Casey’s Computer Corner
Marco:
Did Showbot crash?
Marco:
We only have the Tesla Halo left?
Casey:
It must have.
Casey:
Man, and I didn't put on logging on Colloquy this time, so I don't know if I can easily get to it.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
BB out to the rescue.
John:
bb edit uh casey's computer corner all right he's computer corner got a lot of suggestions wow all right i've got all our titles here ready oh message is too long it won't let me paste it all right i'll do it in the skype chat all right there you go for the chat room if you want to be a lead to bb edit hacks or like me how did i get all these titles so quickly
John:
Command A, Command C, Command Tab, Command Shift N, Command Shift P, exclamation point S, return.
John:
What is that?
John:
And then Command F dot slash S, or dot star S, exclamation point, space, Command equals, Command A, Command C, Command Tab, Command V.
John:
Those are all the keyboard commands that I type to get those titles out of the colloquy chat, remove everything except for the title suggestions, remove everything except for the titles themselves, and then paste them into Slack.
John:
All from the keyboard.
Casey:
I would have followed that easier if you were talking about Destiny.
John:
If I wanted to do one more, I would do Command-Control-S to sort, and then I would do Command-Shift-D return to remove duplicates after they were sorted.
John:
Damn.
John:
Case insensitively.
John:
Like, everything in BBEdit, I have keyboard shortcuts assigned to individual checkboxes in BBEdit dialog, so when I do Command-Shift-D to find, or, you know, Command-F to do the grep thing...
John:
Shift-Control-N toggles case sensitivity, so I don't have to reach for that checkbox.
John:
When you're doing Shift-Control combos, you know you're probably out of key commands, but the thing is about these key commands is if I had to think about it, it's like Emacs.
John:
My fingers just know them, and really if I have to re-recite them, I have to do them in my mind with my fingers and figure out what modifier keys they're hitting because they're so...
John:
ingrained the the one i was using for for getting the things called process lines and it can do more than just what i had to do but process lines i was doing say i have a bunch of lines selected i want you to do something with these lines and my default is usually for every line that matches this expression put it into a new document window right but there's a million other things that it can do with it you know get lines that don't match get lines that do get matching lines into the clipboard bb edit's cool people
John:
In summary.
John:
Now I'm closing some windows.
Casey:
I think everything's okay.
Casey:
Famous last words.
Marco:
So just to clarify, it appears that you're recording for this podcast.
Casey:
Yes?
Casey:
It appears that I am recording for this podcast with the emphasis on appears.
Casey:
So call recorder.
Marco:
And the echo that you were hearing before is gone.
Marco:
That is correct.
Marco:
So you sound normal to yourself.
Marco:
You sound normal to us.
Casey:
I sound normal to you.
Casey:
I sound normal to me.
Casey:
Everything hypothetically is copacetic.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
You love this so much.
Marco:
Let's start out with Casey's computer corner.
Marco:
So Casey, what computer are you recording on right now?
Marco:
I feel like we have to ask this every week.
Casey:
Yeah, you really do.
Casey:
This is so bad.
Casey:
So I decided earlier, well, I decided over the weekend, but I didn't have time to execute.
Marco:
The fact that the response begins with, so I know it's going to be good.
Marco:
There's going to be a story here.
Marco:
There's going to be some shenanigans.
Marco:
All right, what's going on?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So over the weekend, I thought to myself, self, what you need to do is you need to go back to Mojave and see if that fixes all your woes.
Casey:
And that will at least give you more time on this broken iMac that I really just don't want to continue to mess with.
Casey:
And so today I finally had the time to sit down and do that.
Casey:
And it occurred to me that I can't do, to the best of my knowledge anyway, I can't do any sort of like internet recovery to get to Mojave.
Casey:
And the only way I can get Mojave is to use a USB key, which I had built when Mojave was first out, but I didn't even know if I had that at first.
Casey:
So I find this USB key, I'm very excited, very proud of past Casey.
Casey:
I go and I boot off the USB key.
Casey:
That works no problem.
Casey:
I delete the existing partitions or whatever they're called in APFS world on the onboard SSD.
Casey:
Everything's good.
Casey:
I go to click on, okay, install macOS Mojave or whatever it says in the installer.
Casey:
And I click that and then I click continue.
Casey:
And continue goes gray.
Casey:
You know, it's disabled.
Casey:
And I wait.
Casey:
Okay, five minutes have gone by.
Casey:
10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes.
Casey:
Okay, apparently nothing is happening.
Casey:
This is something that, Marco, you have been saying a lot lately that I would like to echo.
Casey:
Why can we never get feedback from Apple when something doesn't go according to plan?
Casey:
Why?
John:
Command L. There's a whole log window on the installer, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Is there?
John:
Yeah.
John:
You don't look at the log window?
John:
I didn't know there was one.
John:
It's totally a log window.
John:
I don't doubt it.
Casey:
I'm not arguing.
Casey:
I had no idea.
John:
You can get it to show everything or just errors.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I believe you.
Casey:
Well, I should have done that.
Casey:
But anyway, one way or another, it just froze as far as I was concerned.
Casey:
And I didn't know the magical incantation.
Casey:
And this is where somebody is already tweeting at me, no, you idiot.
Casey:
If you just go to the view menu, it's right there.
John:
Yeah, it is in the menu.
John:
I think that's the command for it anyway.
Casey:
i apologize everyone i didn't realize it probably just would have shown like some line where it says doing the the whatever thing and then it just would have been on that line for 20 minutes so it doesn't give you that much more information but one way or another i uh i decide okay well this isn't working so what's the next best thing i'll do a fresh install of catalina and hope for the best i guess
John:
Wait, you gave up after that?
John:
That was it for your Mojave?
Casey:
I tried it a couple times.
Casey:
Tried it a couple times.
John:
How did you erase the disk?
John:
How did you delete all the stuff?
John:
Because I have a feeling that's where things went wrong for you.
Casey:
So I booted using the Mojave USB key, and I went into Disk Utility, and I deleted all the partitions on the hard drive, and then I made a new one.
John:
Did you reformat the whole thing and put in a new partition table instead of just removing the... The first time, no.
Casey:
The second time, yes.
John:
Hmm.
John:
Hmm.
John:
Yeah, the log window probably would have helped.
Casey:
Yeah, and I'm not trying to say that it's not my fault some way somehow.
Casey:
But what I am trying to say is I got no actionable feedback.
Casey:
Yes, I understand I should have looked for a log window.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
But what I was seeing on screen was nothing.
Casey:
And so eventually I said, oh, screw it.
Casey:
All right, I'll do an internet recovery of Catalina, which I did.
Casey:
And I did that at about 3 p.m.
Casey:
today, and it is currently 10 past 9 p.m.
Casey:
So cutting it by the skin of my teeth, which makes Marco oh so happy.
Casey:
But anyway, so I'm on my iMac.
Casey:
I'm on the same iMac I've had.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I think I finally made a decision.
Casey:
And I think what I'm going to do is I think tomorrow I'm going to order a custom 16-inch MacBook Pro, which to be clear, to be clear, I don't want a 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And I do kind of like having a desktop.
Casey:
But the more I think about it, the more I think getting an iMac and a fantasy 14-inch MacBook Pro is the most right answer if I'm willing to set many thousands of dollars aflame.
Casey:
But if I want the best compromise and the best all things to all people, if you will,
Casey:
I feel like the best decision right now, leaving Plex aside, which we're going to talk about in a minute, leaving Plex aside, the best decision for right now for me is to get the 16-inch, see how I feel about it.
Casey:
I mean, if I really hate it, I can return it in two weeks, hypothetically.
Casey:
And if I at least think it's passable, then I could always resell it.
Casey:
I mean, there will be a penalty financially, like we had spoken about last episode, but I can always resell it for some modicum of money.
Casey:
And so I feel like the 16 and one or two external displays, and I'm still wrestling with myself what I want to do there, which we can talk about if you guys are interested at all.
Casey:
But anyway, the 16 with one or two external displays, I think is going to be the best compromise because it's got...
Casey:
mega air quotes here all of the power of the mac pro that i would buy the excuse me the imac pro that i would buy i know that's not strictly true i'm just saying for the purposes of this conversation i think it's probably good enough um so anyways it's got all of the power again air quotes of the imac pro i would likely buy it's got the portability
Casey:
to a degree, that I still want.
Casey:
And I can always put, effectively, an iMac monitor on it.
Casey:
Well, not on it, or connect to it, you know, an iMac monitor, and end up basically where I am now, except the computer's actually reliable.
Casey:
Who would have thought?
Casey:
How desperate is my world that I'm saying, oh, I hope this Apple laptop is more reliable, but...
Casey:
Things have changed since just a week or two ago.
Casey:
So anyway, so I think tomorrow or maybe at the end of the week, people are pointing out on Black Friday, you know, you might get a gift card or something like that.
Marco:
Totally.
Casey:
Yeah, I might wait till the end of the week.
Casey:
One way or another, I think sometime this week, I will be ordering a 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I would like to discuss with the two of you the build I think I want.
Casey:
But before we get there, any commentary, thoughts, input from you, Marco?
Casey:
I don't want to hear what John has to say from you, Marco.
Casey:
You already know what John has to say.
Casey:
I know what John has to say.
Marco:
What's your plan for the monitor?
Casey:
So I'm wrestling with three, well, I guess one and a half or two and a half options.
Casey:
So the most obvious option is just get the LG Ultra Fine, whatever it's called, which is like $1,300 or something like that, which is a lot of money.
Casey:
Especially when the computer I'm looking at is probably going to be almost $4,000 as it is.
Casey:
So by getting this laptop and a LG, I'm spending the same money as an iMac Pro anyway.
Casey:
So that's hard for me to swallow.
Casey:
But the obvious answer is get the LG Ultrafine 5K or whatever the hell it's called.
Casey:
What I think I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the days from a couple years ago when I was rocking two 22-inch 4K displays at my last jobby job.
Casey:
And I actually really like that.
Casey:
It's not as much real estate on either panel as the 5K, and it might even be that it's not as much...
Casey:
in, not conclusion, what's the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
Total.
Casey:
In total, thank you, as the 5K.
Casey:
But it worked out pretty well a couple of years ago.
Casey:
And the monitor that I had, which admittedly was not great, but for my purposes, was more than enough.
Casey:
We'll link it in the show notes.
Casey:
But it was some, like, I think it was an L...
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
It was some 4K display that ran just fine.
Casey:
And it was sufficient.
Casey:
And it's like 200 or 250 bucks.
Casey:
So I could get two of these for like 500-ish dollars.
Marco:
You could get four of them for the price of the LG or five.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
So what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to get the 16.
Casey:
I'm going to get one of these 4K monitors and start there and see what I think.
Casey:
And then if I feel like I really need more real estate,
Casey:
I'm going to go and get an identical second 4K monitor.
Casey:
And at that point, I would presumably run in clamshell, which Marco, I'd like you to tell me what you told me in Slack the other day in a moment.
Casey:
But presumably, I would run in clamshell at that point and have these two identical monitors side by side on my desk.
Casey:
And in theory, everything will be great.
Casey:
And the thing I like about this is I can spend...
Casey:
quote unquote only 250 bucks, whatever it is for this monitor.
Casey:
And then if I want another one, I just get another one.
Casey:
It's not that big a deal.
Casey:
Like $250 is a lot of money, but all told, it's not an unreasonable amount of money.
Casey:
But you really rocked my world in the not so excellent way, although useful way, when you told me something in Slack the other day.
Marco:
Yeah, and by the way, first, before I get to that, we've heard from Anonymous Tipster in the chat that – I forgot about this – that the return policy is longer right now because of the holidays.
Marco:
Anything that you buy after November 15th can be returned until January 8th.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Marco:
So you have a little bit longer on Apple's standard return policy right now.
Marco:
So that's good to know.
Marco:
So thank you, Anonymous Tipster.
Casey:
That is good to know.
Marco:
So what I said the other day in the chat, you were talking about these options and going back to this thing you did at work and everything.
Marco:
And we were hearing from different friends and listeners who were talking about how they use...
Marco:
their laptop as a desktop, and it's just fine.
Marco:
And I did it for years myself.
Marco:
I talked about it here.
Marco:
For years, I had my 15-inch laptop or my 13-inch MacBook at certain times next to a 17-inch to 24-inch monitor.
Marco:
And it was fine for years.
Marco:
The major difference seems to be whether this setup works reliably or not.
Marco:
Seems to be whether you use clamshell mode on the laptop.
Marco:
It's whether you keep the laptop closed and plug stuff into it, or whether you open the laptop and use its screen in addition to the monitor that you had, possibly up on a stand to make it look nicer and get the correct height and everything.
Marco:
So if you use the laptop up on a stand with an external monitor, and you never have to operate the laptop closed with external stuff connected to it,
Marco:
It is way more reliable.
Marco:
Clamshell mode, where you have it closed and stuff plugs in, has always been flaky.
Marco:
And there seems to be no end in sight to its flakiness.
Marco:
It seems like it has been flaky, it will be flaky, as things were, things will always be.
Marco:
It will always be problematic for various reasons.
Marco:
But if you leave a laptop open and use it as one of your monitors...
Marco:
that seems to work a lot better.
Marco:
So even though it's still no iMac, that I think gets you a lot closer in various reliability and utility ways.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's what I did at work was I did clamshell in the two identical monitors, and it actually worked mostly well, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement by any stretch.
Marco:
Especially like we have to grade on the Casey curve here.
Marco:
Like for you saying something worked mostly well, that's pretty bad actually.
Marco:
Because you can be like, well, it only rebooted three times a day.
Marco:
It worked mostly well.
Casey:
I really want to argue with you, but I can't.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up from me to me.
Casey:
The monitor I was talking about, I think I said 22.
Casey:
It's actually a 24-inch LG monitor.
Casey:
I will link it in the show notes.
Casey:
24UD58-B.
Casey:
It's an LG monitor.
Casey:
Obviously.
Casey:
Obviously.
Casey:
So memorable.
Casey:
Right now in Amazon in the US, $250 in free shipping, which for a 4K monitor is nothing.
Casey:
Again, I'm not trying to say $250 isn't a lot of money, but for what you're getting, that is not a lot of money.
Casey:
So again, I could get two of these for 500 bucks.
Marco:
that's nothing this is one of those things where like if you're willing to accept something that isn't quite 100 of what everyone else considers like greater or like the maximum you can save a disproportional amount of money it's like like jumping from 4k to 5k proportionally is not that different from jumping from 5k to the 6k xdr right it's like you can you can have a 5k monitor or you can have a 6k monitor for about five times the price
Marco:
You can have a 4K monitor or you can have a 5K monitor for about five times its price.
Marco:
So if you're happy with going one step down, you can save a butt ton of money.
John:
This is my PlayStation monitor, by the way.
John:
This is my Destiny monitor.
John:
Oh, I didn't realize that.
John:
You did because we talked about it when I first got it for my PlayStation.
John:
You said you had the same ones at work.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's right because we were looking at the stickers and all that.
Casey:
I'd forgotten about that.
John:
That's such a terrible stand, though.
John:
I still don't like the stand.
Casey:
Oh, it's terrible.
Casey:
It's absolutely terrible.
Casey:
There's nothing I can do to defend the stand.
Casey:
It doesn't move in any way, shape or form.
Casey:
I think it might tilt slightly if I remember right.
John:
Well, my thing is that even forget about moving and it does tilt, but like it's so wobbly.
John:
Like I can't have any part of my body touching the desk because then it'll do a little head wobble.
John:
Yeah, but was it $1,000?
John:
It's not HDR, not that this matters for your purposes, but when I was looking for it, it was difficult to find an IPS 4K PlayStation monitor, essentially, with HDMI input and HDR.
John:
Now it is not hard to find it, but this one doesn't have it, just so you're clear.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, and it doesn't have the wide gamut color.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Photos on it, they're going to look all weird.
Casey:
There are problems with this, for sure.
Casey:
I'm not saying this is perfect, but for the purposes of doing the normal things that I do, writing code, goofing off on the internet, writing blog posts, for all of those sorts of things, this is more than sufficient.
Casey:
And it's cheap enough that if I got one,
Casey:
and I decide that the 16-inch life isn't so bad, I feel like I wouldn't hate myself if I put this aside and then got the LG 5K later on.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, at $500, if this one monitor was $500, I would want to just...
Casey:
figure it out up front, you know, decide, am I getting the LG 5K or am I getting this, you know, LG 4K?
Casey:
But since it's only $250, like, just give it a shot, man.
Casey:
Like, try it for a little while.
Casey:
And even if you don't like it, it's not going to be the end of the earth.
Casey:
So current plan, I think, is 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Again, we got to talk about specs, but John, I will give you a chance to berate me first.
Casey:
16-inch MacBook Pro with
Casey:
An external monitor, maybe two, but probably just one.
Casey:
And just see what I think about it and see how it goes.
Casey:
And we still have to solve my Plex problems as well, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Casey:
So, John, feel free to tell me how terrible laptops are one last time.
John:
You're going to spend like $3,800 for a laptop you don't even want.
John:
And then your desktop thing is going to be an ugly cheap monitor with a bunch of cables snaking out of it.
John:
Are you going to buy a...
John:
A docking station of any kind?
Casey:
You know, I was looking at that earlier tonight, and I think the answer is yes.
Casey:
But the problem I've run into is based on five minutes of research.
Casey:
So this is not an exhaustive deep dive by any means.
Casey:
But based on five minutes of research, I didn't find any that looked like they did what I wanted them to do, which is I would like two monitor outputs.
Casey:
that can each run 4K at 60 frames a second because I would hypothetically plug in two of these LG monitors.
Casey:
And that basically means two display port outputs from this docking station.
Casey:
And there was one of, I think there was like a Dell that might work with macOS that would do it.
Casey:
They're all ugly.
Casey:
It seems like the ones that have the exact port configuration I want are basically made by either HP or Dell or something like that.
John:
I'm just looking at like the CalDigital Thunderbolt.
John:
port things uh thunderbolt uh dock things those are expensive but those seem to be reliable i believe those cost about as much as the monitor they do first of all and well that's what i was getting at with it when i was saying thirty eight hundred dollars for a laptop you don't want and also probably a docking station and if you want a good one that's really expensive too so now you're spending a whole lot of money for this giant octopus hydra frankenstein thing that you think is going to be more reliable than your single computer that you can't get working
Casey:
Well, yes, everything you just said is accurate.
Casey:
The CalDigit TS3 Plus is Wirecutter's pick, and the problem with that is it only has one DisplayPort out, and I would want two of them.
John:
I don't know if that's possible.
John:
The monitor has HDMI in, too, so you might be able to put one DisplayPort and one HDMI, right?
John:
If you can get 60 Hz out of it, though.
Casey:
That's the thing, though, is when I tried this at work, admittedly, a couple of years ago, when I ran with HDMI, it's exactly what Marco said.
Casey:
It was only 30 hertz, which for four and a half seconds, I was like, oh, that'll be, oh, God, no.
John:
No, no, you can't do that.
John:
The HDMI does support 60 hertz, just maybe not on the standards of these.
John:
things from but i don't know you have to look into it to see like all i'm saying is that this this dock thing is another place where the the aggregate reliability of your system can really fall down and if you don't do it you can plug 17 cables well not 70 but four cables you got one for power one for one monitor one for the other monitor and then you got one port left for any other thing you need to do and that will work but have fun plugging unplugging that every time you sit down your desk
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
No, I agree.
Casey:
And so that's why suddenly the LG, it's still a lot more money.
Casey:
But the fact that it works as a semi-docking station is extremely appealing.
Casey:
And I think the problem, the biggest problem I have with the LG is that in order to get the LG and the $3,800 computer is the same money I would buy, I would spend on the damn iMac Pro.
Casey:
Now, the thing of it is, I can't bring the damn iMac Pro over to the library unless I'm Marco.
Marco:
Oh, you can.
Marco:
I can recommend a case.
Marco:
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Casey:
But you take my point, is that this, in my fantasy world, gets me two computers for the price of one.
Casey:
I know that's not really true.
Casey:
Don't jump all over me.
Casey:
Just hear out the spirit of my argument here.
Casey:
It gets me two computers for the price of one, whereas the iMac Pro only solves the at-home situation.
Casey:
It does not solve the library slash Wegmans grocery store situation.
John:
You solve that one when the new 13-inch slash 14-inch comes out.
Casey:
I can, but I'm so sick of using the adorable with its tiny little screen and its awful processor.
John:
Who bought that computer anyway?
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
But at the time, I didn't think I would be using it to do these sorts of things.
John:
It's your own computer that still works.
John:
We need to stop complaining about it.
Casey:
Well, actually, funny you bring that up.
Casey:
Earlier today, my H key was getting sticky, so I took compressed air to it.
Casey:
And now, hours later, my left shift key is sticking, and I can't get it to work reliably.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Should have held it out the window longer on that car trip.
John:
So surprised your butterfly keyboard isn't reliable.
John:
I know, I imagine that.
John:
I haven't heard that before.
John:
You must be one of the small percentage of customers.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
I think what is most likely to happen here is you're going to spend a lot of money on a laptop setup
Marco:
you're going to spend so much on it that you're not going to want to ever buy a desktop during its lifetime.
Marco:
But really what you probably should do is have both.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, the kind of like BS and flakiness that John and I find with using laptops as desktops is also the kind of stuff that you tend to not mind and ignore.
Marco:
In a way, I think I'm talking myself into this, like for you.
John:
No, we're trying to give him a better life.
John:
We're not trying to allow him to wallow in his continued misery.
John:
Like, I think the idea of buying something where you get the $200 gift card, like, I don't know if that counts with a refurb thing or whatever, but if you can get some kind of good deal on a two-year-old iMac Pro with a $200 gift card, you'd feel a lot better about that purchase.
John:
And you could feel better waiting patiently for the smaller laptop that you actually want.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, because it probably isn't that far off.
Marco:
I have tried the lifestyle of specking up a 15-inch to try to replace a desktop.
Marco:
I've been there.
Marco:
Only a few years ago I tried that.
Marco:
And it was a very expensive mistake, basically.
Marco:
I spent a lot of money on a well-specked 15-inch that...
Marco:
Worked as a kind of crappy desktop.
Marco:
And eventually I'm like, this was stupid.
Marco:
I'm buying a case to bring the desktop to the beach.
Marco:
And I was much happier doing that.
Marco:
That being said, I care less about money and more about desktops working really awesomely than you do.
Marco:
So this is probably the right thing for you.
Marco:
I really hate to say it.
Marco:
I would only say, try not to spend too much money on this setup.
Marco:
Because
Marco:
down the road if you decide you know what you'd rather have a desktop you're you're you will not want to make that jump if you've sunk a lot of money into this setup laptops are best when they are kept on the lower end of the price spectrum replaced more frequently as opposed to you know like kept forever like you know replaced every couple of years maybe two you know two to three years i'd say is like the ideal way to have a laptop if you can and
Marco:
And when you're not trying to make it a desktop, like I love using my laptop as a laptop when I have to because I'm not trying to make it a desktop.
Marco:
When I try to make it a desktop is when I start getting miserable.
Marco:
Like, oh, I can hear the fan.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Or, oh, this monitor didn't turn on or whatever.
Marco:
You know, there's issues like that, right?
Marco:
Or like, hey, you know, the Ethernet doesn't work reliably out through this dongle, and I wish I had a desktop that I wouldn't need a dongle, it's just built in.
Marco:
You know, stuff like that.
Marco:
You will run into all those issues.
Marco:
But the question is whether you care more than you care to keep a few thousand more dollars.
John:
I think it's cheaper for him to buy an inexpensive refurb iMac Pro with a $200 gift card now and wait for the 13-inch that he wants.
John:
His total aggregate cost is going to be less than trying to control costs on a weird Frankenstein MacBook Pro 16-inch setup now that he may need to sell parts of, and also going down this rabbit hole of how am I going to deal with my Plex situation, and then still buying the 13-inch when it comes out and trying to figure out how to transform this all into a desktop.
John:
It is cheaper to do
John:
to get the desktop that you want for as cheap a price you can get on Black Friday, and then waiting a few months and getting the 13-inch you want, maybe not specced up as much because now the iMac Pro handles your heavy-duty needs, and then you're done.
John:
And there's no, like, fidgeting with that setup.
John:
I think that will be less money than what you're describing now.
Marco:
And we'll get into specs in a second.
Marco:
If...
Marco:
you can get away with one of the base models.
Marco:
You can save a lot of money because not only are the upgrades grossly overpriced, generally speaking, and you get killed on resale value on the upgrades, as we mentioned last week, but also the base models are often discounted during various sales or things like Black Friday or deals with certain retailers where you go to B&H or Best Buy on a random day and it'll be like
Marco:
$150 off one of the two base configurations for no particular reason.
Marco:
Like you can get really good deals on those base models and they're a good deal to begin with compared to upgrades.
Marco:
So if you can bring the cost of your laptop option down by offloading that heavy work to a desktop over time, that's an easier solution.
Marco:
That's why you'd be able to get away with, well, sort of get away with having the world's crappiest laptop as your laptop these last few years, because you have a desktop for your heavy lifting.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
And that's the thing is, you know, sitting here now, the specs that I think I want are on the assumption that this is not the satellite computer.
Casey:
This is the all-the-time computer.
Marco:
And my argument is make it the satellite computer.
Marco:
I would rather use a four-year-old iMac as my primary computer than a brand new top-of-the-line laptop.
Casey:
See, and I don't know if I feel the same way.
Casey:
And it would be different if this iMac wasn't such a pile of garbage that never works.
John:
You still get to buy something on Black Friday, and it'll be cool and shiny.
John:
And don't just try to forget that it's two years old.
John:
Get a good deal on it.
John:
Get your gift card.
John:
Buy something on Black Friday.
John:
Feel good about it.
John:
And set that thing up and get everything all settled so you have a reliable podcasting setup and all your Plex stuff is dealt with.
John:
And then just wait patiently on this program.
John:
And every week we'll check to see if the new small laptops came out.
Marco:
I think that would give you the most overall happiness.
Marco:
The only downside is that you can't do it all yet because that laptop doesn't exist yet.
Marco:
That's the only downside.
Marco:
So if you can just make it until the spring, I think you'd be better off.
Marco:
That being said...
Marco:
If you don't care that much about the additional size, as I mentioned last week, I think the 16-inch base model is going to be a significantly good value compared to a similarly specced up 13-inch or 14, whatever it ends up being.
Marco:
And so if you don't mind the size of the 16 and you want this extra six months of using it,
Marco:
Make the 16 that computer for you.
Marco:
Just don't spec it up and make it too expensive.
Marco:
Get one of those two base models and you're done and you can get probably a really good deal on it and that's it.
Marco:
And it's not going to be that much more than a 13 and you have it now.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
have a desktop in the mix because that will be the best overall setup.
Marco:
And whether you keep your current iMac for a little while longer and tolerate it and just use laptop temporarily as your primary without going and buying a bunch of stuff, actually using its screen as your screen.
Marco:
You don't have to set it up as a desktop if it's only temporary.
Marco:
Lots of people use laptops as desktops full-time.
Marco:
I mean, you shouldn't without a standard external keyboard and everything, but you can.
Marco:
A lot of people do.
Marco:
So if the idea is...
Marco:
the setup that you want is not great right now and you want to wait for a while, then you can do that too.
Marco:
That being said, there is no reason to wait for a desktop.
Marco:
So I think just spend the $7,000 or whatever it would be to get both of these things right now and be done with it.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
you're a professional.
Marco:
This is a critical part of your job.
Marco:
You're not like a broke 19-year-old college kid.
Marco:
You have jobs that require these things, and I feel like you're so stuck on this idea, like, I don't want to spend $7,000 at the same time, basically.
Yeah.
Marco:
What's the difference if you spend some of it now and some of it in six months?
Marco:
What's the difference?
Marco:
Who cares when you have to spend it?
Marco:
These are computers that you buy every two to four years.
Marco:
They happen to coincide right now at the same time.
John:
If you buy both systems now, you might be able to get two $200 gift cards.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Seriously, it's an irrational thing to say, I just don't like the idea of... And look, a lot of pricing and buying decisions are irrational.
Marco:
I'm not blaming you for it being irrational, but it is irrational.
Marco:
You're saying, I don't want to spend all this money right now.
Marco:
Why?
Why?
Marco:
You need two computers right now, basically.
Marco:
You have a desktop that's breaking constantly, and you have a laptop that's woefully underpowered for the things you want to do with it, and also, by the way, the keyboard is going to die constantly.
Marco:
You have two computers that are not satisfying your needs.
Marco:
Your lifestyle does seem to need two computers, basically, or at least two setups, a portable one and a stationary one, and
Marco:
You make good money with this job.
Marco:
Just do it.
Marco:
Just get them both now and solve this problem.
Marco:
And then we can talk about other things next week.
Casey:
You know, I should have brought this up with you, too, because I was so confident in my decision.
Casey:
You're ruining everything.
Marco:
My solution, buy everything.
Marco:
John's solution, buy nothing.
Marco:
What a surprise.
John:
I was willing to bargain down to buy the iMac now to get the good Black Friday deal because $200 gift card is basically $200 off for someone like Casey who's guaranteed to spend money on Apple stuff.
John:
It's not like he's going to let that go to waste, right?
John:
So that's a good deal.
John:
And if you can get a really good deal on an iMac Pro, that's good.
John:
And him buying one will trigger them to update that model.
John:
So that's good for everybody else.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
And basically, it's giving him a way to satisfy his insatiable need to buy something immediately.
John:
And then you, of course, say, why don't you just buy everything?
John:
But I'm willing to say buy half the things on Black Friday.
John:
It's a reasonable expenditure.
John:
And then just wait for the laptop.
John:
But I also mostly endorse Marco's deal.
John:
My least favorite thing idea is spending a huge amount of money on a crazy laptop setup.
John:
That is my least favorite by far.
Casey:
You don't say.
John:
And I really, because I know we have these notes here, we really do have to move on because otherwise this whole show is just going to be about Casey and his computer.
John:
You still have the Plex problem and that whole other rat hole.
John:
And if you can get the iMac, you don't have that problem anymore.
John:
It's like, oh, I'll just run it on my iMac and it'll be fine because I don't want to talk about the 8,000 options for Plex servers right now.
Casey:
Yeah, so let me touch on that very, very, very briefly.
Casey:
First of all, with regard to the iMac, I did want to bring up that I didn't last week, that it does seem like, or I don't think I said this last week, it does seem like the stuttering with the mouse is considerably worse when the trackpad is not plugged in.
Casey:
So when it's operating over Bluetooth, really bad.
Casey:
When it's operating via a lightning to USB connector, it's actually not nearly as bad.
Casey:
And I don't know what that means, really, other than weirdness.
Marco:
But it's still not right.
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Well, and I don't know how this new Catalina build is going so far.
Casey:
I mean, I haven't crashed in the last three hours, so that's good.
Casey:
Again, we're on the Casey curve.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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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:
Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So with regard to Plex, a lot of people wrote in a few different things, which are very, very reasonable questions that I should have gotten in front of because I've had to answer them about 400 times each very quickly.
Casey:
Number one, why don't I use the Synology?
Casey:
Because it's too darn slow.
Casey:
I actually just...
Casey:
I restarted, if you will, Plex on MySynology to confirm to myself how slow it is.
Casey:
And even just browsing my library, which is not that unreasonably large, is slow.
Casey:
But the real issue is if I ever need to transcode anything, it's just not quick enough because MySynology is six years old now.
Casey:
And people often very smartly said, well, just transcode when you ingest things.
Casey:
So if you could get some sort of weird MKV with like WebM or something...
Casey:
just put that in H.264 and put it in an MP4 and be done with it.
Casey:
Yes, that's true, and that works when I'm in the house, but what happens when I'm at Disney World and the network connection is god-awful and it needs to transcode down to like 480 for me to be able to watch this?
Casey:
You two don't jump on me about watching 480 stuff.
Casey:
That's irrelevant.
Casey:
So the point is, if I ever want to watch something from outside the house or maybe on the phone where I want it to be not quite so high quality, then the Synology falls on its face.
Casey:
Newer Synologies don't
Casey:
do support doing transcoding particularly the intel ones but the problem with that is that's like mac pro imac pro money wait you say intel he's working on affluent give him a break affluent yeah i know come on give me one more at a time anyway point is the the do do do do powered ones um
Casey:
Those are capable of doing transcoding on the fly.
Casey:
But the problem is, if I were to upgrade my Synology, I would want to get a whole new setup and use the existing one as off-site backup for reasons I don't want to get into.
Casey:
So that's like iMac Pro money as well, just to solve a problem that actually is about the only thing in my life that isn't currently a problem, I say as I knock on my glass top desk.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
That must have hurt.
Casey:
No, actually, it wasn't that bad.
Casey:
A lot of people recommended infuse.
Casey:
I don't know how to pronounce it.
Casey:
I don't know if the emphasis is on the right syllable or what.
Marco:
But anyway.
Marco:
It's pronounced infuse.
Casey:
Infuse.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
A lot of people.
Casey:
Must be Italian.
Casey:
Reference acknowledged.
Casey:
A lot of people say, you know, use infuse.
Casey:
But that doesn't work if I want to share with my family or if I want to use that from outside the house.
Casey:
So what I've come up with is two different options if I do want to solve this with something other than an iMac Pro.
Casey:
Number one, I've heard the Nvidia Shield for most people works pretty well as a Plex server.
Casey:
We actually have a mutual friend who is sending me one because he doesn't need it anymore, which is very kind of him.
Casey:
And I will eventually plug his stuff if this ends up working out and he says that's okay because I don't know if he wanted to do this anonymously or not.
Casey:
Anyway, so I'm going to try that, just see how it works.
Casey:
Can't hurt to try, right?
Casey:
And the second thing is the actual right-ist answer, but because I'm a petulant child, I refuse to listen to Reason, and that's to get an Intel NUC.
Casey:
I don't know what that stands for, but one of those little tiny computers.
Marco:
Next unit of computing, I believe?
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
But anyways, to get a NUC and put Ubuntu or something on it and run Plex on there and just be done with it.
Casey:
But I have no interest in administering a Linux machine.
Casey:
This is the same reason that I have my website on Heroku.
Casey:
I just don't want to deal with it.
Casey:
And so a NUC is the right answer, but because I'm a petulant child, I don't want to listen to Reason.
Casey:
So I'm going to try the NVIDIA Shield, assuming that I don't have an iMac Pro here in the next week or two.
Casey:
I'm going to try the NVIDIA Shield, see how that works out, and take it from there.
Casey:
So yeah, that's the end of Casey's Computer Corner, unless you guys have other things to add.
Marco:
I would like to challenge your entire identity on one other point, actually.
Marco:
Oh God, okay.
Marco:
All right, so you put a lot into this Plex setup.
Marco:
Is this all worth it?
Marco:
i've had that thought over the last couple of days because like like what if instead of using plex for all these things what if instead every time you wanted to watch some tv show movie you just bought it or streamed it on a service and just paid for it and if you added up all that money that you would spend over time
Marco:
would it actually be more than what you're spending on all these hard drives, the computer that's going to run the Plex server, or the power that keeps them all on?
Marco:
Are you actually coming out meaningfully ahead to make it worth all this trouble?
John:
I think there's stuff that he just can't find anywhere.
John:
Like all those top gears that you have and everything.
John:
Can you even buy them anywhere?
Casey:
I don't think so, but I haven't had a need to look because I've already had them.
Casey:
I think you've hit the nail on the head, though, that Plex does satisfy...
Casey:
needs that I don't know that anything else can scratch.
Casey:
Most especially, I get a kind of unreasonable amount of pleasure in collecting these things.
Casey:
Take an example.
Casey:
Declan really likes the show Paw Patrol, and Nick Jr., every week, will put up another episode of Paw Patrol that you can stream for free.
Casey:
You don't have to log into anything.
Casey:
It's just there.
Casey:
And I will capture those episodes and stuff them in Plex.
Casey:
And I feel like that's okay.
Casey:
It's probably not, strictly speaking, but I feel like it's okay because I'm not logging into anything.
Casey:
It's just free on the internet.
Casey:
And it just so happens that I've saved it off.
Marco:
You've provided them an off-site backup of their content.
Casey:
You know, thank you, Marco.
Casey:
That's exactly what I'm doing.
Casey:
I'm providing them a service.
Casey:
Really, they should be paying me.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So anyway, so I've saved all these off.
Casey:
And so now I have almost the entire run of Paw Patrol.
Casey:
This is so dumb.
Casey:
Like I hear the words coming out of my mouth.
Casey:
It's so dumb.
Casey:
But I get some amount of pleasure over the collecting and assembling of all of this stuff.
Casey:
Like Top Gear, like as silly as it sounds, like Paw Patrol.
Casey:
And so it does scratch a itch that money cannot find.
Casey:
That's a problem money can't fix.
Casey:
But you're not asking unreasonable questions.
Casey:
I think in the world where I'm Marco and my job is to set money aflame, what I would probably do is I would get an iMac Pro.
Casey:
I would probably get 16 until the 14 exists.
Casey:
And then I would probably upgrade the Synology and get a new Synology as well and just solve all of my computing problems at once.
Casey:
But that is literally $10,000 plus worth of computing devices, which is just obscene.
Marco:
to be fair I'm not suggesting you do that but also like and I'm not saying that I don't see any value in Plex I run a Plex server too I just run a super simple one and I have an ancient Mac mini that runs it just fine but like you know all the things that you're doing with Plex like these do have costs you know as I said you're paying for the hardware to run it you're paying for all the hard drives you're paying for the power and if you back anything up you're paying for more copies of it and more power and all this you know and
Marco:
and you're paying in complexity.
Marco:
You have to run this Plex server somewhere in your network.
Marco:
I'm sure it occasionally needs something from you, an update or something.
Marco:
Something about it doesn't work right.
Marco:
I know because I've tried to place it off of your Plex server and it hasn't always worked.
Casey:
So I know it doesn't... You always choose to do that at the times when my iMac is dying.
Casey:
But yes, your point is still fair.
Casey:
Well, that's also true.
Casey:
No, your point is still fair.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so all this stuff has a cost.
Marco:
And so part of my...
Marco:
you know, transition into various stages of adulthood has often been like, you know, can I just apply a little bit of money to make this problem go away?
Marco:
Because this is something like, you know, I come from a very modest background.
Marco:
Despite all the jokes about setting money on fire, this has been a very alien thing to me with the, you know, with the environment I grew up in.
Marco:
And it's only been fairly recently that I've become okay with setting money on fire to make my life better.
Marco:
You know, I've been... For years, I would...
Marco:
conserve money or or do things myself in ways that really were not worth it at all and that i shouldn't have been doing and that were actually hurting me more that i i hadn't realized i was so obsessed with like not wanting to spend the money on something that wasn't strictly necessary this is one of those areas where like
Marco:
You know, if you look at people have done similar things with their music collections a lot, a lot of people maintained huge, you know, iTunes libraries and then therefore had to get like big hard drives and have to pay for lots of storage in their computers and their phones and everything over time.
Marco:
And then as streaming services became so compelling and so capable and so inexpensive, a lot of people are no longer keeping music collections because they feel like it's no longer worth it.
Marco:
They have all the music in the world and streaming services.
Marco:
The world doesn't seem to be moving away from streaming services anytime soon.
Marco:
It seems like it's a pretty safe bet for most people.
Marco:
They don't need to keep music collection anymore.
Marco:
They can just do streaming services and be fine.
Marco:
And so they get to save all that disk space, all the hassle of getting files that were the wrong name or whatever.
Marco:
And yeah, a lot of them were pirated and a lot of them weren't.
Marco:
But streaming kind of made it all irrelevant.
Marco:
And I feel like we're in a similar age now for lots of movie and TV content where like...
Marco:
So many of us have kept local libraries, and there is value to that.
Marco:
But it's also such a pain in the butt, and it's so costly to keep those local libraries that for most people, I don't think it's worth it anymore.
Marco:
I think it's only worth it for the biggest enthusiasts.
Marco:
And you are one of those, I think, in this way.
Marco:
You are, I think, one of the biggest, if not the biggest Plex enthusiast I've ever met.
Marco:
But if most of what you're doing with it most of the time is watching stuff that is available on streaming services, it certainly does raise the question of, like, do you really need to be keeping this stuff anymore?
Yeah.
Marco:
And then secondly, if you decide you need to be keeping it, do you need to be keeping it at the same level of flexibility that requires all this advanced hardware?
Marco:
So for instance, do you need transcoding?
Marco:
Or can you keep the Plex stuff for your house, in which case you don't even use transcoding, or at least you shouldn't be using transcoding, within your own house?
Marco:
yeah yeah or and and then when you happen to be traveling make other plans you know if you happen to be traveling the like four times a year that you're traveling and you want to watch paw patrol watch something else or buy or buy something you know buy like an itunes movie rental in the hotel or whatever you know have you know treat the kids to to a fun new movie rental for four dollars and not have to maintain a you know a beefy plex server for transcoding
Marco:
like it, how often are you using the super advanced functionality for things that you can't stream?
Marco:
And in those cases, could you just buy something else or watch something else?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I take your point, but I think what it comes down to is I am, I'm just a pack rat when it comes to this stuff.
Casey:
And, and that's something I'm okay with.
Casey:
And, and,
Casey:
This particular moment aside, if my iMac, which is my Plex server, wasn't falling apart, I would have zero complaints about Plex.
Casey:
Everything would be peachy keen.
Casey:
I don't really have to do very much maintenance to keep it running.
Casey:
I don't really have to do much to keep it happy, if anything at all.
Casey:
And the, the enjoyment, like I get immense amounts of enjoyment, not only from the hoarding aspects of getting stuff into it, but also the, the way in which it has fit into my, not only my life, but my entire entire family's life.
Casey:
And it's so easy for any of us to get, to get what we want quickly and easily.
Casey:
And it's a curated, it's my own personal Netflix, right?
Casey:
In the sense that it is a curated list of things that I can stream anywhere I want in the world at
Casey:
if the network connection and transcoder supports it at really, you know, really incredible resolution and whatnot.
Casey:
So if it wasn't for the fact that I am taking the server away from my whole Plex world, I would have zero complaints about it and I don't see it a problem to be fixed.
Casey:
It's in this scenario where I ditch a desktop that this all falls apart.
Casey:
And God help me, you guys are starting to convince me to get that iMac Pro again, which I
Casey:
really wasn't planning on.
Marco:
What's great about the iMac Pro option is that it sets this problem on fire.
Marco:
It just blows away the problem.
Marco:
You have this big problem that is costing you.
Marco:
I mean, look at the time this is costing you.
Marco:
How much time have you wasted messing with the iMac Pro?
Marco:
You've messed with the iMac for so much time trying to get things to work.
Marco:
The time that you've been spraying canned air into your MacBook.
Marco:
This time matters.
Marco:
This time adds up.
Marco:
This is time that you could be doing anything else or nothing.
Marco:
You could take a nap.
Marco:
You could hang out and watch TV off your Plex server.
Marco:
You could be doing anything else.
Marco:
You could hang out with your family.
Marco:
You could go drive in circles and do donuts in your car.
Marco:
i don't know whatever you like whatever you want to do right you can do you can be doing anything else instead you're reinstalling mac os on a broken computer again like it's just this this stuff matters this is like you know some of the calculus that that i try to do when i'm thinking about you know is it worth spending money on a problem like i often think like what would cgp gray do
Marco:
like he's really good at like at figuring this out analytically and be like can i just throw money at this and make the problem go away because it's worth it to me like that's and i often think like okay what would gray do to fix this problem whenever i have gone with the option i think he would go with because usually blowing money away uh i have always been actually pretty happy like okay this problem is now gone i can get back to my work
Marco:
What he would do if his iMac flaked out as much as yours did is he would take it off his desk, put it God knows where and have a new one there delivered that day and get on with his work because his work is important, right?
Marco:
Your work is important.
Marco:
Your time is valuable.
Marco:
Why not do the same thing?
Casey:
Because I don't want to spend that much money.
Casey:
I don't want to spend $8,000 on computers.
John:
But why?
John:
I would generally advise against using Marco or CGP Grey as your thought model for when you should make purchases.
John:
But, you know, like all that said, like what Marco was saying, I think putting Casey aside for a second because he's a weirdo like all of us.
John:
For you listeners out there thinking this doesn't actually apply to you, Marco's advice is good, I think, for the listeners in general, for the statistical average listener that is out there.
John:
Very often, if you're listening to a tech podcast, you probably have lots of technology in your life.
John:
And there are points where...
John:
When technology in your life sort of ages out, where it is no longer the correct choice to keep doing whatever it is.
John:
Marco had a great example of keeping MV3 collections or whatever.
John:
I was saying keeping CD collections is a thing, keeping record collections.
John:
And at various points, it's time to reconsider those.
John:
You have to decide, am I the type of person who's going to have a record collection for my entire life?
John:
Maybe you are.
John:
Go for it.
John:
Awesome.
John:
Cool hobby, right?
John:
But for most people, the answer to that question was no.
John:
You have to let the records go and go on to the next thing.
John:
And eventually your CD collection, it's like, okay, I've been hauling this CD collection around in these giant case logic boxes from dorm room to dorm room.
John:
At a certain point, you're like, is this still tenable?
John:
Or is there a better solution?
John:
And so you end up with an MP3 collection.
John:
And again, and it goes to the streaming music, right?
John:
I think...
John:
Having a bunch of movies on a server or having a bunch of video CDs, if anyone's old enough to remember that, like there's all sorts of things that we do that are good ideas at the time that we need to reevaluate.
John:
And that I think is the good advice for the listener to look at your life and think, is there something like that in your life where you're spending a lot of time and energy and money maintaining a thing where right now you could do it for much less hassle and actually much less time and also much less money?
John:
by just renting a movie from iTunes every time you want to do it or buying it from Amazon, whatever thing you want to do.
John:
It wins in all regards, better availability, better quality, better convenience, and less cost and less time.
John:
And if you're a tech nerd, it's easy not to see those types of solutions because you're just into the tech.
John:
in casey's case and in many people's case in the sort of the non-average case the outlier case it's your hobby and you want to deal with the tech like more power to you i feel like this is casey's hobby he's also the person i know who's most into plex and i have a plex server and i'm kind of into it too and i would be hesitant to give it up as i got weird stuff in there you know weird anime things and like trailers for stuff and things that were never released anywhere that you can only see in some place but someone did a pirated copy of and like there's all sorts of
John:
you know cool stuff that i have in there and i have stuff organized the way i want it i control cost and hassle mostly by keeping the collection small and if i've watched a movie i'm honest with myself whether i'm ever going to watch again i delete it if i'm not like so i don't have this ever expanding collection it it stays more or less the same size with sort of this rotating buffer of things that i think i want on it um and in casey's case i don't you know
John:
an iMac will do it it might surprise you to hear that if i was into your situation i didn't have an iMac to run the thing on i would buy a NUC i would deal i would just like it can't be that hard to set up but i would just get something that's non-apple hardware because the Mac mini is so expensive such an expensive windows get the cheapest non-apple hardware that will do the transcoding that you need with some headroom and just shove it in a closet and be done with it but you know how to do that because you can get an iMac pro uh on black friday and you won't have to worry about this problem
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Now, using a VPN these days, there's lots of reasons to do it.
Marco:
And I know, I've seen the videos and the blog posts and people saying, well, you know, you don't need it because we have HTTPS.
Marco:
And yeah, you know what?
Marco:
A lot of stuff is encrypted over HTTPS.
Marco:
And so if you're using somebody's Wi-Fi, yeah, they can sniff plain unencrypted HTTP requests and
Marco:
Yeah, there aren't as many of those as there used to be.
Marco:
But you know what?
Marco:
I still don't think that 100% of all the data that goes over my network is encrypted.
Marco:
And so VPNs can help you get around that hole.
Marco:
I always want to use a VPN when I'm using some kind of untrusted public Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Even as a nerd, I know how to encrypt my stuff.
Marco:
I know how to use HTTPS.
Marco:
But you know what?
Marco:
Still, it isn't 100% coverage.
Marco:
That's why I want a VPN.
Marco:
Whenever I'm at an airport or a hotel or if I have to use some coffee shop, I'll try to use Cellular as much as I can, but sometimes you can't or it's impractical and you've got to use someone's Wi-Fi.
Marco:
That's where VPNs come in.
Marco:
And ExpressVPN is number one rated by the VPN provided by review sites like TechRadar and CNET.
Marco:
They really take privacy and security very seriously.
Marco:
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Marco:
And all you need to do is download their awesome, easy-to-use ExpressVPN apps on your computer or smartphone or tablet and use the internet just as you normally would.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you to ExpressVPN for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Marco, tell me about your office furniture.
Casey:
Or not office, just furniture furniture.
Marco:
Yeah, it is office furniture.
Marco:
So on the Upgrade podcast this week, they started out with using their term follow-out, which is when they basically do follow-up on someone else's podcast.
Marco:
And they were talking about, they were mad at John for being able to talk all of last week's after show about his office furniture, basically, and various things like that.
Marco:
And they never thought to talk about furniture, and they talked a little bit about theirs.
Marco:
And it made me realize I have had a dilemma
Marco:
I want to now do some re-follow out or some follow out out or some whatever it would be to loop back around here.
Marco:
I want to talk about my office furniture because I have an office furniture problem.
John:
Marco, just buy a new house.
John:
It'll get rid of this problem in one shot.
John:
You'll be done with it.
John:
You won't have to worry about it anymore.
Marco:
I just have to evaluate.
John:
Do I really need an office?
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I hate you guys.
Marco:
I hate winter.
Marco:
One of the reasons I hate winter is that it's just so dark and depressing all the time.
Marco:
Meanwhile, I have a home office.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
The only lighting in the room are these two lights in the ceiling that each can take three bulbs, but they're enclosed fixtures.
Marco:
And so if you put any LED bulbs in there, they overheat and die within a few months.
Marco:
So, and I use them, I use LEDs in there anyway, just to get more light out of them than like the 60 watts they're rated for.
Marco:
But still like those things burn through lights like crazy.
Marco:
They're mostly burnt out most of the time.
Marco:
I just want more light to help me feel better in the winter, to help my office get brighter and make me feel less depressed when the sun sets at four o'clock, right?
Marco:
Which it's currently doing.
Marco:
So normally I augment the dim lighting on the ceiling.
Marco:
Oh, and I should also clarify also the walls are dark red and behind my computer is dark gray sound foam.
Marco:
So I'm not doing any favors here with like light reflection off the walls.
Marco:
It's it's still it's a pretty dark room by default.
Marco:
So I've had in the corner right next to my desk forever.
Marco:
One of those Ikea not lamps like this is like the Ikea been selling the same lamp for like a decade or more.
Marco:
It's the basic, like, pole lamp.
Marco:
It's a base, a pole that's, like, five or six feet tall, and a little, like, bowl on top, the middle of which has a light bulb in it.
Marco:
You've seen these lamps.
Marco:
IKEA sells them for about $10, and they're everywhere.
Marco:
And, you know, this is a common form factor.
Marco:
Like, other people make pole lamps as well.
Marco:
My solution has been over time, and fortunately with the advent of LED light bulbs, to slowly add brighter and brighter bulbs to this pole lamp next to my desk to try to make my office brighter so I'm happier here.
Marco:
And I've reached a limit of that because it's like even, you know, you can put like...
Marco:
you know like one of those like you know 150 watt equivalent led bulbs in there but at some point they get so big that they stick up past the globe and you don't want to be able to look straight at them because that's too harsh to look at so you have to keep the size low
Marco:
Now, a while ago, I discovered these multi-bulb splitters.
Marco:
You can basically get these little like plastic things that screw into the light socket and split into like three different or four different bulbs.
Marco:
And they can turn them on their side.
Marco:
So you can kind of rotate the bulbs 90 degrees and have like a little like radial arrangement of bulbs or like a circular arrangement within that globe.
Marco:
So at first, I thought, let me get as many lights as possible into this one IKEA knot lamp.
Marco:
to try to like you know one bulb isn't doing it for me anymore i want three bulbs or four bulbs so i finally i figured that out uh and i've i've reached the wattage limit of that it's not enough light so i recently bought myself a second knot lamp and put it on the other side of my desk now i have two floor lamps problem is they've made the globe on top of the lamp they've made it smaller it doesn't it isn't as tall anymore so now my bulbs are sticking out more easily but
Marco:
So now I currently have, let me see, I got four in that one.
Marco:
So I currently have seven light bulbs that are about, I don't know, 75 to 100 watt equivalents each.
Marco:
And this is a good amount of light.
Marco:
But the ones that are in the left one, again with one of those like multi-bulb splitters, are sticking out the top.
Marco:
And they're also non-dimmable.
Marco:
Oh, I should also mention my preferred temperature is 4000K, which no one makes bulbs that are 4000K except for like two companies.
Marco:
So what I'm looking for and that I have been not able to find is...
Marco:
some kind of like pole lamp that i can put on one or both sides of my desk that natively is designed to have like three or four bulbs in it that then i can put you know huge bulbs into each one of those sockets and just totally blast myself out with just a complete ton of light that's what i want here just a ton of light into my eyes all winter long to try to make me forget that it's winter
Marco:
I could get the office renovated and just put more lights in the ceiling.
Marco:
That's the option I should do.
Marco:
But that's incredibly expensive and disruptive and destructive.
Marco:
And I don't want to lose the use of my office for any amount of time to do that.
Marco:
You know, a couple of pole lamps cost, what, 20 bucks?
Marco:
Like, it's not, you know, not the end of the world there.
Casey:
Oh, no, hold on.
Casey:
If I have to buy a $5,000 computer, you have to renovate your f***ing office.
Yeah.
John:
It's not a renovation to put new lights in.
John:
You already have to... You have to open up the ceiling.
John:
Right, but it's not... You already have two fixtures up there, right?
John:
Yes.
John:
So that means you have two power sources.
John:
You can get very large, very wide, huge illuminated fixtures from those two existing holes.
John:
in your ceiling i didn't think about yeah just have them like span out for me that's that's what i did in this round the room i'm sitting in has only one light in the room dead center of this place is like a little wire coming out of the ceiling there was a light there and for years i had like these circular lights that are i don't know it's kind of like you've seen them little round circular things that just sort of stick up on your ceiling right
John:
Yeah, like every light fixture is.
John:
Just like a dome, like a dome light.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Right, and there's a million of them at Home Depot.
John:
I used to have to shop for the one that was the lowest profile because my ceilings are very low in this thing.
John:
And that's what I would get.
John:
And like you, you'd be limited in how much light can you get out of a dome thing.
John:
You don't want it to be harsh, so it has to be like frosted.
John:
And you want it to go in all directions, but it's just a dome light, and you're limited by the amount of light output you can get from that.
John:
Eventually, after...
John:
you know, seeing those things die and replacing the lamps in them and then replacing the entire fixture when it dies.
John:
And I went through that several times.
John:
I said, well, all right, so there's one tiny little hole in my ceiling, but you can put a way bigger light than that one tiny hole.
John:
And so what I got was, this was years ago, but what I got was a...
John:
fairly huge like five foot long fluorescent light fixture that instead of having light from one little dome thing now i have five foot by one foot strip of light with multiple fluorescent bulbs in it that puts out way more light than any dome light that i've ever had
John:
Now, you probably don't want fluorescence.
John:
Sure don't.
John:
And you have more than one place.
John:
But the thing is, I didn't need to make any new holes in the ceiling.
John:
There was no renovation.
John:
Hmm, that's interesting.
John:
I just used the existing hole that was in my ceiling and screwed this thing up into the studs in the ceiling, and it was fine.
John:
I didn't think about that option.
John:
I'm not saying you do this yourself, but you could look at how far apart your light things are and see if you can get one of those things that's like a giant, like,
John:
carpet of lights inside a frosted type thing so it's just like a giant glowing thing what you want is like the equivalent of you know when you get bigger fans inside your PC case instead of what you have now is a tiny fan you're trying to spend faster and faster RPM you need a big fan big lazy slow moving fan of light that's what you need so I don't know what kind of fixture that is it's probably some fancy designer fixture or whatever but you don't care so if you can find something that's like a giant lily pad of light that puts out like 700 watts and get two of them
Marco:
you will have and they're dimmable and adjustable color temperature because these rgb leds like that's it you're all set well that's and that's the other thing too like i've learned i'm actually like a light nerd what i really would prefer to avoid is anything that has its own custom like led thing inside i want something that has a regular light bulb socket so i can pick my own bulbs and ideally lots of them like
Marco:
because but if it has the led one that's color adjustable like and those things last forever well but yeah first of all they're not always color adjustable they also a lot of times they have weird like cri you know color rendering index um many of them are not dimmable like and like i just i want to be able to adapt to as leds and various lighting technology gets better over time i want to be able to just like buy new bulbs every few years and stick them in because they're better like and when you have something that has like a fixed built-in thing permanently you can never do that you're stuck with it forever
John:
You might still be able to find a thing like that that's basically like a giant sheet with a frosted cover on it, maybe even vents on the side for LEDs, and then inside it has a bunch of LED bulbs.
John:
The world of lighting is very diverse, so I feel like if you go to a lighting specialist and show them your room and say, I don't want to tear anything up, I've got two places where electricity comes out of my ceiling, I want megawatts of adjustable lights with adjustable bulbs, I'm sure they can find something.
John:
And your ceilings aren't low, so you don't have that problem either.
John:
I feel like you have options.
John:
yeah maybe i don't know it's i have a hard time envisioning how i can get more light out of just the ceiling fixtures like even if i put new ones in there you definitely you definitely can because that's i mean i'm not saying that's a total solution because a lighting person will say okay you're gonna have your ceiling lights and also you're gonna have floor lamps so what you're trying to do now is like you're asking too much of your floor lamps and floor lamps are annoying anyway because they take up room and
John:
and they're just a hassle like you know they they shine they're not going to bounce light off your red walls or your black behind things so they're just bouncing it off the ceiling like i think you're asking too much of your floor lamps i think you get better ceiling lights that maybe don't do the whole job and then reasonable floor lamps that you're not obsessed with turbocharging and you'll be much better off
Marco:
I guess.
Marco:
Well, my other option, if anybody knows of a floor lamp that has just a truly tremendous dome up top that can fit multiple bulbs with one of these adapters, let me know.
Marco:
But I have been unable to find one.
John:
Let me show you my floor lamp.
John:
I had floor lamps in my other room, too.
John:
These are the lamps that I've hooked up to my voice thing because it was a pain in the butt to keep turning on and off floor lamps because they're ones on one side of the room, ones on the other.
John:
These are not great, but they're better than all the alternatives I had.
John:
They're what you talked about.
John:
There's no replaceable bulb.
John:
They're LED.
John:
They're color adjustable.
John:
They're dimmable.
John:
They're aimable.
John:
And they don't put up that much light, but I have two of them, and I don't need them to be super bright.
John:
But these are so much better than the long series of...
John:
uh floor lamps that i had before this oh that's pretty cool they're also surprisingly short i don't particularly recommend them for your needs they're not powerful enough to do what you want uh but it was a nice solution that i was happy to find well if i if i just line the whole wall with these if i get like eight of them
John:
I mean they do put out a lot of heat these are part of the things that are peeling the paint off of my house you can see where all these lamps are they're shining up on like the trim around my ceiling and you can see all the paint peeling off from where the lights are it's just from the heat from the heat and maybe the UV from when it used to be like halogen and incandescent and fluorescent
John:
Now we're on to LED.
John:
I just put these in for curiosity, but just to see where the sort of cheap dorm room floor lamp has moved on from.
John:
This, I think, is a superior version of that IKEA lamp, albeit at like three times the price.
Marco:
And without replaceable bulbs.
John:
Well, yeah, but these things are going to last forever.
John:
The LEDs in there, it's not bulbs, but it's part of the fixture, and you can see the sort of venting around it.
John:
It gets hot and everything, but I have faith that these will last a long time.
John:
yeah maybe i'll i'll look into something but yeah i mean i i just i have a hard time thinking that anything is going to be better than getting new ceiling fixtures but i i i thought that would be only invasive yeah but yeah but you do need to do both like any lighting person is going to tell you probably can't get away with just floor lamps or just ceiling fixtures or just desk lamps it's always some combination of things right so if you get a combination it lets you balance it and not have to go nuts on any one fixture
Marco:
By the way, so a few people in the chat are suggesting that I look into the Philips Hue line of things.
Marco:
I have.
Marco:
I actually – we have a couple of Philips Hue bulbs.
Marco:
One of the steps I took when I was multiplying the number of light bulbs in my pole lamp was I at one time had four Philips Hue ambience, the white ambience bulbs in there.
Marco:
Because another one of my harebrained ideas that I had in this area was I thought –
Marco:
Wouldn't it be nice if I had, like, adjustable white temperature bulbs, basically, that would automatically adjust with time of day?
Marco:
So in the morning and the evening, they could be a little bit on the warmer side.
Marco:
In the middle of the day, they could be on the cooler and brighter side.
Marco:
And they would automatically adjust with the sun.
Marco:
What a great idea.
Marco:
Yeah, it turns out that doesn't work.
Marco:
Like, no one makes that work correctly.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
Please don't email me.
Marco:
Like, whatever you try... Like...
Marco:
So the Philips Hue way to do that was not great, and I never got it to work well.
Marco:
Also, Philips Hue has a massive issue, which is they just don't make bright bulbs.
Marco:
And I don't really know why.
Marco:
Philips Hue has made...
Marco:
Only up to like 60 watt equivalent bulbs for the entire time they've existed.
Marco:
They've been around for a number of years now.
Marco:
They don't make brighter bulbs than that.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Surely by now you have the technology.
Marco:
I know it would have to be a little bit bigger, but like lots of other brands are making lots of other LED light bulbs that are way brighter than that.
Marco:
surely Philips can make brighter than 60-watt equivalent bulbs, because that's just not enough light for almost anything.
Marco:
So that didn't last long.
Marco:
I then decided to try the LIFX bulbs, because LIFX not only has brighter bulbs, but also has a built-in feature in their app to do exactly that thing with the sunlight timing of the color temperature of the light.
Marco:
And I have never had a set of less reliable home automation, smart home things than LIFX bulbs.
Marco:
They were so bad and so unreliable that a few weeks ago, I just threw them away.
Marco:
I deleted the app off my phone and just threw the bulbs in the trash can.
Marco:
Like I just was so frustrated with them, never working right, staying on constantly or not responding and staying off or like three of the four bulbs in the fixture would turn on and one wouldn't.
Marco:
randomly like just they were so unreliable i have nothing but bad experiences with lifex and phillips hue is just disappointing like i we have them in a couple of lamps at the on end tables in rooms that don't need much light and that's the only thing i found that i use for them for i have very good luck with using regular light bulbs that i can replace in smart switched outlets
Marco:
Like I use Belkin WeMo switches.
Marco:
There's a bunch of other ones too.
Marco:
They work fine.
Marco:
Like switched outlets work very reliably for me.
Marco:
So I'm happy with that.
Marco:
Leave it at that.
Marco:
Leave the light bulbs dumb and leave the outlets smart.
Marco:
All that is to say, I think I'm kind of stuck here, except I guess I should just do what John says and change the ceiling fixtures, but possibly not in a way that destroys my ceiling.
John:
And you should be very used to dealing with people for design considerations for home stuff.
John:
And I'm not saying you're going to use the same people, but talk to a lighting person.
John:
Like, again, you're Mr. Throw Money to the Thing to solve it.
John:
Get someone to talk.
Marco:
Yeah, we've done home renovation stuff.
Marco:
We have people we can call for this, but it's going to be so destructive because if you have to do anything, if they do have to cut into the ceiling to install more fixtures, which I think would be ultimately the best solution, would just be to install a bunch of can lights.
Marco:
But if they have to do that... Oh, no, not can lights, no.
John:
Why not?
John:
There's a reason why people do that.
John:
You can set parameters on them.
John:
You can say, we don't want you to wreck the room.
John:
We have two places where power comes out of the ceiling.
John:
What can you do with two fixtures?
John:
Assuming those two fixtures aren't right on top of each other and they're widely spaced in the room, you have a lot of options.
John:
You have a lot of options what you can do there.
Marco:
The room is a big rectangle, and the fixtures are two fixtures that are in the middle offset.
Marco:
It's where you would put, if you only had two fixtures in a big rectangle, it's where you'd put them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I feel like you have a lot of options just with those two things.
John:
All you need to do is, you know, attach more things to your ceiling, but you wouldn't need to repaint anything.
John:
You will need to cut into anything like there's the power is already there.
John:
The switching is already there.
John:
And then it would just be like that.
John:
And where do I put the accent lights and how do I arrange things?
John:
And I feel like you can come up with a reasonable solution, you know, to set the parameters.
John:
So, yes, I know you could destroy this whole room and come up with this whole new lighting scheme.
John:
But let's say we're going to leave everything where it is, because I think two outlets in a room that size plus flow lamps is plenty.
Casey:
You know, suddenly I'm feeling better about my $5,000 iMac Pro and $2,000 laptop.
Casey:
That was my plan.
Casey:
Because I don't have to destroy my entire office to fix the problem.
John:
He doesn't have to destroy it either.
John:
And he recommended a $22 floor lamp and I recommended a $60 floor lamp.
John:
So we're still in the realm of still cheaper than your box that would connect your terrible laptop to its two terrible monitors.
Casey:
Right, yeah.
Casey:
I shouldn't have brought this back up.
Casey:
Anyway, John, tell me about Microsoft Office's open and save dialogue in Catalina, please.
John:
This was my most recent family tech support adventure and it reminded me – well, it reminded me of how many problems people have with Catalina and how –
John:
people who aren't uh you know into this type of stuff are going to be kind of out to sea so this was my parents telling me that they had they'd gotten it all right so they'd let's start from step zero they'd upgraded to catalina they don't know what catalina is i had to surmise that they'd upgraded to it
John:
But it happened.
John:
Without me, without my participation in intervention, it just goes to show that Apple pushing updates on regular people is having a real effect.
John:
If you had asked them if they wanted to upgrade the OS, there's no way they would say yes.
John:
But somehow it happened to them.
John:
Like white BMWs, it just happened to them.
John:
So I'm surprised.
John:
Who knows how long they've been running it.
John:
But I start talking to them and it becomes totally clear that they are running Catalina whether they know it or not.
Right?
John:
And of course, once they were in Catalina, it told them that a bunch of their old software is no good.
John:
So they got a new version of Microsoft Office.
John:
So good for them.
John:
They bought software, even though software like batteries to people that generation should be free.
John:
You know, who buys software?
John:
I can't even get the struggle to try to get them to buy like more iCloud storage so I could stop seeing the messages for their five gig, you know.
John:
Anyway, somehow, someway, they bought Office.
John:
Because I guess they consider that real software because they were in, like, the workforce long enough for, like, Microsoft Office.
John:
Well, that's real software.
John:
I'll pay for that.
John:
Anyway, they paid for a new version of Office.
John:
So there are Catalina and the new version of Office.
John:
And they don't have to use any of this stuff because the new version of Office is different.
John:
Catalina is weird and so on and so forth.
John:
And my...
John:
Father was in a panic because he had tried to get some Excel document and he tried to email it to somebody, but he accidentally emailed the wrong thing and he couldn't find the Excel document that he just worked on.
John:
He's like, I know it's there somewhere, but I don't see it anywhere on my hard drive.
John:
Where is it?
John:
He said something about it's like in a cloud or no, it's in a drive or something.
John:
So I got to, you know, parachute in for tech support.
John:
uh and figure out what's going on i mean my best guess was i know the new version of office pushes one drive pretty heavily and from the words they were saying i think they were reaching for like one drive and that could explain why they don't see it on their computer because it's saved in one drive or whatever so and pro tip for people who haven't done tech support for anyone in their family recently or and or are doing it the old-fashioned way you got to take control of their screen like don't
John:
don't texting them on the phone like email you just shoot yourself in the head just you have to take control of their screen it's pretty easy with messages if you have an apple computer and they have an apple computer you can say ask to share their screen have them say yes it's such a relief oh my god
John:
Anyway, I share their screen to see what the deal is.
John:
And, you know, at that point, you know, and you can hear them talking.
John:
So it's like you have real time audio communication.
John:
You're both looking at the same screen and you are controlling the cursor that that's the way to get it done.
John:
So we go and he's like, here's my thing, but I don't know where it is and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And it turns out, you know, when you go to the open save dialog box in office in Catalina.
John:
It was showing, like, OneDrive.
John:
Like, the left sidebar was like, this is your OneDrive.
John:
It didn't even list, like, Dropbox.
John:
It was like, here's your OneDrive and your various folders in OneDrive and so on and so forth.
John:
And we could find the spreadsheet that they were talking about in OneDrive.
John:
and open it.
John:
I'm like, this is the spreadsheet you're talking about, right?
John:
I'm like, okay, great.
John:
Well, I'm just going to save this on your computer.
John:
So I go to save, and you get the save dialog, and the save dialog box also shows OneDrive.
John:
And so I'm looking for the thing to say, I don't want to see OneDrive.
John:
I want to see my computer.
John:
In open save dialog boxes, over the decades, there have been many ways that applications can extend the open save dialog box on macOS, some official, some unofficial.
John:
Most of the ones you'll see these days, like the bottom portion of the OpenSave dialog, you can put some UI there.
John:
So in this case, there was a kind of ungainly UI that officers were putting there.
John:
There was a button on the left that said on my Mac or something or go to my Mac or save on my Mac or something.
John:
It was a weird button.
John:
Like, it wasn't worded very well, but it was clear that this button, if you click this button, it would stop showing OneDrive and start showing your hard drive, right?
John:
And I have that same version of Office, which I preemptively bought because I'm going to eventually someday upgrade Catalina 2, so I needed a version that was all up to date.
John:
I didn't recall seeing that button.
John:
I don't think it was the default, but somehow maybe they clicked that button and got confused.
John:
So I see that button.
John:
It says on my Mac or whatever, and I click it.
John:
And the open save dialog box goes away.
John:
just slides back up.
John:
It's like, goodbye.
John:
And so I, you know, the document is still open, but it's open in one drive or whatever.
John:
And I could just like install one driver mounted and take the thing off.
John:
And now I want to figure out what the hell's going on here.
John:
Like the button says like on my Mac or whatever, and it's weird for a button to be a toggle.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like,
John:
Imagine clicking a button in a dialog, and the dialog box changes.
John:
It's like a radio button kind of thing.
John:
It's like the wrong control for this.
John:
But anyway, it's a button, and I know you're limited in how you can enhance the open save dialog boxes, but I'm pretty sure this is the right button.
John:
I do it like five more times, same thing happens.
John:
You click the button, the dialog goes whoop, and it's gone.
John:
Nothing has happened, nothing has been saved, nothing, nothing.
John:
So then I Google to make sure that that's what this button is supposed to do.
John:
And sure enough, yep, if you click that button, it's supposed to switch the open and save dialog box to show your hard drive and all be like normal.
John:
And at the bottom, the button says like in the cloud or something like that.
John:
And you can switch to the other version.
John:
And as soon as I found out that's how the thing's supposed to work,
John:
you know i put two and two together because is this one of the permissions dialogue yeah no of course it's it's a it's a permission thing because the applications have to ask permission to do stuff and maybe they had the open save dialogue was defaulting to a directory like desktop or documents folder they didn't have permissions for and in theory catalina should have thrown up a dialogue box that says do you want microsoft excel to have access to your desktop and i would say yes but it never did throw up that dialogue
John:
Now, if you don't know what Catalina is doing to the permission model, which regular users should not need to know, you would never guess this in a million years because nothing in your prior history of decades of using the Mac have you ever had to give Excel permission to view the desktop automatically.
John:
And the fact that Office was just eating this error and just being like, I'm out, no access, and not throwing up a Catalina dialogue asking me for permission, they would never have figured this out.
John:
And they would have thought it was a Microsoft Office bug.
John:
And for all I know, it is.
John:
Maybe it is an Office bug, but it's a combination of Office and Catalina.
John:
There is probably a way to get Excel to have access to the desktop folder and document, but me being me, I immediately added all of the Office applications to full disk access in the permissions dialog box because I don't want to get any more of these calls.
John:
And lo and behold, if I put all those apps, give them full disk access in the Catalina permissions dialog...
John:
it worked to click that button the dialog switches and now you can see their hard drive and i showed them how to switch back and forth and so on and so forth so here's an example of microsoft and or apple really falling down on the new catalina security model which i mostly endorse but it has to work situations like that no regular user is ever going to figure out unless lots of other people run into it and that's potentially googleable but
John:
I don't even know if they would know the right thing to Google for.
John:
And my quote-unquote solution of getting full disk access isn't really the right solution, but it's the type of thing where it's like, I don't want to have to deal with this again.
John:
I just want it to, you know, sort of go back to the old way.
John:
I'm not going to turn off, you know, system integrity protection or go over that far, but problems like that, frustrating and not encouraging.
John:
So I guess it is encouraging that they were able to successfully upgrade Catalina themselves.
John:
and didn't have any particular complaints about the os but it turns out the main problem they were having with this application was partially because of catalina so that's not great and at least it's one problem that casey isn't having so that's the only one the only one john have you if either one of you in your catalina installs resorted to giving applications full disk access besides i suppose terminal which it's reasonable to give that
John:
i don't think so a crash plan but uh yeah that's reasonable too right that's expected but like i i think most applications expect you to say oh just give me access to your desktop oh just give me access to your documents folder and that's all i'm ever going to need it and you're fine uh i'm sure i'll find this all out when i actually do upgrade to catalina but for now i am avoiding it and i think that is still wise
Marco:
Yeah, I still I mean, I'm running on my laptop simply because it came with it.
Marco:
But I am not running on my desktop yet.
Marco:
And I it's just I don't even think about it most of the time because I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything cool by not having upgraded yet.
Marco:
Like there's no big features that I'm that I'm looking forward to.
Marco:
There's nothing I'm like, oh, I wish I wish I would just upgrade so I could then do X.
Marco:
but I don't want to because it would cost me time and bugs.
Marco:
Nope, there is nothing like that.
Marco:
There's no motivating factors.
Marco:
There's just nothing yet.
Marco:
I thought Catalyst would be that, but I'm still pretty far from being able to do anything with that.
Marco:
No, it's just nothing.
Marco:
I have no motivation to upgrade on my desktop.
Marco:
I'm very totally happy just continuing to use Mojave indefinitely.
John:
i want to use the new photos app and i think i would like the tv app on the other hand i don't want to say goodbye to itunes and for the music app so i'm i'm kind of torn most of the reason i haven't upgraded is because i'm terrified of the upgrade process of photos which i've heard bad stories about right but i do want it you i'm always looking for new features and photos or any any change in photos whatsoever presumably a change for the better so that's my main draw but i'm
John:
I'm currently able to resist pretty easily.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The music app, honestly, I think it's a huge step back.
Marco:
I use it on my laptop.
Marco:
I really don't like it.
Marco:
There's significant regressions from iTunes.
Marco:
I don't know what they were thinking with that.
Marco:
I don't know why they had to mess with it so much, honestly.
Marco:
Whatever reasons they had, I hope they bring it back soon.
Marco:
I heard they're re-out in the column browser in the newest beta or something.
Marco:
If that's true, that's great because
Marco:
That's the way I browse my music and it has sucked on my laptop not having that for so long.
Marco:
But everything about it seems like it's either like a wash or a loss in some way or a risk in some way.
Marco:
And this just doesn't sound appealing at all to me.
Casey:
Yeah, I got no good thoughts about Catalina, so I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.
Marco:
Hey, you know what?
Marco:
If you don't wait for an iMac Pro update, you can buy the current iMac Pro and you can install Mojave on it.
Marco:
No matter what it comes with, you can install Mojave on it because it's compatible.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Marco:
But if you wait for the next iMac update, you will be forced to have Catalina on it.
Marco:
And if you have a desktop and a laptop, you can have a machine that you use most of the time that doesn't have Catalina on it.
Casey:
You really are intent on me setting all of my money aflame.
Marco:
I just don't want to tear my office ceiling apart.
Casey:
It's like I haven't known you for 20 years or something.
John:
It's less money though.
John:
Remember, it's less.
John:
It's less overall than everything you would have to buy on this long string of computer purchases you're going to get.
Marco:
Who cares whether you spend it now or six months from now?
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
It doesn't matter because we've talked about it too much.
Casey:
Adam wants us to know about Amazon's customer support quote-unquote text tree.
Casey:
Tell me about this.
John:
That was in the phone tree thing with text where you're like, you know, do you want to do this?
John:
Do you want to do that?
John:
And I was complaining that you have limited options and then eventually it just did ends.
John:
I actually have two pieces on this one on every product page and Amazon there on the detail page.
John:
There is a link somewhere that says you have a problem with this listing and you can just click that and you immediately get to the thing that you can say something's wrong with it.
John:
The image is wrong.
John:
You just type a text message.
John:
That is.
John:
a faster way to do this rather than going through the support chat thing that I did but according to Adam if you're in that chat thing just type agent as your text string when you get a chance to type something type agent once or twice and you will eventually get connected with a human in theory so next time I'm going to try that agent agent agent do you think that actually works because you're typing agent or do you think it's like this person is typing something we don't recognize three times in a row we'll just kick them to a human
John:
I think agent probably.
John:
It's like when you yell obscenities into the phone tree and the basic AI recognizes angry customer noises.
John:
Or if you just hold down star or hold down zero.
John:
There's all sorts of things that are reasonable signals that you want a human being.
John:
And there's like those websites like get human.com, which tells you how to get a human.
John:
Like the thing about get human and stuff is usually for phones.
John:
I don't know if they've upgraded for text, but this type of thing, I think you used to be fairly assured that if you were typing text chat back and forth, you were probably talking to one poor overworked human who's chatting simultaneously with 97 people and who's mostly copying and pasting or using macros to fill in the things.
John:
But still it's human triggering the macros, right?
John:
Just to figure out which thing to be triggered.
John:
But these days,
John:
with the with advancements in a very basic you know 70s text adventure level uh ai and the continued need to drive costs down you're not talking to a human you're just talking to you know a text version of a phone tree or some very simple ai and you really do want to go star zero agent whatever to get to the actual human
Casey:
What do we want to do from here?
John:
I feel like... It's time for Ask ATP.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Spend a lot of time on your computer.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I feel like it's due by Friday where I just wanted to start this whole thing over and apologize profusely for this whole episode.
Marco:
Well, you don't have that option and neither do they.
Marco:
Hey, you know what our listeners do?
Marco:
They buy computers.
Casey:
this is relevant this is relevant content i guess i don't know this this became i should have been paying more attention to the clock but because it's about me i was riveted it's fine oh god i'm so sorry for everything it's fine just buy all the computers it's fine oh yeah that's what i have to do to repent i want you to do it they want you to do it you want you to do it
Marco:
The only people who don't want you to do this are John and half of you.
John:
I had a plan that allowed him to buy things too.
John:
I had an acceptable to me plan that allowed him to buy things on Black Friday and get cool new computers.
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:
The built in templates are really awesome.
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:
The amusingly named Ask Dr. Tuna writes, my grandson who is 11 is obsessed with Apple.
Casey:
I gave him my old MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Should I encourage him to learn AppleScript or is AppleScript not long for this world?
Casey:
I don't have terribly positive thoughts about AppleScript.
Casey:
I find it, because I'm a developer, I suppose, I find it to be completely inscrutable and...
Casey:
Not like anything else, and that's not a compliment.
Casey:
So I would not encourage AppleScript personally, but that's just my two cents.
Casey:
Marco, I'd be curious to hear your two cents, and then we will let the resident old man round us out and tell us what he thinks.
Marco:
I love the idea of letting power users automate things on their computers.
Marco:
I don't love AppleScript as an implementation of that idea.
Casey:
Agreed, agreed.
Marco:
It is a very difficult language to understand and to write.
Marco:
It reads really easily.
Marco:
You can look at it and you're like, wow, it's so magical.
Marco:
Then you try to write it and it's like, what?
Marco:
How do I even know what to say?
Marco:
And then you try things and it's wrong.
Marco:
I don't think AppleScript is a great language at all.
Marco:
I think it's actually very hostile to try to learn.
Marco:
And it's mostly done by copy and paste, I think.
Marco:
And furthermore, I think it's already dead.
Marco:
Not only does it not have a bright future, I think it doesn't even have a bright present.
Marco:
And even the past has not been kind to it.
Marco:
AppleScript, I think, is totally, totally dead.
Marco:
Now, again, I love the idea of automation, but I think it's not the right way anymore.
John:
I feel like there's some attraction to AppleScript because you might hear that scripting is a sort of an easier, friendlier version of programming and someone's into Apple.
John:
So surely AppleScript is the thing they want.
John:
But kind of like JavaScript, I think you might be misled by the name.
John:
So no, you should not encourage your 11 year old grandson to learn AppleScript.
John:
On the second half of this question, do you think it's not long for this world?
John:
I think it is probably going to stick around for longer than we all think it should.
John:
I mean, it kind of already has.
John:
That doesn't change things.
John:
No, your son should not learn Alpscript.
John:
No, your grandson should not learn Alpscript.
John:
What should he learn at 11?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I didn't do a very good job of getting either of my children interested in programming when they were that age, but eventually my son eventually came around on his own and is learning Swift in his high school class.
John:
I feel like...
John:
The kids have to show an interest on their own.
John:
If they're into programming, there's lots of good apps on the App Store that are programming like, you know, I forget what the names are, like Hopscotch and Scratch and there's the Swift Playgrounds thing.
John:
There's all sorts of stuff.
John:
Like, it doesn't really matter.
John:
It's just that they have to show an interest in it.
John:
If and when eventually he wants to get serious about programming for Apple platforms, then yeah, he can start learning Swift and Swift Playgrounds and all that stuff.
John:
But, uh...
John:
It's a long road, and it really, you know, there's... I don't know, like, encourage him to learn AppleScript.
John:
Like, it's like encouraging somebody to be into the accordion.
John:
Like, I suppose you can do it, but... Like, they really have to take an interest themselves.
John:
Now we're going to hear from all the accordion player.
John:
I don't know, yeah.
John:
It's not a good... I was trying to think of something, like, that...
John:
The person has to have an interest in themselves.
John:
Programming is like that.
John:
You can't lead someone to programming.
John:
They have to take to it.
John:
You can put it in front of them.
John:
You can present it and say, here's the thing you might be into, but if they go, nah,
John:
then they're not into it like same thing put a musical instrument in front of them see if they're into it put a different musical instrument like it's part of being what a parent is present the kids with options but you know this is the trope that we hopefully are all familiar with from all the media we've ever consumed in our entire life if you push your kid into literally anything even if they would otherwise like it they will probably like it less and probably also resent you so don't do that
Casey:
Chris Cast writes, you guys, specifically Marco Armin, talk a lot about bouncing back and forth between laptops and desktops.
Casey:
What the hell, Chris?
Casey:
Where am I on this one?
Casey:
I feel like the last three episodes of it all, whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, Chris writes, how do you keep all of your configs, preferences, et cetera, in sync, or do you use specific machines for specific purposes?
Casey:
Well, I guess I don't need to answer this one, do I, Chris?
Casey:
So, Marco, tell me what's up.
Marco:
I mostly just do manual things.
Marco:
Like if I change a preference on one, I'll change a preference on the other.
Marco:
But overall, my general theme to this is...
Marco:
Outside of a few exceptions, I have my TextMate preferences and I just put those in Dropbox and whenever I set up a new laptop, I just copy them into the TextMate's folder and that's it.
Marco:
And I'll use Dropbox for anything that can be synced easily through Dropbox automatically, but that's about the extent of that.
Marco:
Ultimately, what I try to do is...
Marco:
try to run as stock of a setup as possible, such that I can set up a totally clean install with the way I like to do things within a couple hours.
Marco:
So it's not a huge deal.
Marco:
So I actually don't use a lot of power user tools and workflow tools and automation stuff.
Marco:
The way a lot of people will use things like
Marco:
like Hazel to automate a whole bunch of stuff moving around, Text Expander, Keyboard Maestro.
Marco:
A lot of these tools that a lot of our friends use that are super powerful, I've just not gotten into.
Marco:
Like I recently, on years of recommendations, I tried Better Touch Tool on the new laptop to try to customize the touch bar.
Marco:
And Better Touch Tool is just...
Marco:
a massive arsenal of power tools and i ran it for like one night and i'm like this is too much i don't want this and it's it looked amazing and if you're the kind of person who likes that kind of stuff that's amazing but it was so not for me i very quickly realized like oh this is this is not what i'm looking for um and that was it uh i like to keep things fairly minimally customized that way
Marco:
A, I can sit down in front of any computer and get things reasonably done.
Marco:
And B, when I do want to get a new computer or when I'm using multiple computers, there's not that much to keep in sync between them.
Casey:
Yeah, I mostly feel the same way.
Casey:
I have gotten very quick at setting up a new computer these days, so that's good.
Casey:
I do use Synology Drive.
Casey:
I've mostly divorced myself from Dropbox.
Casey:
Synology Drive is not perfect.
Casey:
It's kind of their faux Dropbox, but it's not actively trying to be awful, which is an improvement over Dropbox, so that's good.
Casey:
They're trying to bust their hearts, just not as good as Dropbox.
Casey:
um but anyways but yeah like you said marco like if there's i i try to stay as stock as i can and for the things that can't i just synchronize that stuff manually by you know clicking around in system preferences for example and plus almost everything i do all of the stuff that i do is all in like github or you know some other repository online so there's
Casey:
There's very little – like in the days of yore, which we've talked about many times on the show, like using – well, not John, but you and I used briefcases on Windows, which I don't know if that's even still a thing.
Casey:
But that was their like faux R-sync.
Casey:
That's what those did?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
My briefcase.
Casey:
I remember that.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I used them very successfully way back in the day when I had a tower and a laptop.
Casey:
And it was, I mean, it was Windows, so it was wonky and fiddly, but it actually worked pretty well.
Casey:
Anyways, I don't have the, I bring those up to say I don't really have a lot of that anymore.
Casey:
And what little I have is stored in Synology Drive or Dropbox or whatever your equivalent may be.
Casey:
So it's not really a problem for me.
Casey:
John, I presume you have like some sort of
John:
figurative and or literal firewall between your work computer and your mac pro yeah like my thing is i don't actually want the same settings on all of my computers especially if one of them is a desktop one of them is a laptop so i don't have any sort of comprehensive syncing thing like marco i do keep like my most extensive settings in dropbox so bb edit i have tons of settings honestly i don't even know what they all are anymore all i know is that if i launch bb edit on a system without my settings like what the hell is this i don't recognize this text editor so apparently i'm customizing it a lot
John:
But like BBEdit has native within the application ability to understand and sync through Dropbox.
John:
So my entire BBEdit application support folder is in Dropbox.
John:
That includes not just all my settings, but all of my like scripts and key bindings and like just, you know, sample templates and preview CSS files and like everything.
John:
So I think that's like my most important and extensive settings.
John:
My browser settings and preferences like that.
John:
When setting up a new machine, I will just manually, you know, I'm so used to manually dragging preference files in or PList files these days or whatever.
John:
I'll do that.
John:
And, of course, as you both know, that's not such a big hassle, even though it sounds like, because how often do I set up a new computer?
John:
It's not that often.
John:
So when I get my new Mac Pro, guess what?
John:
I'm going to be doing it.
John:
I'm going to use migration assistance, which gets almost all of it done for me.
John:
And then on an ongoing basis, synchronizing settings between my laptop at work and my desktop.
John:
If there's a setting that...
John:
is a new like they're both already set up if there's a new setting in a new version of os i'll just set it in both places but my settings on my laptop are very different than my settings on my desktop like everything you go to in system preferences is different so i'm perfectly content to have two different set of settings even for applications things are different because my work laptop first of all for people who don't work uh you know uh
John:
jobs in techno corporate overlord situations they override a lot of settings on your laptop whether you like it or not so whatever my preferences are they have the screen lock set to activate after x number of minutes for security reasons and you know all sorts of stuff like that so i gotta deal with that and then on top of that i just manually do whatever settings i want
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
So speaking of things I cannot pronounce correctly, is this iMessage read or read receipts?
John:
I always say read.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So iMessage read receipts on or off for me on and about three or four times a year.
Casey:
I wonder if that's the right answer, but it's been on pretty much ever since it was a thing.
Casey:
John, let's start with you.
Casey:
On or off?
John:
Off.
John:
Always off.
John:
The main, and I think everyone should have them off, not just me.
John:
The thing that I find most attractive about iMessage and Slack and things like that is that it's asynchronous messaging.
John:
It may seem like it's synchronous, like you're in a conversation, but it's not.
John:
The social obligation, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's asynchronous.
John:
It's better than getting someone on the phone because if they're in the middle of something, they're driving or they're talking to somebody else or they're
John:
taking a dump whatever it is that they're doing synchronous would mean you need their attention right now asynchronous like iMessage or Slack or any other thing is you send the message and maybe their phone buzzes or bloops or vibrates or maybe it's set to totally silent and maybe it's in another room but eventually they'll see the notification or whatever and see that you got a message and then at that point
John:
It also doesn't mean that they then have to respond to you.
John:
That's what a read receipt would make you think, oh, they read my message.
John:
Why aren't they responding?
John:
It's better to not know when they read your message.
John:
So then you can just think, obviously, they haven't read my message next.
John:
And then so every time a message comes in, you can be like, oh, they just read my message and immediately reply if that makes you feel better.
John:
When in reality, they might have read your message two hours ago and known that they can't deal with this right now because they're in the middle of making dinner or whatever, and they'll deal with it later.
John:
So that is the beauty.
John:
That is the social pact of asynchronous messaging is that you don't have to respond as soon as you get a message.
John:
You shouldn't expect it from other people.
John:
And if we all turn off red receipts,
John:
If you're the type of person who wants to believe that people respond as soon as they read your message, you can believe that, and everything will be fine.
John:
As soon as one person turns on red receipts, then the whole system breaks down, and now our own habits are actually revealed, and everyone just feels bad.
Ha ha!
John:
wow now you don't have uh tina set to be on and everyone else off because that is something you can do no all for everybody if you really knew you need to reach somebody if i need to reach my wife i can call her on the phone like i find it if i need synchronous messaging that is available to me i feel perfectly comfortable doing that like but that's not that's not the deal with text messages no red receipts
Casey:
Sorry, Dad.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm totally with you on that.
Marco:
I think that it breaks the expectation.
Marco:
As John said, it's like the social construct and it's like how you expect these communication mechanisms to respond.
Marco:
I don't expect if I get a message on my phone...
Marco:
and I look at it now or I look at it later, I don't expect there to be a difference of something happening as a result of me having looked at it now in a certain way or not.
Marco:
People talk about if you can force touch preview a message to not send the red receipt or anything.
Marco:
There's all these different things.
Marco:
Just disable them because to me, you sent me that message
Marco:
it is none of your business when I've read it, or even what that means.
Marco:
Like, what does it mean that I've read it?
Marco:
Does it mean that my phone displayed it fully?
Marco:
Does it mean I've actually seen it?
Marco:
Does it mean I'm actually going to respond to it?
Marco:
Who knows, right?
Marco:
You sent the message, at some point I can respond, it is none of your business when I do that, or if I've seen it or anything.
Marco:
Like, same reason, like on emails, I disable the, you know, loading third-party images by default.
Marco:
Because that shouldn't be enabled by default.
Marco:
I feel like that enables the same kind of thing.
Marco:
It enables, through various douchey email apps, it enables people to have red pixels on their emails to you.
Marco:
And the same thing, I think that's grossly inappropriate.
Marco:
I know certain employers set this up and require this for their employees, and I think that's gross.
Marco:
It's like, I don't...
Marco:
I don't look at my wife's phone because I consider that like an invasion of privacy.
Marco:
That's like her brain.
Marco:
That would feel weird.
Marco:
I don't poke around.
Marco:
I don't look at her messages.
Marco:
That would feel gross and like a weird overreach.
Marco:
I think red receipts are that same level of thing.
Marco:
It's that same level of like, that's too much.
Marco:
That's too far.
Marco:
That's too much like surveillance of my behavior.
Marco:
And you, the sender of this message, don't deserve that information from me.
Marco:
That's creepy.
Marco:
And you don't need this information and you shouldn't want it and you shouldn't get it.
John:
And it'll make you feel better not to have it because then you can choose to believe whatever you want to choose to believe about Marco's interaction with your text message.
John:
And I think most people will want to choose to believe he must not have seen it until the moment before he replied.
John:
You can happily believe that and Marco will allow you to continue to have that fiction if it makes you feel better.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have them on.
Casey:
I think I've always had them on.
Casey:
I can't recall that ever having knowingly been a problem, but you do make, you both make a very compelling argument.
John:
You're a giver, Casey.
Casey:
That's me.
Casey:
I'm a giver.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I think that might do it.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Linode, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
So we didn't talk about during follow-up the legal question I had from last week and my story about my car getting bumped and what happened with that.
Casey:
The car is back.
Casey:
It's been repaired.
Casey:
It looks great.
Casey:
I am very thankful for that.
Casey:
I got a lot of flack on Twitter and a little bit over email about the way I had handled the situation and what I had talked about on the podcast.
Casey:
And what I thought...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I got a lot of flack for this and I wanted to very quickly address the flack that I received and then talk about the actual question.
Casey:
But to start with the flack, I think even though almost everyone who said something said it extraordinarily obnoxiously, so thank you everyone, I do think that there was actually some amount of truth to what was being said, which is a white guy calling the cops for something that is admittedly minor is kind of the definition of privilege.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't think I had appropriately recognized that at the time in which we spoke last week.
Casey:
And I am sorry for that.
Casey:
I really am.
Casey:
I think I should have been more self-aware than the way I acted last week.
Casey:
That being said, the reason I called the police was because what I didn't mention on the show last week, and I'd love to blame this on Marco having had too heavy a hand with the editing knife, but it wasn't him at all.
Casey:
I just didn't bring it up.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
On two separate occasions in my past, I have had minor bumps or something roughly equivalent to what happened.
Casey:
And at the time of the issue, the other person said, this was my fault, here's my insurance, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And I did not call the cops and I thought everything was copacetic or everyone agrees.
Casey:
We're all happy.
Casey:
We're going to go our separate ways and we will handle this like adults.
Casey:
And in both of those occasions, the other person said, oh no, that wasn't me.
Casey:
Or, oh no, I didn't do anything wrong and fought us on it.
Casey:
And I can give you the whole details, but it's ultimately irrelevant.
Casey:
The point is we got burned twice where we tried to just handle it like adults and
Casey:
And it didn't get handled and we ended up either footing the bill or our insurance had to deal with it because their insurance wouldn't pay because their person said they didn't do it, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So the reason that I called the cops in the first place was because I will never make that mistake again.
Casey:
Now, some people said you should never do that over a bumper.
Casey:
Hey, that's fine if you are able to roll with it like that.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
And I don't mean this to be a jerk.
Casey:
If your car doesn't matter to you that much, or if your paint doesn't have to be pristine, that's awesome.
Casey:
I kind of wish I was like that, but that's not me.
Casey:
I want my car to look pristine.
Casey:
I'm proud of my car looking pristine.
Casey:
I wash it as often as I can because I want it to look pristine.
Casey:
That's the way I am.
Casey:
So that's why I called the cops.
Casey:
I do think it was a bit unreasonable that...
Casey:
I don't feel like I was seeking a citation, but it is unreasonable if I was.
Casey:
And if I came across that way, then that's my fault, and I'm sorry.
Casey:
Now, to answer the actual question, I had a couple different thoughts.
Casey:
First of all, what I didn't...
Casey:
reasonably appreciate last week, which I did since think about and do appreciate now, is that there is some amount of subjective application of the law.
Casey:
And I don't remember if somebody said this to me or if I had an epiphany, maybe an apostrophe, that's a reference.
Casey:
But anyway, I had a epiphany that, you know, if I get a speeding ticket, I will want that officer to be as lenient as they possibly can be and give me as low of a speeding ticket as I possibly can.
Casey:
And if that's okay, then it should be okay for this person who ran into me
Casey:
to also get let off.
Casey:
And I don't think I appropriately appreciated that last week.
Casey:
But to answer the question, Chris, who is either a current or former law enforcement officer from Oklahoma, wrote in and said, when I go to collisions that I know I won't work, for example, private property collisions with no injuries, I'll use my body camera and still get statements from both parties.
Casey:
I then explain that I won't be working the collision, but their statements will be recorded if there's any dispute.
Casey:
The insurance companies can then subpoena my body camera footage if needed.
Casey:
For potential laws that are broken, you guys started to hit right on or started to hit on the right things.
Casey:
There is, of course, falling too closely or failure to devote full time and attention, for example, looking at a cell phone.
Casey:
But now if we have something like, oh, my foot slipped off the brake or, oh, the light turned green.
Casey:
I thought the car in front of me was going, but they didn't.
Casey:
They have an ordinance in Chris's city, which is called careless driving.
Casey:
And it's kind of a catch all that basically just states you drove in a way that caused damage to someone else's car.
Casey:
And I thought that was a pretty succinct and interesting answer to our question of how could they have been cited whether or not it was necessary?
Casey:
How could it have happened?
Casey:
And there's your answer.
John:
To touch on a few more aspects of this, I think your thing about getting into a situation and not involving the authorities and then getting burned on it later because then it's just your word against theirs and there's no sort of third party and there's no one taking statements in the moment and so on and so forth.
John:
I think that's advice that
John:
Is handed out often.
John:
Some or all of us may have gotten that advice from parents or other adults in our life saying if you ever do get into an accident, even though it seems like you and the other person are in agreement about what happened, it's a good idea to...
John:
call the police to report it and get a statement in the moment and get witnesses and all sorts of other things because if you don't this bad thing could happen to you i think that actual advice is another example of what you're getting at before with privilege if you are at the top of the food chain in terms of privilege in this country of course it's natural for you to call on the authorities because it's all upside for you it's like
John:
Nothing bad is going to happen to me.
John:
And they are going to come in and they're going to protect my rights and they're going to protect me.
John:
That's the expectation.
John:
By calling in the authorities, I'm calling them to come and protect me.
John:
The thought doesn't enter your head that I'm going to call in the authorities.
John:
I'm going to be dead in an hour and a half.
John:
That doesn't enter your mind if this is the type of advice you're getting.
John:
And similarly, if your parents are giving you this advice, that the first thing you should always do in any situation like this is call the authorities, chances are you're probably white.
John:
And if you're not, your parents might be giving you very different advice.
John:
And that's something that we tend not to think about.
John:
And that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad advice, because Casey's examples, in accidents, it is a good idea to not just trust the other person to...
John:
say exactly the same thing as I said before.
John:
It is a good idea to sort of get, you know, down what happened.
John:
Like, it's a difficult situation because we should, I mean, we would like to live in a world, in a society where it was a level playing field, right?
John:
So I'm, honestly, I've been in a lot of these situations.
John:
I was discussing this with my wife.
John:
I've been in a minor, you know, someone bumps into my car when I'm parked or something and I see it happen, you know, or like,
John:
We're stopped at a stoplight and someone touches my bumper or something like that.
John:
And sometimes in that situation, I won't even get out of the car because I'm driving an old beater and it's already got dents all over the bumper.
John:
And it was like the world's smallest bump.
John:
And I just give him a dirty look.
John:
Thumbs down.
John:
exactly and we just all go on our way because like you just can't even deal with it right but in other situations if there's actual car damage it is actually important to get things under control and you do have to take an assessment i think this is one of the other things that you were getting yelled at at casey is like the idea that uh another another aspect of your potential privilege i don't think people just made this assumption because they made this assumption but potentially it's like oh casey is you know comfortable in his life and is able to absorb the cost of this bumper whereas the poor defenseless person that uh
John:
hit them obviously is on their last penny and can't afford anything.
John:
Right.
John:
And so how dare you extract money for it, for this thing in any sort of exchange or whatever.
John:
That may be true.
John:
It may be this person was, you know, this was there on their last penny and they're driving to a job interview that they need to keep their rent or as they're all going to die.
John:
Right.
John:
Like this, that could be true.
John:
Right.
John:
And that is a, that is a reasonable thing to take into account when deciding how you are going to handle a situation like this in an accident.
John:
Right.
John:
But Casey didn't say anything about whether this person was driving a Bentley or not.
John:
For all you know, they were driving their parents' Lamborghini SUV.
John:
Does that change your opinion about whether they should buy the $500?
John:
Like, people's sense of justice, right or wrong, depends a lot on, like...
John:
the relative power and financial positions of the people involved in the minor fender bender.
John:
So I think, and again, Casey didn't say anything.
John:
He just said this person was young.
John:
Now, just saying you're young, you say, well, obviously young people have less money than older people.
John:
That's true too.
John:
So that may have been the situation.
John:
And I think it is good to take that into account.
John:
I just think there's not, without all the details, it's very difficult to say what the quote unquote right thing to do is.
John:
And another point related to that a lot of people brought up is,
John:
Sometimes you just do a nice thing by just eating it.
John:
And Casey willingly or not did that in these two other times that he talked about where he just ended up eating it and someone else got something nicer and he didn't particularly do it willingly.
John:
But sometimes like I kind of feel like that's sort of.
John:
what you know can happen if if like in this situation where i don't even get out of my car but on the other hand it's like i'm also saving myself the hassle of dealing with it at all and just be willing to say in that moment my bumper is already destroyed i know this didn't make it any worse i'm just gonna like it's actually easier for everybody including me involved to not worry about it um
John:
But on the other hand, if it's a serious accident or it's a brand new car or someone bumps into the bumper of my Ferrari someday, I'm probably going to get out of the car.
John:
And I will probably exercise my privilege and get the police involved as long as I feel like by doing that I am not putting anyone else in danger, as in...
John:
It's another rich white dude who bumped me the bumper.
John:
I think that's the correct level playing field.
John:
They bumped me with their Ferrari.
John:
I feel like that is a reasonable thing to do.
John:
And if your main concern is not getting screwed over by someone changing their story and everything seems to be on the level with respect to putting people in danger...
John:
then I think that is also a reasonable thing to do.
John:
And I don't know if Casey wants to talk about details of what kind of car hit them or how old the person was or, you know, anything else about them that might change your opinion of whether he should or shouldn't have called the police.
John:
But the bottom line is that he didn't seem to work out okay.
John:
So I think, you know, he probably didn't act in an unreasonable manner.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
No, I think I did say last episode it was a reasonably modern Jeep Compass.
Casey:
I don't know if that made the final edit, but I don't know.
Casey:
I would say it was five, maybe 10 years old and it seemed to be in good repair.
Casey:
You know, it wasn't like the bumper was falling off or anything like that.
Casey:
I'll also say that if the impact resulted in just like a scratch or something, or like a little bit of paint that maybe I could have gotten out with like compound or something, I would have just driven off and called it a day.
Casey:
But there was a clear issue with the car.
Casey:
Now, maybe to you, listener, the issue was not enough to get your junk in a wad over, but it was enough to get my junk in a wad.
Casey:
And so that's why I acted the way I did.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I got enough very angry people yelling at me on Twitter and via email that I wanted to just quickly address it.
Casey:
And since we haven't gone long enough talking about everything under the sun, let's talk about the abomination that is the Cybertruck.
Casey:
Because, oh my goodness.
John:
Oh, it's not that bad.
Casey:
It's bad.
Casey:
You're getting clouded by your fanboyism.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Marco:
It's so bad.
Marco:
It's hard for me to accurately and usefully judge the Cybertruck because I am not a truck person.
Marco:
I am a Tesla person, but I am not a truck person.
Marco:
And truck people are such their own thing that I feel totally unqualified to talk about it.
Marco:
All I can say is it looks pretty cool, and Tesla is doing their usual things of making a mostly pretty cool vehicle with a few things that are incredibly over-engineered about it that will probably cause production delays and problems, like they always do.
Marco:
But it does look pretty cool.
Marco:
I like that they didn't just do something...
Marco:
really pedestrian.
Marco:
Whether it proves useful or not, that's up to people who know more about trucks than I do.
Marco:
But I think it looks really weird, but in kind of a good way.
Marco:
Sometimes you need that in industries that are kind of stodgy and
Marco:
the pickup truck industry has been stuck for quite a while in making things that look pretty much the same all the time.
Marco:
And there are good reasons for some of those decisions, but not for all of them.
Marco:
And so this is, it looks pretty cool.
Marco:
And you know what, you got to give Tesla credit.
Marco:
They announce a bunch of really weird stuff and stuff that seems really out there and really ambitious and
Marco:
They actually do most of it.
Marco:
They actually end up shipping most of the things they announce and it might take longer and it might, you know, have some problems at first, but like they do usually ship the things they announce like this.
Marco:
And so I got to give them credit.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
they're doing more crazy stuff and it seems to be working and no one else is doing the stuff they're doing.
Marco:
So, cool.
Casey:
I quit the show.
Casey:
I quit the show.
Marco:
I'm not saying I'm buying one or you should, but like... Oh, no.
Casey:
It's so... No.
Casey:
Just no, Marco.
Casey:
The only thing I agree with in what you just said was that it is cool that they're doing something different.
Casey:
Hey, you know what?
Marco:
Since we already spent all of my money and your money in this show, maybe John can buy the Cybertruck.
Marco:
John!
Casey:
John, it's your time to shine.
Casey:
I feel like if Microsoft did the computing equivalent of this announcement, I didn't even watch the presentation because everyone I know, even the Tesla fans said it was a disaster, so I didn't feel like I needed to.
Marco:
I didn't watch the presentation either.
Marco:
I know the whole window-breaking thing.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
If Microsoft did whatever the computing equivalent is of this announcement, you and me and John would be beating the snot out of them.
Casey:
But because it's Elon and because it's Tesla, oh, everything's okay.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
I think this thing is ugly.
Casey:
From what little I know of trucks and how they work and what's important and useful to them, it doesn't strike me as a particularly good pickup truck.
Casey:
Yes, it's very strong.
Casey:
But other than that, it's not a very good utility vehicle.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
No, it looks stupid.
Casey:
It doesn't have side mirrors.
Casey:
It doesn't have windshield wipers right now.
Casey:
It's a frigging triangle.
Casey:
Everything about this almost offends me, which makes me wonder if this is old man shouting at Cloud.
Casey:
So I don't know, but I feel like...
Casey:
There's so much that I can applaud about what Tesla's done, even in the cars that I have issues with.
Casey:
Like, I really dislike the Model 3's single screen in the center thing.
Casey:
I really wish it had an instrument cluster, for example.
Casey:
But I can get behind...
Casey:
that that is something different and isn't necessarily just for differences sake.
Casey:
Whereas this just seems like nobody said no to Elon and it just doesn't seem useful to me.
Casey:
I haven't heard connected.
Casey:
So I don't know if they had a chance to talk about it, but I, I have spoken to Stephen Hackett a little bit privately, or we have spoken to him privately.
Casey:
And he, from what I gathered, did not seem overly impressed with it either.
Casey:
I don't know, John, what's your thoughts?
Yeah.
John:
So this product, I feel like, might... It's hard to think of it as like, is this a good car?
John:
Is this a good product for Tesla to make?
John:
Who is this going to satisfy?
John:
The thing about trucks in general in the United States is most of them are not used as trucks.
John:
Just like most SUVs are not taken off-road, most trucks are not used as trucks.
John:
And that's why you get all these trucks that...
John:
you know if you start looking at them and seeing how much they cost and what they have and they have four doors in them and they have these weird interiors and they have these like posh chrome bed liners i'm just making things up but like they're they're very fancy trucks they're mostly not used as trucks so whatever like who am i to say that if someone wants a big snarling giant ridiculous pickup truck that they never use as a truck except for like one or two times every few years to like move someone's couch fine let them have it right and
John:
That is actually, I think, the biggest market for trucks in the United States.
John:
The Cybertruck may actually fill a need in that market for a pickup truck that's not used as a truck that looks different than all the other pickup trucks not used as trucks.
John:
It has to look, it has to fulfill the requirements of that category.
John:
It has to be
John:
beefy and tough looking and actually tough and intimidating and deadly to pedestrians in a terrifying way that should be illegal i think it might hit all of those markers even the styling like it's part of it you know the dramatically different styling than other pickup pickup trucks that might be good for it as a product yes even if it's ugly because you
John:
it's it stands out right um the styling itself like i give them certainly give them points for doing something that's different than all the other pickup trucks i subtract points for essentially instead of coming up with a new styling and
John:
just taking the styling from the it's like retro future it's like straight out of the 80s you could put this thing on a video game box from the 80s or in a movie from the 80s and it's like yeah no that's that like it's not it's not even an homage to that styling it is literally that styling so it's not particularly original because i lived through the 80s and it's like yeah no that's the thing but they're but they're making it a real car right so fine right
John:
I think it's pretty ugly and ungainly, but I understand the vibe they're going for, and I give them full points for making a weird car.
John:
All of that said, I think it's a terrible truck for people who want trucks.
John:
It is not a successful... Unlike, for example, the Model S, which is a great thing to compare it for, the Model S...
John:
like is so practical in terms of like a car that has four doors that stand shape.
John:
How can we make this the most useful car?
John:
That's four doors that stand shape because it's electric.
John:
We can do all sorts of things.
John:
Other four doors car.
John:
So it's big on the inside.
John:
It has big trunks.
John:
It has a hatchback.
John:
It has the seats in the back.
John:
It's like, it does everything that it can to be useful as a sedan, right?
John:
this truck does not do everything it can to be useful as a truck at all.
John:
Like the, everything about it is it's the Johnny Ives school, you know, the bad Johnny Ives school of like a form over function, right?
John:
It looks cool to have a giant long slanting windshield, but that's,
John:
Not great for visibility with those A-pillars stretching out for a mile.
John:
Certainly probably not great for water clearance off the windshield and whatever they're going to have to do to put a wiper in that thing.
John:
The C-pillars, it's not good for the bed to have those weird slanty things.
John:
It's terrible for your visibility.
John:
Like one of the good things you can have a pickup truck is if the cab pokes out above a flat bed and you've got good all-around visibility.
John:
Not on the Cybertruck.
John:
You've got these little tank-like slits.
John:
It is not.
John:
And the bed.
John:
How big is the bed compared to the rest of the truck?
John:
How low is the bed?
John:
Because the battery is under there and all these other things.
John:
How good is electric for towing heavy things?
John:
Like this, first of all, this thing doesn't have the towing capacity of like a giant heavy duty, like Ford F-350 or something.
John:
It's not even in that category.
John:
And even in the F-150 category, it remains to be seen how wise it is and how much your range gets destroyed if you're at maximum towing capacity.
John:
Because unlike one of those big trucks, you can't just add more gallons to your gas tank and get more range for, you know, incredibly cheaply.
John:
If you want more range out of this thing, you got to add more heavy batteries and it cuts into it.
John:
So,
John:
I don't think this is a good truck.
John:
I said before, it doesn't matter that it's probably not a good truck, but all I'm saying is this thing is not a good design.
John:
Design is how it works.
John:
This does not work well as a truck.
John:
If how it works is being attractive to non-truck buyers, then it's probably a good design.
John:
It all depends on what your works is.
John:
And I think it is reasonable to say what works for this segment is not to be a good pickup truck.
John:
There's plenty of good pickup trucks.
John:
We're not making a good pickup truck.
John:
What works in this segment is to be the most appealing thing to someone with $65,000 who wants a big macho truck.
John:
And in that case, maybe this design does quote unquote work.
John:
I still think it's a bad car because having bad visibility out of your car is...
John:
is not an advantage like no matter what kind of car you make there's no car where you're like i want the visibility to be as bad as possible sometimes it is as a side effect like in lots of exotic cars the visibility is terrible but i think good supercar designs like the ones from mclaren or like the nsx in particular focus on outward visibility and say i know it's a mid-engine car and you're going to have a tough view out the rear because the engine is back there but what can we do can we can we make kind of a glass bubble cockpit can we put more visibility in can we
John:
Make it so that the A-pillars aren't blocking half of your field of view just for everything we'll be outside design.
John:
Like, at least try.
John:
And the Cybertruck's like, nope, all we care about is this thing looks like a Matchbox car or a kid's notebook for middle school, and usability be damned.
John:
So, you know, I think it is an incredibly impractical, unsuccessful truck, but I also think that probably doesn't matter because that's not the market they're going for.
John:
I still have disdain for the product, though.
John:
Kind of like, you know, like...
John:
in a way that I don't have for people who buy fancy, like a Ford one fifties, like those are still okay trucks.
John:
And maybe you're over optioning it and getting leather seats and it's silly and it's all polished and you're never going to, but at least it's still, it is still a competent practical truck.
John:
This is, this is not that this is, if you see someone with this, you know, they didn't buy it because they're just constantly hauling things back and forth.
John:
That's not why they bought the cyber truck.
John:
And if they did try to buy it for that purpose, they're going to be very sad and they're going to break their truck.
Yeah.
Casey:
I take your point about the Cybertruck maybe not being for truck people, but I have to slightly disagree with you.
Casey:
I think that most pickup owners do use their pickups as pickups.
Casey:
I think they do it more often than you think.
Casey:
I do ultimately agree with you, though, that in my world, for the amount of times that I would want to pick up,
Casey:
I think that they're silly and wasteful.
Casey:
But that's me.
Casey:
For a lot of people, they couldn't use any other car nearly as easily.
Casey:
Take Steven, for example.
Casey:
He puts his bike or bikes in the bed of his pickup a couple times a week, if not more.
Casey:
And yes, you could do that in the back of Aaron's monstrosity.
Casey:
You could even probably...
Casey:
put a rack on the back of your Accord, John.
Casey:
But it is easiest to do that in a pickup.
Casey:
And I think that unlike SUV drivers, like Erin's never going to take her Volvo off a road.
Casey:
But I do think that pickups do get used more often than SUVs for their allegedly intended purpose.
Casey:
That being said, I do think that this is a terrible pickup truck and just a silly, silly car.
John:
Just putting something in the bed is like saying, because you put something in your trunk, you use your car as a pickup truck.
John:
Yes, you will put things in the bed.
John:
There's no place else to put things, although people do buy those little, you know, containeries.
John:
What are the hell those things called?
John:
I know what you're thinking of.
John:
Covered containers, you know.
John:
Yeah, and you'll put bikes back there or whatever.
John:
That's all well and good, but like...
John:
that you know you're not concerned about the towing capacity or like how much you can hold 2500 pounds in the bed if you're putting a 98 pound bicycle back there like you could put a bike rack on the back of your golf and have the same flexibility like that's not just because you put something in the bed doesn't mean you're using it as a truck i think my my bar is a little bit higher there as in
John:
You are a painting contractor and you bring your supplies to and from the job site every day with your pickup truck or landscaping or whatever.
John:
Like you actually use it as a pickup truck where you Volkswagen Golf with a bike rack cannot do that.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Just one way or another, I really feel like the Tesla people, including potentially even Marco from the sounds of it, are grading this real heavily on a curve.
Casey:
And I mean, that's fine, whatever.
John:
But I mean, I feel like that's like I was angry that it's a bad truck.
John:
But honestly, like if your goal is to sell to Tesla fans a futuristic looking vehicle that can also have...
John:
that is truckier than any of the other Teslas that no one's going to really use as a truck, then this is maybe a successful, viable product.
John:
It, it just, you know, it bothers, like, I feel like you can do all of that.
John:
You can make a daring, cool looking thing with innovative styling that isn't particularly a good truck.
John:
And also like, I think that the thing, the thing spelling is like it's visibility because I hate cars with bad visibility for styling purposes.
John:
Cause I,
John:
this is you know you're trying to sell more than a thousand of these a year so don't like i i'm willing to to accept terrible visibility on your exotic hypercar that you're not going to make more than 500 of not willing to accept it on a pickup truck and then the the giant c-pillars that that you know make the bed sides not flat and just sort of compromise the entire utility of a pickup truck of like
John:
a flat bed, but also flat sides.
John:
Cause if you're going to try to put anything in there, having to deal with those angles and being, not being able to get at things from the side, like these are common activities for pickup trucks.
John:
Like it just, you know, there's kind of a reason that the, uh, the Subaru brat and the, the original Honda ridgeline, like that whole, uh,
John:
you know flying buttress c-pillar thing it's not it's not practical for pickup trucks so it almost would have been better you know with all the memes they're putting out if they just you know if they just put out the halo warthog and said look this is what you want like it's not practical it's cool looking it's futuristic it looks like a big tonka toy matchbox car it's the halo warthog
John:
The Tesla Halo Warthog.
John:
And I think it's fine to have that product for people who want that type of thing.
John:
I just hope they don't drive it on my roads because, again, they're going to kill more pedestrians with it or whatever.
John:
But, yeah, it's not for me.
John:
It may be for a bunch of Tesla fires, but it's a bad truck.
John:
And it's a bad name because what's cyber about it, really?
John:
That's not their naming scheme.
John:
Tesla model this, Tesla model that.
John:
Cyber?
John:
Cyber?
John:
I mean, I guess it fits with the 80s styling.
John:
Cyber?
John:
Come on.