Finding Your Way Back In
I installed the world's most expensive power switch.
There is a product by the audio company called Shit, which I like a lot.
It is actually pronounced that way.
And they sell a lot of products, mostly headphone amps and stuff, most of which I own or have owned at some point.
And they're great.
And they sell a product called the Word, the W-Y-R-D.
Wait, wait.
So Shit sells the Word.
So it's the Shit word.
Yes.
So I have a word between my USB hub and my audio interface.
And the purpose of the word is to provide power isolation.
It's basically like the USB equivalent of a ground loop isolator for audio.
You ever have to use one of those like in car audio or anything?
I know what you're referring to, but I've never had to use one.
It's literally just to make sure there's no physical... I think it uses transformers or something.
I don't know.
John, you probably can explain it better.
More than meets the eye.
Yeah.
Basically, it electrically isolates the two sides.
In the case of a ground loop isolator, of an audio signal.
In the case of this word, of a USB signal.
And when I was originally using the wonderful but incredibly picky Shure SM7B microphone, which in case that's the same one that I made you get at first that neither of us are using anymore for many reasons, one of which is that it's just incredibly picky and incredibly unforgiving of room noise.
It's like a combination of you and me.
So anyway, one of the many stupid things that I threw money at to try to fix the SM7B and make it less hissy on the low end of the track.
Besides, I actually bought a gold-plated cable, which was incredibly stupid, but somebody told me that these Mogami XLR cables make a big difference, and this is what all studios use.
Of course they do.
Well, you might have had it backwards because they're directional.
Yeah.
Well, actually, XLR cables are kind of just because there's always like there's one male and one female.
And anyway, I'm trying to make an audio file joke.
I don't know enough about this insanity to know.
Anyway, the other thing I did was I bought this word because I figured maybe just maybe there's like, you know, some some noise coming in from the computer.
And the main reason I have it is is was for that.
But the reason I keep it now is because I really just like having a power switch for my USB pre to.
And I could just unplug it and then plug it back into the USB port when I want to use it.
Like, Casey, it sounds like you do.
But I don't want that.
I want an actual power switch.
So I use a shit word on my audio interface primarily as a $100 power switch.
This is entirely in keeping with your whole thing.
I know.
That's why I didn't want to admit this to anybody.
That's fine to admit.
I think the gold-plated cable is more shameful.
Yeah.
Well, I was desperate.
So here I had this mic that everyone was telling me this mic is amazing.
It's awesome.
All you need is a really good preamp.
Okay, I bought a really good preamp.
Not cheap.
And then, oh, there's still some hiss at the bottom.
And it's like, oh, actually, oh, yeah, maybe your cables are introducing noise.
Now, XLR cables are balanced.
And so it is extremely unlikely to introduce noise.
I don't know the electrical details.
I think it might actually be impossible, but it is extremely unlikely at any rate.
But I thought, you know what?
A Mogami XLR cable, it was like $35 or $40 or something for like a six foot.
I'm like, let me just try it.
Any other XLR cable is like a dollar a foot maybe.
This is like $35.
Let me...
Let me try it.
I'm desperate.
I have all this noise and this mic I really want to use.
And this mic is awesome in every other way.
And everyone else seems to have no problems with it.
Merlin uses one.
Jason Snell uses one.
Michael Jackson used one.
Robin Quivers uses one.
Everyone else has no problem with it.
So maybe I should try this.
And the problem must be me.
Nope.
The problem is the SM7B.
And it turns out, as I learned later on after throwing lots of money at mine trying to get rid of the background hiss behind everything, if you go to Shure's website, they actually have a little microphone comparison thing.
And their sample has the hiss, too.
And it turns out that... I don't know the details of how this works.
Again, I'm not an electrical engineer.
John almost is, right?
The computer engineering thing.
You explained it on your show.
Me as well.
Oh, you too, Casey?
I didn't know you were computer engineering.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so you guys should both be telling me.
But basically, there's inherent noise in any given amount of resistance...
and the inherent resistance of the SM7B, it is so low output, it needs so much gain, that just the inherent resistance in it makes it so that even with perfectly clean gain, there will always be a certain bass level of noise in every mic.
And the SM7B is so incredibly gain-hungry and needs so much gain to be audible, so low output, that that bass level of noise is always audible.
So there is no way to make the SM7B noiseless.
So all that money was mostly wasted.
All that hassle was a huge pain in the ass and a huge waste of time, money, and effort, and aggravation.
And now I just use a different mic, which is way cheaper and better.
Can't you just filter that out?
So that's what I was doing.
So my step in while editing the podcast, my first two steps were always, you know, convert everything, line it up.
And then I would bring in each of our tracks into Adobe Audition because there's, you know, most wave editor programs will have some kind of thing where you can select a portion of silence that contains basically only noise, like when the person's not talking and they haven't hit the mute switch yet.
So a section of the track that contains only noise, you can select that, you can say profile this, and then in the whole track, remove that profile of noise.
Audacity has one of these.
It's really not very good.
It leaves a lot of audible artifacts in it.
But Audition has a really good one, Adobe Audition.
For all three of our tracks, I would bring them in there and I would noise profile the hell out of them to really get rid of that.
The problem is it's not a perfect removal.
It still does leave little bits of it.
So, like, in the silence, you wouldn't hear it between somebody's words.
But, like, as they would talk, you would hear, like, the noise come in and out a little bit.
And it was very subtle, but it just drove me nuts because it really... And, like, this is, like...
There's just some portion of it.
I know SoundSoap is a similar kind of thing.
Everyone has their things that they like, that they use, but all these things work the same way.
But they always leave a little bit of artifacting in there.
You can't perfectly remove it, basically, or at least without really muffling the sound, which I also was not willing to do.
So, yes, you can remove noise, but not perfectly, and it's better to eliminate the source of noise in the first place.
Anyway, I'm using a new mic tonight, so I don't want to tell anybody I'm using yet, but I'm testing different mics for an upcoming review.
Well, so after you had told me to get the SM7B and then you said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Get the crap.
What is it?
The beta something, something, something.
I first told you to get the beta 58A because that's because I had used that.
I got one.
I'm like, oh, my God, this is amazing.
And then.
afterwards like two weeks later like a month later i told you wait can you still return that because i just discovered the beta 87a which is way better than the 58a um it it sounds a lot nicer to me um and uh it has none and it has no other downsides like what makes the beta so great is that they have incredibly high output um so this is this is a i'll do a quick side on here
If you ask people about microphones, usually you're going to hear from people who know certain ones are the classics.
Because microphones don't change very often.
The SM7B, I think, came out in 1987 or something.
The betas came out in the 90s.
Mics don't change very often.
They don't come out with new models all the time.
And many of them have been around for 20, 30 years.
All the well-known ones have some kind of history of, oh, well, this one was used on these albums by these singers, or this has been in radio studios for decades.
They all have these backgrounds of being classics, being well-known.
And so if you ask people about recommendations, they'll often recommend these classic old mics because they have, like, nostalgia or because they have reputation from forever ago.
The problem is in the, I don't know, 90s to now, there has been a huge movement towards NIB magnet-driven mics rather than the old kind of magnets that sucked.
like the newest models, many of them have switched over to use those.
And mics that are made with those usually have way higher output levels, and so therefore a way higher signal-to-noise ratio, so way lower noise.
And so usually the microphones that were recommended for years are the old kind, and they are a pain in the ass to use if you're trying to get rid of the background noise or have none of it to begin with, especially if you're not in a professional studio.
And the new ones are usually way better, but no one's recommending them because, you know, how many people buy more than one podcast mic to even do a comparison?
And if you ask people online, you'll hear from recording engineers who have been working in studios for 30 years, and they'll tell you all the old ones.
So that's why I'm working on a microphone review.
Anyway.
Well, it's funny because the 58A that I'm rocking, I think I have that right.
The 58A that I'm rocking, when we were recording, I think it was analog two or three weeks ago, all of a sudden Aaron comes like bombing in the room, which is extremely abnormal.
So, of course, I'm thinking like Declan is near death or something like that.
Well, she goes reaching behind my laptop screen.
And I thought, well, OK, that's fine, but weird.
Well, it turns out that our house phone, which never rings except for telemarketers, was ringing for a telemarketer.
I'm sitting literally three feet from it.
I had no idea.
And to the best of my knowledge, I don't believe that even came through on the track.
And this is like two or three feet from where the microphone is.
that's how unbelievably good the 58a is so if the 87a is even better i don't even know what to say like that's just phenomenal right so the 87a basically it has all the advantages of the 58a which is insane background noise reduction because and and these are super cardioid so they're very unforgiving if you move side to side or if you back up like you will lose volume very quickly
But in a practical home podcast studio, that's actually a really good thing because you're probably working in your home office.
There's probably other things in your house that might make noise.
And so it really is nice to have extreme background noise rejection.
And if the cost of that is you have to be pretty on top of the mic, oh well.
It's pretty easy to stand on top of a mic if you pay attention.
And that's easier than trying to eliminate every source of noise in a typical house for most people.
So the 87A has all of that same characteristic, but better sound quality.
Because the problem with the 58A is that it really is kind of muffled sounding and kind of flabby in the lower mids, if that makes sense, or like the upper bass.
It kind of sounds really big and boomy a little bit too much.
And so Casey, for you, I just EQ that out.
But sometimes when I hear you on other podcasts, sometimes they don't EQ it out, and I'm like, oh, he should be using the 87.
And EQ can only do so much, too.
Because a lot of people, once they learn a little bit, they think, oh, it's all about frequency response curves, and you can just make any mic sound like any other mic by just adjusting the EQ.
No, it doesn't really work that way.
There's other variables.
Anyway, that's it for mics.
That's all I have.
I don't even think this is going to go on the show, because this is really inside baseball.
so we should do some follow-up and let's start with intel sky lake and how apparently they're cheating not cheating it was a question when we discussed it last time like how are they getting the power savings because we hadn't heard any of the details and apparently not all the details are out but some some of the details are out on the typical intel trickle of information about their new chips uh our stack thing i had a good story about this uh put a link in the show notes
uh what it comes down to they talk about the things that make it go faster it's a little bit wider there's a little bit more instructions in flight a little bit more parallelism that can extract but the power savings it's just more of the same stuff but it's cool like uh intel processors and all processors for a long time have had the ability to throttle themselves down to slower speeds when they when they don't need to be used and then throw themselves up when they need to be used and they do this on on a scale that makes sense to cpus like i think when a
when like my audio uh compression thing finishes and i stop using the mouse then like a couple seconds later the cpu drops down to a slower speed and then when i run a photoshop filter it runs to a faster speed that that's human scale uh cpu scale the cpus most of us are using now they change frequency in uh you know in tens of milliseconds right so they'll do a bunch of instructions realize there's not that much more to do uh or the operating system will signal them there's not much more to do
and they will 30 milliseconds later go into a slower speed mode so they're they're going faster slower faster slower many times in a single second uh and the operating system is involved because you know there's some communication about it thinks it's okay for the if it wants to go into energy saving mode the if the cpu is trying to save energy the cpu doesn't think it has a lot of jobs to schedule and it's uh you know like the there's not a lot of cpu usage you can say okay you can scale down i can still get my work done that type of thing well in the sky like uh
CPUs, rather than having the operating system communicate back and forth, which takes a long time to just get the message, relatively speaking, on a scale of milliseconds, takes a long time for the operating system to figure out that things are kind of chilling down on the computer.
Tell the CPU, hey, there's not that many processors that want the CPU as compared to a few moments ago, so it's okay for you to crank down.
send that signal to the cpu the cpu gets it cpu honors it and then things that may have changed in that interval so instead skylight cpus are taking over this responsibility so they can change frequency in one millisecond from faster to slower so basically on a millisecond to millisecond basis the cpu can decide how you know what what its clock speed wants to be and then there's the usual stuff of turning off execution units when they're not used they're doing more of that more granular like if no one's using the avx2 extensions just turn that unit off entirely because
tends to be used for specialized purposes uh they tweak the caching a little bit to redistribute the memory they're using for cache they put the cache out farther from the chip so it can be so it so the the ed ram cache that some of these chips can have inside them um can be used it's cache coherent all the time so it can be used by other parts of the system like the graphic system and everything
uh but anyway the oh and then uh one more interesting thing is that the skylight cbus can go way way down apparently down to 100 megahertz uh but this at the process size that we're using the leakage uh current becomes a factor like how much electricity is just going through these things even when they're supposedly off and so there's kind of an it's kind of like driving a car there's like an optimum fuel mileage like the optimum speed for getting the best fuel mileage is not
one mile an hour and it's not 100 miles an hour it's somewhere between there well for a cpu there's an optimum like how optimum power using uh speed so because if you go really really fast then obviously using tons of power because the power usage is like this the square of the the frequency or whatever
But if you go super slow, you think, isn't that great?
Why don't we just go slower?
If it's the square of the frequency, if we go slower and slower, we'll just save more and more power.
But there's a certain amount of leakage that happens all the time.
And if you go super slow, it's going to take you longer to do the calculation.
So if you go down to 100 megahertz, all of a sudden it's taking you 10, 100 times as long to do the calculation, which means you are staying in the 100 megahertz mode for a really long time.
And during that whole time, you have all the leakage of all the transistors that are, you know,
powered up and you know that have power going to them even if they're in the off position so you want to find the sweet spot where you get the work done as fast as possible but you keep the the clock speed as low as possible and this is another thing that the cpu does to try to find that sort of uh mileage sweet spot in the the car analogy um there's some other stuff in there as well people should just read the article although i just tried to summarize it i did a bad job of it but anyway uh intel filled with clever people
It sounds like this could be a pretty big deal, though.
I mean, the early reports that we're seeing from early reviews, rumors, tipsters here and there are all basically saying that Skylake is probably going to be a really big deal in power savings.
Yeah, and this is the type of stuff where you can imagine, like, this is the thing I like to see in CPUs.
They have all these systems for throttling the chips up faster and slower and saying, we're going to shut off this section of the chip when it's not used.
I haven't told you that for years and years and years.
And there's always something where, like, you have an established system where
in this power mode the operating system communicates with the chip and it's like isn't that a great feature like whenever they came up with that you know several chip revisions ago it sounds like it's the best thing since life spread but as those chips go out there they realize now if we want to squeeze any more power out of it the limiting factor is that lag between when the operating system determines that we should slow down to when we actually slow down during that time so much might have changed in the instruction stream that actually we might want to be speeding up at that point we might have missed the part when we should have slowed down
But you can't make that kind of change.
It's significant.
It requires a tick, whatever the hell.
It requires the thing where you make an architectural change because that's not a small change saying we're going to do it all on chip versus we're going to have the operating system communicate these things all the time.
So you just kind of got to wait for the next big revision for them to try an entirely different strategy.
Yeah.
And things like, well, when the processor is down at 14 nanometers, suddenly the leakage current is a big problem.
And so now we have to actually find that sweet spot.
We can't just say, you know what, lower frequencies are always better because that's not true anymore.
You go down too low and you take too long and you're just leaking.
Yeah, chips are weird and getting weirder all the time.
But Skylake looks like all the ideas they had, they've known they should have done the past few revisions.
You've got to wait because these things take years and years to get designed and tape out and qualified and all that good stuff.
All right, so speaking of hardware, do you want to tell us about ECC RAM?
Because apparently we have all the things to talk about with regard to ECC RAM.
Oh, this is more good news on the ECC RAM front.
This is from the world's most interesting podcast.
I'm so excited.
I think this is good stuff.
It's interesting to us.
Yeah, I know.
I'm excited for ECC RAM.
Hey, I don't get file system integrity until 2017 or whatever.
This is what I have to tide me over.
Anonymous source talking about ECC RAM.
ECC RAM, as we've known it and discussed, it requires support from the memory controller because basically the RAM chips have an extra...
thing on them that holds the parity information and it sends all this information out to the memory controller and the memory controller says you sent me this info and here's the parity info and it will use the parity info to determine if there are any problems and correct the problems that it can that's why it's error correcting code uh we should just put a link to the wikipedia page on ecc or correcting code or parity and you can figure out how it works but it's up to the memory controller to do that it gets all the info from the chip reconciles it all corrects any errors and passes it on um
And that's what I've got in my Mac Pro.
That's what all the Mac Pros have.
That's the feature that I want, the error correcting, ability to correct small errors in RAM that happen increasingly, we'll get to this in another piece of follow-up, happen much more frequently.
Sorry for a quick interruption.
Interestingly, the current Mac Pro, while it has allegedly workstation GPUs, they don't use ECC RAM on the GPUs.
And there's been a lot of problems with the 2013 cylinder Mac Pro and the GPUs in it.
And if you put six gigs or whatever of ECC GPU RAM in there, it would be a lot more expensive in all likelihood.
And that's probably why they didn't do it.
But it is kind of unfortunate that that isn't even an option on the current Mac Pro.
Wasn't there something about that GPU also not really being one of the pro GPUs, being more like a souped-up consumer GPUs?
Yeah.
It's basically a gaming GPU that's rebranded and adjusted slightly.
And that's unfortunate.
Again, it's like...
That computer, that cylinder drives me nuts.
It really does.
In so many ways, I want one.
In so many ways, it's terrible.
Apple keeps narrowing certain product lines, like the new MacBook One and the new Mac Pro.
They keep narrowing further and further the question of, who is this for?
And I think they're going a little too far with that a lot of times.
And with a lot of these modern products, by keeping narrowing and narrowing everything and making it for fewer people, the old Mac Pro was for a lot of potential people.
I mean, it was always expensive compared to the other ones.
But...
It was basically a generic tower, you know, with Apple made of Apple hardware.
It was like a not generic, but, you know, it was it was a tower.
It was you could do anything you wanted really to the inside.
It could be in lots of different configurations for lots of different types of needs, ranging all the way from power user geeks all the way up to video editors and special installations and everything like that.
Whereas the new Mac Pro just cuts off so much of that.
because it is so specialized they really like they lopped off a huge part of the market and with you know with the macbook one i feel like it's the same kind of thing where it's like you know a lot of people like it it looks really cool it feels great it's very portable um but some of the decisions they made which didn't seem entirely necessary uh well we talked about both these things a lot so i'll wrap it up but some of the decisions they made with the macbook one and the new mac pro it cut off so much of the potential market for
maybe looks maybe i mean like there's some you know there's some benefits here and there but in the case of the mac pro it's just like the ad said they pushed the human race forward it's just they didn't do an awesome they didn't do an awesome job on it like it's a little bit flaky i kind of think of the first the first cheese grater uh the power mac g5 mine had a chirping power supply and still does as it sits in my attic somewhere
uh that sounds like the the 2013 mac pro a lot of issues with that machine there's a lot of software related issues uh especially if you try to run the thing with a retina-ish display attached to it uh you just mentioned the gpu issues that it's not it doesn't like it's supposed to be this workstation class machine but doesn't have ecc vram and what was it some other uh problems with the gpus they were talking about the failure rates or whatever it just
wait for revision 2 you the 5k iMac you have right now has the same problem in terms of the gpu overheating when you try to play games it's just you don't play games so you don't care uh but yeah wait wait for revision 2 no i'm honestly like i my review of the of the iMac 5k one roughly one year and it came out like last october so almost one year and my review of the 5k iMac is i have zero complaints like it is great like
Yeah, I would love it if the fan was silent under full handbrake transcoding load like the Mac Pro, because on the iMac, it is audible.
But that's it.
Like, it is amazing in every other possible way.
We'll see if it cooks your GPU.
Yeah.
And the screen is so good that it makes every other screen, including the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, look muddy by comparison.
It is so good.
The same way the Retina MacBook Pro ruined every other screen for me when it came out, the 5K iMac screen has ruined every other screen for me now, including that one.
well when the next revision of mac pros come out and they finally decide to make a 27 inch monitor out of that same screen that's in marco's imac and you put them both together maybe second time's the charm we'll see yeah i'll probably get one of those combos eventually all right but i still didn't get to the good news about easy ram sorry
actually going somewhere with this.
I described how ECC RAM works on my Mac Pro.
There's extra chips on the thing.
It sends it to the memory controller.
The RAM is more expensive because it's got extra chips.
Then the memory controller is more expensive because it's got to do extra stuff and it's specially designed to do this.
Then it passes the information back to the CPU.
Well,
in ddr4 that the uh upcoming or current i think this stuff is out now standard for uh ram ecc is built directly into the chips so it's not like the the the dims send the information to the memory controller and the memory controller looks at the information it was sent along with the parity information reconciles it and moves it on the memory controller has no idea that ecc is involved it happens all entirely on the dim and
still has still requires extra hardware and you know to store all that information but it's transparent to the memory controller so you can basically take this ecc not all ddr for but some of them can you can take these ecc ddr dims and shove them in any machine that supports like i guess the physical form factor and everything else involved with it but the memory controller doesn't have to be special which means it is presumably less expensive and less cumbersome and it's harder for intel to segment their marker and all that other stuff
There is a little bit of extra cost because, like I said, the memory is going to cost a little bit more.
And if you're soldering it to the board, you've got to find maybe more room to solder the stuff.
But as DDR4 becomes the standard across the entire industry, that could be the backdoor for ECC.
It's basically like you get it whether you want it or not.
It's built into the chips.
Um, and you don't have to worry about memory controller support or anything like that.
Uh, and the, the only possible downside is that the on die ECC that's on the dims themselves will only catch errors related to the, the chips on the memory, you know, the memory chips themselves.
It won't catch anything that happens like when the signals are on their way from the memory thing to the memory controller.
Uh, and our anonymous source, he originally said the vast, vast majority of all DRAM errors are related to the things in the chips that
But then corrected him or herself later to say, you know what?
All of the errors are related to things that happen on the chip.
Because even if you having the separate thing lets you correct the things between the DIMM and the memory controller, you still have to go from the memory controller to the CPU.
Bottom line is those interconnects are fairly reliable.
So this is basically the way that we're all going to get ACC, it seems.
And then finally...
there is a link to a PDF talking about various problems with modern RAM and the size that we're fabbing things and everything.
And it talks about the bit failures and the times between them and so on and so forth.
And the conclusion it comes to is the most effective way to deal with variable retention time failure bits is generally believed to be ECC.
And this whole thing about...
new memory that the modern memory the size that's fab that the problems inherent in fabbing memory at smaller and smaller sizes basically leads to the conclusion that all ram is going to have to be ecc if we keep shrinking it because as you make as the process size gets smaller and smaller on ram
It's much easier for a bit to be perturbed one way or the other when just everything is so much smaller.
And so you need ECC just to make the things work reliably, period.
So it's going to be built into all RAM eventually if RAM keeps shrinking, no matter what, is the potential conclusion from this paper.
So we will put all those links in the show notes.
Ben Hayes wrote in with a stat I think it's come up the last time we talked about ECC.
something that i'm not sure about how uh accurate this is but i will link in the show notes it says 96 chance of having a bit error in three days if you have four gigs of ram so like these these bit errors are happening if you believe that stat there is another paper that i'll link that says d ram errors in the wild wild a large-scale field study uh
this is from 2009 so it's not particularly new so things may have changed for the worst or for the better depending it's probably for the worst if ecc is not involved since more than eight percent of dims are affected by errors each year so this is happening to all of our computers unless you have ecc like me um whether you know it or not most of the time it doesn't make a difference it's probably not corrupting your data it's probably not doing anything wrong you just got to get unlucky once
Fair enough.
And also, it is worth pointing out that while there might be a bit error somewhere on a RAM chip, that also might not be in a section of RAM that is currently being used and will cause a problem for you.
Yeah, it could be totally unimportant.
It could never even be read.
It could be read and discarded.
It could be the high bits of something that gets masked out.
Chances are very good that nothing bad will happen.
But...
If you believe the first stat where it's like basically every three or four days you're going to have a bit error, you're just spinning that roulette reel multiple times a week.
And over the course of many years, maybe you get one kernel panic because you don't have ECC RAM.
But I'll take it.
Don't give me that kernel panic.
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All right, just a little bit more follow-up.
Jason wrote in and said, I made a new partition of my hard drive, and the hard drive got corrupted.
I had a backup, but the backup is encrypted with a strong password, which is only in my keychain, which is only in the FileVault encrypted user account in the corrupted partition.
And, of course, in the encrypted backup.
So I have a really nice backup, which is a total brick until quantum computers can crack the AES-256 encryption.
I see many friends doing backups using strong passwords and a password manager and checking every, quote, encrypt box they see.
By themselves, these are all good, but together I found out that they can be dangerous.
I didn't hear a read about that before.
Perhaps with a warning, I'd love to hear your comments.
Yeah, you have to be careful about that stuff.
It's a really good point, though, because I definitely tick all the encrypt checkboxes, and without one password on a device somewhere, I am completely lost.
That being said, I have one password on two different Macs, an iPad, and an iPhone.
So it would take a pretty catastrophic issue for all of those to go away.
And, by the way, it's stored in Dropbox, so I'd have to lose Dropbox as well.
But it's certainly something to think about.
And that's why they say your backup isn't really a backup until you try restoring from it.
What if you lost Dropbox?
Like what if your Dropbox file got deleted or corrupted or whatever?
Even before you start thinking about what if you lost Dropbox, putting it on Dropbox at all, almost everything you can do to protect yourself from the scenario he's describing weakens your encryption.
Because now you're saying this super strong encryption with these super strong passwords...
if dropbox's encryption is crappy or their security is bad or whatever like you're you are basically you're combining lots of different kinds of encryption but not layering them you're just saying whichever one of these is the weakest if someone gets to my dropbox x they own me because everything there they can get at once they can get that they've got my passwords and they've got you know what i mean
uh or your email for that matter like there's always whatever the weakest link is in the chain someone just needs to get through to that so you do i was you know i was going to suggest the same thing one way to protect yourself from this is to make sure that sort of the keys to the kingdom are like what if your house burns down the keys to the kingdom can't be in your house you have to have them someplace else so that if your house does burn down you can still decrypt and
your backups that are offsite or whatever and you know how would you decrypt your backups that are offsite the key can't be in the encrypted backups like this like poor jason here you have to have them someplace else and maybe putting them in dropbox be the place to do it so hey you protected yourself but you've also weakened your security because now you're relying on dropbox not to get hacked and dropbox is a big target
That's true.
But I mean, one password has its own encryption.
So you would have to lose Dropbox's encryption and then one passwords, wouldn't you?
It depends on how you store it.
If you're storing in one password versus like I use file vault encryption, I'm just going to write down my like secret, you know, they have the thing like, please store this in a safe place.
What if you just put that in a text file and stick that in Dropbox and you're like, hey, Dropbox is encrypted, right?
Which is true.
It is.
Or if you put it in an encrypted disk image on Dropbox, but then you have to have the password to the encrypted disk image.
And where do you put that one?
Like you're just chasing your tail.
Um,
it's not it's not as impossible to do this i'm saying for the thing the things that occur to most people to do to protect this information usually leads to either not actually solving the problem like the case of putting an encrypted disk image on dropbox then you have to pop the password to the encrypted disk image on a sticky note that's in your drawer when your house burns down you can't get to anything anyway or it weakens things because you literally made a text file and dropbox and put your
you know tertiary password that unlocks the thing that unlocks the thing that unlocks the thing uh in a text file on dropbox and you just hope dropbox doesn't get hacked any thoughts marco man this guy has really geeky friends but no i mean it really you know you guys covered it pretty well like it you know i i also use one password i also store it on dropbox um the question is
So suppose you lose access to every computer that you currently have that works and every device you currently have that works.
Suppose like a Matt Honan happens to you where all your devices get wiped at once.
So you don't have access to any existing installation of 1Password or anything.
So the question is, can you recover from that?
How do you get up from that again?
So, in my case, the question is, like, what I really need is I need access to my email account and Dropbox.
Like, if I have access to both of those things, I'm okay.
But you get honed in.
That stuff is gone, too.
So, you got to figure that out.
Well, so here's the backstop.
Here's one of the reasons I stay away from... Like, I've almost... I've bought one password.
I think I've bought one password more than one time.
And I've played with it, but I've never taken the full dive.
And here's why.
Because I'm afraid...
of having it being in this type of situation where where your passwords stop becoming something you know and start becoming something you have and i need to have at least one super important password be something i know so then yeah i could get hit in the head really hard and then i won't be able to decrypt my data but my ultimate backstop is there is at least one password in the chain and
And it's a big, long, complicated password, and it's the only place it exists is in my head.
And it's never used anyplace else, and I've never told anyone, and it changes, and, you know, and, like, fine, delete all my stuff.
I can find my way back in.
And there's more than one of those.
Like, I have... I don't have a lot of passwords memorized.
I'm not saying this is what you should do.
Hey, memorize all your passwords.
We all have too many friggin' passwords.
I use Keychain.
One password could fulfill the same thing, but...
I feel that most of the people who use 1Password, because of the randomness of the passwords, because of how strong they are, give up on memorizing any of them.
You can store passwords that you make of yourself in 1Password.
You don't have to let it generate the passwords for you.
So I would encourage people to...
someone to somewhere have a password that you know yeah and yes the people in the chat room saying isn't one password like that there's the one password that you know to open your one password again you always want to make it so that you have a way in even if everything is gone what if your one password database is gone because they've they've owned all your stuff and all basically you have is your encrypted like backblaze backup right
Having your one password password, knowing it in your head does not help you get your backblaze password back if you don't know your backblaze password.
And if your backblaze password was in one password and you just assume you'd always have one of your devices that you could look it up on, that's a problem, right?
So just always make sure that if everything you have gets owned and...
uh and like you don't have control over it you don't have access to your email your whole house burns down all your devices are broken or erased all you've got left are your basically your off-site backups that are all encrypted you need some way to decrypt them the passwords that are on those encrypted backups are not going to help you there has to be one of them in your head and hopefully it's the one that lets you do a sequence of events that lets you decrypt whatever it is that you're pulling from whether it's backblaze or a hard drive you have at your parents house or whatever
This is why my Backblaze password is one I know in my head.
I don't rely on 1Password for that one.
And so my way in would be Backblaze then.
If I lost everything locally, all my devices, then I could log into Backblaze with the password I know, get my 1Password file there, and then get everything else from there.
But even that, like, I always, you know, it's like, you get to pick your own password.
Backblaze doesn't have the password.
But if you've ever typed it into Backblaze's website, essentially, if Backblaze has been hacked in some way, like, they could have your Backblaze subscription password, too.
Like, then you're just relying on, okay, well, my house isn't going to burn down.
Because Honand was like, everything he's got, his house might as well burn down.
Like, that was a malicious hacker doing bad things to all his stuff, taking over everything.
So that could happen to you.
And so it's something worth thinking about.
But at the same time you get Honand, Backblaze is not also probably going to be hacked.
Like, those two things may happen, but you're just hoping, like, are they going to happen at the same exact time?
Probably not.
So you're playing the odds with something there.
But it's always freaked me out about those things where most encryption services...
are designed so that they never do take your decryption password they don't store it anywhere you type it into a thing to prove that you are you to do your restore from the web but the bottom line is you are typing that password and they're like oh no don't worry we use javascript it's never actually transmitted to our server it happens all client side yeah yeah yeah maybe it does maybe it doesn't if you got hacked it doesn't anymore right the hacker is the first thing they'll do is make it so that when anyone types in their password or restore they uh actually grab that information and put it somewhere
you have to think about these kind of failure situations.
Like, I don't trust iCloud keychain with anything.
I don't trust iCloud with anything that's totally only living in iCloud.
Because iCloud's failure mode is kind of unknown and poorly defined and probably not great.
Most cloud services, their failure mode is kind of like the failure mode of an airplane.
Which is if an airplane totally fails mid-flight, you have a really big problem.
Dropbox's failure mode is more like a train.
If a train fails, generally speaking, what happens is it just stops moving.
Everyone's still okay.
Just everything pauses, basically.
And there's a lot more recovery from that.
So relying on things like Dropbox and Backblaze.
Dropbox moves stuff around between computers.
And one of those computers or more can be running a backup program.
And those are just files that you have moved between your computers that live in a regular folder that is right there in the file system that isn't anything special or weird.
It's just a folder that happens to be synced by this background process between your other computers.
And then your backup program can read that, back it up to its website, and then you can restore that onto any computer, right?
The fewer airplane-like failure modes you have here, the better.
And so something like if you have everything backed up to your Apple ID or to a Google ID or any kind of big cloud service, well, what happens if they lock out your account?
What happens if they think you did something fraudulent or against their TOS or they just screw something up and you get locked out of your account?
Like how screwed are you with that?
You really have to think about that kind of failure mode and think about what will happen in scenario X. How safe is my data really?
And how big of a problem would it be if cloud service X just kicked me out one day or just totally failed?
And if you want to have a backstop that doesn't involve memorizing things, you can always go back to good old physical security, get a safety deposit box at a bank, put a bunch of passwords on it on pieces of paper.
Like it's that's what two factor authentication is about.
And in terms of like using something you have and something, you know, like just keep adding factors.
like and then you're just you're increasing the odds that you're going to be okay and that like here is a series of things that would have to happen for me to be screwed and it becomes increasingly implausible it's like okay my house burned down and i get hacked and back place get hacked and someone holds up the bank and opens my safety deposit box unless you're in like unless you're in like a wesley snipes movie or something where it's like the world's greatest heist this is not going to happen to you probably but
one of those things could definitely happen water damage takes out all your devices right or you do get hacked and everything that can be remotely done via dot mac gets wiped and because you use apple services for everything you're up the creek right so uh it's this is a good uh good feedback from jason we should all think about this go through the scenario in your head say if this happened what would i do and then dry run that say okay i'm gonna pretend i don't have access to any of my devices and
Can I do that thing I said I could do?
And that's where you'll find out, actually, I don't have that password memorized anymore.
And where did I put that scrap of paper?
I had that on.
Did I give that to my parents when I last saw them?
Is that in with our birth certificates and a safety deposit box?
I don't remember where that is.
Maybe you have to have another piece of paper that tells you where you put the piece of paper that has the passwords on it.
So do a dry run.
It's like a fire drill at school.
It's good to walk through.
All right.
So one last bit of follow-up.
We had talked about – actually, this is follow-up on follow-out.
So we had talked last episode about Alphabet and Google's – not rebranding, but reorganization.
And Jason Snell on Upgrade talked a bit about that, which was –
Very interesting because he had lived through some very similar stuff when he was at IDG.
And I'll butcher the details if I try to repeat what he said.
But suffice to say, in his perspective, it didn't seem like it was particularly malicious.
It wasn't about hiding things.
It was just about reorganizing things that should probably be reorganized.
So we'll put a link.
um not only to that episode in the show notes and that's a great podcast if you're not already listening to it it's jason snell and mike hurley um but i'll also put an overcast link with the relevant time stamp how convenient is that uh so you can check that out as well um so that that was our last bit of follow-up if i am not mistaken anything else gentlemen
Yeah, Marco, I want a way to add podcast episodes to playlists from the web.
Add to Overcast, then I have to go into Overcast, and then go to the playlist that I use, and then edit playlist, and then go add episode, and then it's just too many things.
Right from the web, add to playlist.
Make a little pop-up menu of only playlists.
That's my feature request.
The main reason why there's no Overcast web playlist support is because the code that decides how to insert new episodes into a playlist and how to sort them, because I have manual sorting and all these different sort options and everything, the code that decides that is so complex in Objective-C that I really don't want to.
I'm kind of afraid to try to port it to PHP to work on the website.
Just have a radio button, add to top or bottom.
Done.
hmm not asking for the moon i just don't want to have to go through all those taps like you're right that's not the right thing to do it shouldn't go on the top or bottom but you put it on the form and you make the person pick it's like you said to put it on the bottom of that playlist so i did you said to put on the top so i did yeah
That's not bad, actually.
Another thing, like, people, ever since Instacast shut down, one of Instacast's features that a lot of people liked is an UpNext playlist, where you can hit some podcast and you can say, add this to UpNext, play UpNext, or whatever it was.
and uh and everyone writes me requesting an up next feature and you know to me it's like well playlists do that like you don't i didn't think i needed an up next feature because i figured i have reorderable playlists you can just drag things around as you want them to be played in the playlist but you have to get it added to the playlist to begin with that's the the hurdle
Yeah, so anyway, my theory is at some point during the 2.x cycle, I'm going to add an up next feature and just make it add it to the playlist.
Like, it's not going to be a separate feature.
It'll just add it to the current playlist after the current item.
And if you're not playing current playlist, it'll create one called up next and add these things to it and switch to that.
uh just because like you know it's like i can i can already solve this in another way that i totally support and let me just you know make this easier for people i don't know and then my use case is like people are always recommending interesting episodes of podcasts that i don't want to subscribe to like you see them in tweets and i love it when they put overcast links because then i'll have the ad to overcast but then there's still the extra step of like oh well it just added that episodes to overcast and it's there but i don't play i i'm always using one of my playlists and it's not on that you know so
It's like we're so close.
We're so close to just I see a link.
Someone provides a cool overcast link.
And then on the drive home, that episode will be there.
And it will be part of my playlist.
And when my current thing I'm listening to is done, the next thing that I saw will play.
So for me, I don't run into this problem because I basically have one main playlist where the filter is include everything except X, Y, or Z. Like certain shows I save for different contexts in life or listening with my wife or whatever else.
um so my main podcast is my main playlist is everything except x so when i add a new episode or a new podcast it shows up in my main playlist so i don't have this problem yeah no i'm doing a whitelist instead of a blacklist so it's it's only these things and i have a really big backlog so i probably always wanted to be added to to the top or like you said up next like basically after whatever it is that i'm currently in the middle of listening to right because if it gets added to the bottom
There's too much of a backlog.
If it gets added to the top, I may be listening somewhere in the middle.
I was thinking about my other solution to this is I will just stop using playlists and just try to do everything from the main screen.
I don't even know if that's possible.
I guess it's not really the way I want it to be because I do use the playlist and I do prioritize things and I do like how the shows come into the little priority sections or whatever.
It's just...
pretty much it's only one playlist that i use almost all the time i have a few like you said custom ones for like road trips and kid safe things or whatever but most of the time i'm using my main playlist and that one i want stuff to go into there somehow
Now you're going to make me do some work.
Yeah.
Oh, you're done with streaming.
I don't want you to run out of features.
Thanks.
Believe me, I have a big list.
All right.
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All right.
So we're starting to get into iPhone rumor time.
Oh, boy.
And here we go.
And there has been an interesting rumor that just came out in the last day or so.
And this was broken, or at least this entered my world by way of a friend of the show,
and prior guest host, Christina Warren.
And she had retweeted Cult of Mac saying that someone has found iPhone 6S in the color pink, which I thought was very interesting.
And as the spouse of someone who once owned a pink razor, and I think I speak for Marco when I say that as well, this could be very enticing to Aaron and perhaps Tiff as well.
uh i don't know any thoughts on this other than that i'm happy to see them you know try to do something that appeals that well on the surface anyway appeals more directly to women well this is uh this is where you play the clip of me saying that apple needs to make its phone in more colors uh mission accomplished i assume this is actually true
yeah people like colors people like to pick colors it's annoying from an inventory standpoint uh but it's something that people like and they should totally do it and i really hope this is true because it will help them cell phones and it will make people happy and with anodization like there or if that's even a word anodizing aluminum that's one of the things you can do you can make colors they got space gray they you know they got a gold one they got all like sure pink do do all the colors go crazy thumbs up
yeah i mean so i actually i just brought tiff in here um so she can actually tell you what she thinks herself because she's a person so here hold on hey i'm a person hi there how's it going good how are you guys doing well so what do you think about this pink iphone uh it's pink i just posted the picture that looks like the pink razor yeah would you buy one no you had you had the pink razor though didn't you
I did have the pink razor.
I had the pink razor because the pink razor was one of the first pieces of technology, maybe the second piece of technology that I ever got my hands on that I felt was kind of made for a lady.
I got really excited about it because all the other phones before that just kind of looked like silver pieces of electronic.
Like they just weren't as appealing.
And then you get this pink little razor phone and it's adorable and it's skinny and it's flippy and
I just had to have it.
So I had the pink, I had the light pink one, not the hideous neon pink one.
That one was awful, but I'm not a pink person.
So I won't get the pink iPhone because the white one is there.
Are pink phones just for girls, Tiff?
No, pink is not just for girls.
My son has a pink stroller.
So pink is for boys who like pink if they like pink.
It's funny you bring up the Razer, though, because hand on heart, I'm not trying to be funny.
I might not have ever loved any of my iPhones as much as I loved my silver Razer that I had, geez, I don't know, in like 2007, something like that.
I loved my Razer more than almost anything.
And I don't really know why.
I just think I was so mesmerized, like you said, about how thin it was.
It was sleek looking.
It was awesome.
And that pink color, that light, what made me think of the razor when I saw the leaked photos of the iPhone, fake whatever they are.
It just that's the same pink.
That's like that metallic look to it, you know, with the color.
And that was kind of new then.
So it was super appealing that it was new, not that it was pink.
Yeah, we should point out that various people in the chat room are very insistent that these are fake.
The line in the show notes says, pink phones?
So do not bank on these things being real.
But making a bunch of fake pictures of it and showing it to people and seeing the reaction is all part of the process.
These images traveled around Twitter and social media pretty quickly because people are excited at the idea of...
of a top of the line iphone that comes in a color that's not like black or gray or white or black or you know it something a pink high-end phone i think would sell and you know any other sort of colors that look good in anodized aluminum so even if this is not real i hope that it will be real someday
Yeah, I agree.
I want a teal one.
Put that out there.
Someone Photoshop that so we can have one of those.
You can do that yourself in Photoshop.
That's true, and I'll leak it everywhere and be like, oh, my God, teal iPhone, everybody.
You've got to send it through an anonymous source.
You've got to not have it come from you and just have it, yeah.
That's true.
I've got to find myself a tipster.
Where can I find one of those?
All right.
Good luck.
I'll put Marco on.
Bye, Tiff.
Bye.
Hi.
So, yeah, I mean, these are probably fake, right?
The pictures that were leaked or whatever.
That's what everyone insists.
You can just mess with the little hue slider in Photoshop and make phones pretty much any color.
Yeah, I mean, it looked a lot like they took the picture of the gold one and just did the replace color thing and made it pink.
But they look good.
These mock-ups or whatever, that looks like, if Apple made that product, it looks totally in keeping with their recent aesthetic of their designs.
The color is kind of just the right shade of pink where it's not in your face really, really bright pink, but it's also not so muted that you can't tell it's pink.
I think this is a great product.
I wish they would make it.
i yeah i mean you know they they already make so many metal colored products with all the iphones now the i mean all the ipods now the ipod touch they made the iphone 5c um i i well that wasn't metal but like they obviously are capable of mass producing aluminum bodies for electronics in this price range with pretty much any color they feel like um so i don't know i i do wish they would have more of them uh just to give more variety but
It's just an inventory thing.
We've done various times on past shows the multiplication to figure out how many varieties of a particular iOS device are.
Now allow each one of those to be done in colors.
The fan out starts to get a little bit crazy.
And so I can see why they would not want to add even more colors to the set of colors they already have.
But people like colors, so I think they should do it.
And speaking of metal, that's the next item we have in here about iPhone.
This one, more solid than a pink phone, is yet another parts leak.
Someone's got their hands on what is purported to be the actual back case of the iPhone 6S or whatever they end up calling it.
and this is a video with strength tests uh they've got an iphone 6 case this is a youtube video put in the show notes and they've got i suppose that iphone 6s case and they've got a fairly primitive screw based machine that applies pressure to it it measures how much pressure it takes to bend and uh to spoil the whole video for you the this is just the case this is not the actual phone so this is just the back case with no insides in it so obviously it's weaker than the entire phone which has a front you know laminated to it and everything and is more structurally solid and has stuff in the
but just the case the iphone 6 bends in a you know in a way that it doesn't spring back from around 30 pounds of force and the new one bends around 80 pounds of force so it's more than a 2x increase in stiffness from a case that is still made of aluminum and still looks about the same uh
they didn't mention anything about it being heavier or thicker or whatever what they did do was take a device to it that supposedly measures the content of the metal like they scraped away the anodized surface and got to the metal underneath and what they found is that the new one uses more zinc in the aluminum mix it's like a 7000 series aluminum instead of a 6000 series aluminum
bottom line is if this video is to be believed and they really did get one of those uh cases from the new iphone 6s it's way way stronger and that's a good thing and kind of like how apple learned kind of you know with the antenna gate thing it's like antenna gate it's not a big deal but in the next one of these phones we're actually going to change things to further mitigated issue and the same thing bending is not a big deal but in the next one we're gonna make it stronger because why not why not make it stronger it's just like
we can't escape the car analogies every year every time a new model of some car comes out here's the new generation of honda civic 15 more torsional rigidity like they just the body shells always get stiffer in cars it doesn't go the other way it's like yeah this is the new version of the toyota tundra and the body has 20 less uh rigidity nope it's always you're always stiffer you're always lighter they're always stiffer and so that's the direction they should be going and they've been going that direction with their laptops too like unibody was a big upgrade uh
I don't think we have any BendGate stuff involving laptops, but if they keep going, they will pretty soon, because I bet you could take a MacBook One and give it a nice curve if you tried hard enough.
Fair enough.
No, I thought this video was very interesting, and the first time I'd seen it was via Mike Hurley that we spoke about a little earlier.
But it is very fascinating, and I'm very curious to see if this is the real deal.
Now, my six that I have right now
As far as I can tell, it is not bent in any way, shape, or form.
However, and I think we talked about this months ago, I do have the little crescent moon on the front-facing camera.
So if you look at the front-facing camera, and by the way, if you have an iPhone 6, you might want to ignore me for a second because you cannot unsee this.
But anyway...
If you look at the front-facing camera, there's a little bit of, like, trim that is under the outer glass, but it kind of shimmies over and leaves, like, a little crescent moon left behind.
It's hard to describe, but trust me, it happens to a lot of people.
And what I intend to do is get this thing, get it looked at right around the time the new one comes out so I can either, you know, get it repaired before the warranty expires or perhaps...
and get it repaired before i sell it if i if i can convince aaron that it's okay for me to get a success um well you have to your camera is clearly defective right there's no other choice and i can't fix it except when i go fix it do you have a white front on your phone how can you even see that little i don't have a white front come on well i'm saying i'm looking at i'm looking at my phone with the black front and if there was a crescent how would i even see it it's so tiny no it's it's real it's so what happens is something in there shifts off of its axis
yeah no i know but i'm like if that happened is the thing that shifts also black it's uh it's grayish sam the geek in the chat is saying the crescent is a shift of the foam padding between the camera and the glass and that's what it looks like yeah i've heard of this problem i was just saying like if this happened to me how would i know it if it was also black i feel like i wouldn't be able to see it but if it's a different color then i guess it stands out
No, I mean, it does stand out quite clearly.
Like, once you look at it, like, my first iPhone 6, I think I actually got a swap because it had a really bad one.
And my current one, I'm looking now, it's right there.
I mean, it's clearly visible.
Like, it's definitely, you know, on the right side, that's definitely shifting away.
But it's a much smaller version of the shift than what I had originally.
Yeah, so I just found a link that I put in the chat, and I'll put in the show notes.
And if you scroll down just a little bit, they have a close-up image of an iPhone 6, and that is almost exactly what mine looks like.
Well, it's like a crescent moon.
Yeah, mine doesn't have this problem, thankfully.
Otherwise, I would have to destroy my phone.
And Renz is asking in the chat, was it delivered this way, or did it happen over time?
I'm pretty darn sure it happened over time, although like the FedEx arrow, I didn't know it was there until somebody said something about it.
And I was like, wow, I wonder if.
Oh, God.
So that's why I still worry about occasionally putting my iPhone six down on a flat surface.
Just one of these days is I'm going to realize there's like a little rock to it because it's taken on a little bit of a bend from being in my pocket.
I just tried that.
As you guys were talking about, I just took it out of the case and tried it all over my desk.
At first, like, oh, no, and then I was like, oh, no, it's rocking because of the camera bump.
So, yeah, so now I'm like, I tried hanging that bulge off various edges of the desk, you know, because, like, what if the desk isn't exactly flat here?
And I moved it around a little bit, different parts of the desk.
We should not be doing this.
We should be doing what you're supposed to do with LCD monitors back in the days.
Don't look for dead pixels.
Just don't look for them.
Don't do it.
Don't run those patterns.
Don't do the thing that helps you find them.
Like, if you find it legitimately, fine, but if you don't, don't look for it.
Did you ever have it at Pixel?
Oh, yes, I did.
My 22-inch Apple Cinema display, that beautiful thing, had... I can tell you where they are.
I can put my fingers right now.
I'm putting them on my screen.
There was one in, like, the lower left... Wait, are you a screen toucher?
No, I'm not actually touching.
One in the lower left and one in the upper, towards the upper, lower right and towards the upper left corner.
The lower right one was the worst because it was like stuck on red.
Oh, man.
It was a good practice for me having to learn with the image retention from Destiny HUD and now the Cartoon Network logo, which is the new bane of my existence, which is a black and white opaque logo on Cartoon Network.
now i'm having my kids shifted into different positions with the uh the screen format changing to try to not burn that in but i realized the destiny logo is fading but i'm like oh great cn thanks a lot guys so are you forced them to do like like the various stretch modes and everything to just move it around oh god that's terrible it's not terrible it's fine i mean they watch they watch full house which is standard def and like that just looks terrible no matter what you do to it i just have them move it around
Or just stop watching Cartoon Network because these shows are crap anyway.
And seriously, television companies, don't put an opaque, completely black and completely white logo on for the entire run of your show that you're airing.
Ridiculous.
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A couple more phone things.
Are we going to be force touching each other this fall?
Yeah, that's one.
Wow.
Do we all just assume that's going to be there?
I guess.
You know, there's been a lot of talk about like, you know, what can we do with force touch?
And there's been a lot of intelligent people also saying, you know, this could be weird or a problem or unintuitive.
Because, you know, tying functionality to force touch has a number of issues.
One of the biggest is that anything you tie to Force Touch this year is only going to work on the newest iPhones.
So it's going to be a while before the majority or the entirety of all devices that can run iOS, whatever, actually have hardware support for Force Touch.
So that's problem number one.
There's also, you know, there's problems with potential accessibility and RSI issues.
I, you know, like the Relay guys have been talking about this on Connected and on Upgrade.
Like, I believe both Mike and Steven, I don't find a forced touch gesture comfortable on the watch.
um i you know like the feeling of like applying more pressure than necessary against a an unmoving piece of glass um if you do it a few times in a day fine uh but but if that becomes like a a common gesture i think that might be uncomfortable uh certainly it has issues for people who have motor disabilities or arthritis or lots of other issues um so it is it is not universally accessible by any means
It is not necessarily an incredibly good idea to be doing a lot.
And we still don't really know the full RSI cost and risks of doing lots of computing on these little touchscreens because they're just too new.
We don't really have enough experience with that yet.
But this could be an issue.
I'm just saying it could be an issue.
And the biggest thing for me is, you know, we see kind of how they did Force Touch on the Mac with the Force Touch trackpad.
On the watch, Force Touch is kind of like a menu button.
And I think the watch is so constrained in UI design and in space and in physical design.
It's so constrained that I think that kind of makes sense.
It's not, you know, there might be other options.
It's certainly not very discoverable.
But on a watch, you have to make a lot of tradeoffs.
uh on the mac they added force touch in a way that you know as we discussed when it came out like i think it should have just been a shortcut for right click uh but they didn't do that instead it's this third kind of click that does something in you know whatever app you're in and it varies and most apps don't do anything or they do something standard like a dictionary window or something um in some apps it'll do something special but there's really no way for you to know what it's going to do without just trying it
And because most of the time it doesn't do anything special, I have a feeling people aren't going to be forced-clicking on Macs in random places as a general habit, even if that was a good interface design, which it isn't.
So on the iPhone, I think we're going to see something kind of between those two.
I fear we're going to see something between those two.
It's going to be this third action that you can just try force touching in various places.
You might get a menu or something.
I don't know.
That doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
What I hope they do, and obviously I'm sure it's too late for anything to change, not like they listen to me anyway, but what I hope it is is a shortcut to long press.
Because if that's what it is, and that way, first of all, then if you're a software developer, you don't have to worry about the install base of who has this and who doesn't.
As a user, it's even easier.
So if you just add a gesture recognizer to a UI element for a long press recognizer, and it happens to fire on a force touch, that, I think, would solve a lot of problems.
Because...
You wouldn't be adding a whole other thing to the interface that never existed before.
You would avoid the install base issue, and it would leave this accessibility option long-pressing.
Not everyone can do it, but it's a lot easier to long-press than to force-press.
And I have seen so many people, when they try to use an Apple Watch, and you try to explain to them how to force touch, it is so hard to get people to recognize the difference between force touch and long press.
And they'll try long pressing and nothing happens, and they think it's broken.
And so if those things end up being the same thing, and a force touch is just a long press that you can do faster, that I think is a good way to integrate it into the UI.
you don't have to worry about the software support if the os takes it if it becomes like multitasking gesture or as the tipster is saying like bring up like control center or like a menu or being like like if the os owns it entirely then you don't have to worry about support for that if they try to make it long press then the os kind of can't own it because that has to go through the application
um force press on the watch i'm kind of used to it like when i change the clock face i think the key thing is the the vibration feedback that accompanies it makes it feel like one big thing if that wasn't there i think it would be too weird but and and by the way our tipster says that force touch is coming and uh someone
wrote in a little while ago saying why are you giving all this time to the tipster you don't even know if he's real or not that's why we say these things if the tipster says force touch is coming and the new iphones come out they don't have force touch that lets us know and lets all of you know how much we should discount the tipster but if it does come that's one more you know one more notch in the hey you got this right even though it was pretty easy to guess because i would have bet on it being there and the reason by the way i bet on force touch being there is because
They have room for the sensors.
The watch has it.
The Macs have it.
They're going to do it.
Like Marco is saying, all right, fine.
You put the hardware there.
How do you deal with the software?
They can work that out.
Like maybe they make a bad choice in the beginning and they revise it in iOS 10 or something.
You don't have to commit to that now.
You just need to put the hardware in and then you can figure out how you want to use it software-wise.
how it is used in the OS, how it's passed through the apps or if it's passed through the apps at all and all that stuff that can be worked out.
And by the way, the tipster says this is going to be a new color for the phone, even though the fake thing, even though the pink things are fake.
So that's another thing you can put in the column.
When the new phones come out, if there is no new color or they don't have force touch, we can just start saying this tipster guy's yanking our chain.
Everything here has asterisks or question mark effort.
Anyway, I think that there will be force touch.
I think there is a way to make force touch, make the phone a better thing to use.
I'm not entirely sure that their first crack at doing that is going to work because I don't have experience using it on the Mac.
On the watch it works, but on the watch they have to do it because, like Marco said, you have so few avenues to try to put rich input on there.
Forget about a five-finger texture to go back to the home screen or whatever.
I love doing that on iPad.
Do you guys do that, the five-finger squish?
Totally.
Mm-hmm.
I try to do that on my iPhone 6 sometimes, and it doesn't work, and it annoys me.
It's silly.
It shouldn't work on the iPhone, but it's just so convenient that I want it to work on the iPhone 6, and it's almost big enough that I'll do a three-finger squish.
Anyway...
force touch on ipad starts to make a lot more sense especially if you start adding stylus support and all the other stuff like that so i think this is just this is going to race across all of apple's computing devices and i think apple will find a way to make it useful
You know, I have this fancy new Retina MacBook Pro with the Force Touch trackpad, and I don't find myself Force Touching really ever.
The only time I ever find myself Force Touching is when I want to look something up that's on screen, because if you highlight on most apps, if you highlight a word in
or not even highlight if you just have the cursor over a word and then force touch it will open up the dictionary pop over and show you the definition of what you're looking at and then as marco was talking i was thinking what the crap else does force touch do and i don't know because i didn't even remember and so it was like a zoom right yeah variable speed playback in quick time yeah
Well, that's a little different, but I'm talking about like a force touch click.
And so in Finder, force touch click does quick view, which is actually pretty convenient.
Quick look.
Sorry.
Thank you.
Quick look.
And so that's actually fairly convenient, although I didn't even realize it until just now.
Force touch on the Mac is not something I think, ooh, let me try that.
However, I completely agree with you, John, that I find it very natural on the watch, and I'm curious to see what it works like on the phone.
I suspect it will not replace long press, even though I think that would be a smart way to handle it.
I think it's going to be some other sort of gesture.
We'll just be so happy to not have to long press to place the cursor that it won't matter.
I know I will be so happy because I despise long press.
I despise having to do something for a set amount of time.
And it's always I'm just so spoiled by Twitterific, like the swipe cursor controls or whatever.
Like, it's going to be so awesome on iOS 9 when I do not have the long press to do to put the cursor somewhere.
I hope it's awesome.
I've heard from some people who are testing iOS 9, which I haven't tried at all yet, that sometimes if you're fiddling around with typing, you can fool the keyboard into thinking you were trying to do a two finger drag, which is the cursor movement control.
And it's like I wasn't doing a two finger drag.
I'm just being kind of sloppy typing with my thumbs.
That will kind of annoy me if that ends up being a problem.
So I hope they get these kinks worked out.
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Hover, Lynda.com, and Harry's.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss.
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco Arment.
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
It's accidental.
They didn't mean it.
i got a story a story time with papa john all right gather around gather around the uh the hot imac picture it sicily 2008 no um
Seven years ago, I looked this up because I couldn't remember how long ago.
Seven years ago, the Fios Ferry came to my house, brought a fiber optic cable down, put a big thing in my basement, hooked everything up, took this Action Tech Verizon Wi-Fi router thing, plugged it in.
set up whatever sacrificial mac i let him get his paws on left my house and then i promptly unplugged everything that he had plugged in put an ethernet cable into the ont in my basement threaded it through my house put it into an apple airport extreme uh oh and by the way before i unplugged everything i made it release the ip address or it's the http lease rather
so that when i plugged in you save yourself a phone call yeah uh and then i plugged in my airport extreme the flat one or one of the older flat ones and that has been running my home network for seven years zero problems with it never crashed never spontaneously rebooted and never did anything wrong
super solid fanless workhorse of a uh router so that was seven years ago a couple months ago i was fishing around under my desk i think i was hooking up the playstation 4 or something and i saw that some of my power strips down there were looking kind of creaky i'm like you know what i should buy some new power strips so i bought some new power strips uh replaced the old power strips with the new one's wallet is this something anyone else has ever done
yeah like because it was they were really old they're like from when i was in college i'm like this this probably doesn't even work as a as a surge suppressor anymore it's so old and grimy looking i wanted to get some uh nicer ones no i mean you're right like because like you know like the little things in them burn out after a while but but has anyone casey have you ever looked at a looked below your desk and said you know what i need new power strips these power strips are no good
no don't be crazy you probably have newer ones you don't have ones from when you were in college under there right i might i don't know i mean i very well may you don't marco are you kidding you don't have ones from last week under there new ones because these saw that uh one of them had gold plating on it anyway uh so when up but when i was under there unplugging the stuff from the old power strip plugging into the new one i didn't want the whole house to be off the network so i quickly unplugged
the router and plugged it into the wall into the wall socket directly while i did all the plug shuffling because i was trying to figure out how to reroute wires because it's rude to have the entire house be off wi-fi while i'm doing all this messing with fast forward to a couple days ago and our house lost power which is very rare like it happens maybe once every other year and lost power for 20 or 30 minutes and
And when the power came back on, I was surprised to see that my Wi-Fi didn't reconnect.
And so I went over to see my router and the light was off on it.
And I didn't know what the deal with that was because normally there's some kind of light on it.
So I unplugged it.
I reset it.
I hard reset it.
I did all the things you could do.
And the real bad sign is when you plug it into power, it was making this terrible little noise, like a little rhythmic buzz.
And like the four green lights on the Ethernet ports were blinking.
And the Internet says basically your thing is fried.
And I believe that my thing is fried.
It did not come back to life.
So...
my venerable airport express that i loved for so long finally gave up the ghost pretty sure it got killed by a power surge because it was the only only electronic device in my entire house that is not hooked up through a surge suppressor and is the only one that died and that's super sad and so i took to twitter uh looking to find out the reason i hadn't replaced it in so long was one it was super reliable and i was afraid of getting something flaky and two the new one that apple made has a fan in it and i didn't want that and
and the third reason is all the other ones that people recommend like the wire cutter and everything never tell me whether i could hook my printer up to it via usb and i basically like everything works why am i even bothering to replace this but now it's forced to replace like oh i gotta go through this whole thing i gotta find like does anyone know like a really good wi-fi router that hopefully has better signal strength than my airport extreme which is terrible wi-fi signal strength like it's one of the really older ones it's terrible signal i know it has terrible signal i just kept using because it was reliable right
something that has better signal strength that supports the newer standards and that i can just unplug this thing and plug everything back into it including the usb from my crappy canon printer my crappy canon printer that yes supports wi-fi yes supports ethernet but when i first got the printer i tried all those things except for ethernet i tried wi-fi but not ethernet i think
anyway their drivers are really flaky i hated it so you tried everything except for the most reliable option go ahead well no but it's like it's not that it's the networking right like it's not that the wi-fi was flaky like oh i can't get the signal from point a to point b it's a network printer like you have to install their drivers to print to it as a network printer and the driver is really flaky and terrible and i had no faith they would be updated and this was years ago and i tweeted this by the way and some people are like i've got that same printer and i've never had any problems believe me go look through my mentions anyone who said that
So many more people said, I've tried it through Ethernet.
I've tried it through Wi-Fi.
The flaker, the drivers are flaky.
It's a nightmare.
I went back to direct connector, USB or whatever.
Anyway, I just didn't want to have to change things.
Didn't want to have to buy a new printer.
I just wanted to work the way it worked.
And I didn't want a fan.
So I didn't want to buy the Apple one.
so i was just looking for a recommendation like hey anyone who's got the wire cutter recommendations or has tried some of these wire cutter ones have you found one that you can do this with i know there's like little dongles you can plug into a lot of the wi-fi routers that give you like a usb print server that you can plug the usb thing into and i got a lot of suggestions some people said the number one wire cutter uh pick does have a way for you to plug in the usb thing with like a weird kernel extension and like to the router
And some custom app thing that's really flaky.
And it's just, I don't want to sign up for that.
And so eventually people just started saying, hey, including Marco, I've got one of those old crappy flat airport extremes.
That's terrible Wi-Fi signal that I'm not using anymore.
Do you want it?
And the answer I realized was, you know what?
Yes, I do want one of those.
I don't have any devices that support 802.11ac, so I don't need anything with AC.
In fact, I had to downgrade my network from N to BG support because my son is using a 3DS that only supports BG and doesn't support N, and so I can't go N only.
and so a bunch of people were coming out of the woodwork and saying i've got old airport expresses i'm not using do you want them and including marco who was on vacation at the time and i said oh well just when you get back home look at it and tell me instead of looking and telling me he just merely shipped it without asking me so i knew you would say no and i wanted to get rid of it so i just shipped it bottom line is i had now have multiple old unwanted airport extremes coming to my house um
Oh, and the other part of the story is the day this happened, I had a podcast at night, not this one, but a different podcast.
And it was like T minus like 2.5 hours until I had to record a podcast.
And I didn't have an internet connection.
All I had was my cell connection.
I don't know how to record a podcast over that.
My signal strength isn't great anyway.
Um,
So I had to get back online.
So remember that seven years ago when the guy came and hooked everything up in my house and I promptly disconnected everything?
What I did at that point was took the Action Tech Verizon router that he had plugged in and all of his associated accessories and put it in a Ziploc bag and put it in my basement.
So seven years later, I went back down to the basement.
pulled out the ziplog bag took out a brand new looking verizon router that had like been exposed to air not been exposed to air for seven years plugged it in wow and realized that i can't get uh an ip address and can't get a new dhcp lease because i can't release it from the dead unit because the dead unit is dead i tried cloning the mac address to say i can convince it that the verizon router is the same i'll just have the same mac address nope it just would not give me a thing i just had to wait it out
And I fought with it for a really long time until the point where I'm like, you know what?
I'm at the point now where I'm going to call Verizon customer support.
That's how desperate I am.
So as I was going through their phone tree, I think the lease finally ran out and I got an IP address.
And so I'm using the router now.
It's pretty crappy.
Gets good speed.
It gets better Wi-Fi signal than my Airport Extreme, which is depressing, but that pancake thing was not very good.
All this time, you could have had better Wi-Fi.
Not that much better.
It's better in my son's room, but it's worse in some rooms in the downstairs.
I don't understand how that mix of events happens.
But anyway, the Verizon one...
what couldn't i do on it it was a kind of a pain to get it to distribute the ip addresses the way i wanted it for some reason when i had my custom dns that i have on a lot of my machines it was cranky about that like i had a manual ip address and a custom dns and just all name lookups would fail and i had to let it use the the dns on the router otherwise i couldn't look up anything anyway i don't want to deal with it the sooner i can get this stupid blinking light thing out of my house and back into the ziploc bag the better so
thanks to everyone who offered to send me their old crappy hardware and there are many of them uh and thanks to the people who are actually sending it to me including marco even though he shoved a bunch of other crap that he doesn't want in that box so one thing yeah we'll see what's in there why don't you put some gold cables in next time
No, so I came home.
I learned.
So I did have the kind John wanted and I don't use it anymore.
So I thought it would be my closet.
So I get home and I see that apparently the one I was thinking of, I think I already gave it away to somebody else.
And so the one I was thinking, so the only one I had in my closet was the tall one.
The current model, actually.
So the tall AC version that John didn't want.
I knew he didn't want it because it has a fan in it, even though you can't hear the fan.
And so I knew if I asked him if this was OK, he would say no.
So I just didn't ask him.
I put it in a box and I threw in a whatever the first cheap Nexus tablet was.
Was it the Nexus 7 or something?
Oh, God.
Whatever the very first cheap Nexus tablet was, I've had one of those in my closet for, I don't know, three years sitting around doing nothing.
It's totally useless.
So I packed the Airport Extreme with a few pieces of packing paper and a Nexus tablet and shipped that off to John.
It was like the last time you sent me a stack of Kindles with basically nothing between them, just like Kindles stacked on top of each other, like a four inch high solid stack of Kindles with nothing between it and no other padding in the box.
You just open up like, why is this box so heavy?
You open up, it's just a solid stack of Kindles.
Well, they're very dense when there's not much else in the box.
yeah and like i said my daughter is still using one of those she's using she's using the one that has like a scratch on the screen it came out of the box like that like it's a big gouge in the screen or whatever it's the one with the stupid ir touch sensors that try to figure out where your finger is that's the worst one it is really the worst one that's the first generation kindle touch yeah but that's what she's using uh both my kids don't like to read they'd rather have paper books and you know i don't understand like they do everything else on the ipad they're always watching youtube instead of tv but
When it comes to reading books, they like the paper ones.
They don't like e-books, and they don't like reading them on their iPads.
Well, it gives it a warmer sound.
Yeah.
Stop.
I think they'll come around eventually.
The Kindles are weird, though.
Like, it is kind of a weird experience, especially with the flaky touchscreen.
If you're used to the responsiveness of an iPad screen, the Kindle is like, ugh, this feels weird, and you can't even touch this one.
You have to use these buttons, and you can touch this one, but the screen updates slow.
It just feels awkward.
I think it is like...
It's not that it's intimidating, but it feels like it's broken.
It doesn't, you know, in a way that a paper book doesn't feel like it's broken.
Anyway, they'll probably come around.
So that's what I'm speaking to you now through this seven-year-old Verizon router that's been sitting in a Ziploc bag.
Yeah, I'm glad I had my phone because I had to Google for what the default password is or how to reset.
I could have figured out there's a big reset button on the back anyway.
But I went through the whole sequence of events that I've done before of like...
factory reset your router or determine what the factory password is figure out what the ip address is is this going to be 1001 or 198 192 168 blah blah get in uh the interface was weird like i'm like maybe it doesn't work in chrome it does this crazy thing where you type the username and then you type in the password field you type one character but it shows three dots yep like lotus notes
yeah that it does like a client-side javascript masking crap like all this sort of fake pointless security that they're trying to do to be and at first i was like deleting the key down handler to stop it from doing that but then i realized i had i had to let it because i thought it was a bug like i thought this this thing was created before chrome even existed right so maybe it just doesn't handle modern browser so i'll just put the password directly into the input field and submit but then i realized i just have to let it do its clients anyway
And then you go into that UI and I'm trying to get to release the IP address and I'm cloning the Mac address.
And it was a fun hour and a half or whatever.
Basically, I burned down the clock until it just gave me the IP address.
Yeah.
No, I mean, and you know, I've made that phone call many times.
Like whenever I've changed my setup or changed routers, you got to call Verizon because I've never gotten it to actually successfully release the old IP and give me a new one.
Like I've never gotten that to work.
How long did you wait?
Because it's usually like two hours-ish.
I've never waited that long.
I have a three-year-old who wants to watch Magic School Bus on Netflix.
There's no way I'm going to wait that long.
It may take that long to get through the 17 tiers of support you have to get to the guy who knows what you say when you say, just release the lease.
No, honestly, I've had great luck.
Usually those phone calls are less than 10 minutes long.
I've had very good luck with that.
It's interesting.
Those Action Tech routers...
Those are actually pretty decent routers because it's kind of like the way that back when phone companies made the phones and had to support and they own the phones and you paid for it.
It's similar to how cable boxes work today for most people where you don't own the box.
You pay the cable company for service and if anything was wrong with the box, they have to deal with it.
They have to send someone out to your house or do something else.
So they make the boxes really well and
to you know to to very conservative strong standards so that they tend not to break and that's how phones used to be i didn't talk about like the big uh bakelite yeah drang if i'm pronouncing those big solid phones right but these aren't these are subcontracted like action tech is like a third-party company that they're there yeah right but you're gonna make these things for us but yeah no it seems pretty solid and the performance is really good but obviously like it doesn't even support n because the n didn't exist back then so it's job it's bg only right
and the ui is silly looking and it's like a little it looks like it looks like a linux style ui at best uh and it doesn't there's no usb port on it for my printer like it's just there's a reason i didn't want to use it i just didn't want to be involved with that at all like you know does it retain my ip addresses while my max go to sleep for back to my mac auto waking like all that stuff no it doesn't like that's why i didn't want it to be involved and you can put it in bridge mode and like turn off the wi-fi and use both of them but that just seemed like one more potential thing to go wrong so i just want
ethernet right from the wall into the thing so i'll be happy when whoever's shipment of their uh gently used uh airport uh extreme stuff arrive at my house and the one with the fan marco i'll plug it in i'll give it a try i'll see if i can hear the fan everyone tells me someone did like a decibel test they were like look i'm three inches away with my with some sound meter app for the iphone and it says 40 decibels and which it rates as
uh you know the sound level in a quiet house so we'll see if i can't hear the fan i'll probably be okay with it but it's right on the desk where i play ps4 i'm like i will be able to touch it with my hand and that's kind of where it has to be in terms of all the wire routing that goes all over the place so if i can hear it i'll be swapping in one of the pancake ones
So since you already keep it out on your desk at proper height, why did you not consider the Google OnHub?
First of all, the thing is ugly as sin.
Hold on, hold on.
I would just like to state for the record that I am using the same ActionTech router that I received in 2008 as my router.
and it is running wired into one of the flat airport extremes, and that is how I've been running my network for like two years now.
Before that, I was just using the ActionTech without anything else.
So you've got it in bridge mode and you've got the Wi-Fi turned off?
Mm-hmm.
That's exactly right, and it works just fine.
Is this the MI424WR?
I have no idea.
It says it right on the front.
Along with a million blinking lights.
Yeah, well, that's true.
I can't read it from where I am.
Let me log into that ridiculous admin panel with the ridiculous password crap that you were also talking about earlier.
Let me see if it says on here.
This thing, it looks like it hasn't been updated in eight years.
I know it has, but it is ridiculous.
Yeah.
And speaking of like what Marco was saying, like when the phone company has to do it, they don't want to have the ones to swap it or whatever.
When I was on a Media One customer, which became Comcast, which became Xfinity, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But anyway, Media One, when I first came to Massachusetts back up from Georgia, it was a cable modem.
And the thing, it looked like the outer case was made of cast iron.
I know it wasn't made of cast iron.
but like you know the texture on cast iron pans where it's kind of like dotty like the little dots like that's the texture they had done on what i assume is like the aluminum case but like weighed a ton and it had these fins on it like a heat sink it was just built like a tank but it was a piece of crap like i had so many problems with that thing people would come out and check all the wires on our house and check the signal strength and say everything's great i don't understand maybe you need to put some more filters here like all analog bs crap to try to get the cable signal to be right
and we went through that over the course of like a year and a half and then eventually i just got a new motorola surfboard thing from like best buy or something and installed that it's like oh god boy all the problems are gone drop connections are gone don't have to worry about signal strength anymore uh even though that thing looked like it was built like a tank it was obviously crappy and old um so i don't trust uh the media the isp companies to uh
uh to care if my connection is flaky or not as fast as it can be they just care like that i keep paying whatever like rental fee or whatever that i'm renting anyway i don't think i'm renting this i don't understand why i even still have it but i'm glad i did because that was literally my only backup option i don't have any other routers in the house i was thinking of driving to an apple store and just buying the stupid fan tower thing or whatever if i couldn't get the verizon one to work but the verizon one came right out of the box like a champ everything about it worked
I knew about the IP releasing thing.
I wonder if there is a way to release it if the other one is dead.
Because I don't understand when I clone the MAC address, I couldn't say, hey, just give me the IP.
Like, I am that same MAC address.
Like, I obviously don't know about the details of how this networking works.
I really thought that would work.
And when it didn't, I was kind of bummed.
no i mean you just call them and they can they send like a remote command to your ont to break the lease yeah i mean that was that was another possible option that people were like if you restart your ont and then someone else was said i restarted my ont and it didn't work and i wasn't willing to do that oh yeah no i've tried that there's there's like all there's like three different levels of resetting it's like from like pulling the battery out and everything i tried all that and none of that actually worked but calling verizon fixed it in 10 minutes
Yeah, I've done the Verizon call before during other crises to try to get that done.
But yeah, like I said, the phone tree was long enough that by the time I was about to be connected to a person, the green light went on.
I was like, oh, never mind.
So I have a...
MI424-WR hardware revision D as in dog.
What I was going to say earlier that I actually forgot was I didn't know the secret to having a good Fios installation, which is to have them run Ethernet out of your ONT.
So mine is actually the reason I'm sticking with the Action Tech in no small part is because I have coax coming out of the ONT into the Action Tech.
And that's the Internet is riding on the coax.
And so I really regret when they did the installation not having them run Ethernet like I think you did, John, and I believe, Marco, you've said in the past you did as well.
But either way, I am running this ancient MI424WR Revision D, and it has apparently been active for 711 hours, which is about a month.
If you physically run a cable to it, that's another thing that you can call them and just say, can you switch my ONT to Ethernet?
And they will say okay, and they will do it.
Is the ONT the one that's in the house or outside the house?
I always get them backwards.
The ONT is a thing that's probably in your garage or basement.
Yeah, it's in the garage.
It's got green lights on it.
It looks like yours might be smaller, but it's like a white rectangular box mounted to a wall.
It can be in the garage.
Yeah, fiber goes in and either Ethernet or coax or both goes out.
Yeah, because I have a box on the outside of the house that I thought is where the actual fiber came in.
No, that's your water meter.
No, no, no.
No, seriously.
There is a Fios box on the outside and a Fios box on the inside.
Hand on heart, I'm 100% sure.
You just look at what's on the outside one.
It could just be a box covering the hole they put in your house to get the fiber.
No, no, no.
I've opened it up for some reason or another, and I could swear that's where my ONT is.
But again, I always get them backwards, so I'm probably wrong.
But anyways, but yeah, so there's a box on the outside, a box on the inside, and I can never keep them straight.
Yeah, when the installer was here, I was pretty much going to let them do what they wanted because I knew as soon as they left, I would just disconnect everything.
But the one thing I had to say was, no, no, no, don't.
Just leave the coax in the basement.
Do Ethernet from the box.
I'm like, you won't be able to get on demand.
I'm like, it's fine.
You don't want on demand?
Yeah.
I do not want to.
In fact, I have a TiVo, not a cable box, so I couldn't get that anyway.
So just leave the coax here.
I just could not believe that anyone would pay all this money for Fios and not have on-demand.
This was 2008 or whatever.
Right.
Well, because to the installer, Fios means TV.
That's true.
Now, the one nice thing I will say about having the ActionTech on coax is that I really wanted an Ethernet drop down in the family room and the ActionTech routers upstairs in the office.
Right.
And what I did was I went on Amazon and got a Mocha bridge.
And what that allows you to do is it's not, you know, full speed.
I've done speed tests, damned if I remember how fast they were.
But you can get this Mocha bridge that takes coax in and has Ethernet on the other side.
And so I have a hub hooked up to this Mocha bridge, hooked up to the coax, and it can get on the network because the action tech is taking coax.
Now, yes, I could have put another Mocha bridge on the other side, but...
It was pretty neat to be able to just add an Ethernet drop arbitrarily anywhere that I have a cable drop.
And since this house was built in the late 90s, I have cable drops freaking everywhere.
I don't know.
I just thought that was a neat trick.
Yeah, I feel like I should save this thing because I think this is the airport extreme because I think it is the most reliable piece of network hardware I have ever owned.
It has literally never done anything wrong.
It has just sat there for seven years doing its thing.
especially like you know you can you can usually get like a switch to last that long maybe but like something that has as many roles as a wireless router like that's that whole integrated package plus you know the print server and everything else and i would mess with it i would like i would mess with it with the airport utility i would open up and close it i remember opening and closing ports to try to play quick three arena like that's how old this thing was to try to play multiplayer quick the arena and like trying to up open ports up for bit torrent before it like the clients were good and got through your firewall no matter what like
You know, it has done its job well.
And it never made any noise.
And it didn't have obnoxious lights.
And it was really small and flat.
And, yeah.
Maybe I'll put it in a little frame somewhere.
You mount it on the wall.
It could be like art.
It's kind of boring.
It's just a white, rounded square thing.