623: It’s About Human Connection
23 Jan 2025Nerdy home-buying considerations, Hyperspace updates, the surprisingly difficult engineering challenge of scrolling, and how we’re going to get through all of this.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: #GALP 🏳️🌈❤️🏳️⚧️
- Follow-up:
- Apple pauses notification summaries for news apps
- Marco’s BMW does have dual-screen CarPlay
- Acura RSX: Honda’s first all-original EV
- Another 5K monitor enters the arena: ViewSonic VP2788-5K
- Fast directory sizing lives!
/System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources/apfs.utilman apfs.util
- Apple sample code is on GitHub (via David Rönnqvist)
- Video of an iPhone 16 Pro upgrade 128 GB → 1 TB (via Joe Beninato)
- Tim Cook on Table Manners with Jessie & Lennie Ware
- Hyperspace updates
- Ask ATP:
- What should a nerd consider when buying a house? (via Jeremy Kelleher)
- Post-show: Casey’s Rube Goldberg machine… simplified?
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Nintendo Switch 2 announced
Sponsored by:
- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Use code ATP.
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- GALP 🏳️🌈❤️🏳️⚧️
- Jeff Atwood is awesome
- 18.3 AI-summary changes
- Dual-screen CarPlay
- Acura “RSX” EV
- Another 27” 5K monitor!
- APFS fast directory sizing
- Getting old sample code
- An iPhone storage upgrade
- Cook on Table Manners
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Hyperspace updates
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: Nerd house considerations
- Ending theme
- Casey’s 🚥
GALP 🏳️🌈❤️🏳️⚧️
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to I wanted to a brief political statement to start this because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know oh great yeah there’s nothing going on there these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I think and and you know forgive me this is something I wrote 10 minutes ago so you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it’s that kind of Marco political statement oh my reading from a prepared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah very very it’s still hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all I guess that’s where hot takes come from is that the free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it I’d actually never realized probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey oh that’s Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know a lot of people are you know very upset right now with what’s going on with you know the inauguration the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning and all the executive orders and and it’s you know, it’s it’s gonna be rough for a while and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what we what we have to try to keep in mind is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Republican agenda is Wealth transfer to the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the big thing to accomplish and conceal that they gain votes and power by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by division, cruelty, and violence. But the goal is the wealth transfer to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top. If you look at what they actually do, that’s mainly it in different forms. Tax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuts to the corporations, tax cuts to the rich, straight up corruption, which is now even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right in the open than anything. But also things like large scale deregulation, regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture, and the politicization of the justice system. I think the latter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part there, that is why it seems like we are seeing a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharp and aggressive turn to the right by all the big tech companies. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all are now explicitly supporting the Republican Party to, in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view, to selfishly benefit from the wealth transfer and deregulatory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aspects. And the price they paid to get those gains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to completely sell their souls and their morals out by therefore also supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the division, cruelty, and violence that Republicans require as a smokescreen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a source of power. This is going to be something we’re going to be fighting and angered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hurt by and possibly damaged by for any of us for a long time now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know how to fix it. There is no quick and easy fix. We can’t just turn all of our avatars blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or put stickers on our cars and expect anything to change. What I suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we do is practice the opposite of their playbook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what’s the opposite of division, cruelty, and violence? Generosity, acceptance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love, and protection. And I think we need to embody those in what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we preach, what we do, and as tech people, what we build. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, right now women, anybody who’s not white, LGBTQ people, trans and non-binary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are all under attack by these monsters. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us who can support and protect someone who needs support and protection really need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. So generosity, acceptance, love, and protection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the best thing we can do to get through this for now. And that’s how we can fight it, so we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn this horrible, toxic mess around. And we’ll do our best. From our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position here, we’ll do our best. And all of you out there, I encourage you, do the same and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll do what we can to get through this and help people who need help.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I concur. Marco did not run this by us, not to say that we needed to like approve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or anything, but he didn’t tell us that this was going to happen until 10 seconds ago. We didn’t read it or anything beforehand.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have your statement ready?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t. I don’t. But I completely agree with you. The only problem I have with it is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what did you say? Generosity, acceptance, love, and protection. GALP is not the best acronym. I think we need to workshop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe more than 10 minutes of writing would get me a better one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in general, I’m obviously snarking and joking around, but all kidding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside, this is a real crappy time for a lot of people. And the typical feedback we get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we talk about political stuff is either A, stay in your lane, which I’m sorry, we’ve been doing this for 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years. It’s not going to happen. Also, have you heard our show? We don’t have lanes. It’s also true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so the feedback is typically A, stay in your lane, or B, ha ha, you liberal snowflakes. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to bother you. Who cares? And on the surface, there’s a little bit of truth to that because we’re three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cisgendered white dudes that have a couple of shekels to our names. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m worried about people that I care about and love and people that I don’t know, but I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care about, like Marco was saying. And I think that the announcements and proclamations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and executive orders of the first 24 hours make it clear what their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey priorities are, and that’s hate and anger and division and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the things that Marco was talking about. It’s just – it’s all awful. And so I completely agree that what Marco was saying is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. Remind me of generosity, acceptance, love, and what was the last one? Aaron Powell Protection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Todd Colvin Thank you. There we go. I couldn’t agree more and we’ll workshop a good acronym for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or a good, a good twist of those four letters. But could be GLAP. GLAP. GLAP is not great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either, but we’ll work on it. PLAG maybe? But truly, you know, you’re exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also like, you know, what we saw last time, um, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco administration happened, uh, what we saw last time was basically a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fire in motion constantly that, you know, for those of you who don’t remember or have mercifully blocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out of your memory. Basically every day of that administration was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scandal of some sort. There was something new every day. Can you believe what he said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did, whatever, today? We got all riled up and angry and for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of that time that was for nothing. Like we got all riled up and angry and that mainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just cost us happiness and mental health. So if you are really involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in politics and love reading the news all the time and hearing all this stuff day day to day, that’s up to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not that way. I found that it cost me dearly in stress and mental health
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything and I had to pull back from the news. The scandal of the day is gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing. So you can keep stacking up those blocks and staying really like cranked up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mad and scared and just feeling powerless like you can feel that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single day if you want to pay attention to all this stuff. I suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reconsidering that like if you are not a politics wonk and if you are not a politics enthusiast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like reconsider how much of your mental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health you want to give these monsters. It is not your civic duty to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow everything that they do, to get mad at every single thing that they, you know, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single gaffe or awful thing they do. It is not your job to yell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it and get mad at every single little thing because they’re gonna just keep adding stuff every single day. It’s not gonna stop. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how these monsters govern it is by distraction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and smoke screens and you know I heard the term flooding the zone which I think is a sports thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they govern it’s by just an endless barrage of scandals because by the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody can think of anything to do with one scandal three more have piled on top of it and nobody can even keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up you don’t have to participate in that you can choose to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus on what gives you the life that you need and want. You can focus on your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mental health and protection and focus more on the general themes of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we want to go and you know help people, protect people. You can do all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without paying super attention to every single daily scandal because that’s that’s not a happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place for anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to clarify that what I think Marco is not saying is that boy isn’t it nice that we don’t have to worry about this
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not going to affect us, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m saying by the way. I think it will affect does just differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re, I know, but people are going to hear what you said and they’re going to think that’s what you were saying. So I just want to clarify. The
⏹️ ▶️ John idea is not to say, I’m going to bury my head in the sand because none of this is going to affect me. Ha ha. No, that’s not the issue. The
⏹️ ▶️ John issue is that you should like mark, like GALP says, I think it’s a perfectly good acronym.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should be doing everything you can to counter the things that are happening, helping everybody that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can help fighting against these things. That does not require paying minute attention
⏹️ ▶️ John to every little thing every person says. Like that’s the difference. It’s not just pretend it’s not happening,
⏹️ ▶️ John go la la la, lucky you, you’re so privileged, it’s not going to affect you. That is not the message. The message is
⏹️ ▶️ John fight against it on your own, with your own efforts, and you know what the deal is. You know what needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be done, right? Doing that does not require you obsessively tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John what every one of the people in the administration says on a given day.
Jeff Atwood is awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, special shout out to Jeff Atwood. Have you seen the stuff he’s been doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that is true. We should call attention to that. He donated something like 8 million bucks or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so far, and is going to be donating more. So Jeff Atwood, he blogged under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the name Coding Horror for years. He was also one of the co-founders of Stack Overflow. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just a super nice guy. He’s like a nerds nerd. Even though I didn’t always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree with his blog as he was more Microsofty, he’s still a really nice guy and a huge nerd like the rest of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he made a bunch of money off of Stack Exchange and has been donating tons of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to lots of good causes and promoting, you know, people doing what they can, you know, to help out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, yeah, special shout out. He’s doing some really good stuff recently. So thanks to Jeff Atwood for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being awesome. Like he’s, he seems like a genuinely good person. I don’t know him. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him well. I’ve only met him like twice, but he seemed like a really good person and, uh, and I really respect what he’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I had no idea until I read the blog post that we’ll link in the show notes that he is from right around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. He’s from another Richmond suburb and went to UVA, which is where Aaron went. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if he wasn’t doing amazing things, I would have a little bit of kinship with him for that. But he is doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far more good things than I am, which should be celebrated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. More people like Jeff Atwood should have a bunch of money because they actually do good things with it. the
18.3 AI-summary changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up Apple has decided maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these notification summaries aren’t as great as we thought and so they’re going to pause them for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey News and some other things in the latest betas anyway reading from 9 to 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Apple has temporarily stopped showing notification summaries for news and entertainment apps as part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 18.3 developer beta released on the 16th Here are the changes when you enable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notification summaries iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature, like all Apple Intelligence features, is a beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can now disable lock screen, excuse me, notification summaries for an app directly from the lock screen or notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center by swiping, tapping options, and then choosing turn off summaries. On the lock screen, notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications. And hoo boy, does that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look ugly to me, but that’s neither here nor there. In the settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may contain errors. Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for news and entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to refine the experience. All this is well and good, except I’m really not in love with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fact that they’re opting everyone into this beta software. Did you see that as well? I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link for that handy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so someone was saying that even 15.2, the Mac OS 15.0, and he turned it on by default. This is the question of
⏹️ ▶️ John like when you use upgrade to these new OS’s, do you get asked, hey, Apple intelligence exists. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to turn it on? And I think I personally, I think that it is a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit extreme to say like, uh, that Apple should ask you about this new feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like saying Apple should ask me if they want me to be able to have this new features of the photos app. What if I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John face recognition? They just turn it on without even asking me. Like I know when, when a feature has anything to do with like privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John or is controversial in some way, people like I want to be asked, but that’s not a scalable way to release
⏹️ ▶️ John features. You can’t make every single new feature you put in your software be opt-in and have to have an explicit
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that asks somebody By the way, I had a new feature in my program Do you want me to turn on or not? Like as if people can just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a la carte Accept your application is like I’ll only accept what shipped in 1.0 everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else after that I don’t want and if you foisted on me, I’m gonna be mad about it. That said particular features
⏹️ ▶️ John can get a Be in someone’s bonnet Let’s say they use something controversial like AI people don’t like for
⏹️ ▶️ John various reasons even something like face recognition people can make its privacy invasive despite what Apple tells them about it not
⏹️ ▶️ John being. So I do understand the idea that, and betas, you know, quote unquote betas. I do understand
⏹️ ▶️ John people feeling like in certain cases, they’d rather not have the thing turned on by default,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple intelligence is such a fundamental part of Apple’s software
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy, and it spans so many different features across so many different products. I don’t think it’s reasonable to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, it shouldn’t be turned on for me by default when I upgrade to the new operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t like Apple intelligence that much, A, you can go turn it off, which maybe you won’t be able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future or whatever, but B, don’t use Apple products because I have news for you. Apple intelligence is not going away.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like they’re gonna say, oh, nevermind, we’re not doing that Apple intelligence thing anymore. You can think of every other
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that Apple has added to macOS. Like, I don’t like notifications. I liked it better when there wasn’t notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John or a notification center. Well, it didn’t go away. It still exists. Every app can do it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it off and on off per apps. And if you really hate notifications, don’t use iOS. Don’t use macOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have notifications. it’s part of the operating system. So that’s how I personally feel about the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence stuff in terms of it being on versus off. We’ll get to the actual feature in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people have different opinions. And this is a point where you can decide how
⏹️ ▶️ John much do you hate Apple intelligence? Is Apple turning it on by default enough for you to change platforms?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think the thing that bothers me about it is that they’ll say in one breath,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a beta, it could screw up. It’s a beta, it’s a beta, it’s a beta. And then in the next breath, all their marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is about it. And by the way, Oh, everyone’s going to use it now. You know, like I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the beta thing is totally like trying to deflect blame. As we’ve said last episode, if you ship
⏹️ ▶️ John it to everybody, like in the released version of the operating system, you can kind of say like, well, the whole operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system is not beta, but this one little corner of it is. But like at a certain point, when does it stop being beta? Like wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t, I haven’t done this before. It wasn’t Siri like beta for three and a half years or something like that. Something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri’s still beta. It’s been like over a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’ve they’ve left I believe Apple has left the beta marketing label on many features
⏹️ ▶️ John for just ridiculous amount of time so long that it’s kind of like the interim CEO. Remember when Steve Jobs is I CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John and people have forgotten like, oh yeah, he’s technically still the like temporary. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually they just got rid of the I eventually they get rid of the beta. But yeah, that labeling of the beta doesn’t help anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Disabling it for news is damage control. BBC is mad at you. Can you make them unmad at
⏹️ ▶️ John you by saying we won’t do it for news? Like that’s, that’s, that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, put out a fire. Like, can I make some big, important companies not as mad at Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. Turn it off for news. And then they say, but we’re going to turn it on again later when we’ve quote, refined the feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like when everyone’s calmed down, maybe it will turn it on again later. The italicized text, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John got the little icon that nobody knows what it means except for people listening to the show, italicizing the text.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it make it seem like they’re thinking it like when you read a book and like the person’s thoughts are in italic or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t there’s there’s just no way that if you just showed somebody who does is a
⏹️ ▶️ John casual user of a phone, a notification and one of them’s italic. I don’t even know if they would notice
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the special when you don’t see them compared like you just see a notification you look at it and you’re like, Oh, I think they changed
⏹️ ▶️ John the font is what people will say I don’t like the new font if they notice at all. So that is just
⏹️ ▶️ John not a solution in any like in some ways it makes it worse because there’s one more
⏹️ ▶️ John really subtle thing about these notifications rather than what it should be is a totally
⏹️ ▶️ John unsubtle. This is Apple saying something the BBC didn’t say this. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple saying this based on what it heard from the BBC app or whatever. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this, this just seems like something that is not going to make this problem go
Dual-screen CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right Marco you have some follow-up for us from What is it last week’s post show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right with regard to carplay?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes So I I said in last week’s cook post because there was a news item that BMW’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next Version of their iDrive system and their cars was not going to support dual screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carplay And I was like, huh? I thought my car had really advanced carplay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and It doesn’t support dual screen carplay now Now, it turns out my car does support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dual screen carplay. So thanks to an anonymous friend of the show who informed me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this. And I went and tested it and sure enough, yes, I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have dual screen carplay. What I didn’t realize is that you have to have the center dial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco configuration showing its map mode for it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When that’s there, then the middle screen will show the dual screen. But I also learned, and I think this is just true of dual screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carplay in general, that the second screen in the dial cluster will only show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Maps and only during active navigation within Apple Maps. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use any other map app like Waze or Google Maps, currently with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their current versions, those do not show in the second screen. I have also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned that apparently there is an API for them to do that, but that’s been a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly recent addition, I think in the iOS 17 series sometime, but the Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maps and Waze just have not yet used it. So basically right now, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have two screen car play, what that really just means is Apple Maps directions will show up on the second screen during navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it. For me personally, that doesn’t really help me that much because I don’t usually use Apple Maps for navigation in the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m more of a Waze person myself, but if you do, maybe look into that if that’s
Acura “RSX” EV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And since we’re in neutral corner, John, apparently Honda has decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the two EVs they were going to sell, or they’ve talked about already, are not their only offerings. What else is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the table here?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is an article from The Verge. Honda says the Acura RSX will be its first
⏹️ ▶️ John original EV. Reading from The Verge, Honda announced that its first original electric vehicle, that is an EV
⏹️ ▶️ John built on its own platform and not based on another automaker’s tech like the Honda Prologue, will be the Acura
⏹️ ▶️ John RSX due out in 2026. The RSX is based on the Performance Concept, which was introduced last year.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will be the first EV built on Honda’s new vehicle platform and will debut the proprietary in-house developed
⏹️ ▶️ John ASIMO operating system that was announced at CES. Honda’s two battery electric vehicles in the US,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Honda Prologue and the Acura ZDX, are both based on GM’s Ultium vehicle platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Prologue in particular has been an early success for Honda, outselling its sister vehicles,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Chevy Blazer and the Honda Equinox EVs. What is Equinox? It’s the Chevy Equinox, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ John RSX will also be the first EV to be built at Honda’s new factory in Ohio, where production is expected to kick
⏹️ ▶️ John off in late 2025. The $4.4 billion plant is a joint venture between Honda and LG Chemical,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Korean battery company. So we’ll put a link to this in the show notes. You can see a spy shot of
⏹️ ▶️ John a lightly camouflaged Acura RSX. First thing to note, the Acura RSX nameplate,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may recognize that from the past because that was the car that Honda made a while ago back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John early 2000s to succeed the Integra. The Integra is a very famous
⏹️ ▶️ John small sporty car. It came in two-door and four-door varieties, but it was like a sporty hatchback.
⏹️ ▶️ John The RSX looks very much like an Integra, just not as nice. It wasn’t as popular. It wasn’t as good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the point is it was a small, like, you know, usually two-door sports car. I think there was only two-door for the
⏹️ ▶️ John RSX. I don’t think they made a four-door like they did with the Integra. Anyway, this is not that.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is another instance, like the Ford Mustang, quote unquote, Mustang
⏹️ ▶️ John Mach-E, where they’ve taken a name from a previous car that was popular, or I don’t know, the RSX wasn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John popular, but the Integra was, and said, we’re gonna use that name, but what are we gonna put it on?
⏹️ ▶️ John The only kind of car anybody buys, an SUV. So now there will be
⏹️ ▶️ John a car called the Acura RSX that is a four-door sport utility vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ John like every other car on the road. But the good thing is, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like a four-door sport utility vehicle. It has a rear window. I bet it has a steering
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel that’s almost round. It has regular-ish doors. Like it just
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like a normal car. Oh, and by the way, on the prologue thing, first of all, I saw the first
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those on the road recently. It’s very big. And second, I think it’s hilarious that
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda essentially licensed a car from GM, and GM
⏹️ ▶️ John is selling it two times. They’re selling it as the Blazer and the Equinox. And Honda is outselling them
⏹️ ▶️ John with its like re-skinned, re-badged, re-interiored version of their car. They must
⏹️ ▶️ John be saying, it’s our car. How are we not selling more of it than they are? And the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is because people trust the Honda name and they don’t trust General Motors, which is sad. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you reap what you sow. Anyway, I’m glad that Honda is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make at least one non-extreme, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ John electric vehicle. This looks like exactly the kind of car they would make. If you’re gonna make one car that most people buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John like make it this shape, because that’s what people want, and I don’t want it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that their EV platform is not only good for super weird looking cars
⏹️ ▶️ John with no rear windows and no steering wheels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m excited for you to buy one in the name of the show.
Another 27” 5K monitor!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alison Sheridan pointed out to us that there’s another entry to the suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very robust 27-inch 5K monitor market. I am here for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But somebody pointed out to us, shoot, I don’t know if I can find that tweet recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, here we go. Tom Bullock writes, regarding third-party Mac monitors from last week’s show, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been wild to see all of our reactions in 2016 or so to find out that The year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the dam would break on third-party 5K displays would be 2024 and 2025. Someday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope there’s a good story about what took them 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Other than the best part of that would be, and during that time, Apple will ship one 5K monitor. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is better than zero, but still.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s very good. Anyways, I digress. So, Alson writes in with regard to the ViewSonic VP2788-5K.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Such great names. This is a 27 inch 5K, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same resolution as the ones you’re used to. This has display HDR 400, which goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to 500 nits, 99% DCI-P3. It has HDMI 2.1 display port, two Thunderbolt 4 at a hundred Watts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two USB-A, two USB-C at 15 Watts, a height adjustable stand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal speakers. It sounds decent, if not pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The look of it is fine, But now Casey is interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because gentlemen, $800 as per Dave Hamilton from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac Geek Gap YouTube channel. If it’s $800, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is phenomenal value for money. This thing could be a piece of crap and I’d still buy six of
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Cause that’s so cheap. I mean, ViewSonic is a good brand and they historically have made good monitors. I remember them from the
⏹️ ▶️ John CRT days. Presumably they haven’t gone entirely downhill since then. You can see some video of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was at CES and Dave Hamilton’s YouTube video will link. That $800 price is unconfirmed
⏹️ ▶️ John by ViewSonic, but that’s what Dave Hamilton said in the video. So fingers crossed. Again, this is another example of
⏹️ ▶️ John no mini LED, no HDR, but if you just want, but basically like the studio display, a plain, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John good quality, 5K monitor in a not ugly case that
⏹️ ▶️ John is hopefully sturdy with, you know, a full compliment of ports, no built-in camera or anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John still like good, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco good compliment
⏹️ ▶️ John of ports. it’s nice to see, quote unquote, PC monitors with Thunderbolt on them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They used to be like nothing you could, no equivalent. You’d have to use some weird, you know, you’d use like DisplayPort or some other
⏹️ ▶️ John connector that is not common on the back of Macs, but this one looks like it will just plug right in. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t quite know why they’re all coming out. Maybe it’s because like PC gaming cards are finally getting to the point with like DLSS
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that, where they can, people wanna run games at higher than 1440, right? Or higher
⏹️ ▶️ John than 1080 and still get good frame rates. So now suddenly there’s a market for higher resolution, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just the standard, like five to eight year lag the PC market has behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the nice stuff in the Apple market. But I welcome their low prices.
APFS fast directory sizing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Apparently, fast directory sizing does exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remind me or jump in when you’re ready, but we had talked about how APFS has the ability to very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly figure out the size of the directory, but then there were a bunch of caveats. We thought that it wasn’t actually implemented, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So the fast directory sizing is not about figuring out the size. It’s about constantly keeping the size
⏹️ ▶️ John on record up to date with all the changes that happen. So when you ever ask for the size, it’s like, I already
⏹️ ▶️ John have that size. I’ve been keeping track of it. I don’t nothing happens in this directory without me knowing about it. I’m the file
⏹️ ▶️ John system and whenever something happens I write it down in my little book. And so when you ask me how what is the total
⏹️ ▶️ John size of all the stuff in this directory I just read you the number that I’ve got written down right here and it’s instant.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is the feature and it was advertised with APFS when it was introduced in 2016. Unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John the API to get that information the dirstat underscore and p
⏹️ ▶️ John function has code in it that says, yeah, this is broken, we’re not doing it. We’re just gonna, if you ever call
⏹️ ▶️ John this, we’re gonna do it the old fashioned way by crawling over the whole directory laboriously and taking a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of time and then giving you your answer. But apparently this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John does in fact exist in APFS and can in fact be used by a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John user if they want to use the APFS.util
⏹️ ▶️ John command line binary that is buried in system library file systems, APFS.fs,
⏹️ ▶️ John contents resources, APFS.util. You can run man space APFS.util,
⏹️ ▶️ John all lowercase, and read about this command. And what this command can do is turn on fast directory sizing
⏹️ ▶️ John for a directory. And once it’s on, you can run this command to ask the directory, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the size of the stuff inside you? That’s pretty cool. That shows that the feature
⏹️ ▶️ John does exist and does sort of kind of work. Does it work all the time? Is it reliable?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there something broken about it? We don’t know. I tried the command line thing. I ran it on a directory that had a bunch of files.
⏹️ ▶️ John It gave me an answer that seemed right according to my verification by doing it manually. Maybe it gets confused
⏹️ ▶️ John over time and can’t keep up with the pace of changes. Maybe it’s gonna cause some, like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what the caveats are about this, but it seems clear that the functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John that implements fast directory sizing does exist. This apfs.util thing, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John is not open source. So I don’t know what’s inside of it. Presumably it’s calling some proprietary APIs that were you to try to put
⏹️ ▶️ John them in your app. You would get rejected from the Mac App Store at the very least. You could, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John run this command line utility from your Mac App in the Mac App Store and get it to get the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I’m glad to see that this stuff still exists and there’s hope for it being resurrected.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it does actually work, I would love for them to actually provide APIs for it, and or
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they don’t provide APIs for it, integrate it into the Finder, integrate it into the iOS setting screen. Like we said before,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I go to see what, you know, which apps are taking up space on my phone, that could be way faster if you use this, if only
⏹️ ▶️ John it worked. So I don’t know what the caveats are, but if you wanna play with it, there’s that command line utility. Hopefully it won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John destroy your system. Hopefully not. Oh, and as for, we’ll get to this in the topics thing, but as
⏹️ ▶️ John for a Hyperspace, I’m not going to use this with Hyperspace. It’s not the type of thing that I can, I don’t feel confident
⏹️ ▶️ John that it works all the time or is reliable or, you know, like it’s not, it’s a file buried
⏹️ ▶️ John in the system library, file systems directory. It’s clearly kind of, there’s no public APIs for it. I don’t want to run the
⏹️ ▶️ John command line thing, the command line thing could go. So I’m just ignoring this for now, but it is interesting
Getting old sample code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Ronquist writes with regard to sample code. In ATP Episode 618, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about accessing past versions of Apple sample code. As John points out, the download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is always the latest version of the code, but Apple also has a GitHub history of past releases. So you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to match a WWDC video from two years ago, or look at the diff to see what’s changed. Some sample
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code like Backyard Birds and the Food Truck apps are also available in GitHub and have history
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. So you can see this on GitHub, we’ll link to those repos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s much nicer than the bad old days when everything was like in a zip file that you had to find somewhere on Apple’s site that would download
⏹️ ▶️ John from a CDN. Apple has been slowly but surely embracing
⏹️ ▶️ John GitHub more, which is strategically maybe not the best move, like instead of having their own kind of Git
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but like that’s just the nature of the world right now. It’s like GitHub will never go away, just like Google Reader. It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone can have everything on GitHub. And that’s kind of the situation we’re all in. Hopefully that holds
⏹️ ▶️ John for a little longer. But anyway, I’m glad that the point is I’m glad Apple is doing more and more open source stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John actually in the open. And also that like we talked about this many shows ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve also moved some of their open source stuff out of like the Apple account at GitHub, like github.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s Apple’s corporate GitHub account. There is also I figured out what the name of it is. But there’s another one that’s like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not owned by Apple. It’s Apple’s open source stuff. But it is not owned by the Apple Corporation, like
⏹️ ▶️ John so Swift has been slowly moving out of the Apple username on GitHub and into the,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the open source equivalent thing is that is not owned and controlled entirely by Apple, even if most of the people working on
⏹️ ▶️ John it are paid by Apple, so it’s kind of de facto controlled by Apple. But anyway, positive trends all around.
An iPhone storage upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe Beninato writes, here’s a pretty amazing video of an iPhone 16 Pro upgrade from 128 gigs to 1 terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe had linked a threads post to tweet whatever you want to call it skeet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t what are we calling it these days? Um, but I also found what appears to be a YouTube version of it as well. It might be a mirror
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know which one came first But we’ll put both of them in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was fascinating and a ton of work for something you could just have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple do on your behalf. And I understand that it’s expensive as crap, but this was what looked like hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of work to do this upgrade, but still fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it was pretty speedy, but like the reason it’s in here is because like, we talked so much about
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrading the SSDs, like in those little modules and soldering the little things on the circuit
⏹️ ▶️ John boards made in France and like figuring out how to essentially like, can I make a cheaper version of the little thingies that
⏹️ ▶️ John are inside my Apple thingy so that I can get more stuff for less money? And this video
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, shows the extremes that people are willing to go to. Forget about like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just soldering thing on a new printed circuit board and plugging it into a connector. The technique they use on this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same type of thing. It’s like a NAND chip. It’s got a bunch of, a big grid of metal contacts on the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the chip and that sits on top of the circuit board that has corresponding contacts and that’s how it works, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than trying to like de-solder it and like get the NAND thing to all those little balls to melt and then for the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to come off, they’re not really solder balls. Anyway, to get it to like remove the chip from the thing and then put a new
⏹️ ▶️ John one on, rather than doing that, they take a computer controlled milling machine
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just mill the old NAND out. They just turn it to dust. Just enough. They just go back and forth and back
⏹️ ▶️ John and forth and like they mill the surface to be flush with the printed circuit
⏹️ ▶️ John board and your previous like 256 gig NAND thing turns into dust that hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t inhale because it’s probably terrible for you. And then they clean the surface, then they take a new chip, they drop it on their
⏹️ ▶️ John solder and epoxy around it or whatever and then reassemble the phone. It is an amazing video to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like watching robotic surgery, so careful and such precision.
⏹️ ▶️ John And really like surgery, it’s something that you really want someone who is skilled at doing because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not easy. And the video is zoomed way in, so you don’t realize just how small and
⏹️ ▶️ John how delicate everything is that’s taking place in this video. I found it
⏹️ ▶️ John completely amazing. on. Yeah, big upgrade from 128 to one terabyte. Didn’t do it.
Cook on Table Manners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally, I wanted to call attention to a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think aired a week, maybe two weeks ago. My American
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be showing, and I apologize to everyone who’s listening across the pond, but apparently there exists a podcast called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Table Manners with Jesse and Lenny Ware. I haven’t a clue who these people are. My understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of them, at least, if not both, are very famous in the UK. My genuine apologies. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ignorant American. What do you want to do? But Tim Cook was on the show and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not aware of a video version, although apparently the whole schtick is they serve the person a meal and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk over the meal and so on and so forth. This interview really ticked me off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this is the kind of interview that I think I would want to do with Tim Cook if possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they basically don’t talk about barely anything Apple related.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even though the better interview would be to get Tim Cook to open up about all the decisions he’s made at Apple and why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he made them and so on and so forth. As we’ve said many times in the show, he’ll never do that. That’s never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to happen. So just take that off the table. It’s never going to happen. So knowing that that’s never going to happen, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you do? You just talk to him about what it’s like to grow up as Tim Cook and what does he like to do and how does he work and where does he,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, go to relax and stuff like that. And it’s, I don’t know, it was like half an hour, 45 minutes. I thought it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really, really good. And it showed Tim Cook as a human, which is great because right now I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, I want him to go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is a human that we’re all mad at yeah exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I’m so glad Tim had this really hard-hitting interview puff piece I mean, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is worth it to somebody to but like would you right now watch the same interview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of say Mark Zuckerberg I? Mean, I’m just saying like I think this is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a puff You know BS thing and I’m I’m glad for people who like it Maybe it’ll make you feel better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me this it just kind of angers me like Like why give him this kind of attention right now when he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not deserve anything but very strict scrutiny over what he has done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I also think like, you know, it is, I guess, not somewhat novel
⏹️ ▶️ John for someone to interview Tim Cook and ask so little about Apple. They didn’t ask zero, but so little about Apple. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John do think that literally everything he said was entirely controlled in Tim cookie. Like I’ve just
⏹️ ▶️ John he is impossible to draw out. I’ve never seen anyone do it like to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the human that’s inside there. I’m not saying what he was saying was like insincere or dishonest, I think he was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying things that he really felt and did or whatever, but in a very controlled Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John way, like in a media trained, carefully avoiding anything. He’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John well trained and disciplined that they would ask him things about like, which of these two different
⏹️ ▶️ John kinds of fruit do you prefer? And he would not take a position because he’s afraid that the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John like the kind of fruit that he said he doesn’t like will not like, like, he just will not. Like, I swear
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, like, listen to it. I figure where the details, they tried to ask him to take a position on food.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this wasn’t it, but like, because he did take a position on dark chocolate versus milk and he said he liked
⏹️ ▶️ John dark, right? So apparently he’s okay with that one, but another one, they’re like, oh, it’s not that I dislike it or, he
⏹️ ▶️ John will not be drawn out to be like, you know, unguarded, or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, he’s always very careful in every single thing that he says, and it must
⏹️ ▶️ John be tiring to be him. And sometimes I find it tiring to listen to him because he is so controlled. I think, as
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve said in past shows, I think the least control I’ve ever heard him is when he was somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ John stern with an obnoxious question asker at a shareholder meeting where they
⏹️ ▶️ John complained about the return on investment in some thing Apple is doing related to the environment or whatever the heck it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook said, if you’re so concerned about the ROI, whatever, get out of the stock. It’s not about the bloody ROI, blah, blah, blah. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the closest I’ve ever seen to him showing any real emotion. And it wasn’t that close, because
⏹️ ▶️ John really it was just fairly straightforward articulation of Apple’s corporate policy, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John tinged with a hint of sternness. And that was years ago. And apparently he’s erased
⏹️ ▶️ John that part of his brain that does that. So I’m sure he is not like this when he’s in meetings
⏹️ ▶️ John with other Apple executives, telling them what to do. We’ve heard stories about that. Like there is a real Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, but you’re not going to see him on a podcast about food. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why like I I almost never actually watch or listen to or read his interviews because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s almost nothing of value to it because he is he’s so Guarded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and careful and on message and so the things that you end up getting from him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just things that don’t matter like and and you know, we all had a cult of personality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around steve jobs because He was a really interesting personality and and he would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like let out bits and pieces that were entertaining and insightful and a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bold, a little risk-taking. And Tim Cook is none of those things. Like he is just bland,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco milquetoast, corporate nothingness. And whatever he is behind the scenes, as John said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t see that. What we see in the public is very controlled, corporate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring. And frankly, I don’t know how much more of Tim Cook there is than that. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care because even before I hated him for his political BS that he’s doing now, he’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not interesting. I think Apple is very interesting and you know the moves of the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the products they create can be very interesting a lot of the times. But he personally, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know what people get out of his interviews because whatever it is I don’t get it. Like I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even imagine having to like sit down and talk with him about anything because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what the heck I would say or what he would say back. It would be it would be a waste of time for both of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it was entirely off the record and there was no one recording it, he would be a lot more real, but I don’t know that. I doubt it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, for what it’s worth, I thought the interview was worth your time. I hear what you’re saying, that he is very buttoned up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I hear what you’re saying, that he’s definitely on our crap list, but I thought it was worth it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your mileage may vary.
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Hyperspace updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, take us through some hyperspace updates, if you don’t mind. I can prompt some of this. I had some questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looked like you wanted to keep my question for the end, which is fine, but tell me what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So, uh, uh, last episode, uh, I announced the test flight. It went out to all the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John members, uh, people who were interested, dutifully started installing it and using it and sending
⏹️ ▶️ John me feedbacks through all the various channels. And it occurred to me about halfway through the week
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had included my own little brown M&M in the test flight release
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. Are you two familiar with the brown M&M thing? Is this like a sex thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. I think it’s where you ask for like all green M&Ms or something like that on your rider just to see if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are paying attention to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of. Like the story is that the band Van Halen used to have this very long contract
⏹️ ▶️ John they would have with the venues that they would play their concerts in. And one of the things they would ask for is, and in our dressing
⏹️ ▶️ John room, we want to have a bowl of M&Ms, but there should be no brown ones in the bowl. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John story went around in the 80s. And it was like, oh, Van Halen, can you believe these rock divas? And they got to have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re so full of themselves. They want every little thing. They’re just mad with power and just abusing the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who run the concert halls that they run in. But then the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of later day sort of internet era turns out story about that is, well, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John they put that in there, that was a real thing, and it wasn’t their contracts. And they put that in there because if they went into the dressing room,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they saw either no bowl of M&Ms or bowl of M&Ms, but the brown ones were not removed,
⏹️ ▶️ John they know that the concert venue did not really carefully read or take
⏹️ ▶️ John seriously their instructions. And that was important because a lot of their
⏹️ ▶️ John instructions had to do with safety about, you know, we’re gonna have this light rig that’s gonna weigh this much, and the stage
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna to put this much pressure on these positions, and we have to have these kind of electrical outlets, and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth, for it to be a safe show. I mean, it wasn’t that big, but they had explosions going off, and
⏹️ ▶️ John pyro flames, things, and all that stuff. They wanted the venue to actually read it, and not just be like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah, rock band, we’ll set your stuff up. You’ll be fine. And so that was the supposed utility
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Brown M&M clause, that it was just an easy way to tell, are they paying attention to
⏹️ ▶️ John our contract, or did they just not even read that closely, and don’t even care about the details, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have nothing, I didn’t intend to put a brown M&M in my release notes, but I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John At the top of the release notes in all caps letters is the thing that says it doesn’t actually reclaim disk space because that was the most important thing that people
⏹️ ▶️ John needed to know because I didn’t wanna have a week of telling me that there were people running my program but they weren’t getting disk space back.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s all caps, it’s line number one. I think pretty much everybody read that, so good job everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Line number two of the release notes was a link, it was a URL.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s where everything fell apart because I don’t think people followed that link or read anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else. They said, read the all caps line. They said, yep, got it. Good, doesn’t reclaim disk space, which is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the reason I know is because if you follow that link, it goes to a bullet pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John list. It’s got like five bullet points on the page here. And the very bottom of the five bullet
⏹️ ▶️ John points says the following, the icon is a placeholder. The final icon
⏹️ ▶️ John is still in the works. So every single person in there, a lot of you, who
⏹️ ▶️ John sent me very long critiques about the icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how they didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John it was appropriate and I should really think of something else, you didn’t read the part about the
⏹️ ▶️ John brown M&Ms. You read the all caps part about how it won’t actually reclaim disk space, so I thank you for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that brown M&M is in there, so I just wanted to tell everybody, if you’re listening to this podcast, the icon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think it’s pretty good, to be honest with you, but that’s neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just wanted people to know it’s temporary because so maybe week two, we’ll have a different thing. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John next item, test flight purchases. This was probably the biggest purchase related piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of feedback I got. And as usual, with anything related to in-app purchase,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea what’s up. This is the first time
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Here’s the deal. People who are outside the US would tell me, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to do your test flight purchase. I dutifully read the release notes and I know it’s not gonna charge me any real money. So I clicked the purchase button
⏹️ ▶️ John in test flight. And it didn’t work. It said, oh, this is not in the whatever, the
⏹️ ▶️ John German store, or it’s in the US store. Do you want to change stores? And it would pop up a dialogue with a change store
⏹️ ▶️ John button. And I would click the change store button and it would change, it would have me sign in. I would change to the German store.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it would say, cannot reach app store. And I just want to clarify two things. One,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of those dialogues, the whole thing about you can’t do it in the store, change store, bubble, that’s all Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I am not producing those dialogues. That’s all Apple, right? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how they’re supposed to work. All I know is that people are telling me they don’t work. All the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that I was able to check seem fine. My app is in theory available in every single country
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple allows it to be available in. All the in-app purchases are available in every single
⏹️ ▶️ John country. Like I just double, triple, quadruple checked. Like, yes, nothing is restricted. Everything is everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John But having never done this before, I’m a little bit concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that if you go to the app availability section in App Store Connect, it says for all
⏹️ ▶️ John the giant list of countries, a thing that says available on app release. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Angola, available on app release. Argentina, available on app release. And as we know, my app has not yet been released.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it could be that non-US people cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John make purchases in the Tesla version because this app has literally never been released. and all of
⏹️ ▶️ John those regions will be available on app release, which hasn’t happened
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. So if that is the case, I apologize for all the people trying to make purchases outside of
⏹️ ▶️ John the US and having it not work. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that short of releasing my app,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m not ready to do yet. But yeah, that’s my guess
⏹️ ▶️ John about the deal. Do either of you two have any clarification on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, and I don’t remember this being a problem for me and I definitely had users in other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey countries. a test flight beta testers in other countries. So maybe this is a macOS thing, I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wouldn’t surprise me, because a lot of stuff on macOS is way jankier. So here is a little tidbit, because a couple of people
⏹️ ▶️ John did say, I’m outside the US and it worked fine for me. So then I’m like, well, I don’t know what the heck to make of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? One person did say this. They said, earlier today, I reported an issue with the purchase flow due to
⏹️ ▶️ John an incorrect country setting. Although I’ve never encountered this problem with other test flight apps, I managed to resolve
⏹️ ▶️ John it here. I clicked on restore purchases, which prompted a login window. I logged
⏹️ ▶️ John in using my normal Swiss account, and while there was no feedback and no changes were apparent, the purchasing
⏹️ ▶️ John of the app now worked. So if you’re out there trying to purchase and it’s not working, you can try clicking the restore
⏹️ ▶️ John purchases thing and see if that solved the problem. I don’t know if it will. I’m maybe 50%
⏹️ ▶️ John confident that when I release the app, all these issues will go away and it will be fine, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess we’ll find out. I’ve asked around, I’ve tried to do research on this, I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to look at Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John documentation. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, good luck with
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know what the deal is, but I will tell everybody, if you’re outside the US, you may not be able to purchase it. You can try
⏹️ ▶️ John the restore purchases thing, right? Second thing on purchases, many, many people, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are new to test flights, and we’ve got a lot of test flight testers here, wrote in to tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John that they thought that my app should not prompt them for their Apple ID password,
⏹️ ▶️ John and instead should use Touch ID. And by the way, the dialogue that appears asking for their Apple ID password
⏹️ ▶️ John is super janky and scary looking. I agree. Guess who makes that dialog box?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Everything you see in the purchase flow, all those dialog boxes, that’s not me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using the standard Apple thing, which is like, okay, go do purchase. And then Apple throws up
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of UI. And yes, for whatever insane reason, as far as I know, this has
⏹️ ▶️ John always been the case, both on iOS and on macOS. When you try to make a test-flight purchase, does
⏹️ ▶️ John it let you use Touch ID? Does it do password autofill? No, it makes you type in your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID password. Why does it do that? I don’t know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it does. And it makes you type it into a terrible text box that looks like it’s totally fake.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple is producing that. It’s one of the reasons why I end up uninstalling TestFlight. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John go back and forth between the CallCheat TestFlight and the CallCheat real one, because TestFlight purchases expire on an accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John rate. I just never wanna have to, oh, the TestFlight, I have to repurchase the TestFlight.
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta type in my Apple ID pass. It’s just, it’s so painful.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no way around it. Like, that’s just the way TestFlight is. It’s part of the pain
⏹️ ▶️ John of being a beta tester. And there is pain, there is pain in being a beta tester. I know because I’ve got so many paid apps on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s annoying, I acknowledge it’s annoying. How many years has it been like this? Since the existence of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac app store? I think it’s always, has it always been like this on iOS too?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s always been rough. I feel like TestFlight actually in a lot of ways was better when it was an independent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entity, but you’re asking me to remember 10, 15 years ago when we all know.
⏹️ ▶️ John does it always, have you ever seen an iOS app that does not make you enter your password, like in text when you try to
⏹️ ▶️ John do an ad purchase in a TestFlight?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, not that I can think of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so, but on macOS it’s the same way. And everything does look worse on macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in both cases, it’s just like, nothing else in the system ever asked you, like if you have like face ID or touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID or whatever, Like nothing else ever asks you to type in your password. And then all of a sudden here’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John beta thing doing it. It looks so janky and I agree it’s janky. I wish Apple would fix it. But just to let everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John know, welcome to test flight. It’s not the same as real apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bad. Aye, aye, aye. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John So the other major thing that I spent the week fighting with
⏹️ ▶️ John is my review window. When I was first making this app, was like, okay, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John pick where you wanna scan your files, you scan them, and then, you know, you wanna reclaim
⏹️ ▶️ John space from them. But in between there, it’d be nice if you saw, well, you just did the scan and you told me you found a bunch of files. Can I just see what those files
⏹️ ▶️ John are? Because maybe I don’t want you to do all of them. Like, or even I just wanna see it, like just for visibility, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna review. What have you found before we continue to the part where you reclaim space, or pretend to in the
⏹️ ▶️ John case of my test flight app? So thus was born the review window.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, you know, here’s all the stuff I found. And you can remove things and you know, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the point of the windows. Like for you to take a look at what I found and for you to maybe decide you do or don’t want to include certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t think too much about it. I just kind of made that on a whim. It’s like, oh, it seems like a nice thing to have. But
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty quickly, even before the test flight, I realized, okay, well, if you scan
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big directory, like your documents directory, your whole home directory or something, or people are scanning their whole drives,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might find a lot of duplicates, like a lot, a lot, not like 10, not like a hundred, but like thousands,
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many thousands of duplicates. First of all, is it possible to quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote review thousands of things? Is someone gonna look at a thousand things or
⏹️ ▶️ John are they just gonna be like, oh no, I don’t know, this looks fine. Like you can’t, at a certain point, you can’t manually review
⏹️ ▶️ John it anymore. This came up in my old jobby job when we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John reviewing dependencies for like license and security and stuff like that. Like, you know, any new project you make,
⏹️ ▶️ John we want to make sure that any third party software you’re depending on, we should review it. There should be a human review
⏹️ ▶️ John process to make sure that like, you’re not using some software that you’re not allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ John use because of its license or that has some security problems or whatever. So we should have a process of
⏹️ ▶️ John human review for all software dependencies, which sounds totally sane and like a thing that a company would do as a policy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I know a lot of you right now are already thinking the same thing that I am and maybe Casey’s thinking as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Node modules. Guess how many third party dependencies
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of non-trivial Node.js application has? Thousands. A trillion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thousands, literally thousands, right? There’s no way to avoid it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so now are you gonna have human review of thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of dependencies? And also each time all those dependencies are updated? At a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John point, human review breaks down. But nevertheless, I still wanted to have a review window
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, look, if you wanna look at them, they’re there. Put a search field in the review window. So if you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for something, if you’re like, I wanna make sure it’s not doing anything with my whatever files, type this in some search query,
⏹️ ▶️ John narrow it down, find that thing, uncheck the checkbox next to it and say, I don’t wanna do these things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, I’ll probably add an excludes feature at some point, but probably not in 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John so I made a review window, I put a search field in it. And then I ran into,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the brick wall that is SwiftUI performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John like everything else in my app, this was a SwiftUI window. And I was asking SwiftUI to show
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially thousands of things. At the very least, it’s gonna be thousands of checkboxes
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other control that says, yes, do this or don’t do this, right? And also it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John thousands of file names and probably file paths to say, what am I checking or unchecking?
⏹️ ▶️ John where is this file? And maybe you want other stuff besides just the file name and a checkbox. Maybe you wanna know
⏹️ ▶️ John what size it is or how many duplicates there are or what the total savings is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty quickly, it’s not that complicated, but it’s like, okay, well, it’s like for each item, it’s a checkbox
⏹️ ▶️ John and a string and maybe another string for the path and then maybe a couple of numbers. All right, but it shouldn’t be that bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Well, you get the review window, you put a naive SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation and it just falls over on its face after a shockingly
⏹️ ▶️ John small number of items. You can pull up the page, usually
⏹️ ▶️ John with a small number of items, but even scrolling through 100 or two of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John painfully slow, right? So then you’re like, so what can I do for SwiftUI performance?
⏹️ ▶️ John How can I enhance this? What if I use the lazy version of everything so it doesn’t have to load
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing up front? Because if you use the non-lazy one, it’s just you get a beach ball, like trying to load a few hundred things or whatever. So you use lazy version,
⏹️ ▶️ John it loads fast. Scrolling performance is still not great. So you’re moving the scroll from up
⏹️ ▶️ John and down, you’re like, oh, I can see them like lazily loading and it’s all jerky and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, can I just, can I show less stuff? What can I do to make
⏹️ ▶️ John this better? And so I spent a while fighting with that. One of the ideas I had was,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’ll just like, maybe I’ll just show like, maybe I’ll do like lazy loading on top of lazy loading. So I’ll show
⏹️ ▶️ John you the first hundred And then when you get to the bottom of the hundred list, I’ll have like a little load more button and it will load more,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But of course, if I just let you keep loading more, it’ll just get long again. So I have to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John off ones from the top. So if you hit load more two times, it’ll pull off a hundred from the top, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John That didn’t really help. I implemented that and I was like, well, it’s still like, even just with the hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John window, it’s just the scrolling is not smooth. Like it’s just not good. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, okay, well maybe I shouldn’t use like lazy VStack, maybe I should use list because list
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to be for big lists of stuff. So I re-implanted the window in list instead of using lazy
⏹️ ▶️ John VStack. This is all tech terms or whatever. And just so I should say, I’m rewriting this window in
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple different implementations. I try a list that has a different set of trade-offs. It’s supposedly also lazy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t seem any smoother than lazy VStack. In fact, in some ways it’s worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have less control over the items that are in it. Maybe it’s better on iOS, I don’t know, but on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t that great. All this time I’ve been resisting the, you know, the give up and use Apkit
⏹️ ▶️ John approach, but I also decided, okay, well, let me see what an Apkit approach to this would look like. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John using Apkit for the scaffolding and still having each individual item be a SwiftUI view. So I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t really help. It was a little bit better, but because every individual view was a SwiftUI view, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still in the end loading, you know, end SwiftUI views for end items, even though they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John contained in an Apkit collection view or whatever the thing you have, which is also lazy loading. It is more
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient than the SwiftUI things, but you know, not quite the same. And I think, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s first advice when I first mentioned, saw the screen was slow, he was like, you should just do this in AppKit. I’m like, oh, it’s gonna be a lot of work to do
⏹️ ▶️ John in an AppKit. But like, here I am on implementation number four, right? I’ve done it with,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, VStack, lazy VStack, list, collection, AppKit collection
⏹️ ▶️ John view with SwiftUI views inside of it. And you know where I ended up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I ended up, well, let’s write it in AppKit, which I was resisting because this is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the most complicated screen in my entire app, the stupid review window. It is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, not that my app is that complicated, but of all the screens in my app, this is the most complicated, and now I am rewriting
⏹️ ▶️ John it for a fifth time. Wrote it in just straight AppKit, NSTableView, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the old ways, still in Swift, obviously, but yeah. And the performance was better,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot better. I still kept a SwiftUI view for the detail pane. That’s one of the things I, one of the changes I made halfway through
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, look, I gotta get less stuff on this screen for multiple reasons, but not the least of which is that it kills scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. So what if I have like sort of a list of the individual file groups and then a detail view
⏹️ ▶️ John that when you select one, you see more information about it. So you only ever need to have one detail view and then you have the big
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolly list, which is supposedly simpler. That’s the design I’ve stuck with. I re-implemented it all in AppKit, except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the detail view that I left in SwiftUI. I bashed my head against that for a while and the performance
⏹️ ▶️ John is much improved, as they say. That’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a glimpse into a week of development on a pure
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift UI Mac OS app. I don’t think what I was asking you to do was that big a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although some people like the testers out there, they’re trying hard. I had one person who had a review
⏹️ ▶️ John window with 150,000 items in it. Oh my. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that person tried, I think, most of the different versions of this screen that I made and would tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me when it was not cutting, right? And so I think the new one can handle
⏹️ ▶️ John that and it’s okay. But some point during this whole week of me banging my head against the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John a thought occurred to me and it’s gonna spawn a slight side discussion here. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys to go to this URL.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is web-based. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you scroll that webpage for me, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it scrolls pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. Are you gonna write it in WebKit?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it smooth for you? Does it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seem smooth?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh no. Can you load
⏹️ ▶️ John that on your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I presume I could. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John asking me to do that? Can you see how, yeah. See how this works on your phone maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. Hold on. You’re gonna do this with WebTech, aren’t you? Wow, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast. Does it scroll okay? Does it seem
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth? Did it load fast? Sure did. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my God, you’re gonna do this with WebTech, aren’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m having them load a webpage because I’m banging my head against, you know, SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit, NSCollectionView, NSTableView, LazyVStack, List. The performance is crap. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Mac Pro with 192 megs of RAM. I’m like, why can you not scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John a list? I don’t care if it has 10,000 items in it. It shouldn’t, why can you not scroll this list? What’s the problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just text. It’s text and it’s check boxes. And I’m like, I could, and it’s just, I could do this in two
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds in WebTech. Now granted, it’s web-developed for 25 years. So I have a little bit more of skill in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, I know this would work fine in a webpage. Like this, I’m not asking
⏹️ ▶️ John too much, right? So I made a webpage. I made one with 100 items, 500 items,
⏹️ ▶️ John a thousand items, 10,000 items. And like, I reloaded. And it scrolled,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, today, right now, this scrolls faster than the AppKit, the
⏹️ ▶️ John native Swift, pure AppKit, NS table view
⏹️ ▶️ John on Mac OS 15.2 on a Mac Pro with 192 megs of RAM, this webpage loads instantly
⏹️ ▶️ John and scrolls perfectly smoothly with an equivalent number of items.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Remember we were talking about like, oh, web apps always feel worse. You can always tell it’s a web app because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good and it’s not as smooth and snappy and this and that and the other thing. Web tech
⏹️ ▶️ John has had so much effort put into it that
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, HTML and CSS are an amazingly performant
⏹️ ▶️ John engine for quickly and easily creating user interfaces that scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John like butter. This wasn’t true in 2007 when the iPhone came out, right? WebKit views
⏹️ ▶️ John were not as fast as native views, right? This is not recycling, to my knowledge, it is not recycling
⏹️ ▶️ John cells in this table, right? It’s just rendering them all, putting them into a giant image,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just scrolling with the GPU, like just shake the thing up and down. It’s unbelievably performant,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t think there is a way with any of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John native UI toolkits to make a scrolling list of
⏹️ ▶️ John items with some text in them that is smooth as just doing it in stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John HTML. I believe this is an HTML table, I’ve already forgotten. It’s just, you slap this together and
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes two seconds, right? And you can change that 500 number in there to larger numbers to see different versions.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here’s the thing. I was real close middle of the week. I’m like, screw it, I’m doing this in WebKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m sick of native development. I know I can do this in
⏹️ ▶️ John HTML and CSS. Why am I banging my head again? It’s so much harder to like
⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit, like doing NSTableView, it’s such like ancient technology. Like the number of
⏹️ ▶️ John classes you have to implement, the number of methods you have to override, the number of things you have to do in them. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is going on here? How many lines of code is this? And it’s like, in HTML, it’s just, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a page of HTML and CSS, like in two seconds. It’s just straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John and obvious. And like, the SwiftUI one is also pretty straightforward and obvious, but then the performance is terrible. So who
⏹️ ▶️ John cares that it’s straightforward and obvious, right? It’s great if you have 10 items, 100 items, right? But if you have 150,000, they
⏹️ ▶️ John just, these things just throw up their hands.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I didn’t implement it in WebKit because I think if you change that 500 number
⏹️ ▶️ John to 10,000 in your URL and then load that page. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it drops out. Yeah, it kind of gives up after a certain point and you just get
⏹️ ▶️ John blankness. Now I can tell you that that will eventually load
⏹️ ▶️ John all of it and then once it does load, it’ll be smooth. And even while it’s blank, it’ll be smooth. What we’re saying is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you scroll this list, all of a sudden the list disappears and then there’s no more list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then you’re just scrolling. It’s fine on my desk. You guys gotta get better computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, by the way, Chrome does it way better than Safari. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you load that page in Chrome, much better job than Safari. But Safari on both the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and on iOS, when you load the page with 10,000 or more items,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just stops drawing it very quickly. Now, like I said, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John it will all load in. Thank God knows how much memory is thing. This is the consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John of it not being lazy, but this made it a non starter for me because as slow and janky as it
⏹️ ▶️ John is in Swift UI, or an app kit for 150,000 items, it does actually
⏹️ ▶️ John load, you can actually scroll, it is just jerky and slow,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? WebKit at a certain point says, Nope, check, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not gonna do it. And then, like I said, if you wait, if you wait, like, wow, mine just came in finally
⏹️ ▶️ John now. If you wait, eventually, especially if you have 192 gigs of RAM, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John it will load in, right? And eventually you can scroll your list of 10,000 items and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will, you know, it’s a little bit blinky and stuttery, but it’s still pretty smooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, have you tried this on Tina’s computer? I’m not trolling you right now because the performance problems you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey describing on your computer, I’m not having on mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried it on my, you can see the same thing on the phone too. Try
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it on the phone. You
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t see the blanking? Like it blanks for a variable amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time. It blanks for like a split second, like a blink of an eye.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, on my phone, I’ll send you, I had a long enough time to screenshot it. On my phone it is blank for a long enough time
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to stare at it and take a screenshot, right? And my phone was my measurement of like, look, this is, you know, this is a good baseline,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And like I said, Chrome does way better than WebKit, but obviously if I’m doing it,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, actually I could use, I could embed like the blink engine in my app, but I’m not gonna do that. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t choose to use WebKit for it, but had I chosen to use WebKit for it, this one aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, how quickly it can draw this and how smooth it can scroll it would be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John What would not be better, I think, is say sortable column headers, because if I did
⏹️ ▶️ John that naively in HTML, in JavaScript, the performance would be horrendous. What I would have to do is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John re-implement NSTableView in JavaScript, which many people have done. Like where it’s like, okay, well, I’m not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna redraw everything. I’m just gonna have a fixed number of cells. I’m gonna recycle them and I’m gonna refill them with content.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you tell me to sort, I’m gonna sort the data store behind the scenes and then redisplay the window of them that you’re looking at, like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff that NSTableView and LazyVStack are doing behind the scenes. You can also do that in HTML, but either
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have to implement it all myself in HTML and JavaScript, or I have to find a third party framework that does that of which there are a
⏹️ ▶️ John thousand, which is part of the problem. Because I have to find one of those thousand to embed in my app. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be communicating a fairly large amount of app state
⏹️ ▶️ John in and out of a WebKit view through the slurping straw of JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I did not relish that. Even doing it the way I did it, where I have AppKit and SwiftUI views communicating
⏹️ ▶️ John and both trying to manipulate a fairly high volume of data
⏹️ ▶️ John in real time, up to sync everywhere, that was difficult enough to do between SwiftUI and
⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit. throwing WebKit into the mix would be even more difficult. But I just, this is a good, interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to note that the conventional wisdom about quote unquote native
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and how much better they are and how much better the performance is and how you can always tell when something is janky
⏹️ ▶️ John in a WebKit. Now, you know, with the caveats I said, I am an expert web developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am not an expert Mac OS or iOS developer. So maybe someone who is a better Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS developer than me could do a better job. I think I did an okay job
⏹️ ▶️ John on the AppKit table view. If you two have the latest test flight version of the thing, you can run it against something and get
⏹️ ▶️ John a big review window and scroll it. It’s all right. You know, it’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not as smooth as that
⏹️ ▶️ John WebKit view is. It is not as smooth as that web page. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for whatever it’s worth, it native dev should be faster. Now, the most common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trick that Apple’s frameworks use, I presume other platform frameworks probably do similar things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It shouldn’t matter really how many items are in a scrolling list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the list performance. With the trick they usually do is they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the list, you know, suppose on screen you can fit 10 cells. Well as you scroll through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list of 100,000 items, it only keeps like 12 cells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alive in memory. It just recycles their content. So it has like, you know, the 10 cells that fit on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has like one above and one below so that as you partially scroll, that’s already loaded. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you scroll the list, all it’s doing is swapping in the content of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same 12 cells. So it isn’t like allocating everything. It isn’t rendering the entire list. It’s just rendering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the part that you are looking at. So theoretically it should be fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco linear. Like the performance of the list should be about the same no matter how many items it has. Now, there are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few things that can break that assumption and require the frameworks to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load all the items or to render all the cells. That can be things like if they are variable heights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you want an accurate scroll indicator of where you are in the list position, then the framework
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to render every cell to know, well, how tall are all the cells? So I know how tall is the total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view, so I know where to put the scroll indicator. And there’s also things like, Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where are the cell content? Does one cell’s content depend on another cell’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content? Or does something depend on the content of all the cells in order to render it? And so there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are little pitfalls you can fall into that will require the framework to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load or render everything rather than loading and rendering only what is on screen and kind of paging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the data dynamically. And it can be very, very easy to accidentally fall into one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those pitfalls. And this was true of both UIKit and SwiftUI. AppKit I never really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used so I don’t really know, but definitely UIKit and SwiftUI both had the potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a UI table view or a list respectively or a lazy VGrid or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They all had the potential to make some small decision or some small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mistake or not flag something correctly in the code and it would have to render the entire list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time. So I’m guessing that now and on iOS, I can tell you I don’t have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem like using Swift UI list on iOS. Like I tested my playlist screen with 100,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco items and it scrolls just as well and just as smoothly as it does with 20 items.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m pretty sure I don’t have this problem with overcast and I that’s just let’s say Swift UI list.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think you would ever have a overcast playlist that’s 150,000 items either. So it’s not really something you need to worry about too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. you’d be surprised what people try to do. But that’s why I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a test account that has a hundred thousand podcasts in it. Like, trust me, people do some interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Anyway, so I can tell you that SwiftUI, like this is not an inherent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem to SwiftUI in general as a concept. It has that same optimization that UITableView
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has of only loading certain cells on screen and buffering in, you know, changing their content. Like, does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that same thing or at least it can do that same thing on iOS where I’ve used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the problem is again there are all these different pitfalls like you could be inadvertently triggering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to do a full render with some detail of how you’ve implemented it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also possible that that optimization doesn’t work or doesn’t work correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mac OS. Because SwiftUI on Mac OS is a little bit of a… it’s like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t it’s not nearly as as tested and mature as it is on iOS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you this is probably not a problem with Swift UI overall, but it might be a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Swift UI the way you are using it or it might be a problem with Swift UI on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can tell you I know all those things that you just said and I’m pretty sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John is not what I’m running into because you can very easily trigger it so that you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ John example, use this use V stack instead of lazy V stack if you want to see what it looks like when it loads all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John up front, use just plain VStack without the lazy. And the difference is stark.
⏹️ ▶️ John You will just get a blank screen and a beach ball for minutes. It’s not subtle, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And even like on the NSTableView thing, all these, obviously they’re all the same height, they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed, they’re all not doing computation. Like it’s just, all the optimizations I know about from AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, applying them to SwiftUI, it’s so clear that what the problem is is not that it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the thing, because it is, you can literally see it doing it. Like you can see LazyVStack recycling
⏹️ ▶️ John those cells and like, you know it’s doing it. The reason you know it is because you load a thousand, 10,000, 100,000, they perform exactly the same. Like there’s no difference in the performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is the thousand performance is not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the hundred performance is not good enough. The 150,000 performance is exactly the same as a thousand performance. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John both not good enough. Like it’s so clear that it is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the thing you described just like NS table view is, right? There’s nothing that’s happening that is like
⏹️ ▶️ John subverting that optimization. Now there may be other things that are happening that are making it like
⏹️ ▶️ John slower, but like the basic optimization of just show some small number of cells and recycle the content is
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely happening. And like, you know, I did the thing, I didn’t describe as part of the debugging process,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was the first happening with my SwiftUI view. I said, all right, start over a new test app, list,
⏹️ ▶️ John all it is a list with the word hello in it a hundred times, right? Strip it down to nothing. How
⏹️ ▶️ John fast can it be? And then like build up from there. A constant string in 100,000, you know, a thousand, 100,000
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, just empty app, nothing in it. Like just let’s see what the performance is like. And I can tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John having built up from zero, from like the simplest thing you can possibly have, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Building up slowly to be something approaching a UI, the performance gets crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John so fast. Like it doesn’t, you know, it’s not like it becomes like unusable, but like the smoothness,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, this is, with the word hello, it seems pretty smooth. This is great, right? And then you add like, oh, can I have another
⏹️ ▶️ John word in there? Hmm, I’m starting to get a little bit, like there’s still constant, can I have a third
⏹️ ▶️ John one? Maybe right justified, oh no, it’s all over. It’s just like, it’s not like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, but it doesn’t feel like it should. It doesn’t feel like that webpage, it doesn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John totally smooth. And like, that was the thing I was doing of like, is there something that was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is there something I can do with the content? Is the problem the content? Is the problem like the data model or where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s coming from? Or like, let me just eliminate, There’s no data model, it’s literally constant strings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I get acceptable performance in like the best case scenario? And as I slowly added things besides the word
⏹️ ▶️ John hello, it just immediately started to feel not that smooth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even just the word hello, by the way, if you compare just the word hello to an NSTableView with the word hello, and a table you
⏹️ ▶️ John stomps all over it on the Mac. It’s a table that is recycling cells
⏹️ ▶️ John with the word hello in every cell. That’s all it is, right? It’s a fresh new app. There’s no data model, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And NSTableView is just faster, right? So that shows immediately that SwiftUI on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John has a long way to go to catch up in the naive case to the responsiveness
⏹️ ▶️ John of AppKit. But both of those things seem to have a real far way to go to catch
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the stupid brute force implementation of HTML
⏹️ ▶️ John and CSS with no recycling of cells, No clever anything, just
⏹️ ▶️ John render it all. Just render it all immediately, now,
⏹️ ▶️ John and scroll it as smooth as glass on your phone. Or on, like, any
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. Like, web technology is amazing, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, not in every aspect, because again, once I start sorting column view headers, it’s like, guess what? You’re re-implementing
⏹️ ▶️ John NSTableView. You’re re-implementing UITableView. Like, there’s a reason those optimizations exist, there’s a reason they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John re-implemented in the web, and things start to tumble downhill pretty quickly once you’re doing everything in JavaScript versus doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John in Objective-C or Swift. Like, I’m not saying web technology is better than native. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the case. I’m saying that on the Mac specifically, this is definitely a functional gap where
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have been very disappointed by the performance. And like, again, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not experienced on the platform, so obviously there may be some things that I’m doing wrong, but I asked a lot of more
⏹️ ▶️ John experienced people and every single thing they told me to check out, it’s like, already doing that, already doing that, already doing that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I was able to eke out some more performance, you know, it was already acceptable in a stable
⏹️ ▶️ John view, right? And I was able to make it a little bit better. It’s fine. Like, it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just bothers me that any amount of effort should be required on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John with any of Apple’s native platforms to try to match
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance of a naive HTML page that someone could slap together on GeoCities.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it wasn’t fast back in the GeoCities days, but anyone can learn HTML and type those tags and they can be lowercase,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can be capital. You don’t even have to close them right. Thing will just scroll like butter.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, that was my journey this week on that screen. I re-implemented it at least five times, ended
⏹️ ▶️ John up at NSTableView. Performance is now acceptable. That’s probably where I’m gonna ship in 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe revisited in future versions if I can get the WebKit thing to work, but probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That was a journey, John. That was a journey. Journey for me, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to rewrite the most complicated screening route five times in a week? Don’t recommend. Nope. Do not
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend. I do not. The last two items quick. One, I’m working on voiceover stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am lousy at it. If you two have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey any voiceover
⏹️ ▶️ John tips, please send it to me. I find it so hard to figure out where and how to put the right modifiers
⏹️ ▶️ John on the right elements to get it to say same things when I use voiceover. Because if I
⏹️ ▶️ John put it on the parent element, it stops saying the things about the child elements, but I want it to say that the parent element is this larger
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Anyway, I’m no voiceover expert, but I’m trying, so that is another thing I’m struggling with this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so very, very quickly, very quickly, if you think about call sheet and the right-hand side of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a person or a movie or something like that, there’ll be like a title and then below
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a runtime. And there are modifiers you can use to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voiceover, treat these two things as one thing. So instead of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I forget exactly how it works, but something like it will say something like, You know, a release date, title,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey October 24th, 2024. Well, now it says like, you can have it say, you know, released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on October 24th, 2024, or something like that. And you can do that pretty easily. So if that’s what you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, you and I can talk after the show and I can show you how I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, please tell me. A lot of my problem is like the, I have a lot of things like laid out like grid views and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the label and the value are separated. So I can’t even put one modifier on both of them. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little true, like, you know, anyway, I’m not, I know it’s not gonna be, the voiceover support
⏹️ ▶️ John is not gonna be great, but I want it to be okay. And so I’m trying to get to the level of like, I could use it as
⏹️ ▶️ John my eyes closed and sell what the things are. I want it to say reasonable things for every item and just figuring out where I
⏹️ ▶️ John can get it to say the right things is a little bit tricky. Oh, and you’ll be shocked to learn the controlling focus
⏹️ ▶️ John in SwiftUI on Mac is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, it’s terrible on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS too. I was fighting that earlier today. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worse on the Mac. I believe it’s so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s the new, Does the focus state stuff exist on Mac yet? Yeah, it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little limited. The way it interacts in the hierarchy is
⏹️ ▶️ John bananas. Like, doing things on the parent view overrides things in the child view. But I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The whole point is, if I override it on the child, why is the parent taking over?
⏹️ ▶️ John just makes certain things very difficult. So I’m struggling. Final item,
⏹️ ▶️ John analytics. I said it in the last show, I didn’t want to deal with it at all. Having all the feedback from the test flight testers
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, By the way, I want to thank all the ATP members. Casey was totally right. You are all great testers. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John so much feedback, so much of it great. Just appreciate all of it. It also
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly led me to learn that I need analytics because trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a sense of what’s going on, I was not able to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John by, and I’ll tell you, I’m reading everybody’s feedback. I cannot respond to all of it. If I responded to all your feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ John all I would do all week is just respond to feedback. So I thank you for all your Tesla Lite feedback, but I can’t actually respond
⏹️ ▶️ John to you all. It doesn’t mean I’m not reading it, I am. But anyway, I need analytics, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John A company that is apparently a friend of the show offered me a free account for their analytics
⏹️ ▶️ John service, which I gladly accepted. I probably wouldn’t have done this if they had not given me a free account, so thank you to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I am trying it out and collecting analytics and seeing what it can tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m fighting a little bit with the analytics backend, but at the very least, the front end is doing stuff. What
⏹️ ▶️ John am I collecting? just numbers. How many items did you scan? How many files? How many folders? How many errors did you encounter?
⏹️ ▶️ John How many bytes did you scan? How many bytes did you reclaim? How many bytes could you have reclaimed? How many times
⏹️ ▶️ John did you launch the app? I think I just listed everything that I’m collecting. It is completely anonymous. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John no personally identifying information whatsoever. It’s just a bunch of numbers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s it. And so it’s given me some insight at least into the testers. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John glad I liked this analytics package because incorporating to the app took like two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was straightforward to do. I am not enjoying the backend where I get to analyze this data because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John beating me up with a query language that I do not like, but you know, it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I will probably ship with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analytics in there. So, I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the most ingenious things I ever heard from Underscore is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for one of his apps for analytics, he was just having the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just make a URL request to his server and encode a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the URL. Now, this URL was actually not a real page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on his server. It would just 404, which would be logged to the error log,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which he could then parse.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done the exact same thing my whole career in web dev. Yep, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is a common thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it actually is like a reasonably easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Absolutely, because if you’re at a big company, you already have some system that is ingesting your logs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can use it to analyze them. Just make an HTTP request, put data in
⏹️ ▶️ John the URL, and then take your thing you already paid for that’s analyzing your logs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it can extract stuff from the query string, and you can decode it and de-parse it and decrypt it and
⏹️ ▶️ John slice it and dice it. Yep, it is the world’s jankiest analytics system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and if you think about what you need for privacy protection is basically like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t associate anything with people’s IP addresses. At this context, that’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all you need to do is don’t have any kind of persistent customer identifier in those requests and don’t associate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IP addresses with them. You can make a custom HTTP log that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just these query strings for things of this format and logs it to a log that does not log
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IP addresses with a fairly straightforward nginx or whatever configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that’s all I want to know is like, but I just want to say like, what is the average number of files scan per scan?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I just every every entry is a number. I just add them all up and divide by the number of numbers. There’s my answer, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like I’m just literally just log numbers. But yeah, trying to trying to sort of get
⏹️ ▶️ John a feel for that from people’s screenshots was surprisingly difficult because not everyone sent one and
⏹️ ▶️ John just getting a sense of them. Like what happens is like, I think like the outlier stand out, like that person had 150,000 files is kind of an outlier. 150,000 duplicates,
⏹️ ▶️ John not 150,000 files, 150,000 duplicate files. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even forget how many millions of files were scanned to get that result.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, having the actual numbers is gonna be convenient. So I will probably ship with that. Like I said, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty happy with the SDK side of it. Seems pretty lightweight
⏹️ ▶️ John and the performance is good because obviously when you tell it to log something, it doesn’t actually do it. It just puts in a queue and then
⏹️ ▶️ John flushes it later. It’s all Swift 6 compliant, you know? So it was a very simple
⏹️ ▶️ John and straightforward thing to put in there. So yeah, analytics, they are a thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see how it goes. Oh, and the only other thing I put in there is I did put analytics for like, how many people click the
⏹️ ▶️ John help buttons. Did someone click a help button and I’ll just count up,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the app was launched 10 times and the help button was clicked zero times, stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know. Oh yeah, and test flight testers, don’t forget to pretend reclaim. I know that
⏹️ ▶️ John from analytics, a lot of you are not pretend reclaiming, you’re doing the scan and you get to see the numbers and you’re like, done
⏹️ ▶️ John and done. Don’t forget to click the reclaim button. Even though it doesn’t actually get you disk space
⏹️ ▶️ John back, it does everything else. It does a whole bunch of work and then just throws the work away, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I want you to make it do that work because in the course of doing that work, it will encounter
⏹️ ▶️ John errors and then you’ll send me those errors and I’ll fix them. Or try to fix them or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John please, the ratio of people scanning to hitting the reclaim button
⏹️ ▶️ John is very low. Please do the fake reclaiming. I know it will not actually reclaim space. It seems like a waste of time, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it really helps me because you could do that reclaim and then tell me it crashed the app. It did
⏹️ ▶️ John this, like that’s beta testing. You know, it broke my computer. Hopefully it won’t break your computer, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John beta testing, if you don’t want to use a beta, don’t sign up for a TestFlight. Guess what? TestFlight apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have bugs. So to release the apps, don’t tell anybody. But anyway, TestFlight apps definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John do. So if you are a brave tester and you want to be a brave tester, click that reclaim space button
⏹️ ▶️ John and then cross your fingers and let me know what bad things happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I think for pricing, like we got a bunch of feedback on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how you should price. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got a ton of that through TestFlight as well, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I have come around to being the best price is a consumable IAP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price per reclaim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said? Yes, I think it is. But-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Come on, man. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I’m just saying like, Upon further thought and upon replaying Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argument in my head over and over again, definitely that’s how I was convinced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Upon further thought, I do think given all the trade-offs, given your desire for ongoing revenue, given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how you want to be able to fund future things and make the app better to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reclaim more space and everything, and because of the nature of it being most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are gonna have most of the value be this one-time upfront thing. I think about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a kind of similar, but not quite market is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those like SD card data recovery tools, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are almost always, like, you know, you don’t get a free trial for your SD card data recovery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tool, because chances are, if you have a need for that kind of app, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it right now, probably once, and then you’ll never use it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe you’ll use it again like five years from now, where you will again like desperately need it right now. So those apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are priced and are structured such that like, you know, all their value is upfront.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they don’t like give you a week free or anything. You just have to pay for it if you wanna recover the data. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see the data before paying, but then to actually get the data, you have to pay. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app has, you know, a similar like customer value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timing dynamic, where like, as mentioned last time, for most people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most value they will get out of this app will be captured the first time they run it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think having it be, you pay me, whatever it is, 10 bucks, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, you pay me 10 bucks to do the reclaim step. Like I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scan it, I’ll show you how much you can reclaim for free, and if you wanna actually reclaim this space, you pay me 10, 15, 20 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is. I think that’s the right move. And then if you want to reclaim,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to run it again in two years and get another 50 gigs, 100 gigs back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s another 10 bucks. I think that’s best. You could even then, if that is your model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could even then also have tiered pricing by how much data is being saved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like if someone’s only going to save 20 gigs, maybe they’re going to have that for like, you know, two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks or five bucks. Someone’s gonna save, like in my case, when I scanned my NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive, I could save 750 gigs. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good thing I didn’t have the analytics on that, because you were literally thrown off the average.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s 20 bucks. Like, you know, I think you can see that scaling, like, you know, maybe 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs is 10 bucks. Maybe up to 100 gigs to 500, you know, like you could tier it like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, you know, if I run it there, and that gets me that reclaim,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I have two computers, I think it kind of makes sense to pay for two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different reclaims since what you’re paying for is literally I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying to get that amount of space back. So I really do think that that is probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there are ways in which it is not perfect, but I think that is probably the best price structure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that will give you the most bang for your buck, so to speak. I think that’ll give you the best income. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it will be easier to do things like dynamic pricing to help align
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value that the app delivers to the customers with how much they are then willing to pay for it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that the word best in the sentence of the best pricing structure for your app is doing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The least terrible pricing structure for your app.
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on what you value. I have to say that the test flight feedback has not
⏹️ ▶️ John been as enthusiastic about this approach as you are. But again, TestFlight is not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John representative either because they’re all like ATP members and they’re technical people or whatever. But then again, they’re also the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are gonna buy the app. And anyway, I’m not really worrying too much about
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing this point, except for dealing with bugs related to pricing, which I’m still trying to make sure I can, make sure everything
⏹️ ▶️ John works the way it’s supposed to. Before I ship, I can obviously change my mind
⏹️ ▶️ John about monetization and stuff. But for now, I’m just working on the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I obviously agree with Marco, who’s in turn agreeing with me, that I really think consumables—this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of the very, very few places other than a game that I think consumable does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sense and I think it’s worth considering. And you likely will not end up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going that route, which I understand, but I really think you should think about it.
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#askatp: Nerd house considerations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP, and we start with Jeremy Kelleher, who wrote probably three years ago, knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, but I think it was actually fairly recently. Wondering about your suggestions for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nerd who will be shopping for their first home soon. While I’m touring homes, are there tech-related questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should ask? I’m thinking, is there an Ethernet running throughout the house, or is there power in the garage I can use for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an EV charger? I think those questions are great. They’re also hitting me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a bad time, or really a great time, depending on how you look at it, because as we’ll probably be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about in the post-show, I’m turning into one of those. It’s not CrossFit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, it’s the nerd equivalent, it’s Home Assistant. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Not quite as healthy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not nearly as healthy and probably quite a bit more expensive. It’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking about if you want to do any sort of home automation, be that a home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit, be it a home assistant, be it whatever, what is the situation for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switches in the house? Are there smart switches? And if so, will they convey? Will the owner leave
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you talking about light switches?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. I’m sorry. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Light switches. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John to clarify, people don’t think of the Ethernet switches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, light switches. Let’s say you see a bunch of Lutron Caseta stuff in the house. Are they going to take those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with them? Because honestly, I probably would. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to rip out the light switches when you move out of your house?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, hell yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’d put in the regular dumb switches. I absolutely would. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my god! I was thinking the fan’s off the ceiling. I wouldn’t go that far, but…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in this scenario, so you know, a Lutro Caseta switch is about 60 bucks. So in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenario, you’re going to rip out a switch that is probably by that time like a decade old,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, you should probably have an electrician do some of this type of things too. So it’s like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going to be worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Actually, that is true. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably use it as an excuse to upgrade, so maybe I take it all back. Okay, Casey’s never going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move, so it’ll be fine. That’s also true. buy someone’s house who was a smart home enthusiast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are what you’re going to find in if they do have like wall switches. It’s all X10. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to be like an old like you know broken like old thing from you know some standard from 15, 10, 5 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X10. Well right, fair. Yeah but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to be like you know Belkin Wemo switches that no longer pair to the anything or like it’s going to be like old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken crappy home gear like that’s you’re not going to find somebody with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a house full of Casetas, which is like, you’re not that lucky. Like, that’s not what you’re going to find. You’re going to find somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a bunch of cheapo Amazon knock-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But leaving that aside, like, I think it’s worth identifying, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, whatever smart home stuff is there and figuring out what’s going to happen with it. But on the assumption that nothing is there, depending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the age of the house, you might want to maybe during inspection or perhaps even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, figure out, you know, what is it, the wire that I’m thinking of, the common,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that what I’m thinking of? The wire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the thermostats? Well, for thermostats and for smart switches as well. Oh, a neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neutral, maybe that’s what I’m thinking of. How did you forget that word on this podcast? Right, seriously? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I was conflating the two, but yes, a common wire for, as Marco said, a thermostat or a neutral wire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for light switches. Basically, if the house is old enough, the switch may not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have power unless it’s switched on, and that’s bad for a smart switch, right? You want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the smart switch to always have power, and then the device that it’s switching may or may not have power, depending on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether the switch is on or not. So you might wanna ask about that. Another thing that I think is very important,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I mean this genuinely, is what are your ISP options where you’re living? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of us now have been spoiled by Fios for 10 plus years. I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that if I had the choice between a darned near perfect house in Comcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey territory and a house that wasn’t quite as good, but in Fios territory, I’m buying the Fios
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house every day of the week and twice on Sunday, because it is that much, it truly makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my life as a nerd that much better. And just the other day, I was somewhere, I want to say it was a library or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the internet was a little spotty there, and it was beyond infuriating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have patience at almost 43 years old. I don’t have patience for crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet. I cannot tell you how amazing Fios has been for me, and I think I speak for all three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. So I think I would look into that.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the ISP front, by the way, I feel this pain not personally, because I, like Casey, intentionally bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a house that could get Fios. My relatives, unfortunately, live in places
⏹️ ▶️ John where their ISP options are very limited and have been terrible. So every time we do FaceTime calls
⏹️ ▶️ John with people, they look like potatoes, because their upload is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, they have terrible lighting in their house. But other than that, their upload is terrible. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we look clear to them because it’s like, you know, some crappy Comcast package where their download is perfectly adequate, but
⏹️ ▶️ John their upload is like nothing, right? And so a very exciting development. My
⏹️ ▶️ John sister recently said, hey, there’s this company in the neighborhood, they say they’re offering me,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, internet service for X amount, Y, Z, or whatever. And I was like, do it, take
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like you need to get off of Comcast, right? It was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, remember the name of the company is, but it’s one of those, like, you know, like, I don’t know if it’s municipal fiber,
⏹️ ▶️ John but some kind of like, one of those upstart fiber companies that’s like, but I’ve never heard of this company. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, do it. Name that sound like Skynet, but are not Skynet. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like something I’d never heard of. I’m like, whatever it is, do it. How many years have
⏹️ ▶️ John you been suffering under the yoke of Comcast, Xfinity, whatever the hell it’s called now,
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And guess what? She did it. and her upload speed went from like 0.5
⏹️ ▶️ John megabits per second to 600. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John You have, and the other thing is she called me and she was like, there’s something, you know, I can’t, I’m not getting, I did
⏹️ ▶️ John a speed test and it’s showing me these numbers and they’re not, you know, the speed test up here on the third floor is not as good as it is
⏹️ ▶️ John in the basement or whatever. And it’s like, well, first of all, that number is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 200 at that point. And it used to be like 0.5 megabits. So like, congratulations, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way better than it was. But second of all, they debugged the situation. And what they did, they had installed the ISP router,
⏹️ ▶️ John like where her old Xfinity router was, and it’s like next
⏹️ ▶️ John to the TV and like this sort of downstairs like split level, like entertainment room or whatever. But she
⏹️ ▶️ John had an Eero system that I had given her, one of my old Eero’s, I gave her and installed at her house to try to like
⏹️ ▶️ John mesh network the wifi from what is essentially the basement up to like the third floor, like loft
⏹️ ▶️ John area where she’s got her iMac on wifi essentially. And she’s had that Eero system for ages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so she was like, I hooked up the Eero to try to get better signal to the Mac upstairs, but it’s not working.
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked at the way everything was configured and it was, she had two wifi networks, both
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow with the same SSID, but they were like fighting with each other. In the end, the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John was unplug all the Eeros, put them into a Ziploc bag, find someone else who wants them and
⏹️ ▶️ John use the one router that this weird janky fly-by-night company that gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John fiber gave her that’s in the basement. And now she’s at 400 megabits per second,
⏹️ ▶️ John up and down, symmetrical from a wireless iMac on the third floor. I’m like, welcome to
⏹️ ▶️ John civilization. ISPs make such a big difference. You’re thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you’re such a prima donna, you need to have your fast speed for your torrents. No, no, it’s about human connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you do FaceTime calls with your family? Or like Google video? Like this is how we see whenever there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a, this is how we see our relatives. People who aren’t flying around from place to place, right? We see the other people in
⏹️ ▶️ John our family and talk to them through two-way video. And if people
⏹️ ▶️ John have poor upload, you can’t see them. It’s not a thing that you can control yourself, but you know, so this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John gift you give to everyone else. Get a good ISP with good upload speed. Do not ignore the Xfinity
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that say, look at this big number you’re gonna get down. Who cares about down? You want symmetrical. And
⏹️ ▶️ John cable tends not to be symmetrical for a lot of historical and technical reasons. And fiber tends
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. So yeah, look for a house that has a choice of fiber ISPs, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just Verizon, but there’s all sorts of other ones that are around. And they, some of the, again, I don’t even remember the name
⏹️ ▶️ John of this company. Anything is better than massively asymmetrical and expensive cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And, and, you know, there’s a number of, you know, shortcomings for nerds that houses might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that you could fix, you know, if you want to, either yourself or maybe by applying small or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large amounts of money, usually your availability of ISPs cannot be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any amount of money. Sometimes you can pay somebody to run a cable to your house, but that’s rare.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna pay them huge amounts of money, like enough to buy five more houses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, for the most part, whatever ISPs are available for your address, you’re stuck with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s very hard to ever change it.
⏹️ ▶️ John My sister has been in the same town for, I don’t know, 15, 20 years, finally she has one ISP choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like RCN or Xfinity or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so when you’re thinking about, going back to Jeremy’s question here, like, is there power in the garage you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use for an EV charger? Well, if there’s not, usually the circuit breaker box is in the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s pretty easy for an electrician to come out and add that without too much cost or hassle because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding something in a garage next to the circuit breaker, like that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the, I already actually answered Jeremy’s email from who knows how long ago because I didn’t want to leave them hanging
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, but that was the main piece of advice I had is when purchasing a home and when you’re looking at a home.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was giving advice from the perspective of somebody who did the one amount of home
⏹️ ▶️ John shopping he has ever done in a very hot real estate market, where the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John picking a house based on what it has is laughable, let alone demanding that you have things. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like trying to find a house that will accept your bid, and waiving the inspection,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just accepting that a family of rats lives there, or whatever, because that’s what it’s like in a hot real estate market. And don’t forget to
⏹️ ▶️ John offer 20% over asking. Anyway, the way I’m framing it as questions is like
⏹️ ▶️ John finding out what you’re going to have to do to the house when you buy it, to factor that into your
⏹️ ▶️ John equations. Not like, you should look for a house that has this. Margo’s right, the ISP thing is the one thing you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that because you can’t fix this. But almost everything else, especially if you’re in a hot real estate market is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m giving you advice so you know what you’re in for. Not that will influence your choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should not forego a house that doesn’t have what I’m about to describe, but just be aware
⏹️ ▶️ John that the house you’re buying doesn’t have this because you’re gonna have to pay for it yourself. And the one thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John suggested was find out how many amps are supplied
⏹️ ▶️ John by the circuit breaker, the panel, like how many amps of power are available in this
⏹️ ▶️ John house? I forget what they’re, they come in like 100, 150, 200, whatever. You kind of have to know how much power
⏹️ ▶️ John is already in the electrical system in the house and how close to the limit of that power the
⏹️ ▶️ John house is. Very small house might not need that much. very big house might need more. Does it have air conditioners? How many
⏹️ ▶️ John air conditioner units does it have? What is the heating and cooling like? And then you have to add to that the loads
⏹️ ▶️ John that you think you’re gonna add with your nerd stuff. Do you have an EV? Do you have a bunch of computers? Do you have a big TV in the entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John center? Do you have a big stereo? That’s gonna add up. You should do some kind of back of the
⏹️ ▶️ John envelope math and figure out, hey, this is a 3,000 square foot house with 100 amp service. Nope. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have to upgrade that. That’s why I’m telling you, look at the panel. especially
⏹️ ▶️ John old houses are way under provision for modern standards. Yes, despite the fact that they had incandescent lights, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have EVs, right? So be aware that when you’re looking at a house, again, don’t not buy it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but go to an electrician and say, hey, if I want to upgrade this service, they just run another line from
⏹️ ▶️ John the street or like connect the lines already running from the street. Like, it’s not like you can’t do it, but you have to pay an electrician
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it because you will die, okay? Pay an electrician to do this, please, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s gonna cost you a lot of money because it is dangerous work that only electrician can do,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna know that number. So that was my number one piece of advice for any tech nerd buying a house,
⏹️ ▶️ John find out how much power is going to it. And if you have to on day zero before you move
⏹️ ▶️ John in, upgrade the service to your house and pay an electrician to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and also that typically involves the electric company as well. Like you have to get approval from them to upgrade the service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will then have to replace probably your entire breaker box. Like it’s so it is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a job, but it can be done. But it’s, you know, it’s probably like a few thousand bucks. And sometimes it
⏹️ ▶️ John has to be done. Yes. Like if you want to live a sane life with like lots of electronic
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment and it’s definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an EV. Yeah. And you can do stuff like, you know, smart breaker panel boxes, it’ll make better use of limited service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but usually upgrading your service is actually pretty much the same price as a smart breaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box. So you might as well just upgrade the service. But sometimes if you don’t have that option.
⏹️ ▶️ John The smart breaker box is terrifying me. It’s like, yeah, we’re just going to take power from this part to deliver it over there. It’s like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John I need like, let me do that. I’ll turn lights off and stuff. I just need, I need it
⏹️ ▶️ John to be possible to cook in the oven or on the microwave at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be able to do that, like without the lights going out. So yes, please check your service.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I think a corollary to that is how many open slots do you have in your box? I mean, a very well, maybe that you were going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to replace it anyway, but if you’re bursting at the seams, maybe, maybe you have 500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amp service. I’m being facetious, but you have 500 amp service, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have one little itty bitty slot for a new circuit breaker. Well guess what? The whole kitchen’s on one circuit breaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. That’s the other thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? That’s the other thing. But if you only have one slot available, then you’re either going to need to have a daughter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box or what have you, or you’re probably going to need to replace the whole damn thing and rejigger it all. So that’s also worth looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at. But in terms of nerd stuff, I mean, yeah, is there Ethernet running throughout the house? I think that’s a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. not Ethernet, is coax running throughout the house. I have had extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good luck with, as I’ve talked about many times in the past, Mocha Bridges, which are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that go from Ethernet to coax and then back again. So my house is sort of kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of wired for Ethernet. Nerds, just let it go. It’s fine. My house is sort of kind of wired for Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have these boxes in a couple of places and I just ride on the coax and it’s surprisingly fast. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not as good as real Ethernet, but it’s close. It’s certainly not as good as fiber, am I right? But anyways, you know, I would look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at what is the in-wall situation for Ethernet, for coax,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anything really, and see what’s available. But I think for me, that’s most everything. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like you haven’t had a chance to offer any unique suggestions. You’ve certainly had commentary about ours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything you can add?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, mainly that like, so yeah, Ethernet running through the walls would be amazing. You’re not that lucky. It’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not going to find it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house that had Ethernet already in the walls.
⏹️ ▶️ John if you did, it’s not going to be like cat six or cat seven. So it’ll do one gigabit or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So for me, the, the, the question there is not, is there ethernet in the walls?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And is there an EV charger? Cause there won’t be either of those things, but although you’ll, you’re more likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find an EV charger these days than ethernet, but the question is. How hard is it to add it? And that depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the house. Like one, what would really help a lot is if the house has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a basement or a cross-base under it and an attic above it then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more easily like run wires you know in and out or like if there’s an attached garage you can kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go from the garage and go in and out of stuff like basically does your house have like utility spaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above below next to or throughout any kind of utility closet anything that where you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run wires through and access the interior walls of some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other rooms like by going in from above or below so you don’t like tear up big sections of wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the question is not like, will you find a house with Ethernet? No, you won’t. But the question is, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involved and disruptive and expensive will it be to add Ethernet to this house? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t necessarily like, you know, if you’re going to have to do that to a house, you don’t need Ethernet in every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room. If you can get it in most rooms, that’s great. But if you’re trying to retrofit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to an existing house and and don’t want to tear up every room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or don’t want to spend quite that much money to do it, you can just kind of have the greatest hits. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Ethernet go from the garage, wherever your computer will be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wherever your TVs will be, and wherever you think you might need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wireless access point. Now, if you want to go even further, you could run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet to anywhere you might want a power over Ethernet device like a camera, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s more kind of advanced mode. But yeah, most houses could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well wired for nerd’s sake for ethernet with between like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and four ports, like if they’re well placed throughout the house. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s all I’ve got. The only things that are connected to ethernet and I wired them myself through my large basement
⏹️ ▶️ John is my computer room. So every single computer that is not a laptop is connected to ethernet. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV entertainment center. So all my streaming boxes and everything like that. and my PlayStation is in here in the computer room. So
⏹️ ▶️ John every device that I care about is on ethernet, but there’s literally only two rooms in the house that have ethernet. And my
⏹️ ▶️ John security cameras, those have power going to them through like a little USB-C thing that plugs into a plug
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in the garage or whatever. But they just use wifi because with a good mesh
⏹️ ▶️ John network, you don’t need that many access points to cover my not so big house. So yeah, if you’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I gotta have ethernet in every room, you don’t unless you live in some like 50,000 square
⏹️ ▶️ John foot giant mansion, right? like just ethernet in strategic places plus good mesh wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John will get you covered. The only other thing I think about related to networking stuff is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is a thing you can really check because the people you’re buying the house from are never gonna tell you this or whatever, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do your walls have lead in them? Is it one of those old houses where
⏹️ ▶️ John for some reason, wifi cannot penetrate from room A to room B? You’re only gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of find that out when you’re there, but like the things we’re talking about here, This is another reason why if at all
⏹️ ▶️ John possible, again, don’t not buy a house because of these things, but just be aware of them and factor it into both your budget.
⏹️ ▶️ John And considering like, can we afford this house, given that we have to upgrade the service, given that we have to do x, given they have to do y.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, the time of like, before you move in, is the time to have
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody ripping apart walls and fishing things through attics and basements before there’s furniture before you
⏹️ ▶️ John live there. I know it’s a luxury sometimes you don’t always have. But like, before you settle in,
⏹️ ▶️ John do the, you know, obviously the refinish the floor is like before you move your stuff in, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even just fishing things through walls, or, you know, trying to get something in into
⏹️ ▶️ John a difficult place. It’s a lot easier to have something to either do that yourself or have someone else do it when there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing else in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and you know, in worst case scenario, if you if you want Ethernet throughout your house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s difficult, you know, to get it through the walls or anything like a lower tech solution might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fine depending on how much jank you can tolerate. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we first bought this house and my ethernet wiring wasn’t installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, I ran the cable out the window and threw it into the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because ethernet is very tolerant of running long distances through lots of different conditions. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know Margo’s kink,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Sorry so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just I bought like a hundred forty three night cable and plugged into my computer and ran it out the window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and closed the window on top of it. So it wouldn’t move and just ran it you know through the bushes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across the across like the front of the house. Yeah, it’s like running. It’s like running Christmas light wire. You just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of tuck it in different places and then you know under the garage door like into the garage. It was and I ran it that way for like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of months and it was fine similarly like you know if you like you don’t need necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have ethernet jacks in the wall. If you need to, you can just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, depending on again, where you can kind of hide or get away with this, you could just like drill a hole in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco floor and run a cable from your basement up into the, like, there’s lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways you can do it. It’s pretty tolerant and it doesn’t have to be perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how my internet gets to my rooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Because it works like a lot of times, especially if you have an old house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be pretty difficult to run professional wiring in the walls,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into jacks in the walls. That could be very disruptive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you’re willing to rip open the entire wall, that’s a much bigger project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. It can be, you could do it the way every college nerd did it when we were in college. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run the cable down the stairs and tape it to the wall. There’s lots of options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, good luck with the house hunt, Jeremy, if you’re still in it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are, if you weren’t to begin with. But yeah, there are a lot of options. But the thing with most houses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not, will it have this already? Because it won’t. And if it does, it’ll be some ancient or bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version that you won’t want to use. It’s more, how easily can this be added and how much will it cost me?
⏹️ ▶️ John Pick your house based on the location. That’s stupid saying location, location. That’s stupid, but it’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pick it based on the location. People’s commutes to your jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ John proximity to public transportation, to grocery store,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that is going to have such a bigger effect on your life. The only reason all these things we’re talking about come in is because you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John factor them into your time and money budget. And so that’s how you’re selecting. Like I said, do not
⏹️ ▶️ John reject the house if it’s in the right location, if it doesn’t have all these things, if it fits within your budget
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix all of them. The only one you can’t fix is the ISP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s all about location and Fiber ISP access.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our members who supported us this weekend. And thank you to our sponsors, Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Delete.me. One of the perks of membership is our weekly overtime, our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus topic every week. This week in overtime, we’re gonna be talking about the Nintendo Switch 2 that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was announced. We don’t know much about it yet, but we know enough to talk about it. So this week overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nintendo Switch 2 announcement. You can join us at atp.fm slash join if you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to that overtime and all the other member exclusive content that we do, including overtime every week and a bunch of different specials,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco et cetera. So thank you very much for everybody for listening, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
Casey’s 🚥
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I alluded to a little bit of home automation talk earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t wait. I can’t wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a monumental occurrence in this household, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally nobody in the household is even aware of other than me. But this is how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to recap, we talked, and I believe it was on episode 376, which we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We talked a couple of years ago, one of my pandemic projects, as especially nerds would want to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was to make the most cockamamie and ridiculous Rube Goldberg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scenario for alerting myself if the garage door was open. We have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a smart garage door opener, like the physical machine that opens and closes the garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door, but it doesn’t work with HomeKit. It will never work with HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I could get the like myQ thing, but I had one and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right. And then it got better for a while then they like took away home kid access or something like that I forget the details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t really matter but I needed a project anyway And so what I had done was I got a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of Raspberry Pi zeros Which at the time were the cheapest and most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underpowered Raspberry Pis that existed. I think they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things that are closer to an Arduino now, but either way at the time in like 2020 They were the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could get there were like 10 or 15 bucks I think each I got zero WHS which is to say zeros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had Wi-Fi capability there’s the W and the H meant that they had the GPIO that basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the I open soldered on because by default a Raspberry Pi zero doesn’t have any the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pins to connect to other stuff and I had one Literally sitting on top of the garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door opener with a contact switch Running on up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the top of the garage and it would use that contact switch hooked to one of these aforementioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPIO pins to figure out whether or not the garage door was open. And when it was opened or closed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either way, it would periodically broadcast a UDP packet on the network saying to anyone who wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to listen, the garage is open, the garage is open, the garage is open, or whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I had another Pi Zero WH up in the bedroom hooked up to an LED, LED, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it received one of those UDP packets saying, the garage is open, then it would illuminate the LED.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And although in the two or three years, I forget when we recorded that episode, it, God, it might’ve been five years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point. Time is something else. Anyways, in the several years since this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since I started this whole project, it’s been mostly bulletproof and there have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five or 10 times in five years that I have had garage door closed because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed the red illuminated LED by my bed. So mission accomplished.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Putting all that aside, recently over the last several months I’ve started to dabble
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again with Home Assistant. I had been running Homebridge, which was my preferred home automation thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of choice. And Homebridge is pretty darn good at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking things that don’t have native HomeKit support and putting them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into HomeKit. And that’s done mostly via JavaScript add-ons and things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because hey, why wouldn’t you? JavaScript’s everywhere. And I did like it and use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it for a long time, but let me tell you, the Home Assistant people, do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s flying monkeys are bad? Oh, let me tell you, the Home Assistant flying monkeys are worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They will not stop talking about Home Assistant. Everything relates to Home Assistant. There’s no problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot be solved by Home Assistant. and it is the only thing, it is the only software you should care about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey period. And I always found that so incredibly off-putting, and I did try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Assistant around the time I had trialed HomeBridge, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was wildly different than what I wanted, and I didn’t understand how it worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I am here to tell you I now understand how it works. I am now one of the flying monkeys in everything relates to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomeBridge, or excuse me, Home Assistant now. There is no problem, gentlemen, that I cannot solve with Home Assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in my Home Assistant journey, I became aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of something that I should have known about. It’s existed for like 20 years or something like that, but I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never heard of before. And this is MQTT. It’s an acronym
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who’s, I already forgotten what it stands for. It doesn’t really matter. But what it basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, there you go. MQ, telemetry transport. That totally explains what it was, what it is, at least that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it originally was called. I think it has a different definition now. What this basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, and the nerds will come after me for this description, but what it basically is, is like a data bus. So it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pub-sub sort of thing where you can say, I would like to know when such and such happens or, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such and such happened. So I’m running this as you would expect as a Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image, as I am Home Assistant on my Synology. It is extremely lightweight and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely fast. And I have realized now that what I can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I can put things into an MQTT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey message, if you will, and then somewhere, and then I can read them somewhere else. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what that means is, since Home Assistant has even more support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for different devices than Homebridge did, and Homebridge had a lot, Home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Assistant actually has support for for my cockamamie garage door opener.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it has native support for it, which is great. And what I can do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can have Home Assistant, when it sees there’s been a change in the state of the garage door,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can publish a message on MQTT that says, hey, the garage door is open.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I can have the Raspberry Pi that’s upstairs in the bedroom, listen for those messages, and it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn the LED on or off. which means that now I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my garage Raspberry Pi. And so it has been officially decommissioned as of earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. And at this point, Marco, if you would like to insert taps, please feel free. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am down to only one Raspberry Pi and two Docker images.
⏹️ ▶️ John You might want to run the Docker containers on the Raspberry Pi, because maybe it has a better CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and memory than your Synology. Like you’re running so much on the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not the Raspberry Pi Ws, or excuse me, the Zero Ws. Those are very weak. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bet they could do it, especially for Mosquito, which is the particular-
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand, like, I always get nervous about you running all this stuff in your Synology that like does actual computation. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you say it’s lightweight, but like, I’m, you know. What does your Synology have? Does it have like an Atom processor or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it does. I understand the question. I forget what it is. It’s a 1621 Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was, it’s not the original one that we all had gotten years ago. I’d gotten this a couple of years ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a year and a half
⏹️ ▶️ John ago. So it’s, so it’s, you know, one 800th as fast as an Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I would go that far, but your point is fair. But I’m running, let’s see, right now I am running,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where is it? I don’t know, there are 22 Docker containers that are on Mycenology of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which 20 are running at the moment and it’s fine. Like it really is fine. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, but in any case, I have now, thanks to MQTT and I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mosquito, which is the particular implementation of MQTT, I have decommissioned one of my Rube Goldberg
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds kind of like you’ve replaced it with another Rube Goldberg machine. You just think it’s cooler because it has an acronym.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, pretty much. And it’s not relying on UDP, which I think is an improvement as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s wrong with UDP?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, nothing. It just seems so old and janky by comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ John and janky? It’s not any older than TCP IP. They’re the same age, roughly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just feels jankier to me. And you want to do that? Anyone want to do the joke? You want to do the joke? I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joke you’re talking about. So no, I don’t want to do the joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, there it is. Well done. Well done. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, and MQTT does run on TCP. In any case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what this has now created, though, other than probably more problems and certainly a complete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time suck, is now I want to do something different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know you two are going to make fun of me, and I don’t care, but I need help. And I was talking to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my good friend, Eric Wielander, who has a phenomenal YouTube channel about smart home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, especially HomeKit, but not exclusively HomeKit. And I was talking to him,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he came up with a couple of pretty good options, but I haven’t come up with a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option. What I think I wanna do is I wanna have a very low tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-home status board. So what I want is like three LEDs. Now, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the terminal that Marco has, the little e-ink thing, I think it could serve this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could write my own custom thing for it. And to be honest, I might end up going that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey route because I don’t know if we spoke about it on the show, but Terminal was kind enough to offer John and I freebies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically because of Marco’s hard work. So, thanks guys. My hard work and buying one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and talking about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, still. And I believe, and to be fair, I believe they are sponsoring a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future episode of the show. But one way or another, I could do this on the terminal, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure I could. But what I kind of want to do is, I want to take like a light, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the space that a light switch would take up, and I want to have three LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John This is such a 1970s slash 80s solution. It is. Forget about a screen with information.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I get three lights? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I know. And stick them in a switch
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John I will know. It’s like looking at the lights on your cable router in 1994. 1994 is like I know what those lights mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why stop at lights? Why not go for like nixie tubes? There’s like flipboard things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I should go that route. No, I mean I again I know you’re making fun of me and truth be told if I was on the receiving end of this conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would make fun of you as well But I think it would be neat to have like two or three LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That will show like the state of things that I really really care about in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John things You know how to read them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you know how to read them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John One of them is whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not Aaron’s car is actively charging, whether or not the garage door is open,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whether or not the mail has been delivered. Because I think we talked about in a past show, yeah, we did talk about with my ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup out in my mailbox. I’ve also gone deep into the YoLink world, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that’s been integrated into Home Assistant, et cetera, et cetera. But I think those three LEDs, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I want to do is, like John described, not literally replacing a light switch, but in the same kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup, you know, like I can I can envision in my mind three of these LEDs in the spot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where a light switch could be and they will illuminate based on presumably like an Arduino
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe if I had the physical space to fit the Pi zero in there, which I probably wouldn’t. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I can’t figure out a graceful way to do this because presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were to literally replace the light switch, which I don’t plan to do, but for the sake of conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were to replace a light switch which I would have power there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in the way I would want. You know, that’s not like an AC outlet is in a junction box behind the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light switch. There’s 120 volts back there or whatever, 110 volts back there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in the spirit of your mailbox contraption, you can get one of those switch plates that has USB
⏹️ ▶️ John ports on it, USB-A or C ports, and then you plug a cable into the port and fish that cable back behind the switch
⏹️ ▶️ John match your mailbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They would match my mailbox perfectly. But what I’m driving at is, is there some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of, you know, LED, a controllable LED, preferably from either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Assistant or like an Arduino or something like that, wherein I could turn, you know, one to three LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on or off as I see fit. And I don’t think I want a single one because multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things could be happening at the same time. You know, I-
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure an Arduino can handle turning on LEDs. In fact, that may be the main thing people do with
⏹️ ▶️ John them when they first get them. Or you can just get yourself a breadboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s also fair, but the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like, how do I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power the Arduino? Where do I physically put it? And so I think there’s probably a more graceful solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this, which probably is the terminal, but a more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution to this that I’m not thinking of. So Eric gave me a couple ideas. Like he had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggested, I think it’s called Nanoleaf, the like tiles you can stick on the wall, which he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew isn’t exactly what I wanted, but it’s in the vicinity of what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I presume there’s some other options that I’m not thinking of. So if you have something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that that you’ve done or that you’re thinking of, please reach out to me on either email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Mastodon, let me know, because I would love to have some suggestions.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the next person who buys this house someday is gonna be like, why are there LEDs in the wall? This must’ve been done in the
⏹️ ▶️ John 60s. Like, nope, 2025. Yeah, it’s exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, it’s so true. It’s so true. And
⏹️ ▶️ John not have computer screens? No, they have them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This old fogey just didn’t want to use them. That’s what it boiled down to. No, I just think it would be, it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those things that’s just a fun project. And so far I’m failing miserably. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, I’d love to have some feedback if you have any. So please feel free to reach out.