’re in a situation like

⏹️ ▶️ John this, where, hey, my thing breaks on the new OS, you always have the question, maybe I was doing it wrong before,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the new OS corrects a bug that breaks my app. And you would think if you’re not a programmer,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, oh, that seems like a weird situation. But apps are complicated and frameworks are complicated. And

⏹️ ▶️ John there is no non trivial application where there isn’t some part of the code that is just accidentally working

⏹️ ▶️ John because of a misunderstanding about an API supposed to use. This happens all the time. And that’s frustrating. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John also just part of being an app developer. Ideally, a good platform would clarify and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, yeah, this used to work this way, but that was a bug. We didn’t intend it to work that way, and

⏹️ ▶️ John that way has problems. Therefore, on the new OS, it works this way. And from that, you can figure out how to work around your issue

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And not knowing also happens, because sometimes there’s just not enough people to track down all these little

⏹️ ▶️ John things in everyone’s little app. Because every single person’s app could be relying on

⏹️ ▶️ John a different piece of weird undocumented interaction, right? Apple can’t chase all those

⏹️ ▶️ John down, and figure out in all those cases what all those things are doing, right? It needs to do a better job than it is doing, obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s always going to be a situation where something in your app that used to work is now broken

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s radio silence about what you can do about it. And I think it’s unfair to expect Apple to help every single

⏹️ ▶️ John developer with personal attention like that because they just can’t do it. There’s just too many developers, right? Marco’s situation,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you can look at his Twitter thread for details, so Marco’s situation is kind of a little bit worse in that he did get a response and the

⏹️ ▶️ John response was, the thing you wanna do, That’s not what the feature you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John using is meant to do. You should use this feature instead. But that’s where Marco started. He was using

⏹️ ▶️ John the other feature, but the other feature is deprecated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s literally, it’s worse than that. So literally, so I didn’t even, I didn’t post Apple’s response to Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I didn’t want to set them on fire, but literally, so my issue is, I have,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my app, you can change the tint color, and I have features where you can have different tint

⏹️ ▶️ Marco color for dark mode versus light mode, and so I need to be able to change the tint color, which is like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the main accent color for the whole app for like, you know, controls and stuff. Change the tint color programmatically. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SwiftUI, and this is very easy in UIKit. In SwiftUI, it has a modifier called.accentcolor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was used before, and you can set that at the root of your view hierarchy so we can propagate through everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of the features of SwiftUI of like the power you get by being able to set certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco appearance modifiers at a root level of something and it automatically goes to everything underneath it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s one of the greatest advantages of SwiftUI. And so, anyway, so this accent color modifier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked. It does this perfectly fine. Well, the new API they have, the new navigation split view for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 16, it wouldn’t react to changes in this property if it changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco during runtime for the buttons that are kind of internally managed by that. Things like the back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco button in the navigation bar wouldn’t respond to that, to changes in that tint color

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the new API that they’ve replaced that with, which is called.tint. They deprecated the old one,.accentcolor,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that worked. And if you use.accentcolor, it’ll give you a warning in the editor, and it will say, this is deprecated,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use.tint instead, which suggests to me that those are equivalent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you use.tint, it doesn’t work. It won’t change the colors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And their response was literally like, this isn’t really intended to change the color

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of entire stacks. It don’t use it at the root of your whole UI. use it like on one control.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s not what the documentation says. That’s not anywhere in the editor. If this function

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work or can’t be trusted to work at the root of a view hierarchy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then if I use it at the root of a view hierarchy, it should produce some kind of error or warning. Ideally, the compiler would at least have runtime.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, that isn’t how it works. It just fails in weird ways. And their recommended workaround is for me to go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the deprecated function.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I literally filed a bug. And I was just like you, Casey, I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very dutiful. I had a sample project, and every time a new beta came out, I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rerun my sample project, and I would update the bug saying, FYI, this is still broken

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in developer beta three, developer beta four, developer beta five. I would keep updating it every time to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco re-update, hey, I checked this again, it’s still broken, you know? And so to get that response

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was basically blaming me for this for their first coming. It’s clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their bug and basically saying it’s my fault for expecting it to work and that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know too bad and that is infuriating.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they blamed you and yes it is infuriating but I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think they absolutely blame

⏹️ ▶️ John me they said it’s not meant to be used this way but that’s not but that’s not blame so here’s thing so they had bad documentation because they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t explain this they have no documentation right well our bad or no documentation right the Xcode suggestion

⏹️ ▶️ John of saying this is deprecated use this instead you can imagine how that would come to be because although they are not equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ John when set an entire view, our hierarchy, they are equivalent when set on a leaf node. And when set on a leaf node, they are

⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent and do work what they were missing was communicating the fact that tint color is not

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever tint is not meant to be set on view hierarchies, whereas accent color is right. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John the situation they’re in is it’s an annoying situation, but it is a situation that probably happens all the time certainly happens

⏹️ ▶️ John in lots of other platforms besides iOS, where there is new functionality that is different than the old

⏹️ ▶️ John functionality that is not a drop-in replacement for it. And the old functionality is deprecated

⏹️ ▶️ John without any direct replacement for it. So the old functionality is I can set accent color an entire hierarchy.

⏹️ ▶️ John There is no non-deprecated way to do that. That is an annoying situation to be in, but it happens

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. I would say that you got a good experience because you got this explained to you. You didn’t have to just

⏹️ ▶️ John wonder as your app goes out, like, why is it that accent color and tint color don’t do the same thing? You actually got an

⏹️ ▶️ John answer. Granted, that answer wasn’t written in the documentation where everyone can benefit from it. It was sent to you individually, and then you posted

⏹️ ▶️ John it to Twitter. So the system still sucks, but this is another annoying situation

⏹️ ▶️ John when dealing with any kind of platform. Sometimes the functionality you want is deprecated, and there will never

⏹️ ▶️ John be a replacement. I mean, in this case, I think there probably will be a replacement eventually, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, in this case, my replacement was I just dropped out of the UI kit and do it there, because it works perfectly fine there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that sucks. And also, let’s also be very clear here. We all know the reason I finally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got an answer was because I was tweeting about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, running to the press never helps. Right, right. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, and the system

⏹️ ▶️ John is broken in that way, but I’m saying like the underlying situation where the API you wanted to use is deprecated

⏹️ ▶️ John and the replacement doesn’t do the same thing happens all the time and it’s just some crappy thing that you have to deal with sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you should file a bug against that to say our feature request for all the good. That does it says, look, I think there

⏹️ ▶️ John should be a non-deprecated way to set the accent color for entire view hierarchies, right? But things say deprecated

⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. Like even in my dinky apps, they’re full of warnings for deprecation, which I wish I could

⏹️ ▶️ John silence. I’m like, I know what I’m doing is deprecated. I’ve tried the new way, but it’s different and worse in certain

⏹️ ▶️ John ways. So I’m just gonna ride that deprecated thing until they yank it from the OS and then I’ll deal with it then. I know they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John there, but there is no current non-deprecated equivalent that does what I want it to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ll just keep using the deprecated one. And I feel like that is a possible solution because how long is it gonna be deprecated?

⏹️ ▶️ John For one release, for five, for 10? Sometimes things stay deprecated for a long time. This probably sounds like blanket

⏹️ ▶️ John policy for Apple. It’s such a code

⏹️ ▶️ Casey smell, though.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s such a code smell. It’s crappy, but you don’t control the platform. You’re writing against this

⏹️ ▶️ John platform, and- This platform is writing against us at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this point.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I think things staying deprecated for a long time is actually an advantage sometimes, because they’re like, well, if the old way

⏹️ ▶️ John keeps working, then I’ll just keep using it. Same thing with UIKit workarounds. That’ll probably work for a long time. That workaround that you

⏹️ ▶️ John did with using UIKit, I don’t think that’s gonna go away anytime soon. There’s too many apps written in UIKit. But the

⏹️ ▶️ John real request is, hey, I think there should be a way to do this. You made a new way, Xcode suggests it because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent when talking about a leaf note, but it’s not equivalent when setting it on a whole view hierarchy. Xcode doesn’t know that,

⏹️ ▶️ John documentation doesn’t know that. So these are all symptoms of Apple’s crappy system of not, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, missing documentation, incorrect documentation, the time it takes to communicate,

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that you have to be a high profile person and complain on Twitter to get an answer. I feel these

⏹️ ▶️ John frustrations, but you know, some of them are in the end frustrating situations that are gonna be frustrating

⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what, exacerbated by all the things that we think Apple should be doing better in terms of communication

⏹️ ▶️ John and documentation.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing is that if documentation was flawless, which it is getting a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. And I was told by a friend of the show, sir Andy Caldwell that you can actually file

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bug against documentation explicitly and say, Oh, this documentation is broken, missing, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, it’s getting better, but it’s still garbage. It is absolute garbage. I found a workaround

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an issue on Reddit once like that, that should be in the documentation. Like it’s such garbage. And if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the documentation was kind of perfect or near perfect and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the feedback system was broken, that sucks, but okay. If the feedback system was perfect or near perfect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the documentation was broken, no, that sucks in a different way, but okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the fact that both are so fundamentally screwed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what makes it just so demeaning and so awful. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just, I don’t know, sometimes it’s just really not fun to work on Apple platforms and that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a real crappy place to be. And I don’t know if that’s, again, maybe it’s me, maybe the issue is me. And I’ve just, I’ve been on this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey platform for so long, even though I haven’t done near as much work as like Marco, for example, it’s still something I’ve been working

⏹️ ▶️ Casey against for a long, long time. Maybe I’m just bored of it. I don’t know. I mean, but it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, it’s hostile. It’s hostile to us in ways that I don’t think it has to be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it stinks that the only way for me to find out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey information on the status of my bugs is to ask friends on the inside. The only way for Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it is to either do that or whine about it on Twitter. And like, it is not fun for me or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco to whine about it on Twitter. It is not fun for me to go to friends on the inside with a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pile of feedback numbers and say, hey, please, please, can you tell me if anything’s happened with this, please? Thank you. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking like puss in boots or something. Like, that’s not fair to my friends. That’s not fair to them. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t have to be the voice of feedback because their entire feedback system’s screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was looking at it, you know, and I have filed one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different feedbacks this summer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will put the feedback numbers in the show notes if you happen to be an Apple employee. I have received literally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no feedback on any of them. None. And I get it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have more people writing more feedbacks than I can wrap my head around. I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But that isn’t my, well, what’s your phrase, Marco? It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my fault, but it is my problem. It’s, but it shouldn’t be my problem. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there should be, if this system is as broken as it seems to be, then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess what? Maybe we should find a different system. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know what that is exactly, but every time I rant about this, either on ATP or on Twitter or what have you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I always get people from like every other platform, Android,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft, anything. And they’re like, oh wow, that really sucks. I can’t imagine having to work like that. Here’s what we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. Oh, the bug tracker’s all in the open and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like Swift’s, for example. It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is all fundamentally broken. And it’s just not, it’s not fair, I don’t think, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, and that’s, I guess, opinion. But also, maybe also opinion, but to me, it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just not fun. It’s just not fun to be fighting against the frameworks constantly. And if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not fighting against the frameworks, you’re fighting against feedback. You’re not fighting against feedback, you’re fighting against documentation. Don’t forget app review.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And don’t forget app review, that’s true. And if you’re not fighting against those, you’re fighting against app review. It’s just, can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we get a break on one of these pillars, please? Can any one of these pillars not be made of sand? Cause that would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Make you feel any better. I think part of my, you know, my 20 mumble years of being

⏹️ ▶️ John a web developer conditioned me for this because if the experience for doing web development,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say you’re, you know, you’re midway through your career and you’re doing an important feature for a website,

⏹️ ▶️ John of course, for your website, you don’t control what web browsers people use, and you run into a bug. This version

⏹️ ▶️ John of this browser has this bug, and you’re in the same situation we just described. Is this intended

⏹️ ▶️ John behavior? This changed since the last version. Is it supposed to work the new way or the old way? Should I do a workaround?

⏹️ ▶️ John Is there a workaround? What should I do? If you think it’s difficult to get any kind of answer out of Apple about the

⏹️ ▶️ John intended behavior or framework, try getting an answer out of Microsoft as a individual web

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco developer on a

⏹️ ▶️ John dinky little website somewhere that’s trying to write some JavaScript that just broke in the latest version of Internet Explorer that is rolling

⏹️ ▶️ John out to all your customers right now. See if you can get them to tell you, is this intended behavior? Is there

⏹️ ▶️ John a workaround? Can you look at my sample project? You have no way to get any

⏹️ ▶️ John response from them, so much so that it’s just, it’s completely hopeless. You don’t even entertain the

⏹️ ▶️ John idea that you’re going to somehow like file a bug against Internet Explorer and get the answer in time for your release

⏹️ ▶️ John this Friday, right? I’m not saying this is a good system. It’s bad, but writing

⏹️ ▶️ John on top of any platform is always going to have frustrations like this. And yes, it is the job of companies

⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple that, you know, in theory, pride themselves on being more responsive than, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft would be to an individual developer at a 10-person company writing them an email in 2005, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they are slightly more responsive to that, but not much. In case of your comparison to equivalent platforms

⏹️ ▶️ John is really where Apple should be looking. How much more frustrating is it to be an Apple developer than to be an Android

⏹️ ▶️ John developer for writing phone apps. That is a pretty direct comparison. Apple should measure itself

⏹️ ▶️ John against that. But more importantly, Apple should measure it against its ideals and its ideals I think are that it

⏹️ ▶️ John should be much better than it is in all of these areas.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just, I’m sorry for getting angry, but it’s just so fricking frustrating. I just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so frustrating.

#askatp: DNS for local devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP, and let’s start this week with Christopher Anderson, who writes, do you have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any recommendations on domain name and IP address management for home network devices? I’ve been adding more hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my home network, such as a Synology, Homebridge, RAS-35, networked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey AV receiver, et cetera. Connecting these devices using an IP address always feels janky. It’s tough to remember the IP.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can get certificate warnings, et cetera. Using a host name in a.local suffix

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is hit or miss as well. Any suggestions on a cleaner way of addressing devices on a home LAN?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a few thoughts on this. First of all, if you run my beloved Pi-hole, hey, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have a Pi-hole, then you can set up local DNS in that. The only problem, though, is that if you are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey running any other DNS servers concurrently with the Pi-hole, I’ve learned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently that no matter what order DNS servers are in, that doesn’t mean anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, the Mac OS, and I think iOS, considers any of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the DNS servers in your DNS server list to be an appropriate server

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any of your requests. So it doesn’t go from the top and work its way down. It just kind of splurts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey across all of them, which is news to me. So that may or may not be useful because if you run other backup DNS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey server, then the high hole may or may not get the query to the host name you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want. So tread carefully. There is a future sponsor, Tailscale,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I have a lot of thoughts about, and they’re very, very cool. They have not sponsored yet, but they are on the books to sponsor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the future. So, you know, take this with a grain of salt. But I have been dabbling with Tailscale

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and really, really like it. I really honestly do. And one of the nice things about Tailscale is it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone, or at least I thought it was a VPN and it kind of is, but that’s not exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s for. What Tailscale is really good at is saying, no matter where your devices are, no matter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what network or networks they’re on, anything that is connected to Tailscale, you will always be able to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey connect to anything else connected to Tailscale. So I could be at home connecting to other home servers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could be at a, not a park bench, mind you, John, but a picnic table connected to Tailscale and connect to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers at home. I can be anywhere. And as long as I’m on Tailscale and my other devices are on Tailscale,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I can connect to them. And that allows host names as well. So that is what I would recommend for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey host names with regard to certificate management. I’ve got nothing. Channels does it all automatically for you, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of cool, But I don’t have any good answers with regard to that. Marco, since you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably near death with regard to your voice, do you have any thoughts on any of this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t really have these problems because I don’t really need to refer to my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco local network devices that often. Part of that’s because I don’t have as many network devices as you guys do. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use a Synology, but I hardly ever need to access it via host

⏹️ ▶️ Marco name or IP address. I usually, like, I have a file share on it and it just shows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up in my finder list on the sidebar there and I just click it there. If I occasionally have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to log into the Synology, I actually am not even sure how to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that right now because I just use that quick connect dot two thing that it sets up. I just use that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which works every time. And other than that, the only thing I ever need to maybe log into is my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ubiquity Unified Network. And that’s just, you know, one and two, one six eight, one one. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to know a host name for that. So I don’t really have this problem. So I actually don’t have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution for it. My solution is don’t have your problem, which is kind of, this is how I should respond to their bug

⏹️ ▶️ Marco report, saying, look, you’re doing it wrong. And in fact, it’s your fault that this is broken. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, this is all you. And I won’t document that anywhere. Yeah, too soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, I should mention, it didn’t even occur to me until just now, but you could also use a host file to do this. So a host file, and I’m probably going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to butcher the description, but it’s a file in, what is it, slash etc slash host. And basically, what you do is you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey write a line item for an IP address and what host name you would like to use to refer to that IP address.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And any reasonable operating system will let you, will parse the host file

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and try that before it tries any external DNS servers. So that won’t work for iOS very well or iPadOS, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would work for your Mac or PC or what have you.

⏹️ ▶️ John What is the quick connect thing? I think I used it when I first set up my Synology, but not since then. What is the actual mechanism

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you set it up in the Synology’s control panel. And what it does is it basically heartbeats

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Synology servers and says, oh, I’m at IP address 192.168.1.1, except it’s your external IP. That was a terrible example.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. It’s whatever your external

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco IP is. And so then what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that does, and I believe it’ll do the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey proxying thing, where even if you don’t expose ports on your router,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you go to Synology’s quick connect.2, whatever your particular quick connect account

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you say that, like go to, what is that? You type into what? Into the address bar of your browser.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You type quick connect.2. and then whatever you specified as your. .to. Yes,.to.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick

⏹️ ▶️ John connect period TO. And the TO is the top level domain name. Correct.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And then your particular. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like slash your Synology

⏹️ ▶️ John name. And then it figures out what IP you’re coming from and does the lookup. Yeah, it’s like a DNS relay kind of thing. Okay, all right, okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know about that except for, I think I probably, like I said, I think I probably did it in 2013 when I first set up my Synology.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco think it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey available

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco then. No, and now, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I set mine up, whatever it was last year or earlier this year, whenever that was, when I set mine up, it defaults

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bringing you through that and setting that up for you. Like I used to do the regular setup wizard and that was part of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right,

⏹️ ▶️ John so what I do for that is for my Synology in particular, Synology also has a free service

⏹️ ▶️ John where they will give you a domain name for your Synology. And so it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever name I picked.synology.me and that will do dynamic DNS with, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the Synology will occasionally chime in and say here’s what IP address I’m at or whatever. So that’s one convenient

⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it. I do have in my host file from back in the day, the name of my

⏹️ ▶️ John Synology.local for the, you know, dot local things. Dot local is used for like a Bonjour,

⏹️ ▶️ John Rendezvous, whatever DNS domain in macOS. But you can also

⏹️ ▶️ John just define dot local ones, right? I also, also, I know this doesn’t help

⏹️ ▶️ John you with naming, but this is one of the things I do. From back in the day with my airport extreme,

⏹️ ▶️ John I assign static IP addresses to my internal things. you’re 10.0.1.5,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re 10.0.1.6,

⏹️ ▶️ John based on the Mac address of the ethernet interface, right? So my synology is always 10.0.1.whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John my second synology, like, and I memorize those numbers, because there’s not that many of them. This is not a solution to naming, I’m just saying this is the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John I do. It is surprisingly convenient. Some things, like the HD Home Run that I just got,

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t do anything for this, but if I go to HDHomeRun.local, that’s my HD Home Run.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it is, it advertises itself as that. I don’t know what happened if I had two of them, maybe you’d put a number after or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I didn’t have to do a thing for that. It just says the rendezvous advertisement. Super

⏹️ ▶️ John convenient. If I didn’t do that, I could just go to, if you go to your channel server, it will tell you the

⏹️ ▶️ John IP address of the HD home run, you can go to it that way, whatever. I have never gotten to the point where I’m like, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna run my own DNS. That is the correct solution to doing custom naming for things, but I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John always had some simpler, jankier way to do it. Memorize the IP, put something

⏹️ ▶️ John in Etsy host, use a service that comes for free with your NAS to come up with a domain name or whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always done, I even have like a dynamic, a free dynamic domain name for like, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ John a dynamic DNS service for one of the other things that I signed up for ages ago. I

⏹️ ▶️ John just keep doing it that way and it’s fine. And even though I have more devices than Marco, there’s not that many and everything I’ve described, all those

⏹️ ▶️ John weird workarounds covers it all. But if you really wanna solve this problem once and all, you could run

⏹️ ▶️ John your own DNS. But running your own DNS is, it’s not a formula for sadness, but it’s close because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco now you’re running your own DNS.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’ve got to be careful about things. Now you’ve got to make sure everything is resolving. Oh, is my streaming slow because

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m connecting to the wrong thing? Am I, you know, should I, you know. Even something as simple as changing your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 or those

⏹️ ▶️ John things, whatever, can mess you up. So once you enter the realm of DNS, then you may find yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John in the situation where you start to be

⏹️ ▶️ John able to understand and relate to the technology meme that you will see on Twitter very often, which is it’s always

⏹️ ▶️ John DNS. What’s the problem? Why did the service go down? Why is S3 down? Why did this thing get hacked? Why did

⏹️ ▶️ John this happen? No, it’s always DNS. It’s not always DNS, but sometimes it feels that way. So I would caution

⏹️ ▶️ John against that. And I would say, try using the other methods. Again, like in the case of the HD home run,

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t have to do anything. And there’s a name that I can look it up with. And I didn’t have to memorize any IPs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just take that victory and go with it and just type HDHOME.LOCAL. For other things, try a host file.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you want it to be accessible everywhere, I mean, even something like tail scale may be easier than setting up

⏹️ ▶️ John and running your own DNS. If you’re doing it already for PyHole, then you’ve already bitten that off, and so have fun.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I have not decided to undertake that task. just get by with my sort of molly

⏹️ ▶️ John collection of techniques.

#askatp: Advice for new parents

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Carlos Quintela writes, my wife is due in October. Congratulations. With her first child. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also had fertility challenges. So thanks for speaking about those, Casey. You are welcome. I’m glad to hear that that has worked out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am starting to get a little overwhelmed, writes Carlos. Any words of advice? Things you wish you had done, arranged, or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought about earlier, both tech and non-tech related? This could go on for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey approximately 35 years, but I will try to be brief about it. I think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot that could be said and can be done. But ultimately, no matter how much you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prepare, it really is true and it’s so frustrating to hear it, but no matter how much you prepare, there is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing that will prepare you for your first child. There’s nothing you can do. Like this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to completely destroy your world in all the best and worst ways. And that’s okay, that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But some specific things that I would advocate, when you are on your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to the hospital, if either of you is even the slightest bit hungry, eat something,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eat something right then. Because if you are going the route of having an epidural, or if your spouse is going the route of having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an epidural, then they can’t eat once the epidural is in, you probably won’t have the time inclination

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or ability to eat once you’re at the hospital, eat on the way. Once you’re in the hospital, particularly after the baby

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is born, take advantage of the nurses. If that baby doesn’t need to sleep with you that night, that’s just my two cents, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they don’t need to sleep with you that night. They’ll be fine in the nursery. You need to get a little bit of sleep while you can, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there ain’t none coming for the next, oh, six to 50 weeks, I don’t know. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey take advantage of the nurses in the hospital. They’ll do what you want them to do. If you want to bring the baby in when it’s time to feed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ll bring the baby in. But one way or another, take advantage of the nurses. Ask them questions. They have heard everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have heard all the dumb questions, all the smart questions. Ask them questions. Be present, be there. That’s something I work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on every day. I’m not great about it, but I need to be better about it. I’m trying every single day. Something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin and I found was that early on, I would wake in solidarity with her because, you know, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey breastfed or she breastfed, uh, Declan and did with Michaela as long as she could, uh, before Michaela

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had some allergy issues. Uh, I, I mean, at first would wake up and just kind of be awake

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with her just to show like, Hey, I’m, I’m doing this with you and I’m here. And we quickly realized that was really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid. Like if anyone can sleep, if anyone can sleep, sleep, that’s the best recommendation I have.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If anyone is capable of sleeping, I don’t care who it is. Sleep. Um, if you have any inclination

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a good camera and to find good, however you want. Now is the time to do it. I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so incredibly glad that I bought the Micro Four Thirds camera that I bought before Declan was born.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t use it that often anymore and I actually find that it’s only,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally think it’s only better than the iPhone in natural light. So I don’t ever reach for it when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside a building. But that being said, if you want a good camera, now’s the time to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. And I would expect that Marco and John’s fancy cameras would probably do much better inside than mine does.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And And then something that was useful for me, and I think it’s because Aaron and I are both super type A and may or may not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be useful for you, is getting some sort of an app that tracks what the baby is doing. Especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey early on, you kind of have to know how often they’re peeing, how often they’re pooping, et cetera. I used, or we used,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Baby Connect, which is hideously ugly, just hilariously ugly, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely powerful and is really good at being quick and easy to track things. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also liked this for when I went back to work, with Declan in particular, because Aaron would say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, the baby, it would mark in the app, oh, the baby went down, and then would mark when the baby woke up. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be a really good indication as to how just completely frazzled Aaron will be when I get home

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from work, because if Declan has only slept for 20 minutes, which was not unusual for him, then she’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna be in need of assistance. Whereas if he somehow powered out, dropped a hour and a half nap,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was very rare for him, if ever, then she’ll be okay when I come home. And so that was useful for us,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey may not be useful for you and that’s totally fine. Um, oh, and finally lean on the people around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, your natural inclination, or at least if you’re anything like me and Aaron was to like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Uh, what is it? The, the bring the circle of wagons. That’s the term phrase I’m looking for circle of wagons. And like, just the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two of you will take care of this. No one get near us. We will handle this. Granted. We’re about to keel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over from exhaustion, but we’ll take care of it. Everyone leave us alone. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. If somebody wants

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bring you food, let them bring you food. Somebody wants to come over and do laundry. let them do your laundry. I don’t care how embarrassing it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, let them do your laundry. If they want to do anything, if they want to take the baby from you while you go upstairs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do anything but baby stuff, let them do it. Rely on people, take

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people at what they offer. Whenever somebody offers anything, the correct answer is, yes please, I’d

⏹️ ▶️ Casey love that. That’s all I’ve got. That was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Did you write that down first?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I didn’t. I mean, I had a couple of bullets in the show notes, but that was most of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s amazing. Yeah, so that Casey covered pretty much all the big highlights that you’re going to deal with. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you know, raising a kid in general, you know, over the next 18 years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and plus more, hopefully, there’s lots of things to address there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’ll pick it up as you go. And, you know, we can cover that in larger questions down the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco road. But, you know, for the initial needs of a baby is coming. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Casey covered it well. You’re, it’s going to put a lot of stress on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you physically and mentally and on the baby’s mother,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your wife. And so this is going to be a hard time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you, for your relationship, for your household, for your family.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s lots of upsides. And so just be prepared for those downsides and try to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you can to support each other, to believe in each other, to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give each other the benefit of the doubt, to recognize that there’s going to be a lot of times coming up where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or both of you is going to be really grumpy because you’re not going to be getting a lot of sleep and you’re going to be really tired and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really frustrated and it’s going to push all of your buttons that exist like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what that’s especially you know what infants do is like they are biologically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed to push all of your buttons so you keep giving them everything they need and so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a strain it is a big strain and and go into it knowing that’s going to be the case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and supporting each other as best as you possibly can. And whatever that means for the two of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that could be a lot of things. That could be things like, you know, you take over, like you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the father, for a while you can’t really feed the baby,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can do other supporting roles. So anything you need to support

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mother for the things that you can’t do, you can support her in those things. And everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can do, just do it. You can be the diaper parent. You change every single freaking diaper. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, you do what you can to support her and to support the baby. If either or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of you might want to consider therapy afterwards, that also can be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very beneficial and oftentimes very necessary. Leave all of these options on the table because,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it’s a big strain on everybody in this time period. And so just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do your best to support each other and realize that you’re in this together and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re building this family together. And so all the hard parts are worth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in the end. So you got to just get through the hard parts and be there for each other. And again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give each other the benefit of the doubt as much as possible and support each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well put. And another one that I just thought of, my brother-in-law and his

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wife actually just had their first. And something that occurred to me is, and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really in no position to talk about this, but everything I’ve ever understood from almost any mother I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever spoken to is that nobody really tells you that breastfeeding is not easy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not easy and it’s painful from what I understand. So it is completely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey normal and maybe not healthy, but like normal for the child

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the mom to just not get the whole breastfeeding thing squared away for like the first few days, if not week or two. That is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally normal. The mom is, well, if she’s anything like Aaron, and I’m almost any woman

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve ever spoken to about this, will immediately blame themselves and be like, oh, I’m not doing this right. It must be something I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing wrong. It’s just, it’s hard. And nobody ever tells you how hard it is. It’s frigging hard.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And from what Aaron has told me and other moms I’ve spoken to, frigging hurts, especially in the beginning. So that is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely normal and completely, well, again, I shouldn’t say it’s okay, but for lack of a better way to say it, it’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, sorry, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, one more thing too. When our kid is upset about something, he’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco often, as many people do, he might say something kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hastily, like, I’m never going back there again, because something bad happened somewhere. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always repeat to him, look, we don’t make decisions or proclamations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the future when you’re upset. So when you’re like, oh, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going back there again. Well, you literally just had a bad experience somewhere, this is not the time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, in the future I’m never gonna do this thing again, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep in mind that during this first few months especially, you’re gonna be in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very fragile state for a lot of that time, just because of things like lack of sleep and a lot of stress

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. And your wife is gonna be, her body has to recover,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco her mind has to go through a lot of this stuff, and this is heavy stuff. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, as part of the giving each other the benefit of the doubt constantly and supporting each other thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also keep in mind that all of that stress and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges of the body and mind are temporary. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll have different challenges down the road as the kid gets older, but the infant stuff, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a temporary thing, and that’s like an extreme version of the challenges. And so keep in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind that whatever you’re feeling during this time, it’s temporary,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right in the middle of it, and don’t make any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco major proclamations or decisions when you’re in that time, because you’re gonna be very sleep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco deprived and just very drained for a lot of that time. And so just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get through it, support each other as best you can, and see you on the other side.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. John?

⏹️ ▶️ John As you said, there’s nothing you can do to prepare for it. And in many ways, that is very true, because it’s kind of one of those things where

⏹️ ▶️ John you never know how much you read about it until you experience it. You don’t really know what you’re in for. But one of the important things you could do

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of preparation is kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John get OK with the concept that

⏹️ ▶️ John things, well, all right. So there’s societal pressure

⏹️ ▶️ John surrounding parenthood. And in case you’ve touched on this with the

⏹️ ▶️ John breastfeeding thing, both of you are going to feel ways that you think you quote unquote shouldn’t feel.

⏹️ ▶️ John At various points, you’re going to say, I hate this baby. And then you’re going to feel guilty.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to feel

⏹️ ▶️ John guilty because I’m not supposed to hate my baby. What kind of good parent hates their baby? This is what

⏹️ ▶️ John you should prepare for, the cognitive dissidence of feelings that you absolutely will

⏹️ ▶️ John have that you also at the same time think are bad or wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because that can eat you up. That can make everything so much worse. You can spend a lot of time beating

⏹️ ▶️ John yourself up about the fact that I don’t love my baby. I shouldn’t be hating this. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re beating yourself up about feelings that you’re having. Now, the

⏹️ ▶️ John flip side of this is this doesn’t mean ignore all the bad things you’re having. So to give one example,

⏹️ ▶️ John if breastfeeding is painful, talk to a lactation consultant. Do not say, well, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be painful there, it’ll be fine. It shouldn’t in the ideal case be painful, but it can be.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if it is, there are things you can do to try to help it. And it could be that you may just have to

⏹️ ▶️ John not breastfeed, but don’t make that decision, to Marco’s point, don’t make that rash decision on your own based on your guilt about

⏹️ ▶️ John not doing it and the fact that it is painful. Find help. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an actual job called lactation consultant that they do this. And if you can’t find one or can’t afford one,

⏹️ ▶️ John find someone who has breastfed or whatever. And in terms of the like preparing for you feeling bad,

⏹️ ▶️ John and part of that is having somebody in your life who you can talk to about

⏹️ ▶️ John your bad feelings. So right there, that’s a pretty high bar. Who do you wanna tell that you hate your baby? You probably aren’t gonna feel

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ John telling your mom that you hate your baby, right? Same thing with like, oh, breastfeeding is painful. I don’t know who

⏹️ ▶️ John to turn to. I don’t know where a lactation consultant is. I can’t afford one on my brain space and now this is who should I

⏹️ ▶️ John talk to about it? You may think I’ll talk to my mom. She breastfed, she’ll give advice to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on your mom. Maybe your mom will be awesome and give you great advice and walk you through it. Or maybe your mom

⏹️ ▶️ John will be like, I don’t remember, but I think it was fine for me and it should be fine for you and you have a weird relationship with your mom that just makes you feel worse.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to have someone sane, who isn’t sleep deprived, so probably not your spouse,

⏹️ ▶️ John to sanity check what you’re doing because you’re gonna feel awful and it’s gonna feel terrible,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then also you have to know, yeah, but is that just like the heart of being an infant or is there something

⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, right? Or is there something I can do about this? And it’s so hard to know when you’re in the middle of it, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John when you add in the guilt, is this a bad thing that I should just power through or is this a bad thing that needs

⏹️ ▶️ John to be addressed? You will not be able to make that call on your own because your brain will be so scrambled

⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ve never heard a kid before and you don’t know. And that’s why it’s so important to have someone somewhere in your life who is not

⏹️ ▶️ John the Google search box that you feel comfortable talking to about these things

⏹️ ▶️ John and will give you an honest answer. And very often, unfortunately, that is not our parents, for a variety

⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons that are too complicated to go into. Also, the fact they had kids a long time ago. There are people

⏹️ ▶️ John who do this for a living. There are friends who may be closer to your age who have done this more recently. Find someone that you trust

⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about this, because what you don’t want to do is say, a hard-to-know podcast is going to be really hard. Therefore, anything that bad happens, I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John just shut my mouth about it and say, well, it’s just supposed to be hard. Deal with it. And I know this is not

⏹️ ▶️ John really good advice. I’m telling you, it’s going to be hard. But if it’s too hard, something might be wrong, so find out. But

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what makes it hard, right? So you can do that ahead of time. You can think about, while

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not sleep deprived, you and your spouse, who will we be able to talk to that we can trust?

⏹️ ▶️ John Should we find a lactation consultant now while the baby is safely ensconced in some inside of another human

⏹️ ▶️ John being? It’s so much easier to deal with that baby inside there. Despite all the terrible things that having

⏹️ ▶️ John to do with pregnancy that your wife will be able to fill you in on if you’re interested in, it’s worse when the baby comes out, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And the final thing that I’ll say is, part of managing the guilty feelings about the, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, like feeling bad about your feelings, part of managing that is so that you will find yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John able to enjoy the good moments because there will be good moments, even with the worst infant, when it smiles

⏹️ ▶️ John at you and makes a funny burp, when it’s comfortably napping on your chest and you’re watching TV, you will

⏹️ ▶️ John have these moments. And if you are spending all that time feeling bad

⏹️ ▶️ John about how you don’t love your baby the right way, you will miss them. Don’t miss them. So the preparation

⏹️ ▶️ John is like set up those supports, think about them when you have a sane brain, be prepared for the fact

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re going to feel things that you think you shouldn’t feel and practice sort of getting past

⏹️ ▶️ John that so you can successfully be in the moment to enjoy the good parts because there are good parts

⏹️ ▶️ John to having an infant, right? And they get even better as the kid gets older and everything. And you want to be able to enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ John them that will really help you get through all of this. And finally, like Margo said,

⏹️ ▶️ John postpartum depression is a thing. And it can be difficult even to just be a father in this situation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Do not be afraid to ask for supports. There are people, again, mental health professionals, or whoever, who can help you

⏹️ ▶️ John while you are having a baby. It is not a failure of you as a parent. It is not a failure of your child.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s something that you should have sort of lined up. You may not need it, but if you do,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t feel guilty about needing it. There’s no guilt about it. that it can be helpful and

⏹️ ▶️ John you should definitely seek it out. If you spend all your time feeling bad about it and then feeling even worse that you’re considering

⏹️ ▶️ John having this thing, I shouldn’t need therapy, my parents didn’t need therapy to raise me, what am I even doing? Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have that attitude. I know this sounds all grim and terrifying and if you’ve never had a kid, you’re like, why would anyone have a kid? This sounds awful.

⏹️ ▶️ John We just, I just feel like it’s the thing that no one prepared me for because everything that I heard and

⏹️ ▶️ John read from people is like, oh, you’re having a kid that’s so wonderful, it’s gonna be so great because that’s what we’re all conditioned to do. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like as engineers, all having gone through this, we’re telling you the things

⏹️ ▶️ John that other people won’t tell you about it. I mean, I guess if you all listen to parenting podcasts, you probably hear it all the time. But on a tech podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ John you probably just say, oh, it’s great, you’re having a baby, it’d be so fun for you. There are hard parts too.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the more you can get yourself right with how it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be hard, again, in a balanced way, do not ignore problems that might actually be problems, but also

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t expect everything to be wonderful. I don’t know if we’re being helpful or just scaring people away from having babies. But it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like people keep having them no matter what. So I think somehow the system might work.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I would also say on the therapy front, like as you mentioned, John, like on the therapy front,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s common wisdom out there that if you get in a car accident, like suppose you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rear-ended or something, a lot of people say, you know what, you should go to the hospital just to get your neck and shoulders and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco checked out, just in case, you probably have something there that could be worked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on or at least monitored. and certainly if you actually do have any kind of injuries, you should get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them looked at and work on them, work on them somehow, address them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one says that about mental stuff. Like no one, when you’re going through this massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change in your life that can be very emotional and very stressful,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one says, hey, you know what, even if you don’t think you need therapy, why don’t you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go get checked out? Like go have a few sessions, just talk through some stuff and just see, even if you don’t think you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it. No one ever says that. We probably should. Like, there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on here when you go through major life events, whether they are things like having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a child, or maybe losses, like somebody passes away, you’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco divorced or whatever. There’s so many instances in life where this is a major shift

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna put a lot of stress on you. It’s a very emotional, challenging time in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain ways. Go to therapy. Why not? Go for a couple of sessions if you don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to. Just go for a couple of sessions just to see. Even that can be helpful in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get checked out. Like, we don’t do that as a society, but I think we really should.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an example of having a person who will be able to tell you to sanity

⏹️ ▶️ John check. Like, because again, when you’re in it, you’re not gonna be able to tell, is what I’m feeling

⏹️ ▶️ John within parameters that should be expected, or is there something wrong? It’s so difficult to tell that about yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ John So a therapist is an example of one person who will hopefully be able to give you the perspective that you aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ John able to have. And again, I would stress that your friends and family may not be able to give you that perspective because

⏹️ ▶️ John there is societal pressure for your friends and family to be relentlessly positive and say, oh, I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be fine. Oh, you’ll get over it. Oh, we can help out. Are you feeling better? Like, not that they’re doing anything bad about that,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not, like, it’s not their job, right? That’s the therapist’s job. And in terms of preparation,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard from so many people Trying to find a therapist is like the hardest part of therapy. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John forget about the decision to do it, and sometimes that’s also hard to get over that hump. Okay, I’ve decided I want a therapist.

⏹️ ▶️ John Who? I don’t know, I can search. Oh boy, there’s a lot of them. How do I pick one? Or like,

⏹️ ▶️ John do that before the baby comes out of someone’s body. Because you

⏹️ ▶️ John are more able to, because think about if you’re in this terrible situation and you think there might be something wrong, but you can’t tell,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the time you want to say, oh, and now I have to figure out how to pick a therapist. You can do that ahead of time. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John call them up. you can make your first appointment for the first week after the baby’s due date. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John do it while you don’t have baby brain. Do it now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And just to end on a slightly more positive note, I have known Erin, I think the least of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that each of us have known our spouses, but I’ve known Erin 17 years, 17 and 1 half at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The single most impressive and amazing thing I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to see her do is be a mom. But the single most impressive thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’ve ever seen her do is to have our two kids. Like watching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your wife do that is something that is unbelievable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t have the vocabulary to put into words what that’s like. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think Erin’s unique in this. I think, you know, Tina and I think Tiff are exactly the same. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just watching your wife, I’m going to say go through that, but again, that implies negativeness, but to watch your wife

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring another person into the world, and that includes pregnancy, but particularly birth, like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, it’s unreal. And for my money, so to speak,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the most impressive thing I’ve seen Aaron do. And that’s something really special that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, no matter how good or bad a parent she is or was or will be,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will never take that away from her. And that’s just a super cool thing to share with your spouse.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I almost missed it because I was taking a dump.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my. Well yeah, okay. So eat a sandwich in the car.

⏹️ ▶️ John Being a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco father during birth is a little bit easier. I would recommend not complaining that your feet hurt.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, also a good idea. Eat a sandwich on the way to the hospital and then immediately,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then immediately take it up that’s that’s our collective advice

#askatp: Work vs. family time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick Serrano writes, I was just wondering if you guys could talk about alone or focus time when you’re in app development

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode and how you balance the time you need for that and the needs of interpersonal relationships like with your partner and kids.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does your partner respect that as a legitimate need or has it ever caused tension? For me, and I think all three of us will probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have different answers for this, for me, I think the only tension it’s caused

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that Erin is almost too good about it and that I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she more jealously guards my work time than I do, which is probably a sign that I should guard it more jealously, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey neither here nor there. Um, but there are times, especially over the summer where I’ll be like, Oh, I want to go with you three to do that thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey She’s like, well, are you sure? Don’t you have work you need to be doing? And she’s not saying that to be a turd. Like she’s not, it’s not like your mom

⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, are you sure you don’t need to clean up your room? You know, it’s not that sort of thing. It’s like, no, genuinely, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you need me to take the kids away so that you can concentrate and get work done? Um, and,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s been kind of funny this summer, but generally speaking, we reached an agreement that these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are my, you know, kind of core working hours, which is really business speak, but that’s basically what it boils down to.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And generally speaking, she tries to leave me alone and the kids try to leave me alone when I’m in the office during those times.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And once or twice a week, I will go somewhere else, like not a park bench, mind you, John, but a picnic table

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe a library or maybe the exterior of a grocery store cafeteria or what have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. And that’ll give me some focus time as well. But generally speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we basically talked about it before I went independent and came to an agreement that this is the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time that I should and will be working and this is the time that I won’t be working and we’re going to be okay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that. And obviously it flexes from time to time, but it’s pretty consistent for the most part and that’s worked out pretty well for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. Actually, Marco, I probably should have started with you since you’ve been at home the longest of the three of us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you and Tiff and Adam work this out?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am terrible at this. And I always have been. I am just terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at time management in general. And when it comes to balancing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco working at home with getting stuff done, I am terrible at that too. And I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been terrible at that for the entire time I’ve been working at home full time, which began 12 years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t really have good answers here. I mean, so to some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree, I’m served well by the fact that I have always been a slacker

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with really inconsistent productivity. I, you know, we talked about this a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit before, like I will work my butt off for like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four hour stint in a day and that’ll be like most of the work I get done that week.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be in those chunks where I’ll have these massively productive chunks of time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I will have days afterwards where I don’t have anything like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of that is not on the family, it’s on me. I’m the one who is usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being distracted by other things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of that’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I do different things. Like I have been juggling this podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other podcasts along with app development. And there is very little overlap in those two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of what kind of mental mode you have to be in to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I do a lot of other things too. I have other hobbies and other projects that I work on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. And so I’ve never been that good at managing all this stuff. I kind of just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do work whenever I’m motivated to do it, but that is not a predictable or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistent thing. Otherwise, when it comes to things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kids and partners, like Tiff has been always very respectful of my time. Whenever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need time, she lets me take it. And that’s always, and she takes, she works too. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I give her time and we go, We’ll be together for the morning and the evening and lunch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then in between, we’ll both be working on stuff. When there’s a kid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the house, it’s a little bit different. Obviously, at least one of us needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to usually be, especially when the kid is young, at least one of us usually is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing with the kid or managing the kid in some way. And that’s challenging if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you both have work to do. And that’s something you kind of have to work out with your spouse and figure out a good balance there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, if the kid is home and you are home, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to run into your office sometimes and show you stuff. That’s just how kids work. And you can’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect them not to do that because they’re just kids. And so you kind of have to be prepared for that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try to find ways. And obviously, school makes this much, much easier.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try to find ways where you can get work done when the kid isn’t home. Yeah, school

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a godsend for this. Like that’s when I get, this is why in the summertime I get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way less work done than during the school year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few reasons for that, but that’s probably the biggest reason is that like in the school year, we are forced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wake up early every weekday and then after an hour of rushed craziness,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we then have alone time in the house. And then we can get all of our work done until mid-afternoon when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then other stuff can then happen once the kid is home. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco school is awesome for this. Uh, otherwise I have no useful tips.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, this is most pertinent for you because this is newest for you. So what have, what have you guys been doing?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not really new for me. Cause I mean, my very first job out of college was a telecommuting job.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s true. That’s true. And you’ve been working from home for a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John while.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m working for home for all of my jobs that I’ve ever had in various amounts, ranging from a hundred percent

⏹️ ▶️ John to probably not less than 50% for most of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think when you think about, you know, this question alone, focus time for working on

⏹️ ▶️ John app development or whatever, and relationships, you would think that this is a task

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, Oh, I have to, you know, talk to my spouse and family,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, and just come to an arrangement and agreement. And there is that, like communication is important and talking about it with

⏹️ ▶️ John the other people in your house is important. But I think one of the important things that’s easy to miss is self-knowledge.

⏹️ ▶️ John Knowing what kind of person you are, what, you know, how are you most productive? How

⏹️ ▶️ John do you like to work? How much time does it take you to ramp up to whatever task that you’re doing? Does it literally

⏹️ ▶️ John take you an hour before you get into the zone when programming? You know, how quickly can you

⏹️ ▶️ John task switch? If you get interrupted, how much of a loop does that throw you for? All the way down to the type of thing of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John having the self-knowledge to know whether you are more productive or less productive

⏹️ ▶️ John when people aren’t in the house. Some people are way more productive

⏹️ ▶️ John as people leave the house. Some people get antsy when no one’s in the house, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it depends on your personality trait. Like, and I’m not saying they’re bothering you, it’s just literally like, are they in the

⏹️ ▶️ John house, right? You have to know sort of what, how you work,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s sometimes difficult to know that until you’ve tried. You maybe think, I would love it when no one’s in the house and it’s nice and quiet

⏹️ ▶️ John and then everyone leaves the house, you’re like, finally, I can get the programming done. You find you cannot concentrate. That may be teaching

⏹️ ▶️ John you that you’re not the type of person who becomes more productive when everybody leaves. Or you may not have realized you’re that type of person until

⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly the school year starts and your kids aren’t there and your wife’s out of the house in the morning. You’re like, wow, I was so productive. What changed

⏹️ ▶️ John about this morning? Knowing how you work will let you figure out how

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to arrange things. If you are the type of person who needs that long ramp up time, you should arrange

⏹️ ▶️ John your life so you have these large blocks where you can do that. And don’t even attempt to time

⏹️ ▶️ John slice in a 20 minute development thing between tasks, but you have to know that about yourself, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Are you the type of person who works well, you know, going out to sit in front of the Walmart

⏹️ ▶️ John or on a park bench or whatever? Like, maybe you don’t know, you’ve never tried it. Try it and find out.

⏹️ ▶️ John And based, like, don’t commit to a plan ahead of time and then beat yourself up because like, oh, I said I was gonna do this in these hours,

⏹️ ▶️ John these hours and it’s not working, I can’t figure out why. try a bunch of different things and, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John introspection, look into yourself, figure out what works for you and what doesn’t, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John figure out your schedule around that. And the final thing that I’m saying is, this is a trait that is common to many programmers

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s probably true of Nick. When we get into the zone and we’re working on a problem

⏹️ ▶️ John and we almost have it fixed, of course you wanna finish it, of course you wanna make the commit,

⏹️ ▶️ John of course you wanna push the commit, of course you want to like just get over the finish line. this is where you

⏹️ ▶️ John run into trouble. Because no programmer wants to stop in the middle of a thing that they just figured out the solution to and they’re almost

⏹️ ▶️ John about to solve. But that’s where you have to be firm with yourself and say like

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever boundary we set with the agreement, like five o’clock it’s family time or whatever. Sometimes you just

⏹️ ▶️ John have to stop in the middle. Now figure out some version control stuff, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, put it in a stash, like make a commit and then like amend it later or whatever, like whatever you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John do from a technical perspective. but be okay with the idea that you’re not always going to be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to get satisfaction, right? And it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John hard when you’re like, especially if you’ve just cracked the problem and now it’s just a simple matter

⏹️ ▶️ John of programming to bang it out or whatever, oh, but it’s dinner time, just give me 20 more minutes and 20 more minutes turns into 45 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is not a formula for a happy household. That is not a formula for a happy you. So prepare

⏹️ ▶️ John ahead of time to, regardless of how you are as a person, We all want to finish the

⏹️ ▶️ John problem, condition yourself to figure out how you can be okay with stopping in the middle when it goes against

⏹️ ▶️ John every fiber of your being, because that is an important, it’s an important part of setting boundaries for yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John and respecting your agreement with your family about how you will confine yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t mean you can’t ever go over. It doesn’t mean like, oh, today this is actually important. I have to ship a thing out. I’m going to miss dinner or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but be careful with making that a habit. So, and the best way to do that is to be okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John do some practice runs and be okay of stopping in the middle. with your productivity. I know it’s going to take you a long time to ramp

⏹️ ▶️ John back up to it tomorrow, but it’s a skill you need to develop. So practice that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode and Collide. And thanks to our members

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join on atp.fm slash join and we’ll talk to you next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it

⏹️ ▶️ John was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long

Neutral: John rents a car

Chapter Neutral: John rents a car image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you recently traveled and you rented

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so hard to rent cars because you can rent a thing, but can you rent a car? Oh, you can rent an SUV so easy.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they have.

⏹️ ▶️ John But like when they have like the categories of what kind of, it used to be like, I’m so old enough I remember it was like, what car, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what type of car would you like to rent? You can rent a compact car, midsize car, or full size. And what they meant is compact,

⏹️ ▶️ John midsize, and full size sedan. Like that’s all you could rent. That’s how old I am. Right. If you want

⏹️ ▶️ John a sedan, you have to say, what category has non-SUVs in it? It’s so hard to find. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even then, you can’t. Because when you, I’ve, this has run into me, I’ve run into this a few times, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m going on a trip and I want to rent a car, I’ll usually pick whatever is the premium sedan option. Because I want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get, let me get a nice car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to kind of escalate is what you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco get. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what those categories say on the website is, yeah, you’ll get maybe a Nissan Maxima or something like that. what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually mean is price category. That’s what they mean. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what they mean

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is cheap car,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less cheap car, more expensive car. And so, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they consider it totally routine and normal to substitute other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars of the same price category with whatever you ordered and they act like they’re doing you a favor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when I book the car, what I actually get oftentimes is, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we upgraded you to this SUV. And if I’m like, well, can I not do that? Like, oh, this is all we have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. So you’re stuck with it. Like, okay, well, I mean, thanks, but that’s not what I wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, if you search hard enough or you specify, you can usually get a sand.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that’s what I wanted on my trip was I wanted a sand. I wanted as close as I could get to my Honda Accord as I can, surprise, surprise.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Of course you

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get a Honda Accord, but just kind of dumb, because I don’t know why rental car fleets don’t have Accords. It’s not like they’re not plentiful,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t often see them. I’m sure somebody has them. Anyway, I got a Camry, which is like A++,

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what you wanted. Like that is the equivalent of an Accord. It is a mid-size, full-size type sedan.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is not an SUV. It is so rare to find. I mean, obviously it’s not stick shift, but let’s be realistic

⏹️ ▶️ John here. So I was pretty happy. I’m like, we’re, you know, and you never know what you’re gonna get until you get there.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, here you go. It’s a Camry. I’m like, hey, pretty good. That is, you know, that’s as close as you can get

⏹️ ▶️ John without going over to getting an Accord, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey A Maxima would

⏹️ ▶️ John have been fine as well. And the car was for the most part fine. I mean, my wife drove it

⏹️ ▶️ John because we were in her hometown area. She knows where everything is. I drove it a little bit, too. But she mostly drove it.

⏹️ ▶️ John She immediately hated it. You know, we’re very similar in this way. She seems

⏹️ ▶️ John often to have even more visceral hatred of automatic transmissions. Again, neither of

⏹️ ▶️ John us in our married life together has ever owned a car that is not stick shift.

⏹️ ▶️ John I keep telling her that it is possible to have a good automatic, but the Camry doesn’t have a particularly good automatic. So she was like, boy, I

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t wait to get back to my court. I don’t like this car. But you know, it’s a Camry. It’s a big, mushy, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it wasn’t particularly fun to drive or anything like that, but it got the job done. But most of my complaints about the Camry

⏹️ ▶️ John when riding it, it had to do with the infotainment, because that’s, you know, she’s driving, that’s my job to wrangle the infotainment. And this

⏹️ ▶️ John is the first car that I’ve ever like used used, as in not just been in for two seconds, that has CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I was excited to try CarPlay, not wireless CarPlay as far as I can tell, just wired CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ John And as Marco and Casey know, because I was talking about it in our like neutral Slack channel

⏹️ ▶️ John with the other car enthusiasts, for this whole like, you know, week long vacation,

⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to figure out one problem having to do with CarPlay that I never did

⏹️ ▶️ John get solved despite all the suggestions. And I thought I would throw it out on the podcast in case someone can tell me what the deal

⏹️ ▶️ John is, right? Plug in your phone, throws up the map, you know, does the CarPlay thing. We were just using

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Maps for directions and stuff. And Apple Maps, the friendly person at Apple Maps would

⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know, take exit 25 in one mile or whatever with

⏹️ ▶️ John the voice prompts. But that voice was so loud, like

⏹️ ▶️ John ear splittingly loud, like so loud that the kids were like, stop, make it stop, turn off the directions.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was so loud. You’d think this would be an easy problem to solve, but me being

⏹️ ▶️ John a CarPlay novice, I’m like, maybe there’s just something I don’t understand about CarPlay. So we tried all the things

⏹️ ▶️ John that you can imagine. I tried the volume knob on the dashboard because that was just a plain old volume knob and it can’t be,

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do anything. I tried the volume on the phone, didn’t do anything. I tried looking for settings in the car, couldn’t find it. I tried looking

⏹️ ▶️ John for settings on the phone, couldn’t find anything relevant. Casey’s suggestion and many other people’s suggestion was, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to adjust the volume while the audio is playing because otherwise it thinks you’re adjusting the volume of like

⏹️ ▶️ John the music that you might be playing, but you want to adjust the volume of the voice. So do the volume adjustment when

⏹️ ▶️ John the voice is speaking. Nope, didn’t make any difference. Tried all the volumes things on the phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of settings, the knobs, when the thing is playing, had no effect whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing we found that relieved this agony was using Google Maps because the Google Maps

⏹️ ▶️ John voice was slightly more quiet. It was not as ear splitting. Still couldn’t adjust the volume in any way

⏹️ ▶️ John and it was still loud, but not as loud. And this can’t be the way

⏹️ ▶️ John the world works, right? Like this can’t, like if you have a camera, This was a 2022 Camry, right? This

⏹️ ▶️ John cannot be the status quo on the 2022 camera that, sorry, there is literally no way to control

⏹️ ▶️ John the volume of the voice that reads you directions when you’re navigating through an app

⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone. Just could not figure that out and it boggled my mind and it really made

⏹️ ▶️ John me dislike this car a lot. Aside from the driving, the only other weird thing, I mean, this is just personal

⏹️ ▶️ John preference or whatever. The seats felt like Venus fly traps that were eating me. What?

⏹️ ▶️ John I was in the passenger seat, which usually doesn’t have the same number of adjustments as the driver’s seat on these cheaper cars.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, so it was all manual and maybe it was lacking some adjustments, but like the main thing I wanted was the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John tilts the seat bottom, right? So it’s either, you know, like either a flat, like a parallel with the ground would

⏹️ ▶️ John be completely flat. And then you usually, you can tilt the seat bottom up. So it tilts. These seats were tilted so far up. And

⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I could tell, had no way to adjust it down that I felt like I was like sliding

⏹️ ▶️ John backwards into a terrible pit. So uncomfortable. That’s awful for your lower back. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you could adjust the seat back angle. Like, you could do that to try to make it better. But in order for me to feel comfortable, I’d

⏹️ ▶️ John have to be laid back so far that I’d be looking through the rear window, right? Like, it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s, maybe the seats feel comfortable to other people. And I think the driver’s seat did have more adjustment, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John was weird. But anyway, the CarPlay thing, I couldn’t figure out. So if someone knows the secret solution to adjusting the

⏹️ ▶️ John volume of the voice on a 2022 camera using wired CarPlay and the latest version of iOS with

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Maps, I would love to hear it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So real time follow up, John, can you click the link I put in both the Slack and in the chat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey room? This is a 20 second YouTube video. Is this what you were working with? Because I don’t know what the inside of a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern Camry looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like. I mean, that’s not, that doesn’t look like it. I recognize the software, but the dashboards around,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the 2022 Camry that we were in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, so in there, if you look at about 10 seconds in, in the menu, you can go to setup, and then there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a voice section and voice volume, and there’s an adjuster in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, that was, I mean, I looked through the settings a lot and this was not there. I would love for it to have been there,

⏹️ ▶️ John but this menu item was not there. Maybe it needed a software update. That could also be possible because it is a rental car

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but I think we did have the audio item because I remember clicking on audio a lot thinking surely it’s gotta be here,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there was no voice item. Well, remember this is in voice, not audio. I know, but there was no voice item. I would have gone

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey into voice for

⏹️ ▶️ John sure

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if it was there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I mean, I did a quick Google just to see if I could somehow shame you with an answer, but unfortunately

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. No, but for the record, on both my car and Aaron’s, you know, on my Volkswagen and Aaron’s Volvo,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am 99.9% sure that if you twist the volume knob

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the announcement is happening, it will adjust the announcement volume. I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost certain of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it probably does work that in other cars, just not in this one. We got a, I’ll make this anonymous, but from an anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ John person who works for a car company said this, the iPhone sends navigation prompts as nominal,

⏹️ ▶️ John unattenuated audio. the car system should allow for volume control. So just in terms of the responsibility,

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone sends the audio and is really up to the car’s infotainment system to

⏹️ ▶️ John adjust that audio. So I guess that focuses your efforts on, don’t bother trying to do it on the phone. That’s probably not going

⏹️ ▶️ John to work. It’s got to be somewhere in the car infotainment system. And I’m totally willing

⏹️ ▶️ John to believe this is a user error. Maybe something about how I set up the phone with CarPlay was wrong, because there was this,

⏹️ ▶️ John when you plug in the phone, it puts up this prompt or whatever. And who knows what I tapped when we were in the airport parking lot in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco New York. But isn’t it just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two questions? It’s like, do you want to use for CarPlay? Yes or no? And like, do you want to sync your contacts oftentimes? Like that’s the-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John those are the question. I mean, I don’t remember. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe one of them is whether or not you allow CarPlay use while the phone is locked because I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things you can do is say it will not connect to CarPlay until you have actively unlocked the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a thing that you could turn on.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this voice volume thing has got to be the solution in this video. It just, we didn’t have that

⏹️ ▶️ John menu item on the left-hand menu. we had a similar version of software. It looks kind of the same. And I recognize

⏹️ ▶️ John like those horizontal buttons, home, audio, map, apps, like

⏹️ ▶️ John it just, I mean, this is not the car we were in because, you know, our screen was above the vents and, you know, it was totally different volume knobs,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So maybe this is changed in later versions or earlier versions, or maybe the firmware needed to be updated or something,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m glad to know that there apparently is a way to do it. It just was not in the thing that we had.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was very frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what did you think of CarPlay other than the excessively loud announcements?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that really super did ruin it because the main thing you’re using it for is, you know, I mean, we had the overcast

⏹️ ▶️ John icon and everybody was like listening to podcasts. I mean, it was great. Like I would love it on my next car. Like it’s, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, I’m not against CarPlay, I’m for it. It’s just, it was very weird. Oh, and then one more thing. Let

⏹️ ▶️ John me find a…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey While you’re looking, I’m surprised that both of you wanted audio announcements because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost never use audio announcements and this is actually even better for Apple Watch users. Oh, I almost

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John never do. Why

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t you? You can keep your eyes on the road. and a friendly voice tells you when to turn.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so a couple of things. First of all, generally speaking, if I’m traveling somewhere unknown, it’s typically with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron. And typically, whoever’s not driving will also be, you’ll have a much keener eye.

⏹️ ▶️ John You get live performances of the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey announcements?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, yeah, I guess that’s a good point. I guess I ultimately am getting the announcements, just not from CarPlay. I didn’t think of it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. But no, even if I’m by myself, generally speaking, I’ll glance down at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey map from time to time. Also, if you’re an Apple Watch user, which last I heard, was, then it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will tap you incessantly and repeatedly when you’re coming up to a turn. Well, I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a bit overdramatic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s only with Apple Maps, though.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, that’s a good point. That is a good point. That is only with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Maps. I mean, we were using Apple Maps. Maybe, I mean, she was wearing her watch. Maybe it was buzzing. I just didn’t, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not on my wrist, so I didn’t feel it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it would only be buzzing if you were using her phone for car play.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s it too, because I think probably half the time, probably had my phone plugged in just because I’m managing the infotainment.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another thing, this is another weird one, like this dashboard,

⏹️ ▶️ John it had a lot of glossy black plastic, which is kind of out of fashion because it collects fingerprints, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John this like lag time for car manufacturers to figure out that people don’t want piano black plastic everywhere anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it was a fashion trend for many years. Hopefully it’s fading now, but anyway, there was a lot of this plastic and

⏹️ ▶️ John what they decided to dedicate dashboard space for. So they had the big screen in the middle and the vents and stuff like this, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna look at this picture in the chat here. Look at the size of these items here. I should

⏹️ ▶️ John have put something in it for scale, but like to the left is the screen, right? That’s like several inches

⏹️ ▶️ John long, that passenger airbag light. Maybe there are other warning lights on that thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s a big control to have to the right of the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John on the dashboard. You can see the seatbelt lights below it or whatever. And the thing that baffled

⏹️ ▶️ John me about this is it was the opposite of, and granted I only get Honda, so I don’t know what other cars like, but it was the opposite of any car

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever owned where for people to know, there is a safety feature of modern

⏹️ ▶️ John cars where if there is a child in the passenger seat, the car will disable the

⏹️ ▶️ John passenger airbag so it doesn’t kill the child because passenger airbags have to be sized to save an

⏹️ ▶️ John unbelted adult because we live in a stupid country where people don’t wear their seatbelts. So the explosion is very

⏹️ ▶️ John powerful and it can kill a child, right? So if there is weight on the passenger seat, but that weight is not

⏹️ ▶️ John as heavy as a full-size expected adult human, the passenger

⏹️ ▶️ John airbag will be disabled. And normally there’s a light somewhere in your dashboard that will tell you, hey, just so you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ John passenger airbag is currently disabled. They don’t tell you why, but you just have to know that it’s disabled because it thinks there’s a kid there.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if you put a bag of groceries in the seat very often, you’ll start the car, you’ll see a little passenger, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John passenger airbag disabled. Well, look at this picture I just posted. What is this trying to tell me?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that is really crummy UI, that or user experience, information architecture. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s saying that there is not a car seat there. And so the passenger airbag

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is indeed on. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think. I can tell you as a spoiler, I’m sitting as a full size adult in the passenger seat when this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is on, right. The entire time on the entire trip, that light is on.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s the, it’s the everything. Okay. Siren, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think what it’s telling me is,

⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, just so you know, the passenger airbag is enabled because we have determined you’re a big fat adult

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s okay to and blow up this explosion in your face, right? But it never goes off. It’s a big

⏹️ ▶️ John light and it’s bright and it is prominent on the dashboard. And so it’s like basically saying, everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ John okay. The passenger airbag is on, you are an adult, everything is okay. And it never goes

⏹️ ▶️ John off. And I’m like, well, who designed this? Because like I said, every other car I’ve been in, you see a light persistently

⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s off. But in the normal situation, either nobody in the seat or an adult

⏹️ ▶️ John size person in the seat, there’s no light, right? And so I don’t know what the Toyota designers were, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John every Toyota is like this. I don’t know what they were thinking with the prominence of the display. I don’t know what they were thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John with the infographics and I don’t know what they were thinking with the decision to have the light on all the time as

⏹️ ▶️ John opposed to the reverse. Super weird. So, I mean, not that I was ever in the market for a Camry

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, but this is some weird decisions. It’s almost a shame you didn’t get the 4Runner, which by

⏹️ ▶️ John the way, I’m seeing tons of 4Runner everywhere now that I know what they look like. They’re just so gross in person.

⏹️ ▶️ John I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wonder if it has the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Almost all modern Toyotas and Lexuses, Lexi, are hideous. Like not BMW hideous,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hideous.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s some nice looking Lexus models, but- I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen them. Oh, there’s the Toyota,

⏹️ ▶️ John what is it? The, it used to be the FRS, but now it’s the G86.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. That one’s pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not the Supra though. That’s gross.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think the Supra is that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so bad. It’s like a melted snailfish. I don’t like it, it’s just so aggressively ugly.

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