Apple Chips Are People
Casey:
John, while you're taking over the CMS, can you make it so that the button that does new episode automatically disables as soon as it's tapped, checked, clicked, whatever?
John:
So, you know, the story of the accomplished children don't have shoes.
John:
I will do things for the end user, but for us, I'll just say be careful on clicking, Casey.
Bye.
Marco:
fine oh man john you should be able to do like a like you know conflict save detection yeah let's not get crazy here maybe you could you could do a whole google docs like you know live editing thing just re-implement sub-ether edit all you know how hard could it be small matter of programming uh i just yeah well i did i did fix one incorrectly curled apostrophe so i'm really doing the important work okay
John:
It's been in there for how long?
John:
For how many years?
John:
Not going to tell anybody where it is, but it's there.
John:
Oh my God.
John:
That's amazing.
Casey:
I also find it hilarious and completely predictable how quickly Marco completely divorced himself of the CMS because John touched it twice and Marco was like, well...
Marco:
i'm out i'm not signing the divorce papers so yeah so john now has access to the stripe account which she had access before sort of but yeah we made so now john john has access to the stripe account he has access to the source code he can run it he can push to it the only thing i haven't given you access yet is just like to be able to log into the server and update the live site but that's something we can do in like 10 minutes so let's just do that i don't i don't want that
John:
I don't want that access.
Marco:
Well, you care the most about the CMS and you touched it last.
Marco:
So I think by common law rules.
John:
There's just so much stuff in the stack that's all your stuff that I don't need to know about.
Marco:
It's not that important.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
You don't need to know about it.
Marco:
You're looking at my PHP framework from 1,000 years ago.
Marco:
You don't need to know most of that stuff.
Marco:
You're not using most of that stuff.
John:
I'll talk about all the servers and the stuff they run on and all the DNS they're running and then networking and what machines they're on and all that stuff.
John:
I don't know about any of that.
John:
I don't need to know about any of that.
Marco:
This runs on one server.
Marco:
Our site isn't that big.
John:
Anyway, this is going to pass back through you on its way out the door.
John:
Just be prepared for that.
Marco:
You can even do what I do.
Marco:
Like if, you know, right before I deploy something big, I first update neutral because like that's a lot less traffic.
Marco:
And if it breaks, it's not a problem really.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
so neutral is my like test bed for all of our cms updates first i first do it there and then i okay now that works okay now i'll do it on atp anyway i think it's very clear you know shotgun rules like you know first out the door you got to be the cars to be in sight whoever says you know similarly like cms rules whoever touched it last it's yours
Marco:
that's it you touched it it's now your problem this is the you smell whoever smelt it dealt with of exactly programming and once you also roll in whoever cares the most wins like you both care the most and touched it last so i i feel like i have an ironclad case here this is yours you're gonna care too am i because you don't want you don't want the site to break
Marco:
Well, but caring about not breaking is different from, you know, it'd be really nice if we added this one little feature or change over here.
John:
Oh, but you just have to look at the changes I did and make sure it works and find out all the things that, oh, you didn't know about this and you didn't know about that.
John:
Or this is, you know, just even as simple as making dumb mistakes in PHP all the way down to, no, this is going to destroy everything.
Marco:
I mean, it's a good thing that you left QA up to me, the best tester in the group.
John:
you just need to do code review and then yes you do a little tiny bit of QA because you need to have at least one other person try it my QA is I go to the server and type get pull and just refresh the page and see what breaks
Casey:
Alright, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
We forgot to mention last episode that we had an unbelievable contribution to the St.
Casey:
Jude fundraiser, and it completely slipped our minds.
Casey:
Or maybe we didn't know about it until after the fact.
Casey:
Let's go with that, even though I think we might have.
Casey:
But let's go with we didn't know about it until after the fact.
Casey:
But James Neal has, for the second consecutive year, not only has James matched...
Casey:
our donation, but James has matched our donations, plural.
Casey:
So James has, for the second consecutive year, to the best of my recollection, matched the entirety, the sum total of all of ATP.
Casey:
So this, I was going to say this past year, but the month that just ended, James donated $21,011 and one cent.
Casey:
so kudos to james i have offered stickers uh james basically forevermore if you ever want a sticker i don't care what time of year it is you just let me know and stickers will be in the mail uh but that is absolutely phenomenal i would never in a trillion years expect any other listener to get to this level but i'm not saying you can't individual corporations can like one password i think donated more than that at one point so yeah businesses hop on board you might get a sticker too
Casey:
Yeah, you could get one sticker for your whole business.
Casey:
I kid, I kid.
Casey:
But anyway, thank you.
Casey:
All kidding aside, and I know we said we weren't going to talk about this anymore, but that was such an incredible donation.
Casey:
Sorry, not sorry.
Casey:
Thank you, James, for your phenomenal donation.
Casey:
I will not expect it for next year, but I would love it if it continued.
Casey:
So here's hoping.
Casey:
John, you've had a lot of people trying your window management whatever bug.
Casey:
What's going on there?
John:
Well, the first thing I want to say is that word on the street is that Apple is going to fix this bug.
John:
So everyone who's telling me they're never going to fix it, we'll see.
John:
But the word on the street is that they are going to fix this bug in some future version of the Mac operating system.
John:
Which one will it be?
John:
We'll find out.
John:
But I am excited about that.
John:
Of course, there's no way for me to know that by looking at the various feedbacks I file because they have no responses.
Casey:
Of course not.
Casey:
Why would they?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
So fingers crossed.
John:
I'm always worried.
John:
I'm very worried, by the way, when there's no response on the feedback, not because I'm worried that they're not fixing it, but because I'm worried that, like, let's say they are fixing this.
John:
I would love to be able to, you know, be in communication with the people who are fixing it to make sure that they're really fixing it.
John:
I don't want to, like, wait for it to come out in a macOS update and then I try it and it's not fixed.
John:
I could tell you whether it's fixed right now.
John:
Let me help you.
John:
You know, like, that's what communication between the bug reporter and the people who are fixing it is an important efficiency.
John:
If the people who are fixing it just never communicate and then release a fix and then have their fingers crossed.
John:
Why?
John:
I hope we fixed it.
John:
Like I can tell you if you fixed it anyway.
John:
So we'll see how this goes.
Casey:
You know, I would like to point out that David Schaub in the chat says it'll be fixed in the first Armour Heroist release, which would be so mean, but so hilarious.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
John:
Please, Apple, please do that.
Casey:
for me.
John:
Do it for me.
John:
I think it's going to be before that.
John:
I was just on spoilers for an upcoming episode of another podcast that I'm going to be on, but we were just talking about we had our discussion many, many shows or maybe multiple years ago about when do we think they'll stop supporting Intel with macOS, and I think based on the math of when they stopped supporting PowerPC and 68K, we came up with a number that was reasonable.
John:
Of course, I forgot what it was.
John:
I think it was maybe 2026.
John:
Do you guys remember what it was?
John:
Oh, I don't remember.
John:
But yeah, I'm guessing it's within the next couple of years probably.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
So that time is coming, but hopefully far after this bug is fixed.
John:
And speaking of this bug, lots of people were having fun trying to reproduce it.
John:
Inspired by Casey's brave attempt in the after show on the last show where he opened many, many windows while recording a podcast...
Casey:
Oh, actually, speaking of, I think I asked you in Slack.
Casey:
I don't think you ever replied, but I'll ask you here.
Casey:
Did you end up needing to use the hardware recorder's audio file or was the audio hijack file fine?
Marco:
No, your audio file was fine.
Marco:
It did not interrupt the audio.
John:
Thank goodness.
Casey:
Oh, good.
John:
Your computer can handle some empty text edit windows.
John:
It's okay.
John:
But lots of people tried reproducing it because they wanted to be like Casey, because who doesn't?
John:
And they would open lots of windows and they'd send me screenshots or whatever.
John:
And I just got tired of replying to them all by asking a simple question.
John:
Did you have more than one user logged in?
John:
Because it's so much harder to reproduce with a single user logged in.
John:
You can do it, but you're going to be opening a lot of windows, right?
John:
So if you don't want to open a bazillion windows, log in a second user.
John:
And of course, then people say, well, I don't have a second user.
John:
it's really easy to make a second user on mac os you just go to system settings you go boop boop boop call the user test give it a dumb password it's so easy and then when you're done you can delete that user and delete the home director and they're gone it's very clean very easy to do so if you really do want to reproduce this my public service announcement is log in as more than one user
John:
If you've never done that on your Mac, that's another fun part of this thing.
John:
But anyway, if you want to reproduce it, it takes far fewer windows that way.
John:
We had one bit of feedback from someone who could reproduce it.
John:
Smay, S-M-A-Y, I don't think I could find a full name, on Macedon said, I can confirm the suspicion that polling rate has an effect on the window dragging bug.
John:
Higher polling rate seems to be correlated with more shakiness.
John:
My mouse was connected via its wireless angle for this recording, but connecting it over USB does not appear to have different results with the same polling rate.
John:
So we'll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video.
John:
This person has one of those control panels for their mouse where you can change their report rate.
John:
Basically, how often does the mouse tell the computer a new position?
John:
And you can change it from 1,000 per second, which shows the worst bug behavior, down to 125 per second, which shows the best behavior.
John:
Sme continues, further testing shows that each step down in polling rate means more windows are needed to reproduce.
John:
I would be interested to see someone test with an even higher polling rate to see how few windows are needed.
John:
And we have a second video where the technique has been refined.
John:
So this is confirmed that a polling rate is absolutely a factor and you can just crank it up and down and watch it go.
John:
a thousand reports per second for the mouse.
John:
Apparently that's not as high as fancy gaming mice go, but that would explain a lot of the variability in pointing devices.
John:
And this is like wired versus not wired.
John:
The first video was not wired, but I think if you have one of those mice that does high polling rates, it doesn't really matter whether it's wired or not.
John:
It's just because you can do high polling rate over RF just as easily as you can do it over wired.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We got a handful of feedback with regard to Chromebooks, and I think John Weston had the best summary.
Casey:
John writes, regarding the Chromebook education segment in episode 555, you're all absolutely correct about the fact that Apple has no solution for the suite of things teachers and students would want to do on these things.
Casey:
In particular, the entire Google ecosystem around sharing files, handing assignments back and forth in team or shared drives for staff and clubs.
Casey:
But forget about that for a second.
Casey:
How do the students log in?
Casey:
I've taught in a middle school Mac lab for the last 17 years.
Casey:
It started with Emacs.
Casey:
And just last year, we finally saved up enough cash to replace the 2007 era iMacs in it with M1 iMacs.
Casey:
With that came the school district's insistence that we switch to using their Active Directory accounts for logins.
Casey:
And let me tell you, it's been an absolute nightmare.
Casey:
Logging into a Mac with a quote-unquote roaming student profile that properly syncs A, your regular old documents, but also B, your tilde library stuff, in a way that doesn't absolutely poop the bed under modern Mac OS is not trivial.
Casey:
Our current login stack of shell scripts that manually symlink things, replace sidebar elements, push things into docs, manually sync certain things that can't sit quote-unquote live in networked locations...
Casey:
like GarageBand projects, Minecraft Worlds, etc., is a total hellscape.
Casey:
Nobody on the IT staff has ever used a Mac before.
Casey:
They're all just Googling and using bloody chat GPT to try to solve these issues, while I flail away on the teaching end, trying to commiserate with students when their work disappears entirely every couple of days.
Casey:
Anyway, my thought on an Apple Chromebook competitor is, huh, LOL, no.
Marco:
Yeah, this is actually – this theme we saw a lot in the feedback that basically even if Apple were to somehow get close to the price of Chromebooks, the Chromebook ecosystem has so many management advantages and logistical advantages compared to iPads or MacBook Airs or whatever it would be that –
Marco:
You know, what schools want and what schools need for administering and deploying and servicing a giant fleet of these things is just way, way easier on them in the Chromebook ecosystem for what they actually are doing with these things.
Marco:
Even setting aside the price, which itself is also very powerful.
Marco:
But for a lot of even districts that have the funding where maybe they could get a little bit higher price, they would probably still stick with Chromebooks because the management side is so good for them.
John:
yeah you get from this story i can see because i've had macs that have had to be an active directory and everything that uh the fact that the people don't know what they're doing with macs is just making this worse uh when i had active active directory on my mac at work because it was a requirement for all the macs at the company i think the first implementation that my work did uh use the active directory support that's like was part of mac os at the time i'm assuming it's still there
John:
Uh, and that is terrible, uh, because everything is slow and blocking and nothing works.
John:
Uh, and then eventually they moved to one of the third party solutions that basically has like some third party software running on your Mac that runs and keeps your stuff in sync with active directory, but doesn't actually use the operating systems like built in active directory stuff.
John:
So you can log into your Mac, even if active directory is hosed in some way, but, and like, if you change the password on your Mac, uh,
John:
this little background thing will sync it with Active Directory.
John:
And if you change your password in Active Directory, this little thing will sync your password on your Mac with it.
John:
And it's basically like sort of an asynchronous way of doing it rather than synchronous, because the synchronous way means that nothing ever works and everyone hates it.
John:
And then you need on top of that fancier software that you can do stuff like manage what's in people's docs and restrict their access to system settings and stuff like that.
John:
That's all stuff that's available through third-party software, but it takes expertise and money, and those are two things schools tend not to have.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
Steve Ligat writes, I worked in Vermont schools for over a decade in IT support and saw schools try Windows netbooks, thin clients, Apple devices, Macs and iPads, Linux, etc.
Casey:
before Chromebooks came out.
Casey:
Chromebooks were the one system that provided simple account and device management as well as free or inexpensive online administrator training and certification.
Casey:
School teachers and librarians administer Chromebooks in many schools, and they are a community that shares their knowledge.
Casey:
This is quite different from the worlds of arcane knowledge required for Apple and Windows administration.
Casey:
Another factor in Chromebook's success is the fact that the device can be easily used by many people.
Casey:
This is going back to what John Weston was saying.
Casey:
For example, if a Chromebook breaks, any other Chromebook can replace it without loss of a user's files and preferences.
Casey:
It just works.
Casey:
Apple could create a less expensive Mac or iPad, but can they duplicate the other factors that contribute to Chromebook's success?
John:
Remember when Chromebooks first came out?
John:
I think we talked about it on the show.
John:
Google put out like a comic book style sort of introductory series of graphics to explain what the deal is with Chromebooks.
John:
And I think this is probably where I got obsessed with the idea of you throwing your electronic device into a lake or whatever.
John:
I think that was their example that like if you have a Chromebook and it gets, you know, dropped into the ocean or over the side of the boat or into a lake.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
None of your stuff was really on there anyway.
John:
It's just a fancy terminal front end for a web browser for a front end for everything that's in your Google Drive and your Gmail and all that other stuff.
John:
And that promise, like Apple is slowly creeping up on that promise with their client side approach with phones.
John:
Jason Snell talked about this a lot this week as he deleted his user account and recreated it in a slightly ill-advised troubleshooting thing.
John:
We'll try to put a link in the show notes to that.
John:
He's already written about it on Macworld, but he also talked about it on Upgrade.
John:
With an iPhone, in theory, if everything is iCloud backed up and everything, if your phone falls in the ocean and you get a new phone, you can restore from your most recent iCloud backup, which should be fairly recent, you hope, like maybe the night before while it was plugged in, while it was charging, and you'll get pretty much all your stuff back.
John:
all your settings you won't have to spend an hour setting everything up maybe you have to log into one or two things but it's getting close it's not as close as the chrome thing we're like don't worry nothing was ever on there anyway the cloud is the source of truth this is really a fancy web browser terminal right
John:
Apple's devices are not like that, but they're trying to provide that same experience on the iPhone.
John:
On the Mac, forget it.
John:
If your Mac laptop falls into the ocean, you better hope you have a legit recent backup somewhere that you can restore from, like
John:
a time machine backup or you know like even an online backup is probably not going to be as rich as a time machine backup and how many people do that i know we talk about it all the time on this show but macs don't come with a second hard drive built into the automatically does time machine too that's something people have to choose to do it's easy once you get connect drive it'll say do you want me to use your time machine you say yes and you're off to the races but if it's a laptop how often do you connect it people don't like mounting and unmounting drives so the mac or anything like that is far from this and on the ipad of course the problem is it's a single user thing
John:
and there's no sort of multi-user solution.
John:
So even though you could use the iPad as sort of a glorified web browser for web apps or whatever, A, that's not taking advantage of the iPad, and B, there's still no multi-user solution.
John:
So, yeah, Chromebooks have won an education not because, oh, they just undercut Apple, but really Apple stuff is better.
John:
They won an education because they're better.
John:
They're a better solution for education than anything Apple has done.
Marco:
Yeah, it isn't just because they're dirt cheap.
Marco:
That helps a lot.
Marco:
And in many cases, it's the only option because of how cheap they are because school budgets are very tight in most places.
Marco:
But it isn't only because they are cheap.
Marco:
But they have also developed a huge amount of value for the schools in the way that they run, the way they are managed, et cetera, and what they run and what they don't run and what they don't need.
Marco:
For Apple to actually meaningfully address that market would require them to do way more than just make cheaper MacBook Airs.
Marco:
Like, that isn't enough.
John:
The only thing, like I said, the only thing that they have that's getting close to that, and it's not particularly close, is the iPhone.
John:
Because the iPad, you know, well, I guess you can restore the iPad the same way.
John:
But the iPhone and the iPad, they work so hard because, mostly just because of the iPhone, because that's their top product.
John:
They've improved the process of, as Jason puts it, getting a new iPhone and making it yours.
John:
at least that's possible there's nothing like that on the mac not even possible never mind that it takes hours to do it on the phone on the mac there's just nothing wait what about migration assistant and everything migration assistant does not copy all the things all the time it's pretty good and yeah it is good but it's not the same it's not the same as like uh you know the problem with migration since obviously is that if you did drop your mac laptop in the ocean what are you going to migration assistant from like it's in the ocean oh it's using my time machine backup again nobody has time machine backups unless i listen to this podcast uh
John:
There's no basically there's no iCloud backup for Macs.
John:
That's what it comes down to.
John:
And there was iCloud backup for phones for ages before it was good with the restore.
John:
But they're just plain is no iCloud backup for Macs, which I don't quite understand because as the Mac, you know, Mac is on Apple Silicon and like I know you can't reuse all that software and Time Machine is great and all, but like.
John:
iCloud backup for Mac is starting to get on my list of kind of overdue things.
John:
Because then yeah, when you drop your laptop in the ocean, then you can do an incredibly long and tedious restore from your last iCloud backup of your Mac.
John:
And that would be great.
John:
And they could sell more storage, right?
John:
I would love to hear more about what's on that list.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But anyway, but with the Chromebook, you don't sit there and do an hours long restore.
John:
You just get a new Chromebook and you sign into your Google account.
John:
Like it's two seconds.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like I really just want to emphasize there, even though functionally they're doing the same things, the amount of time it takes to restore your phone in the best case scenario is nothing compared to sign into your Google account on this.
John:
OK, you're ready to go again.
Casey:
Moving along.
Casey:
Apparently, everything is coming up Milhouse.
Casey:
I mean, Syracuse.
Casey:
Joachim Fornalaz.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I'm an American.
John:
I tried to put a guest pronunciation by Googling, searching it.
John:
I think it's Joachim.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
We'll go with that.
Casey:
In Mac OS 14.1 beta, the Photos app will remember whether original or freeform was last chosen as crop aspect ratio and will pre-select that setting for uncropped photos.
Casey:
You're welcome, everyone.
Casey:
It's thanks to us that this has happened.
Casey:
Clearly.
John:
Yeah, so this is from several shows ago when I was complaining that I had clicked the original aspect ratio 16,000 some odd times because it never remembered that that's what I want as my default for all photos when cropping them in the Apple Photos app on the Mac.
John:
And supposedly in macOS 14.1, they have...
John:
solve this problem in the the way i was saying like the most straightforward way the simplest way is like look just remember what i clicked last time um that's not the best solution i'll take it to be clear i will absolutely take it because but it does mean that if i decide to crop something to a square the next time i go to crop a photo it will be on square if you if you wanted to do the better solution to this it would be uh it's more difficult it would have you'd have to keep track for every single photo in your library um
John:
has the user ever selected an aspect ratio?
John:
Yes, no.
John:
And then you have to say, okay, what should the default be if on a photo they have never selected an aspect ratio?
John:
That's different than just saying whatever they pick last time, I'll use that on the next one because say I crop something to square.
John:
in the fancier system when i go to the next photo it would say has any aspect ratio ever been selected for this photo yes no and the answer is no what do they want the default to be original okay so it would be original so that would be a fancier solution but once you're storing a new piece of data for every photo that is a heavyweight solution that's not something you can sneak out and you know
John:
mac os 14.1 that's like a year-long investment because you know i have 170 000 photos you want to store even just a boolean for 170 000 photos uh and you know how do you seed that boolean and where do you put the storage for it and how do you sync it and it's just you know it adds up real fast how many photos do you think apple deals with so i understand why they did the solution i thank them for it and i'm excited to live in a world where i don't have to deal with this issue anymore
Marco:
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Casey:
We have gotten word from the streets that off-centered holes for lightning or USB-C or what have you, not new.
Casey:
So Paul writes, I just had a look at my girlfriend's iPhone 13 mini with an Apple leather case.
Casey:
The cutout for the lightning port is also far from perfectly centered.
Casey:
How did we never notice this before?
John:
I think, like I said, I think it's just because, you know, how often do you look at a man's shoes, right?
John:
Like we didn't, we weren't looking at the bottom of the phone until the USB-C cables wouldn't correctly, you know, seat because they weren't fitting through the hole.
John:
And then all of a sudden we became very interested in why doesn't it fit?
John:
Why doesn't it go all the way in?
John:
Is it because the hole's off center?
John:
And like I said, the answer in my case was no, even if the hole was centered, it still wouldn't have fit.
John:
But that's why we're all suddenly looking at the bottom of the phone.
John:
So this is an iPhone 13 mini.
John:
So it is not like recent history.
John:
It's just apparently very hard to get that hole centered.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Now, this is a word that for the longest time I pronounced incorrectly in my head.
Casey:
I always pronounced it Alacantara, which is not even close to correct, but Alcantara, or close to that anyway.
Casey:
They're Alcantara iPhone cases.
Casey:
Tell me about this.
John:
I just put this in here because it's a fun... I hadn't seen iPhone cases made of Alcantara.
John:
Alcantara is a material that's been used in the interiors of cars for many years as a sort of synthetic suede type material.
John:
I'm not sure why it got popular.
John:
I think part of it is fashion.
John:
Part of it is like...
John:
It's grippier than leather.
John:
So in lots of racy cars, they would put it on the seats to keep your butt from sliding around because leather is slipperier.
John:
They put it on steering wheels because it feels soft and it's nice and grippy.
John:
And unlike leather, it doesn't sort of get shiny as you use it and gets more slippery.
John:
making an iphone case out of it is interesting i think it would have way too much pocket friction but i do confess i've never tried it on an iphone case so we'll see um and it's also related to a recent change we made on the uh the podcast artwork um the regular atp artwork that you've seen is just a black background with the atp logo on it um but if you are a member you get the the uh the edited members feed like not the bootleg but the the edited members feed that just has no ads in it the artwork for that is
John:
it looks very much like the regular public show artwork but instead of a black background it's got kind of like a dark gray and that's supposed to look like alcantara because you know we talk about cars a lot and alcantara is a kind of a car thing um but a lot of our members complained that they would subscribe to the public feed and the member one and it was difficult for them to tell which one was the member one because it's just like a instead of it being pure black it's like it's kind of a fuzzy gray and it's hard to tell yeah it's hard to tell so um
John:
I was messing around with the artwork because we recently introduced feed that just has the specials in it.
John:
We need a new artwork for that.
John:
And I put like colored stitching around the border because again, in car interiors, they very often have Alcantara with, you know, Porsche will charge you $800 if you want the accented contrasting stitching for your seats.
John:
This is the thing that happens in cars.
John:
Don't ask anyway.
John:
I put contrasting colored stitching around the specials only feed.
John:
Uh, and, uh, you know, we liked it so much.
John:
We said we should do that for the members feed too.
John:
So now the members feed has yellow stitching and it's Alcantara background and the specials feed has blue stitching and it's Alcantara background.
John:
And I know at the tiny thumbnail size that you see this thing, it's almost impossible to even detect this.
John:
In fact, we kept cranking up the size of the stitching so you could even see it at thumbnail size.
John:
Um, but if you zoom the artwork in a lot, you will see it more clearly.
John:
Um,
John:
My artwork on this is not great, I admit.
John:
But just for people who want to know, what the heck is that supposed to be?
John:
It's supposed to be Alcantara with stitching.
Marco:
By the way, I have some relevant information here.
Marco:
If only one of us had the Alcantara phone case...
Marco:
Right here.
Marco:
Did you get it because it was in the notes or are you just buying every iPhone case?
Marco:
I actually, by coincidence, had ordered it about a week earlier.
Marco:
I had been familiar with this Alma brand because I also have one of their Alcantara watch straps.
Marco:
So I can say your suspicion of it having way too much pocket friction is exactly right.
Marco:
I would say that the level of pocket in and out friction that it has is similar to silicone for totally different reasons.
Marco:
Like, you know, it is like all, you know, textured fabric and it feels fantastic.
Marco:
Like the actual, like if you're, if you're going to like, you know, pet your phone on the desk or something, this material feels awesome.
Marco:
And the color, of course, I got the orange one.
Marco:
The colors are good.
Marco:
They actually come in very nice colors.
Marco:
None of these like, you know, boring, safe grays and browns like everyone else.
Marco:
So this is a wonderful object for looks and feel.
Marco:
It is not a very well-made case.
Marco:
The buttons are a little bit crooked and a little bit misaligned, and they don't feel that good.
Marco:
The camera lip around the camera plateau has a sharp edge.
Marco:
If your finger catches the edge, it's sharp, and that's no good.
Marco:
And overall, the case is pretty bulky.
Marco:
It's fairly thick.
Marco:
Honestly, when you compare it to the fine-woven,
Marco:
The fine woven is still my favorite case that I have so far.
Marco:
Like it's I hate to say it.
Marco:
I mean, the Alcantara one, the Alma one, it does have an action button, but it's misaligned and it's hard to press and doesn't feel good.
Marco:
Lovely.
Marco:
You know, it is mag safe.
Marco:
It doesn't have any branding on the back.
Marco:
So, like, I like a lot of it.
Marco:
It does have, you know, it has the bottom.
Marco:
So John would hate it.
Marco:
you know it's a fine case but for this purpose i i can't really recommend this material it it is just too much friction and i think if you're going to have that much friction you're getting out of the pocket you might as well have the silicone case which i think works a little bit better but it is really cool and it feels it feels and looks fantastic although i do see the crooked uh action button in their own product photography yeah that's not good yeah lovely
Casey:
I also have some case-related follow-up.
Casey:
I am still casting around for a case that I do more than just like, that I really like.
Casey:
But what I've landed on for now is a case that was very highly recommended by a bunch of people I'm asked on.
Casey:
The Taurus!
Casey:
Because apparently it's all caps.
Casey:
T-O-R-R-A-S.
Casey:
Magnetic Slim Fit.
Casey:
Designed for iPhone 15.
Casey:
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Anyways, this thing was like $18.
Casey:
Which is obscenely cheap compared to the $60 Apple leather cases I've been buying for most of my life.
Casey:
It is a plasticky case.
Casey:
It is a little bit slippery for my taste.
Casey:
And critically...
Casey:
The lip is quite tall.
Casey:
So, John, this would never in a million years work for you because apparently you are incapable of hitting the swipe up gesture unless there's nothing in the way.
Casey:
This is like a full-on cliff in the way, which it took me a day to get used to, and it's now fine.
Casey:
The case is very cheap, which appeals to me.
Casey:
The magnet within the case is really, really strong.
Casey:
So my new best friend, the PopSocket, is like freaking welded onto this thing.
Casey:
Which is kind of nice.
Casey:
But the case is fine.
Casey:
I would give it four stars in no small part because it's so darn cheap.
Casey:
The button feel is good.
Casey:
In fact, the buttons might be the best part of this.
Casey:
It's a really crisp button feel, which I really, really like.
Casey:
But I really wish that the Peel case, P-E-E-L, I really wish they had buttons instead of a cutout, particularly for the action button, which when I had briefly had one, it was a cutout.
Casey:
If Peel ever comes out with one that has actual buttons, please somebody let me know so I can buy that one because I loved the feel of that.
Casey:
I absolutely loved the feel of that in hand.
Casey:
It's just I couldn't stand those buttons for more than 15 seconds.
Casey:
Literally, it was 15 seconds.
Casey:
It was on my phone before I took it back off and then returned it.
Casey:
But anyways, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
This is not a spectacular case.
Casey:
Four stars out of five.
Casey:
And I think I'm grading on a curve because it's so darn cheap.
Casey:
But it is the best one I've found so far.
Casey:
So you might want to try that out.
Casey:
i'm trying i want to see the size of the the bottom lip doesn't look any bigger than normal i don't know it's hard to tell have they photoshopped the product photography to make the phone itself look thinner yes it's like rendered yeah it's not a real photo the pictures are not great and i am in a dark room so i don't think i well and i only have one camera with me well no i guess i have my continuity camera anyways so i was to say i'm not gonna be able to take a good picture of it now uh but it is too tall like it i i
Casey:
It's not too tall to the point that I can't use it because obviously I'm using it, but I really wish it was a little bit slimmer.
Casey:
There's so much space between the top of the screen and the top of the case.
Casey:
I'm probably overblowing it in my verbal description here, but it's more than the leather case by a noticeable margin, and I don't care for that.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Speaking of things that I don't care for but apparently are useful, Adam wrote in – well, I don't think it was Adam Armand, but you never know.
Casey:
Adam wrote in with regard to those absolutely bananas Razer phone coolers.
Casey:
This was the LED thing I think we mentioned in the episode before last that I think operate via – well, I shouldn't say via MagSafe, but they attach.
Marco:
They attach via MagSafe.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
By way of MagSafe.
Casey:
And anyways, Adam writes, most of my friends play on smartphones, so I do too.
Casey:
And when I want to play with them, keep in mind that a smartphone is the only gaming device for many people, especially outside the US.
Casey:
When I play multiplayer shooters like PUBG or Call of Duty for longer periods of time, my iPhone 13 Pro overheats.
Casey:
The screen dims, my frames per second drop.
Casey:
It's not terrible, but it's uncomfortable.
Casey:
That little thingy from Razer works like magic.
Casey:
It's not only a fan, it gets literally ice cold when it's on.
Casey:
I don't know how it works, but it's shocking how effective it is.
Casey:
Since buying it, I haven't had a single performance issue, even the most demanding games, during long, sometimes two-plus-hour sessions.
Casey:
Also, you can turn the RGBs off in the app, which is good to know.
Marco:
Yeah, and the way it works, the way it gets ice cold on the back is that it actually has a thermoelectric plate, also called a peltier plate or peltier.
Marco:
I don't know how people pronounce that.
Marco:
Overclockers use these things sometimes to amp up their overclocking abilities.
Marco:
It's basically a solid state device that transfers heat from one side to the other.
Marco:
So it burns a ton of power, but what it creates is a very cold side and a very hot side.
Marco:
And so you can make fans and heat sinks work a little bit better at the expense of massive amounts of power if you put the cold side on the thing you're cooling and put the hot side against the fan or heat sink.
Marco:
And then the fan has to cool both the heat from the thing that you are cooling plus the heat generated by the Peltier plate –
Marco:
So it ends up being comically inefficient.
Marco:
And in order to chill the CPU a little bit more, you have to use a lot more power and then dissipate a lot more heat on the other side.
Marco:
But it does work.
Marco:
You can buy like little mini fridges and stuff that occasionally work this way, like really, really, like, you know, desktop size, like, you know, fit one can kind of mini fridges that have those things.
Marco:
But they're
Marco:
they're they're so weak and inefficient you don't you don't see them used for very much else but that it does have one of those mentions in the amazon description so that's how that works and i gotta say like if i had a need for this which i see why some people do like if you're like really you know as as this person writes in like if you're like a really hardcore phone gamer this could be relevant and honestly this looks like a fairly decent product for those needs as long as you don't care about you know heat noise or dignity
John:
I mean, it's not going to help your battery life, right?
John:
Doesn't the thing get powered by the phone?
Marco:
It can be ever since.
Marco:
It has USB-C input.
Marco:
So you could power it from the phone.
Marco:
I wouldn't power it from the phone.
Marco:
I think it would drain it pretty fast.
Marco:
Yeah, indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We need a clever name for this, and I don't have one.
Casey:
But as part of the We Have Listeners in Every Walk of Life corner, Matthias Lindblad writes...
Casey:
I have extensive experience in developing indirect tire pressure management systems, or ITPMS.
Casey:
I think this was brought up because you were talking about the Rivian and decreasing the air in the tires if memory serves.
Marco:
Yeah, I was basically saying the Land Rover had whatever kind of tire pressure sensor was in the Land Rover.
Marco:
It updated live so that if I was stopped and putting air in the tires or taking air out of the tires on the dash, it would show me like the current inflation level of the tires, like the current tire pressure of each tire.
Marco:
Whereas the Rivian, I had said during that episode, I had said that when I aired down the Rivian, it didn't show me live.
Marco:
I had to drive a little while before it updated.
Marco:
But it turns out... So, I actually... I changed the tire pressure one time since then.
Marco:
And when I did it the second time, it did update live, but only in one tire.
Marco:
So, I don't know what capability it has.
Casey:
Software, baby.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't... So...
Marco:
So maybe if somebody can write in, maybe, maybe Matthias Lindblad here, if somebody write in and say, like, what do I have here?
Marco:
What kind of system is it that doesn't update in real time most of the time, but once one wheel did?
Marco:
Because it seems like the indirect tire pressure measurement systems by the people who've written in, it sounds like they wouldn't work this way.
Marco:
So I don't know.
John:
Yeah, that just sounds like bugs, but I think Matthias wrote in because I had mentioned that my car also doesn't show the pressures, but it also doesn't, you have to like drive for a little bit for it to do anything.
John:
So anyway, this explanation, I think, sheds some light on it.
Casey:
ITPMS is an amazing piece of software using sensor fusion and advanced signal processing to determine when the pressure has dropped significantly compared to the reference level.
Casey:
The main input are the signals from the rotation sensors of the ABS system, that's any luck brakes, but rotational speeds are not enough.
Casey:
If you would, for example, have lost the pressure in all four wheels at the same time, this would just be interpreted as the vehicle going a different speed.
Casey:
You could, in theory, compare to the GPS speed, but that's not reliable enough.
Casey:
So instead, you have to look at the changes in the signal spectrum caused by the change properties of the underinflated tire.
Casey:
The fact that you need to look at the signal input during driving means that it will take a short while before you can get a warning.
Casey:
It is, however, not the explanation for delay in showing the absolute pressure, as this is not something an ITPMS system can measure.
Casey:
So if you can get a reading of the pressure, you don't have an indirect system.
Casey:
Direct pressure monitoring systems, or DTPMS, which use battery-powered sensors in each tire, can provide immediate readings.
Casey:
However, this comes at the cost of higher battery consumption.
Casey:
To optimize battery life, many DTPMS systems...
Casey:
only transmit data when they detect driving activity, which is especially important since these batteries are non-replaceable.
John:
So maybe they're sending, maybe the ones in your tires are sending them on different intervals and they're out of sync with each other.
John:
Maybe batteries are dead.
John:
Maybe there's a software bug, but it is a good clarification that the, you know, the cheapo system like I have in my car that just uses the wheel speed sensors that they already have to put on the car for ABS.
John:
You know, it's not my, it's not like they're cheaping out by not showing pressure.
John:
They just don't know.
John:
Like the car doesn't know the pressure because it's not a pressure sensor.
John:
It's just basically saying, hey,
John:
Is the pressure different than it's supposed to be?
John:
I don't know what it is, and I don't know what it was before, and that's why there's like a calibration, you know, when you, you know, if you get the tire light on my dashboard that comes on because the tire is low, and you inflate everything to the right thing, you have to manually reset the system and say, now, whatever the tires are at now, this is how they should be, which is why you should always do all four tires, not just, you know, one that you think is low.
John:
But direct tire pressure monitoring, yeah, that's a whole different can of worms, and I'm not quite sure why yours aren't showing the numbers.
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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Thank you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some topics.
Casey:
I wanted to very, very briefly mention that I have been dabbling with the new... I think it's just for the new phones, but certainly new in iOS 17.
Casey:
The setting in your battery settings for topping out at 80%, kind of like you're in an electric car.
Casey:
My thought process here was, well, I've got the big boy phone now, and it's got the big boy battery, so why not take some empathy or have some empathy for the machine, John...
Casey:
And top the battery out at 80%.
Casey:
And I've done this on and off for the last week or so.
Casey:
And I don't think I dig it.
Casey:
And I think that I don't like it because it stresses me out, which is probably a Casey problem.
Casey:
I am not saying that this is not something that you, the listener, should try.
Casey:
I'm just saying I didn't care for it.
Casey:
I am also of the opinion that showing your battery percentage in your status bar is barbaric because all that does is add stress in your life.
Casey:
And turns out when I'm not topping out, when I'm not at my maximum available battery charge, when I take the phone off the charger in the morning, I basically am just stressing myself out all day long.
Casey:
And so.
Casey:
So I do think it is a very good idea.
Casey:
And certainly if I wasn't a complete dork that, you know, if I didn't upgrade my phone every year in the very wasteful way that I do, I would be more apt to try to run this.
Casey:
Like, John, perhaps you would consider this particularly for future phones.
Casey:
But since I upgrade every year and since it just stresses me the crap out,
Casey:
i've decided that i'm probably not going to stick with it um but i do think i i applaud the the feature the feature's existence and i definitely think that i could live with it it's just i would constantly be looking at my battery wondering uh-oh what happens if i need to leave the house and i need a whole bunch of charge and i didn't expect it and oh my god what am i gonna do i mean i have that battery pack but it's all the way upstairs and i'm like i i was wrapping myself around the axle completely unnecessarily which is why i think it's a casey problem
Casey:
But I do think that on an average day, the 15 Pro Max could get me through the day from 80%.
Casey:
I would probably hit, you know, 20 to 30% by the end of the day on an average day's use.
Casey:
That seemed to be what I was getting.
Casey:
But it just stressed me out too much.
Casey:
And so in the same way that I've always had battery percentage off, like you should, I turned this off after a few days because it was just too much.
Casey:
It was too much for me.
John:
As battery technology advances, there'll be a nice software solution to this, which is basically just to show 100% when it's at 80%.
Casey:
That's a good point.
John:
The big expensive batteries in electric vehicles pretty much all try very hard to not get you to charge at 100%.
John:
I'm not sure if any of them outright lie to you.
John:
Some of them put a huge amount of the batteries in reserve.
John:
Because again, these batteries are the most expensive component in the cars, and
John:
Uh, by default, you, you know, in many cars, you can't charge them more than 80% unless you do the, are you super duper serious?
John:
And you're going on a road trip, then you can go to all the way to a hundred, but they come basically out of the box.
John:
Like this option in the iPhone that says just never charge over 80% because you got plenty of range for the 80% and because it links in the life of your battery, uh, draining your battery to zero or charging it to a hundred or all things your battery does not like.
John:
It wants to be somewhere in the middle.
John:
So if you never go to 100, it will lengthen life in your battery.
John:
If you're planning on handing down your phones to like your kids or younger siblings or whatever, turning this option on will make it so that when they get the phone, when you're done with it, the battery will be less fried.
John:
um but of course it means you have to have a phone that's at 80 and for a regular size iphone i think 80 may not be enough to get through the day with the big one it might be as you know to casey but it's stressing you out because it's showing 80 but apple we're not at the point for battery technology where apple can do the software change that says yeah i just show 80 as 100 and show 100 as like you know change the color of the status indicator or something goes super duper topped off or whatever battery ultra
John:
battery pro max we're not there yet on the regular size iphone on the max maybe they could get away with it but uh you first of all if they did this you know it would be another gate it'd be battery gate like apple's lying to you they say your your uh battery's 100 but it's really at 80 never mind like you know the evs do this all the time like they would be sued instantly right but you know i can if
John:
if there was third-party control of this someone would immediately make a little system level utility that says show 80 is 100 in case he would use it and so he wouldn't be stressed out but this is there's no third-party system level utilities like that for the iphone so we just have to wait for apple to get around to it and you know if if you could snap your fingers and say hey apple for the same size and weight you could double the battery capacity then they could roll out this feature and they could make it an optional and have a little switch that says show 80 is 100 in case he would turn it on and he would be fine but we don't have that magic battery yet so we'll just keep waiting
Casey:
In keeping with the theme of like grab bag topics, Marco, can you tell me about the seemingly terrible decision you made based on what's been put in the show notes?
Casey:
What we have in the show notes here and in the private show notes is AirPods Pro 2 as concert earplugs, which seems like you are just begging for all the feedback.
Casey:
But why don't you explain yourself and then we can all laugh at your terrible decisions.
John:
And by the way, let us know if they're the AirPods Pro 2.1 or the AirPods Pro 2.0.
Marco:
They were the 2.0 because this was actually about a month ago or something like that, a month and a half ago.
Marco:
So earlier in this summer or fall, I attended, of course, a Phish concert.
Marco:
I don't go to that.
Marco:
I go to like one concert a year.
Marco:
So I'm not like a concert power user here.
Marco:
So keep that in mind.
Marco:
But because I care about my hearing and I kind of need it for things,
Marco:
I typically wear some kind of concert earplug, set aside the ridiculousness of I'm paying good money to go to hear music that I then have to plug my ears up so I don't hear it too much.
Marco:
I know this is ridiculous, but this is how concerts are.
Marco:
I would love for them to just turn it down a little bit.
Marco:
But unfortunately, they don't mix concerts just for my tastes.
Marco:
But anyway, this is actually a very common request, a common need for people who go to concerts a lot or a little and who don't want to blow their ears out so much that they cause hearing damage over time or that their ears are ringing for the whole rest of the night or whatever.
Marco:
So there's this whole category of concert earplugs or musician earplugs.
Marco:
And those actually are two slightly different things.
Marco:
But for the most part, it's earplugs that are made specifically to reduce the amount of volume that you're getting.
Marco:
But to try to do it in a way that doesn't make everything sound like crap, that doesn't like muffle everything and make it sound like you're listening through a pillow or anything.
Marco:
So the idea is reduce the level, but make sure that you're doing your best to let the frequencies through evenly.
Marco:
And that's difficult.
Marco:
You know, if you just stick your fingers in your ears, what you'll notice is that
Marco:
The frequencies are not muffled uniformly.
Marco:
You lose a lot more of the high frequencies, like the treble, the crispiness, that sound.
Marco:
You lose a lot more of that, and you keep a lot of the bass, the low frequencies.
Marco:
And that's just because of various physics properties of plugging your ears.
Marco:
and sound waves so anyway so you can get earplugs that cost like you know 10 cents in a bulk pack that construction workers use and stuff you know just like those those little foam plug things you can get those and wear those to a concert and they will work just fine but it won't sound very good like you will kind of you will kind of feel like you know you're wasting your money a lot more in that in that scenario to see this concert because you're going to miss a lot more of the music and it won't sound very good
Marco:
Anyway, so there's this whole category of concert earplugs.
Marco:
I did all the research a couple years ago when I started going to concerts again.
Marco:
I did all the research and bought a few and tried a few.
Marco:
The funny thing is it's actually kind of fun to try because the way I would try them would be to put them in and then put full-size headphones on and just crank the music up really loud.
Marco:
And see, like, how do they sound?
Marco:
How do they work?
Marco:
So anyway, I was able to test a few different ones.
Marco:
So for quick reference, before everyone writes in and tells me I didn't test their favorite one, the ones I tested were Eargasm, the Edemonic ER20, Earpiece, Vibes, Mumba, and the Soundbrenner Minuendo.
Marco:
They all suck.
Marco:
The ones I spent the most time with were the Soundbrenner Minuendo.
Marco:
Those were the least sucky among the group, in my opinion.
Marco:
But they all suck.
Marco:
They all promise that, oh, it's a flatter frequency response.
Marco:
You'll hear the music really well.
Marco:
It still sounds like garbage.
Marco:
It kind of sucks because you want to enjoy the concert.
Marco:
Again, you want to enjoy the music.
Marco:
And these concert earplugs, while they are better than just the cheap little phone plugs, they're not that much better.
Marco:
And I think it's doing a disservice to people not having better options because ideally more people should be using some kind of hearing protection at concerts.
Marco:
But if it's going to ruin the way it sounds, most people won't do it.
Marco:
So ideally, we need a better solution.
Marco:
Now, I was curious, does active noise cancellation in ANC headphones, like the AirPods Pro, does that actually protect your hearing?
Marco:
Now, I am not a doctor.
Marco:
I don't know if this physically does the same thing.
Marco:
Does noise cancellation actually provide the same physical protection as earplugs?
Marco:
And I don't know the answer, but I decided to try it for this concert.
Marco:
So for this concert, I brought with me my Soundbrenner Minuendo because I wanted a point of comparison.
Marco:
And I knew that if the AirPods Pro didn't work out, I would switch back to those.
Marco:
And I spent like maybe a quarter of the concert with the Soundbrenners.
Marco:
And then the other three quarters, I did the AirPods Pro.
Marco:
I should clarify that this was all, because it was about a month and a half ago, this was all done with iOS 16 and the iOS 16 version of AirPods firmware.
Marco:
So the AirPods firmware has actually changed decently much in the iOS 17.
Marco:
I was trying to get the beta to install on them, but it would not do it.
Marco:
Like the way you install an AirPods Pro firmware beta, you enable the beta profile with these few steps and then just wait.
Marco:
and just hope it does it sometime it's like face recognition and photos yeah they even tell you like this might take like 24 to 48 hours and i i didn't think to do this until the day the day before the concert left everything on on wi-fi powered open and closed the case a few times put the airpods in put took them out for a while like tried everything to like mix it up and kind of kind of kick them and it never installed it until like you know three days later so so
Marco:
I wasn't able to try the new features and how they worked with things like adaptive audio.
Marco:
So I wasn't able to try any of that stuff.
Marco:
But anyway, with the previous iOS 16 era firmware, here are the results of how this went.
Marco:
You know, there's different modes of AirPods Pro.
Marco:
There's the off mode where they're basically just earplugs.
Marco:
And the off mode works, but because, again, it's not doing any processing and it's just, they're just, at that point, dumb plugs in your ears, it muffled the treble and the high frequencies too much, just like any other dumb ear plugs would.
Marco:
So I can report that you can actually use air, if they fit your ears well, you can use them for some level of hearing protection.
Marco:
Not a ton of hearing protection.
Marco:
I wouldn't do this every day.
Marco:
I wouldn't do this in an industrial setting or a construction site or anything.
Marco:
But if you're going to a concert and you have nothing else and you want to protect your hearing, you can just put AirPods in your ears and that will do some level of that.
Marco:
That's enough for occasional concert going.
Marco:
I also tried the full noise cancelling mode.
Marco:
And this actually worked too well.
Marco:
It was way too quiet.
Marco:
And the other problem with noise canceling mode is that it's very non-uniform in what it suppresses.
Marco:
You know, at a concert, you have, especially at a first concert, there's a lot going on.
Marco:
There's a lot that's going on in that sound.
Marco:
There's a lot of different, you know, frequencies and instruments and, you know,
Marco:
Quiet parts, loud parts, gaps, big parts.
Marco:
Maybe the AirPods Pro got a contact high from all the people around me.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
So there's a lot going on there.
Marco:
So the noise canceling mode I found was not really suitable for it.
Marco:
What was interesting, I thought, if I just put on transparency mode, will it blow my ears out the way the concert does?
Marco:
And it turns out the answer is, yes, it will.
Marco:
I thought transparency mode would have some kind of limit on how loud it would go.
Marco:
I could not find that limit.
Marco:
And in all fairness, the transparency mode, when I would test, I would have it on, and then I would take them out and listen without anything in my ears.
Marco:
And it was pretty much indistinguishable.
Marco:
So the transparency mode did accurately transmit the audio from the concert transparently to my ears, which was actually pretty impressive considering how loud it was.
Marco:
But this wasn't really solving my problem because it was still way too loud because it was basically the exact volume of the concert.
John:
I mean, if you think about it, when you use them just as dumb earplugs...
John:
the amount of sound that they allow through when you're using them as dumb earplugs is still going through when you're using them in transparency and then added to it is what the speaker inside the earphones is outputting so it doesn't surprise me that it was the same volume it would be it would be better if maybe like when you did like concert transparency that it only played like the highs like if it knew what kind of sound would be passively muffled by the plastic you
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
Or the rubber or whatever your thing is.
John:
But that's difficult because you can buy different tips for those things.
John:
And so it may not know exactly what's being muffled.
John:
But if they always know, it's just the highest.
John:
But anyway, transparency mode is sending through everything.
John:
So you've got like for transparency mode to be volume limiting.
John:
When there are dumb earphones, you should hear nothing because then the only sound you would hear would be produced by the earphones.
John:
Then you can control the volume.
John:
But I think most of the sound you're hearing at a concert is sound that's just blasting its way right through those eartips into your ears, except for maybe the high frequencies.
John:
And then transparency mode is playing all the frequencies in your ear.
John:
And just to be clear on your advice of saying, hey, if you have nothing with you, you can use AirPods.
John:
Only AirPods Pros or other AirPods that go in your ear canal.
John:
If you have like me, the AirPods 3, they're not going to do anything for you.
John:
Yeah, you need the kind that has like the squishy rubber tips, basically.
Marco:
So anyway, transparency mode was not going to do it.
Marco:
There's various options under accessibility.
Marco:
There's various headphone accommodations, various other things.
Marco:
I had a really hard time getting any of them to be good in this context.
Marco:
What I ended up doing and doing for the majority of the concert was in the AirPods settings, just in the regular settings page, there's an option down at the bottom called something like attenuate loud sounds.
Marco:
I basically would use transparency mode, but with that, with attenuate loud sounds turned on, that actually did a really great job overall.
Marco:
It was not ideal, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but overall, it was way better than every single concert earplug I've tried by a mile.
Marco:
A thousand times better.
Marco:
In every way, it was more comfortable.
Marco:
It sounded better.
Marco:
It was less awkward.
Marco:
It fit better.
Marco:
Everything about it was better, even in just this mode, even though it was not perfect.
Marco:
So the main problem I had with the attenuate loud sounds, first of all, is that it's dynamic.
Marco:
So if they would really go at it, you know, got a nice loud part of the music, it would bring it down.
Marco:
But then if there was a quiet part, it would then amplify everything back up again.
Marco:
And then as soon as things got loud, it would bring it back down, like a slow compressor.
Marco:
It was a little distracting, but it wasn't enough that I wouldn't enjoy the concert.
Marco:
And even with that, again, still better than every concert earplug I've ever tried.
Marco:
But that was a little annoying.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
It was a little bit too smart in the sense that transparency mode, and especially with the attenuate loud sounds option, but even regular transparency mode, it tries to be a little bit smart about what it sends through.
Marco:
It's not actually fully transparent.
Marco:
One thing I noticed recently, which I hope this is temporary, ever since the iOS 17 firmware updates for the AirPods Pro, if I'm walking and, say, a car drives by,
Marco:
It sounds weird for a second.
Marco:
Like, it's not processing it correctly.
Marco:
It tries to do something with, like, the tire noise of it rolling by.
Marco:
And there are, like, certain noise things that pass me in real life with transparency mode are being weirdly handled by it only since the iOS 17 firmware.
Marco:
So I hope this is a temporary bug or they're going to tweak or fix or something because it's a little bit weird.
Marco:
Anyway, in the concert setting, some of those smarts would get in the way a little bit of this feature.
Marco:
You know, certain frequencies it would muffle a little bit more than others, maybe because they were louder than them.
Marco:
Certain noises it would muffle more than others because maybe it sounded like white noise.
Marco:
It was trying to be smart.
Marco:
ideally give me an option like I would love them to do this and I know I'm pretty sure I know why they won't I think it would be a liability thing but I would love for Apple to add something whether it's called this or not a concert mode for AirPods Pro and again they probably wouldn't call it that because they don't want the liability in case people actually hurt their ears or whatever but I would love a mode in AirPods Pro it's like transparency mode but it just lowers everything by a certain amount of decibels
Marco:
And, of course, they don't have to call it that in the interface.
Marco:
They can make it nicer and not use technical terminology so people don't need to know what these terms mean.
Marco:
But that's what I want.
Marco:
Transparency mode that just lowers all frequencies by a fixed amount that you can somehow control.
Marco:
Because if they did that...
Marco:
they would be the most perfect concert earplugs.
Marco:
They are so close now and they're already better than the entire category.
Marco:
But it was a little annoying that they were trying to be smart in ways that they were kind of being defeated by the music.
Marco:
Like sometimes it would do weird things to the vocal range.
Marco:
Like you don't want that.
Marco:
Or like if I moved my head, like if I looked left or right,
Marco:
now they're getting different levels because they're not on access with the speakers each anymore so like you know if i turn my head to the left well then my right ear is closer to the speakers now and so it would lower the right ear more like if so it would do weird things like that because it was trying to be too smart what they need is a dumb reduction mode like just act like earplugs bring everything down by a certain fixed amount and leave it there until the
Marco:
with that change i think you could see these used in a lot more places um battery life was great there was no problem making it through the entire show which i i was i was kind of curious if they would because the fish shows like three hours long uh but they did they made it through just fine again comfort was great didn't notice them what i would also like is is maybe a more discreet look uh maybe like a black wrap or just if they ever make them in black or some other like more discreet color so that
Marco:
You kind of stand out if you're wearing AirPods at a concert.
Marco:
People see those white things in your ears.
Marco:
It's very obvious where earplugs usually are not bright white.
Marco:
They're usually black or skin colored to try to blend in.
Marco:
So that would be nice too.
Marco:
But overall, these are by far my favorite concert earplugs, if you can call them that.
Marco:
Again, I don't know if physically they are providing that level of protection.
Marco:
But just anecdotally...
Marco:
If I go to a concert and I'm not wearing earplugs, my ears ring and are sore or hurt afterwards.
Marco:
After this, after wearing these for almost an entire concert, my ears felt totally fine afterwards, as if I hadn't just been to a very loud concert.
Marco:
They seem to have worked, physically speaking.
Marco:
And certainly on the audio front, they worked exceptionally well compared to everything else out there.
Marco:
Yes, it was it still didn't sound exactly right because it was trying to be smart and it would vary a lot as I moved around and stuff or as the music change changed.
Marco:
So, again, I would love that kind of dumb reduction mode, just like a fixed uniform reduction.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
Whatever form that takes.
Marco:
that would bring AirPods Pro to even more use cases.
Marco:
And yeah, but other than that, they're already very, very good for this purpose.
Marco:
So again, I'm not a doctor.
Marco:
I don't know if this is providing the kind of protection that actual earplugs provide.
Marco:
And certainly like there's, there's a level of like decibel protection that earplugs do.
Marco:
And this is not going to provide like massive protection for everyday use in like a loud, you know, if you're like operating a jackhammer at a construction site, you're going to want something that's actually made for that purpose.
Marco:
But for occasional concert going, AirPods Pro worked the best of all the concert earplugs I've ever tried.
John:
They sell different tips for the AirPods.
John:
You can buy third party ones.
John:
I think that would probably affect the sound, the passive sound blocking ability tremendously because the Apple ones are just that flimsy little thin membrane.
John:
Right.
John:
And they have other ones that are like made of thick, dense foam that I have to think blocks more sound than the stock ones.
Marco:
The sound blocking amount, I think, is controlled more by the transparency algorithm.
Marco:
And if you say attenuate loud sounds, you don't get to set what threshold is considered as loud.
Marco:
Above what threshold do you attenuate?
Marco:
That's not a setting.
Marco:
So I think there's more to do in software, really.
Marco:
Because if they're actually doing full attenuation and noise canceling, they're pretty powerful.
Marco:
They can achieve quite a lot.
Marco:
I mean, typical concert earplugs, you might be getting like...
Marco:
8 to 12 decibels of reduction, maybe 16 at the most.
Marco:
You're not getting a ton of reduction unless you really make the sound really bad.
Marco:
The higher reduction ones, the higher you go, the worse things sound because of the non-uniform suppression of things.
Marco:
Basically, the more you suppress, the more bass-heavy everything becomes, the more muffled.
Marco:
You lose a lot more treble.
Marco:
You don't lose as much bass, so everything just becomes muffled.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
They're so close to being amazing for this purpose.
Marco:
They're already great for it.
Marco:
They're so close to being amazing.
Marco:
They just need that setting.
Casey:
JP in the chat room apparently is in live entertainment and has suggested a company called Coda Room, and they have custom high-fidelity earplugs, which apparently attenuate 9, 15, or 25 decibels.
Casey:
But interestingly and importantly, they actually have a graph that shows exactly the frequency response and attenuation across all of these different frequencies.
Casey:
So it looks pretty flat to my eyes, but I am well outside my comfort zone.
Marco:
Well, OK, so first of all, these are like ideal cases.
Marco:
Second of all, notice how this graph, the highest frequency on it is 8000 hertz and all of the bars drop precipitously right as they approach that.
Marco:
Which suggests to me, just for reference, human hearing goes up to, at the best, about 20,000 hertz.
Marco:
And for most adults, you're probably in the teens somewhere, like 15,000 hertz, maybe 16.
Marco:
So for these to drop off heavily at 8,000 means they're going to have the same problem everything else has, which is basically there's a lot of bass, there's no trouble.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Our favorite topic from the last year or so has come back around and become relevant again.
Casey:
Rewind.ai.
Casey:
This is the thing, the live streams.
Casey:
We need a, I don't know, not a Viberslap, obviously, but we need some sort of dumb musical instrument for that.
Casey:
But anyways.
Casey:
Life streams are something that rewind.ai is basically trying to do.
Casey:
But the problem is you can't have a life stream of all of your life when you're running software, because in order to have a life stream of things that happen outside of software, you would need hardware.
Casey:
So, John, what is the pendant?
John:
This is interesting because Lifestreams, when I first brought up on the show, I was remembering a computer user interface that lets you organize everything you've done on the computer as a stream of events from the present to the past that you could fly through and see.
John:
What did I do yesterday, a week ago, two weeks ago?
John:
Anyway.
John:
But Lifestreams is also – that same term was used for –
John:
hardware approach of what about when i'm just walking around during the day and i want to keep track of everything that happened to me during the day and i have all sorts of people at mit and other schools over the over the decades that have like i'm just going to wear a camera for an entire year i'm going to record audio everywhere that i go so rewind.ai is making a hardware product that they're calling the rewind pendant which looks like a little tiny cylinder that goes on a little lanyard around your neck so you wear this little necklace with a little tiny cylinder it looks kind of like a microphone and
John:
And it records everything that it hears and transcribes it and encrypts it and lets you search it.
John:
So the Rewind.ai software product that we talked about in the past was the thing that runs on your Mac and records everything that happens on your screen, including OCRing text out of Windows and stuff like that and recording audio and compiling it and making it so you can search it.
John:
This extends that to...
John:
audio whenever you're wearing this pendant i don't think this product is out yet it's on pre-order now for 60 bucks but this shows kind of uh where we are in the technology stack where this type of thing of uh gathering audio basically having a cheap battery-powered microphone
John:
And then being able to process that audio into something useful through transcription, right?
John:
And some smarts using these, you know, machine learning, we used to call it, but now I guess everything's AI.
John:
These language models that we've trained to be able to understand whatever language that this thing is going to support.
John:
And then it just becomes text.
John:
And then you can smush that text down really easily and make it searchable and do all the things, right?
John:
This pendant, I feel like, is a natural extension of the Rewind company's whole deal, which is...
John:
Over the course of your life, you encounter things.
John:
You say things.
John:
Things are said to you.
John:
You see things and stuff like that.
John:
But you might forget it.
John:
And you want to say, what did that person say to me yesterday?
John:
Or what happened in that meeting?
John:
Or where did I see that web page?
John:
And that's why I've always wanted live streams.
John:
And this company is trying to bring it to you.
John:
As you can imagine, as we discussed with the computer screen recording thing, the privacy implications of this are mind-blowing.
John:
Because...
John:
when you know as always technology is ahead of both our culture and our laws uh because all of a sudden it is possible technologically to record everything that happens around you and transcribe it and start and do a lot of stuff but that's not something that people expect to be happening and so like what's the deal with that uh you know if i wear this and it records everybody around me is that against the law am i going to get in trouble am i going to get beat up
John:
uh what the rewind company of course is trying to do the best it can to say well we don't know what the deal with this is either culturally or legally so we're trying to make it as you know do it as carefully as possible where it's opt-in you have to get an agreement a verbal agreement that the thing hears although obviously if it can hear your agreement it's already listening to you
John:
But anyway, just don't think about it too much.
John:
And then only only when it's optimal, you record things and it will record.
John:
It'll summarize them again with the magic of AI slash machine learning.
John:
It will summarize it and not save it verbatim.
John:
And obviously this is, you know, once they've done all that to me, it's probably inadmissible in court and everything.
John:
But like this is the path we're traveling here.
John:
And the analogy that I thought of was like the advent of photography.
John:
uh before there was photography the idea of someone capturing an image of you anywhere was just like what are they gonna do sit down and sketch me on a piece of paper it's like i'll just run away before they finish the drawing it's fine um they're certainly not going to paint me in full color but what if i told you i could capture an image of you instantly how will society deal with this and it took just i don't know i don't know if it's centuries decades for us to get laws on the book that say where and when is it legal for you to take a picture of somebody else without their consent and every country and every municipality and everything has different laws but
John:
as a society we've come up with a semi-reasonable set of things that deal with that i think once again technology has outrun uh the law with the advent of the quote-unquote camera phone because now it's not like it was when these laws were written when it's like oh you know paparazzi photographers that were worried about or people with a camera or whatever now everybody has a camera with them all the time and so you see conflict of like the police not wanting themselves to be recorded because now the
John:
and they push back against that.
John:
Or imagine if we got camera technology that allowed our phones to have a 500X optical zoom with a good quality.
John:
If that technology ever arrived, there's a whole new set of things like, well, technically I was following the laws because you're in public and I'm here and I'm there.
John:
Luckily, the paparazzi laws have helped a little bit with that because paparazzi are motivated to use these really long lenses.
John:
So I'm sure there's, at least in California, there's probably laws in the books about that.
John:
But the advance of technology allowing us to do things that we never worried about before
John:
requires us to think about these issues and probably make laws related to them.
John:
Uh, but here's rewind out there, uh, pushing the envelope, uh, because we all see the utility in this.
John:
Like you, if you describe this, we all say, this would be great.
John:
I would love to be able to basically have an outboard memory, have the computers keep track of stuff for me.
John:
It's like having in an ideal case, a personal assistant with you at all times.
John:
So you can just ask them like, you know, when you see on these politicians where they have the person who's always behind them, like a Gary on beep, but competent, um,
John:
We can just ask them anything.
John:
Who is this?
John:
Who am I talking to?
John:
What did they say yesterday?
John:
Where are we going?
John:
People want that, but they would like it to be magic and automatic for them with tiny devices they carry with them.
John:
But you can't have that without also having everybody recording everything all the time everywhere.
John:
And yeah, I'm not sure how we're going to square that because a lot of the utility of this type of thing comes from the ubiquity.
John:
When it's you on your own computer, you can choose the level of ubiquity.
John:
The Rewind software, A, you can just not run it, so that's fine.
John:
But if you do run it, you can control which applications it can see.
John:
You can control when it's on and when it's off.
John:
You know it's confined to the little world of you, your computer, and your computer's microphone and camera.
John:
So if you leave the house, you know your computer's not following you and recording you, you know.
John:
But the pendant is around your neck.
John:
And now we need a whole set of rules for this.
John:
So I think probably the technology with this thing and the jankiness of the transcription and everything is going to be limiting.
John:
But I think this is because it is starting to be possible.
John:
This is something that other companies will pursue.
John:
And I will say personally, I think it's something they should pursue because the benefits are tremendous.
John:
But of course, the downsides are also tremendous.
John:
So I hope that as we travel this road,
that.
John:
I mean, it's hard for me to be be hopeful, at least in our country, about our ability to make new laws that correctly constrain technology without stifling it or without leaving it completely unconstrained due to regulatory capture or whatever.
John:
Like we have all the badness and not the goodness there.
John:
But I feel like eventually the planet Earth as a society will construct social norms and laws surrounding this process so that we can get some of the benefit without all of the terrible downsides.
John:
We can hope.
Marco:
When I first saw this pendant thing breeze through the news, and yeah, it isn't out yet, and it's not even out soon, I think.
Marco:
It seems like they're kind of just starting to develop it now.
Marco:
But when I saw it breeze through, I had the same thoughts as everyone else, like...
Marco:
Yeah, this sounds like it would be massively privacy invading for all of the people around you all of the time.
Marco:
You know, strangers walking by could have one of these at any time.
Marco:
You don't know.
Marco:
But it does kind of make sense that it's kind of like photo capture.
Marco:
There is a difference in degree that if this thing is always recording in the background.
Marco:
Now, yes, I know.
Marco:
I watched the video of the guy saying, like, here's how we're going to do privacy features on this, maybe.
Marco:
And they're just ideas.
Marco:
They're not actually done and created and tested and working.
Marco:
And frankly, I think the... As John said about the utility comes from Ubiquity, the features that they mentioned are like, oh, we'll have it just be opt-in.
Marco:
Only people who opted in to be recorded will have their voices recorded.
Marco:
First of all, I don't buy for a minute that that would work very well.
Marco:
But second of all, that makes it way less useful.
Marco:
And so if that is actually an option to be turned off...
Marco:
Most people will just turn it off.
Marco:
The reality is, I would love to have a perfect memory.
Marco:
And what got me very, for a split second, interested in this thing is when somebody was like, wow, wouldn't it be nice to remember the person's name that they introduced themselves to you five minutes ago in the conversation?
Marco:
They quickly said their name.
Marco:
You have since forgotten it.
Marco:
And you're like, God, what was this person's name again?
Marco:
They told me a few minutes ago, and it slipped my mind.
Marco:
I forgot.
Marco:
I would love that.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
That would be life-changing for me.
John:
That's the goal of the AR glasses that we always talk about.
John:
What's the killer app for the AR glasses?
John:
Names that float over people's heads.
John:
And you combine that with a ubiquitous recording.
John:
It's like, well, how would it know the name that float over their head?
John:
Well, if they told it to you earlier, then it knows it because it can associate it with the face that spoke the words that said, my name is blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then it can transcribe it and stick it over the thing.
John:
Like,
John:
it all will work out like with you know and speaking of glasses what is the company that did was it uh snapchat that did the glasses with cameras in them they're recording all the time right doesn't facebook still make those yeah i think that like so his thing like the technology is getting there for this type of thing rewind i think i'm taking more seriously just because they've they've proven the utility with the thing that runs on your mac essentially like it has utility and it works and it's not you know it's not trying to record video all the time and everything right um
John:
it's just audio so it's lower bandwidth and it can transcribe it but the video approach like people could canon again these mit things from the 80s where someone's like i'm gonna wear a video camera on my head uh you know for an entire year in the 80s and it was ridiculous looking but now you can get a very tiny camera that people might not even be able to see that's recording video all the time through like a little tiny tether that's going down to like uh you know ssd that's in your pocket or whatever like we have the technology to do this already
John:
But it's not socially acceptable.
John:
To your point, Marco, if you start every conversation with, do you mind if I record you?
John:
People wouldn't want to talk to you real fast.
John:
That's the guy who always asks if you can opt into recording.
John:
And people are like, what?
John:
No.
John:
We're not ready for that.
John:
We're also not ready for, by the way, you never know who's secretly recording you.
John:
Because that, A, that's probably not legal in lots of places.
John:
And B, people don't want that to happen.
John:
They don't want to know that it happened after the fact.
John:
And if you say, oh, yeah, no, I record everybody all the time because I turned off the opt-in feature.
John:
Again, people aren't going to want to talk to you.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And there's so many differences when you're talking about this kind of feature or this kind of product.
Marco:
It's very different to say, I'm going to carry something in my pocket that makes it easy for me to record stuff when I want to versus
Marco:
I'm going to be wearing something that is always recording everything without my input.
Marco:
Those are very, very different things.
Marco:
There's obviously, as John said, cameras got smaller and easier and better and more ubiquitous, and so that changed the photo and video angle pretty significantly over the last few decades.
Marco:
But
Marco:
ambient recording of everything around you and all the people around you without you having to choose to record it and also to be physically looking like you're recording it, that becomes a very, very different thing.
Marco:
There's going to be a lot of...
Marco:
Just like the regular Rewind product for the regular desktop capture thing, there's going to be a lot of unintended capture or unwanted capture.
Marco:
And that's going to cause a lot of problems, both privacy-wise, legally.
Marco:
It's going to be a mess.
John:
I mean, it's like all the tubes in our house, like the Amazon Echoes and all the other things that are always listening.
John:
Because, again, that's how they can hear you say, hey, dingus, they're always listening.
John:
And those little recordings.
John:
And then, like, you know, law enforcement, of course, gets wind of this.
John:
And they're like, can we, you know, subpoena the surreptitious recordings from people's accidental activations of their Amazon device?
John:
If if these things sold to anybody, you know, law enforcement would be like everybody who was in that area at the time was wearing one of these pendants.
John:
We're going to subpoena all your recordings and subpoena all your transcripts.
John:
And like, you know, law enforcement and will always take advantage of every possible like the ring doorbell cameras.
John:
Right.
John:
The whole the whole.
Marco:
Those are all police cameras.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is going to happen.
John:
And we have to, you know, come up with laws and norms around this that don't allow things to swing wildly in one direction or the other.
John:
Free for all recording of everything is terrible.
John:
The ability of law enforcement to get a recording of everything everywhere is terrible.
John:
Just ask people in the UK, I suppose, because my understanding is that they have a much more ubiquitous video recording of public spaces there than we have here.
John:
Uh, but again, utility, the utility for actually catching criminals, criminals is there.
John:
It's good.
John:
It exists, right?
John:
It's, you know, abuse of it is bad, but you know, appropriate use of it kind of like everything else, like telephone conversations, video recording.
John:
We have all sorts of laws about what is and isn't admissible as evidence and what law enforcement can and can't do.
John:
for technologies that have been around for a long time.
John:
But suddenly when you throw something like this, like, oh, we went from nobody having cameras on their front door to a huge number of people having cameras in their front door faster than we could gather laws around this or faster than we could gather social norms around this.
John:
should i buy this device should i join the neighborhood watch thing where we all share all our front door recordings with the police or should i not do that uh you know so it's just i do feel like uh the technology is definitely way out ahead of how we can handle it but you know there's no the alternative isn't like well we'll just stop this technology because that's never going to happen right the advantages of making cameras smaller and making lower power things and doing ai powered transcription
John:
Those advantages are too good to ignore.
John:
We should pursue that because it makes things better for everybody.
John:
We just have to worry about the downsides and deal with them rather than saying, okay, well, I'm just going to pretend we're not going to progress because we are and I think we should.
John:
You wear one of these things to your job, you're getting fired.
John:
There's no way.
John:
Your job is going to make you wear one of these for compliance reasons, and they're going to check the transcripts every day, and they're going to see if you're leaking secrets.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
The workplace loves this crap.
John:
We talked about this with Rewind.ai.
John:
There's already a breed of enterprise software that records everything you do on your screen and sees if you're goofing off or playing solitaire, if you're not moving the mouse enough, or if you're not being productive.
John:
Yeah.
John:
they're going to love this.
John:
They're not going to let you bring in your own, but they're going to make you wear one that they have.
John:
And that is, again, a situation where I think social norms need to come in.
John:
We're like, yeah, since you're not legally required to work for this company, you can just quit if you don't like it.
John:
But if everybody company does it, that's kind of crappy.
John:
So we kind of have to have pushback from labor, as they call it, to say, here's what isn't okay as a society to allow, you know, the workplace to demand of us.
John:
Like, you know,
John:
working more than 40 hours a day without overtime pay not getting weekends off all the things that the labor movement has given us uh it needs to give us some more things as uh you know as our boss uh starts finding new interesting technology to try to make uh more money for them but more misery for everyone else oh my god that's terrifying but correct
Casey:
For what it's worth, in the explanatory video that Rewind put up, they said in two days they got over 3,100 pre-orders.
Casey:
They also made mention, I think, John, you said this a minute ago, they said that they've had a couple of theories about how they can make their privacy safe.
Casey:
First of all, they'll be parsing everything they hear and they can do speaker detection, you know, as in who is speaking and they can figure out, oh, this person said, yes, you can record me.
Casey:
And then, oh, we're good to go, which is both clever and creepy.
Casey:
But the other thing they said was, hey, look, what if we only store summaries rather than verbatim conversations?
Casey:
Because then it's just like having a really, really, really good note taker around you always.
Yeah.
Casey:
Here again, I see what they're going for.
Casey:
It does make sense.
Casey:
A little creepy, but I do get it.
Casey:
And I thought those were at least semi-reasonable approaches to try to ensure some modicum of privacy and safety.
Marco:
First of all, I think those are very optimistic, that they would be able to do that reliably.
Marco:
And again, if that was optional, nobody would enable that option.
Marco:
The option of only store this minimal amount or only record people who said it, nobody would enable that option if that was optional.
Marco:
And even then, the summary is...
Marco:
real conversations are messy and organic and all over the place.
Marco:
First of all, you assume it can hear you well enough to have accurate transcriptions and to hear everything.
Marco:
That's a big assumption right now, but whatever.
Marco:
Assuming it gets better, it can actually capture everything.
Marco:
I mean,
Marco:
First of all, you know it's going to be like, do you think she liked me?
Marco:
No, she was just being nice.
Marco:
People are going to use it for dumb stuff.
Marco:
But if you're only storing the summary, what if the summary is wrong?
Marco:
then you will have this now incorrect record of the conversation that you think is a record of the conversation.
Marco:
You think, well, this is what was recorded, and this is the summary of what was recorded.
Marco:
You think that's correct, and you treat it as fact, or you treat it as reliable, you treat it as correct.
Marco:
What if it's not correct?
Marco:
Even a little bit off, what if it missed some nuance?
Marco:
There are just so many things where I don't think that option is a very good option.
Marco:
Oh, we'll just store summaries.
Marco:
No, that's not a great option.
John:
For a $60 device, too, we've all had the experience with our $1,000 phone where we say, hey, dingus, remind me to blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then later in the day, we look at reminders, and it says some word salad.
John:
We're like, what the hell was this?
John:
Because it transcribed it wrong?
John:
That's one sentence.
John:
That's one literal sentence that it's trying to say verbatim.
John:
And it does it so badly that you get a thing that's so far off that you're trying to sound it out like,
John:
What did it think it hurt?
John:
It's a challenging environment.
John:
Like you're on the go, the pendant is around your neck, right?
John:
So forget about summary, straight transcription is hard enough.
John:
Obviously this will get better with time, but that's part of the challenge.
John:
And I do wonder if our use of all of our assistants on our phones
John:
will culturally prepare us for the idea that yeah it's probably not going to be accurate even as it gets better and better and better over the years the sort of built-in cultural distrust of like oh sometimes it messes up sometimes autocomplete types of bogus things sometimes uh speech to text gets it wrong in challenging environments so
John:
it's not entirely trustworthy.
John:
I think it would take many generations of, you know, near 100% accuracy for us to culturally believe it.
John:
So we can thank the poor performance of our, you know, voice assistants now for training generations of people not to trust this.
John:
And this whole topic, by the way, lets me pull out this, the title of the Philip K. Dick story, which I already used in one of my hypercritical posts from way back, but it is endlessly applicable.
John:
And my post on hypercritical was about remastered games where they'll take an old video game, but like sell you a new version where all the graphics have been redone for the current generation.
John:
So it's the same game and the same mechanics, but it's high definition.
John:
It's a new texture pack.
John:
It's even better geometry, different lighting.
John:
And the title of the Philip K. Dick story is We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.
John:
That should be the tagline for this Rewind.ai company.
John:
We can remember it for you wholesale.
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:
That's collide spelled with a K, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com.
Marco:
Collide, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
You want to do some Ask ATP?
Marco:
Let's do it.
Casey:
Let's start with Buckaroo Ponsai.
Casey:
Ponsai?
Casey:
Ponsai?
Casey:
Ponsai?
John:
Ponsai?
John:
It's Ponsai, but it's supposed to be like Buckaroo Ponsai, the movie.
John:
Is it Ponsai Beach or Ponzi Beach?
Casey:
Air high five, Marco.
John:
We were pronouncing that wrong even when we thought we were doing it right.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Anyway, Buckaroo P writes, what is so much better about Apple's chip designs besides tailoring to their own needs and monopsony access to smaller process nodes?
Casey:
They must have some design principle or innovation that stops Samsung and Qualcomm from catching up, right?
Casey:
I mean, I think, John, you're probably best equipped to answer this.
Casey:
But I think, to me, the number one thing that Apple does incredibly well is their chips are fast, but...
Casey:
but they're also incredibly power efficient, which is not something that's easy to do, be both fast and power efficient.
Casey:
But what's your answer?
John:
Well, so here's the thing with Apple's lead on chips.
John:
It is shrinking.
John:
It still exists, but it is shrinking.
John:
And what gave them that lead in the end is two things.
John:
One is what they're saying, like exclusive, because they have the most money, they can pay for the access to the best fabrication process.
John:
And at various times in the past,
John:
having access to the best fabrication process has been a huge advantage.
John:
It remains to be seen if having exclusive access to three nanometers from TSMC is going to be a huge advantage.
John:
We still have question marks about that based on the phone chips that we've seen.
John:
But in the past, definitely, when Apple had a better process than their competitors, that made a big difference.
John:
But the second one is the boring answer to most technology questions.
John:
It's people.
John:
Apple bought a PA semi, which had a bunch of people in it who were good at designing chips.
John:
Chips aren't designed by robots or computers.
John:
They're designed by people.
John:
If you have the best people, you get the best chips.
John:
Apple...
John:
bought that advantage by buying a company filled with really smart people and then giving them lots of money and hiring new smart people to make their own line of chips.
John:
And that's worked out really well for them.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to a lot of those people have since left Apple and formed their new company called Nuvia, which was then acquired by Qualcomm.
John:
And now Qualcomm is using its Nuvia acquisition, which presumably has a bunch of good people.
John:
to help Qualcomm's chips be better.
John:
That's part of the reason the gap is narrowing.
John:
It all comes down to people.
John:
Who has the best chip designers?
John:
The people who know the most about chips with the most experience who can make these chips.
John:
And on top of that, finally, a somewhat distant third is, of course, Apple can make chips that are exactly tailored to what they want.
John:
Qualcomm can also make chips exactly tailored to what they want, but they are serving many customers.
John:
They don't have their own phones that they make, so it's more difficult to them.
John:
um and that that is super important for like bringing that last couple of percent out because apple can just especially for the phone because let's be honest like that when they're making the chip for the phone they're like we're gonna make exactly the chip that we want but when it comes time to make the chips for the mac they're like okay here's the guts we have from the phone thing here's what we have to do to make it good on the mac what else can we add but it's not like they're making the cores specifically tailored to the mac at this point so um
John:
you know the that advantage of making everything perfectly custom for what apple wants it to be used for tails off a little bit as evidence in the worst case scenario obviously by the mac pro where apple has not made a chip that's exactly what they need for the mac pro they just absolutely have it intel didn't make it for them into the zeons because the zeons had a bunch of crap that apple didn't want and weren't made the way apple wanted them to and now that apple makes its own chips apple's also going oh
John:
Now I see a way until it never made the chip that we wanted because we would be only customers for it and we don't sell a lot of these computers.
John:
Um, but yeah, uh, the advantages people, uh, and that advantage only lasts as long as those people last, uh, either those people, you know, those people can retire or in the case of many of the good people who worked on Apple Silicon, a lot of them have, uh, went off to start a new company that got acquired by Apple's competitor, which is not good for them, but Hey, new people are coming out of school every day and getting hired on.
John:
And that's, that's the competition in the tech sector.
John:
Uh,
John:
especially in this area where having a small number like a few hundred of the really best smartest most experienced people with the best ideas can have a huge effect because chip design is like look if you get that right that has ripple effects that go throughout your entire product line kind of like you know product design having a johnny ive or whatever has such an outsized advantage versus like
John:
Someone who's just like, I'm really good at writing software and I wrote a really good version of this application that ships with every computer.
John:
It's probably not going to have as big an effect as the people who do the chips or the general product design.
John:
But that's what it comes down to.
John:
Apple chips are people.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Alfred Flynn writes,
Casey:
I used to do this way back in the day on Windows computers.
Casey:
This is something I picked up from my dad.
Casey:
He would use the C drive.
Casey:
John, just hush.
Casey:
He would use the C drive for the OS and things like that.
Casey:
And I think he would make a partition D for data if memory serves.
Marco:
And then E would be... No, you've got to skip D because it's the CD-ROM drive.
Casey:
Maybe you're right.
Casey:
It's been so long.
Casey:
But yeah, you're probably right.
Casey:
But you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
It was something along those lines.
Marco:
And you're reserving A and B for your floppy drives, of course.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
That's a little place for it.
John:
Let's have some unity between the poor Windows slobs and the beautiful Mac users.
John:
We've talked about this in the past.
John:
Why is Command Shift 3 screenshot?
John:
well that's because command shift one and two are eject floppy drive one and ejects floppy drive two why is the hard drive c on windows that's because a and b are the two floppy drives so the idea of of having two floppy drives and giving them like the good drive letters or the good keyboard shortcuts is still with us to this day that's why command shift three is still command shift three they never change it even though we no longer have two floppy drives by the way for whatever it's worth i one of the first things to do when setting up a new mac is i remap command shift three to command shift one because it's easier
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, I see.
John:
Windows is still like the hard drive still defaults to C and like Windows 11, doesn't it?
John:
So they haven't gotten past that either.
John:
You have to save room for your floppy drives and your brand new PCs.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
I know you don't want me to harp on that, but drive letters.
John:
Come on, people.
Casey:
Anyway, I used to do this back in the Windows days for me, but I haven't done it since.
Casey:
And now I don't do anything like this with Mac OS.
Casey:
John, you talked a lot last time.
Casey:
Marco, what is your approach?
Casey:
And then we'll get to John.
Marco:
Like you, I used to do it in my Windows days, and the reason why was because being a Windows Power user, formatting and reinstalling the OS is a fairly common operation.
Marco:
I would do that about maybe once a year or so, and it was much easier to know that if my user data is all on this other partition, then I can format the C partition without worrying that I'm going to lose stuff.
Marco:
So that was pretty much what I did and why I did it back then.
Marco:
As soon as I went to Mac, first of all, I started out on laptops where I didn't have multiple drives and it didn't make a lot of sense to have multiple partitions.
Marco:
And so I just never, never got into that habit on the Mac.
Marco:
And I found it's mostly not a problem.
Marco:
I mean, you know, for Alfred's, you know, not the software, for the right air of this question, for Alfred's purpose here of developer tools having restricted access is,
Marco:
I don't really have that issue because most of my development is in Xcode.
Marco:
And I also hardly ever install any kind of third-party stuff.
Marco:
So I hardly ever install third-party developer tools or libraries or things like that.
Marco:
And Xcode is actually... Modern Xcode stuff is pretty well sandboxed.
Marco:
Even if you get Swift packages and you have build steps as part of a Swift package...
Marco:
Those have very little access to anything like everything is sandboxed and all of that.
Marco:
And so it's actually fairly safe.
Marco:
But my general approach to my Mac security is, you know, I will let the OS sandbox and protect things to whatever degree.
Marco:
Certain things require full disk access.
Marco:
I, you know, things like backup tools, which we'll get to soon.
Marco:
I will allow those as needed, but only for stuff that really makes sense.
Marco:
I'm not pasting terminal commands into terminal and letting things go nuts.
Marco:
So I don't really have that kind of security concern of that.
Marco:
And if something ever did go rogue, that's what I have backups for.
Casey:
John?
John:
So practically speaking, trying to keep things in separate buckets is annoying, and the Mac operating system does not want you to do it.
John:
In earlier days of the Mac OS X...
John:
there was sort of built-in support carried over from the next step days of much better support for keeping things in separate bins having your user directories on a different drive than your operating system like actually a different physical drive not just like a different partition having network home directories uh there was a whole thing of like your home directory would be on your ipod do you remember that you connected with uh with firewire oh yeah so uh
John:
But as time has gone on, those features have either slowly departed the Mac operating system or become so buggy as to be useless or inadvisable.
John:
So the path of least resistance is to put everything on the same drive.
John:
Now, practically speaking, in terms of security, Alfred says, as a developer myself, many developer tools have unrestricted access to the file system.
John:
If that means like full disk access, I don't actually know the answer to this.
John:
But does full disk access provide programs that have it with full access to all mounted drives?
John:
Or is that the separate access and external drive permission?
John:
Oh, I don't know.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
But anyway, multiple partitions of the same drive, I think full disk access definitely does give you.
John:
And if you have an internal drive, if you're one of the few people who has a computer that has multiple internal drives and can run macOS, I think full disk access would probably access that too.
John:
I still think the annoyance of trying to put things in separate buckets,
John:
is not worth the hassle it's not worth the bugs it's not worth the hassle it's not worth the management of space oh i filled up this bucket but that bucket has plenty of space left on and i have to try to rebalance i would not advise doing it i don't personally do it even though i do have multiple drives most of them are just backups of the one big one
John:
My ideal scenario is kind of like the one biggest monitor I can get.
John:
I want the one biggest boot drive I can get that has all my stuff on it.
John:
And then everything else is ancillary.
John:
I've got a NAS.
John:
I've got some spare drives or whatever, but I just want everything to be in all one place.
John:
You could, if you really wanted to, with the magic of APFS, divide up your boot drive into a series of partitions that all stare at the same storage so you don't have to worry about one bucket filling up because they're all just fighting all the time over the same pool of storage.
John:
But then still, you have a bunch of different things mounted and a bunch of different paths, and it's just...
John:
For me, it's too cumbersome.
John:
Use folders.
John:
Don't use partitions.
John:
Don't use drives.
John:
If you need to organize your stuff, use folders.
John:
And in terms of protecting things security-wise, I don't think it's worth trying to protect things.
John:
And it may be useless anyway if the full disk access permission gives things access to every disk.
Casey:
And finally, Joseph Zoller writes,
Casey:
I don't have a hard drive or a third-party cloud backup of the family's precious memories.
Casey:
Is there an easy or approved way to create an export or backup of all my photos in my iOS or iPadOS library?
Casey:
You've talked extensively about your own workflows on the Mac, but curious about a solution for the iPad.
Casey:
Oof, I got nothing.
Casey:
I guess you could...
Casey:
Also use Google Photos, and I think it'll do all the importing to Google Photos from what's on the iPad as well, I say, with no certainty whatsoever.
Casey:
But I don't have any good answers on this one.
Marco:
I mean, the problem is I don't think there is a good answer for this one.
Marco:
This is one of the major downsides of an iOS-only lifestyle, which I think is very relevant because a lot of people...
Marco:
They might not be iPad only, but a lot of people are iPhone only or iPhone primary.
Marco:
Or for a lot of people, the iPhone is their only Apple device.
Marco:
And so a lot of people have this issue of all of their photos, hopefully they have the iCloud backup of their photos, which that alone is a huge thing, especially the dumb 5 gigs thing.
Marco:
But all of their photos are in this system.
Marco:
They don't have any of their backups.
Marco:
It's entirely this system.
Marco:
That is very, very common for millions of people.
Marco:
And I think part of the problem here is on the Mac, you have tools like Backblaze or Time Machine or Cloners and things like that.
Marco:
You have other options for backups, many of which are very, very good.
Marco:
And on iOS, you just don't have that access.
Marco:
Apps can't do it.
Marco:
And the good thing is, as John was saying earlier, with the lack of an iCloud backup for Mac, the good thing is that Apple's backup is very good.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
And that's what most people do most of the time.
Marco:
But what if it doesn't work for you?
Marco:
What if you get locked out of your Apple ID?
Marco:
What if somehow that goes wrong for you, that system breaks for you?
Marco:
That's a problem.
Marco:
What if you get Matt Honand?
Marco:
Like, if somebody logs in, uses remote Find My to delete all your stuff off all your devices, and then changes your Apple ID password?
Marco:
Like, you know, what if, you know, one of these people who we were just talking a few months ago, the, what Joanna Stern broke in Wall Street Journal about how, like, there's a scam of people, you know, looking at your passcode in a bar, and then taking your phone, taking your passcode, changing your Apple ID password, locking you out of everything.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
If that happens and your only backup system is this system, that's a bit of a problem, to put it mildly.
Marco:
And so I think it's very nice that the mass market has this option for easy, mostly automatic, mostly everyone has this available to them, backup of the most important stuff that is captured or stored on an iPhone or iPad.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
but if you want more protection, and I would suggest anybody nerdy enough to listen to this show should probably want that, I would strongly suggest getting something else in place.
Marco:
And unfortunately, I think if you're iOS only, I don't think that's possible.
Marco:
By the way, all of this presumably will also apply to Vision OS, because Vision OS seems very, very much based on iPad OS and iOS.
Marco:
So it seems like it's going to work the same way.
Marco:
So what I would suggest doing is get some kind of cheap used Mac, put it in a closet with a bunch of water on top of it, have it just sitting there with your user account logged in and with photos there downloading originals, get enough storage that you can fit your entire photo library on it with originals.
Marco:
And then run Backblaze on that.
Marco:
Get a Mac somehow and run Backblaze on it.
Marco:
That's a good fail-safe backup.
Marco:
Because if this stuff is that important to you, it's worth it.
Marco:
This doesn't need to be a good or recent Mac.
Marco:
It just needs to run a recent OS.
Marco:
So it can be like somebody's used Mac Mini, some old iMac, whatever you have the space for, the budget for.
Marco:
It doesn't have to be good.
Marco:
But that is the best solution here.
Marco:
And I wish there were better options, but there aren't.
John:
Two things on this topic.
John:
One, based on what we discussed before about the cultural adjusting to changes in technology, I feel like we've kind of gotten to the point now where it is culturally the norm to use the cloud backup provided by your device and to accept
John:
Anything that happens to you as just like, you know, it's a tragedy, but sometimes that happens like it's rare.
John:
It's probably not going to happen to you.
John:
And if it does happen, it's just like it's like getting struck by lightning.
John:
Oh, it's a bummer, but it's rare enough that like.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And tech nerds don't find that acceptable.
John:
So we want another solution.
John:
That's why Joseph is writing in and we're trying to find solutions.
John:
And the second point is access to those better solutions on the Apple platforms.
John:
It shows how much Apple continues to lean on the Mac because the Mac can do so many things that all the other platforms can't.
John:
Apple keeps making new platforms and none of them have the flexibility to
John:
for even third parties to provide solutions like this.
John:
Like iCloud backup is for your iPhone.
John:
Are there a lot of third party things that can back up and restore your entire phone?
John:
No, there are not.
John:
But there are third party things that can back up and mostly restore your entire Mac because the Mac is a more open platform.
John:
It's one of the things I always fear with the Mac going away.
John:
We're basically saying, I can't back up my iPad.
John:
I want a second backup of my iPad.
John:
What can we do?
John:
Can I download an app for my iPad that solves this problem?
John:
Probably not well.
John:
I mean, there's no reason technically you shouldn't be able to.
John:
USB-C, iPad, plug it in, SSD, have it back up all your things to it or whatever.
John:
But Apple's not interested in pursuing that.
John:
Whereas the Mac...
John:
already does it you know even with apple's own software now you've got a local copy of your photos and now you've got a second cloud backup of your photos and if someone compromises your apple id guess what you can still log into your mac and if your house burns down guess what your photos are stolen backblazer you are taking your your digital life into your own hands and providing a better solution and so even though society will never blame you for like oh i lost all my family photos isn't that a sad story i read it in the local paper no one says those people should feel ashamed because everybody just uses you're lucky if people use the cloud backup if
John:
half people might not turn that on and they're not even using because they don't want to pay for icloud storage right that is the cultural norm but i think it is unacceptable for things like photos again people's houses burst down or merlin's photos were in his garage and they got waterlogged and he lost all his old photos like it happens but there are things especially with digital stuff there are things we can do to prevent it that are way easier than trying to carefully preserve a bunch of physical photo albums and and you know
John:
If you live somewhere where there's flooding or like your house burns down, we can do better with digital stuff.
John:
And Apple is trying to do better.
John:
I feel like iCloud backup is better than physical photo albums for resilience against tragedy.
John:
But we can do better still for the people who want to take that extra step.
John:
Having to buy a Mac because none of Apple's other platforms, including, like you said, Marco Vision OS, can do anything to help you here, I think is a failure.
John:
And I think, you know, if I had to steer the direction of all Apple's platforms, I would definitely be steering them all towards the idea of let's keep all the advantages that you've found while also trying to open up these systems to have more functionality, but see every discussion of iPad OS for the past five years.
Marco:
five more than that even like ipad os and ios like i would love time machine for those platforms even if apple did it and even if it's only internal to the device we we just said we wanted icloud backup for the mac but now we said but also can we get the thing that the mac has for everybody else
Marco:
Yeah, like how, I mean, look, especially, I mean, geez, I can't tell you the number of times that like my kid, especially when he was younger, mostly when he was younger, would like accidentally delete something he had made in a game, like a level or a map or something.
Marco:
He would like accidentally delete something and just be crushed because there is no undo.
Marco:
There's no recovery.
Marco:
And like on a computer, on a Mac, I could just get his, get the files off time machine for that app or whatever and stick them back in place and it would be fine.
Marco:
on ios you mostly can't do that like there you know there are those tools you can like plug it in and use like phone view or whatever like those tools you can plug it in and deal with their directories directly and attempt that which i actually have done for minecraft before a long time ago for this reason and it did work but it doesn't work for everything uh and like there's no way on the device to say you know what i really messed up my data in app x please kick me back an hour to what it was an hour like you can't do that that would be an amazing feature
Marco:
And I can see there's certain reasons why they might want to do it.
Marco:
I mean, I think a lot of apps assume a certain level of security of their own data directories that that would possibly violate.
Marco:
But the user benefits would be so great in situations like that.
Marco:
I think that's something they should seriously look into, honestly.
Marco:
But yeah, those options just don't exist on iOS.
Marco:
They've simplified them all away.
Marco:
And largely, the lack of that complexity is what makes those platforms so great in a lot of ways to a lot of people.
Marco:
But the downside is, again, just like everyone else about iPadOS, when you hit a wall, there is no going around it.
Marco:
You just can't.
Marco:
Whereas on a Mac, or on a PC, or even on Android, usually, whatever wall you hit, there's usually a way around it.
Marco:
And you just don't have that on iOS, on iPadOS, and probably not on a vision OS either.
Marco:
Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Collide, and Clean Email.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
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 so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t-marco-r-m-n-s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-s-siracusa it's accidental they didn't
Marco:
So, related to what we were just talking about, about data backup, I have a little bit of a mini-topic here that will fit perfectly in the post-show.
Marco:
In our topic list, in my grab bag of possible tech topics, one of the entries there is an optical disk journey.
Marco:
John, when I sent you my box of crap most recently, what was in it again?
Marco:
It's a bunch of writable Blu-ray discs that are good for a thousand years.
John:
It was a hundred years.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It was some ridiculous.
Marco:
It's a thousand because they're M disc for millennial disc, I guess.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
I sent you a little USB Blu-ray drive and a small spindle of Blu-ray recordable M discs.
Marco:
And the reason I sent this to you... So the appeal of this, the reason I bought it is because I thought, you know...
Marco:
It wouldn't hurt to have like a really good offline cold backup for really important stuff like my photos, like my family photos.
Marco:
I have all these online stuff.
Marco:
I have Backblaze.
Marco:
I have Time Machine.
Marco:
You know, we have iCloud Photos, of course.
Marco:
And those are all great, but those are all online.
Marco:
And if somebody really wanted to mess with my online life, they could possibly break into all those things.
Marco:
They're all online.
Marco:
They could delete those accounts.
Marco:
They could, you know, whatever.
Marco:
Or I could.
Marco:
Maybe I messed something up really badly and all that stuff.
Marco:
So anyway, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to have some kind of cold storage, some kind of long-term cold storage backup for the most important stuff.
Marco:
Not everything on my computer, but the most important stuff.
Marco:
Photos, documents, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
The problem with optical disks, there's been two major problems with using them over time for this.
Marco:
Number one, they're just not big enough.
Marco:
They don't store enough data for any kind of modern data needs.
Marco:
You would need a ton of them for most people's modern libraries.
Marco:
And number two,
Marco:
Recordable optical disks, until the MDisc style was made, recordable optical disks used organic dyes.
Marco:
And what that would mean is that they would break down over time.
Marco:
Like if you have old recorded CDRs or DVDRs, chances are if they're pretty old, they might not read anymore because they have probably degraded to the point where they will no longer read the data.
Marco:
Optical disks were not great for long-term storage.
Marco:
Other stuff like flash cards, like SD cards, are actually not that bad for long-term storage.
Marco:
They're not that good, but they're not that bad.
Marco:
They keep the data for a surprisingly long time.
Marco:
They're very durable.
Marco:
They're very small and data-dense in terms of how much you can fit in the amount of physical space.
Marco:
They're inexpensive and easily accessible, easily readable.
Marco:
So SD cards are actually not that bad.
Marco:
Obviously, there's more obscure things like tape, magnetic tape and stuff like that.
Marco:
I don't know anything about tape, really.
John:
Chisel all your photos into a stone tablet.
John:
They'll probably keep for a few thousand years if you're lucky.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But anyway, so there's all these different options.
Marco:
Hard drives are actually not terrible either.
Marco:
One thing that concerns me about hard drives is that if you record stuff on a hard drive and then just put it in a cabinet for 10, 20, 30 years,
Marco:
like when you plug that back in is it going to actually work like that's a lot of mechanical needs in there that i think over a long term the the odds of that just spinning up and working right after a number of years of it just sitting around being idle i don't know if i would trust a hard drive in that case forget the series of dongles that you would need to connect that hard drive you're you'd have to get like a sata to this to that to firewire to thunderbolt to optical to magic wireless to you know
John:
The longer you wait, the less likely you are even to have a device that can connect that hard drive.
Marco:
Yeah, and that applies, by the way, to almost any long-term computer storage solution.
Marco:
That problem exists of how do you read it in the future?
Marco:
What hardware is required to read it?
Marco:
And is that even still available?
Marco:
And can it connect to modern things?
Marco:
That does become a bit of a problem.
Marco:
Anyway, the M disk came out, and the M disk is basically a new technique and type of layer on optical disks.
Marco:
Rather than using organic dye, and forgive me, I don't know the fine details of this, but rather than using organic dye, it uses some kind of etchable material that physically etches the pattern into the layer so that it's much more like a pressed disk, and it doesn't degrade over time, at least not anywhere near what organic ones do.
Marco:
So they've been tested, and they seem to be tested to last at least 100 years under most tests.
Marco:
And, you know, obviously it's hard to simulate this over long spans, but they seem to be holding up to their claims of durability.
Marco:
So I bought that drive and those disks with a plan of doing this kind of big backup for my photos.
Marco:
And it just never happened.
Marco:
The biggest reason why is that when you have to backup your roughly terabyte photo library to 25 gig BDX or BDR disks, Blu-ray recordable disks, and
Marco:
That takes a lot of discs and a lot of juggling of stuff and a lot of time.
Marco:
And the project just never came together for me.
Marco:
And I mean, I bought that years ago.
Marco:
Well, more recently, the Blu-ray recordable market for the two people who were using it is actually advancing fairly nicely or has advanced fairly nicely that Blu-ray discs originally stored 25 gigs for single layer or 50 gigs for dual layer.
Marco:
And I don't think...
Marco:
dual-layer recordable disks were widely available at first.
Marco:
I could be wrong.
Marco:
So for the most part, you were looking at 25 gigs.
Marco:
Well, in the intervening years since I last looked, they've made BDXL disks, which use even more layers somehow.
Marco:
I have no idea how.
Marco:
And they can fit 100 gigs per disk.
Marco:
And they make them in the MDisk formulation.
Marco:
That's still, you know, 10 discs for my photo library, but 10 is a lot better than 40.
Marco:
So maybe I should try this.
Marco:
They're fairly inexpensive.
Marco:
Like the drives are about $100 that can do this.
Marco:
And the reason I sent you that drive, John, is that that drive can't do this.
Marco:
Also, that drive is like micro USB or it might have even been mini USB.
Marco:
So I was like, you know, screw that noise.
Marco:
So I got a nice USB-C Pioneer slot loading drive.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That does all the formats.
Marco:
It's bus powered, so there's no dumb power adapter.
Marco:
Bus powered via USB-C, USB-3 speeds, etc.
Marco:
And I got a bunch of these BDXL M discs from Verbatim.
Marco:
If you buy them in 5 or 10 or 20 packs, they run something like $5 per disc.
Marco:
Which, again, is not that cheap when they're only 100 gigs.
Marco:
That isn't actually super cheap.
Marco:
But $5 for 100 gigs of fairly...
Marco:
strong long-term storage i consider that to be not that bad especially considering like i'm not storing terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data here i'm storing like a couple of terabytes total maybe you know so i bought myself a new uh bdxl burning setup and i i've been using i i've gotten through my entire photo library and half of my fish collection because i figure that's worth backing up too of course
Marco:
It's only 200 gigs, so it's only two days.
John:
I feel like you have a pretty good distributed backup of your Phish collection to all the other Phish fans in the entire world.
Marco:
Well, yeah, but at some point, the band's not going to be existing anymore, and they're probably going to shut down their live streaming service at some point that sells all these downloads and everything.
John:
I mean, I know it's inexpensive, but I definitely would not be spending my time swapping just to back up something that is accessible through hundreds of other people on the internet.
John:
Your family photos, yes.
John:
Phish, maybe not.
Marco:
Well, anyway, I got this awesome little Pioneer drive.
Marco:
It is truly USB-C bus powered.
Marco:
Now, one issue I ran into is that it takes some effort to try to get Apple Photos to export the originals in roughly exactly 100 gigabyte chunks.
Marco:
because ideally what you want is you want to say all right disc one disc two disc three you know this disc covers this date range this disc covers this date range and photos are great you know photos make this easy because you don't have to worry about incremental backups over time like you know that if this disc contains all your photos from 2018 you know there's not you're not going to add more all of a sudden you know so it's easy this is actually a really easy process to do with photos um and i should clarify the m discs as far as i know they're not ever rewritable it's only right once um which is probably for the best rewritable stuff always sucked
John:
It was an interesting choice to do export on modified originals.
John:
Like, I can see where you got to that, but it's like, hey, backup, why don't I backup the original?
John:
But if, like me, I guess you're not like me, but if, like me, you have put a significant amount of time into editing your photos, I would also want a backup of all my edited versions.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, maximum quality JPEGs of all the edits plus all the unmodified originals, which does significantly add to the size.
John:
But, yeah, I was wondering how you were doing this, and my approach when I was thinking about it would be,
John:
I would do export on modified individuals and also export the actual photos at maximum quality JPEGs to an external drive as files on disk.
John:
And then I would write a little script that would divide them up into folder size to be under a terabyte each or whatever.
Marco:
That's probably what I should have done.
John:
That's not what I did.
John:
Yeah, because I can imagine being in photos like, where did I leave off?
John:
And I'm dragging things into albums.
John:
And it's like, I don't want to do that.
Marco:
That's probably what I'm going to do.
Marco:
So I did my entire library.
Marco:
I did not yet do Tiff's library.
Marco:
And I don't have access to her computer all the time.
Marco:
She's using it.
Marco:
And I'll get to how long this takes in a minute.
Marco:
So she's using her computer.
Marco:
So I was thinking, how am I going to do this with hers?
Marco:
And I was thinking maybe...
Marco:
That's a good idea.
Marco:
Maybe I'll plug in an SSD that's big enough, just export all of her originals as one giant folder, and then write that script to break up hers into the 100-gig chunks.
Marco:
Anyway, so how I did this was I made a smart album with a date-captured range.
Marco:
For each disc, BDXL1, BDXL2, etc.
Marco:
And each one I wrote, you know, I labeled the discs with like the date rings I covered.
Marco:
The problem is to actually make this 100 gigs from that perspective, or from that workflow, you can't, as far as I can tell, Apple Photos app, there's not an easy way to tell what is the size of the modified originals of this album.
Marco:
Um, fortunately there's another app called power photos.
Marco:
This is a third party app that reads your Apple photos library.
Marco:
You can do stuff with it.
Marco:
And one of the things it does is if you click on a smart album, it'll tell you in the sidebar how big it is.
Marco:
Oh, that's cool.
Marco:
The problem is it's not super accurate.
Yeah.
Marco:
I guess when you actually export originals, it's exporting something in some kind of format sometimes that it ends up being larger than power photos thought it would be.
Marco:
So sometimes I have to like check power photos, do the export, see, oh, it's actually 107 gigs now, and then go back, cut, you know, a month off the date range, do it again.
Marco:
So there's probably a better way to do this.
John:
Like I said, put them on disk and write a script.
Marco:
Yeah, I think your way... Be a programmer.
John:
Don't be there slumming it with these photo editing apps.
Marco:
Yeah, that's probably the right approach.
Marco:
And I should clarify too, because APFS does not make a copy of the data if it doesn't need to make a copy of the data, when you export unmodified originals on the same drive, on your main SSD probably, when you do that,
Marco:
You don't need like a terabyte of space extra because it's already on the disk.
Marco:
So it's just basically creating a whole bunch of pointers to the original files in the photo library.
Marco:
So that's one thing I didn't realize when I first started.
Marco:
I thought the reason I would have to do it this way was because I didn't have a terabyte free.
Marco:
And it turns out, no, when you export things, they don't take up any space.
John:
so with the caveat that there is a an api to do that and if you are using some other program that doesn't use the the correct or expected apple apis for efficiently copying things in apfs you could end up not getting a clone everything from apple should do it the finder does it i guess photos does it too but i would test it first before assuming just every program that you run on apfs this does this the file system has the capability but not every program will take advantage of that capability
John:
yeah especially like if you if you're using shell scripts and using like cp or rsync i think by default those don't do it i i think the apple's built in yeah i think apple's built in cp might do it by default again you can test this yourself but uh those things change but you know just it's worth testing but yes that's one of the magical abilities of apfs i take advantage of it all the time because my disk would be massively full if i couldn't do this yeah
Marco:
so anyway so i've burned uh 12 discs so far i think one of them was bad and i was kind of curious like like when i'm burning this i'm like should i take it easy on the computer like remember buffer under runs remember that with cd-rom like don't touch the computer it's burning a disc yeah like i was actually worried like should i like is this a concern i should have with modern disc wording you should open 300 windows
Marco:
right yeah it's like like should i like should i like not run xcode because it's kind of heavy should i not like play music because it makes the desk vibrate slightly like i don't know i am a little bit iffy about xcode i do i have to confess i do quit xcode sometimes like before i podcast just like if something's gonna you quit things
John:
yeah it's hard to believe but yeah no because not because i need the ram but i'm like you know what xcode does all sorts of weird stuff and the most thing related to that actually is i've been getting a bunch of errors in my web browser today that said er network changed in chrome if you've seen that one uh and i'm pretty sure it was don't use chrome i'm pretty sure it was docker because docker runs this thing with you know docker of course does also know the working shenanigans i'll let you know tomorrow um but i've been doing
John:
I've been doing development on the ATP CMS with my Docker image.
John:
That means that I'm constantly running Docker, which means that Chrome occasionally gives you this network change error.
John:
It may be something else.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It might be the HTTP2 denial of service attack affecting Google properties, but more on this in future episodes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
anyway so i i still don't really know like the tolerance of what you can do in your computer while it's burning and not mess up the disc the one that was bad when i put so these are officially like 4x speed and of course the x's don't mean the same thing as x's for like dvds and cds they're all different actually the discs say 6x speed but when you put them in finder says 4x speed maximum okay whatever um
Marco:
And by the way, burning disk support is still built into Finder.
Marco:
You don't need a separate app to burn the disks.
Marco:
You insert the blank disk and Finder just gives you a thing in the favorite sidebar in Finder Windows called Untitled BD.
Marco:
And you just drag stuff to it.
Marco:
It has the little nuclear icon that all burned disks have had forever.
Marco:
You drag stuff to it.
Marco:
When you're ready, you go there and you hit burn.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It works just fine.
Marco:
And it burns and then does a read verify pass.
Marco:
So it actually reads the data back to make sure it actually wrote correctly.
Marco:
So it's great.
Marco:
Anyway, the bad disk, instead of saying 4X, it said 2X.
Marco:
Like Finder would only do it at 2X.
Marco:
I thought that's kind of odd.
Marco:
So I ejected it and I put it back in.
Marco:
And the second time it read 4X as usual.
Marco:
So I think there might have just been something funky about that disc.
Marco:
So anyway, the other thing about this process is that 4X in practice.
Marco:
Now, I tried looking up what these speeds mean on Wikipedia and Wikipedia says it should be a 96 minute time to burn a whole 100 gig disc at that speed.
Marco:
It actually takes me 128 minutes.
Marco:
And then another hundred or so minutes to verify.
Marco:
So it actually takes about four hours to burn and verify read a full hundred gig Blu-ray disc.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
That's that's not I mean, look, so the reality is like what I would do is I would just, you know, for every night for a week, I would just right before I was going to go to bed and put in a blank disk.
Marco:
I already had the folders all prepared of like what went on each disk.
Marco:
So, all right, put in the next one, drag it over, hit burn, go to bed, wake up in the morning.
Marco:
It's ready.
John:
What are you using to burn them, by the way?
John:
Did I miss what you said?
John:
Finder.
John:
Just Finder.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Talk about functionality.
John:
It's been sitting in Finder for ages that I would have not a lot of faith in.
John:
But hey, if it's working for you.
Marco:
If it didn't do the read-verify pass, I would have a lot less faith in it.
Marco:
But I'm very glad it does that.
Marco:
But yeah, so it works.
Marco:
It works just fine.
Marco:
And it's a little bit slow.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I am actually very happy I had this option because now, you know, so now I have these, these two small boxes of Blu-ray discs and they're, they're both protected.
Marco:
I got the jewel cases for each one.
Marco:
Like, so like instead of a spindle, like they're all in jewel cases.
Marco:
So I got, I now have this, this, this small set of Blu-ray discs that I can like put in, you know, a fire safe box or a safe deposit box or something, or, you know, just some kind of safe storage somewhere.
Marco:
Like I can actually have my, my family photos that,
Marco:
And I know that if everything goes wrong in my digital life, I still have this backup.
Marco:
And so I'm going to do a few.
Marco:
I'm going to do like, you know, important documents.
Marco:
I'm going to do, you know, my source code here and there.
Marco:
But, you know, for the most part, this is like long-term archival stuff because, you know, they're write-once disks.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It actually is, I think, a useful option to know about.
Marco:
This is not for everyone, and it's even barely for nerds.
Marco:
But if for some reason this might be interesting to you, it's an option worth knowing about, that you can get 100 gigs per disc on a disc that lasts basically your entire lifetime fairly easily.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
Marco:
Again, this is not a common need, but for stuff like family photos, I think it's a pretty cool option.