You’ve Exceeded Some Limit
I was going to buy a streaming box for a fleeting moment when I thought, uh, when you were becoming a vlogger, right?
Well, no, I'm still, I'm still becoming a vlogger just exceptionally slowly, but I thought about buying a streaming box when I thought I was going to get into like switch streaming with, uh, with iMike and then never ended up doing so.
I wonder which of us makes our second YouTube video first, you or me.
It's a race to the bottom, I assure you.
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Guess what?
We don't really have any.
I think that's because, in part, we just released, or Marco just released, last week's episode earlier today because we are recording...
The episode from the future in the past or something, because it is currently the 20th of July.
We are recording the episode that will be released on or around the 26th of July because our vacations are in serial.
And so we didn't really have time to amass follow up.
Other than to say we are going to be doing a Q&A episode, I believe.
What did you say, John?
Master of Ceremonies, Syracuse.
So you said the recording on August 4th and we're doing a double recording with back to back episodes, which is why we're doing the Q&A, because we're just going to answer questions until we all die.
And then we'll make two shows out of it.
Sounds wonderful.
So anyway, so yes, please pile up questions.
At this time, the only way to get a question put in to be a contender for the show is to tweet with the hashtag AskATP.
Please do not email us because it will get lost to the ether.
And if we were cooler like Hello Internet, we would have asked for postcards, but we are not that cool nor that organized.
That would be a terrible mistake if we learn nothing from Hello Internet.
Who wants to go to the post office or P.O.
box and bring home a bunch of pieces of paper and then transcribe the things on them?
Terrible mistake.
Yeah, so please tweet hashtag AskATP, and we will hopefully select your question.
Anyway, that's it for follow-up, right?
That might be record time.
We should have somebody go through and chronicle how long we spend on follow-up.
What does the trend line look like?
I'm sure there's one angry fan who has already done that.
Is that fan you?
Because no one else cares.
It's fine.
Sometimes there's none at all.
Sometimes there's just one thing.
Sometimes there's a lot.
If we record two days before we do a second recording, usually not that much.
Funny how that works out.
You should go on Adobe schedule vacations more often.
You're right.
Oh, man.
All right.
So let's start with the topics.
And first thing is the Apple A10X is 10 nanometer.
That's cool.
So tell us about this, John.
We were talking about Intel and their process advantage and how Taiwan Semiconductor was supposedly catching up.
But, you know, Intel still had a lead and also stuff.
And we were seeing we're going to see, you know, Intel was going to be first a 10 nanometer with a significant type of chip, not just memory or something like that.
um but as people who took apart uh the new uh the new ipad with the apple's a10x and it discovered uh the the a10x system on the chip is using taiwan semiconductors 10 nanometer uh process and a10x is not a tiny chip i mean in the grand scheme of things it's not as big as a xeon but it's pretty complicated right it's got multiple cores and a gpu and ios it's not just as simple as a memory chip so
I haven't been keeping up with Intel and its various woes.
that much but bottom line you know of all the apple devices we care about which includes pcs and and ipads and watches and phones and all sorts of other things the first one as far as i'm aware to get a 10 nanometer chip is this one and the chip is not from intel so whether or not intel has quote unquote lost its lead in process it is it continues to be embarrassing that apple's
system on a chip a xx line of chips uh are so fast and so low power and now are on a smaller process than the chips that are in all of apple's macs so it's kind of exciting slash depressing depending on how you look at it
So remind me, and I'm not being funny at all, what does the 10 nanometer represent, the lines within the processor, like the quote-unquote wires?
Is that correct or is that not even close?
Oh, I don't know.
They call it feature size.
I'm sure there's some standard for measuring from this thing to that thing.
I think it was like a dot pitch on monitors.
I'm sure there's some standard because you say, well, what is a feature?
It's from one transistor to another, how closely you can pack them together.
I have no idea.
maybe it's like the center of one to the center of the next one yeah but but there's different geometries like this is their fin fet thing like they're actually 3d if you look at the shape of where the source and drain and gate and everything is they they all have all these clever arrangements of layers of stuff someone should look up you could probably just go to the wikipedia and find out but it basically if you think of it like dot pitch on a monitor it's from you know
From the center of one thing to the center of the other, the question is how do they determine that?
Because I think there are different sizes and configurations of things that you can put down on a chip.
I'm assuming it is the smallest distance between two features.
Anyway, Taiwan Summon Conductor, doing pretty well.
Apple with its A-series chips, doing pretty well.
Intel, I don't know.
Doing okay.
kind of stumbling it was the recent announcement they were getting out of the wearables market that they were never really in yeah i was gonna say what did they have in the wearables market they had a they had a program and an initiative and it's not like like they've done many times like remember when they tried to get into the standalone gpu market with uh what the hell was that called chat room will tell me in oh yeah seconds or so yeah like about five years ago maybe yeah where they were taking a bunch of little x86 cores and put the larabee i got it for the chat room haha
Um, and they were going to make a run at the, the GPU market and they had evangelists and they had APIs and they had some Silicon and it just never came together.
They said, Oh, okay, well, we're not going to do that.
And then they, they,
concentrated on their internal gpus like the the integrated ones and they've come a long way on that partially supposedly a rumor has it uh at the behest of apple asking for more powerful integrated gpu so they don't have to include a discrete gpu on every single mac just to have to have any graphics performance worth a damn um they were going to get into wearables and they had an initiative and they had a team and they had blah blah blah and now they've just
They also had a bunch of things like getting into set-top boxes back in the day.
All the Intel failed programs where they were going to enter a new market.
I mean, if you want to trace it all the way backwards, it's when they divested of all their ARM holdings.
They had X-Scale.
They had ARM CPU, and they said, now we're going to get out of that business.
probably it's going to turn out to have been a bad idea but in theory like i mean it didn't have to be it could have been they got out of that business and they and they made a bunch of uh you know their own x86 chips that were just as good as the things that apple is making now but they didn't they didn't make those and apple did and so that's how you lose so you can trace it back oh you should have said there's no guarantee that if they kept x scale that they would have been able to do as good a job as apple is doing now so
It's a weird world we live in for someone who grew up in the Wintel era, but I'm still rooting for Intel because all the CPUs are in all the Macs, and I want a really good Mac, so let's get going.
Yeah, that's pretty much why I care about this stuff so much.
I know that it's probably, for lots of reasons we've discussed before, it's probably unlikely that we're ever going to see, or at least I guess never say never, but that anytime soon we're going to see Apple bring the A line of ARM CPUs to the Mac and have ARM Macs.
And that's kind of a shame because these CPUs are awesome.
They keep making these amazing chips and with their in-house designs that are kicking the butts of everything else in the mobile market and Intel is really having a hard time getting incremental performance gains every time they release something and they're even having a hard time releasing anything.
So I kind of wish that more of this excitement would be available on the Mac side because
Who knows what they could do?
Right now, they have this amazing A10X chip, based on the amazing A10 chip, making the iPad very competitive with low-end Macs in CPU performance.
And imagine what they could do with that if they let it run in a 150-watt desktop enclosure.
That could be really amazing.
But for lots of reasons we've discussed before, basically making our Macs is neither easy nor likely.
But I do think that's kind of a shame because there's all this exciting stuff happening over in the ARM world that us Mac fans are just kind of not a part of or minimally a part of.
I continue to think that there is nothing specifically magical about ARM that guarantees that if Apple...
Yeah.
you know, I think they would make good chips, no doubt.
And maybe they would make ones that are actually better than what Intel offers, but it's not, I don't feel like they would be crushing them in the same way that they're crushing on the, on the, you know, on the low power side, because this is not Apple's first chip.
Like, what was it?
The A6 was their first, you know, sort of their own design.
Yeah.
They've had years and years to get this good at system-oriented chips in tablets and phones.
They have no experience so far in making, you know, a Xeon class processor.
So even if they did make one,
The best you could hope for is probably like parity or a slight edge on Intel's things because they can make different choices.
But give them four or five years and I think they'd be doing really well.
But who knows?
Then we wouldn't be able to run Windows as well as we can now.
So that would be sad.
Who runs Windows anymore?
What year is this?
I do.
Casey does.
I used to.
No, I don't anymore.
I used to.
Yeah, Casey's a real developer now.
Ooh, sick burn.
But yay!
Yeah, my apologies to everyone who has to develop on Windows.
I feel bad for you.
Hey, man, I maintain C Sharp is an unbelievably good language.
It's just everything around it that's garbage.
I agree.
I completely agree.
And Microsoft has almost always been really good at developer tooling.
They're really good at that.
Just Windows is terrible.
But the developer tools are usually great.
But yeah.
And one thing before we cap off this topic is that
I do think that even though my example of the 150-watt Mac Pro slash high-end iMac chip would maybe be hard for them to move to, the A10X, the iPad class of chip they're making now, which is not that different from the iPhone class chip they're making, is probably suitable for at least the bottom two lines of MacBooks.
at least the MacBook 12-inch and at least the, what I call the MacBook Escape, the non-touch bar 13-inch MacBook Pro, I bet they could make an A-series chip that would be very competitive in those two form factors.
Yeah, I mean, they already do, practically.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just a question of the GPU.
And by the way, it's making me think about things about Mac losing out, like, oh, so they're missing out on Apple's, on the potential of Apple's expertise in the areas where they've shown they can make a really good chip and their potential expertise...
for higher bandwidth chips and also apple thus far is missing out on the other place that the action is happening that's relevant to the mac in terms of silicon chips that are inside there nvidia gpus that is currently where a lot of the exciting high-end action is happening on desktop computers and apple is thus far
pretending it doesn't exist and continuing to ship amd slash ati gpus which are fine but it's not you know it's like the excitement is happening on the arm side with apple's own things and in the gpu land the discrete gpu land the excitement is happening on nvidia's side of the fence and apple is like no we're just no intel and amd and we'll just ignore ignore all those fireworks and then the happy laughter happening in other areas
And I do think, ultimately, one of the biggest reasons why we're unlikely to see ARM Macs for the foreseeable future is I really don't think that a lot of Mac apps would be rewritten or recompiled for ARM in a prompt manner.
I think the Mac is... Some parts of the Mac are very healthy.
Content creation, high-end productivity tools, these are fairly healthy.
But...
There's a whole lot of Mac apps out there that are basically unmaintained, and some of which are very, very old.
And they continue to work now, just because the architecture hasn't changed in a long time, in over 10 years.
And so they continue to work, but...
I worry if Apple were to force an incompatible move to the basis of the operating system, I worry about what would happen to the app ecosystem.
I bet we'd lose a lot of apps.
As we're seeing right now, I mean, look, iOS in this way, iOS is way healthier than the macOS.
And the transition to iOS 11 is losing lots of apps.
Just from the 64-bit change, it was only a few years ago, for the Mac to change CPU architectures.
uh it would it would be it would be i think really difficult to move a lot of mac software over just because so much of it's unmaintained numerically ios obviously will lose more because it's numerically got so much more but on the mac i have some confidence you know the mac has gone through this multiple times before in the past that yes you always leave stuff behind but the apps that we care about
would be ported just just like they reported from 68k to power pc and those same apps that we care about that we're still around reported from power pc to intel and they reported from intel 32 bit to 64 bit and they would be ported from 64 bit like the apps we care about would would be ported it's just maybe like one or two random abandoned apps that you would lose but
numerically speaking on ios there's just so many apps and we all have some i think i don't know do you think you have more apps installed on cumulatively on your ios devices or on your max like numerically each application icon counts as one thing
Oh, it's no question, iOS.
I would guess the same.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably.
Maybe not on my iPad or my iPhone, yes.
I think my iPad is relatively lean and mean, but iPhone, yeah, I think Marco's right.
How many applications are in your applications folder on your Mac?
Just pick a random Mac.
I have 129.
112.
Although many of these I barely even recognize because I launch show infrequently.
Yeah, I know.
We all have junk in there.
Oh, this is reassuring.
So in my applications folder, I have two applications called system preferences, which apparently have exactly the same name.
That's good.
This does not make me feel good.
This is from 2014.
And the second one is from 2015 and 2016.
And one of them does not have a .app extension.
That makes me feel good.
I got to clear a lot of this crap out of here.
My God.
Anyway, you want to guess how many applications I have in my application?
I mean, if I have 129 and I keep things pretty minimal, I'm going to guess you have 200 maybe?
Yeah, I'm going to say 250-ish.
Is it Price is Right rules?
No.
Oh, okay.
Then I don't have to bet one application.
311.
Wow.
How many do you actually use on a regular basis?
Not 311.
I probably use something like 20 or 30 on a regular basis.
Mac tools tend to be larger in scope and fewer in number for a lot of people, I would bet.
There's a lot more like large productivity tools, large creation tools, large library tools as opposed to an iOS where you have a whole bunch of stuff that does like little things or one thing at a time.
Not to mention iOS has games and the Mac unfortunately doesn't.
I do have a subfolder for games.
Let's see what's in that.
I have a subfolder for Mac ports that I haven't touched.
I mean, I have a Steam icon there, too.
All right, so the games folder only have 42 items, but there are subfolders in there, so it just goes on and on and on.
I got a lot of applications.
Here's the thing.
The reason I have so many applications is they don't, on the Mac, applications aren't in your face like they are in iOS, like in Springboard.
They're in your face unless you bury them in a folder, like all of them are.
I don't watch applications if I go to the application folder like nobody does.
You do Command Space or whatever, right?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
and whenever i use like disk inventory x or whatever to find out where all my space is being taken up it's never with applications because in the grand scheme of things they're tiny you know i one terabyte drive even a huge application like maybe occasionally like marco i get cranky at some multi-gigabyte sound samples that are part of some stupid apple application but other than that um all the data is elsewhere so i never ended up deleting applications like i look in here and i've got like
i don't know when i got multiple old i've got delicious library two and three i've got many applications where they're like the history of the application is present in the folder as the the versions and the numbers and the icons go up and just i never i never ended up deleting them because it's not as and don't get me wrong my ios home screens are also a giant graveyard of ancient files which is why i'm kind of dreading when they drop 32-bit support because it's going to
well dreading and looking forward to because it'll it'll like reduce the number of applications by half because i think i still have applications there from like my original ipod touch that have just been carrying along from itunes backup to itunes backup i only had i think two yeah i have scorekeeper xl and icast pro and the scorekeeper developer said he's updating it icast has already done a new version that's like a million dollars so you know they're not actually really going to be lost
Is iCast the thing you use to do the live broadcast from the road?
I used to, yes.
It's an iCast server, an iCast broadcaster, rather.
So I used to do that from the road.
Now I just bring a Mac and use Bergamiba's iCast app because it's...
What I learned while doing our live show and setting up for that and doing various things over the last few years, I've learned basically that I greatly prefer Macs to be in those kind of production roles and not just for superstition of Macs being reliable and iOS not being, but just for the flexibility they offer.
You can do these things on iOS if you need to, but
I'm much happier and more versatile when I'm doing it on the Mac, if that makes sense.
I mean, we all know that you can't get work done on iOS, so that's why you're doing it on a Mac.
Oh, my God.
I still have Firefox?
Does anybody still use Firefox?
So we've gone during the pre-show that hopefully has not hit the regular show.
watching tv as a group and now we're letting all the people listen to us plunge through and go spelunking through our application folders as a group this is the best i still have make mkv i haven't ripped a blu-ray in years i just did that yesterday i have firefox i also have make mkv i just ripped i ripped days of thunder yesterday it's a great movie see i don't need i don't need to rip anything i can just play stuff off of your plex server
i know that's what that's exactly what i was doing and we bought days of thunder on blu-ray but blu-rays are barbaric and so i immediately ripped it and it is now on plex oh i still have open ttd i should play that the transport tycoon oh yeah i have uh applications with like the circle with a line through it i should just probably delete those i don't think i've ever even seen that do not run on my fancy new version of mac os called el capitan
Man, I can't even imagine cleaning out John's 10-year-old computer.
What you must find there.
Just never clean it.
That's the secret.
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So in the show notes near ish the top, but never, ever, ever high enough for us to actually talk about it has been three words and it has been here for months.
And those three words are Netflix credits skipping.
And apparently this is enough.
And John is flustered enough that he would like to talk to us about skipping credits in Netflix.
Um,
I don't know why I'm in for this ride as much as you guys are.
So let's all buckle up together.
We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
We really are.
You know why this is in there.
I mean, the link there explains it.
So this is from March.
So yes, it has been there for many, many months.
The story will link to the verge thing because by now it's the only URL we have for the stories that Netflix in their normal way was like testing this new feature on some platforms and some clients for Netflix that when you're watching a show on Netflix and the credits come on the opening credits to the show like there would be a button in the interface somewhere.
That says skip credits and click that.
Oh, yeah.
When we were in Chicago, we were finishing up House of Cards.
And I had done that by connecting my MacBook Adorable to the TV.
And I saw and used that button.
And so that was on the web client.
Yeah, and I'm not sure where they're rolling it out to and what clients or whatever, but it's not everywhere, and it seems like it's a thing they're testing.
Now, already for several years, Netflix has had a thing where if you're binge-watching and you watch one episode and the next episode's going to come, that it will not show the credits to the subsequent episode, so it'll just get right to the program.
I've seen that.
I don't know if that's show-specific or whatever, but it's been doing that for a long time.
So if you sit down and watch five episodes of a program, you don't have to see the opening credits five times, but you would have to see it once.
for the first one and now with the skip credits thing it'll be like if you don't want to see the opening credits to house of cards because you're afraid you'll die of old age you can and you're on the right interface you can click this button to skip it and the reason uh i put this in the notes so long ago is that
four years ago four years before this feature was added to netflix i am one of my rare fits of blogging wrote a blog post about this very thing about the idea of uh credit skipping in netflix type environments specifically it was also in the context of the playstation 4 which was not yet out but had been announced and the features have been announced and the title of this post is annoyance driven development the idea that if you look at
technology product or something that you're working on and think about the things that annoy you and other people about your product and try to knock those down one by one even if they seem silly i think uh refreshing remember this thing the playstation examples were
things like being able to pick up a game right where you left off and not having the thing uh start downloading a software update as soon as you turn it on and so they did a lot of things in the playstation 4 to remove the annoyances of the playstation 3 by giving it a low power mode and an auxiliary processor that let it do useful things when it's quote-unquote off like the fans are off it's sitting there you think it's completely off but it's not it's downloading software updates in the background it's you know it's preserving the state of your game so you can
Pick up right where you left off.
Even Nintendo has come on this bandwagon a little bit with the Switch where you can put the thing into sleep mode, pick it up, get it out of sleep mode, and you are exactly at the second you left off in your Zelda game, which makes you want to pick it up and play more than if you had to wait through a boot sequence or launch the game again or something like that.
And software updates, which are ubiquitous nowadays, having it download multiple gigabytes of stuff while you sleep so that when you wake up, it's all just already there for you is a great example of annoyance-driven development.
Because it's not the end of the world.
Like, oh, software updates have to happen and there's no getting around the fact that you've got to have multiple gigabytes and we can't make your internet connection faster.
It's like, but can we design the PlayStation 4 in a way to make this less annoying for people?
going so far as they'll have a, you know, a separate mode with a separate CPU and a low power state of like, it complicates the hardware tremendously, but it's, but it's a big win.
So in terms of streaming video, I was using house of cards as an example, because the credit sequence is really, really long.
I was saying how, how Netflix has changed how you watch television, how you have to reconsider every, every part of the experience and think about how annoying it is.
And the opening credits aren't annoying in the old world of television where, um,
There were no DVRs, and you just watched television when it was on, and that was it.
Commercials were annoying, but that's a whole separate issue.
But already, with Netflix and streaming video, they understand that people do binge-watching, and they did that thing where it will skip the credits to the next episode.
They just need to go to the next step.
Also, by the way, releasing entire seasons all at once instead of doling them out at an episode of the time.
They reconsidered so many things, and this seemed like the very next thing on the chopping block, which is, hey, credits.
They make sense when you are...
watching television in the old world and the new world do they make as much sense to have opening credits before every single episode or before any episode and i know as i said in this post there's lots of things about union contracts for screen actors and writers and everything and then there's the other angle over like oh people should get credit for their work and blah blah blah like basically the motivation behind
all those union rules and everything.
But I think you can't, you have to change, you have to change your outlook and the rules surrounding all this stuff as the technology changes.
And technology is changing how we watch television.
And so every single aspect of how we watch television should be up for grabs for reconsideration to say, is this the best way to do it?
Or is there a better way given how technology has changed how we watch television?
And apparently Netflix eventually, how many years later?
Four years later, eventually, more or less agrees with me that maybe the credits are a little bit too much, and maybe we should give people the option of skipping them entirely if they want.
There's already no commercials, so they've already got that going for them.
So anyway, I was excited enough about this in March to put it in the show notes and to leave it there, and now I finally get to talk about it.
And I feel like this is... I'm not going to say it's vindication, because I know a lot of people...
agreed with me when i originally posted this but it's more of a celebration to say you know i'm i'm actually getting the thing that i was asking for and it seems inevitable because netflix is very aggressive in these type of things i'm just i'm actually surprised it took four years for them to do it but more like this please
wow cool i feel better for having listened to that nothing you said was wrong but i felt like this has been sitting in the show notes like almost there but not quite there for months and i was expecting some sort of it's not timely it's not like you know it doesn't go bad john i love you so much and you know you don't have a product to speak of now that that uh what
What did Dr. Wave say your application was?
Was it a fart app?
Oh, yes.
I was so confused.
It looks kind of like a guy farting.
I don't know.
Anyway, Marco's got a part.
But anybody who's listening to this who has a product or is involved in making a thing that people use, it's a potential edge in the market.
Think about what is annoying about using products of your type.
And in the next version of your product, try to eliminate those annoyances and don't
Don't keep any sacred cows.
Like, oh, we can't change that.
You'll find out... You'll find a lot of people hold sacred many things they won't even consider changing.
Like, you have to consider everything and reconsider it in the face of technology and find the annoying things and be willing to...
you know do what sony did make your product way more complicated and way more expensive potentially introducing bugs because the payoff is when you when people turn on the playstation 4s the 11 gigabytes of the destiny 2 beta is already downloaded and the system update has already happened and they can start playing immediately even if it takes forever to download if it does it while you're sleeping you don't care and it's 100 worth it to add an entire separate cpu and low power state and special os mode for this so
and also skip those house of cards credits because come on we've all seen them enough now so i mean they're beautiful but they're so long oh my word it takes forever so long so long oh all right so uh let's talk about something that always cheers us up twitter and a while back uh there was god i don't remember how long was it how long was a while ago casey
apparently it was october of 2016 why are we talking about a news article from october 2016 i have i have a reason for this one too oh my god bringing out you're dead that's right i'm so sorry listeners for this entire episode you did you apologize here how do you where do episodes come from marco when when three podcasters love each other very much
somehow every week there's an episode uh and it's because somebody some elves go into the show notes and find a bunch of topics and put them in there uh and if you're not gonna do it guess what i'm gonna do it and then you don't get to complain about the things that we talk about and try to apologize for the listeners for things we're talking about because guess what i build the show in the notes and that's what we're gonna talk about if you want to talk about something feel free to rotate something up to the top and then we'll talk about that instead
In fact, I will offer that opportunity to you now because I just talked about Netflix credit tipping.
Is there something that you would like to talk about that you'd like to move up?
Let me see.
Overcast Springboard Crasher Stories.
That's a good one.
That's kind of boring.
No, it's not.
I think it's exciting.
It's exciting.
It was exciting when it happened, but now I've forgotten mostly about it and probably you did too, but it was cool.
It's not even old.
It's not even old by comparison to October of 2016.
It was a couple of months ago.
In a surprising turn of events, Marco did not immediately command A and then delete the entire show notes in a fit of rage just moments ago.
Oh, my word.
The secret is he doesn't look at them most of the time.
That is accurate.
So down, if we scroll down a couple pages, we have an item that says, TSMC ahead of Intel on Process Soon?
Look at that.
The show notes.
They're like a crystal ball.
Look at the slug on this.
10-nanometer chip foundry process coming to Apple partner TSMC ahead of Intel.
And it was from that ever-reliable news source, AppleInsider.com.
This is dated September of 16.
Oh, my word.
We didn't talk about it, but guess what?
They did it.
It came true.
Maybe this is how we can make things come true.
Just put them in our show notes.
Put them in the show notes, and it's like burying a time capsule.
It's like...
our show notes are show notes are the crock pot of apple news just wait long enough it's gonna be there oh my god all right so let's talk about disney since marco hasn't come up with something better but it'll be the marco show after this when we talk about overcast and springboard marco should start remembering now all the details of the springboard crasher stuff did you know that letterpress moved off of game center did it i didn't know that that's down here too
You know what we should do?
If we get really desperate, we should go from the bottom up and just say, we're dedicated.
We have to do it.
We have to do it.
Just start at the bottom.
Oh, my word.
This is so bad.
Anyway, all right.
I'm going to try to bring this back around.
So at some point one day, eventually, or years ago, it seems...
There was some talk in late 2016 about Twitter potentially looking to be bought.
And there were some potential suitors.
I don't remember who they were other than Disney.
Wasn't Salesforce in the running?
Maybe.
And so what ended up happening, and I didn't get a chance to look at these show notes and refresh my memory.
So being chief summarizer in chief is a little dangerous today.
But my recollection is that Disney was kind of sniffing around, saying, eh, maybe we don't.
do want Twitter and then realized oh wait Twitter's accessible disgusting terrible people so yeah we don't want anything to do with that the reason I put this in there not because I don't care about this whatever people buying Disney that's all news I don't know why it stayed in the notes I probably would have deleted it but I saw it down there and it brought to mind something what was it was relevant it's eternally relevant I forget what the specific inciting incident was but it's about when you have
An online community of any kind.
Oh, I know what it was.
It was the PUBG thing.
You guys don't follow this.
Do you know what that is?
Nope.
Anyways, it's a new game, PlayerUnknown's Battleground.
It's a game.
It's a cool game.
You'll like the premise of it.
We love games.
Yeah.
Well, no, it's a game mode.
I think it might have started as a mod, and now it's a zone game.
I always get confused about the details.
But anyway, you are like an army guy.
You parachute into this, you know...
fairly realistic looking world like a big open field with some trees and buildings and stuff like that and you have to sort of scrounge for weapons and bandages and stuff like that and it's fairly realistic in that you can't take 500 bullets like a few bullets kills you right and there are teams and there is sort of a gamey shimmery circle ring dome around the entire play area that starts off really really big
but it slowly shrinks over time, eventually corralling all the people together.
And eventually there's one person who's left alive.
Right.
So part of your strategy could be, I'm just going to crawl in the grass and hide behind this tree and be like a mile away from everybody.
But the circle will shrink and shrink and shrink.
And if you're not out there fighting, you're also not getting better weapons and getting healing supplies and stuff like that.
So it's a fun game mode.
Um,
And they're fun videos to watch because there are teams in this friendly fire and it's, and there's no like radar or anything like that.
You're just like crawling around and going through buildings.
And some people like camp out in buildings and you just go around the door and there's a guy.
Anyway, it's very popular game right now.
And the guy who made the game has like a, you know, community standards for, you know, for, for his game, basically saying if you, if you intentionally kill people on your team, because friendly fire is a thing that's against the rules and you get banned, you know, temporarily banned.
And I assume if you keep doing a permanently ban.
Because that's bad behavior.
We don't want someone who comes and you join a game and the guy on your team kills everybody on his own team and takes their stuff.
Like, no, we don't have that, right?
And he did that to, like, a popular streamer, like, a Twitch streamer.
And the Twitch streamer was cranky about it and said some jokey things to him about, like, how he was going to kick him in the face or something like that.
And the guy...
because he had temporarily banned him and he explained to him why he doesn't tolerate even jokey sort of threats of violence or whatever and anyway that was the story like game creator bans popular streamer and has to explain to him why he doesn't think threats of violence are funny you know counter to everything in macho stupid gamer dude culture right and
And it made me think of Twitter and anybody who has any kind of community, whether it's the game that you made and the standards you make for the people who play your game online or Twitter, who makes a service that they let people use.
Or, you know, just think of anything like if you have a website and you have comment section or you have the old style web bulletin boards or whatever online communities and the policing of them.
it always amazes me that Reddit is a great example.
It always amazes me how reluctant people are in these communities to, to enforce any kind of, to enforce their will.
Like, so we all have opinions about what we think is good and what's not good, but the standard sort of non-oppressed majority opinion of like, I, you know, I,
I'm not in a group that is frequently the target of abuse or I'm at the top of the pyramid.
Therefore, I think everyone should be able to do everything.
So even though I think something is bad, I'm not going to tell people in my community that they can't do that thing because who am I to judge, right?
And even if removing the motivation, just the whole idea of like, I want my community to be a place where everyone is free to be themselves and do whatever the heck they want.
And it almost seems to me at various times on Twitter and other places that there is, you know, there is nothing so terrible that the community, the people who run the community would decide that it's not allowed.
Right.
So it's like I'm trying to think of something for the show that I could use as an example.
Like someone comes in and says, I'm in favor of eating babies.
I love to eat babies.
They come out and I just eat them instantly.
Right.
Perfectly healthy babies.
I eat them.
Right.
Right.
and people like you know we don't like baby eating can you ban all the people who uh promote baby eating in this community because they're really annoying and and we're all against it right like everyone here in this community of you know uh you know knitters or uh woodworking people or you know go-kart enthusiasts or whatever can we just say that if you promote the eating of babies you get banned like no baby eaters right
uh and people run the community like well i don't like eating babies and i know most people don't like it but those people should have the right to talk about baby eating and it's like what do you what do you mean the right it's your community it's a website that you made it's a product that you made it's not you're not the u.s government they can talk about eating babies all they want on their front lawn i don't want them in this community and so they decide to make a community where everyone is allowed to do everything
Because that feels like egalitarian for them.
And, you know, it's freedom.
And even if they don't invoke freedom of speech, it's like, this is the kind of community we want.
We want a community where everyone is free to say anything they want, even if it's about baby eating.
And there's a place for that type of thing.
I think you usually call that place 4chan, right?
But whatever.
But it continues to be amazing to me that you see so little people
of the other thing where they say you know what this is my community and i don't like baby eating and if you talk about baby eating here you're banned forever and they're like that's not fair just because you don't like yeah yeah just because i don't like baby eating that's the only reason and this is my community right whether it's this guy with his game and that's why you get a situation where
This person saying, hey, killing people on your team is bad and threats of violence on Twitter are bad and you're going to get banned for it.
That's why it's a story.
Like, that's a story in the gaming news.
It's a man bites dog story, right?
Like, whoa, someone decided like their own personal opinion and they enforced their own personal opinion on their community.
Is this person the worst person ever enforcing their own personal opinion?
Now, in Twitter, there's no personal opinion.
I guess Twitter is a giant massive corporation, but they have the same problem.
That they seem unable to choose to enforce, you know, any kind of standards, but it's like, well, we don't want to enforce our standards on other people.
I use baby eating because I was hoping to find something that everyone or audience would be like, yeah, I'm against baby eating.
Now, the pro-baby eating people, go ahead and email us, whatever, but...
Now I'm going to say one that I would have used years ago in place of baby eating, feeling confident that everyone who's listening to my voice would be like, yeah, totally.
Baby eating is bad.
But unfortunately, I cannot think that these days.
And that is the example from Twitter where Twitter is like, hey, are you the neo-Nazi party?
You want to promote a Nazi agenda?
you're fine on twitter as long as you don't you know threaten violence or blah blah blah or violate one of our things that we decide we're okay with nazis like if they just want to talk peacefully about nazi stuff that's fine with us as long as they don't threaten violence right isn't all of their speech kind of well that's what i'm saying like i would just hope that twitter as a company be like you know what
even if nazis are just like talking calmly about you know their their nazi agenda no no nazis like not like are you in a group are you in the neo-nazis are you in an organization right are you affiliated with them do you promote that in any way you're banned it's like whoa you can't ban them that's freedom it's like no no they can have their meetings like they can talk about their nazi things they just can't be on twitter
uh but twitter seemingly cannot bring itself to do that because it would be seen as like oh twitter don't go there because they don't let you if they don't like what they're saying they ban you right and not just like you know things that we all agree are bad but just like political ideas like the nazi party like some people are just into that man why can't you just it's like can't we just say no and
twitter and many other companies inability to draw the line you know and draw whatever twitter wants to draw it like they i feel like you know you lose all the nazi people yeah the nazi people will go elsewhere they'll have to go someplace else like well but if i ban if i ban too many things everyone will leave and our daily active users will go it's like you have you have to make that choice i i feel confident if i was running twitter that if we ban all the nazis just on principle like they don't have to do anything bad they're just they're just gone right
that you won't lose too many users but and the users you do lose it's good that you're losing them right and so it frustrates me as a user of twitter and many other services to see the unwillingness to to enforce you know personal standards and even when you know if more people did this that would mean people are gonna have weird personal standards they're gonna be like sorry
nobody's name begins with the letter J and then I can't join their service and I would be mad about it.
Right.
But it's their service.
Like they can do, make up their own stupid rules.
Right.
I'm just saying like, maybe the baby eaters and the Nazis, maybe get rid of them.
And it's like, well, who cares?
Twitter is being more successful if they let everybody in, but things like these rumors about, Oh, someone was going to buy you, but your service is a cesspool.
Uh,
That, you know, your choices have a material effect on your company, not just on the users, which you should care about.
Like, what's it like to use Twitter?
The decisions about what is and isn't allowed affect what it's like to use Twitter.
They also affect potentially who is willing to buy you, right?
And they affect your image.
Like, there's tangible and intangible repercussions to this.
So I continue to hope that more services will act like small services with one opinionated person.
Like the guy who runs the, you know, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to say, I have rules, and these are my rules, and you might not like the rules.
That's my damn game.
You don't like the rules, go somewhere else, make your own game, right?
You don't like the rules on Twitter?
Nazis, we're banning you all from Twitter?
Go make your own service.
Go someplace else.
Go do another thing.
Because we're not the U.S.
government.
So anyway, I'm against baby-eating.
I'm against Nazis.
I'm also against player-killing in Battleground.
How do you feel about people who's naming him with Jay?
Neutral.
A lot of people have been being with Jay.
Come on.
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Marco, you had some very interesting overcast crashes that you had a little bit of trouble figuring out.
And justifiably, because having heard this story back a couple of months ago when you did discover what this fix was, I thought to myself, my goodness, I don't know if I would have ever been able to figure this out.
But...
I think it's a really interesting, to the best of your recollection, story of both what was going on, why it was going on and how you discovered it.
So can you take us through this, maybe starting with like, how did you discover there was an issue in the first place?
iTunes Connect, the backend for the App Store, reports your number of crashes for each version of your app.
And this is as reported by people who opt in to sharing the stats with Apple and developers during the iPhone setup process.
I started seeing a big uptick in crashes and I started noticing a separate problem too, which is my app would crash in the background a lot.
And I would get all these crash logs for background crashes and
I didn't immediately identify it as such.
What I immediately saw was my app would not resume playback if you hadn't been running it in a while.
So if you sent a play command, like let's say you get in your car and the Bluetooth turns on and it sends a play command, or you put on Bluetooth headphones and you hit the play button on them, I noticed that the app was not in memory anymore.
I started getting reports that were auto-generated from Springboard that it was terminating me in the background for...
holding on to a shared lock on the database file so i did a number of things to try to fix this i had read somewhere that if you open up a background task assertion so in i forget you know how if the mac does this but but if the on ios you do the ui background task id and you say begin background task with identifier and
It basically gives you a little handle and you do your task and then you tell it, okay, I finished that, end this task.
And then if your app is about to be terminated for whatever reason and you have one of these open, the system will give you a little bit of extra time to go complete that.
So somewhere I read some articles that I can't find now, which is probably good to protect the not-so-innocent.
But somewhere I read some article that said, in order to fix these crashes about holding onto the lock too long, just open up a background task for every database query that you make.
Because the way SQLite works is every query, it temporarily locks the database file, does what it needs to do, and then unlocks it.
And this is required because that's how you have different processes sharing a database through SQLite without some kind of server managing the background.
Like MySQL would have a server, but...
SQLite doesn't.
So anyway, it needs to do file lock to do this stuff.
So I got this tip from some random blog post that, oh, wrap every database query in a background task assertion, and then you won't have this problem anymore.
That was technically true in the sense that when I shipped the version that included this fix, it was technically true that I was no longer getting killed with that background code.
However, what was happening is I noticed that my crash rate, rather than going down, went way, way up.
It took me a while to figure out what was going on,
And during the time that I was trying to figure out what was going on, I also noticed that as I would be listening to Overcast in the car on long car trips, sometimes my entire iPhone would crash.
And it would do what nerds might know as a respring, which is that the phone does not reboot, but it looks like it's rebooting.
And it just comes back up faster.
And you see the little spinner, all your apps quit, and then eventually you get back to your lock screen.
And the way you can tell that it wasn't a real reboot is if Touch ID is still on.
Because when you reboot for real, you have to enter your passcode the first time.
But if it does a little spinner and back to the lock screen and all your apps are gone and Touch ID works, that was a springboard crash, not a full reboot.
And I noticed my phone was doing this more and more.
And it was very inconvenient at times such as when I was driving and following directions in Waze.
And my directions were just gone for a little while while all the apps got killed and I had to restart everything.
But anyway...
And I started getting reports from people saying, my phone keeps crashing with Overcast, but I can't figure out why.
And it took until one guy sent me a video that he showed something amazingly useful to me.
He said, look, Overcast, if you pause it in the background and you bring up Control Center so you can see that Overcast is still in the now playing thing in Control Center...
After 10 minutes exactly, or no, I think it was like three minutes.
Anyway, after some short duration of minutes, it disappears reliably every time.
So that led me to finally catch it in a debugger and to see that I was being killed with a certain crash with a certain code.
And it still was not enough to actually figure it out because the code I was getting killed with was, you've exceeded some limit.
Yeah.
It's like, okay, well, helpful, maybe, you know, thanks.
But, you know, I have no idea still.
And I tried a few things, trying to figure out what limit am I exceeding here?
What does this code mean?
Eventually, I realized that this would also sometimes correspond with one of those springboard crashes where the whole phone would crash.
And so I thought, I wonder if this is related.
Okay.
I direct messaged somebody who I know on the Springboard team.
I basically said, look, I'm at my wit's end here.
I can't figure this out.
Is there anything that would cause this crash code to be sent to my app that might sometimes crash Springboard?
A little while later, I hear, oh, there's actually a bug report internal to Apple talking about how Overcatch is causing this problem.
I was like, oh?
Do you think they ever would have told you?
they're just like i don't so there is actually there is like a process that happens sometimes inside of apple where if you have an app that's causing lots of problems for for apple like they there is sometimes you will you will hear from one of the one of the developer evangelists about it um this has happened to me maybe like once or twice ever uh so it isn't this isn't a thing that happens often um
But this was happening in the lead-up to WWDC.
This was only a couple weeks before WWDC, I think, if I remember correctly.
And so the problem with that is that this is a time when the entire, like all of Apple is basically freaking out, rushing to finish the WWDC betas.
Because that's like the first time the OS is really going to see any kind of wide attention.
It's going to be installed on a bunch of developer devices and a bunch of enthusiasts who say they're developers who aren't and just use the developer betas anyway.
So there's a massive rush right before WWDC for anybody who works in anything near these new OSs to just get it done, to get that first beta ready for the public.
And so this was happening during that big crunch time.
So I imagine it slipped through the cracks.
I'm sure it was on somebody's to-do list to maybe see if they could reach out to me or something, and they didn't.
Because you can imagine Apple is not so keen on an app that can crash Springboard.
That's not something that apps are supposed to be able to do.
So, basically, so there was this internal thing that I just happened to, like, I happened to ask somebody who started looking around who happened to find this.
And then, basically, the notes that Apple Engineering had noticed about it was that I was taking a large number of background assertions in the app, which was apparently...
causing Springboard... Springboard has a watchdog that goes along and checks various limits every few minutes.
And that watchdog, when it looked at how many background assertions I had, because I was doing one for every database query... So a typical load of the app is going to make probably a few hundred database queries over the course of navigating the first few screens.
So we're talking...
Over the course of typical usage, I might make a few hundred to a few thousand database queries over a well-used session of the app.
The background task API was designed back in the early days of iOS for you to take out one background task assertion if you're finishing uploading a file to a web service or doing some kind of sync operation.
Like, okay, take a background assertion, finish the sync operation, and then give it back.
And so apparently this was designed for something more on the order of like hundreds of these to happen during a process, not thousands of these to happen the way I was doing it with every database query.
And this was causing two problems.
Number one, it would cause this watchdog that goes around to check to see if you've exceeded your limits, it would cause it to kill my app to say, hey, you've exceeded your limits.
But apparently there was also a bug in that watchdog in older versions of iOS before 11 that sometimes if you had such a ridiculous number of them as I did, that watchdog would crash.
And because it's a part of the system, if that crashes, basically all springboard comes down and is brought back up.
This has been fixed in iOS 11, but it was not fixed for at least the earlier parts of 10.
I don't know if the very last version of 10 might have fixed it.
I don't know, honestly.
So basically, Overcast was not only exposing its own limit crossing behavior.
And by the way, I don't know what that limit is.
Nobody will tell me what that limit is.
It doesn't really matter for my purposes.
All that matters is background tasks are something to be used not in the thousands.
But basically, I was causing Springboard to crash.
And I greatly, greatly appreciate both the user who sent me the video who showed that it would be terminated after a certain number of minutes because that allowed me to get the crash code that was reliably causing this problem.
And I also greatly appreciate anybody inside Apple who helped me track this down.
And I greatly don't appreciate the blog post I read back forever ago, and I'm glad I can't find it now.
So I'm telling you all now, any developers listening...
Don't use background task IDs for frequently occurring things like database queries.
That is too granular.
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Oh.
So going back to the original problem, the problem was I was holding on to a shared file lock in the shared app container because the database file, so quick, very quick overview.
I apologize to non-programmers.
This is probably very boring.
I've been trying to not talk about this for weeks, and John's finally making me this week.
But anyway, so... And not just him.
Okay, you too.
So anyway, long explanation, slightly less long again.
iOS apps are totally isolated from each other.
For security reasons, for control reasons, for user-friendliness, there's lots of good reasons.
iOS apps, if your app wants to read or write a file for its own data purposes, it writes it in a special sandbox folder that it can't read or write anything outside of that, and no other apps can read its files.
And this is extremely enforced such that even if you have multiple apps from the same developer, they are isolated from each other.
Even if you have extensions of your app, because an extension is technically running as a separate process on the system, the extension can't read and write the same data as its parent app even.
That's how walled off everything is in iOS for various good security reasons.
Which, by the way, I love, and I kind of wish that the Mac had more of that.
Anyway, Apple created a system called Shared App Group Containers to try to solve the problem of, first of all, if you have multiple apps from the same developer, can they share any information?
And then second of all, if you just have an app with an extension, it's pretty hard to make a useful extension that can't read or write any of its parent app's data.
The shared app container is basically a... It's literally what it sounds like.
It's a shared container that apps and extensions can all read and write from separately from their main data space so they can share data.
I had the bright idea back when watchOS first came out and I had to make my watch extension, which was Overcast's first extension...
What if I just move the database file into the shared app container?
And then the extension can read and write the same database as the app.
And I can copy the same model files over and have the extension have a lot of code sharing with the main app.
The thing with iOS is that...
Processes can be randomly suspended and terminated without their consent or whatever, as the system deems them no longer necessary if the users quit, see it, or whatever else.
And this is especially enforced on extensions.
If you open up, say, a widget, like the Today, well, it used to be called Today Widget Now, and I think they're just called Widgets Now, right?
I don't even remember.
Whatever they're called in this iOS release.
So widgets have very, very low limits because you might have a screen that has like five of them on it.
Like if you open up your whatever notification center is called now and you have the part of the notification center that used to be called today's screen that who knows what that's called now.
Anyway, so you have all these things that might be called widgets on that screen.
And so each one of those is running a separate process.
And so they have very, very aggressive limits on those.
In the context of a widget, or actually any extension technically, there is no such thing as a background task assertion in the typical sense where you say, you know, begin background task and I'll tell you when I'm done.
They have this other thing, this NSProcessInfo API that is horrendous and really hard to use.
But basically, they very aggressively terminate the processes of those extensions whenever you're done with them.
So the problem is if you have a shared app group container and you have the ability for one of these processes to take a lock on a file in that, you have a problem then, what do you do if, say, the widget has a lock on the database file, which is the single copy that's shared between the parent app and everything else?
If the widget takes a lock on that file and then gets terminated before the lock is released, what should happen?
Should the lock not be released?
Then the app can't run because it's deadlocked.
It's waiting for that lock to be released from the extension that's not running right now.
Or should you just kind of force the lock to be released?
Well, then you have the risk of data corruption because then if the widget then relaunches, the widget thinks the file has been locked that whole time in the meantime, but it actually hasn't.
So the lock is kind of meaningless.
And so you either have lots of bugs or you have data corruption or whatever else.
So Apple, realizing this would be a problem, built in this wonderful system of this special springboard crasher that you will get a log if your app is terminated while it's holding a lock in the shared container.
You get these crazy crash logs that were the kind I was getting to begin with.
This was the problem I was trying to solve at the beginning.
And the reason I did this whole background test thing that was horrendous.
Finally, the end of the story.
I had that problem for that reason.
And I tried to solve it with this background task on every database query thing, which was a terrible idea that caused this other springboard crash, this way, way, way worse crash.
And so instead, I decided, you know what?
I'm just not going to have the database in the shared container anymore.
I just moved it back into the app's private storage.
And instead of the widget communicating with, and the watch extension, instead of them communicating with the parent app by reading and writing the database directly, now they just have their own little mini APIs to the parent app where they're communicating via dictionaries that are just being written to little files in the share container that are not locked or anything like that.
So I took this elegant but complex solution of having the database be shared and made a much, much, much simpler, lower-tech solution of just passing around serialized dictionaries as unlocked files, basically.
And now all these problems are gone.
It is totally solved.
My crash rate has dropped to barely anything, relatively speaking.
and it is finally done.
And my users were very patient during this time, and I greatly appreciate that, along with the guy who reported the initial bug and the Apple people who helped me find it.
So that is the story.
I think this was now, because this was before the WVDC barrier in the year of Apple scheduling, I have very little recollection of most of these details, so I apologize if I got anything wrong.
I apologize for the long-winded nature of this, but Casey and John made me do it.
So I have a couple of questions about this.
Yeah.
How many database queries were you making?
I never really measured, like, what exactly the threshold of being a problem was.
But I think it's in the order of, you know, it's in the magnitude of...
hundreds over a short time and then maybe maybe approaching thousands if you use the app for a while and it's doing a lot of you know because the app syncs back to the server you know every few minutes as you're listening every few seconds it's writing your progress back to the database that way in case it crashes your phone crashed or whatever else that you don't lose too much progress so every few seconds i'm writing to the disk at least
And then when you're doing a sync, there's a lot more queries that go on there.
And if you browse a list, it's loading all that data as you page through that list.
As you scroll, it's loading all those table cells for all the episodes.
It's loading all that stuff.
So I do a good amount of queries.
That was my question.
So when you're scrolling through a list, it's like loading them on the fly at that point for the data source of whatever it's called, the data provider for the table view or whatever?
Yep.
And it's not...
It's not like pulling the whole list and keeping it in memory and then just doling it out to the GUI data source provider thingy?
Like you don't just do one big giant query up front to get the whole playlist and then just keep it in memory and chuck it out as the table cells ask for it?
Well, I do.
And I have some caching built into the database layer as well.
So for instance, I do load the whole list of episodes for a playlist view.
But then as you scroll, I need to know the artwork.
And that comes from the podcast record, not the episode record.
That's one level up.
And so I have podcasts cached.
I have that in a nice instance cache and everything.
But keep in mind, a lot of this stuff falls over if people have a lot of podcasts.
Basically, if it exceeds what my app reasonably expects to cache or what will reasonably fit in memory to cache, there's a lot more queries happening as the stuff is paged in.
Also, if things change, for instance, if
I get a changed value from the server, it invalidates a lot of these values that are cached.
So I have to then reload those on their next request.
If the list of playable content changes, which basically is like if a new episode comes in or if an episode gets deleted or if some criteria of an episode changes whether it is a member of a playlist or not.
uh then that is called you know in my app i call that the playable content change which is basically like the the the some part of what belongs in the list of episodes somewhere is no longer valid and when that happens lots of things get invalidated and so there's there's a lot going on i mean
A podcast app is a lot more complex than most people would assume.
It's certainly more complex than I assumed when I started writing one, as I found out.
And they're only getting more complex over time as the market matures and as the scope of these things, the scope of what people expect expands.
It'll be interesting to see, you know, like I guess you probably get it in just looking at the console log or using instruments or something like the flow of database queries because I, you know, using Overcast, everything.
Well, you know, this does some database queries, but surely I would never guess the size of the number of database queries like over the course of a 10 minute period that it would literally do thousands.
Like, especially just during normal use, even accounting for the hey, I'm syncing your play position every few seconds.
So I found that pretty surprising in this whole thing.
And also, I would I would say that whatever that blog post was that you found that was like, just do everything as a background task.
Can't really blame the blog post because any solution like that is like the underlying assumption is you're not doing anything.
hundreds or thousands of database queries like you've got a couple database queries and you do them and just put them in the background you'll be fine and you would have been fine if the number was like 20 you know like a couple a minute like five five database queries every minute but if it's hundreds or thousands then obviously that solution is not going to work um my question another question about your uh
not having the database in the shared container and just having the thing write PLS to the shared container, does that mean that the main Overcast app has to be running to notice those things appearing in the shared container and take action on them because it owns the database now?
How does that work?
It would mean that, but for a variety of reasons, it either always is running or becomes running.
So let me go through.
Basically, there's only two extensions that matter for this purpose.
One of them is the widget.
The other one is the watch app.
So when WatchOS, WatchKit 1, back for WatchOS 1, the extension for the watch was actually a process running on the phone.
And so it had access to the shared data container on the phone.
So it was actually surprisingly easy to make WatchKit 1 apps because you could just share the database, share all the model files and everything, and then just have the WatchKit read and write the database directly.
And it kind of took care of that for you.
watch kit 2 and forward so watch os 2 and 3 and also now 4 moved the extension to run on the watch itself instead of on the phone because running it on the phone made the app really slow basically because it had to send all the interface stuff over bluetooth and it sucked that's one of the reasons why watch os 1 was so so bad for apps and why the why the newer watch os since then have been so much better
Anyway, so when the extension execution moved to the watch, that meant it could no longer read and write the container anymore because the container is on the phone.
So it had its own container on the watch now.
But anyway, it couldn't read and write the database.
So that eliminated the whole reason I had it there in the first place.
The only reason this came up is that when I made Overcast 3.0, I made a widget.
And the widget was like the first time I was really using or really taking advantage of the fact that the database was somewhere shared to begin with.
The watch extension already needed to have ways to communicate with the app to wake it up if need be.
And the watch connectivity framework allows for all that.
There's different commands and stuff that...
There are ways for the... It basically is already communicating the way that I said I moved everything to.
It was really only the widget that was causing the problems because I'd already made this move with the watch app.
Anyway, so the widget... Either the phone app is already running, in which case it notices anyway...
Or, basically, I have a mechanism in the widget because the widget has a play button.
And if you tap into the artwork, it'll play that one also.
So the widget needs to have some way to wake up the app.
If it was just one-way data transfer, if the widget was just showing status from the app, like you might have if you made a weather app, for instance, there'd be no reason for the widget to communicate back to the parent app and something like that.
You might just have the widget launch the app, but you can do that already.
In my app, I had to have some way for the widget to communicate back to the app, and the app might not be running.
So what I did for that was the widget basically sends a command through one of these serialized playlists.
It puts a file in the shared app container that says, hey, do this command.
And if it doesn't get a response within some very short time, I think it's like a half a second or something, then I launch a URL scheme that launches the app in the foreground.
And you'll notice that if you use it.
If basically the app was already running, if you hit that play button in the widget, it'll start again in the background because the app was still running.
So basically, this is all a giant pile of hacks.
But the short version is the widget tries to send the app a command, and if it doesn't get a response, it knows it isn't running, so it launches it in the foreground.
My final question, because every Overcast segment would not be completed without some kind of bug report slash feature request.
Oh, my word.
I'm still... This better not be about offline watch playback.
I swear I'm going to set that feature on fire.
No, it is not.
I know about your woes with that, and I did try it myself, and I had my own woes because the volume was too low and I couldn't hear anything, but you know about that already.
It's getting worse.
It's getting so much worse.
But my question is about the mysterious world of the internal state of something on my phone that decides...
what it is that will start playing when my phone connects to bluetooth on my car so very often i will enter my car and i just did it today actually before i entered the car i unlocked my phone and looked and either i either i used the multitasking switcher to go to it or i tapped the overcast icon or it was already in it but the point is overcast was the front most application
Right.
I had previously been listening to a podcast.
I was not listening now.
I think I double tap my AirPods and like put them away or whatever.
But Overcast is the front most app.
So it's a sleep button.
I go into my car, connects to Bluetooth.
And instead of Overcast continuing to play the thing I was just listening to, music starts to play.
And I have no idea how iOS determines what it should start playing.
uh when i get into my car and it connects to bluetooth but maybe 15 of the time it starts playing music instead of playing i mean sometimes like overcast is long gone like it kind of makes sense like the last time i listened to overcast was last night and i've since used twitter and browsed the web and done all sorts of stuff surely overcast is not running anymore
because i've just thrashed through the memory and so when i get into my car maybe it's going to be like oh i should start playing a random playlist right but when overcast is the front most app and i was just listening to it and it starts playing music makes me realize i have no idea what the hell's going on inside there i'm assuming you have very little control over this as with so many things that seem like os level things but can you shed some light on what the hell's going on there
Sure.
I mean, I can tell you right now I have zero control over it, but I will tell you roughly what I know is happening.
And a lot of this is conjecture.
A lot of this is just figuring it out over time with experience.
And some of this, some, very little of this has been documented before, but not most of it.
So the short version is...
It tries to do whatever you did last, but there are some exceptions to when this will happen.
So first of all, a lot of times, especially recently with the rise of video clips on Twitter and Facebook, what you did last might not be what you think you did last, or you might have forgotten, or it might have been something.
So for example, if Overcast is paused, and you're looking at Twitter, and you view some kind of embedded video clip, Twitter has just become the most recently audio playing app.
And iOS keeps track of whatever the most recently audio playing app was for this purpose.
But lots of things can take it.
So anything that plays video, anything that plays audio.
If you view a video in Safari, for instance, that becomes then the last app that played audio.
So it could be lots of different things that you don't even realize are taking it over.
But if you play that quick video and then it stops...
it doesn't give the last audio app status back to what it had before.
It just stays on whatever that was.
So much of the time in practice, that's the problem, is you actually did play audio through something else and either subconsciously assumed it would go back to overcast after that or that you just forgot or didn't realize that that's happening.
That makes sense, but that's never the case with me because I've never heard it do a tweet.
And I think I've done what you've described, like played a video on Twitter, played a video on YouTube, but I've never heard it resume a YouTube video, resume a tweet video, resume anything.
It always starts playing seemingly random playlists in my music collection.
And I can tell you I'm not listening to music on my iPhone, like, ever.
Because I have a dedicated iPod connected with a USB cable in my car.
Like, I don't even listen to music on my phone in my car.
I have a separate iPod for that, right?
Yeah.
And it's amazing to me.
And I know it's doing it because it's taking a really long time.
It's amazing to me.
I don't know how it picks the playlist because it's not even like the playlist that I was last... If I go into a music app intentionally and play a song and then forget about it, it just...
I don't know what it's doing.
Is it honoring my shuffle?
But anyway, it always plays music and it takes forever for it to start playing music because I have never even launched the music app.
Right.
So there's other things at play here.
So first of all, even if it remembers properly the last app you used was Overcast,
If overcast has crashed in the background, it won't resume.
Again, I try to minimize background crashes.
There are occasional ones that still happen that I'm still trying to track down, but they're relatively rare compared to other things.
That probably is not doing what you're doing now, but I can't tell you for sure it isn't.
Other things that are at play here...
If it tries to resume something in a car setting like that, and the last used audio app does not respond in a certain amount of time, I think iOS defaults to music.
There's also... This has been a problem for cars for a while that had iPod support.
There are these iPod control protocols that work with USB and Bluetooth, I think.
And...
If a car has iPod support, what will sometimes happen is the car will basically invoke that instead of the generic Bluetooth play thing.
And iOS devices, when prompted for music support, try to do the right thing.
They try to show their music library to the car.
And you said that the music is kind of random.
So it used to be, whenever it would ask for the iPod library music stuff, it used to be that most of them would default to playing the first alphabetical song title.
So like whatever song you had that began with A in your library, it would just play that every time.
My car does that with the USB connected iPod touch.
It always goes with the A songs.
Here's the thing.
It still takes me like two songs to figure out what it's doing.
Yeah.
i don't know why i haven't identified like the first song the second song sometimes i'm up to the third song because i kind of like the first two songs like oh this is good oh and i do use random plants like oh conceivably could have picked the song right by the third song i'm like wait a second these all begin with a and like how many years am i gonna do that i'm dumb
And just as a note, okay, as this episode has been somewhat about, I'm not perfect.
I make a lot of mistakes.
But as a note to people who implement these kind of audio systems, nobody ever wants to play songs alphabetically by their titles.
That is never a thing anybody ever wants.
It is never the right idea.
Just never, ever, ever do that.
And there are so many cars and things that do that.
Sometimes it's the only option in certain views or certain parts of the UI is
Nobody wants alphabetical song playback.
Ever.
Just don't do that.
Anyway, it seems like in recent times, Apple has figured out, okay, nobody wants to hear All In by Stroke 9 every single morning when they get in their car.
Let's instead play something from Apple Music that they might like.
So if you subscribe to Apple Music, you often get that, where your car will suddenly start playing just some radio station or some playlist off of your phone if you can't figure out what else to do and the car is requesting music.
So that's a thing, too, and that's been, I think, in the last two iOS versions, I think since iOS 10 at least.
So, you know, there's lots of things that your car and your phone can negotiate and do.
What you quickly realize as you dive into this stuff is that this is just an incredibly complex system.
And most of it's complex for a reason.
Like, you know, iOS's whole concept of the last used music playing or audio playing app, that is complex in itself because of all the things I mentioned, like videos and Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that.
you know embedded stuff in safari youtube videos like it's so complex to even just try to keep track in a reasonable way of like what was the last app that played media and so if the user says play what should i play um so i don't have a good answer for you except it might it might be one of those things or it might be something else
I mean, like I said, almost most of the time it works, 85 percent of the time, 90 percent of the time it does what I expect you to do.
But it's the times that it doesn't like, well, what was your problem this time?
What you said about it trying to get it to play, but like it giving up after a short period of time and then going to music rings true for me because it always seems to take longer.
I can always tell when, oh, I'm not going to hear my podcast.
I'm going to hear music.
Because everything on my car takes a long time in terms of Bluetooth and booting up and everything.
And so these are counted in seconds.
I can say, oh, I know what's going to happen next.
It's going to play music.
And it does, but almost all the time it works.
Anyway, another thing.
I mean, I guess that can be solved by Honda updating their in-car infotainment system.
Which, by the way, they did.
The new Accords have an all-new Android-based, presumably non-disgusting,
uh you know like what do i have now is like pre android ios like the old world of uh car infotainment systems the bad old world and the new one is just you know
the modern era.
So I'm hoping it's better and I'm hoping they put faster CPUs in and I'm hoping it will take less time to connect to Bluetooth.
So at the very least I can get the wrong thing playing faster.
In the meantime, I will just, you know, I mean, it's pretty, pretty high success rate, all things considered, but yeah, it does sound complicated.
It almost makes me wish that there was a way that I could say, look, all I ever wanted to happen ever, ever, ever when I enter the car is for you to start playing overcast and that's it.
But that doesn't seem like it's in the cards.
So before you get a ton of email, hopefully, you were able to back channel kind of directly to Apple and say, hey, what's going on here?
What do you think would have been your course of action if that wasn't available to you?
DTS ticket would be the next thing.
that would have been escalated to an engineer who could have helped you, hopefully, maybe.
Yeah, and the way these works, and forgive me for not having the details right because I've actually never filed one, but basically every paid Apple developer membership includes, I believe, two developer technical support, that's DTS, DTS,
incidents per year and you basically like you know you say you want to use one and you can actually get like code level support you can actually say like okay look here's this code it is not working here I can't figure this out can you help and actually
apple and an apple engineers will actually help you with that problem and so it's it's a pretty involved process that's why they're limited um so it's two per year and uh and i think there's some provision where like if what you found is actually an apple bug then i think they don't they don't like charge you your ticket for that year um they don't accumulate so you know i would have a lot if they did but they don't uh but yeah so there actually is this you know there is a way to do this and
While I have no experience with it myself, I've heard from people who have used them that they're incredibly helpful.
And so this is something that all developers have access to.
So that's pretty cool.
That's awesome.
All right.
We good?
I mean, I could tell some more long, boring stories if you want.
Well, we've got to figure out an after show because I have something brief, but I don't know if it's going to be worth it.
Oh, I know what we should do.
All right.
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Eero, and Fracture.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
so john tell us about your mongoose californian you're trying to really clear up things in there oh yeah we have to set the stage we have to set the stage so forever and a day ago at the so the very top of our show notes has some sections and then including follow-up and then the topics right and
So the very, very, very top, like the fifth line down, in sitting in this document for maybe a year now, is My Mongoose Californian, parenthesis, 1984 parenthesis, and two links.
And this has been sitting there staring us in the face at the top of this document for probably a year, maybe two.
And apparently it's been three years.
Now is the time that we are going to finally clear this out.
Good call, Marco.
The thing that we really should be clearing out is, like, early on, someone, probably Casey, was trying to put sections in the notes.
We didn't have names for things.
It's, you know, the naming problem with programming again.
Like, he hadn't actually come up with, you know, precise names for things.
So there's all sorts of, like...
pre post show public post show after show pre show like we didn't have the names for all the different times that we can talk to each other the times when we're live when we're not live blah blah blah so this section got anchored up here with public post show which now we call the after show and is lower in the document
And so that's how old this was.
So we'll be able to delete this entire section when we do this.
The problem with this topic is it was a thing I was angry about.
I was angry about it in 2014, unfortunately.
It's hard for me to muster that anger again.
Oh, really?
Is that so, John?
Well, I demand that you do it because you made me dig up my crash story.
you weren't angry about it that was i was angry it's like a detective story a detective the anger should have subsided now you've defeated the beast now you can look back on it and it's more like uh you know a detective story if like there was this mystery and i solved it and it was weird and it's like a programming problem so if i had you do it in the middle of it like your app is currently out there and crashing you still can't figure out what it is and then you talked about it that would be a different story but anyway uh i'll see what i can do to uh
bring myself back to 2014 this is a precipitated by me being on a podcast that will link in the show notes storming mortal where i talked about a whole bunch of things including uh in the words of a show that god help me casey must have seen and please marco know that at least exists uh the best present the best christmas present i ever received and ever would receive my 1984 mongoose californian bmx bike
Casey, do you know what I was referencing?
Nope.
Not a bit.
Come on, guys.
Come on.
What was it?
Did I get it wrong?
The best Christmas present I ever received and ever would receive?
I'm close.
I'm really close on that.
You're not close enough for us.
A Christmas Story, they only play it 24 hours a day.
Oh, I've only seen it like once or twice.
oh what do you mean you've only seen it once or twice i think i've seen it all the way they play it literally 24 hours i know i never pay attention yeah exactly it's one of those things it's always on and so you never pay attention if you had said you'll shoot your eye out with that thing i would have known immediately well at least there's that anyway it that movie by the way is a really really really good movie ignore the fact that it's played 24 hours they used to not play it 24 hours it is a really good movie
The kid in the movie gets a BB gun for Christmas and he says, the narrator, the older version of it says the best Christmas present he ever received never would receive.
that's my that's my uh bike for a variety of reasons um and the reason the reference we were supposed to recognize there was not the bike itself just the best present that you know you know yeah it's a lot just that part very very near the end of the movie it's like the second or third to last line in the movie we didn't stand a chance nope it's pretty significant line it's pretty significant sentiment um anyway i should get that quote exactly right so i can uh repeat it with more confidence in the future anyway on this podcast we talked about a whole bunch of things i also talked about bmx and around this time
I was buying bicycles for my kids.
of various sizes like like non-training wheel bikes like their first like real bikes and i found that experience incredibly frustrating so i i grew up in a bike culture uh which is like 70s 80s suburban new york metro area it was a bike culture kids were on bicycles can i tell people that you're a biker different different thing different context although we did put uh playing cards in our spokes with a with a close pin so your bike sounded like motorcycles
oh yeah that really confused anybody ever that's right that was awesome um so kids kids were on bikes all the time like if you watch a steven spielberg movie showing kids in the 70s raised and they're riding around on bicycles if you watch stranger things and kids are riding around on bicycles that was a real thing that's all we did we'd come home from school we'd get on our bikes we'd go all over the place nobody had helmets we would fashion jumps out of garbage we found in other people's trash on trash day in the middle of the street it's all very dangerous and and uh scary and we've never let our kids do it today but that's what we did
And because we're in a bike culture and bikes are so important, there's a hierarchy of what kind of bike you had.
And all the fancy rich kids had mongoose or red line, which were expensive bikes.
And I wanted a mongoose.
I think I thought red lines were more expensive.
I don't even think they were, but that's what I thought.
And I wanted one for Christmas and I thought there's no way I'm going to get one because they're really expensive.
And they were.
And my parents totally surprised me with it.
Like the present that you don't think you're ever going to get.
It's not even I was like hopeful for it looking for it.
It was it wasn't even didn't even enter my mind.
It's like being a kid and saying, I want a Lamborghini Countach.
And you're like, yeah, but like, whatever, I'm not going to get one.
And then you wake up on Christmas morning.
It's in your garage and it's yours.
Right.
It was like that, basically.
And I rode the hell out of that bicycle.
i rode it everywhere jumped it off jumps and dirt bikes and trails that rode up and down highways on this bike has no gears by the way it's a bmx bike like it's just straight up you know took really good care of it you know cleaned it and oiled it all the time like all the things you can imagine doing this bike is like my pride possession i still have this bicycle it's still in my house oh my wow in the attic
in the basement um i tried to get my kids to ride the bike right it's like the reason i saved it for my kids and they couldn't care less a they didn't care and b they didn't like it right but i rode i rode the bike here i am 30 something years old on my bnx bike
you know what it's still a really good bike you get on it and you can tell this is you know it's not a complicated thing it's got a pedals and a gear then a chain that connects to another gear and some hand brakes and tires and of course the tires have been replaced over the years because you know i went through many tires and many inner tubes over the time of owning this but pretty much everything else on it is original um
And to this day, like how old is this bike?
It's a 1984 bike.
It rides great.
You pedal and it feels like, I don't know, like for Casey, like a BMW manual transmission, like a Swiss watch for Marco.
Swiss watches are still hard, but like precision piece of machinery.
There is no slippage.
There is no slop.
All the bearings in it are smooth.
There is very, very little friction.
The brakes are a little crap because, you know, the pads and the brakes have been replaced many times and they're kind of, you know,
hard and crusty for me in the basin but but the pedaling experience in this bike there are no squeaks and rattles 100 solid so when i'm looking for bikes for my kids i'm like well you know they don't whatever i just need any old bike right but you know me being
the uh obnoxious uh suburban uh rich dad trying to buy things that are too expensive for his kids it's like well let me try to get you know i know it's just a kid's bike but let me get a good quality one because i want my kids to have a good quality but not just some some cruddy like toys r us made of like some weird terrible cheap aluminum alloy that you can bend with your fingers that's just going to fall apart or rust or just you know
bend if it goes off a little bump in the road.
I want to get a good bike, right?
And maybe it'll have good resale value or whatever.
And I'm looking to try to find one, a kid's size, you know, not an adult bike, but a kid's size bike,
I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars, but I would spend, you know, a couple hundred bucks on it or whatever.
That maybe it's not going to be as good as my Mongoose, but just it's competent that, you know, you, you pedal and it feels like you are pushing yourself forward.
You don't feel the gears in the chain or any other stuff like that.
And we went through a couple of bikes and a couple of different ways to get them and a couple of different stores and
and i felt like marco buying something and then returning it and buying something and then returning it because they were all just terrible i heard sometimes sometimes they they the problem was like the shipment like the shipment would come and the box would be damaged you could see that it was like crushed and like the gears would have been like jammed against concrete or something because the little teeth on the gears were bent because you could tell the paint was shaved off sometimes you'd get it and
you know no matter how much you tried to lubricate things in it and get it up and running it always just you know the the bike chain would would bend and get a kink in it and never straighten out or the the chain would jump off and you know i know how to i have a lot of experience fixing and maintaining bikes over my life all the way up to 10 speeds and everything when i was old like i know what i'm doing
And these bikes were just crap.
Every part of them was crap.
Their bearings, if they had them at all, were crap.
The parts were not precisely manufactured.
They were made of crappy metal that I could bend with my fingernails.
The paint jobs were terrible.
They were heavy.
They were ugly.
They were slow.
They felt terrible.
Every one of them was like, you know, I wouldn't have traded a thousand of them for my mongoose, right?
And I didn't understand why, you know, what the deal is with bikes.
Like, is it only like super adult, multi-thousand dollar, even more obnoxious rich dude bikes that you have to get?
Like, is that the only place good quality components are?
Even Mongoose, which is a brand that still exists.
And I think Redline still exists too.
Their bikes are these weird monstrosities that just don't seem to be the quality they used to.
And it got me into the super duper old man, you know, second only to my literal telling children to get off my lawn,
uh of like they don't make things like they used to wait do you do that that was one of my that's my favorite tweet i have ever made um i gotta look it up for the show notes uh so this is the tweet i'm gonna try to recite it from memory uh the school bus stops in front of my house uh this morning i found myself literally telling children to get off my lawn
This is a real thing that happened because the school bus stop is in front of my house.
And when school bus stop, the kids are like, oh, let's just go on this lawn here and like play ball and like run around and, you know, stomp through the planting beds and throw balls.
So they end up hitting our house.
I told the kids to get off my lawn.
because like seriously you think you wouldn't do this but just think about it if you had a bus stop in front of your house and every single morning a fleet of children are there just running around and stomping on your downspouts and bending them and crushing your bushes and throwing balls and bouncing off their house and the balls hitting your car in your driveway casey you would go out there and you would tell the kids to get off your lawn so i literally went out and told the kids to get off my lawn
The school bus stop is in front of my house, period.
I am now literally telling children to get off my lawn, period.
8th of January, 2009.
And you would, too.
You know, that's the oldest.
But the second oldest I ever felt is, and I heard my grandfather say this all the time, and I mostly just ignored him and rolled his eyes, but he would show me how they don't make them like they used to.
Like, they don't make with him it was cars, right?
And I contend they do not make bikes for kids like they used to.
There is no bike at any price anywhere in the world that is of equal quality to my 1984 Mongoose Californian in terms of the simple machine with bearings and pedals and wheels and chains that takes your leg energy and turns it into forward momentum.
That stupid thing in my basement right now hanging from the ceiling is better than anything you can get at any price.
And I find that depressing, and I'm assuming it's just because I don't know the secret place and the secret brands for today's good bikes, or maybe kids don't like bikes at all until they're adults and, you know, fried grown-up bikes.
But anyway, that was depressing, and I ended up getting my kids a series of terrible bikes from, like,
I think they had a couple from bike stores and a couple from target.
And it's like, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter how much you spend or where you get them.
I just resigned to the fact that they're all crap.
So just, you know, after in the end times, instead of pushing a shopping cart through the ruins of civilization, I will be the 50 year old man riding a way too small for him.
BMX bike.
That is awesome.
John, I have good news.
My friend, you have successfully mustered up the appropriate amount of anger.
I was so, I was so much angrier then.
because like you know i think it's the marco style anger is like something that money can't fix what what is wrong with the world i'm willing to spoil my children and buy them things that they shouldn't own that they're not going to appreciate and yet i can't i'm not allowed to spoil my children
The thing I want is not available on Amazon.
No, I was going to bike stores.
I went to actual bike stores.
We did actually buy a couple of bikes at bike stores.
At least we got some that were sturdy from bike stores at tremendous expense, mind you.
But I'm totally willing to support a bike store if it's going to keep a bike store in business.
Because if you don't go to a bike store, it's Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, and like sporting goods stores, none of which know anything about bicycles.
So if you have a local bike store, go there and give them whatever they want because it is better than shopping elsewhere.
I think you guys have... Does Adam have a scoot bike?
He has a balance bike.
I don't know if that's the same thing.
It's basically a bike with no pedals.
Yeah, those are awesome.
Yeah, and he has taken... He's had it now for over a year, I think.
Maybe even two years.
He took to it immediately and is really into it.
It's almost to the point now where...
i was thinking about um in a few weeks i was thinking about like trying him on a like on a like a real bike to see if he if he can do it yet because i think he might be able to he's 100 ready i've seen video of him doing it he is ready for a bike he is you know that that's good bike he's totally mastered it he's yeah my kids never wanted to use a scoot bike of course we want the scoot bikes oh i understand the theory behind a scoot bike it'll be awesome my kids were like nope no way in hell i'm getting on that so they took a long time to learn how to ride bikes
But Adam's going to be riding a bike tomorrow if you give him a bike with pedals.
Don't even bother with the training wheels.
He's ready.
I didn't ride a bike until, like, middle school.
It took me a long time.
This doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, like, I was really into scooters and just didn't really, I thought I didn't need the bike.
You didn't understand mechanical advantage.
Not at all.
No.
Yeah, so it took me a while.
Then you entered middle school and you learned about levers and
Other simple machines.
Well, and actually, at the beach, it's like a no cars community.
Like there's no cars anywhere.
Only wagons.
Yeah, everyone bikes everywhere.
And there were some bikes in the basement of this place.
And so I took one out in the last couple of times we've been there and started riding it around.
And I haven't ridden a bike since my high school bike, which was never quite adult size.
It was like a couple inches smaller than like a regular.
To be fair...
yeah are you really adult size i didn't even see where that was going yeah i was just gonna say to be fair and hoping you would auto complete the joke but i had to i had to go a little farther um yeah so i i started writing and first of all riding a bike when you haven't ridden one in you know probably 20 years um
It's just like riding a bike.
Yeah.
The old saying, oh, it comes right back to you.
I mean, yes, but not well.
And it's terrifying.
And also like the bike.
Oh, wait a second.
I took a long break riding bikes, too.
Like most people like you ride a bike when you're a kid and then you become an adult and you get a license, you get a car.
So I think there was a pretty big gap between riding a bike.
In my experience, it was like riding a bike.
i'm no problem i'm like of course i know how to do this um maybe your gap was longer than mine or maybe you didn't maybe you didn't have the hours the flight hours uh uh in the in the seat of a bike but i just rode my bike i i really like to pick up my car from the the body shop where i got a you know scratches fixed in my paint
And I had to go pick up the car, but of course you can't drive a car to pick up the car.
So I had to pick up the car.
And you know, it was, that's not the first time I've ridden a bike in a long time.
But anyway, in my experience, it was just like riding a bike and wasn't terrifying, but maybe, maybe your gap was longer.
Well, it kind of an exacerbating factor is that the, the bike that was in the basement of this house is not only very, very old and has a lot of rust and failing parts.
Like it is an 18 speed mountain bike.
Um, uh,
i don't know what brand i don't think it would be a brand anybody would recognize it like it isn't it's it's cheap bike but it's also a cheap old bike that has been around sea air for a long time so there's lots of rust and it's to the point where like the gears like if you shift the the big gear like by the pedals if you shift that the the uh thing falls off like the the thing that moves the gears back and forth like it just falls off and you have to like it jams up in weird ways and you have to like unjam it in weird ways kinks in your chain too
something like that yeah but only if you shift the middle gear and then it the the back gears like the smaller ones that are supposed to be like more fine grained the the gear shifting thing seems to just like skip every two or three at a time so it is technically an 18 speed but i can only actually get it to engage maybe three distinct speeds and they're very far apart from each other so i basically keep it in one gear
when i rode to get my car i was using you know some ancient like it was like a given to us by a friend who was going to throw it in the garbage and the same same problem it's like a mountain bike with a whole bunch of gears and in theory you have a whole bunch of them but in practice it jumps over all the gears and the worst part for me is because i have kinks in the chain if you try to pedal hard the chain pops off the teeth oh geez and then and then catches again like seven notches later and that is the worst thing when you're trying to pedal it's like i just
I mean, I don't blame that bike.
I know there are available good mountain bikes.
If I was willing to buy them, I'm just a hand-me-down bike.
But yeah, riding a bad bike feels gross.
The other problem is this bike is way too tall for me.
Like, it's, first of all, not comfortable.
You have your tippy toes to reach the pedals.
i have to almost jump onto it like that's that's how it's like it's really it's way too tall we need some video of this what what is what is tiff periscoping if not right you took the words right out of my mouth like of all the stuff that you've periscoped and the seat the seat is at the bottom like it can't be adjusted any further down than where it is now and it's just it's just too big for me we get you to do a running start and get that on periscope you can do the running start and jump on
yeah it's so it's it's quite terrifying like if i if i have to slow down like to go around some people on the sidewalk i just have to just just stop and just put my feet down just i'll just wait for them to pass well at least you can put your feet down if when the seats are really high like when i first got a couple of my 10 speeds or when i'd ride my dad's 10 speed i couldn't reach my feet couldn't reach the ground i would have to jump off of the seat and even when it was on the bar i'd be like rest resting on my balls tilted over so one foot could be on the ground
yeah i mean yeah i'm only putting one foot down i don't i don't quite have your bar issue but it's it's not that far off like it's really so yeah i i and i so actually this was interesting this was the second time i'm looking at bikes online today uh earlier today i thought you know i would like to get you know obviously a bike that that fits me for this place because i'm about to go be there for a long time for the for my big summer vacation so
I would like to maybe get my own bike that actually fits me.
It would be less terrifying to ride and maybe has gears that work.
So I thought maybe I should look at bikes.
And I thought, you know, if there's one bike I would really want to have.
John, you know the decade that we grew up in.
Can you guess what bike I want?
I do know the decade you grew up in, but I didn't grow up on that decade.
I know what the answer would be if you were my age, but I'm assuming because you're 90s children that you want some kind of gross mountain bikey thing with suspension.
Casey, can you guess the one bike I might want from our childhood?
Oh, the Pee Wee Herman bike?
Yep, there you go.
That's closer to my generation.
Oh, my word.
I should have known.
I should have known.
Well, that's better than a gross mountain bike thing.
i want the bike from peewee's big adventure right and it turns out that there there is a community of people who make replicas of these bikes but they only make them like for themselves as projects like they're they basically never go for sale anywhere there's no gears on the peewee bike you don't want that well but actually for the place that i'm staying at like there's no hills and you can't go that fast because you're on sidewalks with people on them but it could be too high it could be too tall geared and then it's like hard to go slow
I guess it's true.
I imagine there would be some way to maybe swap out the front gear or something to fix that in some way, right?
I don't know.
Of course you can, but I would think you could get me a Pee Wee Herman replica bike because I'm Marco, but also give it to me with like five speeds or something.
I mean, it's a whole custom build anyway, so I'm sure I can get them to make one that's actually my size and maybe give me three speeds.
I don't need a lot of speeds.
It would not have occurred to me.
I'm thinking, well, he's going to get one of those expensive carbon fiber racing bikes, that type of thing, and those are going to cost a lot.
No, Marco wants someone to build him a bike, some ridiculous bike from a movie.
Yeah, and one of them that was actually in the movie, one of the actual prop bikes, sold on eBay in 2014 for $36,000.
Yeah, don't get that one, please.
Yeah, well, I'm not going to get that.
Also, I wouldn't want to ride that one.
That one's not going to ride good.
Yeah, and apparently, in order to build this bike, you have to get a frame from, I think it's a Schwinn.
It's some kind of good bike frame from the 40s.
like the 1940s like that's it's like find one of these frames and then get all this custom stuff to go around it like it's it's totally crazy so i'm all for these bikes as long as if i get on them and i pedal the pedals i feel an efficient transfer of my my leg force to forward momentum
i don't want to feel the gears or the chains or friction of the parts moving i want to feel like like my legs are magically attached to like forward momentum and i swear to you like no no no children's bike that i've sat on is like one eighth as efficient as the mongo so you're gonna spend all this money and the fancy bike looks like the pv herman bike also make sure that when you pedal it it feels like a hundred times better than those crap bicycles you're trying to ride now you're like
wow suddenly biking is easier because all the friction has been taken out of this mechanical system
And the other thing is, like, if I actually want to bike a lot in this beach place, there are parts of it, like, I can only go so far unless I'm willing to go on sand for some portion.
Then you end up in the ocean of the day, I know.
No, no, I mean, it's a long space island, but there's, at some point, like, there are certain parts where, like, there's just private property for the whole width of the island, so, like, you actually can't progress.
Or then the ticks get you.
You can't go any farther.
Oh, the ticks.
Well, you can if you're willing to drive in the sand for a little bit.
so i actually so they have like there are people around there who have those like giant sand cruiser tire bikes like the ones that have like the five inch tires like so i actually and there's a rental place there so i think i think about renting one while i'm there just for a day and just try it and see if i imagine i'm going to hate trying a bike on sand it's probably ridiculously hard those yeah those tires don't make it
that much easier yeah right still biking on sand the other so so basically i'm looking at i'm considering two options the other option is an e-bike which is the very you know this is like this would be the high-end option oh so if you're willing to spend like two grand at least on a bike you can get one that that has an electric motor assist why do you even say if
And so, well, but listen, I'll address that in a second.
You can get one that has an electric motor assist and a small lithium battery in it.
And those would be nice when going on the sand to just assist you through the sand and you can get back on the pavement and turn the assist off.
So that's one thing.
However...
One thing I really hate about the practicality of using a bike in a place like this is that you have to lock it.
Locking a bike sucks.
And bikes, you always have to worry so much about theft because they're stolen so often.
And even if you get the most ridiculous locks, then they'll just steal all the parts or whatever.
Are they going to be stolen where you are?
Because there is a physical...
reason why bike thieves would have more difficulty like unless it's gonna be stolen by your neighbor right yeah it's like like where because like where are you gonna take the bike you know like yeah exactly but you have you have time to catch them there's a bottleneck you just show up at the ferry with some goons and be like where are you gonna go
you drive it off into the ocean no i know where you're going but but i feel like there there are two there are two approaches here that would make sense number one get a nice bike you know get like a peewee herman bike or or something that something is of that style that i can really be proud of get like a nice like a schwinn like a nice brand and and give it some gears make it a really nice bike and that's probably going to be about a thousand bucks
or you go the crazy e-bike route but i don't think that's really necessary or practical or worth the cost necessarily none of those things have ever bothered you before ever true or just get the cheapest bike you can possibly find and just don't lock it like who cares like if you steal it they'll still steal it they will still steal but if it's if it's like a 60 walmart bike then it's like it's a lot less of a loss you know
You don't want to ride that.
You're going to be spending all your muscle strength will be going to friction.
Those things, it's just not an enjoyable experience.
It's terrible.
Don't do it.
I mean, you don't have to spend, there's something in between $2,000 and $60.
You can buy a $200 bike.
Don't lock it.
Resign yourself that it's going to get stolen every 1.5 years and just go.
right honestly like i think i would rather have that than like a fancy expensive bike that i would worry about getting stolen all the time yeah and two thousand dollars by the way is low like if you if you were to buy like a racing bike like a road bike uh you know 10 speed is you know dated lingo or whatever you can go up 10 grand easy on those like it's it's it's not like watches but it is like max you can you can keep going and well into the five digits and just keep going and keep going and it's insane and and also those like that's the five digits
yeah yeah wow i mean i guess once you start getting to like carbon fiber and stuff i guess the sky's the limit right and and and there's the and like max there's the premium above and beyond the yes this is made of fancy materials and engineering but also we know that you know you are you're the pro users and your actual racers and yeah it's it can get very expensive very fast
man who knew it's better than a watch actually this this uh people in the chat suggested uh the schwinn cruisers line this actually looks pretty nice yeah they're like the same between anything they look like people herman style but they're just you know playing up the middle bikes couple hundred bucks i've never been on one but i assume they pedal okay
available exclusively at schwinn's signature independent bike shops yeah oh wow 800 bucks i i guessed too low yeah the high-end ones are 800 bucks the low lower ones are more like in the four to five range but yeah well that's the thing i don't know at what point in this price range pedaling becomes just like grinding a bunch of metal gears through sand at what point does it become like you know sliding the bolt on a well-oiled rifle that's that's the bike you want
You can borrow my mongoose.
It might be the right size.
Actually, no, I would not let you borrow my mongoose.
No, you wouldn't.
Even though it was the best Christmas present I ever received, never would have received, it is still one of my prized possessions.
So that's why I still have it.
I would not want to borrow your mongoose because I'd be too afraid of damaging it.
Oh, yeah.
I did a pretty good job on it.
This tells you how different I was as a child and how it took me a long time to become the thing that you see before you today.
At one point...
I wanted to make sure that I had fear of my bike being stolen because the mongoose and red lines were highly coveted in the neighborhood.
And I wanted to make sure that I could identify my mongoose.
And the way my...
nine-year-old brain decided to do this was there was like a sticker on the front like a little tube that connects the handlebars down to the front fork right and there's a sticker on the front i decided to take one of my dad's razor blades from like his little tool area and cut a big line down the middle of the sticker like cut like a valley and not even like a straight one but it's like this big jagged
you know as if you had taken something and just scraped the front of the thing so like now i can always identify my bike and that's what i did does that sound insane to you like what no version of my brain as exists today would consider like i literally damaged my own bike to identify it and so down there is down in the basement with a big giant gash there and me looking at it and saying what were you thinking nine-year-old me wow oh my word so now we just need to get casey a bike and we'll be ready to go
I wanted not the Mongoose Californian I want to say it was the Huffy White Heat which was like Huffy is crap I'm not saying it was good I'm not saying it was good John Huffy is like the bottom of the was the bottom of the neighborhood ladder because there was nothing below that there was no like Walmart brand by Huffy that was the bottom oh my god are you done just saying
I don't even want to tell the story.
I'm done.
Go ahead.
I've got to Google this bike now.
It's the Huffy what?
White Heat.
I was looking for a picture earlier.
I never found a terribly great one.
Oh, it auto-completed.
It must be a popular bike.
i don't know um i i think i wanted it because if memory serves it had a pretty serious like marketing push and i think it had like little um uh like guards in front of the handlebars which i thought was super cool it totally did it's a mountain bike not a bmx bike yeah yeah yeah yeah um and it was like neon green as you do in the late 80s early 90s and yep
and uh i just wanted it so hard and i eventually did i get it i don't remember now you can tell how much it really i'm assuming it was still a crap bike because you know huffy but sure it was wow i mean these days huffy is probably like uh you know it's like it's a name brand it's above like the whatever the random walmart brands are so it actually probably is probably the same probably the same quality as mongoose and redline these days but when i was a kid huffy was you just you know oh you just got a huffy
It was a very materialistic go-go 80s money equals status environment for the single digit year old boys in suburban New York neighborhoods.
100%.
Hoffie's a funny name.
I'm looking at this cool Schwinn bike.
The only thing is, I doubt I'm a 26-inch... I'm pretty sure that's like... Do they have a bike store there near you?
There is a bike store in my town.
It is not... Whatever kind of dealer Schwinn says these are exclusively sold within, it is not showing up on their map.
Because you do want to...
Well, you can fit a bike in your Tesla easy.
What you want to do is ride it.
Go to a bike store to buy it, first of all, even though you're going to pay way more.
And then they'll let you ride it.
Try it out.
See how it feels.
Then you'll know what size.
And you'll be able to distinguish the crap bikes from the good ones.
If you ride them back to back, it's well worth it.
yeah that is how i would do it because i especially because i don't know what i'm doing so like i would want the expertise of a local shop but this is exactly what local shops are good at yep should i get a mongoose californian from 1884 for adam's first bike that would be amazing if you could find one in good condition uh and if he fits on the bike yes absolutely how old of a kid you have to be to fit on it like i think he's too i think he's too small he would have to be much bigger than he is but like if you know
If your kid was tall enough for it at the time that he wanted his first bike, yes, if you could find one.
Because judging by the condition mine is in, I don't know if they're expensive to get in good condition, but yeah.
Let's see.
Have you actually looked?
I have looked.
I was looking for pictures of other people.
The problem is a lot of them, they seem to be modified a lot.
It's like trying to find a 1990s Honda Civic with no modifications in good condition.
It's like basically impossible.
I can get just the fork for $400.
Yikes.
There's one on eBay for $600.
Oh, my God.
These are much more than I expected.
It's a popular bike.
The ones that have the plastic wheels?
No.
You want the ones with the wire spoke wheels.
Those plastic wheels are either an option or aftermarket.
and just say no that let me let me find you a picture of my actual bike as close as i can find yeah it looks like the the going rate for these is generally looks like it's around 500 bucks if you look at like at ebay sold items that's probably close to what they're oh look at this yeah
every single one i find is modified so this picture i'm going to put in the chat room now it's close to mine it has the mine does not have the bent back seat my seat pole is straight the stock seat poles were straight and also those pedals are weird but that is very very close and you can see the sticker i put the scratch in right in the little tube there this is very close to uh it's also probably in better condition than mine but it's very close to mine you should do the scratch technique with your jet black iphone
yeah i always wonder what it looks like sometimes i forget i have a jet black phone because it's in the case and i think about what it might look like under the best thing about the the 84 californian is like power rangers it came in colors black red blue uh what was the other color um but but anyway it was you know you can see if you do google search for 1984 mongoose california you can see the red and the blue ones and the black ones i got the black one obviously this is the coolest um yeah but but they were like the wheels on the red one were red which was pretty cool the wheels and the blue one were blue
uh total power rangers vibe and the colors looked awesome they were they were like the candy colored imax before they were a thing god i i at the point i would like to have if i could get main condition uh i'm trying to think if there was a color other than red blue and black but if i get main condition versions of all those with all the original stuff like that would be
They'll be right next to my LaFerrari and my fantasy unlimited money mansion.
Wait, if you could get a mint condition what now?
All three of these colors.
Oh.
Of these bikes.
What is a two-speed kickback drive train?
What is that?
Is that when you pedal backwards to brake?
I don't know.
Never heard that term.
Newfangled technologies.
I was a kid, uh, bikes were, bikes were simpler.
They didn't have these weird, they have these things to make changing gears, you know, easier.
Like you just like making a binary, like click this little wheel and it clicks to the next number.
You've changed gears where they come from the generation where you pull lever and
that pulls a cord and you have to pull it the right amount to get the thing onto the gear right so it was all you know completely analog adjustment of knowing just where to put it now they try to make it mechanical all these things have some sort of ratcheting mix number it's like click click and it's exactly on the gear or it's not and there's nothing you can do about it
So the people in the chat are saying that what this means is that you pedal backwards really hard to shift gears.
That's terrible.
What?
It's a two-speed that you just, like, pedal backwards to shift between.
So I guess it probably still has some kind of, like, you know, handle break.
Here, I'll place this thing in the chat room.
This bike, for some reason, has a built-in cup holder and bottle opener?
Seems like a bad idea.
That's a high-performance machine right there.
You know it's got a cup holder and bottle opener.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess maybe it's a way to have gears on a bike that doesn't have a derailleur.
I've never heard of that.
Yeah, it probably just keeps the handlebar area simpler.
You don't have the big cables running up to do the gear shifting.
And it's also got some kind of suspension.
That's a popular thing now for old people's delicate butts, like lots of bikes have suspension.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You would expect that.
I wouldn't expect that.
Well, I expect that, excuse me.
Expect a cushion for your bum.
You say bum?
You're one of those people?
No.
You're a bum person?
No, it's like you're a poshous cushion, so you gotta say bum.
Yeah, see, the cool one I'm looking at here, this big classic one, this one has a cruiser springer fork.
Does that mean it's like a little spring suspension in there?
What does that mean?
Maybe.
I mean, like I said, almost every bike for grownups has some form of suspension because grownups don't like going over the pothole ridden.
infrastructure on our you know crumbling nation yeah and realizing those shocks transferred directly through to you it's unpleasant whereas as a kid i don't remember being bothered by this at all but as an adult as a much heavier larger adult i can tell you it is jarring to have those jolts come through this one is totally awesome if i can get if i can somehow try this in person somewhere and if it actually fits me i would seriously consider this
Yeah, that's pretty styling.
The other one was much more kind of black and ugly.
This one looks awesome.
This is a total 50s throwback.
It has a built-in headlight and a horn.
You've got to get a place to put a basket so you can put groceries and stuff in it.
It has the big back rack thing.
Can you just hang stuff off of that?
Yeah, well, you can get panniers or something for the back on the sides of the wheels.
Is that what you call little side things?
Yeah, or you can just get a big crate.
You should ask the Portland people.
They're all riding their bikes.
They have these giant wheelbarrows that you put your kids in that you push in front of your bike.
They're doing everything on bikes over there, which I don't understand because it isn't always raining there.
It is always raining here.
Or there.
And also, so one of the reasons I don't have a bike here at home is because I live in a very hilly town.
And biking on hills sucks.
But... Wimp.
At the beach, it's totally flat.
Like, there's no hills.
And because you're riding on sidewalks that are shared with people, you can't go that fast anyway.
You're riding the bike on the sidewalk?
I guess there is no streets, right?
Yeah, they're like broad walks.
They're like alleys.
yeah they're yeah well they're they're they're basically like double wide sidewalks those are the streets but there's a lot of people around like during peak weekends and stuff so like you do have to be cautious of people and you know as you're walking you hear like the bike bells behind you ding ding and you gotta like move over and yeah so it's that kind of but like so i'm never going that fast and i'm never going uphill that's why i can get a ridiculous bike like a big cruiser like this and it's not really impractical at all with the exception of you know having to lock it up and not worry about getting stolen but
the only thing i worry about with these bikes is because there are like 50 style bikes like the reason they don't make bikes like this anymore is they're heavy like all that all that metal stuff for the guards to like oh so the rain doesn't splash back up and you're not going to be riding it in the rain like oh that everything about it the metal cover for the chain and the big tube thing like this is a heavy bike and heavy bike equals harder to pedal and you know like not good that's why all the bikes you want the bike to be light
Actually, for my purposes here, I've been enjoying biking there for exercise and sightseeing, but exercise is one of the primary goals.
I do a lot of dog walks, but my dog is fairly small, and he can only take so much.
If I want to keep going with the exercise for the day, I've got to go out on a bike and get some more distance that way.
But for my purposes, it's actually better if the bike is less efficient.
You're just saying that you didn't want to ride bikes where there were hills.
You've got to make up your mind.
Do you want exercise or do you not want exercise?
I want some exercise.
But not that much.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyway, I think in the grand scheme of things, you want a bike that is efficient, that doesn't have a lot of friction losses, and that is not too heavy because it is much more satisfying to ride an efficient bike for longer distances or faster than to ride a heavier bike for shorter distances.
It's the same amount of exercise work, but it feels worse to do the heavy bike for shorter distances.
That makes sense.
So you want to feel like is the whole point of the bike is mechanical.
Like, look how fast I can go with just this much effort.
If I put this much effort into walking, I'd be going slowly.
Same amount of effort into a bike.
And I'm flying because going fast is fun.
And the wind on you and it's, you know, making the sweat evaporate and cooling you off.
You want the efficient bike.
fine and you have to periscope this give her her assignment oh yes absolutely yeah what i really also want to periscope i want to see you renting the sand bike and trying to make i've never tried one of those things either like i see them right i see them riding on the street you can hear them coming from a mile away like your m5 because the stupid tires the giant knobby tires on the asphalt make this terrible droning noise yep right i've never seen one uh riding on sand and i've never tried it but it seems like it would be terrible
Yeah, that's why... Yeah, I'm not in a huge rush to do that because I suspect... You're right, I suspect it will be just awful.
So that's one of the reasons why I've been going there a lot this summer and I still haven't done it.
I keep putting this off.
I still haven't done it.
So...
probably not going to but hey casey here's what here's what huffy meant uh in my time take a look at that that's hideous that's a hell of a thing huh 1970s huffy uh and that seat you see there it's not a banana seat because banana seats are for girls or so we thought when we were stupid kids in the 70s it's like a manly banana seat see how much thicker it is it's a bro-nana seat yeah and i had uh before my mongoose i had basically an off-brand huffy it's like it wasn't even good enough to be a huffy it was like generic
terrible bicycle and had one of those seats on it i hated it all right i have a question this bike i'm looking at this this big schwinn 50s thing it doesn't appear to have brakes in the uh in the coaster brakes yeah it says brakes coaster coaster brakes are terrible they're stupid they're from the 50s but that's what you're getting when you buy one of those is that when you pedal backwards and it's stopped yes
yep you pedal backwards and it tries feebly to stop there's a reason every real modern bike has hand brakes because coaster brakes suck but you're not going to be going fast so you'll probably be fine yeah just don't just don't get up to speed going down a big long hill and think you're going to be able to jam on the brakes because you won't because coaster brakes suck
But there are no hills.
And they only break the back wheels.
So all it's going to do, if you did ever start going fast and you tried to stop, all you do is, if you were able to with the coaster brakes, if you were even able to, is lock up the back wheel and then your bike would continue to slide and slide and slide.
Yeah, I'd just spin out at that point.
No, you don't spin out.
You continue to go the direction you were going.
You just don't stop.
It's like locking up.
Imagine if you could just lock up the back wheels on a car.
It would stop eventually and you could still steer during that time, but you wouldn't stop as fast.
So with the bike, you want to have front and back brakes that you were able to modulate so that you can stop faster.
If you lock up both wheels, obviously you got double the friction.
You stop even faster, but usually it doesn't come to that.
Have they not figured out analog brakes for bikes yet?
Those are analog.
You're pressing the levers.
This is the first time I've ridden my bike amongst the cars in a long time because normally you're riding it recreationally and now I was riding to actually go somewhere.
I don't know if things have gotten worse since I was a kid, but
People in cars want to kill people on bicycles.
I was using all of my defensive bicycle driving skills honed over many years of riding on actual major highways before I had my license with my 10-speed bike and everything just to stay alive.
I was shocked at exactly how aggressively people in cars want to kill bicycles.
Yeah, I have zero temptation to ride a bike on roads.
Up here in the suburbs, it would probably be less horrible, but I still don't think it would be great.
Drivers really hate bikers.
I don't know.
I'm a driver.
I don't care about bikers.
Or they're oblivious.
Even when there's bike lanes, they don't care.
We have actual painted on the ground bike lanes with little pictures of bicycles and dedicated lanes and cars.
They're like, this is my lane.
Bicycle, go away.
I'm going to run you off the road with my giant Tesla Model X. It's like, save me.
It was scary.
So looking at the reviews of this bike, it's apparently 67 pounds.
That's a pretty heavy bike.
That seems like a lot.
It is a lot.
It's made out of 50s metal, and they have metal places where you don't need it.
Why does there need to be a metal chain guard?
Why does there need to be a chain guard?
Why?
Because that's what they did in the 50s, because they were dumb.
And all they had was metal left over from the war.
For this price, they can't throw in some aluminum, maybe?
There are lighter metals.
I think it probably is aluminum.
There's just so much of it.
I mean, so you need something structural, like structural steel or very strong aluminum for the frame.
Yeah, for the frame.
But all the decoration pieces, that can be carbon fiber.
It's not, though.
I know.
It's metal, and it adds up.
Maybe the whole thing is steel.
That would explain 67 pounds, but yeah.
Yeah.
Check out the weight for the Mongoose California.
It's probably lower.
Well, yeah, because there's no bike there, practically.
25 pounds for the Californian.
So I can fit almost three of them in the weight of this bike, apparently.
It does have excellent reviews.
The reviewers all say basically what you'd expect.
It's like, this is an awesome bike.
It's beautiful.
It's smooth.
It looks awesome.
It's great.
It's fun to ride.
However, it's heavy, and the brake is not sufficient enough for its weight.
Coaster brake.
Everything you'd expect.
Now I'm on eBay looking at these bikes.
This is not good.
I told you.
It looks like they go in pretty reasonable quantity.
If you look at sold items, there's a good number of them there.
They seem to be approximately $500 range.
For non-original, I can look at them and say these are non-original parts.
All sorts of aftermarket stuff and still $500.
There's lots of people with fond memories of this bike.
People my age with money they want to spend.
Chromali.
That's what the frame is made out of.
What is Chromali?
The world may never know.
Yeah, I've never even heard of that.
that was it's big selling point in the 80s like blast processing right yeah exactly discussed amongst the kids and in like the lunchroom chromoly was discussed does your bike have chromoly no it's a chromoly it's a chromoly frame well the chrome part of it you can get because it's shiny like the outside looks like it's shiny and chrome what was it made about i'm assuming it was some sort of aluminum thing or whatever but blast processing and chromoly that's it