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

619: Master Plan to Take Over the World

26 Dec 2024

Disk-cloning drama, recognizing obscene waveforms, Storacusa progress, and the plug-in-hybrid life.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Members like you! Become a member for ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

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

Chapters

  1. Holiday overlap
  2. Member special: How It’s Made
  3. Recognizing audio waveforms
  4. Follow-up: Emo-Siri
  5. Follow-up: Immersive capture
  6. Storacusa feedback & progress
  7. Ice Dive
  8. Bootable Mac clones
  9. #askatp: Recents folder
  10. #askatp: Path for scripts
  11. #askatp: macOS firewall
  12. #askatp: Current cameras
  13. Ending theme
  14. Neutral: The plug-in-hybrid life

Holiday overlap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Happy almost Christmas and almost Hanukkah. Did you know that Hanukkah and Christmas, the first night of Hanukkah is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christmas Day?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I heard that and that’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual, right? It happens every once in a while. I don’t love it. I don’t love it, to be honest with you, because we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a blended household in many different ways. I guess I’m a blended human

⏹️ ▶️ Casey title insofar as I think I’ve said many times on the show, dad was raised Jewish, although

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he doesn’t really practice now. Mom was raised Catholic, doesn’t really practice. So I I was basically raised

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeling guilty for everything. We celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I was growing up and in my family and, you know, with Aaron and the kids, we recognize

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hanukkah and to a small degree celebrate it and of course Christmas and don’t love

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they overlap like this. Not my favorite.

⏹️ ▶️ John What’s bad about it? What’s bad about the overlap?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because then neither one of them, well, Christmas, first of all, Christmas overshadows everything, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find. I mean, I get it. That’s that. sense. But then Hanukkah doesn’t have the space to like be its

⏹️ ▶️ Casey own thing, to like be its own person, if you will. And that kind of bums me out. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. It also, you know, how do you delineate the presence and what’s from Santa

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what isn’t and what’s, you know, Hanukkah and what isn’t and it’s I don’t know it’s fine it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just not my favorite but you know what is my favorite?

Member special: How It’s Made

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing member specials. And we did a member special, uh, and even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the last recording of the regular episodes, but we did what is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the worst promo for that member special. Uh, when we recorded it actually happened,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe at the very end of the episode and through the magic of editing and Marco, he shimmied it up to the front,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’re going to make an attempt at doing a better copy this time. So let me tell you, guess what? There’s a new member special

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s called HP Insider Making the Show. And this was John’s idea, as many of them are. So John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you like me to summarize or would you like to give the pitch?

⏹️ ▶️ John I can give a pitch. And actually it wasn’t my idea. It was sent from a listener, but that’s the whole point of these things.

⏹️ ▶️ John We get asked all the time questions about the making of the show, the mechanics of

⏹️ ▶️ John making of the show from people who want to start their own podcast, from people who are just curious.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we sometimes we answer them and ask ATP. Sometimes we say things offhandedly. We thought it would be a good idea

⏹️ ▶️ John to have a single episode of the show that we can point people to to say, if you would like to know how we make

⏹️ ▶️ John the show from beginning to end, uh, each week, here is an episode for you. You’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John hear about our process. You’ll hear about, uh, the equipment we use. You’ll hear about,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, all the different aspects, gathering up the show, um, uh, writing both versions of the show notes,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, editing the episode, posting the episode, things we think about when we’re recording it and just everything you can imagine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it really is. It’s, it might sound boring to you like, oh, great. you’re going to tell me the nuts and bolts of

⏹️ ▶️ John how you make a podcast. Why would I care about this? But hopefully there’ll be at least some insight into how we think

⏹️ ▶️ John about the show. And certainly lots of tidbits about the gear we

⏹️ ▶️ John use, which is not particularly exciting. And hopefully when you listen to this, you realize making a podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not about the software. It’s not about the hardware, like, like the holiday season.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s about the people.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s true though, it’s very true. No, I thought it was a fun episode. This is classic ATP because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we sat down, I think all three of us thought, eh, it’ll be 30, 45 minutes, maybe an hour. And Marco, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the total?

⏹️ ▶️ John I never think that, but apparently you do a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You always come

⏹️ ▶️ John to the member specials thinking this is gonna be 45 minutes. You’ll say it in the show, you’ll say, yeah, we should be done in 45 minutes. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco happen. It’s never gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I came upstairs to record that, I told Tiff, I’m like, I bet I can come down afterwards and watch some TV with you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right? I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco saying.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like at most an hour.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco JSL Right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure I said almost verbatim the exact same thing to Aaron. And like an hour in, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had even gotten past John and slightly me, but mostly John assembling the internal notes for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the week. And I think I sent Aaron a text like, yep, I’ll see you tomorrow. JSL Yep. JSL

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I think I sound like I’m complaining and whining. And if I do, I apologize. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to. It was just one of those things where I was so convinced, so convinced that it was going to be a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick one and it was not a quick one. So that being said, it was fun and I did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really enjoy it. And I think there is a lot of fun to be had, even for the three of us, hearing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how each of us thinks about our different like roles in the creation of the show. Cause obviously we talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but it’s not often that we get to, I don’t know, get to the feels behind it. And it wasn’t a heavy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeling show, but there’s a little bit of that too. I don’t know. It was just, it was fun and I really enjoyed it. And even if you’re not looking to start a podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think there’s something in there for everyone. So check it out. Now, John, if you aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey already a member and thus don’t have access to this incredible content, how would one go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about becoming a

⏹️ ▶️ John member? Very simple. Go to atp.fm slash join and you can become a member. Don’t want to pay

⏹️ ▶️ John for your own membership? Get someone else to do it for you. Atp.fm slash gift. Direct them

⏹️ ▶️ John to that page. Tell them your email address. They can buy you a membership. You can get it for the holidays,

⏹️ ▶️ John redeem it and have a membership that someone else paid for, it’s the perfect time of year for it. Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I believe you can schedule delivery or is it on, what, how is it set up? Do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you? If

⏹️ ▶️ John only you knew how our website works.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been so long since I’ve looked at this because I did your user acceptance testing for you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was so long ago I forgot exactly how

⏹️ ▶️ John it works. Yeah, it’s, we’re having pretty good luck with this. Here’s how it works. When you buy someone

⏹️ ▶️ John a gift membership, it does not immediately like send them an email and like spoil it for them or whatever. And I considered

⏹️ ▶️ John having a thing where like you can schedule for when it’s going to arrive or whatever, but in the end I picked the simpler

⏹️ ▶️ John method, which so far has been working really well, which is when the person who is buying the gift buys

⏹️ ▶️ John the gift membership, after they’ve successfully bought it, there’s a screen that says, here’s what you gotta do,

⏹️ ▶️ John take this link, or this promo code, or whatever, like the seven different things it explains, and give

⏹️ ▶️ John them to the other person however you feel like it. You can message them, you can write it on a piece of paper,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can put it in a card, you can print this webpage out as a PDF and send it, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John do anything you want. It’s just like, you’re never gonna lose this information. It will always be like the gift

⏹️ ▶️ John giver, it will always be on their page at atb.fm. They can always see the gifts they gave. They can always get the link.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna lose it if you miss that screen. But it just says, you have to give it to them. Then you can give it to them

⏹️ ▶️ John whenever you want. Like whatever holiday you’re celebrating, wherever you are, however you wanna give it, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have the choice. And that’s been working really well. Some people have been getting early presents

⏹️ ▶️ John because I’ve done a little bit of support for people who bought a present. And I guess they didn’t wait for Christmas or Hanukkah. They’re just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, here you go, giving it to you immediately. But yeah, you can decide when you want to deliver it and how you want to deliver it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you want to print it out and put it in a nice little card, that would be nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so you should go to hp.fm slash join or hp.fm slash gift and check it out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have built up quite the assembly of pretty solid member specials that run the gamut

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from food, movies, feelings, all sorts of stuff. So you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should definitely check it out. I think there’s a lot of good stuff in there.

Recognizing audio waveforms

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. And speaking of that member special, Martim asks, on your latest member special, you forgot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing. What’s with the, hey, future Marco, blah, blah, blah, goodbye, future Marco. Goodbye.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so the comment, I think I’d said it off the cuff probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a year ago now, but that’s my cue to Marco to say, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re entering in like a huddle to use football terms. We’re going to do some kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of chit-chat amongst the three of us that we don’t intend to air on the released version of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode. Obviously, if you are a member, you will hear all of this in the bootleg. But the idea

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is for Marco to be able to see or hear this in the future and take out that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversation. And I think a lot of, I presume the goodbye is in part to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to get a little bit of cross-talk to cue you that something’s going on. What does it look like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your end? That’s exactly it. Whenever the speaker changes, it’s very visually obvious, as as I’m skimming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the track. And so I say bye because that’ll be like a blip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my track that will show up as a block and it’ll be very obvious as I’m skimming forward listening. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a point that needs attention, so that’s why.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you at the point, I meant to ask this during the episode and I completely forgot and I’m so mad at myself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you at the point that you can recognize the waveform for Hello Future Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not the answer to that is yes or no, what waveforms, like verbal ticks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, especially for me, do you, or can you visually recognize at this point?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, are you at the point that you can see my, that being said, waveform?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t, I don’t look that closely and I don’t recognize words that well. What I,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I can do is, um, you know, so during the live recording,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same reason, um, if somebody swears, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say afterwards, beep, same reason so that just so that I will have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a block on my track so that as I’m skimming through I’ll see, oh, crosstalk, and I’ll pay attention to that, I’ll play it and see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that is. When I am beeping out a swear word, obviously you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it to be bleeped out in such a way that the adults listening get the intention, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t get anybody in trouble, and so I will try to leave in the first consonant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound or whatever so that adults can figure out what word was there in case it’s not super obvious.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have figured out what the waveforms look like of common swear words so I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which parts to remove. Otherwise, otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, for a while I would try to remove things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the, one of the peeves I have about modern speech. This is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not something that I should care about. I don’t like how we’ve all started to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco end sentences with right. Oh yes. I really don’t like that and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to try to edit that out. And it’s just so many of them, it’s just impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s just it’s way too much of a job. But I used to look for that. Like for a period,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would actually look for at the end of sentences before a gap in the waveform, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could often see the right, right? So I would actually try to edit them out if I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could. And they’re actually somewhat tricky to edit out a lot of the time. Sometimes you’d be surprised how often you can just cut

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out and the sentence sounds better without them every time. But sometimes like the way it works with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the person’s breath or whatever or the next word or whatever. Sometimes you can’t cleanly edit it out. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than those two things, I don’t really recognize individual waveforms, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s enough information in the track to do that. Like it’s mostly amplitude you’re seeing in the waveforms

⏹️ ▶️ John and logic. You don’t you don’t have enough frequency information and it’s too squished together on the screen with too few

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels that I don’t think you could actually see high pitch versus low pitch like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no way you could quote unquote recognize a waveform visually except by like brute force pattern

⏹️ ▶️ John matching of like well this is what the amplitude bump tends to look like for this word when this person says

⏹️ ▶️ John it which is not quite the same thing but it’s the type of thing where you could easily fool it by making

⏹️ ▶️ John a totally different word with different frequencies with similar amplitudes so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well but there are certain words where like so when I’m saying, you know, the pieces of the swear word, like for example,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the S word, the shh at the beginning, that’s a very distinctive look on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the rest of the word doesn’t look like that at all. So that’s why you can recognize certain sounds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do look very distinctive in a way or form, but I’m not looking that closely at everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re saying because that would take 12 hours to edit a show. That would be ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ John But even the shh, it’s mostly just about amplitude And because you don’t have the frequency information

⏹️ ▶️ John in there, it’s too, like, unless you’re zoomed all the way in and can literally see, like, I don’t think the auto

⏹️ ▶️ John editor even lets you zoom in that far to be able to see the waves and figure out the distance between the

⏹️ ▶️ John peaks to come up with the frequency to know what frequency the S sound is.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, the frequencies we’re dealing with would be so, it would be absurd to try to recognize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And now there are certain wave editors will allow you to show, instead of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amplitude view, they’ll show you a frequency breakdown, which, and it looks kind of like this, like, you know, colorful,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost like a histogram kind of view. It’s easier to see different word shapes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that view in certain ways, but I’m not advanced enough to do that, and logic doesn’t show that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, the way I’m editing. So there are many ways to view sound information when you’re editing, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain contexts, like if I’m pulling noise out, like if somebody had, you know, their leaf blower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guy show up next door, or the air conditioner or the fan running, if I’m doing noise removal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I’ll pull it into iZotope RX, which is kind of an advanced wave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco editor with all different noise removal and fixing tools for sound problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And iZotope, I will see the frequency breakdown there. I’ll be able to see down like, oh, there’s the 60

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hertz. That’s the leaf blower. So I’ll pull that one out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are different techniques to use different views to show you what you need to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in audio. But none of those really work for like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing the words as you’re going by. I think if that’s the kind of view you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want, it’s probably better these days to use some kind of editor or editor service that transcribes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the audio and then just puts the words below it. Which I’ve never seen that done in like in Logic, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know there are apps that can do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Descript does it, the app that Merlin loves, where you actually edit it by, you edit the audio by editing

⏹️ ▶️ John the text, because it just puts a transcript there. And if you see a word that you want to remove, you just literally remove the word from

⏹️ ▶️ John the text and it removes the waveform. It’s a different way of doing things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s fascinating. Thank you.

Follow-up: Emo-Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, let’s talk about Emo Siri. Dan Milcars writes, Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has definitely gotten sassier in iOS 18. I like it. I sent a text to my daughter about it when I noticed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the timestamp on the text was only after iOS 18.0, not 18.2. We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a few different pieces of feedback with regard to this. I had thought it was new in 18.2 because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t notice it before then. Dan obviously says that it was before for him.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, wrote to me, pretty sure the Siri thing you’ve experienced has shipped

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back during the 18 betas, but it relies on your devices having to download the updated Siri voice, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens at seemingly random times for different people. So that perhaps and probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does explain why for me it was 18.2, but for others, it wasn’t. With regard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to emo Siri, Dave Martin writes, not only have I noticed some effect in Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she just spoke a text message into my ears with a hint of doubt that the text wanted to portray, But I live in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Boston area like John. I’ve had cause to ask her to direct me to addresses in my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey town lately, and my town has a mid-word R in it. I jokingly speak the town name with a Boston accent, often

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exaggerated. Siri is doing that now too. I thought I misheard her the first time, but she did it again. So I guess you do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey park the car down at Harvard Yard. Am I right, John?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, John doesn’t have a Boston accent, remember? Except for all those words that have slight Boston accents, but other than those. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all zero

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them? Yeah, sure. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John Once again, of the many, many things Marco holds dear to himself incredibly wrong ideas like the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ John I have a Boston accent he will go to his grave believing it despite the fact that it is absolutely not true.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. Okay. It’s like I always think that you’ve been dissuaded of these things but then you bring them up a year later and you’re like well as

⏹️ ▶️ John we all know John has a Boston accent. Okay. Alright. Marco, take that one and just

⏹️ ▶️ John just remove it. Drop it in the trash. Sure. And then empty the trash.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In what order should I do that in, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John You sound so much like me. Oh my God. It’s just, it’s like I’m talking to myself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey God help me for defending John on this because nothing makes me happier than us making fun of John. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think our, I can’t even do it right. The ardor or whatever it is. That’s not it either. Whatever it is that John says, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just his bananas and just demonstrably terrible Long Island accents. He also had Mario.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That has nothing to do with Boston. That’s just Long Island. Parker doesn’t have a

⏹️ ▶️ John good ear for accents maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are products of where we spend time. I spent the first half of my life

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Midwest, and now I live in New York. And so the way I speak is some kind of probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird hybrid of some New Yorkish, some Midwestish. John

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks that he left Long Island 1,000 years ago and somehow has not picked up any influence

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from his surrounding area. And that’s just, it’s impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ John The influence has been a filing down of my Long Island accent. It has not been the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco adoption

⏹️ ▶️ John of a new accent for the new region.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, you have a hybrid. Exaggerated Boston

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accent. It’s a hybrid. It’s everyone has a hybrid accent of wherever they’ve lived. It’s kind of hybrid, new kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hybrid

⏹️ ▶️ John accent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this. Just the right awe and just the right. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right sync and just the right bounce. Oh my God. We’ve got to move on, but that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is amazing.

Follow-up: Immersive capture

⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to filming immersive video, which we’re also gonna talk about later, Video Alex

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, this camera is a modification of the Blackmagic URSA. Oh, I’m sorry, this was the Blackmagic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Immersive Camera specifically that we talked about last episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the URSA Cine Immersive, I believe, is the full name. Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that camera is a modification of the Blackmagic URSA, U-R-S-A. While the standard URSA has interchangeable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lenses and lens mounts, the lens on this new camera does not appear to be removable. The regular URSA Cine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is also only $15,000. I think this new camera has two sensors built into the front lens

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unit, which would have specific demands for cooling, hence the high price. So no, the lens won’t come off.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is just my best guess. There’s not much info on the Blackmagic website so far. I think Apple has been using the Insta360

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Titan for the Vision Pro stuff that they’ve been doing so far. I briefly was now Casey speaking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hi, this is Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I looked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into this briefly. Hello, FutureMarket. I looked into this briefly. And this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a weird, extremely weird looking like ball of a camera

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has apparently eight micro four thirds sensors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going around it, around the like mid axis of this orb. I don’t think I’m doing the best job of painting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a word picture, but it is really, really cool and really weird. Anyway, back to Video Alex.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It shoots full 360 degrees in stereo at 11K resolution. It has very large

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sensors and you can choose to shoot just 180 degrees. And by the way, Marco, you can rent the Titan from Lens Rentals today

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for $700 per week. The Insta360 Pro 2 is also great, 8K resolution renting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at $325 per week. But the software is fiddly. When I rented the Pro 2 a few

⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago for a project, it included seven SD cards for the recording and then seven SD

⏹️ ▶️ Casey readers and a seven port USB hub. Also monitoring is hard.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they all record like individually? I guess, yeah. And then you stitch

⏹️ ▶️ John it all together afterwards.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure the software that’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah. One more point on 3D video writes for you, Alex. In 2016, I worked with a company that had three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey live VR cameras at the Indy 500. They were seven GoPros and a custom

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rig with fiber adapters coming out of them that ran seven fiber feeds to three computers that did the stitching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey live and broadcast it to three headsets next door. They wanted to beat it to the internet, but ABC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shut them down immediately. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so all this is to say, so we were talking about the new Blackmagic camera for immersive video

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s coming out in the winter or spring this year. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were speculating, what is the state of VR capture, video capture

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware for VR 180, for immersive 180 degree field of view video? And it seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are other options out there. We have had a number of people send in reports like this and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing us different options that exist. But this is still very early days. Many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are hacky or limited. And as far as I could tell,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Blackmagic one, because it has 8K sensor per

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye and 8K resolution per eye that’s recording, that seems to be higher resolution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than not only everything else that we’re seeing from other companies, but also higher resolution than what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s actually serving to the Vision Pro, which probably makes some sense given

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Vision Pro only has 4K displays per eye. So that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. But like one thing I noticed when I’m watching the immersive video content is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not as sharp as I would like it to be. Like it’s kind of an odd experience with your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyes for lots of reasons. You know, we’ve mentioned in the past, like it’s weird because you think you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus on everything because in real life you would be able to focus on whatever you wanted. And you know, with VR video,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t. You can only focus on what was in focus by the lenses when they shot it. So one of the weird things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it is you can’t focus wherever you want. But another weird thing about it is it looks so realistic. It looks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much like you are there that when you try to look at something that should be sharp

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can kind of see the inherent softness of the pixels at that resolution,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you almost feel like your eyes can’t focus right. You like rub your eyes or like, you need to put on your glasses or something. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels weird because your eyes aren’t focusing as sharply as they would in real life

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s only 4K and being viewed at such close distances

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So anyway, all this to say, this is still very early days.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think for this, I think we’re in right now the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1X non-retina world here. And hopefully in the near future,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully we will be able to upgrade the resolution of both the cameras going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 8K per eye and then also hopefully the displays inside the headsets eventually will get higher resolution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. I’m glad to see like the hardware getting better than Blackmagic side. But that being said, there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are lots of reasons, including things like data size and complexity, why it seems like what almost everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing is 4k per eye. All the other hardware was 4k per eye.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The people will throw around the term 8k, but that just means there’s two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4k eyes, which is not 8k. That’s not what that means, but they, they throw around 8k as if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, Oh, it’s just four plus four. No, that’s not what that means, but okay. And the other thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that we were, I believe John was speculating about, you know, what possibilities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might exist for different lenses on this? You know, the reason the Blackmagic Cine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco immersive seems to have fixed lenses. We had a number of people write in to say basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the 180 degree field of view, pretty much like that is the lens that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a fixed perspective where that works. and that if you try any other perspective

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any other lens, focal length or anything, it just doesn’t look right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Certainly it wouldn’t look right if you tried to project it at 180. And speaking of projecting, like the using of

⏹️ ▶️ John the terms like 4K and 8K for headset recording of stuff and playing

⏹️ ▶️ John it back is not really appropriate because when we talk about a 4K TV, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can see all 4K of those pixels in front of you. But when you’re seeing something like immersive

⏹️ ▶️ John video when it was shot, quote unquote, in 8K per eye, you’re almost never seeing

⏹️ ▶️ John all the pixels that were shot in any one of your eyes because it wraps around you. You can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, if you could move back and shove the immersive video so

⏹️ ▶️ John far away from you that it’s like this little curved thing that’s in front of you. That’s a good point. Like, it looks like, you know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John Then you’d see all the pixels. But when you’re looking around, you’re like, oh, well, the screens inside the Vision Pro only have

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K, but you’re never looking at the whole thing that was recorded at once. So yeah, the resolution

⏹️ ▶️ John is insufficient. Oh, that’s true. They recorded it at 8K, but that 8K

⏹️ ▶️ John takes up 50 feet and you’re only looking at a tiny portion of it at a time, but your tiny portion has 4K per

⏹️ ▶️ John eyeball. So they need way more resolution if they want to match the resolution that is in the headset

⏹️ ▶️ John than recording it in 8K per eyeball.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like part of the big challenge with the sharpness and fidelity and resolution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everything in the Vision Pro is you have to think about like, you know, that effect of like yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s 4K per eye, but you are not seeing all of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4K pixels for all the content that is being used. It’s like the same way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where on a regular computer monitor, if you use one of the scaling modes that is not native

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the panel’s pixels, everything gets a little bit blurry in certain ways. And you can, especially if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you scale it to be larger than what the pixels can actually do. So it’s scaling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down a higher resolution image to the lower resolution pixels on the screen, things get blurry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way things are shown in a VR headset, you’re going through like multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different levels of that because you have the screens that actually physically exist in there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are being projected on through a system of lenses that kind of bend and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco warp it to go around you. And so first of all, the pixels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco per angular degree are different at different parts of your eye, Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle, you have more detail in the middle than you have on the edges, where they’re being like warped out. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like the warping happening there to try to map this, you know, rectangular screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fill your whole view. And then you have whatever the software is running inside of that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is like scaling itself to some virtual viewport, then projecting it onto the physical screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is itself warping it back around your eyes. So the result is you’re going through tons of those like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scaling steps, And there is nowhere near enough resolution yet with the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is seemingly possible to exist today or that we know how to make today. Like we have nowhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco near the number of pixels needed to make that look good for most things. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s both a hardware problem in the sense of, we need that 4K per eye to get a lot bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We need those to be at least 8K per eye and probably more than that. And that’s, given how hard it is to get 4K

⏹️ ▶️ Marco per eye today, I think we’re a ways off from that. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that, once we have higher resolution displays in the Vision Pro, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you also need higher resolution content. And so it’s easy to like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco render the UI higher resolution. Now, we can do that with computers, we know how to do that. But then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna need like the 8K per eye or more in the video that you’re watching. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a long way to go on all this

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. You need a lot more than that. Like if they increase the resolution of the screens inside the

⏹️ ▶️ John headset, that makes it so much harder for recording. Cause right now, as you look around,

⏹️ ▶️ John your field of view is 4K per eye. And you can imagine taking chunk, taking 4K per eye chunks

⏹️ ▶️ John out of the giant thing that is, was wrapping around you, right? So you

⏹️ ▶️ John look a little bit to the left, that’s 4K per eye and the part you can see now, look a little bit more to the left, you know, like just you’re taking

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K chunks out. Every single one of those 4K chunks of your field of view has to be at least 4K

⏹️ ▶️ John in the source material, right? Suddenly if those same field of view chunks are now 8K, because they doubled

⏹️ ▶️ John the, well, because they doubled the Ks, quadrupled the resolution or whatever of the eyepieces.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’ve just demanded that the source material also increase resolution by the same proportion.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, and we’re not even close to what it is now, but it’s like, you know, 8K per eye, right? How

⏹️ ▶️ John many different 4K, you know, field of view things can you get out of that?

⏹️ ▶️ John You can get like one looking all the way to your left and like non-overlapping ones. You can probably get three, four,

⏹️ ▶️ John five of those. So already your, your, the resolution is five times lower than it needs to be in each

⏹️ ▶️ John dimension. So yeah, there’s a long way to go. And this is even just for, you know, still single

⏹️ ▶️ John focal plane images or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, and that’s also, by the way, that’s also even more complicated by the fact that that’s also not linear.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the, if you look at like, you know, what, what the video data actually is, it’s too,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a fisheye view per eye. So if you, if you see like a fisheye picture,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a picture that actually has a 180 degree field of view, viewed on a flat screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks very bulbous. Like, you know, the middle of it is where almost all the detail is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And around the edges, there’s way less detail. Like once it is kind of re-projected

⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto like a sphere that you’re kind of looking at it from within when you’re in 3D. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Cause they’re, cause they’re recording it on a flat rectangle instead of recording it on the back of a sphere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So, so we actually are, are closer to the center of it looking pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on higher resolution screens. It’s still need more than 4K, but I think I bet the Blackmagic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, like I bet if you’re shooting an 8K, I bet the middle of it will look pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Vision Pro’s hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have some more feedback about immersive video. This is from an anonymous visual effects worker.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey While certainly the dedicated hardware for capturing immersive video is becoming more accessible, there’s ML-based

⏹️ ▶️ Casey approaches that are also rapidly becoming shockingly good. Depth Anything is a project, one of many,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can infer depth from a single monocular image. Monocular, monocular, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. While simultaneously being mostly temporally stable. This means that the depth

⏹️ ▶️ Casey approximations aren’t going to jump around on you between frames. My suspicion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that, while it will be a combination of hardware and software, it’s more likely that the solution will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lie more in the software, and less so in the specialized hardware. Imagine shooting on your iPhone 18’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultra wide camera and iOS processing the video into an immersive video in the background or maybe even real time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even being able to run a depth process on an old pre-iPhone era video and getting to watch that video in the Vision

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. That would be magic, can confirm. We’re probably a few years out from the iPhone’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultra wide video being of the quality you’d want, but it’s only a matter of time.

⏹️ ▶️ John That definitely sounds like a thing that Apple would try. They love to sort of do in software what they can’t quite do in

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware, witness the portrait mode, you know, background blur and stuff. So take a flat image and

⏹️ ▶️ John try to infer depth from it and then let you view it and have it be a little bit 3D-ish.

⏹️ ▶️ John That sounds like something that they would definitely try.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did try it. It’s new in Vision OS 2.0. It’s already there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. That’s the trying to add, did they just do it for your videos? Or did they do it for pictures?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it was stills. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think it’s only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stills. I viewed some stills earlier testing out that feature for the first time, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really weird. It’s really weird. My personal opinion of that, I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it on the show. It is cool. I would not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say it’s the mind bending, like this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen that a lot of people seem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pitch it as. I didn’t really get that bowled over by it, but it is very cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s an interesting toy to play with. You know, like all of their other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco early stuff like Portrait Mode, it works better with some content than others.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so like, you can find pictures where it looks really impressive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a pretty cool effect, but that is not universal.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this depth anything thing is like the reason it’s innovative or interesting is that it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple is doing with these still images, but now do that on every frame of video

⏹️ ▶️ John and have it not have it be consistent. So if it thinks the depth map is this in one frame

⏹️ ▶️ John of video, the next frame, the depth map shouldn’t be wildly different because it would look all sorts of wacky. So it’s got to sort of figure out

⏹️ ▶️ John where what the depth, what a stable depth map is for a moving image of things moving

⏹️ ▶️ John through the frame. and that would be interesting, but I would imagine it’s not going to be any better than the

⏹️ ▶️ John 2D version of it. So if you have whatever quality the 2D one is at, the video one

⏹️ ▶️ John is probably limited by that quality.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Then continuing on, James Laughlin writes, Google experimented

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with light field capture. First, static captures, see Welcome to Light Fields on Steam,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then video captures. And there’s a video from SIGGRAPH 2020. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey technical paper was immersive light field video with a layered mesh representation. And a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of poll quotes that I collected from this video, which is only like five minutes or something like that, it was very interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They said, are videos compressed efficiently for streaming over one gigabit per second internet connection? So you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could stream a full immersive video over a gigabit connection. Although

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess in retrospect, actually, this is already happening with Apple’s immersive stuff on considerably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than that. But whatever. Also, apparently the way they made this work was they put 46

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time synchronized, I don’t think they were literally GoPros, but effectively GoPros, in this sphere and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wired them all up together, like I said, so they could be time synchronized, and that’s the camera they used for this, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very interesting. Anyways, it allows for some six degree of freedoms movement, but still

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a small bubble around the capture device. And again, you can see that in the demo video. Another quote, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think John pulled this one, “‘Our pipeline produces volumetric free viewpoint video that can be explored with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey six degrees of freedom within a spherical 70 centimeter diameter viewing volume.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This allows you to move your head and change your perspective, peek behind objects and enjoy a greater sense of depth through motion parallax.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the camera you were describing that you’ll see in the video, it’s like many sort of SIGGRAPH

⏹️ ▶️ John research type papers. It’s one of the jankiest things you’ve ever seen. Picture just a big, clear plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John sphere with cameras stuck to the inside of it with tape. Like that’s what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, you know, it’s all through the magic of software. So that just, well, and the cameras are stuck,

⏹️ ▶️ John not at random, but like hand placed, roughly equal. It’s not like a precision

⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. They’re just kind of, I mean, I don’t know how precisely they’re putting that, but it looked pretty haphazard and pretty like

⏹️ ▶️ John DIY, right? And so what this gives you with, you know, a bunch of cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John and a plastic sphere and a lot of computers, which is the important part, is the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John to watch a video and while the video is playing, you can change

⏹️ ▶️ John your perspective in the video. You can do the thing that we were talking about last time where like if you have a video

⏹️ ▶️ John of a concert and you want to, you know, if you stand up when you’re watching it in a headset

⏹️ ▶️ John and you stand up on your couch while you’re watching it, the camera that recorded the video of the concert does not stand up. The

⏹️ ▶️ John camera was on a tripod, it never moved. It never got any higher or any lower, it never moved to the left, it never

⏹️ ▶️ John moved to the right. It was on a tripod the whole time, right? You can’t control that by you getting up with your headset,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? You should just sit sit sit still because then your movement will match the movement of the camera Which

⏹️ ▶️ John is no movement you can turn your head because the camera captured a field that is 80 to 180 degrees 360 or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John You can turn your head up and down left and right and that works fine, but you can’t move So this sort of light

⏹️ ▶️ John field capture thing lets you Move your head and have that

⏹️ ▶️ John motion reflected in the video as long as you move within a 70 centimeters or some

⏹️ ▶️ John viewing volume. So you can’t move a lot, but you can move. And there are demo videos of

⏹️ ▶️ John this on the website. We’ll put the links in the show notes. Go to the demo video, that’s just in a webpage. And you can move your

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse around essentially to say, all right, I’m watching this video. If you don’t move your mouse, it just looks like a video. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ John move your mouse, you can be like, now I can see more on the top of that workbench

⏹️ ▶️ John or less if I go down, right? You can move around left, right, up and down in the video, not

⏹️ ▶️ John just turning your head like QuickTime VR or these things, but moving within the video. And part of the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that is exciting about this paper is like, okay, the way they do that is essentially brute force it. Like they

⏹️ ▶️ John have, if you picture a series of concentric spheres,

⏹️ ▶️ John a little sphere, then a bigger one, then a bigger one, like concentric spherical shells, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they’re recording. And then when you move around, it’s sort of moving you through those shells. But as you can

⏹️ ▶️ John imagine, that’s just incredibly data intensive to do. So this paper is

⏹️ ▶️ John about how they figured out how to compress that down into, as Casey mentioned, a

⏹️ ▶️ John one gigabit video stream by figuring out what parts they can throw away and how to

⏹️ ▶️ John efficiently store all of them. And that’s the innovative part. Like instead of just saying, we need a

⏹️ ▶️ John giant supercomputer to do this, we can put this on a webpage and you can move around it and it looks okay and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John break up. You can look at the video, you can see what they’re constructing the video out

⏹️ ▶️ John of, all the different pieces of the shells as you move around, but they do a really good job of blending them together. So it

⏹️ ▶️ John really looks like, I don’t know how to describe it because there’s not really any parallel. Like even in Vision Pro, there’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ John any sort of like thing to compare it to, but like, like actually being there, if you were really there and you move

⏹️ ▶️ John and you like sat up or, you know, stood up or sat down, your perspective would change.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can do that with these videos. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, maybe it’s like the Harry Potter things with the little animated. No, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not even that. It’s holographic maybe, I don’t know. They can need to come up with a better marketing name for this, but

⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I was talking about of like the Bahamas thing. If they could do this and make it maybe a little bit bigger than a 70 centimeter

⏹️ ▶️ John diameter viewing volume, then you could walk around on the beach and it would all be

⏹️ ▶️ John captured live video. And you’re looking at a real thing. It’s not a 3D rendered scene.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just concentric spheres of live video from many different positions. Again, this is what I was getting at with last

⏹️ ▶️ John time with like the real estate things where they put a camera in six different places in a room, put it in like 6

⏹️ ▶️ John million places in the room. So now you can just walk into the room and look around. And again, different than

⏹️ ▶️ John making a 3D model of it, which is probably the much more efficient way to do this, but this would be all real video,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Somehow all real video. I’m not sure what the mechanics are, but it really is kind of like sci-fi

⏹️ ▶️ John fantasy stuff when I look at this, even though it is a very, very limited tech demo with very janky

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware, I’m still very impressed by it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is super cool. And then continuing on in a similar vein, Joseph Humphrey writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one technology I find fascinating and that could shape the future VR capture, if the R sticks around long enough,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is neural radiance fields. It’s essentially a photogrammetry based, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hope I got that right, method for capturing still 3D images of objects or entire environments. What’s remarkable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is its ability to render realistic perspectives from multiple angles complete with accurate reflections

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and specular highlights. So this is NERF, which is representing scenes as neural, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey E, radiance, R, fields, F, for view synthesis. Again, we’ll put a link in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a talk that was given by, among other people, Matthew Tancic. We present a method that achieves

⏹️ ▶️ Casey state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric

⏹️ ▶️ Casey scene function using a sparse set of input views. So I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I can tell you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey having watched the video, what it appears to be is let’s take, I think it’s a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of stills. I don’t recall if it was one or several. But one way or another, take one or more stills

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be able to figure out, OK, what is the depth in this? very much like the portrait videos

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it definitely is. I think it is more than one picture because the whole point is like, the thing I just described where you can watch

⏹️ ▶️ John a video and view it from different perspectives, this is the photo version of that, where it’s just one moment

⏹️ ▶️ John in time, but it’s captured from different perspectives. And then when you look at it, you have the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John to look from different angles at your still image. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So continuing on from Joseph Humphrey, while it’s not ready for video capture yet and the quality isn’t perfect,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meta has created an impressive demo for the Quest, and there’s a MetaNerf demo for the Quest,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is called Meta Horizon Hyperspace Demo. The description is, this is a demo experience to showcase our vision for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey photorealism as a profound new way to feel like you’re physically there. We created these digital replicas using mobile phone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey scanning and cloud-based processing. Scanning is not available to users today. So now returning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to Joseph, what excites me most is the potential to fully capture 3D scenes, including different perspectives,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey without the need for manual 3D modeling. If future research leads to viable, quote unquote, video version

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, the possibilities could be incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should check out that Google link because that’s what they’re doing. It’s basically the video version of that, but the 2D version of it is

⏹️ ▶️ John much more well-established. Like Nerf stuff has been around for a while. Again, this is from a 2020 paper.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you have the sort of still image version of it, that works really well for,

⏹️ ▶️ John to fool you into thinking it’s a dynamic environment, you can do what they do in video games. is just like, it’s basically a bunch of still textures,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then you put like some video of rippling water on top of the water thing. So the

⏹️ ▶️ John things that you expect to be moving are moving, but you know, or even just like, if you look

⏹️ ▶️ John at the demos of here, you can be convinced like that this is video until you notice like none of the blades of grass

⏹️ ▶️ John are moving or whatever. So the Google thing is exciting because they’re really trying to do it with video with very limited motion.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this Nerf thing is exciting because I imagine this is the type of thing you could actually do on a phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Wave your phone in front of a person, it takes 15 pictures, it reconstructs this, and now you have

⏹️ ▶️ John what appears to be a 3D image of the person.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, these video demos are incredibly impressive. by moving up from a person immersive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey video

Storacusa feedback & progress

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s talk about John’s app and some feedback with regard to it or things adjacent to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it. Wait, are we talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Storic Husa or are we talking about Forage Space?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know if

⏹️ ▶️ John you like Forage Space. Do you like the British person who pointed out that in UK English, those words don’t rhyme?

⏹️ ▶️ John Forage and Storage don’t rhyme?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, because they pronounce the O as an A. It’s Fireage Space or whatever. It’s ridiculous. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey must be their Boston accent. It is. A

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time. It’s a hybrid accent. Anyway, all right, so I’ll stick with Storic Husa. I’m going to keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco calling it Storacusa until you tell us another name. I like Forage Space.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also like Storacusa for the record, but I like Forage Space. I think that’s great. And you know, they’re the same people that can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand when we say hover, which is bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really care what they have to say. Theirs is English traditional. We’re English modern. Anyway. Storacusa.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave Nanian, friend of the show, Dave Nanian. Dave Nanian writes, and this is with regard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to SuperDuper’s Smart Update and making clones. Dave writes, to be clear, Smart Update does not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey separate clones unless, oh excuse me, not making clones, I’m sorry, using clones on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the file system. To be clear, Smart Update does not separate clones unless those clones change, which starts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to separate them on the source as well. What we can’t do is only change the diverged blocks. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also, I’m not worried about my support because I can offer solutions. I’m worried about things like migration.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, this is going to be run by those who are out of space, not those who want to optimize their drive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the thing about a Smart Update, like that’s a good nuance about what I was describing last time like on

⏹️ ▶️ John the first clone with super duper it will faithfully reproduce your clones. So

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have some drive that is essentially over provisioned because you have you know many many clones of

⏹️ ▶️ John a very large file that if they all took up their individual space it would overflow your drive

⏹️ ▶️ John when you do that first erasing clone with super duper it will faithfully reproduce that but in subsequent

⏹️ ▶️ John clones like do using smart update which says hey just just copy the stuff that’s changed since last time.

⏹️ ▶️ John At that point, if one of the clones has changed and diverged on the source,

⏹️ ▶️ John it can diverge a little bit at a time based on how much has differed from the other ones. But during smart

⏹️ ▶️ John update, if it’s a diverge at all, you get an entire complete separate copy during the smart update.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that can cause you to slowly fill your quote unquote equally sized drive with a series of smart updates.

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, you can always fix this by doing an erase update and that will restore all your clones. but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just a fact of life. And in terms of people oversubscribing their disks

⏹️ ▶️ John and having problems during migration, yeah, that’s potentially a problem. Like I said, that could be a problem today

⏹️ ▶️ John because the Finder does the same thing when you duplicate files. And depending on how oversubscribed people are on their drives, they

⏹️ ▶️ John could already be in a situation where they can’t migrate. I would hope that Apple would come up with a way

⏹️ ▶️ John to faithfully reproduce clones during the migration process. That would be very helpful. They certainly

⏹️ ▶️ John have the expertise, technology, and access to the innards of Mac OS to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I also don’t see that as something that is forthcoming. So make sure your drives are always big enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peter Marks writes, all this talk of RAM doubler and disk doubler and ATP triggered a memory of a time in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 90s when someone released software that drastically sped up Finder copies. I was working at Apple at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and we were amazed. It turned out, this is such

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an amazing story. It turned out that the Finder was updating the progress bar so frequently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it slowed down the file copy. Amazing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John absolutely amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Still

⏹️ ▶️ John a modern thing. Early in my development of my app that I’m working on, I

⏹️ ▶️ John was testing the speed of scanning for duplicates and stuff like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I, at first, tried the naive implementation of every time you’ve scanned another

⏹️ ▶️ John item, convey that information in the UI. And scanning,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially on SSD, goes really, really fast. and probably faster than 60

⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second. It was a lot of updates. I’m not sure if it was slowing things down,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I think it might’ve actually gotten faster when I throttled the UI

⏹️ ▶️ John updates, because you don’t want, I mean, it’s probably not that big of a deal, especially since it’s just separate threads, and I have a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of cores and had a thread dedicated just updating the UI, but it’s still kind of a waste. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John updating the UI at faster than the refresh rate of the screen is usually

⏹️ ▶️ John not a good idea. And then back in the bad old days, I think it was just probably burning CPU because you didn’t have multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John cores. And I think it was probably wasting a lot of CPU time, you know, updating the UI as fast as it possibly

⏹️ ▶️ John could. I think he might be referring to Speed Doubler, the thing I mentioned on the past show. I don’t remember what

⏹️ ▶️ John Speed Doubler did. I only remember that I ran it and it did make things perceptibly faster. And maybe this was one of the things that it sped up file copies

⏹️ ▶️ John by updating the progress bar less frequently.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Harvey Simon writes, why should we care about how much free space we have if we’ve turned on desktop and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey document sync in iCloud Drive? If we run low on storage, older files are offloaded to iCloud, freeing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up space locally, especially if one has, say, a desktop Mac with large SSD and a MacBook with an only 256-gig SSD.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why worry if 256 gigs is sufficient if it looks like all one’s files are where they belong and everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey backed up and you’re online? I don’t personally like, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on paper, this makes sense, but I don’t think I would trust Apple to do this and do this well, personally.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it looks like everything’s there until you need that one file and you don’t have an internet connection.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And also

⏹️ ▶️ John I will add that some cloud services, in my experience, iCloud Drive, are not really great

⏹️ ▶️ John about doing the thing you want them to do right now, right now. I know they have pinning for iCloud now, finally,

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can say, please don’t offload this file. I always want it to be local. But in situations,

⏹️ ▶️ John even when you have a network connection, you can be waiting for iCloud to take its sweet time to

⏹️ ▶️ John do something. I talked about my son’s iCloud file, iCloud Drive disaster where he had so many files.

⏹️ ▶️ John you could just sit there staring at them for all day saying, when is it going to download the files that are in this folder? You can

⏹️ ▶️ John double click them and it would just sit there spinning and it’s like, eventually it might do it or maybe it never will

⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s too many files. It’s not a, I’m not a fan of iCloud Drive. I’ve never

⏹️ ▶️ John been a fan. I continue not to be a fan. That big disaster with my son did not make me a fan. That’s years after iCloud Drive has been

⏹️ ▶️ John out for a while. I know people have a lot of success with it, but I think they’re using it lightly.

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have lots of files. They don’t have lots of churn. And it’s just like, oh, it’s magic.

⏹️ ▶️ John My files are just always there. In my experience, that is not how iCloud Drive works when

⏹️ ▶️ John pressed even a little bit. Dropbox, at the very least, has, like I said, one of the things I like about

⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox is if you use it the old way, I’m still not using the one with the file providers, which I know

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone else is probably using, but somehow I’m still not updated to it. But the old one, when you launched it,

⏹️ ▶️ John it would brute force right now, right now, with all its CPU cycles,

⏹️ ▶️ John download all the files locally. I’d had it not to do streaming, keep every file local, like the old style, old school

⏹️ ▶️ John way, I could see it working. It would go through the files, find

⏹️ ▶️ John all the ones that have changed, download them all and then be done. I was never staring at like a little cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John icon and list you in the finder wondering, when is it gonna download? Is there anything I can make it download faster? So

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, as for should we care about disk space? If you keep everything in like a, you know, Google

⏹️ ▶️ John Drive or OneDrive or something that you do trust that you think is reliable, that you can actually get to upload and download files

⏹️ ▶️ John when you need them to, and you’re always connected to the network, sure, feel free. But I think that

⏹️ ▶️ John for most people, they either don’t have as reliable network access as that, or they don’t have fast

⏹️ ▶️ John enough network access as that, it’s both, or both. And even if you do have all that, I have very fast, very reliable

⏹️ ▶️ John network access in my house. Practically speaking, I don’t wanna have to wait around for something to download.

⏹️ ▶️ John If I wanna like, you know, we’re doing our member special on Kiki’s Delivery Service, and I wanna scrub through the movie, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna have to wait for a multi-gigabyte movie to download. I just double-click it and move the scrubber, and it should be as fast as

⏹️ ▶️ John my SSD can read it. And I don’t have to worry about, oh, that file isn’t there yet. How fast can you download a gigabyte? Because remember,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just your network connection. The server has to serve it to you at that speed. Your network connection can be as fast as you want, but if

⏹️ ▶️ John the server is doling the thing out to you at a slow data rate because it’s overwhelmed with doing a bunch of other stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John or because the network connection between you and it is slow, you’re still SOL. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you think local storage is still not relevant and you’re leading that life,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s good for you, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Ice Dive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk some topics. And Marco, you had yet more homework. I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve done maybe three out of four of the last episodes. You’ve had some sort

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Vision Pro related homework. And here we are yet again with Vision Pro related homework. Apple, right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after we recorded last week, released a new episode of their Adventure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey series. And this one is called Ice Dive. And it’s 15 minutes long. Its peers off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top of my head are, was it the hot? No, was the tightrope walker and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, uh, parkour, if I’m not mistaken, where the two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco others,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, and this one is ice dive where we follow, um, an ice diver, an ice

⏹️ ▶️ Casey diver, that’s trying to set a world record for swimming 200 yards,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is something like 180 meters underwater with, you know, a fin on, but with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one breath of air. And so he is swimming, hopefully, 200 yards, one breath of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey air under, you know, under ice in the water under ice. So it’s probably a little bit cold.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s very, very cold. He doesn’t wetsuit on, but still. Anyways, it’s like 15 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wanted to not only alert some of you that this exists, but I also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to hear your thoughts and I have some thoughts. Would you like me to start or would you like to start?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think mine will be pretty quick. I didn’t get all the way through it. I got about eight minutes in. I stopped because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was getting motion sick.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, really? Oh, that’s very surprising to me. Huh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So this, so this series, the, you know, I didn’t see the middle one, the parkour one. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw the tight rope walking one. I got about the same amount into that one before I had to stop.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This series does a lot more camera movement and a lot more cuts between different scenes. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what I find is like, I’m trying to focus on things. And then all of a sudden, boom,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re cut away. And then, oh, now I’m flying over a mountain. Whoa! So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot more motion in this. And this series too, they focus on very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco close up shots of people and things. So similar to like, you know, the very first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opening scene of the tightrope walking one, I described in the past how like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like right in front of this woman’s face. It’s a little unnerving. You’re like, I would never be this close

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a person I was not romantically involved with, you know, in any other context in life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it kind of feels wrong to be that close to somebody and to have it look so lifelike. Well, they start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one the same way with the swimmer guy. So again, it’s like, whoa, this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very intimate, a little bit oddly so. So they keep doing all these closeup shots of people and things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think they are doing the closeup shots with an assumption of sharpness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as I was saying earlier, isn’t actually there in the viewing experience. So what you get is really closeup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people that look a little bit out of focus a little bit blurry or a little bit soft. And so your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyes, it like plays tricks on your eyes in ways that the other immersive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco series, I haven’t had that much of a problem with, um, because I think they just shot like a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit further away from things, uh, with a little bit less camera movement. So this one, this, this series, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just, I can’t like my eyes and my motion brain, I think can’t handle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this series. Uh, but Hey, I’m glad they’re putting out more content.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, again, the pace of the new content has been really good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bummed, sorry, I’m grading on a heavy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco curve there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be clear, you can still watch every single bit of immersive video on the Vision Pro the first night you take one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I think that is true. And certainly Underscore’s chart from a few weeks back would probably lend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey credence to it. Anyways, I wanted to call this out, partially, like I said, because it’s new,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also I thought that this one was possibly my favorite of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like reality, or not reality, like docu series is that Apple has done so far.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, I feel like it’s a bit longer. I, my recollection is the parkour one was closer to 10 ish minutes, and this is like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey full 15 or so. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what do I think made this good?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I didn’t get a chance to look and see if the director is the same or not, but she did a phenomenal job on this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. And I think part of what I really, really enjoyed about this was that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The, the, the tightrope walking one just had the, the, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey smell of it being completely staged, like, you know, of course, at one point she’s going to fall off the tightrope

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and of course she’s tethered to it, so it’s no big deal, but you still have that moment and whatnot. The parkour

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one was a little of that, but they tried to a degree to build

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of a story and toward the end, spoiler alert, they’re trying to do like a really big jump and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re supposed to be stressed out about whether or not they’re going to make the jump. And I mean, you are to a degree, because you can look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey down where, where the camera is and see how high up they are. But it was kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a contrived story. You know, it was clear that it was a story, but it was kind of forced. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one, there is a, a, a plot and I’m using air quotes here, but there’s a plot to it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a thing, a challenge that, that is going to be conquered if all goes according

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to plan and there’s consequences if it doesn’t. And so you have a hero and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the villain, I guess, to the degree that there is, is the situation, but there’s a hero and you’re watching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hero’s journey, literally. And not only that, but I thought, I mean, I didn’t have any motion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sickness problems and I thought that the way it was filmed was good. There’s some annotations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the video showing how far away everything is and like where the start is and where the end is. And it’s not overdone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s in that Apple style that that they’re developing over these immersive videos that I like.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just thought it was really, really, really good. And I really enjoyed it. And I thought it was it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very captivating. And so here again, if you live near an Apple store, have a friend that has one of these,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume they’ll let you watch it if you want to. And I think it’s worth your time. I thought it was pretty darn good. So check that out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Adventure Ice Dive. John, thoughts

⏹️ ▶️ John on this? I can’t believe Marco is getting motion sick and you’re not. I mean, neither one of you is particularly prone to it, but, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s It’s one of the, I feel like it’s one of the limitations of this type of content. It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how you can get over that other than just not making content

⏹️ ▶️ John that moves around too much. Because it’s really limiting from

⏹️ ▶️ John the, like the recording perspective to try to do interesting things or show something dynamic.

⏹️ ▶️ John And again, the assumption is that, you know, the person who’s watching it is not

⏹️ ▶️ John going to know how to move to match the movement of the camera, even if they could, which they probably can’t because

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re sitting on their couch. So there’s always going to be this disconnect between what you see and

⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re actually feeling as you sit there. So yeah, I think this stuff is cool and I

⏹️ ▶️ John like to watch it, but I definitely don’t like to feel sick. So I’m torn.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. No, I just think it’s really cool. And again, If you have the ability to go check this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, I strongly encourage you to.

Bootable Mac clones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking earlier of Dave Nanian and SuperDuper, there’s been a bit of a brouhaha

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over bootable backups on macOS. And so, to back up a little bit and set the stage,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SuperDuper, and I can’t speak for Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a, I guess, a competitive product to SuperDuper,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only ever used SuperDuper. But anyway, SuperDuper’s thing, or one of its things, is that you can create a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bootable backup of your drive and then update it, you know, every night, every other night, you know, however often you want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to update it. But the key is that if you plug in this external drive and you know do whatever Incantation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and dance you need to do in order to tell your Mac to boot from it It should be able to boot from it and that’s worked really really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well for a really really really long time But then a week or so ago

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whenever I guess 15-2 came out Dave had problems and so Dave

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote a blog post of which I will read some excerpts Mac OS 15.2 was released with a surprise a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey awful surprise Apple broke the replicator or ASR Apple software restore Toward

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of replicating the data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either preboot or recovery, it fails with a resource

⏹️ ▶️ Casey busy error. In the past, resource busy could be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But this new bug means on most systems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s no fix. It just fails. Since Apple took away the ability for third parties, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the super duper folks, to copy the OS, it took on the responsibility themselves. It’s been up to them to ensure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this functionality continues to work. And in that, they failed in Mac OS 15.2. Because this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is their code, and we’re forced to rely on it to copy the OS, OS copying will not work until they fix it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To put it bluntly, this sucks. It’s bad enough we have to work around other bugs in this code. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it breaks completely, we’re stuck pointing fingers and offering workarounds that don’t involve the replicator.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, with that said, we had a response, to a degree, from Mike Bombich,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is the or a developer on Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac OS. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey took out some of the spicier hot takes in this blog post, but it was a spicy blog post.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it might be worth checking out if you’re interested. Anyways, Mike writes, while some developers seem surprised by a change

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Mac OS 15.2, there’s a little bit spice, we’ve known for several years that making bootable backups would eventually become impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We shifted carbon copy cloner strategy away from relying on external boots so our users wouldn’t be affected by this inevitable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey result. Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the Mac OS Big Sur changes that affected how third

⏹️ ▶️ Casey party developers would able to make copies of the system. In that blog post, I made reference to a conference call that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had with Apple on December 2, 2020. Participating in that conference call was the APFS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey team lead, someone from developer technical support, and to my surprise, Apple’s director of product marketing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I joined the call, I was prepared for a technical discussion of what was broken in the ASR and whether Apple would be able to fix those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues and make it reliable enough for a commercial backup solution. The call didn’t quite go in that direction. The marketing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey director kicked off the call by asking, quote, so how would it look if someday in the future you simply couldn’t make a a copy of the system at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He and the more technical folks on the call went on to explain that why only a why only ASR could be allowed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to copy the system, and that they were committed to addressing any problems with it as long as it did not require making a compromise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to platform security. Platform security is a top priority at Apple. And one of the keys to that security

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a secure boot environment, allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify key

⏹️ ▶️ Casey system components. Some of this can be mitigated by only allowing Apple’s ASR utility to make the copy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s still inherent opportunities to inject changes when copying system files. Apple has invested

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of effort into the recovery mode environment in Migration Assistant. It has become trivial to boot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac into recovery mode, perform a clean and secure install of the system, verified and signed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then recover user data via Migration Assistant. All of that can be done without compromising the security of the boot environment.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Will Apple fix this issue so that bootable backups can limp along a little further? Maybe, but that’s getting to be a moot question.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey platform security.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so a couple of things here. To start, why do we care

⏹️ ▶️ John about bootable backups? Why do we use something like SuperDuper? Why is this a valuable thing to have?

⏹️ ▶️ John And most importantly on Mike’s post, why is it, why is recovery

⏹️ ▶️ John mode not a sufficient replacement? The magic of bootable

⏹️ ▶️ John backups is that if something goes wrong with your main drive, you can just reboot

⏹️ ▶️ John and be back up and running in the time it takes you to boot from your

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey other drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John This was much more important in the days of spinning disks, and also much more reliable

⏹️ ▶️ John in the days before Apple Silicon, because as we noted on a show a week or two ago,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon Macs cannot really boot from external drives. They always essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John boot from the internal drive and then say, oh, I see you wanted to boot from an external drive and essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John hand off control and continue to boot from there. But the secure boot environment is all contained

⏹️ ▶️ John within the hardware that Apple sells. And it’s, you know, cryptographically

⏹️ ▶️ John as secure as it can be knowing that it’s booting off a known good system and allowing that

⏹️ ▶️ John all to be bypassed by saying, just trust whatever’s on this drive is a, you know, a potential problem, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of, that’s the secure boot environment that Apple is defending. That’s why Apple Silicon Macs work

⏹️ ▶️ John like they do. But what it also means is, unlike the old days, if your boot drive like

⏹️ ▶️ John dies, dies, like, you know, is totally broken or is fried, or like just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John in the old days, you’re spinning hard drive, the heads crashed into the platters, like it’s just dead.

⏹️ ▶️ John The old days, you’re like, okay, I’ll take this internal drive, rip it out of my computer, throw it in the garbage can,

⏹️ ▶️ John and boot from my SuperDuper clone. And I’m up and running as of whenever the last backup was,

⏹️ ▶️ John might have been last night, right? Just in the amount of time it takes to boot. I don’t have to wait for a whole OS install,

⏹️ ▶️ John which can take a very long time. I don’t have to do any of that stuff. I’m just up and running. And by the way, I

⏹️ ▶️ John just booted my Mac that has no hard drive in it. I booted it from an external drive because

⏹️ ▶️ John that hard drive that was broken is now in the garbage can. If your Apple Silicon Mac, if the SSD goes

⏹️ ▶️ John bad, like totally dead on it, you cannot boot off an external drive. That Mac will not

⏹️ ▶️ John boot off anything because you need the internal SSD to at least have enough

⏹️ ▶️ John parts of it working to boot from the little part of the OS that’s needed to go

⏹️ ▶️ John to external bootstuff. So that is different. But still, if you hosed

⏹️ ▶️ John yourself, accidentally deleted a bunch of files, broke some part of your user directory,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, accidentally, recursively deleted parts of your home library directory

⏹️ ▶️ John as root, your system could be entirely hosed, but your SSD still works.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you will be able to boot from an external backup and that’s where having a super duper bootable backup

⏹️ ▶️ John can get you up and running much faster. I mean that whole like, you know, as I develop this app that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John working on, maybe I will accidentally hose my directories,

⏹️ ▶️ John my files in a way that didn’t damage the SSD, but it renders my system entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John useless to me. It will be great to boot from my super duper backup in that scenario. So I think bootable backup

⏹️ ▶️ John still is very important and recovery is absolutely not a substitute because if anyone has ever done recovery mode,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though we have fast computers, fast internet connections, reinstalling macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John takes longer than you think it does. If you’re in a hurry or if you’re trying, like

⏹️ ▶️ John you might as well just write off the whole rest of the day to dealing with that sometimes because it takes, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John just be staring at indeterminate spinners for a long time wondering how

⏹️ ▶️ John long it’s gonna take, How many more reboots is it gonna take? How many more progress bars am I gonna have to see? So I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a great solution. All right, given all that, this whole discussion in 2020 with,

⏹️ ▶️ John was it Phil Schiller at the time as the director of product marketing? I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that was already past the change. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know who it is, but anyway. So the quote, we know there’s a quote or a paraphrase or whatever it says. How would it

⏹️ ▶️ John look someday in the future if you simply couldn’t make a copy of the system at all? The conclusions

⏹️ ▶️ John that Mike draws from this, that bootable backups are not a thing, and

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with platform security.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure I agree with that. So first of all, the statement is, this is an Apple person saying, how would it look someday in the future

⏹️ ▶️ John if you simply couldn’t make a copy? If you, third-party developer, simply couldn’t, that came to pass. Third-party

⏹️ ▶️ John developers can’t make bootable copies. You have to run Apple’s ASR tool to do it. Apple can

⏹️ ▶️ John make a bootable backup, you can’t. Which is why SuperDuper is in the bind it is, because they can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do it. They have to use Apple’s privilege signed secure tool to do

⏹️ ▶️ John it. But I’m not, and the second thing is I’m not sure, I’m not saying this

⏹️ ▶️ John is not true, only that I have not been convinced that it’s true by reading this post. The

⏹️ ▶️ John idea that if copies of system files can be made by anybody, including Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John somehow this is a security issue. So saying like, allowing system files to be copied introduces

⏹️ ▶️ John an opportunity for attackers to modify key system components. Some of this can be mitigated by only allowing ASR

⏹️ ▶️ John to make a copy, but there are still opportunities to inject changes. I don’t understand how that could possibly be the case. The whole

⏹️ ▶️ John point is you cryptographically sign the whole thing with the sealed system volume or whatever. And those

⏹️ ▶️ John cryptographic keys are secured by keys that are in the hardware and verified over the internet and yada

⏹️ ▶️ John yada. Like if you modify any part of the system, if a nefarious third party modified part of the operating system when copying

⏹️ ▶️ John it, like that would be detected because the signatures wouldn’t match.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the secure boot environment, like the Apple Silicon Macs booting from their internal drive and making sure they have a secure boot environment,

⏹️ ▶️ John ensures that the thing doing the verification can’t be tampered with, because that’s the thing that kicks off the boot process on the external

⏹️ ▶️ John drive, and it can verify that the system volume is sealed correctly or whatever. Maybe I’m missing something here, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the conclusions being drawn here are, at least do not convince me that Apple thinks

⏹️ ▶️ John that making a bootable drive should not be possible, because that doesn’t make any sense. You make a bootable drive all the time. You

⏹️ ▶️ John make a bootable drive when you install the OS. That is an example of Apple software making

⏹️ ▶️ John a bootable drive. It’s no different when they’re doing it to the one and only drive on your Mac or doing it to

⏹️ ▶️ John the second and then, you know, another drive on your Mac. It is still Apple software connecting to

⏹️ ▶️ John the internet and putting in an OS there. And yes, it put it by downloading off the internet, but it’s no difference

⏹️ ▶️ John than it putting it by copying it from another location. In both cases, it has to verify that the OS is proper and signed

⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. So this is unfortunate. Like ASR has broken before,

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way. SuperDuper has always been dealing with it. We’ve been in the age where only ASR can copy the operating system for a while now.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s, as Dave says, it’s broken in the past. And it’s cruddy because

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a third party. You’re like, look, I can’t do it myself. I have to use this tool that Apple provides.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if the Apple provided tool has bugs or does weird things or just plain doesn’t work,

⏹️ ▶️ John you just have to sit around and wait for Apple to fix it for you. Assume that’s what will happen in this case. I assume

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will fix it Like I said, I am NOT personally convinced that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John was trying to say that it is impossible to make a bootable version

⏹️ ▶️ John of Make a make a drive that is able to boot Mac OS using Apple software because it just doesn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ John any sense to me That’s what software that’s what the OS installation and recovery process do I don’t see how cloning

⏹️ ▶️ John is that different worst-case scenario? You could say, okay, it won’t copy the

⏹️ ▶️ John operating system from one drive to another. It will install a fresh one from the internet. But because

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that you boot from is a read-only cryptographically

⏹️ ▶️ John signed snapshot, it’s the same for everybody. It’s a separate volume. It’s not where your data

⏹️ ▶️ John is. There should be no difference between copying the operating system from

⏹️ ▶️ John one drive to another and putting a fresh version of that operating system downloading

⏹️ ▶️ John it from the internet. The only place where this is there there are you know questions here is like okay well what if Apple is no

⏹️ ▶️ John longer signing that version of the operating system or you can’t get it because it’s so old or whatever in that case a copy would

⏹️ ▶️ John work but a download wouldn’t but I don’t know I just I I

⏹️ ▶️ John think and hope that what will actually this is just yet another one of

⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunate bugs in Mac OS because these parts of the OS are understaffed and that they will eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John fix it and super duper will start working again and and all will be, if not

⏹️ ▶️ John right with the world, then better. But I just, like, again, if someone knows, if someone can explain

⏹️ ▶️ John to me how what Mike Bombich is saying makes any kind of sense, please

⏹️ ▶️ John do, but right now I feel like Apple was not trying to say that it will be impossible to make bootable

⏹️ ▶️ John versions of macOS. Only that third-party developers wouldn’t be able to do it themselves. Only Apple could

⏹️ ▶️ John do it. That’s another thing that only Apple can do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would hope that Apple provides a mechanism to do this and maintains it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know, we’ll see what happens. We’ll see how this shakes out.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I kind of wish, like, so the promise of APFS and all of the new file system stuff they did

⏹️ ▶️ John is that this type of stuff could get better, and it did get better in many

⏹️ ▶️ John ways. Like a lot of the parts of the system that deal with this, like Time Machine and stuff like Time Machine, will now like

⏹️ ▶️ John make a snapshot first and then copy that snapshot. Kind of, I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the benefits of that is that it helps with the painting the Golden Gate Bridge problem, where in the bad

⏹️ ▶️ John old days, time machine would start running and it would start copying files from your disk to your time machine backup.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in the beginning, it would copy, you know, a bunch of files or whatever. Two hours pass

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s copying the last files. During that two hours, the files that it copied at the beginning could have changed.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so you’re like, oh, well, when am I done? Do I have to go back to the beginning now because I noticed some new things changed? Oh, wait, now by

⏹️ ▶️ John the time I get to the end of that, there’s still things that you keep going back and back. You know, it just copies it once and says, okay, I’m done. you may

⏹️ ▶️ John end up writing an inconsistent view, like the source disk never looked like this

⏹️ ▶️ John at any moment in time. The beginning of the source disk looks like this, and by two hours

⏹️ ▶️ John later, the end of the source disk looked like this, but the thing that you wrote has files that you copied

⏹️ ▶️ John in the beginning look like they did an hour ago, and files that you copied at the end look like they do right now. Snapshots,

⏹️ ▶️ John avoid that, because you can take a moment in time snapshot and say, here’s a frozen snapshot of what this

⏹️ ▶️ John drive looked like at a given moment. And now I can take my time, leisurely

⏹️ ▶️ John copying that snapshot because that snapshot is never going to change. It is literally a moment in time snapshot.

⏹️ ▶️ John So even if it takes you four hours to copy that snapshot, the file you copy at the end

⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly from the exact same moment of time as the file you copied at the beginning. Stuff like that is great.

⏹️ ▶️ John One of the strategies Time Machine uses to figure out what has changed since my last backup so

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to scan the entire disk again. One of the strategies is some kind of snapshot diffing

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I really hoped that they would go whole hog ZFS thing. ZFS has the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John to send block level diffs between snapshots, where not only

⏹️ ▶️ John does it, you know, know exactly what changed in, I’m not sure if it’s constant time, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it might just be linear, but anyway, an efficient way to tell exactly what changed. It does it at the block level, not at the file

⏹️ ▶️ John level. So it doesn’t, if a file changes, it’s not like copying whole files. It says, I know this block from this file

⏹️ ▶️ John change and these two blocks in this file change and can efficiently transfer just those blocks to

⏹️ ▶️ John another thing, but there’s lots of limitations to doing that in DFS. Anyway, I was hoping that kind of technology

⏹️ ▶️ John would come to macOS and they’ve sorta kinda got a little bit of it, but not really. And you know, cloning is a whole

⏹️ ▶️ John other thing, but anyway, it would be great if they continued to advance their file system APIs

⏹️ ▶️ John and support for this type of thing to do efficient,

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially what SuperDuper does, efficient copies like that smart update. only copy the things that changed over

⏹️ ▶️ John here. And yes, to also be able to make bootable efficient clone

⏹️ ▶️ John copy backup things. Like I’m not saying put super duper out of business, but I’m kind of saying like, eventually technology gets

⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where what was once a thing that only a third party could do

⏹️ ▶️ John because it was so not supported by the operating system, eventually should become something that

⏹️ ▶️ John is so easily supported by the operating system. Kind of like what I’m doing. My app is doing stuff that is so easily supported by the operating system.

⏹️ ▶️ John just providing like a fancy wrapper on top of it. I would hope that’s where super duper would get eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John building on ASR to say, okay, well, we can’t do it, we have to use Apple’s tool. It seems like it’s going in that direction,

⏹️ ▶️ John except ASR is so much less capable of the code that super duper when it was doing it itself. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John as ours just like, well, I’ve just got one job, I’m called Apple software restore, I’m not called be

⏹️ ▶️ John the underlying engine for super duper. So it is so limited and so brute force and so not what SuperDuper

⏹️ ▶️ John would want, but you know, maybe someday, like it took us so long to get APFS

⏹️ ▶️ John and we got lots of benefits from it, but I still think we’re a long way from really realizing

⏹️ ▶️ John all of the benefits of modern file systems to make stuff like this so much better. And, you know, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John I appreciate the time machine snapshots, local snapshots, where you can do essentially time machine backups without having your time

⏹️ ▶️ John machine drive attached, so you can go back in time to something from 10 minutes ago because a local time machine

⏹️ ▶️ John backup was taken. That’s all well and good, but Time Machine itself still feels like kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of abandoned and lonely and filled with bugs. And yeah, ASR being the one and

⏹️ ▶️ John only tool that can copy a bootable version of the operating system from one disk to another, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John seem tenable to me. And as for only being able to boot off internal drive and Apple Silicon, I don’t know what the solution to that is because

⏹️ ▶️ John I do understand why they do that. Like that’s the security implications of not allowing that makes

⏹️ ▶️ John sense to me. But it is very limiting when it comes to the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John to recover quickly from a disaster. It kind of makes the most

⏹️ ▶️ John workable solution for that to essentially have a second Mac, right? So, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, have two Macs that are both as up to date as they can, start your project, and if you’re like, if this

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac fails, I need to be able to continue work immediately, just throw that whole Mac away, slide in the new Mac, and

⏹️ ▶️ John just try to pick up where you left off. If Apple’s cloud syncing was better than it

⏹️ ▶️ John actually is, you could probably do that, but as it stands, you’re probably starting work from wherever you were at the beginning

⏹️ ▶️ John of the day.

#askatp: Recents folder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Ciro Mazzola writes, with the Mac’s latest operating system updates, Sequoia 15.2,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s created a new folder for recording your history. It’s called Recents. It’s an option in the Finder sidebar.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How does this fit in with Apple’s policy of privacy? Is this really new? I swear this is not new,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe it is. I think I might be missing the point here. Why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this not privacy-friendly?

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so I think what Ciro is saying is like, if this is in the sidebar,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if you see it in the sidebar and you click on it, you may be shocked to see, there’s all the files

⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve messed with recently. And it’s sort of like a trail of your activity. And if you thought you were

⏹️ ▶️ John secretly messing with some files somewhere and you have a document that says, my master plan to take over the world.txt,

⏹️ ▶️ John and suddenly when someone clicks on something in your sidebar, they see that file and your plans

⏹️ ▶️ John have been revealed. What that recent thing is doing

⏹️ ▶️ John is the same thing you can do if you hit command F in the finder and you search for files recently

⏹️ ▶️ John opened within the last 30 days, which is a thing that you can do that you’ve been able to do for decades

⏹️ ▶️ John on macOS. It is just finding, it’s just a saved search, finding

⏹️ ▶️ John files that have been opened recently or whatever the thing is. Let me put up in the finder to see the

⏹️ ▶️ John exact thing. I think it is last opened to date. Last open date

⏹️ ▶️ John is within the last 30 days. You’ve always been able to run that search. Now, it’s more

⏹️ ▶️ John accessible as a sidebar item in the finder than having to hit command F, pick one item from

⏹️ ▶️ John a pop-up menu, type three zero, and hit return. But practically speaking, this is not a

⏹️ ▶️ John privacy invading feature. This is just part of a fact of life. If

⏹️ ▶️ John someone else has access to your computer, logged in as you, they can hit command

⏹️ ▶️ John F and find files based on any criteria they want. They can find image files, last

⏹️ ▶️ John opened within the last 30 days that are JPEGs that are larger than this size, And they can save that as a

⏹️ ▶️ John saved search in a smart folder that looks like a little folder icon, but when you double click it, it opens a folder. But the contents

⏹️ ▶️ John of that folder are the contents of a saved search. This whole idea was something I really liked

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the days of like BOS, where their file system had native support for this with like indexing in the file system and really fast searches.

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS still supports it. Some people get a lot of use out of it. I think its implementation is a little bit janky and

⏹️ ▶️ John its integration in the Finder is not great. So many people don’t even know it exists such that when they put

⏹️ ▶️ John something called recent files in the sidebar, they’re like, privacy invasion, where did this come from? It’s a new feature in 15.2. I

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of see the point, but just FYI, this has always been there. It’s kind of like realizing

⏹️ ▶️ John that your web browser is keeping track of your browser history if you’re not running in incognito mode all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can just go and there’s a menu item that shows history and you’ll scroll. This is every web page I’ve been to.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s watching my

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey every move.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and Google Chrome is probably reporting it back to Google as well, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how computers work to some degree. If you don’t like it, there’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John much of a solution. Some things in like macOS, like within individual applications,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you go to the file menu, there’ll be an open sub menu with like recent items. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John clear that recent items menu, which used to be just like a plist somewhere. I don’t know where they’re storing it these days. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you can clear the recent items to clear the last things that you’ve opened. But practically speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s file system metadata, the find command can search based on it and return results.

⏹️ ▶️ John you could wipe that metadata if you wanted. Every file that you last opened, go through it and wipe the metadata

⏹️ ▶️ John or duplicate that file and delete the original or like, there’s all sorts of stuff you can do, but like, what are you trying to do

⏹️ ▶️ John here? Really, if you don’t want people knowing this about your computer, don’t let them access to your computer logged in as you. That’s the solution.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ay yi yi.

#askatp: Path for scripts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Tucker writes, what is the quote unquote correct directory location to save random Python

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shell, Ruby, Perl, PHP, et cetera, scripts to keep them organized and easily accessible, or excuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, executable? I use the Phish shell and I typically write

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my scripts of that sort using Phish. And so there’s a particular folder that you’re supposed to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put them in. And then occasionally if I write other stuff, I’ll just put it in my home folder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have very little in my home folder. I’m sure this is going to make John roll over in his not grave,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but grave. So before John tells us all what we’re supposed to be doing, Marco, what is your approach?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For this kind of like, you know, random script and stuff for my local Mac to run, I actually have a folder in Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those. And part of my new Mac setup is to add

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my, well, first install Bash, and then add to my Bash profile to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco include a Bash profile file that is in this Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder. And then that does everything else for me. So that way when I set up a new Mac or, you know, managing between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desktop and laptop, I don’t need to like constantly be shuttling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things back and forth manually or resetting things up. Any of that stuff just lives in Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and including most of my bash profile, which again is just included by the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual local bash profile. It includes the Dropbox bash profile and that sets everything else up. where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my aliases are and all sorts of stuff like that. So I suggest whether you use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox or whatever other file sync provider you use, keep it in there unless you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some really good reason not to.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, what are we supposed to be doing?

⏹️ ▶️ John So there is a correct, with the scare quotes like this question says, a correct directory

⏹️ ▶️ John for saving executable scripts from a cultural perspective for everybody my age and older

⏹️ ▶️ John who cut their teeth on Unix in the late 80s or early 90s. Uh, and that answer is

⏹️ ▶️ John tilde slash bin B I N lowercase. You make a directory called bin in

⏹️ ▶️ John your home directory. You put all your executable files there. You add your, you know, tilde slash bin to your

⏹️ ▶️ John path. Uh, and then on every system you do that. And whatever things you want to be executable, you put in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s mostly just a cultural answer. Uh, and it’s based on the fact that if you were on a multi-user

⏹️ ▶️ John Unix system back in those days, probably at your university or whatever, you didn’t have access

⏹️ ▶️ John to the system-wide directories. So you had to pick some other directory to put things, but you did have access to your home directory, but you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John want the directories in your home directory to be structured like the system-wide ones. And so, you know, the LS

⏹️ ▶️ John command is bin LS and your customized version of the LS command would be tilde slash

⏹️ ▶️ John bin LS. I in fact do have a bin directory in my home directory. I make it invisible so it doesn’t show

⏹️ ▶️ John up in the Mac side of things, but they’re just the hidden attribute, but it is in fact there. that is in

⏹️ ▶️ John my path, that is the correct location for files that you want to be in your own directory. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you just want to say, stuff that you just want to be able to run, the other correct location on your own

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, where unlike in the university, you do have access to the system wide files, is user local

⏹️ ▶️ John bin, and that’s USR, not USER, and it’s all lowercase. All lowercase slash USR

⏹️ ▶️ John slash local slash bin. User local, Apple has essentially pledged

⏹️ ▶️ John like Europa in 2010, you know, attempt

⏹️ ▶️ John no landing there, all these words are yours, all these worlds are yours except user local.

⏹️ ▶️ John They said they won’t mess with user local. They’re not gonna put their stuff there. They’re not gonna accidentally wipe it during an OS update.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was a promise statement for many, many years ago. So

⏹️ ▶️ John far it has still been true. If you would like to put system-wide stuff somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John for yourself manually, user local, user local bin, user local include, user local

⏹️ ▶️ John man, user local lib, user local share. Everything in user local is yours.

⏹️ ▶️ John And what do you put there? The same directories that are at the top level, a bin, a lib, a share, an include,

⏹️ ▶️ John anything you want, you put there. So user local bin is where I put the executables

⏹️ ▶️ John that I want to be generally available to everybody on the system. And my path also includes user local

⏹️ ▶️ John bin, which is another common thing to have in your shell path on a Unix system. So those are the

⏹️ ▶️ John answers, bin and user local bin for executables. As for keeping them

⏹️ ▶️ John organized, that’s different than keeping them easily executable. You might wanna organize them

⏹️ ▶️ John by category and make subfolders, but now you’re adding even more files to your path and maybe you could have some links

⏹️ ▶️ John up to the top level, put them down to other things. And if you’re using a package manager, all your crap is at opt and it’s messing

⏹️ ▶️ John with your path and you’re using RVM and NVM and all these virtual environments to point to

⏹️ ▶️ John different versions of Node and different versions of Ruby and different versions of Python. and there’s a whole web of

⏹️ ▶️ John sim links and just, I don’t like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It runs me the wrong way,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it is how a lot of the world works. And speaking of phish, every single one of these freaking things assumes, of course

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re running ZSH, ZSH, Bash or phish or some other POSIX compliant shell. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no problem if you want to use NVM, just type dot space NVM dot SH and you’re up and running.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but you’re not running ZSH or Bash or SH or phish, are you? Oh, well, tough

⏹️ ▶️ John luck because you can’t source that file because it’s written in the shell that your thing doesn’t support. So I guess you just can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John use our thing. Oh well, there’s no other shells in the world except for Bash, ZSH and Phish as we all know. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that will never come up. Guess which shell I use? Not one of those three. What do you use?

⏹️ ▶️ John So I use TCSH because I’m old and that was on my first Unix system and someday I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be forced to change probably to ZSH or Bash or something else. I probably won’t change to Phish, a little too weird for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, a lot of those systems just assume they know what shell you’re using and nothing works,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t use the node installed by NVM until you source the NVM thing, or unless you

⏹️ ▶️ John port it to TCSH or figure out how it’s manipulating your path to do what it’s supposed to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is why I compile everything from source and put it installed on user link. It comes with me across OS updates.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s always where I want it to be. It’s not a web of sim links and everything works fine. I think that is a reasonable organization,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m an old Unix person and I don’t like these newfangled things

⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t use homebrew and I don’t use any kind of package manager and I kind of wish Apple would write a package manager

⏹️ ▶️ John for macOS that was natively supported, but so far they haven’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John had opinions, who knew? Shocked.

#askatp: macOS firewall

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Saul Sutherland writes, do you keep the internet firewall enabled on your Mac? It comes off by default on new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey installs, but I make it a habit to enable it to protect myself from incoming connections on coffee shop Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when my Mac is connected directly to the internet for testing at work. For me, I don’t turn it on. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I ever have. I’m not that concerned about incoming connections. I mean, I could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make an argument why one should or could be, but I don’t know. I’m not that worried about it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I leave it off. And when I’m on coffee shop Wi-Fi, I use Tailscales,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a sponsor of this episode, but obviously I’m in love with them. Tailscales exit node functionality basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, take all of your outbound traffic anyway and route it through something else. And I route it through my house. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, no, don’t use it. Again, because I think John will have most opinions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with Marco. Marco, do you use the internet firewall?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think most software these days is designed to assume any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco network you’re on is hostile and to not grant open access to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco others on your network without your permission. So I don’t think it’s super necessary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people to worry about that. But if you have that kind of extremely high security need for the networks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re on, then you might have different priorities. But I think for most people, you don’t have to.

⏹️ ▶️ John John. As someone who essentially never does a clean install and has just simply been

⏹️ ▶️ John migrating from one Mac to the next and installing new versions of macOS on top of the old ones

⏹️ ▶️ John since 1984. It’s sometimes a mystery to me what

⏹️ ▶️ John my settings actually are because the last time I looked at them may have been a decade or more in the past. So I had to actually go

⏹️ ▶️ John to system settings to see do I have the firewall enabled? And this would have been something that I set back on the Mac OS 10

⏹️ ▶️ John days, right? Because it didn’t exist in classic Mac OS. The answer to my surprise,

⏹️ ▶️ John as I thought I had it turned off, is yes, I do have it active. Why? Maybe it was the default

⏹️ ▶️ John a long time ago. Maybe it’s currently the default, but I have it active and it has never affected my life, so I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John inclined to keep it that way.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think about

⏹️ ▶️ John it actively. In general, I agree that most sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John network security happens outside the realm of your computer. I’m a desktop guy, so I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not going to coffee shops with laptops. But my advice for Firewall is,

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not on by default on a new Mac, which I don’t know the answer of, if it’s not on by default, try turning it on

⏹️ ▶️ John and see if it annoys you. If it doesn’t annoy you, leave it on. It’s providing some additional measure

⏹️ ▶️ John of protection. If it starts annoying you too much, then you can figure out, is there a way I can keep this on and have it be less annoying?

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you can’t figure it out, then just turn it off. But I would advise the default being, turn it on and leave it

⏹️ ▶️ John on until or unless there’s some reason not to.

#askatp: Current cameras

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Torstein writes, is Marco still using his X-T5 or did he go back to his iPhone again, like you predicted he would?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, what are the rest of y’all using these days going into the holiday season? iPhones or camera cameras?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess since Marco was quoted in this, or named in this, why don’t you start, Marco, and then I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey continue after you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so my Fuji X-T5 remains my most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco commonly used standalone camera that’s not an iPhone. I believe I mentioned a couple times in the past,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did really bite the Fuji bug, or get bitten by the Fuji bug hard,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and last year, around the Black Friday season, I picked up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on great sale their giant medium format GFX100S.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has since been succeeded by the GFX100S II, I have the first one. Whatever I’m willing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to carry around a very big camera, I bring the GFX100S, and it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous. And I only have the, I only have two primes for it. I have the 110

⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeter portrait and the little, the relatively little pancake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens for it, which is the size of a grapefruit. The 50 or 55 millimeter one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep that 50-ish millimeter one on most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is my like landscape everything camera. Because it is so big and heavy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I more often have the Fuji with me. Like if I’m going somewhere with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a backpack, I will often have the X-T5 with me is what I mean.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on that, I have the little tiny prime lens or little tiny pancake prime for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. The 27 millimeter, which converts to like a 45-ish. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that combo. It’s a fantastic camera. The X-T5, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco though it is not technically as amazing as the GFX 100S, I greatly prefer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco its controls. I think it is my favorite camera I have ever used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of handling and controls and capabilities. It has tons of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco manual control dials. And so I’m able, especially when I have a lens, which most of my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lenses do, where the lens has an aperture ring on it, then I have physical controls for all of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco main things. You know, I have shutter speed, ISO, aperture and exposure, all of those there’s rings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for if your lens has an aperture ring on it. I just love the X-T5 because everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just clear and obvious. You can just, you can tell what all the important settings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just by looking at the top of the camera. That’s how I like to shoot. It handles the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want a camera to handle. Things are laid out in a great way, which is not what I can say about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GFX, but the GFX wins on tech detail. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the X-T5 I absolutely love. So to answer the question, whether I’m still using it or whether

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went back to my iPhone, I never stopped using my iPhone to take pictures. Now I just, when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the ability to have a big camera with me, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do take pictures with the X-T5 and I really enjoy it. And in fact, today

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going on a sunny winter day walk at the beach

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I brought the X-T5 and I took some pictures around the beach of the snowy town

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was delightful. So I do use the X-T5 as often as I’ve used any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other big camera in the last 15 years which is not incredibly often but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad I have it when I want it. Christmas, I’m going to be using both of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those heavily. Our Christmas setup is kind of a multi-camera setup usually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a big family ordeal and there’s different cameras for different purposes so I will have the GFX with me with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that prime lens on it, especially when light gets low, but for other times of the day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll be using the X-T5 with a more versatile zoom lens on it. So the answer is yes, I use it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I have a Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera, which is why I was, my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interest was peaked earlier with that immersive camera. I use, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember what generation it is to be completely honest with you, but I use an Olympus OMD E-M10.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to say it’s a Mark III, but I’m not 100% sure. The Mark IV appears to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the latest and greatest. That camera, while I love it, and to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyes, takes incredible pictures, I’ve come to the conclusion over the last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey several years, I want to say three or four years ago now, that if I’m indoors,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless I have a lot of light, then the iPhone is likely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do a better job taking a photo than this is. Obviously the, the bouquet won’t be nearly as good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the iPhone. In fact, it will either be synthetic or not great, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In general, I find that particularly indoors, the iPhone does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. And then outdoors, it depends on what I’m up to because the Olympus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t have automatic or my Olympus doesn’t have automatic, um, like HDR or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I will choose between having subjects that are, you know, exposed properly in a washed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out sky or vice versa. And so I do still use the Olympus particularly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I want a zoom, because I have some flavor of zoom lens that I forget off top my head on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, which is again, less relevant now with the iPhone’s five X camera. Um, or if I’m outdoors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure, if I’m outdoors trying to capture like people or whatever, I am 100% reaching for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, for the Olympus. But that’s about it. If I’m not outdoors in decent light,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then oftentimes it’s just less fuss to use the iPhone. And that’s typically what I’m doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I need you to keep this to under three hours. Which one of your 17 cameras are you using? What scenarios,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey please?

⏹️ ▶️ John So for the holidays, I just really for everything

⏹️ ▶️ John except for Long Island Beach photography, I use my phone, obviously.

⏹️ ▶️ John and also what I consider my main camera, which is the Sony a7 III that

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco generously gifted me all those years ago. Love it, still getting great mileage out of it. The

⏹️ ▶️ John lens I use on it is what I consider my sort of everyday lens. It’s the most versatile

⏹️ ▶️ John single lens I have for this camera. It’s the Sony 24-70 F2.8 GM II.

⏹️ ▶️ John What I like about the lens is the zoom range is reasonable. the aperture at 2.8 is reasonable and the

⏹️ ▶️ John size is reasonable. You can get lenses with longer

⏹️ ▶️ John ranges and with a wider aperture, they’re all bigger and heavier. This one is

⏹️ ▶️ John already kind of at the limit of big and heaviness, but it is versatile enough that I can use it in

⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of indoor or outdoor scenario where I’m gonna be taking pictures of people at an event or doing

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. So Christmas morning is that camera and occasionally the phone, which

⏹️ ▶️ John I will take out for, I don’t do any video on my big camera. I do video only on the phone. And occasionally I’ll take

⏹️ ▶️ John out my phone to do video and then snap some shots with it as well. Depending on how quickly I need

⏹️ ▶️ John to get the shot, is the camera around my neck? My family complains that all the pictures of me Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ John morning, I have the camera around my neck. Like someone’s gotta take the pictures and it’s gonna be me. So any picture

⏹️ ▶️ John they take of me with their phones, which they’re terrible quality phones, is me

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey with

⏹️ ▶️ John a camera around their neck. Yeah, so that’s my plan for this year as well. Same lens, same camera.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be around my neck while opening presents. I’m gonna be taking pictures of everybody else and then they’re gonna end up going in the

⏹️ ▶️ John calendar that hangs in the fridge and it’s just the way it works. Plus my iPhone pictures. My iPhone pictures

⏹️ ▶️ John get better every year because well, not every, every two years, my iPhone pictures get better because I get a better phone and that

⏹️ ▶️ John trend continues. But it’s gonna be a little while before I ever upgrade the big camera.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are obviously many better cameras, but like me with my TVs, I’m waiting for that right better

⏹️ ▶️ John camera. Well, first of all, a better camera is gonna cost me a whole bunch of money. So, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m gonna, I’m looking at the Sony cameras cause I wanna be able to reuse all my lenses and I like Sony cameras. And so I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for that right one. Like the, the A7R5 was actually a really good

⏹️ ▶️ John one but I don’t know if I want the R series with that much extra resolution. I’m not sure if I want or

⏹️ ▶️ John need that to make my photos bigger. The A1 was tempting, but super expensive. The new

⏹️ ▶️ John version of the A1 is like, oh, it’s better but they didn’t change the really the sensor. Then there’s the A9

⏹️ ▶️ John with the electronic sensor. And it’s like, maybe I should just wait until they basically have something with the

⏹️ ▶️ John dynamic range of the A1 series, but with the instant readout, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what the name of it is, but like the electronic shutter instant readout thing of the A9, and that

⏹️ ▶️ John is a technology that doesn’t exist yet. So I’m just sitting here waiting. I’m saying in the meantime, I love my

⏹️ ▶️ John a7 III, take tons of pictures with it. I have lots of different interesting lenses for it that I use in occasions when I have time

⏹️ ▶️ John to prepare, but my everyday lens, the Sony 24-70 GM II,

⏹️ ▶️ John Highly recommended lens, great compromise between image quality, weight, and

⏹️ ▶️ John aperture if you have to pick one single lens to use for anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ John when I take, you know, sometimes like my kids are going to like a dance at school or

⏹️ ▶️ John something like that, like where I know I’m gonna be taking pictures of people like all dressed up in their nice outfits, I’ll put on one of my prime lenses

⏹️ ▶️ John to get better pictures out of it. But most of the time, the everyday lens gets me through.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsor this week, The Members. Thank you so much, members. You really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you mean a lot to us, especially now we’re getting all sentimental about holidays and everything. Thank you very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. You really mean a lot to us. If you wanna join and be a member, one of the perks of membership is ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overtime. This week in overtime, we’re gonna go through a wonderful idea John had. We’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco name, each of us are gonna name our best tech thing of 2024, our worst

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech thing of 2024, and the tech thing we are most looking forward to in 2025. If

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to hear that and every other thing we do in overtime every week, and all of our other bonus content, and all the other benefits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of being a member, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. Thank you everybody, and we’ll talk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They

⏹️ ▶️ John did it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to, accidental Check podcasts, it’s so long

Neutral: The plug-in-hybrid life

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought maybe we could take the opportunity to do like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a quick catch up on Aaron’s car. If you recall, in June

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we were all at WWDC together, Aaron’s old Volvo had a catastrophic engine failure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget which episode we talked about it, but you should go and listen to it. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco caused by a very small pebble.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Correct.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not going to say like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for you to get to that point. You’re just going to say I would have had a catastrophic engine failure anyway. Continuing on. It

⏹️ ▶️ John had a catastrophic engine failure caused by a pebble. It had a encounter

⏹️ ▶️ John with a pebble. It was defeated by a pebble. It was destroyed by a pebble. There’s so many different ways you can do this. The important

⏹️ ▶️ John part is the pebble.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was possibly the most interesting catastrophic engine failure I’ve ever heard.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, there you go. So anyway, you can hear the details on a prior episode. I don’t recall which one, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was in June. And then in early July, we figured out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we really just wanted to stick with Volvo. And I don’t need to hear any feedback as to whether or not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was smart. Don’t care. That’s what we did. It’s already done. And what we did this time, though, was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron had a Volvo XC90. It was a 2017. We bought a 2024. We leased, actually, a 2024 XC90.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this one is a plug-in hybrid, an XC90 T8. And basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what that means is it has a turbocharged four-cylinder engine, and it also has a battery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric engine, if your motor, I guess, strictly speaking, if you will. And anyway, so it gets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 30 to 35 miles of range, generally speaking. We can charge it in about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey five hours from dead here at home because we have a like American dryer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey style plug, which is a 220 volt plug. I want to say it’s like 50 amps, something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which then gets converted down to, I think it’s a 30 amp, which is all that the car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants because it’s not a huge battery. I believe it’s 18 kilowatt hours or 18 kilowatts, excuse me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something like that. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you can tell it. No, there we go. I screwed it up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I thought it would be interesting to talk about what it’s like for someone to have a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug-in hybrid car. And I got to tell you for our particular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs and our particular needs are relatively unique,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for us, I freaking love this thing. And I think it was the perfect solution for our family.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So generally speaking, Erin drives 10

⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles in a day, maybe 20 at most on an average day. And I just told

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that the battery lasts roughly 30 miles, give or take a little bit, generally speaking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that means that almost all of her driving she can do on electricity.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that also means that we bought the car, I want to say it was like July 10 or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thereabouts. I forget exactly what day it was, but it was in the top half of July. A couple of weeks ago, we put our second

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tank of gas in the car.

⏹️ ▶️ John How much horsepower is the electric motor?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I honestly don’t know. I want to say it’s like 100 horsepower, but I really, truly don’t remember off the top of my head.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because I was wondering, are you like forcing it into EV-only mode? Essentially, you get in, you put it into the mode

⏹️ ▶️ John that says don’t use the gas engine at all?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is. That does exist. It’s called Pure. And I have done that a handful of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey times. And oftentimes, if I do it, it’s because I want to allow myself the full

⏹️ ▶️ Casey depth of the accelerator pedal. You know how in an automatic, you can just kind of feel, not physically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel, but you just kind of feel out that, oh, if I go any further, the car will downshift. And you know that unless

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re really trying to get going somewhere, you can just, that, say, 50% depth in the accelerator is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all you’ve really got at that particular moment. Well, the same sort of thing is true here. Now, it is an automatic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s using the gasoline engine, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I mean is you can just kind of tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if I go beyond this depth of the pedal, it’s gonna kick on the gas motor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only that, but the tachometer, or I guess it’s the power meter, strictly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, it has a droplet. I’m not sure why it’s a droplet, but it’s a droplet and a line that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicates, okay, if you ask for any power beyond this point, I’m kicking on the gasoline. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we run it in hybrid mode 99% of the time. And it is exceedingly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rare that it will turn on the gasoline for just getting around town purposes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, if we’re on an interstate or something like that, it will absolutely kick the gasoline on from time to time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then also I’ve found that if you use the onboard navigation, and this has Android automotive,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which means it’s the Google powered thing, it has Google Maps and whatnot. if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you tell the car the destination, rather than using like Apple Maps on CarPlay, it will do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of computational magic such that it will kick on the gasoline when there’s plenty of battery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey power left, I believe because it thinks, okay, later in the trip, when you’re close to your destination,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re gonna want the juice for then. That being said, I’m not sure I really agree with some of its choices.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it would use battery at times where I thought the gasoline might have served it better, like say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the interstate, And it used gasoline when I thought the battery might’ve served it better, like around town. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s right. And certainly it’s presumably smarter than me, but I don’t know, it just felt weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that was many words to say, no, we don’t typically put it in pure mode. We typically run it in hybrid mode.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised that your gas tanks last in that long, man, because like you’re essentially not, you’re not disallowing the

⏹️ ▶️ John gas engine from turning on. So it turns on whenever it feels like it. Although it does sound like you’re kind of babying it because you don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John the gas engine to turn on, but still it’s turning on in your daily use. But I guess just a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit, just briefly, and not enough to go through. Does it have a big gas tank? How big is the gas tank?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that’s a great question, which I also don’t know off the top

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of my head.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You only filled it up twice. Yeah, I’ve only filled it twice. Let me see if I can quickly find the, I log

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our fuel spreadsheet, a number spreadsheet. I don’t know why I do it. I just like doing it. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no good justification for it. But the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco last time you. Even less

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so now. Yeah, right. The last time we filled it up, it was pretty darn near empty. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put in almost 16 gallons, like just a shade shy of 16 gallons. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an effective miles per gallon on that tank of 77.2. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is by taking the amount of miles driven, divided by the amount of gallons burned.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But again, that’s not really fair, because most of that time, we were running on electricity rather than gasoline.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that always worries me about hybrids and we’re so worried about Marco’s i3’s range extension is

⏹️ ▶️ John like, if you don’t ever use the gas engine, A, you’re just, you know, wasting electricity hauling

⏹️ ▶️ John this big heavy thing around, and B, if you don’t run a gasoline engine for long

⏹️ ▶️ John periods of time, it gets cranky. Like you do have to occasionally start it, and you are, like it’s clearly

⏹️ ▶️ John turning on, and although auto stop start also makes me have empathy for the engine.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John know they’re designed to auto stop start, I know all the things they did to change the engine so they can do that in more robust starters

⏹️ ▶️ John and yada yada, it’s still not good for the engine, still. I do worry that, I mean, you’re a lease and so who

⏹️ ▶️ John cares? But like, it’s one of the strange compromises about hybrids

⏹️ ▶️ John is, depending on how you use them, in like the quote unquote best case scenario where you’re basically on EV almost

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, A, it’s inefficient to lug the engine around, and B, that engine is

⏹️ ▶️ John having a sad, difficult life.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s probably not being run enough. It wants

⏹️ ▶️ John to be run, it’s like a thoroughbred horse, wants to get out there and run and you’re just

⏹️ ▶️ John like nope electric motors got it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah and I mean I would say that it probably if I were to wager a guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the six months or thereabouts that we’ve had the car I would say the gasoline motor has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been on 10 hours or less maybe like it is very rare for the gasoline motor to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John run. See

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a good healthy life for a gas engine I know who cares about the whole point is you don’t want to be burning gasoline like I get

⏹️ ▶️ John that but it’s like it just that’s why I always feel like a pure EV is so much more of a simple

⏹️ ▶️ John solution, but you know, hey, live and learn.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, again, I can’t find any particular beef that I have with anything you just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said. I agree with you. But so far, six months in,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has been incredible because we almost never use gasoline. And again, it’s been a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thousand miles. Shoot, I already closed the numbers document. But I think we’re at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, at the time of the last fueling, We’re at 3,000 miles at the time we last fueled it. 3,000 miles, and we have put in a sum total

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 26 gallons of gas, which is just bananas. And for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our uses, it is the best of both worlds, because easily 90-plus percent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the time, Aaron is using it just on electricity. And then the handful of times that we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to go further. Now, admittedly, we haven’t taken it on a proper trip yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I say further, I’m saying like a sum total of 100, 150 miles, which I know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most reasonable EVs would laugh at. But that being said, any time we want to take it further than like 30

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or so, then the gasoline just kicks on. And it’s no problem. And that’s worked out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey super duper well. And I think we could, our family could have a EX90,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the full electric version of this car. I mean, it’s strictly speaking a little bit different, but it’s effectively the full electric

⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the XC90. And I certainly think we could make that work without too much compromise, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, I wasn’t ready for the family hauler

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be full electric yet. I 100% believe that I should have years ago gotten full electric

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for myself. I haven’t for several different reasons, but for the family hauler,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t want it to be full electric yet. And I stand by that for now. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, I could make a strong argument about how wrong I am. So I’m not, you know, this is a week So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco can I. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a weak opinion held loosely. Right, exactly. It’s a weak opinion held loosely, I’ll be the first to tell you. But certainly for sticking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our toe in the water, the plug-in hybrid has been excellent. And I’m really, really happy with it. The qualms

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have with the car are, well, let me ask you guys, if you were to just hazard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a guess, what do you think my biggest complaint about the car is? Infotainment. Close.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, I was gonna say the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco transmission.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no. Well, there is no transmission 90% of the time we drive it. No, it’s software. The software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not great. And it’s Google’s Android Automotive. Now, maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Volvo’s application thereof. I’ve never had an Android Automotive car before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Android Automotive is a perfectly solid foundation. It’s all the crap that the manufacturers put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of it that often has bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, that’s what I meant by infotainment. How am I close? I’m exactly right. It’s infotainment. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the term of art for the thing you’re describing. It’s the software that runs on the middle things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I can’t put my foot… there are times that it’s something at a lower level than the infotainment.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 90% of my complaints, you’re exactly right, it’s the infotainment. But there are occasions, and of course, I can’t put my finger on one specifically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right this second, but there are occasions that it’s something that I think is lower level than that. But definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of my complaints are the infotainment. And I actually liked the,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they called it Census, which was the Volvo homegrown thing that predated Android Auto, or excuse me, Android

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Automotive. I liked it, most people did not. They’ve kind of tried

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make a faux census on top of Android Automotive and it’s all right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I just don’t love the way some of it works. And some silly things have been regressions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a great example of this is, I don’t particularly care for the radio in any capacity.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin loves listening to the radio in the car. And she really has come to like SiriusXM.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’ve talked about this in the past, but she likes satellite radio. And Erin is not one to want to pay money for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really anything if she can avoid it. She’s very frugal, maybe is the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey word I’m looking for. I think there’s an even more complimentary term than that that I can’t put my finger on. But she doesn’t like to spend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey money frivolously. Meanwhile, that’s my specialty, but that’s neither here nor there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am a mere apprentice to Marco’s expert level at this, but

⏹️ ▶️ John nevertheless. You see how he snuck in the new version of the big medium format Fuji in

⏹️ ▶️ John there?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly, exactly. I didn’t say I own the new version of the media. I just I there is a new version.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the old version. Oh, I thought you’d bought the new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John version. No, it’s a mention

⏹️ ▶️ John it as a off to the side during your story. Okay, that’s a good clarification. Marco did not

⏹️ ▶️ John buy the new one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, by the way, remind me to tell you sometime about Long Island Christmas light installation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing. Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying somebody else to do it. This is okay. I’m sorry for the for the derail. This is a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how long this has been a thing. I’m relatively new to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island. But this is a thing. There are a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of houses, especially as you get towards the nicer blocks in town, a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of houses have professionally installed commercial grade Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lights. And you can identify them pretty easily. I believe it’s the C9 in sizes, I think it’s what they’re called,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re the large lights that are perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco evenly spaced and are all perfectly aligned to outline the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco roof line and all the side lines of a house. And usually some of their landscaping,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe their driveway and everything. This is so prevalent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m shocked, like how many houses do this? And first of all, I respect what they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to achieve. I do think it kind of goes against the spirit of Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lights, if they’re all perfect and corporate installed by like, you know, like somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re paying to put them in your house. Like, I feel like that kind of is against the spirit of Christmas lights. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I prefer a more organic look where somebody just like went out there themselves and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco draped some lights over their bushes. Like I like that look better. It’s a little more homey. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s kind of what I go for. But anyway, so there’s all these like, you know, just residential homes. Our kids

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw this one time and was like, oh my God, we have to have that. How do we do that? So we called around some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different places that we saw signs for. You would not believe what this costs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey On Long Island, I’m sure it’s thousands.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, which greatly surprised us. And we were asking for a very basic thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was, the quote blew us away. We scaled it back quite a bit.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But based on the quote that we got, and based on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what everyone else was charging for the same thing, and based on what everyone else seems to be doing to their houses,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there are at least 15 houses within a few blocks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of here that have spent over $5,000, possibly over $10,000

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their Christmas light installation and that’s just for the year. That’s just for this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. Don’t forget about the electricity. Believe me, that’s nothing compared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, if you’re paying five or $10,000 for your light installations every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, the electricity is not going to matter

⏹️ ▶️ John at all. Back when they were incandescent. I think I think you could compete with that if you left them on all the time. But yeah, with LEDs,

⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully it’s not that much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This shot, it’s shocking to me that people would pay like, you know, five or $10,000 to decorate their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco house for like three weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ John You see how it works, because you just got done saying how you think it’s, you know, not to your taste. But then

⏹️ ▶️ John also you’re looked into paying for something because the neighbors did it. That’s how it works. The neighbors have lights and you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to have the lights and just keeping up with the Joneses. And it’s happening to you too. Because like, why did you even agree? Just because

⏹️ ▶️ John Adam wanted it? And you’re like, OK, well, I don’t like it, but Adam wants it, so we’ll do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I figure, you know, we try it for a year and then, whoa.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could have hung them yourself. Like, I mean, that’s the you know, the old way. I saw this by just not doing lights at all. But when I was a kid,

⏹️ ▶️ John my dad and I did lights. We hung them ourselves and it was dangerous and stupid. And that’s the Christmas spirit.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But these these are somewhat involved to do yourself because like it’s one of those, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the perfect alignment. Each light has its own bracket. It isn’t you’re not just like, you know, stapling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of staples for the wires. So, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I understand. Like, I agree with you. I don’t like that look. I when I were hanging them, I say, like, you have nails stuck

⏹️ ▶️ John into like the the eaves of your house and you hang wires over the nails and

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is evenly spaced and, you know, it’s very organic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I prefer that look. But there are a lot of people who prefer this look. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. Like once I learned how much it costs, it kind of ruined it for me. Now I’m just kind of like, oh my God, those people wasted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, like, so anyway, all this is to say that, believe me, Casey, there are people who are way better at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasting money than either of us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good to know. You

⏹️ ▶️ John could put a projector on your lawn, Marco, and have it project lights onto your house. You know, those things where they take

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, you know, project things

⏹️ ▶️ John onto surfaces. They won’t be as bright as the neighbor’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lights, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you can have any

⏹️ ▶️ John configuration you want, and it’s just one little projector.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, Erin doesn’t really love spending money

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if she can avoid it, which is great because I’m very good at it. And so she really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey likes SiriusXM. And I was starting to say before we got a little sidetracked that one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the things that’s worse about this new version of Sensus, if they’re even calling it that now, is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on her old car, when you looked at the list of channels in SiriusXM, if you’re trying to flip to like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different channel, it would show you what the currently playing song was on each channel. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this list, it would say, you know, hits whatever is playing Justin Bieber and hit then, you know, nineties

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on nine is playing so-and-so and, and zeros on zero is playing such and such. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would show you whatever’s playing on each thing. And it doesn’t do that on this version of the software. And to John’s earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, I believe that is Volvo. I don’t think that’s Android or excuse me. I don’t think that’s Google at all. That’s Volvo’s work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s silly things like that that are frustrating. And oftentimes there’ll be little bugs and little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quirks. And every great once in a while, we’ll have to do a hard reset on the infotainment, which takes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey down like everything including the h-back So we can be hurtling down the road

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have to pull a Marco in his model s and have to reboot the center console This has only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened a handful of times in six months, but every time it does it’s infuriating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can’t tell if that’s 100% Volvo if it’s 100% Google or in all likelihood a combination thereof But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that drives me nuts It’s just the software is the issue on this car. And it’s not bad enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would say don’t buy one. I really do love this car, but it’s the software. Oh, another great example.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This hasn’t happened in a while, actually. But when we first got the car, I don’t know if it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we had things stored in the garage or something like that. We have a fairly spacious garage, actually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Aaron would go backing into the garage and it was not infrequent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the car to panic stop. And understandably, that drove her up a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey f***ing wall because every time it happened, it’s intense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, granted, she’s not bombing into the garage. We back in because we’re adults and that’s what adults

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should do. And we back into the garage. And so she’s not driving at 15 miles an hour into the garage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in reverse, but she’s going quick enough that if you get this thing panic-stopping, it’s all of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sudden, you know, it’s stopped. You’re going from moving to dead. And 90% or maybe not 90% of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time, but a lot of the time she has the kids in the car and it scares the piss out of the kids too. And so we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rearranged a couple of things we had in the garage that really were not that close to the car, but were close enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think it might’ve been setting this off, but like, that’s a software thing. You can’t just disable that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You probably could, but I don’t think you can permanently, you know, short of like, you know, coding the car or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like the proximity things, like when, you know, my wife got her new car, it’s the first car we had with any of these proximity

⏹️ ▶️ John auto stop thingies. And we haven’t had the auto stop thingy, We did have like the beepy things that yell at you if you

⏹️ ▶️ John get too close to something. Yeah. Or yell at you when you’re changing lanes with your blind spot. And the proximity ones

⏹️ ▶️ John in particular, at least in this car, there’s a very prominent actual physical button on the dashboard

⏹️ ▶️ John that you can hit to turn that feature on and off. So what you just do is when you’re pulling into the garage, you hit the proximity

⏹️ ▶️ John thing off. I was telling, I tell her, she has it off by default. I tell her, turn it on when you’re parking.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if you know you’re getting close to some stuff, but in Aaron’s case, I would say, turn it off when you’re back into the garage.

⏹️ ▶️ John even if it comes on as soon as you start the car, like that’s what you want. So you should check to see if there’s a way to turn off.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, your problem, it’s not the proximity sensing, it’s the emergency stopping that you don’t like. And Volvo being

⏹️ ▶️ John Volvo may not let you turn that off, but you should double check.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. But I mean, I think it was a software thing. And I think by rearranging some things in the garage,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has made a big difference. But when it does happen, it’s happened with me in the car a couple of times. I don’t get driven up a wall by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but unquestionably it’s unsettling. And that’s being generous. Like it’s very unsettling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the point that it’s almost scary. And that’s as a passenger, much less as a driver.

⏹️ ▶️ John Does it beep at you too, besides just emergency stopping?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’ll beep, beep, beep, beep, and then it’ll slam on the brakes and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound some sort of alarm or something like that. Ryan Booker in the chat is saying, that was a bug,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think. Polestar used to do the same thing back into our driveway if there was a blade of grass in the way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As soon as you go into the reverse gear, you can just turn it off, but you have to do it every time. And that, I believe, corroborates

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what my experience was. Do you have to go through menus on the touch screen to turn it off? I don’t recall, to be honest with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, but it’s not great in that regard. But again, it’s partially our work,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially partially Volvo’s work that’s gotten better.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, you know, so Volvo, again, being a Volvo and being very safety focused, I can see how they might turn a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of these things on by default, but Honda trying to do the

⏹️ ▶️ John right thing in its interiors with both the proximity sensor and also the auto stop start,

⏹️ ▶️ John the proximity sensor, again, a prominent button directly on the dashboard dedicated to this,

⏹️ ▶️ John just turning the proximity on and off. And it defaults to on, but then you can turn it off, or I think you

⏹️ ▶️ John can set it to default off and then you can turn it on, but then the auto stop start has to default to on for them

⏹️ ▶️ John to get the good EPA, like mileage rating, blah, blah, blah. So it always

⏹️ ▶️ John turns on, but it’s right by, like the gear shift lever, like the auto stop start button.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there is an $80 thing, as I think I mentioned when she got this car, there is an $80 thing you can buy and shove inside your dashboard

⏹️ ▶️ John that will turn it off by default. but Honda’s trying to say, look, we know which

⏹️ ▶️ John features of our car are annoying and we will give you ways to defeat them that are as convenient as possible,

⏹️ ▶️ John very prominently located, easy to reach, easy to see. The auto stop start thing has a gigantic

⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated badge on the LCD instrument cluster. So you always know when it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John on and off, it never goes away. It’s like the most important thing on the display besides like the amount of fuel you have and your speed,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they have to turn it on by default for safety reasons. the Volvo is not really meeting you halfway

⏹️ ▶️ John about knowing which things are annoying. I think they probably just think, this emergency stopping thing is gonna save your life someday. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, I’m just trying to back into the garage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. The other nice thing about having a plug-in hybrid is that even though the car is parked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a garage with garage door closed overnight, and even though you two, particularly John, seem to think that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we live effectively on the equator because we are South of, I don’t know, Philadelphia.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s obviously correct. As it turns out, it does actually get cold here, by any reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey definition. And so- But not cold enough that your water heater isn’t in your garage. You can’t help yourself, can

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you? Anyway, the point is-

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s 15 degrees

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey here,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay? My water heater is not in my garage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, at least mine isn’t outside like Jason’s. Anyway, the point is- I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it’s 24 degrees here, and my water heater is currently air-conditioned in my garage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s 28 here, thank you very much. So it’s not like it’s that frigging different. Anyway- That’s tropical.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jesus Christ, I quit. Anyway, so the point is, in the mornings, when it got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly cold here, which again happens more often than you two, John, think,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would oftentimes pull Erin’s car out before the kids and her got in it because she drives

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to school. I would pull her car out maybe five or 10 minutes before they were gonna leave so the kids

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have to get into a freezing cold car, and Erin too, but particularly the kids. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this, if the car isn’t plugged in, you can only run

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the electric preheat or pre-cool for three minutes and it turns itself off, probably because the battery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so darn small. But if the car is plugged in, you can run it for a solid 30

⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. And so anytime within 30 minutes of them needing to leave in the morning,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can just flip that bad boy on from my phone and it’s just perfect in there by the time she

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets in and unplugs it, which is great. So again, there’s a lot to be said for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery electric or plug-in hybrid cars. I’m sure there’s other things I’m not thinking of that I could say about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I gotta tell you, if you’re in a situation where most of your driving happens within the range of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery on your plug-in hybrid, but you still wanna be able to drive two, three, four, 500 miles

⏹️ ▶️ Casey without having to stop for 45 minutes at a clip, then I gotta tell you, I am really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy with our plug-in hybrid. And I really do think that my next car will be full

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on battery electric. And that will actually probably make some very interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey changes in the way Erin and I drive our cars. Because right now, it is very clear that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have my car and she has hers, because she can’t drive a stick. And once I get a battery electric, when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that goes away and there are only two pedals, I’m very curious to see how we split the duty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of our cars. Will she, generally speaking, take quote unquote mine when she’s doing basic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff around town, because she’s not going to want to haul the, I think it’s like 5,000, 5,500, 6,000 pound car in order to do stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or will she just take hers because she’s more comfortable with it?

⏹️ ▶️ John How much do you think your EV is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey weigh? I was gonna say, I have one

⏹️ ▶️ John of those 3,000 pound EVs. Yeah, I have bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco news for you about how much EVs weigh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You make a very good point.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even when they’re not SUVs, they’re all heavy.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is very true. You’re right about that. But you still take my point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John though. I mean, whatever battery I get. Smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John dimensions would maybe be

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey better around

⏹️ ▶️ John town for parking and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So, I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I’m not currently in the market for a car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really do love my car. And I know I’m going to desperately miss having a stick

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whenever I get something different. But I am really, really happy with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey her plug-in hybrid and some quibbles here and there for sure. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really, really glad this is where we ended up. And it may come a time, I presume there will come a time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we get both of us full-on electric cars. And I’ll say to Marco, you know what,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you were right. We could have done it for that 2024 that we leased. But sitting here now to get our foot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the water, I’m really, really happy with it. And if you have this situation where, you know, you work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from home or your commute is very, very, very short. I mean, when I was working outside the home, my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey commute was like three miles. So if you’re in the situation where you’re not driving a whole ton every

⏹️ ▶️ Casey day, and yet you still wanna be able to drive far if you so desire, plug-in hybrid, man, it’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plug-in hybrids are great for a lot of people. That being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, once you actually live with a full EV, you’re going to realize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it was so not a big deal the way you thought it would be.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m sure you’re right. I don’t doubt it. In

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms of long trips. Because, look, I get range anxiety.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get trying to avoid EV charging infrastructure because it’s unfamiliar and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scary. I get that. And yes, there are downsides for certain use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases for EVs, but it’s so much less of a big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal than people think it will be to take EVs on long trips before they own them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once you own one and live with it and actually do it, you’re like, oh, that’s fine. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t better in every way, but it’s better in a lot of ways. And it’s not that much worse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you think it’ll be in the few ways it is worse. So yeah, it’s not a big deal. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the meantime, plug-in hybrids are a good transitional

⏹️ ▶️ Marco option. And so I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I’m glad it’s working

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as kind of training wheels into the world of electric. And I’m glad you’re able to enjoy some of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those benefits of electric-only use or electric primary use in the meantime. So that’s great. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t agree with you more that this is training wheels at the moment. And the funny thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this is that, if I’m honest with you two, there are definitely times that Aaron’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prior XC90, the pure gasoline XC90, there are definitely some multi-hundred

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mile trips we went on with that car. But generally speaking, in an average year,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the longest trip that Aaron’s car made, and this one will make, is 140

⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles, which is well within the range of—now that’s one way,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind you. So what is that? About 300 miles round trip, which is still almost, I would say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most electric cars, jump in Marco, but most electric electric cars have roundabouts of 250 to 300

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mile range. So even round trip, we could probably do it in one charge if we really needed to. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, you know, so generally speaking, her car does not go far. So that’s even more credence that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey full of it. And Marco’s right that we should just have a full battery electric for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Aaron. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John currently using an EV with 35 miles of range, you realize. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your living. That is able

⏹️ ▶️ John to serve all of your needs with an EV with 35 miles of range. It just happens to weigh

⏹️ ▶️ John 5,500 pounds. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree. You’re not wrong. That being said, we are going on a longer trip this upcoming summer, which is 320

⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles each way. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t charge when we’re there. And it’s going to be a week-long trip.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So presumably, even if we were plugged into a standard 110-volt outlet,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume in the span of literally a week, we would be able to top that thing up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So… But you would never do that because fast charging is really easy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also fair. But my point is that like, it could happen. I’m not trying to say that it is an impossibility

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us. It’s just something that I certainly wasn’t comfortable with. And if I wasn’t comfortable with it, there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is no chance that Aaron would be comfortable with it. And Actually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John is writing something in our internal show notes as we speak, which reminded me of the one thing I meant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, which I’ve forgotten to say. Um, Aaron, the other day, when it started to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get cold by our standards, which at this point I will concede is not cold by Northeastern standards.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was like maybe a month ago, Aaron gets in the car and it’s like, uh, is something wrong

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my car? And I was like, Oh God, what, why? She said, well, it’s not saying I have 30 plus miles

⏹️ ▶️ Casey range. It says like 28, 29, 27, something like that. I forget what it was and I was like, huh. And then I stepped outside. Oh, yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. That’s the thing. And she said, what, what are you talking about? I was like, oh yeah, it’s cold

⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside. Yeah. Well, the battery doesn’t work as well as it’s cold when it’s cold. What? Now, let

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me be clear. Erin is not a dumb woman. I would say she’s brighter than me in almost every capacity, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s not as knowledgeable as me about cars and that sort of thing. And she had no idea that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she would take a hit for range during, during the winter. And yeah, the 32-ish

⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles that we were getting in the summer, it’s now like 27-ish usually when we pull out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the garage in the morning.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but again, like, yes, that is like a thing that happens, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less about like inherent shortcomings of EVs and more just about lack of familiarity. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always think there was that one blog post that we linked to a thousand years ago from like, it was like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco written from the perspective of somebody who’s just discovering gas cars for the first time after having EVs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, that was very good. I forget, I don’t think we could find it, but that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco very good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, but it was like, I love that perspective. It’s like a lot of what people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider downsides of EVs are not considering similar downsides

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of gas cars. It’s like comparing it against like a perfect ideal that doesn’t exist, rather than looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at what actually is, you know, there’s downsides with everything and there’s different trade-offs. part of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why EVs have to, you know, make their own heat in the winter, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is somewhat inefficient and uses more range, is because there isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a giant inefficient heat reaction happening as it operates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to drive itself forward the way it is in gas. Like, gas cars can heat the cabin for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically for free because there is just so much waste heat coming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the engine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like, okay, well that’s great, that’s free. But then you’re like, well, hmm, you mean we’re wasting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that energy all the rest of the time? And it’s heating up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world all the rest of the time? Like, that isn’t without downside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either, you know? So like, there’s a lot of kind of, you know, just gas car bias in our minds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we’ve accepted that as normal. We have internalized, like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just how quote normal cars operate. So then when EVs come around, like we see all the differences without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco realizing like there’s a lot of downsides to gas cars too. Oh definitely. Definitely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, like I will never say that EVs are better at everything. I will say that they are better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at most things. And again, like the ways they are worse are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as much worse for most people as they might think. But in almost every other way, right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And again, I think we could absolutely make an EV work. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I say that as though it would be some immense burden.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco wouldn’t be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It wouldn’t be. And intellectually, I know that, but I just wasn’t there yet. And again, if I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not there yet, I don’t think Aaron was either. But I suspect what’s going to happen is whenever my car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets replaced, and I don’t know if that’s tomorrow or 10 years from now, but whenever my car gets replaced, I’ll get some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of full electric car. And once we live with that, I think it’ll quickly become very clear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us that, oh, we could make this work and it wouldn’t be as burdensome as we fear.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’ll be better than that. You won’t just be making it work. You’ll love it. Give

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like two months or less and you’ll be like, oh my God, why did we wait this long?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s true too, because Aaron’s car went in full battery mode either because it’s in the quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pure or because we just haven’t kicked on the gasoline yet. It’s sufficiently quick,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is not quick. I mean, it is a very heavy car, and it is not a tremendous motor that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving it. And so it is not fast by any means. It’s actually surprisingly peppy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey once you’ve got both of them working together, because the gasoline, I believe, only drives the front

⏹️ ▶️ Casey axle and the battery only drives the rear. But generally speaking, when we drive it, it’s, like I said, it’s sufficiently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick, but it is not quick. Whereas even slow EVs that I’ve driven, like my parents have a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chevy, is it Bolt? I always get it Bolt and Volt wrong. I forget which one it is. Whatever one is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that they were producing up until like a year ago. Maybe it’s a Volt, crap, I don’t remember.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t matter, anyways. Moult. Fair, yeah, it sheds, it sheds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey every couple of seasons. It’s very weird. But anyways, whatever their piece of crap Chevy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric is, it is a piece of crap Chevy electric, and yet it’s actually delightful.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And from zero to 30 miles an hour, pretty damn fast. You’d be surprised.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s not a performance car by any stretch of the imagination. So I am looking forward to whenever we get a full battery electric

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have, you know, that instant torque in more than just a small helping of it from zero RPM.

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