Blow Your Redo Stack
Casey:
I really did have fun.
Casey:
And if I sounded otherwise on the show, then edit me to make it sound like I had fun because I did.
John:
No, I did.
John:
It was good.
John:
I had fun too.
John:
I'm glad you two are having fun while I'm at work.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Hey, well, I'm at work too.
Casey:
It's only Marco that isn't because he's doing my work for me.
John:
Tell me all about it.
Casey:
That's why I was sitting.
Casey:
I was suffering.
Casey:
It was just a little bit chilly outside at the outdoor mall when the kids and Aaron were in at the Children's Museum in the mall and I was working on my adorable.
Marco:
Yeah, it sounds like a hard life.
Casey:
It was tough.
Casey:
It was very difficult.
Casey:
Yeah, because it was a little chilly.
Casey:
Just a touch, touch too chilly.
Casey:
If I'd moved out of the shade, it would have been better, but then I wouldn't be able to see my goddamn screen, so...
Casey:
I don't know if it was because I stumbled onto the Wikipedia page for bug-out bags.
Casey:
So this is the, oh, shit, I've got to get out of the house now.
John:
What are you bugging out from?
Casey:
I have no idea.
Casey:
So I was doing the show notes for Ask ATP.
Casey:
What's our WWDC EDC, which is, you know, Everyday Carry?
Casey:
And then I was looking at – I was trying to find a link for EDC, and then I stumbled on Everyday Carry on Wikipedia, and that led me to Bug Out Bag, and I was just reading about, you know –
Casey:
blizzards and earthquakes for all the natural disasters that hit virginia hey we have we have not hurricanes in like the florida sense but hurricanes in the surprising amount of rain and wind for as far inland as i am sense and so that can cause some problems from time to time yeah but i think you're you're far enough inland that it is merely surprising not like life ruining or house destroying you
Casey:
Nine times out of 10, I would agree.
Casey:
There have been occasions that it's been actually legitimately scary, but yes, you are certainly far more right than you are wrong.
Casey:
But did you know, Marco, that a bug out bag or Bob may also be referred to as a good bag, which is an acronym for get out of Dodge, an inch bag, I'm never coming home, a personal emergency relocation kit or perk, or a quick run bag, a QRB.
Casey:
Needless to say, someone has been looking at Wikipedia lately, and that someone is this guy.
Marco:
See, I feel like there's probably a lot of overlap between that community and the red staters, people who fantasize about zombie apocalypses and watch The Walking Dead.
John:
I wasn't going to bring The Walking Dead into it, but I was just going to make the same point.
John:
This is like the slightly kinder and gentler version of the fantasy where you're going to be like...
John:
defending your family with your giant collection of firearms the slightly kinder one is that I'm going to somehow escape disaster when others don't because I have a well-packed bag and that will make all the difference right like nobody prepares a bag like this
Marco:
without a little bit of a fantasy in their head that they someday will have to use it like that's it's the same thing with buying guns and everything it's like people want they fantasize about having a reason to use these things and they they kind of revel in the idea of that and so like that's why i can't i can't even look at like everyday carry stuff because it very quickly turns to knives and guns
Marco:
I am very interested in lots of other things that people typically classify as everyday carry, but if you look on Instagram or anything for that, it's quickly knives and guns.
Marco:
Very, very quickly.
Casey:
I couldn't agree with you more.
Casey:
It's funny because
Casey:
I don't know if it's because I've lived in Virginia for a while.
Casey:
I don't know if it's I was never a Boy Scout, so it's not that.
Casey:
But there's something that appeals to me about the thought of having a bag that I can grab at a moment's notice and know that anything I could reasonably need is within it.
Casey:
And I've talked many, many, many times about what I call my go pack, which is all of my nerd.
Casey:
It's like my nerd bug out bag.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So it's all of my nerd cables.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I have one of those, too.
Marco:
And I fantasize about someday needing that micro USB to USB-C cable.
Casey:
I'm right there with you.
Casey:
But all snark aside, it really is convenient.
Casey:
And I think the difference between what I call a GoPack and a bug out bag is that a GoPack you use presumably at least a few times a year, no matter how much or little you travel.
Casey:
you're going to travel at least occasionally.
Casey:
And so at least occasionally you'll use a go pack.
Casey:
Whereas I do agree with what you're saying.
Casey:
A bug out bag is like, you know, I'm like, you know, hand wringing in a happy way.
Casey:
Like, oh, I can't wait to have that natural disaster so I can use my first aid kit that I spent $350 on that lasts forever.
Casey:
And I don't know, like it appeals to me in a sense because I like the preparedness aspect of it, but I don't really see the point, you know?
John:
It's not really preparedness.
John:
Even your adapter bag is probably not actually preparing you for anything.
John:
But any of the other bags, in the balance of things that are going to help or hurt in the case of any kind of disaster, the few items you put in that bag are not going to make any difference.
John:
Unless you can fit food, shelter, and a vulnerable bubble and three years worth of shelf-stable food into that bag, the bag will not make the difference.
Casey:
and like the reality is like if society ever falls apart that much we're all just going to be killed immediately like we're not we're going to last no time at all like well i would have been killed but i had a bag with some stuff in it that did it you say you're going to die immediately but i have plenty of friends with these small arsenals in their homes which does not make me comfortable yeah they're all going to kill each other it doesn't matter and it's not going to help you
Marco:
Yeah, and what value will you provide them?
Casey:
I'll be delicious to eat.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
A little gamey.
Marco:
You'll have this bag they can take very easily from you.
Casey:
For real.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
This is all somewhat... Follow me down this tangent.
Casey:
This is all somewhat relevant because last night we had one of the... It's funny as parents how quickly you lose the ability to be woken up overnight.
Casey:
So Michaela is 16 months old and she has been sleeping through the night...
Casey:
for most of those 16 months.
Casey:
And for the times that she wasn't, generally speaking, it was Erin who was going in to nurse her.
Casey:
So, you know, I got to sleep through the night a lot.
Casey:
But last night we had Declan having a bad dream.
Casey:
Then, of course, we had a smoke alarm that decided to go off.
Casey:
And even though the battery from the, you know, 9-volt tongue test seemed fine, the smoke detector was dissatisfied with it,
Casey:
So we had to do that, change that.
Casey:
And that was in Michaela's room, which made it all the worse.
Casey:
And, of course, that woke her up, which made it even worse.
Casey:
And then there was something else that happened.
Casey:
Like all of these are minor.
Casey:
Oh, the power flickered.
Casey:
That was where this tangent came from.
Casey:
The power flickered a few times, which is pretty unusual for us these days.
Casey:
And, of course, my UPS is going ballistic and, you know, things that are on smart switches like the fans in the kids' room are now turning themselves off.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And none of these are a big deal, like in and of themselves.
Casey:
None of them are a big deal.
Casey:
It just so happened that they all decided to hit at once, like one hour apart from each other, which was not fun.
Casey:
So I'm a little tired and a little loopy.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's got me thinking, like, what would happen if legitimately like our seemingly very vulnerable power grid, like legitimately just got hacked and shut down?
Casey:
Like what happened?
Casey:
What was it around 2004 ish when the Northeast, you know, like shut down for two days or something like that?
Casey:
That sounds terrifying.
John:
I was on my way to work at Staples.
John:
Oh, nice.
John:
I think we didn't have power for like a week maybe in Hurricane Gloria before you guys were born maybe.
John:
You just hang out in your house.
John:
I mean especially if it doesn't happen in the dead of winter.
John:
In the dead of winter, you've got more problems.
John:
But places with the dead of winter also have fireplaces and you get by.
Marco:
Even that time, when we had that giant northeast blackout when I was working at Staples, it was really inconvenient for the few hours that we were in Pennsylvania that we were out of power, and then it was fine.
Marco:
I have...
Marco:
Oh, geez.
Marco:
I mean, I have the amount of like battery capacity and flashlight capacity that I have in my office right here within 10 feet of me is incredible.
Marco:
Like I could keep our phones charged and our and at least one room of our house somewhat lit with flashlights for like a week with what I have right here already.
Marco:
And when am I ever going to need it?
Marco:
Like probably never.
Marco:
And if any of it ever comes up, I'll be really excited to use it.
Marco:
Oh, I have just the battery for this purpose, right?
Marco:
And like that'll happen maybe once every 10 years for an hour.
Marco:
And then it will never happen after that.
Casey:
You know, my parents live about 45 minutes from me and they have this very fancy inverter generator that's enough to power, not the entire house, but like a large portion thereof.
Casey:
It's like a 6,000 watt generator or something like that.
Casey:
My mother-in-law, who is about 20 minutes from me, has a whole home natural gas generator.
Casey:
I've really, really, really kicked around the idea of spending something like $2,000 or $3,000, I think, for a fancy inverter generator.
Casey:
I already have a hookup in the fuse box to plug it in, and I could
Casey:
power whatever portions of the house i wanted i this is like the bug out bag but even more expensive right because i really really want to get this like three thousand dollar generator just so i know that i will never have the problem but then it's exactly what you were saying earlier marco then i'm just like fantasizing about the power going out like oh maybe tonight's the night oh it's getting windy it's getting windy should i go get the generator ready it's so silly like i haven't bought it because i know deep down it's a complete waste of money especially since we have relatives so close but i want it
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
If you're actually losing power so incredibly frequently that this thing would pay for itself, that's one thing.
Marco:
But the reality is, in most places around here, where you live too, I'm sure, you lose power so infrequently in short periods.
Marco:
Worst case scenario, if you lose power...
Marco:
and you like can't stay in your house and maybe it's like in the middle of winter it's really cold outside or something like that it's like it's kind of you know so you kind of need heat to stay in your house you don't have it and it's too cold to just put on sweaters and blankets and everything and you can't get space heaters and all this other stuff then it's like okay well then you know get in your car and drive somewhere like drive as far away as you need to to get a hotel room yeah how much does that cost for like the one time every 10 years that you'll need to do that
John:
versus like what it costs to get a generator installed they should sell people just empty metal shells like they would never know right just like selling this thing and it just makes noise and it's very heavy because like it just sits in your house and rots right it's just it's waiting out there you're hoping it's not just like rusting or whatever
Marco:
Well, it does more than that.
Marco:
Like I know my in-laws have one and I think once a week it does a self-test.
Marco:
You know, you have this massive, you know, gas engine thing that once a week goes for like, you know, 15 minutes while it self-tests itself.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
These things aren't without their downsides.
Marco:
That's the thing that you have to get installed, get periodically maintained or serviced.
Marco:
It's very intrusive, invasive.
Marco:
It takes space out of your yard or out of your house or whatever.
Marco:
It isn't like a small deal.
Marco:
And it's for a benefit that you probably will never need or you would need...
Marco:
once every 10 years, but then you could just go to the hotel room somewhere for way less money and not having that noise and space and giant thing sitting in your yard for the last decade.
Casey:
It's not unusual for us to go to Erin's mom's on a Sunday afternoon, and that's when her whole home generator decides to do its self-test.
Casey:
And it is exactly what you described.
Casey:
It's extraordinarily loud.
Casey:
It runs for like 10-ish minutes, and it's very random.
Casey:
And so every time I'm like, what, what, what?
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
And it just freaks me out every time.
Casey:
And it's not a big deal.
Casey:
In the grand scheme of things, it helps her because she's not remote by any reasonable definition of the word, but she's remote enough that power does go out for her periodically.
Casey:
And so it does make sense for her to have it.
Casey:
But yeah, for us, where most of the electric lines, not near-ish us, are in-ground.
Casey:
And the one tree that kept knocking out our neighborhood's power in the above-ground section has been trimmed back a couple of years ago.
Casey:
And ever since that tree got trimmed, it has been pretty reliable here.
Casey:
But it was just a few years ago.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly when.
Casey:
Actually, it was probably six or seven years ago that one hurricane came through Richmond and...
Casey:
The south side of Richmond, which is not where I am.
Casey:
Don't be creepy.
Casey:
They were without power for as much as two weeks.
Casey:
And that was surprising.
Casey:
And we knew the hurricane was coming.
Casey:
Like it wasn't that much of a surprise that it was coming, but it brought far more damage than anyone expected.
Casey:
And so we were fine.
Casey:
This is when we did have a generator that has since died.
Casey:
But we we had I think didn't have power for like two or three days or something like that.
Casey:
And like I said, the, the other side of Richmond didn't have it for as much as two weeks and it was, it was something else.
Casey:
Like it was intense for a while.
Marco:
But even then, like, I feel like the, the solution, you know, we are fortunate that we have some disposable income.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so like, I think the solution is very clearly like just apply money to this problem until it goes away.
Marco:
Like when, when it happens, if it happens.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So like, like, you know, my car can go 300 miles.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
from my house before i have to stop anywhere so if anything ever happens to the area that i'm in i can put my family in my car and drive somewhere up to 300 miles away where i can get a hotel room i'm sure i know the local hotels are probably going to be very crowded but i'm sure within 300 miles i can find a room but if you if you had that kind of a problem though wouldn't you take the bmw rather than the tesla why on earth would you take the tesla
Marco:
Because I can plug it in anywhere and it will already be full.
Marco:
It will already at all times have that 300 mile range.
Marco:
Whereas the BMW might have a quarter tank of gas in it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Sure, but... You can't guarantee like any given day that the BMW is going to be full.
Casey:
And that makes sense.
Marco:
Whereas you know the Tesla is going to be full.
Casey:
And I agree with you, but don't you think if there was a risk of a hurricane hitting the New York or whatever, or a blizzard hitting the New York area, don't you think you would go and fill the BMW if it was really that much of a problem?
Casey:
Because if it were me and I had a dyno juice car and a zap zap car sitting in the garage, I would absolutely choose the BMW just because of the convenience of being able to fill up just about anywhere without having to worry about power.
John:
Plus, you can relive Mad Max, a movie that neither of you saw.
Casey:
I saw Fury Road.
John:
Right, I meant the original.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
If there is a severe natural disaster, it's more likely to be really hard to get gas than electricity.
Marco:
Like, around here, with U.S.
Marco:
infrastructure and everything...
Marco:
there's frequently like, you know, runs on gas stations before major hurricanes or where like you just, you can't get gas.
Marco:
You have to wait in very long lines to get gas.
Marco:
If everyone, cause everyone else has the same idea.
Marco:
Oh, I better fill up my car.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
Like before any kind of major hurricane, it's actually very hard to get gas around here.
Marco:
Whereas like you can almost always find power somewhere either in your house or if you have lost power, like within 300 miles, it's probably easier to find power than gas during a natural disaster.
Marco:
Honestly.
Yeah.
Casey:
I want to argue with you, but I don't know enough about this to be able to make any sort of compelling argument.
Marco:
That's all right.
Marco:
Now these days, everything needs a website.
Marco:
It's table stakes.
Marco:
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Marco:
And a lot of times website hosting in the past has been difficult.
Marco:
You've had to get your own server, install some package on it, keep it updated, keep it running, keep it up.
Marco:
It was really hard in the past, and Squarespace makes all of that super easy.
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:
All right.
Casey:
First and foremost, I need to remind you.
Casey:
No, I'm just kidding.
Casey:
We're all done with that.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
Thank you, everyone who bought shirts and hats and polos and sweatshirts and everything else.
Casey:
Really and truly from the bottom of our hearts, we really appreciate it.
Casey:
I would like to just vindicate myself.
Casey:
Is that the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
I'd just like to congratulate myself that within, I think, an hour or two of the sales closing at Cotton Bureau, we got tweets from people saying, oh, God, I forgot.
Casey:
Is there anything I can do?
Casey:
You guys think I'm just saying that to be a jerk, to be a big jerk.
Casey:
You think I'm saying that to be mean?
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
It was within an hour or two that there were poor people.
Casey:
And I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
These people were upset.
Casey:
I do feel bad for them.
Casey:
But that's why we reminded you.
Casey:
So anyway, thank you everyone who bought shirts and hats and everything else.
Casey:
I really, and I know my two co-hosts really do appreciate it.
Casey:
And I am super amped to hopefully see some of this walking around the San Jose area in just a couple of weeks, actually.
Casey:
It's coming up real soon.
John:
Yeah, thanks, everybody.
John:
I wondered if Casey would find a way to get mad at listeners again, even though the sale was over and he found a way.
John:
Why do you stop yelling at them?
John:
They're just buying merchandise.
John:
You don't have to yell at them every week to shame them for not buying in time.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Which one of us is bad cop and which one of us is good cop?
John:
You're the bad cop.
John:
I'm trying to be the good cop here.
John:
Thanks for buying our stuff.
John:
I hope you like it.
John:
I'm not going to be mean to you and yell at you.
Casey:
Hey, sometimes you need some tough love.
Casey:
I do want to congratulate a certain co-host of mine, even though he is being bad cop, and say that... You're the bad cop.
Casey:
I was the bad cop.
Casey:
No, whatever.
Casey:
It's really just like wrecked gifts.
Casey:
Anyway, I would like to congratulate John for his very amusing, what you have put in the show notes as frame game fun, which if you don't follow John on Twitter, first of all, you're making a mistake.
Casey:
But second of all, John was giving away codes for free t-shirts and
Casey:
And the way he was doing this was by putting increasingly, or I guess decreasingly, whatever, smaller and smaller photos or clips of frames of movies into tweets and saying the first person to correctly identify them will win a free t-shirt code.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I didn't know most of these movies.
John:
The contest is not for you, too.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
And even the one like you had Jurassic Park at one point.
Casey:
Don't ruin the surprise.
Casey:
Oh, sorry.
Casey:
You had something at one point that I had seen.
Casey:
Once I saw the full frame, I was like, oh, oh, OK, that makes sense.
Casey:
But man, just looking at each of these pictures individually, I didn't have the faintest idea.
Casey:
I presume, Marco, you are also clueless.
Marco:
I recognized zero of them to nobody's surprise.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Same story here.
John:
So we get these codes and like, you know, you want to give them away to fans, right?
John:
Because what else are you going to do with them?
John:
But you want to try to make it fun or, you know, I don't know.
John:
I've tried a whole bunch of different ways.
John:
I used to do like trivia questions where the answer was like, take the first letter of the first word and the last letter of the last word.
John:
And then those are two characters that you replace in the promo code.
John:
So I would put in the promo code with a bunch of X's and, you know,
John:
And then I would just... There would be like trivia questions or whatever, but it's really, really hard to...
John:
ask anything, especially trivia questions or tech questions that people can't Google for in two seconds.
John:
And I always wanted the person who won it to be somebody who knew something, not somebody who was as good at Googling.
John:
And so of course I tried to Google them myself before I did them, but it's really, it's just lots of really fun, interesting questions.
John:
You realize, oh, they can Google that in two seconds.
John:
So everyone's, you know, in fact, if you Google that, you might get it before someone who was like, oh, it's on the tip of my tongue.
John:
What's that thing?
John:
So I tried a couple of different things this time.
John:
One of them was,
John:
doing drawings like i actually took out my apple pencil and drew something on my ipad and said like identify this thing that i drew because if you take a photo of a regular thing people can just do like a reverse google image search and find similar pictures um and it tells them what it is but if you do a line drawing all google finds is just a bunch of other line drawings that are totally unrelated except that they're white backgrounds with black lines so i did that and that worked but i really didn't have any more ideas about things i could draw and
John:
Um, so I came up with the frame game thing where I think it mostly worked for the intended purpose.
John:
I'm taking, you know, a frame of a movie and I'm taking a very, very small portion of it, like incredibly small, but it's not randomly chosen.
John:
If it was like a computer that said, here's, here's a movie, pick a random frame and then pick a random square.
John:
That's like, you know, a centimeter by centimeter.
John:
Nobody would get it.
John:
because given a random section of a random frame it could be anything could be like a piece of blue sky or a green leaf how you can identify the movie right so the whole point of the game is i would try to pick the smallest piece that i could but strategically chosen from a frame that is significant for a movie that i think people will know and from from a portion of that frame that i think will evoke the movie um
John:
So one of them, I mean, in case you already remember before, the Jurassic Park one, it's an iconic scene from the movie.
John:
And if you see a portion of it, you can mostly tell what it is because it's like some kind of scaly skin.
John:
It was a dinosaur, surprise.
John:
And then some sort of like man-made lines, like a thin white line, then a black field, and then a thing with a red with a little lighter thing around it.
John:
But it's a particular color scheme.
John:
Just that portion of colors next to something that looks like dinosaur skin should bring to mind that scene.
John:
And sure enough, from this picture, it looks like nothing.
John:
You know, instantly people get it.
John:
They're just like, oh, Jurassic Park.
John:
You know, like I post the thing and then like I refresh my Twitter client and there's the answer.
John:
Like I just scroll like a little bit and there's the answer.
John:
So people were getting them really, really fast.
John:
Um, the, I think the best one was the one I have in the show notes.
John:
If you guys can look at it on the left, it's like a smudgy orange square with some black stuff on it.
John:
And the best thing about that, the best thing about that one is that it's one of those things where out of context, like especially if surrounded with like a white background, it just sounds like nothing.
John:
It's like mud.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, but if you see the full frame, that part that I'm showing you is like the, the brightest part of the frame.
John:
you know you would think it's basically like the sky and sunlight but taken it's like when you do that optical illusion and you're like these two things are the same color and you're like no way they're not the same color and then you take like a little piece of paper that just has a hole punched out of it and you just put the little piece of paper so you can just see that region and then you slide it over so you can see the other region like oh i see without the surrounding stuff they totally are the same color anyway that one was great because if you don't know the movie and don't you know know why it's famous you would never get it but people got it instantly
John:
I think there was only one that really stumped people, and that was where I misdirected by grabbing a portion of a frame that had a thing that was in the background.
John:
That's kind of mean, but I figured people might have noticed it in the background, but they didn't.
John:
People got all of them eventually, and the thing is you can't really Google them.
John:
If you try to Google image search and any of these little snippets, you come up with nothing.
John:
So I enjoyed that and I think I'm going to do it more in the future unless someone can come up with some other way to defeat Google while also rewarding people for obscure pop culture and or tech knowledge.
Casey:
I thought it was a very clever way of doing it and I was enjoying just watching along with the whole thing.
Casey:
But yeah, most of these I didn't have a clue what they were.
John:
Oh, the earring one was good, too.
John:
Like, I did lots of eyeballs and stuff.
John:
But then I did one that was showing, like, someone's ear with an earring in it.
John:
And it was like the, you know, the Shawshank thing.
John:
After all, how often do you look at a woman's earring?
John:
Like, there are lots of famous scenes where you're like, oh, I know that person.
John:
I know that actor.
John:
I know this famous scene.
John:
But do you know what earrings they were wearing?
John:
I just put the earring and the ear up there.
John:
Instantly, people got it.
John:
People are amazing.
John:
Someone was tweeting like, it should be like the collective wisdom of people on the internet versus the world's most powerful AI.
John:
And I think the internet would give them a run for the money.
Casey:
I was having a conversation with somebody once.
Casey:
There's a subreddit or something like that where you can put up a picture of something somewhere.
Casey:
And it can be as obscure as like a portion of a carpet of a hotel inside.
Casey:
And the whole, like, schtick or game of this subreddit is to try to determine where on the planet that picture was taken.
Casey:
And according to whoever it was that was telling this story, it was stupefying how accurate these people can get.
Casey:
Like...
Casey:
Based on just infinitesimally small pieces of information, they can find exactly which room of a hotel somebody was in.
Casey:
Maybe I'm exaggerating some, but you get the point I'm driving at.
Casey:
It is unreal what the hive mind of the internet, when it puts its hive mind together, can do.
Casey:
It's just tremendous.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Just earlier today, I believe it was, we heard some news from Apple with regard to Intel CPU vulnerabilities.
Casey:
And I forget the marketing names for these things, but this was the thing.
John:
Zombieland or something?
Casey:
Yeah, this was the thing with predictive execution.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
It's another one like that.
John:
It's a new one, but it's along the same vein.
John:
Yeah, similar to Meltdown and Spectre.
Marco:
Spectre, that's it, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, very similar to those where basically it's exploiting some of the side effects of predictive execution and faults and stuff the way Intel CPUs work.
Marco:
John, so I actually tried to read the paper right before we started here, and I honestly had a hard time...
John:
figuring it out um john did you actually have a better understanding of this i didn't put it in here for us to dive into the nitty-gritty details just to like think about the you know to revisit this topic because we talked about it more last time you know situations where intel cpus where you if you can get them to run anything you can read information that you weren't supposed to be able to read based on the effect of you running your thing like whether it's timing or like
John:
you know like i said faults or other other things like the side effects of what you're running let you determine something about the world and once you have a tiny little tool like this like well if i do this in just this right way and either look for this side effect or check this timing i can tell whether uh the first bit of this thing that i'm not supposed to be able to read is a one or a zero and then if i do it a certain other way i can tell the second bit and the third bit and the fourth bit and then your computers are great at doing stuff repeatedly
John:
then you're off to the races and now you're reading bits of information that you weren't supposed to be able to see, which are probably mostly garbage.
John:
But if, but you just keep running it and just read everything that's in there and eventually you can start to extract interesting information that might be in memory or in caches or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
And this has plagued Intel CPUs for a little while now.
John:
And the first time it went around, it was like, okay, well, Intel CPUs have this problem.
John:
But ARM CPUs that Apple uses in its phones don't because the ARM CPUs Apple's using are generally simpler and didn't have the same speculative execution logic or didn't have hyper-threading.
John:
Basically, the features that were being exploited didn't exist in the ARM CPUs.
John:
Now, this one, I assume...
John:
is the same type of deal like where people say oh well you know this is why apple should switch to arm because they wouldn't have to deal with all these intel problems and there's two parts to that one is that there's always fixes for these things of like uh change something about either the operating system or the microcode and the cpu to to avoid the situation but those solutions are getting increasingly onerous they were already kind of onerous with the the meltdown inspector thing but now for this one apple has a
John:
support article that explains what to do to avoid this.
John:
And it's like, turn off hyper-threading on your CPU.
John:
That'll do it.
John:
If they're exploiting some aspects of hyper-threading, you can just turn it off.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
But turning off hyper-threading is bad.
John:
In Apple's document, they're saying
John:
You know, this is straight from their thing.
John:
Testing conducted by Apple in May of 2019 showed as much as a 40% reduction in performance.
John:
This is Apple saying this.
John:
This is not like a sensational site saying, oh my goodness, 40% reduction in performance.
John:
As much as, sure, as much as a 40%.
John:
Anyway.
John:
That's bad.
John:
The whole point of using an Intel CPU is because it has all these features to make them faster.
John:
If you have to disable those features for security to make them slower, that's bad.
John:
Now, I don't know if Apple's latest and greatest ARM CPUs have similar features that could be similarly exploited.
John:
This paper isn't focusing on ARM.
John:
For all we know, there could be a paper that comes out next week or next month or next year on how to exploit similar things in the most advanced ARM CPUs that either exist already or are going to exist.
John:
So it's not like ARM is magically immune because it starts with a different letter or because it's got the Apple magic.
John:
But both Intel and Apple are now well aware of this type of problem.
John:
And presumably in all their new and upcoming CPUs, they're trying to address it as best they can.
John:
But I think this is interesting in that it's just another nudge in the direction of getting Apple off Intel.
John:
Again, not because ARM CPUs are magically great, but because if an Apple CPU has this problem, I bet Apple feels better about it than if Intel does, because Apple is highly motivated to fix its own CPUs for its own products, and Intel is slightly less motivated.
John:
It's more motivated about protecting its business and all this other stuff, and maybe it doesn't view Apple as an important customer if it knows they're already going to bail.
John:
You know, this is why Apple wants to own and control the core technologies, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And the other thing that I want to talk about this is I think I saw a couple of things like this is, you know, if you're executing code, it can do all this stuff and get it all your memory, but just don't run any any strange programs in your computer and you'll be fine.
John:
Like it's not a, you know, it's not a thing that someone can use to break into your computer.
John:
But as far as I'm aware, and again, this would have, you know, I don't know if you saw it when you were looking at the paper, Marco, that you just need to execute anything on the CPU.
John:
So one thing that we execute on our CPU all day long is JavaScript and web pages.
John:
And I think a lot of these papers, perhaps also including this one, have a demonstration of the exploit using JavaScript on a web page.
John:
And so, yeah, it's not like you have to download a piece of malware.
John:
I'm not sure if it's this one or the other things, but if you can just run JavaScript and exploit this, that's really bad.
John:
That's really, really bad.
John:
Now, there are no, to be clear, as they point out, there are no exploits in the wild that do anything with this.
John:
And just because you can read this information.
John:
You'd have to do a lot of reading and transmitting that back to something.
John:
They can process it and figure it out.
John:
It's a little bit of a road from this exploit to breaking into someone's computer, but it's not that long of a road because as we browse the web on our computers with Intel CPUs, we're executing JavaScript all day long, and that JavaScript could be mining for Bitcoins or it could be searching our memory for encryption keys or who knows what it's doing.
John:
So as these stories come out, I think a lot of, you know, if you're not a tech nerd and not following these things, you might not know about them, but if you know a little bit, you'll be like, what can I do?
John:
What should I do to protect myself against this?
John:
And the answer is like,
John:
It's not much you can do.
John:
Like, you can do what's in the Apple support article.
John:
They have you boot your computer with some NVRAM args that slow your CPU way down by disabling features.
John:
You could do that, but does that kind of protect you?
John:
Or is that just going to protect against this particular bug and you're just waiting for the next one?
John:
Like, it's one of those situations where it's bad and there's not really much we can do about it except...
John:
not use our computers with intel cpus i suppose or hope there aren't similar exploits to arm ones i feel like this is i think we said this last time it's worse than heartbleed because at least heartbleed you could patch a buggy piece of software everywhere and even that was a pain this is like a hardware problem and you can't really change the hardware that's in all of our computers other than disabling features and even that might be complete protection so i
John:
I don't have any good advice for people.
John:
I'm not going to recommend everyone slow down their CPUs, but I'm also not going to say that you're safe because you're not and we're not.
John:
So I guess we'll all just hang on here and wait for the new products with new CPUs that avoid this.
John:
Well, actually...
John:
I don't have to worry because all these bugs only apply to CPUs made after 2011.
John:
So I'm actually safe.
John:
Because my 2008 Mac Pro... Your computer is so primitive that it has none of these... There's no hyper-threading.
John:
It does have speculative execution, but apparently... Hackers can't be bothered to find exploits in 2008 CPUs.
John:
So if you're using a 10-year-old computer like me, you're actually safe.
John:
But everyone else should be real worried.
John:
Well, except isn't your software probably riddled with vulnerabilities that are no longer being patched?
John:
No, no, it's fine.
John:
I mean, I have the latest Safari and everything.
John:
Everything's fine.
Casey:
Are you sure?
John:
I think I do.
John:
Let me see.
John:
What is the latest Safari?
John:
Everyone go to your About Safari window.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us what you have before we tell you and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Casey:
I have a 11.1.2.
John:
I have 12.1 14607.1.40.1.40 I don't have the newest but I think they're still doing security patches Oh yeah funny how the story changed I have the newest Safari well it's almost the newest Well you know what I mean like they might still be updating I think they are still security patching the 11 version I do have a software update pending I should see what that is Oh my word
John:
I was about to go to system preferences, but that's not where the software updates are in this operating system.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Oh, no, it's just the Kindle app updating.
John:
Never mind.
Casey:
John, you know, I really, I'm not sure my body is really ready for the 14 straight episodes that we spend talking about whatever Mac Pro is released, either loving it, hating it, critiquing it, being hypercritical about it, whatever.
Casey:
But at this point, your computer is so ancient that I am willing to take the fall for you, John, and deal with these 14 straight episodes of nothing but Mac Pro just so you have something built this millennium.
John:
I don't think it'll be that many episodes, but the real problem is after Marco buys it, you have to get like, so we'll buy, we'll talk about it.
John:
Then we'll buy it and we'll talk about how he bought it.
John:
All right.
John:
And then Marco will talk about some weird problem that he has with it.
John:
And then Marco will talk about his disillusionment with it.
John:
And then Marco will talk about why he sold it and replaced it with something.
John:
Whereas I won't say anything else after it, after I get through the initial like stuff.
Yeah.
John:
I'm hoping anyway.
Casey:
That's possibly true.
Casey:
I will concede that much.
John:
Marco, you're going to have to deal with more Mac Pro talk from Marco in the long term.
Casey:
That's probably true.
John:
Like the case he buys for it, like the backpack he puts it in.
John:
How it doesn't work with his weird Microsoft keyboard.
John:
Yeah.
John:
How he can't plug in his amps.
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:
I got to say, when we first did marine layer sponsorships, maybe about three, four months ago, I had just gotten their stuff and I was impressed.
Marco:
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Marco:
But I thought like...
Marco:
How soft is it really going to be after a few washes?
Marco:
Well, they've been in my regular rotation now.
Marco:
I've heavily worn the T-shirts I got from them three, four months ago, and they are still remarkably soft.
Marco:
I am shocked at the level of softness, durability, I guess if that's a thing, that you get out of Marine Layer's clothes.
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:
And they even, on some of their most popular stuff, they even make in-between sizes, like between medium and large, they make a marge.
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:
Steve Troughton Smith had an interesting tidbit.
Casey:
This is actually a few weeks ago now, I think, about Mac OS 1015, which is the forthcoming version, house cleaning.
Casey:
And so his tweet reads, dashboard isn't the only thing gone in 1015.
Casey:
Sorry, John.
Casey:
So his 32-bit app and plug-in support, Carbon, Inc., QuickTime 7 and QuickTime plug-ins.
Casey:
Sorry, John.
Casey:
PPTP, which is a VPN protocol that I guess is really insecure but is very convenient.
Casey:
and hardware raid but you will get python 3.7 ruby 2.6 at least says steve uh i don't really have a whole lot to say about this other than i am surprised some of this stuff lasted as long as it did did anyone else know that ink ink was still in there
John:
I knew it was in there, but I've never actually seen or used it.
John:
The last time I saw or used it is when I wrote about it in a Mac OS X review.
John:
Honestly, if you ask me now, I don't even remember how to find it.
John:
But it's still in the operating system right now.
John:
This looks like...
John:
The 64-bit transition was a good time to kind of clean house and get rid of old stuff, but they didn't deprecate the 32-bit.
John:
So this is kind of like the other shoe dropping on the 64-bit transition for the Mac, which was so long ago, most of us barely remember it.
John:
So, yep, we went 64-bit.
John:
uh and then eventually all that 32-bit stuff's not going to run and that's not a problem if that stuff was also updated 32-bit but everything updated to 64 rather but everything that wasn't updated to 64-bit is stuff that apple doesn't want anymore so quick time not updated because it's not going to continue hardware rate i guess they're not into it anymore you know carbon already we know didn't get 64-bit famously a while back
John:
um dashboard i mean that should just go away period like i say this is something you use it every day i'd use it every day but like it's it's obviously not maintained in any possible way it's only been getting buggier over time so it's like well if you're not gonna keep developing that software don't keep including it with the operating system um and i don't know if there's a 32 or 64 bit issue there but this could be uh one of the big mac operating systems to leave behind a lot of stuff um
John:
And I'm hoping there'll be some way to, like, run VMs or something to be able to access old software that you need to just use briefly for some reason or another.
John:
Even if it's just, I don't know what I'm going to replace QuickTime 7 with.
John:
I mean, you know.
John:
FFmpeg?
John:
Maybe.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Like, I'll end up just Googling and searching Stack Overflow for FFmpeg incantation strings.
John:
But I don't, that's not... Isn't that the UI to FFmpeg?
Casey:
pretty much hey man i have i have a whole folder in notes that's all like my recipe book for ffmpeg and it has saved me countless hours because a lot of this over time i've learned but there's a lot that it's it's literally like casting a spell and so having this like series of of examples and whatnot in in my notes app is has really saved me
Marco:
Yeah, but in the process of saving you countless hours, how many hours has it taken to figure out the correct commands the first time?
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
It's many, many, many hours.
John:
I don't really use QuickTime Player 7 for too much.
John:
It does much more than I use it for.
John:
For people who don't know, who haven't been long-time Mac users, and they think all QuickTime 7 does is like,
John:
save in different formats or something and have a plugin structure so you can play different formats.
John:
It does that, but it also lets you arbitrarily cut, copy, and paste sections of media.
John:
Not with a particularly nice interface, but it lets you do it.
John:
It doesn't just let you, like the replacement that uses AV Foundation, it doesn't just let you trim the ends.
John:
It lets you cut, copy, and paste
John:
Anywhere in there, you can paste one track on top of another track and overlay them so you can add a new soundtrack to a portion of a thing.
John:
You don't have to just append or slice in the middle and insert.
John:
You can extract tracks and save them out into separate files and then copy and paste from them.
John:
It's kind of like a blind video editor where you don't get
John:
that you know a iMovie or Final Cut Pro style timeline you just get a single bar with regions on it but you can do a surprising amount of things and but mostly what i use it for is to to extract tracks and to change format so i could probably use ffm ping for that but really it's a nice player the controls don't float over the movie so you can see the movie and go a frame at a time when you're watching this the Star Wars trailer for the 19th time sorry the Star Wars teaser because i don't watch the trailers um
John:
And, you know, it's brush metal and it's silly and all that stuff, but I'll miss it.
John:
And I have a bunch of plugins that let you play stuff.
John:
From the playback front, I think this is a good time to talk about alternatives to QuickTime Player 10X, whatever, just for playing stuff.
John:
Like, forget about all the other features I talked about.
John:
Because QuickTime 7, with a whole bunch of plugins, could play almost any format.
John:
And since that's going away, if you're just left with the QuickTime player 10 or X, it can only play the handful of formats that AV Foundation deals with, and not all these weird, obscure formats and container formats that we might want to play.
John:
You can use FFmpeg to transform them, but who wants to transcode things?
John:
Casey does.
Casey:
First of all, yes, I love transcoding.
Casey:
It's my favorite thing to do.
Casey:
But second of all, you can use FFplay, which is a truly awful way to just play stuff that FFmpeg can read.
Casey:
But that is not the spirit of what you're after.
Casey:
And I think the spirit of what you're after is, I don't know how to pronounce this, but I-I-N-A, which is basically just a gooey front end FFmpeg as far as I'm aware.
John:
I'm not sure what the guts are, but the app itself, I mean, it's not particularly Mac-like, but it has enough of my minimum set of features.
John:
Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it either, but it's nice because it's quick to command space to because not many other applications begin with a double I.
John:
But the UI is just like a little rectangle.
John:
I think it might have rounded corners, which I don't like.
John:
But anyway, and it plays the video, but it's got lots of options.
John:
And it has so many options that it lets you export a config file with all your preferences so you don't have to reset them elsewhere, which is, like I said, not very Mac-like.
John:
That's amazing.
John:
But the most important thing
John:
thing it has like out of the box uh like a lot of other video players it doesn't do what i want in terms of navigating the video what i want is spacebar to play pause which it does but then i want the left and right arrow keys to go a frame at a time and very often the app will decide oh forward the right arrow key is skip forward five seconds the left arrow key is skip back one second i don't want that i want a single frame well in this app ii ana whatever the hell it's called
John:
You can just change the configuration and say, I want the right arrow key to be move forward one frame, which is probably some FFmpeg command that it's sending under the scenes or whatever.
John:
And it does it.
John:
And so you can just set it up the way you want it.
John:
And it plays movies and you can scale them at different sizes.
John:
And it plays every format you can throw at it and every container format I've thrown at it.
John:
And it does a fine job.
John:
So that is my current replacement for playback.
John:
My current replacement for editing is nothing.
John:
It's Casey, I guess.
John:
It's Casey's FNPEG file.
John:
And iMovie, I suppose.
John:
But honestly, iMovie has very limited options, and I don't have a working copy.
John:
I might have Final Cut Pro 4, but I don't think it still runs.
John:
I'm probably going to end up buying Final Cut in the 64-bit era if I can't do basic video editing anymore, but I'm holding off on that.
Marco:
Can I put out a request to the audience?
Marco:
I have a quest that I don't want to undertake myself.
Marco:
I'm hoping the audience can do this for me.
Marco:
What I want that I haven't been able to find in my admittedly zero research is every video editing app out there
Marco:
From the simple to the complex, like from Apple's built-in stuff all the way to things like Final Cut and beyond, every video editing app seems to want to put you into this project workflow where to do anything to a video, you have to first make it into a project and then it copies the file God knows where and takes up God knows how much disk space.
Marco:
You need to then create an event within the project.
Marco:
All that stuff, I...
Marco:
hate dealing with that kind of structure.
Marco:
What I want is to occasionally make small edits to videos, like what QuickTime Player 7 would do, but even beyond that a little bit if possible.
Marco:
I want basically preview for videos.
Marco:
The way preview allows you to make small image edits.
Marco:
Just simple stuff like
Marco:
cropping, rotating.
Marco:
If I accidentally shoot a video and it's the wrong orientation, let me rotate it.
Marco:
Even Apple's built-in Photoshop doesn't let you do that.
Marco:
I couldn't find how to rotate a video in iMovie either.
John:
It's probably hiding in there somewhere, but it's not obvious.
Marco:
What I want is a simple video app that lets you just open a video file, perform some basic operations, whether it's cropping, trimming, rotation, and not just 90-degree rotation.
Marco:
What if the video is tilt a little bit and I want to rotate it like three degrees and crop into whatever can fit there?
Marco:
Ideally, even basic color and exposure correction, basic audio correction, maybe like basic operations that you might want to do a video.
Marco:
Just open a video file, perform those operations and save the file, not adding it to any library or project in the process.
Marco:
I want that to exist.
Marco:
I don't know if it already does, but I have yet to find it.
John:
I have that problem with the size, like when I do my Destiny videos, I have gigs and gigs and gigs of video, and then I make like a three minute video out of it.
John:
And I don't want those gigs of video hanging around, but I do want the original clips in the original format.
John:
So I would like to losslessly clip out just the parts that I have, like sort of do a, I think Final Cut used to have this feature, maybe it still does where you tell it.
John:
Okay, I'm done with the edit.
John:
Discard any media not used in the edit, but keep all the media losslessly that contributes to the final thing so I can remake videos.
John:
That's interesting.
John:
I don't know if iMovie does that.
John:
If it does, I don't know how to make it do it.
John:
So I just have my disc slowly filling with gigs of Destiny videos, which is probably untenable long-term.
John:
Eventually, I'm going to have to get Final Cut and learn how to use it in some way, but I'm holding off on that as long as I possibly can.
John:
I mean, I might as well wait until the ARM Macs come out and get the ARM version of Final Cut, right?
Casey:
something like that i mean this actually does sound marco exactly like what i would like for not you know the the youtube videos that i'm occasionally doing occasionally but uh we're still telling ourselves that huh yeah exactly um but no i i would love this sort of thing but i don't need a project right now so stop trying to put bad thoughts in my head yeah i movie speaking of projects i movie is worse than even you described marco where you have to make a project for stuff
John:
Again, unless I haven't figured it out, iMovie, you hit the little plus thing to make what you know is going to be a new project, and you get a little empty area, and you can drag in clips and do all this stuff and so on and so forth.
John:
But until you hit the left arrow navigation, like the back navigation in the upper left,
John:
i can't figure out a way to name the project when you hit the little left arrow to go back to the project screen it says oh and by the way you should name this thing because it's called like my project until you go back so what i end up doing is i go into the project then immediately go back so i get to name it and then go back in again it's just it's a strange flow where it doesn't ask you what you want to call the thing until and it's auto iMovie's all auto saver it's like ios style so there's no saving or anything so you're just they're working at it for a really long time and it's just called my movie for like the entire time you're doing it
John:
Until you're basically done, they're like, oh, yeah, I have to name this thing.
John:
It's very strange.
John:
And again, not particularly Mac-like.
John:
I see what they're going for.
John:
Most of the time, I kind of like the autosave nature until I get too bold with my undo-redo.
John:
You ever do that?
John:
I do it in text editors sometimes where you, you know, if you're in a good text editor, I use kind of undo-redo as fast-forward and rewind.
John:
So I will do a bunch of stuff, and then I'll be like,
John:
uh did i forget something what was that like before and then i would just hold down undo for a while and watch my changes go rewind rewinding through history and then what i'll do is i'll get back to some state i'm like oh yeah this used to be like this and i wanted that line so i'll go grab that line and copy it right but if in the course of copying that thing i like accidentally hit the space bar or hit the delete key or move the text or something
John:
oh and you've lost your undo history oh no that's right now i've hosed my undo history now i can't redo i mean i'm so paranoid i will have saved it and i have my editor configured to save a backup copy every time i save so i've never actually lost stuff this way but sometimes it's frustrating you blow your your redo stack because you're uh you're a 700 items back and undo because you've been holding it down for three seconds and now all that's gone and you have to go find that the save that you made just before you did the undo
John:
Yeah, I feel like that when I'm using any of these sort of autosave apps where I can undo and redo, but I can't even revert to a previous version because there's no saving.
John:
And if it did save, what would it save?
John:
To your point, Marco, the project file, does that have all the media inside of it?
John:
Did it leave the media where it was?
John:
Is it just referencing it?
John:
Who the hell knows?
John:
My awareness of what iMovie is doing under the scenes is very low.
John:
All I know is that it needs lots of disk space.
Casey:
All right, so we poured one out for Carbon, for anything else?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
The reason I was thinking about this is like, what crap on all of our computers is going to break that we're not even thinking about?
John:
I suppose we could all run Activity Monitor and look at all the 32-bit apps, but...
John:
The one I was thinking about recently, I was actually kind of panicking about because I saw people fretting about Adobe doubling the prices on their subscriptions to their various apps because they can.
John:
And I was like, well, I don't have a subscription.
John:
I bought the last version of Photoshop that you could download that was just like it will run by itself.
John:
I think it runs without a network connection.
John:
Adobe Photoshop CS6 I bought.
John:
because I was aware at the time that either it was probably or was known to be the last version that's not Creative Cloud infected and stuff.
John:
This is before they went super-duper subscription for everything, I think.
John:
I'm like, oh my god, is CS6...
John:
32 bit as far as i can tell it's not i think it is 64 bit so i think i'm safe but i'm paranoid about it breaking because a i don't want to buy photoshop again and b you can't even buy a photoshop anymore as far as i can tell you cannot buy photoshop you can just rent it along with like a bunch of other apps that you don't want for like ten dollars a month and i love photoshop it's how i prefer to do any image editing
John:
Uh, just because I've been using it so long, but I don't use it $10 a month worse.
John:
I use it like once every two months or something, or like, or sometimes I'll use Photoshop to crop something like just, I'm just used to Photoshop.
John:
You could do that in preview.
John:
There's no reason to use Photoshop.
John:
I have acorn.
John:
I have all bunch of that.
John:
Why the hell am I using Photoshop to crop something?
John:
because i'm used to photoshop that's why i do it and so i'll be sad if i can't run it but i'm not gonna pay ten dollars a month for it so i really hope csx keeps running but as far as i can tell other than all my old mac games breaking what else is new um i don't think i'm gonna be missing any major piece of software what about you guys what do you think is gonna break
Casey:
Nothing that I can think of.
Marco:
I'm looking through my system information list of all the 30-bit apps.
Marco:
If anyone forgot, if you go to system information, under software, applications, there's a column there called 64-bit, parentheses, Intel.
Marco:
And so you can see all the things and anything that says no in that column won't work in the next version of Mac OS.
Marco:
And for me, it's mostly just a whole bunch of ancient Adobe binaries from old installations of Adobe stuff.
Marco:
But not the apps, just installers and utilities and stuff like that that happen to be dumped there.
Marco:
I don't think there's anything here besides QuickTime Player 7 that I ever actually launch in
Casey:
I have a ton of stuff, which I didn't realize that is not 64-bit.
Casey:
But as I'm looking through it, it's like a graveyard for all the abandoned iOS projects I've done since literally 2011.
Casey:
All of this stuff is stuff that I haven't looked at in three, four, five, six, seven years.
Casey:
There's a whole bunch of copies of fast text apparently floating around somewhere on my drive that are not 64-bit.
Casey:
No way.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
There's a Google Talk plugin that I don't think exists anymore.
Casey:
The stuff that you were saying from Ecamm, that seems to be most of it.
Casey:
UnrarX, if you were to ever find something that falls off the back of a truck, which I would never do, that is convenient.
Casey:
I'm sure there's something more modern and better now.
Casey:
But yeah, that's about it for me.
John:
Can't copy and paste from the system report window?
John:
That is not a good Mac app.
Yeah.
John:
not a good anyway i have a lot i think about half of the things listed in that little window that's surprising all right but but it's it's tons of crap stuff from windows xp why the hell is even showing that it's probably like vmware exposing that i suppose i would guess is your processor 64 pitch on or is it too old to be 64 64 uh oh disco is not going to work anymore
John:
The iWork Tour.
John:
Oh, wow.
John:
WDOC Bingo app.
John:
Halo.
John:
Halo's not going to run it.
John:
Yeah, all the games are going to break, obviously.
John:
That's probably going to be the biggest loss.
John:
Not that I play Mac games a lot, but everyone's going to launch one and play with it.
John:
Just those Mac games are either made by porting companies that don't exist anymore.
John:
If they do exist, there's no way they're going to update them.
John:
There's never going to be 64-bit ports of any of that stuff.
John:
That's kind of sad.
John:
That's why I hope there's a VM solution or something like that, because these games don't take a lot of power.
John:
They could run fine in emulation, not emulation, but you know what I mean, in some kind of virtualized environment.
John:
I don't even know if VMs would target that type of scenario.
John:
On an OS doesn't allow 30-bit executables run a VM that can somehow run 32-bit.
John:
I don't even know if they can do that.
John:
I hope somebody does something.
John:
Oh, iWeb.
John:
iWeb's 32-bit.
John:
The backup application.
John:
Remember that?
John:
She had like a little umbrella when Apple made a backup application.
Marco:
That was before my time, I think.
Casey:
Yeah, same.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's the type of thing where you can plan and you can think what's going to break.
John:
And I'm sure the Apple installer will have a stage that tells you these are the apps that aren't going to run anymore.
John:
They tend to be pretty good about that.
John:
But at that point, what are you going to do?
John:
Stop the install?
John:
I mean...
John:
save list of them take a screenshot take a picture of your screen with your phone to remember which applications i mean you'll find out when you kind of like i used to find out when i'd upgrade it to any of the versions upgrade to like snow leopard and half my applications have like the circle with a line through it over the icon because they don't run on this version of the os anymore it's not because of any sort of bit transition it's just like nope not compatible with this version of the os at all that happens all the time but i feel like this is going to be the big one right and to be clear i you know i accept this as a
John:
You have to do this every once in a while.
John:
You can't keep all the old software running forever.
John:
It's counterproductive.
John:
You just end up being Windows.
John:
So I think it's good to clean this stuff out.
John:
It's an opportunity to find new, interesting, better alternatives.
John:
I'm happy finding that Ena or whatever application because I'm glad someone's developing.
John:
Someone who...
John:
has some of the similar values to me in terms of configurability and UI and feature set, is making a video player for the Mac.
John:
It is not even Marzipan.
John:
Like, what's even going on?
John:
When's the last time we saw a new Mac app?
Casey:
Real-time follow-up from a friend of the show, Steve Trouten-Smith.
Casey:
He posted to Twitter a couple of weeks ago, which I did not notice or didn't remember.
Casey:
There's a way to actually force your Mac to run only in 64-bit mode, which I haven't looked into the instructions yet, but we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
So you could boot into this 64-bit only mode and see how many things fall apart to kind of get a taste for how screwed you are.
John:
Yeah, it's not entirely representative because there's parts of the OS that are 32-bit that will presumably be ported, so you don't have to worry about them, but it'll be broken.
John:
But yeah, you can...
John:
definitely find out which your apps aren't going to work but like part of it is which apps aren't going to work and part of it is just to find out uh which one of these developers is going to release 64 bit version because i bet a lot of them are like there's some you know it's still a developed application and they just never saw they need to be 64 bit and they're going to release a 64 bit version but they're not going to release it until they have to essentially until this os is out for real
John:
Um, so even if you find them, it doesn't mean for sure you're not gonna be able to run it.
John:
Just maybe go to their website.
John:
See the last time I was updated, send their support person an email and see if you get a response and say, so are you going to make a 64 bid version of this?
John:
And if you don't get a reply, that probably means no.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
So hopefully it won't be too bad.
Casey:
But I bet you there's going to be a lot of whining about random things that just stopped working that nobody expected to stop working.
John:
And speaking of the end of this thing is about they're finally upgrading to a more modern version of Python and Ruby.
John:
Command line stuff or other sort of, I mean, obviously the stuff with the ship is the operating system.
John:
That's fine.
John:
But if you're like me and compile a bunch of software out of the box, I think most of my compile stuff is 64 bit.
John:
But
John:
There's another situation where if there is anything built with 32-bit, it probably means that no one has bothered messing with it for such a long time that it just happens to build using Apple's GCC lookalike emulation in 32-bit mode.
John:
And when 64-bit comes, I mean, I guess you can still compile a 32-bit executable, I suppose, with the GCC's cross-compile thing, but you can't run it.
John:
And to answer the chat room's question, no, I'm not going to use Homebrew.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think it'll work out.
John:
I wish, yeah.
John:
It's one of the few times that I wish, I don't wish I was still writing the reviews, but I wish I had already written the review because I would know the answer to a lot more to these questions.
John:
Nice.
John:
Because when you're forced to write the review, you're forced to learn the answer to all these questions, and now instead I'm just asking the questions to the air, and I've got to read someone else's really big review.
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This is longer than ATP has been running, long before they were a sponsor of this show, of course.
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Casey:
All right, let's move to Ask ATP, and we start with Alex White, who writes, I hear Syracuse say that he writes lots of code comments.
Casey:
Many coders today consider comments to be a quote-unquote code smell.
Casey:
That is to say, it's not good.
Casey:
Why does John think that they are valuable?
Casey:
And Alex wanted to chime in that they also think that they are valuable, for the record.
John:
I mean, I suppose...
John:
Margaret probably doesn't have too much experience with other programmers, so I'll ask maybe.
John:
Have you ever met someone who considers comments to be a code smell?
John:
Never.
Casey:
No, I don't think so.
Casey:
Not that I can recall.
Casey:
I would presume at some point or another I...
Casey:
I don't think I've heard anyone explicitly state that they think it's a smell, but certainly by virtue of the lack of comments in their code, you can kind of deduce that they think it's a bit of a smell.
Casey:
But no, I don't think I've ever seen anyone thumping their chest saying, this is gross, get it out of here.
Marco:
I can guess the logic behind it.
Marco:
I think there's two arguments against comments that I can think of.
Marco:
One would be the code should be self-documenting, and the second would be that comments don't update themselves when the code changes.
Marco:
If you refactor or rewrite or change something, there's a chance the comments could be out of date.
Marco:
Besides those two things, which aren't massive problems, I don't write a ton of comments
Marco:
So maybe I'm the wrong person to talk about this, but I don't think comments indicate technical debt or bad code smell or anything in and of themselves.
Marco:
I think they can reflect other problems maybe, but the presence or absence of comments doesn't itself indicate much of anything.
John:
yeah the self-documenting thing is is what i was thinking of is probably the strongest reason that they're not updating stuff is like one that doesn't doesn't make any sense like you control both of them so yeah they could get out of sync but you could also have random lines of garbage code and dead code like is code a code smell anyway um for for the self-documenting
John:
Let's get into, I was forced to try to explain this to my son because he's doing programming.
John:
I was trying to tell him how to write good comments.
John:
This is all just basic advice that you hear from when you're learning programming, but it's worth...
John:
worth talking about for a non-programmer audience that may be listening to this and just about to fast forward.
John:
Hi, Jason, because we're talking about programming.
John:
The self-documenting thing is like the code should be obvious in itself.
John:
You shouldn't need a comment to explain it because if you have some code that's super clever and you need to write a thing about like, I know you can't figure out what this is doing by looking at it, but let me explain.
John:
And that's a sign that you're being too clever for your own good.
John:
And there is definitely a too clever angle.
John:
But on the flip side of that, in terms of like documenting the code,
John:
Self-documenting code, as in I can tell what that line is doing, is not really what the purpose comments are supposed to serve.
John:
So the canonical example of a bad comment that we've all seen is, and I can't even use this in Swift anymore.
John:
He was doing Swift, so I had to self-edit myself.
John:
Instead of saying I++, you can't do it.
Anyway.
John:
i plus equals one or i plus plus or whatever you're taking a variable and you're incrementing if i want so you that would be the code why they took out plus plus and swift don't even get me started on this marco don't even get me started this makes me so angry why they didn't take it out i don't think it was ever there
Casey:
No, it was there.
John:
It was briefly, I don't know.
John:
Swift 2?
John:
Yeah, it was early.
Casey:
I can't handle this conversation.
John:
He literally can't even.
Marco:
Swift is such a dick.
Marco:
Why?
John:
Why does it have to be such a dick all the time?
John:
Because of post-increment and pre-increment.
John:
Anyway.
John:
That's not really what we're talking about here.
John:
I'm going to use I++ to pretend we're objective C or C++.
John:
And the canonical example of a bad comment is add one to I. Like, that's the comment.
Marco:
Right, right.
John:
So that's, for non-programmers, you know, plus plus means just take the variable and add one to it.
John:
It's a short way of writing that, right?
John:
And if your comment says add one to I, that is a useless garbage comment because anybody who is...
John:
a programmer knows what i plus plus does and you writing add one to i does not add any information whatsoever like it's just it's just noise it's forcing someone to read it before they get angry by the time they finish reading like oh great that doesn't help right
John:
So self-documenting code, I++, arguably, if you're an experienced programmer, is self-documenting.
John:
You look at it, that's the whole line, there's no other, it's not in the middle of a big complicated expression, it's just on a line by itself, or I plus equals one, or I equals I plus one.
John:
It's self-documenting.
John:
But what you write comments about is not what a litem code is doing.
John:
I mean, there's lots of things you write comments about, but I'm starting at the micro level here.
John:
It's why it's doing it.
John:
So to give an example, I ran across this on the same day I was trying to explain comments to my son.
John:
It was some actual coded work that I was looking at that someone else wrote.
John:
And it was like, if interval greater than one and value greater than equal threshold, do whatever.
John:
It was a conditional and an if.
John:
You look at that, and you're like, I know what all those operators mean.
John:
I know what a greater than means.
John:
I know what greater than or equals means.
John:
The variables were named reasonably.
John:
Intervals, like some interval the thing is taking place, and threshold is like some value when it's whatever, right?
John:
You don't need to comment on that.
John:
The stupid comment would be, if interval is greater than one, or if you write the English version of it, or if value is greater than or equal to threshold, or whatever.
John:
Anyway.
John:
But the question was, the question that a comment would need to explain here, and I think this is the annotation I added to the code review, was you should put a comment on this thing not explaining what the code does, but explaining why it's doing this.
John:
And in this case, it was like, the question is, why is it greater than or equal to instead of greater than?
John:
And why are you checking if the interval is greater than 1?
John:
Like, why do you care if the interval is greater than 1 before you check the threshold?
John:
Right?
John:
Now, I more or less knew why, but that's the type of thing you put in a comment.
John:
It's like, well, if we do this for fractional intervals less than 1, and because the conditional is greater than or equal to, and the thresholds are integers, but the interval is afloat, you may end up redoing this check multiple times per second because...
John:
You'll check again every tenth of a second, but you won't pass the threshold until you get to a certain point.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like I'm I'm explaining it poorly, but like it's it's more obvious if you're a programmer and have done stuff like this before.
John:
But the point is, that's what you write the comment about and explain.
John:
This isn't a mistake.
John:
I didn't accidentally put greater than equal to this comparison to the interval is not redundant code that is pointless because interval is always going to be greater than one.
John:
what you have to do is explain the reason this is a double conditional is because in the situation because one's an integer and one's a float in the situation where this one is less than one you don't want to check this multiple times because it would be inefficient that's what you write in the comment and that's like the lowest level comment i'm talking about moving all the way up to a comment about what the hell this function is supposed to do broadly speaking what arguments does it take what return value does it have what exceptions could it throw in this structure's ways to do that depending on your language
John:
classes what the hell's the point of this class what is it supposed to do what are its responsibilities broadly speaking right in a large function break it up into pieces this is the part where we do the setup this is the part where we do the work this is the part where we do the cleanup like that's what comments are for they're not for tell me what this line of code does right it's about the why and about the the overall design the best comments you see like a lot of examples in apple's code where they'll do little ascii art diagrams of
John:
in-memory structures for nitty-gritty code that's doing like lots of bit slinging and stuff those are invaluable like the code is obvious look i'm just taking this pointer i'm iterating and like but show me show me the little rectangle show me the region show me how things are done right you can do surprisingly uh rich set of documentation just with little ascii symbols
John:
uh yeah so comments i think are super important doing good comments writing good comments is a skill and it's difficult and you know the first step in that journey is knowing not to write add one to i but there are many many steps after that and i highly endorse getting good at writing comments
Casey:
Yeah, that was the thing I was going to say, which you eventually meandered toward, which was it's less about what and more about why.
Casey:
And I don't think I really ever, I don't think I had intuited that until somewhat recently.
Casey:
Sometimes I would describe what's happening when it was either a little bit clever or a little bit convoluted, which sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two.
Casey:
And it wasn't as often that I would be sure that I was describing the why.
Casey:
But whenever I read that or heard that the first time, it may have been from you for all I know, that really rocked my world in the best possible way.
Casey:
And that is what I would recommend is –
Casey:
Certainly there are times where describing what is important, but you should start from the perspective of, you know, if I'm going to write a comment here, I should describe why I wrote the code that follows or above it or whatever.
John:
The dark version of that is if you work for a jobby job for a big corporation, chances are good that a lot of the comments you write will explain, like, this is like this because the previous version of this product did this.
John:
And when this person was here, he decided it wanted to be like this.
John:
So we did it like that.
John:
And if we ever change this thing, we can get rid of this.
John:
But for now, you have to leave it.
John:
Actually, don't delete this.
John:
Even though it looks super dumb, we have to keep doing it this way.
John:
Here's a URL to something in our bug tracker.
John:
And if you check this part of the code in this file and if it ever changes, you can go back and clean this up like historical documents.
John:
Because, again, you're never going to figure that out by looking at the code.
John:
If you just look at the code, you're like, this makes no sense.
John:
You're like, actually, I know it seems nonsensical and it is bad, but let me explain to you why it's bad and let me stop you from deleting it because if you delete it, stuff will break and you might not realize that.
John:
I mean, you don't feel good writing that comment, but that's an important job of comments in a real code base where you don't have the luxury of just making everything beautiful all the time.
Casey:
It is not often, but there were definitely occasions where I was asked or compelled or what have you to do something that seemed weird or I disagreed with or something like that or just seemed counterintuitive at first glance, even if I did agree with it.
Casey:
And I would definitely write, you know, the following was decided because of such and such conversation between me and such and such person on such and such date.
Casey:
you know, with my name attached to it.
Casey:
So exactly what you said, you know, future me or future coworker or what have you, when they stumble on this and go, what?
Casey:
Then they can see the comment and say, oh, and sometimes to your point, John, it'll be a link to like, you know, God, God help me.
Casey:
It was JIRA at my most recent job, but, you know, a link to an issue tracker that says, okay, let me explain, you know, the history here and what was going through all of our minds at the time.
John:
Be careful with links, though, because if your company changes the issue tracker every three or four years, then all those links break.
John:
Like I said, the main thing I tend to end up commenting here is like, future person, which may be me, at what point is it safe to undo or get rid of this hack?
John:
What conditions must be met?
John:
Like, this is gross.
John:
This shouldn't be done this way.
John:
We have to, for some stupid reason that I want to document, to tell when it's safe to fix this, check this, this, and this.
John:
I found that very valuable as someone who's been at the same job for many years.
John:
to for my past self to leave things like that and go oh i can delete this now because past me says it's okay and you still have to figure out how to test it but it's much more reassuring than like can we change that like it explains this big long-winded reason but does that still apply is that still true of that other module yeah yep
Casey:
You know, I was thinking recently, this is a tangent, but I was thinking recently back to when I worked at Northrop Grumman, and I was working on a code base that was very old, very, very old.
Casey:
It was a C++ code base.
Casey:
I don't know C++ very well anymore, and I don't recall exactly what the timeline was for all these things, but I feel like it predated the C++ standard template library.
Casey:
So strings were not something that existed in C++ when this app had started life.
Casey:
Well, anyway, I bring all this up to say it's a very old app.
Casey:
And I remember at the top of each and every file in the entire app, and this was a big app, like a couple hundred thousand lines or something like that.
Casey:
At the top of every file, there was the entire change history, like all of the basically commit messages that you would add by hand and go through code review.
John:
There was some other way to track that information.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
No, and I know, and now I scoff at it, but at the time it was actually pretty helpful because I forget what – we were on the Rational suite, I think, which was a complete piece of garbage at the time.
Casey:
This was in 06, 07, somewhere in that neck of the woods.
John:
That's great when your version control system requires installation of a kernel extension, which Rational Clearcase did at various points.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, but I just just a few days ago, I was reflecting on that and about how we would have like one or 200 lines for some of these files, you know, like the string that was homebrewed, you know, for this project.
Casey:
That string file had like 100 or 200 lines of just version history and a huge ass comment all the way at the top.
Casey:
And in a lot of ways, I think it was ridiculous.
Casey:
But I also found it somewhat useful.
Casey:
And it was also kind of funny to go spelunking through this version history and see like upper management back when they were just grunts, you know, who had made commits to like the string library.
Casey:
And you think, oh, you know.
Casey:
Sue Smith, when did she ever actually write code?
Casey:
John, you know, whatever, he wrote code?
Casey:
I just knew him as, you know, super director and, you know, Sue's underling or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And it was always funny to see some of those people that had been there forever back when they were, you know, in my position, just slinging code.
John:
That's me now because people come to me and say, I'm editing a bunch of code and I did the whatever blame thing on it and all the lines are from you.
John:
I'm like, yeah.
John:
Yep.
John:
I said eight years ago.
John:
Speaking of version controls, another thing I'm annoyed that my son's programming class doesn't teach him because I mentioned that he should use version control and he just rolled his eyes at me.
John:
But sure enough, I go over and look at his little Google Drive where he has to upload all of his source code.
John:
And what do you see in the folder with all his .swift files?
John:
tank underscore v1 tank underscore v2 tank underscore v you know version control by file naming oh god like because they don't they don't teach them to use version control and even if they did they can't use it in google drive the way they're forced to submit things so and locally locally on on the local mac is that swifi he's doing the same things like
John:
i didn't i didn't i'm not going to go through like i have to learn git or something and honestly i don't even know how git integrates with xcode so i'd probably just hose something so i'm like all right just just keep doing that but know that this is know that this is not what normal people do like this is not the way to do it yeah it's funny you bring that up too because when i graduated from virginia tech with a computer engineering degree i had never used source control like
Casey:
I feel like, and this was in 2004 when I graduated, I feel like the program I went through was really good.
Casey:
I really honestly believe that.
Casey:
But it was very, very, very academic and not terribly pragmatic.
Casey:
And that I somewhat regret.
Casey:
And I had to learn a lot of that stuff in my first job.
Casey:
Like, oh, this would have been so nice to have known about source control three years ago when I was working on school stuff.
Casey:
Although at that point I was such a slacker, I probably would have avoided it anyway.
Casey:
But nevertheless, you know, it was all that stuff like practical software development that I just didn't really get in school.
Casey:
So I don't find it particularly in high school.
Casey:
It's high school that he's in right now, middle school.
John:
High school, yeah.
Casey:
Okay, so yeah, I'm not entirely surprised that a high school program doesn't teach you about source control.
Casey:
But yeah, now, thinking of going back to that time, it's incredible to me that I was able to graduate from a four-year program and get an engineering degree in something that was related to software and still had never used version control at the time.
Casey:
I presume at this point that is very much a part of the curriculum, but back in the early aughts, it was not.
Casey:
Marco, did you ever do anything with it?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
So you never had source control anything in school?
Marco:
No, not at all.
Marco:
We barely learned anything, any kind of practical tooling kind of things like that.
Marco:
My computer science education was much more focused on the theoretical.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Those things are going to go in and out of fashion in a few years, whereas we don't want your education to be out of date in five years when the tools change.
Marco:
And that's fair, but the reality is that just means that you have to pick up all that stuff on the job.
John:
Yeah, colleges generally consider themselves not to be vocational schools, and they're trying to teach you theory and math and stuff that doesn't change, and it makes some sense.
John:
Yeah.
John:
For something like version control, in a four-year program, there's room for one section of one course that teaches you something practical.
John:
It doesn't suddenly turn into Apex Tech for programmers.
John:
It doesn't suddenly turn into just a boot camp.
John:
You're still learning all the CS theory and all the algorithms and all the crazy math and whatever you're learning.
John:
like the timeless stuff that doesn't change or that isn't dated to certain technology or products, but just in one class, maybe in your first class, maybe as like a freshman class just to get you up and running before you know anything anyway, just teach them the basics of version control.
John:
I learned version control not from any of my classes, I'm pretty sure, but because I'm so old, I learned it from the very first web pages showing you how to build web pages and websites, showed you how you can use CVS to help you build websites.
John:
that did not age well that that knowledge and skill and practice did not age well at all and i think i think even in like some of my early jobs i was using subversion like my first job i used cvs yeah and rcs was what i read about in my really old uh beauty man unix books but i never actually used it because i can tell from reading about that it was terrible cvs is so much better
Casey:
until you want to delete a directory yeah just gotta fix stuff in the attic everything will be fine all right let's move on the next ask atp question is from dan provost friend of the show and dan writes i'd love to hear your methodology this is mostly for john i'd love to hear your methodology for rating movies on letterboxd or letterboxd i give way too many movies either 3.5 or 4 stars my system is broken
John:
I mean my system my system I use is similar to what I use to music which is like it's a little bit different so for movies like we've talked about this on I've talked about this a lot of my podcasts of best versus favorite is this your favorite song or is this the best song in your collection and for songs I tend to lean more on the favorite side like the songs that I like a lot they may not be the world's best song but they may get
John:
in very high ratings because i like them we talked about this last time with like songs with catchy music that i like but with stupid lyrics right movies for whatever reason i lean slightly more in the direction of best so i will only give a five as you know they do star ratings up to five i only give a five star rating to a movie that i think is just excellent it's not perfect five doesn't mean perfect but it means
John:
There are very few movies that are better than this.
John:
This is the cream of the crop.
John:
This is a great, great movie.
John:
It does everything well.
John:
Everything that it's set out to do, it does well.
John:
Even if it's the type of movie I don't like, I might give something five stars because I think it was like
John:
an amazingly executed movie in a genre that i'm not that interested in so it's not my favorite movie but i would give it five stars that's rare but i'm saying i just lean slightly more in that direction so the fives are reserved for movies that i think are just unassailable like you can find things to poke at them that are wrong but in general they do everything they're supposed to do they have some exceptional elements and they have nothing super bad about them
John:
Once you reserve the fives for those, you realize there aren't that many fives out there in the world.
John:
Like the best picture winner are the Oscars every year.
John:
Chances of that being a five are pretty low lately.
John:
So the fives are just, you know, every once in a while a movie will come along that you think is a five.
John:
So cut them out.
John:
You don't have to worry about them.
John:
It's going to be like a handful of movies.
John:
Now you're working with one through four.
Yeah.
John:
Four are movies that are really, really good, but there's at least one thing that you're like, eh, that could have been a little bit better.
John:
That's what the fours are.
John:
Three and a half is, this was a good movie, but there is something obvious wrong with it that I don't have to think too hard about.
John:
They blew it in one particular aspect, and it's not like an eh, it's like, oh, that part wasn't good, but...
John:
you know, or, or that, that aspect of it could have been a little bit better, but overall it was a pretty good movie.
John:
Three is my thresholds for liked, didn't, didn't like it.
John:
If it's a three star, it's like the minimum, uh, that I'm going to give a movie that I mostly liked, but it's got a lot of issues.
John:
Right.
John:
But I still like, yeah, I still had fun.
John:
It was fine, but it's not really a particularly good movie.
Um,
John:
and then anything below that i don't think i have any two and a half but twos ones like i don't even use halves down those ranges those are movies that you actively disliked and not only do you actively dislike them but they're not good movies they they didn't have any redeeming value they weren't put together well everything various aspects of them were bad that's just a question of
John:
where the garbage is in it so i think i spend a lot of time hanging out in the maybe i do to two and a half two and a half three three and a half range to break into a four you have to be pretty good four and a half is like it's a five except there's like one little niggle that is just bothering me and i can't give it a five right so i think if you did a distribution of my movies i'm hoping it would
John:
show that most of the stuff is hanging out around the threes you know two and a half three three and a half range anyway that's that's my system and i'm trying to use the whole range i suppose i don't use one and two enough like what distinguishes a one and two probably my hatred for it because like two is basically like thumbs down one is like thumbs down and also i don't really i actively dislike you and half is when i can't give it zero
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
Let's just never have you rate your co-hosts.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
M Rosilius writes, Hey, Marco teases that he has a new backpack a couple of months ago, but he didn't provide any details.
Casey:
Can you share the bag and contents you're bringing with you to WWDC?
Casey:
This is actually relevant for the pre-show that may or may not have even made it into the final recording.
Casey:
It will.
Casey:
But what would you say you're going to treat as your WWDC-specific everyday carry, Marco?
John:
So it isn't every day, is it?
John:
It's going to have a generator and a really big knife.
Marco:
Yeah, I went on this kind of backpack odyssey over the last couple of years.
Marco:
And I mentioned on this show before that I was a big fan of the peak design everyday backpack, but that I had kind of a love-hate relationship with it.
Marco:
uh, that I liked a lot about it.
Marco:
I used it for a long time, but I, I, so I had the, the smaller of the two, the 20, 20 liter.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
20, 20 or 25, whatever it is.
Marco:
Uh, the smaller of the two peak design backpacks.
Marco:
I loved so much about it, but it just never held enough stuff.
Marco:
It just, it was just way too cramped.
Marco:
And the big one I saw, um, actually last year at WWDC, um,
Marco:
Two different people came up to me, because I had mentioned it recently before that.
Marco:
Two different people came up to me and showed me they had the larger one so I could see it in person.
Marco:
And I looked at it, and I took one look at it, and I'm like, oh, that's way too big for me.
Marco:
I can't pull off the larger one.
Marco:
So I was kind of stuck.
Marco:
Now, as I was complaining about the smaller one, one of the very first responses I got for it was somebody who said...
Marco:
I had the smaller one too.
Marco:
I had all the same complaints as you.
Marco:
I got the bigger one and it's so much better and it solved all my problems.
Marco:
So just get the bigger one.
Marco:
Just try it.
Marco:
But again, I had seen them in person and I thought it's way too big on me.
Marco:
It would look ridiculous.
Marco:
It looks comical.
Marco:
It's just giant.
Marco:
Forget it.
Marco:
And so I tried a bunch of other ones.
Marco:
I tried the Tom Bin Synapse 25, which I believe I mentioned here on the show that it didn't fit at all.
Marco:
The shape it formed against my back when there was stuff in it was really, really badly resting on me.
Marco:
It was clearly meant for people who are taller than me.
Marco:
And so all the love for the Synapse 25 I understand from certain perspectives, but it just didn't fit me.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
And the Synapse 19, I didn't want to try because from what I understand, it doesn't really fit a 15-inch laptop very well.
Marco:
And while I don't currently have a 15-inch, I want the ability to have one in the future because I do waffle between 13 and 15-inch laptops every couple of years.
Marco:
So I thought...
Marco:
Well, I'll try a few others.
Marco:
I tried the Nomadic Travel Pack.
Marco:
And by the way, this is a good time to shout out again to our friend Chase Reeves.
Marco:
Chase Reeves does a wonderful YouTube channel and a website at bagworks.co where he reviews high-end and mid-range to high-end like backpacks and travel bags and other travel gear like that.
Marco:
And he's, you know, super like backpack nerd.
Marco:
And so I love watching his videos for lots of reasons.
Marco:
I mean, he's also just a really fun person.
Marco:
But, you know, for bag reviews, you can't go wrong with Chase Reeves and bagworks.co.
Marco:
Anyway, so I was going through all his recommendations, watching all his videos, thinking, I got to find like my ideal backpack.
Marco:
Got to find it.
Marco:
Got to find it.
Marco:
And I, you know, I tried a few.
Marco:
And eventually I just, after going through a whole bunch of other bags and not liking them as much as I love hated my
Marco:
Peak Design Everyday 20 liter, I decided, you know what?
Marco:
Let me just freaking try the big one.
Marco:
It's really big, but it's fine.
Marco:
And I'm, like, happy with it, finally.
Marco:
The bigness does actually solve many of its problems.
Marco:
Like, one of my big problems with the small everyday bag is that the side pockets...
Marco:
were so small as to be fairly useless.
Marco:
It was almost like, why do they even put these side pockets in here?
Marco:
And the big one, the side pockets are just bigger enough that it's better.
Marco:
It works.
Marco:
The laptop compartment is still really tight if you want to carry an iPad and a laptop, but it's doable.
Marco:
And it's way more comfortable when getting a laptop in and out than the smaller one.
Marco:
The actual main cargo space is bigger and I'm able to fit more stuff.
Marco:
Not like massively more, but more.
Marco:
And it's enough.
Marco:
I actually still have both sizes.
Marco:
And for one of the – I took a day trip recently and I decided let me load up the small one and bring that to see like if I miss it.
Marco:
And I did immediately.
Marco:
I was like, I can't fit anything in this thing.
Marco:
And, uh, and so I, I fully converted now to the big one.
Marco:
Uh, so I'm, I'm happy with that as my bag.
Marco:
Now it is a big bag and I occasionally, actually I frequently need or want a smaller bag for less needs when I'm not like packing up for a big trip or bringing a bunch of gear with me.
Marco:
I'd like to have a smaller bag available.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So I've gone through a similar backpack odyssey with that.
Marco:
One could argue I should just use the smaller one of the everyday bags as my small bag.
Marco:
And that's a reasonable argument, which I might end up doing.
Marco:
I'm currently using the archetype dash pack.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
It's not like a stellar bag, but it's nice.
Marco:
I don't know if I'm going to stick with the archetype long term.
Marco:
If this is my I'm done small backpack, probably not because there are aspects of its design that I don't use.
Marco:
It has this weird sideways laptop compartment that goes right against your back that you access from the back side of it.
Marco:
And I just don't use that compartment at all because it's stupid.
Marco:
I just put the laptop in the main compartment where there is a pocket for it also.
Marco:
I don't know why there's this weird thing on the back.
Marco:
But anyway, this bag is not perfect, but it's fine.
Marco:
But my small bag needs are still unresolved.
Marco:
My big bag need, though, is pretty well solved by the Peak Everyday 30.
Marco:
As for what's in these bags, I decided a long time ago
Marco:
That I wanted my travel bag.
Marco:
Whatever my travel backpack was.
Marco:
In this case the Peak Design.
Marco:
I wanted to always keep in it.
Marco:
The things I would need.
Marco:
Electronics wise.
Marco:
When I was traveling.
Marco:
Which means buying extra things.
Marco:
Casey you discovered this religion recently too.
Marco:
It's so much nicer.
Marco:
if you can buy an extra charger and buy an extra cable and buy, you know, buy extra copies of any tech that you need when you're traveling and just keep them in your backpack all the time.
Marco:
Never take them out unless you are using them during traveling.
Marco:
That is the only time you take them out.
Marco:
Otherwise they stay there.
Marco:
And that way you do have kind of this go bag of, at least for tech stuff, where like, you know, you can just like put your laptop in this bag if it isn't already in the bag.
Marco:
And just take it with you.
Marco:
And you know you have everything you need.
Marco:
So laptop charger, phone charger, if those are different things.
Marco:
Any cables you need.
Marco:
If you want to have a phone charger for the nightstand for the hotel room, bring that.
Marco:
The long cable for that, which is nice.
Marco:
That's another tip.
Marco:
Get the two meter lightning cable for your phone for traveling.
Marco:
It's really nice in the hotel rooms.
Marco:
So that kind of stuff.
Marco:
Keep everything separate.
Marco:
And I also have this old person pill box.
Marco:
that I got from Amazon for like $2 for $7.
Marco:
And it's like this folding closed, sticks together with Magnet's pill organizer box that has just different little flip compartments that you can put different pills in.
Marco:
And I put in there a small amount of
Marco:
all sorts of over-the-counter drugs that I occasionally need while traveling.
Marco:
Antacids, ibuprofen, allergy pills, Dramamine, stuff that I frequently will need while traveling that is a pain to have to buy every time or is very expensive to buy a tiny amount of in an airport or something.
Marco:
And it's really nice to have that always with me.
Marco:
Like, oh, if I'm on the plane and I decide, crap, I need some Advil right now, I have it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's always there.
Marco:
So I have that in there.
Marco:
I have a couple of packets of fancy instant hipster coffee, Swift Cup coffee.
Marco:
That's my current favorite one.
Marco:
High end instant coffees that are surprisingly good.
Marco:
They're a little expensive.
Marco:
Usually they're about between like $1.50 and $2 each.
Marco:
So they're surprisingly expensive, but they're very good.
Marco:
um so you know i have my own coffee and that way like when you are on a plane say or somewhere like in a horrible place to get coffee you can just ask for a cup of hot water and you can then take out your little packet when nobody's looking and dump it into your cup and try to hide the fact that you're being a total jerk by making your own instant hipster coffee instead of taking the plain coffee uh but it's totally worth being that jerk because it is so much better
Marco:
What else do I keep in that bag?
Marco:
Dongles, any kind of dongle I might need.
Marco:
I have recently entered the sub-bag lifestyle for certain things.
Marco:
I certainly love packing cubes when packing a big bag with clothes and everything.
Marco:
In the backpack, I don't use them quite as much, but I do like having a couple of small pouches for tech miscellany.
Marco:
Stuff I don't usually need, but I might.
Marco:
So that's things like a microSD to full-size SD card adapter, the little USB-C and lightning dongles to headphones, stuff like that.
Marco:
The little tech crap that you occasionally need, a spare SD card, stuff like that.
Marco:
I have little tiny Tom Bin zipper pouches for those that I shove pretty much everywhere.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
And, uh, and yeah, and that's, that's most of the stuff that stays there all the time.
Marco:
Oh, like a little tiny notebook and pen.
Marco:
Um, I think the notebook's from Muji, like some like small thing optimized for low weight and low size.
Marco:
Cause I don't usually need to handwrite anything, but occasionally I do.
Marco:
Um, I always carry earplugs with me, uh, when traveling because I will occasionally find myself in a very loud place and I don't want hearing damage.
Marco:
Uh, so always carry earplugs.
Marco:
If I'm going on a plane, I will bring my noise-canceling headphones, currently the Sony MDR, whatever, whatever, Mark II.
Marco:
I should mention my travel setup for powering and charging my devices is all USB-C.
Marco:
I have moved everything over to USB-C.
Marco:
Not all the peripherals that I have are USB-C yet, but all of the power sources, and therefore all of the charging cables I have are USB-C.
Marco:
I only keep one USB-A cable with me.
Marco:
It's one of those multi-enders, where you have USB-A on one end, and then micro, C, and lightning...
Marco:
things you could stick like little duck heads that you could stick onto the other end.
Marco:
But everything else I have is USB-C.
Marco:
So all of my lightning cables, with the exception of that one, every other lightning cable is an Apple USB-C to lightning cable.
Marco:
My charging cables are all Apple USB-C to C charging cables because they're super thin to the Apple ones.
Marco:
And then my laptop charges with C. My headphones charge with a C to micro adapter.
Marco:
And yeah, it's wonderful.
Marco:
All the power bricks are C bricks.
Marco:
This is an area that has taken great strides recently.
Marco:
I guess I'll put in the show notes, I have a couple of USB-C power bricks that are really nice.
Marco:
There's the new Gallium Nitro.
Marco:
Great, gallium nitride, whatever the new GAN standard or silicon alternative is for making power transformers has allowed much smaller power bricks than before.
Marco:
So now you can get a little 30-watt power brick
Marco:
or a 45 watt power brick that's significantly smaller than they were before.
Marco:
So I now use those on my laptop.
Marco:
So I don't even carry the Apple 60 watt brick anymore.
Marco:
I use this like RavPower 45 watt thing that is smaller than Descartes and it weighs almost nothing.
Marco:
And it's 45 watts, which is enough for my travel needs.
Marco:
And so I use that to power my laptop.
Marco:
And I have a couple of smaller ones, like little 18-watt things, little 30-watt things for powering my phone.
Marco:
And those are powerful not to fast charge a phone or an iPad, but they're not that much bigger than a phone or iPad power brick would be.
Marco:
So I have a few USB-C power bricks, a few USB-C to C or Lightning cables, and my one multi-cable, and that's it.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
John:
You might want to reconsider the medicine thing, because the idea of having stuff always in the bag, writing writing figures is fine for things that don't deteriorate with age.
John:
But I think some medicines do either lose their potency with age or other bad things happen to them, even if they're sealed in bottles.
John:
I don't know exactly what you're keeping in there, but it's worth looking for all the things you keep in there.
John:
If this has been in there for five years, is it any good anymore?
John:
Should I still be swallowing it?
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
Oh, and the one big important thing I have come to in the last six months or so is that I keep two bags.
Marco:
Like I keep the big bag and the small bag.
Marco:
All of those exact same things are in both bags.
Marco:
I have duplicates of everything.
Marco:
So I can take either bag with me.
Marco:
And I know it's going to have a set of USB-C to whatever cables, the multi-cable.
Marco:
I have two identical pillboxes of all those pills.
Marco:
They both have instant coffee in them.
Marco:
Everything is duplicated except for the laptop.
Marco:
I only have one.
Marco:
have one laptop but do you though all the accessories actually all the accessories all those like cables chargers you know pills notebook pen paper like all that stuff is all duplicated between the two bags so at any time I can just grab either one of the bags and know that I have all those basics covered
Marco:
And that has been really nice, too.
Marco:
That has been almost as nice as having all the stuff stay in your travel bag in the first place.
Marco:
I think if you are leading a multi-bag lifestyle, that's the way to do it.
Marco:
Pick two bags, make your big one and your small one, and load them both up with all the basics so that they're always available to you.
John:
So you either have a lot of willpower or it's a testament to your amazing conspicuous consumption that you don't find yourself digging into one of those bags when you just can't find that one adapter that you need.
John:
And you're like, oh, I know where one is.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, no, no.
John:
There's one in my bag, which is a no-no you're not supposed to do.
John:
But the only reason you wouldn't do it is if you never find yourself in that situation because you bought 150 of them to be all over your house.
John:
Like the luxury of buying duplicates and triplicates of all your things and having the bags is nice, but that can get expensive.
John:
And unless you travel a lot, maybe not entirely worth it.
John:
And the second thing is, as your kids get older, they will probably have fewer compunctions about, oh, I know where there's, I mean, to give an example and not to turn this into directives, I know where there's a nail clipper.
John:
in dad's backpack because he always keeps one there so guess who's always digging into my backpack because they can't find any of the other nail clippers because they left them who knows where and then i go and go for my nail clipper and it's not there why is it not there a kid took it so just wait until your kids want your adapters just wait i mean the good thing is when you go to an all usbc travel lifestyle you actually don't need very many different things like there actually aren't that many like by quantity there aren't that many different things
Marco:
And it actually isn't that expensive to outfit a backpack with these basics.
Marco:
Because you're really talking about two or three little power bricks, maybe three or four cables at most.
Marco:
You're not talking a whole lot of stuff.
Casey:
Something that I've discovered recently is I have my GoPack, which we'll put a link in the show notes to that, and that's fairly large.
Casey:
Actually, I guess all of it is self-created, but some of that is self-created because I like to be a little over-prepared, and I have a few things in there that I probably won't need, but you never really know.
Marco:
Do you have an entire generator in your backpack?
Casey:
No, I wish I did.
Casey:
Man, that would be convenient.
Casey:
A little heavy.
Casey:
Heavy, but convenient.
Casey:
But what I've done is I have a Tombin organizer pouch, which is one of those zipper clear pouches, probably the same thing you were talking about earlier, Marco.
Casey:
And I have that clipped to the inside of my Tombin Copilot, which is the bag I use more often than not these days because I don't have a 15-inch MacBook Pro anymore.
Casey:
Well, anyways, in this little organizer pouch, which is actually quite small, I keep one lightning to USB-C cable, one of those multi-ender cables that you were talking about.
Casey:
I think Gruber had recommended it like a couple of months back, and basically every nerd bought one, including me.
Casey:
So it's the USB-A to C, mini, and micro, I think, or something like that.
Casey:
It's what you described before.
Marco:
C, mini, and lightning.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's right.
Casey:
I keep the Luna display in there.
Casey:
I keep, as you had said, the USB-C to headphone adapter and a lightning to headphone adapter.
Casey:
I keep a mini SD and full-size SD card reader.
Casey:
It's the same thing.
Casey:
It's the same unit.
Casey:
It can do both.
Casey:
I keep a little tiny, tiny, tiny dongle that's a USB A to C converter, uh, because you never really know.
Casey:
And then a little tiny, um, I don't know who makes this, but it's a, a power port mini, which is a two port.
Casey:
Oh, right on the side.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's an Anker two-port USB-A charger.
Casey:
So think of something that's about the size of an iPhone brick, but actually has two ports.
Casey:
And so this is convenient if you're in an airport and me and Aaron want to both charge our phones.
Casey:
Well, actually, we'd probably be doing that off of my Away suitcase.
Casey:
I don't even know if they're sponsoring this week.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But that really is the truth.
Casey:
That's probably how we would be doing it.
Casey:
But if not, we use this little Anker PowerPort Mini.
Casey:
And all of that lives – now, admittedly, it gets crammed into – but all of that lives in this little pouch, and that pouch can go back and forth between the two bags.
Casey:
Now, in a perfect world, yes, I agree with you.
Casey:
I would have an identical pouch for the other bag that I used to use from time to time when I had a big laptop, and now I almost never use it, which is a Tombin Cadet.
Casey:
But anyways, this little pouch, this is my little mini GoPack, and the sanctity of this is paramount.
Casey:
This is what John was alluding to earlier.
Casey:
Nothing leaves this unless it goes back in the moment I have finished using it, and I am religious about that.
Casey:
So in a perfect world, I would never go into this unless I'm traveling, but in the case that I do occasionally go into this, even when it's at home, I am very...
Casey:
very strict, and I will be until Declan is of age and Michaela later, I am very strict about nothing leaving that unless it is absolutely necessary and then it gets dropped right back in as soon as it's done.
Marco:
By the way, this whole bag thing, my whole cables and power and everything...
Marco:
this is why I want the iPhone to go USB-C.
Marco:
Oh, agreed.
Marco:
Because right now, I have C to C and C to Lightning cables, and I have to have these two different cables, and there currently is nobody who makes cables that are C to multi-ender Lightning or C.
Marco:
Those don't exist as far as I know.
Marco:
And if they did, they would probably be severely limited with how much power they can transfer or something like that.
Marco:
Right now, I can take a C2C cable and charge my laptop with Apple's little skinny C2C... Yeah, their charge cable, the one-meter charge cable.
Marco:
It's a C2C cable.
Marco:
It's like as thick as an old lightning cable, which is like not very thick at all.
Marco:
And it's very, you know, small, light, thin, flexible.
Marco:
And it can plug into a tiny like 30 watt or 45 watt, you know, GAN power brick.
Marco:
And I have what used to be like this big bulky setup to charge a laptop.
Marco:
is now this tiny little like you know thin light small thing that's way cheaper too like you know the combined cost of the cable and the power brick is like 50 bucks way cheaper than buying a separate laptop charger used to be and you can keep it in your bag and if you don't need it at that moment you can use the exact same thing to charge an ipad and if you switch out the cable and put the lightning version on you can use the exact same thing to charge a phone
Marco:
And if the phone also goes USB-C, that makes all of this even better.
Marco:
I will very quickly throw away most of my lightning cables if that happens because I have lightning cables all over the place, like just in case I need, you know, for a phone or whatever.
Marco:
And it's like, man, that cannot happen soon enough.
Marco:
Like the transition, hopefully, of a phone to USB-C will make this even better, even simpler.
Marco:
It'll make me carry even fewer cables.
Casey:
Yeah, I am definitely ready for the iPhone to go USB-C.
Casey:
I don't expect it to happen quite yet, but I am ready for that life.
Marco:
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Marine Layer.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it in me.
John:
semi real-time follow-up apparently letterboxd does have a view where you can see your average ratings per year i guess a little wonky like back in time for like old movies where i'll like rate one movie for the entire year and that becomes the average rating
John:
uh but looking at the graph you can see my average rating has been going down slightly during like the years where i watch lots of movies my highest rated non my highest rated year with enough samples is 1980 with an average of 4.38 2019's current rating is 2.90 whoo um there's lots of twos around the past five years or so like 2016 is 3.12 it just clears three um
John:
So, yeah, I guess that makes me a tough grader, but I just feel like I'm using the whole range.
John:
I mean, these years, these are years like the 2000s and stuff and where I'm watching lots of movies.
John:
So I feel like the average is representative.
John:
But as I go back in time, either the only movies I even remember from like my childhood are the ones that were really good.
John:
So the average is high or I've only I only have like three movies rated in like 1961 or whatever.
John:
So.
John:
The average is high because, again, I'm reading movies that I've seen that are old because they're probably classics or really good movies.
John:
But, yeah, Letterboxd's got everything.
John:
I'll put that link in the show notes, too.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Marco:
Do you want to talk about your app or do you want to save it for when you ship it?
Casey:
At the moment, I am angling and hurtling toward releasing.
Casey:
It's been extremely fun, extremely stressful, and extremely weird and good.
Casey:
in this last push because, you know, I've been, I've been sending betas or alphas.
Casey:
I've been calling them, whatever.
Casey:
I've been sending builds to, you know, a bunch of friends.
Casey:
And I think my test flight has something like 30 people on it.
Casey:
Most of whom are friends.
Casey:
A few of them are, you know, people that I, that I at least casually know.
Casey:
But it's been a lot of fun building,
Casey:
getting a whole bunch of feedback from a whole bunch of people, most of which has been really tremendous and has made the app a hell of a lot better.
Casey:
Some of which I disagree with, some of which I begrudgingly agree with.
Casey:
Marco and I have been going back and forth on a few things, which sometimes we'll be like, I don't know, I really don't like this.
Casey:
But then it has led one of us, typically Marco, to have an epiphany that has made things really a whole lot better.
Casey:
So it's been...
Casey:
It's been a lot of fun.
Casey:
When you have a regular jobby job, especially if it's a... I don't want to say the word relaxed, but maybe not a fast-paced jobby job.
Casey:
Sometimes you can lose sight of... It's nice at a regular jobby job to have that moment when you have to give the big heave.
Casey:
And I haven't really had to do that in a while because even at my last jobby job...
Casey:
For the most part, the deadlines were self-created.
Casey:
So, you know, oh, well, we didn't hit that deadline.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
It's been a few years since I've had like a really strong deadline.
Casey:
And as I've said in past shows, I really, really, really want to try to at least get this into app review before WWDC, preferably out before WWDC.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
At the very least, I'd like to get an app review on, you know, extremely soon.
Casey:
And having that deadline and then working with all of my friends and whatnot, trying to get this squared away, it has been so stressful and so occasionally frustrating.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Overall, it has been such incredible fun, and I'm really appreciative to a bunch of my friends who have spent an unfair amount of time, and by that I mean unfair to them amounts of time, helping me out this stuff.
Casey:
Marco is a great example of this.
Casey:
My friend Jelly, who does...
Casey:
what is it, Independence?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
The really great podcast with Curtis Herbert and Alice Zhao.
Casey:
I hope I have all that right.
Casey:
That was right off the top of my head.
Casey:
Anyway, Marco and Jelly have been extremely helpful.
Casey:
Ben Rice McCarthy has been extremely helpful.
Casey:
And it's just been a lot, a lot of fun.
Casey:
And I'm stressed out of my mind, but at the same time, I'm really enjoying getting this kind of across the finish line.
Casey:
And I think the thing that's most exciting about it is...
Casey:
It's gone from utter crap, both functionality-wise and looks-wise, to something that was at least somewhat, you know, it was getting there, both in terms of functionality and looks.
Casey:
But now, I don't think this is going to win any design awards by any means.
Casey:
I'm not trying to oversell it, but...
Casey:
I'm pretty proud of how this looks.
Casey:
And as someone who is an okay design critic but has no design eye, I'm pretty happy that Ben and Jelly and Marco have really been able to steer me in the right direction to get this thing looking pretty good.
Casey:
And I know that there's things that Marco still disagrees with, and we don't necessarily need to talk about that now, although we can if it's relevant.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But even with the things that I'm ignoring that Marco's suggesting, I still think this is way better, thanks to Marco and Jelly and Ben's influence, than it would have been if I was left to my own devices.
Casey:
So I thank the three of you particularly, and everyone else has been helping out.
Casey:
It wasn't just the three of you, but I thank the three of you particularly.
Casey:
But it's been a lot of fun.
Casey:
And oh, man, it is.
Casey:
Oh, I'm so stressed.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
Like, I'm really happy, but I'm so stressed.
Marco:
That's part of the process.
Marco:
One thing that I think is going to be telling here, and I don't want you to answer this yet because you don't actually know the answer yet, but I will be asking you at some point in the future whether this is going to be like making videos or whether it's going to be something that you want to actually keep up with.
Marco:
What I think you learned, what I certainly have learned, is that while I
Marco:
kind of learned how to make videos.
Marco:
I hated every minute of it, and I kind of decided, you know what, I probably actually don't enjoy this enough to really keep doing it.
Marco:
And you are going through a lot of stuff now with this app that you either have never had to do or haven't had to do for a long time, or maybe only had to do it on a different scale before, or coming from a different place.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
You are going through all the crap that is necessary to make your own app.
Marco:
All the stuff that you don't have to deal with when you have a full-time job with other people where you're only one cog in the machine.
Marco:
And so you're dealing with a bunch of crap now that you may or may not actually want to do again in the future.
Marco:
And I do not want the answer now, but I will be asking you at some point soon, like...
Marco:
to try to evaluate that, to try to say, is this something that you actually enjoy doing?
Marco:
Because if all this crap that you have to do to get a version 1.0 of an app out the door, you have to get an icon made, get the name squared away, get the app store submission crap, get the in-app purchase, all this stuff that you have to do to get any 1.0 app in the store when it's only you working on it,
Marco:
Is that going to be something that you actually want to do again in the future?
Marco:
Or is it going to be such a grind and it's going to get you so down that you would rather work with other people still and not do stuff on your own?
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's a fair question.
Casey:
It's actually something I was thinking about earlier today.
Casey:
Marco and I were going back and forth a couple of times during the day where he would suggest something and I would either say, wow, that's a great idea.
Casey:
Give me a few minutes or, oh my God, no, I don't want to do that at all.
Casey:
And then oftentimes I would do it and then sometimes we would end up that I would be convinced that Marco was right, but sometimes I ignored him.
Casey:
But anyway, as we were doing this back and forth... And by the way, just a quick sidetrack, if you'll forgive me.
Marco:
I get design feedback from very talented people making very good points about my app all the time.
Marco:
I don't listen to all of it.
Right?
Marco:
Because design suggestions are merely that.
Marco:
They're suggestions.
Marco:
Any designer who's giving something who says it isn't a suggestion is lying to you.
Marco:
It's always a suggestion and sometimes it's a really good suggestion and sometimes they point out problems that maybe you disagree with the way they solved it but are still legitimate problems that you need to solve.
Marco:
But regardless, people's design suggestions are just that.
Marco:
They are suggestions and you don't have to follow them all.
Marco:
Again, it is worth considering why they're making that suggestion and seeing if maybe you can solve it in a different way if you don't like their solution.
Marco:
But it's merely that.
Marco:
It's merely like how other people would do this.
Marco:
And you can take that with a grain of salt if you want to.
Marco:
And for some of these things, you can say, you know what?
Marco:
I appreciate the feedback, but I want to do it my way on this because I think my way is better or this is the way I want to do it.
Marco:
And sometimes you'll be wrong.
Marco:
But that's part of the learning process that you're going through too.
Marco:
You're going to have to figure out for yourself when to take that feedback and when to know not to.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
So an example of this, and I'll be specific because I think it's a really good kind of case study about something that I really enjoyed that happened, I think it was earlier today.
Casey:
It's been such a blur.
Casey:
I've been working kind of nonstop.
Marco:
You sound like six builds today.
Casey:
Yeah, it wasn't six, but it was a bunch.
Casey:
I mean, I've been really trying to get this thing out the door.
Casey:
But the kind of landing screen and a general run of the app is, the way it existed 24 hours or less ago, was that, you know, you have a navigation bar at the top, you have a button at the bottom, and a whole bunch of white space with nothing in the middle.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I didn't love it, but it was not something I was really looking at fixing at the time.
Casey:
And Marco very justifiably said, sometime in the last 24 hours, in a nicer way, basically, you've got to fix this thing, man, because this looks like crap.
Casey:
And Marco had come up with several different ideas, which I ignored, and I put...
Casey:
I did this knowing that it was going to drive you freaking mad, and it did.
Casey:
So not in a screw you, Marco way, just in a I know this is going to really piss him off, and that will cause both he and I to find a solution to this problem.
Casey:
So what I did was I put like a 50% opacity bit of text directly in the center of this humongous swath of white space.
Marco:
Yeah, like you had this button on the bottom that's basically like start.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And there was nothing above it before.
Marco:
So it was a giant white screen with a button like by the home indicator saying start.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yep, yep.
Marco:
And so your solution was to, my suggestion was get rid of the screen entirely, just start.
Casey:
and your solution was to put like a label a text label like in the middle of the white space saying like click down there to start or something and an arrow pointing down and i and i knew that i was never going to ship that for real but i knew it would get both of us riled up enough that it will force us to find a solution so i was basically uh i was i was compensating marco for helping me by pissing him off that's how friends work right
Casey:
But anyway, I bring this up in part to laugh about it, but also in all seriousness, because then what ended up happening was this morning you and I were going back and forth about, you know, what can we do to fix this?
Casey:
And there's some other nuance that I'm going to kind of gloss over here that was important in the context of our conversation.
Casey:
But what we ended up deciding was, hey, what if we move the button to the middle again?
Casey:
And also, when you tapped this Go button, which is the button that would go and search for all these different services for images for all of your contacts, that can use a whole lot of data.
Casey:
And so the way it worked before today was when you tapped that button, it would look and see if you were on cell or if you were on Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And if you were on LTE, it would say, well, are you sure?
Casey:
Because this could use a whole lot of data.
Casey:
And there would be a prompt.
Casey:
And then you could say basically, yeah, yeah, fine, whatever.
Casey:
Or, oh, you're right.
Casey:
I'll do it later.
Casey:
And I never really liked that prompt to begin with, but it was important to me that the user was at least aware that, hey, this is potentially going to use a bunch of data.
Casey:
Are you sure?
Casey:
Well, not only did I not like the prompt, but not the podcast.
Casey:
I love the podcast.
Casey:
I'm talking about the prompt in my app.
Casey:
Anyway, not only did I not like the alert, but on top of that, the code that was holding all that together, I really didn't like.
Casey:
And it was one of those things where I'm not going to fix it right now, but I'm going to have to re-architect this at some point.
Casey:
So I already didn't like that whole block of code.
Casey:
I didn't like this white space.
Casey:
I didn't like the alert.
Casey:
And then what Marco and I ended up concluding was, hey, let's move the button to the middle and put a nice little piece of text below it that basically says, hey, it's really recommended you do this over Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And that solved everything at once.
Casey:
It got rid of, or maybe not solved, but at least dramatically improved everything at once.
Casey:
So it got rid of that huge swath of white space or broke it up, I guess, if nothing else.
Casey:
It got rid of that ugly alert that I really didn't like.
Casey:
It got rid of all the code for that ugly alert that I didn't really like.
Casey:
And in the heat of the moment, like I was never annoyed at Marco, but I was annoyed at the situation because I felt like neither of us were coming up with good answers.
Casey:
And I was just getting frustrated by it.
Casey:
But then when it was mostly Marco, I think, but one way or another, when the two of us reached this conclusion, it was like, oh, this is exactly what I wanted.
Casey:
This is so much better.
Casey:
And I
Casey:
I don't want to put words in your mouth, Marco, but for me, that whole exchange was one of the things I miss most about work.
Casey:
Because even though I do quite like being my own independent person, it is just fun to me anyway to be able to bounce stuff off of someone and work together to find a solution that you're really excited about, if not proud of.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And something that I got thinking about after that whole happy kerfuffle was over was I wonder how much you feel that way as well.
Casey:
And it's okay if you're like, well, I'm just helping out a friend and I really hated every moment of it.
Casey:
Like, whatever.
Casey:
I got what I needed out of it.
Casey:
It's okay.
Casey:
But it's...
Casey:
But I can't help but wonder because you strike me as a little bit more fiercely independent than I am.
Casey:
I wondered, you know, was this fun for Marco or does Marco miss this for Overcast?
Casey:
Perhaps you are getting it from Overcast, just not from me, which is perfectly fine.
Casey:
But, you know, it was a lot of fun for me to have that back and forth with you.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
And I was curious, like, do you...
Casey:
enjoy that sort of thing?
Casey:
Or would you rather just go into your cave?
Casey:
I don't mean that dismissively, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like go into your cave and then come out with this like perfectly hewn piece of, of whatever of app.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I mean, you are on the Overcast beta.
Marco:
You know that that's not how it works usually.
Marco:
As you're alluding to, one of the hardest things as an independent developer is getting good feedback and finding a way to have that feedback loop of iteration with somebody else or with other people's contributions and ideas and
Marco:
And it's funny, as you mentioned, one of the most frustrating feelings is when someone points out a problem with your design and you know they're right, but neither of you have come up with something better yet.
Marco:
And that is part of the fun.
Marco:
That's why you were so mad.
Marco:
Because I get the same kind of feedback too.
Marco:
Somebody will tell me something that's wrong and something I'm proposing on and be like,
Marco:
because they're right that is wrong or this does suck in this way and and i and i just can't figure out anything better yet but eventually you know eventually i do and so where i get this feedback from is a combination of friends tiff and twitter the the best suggestions come from like when i when i kind of like iterate a design on twitter
Marco:
which i do sometimes with overcast where like i'll like post a screenshot like i'm kind of thinking about this what do you think and then i'll get a whole bunch of responses from people and then i'll be like all right well how about this i'll kind of tweak it live like on twitter like and and get feedback that way that's really cool when that happens i don't do it that often but when when i when i have something where that makes sense to do that feedback is always really valuable really excellent um
Casey:
I don't know how much I drove you nuts today, but I will speak for myself in saying I was having a hell of a lot of fun.
Casey:
Even when I was frustrated with what was going on, it was still a hell of a lot of fun just working with somebody, especially someone who I quite like, and working with someone and trying to figure out a solution to a problem.
Casey:
That's...
Casey:
To me, I think that's what engineering is all about, is just looking at the trade-offs and trying to find the best solution you can, given time constraints, given everything that you have in front of you.
Casey:
And that, to me, is the core of engineering.
Casey:
And I know Dr. Drang, if he is listening to this, is just dying right now.
Casey:
But that's what I find most fun about this discipline, which I claim to be engineering.
Casey:
And so I was really enjoying it, and I appreciate all the help and appreciate you taking the time to go back and forth with me.
Casey:
And I think the app, not just because of this white space issue, it was just a very easy case study that I could describe verbally, but I think the app is much better for all of the feedback I've gotten from all the beta testers, but particularly you, Marco, amongst others.
Casey:
So I appreciate it.
John:
Thanks.
John:
It was fun for me, too.
John:
Marco, did you talk to him about the emoji titles for the sections and settings?
Marco:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
No, I actually decided not to fight that fight because I thought it was kind of fun.
Marco:
See, thank you.
John:
I mean, it's definitely a Casey personality thing, but it's...
John:
like they're too small to be, they are.
Casey:
I will concede they're a little bit small that, that, that I would agree with.
John:
And then you made them bigger than it's like, what are these stray emoji doing in my UI?
John:
I mean, I know why they're there, but people who don't know you might be confused.
Marco:
Anyway, no, I thought, I thought they were like, when I first saw that, I'm like, that's weird.
Marco:
But then I, I, it went from weird to good for me.
Marco:
Like I, I liked it because like, like I, I use some emoji in the overcast interface and
John:
Yeah, like the tips for great results, like the little light bulb.
John:
That makes sense.
John:
But as section headings, I think it throws off the spacing.
John:
It's just not visually balanced.
Marco:
Well, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, I think the use of emoji in UI is still very young, and...
Marco:
A lot of people will react negatively to it just because it's not the common case, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, or that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it.
Marco:
You wouldn't believe.
Marco:
Most people didn't care, but I did get a few really nasty comments when I switched to using emoji for things like indicating whether an episode is starred or whether it will stream.
Marco:
I used the star emoji or the cloud emoji in its little description label in those circumstances, and
Marco:
There were, you know, most people didn't care.
Marco:
I thought it was cool.
Marco:
But there were a few people who were like viscerally offended by that, that I was using emoji in the interface.
Marco:
Like that was really offensive to a small number of people.
Marco:
But, you know, most people don't care because most people are not jerks.
John:
I'm surprised people got that angry.
John:
What do the people care about?
John:
What is their complaint exactly?
John:
Like that you didn't draw it yourself?
Marco:
There's always a subset of people who are really mad at me because I don't hire a designer for most things.
Marco:
Are these designers looking for work?
Marco:
I think sometimes.
Marco:
I mean, there is the whole phenomenon of the unsolicited redesign, which I get all the time.
Marco:
And by the way, Casey, you're going to get this too.
Marco:
And some of it is from us.
Marco:
The unsolicited redesign, the people doing it usually are not considering some design challenge or some factor that you have to include or some condition that they didn't think about.
Marco:
Usually you can't do their design or you shouldn't do their design because of some reason that they didn't consider.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that you know because you make the app.
Marco:
I will tell you what, I get a lot of overcast unsolicited redesigns.
Marco:
I have never gotten one that was even remotely tempting of like, oh, I should do that.
Marco:
Not even once.
Marco:
Because they're usually, first of all, a lot of times they're just bad design.
Marco:
Anybody can call themselves a designer.
Marco:
Heck, I do.
Marco:
There's no qualifications required to call yourself a designer.
Marco:
There's no professional certification or anything like that.
Marco:
You can call yourself whatever you want.
Marco:
And a lot of the designs are just bad.
Marco:
But also, so many of them are designs that...
Marco:
I look at it and I'm like, is this actually better?
Marco:
Like, who would think this is better?
Marco:
Or like, this doesn't really account for this entire feature set over here that I know I can't cut.
Marco:
Or like, wow, this looks great on this size phone, but it will totally break on this other size phone.
Marco:
Or, you know, something like that.
Marco:
Like, there's...
Marco:
Basically, you know more about your app than anybody else.
Marco:
You know what is necessary.
Marco:
You know all the design considerations and constraints that went into the current design to begin with.
Marco:
You know why it is the way it is if you did put thought into it.
Marco:
So ultimately, do stuff your own way.
Marco:
And that's why my solution has been to just slowly develop these skills myself.
Marco:
Because I was tired of working with other people who would try to make me do things that I would immediately be like, well, I can't do that because then I can't do this or then this will break or that won't work if I change the font size or whatever.
Marco:
There were so many conditions constantly where somebody would suggest something or I would hire a designer and they would do something and I'd be like, well, that's nice, but I can't do that.
Marco:
Or I'd rather not do that because then that would create this other problem over here.
Marco:
So in conclusion, don't always listen to what everybody tells you because ultimately, take it all as suggestions because ultimately you should know best and maybe you don't yet, I don't know, but you should know best what your app should be.
Casey:
And with you and with everyone else, I have taken them as suggestions.
Casey:
But at this point, I feel maybe this is my own self-deprecating nature that has been on display for many years now.
Casey:
But I feel like I know enough to know what I don't know.
Casey:
And I know I'm not a terribly great designer.
Casey:
And so generally speaking, if someone comes to me and passionately says, oh, this is really jacked up.
Casey:
generally speaking, I'm going to listen to them.
Casey:
Now, there's some cases where I'm not.
Casey:
As an example, that whole cascading selection thing that I love so much, I'm going to ship that at least in part.
Casey:
And you and I were going back and forth about this earlier, Marco.
Casey:
I'm going to ship it at least in part
Casey:
But I've toned it down and I've eliminated one of the places where it's used because I think even though I find this clever and interesting and funny, I'm unconvinced that anyone else will.
Casey:
And so I'm going to ship it as is to see what happens.
Casey:
And then if it ends up that I need to pull it, I need to pull it.
Casey:
It's no big deal.
Casey:
And that's a very, very silly example.
Casey:
But it's an example.
Casey:
And like the emoji section headers, they're totally getting shipped that way.
Casey:
I may regret it, but I'm definitely going to ship it that way because I like it and I think it's cool.
Casey:
I'm sure it's been done in other apps before, but I can't think of any where it's been done.
Casey:
Maybe because everyone else is too serious about their jobs.
Marco:
You have an advantage here in that you are independent.
Marco:
You have to answer to nobody else for this except for us.
Marco:
If you decide you want to ship emoji,
Marco:
damn it, you can ship emoji.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
You can communicate everything in the app by emoji if you really want to.
Marco:
No one's going to stop you.
Marco:
And you're using emoji for headers in a settings table view is going to affect nobody.
Marco:
It's going to lose you probably no sales.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
So if it makes you happy, ship the damn thing.
Marco:
You're making this app to make yourself happy.
Marco:
If that's what makes you happy, do it.
Marco:
And
Marco:
It might even reward you.
Marco:
When I shipped 1.0 for Overcast, there was a whole bunch of personality in the app and various microcopy here and there.
Marco:
At the time, that was not common to see.
Marco:
Honestly, I think it still isn't.
Marco:
I was worried that that would make my app appear unprofessional or that I wasn't taking it seriously enough or anything.
Marco:
I had no idea how people would take that.
Marco:
It was a risk.
Marco:
But it paid off.
Marco:
People took it really well.
Marco:
And maybe I've lost some people over the years who didn't want their act to have any personality.
Marco:
But certainly those people are probably the minority, dramatically so.
Marco:
And so, yeah, you might have one person, like John, who is really weirded out by your emoji settings headers.
Marco:
But chances are it's not going to be a majority, even close.
Marco:
And it might even make your app seem even more friendly and even better.
Marco:
And it might even cause people to buy your app even more.
Casey:
Yeah, and you know, another example of this is I tend to be pretty verbose when it comes to the copy in the app.
Marco:
Oh, dear God, yes.
Casey:
And at first, when you were beating me up about the copy, I was like, well, I don't want this to sound like Marco's app.
Casey:
And that wasn't at all what you were trying to do, but that's how it felt at first.
Casey:
And some of those first iterations that you had suggested, I was like, eh.
Casey:
I like the spirit of where he's going with this, but I think I should take it a slightly different direction.
Casey:
And then toward the end, I think, well, I like to think, maybe it's just me lying to myself, but I think because of, you know, I would try this version, which was a lot shorter, but it wasn't exactly what you said.
Casey:
And then you would say, okay, well, what about that?
Casey:
And then I tried that.
Casey:
Okay, well, what about this?
Casey:
And by the end of this back and forth, we ended up with something that I don't think screams Marco.
Casey:
I don't know that necessarily screams Casey, but I do think that it is better for the user than where I started by a lot.
Casey:
And so that is another example of some back and forth where I could have taken what you had initially sent exactly as it was, and it would have been an improvement.
Casey:
It would not have been bad, but it just didn't feel exactly the way I wanted it to feel.
Casey:
And I'm glad that you were...
Casey:
willing and patient enough to go back and forth with me about a lot of this copy because I do quite like where we ended up because it was it was way too much and I didn't really see it until you pointed it out but once you pointed it out immediately I was like oh yeah this is way too much and I have you down to I think only one semicolon left you know semicolons don't hurt you I swear