I Should Probably Get Reading Glasses
Casey:
So how is the honey-do list, be it self-imposed or otherwise?
John:
I'm still working on it.
John:
These things take so much longer than you think.
John:
Oh, and I mean, we talked about this in... Did we talk about this in Slack?
John:
Anyway, pre-show, COVID has visited my family.
Casey:
I wanted to ask of what the status was, and I meant to do it during the pre-flight, and I forgot, and then I took a mental note to ask you after the show was over.
Casey:
So now that you've brought it up, how's everyone doing?
John:
Yeah, well, I mean...
John:
Um, everyone's fine.
John:
Like not a big deal.
John:
We're all vaccinated and boosted and stuff like that.
John:
But, uh, we did have positive tests and so far the rest of us are negative and we're hanging in there.
John:
But what this does relevant to your question, all the things that we have like appointments to do, like see people or like sign documents or get things set up or whatever.
John:
Now it just gets pushed out.
John:
because we're not gonna you know go anywhere or do anything again even though you know most of us are fine and of course we're taking tests every single day so my streak of never not only not getting covid as far as i know but also not taking a test that has ended and now the entire family is testing every single day good thing we have a pretty big backlog of tests uh testing is not fun it makes my eyes tear a lot yes um
John:
But, yeah, that's what we're doing.
John:
And so, yeah, that's totally screwed up my list of items.
John:
So things that I thought I was going to finally be able to check off, because, again, I only checked them off the list when they're actually done done.
John:
I did check off the car thing.
John:
Like I said last time, the car is fixed, you know, although...
John:
Did I mention on the show that they tried to clean the interior?
Casey:
Yeah, with Armroll.
Casey:
I don't know if you mentioned on the show, but you definitely told us.
John:
I don't know if it was Armroll.
John:
I don't want to throw that brand under the bus.
John:
But the garage is trying to be nice.
John:
The body shop is trying to be nice.
John:
Like, oh, we'll clean your car for you.
John:
And they vacuumed it and they washed it and they tried to clean the interior.
John:
And I'm just one of those people who does not approve of the various, let's say, greasy protectants that are often used on the interior of cars.
Casey:
I'm so surprised.
Casey:
I'm so surprised you have an opinion about this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So they did that, and I spent a while cleaning that off.
John:
But the main problem, of course, is anyone who's ever gotten body work done is that it smells like drying paint because, you know, they repainted a thing.
John:
And that's just, you just deal with that, and eventually the volatile compounds dissipate or react with the air, and you don't smell it anymore.
John:
But anyway, that did get checked off the list.
John:
But that, remember, wasn't on the to-do list until something happened to the car.
John:
That was a fun incidental item.
John:
Of the big items that were there, I think they're all basically still there.
John:
They're just...
Marco:
and many new items have been added and it's just yeah the list is getting longer and not shorter that's what happens casey and i have been unemployed for longer than you and uh you'll notice that we are not like we don't have tons and tons of free time right indeed like stuff comes like your time gets filled it's like hard drive space like it gets filled like you you think you you're gonna have all this time and then it gets filled up with stuff and you're like wait a minute i
John:
the whole rest of my life before this point i was working all day at where did that where did that eight hour block go in my current schedule and yeah it just it gets consumed i know i know where it goes i mean like the problem i i really do think i will shrink this backlog but the problem is before i would just neglect all these things they were just all being neglected so it's no no question to me like where the time go i just didn't do any of these things they weren't even on the to-do list anymore because it's like well i don't have time to deal with that right now i'll deal with that uh some point in the future well now is some point in the future
Casey:
All right, so let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
And we had a person write in by the name of Kyle, and Kyle wrote, all right, I'm going to really try hard.
Casey:
I really, I'm not trying to be sarcastic.
Casey:
I'm really going to try hard, and I'm probably going to screw this up, but I'm going to try.
Casey:
Okay, so Kyle wrote in about Bartosz Chichnowski.
Casey:
Kyle wrote, I happen to work with Bartosh, and yes, the same Bartosh, who makes the delightful articles explaining how things work.
Casey:
His most recently mentioned article was Mechanical Watch Explainer.
Casey:
In addition to making these excellent guides, he's one of the best software engineers I've ever worked with.
Casey:
I do have a little more to add about this, but Marco, you were saying to us privately in the pre-flight that you had some thoughts about the Mechanical Watch Explainer.
Marco:
Yeah, I hadn't actually gone through it in the last show, and I have since, and I'm a watch nerd.
Marco:
When everyone was saying, look, here's a guide on how a mechanical watch works, I figured it would just be the time hands.
Marco:
Here's an escapement and a mainspring and a few gears in the middle, and that's it.
Marco:
That would have been great just by itself.
Marco:
This was – I kept going down, and I kept seeing, like, the scroll bar is not reaching the bottom portion of the screen here.
Casey:
There's a lot more to go.
Marco:
And then Bartosz would go and explain, like, you know, and then what if we wanted to show the date?
Marco:
And I'm like, really?
Marco:
He's going to do a date movement on here?
Marco:
And then I keep going –
Marco:
He added quick setting to the date.
Marco:
Like, and then eventually I'm like, he's going to, he's going to do automatic.
Marco:
He's going to do automatic.
Marco:
Sure enough, the automatic rotor comes up.
Marco:
It's a bi-directional winding automatic motor of which not all watches are that.
Marco:
Not all watches have dates.
Marco:
Not all watches that have dates have quick setting mechanisms to jump quickly between them with a three position crown.
Marco:
Like that's not, not every watch has it.
Marco:
You have to go pretty, you know, many, many hundreds of dollars, at least before you get one that has these kinds of features.
Marco:
And usually more than that, um,
Marco:
And then, and then at the end, I'm like, then he throws in hacking seconds, like where you pull the crown and it stops the time.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
Like these are, these are features like I've, I've bought watches before that don't have these features like for major brands.
Marco:
So this, to have, to have all of that in the basic explainer, to have an automatic hacking seconds, quick set date movement.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
like that's what he's explaining that that was quite impressive on so many levels so that was delightful and i'm i'm very very glad and there was a lot a lot of stuff in there i didn't know you know like stuff that like i you know i knew that watches did this but i didn't know how they accomplished that exactly and so that was it was really cool to go through all that
Casey:
Yeah, and the entire internet is on my poo-poo list, on my naughty list, because unbeknownst to me until I think when I was clicking around while we were recording or maybe after the show, there are a bunch of other articles that I'm deeply interested in.
Casey:
I haven't had a chance to read yet, but more importantly, nobody told me.
Casey:
Where were all of you?
Casey:
Nobody told me that Bartosz has GPS, has curves and surfaces, naval architecture.
Casey:
The one I did know about was the internal combustion engine, which I cannot say enough good things about.
Casey:
It's amazing.
Casey:
Cameras and lenses, lights and shadows, gears in general, and a bunch of other stuff.
Casey:
Like, this is a treasure.
Casey:
And I was happy to discover...
Casey:
And in the least slimy way possible, you know, if you look at his website on the header at the top, you see, you know, RSS, email, Instagram, Twitter.
Casey:
And then, oh, wait, that's the Patreon P, isn't it?
Casey:
So you bet your ass I decided to be a patron.
Casey:
And so you should do that, too.
Casey:
There's three membership levels, and you get to see, like, Bartosz will put up posts about how the...
Casey:
the posts that he made on his website were made.
Casey:
And I was saying to the guys before that we started recording, the post for the mechanical watch one is a screenshot of all the CAD drawings and CAD work that Bartosz had to do in order to make this article.
Casey:
And it is freaking nuts.
Casey:
So you should definitely be a patron.
Casey:
You should check this junk out because it is delightful.
Casey:
So we will put links in the show notes to all of these things.
Casey:
You should definitely, definitely give it where all
Marco:
and in the unlikely event that bartosh is listening i am so sorry that i butchered your name 85 times but hand to god i've really been trying really really hard so uh my apologies yeah this is the kind of stuff that the internet used to have a lot more stuff that was really good yes and and kind of just and and good in a in an uncomplicated way this is just really good and there's no ulterior motives there's no like you know ads plastered all over the thing unless my ad blocker blocked them i don't know but probably not like
Marco:
there's there's no like you know actually this is a wiki how and we're gonna try to you know like there's nothing like it's just a person who is an expert in something making a really great thing and just putting it out there for the world for free that's amazing and that's there again there used to be so much more of that on the internet and these days that stuff seems to be not only produced less um but harder to find and so this is just a gem to find and i'm this just made me so happy
Casey:
yep and i mean like i said the patreon wasn't like hey you know smash that i know this is a patreon not youtube but it was there was no equivalent of like smash that bell or anything like that yeah hey guys like there was nothing the only reason i knew that there was a patreon was because i happened to realize that that little p up in the upper right hand corner is the patreon logo that was the only mention i saw of patreon was the little logo like there was no yeah there was no like hp.fm slash join or anything like that it was just a little teeny tiny logo in the corner so uh
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
Just five stars, six stars, if such a thing is possible.
Casey:
John, tell us about the Apple Developer Center, if you please.
John:
Yeah, they're pronouncing new words.
John:
So Gruber had a post about some information about the Apple Developer Center or some rumors about it.
John:
Is the Apple Developer Center Tantau 14?
John:
What's Tantau?
John:
Is that like Tantan from the Flophouse?
John:
No, it's not.
John:
It's the road that goes along one side of Apple Park, apparently.
John:
And the rumor speculation is that building 14 on that road, what is it, Tantau Avenue?
John:
Something like that, yeah.
John:
Is, in fact, the developer center.
John:
And as Gruber said, I'm sure we'll find out later what the deal is.
John:
But based on tips, he thinks it's Tantau 14 next to the visitor center, which makes a lot of sense.
John:
So there's a...
John:
Parker Ortolani had a post showing a map of where this stuff is and some more information about it.
John:
So if you look at the map, it's got the Steve Jobs Theater, which is this little circular thing that's on Apple Park.
John:
And if you basically go straight across the street, straight across Tantow Avenue from Steve Jobs Theater, there's a big, long, skinny building.
John:
That's Tantow 14.
John:
The theory is that is the building that is going to be the new developer center.
John:
And then next door to that is the existing Apple Park visitor center, which is a smaller rectangular building.
John:
building uh and this makes some sense um if you look at it this gets into the idea of like apple is inviting people to apple park if you think apple park is just the the ring the big ring-shaped building and the land that is around that
John:
Maybe that is too narrow of a definition, because by that definition, the Apple Park Visitor Center is not, in fact, in Apple Park.
John:
It is across the street from that.
John:
Same thing with this building 14 is also, quote unquote, not in Apple Park.
John:
But I think it's all kind of part of the same campus.
John:
And the theory of this building is that it will be, you know, this is the developer center that is, you know, a fancy new building.
John:
It will be where the Apple developer, like evangelist people work, like their actual office building.
John:
And it will also be where they would bring developers in to
John:
do whatever it is that they do with them in the developer center um so we'll see if the speculation proves correct yeah we and we got i mean we didn't just get a birdie we got like a flock of seagulls telling us this so it seems like this is pretty well supported it's before your time right the band yes you might have you might have heard it in the uh the play pop hits of the 80s right there you go there you go
Marco:
i'll tell you what man so we're we're in the um we just crossed over 1970 and the rock hits uh go through of this it's so much better it's interesting what like what are the rock like where does that pull from i don't know i mean they're apple music playlists so you know somebody curated these lists at some point i don't know but anyway the rock version is really good
Marco:
It's significantly better for our tastes than the pop version, which, given that we've always liked rock music, that's not that big of a surprise.
John:
There's a question.
John:
In the run-throughs you've done, you did the pop hits, and now you're doing the rock hits.
John:
I'm assuming fish does not appear anywhere on any of these lists.
Marco:
i don't know i mean i think the only place they would potentially appear is when farmhouse was on the radio i think in the late 90s um for a brief time um and i certainly would not have shown up on the pop list but maybe maybe it might be on the rock list but i don't think you can try the all quote-unquote alternative list and a category of music that didn't exist until like the 90s like alternative hits of 1955
Marco:
Well, I mean, rock didn't exist until 65.
John:
I'm assuming that's when it starts then, right?
Marco:
Yeah, like there was no, there is no music rock hits 1964 or earlier.
Marco:
So from 55 to 64, we just did pop hits again, but this time doing it the right way instead of asking Siri to play whatever and have her walk away after a few minutes.
Marco:
But yeah, this time was just play the pop hits playlist from those years, which were actually pretty decent.
Marco:
The only weird thing about them is that
Marco:
You play the pop hits of the mid to late 60s, and what you really should be hearing is a heck of a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stones later on, like Zeppelin.
Marco:
But the people who make these lists, they don't want to put six Beatles songs in a row.
Marco:
And the list is pretty long for each day.
Marco:
It's 20, 30 songs at least.
Marco:
It's hours long, I think.
Marco:
And so you end up...
Marco:
missing a lot of significant hits not because they weren't ranked high in the charts but because they were spread out by a human on this on this playlist so you didn't hear too much of the same band in a row that's that's the only downside of this approach so um otherwise it's not it's not you know i i have no other faults with the exception that my home pods keep dying
Casey:
They just ran, Marco.
Casey:
They ran so far away.
Marco:
They're so dying.
Marco:
I'm still holding on, but this is, I mean, my holding on to these, this is worse than Casey's iMac at this point.
Marco:
They're rebooting every day.
Marco:
It's just, they're in bad shape.
Marco:
I really should replace them, but I can't make myself do it.
Marco:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
Speaking of things I'm sorry about, John, how's that multi-factor authentication dance going?
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, as a follow-up on the college account stuff, so I dealt with that.
John:
Where did I leave it?
John:
I did say I was going to have to contact them, so that's what I did.
John:
I contacted the help desk or whatever.
John:
So here is what the deal was.
John:
So the problem that the college had is that they have the system where there's a page where you say, you know, set up multi-factor authentication, or if you already have it set up, it says reconfigure multi-factor authentication, and then there's also a button that says disable multi-factor authentication, and
John:
As I said, I was having trouble with it, couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, so I hit disable.
John:
And, you know, it was disabled, and then it said, you know, it changed to, say, set up multi-factor authentication.
John:
And the disabled button was gone, it was replaced with a button to set it up.
John:
But, you know, I wanted to leave it unset up, and of course, that didn't work.
John:
Every time I tried to log in, it kept asking me for multi-factor, and eventually I got logged out of everything.
John:
So that was the problem.
John:
And I sent like an email to support and explain the situation.
John:
And it was very clear in my support email and usually pretty straightforward thing.
John:
It's like I disabled multi-factor authentication.
John:
But now when I log in, it asked me to do multi-factor.
John:
Like I feel like it's a succinct summary of the problem.
John:
So help because I can't log in because it prompts me for multi-factor.
John:
But as far as I know, I disabled it.
John:
So I don't have anything to enter.
John:
Right.
John:
And the email reply from a human was,
John:
was oh if you're you know having trouble setting up multi-factor like you know do this that you know it was like telling me like what i should do to set up multi-factor or like you know how different different apps i can use for it or whatever and i felt like the response didn't acknowledge my statement which was i've disabled multi that's what i opened with my opening was i have disabled multi-factor authentication
John:
But when I log in, it prompts me, right?
John:
And so they were just trying to help me, like, oh, why can't you log in with your multi-factor?
John:
I'm like, because I disabled it?
John:
Anyway, after contacting a human via telephone, what they said was, oh, you can't disable multi-factor.
John:
It's required.
John:
The college requires it for all logins, which, you know, is a reasonable policy.
John:
But why is there a big button that says disable multi-factor?
John:
Well, it turns out that this third-party product they're using for, like,
John:
It's some third-party product that any college can buy that helps kids organize their schedule or whatever.
John:
I'm not actually entirely sure what it does.
John:
But that third-party product has its very own login system.
John:
And it has its own account page.
John:
And on that account page, it has a bunch of multi-factor stuff.
John:
But the implementation in this college doesn't use its own login.
John:
It uses your college login, you know, like your account for the college.
John:
And then it just does single sign on basically to get you into that other thing.
John:
So you never actually log into this third party system.
John:
But the third party system has an account page.
John:
And also, it's by the way, you land on this third party system like when you log in.
John:
So it makes it seem like you've logged in.
John:
Here you are.
John:
Here's your thing.
John:
And there's a big, you know, your little silhouette of a person and go to account.
John:
And it makes you think this is your account.
John:
this is where you'd go to change your password to set up multi-factor or whatever but that multi-factor stuff has absolutely no effect on your ability to log into your school account the school account it turns out is just microsoft active directory blah blah blah right and it uses single sign on to this third-party product but i said to the person you should really remove all those buttons that say change your password set up multi-factor because those have no effect on your actual account so it turns out
John:
I was just messing with multi-factor stuff for an account that I was never going to log into.
John:
And because the first time I set it up, I deleted the previous multi-factor and entered the new one that I thought was the new one when I reconfigured it, right?
John:
I had just deleted the one and only valid multi-factor to actually log into the AD thing, right?
John:
And now I was just messing with this third party thing, which was never going to have any relevance whatsoever to anything that I ever did.
John:
So multifactor was reset.
John:
Now with my newfound knowledge that I should just completely avoid that entire account page and don't touch any of that multifactor stuff because it's totally irrelevant.
John:
I got multifactor set up everywhere.
John:
And yes, I did use the thing.
John:
On the phone, if you do it in iOS, you can just point the camera at the QR code and it reads it.
John:
I still have a to-do item to get some stuff together for Ricky, who works on this team at Apple, to figure out why Safari on the Mac wouldn't let me right-click after I replaced the URL.
John:
And I think my suggestion that the Mac be able to also accept QR code input, either through the camera or by dragging an image or something like that, I think that feedback was also heard.
John:
So fingers crossed for the future.
John:
But anyway, it is all sorted out.
John:
And it just goes to show the dangers of, I don't know, like slightly too much knowledge, too little knowledge.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I still feel like the whole page is a trap because anybody who wanders over to that page and goes to their account and sees all this stuff about passwords and multi-factor, it's totally a trap.
John:
Almost anything you do there is at best going to have no effect and at worst going to confuse you into locking yourself out.
Marco:
I will say on this topic that this whole story kind of inspired me to try to put some of my most frequently used two-factor logins into Apple password system, whatever.
Marco:
Is it called like Keychain?
John:
iCloud Keychain, yeah.
Marco:
Okay, so yeah, putting it into that because I still use 1Password, but 1Password is...
Marco:
increasingly clunky uh in in my experience um i haven't yet been updated to one password eight yet they just did a big new release so maybe it's improved there i don't know but the interaction between one password and my browsers on both the mac and on especially the iphone um it seems very fragile and and it seems to miss a lot
Marco:
And so I'm interested now in moving some of the most common things to the Apple system just so it fills faster and more reliably and stuff.
Marco:
So anyway, so I learned that there's a really nice export process from 1Password.
Marco:
You can export any item or set of items into an iCloud keychain CSV file.
Marco:
Now, this is comically insecure while it's on disk because this is literally a file with unencrypted password data sitting in plain text on your disk.
Marco:
And what's nice is that if you go into the Apple password pref pane, in one of those little drop-down boxes, there's an option to import this specially formatted CSV.
Marco:
And it, of course, yells at you, this is really insecure, by the way.
Marco:
But then once you do it, it actually gives you a little button that deletes the file immediately and bypasses the trash system on the Mac.
Marco:
So, you know, that's nice in the sense that this is only on your disk for a short time and this little convenience thing is there.
Marco:
And anyway, the two-factor stuff that I transferred over transferred perfectly.
Marco:
You know, whatever the format is of this file, it's just, I looked at one of the files, it's just literally like, it's like, you know, website, you know, username, password, and OTP basis or whatever.
Marco:
And it worked great.
Marco:
So now I have some of my most common, you know, two-factor things in iCloud Keychain.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, it just kind of works.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I might start moving more stuff into that or at least copying it.
Marco:
And I've decided finally, literally like yesterday, remember when I mentioned months ago that I had the ridiculous setup where both 1Password and iCloud were prompting me to fill in every single password field in Safari?
Marco:
I maintained that until yesterday.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
It was a mess.
Marco:
I finally got fed up.
Yeah.
Marco:
And so I decided I finally turned off the the like auto prompting of like in every input field for one password.
Marco:
So I'm going to leave Apple to auto prompt me and and kind of leave one password as like a lookup system and see how that goes.
Marco:
But anyway, I just wanted to bring up the migration thing because you can really easily export from one password into a key chain in a way that I didn't think would work at all, let alone that everyone would have made so easy.
John:
Two things on that one.
John:
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have a file that like, you know, a file is going to be full of your passwords briefly or whatever.
John:
And if you're super paranoid about it, it's a good idea to have somewhere on your, somewhere in your folder structure in your home directory, uh,
John:
uh a dedicated directory i just call mine do not back up um it's a folder that you just mark as you exclude from time machine i have lots of stuff excluded from time machine if you don't know how to do this you go to system preferences go to time machine click on like options or something and it lets you basically drag in or hit the plus button and select the folder you want to be excluded from time machine
John:
right but just having a dedicated location that you know is always excluded from time machine like a do not backup folder that is a great place to store these files that you only want to exist for a brief timing it deleted because you never know maybe time machine was in the middle of running and the time file appeared and time machine was just about to go through that folder and it picked it up and shoved into a time machine backup and now unbeknownst to you you have every single one of your passwords in plain text and time machine backup for who knows how long
John:
But if you put it in the do not backup folder, it'll never do that.
John:
Same thing with like Backblaze.
John:
You can exclude folders.
John:
Just have this one location that you're sure is excluded from all the backup systems that you use.
John:
And anytime you ever need to put something on disk that you don't really want on disk, put it in the do not backup folder.
John:
Second thing is related to exports and everything I talked about.
John:
Before, when we had the two-factor set up, I just wanted to get that information out, and it was set up in the Google Authenticator app, and I said I basically ran out of time when I was trying to reverse engineer the format, because if you do an export from Google Authenticator, it'll give you a QR code, and so I saved that QR code, and then I decoded the QR code, and then within that decoding of the QR code, there was some more information to decode, and I was...
John:
And eventually it decodes into like a there's a big chunk where it's like a proto buff because Google loves its proto buffs.
John:
And I was decoding that and I got that decoded.
John:
But then there was more like binary data in it.
John:
I just ran out of time before I could get it all down.
John:
And other people were like, what are you talking about?
John:
If you just decode the QR code, it's a simple plain text thing.
John:
And the thing field called secret is just what you put into that sort of setup code in the Apple thing.
John:
That's true, but what the Google Authenticator app exports is not the whatever is OTP, whatever URL scheme.
John:
It is a special Google Authenticator thing, and it's not like it's encrypted or hidden or anything.
John:
The information is there.
John:
Obviously, that's how QR codes work.
John:
The information is in the QR code.
John:
It's not like it's hiding the information from you, but...
John:
I think they came up with their format because if you export multiple items from Google Authenticator, it gives you one QR code, which is super convenient if you ever need to copy it to another device.
John:
I think it lets you do 10 or so at a time.
John:
But that means they're not using the same format because the regular format is like, you know, it's some plain text URL that says basically website.
John:
blah blah secret equals this value it looks like a url right but if you're doing 10 at once you can't just use a single url so what they do is like some other url format where it says like data equals giant base 64 encoded thing and that base 64 encoded thing is the protobuf thing and then you have to decode the protobuf and that's got information inside it including some binary numbers that are
John:
You know, a number is not encoded as ASCII, right?
John:
Actual binary values of 16, 32, 64-bit values.
John:
I think those are the secret.
John:
I didn't get to the point where I could decode those.
John:
But for people wondering why just decoding the QR code wasn't sufficient, it's for this reason.
John:
Because Google Authenticator has an export format of a QR code that is essentially only understood by Google Authenticator because it's to export these things.
John:
Like if you wanted to put it from, you know, if you wanted to have it on two phones or on a phone and an iPad,
John:
you have google authenticator and both that's what you use so the information is in there and you could in theory extract it but i never got to that point there's lots of like python libraries and jobs libraries to actually decode them if you really want to again it's technically possible but once i sorted out all the stuff i knew i had to reset everything anyway because i was totally locked out so when they when i reset my stuff i was at the point where i you know had the real qr code in front of me and then i just put all the devices in front of it and you know got it all set up
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So Marco has a computer that cannot successfully record a podcast, and you are also having some amount of computer trouble, it sounds.
Casey:
So I can hardly wait to hear what I'm spilling on my laptop or what ailment is going to befall me soon, since everything happens in threes anyway.
Casey:
But tell me, John, what's going on with your computer?
John:
that's not it's just a follow-up from a past thing remember i talked about i had this i did this long audition of many many different mice for my computer and i ended up picking the one i wanted there was this microsoft mouse and then i used it for a while and then like the rubber on the side where my thumb touches it started to wear down yeah i feel kind of gross and i bought a backup one and i went through that whole rigmarole where they had to like have me take a video of it that was many episodes ago i don't i couldn't find the episode but anyway a while ago that happened
John:
So I've been using the new, you know, replacement, not replacement, the backup mouse.
John:
They sent me, I sent my mouse in because it was broken.
John:
They sent me a refurb one.
John:
I thought the refurb one looked kind of gross, but I had previously bought a backup mouse.
John:
So I was using the backup mouse.
John:
And now the backup mouse has worn in that same spot where my thumb goes.
John:
So I looked at the dates, and I ordered this mouse on April 2nd, 2021, and on May 8th, 2022, the little thing was worn.
John:
So that's 401 days, just slightly over a year.
John:
So the Microsoft Precision mouse, my favorite mouse, the mouse I really, really like, essentially lasts a year, and it costs $99.
John:
So I guess I'm going to pay...
John:
a hundred dollars a year to keep using this mouse or probably what will happen is I will tolerate the fact that there's a little thing that I can feel under my thumb by the side of the mouse but I really wish they had just used like they should talk to Logitech whatever rubber Logitech uses on its mice I think it is way sturdier maybe it's not as supple and soft and velvety as the rubber they use on the Microsoft mouse but I think it's more durable you know and I don't dislike the other mice that I bought um
John:
I have an MX Master 3.
John:
I have like a Logitech gaming mouse.
John:
I have a different, some other mouse that my wife is using on her computer.
John:
I still like the Microsoft one the best.
John:
I just wish it was slightly more durable.
Casey:
We had some good feedback with regard to Async Await and Combine, which was an ASCII ATP from last week.
Casey:
This feedback was from Patrick Niemeyer, and I thought I'd just quote it real quick.
Casey:
Async await is syntactic sugar for asynchronous callbacks, making code simpler and more readable by virtue of being more quote-unquote declarative.
Casey:
APIs like Combine or RxSwift generalize this further, letting you think of the callbacks as streams of events, which can be reasoned about over time, allowing them to be filtered and orchestrated across multiple sources, also in a declarative way.
Casey:
When possible, it is always better to tell code what you want to do rather than how you want to do it.
Casey:
This generally improves the readability and maintainability of the code while simultaneously allowing it to benefit from improvements in the underlying APIs, compilers, and tools that they improve.
Casey:
I thought that was really well put.
Casey:
This is a lot of the same argument for SwiftUI over UIKit.
Casey:
You're just saying, you know, hey, I want a list here.
Casey:
I want within the list a text, a vertical stack, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So this is a lot of the same reasons why I've come to like SwiftUI.
Casey:
Also, for me, it's worth noting, I don't think I belabored this point appropriately last week, but one of the things I really like about RxSwift and Combine in functional reactive programming is that if you're smart about it, it's very, very easy, generally, to write kind of state-free apps.
Casey:
And obviously, every app has state, but when you're just processing an input...
Casey:
and then potentially generating, kind of atomically generating a new state of the world, you don't have to really store the state.
Casey:
It's just you react to the next version of the state.
Casey:
This is hard to paint a word picture about, so I probably lost everyone and I'll just let it go.
Casey:
But suffice it to say, you can get rid of a lot of state in your app by not having to store things and simply reacting to events as they happen, which is exactly what Patrick was saying as well.
Casey:
So I thought that was pretty cool.
Casey:
All right, so this is Inwall Ethernet Corner.
Casey:
I got a lot of feedback about this, which was good.
Casey:
I appreciated all of it.
Casey:
I tried to at least acknowledge most, if not all of it.
Casey:
If I didn't acknowledge your feedback, don't think that I didn't read it.
Casey:
I absolutely read everything.
Casey:
One of the things that I loved about this adventure so far is that I got these two pieces of feedback, I think, the same day.
Casey:
First from Daniel.
Casey:
Daniel says, absolutely do not bother with Cat 6a.
Casey:
And Daniel writes, I am not sure what the price difference between Cat 6 and Cat 6a in the U.S.
Casey:
is, but for me in Australia, the only thing for me that would warrant the extra expense of Cat 6a would be if the run was long or extremely hard to repeat in the future.
Casey:
Cat 6 achieves 10 gig at distances shorter than 55 meters, so that would be fine in a home network.
Casey:
The same day, I received the following from Josh Hattersley.
Casey:
Absolutely use Cat6A cable for your interior wall slash attic slash subfloor runs.
Casey:
It's a nice bit of future-proofing, and given that you should never have to touch those wires again, worth the extra time and pain in the tookus of working with stiffer cable.
Casey:
Josh also pointed out, I think it was Josh that pointed out a few other things, including, Josh wrote, note that they're both unshielded 6AU or UTP and shielded 6AF UTP.
Marco:
Doesn't F UTP sound like a show that our haters would make?
Casey:
probably yes actually very well done indeed uh don't give them ideas please uh so anyway uh additional level shielded cable available at six i like the butterfly keyboard f-u-a-t-p what would it be all about like elon musk nfts and the butterfly keyboard maybe android
Casey:
There's an additional level of shielded cable available, 6A SFTP.
Casey:
That's S slash FTP, not SFTP.
Casey:
That is not only an outer screen braid, but also individually foil wrapped twisted pairs.
Casey:
Unshielded 6A will likely be fine or go for FUTP at the most.
Casey:
And we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I know, I know.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes to pictures of all these things.
Marco:
Follow up, you suck.
Yeah.
Casey:
Here we are again on the FUTP podcast, and they still suck.
Casey:
Why don't they just switch to Windows?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
If they hate the Mac so much, if they're so critical, if they're so hypercritical.
Casey:
Anyway, all right.
Casey:
So a lot of people said to use Cat6 or even 5E cables to get from the jacks to your equipment, Cat6A is not at all flexible compared to other Ethernet cables and a pain to use in patch-length scenarios.
Casey:
If you actually need higher rated patch cables down the road for 10 gig E, you'll be opening up a whole new can of worms anyway, and you'll need to replace those cables regardless.
Casey:
So that was mostly, if not entirely, from Josh.
Casey:
I really appreciate that.
Casey:
Some more general observations, other than everyone disagreeing over what kind of cable to run.
Casey:
A lot of people said use pass-through crimpers.
Casey:
I may or may not have mentioned this last episode, I don't recall, but when you crimp an RJ45 end onto a cable, when I was doing this 20 years ago, you had to get the eight little teeny tiny wires all the way up to the end of the connector, and then you had to use a little tool to crimp down and hope that none of those eight wires shimmied forward or back even the tiniest bit, and it was a nightmare.
Casey:
Well, apparently there exists now pass-through crimpers where you just shove the eight lines all the way through the RJ45 and then you crimp it and some of the really nice crimpers will just slice off the extra.
Casey:
Or worst case, you take wire cutters and slice off the rest, which is super cool.
Casey:
And everyone pretty much universally said use those.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, when I was trying to fix my Cat7, my couple of bad Cat7 cables and jacks myself, I actually tried one of these.
Marco:
But the problem was I could not for the life of me find pass-through cable ends that would fit the thickness of the Cat7 little cables.
Marco:
And there's yet one more reason not to use Cat7 for most people.
Marco:
So I can strongly recommend doing this the correct way and not doing what I had.
Yeah.
Casey:
And I have heard some people say that 6A, the individual, eight individual wires in 6A are often a little bit bigger than five or regular six.
Casey:
So you do have to be a little careful with the components you buy.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it seems a lot less bad than Cat7.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I also, this was mentioned by Josh earlier, but I also heard pretty much unanimous agreement that I should not do what kind of started me down this whole path in the first place, which was, oh, I can have the exact length patch cable I want.
Casey:
I'm not really clear why everyone is so against this, except if you're using big, thick cable like 6A.
John:
pretty much everyone agrees that i should not do that and i should just buy patch cables i don't know i mean i think depending on what i end up buying if i do this at all we'll see how it goes i like i said apparently 6a is really crummy for cabling or patch cabling because it is so physically can you buy is it easy to find stranded uh cable because patch cables are always with stranded what you mean by stranded is that within each individual conductor it's made up of a bunch of tiny little conductors like you've seen this if you ever cut open a wire and instead of seeing a solid copper conductor in there you see a
John:
whole bunch of little tiny hair thickness copper things that's stranded wire that makes the wire more supple and easier to bend it's not stiff right and so that's what patch cables are made out of you just buy commercial ones if you're going to make your own patch cables you'd have to find stranded cable and then crimp
John:
the stranded cable i don't even know how that would work right i don't know if that's easy to do or not but i would never want to make like setting aside the difficulty of like making it yourself and how stiff it is just like i wouldn't want a patch cable that's not made with stranded and once you're making it out of stranded stuff i feel like you might as well just buy it at that point because
John:
It just seems like a whole different thing than making.
John:
Maybe it's just the same as making a regular one.
John:
But anyway, coming from office environments like you, Casey, like didn't your work also have like someone in the IT department or whatever, the networking department made the patch cables and weren't they not pleasing to use?
Casey:
You know, I don't, it's been a long time since I worked at a place that used Ethernet.
Casey:
Like I demanded it because I'm that guy, but almost pretty much everyone else at my last job, they were just sitting on wireless all day, every day.
John:
Well, we had, we had plenty of patch cables that were made by the networking people and they were not stranded wire and they didn't have nice looking connectors on the end and they were just a pain to deal with.
John:
And they didn't, they were just, they were not pleasant.
Marco:
Yeah, they don't usually have like nice strain relief boots and stuff either.
Marco:
Exactly, right.
Marco:
They're just never nice to use.
Marco:
Self-made cables end up looking like cheap knockoff cables.
John:
And if they're not made with stranded wires, they're really stiff and awkward and often have their own kind of bends in them from however they were stored and wherever they were.
John:
And so you try to hook up your thing to them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
For example, when we all got the stupid MacBook Pros without any ports on them, and we all got these little USB breakout boxes so we could connect stuff to them, often one of the things you would connect was Ethernet, and you'd put in the non-stranded patch cable, and it would lift the thing off the table because they're so small and lightweight, and the cable was so stiff that you'd plug it into the Ethernet, and then it would just lift off the table, or one side would lift off the table, and it'd just look ridiculous.
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm glad you said that about stranded versus solid copper, because I never put that together.
Casey:
I genuinely did not understand why it would be so much worse to do it with the bulk cable I might be buying.
Casey:
But hearing you say that, it makes perfect sense, and I get it now.
John:
I'm talking about three feet long, or it goes from your computer to the little USB-C breakout box.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
You don't need anything fancy.
John:
Like Marco said, you want to have the strain relief boot, because things can get yanked around, and you want it to look nice.
John:
Yeah.
John:
aesthetically pleasing.
John:
You don't want it to look like a cable shoved into a little plastic connector.
Casey:
A lot of people pointed out, oh, guess what?
Casey:
You're back in the T568A versus B discussion all over again.
Casey:
I was wondering if that would come up.
Casey:
That made me very sad to realize.
John:
We're not back into it.
John:
We resolved this before.
John:
Yeah, but what did we resolve it to?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
The resolution is it doesn't make a difference.
Casey:
As long as you're consistent.
John:
So just pick one and which one you pick, it doesn't really matter.
John:
But people, you know, people have a preference to B just because it's one more than A, isn't it?
Casey:
Well, and a lot of people just said B was used for residential and A is for commercial.
Casey:
I remember going through this a couple of months ago.
Casey:
I don't need to reopen this.
John:
It was like their compatibility with phone system and things that aren't relevant to your scenario.
Casey:
So it doesn't matter.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
John:
The whole point is do not mix them.
John:
Just pick one and stick to it.
Casey:
Good tip from Ron Dishow.
Casey:
He had said, mark your cables.
Casey:
Either use a label maker or mark them with a Sharpie or something.
Casey:
For example, use an increasing number of tick marks that match on both ends.
Casey:
Something obvious, but I don't know that I would have thought about that.
Casey:
So that was a great tip.
John:
The tick mark system, I like the idea of doing this, but then I'm like...
John:
But what if you're in an office and I can see someone counting the ticks?
John:
One, two, three.
John:
Like, are you supposed to do the slash to them?
John:
If you do five, you know, four vertical, diagonal slash.
John:
It's like we have numbers.
John:
Just write them in.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
Also, a lot of people were sending in recommendations for cable, which I appreciate.
Casey:
But since I'm planning to go through old HVAC tubing, if I do this at all,
Casey:
I should probably get plenum rated cable.
Casey:
So I don't remember if we talked about this last episode, but there's riser rated cable, which is about what the fire resistance of it is.
Casey:
And with riser rated cable, it's somewhat fire resistant.
Casey:
And that is not designed to be in like air ducts or anything like that.
Casey:
If you're in an air duct, certainly an active air duct,
Casey:
I think it's a little kind of dealer's choice if you're in an inactive air duct like I would be.
Casey:
But if you're in an air duct, you're supposed to get what's called plenum rated cable.
Casey:
And that is extremely fire resistant as compared to the riser stuff.
Casey:
And it's made of materials that when they burn off, they're not releasing like toxic fumes into the air.
Casey:
Because if it's in an active HVAC system, then you're pumping these toxic fumes all over the building or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
So I think in my case, if I do this at all, I'm probably going to go with plenum rated cable, which of course makes the already expensive cable even more expensive, especially if I'm thinking 6A.
Casey:
But why?
John:
You're not putting in an active air duct.
Casey:
Yeah, but it just seems like why wouldn't I do this, especially since it's better at resisting fire, and God forbid the house tries to light up.
Casey:
I'm sure the Ethernet cable would not be the thing that carries it all around.
Casey:
But hey, it could be a toaster, and that's a reference for some of you.
Casey:
So anyway, so the point is I just feel like getting plenum rated would be the right-er answer.
John:
wouldn't that just make it more difficult to work with possibly and also it would make it more expensive which might make you not do this whole project in the first place yes to all of those things and i think it makes it more difficult like i said i think the difficulty yes you're making it more annoying for yourself and i think you don't need plenum rated cable but in the grand scheme of things this project is not too large so i feel like no matter what you do you're going to get it done because you have like three things to connect and you're done
Casey:
Well, yeah, about that.
John:
Has the scope expanded?
Casey:
Oh, has it ever.
Casey:
It's so funny.
Casey:
It's so funny being on the other end of scope creep.
Casey:
So if you're not a developer, especially if you're a consultant.
Casey:
Sorry, let me try that again.
Casey:
That made no sense.
Casey:
If you're not familiar with how software development works, particularly in the world of consulting, what will happen is a software developer and maybe a project manager and a couple other people will go to a client and say, okay, what would you like us to build?
Casey:
And they'll say, we would like A, B, and C, please.
Casey:
And you say, okay, great.
Casey:
That'll take, you know, 45 hours or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Inevitably, the client then comes to you and says, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
We need D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
That's what developers call scope creep, because the scope of the project has now crept to be larger.
Casey:
And I joke, but typically it's more like, oh, oh, oh, we need D. Fast forward three weeks.
Casey:
Oh, oh, oh, oh, we also need E. Fast forward a month.
Casey:
Oh, and F and G. Forgotten about F and G. We definitely need those.
Casey:
And that's scope creep.
Casey:
Well, I have scope creeped my stuff to death already.
Casey:
And as I was thinking about this project, well, if I'm going to be in the walls anyway,
Casey:
And if I'm going from like the downstairs to the upstairs, I'm going to want to do all the possible runs that I, that I would need to go between, you know, upstairs and downstairs at once.
Casey:
And well, Michaela's room was my old office and that's tiny, but,
Casey:
And the guest room is the current office and that's much bigger.
Casey:
And it wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the future, the 35 ports that I, figuratively speaking, that I need in the existing office.
Casey:
Well, what if I end up needing those in Michaela's current room?
Casey:
Because when we flip, you know, what if Michaela and I flip flop rooms so that her room is the office and my office becomes her room?
Casey:
Well, shoot, then I need like six or eight drops in both her room and the guest room because you never know which one will be the office.
Casey:
It's just exploding.
Casey:
So, um...
Casey:
I was in the attic this morning, and let's just say the Historical Planning Commission is not necessarily on board with the project in the home at this juncture.
Casey:
So this may or may not be happening.
Casey:
We'll see.
Marco:
So I'm curious, which part of the project would be the most objectionable to a Historical Planning Commission?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think the thought of me putting my fist, or not even my fist, my foot through the ceiling of the upper story, because not all of our attic has boards on it, especially the parts that I need to be crawling through.
Casey:
I think the Historical Planning Commission is extremely...
Casey:
unenthusiastic about the idea of having to do a ceiling drywall repair at any point during this project.
Casey:
And knowing how much of a clod I am, that is exceptionally likely to be a plausible outcome.
John:
Don't forget, I don't know what your eye looks like, but don't forget the hazard in the other direction, which is standing up too quickly and getting a roofing nail into the top of your head.
Casey:
Oh, that is a fear that I did not have until just now.
Casey:
Thank you so much for that, John.
John:
Do you have open stud bays in your uninsulated southern house?
Casey:
I mean, I don't remember there being nails just hanging down into the living area.
John:
Well, look up when you're in the attic.
John:
Point your iPhone upwards carefully without dropping it and take a picture of the ceiling and see if you have open stud bays.
John:
You will have roofing nails coming through the sheathing on the outside of your house and pointing downward into the room you're in.
John:
And if you get up quickly, that nail will go on to the top of your head and you will be sad.
Casey:
I would say I would be very sad indeed.
Casey:
And so will you two, because I will probably not be around for the show anymore.
Casey:
Maybe you'll be happy.
John:
You won't die.
John:
You'll just bleed a lot.
John:
Get some stitches.
John:
Stupendous.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
So there was also near universal agreement that if I am wiring any room, be it one or 10 or whatever, if I'm going to any room, don't be an idiot.
Casey:
Wire at least two wires.
Casey:
If you're going to have one, have two.
Casey:
If you think you need two, put in four.
Casey:
And that's how I got to like eight in the office because I think I might legitimately need that many.
John:
You realize with this project, you are essentially in a race with wireless technology.
Casey:
I know that's a very good point.
John:
We've already talked about like people getting ridiculous 5G signals, right?
John:
If you happen to be right near one of those millimeter wave things or whatever.
John:
So, yeah, this whole project and any wiring project is racing against the advancements in wireless.
John:
Now, the good news is Wi-Fi standards move.
John:
not slowly but at a fairly steady pace they don't seem to be accelerating right so you could probably graph out like how much faster wi-fi has gotten over x number of years and figure out when is it going to catch up with 10 gig or whatever um and really it doesn't matter too much if it doesn't keep up with your internet connection which is moving much more slowly than that but uh you know it's future proof that's why cat 7 is such a you know ridiculous thing it's like as future proof as you think you're making it
John:
Like, just, you know, this type of thing, assuming wireless technology, you know, just within the house, assuming wireless technology continues, eventually, you know, when you're all dead and this house gets sold to the next family, presumably Wi-Fi will be like 10 gig or better and no one will care about what you put in your wall and they'll just laugh at it the same way we laugh at the weird old-timey things you find in old people's houses.
John:
Like razors in the walls.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Counterpoint, though.
Marco:
Look at the history of these two technologies and what actually happens in practice.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Ethernet doesn't move that quickly and requires you to put wires in places.
Marco:
However, those wire standards, again, like I put Cat6 in my house 10 years ago, 12 years ago, whenever it was, that's still fine.
Marco:
I still don't have networking gear that can exceed the capacity of those wires I put in my house 10 years ago.
Marco:
um and and meanwhile 10 years ago they promised gigabit speeds and they delivered gigabit speeds and this entire time they have been reliably delivering gigabit speeds no matter what i have done as technology has moved forward that's always been very reliable 100 of the time the fastest internet service i can get to my house is gigabit and that's unlikely to change anytime soon so then look at wi-fi
Marco:
Wi-Fi always promises more, more, more.
Marco:
In practice, though, Wi-Fi tends to hit a ceiling, you know, of substantially less than whatever speeds they claim it can hit in most people's actual real world use.
Marco:
Because you have things like walls and other people's Wi-Fi and the person next door who still somehow has a cordless phone on the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz networks at the same time somehow spreading broad spectrum interference all over the place or they have a microwave or something like, you know, Wi-Fi is,
Marco:
better in theory in a lot of cases but in practice rarely matches ethernet so wi-fi has a history and probably a future just because of things like physics of potentially being really good and in certain cases being really good but not being as rock solid reliable as wired ethernet when it's available and so for a situation in your own house where if you have an opportunity to wire things and
Marco:
that are generally not moved, things like your TV setup, your office desk, if you can wire those things, wire them.
Marco:
Because not only will they be more reliable and faster, but then they will free up wireless spectrum and bandwidth for your Wi-Fi only devices, like your phones and laptops and stuff, to have more speed for what they are doing.
Marco:
So I think there not only is still a role for Ethernet today, but I think that role will kind of continue indefinitely.
Marco:
Again, I'm not making an infinite timescale argument here, but I think Ethernet has still quite a lot of years that we will still want to use it when we reasonably can.
John:
I'm not arguing against wiring things with Ethernet, obviously.
John:
All my stuff is wired with Ethernet for those exact reasons.
John:
What I'm saying is for most people...
John:
Ethernet is already pointless.
John:
How many people do you know who it's super important in their house that they have Ethernet drops to every room?
John:
Only the weirdest of computer nerds.
John:
Everybody uses Wi-Fi.
John:
Wi-Fi is the home networking solution, despite the fact that it has worse latency, that it has worse bandwidth, that it has interference, and your microwave messes it up sometimes.
John:
Despite all of that, Wi-Fi has already won that.
John:
And what I'm saying is if you graph how much faster is Wi-Fi getting better versus...
John:
Ethernet standards, which are only tangentially relevant because people don't even have Ethernet wires in their house.
John:
And internet connections, which are getting better much more slowly.
John:
And especially if you throw 5G in there and the possibility of 5G penetration, especially people who live in urban areas, 5G is already faster than gigabit Ethernet.
John:
if you are lucky enough to look out your window and see a millimeter wave thing or whatever.
John:
And obviously it's not as wall penetrating and so on and so forth, but like wireless has already won that battle.
John:
And so that's what I'm saying.
John:
Like what you're racing against is even for the tech nerd, it's possible depending on where you live that either advancements in wifi or advancements in 5g penetration,
John:
could give you more bandwidth than wired gigabit still wired is better for reliability for latency which is our argument that if you're playing any kind of games put your console connect your consoles to the ethernet do not connect your consoles to wi-fi no matter how good your signal is you know get that a little extra edge it's good um but i feel like that is what is probably going to you know arguably has already quote unquote obsolete the ethernet because
John:
the limitations of ethernet oh i have to have a jack i have to have a wire i have to be near that jack if it's not already in my house i have to have it already makes ether wired ethernet feel like the same kind of relic as having like two phone jacks in every room where if we saw that we're like who cares who uses phones use your cell phone or you get a wireless phone i don't need a phone jack in every room and you say well phone jacks are more reliable than these wireless things you can get interference in your wireless like no i don't need a phone jack right
John:
um never mind that the phone system is ancient and gross or whatever but i feel like we're already there with wired ethernet that already looks weird and for casey's particular scenario if for example he had chosen a wiring standard that maxed out at one gig i feel like within his lifetime of owning this home it's possible the wireless would be defeating that 10 gig he's probably got plenty of headroom but certainly you don't need more than that um and i still think if he does
John:
you know go whole hog and put eight wires into every single room the next person to buy this has to be like what kind of person own this why are these holes in the wall what is this like they won't even know what it is like because wi-fi is just so ubiquitous and you know they're like is this was it an office telephone system you know i don't even know if they'll be able to identify it because you know to casey's point like even many workplaces people don't have ethernet to their desks it's all just wi-fi
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with both of you.
Casey:
And as a kind of anecdote that puts the period on the sentence, if you will, when we were doing the screened in porch, I think I mentioned several times that one of the things I demanded from the electricians and paid them to do was to put an Ethernet drop in the screened in porch.
Casey:
So it's on what was once the exterior wall that I guess it's still strictly speaking the exterior wall of the house.
Casey:
It's just, you know, undercover now.
Casey:
And I will, if I'm sitting down on the screened-in porch working for, which I do often, and if I'm doing that for more than like half an hour, I will grab an Ethernet cable and I will plug it into that port because even though the Wi-Fi is just fine in the screened-in porch, it's still so much faster and so much better.
Casey:
Even considering the fact that this particular Ethernet port has to go through coax, through two Mocha bridges and coax in between them to get to anything, it's still so much better and more reliable than Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And I have the most modern Eero hardware one can get.
Casey:
And this is not an indictment of Eero.
Casey:
It's just that Wi-Fi is a miracle that it works at all.
Casey:
And so I agree with what you guys are saying, that when you have something that is a direct cable to the other things you're trying to reach, it's just so much faster and so much more reliable.
Casey:
And so speaking of future-proofing, Matt Van Ormer writes, forget future-proofing for bandwidth.
Casey:
The hardest part of running Ethernet is running the Ethernet.
Casey:
So if you're fishing a wire through the wall, fish at least two.
Casey:
Then worst case, if you want to plug in another device in the room, you don't need to dangle a switch off the back of your studio display, which here again is just, if you're going to run one, run two.
Casey:
If you're going to run two, run four, et cetera.
Casey:
Also, patch panels are a thing.
Casey:
And I should probably figure out how rack mounts work because I vaguely understand what 1U, 2U, etc.
Casey:
means, but I've never really had to understand what all that is.
Casey:
And I didn't really think about, okay, if I'm having a central terminus for all of this Ethernet that the historical committee may or may not approve...
Casey:
then where is that going to be both in the house and where is it going to be as in what does it look like?
Casey:
Is it just a bunch of RJ45 connectors hanging out of a wall or ceiling somewhere?
Casey:
And so, yeah, I guess getting a patch panel is a thing.
Casey:
And it makes sense.
Casey:
I just didn't even think about it.
Casey:
And then I had a bunch of suggestions for specifically keystone patch panels.
Casey:
So a lot of patch panels apparently have just a gazillion connectors on the back.
Casey:
You know, each individual Ethernet connection has eight strands on the back, you know, and you're tapping all of these yourself.
Casey:
And apparently that's a real pain in the butt.
Casey:
So what you can do is you can get keystone patch panels where basically it may not literally be a square, but basically there's an empty square at each spot.
Casey:
And then you slide in the particular connector you want there.
Casey:
Now, obviously, in most cases, that would be an Ethernet terminus.
Casey:
But you could put like HDMI there if you so desired.
Casey:
So Ron Disho again, if I have 10 drops, this is with regard to why it's better to do Keystone over the other kind of patch panels.
Casey:
If I have 10 drops and want to add another, I have to pull the entire panel off.
Casey:
I have those mini wall jacks like Marcos, says Ron.
Casey:
And along with dealing with the existing 10 cables, to get the 11th into place and terminate all of them while hoping none of my existing connections loosen, etc.
Casey:
With the keystone ones, you can just deal with them individually.
Casey:
Terminate the keystone and pop it in the hole through the back.
Casey:
Not to mention, if for some reason you have a need for it, they make keystones for all sorts of connectors.
Casey:
HDMI, RCA, USB, etc.
Casey:
I'm almost done, I promise.
Casey:
Cameron McKay also had a great tip.
Casey:
Cameron says, I'm glad I had our kids, age six and eight years old, help out with testing the runs.
Casey:
They plug the laptop into each port, run ifconfig to check for a gigabit duplex link, and then run the Oculus speed test app to check for expected performance.
Casey:
They loved doing this and felt proud to be trusted with an important job, which is another great tip.
Casey:
Uh, and then finally something I saw, I was, uh, messing about in the garage, just trying to get an eyeball and a rough guesstimate of, okay, how much cable am I really going to need if I do this?
Casey:
Cause I think I want to terminate everything into the garage.
Casey:
I don't really have a good closet for it.
Casey:
Um, I don't have a basement.
Casey:
I have a, a, I think I said last week, I have a, a, like a kneel space rather than a crawl space.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And the attic gets really, really hot in the summer.
Casey:
So the garage seems like the best place to be the central hub.
Casey:
And I was looking at it, and just because of the way things are laid out in my garage, I think I would need roughly 25 feet or about 8 meters to
Casey:
of cable for each and every drop just to get from the garage either to the crawl space or to the ductwork that takes me up into the attic.
Casey:
So each and every single one of my runs I think is 25 feet at a minimum.
Casey:
And if I think about the runs to the office, which is up and across the house,
Casey:
Each of those runs is probably a little less than 100 feet, I think, if I'm doing this math right.
Casey:
I might be wrong, but just back of the envelope, it's like 30-ish meters for each of these runs.
Casey:
And so I'm not yet hitting the 55-meter wall that is six, not 6A, but six maximum distance for gigabit or 10 gigabit, excuse me.
Casey:
But I'm close enough that I think, I really think I want to go 6A.
Casey:
and i'm probably going to regret it but here we go uh so that's that's casey's ethernet corner uh again the historical planning committee is not on board with this yet so there may not be any action on this for a while but i will let you two know if there is we are brought to you this week by mac weldon my most worn brand of clothing i'm wearing mac weldon stuff every single day
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Silver is naturally antimicrobial and they weave it into the fiber blend.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
I have other problems in my life, I gotta be honest.
Casey:
A lot of people are getting these delightful-looking yellow objects, and although I do have one on order, I am not in the first batch.
Casey:
I am in the second batch somewhere, don't really know where.
Casey:
I have no idea when my delightful little yellow object is arriving, and I'm really jealous.
Casey:
John, do you have a delightful little yellow object?
John:
I don't really play handheld systems just because the RSI issues make it difficult for me to hold a small thing.
John:
Typical handhelds are very small and not particularly ergonomically friendly to use, so I don't really use handheld stuff.
John:
But the Playdate is just so adorable.
John:
I just feel like even if I never played the thing, I just wanted to have one just because it's kind of amazing that it exists at all.
John:
And I know the people at Panic and I think it's just wonderful that a thing they made.
John:
So I'm like, look, I'm going to get this.
John:
Like the same reason I got the, you know, a paper copy of Next Generation.
John:
It was not Next Generation.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Edge magazine.
John:
Anyway, Next Gen was a great magazine.
John:
Edge magazine with Playdate on the cover.
John:
I have a nice pristine paper copy of that.
John:
And I did order myself a Playdate.
John:
But I did enough sort of hemming and hawing over whether I should get one or not.
John:
that I am just so far back in the line.
John:
I have no idea when I'm going to get one.
John:
2023, maybe?
John:
So, you know, I console myself because I did get to see and play with the play date, what, at WWDC 20... 18?
John:
19?
John:
18?
John:
Playdate's been – there's a great podcast about that.
John:
There's a couple of podcasts about it.
John:
So there's the Panic podcast that they talk about the Playdate on.
John:
Now there's a dedicated Playdate podcast.
John:
I'll try to find a link for it for the show notes to hear the story of Playdate.
John:
This is something they've been working on, what, for a decade now?
John:
It's not like they just did this this year.
John:
Oh, it's a Kickstarter.
John:
It'll be done soon.
John:
They've been working on it for like at least 10 years.
John:
So, yeah, I did actually hold and play with a Playdate very early on, and I feel very excited and privileged to have done that, and that will –
John:
tide me over as i wait for my play date to come i mean it'll come after my mac studio but maybe before the heat death of the universe so i'm being patient goodness do you know what group you're in or what your like order number is or anything my i'm in like the 20 thousands and i think like now i don't even know if they've broken into the thousands like people who are getting there is there aren't their numbers like in the hundreds or maybe the single the one thousands i'm
Marco:
thought they were in the thousands but i'm at 20 000 whatever group that's in i you know i i'm my own fault i waited too long what can you do oh man i'm in the 11 000 i'm way before you baby yeah well one of us did get one though and i'm very jealous hey all right so i got my uh play date i was in group i was like number four thousand something and uh it's just delightful so here's the thing
Marco:
If you want a cutting edge game system, the Playdate is not one of those.
Marco:
It has this monochrome, very high resolution.
Marco:
And again, monochrome is not grayscale.
Marco:
The pixels on the screen are just black or white.
Marco:
No shades of gray.
Marco:
It's very dense.
Marco:
It's a very high resolution screen for its size.
Marco:
And it is not backlit.
Marco:
which means you are relying on the light of the room around you.
Marco:
And, you know, certain angles that you hold it against the light are much more visible than others.
Marco:
And so it does feel a little bit primitive in the screen in the sense that, you know, it's like, I think that the lack of a backlight is what really makes it feel like different and weirdly old, but yet the extremely high resolution of the screen makes it feel newer than that.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
It's a fun combo.
Marco:
Did you ever have a front light for your Game Boy?
Marco:
I never had a Game Boy.
John:
So, like, the original, obviously, the screen technology was way worse.
John:
I think they even used, like, passive matrix LCDs.
John:
Yes, it was a blurry, smeary mess.
John:
But they didn't have backlights, and they didn't have edge lights, but you could buy, like, basically, like, a reading light for your Game Boy.
John:
They would, like, attach to your Game Boy and shine the light down to the thing, which isn't great because it's not a...
John:
It's not like it's e-ink.
John:
It's not like it was a reflective screen.
John:
But if you wanted to play in a dark car ride on the way home or something, you literally couldn't see the screen without some kind of light shining out.
John:
So they'd sell you this little attachment.
John:
I mean, the Playdate, like to your point, the Playdate is much more modern technology, incredibly high DPI.
John:
I'm sure it's incredibly crisp and much better battery life.
John:
But it is in the end, it is not an e-ink display and it has no light display.
Marco:
emitting from it on its own if you were in a completely dark room with it you would not be able to see anything because it doesn't unless you have some source of light yeah exactly um and and i will say like you know compared to the the black and white lcds of old not only again is it super high resolution um but motion is perfectly smooth on you know again like the old game boy and stuff
Marco:
it was just smeary and blurry this does not have that problem this is incredibly fast clear like it's it's almost as it's almost like you know like a printed page that is animated like it's just extremely clear and sharp um it is not retina in the
Marco:
So the actual hardware is, I can't say enough, small.
Marco:
Everything about it is very, very small.
Marco:
Like it fits very comfortably in your hands.
Marco:
It's almost too small for some adults.
Marco:
I think some adults might find it too small.
Marco:
I actually, I think this might be my first hint that I might be getting slightly farsighted because it's a little bit hard for me to see some of the really tiny details in some of the games on the screen.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I mean, I've, you know, I've never had corrective eye anything before and I'm about to turn 40.
Marco:
So, you know, that's, that wouldn't be unheard of.
John:
So do you need to like, I'm assuming you don't need to extend your arms at full extension to see the details, but you can't, you can't hold it like touching your nose like you used to be able to.
John:
yeah exactly like i i have to hold it like like the distance that i'm like looking down at the keyboard on my desk like that's about the distance that i have to hold it to see everything totally sharp that's pretty it's pretty far so that's that's probably that's what that's one advantage to having uh to being uh incredibly nearsighted is that in my old age uh my distance vision has gotten slightly better and although my closer vision has gotten worse i can still hold things way closer than marco
Marco:
yeah um so anyway so the entire system so far like the the first run experience there of course it's what you'd expect from panic very well done very pleasant experience um they i did a software update earlier today on them and it like shows little fireworks when it's installing the software update like it's just so cute everything is like so nicely done
Marco:
um you know it's the hardware feels great it's you know usbc uh this yellow plastic like the matte finish it just feels good in the hand buttons are nice and clicky the d-pad's like clicky and nice it just everything feels solid and intuitive um right now there's only two games for it because the way they stage out the games so that they're i think it's gonna be two games every week or two um that come out for the for the for the first 24 weeks it's like see it's they're calling it a season of games
Marco:
Hence the name Playdate.
Marco:
It's kind of like scheduled releases automatically.
Marco:
And all these games are included with every purchase, so you don't have to buy them separately.
Marco:
So that's a cool idea.
Marco:
And what this does... We are in a time now where we live in a world of incredible abundance, especially in the area of games.
Marco:
We have millions and millions of games we could play.
Marco:
Now, when it comes to handheld games, and especially this has kind of like a...
Marco:
I wouldn't call it an 8-bit vibe necessarily because the graphics are significantly more advanced than you've ever seen on an 8-bit system.
Marco:
The sound is 8-bit inspired.
Marco:
And the gameplay, I think, is kind of a combination, like 8 and 16-bit, but monochrome.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
um i also have upstairs an nes and a genesis and a super nintendo that have game cartridge on that have hundreds or thousands of games on each cartridge on these rom carts and i can pick any game i want from thousands of choices and most of the time that means i pick nothing because it's overwhelming and so what's interesting about the play date is that
Marco:
Here's this device that right now I only have two games for.
Marco:
Only two games are available right now for it.
Marco:
And next week or whenever they do the next drop, there will be a couple more.
Marco:
And so what this made me do, it's kind of like when I got my Sega Genesis, which is my first video game system when I was a kid, it came with the game Altered Beast, which is not a good game.
Casey:
Oh, you bite your tongue.
Casey:
I love that game.
Casey:
And I didn't even have a Genesis.
Marco:
Anyway, I got it for my birthday in June.
Marco:
And from June until Christmas that year, Altered Beast was the only game I had.
Marco:
And for Christmas, I got two more games.
Marco:
And that was the only three games I had for a long time.
John:
I feel like this is a good definition of the difference between Sega and Nintendo, the Sega Nintendo experience.
John:
It's one of the complaints about, for example, Nintendo 64.
John:
Oh, there's no games for it, right?
John:
So I got a Nintendo 64 and I had one game for it.
John:
But that game was Mario 64.
John:
And I didn't care if it was one game because it was like the greatest game of all time.
John:
You had Altered Beast as your one game.
John:
So having just one game for your system can seem very limiting.
John:
But if that one game is Mario 64...
Marco:
it's all good yeah that's that's true yeah i had a friend who um got the n64 like at launch and had mario 64 and pilot wings which were the only two games for a couple of weeks or something like that and oh what about wave race wave race was the best it wasn't a launch game it was literally just it was just mario 64 and pilot wings for a little while you could put pilot wings that can like if you have a table that's wobbly you could put that under the table and you could play mario 64 something
Marco:
That's that's about the use they got.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, so by having this limited choice right now, there's only these two games right now.
Marco:
It's it's this game called Whitewater Wipeout, which, OK, a long time ago, I had my cousins had a Sega Master System, which was the most people don't even know this existed.
Marco:
It's it was Sega's competitor to the original NES.
Marco:
So it was before the Genesis.
Marco:
It was an 8-bit system from Sega.
Marco:
And they had this game called California Games, which is basically a minigame collection of like, you know, hacky sack and surfing and roller skating and everything.
Marco:
Whitewater Wipeout for the Playdate is very similar to a modern-ish reinterpretation of that surfing game from California Games for the Second Master System.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I already knew how to play it.
Marco:
And you basically use the crank to like surf on a wave and make jumps and make spins and everything to get more points until you crash.
Marco:
And that's a really fun little action game.
Marco:
It's fun.
Marco:
Like, and this is something I would probably not have found this in an app store with 100 games in it or a million games in it.
Marco:
But here it is.
Marco:
I got the play to take it out.
Marco:
And there's two games already on it.
Marco:
I didn't have to buy them.
Marco:
They're just there.
Marco:
And it's two games.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Then this other game, Casual Birder, is this kind of like little adventure game where you're going around taking pictures of birds and solving these little adventure puzzles.
Marco:
And I spent like an hour earlier today playing this game.
Marco:
I would never have played this otherwise.
Marco:
I would never have, again, found this in a giant app list or app store or whatever.
Marco:
I would never have gone through that.
Marco:
But here, I found it.
Marco:
Because it's here, and it's my only two games.
Marco:
So I was forced to play it, and I really enjoy it, actually.
Marco:
And I'm glad I was forced to play it.
Marco:
And
Marco:
What's nice about this system is that, you know, modern gaming, I think, has a severe lack of fun.
Marco:
Most modern games are not as fun as we want them to be.
Marco:
In fact, I would even say...
Marco:
I have a very hard time finding almost anything on iOS that's fun.
Marco:
iOS games have been so instrumented to be money extraction machines from people that it's really hard to find anything on the iPhone that's new, that's fun.
Marco:
uh it's they do still exist but they're really few and far between and unless unless like a friend somehow finds it and tells you about it you'll never find it yourself on the app store like they're so it's so little fun to be had out there on ios these days and the big consoles you know i think nintendo is still pretty good with fun they still they still do it pretty reliably um the other the others it's hard you know it's there's so many games that are like hardcore let's
Marco:
shoot a bunch of people you know and and that's not my scene and there's so many other games that are like here's a an artsy look at and we're gonna run through a field and you know and it's like okay that's that's nice it's interesting experience not sure how fun it is the play date is just fun like it's the hardware is fun the the two games that exist so far are fun they're really simple and
Marco:
And I'm really glad I have this little stupid thing.
Marco:
It's so delightful and fun in the broader world of games where that's hard to find now.
Marco:
These games have no in-app purchases.
Marco:
They don't want me to sign up for their mailing list.
Marco:
They don't want to run in the background.
Marco:
They don't want me to create an account.
Marco:
They don't need me to buy DLC packs.
Marco:
They don't need me to buy coins or gems or any of that crap.
Marco:
They're just games that are made to be little fun distractions for a little while on this cute little yellow thing that fits in your pocket.
Marco:
And that's fantastic.
Marco:
And even though it's not going to take over the world, and I probably should get reading glasses to play it.
Marco:
I'm still really happy that this thing exists.
Marco:
And there's a whole other world of it that I haven't explored yet, which is they've made some pretty incredible looking developer tools for it at very different skill levels.
Marco:
They have like a web-based thing where you can literally make games with a web app that seem like it might be a pretty approachable thing possibly for my son to start doing, which I want to start exploring soon.
Marco:
And they also have a C API and a Lua API and all these tools.
Marco:
So I think this is going to have an interesting developer story as well.
Marco:
People keep asking me, hey, you should port Overcast to it.
Marco:
I don't think that would be a good idea for a number of reasons.
Marco:
I don't think this is going to be a device that people...
Marco:
don't ever carry around when they don't have a phone on them and a phone is a much better device to be a podcast player for so many reasons so i don't think that's what that's what this is going to be this is not going to become like this is not going to have a bunch of different types of apps on it for for most people to actually want to use it's going to have games on it it's going to have fun little games on it
Marco:
for that i think it's it's going to be a really neat thing and i really hope it takes off i hope people make stuff for it i hope the games take off uh i hope that maybe maybe my son gets into making you know playing with the you know experimenting with the game maker things maybe maybe i will maybe casey should i don't know like you're gonna make your total annihilation clone for it yeah that'll be good that's a solid call and you could use the crank to like aim and stuff
Marco:
No, that's not how TA works.
Marco:
Anyway, so... Oh, no, what am I thinking of then?
Marco:
You're thinking of scorched earth.
Casey:
That's what I'm thinking of.
Casey:
Sorry.
Marco:
Yeah, scorched... Actually, because TA requires a mouse.
Marco:
And what's nice about this, too, it has a D-pad and an A and a B button.
Marco:
And so, again, it's simple, which keeps it... And a crank.
Marco:
And a crank.
Marco:
So it's simple and it keeps it fun, but it also...
Marco:
It allows it to do things.
Marco:
Any kind of game that works really well with a D-pad generally sucks on a phone.
Marco:
This would be a great thing for Tetris-style games.
Marco:
Stuff that you just can't really play very well on a phone because you need a D-pad to really do it well.
Marco:
I'm very much looking forward to what this becomes.
Marco:
I'm delighted with what it is already, even with just two games on it.
Marco:
I'm so happy this exists.
Marco:
It really is...
Marco:
you know it's like cables has this personality like in a product it's like this just this force of positive energy shamelessly positive and delightful in a category where we really haven't seen a lot of that recently so i'm very happy to see this it is refreshing and promising and and just fun and delightful and
Marco:
And so I strongly suggest, you know, if you really want one, you can buy one on eBay right now for about four hundred and fifty dollars.
Marco:
I wouldn't necessarily think it's worth that much.
Marco:
But, you know, I strongly suggest if you if you are on the fence about this, put in a preorder, get on the wait list.
Marco:
You can always cancel if you want to get on the wait list for it, because this thing, I think, is going to be a lot of fun for a while.
John:
What is the actual price?
John:
Is it two hundred dollars?
Marco:
200 bucks early it's like 180 or 200 with a little flip case and i do have i did buy the flip cases little purple things and they're nice too they're i mean i don't have much to say about them yet they're fine um but i'm mostly holding it without the case because it's just this cool little yellow thing it's more delightful without it i think
John:
And you keep saying there's only two games, but it's like, just to be clear, it's it's it's time to release like it's instead of like Netflix dropping the whole season at once they do.
John:
They're doling out the game slowly.
John:
So that's supposed to be part of the fun.
John:
And you're you're doling out of games begins when you buy your device.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not like everyone is in sync with each other.
John:
Oh, I didn't realize that.
John:
That's that's a really good smart way to do it.
John:
Well, if you listen to the podcast, they talk about the debates they have, like, should they try to make it?
John:
So there's like, you know, everyone's on the same schedule or should they try to do it timed?
John:
And there's plus and minuses of each one's again, lots of discussion.
John:
That's the podcast.
John:
But yeah, the whole first season of games, as far as I know, is done, right?
John:
They're just doling them out to you a little bit.
John:
So it's supposed to be like, not only are the individual games fun, but it's like an on a regular schedule, you pick up your thing and oh,
John:
Here's a new game that wasn't there before.
John:
And you don't have to select the game or whatever.
John:
The games just arrive on your play date according to the schedule of the season.
John:
And by the end, you have them all.
John:
And of course, you know, we talked about this when we talked about the play date.
John:
Not only is like their web-based SDK and a regular one, but every single play date is essentially a dev kit.
John:
There is no special dev kit version of that.
John:
Anyone who owns a play date can make games for it.
John:
And you don't have to go through an app store to distribute those games.
John:
You can give them to anybody.
John:
They can put them on.
John:
There is no quote-unquote side-loading.
John:
It is an entirely open platform.
John:
So if you make a game for Playdate, you don't even have to tell Panic about it.
John:
You can just give it to all your friends and play it.
John:
It is like the PC of handheld consoles, which really hasn't existed in a popular form anyway.
John:
Like,
John:
The personal computer has been like that, but most game consoles, and especially handheld game consoles, have been owned by some platform owner that controls what kind of games get to go on it.
John:
Not true of Playdate.
John:
So if you get a Playdate, you can make a game for it.
John:
You can get a game from anyone else.
John:
You can put the game on there.
John:
And by the way, also, you can buy...
John:
future seasons of these uh play date games uh from panic one season was like one season comes with the thing and then after that i think you'll have to buy the seasons if you want to um but if you don't you just download free games that people put up on their websites or whatever yeah i think it's going to be so fun to go through that because like you know part of the appeal as i was saying was like i only have these two games and so i'm actually playing them both and i'm actually spending decent time with them both
Marco:
if it just came with 24 or 100 games available for it i wouldn't be doing that i would like pick and choose i would have trouble choosing finding one oh that one looks i don't know if i'd like that i'll skip it you know now i'm actually just trying them all and so by having that kind of that kind of gradual trickle of new games coming in it is making me try them all just like i used to do with my old consoles back when i you know had no money and games cost sixty dollars and so
Marco:
I would get one new game maybe every couple of months.
Marco:
It wasn't a frequent thing to get a new game and then be able to spend a lot of time with it because it's all I had.
Marco:
And so to have that in this little thing, I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
Marco:
And this has made me smile more than any game I've found on my phone in the last year.
Casey:
And to be clear, there's a blog post on the Playdate website where they talk about a bunch of other games that you can either buy or get right now.
Casey:
You can buy not through Panic, through other people.
Casey:
You can buy other games.
Casey:
There's one called Bloom that's $10, and they say in the blog post, Bloom is the first commercial Playdate game outside of our season.
Casey:
And so there are other things that you could get if you so desired, but you certainly don't have to.
Casey:
And like you said, you can wait and just get more when they show up.
Casey:
There's also a pocket planner, which I think is very funny, where you can... It's like a calendar on your play date.
Casey:
Anyway, I want one.
Casey:
I'm glad I pre-ordered because...
Casey:
When the pre-orders were starting, this was classic Casey FOMO, right?
Casey:
Like, oh, I don't think I want this.
Casey:
Oh, but everyone else is getting it.
Casey:
Oh, I don't know.
Casey:
I don't want to be that guy that doesn't have one.
Casey:
It looks neat.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
I'll buy it.
Casey:
And I don't know if I'll use it after the first year, but for a couple hundred bucks to try something out from some people I at least casually know, I think it's worth it.
Casey:
And I'm looking forward to getting mine whenever that may be.
Casey:
So hopefully sooner rather than later.
Marco:
Here's a general strategy.
Marco:
If all your tech friends are hyping up this thing that you think you might someday want and there's a pre-order thing, if you can afford to, just place the pre-order because you can usually cancel them.
Yeah.
Marco:
They usually let you cancel them very easily and either get the refund or never have them been charged in the first place.
Marco:
And so just put the order in because it can't hurt to have the order in as long as you can afford to actually buy the thing.
Marco:
It can't hurt to have the order in and you can always cancel it if you change your mind down the road.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
who in the past saw just how much MDM was disrupting their end users, often frustrated them so much they would just give up and switch to using their personal laptops without telling anyone.
Marco:
And in that scenario, everyone loses.
Marco:
Collide is different.
Marco:
Instead of locking down a device, Collide takes a user-focused approach that communicates security recommendations to your employees directly on Slack where they already are.
Marco:
After Collide, device security turns from a black and white state into a dynamic conversation that starts with the end users installing the endpoint agent on their own through a guided process that happens right inside their first Slack message.
Marco:
From there, Collide regularly sends employees recommendations when their device is in an insecure state.
Marco:
This can be simple problems like the screen lock isn't set correctly to hard to solve and nuanced things like, hey, your two-factor backup codes aren't secure because they're sitting in your downloads folder.
Marco:
And because it's talking directly to your employees, Collide is educating them about the company's policies and how to best keep their devices secure using real, tangible examples, not theoretical, boring scenarios.
Marco:
So that's Collide, cross-platform endpoint management for Linux, Mac, and Windows devices that puts end users first for teams that slack.
Marco:
Visit collide.com slash ATP to learn more.
Marco:
That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Learn more and activate a 14-day free trial today.
Marco:
You enter your email when prompted to receive your free Collide gift bundle after trial activation with no credit card required.
Marco:
Once again, collide, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP today to get endpoint management that puts the user first.
Marco:
Thanks to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We do have to pour one out for something that's canceled, though.
Casey:
The iPod Touch is no more.
Casey:
It has been discontinued.
Casey:
The music lives on, gentlemen, but the iPod Touch does not.
Casey:
What an odd news release it was.
John:
It was such a weird press release, right?
John:
So the story is that Apple's not going to be selling iPod Touch anymore.
John:
It's still available while supplies last, but once they're all sold out, that'll be it, right?
John:
And they have a press release.
John:
Fine, whatever.
John:
The press release...
John:
Spends a long time talking about all the different ways that Apple has available to you to listen to music.
John:
The music lives on as the title and it says the iPod touch subtitle iPod touch will be not the iPod touch because Apple would never say that iPod touch.
John:
No article will be available while supplies last.
John:
And then it just goes on talking about the iPod from 20 years ago.
John:
And it talks all about the different kinds of iPods and has a little slideshow showing them and then saying all the different ways you can listen to music today.
John:
And just like a couple paragraphs of that.
John:
And then in the very last sentence of the entire press release, it says customers can purchase iPod touch through Apple.com, Apple store locations, and Apple authorized resellers while supplies last.
John:
That is the entirety of the content of this press release that tells you anything about the fate of the iPod Touch, other than the subtitle that I just read, which is weird.
John:
But anyway, so yeah, this, you know, as Marco said in another channel, and I'm sure as many people have thought, Apple was still selling iPod Touches?
John:
Yeah, Apple was still selling iPod Touches.
John:
I mean, it hasn't been updated in three years, but even that, Apple updated the iPod Touch three years ago?
Marco:
Yeah, they did.
Marco:
They put different guts in it.
Marco:
Well, I mean, sort of.
Marco:
Yeah, like, so the iPod Touch has the guts, the current iPod Touch, I guess now outgoing iPod Touch, has the guts of the iPhone 7, roughly.
Marco:
It's the iPhone 7 CPU.
Marco:
I think the camera's probably worse, but, you know, otherwise... No touch ID.
Marco:
Yeah, no touch ID.
Marco:
Yeah, but it's the approximate guts of the iPhone 7.
Marco:
And so that's already, like...
Marco:
Most people don't realize that the last three major versions of iOS 13, 14 and 15 all have the same supported hardware.
Marco:
So 14 and 15 did not drop any supported devices like, you know, when I was 16 comes out, presumably, you know, being in beta in about a month and then, you know, coming out this fall.
Marco:
it would not be unreasonable for them to drop multiple old hardware generations.
Marco:
Right now, the 6S is the minimum supported CPU.
Marco:
It's possible iOS 16 will drop the 6S and the 7 CPUs.
Marco:
So it's possible they're about to release a version of iOS that drops support for this version of the iPod Touch anyway, and that wouldn't be unreasonable given its age.
Marco:
So anyway, this announcement, again, number one, I think most people were like, wait, they were still selling the iPod Touch.
Marco:
everyone's saying, oh, now the iPod is finally dead.
Marco:
And I understand the sentiment, but I think the iPod died as soon as it became an iOS-only product line.
Marco:
Like, the iPod Touch is not an iPod.
Marco:
It's a cut-down iPhone.
Marco:
And it was never an iPod.
Marco:
You know, they used the name, but really...
Marco:
When you say iPod, that's not what most people think of.
Marco:
Most people think of the music players that didn't run iOS, that had some kind of wheels or buttons or whatever.
Marco:
Even the later generation iPod Nanos that had the kind of fake iOS-looking home screen with a touchscreen, most people didn't even know those existed and have never used one.
Marco:
When you say iPod, you're thinking of...
Marco:
The iPod Classic, the iPod Mini, the iPod Nano.
Marco:
That's maybe the Shuffle, if you are a glutton for pain.
Marco:
That is what you think of.
Marco:
The Shuffle was one of the best iPods ever made.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
Disagree.
Marco:
But that product line ended a long time ago.
Marco:
To say now that this thing that was basically an iPhone...
Marco:
The death of that thing is the death of the iPod line.
Marco:
There's a lot of asterisks on that.
Marco:
I don't want to yuck on anyone's yum, but I think the end of the iPod happened a long time ago.
John:
This is the end of the iPod branding.
John:
Apple used the iPod brand.
John:
They slapped it on this thing that's not an iPod because the iPod brand had value and because also people knew what that was and it communicated back in 2007 with
John:
that you could buy this and it was like an iPod, like it was not a phone.
John:
It's basically what is communicating, not phone.
John:
There's no, you're not gonna make any calls from it.
John:
It's an iPod, but it's an iPod touch.
John:
It's an iPod that you can touch.
John:
Really, it's an iPhone without the phone, but they put the iPod branding on it because that was a good way to communicate its purpose and to put it into a family of incredibly successful products with a name that people loved.
John:
And the retiring of the name, the retiring of like Apple will no longer sell any products with iPod in the name
John:
That means that not only is the iPod gone, which, like Marco said, the iPod went away a while ago, but that the brand is now so retro that it no longer has enough value for Apple to continue to stick it on a product.
John:
And furthermore, that the product that they're making here...
John:
Doesn't really have a place in the market anymore for them to be worth making.
John:
So arguably didn't have a place in the market for many years, which is why they'd go years and years without updating it.
John:
But basically the role of a touch device that's not a phone that is less expensive than a phone has been filled, you know, you know, for kids has been mostly filled by cheaper iPads.
John:
or by hand-me-down phones or used phones.
John:
Now, you can say, okay, well, nothing really fills this role.
John:
And I would agree.
John:
There is nothing that is exactly as cheap and exactly as small and exactly as convenient without the caveats about trying to find used phones and their batteries are worse and blah, blah, blah.
John:
You're right.
John:
There is kind of a hole, but it's a tiny hole.
John:
And in general, I think history has shown that kids would rather have
John:
a small ipad or a big ipad or any literally any ipad than this dinky thing because kids aren't like on the go and want to have this device as they go off you know like that's a phone right and for not phone kids prefer something with a bigger screen because who wouldn't even an ipod mini uh ipad mini has a bigger screen than this so this is a product that really no longer has any place in our lives and it goes out and with it leaves the the ipod product line which
John:
I feel like hasn't had cache in a really long time.
John:
And certainly for the kids that you would be buying this iPod touch for, they have never even seen an iPod and have no idea what it is.
John:
It's just a thing that their parents tell them about.
John:
So it's, you know, it's sad.
John:
I was, as we talked about ages ago on the show, I was, I love my iPod touch.
John:
It was what I bought when I didn't want to pay for a plan for my iPhone.
John:
And I used iPod touches for many years and I still haven't seen anyone mention it.
John:
A little people came close and I'll always bring it up.
John:
There was a very, very, very, very brief moment in time when the iPod Touch was the highest performing iOS device that you could buy.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Before it was called iOS.
John:
It was called iPhone OS, and it ran on your iPod Touch.
John:
It wasn't even called iPhone OS.
John:
It was just the firmware, right, that ran on your iPod Touch.
John:
I think it must have been the first generation iPod Touch.
John:
Actually, it was a little bit faster than the phone.
John:
They were always thinner, as Gruber talked about.
John:
Like if you wanted to see the future of the iPhone, you used to be able to look at the iPod Touch because it was the iPhone without the phone.
John:
And the phone bits used to take up a lot of room in there.
John:
And so the iPod Touch was always thinner.
John:
So I have an attic full of old iPod Touches.
John:
And iPod Touch was stolen out of my car, as I mentioned in a previous show.
John:
I've had a lot of them.
John:
I had a lot of affection for them.
John:
But it's very clear that the time for this product has come and gone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And if anybody out there is feeling very nostalgic about the iPod era, rather than jumping to go try to buy one of these outgoing, you know, slow old iOS devices.
Marco:
I think they're kind of already sold out from what I've been seeing.
John:
Like, I think.
Marco:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
Anyone who was even like a lot of people like, oh, I use a testing device or it's nice to have a slow device or I just want to have one for my kit.
John:
Everybody who is like, you know, thinking about that, but never actually going following through and buying it.
John:
As soon as they announced cancel, I think all those people just said bye.
John:
It's cheap enough.
John:
It's like an impulse purchase and they are very difficult to find now.
Marco:
yeah and and i have heard you know i i said on twitter like who even use these anymore and and i have heard from a lot of people who said like they have they have some kind of special use for them like one of them was like people who who do audio tours in museums they they have these things in special rugged cases or people who have like certain things where they have to give like a fleet of them to children in school for some reason like there are people who use these um but but yeah i think that's that's a that's a dwindling group and the fact is that
Marco:
If this market was already being served enough by still selling iPhone 7 guts in 2022, then it probably is not that big of a market.
Marco:
But that being said, if you want to experience iPod nostalgia –
Marco:
Here's what you do.
Marco:
Don't buy one of these things for $200.
Marco:
Go on eBay and buy a second generation iPod Nano for like 30 bucks because there's always I know this because I did this for as part of a thing I was doing last fall.
Marco:
I actually bought an iPod Nano from eBay for 30 bucks.
Marco:
It had like a, you know, refurbished with a new battery in it.
Marco:
and it was fine and it worked and it was really fun and modern mac os still supports syncing to an ipad to an ipod as long as you can dig up a dot cable somewhere or possibly buy one of those on ebay as well or it might come with it depending on you know what kind of seller you buy it from um but as long as you still have or can get a dot cable and you can plug it into any modern mac and you can sync songs to it uh from the the now finder interface for plugging an ipod and it works and
Marco:
The iPod Nano second gen, I think, is the epitome of what people think of when they think of what an iPod is.
Marco:
You know, you're usually not thinking of the later, again, like the big kind of all screen models.
Marco:
You're even not really thinking of like the ones that have really fancy color to like, you know, show video and big album art and everything.
Marco:
The ones that look like iOS, like that's not what you're thinking of.
Marco:
You're thinking of either an iPod Classic or an iPod Nano.
Marco:
And even then, like the earlier Nanos, not even the later Nanos.
Marco:
And you can get that experience for $30 on eBay.
Marco:
And then you can try it for a few days and you can realize, okay, this is fun and nostalgic, but it's so much better to just use my phone with my wireless earbuds and my streaming services and my cell connection if I forgot to download something and my easier navigation and my much larger collection.
Marco:
You start realizing, okay, actually, there's a reason why we replaced Windows.
Marco:
all of this category with phones and that's where really killed the iPod was when we all got iPhones then there was no reason all of us we loved our iPods and when we got our phones we would tell ourselves I'm still going to carry the iPod too maybe I'll keep it in the car or whatever and they just slowly fell out of use because phones are just so much better for this role so
Marco:
This is a wonderful piece of nostalgia.
Marco:
It's great to go the eBay route if you want to have some fun with one for a little while, but then you'll move past it because what we have now is better.
Marco:
So it was a great era.
Marco:
That era is over.
Casey:
Yeah, my first Apple device of any sort was the original iPod Nano, which I coveted.
Casey:
I wanted one so badly.
Casey:
And if I'm not mistaken, it was one of Aaron's like first big gifts to me.
Casey:
I think that's correct.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure that's right.
Casey:
And I don't even know if I still have it or not, but I wanted that thing so bad when I got it.
Casey:
I loved it.
Casey:
Gosh, did I love that thing.
Casey:
And I take a slight issue with what you said earlier, Marco.
Casey:
The iPod, I think, died with iOS 5.
Casey:
And I was running through the screenshots on Wikipedia.
Casey:
I had forgotten that the music app on iOS 1 through 4 or iPhone OS 1 through 4 was called iPod.
Casey:
And it was iOS 5 that it became music.
Casey:
Yeah, I did not remember that at all.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
And that's not just on the iPod Touch.
Marco:
On the iPhone build as well?
John:
It's not three separate devices that you're getting at.
John:
There's an iPod app, there's Internet Communicator, which is Safari, and there's the phone icon.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I had completely forgotten about that.
Casey:
I forgot about that, too.
Casey:
So iOS 5, when it became music, that's when the iPod really, truly died.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
John:
Oh, I've got to do one more canceled product.
John:
No, it's going to take too long.
John:
It's not going to take too long.
Casey:
It'll be fine.
Casey:
Okay, here we go.
John:
You have tons to say about this?
John:
I don't think you do.
Casey:
I have hours of content about this, John.
Casey:
Hours, I tell you.
John:
This is a few weeks old, but it's in the same category as Apple canceling products.
John:
They finally put to bed macOS server.
John:
And you may be wondering, what the heck is macOS server?
John:
Do you mean macOS 10 server?
John:
No, I do not.
John:
This is another one of those products that Apple had for many years that slowly faded away, kind of like the iPod slowly faded away until finally it goes away and people are like, what's going away?
John:
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
John:
Not to give too much history, but back before Mac OS X, there was a product Apple sold called Mac OS X Server that was based on... It was not based on the same code base that Mac OS X 10.0 was based on.
John:
It was based on the Rhapsody code base from ages ago.
John:
So it was really confusing.
John:
They released a product called Mac OS X Server, right?
John:
But that was not based on...
John:
mac os 10 then mac os 10 came out you know we got jaguar puma you know cheetah jaguar puma blah blah blah right and they also introduced a new product called mac os 10 server that had really no relation to the previous mac os 10 server but was instead the server variant of mac os 10.
John:
So, you know, you get Mac OS 10, 10.2 Jaguar and you'd get the server variant.
John:
I forget what year the server variant came.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
I never reviewed Mac OS 10 server.
John:
Right.
John:
But it existed as a companion with the regular Mac OS 10 thing.
John:
And then at some point in the past, you know, we're not going to do that anymore.
John:
we're not going to have a server version and a regular version because we're just tired of supporting the server version.
John:
And, you know, we're just going to have one version.
John:
We're going to call it OS 10 by this point, I think it was called.
John:
And the server part of it will just be an app or a set of apps that will, you'll be able to get and install on plain old Mac OS 10 that will provide you server functionality.
John:
So if people are wondering what, what is Mac OS 10 server?
John:
What did it have?
John:
Have like a mail server and you can manage other people's Macs with it.
John:
And,
John:
What else did it have?
John:
Like a directory service.
John:
Like it had server type stuff that you could run on a Mac if you wanted a Mac to be a server, usually a server for a bunch of other Macs, but the services would be cross platform.
John:
And they just consolidate a lot of stuff into apps or an app called server or whatever.
John:
And so Mac OS 10 server was no longer a product that you could buy.
John:
But you could still buy Mac OS 10 or whatever it was called and then put this server stuff on it.
John:
This discontinuation is now we're not even going to give you that server stuff.
John:
We're tired of having a directory server.
John:
We're tired of having a mail server, a file sharing server, a time machine server.
John:
We're not going to have that as a separate product.
John:
Most of those things have been built into plain old Mac OS, right?
John:
So you don't need a special server variant.
John:
It's just part of the OS now.
John:
And the things that weren't built in...
John:
We're just not going to make them anymore.
John:
And Apple points you to third parties that do things like this.
John:
So if you want to use mobile device management, there are third party ones for that.
John:
If you want to use some other feature that is not built into the U.S., here are some third party companies that provide that.
John:
And I feel like this kind of this is the sort of end of the road and not really because like it's been the writing's been on the wall for ages.
John:
Right.
John:
But.
John:
Apple slowly but surely exiting the server space saying, that's not what Macs are for.
John:
You don't run a Mac to be a server for your fleet of other computers, right?
John:
Apple wanted to be in that business back when the PC was kind of the center of gravity of the market.
John:
And then it tried to play there.
John:
Apple made servers, the X server, rack-mounted Mac server.
John:
They made a server OS.
John:
They said, you can use a Mac to be a server.
John:
And some people were into that, but not enough people.
John:
And just eventually Apple said, you know what, Microsoft, because that's what we're talking about here, you can have this market.
John:
And so for a brief moment, Apple was like, we're going to fight against Exchange and Active Directory and we're going to have our own products and some of them are going to be open source and we're going to be a great server for Macs.
John:
Well, we can serve other things too and you can buy a really nice looking server and rack mount it.
John:
And pay way more than you'd pay for an Intel Unix or Windows-based server.
John:
But it looks really nice.
John:
And we'll run our server OS on it.
John:
And it just never really got going.
John:
For lots of very good reasons, it never really got traction.
John:
And so this is not a surprise that Apple is just finally, completely, totally exiting and saying, look, we're not even pretending we're doing anything remotely in this space.
John:
We'll just disband all those teams.
John:
Any part of this that we thought was useful, we shoved into macOS proper, and it is there, and it is useful, and you can have it, but we're not pretending Macs are servers.
John:
And kind of like the iPod Touch, like, okay, this all makes sense.
John:
If you write it down on paper, like, I can see, you know, this is not a market Apple wants to be in.
John:
But in kind of the same way as Apple getting out of the Wi-Fi market, well, maybe not quite the same way, but, like, I find it a little bit sad because it is essentially...
John:
you know, receding the market to Microsoft.
John:
Not that I have anything particularly against Microsoft, but Microsoft's complete dominance in the world of corporate IT of like, hey, you have a company and people in your company have computers and you need to have like a directory service so people can look up other people's email addresses and you need to have a mail server and so on and so forth.
John:
Having Microsoft continue to
John:
just completely dominate that field does not make me particularly happy and it's not just because everyone ends up getting slack and liking it and then slack gets replaced with teams that everyone hates but that is part of it that's an example of that is so true in so many places even before slack and teams like it's like example of just like look
John:
You're going to have to pay Microsoft anyway because every company pays Microsoft because there's something you need from Microsoft.
John:
And why do you need something?
John:
Well, you want your people to have corporate email, right?
John:
And you want to do like anything you think you want to do.
John:
Microsoft is the default.
John:
And if you decide, well, I don't want to pay Microsoft for everything.
John:
Not that it's impossible to find alternatives, like Google will sell you all that stuff too, right?
John:
But Microsoft is still dominant in this business.
John:
Microsoft is the best at it.
John:
They've been doing it the longest.
John:
And when I say the best at it, they're the best at selling companies things that companies want to buy or think they want to buy.
John:
But in my experience, using these products...
John:
Google's not great at it either, but Slack is the great example.
John:
How about someone who's not Microsoft or Google?
John:
Can they make a product that can help enterprises do the things that enterprises want to do and that users don't actively hate?
John:
Yeah, they could.
John:
And for a brief moment, there was a product that people didn't... Same thing with Dropbox.
John:
For a brief moment, there was a product that users didn't actively hate that businesses seemed to like.
John:
But Dropbox was replaced by either Box or OneDrive, and the Google stuff was replaced by Microsoft, and it just...
John:
I know I'm kind of out of the corporate rat race, and this is really not relevant to my life anymore.
John:
But I look at them and I say there was a moment that people never really believed was real, but it really was when Apple was like, you know what?
John:
We're going to get right in there, and we're going to fight for this market, and we're going to fight for this market with Apple-y products, unashamed Apple-y products.
John:
They fought, and they lost, and they lost big, and then they ran away.
John:
And I feel like it's not good for no one to be fighting for this.
John:
And you say, well, Google's fighting Microsoft.
John:
But on the other hand, Microsoft's fighting Google.
John:
I feel like just the number of competitors is too low and none of them seem to have...
John:
i don't know i mean there's a reason i'm a mac user and not a windows user and that appeals to my tastes and and i guess there's a reason that that businesses choose windows for their servers even as businesses increasingly choose max for their you know end user things it it just i i feel like i don't want to live in a world where the only two choices are microsoft and google and that microsoft is dominant um and i think that it's sort of
John:
emblematic of the entire enterprise software problem where the people who choose what to buy are not the people who, you know, use the software, right?
John:
And so users continue to be somewhat put upon by the corporate solutions they're forced to deal with and every other competitor that tries to fight for that market ends up getting squished and running away.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Robert Boyle writes, in your discussions of the Mac Studio versus Mac Pro, you focus on modularity differences.
Casey:
In the past, you've said that ECC RAM was a big issue for you, which the M1 doesn't have.
Casey:
Do you think Apple will offer ECC RAM and the Apple Silicon Mac Pro?
John:
so the point of ecc ram is you know if there are errors that they'll be detected error correcting code right so we can we can figure out if there's some kind of ram error and the more ram you get the more likely you are to encounter a ram error just because it's a lot of averages you just keep adding more and more bits and if the rate of bit error is the same as you add more of them the chances of one of those bits being wrong goes up and big computers like big pro max tend to have a lot of ram so it'd be good idea to have ecc ram
John:
But this whole thing of like having ECC RAM is kind of a nomenclature in technology from not the distant past, but the reasonable past.
John:
Like that was the way we would do it.
John:
You'd buy, you know, SIMs or DIMMs.
John:
There would be these chips that have RAM chips on them.
John:
You'd shove them into a slot.
John:
And there was a variety of that that had ECC RAM that had error correcting codes.
John:
There would be extra circuitry to detect when an error was encountered and either correct the error if it could or fail if the error was, you know, too bad or whatever.
John:
And that was important for servers because they had a lot of RAM and there were a lot of them.
John:
And if they had an error, you'd rather have them fail or fix a one bit error if they could or fail if they needed to rather than just to continue as if everything's fine with an incorrect error.
John:
I could say it's a banking application or something like that where you don't want a bit error causing the wrong amount of money to go somewhere.
John:
You don't want that to silently just happen, right?
John:
So that's what you're trying to do is make a more reliable version of RAM when you can detect when errors happen and correct them if possible.
John:
Lots of the more modern RAM technologies, if you look at what they're doing under the covers, have some internal system for detecting and handling and even sometimes correcting RAM.
John:
But we don't call those quote unquote ECC RAM because it is not exactly like the RAM of the old days with ECC technology in them.
John:
So all that said, I don't actually know if any of the RAM Apple uses in any of its M1 type things have any kind of error correcting circuitry or technology whatsoever.
John:
I know they're not advertised or called ECC RAM, and they're not the same as the ECC RAM that was in like a 2008 Mac Pro for sure, but I don't actually know if the underlying whatever it is, you know, LPDDR4 RAM is
John:
itself incorporates some of the sort of circuitry techniques and technologies that ECC RAM did.
John:
So I think for the Pro Mac, I don't think Apple's going to go to any particularly heroic measures, but it could be that whatever RAM Apple ends up using, perhaps if not in the first ARM-based Pro Mac, or maybe the second or third one, will incorporate some kind of error-correcting technology that
John:
Just because the underlying industry standard RAM technology they'd choose, like say in the distance future, like the high bandwidth venture, HBM4 or whatever, making some future thing, that itself could incorporate some error correcting thing.
John:
And if so, Apple will use it in the appropriate context.
John:
But I don't think Apple is going to go out of its way to do something entirely exotic and different.
John:
if there isn't already an industry standard RAM technology that offers error correcting stuff for the Mac Pro.
Casey:
John Sulik writes, for several years I've used both PC and Mac platforms.
Casey:
One of the questions I've always wondered is about cleaning software.
Casey:
In the world of PCs, you often find yourself needing to have something that will go through and remove various applications and file system cruft periodically.
Casey:
I was just about to buy some software for my new M1 Mac to handle this very thing, and I thought I would ask the experts.
Casey:
You probably know what to look for and remove manually, but for those of us who are not as familiar in the world of the Mac, are these types of programs snake oil or would they be worthwhile?
Casey:
I can only speak for myself, and I have run things like this in the past.
Casey:
It's been so long, I don't even remember what I ran, and this is not something that I personally worry about, but I have a feeling one or both of you guys will have some thoughts.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that you have to be careful about what you install and what their claims are and what you can do yourself.
Marco:
Things like uninstalling apps and cleaning out a bunch of files
Marco:
That actually is a problem on macOS.
Marco:
One of the great things about iOS is that when you delete an app on iOS, with a couple of weird, odd exceptions that mostly clear after a reboot, it's gone.
Marco:
When you delete an app on iOS, that's it.
Marco:
For some reason, Apple has never brought that experience to macOS.
Marco:
You can delete the app on macOS, but...
Marco:
that doesn't mean that it's gone it just means that like the executable like the binary is gone but it could have left a whole bunch of crap all over your library or whatever um and that that could be there forever basically um that being said uh having a bunch of crap in your library doesn't seem to really be a problem with the exception of disk space that it takes up but you know it doesn't like slow your computer down in a meaningful way to have a bunch of crap there but
Marco:
There are apps that will offer various tidiness or cleaning-type verbiage to describe deleting files that you probably don't need anymore, possibly from apps that aren't installed anymore, or whatever.
Marco:
That's a perfectly fine thing.
Marco:
If you are going to go down that route, make sure that you trust the developer, because you have to give them full disk access to be able to do this, and you're having them go find stuff to delete off your computer, so this is not something to be taken lightly.
Marco:
And most people find that kind of tradeoff not to be worth it.
Marco:
You know, that if you're going to, if you want to go like delete stuff out of your library folder or whatever, you know, try to delete old cruft, you can generally just do that yourself if you are at all technically inclined.
Marco:
You can find the handful of places in the file system that these files tend to be.
Marco:
and you can delete them yourself, and it's usually fine.
Marco:
So these apps, they do provide a service that is a real useful utility, but it comes with significant risks, and there is a lot of snake oil in that business where, you know, certain less scrupulous versions of these apps, I mean, some of them are just malware.
Marco:
Some of them will make claims that are technically unsound or will try to, like, you know,
Marco:
always be running so that that way they can like monitor everything and that's that has some security implications and and again technical scariness so um it is a category where it is useful to have apps in this category for certain people but i think it's probably not most people
John:
This is one of those questions we get every few years and I intentionally put in the program every few years.
John:
Sorry if you're hearing the same question addressed again.
John:
But, you know, I think it's important because especially people who are new to the Mac, they get a Mac and they're like, what things do I need for this?
John:
And you will see heavily advertised.
John:
Things that like you need this to help maintain your Mac, right?
John:
That is just, you know, like the same way you have to get an oil change in your car.
John:
You need an app like this.
John:
And so people don't even ask whether they need it.
John:
What they ask is which one of these things should I get?
John:
The other category is virus programs.
John:
We're not talking about that right now is I do which one of these Mac cleaning programs should I get?
John:
Because it seems obvious that I need a Mac cleaning program.
John:
And, you know, the basic answer is, what I always say is, you don't need a Mac cleaning program.
John:
Mac OS is not designed to need a Mac cleaning program.
John:
If you literally never use any kind of Mac cleaning program, you use your Mac, you'll be fine, right?
John:
Anything that you could, you know, the bad that could happen and, you know, that a Mac cleaning program could save you from...
John:
It can't actually save you like that type of badness of something getting wedged in there and running weirdly or spinning out of control.
John:
That can happen whether or not you run a cleaning program.
John:
Now, the cleaning programs, they're like, OK, well, I don't like say you like Marco said, I can just go delete stuff, but I don't trust myself to do that.
John:
I think that's a good instinct.
John:
If you don't know what you're.
John:
should be deleting don't just go and look and say i don't think i need this and delete it because you will screw things up right um especially if you you know give yourself a bin permission to delete stuff right but by the same token using one of these cleaning apps does actually require some knowledge of what
John:
what's what right because you can mess yourself up with one of these cleaning apps not through any falls of the app but they very often offer features that let you do things that you probably don't want to do like nuking your launch services database there are situations where you might want to do that and having a trusted third party app do it for you is good but you don't want to do that routinely it's going to mess things up because now it's got to re-index all of your apps
John:
apps and do a bunch of stuff that's going to make your computer slower for no reason and it's another opportunity for things to get screwed up if your launch services database was fine you didn't need to mess up and if you don't know what the launch services database is don't buy an app that that lets you nuke your launch services database and then click the button because you think it's somehow making your mac better or like a cleanliness thing mac os is not designed to need any of these apps
John:
To the extent that it does, to Marco's point, like, oh, what if an app installs a bunch of cruft and it's hanging around and it actually is harmful?
John:
That is a problem for Apple to fix, not you.
John:
In general, there's not much apps can do these days, especially good modern apps, to sort of screw up your Mac long term, other than taking up a minuscule, negligible amount of disk space.
John:
But you really shouldn't worry about that these days.
John:
And the other one is, and this is going to get more technical, you probably need to know, but like if launch services stuff is left in there, that can have something that is actually running or trying to run and generally sort of being in the background annoying that you don't need anymore because you deleted the app, but the launch services thing is still there.
John:
Very often launch services thing will be there and it will be trying to be run a binary that doesn't exist anymore because it was inside the app bundle.
John:
Apple's modern practice on the Mac are moving very heavily towards the iOS model, where everything is part of the app bundle, including all the extensions and everything rather than being in your library folder, they will actually be in the app bundle.
John:
So when you throw out the app, it actually throws out all the extensions with it like finder extensions or whatever.
John:
But because the Mac is an older platform, that's not true of all Mac apps.
John:
So it is still possible for Mac apps to spray files all over your disk.
John:
Which is why, by the way, one of these sort of instincts that you can, you know, lean on even as a new Mac user is if I install the app by dragging an icon into the application folder, I can be fairly confident.
John:
And if it didn't prompt me for some future install process, that dragging the app out of the application folder into the trash.
John:
got rid of anything that i really need to care about yes you'll still have preferences and other stuff or whatever but if on the other hand you used an installer or a dot pkg thing to install the app that may have sprayed files all over your disk you don't actually know where it's putting things you can find out if you're technically savvy you can look at a use an app like pacifist look what pkg is doing and you can look at what an installer is doing by you know running fsu you know like there's all sorts of techie things you can do but
John:
FS usage?
John:
Eh, I guess so.
John:
But like, if you, you know, modern, well-behaved Mac apps...
John:
will not even leave any cruft around that you need to care about.
John:
And in general, macOS does not require you to have any of these kinds of applications.
John:
So I would say my default is you don't need one of these, don't try to buy one.
John:
If you find yourself in a weird situation and it seems like, oh, I have a problem and I see lots of people suggesting one of these apps might be the solution,
John:
Again, be careful.
John:
But if you have people that you trust at that point, maybe considering finding one of the reputable ones of these applications, someone you trust tells you this one is reputable.
John:
And I know this thing is asking, do you have a reputable one?
John:
I honestly don't because I don't use these type of applications, but they're out there.
John:
There are reputable ones, but only at that point.
John:
where you are troubleshooting an existing problem and troubleshooting that has led you through a series of things that you trust to potentially look at one of these apps, only then look at it.
John:
But you do not need one of these as a routine part of owning a Mac.
John:
Just let it go.
Casey:
Abel DeMose writes, I'm going to build a backend application that does a lot of server-side crawling and has a handful of questions.
Casey:
To what degree does your choice of programming language impact server costs?
Casey:
Would a statically typed compiled language with a robust concurrency model like Golang be more efficient at crawling RSS speeds than, say, PHP and significantly reduce server costs?
Casey:
If the language choice does matter, what about Swift and Go?
Casey:
Language benchmarks say that Go is faster in many respects, and Golang has a better concurrency model than Swift.
Casey:
I'm comfortable with Swift, but I've never written a line of Golang code in my life.
Casey:
And finally, would the savings and server cost be worth learning a new language?
Casey:
I think, Marco, you're probably most appropriate to answer this question, partially because I don't want to hear John go on and on about Perl for an hour.
Casey:
So tell me, what do you think, Marco?
Marco:
In my experience, I mean, this is very application dependent.
Marco:
So, you know, massive disclaimer here.
Marco:
It depends on what you're doing.
Marco:
Now, I happen to have a lot of experience with this particular thing of crawling a bunch of server of RSS feeds.
Marco:
Basically, that I do, you know, overcast crawls.
Marco:
probably hundreds of feeds per second.
Marco:
This is off the top of my head, but it's probably in that ballpark.
Marco:
This is an area that I do.
Marco:
The crawlers themselves are written in Go.
Marco:
The role here, to be clear,
Marco:
The Go is not parsing any of the RSS or figuring out what to do with the contents of the feeds.
Marco:
All it's doing is fetching the feeds on a regular interval, determining whether they have changed since the last time they've been processed.
Marco:
And if they have changed, stuffing them into a queue to be processed by PHP so that I wouldn't have to deal with Go for all the string handling code of doing all that.
Marco:
And because I had already written it in PHP.
Marco:
And then there's a whole bunch of PHP queue consumers that run on various application servers that deal with that.
Marco:
Now, as for a cost breakdown, the Go servers that are crawling all the feeds, that costs me in the order of a few hundred dollars a month on our frequent sponsor Linode.
Marco:
I have six crawlers that I pay, I think, $60 a month each, so they're like $360 total.
Marco:
now for my databases i pay like three thousand dollars a month um so it's you know we're like talking like 10 times as much cost for databases as for that um and there are a few other servers that help out um you know like the actual web slash application servers that are running all the php you know that's that's an untrivial cost there but databases are the big part of it because databases need
Marco:
lots of everything they need lots of cpu power lots of ram and when you're crawling this many feeds lots of storage space so it depends again depends on what you're going to be doing with with your app but in general in my experience so far every single web thing i've worked on so far that has had multiple servers and therefore you know significant costs
Marco:
Databases are always the biggest cost because when you're doing web servers slash app servers, you can usually do the shared CPU instances at your host, which are usually cheaper.
Marco:
You can usually do almost no disk space, just enough to hold the app and whatever temp stuff you might need.
Marco:
But for the most part, you have no disk space.
Marco:
So that saves on the massive SSD cost there.
Marco:
And you're mainly dealing with CPU and some RAM.
Marco:
You don't even need a lot of RAM usually on most application servers.
Marco:
And CPU, especially the shared CPU plans, that's usually the cheapest resource to get at most modern hosts compared to the other ones.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
You do save in the CPU time by using a very efficient language like Go, but you're saving the cheapest, most available, and most easily scaled resource.
Marco:
Whereas databases are expensive and hard to scale, and usually the bottleneck of pretty much everything you're going to be doing.
Marco:
So yes, the language choice does matter, but not as much as you think for most applications.
John:
The other thing I'll add is that, obviously, depending on your application, it may be premature to worry about this because try getting some customers first where you actually have to worry about scale.
John:
But it is worth thinking about up front because if you think there's a reasonable chance you are going to have scale, the next thing you need to ask is,
John:
yeah but is this like am i going to be limited is the language going to be limiting me in some way right so one way i could limit you is cost like oh it turns out that if we you know we scale up to 100 million users this will cost me so much money so it is limiting me because it costs lots of money i got to rewrite it in a cheaper language but the other way it can limit you is in terms of like total performance throughput right that you just can't get the performance you want like you can't scale this thing up without you know doing something ridiculous like say you write this application and it becomes gargantuan and it's written and you know
John:
PHP or Python or something that is not particularly stingy with memory, and you just made this monster, and now you need to run on something with huge amounts of RAM just to run one instance of your thing.
John:
Oh, and by the way, now you need thousands of those instances.
John:
just to get the performance you want like on an average day of like i just can't i can't handle the peak load at noon when most people are using my very popular application to do that like i have to you know i have to basically scale vertically because it's easy to scale out horizontally but if it turns out that just to sort of run one instance of your thing on one server you need like a monster instance that with a huge amount of ram and a huge amount of cpu because of your language choice that's not a good place to find yourself like you've accidentally written a monolith in an inefficient language
John:
And you need huge amounts of them and it becomes sort of untenable that maybe you can't even get that many or like you start getting beat up on the overhead of just having these things, you know, any kind of sort of sideband communication with each other.
John:
Right.
John:
So an early choice up front to know, is this the part of the thing that is going to be a performance bottleneck or is that is going to like scale up like.
John:
How much RAM is this going to use if we get a million times more customers?
John:
How much CPUs is going to be used if we get a million times more customers?
John:
You can do that back in the envelope math to make some choices early on.
John:
But very often, like in the case of Marcos thing, it's not like a real-time interactive application.
John:
And so in that case, as long as you can get the crawling done, for example, like you can get 24 hours worth of crawling done in 24 hours,
John:
You can just, you know, use wimpier, slower, smaller instances and just take the full 24 hours, right?
John:
Yes, if you wrote it in Go, you'd use half the instances for half the time.
John:
But the bottom line is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, right?
John:
You're just going to start over at the other end when you're done anyway.
John:
And as long as the throughput is sufficient for you to do whatever batch job you're doing, as long as you can get the job done in sort of your time window...
John:
The inefficiency of using a 10 times slower language doesn't really matter because to Marco's point, like it's not going to be that that's not your big expense anyway.
John:
And if it's, you know, if it was fast for you to write and it was, you know, it's a language you're familiar with, even if it's 10 times less efficient, as long as it gets the job done.
John:
And as long as you don't think like, well, if I, you know, are, is there, are there going to be a trillion podcasts in 10 years?
John:
Probably not.
John:
Like the number of podcasts is somewhat bounded, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
So you can kind of do the back envelope of math and say the job of crawling podcasts.
John:
How often do I think they should be crawled for a good experience?
John:
And how many podcasts are there going to be essentially ever like bounded in order of magnitude?
John:
You can say, all right.
John:
Yeah, if I wrote it and go, I would save a little bit of money each month.
John:
But, you know...
John:
If I write in PHP, it's not the end of the world.
John:
It will get the job done.
John:
So it's very difficult to give blanket advice because we don't know what you're doing.
John:
Are you doing a podcast crawl that needs to crawl feeds once every 24 hours, once every hour?
John:
Or are you writing something that needs to be up to date for the moment?
John:
Or are you writing an interactive application that users are going to be using and at peak times there's going to be, you know, 1 million per second or something?
John:
Very different choices based on those things.
John:
So unfortunately for server-side stuff, there's no one answer other than saying you could probably find a way to do it with AWS.
Casey:
I would like to add one quick thing in that, in my experience, learning another language, even if you don't really do much with it, is almost always a worthwhile expenditure of time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
When I first dabbled with Python 10, 15 years ago, I didn't think in a million years I'd be writing code to figure out if my garage door was open or not.
Casey:
And yes, that wasn't particularly important, but it was still nice to have a little exposure to Python years and years and years and years in the past to get me ahead on that.
Casey:
So I don't think it's necessarily bad to explore another language or even learn to some degree another language.
Casey:
And I mean, Marco, I don't see you writing a lot of Go willingly these days, but nevertheless...
Casey:
I think it was a worthwhile expenditure of your time, and I would guess that you do too.
Marco:
Oh, it was 100% worth it because my PHP-based crawlers before this were not nearly as good for this particular task.
Marco:
I use Go's whole channel system, their whole concurrency model for managing this whole thing, and it's great.
Marco:
And you're right, I don't write a lot of it because I wrote this
Marco:
years ago and then basically haven't really touched it much since then and i have since mostly forgotten the language and whenever i do have to go in there and like change one little thing i have to basically relearn the language again just to be able to make a two-line change or something like that it is it's kind of funny and a little bit scary like if i ever have to do a bigger change it's i'm gonna have to like take a weekend and really like relearn the entire thing again
John:
You just rewrite it in Rust then because that's the good thing.
John:
You pick the part of it that actually is performance sensitive, that concurrency matters.
John:
Like you said, you didn't rewrite the whole parsing feeds or whatever because you already had that code and that's not the code.
John:
You can just cue that out and paralyze it.
John:
It's the crawler itself, the little core of the crawler.
John:
And so if you needed to write that again, you know the job that it needs to do and you could say, okay, well now it's time to learn Rust and you could write it in Rust and then you don't have to relearn Go.
John:
And as long as it is comparable in performance and comparable
Marco:
you know mechanisms for concurrency you can just write it in whatever the language of the day that is the most go-like right yeah i mean and and frankly you know if i was writing something from scratch today i think i would i would consider a radically different architecture than than what i did here like i i i've been brainstorming for a while like can i really can i maybe reduce the amount of like database use that i have here because put stuff on people's devices
Marco:
yeah and or you know use things like s3 as the storage you know there are things i can do that i've been brainstorming of like i think i might want to go in somewhat in this direction because it running all this like i had to deal with some database stuff this week and it was stupid and it was easy but i still hate dealing with it on so many levels and and it's extremely expensive and so i i was thinking like maybe i should start you know changing things but there's never a good time to do that so i don't know
Marco:
Anyway, thank you so much, everybody, for listening.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Hover, Mack Weldon, and Collide.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atpc.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
I'll tell you what, I got my new capture setup going with the PCIe enclosure.
Marco:
Finally got it working now with the Maxwell card.
Marco:
I returned the Blackmagic DeckLink card.
Marco:
The Magewell Pro Capture HDMI thing is working great.
Marco:
I have four capture streams.
Marco:
It is a dream to use because not only is this much smaller and simpler than my previous setup of having like four or three different little HDMI capture USB thingies, like it's so much simpler.
Marco:
The enclosure has been great.
Marco:
I have everything running off of one cable correctly now.
Marco:
Like, you know, before...
Marco:
I was describing when I was trying to plug every single thing into the CalDigit TS3+, that some of the capture things would only work if I plugged them in directly to the computer.
Marco:
And so I ended up using all three of my computer's ports anyway.
Marco:
Now I can literally just use one.
Marco:
The only downside is that the enclosure only provides 15 watts of power to the computer.
Marco:
So that's not great as the only power source.
Marco:
So I'm using a second USB-C port purely for power.
Marco:
I could also use MagSafe for that.
Marco:
It would be fine.
Marco:
so anyway that's that's the only real downside otherwise it's fantastic it is it is so far been very reliable the quality is great um and i'm i'm very happy with it so i should have done this earlier honestly okay i should have gone straight to the solution um because like you know it's a decent amount of money but
Marco:
So was the previous setup where I had three different Elgato capture thingies plus the TS3+.
Marco:
That's not cheap either.
Marco:
And so having this PCI Express enclosure with this dedicated card in it and these USB cards is a dream.
Marco:
So I'm very happy with it.
Casey:
So tell me again, it's a generic PCI Express enclosure that lets you basically put what I would consider to be a desktop card in a box and then connect it to your laptop.
Casey:
And then remind me what the card is.
Marco:
So the enclosure is almost everything is Sonnet.
Marco:
So it's a Sonnet enclosure with three PCIe slots in it.
Marco:
Two of the slots I've put Sonnet USB cards in that have four ports each.
Marco:
One A, one C. Like, you know, one bank of A's, one bank of C's because I have both devices.
Marco:
And then the third slot has a Magewell Pro HDMI quad capture card.
Marco:
So it captures four HDMI ports.
Marco:
And the Magewell was the only thing that required drivers.
Marco:
i wish there was some kind of hdmi capture that didn't require drivers on mac os i don't know if that exists um but as far as i can tell they all require drivers um so this this required them so you know that's one thing that could break in the future is like you know if some future version of mac os comes out and then may as well does not update their drivers that that could that could mess me up a little bit and i'll i'll cross that bridge if it comes um but otherwise yeah it's it's been great