Re-tend That Garden
I have a pre-show.
All right.
And then if we don't have a better post-show, I did have a Synology adventure a week or two back that the both of you will find quite humorous because I almost died again.
But we don't have to do that if we end up on something better.
I think we might lead there a little bit earlier.
Oh, no.
That scares me.
I don't know.
I don't like where this is going at all.
How long is your pre-show going to be?
If your pre-show is going to be an hour long, maybe think of it as a topic.
We'll see.
Oh, God.
I'm very scared.
You're going to be like, what is that movie?
I mean, I think The Fugitive does it, a few other ones.
Todd tweets about it sometimes.
We're like...
the title card for the movie comes up like 40 minutes in.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Or like the other one is like, when does the last credit appear on the screen?
Some of those are like, you know, 40, 50 minutes into the movie.
The last like, it says, you know, directed by whatever, like 50 minutes of the movie is ridiculous.
It's going to be one of those days.
Oh, wait, I need to open IRC.
Shoot.
Yeah, I didn't have it open either.
I kind of dislike textual because textual is taking over like the TEX like shortcut.
You know what I mean?
Because I don't want to launch text edit.
okay wait you launched text edit yeah that for what sometimes i need styled text for what sometimes you need fonts you know yeah but if you're i mean anything i would use rich text for i would do in pages because it's probably something i'm making i'm printing out ages come on why else would i use rich text
Yeah, I kind of agree with Marco on this one, to be honest with you.
Like, all plain text documents open up in TextMate, and for you, I'm sure it's BBEdit, and for Casey, I'm sure it's some kind of garbage thing made by Microsoft.
Oh, stop.
Some non-native app.
I've never actually used it.
I don't even know how good it is, but I'm sure it's fine.
But no, TextEdit launches real fast, and if you just want to do some style text, like, you know, let's say you want to print, like, a label or something.
I just want to launch an app that launches real quick and print some style text.
No way I would launch pages.
Are you kidding?
I guess I would just use Pages for that.
TextEdit launches instantly.
Maybe you're so accustomed to using a 12-year-old computer that now that you have a fast one, you don't realize, oh, Pages also launches instantly.
Let's see how long Pages takes.
Three, four, five, six...
Six bounces.
Six bounces.
All right.
Now the text came up.
All right.
Now let's see text edit.
Text edit.
One.
Done.
Yeah.
Six times faster.
As counted in bounces.
All right.
Fair enough.
Before the show, John has instituted over the last, I don't know, six months, maybe a year, something that he likes to call pre-flight, where we kind of run through what we're going to talk about.
And it's actually very helpful as much as I give him grief for it.
And Marco just kind of slid in in the midst of pre-flight.
I have a pre-show, which is fine.
That's not entirely unusual.
And then as we keep talking, I said, oh, you know, I have an after show about how I had a heart attack about my synology.
And Marco said, well, that might come up before the after show.
I'm getting really nervous and I would like to end my misery as quickly as possible.
So what's going on, Marco?
Well, let me start by saying that my Mac mini flooded my closet.
What?
What are you talking about?
I'm trying to think, what kind of things involving water does the Mac Mini control?
The ice machine?
No.
So here's what happened, listeners.
When I moved away from the Mac Mini as my desktop, when the Pro laptops came out, I switched, as you know, to my desktop laptop, which I'm still extremely happy with.
And in fact, the Mac Mini and Tiff's old Intel MacBook Pro
are both, as we speak, sitting in their trading boxes waiting to be shipped out.
The Mac Mini is no longer going to be used as a home server because what I was using it for, so here, you know, backing up a little bit, when I got the new laptop, I figured I have some uses for a home server here and there, pretty light uses, if I'm honest, but I could use one here and there, you know.
Network storage is probably the biggest use case.
And then I was thinking, like, in the past, I've used my Mac Mini back in the other house.
I used an old Intel Mac Mini to, like, run the crappy software for my scanner and stuff like that that I didn't want cluttering up my main Mac.
Or, you know, when I had the Synology back at home, I would run the iSCSI Terminator on that Mac Mini because iSCSI is such a garbage fire on Mac OS.
But I was using iSCSI so that Backblaze could back it up.
Remember that whole thing.
So anyway, so I thought, I have some uses for a home server.
That was the idea.
And I had two eight terabyte external SSDs that were serving as massive storage for both me and TIFF.
They were serving as time machine hosting as well as archive storage.
And because they were mounted on a Mac, the archive storage was also being backed up to Backblaze.
So I figured that was a really good solution overall.
And I originally got the SSDs so that it could live in my office because they don't make any noise and I don't allow fans in my office.
Um, so it was fine in my office, but my office here is kind of small and I wanted to get it out of my office because once it's operating as a server, a Mac mini doesn't really need to be next to you.
It can be anywhere in your network and it serves the same purpose.
Um, so I happened to have a closet nearby that hosts the router and the switch to
I figured I can put the Mac Mini in this closet.
It's perfect, actually.
There's plenty of room for it on this high-up shelf.
All the networking gear is right there.
So I brought the Mac Mini in there about a month ago, and I also brought with it the two 8-terabyte external SSDs.
Each one of those is just in a $15 cable matters enclosure from Amazon where one side is metal and the bottom plate is plastic and just a basic USB-C external enclosure.
I did run into a couple of issues there.
The M1 Mac mini is actually kind of a crappy server.
It seems to require a keyboard to be connected to it to boot.
You know, I tried from previous Mac minis.
I knew that if you were going to run a Mac mini headless, that you would want one of those little HDMI dummy port dongle things.
That way it thinks there's a hardware monitor plugged in.
That was the first thing I got.
um but the m1 series of mac minis is more complicated than that to run headless you actually need a keyboard connected otherwise it will not boot headless so and i had mixed luck getting it to boot or not boot with a password it ended up being complicated so that was kind of crappy and and i didn't i didn't love that other than that it seemed to work okay um but i did notice that every so often i would open up that closet and it would be really warm in there
okay i'm thinking like is it is all i've changed recently is i put this mac mini there well i reached up and i felt and i noticed that those ssds run pretty hot actually like for some reason an ssd that is idle most of the time for whatever reason these things run really hot i imagine not all ssds are like this but these these you know big eight terabyte cheapo micron ones uh were definitely like this
That's why Sony requires a heat sink on SSDs that if you buy like a third party M.2 SSD for your PlayStation 5, you must use a heat sink with it.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, I never really thought about whether SSDs run hot because I always assumed they wouldn't.
But no, I mean, I'm sure it depends a lot on what they are and how they're controlled and everything.
But these definitely run pretty hot.
I also noticed that the surface of the Mac Mini itself was like, you know, once it's in a warm closet, it actually was kind of warm as well.
I kind of made a mental note, like, I should probably move these somewhere else sometime.
Well, the other day, I was working in that closet a little bit.
We have a printer in there, too.
I was trying to feed some stuff into the printer.
And...
I noticed that the shelf was wet.
What?
Because one other thing I keep in that closet, well, kept in that closet.
Oh, no.
Blocks of ice?
Is a gallon of distilled water for putting into my rowing machine.
Oh, this is distilled water, so then it shouldn't conduct electricity as easily, right?
Theoretically, I hope, yeah.
So I noticed that the gallon of distilled water that was back there was about half filled and kind of imploded slightly, like as if there had been some thermal contraction.
oh no is the the gallon of whatever water that's on the floor right no it's up on the shelf along with everything else oh imagine that you put a thing of water high up on the shelf imagine that imagine it could just happen to you it could just happen to you john it like it's heavy like don't you want it on the ground you don't want to reach up to a high shelf and pull down a big thing of water
It's a big shell.
I mean, the weight wasn't a problem.
Calum water weighs about like seven pounds.
Can we just learn putting water up high is called a water tower and it's to get water pressure to places in the Midwest, right?
Don't do that in your house unless you're trying to create a miniature water tower for a tiny Lego village that you have in the floor.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, most of the water, well, about half of that gallon of water had leaked out over some time period.
It sure looks like it was due to some thermal issues that were happening nearby.
So it got so hot that it melted or weakened the wall of a plastic container containing water?
It seemed to have weakened the wall of it enough to make a tiny little hole somewhere on like one of the seams.
What kind of container is this coming?
Can you describe, like, what is it?
Like a gallon of milk, kind of.
You know, like that big plastic.
Exactly like a gallon of milk?
Yeah, like the big plastic thing with the handle.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, no, do not put jugs full of milk high up on shelves near electronics.
What are you doing?
It was distilled water.
It's not conducted.
Anyway, I'd never seen this happen before.
It's right next to the mineral oil.
so anyway fortunately nothing was damaged and the water didn't escape the shelf and stain the floor or anything so that's that's good and didn't even seem to see the shelf somehow um it's i guess it's a good shelf so anyway besides a couple of you know a couple of sheets of printer paper that got wet and got ruined and a few cardboard boxes for things i didn't need anymore including this mac mini um nothing else seemed to have been damaged by this so fortunately that that's good
Wait, are you going to trade in this Mac Mini now that's been in the water?
The Mac Mini was not in the water.
It was one shelf above.
All right.
Same closet, one shelf above.
Anyway, so I realized I need to get rid of the situation now.
I mean, also, I need to stop collecting water in my closet, but that problem just solved itself.
There is now no more water left in my closet.
My closet has good drainage.
Did it just leak out of your house?
Yeah.
no i just it sat on the shelf like it wasn't it didn't have enough surface uh tension or there wasn't enough volume of water to overcome the surface tension to make it go over the edge so it was just like a like a shallow layer of water on the shelf but i i don't know anyway so that's not the point of the story do you have photo we need even if you don't post them just we need some private photos of yes concur
I didn't take it.
I was busy freaking out and getting paper towels.
I know.
I'm just going to say to the listeners, in general, I know you hear the idea of like a server closet or whatever, but closets are terrible places for anything that produces heat.
Unless you have a ventilated closet, a closet that has airflow going into and out of it, don't put things in closets or media cabinets, for that matter, if they're entirely enclosed.
You need some source of fresh, cool air for your electronics to be healthy.
turns out so anyway and yeah this is not a ventilated closet although the networking gear does fine in there you know it's the ubiquity dream machine a big switch like you know it's fine i'm sure it does fine because it's more tolerant but it's not great for that either
But I've literally, with the exception of since I moved the Mac Mini in there, I've never opened up that closet and felt it noticeably warm.
And it's an interior closet to the house, so it doesn't get too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter either.
So anyway, I have to adjust my Mac Mini setup.
So I have a couple other places around the house I could put it that are somewhat enclosed but better thermally controlled.
Like there's a utility closet on the outside that has electrical stuff in it, and that's fairly controlled.
So I'm like, all right, I could put it in there.
But I realized I was doing all this.
You know, this Mac Mini, I looked up the trade-in price, and the trade-in price was like $800.
With Apple or with someone else?
With Apple.
Okay.
So I was like, all right, I could trade this in.
What do I actually need this for?
Could I get away with less?
Is there something else that I could spend the $800 on that might solve my needs in a better way?
And or, you know, something like this is not a great solution that I have here.
It seems like both a waste of a perfectly good M1 workstation computer that could be used in other ways.
And also, you know, this is not a great storage solution physically or logically.
Like, as I mentioned, it's kind of a crappy home server.
Yeah.
So I thought, all right, let me think about some other options here.
As much as I hated to admit this,
I thought maybe some kind of network attached storage would probably solve this need better.
The main thing I needed it for is Time Machine.
Tiff and I now both have large laptop internal storage, and we can fit almost all of our archive files on our laptops.
All we really need something else for is Time Machine.
The Time Machine does have to be fairly large, though.
Tiff's laptop is 8 terabytes minus 4.
I need a lot of terabytes of Time Machine and not much else.
So I basically just need like, what were those?
Time capsule.
I need a time capsule, but like for the modern age.
So I decided this would be best solved by a network attack storage device.
Indeed, putting storage on the network would indeed be best solved by a network-attached storage device.
I agree.
Preferably that you do not store in a closet.
So what did you buy?
Take a guess.
Did you buy a Synology?
I got a Synology.
I got another one.
Atta boy.
Which one did you get?
I'm not even sure I should tell you.
Why?
Honestly, I'm not up to date on the newest Synology stuff.
In fact, I was just discussing this with a friend via text the other day.
My primary Synology that I use probably more heavily than either of you guys is still the original one that Synology sent us in like 2013.
It's almost 10 years old.
Now, granted, it's the ship of Theseus.
The 1813 plus, right?
yeah yep yep 1813 plus i upgraded the ram on mine did i tell you that no you didn't was that easy when synology is like os7 came out they said oh you know you can get by with this much ram or we recommend that much and i'm like huh i wonder how hard it is to upgrade the ram on synology turns out it's not hard at all it's super cheap i bought a little ram expansion thing opened it up shoved it on while i was in there i sprayed out some of the dust slaps it back together it's got like double the ram that it had before yeah i'm still going strong
Can we put that in the parking lot and talk about it later, please?
Because I genuinely would like to know about that, but we can take that offline.
So, yeah.
So, anyway, very briefly.
So, I have this 1813 Plus that's sitting here now, despite my tale of woe that I'll hopefully get to later, is running really well.
But I know the clock is ticking.
And...
I, as you, as listeners have really found out in the last couple of weeks, I am a little bit on the frugal side and I really don't want to buy another eight bay Synology.
And then the proper answer is probably to fill it with all new hard drives rather than to just extract the ones in the current Synology and punt them over to the new one.
So that's like a several thousand dollar expenditure that I really don't feel like doing.
Wait, wait, how much space are you using?
I think I'm using around 11 terabytes at the moment.
Okay, I can tell you exactly how much it would cost to replace that because I just did that.
Good.
Okay, well, tell me more.
But did Marco get the one that's all SSDs?
Yeah, that's the thing.
Well, I thought about it.
So first I thought, all right, if I get, they made a few years ago, I don't think any of them are still made, but they made some that only took two and a half inch disks.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Oh, no, you don't want that.
That's gross.
There was a little tiny six bay.
Oh, I bet that was adorable.
It was.
Yeah, there's a six bay.
It's called the DS620 Slim.
It doesn't seem like it's currently made, but you can still find a couple of them for sale here and there.
But it's like a little tiny six bay SSD only one, which I thought was kind of cool.
But...
I realized like, okay, for my actual needs here, A, I don't have six SSD size disks.
I don't really need to or want to have those.
And also I want this to be very large storage and it can be very large, very cheap, you know.
And so I'm looking at three and a half inch drives.
But I also realized like I also don't want like my needs here while they are large, they are also simple.
I'm not running Plex on this thing.
I'm not going to get into the Docker fest and running apps and having it download pirated movies for me and everything.
I'm not going to do any of that stuff.
It just needs to host Time Machine.
A Raspberry Pi could possibly have done this with more work.
So it's really fine.
Anyway, so I decided I'm just going to get a small one.
Now, I know Merlin would kill me if I got a 2 Bay.
And that is correct, by the way.
But I really only want two disks.
If all I'm doing is time machine, theoretically, I could get a one bay one.
Because I could just get a single 16 terabyte hard drive and be fine.
That's all I would really need.
And in your defense, when we had first gotten these synologies almost a decade ago,
You and I were talking, maybe it was all three of us, but I remember particularly you and I, Marco, were talking about how to allocate these eight drives.
And what you had said you were going to do, and I agreed with it, and still am doing to this day, is you said you were going to, what is it, RAID 0, two of the physical drives, which is to say make it as though it's virtually one large drive.
But the only thing that gets put on that drive is Time Machine because that's redundant.
And yes, I'm sure John is fuming right now.
But I concur with you, Marco, that for something that is already redundant, it is not the end of the earth if it poops the bed.
If you have Time Machine and Backblaze, you're pretty well covered.
And you can put that Time Machine on a single disk or a RAID 0 or whatever.
It's fine.
If you like to live dangerously, I'll cross that bridge when I eventually run out of storage because, you know, that's like the last bridge.
Like, how do I get more storage back?
Well, I'll break that RAID array, break that RAID 5 array and then put it into RAID 0.
And voila, you've like doubled yours.
And that's where I'm going to run out of storage.
Like, you know, because we back up everything to Time Machine, to that all the laptops in the house, all the desktops, everything.
And that adds up after a while.
Yeah, so anyway, I realized my actual storage needs are, you know, they're large in the sense of, you know, we have roughly 12 terabytes, maybe 13 of time machine data that I want to back up.
That's a lot.
But also, modern hard drives go up to 18 terabytes.
So in a sense, it is a lot like in absolute terms, but relative to modern hard drives, if you're buying new equipment, it kind of isn't a lot.
That's why I said like I could get away with a one or two bay one because really I just need like one drive worth of storage.
So I looked at my options.
I ended up going with one called the DS420J.
It's four bays, and it has otherwise pretty minimal features.
Nothing is hot swappable on it.
It doesn't have, I don't think it has any of the like fancy media encoding features or anything like that.
But what's nice about the 420J is that it is compact and quiet and low powered.
And so if you're going to put it in a closet or something, those are pretty attractive qualities.
And it's not that expensive.
It's $300 empty.
That's really not bad.
Yeah, for a four-bay Synology, that's pretty good.
And by the way, looking at the official site for this device, DS420J is a four-bay desktop NAS designed for home data backup, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I think you're barking up the correct tree, I would say.
But is it rated for outdoor use?
Oh, gosh.
As long as there's a roof over it, it'll be fine, right?
Yeah, theoretically.
Totally, totally.
The rain doesn't get to that area.
So, I got it, I set it up today, and I put into it
only two drives so far i figure if i really need expansion later i can expand later i probably never will um but it's good to have the four bays for flexibility in the future if need be given that the price was so good on this and the drives i got were two seagate whatever whatever 18 terabyte drives that for some reason are on sale right now for like 350 each where uh how do you get the drives in this thing
the you actually like unscrew the butt it's like it's like those like those old overalls where you'd like unbutton things for like the butt access panel yeah i saw the back panel i see two big openings for fans so you open you open that up you see those those giant black thumb screws on the corners of those fan the fan panel you unscrew all those and the whole back hinges down and then does it flap down like a door
Yeah, I see it.
Do the fans come with it when it hinges down?
Yes.
And then it's just four vertically.
And then, yeah, you have these four trays you pull out and stick the hard drives in.
Yeah, so it's fine.
I did the new setup.
I mean, the last time I set up a Synology was 2013.
They've come a long way since then.
I did it all from an iPhone app to start, like the whole finding your IP and setting up your admin password and stuff.
And I did the rest of the setup via the web interface when I had to enable time machine shares.
it's been totally fine to set up it was it was a very quick and easy process um it was it was really nice so overall i'm i'm satisfied so far we'll see how it goes but i think this will be a really good solution and what i and i've decided here you know in the past i have had issues as talked on the show about like how the heck do you back up a synology
Yeah, tell me about it.
You can't use Backblaze or any good cloud backup for it.
You can use B2.
Well, right, but you can't have unlimited capacity.
You've got to pay per gig, and you can use various services to pay per gig.
Backblaze B2 is one of those services, or you could do S3 or whatever else.
So those options exist.
I don't love those options.
What I decided to do with this
is because we now both have these large laptops, and because of Synology, we mostly just need it for Time Machine, I've decided to only use it for Time Machine, effectively.
Maybe I'll, like, you know, if I have some kind of weird, like, app I want to run on, maybe I'll do that in the future.
Again, I don't think it's very likely.
But what I really want here is for the computers themselves that we're using to be the primary storage.
and to have the network attached thing only be for backup and that way i never have to worry about how the heck i back up the synology i recommend eventually like it's it's hard for me to believe that you're going to have this four base analogy that you only have two bays filled on that you're only ever going to use it for time machine eventually inevitably you're going to fill those other two bays then you're going to have more storage than you need then you're going to put files on it and then you're going to think about backing it up and when you do that several years from now i'm here to tell you
like using the the the native or whatever the synology b2 backup thing and just pointing it not at your time machine volume but your other volume it's really simple it's pretty darn cheap it's not as cheap as like the five dollar flat rate per month whatever backblaze is now you pay per you know byte that you store but to give an example you know what i back up from my from my synology there yes there's a smattering of files that are only on the synology for storage or whatever of course they get backed up through the b2
I back up my media library, which I don't need any of that.
I can reconstitute that at any time from other sources, but I don't want to.
So I pay to back it up to B2.
You're talking about things like Blu-rays and stuff?
Yeah.
That's got to be a fortune.
It's not.
It's like $8 a month.
No, B2 is really cheap.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
It's not that much money.
I looked at this, and for 10 terabytes, it was not cheap at all.
Well, I also have two Synologies, and I back up one Synology to the other Synology.
a subset of it right so i've got the big synology and then a subset of the big synology syncs again through built-in software that comes with the synology i can sync a subset of it to the other synology it's very convenient yeah it's five terabyte five dollars per terabyte per month so that's you know 50 bucks a month for me yeah i don't have like a giant media library like yeah see that's the problem with having a giant media library
And see, I've decided for that, like, I mean, look, I've ripped a lot of Blu-rays and DVDs in my time, but I decided, like, you know, I have all those sitting on my other sonology.
I have all those sitting there, and I never watch them.
Most of the movies that I've bought on physical media, either I never watch, or when I want to watch them, I can watch them on...
whatever iTunes is called now because I hooked up that Movies Anywhere thing years back.
And all those purchases, I redeemed all the Blu-ray codes for all the discs I had.
And so almost every movie I own on physical media in any modern format like Blu-ray, I have access to that for free or for no additional cost through iTunes.
So I can always just go and watch those whenever I want.
And yeah, the quality is not going to be as good playing off of the Apple Store compared to a much higher bitrate Blu-ray.
But I also just don't care anymore.
And I've decided the simplicity of that setup...
is so much nicer than having to maintain my own like physical copy or you know whatever physical or digital copy of this thing like sitting on a disc I own somewhere and having to worry about things like file management and backups and data integrity like all that stuff I've just decided like I there's so much in my life that I care so deeply about and that I nerd out about I had to get rid of some stuff and that's one of the things I got rid of
You know, and that makes sense, especially if you're only consuming media that's easily findable, replaceable, buyable, whatever.
Fair point.
As we've talked about a lot, and I don't need to belabor the point that I tend to track down, and I don't necessarily, that's not like a tongue in cheek way of saying pirate, although occasionally that might happen.
But generally speaking, I'm able to track down or, you know, YouTube DL or something, something that doesn't exist anywhere else or doesn't exist in a way that's easily replaceable and so on and so forth.
So I think for your purposes, and I don't mean to sound dismissive, I apologize if I do, but for your purposes, I agree with you.
What you're doing is the right approach.
For me, it's not quite so simple because not only do I have a lot of media that's not easily replaced,
not easy to replace, but I'm often tweaking that media.
So I'm adding chapters or doing this or doing that.
And so that's part of the reason why I am going through this ridiculous amount of administrivia and headache to maintain my Plex library because as ridiculous as it probably seems and maybe is, it does provide me an immense amount of joy and it is not easy for me to just replace.
Like John, you said a minute ago, oh, I can just get this stuff back from other sources.
A lot of the stuff I have in Plex I could, but not all of it.
And I would be devastated if I lost it.
It's not so much that I can't get this stuff back.
It's that I do tend my Plex library a little bit.
Like I put custom artwork on some things because I didn't like the default ones.
I messed with the metadata.
I have 17 versions of Star Wars that I kind of have to hand roll because, you know, Plex just knows about Star Wars.
But then I got all the different versions and I want them labeled and, you know, like everything.
and if i if it went away and i lost that it's like oh well you can get those things back but now i have to go and retend that garden i have to put remember where did i find that good artwork that i like this did i save a little subfolder of like synology custom artwork on my mac or did i not do that you know how did i set up the metadata for these different versions of star wars so they're all set up correctly you know just how do i recreate the folder structure the right way like
it's not just the data it's the it's the tending to the same thing with my photo library i worst case scenario like i have my photos backed up a million times including to google photos again but google photos doesn't have any of my metadata about it and i would be devastated to lose all that metadata so part of me backing up my you know iCloud photo library a thousand times is because i never want to lose all the work that i have poured into tending that particular garden of you know tagging photos and
editing them and cropping them and putting them into albums and sub albums and the smart folders and like you know keywords and like that's time i've invested into this library it's not a lot of data that metadata is probably like you know less than 100 megabytes or something but that is the most important part of it yes obviously you want the photos themselves which is why in the end
My backstop against my backstop against my backstop is, you know, oh, at least I still have the photos.
And that's better than, you know, that's what you really want.
But the real thing that would devastate me if I still had the photos is if I lost all that metadata.
I do less tweaking to Plex.
There's probably enough customization that one day worth of banging my head against it, I could get it back to the way I wanted it.
But I don't want to spend that day, so...
yeah i just back it all up um yeah and the good thing about network attack storage is for me anyway it's a big noisy thing but it's in my basement i never hear it i never see it it backs up the b2 with me not having to do anything and it just runs and it's been running for 10 years with no problems yeah i cannot say enough good things about synology and that's why as cheap as i am i will at some point either because i'll be forced to or because i'm
finally being proactive i will be buying another one now maybe it won't be eight bay maybe it'll be six because you know drives are getting bigger blah blah blah i don't know i haven't really looked into it but i will be getting here's the thing i'm telling you like you can my setup here was about a thousand dollars total for 18 terabytes of raid one yeah yeah that's pretty good and i have two extra bays for the future if i really need that but like the drives are so big the the days of any of the three of us needing a six bay
NAS are over.
Well, I don't know.
When I look at them, I also look at new synologies and I think because storage is so cheap, I think both Casey and I are of the mind that if we had like 10 times more space, we can think of things to use it for.
I really can't.
That's why I went this direction.
I looked at what is my personal slice of the archive drive.
Tiff's is a little bit bigger.
She has more of the family photos from big events and stuff.
My slice of the archive drive is like one and a half terabytes.
I just copied those files onto my laptop
in a folder called archive and it fit you know i i have less free space now but i still it still fit just fine and so now that's okay this is just primary storage now archive is simply a you know a filing system as opposed to not a file system a filing system concept as opposed to like you know a physical distinction of how it is stored
Again, I don't mean to sound dismissive.
I think for the purposes that you are talking about, I think you made the exact right choice.
And I'm glad that hashtag Casey was right and that you should have and did eventually end up with Synology.
So what we're learning over the last month or so on ATP is that I need to listen to you more.
You need to listen to me more.
And probably neither of those things is going to end up happening.
That's okay.
All right.
So now that we're 40 minutes in, you want to start the show?
Directed by Marco Arment.
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run my servers.
Visit linode.com slash ATP.
See why Linode has been voted the top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius.
I run all of my servers at Linode.
These are wonderful virtual cloud servers that, frankly, it offers every feature you can possibly imagine.
So obviously there's all the benefits of virtual servers.
You can move them around to different hardware.
You can resize them up and down in resource needs.
All sorts of protections and conveniences available there.
But what it comes down to for me for Linode is...
first of all, amazing performance.
They have really high-end hardware.
They are one of the first hosts to go all SSD, and they just are always leading the way in terms of performance of what you get on those cloud instances.
And they also just have a really great infrastructure around it.
They have an amazing control panel.
They have amazing tools and API to automate stuff.
They have great support if you ever need it, and all of that is wrapped up in an incredible value proposition.
That's what I love the most about them, that...
Frankly, they are the best value in the business that I have found, and I've been with them for almost a decade now, and they've been the best value the entire time because as technology gets better, they always stay competitive.
They will give you more for your money, or they'll introduce even lower-cost plans.
It's just great being a Linode customer.
I run a lot of servers.
All of my servers that I run are run on Linode.
And I think I have something like 35 instances total so far.
And it's just a wonderful web host.
I strongly, strongly recommend.
If you need to run a server somewhere, go to Linode.
They will probably have what you need, and they'll do a really great job of it.
So go to linode.com slash ATP, create a free account, and you get $100 in credit.
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Make a free account today to get $100 in credit.
Thank you so much to Linode for being an awesome host and for sponsoring our show.
Do you have the XDR yet?
No, no.
I do have a new desk setup, though, which we can talk about and we'll talk about in just a few minutes.
But no, I do not have an XDR yet.
I have not purchased an XDR yet.
My desk setup is ever-changing, but no, nothing yet.
But we have to start with a little bit of housekeeping, I suppose.
And one of you would like to talk about lithium batteries and smoke detectors.
Andrew on Twitter pointed us to a Consumer Reports article counteracting our advice from past shows that say you can use these really cheap lithium 9-volt batteries, really long-lasting 9-volt batteries in your smoke detectors because they last much longer than alkalines and you don't have to change them as often.
Here's what Consumer Reports has to say.
Lithium 9 volts aren't recommended for smoke detectors unless you follow a strict battery replacement schedule.
Those batteries maintain a high voltage until the end of their usable life, so they provide a much shorter low battery warning to alert you that it's time to swap in a fresh one.
Alkaline batteries, by comparison, have a more gradual voltage drop-off prolonging the low battery alert and greatly increasing the odds that you'll be nearby to get the alert.
So here's Consumer Reports doing a very bad job of what is their basic job, right?
So this is their advice.
Hey, just don't use lithium nine volts, right?
And here's why, right?
But there is no sort of quantifiable information.
Okay, so...
You'll have less time to hear the beeping.
The whole idea is that the smoke alarms beep when the voltage gets too low.
Right.
So if you can graph the voltage of a battery over time, there's some threshold after which the smoke detector starts beeping.
And you can imagine lots of differently shaped curves.
The question is, like, how long if you don't if you ignore an alkaline battery, you know, in your smoke detector and it starts beeping, how long would it beep?
Say you're on vacation for a month.
It starts beeping the second you walk out the door.
When you come back a month from now, is it still beeping?
How long does an alkaline battery beep in your smoke detector?
A day?
A week?
A month?
Two months?
We don't know.
And also, how long does a lithium beep in your smoke detector?
30 seconds?
One minute?
Does it beep once and never again?
Or does it beep for one week instead of two?
I can't make an informed decision about whether or not I should use lithium 9-volt batteries in my smoke detector without knowing how short is the low battery warning.
Yes, you might be out of the house when it beeps, but I would like to know, does it beep for 30 seconds or does it beep for three days instead of two days or instead of two weeks or whatever?
Like, that's an important question.
And they do touch on, okay, if you have a battery replacement schedule and you just put a reminder for, you know, every year, replace all the smoke detector batteries on, you know, whenever we set the clocks back or whatever...
You won't have a problem with this.
But this advice I wanted to put on the show because we did recommend to use these lithium-ion vaults.
We want you to know that apparently there is a potential problem, but I can't quantify that problem or know how seriously to take it because A, it's consumer reports and they have weird opinions on stuff.
And B, they don't tell me how much shorter it's going to be because that is the most important fact in deciding whether this is important advice that I should definitely follow or advice that I can ignore.
Yeah, because there's an obvious trade-off.
If a lithium battery lasts two or three times longer than an alkaline battery, if you're optimizing for time the smoke alarm is working, then that's a pretty big benefit.
So you have to weigh that.
As you're always saying, we don't know how much shorter is the beeping window.
Who knows?
There's no data here.
So this sounds like the kind of thing that sometimes,
established people with established mindsets have a hard time adjusting to new things and try to immediately disregard or discredit some kind of new option as, ah, you can't do that.
It's not safe.
It's not the way we used to do it.
And
And that kind of attitude often is the cause of myths and, quote, wisdom that is not true spreading around.
And this sounds a lot like that kind of thing to me.
There is actual science in the sense that lithium-based batteries do have higher nominal voltages than alkalines.
i think i think they're slightly above 1.5 and like things that try to detect their battery level based on the assumptions of alkaline battery voltages will often not detect it correctly in either lithiums or going the other direction if you put in rechargeables like the rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries that everybody uses in most things like rechargeable double a's and everything those have a lower nominal voltage than double a's so when you put those in something i think those are 1.2 or 1.3 volts instead of 1.5
off the top of my head i could be wrong but it's you know it's lower and so when you put those in something oftentimes it will think that you have a low battery even when you don't and then those also have a different kind of curve of like when they fall off like alkaline batteries fall off kind of gradually uh nickel metal hydride i think has a little bit flatter of a curve and then lithium has a much flatter curve where lithium will stay at a high voltage level until pretty close to the end which is the problem they're they're citing here but anyway this claim is
about a safety issue with lithiums i think needs more information to to be backed up here um but if you're actually that concerned about your smoke alarm safety you should get the ones that are that have the new like permanent built-in 10-year lithium batteries and then when they die and they're designed for lithiums so they probably have you know the correct voltage curve uh adjusted for in their in their beepiness um
When they die, you replace the whole thing.
Like that's the currently best recommended practice for smoke alarms in your house.
And that way you get all new sensors and everything in addition to a new battery when you get a new unit.
So if you're really that concerned about safety, do that.
And otherwise, if you're going to replace your 9 volts in your resisting smoke alarms, I still think lithiums are fine.
Honestly, you should probably replace the whole smoke detector, especially if it's in an area near the kitchen where greasy smoke and stuff can accumulate.
After 10 years, even if the battery's not dead, it's probably a good idea to get a new one.
We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon, my favorite and most worn brand of clothing.
The holiday season is here, and with it come the yearly questions.
What do I wear to non-ugly sweater parties?
How do I maximize my time-savoring holiday moments and minimize my time shopping for gifts?
So fear not, Mack Weldon has your answers.
Whether it's an office party, or family gathering, or just you, your couch, and a game on TV, Mack Weldon has all the essentials to keep you stylish and comfortable throughout the season.
And their innovative daily wear system has taken the hard work out of outfit planning with pieces designed to work together for any occasion, saving you time and sparing you any extra holiday stress.
Mack Weldon's stuff, frankly, is amazing.
I have been wearing their stuff a
heavily for years i wear their underwear every single day i wear their t-shirts most days i have almost i have one of almost everything they make and i have way more than one of my favorite things i have something like 20 pairs of underwear i guess i have their socks they make wonderful like boot knit socks for the winter they're really nice they're warm knit long sleeve uh tees and and other items are really really nice for the winter
I always love their silver line.
I'm wearing one of their silver t-shirts right now.
This morning when I was working out, I was wearing their Ace sweatpants, or their Ace sweat shorts, rather, because it was a very heavy workout today, and I was wearing another one of their shirts for workouts, and it is just a fantastic system.
I love Mack Weldon stuff.
It's all really great quality.
It holds up over the years, and it fits great from day one to year five, and it's just fantastic.
So...
See for yourself at macweldon.com slash ATP podcast, and you can get 20% off your first order with promo code ATP podcast.
That's macweldon.com slash ATP podcast, promo code ATP podcast for 20% off your first order.
Mac Weldon, get it right this holiday season.
All right, let's go to Casey's Corner, and I'm not talking about the restaurant at Walt Disney World.
I have a whole bunch of hopefully quick follow-up.
Wait, there's a restaurant at Disney called Casey's Corner?
Mm-hmm.
There sure is.
They serve hot dogs and other things of the like.
It's delicious.
They serve, like, Velveeta.
Boar's head American cheese, white American, yeah.
That would be incredible.
Velveeta shells and cheese.
I actually have several pictures of me in front of it, which if I remember, which I won't, I will give you one for this chapter of the show notes, but I will surely forget.
Nevertheless.
You inspired my wife to get Forest Head white American cheese at the store the other week.
It's good.
And?
I always liked it.
I've liked it my whole life.
It's good.
I ate it.
Good.
See?
I'm telling you.
Yeah.
I'm still a yellow American person, but otherwise, I admit the white American is very good as well.
There you go.
See, now that is useful follow-up.
That is what I like to hear.
All right, so let's talk about... Is this the only food and drink opinion that the three of us share?
That might be, actually.
We all find boar's head American cheese acceptable.
Thumbs up.
No, actually, really and truly, I think you might be onto something.
Do we all like water, too?
Not distilled, Marco.
Too soon.
Too soon.
Two of you have a fraught relationship with water.
We do.
Me more so than Marco, but both of us now.
All right.
So, hey, the LG Screen Manager app, which is this piece of garbage app that you can install on a Mac in order to update the firmware.
on your LG UltraFine 5K.
As we discussed a show or two ago, that only successfully worked on Intel Macs.
And as of the last day or two, it now works on M1 Macs, which is great.
And that was via Dave Stachowiak via Twitter.
So we'll put that link into the show notes.
If you have an LG 5K or presumably 4K, you can check that out if you have an M1 Mac.
Now let's talk about my LG.
It is no longer in the house.
Oh.
After nine days of pestering LG, I have finally gotten a RMA and it is finally on its way back to LG.
Thankfully, the repair center is super close.
Let me see where it is.
Oh, City of Industry, California.
So now this thing is going to probably go on a truck all the way to California to probably sit for three weeks until somebody's available to look at it, only to probably tell me that the thing is backordered.
And then eventually in a month or two or seven, I might have my Ultrafine 5K back.
And it might even work then.
And it might even work then.
So that'll be the test.
What will be over first?
My monitor drama or the pandemic?
I'm probably going to go in favor of the pandemic at this point, and I realize how bold that is.
Nevertheless.
You can end your monitor drama tomorrow.
Oh, stop.
Stop.
Well, I sort of have, and we'll get there in a second.
So just to show you how great LG service is, I had an online chat with them on Monday the 6th.
which actually was fairly easy and delightful.
I didn't get a lot of flack about what I wanted.
I didn't have to, like, ensure them that I've plugged it in and blah, blah, blah.
Like, it was pretty shameful.
You didn't have to take a video of your monitor?
No, no, no.
Didn't have to take a video of my monitor.
Nothing like that.
But they said, hey, here's the deal.
And I think I spoke about this last week.
We need $150 from you in order to do the repair.
And we're not going to collect that by an online check.
So in order to do the repair, they wanted $150 up front.
I think I said this last week.
So you're spending even more money on the LG now.
Correct, yes.
You might as well buy a boat.
It's like just throwing more money.
You're not wrong.
But no, I really, I have faith.
I truly honestly have faith that sometime between now and when I'm dead, this thing will come back to me and work properly.
But nevertheless.
I will agree that it will most likely come back to you.
Oh, gosh.
I'm going to be so furious.
In fact, if I'm smart, I won't bring it up if it comes back and it's not working.
Please, future Casey, don't say anything to Marco.
I'm telling you, the LG 5K is like the butterfly keyboard.
They can maybe repair it and send it back to you, but it's not going to be flawless in a reliable way for an indefinite amount of time.
There's a high chance that something about it will flake out again.
We'll see.
Hopefully not.
But nevertheless, so very quickly, on Monday the 6th, I have an online chat.
They say, okay, we're going to call you in two to three days so we can take your money.
I said, great.
On Friday the 10th, they haven't called yet, so I had another online chat.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
We will absolutely call you as soon as possible to take your money.
Great.
On Tuesday the 14th, I said, guys, please, can we please call me and take my money?
All I want in the world is for you to take my money.
Please end this.
Please and thank you.
Can we all buy you an XDR so we can stop talking about it?
Yes.
Yes, if you want to buy me an XDR, I will gladly accept it.
I am not buying it.
I am not volunteering for this.
If Marco would like to volunteer his tribute, so be it.
So anyway, so on the 14th, I get on the online chat again.
So finally, I speak to the last person that I end up speaking to, and that individual, who was very kind, said, in so many words, I'm the person that's in charge of, like, scheduling refrigerator in, like, TV repairs.
There is no chance I'm going to be taking $150 of your money over the phone in order to get a monitor repaired.
I don't even know why they sent me to you, or sent you to me, but anyways.
So...
I was like, okay.
Why?
Why are you putting yourself through this?
Because now I have to see it through.
I'm not a goddamn quitter, Marco.
Quit this monitor.
You have to quit this monitor.
This is sunk cost fallacy.
Come on, just get out of this situation.
No, it's going to be okay.
Run from this monitor.
It's not worth it.
It's so not worth it.
But it was so nice when it was working.
Isn't your time worth anything?
Well, apparently not.
So eventually I do get a call back from a very delightful lady who said, I will take $150 of your money, please.
I said, yes, absolutely.
And so she immediately sent me a shipping label and I dropped the LG 5K off at FedEx this morning to go to City of Industry to hopefully get repaired.
So I don't, she said in a best case scenario, you know, it's probably going to be like a week to get there a week or so getting repaired in a week back, which say I didn't look to the calendar, but that's like what the first half of January, I will bet that there is a 50, 50 shot.
I see this thing before Valentine's day.
And even that I'm not particularly confident in obviously.
So we'll see what happens.
So, just for the record, I know the XDR is expensive.
I know.
I've said it.
No, it looks back at expensive and says, ha, remember how cheap expensive was?
I'm ludicrous.
Fair enough.
However...
lg's service is awful it has always been awful and one of the things you get when you buy something nice from apple is most of the time they're not perfect all the time but most of the time a way better service experience if you need it this is ridiculous like the the hoops that you're jumping through to try to get what is you know in in absolute terms still a pretty premium priced monitor yeah to get warranty serviced
oh no it's out of warranty which is part of the problem but sorry well to get serviced by its manufacturer yep it's that's still a ridiculous amount of hoops to jump through and a huge amount of time to be without it people buy tools for their work and they need them to work and like this is one of the things you know when i was when i was you know younger and didn't have money and and you know i would i thought i was you know uh you know a hotshot who knew everything and everything i didn't understand was stupid and
Wait, you thought that?
That stopped?
That's called being smart in 20.
That's what that feeling is.
And so I would look at things like enterprise-grade servers and stuff like that, and I'd be like, my God, those computers are so expensive.
What idiot would pay that premium price for that Dell workstation when I could build a very similar or identically performing computer for less money?
And so I did.
And God, I spent and wasted so much time building and then repairing and fixing and trying to get to work custom-built computers for me and my friends throughout all of high school and college.
So many hours down the drain.
But we didn't have much money, and so that trade-off made sense.
But I never understood why people would buy the expensive things.
Well, now that I'm like a business...
And an adult, it makes sense.
If I'm using this thing as a tool for all of my income, I can spend a little bit more.
This is the phrase, throw money at the problem to make it go away.
If I can throw money at this problem and make it totally go away,
that is often worth doing because these problems are not worth the massive amount of time and hassle and potential risk of like, this thing might just die one day when you really need it to be working.
You know, if you're working on something really important, this thing might just die and you're just screwed.
And if when something does die, it takes you like a week of effort to even get them to start the repair and then you might see it back again in a month,
That is not suitable for professional use.
Simple as that.
And that's why professionals in professional environments, when they can afford it, get nicer gear that has better support, better reliability, and better service when you need it.
And in this case, you're just making the case for the XDR over and over again every single week.
He's making the case against the LG 5K, not necessarily for a $6,000 monitor that's been surpassed by the laptop monitors.
It pained me so much to order this goddamn expensive monitor.
It really did.
But my monitor problem has been totally gone since then.
Zero issues.
I'm totally happy with it.
Regardless of what John says, and we'll talk about the rumors in a second, I am not at all feeling FOMO about, oh God, what if I'm going to miss the new thing?
No, we bought ours at the right time.
We bought them when their price made the most possible sense.
Well, it never made that much sense.
But you bought yours at the best time when it was brand new.
Yeah, if you look at the slope of how much sense does this monitor make at this price, it's going down real fast now.
Maybe.
I wouldn't say fast.
But anyway, so the point is, one of the reasons it's so expensive, yeah, it is a ridiculous price and it is a ridiculous thing.
But you do get a lot for that.
Whether it's worth it to you or not, that's up to you and everyone else.
But for me, if my LG monitor that I was depending on every day...
If it died one day, I wouldn't even bother contacting them because I've dealt with LG warranty support in the past.
It's always been terrible.
As far as I'm concerned, if the LG monitor dies, I would just put it in a closet, forget about it forever, and just get it.
I would overnight myself for replacement and keep working.
Well, I understand what you're saying.
And that's the other thing, actually, is even if I wanted a brand new LG, they're backordered for like a month or two.
Why?
Because there's no other options.
Well, there's one.
Nevertheless.
Well, there's one.
So I've settled on a new desk setup, which will hopefully persist...
Until and when and if I ever get that 5K back.
And so I have the 24-inch 4K not ultra-fine LG monitor that I was using literally four years ago at work, no, three years ago at work, that I borrowed from my good friend at my old job.
And then I don't know if I mentioned it on the air or not, but I actually ordered one of those as well before I even spoke to the friend because I figured, oh, there's no way he's just going to let me buy or much less borrow one of these monitors.
So I'm just going to order one and I'll use, you know, one of these 24 inch 4Ks and the onboard laptop screen.
Speaking of orders, didn't you order a new LG 5K?
And you're like, oh, I don't think I'm going to cancel that order yet.
That's the last we heard of it.
Did you cancel that order?
I did cancel it, I think, around the time that the LG, the one that I had.
Do you regret canceling it now?
A little bit, yes.
But that's neither here nor there.
So anyway, so I have, I had order.
You know what's better than one mediocre, finicky monitor?
Two of them.
Well, it would be a brand new one that maybe would be less finicky because who knows why.
And by the way, you're talking about it.
Here's my new desk setup.
Again, I would petition for a photo to be shoved into the Slack so at least we can see it.
And so I can also point out all the liquids that are threatening your setup.
All right, you know what?
I will do it right now.
So now you're going to have to vamp because I will do it right now and I will not touch the water.
I will show you exactly what my situation is.
So hold on.
You two vamp for a second.
You have plenty of time, Marco.
Marco will edit this out and then while you do that, we can discuss which part of Marco's adult businessman brain decided I'm going to store a jug of water next to the computers in my closet.
In my defense, those were stored there at very different times.
When you're an important businessman, you realize don't do risky things like make your own computer.
It could cause problems.
I have a jug of water.
What should I do with it?
How about up high in the electronics closet?
You need some adult supervision over there.
I don't know what you're doing in that office.
You're probably on Wi-Fi right now.
I did this with a wide angle lens, so it's probably not the crispest or brightest, but it should be going through now.
I forgot you sit in darkness.
No, actually, the overhead light is on.
It's a great thing with your glass desk that we can see the cable mess right through it.
Like, oh, there's my bad cable management.
Yep, still there.
It's an absolute disaster.
I'll be the first to tell you.
But yeah, so what I have now.
Wait, hold on.
Okay.
He does have a water.
What are you doing?
It's way over to the side.
Mine was in the corner.
You learned nothing.
All right.
You have an on-air sign, but it's off, and we're on the air.
The USB Pre 2 is right there, which is like a $700 box that does not like water.
The keyboard is there, whatever, but you already said there's like 100 and something, right?
The laptop is up on a little stand, but it's learned its lesson.
It's on an iMac stand.
Isn't that an iMac stand?
Yes, it is.
It is, actually.
At least it's on something.
It's like someone scared of a mouse in a kitchen going up on a stool.
It's hanging over the side by like four inches.
Yes, well, all right.
Nobody's perfect.
So here's the thing.
So what I've got, I do have my glass desk, which eventually I will replace, but have we mentioned I'm cheap?
Where's the iPad that this Apple Pencil belongs to?
It's nowhere.
Charging behind me.
I think one of the kids removed the pencil and dropped it on my desk, and I haven't had a chance to put it back on the iPad.
All right, so let me describe this picture that I took that you will probably not see because my whole situation is a mess, but I'll describe it to you.
So I have my glass desk.
Centered directly in front of me is one of these LG 24-inch 4K monitors.
This is the one that I actually bought, and I told myself I was going to return.
Like, I'd never opened it for a week and a half or something like that.
And I said, you know, I'll just return it because I'll just live off of the borrowed monitor until the LG comes in.
And this thing was like $300, which is not a small amount of money, but it's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things.
And that's 27 inches at 4K?
24 inches at 4K, which, strictly speaking, isn't retina.
If you look at the numbers, like the PPI numbers, but for my crap eyes, it is absolutely retina, without question.
I would say that is like the upper edge because back in the olden days, 24-inch monitors, when they first came out, were 1920 by 1200.
And 4K is roughly, depending on some details, but roughly double that.
It's the roughly retina version of that.
So later on, towards the tail end of 1X monitors being normal in Mac land, they did get more dense and that 1920 across resolution shrunk down to 21.5 inches for the iMac in the same way that the 2560 across was first in the 30-inch Apple monitor and then later on was put in 27s.
So I would say...
Going back to the 1920 point across monitor at 24 inches, while it is not today's version of Retina, it is close enough.
It's within the realm of what we expect as Mac users.
Absolutely.
So that's centered in front of me.
And then to my right, at like a 45 degree angle, is the borrowed equivalent.
It's the exact same monitor, just the borrowed version.
And that's off to the right.
And then to my left, on a riser that was designed for the base of the iMac and is thus a little too small for the MacBook Pro, but nonetheless, here it is.
On the riser is my MacBook Pro in clamshell at the moment.
And so I've got two identical 4K monitors basically directly in front of me.
For the record, my water is all the way to the right, as far away from my hand as it can possibly be.
You know what water can do across a flat surface, especially one made of glass?
It can travel because it's all the same level.
It's an Aquafina bottle that's been recycled in the sense that it doesn't have Aquafina water in it.
It has tap water in it now, but it has a lid on it.
And the lid always stays on it unless I'm actively drinking.
So, you know, I'm doing the best I can here, fellas.
Yeah.
I wonder if maybe the solution to John's water anxiety is sloped desks.
That's going to cause more problems.
Or what if you use an air hockey table as a desk?
Now you've got stuff sliding away.
It's not that difficult.
No, but you have the holes, all the drain holes.
You just need a surface around that same place that is like three inches lower.
My next test is going to be an air hockey table.
By the way, your laptop being on the iMac stand, none of the feet of that laptop are in contact with the stand, right?
Correct.
So it's just metal on metal.
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no, no.
The stand has like a little pad on it.
There's some metal on metal, but the stand does have a little pad on the top.
Oh, God.
You can do like a tray table.
You have tray tables in your house.
Just put a tray table next to your computer.
All right.
I'll get right on that.
And you can put like a whole meal on that tray table.
And when it spills, it just goes to the floor and nothing on your desk gets any of the liquid.
Well, you can't really see in this picture because it's terrible, but there's a filing cabinet directly to the left of the- Yeah, just roll that out a little.
Yeah, well, I could, but I always put junk on there.
That's like my landing area.
As you can tell in this picture, it's my landing area for the office.
Nevertheless- I get some lights in this room next time.
Yeah.
So anyway, I bring all this up to say right now my setup is two of these identical, I'll put the model number in the show notes, I forget what it is offhand, but two of these identical 4K monitors.
Each of them is $300 on Amazon, which again is not cheap, but given what you're getting is actually really not that bad.
The monitors are not great.
They are fantastic.
They're too low on this desk.
I'll be the first to tell you they're too low.
I was thinking about that earlier today.
I need to figure out a way to raise them up.
Because in typical LG fashion, the stand sucks.
But it's fine.
And the thing is, and the reason I bring all this up, is because to my eyes and to my wallet...
even if I bought both of these, $600 for two 4K monitors, it is not what I would prefer, but it is absolutely not 10 times worse than the 10 times more expensive Pro Display XDR.
I just can't get... I don't think I would get 10x the... I can't think of the word I'm looking for.
Joy, the return out of a $6,000 Pro Display XDR that I am off of this not...
perfect but ultimately pretty serviceable six hundred dollar setup and that's why i keep digging my heels because it just i can't justify 10x what i've got right now i just can't now if somebody else wants to literally buy me one i will absolutely accept your pro display xdr but i and if it was like a couple thousand dollars i probably would but at four or five or six thousand dollars i just can't bring myself to do it and it
And I actually don't disagree with you, Marco.
I really, truly don't.
Like everything you said, logically, I 1000% agree with you.
I just cannot bring myself to open my wallet for $6,000.
I just can't do it.
So that is my new desk setup.
And related to that,
One of the things I've noticed is that now I'm running out of ports on this computer, which I actually have a dock coming from someone coming my way in the next few days.
But with that said, I currently have plugged in one of the monitors via HDMI, one via USB-C to DisplayPort.
I have the MixPre 3, I have an Ethernet adapter, and I have MagSafe.
So I am using...
Every one of the ports on this computer right now, which I'm glad that this computer has as many ports as it does.
And that brings me to a tip.
I forget who it was that wrote in, but I had read a few nights ago and then somebody wrote in the next morning that you can actually do 60 hertz via HDMI, which I previously erroneously said was not possible on these monitors.
The thing is, you have to engage HDMI Ultra HD deep color, because when I think of refresh rate, I think deep color.
Does that screw with their color reproduction?
Because a lot of displays... You think I noticed?
Well, televisions and some displays have a mode in which they can accept your signal and say, but actually, the color gamut of the monitor is wider in some areas than the color gamut of whatever this thing is supposed to be displayed.
It's more important for TVs because things are mastered in a certain color space.
And for accurate reproduction, that color space should be shown on the TV...
within the color space that the thing has mastered that but the tv is like but actually i've got more colors than that don't you want me to just take that image and expand it to fill the whole color space and it makes everything look all like candy colored when it shouldn't be and the only reason that's relevant to your computer is if you're looking at pictures and you're trying to like adjust them and everything looks all candy colored and you're like i got to try to dim it down but then you look at it on an actual device that shows it within whatever color space that you know photo like srgb or adobe you know whatever rgb
If you see it accurate, you just realize you've changed your picture in a way that you don't like.
So it's not that you care like super duper professional, but if you're ever doing anything with photos on it, you want what you see on the screen to reflect the reality and not to be some, you know, ultra HD deep color thing where the monitor is disregarding the color space or expanding the color space for you.
Yeah, I can't say I've noticed one way or the other.
But again, I do have a discerning eye about some things and clearly a discerning ear because I can tell you all about how great vinyl is.
But this is not one of those things.
And so if you happen to have one of these monitors, for what it's worth, menu, picture, picture adjust, HDMI ultra deep color.
And if you do that, you can use an HDMI cable and do 60 hertz at 4K.
I will say not about color, but I could swear like...
Something about the anti-aliasing is different.
I couldn't tell you what, and this is, again... You're running it at native resolution, so there wouldn't be any... I agree.
Something felt different to me, but I can't put my finger on it.
I'm probably bananas.
Is the sub-pixel arrangement different on these monitors?
I mean, possibly, but... No, no, no, because what I was doing was I was switching between DisplayPort and HDMI and the same actual monitor, and I felt like it looked different, but there was enough delay between the switching of the two that...
I think the signaling, someone just wrote in about this.
They were saying how you were complaining about using DisplayPort and it made you feel like it was gross and ancient.
But I think what you meant is you were using an older DisplayPort connector and that felt old.
But the DisplayPort protocol is more modern and more computer-focused than HDMI.
Can you find that email so I don't just make this up?
Something about HDMI mixing chroma and luminance in the thing when DisplayPort has them more cleanly separated.
I don't know.
Anyway.
That could explain the difference in that you're getting worse picture quality because of some HDMI thing.
Yeah, and I mean, it's certainly within the realm of acceptable.
It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt like I was noticing something, although I couldn't really put my finger on exactly what it was.
Nevertheless, this is workable.
This is what I think I'm going to stick with at least until the 5K comes back or until somebody literally donates a phone.
It's DR to me, which I'm not actually advocating for the love of all that is good and holy.
I can afford one if I really wanted to.
I just really, really, really don't want to.
And for the record, this is an LG 24UD58-B 24-inch 4K UHD IPS monitor with FreeSync, comma, black, as per Amazon.
So there's only 16 left in stock.
So go fast.
Anyways, so that's what I'm doing.
And also one other quick bit of follow up.
I'd been complaining a little while ago about my magic mouse, my brand new magic mouse feeling weird with my brand new M1 Max MacBook Pro.
and it felt like i think i said a week or two ago it felt like almost as though the the bluetooth connection was sleeping too soon i have no evidence to to to prove my theory but it felt like it was going into some sort of like low power mode too quickly and monterey 12.1 has come out since i last spoke about it and i think it has made it mostly better there's also been i forget who pointed this out to me but somebody pointed out a tweet from charity majors who uh has a defaults right that you can try that um
that apparently disables mouse acceleration.
I have not tried this yet because I think it's, it's workable for me now that I don't have to plug in the mouse to make it feel like it's okay.
Um, but it is something that I might try if I feel like it gets worse.
So we'll put a link to that in the show notes.
I found the tweet.
It doesn't have much more detail, but, uh, Andreas Hardell says, uh, about you talking about DisplayPort versus HDMI.
Um,
He says, HDMI is based on DVI and mushes together all data in a stream that still has the concept of blanking intervals.
DisplayPort is more modern and packet-based.
Video over Thunderbolt uses the DisplayPort protocol.
So that doesn't have much more information.
Sorry, but that's what I was trying to remember.
All right, well, I appreciate the try.
All right, that's all for follow-up now for SKTP.
My goodness, this went a little longer than intended.
We've got one more monitor item, and now it's ostensibly a topic, but sure.
Oh, yes, that's right.
We do have that one more monitor item.
How could I forget?
So you are welcome, all of you.
Every single one of you, what can I say?
But you're welcome.
Because we heard a rumor today, which was a short tweet thread, and then we'll put in a MacRumors post about it, that says, as per Twitter user Dylan something or other, I don't know that they really have a last name, but nevertheless, there are three LG-made displays, right, Dylan, encased in unbranded enclosures for usage as external monitors that are in early development, two of which have the same specifications as the
24 inch iMac displays the other display seems to be an improved 32 inch pro display xdr despite the lack of branding it can be assumed at the very least that this display will be apple branded okay i mean it's a little bit bold but i'll go with it uh dylan continues interestingly enough there seems to be a reference to custom silicon powering the 32 inch display sadly no such references were found for the 27 inch or 24 inch displays with regards to custom silicon
uh and dylan continues finally this of course does not rule out the possibility of custom silicon for these displays it simply means that there's not sufficient data proving otherwise finally the 32 inch and 27 inch monitors seem to have many led displays at 120 hertz variable refresh rate this is very exciting except for one key word did you catch the key word that is making me very sad early development early that does not make me happy at all
isn't it weird that like according to this rumor again this is just i don't think there's much more in these rumors than we've seen in the past because we've seen rumors for months now about apple's making them on an external display with a with like a you know a system on a chip in it you know an a something inside there whatever but the the idea that one of these displays is the same as the one in the 20 current 24 inch imac correct me if i'm wrong but the current 24 inch imac screen is not high refresh and is not hdr
I don't know about HDR, but it's definitely not a high refresh.
It probably is HDR, at least in the old way, like before the micro-LED things that all the previous MacBook Pros and stuff had, where they would just kind of overdrive the screen brightness.
Is it not mini-LED as well?
No, as far as I know, the current M1 iMac is not mini-LED.
It's 500 nits.
Yeah, just look it up.
24-inch iMacs or 500 nits.
That is not HDR.
Right.
So all this being said, if this information is correct about the products that are in development, that sounds perfectly great.
I'm actually kind of surprised they would sell a smaller monitor.
But certainly the 27-inch and, you know, assuming that, you know, whatever the updated HDR is, is probably going to be similarly priced.
Yeah.
And we talked before about the 27-inch.
If they do 27-inch 120Hz and mini-LED, that's going to be probably a fairly expensive display.
And so it would be nice then to also have that 24-inch option, although honestly I would want it to be bigger.
I'd rather have a 27-inch that doesn't have 120Hz and mini-LED in the lineup.
But anyway, I see why they would do all three of these things, although I would also see why they would only choose to do the top two.
But, this is also, you know, this is a random person on Twitter.
And random people on Twitter who tweet Apple rumors don't have a strong track record.
I'm not familiar with this particular person's track record, but I would not...
read this as gospel like until we have somebody who is reliable with this kind of thing somebody like ming shi kuo mark german like when they start claiming specifics and timelines those are way more reliable than twitter leakers and youtube leakers have been so far
I think both of those people did have an external display with some kind of chip inside it, remember, from many months ago.
Right.
And having the chip inside of it, they don't necessarily say what kind of chip it is.
It's just a custom Apple chip.
That could be a lot of things.
That could be a timing controller.
That could be a display controller.
That could be a lot of things that is not like an M1 Pro running in the display.
It could be a lot of things.
So I don't think that necessarily means much with the information or lack thereof that we have.
but um the part of that about it being early development that again that could be true german said a display was an early development like a year ago well when did they receive the information where this information come from maybe they received old information or maybe maybe they only saw evidence of early development because the evidence of the current development didn't leak out in that same way through the same channel
Getting any kind of timeline argument from this I think is weak and unreliable.
It sounds like a lot of this information is being derived from software support somewhere or references that are in a library somewhere to different displays.
So I wouldn't read too much into this.
We have heard from multiple places for about a year that Apple is working on an external display.
At least one that is going to sit below the XDR in the lineup.
There is a lot of smoke to that fire.
That's probably going to happen.
I don't think this information from this person today gives us anything really concrete to work with that we didn't already have.
I wouldn't assume that the 24-inch proves to be a thing.
I wouldn't assume that anything this person said that wasn't backed up by other sources over the last year would be a sure thing.
It's all maybe.
If this is true, that'd be great.
You know, the timeline is not going to be what Casey wants, but that would be a great, you know, again, typical Apple fashion.
They basically stopped working on the Mac from 2016 until about 2018.
Um,
uh like they they really did like almost nothing for the mac in that time um for whatever reason history will eventually maybe tell us in some tell all books sometime but it certainly seems like they basically like turned off mac development hardware wise for that time there was this giant hole in the lineup and they decided to fill it sometime in the last couple of years i think as from what we can derive so far um
And it takes some time to make stuff.
And an external display is going to be way lower priority than things like fixing the Mac Pro fire they made for themselves and fixing the laptop fire they made for themselves.
These things are all more important.
And so if you only have a certain amount of engineering resources that you're willing to devote to the Mac and certain teams you're going to move around to do it, the monitor is going to be last priority.
Well, you say that, but all the other fires are out at this point, right?
Like, yes, yes, yes, Mac Pro.
And actually, legitimately, the 27-inch iMac.
But other than those two, which I would argue the Mac Pro is a smaller fire, what else is left, right?
Like, in terms of Mac stuff, this is it.
This is what they got to fix.
Agreed.
And I think that this is very likely to be a problem that Apple has decided to solve.
When they decided to solve it is – that's a question mark.
And how quickly the result of that will come onto the market is another question mark.
Whether the result will solve it is a third question mark.
But –
It does seem like they are making an external monitor, at least one that is going to be lower than the XDR in the product line.
But other than that, I don't think this gives us any new information at all.
One quibble with what you had said earlier.
I personally am not familiar with Dylan...
What is this?
Dylan DKT is the Twitter user.
I have never seen this person before.
But as per the summary on Mac rumors, they write, according to Twitter account, you know, Dylan DKT, who has a mostly accurate track record with Apple related rumors.
I have no earthly idea what that track record is based on, what rumors this person has leaked.
But according to Mac rumors, they seem to think that this person is not a complete dope.
So take that for what you will.
But the problem with this rumor, it says we found three displays, but you can explain the use of those displays all in a context other than a new external display because the 24 inch, he already says it's the one they use in 24 inch iMac.
Great.
Well, so why do we care about that?
Yes, there's a display used in the 24 inch iMac.
OK, maybe that's for a 24 inch iMac.
Then there's a 27 inch one for the upcoming iMac.
OK, maybe that's display for the upcoming iMac, which is also not an external display.
And then finally, 32 inch for the replacement for their one existing extremely high priced external monitor.
So none of those, you know, hey, we found these display panels.
None of those things necessarily say that there will be a new display that is not the XDR.
All it says is we found one that might be for the new XDR and we found two other ones that are going into iMacs.
Great.
The other thing is that this says that LG is developing these things.
And to some degree, that is not as bad as it sounds because LG, it makes the panels that Apple often uses in their large display computers.
It's actually two different companies.
So there's LG Display and LG Electronics.
And the company you hate is LG Electronics because they make the monitor.
LG Display makes the panels.
Like, for example, LG Display makes the OLED panels that every single OLED TV maker uses.
Sony uses them.
Panasonic uses them.
Oh, I didn't know that.
And LG Display sells their panels to LG Electronics.
And the relationship between LG Electronics and LG Display is surprisingly contentious, considering it's like same team.
Like, for example, LG Display versus LG Electronics have disagreements about...
whether or not we should you know move on to display technology xyz like what should we do next after oled should we use qd oled should we use go back to some weird lcd thing or whatever there's very often debates between them as to what they actually want for their next television so it's super weird over there
But when Apple's talking about – Apple is buying things from LG Display.
They're not buying things from LG Electronics.
But, of course, Apple does have some kind of relationship with LG Electronics because I think they kind of like essentially cajoled them into making the stupid 5K that we all love.
Totally.
And Apple does that – at least they did that kind of relationship with lots of companies before.
Especially in the last few years, Belkin has been the recipient of a lot of those kind of seemingly like Apple contracts possibly where Apple kind of just –
you know, work it out with either Belkin or LG or somebody like that.
Like, Hey, we don't want to make, you know, USB to ethernet adapters anymore.
Just please you make one that follows these specs and we'll sell it in our stores and we'll, you know, promote it.
Like, and that's probably the arrangement they have with LG, probably something like that.
LG electronics, um, for, for the ultra fines.
Um,
I hope that LG in this rumor only refers to LG display because I hope that Apple has realized, and I think they probably have, that outsourcing those essential items to LG or Belkin or companies like that doesn't usually result in the quality that Apple wants.
You get a monitor that doesn't work when it's near Wi-Fi.
Remember that?
Yeah, first version.
It's like real basic kind of like, hey, so your job is to take this panel from LG Display and make a monitor out of it.
Can you do that?
It's like, it won't be near Wi-Fi, right?
I mean, we didn't really test it near Wi-Fi.
We were just surprised as you when we shipped this product out to customers and the thing turns off when it's near Wi-Fi.
Yeah, exactly.
And you know what also is pretty mediocre?
The Belkin USB-C to Ethernet adapter.
Apple should make these things if they matter.
And the monitor matters.
That is definitely an area where it matters.
And I hope Apple has learned that.
And again...
Given how good their recent releases have been, it really does seem like there was this bad period with the Mac for a few years.
They have since turned it around, and it has just taken a while for the good stuff to really come out.
As part of that turnaround, I would expect current-day Apple to be making these monitors themselves, not to have LG Electronics give another crappy ultrafine solution.
I would expect whatever comes out is going to be Apple-branded with an Apple price tag sold in Apple stores and hopefully with Apple quality.
I sure hope so.
And I mean, obviously I'm, I'm burned by this ultra fine experience.
So burned that I bought a different $300 LG monitor, but nevertheless, um, exactly.
Uh, but I hate this LG so much.
I'm going to buy two more of them.
that's the thing like when you look like again looking for gaming monitors and stuff most a lot of the top choices are often by lg because of course lg makes the panels and lg electronics often packages those panels in a reasonable thing like you know asus and and razor and whatever all these other gaming companies also package them but they're all they'll have like rgb lights and these weird pointy things all over them and so if you just want just give me the lg display inside like a black rectangular thing lg electronics and their monitors they have lots of different options for them and it's
you know, they're, they're one of the better sources to get those things because it's not like you're going to buy an Apple to monitor for your PlayStation or whatever.
Yeah.
But I mean, I, I am really hopeful that this rumor comes true in some way, shape or form.
And I really hope it's sooner rather than later.
Like,
In a perfect world, I will have my 5K back soon and it will actually work and it will stay working for a little while.
In a worst case scenario, I will have one or at least one of these 4K monitors that I can fall back on if necessary.
But I would love to be able to retire this LG Ultrafine 5K
and buy an Apple-branded, or even if it was an LG Electronics display that actually worked better.
And if they've learned their lesson from the 5K, I would be okay with that.
I would really love to start fresh and try again.
And I really think that...
you know, a $1,300, I think the 5K is $1,300 new right now or something like that.
That is an expensive monitor.
It is very expensive.
Arguably not worth the $1,000 premium over the monitors that are sitting in front of me right now or, you know, one of the monitors sitting in front of me right now.
But I would do it because I really love having that 5K in front of me.
But yeah, and so I think an Apple branded version of that, like I would probably pay two grand for an Apple equivalent of an LG Ultrafine 5K that actually worked reliably.
I would probably pay a couple thousand dollars for that.
It's just there's such a gap between there's a pretty big gap between
between the $300 monitor that I've come to like and the UltraFine 5K.
And there's just this phenomenal gap between the UltraFine 5K and the XDR.
And I really feel like there's a place for at least one, if not a couple of options in that space.
Wow.
Now, kind of tangentially related, I don't trust myself to do this mental math at this time at this hour, much less probably at any point.
But nevertheless, if there was and if there was a five K.
120 hertz HDR monitor, we don't have a port that can support that without some sort of compression, right?
I feel like the three of us have talked about this in the past.
Yeah, I think we went through this before.
I think it's plausible with display stream compression, which gets used for the XDR as well in many scenarios, so...
So we think we, so we think we could do it on today's hardware.
Jonathan Dietz to go through the math again, but yeah, I think it's fun.
Fair enough.
I mean, I would, and that's the thing is I think Marco has been saying this as well.
And I agree with Marco.
Like if, if I couldn't run at 120 Hertz on an external display on, on the computer that's sitting on my desk right now, I'd be okay with that.
If I didn't have HDR, that would bum me out too, but I'd be okay with that.
I just want a reliable 5K display that works.
That's all I want is a reliable 5K display that works.
Yeah, and until we have those in the market, HDR and 120Hz are just nice to have in the future bonuses, but until those basics are covered...
like we'll be fine like just give us the basics like that's what we need with the rest of the stuff you can deliver that when you can i feel like it's starting to be table stakes i mean we just assume the big iMac's gonna have all that stuff we know the laptops have it so it's kind of i know you don't need it to code like i know you don't need hdr or 120 hertz to code and it'll be fine but eventually it just becomes kind of the baseline and you feel disappointed if you don't get it kind of like 24-bit color uh for i think you pc losers spent decades being like 24-bit colors who needs all those colors that's ridiculous but
eventually it just becomes the baseline and now we'd never go to the you know system preferences to a color and pick you know what is it four eight sixteen uh two fifty six thousands and millions those or something like that used to be the choices in mac os that doesn't exist anymore 24 bit is just the baseline i don't need all those colors it's ridiculous uh eventually i feel like hdr and in fact improving hdr in terms of like you know what is the what is the maximum brightness can you do it full screen versus a 10 percent window or whatever uh
not this year maybe but like in a few years just like retina eventually became the floor and we made fun of the remaining non-retina monitors hdr and high refresh will be the floor eventually agreed i just don't know how long that infinite or really ultimately finite time scale is but but you know this this is the year when i feel like every single mac that apple sells that has a monitor or can attach to a monitor is probably going to be hdr and and high refresh
I think you're probably right.
That is probably what's going to happen.
But I also agree with Casey that we don't need that.
The other day, I noticed 120 hertz on my laptop, I think for the first time.
I was scrolling something, I think a tweet bot list, and that happened to be whatever combination of conditions makes it run at 120 hertz.
And I was like, oh, that's pretty smooth.
But then I instantly forgot about it once I did anything else.
And it's fine.
Until I have 120 hertz everywhere, I'm not really going to notice its absence, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
So I do think this is, you know, to try to put a positive spin on this, I do think this is great news that there's at least some amount of smoke that there is a fire being built within Apple to make some sort of new monitor.
I really, really hope that this comes true.
And
And I know the Apple way, maybe not in the last six months to a year, but for a long time, the Apple way was, you know, here's our $6,000 6K monitor.
And if you don't want that, then kindly piss off and get one of these pedestrian $300 ones that only losers use.
And I really think that there is room for...
I think there's room for a 24-inch and a 27-inch and a 32-inch.
I would love to see all three of those, and we'll see what happens.
My concern is that if they're making a 24, that probably means the 27 is going to be really expensive, and that's why they have to make a 24.
Maybe, maybe.
And obviously, you know, again, I have my hopes for a 5K, but if I had a 4K that was 100% rock solid, which is so far what I'm looking at right now, that wouldn't be so bad.
So we'll see.
I don't know.
I'm really, really hopeful that this will be a springtime surprise sometime next year, although I don't actually expect it to be by any stretch of the imagination.
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Start building your website today at squarespace.com slash ATP.
Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Squarespace makes it very easy to make websites, and there are so many things these days that need websites.
Obviously, this is not news to you.
You know this.
You're listening to a nerd show.
You know about websites.
You also probably know how to make websites, but there's also a lot of times where
Making it yourself from scratch or setting up your own server is not really warranted for the kind of site or the project that you're working on.
Or it's really hard to set up the kind of site you're working on.
Like if you want to set up your own storefront or like your own podcast hosting and things like that, that can be pretty hard to do yourself.
Squarespace makes all of that super easy.
So whether you're doing a simple site with a few pages of info to something like a full-blown store.
Squarespace does all of that with ease regardless of your skill level.
There is no coding required.
You never have to see any kind of source code or anything.
You don't have to deal with server maintenance or installing packages or security updates.
They handle all of that stuff behind the scenes for you.
So you just focus on the site.
It's fantastic.
So you, even as a nerd who can do this yourself, you save tons of time and don't add stuff to your plate.
And if you're not a nerd, you can make a website that looks like you had professional nerds like us make it because it really is an amazing looking site you get from Squarespace, fully customized to however you want it to look, no matter what your skill level is.
See for yourself by starting a free trial site at squarespace.com slash ATP.
When you set a sign up after that free trial, go back there, squarespace.com slash ATP.
Use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Once again, that's squarespace.com slash ATP for that free trial and code ATP at checkout when you purchase to get 10% off your first purchase.
Thank you so much to Squarespace for making it super easy to make websites.
Make your next move with Squarespace.
All right, you want to do some Ask ATP?
We need to clear some of this out.
So this was added to Ask ATP possibly six months ago, which is relevant when you hear me read, that Steve Wellington writes, I'm getting my first iPhone this Friday, six months ago, after a decade on Android.
Yeah.
But what are your favorite things that I should know?
Tips, apps, obscure settings, et cetera.
You know, I should have done homework on this.
It's been so long since I've had a new iPhone.
Like, I don't even know what people don't know these days.
I don't think I put this in.
So, I don't know.
Whoever put this in, you've got to have some idea of some good tips.
And maybe that'll spur my memory and make me think of others.
What do you guys got?
I suggest Overcast for your podcast needs.
Actually, yes.
Use Overcast.
That's a good idea.
You sure you didn't put this in, Casey?
I think you did.
Did I?
Well, it was so darn long ago.
I've forgotten whatever I was going to say then.
All right.
Well, so here's my main tip.
Like part of the reason all of us don't have like, well, what are the tips?
I don't remember what it's like to have a new phone is because Apple's system for sort of setting up your new phone like your old one is pretty good, right?
And so there are things that we set about the iPhone, you know, some of us in 2007 that we have just never thought about or looked at again.
But if we suddenly got a factory fresh phone and all those settings were off, we'd be like, what's weird about this phone?
This doesn't work the way I want it to, right?
So my first suggestion is to, when you get the iPhone, spend a long amount of time in the settings app just going through every single screen.
We can't tell you which exact settings you're going to want to change or whatever.
And also it's organized in a really Byzantine way.
So we can't even tell you, look in this section, look in that section.
Although I will say, do not skip the accessibility section because there's lots of good stuff in there.
And just wander through the settings.
This is a thing that might sound dumb or boring, but I think for most computer enthusiasts, let's say, going through the settings or the preference screen is like the first thing we do in any application, right?
What can this thing do?
What can I change about it, right?
What are the options that I have available?
How can I customize it to be the way that I like it?
And just go through literally every single setting screen, just for the phone, not for every single app, because apps also put their settings in settings, which is dumb and weird, but whatever.
Yeah.
And you will find things in there that pique your interest.
And maybe you'll change your mind about them, you know, whatever.
But like key clicks on or key clicks off, right?
How big do you want the text?
Oh, I can change it to make it easier to read.
Sometimes you can change the screen resolution.
I don't even know if that's still in there.
Like make everything bigger or smaller on the phone.
I believe display zoom is still offered.
yeah like there's so many things in there you know reduce motion higher contrast again not just accessibility things sound what sounds the various things make oh i did you know you can make different sounds for different notifications for you know different people who text you and messages or whatever and when i say the apple stuff i mean like the built-in apple apps as well like don't i'm just saying just don't go through every third party apps settings screen settings will bubble up to the top like the important first party apps like safari messages camera stuff like that
Um, and just spend some time there getting set up and trust that the time you spend setting that crap up will be well spent because the next phone that you get, you won't have to do this all again.
It will just carry this stuff over for you, which is why we don't know what any of these settings are.
Um, and the final thing I'll suggest just because this is the way I run my phone and a surprising number of people do is on the side of your iPhone, there is shockingly, surprisingly a tiny little physical switch called the, I guess it's the silent button, the ring silence button.
What are the hell is that button called?
I think it's called the mute switch.
The mute switch.
Anyway, it's a physical switch.
And when you put that switch so that the red part is showing, your phone is in like silent mode.
Back from the old days when we had feature phones, it was like business.
It turned the ringer off, right?
If you do that,
It's not that nothing on the phone will ever make a sound.
It's that the phone won't make a sound from its speaker when you're not using it for the most part.
And so I think a lot of people, if you don't know what that is or don't think about it, you're like, well, I want audio to come out of my phone.
Why would I make it silent?
Like, I need to hear things.
I want to watch a YouTube video and hear stuff, right?
Why would I put the silent switch on?
Turning that silent switch on does not stop you from
watching a movie on your phone and hearing the audio of that movie out of the phone speakers, right?
That will still work.
What it does mean is when your phone is off and someone texts you, it will not make a beding sound.
It will vibrate instead, right?
It will like, you know, to use the vibration motor or whatever, the haptic thing in it.
And I have to say, a few times that I've turned that off and my phone has started bleeping and blooping at me, I was like, what the, oh, I somehow, you know, I must have been cleaning it and I switched the silent switch back to on.
I am a strong proponent of just leaving that silent switch on silent for the life of your phone.
Mm-hmm.
And a surprising number of people who are longtime iPhone users do that.
And it does not really impair your ability to use it or be notified.
Because again, like a vibrating iPhone on a hard surface, you'll hear that from across the room.
Don't think you won't notice that you got texted.
If it's on a pillow, no, you won't hear it.
And the ding would be better, right?
But it's a physical switch.
It's really, really easy to change your mind about that.
I'm about to put my phone down on this pillow and go to the other room.
But if I get texted, I want to hear it.
Put the switch on, go in the other room.
Like you don't have to go launch into a screen.
You don't even have to unlock your phone.
It's a physical button.
It's amazing.
Amazing feature they have.
It's a button on the outside of your phone that you don't need to use the screen to access.
Take advantage of that button.
Decide which how you want it to be set.
And don't be afraid to move that switch up and down.
That is a very good fidget device, which you shouldn't use it for.
Don't stress test the switch.
It's probably only good for like, you know, 30,000 switches.
Nonetheless, as it turns out, I think you were right.
This was apparently sent in in September and I said I was going to add it to the list.
And I actually apologized in advance that we probably wouldn't get to it for, quote, a month, quote.
So I was a little off there.
But nevertheless, at least I knew us well enough to
that's awesome someone puts on the chat room like when you have that silent thing on and you're and you're sleeping and you set the alarm and the clock app which is a built-in app or whatever the alarm will still go off too like it will wake you up like don't worry that the silent thing is going to stop you from here like i guess i guess this thing you just learn from experience what does the silent thing stop versus what does it not stop for them but for the most part it does smart stuff like if you forget you have that sound switch on but you set an alarm to wake you up at 5 a.m and you put your phone to sleep and plug it in put on your nightstand i'm pretty sure that alarm will still go off and make sound
Yeah, alarms will always bypass the mute switch.
And there are even certain apps can register for a special entitlement that will allow them to do the same thing.
So there are certain custom apps from other people who are not Apple that are important alerts of some type that can do that as well.
I would add a couple of small things to this question.
Number one, I would suggest turning down the sensitivity of Face ID's security in one key way.
There's a switch under Face ID and passcode.
Require attention for Face ID.
This means basically like require you to be looking at it to actually, you know, count as face ID.
I would say this is not necessary for many people.
Evaluate your own security needs.
And if this is not necessary for you, that's fine to turn off.
I would also turn off the switch right below it.
Attention aware features, which should have a hyphen between attention and aware, but doesn't because I guess they're expensive in California.
And it shows that you have a notification on the lock screen.
But until you look at it and unlock it with your face, it doesn't show you the contents of the notification.
This, again, is a level of security that I personally don't need.
Many people don't need.
I love that feature.
Right.
So evaluate your own security needs.
If you don't need that feature, don't use it.
And beyond that, I would kind of go a little bit extending what John was saying.
I would say use the built-in apps first before you seek out a replacement in most cases.
Because when you use Apple's built-in apps for things like notes and reminders and stuff like that, mail, Safari, when you use the built-in apps, a lot of things about the system work better or are more convenient or are less of a pain in your butt or enable certain kind of integrated features that you might enjoy.
And that's part of the big benefit of Apple stuff is when you...
when you buy in further into Apple stuff, when you use more of their integration, more of their first party apps, you get a lot more of those cool features.
And over time, as they add more of those features, you know, every WBC, they announced some new thing.
It's like, well, this is going to be great, but I don't use reminders or whatever.
And then you're disappointed.
Yeah.
it's good to minimize those areas that are unnecessarily using third-party apps where the first-party app actually would cover your needs just fine.
So by default, I would say try Apple's built-in stuff in most cases, except for the podcast app, which is garbage, use Overcast.
Sam writes, did any of you use a Finder alternative?
Pathfinder, for one example, proudly declares the one John Syracuse, if the name sounds familiar, reviewed it and called it a, quote, tour de force.
Things change over the years, so I wonder whether you have any opinions on these apps these days.
Do you use a Finder app replacement?
I think that Pathfinder review has got to be over a decade ago, right?
I don't even want to look up how many years ago it was.
But Pathfinder still exists.
In fact, I just recently bought the latest version of it as part of some big app bundle thing that I found myself buying.
So the problem with Finder alternatives is kind of like what Marco was just talking about.
Apple...
does not make it particularly easy to supplant a lot of its built-in apps so the part of the reason why using safari is so convenient is uh well i don't know is this still true they just they let you replace your your mail app and your web browser correct now yeah basically to handle like mail to and url all right so so i need another example but like apple is has been slow on ios in letting you replace all the built-in apps with custom versions of like reminder i think still can't be replaced as a default right
um that is correct yeah reminders um certainly things like notes and or things like siri you can't replace siri with music maps right yeah um so that's that's an annoyance and on the mac the finder is not easy to replace yes there are ways you can you can obviously you can quit the finder that's a thing you can do pretty easily and you can run another app instead of the finder but lots of other apps especially in the olden days maybe less now but like
would send Apple events to the Finder to have it do something.
They just expect the Finder to be there, and they expect the Finder to be the thing that they talk to to do file management.
So if you try to use a third-party one, you are, you know, swimming against the tide.
Lots of things in the system will try to relaunch the Finder or try to do things with the Finder, and Pathfinder is not the Finder.
Um...
I don't use a Finder alternative partly for that reason and also partly because Pathfinder, which is, I think, the best Finder alternative, is an extremely powerful browser-style file manager.
I don't want a browser-style file manager.
If I wanted one, Pathfinder's there and you can use it.
You can use it in addition to the Finder, which, you know, if you want a better, cooler browser that does more stuff, just run Pathfinder all day, but then also run the Finder and just don't open any Windows in it.
I want a Spatial Finder.
Nobody really makes one of those.
And even if they did...
like part of the benefit of the finder that i want to see is it has to be the actual finder the default one the one that everybody uses and not some third party thing that i'm constantly trying to run but being chucked back into the other one so the answer is no i don't use it but pathfinder is super cool you should check it out it may appeal to you but keep in mind that you will be fighting against the entire operating system and the entire apple corporation that wants you to just use the finder
All right, Yonda G writes, Swift can be used in the command line, and I expect that you can also use it for automation, like what people do with Python.
I also read that you apparently can also run Swift with Linux and Windows.
Do you guys have experience in using Swift for other purposes in creating iOS and macOS apps?
I do a little bit.
My bespoke, I'll call it a script, although it's probably more of a command line app, that I use to file away my pictures, that is a Swift command line app.
That's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head.
Swift...
You know, Lattner, I think on this very program, Lattner has said, and he's certainly said in other places that he envisioned Swift to, you know, its goal is world domination.
So you can use it, you know, for super, super important, low level stuff, and you can use it for scripts.
And...
Yes, one could use Swift for that sort of a thing, but I wouldn't say it's terribly well positioned for that sort of a thing since it really is designed to be compiled and it just doesn't feel to me like that's the right fit.
That's just my experience.
Again, like a command line app is a little bit different, but for like something more along the lines of what I would turn to like Python or Python.
Or I guess if I was an old man, Perl, or if I really liked weird technology, PHP, you know, I could use one of those things.
And honestly, if it were me, if I wasn't going to use like bash or just a fish script or something like that, then I would probably turn to Python myself.
Marco, what's your thoughts on this?
I pretty much agree.
Swift, while I'm developing an appreciation for it as I use it more and more in my app development, what you want out of that kind of language, out of a command line utilities kind of language, is...
a little more quick and dirty of a style of a language.
And Swift is so rigid and unforgiving.
The type strictness, I can understand the value of it when building a larger app for public distribution for something like a shell script or something that is a quick little command utility.
Swift is just too cumbersome and too picky.
The other thing I would say about Swift is that its string handling sucks.
I kind of can't believe...
that a language developed so recently has such bad string handling.
All right, now hold on, hold on.
Let me quickly jump in.
First of all, string handling sucks in Swift.
You're absolutely right.
I couldn't agree more.
But I think the reason is because it's too academic and it tries to be too...
pedantically correct in too many cases.
And that's at the cost of an easy to use API surface, or just an easy to use API.
So I understand why it sucks.
And I agree with you, it sucks.
I agree with you, it shouldn't suck.
But there is at least a reason behind it.
But it still totally sucks.
So much of modern programming is string processing in many ways.
String processing is just everywhere.
That's why it's so generally good and friendly in most web development languages, because the web uses tons of string processing.
Modern programming in general uses tons of string processing.
And when you're dealing with command line stuff, you're probably dealing with a lot of string processing.
And that's why Perl is so often used in this way.
Because Perl, for all of its weird little faults, it's pretty good at string processing.
Python, from what I understand, I don't have any experience with Python, really.
But I understand it's pretty good at it, too.
Swift is just terrible at string processing.
It's just so cumbersome to use with strings.
It seems like the API was designed, as Casey said, for academic perfection rather than the actual practical needs of most programmers doing string processing.
For those reasons, I could use Swift for this kind of thing, but other tools are usually better, and I will reach for them almost every time in this kind of context.
So I'm going to agree with your conclusion, but not for the exact reasons that you stated.
So the main problem that Swift has as a kind of like, have you used it for something that's not an iOS or macOS app?
Like the type strictness is an issue, right?
Like that's just the type of language it is.
But most of the things you do from like, you know, like just a command line program or something that's not a GUI app or whatever, just basic scripting, you only ever really need to deal with like one or two types.
You need to deal with string, which we've talked about and I'll get back to in a second, and then some kind of numbers, right?
Or if you wanted, you can just treat the numbers of strings and have some convertible thing that works in some scripting mode or whatever.
Yeah.
that's basically it like especially in one-off little scripty things you're not defining a bunch of new types and whatever and like if you just deal with the built-in types and easy conversion between them even if you get into things like urls and dates um you're probably okay with the type like the type system is not going to kill you right what's going to kill you is the api and actually before i get to that it's not the compiled nature either pearl is a compiled language as well
Having a compilation phase is fine as long as that compilation phase is fast enough.
Perl's compilation phase is so fast people don't even know it exists, but Perl is a compiled language.
It goes through your whole program, loads all of it and all the files that it includes and all the other things, and has a compile phase in which it compiles it before it runs it.
It's a little more complicated than that, but it is not an interpreted language where it goes line by line and doesn't even know what the next line is going to be before it executes it.
It compiles it.
So being a compiled language...
is no barriers and i'm assuming python and php are similar in that way that they have a compile phase swift has a compile phase you can use a you can write a command line script swift thing and when it runs with the little you know hash exclamation point whatever user bin swift it compiles it on the fly for you and runs it you don't have to compile it make you know like a c program and make your your a.out executable and run that it does it does it for you right so that's not the barrier the real barrier is its api is
not good for those common things that i just said strings dates urls uh and it's not because they're like oh they're academically correct and it's a hard problem i will point to pearl pearl has academically correct string string i know right right yeah pearl has academically correct string handling with all the unicode crap in it and it is complicated and if you care about the nuances of unicode normalization and all that stuff you can do that all in pearl and fast by the way but if you don't care about it
because pearl's api and interface to dealing with strings does not make you care about it and swift's api makes you not only have to care about it like it just shoves it in your face we just talked in the chat room the thing we were talking about in the slack is i want to extract a substring from a string swift's api has defined a substring type that is not a string and because swift is type safe you can't take a substring and pass to a function that wants a string because it's a substring you have to construct a new string by using the string constructor on the substring you just got from a string and nobody expects that
nobody expects that to happen and it's not the biggest deal in the world it's like oh once you just know that you just do it it's like yeah but it's inconvenient that that throws the type system in my face in a way that i don't want to or just you know i mean regular expressions are coming to swift see the swift forums and the discussion of it i i uh
participated in a little bit trying to say that like you know the pearl motto from ages ago easy things should be easy hard things should be possible easy things are not easy and swift and it's not because it's a compiled language it's not because it's a type safe language it's because the apis to do easy things is not easy like it's not convenient right it's not it's not like i'll just do the first thing i think and it'll probably work if you if you have never programmed in like if you program just in one of these language and you hop into php and you hop into javascript or you hop into pearl
You're going to guess right like more than 50% of the time about how to do stuff related to strings or if you don't you just look it up and it's like oh they spell it a little bit differently.
None of that knowledge transfers to Swift you're like how the hell do I find you know do I replace a substring in a string how do I construct a URL and get its components.
It was just today a big proposal and say, oh, by the way, if you pass a string to the URL constructor, if you just did URL double quote and then like a string because of the, you know, string convertible thing that they built in or whatever, even if it's like HTTP colon slash slash triple W dot Apple dot com, it will be it'll construct a file URL for you out of that because the string got literal converted to a file URL and then that file URL got passed to the constructor.
right and so they want to make a change hey if i pass http like shouldn't just look at the http and realize this is not a file url and that's the change they're proposing that means for years now this behavior has gone on if you were doing a script you never want that to happen you don't want to be surprised by stuff like that swift just does not have an api that lends itself to let me just write 15 lines of code and not be surprised right
Um, and arguably all those same things make it more annoying to use in quote unquote relapse too, but it's more tolerable in relapse because it's like, well, this is a more serious endeavor.
I should think more about my types or whatever.
When you're doing a one-off script, it's not that you don't want to deal with the types at all or anything like that.
You just want to, you just want the obvious thing to work and you want easy things to be easy.
And that's where Swift is falling down as a scripting language.
And then the final thing about that is all three of us, I think probably, well, maybe not Casey, no, probably still Casey, uh,
I think we all know some other language better than we know Swift that is better at this job.
Marco knows PHP better than he knows Swift.
I know Perl better than I know Swift.
Maybe Casey knows Python or something better than he knows Swift for these purposes.
Casey's using C Sharp for all of his shell scripts.
Yeah, or C Sharp.
The thing is,
PowerShell, baby.
When you want to bang something out and you're an experienced programmer who has a deep experience with even just one language that is vaguely suited to the task, it is so much more efficient to just say, even though there's a better tool for this job, I know this tool like the back of my hand.
So I'm going to ignore the supposedly better tools and just bang out what I know will work.
It's why my stupid CMS site generator is written in Perl and why Marcos is written in PHP.
Because those are the languages we know best and we could bang it out now.
We don't have to think about it and it works fine for that purpose.
Yeah, and that's why for a lot of things I'll turn to Python, which I know okay.
Like if it were an actual spoken language, it would probably be a bit of a stretch to say I am conversational in Python, but I feel like that's kind of where I'm at.
And I would turn to Python for these sorts of things, even though I don't know it super well, but because it feels like a much better tool for the job than Swift would be.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Mack Weldon, and Linode.
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
We will talk to you all next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter...
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-G Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
So I've been alluding to, or kind of casually hinting at, I had a Synology adventure a little while ago, which I'd like to... Vibra-slap.
It's only the first mention, Marco.
Come on.
Well, it was a little one.
All right.
So in any case, so again, I have an 8-bay Synology.
The first two drives are Time Machine, RAID 0.
The remaining six drives are Synology Hybrid RAID, which is their version of some other flavor of RAID.
I forget which one.
It's like what Drobos do.
It's their version of it.
It's a dynamically expandable software-based RAID that abstracts away a lot of the details.
It's not like a straight RAID 1 or straight RAID 5 or anything like that, but it's just their dynamic thing that has some redundancy depending on how you set it and is kind of managed in software so it can be expanded over time without breaking the whole array.
and speaking of that marco quick aside uh what file system did you pick for your synology um i did what it did by default through the ios app which i was curious what the heck it did because i was intending raid one um because i got two identical no not raid the file system oh i have no idea whatever's btr now or butter whatever it's called isn't it yeah that's what i was going to suggest that if you didn't pick that now is a good time to maybe change that decision because btrfs has is the i think the best choice
Alright, I'll check it.
I mean, whatever was default.
I thought it was interesting that by default, it just did SHR as the RAID setup.
So even though I only had two disks, it didn't even ask me.
It just set them up as SHR.
Which, in theory, I was a little bit upset by that because I'm like, RAID 1 would be faster, probably.
But I also think in the grand scheme of things, I'm probably only ever going to have two drives in here.
And I might want expansion.
And you don't want to have to match the size of
Exactly.
So I might want the expansion down the road.
So I figure that's fine for my purposes here.
So in my RAID 0 array of two drives that is used only for a time machine... It's pronounced Rado.
Rado.
My Rado array with the two drives, one of them was dying.
And that wasn't great, but wasn't the biggest deal because it's my time machine volume.
I don't use it for anything else.
It's not the end of the earth.
So I tried to play this smart instead of fast and loose, and I decided to wait until my periodic time comes when I back up the entire Synology to a single physical external drive, which then gets plugged into my Mac Mini server so it can go up to Backblaze.
So I waited the week and a half, because I do this every couple of weeks, and I waited the week and a half or whatever it was until the Backblaze backup was completed, and
And then I went to, I set about to replace drive two.
This is a three terabyte drive.
I think it had been in the machine since when I got it in 2013.
It's not unreasonable that it was time to replace it.
And since I don't need a ton of time machine space and I don't really care that much about time machine, to be honest, I don't know that I've used it in literally years, but I like having it as yet another backup.
So I bought basically the exact same drive to put back in.
So I got another three terabyte drive to put in.
They still sell those?
I don't even remember how much it was, to be honest with you, but yes, they do.
So I think to myself, well, I'm pretty sure this DS1813 Plus can hot swap.
Why don't I just do that?
I always used to shut it down when I was doing a drive swap.
Hot swapping to you just means I didn't have to turn the power off to the thing to take out the drive, but it's RAID 0, like the thing.
You can't take out one of the drives.
Right, right, right.
No, no, totally.
I knew I was going to lose everything.
I knew I was going to have to recreate the volume and so on and so forth.
But could I just hot swap the physical drive and have the Synology understandably freak out and then tell it, you know, just put everything back, please?
To be kinder to the thing, what I would have done is destroyed the volume, destroyed the RAID 0 volume and just said, now you just have two empty disks.
And then if you want to do a hot swap experiment, leave the thing on and yank out the drive.
See, this is why you're smarter than me, because that didn't even cross my mind.
It didn't even cross my mind.
Well, one question I have is, like, how do you know which volume Synology's OS is installed on?
You know, agreed.
Agreed.
You can look this up, but yeah.
My main question is, how do you make sure that the one you're yanking out is the bad one?
Because they all look the same from the front.
Well, so they actually... They start numbering from left to right or right to left.
They number from left to right.
Is it drive zero or drive one?
they number from left to right and there is actually a feature yeah i forget where it is in i think storage manager there's a feature that where they where you can go in and i think they call it identify and you can have it identify that drive it'll play music on the voice coils inside the hard drive no stop it so uh it plays the the imperial march right you know it should play do do do do do do
Yeah, right.
It'll play the washing machine or the freezer thing.
So no, what it does is it turns the light on that particular drive amber instead of green.
And because at this point it was dying, it was not dead.
So it was still showing green.
What made you think that it was dying, by the way?
Because it said I got emails about it literally every day.
What did it say?
I forget.
I could dig it up.
Because I get periodic emails about my drive help, too.
I think it said it kept reconnecting or something like that.
I forget exactly.
I haven't gotten that message.
So anyway, so I decided to hot swap.
And you two are a thousand percent correct.
I should have destroyed the volume first and so on and so forth.
But I didn't.
I just hot swapped it.
And everything took a dump.
Everything took a real big dump.
So I tried to do that, and suddenly the web interface kind of stops responding, which was not entirely surprising, but I'm thinking this is not good.
Was it the OS drive?
Maybe.
I don't even know, to be honest with you.
Still to this day, I don't know.
This would be a thing to check before, again, before yanking drives out of your computer.
Perhaps, perhaps.
Also, probably not the best to have the OS on a RAID 0.
Well, I don't even know how to move it.
Like, even if that's true.
Listener, if that's true.
It's not about moving it.
It's about not creating.
Like, when you do, like, volume groups, don't create any new volumes in the volume group that has the OS on it.
I mean, it's a bit late for that now, isn't it, gentlemen?
So anyway, everything takes a dump.
The web interface isn't really working or it's sort of working.
It's like I'm on a 1,400 baud modem.
Occasionally it'll work a little bit, then just kind of crash.
I shouldn't say crash.
It just doesn't really do anything.
I try entering my username and password, and that doesn't really work.
And so eventually I was able to request a shutdown.
I forget how I did that.
I don't remember if it was through the web or by like an iPhone app or something.
And it started to shut down, but it didn't succeed after literally like 15 minutes.
And so I said, ah, screw it.
I'm just going to force the damn thing to shut down, which I know I shouldn't do.
But at this point, like I don't have a Synology for all intents and purposes.
So I need to do something.
So I force a shutdown, and I boot it back up, and it's very, very upset.
And it wants me to enter a username and password, and I try entering my username and password, and it accepts it, but it refuses to accept my one-time password, you know, the little six-digit thing.
and i try that and i try that and i keep trying that and it's still not working and now i'm running out of chances before it like locks my entire account out so then i think to myself all right well surely i will try to use all right surely i can use the admin account you know the out-of-the-box administrative account which i know i've changed the password for and there's only three or four options of passwords i would likely use for it so i'll try that and that doesn't work
So let's recap.
I have a Synology that has eventually booted itself, and it is literally beeping because, you know, the volume is crashed.
So it wants my attention.
It is booted, but I can't log in using the login I usually use.
I don't think I have any other administrative logins except the actual administrator account, which it won't accept the password for that either.
So I literally cannot log into my Synology.
What do you do?
Quick real-time follow-up, by the way, about the operating system.
Someone in the chat room said, and I just did a quick Google that found at least some supporting evidence, that Synology stores the OS and all of the data related to the OS on all of the hard drives.
Oh, that's cool.
So as long as you have one disk that still works, you should, in theory, have your OS in all your settings.
That does not necessarily mean that Casey hasn't hosed himself.
So continue your story.
All right.
So, so pop quiz hotshot, you can't log in with your username, password, one time password.
You can't log into it with an administrator account.
What do you do?
you have physical access to the machine you can boot into with like the firmware mode and go into especially single user mode you know what i mean yeah isn't there like a reset hole on the back there is a reset hole oh just single user mode like back in the old days in regular unix you could boot into single user mode where it's not in multi-user and the one because you have physical access and there's some you know thing you have to press to make that happen but then you are essentially root on the thing and you can fix whatever's broken
So what you can do and double check me on this, if you're listening for the love of all that is good and holy, double check me on this because I Googled to figure out the right answer.
But there is a reset hole with a button within it in the back of the machine.
And if you I forget the details, but it's like if you press it for a small amount of time.
it will basically reset like the administrative password or something like that, if I remember right.
But if you hold it for a really long time, it will straight up reset everything.
And if you hold it long enough, it will straight up reset everything to the point that you lose your data.
So there's like two or three stages of reset.
And so I did the littlest bit of reset.
And that got me into the administrator account with the default password.
And
That just resets the wallpaper.
Yeah, basically.
I got into the administrator account with the default password, and then I was able to restore my account.
Well, I shouldn't even say restore it.
I think I know what the problem is.
What would cause my username and password, which is one of the few passwords I have memorized, and my one-time password, which is stored in one password, not work?
What would cause that to not work?
Date and time, Roe?
I think so.
I think the date and time got out of whack, and that's why the one-time password wouldn't work.
Because my limited understanding of how one-time passwords work is they have some sort of seed value.
Jump in, gentlemen, when you're ready.
They have some sort of seed value, and they compare the time to some reference and can compute via algorithm what these six digits should be at this time.
And if the time isn't agreed upon between your device and the device you're trying to log into, that will cause it.
So whoopsie-dupsie.
So I did an update to the time.
I was able to get back into my account.
And then when I was putting everything back and trying to restore everything,
It was very, very angry at me that the administrative account was enabled at all, because to their eyes, that's very ripe for a dictionary attack or something like that.
And so they really, really, really don't want you to have the administrative account active.
But the problem is, when you're a single-person company and a single-person Synology user, I only had the administrative account, which I surely had disabled, you know, because I did what they told me to do, and my own account.
It's not like I could go to Bob down the hall and say, hey, Bob, can you log in with your administrative account and get us all squared away again?
So I think...
That really kind of hosed me.
But the good news is I was able to not only get my normal account back with very minimal loss of data or settings or anything like that, but I was eventually able to set up an administrative account that is not my normal account, that does not use the username admin, and
And I was able to set all that up.
And I have a ridiculously strong password for that that's stored in one password.
But I decided not to turn on the one-time password for that.
So this way, I will never have that particular problem again.
But for a brief window of time, again, I thought that I had lost everything on my Synology, which was not delightful.
And thankfully, I had been smart enough to wait until everything was confirmed to be in Backblaze before I did all this dance.
But, wow, that was a very tense, like, two hours while I was trying to figure all this out, and it was not fun.
You have some, like, your impulse control when it comes to technology.
Like, when we're talking to you now, you're like, oh, yeah, no, I probably should have destroyed the volume first or whatever.
But in the moment, you're so excited about hot swapping.
You're just like, let's see what happens when I yank this out.
Yeah, why not, man?
You're not projecting forward in time and saying, well, what's the worst that could happen if you yanked this out?
And you almost saw what the worst that could happen if you yanked it out.
Yeah.
So yeah, so now drive two is back up and running and volume, the time machine volume is back up and running.
I did lose, of course, everything on that volume, but that's fine.
But yeah, what a nightmare.
It was a self-created nightmare, but what a nightmare that was.
And I was so thankful that Synologies have this multi-tier reset paradigm wherein I could get myself logged in because I have physical access to the machine.
I could get myself logged in without having to reset all my settings and all that jazz.
Yeah, physical access usually means that if there's...
There's working stuff inside there.
You can get to it.
That's the whole point of physical access.
It's something you have to hold down or press or do, but you can get back in.
And if this, you know, I'll have to look more into this, but like the idea that Synology puts the OS in every single drive is interesting and clever.
Another reason to like how they do things.
I was just thinking of that with Marco was like, oh, I'd only need, you know, I just have two drives or whatever.
Well,
you know especially if you just have a single volume uh you're like if one of them goes bad who cares i'm assuming you'll have to reset up your whole os right because if you destroy that volume and it's the only volume you've also destroyed all your settings and stuff if like a disk went bad like if you raid zero it is what i'm saying like because you don't have a second place for the os to be you have a single raid zero volume
maybe it's on all each individual hardware i don't know i don't know quite how it works but i would i would not try like i i always feel better having you know at least three drives i know you bought a four bay thing but you only put two drives in it maybe maybe get a small third one and throw it in there just to be like your os backup boot drive so that the other two can be totally hosed and you won't lose all your settings then again you probably don't have too many settings but it is annoying to go back through and reset up the time machine volume and set up quotas for people or whatever you did you know
Actually, I couldn't even do the quotas, because the quota for TIFF's computer needs to be 8 terabytes, and the most it'll let you enter is 4 terabytes, presumably for some kind of integer limit somewhere.
So I'm just like, well, I guess I just won't use quotas then.
Yeah.
I don't use quotas and like it takes care of itself and that whoever's filling the thing, you'll see their poor Mac say cleaning up like, or free, you know, freeing up space.
Like if you look in the time machine menu bar, it says like freeing up space and it will do that for a long time.
But what it's doing is saying, Oh, well the disc is running out of room.
And,
I'm in the middle of doing a backup and I know that I can't do my next backup unless I clean up space and it will delete like a whole bunch of old backups and they'll all just fight with each other over that last scrap of space.
It also is a good idea to, to change like Synology will email you if like a volume is getting low on space and you can choose what threshold it will email you.
if you have the threshold set like too high like if you have it set please email me when you have 20 space left you will be emailed forever right because time machine will never leave 20 free but time machine will leave you know eight percent free so if you set the threshold to be like five percent then you'll only get the email when like something has gone wrong you know with time machine it hasn't been able to free up space or something
The only reason I ever want this analogy to email me is a hard drive has died.
I want to know that.
I want no other emails from this device.
Don't you like the health report ones that tell you how many bad sectors all your hard drives have?
I turn those off after a while or they stop working.
Somehow they were turned off.
That gives you the pre-warning of if you get an email and say there's one bad sector and the next week you get an email and say there's 10 bad sectors maybe start shopping for a new hard drive.
But, you know, I still get the emails, I think, monthly.
And, like, I've had a hard drive that's had one bad sector for, like, six years.
And that's fine.
Like, hard drives have bad sectors.
And it just keeps emailing me.
I just look at that number.
And if it's still one, I'm like, everything's fine.
If it's 110, I need a new drive.