Island of Shortcuts
Casey:
So a couple of days ago, I got afflicted by my iMac's newest virus, which is to say that although it no longer shuts down willy-nilly, it will occasionally decide to not play video, and it will instead show a perfectly green screen.
Casey:
I've never understood why this is.
Casey:
I have never found anything I can kill or force quit or anything to kind of, you know, get the engine sputtering again, if you will.
Marco:
Now, wait, if you'll permit me for a second, is it only DRM like iTunes video or is it any video?
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
Any video like stuff I've taken with my GoPro, for example.
Marco:
I wonder if it's like the like the the MPEG decoder failing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because like if you're just seeing green it's like this is like a placeholder that's put that's put here and like the GPU is told to render something here.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it's but like it's just not doing it.
Marco:
So like I would say you have a GPU issue in all likelihood but possibly this might be software maybe.
Casey:
It could be either or.
Casey:
I was also of the impression that it might be a GPU issue, and what will eventually happen is I'll be the first one to get a Mac Pro of the three of us, and that will really screw everything up.
Casey:
But anyway, so I had whined about this on Twitter, as one is off to do, and somebody who I don't have in front of me said, hey, have you looked into audio plug-ins?
Casey:
And so apparently some random stranger on the Internet had said another random stranger on the Internet had had a similar issue.
Casey:
But when they removed some audio plugins, it went away.
Casey:
And so the only audio plugins I'm aware of that I had installed are Soundflower, which I was using to try to capture a live Mute Math concert that I couldn't figure out how to download using YouTube DL.
Casey:
Which we'll talk about later, actually.
Marco:
Soundflower is a mess.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Casey:
It is a mess.
Casey:
It's an absolute mess.
Casey:
And I also had the Audio Hijack, what is it, ACE or something, Audio Capture Engine, something like that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I uninstalled ACE, and more importantly, I uninstalled Soundflower.
Casey:
And I'm just trying to, like, shotgun approach, figure out if uninstalling any of these audio bits and bobs will fix my green screen issue.
Yeah.
Marco:
I got to say, Tiff's iMac Pro is having a weird issue that I don't know is, whether it's software or not, it seems like it probably is, when she plays Netflix video sometimes.
Marco:
And sometimes Logic is running, because she's now a podcast editor, and sometimes it isn't.
Marco:
But Logic is installed.
Marco:
As far as I know, there's no weird plugins or anything.
Marco:
Sometimes the video playback in Netflix in the web browser will basically run through the entire episode that she's watching in like a split second as if it has no time restraint.
Marco:
So it just flies through and there's all the frames at once and it's done instantly.
Marco:
Sometimes this problem has been fixed by quitting logic.
Marco:
So it does seem like maybe it's using the sound subsystem as the timing device for the video playback.
Marco:
And something is wrong with the sound subsystem.
Marco:
And this applies whether she's using the built-in audio or not.
Marco:
When it's in this mode, switching audio outputs does fix the problem for whatever she switches it to.
Marco:
But when she switches it back to the built-in headphone jack, the problem resumes.
Marco:
uh and sometimes it has happened without logic running so something's up and i and i have the exact same computer across the exact same room with many of the same things plugged in and i've never had that problem but i also i never watch netflix in my browser so maybe there's something with browser video where it's doing something but like i watch youtube sometimes and that that never has a problem so because you tried chrome instead of safari
Marco:
why would i do that to see if it's the browser but chrome is gross you're just watching video it's gonna be a video window i would it's like the first thing i would try is a different browser i think we actually did try chrome and i think it didn't happen there but that's probably because chrome is doing everything using the like the most cpu possible and ignoring all the hardware that's my that's my best guess all right well it's plugged into the wall what do you care
Marco:
I mean, I care a little bit about fan noise, performance, efficiency.
Marco:
I mean, there's some caring.
Marco:
Also, Chrome is just gross.
Marco:
Truth.
Casey:
I hope that part doesn't make the show because we're going to get so much email.
Casey:
Even though you're right.
Marco:
I do have some video follow-up.
Marco:
I lost my first video today.
Casey:
Did you go to try to find it?
Marco:
So I wanted to do a quick video on how I roast coffee.
Marco:
Just, you know, quick, like, here's how I do it.
Marco:
You know, you can do it if you want.
Marco:
And I set up my, you know, my Sony.
Marco:
So I don't know if I mentioned I got a Sony a7 III to be like my video camera.
Marco:
um of course you did but anyway well it's good but anyway so uh so i set it up and i was all ready to go and roasting coffee takes about 25 minutes but i i kept having to like pause and set up again and everything so anyway so i was recording for probably about 40 minutes or so and uh i get to the end okay fine
Marco:
I go look at the camera to stop the recording and it doesn't look like it's recording.
Marco:
Whoops.
Marco:
And I was like, Oh no, I forgot to hit record that whole time.
Marco:
40 minutes later after doing an entire coffee roast.
Marco:
So you gotta be kidding me.
Marco:
Like I, how could I, how could I have made that mistake?
Marco:
I decided, you know what, let me pull the card out and see if anything's there anyway.
Marco:
I mean, can I save this video?
Marco:
So I plug in the card, and there is a 12 gig file.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
That is a few seconds less than 30 minutes exactly.
Marco:
And I thought, hmm.
Marco:
So I looked up, is there a video length limit on Sony A7 series cameras?
Marco:
Turns out, yes there is.
Marco:
It's 30 minutes long.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
I did indeed press record, thank you very much.
Marco:
I had the first 30 minutes, but since it was like a 40-something minute video, and the last 12 minutes of it are like the end of a coffee roast, I can't really do that over again very easily without doing a whole thing over again, and I didn't have time for that today, then I have to redo this whole video.
Marco:
Because Sony cameras have this...
Marco:
fairly poorly documented limit of 30 minutes for a video clip and then it just stops doesn't like start a new one maybe like it did it wasn't hitting like like a file system limit like the way old ones would like with four gig limit it wasn't hitting that like it's just 30 minutes and it just stops without warning
Marco:
So I'm annoyed.
Marco:
I know some people in chat are saying for heat reasons on the sensor.
Marco:
We've had full frame sensors for a very long time.
Marco:
We've had 4K video now for a pretty long time.
Marco:
This isn't the first camera that can shoot 4K 30.
Marco:
This is not a very new thing.
Marco:
I don't think we should have limits like this for heat reasons anymore.
Marco:
That seems unreasonable to me.
Marco:
But anyway, I'm annoyed.
Marco:
But in the future, I guess I'll get one of those large kitchen timers that you see stuck to the wall behind people's stoves and just set it to 30 minutes and put it on the front of the camera facing me.
Marco:
So just every time I hit record, hit that so I can see and make sure I'm not actually accidentally hitting that buffer.
Marco:
But it's very annoying.
John:
I suppose I'll find this out eventually but what exactly are you recording for 30 minutes while coffee beans roast?
John:
I mean are you in front of the camera during this 30 minutes?
John:
Are you literally pointing your camera at coffee beans inside a contraption that is making them hot for 30 minutes?
Marco:
It was a frame of me, me next to the coffee roaster as it's running.
Marco:
And my idea was I was shooting a bunch of B-roll with my iPhone.
Marco:
And my idea was I would use that track as the master track to sync everything to.
Marco:
But I wouldn't actually include all 40 minutes in the finished video.
Marco:
The finished video would be like 10 or 12 minutes probably.
Marco:
And I just edit out chunks of it when not much was happening.
John:
not much is happening the entire time coffee beans are roasting as far as i'm concerned yep they're still roasting let me check again roasting i use the rest of the time to explain things like why i roast why you might want to consider roasting you know what's some what's going on and what you need to consider like stuff like that like i use the time wisely thank you very much but all right i mean i'm sure i'll see in the edited video and just i'm just thinking you know roll that beautiful bean footage yeah
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
What is that recipe anyway?
Casey:
Does Duke still have it?
Casey:
Anyway, you know, it's funny to me hearing you talk about your Sony cameras because having only held one of these beloved Sony cameras for like five minutes in my life, it seems to me like, and I can't think of an analogy that's just right for this, but it seems to me like the Sony cameras are...
Casey:
It's wonderful as long as you can get past the asterisk, the double asterisk, the dagger, double dagger, and the seven other things that make them freaking terrible.
Marco:
What are all the asterisks?
Marco:
Honestly, I have found very few things to complain about, and that's saying a lot, but this 30-minute limit just bit me in the butt today.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
like you know honestly like of my time using sony cameras like there have been some that have flaws like like the a7r2 that i had was incredibly sluggish to render its files like and to be able to preview what it shot um the rx1 the first generation rx1 that i had had an absolutely terrible autofocus engine that was very very slow because it was contrast only and everything
Marco:
So, you know, there were some issues here and there.
Marco:
But the modern ones, like basically like the 3 generation, the a7 III and the a7R III, got rid of all the previous issues that the other ones had and pretty much brought no new ones as far as I'm aware.
Marco:
So they're just awesome.
Casey:
Wasn't one of them like you had four shots before the battery ran out or something like that?
Casey:
I mean, I'm obviously exaggerating.
Marco:
That was the a7R II and actually the RX I. Yeah, I forgot those had awful battery life.
Marco:
But the 3 Series fixed that pretty well, too.
Casey:
I guess my info is out of date.
Casey:
I feel like I've heard both you and, to a lesser degree, Stephen, say, oh, I love this camera so much, except this, that, and the other thing.
Casey:
But I must be making it up.
Marco:
Well, look, I mean, if you don't know the shortcomings of your camera, you're not using your camera enough.
Marco:
Like, every camera has...
Marco:
some kind of shortcoming or thing you wish was different.
Marco:
That's just the reality of complex products like this that have complex interfaces, complex needs, where no two customers' needs or preferences are the same.
Marco:
It's like to-do lists.
Marco:
You're never going to be satisfied with whatever you're using.
Marco:
Sure.
John:
I can't believe Casey didn't read the manual for you and find out there was a 30-minute video recording limit.
Casey:
The difference is, is that I was going to drive the M5 for at least a small stretch of time.
Casey:
And the likelihood that I'm going to be taking more than maybe three pictures with any of Marco's 16 cameras is extremely unlikely.
John:
You could just buy Underscore has the same camera.
John:
So you either buy his or Marco's when the first one gets bored with it.
Casey:
You know, it's funny you bring that up.
Casey:
I thought a lot about should I go like full frame or something?
Casey:
And the immediate answer to my question is no, because I'm too cheap.
Casey:
But I wondered exactly that, like when Marco inevitably sells off all of these via Twitter, you know, for reasonable prices.
Casey:
Or underscore.
Casey:
He's closer.
Casey:
Or underscore.
Casey:
But the problem is, even if I can get a body for $500,000, whatever the crap these bodies are.
Casey:
I knew they were a lot more than that.
Casey:
I'm saying if I can get a secondhand one from Marco or underscore for several hundred to $1,000, I'm still going to have to spend thousands of dollars on lenses.
Casey:
And I only have two lenses.
John:
$1,000 on lenses.
John:
It'd be fine.
Marco:
Yeah, so I actually got with the a7 III.
Marco:
So I still have my Sony lenses, my 35mm f2.8 and the 55mm f1.8.
Marco:
Those are both amazing primes.
Marco:
I didn't put either of those on the video camera because I didn't want to have to detach them and I wanted to use them with my still camera.
Marco:
So the video camera, they had a deal.
Marco:
It was something like $1,900 if it was body only.
Marco:
but it was like 2150 or 2200 if you got it with the kit zoom.
Marco:
And I was like, that's a pretty cheap price.
Marco:
And the kit zoom actually reviewed pretty well.
Marco:
It's not bad.
Marco:
Like it's not, you know, if it isn't going to be the sharpest lens in the world for like tack sharp photos, but for video, it's totally fine.
Marco:
And, you know, so for you be doing, which would be mostly video with it, um,
Marco:
the cheap kit zoom is fine and you know i wouldn't say that you know easily or lightly but uh yeah it's totally fine like yeah again if you're shooting like you know photos i would suggest a better lens well right i i wouldn't even say you need to spend thousands like each of the primes i mentioned is i think a little bit under a thousand and i wouldn't say you necessarily need both of them
Casey:
Well, so for my Micro Four Thirds camera, I actually just upgraded the body, but I kept the same lenses.
Casey:
And I have, I don't remember what they are, but I have a Prime and a Zoom.
Casey:
I can't remember the details off the top of my head, but each of them was like between $700 and $1,000.
Marco:
Yeah, it's about right for a good Prime.
Casey:
So I'm like two grand into lenses on this thing.
Casey:
And granted, I've had it for four years.
Casey:
Well, the Micro Four Thirds system I've had for four years now.
Casey:
So I shouldn't really complain about the money I've spent on these lenses.
Casey:
But if I were to go and get one of these Sonys, I presumably would want it to be my everything camera in the same way that the Olympus is my everything camera.
Casey:
So I would not only be using it for video, but also for stills of the family.
Casey:
And one of the places that the Olympus falls down, or at least the prior version, I haven't really tried the new version in this situation yet, but it's low light.
Casey:
Low light on my Micro Four Thirds, it's okay, but it is by no means anywhere near the synthetic light that the Sony just invents somehow by being full frame, I guess.
Casey:
And so one of the things I've been thinking about
Casey:
is if I were to really just go all in on a whole new camera setup, should I do, you know, should I pull a Marco slash Steven slash underscore and just follow in your footsteps?
Casey:
But I'm too darn cheap for the body to begin with.
Casey:
And even if I got the body, I don't want to spend another two grand on lenses when I have two perfectly good lenses that are for a completely different camera system already here.
Casey:
And I know that that's just the way this game is played.
Casey:
And I'll either need to get over it or not.
Casey:
But that's one of the things that's hanging me up.
Casey:
Hey, so I'd like to do a little bit more follow-up.
Casey:
I have a product review mostly for Marco.
Casey:
I have tried your other most favorite product in the whole wide world.
Casey:
I'm trying to think of what that might be.
Casey:
Aeropress?
Casey:
No, not an Aeropress.
Casey:
Don't be ridiculous.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
John:
Let's not get too crazy.
John:
That's his other favorite product, though.
Casey:
That's probably accurate.
Casey:
It is not technology-related, but an Aeropress is close-ish to what I'm thinking of.
Marco:
The Patagonia MicroPuff hoodie?
No.
Marco:
Tell you, those things are amazing.
Casey:
It's a consumable as in not.
Marco:
I mean, eventually it will be consumed by the earth.
Casey:
It is something that I put inside of my body.
Marco:
Huh.
Marco:
That's not coffee.
John:
No.
Marco:
Hmm.
John:
Beamster cheese.
John:
That's real good.
John:
No, it is not something... One of those weird skunky beers Marco likes?
Casey:
No, it is not something I wanted to put in my body.
Casey:
It was because of necessity, my friends.
John:
Allergy shots?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Oh, Fisherman's Friend.
Casey:
Fisherman's Friend.
Casey:
I have finally tried Fisherman's Friend, and I would like to provide a review for you right now.
John:
I wouldn't say that's Marco's favorite thing.
John:
He turns to it in his time of need.
John:
I think if he wasn't congested, it's not like he'd be like, you know what I want?
John:
Some Fisherman's Friend.
Casey:
Are we doing some Foley work?
Casey:
I can do that, too.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I've got my fisherman's friend.
Casey:
I have to tell you, these taste like shit in the mouthfeel.
Casey:
And the mouthfeel is even worse.
Casey:
And part of the problem is I grew up on Ludin's cough candy, which tastes delicious but does absolutely nothing to help a sore throat.
Casey:
But Declan has brought home something that has now infected the entire family.
Casey:
And lo, I needed to do something to fix a sore throat.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, self, several months ago, you got Fisherman's Friend because not only did Marco insist that it's great, but my real life – well, not that you're my real life friend, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
My outside of podcasting friend, Stee, had recommended it as well.
Casey:
And so I thought, oh, I should try Fisherman's Friend.
Casey:
They do work.
Casey:
They do work.
Casey:
But I am miserable while I'm consuming it.
John:
Do they work by distracting you from your sore throat with the disgusting taste?
John:
Maybe that's what it is.
Casey:
Maybe that's what it is.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
But I just thought I'd provide the quick product review for you, Marco, that they get the Casey stamp of approval in the sense that they do what they say they are setting out to do, which is to make your throat not feel like it's on fire properly.
Casey:
but not an enjoyable experience to get to that point.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, I agree with you.
Marco:
When you first try these, they do indeed taste horrendous, which I believe I said in my initial review.
Casey:
You probably did.
Marco:
I will say over time, you get used to it.
Marco:
Now that I've probably consumed like 400 of these things over the last three winters of sick children, it does taste horrible, the first 200 or 300 that you try.
Marco:
But after that, you'll get there.
Marco:
After that, then it's fine.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
You barely even notice.
Marco:
It just tastes like a mint.
Marco:
It's not like fish.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And while we're doing the Casey and Marco Corner, can you give me an update on your car?
Casey:
Is there an update on your car?
Casey:
What's going on there?
Marco:
There is an update.
Marco:
It is not done yet, but things have happened.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I had two problems that we mentioned last week's after show.
Marco:
Number one was that Tesla had not canceled my lease when they offered to renew it early.
Marco:
They left the old one going.
Marco:
And so I was being billed for a car I no longer had.
Marco:
That was fun.
Marco:
That has been partly resolved.
Marco:
They did indeed send a check that, well, it hasn't cleared yet, but they did indeed send a check that I deposited yesterday for the parts of the payment that I have paid already, but not for the $5,000 bill that I got.
Marco:
I asked and allegedly they have cleared that bill with the bank and the bank should process it within a week.
Marco:
So ask me again next week.
Marco:
I called the bank yesterday and they hadn't yet seen this, but oh well.
Marco:
Secondly, they sent a mobile tech out to my house, which is literally what it sounds like.
Marco:
It is a person who can service the car in a van.
Marco:
And so they drive to your house and service it at your house instead of at the very, very crowded Tesla service center.
Marco:
Mobile services existed for a while.
Marco:
I know our friend Underscore has used it before.
Marco:
I had never been offered it.
Marco:
But for this problem, I was offered it.
Marco:
So that was really nice.
Marco:
They sent a tech out to replace my yellow ring screen.
Marco:
And it is now replaced.
Marco:
It is fixed.
Marco:
The guy was super nice.
Marco:
And that problem is gone.
Marco:
So I really...
Marco:
I could tell based on some comments that the various people made that part of the reason that this was being fast-tracked was because of me complaining on the podcast and on Twitter.
Marco:
Nice!
Marco:
And I feel a little mixed about that.
Marco:
Normally, I'm fortunate enough to have a large following in these places, and so I kind of knew that I was increasing my chances of getting it fixed by going public with it, but
Marco:
And so normally I wouldn't do that kind of thing lightly.
Marco:
Like I don't like to just like complain to companies in public, you know, in that way.
Marco:
But because I had gone through the official channels for like two months and gotten nowhere, I felt like I was like at the end of my rope.
Marco:
And so I was like, all right, fine.
Marco:
I'm going to go public.
Marco:
I'm going to push that button.
Marco:
I'm going to use it.
Marco:
And I don't feel great that that's why it is getting fixed.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But the reality is it is getting fixed and I'm happy about that.
Marco:
And I, I just, I can't, I hope they're right.
Marco:
I hope the bank thing is done.
Marco:
And when I call the bank in a, in, you know, five or six days, I really hope they say this is resolved because then I can finally complete this project.
Marco:
Like I hate having things hanging over me, you know, like, like,
Marco:
undone projects.
Marco:
I have this paper on my desk that's been on my desk for three months.
Marco:
I want to get this done.
Marco:
I just want to close this out and be done with it so I can get back to not only enjoying this car that I love, but literally anything else in my life.
Casey:
That is something else.
Casey:
I understand what you're saying about not wanting to go nuclear and leverage both Twitter and the podcast.
Casey:
But I think you did right by them and gave them more than enough time to resolve these issues as expediently as possible.
Casey:
And they did not take you up on any of your offers to do that.
Casey:
So I think it's a good sign that you feel guilty, but you should not feel guilty.
Casey:
I think you're fine on this.
John:
i would feel even more i would feel even angrier if this is the only way a problem got resolved because it's almost like i would i would prefer it if the the status quo of just like slowly over the course of six months to a year the problem was fixed and i would complain that this company is terrible and has bad service but it's it's almost worse to me than like oh oh well there's some bad pr oh now we'll fix it because that shows that they had the ability to fix it before but didn't care enough to you know what i mean it's like it's like worse like i
John:
The whole time I'd be saying, what about people who don't have podcasts?
John:
Like, this doesn't help you be a better company.
John:
You think this does.
John:
You're like, we're addressing the PR problem.
John:
We're a good service company.
John:
No, this is the exact opposite.
John:
A good service company does not need you to complain about it on a podcast.
John:
It just makes me angry.
Marco:
Yeah, like, I shouldn't have had to do any of this.
John:
And they shouldn't be able to quickly solve your problem because you're on a podcast.
John:
Because it shows that the problem was just, like...
John:
You know, this could have happened at any point.
John:
Obviously, it's not, you know, tremendous costs to them.
John:
It's just, just do it.
John:
Just do it when you were asked two months ago.
John:
Don't, you know, how long can we let this go until we absolutely have to do it?
John:
Let's continue to do nothing and be incompetent.
John:
Let's go for a little bit longer.
Casey:
Aye, aye, aye.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we also have feedback since we're in the Tesla section.
Casey:
Now we had feedback from David Griffin about your mystery box in your, is it your frunk or your trunk?
Casey:
It's your frunk, right?
Marco:
It's in the trunk.
Marco:
It's like, like normally the trunk has, it has like these two like kind of support beams that come straight back and,
Marco:
And then on either side of them, like between them and the actual outer edge of the car on the left and right, they're like these little cubbies and that you can put stuff in.
Marco:
Well, on the new car, one of those cubbies, the right one is just gone.
Marco:
It's replaced by this giant enclosure that seems to have no openings.
Marco:
And it's just space that is used by the car for car things.
Marco:
And I had speculated, I'd asked last time during that big Tesla rant, I'm like, hey, by the way,
Marco:
My new car has this thing.
Marco:
The old car didn't.
Marco:
I can't figure out what it is.
Marco:
I've searched the internet.
Marco:
No one seems to know.
Marco:
If anyone knows out there what this thing is taking up space in my trunk for, I'm just curious.
Marco:
I really just want to know.
Marco:
I have about three square feet less of trunk space.
Marco:
I just kind of want to know why.
Marco:
And yeah, so apparently...
Marco:
It is a subwoofer or a bass box, whatever that means.
Marco:
Thanks to listener Dave Griffin, who has given us lots of good Tesla info over the years.
Marco:
So yeah, basically, I mentioned one of the reasons that the new ones are more expensive is that premium sound is now required.
Marco:
It's just now bundled in.
Marco:
uh before it was an option and i didn't take the option before uh which is weird for me but i mostly listen to podcasts and so i i didn't think it was worth the you know a couple thousand dollar upgrade on the last car but this car you're forced to get it because they wanted they wanted to drive the prices up kind of very apple like and uh so apparently i'm forced to both pay more and have a little bit less trunk space with the new car neat still love the car but if that was an option i would have unchecked it yeah that's fair
John:
Speaking of frunks, we got a little bit of a follow-up from i3 owners, and I'm sure Marco read through all of it about his potential purchase of an i3, but I read through most of it, and the one thing that struck me, the one tidbit that struck me, and I don't know if this is true because you just heard it from one person, is that
John:
This person mentioned offhand, by the way, the frunk on the i3 is not watertight.
Marco:
Yeah, I actually I saw that in a couple of the video reviews that it basically it's more like a hood in like, you know, like if you put like if you open up your hood of your regular car, you might see like leaves and crap stuck in there.
Marco:
And it's because most hoods are not watertight either.
Marco:
You know, like in extreme cases, stuff can get in there.
Marco:
and so yeah apparently the frunk of the i3 works the same way that is basically like a car hood and so you can keep stuff in it but there's not a lot of things you can keep in there because it can they can get wet or if you live in california and it never rains or something well i mean you could keep like i don't know like a first aid kit if it's in like a waterproof box or something i don't know there's stuff you keep in there
Marco:
seems terrible like yeah the hood of a car yeah that's where the engine is like and lots of air needs to get in there and stuff to cool the engine right if you have a frunk make it watertight like i don't understand that at all yeah it definitely seems like an odd choice especially because like this wasn't a retrofit of an old of an old gas car that they just kind of made electric like they made the whole thing from scratch right yeah like it's a whole whole new design so
Marco:
So it is kind of weird that they chose that.
Marco:
I'm sure they had a good reason.
Marco:
Maybe it was for the weight would seal it up all weird.
Marco:
Who knows what the reason is?
Marco:
But it is an odd omission to have a frunk in a designed-from-scratch electric car that lets water in so you can't really actually keep a lot of things in there.
Casey:
Yeah, it's not choice.
Casey:
Speaking of trunks, we have more trunk-related follow-up.
Casey:
It just occurred to me.
Marco:
Accidental trunk podcast.
Casey:
John, I really enjoyed your tear, I think it was over the weekend, going through the differences between your Accord and the brand new Accord.
Casey:
And one of the things you lamented was the way in which the Accord trunk, the machinery, if you will, the mounts that let the trunk open and close, intrude upon the space within the trunk cavity itself.
Casey:
And there are terms for this, which I've already forgotten, don't really care, doesn't matter.
Casey:
But I had pointed out to you that both of my cars are superior in that we have shocks on both of our tailgates and they do not impede any of the interior space.
Casey:
So I would like you, John, to acknowledge that my cars are superior to your piece of crap.
John:
You can't have a gooseneck on a hatchback.
John:
Like, it physically doesn't work.
Casey:
Doesn't matter.
Casey:
Doesn't matter.
Casey:
Doesn't matter.
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
Yeah, it's going to be hinged to your roof.
John:
No, you do not get any extra points because they're hatchbacks.
Casey:
Come on, Dad.
John:
This is about trunks.
John:
You don't even have trunks because you don't own cars.
Casey:
You know, I try so hard, ladies and gentlemen.
John:
Has anyone ever done a gooseneck on a hatchback?
John:
I don't think I've ever seen one.
Casey:
All kidding aside, that would be monstrous and in a not good way.
John:
Physically, maybe you could pull it off.
John:
I don't think the roof is like structural enough.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It would be madness.
Marco:
i gotta say i'm a hatchback convert like like now that i've had the s for a couple years like or man i just i love it like like when i was all mad at tesla i was thinking like what if i just like drive this car back up to the lot and say screw you i'm out fix this yourself and just like leave right like and what would i what would i get instead of this and i was thinking i was looking through the options i'm like you know i don't want like you know in john prance i want a car shaped car that eliminates everything now exactly
Marco:
right yeah it's like like yeah like i don't want like a mini suv i don't want a regular suv i don't want a hatch like a hot hatch shaped car like casey's and i don't want a wagon and so i want basically like a sedan that works like a hatchback and there are a few panamera yeah there's the panamera there's the a7 a7 but that's about it like there's not a lot of other ones
Marco:
and so i did think i was like i guess i would probably look at the a7 first um but it's not nearly as big like it doesn't have nearly as much space i have seen one before i haven't i haven't driven one but i have seen them in a showroom and uh and like i'm like i just i everything else like going back to a
Marco:
would feel like going back in time.
Marco:
It would feel like a step back.
Marco:
I'm so spoiled by how awesome my giant hatchback is with all of its cargo capacity without looking like a shaped vehicle I don't want that I'm kind of spoiled by it.
Casey:
You know, we're going to get feedback from people who are grumpy that this is not in the after show.
Casey:
But you know what?
Casey:
Tough noogies.
Marco:
I love that CMF just pointed out in the chat the BMW GT series, which literally Tiff owns one.
Marco:
It's parked next to my car every day, and I didn't think about that in the list of cars.
Marco:
And it's her second one.
Marco:
Yeah, it's your energy store second one.
Marco:
And for some reason, I didn't think of that in the list of car-shaped cars that have hatchbacks.
Marco:
Well, it's because it's ugly as sin, that's why.
Casey:
It's not that bad.
Marco:
Although I think the Tesla's a lot nicer, but yes.
Casey:
It's about great.
Marco:
Oh man, that is funny.
Marco:
The 5 is way worse than the 3.
Marco:
Yes, that's true.
Marco:
Like what's, what's really nice about the three GT is that it's based on the three long wheelbase platform.
Marco:
And so you get this massive amount of rear leg room.
Marco:
Like you get, I think even a little bit more rear leg room than you do like in a five series, but without having the width of the five series.
Marco:
So it still feels like, uh, you know, the narrow three series width, but you have a surprising amount of space back there.
Marco:
So it's, it's honestly, it's a pretty nice car.
Marco:
It's just, it's not for me and it doesn't come any transmission I would tolerate.
Marco:
Uh, but, but it is a nice car.
Marco:
Actually, neither does the A7.
Marco:
So there goes that.
Marco:
Whoops.
Marco:
I don't know why we're talking about this anyway.
John:
I know these are electric, so it's not like Marco's going to buy them.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm spoiled.
Marco:
Because now I want a car-shaped hatchback that is also fully electric.
Marco:
Are there any others?
Marco:
Like, I guess the Porsche, not the e-tron, what's the Porsche?
John:
The Tamarack?
John:
No, that's the Chief Linger's.
John:
The electric Panamera, yeah.
John:
Taycan, Taycan.
Marco:
That's it, yeah.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
If that ever comes up... By the way, we heard from people who... I was having my problems with Tesla and their administration.
Marco:
We heard from a few people who tried to order the Porsche Taycan, formerly the Mission E. And it sounds like it is a total crap show of trying to place a deposit, trying to place an order.
Marco:
You have to go through dealers to get them.
Marco:
And it sounds like it's a way bigger mess than my dealings with Tesla have been.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I'm not sure that would actually be an improvement.
John:
But that car doesn't exist yet.
John:
That's all just people trying to get in line to get the first of a car that is even out.
John:
Those aren't anywhere yet.
Marco:
No, but they're placing deposits to place orders.
Marco:
And they're saying it's basically impossible.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
But it's like the Model 3 thing where they'll take a bunch of money for cars that haven't been built yet.
John:
Yeah, yeah, basically.
Marco:
But yeah, so it sounds like if you want a car-shaped hatchback electric car...
Marco:
the Tesla Model S is actually the least hassle option to get it.
Marco:
Even if Tesla screws up the way they did with me, it seems like it's better than what's going on with Porsche right now with the Taycan.
John:
The Tesla story that stood up the most to me was someone saying that there was an accident in a Tesla dealership where one car scraped into five other cars and that all of them were off the road for six months and counting because none of them can be repaired.
John:
Yeah, because the part to repair them all was backordered and so none of them
Marco:
That was painful.
John:
And so they all have loaner cars while they wait.
John:
And speaking of loaner cars, I know we're stuck in a lot of pre-show NutriHiller, but another bit of I3 feedback.
John:
There's some sort of deal where if you get an I3, they'll also give you a deal where...
John:
If you ever need to go somewhere where the i3 doesn't have the range or you don't want to deal with the range issues, they'll give you a loaner gas car for free anytime you want it.
John:
Yeah, that was really interesting.
John:
Which is kind of an admission that maybe your electric car doesn't have enough range, because the i3 is not like the Model S. I don't know what the range is, but I think it's like half, maybe less.
John:
Yeah, but anytime you want a gasoline car, BMW makes those too, and they'll loan you one, and you can use it for your trip.
Marco:
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Oh,
Casey:
What can you tell me about multi-output MIDI devices?
John:
This is about Marco on the plane trying to watch a single laptop with two people with Bluetooth headphones.
John:
Couldn't get the Mac to output to Bluetooth to two different sources.
John:
And apparently, I haven't tried this, but many readers or listeners were going to tell us, if you go to the Mac's audio MIDI control panel, which is probably someplace that people who don't do anything with musical instruments ever go, you can apparently make a new output device and make it multi-output and...
John:
let two people with Bluetooth headphones watch the same video.
John:
That's what we're told.
John:
I haven't actually tried it, but if I was stuck on a plane and trying to pull this off, I'd open that preference pane and give it a go.
Marco:
There's a thing where you have to have one of them be the drift master.
Marco:
You have to correct the drift somehow, and one of them gets to be the master.
Marco:
There are a lot of issues that don't come up when you're using an analog headphone cable splitter.
Marco:
It sounds like it might work, but it's so much more complicated than just a headphone splitter that I worry that it might not.
John:
Make the new audio device and then just select it as one of your outputs.
John:
The main thing I thought about when I read it was like, this is yet another place where the iOS devices have a long way to go to catch up with the Mac.
John:
uh with the mac no it doesn't do everything but the chances of you being able to find some kind of weird hacky solution are much greater this is like if ios doesn't support this guess what it doesn't support you either jailbreak and hack something in or you're out of luck and in the mac there is a chance that there's some weird actual gooey buried somewhere that you haven't seen or like a command line utility or something that will let you do this you know like you know kind of stuff with disk images and disk repair another example the flexibility of the mac like
John:
there's functionality you probably don't even know about and you can add to it pretty easily and you know the command line stuff like so lots of times the guis that apple gives you like their utility folders guis will do stuff that you've never thought of doing but also if the gui app doesn't do anything a lot of them are just built on frameworks that are also fronted by command line equivalents that will do even more stuff like i don't know how much i use tmutil right or hdiutil for disk images and stuff but
John:
Some of it is working around Apple's utility applications that they don't update very frequently, but the actual capability of the systems are much greater, and you have access to those capabilities if you know where to look and can take the time.
John:
Yeah, that's one thing.
Marco:
As the iPad gains in popularity and as we all try to use it for more things because the hardware is so cool...
Marco:
That is one thing I run into a lot of like, there's this one behavior that I do on the Mac or that I depend on or this feature I want or this functionality that I need that on the Mac, it relies on the existence of one of the Mac's many advanced features.
Marco:
There's so much advanced functionality built into macOS of things you can tweak, things you can do that on the iPad either...
Marco:
are very cumbersome or very roundabout ways that you need to do them or are just simply not possible.
Marco:
And I do find, like, I hit those a lot on iOS.
Marco:
Like, a simple thing.
Marco:
Like, for instance, on the Mac...
Marco:
I remap a couple of keyboard shortcuts that are pretty common to be more comfortable keyboard commands for me to use with my actual hands.
Marco:
One of those is the screenshot, the Command Shift 4.
Marco:
I put it on Command Shift 1 because that's what I use the most, and it's just faster that way.
Marco:
The other one is I archive my mail messages using a different shortcut for archive than what this system one is.
Marco:
Again, just common action.
Marco:
I want it to be more easily done.
Marco:
And on iOS, you can't do that.
Marco:
You have to just do whatever keyboard shortcuts there are, and there aren't enough.
Marco:
You can't remap them.
Marco:
You have to just take whatever they are.
Marco:
And everyone has a feature like this.
Marco:
There's no services menu.
Marco:
There's no scriptability.
Marco:
There's no terminal to do a lot of terminal stuff.
Marco:
And this is why I don't think...
Marco:
If you're like a real Mac power user, I don't see the iPad replacing the Mac for you.
Marco:
Whereas if you're just like a regular Mac user, like a more typical one, and you leave most things at the defaults, and you don't really get into those areas of deep customization of the OS and its behavior, it's an easier transition for those people.
Marco:
But I'm unfortunately not one of those people.
Marco:
And so I think the iPad will remain for me a...
Marco:
secondary platform that I do some stuff on, and I enjoy it, but I don't see it taking over, even if it adds things like Xcode and everything else.
Marco:
There's so much amazing flexibility in macOS that I would simply miss too much.
John:
Real-time follow-up, I think I referred to the MIDI thing as a preference pane.
John:
First I was going to refer to it as a control panel because I'm old, and then I said preference pane.
John:
Neither one of those is correct.
John:
It's in application slash utility slash audio MIDI setup.
John:
So if you're looking for it, that's where it is.
John:
And then as for the keyboard shortcut, that's not comfortable.
John:
Command-shift-4, you change it to command-shift-1.
John:
When you said that, it made me remember the, and I hope I'm right about this, the origins of those.
John:
Why the hell is it Command Shift 4, right?
John:
Well, it used to be Command Shift 3, which still does screen, you know, the screenshot.
John:
When they added the capabilities of being able to do the crosshairs and the space bar to capture the whole window, they said, well, Command Shift 3 is already taken with the just take a screenshot of the screen.
John:
So let's do 4, which is the next one up.
John:
Why didn't they use 1 and 2, you may ask?
John:
One and two, Command Shift 1 ejects the first floppy disk.
John:
Command Shift 2 ejects your second floppy disk.
John:
And they've never gone back and taken those commands.
John:
Those were very important commands.
John:
I always thought it was cool that Command Shift 1 would eject the floppy, but when you connected your $450, 1980-something money, external 800K floppy disk that you paid for half of as your combination of Christmas and birthday present, it would eject the second floppy disk.
John:
That is fantastic.
Casey:
While we're going down this nostalgia trip, this episode is all over the place.
Casey:
Hearing the talk of Driftmaster reminded me of when I was young.
Casey:
We had a I think I've told this story once before, but it was years ago.
Casey:
We had a Thrustmaster joystick.
Casey:
I couldn't tell you what model it was.
Marco:
That was the best brand name of anything ever.
Casey:
so good but i don't my dad would buy like video game stuff periodically just for fun and then never ever use it which was great for me but i don't know what possessed him to do this but anyway i mean that's literally like i buy a whole bunch of ios games and never ever play them
Casey:
Well, there you go.
Casey:
So in any case, he bought this Thrustmaster, and I remember it was during the time of the PS2 keyboard connection.
Casey:
So I don't know what that makes this, like mid-90s or something like that.
Casey:
But the Thrustmaster needed the old, like humongous keyboard connection that were from like the original IBM PCs, you know what I'm talking about?
Marco:
Yeah, like the big DIN something.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So what happened was the Thrustmaster, you would plug the keyboard into the Thrustmaster joystick, then using a converter to go from PS2 to whatever the hell this other thing was called.
Casey:
Then you would plug the Thrustmaster in not only the special joystick ports, which might have been on your sound card, actually, if memory serves, but nevertheless... Yes, it was.
Casey:
You would also plug it in to the keyboard on your computer because the Thrustmaster had a little app, well, program, that you could...
Casey:
do like have it do key combinations or mimic keyboard presses with all of these different buttons on the joystick the joystick had like 8 000 buttons on it and so this never really seemed like that useful to me until i started playing descent which is one of the many games that john could never play because he had a mac and i played descent there was a mac version oh i was hoping i had a 50 50 shot i also played it on pc before there was a mac version but
Casey:
Oh, man, that's disappointing.
Casey:
I was going out on a limb there, but that's right.
Casey:
So anyways, so I would play Descent.
Casey:
And when I gripped the joystick, your thumb was on a, I don't know what the technical term for it is, but like a little four-way thing.
Casey:
So you could go up, down, left, right.
Casey:
And so I remember that I had had the keyboard mapping so that when I pushed my little thumb thing forward, the ship would fly forward.
Casey:
When I pushed back, the ship would fly back.
Casey:
And I believe I used left and right for strafe.
Casey:
And, oh, my word, was that amazing with Descent.
Casey:
I mean, Descent in general was amazing.
Casey:
And if you're not familiar with it, you should, like, look up the Wikipedia article or whatever because it was a truly phenomenal game.
Casey:
But using the Thrustmaster joystick with this ridiculous, like, not really daisy chain, but almost like daisy chain.
Casey:
Like, that was Dongletown before Dongletown to some degree because you needed to get all these little stupid converters.
Casey:
It was the predecessor to Dongletown.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I guess that makes it Dongletown, England.
Casey:
And now we're in New Dongletown, America.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, is that it was this most ridiculous setup in the world with clearly like mid-90s technology.
Casey:
And it was phenomenal.
Casey:
I kind of miss it.
John:
This sounds like an old-school Q-op.
Casey:
You know that game?
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Q-O-P?
Casey:
No.
John:
Q-W-O-P?
John:
Am I getting the name right?
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Well, you might be getting the name right, but it means zero to me.
John:
The game where it's like the side view of a runner, and you use the keys on the keyboard, Q-W-O-P, to control the runner's leg joints, all independently of each other, and the goal is just to be able to run, right?
John:
So you have to carefully orchestrate the limbs, and basically the person just falls to the ground.
John:
a descent was a true six degrees of freedom like that was the gimmick of the game there's no up no down no left and right you're floating in free space and so without a thrust master setup you had lots of keys on the keyboard to control all the different axes of rotation and thrust and it was very difficult to get a handle on you maybe used like first person shooters oh i can do this great i'm really good at doom but that like constrained you to a plane and then you would just you know left and right and strafe well imagine you had left right strafe but in like two more axes it was uh really fun
John:
Doom was actually an interesting case of it.
Marco:
Doom was actually a 2D game.
Marco:
2.5D, they call it.
Marco:
Everything was rendered in 3D.
Marco:
It looked 3D, but the maps were 2D.
Marco:
The projectiles all moved only in 2D.
Marco:
Basically, the Z axis, the up and down axis, was only visual.
Marco:
There was never a room above another room on the map.
Marco:
There were enemies that were above you, but you wouldn't aim up or down.
Marco:
You would just shoot straight ahead, and your thing would hit the ones that are up above you, and they were shooting down at you.
Marco:
It was a very, very clever use of not quite being ready for full 3D yet until Quake, I think.
John:
The colony had shooting vertically.
John:
The colony was also raycasting, but you did shoot with the mouse.
John:
This was when Max had mice and PCs didn't.
John:
You did shoot with the mouse, and because you could shoot anywhere on the screen, you could actually aim above and below.
John:
the dead center axis but you've never heard of the colony but it was a good game well because it was it was a mac game and it was it totally was it might as well it might have lived on mars like there's an awesome video of like the person who made the colony like one person because this is back when single people made games uh
John:
a youtube video of him going through the colony explaining what he was thinking when he made the game it's you know it's amazing normally you can't even find like has anyone even heard of this game can i even find a screenshot you can go on youtube and watch the creator of the game walk through the game with you it's really cool see if i can find that video for the show notes for the five other people listening to this who remember the colony
John:
Guess who made the colony, by the way?
John:
The guy who you saw on YouTube or whatever?
John:
What was that?
John:
David Smith.
Casey:
Nice.
John:
That's funny.
John:
I mean, it is kind of a common name.
Casey:
Fair enough.
John:
I don't see any punctuation in his, though, so it's clearly inferior.
John:
Yeah, and he goes by David A. Smith.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's a little pretentious.
Marco:
He's an imitation David Smith.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode, my favorite web host by far, for sponsoring our show and for keeping all my servers running.
Casey:
Do you want to talk about, Marco, what's going on with Overcast these days?
Casey:
Because it sounds like you had a really, really, really crummy bug.
Casey:
And crummy in the sense that it would be hard to reproduce and kind of figure out what's going on.
Casey:
So maybe this is not that interesting, but I'd love to kind of hear you walk us through what was the bug report and how did you go about trying to figure this out?
Marco:
So I've had reports for a little while now that they would be playing a podcast, and a few minutes into playing it, it would just get killed in the background for using too much CPU usage.
Marco:
I couldn't figure it out for a while.
Marco:
I thought it was watch transcodes, and so I adjusted the throttling of the watch transcode engine to make sure it definitely wouldn't go past the limit of... If you're in the background, the limit is something like...
Marco:
80% over 60 seconds, something like that.
Marco:
I forget the exact number, but it's in that ballpark.
Marco:
I kept having these crash logs, these reports, and when you get killed for energy usage or one of those resource limits, the crash logs you get are not very useful.
Marco:
There's not a lot of info in them.
Marco:
You kind of have to...
Marco:
blindly figure out why might you have used that much cpu usage because the the logs you get usually won't tell you so i was trying to figure this out and and you know again i blamed the watch thing for a while i i throttled that back but i was still getting some reports of this i was at my wits and i could not figure it out i looked i poured the reports couldn't get any useful information out of the reports i had so i finally went to twitter with the overcast kind of like hey
Marco:
I'm getting these reports of crashing in the background during playback.
Marco:
I cannot figure this out.
Marco:
Can anybody tell me steps that reproduce the problem, that do it every time?
Marco:
A few people actually did.
Marco:
And by the way, I should clarify right up front.
Marco:
I don't know if this is the only reason Overcast gets killed in the background for too much CPU usage.
Marco:
But one of the reasons it could do this, I have now identified and fixed.
Marco:
And it's in the TestFlight beta as of today.
Marco:
I'm hoping to see if that does fix it after a few days of crash logs from TestFlight, but I don't know yet.
Marco:
Anyway, so the problem was, all right, let me, I'm trying to think like how much explanation should I give here?
Marco:
Because it could get really long and boring.
Marco:
So I'm going to try to like pair it back and summarize it.
Marco:
Basically,
Marco:
one of the conditions that could cause this was if you are in a streaming mode where you are downloading the podcast as it's playing and it's not fully downloaded yet and the app is in the background so suppose you hit play it starts playing you put the phone in your pocket so the app's in the background if you pause playback
Marco:
iOS will suspend the app in the background after a few seconds of no audio playing from it.
Marco:
So as the download was happening, if you paused it and the download wasn't going to finish in that time, iOS killed the app, which kills the download.
Marco:
It stops the network transfer.
Marco:
When you would go to press play after that,
Marco:
It would resume playback, but the part of the file that wasn't downloaded, Overcast would basically get into an infinite loop in a background thread, trying really, really hard as a busy wait, saying, are you done yet?
Marco:
Are you done yet?
Marco:
Are you done yet?
Marco:
And it was looping over and over and over again, rather than doing a throttled check now and check back later kind of approach.
Marco:
And so there was basically a way for...
Marco:
it to after after a failed transfer in the background it was not properly interpreting that failure and was instead doing this infinite loop thing which was making one thread max out so the symptom would be if you resumed a podcast under these conditions if you resume playback about 48 seconds in the app would get killed and playback would stop
Marco:
And if you hit play again, it would relaunch in the background and start playing again.
Marco:
So it seemed to you, the user, as if it stops playing after a minute or two for some reason.
Marco:
But that was the actual cause that I could finally reproduce.
Marco:
Thank you very much to the people who reported that.
Marco:
Again, I don't know if there's any other ones.
Marco:
I don't know if this topic is even interesting enough to keep in the show, but that's what happened.
Casey:
Well, so hold on.
Casey:
So how did you figure out the technical bits that were going on?
Casey:
Because all you really had to go on was just that, oh, I backgrounded the app.
Casey:
I was streaming and then bad things happened.
Casey:
So how did you dive into finding the actual problem?
Marco:
It never showed up for me in my own usage of the app.
Marco:
And there's a number of reasons for that.
Marco:
I mean, one is which I don't use streaming.
Marco:
I download everything.
Marco:
So the only time I ever stream a podcast in normal use, unless I'm testing some streaming feature, the only time I ever stream a podcast is if I want to start playing something immediately that I hadn't yet downloaded.
Marco:
Like if I heard of a new episode of a new show, I just want to start playing it right now.
Marco:
So I go hit play and it'll stream it.
Marco:
The other thing is, usually I have pretty good connectivity.
Marco:
Usually, at home, I have really fast Wi-Fi.
Marco:
When I'm out, I live in a nice suburban area, so there's usually a strong cell signal and everything.
Marco:
Normally, I wouldn't even hit the problem where the partial download hasn't completed yet when you pause it for a little while.
Marco:
And so, I wasn't seeing this problem at all.
Marco:
When I finally got these reproduction steps, it allowed me to... So, first of all, I tried it and I realized, oh...
Marco:
This is not happening when I do it on my regular Wi-Fi.
Marco:
But there's this wonderful utility that used to be just on the Mac and now is also in the iOS developer menu called Network Link Conditioner.
Marco:
Apple supplies this.
Marco:
It's a pref pane on macOS, although honestly, I couldn't get the macOS version to work under Mojave.
Marco:
Maybe I have to update it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But on iOS, if you go into the developer menu and settings, there's a network link conditioner.
Marco:
And you can basically artificially throttle your own network connection for all apps on the device in order to test how your app behaves under slow networks or intermittent connectivity or heavy packet loss or other kind of crappy network connectivity.
Marco:
It's a wonderful tool.
Marco:
And without that, I would have had a much harder time testing this.
Marco:
I would have had to do some kind of router hack maybe or throttle it in the app somehow.
Marco:
It would have been much harder.
Marco:
So anyway, thank you very much, random Apple employee who makes network link conditioner.
Marco:
Anyway, I was able to slow down my connection to like 3G speeds, which would give it enough time to get the app suspended into the background without the file being fully downloaded.
Marco:
Then I was able to relaunch it, and then I saw, finally, I could see this happening on my own phone, where I saw the CPU spike to 100%, and then eventually get killed.
Marco:
Now, once you can... This is why developers always love a reproducible list of steps that...
Marco:
Do this, this, and this, and it will make the problem happen every time.
Marco:
Because then we can plug in our developer tools and we can profile the app.
Marco:
And so I ran it in Instruments, which is a tool that comes with the Xcode bundle.
Marco:
And Instruments can tell you if you run a session of your app under Instruments...
Marco:
it will tell you what parts of the app are using the most CPU usage.
Marco:
And this is for any developers who use it.
Marco:
I know this is a gross oversimplification.
Marco:
It can actually do a lot more than that.
Marco:
But the most common thing that I do with instruments is measure where in my app is using the most CPU time.
Marco:
What is using the most processor resources?
Marco:
And so when I was able to run this finally in a reproducible way, I could run it with instruments running.
Marco:
And so I saw when the CPU spiked to 100%, I was able to profile what it was actually doing in that.
Marco:
And that's when I saw, oh, it's calling this render method over and over and over and over again.
Marco:
It definitely should not be calling this this much what's going on.
Marco:
Basically, the root issue was that at some point I'm returning zero audio samples when the rest of the audio engine expects there to be some, whether it's a block of silence or not.
Marco:
But I was returning zero audio samples.
Marco:
So it would just call it again until it had enough to fill its buffer, which it never did.
Marco:
The reason why I was so surprised when I found this out, when I found out why it was doing this, is it's been that way for a while.
Marco:
And I wondered, why is this only a problem now?
Marco:
Looking at this code, this should never have worked.
Marco:
And while I was in there, I also decided to fix a couple of other things.
Marco:
Basically, the fix was the app needed better detection of whether it was in a buffering kind of state or not.
Marco:
Is it waiting for more data or is it not waiting for more data?
Marco:
Fixing that required a whole bunch of actually surprisingly deep changes, which is why I'm going to do a big beta of this before I release it.
Marco:
It's one of the things where it's like, how did this ever work?
Marco:
And the UI for buffering was totally broken before.
Marco:
It would show an activity spinner beneath the pause button.
Casey:
Nice.
Marco:
Partially overlapped by the pause button.
Marco:
I'm embarrassed that I ever shipped that, honestly.
Marco:
But anyway, so the app had pretty poor detection before of...
Marco:
whether it was buffering or not.
Marco:
So I fixed that as well, which was kind of required to fix the real issue.
Marco:
So anyway, I think I have fixed it.
Marco:
It was all because I finally had reproduction steps.
Marco:
And so for anybody out there who's filing bug reports, if you can come up with reproducible steps, and I know it's hard, and I know it's impossible to do for bugs that just seem to happen intermittently, but man, if you have reproduction steps that reproduce the problem every single time,
Marco:
that is invaluable for a developer.
Marco:
And that can help get a problem solved way faster.
Casey:
I find this really fascinating.
Casey:
Out of curiosity, and I've been messing around with something that I don't think I'm ever going to release, but I wrote myself an iPad app since actually we last spoke in order to help.
Casey:
So when I do what I call the edit for analog, which is not actually an edit at all, and it's what I used to do for ATP in the first couple of years of ATP, and then Marco kind of took over in a good way.
Casey:
And so I don't have to do it for ATP anymore.
Casey:
But for analog... I stole the edit from you.
Casey:
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think that's the case at all.
Casey:
I think it was better for everyone this way, and you were able to dedicate the extra time to do it.
Casey:
But all that aside... It's not you, it's me.
Casey:
So the flow with analog is we record, and then I listen to the recorded version straight off the mics.
Casey:
And I say, oh, at 15 seconds, I coughed at 5 minutes and 42 seconds.
Casey:
We cross-talked real bad and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And I generate this list of edit points that Mike is the one who does the actual work.
Casey:
I used to do this by just having a text edit window open on my Mac and listening to the show.
Casey:
And when I heard something, I would not have the window open because I'm usually multitasking.
Casey:
And so then I would have to find the space that has the player window and then back up a few seconds to get the correct timestamp and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, there's got to be a better way to do this.
Casey:
And it would be kind of neat to be able to do this on the iPad.
Casey:
And so I built this little app that will let me ingest a file from, say, the Files app, which really means like Dropbox or iCloud Drive, load it up, and let me play it.
Casey:
And then I have a humongous, like literally a quarter of the screen is a button that reads new edit.
Casey:
And when I do, when I tap that button, it'll pause playback, take note of the timestamp.
Casey:
and throw up a little popover where I can say, oh, I want there to be a chapter start here, or I want there to be a sponsor read here, or there is a sponsor read here, or I coughed, or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
I bring all this up to ask, I'm curious, Marco, what do you do, and I feel like I've asked this before, but I don't remember your answer, what do you do for bug tracking, issue management, and stuff like that?
Casey:
Because I have this right now in a private, I'm trying to be gentle, John.
John:
You're asking the person who doesn't write any tests what he uses for bug tracking, okay.
Casey:
Well, I'm trying to be gentle here.
Casey:
And before you answer, Marco, the reason I ask is because I've been using GitHub issues, which are not perfect, but it's just me.
Casey:
And it's not something that's actually that serious.
Casey:
But I find that I often have a thought of something I would like to do.
Casey:
but I'm not in a position to actually code it, even if it's something very quick.
Casey:
And so I'll make myself a little GitHub issue to just remind myself later on that I want to do that thing.
Casey:
And I haven't actually used this app for an analog edit because this is an off week.
Casey:
And I literally wrote the guts of it in about two, you know, two mornings, two consecutive mornings.
Casey:
And we won't record analog again until this upcoming week.
Casey:
And then we'll see if it works and what will happen.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Marco, do you use any sort... I think you had said you use some text file or Todoist or... No, not Todoist.
Casey:
Like Task Paper or something like that?
Casey:
What do you do to manage bugs and planning and that sort of thing?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
For a while, I used Task Paper as my master to-do list for Overcast.
Marco:
When I had my to-do list renaissance about a year ago...
Marco:
and I switched things for like all my management on all devices now I just have a things project that is overcast and under it I have like all these headings for different version milestones I want to do I know I'm not using it right but I don't care yeah whatever and I have a list in there of like bugs to fix for you know the next version and whenever something comes up I put it in there and then I try to fix it gotcha
John:
So you wrote an iPad app, and the app you wrote isn't a thin wrap around YouTube DL?
John:
No.
John:
With shortcut support or something?
John:
No, no, no.
John:
So you could just say, hey, dingus, download this video?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
And actually, I should bring up, this actually probably should have been follow-up, but a lot of people wrote in and said, in various degrees of politeness, why don't you use shortcuts to do this?
Casey:
And it's a fair question.
Casey:
And
Casey:
There are two answers, neither of which will be satisfying to the people who have suggested this.
Casey:
Number one, it is not only YouTube that I do this sort of thing for.
Casey:
As an example, if you have a particular show on terrestrial television that you enjoy and you would like to persist a copy of them for the future, you can very easily use YouTube download to grab like an NBC show.
Casey:
or CBS or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
As another example, we like to play a lot of holiday specials, holiday like music specials on endless repeat throughout the List household for the month of December, which is why nobody ever visits us in the month of December.
Casey:
But anyway, as an example, just a night or two ago, Pentatonix, who is an acapella group,
Casey:
did an extremely cheesy yet delightful Christmas special that was aired on NBC, and I wanted to keep it so I could watch it in the future.
Casey:
And so I YouTube DL'd it, and it worked no problem.
Casey:
And maybe shortcuts would work with these sorts of things too.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
And given what shortcuts it's capable of, I'm sure there is a way that it could be done.
Casey:
But I use YouTube DL for a lot more than just YouTube.
Casey:
And additionally, the real honest answer to the question of why not use shortcuts or SSH or something like that
Casey:
or torrent them.
Casey:
Why torrent them when I can go to the actual source?
Casey:
But anyways, why not just do anything else other than this ridiculous ISH thing?
Casey:
It's because I'm used to doing this on the command line.
Casey:
It's just momentum, man.
Casey:
I'm used to doing this on the command line.
Casey:
I know YouTube DL and FFmpeg
Casey:
alarmingly well now, which is not something I probably should be proud of.
Casey:
But it's just what I'm used to.
Casey:
And it's what I'm quickest with.
Casey:
And I like when I can use the tools I'm used to because I'm quick with them.
Casey:
And so that's why.
Marco:
One of the reasons why, going back to my iPad advanced options from the Mac thing earlier, one of the reasons why I find it difficult to become an iOS power user with shortcuts and formerly workflow is the things you can do with it.
Marco:
Really, it's this whole layer of power and advanced features and automation that you can achieve that
Marco:
Well, we've had that for a while on other platforms.
Marco:
And for many of us, a lot of people going back decades, it's the terminal.
Marco:
It's a shell like Bash and it's shell scripting and tools like this, command line tools.
Marco:
And one of the great things about learning the terminal is that once you know one of the common things like Bash and basic command line usage, first of all, you can use it on a whole bunch of different platforms.
Marco:
mac os even windows now with the wsl thing you can use it on linux servers and it doesn't really change that much over time like you can you can learn a lot of these skills once and then you can use those skills for like literally decades like 20 30 years easily and a lot of the stuff doesn't change or at least like the foundation you built 30 years ago can still be used today
Marco:
Honestly, I think workflow and shortcuts, I think these actually are very much like the command line in the sense that they enable advanced users to learn some more complex things if they're willing to learn in order to get a lot of power, in order to get new things done, get things done faster, have more customized behavior, more advanced behavior.
Marco:
The difference, though, is that shortcuts is not the command line.
Marco:
It's totally different.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
I would say shortcuts is not that much easier to use than learning the command line is, in the sense that you still need to learn how it works, what it expects, what it does and doesn't do.
Marco:
You still need to learn...
Marco:
its limitations, how it expects you to talk to it and use it, and you still need to learn the library of things it can do.
Marco:
So there's a learning curve to both things.
Marco:
And the reason why people like me and Casey want so badly a terminal on the iPad...
Marco:
is because we've already done that learning curve like 20 years ago or whatever, and we just want to be able to use it now because we can use it everywhere else.
Marco:
That's why it's so awesome that the Mac is under the hood, like this Unix subsystem.
Marco:
That's why Microsoft was so pressured to create the Windows subsystem for Linux thing.
Marco:
Because once you're in that system...
Marco:
It's great because you can have this long-running expertise in this different language of how you can make your computer do amazing things.
Marco:
And you know the syntax and you know the tools that you have at your disposal.
Marco:
And you can use the same knowledge and expertise and tools even on all the different platforms you use.
Marco:
And that's really awesome.
Marco:
So as awesome as Shortcuts is for the people who use it,
Marco:
That doesn't apply to shortcuts.
Marco:
You can't use shortcuts anywhere except iOS.
Marco:
And so while it is awesome, it's not the same kind of thing.
Marco:
And it doesn't have the same long-term value of investing your expertise in and investing your tools and your script and your time into as learning shell scripting does on any other platform.
Marco:
And so I kind of wish there was something like that
Marco:
you know some kind of power user layer like this whether it's you know something like shortcuts or something like a terminal that you can use on all of your devices and right now there isn't and if you could get a terminal on the iPad that was pretty good you would have that if you were a terminal person and so that's why we want this
Casey:
Additionally, it used to be, I don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be years ago that you could jailbreak your phone and get SSH access or even straight up terminal access and all sorts of stuff.
Casey:
So it feels as though this is just a completely synthetic gate that Apple won't let us walk through.
Casey:
And I don't want to speak for you, but that really chaps my hindquarters that it's all there waiting for us.
Casey:
We just aren't allowed.
Casey:
And that's so frustrating.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm not even saying that I want to be able to go in and edit system config files.
Marco:
I don't care about that.
Marco:
Make me a sandbox.
Marco:
The apps run in sandboxes literally let me... And this is actually what ISH kind of does.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
let me run a terminal where I can install packages from a package manager, like whatever it might be, brew, yum, Swift's thing, whatever it is, I don't care.
Marco:
Some package manager, let me install things like FFMPEG and any other tool I might want that might be in a repository like that, and compile stuff from source if I have to.
Marco:
Give me the tools to do that, and
Marco:
give me a sandbox that I can put that I can put files in and then I can you know open them in other apps you know so like I think I think the reason well I think one of the reasons why we don't have terminal for iPads yet is that nothing on the iPad really works that way with like a common file area there is the files app but as our iPad power user friends always talk about it's very limited the
Marco:
And it's hard to get to those files from a lot of apps.
Marco:
It's very limited in what you can and can't do there.
Marco:
You don't really live in the files the way you do on a Mac where your files are all over your desktop and you're living in your files all the time.
Marco:
On the iPad, it's this buried little back zone that they don't really want you going near and not a lot of stuff supports.
Marco:
So I think they need to address that first and make the local file system more of a thing in iOS before they would go into something like considering a terminal.
John:
I think there are some more fundamental issues they have to address in the core of iOS.
John:
I'm not aware of all the details, but I'm pretty sure the way the processes are managed is one of the reasons you don't have multiple users for iOS devices already is that it's not like it's not a multi-user system because it is, but it's not...
John:
It's not as cleanly separated as a Mac is, which is, you know, based on the next operating system, which was multi-user from day one, where the entire file system is cordoned off into sections for each user's stuff and processes run as the logged in user with the exception of system processes.
John:
I think iOS has always played a little fast and loose with all that stuff.
John:
But I think if iOS continues along its current trajectory, especially if iPads keep getting bigger and more powerful and Apple eventually does like a Surface Studio type thing, it's inevitable that it will have a terminal.
John:
And you can get around the whole file sandboxing thing.
John:
It's like, yeah, of course it would be sandboxed, but you can basically mount in using – not mounting, but a similar technology where from within your sandbox you have visibility into –
John:
the same sort of sections of the iCloud file system and the local file system that you own only through like a, you know, there's lots of existing Unix security features that act like this.
John:
There's lots of existing iOS features that would help them implement this.
John:
Like it's, it's technically possible, but I think, you know, that there are, the iOS wasn't designed to do this from day one.
John:
So there's a lot of rejiggering they would have to do, and they're not going to disturb their flagship operating system for such an esoteric feature.
Um,
John:
until they've really gotten down to the bottom of the barrel in terms of features they need to add.
John:
Because if it was easy to add multi-user, I think they would have done it already for iPads.
John:
I mean, just look at what they did with the iPad for school thing with the multi-user support that basically reboots the entire user space.
John:
They didn't do that for the hell of it.
John:
It's like that was their best option at the time because it's just not set up for a log in, log out like our Macs are.
John:
So you might be waiting a little while for that.
John:
On the command line and shortcuts issue, this is a good time for me to hoist up a
John:
topic that i had in the notes forever which is related to this i was thinking when i wrote this notes i was thinking about shortcuts and how we all know a bunch of people are super into them they're doing really cool things with them and i've been downloading shortcuts and messing with them um but uh like you guys i haven't really gotten that into them
John:
And I know why I haven't gotten that into them because I feel like I've been down this road before with these types of things.
John:
And it doesn't mean that they're bad.
John:
I think they're great.
John:
I think the people who are using them are excited to use them.
John:
But if you are a programmer, it's far, far less appealing.
John:
In fact, it's kind of a turnoff to be asked to essentially write a little program
John:
with a bunch of gooey bubbles in a big, long, linear list from top to bottom with a limited level of indenting with no functions or libraries, with no debugger.
John:
I mean, it's like, yeah, I could do it, but why would I put myself through that?
John:
So, Margaret, when you're describing the things you can do with the terminal, one of the most important things you can do with the terminal is write programs.
John:
And most of the programs that you can write in the terminal are in some kind of language that has a debugger and just the basics of programming.
John:
So if you're a programmer,
John:
none of that scares you want to program that's what i was thinking about shortcuts is like the different levels of essentially programming on computers right so you've got the applications that just do what they do that someone else wrote them but you don't you're just the user right so that's like the bottom level you're not doing any program you're just using an application tapping around blah blah blah right you've got something like shortcuts where now you have a series of things that it can do and you've got conditionals and you've got loops and it's like go crazy but you're not actually writing any code
John:
And I saw a lot of people asking for in shortcuts.
John:
I don't know if this already exists.
John:
It maybe does, but I see this in a lot of similar applications where there's one particular thing that you can do in this GUI sort of programming environment is do a thing here.
John:
And one of the, one of the ways you parameterize this thing is, Oh, here's a text box in the text box.
John:
you then finally get to write some kind of code, right?
John:
So it's like operation, conditional, loop, whatever, and then operation, oh, and arbitrary code.
John:
So like finally within this application where you're dragging blocks of stuff around, you get a text box and you get to finally write code just for this little tiny corner of your application.
John:
But for programmers, we want the whole thing to just be the code that we write.
John:
And it amazes me.
John:
I was messing with this today.
John:
Some friends were talking on Slack about some AppleScript thing, and they were using JavaScript and AppleScript.
John:
I opened up script debugger.
John:
Not script debugger.
John:
I have sort of a...
John:
Jump to the end there.
John:
I open up Script Editor, and I'm like, oh, yeah, people write AppleScript, and there's no debugger.
John:
That's why an application called Script Debugger exists.
John:
How do you write any code without a debugger?
John:
Like, I don't... It's just... You can be a PHP programmer.
John:
It's like everyone's caught in the Stone Age, right?
John:
The JavaScript way was you debug it in Safari, right?
John:
So you can write the JavaScript that actually translates to the same stuff as AppleScript does, and you debug it in Safari.
John:
It's just...
John:
It's not attractive to, you know, all the things that you guys said about shortcuts is true and, you know, limited to single platform and not general, whatever.
John:
But also, it is a total turnoff to anyone who's actually a programmer.
John:
Which, granted, that's not what this is for.
John:
If you're a programmer, fine, write programs.
John:
This is for people who aren't programmers to give them the ability to do things that programmers can do.
John:
But it is kind of like a ladder that you climb.
John:
Look at these giant things that Vitici's putting together.
John:
I'm like, well, he's essentially graduated now.
John:
He's graduated out of shortcuts.
Yeah.
John:
He is ready now, more or less, to start writing actual programs.
John:
Because, I mean, really, like some of these shortcuts are like, I think you saw one of those in the hundreds of commands.
John:
Maybe one was up into the thousands.
John:
And this is just one giant linear list from top to bottom with everything just in line.
John:
And it's like how you write programs before you know how to write programs.
John:
And only you didn't write any of it.
John:
It's just a bunch of blocks.
John:
And then how do you debug it?
John:
And just, I don't, it's not attractive to me at all.
John:
And there's an analog to this.
John:
having to do with the eternal debate that we are all having collectively in the Apple community about iOS versus the Mac.
John:
Just the operating systems in terms of how they deal with doing more than one thing at the same time.
John:
Multitasking is a simple way to put it, but Windows is another way to put it in the menu bar and all that stuff, the discussions we have.
John:
I think there is a direct analog to...
John:
The way we've been discussing the way the Unix command line works and the building blocks that it's based on and contrasting that with shortcuts, which is this very regimented, simplified environment.
John:
very similar to the way the mac gui works versus the way the ios gui works but i haven't i keep it's one of those things you know when on this show where i make up like stupid analogies on the fly uh i keep making up stupid analogies in my head on the fly about this about how to correctly articulate the difference in these two things and they're all really bad so i'm i'm holding it in for now we'll save it
John:
for another podcast, for another episode.
John:
If I ever come up with a good analogy, I have a bunch of ones that sound good, but then you think about them a little bit more and they're not really that great.
John:
But I'm just going to leave it for now.
John:
But I think it is very similar to the idea of, like, if you learn the basics of, you know, the Unix shell and the way processes work in Unix and, you know, the basics of input-output redirection and the basics of one or two simple programming languages...
John:
you can use those building blocks to do whatever you want more or less and, uh, be comfortable and efficient.
John:
If you learn Apple shortcuts, best case scenario, you pull the TG and you very quickly graduate from the shortcuts program, which is great.
John:
Like, again, I'm not slamming shortcuts or saying everything should be a program, right?
John:
It shouldn't.
John:
There is absolutely a place for shortcuts and it's great that it exists.
John:
And most people will never graduate from it.
John:
Like most people will find shortcuts itself too inscrutable to use, right?
John:
We have a long way to go to make that kind of power accessible to people.
John:
But if you do actually climb all the way up that ladder, we need there to be a next step on iOS.
John:
And right now there isn't.
John:
The next step is basically get out Xcode and you can write your own app.
John:
That's it.
Marco:
You know, a lot of times people will, a lot of times it's developers who will say like, we need something easy for everyone to use.
Marco:
But like there's an inherent level of complexity in shortcuts that, you know, because it is kind of like a programming environment.
Marco:
No matter what the syntax is,
Marco:
no matter whether you're typing code or dragging together blocks, the fact is it requires logic and snapping together different pieces of functionality to do different things, and that itself is complexity that is beyond a lot of people.
Marco:
And so whenever programmers try to simplify things for other people who aren't them, we've been trying to do that for like 40 years, and we largely haven't succeeded very well.
Marco:
Certain things break through, but for the most part they haven't.
Marco:
I would also say that Apple has said on a number of occasions recently that developers are their largest segment of pro users.
Marco:
So when you're pushing the iPad into pro territory marketing-wise and hardware-wise, it does make sense to have it be a little bit more suitable for developers to use and to consider features that maybe only developers would ever use.
Marco:
But that's not a bad thing.
Marco:
Developers is not a bad word.
Marco:
we are users too we buy a lot of apple products that end in the word pro it is not unreasonable to say like you know what this this environment that i'm asking for like basically a terminal app for the ipad like that isn't that that crazy of an idea for apple to actually prioritize for their new pro platform that they want to jack up the prices for and charge as much as a laptop and secondly i i i i know i said this already i just really want to reiterate
Marco:
how awesome it is to teach yourself the command line because of the incredible breadth and longevity of that skill.
Marco:
Like even today, you hear about somebody like Federico saying how awesome Homebridge is on a Raspberry Pi.
Marco:
You can run HomeBridge on a Raspberry Pi.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
Raspberry Pis cost between $10 and $30.
Marco:
They're amazing little computers.
Marco:
They are Linux computers.
Marco:
And if you know command line basics, you can very easily run a Raspberry Pi and have it do all sorts of fun things.
Marco:
In this episode, we're sponsored by Linode.
Marco:
You can get $5 a month.
Marco:
You can go buy a Linode server and have a server in the cloud that runs YouTube DL for you.
Marco:
And you can do all sorts of other stuff.
Marco:
All it takes is a little bit of command line knowledge.
Marco:
And the command line knowledge that I have, I learned in college in like 2001.
Marco:
And I use it for my very first job in 2004 through the present day and probably well into the future.
Marco:
There are very few things that programmers can say that they learned in college that they still use.
Marco:
Usually, you know, languages change, technologies change, the whole market changes.
Marco:
But that's something.
Marco:
We know that.
Marco:
Shell scripting and basic command line usage and some of the Unix simple command line tools that are available.
Marco:
When you learn that, it has such long-term value, not only as a programmer, but even just as a power user of a computer.
Marco:
The value of having that on a platform you use is very, very high.
Marco:
And the selling proposition of a platform that you use a lot but that doesn't support that entire world of things, it's a really tough sell to make that a high-work-getting-done platform.
Casey:
I think it's worth noting, though, that we are three old dudes who are lamenting the fact that our old technologies aren't available to us on this unbelievably cool new platform.
Casey:
And I stand by everything I've said.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It is a bunch of old dudes whining about old stuff not being there.
John:
It's not about old things, because everything old is new.
John:
The shortcuts thing is not old.
John:
I did HyperTalk and HyperCard, and I've done FileMaker databases, and I've done all sorts of GUI-type environments of simplifying programming.
John:
Like I said, there's definitely a place for them, and in fact, there should be more and even easier solutions, because even shortcuts, I think, as Marco pointed out, are too complicated for most people.
John:
Uh, but none of those things, like at a certain point, those things are harder than actually writing a program.
John:
Like I would, I would much rather debug, uh, you know, a page or two of actual code than a 2000 instruction shortcut because a page or two of regular code, I would get to use a code editor and, you know, an actual debugger.
John:
and it would make sense and i would know i would be able to understand the what the language can do and also you know like it would be documented like shortcuts is an application that you use and it's like a little game you can play inside shortcuts and you do amazing stuff but at a certain point i don't want to it's harder to hold the 2000 quote-unquote instruction shortcut in your mind and reason about it and debug it and work on it and repeatedly run it and test it and just
John:
it's not that's not the way that that's not it's harder to do that than to write an actual program like and that's that's true whether it's new or old that's true whether you're trying to write a game in hypertalk or whether you're trying to make an excel spreadsheet play tetris like lots of things are possible and you're like wow the excel spreadsheet you can play tetris that's amazing but
John:
But if you want to write Tetris, don't use Excel, right?
John:
So some of these things I see that the shortcuts are doing, it's not because we're old and it's not because we like Unix or whatever.
John:
Their utility is in their ease of use and the ability to do simple things fairly easily.
John:
But hard things are barely possible.
John:
And if you are super into it, you will quickly reach the limit of where you should not be using shortcuts anymore.
John:
And there is a huge chasm between shortcuts and Xcode.
John:
And so that's the place where the command line might come in, where you're not ready to dive in and write an app in Xcode, but maybe you're ready to learn some basic command line stuff, download some open source packages in a safe sandbox type environment, and say, run YouTube DL to download something.
Marco:
And you can have a programming environment there.
Marco:
You can run things like PHP and Python and Ruby.
Marco:
You can have all that running locally.
John:
Yeah, that's a good place to learn.
John:
They have that now with the Xcode Playgrounds and stuff like that.
John:
Playgrounds is actually getting close to that type of environment, but you're still kind of containing the walls in the application.
John:
In this topic, which I just hoisted up to the top of the show notes, I had a bunch of other stuff in there with apps versus apps that have loadable bundles versus code as data, which is the part where like
John:
Well, you're not writing code, but at some point, this application will present you with a text box, and you can paste code into that text box.
John:
So it's like a little escape hatch from the thing you're doing, and then shortcuts, and then writing actual code.
John:
So yeah, obviously, if you have a Unix environment, you could run Node right in there and just be off to the races and start running and debugging stuff.
Yeah.
John:
there are quote-unquote ides command line ides and wait command line debuggers like i'm very comfortable using those things and that's more of an old man thing but stuff like shortcuts that type of gooey programming environment it has its limits regardless of when it you know whether it's new technology old technology it's it's not because we're old men it's it's because a it's because we're programmers and b it's because there is a huge gap between
John:
a gooey thing where you can make programs and programming in xcode and you know i don't think it's up to apple to bridge that gap that was the old 70s view of technology eventually everyone who uses a computer will be a programmer that's not true like everyone who drives a car won't be a mechanic everyone who uses a computer won't be a programmer that will never happen
John:
that was a wrong-headed way to think about things.
John:
The reason I think people thought that in the 70s is because the people saying that were programmers, and they realized the incredible power of being a programmer.
John:
It's like, if you're a programmer and you have easy access to a computer, essentially, a computer of your very own in your own house, you can do amazing things.
John:
And they're like, wouldn't it be great if everybody had this power?
John:
Yeah, it would, but they're not going to.
John:
It's not a thing that everyone will do.
John:
It would be great if everyone had the ability to
John:
fashion their own furniture out of wood but they don't and they won't and it will never ever happen as cool as it might you might think it would be so that dream has definitely died but i you know what we're talking about is i can think of a thing that my device can do
John:
i just need to like it's capable of doing it it just i want it to do it like all at once like i want to give it a series of instructions and maybe with some conditions and i wanted to do that so i don't have to manually do it like you know sort of my first program can you give me a way to do that can you that's why they call it automation like i'm not
John:
not actually programming i'm just telling the computer a series of things to do maybe with some conditionals in there so it's automation it's not program but it's the exact same thing it's just a continuum from i don't do anything except for press buttons at a program someone else wrote to i write my program and in that continuum there are huge gaps there's the gap way at the beginning between nothing and shortcuts then there's this little island of shortcuts and then that peters off into the ocean and there's a giant ocean and then there's xcode
John:
way out on the right-hand side.
John:
And even in Xcode, you're like, well, but it's not jailbroken.
John:
On the other side of Xcode is like, jailbroken iPhone, and now you're writing the operating system and stuff like that.
John:
I'm still working on the analogy slash metaphor for my gooey thoughts.
John:
I really hope someone doesn't write like a blog post that says exactly what I've been wanting to say for like six months, but they probably inevitably will as I ruminate on the perfect analogy.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Drew Shannon writes,
Casey:
I don't I don't know that just seems like it wouldn't be wise because it would be so chatty over the network maybe I mean I guess on the surface there's nothing that strikes me as oh this is a terrible decision but it is not something I've ever thought to myself oh I want this in my life so I don't know let's leave John Mr. File Systems for the end Marco any thoughts on this
Marco:
I would say one of the obvious ones is privacy of that data.
Marco:
That's a big thing.
Marco:
As John will probably point out, certain jobs and professions you actually either shouldn't or legally can't store your primary documents or a lot of your documents in public storage places like this.
Marco:
You also are
Marco:
stressing that process, like the sync process, the system for doing it, you are going to have probably poor performance of that process if you have a whole lot of files there.
Marco:
And then finally, you're basically having a giant single point of failure.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
I don't think it matters that much if you have other systems in place.
Marco:
So for instance, Dropbox, honestly, I don't know how Google Drive works.
Marco:
Dropbox is just a folder on your file system and there's a background process that syncs to and from it, basically, into their cloud thing.
Marco:
And so you can do things like run Time Machine or run internet backup like Backblaze or things like that.
Marco:
that will include those files because they're just files sitting there on your disk.
Marco:
So you can have different levels of backup, and you definitely should if that's your primary storage.
Marco:
Because yes, Dropbox is wonderful, and yes, it has version support, but what if it breaks?
Marco:
What if your account gets suspended?
Marco:
What if they have a problem?
Marco:
What if you go to restore a file and it just says, oh, sorry, server error, can't do it?
Marco:
It's always nice to have your own backups in some other form in addition to whatever they're doing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I would say it can be a single point of failure that you want to avoid, but it doesn't need to be.
Marco:
In addition to that, having your primary thing be something that is synced introduces the potential for sync bugs to wipe it out.
Marco:
So you could log in one day, and as soon as you connect to the Wi-Fi, Dropbox starts deleting all the files in your Dropbox.
Marco:
because some sync problem has happened, or maybe your account was hacked, but chances are, I think a bug is more likely.
Marco:
Something has happened, and it's blowing away all your files.
Marco:
And you might notice, you might not notice in time, it might blow away some of your files, and then you don't notice until it is too late, and the things that were blown away are no longer in any of your backups or their version control system.
Marco:
So it's kind of shaky in a few areas.
Marco:
Uh, but if it's like a secondary computer, like a laptop, then the calculus changes.
Marco:
Like if you have like a primary desktop or something at home and you're, you have like, you know, a MacBook one or something and you're trying to like, just have a few things on this and just have that thing be expendable.
Marco:
That's a different story.
Marco:
Uh, so it depends on how you're, how you're using it.
Marco:
But, uh, there are definitely some pitfalls that you might want to consider and, and try to avoid.
John:
John?
Yeah.
John:
You guys covered most of it.
John:
The philosophical problems are that it's starting to think that because you use one of these cloud drive services that you don't need a backup, that this constitutes your backup.
John:
Oh, a Dropbox saves old versions.
John:
Even if I accidentally delete the file, I can get it back.
John:
None of these things are backup solutions.
John:
Don't trust them for that.
John:
The main difference between a backup solution and these things, like Marco pointed out, these things are not
John:
you do stuff in a local file system and it puts them into the cloud, it's bidirectional.
John:
It's sync, right, which has bugs and problems.
John:
But the main difference between it and a cloud backup service is that a cloud backup service never deletes anything off your drive.
John:
It just takes things off your drive and puts them into the cloud.
John:
At no point does Backblaze, frequent sponsor of the show, decide, see that file on your hard drive?
John:
That shouldn't be there.
John:
Let me delete it.
John:
That will never happen.
John:
It's not the job of Dropbox to delete stuff.
John:
It's the job of Dropbox to see what's there and stick it up in the cloud.
John:
One direction only.
John:
If you want to do a restore from Dropbox, it's a whole other process that you have to manually initiate.
John:
It's not going to randomly happen.
John:
And then practically speaking, depending on what you're doing, and Marco pointed out the performance things, like...
John:
if you you know i wouldn't put a git repository on dropbox or google drive i know from experience that if you do npm install on dropbox or google drive you're doing no development uh it will just i mean it will catch up eventually with what you're doing but it becomes so far from real time and just slaughters your computer that you end up having to say well let me turn off dropbox or google drive if you can you can't turn off icloud drive
John:
Let me turn it off, do my development, and then turn it back on later and let it sync.
John:
And at that point, you're now doing this manual system.
John:
You're going to forget to turn it back on, or you're going to accidentally delete something.
John:
You don't realize it was synced, and it's like you are eliminating the benefits.
John:
Given the technological limitations, there is no sort of automatic transparent, oh, I do stuff locally, and it just magically goes up to the cloud.
John:
The best we have is sort of an asynchronous way to make that happen eventually, and the safest way to do that is to just...
John:
do your development locally.
John:
You can put some things in Dropbox or Google Drive, but have a backup system that takes your entire drive and puts it one direction from your Mac up into the cloud and have that be your safety net.
John:
So we're stuck saying some files have to be local, some files can be in Google Drive or Dropbox, and you have to run a backup utility and you have to be conscious of which things are in which locations.
John:
It's cruddy, but that's life.
Casey:
Justin Winchester writes,
Casey:
Would it be beneficial to get a Pro over a Mini for basically the same price?
Casey:
And then there's some details that he provides about his Drobo, and then he continues.
Casey:
So should I even consider the older Macs?
Casey:
All my videos are MKV or M4V, so I don't believe the Mac has to do any transcoding, as I believe my devices can play those files natively.
Casey:
So what should I do?
Casey:
Well, I actually exchanged a couple emails with Justin, and I was not the one who put this on the show notes.
Casey:
I presume one of you has some thoughts on this.
Casey:
But what I had initially recommended was actually an NVIDIA Shield.
Casey:
And to be fair, I don't know very much about this at all.
Casey:
But a friend of the show, Bradley Chambers, has used these in the past and says that they're really, really good.
Casey:
And you can actually, to the best of my knowledge, check my math on this, you can actually run a Plex server on the NVIDIA Shield.
Casey:
And
Casey:
As far as I understand, Justin actually did some research on this.
Casey:
And according to him, it can only do like two or three simultaneous streams, either because of the constraints of the processor or because of some sort of artificial limitation.
Casey:
Again, check my math on this.
Casey:
But I guess Justin, he said privately to me, often has many people all streaming from him simultaneously.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
That probably wouldn't work for him.
Casey:
And if that's the case, I would say just get a new Mac mini.
Casey:
You'll be surprised what else you can do with it.
Casey:
And I have not spoken to him much, but I understand that other friend of the show, Mike Hurley, has just gotten himself a Mac mini.
Casey:
So I'm basically one step away from flying to London and installing Plex on that mini for him.
Casey:
So I would say if you have light uses, take a look at Nvidia Shield.
Casey:
If you're more like Justin and running a mini Netflix out of your house, then something like a Mac mini.
John:
either of you guys other thoughts justin may be the only person cross shopping a mac pro tower and a mac mini they seem so similar i can't decide they're the same price one of them is the size of a house you could fit like 20 mac minis inside a mac pro case like stacked on top of each other they're not comparable in any way i mean i guess he's got someplace so he can tuck them away but like the power that the mac pro would use please don't buy a 2010 mac pro to be your plaque server that is the wrong
John:
it's like i'm not even gonna say it's overkill because it's slower than the mac mini it's just giant and it's ridiculous don't do it the other question that you glossed over in the middle and one of the reasons i put this in here was worried about like oh i have a drobo and has usb3 but if i got a 2010 mac pro wouldn't have usb3 again don't get a mac pro tower it's ridiculous um but uh for for the transfer speeds um
John:
I don't think any modern computer, it doesn't really matter how many streams, sequential data reading, especially from SSDs, but even from spinning disks, especially for compressed media files, should be adequate to serve tons of streams of almost anything.
John:
It shouldn't worry too much about the I.O.
John:
I suppose if you have a 2010 machine, maybe worry a little, but don't get a 2010 machine.
John:
Get a recent thing, whether it's a Mac Mini or...
John:
I don't know what the Nvidia Shields I.O.
John:
is like or whatever, but unless you are serving like an entire town streaming from your thing, which you probably shouldn't be anyway, like even if it's your entire immediate and extended family streaming from your Plex, any modern small computer will do just fine.
John:
So please don't buy a Mac Pro.
John:
The Shield thing, I don't know.
John:
I mean, you can check it out.
John:
It's cheap.
John:
It might be fun to get into, but a Mac Mini would totally crush this task and would be awesome if I had $800 to spend on a Plex server and wanted to get a Mac.
John:
That's what I would get.
John:
Same.
Casey:
Marco, any other thoughts?
Marco:
Yeah, pretty much.
Marco:
I was going to point out the power usage difference if John didn't.
Marco:
They're the same buy-in price now, but for a computer that you run 24-7, power consumption will actually probably add up to real money.
Marco:
And so the Mac Pro will definitely use more power.
Marco:
I would also remind everybody, as you touched on, that you'd be getting...
Marco:
you know usb 2.0 only people don't realize how old the tower mac bros are until you point out the fastest io they have is uh firewire 800 my word they are pre-usb 3 and pre-thunderbolt thunderbolt 1 like they don't have thunderbolt 1 or usb 3
Marco:
I would also say regarding the NVIDIA Shield, I know Federico Vatici, if we didn't make his head explode enough with all the iPad and shortcuts talk, I'm pretty sure he had an NVIDIA Shield, I think.
Marco:
He had something like that.
Marco:
I think that was it.
Marco:
To do exactly this, to be a Plex server.
Marco:
And he has since moved on to a different setup because it didn't work out.
Marco:
And I forget the details of why it didn't work out, but I'm pretty sure it was not a favorable review of that setup.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
so i i don't think uh i i wouldn't recommend that um you know look if you're going to be if you're considering two macs like yeah just get a mac and the mac to get for this purpose is definitely the mac mini and you don't even need to spec it up like if you're using external storage for all your stuff you can get the base model
Marco:
You don't need more than the i3 is likely to deliver, processor-wise.
Marco:
The GPU is going to be the same awful GPU in all of them, so there's no upgrade to have there.
Marco:
I don't think this is a very RAM-heavy workload, so you don't need to upgrade the RAM either.
Marco:
I think get the base model Mac Mini and enjoy the energy savings and much smaller size and the ability to use I.O.
Marco:
that was invented in this decade.
Casey:
And actually, real-time follow-up from XMN in the chat.
Casey:
There's apparently a Plex equivalent of a KBase article specifically enumerating some of the limitations of running a Plex server on the Shield.
Casey:
So again, it's probably the cheapest and easiest way to fix this problem if you don't have the needs that Justin appears to have.
Casey:
But it's worth checking out.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, Eric Wagner writes, I was wondering if you guys ever had an issue balancing work and play.
Casey:
If so, what do you do to solve this issue?
Casey:
For example, I'm a computer science major and a lot of my work is done on the computer, but I also enjoy playing video games on said computer.
Casey:
And then there's video game talk, whatever.
Casey:
I've been playing this tug of war with, should I do homework or should I do my daily missions?
Casey:
Unfortunately, the latter has been winning out more often than it probably should be.
Casey:
How do you suggest I resist this relentless urge?
John:
Daily missions in what, Casey?
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
What does that mean, daily missions?
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
It's in some stupid... I was going to ask about this.
Marco:
This is definitely... When I was a kid in college learning computer science with a computer full of games and trying to balance it, games were so much less exploitive and addictive and constantly online.
John:
Total annihilation?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Network play.
John:
Network play is the ultimate time sink.
Casey:
Yep, that was Counter-Strike for me.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I didn't have any daily missions.
Marco:
Yeah, it was TA, it was Counter-Strike, it was later Return to Castle Wolfenstein, stuff like that.
Marco:
But, like, I never had that big of a problem, in part because my college had awful internet connectivity, and so the ping times were too high to play most of those games reasonably.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I think, you know, the games now, they're so much more addictive and immersive and they like take over your life to a greater degree for more people than they did back then.
Marco:
So it's a little hard to answer.
Marco:
But my actual answer to this really is get a Mac.
Yeah.
Marco:
Because you won't be able to play any games.
Marco:
Gaming on a Mac is so painful and punitive, you won't want to do it.
Marco:
And you can still do all your computer science work on it.
Casey:
That's an interesting answer I did not expect, to be honest with you.
Casey:
I don't have good advice on this, and it's definitely do as I say, not as I do, because I was a terrible student in college.
Casey:
And it wasn't specifically because of video games, although it was part of it.
Casey:
Marco and I were in school when EverQuest was a thing, and I remember there were literally...
Casey:
many kids who dropped out of college because they spent so much time on EverQuest, which was one of the earlier massively multiplayer online games.
Casey:
I'm sure it wasn't the first, but it was one of the first ones that was popular enough that I had heard about it.
Casey:
And this is, to my knowledge, before World of Warcraft was a thing.
Casey:
And so, yeah, there were a lot of kids that lost their college careers to EverQuest.
Casey:
But the best advice I can give is that, look,
Casey:
Hopefully, this is four years of your life, which seems like a heck of a long time, especially if you're 18.
Casey:
But in actuality, it's not that long.
Casey:
And if you can just build the skill by force, by reward, by punishment, any way you can, of doing what you need to do and getting that over with as quickly as possible so you can go and play games until you keel over...
Casey:
That is a skill that will be useful forever.
Casey:
And if you can do it at least for these four years, then hopefully you will find a decent enough paying job that you can basically slack off anytime you're not at work for pretty much the rest of your life.
Casey:
And that's a pretty good trade.
Casey:
Four years for the rest of your life, I would make that trade.
Casey:
And so I know that's not really the most concrete advice or actionable advice, but just suck it up for four years, man.
Casey:
You can do it.
Casey:
I have faith in you.
Marco:
I do love your philosophy of just work now so you can be a slacker forever.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
That's the idea.
Casey:
That's fantastic.
Casey:
If we could only all be so lucky.
Casey:
John, what's some actually useful advice?
John:
Well, the suggestion to get a Mac isn't really going to help because there are network games on the Mac too.
John:
And even though there aren't that many of them and they're not as good in general, it just takes one.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
All right.
Marco:
Modified statement.
Marco:
Get a MacBook Air.
Yeah.
Marco:
Or a MacBook.
Marco:
The GPU is so bad that it's fast enough... Actually, no.
Marco:
Even better idea.
Marco:
Get one of the new Mac Minis.
Marco:
Because it's the worst GPU in the lineup.
Marco:
But it's totally a great system for development.
Marco:
So you can do your homework...
Marco:
you know whatever you need on you can do it on the mac mini but the gpu is so awful that probably every game would be nearly unplayable so yeah get a mac mini and get the biggest monitor you can so that gpu is really working hard you're forgetting about streaming games oh is that a thing where it doesn't run locally runs in the cloud and you can play your mmo because you don't care about lag because it's not like a real-time combat game like there's no escape all right the thing about wait no now there is i got it
Marco:
Mac mini plus the aforementioned network link conditioner.
John:
Simulate my college connection.
John:
You'll have no problem at all.
John:
I mean, there's no escape from this.
John:
Like this is the thing you're going to have to deal with for your whole life of things that you have to do versus things that you want to do.
John:
Often in college, it's when people are first faced with that.
John:
Because if before college, like if you're living at home with some authority figure who tells you.
John:
what you have to do versus what you want to do and then when you're off in college it's just you telling yourself that this is a life skill you're just going to have to figure out all right and so you know this if you have to go cold turkey off something i know some people who you know got into mmos and or or muds or mushes uh or other things that predate that like basically anything with network effects the network based game
John:
If you have to go cold turkey off it to get yourself to do what you have to do, then that's what you have to do.
John:
If you can learn to moderate it, fine, but it's not going to go away.
John:
Like, your parents aren't going to come back and start running your life again.
John:
You're going to go off on your own.
John:
You're going to face the same problem.
John:
Do I, you know, do what I have to do?
John:
Do I go shopping and do my laundry?
John:
Do I play video games?
John:
Like...
John:
it doesn't work out well if you can't get this balance.
John:
So take this time in college to figure out how to get that balance for yourself.
John:
Um, hopefully you don't have to go cold turkey and everything, but if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.
John:
Don't be one of those people Casey described that actually fails out of college before it, because it doesn't get easier after that.
John:
It's not like, well, my college experiment failed, but it's smooth sailing from here.
John:
Nope.
John:
You'll still have to get a job and support yourself and, uh, you know, do your laundry and, uh, make yourself food and bathe.
Marco:
and find some way to support yourself like it doesn't go away so uh i guess i don't have any great advice on how to do it uh just that it's not a problem that's unique to college and you better learn how to deal with it and also just like you know to to conclude like philosophically as one slacker to another i can tell you that you're never gonna if you're having these issues like this you know you're probably a slacker like me you're probably you're probably never gonna have an amazing work ethic
Marco:
But what you do need to learn, and college is pretty good for this, is learning how to tell what you do and don't have to really do.
Marco:
Because in most college curricula – curriculi?
Marco:
Curriculums?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
In most plural college curriculum, it's pretty much impossible –
Marco:
for one person in a single day to do all of the work that was assigned or recommended to them in all their classes.
Marco:
So you kind of have to develop these skills for knowing how to tell what you don't have to do and prioritizing things and as John was saying, figuring out how to balance things you want to do versus things you have to do.
Marco:
But learning how to tell what you don't have to do is possibly the most valuable skill you can possibly learn in your entire academic career.
Marco:
It's a skill that not everybody does learn.
Marco:
But it's, you know, for everybody, not just slackers like us, but for everybody, that's a very, very important skill to learn.
Marco:
Because, again, there isn't enough time in the day to do everything.
Marco:
But you also can't do nothing and just play games all day.
Marco:
You have to get somewhere in the middle there.
Marco:
And that is a skill that, as John has said, much better than this.
Marco:
College is a pretty opportune time to learn that skill.
John:
And for Destiny, that's the game, by the way, obviously, that he was talking about Destiny specifically.
John:
As someone who can't play Destiny all the time because there's stuff I have to do, it is possible to play and enjoy Destiny at a slower pace.
John:
You can play...
John:
one night a week and still make reasonable progress in the game bungee has done a pretty good job of making a game that you can play obsessively all day every day if you're a professional you know twitch streamer and you can also play once a week and the once a week people will progress more slowly but you can still play and enjoy the game at a
John:
uh in destiny i have just hit the the light level cap and i've more or less done all the major things that were in that content it's what everybody did who's a twitch streamer the first week it came out the first week the expansion came out it takes me an entire season to do it but i do get to all the content so don't feel like you're gonna miss it so if you have to make a schedule say look i get four and a half hours to play destiny on saturday and that's all the only time i ever play destiny and you will not miss out on any content you'll just progress more slowly
John:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Linode.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Twitter
Marco:
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-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
This is pretty.
Marco:
It looks like they're definitely taking a lot of cues from the BMW i-series.
Marco:
They're using the sustainable interior.
Marco:
Everything's vegan.
Marco:
They're using a vowel as their branding thing.
Marco:
I do think that the BMW i-series is way better branding than e-tron.
John:
yeah no e-tron's not a good name like e-tron sounds like one of the lego sets i would have played with in the 90s and 80s not like a a car in 2018 that's supposed to be like a forward looking thing like it sounds so old what the hell is that i think volvo has one too i keep wanting to say polaris but i'm thinking of polaris lance from destiny because i just talked about it uh thought they had they have like a premium brand and i thought their premium pole star maybe let's see that's their performance stuff that's hybrid oh never mind
John:
Anyway, Volvo's styling has always really been on a tear with the styling lately.
John:
So if they ever make a full electric car, I bet it'll look nice.
John:
I think this Audi GT looks really nice, but this is a concept car.
John:
So who the hell knows what they're actually going to make?
Marco:
It actually does look nice.
Marco:
I mean, I don't have a lot of use for a two-seater.
John:
It's the same platform.
John:
I'm sure this is all on whatever their midsize electric car platform is.
John:
It's exactly what's underneath the e-tron.
John:
Just imagine a four-door version of that with reasonable proportions because...
John:
outies all tend to look the same anyway so you can very quickly visualize oh i can see what a four-door version of that would look like with with reasonable wheels on it why is there e-tron on the front gaping mouth because they're as marco pointed out they're very bad at branding like each the worst thing about e-tron is that it it highlights the fact that it's their electric car which is going to be look more look more and more ridiculous as every car is electric it's like naming your gasoline car like the the cylinder masher or the you know the fuel injector
John:
yeah or like yeah just it doesn't the the piston pumper like what is his name supposed to highlight to me that it has an internal combustion engine okay great good yeah it's like i i almost i feel like these these car companies like audi and to some degree bmw and and definitely honda and toyota like that that kind of company i feel like
Marco:
relegating the electric efforts to a sub-brand is probably a bad idea.
Marco:
They already have these amazing, successful, long-running car platforms and models and brands.
Marco:
They should just do what everybody wants,
Marco:
is just make those electric.
Marco:
Like, give an option for... Like, make an electric Accord option.
Marco:
Make an electric Camry.
John:
Well, that's what everyone's going to do eventually, but this is like the dipping the toe in the water.
John:
I mean, like, Volkswagen just came out and said they're not going to make internal combustion engines anymore, period, after the upcoming generation of platforms that they build on.
John:
So it's still a slightly longer timeline, but yeah, they're going to convert everything.
John:
And even Honda, I think, has mostly learned the lesson of...
John:
Uh, don't make dedicated models.
John:
The Honda doesn't do any EV because like I said, they're really slow, but just take hybrids.
John:
Don't have dedicated models for hybrids.
John:
And also don't make your hybrids look weird.
John:
Like that was the thing in the beginning.
John:
Oh, your hybrid has to look like a Prius.
John:
It has to look like a little snail turd or whatever.
John:
uh if you look what they did with the new insight the insight just looks like a honda now they stopped for the most part they're still hanging on a little bit but they stopped making them all look weird and nissan leafy or whatever it's like just make a normal honda car and then have a discreet little hybrid bed and of course there is a hybrid accord there is a civic accord and those look exactly like a hybrid civic rather those look exactly like civics and accords they just have a little badge and uglier wheels usually and a slightly uglier grill but otherwise they're they're exactly the same cars
John:
uh yeah someone pointed out uh that honda's hydrogen efforts honda's off in the weeds on this whole topic but yeah everyone will eventually just have all their cars just be normal but in the beginning there is some advantage to making a bit of a splash by naming your thing e-tron or making your i3 look like this weird refrigerator and wheels like and making everything out of wood sustainably and having a little flower growing out of the dashboard like that's how you get into the market but
Marco:
Well, but that's how you get into the market like five years ago.
Marco:
I feel like now, doing this kind of stuff now, it's a little late for that.
Marco:
It'd be like if somebody came out now with a brand new hybrid line and they really touted it and sub-branded it.
Marco:
And it's like, no, that's old now.
Marco:
When the very first hybrids came out, the very first Prius and Honda, was it the inside?
Marco:
The very first consumer hybrids,
Marco:
when those came out that was the time to do like you know crazy styling and really call attention to the fact that it's a hybrid but i feel like with electric cars like we are already like at like the phasing out part of the adoption curve here where we're already at the point where like you should like reduce the amount that you call attention to the fact that it's electric and just make a really good electric car you are
John:
crazy yeah we're not at that point first of all but look at the styling on this this looks like an audi like the styling of this audi says nothing about the only thing that says electric is the stupid name and the fact that they put the name on the front but otherwise it looks like a straight up audi and the same thing with the the jaguar looks like a squished suv like all their other squished suvs like that the styling error is already over before these people have even made their first electric car but we are still in early days of electric cars period
Marco:
I will agree that this is that this the e-tron GT concept thing is actually a very nice looking car.
Marco:
And yes, you're right.
Marco:
It doesn't with the exception of the stupid thing on the intake non grill.
Marco:
It doesn't.
Marco:
Is that even it's a fake intake grill, isn't it?
Marco:
Yeah, it's blocked off.
Marco:
Why would you need air to go in there?
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
So the giant e-tron branding on the fake intake grill, I think, is a mistake.
Marco:
But other than that, if they just deleted that and the grill, and if you take that out, it actually does look very, very nice.
Marco:
But it looks like a very nice version of a car I don't need.
Casey:
I think the problem that you're running into, Marco, with regard to where we are in the timeline of electric cars is that you've lived with one for three years now.
Casey:
But to any regular – I don't mean this to sound dismissive and I apologize – but to any regular person with regular cars, they still seem like a foreign concept.
Casey:
I've probably spent more time driving an electric car –
Casey:
than many given that i don't own one you know i've driven i've driven underscores cars plenty of times i don't recall if i've actually driven yours but it ultimately doesn't matter the point is i've spent a fair bit of time behind the wheel of a tesla and i am pretty familiar with what they are and how they work but most people i know like have never really even been in an electric car much less owned one or driven one or owned one so i think we're far earlier in the adoption than i think you're giving them credit for
Marco:
Well, I'm not saying they're like every day, but the time that it was really crazy unique for an electric car to be an electric car is fading already.
Marco:
And so if you are debuting a new model in the next two to four years and you're planning on starting this big sub-brand of your company for electric, I think the time for that has passed.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It is still novel, and you're right, most people don't have them yet.
Marco:
But, like, I mean, geez, like, look at the number of Model 3s Tesla has shipped.
Marco:
Like, look at, like, it's getting pretty mass market at a pretty accelerating pace.
Marco:
And if Tesla wasn't such a, you know, crazy, poorly run company for operations, I think there'd be even more of them.
Marco:
And so it's only a matter of time before other companies come in and have...
Marco:
products that are as compelling as the Model 3 and Model S and sell in similar volumes, we only need like one or two more of those before this becomes very common for a lot of people.
Marco:
Whether they own one or not, it's a different story.
Marco:
They have to get cheaper still.
Marco:
Yeah, they do.
Marco:
But it's going to become as boring as owning a BMW.
Marco:
Most people don't own BMWs, but most people also don't care that much about them.
Marco:
They aren't that novel anymore.
Marco:
They might have been novel 40 years ago, but they're not very novel now.
Marco:
That's why I think we're getting there with electrics faster than a lot of these car companies seem to think, where...
Marco:
It's no longer going to be like, hey, look at us.
Marco:
Give us a big hand for going all electric.
Marco:
If you go all electric in 10 years, no one's going to give you a big hand.
Marco:
That's just table stakes at that point.