Full Brichter
Timeboxing is such like a consultant-speak thing to say.
I don't even know what that means.
It's doing a task but limiting it to a certain amount of time.
But time is one-dimensional.
Boxing doesn't make sense.
Well, the thought is, oh, I don't know how long this task is going to take me.
All right, well, we'll timebox it for two hours and see where you get.
Maybe time bracketing?
I'm trying to think of something that doesn't imply a second dimension.
Only you would be pissed off that time is one-dimensional.
There's probably regular English words that will work here.
So you did something at an interesting hour last night by the time we're recording, but almost a week ago by the time most people hear this.
Yeah, I released a new app for the first time in a long time.
How'd that go?
Really well, actually.
So this was my few days project app that I discussed a couple episodes back.
And the app is called Bugshot.
And it is kind of like Skitch for iOS without sucking.
So it's basically a very, very simplified screenshot annotation app where it just shows a list of all your screenshots and your camera roll.
And...
And then you get to draw big orange arrows or boxes on them to point out certain things in them and then email them or do something with them.
And that's literally all it is.
Boxes and arrows, orange on screenshots.
And the reason I created it is because it was just like a couple of weeks ago.
I was in the back den playing with my kid and navigating through a podcast that was playing on a speaker, and I noticed yet another visual bug in Downcast while I was doing this, because Downcast still has a few issues on iOS 7.
It works, but there's a number of UI glitches.
And so I took a screenshot, and I always do.
Whenever I see a bug in an app, whether it's mine or somebody else's, I always take a screenshot with the intention of going and, you know, once I get back to my big computer, emailing it or fixing it if it's my bug or something like that.
And...
Usually I forget to do this.
And so what I end up with is I'll go through my camera roll looking for something else and come across all these screenshots of bugs that I have long since forgotten about that are either out of date or I'll look at the screenshot and think...
Why did I take this screenshot?
What's wrong with this?
I'll forget, and it won't be immediately obvious upon looking at it.
Wait, why did I think this was a problem?
Bugshot for me was a way to both give screenshots a workflow, to make an app that's dedicated for
receiving them and doing something with them immediately on the phone.
So it kind of gives me an excuse to remind myself, oh, now that I have this app, especially now that I made this app to do this, I won't just screenshot and forget.
And also the annotation part of it is very handy to prevent the second problem, which was forgetting why I took the screenshot or it not being 100% obvious and having to describe to somebody in an email or something exactly what part of it you're talking about.
So that's what it is.
And
There were a number of decisions I made along the way.
Mainly, I knew this was not going to be the app that carried me in business for the next five years, and so I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on it.
And almost every decision I made during development, I had to balance against, like, okay, well, I could do X, Y, or Z, or I could do this this way or this other way, but...
But that'll take a week or that'll take too long or that'll have ongoing maintenance or something like that.
And I only want to spend a few days on this.
And of course, a few days became about a week.
But still, a week for an app really isn't that bad relative to anything else.
because even even with this app where its feature set is relatively small and trivial there's still a lot of of implementation to get right and a lot of decisions to make along the way and just a lot of work to do you know screenshots the icon like there's all sorts of like stuff that no matter how simple your app is if you want it to be high quality even if it's simple you still have to do a whole bunch of stuff
So there's probably a whole bunch of topics in here we can talk about if you want, but that would probably take too long.
I mean, I don't want to spend all day on this podcast.
So I don't know.
What interests you here?
I have complaints.
Do you want complaints?
Absolutely.
Oh, as do I. As do I. I was hoping you'd have complaints.
Do you want to go first, Casey, or do you want me to go?
I actually only have one in particular, so I can go first and then leave you the floor for the next 50 to 90 minutes.
But Marco was in town, as we talked about, I think, the last episode.
He was in town for a party that we threw, what was it, last weekend.
And so he showed me the app.
I think you had already sent it to the App Store at that point, but it wasn't released, of course.
That's true.
And I had seen – well, John and I both had seen a couple screenshots, but that was my only exposure to it.
We barely talked about it, and basically Marco handed me his phone and said, all right, here you go.
So in using the app, I thought it was extremely intuitive.
I thought that the way in which you drew things was very reasonable and made a lot of sense.
I wasn't really clear how to delete something, so I just tried a couple things.
And the second thing I tried, or third thing I tried, was double tapping on an object.
And sure enough, there it went.
So I thought that was really nice.
There was no demo needed.
I thought it was extremely intuitive.
I know you got some flack on Twitter about that, but it made sense to me.
The thing that I didn't like, however, is you took the easy route, which is probably what I would have done,
with the boxes in that the touch target for any rectangles or squares or whatever, what have you, they're the entirety of the rectangle, including the inner part that's actually clear.
So if you were to put an arrow or another box inside the bigger box, that gets a little bit dodgy in terms of how you select what you want to select.
And that really annoyed me, even though I don't know why I would ever run into that.
And so today, I spent this morning while Adam was watching Sesame Street, giving me some time here because my wife was out of town until this afternoon.
So I spent this morning during Sesame Street working on that hit testing and playing with different things.
And
I'm going to change it for 101.
I'm going to make it so that basically... See, the challenge here... And I faced this challenge during development, too, and I decided to take the easy way out.
But the challenge I faced is... So, obviously, if you tap and hit a shape...
basically what's the bounding box or what's the bounding path for what should be considered hitting that shape and the problem is the shapes can be all different sizes and this is a touch device so everything's imprecise like the input is imprecise so
If you constantly miss what you're trying to hit, that's bad.
But the way it was, especially with boxes, where if you drew a really big box, you couldn't draw anything inside of it then.
Because any tap inside of it would be considered dragging that box.
Even if the space inside of it was really vast and empty.
So...
Obviously, there's some middle ground here.
So what I'm playing with now is basically like if the shape is below a certain size, just the whole thing is the bounding box.
And then if it's above a certain size, then only its border plus a little bit of padding on both sides of the border.
That represents the bounding path.
And similar thing with arrows, where if the arrow is below a certain size now, it's just going to be the whole bounding box of the arrow.
And then once it gets past... I think I decided about 80 by 80 would be the boundary.
Once it gets past that boundary, then the arrow itself, its path is the touch area.
But it's all... This is a great example of one of those things where...
The app looks really simple, but there's a lot of little tiny details like that where I had to make decisions and experiments and everything else.
And that's why I have a feeling a lot of developers, upon hearing that this took me about a week to really do and submit, probably would think a week is way too long for an app that's this simple.
But really, there's so many little details like that.
And that's what takes all the time, really.
You can make a really terrible app in two days.
From new project to submitted in two days.
You can do that, but there's very little chance it's going to be good.
So what I really wanted to do was I wanted it to be very, very simple, but also good.
So what was left on the cutting room floor, and John, I know I'm delaying your complaints, but what was left on the cutting room floor that you wanted to get done that didn't, but you did that as a conscious choice to get it out quickly?
Yeah.
i played with a few ideas one of them a smaller version of of what i about to say like so one of the things i was doing was um some kind of state of marking which screenshots you have dealt with already so like you know like anything you that you'd annotate obviously i'd have to save the annotations which is a whole you know can of worms right there of how do you save and restore these things and then and then you know that then you have user data to deal with like then do you
have an export?
Do you have to sync that?
That's a whole can of worms.
The way it is now, you draw your boxes and arrows, and then you hit either cancel or done.
Basically, if you've shared it anywhere, then there were changes to done.
Either way, once you're out of that screen, that information is lost.
It's not saved anywhere.
And so that was mostly for simplicity's sake and, you know, the time constraints.
But also, like, I feel like this is temporary data anyway.
Like, the whole point of this is annotate a screenshot and then get rid of it.
Send it somewhere, you know, so that you can deal with it in some other place.
And for me, it's just emailing it to myself usually.
But either way, which I know is terrible, but...
amazingly emailing things to yourself is the best solution to a very very wide set of problems that unfortunately we still haven't solved in better ways yet uh but i'm sure everyone i bet i bet even john syracuse do you still email things to yourself in certain contexts i email things myself all the time see it's it is it is the solution to so many problems
Yep.
Now, what about AirDrop?
Because I know that they've made passing mention to AirDrop.
AirDrop does not work between iOS and Mac in 7.
Ah, okay.
See, I haven't looked much into it yet.
So, yeah.
So, one of my most frequent things is, like, I just took a picture of something and I wanted to get it on my computer faster than PhotoStream will do it.
I'll just email it to myself.
It's so many people do this.
Anyway, so saving data was one thing that I kind of punted on and decided, well, let's see if this thing really justifies more time investment.
Maybe I will investigate doing that.
And then you have the issue of, okay, well, then do you hide screenshots that you've dealt with?
Because you can't delete them.
As far as I know, there's no API to delete things from the camera roll from an app, which is probably for the better, honestly.
But...
Either way, there's no API to delete things, so I can't do that.
So I could hide them, but then what if you want to annotate the same screenshot twice?
Then you have to have some kind of UI for showing hidden items or toggling the done state.
And so there's all sorts of little things like that.
Like, well, if you do this, then you have to add this, this, and this to make it good.
And so it ends up saving data or marking things as dealt with are both bigger topics that I didn't want to address yet.
And the other big thing, which a few people have requested, is the text tool, being able to draw text on the photos.
And a lot of people have requested this.
Back in the days of using Sketch, and it's still on the Mac, I still do use the old version of Sketch on the Mac, but obviously text is very nice to have, but the problem on iOS basically is implementation.
The way I would want to do it
would be that you are typing directly on the image.
You pick a place, the keyboard comes up, and you are typing directly onto the image in the big orange font with the stroke, and exactly as it's going to look, WYSIWYG style, you are typing directly onto the image.
And doing that on iOS in a way that doesn't suck for other reasons.
Doing that on iOS is not easy.
And it's getting easier with every version, but I still have to support 6 for this app, because obviously 7's not out yet to the public.
I can't make an app to the app store that requires iOS 7 today.
So...
I have to do... I still have to do this in a compatible way.
Anyway, so doing text writing the image like that would have been at least another day of work.
Probably a couple days to really get it right.
Because there's so many weird little things with text input.
And I realized that...
When I would email these things, usually I would just – whatever commentary I had that required text, I would usually just type it into the email.
Usually there's the subject.
Here's what I'm talking about with this arrow pointing to this thing in the screenshot if it even needed any text.
So I kind of figured that if most of the sharing targets of whatever you're going to do next after you draw the arrow in box on this screenshot, if the next step in your workflow is going to involve text input, which almost all of them do, then I kind of figured text was less important for this app.
And so I wouldn't mind adding it at some point, but I don't think it's ever going to be worth the time to really do it well, and I don't want to do it badly.
Right.
Now, to further delay John and make him even more grumbly, why not iOS 7 only?
I mean, obviously, if you wanted to release it today... Well, I can't.
That's the problem.
Well, right.
But why not hold it?
Why not wait?
Well, because it's really useful right now.
As everyone's apps are breaking under iOS 7, including Apple's and the OS itself, it's very useful.
Like...
That's one of the reasons why I decided to make this app right now is because I'm constantly finding UI glitches with 7, whether it's in the OS or other people's apps running on 7.
There's so many problems because so many things are different.
So many of the Apple apps are really rewritten or have really kind of rough edges still.
So it really – for this to be most effective for me and I think for a lot of people, I really had to get it out there now during the iOS 7 beta.
And so that's why it doesn't require iOS 7 basically because I can't.
Fair enough.
All right.
I'm sorry, John.
Please take the floor.
All right.
Some of my complaints are, you know, things that Marco had to omit.
And he already named a couple of them.
The one where you can't draw a box inside a box.
Casey got that one.
Oh, that's fixed for 101.
There you go.
And I was thinking of, like, saving the screenshots and the annotations separately within the app's documents silo.
Yeah.
Basically, as a roundabout way to get the same thing you were talking about, where you'd have some sort of process whereby you went through the screenshots and did something with them, and then they would go someplace else and they would disappear from the main list.
And saving the annotations and the shots separately would be so that if you changed your mind later, you hadn't...
you know that was my solution to unhiding the screenshot that uh you don't see it on the main screenshot list anymore but you see it in your ones that you've dealt with and when you see it there if you change your mind you want to report a different thing you can add a different set of annotations to the same image but anyway you already talked about those uh the ones you could do although you already you put out 101 already well no i haven't i haven't submitted yet i'm working on today see that was one of the things i was trying to figure out what
version of this do i have and from the device there's no way for me to tell inside your application in ios at all what version i'm using like is there some is there some way in settings i looked i didn't see any way to get a version number out of it uh but anyway the toolbar buttons on top i haven't used ios 7 enough to know if this is accurate uh but they highlight on on you know on mouse down to use mac yes i was actually just uh talking to john gruber about that he complained the same about the same thing yeah and um
So there's two problems.
One is that I did not implement a highlight state, and so I'm going to do that in 101.
Basically, these controls are all mimicking iOS 7 style, or totally ripping it off, and...
And so I am going to do that, the highlight state.
But I actually don't know.
I'd love to hear from users or from listeners, although I probably won't hear it in time before I submit 101.
And this is a really nitpicky detail, but...
As far as I can tell, I can't figure out if there is a good way for UI segmented control, which is what this is.
This is a real segmented control just using UI appearance to customize the way it looks.
I can't figure out how with UI segmented control to do the thing where if you tap down and then drag your finger out and release, it doesn't trigger it.
This is really technical.
I'm sorry, but I'm using the...
the UI control event value changed mode here.
And I tried the control event touch up inside, which is usually how you do that, and that didn't work.
It still just fired upon touchdown.
So I don't really know how to do that.
I only spent like two minutes looking at it because it was right before the show.
So I'll look at that later.
But I might not be able to fix that easily.
We'll see.
that's debatable at this point whether it would be more expedient for you to go full brichter on it and just draw yourself around rect and do your own hit testing and like you know what i mean oh that's definitely not worth it well i mean but like if you're trying to if you're trying to take segmented control and figure out how to like if there's no event 40 you're trying to figure out some way to get it to do what you want you could burn a lot of time trying to make the existing control do what you want and if you had spent that same amount of time
Simply implementing your own really simple control, it might end up being a washer.
It might end up being faster.
It probably also depends if you're Lauren Brichter because presumably he has a little bit more experience making his own widgets from scratch.
If I were Lauren Brichter, I would have written this entire UI in OpenGL and re-implemented every part of UIKit in my own awesome better way.
and spent six months making this app but unfortunately i can't justify that amount of time and i'm not lauren brichter and so i it would take me way longer than it would take him so uh unfortunately that's not going to be an option but i am i do i would like to get that detail right about about the touch shop and touch so iowa 7 doesn't do that then right because i was wondering like maybe maybe this is how iowa 7 does it and you're just faithfully reproducing but i'd
Well, no.
Gruber pointed out that on the Notification Center segmented control, the all events or today, the thing on top of Notification Center, that behaves properly in what you guys are talking about.
But again, I haven't had much time to look at it yet.
Probably right after we record the show, I will spend another 20 minutes on it and figure out the solution.
But right now, I don't have it.
And I don't know if it's going to be easy or not.
So on the screenshot list, the highlight issue there is that there is no highlight.
It just zooms the image up, and there's no dimming it or doing any sort of highlight to let you know that you let go of your finger and the thing zooms up to full size, but there's no highlight.
Oh, that's interesting.
That I can probably fix.
That's the collection view.
That's Apple's collection view, right?
yeah it is but and this is actually the first one i've ever used a collection view so i don't know whether this is the responsibility of the view or more likely it's probably the responsibility of the cell to implement that so i will i will look at that yeah and the collection view was flaking out i can't tell i haven't been able to reproduce this one i should have screenshotted it but i was like i'm sure i'll be able to reproduce this let me screenshot it but no
So when you go into landscape, it changes the layout of the thing, and then when you go back into portrait, briefly it's two columns, and then it goes back to three columns, and it got stuck in two columns for me for a while.
But then I just filled around with it some more, and now I can't get it to get stuck.
But that's almost certainly a collection view bug of some kind, and probably not your bug, but I would watch for it in your travels through the application.
One of the things I did that was actually a surprising amount of the coding and the getting things wrong and then figuring out how to get things right was handling rotation.
Because I didn't want to...
So basically, the app only ever presents screenshots full screen at 100% scale.
There is no zoom.
There is no panning or anything.
And this was all for simplicity and speed of dealing with it.
So there is like... The whole point of this app is to get in and get out very quickly.
To do what you have to do.
Because just like any good workflow tool, you don't want the tool to be slowing you down necessarily.
So...
The app, the collection, the list view does support rotation, but the drawing view does not.
And so there's all sorts of weird complexity of like, well, if you're in portrait orientation in the list and you select a landscape screenshot, then the whole app basically forces itself to be in landscape mode during the editing.
So you've got to turn the phone on the side and then once you're done, it switches back to landscape if it needs to.
There's all sorts of complexity like that.
Yeah.
or of implementation complexity to get around the need for zooming and scaling, basically.
So there's a few things about that that I'm not 100% happy with.
One thing I'm not happy with is how...
Images appear in their native orientation in the list.
And so if you have a mixture of portrait and landscape screenshots in your camera roll, then the layout gets really inefficient and gappy.
And it just kind of doesn't look good.
And I'm playing with different options there.
I tried some of them during development, and I just didn't like any other alternative.
So here we are with this.
I didn't say rotate them all to portrait.
I tried that, and there were, first of all, a lot of difficulties doing that well.
But it didn't really look great, and it didn't handle rotation that well.
I might revisit that at some point, but it was not good.
I thought that would be the answer, but it wasn't.
And my final complaint was the one I gave you last week.
The first thing I thought of is after I draw these little overlay things, particularly arrows, can I manipulate them after the fact?
And you can move them, but you can't resize them or reorient them after the fact.
And I would expect anything that lets me draw a little rectangle gives me anchor points on the four corners so I can resize the rectangle.
And anything that lets me draw an arrow lets me twist the arrow around and stretch it out to make it longer or shorter.
I mean, like, moving it pretty much solves the problem of, like...
How do I make an arrow precisely point to something?
Because if you start where I first tap with my fat finger, that's not very accurate.
But if you do it the other way, where you start with the stem, then as I drag out to the thing I'm trying to point to, my finger is covering it anyway.
So there's no good solution there.
You have to have some after manipulation, and you allow moving after, which allows you to reorient it.
But basically, if the overlays were sort of persistently vector shapes instead of being rasterized and just being able to be moved around.
Well, and they actually, in the code, they are, and the rectangles can be scaled if you pinch them.
The arrows cannot.
I did not figure out that rectangle thing.
I spent a while trying to resize those rectangles.
All I'd ever do was move them.
I guess maybe I was pinching outside them.
You got to start inside, I guess.
Yeah.
And, I mean, one of the problems is just on the iPhone, there really isn't a whole lot of space to do pinching and rotation gestures.
And it's really, really hard to do with any kind of precision on the iPhone.
On the iPad, of course, it's a different story.
But for me, I'm using this mostly on the phone.
And so, you know, whatever decisions I make have to work well on the phone for this.
And so, one big thing is I don't think...
I tried very briefly in early development having pinch and rotate enabled on all shapes.
And it didn't work that well.
It was just very hard, again, with precision.
It was very hard to do it, especially to avoid accidentally rotating something when you're supposed to be pinching it.
Or when you combine rotation and scaling...
simultaneously in the same gesture, it kind of behaves weirdly, and there's these weird edge cases you can get.
And so there were a number of things that just didn't feel good with having that in place.
You probably have to go modal like those old apps where you tap the thing, and that makes the little anchor things appear, and then when you select one of the anchors, it's clear if you're now in rotation or scaling mode, and the hit areas all increase, like a full-fledged...
Vector drawing app on the iPhone would.
But that also falls under the scope thing of like, okay, now you're getting into, you know.
Well, and then like every one of those things that you add, that needs UI.
And a lot of times that needs state, as you said.
And so it adds so much complexity to using the app and to building the app that, yeah, it very, very quickly balloons in both scope of development and also just different modes the app can be in and different ways it could slow people down or confuse them.
But right after you sell the first 50,000 copies of this app, then you've got to get working on this feature list.
Okay.
If I sell 50,000 copies, I would consider doing that, yes.
There you go.
Right now, I'm at something like 1,000, I think.
That's pretty impressive.
And actually, I thought of one other complaint that I had when I was looking at it last weekend.
I apparently am the only person on the planet that likes Shake to Undo because I went to try that and complained about it.
I tried it too, Casey.
Thank you, John.
I complained about it, and Marco definitely said in so many words, you're insane for even wanting that.
And I want to say underscore agreed with you, but I don't recall.
So apologies underscore if I'm putting wordshare off.
I think you're right.
I think we both agreed.
Again, apologies if this is wrong, David.
But I think we both agreed that shaking your phone is ridiculous, and it should never do anything because it's ridiculous.
It is ridiculous, but I did try it.
I do find myself trying it because I do want to undo a lot of the times.
And although shaking is ridiculous, it's kind of the you don't need a UI button for it, but maybe it'll work.
And sometimes it does, and it makes me feel good when it does, even though I'm shaking my iPod.
Yeah.
But no, all in all, it certainly is a really interesting exercise in doing a small app and just like you've been discussing this entire time, cutting out what you don't need.
Being able to spin an arrow or re-anchor an arrow I think would be nice.
But to your point a minute ago, if it's not done well, I'd rather not even have it.
And I've come to that conclusion, I think, after seeing Apple make that choice so many times, like copy-paste early on in iOS, for example.
Yeah.
So it certainly – I can't say I've had to use it yet because I'm not – partly because I'm not running iOS 7.
But it certainly made a lot of sense, and I thought it was very intuitive with almost no UI.
So I thought it was a job well done.
Thank you.
And another issue with adding these things, like even when I – in development, when I briefly had the text tool in the toolbar –
that toolbar gets really crowded really quickly.
And right now, with the cancel button on one side, the action button on the other, and the two buttons in the middle, on an iPhone in portrait orientation, that toolbar is pretty much full already.
And so the question is, like...
If I wanted to add a color picker or additional tools, text, or somebody in the chat just suggested a redaction blur or blackout.
It's like blackout sensitive information that's in the screenshot.
That's a good idea.
But where's that going to go in the interface?
And as soon as I go beyond one toolbar, then the interface becomes a lot bigger and heavier.
The whole point of this is to annotate screenshots at 100%.
So there really isn't a whole lot of room to like crowd the screen with buttons and stuff.
And it's just like that toolbar is already full.
So like, what do you do?
Right?
Like it's, there's no, again, there's no good option.
And so a lot of times the answer is just, well, you know what?
It's better to just keep it simple.
And yeah,
Another reason why I didn't really go for more tools is because I think an arrow in a box, that's the essence of this kind of tool.
There are other more specialized things that might be nice, like maybe you want to draw a circle or an actual rectangle that's not rounded corners, or hell, a triangle.
If you want to annotate something with a big hollow triangle, I'm sure somebody wants to do that.
There are cases where more specialized tools would be better, but to have an app with all that stuff in it
it very quickly becomes Illustrator.
And that's a very different thing.
Like the show opening, I think it was the show opening last week that you threw in there.
The thing I suggested when we were talking about this after last recording session was the, like, you could, you know, you've got Box and Arrow.
Replace Box and Arrow with...
The ability to draw a freeform with your hand and then an item lets you just pick color and transparency, like a popover lets you pick color and transparency.
So then you've got redaction, circles, arrows.
You know, you got my yellow highlighter that I want, 50% transparent, yellow, you know, default.
Like, then you just draw with your finger on things.
And, yeah, you can't make a precise arrow, but you can circle things.
You can redact things.
You could put squares around things.
It produces a different result than the type of thing you'll see from this viewer.
You get a nice rounded rectangle and a nice arrow pointing it and stuff.
Maybe it's less precise as well, but you would have enough toolbar space for basically for that.
It would be like, I guess just one toolbar button, or maybe you could put two, one for color and one for transparency.
You could do them both if you did a popover because there's no tool selection.
The only tool you have is, I guess, maybe like brush size or something.
But anyway, that would be a different way to go with this instead of vector art, go with finger painting.
Yeah, and certainly having basically a pencil tool would cover a lot of that.
If you just added a third tool and it was a pencil, that would definitely cover a lot of these cases.
But again, there's a whole lot of UI state that you have to add to that then.
Like, you know, once you draw the thing, then do you pick the color afterwards or do you try to shove the color thing somewhere in the bar somehow and invent space out of nothing?
And then the more things you add to the bar, even if you can make them fit, then they necessarily have to be smaller each.
And so then it increases the chances of somebody hitting the wrong thing and being frustrated or doing something they don't want to do or losing data.
I was saying replace the box and the arrow.
Oh, I see.
With the brush.
You know what I mean?
Like two replacement things.
Just brush and color slash transparency.
You'd still need some kind of overlay or like dialogue or something to pick the color and the transparency because that's too much control to put in a toolbar.
But if that's the only thing in the toolbar, you've got room for like the one button to pick size and the other button to pick color and transparency, you know?
Yeah, I guess.
Oh, and somebody in Pan and Scan in the chat just said zoom would be a handy feature.
The problem with zoom is that it conflicts with gestures for everything else.
So if you had pinch to zoom, for instance, then you can no longer pinch on a rectangle to resize it.
You could be the first iOS app with a plus button in the corner that you hit and it zooms by increments, plus, plus, plus, plus.
That will give you the ratings.
That'll get you the ADA.
Honestly, I bet I'm not the first.
I know.
I'm sure you're not the first.
There's some app out there that probably uses a greater than or less than sign on a UI button to do it like zooming in and out.
All right.
Let's go to our first sponsor before I forget to do sponsors this episode because we're a half hour in.
Our first sponsor is a new sponsor this week.
It's an iOS game called Mind Blitz.
Mind Blitz is a twist on the traditional memory matching game.
You know, like where you flip over cards and you try to remember what card is where and then you try to pair them up with the matching cards.
It's like that with action puzzle elements.
So it's a beautifully designed game.
They have achievements, high scores, power-ups, penalty cards.
They have different gameplay modes.
There's a Blitz mode and an Endless mode.
And this is really like a very deluxe, fancy action version of that old memory card game.
In Blitz mode, you flip over the cards to match corresponding pairs, and then you fill up this power meter with every match you make.
And then you get points, and then you can redeem the points for power-up cards.
And then in Endless mode, the player competes for the fastest time without the worry of the timer or penalty cards.
It's just fastest time to complete matches.
And it's like a more pure version of the memory game.
And it's beautifully designed.
I even had some suggestions for the developer.
The developer bought the sponsorship.
probably like two or three months ago now.
It was pretty far, pretty long ago.
And I had a few suggestions for adjusting some of the timings on some of the things.
And sure enough, he improved them.
They're done.
And they're in the app.
And he's very responsive to suggestions.
But the app is just really, really solid.
I really enjoy playing it.
It's a universal app.
This is MindBlitz.
Universal app, just $2.99 in the App Store.
So search the app store for Mind Blitz, two words, or go to mindblitzapp.com slash ATP to find it.
You guys played this game, right?
Did it look like this before iOS 7 came out?
Yeah, that was always the style.
It is very iOS 70, right down to the icon, I think, too.
If you look at the icon, that would fit in with the Johnny Ive color scheme for the standard built-in icons.
I play memory games like this with my daughter a lot where you have to put the physical cards on the ground and get them all set up and
I think we actually have an odd number of them.
So one of them ends up always not having a match and setting up the cards and cleaning them.
Like, yeah, I'm definitely ready to, uh, to jack into cyberspace and not have to, to not have to, uh, you know, what they used to say in the nineties, man, no more physical stuff.
Everything's going to happen on the interwebs.
So they didn't say interwebs back then, but anyway, they definitely did say jacking into cyberspace.
Uh,
Yeah, it's nice not to have to clean up the cards is what I'm getting at.
And a tip for people who are playing this game by themselves, you don't have to wait for the sound to finish playing to go for your next pair.
So it's possible if you're fast to have many more than two cards visible at a time.
A little tip there for people trying to hone their high scores, but I enjoyed it.
Actually, one of my suggestions to the developer was in the mechanics of when you have more than two cards flipped over, how you know whether a match has succeeded or failed.
And yeah, he's very responsive.
Really, this game is a fantastic implementation.
It really is like a deluxe action card memory game.
And it's bringing the best of the old with John's cyberspace jacking.
And...
My Cyberspace Jack.
It's like William Gibson's or something.
Oh, goodness.
No, it really is a great game.
And the thing that bothers me about this game, though, which I know I shouldn't complain about sponsors, but it just proves to me how crummy my memory is.
Because I am terrible at this game.
And it's because I have the world's worst memory.
Wait, John, how old is your kid that plays this game?
Oh, don't even go there.
Six years old.
I'm pretty good at the game.
Maybe I've been honed from practicing on the rug with a six-year-old, but I think the thing that really helps in this game is the really deep, saturated colors they have.
A lot of times I'm matching by color, not even the symbols, you know what I mean?
Yeah, that helps a lot.
I mean, there's so many nice little touches.
It really is a very polished game.
So, all right, thanks a lot to Mind Blitz.
Go to mindblitzapp.com slash ATP or search for Mind Blitz, two words, in the App Store.
$2, universal app, great game.
Thanks a lot.
All right, so another thing I wanted to ask you about, Marco, since apparently this is turning into the Marco Show, you've been fiddling a lot with network-attached storage these days.
It's pronounced NAS.
Now, how is that different from the thing you're putting in the M5?
Oh, it doesn't need that, believe me.
No, it does not.
No, it does not.
No, but tell me about what you – I know you were seeking different options.
Even when we were at WWDC, I remember being in line for Presidio once, and you were talking about, oh, should I go Drobo?
Should I go Synology or whatever it's called?
What did you end up concluding, and how's that going?
So I should disclose.
So basically I decided through various research and Twitter mentions, I decided to go with Synology.
Synology?
Did we ever decide what that is?
Anyway.
I don't think so.
Tell them to sponsor the show and then they can send you a pronunciation guide.
Okay.
So anyway, I'm going to say Synology because that's how I say it in my head.
So until somebody corrects me authoritatively.
All right.
So anyway, I decided to get a Synology and I ordered it from Amazon and it was like a Saturday night.
So it wasn't going to ship for like another day and a half or something like that.
And between the time I ordered it and when it was going to ship, a representative from Synology saw me tweeting about this stuff and offered to just send me the thing for free, which is very, very nice of them.
And so I canceled my Amazon order, and they very generously sent me the one I was going to get for free just so I could have some experience with it.
And they aren't sponsoring the show, but that was a very nice thing of them to do, and so it's worth mentioning that.
It also obviously is required for probably sensible disclosure reasons for me to tell you that.
um anyway so i uh i've i've had a lot of time with it and i still have a lot to do with it i haven't done that much just because like i i filled it up with a whole bunch of like one two and four terabyte hard drives that i had lying around so it's uh it takes a pretty long time to to alter anything that involves like 12 terabytes of raw storage but uh
Like, you know, it's the kind of thing, you know, oh, I want to, let me try this volume and this other kind of structure.
All right, start, and I'll come back, you know, midday tomorrow, it'll be done.
Now, let me interrupt you real quick.
I should have asked you to start off.
What problem or problems were you looking to solve by getting this device?
That's a very good question.
All right, so the main reason I wanted to get into network attack storage is that
I've always loved having internal hard drives in the Mac Pro, as we've talked about many times before, just like Sean.
I love internal drives because what I really, really hate more than anything is a desk covered in hard drive enclosures.
Because hard drive enclosures are terrible.
They have usually either really bad cooling or no cooling.
So it results in either a tiny 40mm rattly fan,
on your desk all the time going and making too much noise or no cooling.
And then the hard drive overheats and dies in a year and a half.
Uh, either way is bad.
And enclosures are kind of overpriced if you get them empty.
And if you get them full, they like from like directly from people like, like Seagate and Western digital, then they usually have like really kind of oddly cheap construction and, um,
It's just kind of weird, and it's very hard to get one that's not USB, that's actually reasonably priced.
Like, USB ones are always cheap, but historically, if you wanted to get good speed, you'd have to go, like, Firewire 800, and those were very expensive.
These days, you have Thunderbolt or USB 3 to choose from, although at least USB 3 is finally good.
But anyway, I don't like little individual disc enclosures, and I don't like having to have them on my desk and having more wires and more things that make noise right in front of me and more power bricks and all this stuff.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
Don't forget the stupid power adapters.
Yeah.
Because every single one of the drives needs to have its own cheap little...
terrible power adapter and brick that you need to like it's always like a brick and then a cord hanging from it so you've got these like little just bricks littering the floor and you need to find someplace to put them exactly the plugs yeah I just ordered a new drive enclosure now that we're complaining about them wait which one what did you get
I've been getting these ones from Otherworld Computing.
The Mercury Elite Pro?
Yeah.
They're not my favorite, but they're not terrible.
They're kind of terrible.
I like their construction, but they're very expensive.
I don't like much about them, but I have had several of them, and unlike almost every other conclusion I've gotten, the power bricks have not died.
So, thumbs up on that.
Although they are big and bulky.
Yeah, because that's the big thing.
The power brick is the weakest component in these things.
The power brick dies, and then you're just left with this useless thing.
No, I got it, because...
I have spare drives hanging around, and I'm doing lots of Mavericks testing.
And I'm like, you know, I could really use one more spare drive.
And I have the mechanisms.
I don't want to keep swapping them in and out of my Mac Pro, and I need to be able to hook it up to a laptop.
So I just go, all right, let me just get one more enclosure.
And I looked around for Thunderbolt enclosures, but it was like, no, I don't want to spend that much money.
So I bought another one.
Well, and the problem is Thunderbolt won't work on your Mac Pro.
It won't work on any of my computers that I would need to test on.
Yeah.
So I bought another one, but yeah, I'm in the same situation as Marco.
I like my internal drives and I'm sure what he's leading to is that, you know, eventually we're going to get computers, like probably both going to get the Mac pro.
And if we do no internal storage there, that's exactly it.
I mean, and it isn't just about that.
It's,
If you can move to a world where you don't need a whole bunch of internal drives, that enables you to switch to the new Mac Pro if you want to, or to switch to a laptop full-time, or to switch to an iMac without having a desk covered in hard drive enclosures.
There's all sorts of benefits of simplifying your setup and adding flexibility to...
shifting a lot of this stuff to a network attack storage box.
Also, just for physical reasons, I like not having that crap all over my desk.
A network attack thing I can put anywhere in the house that has networking.
And if you're willing to tolerate wireless, you can put it really anywhere.
For me, I like things wired, but when I had my house construction, I did run Cat5 wiring or Cat6 wiring to most of the rooms.
So...
I actually have mine in what's basically my server closet, which is just the closet in my office that I had them install an outlet and two network ports in.
So that's where I keep the router and the printer and all the crap.
Are you worried about heat inside a closet?
I was worried.
It is a very big closet.
And so basically my stress test was I filled the Synology with eight disks and had it restructure the array, rebuild the array by replacing one of the disks.
And then I closed the door and left in July for eight hours.
And then I came back and opened the door and it was like one degree hotter than the room next to it.
So it wasn't a meaningful problem, I don't think.
Anyway, because it's the closet that's 10 feet from my chair, I still go over there and walk in periodically to check the temperature to make sure it's not getting too hot.
But so far, it never has.
So I don't think it's going to be a problem.
Anyway, so my goal really here was, as I said, just flexibility.
And so I can get away from requiring...
a big hard drive or requiring multiple big hard drives in my main computer because obviously that world is ending in Macs.
The current Mac Pro is the only one that can do that and it's going away.
So even, you know, like the Retina MacBook Pro doesn't even have two bays anymore.
Like, you know, the old ones you could put, you could replace the DVD-ROM drive with a second hard drive bay, which I did for a while.
you could do that.
The new ones, you can't do that.
The iMac still has two bays.
It has an SSD bay and a big drive bay, but I bet the days of that are fairly numbered.
I bet that goes away probably within three or four years.
Obviously, we're moving away from having any kind of replaceable drives in Macs, let alone multiple bays.
So...
And again, also, if you have network storage, then you can also do things like get an SSD for your only drive on your main computer or get a computer where SSDs are the only option and not be too constrained by the size of the SSD.
So all these things, very, very good, very important.
Basically, it's adding some slight time and investment now to add a lot of flexibility in the future.
So that's why I decided to do this.
I've done a few things with it.
I have Time Machine running to it.
Right now I have the drives as one giant array using their dynamic resizing thing, which is kind of similar to what Drobos do, I think.
I've never owned a Drobos, so I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's the same kind of thing, which is it's like a software dynamic raid where they kind of dynamically manage the storage for you.
I don't think you have any kind of direct block access to it, so they can do that.
So you can like, you can like pop out a small drive and add a bigger drive and it expands the array to have more space, stuff like that.
Um, so I tried, I'm trying that now.
The only thing I don't like about that setup is that it requires all eight discs to be reading and writing whenever anything's accessed.
And, um,
so it's loud and it's keeping all of them spinned up almost all the time.
And that's just, it's just inefficient.
It's kind of inelegant.
So I think what I'm going to do, I still have enough spare drives lying around that I can, I can move stuff around pretty easily.
So I'm going to probably break that array like tomorrow or the next day and split it up into like, you know, one for my time machine, one for TIFF's time machine and one for like our, our big archive.
And maybe that one's expandable, but the time machines aren't, et cetera.
Um,
One big concern here was backup.
And so you guys both have... Do you both have Backblaze?
No, I use CrashPlan.
Oh, really?
I have both.
Okay.
Really?
I'm curious.
What's your split there, John?
What do you use each of them for?
My computer's Backblaze.
My wife's is CrashPlan.
And that's more redundancy, I assume?
Yeah, basically.
I got Backblaze years and years ago.
I don't even know if Crash Band was around, or at least I didn't know about it then.
And when it came time to get a backup thing for my wife's thing, I'm like, you know what?
Why don't I get a different one?
Mostly because Crash Band had been getting good reviews, and I wanted to give it a try.
And I figured if it's way better, then I'll switch.
And it's basically been a wash.
There's advantages and disadvantages to both.
So I just feel a little bit better having two different ones.
Yeah.
Yeah, it would probably be cheaper for me to consolidate on one, but I like having the two different ones.
And her computer is all SSD.
There's no spinning disks.
So any problems from inefficiencies due to crash-pumping Java or something, I assume they're being masked by her full SSD setup.
And so I'm happy with that there, and I'm happy with this here, and so I'm sticking with it for now.
For me, I have both also, but CrashPlan, I basically bought for my mom's computer.
One thing that's nice about it is that it emails you a weekly, I think, report of your backup status.
I can tell if my mom's computer hasn't been backed up in two months, I can tell, you know, I should probably fix that somehow next time I go see her or call her and tell her how to fix it.
It's nice when you want to...
be updated on the status of things.
It is very nice for that.
But my problem with CrashPlan is that from my house, it's just extremely slow to upload.
And I've seen so many people online talking about similar problems with CrashPlan in particular.
It seems like a pretty widespread issue that even though I have this massive upstream pipe, they can only use like 2.1 megabits of it.
And I tried all their tips, all their things like turn off encryption or change this buffer size or change this limit.
None of them had any effect on that cap.
And it just seems like it just depends on whatever crash plan node is nearest to you, whatever you get assigned to.
Some of them are just slow or overcrowded, and some of them are.
And so I basically can't use crash plan myself.
Yeah, every time I've looked into that, it's come down to your distance from the data center that you're transferring.
It's like geography, where you are, what ISP you're on, what the route is to the server you're eventually connecting to.
And so, like, it's hard.
Some people say, oh, that means you shouldn't get CrashPlan, but it may be CrashPlan.
The CrashPlan node that you're going to connect to is way closer to you and has better connection than the Backblaze one.
You won't know until you try it.
For me, it's about even for both of them.
Neither one of them ever fills my connection just because it's big, but I get better than 2 megabits on both of them.
I get, like, 6, 7-ish.
It varies, sometimes up to 9 on Backblaze.
CrashPlan may be a little bit slower, but I don't watch them that closely because, really, it's not...
Like once you get caught up, it doesn't run for more than 20 minutes every night.
Right.
You know, it's funny you say that you didn't get good speeds with CrashPlan because a friend of mine had recommended Carbonite.
And I tried that, and it was going to take about seven years for all my data to upload to Carbonite.
And then I tried CrashPlan, and this was – when I did my first upload, I want to say it was like a year, year and a half ago, maybe more than that.
And it pretty much maxed my line for like a day and a half or something like that.
Now, it could be that they're using a data center in Ashburn, which is in northern Virginia, which is only a couple hours drive from where we are.
And that would be somewhat significant for both of you guys.
That's complete speculation.
I have no idea if that's right or not.
But I think, John, you nailed it when you said it.
CrashPlan worked for me and had a really good upload speed, although they have a god-awful user interface, and it's all Java-based, like you guys said, and I hate it.
But the upload speeds were good, and everything else seems to work reasonably well, and I do like getting those updates.
So that's how I landed on CrashPlan, but it was mostly about upload speed, which is funny that you said it was terrible for you.
Yeah.
I'm assuming Marco's getting to this because he's going to talk about how online services view his NAS, whether it's eligible for backup or not, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And because that's the thing, Backblaze, I've used Backblaze from my computer and TIFF's computer for, I think, about three years now, something like that.
And we have, I think, a total of about three terabytes backed up between the two computers.
to it, and it's fine.
I've restored a couple files from it here and there, and it works.
I like Backblaze a lot, but Backblaze does not back up network drives.
Now, I've heard, I haven't tried this yet, and I think I might play with this.
I've heard that if you mount it over iSCSI,
That because iSCSI is kind of treated by the OS as a locally attached disk, apparently Backblaze can't tell the difference, but I haven't confirmed this yet.
And so anyway, apparently if you mount iSCSI drives, it will back those up.
That was my question about you mentioned you're doing time machine to it.
Is that one of those things where they're like, well, it's not officially supported by Apple, but the NAS manufacturer figures out how to make their thing work, and every time there's an OS update, you have to wait for the NAS thing to update to work with it?
Maybe.
They have implemented in their software, they have some kind of time machine server, and it does work.
I don't know if Apple has documented this in any way.
I'm pretty sure.
Probably not.
Because, like, NASA's have been doing that since Time Machine has existed, and every time there's an update, everyone who has one of these things who isn't tech savvy is like, oh, my thing broke, why is it... I mean, you have to understand, like, they're making it work, and it's not a big deal, but it's a big enough deal that Apple's not being careful to make sure they don't break it every...
os update especially major os updates and so that's why i would be leaning towards like that's why i've been worried about a nas because direct attached storage particularly like you know direct sata storage which is like right in there is the the most problem-free way to do time machine even external firewire i find ever so slightly flakier than you know internal internal drive because my wife has firewire although
With her system, who knows?
It could be the Thunderbolt bridge and stuff like that.
I have a big firewire drive attached for her occasional time machines.
Well, in theory, iSCSI would fix that problem.
You'd still have to get the iSCSI initiator to work on the new version of it.
Yeah, but that's the thing.
Then you're like, okay, well, it's fine.
Time Machine is fine with it, but does the iSCSI driver work with Mavericks, for example, and how long do you have to wait for them to update the iSCSI driver and how reliable is that driver?
Those are the details.
Or even stuff like, I guess SuperDuper doesn't care at all.
Well, one of us would be in a position to test that.
John.
You can download Mavericks too, right?
I guess I could, yeah.
I have all these drives sitting around.
I suppose if you run with this setup for a while and you're like, okay, well, whatever they did, Time Machine works fine and presumably you'll eventually upgrade to Mavericks and you'll say, okay, well, Time Machine works fine and I can super duper do it and Crash Planner or whatever sees it and backs it up, then that'll be fine.
I won't be that scared to do it, but I wouldn't want to be the one to find out by buying the big expensive NAS and then trying to get
my backup regime to work with it.
Well, I figure I could always fall back on iSCSI.
Let's say Mavericks comes out and it breaks the Synology time machine thing and Synology doesn't fix it soon, which itself is unlikely, I think, because one of the reasons why I picked them is because they're very active in development.
They have a lot of users.
They have a huge community of people who use and love these things.
I have never seen a storage product
I've very rarely seen any computer products at all that had such a universal acclaim as Synology NASA's.
When I asked about them, everybody on Twitter loved them.
There were zero reports of anything bad.
I was shocked how positive the response was.
they really are pretty on the ball with software updates.
They're working on a big update now.
There's so much user-created software you can run on it.
They have a whole package store you can browse and stuff.
It's pretty advanced, and it seems like they're really on the ball.
That's generally what you want.
You don't want...
the manufacturer that nobody's using for stuff like this because that that's i think more likely to be the one where some os update comes out and it breaks something that you relied on and it's just never fixed you know whereas if you're if you're with like the big dominant player or one of the big dominant players you're way more likely not to have those problems uh or or you're likely to have those problems be fixed sooner in most cases
Do you know what the thing is running?
Is it like a free BSD thing in there?
It's some kind of Linux or BSD thing.
And it has an Intel Atom processor.
I believe it's x86-64, which I was pretty impressed by.
It's like a dual-core 2 gigahertz.
I think it was 4 gigs of RAM.
It has pretty good hardware in it.
And, like, you could... One of the things I tried was you can... If you want to, you can directly install CrashPlan on it.
And so I tried that to see if that would be any better, and it wasn't.
But it's like, you know, the instructions are, like, you SSH into it.
Like, first you go enable SSH, then you SSH into it, and you, like, manually download this package with wget and everything.
And so, like, you can do...
pretty much everything you can do with a low-powered Linux box right on the thing.
Does it have built-in stuff?
Does it have a DLNA server or anything?
It does, yeah.
And there's so many things.
I've barely scratched the surface.
It has DLNA.
It has iTunes sharing.
And again, I'm sure that's using some kind of undocumented or unsupported API by Apple.
But it does have an iTunes share.
But I haven't even used any of this stuff yet.
I haven't had time to play with it all yet.
Yeah, because that's always the, like, once you go NAS, you're like, well, once I have a NAS, why don't I just get a full flat, like, get a Mac Mini and hook up, like, a big RAID attachment to it, and then, you know, like... Right, you could.
I mean, there's no... One of the big reasons for me, honestly, was simplicity of devices and also cost, because...
This thing retails for $1,100, and this is their high-end.
It was the DS1813 Plus model.
It's fairly new, and it's eight bays.
There's a five-bay version that's significantly less.
I think it's $900 or $800.
Basically, the more bays you want, the more expensive it is.
But...
Once you put together the cost of a Mac Mini, even a low-end used one, Mac Minis aren't that cheap because everybody has some kind of use they have for one.
So you can't really buy a Mac Mini for less than about $500 if that's any good at all.
And so you throw in a $500 or more Mac Mini, give it some kind of connection.
Once you add a big enclosure that has four to eight bays in it...
If you want that to be fast, it's going to have to be probably Thunderbolt.
And so that's going to be really expensive.
If you don't care about it being fast that much, you probably at least want it to be Firewire 800 or USB 3.
So you're still talking a lot of cost.
Then you have two things.
You have two power bricks.
You have two things heating up your closet.
And then the cost savings really is pretty minimal at that point.
Or it's more expensive going that way.
I looked at that stuff, but multi-drive high-speed enclosures are really expensive.
Yeah, you'd end up buying something like that anyway and connecting your computer.
But the true Greek way to do it, which neither one of us probably feels like we have time or inclination to do, is get one of the free NAS things, make your own ZFS NAS out of your own BSD box and a bunch of devices.
And ZFS is really cool.
I'm a big fan of ZFS, and people wonder why I don't build my own NAS out of ZFS.
But I would love for someone to make that product for me to buy.
But I'm not going to spend time.
I don't have a ton of time to screw up my storage.
I want my storage to be bulletproof, problem-free, supported by a company like this analogy sounds like it is.
I prefer it to be from Apple because then it's like all one big thing and I would pay whatever crazy, but they're not into making storage, so fine.
Well, yeah, honestly, if Apple did make one of these, I probably still wouldn't get theirs because it would be some kind of, like, side project for them they didn't really care that much about.
And so it probably wouldn't be very good.
But they like the X-Serve Raid.
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah, they did make something like this, and they no longer make it for very good reasons.
And also, you know, one big advantage that Synology has also over, like, a build-your-own thing is that it's really quiet.
Because it has these two giant... I think they're probably about 92mm size fans.
They're big, slow, powerful fans.
And most of the time, they're very quiet.
When I first got the thing, I just had it next to my computer on a little end table here.
Because I was still configuring it and still putting drives in and out.
And I figured, alright, I'll set it up here.
And I'll move it into the closet in a couple days when it's all set up.
And I was shocked how quiet it was.
The drives make all the noise.
The fans are almost inaudible.
Like, it was quieter than my Mac Pro.
And the Mac Pro, despite a lot of people complaining about it, I think is a pretty quiet computer, especially given what's in it.
It definitely is if you've ever owned a G5 before then.
Yeah, yeah.
It's way quieter.
Yeah, so, you know, it really is.
I mean, yeah, I mean, the Synology basically is just an embedded computer with a bunch of bays and some custom...
custom software but it really is a very very nice implementation of that and so once you throw in how nice it is how flexible it is how much it can do and how it's very cost competitive with building your own um i don't think there's much reason to build your own honestly unless you have very specialized needs that you can't get with somebody else's thing
One of my attractions to a NAS is that I wouldn't have to have it in the same room as the computer, so then I probably didn't care how noisy it is.
Because you're right, I know how noisy a drive is, and even if you have a fanless device, which would not be very smart, yeah, the drives make noise.
So that's why I don't want to buy the new Apple router thing with the fan in it, because I wouldn't buy the time capsule version.
It has a fan?
yes they all have fans i didn't know that the time capsule ones have fans and even the ones without the time cap this is the same case like yeah they just leave it empty but yeah they all have fans so i don't know yeah plus it's like this weird vertical ugly telephone booth thing so
so i was thinking about buying that because i'm having some range issues i've always had range issues with the current one which is in the aforementioned closet um so the fan wouldn't bother me that much but still that sucks that it has a fan although did you know you wouldn't the first generation apple tv had a fan and most people didn't know that um yeah no but it was just really really quiet most of the time yeah i mean it was it was like a mac mini the first generation apple tv
Yeah, like a very, very low-spect one.
Yeah, that got super hot even with the fan.
Yes, it really did.
Wait, to go back a step, why wouldn't you just drop like an Airport Express or another Airport Extreme in a different part of the house if the house is all wired with Cat 6?
Basically complexity and interference.
I had that set up in a couple of apartments before I bought the house because a lot of old apartments have very, very severe range problems because of what's in the walls because it's so old and it's all like...
you know, metal sheeting and brick and stuff that, stuff that is not very radio friendly.
And, uh, so yeah, I, in two apartments I had, I had like the, the airport extreme as the home base station and then like a little airport express, uh, usually wired, um, like with a very long cable from, from the base station.
And, uh,
It never worked that well.
Sometimes your devices would pick the wrong one, and then the connection would just be really bad, and they wouldn't switch to the other one, even though it would have a better reception.
Did you have it set up with that fancy Apple?
Yeah, WDS.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That didn't make a difference?
Yeah, WDS is not just an Apple thing, but if you use all Apple stuff, it makes it a lot easier to use it.
Right, right.
And yeah, I tried that, and it really didn't do much.
It wasn't very good.
So, like, if that's your only option to get good range, then, you know, do what you got to do.
But if there's any other alternative, like, if you can just buy a better router and have better range from one router, that's a better way to go.
If that'll cover your area.
All right, we should talk about our second sponsor, which is related to everything we've just been talking about.
Can you take a guess?
Is it File Transporter?
It is.
It is File Transporter.
I cheated.
I knew who it was.
Really?
You looked?
Yeah.
That's such a cheat move.
But at least I fessed up.
So this fits in with a lot of what you were just saying.
File Transporter, well, that's their website.
Their product is just called Transporter.
Transporter is an off-cloud, peer-to-peer storage drive for privately sharing, accessing, and protecting your files.
So what does all that mean?
Okay.
It's designed with your modern social lifestyle in mind.
File Transporter is an enclosure, a drive enclosure, with or without a drive.
You can supply your own.
You can buy one directly from them.
It's an enclosure that looks pretty cool with a network port on the back.
So it is basically a NAS enclosure, but with some special software that allows you to do some special things.
So one thing is they integrate directly into Finder.
And very similar to how Dropbox integrates.
And you can use it in a similar way that you would use Dropbox, where you have a special synced folder and you have Finder integration with right-click links and sharing links and stuff like that.
But all this data is stored on that physical device that you own, on that physical hard drive sitting in your house somewhere or your office.
And so it isn't sitting on someone else's servers.
It's huge security implications there, huge ownership implications there.
And you can still, if you have multiple transporter devices, let's say your friend has one, or you have one at home and one at work, you can selectively share files or folders between any two transporters or any number of transporters with only the people you select.
So it's nice and secure.
End-to-end encryption with all communication that goes over the internet.
So all the data can be read by nobody in transit.
And if you have multiple transporters, they will automatically sync these shared folders to each other.
So you really get a lot of that Dropbox-like functionality, a lot of that convenience of cloud storage without having to have your data be held by somebody else.
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So what else does this do?
So you can have automatic off-site backup.
That's a huge use for this.
We were just talking about – actually, I need to revisit that topic when we get back to the show.
We were just talking about how the heck do you backup network attack storage.
With Transporter, there's a really great option.
If you buy two of them, you put one in your house and one in your office or your friend's house or your parent's house or something maybe geographically far away.
then you can have these things automatically back up to each other all the time.
And so you have a constant off-site backup in real time.
And again, everything is encrypted end-to-end, so it's really, really secure.
And it's also great for collaboration between people.
Let's say John and Casey have to send me their audio files after every show we do.
If we were all using transporters, which you're working on, but if we were all using transporters, then...
we could just have this one shared folder, and everyone could just drop their audio in that shared folder, and it just syncs everywhere using direct traffic between our devices, and nobody in the middle able to read the data, including the NSA or anybody else.
Well, unless they've cracked the encryption, but I think that's unlikely.
This is pretty good encryption.
And so...
You can have this awesome collaboration with very large files that would be prohibitive on other services or would be just really, really expensive or just not allowed.
It wouldn't fit.
It's a really great solution here for collaboration, for sharing.
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Yeah, you know what it is, is if you didn't want to go the nuclear option of like a Synology or Synology, whatever we're calling it, or a Drobo, but you still wanted a fairly, a really cheap, but not bad cheap, good cheap, network-attached storage that actually does more than just sit there on your own network that you can never access from anywhere else, this is your ultimate answer.
And I've been using one that they sent me, which is very nice of them, and I really, really like it.
It really is really nice.
Yeah, it's – and I don't think it has to be – this is one of the reasons why I'm comfortable talking about this in the middle of a NAS discussion.
I don't think it has to be mutually exclusive between this and a NAS.
I think these are different use cases.
No, that's true.
You're right.
I think a lot of people are going to be fine with one or the other, but a lot of people could really use both.
It really is about what's your use case here and –
And the transporter does things that I don't know of any NAS that does similar things.
And it's all, you know, very integrated and everything.
And it really is a very unique device and very cool.
All right, so back to our NAS backup question.
I hope this isn't too boring, so I'm going to go through it quickly.
Basically, Backblaze won't backup network attacks drives.
They might backup iSCSI.
I will know that eventually if I ever try iSCSI.
My fear with iSCSI is, as we said before, I'm worried about like...
What if the next version of OS X comes out and there's only, as far as I know, two major iSCSI initiators for it.
There's GlobalSan and Atto.
The GlobalSan one's free.
Atto's $200, I think.
Dave Nanian of SuperDuper fame, which is an awesome app for cloning drives and backing up, he strongly recommended the $200 Addo one.
He said it's significantly better and that he's seen a lot of people have trouble with the Global Sam one.
I haven't tried either of them yet, but he is pretty qualified to know things like storage and people having trouble from Macs using hard drives.
So the guy who makes SuperDuper knows that stuff pretty well.
Yeah.
I would imagine his support email alone is a vast treasure trove of Mac storage-related issues.
So I'm inclined to try the Addo one.
But then again, it's like, you know, what happens if an OS update breaks this?
Then you can't access your shares or your drives or your time machine.
So I'm a little wary about that.
Windows, I believe, for a long time now, I think for a couple of versions, has supported iSCSI initiation just in Windows.
I don't think we know why Apple doesn't do it in Mac OS X, except they just haven't cared yet or haven't had time yet.
I don't really know the reason.
I assume there's no weird patent issues or anything, but for whatever reason, Apple doesn't support it directly yet, so you have to have these third-party things.
Obviously, these are probably kernel-level extensions and
That's kind of questionable.
I don't know.
John, what do you think about that stuff?
I prefer to run no third-party kernel extensions if I can help it at all.
I mean, getting back to the old Mac Pro again, that was the beauty of the thing.
That's why I would buy the biggest video card that could come with because I didn't want to buy an aftermarket video card and have to deal with the video driver because who knows how that would flake out.
So I'm totally on board with the – and I slowly weaned myself off every other one of the –
in memory resident hacking things like the various uh application enhancer and symbol plugins and stuff like that like i'm just trying to get that stuff out so i'm really hesitant to bring in anything else like that especially something for storage and you know maybe if it was officially supported by apple like that's even more like you know fusion drive like yeah apple says you know not really technically supported to make your own fusion drives but it totally is like they use the command line utilities apple's own command line utilities and yet i still feel wary that
you know, someone at Apple is not QA-ing the setup that I've created with my external Fusion Drive because it's not part of their QA automation and they're going to accidentally break it and not know it and I'm going to be the poor sucker that finds out.
Right, exactly.
So yeah, I'm not a big fan of the idea of iSCSI.
It sounds like it would be awesome in practice.
Not for our network share because only really one computer can access it responsibly at a time.
But, you know, certainly for each of our computers' time machines, that would be perfect.
Yeah, it's not the technology.
iSCSI is fine.
I mean, like, it's the fact that Apple, you'd have to install a third-party driver.
Right, it's a client issue.
Yeah.
And yeah, I'm with you.
I really, it makes me very uncomfortable to have to rely on or even have installed any third-party kernel extensions.
I really prefer not to or to minimize them.
So...
I'm probably just going to keep with the possibly hacked network setup that they have where they're just emulating the Mac OS X slash time machine server or time capsule server thing.
Because it works so far.
I'll see in practice.
But yeah, I'll see.
So anyway, for backup, obviously backing up your time machine drive to a cloud service is probably not necessary.
It might even be problematic because of its structure.
So I don't back that up to a cloud service.
But...
And I should point out too, there was an article, I don't know, it's probably out of date now.
I was trying to find it during the discussion before the sponsorship.
There was an article somewhere, I'd love the link if anybody can find it, that compared all of the popular online backup services and how they handle Mac file system metadata.
It was from the Arc guy, wasn't it?
Yes, because Arc won, basically.
But I can't find this right now.
If somebody finds it, I'll put the link in the show notes.
I've been complaining about that for years.
First, I've complained to Backblaze, then to CrashPlan.
It's pretty much trivial to create a file with a bunch of Mac-specific metadata and then back it up and then bring it back down and see how much of it you've lost.
In practice, mostly doesn't matter, but it's like, after a certain number of years, especially if you're pitching your product to Mac users...
You should, you know, pick up the ball.
And Backblaze, to its credit, has gotten a lot better since the way it started years and years ago.
But I think Ark is still the only one that's like at 100%.
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me at all because Arc is like... Backblaze and CrashPlan both have these kind of Java-heavy APIs.
I don't know if Backblaze actually is Java.
No, Backblaze is not Java.
It's not a good interface, though.
The settings pane I really don't care for for Backblaze.
It's better than the Java thing from CrashPlan, but it's not great.
I've had some weird UI issues with it over time where...
It works, and the data's backed up, but sometimes the UI is a little confusing or clunky.
So not a huge fan of Backblaze's interface, but Arc is like a real Mac app made by a real Mac nerd who obviously is really into getting it very Mac native and getting that right.
And...
And so I really respect that, and that's obviously one of the reasons why he cares so much about getting all the Mac metadata right.
It's kind of like something that you could talk to Dave Nanny about because a lot of the cases with the esoteric Mac metadata…
it's not so much that either Backblaze or CrashPan isn't doing it because of some technical reason.
A lot of times it's like a policy decision.
It's like, all right, well, this thing has ACLs, but it's mounted with permissions, with the permissions off type of thing.
You're not even sure what the right thing to do is.
What UID should I attach to this if it's mounted with permissions off, but I see that there's an ACL on it as well.
You don't even know what the right thing to do is.
What does this person want?
And when they restore it,
The environment could be totally different and things could have shifted.
It's not always clear what you should be doing.
So I think a lot of these bigger backup things are like, look, we can't even figure out what to do with that thing.
So we're just going to...
We're just going to drop it on the table and make sure that it works.
Ownership is an obvious one.
Say you back up something and you delete that account and someone else comes on with the account with the same UID.
You have to just forget about ownership because it's like NFS.
Oh, well, your UIDs have to match or you need some sort of directory service or some sort of configuration file to map your UIDs.
There's no real distributed internet-wide identification and UIDs are so...
It's just a number.
It's not a good way.
So the policy decision surrounding ownership or any other kind of metadata associated with files is difficult, and people just want it to work.
They just want their data back.
So you're like, oh, this didn't exactly preserve.
It's not exactly the way it was when I put it up.
What's different?
Well, if the ownership changed, you probably don't care that much unless one of the things was set UID root and now your application won't run because you tried to restore it.
God, file systems are terrible.
LAUGHTER
Naturally, you had to throw that in there.
It wouldn't be a complete discussion about storage without a Syracuse file system complaint.
Anyway, so my backup solution for the NAS is... Time Machine, I don't backup to the cloud because of issues.
And the network shares that I've created... Right now, I'm using Arc on the Mac...
to back it up via the network mount to Amazon Glacier.
And Glacier, for those unfamiliar, is kind of like S3 in that it's an Amazon storage service that you can access, just pay per use.
But it doesn't really work anything like S3.
It's made for long-term archival storage, just stuff that you probably will never have to look at.
And if you do ever need to look at it, you don't mind it being delayed by five hours to go retrieve it.
And so for online backup, it makes a lot of sense in a number of ways.
There's a few weird things about it that make it a little inconvenient.
But the great thing about it is that it's dirt cheap.
I believe it's a cent per gig per month.
Something like that.
So backing up a terabyte is like $10 a month.
It's something like that.
It's not as cheap as Backblaze and CrashPlan.
It isn't.
You're right.
But...
It's way cheaper than S3, which I believe the base rate for S3 is still $0.08 a gig.
So it's like, you know, eight times cheaper or something like that.
Yeah, that's why ARK was a non-starter back when it came out because it was S3 back-end.
And I have like five terabytes up on these free online, or these, not free, these $5 a month online backups or whatever it's at now.
And so, yeah, if I had to S3, that's too much for me.
Exactly.
So...
And CrashPlan, the reason I tried it is that CrashPlan does backup network stuff if you tell it to.
And as far as I can tell, that doesn't appear as though it's going to change anytime soon.
It seems like that actually is their official policy to backup network stuff.
So...
So Backlays won't do it.
CrashPlan so far will, if you can tolerate their slow upstream, if you have that problem from your connection.
And Arc will do it directly to S3 or Glacier, which is awesome and very nicely integrated, but has high storage costs per month relative to their services.
So...
There's no perfect solution for most people.
For me, I'm using Glacier through Arc, and it's going to end up being something like $10 or $15 a month for what I'm putting up there.
So I'll see.
That's what I'm doing so far.
It's worked.
I uploaded the whole set already of what's there so far.
Yeah, so far, so good.
There's a number of other advantages to Arc as well.
We should really talk about this in more detail.
Well, honestly, we probably shouldn't talk about it in more detail sometime.
But one of the cool things about Arc is that it's storing data on Amazon S3 or Glacier, which are these services that you kind of control because you sign up for Amazon Web Services, and then it's your access keys that it's using to access the stuff and to put it up there.
Yeah.
you can always use any other S3 client or access method and look at your data directly yourself without involving Arc.
And then the data format, they've actually documented the data format, and they even have this open-source GitHub restore tool
so that you can always look and see, like, how do you restore data?
So, like, if Arc's maker haystacks offer, if they ever go away or become dicks or something, you can always go and just get your data off there, and, you know, without being, you know, proprietary locked into someone else's server.
So there's a number of cool things about it, as long as you can swallow that much higher storage cost than the other options, which is admittedly a pretty big problem for a lot of data.
I think that's all I have on this topic so far.
What do you guys, do you have anything to add?
This has been kind of the Marco show, unfortunately.
I'm sorry.
Well, it happens.
I actually don't have any particular thing to add on that.
I mean, I'd love to get something like that, but to be honest, my data storage needs just
aren't that big i don't i don't generate that much data we don't have a kid we don't have fancy cameras so for me it's just not a need i have but john i would assume you have at least a couple questions uh i mean i still don't know what i'm gonna do uh when i get my fancy new mac pro like i'm thinking about why do i have all this data and that the stupid dream that i've had since i had a mac 128k with a floppy drive has
has been every time i get a new computer you know in storage space was going up so much like all right on this new computer i'll be able to fit everything from my old computer plus all the stuff i have like that i had to take off my old computer because it didn't fit like so that box of floppy disks next to it or when i had a hard drive like i had to have a bunch of stuff that i can't fit on the hard drive but it's not that important it's like old stuff i'm not really into it but i have to put it on the side but i'm like
Boy, when I get that next computer, I'll be able to have all my current stuff, plus everything from my entire lifetime back.
Because it's so small.
Like, how big was the stuff that was on my Mac 128K?
How big was the stuff that was on my Mac Plus, you know?
And, like, it's so tiny compared to, you know, it's like the hockey stick graph of the iPhone sales.
Like, this new hard drive will hold everything I have now, plus everything I've ever created in my entire life, right?
And...
That has never quite been the case.
So for example, like I have an external one terabyte here just holding WWDC videos for like the past three years, right?
Because I wanted to reference them when I'm writing my review and I couldn't put them on my main drive because if I put them on my main drive, they'll start to go into my backup vortex and my main drive is ever so slightly bigger than my other backup ones.
And so I'll run out of room, like I won't be able to make the super duper clone because I'd have to exclude, you know, like it's just easier to get them out of there, right?
I have stuff backed up on drives that are shut, like all my Apple videos.
I'm like, do I really need to see the videos from WWC 2003?
Do I need those to be on my hard drive?
No, I probably don't, so put them off.
And so I keep thinking the next year we're going to get, I was like, all right, I can finally bring all that stuff in.
Come on, guys, WWC 2003, it's your time to be on the hard drive again.
because it's convenient for me to get at.
Sometimes I don't want to go rummaging through things and figuring out what disk something was on.
I just want it all to be there, right?
And so maybe the NAS gives me that.
It's like, well, finally, I could put like 12 terabytes.
Surely I can fit everything in there.
And then I won't feel guilty about having just gigs upon gigs upon gigs of Apple videos and whatever else in there.
And I don't even forget about it.
I know the people who have tons and tons of both legal and illegal movies and stuff.
I don't even do that.
I have Blu-rays, DVDs.
I do not have digital versions of those.
So I'm not even entering that area.
I'm just talking about my digital crap, which is like maybe at this point 100 gigs or so of photos plus probably more than that.
I have more Apple video than I do pictures of my own children at this point.
Although maybe they'll cross over at some point.
But the problem is WDC 2013 is like 1080p video, and that stuff is big.
Yeah.
Well, you can download lower res, but still, even the lower res ones are like a gig per session or something.
I almost considered downloading lower res.
I'm like, no, you'll regret it later when you have your three petabyte holographic cube.
You'll be like, damn it, I should have downloaded 1080p.
Those things are nothing now compared to my holographic cube.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, my rule is, like, you know, if it's something that can be probably easily re-downloaded from somewhere in the future, I don't need to even store it most of the time.
And if I do choose to store it, I don't really need to back that up to more than just, like, you know, like, the NAS has its own built-in RAID level to prevent against some of those failures, and Time Machine is another level.
But, like, you know, like, I don't need to necessarily cloud backup WWDC videos.
Yeah.
Well, but the thing is, I don't assume that I can redownload them.
And, you know, like, I assume they'll like go away and I won't be able to just look at their stupid developer documentation URLs.
Every single major release, those things break.
So I'm like, I'll forget it.
I'm never going to be able to get these videos again.
I got to grab them now.
And, you know, and that's it.
I'm never going to find them again.
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's like some of the stuff, like Apple has their, the Apple Keynote podcast feed.
I think they call it Apple Special Events or Apple Keynote, something like that.
It's in the iTunes store.
There's multiple feeds.
There's the HD one, there's the 1080p one, which is not confusing at all.
Right, and the 1080p one in many cases is just upscaled.
Yeah, I know.
Anyway, so those, I save all of those, and I have those in long-term backed-up storage because I do sometimes refer back to them, and it would suck not to – yeah, for the same reason you have them.
I'm sure – I don't even have to ask.
I know you have them.
I just looked at one in real media, like .rm file.
Nice.
Because I was just looking up the exact quote of, like, WWDC 1999, and I had it in .rm.
It's also on YouTube.
Yeah, but, you know, who knows about that?
But YouTube has made it more difficult to download.
I tried to leech it from YouTube, and the sync issues were off.
So I'm like, you know what?
This real media file still plays, and it's actually higher quality than the YouTube one.
Yeah.
But yeah, so stuff that's for historical reference that I'm likely to look back on five or ten years out for some reason, that I'll keep, even if it's big videos.
But WWDC session videos, I very rarely find a reason to look back more than one year on those.
And Apple still has those up from a year ago.
I think the first time I'm looking for something from five years ago and can't find it, then I'll start saving them.
I have a VHS tape of a WWDC thing, which I didn't go to.
It was before my time, but a friend of mine who has been going to Apple developer conferences far longer than I have was cleaning out his basement.
He said, do you want this?
I said, you know what?
I think I do.
Do you still have a VHS tape player?
I do.
It's in the attic, but I have it.
My Sony VCR that I bought when I got married still works.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
All right, so is that it?
Yeah, I think we should wrap it up before we talk another two hours about VHS tapes and gigs of videos.
I agree.
All right.
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, MindBlitz app and FileTransporter.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause 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
me too.
Accidental.
Accidental.
Tech podcast so long.
Polygon Sandwich had a good line in the chat that I suppose she said that my kid should play Casey at Letterpress.
Oh!
Oh, what a jerk.
Getting back to the concentration game thing.
I didn't see that.
Oh, that's funny.
I bet you I'd still lose.
We got to make that happen just to see.
No, don't.
If you do, don't tell me.
Because, oh, God.
Sometimes she sees me playing and she says, what are you spelling?
Like, she's in kindergarten, so she doesn't really know how to spell anything.
Oh, God.
You know, you should do, like, there's a lot to be said, Casey, for the technique that I have used very often in both this and Scrabble, which is, like, there's no time limit.
Just start tapping letters.
You don't have to know if it's a word.
Many times I'm surprised when I hit submit that the random assortment of letters that I put up on the thing turns out to be a word.
Right, because there's no penalty for trying to submit a word.
Right.
So I just, I sit there and I just try and try and try and, you know.
It doesn't work quite as well in letterpresses.
There's too many possibilities.
But Scrabble, it works really well because you just have the letters you have, and the number of combinations is actually quite small.
Yeah, I just don't have the patience for that.
Yeah, that's why you lose and lose and lose.
Oh, that's not the sound it makes.
Whoa, okay.
What is the sound it makes?
That sort of phonetic spelling of a sound, sort of an onomatopoeia for the sad trombone, should not have P's in it.
There's no P at the end of a trombone sound.
Oh, it's the sad trombone.
W-A-H.
W-A-H would be a lot closer.
Womp womp sounds like you're banging something, like you're playing that thing where the moles pop up from the arcade.
What is that called?
Whack-a-mole.
There you go.
Oh, God.
Only you would get this worked up about something so mundane.
I think I complained about it.
I hate it.
Because it doesn't read right.
I read it, and I'm like, for the longest time, I didn't know what it meant.
Then I bothered Googling, and I'm like, that does nothing like sad trombone noise.
W-A-H-W-H would be way better.
Just...
W-O-M-W-M isn't good at... Womp?
It really looks like you're hitting something.
It makes no sense.
Do you disagree?
No, I don't know.
I never really dug into the intricacies of whether my sad trombone spelling was appropriate or not.
It's not yours.
I mean, it's the Internet's.
It's like the at in front of the Twitter replies, which is so dumb.
Like, at whatever.
I remember when whoever first invented that, I did not like it.
I mean, it's not like I could fight against it.
What could you do?
But you sort of could, because in 2007, in January, there was like 100 Twitter users or whatever.
Yeah.
So to hopefully get us back on track in the thing that, by definition, doesn't have a track.
You think we're going to get back on track after that?
No, God, no.
So what are we doing for titles?
Are we doing Full Brickter?
Are we doing Jack into Cyberspace?
I like Full Brickter.
Jack into Cyberspace is dumb.
It's hysterical.
Because it's funny and you said it.
I said it to be intentionally dumb.
Sure.
Sure.
In any case, so I say Fulbrichter, and if we have a quorum on that, then that's good.
Yeah, now he'll listen to the show.
You put his name in the title, maybe he'll perk up.
Yeah, that's how we get him.
That's how we get him, yeah.
We're happy trolling him.
He listens to one episode.
Woo!
I love how everyone tried to blame me for going on vacation.
Everyone totally missed the whom joke.
There were a couple people that nailed it, but most people didn't.
All the replies that I saw, I guess I just only saw the ones that that mentioned to me.
They're like, oh, it's you again.
No, he said whom.
It's clear who it is.
A lot of people thought Casey wrote that tweet, though, because of the whom.
Yeah, because you have not shared the credentials for that account with me, and I presume not John either, so that's all you.
No, you're the only one that doesn't have it, Casey.
John and I both control it without you.
No, I do not put any tweet on that thing.
I disclaim all responsibility for tweets on that account.
I don't have the password.
I'll give it to you guys if you want.
I don't want it.
I don't want it.
Because I don't have enough.
My Twitter client situation is fraught enough as it is, and I don't need multi-client
isn't handled that well by the ones that i use and i don't i don't want to add to my pile then we'd have to then like go into like that stupid uh carrot initials ending every tweet so everyone knows who it's from no screw that do the paul and storm thing where you do the bracket you don't know who paul and storm i forget i've heard this is this is my dark crystal moment for this week
I'm cutting myself off, not even giving you a chance.
I'm just like, I've just decided you don't know who that is.
You're right.
Yep.
I've heard those two words, or three words.
Yeah, I've heard those words in the English language.
As a unit.
Yeah.
And goodnight.
I was Googling who the hell these people are.
Don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it, Casey.
Hey, Arlington, Virginia.
That's relatively close to me.
There you go.
Musical duo.
They have a joint Twitter account was the point, and they do square bracket, capital P, square bracket for Paul and S for Storm before each tweet.
It's a system.
If we shared the credentials for that account, I think part of the fun would be never signing the tweets and everyone, including each other, could guess who the hell had posted them.
Although, I don't know, I suppose it would be pretty obvious because I'd use whom everywhere.
Jerks.