508: Later Is Getting Later and Later

10 Nov 2022

Twitter, Apple TV setup, a “new” phone and mouse, and maximizing the value of smart-home gear.

Episode Description:

THE ATP STORE IS BACK, BABY! The store will be open until Sunday, 13 November! Don’t delay! Our thanks to the teams at Studio Neat, and, as always, Cotton Bureau. Don’t forget, members get 15% off!

• Pre-show: lol twttr
  • Hotline
• Follow-up:
  • Rewind has stopped using cloud transcription, so, you’re welcome.
  • Speaking of screen recording, let’s talk about corporate espionage protection
    • DTEX
  • Jason has found the answer to John’s confusion about using ML-generated keywords in smart albums
  • More on Casey’s wonky iPad volume buttons (via Andre Aguilar and others)
    • Support article
  • ECC RAM support is coming to macOS
    • XNU
  • Ventura System Settings & third-party preference panes
  • Mark U teaches us how to read Apple
  • Steve Troughton-Smith also teaches us how to read Apple
• John’s “new” 📱 & 🖱️
  • John’s mouse
  • John’s 🍄
• New Apple TV upgrade experience
• Bono apologizes for Songs of Innocence
  • How do you remove this darn thing anyway?
  • Removal URL
• iPhone 15 buttons may go solid-state?
• #askatp:
  • Is “smart home” tech really worth it? (via James Egg)
  • Which host is the fastest typist? (via Mark Richard)
  • Why don’t we have interactive home screen widgets yet? (via Brian Hamilton)
• Post-show: Marco made a pilgrimage
  • John’s of Bleecker Street
  • Branchinelli’s

Sponsored by:

• Kolide: Make your team into your biggest allies for endpoint security. Solve problems, right within Slack.
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Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed! And 15% off in the store!

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

Chapters

1. Twitter
2. ATP Store 🖼️
3. Follow-up: Lifestreams
4. Follow-up: Photos Smart Albums
5. Follow-up: iPad volume buttons
6. Sponsor: Memberful
7. ECC tidbit
8. Ventura prefpanes
9. Decoding Apple nomenclature
10. Sponsor: Hover
11. “New” phone and mouse 🖼️
12. New Apple TV setup
13. Remembering Songs of Innocence
14. iPhone haptic-buttons rumor
15. Sponsor: Kolide
16. #askatp: Smart-home worthwhile?
17. #askatp: Fastest typist
18. #askatp: Interactive widgets
19. Ending theme
20. A pizza pilgrimage 🖼️

Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let me post that we’re live to Twitter, if it still exists.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is it still running?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Who even knows? What a disaster. Holy jamolis.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What a week. I was slightly optimistic last week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I’m less optimistic now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I don’t need to do any navel gazing other than to say, I regret not pushing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey back on you a little bit more last week. It doesn’t really matter. I think all three of us can agree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh man, things are happening and it’s not good. It’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was today, I believe, that anyone could start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey signing up for Twitter Blue, the new version of Twitter Blue, where you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a checkmark, a verified checkmark for signing up. And so any normal person

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who is reading all these tweets, who sees a Twitter user with the, you know, display name Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say LeBron James and a blue check mark next to them. They don’t need they don’t look at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actual handle for this account They just see that LeBron James is saying Oh, I want to get traded or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whatever the fake thing said earlier today And so news outlets are now picking this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up because that thing is getting retweeted and you see Oh LeBron James with the blue check said he wants to get traded,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s just some dummy who paid $8 for Blue Checkmark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, that’s the silly version of it. The less silly one are the people who are doing, like, cryptocurrency

⏹️ ▶️ ^John promotions. Like, somebody imitated the official Twitter account and said, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, Twitter Blue is now available, and to get it, you just need to get this cryptocurrency and go to this link or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it had, like, thousands of retweets. That’s real people, like, potentially losing real

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money on someone who’s just scamming, trying to, you know, trying to take advantage of the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s pretty easy to make an invitation Twitter account now. And they basically were up for two hours

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before they got banned, right? Because the, the enforcement of like, hey, you’re not allowed to do this is not lightning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quick. And so in that two hours, how much money did they make? And was it more than $8? Because if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} more than $8, it’s worth their time to just keep doing this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. And then my other favorite thing, I don’t, I’m not going to be able to dig up show notes entries for this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But my My other favorite thing was Twitter briefly had the blue checkmark,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which used to mean that you have like – and all three of us are verified. It was forever ago for all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of us that this happened. If memory serves, I had to provide like a copy of – like a scan of my driver’s license to become

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey verified or something along those lines. So for the verification, hence verified,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all three of us had to provide some sort of actual government credential, a scan at least of a government credential to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Twitter, which yeah, you could fake that, blah, blah, blah. But it was still, they were trying. Now, apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what they’re doing is, blue just means you’re either one of the old farts like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us that had already been verified, or you’re paying the $8 to get yourself Twitter blue and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thus verification. And then certain government accounts and certain important people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have briefly had, I think it’s already been canned, a different check mark that indicates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you’re actually who you say you are. So the way we fixed the checkmark problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was by making more checkmarks. Like, oh, how? Why? Why?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But then I think they undid the gray checkmark, or they took

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it away from a bunch of people. I think they did. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s in the process of being unwound now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so this general chaos or whatever, like, it reminds me of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the discussion we had about this back when Elon made the offer for Twitter. I don’t know how many months ago that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was. And at that point I was, you know, not necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John optimistic, but I could see a lot of the potential upsides of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter getting new ownership that is not as beholden to, you know, just not rocking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the boat and keeping the share price up and growing and all those other things because you have many more options when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a private company. I still think that’s true in terms of, you know, pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much no matter how much Elon screws this up, like, oh, I’m trying this, I’m trying that, I’ll try this, oh, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work, I’ll undo it, and I’ll do this, you know, doing things haphazardly, not really having much forethought, doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a cruddy job on a lot of them, causing bugs. That doesn’t really, like, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that for a long time because there’s no one telling you to stop. As long as you continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to just pump money into the company, and he has sold a bunch of his Tesla shares recently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s easier to have a years-long, you could say gradual decline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into chaos, Or you could say a long runway to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try to figure out something that works. And in the process of doing that, maybe people flee, maybe they go away, maybe they come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back, but the network effects of social networks are such that it’s actually, you actually have to do something to actively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John send people away, like something that is harmful for them to be there. If you just slowly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remove value, people will stay for a really long time, witness Instagram, which I feel like it, not necessarily removing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John value, but it’s less nice than it was in the past. but the network effect is strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the habit is strong. So I do feel like despite all of this silly flailing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a private company with one person just making random decisions from day to day, hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to hour, moment to moment, you can do that for a really long time because no one knows who’s gonna stop him,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? He’s just, you know, he does it until he gets bored or until everybody leaves and everyone’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna leave. You know, people will trickle out, but you know, anyway. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like this is the type of thing that it’s going to be exhausting if you try to keep up with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it for a moment to moment. And it’s more just kind of like sit back and watch it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go. I mean, and the good thing about making lots of decisions and trying things than undoing them is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably eventually you’ll find something that’s not bad. We’ll keep you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John posted, it hasn’t happened yet, but you know, it seems like it should happen eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And having that runway of just like, I can do whatever I want and no one’s gonna stop me, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a lot of money, allows for a lot of these decisions to take place. I just hope that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t actually get so bad that Twitter becomes less useful, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really do use it a ton. Not that it has replaced RSS for me, but it has supplanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RSS as the primary place where I get content for the show, where I learn about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world, where I follow the news. Like, I’ve always been a big fan of Twitter, and I will continue to use it as long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as it provides that value to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, same. You know, a lot of people are really, you know, sitting back and enjoying the shot of Freud, like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look at this jerk who’s making a fool of himself. And that’s true, and he is. And thank God for that, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he could use it. And I do think it’s kind of amazing. I saw some tweet earlier that, like, basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he has turned Twitter into a platform that is mostly dedicated to dunking on him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s become the permanent main character.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is, I think, you know, he, I think, could use some of this. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just assuming that he, you know, I don’t think any of it is penetrating. I mean, really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you’re as famous and as rich as he is, people are constantly saying terrible things to you, and eventually you just learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to ignore it. And then eventually, I feel like you learn to ignore it all, even the valid criticism.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s how you get Elon Musk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but at this point, I think he is, like, the things he’s trying are going over like lead balloons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think he can’t help but see the backlash on some level. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think that’s, you know, maybe it’ll introduce some, you know, very much needed humility to him, but.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s the thing about like him and people like him and Trump to some degree is like, these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are people who value, who care about what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other, like, they admire and look up to some other people. And they care about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what those people think. So Elon Musk cares about what MKBHD thinks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the new gray checkmark feature. because MKBHD is a big famous person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a tech person. And it’s not like Elon cares about what people writ large think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but he cares about what other famous people think, what other tech people think, what other rich

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entrepreneurs think. Like, there is a cohort of people that he cares about their opinions of, and it’s a big set

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people. Which is why he’ll try something like the gray check mark and then get yelled at by the six

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people he cares about. And he’ll take what they say seriously. He’ll ignore the million other people who told him the same things, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weeks and months and, you know, like, it’s not like he’s listening to quote unquote everybody, but there are people they care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about. And so if they do something silly, and it doesn’t work, I’ll be like, whoops, that was bad. Let me try something else. And that feels like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the process is going on right now is he’s trying things and listening to the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, small in the grand scheme of things, but still large set of people that he can that he respects

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and considers his peers as captains of industry or famous people or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it’s it’s what we all do. Like, we We don’t we can’t listen to everybody, but we do listen to our peers just so happens that Elon’s peers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are, you know, other famous people or whatever. So that acts as a feedback mechanism

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to let him know, hey, the gray checkmark, it seems kind of silly or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Unfortunately, a lot of his interactions online are not just with, you know, people, there are people with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people that he understands and respects and wants to interact with. But those people may not be the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that everyone else on Twitter understands and wants to interact with and respect. So when he gives lots of air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John times to, you know, QAnon conspiracy theorists and alt-right people or whatever, maybe that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John upsets other people. But there is a feedback loop happening here. It just remains to be seen whether it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually produce better results. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And, you know, honestly, like a lot of people out there are like, well, this place is over, burn it to the ground. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have the attitude. As much as I don’t like him as a person, and I’m liking him less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and less as the days go on here, but as much as I dislike him as a person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I want Twitter to work. I want it to succeed because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still get a ton of value out of it and there is no direct replacement. People

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think oftentimes, oh, we’ll just all go to Mastodon or whatever, insert thing here, app.net back forever ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco People think, oh, we’ll all go over here and we’ll make a better place there. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not really how this works. First of all, as I mentioned last time, you’re never going to get everyone to go over to any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one particular place. So that’s problem number one and that’s that’s the biggest problem. Problem number two is if somehow you magically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco succeeded, you have all the same problems that Twitter has. Like you would have all the same challenges of moderation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and extremism and hate and harassment and misinformation. You have all of the same problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you just have a either no company if it’s going to decentralize thing to deal with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it or you would have a smaller and less effective company possibly to deal with it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ultimately if we want this form of communication to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco persist and and to be a thing that that exists in the future which I think enough people get a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of value out of it that we probably should want that the the easiest path to get there and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most likely path to get there and possibly the only path to get there is to make Twitter succeed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco None of us want this guy to succeed because he’s a huge dickhead and we all know that and nobody wants

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco him to, you know, whatever. As I mentioned last episode, I didn’t think that highly of the previous leadership,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but still I use the platform because it’s where all my friends are. It’s where I get a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of my information. It’s where I conduct a lot of my business and it isn’t just like, you know, trying to like sell stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I make or anything. It’s stuff like posting programming questions and like, Hey, I got this error. What does this mean? And like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of their iOS developers are there and they’re all answering stuff and or I can see what other people do and what other people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try. I can, I can see if something’s going going on in the world, I can see stuff there. It provides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of value. You can’t just pick up all of that and move it somewhere else and have all of our problems magically solved.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because A, you can’t pick it up and move it, and B, the problems would still be the same. So as much as it pains

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me to say anything positive about this guy, I want this company to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco succeed because I want the product to continue to exist. And my biggest concern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not that they’ll do weird stuff with the product, because I think the feedback mechanism there as John was just saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not great but it exists and if he really takes a big steaming turd

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everyone reacts the way they’ve been reacting and he sees that and takes it back ok well that’s iteration you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know we’ll all dunk on him the whole day it’ll be kind of funny we’ll get some laughs out of it and then we’ll move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on. My biggest concern is it won’t stay up because all the people he

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fired all knew how to run it and we keep hearing all these stories of like well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this one part of the infrastructure was basically held together by three people and they’re all fired. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, there’s, there’s all sorts of things like that, that he basically like. You know, slice and dice the company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apart with this mass layoff. He just did a lot of those people were like the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco institutional knowledge of how certain things worked or they, they had a process for keeping certain things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco running that now no one knows or no one is assigned to do. Um, and that’s, and that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that applies for lots of things that applies for, you know, technical stuff all the way to things like policy decisions and, and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and abuse prevention and stuff like that. There’s basically just giant gaping holes and missing teams because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he came in and slashed everything without fully understanding what anything did. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is where my main concern comes. It’s not the product. The product, they’ll figure out eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because there’s good feedback on that. My concern is all the people who are now gone who were holding the place together,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now it will fall apart in certain ways. And I think we have a rough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year or two ahead of just infrastructure, policy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco content abuse to deal with on Twitter. And I think eventually, they’ll figure it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out and they’ll get people in there and people will come up to speed and problems will be fixed. And I think eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope, I mean, I’m always an optimist of this kind of stuff. I think eventually they will bring it together

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it will kind of solidify and move forward in some clear direction. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s gonna be a really rough road between now and whenever that solidifies. and that it could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take a year, it could take more than a year, I don’t know. Maybe somehow, miraculously, it’ll only take a few months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it’s gonna be rough, but I think, I still maintain the attitude of I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want this to work because Twitter is a platform we all love to hate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The reality is we all use it, and I’m finally willing to admit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know what, I like it, fine, I like Twitter, I want it to stick around, I don’t have anything to replace it, I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to replace it, nothing can replace it, I hope it sticks around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is another example of how famous, much admired billionaires get graded on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John curve, right? Again, if you weren’t a billionaire and you did any of the things he’s doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would be so shamed and it would just be like, you know, what do you do when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take over a company? Well, I obviously have to cut some staff. Okay, how are you gonna do that? The clumsiest way possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} with no forethought. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then a day later regret it so much that you try to hire people back. It’s just like, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dumbest things. Because he’s a billionaire, I was like, no, this is, he’s a secret genius. It’s like, no, he’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing a bad job. Like, and again, you know, cutting people, you know, laying off people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from a company that people think had, you know, too many, like, I don’t disagree that maybe Twitter had too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many employees and needed to be thinned down, but there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it. He’s just doing it badly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there may be consequences of that, or he may get away with it, but it’s like, when you are rich and famous, almost anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you do, people will bend over backwards to find a way to explain that actually it’s great. When really, if you again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took Joe Schmo off the street and said, Gareth, you’re the CEO of Twitter now and they did all these things, they’d be like, boy, took this guy off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the street and he’s making a lot of really easy mistakes here. Like when you come into a company, sure, you got to lay people off, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, take a day or two to figure out which people you should lay off and then don’t regret it a day later

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and try to beg them to come back. And it’s just doing basic things badly is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seen as like a badge of honor when you are a bazillionaire. you’re not a bazillionaire is just seen as being bad at your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John job.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, look at it this way. He is fitting in with the tradition of Twitter management. He is bumbling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about making crummy decisions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Well, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the old Twitter management wouldn’t make any decisions. They would do nothing. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they only bumbled about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well, fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It actually is. As much as I am so here for dunking on Elon Musk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will say that for better and for worse, they are at least shipping things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shipping? I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} anything’s actually gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^John released to the point where it’s extended to all users. Like I wonder if they start pulling the release back before it’s even just, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, been visible to everybody. I can’t even keep track of what they think they’ve deployed and what they haven’t. And I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, this is gonna be probably fairly disastrous in the short term. And again, there’s good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ways to do that in bad ways and there’s good ways to do it in the bad way. But that’s the thing of being insulated from consequence. You’re insulated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from consequence because A, it’s a private company, you don’t have shareholders hands to do it, and B, he’s got a bazillion dollars. So when you’re insulated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from all consequence, It’s like, well, all consequence for him, I mean. Not all consequence from us. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the point a lot of people made in the feedback. Like, it’s all well and good to say, oh, well, Elon is insulated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the consequences of his actions, but we’re not insulated from the consequences of actions. If he does, it’s possible for him to do things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that affect everyone else really badly, right? And we’ll see how that happens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But for him, it’s like, he always lives to fight another day. And so it’s like, you know, people look at that as admirable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s admirable to have no consequences for yourself because you’re all set and you’re a bazillionaire, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I guess people wish they were in that position and they can make as many mistakes as they wanted and never suffer for them because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll all be fine, but there may be consequences for the rest of us. So hopefully he gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nudged in the right direction and the mistakes he’s already made don’t end up being, even just a very simple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John consequence, it’s not a big deal, but like, hey, Twitter goes down again because some infrastructure thing fell over and it takes an hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to come back up, right? That’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things and it might be a blessing for some people depending on how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well Twitter is going that day. But it is a consequence. And if you were the CEO of the company, you took

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over and then in the first month you had a bunch of downtime, people would say, boy, that new CEO did a bad job. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it’s a private company and you’re Elon Musk and you don’t care, so what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and that’s, that’s the thing, again, I want this to work because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Twitter is, again, as much as we love to crap all over it, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is very important to a lot of people and it provides a lot very important functions to a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a lot of businesses and a lot of our friends. It’s a very important site. Lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of important stuff happens on Twitter. And this is why I’m not rooting against it. I really want it to succeed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco People think, like, oh, we’ll just go back to blogging and everything. It’s like, well, yeah, some people will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the world you think you’re going to go back to, it doesn’t exist anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s like a ghost town of like rotting wreckage of what was there that’s been neglected for 15 years or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco People think they’re just going to go somewhere else and have all the same functions or features and I’m telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you it’s not that way. The best chance for most of us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is for Twitter to succeed and that way we can choose to keep using it or not but you know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decision isn’t forced upon us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s the easiest decision because we don’t have to change anything but like over the the history of the internet, like things do go away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, there used to be extremely popular usenet groups that eventually just became ghost towns,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you said, because everyone used, moved to web bulletin boards. And web bulletin boards

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} had years in a heyday

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where it was a big, great place to be and everyone loved to hang out there and had great features and everyone understood them and they figured out the moderation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But then those web bulletin boards, most of them or many of them, became ghost towns because everybody moved to Facebook or to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter or to whatever. And eventually these places will become ghost towns. And it’s not like the thing that replaces

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them will be like Twitter, but better, because web forums was not the same as Usenet. Different technology, different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John atmosphere, different people, different pros and cons. It was fairly different, but it was like a place to hang

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out online, right? Just like Facebook was, MySpace, Usenet, Twitter today. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Twitter does go down in flames eventually and becomes a ghost town, the thing that replaces it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not be, it’s just like Twitter, but a different. It’ll be something entirely different because that’s the way these things go. We,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, we all collectively find a place to hang out online that we enjoy and we’d all don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want it to end or change or be different. But in my lifetime alone, there’s been like five or six different places that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve, you know, hung out online with, with small groups, people, large groups of people, the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John internet, and most of them have gone away and what they’ve been replaced with has not been just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that, but with a different masthead on the top, but it’s been entirely different. You could argue that Slack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is kind of like hotline. Uh, if any old school Mac users know that. And, you know, and you could argue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that web forums is kind of like Twitter or, of course, there’s discourse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the modern reinvention of web forums, so everything old is new again. But yeah, I don’t I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter is forever. But if you wanted to say, what’s the what’s the shortest distance to not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John causing tons of disruption, it would be like make Twitter good. But failing that if Twitter does fail,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something will replace it eventually. And what does probably won’t look like Twitter does, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that tends to be not the way these things go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and I think what is most likely to replace Twitter is not having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco its value as a public square. The Twitter founders use this phrase, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of douchey when they do a lot of times, but there is some value to it in the sense that on Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can just at mention someone. And first of all, every important person

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can think of is probably there. The owner of different companies is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there, different executives, celebrities, sports figures, you know, politicians,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re all there. Whoever writes the app that you want to have a question about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or anything, they’re probably there. Like, almost everyone who you might want to contact is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there. Now, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it’s way smaller than something like Facebook, but it’s different. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the people who you would want to interact with in public in some way or have a public question, any company you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might want to interact with, they’re all there. and you can just like at mention them or DM them if they’re open

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can like reach these people and you know maybe they’ll respond maybe not but they’ll probably at least see it or somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will see it you know who works for them or whatever and that’s something that it doesn’t really exist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the other platforms in that way you know Facebook is is a giant you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco black hole of we’re gonna hide almost everything by default from everybody until unless you pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us to boost your posts so the people who want to see it actually will see it or you know it’s all this mess at Facebook And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, all these algorithmic filters that they can extract money from people for trying to reach

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audience. And Elon made a couple of feints in that direction to say, oh, if you pay for the $8 thing, your replies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be more prominent in the algorithmic timeline. It’s a time-tested thing. It’s just that Facebook has billions of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} has a few hundred million. Correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But if Twitter goes away, what’s most likely to happen is everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will flee partly to private things like Slacks and Discords and everything, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people have already been doing. And so now if we wanna just kinda say something to our friends,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have other places to do that. We have chat groups, we have message groups, we have WhatsApp or iMessage or we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have Slack or we have Discord or whatever. There’s all different ways that people have private chats between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco themselves that is not trying to be some kind of broadcast. If you’re gonna have a broadcast,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Twitter’s the best place for that. It’s way better, and for most audience types, it’s way better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the other platforms And because it’s much more reliable in a lot of ways, it’s simpler in a lot of ways. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter, which is not most of the world, as I was saying, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter and we do, then that’s where these people all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are. And it would be a shame if that went away because suppose you go over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Macedon or whatever, app.net, if you go to some smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Twitter network clone, then you can try to broadcast stuff there, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you just have way fewer people, way fewer people. And so the value of having it be public

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at all is diminished. And then at that point, you have the liability of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things being public without a lot of the benefit of things being public, because it isn’t a large enough group. If you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna talk to a small group, you’re better off having the group be private. That way you don’t have the liabilities and problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it being public. If you’re gonna talk to somebody in public, you want it to be the biggest public area

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can find. Twitter is that for a lot of people. and us included, and most people who would listen to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a show like this, that is where most people who like information, that’s usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where they are. And so it would be a massive loss if that went away. And nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is out there to replace it right now. And on the infinite time scale, John’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Something will come along and replace it, because that happens over time. But that happens after something has become irrelevant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and people have left voluntarily, not when a popular platform implodes while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s still popular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, Google Reader and RSS. I mean, that’s not just that. I think that’s what made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RSS go away. But RSS and blogs had a slow fade to sort of less prominence,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John partly because new things came along and were exciting. And people would tweet instead of blog.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, it’s just if younger people listening have never been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through this, all I just wanted to point out is this stuff does happen. Nothing is forever. Even Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even though it seems like it’s forever, is probably not forever. I feel like the timelines are getting longer as the internet has matured.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In the early days of the internet, things would last like a month or a week, and come and go, and they’d seem like the biggest thing ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now things are lasting way longer because these companies are so big. But even IBM, which seemed unstoppable in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my youth, eventually didn’t go away. IBM still exists, but boy, is it different than it was. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the concept that I have in my head at IBM has no match to what they are today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mostly for the better for the world, I think, but not for the better for IBM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, stop it. IBM was bad for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} world. Big Blue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. Hey, Big Blue, as I’ve said many, many times on the show, Big Blue paid for basically my life until

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was an adult. So I will always have a, I will always defend them, even if they did made a lot of questionable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey choices.

ATP Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Speaking of questionable choices, if you haven’t already gone to atp.fm slash store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now is the time. You are basically out of time. We are going to close the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey store. What is it? Saturday, Sunday, sometime this week. It doesn’t matter sometime this weekend. So the shirts are going back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the vault. Walt Disney would be so proud of us. Uh, so yeah, so the ATP store, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up, but it is not up for much longer. Uh, so now’s the time if you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at all interested in an M2 shirt, either the colorful logo on black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or the monochrome logo on very colorful shirts or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey classic ATP logo shirt or the hoodie. Now is the time. You’re running out of time because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all of this stops on Sunday the 13th. So go to ATP.fm. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, if you wanted to save a little bit of money, is there a way you could do that while still getting excellent, excellent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey merchandise?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes. So first, if you live outside of the US, move to the US. That’s true. You’ll save a lot on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shipping. That’s a tough sell lately, but okay. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Barring that, you could, or in addition, you could join us as a member at ATP.FM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash join, and you will get a coupon code in your membership panel for 15%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off your merchandise order. Excellent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you can go to ATP.FM slash store and ATP.FM slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now this is where John would say, well, here’s what you can do. You can join for just a month and then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can cancel because we’re gentlemen and we let you cancel and we don’t hassle you about it. And you can just cancel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and get your 15% off and then move on with your life. But if you’re already joined, why don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you check out the bootleg? Why don’t you check out the ad-free version of the show? You might like either one of those or both even.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hey, listen to all three versions. Listen to the version with the ads and then listen to the bootleg and then listen to the one without the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ads. You get the full experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} It’s perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And don’t forget our movie club episodes and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} there’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something we’ll make in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You never know. So you don’t have to cancel. Don’t listen to John. John isn’t always right. Usually. Yes, but not always.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Don’t listen to John. Just let that, let that ride. Just let that baby ride.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And again, the date, the end date is a Sunday, November 13th. Um, the time is clearly marked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the site. They’ll tell you like how many days, you know, hours, minutes that are left.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One thing to remind people that they’re listening to this later. If you go to aap.fm slash store and the sale

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has already ended, you will see stuff for sale there. We sell like our leftover merchandise, but also we sell the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on-demand versions of certain shirts. I’m not sure which ones they’re gonna be, but as I say, every time we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these sales, the on-demand ones, they’re less expensive, but they’re also not as nice. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less expensive because they’re not as nice. The printing process is not the super fancy, extremely expensive printing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process that we do use for the shirts that we’re selling you now. So if you want a shirt, don’t be fooled into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting the on-demand ones. Like again, when the on-demand store is there, it’ll be clear, it won’t say there’s limited time, blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah. Like it’ll be, it’s a different store, It has different text at the top of the page, but the shirts will look similar. We’re probably going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to sell some similar designs to the ones you see up here now, and it’ll just be shirts, it won’t be hoodies or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So don’t accidentally buy an on-demand shirt if you come to the store, like on November 20th or something. Be aware that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store does change over and we drain old merchandise and put the on-demand shirts on. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John telling you, if you have any desire to have this shirt, get it for yourself and give it to someone else

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to give to you as a Christmas present. They’ll be happy they don’t have to shop for you you’ll be happy that you got the good version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mm-hmm. We haven’t mentioned the chicken hat, the pint glass, the mug, because, hey, they’re already sold out. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you snooze, you lose, and that’s why you need to go to atp.fm. Now’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the time because you’re almost out of time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And don’t forget to click through on the hat, the pint glass, and the mug, and click the bring it back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button to let us know if you want one of these the next time we sell them, which will probably be like, I don’t know, the spring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. Whenever we do the next sale sometime next year, that bring it back thing will let us know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many people want more hats. If we sold every chicken hat we’re ever gonna sell and we don’t need to make any more or there’s still people who missed out and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t want one. The only way we know that for sure is if you enter your email address and then click the bring it back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button. Yes, I know it’s annoying to enter your email address and we’re not gonna take that value at face value

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because we know some people won’t click it or whatever but just it’ll give us a rough idea.

Follow-up: Lifestreams

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. We were talking about rewind.ai last week. This is the live

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stream thing. And apparently, the CEO caught wind of it and listened. So, hi, Dan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And clarified for us that since we recorded, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fact, he had a tweet about it. When we launched two days ago, we shared that we would use a cloud transcription service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That didn’t go over so well with some folks, you don’t say, Dan. So, today, we decided that we will entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ditch the cloud transcription and only do transcription locally on your Mac. And then there was another tweet where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dan pointed us to that tweet. So thank you, Dan, for following up. And yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not going to the cloud, which I am in full support of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Weird that like, if you are running this company, like you know that people are gonna look at your product and be scared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it for security reasons. Yeah. And you’re surprised when people don’t like the fact that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sending the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} audio that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John constantly recording to a cloud-transcripted service. I mean, I don’t, in that meeting, I guess you say like, look, people aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna like it, but I guess people are used to this anyway. I mean, they do with their Amazon Echoes and stuff. I think they’ll just be okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it. It’s like, why not? They’re like- Just not do that. Yeah, like better, like, it’s gotta come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up, right? You gotta have to have the meeting and someone’s gonna say, no, I think it will be okay. I think people will choke this down. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, just why not? You know, they’re doing so well with everything else. Like we’re all privacy, security,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to say all the right things, we’ll never take money. It’s like, don’t use a cloud transcription service. Like, you know that’s gonna come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up and they reverse so quickly. And maybe they just didn’t have the local transcription ready in time. And that’s why they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had the cloud one in the first version, it’s hard to know, but it just definitely seems like a silly fumble for a launch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So John, speaking of screen recording, let’s talk about some enterprise spyware, baby.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we mentioned this on the last show and I talked about this similar stuff on a recent episode of Rectifs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And someone wrote in to say that there’s a corporate security product called D-Tex that watches what you do using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the screen recording APIs and Mac OS to try to identify if you’re leaking or stealing data to calculate how productive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you are. So this was from Alex. And this is a whole genre of software that is basically corporate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spyware, corporate malware, that is trying to watch the employees, especially if they’re remote employees,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who knows what they’re doing there, up to and including doing exactly what Rewind is doing, is like literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recording your screen all the time. And I guess having somebody or some machine learning thing review

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to make sure you’re not playing Minesweeper all day. Yeah, corporate spyware is not great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t reflect well that you don’t think you can trust your employees, but it is definitely a thing. So again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Rewind is the kinder, gentler version of that, or you do it to yourself. And hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the company that you choose to buy the software from, you trust in some way. Whereas enterprise software is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone else does it to you and like all enterprise software, the person who buys it is not the person who has to be subjected

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it.

Follow-up: Photos Smart Albums

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We had some breaking news just before recording. A friend of the show, Jason Snell, has done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some research for us because we’re not allowed to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So last week I was complaining about the smart folders in the sidebar of photos and how they seem totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disconnected from the sort of machine learning powered search field in the upper right. And I also think I said that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are excluded from that, but that’s not true. You can person as one of the things in the pop-up menu. But Jason figured out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as I requested, if someone knows how this works, please tell me. figured out that if you say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the smart album field, if you say text is, like that’s what you pick from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John left menu, pick text. If you type a word in the field, text is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever, it’s like you had put that term into the upper right search field.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It does also search the OCR text, like that’s what you might think it is, like oh, this photo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has text in it. It does do that, but it also understands the concept of like what is a dog

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. So Jason wrote an article about it at sixcolors.com. We’ll put a link in the show notes. He did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an example of searching for a person is, or he did a person includes, person is John

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse, because he’s got pictures of me, and text is microphone, or I think it had text as camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the example thing. And what it’ll do is it’ll find pictures that the machine learning thinks have a camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in them, and also pictures where the person is labeled as me. And so I’ll find pictures of me with a camera,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s exactly what it did. It doesn’t do the autocomplete thing like the search field does, So you can’t tell that what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John typing, if it’s a search, if it’s like a keyword, or if it’s like an ML keyword, or if it’s like OCR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text. If you type it in the upper right, it shows you like an icon next to each one to let you know what you’re doing. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also in my brief experimentation, when you type in that text is field, every time you type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a character, it wants to update the number of items matched. And in my library, there’s like a two second pause each time I type a character.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the performance is not great either. But at least it’s possible. And then for people who don’t know, the icing on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cake is that smart albums don’t sync to iOS, so they’re invisible to most of the world. But I will enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using this feature on my local instance. And the jury’s still out as to whether there’s a way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do nested Boolean logic, like instead of just saying, and all these conditions together, or all these conditions, basically to be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have parentheses with sub-expressions with different logic. Not sure if that’s possible, but if it is, that’ll probably be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John FU next week. Indeed.

Follow-up: iPad volume buttons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then with regard to my confusion on the iPad volume buttons, Andre

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Aguilar shared that there is indeed a setting, which I think I had made brief mention of last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey week. You go into settings, then sound, and the setting is called fixed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey position volume controls, which defaults to off. But what’s interesting is an unnamed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey listener who has been listening since neutral points out that this is not available on my iPad, the M2 iPad, nor on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the iPad 10th generation. And there’s an Apple support document about this which reads, on most iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey models, with iPad OS 15.4 and later, you can allow the volume controls to change based on how you hold your iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey With iPad Pro 11-inch fourth gen, iPad Pro 13-inch sixth gen, and iPad 10th gen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the dynamic volume buttons are always on. And I also thought it was kind of interesting, and I think somebody else pointed this out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me, that it’s reversed for right-to-left languages. So in the same document, with languages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that have writing that goes from right to left, you increase the volume with the button on the left or top, and decrease the button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with the bottom button, decrease the volume with the button on the right or the bottom, which is a nice touch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So yeah, it turns out I can’t change this back even if I wanted to, even though a lot of people have this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still have this ability and are apparently using it because they were all reporting to me that that’s what they did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Real time follow up from Jason reminding of the old ways from back in the iTunes days to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nested Boolean logic. One of the ways you do it is you would make a playlist and then you would reference that playlist

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your smart album. So every sub expression you’d have to make a separate entity. And you can do that with albums. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a smart album and then reference that within your thing, the problem is you have to have a bunch of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of sub-expression albums or smart albums in your sidebar. I guess you could bury them in a folder or something. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that old technique from iTunes continues to work. It’s just super gross. So that’s how we’ll suggest that, that’s the Boolean logic.

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ECC tidbit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, you got some excellent news about the, how do you pronounce it? It’s not XNU. Is that, what do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you, what is the verbalization of this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is this new? I don’t know. I don’t, I think I’ve only ever read it. No, I must have heard it in a WWDC thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not XNU, that’s for sure. If you, if you work on Darwin and you know how to pronounce the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name of the kernel that’s spelled XNU, write it and tell us. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no controversy about how to express a computer term that most people read and never speak.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yes, exactly. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a tweet from Longhorn, who is never underscore released on Twitter. He’s a good follow who knows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lots of deep technical stuff. And it was tweeted in response to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kernel sources being released for Mac OS 13. For people who don’t know, the core OS of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac OS, iOS, iPad OS, TV OS, audio OS, reality OS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John am I missing any OSs? Maybe the car OS, maybe not, is Darwin, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a BSD Unix like derivative with the mock microkernel with the BSD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John layered on top of it. That’s all open source. And every time Apple comes out with a new operating system, like when they come up with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a new version of macOS, shortly after that, they post the open source version of like, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the open, here’s the version of Darwin that is underneath macOS 13 Ventura. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they just did that. And then people come over it to see what they can find. And what Longhorn found is something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they didn’t point out directly, but they just said this and I follow them enough that I trust them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ECC support is coming to ARM64 Mac OS with page level granularity retirement on faults.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That is what Longhorn says. And you know what that means? Mac Pro day is getting closer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cause why would they add ECC support to Darwin for ARM64 and Mac OS?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What kind of Mac might benefit from ECC? Arguably all of them would benefit from ECC. There it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the Mac Pro is the most likely to have one and Apple itself has already pre-announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac Pro a long time ago, lest we forget. They said, there’s one more machine that needs to move to Apple Silicon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s the Mac Pro, but we’ll talk about that later. And later is getting later and later, but sometime in 2023,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably we’ll get to see the new Mac Pro, and it seems like it might have ECC memory, and I’m excited.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now remind all of us why ECC memory is important and useful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So RAM is not perfect. Sometimes RAM has faults, and you’ll try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to read some bits, and the bits you get will not be the same bits the bits that were written there. And as you can imagine, that can really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screw things up on your computer. There are lots of parts of the computer that try to help,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, make that not happen. One of the many ways to that you can help with that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is called ECC for error correcting code. And it’s a very old way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of essentially putting a bunch of redundant data in the data that you store so you can tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when the data you read is not the data that you wrote. Sometimes you can also correct the error if you have enough information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to fix the one bit that you know is flipped based on the extra information you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in there. And when you have, as the amount of RAM you have increases, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your percentage of error stays the same, you’re much more likely to hit an error. Because if the percent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like one in a million bits, well, what if I told you you have 500 million bits? That’s much worse odds than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you had 500 bits, right? So big computers with big memory where you really care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about there being any kind of fault have historically employed ECC for error correction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There are other techniques in hardware that also help with this. ECC is a very specific one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but until and unless it’s replaced by something better, it’s one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most important tools we have in the tool set for making sure that the RAM in your computer is reliable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Didn’t the iMac or, yeah, the iMac Pro had ECC RAM, didn’t it? Sure did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, someone was pointing out in the chat room that the later DDR standards, I think I talked about this on an episode of ADP like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a year or two ago. or DDR standards incorporate ECC-like functionality within them just to function

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that’s just how how they’re made. But again, I trust Longhorn to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this stuff and so if there is evidence of ECC stuff in RM64 on macOS, I think that’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take it at face value and I think there’s just gonna be some kind of ECC RAM in whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SoC is coming in the Mac Pro. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t wait, I can’t wait, even though I’m probably not going to buy it, I still can’t wait.

Ventura prefpanes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ventura and third-party preference panes. What’s the deal with that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So my first question when I was writing the line item is I’ve been calling them preference panes since 2001,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but now that it’s called system settings, what the hell is it called? What are they called? What we mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the little icons on the left that you click on to see stuff like mouse or users and groups or privacy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And like, what are those called? Go to the- Sections? Go to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John privacy and security section. I mean- No, there’s settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gears, obviously. If it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} preference pane, then it must be a settings gear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Go to the network settings. I guess it’s just network. Anyway, we used to call them preference panes. It was nice alliteration there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now I don’t know what the heck they’re called. So that’s one thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Settings sections, it rolls right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off the tongue. Yeah. We had some questions for people like, hey, you know, system settings is like overhauled.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What about my third-party preference panes? You know, the third-party software can make little preference panes in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there. For example, Backblaze, frequent sponsor of our show, puts a little, used to put a little icon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was amongst all your other icons and system preferences. What happens to it in Ventura?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For the most part, if you had a third-party preference pane installed, it will continue to work in Ventura.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just at the bottom of the list alongside, you know, they’re kind of grouped together, all the third-party ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Backblaze in particular has basically decided they’re out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the preference pane game. So if you are running the latest version of Backblaze, it still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shows up in your little sidebar in Ventura, But when you click on it, all it loads is basically an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John empty preference pane with a button that says Backblaze Preferences. And when you click it, it just launches a Backblaze

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app. So it’s still there for you to find it so you didn’t say, hey, where the heck did Backblaze go? Is it still installed?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they basically moved their functionality out into an app. And a lot of the functionality was outside of the preference pane before anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Preference panes are weird, especially weird when you’re running on an ARM Mac and you have an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John x86 preference pane and it has to run through Rosetta and it’s being launched, trying to show the content inside an ARM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process, which is the system settings app itself. So third-party preference panes have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not out of favor, but just sort of marginalized over the past few years. I still run some important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones like my mouse acceleration software, Steer Mouse is still a preference pane.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It seems a little bit weird in Ventura, but it does work and it does, you know, I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clicked it and I, and I guess the next part of this item here, I just clicked it while

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was talking and it crashed in exactly the same way as I have pasted into our show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nice. Legacy loader x86 died when trying to look at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John steer mouse preference pane.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it works, but sometimes it doesn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Isn’t your entire computer a legacy loader x86? Oh, sick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John burn. Why is it doing like legacy loader? Cause it’s not like it’s, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not running the ARM version of system settings. I don’t have an ARM CPU. So what is going, I don’t know. Anyway, it crashed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a little bit janky, like many things in Ventura’s system settings. But for people wondering, preference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John panes are still a thing, barely, and it seems like some of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John companies that are more on top of their game like Backblaze are kind of moving now.

Decoding Apple nomenclature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We got an excellent, excellent, excellent tweet from Mark Yu.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is one of those things where incredible brevity is exactly what you need in order

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to make this great, which is something that I’m not good at. But Mark writes, here’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m filling in actually, so the context here is, what is a smart versus magic versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cover versus folio on the keyboards? How do we decode this? We were talking about this like two or three weeks ago. Mark writes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey smart, screen turns on when opened. on when opened. Magic has full travel keys, not the nubs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cover screen side only. Folio, both sides. Combine those as needed. Boom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nailed it. As far as I can tell, this is accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, you’re just back solving for the products they release when they release a new one, you have to get a new map. So it’s not it’s not as if there’s this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John helps you parse anything, but it is a nice retroactive taxonomy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. This was extremely well done. And I am very impressed. And speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of nomenclature, What’s going on with Stage Manager?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, we were asking a couple of shows ago, what do you call those piles of things on the side of the screen in Stage Manager

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Mac OS? What are they called? Well, according to the menus, apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they are called sets, because the menu item and the window menu in the finder is, you could say, remove window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from set. So I guess that makes some sense, but it’s still kind of weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, what set did you put the thing in? I don’t know, it would be nicer if they had a branded name that made more sense. I mean, they can call the thing the Dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Island, but they decided the things on the side of Stage Manager is called sets. Anyway, that’s that appears to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be what they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Related news earlier today, I wanted to do something on my iPad where I was flipping back and forth between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two different windows. And I wanted each of these or two different apps. And I want each of these apps to take up most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the screen. And it occurred to me, ah, I could use stage manager for this. Sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enough, I turned on stage manager, I was only using it for about five minutes. But not only did it not crash,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was actually kind of nice. I only used it for a few minutes and I quickly turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it off as soon as I was done, but for those five minutes I actually kind of enjoyed it. So that was a neat moment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like stage manager for the Mac, as I’ve said many times, it’s basically spaces for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who don’t want more visibility. You know, they don’t want stuff to be hidden, you know, off to the side that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t see, like mentally I have to know that there are these various spaces, I have to bring a mesh control to see them. It’s like, why don’t we just put it all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on one screen and you can cycle through sets of windows through sets of windows and you sacrifice some screen space for those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little sets and you can even hide those if you want and make them appear just when you need them. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s easier for people to manage because it’s like it doesn’t suddenly make a bunch of virtual screens all around them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People, you know, if you if you like spaces, you’re probably already using it. But if you don’t like virtual screens, stage manager

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tries to be it’s like virtual screens, but a little bit more comfortable if you don’t like having virtual screens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, as someone who really, really, really likes spaces and uses them heavily. When I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tried Stage Manager on the Mac, its mental model does not match my mental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey model for how things should work, and so I really didn’t care for it on the Mac. But in limited use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the iPad, when you have a very constrained problem. It actually was reasonably nice.

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“New” phone and mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, tell me you’ve got a, you’ve got scare quotes around the word new, but in the show notes it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey says you’ve got quote new quote phone and mouse. What did you break?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, I talked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about my mouse before that it was being wonky again and you know, that I figured out the stick in the post-it note

⏹️ ▶️ ^John under the little shaky button, but I still had the one that was being wonky, right? Because I fixed the noisy one with the post-it note, but then it was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wonky one. So I decided to just do another warranty repair on the wonky one because why not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this time they did not ask me to send them a video of it not working oh nice i have no idea why because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have no idea who i am had no record of my previous returns they just you know it’s everything is new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it was all done through chat took a long time and it did require me to dig up the original receipt and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John send them you know a picture of that and a bunch of other stuff but you know it got done um

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they sent my new mouse but also they sent me a shipping label right so i have to send the old mouse back which i did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh and they eventually sent me a new mouse and this is a microsoft computer mouse picture in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mind it came to my house in a box that was 19 inches by 14 inches by six inches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what i was like what is this it was huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco i recently ordered a bike handlebar that came in a smaller package than that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah inside the box was a smaller box and inside the smaller box was a mouse wrapped in bubble wrap and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i have to say every Every time I’ve gotten one of the, you know, I’ve done it twice now, both of these mice that have gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^John replaced, when the replacement one has come, they all look just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dirty and scuffed up. Like they do not look new. The whole thing with like Apple refurb stuff is there’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every part of it that you can see or touch is brand new. Not the case when getting a mouse replaced by, I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know what they do. Like, again, I didn’t pay enough attention to look at the serial numbers, but did they just replace the guts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my mouse? No, this is scuffed up in a way that my mouse wasn’t in different places. Like it just seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dirty and grimy and not like I’m getting a new mouse. And again, it just comes wrapped in bubble

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrap, like literally the bare mouse with bubble wrap wrapped around it. Not even any tape to hold the bubble wrap on, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wad it into the bubble wrap, shove it in a box, shove it in a bigger box, you know. I’m glad I got it replaced for free under

⏹️ ▶️ ^John warranty, but now I’ve had two of these and they’ve both been replaced under warranty, so it’s not going too well over here in Microsoft Mouse land.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, that is my quote unquote new mouse, which is absolutely not new. And in fact, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure if they even still sell this mouse, because a bunch of people are like, oh, I have a Microsoft discount, do you want to get a discounted version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this mouse? And they all look at their store, like, oh, I guess you can’t get this mouse discounted. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe when it comes back to the store. You can still get the Surface Precision mouse, which is, as far as I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this mouse, but gray, but I want the black one, the Microsoft Precision mouse, that’s black.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And maybe they’re just not selling that anymore. Maybe it’s because they all die within a year, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just giving me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rotating through this batch of, you know, cruddy ones that they have in their factory. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m using my quote unquote new mouse. And the phone thing. So I think last episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I complained about my, the camera on my iPhone 14 Pro. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I said like it gets a lot of glare from the sun and I wish I had a lens hood to stop the glare from the sun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I was using my hand over the, I would hold up the phone to take a picture, like, you know, walking around in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fall and the sun is low and it would get this glare and I’d put my hand over to try to make a lens hood and then my fingers would go in the picture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it was annoying me. I’m like, well, I guess it’s just this new cameras with the big lenses and lots of lens elements, they’re just catching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of glare. I guess that’s why, you know, I use lens hoods on my real cameras. But then a couple of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrote in to me and said, I had the same problem with my iPhone 14 Pro camera and I brought it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into the Apple store and it turns out my camera was messed up and they replaced it for me. So I’m like, huh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I took a bunch of test pictures. I just put in our little Slack channel and Marco can use this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the show thing if he wants because it’s no criminal evidence. It’s a picture of some mushrooms growing on some random person’s lawn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my neighborhood, right? So it’s not even my house. And you can see at the top of the photo, like I have a gray

⏹️ ▶️ ^John haze coming down, like sun glare basically. And that gray haze,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you can make something like that happen with any iPhone camera or any camera at all, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without a lens hood on it. But it is much more severe on my iPhone 14 Pro camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than on my wife’s iPhone 13 Pro or any other iPhones in the house. And I just thought it was part of this camera,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but then I’ve seen, you know, someone said that they got the thing repaired. They showed a closeup picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like the main camera on the back of their phone. They said the lens actually looked cloudy. So I turn over my phone and I look at the main camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lens, which is like the biggest one. And you know what? It did look a little bit cloudy. Like almost like there was condensation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it or like oil covering it or whatever. Something you wouldn’t notice unless you had light hitting it at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an angle. And so I took a whole bunch of test pictures to say, you know, I was gonna bring these with me to the Apple store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and say, here, this is what my camera’s doing and it seems like it shouldn’t be like this. And it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take much to make this happen. You just need the sun to be a little bit low and you just, you know, you don’t even need the sun in the photo. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this mushroom picture, the sun is not in the photo. The sun is above the frame of the camera, but it’s producing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so much glare and just, you know, gray haze coming down. And I tried it with all the cameras. 3X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera didn’t have it. The 0.05 had it and the 1X had it. But the 3X was, you know, that’s part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the reason I could tell that it wasn’t quite the same. Now, obviously focal length changes how much glare you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna get and stuff like that. So it’s not like an Apple’s to Apple’s comparison, but I thought I had enough to make a Genius Pro appointment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I did, and I brought the phone in, and the good thing is I sat down at a table and I said, let’s just grab

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a 14 Pro right here, and let’s do a comparison. Let’s find something glary here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and take a picture of it with these two cameras side by side, the 14 Pro that’s security chained to this table,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and mine, and see if there’s a difference. One thing I learned is it’s surprisingly hard to find a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John place to demonstrate this inside an Apple store, because yes, there are glary lights in the ceiling, but they’re not that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John glary, they’re pretty gentle. And if you aim the camera up at the ceiling lights, everything up there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is gray. So you’re never gonna see a gray haze, right? So the technique we came up with was, have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one iPhone 14 Pro turn on the flashlight on the back and point it at the other one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then reverse it. And you could see, it was pretty clear that the one in the Apple store did not suffer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from glare as much as mine did. So the person did take the camera into the back and ran it through their camera tester thing and said the camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tester thing didn’t find anything malfunctioning in terms of color reproduction or whatever, but they could see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it was clear from the photos that they were taking that comparing my 14 Pro to the 14 Pro in the store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there was a difference. They could not replace the camera because they just don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera parts. I don’t know if this is a Shanghai zero COVID shutdown

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing or just like early on in the production run of any phone, they don’t have parts. So they said, but we can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John replace the whole phone. I said, okay, do that then. So, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they said, okay, we’ll replace the phone, but we don’t have this phone. So you have to come back when we have it in stock. So eventually they got it in stock and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I knew it was coming next and I was dreading it. I even discussed it with the person when I was there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna go pick up a new, basically a brand new version of my exact same phone, black iPhone 14 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with whatever, 256 gigs or whatever. But I can’t just hand them my old phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t just erase my old phone and hand it to them and take the new one because I have too much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multi-factor authentication crap on here. And some of it cloud syncs like Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multi-factor cloud syncs, but some of it doesn’t. We went through this before, last time I got my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone two years ago, and I was complaining that the Google Authenticator app didn’t have a way to transfer stuff. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google Authenticator does have a way to transfer stuff, but it’s a manual way. So you see where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is going, don’t you? I’m gonna go to the Apple Store to quote unquote pick up my phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then what’s gonna happen? I’m gonna sit there and have to do device to device

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transfer for my old phone for the new phone, wait for that to complete,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then do a 30 second export import from Google Authenticator,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Oh my God. And I couldn’t think of a way around this. They’re not gonna let me leave the store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with two phones. Nope. I should have just asked them and said, can I just take both of them and bring back the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one later? Because I don’t need to be here

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} for this, right? Not a chance. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not really happening. And there’s no way to make it go faster. I can’t do the Google Authenticator

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing Like, I mean, I guess I could have done, taken like screenshots of the QR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John codes, but like that’s a terrible security. Don’t do that. Do not, don’t write down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your passwords and don’t take screenshots of the QR codes for your multi-factor authentication. Like I could have done that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I just didn’t wanna risk. Anyway, I went to the Apple store and I did device-to-device transfer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And of course the new iPhone, when it came out of the box, wasn’t running 16.1 and my new phone was. So first I got to do an OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh God. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John started doing the OS update and the person, I mean, these people do this all day, so they know what they’re doing. They said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if that progress bar doesn’t seem like it’s moving, let me just bring out the computer. And they had like a computer running Apple configurator

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too and they’ll just, with the 16.1 already downloaded. And so we waited for like three minutes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John set up that progress bar is not satisfactory. They just, you know, brought out a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air, plugged my phone into it and did, you know, blasted on 16.1. Still took a while, but it was way faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than waiting for the update to run. Then I had to do device-to-device transfer, which took forever. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after that was finally over, then I, at that point I’d been there so long, I was like, you know what, I’m gonna install my test

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flight apps, you know, and I’m gonna do the multi-factor thing. And, you know, after you do device-to-device

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transfer, I’m still shocked when I pick up my phone and it has a whole bunch of grayed out icons that say waiting underneath them. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wait, you just did, oh, it doesn’t do the apps. It just always downloads the apps from the app store. I needed to download

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google Authenticator, ASAP. I don’t care about all the other apps. And there’s a way to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We may have even talked about it on this very program, but it was so long ago that I forgot about it. If you hold down your finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on one of those grayed out icons that says waiting, a pop-up menu appears and you can select prioritize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John download. Oh, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} didn’t know that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And your phone will bump that app to the front of the queue. So I did prioritize download on Google Authenticator and a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my other Authenticator apps and downloaded them and I transferred all the stuff. Oh, excellent. So I spent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little bit over three and a half hours sitting in an Apple store. I had the forethought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to bring my iPad with me because both my phones would be out of commission during this whole time. And I just sat there and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dorked around on my iPad and listened to other people’s tales of woe with their computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and iPads and stuff. And I got to look at all of the current crop of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware. And yeah, that was how I spent an entire day. It was great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} See, this is why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fun employed John is very helpful because what would you have done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you had an actual job?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would have had to go on a weekend, but like I thought of it as it’s like, This is why I’m kind of all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in on iCloud Keychain for multi-factor stuff. I don’t wanna ever have to do this, but if I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to get a new phone, if something happens and I get a warranty repair, I’m gonna have to do this again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And I know there’s other ways about it. Like I can and have transferred my multi-factor stuff to other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John secure devices in the house so I could just trust that it’s all gonna be there and then bring the new phone home and do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe I’ll do that next time, but you know me in redundancy. I just feel like I don’t wanna just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have this stuff in one. The whole point of me having backups, like having this on this device and also on another iPad or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that it’s in more than one place. And if my phone falls in a lake, I don’t lose all my multifactor stuff, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having it in one place, even for a short period of time, makes me a little nervous. But after three and a half hours in an Apple store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John breathing through a mask the whole time, of course, maybe I’ll think better of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s painful.

New Apple TV setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But don’t worry, it’s not like you’ve wasted any time doing any sort of login or setup of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple products because you didn’t get a new Apple TV, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, device-to-device transfer on the phone is the, as we learned last time I made a terrible mistake,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the best chance you have of all your apps not requiring you to log in. If you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the new Apple TVs, which I did, you have no chance

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} of protecting your login

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information. There’s nothing you can do apparently. You get a new Apple TV. I got one. It’s smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s cute. One of the funny things about the new Apple TV, because people do reviews of it online,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and very often they would take a picture of it next to the old hockey puck, because what else are you gonna take a picture of? Look, it’s smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? I think I saw at least two reviews that made me think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the new Apple TV matte black instead of glossy black? It’s not matte black,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but there is a matte black protective piece of plastic around it, and like every protective piece of plastic on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every electronic device ever, Sometimes people don’t notice it and forget to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take it off. And people had actual product shots in their reviews on reputable tech sites

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they forgot to, I would assume forgot to, peel off the matte black, the carefully,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, precision cut, almost invisible matte black wrapper around the brand new Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it looked like the new Apple TV was matte. It’s not, it’s glossy. Take off the sticker.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Doesn’t it cover up the ports on the back?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, it does. I thought it did. But they were just taking, you know, they’re just taking like the pictures of it. Like any picture of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} merchandise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t show the cords, right? No cords on the Sony TVs, on the Sony site, no cords on the Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but you would think if they’re reviewing it, they would at some point try to plug a cord in and realize, oh crap,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have to peel this whole thing off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They did, but by then, the photography people had already taken all their pictures probably. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} know. Oh my God. Multiple people doing things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s silly. Speaking of the cords, though, that’s one of the things. They changed the cord layout in the back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Obviously, I got the one with ethernet. And I think, now I’m gonna remember. I think the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John layout used to be a power HDMI ethernet, and now it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is power ethernet HDMI. So basically previously HDMI was dead center in the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and now HDMI is not dead center. An HDMI cable is the thickest and stiffest cable that connects to this tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little puck. I kind of understand why they did it, because most people don’t have ethernet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so with the old arrangement, it would be one cord in the middle and one cord on the left, if you’re looking at it from the front.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now it would be one cord on the left and one cord on the right the empty ethernet in the middle for most people. But honestly, if you buy the one with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ethernet, maybe you, I don’t know, maybe you just want the thread radio but anyway, they changed the cord arrangement. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, you plug that thing into your TV and it says like, oh, bring your phone nearby or some, it’s one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those like weird come ons of some magical technical thing. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} we’ll just do the magical thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just come here and it says, oh, I found your phone. I think I know who you are, I’ll set this up for you. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have the home screen syncing configured. So it remembers all the apps I had installed and where I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put them on the home screen and does it all. And you’re like, wow, this is awesome. really easy Apple setup experience, and my Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is back exactly how I left it. Look at this, it’s like you can tell, almost nothing changed except for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John box got smaller, and a completely inaudible fan has been eliminated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And if you have TestFlight, because remember TestFlight is just not a thing to Apple, if you have TestFlight apps, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they are not installed by default, just like on the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have TestFlight apps on Apple TV?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Plex and channels, Plex and channels, I think are the only ones, but yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why am I not on the Plex TestFlight?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, because you didn’t evangelize as well as I did, apparently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apparently not. Anyway, but no, that’s all, as Jason Snell said in another article, he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really on top of his game lately, six dollars.com, that’s all an illusion. Don’t be fooled into thinking your Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is back exactly the way you left it, because every single one of those icons, if you click on it, has no idea who you are, and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} have to log back in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every one of these apps has a different way to log back in. Sometimes it wants you to enter your username and password.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why can’t Apple TV, one of Apple’s own platforms, use iCloud Keychain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the Apple ID that you are logged into the Apple TV with to get your username and password? I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it doesn’t. Instead, you have to use your phone as a remote and your phone is also logged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into your Apple ID and can read your iCloud key chain. And so your phone will look up your username and password and iCloud key

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chain and send it as text to the text field that it is being used to enter. Why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t you do it on the Apple TV? I have no freaking idea why, it drives me nuts. Sometimes you’ll have to go to servicename.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slash activate and type in a four digit code and get in that way. Sometimes it’ll say, hey, just launch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Disney Plus app. And if it’s on the same network as us, it will let you log in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Allegedly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m glad Jason said in the article, that has never worked for him. It’s never worked for me either. Remember last

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} time I said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe it’s because I’m not on wifi and it says you have to be on the same wifi network. And there’s like the technologist in me saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do they mean wifi, wifi? Or is that just like the catch all word for network because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people don’t know that there are other kinds of networking than wifi. Because my TV isn’t on wifi, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connected through ethernet only and is not connected to wifi because Google TV OS doesn’t let you do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both of them at the same time. And so it never worked for me, but it also never worked for Jason. So then you got to do using your own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John password. So laborious and you know, poor me, just like Jason, I have subscribed to way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too many streaming services. Yeah, I know, it’s such a terrible thing to do. But anyway, I spent not three and a half

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hours, but at least probably 45 minutes, maybe an hour,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going through all my services and logging them all back in, reconnecting my Plex,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finding all my shares on Infuse, Logging into all the different services, log in with TV provider,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get redirected to the Verizon page, log in, bounce back, pick up your phone, enter this thing in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pull things out of the key chain. So laborious. I’m glad new Apple TV doesn’t come out very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John often.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it is a real, real pain. And I went through it when I got my new Apple TV with ethernet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Disney plus sign in thing did not work for me for beans. So just like you said, I’m glad Jason had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said something. Like in the grand scheme of things, it’s fine. All my stuff is in one password, but the inconsistency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey across all these apps, not surprising, but frustrating nevertheless. Like, you know, again, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s slash activate, slash pair, then it’s, oh, I need a username, password. And the Apple TV does remember,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, an email address that any email addresses that you use to sign into stuff, which is nice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but then you still gotta be on your phone or your iPad, and you gotta go and grab the password from one password and be ready

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to paste it in the field. And it’s like, none of this is a big deal, but it’s just frustrating. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’re not gonna have time to talk about the ads thing, that this is just another one of those like paper cuts that seem to be appearing more and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more often in Apple stuff. Or maybe a more complimentary way of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey looking at it is so many other paper cuts have gone away that these ones that are left stand out more. I’m not sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which one it is, it doesn’t really matter. But, you know, in the same way that if they add ads everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in these OSs, it’s gonna be, you know, more and more frustrating. Well, something like this is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey frustrating. It’s not a big deal, it’s just frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s weird though, because like they write tvOS. It’s their own platform. You sign in with your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple ID. One of the options you have is to not be prompted for further authentication when making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John purchases. Like that’s an option in the settings. You can say, hey, I’m signing in my Apple ID and I just wanna be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy stuff. Don’t prompt me for my password when I buy stuff. So you can spend money, real money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without entering anything. But somehow the platform has no ability to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what every other Apple platform can do, which is look up your passwords in iCloud and Keychain and stick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them into fields when you’re logging into something. And this is on, you know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in version one, they don’t have that fine, but eventually it will come. Now it’s way past overdue. Like I don’t call this a paper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cut. I would call this like a feature that should have been there a long time ago. And there must be some reasonably sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technical reason for why they just don’t wanna do that. But I cannot think of what it might be not knowing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John details. And it just, and not that that’s the greatest thing. That’s like the minimum of like, hey, just autofill my passwords

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from my Keychain like I do on my phone, on my Mac, on my iPad, on anything else, like just autofill from my key chain.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But on top of that is every other Apple has ever done to like sign in with your TV provider

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or universal sign in for everything. And all those different approaches that they’ve touted in various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keynotes have not been adopted universally. So now every time you launch an app, just like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gee, I wonder how this Apple want me to log in. Will it try to use Apple thing? Will it try to use sign in with provider?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some of the apps I discovered, Maybe you sign with like one app, like one Fox affiliated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app, other Fox affiliated apps already know that you’re logged in cause they probably do the application group sharing thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever behind the scenes, right? This is super weird. And you know, and like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not that people buy new Apple TVs very often, but this is one of the main and only friction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John points for regular people to use Apple TV because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people do subscribe to streaming services and sometimes they subscribe and unsubscribe, but you’re like, you’re gonna have to do this. there’s no avoiding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to sign in to Netflix. You have to like, you can’t use these streaming services without signing in. If you pay for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, you have to authenticate. Everyone’s gonna have to go through this and it’s not a simple process if you haven’t done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it 50 times. And even if you just subscribe to two or three streaming services, it’s not a good sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first impression, right? That’s why the first impression of a device transfer on the phone is like, oh, I got a new phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It knows that I got a new phone. It’ll bring all my junk to the old phone. Most people don’t use TestFlight, so it’s not a big deal. Most people don’t have two-factor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outside of Apple stuff, right? That’s a good experience. TV is like not a decade

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away from that, but at least five years behind the times.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. I also was very confused. I don’t recall how much I talked about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey last episode, but I wasn’t sure the right way to accomplish what I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do with my Apple TVs, because what I wanted to do was trickle down, right? So take the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 4K Apple TV that was in the living room, put that in the bedroom, take the 1080 Apple TV that was in the bedroom, that becomes a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey travel Apple TV. But I wasn’t sure the rightest way to do this, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, if you, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can tell you the wrong way to do it, which is to have a plan to carefully rename them to what they’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be when they get in their proper homes and then forget to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Well, that’s the I did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I did only the first step. I had or I had the plan and then I executed the plan. And that seemed to work just fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what we’re saying is basically, you know, go to the living room one and then go to general settings, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and rename your living room one from whatever it’s called now, which may mention living room. rename it to bedroom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But oh, you can’t rename it to bedroom because if you try to rename it to bedroom, it’ll put bedroom parentheses two at the end. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first, go upstairs to the bedroom and either shut

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that one down. No, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is no shutdown function for Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I searched for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Just yank it from the plug. It’s just like a TiVo or whatever. Or rename it away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from being bedroom. Then go back downstairs and rename the one downstairs into bedroom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Then bravely unplug everything because there’s no way to shut down. I guess you can put it to sleep if you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to unplug it, honestly, it doesn’t make a difference, I don’t think. Then hook up your new one, and then you can name your new one Living

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Room, and it won’t become Living Room, parentheses two. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lucky. If you’re unlucky like me and forget to do that, you’re, you know, you just gotta go through this again. But even if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remember to do it, I think you need some time for it to like settle. Otherwise, they forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they were named, and you’ll end up with the parentheses two anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cool. Yeah, so I did do exactly what you described, because I thought about it for probably longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than I should admit. And I was like, well, I guess what I can do is I can start the bedroom TV and rename that, and go to the living

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey room one and rename that and then add the new one and hopefully it’ll all work out. And it did, but I don’t know, I almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feel like I expected or it’s certainly hoped that when I set up the new Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey TV, it could be like, oh, am I taking over for the old one? And I guess the difficulty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there is that I would have to have both of them online simultaneously and often in an entertainment center that’s not something that’s easy to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But these are wifi, so you just plug them both in. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the thing I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thinking of as an example, I mean, I would just mention the phone, but the great example of doing this right is again, frequent sponsor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Eero, replacing your router, the thing that provides internet to your entire house,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like it would be the most fraught example of, hey, I wanna swap one device for another, you know, Indiana

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Jones, Raider of the Lost Ark style, you know, with the bag of sand and the, I don’t like, because the thing needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to talk to the internet to figure out who you are and what your info is, like Eero has like a cloud sync

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notion of your identity, you have an Eero account, right? It needs to talk to the internet to do that, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is the internet, it is providing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} internet, providing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IP addresses for doing other routing. I got a new Eero and I plugged it in and I said, hey, you’re the new Eero,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s the old one. And it said, okay, I’ll replace the old one. It’s like, done. Nothing to do anything. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John swapped itself in as my router with no errors, no problem, it understood what it was doing. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was like, and I get a new Apple TV and it’s like an all day project, what the hell?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s so true. That’s all right. I am liking the new Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t say I’d notice anything that’s particularly different, but I mean, I like it and you know, now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my 4k bedroom TV, which is not fancy at all, but now it has a 4k Apple TV attached to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. So that’s kind of cool for the, you know, once a month that I actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Speaking of settings, I was speaking of like noticing a difference. It didn’t remember how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had configured in terms of audio video. So I had to go back through and do all those settings again that we talked about before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like to match content on or off, you know, what do you want the menu screen to be? HDR, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Dolby Vision, screen size, audio format, like every single one of those options, it had no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recollection of what they were previously. So it just had to start, you know, reset everything again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mm, fun.

Remembering Songs of Innocence

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You want to tell me about your boy Bono and what he’s been up to recently?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a funny bit from it. So Bono’s got a new book out. It’s like an autobiography about, I don’t know, about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, his life and his band. He’s the lead singer of the band U2. And there was a, going around a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John couple of weeks ago, was excerpts from it in the various reviews. One of them was about the infamous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John album that Apple distributed for free onto everyone’s iPhone or into everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iTunes library more precisely whether you want it or not And Bono had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an apology In the book about that as quoting from the book

⏹️ ▶️ ^John As one social media wisecracker put up put it woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen drinking my coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wearing my dressing gown reading my paper For the less kind the free you to album is overpriced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} sorry I said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if just getting our music to people who like our music was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea, that was a good idea. But the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music and maybe there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might be some pushback. At first I thought it was just an internet squall, but quickly realized we’d bumped into a serious discussion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about big tech. I take full responsibility bonuses. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not Tim Cook, not Eddie Q. I thought if we could put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Not quite. I think, who cares about the U2 album or whatever, but I think it’s interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why why we still remember it, and why was it such a big deal? Giving stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away for free is usually not frowned upon. Even if you don’t want it, people will take free stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just because it’s free. I mean, that’s why you end up tasting all those weird free samples at Costco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s free, whatever. And that’s something you’re putting inside your body, but like, you know, free anything, here, here’s a free thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. Why did everyone hate the free album? I’m not entirely sure that Bono

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really understands why people hated it so much, because he as a famous rock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John star who’s not particularly tech savvy, probably doesn’t know or care about these intimate details. He knows it was a mistake

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and he takes responsibility for it because he argued for it or whatever. But like, why?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why did everyone get so angry about the U2 album being on their devices?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think it’s instructive, and not that we’re gonna, again, not that we’re gonna talk about this week, but we probably will later, about the ad stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of how it feels to have a powerful entity that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know or care that you exist do something to one of your personal technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices without your consent that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t ask for and can’t undo. And if the thing that they’re doing is putting free music

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your iTunes library, who cares, not a big deal. It is probably the smallest deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can think of. It’s like all that means is that there is an album in your iTunes library that I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put there and maybe I’m not interested in. But even that tiny bit is like, every time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you go in there, you’re like, that stupid U2 album is there again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I don’t even like them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or maybe, worst case scenario, it’s the only thing in your library, and every time you connect it up to your car, it starts playing a song,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it starts playing one of those songs from the U2 album, because that’s all you’ve got in there, because you use Spotify.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s the tiniest thing, but that tiny thing put in literally every single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person’s iTunes library, whether you want it or not, and you couldn’t get rid of it until they get that thing later

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you get to delete it, right, before all the big blowback. That just makes everybody go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off the deep end. And I think justifiably, because it just, you know, it reveals

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the control that the large companies have over our lives that they mostly don’t exercise or they exercise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for good, like, you know, stopping malware or putting signatures for a malicious software or whatever. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just to do this, and you know, we’re trying to do the nice thing. We’re trying to be, you know, we’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to give people free music or whatever. Doesn’t matter what the motivations are. It’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that album just sitting in there, even if you didn’t care about it when it came out, a week later, two weeks later,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a month later, especially if you’re not into the tech news and you miss the story where it’s like, hey, go to this page where you can delete it from your library,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which that page I’m assuming is still up at Apple’s website somewhere because there could still be people who have this in the library and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know that you can delete it. We should probably try to find it for the show notes, but most people don’t know or care about that. They just know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that every time they look at their iTunes library, there’s this album that they didn’t want there, and they just get madder about it and madder about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Someday there’s gonna be some person who’s had that in their iTunes library for 20 years, not knowing how to get rid of it, and they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be so angry about it. If they ever meet Bono, that’s the first thing they’re gonna yell at him about. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I understand why Bono apologized, but I do think it’s an instructive lesson about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the smallest, most well-intentioned thing can cause a complete open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John revolt, whereas other things that companies do that people don’t notice that are way, way worse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nobody cares, like, you know, selling access to your demographic information to advertisers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and tracking you across multiple sites. That’s invisible to people. They don’t even see it and they don’t care about it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and is in general way worse. But that U2 album, every time they see it, I feel like people just get madder and madder.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even very good. No, it wasn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} March 14th, 2020.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Blackguard91 writes, how can I remove U2’s Songs of Innocence from iTunes and iPhone in 2020?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m doing a little long overdue maintenance on my iTunes account, thanks coronavirus slash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey social distancing, and I still have Songs of Innocence albums stuck on my phone. I never really cared for YouTube, but the constant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ambush of their music over the years has elevated them to nickelback levels of discomfort. Web searches have revealed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a web tool that I missed by about six years that Apple provided to remove the album, but it was engineered prior to the advent of two-factor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey authentication and does not properly work with modern Apple infrastructure. How can I get rid of it? To which Joseph underscore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey S writes, who is apparently a community specialist for Apple, Hey there, thanks for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey using the Apple Support communities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You need to contact Apple Support.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Here’s how you can do it. So that’s the answer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s nice. So, you know, at a company that cared more about the web, that page

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would both still exist and still work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I guess it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hasn’t worked for six years, and I guess you can contact Apple so they can get rid of it, but man. And that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other thing about this. They realize the mistake they made from the blowback, and they introduce the tool to remove it, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most people don’t know about, because most people just are not following the tech press and who cares, right? And then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, that was it. Like, they said, well, this problem is, we’ll never have to worry about this again because people who want to remove

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it will use the tool and people who don’t care, don’t care. It’s like, no, most people care and have no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea you introduced that tool. So you should have a solution for that long-term, right? Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hack they did to give this to everybody, there should be an accompanying hack, which is basically like a button

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on every single person’s Apple ID page that never goes away. and the only thing that button does is delete YouTube album.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like just that’s gotta be there forever now. That’s your price for this mistake. Is forever on every, you know, account.appleid.apple.whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to have the delete YouTube album button and you can never get rid of it. And you have to test it every time you do any kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change to iCloud.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is such classic Apple. So I found what is allegedly the link. And you know how Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is really good about having really clean and pretty URLs. I mean that genuinely, like they really honestly do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The URL here is buy.iTunes.apple.com slash webobjectsbaby slash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mzfinance.woah slash wa slash offeroptout. That is your URL.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s just the Steve Jobs equivalent of you want a bumper case, fine, have a bumper case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You want to be able to delete the thing, fine, go to a WebObjects URL. Yep, and for the record,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s a 404. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always pronounce it woah in my head, mzfinance.woah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John WebObjects application? Probably. The WoW extension, some web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John objects guru probably knows.

iPhone haptic-buttons rumor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, apparently the iPhone 15 buttons, allegedly, are going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quite a bit different. Ming-Chi Kuo writes, My latest survey indicates that the volume button and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the power button on two high-end iPhone 15, the new iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey models, may adapt a solid-state button design similar to the home button design of the iPhone 7, 8, SE, 2, and 3,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to replace the physical mechanical button design. There will be taptic engines located on the internal left and right sides to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey provide force feedback to make users feel like they are pressing physical buttons. Due to this design change, the number of Taptic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Engines used in each phone will increase from the current one to three. As a result, the existing Taptic Engine suppliers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey LuxShare ICT, which is the first one in AAC technologies, the second one will be significant beneficiaries.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is expected that high-end Android smartphones will also follow Apple’s design to create new selling points,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is a structural positive for the mobile phone vibrator industry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I love the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people tweet when their beat is like part suppliers for the iPhones. It’s such a different perspective. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s important about this? It means more phone vibrators. It’s really good for these companies that make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. I find this fascinating. Is there something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrong with the power and volume buttons on our current phones? I guess because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John move it makes waterproofing harder. What else is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrong with them? Anything on an iPhone that moves or that is an entry point for dust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and stuff is also a service liability in the sense that it’s something that can break, it’s something that people will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco break on their phones or that will fail on the phone and that either the person or Apple will be responsible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for repairing it. So there’s that angle too. But is this plan, I mean, if this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco real, I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} plausible. Yeah, we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, you gotta think like, are they really gonna be saving that much? Like so they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have the cost of two new Taptic engines, have to put them somewhere and I space I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to imagine that they’re going to take up more space than the buttons do but maybe I’m wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I mean, that’s that’s what I would assume and then the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John battery power to every time you hit the button your little burst of electricity to move a little mechanical thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean that being said like when they moved the home button to a haptic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Taptic engine, which I think it was the iPhone 7 or before then.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I think it was a 7 that was great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love the iPhone 7.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like like, you know, we We had our doubts when that information came out back then, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it came out and it was fine. I would even say possibly good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think it was better than the physical one, but that physical button was like, I mean, forget about tiny dust particles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You could fit an entire cat inside there, and people did shove their entire cat in. Those home buttons would break

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time because you were pressing it constantly, and it really moved. You could put cereal in there, cookie

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crumbs, potato chips, whole pets. Just everything would go in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You think the lightning port is bad for collecting stuff. The home button was a nightmare. But I do wonder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much of your pet you can shove into the crevices on the side of the power button on a modern iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think from a product quality perspective, I would trust Apple to do this well because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already have done it well. So I think it would feel fine and we wouldn’t notice when we get used to it. It’d be one of those weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that everyone says like, oh, I remember when it was a real button and now you can’t even tell unless the phone’s off or whatever. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, it’d be one of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like I don’t object to it because I think it’s gonna be bad, but boy, in terms of cost of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John parts, complexity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And space, that’s the thing, internal space. That to me, I can’t imagine this is worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Internal space, I mean, we’ll see. Maybe these things have gotten way smaller and you just need to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little for this, but it’s so fascinating. It makes sense because look, if your job is to waterproof

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPhone and you’re sick of your weak point was the headphone jack or your weak point is the home

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button, you’re knocking them down one by one. Every year, it’s like, what’s the next thing we can make this phone more waterproof,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And maybe these just came up on the list, right? Yeah, I hope.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the fascinating

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the last bit here, again, from the perspective of someone who’s talking about, you know, parts manufacturers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for iPhones. It is expected that high-end Android smartphones will also follow Apple’s design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just expected that whatever Apple does, even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if it seems to be dumb,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll copy it because Apple does it. Like, there’s no other reason you need to do it. Like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could have done it five years ago if it was a good idea, they could have done it. But it’s like, but as soon as Apple does it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, they’ll do it too just because Apple did it and they can say, oh, whatever Apple has, we have that too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like don’t just, you know, give Apple a year to do this to see if it actually is a good idea and then you can copy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. But it’s just fascinating. Anyway, maybe this is all just a rumor put out into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the world by the manufacturers of tiny Taptic engines for phones, we’ll see.

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#askatp: Smart-home worthwhile?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, let’s do some Ask ATP, which we haven’t had time for lately, and I apologize.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But let’s start with James Egg, who writes, I’m building a house to be completed within the next few months. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a great opportunity to upgrade my home tech. And with Matter in the news lately, I’m thinking a lot about smart home options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There are plans for in-wall ethernet wiring to any place there might be a stationary internet connected device,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey connections for external wired ethernet cameras, and ceiling mounted Wi-Fi access points. But I’m dubious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of some of the other smart home products and how useful they are. My life does not feel burdened by turning on lights manually, for example.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How useful are things like smart switches, thermostats, door locks, garage door openers, and other options, really?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is all of this smart home tech really that great? I have no idea.” So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me, I’ve dabbled with a reasonable amount of this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I haven’t done a lot of like smart locks. I haven’t really played with any of those or some of the really invasive stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with regard to like light switches and things of that nature. I’ve dabbled with a fair bit of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey For my money, they are a past sponsor, but I swear I freaking love them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Lutron Caseta stuff, and they actually, the ones that were current at the time we sponsored

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are fine, but they actually have a new dimmer that’s aesthetically much better looking than the ones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they had up until recently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey envy the new one. It’s the Diva smart switch, which the guts, the insides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are the same as all the other Lutron cassette stuff that I’ve been that I’ve been singing their praises both when they paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me and when they haven’t because it’s so damn good. But this one, the Diva stuff, I think it’s just a dimmer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so far, is so aesthetically so much better looking than the existing stuff. And I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey find the existing stuff bad, but this is way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better. But it doesn’t it doesn’t pop out and become a remote though, does it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No. Well, Well, no, none of the Caseta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff, well. They have remotes, but the in-wall switches don’t pop out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you can, like, they give you a little plate because that’s what I have. They give you a little plate that you can take the remote and mount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to your wall. It’s not actually going into your wall. It just looks like a switch, but you shove the little remote in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so that is a dimmer switch. It’s just not connected to anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can also get a dimmer switch

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} is wired. That’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wall, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Anyways, we’re getting off into the ether here, but the Caseta stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really, really good. Like, honest to goodness, it’s really, really good. Obviously, I can sing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for hours my praises of Sonos equipment. Not everyone on the program agrees, but that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But the Sonos stuff has worked out really well for me. And as I spoke about a few episodes ago, integrates to some degree with some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the Caseta stuff, which is super delightful. I haven’t, some people have asked, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sometimes snarky and sometimes in a not snarky way, what’s going on with the Ethernet project or maybe the Fiber

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey project. That is still something I want to work on, but I’ve mostly put aside for now. I’ve just been distracted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by a bunch of other stuff. And this is the busiest time of year for the List family because not only do we have regular holiday

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stuff, but Declan and Michaela’s birthdays are both like before and after the holidays. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from basically mid-October to mid-January, life is crazy busy around my house. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m probably not gonna do anything more with the ethernet stuff anytime soon, but I will say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that one consistent piece of advice, and I got a lot of advice, A lot of which conflicted with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other pieces of advice that I was given. Like it was all in conflict with each other. But the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one thing that almost everyone agreed on was anywhere you want an internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drop or ethernet drop, you want at least two ethernet drops. Don’t put in one, put in at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey least two, because you’ll, you never know what else you’re going to want there. So I will say James,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that if you are putting ethernet in the walls, which you say that you are, put at least two ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drops in the wall. They can be in the same panel. I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one on one wall, one on the other. But wherever there’s Ethernet, put at least two. That’s what you gotta do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. I would say on the front of like, I think the most interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of this question is is smart home stuff really worth it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh yes, yes. Like as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco James says, to quote, my life does not feel burdened by turning on lights manually, for example. How useful are all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things? And first of all, it depends so much on your situation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how many smart things you’re going to do, what smart things you’re going to do. To me, whether it’s worth it or not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comes down to how much effort and cost and setup fiddling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does it take to actually get it to work? And then how much time does that save me over time?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And how long does it last before it breaks? Now, the reason why I’ve been such a fan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the Caseta stuff is that it does have a fairly strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uphill route to get there in the sense that most of the Lutron Caseta products are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the higher end price-wise compared to competitors, and to really do it right, a lot of these have to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard-wired switches in the wall and stuff like that. So there’s a bit of a curve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get there. However, I’ve tried a bunch of other stuff before. I’ve tried other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smart home products, I’ve tried stuff that can be controlled via HomeKit or via the Alexa ecosystem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve tried a bunch of other stuff from a bunch of different brands and all the other ones were just flaky

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they would either have to be like unpaired and repaired and reset up every so often

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they would only work like 90% of the time and everything. Whereas Caseta works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every single time

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once you set it up you don’t need to touch it. It just works all the time forever. That’s why I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stopped using all the other stuff and I go with it because whether it’s worth or not, if you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some value out of something, but then after four months you got to reset the whole thing up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and repair it with HomeKit and all that crap, that’s going to really eat into the value that it created for you. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to question, should I just throw all this crap away and just go back to dumb switches? But if you set it up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once and it just always works and it works every single time reliably and quickly, which is what Caseta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does and which frankly nothing else I’ve tried does, then the value burden

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has to overcome is lower. And so I like, for smart switches, I don’t have everything in my house

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a smart switch. I have them in kind of like key areas. So here’s some situations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where they’re great. So number one, automation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can have like certain lights outdoors turn on 10 minutes after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sunset every night and turn off right before sunrise or whatever. And all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff, because of the way Caseta stuff works, you can, you know, there are just, there are switches on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the wall, that, or little remotes that you can put around. And so, you can, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just hit them manually. You don’t have to like tell the other people in your family, like, hey, to turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this light off, don’t touch the switch, because you’ll ruin my smart light. You have to instead speak this one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco command to our voice cylinder and hope it works. No, it’s not like that. Because again, that raises the annoyance level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that decreases the value you get. So if you do like smart switches, like you know, Caseta stuff and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re on a good path. And then where it helps is for, you know, first of all, the automation angle. Whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, occupancy sensing in a room, motion sensing, or you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time, time trigger things, temperature trigger things. Like there’s all sorts of things you can do with,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with, you know, both the built-in Caseta functionality and when you tie it to HomeKit or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever else, like you can, you can do all sorts of fun stuff there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, like a really good example of that very quickly is, you know, on weekdays, Erin is the first one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey downstairs. And it used to be up until, you know, a few days ago, it used to be pitch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey black when she would get up. And I recently put a Caseta dimmer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey switch on the like little pendant lamp or whatever it’s called that’s sitting above our kitchen sink.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so what I’d figured was, well, wait, why is she going downstairs to a pitch black kitchen? I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have that thing turn on around the same time that her alarm wakes her up every weekday. So Monday

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey through Friday, I forget exactly what time it is called six o’clock, Monday through Friday at six o’clock. The little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pedestal lamp comes on at like 50% brightness, uh, or pendant or whatever it’s called. Doesn’t matter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It comes on at like 50% brightness. And this way she walks downstairs and she’s not a, she’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not blinded by full brightness, led light. And B there’s a little bit of light already there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for, so she’s not bumping into things. And that is very silly. I’ll be the first to tell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s silly, but it’s actually a kind of nice quality of life improvement because it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something that automatically happens that that makes your life just a teensy bit better. A big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey deal? No, but convenient nevertheless.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Um, and I would also say like, you know, the, the value in just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having voice control or, or home kit control for a lot of the stuff is pretty significant. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for instance, like every night I walk around to like turn off these two lamps in our living room

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you know, we turn these lamps on when we’re hanging out there at night and then every night when we go to bed I walk around and I turn these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lamps off and I lock the door and you know you do these things like you know these routines are part of your life. Well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you can just trigger a scene or use an electric command or whatever to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goodnight or you know turn everything off, turn off living room whatever it is you can save yourself from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco walking around the room and that saves you you know 15 seconds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every day for you know indefinitely into the future. So you know the very first time you set it up you’re going to feel like well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this worth it, but you know after a while like that really adds up. So again, if the barrier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to entry is not too bad for you and if it doesn’t require ongoing fiddling, that can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very valuable. Another thing, like right now on my desk I have three Lutron

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Caseta Pico switches, which are little wireless switches. I’m just talking, you know, so these three little wireless switches, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco control the two banks of lights in the room and the heat of rug. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just little wireless battery-powered things on my desk that control other Lutron I’m not gonna say the products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the switches that are by the door of the room, which is not within reach as I’m sitting here podcasting, and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rug, which is down under my desk on a smart switch down there that’s also temperature controlled.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I was just sitting here, and as we were podcasting, my feet were getting cold. So I turned the rug on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I didn’t have to get up out of the chair, I didn’t have to take my headphones off, and I didn’t have to do a whole thing. It’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can also, if I’m in the middle of a show, and I’m too hot or too cold,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can open up the Home app, I can change my thermostat from here, from my computer, or from my phone, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from anywhere. So that’s another thing, smart thermostats, which also James asked about, are amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like if you only smartify one thing in your house, make it smart thermostats. And it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you can like use their automatic learning behaviors, no those are crap. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just so you can control it remotely. And that’s incredibly nice. So not only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can you control it from within your house, like I was doing a workout, I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these FaceTime workouts, and I was doing a workout with my trainer, and I was getting a little hot, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I realized, oh, I forgot to turn the heat down. And so I just raised my wrist and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco told my watch, turn off downstairs heat, and it worked. That kind of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is amazing. As I mentioned, it’s great when you’re just at your desk, you don’t want to or can’t easily get up, you can adjust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it there. Or if you are out on a trip or something, suppose you went to visit your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco family for a holiday, you’d be gone for a few days, you turn the heat down. Well, when you’re coming back,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can turn the heat back up a couple hours before you actually get home. So your house is not freezing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you get home. Or if you leave for a trip and forgot to turn the heat down, you can go do that when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re on the trip. So stuff like that. There are high value things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then also there is just kind of those little everyday conveniences of I don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco walk around and turn off two or three lamps anymore. I can just do it all from one button or one command and that’s it. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can automate things with sunset or motion or whatever else. So there’s that kind of value. So you don’t have to automate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or smarten everything in your house, every light switch, that’s overkill. But to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do them in certain places where you have potential high value really can be worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The thing that got me over the edge of getting this because I don’t really want most of the smart stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I have an older house and I don’t have the luxury

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of having as many outlets and particularly not as many switch controlled outlets. So like basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our main living room, the lights that are in there, two out of the three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John main sort of areas of lights aren’t controlled by any wall switches. You have to walk up to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the lamp and turn it on with like a switch on the lamp itself. And they’re kind of in the corners of the room.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And every time we go into the room, we gotta walk all the way to one side of the room, turn on the lamp,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John walk to the other side of the room, turn on the lamp, and then there’s a switch for the third one that’s on another wall,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And it doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s kind of annoying. And it just, it got, it was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got tiresome for me. Or even if you’re just on the couch and you want to turn one or both the lights off when you’re watching, you gotta get up off the couch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You gotta walk over to the corner of the room, turn the light off, walk away, you know. And yeah, you can rewire the house and put those things on a switch or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but also you can just use one of the smart outlet things. And so now I don’t have to do that. I can yell into the air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can do it on my phone. They are automated to turn off at night when we’re in bed. So if we go upstairs and people forgot to turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the lights off, they’ll turn themselves off. Like that seems like a small thing. you don’t want to walk an extra 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feet to turn off a light, but that kind of little thing like You know multiplied

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over how many times per day that I turn those lights on and off I mean It’s at least once

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turning them on at least once turning off and usually more because you probably want to you know Turn them off when you’re not in the house

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s pretty convenient and the cost of it was small like one of the little smart outlet things There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some initials, you know set up to buy the little thingy But I think the first one I got was like 50 bucks and had two outlets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it and it integrated with every single one services and it was fine. As for Lutron specifically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I recently bought one of their things. And the smart hub, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that’s what you need to sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} start having a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lutron

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it is hub based. They’re not Wi-Fi. And it’s actually is a very good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They use their own RF protocol that uses the same frequencies as wireless microphones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco roughly. And so it’s like it’s this part of the frequency spectrum that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very reliable, goes through houses and walls very well and very easily, has great range,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has pretty much no interference. And their protocol is such that it’s kind of like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Matter is trying to do now. But their protocol is such that their devices all talk to each

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other. And there is a hub for them to interact with the rest of your Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco network and the Internet. But the hub is not required for operation, like, you know, for the devices to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talk to each other. So like, if you have like, in my bike area downstairs, where we pull our bikes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in at night, I have a motion light setup where I have a Lutron motion sensor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you know, maybe 10 feet away, I have a Caseta smart switch in the wall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I have set up so that that motion sensor triggers the lights to turn on when it detects motion. So we pull our bikes in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco under the house and bing, lights turn on so we can see what we’re doing. And the reason is and super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reliable and the reason is because when the motion sensor detects motion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It doesn’t have to relay the signal through the hub to then have the hub till the light turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on instead when you set it up it programs it such that the Motion sensor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talks directly to the switch and doesn’t really through the hub so the devices can talk to themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Directly when necessary and that dramatically improves performance and reliability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was kind of surprised when I was setting up the hub, although, you know, think about it, it makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hub doesn’t connect with Wi-Fi. It’s Ethernet, which I guess is another reliability thing, because one of the things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tends to be flaky with home automation stuff is surprisingly, they fall off your Wi-Fi network. I don’t know why they do, but it’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that happens. I don’t know, they get confused if Wi-Fi inherently is not the type of protocol where you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to have a device that’s constantly connected to your Wi-Fi for years at a time. But yeah, the smart hub plugs into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ethernet only, which is not a problem for me because I have Ethernet in lots of places. One complaint about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at a smart hub, it has like a strip of like LED light up, you know, thing around it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you can’t turn that light off. So I had to put a piece of black tape around the entire smart hub, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I wouldn’t see that stupid light glowing at me from like behind the TV. Cause I put it behind the TV, I have ethernet to the TV area.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s very small and you know, plugs into ethernet and power. And you know, that’s it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not a complicated thing, but it has a light that you can’t turn off. It’s another thing that Eero gets right by the way. This is just the time where we talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about all our past sponsors. Eero’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} has lights on all their hub

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, but you can turn off the lights. So the Eero that’s upstairs doesn’t have light on because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t want a light shining that it’s visible from our bedroom, right? So yeah, Lutron, you gotta let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people turn off that light. Like it’s no point. I’m hoping I’m not making the thing overheat, what is it, tape around it, but I’m not blocking any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vents or anything. But anyway, yeah, I think the utility of smart home stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is undeniable. It’s just a question of not overdoing it because you do have to have that balance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How annoying is this versus how much benefit do I have? And that’s why we tend to like the things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that don’t require you to teach people who enter your home how to operate your home.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You don’t have to know anything about smart home to press a switch on a wall. Even if it’s like I said earlier, like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Lutron switch that’s on the wall. It’s not actually a switch. It’s just one of those little remotes that Marco was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking about stuck to your wall. It’s literally all it is. Behind it is just your wall. It doesn’t do anything, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it fools people who don’t know anything about home automation and think, oh, that’s a switch, because I see a switch plate, and I see a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that looks like a switch, and it’s got a light bulb on it, and I press it and the lights turn on. That’s all anyone needs to know. They don’t have to know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can talk into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and make lights turn on, but you can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, and I think that just to put a period on the end of this whole topic, the thing with Lutron that’s so great, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this isn’t unique to Lutron, but they do the best at it that I’ve seen, is that their physical traditional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey switch is first, and smart switch is second. So you don’t have to like have the hub

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on and active and whatnot in order to turn your lights on and off. If you don’t have an internet connection, your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lights will still work because these are traditional light switches first that just so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happen to be able to communicate via RF to smart stuff elsewhere in your house as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I think that’s very important.

#askatp: Fastest typist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind, I’ve put a link in Slack. Can we all go to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey website? Because apparently we’re going to figure out, because Mark Richard wants to know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which of the three of us is the fastest typist? Oh, no. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already did this, because I put this in the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, I didn’t do it. Oh, this website’s stinky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} How do I even use this? Yeah, I was trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to find the classic one that is better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} this. Wait, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey telling me I’m ready. I don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} race yet. Two, one, go. No, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to race yet. All these guys are doing this. the chat room, do you remember the like the good type racing game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that used to be on the internet? It was a web page and you’d go in and it would say ready go and it would show you a bunch of text and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’d have to type it exactly as it appeared and it wouldn’t let you keep typing if you made a mistake. There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John million of those sites now and all of them are just scummed up with ads and scams and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like they’re all ugly and not fun and I tried to find one that was tolerable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that more or less did what I wanted to do but I don’t, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, we’re playing Type Racer. It’s not, this is a terrible site.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it really is. I think I got 85 words per minute. It already cleared itself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, mine cleared too. Well, you beat me slightly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it was 85 and 81. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you, the fastest typist is John, probably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Why would you say that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a terrible typist. So what was your speed then? Well, you guys just play it, so tell us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you got.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I said 85 for me and 81 for Marco, I’m pretty sure, with like 96% accuracy for me, and I don’t think Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey worked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I like hit one wrong letter at the beginning, and I kept typing ahead of it, thinking it would just not matter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it totally mattered, and then I had to backspace all the way back. Like, so it was just.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can take a second run, if you feel like your first one was messed up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were slow in the game. To me, like, who’s the fastest typer? Like, I don’t really care. It’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John, and I don’t care. So what did you get, John? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know why you would think it would be. Have you ever seen, you’ve seen me type. I’m a terrible typist. I don’t type the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way. I am, I mean, I’m a touch typist in that I don’t have to look at my fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of the time, but I’m not a touch typist in that I do not type the way you’re supposed to type if you’re a touch typist. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t use all my fingers, I don’t do it right. That’s why I’m such a slow typist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m a weird typist. The one I can most relate to is Matt Panzarino of TechCrunch. When I first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John met him, we were sitting next to each other at WODC, and I noticed that he typed the same way I did, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the wrong way, using not enough fingers on all the wrong keys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And I was like, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re typing buddies. We both type in this totally messed up way. If you’re watching me do it, it’s like the least efficient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Like there’s, for touch typing, there’s fingers assigned to each key.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like if you look at the key on the keyboard and you say, what finger should I use to hit that key? Maybe in some cases there’s debate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you could maybe use one or two different fingers. I use all the wrong fingers for all the wrong keys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and lots of my fingers are doing nothing. So I’m a terrible typist. But based on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brief run on TypeRacer here, we’re kind of all in the same ballpark. I got 84 words per minute and 97.6%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accuracy. And that was just on my first run. I did not like do multiple runs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to try to get better. I’m sure I could go faster and I’m sure I could also do worse. So we all seem to be in the mid 80s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this test. And this test I think was pretty easy because it didn’t give you lots of weird words. So a lot of it is just us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John activating macros where we, you know, our brains have macros for the common English words.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we don’t have to think about typing letters. Whereas if it was a bunch of proper nouns of cities, we’d never heard of, we’d be like transcribing them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a letter at a time. And that would really reveal how crappy we are. But none of us are particularly fast typists in the grand scheme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of things, because if any of us actually touch typed, we’d be going much faster. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do. Do you do it right with the right fingers on the right keys? I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for the most part, the only thing is I will say that I only ever use my right thumb for space bar and I only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ever use the left shift key, which is not correct. Other than that though, I think I pretty much use the right fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the right spot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should take a recording with the center stage camera of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the look down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at your desk. What is that feature called? The thing where it looks down at your desk?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah, like desk view or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something. Just say, why are you not so much faster? I’ve been doing 84 words for minutes using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and you can’t. Well, let me try again then. Good grief. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hold on. You know what I’ll do? Let’s do it again. I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} do a new URL. While

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you race yourself, so I will answer Mark Richard’s second part of the question, which was, how much typing do you feel you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do while writing code, particularly when using an IDE with autocomplete, et cetera? So for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do not that much typing when writing code because most of writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code is not limited by your typing speed, it’s limited by your thinking speed and your debugging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speed later. So that’s not, where I do a lot of typing is server administration.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because that’s, if I have to type in different repetitive commands

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or if I’m typing in SQL queries to try to figure out what’s going on with my database or whatever else,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s where I do a large volume of repetitive typing. But for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actual code writing, it really isn’t that much because I’m not actually writing that many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lines of code per minute or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Part of the reason my weird typing isn’t that much of a problem for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John programming is, yes, part of it is that you’re not really typing much, but also, I think typing speed is important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to programming, but in a weird way, like in your iteration speed, is what you’re typing in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John programming is not prose. It’s lots of square brackets and curly braces and hyphens

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and greater than and less than signs and dollar signs and at signs if you’re in Perl. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird characters that are not in convenient places in the keyboard. So my totally wrong typing doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John impair me there, but I can type those programmery concepts really fast. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where it helps in terms of iteration is if you’re trying to do a thing, especially if you’re an experienced programmer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’re working in a language that you know, you’re like, I should do it like this. Now maybe I should do it like that. Maybe I should do it like that. And you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John working in just like a little, like a little, you know, not a paragraph, but a little, you know, five, 10, 15 lines of code. And you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having different ideas about how you should do things. Even if you’re just half the times you’re hammering on the autocomplete,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like tab return, whatever the autocomplete thing, writing sort of writing the autocomplete from your in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your ID, to quickly be able to say, I’m gonna do a loop like this. Oh, I need a variable here. I need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a property here. I need anything like that. I need to navigate my ID up here to put this property. And I’m gonna come back in. If you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an experienced programmer and you’re doing something fairly trivial, you know what you wanna type and your brain absolutely can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outrun your fingers. Cause you’re like, okay, I need this property, I need this for loop, I need this thing over here, need to call this method, need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make this new method, need to make this new class. If you’re good with your tools, your brain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can go faster than your fingers. And that’s where being a fast typist helps. It’s not like you’re doing that sustained. You do that in tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bursts over the course of an hour of you banging your head against the wall, trying to figure out why something doesn’t work, right? Like that’s programming, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But for those little bursts, it is nice to be able to close the gap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between your brain and your fingers. When you’re a beginner, there is no gap because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t even know what you have to type yet. But eventually, as you gain experience as a programmer, you do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John repetitive things. You get familiar with the API, you get familiar with your tools, and it’s nice to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make that connection faster because then it lets you have the thought and have the code for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it appear so you can get to your next thought. So you don’t waste any time sort of waiting for the curly braces to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fall out of your fingertips.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, real-time follow-up. I’ve raced the chat room a couple times. I got 100 words per minute the first time, 97 words

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey per minute just now, accuracy hovering at between 97 and 98%. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I think you’re probably the fastest one unless Marco makes some other runs. But I honestly, I don’t think I could do much better than 80, 90.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I doubt I could crack 100. Whereas like Jason Snell, what is he, like 120, 130, like accurate. You know, he’s an actual real typist

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for these pros texts. He

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} is bananas fast. Yeah.

#askatp: Interactive widgets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then finally, Brian Hamilton writes, home screen widgets are still just app launchers without any real interactivity. Why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hasn’t Apple OKed buttons yet? What makes the dynamic island and live activities use less power than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a full PCAL calculator widget or more interactive overcast widget?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think a lot of this is because of the tech they use to do it. To the best of my knowledge, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey serialize the SwiftUI view. And so basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s not exactly a snapshot, but for the purposes of this discussion, They take a snapshot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of a SwiftUI view, write like, here’s what you need in order to reconstruct this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to deserialize it later. Here’s what we’ll need, and then they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey compute it once, put it on screen, it stays static. If they have to recompute this constantly, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s incredible. I shouldn’t say it’s incredible battery drain, but when you’re operating at Apple’s level,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every little teeny, tiny bit counts. I have a few engineers that work on some of this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s fascinating listening to them talk about perf. Everything is about perf, which is performance. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget what they call like, how battery efficient things are, but I think they have a funny term

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for that as well. But anyway, the point is, is that having something that’s interactive, you know, suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re causing far more battery drain than you would otherwise. Not to mention that this whole serialization

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dance of the SwiftUI views doesn’t, I don’t think it really lends itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well to interactivity because then you’re talking about more than just a static view. You’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey logic and what do you do when it’s interacted with and so on and so forth. It is a bit of a bummer. Like I wish

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that these things were interactive, but I do understand from a technical perspective why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it isn’t the case. I don’t know if you two have any other further thoughts on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the actual thing I’ll add, and it gets even more technically esoteric here, but to understand that to have interaction,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I think they eventually will, but like the reason they’ve been holding off so far is actually a more complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem than you think. to have any kind of interaction on the phone or anywhere in a GUI, you need an event loop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And that event loop needs to send events to code that’s going to process those events. And there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an event loop on all the screens. That’s how it catches your swipes and your taps and all your other things. But remember what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John asking is, hey, Apple on this screen that you control, the lock screen or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John control center or whatever, you know, wherever you want it to be, widgets, that’s not a third party app. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple app. Springboard is an Apple app. Whatever the heck runs all that stuff, like that’s Apple apps. and you’re saying you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John third party code to participate in processing of events from the event loop on those things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how do you get the third party code to process events coming from Apple’s app? Well, there’s a million ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do that. You can do it with XPC, you can do it with the plugin architecture, you can do it all sorts of things, but that is all of a sudden

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way, way more complicated than the data driven approach of, hey, third party app, give me a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Swift view set up, which you can think of as data and not code, right? And then the event

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loop that runs those screens does not need to send events to third-party code that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can then do whatever the heck it wants. Forget about power usage, forget about like, oh, I’m afraid I’m gonna send

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a tap event to third-party code, it’s gonna go into an infinite loop and drain the battery and freeze the screen, which is a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and difficult to defend against. But setting that aside, you have, once you allow third-party code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to run within the context of, you know, the home screen or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lock screen, even if it’s an external service and you’re using XPC, the cross-process communication to do it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve now let third parties into your application in a way that they can impact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reliability and functionality of your app. And doing that has to have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big enough trade-off that you’re willing to build the infrastructure required to protect Springboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to protect Control Center from third party bugs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? You got enough of your own bugs that are screwing things up, right? And so I think that has mostly been the barrier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like to do this right, we can’t just sort of load you as a plugin or load you as an external

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process and funnel events to you because both of those things have, yes, you know, battery life concerns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff like that, but security concerns and reliability concerns.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so it seems it’s like, well, you’ve got this stuff, just let me tap on it. The just let me tap on it is sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the success of the user mental model of a GUI is like, oh, it’s just a button and I press

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. But under the covers, the actual machinery of accepting events, processing them and handing them off to code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and who wrote that code and where it came from and how they all run the same process and how they can affect each other. It’s a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John users don’t have to worry about, but programmers and platform owners do, and it is actually slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more thorny than you think. All that said, I think it’s gonna come eventually. It’s a useful thing. They’re gonna make it happen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s definitely not a 1.0 type thing, and I think it’s going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a while before they get around to tackling that task in a way that they feel comfortable with.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think it’s actually more fundamental than that. I mean, you’re right, those are complexities they’d have to deal with,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they have ways to deal with those, and I think it would be fine overall. The bigger problem is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way that widgets work on iOS, the apps that you’re seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the widgets for are not running. That’s very important to realize.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That what you’re seeing, like what Casey was saying, they wake up a part of your app, an extension

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of your app, every so often, and it’ll allow it to run for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brief, you know, a few seconds of background time to give them a timeline of new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco views to say, all right, at this time, show this view. And then at this time, change it to this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at this time, change it to this. And they’ll wake you up every so often in the background, they’ll wake up your extension,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you have a few more seconds to generate the next set of those timeline snapshots.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So what you’re looking at with widgets is things that the app rendered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at some point in the past, It could be a few minutes ago, it could be a few hours ago. That way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you have a screen that has six widgets on it, you don’t have to keep six apps running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because that would be a much more significant drain on battery and performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything else. So what you’re looking at with a widget is not anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the app has live access to. Now, that’s a little bit different with live activities. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have more access, but it’s still, in general, the way the widget system works is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the app can’t really do much live in that widget. It can simply provide

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the system with a timeline of snapshots to show at certain times and the app gets woken

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up periodically to update those. And overall, again, this is kind of, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reason why iOS is generally more power and memory efficient

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than Mac OS or Windows or Linux is because it has these very aggressive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app lifecycle management things happening in the background where you think you’re running a bunch of apps, but you’re really not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re really running like one or two apps at a time on iOS, really. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, so changing, you know, making widgets more interactive would basically require that those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps were running and ready to respond to your touches and respond, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dynamically and possibly run animations or whatever else. And so it’s a totally different life cycle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the apps. That’s a much, much greater thing. Like right now, the little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit of activity or the little bit of interactivity you have with widgets is you can basically define like rectangles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and say, all right, when this rectangle is tapped, open this URL in the main app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so it’s much more of a kind of like, of a launcher kind of response than a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco live interaction kind of response.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s data driven, you just give them data. You give them the regions, you give them the URL, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see how the data just gets all the data. And to do this the right way and the way that is efficient,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wouldn’t actually run all six apps for such widgets, you’d come up with some kind of approach where you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make that more efficient. Whether it’s a single sort of firewalled off place where all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John third party ones run in a single process where they load all the stuff, or it could even just be more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data driven approach where you still don’t get to write arbitrary code, but you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John provide more data than just this region in this URL. Like you could provide a slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John richer format of what you want to happen. All the way up to and including, like I said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a single process that runs all the widgets. And when that process crashes, it takes out all the third party widgets, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t affect Apple stuff, right? And then you get to load some small, extremely constrained

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of code into there, and there’s memory limits, and there’s something watching it to make sure it doesn’t spin in the CPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like it’s a pain to do, because you have to sort of cordon them off and confine them and separate them from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple code. And you can’t run, like you can’t have, say, oh, you can have 24 widgets, and then we’ll run 24 extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John processes and do XPC to them. That’s not good either, right? So it’s not impossible. you can do it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s just doing it right. It’s kind of like doing stuff with the web. Like all the stuff that I’m talking about has happened within web browsers because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John web browsers have a whole bunch of code all running on one big stew. And how do we protect the user and the browser

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the OS from that big stew? And the answer is Safari and WebKit have been broken off into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these little islands of limited functionality to communicate with each other. But there’s only one of them. There’s not, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it gets multiplied by the number of web pages, but still. It’s not like they have a separate process running for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every single GIF animation on a web page, right? There’s some engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that runs all the image decoding and processing that’s firewalled off from everything else, but you don’t have to have one for every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John image. Thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to our sponsors this week, Hover, Collide, and Memberful. And thanks to our members who support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. We will talk to you next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental, oh it was accidental John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Accidental, check podcast so long.

A pizza pilgrimage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I went to John’s Pizza Place.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Was it everything you dreamed of and more?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So this is so, you know, John being from but not currently residing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in Long Island has of course his pizza

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco place from when he was here that he thinks is the best pizza place.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Two of them. He went to one of them. They’re basically the same. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine. Okay. And we’ve learned over the last couple of months

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that not only have I never been to it, but that I coincidentally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco constantly run errands very close to it. Which has frustrated John to no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco end, that I’ve had the chance to go to this pizza place many times and never had.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. Well, we were talking after the show like a month ago, and I was following along

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Google maps as the two of them were discussing where things were and what was going on. And we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey realized, or Marco and I at least realized live as we’re talking to each other, although we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were not broadcasting live at that point, that, oh my goodness, one of these pizza places, like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said, Marco, you’re basically driving directly by it all the time. And neither you nor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I, I mean, obviously I wouldn’t know, but even you didn’t have any idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You both had an idea because I pointed this out to you multiple times in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well we ignored it the other time. But once I realized it was like across the street from the Whole Foods

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I go to, it’s like, okay, that’s pretty close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, John said over and over again, get the Sicilian, a corner piece preferred,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and get garlic nuts. And we sure enough, we decided to get a whole bunch of stuff and kind of share

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it all, try it all. And included in that whole bunch of stuff was a couple of corner pieces of Sicilian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a whole bunch of garlic nuts and a whole bunch of, you know, maybe like three or four other slices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got the crispino too, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that little like thin square thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with like the fresh tomatoes on top of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, yeah, it was like fresh tomatoes and like, you know, a little red pepper and fresh mozzarella. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m really annoyed because it was really fricking good. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t want John to be so right about it, but dammit he was right about it. Like, when we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were first taking bites, were like, huh, all right, this is decent, okay, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe it’s not the best pizza I’ve ever had, but it’s pretty good, okay, and then like, as we’re going through, we’re like, you know, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually, this is really good. Like, this, I hate to admit it, but like, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is actually really good pizza. Like, and I was like, I’m trying to think, like, you know, what pizza have I had that was better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in certain ways? I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} hmm,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s actually, there’s certain elements of this that I actually like better than other pizza. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, hmm, I would maybe give it a nine. Like it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very, very good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh. And it’s not fancy pizza, it is utilitarian pizza. So it is not trying to be gourmet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John despite the crispino being a little bit fancy or whatever. It is very kind of, I’m not gonna say junk food

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pizza, but it is like staple pizza. It’s the type of pizza you can get all the time and it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good for you and it’s greasy and it’s way too much bread and you’re probably gonna eat too much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and make yourself sick, but it’s like, that’s what it is. And that’s, you know, it’s not, I never say this is the best pizza.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For example, Casey’s, you know, John’s of Bleeker Street, undoubtedly better pizza.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But this is the pizza that I grew up near and this is a really good example of neighborhood

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pizza. And in particular, the Sicilian is junky in exactly the junky way that Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loves and that it is just unapologetically a giant wad of dough with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too much sauce and cheese on it. And it’s all greasy. And that’s exactly what I want for it. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I have this pizza once every year at most, maybe I’m probably down to once every 0.74 years or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I didn’t go last time I was on Allen. That’s the perfect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frequency for me. And I’m just so glad that this place and the other place that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of its sister restaurant that have the same pizza managed to still be there so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many years after so many things like you eat it when you’re a kid and the restaurant closes down and they bulldoze the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing and they build something else in its place and now everything is a Whole Foods or whatever. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John place looks very different, but it’s still there and apparently, I mean, I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a fact, because I’ve had it like, you know, two or three years ago, last time I was there pre-COVID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still good pizza and it still tastes like it did when I was a kid and I love that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and the only thing I would suggest to you, John, is that I actually don’t think the Sicilian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was their best pizza. I was extremely impressed with their white

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with spinach And with their kind of margarita style slice where it’s like kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a regular pizza, but it’s like the fresh mozzarella,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re not, Sicilian’s not for everybody. It is just my favorite, but all their pizzas are good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The white pizza, by the way, was very popular with the high school students when I was growing up. It was super popular, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is a good slice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but yeah, the margarita slice, I think, was my favorite one. But they were all, unfortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they were all really good, and I hate to tell you that I think you were right, but yeah, I think in this case. Yeah, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John garlic knots, it’s hard to screw up. just like dough and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no no no it’s very easy to screw up garlic knots they many places screw up because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s two I say three main ways you could screw up a garlic knot number one you could overcook it number two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could have way too much bread you know as like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ratio could be way way off and and number three I forgot how to count I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think this is those two but anyway so like you can you can really mess it up with just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sloppy ratios

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, number three is you could drench it too much in oil. Like, it’s just, you know, it’s just like soggy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, maybe, but usually, when I’ve had bad ones, they’ve either been burnt or they’ve been like way too bready and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the ratios are off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I wouldn’t, yeah, I’m not saying that they’re easy to get, like I’m saying in the New York metro area, garlic knots are hard to scrub. Anyplace

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else in the country that I don’t even know what garlic knots are, don’t, if you see them, don’t buy them because they have no idea what they’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but yeah, I gotta say, man, that’s, I’m glad I don’t live really close to this because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that would be a very bad thing for me. Because I would go there a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they do have like, it’s a pizza place, but they do have an attached sit down restaurant, which also had some pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay dishes, but I have no idea what their menu is like anymore. And it was honestly, it was always a little bit weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The weird thing about this, so this is this place called Emilio’s, we’ll put a link to it, Emilio’s in Comac. And the sister restaurant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was Branch & Ellie’s, which is right across the street from my high school. And that’s obviously the one I went to way more often, but they were both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically equal distance from the house that I grew up on. So we go to both of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time. And the restaurants could not be more different. There’s like no shared item on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the menus for the restaurant, but the pizza is exactly the same. And I don’t know the history behind that. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even know if like one family started the restaurants or two families did, or they’re just totally unrelated and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copy each other’s pizza. But I’m so glad that, and that place still exists too. I’m so glad both of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John places are still there. And very jealous that you got to eat all that good pizza.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say it was kind of funny, you know, this place was a, it’s a good like 45 minute drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for me. And like going there to eat a whole bunch of bread, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s like a Sicilian and garlic knots, like just like, this was just a wad of bread

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} basically. And cheese

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and oil. Yeah, and to eat all that bread before having to drive for 45 minutes was, you know, that’s a bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco challenging of like a, you know, stay awake situation, but it was worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the other move that, so when I go to it, I’m going from out east on the island, So it’s like I’m driving for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like two hours to get the chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and then you drive it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back. And of course, by the time you get it back, it’s stone cold, right? Like the heat has been gone for, but this is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good thing about it, especially the Sicilian. It is great warmed up again in a toaster oven.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The next day or after two hours of driving, just so, so good because like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s so big, it can handle being warmed up for 15 minutes in like a 325 toaster oven on top of a piece of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John foil. Cause then the little bits that the edges get all kind of like crispy or whatever by the time it’s heated all the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through. So good, awesome leftover pizza. Totally a different thing than leftover, just regular Neapolitan

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pizza, but God, I need to have some of that. This next summer, I need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a trip out there. It is so onerous though, like if you’re driving two hours in each direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through long-haul traffic to get pizza, really does make the experience less nice, but you get to go at off hours and you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whole Foods anyway, so you should always just pick up an entire Sicilian pie,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throw it in the back of your car, and then don’t even bother eating it that day. You just put it directly into the fridge, wrap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John individual pieces in foil, and then for that week, whenever you want to be super unhealthy, you take a piece out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the foil, you unfold the foil, the foil’s already, you know, put it right on top of your toaster oven tray,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put it in there for 15 minutes, 325, you’re good to go. So first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love that you’ve managed to take this easy thing and turn it into a whole bunch of work. But…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What’s work? What’s work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s easy. Just eat the pizza at the pizza place. Yeah, but you said you eat it and then you can’t move because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just had like 20 pounds of dough and sauce.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well anyway, and I will say also though, I did a couple times reheat pizza in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my dumb steam toaster, and it’s really very good at reheating pizza.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, you would think a little bit of steam would make it soggy. No, it just softens the crust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit, so it doesn’t get like that rock hard reheated crust texture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If it’s rock hard, you’re over cooking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I mean, Sicilian would be harder, but I’m talking about like a regular pizza slice. If you put a regular pizza

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slice in an oven or a toaster oven to reheat, you run a pretty significant chance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the crush getting pretty hard. And if you have a dumb steam toaster and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can somehow cram a slice of pizza into it, which it really doesn’t fit gracefully in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really good. Like I strongly recommend it. It’s amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For the proponents of the skillet technique, overrated. Too fidgety,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re dirty a pan, and the difference between doing it in a good toaster oven is not worth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There are pros and cons of both approaches, I would never choose the set of trade-offs for the skillet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heating up a pizza.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, frankly, the best way to eat pizza is to just eat it fresh. The second best way to eat pizza is cold.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, you and your cold pizza. My wife is into the cold pizza. I don’t completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John object to it, but I do not prefer it. And I love reheated pizza, like not as much as reheated lasagna,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which everyone knows is the best way, literally the best way to have lasagna. Oh, facts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that fresh. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reheated pizza is, uh, is I love it. It’s amazing. Like part of the fun of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting pizzas to have three, it’s different than the fresh pizza and I like the fresh pizza better, but I still like to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have, it’s like turkey leftovers. It’s like the second version of the meal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m glad you went on your pilgrimage. This is making me want to like figure out a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to have the three of us come together and do like John’s a bleaker and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do Emilio’s and somehow make like a a video or a podcast out of it or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know how, but.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} No

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one wants to see us stuff our face with unhealthy food. Oh, I bet they do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I wanna stuff my face with unhealthy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John food, but I don’t think people need to watch it. It’s a private time between me and my pizza, my garlic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nuts.