An Uneasy Peace
Casey:
How's it going?
Marco:
Not bad.
Casey:
You?
Casey:
So I was taking a sip.
Casey:
I'm well.
Casey:
I have, as of four seconds ago, started my holiday party.
John:
Yeah, starting a little early.
John:
I did not bring the bottle like I did.
John:
No, no, no.
Casey:
The critical error I made years ago, which I will not make again, was bringing the bottle with me.
Casey:
I have rationed appropriately.
Casey:
I do not have an inappropriate amount.
Casey:
And the only way for me to refill is if I go all the way downstairs.
Casey:
I am learning from my mistakes.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
How's it going?
Casey:
I agree, and we have a long night ahead.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Are you having a beer tonight?
Casey:
Not yet.
Casey:
Pacing yourself.
Casey:
Very boring, but very adult.
Marco:
Yes, I'm very tired today, so I'm having some caffeinated tea to help keep me nice and alert and lucid as much as possible for this podcast.
Marco:
This is busy week.
Marco:
For Christmas week, in our family, we tend to basically do nothing for an entire week.
Marco:
And when you have a job or something, a regular job, for the most part, I mean, not everybody, but for the most part...
Marco:
when you take a vacation, you just kind of stop going to the job and other people pick up your slack.
Marco:
And I know it's a little hard for the holidays, but when you're self-employed as Casey, you know, now when you're self-employed, uh, when you just, when you take a week off, uh,
Marco:
The work doesn't get done by other people.
Marco:
It just doesn't get done.
Marco:
So all you're doing is moving the work from your, quote, vacation week.
Marco:
You're just moving it to different times before and after.
Marco:
So the week before vacation is extra busy.
Marco:
And that's where we are now.
Casey:
Which explains why I saw a new test flight beta from Overcast fly by, like...
Casey:
I don't know, half an hour ago or something.
Marco:
Yeah, it was like 20 minutes ago because I'm trying to fix all these bugs in time for the App Store Connect holiday shutdown.
Marco:
When is that?
Marco:
I know what you're referring to.
Marco:
I believe it begins on the 24th, I think, which is Monday.
Marco:
I'm surprised it's that late.
Marco:
It's something like that, but I want to ideally submit this to the App Store tomorrow, and that way it gets approved probably by Thursday, and then if I have to do an emergency fix, I can issue that Thursday or Friday.
Marco:
That's smart.
Marco:
It's a whole thing.
Marco:
So it's like everything is compressed.
Marco:
And it's a very busy week.
Marco:
This is the same time that I believe it was last year that I started using things.
Marco:
Because in the holidays, in our lead-up to our big holiday family trip...
Marco:
all the stuff we traditionally do for that, we have a whole bunch of to-do items for that, in addition to just life stuff, all catching up, end-of-the-year stuff, tax stuff, all sorts of things, and it becomes very, very nice as you're running around doing crazy things to just be able to yell into your phone, hey, thing, add this to my to-do list and things, or whatever, and to build up a quick list via Siri and
Marco:
be able to plow through them as uh as you get chances to so i'm i'm in that kind of mode like the super busy doing everything mode like getting tons of stuff done juggling five different things but i have an important update i called us bank this morning to inquire about my tesla lease balance yes and they said that they had just this morning received payment from tesla and i have a zero balance
Casey:
Yay!
Marco:
Yeah, we finally... They're going to send me a statement that confirms that I have zero balance, that I don't have yet, but they told me verbally that it is done.
Marco:
And this should be the last I hear of my old Tesla lease that Tesla failed to terminate properly when they offered to.
Casey:
So let me play this back to make sure my understanding is right.
Casey:
So you had paid...
Casey:
a bunch of money that you shouldn't have against that lease that should have been closed but wasn't or done or what have you and it wasn't so that has or has not been refunded to you that pile of money the pile that i had paid has correct tesla sent me a check for that okay and and you have received it yes and i deposited it and it hasn't bounced yet so we'll see what happens
Marco:
I don't know how long it takes to really be totally clear.
Marco:
I think it takes like a week.
Marco:
Sure, sure.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But yeah, so hopefully that doesn't bounce.
Marco:
If it does, it'll make for a great segment on the show.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
In a way, I kind of want it to.
Casey:
Okay, so you have that money already, and as far as we can tell, all is on the up and up.
Casey:
And then the only other missing piece was to get the bank that held, or whatever the terminology is, that held the lease to agree that the lease is done.
Casey:
And that sounds like that is also now accomplished.
Marco:
Yes, because Tesla had to both pay me the money that I had overpaid to them, and they had to pay the bank the rest of the balance, because the bank sent me like a $5,000 bill.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
So both of those things have now been done.
Marco:
And so as far as I can tell, I think I'm done.
Marco:
I think I'm finally out of that.
Marco:
I think it's all taken care of finally.
Marco:
And I can finally get back to enjoying what is really my favorite car I've ever had.
Marco:
And I just want to enjoy it.
Marco:
So now I'm back to enjoying it.
Casey:
Did you read – was it a Wired article?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
This Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk life inside Tesla's production hell.
Marco:
I have – you know, I typically don't read anything like that because –
Marco:
even before this lease debacle where they totally butchered basic administrative tasks, I knew the company was a mess.
Marco:
I knew Elon Musk personally was a mess and kind of a horrible person, especially to work for.
Marco:
And so I knew there was a bunch of like, you know,
Marco:
toxic waste over there and i i i love the car so much i didn't want i wouldn't want my view to be tarnished i didn't want to have to get down into like the dirt of that and get involved in that so like i don't pay attention to their drama their company their stock anything like that i don't get involved i just like the car a lot and there is no other car i'd rather have and so
Marco:
Whenever some big toxic whirlwind starts about them, I try to ignore it as much as possible.
Marco:
And a lot of them are BS anyway.
Marco:
Some of them are true, but a lot of them are BS anyway.
Marco:
So it's just kind of nice to stay out of the whole thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Did you read this, John?
John:
I read it.
John:
I just kept waiting for you to say ignorance is list, but I guess you're off that train.
Casey:
Never, never.
Casey:
I just didn't think about it.
Casey:
No, I'm never off the train.
Casey:
Let's not get ridiculous.
Casey:
The list puns will never end.
Casey:
The puns will continue until morale improves.
Casey:
Do you hear this, by the way?
John:
Can you hear this on my microphone?
Casey:
It sounded like a printer for a split second.
John:
Yeah.
John:
No, sure.
John:
People can print while I'm in here.
John:
It's fine.
John:
What?
John:
Which family member is committing... It's the one that's my daughter, because she doesn't care.
John:
You just hear the dulcet tones of my Canon inkjet printer.
Casey:
I read this article, and then it was a good article, but it's really more of the same.
Casey:
You don't need to read any more Elon Musk articles, or really any more Tesla articles.
Casey:
This is a little more detailed than I had read previously, but ultimately it says what we all knew, which is exactly what you were just trying to say, Marco, is that
Casey:
Elon seems to be kind of a dirtbag for a loose definition of the term.
Casey:
And the company seems to be a complete disaster.
Casey:
So news at 11.
Marco:
Exactly.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
But it was interesting.
Casey:
I'm not saying, you know, like don't bother, but it is exactly what you expect it to be.
Casey:
But it's well written.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it does raise the question.
Marco:
People have asked me before, like, how can I support them?
Marco:
And, you know, this horrible, you know, this horrible person who runs this company, how can I support them by, by being their customer?
Marco:
And, you know, it's, we, we've talked about this a little bit before.
Marco:
Like there's only so many companies to buy certain things from.
Marco:
There's only so many large corporations, large, you know, airlines are a big one of these where like an airline can, you know, make you really mad.
Marco:
But then sometimes you had got to fly them again in the future anyway, because there's only like five airlines.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
With cars, there's a pretty small number of car companies out there that make cars that are anything like what I would drive.
Marco:
I don't know anything about the other ones, really.
Marco:
They could be led by horrible people, too.
Marco:
You typically don't become the CEO of a large corporation, and you especially typically don't succeed as the CEO of a large corporation without being able to play the politics game real well, and a lot of that comes kind of...
Marco:
dirtily?
Marco:
Is that a word?
Marco:
I know what you're saying.
Marco:
Most people who run most large corporations have some dirt on them and are not the nicest or best people in all of their lives.
Marco:
We typically just don't hear about most of the other ones.
Marco:
We hear about a few high-profile examples of these companies, but we don't hear about most of anything else.
Marco:
It's better to just do what you can here and there, but not be super religious about it because chances are anything you love, somebody can ruin it by saying, well, you know, this executive who works there was kind of a jerk once.
Marco:
So you got to kind of be willing to look past some degree of that.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, my dad worked at IBM for a very long time, and by virtue of his particular role in the company, he would interact with the CEO on a not completely irregular basis, like enough that the CEO would recognize who my dad is, although my dad was nowhere near the CEO.
Casey:
You know, it was one of those, like, he sidestepped his way into the CEO's world, if you will.
Casey:
Well, anyway...
Casey:
He worked there under the tenure of a few CEOs because he was there for like 30 years.
Casey:
And I'd asked dad once – this was around the time of a CEO change – hey, is Joe Smith or Susie Smith or whatever, is Mr. or Mrs. Smith – are they kind of mean?
Casey:
And my dad just looked at me and scoffed.
Casey:
He was like, of course they are.
Casey:
They're the CEO of IBM.
Casey:
You don't get to that position by being nice, which is exactly what you're saying.
Casey:
He was –
Casey:
he was kind of almost offended that I'd even ask such a ridiculous question.
Casey:
Of course they're a jerk.
Marco:
See also most politicians.
Marco:
Most politicians who start ranking highly, once you get to the national level especially, you have to be a certain level of dirtbag to be able to succeed and to climb the ladder.
Marco:
Very few people make it that far who aren't just total jerks in some way.
Marco:
Some do.
Marco:
It is possible to.
Marco:
Just the odds are against you.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's continue since we've already started with follow up and let's continue.
Casey:
A lot of people helpfully wrote in to tell us why your camera error happened.
Casey:
And some people seem to think it was ridiculous.
Casey:
We didn't know this.
Casey:
I will.
Casey:
I will come to your defense, Marco, and say I had no idea this was a thing.
Casey:
And I think that it's utterly preposterous.
Casey:
But Marco, would you like to tell us why your video cut off at just barely shy of 30 minutes?
Marco:
All of Europe told us about this.
Marco:
There was an EU import law that classified video cameras at a different tax or tariff or import rate, whatever it is, to other types of cameras.
Marco:
And that by all DSLR and mirrorless manufacturers setting their limits to just shy of 30 minutes would get them classified not as a video camera, but as a still camera.
Marco:
And that got them, I guess, a lower import tax or whatever.
Marco:
And so they could be sold for lower prices.
Marco:
And so basically all of those camera makers that make those kind of cameras all limit their cameras to 29, 59 or whatever.
Marco:
And apparently we've also heard, although I have not yet verified, we've also heard that that tax regulation is getting relaxed next year.
Marco:
And so maybe the camera makers will adjust things.
Marco:
We also have already been told, thank you very much, about various like hacked firmware things that we can install on our cameras.
Marco:
That's nice.
Marco:
I'm glad those exist.
Marco:
I'm not going to do that.
Casey:
Yeah, no, not a chance.
Marco:
And finally, we absolutely did hear about external recorders to be used to basically use HDMI recorders or recording monitors to get around this limit.
Marco:
That is nice.
Marco:
I believe I said this last episode, but cut it out.
Marco:
Those cost like $800, and that doesn't seem like a great solution to this problem either.
Marco:
So my solution instead is going to be I'm going to just not record for more than 30 minutes at once.
Casey:
Chris Adamson writes and says, another reason not to use Dropbox for everything.
Casey:
So this was in the context of why don't I just put pretty much everything in Dropbox or Google Drive or what have you?
Casey:
And so Chris says, another reason not to use Dropbox for everything, it cannot store bundle files such as GarageBand projects.
Casey:
An Apple support article notes that while GarageBand for iOS can save files locally or to iCloud, saving via the files app won't work to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, or Microsoft OneDrive.
Casey:
John, I get the feeling that you're twitching because I didn't appropriately describe what a bundle is.
Casey:
Would you like to elaborate any or are you satisfied?
Yeah.
John:
I'm not sure the summary is right where it says it can't store bundle files.
John:
The tech note says it can't store garage band files, which I assume are bundles.
John:
Bundles is just a directory full of files, but the directory itself has a dot and a bunch of letters at the end of it.
John:
And the OS and applications treat it specially and don't show you that it's a directory.
John:
They just show it to you as a file unless you do a particular run.
John:
Anyway, there's nothing particularly special about bundles or garage band bundles that would prevent
John:
dropbox from storing them correctly and in fact i'm pretty sure dropbox does store you know just bundles as a concept okay because i'm pretty sure i've put some bundle files in there and taken them out and they continue to work but there must be something about either how garageband works or how ios treats them or maybe there's some mac specific metadata that dropbox doesn't support that's important in this case that apple has a tech note that says no don't try to save your garageband files to cloud storage you can save them to icloud drive which again shows that it's not some limitation of cloud drives it's just some limitation these services so
John:
Yeah, that kind of gets back to what I was saying.
John:
I think we talked about this when we were talking about Plex.
John:
Not all file systems are created equal when it comes to storing stuff from your Mac because the rules about file names are different.
John:
And in this case, whatever thing is preventing this particular kind of bundle from working in a particular application might have particular requirements.
John:
Some applications are cranky about storing stuff on what they...
John:
perceived to be network volumes so you have to fool them somehow we've talked about that before so yeah the world of file systems is still filled with pitfalls and if you don't think about them and just think oh like everything is everything and i can i can store this file anywhere i want in a cloud on a drive you know on a fish in a box with a fox you actually kind of have to be careful a little bit
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There's another link in the show notes, which I only had a chance to very quickly glance at because it came in late breaking.
Casey:
I don't know which one of you gentlemen added this.
Casey:
I'm guessing, John, but can you tell me about shortcuts.fun, please?
Marco:
That's a fantastic domain name.
John:
It is a really good domain.
John:
Well, the first thing is that my work firewall prevented me from getting to it.
John:
I'm assuming just because it has .fun on the name.
John:
They're like, you know what?
John:
Just don't allow anyone to go to .fun from work because they shouldn't be going there.
John:
Anyway, I got to look at it later.
John:
So this is a website and a library created by Josh Verant.
John:
And the upshot is it lets you make shortcuts and
John:
by writing javascript like just open a text field and start writing javascript against his library and then it will compile it sort of or package it into a dot shortcut file which i'm assuming is just like a bundle directory that's zipped and renamed dot shortcut or whatever you can do right on the website you can go to the website there's a text field you can write stuff there you can click a button and it will take what you type in that text field and download in your browser a dot shortcut file and you can run
John:
on ios and so this is like a reverse engineering of the dot shortcut file format which again i know nothing about but i assume like so many of apple's other formats is just a either a zip or a zip file that if you decompress it is a directory full of files then a particular format a particular folder structure and it just runs them
John:
um so if you do want to make shortcuts but don't want to use the ui uh this is the thing for you what josh wrote on the website is i built this library out of frustration with apple shortcuts app as i found complex shortcuts were difficult to manage using this drag and drop interface i wanted to write shortcuts the same way i write code so i created shortcuts.js or shortcuts.js he's got a big article in medium where he describes the whole process and reverse engineering we'll put a link to that in the show notes um
John:
So that's cool.
John:
I mean, obviously, this is a hack and it's reverse engineered and Apple can change the format at any time, yada, yada, yada.
John:
Like, there's no guarantee this will continue to work.
John:
But it's nice that it has an option.
John:
Of course, one of the links is to an example.
John:
I said, like, what do these things look like?
John:
What does it look like when you write a shortcut in JavaScript?
John:
Doesn't quite look maybe the way you would expect it to.
John:
So they have a bunch of examples.
John:
Like here's a battery level checker example.
John:
And everything is done in terms of what I presume are the underlying either Objective-C or Swift objects or whatever.
John:
so there's a thing called get battery level that gives you the get battery level right and the shortcut is if you're writing the shortcut in the shortcuts app it would be like okay we'll get the result of this action and then compare it with this comparison block and you know it's parameterized so it's a less than thing and then i say it's 20 it's like oh great when i get to write this in code i'll just be able to do if get battery level less than 20 no you have a function called conditional and
John:
that takes an object with keys named input and and that's a string which is the less than sign and then value and that's a number which is 20 and then an if true key which gives you an array of just it's like it's not how you would write it you don't you can't just use the less than operator in javascript i mean this is you could add this on top of the library uh you know eventually this is like version one or it just shows that under the covers you
John:
All those blocks you see in shortcuts apparently map directly to silly functions called conditional that take strings as input.
John:
It's not the way you would write it in a code.
John:
I still say this is probably more comfortable for a programmer than using the shortcut UI.
John:
I'm not sure if it helps with debugging.
John:
Again, I just looked at this this afternoon.
John:
I don't think just because you write it in JavaScript, you can actually debug it in JavaScript because in the end, you have to package it up as a .shortcut file and run it on your phone.
John:
At that point, you're at the mercy of whatever debugging abilities you have there.
John:
But if you're a programmer and you're interested in playing with shortcuts in something other than a bunch of rounded rectangles on your phone or iPad screen, check out this site, shortcuts.fun.
John:
Is that plural?
John:
Yeah, plural.
John:
Shortcuts.fun.
Casey:
This is very cool and very impressive, but I agree with you that the language of it, and I don't mean that like JavaScript, but the kind of flow of the way it's been implemented is clunky.
Casey:
This reminds me of, what was it?
Casey:
It was some god-awful SharePoint thing I did.
Casey:
Was it Camel, C-A-M-L?
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
Now I'm miserable just thinking about SharePoint again.
Casey:
But basically a query language where you have to say, okay, I want this thing, and then I want a comparison.
Casey:
The particular comparison I want is less.
Casey:
It's exactly what you said before.
Casey:
It's just so clunky.
Casey:
And it's probably a lot less clunky than dragging stuff around on the screen.
Casey:
I mean, I've seen some of Federico's shortcuts, and they are masterpieces, but they are out of control.
Casey:
And so this does seem like it would help a lot.
Marco:
So I've done some research while you guys were talking on the .fun TLD.
Marco:
I was wondering what's available.
Marco:
I had never heard of this.
Marco:
I was wondering what's available and how much do these cost.
Marco:
And it turns out that you can register a lot of keywords there that are dictionary words, but they seem to be priced such that the ones that are better and more desirable are way more expensive.
Marco:
So for instance, coffee.fun is $5,600 per year.
Marco:
and so that to me suggests coffee is a very fun thing so i wondered what can i get that's less fun than coffee now i think podcasts are pretty fun uh podcast.fun is only two thousand eight hundred dollars per year so that's about half the price for podcast.fun compared to coffee.fun that does seem to suggest we're getting less less fun though so then i tried sharepoint.fun so
Marco:
god that's only eleven hundred and sixty dollars per year so that one has a lot less interest in the fun buyers looking for sharepoint then i found the bottom of the barrel how is that not sharepoint that is the bottom of the barrel there are things that are less fun than sharepoint tied at just four dollars a year each are airport security dot fun and finally tetanus shot dot fun so
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
This is useful podcasting content.
Casey:
I'm glad we're here.
John:
I'm not sure this is an efficient market setting these prices.
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:
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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:
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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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Casey:
Apple is shutting down Apple Music's rarely used Kinect feature.
Casey:
So is this the thing where, as an artist, you could go up there and talk about what you're up to and what tour you're doing and do a little behind-the-scenes stuff?
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Was this the thing that Drake introduced or was this before that?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I don't remember.
Marco:
But yeah, it was basically Ping 2.0.
Marco:
It's like, here, let's build a social network inside Apple Music so that the artists can post their stuff here and people can follow them.
Marco:
It was basically, you know, the world of music promotion is very heavily tied to other networks, especially like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.
Marco:
So like it was basically Apple's attempt at trying to capture that world of social promotion of musical stuff and musical bands and fans following musicians itself.
Marco:
into their own thing uh and it was you know not that different from ping really ping was ping was like follow your friends this was follow the bands you like and i don't think it ever had any traction at all even at the very beginning like they they had a few artists on board to start it out and start posting and i tried following some artists i like but it didn't it seemed to pretty much die out and have nobody posting there that i followed almost immediately afterwards
Marco:
I think the reason why social networks like Twitter and Facebook and to some degree in this area, YouTube, the reason these succeed is because like, you know, artists that you follow tend not to have a lot to say most of the time.
Marco:
Like, you know, if you go follow your favorite handful of bands on a social network,
Marco:
If the social network is only them, if you're not seeing anyone else posting, that's going to be a pretty low volume social network.
Marco:
Whereas the other ones, you're going there all the time for other stuff, for all sorts of different sources and people to follow or communicate with or post things yourself.
Marco:
There's tons of reasons to go to social networks other than whatever this is, not App Store Connect, not iTunes Connect, Apple Music Connect, Apple Music Ping, whatever the heck it was called.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
There's no reason to just keep going to that, to have that be integrated as part of your life that you're constantly going to, whereas the other ones have other draws that keep people going back and checking in all the time.
Marco:
So I don't think this ever really stood a chance.
Marco:
Even when it was introduced, I don't think anybody was saying, this is going to take over the world.
Marco:
I think everyone was basically saying, what are they doing?
Marco:
Why are they doing ping again?
Marco:
And it didn't work out.
John:
This falls under our category of the best time to cancel services after people have forgotten that exists.
John:
And this definitely qualifies because I read the story.
John:
I had forgotten it exists like, oh, yeah, they did that thing.
John:
I do think it's actually very different from Ping for exactly the reason you said.
John:
Ping was...
John:
Uh, you know, see what your friends are doing, like an actual social network that all the participants would both be able to consume the output of other people and produce output for other people in the networks.
Marco:
It was all, it's many to many, right?
Marco:
Well, and that was fundamentally flawed because it was based on the assumptions that you and your friends have the same taste in music.
Marco:
I guess, you know, nobody has like a fish friend.
John:
Oh.
John:
It doesn't expect you to be the same taste and it doesn't expect you to be just your friends.
John:
But the whole point, it was just regular people to regular people.
John:
But Connect seemed, I don't know if this is entirely true, but it very much seemed, this is, first of all, it was pitch to creators to get them to come.
John:
Like, hey, you famous person who makes music, come to our service.
John:
All the things that you think you want to do to communicate to your listeners, we'll make it easy for you to do those things.
John:
So it made attractive to them.
John:
And then for everyone else, it was like, you sit back and wait to hear from the famous people.
John:
So like you said, if your band has an album once every few years and then they go on tour and maybe they'll have some behind the scenes stuff, which takes work to produce.
John:
Like that was the whole picture of the team.
John:
Like your fans are hungry to know like how you're in the studio working on your album and what did you have for lunch today?
John:
And here's some behind the scenes look at our lyrics in progress and, you know, whatever.
John:
You have to encourage the artists to do that.
John:
I mean, Apple probably went this far as to, you know.
John:
get the ones that are friendly to them to do it, pay them to do it, whatever.
John:
You just got to kickstart the service.
John:
And then presumably the fans are sitting there waiting to see something from their band.
John:
But that's the ghost.
John:
Like I said, it's a ghost town because people don't follow that many artists and artists don't have that much to say and that much to update.
John:
And the artists aren't going to invest the time and energy
John:
to put highly produced content out to an audience of nobody.
John:
All the people are not sitting in, I don't know where you would sit, in iTunes application, in the music application on your phone, waiting for the once a month thing.
John:
No, you're going to be someplace else.
John:
You're going to be on YouTube looking at the millions of videos.
John:
You're going to be on Twitter.
John:
You're going to be on Facebook.
John:
You're going to be where things are actually happening.
John:
So no one's going to produce for an audience that isn't there.
John:
And it's like...
John:
you can't have an audience if there's nothing for them to do except for wait for messages from on high from the famous people.
John:
So I think ping was actually a better, smarter effort than connect, which is saying something because ping was also fundamentally as well.
John:
This is why it was like, why would people, how do you bootstrap this social network when you don't have anything to offer over the million other social networks that are already much better established and where people already have a place to
John:
talk about music that they like or send each other links to things that they think are cool.
John:
Like they do that on every other social network and Ping didn't have any, you know, all these services, especially when they're tied to iTunes, seem like they were created by an Apple that still thinks it's the king of digital music, you know, because of the iTunes store and selling people songs for 99 cents.
John:
Like that time has passed, but that seems to be the place where Apple thinks they can, they have a lever to, to bootstrap a social network and they just don't, they just don't have one.
John:
Like,
John:
You can bootstrap a social network with enough money and effort, but iTunes is not an advantage.
John:
In fact, at this point, it is probably a very big disadvantage because no one wants to launch that app, and the apps on iOS are not particularly well suited to that, or neither is any real music player app.
John:
Even something like Spotify, which is doing what Apple wishes they could do, where people trade Spotify playlists with each other and create them, and even that.
John:
Apple is so far behind that, and that's a thing that has existed for years, so...
John:
I kind of feel bad for Apple's efforts in this area, especially since they continue to think that producing high-quality content by famous people is a thing that helps you win.
John:
I don't understand how YouTube hasn't convinced them that's not the case.
John:
YouTube didn't win by having high-quality content by famous people.
John:
YouTube won by having people making videos in their basement showing demonstrations of VCRs.
John:
That's how YouTube won.
John:
And I can't imagine Apple producing anything that encourages and fosters and builds on that type of content.
John:
But that's apparently the way you build a social network.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Microsoft Edge, which I guess is a web browser, don't really care.
Casey:
But apparently it's coming to macOS.
Casey:
Hooray!
Casey:
Yes, I think.
John:
That's not what this says.
John:
You are missing the story here.
Yeah.
Casey:
Now, I know that the story is that it's – my understanding of the story is that they're canning their custom rendering engine and they're now forking Chromium.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
And using that as a rendering engine, which means basically the entire world is going to be WebKit going forward.
Casey:
It's just a matter of what the particular genesis is of your particular flavor.
John:
Excuse me.
John:
Chromium is not WebKit.
Casey:
Well, no, it is a descendant of WebKit, is it not?
John:
Yeah, so the family tree is getting complicated.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
There you go.
John:
You mentioned before you didn't know what Edge was.
John:
So Edge is the thing – we all know Internet Explorer.
John:
Good old, bad old Internet Explorer that –
John:
was a big problem for the whole world for a long time.
John:
And many generations of web developers will continue to loathe into their retirement.
John:
We'll tell stories of IE6 forever.
John:
I will tell stories of IE6 forever.
John:
I guarantee it.
John:
Edge was supposed to be the successor to Internet Explorer because Internet Explorer was old and creaky and had to support people's corporate intranets forever.
John:
And as much as Microsoft tried to improve it, they had...
John:
increasingly Byzantine backward compatibility hacks involving HTML comments and different modes and a mini language inside the headers to basically say, we won't break your intranet, but if web developers know the right incantations, their standards compliant sites will render almost as good as they do in insert standard compliant browser here.
John:
Edge was a successor to that to say, clean sheet, this is not compatible with your stupid IE6 only intranet.
John:
It's a modern browser and it's fast and they spent a while developing that.
John:
um and then i don't i wish i knew the exact timeline so i could say the number of years they spent on the edge stuff but this announcement is all right never mind about the edge thing we're gonna make a new web browser and it's gonna be based on chromium which is based on blink which was based on webkit which is based on khtml and kjs which are from the kde foundation and and if you know what kde is you're probably very old
John:
I am.
John:
Yeah, so that's quite a lineage of these browsers, and it'll be coming to macOS, so you'll be able to run a Microsoft web browser on your Mac if that's really a thing you want to do.
John:
But the main...
John:
thing that's got people in a tizzy about this is it kind of reduces the biodiversity of the web browser ecosystem by one which is a lot when there weren't you know how many browsers out there how many web browsers exist that you can basically view modern websites with not many you can count them on probably one hand especially if you coalesce the mobile and desktop variants um
John:
and so microsoft apparently is not a big enough company and does not have enough money and is not strategically important enough for them to sustain the development of a separate web browser engine so they're going to build something on chromium are they going to fork it are they going to say in the same way that blink was forked from webkit are they going to take chromium and run with it i doubt it because if they could support the continued development of a web engine uh
John:
a web browser engine they would do that i think they want google and the open source community to continue to advance chromium and they just want to reap the benefits of that so i think they will release a browser built on chromium and when chromium gets updated they will incorporate those updates into their browser and they will just keep doing that and basically be mostly out of the business of developing a full-featured modern
John:
web rendering engine and instead allow that to happen allow someone else to do that because it's just too much of a pain it's just too much work to to do that as a project which is making me think about um you know it used to be we talk about how many how many companies have enough money and technical expertise to to be a platform in the old days it was like a desktop pc platform right you have to make an operating system and you have to have apis you have to have a developer program you have to support them and you have to get hardware vendors to
John:
make the hardware you want or you have to make your own hardware and you have to deal with drivers and you just like it takes a lot of time money and expertise uh to make a platform and then for that platform to be successful enough in the market to sustain that it's very difficult so there's not a lot of say personal computer platforms that exist and are popular today you've got the mac you've got windows you've got linux and desktop which is coming anytime soon um and various also brands in the mix there um
John:
At this point, web browser engines seem like perhaps even more difficult to keep up with than desktop operating systems from a technical perspective because the web changes much faster.
John:
And it's a sort of a communal thing where if new web standards come out and those web standards are supported by insert whatever the important browser is that has the most market share and you don't support it on a reasonable timeline.
John:
and websites start using it because the browser that has 80% market share supports it, you will be left behind and people will come to say, well, the site doesn't work and insert my favorite browser, I have to go to the market leader.
John:
That's what happened with Internet Explorer and Chrome and it's...
John:
Right now, even Microsoft thinks we can't keep up with that.
John:
It's just too much.
John:
It's too much too fast.
John:
And actually, that's not our strategic strength.
John:
It's not an important advantage for us to have our own browser engine.
John:
So we'll let someone else do it.
John:
If everybody does that, though, eventually there's only one browser engine.
John:
hopefully not controlled by some single company and that's you know then we're back to internet explorer again where microsoft and internet explorer dictated what could and couldn't be on the web because so many people ran windows and internet explorer 6 that even if you made a cool standard compliance site if it looked like crap in ie6 it was basically invisible to a large portion of the population so this has a lot of people nervous uh i kind of understand why microsoft bailed on it from an investment perspective but
John:
And I do understand exactly how complicated it is to build and sustain a modern web rendering engine, but I just don't really have a particularly good feeling about this happening.
Casey:
Yeah, I already feel like, as you said, Chrome is becoming the de facto standard, and that makes me uncomfortable.
Casey:
I can't think off the top of my head of that many – or really anything that absolutely requires Chrome, but certainly Google's own web properties work a lot better in Chrome, which makes sense.
Casey:
There's a handful of sites, again, I wish I could think of an example, that just don't work properly in Safari and do work better in Chrome.
Casey:
A lot of people seem to really like Chrome.
Casey:
I don't particularly care for it.
Casey:
It doesn't really work for me in a few different ways that really don't matter, but...
Casey:
I am not keen on the idea of Chrome kind of getting even more cemented as the de facto standard.
Casey:
And yeah, it's all sort of WebKit behind the scenes, but there's more differences here than I'm comfortable with already.
Casey:
And that just makes me uncomfortable.
John:
The JavaScript engines are totally separate because Chrome has the V8 engine and Apple has what the hell is there called?
Yeah.
John:
Is it Nitro?
John:
Is that a thing?
John:
There's a bunch of code names for the faster versions.
John:
But anyway, they have their own and they're separate from each other.
John:
JavaScript core is, I think, the framework.
John:
Anyway, someone posted in the chat room an article I read earlier today, an article, a Hacker News comment that shows just how fraught the world of...
John:
browser development is.
John:
So this is, you know, Microsoft, back when they were doing their Edge thing, they're having a problem where YouTube, if you tried to go to YouTube and play a video at Edge, all of a sudden, the sort of hardware accelerated, efficient...
John:
gpu driven video path that that was nicest to your battery stopped working in edge and when microsoft's browser team investigated they found there was like an invisible div like a div with some transparency or a hidden div or whatever covering the video and their acceleration framework thought that it couldn't accelerate that because there was an element in front of it like it thought that it couldn't do use the fast path so it fell back to like the less efficient rendering mode and
John:
uh and but that didn't happen in chrome chrome was apparently smart enough to know that oh yeah there's something in front of it but use the accelerator path anyway but because the thing in front of it is invisible or is you know zero percent opacity or whatever uh and the nefarious interpretation of this is that aha google is intentionally making changes to youtube which google owns to make microsoft's browsers worse because they were chrome uh google was touting how battery efficient chrome is look at us we when we
John:
Which is ironic considering Chrome is a battery pig compared to Safari.
John:
But, you know, everything's relative.
John:
So if you have a PC and you're not running a Mac and you're trying to watch YouTube video, you do it in Chrome, it hurts your battery much less than if you did it in Edge.
John:
And so they're like, look at this Chrome, Google taking advantage of the fact that they own YouTube to crap on someone else's browser to make Chrome more dominant.
John:
And that could be what happens.
John:
That's the thing that happens in technology all the time, doing stuff to make your competitor's product look bad.
John:
But a more benign explanation is that
John:
YouTube and many other web properties have to do all sorts of things to either defeat ad blocking or defeat bots or both, like all sorts of obfuscation techniques because the web is a very adversarial environment and Google knows this.
John:
People are constantly trying to game Google.
John:
Lots of things are coming by trying to scrape content or be automated.
John:
Sometimes you have to do stuff in the markup that doesn't make any sense because it breaks some other adversary.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it might have also broken Edge HTML at the same time because its optimization didn't understand that that thing was invisible.
John:
So there are also plausible, and again, I'm not saying this is what happened, but plausible benign explanations.
John:
So the bottom line is, if you are Microsoft making Edge HTML, it doesn't really matter whether it was they're trying to mess up your browser or they're trying to fight bots or something.
John:
You have to be aware at all times, how is our browser doing with the latest version of insert popular site that we don't control?
John:
Oh, it looks like it used to work great on that site, but now it doesn't.
John:
Quickly figure out why it doesn't work and fix our rendering engine so it does.
John:
And that's what it means to make a web browser.
John:
Like if your web browser works worse in YouTube...
John:
you can't ignore that you have to have people a very large engineering team forget about adding features just all the time making sure that all the popular websites that must work and must work well continue to work and continue to work well and those websites are changing all the time and they're not consulting you when they change and they're making the changes they need to make whether they're trying to intentionally mess you up or they're just doing something totally unrelated that incidentally messes you up because what they're doing seems inexplicable but many again many inexplicable things happen on the web for purposes other than screwing other
John:
web browser vendors.
John:
That's just a tiny glimpse of what it would take to maintain a web browser engine.
John:
And if you don't think it's strategically important for you to do that, why would you waste all that money?
John:
Thus far, Apple continues to think it's strategically important for them to have their own web browser engine.
John:
I don't think they're ever going to change their mind about that.
John:
because it seems like that battle was won a long time ago and now that they have their own browser engine they can be much more battery efficient with it on all their portable devices which is super important to apple because phones is their whole biz and other portable products and i think they like the control and yada yada and you can see google and apple and firefox the mozilla foundation whatever duking it out over standards both inside and outside the formal standards process so they're all and microsoft's in that mix too so everyone still has a stake in this but
John:
you know, Microsoft sort of bowing out and not getting behind the Google side of things, but saying of all the, because they could have just picked WebKit, right?
John:
They could have picked WebKit and, you know, JavaScript core or whatever, but they didn't.
John:
And just basically saying, well, we'll use what you do.
John:
You just do what you do.
John:
And we'll, I'm assuming Microsoft will continue to participate in W3C standardization process and put their two cents in, but they're, you know, they're just going to take Google's work.
John:
And so now it is,
John:
Google, which already had by far the dominant market share of web browsing across the entire world.
John:
And then in a tiny little corner off to the side, Apple with its whatever it is, 20% worldwide market share, but a much larger percentage of people who buy things through the web browser, so they still have that power base to work from.
John:
I'm a little nervous about this.
John:
I'll try Edge when it's on the Mac, but...
John:
Kind of like Firefox, I don't think it's a change that's going to stick unless it does something pretty amazing.
Casey:
I got to tell you, I do not miss doing web development.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
It was fun for a while, but I do not miss it at all.
Marco:
I mean, you know, every field of development, you have to deal with somebody's BS.
Marco:
But it feels like with web development, you had to deal with a lot of people's BS, and it never really ended.
Marco:
In fact, it only seemed to increase over time.
Marco:
We thought, okay, once IE6 is out of the picture, everything will be easier.
Marco:
And instead, it just got harder in different ways.
Marco:
And now, modern web development is certain things are very easy, but
Marco:
in general, the entire field as a whole, has not gotten easier.
Marco:
It's just way more complicated and there's so much more that you, quote, have to do and use and know about and learn and it seems like it's accelerating how quickly things change and how much stuff you have to know to be a working web programmer in most of the industry.
Marco:
It's just nuts.
John:
It's kind of like programming in the early days where you're just writing some sort of batch job in Fortran or something that, you know, on a high-performance computer that just does some operations on a bunch of numbers.
John:
And today, to be an iOS developer, you need to know so much more than they needed to know.
John:
They needed to know how to write to one machine, and they needed to know some basics, and the API was small, and you could do it.
John:
And now to be an iOS developer, you have to know all the stuff about using the IDE and the million APIs and everything about design in Atlanta is just so much harder.
John:
It's because we make better programs.
John:
We make more complicated programs.
John:
So in web development,
John:
Things are better if what you wanted to make was a website that you could have made in 1993.
John:
You can make that today so much better with so much less work.
John:
But you don't want to make a 1993 website.
John:
You want to make a modern website.
John:
And modern websites, guess what, have way more features and do way more things.
John:
And so you have to learn more APIs.
John:
It's just scaled up.
John:
So I think the standards were to get IE6 out of there and to...
John:
basically try to get everyone on some semblance of the same page and get basic support for things that everyone knows are good but that microsoft was presenting preventing us from using for years like basic css that's so boring no one even talks about it anymore it's we're like 17 battles on from that but the stuff that we fought the battles over and won you can use that right now and it is very pleasant to use and but just you know the
John:
The table stakes have been raised.
John:
You can't even participate in the web at the highest level if you don't know how to use all these other things.
John:
And that's, you know, that's where everyone's fighting and working at the bleeding edge to have the coolest, most advanced website.
John:
The nice thing is that if you don't want to have a cool advanced website, but you just want to have, you know, a bunch of static pages with words on them and pictures and stuff.
John:
it's so much more pleasant now to do something like that there is a little bit more you need to know because you don't have to worry about responsive back in the day because what did that mean who's going to be you can't you look at a website on your phones you don't have to worry about that and you just got to make sure you support the smallest computer screen at 640 pixels wide or whatever the hell which ironically is narrower than most phones these days but if you just want to do a simple website the web is incredibly pleasant today but yeah if you want to make youtube or gmail or whatever it's incredibly complicated
Marco:
Squarespace has it all.
Marco:
from simple things like basically content, information sites, all the way up to full-blown storefronts, podcast hosting, all sorts of things that oftentimes elsewhere can be very complex to host.
Marco:
With Squarespace, you don't have to worry about it.
Marco:
It's super easy to set up.
Marco:
They keep it updated.
Marco:
They keep it up and running with big traffic spikes and everything if you get a lot of traffic to your site.
Marco:
That's all their problem.
Marco:
If you need any help with anything, that's their problem too.
Marco:
They take care of you.
Marco:
They have great support, and you don't have to worry about any of that stuff.
Marco:
They take care of the boring stuff and the difficult stuff, and you take care of running your business or making your hobby happen, whatever it is you're making the site for.
Marco:
That's how things should be, and that's how Squarespace lets you manage your time.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
You can start a free trial at squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can build a whole site with the free trial.
Marco:
You can see how it works, see how your site looks, see how far you get.
Marco:
Once you decide you want to sign up after that free trial, make sure to head back again to squarespace.com slash ATP and use coupon code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Once again, at squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
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Marco:
Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
Casey:
Over the last week or two, there has been a pitch from NPR for something that's rad.
Casey:
It's called Remote Audio Data.
Casey:
And this is the pitch directly from rad.npr.org.
Casey:
Remote Audio Data measures podcast listening across a range of participating clients and platforms, aggregating the data in Publishers Analytics Endpoint.
Casey:
No thanks.
Casey:
I mean, what, what, huh?
Casey:
What is this about?
Casey:
Marco, tell me about this.
Marco:
Yeah, this is, I mean, I guess I should be careful here because I'm in this field and it's involving other people who are in this field and everything else.
Marco:
So, you know, I don't want to like be rude or anything, but this is a spec that NPR developed to get more analytics in podcasts.
Marco:
And I honestly don't think we're going to hear about it at all past about this week or so for the simple reason.
Marco:
And again, I'm not saying this to be mean for the simple reason that there is absolutely no reason for podcast app developers to implement this at all.
Marco:
The only support I think I expected to get client side is from NPR one, which is their own app.
Marco:
And maybe down the road, pocket casts, which they threw a consortium of something complicated.
Marco:
They do own it, but pocket casts has said publicly, they're not planning on adding support to it.
Marco:
So I, I don't see any reason why at makers, including Apple, um, which is the big one that matters the most, uh, would implement this.
Marco:
So here's, here's what rad is.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So the fundamental problem that they're trying to solve, right now in podcasting, the only way you can really measure your audience is either by number of hits to the RSS feed, which is incredibly unreliable and not very relevant for podcasts.
Marco:
But the bigger one that people usually use is number of downloads that an average episode gets.
Marco:
Or some of the bigger shows will say number of monthly downloads that the show tends to get total, including all of its archived downloads.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
That's kind of how you sell your ads based on, you know, like, well, our show tends to get X downloads per episode.
Marco:
And so if you buy an ad for this episode, you are likely to get about X downloads.
Marco:
Now, there's a number of problems with this and limitations of this.
Marco:
First of all, measuring a download is itself a little tricky.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of efforts that have been made over the years to try to standardize what that means or what counts, what doesn't count.
Marco:
There's been lots of complexity in the real world that have made it harder.
Marco:
So, for instance, a download is not just a, quote, hit or request to the file.
Marco:
Because even since like forever ago, like since like desktop iTunes, sometimes clients would make multiple requests for the same file, taking different ranges of the file for each request to basically run like four download segments in parallel to speed up the download.
Marco:
So you kind of have to, like if you see multiple download attempts from the same IP address, if they're for different ranges of the file, you might have to conclude, well, that's one download really.
Marco:
But there's lots of situations where multiple people are sharing one IP address.
Marco:
So you can't just say that one IP has at most one download that's attributed to it.
Marco:
Also, in the modern world, people download from their mobile phones.
Marco:
And so they can roam between cell networks and have different IPs at different times of the day.
Marco:
So you might have 10 people behind one IP, or you might have one person who's roaming between four different IPs throughout the same day trying to stream the same podcast bit by bit.
Marco:
So it's actually not incredibly accurate to measure downloads.
Marco:
And then the other problem with downloads is that you don't know if they actually listen to the podcast.
Marco:
All you know is that these people who you can sort of measure downloaded the podcast for the most part, we think.
Marco:
And then you can assume based on that, well, it seems like most of them listen to it, I guess.
Marco:
And for a while, that was pretty much the only information we had.
Marco:
We can see people are downloading it, and our advertisers who advertise with us, they'll put in coupon codes or special links that we read out, and people are using those codes.
Marco:
So it seems like people are hearing the ads.
Marco:
So it seems like we have an audience.
Marco:
People write in, they say they listen to the show.
Marco:
You can have people try to take a survey, but that never works.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Everything is based in podcast metrics.
Marco:
Everything is based on estimations.
Marco:
Now, a big thing happened a few months back after years of big podcast producers kind of campaigning Apple.
Marco:
They convinced Apple Podcasts to open up something called Podcast Analytics.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Apple has the iTunes directory and Apple also has the biggest podcast player in the Apple podcast app, which has something like 60 to 70% market share, depending on who you ask.
Marco:
So it's like the big dog.
Marco:
It is the only big player that matters in podcasting.
Marco:
Everything else is way smaller by comparison.
Marco:
Spotify matters a lot.
Marco:
They're estimated to have like 5% to 7%, something like that.
Marco:
Apple has like 60% to 70%.
Marco:
It's a big deal.
Marco:
Apple finally agreed with podcasters a few months back, and they introduced podcast analytics, which in typical Apple fashion is not personal creepy level type stuff.
Marco:
It's very privacy respectful, aggregate stats, and only for people who opt in with Apple's global opt-in thing during the iOS setup thing.
Marco:
it's very anonymous what you get from them but you are able to see basic trends like how many people who download the first of all how many people download it how many of those people actually listen to it and then how far into each episode they listen and you can see what parts they skip over my position basically is that's plenty that's more data that's way more data than we had before um
Marco:
And what it showed us, honestly, was that all of our assumptions have basically been true.
Marco:
That most people who download it listen to it.
Marco:
Most people who listen to it listen most of the way through.
Marco:
And most people don't skip ads.
Marco:
That's kind of what we've figured out over the years based on how ads performed and everything.
Marco:
And so that seemed to be the case.
Marco:
And now we have...
Marco:
really good data from the biggest podcast app by far in the world that supports that theory that yeah you know what podcasts are fine they you know the downloads are mostly being measured accurately they're you know they're mostly counting people are hearing the ads etc but there's a lot of big publishers now of podcasts and they really want to have their own first of all they want more they want much more data and
Marco:
And then they also want more control over that data.
Marco:
And they have all these backend systems.
Marco:
There's all these ad platforms.
Marco:
There are things like dynamic ad insertion, which we've talked about before, where they inject ads at certain timestamps of the file at download time for each user.
Marco:
That can be locally tailored or whatever.
Marco:
That's why if you listen to big popular podcasts, you might hear a local car ad or something like that.
Marco:
That's why that's happening.
Marco:
When you're injecting ads at download time, and those ads might be different lengths,
Marco:
A bunch of stuff breaks.
Marco:
because subsequent requests to the same URL can get different durations.
Marco:
And so you might make a request for the first chunk of a file, then get interrupted.
Marco:
You go into a subway tunnel or something.
Marco:
You come out of the tunnel, it makes a second request for the second half of the file, and you have a little gap in the middle of the file, or you have a part that gets repeated because it's being served a different duration file.
Marco:
And all these platforms are out there that try to do this.
Marco:
None of them do a great technical job of
Marco:
Actually, in certain of the ads, they usually ignore basic HTTP caching and e-tag types of directives.
Marco:
And they typically violate the MP3 standard in a number of ways.
Marco:
So lots of weird stuff happens with podcast app seeking and everything else.
Marco:
It's a mess.
Marco:
But anyway, the bigger problem with dynamic ad insertion in the context of this conversation is that it breaks the relevance of Apple Analytics.
Marco:
If the podcasters want to know how many people listen to a particular ad...
Marco:
Apple's aggregate stats of all people who downloaded that episode aren't going to really give them that information because that particular ad wasn't necessarily served at the same timestamp every time and wasn't served for all downloads of that same file because they might run like an ad for two days and then the rest of the week they put a different ad in that spot or whatever so
Marco:
What the big podcasters want is a system that they control completely, that they can have individual tracking of everything integrated with their ad servers so that they can tell exactly how many people listen to a podcast through certain timestamps, through certain ranges of time.
Marco:
They want to know whether they made it to the end, whether they made it most of the way to the end.
Marco:
And of course, they really want to know how many people heard, how many ads, and exactly which ads and when.
Marco:
Now, this introduces a number of privacy concerns.
Marco:
So in the old system, the system that we are all still operating in, the only information they have on you is your IP address.
Marco:
When you fetch the file, they see your IP because that's how internet transfers work.
Marco:
You make a request to their server.
Marco:
They see your IP.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
And the reality is there are services out there and ad networks out there where like they on the back end can submit your IP to a web service and learn everything about you.
Marco:
No, this is true.
Marco:
So like already like the publishers that want to be gross about your privacy are being gross about your privacy.
Marco:
They're already able to with your IP address.
Marco:
They're able to with reasonable certainty correlate your IP address with other data sources and services out there to figure out exactly who you are if they want to.
Marco:
And use that for advertising purposes.
Marco:
They absolutely do that.
Marco:
They will try their hardest to do that.
Marco:
And that's the reality of big publishing businesses.
Marco:
So to some degree, the cat's out of the bag, right?
Marco:
But just because they can do that doesn't mean that I want to make it easy on them to do anything else.
Marco:
I have been very adamant in Overcast and just as a podcast listener against any other attempts to track any more data.
Marco:
I think on a number of levels, it would be bad.
Marco:
There's the personal privacy level where it's just kind of gross that I think listeners don't need that and don't want that.
Marco:
There is the kind of infrastructure level of like, I don't want...
Marco:
Other entities telling me what to do in my app and what I need to support in my app.
Marco:
Because podcasting right now is wonderful.
Marco:
It's open.
Marco:
It's an RSS feed with MP3s in it.
Marco:
It's pretty basic.
Marco:
You download those MP3s and you can do whatever you want with them.
Marco:
You can play them.
Marco:
You can not play them.
Marco:
You can do whatever you want with them as the player and as the listener.
Marco:
And there's no...
Marco:
The contract basically ends between the podcast maker and you at the point of download.
Marco:
Once you download it, you have full control.
Marco:
And they have no visibility.
Marco:
And I like to keep it that way.
Marco:
But anyway, that's not what the big publishers want.
Marco:
And I should clarify, too, while it is true that many of the publishers of the largest podcasts in the world want things like this, most of the podcasts that you, dear listener, probably listen to, like if you listen to this show, you probably listen to other tech shows, you probably listen to other indie shows, you know, smaller shows that are produced by people and not big corporations, but
Marco:
chances are the people who make the shows you want you listen to don't want any of this like we don't want any of this our friends over at relay and five by five and all these other networks they don't want any of this either like indie podcast makers don't want any more tracking and you know dynamic ad insertion and other bs we don't want that we don't need it
Marco:
Our ads sell fine.
Marco:
Our podcast does fine.
Marco:
We are very satisfied with the status quo.
Marco:
We don't need any of this garbage.
Marco:
So this is only a request from the biggest, biggest, biggest podcast makers because that's what they do.
Marco:
When you get to a certain size, you can start thinking that way.
Marco:
You start getting data people on board and growth people and this kind of stuff happens.
Marco:
So anyway, what the RAD standard is at a technical level is simply an ID3 tag that includes a JSON bundle, a JSON dictionary inside of it.
Marco:
And it's basically a series of timestamps and URLs to hit with arbitrary dictionary key value pairs to hit those URLs with when a user hits those timestamps in the file.
Marco:
So what you're supposed to do if you implement RAD on the client side is when you hit certain timestamps given in the file, make an outbound network request to the URL that is provided by the podcaster.
Marco:
Once you have that, you have usual level tracking.
Marco:
You have individual tracking.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
The spec has certain privacy promises that aren't actually fulfillable in practice.
Marco:
The spec requires apps to make outbound requests to arbitrary URLs that are specified in an ID3 tag in the file that was downloaded.
Marco:
So even if the player doesn't provide a user identifier, the download server already has your IP, and
Marco:
And it can serve you a dynamically generated file.
Marco:
So it can serve you a file that has dynamically inserted a unique set of URLs just for you to be called back to.
Marco:
So it can track you through multiple IPs as you've run throughout the day.
Marco:
It can see exactly how far you, you know, user that started out at this IP address, which they might be able to resolve to you, you know, Casey Liss.
Marco:
They, like, that's all trackable then.
Marco:
Once you have, once you know,
Marco:
which copy of that file you serve to which user, which you can do by ingesting dynamic URLs, then you can track a user from start to finish, you can see exactly what they do, and you can build a network of knowledge of what IPs they tend to use, at what time they tend to use them, and then you can track users between shows over time.
Marco:
So the privacy angle of this is pretty rough.
Marco:
There's pretty much no privacy guarantee here.
Marco:
And the fact is, even if...
Marco:
a publisher now says, oh, well, we won't do that.
Marco:
The fact is, you know, it's ad tech.
Marco:
People will do it eventually.
Marco:
If you won't do it, someone else will.
Marco:
It'll happen.
Marco:
So the only protection against ad tech is to block it completely.
Marco:
And so on the privacy front and on the feature front, I see no reason at all why podcast apps would implement this.
Marco:
And the good news about the world of podcasts is
Marco:
is that what are they going to do about it?
Marco:
You know, like right now, like if I implement it, so suppose I say, no, I'm never implementing this, which I did because I won't.
Marco:
And so suppose, suppose a podcast app says that.
Marco:
a podcast publisher, like a big publisher, cannot then block Overcast from downloading those files because a podcast is beautifully an RSS feed full of MP3 files or links to MP3 files.
Marco:
And if they somehow try to lock that down any further than that, Apple Podcasts can't play it and they lose their entire market.
Marco:
So as long as Apple doesn't do stuff like this,
Marco:
then we're pretty safe.
Marco:
And I cannot possibly see Apple implementing this for all the privacy reasons.
Marco:
There's no way.
Marco:
And there's nothing in it for them.
Marco:
So there's basically no incentive that anybody could provide that would make this worth implementing on a player side.
Marco:
Unless they back up a truckload of money into my driveway and buy Overcast.
Marco:
I don't think there's any path to this on the client side.
Marco:
There's no reason for clients to do it.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons for clients not to do it.
Marco:
Number one, being creepy.
Marco:
Number two, GDPR liabilities.
Marco:
There's huge liabilities.
Marco:
If I am taking your behavioral data and basically phoning home and telling any arbitrary URL what you are doing as you're listening,
Marco:
That's a pretty huge security violation or privacy violation, I should say.
Marco:
And while it technically might not be personally identifiable information, you know, by the GDPR definition, it's still real creepy and it's still a liability and it's still something that like...
Marco:
If your users found out that you were doing that, I bet they'd be upset about that.
Marco:
I bet that's the kind of thing you would want your users not to know about.
Marco:
And typically, it's a good idea to minimize those kinds of things in your business.
Marco:
If you have a lot of those things, you're doing things wrong.
Marco:
So I see the problem they're trying to solve with RAD.
Marco:
I don't think it's as big of a problem as they seem to think it is.
Marco:
This is not a problem that most podcasters that I listen to or know have.
Marco:
And the solution they've come up with, I fail to see why any app would ever integrate that.
Marco:
And there's a lot of reasons why we shouldn't.
Casey:
So I have a couple of thoughts about this.
Casey:
I guess starting with what you just said, I don't understand what – why would you do this?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What is in it for anyone other than NPR?
Casey:
Why does anyone – as a podcast client developer –
Casey:
why would you spend the time to do this?
Casey:
What's in it for you?
Casey:
I just don't understand.
John:
The NPR website has answers to all your questions.
John:
Yeah, so what's the answer?
John:
So to their credit, they did put up a page basically like a fact explaining this.
John:
But this is their best chance.
John:
They write this website.
John:
It's their best chance to present their best case.
John:
And so they address everybody.
John:
So what does RAD mean to me?
John:
If you're an app developer,
John:
why should you implement this spec which is that's one constituency they they spend one short paragraph and basically say rad will allow publishers to receive organized enhanced listening metrics and editorial blah blah blah right so i'm an apple you've told me that rad will allow publishers to receive a bunch of new information okay i'm still waiting for the part where i'm an app developer and it's appealing to me
John:
it reduces the need for each platform to have a detailed analytics dashboard am i am i a platform do i have indeed not our problem do i have a detailed analytics dashboard i just have an app that plays podcasts i don't have a detail i don't want a detailed analytics dashboard you know it allows for information to be aggregated in a third-party location do i care about aggregating this information
Casey:
And why is that an advantage?
Casey:
That's not necessarily an advantage.
John:
RAD does not track specific user behavior.
John:
Instead, RAD uses a session ID, blah, blah, blah.
John:
The SDA created to be lightweight, blah, blah.
John:
So they say it'll be easy to integrate into your application.
John:
So they have an entire paragraph, which as far as I can tell, doesn't contain any piece of information that would say why I should implement this spec unless I really, really want to have...
John:
uh detailed analytics dashboard but i don't want to implement it myself i want to like have a third party one like it's be an industry standard or whatever so speculatively in some future where everyone implemented rad there could be this dashboard that lets you look at your rad reported information or provide the server side for whatever and it allows publishers to receive organized enhanced listening metrics and i suppose if you are a publisher and you want organized enhanced listening metrics and you have your own app maybe you would do that
John:
Then it says, what if you're a podcast creator?
John:
What if you, you know, you make podcasts?
John:
Why should you use rad?
John:
And this is an even shorter paragraph.
John:
And I think probably even less power because that was the best case right there.
John:
If you're like an app developer, like they go to the publishing thing or whatever.
John:
Anyway, why should you use rad if you're a podcast creator?
John:
The metrics will help you better understand your audience across a range of platforms.
John:
You'll be able to produce more informed, engaging content and over time, develop improved data for your sponsors and advertisers.
John:
So basically this thing, if you knew more about exactly what your listeners were doing, you'd be able to make better content.
John:
because if you like if you know okay this is the point where they hit pause and a whole bunch of people hit pause here a whole bunch of people stop listening at this point i'll know whatever we did there let's do something different like you just get inside the heads of your audience and use that as a direct feedback loop to produce better content and also develop improved data for your sponsors and advertisers again saying sponsors and advertisers want this and if you give it to them it will be better data for them but that's their whole pitch that if you know more about your audience you can make a
John:
on its face seems like okay well maybe that makes some kind of sense but on the other hand you think about it like well but does it like is the information i'm going to get about people uh you know in terms of what time stamps and everything really going to help me like is that the best way to create good you know content good entertainment right to to be able it's kind of like those things that they they parody on the simpsons which is an episode that you guys might have seen but like
John:
and based on a real thing where they would show like test audiences something a movie or a television show and the members of the test audience would have some kind of device or feedback real-time feedback like a dial that they can turn to say you like this you don't like it or whatever some sort of way to give real-time feedback about how they're feeling about what it is that they're watching and it would all be like the it would be aggregated into a graph so like a boring part of the Oscars would come on all the lines would dip down and then like a cool part would come on all the lines would go back up
John:
you ever see that type of thing right and it's like as if they expect either in real time for you to be reacting to this oh all the dials went down everybody be funnier or like next time we do the oscars we won't do a segment like that because nobody liked it like it's it seems to make sense but if that's marlon talks about this a lot on his various podcasts it
John:
That's not really the best way to improve the quality of your content is to micromanage the psyche of every person consuming it because there's too many assumptions.
John:
The main one being that the people who are currently listening, giving your feedback are the audience that you want or that represent the only audience that could ever exist for whatever it is you're doing.
John:
um never mind that this is not like that little dial of happy and sad it's merely like when did they hit each time stamp or whatever it's really geared towards did they hear the ad or not which has some relevance to you as a podcast creator but it probably won't help you make your actual podcast better unless your podcast is 100 ads in which case maybe it will help you um
John:
And then finally, if you're a brand slash sponsor slash advertiser, what does RAD provide access to?
John:
And, you know, all the information they want about download, stop, starts, ad listens, so on and so forth.
John:
So this page where they explain why you would want
John:
to why rad where does rad fit into your life if you're making a podcast play rap why would you do it if you make your own podcast why would you want it and if you're a listener of podcasts why would you want it and it's it's not it's not a really particularly compelling case uh and so yeah i don't
John:
It's one of those things where the way stuff like this actually comes to pass is not because the case is made successfully to all constituencies.
John:
It's because one particular constituency has all the power and they also reap all the benefits and they just do it.
John:
So if Apple were an advertising company like Google and they were the dominant podcast platform, they would do this immediately and it would become the de facto standard because the person who could benefit most from it.
John:
has the most power when they just do it and it wouldn't really matter whether app developers want to do it whether podcast creators want to do it or whether listeners want to have it happen it would just happen again getting back to web browsers if you know every web browser influence that uh w3c drm scheme doesn't really matter
John:
whether uh you as a web browser user care about that you're getting whether you like it or not uh which is why it's bad to concentrate power like this so i think we've talked about this before how we've basically been saved by apple's at one point benevolent neglect and now just general benevolence of podcasts the fact that they're they're they're not an advertising driven company they don't care that much about podcasts so they don't so they're going to be careful about privacy and they're not going to screw it up uh
John:
It's an uneasy piece we have right now with podcasts, and we just better hope that Apple doesn't turn into an advertising company or doesn't lose its dominant position in podcasts because that'll be bad for everybody.
Casey:
So the other thing I wanted to say about this is I'm going to put a little bit of words in Marco's mouth.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
He's the editor, so you can always cut this later.
Casey:
But I feel like this is an example of why Marco is so fiercely independent and why, Marco, you went for market share a year or two ago or whatever it's been.
Casey:
Four.
Casey:
Good grief.
Casey:
God, we're getting old.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
Anyway, the point I'm driving at is that
Casey:
If you have a lot of market share, if you have some amount of influence or perhaps leverage over the community or over the market, if you will, then you can say no to RAD or things like it and –
Casey:
That may be enough.
Casey:
Now, I don't know if you're at that point.
Casey:
And honestly, it doesn't really matter one way or the other.
Casey:
But for those of you who heard Marco say four years ago, oh, I'm going for market share because podcasting is important to me and I want to try to steer it in the way that I think is best.
Casey:
Well, now the fruits of your labor are coming to fruition, you know, because now by you not implementing this, I don't know if it would be enough to kill Rad.
Casey:
Like, I think you're right that Apple's the one who will really, you know, put the nail in the coffin.
Casey:
But by you and Pocket Cast, and I don't know if Castro has made a statement about this one way or the other, but I can't possibly see them doing this.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And we know the Castro guys, and they're great, great people, and I agree.
Casey:
I don't expect them to do it.
Casey:
So by you guys as a collective and you as an individual angling for market share and refusing to do this sort of invasive stuff –
Casey:
That, if not you individually, but that in aggregate could be enough to really make this go away.
Casey:
And as both a podcast consumer and a podcast creator, that's really darn important to me.
Casey:
And I'm thankful for you and Castro and Pocket Cast, at least so far, for standing your ground and not caving to this.
Casey:
And so if you scratched your head and thought Marco was being ridiculous and getting on his high horse for no good reason, well, maybe it was for good reason.
Casey:
It just took four years for us to get there.
Marco:
Ultimately, what I want and what I've wanted this whole time is I want the podcast client-side ecosystem, the player ecosystem, to be so diverse that nobody accumulates enough power to dictate things like this to the market.
Marco:
And Apple already has that much power, but due to the aforementioned benevolent neglect they've been mostly doing with podcasts, they're basically this giant, unmovable force, but that mostly is good to us.
Marco:
That mostly doesn't make waves and doesn't ruin things and doesn't lock things down.
Marco:
And that's really nice.
Marco:
That has allowed podcasting to flourish and to be what it is today.
Marco:
If Apple tried to lock this down for themselves...
Marco:
10 years ago, 5 years ago, they could have.
Marco:
And apps like mine wouldn't be able to really have a market.
Marco:
But they didn't, and that's really nice.
Marco:
But beyond Apple, the other 30-40% of the market...
Marco:
that does have the potential for significant consolidation of power if it doesn't remain diverse.
Marco:
Right now, it's nicely diverse.
Marco:
Spotify is a bit of a concern to me, but for the most part, we're doing okay.
Marco:
And you can't get 40% of the market right now, because it's so many different players, to all agree on a new standard to implement.
Marco:
You're never going to get all of us to do that.
Marco:
And that's actually really good.
Marco:
Because there is... Besides Apple, which is not moving, there is no other consolidated source of power in this business that has enough power to really matter that much.
Marco:
And as a result...
Marco:
the medium can't move forward quote forward in the way that people want it to.
Marco:
But I consider that a good thing because right now where the medium already is, is great.
Marco:
It's thriving.
Marco:
It's flourishing.
Marco:
It's booming.
Marco:
People are making tons of money.
Marco:
It's very, very healthy and it's wonderful for listeners too.
Marco:
It's, it's not, you know, it's, you don't have like people making tons of money at the top and then listeners, you know, having their privacy all crazily horror, you know, horribly invaded on the other end.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
It's just really good.
Marco:
It's nice.
Marco:
It's a great market.
Marco:
And the last thing I want is for that to get ruined.
Marco:
And when people say, like, the people who argue for things like this, like I was talking about it on Twitter the other day, and I got a bunch of responses from people.
Marco:
Most really were in support of my position, but a few were opposed to me saying, like, they need this.
Marco:
And, you know, be careful when you hear somebody describe anything as the future or as moving forward.
Marco:
because that implies like a certain level of inevitability that like podcasting is by staying where it is by not implementing things like this they're they're trying to position the future they want as the future period and the future they want as the way forward but that's not a foregone conclusion
Marco:
The future of podcasting hasn't been written yet because it's the future.
Marco:
We can make it whatever we want.
Marco:
And based on certain power structures and dynamics in the market now, there are certain outcomes that are more likely than others.
Marco:
And I think an outcome where everyone's doing tons more tracking on the client side is pretty unlikely because of the way this power structure is set up.
Marco:
And I would absolutely argue that
Marco:
that it is not a foregone conclusion that the way forward is more ad tracking because that presumes that we have a problem today that like ads are terrible today and people can't build real businesses or whatever and that's totally bogus
Marco:
The only people trying to make that argument are the biggest companies in podcasting who, by the way, tend to make millions of dollars a year in ad revenue.
Marco:
We don't need things like this.
Marco:
The only people pushing for this are people who want even more, even more, even more.
Marco:
And that's what big companies do.
Marco:
I understand the urge to do that.
Marco:
But the rest of the podcasting ecosystem out here doesn't want or need any of this.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I would strongly argue that the future of podcasting is not going to be what these handful of big publishers want it to be.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I'm going to try this.
Casey:
I apologize in advance.
Casey:
So, Kapila Wimalara Ratney.
Casey:
I hope I got that right.
John:
We've done this name before.
John:
You've read this name before.
John:
Have I?
John:
Yes.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Yeah, totally.
John:
I totally knew that was correct.
John:
You did better the second time.
John:
Or the first time, rather.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Casey:
When will Laura Ratney?
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
So Kapila writes, researching a TV purchase for next year.
Casey:
Something I'm finding weird.
Casey:
I'm not concerned about picture quality since anything 4K over 40 inches will be far superior to our current TV.
Casey:
The criteria have narrowed down so far.
Casey:
Built-in Chromecast, so I don't need to switch HDMI inputs to cast from Google Home or Pixel 3.
Casey:
Hard buttons on the remote to jump straight to a given HDMI input when using PS4, etc.
Casey:
A built-in webcam, question mark, so my son could video chat with his friends while online gaming.
Casey:
And that's it.
Casey:
Is there something important missing from my list?
Casey:
What is your criteria list for buying a new TV?
Casey:
As I've stated in the past, I haven't bought a TV in forever and a day, so I am useless when it comes to this.
Casey:
I have a feeling that John will have the most thoughts about this.
Casey:
So Marco, let's start with you.
Casey:
Any immediate thoughts?
Marco:
I don't know how to shop for a TV for someone who says they're not concerned about picture quality.
Marco:
That's not my style.
Marco:
And so I really can't help on that.
Marco:
I also would highly question the feature request of a built-in webcam because TV manufacturers are not known for their incredible privacy respect or their ability to deliver really secure software.
Marco:
I honestly don't think you should be plugging your TV into a network at all.
Marco:
or ever giving it your Wi-Fi password.
Marco:
But that's just me.
Marco:
Maybe I'm being overly cautious there.
Marco:
But however, the feature request for hard buttons on the remote to jump straight to a certain HDMI input, I would love that.
Marco:
I hate going to the input menu and going down and hitting enter, or having to hit the input switch button and going through one by one like...
Marco:
I would love to just have like, look, there's only like four HDMI inputs.
Marco:
Just have HDMI 1, 2, 3, and 4 buttons on the remote.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
My TV doesn't have that, so I can't recommend it, I guess.
Marco:
But that is a feature request that I wouldn't have thought to make.
Marco:
But wow, does that sound great.
Marco:
I wish I had made that feature request.
Marco:
John?
John:
Built-in Chromecast.
John:
These features, I'm in Margo's camp where picture quality is the thing that I care about the most.
John:
But, you know, there's something important missing from my list.
John:
Like, yeah, webcam thing I've covered.
John:
Luckily, I don't think you'll even be able to find many TVs with webcams.
John:
Mine has one, by the way, because they used to be a thing that people did, but it's not very popular anymore.
Yeah.
John:
The thing about the built-in Chromecast, the Chromecast is not expensive or big.
John:
Like, you can add it to any television.
John:
Like, I wouldn't reject a television because it doesn't have built-in Chromecast.
John:
You can add Chromecast very, very easily and cheaply.
John:
It's not a thing that you have to get a TV where it's built in.
John:
In fact, it may be better for it not to be built in because if Chromecast gets better or there's a new Chromecast that comes out, you can upgrade it, whereas if it's built in, you can't.
John:
The hard buttons on the remote thing for jumping to inputs, setting aside the most television remotes are terrible.
John:
If you just get a receiver, like you have that.
John:
Receivers have buttons for not only switching inputs, but switching to like whatever they might call them, scenes or presets or whatever, which is a combination of input and a bunch of other settings.
John:
So my receiver remote has...
John:
I think at least four, probably more buttons that let me switch to different scenes and also direct buttons to go to each of the inputs, which then it's more than four inputs you can go to.
John:
The television is only, you know, if you have this setup, is only ever on one input.
John:
It's only ever on the input that's coming out of your receiver.
John:
So there are better solutions to that.
John:
And even if you don't have direct input switching, if you have the
John:
the thing that works 50% of the time, what the hell is it called?
John:
HEC?
Marco:
CEC.
John:
CEC, yeah.
John:
If you're a CEC unicorn and you get a television setup where that works all the time, you don't have to switch in, but it's either because it'll auto-switch based on which one is giving the output.
John:
So this feature list looks really weird to me.
John:
And I think this feature list, say this is kind of like I'm trying to suss out like...
John:
What are you looking for in a TV based on the things you listed?
John:
There's a bunch of things you probably haven't thought about that may be important, like how long does it take from the time you hit the power button on the television to the time you can start watching television, like sort of the boot time.
John:
How sluggish are the menus?
John:
where on the screen is the volume uh up and down thing if you use the volume on television which you shouldn't because you have a receiver and it should be invisible on the tv um and how ugly is it samsung has incredibly ugly overlays for their volume thing showing like an ugly speaker cone with a glow around it and crap like that
John:
Things like that you'll never think about in your sort of criteria, but once you get a TV, you'll be like, oh, every time I change the volume on the TV, I see, you know, an animated frog jumps across my screen and says ribbit, right?
John:
And then the overlay stays on the screen for seven seconds after I stop hitting the volume button.
John:
Stuff like that will probably have a bigger effect on your enjoyment of your television than whether it has a built-in Chromecast.
John:
But all of a sudden, like...
John:
Everyone's got their own criteria.
John:
My criteria are almost entirely about picture quality.
John:
And then I live with all the other things that are inevitably going to annoy me about the television because most of the time I'm using my television, I'm not touching the remote and there's nothing on the screen except for the picture I'm displaying.
John:
So that's why I feel like picture quality is my biggest criteria.
John:
But as for what you're missing, I guess you'll find out after you buy your Chromecast TV with a webcam.
Yeah.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
This is why you trust somebody else to do it.
Casey:
So we've made mention of this many times in the past, but Don Melton, who, among other things, was instrumental in getting Safari onto Mac computers, he, in his retirement, has decided to do the community a tremendous service and create a series of scripts that you can use to transcode videos.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I have a less discerning eye, certainly than John and probably than Marco in this context.
Casey:
And so for me, I am more than happy with the output of Don Melton's scripts.
Casey:
And you do have to be able to use command line, but it is very straightforward.
Casey:
Well, it's easy for me to say that because I'm used to the command line, but I find it to be very straightforward and easy to use.
Casey:
And basically it will take those 30 gig MKVs down to like anywhere between five and 10 gigs, depending on the particular film.
Casey:
And you can use it without – he has a bunch of options that you can give to his scripts in order to tweak this, that, or the other thing.
Casey:
But really, I just use them in the default settings.
Casey:
The only real option I give the script is to tell it to output an MP4 rather than a compressed MKV.
Casey:
And that's more than enough for me, and that's what I recommend.
Casey:
So, John, thoughts about that?
John:
So the business about real-time live encoding a 30-gigabyte MKV movie, depending on the compression codec used on Blu-rays, I think they have two options, like there's the VP whatever thing, and I think the other option is probably some MPEG thing.
John:
If you have a player that can natively play whatever codec is used on the Blu-ray that you're showing, there is no sort of recompression step or transcoding step that has to take place.
John:
It can just take that 30-gigabyte
John:
You know, data that it pulled right off the Blu-ray disc and didn't transcode or change in any way and just send it to the decoder that will decode that image and put it on your screen.
John:
That's the benefit of using it.
John:
Make MKV to just pull the data off a Blu-ray without changing it in any way.
John:
Just take the bits that are on the disc and put those bits in a file in a container, blah, blah, blah.
John:
That's not that's conceivable.
John:
That's the thing that you can do.
John:
In fact, I think Infuse on Apple TV will natively play without any transcoding or recompressing.
John:
at least one of the formats that it's commonly used on blu-rays but that's something you might want to look into if you're worried about quality uh and you don't care about disk space which apparently you don't because you're pulling 30 gigs off of blu-rays uh look into that because you don't then you don't have to worry about recompressing into what format should i compress in a river i uh as casey surmised don't particularly like the idea of taking compressed video and then compressing it again
John:
no matter how many options and settings there are it's it's a lossy process you are you know losing quality it's why i buy blu-ray discs and why i play blu-ray discs because it's already lossy compressed i'll just take it the best i can get it straight off the disc decode the image decode the sound put it to the outputs um i think the last time i looked into doing that with my setup i couldn't get the 24 frame per second cadence but now presumably with the new apple dv i could but i haven't actually revisited it because
John:
Disk base is still an issue.
John:
Blu-rays are very big, and I'm still just putting plastic disks into a drive and dealing with it like that.
John:
But yeah, if you are going to recompress either Mountain Scripts or, honestly, Handbrake has a bunch of options, but it also has presets.
John:
A whole bunch of presets come with Handbrake.
John:
Try a couple of the presets.
John:
To Casey's point, if you find a preset that makes files that are about the size that you want,
John:
and they look okay to you you're done like like it may not be the best thing in the world but if you can't tell the difference and you're happy with them and they they can press down to a size that you like just keep using that preset you'll probably be fine the only places where you might be get a little bit messed up are if it's messing with the frame rate which can be a little bit tricky to mess with you probably shouldn't change the frame rate of the video at all because then it'll interpolate and you're basically just
John:
embedding motion smoothing into your videos which will make somebody sad but hey maybe you can't tell uh and also if it's a particularly strange movie like if it's animation versus live action sometimes artifacts that aren't visible in live action become visible in animation due to the large regions of uninterrupted color and other things that are unique in animation um
John:
And if you just don't want to deal with any of this and you're compressing video anyway, you can just buy from iTunes or some other video service and then, you know, hopefully play that natively on the player of choice.
John:
And instead of buying giant videos on Blu-ray and then figuring out a way to get them off the disc and compress them.
Casey:
All right, Brian Edwards writes, what would you recommend for somebody who wants to learn their way around a command line interface?
Casey:
I don't have any particularly good suggestions for this.
Casey:
As always, in the same way that I say this about learning to write code, really you need a specific task in mind.
Casey:
At least that's what works best for me is having a specific task in mind and looking for a solution for that task.
Casey:
But one of you added a link to a book in the show notes.
Casey:
So who was that?
Marco:
I'll give you one guess.
Casey:
Yeah, I had a feeling, but you never know.
Casey:
You never know.
John:
So this is actually a difficult question because as I think I've recounted before, this is another situation where people ask, what's a good way for me to get started learning whatever subject?
John:
And they ask someone who has experience in whatever the field of the subject is.
John:
And the way that that person learned so many years ago is almost never the best way to learn right now.
John:
Uh, that's almost certainly true about this.
John:
The best way to learn your way around the command line is probably some online course or tutorial or something that I don't know about because that's not how I learned because when I learned it, the web didn't exist.
John:
Right.
John:
So, but anyway, I'll,
John:
The answer is really, I don't know.
John:
There's probably a really good way to learn it, and I don't know what it is, and you can go and find it.
John:
But if you're asking how I learned it, and also I think this is a way you could learn it, there are a bunch of old books and other things that I read, and actually the main way I learned the command line stuff is...
John:
by printing man pages on the uh the printer at uh at my college so you could just wow do like man command pipe lpr and it will just you know print the man pages and then it take the man pages on paper back to my dorm room and read them i do not recommend however that is special it take it will take you a long time man pages are some of them are well written but most of them are not um but there is a book that i read i read many many books when i was uh undergrad in college many books about unix and
John:
The book I'm going to recommend is not the first book I read and it's not like the titles, as the title suggests, not like a, you know, teach me the basics type thing.
John:
But I'm still going to recommend it and I'll explain why.
John:
The book is called Unix Power Tools.
John:
So it's basically saying like, oh, so you know the basics of Unix.
John:
Well, here's some power tools, right?
John:
It's an older book.
John:
It's in like third edition, but the third edition is like 10 years old, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It contains a bunch of information that is basically not relevant to modern Unix or Linux or anything like that.
John:
Oh, you're selling it well.
John:
Right.
John:
But what it shows you is the mindset of... So you've got some basic knowledge about how to use command line stuff.
John:
What can you do with these tools?
John:
And it strings them together in different combinations that I think will be mind-expanding and eye-opening both to learn what it is that you can do...
John:
how an operating system works how unix works even if your particular linux doesn't work like this or your unix doesn't look like this the things they describe the details are no longer relevant but the concepts are and to say all right so you've got a unix operating system that works like this and you've got this bucket of tools this toolbox over there what can you do and it will it's kind of like getting back to shortcuts we were talking about the other day seeing someone build a shortcut and
John:
and make it do something you didn't think shortcuts could do by just stringing together a bunch of pieces in a novel way is mind expanding.
John:
So Unix Power Tools is a huge book, and it's kind of like jumping into the deep end because it assumes some base knowledge that you may or may not have.
John:
But I guarantee you, if you read Unix Power Tools from cover to cover and start with zero knowledge by the end of it, you will...
John:
grok as we used to say you will you will understand the unix command line way better than someone who just did a basic tutorial of like here are the basics how to use the command line like it i think it actually is a very valuable tool for for you know understanding the mindset of unix and seeing just how deep the rabbit hole goes even if you don't understand every single thing that's described in and even if you don't know which parts are relevant or which parts aren't
John:
you be in a better place when you come out the other side of this phone book-sized Unix book?
Marco:
I would go with a little bit simpler solution.
Marco:
I would say, as the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of all command line experience.
Marco:
I would say...
Marco:
try to do something with a Linux server.
Marco:
So we have a sponsor for this episode, Linode.
Marco:
You can get one for $5 a month.
Marco:
Get a Linux server for whatever level of resources you need, which is probably $5 a month, and try to set up something on it, whether it's like a VPN or a small, simple web app or some kind of other server role.
Marco:
setting up a Linux server requires you to do everything remotely via the command line.
Marco:
And that will teach you a ton of basics.
Marco:
And as I said last episode during this discussion, the basics you learn on the Linux server, much of that will apply also to macOS.
Marco:
A lot of the basics of using the command line will apply to macOS as well.
Marco:
Not every single tool is the same, but they're all pretty similar.
Marco:
Or they're very close.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Having to do something will basically force you at every step like, okay, I'm getting this weird error or I'm stuck in VI.
Marco:
How do I get it?
Marco:
There's going to be something that's going to make you do a bunch of web searches to save your butt every single time.
Marco:
And that process will build expertise and you will learn it.
Marco:
And you will have the goal in mind and the motivating force of whatever you want this server to do for you.
Marco:
And you will hopefully then at the end of it have something useful.
John:
The chat room is commenting on my description of this as a phone book size book.
John:
It is actually 1,200 pages in paper form, the third edition.
Casey:
So it is a big book.
John:
And yes, I did read it from cover to cover.
John:
In fact, it's sitting on within arm's reach right now.
John:
I can touch the spine of the book and I was looking at it to see, do I have the first edition?
John:
I'm pretty sure I do have the first edition because I got it a long time ago.
John:
And back then, O'Reilly, which was then the king of the technical books for budding computer slash internet nerds, they had a brand for their various books, which was like the Nutshell series.
John:
It would be like, learn whatever in a nutshell.
John:
Like, it was just...
John:
One book that would tell you everything you need to know about SendMail or whatever.
John:
So the Unix Power Tools has the Nutshell logo on it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Unix Power Tools in a nutshell.
John:
So in a nutshell, it's 1,200 pages.
John:
Kind of subverting the brand there.
John:
But the thing is, it doesn't tell you everything you ever could know about using Unix because there's just too much to know.
John:
So in some respects, it is in a nutshell.
John:
But in other respects, it's not at all.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I think it's incredibly valuable to read that book.
John:
And this is another advantage you get from listening to ATP.
John:
No one else is going to tell you to read that big book.
John:
No one else is going to have read it.
John:
You, by reading it, will know secret things that no one else knows.
John:
You probably know more than me and Casey.
John:
Definitely, for sure.
John:
You will know incredibly obscure stuff will probably never become useful.
John:
But actually, I think it will make lots of the weird... Unix is weird in that there's lots of like...
John:
residue or layers it's like an archaeological dig it's like why does this command have these flags or what is what is the mnemonic between this what is that command even supposed to mean or why do these two commands exist with this 30 command it seems like a combination like if you learn the history behind it it helps you it's kind of like a story you tell yourself it helps you remember how things fit together you're not just remembering arbitrary stuff you kind of see how things evolved in the
John:
I don't know if this is the same category.
John:
We're in the same category.
John:
Last show where I said command shift one was eject the first floppy drive and command shift two was eject the second.
John:
Now you know why command shift three is over there.
John:
Maybe it helps you remember what the screenshot keyboard command is because now there's a story to go along with it.
John:
You know it's three because one and two are floppy drives.
John:
Maybe that's a bad analogy, but I always feel like knowing the reasons behind things helps you to internalize them better than just memorizing.
John:
Like, oh, I just have to know.
John:
You know, this flag is like that, and capital letters do this, and this command is called that for these reasons, and this is why the variant of that command is called something different.
John:
Anyway, check it out.
John:
It's a big, giant paper book.
John:
It's cool.
John:
You should read it.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and Linode.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
John:
And now the snow is falling.
John:
Their kids are building snowmen.
John:
It's accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Holiday fun time.
John:
Holiday fun time.
John:
John's gonna make snow angels.
John:
Marco and Casey are gonna let him.
John:
It's accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Syracuse Angels.
John:
Holiday fun time.
John:
And you can find the show notes.
Marco:
Deep in Santa's beard.
Marco:
And follow them.
Marco:
on twitter for holiday fun time cheer at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s k-c-lis-m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
John:
It's an accidental, accidental Snowball fight It's an accidental, accidental
Marco:
Unix Power Tool is a great gift idea.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Look for it in your stocking.
Marco:
If you need any last-minute Christmas gifts, that one probably won't be out of stock.
John:
Yeah, probably.
John:
No, actually, I went on the... I always wonder how popular these books are.
John:
I wanted to see if it was still even in print, but on the Amazon page.
John:
It was like, hurry, only three more in stock and available from other sellers.
John:
You can buy it directly from O'Reilly, too.
John:
There's also a Kindle version.
John:
I feel like you're missing out if you don't get to see the cool fonts and everything for all the command line stuff.
John:
Like Courier.
John:
O'Reilly books.
John:
Do you guys read O'Reilly books when you were learning stuff?
John:
Yes, but it's been a long time.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
They look like they were laid out using...
John:
uh what the hell is it the uh the typesetting thing uh latex or latex or however you want to pronounce it they look like they were laid out using that whether they weren't it's pronounced ricotta yeah yeah whether they were or not um because they use a similar font and like just just sort of the style like what do i use for my monospace font what's my proportional font how how do i set out the code examples just has a certain historic flavor uh that i appreciate because it reminds me of all those books from that era