You Got Your Non-Money’s Worth
i have entered the world of winter luxury did you get new gloves or something i did get new gloves um they're okay but like all gloves they're at best okay i i do think you know we did get a lot of glove recommendations the recommendations were all over the map and there was no consensus whatsoever on like what might be good well i think i think there were two strong themes both of which we well one of which we definitely touched on in the show and the other one that was uh we should have touched on more um
One was, hey, mittens are warmer than gloves.
A lot of people said that, right?
And we did mention that on the show, although it was so fast you might have missed it.
And the second one was layers, like wear a thing underneath a thing on your hands.
In fact, some of those things that were suggested were these all-in-one things where it's a glove on the inside and then a mitten on the outside, and you can unzip the mitten and get the glove, but you can do that yourself with it.
glove liners back in the 80s slash 90s we had these sparkly glove liners they look like kind of like a michael jackson glove of course for skiing and i think that's awesome i think the idea is like it would reflect the heat honestly i don't know because i was young and it's just like here these are glove liners you wear them underneath your gloves i was like all right whatever i didn't really question why they were sparkly but they were sparkly but you can buy ones that are not sparkly or silky or whatever so i feel like those are the two big themes then after that it was just here's the favorite glove that i've tried
Yeah.
And I feel like part of the problem here is that this category, literally just the whole category, is bad in some way.
And another part of the problem is that people have vastly different needs.
Like, you know, my needs... Like, it's so funny.
People...
often will recommend gloves that, like... I have tried either that glove or something very similar to it, and it works great when it's 40 degrees.
But you need very different things when it's 20 degrees.
And you need very different things when it's 10 degrees.
And, like, I feel like people...
people just think that cold is cold.
And you don't realize like 20 degrees makes a pretty big difference.
Like you wouldn't wear the same clothing between a 60 degree day and an 80 degree day.
Like those are, that's two very different needs.
Well, for some reason, people think like, oh, these gloves that work when it's 30 will work fine when it's 10.
Nope, doesn't work that way.
So I got some more gloves, they're okay.
And they continue my parade of okay gloves, none of which I'm extremely happy with.
See also like, you know,
to-do apps, weather apps.
There's so many things like that in life, right?
You're like 80% happy with something at any given time.
Gloves are definitely one of those things.
But that is not the luxury I have entered.
I am podcasting right now from atop a new heated rug.
that's a thing i was gonna say i really thought you were gonna say you got silk thermal underwear and then when you said sitting atop i'm like did you get like a heating pad for your butt but no it's the rug that's heated yes so a place i used to live had radiant floor heat in my office and i loved that so much because it's it's amazing like if you have to have a a home built for winter weather or configured for winter weather
trust me you want heated floors it is by far the best form of heat for a house for almost any needs right up until it leaks well it depends you can also get electric heated floors but hydronic heated floors are very hard to leak when they're like in a slab yeah they are good right up until they're not
because then you have a bunch of tubes going through concrete that you have to break up and the modern ones they usually take aluminum stuff and they nail the tubes to the underside of the subfloor so at least if it leaks you have access to it but yeah those things last a good 20 to 50 years and then it's someone else's problem
i mean fair but i mean that's true of many large construction projects and houses like that's that's not that unreasonable but usually not heating like i mean if you think about the the stupid radiators in my house put in here in the 30s and still going strong like there's the bearing stuff in the floor is a not accessible and be subject to all sorts of things that just bear pipes going through the wall not subject to
But your point stands.
You're going to be out of the house by the time this happens.
So yes, if you're getting a house and you have a choice, put the heating in the floor.
And then when you die or move out, someone else will deal with it.
Yes.
And so I don't have that here.
And I missed it dearly.
And I've tried...
Last winter, I tried, oh, let me just try turning the heat up a few more degrees in the room.
And that doesn't really solve the problem.
My feet and legs would be kind of cold, or my hands would be kind of cold, but the rest of me would be fine.
Are you not wearing slippers?
No, I am wearing slippers.
What kind of slippers?
Well, in all fairness, they're not technically slippers.
Oh, here we go.
They are what the website described, I believe, as driving moccasins.
What?
They're slippers.
Can we get a link to this so we can have a ruling?
I'm going to find a link to what I'm wearing right now, which is the latest in a long line of mildly satisfactory slippers.
Can you guess that the ones I normally get, they don't make them anymore?
You don't say.
I'm so surprised.
Well, actually, no, it's not true.
They make them, but they don't make them in wide anymore.
I'm like, seriously, you still make them, but you don't make them in wide?
There's nothing about your body that has ever in its entire existence been wide.
You claim you have wide feet.
With slippers, I like the gloves.
I like them to be oversized for extra warmth.
These are the ones that I'm currently wearing right now.
I've got complaints about them, but lack of warmth is not one of them.
see these giant like the ones that have like basically like an entire rabbit stuffed inside of them like all this fuzz coming out that to me is it's like too it's too fuzzy it'll keep your feet warm well that's too warm that doesn't make my feet too warm so what i wear is basically like uninsulated uh how to put the link it's these duluth yeah these these are nowhere near slippers they're not even in the vicinity of slippers
They're called slippers right there in the title.
I don't know how these aren't slippers.
I know what you're talking about.
You can't slip your feet into them.
No, you're talking about mine.
No, I'm talking about Marcos.
I haven't even looked.
Oh, yeah, yours are preposterous.
I've seen these in action.
They're ridiculous.
But I don't doubt that they're incredibly warm.
You haven't seen these.
You've seen similar ones.
Yeah, I see what you... Those are actually like...
Yeah, they're driving shoes.
Yeah, these are not slippers, Marco.
I've never driven in them.
That's stupid.
Let me just say I do like the fact that they have rubber bottom things on because that's the thing people miss about slippers.
If you're going to buy half-year, six-month slippers like I do, it is good to have a sole on them that you can walk outside in to like...
go get the mail or take the dog out for a brief walk or whatever hard agree hard agree on that right yeah i do that i do that all the time like you know if it's like clean and dry outside yeah i'll take the trash out wearing these it's fine yeah so anyway i do wear slippers however i was not i just wasn't getting the kind of warmth that i knew that a heated floor could offer and so first i looked at should i get one of those little like panel heaters and put under my desk for supplemental heating what do you mean by panel heater
It's basically a radiant space heater, but there's a whole category of them that are made to go under desks, and it's a vertical panel that just radiates heat onto your legs.
The reviews were all really mediocre, and they looked like they sucked, and I didn't want that under my desk.
At first, I tried this little tiny $40 heat mat that's the size of, I don't know, it's like an 11 by 17 piece of paper, like that kind of size.
You have to keep your feet directly on the little piece of paper.
Yeah.
And I tried that.
And it did work in the sense that it was pleasant and it kept my feet warm.
But it was, first of all, really cheap and crappy looking.
It's not something I was proud to show in my office.
And it just was such a tiny little area.
And so it's like, I want something bigger.
So I started looking for, do they make larger versions of that?
And it turns out there's this whole category of basically heat pads that you put under rugs that are made to heat rugs.
Now, my office didn't have a rug, so I went through the process of finding a rug I liked.
Can we see the rug, too?
Put some links on this.
Yeah, it's a ruggable thing.
It doesn't matter.
Does it have, like, a race track on the rug or no?
Actually, it kind of does.
Because you could, you know, get out some cars and, you know, I'm in a race.
That's actually not that far from the design.
Hold on.
I'll find the design.
You could have a town where you have roads, but then there's a post office.
Yeah, you have your kids' rooms.
That was actually the rug we had in our downstairs den area for the longest time.
I think Ikea still makes those.
The kids grew out of it, and we still have the rug there.
I guess it eventually occurred to us when the kids are both approaching teenagers that we probably don't need that rug anymore.
So you actually kept something for a long time in your house, John?
Yeah.
No, surely not.
I think we still got a lot of baby clothes, so.
I'm surprised it only lasted one generation so far.
That's the bigger surprise.
I don't think that rug is an erratic, at least I hope it isn't, but if it is, we'll throw it out.
All right, here's my rug.
It's the Ruggable Metro Slate Blue Rug.
Instagram victim.
Oh, this is a racetrack.
Yeah, I told you, it kind of is.
Yeah.
all right no that's cute um how big is how big is it five by seven because that's enough to go under the whole area that i put my feet plus to go under my chair that way i don't have to run the chair over the like the rug to floor transition um it does it's kind of hard to run the chair over this rug now like because it's the late it's like the ruggable rug itself because it's a thin rug with a thin like liner behind it
that keeps it from scooting around then the heat pad which is like a giant foil thing then under the heat pad is the insulation mat as well so it's like four layers of rug stuff but my god is it nice well when uh when your house goes up this will be good for insurance purposes
i i think it's done in a fairly you know conservative way everything is is pretty pretty conservative on it so it's like very well guarded and it's only like 300 watts it's not that much power um so yeah so it's it's glorious did you ever put a link to the to the heating thing no hold on let me i'll dig that up too hold on it's a lot of bad review when i brought when i first got assaulted by ruggable ads on instagram i looked up some youtube reviews and they there were a lot of complaints about
them yes here so here the the ones on amazon all seem to have really wacky reviews and also the amazon one seemed to be based on either asian or european rug sizes and so i couldn't find one that would fit under any size rug that ruggable sold and i wanted one of their i knew they were okay and they were pretty cheap um and so here so the one i got is from cozywinters.com the rug heat brand is the mat and this brand did not appear to be reliably available on amazon
But I got it through here.
It was great.
And yeah, 5x7, it's glorious.
It's got a little hairdryer GFCI thing or something in the wire, which is nice.
Yeah, like a giant, it's basically a giant GFI thing on the... And then, what was I going to say?
What I need, speaking of things underneath rugs, is I need a...
Something with more traction because when people are in front of our house, my dog is very upset about it and she runs back and forth from one rug to the other.
And each time she changes direction on the rug, she shifts it.
And I always have a rug like in front of my door.
So when you come into the house, the first thing you step onto is not our hardwood floors, but onto this rug.
And she's constantly forever like moving that rug by little bits at a time and I'm constantly moving it back.
And it's got one of those traction pads underneath it, one of those kind of like mesh rubbery things.
But when it's only like a small like area rug for just the front of the door,
it just you know it doesn't have enough weight to get traction yeah and uh yeah well i'll tell you what like on this on this page it says note you must use a non-slip rug pad that rug pad that i that's the one i got for under it it is extraordinarily non-slip like that's you actually might want to guess a small one what's the what is it what is it made out of i mean the problem is the rug size like i mean because if you can imagine if you made a three inch well you cut it
a three inch by three inch rug no amount of like non-slip stuff would work unless it was literally sticky like tape right yeah no i mean i would imagine after a while if it was moving frequently then it might pick up enough dust that it might like lose its its grippiness but it's pretty like it was grippy enough that like once it's down you really can't scoot it around unless a dog runs at it and changes direction suddenly while on the rug right yeah and if you you know if you have a very small rug that's going to be obviously more likely to happen but
I can tell you if you somehow put a 5x7 rug in that area, it's not going anywhere.
Yeah.
I got those like 3M tacky stuff underneath.
There's lots of things I can do, but instead of just resigned to moving.
Yeah.
What's the micro, not microfiber, the micro suction tape?
Yeah.
Something that's actually sticky would probably help.
Of course, then you need it to stick to the underside of the rug as well, which is often the problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
You know, it's funny hearing you talk about, you know, the difference between 60 and 80 degrees and 30 and 10 degrees.
And I'm just reminded how much better Fahrenheit is for ambient air temperature than anything else.
Because what's the difference between 60 and 80 and Celsius?
Like 16 to 17 or something like that?
Yeah, it's like one degree.
Yeah, it's an entire 20 degrees in Fahrenheit because you can tell the difference in Fahrenheit between just a degree or two.
But in Celsius, it's like a degree to cover that entire delta.
How do they... Do all thermostats have fractional... They must have fractional degrees.
It's barbaric, John.
It's barbaric.
Yeah.
Can you imagine going through life saying, oh, it's 16.5?
Like, come on.
No.
I like to wake up at, you know, 17.35.
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Google has shipped tap-back parsing.
That's a tongue twister.
So we talked about this, I think it was just last week or the week before, and we were lamenting how you can see, like, Jason liked blah, blah, blah in iMessage and SMS group chats, or I guess SMS or really MMS group chats, strictly speaking.
It's pronounced mmms.
In the mmms group chat.
And yes, this is where everyone that's not American says, why are you using iMessage or whatever for this?
I understand because we're weird.
That's why.
We're not weird because of Fahrenheit, mind you.
We're right about that.
But maybe we're a little wrong about this.
And to be fair, the metric system is superior in pretty much every other way.
I don't think it's pretty much in every other way.
In literally every other way.
Except when describing ambient air temperature for humans.
That is clearly Fahrenheit superior.
I will give you the metric system for literally everything else.
I'll use it for cooking.
That's fine.
Well, first of all, sorry for the tangent.
First of all, when I was doing my bake-off last week, one of the things that I sought out when looking for a recipe was a recipe that gave me the ingredients in weights.
Because for the love of God, I don't need, like, don't tell me to add a cup of pistachios.
What does that mean?
LAUGHTER
like give me grams how many grams i have a kitchen scale it weighs in grams give me grams like that's what i want and yeah so metric is great for that cooking by weight is wonderful and so much better than volumetric measurements for things that are not liquids like it's fantastic so yeah we get everything wrong we get everything wrong except fahrenheit that's the only thing we've got so we got to cling to it because we do we do dates wrong like month day year no no that's preposterous ymd is the only way to go
it depends on the context but it's either ymd or dmy one or the other yeah what did i what did i come across recently that had dates oh it was i think it was the uh i was scanning pictures and they had the little burned in dates you know and i transcribed the first maybe 20 or 30 of them wrong until i hit something when i said wait a second there's no month 29 wait a second because it was two digit day two digit month two digit year uh and that is just wrong i'm sorry
See, for normal, like, colloquial use, I'll do day, month, year, because it's unusual for, like, scheduling things that you're going to worry about another year.
Now, if you're sorting stuff, then absolutely, year, what is it?
Year, month, day.
You misspoke.
You mean month, day, year.
Oh, no, he doesn't.
So you're saying, like, 25th January.
Like, that's...
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, God.
Because I'm that jerk.
Because we get it wrong.
We get it wrong.
It's stupid.
The only way that's defensible is if you're European, in which case you're charming and it's not your fault, or if you are actually using the month name or abbreviation instead of the number.
Yeah, no, we're just talking about numbers here.
If you're writing out the words, there's an obvious way to do it.
But if you're not writing out words and you're just doing numbers, it's either ISO or whatever that thing is where it's year, month, day, which everybody understands and sorts and is nice and everybody loves it right up until year 9999 when the entire planet, if they're still around, is going to curse us all, right?
Fine.
um but in this country it's month day month day year right that's when you just use numbers that's the rule and i know it's bad and people don't like it it doesn't make sense and so on and so forth but it has a lot of utility and if you're in this country casey do not do day month year with digits you're angry people well it depends if it's for myself i'll do day month year if it's for other people then yeah but you'll have no idea except for when the days pass the number of months i know i always know for the first 12 days of the month it'll be ambiguous
If it's for yourself, it's YMD because then you're a programmer and you can sort things.
Oh, no.
See, here's the thing.
We're getting sidetracked.
I was really having fun, making fun of how stupid Celsius is for ambient air temperature because it's so bad.
Agreed.
And we get everything else wrong.
And it's so funny how dug in the entire planet is on Celsius for ambient air temperature.
And it's so stupid and wrong.
It's preposterous how wrong it is.
Well, we screwed up the calendar, too, with, I forget what the historical reason of, I think it was like some, was it Greek or Roman people shoved in some months themselves and screwed up the numbering, so OCT isn't the eighth month and DEC isn't the tenth month, and it's all messed up now.
I actually also print, so we have a printed family calendar on the fridge, just for a quick reference, and that, we start the week on Monday, because the Europeans get that right, too.
The weekend should be together on the end of the line.
Yeah, I don't necessarily agree on that one.
I'm not down with that.
Nope.
Yeah, well, you guys can be wrong all by yourself.
There's a Robot or Not episode about it.
Check it out.
All right, so let's get back to what we were trying to talk about.
Google shipped tap-back parsing.
So instead of saying Casey likes this message about how Celsius is dumb, then apparently it will say something different.
So let me read a quote from, I believe this is Macworld.
Instead of, quote, Jason liked this message, quote, when an iPhone user selects a tap back, Android users will see a small emoji under the message rather than above it, but otherwise they function just like they would if they were using an iPhone.
As a result, iPhone users won't have their conversations cluttered with tap back texts and Android users won't feel like second class citizens.
It's a true win-win in the smartest messaging feature Google's implemented in years, which isn't saying much because how many messaging protocols and things have they canned in the last 10 years?
It's a big number.
I forgot.
Someone did an article about it.
I think it was double digits, right?
Yeah.
So apparently, and to be clear, this is shipping as of, I think, today or yesterday.
And then continuing very briefly, tapping the emoji brings up a banner at the bottom of the screen that says, translated from iPhone with the appropriate emoji.
Responses come in as quickly as the text and even have a nice bit of animation that feels incredibly natural as per Macworld.
So...
I think this is excellent.
I wish, like we had said in an episode or two ago, I wish there was the same on the incoming side, because if you're in a group chat with part iPhones and part Android phones, you'll see, like, Katie liked blah, blah, blah.
And I wish that Apple just parsed those.
I understand why it isn't entirely reliable a thousand percent of the time, but I don't care.
So that's shipping now.
And so I sent this link to my brother-in-law, who is the lone Android person on a four-person group chat between Aaron, me, him, and his wife.
And do you want to guess what his response was?
He can't update his phone to that version.
Very, very good guess.
That is not correct, though.
Excellent guess, though.
I award you full points, even though that is not the correct answer.
Hmm.
I don't know.
Hmm.
Too bad I don't use Google's message app.
Oh, of course.
You know what?
Of course.
Android people, you can have the world you've made for yourself.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I would like to have a diversity of messaging apps and be able to use iMessage from third-party clients.
Well, that's fair.
That's fair.
Sorry for doing another tangent here.
But this continues to just boggle my mind.
And I don't actually talk to the people who I see do this because I don't want to bother them.
But here on my podcast, I'm going to say it again.
Every time I see somebody who I know or someone who I know is like a tech nerd or whatever just complain on a podcast about how annoyed they are about being assaulted by ads in Twitter and the trending tweets and promoted tweets and all the ads they see on Twitter, I just go like...
what are you doing why why are you ever seeing ads on twitter and i think like don't say that to them because they know it's not like they don't know there must be something about the official client that is part of how they do it and i and i go through this whole thing i'm like maybe they're really into like trending topics or like they don't they follow 800 people so they can't use their timeline normally so all they can ever do is look at hashtags and trending things like is there something because third-party clients don't have access to all the stuff the official client has and i'm like
What is keeping you on the official?
For people who don't know, if you use a third party Twitter client, you don't see any ads on Twitter.
You never see a promoted tweet.
You never see an ad ever, ever, ever.
Right.
You also don't get trending topics promoted.
But like there's a whole bunch of features you don't get.
But if you don't care about that, if you just want a time ordered set of lists of tweets from people you follow.
Right.
Like third party clients can give you that.
And all these tech nerds I know, they know this.
They know this.
Sometimes they have these third-party clients installed, and they use them sometimes, but then they come on and say, oh, every fourth tweet is an ad.
It's like, what are you doing?
Anyway, I'm sure everyone has their reasons.
There must be something about the official client that third-party clients don't have.
It just kills me, though.
If you're annoyed by Twitter ads and you don't care about any of the features that are only in the official Twitter client, please use a third-party Twitter client on your iPhone.
I don't know what the situation is on Android.
I'm sure there's a bunch of things you can get.
And then you just never see an ad again.
It's great.
Try it.
I know real honest to goodness nerds, like people in our social circles that use the official client and swear by it.
And for the life of me, I do not understand.
It's got to be one of those features that we don't use in third party clients that only exists in the official one, like that they don't browse their timeline or they only look at trending topics.
I don't even know what all the features are, but there's surely some features that you can't do for a third party client that are only in the first party.
And that's how they use Twitter.
So if you don't have that feature, it's pointless to them.
Yeah, I don't get it.
John, can you tell me about a friend of ours who is an Academy member?
Sure.
Feedback about screeners.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has an app for a few years that provides streaming screeners.
And this is the first year where they were prohibited from physical screeners to be sent to its members.
So that's, you know, cool.
If you think about all the different things that have screeners.
you know the oscars the you know academy of motion picture arts and sciences probably going to be like the top tier they have the best the most money the most ability to move away from silly plastic discs anyway continuing this feedback slowly the other guilds and groups are following the academy's lead physical screeners are environmentally wasteful and are much more expensive to create and ship than digital streamers and much easier to pirate and are also more difficult for small studios to produce and send out that's another thing i hadn't thought of like
that if you're if you're like a small independent movie studio now you have to like get a bunch of plastic discs printed which is probably hard to do now because it's not as common as it used to be whereas you just upload a digital file to something it'd be way easier anyway continuing as of right now 162 movies are available to screen to stream on the academy app um so i guess everyone can't be an academy member but it's good to know that uh even that part of the industry is slowly moving into the modern age
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Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and for sponsoring our show.
Bye.
And then, John, tell me more about Game Pass, because apparently we still haven't quite gotten this 100% right.
Right.
So the main thing we got wrong last show was talking about how Game Pass is no good to you if you're into PC games.
But there is a Game Pass for PCs.
It's called, like, whatever, Game Pass PC, just for PC games, right?
And on top of that, there is also a Game Pass for more money that will give you access to PC and Xbox games.
for i think it's like the regular one is like ten dollars a month so you can choose do i want game pass for my console ten dollars a month do i want it for my pc ten dollars a month or do i want game pass ultimate which everyone insists on abbreviating as gpu which i feel like it's a little overloaded in the gaming space but anyway game pass ultimate for only 15 a month gives you access to both pc and xbox games
And in addition to that I said it would be great if you could pay a little bit more To get an Xbox Series X as part of your like game pass subscription because you can get like the cheaper Xbox a Series S You can you can pay more money and they will give you a Series X and from what people tell me It's more like a zero percent interest loan than a rental So it's not like you can have it for one month and just return it and just stop paying like you're basically signing up to buy the console
But there's no interest on it, and it's actually a fairly good deal if you actually do want the console and the games.
Of course, the problem with getting, you know, you can in theory get the Xbox Series X console as part of Game Pass, but good luck getting that because supplies are limited because COVID supply chain and so on and so forth.
And then finally, don't forget that we talked about this in past shows, Xbox Cloud Gaming.
where you can play any of these games on Xbox.com, in the Xbox app on your PC, in the Xbox Game Pass mobile app on not your iPhone, because Apple doesn't like that, and also on Xbox consoles.
The fact that you can play on Xbox consoles is wild, right?
So you have an Xbox console...
But rather than playing the game on the Xbox, you can stream it.
The game is actually running in a data center somewhere, and you're streaming it.
I guess maybe that lets lesser consoles play better games, but fascinating.
Anyway, Stratechery had a good interview with the Microsoft gaming guy with his name, Phil Spencer.
a while back and he talks all about like microsoft strategy of like look we just want you to be able to play your game everywhere of course it's nice for microsoft to say that because they essentially own two of the platforms they have a console and they also essentially own the entire pc space so they seem so we're so magnanimous we want you to play anywhere on our platform a and on our other platform b
uh i guess they don't have windows phone anymore so they're being nice letting it be on android and then apple's being mean not letting them have it on iphone but anyway game pass it's a pretty good deal if you are interested in the games that are available on game pass which are not all the games in the world but a lot of really good ones and if you don't want to pay for individual games
So moving right along, we got a fair bit of feedback, and a lot of it was really, really good, about Apple in the Netherlands and their fine, which we had described as basically just a fee, you know, because Apple is more money than God.
So why don't they just pay this fine, treat it as a fee, and move on with their lives?
I want to add one thing to that, by the way, though.
Yeah.
The fine is just a fee as a saying, a common saying of like, if you have enough money, if the only penalty for doing something wrong is a fine, and then you basically get to do it whenever you want, because the money means nothing to you, and you just get to go do it.
And a lot of people were pointing out just in general, before we get to the specifics of the Netherlands, that...
Most places that have a fine, it's not just you get a fine and then you're allowed to break the law forever.
Either that fine repeats or that fine increases or something else bad happens that escalates.
And we'll talk about the potential escalations over the Netherlands situation in a second.
But I do want to point out that the reason a fine is just a fee saying is so common is because if you are wealthy...
very often, you've already gotten to do the thing and reap the benefits of it.
So yeah, maybe after you are fined, then the next level up, the fine gets bigger, or the next level up, you go out of business, or whatever the next level of punishment is.
You already got to do the thing and only had to pay the fine, and that's simply a fee for you getting to do the thing.
So say the thing that you were getting to do is, this is obviously not particularly relevant to Apple's example, but it's the most egregious example.
Say you're dumping...
chemicals somewhere where you're not supposed to be dumping them you've already dumped them you can't get the chemicals back out like if they say there's no process to like extract it or like remove it or clean it up it's like dispersed into the environment and it's like oh well shrug i guess i'll just pay the fine you already did the bad thing you already didn't have to pay to dispose of your whatever and now it's just dispersed in the whole and you just pay the fine and in that case
There is no escalation because maybe you get fined more the next time you do it.
Maybe you just need to do this one time.
I don't want to pay all these millions of dollars to clean up this factory, so I'm just going to dump this all and it'll disperse into the atmosphere and I'll pay the fine.
That is the worst case of the fine is just a fee.
In the case of Apple, you know, they're doing a thing and you could say, well, they got to impose these unfair app store rules for years and years and then this fine comes along and they pay it and they get to do it for an extra three or four weeks.
Apple getting to...
control the app store in the way it is a custom for an extra few weeks or months or even years is not that big a deal but i just want to explain the saying that it doesn't necessarily mean that like you know oh well it's not just you know a fine isn't just a fee because eventually you're gonna have to stop doing it very often getting away with it for some period of time is the whole ball game and then you just pay the money and then you're good after that yeah
So we had said last week, you know, that, oh, well, the Netherlands is a thousand, you know, not a thousand, like three million people or something like that.
I forget what the number was.
Eighteen million.
Two big cities.
Two New York cities, maybe.
Okay.
So it's two New York cities.
What are they really going to do to Apple?
So Renier Zwisterlut wrote, and there were several others that wrote, but I like this one a whole lot.
So let me read what Renier wrote.
If Apple just pays the fines, then the ACM, that's the Dutch authorities, will sue again, will win, and will get three zeros appended to the penalties.
Neither the ACM nor judges are political, and they do not need to be elected.
So Apple can't simply rely on a horde of angry voters to fix this problem.
If they threaten to pull the App Store, then the ACM will simply tell them to go right ahead.
And then the ACM will take their case to the European court to get the App Store banned for all of the EU.
That's more or less the point of the EU.
Whilst the EU is wildly at odds with itself about what the EU is and is not supposed to stand for, the one thing that all member state rulers and governments generally all agree on is that they won't stand for individual member states to be bullied by non-governmental entities.
Surely Apple is not willing to pull all products from the entire EU, which means they will lose if they decide to die on this hill.
I thought that was a really great summary of the situation.
Of course, the question is, will it escalate up to the level of the whole EU thing, or would Apple do whatever it takes to appease them, and that what they're doing now is flouting it and paying their fee, or their fine, and they'll do that for as long as they can until it seems like things might escalate, and then they'll say, okay, okay, what do you really want us to do?
We'll see how it shakes out.
I'm assuming Apple wouldn't be stupid enough to, you know, antagonistically escalate this to all the EU.
But that is a possibility.
And that is, of course, what the U stands for in the EU.
It is union.
But the UK can go after themselves, I guess.
Too soon.
Too soon.
All right.
So a couple of things about new beta bits, starting with the new face ID unlock.
Ryan Booker writes, face ID with a mask asks you to scan with and without glasses if you're wearing glasses and you can add extra glasses, which is kind of cool.
And you guys haven't tried this, right?
You're not on the betas?
I just installed it this morning and have not tried it once.
I would like to try it.
I'm excited to scan my glasses.
Go team.
talked about this on, was it Upgrade this week?
I think there was more discussion about that.
But basically, if you think about, say, Apple Pay, for example, or 1Password, when you're using the Apple Watch-based mask unlock, you still have to enter your passcode for 1Password for Apple Pay, things like that.
And apparently, the new eye-only face ID scan, when you have a mask on,
It actually will work for 1Password, Apple Pay, so on and so forth.
So that's worth looking into.
And I will definitely check that out when the beta is no longer a beta and when it's released.
And then Carlos continues, also unrelated.
Well, actually, this is me saying also unrelated.
Apparently, universal control works from Wi-Fi to cellular.
I have not tried this myself because, again, I'm not on the betas.
But this is what Carlos wrote.
But universal control is a big advantage over Sidecar.
As expected, my school's network has several resources and web pages restricted, but sometimes I have to access them.
They usually meant disconnecting Sidecar and using the cellular capabilities of my iPad to access the web I wanted.
Well, universal control works even when the MacBook and the iPad are in different networks.
I can use the MacBook Air to disable the iPad Wi-Fi and continue controlling it to freely browse the web from the iPad while the MacBook Air is stuck on the school Wi-Fi.
This is the only place I've heard this.
I have no idea if it's accurate or not, but I have no reason not to believe it.
How freaking cool is that?
Does it use like, doesn't Airdrop use like a ad hoc local Wi-Fi network?
Maybe it uses the same thing.
It could be.
I don't know.
I just thought that was super cool though.
And that was the first I'd heard of it.
I've seen a lot of demos of the universal control, and as delayed as it has been, I can imagine it's tricky to pull off, but boy, it looks really neat when you see it done.
It's got to be some kind of persistent, whether it's the same technology as AirDrop or not, it's not like there's a waiting cursor for some kind of connecting thing.
I don't know.
It makes me think of a recent complaint, a recent, a decades long complaint that I've had.
Like I'm in my computer room here.
My computer is here.
You know, the other side of the room is my wife's computer on that desk.
They're both connected to the same Ethernet network.
Very often I want to copy files from one Mac to the other.
And I'm cursed to use the Finder to do that.
And it's just so hard.
It's just so slow, so painful.
Like, it's just it's just bad.
Like, I would be better off using FTP, honestly, because FTP clients can be persistent.
They always work.
Like when I try to what I want to do is like, can you put your receipts into the expenses folder?
Because I'm doing taxes stuff, right?
I need to connect her computer as her, which I can do because I know her password.
It's in my key chain and everything.
Right.
We're all in the family here.
Yeah.
right where it opens up in the finder and then it shows it's connecting you click connect as like disconnect then connect as and then you get to type in your name and it has a checkbox to remember the password but it literally never ever ever does right maybe it's because i'm using the dot local you know bonjour rendezvous names who knows but it is so painful i'm like these are two computers in the same room on the same wired network and i just can't have a persistent folder that i can just double click and it will open
Why don't you just make an alias of it?
Why don't you do this?
Why don't you do that?
I've tried all these things.
They're just so unreliable.
And yet, apparently, two devices, not even on the same Wi-Fi network, you can drag your cursor between them seamlessly and drag files between them.
Like, why does that work?
And why can't I just... It's so painful.
Honestly, I should just use... I should literally just use, like, transmit or something, FTP client, because that will always work.
It will never, like, connect as the wrong user.
It will just...
It's so frustrating.
I don't know if I'm the only one who has this problem.
Maybe it's because I'm not using the IP address, but I'm using a .local name, and if I do use an IP address, the stupid alias would work.
The latest thing in Monterey is the alias gets a generic document icon.
It's an alias to a folder on my wife's computer, but now it just looks like a blank white document with a little dog-eared corner of the page on it.
Why?
God only knows.
If I double-click it, it will usually connect and change back into a folder icon, but not always.
anyway sorry sorry to derail i get the feeling you know like whenever apple is not great at maintaining things that they don't seem to use themselves and it seems to me every time i use like any kind of finder like network share feature of any kind like this i think i i would venture a guess apple does not use this kind of function internally
Because it just seems like it always has been mediocre at best.
It almost never changes except in the direction of gradually breaking more.
What do you all use for this thing?
Like when you need to drag things between your two different Macs that are on your home network, how do you do that?
i usually do that connect as thing um if i have to but more often than not like if we have to send files together we'll just airdrop them because that works much more reliably than network uh shares which is annoying when i'm the only person in the house though i would have to go over to the other computer and click accept you know what i mean whereas file transfer i just you know i don't want to keep getting up and going back and forth when i'm doing a bunch of stuff like that
Oh, to be clear, AirDrop is totally the wrong solution for this.
I mean, especially because, like, you know, if I presume both of those computers probably have wired Ethernet, it would be ridiculous to use AirDrop for this purpose, and it would be slower to use AirDrop for this purpose.
But, you know, that's not how things work, you know.
People are still emailing files to themselves because that often is the best way to transfer something.
Yeah, I mean, I think, John, if...
What I would recommend is what Aaron and I do is, you know, we have a shared Dropbox folder.
And even though I don't really use Dropbox anymore.
That's such a long way to go.
It is, but it works every time.
Like, do you care?
I mean, like, once you get connected, it works fine.
I'm just frustrated with how cumbersome it is to initiate that connection, right?
Yeah.
once I'm connected and it's a finder window open, like it's fine.
Like it just files transfer.
It does all the things.
Right.
But it's just, it seems like it, the reason I'm contrasting with universal control is like, look how, look how seamlessly these two completely independent devices running different OSs can be.
Like you can drag your cursor between them seamlessly.
You can drag a file from one to the other and it just instantly appeared.
I'm talking about all the demos I've seen.
Universal control is so impressive.
How can that be so seamless with no setup, no configuration, no dialogues, no password login or whatever.
It's just so seamless.
And yet,
you know getting getting that other finder window that is a folder on my wife's computer to appear in my computer in my finder that sort of hurdle that you have to overcome each time is just has just enough little stumbling blocks that it just i wish it was seamless and i wish it was way faster because even if everything goes perfectly and you you know double click the alias the amount of time it takes before that finder window appears and you can drag stuff into it is so long compared to again slamming your cursor against the edge of your mac screen and having it appear on your ipad
You know, another couple of things you might want to at least consider.
Synology Drive, if you wanted a faux Dropbox that doesn't leave your network, like that would be presumably much quicker.
And it has a concept of like a team folder or something like that.
I don't know if they do that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, well, it operates much like Dropbox.
So think of it as like a fake Dropbox.
And so you could do something like that.
Oh, so you need to run an app on your Mac then?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But what you can do, though, is you can stop running the Dropbox app because you can put your Dropbox within your smartphone.
I'm not running a Dropbox app now.
Dropbox is an on-demand launch for me.
Oh, you were a weirdo.
But nevertheless, you could SCP.
Why wouldn't you just try VNCing or remote desktoping or whatever?
Because that supports file transfer between Macs.
Does it?
No, I wouldn't want to go that whole.
I don't want her entire screen on my Mac.
Plus, sometimes she's weird.
I'm answering your question.
Well, anyway, Neil underscore underscore in the chat swears that if you use .home instead of .local, magic happens.
I don't know why, but that's what Neil underscore.
Like I said, maybe there's some particular thing that I'm doing that makes it cumbersome.
But, you know, the two basically bugs are that the finder insists on connecting as me instead of my wife, even though I put the username in the URL.
And that the other one is it just takes a long time.
It just takes a long time to, you know, when it is in the process of connecting, it's like the computer's right over there.
They're both, these are two idle, very fast computers, like literally feet from each other connected to the same Ethernet switch.
It should be like instant, kind of like universal control.
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So Nintendo hasn't been purchased yet, but apparently everyone else has.
So Sony has bought Bungie for $3.6 billion.
Now, I'm hoping against all hope that that means that we don't have to hear you speaking in other languages about Destiny anymore.
Is that how this works?
Mm-hmm.
No, how is that not going to happen?
Of course that's going to happen.
We're not that lucky.
It's like on topic.
Although I have to tell you, when this happened, I thought of our long running joke of like, oh, we won't record another episode until X time in the future unless, of course, Apple buys Nintendo or something.
And that has been a joke for years.
And at this point, it's becoming a lot less of a joke, isn't it?
Everybody's buying these big gaming companies that were not previously thought of as being for sale.
Activision Blizzard obviously was $70 billion, and Activision, of course, bought Blizzard before that.
and then what was it take two bought zynga um and now sony's buying bungie and it's just it's a free-for-all in the gaming world and so apple buying i mean not that i think we've talked about this on pet i don't want apple to buy nintendo i think that would be bad for the world everybody
And I don't think Nintendo is particularly for sale, but geez, that's scaring me with how close it's coming.
Anyway.
First of all, for the record, I don't think that's going to happen.
Yeah, no.
For lots of reasons.
I mean, without getting too far into it, the big ones are that Apple undervalues gaming and Nintendo is probably worth a lot.
So I don't think they'd come together on a price.
And also Apple, I can't imagine Apple ever buying a sizable company that is itself opinionated.
because apple is extremely opinionated and i can't see them buying an opinionated company in a way that wouldn't destroy that entire company or clash heavily because apple wouldn't let whoever's being the opinion holder in that company now continue to do that role because apple can't have that under them like they they they would be the opinion directors of whatever they're buying and so to have the the idea that
nintendo would be absorbed by apple in any kind of graceful fashion i think as a fantasy and so even if they come together on price which they probably wouldn't because apple undervalues gaming i can't see that culture ever blend together yeah i don't think i don't think nintendo would ever be for sale at any price at this point but stranger things have happened and i you know time marches on and apple's attitudes change and like the
The culture fit between Nintendo and Apple actually is closer than maybe any other purchaser in terms of this sort of happy, shiny, user-friendly type of thing.
And just because it would be terrible doesn't mean some future Apple management wouldn't do it anyway and destroy Nintendo in the process, which is why I keep saying it would be bad for the world, because I agree that it would not be healthy technology.
It wouldn't be healthy for either company because to the extent that Nintendo stays Nintendo, that would be unhealthy to Apple's culture and vice versa, very strongly.
If Apple started to screw with Nintendo, it would just crush the company.
But in the future, a future Apple could somehow discover the technology of how to acquire someone and not screw with their culture because that has occasionally, not commonly, but occasionally it has happened in the past in the entire world of business where someone buys someone and doesn't immediately screw them up.
But yeah, it's not likely.
But anyway, getting back to the story, I think this has a chance of happening.
Other companies are better about acquiring certain kinds of other companies and not immediately screwing them up.
So Sony's buying Bungie for a pittance, $3.6 billion.
It looks like a pittance compared to $70 billion for Activision Blizzard, but there's a lot of IP under that $70 billion umbrella.
Whereas Bungie is just one company to, you know, sort of size this up.
Star Wars was bought for four billion.
So Bungie is worth almost as much as a Star Wars.
Good grief.
All right.
Which, you know, again, gaming is bigger than movies has been for a long time.
People don't realize it.
But yeah.
But the reason this is extra significant to me, obviously, is because the game I play all the time is from Bungie.
And of course, Bungie is a long time.
game developer close to my heart because they were a mac game developer first and halo was supposed to ship on the mac and then microsoft bought them they went independent now sony bought them still bitter about this how many years ago was that 20 oh bitter about it yes i am oh my gosh so uh you know why is sony doing this as a lot of people saying this looks somewhat defensive because hey everyone's buying everything uh you know it's good for us to have a popular gaming company with a
in our pocket because microsoft our big competitor in the console space has a lot of things in their pocket now but interestingly both companies with microsoft and sony are saying i know we just bought a bunch of games right or gaming companies or developers or whatever
But don't worry, game players out there.
We're not going to make these games exclusive to our platforms because that's not what we do anymore.
And for the most part, I think they are believable.
That is a plausible thing because that's not the best strategy anymore.
Right out of the gate, Bungie has said, hey, Sony bought us, but just to reassure everybody, Destiny, which is currently available on many platforms, Xbox, PlayStation, Stadia, it still exists, PC, right, will continue to be on all those platforms.
Our future expansions will continue to be on all those platforms.
we're not even going to differentiate the platforms like for destiny back in the day and back in destiny one uh i think even a little bit into destiny two actually had playstation exclusives like if you got destiny one there was like a weapon you could only get if you had a playstation or like a pvp map that was only available on playstation and that wasn't
You know, that wasn't because Sony owned Bungie.
It was just, you know, Sony did a deal with Bungie and said, hey, if we pay you some extra money, or I don't know what the deal was behind the scenes, but give our players something extra.
So there'll be a reason that Destiny on PlayStation is ever so slightly better than Destiny on Xbox, right?
They don't even do that anymore, right?
So Destiny now is, everything's the same for everybody.
I think Bungie did that back when they were with Activision as well, because Activision probably brokered that deal.
But anyway...
So when you have a game like this that gets like the more people that play it, the more money you make, because the more people play it, the more people buy the expansions, the more people buy horse armor.
We talked about that in the past show.
You want as many players as you can playing your game.
And if you limit it to certain platforms, you're giving up players who could potentially be giving you money.
so bungie says don't worry sony bought us but destiny will stay on all platforms but of course bungie has been for i think at least one year possibly multiple years been working on the next big thing because game development takes a long time so as destiny is quote unquote winding down right destiny was conceived of as a 10-year game a decade game it came out in 2014 i think and they're just about going to hit that so bungie has announced
The future of destiny, the expansions they're going to have up through 2024.
So that would be a 10 year game, right?
But you got to start working on your next thing.
So Bungie has been working on in secret, whatever the heck its next thing is, or its next two things or whatever, right?
For a while now, well before this acquisition.
And so the question is, OK, Destiny is going to be available on all platforms because it already is.
And you're not going to take it away from people because, you know, why would you give that up?
You already paid the money to make Destiny on PC, to make sure it runs well on Xbox, to make sure it runs on PlayStation.
You already paid that money.
Of course, you're going to leave it on those platforms because you'd be losing money by sacrificing those people who play on those platforms.
But for your next game, surely that will be PlayStation exclusive because Sony's big strategy is all these PlayStation exclusive games like The Last of Us.
uh horizon zero dawn and uncharted and i'm just naming games that i like but i'm sure there's lots of other exclusives to playstation as well what about those next games but on the day of the acquisition in little bungie's little fact that we'll put in the show notes they put in an item that says in their fact question bungie has future games in development will they now become playstation exclusives answer
no period we want and then they expand we want the worlds we are creating to extend to anywhere people play games we will continue to be self-published creatively independent we will continue to drive one unified bungee community that is pretty unequivocal now just because you say something in a fac item doesn't mean that four years from now things won't change because that's the whole deal with acquisitions you see it all the time usually it's more like more dire like there's an acquisition and there's some press release that says don't worry everything you love about company x will remain the same and then like
Two months into it, it's like, yeah, they fired everybody, they changed everything.
When you have a new owner, you can say whatever you want, but you can't really, it's very difficult to put anything into the agreement that says, you are acquiring me, you will be in charge of me, but you agree not to be a bad parent.
Like, there's no real way to enforce that because they're like, what if we just fire you all?
Now we can do whatever we want.
Like, you can't, it's not like a partnership.
It is an acquisition.
So anything can happen in the future.
But this is, I think, the first time I've ever seen such a strong statement on day one that not only will our current games not change, but even the things that we're working on that aren't going to be ready for three years, those will be multi-platform too.
And that speaks to the idea that in the gaming market today,
Though exclusives are beneficial for driving differentiation to your platform, certain kinds of games, particularly what they call live games, where a game runs for years and years and they just give you new content and new content, the best way to make money from that game and the best way to get the most number of customers is to make sure it is available everywhere that people can conceivably want to play it.
Microsoft is obviously going to an extreme by letting you play it on your cell phone through their cloud gaming thing.
but and you know sony doesn't even have a subscription program yet to rival game pass so like i said last week they are rumored to have something like that but that seems like it's the future of these type of games and sony talked about we acquired bungie because they know have shown they know how to run a live game they've been running destiny since 2014 destiny slash destiny 2 the fact that there's one and two is a accident unfortunate accident history it was neither here nor there
But that that is a type of game.
Not all games are like that.
Obviously, Candy Crush isn't necessarily like that.
It's a different thing.
But live games where, you know, millions of people play it for years and years and every year they give you money.
And also they buy horse armor inside the game and the whales buy tons of horse armor across multiple platforms.
That is a very viable business model.
it doesn't matter how awesome that game is.
You shouldn't use a live game to differentiate your platform.
You should use single player games.
Like again, the last of us or something when that's on your platform that can get people to buy it because like, well, if I have to buy a platform to pay destiny, I'm going to buy the one that has the next last of us game.
Cause I love that franchise or something.
So you pick a PlayStation, right?
And that could be why PlayStation is winning this generation.
But, uh, this, I have to say that I mostly believe the statements here are,
There's also statements about like creative freedom and the fact that they will continue to be self-published, right?
That Bungie is trying to retain as much of its independence as possible while still being owned by Sony.
And I think Sony is the type of company that has shown that it is plausible that it could acquire a developer and not ruin them by screwing it up because Sony has done it before.
They have bought a bunch of developers and they've generally not screwed them up.
Sometimes the developers themselves screw up, but like, you know, that's not Sony's fault.
But, you know, they they buy these game developers and they become owned by Sony and they put out another hit game in a hit driven business.
Nothing is guaranteed.
Right.
So you could get, you know, the biggest names to direct your new movie for your streaming platform and maybe the movie stinker and maybe it won't.
But the best odds are by buying a company that's made a lot of hits.
And Bungie made a bunch of awesome games on the Mac that nobody knew about, but that I played.
Right.
And then they made Halo, which is the whole reason the Xbox exists and is still a viable platform, in my opinion.
And then you're like, OK, well, that's great.
You had one great hit.
And then they made Destiny, another great hit.
So they they have a track record.
Right.
And it's mostly a lot of the same people there.
And there's some continuity of culture.
So it is not implausible to say whatever Bungie is working on next for their next decade long game that it will launch in 2024 or 2025 or something might also be a hit.
And even if it's not, you just bought a company that has years and years of experience running a live game.
And Sony, if you want to have popular live games that run really well on your platform that are defense against the ones that Microsoft just bought, it's good to have Bungie in your pocket.
Because if the Cold War becomes hot many years in the future and they say, well, guess Microsoft says, well, guess what, Sony Call of Duty, you can't have that anymore.
Because we own that and we're taking it away because we're angry at you.
And they'll be like, okay, well, we'll take away whatever the hell the name of the game after Destiny is going to be, right?
So it is good to have some extra weapons in your pocket.
But in the meantime, they bought a really good game developer.
They probably won't screw it up.
And from Bundy's perspective, this is super important to the game of Destiny because Bundy's problem has been lately that they don't have enough money or people to keep up with the voracious hunger of the people who pay for their live game.
When they were in a publishing deal with Activision, Activision
gave them an influx of money and said, here you go, here's a bunch of money, make the next expansion to Destiny really awesome, so we'll make lots of money from it.
And by the way, I know you can't hire people with this money, so you can contract out to, what are they called, Vicarious Visions, I think?
They contracted out to another developer to say, please help us make this expansion to Destiny because we don't have enough Bungie employees and we can't hire them fast enough.
And Activision gave us a bunch of money.
And that was the best recent expansion when they had help from other people.
So when Bungie split from Activision, said we didn't like Activision because Activision was a crappy company and they were all mean there and it turned out to be true.
uh and they made us do dumb things in the game and activision did arguably make bungie do dumb things in the game that nobody liked or whatever and it was it was a fraught relationship so bundy split from them and said we are independent now we have creative freedom and we can we're finally free to make our game better in the ways that we want because activision did screw with bungie's creative vision and made the game worse and when bungie got split from them they got to fix all those problems and that really helped but they didn't have all that activision money so
Post-Activision, most of the content for Destiny was a little bit smaller, not as big, not as much stuff, and actually that third-party developer they got to help them was really good and added a lot of their own flair and panache to the content.
Now they got Sony money, and Sony has a lot of money.
So hopefully Bungie will have a bunch of cash and maybe be able to contract out if they can't hire people fast enough or use some of other Sony's other gaming talent to make the next few expansions of Destiny.
More likely that money will be found into whatever the game after Destiny is and they retain their creative freedom.
And it was Sony that bought Bungie and not Microsoft.
And so I give a cautious thumbs up to this acquisition.
I hope that Destiny does continue through 2024 and is everything it could be.
And I hope the next franchise is good, too.
Cool.
Cool.
So you're all going to get PlayStations and play Destiny with me for the big member special, right?
Oh, yeah.
About that.
You have this gaming streaming setup.
Marco's got it over there.
We're so close.
We just got to shift over a little bit to get a console streaming setup going.
No, this setup can actually capture consoles just fine because it's all based on HDMI capture.
However, I don't know how easy it is to get a PlayStation right now.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Yeah.
I mean, that's like I said about the Xbox Series X. You can get it as part of Game Pass if you're willing to wait.
I mean, I would entertain playing Destiny on some sort of streaming setup, even if that required getting a PlayStation.
But I would need to get the PlayStation, like you said.
I mean, it's... I mean, you can get a PS4 technically, but that'd be gross.
Come on.
That's right.
I don't want to have to fish another damn HDMI cable through the wall either.
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I got a problem.
So back in 2006, Google offered this thing called Google Apps for Your Domain.
And at the time, I mean, Google, man, there's so many problems with Google.
But one of the things is they like changing the names of things 85 times and...
You know, just keep throwing things against the wall until something sticks.
And back in 2006, it was called Google Apps for Your Domain, and then it became something else, something else, something else.
It was G Suite for a while.
Is it still G Suite?
I don't even know.
It's like Google Workspace now or something.
I don't even, I can't keep it straight.
But...
One way or another, in 2006, you could get Google Apps for your domain.
If you were a nonprofit or basically just a family, you could get Gmail and the things associated with it with a custom domain for free.
And I don't remember how long they said this was going to last.
Some people have said lifetime.
I don't know if that's true or not.
But one way or another, it was free at the time.
And they cut that off six years later in December of 2012.
And at that point, they were not accepting new free accounts anymore.
And I have and had and have one of these free accounts.
My personal email is one of these accounts.
It's Gmail under the hood, but it's, you know, at caseylist.com.
And as of a couple of weeks ago, they've said, hey, guess what?
If you want to hold on to that, you're going to have to pay up.
And there's been a little bit of updates since then.
But they had said basically you have to sometime in the next couple of months – I forget exactly when it is.
I want to say it's July.
You're going to have to go ahead and start paying us.
And I think it's something like five or six bucks a month per account.
Yeah.
And so, obviously, everyone who has these accounts got very, very upset about it.
So, as of just a week or so ago, Google relented slightly, and they said legacy G Suite users would be able to migrate to free accounts.
So, reading from an RS Technical article, we'll put in the show notes.
First, Google is launching a survey of affected G Suite users.
Apparently, the company is surprised by how many people this change affected.
Second, it's promising a data migration option, including your content purchases, to a consumer account before the shutdown hits.
So Google said, in the coming months, we'll provide an option for you to move your non-Google workspace paid content and most of your data to a no-cost option.
This new option won't include premium features like custom email or multi-account management.
You'll be able to evaluate this option prior to July 1, 2022, or should I say 1 July 2022, and prior to account suspension.
We'll update this article with details in the coming months.
So first I would like some advice, but, but John in particular, since I know that you, um, you use Gmail, do you have anything to add about the story so far?
So the idea that you could get email with a custom domain for free from Google definitely falls into the category of if you think you're getting something of value but you're not paying for it, you're obviously subject to the whims of the company that's running it that one day either they might decide to charge you or they might just decide to make it go away.
But I have to say that whatever this was called when you started it, what was it, like Google Apps for your domain or whatever?
I believe that's right, yeah.
It's had a good run.
Oh, it has.
2006.
It's not like they use this for a year and then turn the screws on you.
Ha ha, once I got you addicted to it, now I'm going to start charging you a year later.
What is it?
I can't do the math in my head.
Like 15 years?
I got to do the math.
It's very difficult.
It's 15 and a half, isn't it?
Okay.
I'm always afraid that I'm getting math wrong on the fly.
Anyway, it lasted a really long time.
And I feel like you got your non-money's worth.
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Now, it is disappointing that it seems like, you know, like some people say, I want them to charge money, so then I know it won't go away.
But sometimes when they charge money, and I'm assuming this is the case here, in case you can tell me for sure, sometimes they decide that the customer for this is not you.
Like, yes, they're going to charge money for it, but they're going to charge so much money that
It's clearly meant for businesses, small businesses, big businesses, and not for individual people who just like the head of any domain.
Now, is that the case?
If you chose to pay for this, how much would it cost?
So that's the shtick, right?
Or that's the thing, is that I need to figure something out.
And so I will answer your question, but just to set some understanding between all of us.
So I have almost 20 gigs worth of email.
I don't know how, I don't know why, but that's the case.
And I think part of the reason is because my earliest email, I looked this up last week, I think, my earliest email was the 16th of July, 2004.
So that's 17 years, six months, and 17 days ago.
Do you have a lot of attachments?
Because I remember you said that casually in a chat or something, and I looked at the size of my email, and I'm not using that much.
I would assume so.
And ATP gets a preposterous amount of email, but almost no attachment.
So it must not amount to much.
Did you just email yourself like MP3s for a few decades?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, anything is possible, but I don't think so.
I mean, my earliest email is from 1997.
Yeah.
Well, I technically have one from 1969, but everyone who knows Unix knows what that is about.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
So anyway, so I have 17 years of history, 17 and a half years of history.
Also on Google is the shared family calendar.
So the way I've done this, and I will be the first to tell you this was a kludgy, silly way to do it, but it is the way I did it, and I've done it for years, is that I would sign into my Google account on Aaron's phone, but the only thing I would turn on is the calendar.
So, I mean, yes, she could go in there and like flip on my email if she really wanted to, but she would never do that.
And so our shared calendar is effectively my calendar.
It's just that, you know, both of us have access to it.
So I need to do something for both email so I can keep my custom domain because I would like to do that.
And something about calendaring.
Now, maybe when we'll get to calendaring in a minute, maybe that's iCloud or something.
I don't know.
But we need to do something about that.
Additionally, I should note that as of just a couple of months ago, I'm now paying $20 a year or a little under $2 a month for 100 gigabytes in Google Drive specifically for email.
Like, I don't use Google Drive for anything else.
It's specifically to handle my preposterous amount of email.
Wow.
Uh, quick update.
I was just misreading the thing at the bottom of the page.
I have 14 gigs of mail.
I thought I was reading it as 1.4 gigs and I just, there was comma versus period.
Anyway, I have 14 gigs of mail.
So 20 gigs has not seen that ridiculous.
Okay.
Thank you.
So I'm not sure exactly what to do.
And I feel like, um, so here are my options.
So Gmail, to answer your question from 20 minutes ago, Gmail appears to be $6 a month for one account.
That's, you know, my caseless.com account.
Plus the $2 a month for storage, potentially.
So that's a total of $8 a month.
And that's not awful, especially for something as critical as email.
Yeah, for custom domain, that sounds like a good deal.
It's not bad, but...
I don't know if that's what I really want to do.
And at this point, I kind of feel like I should just divorce myself from Google entirely because I'm not using Google Photos anymore.
Like I'm not really doing anything Google anymore.
So I wonder if I should just divorce myself from using Google Calendar.
Well, sure.
But I mean, I feel like I think that would be a reasonably straightforward thing to replace.
As someone who uses Google Calendar as a family calendar, but also for whatever reason, continues to use the Apple Calendar as well.
I can tell you that... And I have notifications on for both of them.
Google wins.
It is more reliable.
Apple's calendar thing.
I have no freaking idea what it's doing.
I can't understand it.
I can't control it.
Whereas Google Calendar just works all the time.
Maybe you'll have better luck than I do.
I tried Fantastical.
I tried Apple's calendar.
I tried all sorts of things.
And Google's calendar just functions all the time.
I would be...
As much as I love Gmail, I would probably give up Gmail before I would give up Google Calendar.
That's interesting.
I did not expect you to say that.
That's very interesting.
We don't have particularly complicated needs from our calendar at this point anyway.
So I feel like that's a conquerable problem.
But maybe my head's in the sand.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, they all have the same features in theory.
Yeah.
I think a Google calendar really has come through with us at the point where our kids got enough for them to have their own calendars.
We made them their own Gmail accounts with their own Google calendars.
And now I can see I can put events on their calendar and so and they'll get notifications on their thing.
So like it becomes a family calendar where it's not just you and your wife, but also your kids events when they're going to go to practice or, you know, go to this thing.
You're going to be over their friend's house or stay late on it like everything.
It's so nice to have that in all one unified calendar.
And yes, Apple Calendar can do that just as well.
In theory, in practice, I find Google much more reliable.
Yeah, so I got to look into the calendaring.
But leaving aside the calendaring just for a moment, like what do I do?
So I told you it's about eight bucks a month to stick with what I've got.
And that would have the advantage of – I've actually recently – we haven't talked about it on the show.
But after hearing about it from several different people on various podcasts and whatnot –
I've been trying Mimestream, which is a hilariously bad, although I understand where it came from, a hilariously bad name for what is actually a very good email client, but it's specifically made it, at least right now, to Gmail or Gmail equivalents.
Welcome to this world, Casey.
No one has made a good email app for non-Gmail email hosts in probably a decade or more.
Right.
And truth be told, up until literally a month or two ago, I was using Apple Mail and it was fine.
Like, I don't love it, but it's sufficient for my needs.
So I could perfectly well go back to Apple Mail and I'd be fine with it.
But I do like Mimestream.
There's a lot to like about it.
So, you know, if I go to any other provider other than just sticking with Gmail, then I would have to give up Mimestream, which is fine.
And Google Calendar, which I think is fine.
So let's take it as fact, which it isn't, but let's take it as fact that I want to switch to something.
well, what do I do?
I could do iCloud with a custom domain, but how do I get my archive up to iCloud?
And do I really want to push another 20 gigs to iCloud?
I don't think that's really tenable on several different levels.
Plus, even though I'm so hilariously in bed with Apple at this point, it defies description, do I really want to add one more thing and something as critical as email to that list?
Yeah, I would add to my list of not trusting Apple that I would have found Apple's email service, whether it has been iCloud
iTools.com, Mac.com, Me.com, iCloud.com, under all of its various names, has worked in the least, not the least reliable, but the least straightforward way.
For example, Apple's approach to spam filtering has very often made it so that
uh, sometimes email sent to their email service will just not arrive in a way that is 100% invisible to you.
And if you really wanted to pursue it, sounds like Apple.
Cool.
Yeah.
If you really wanted to pursue it, you could go through all the tech support things and eventually to come down to like, yeah, we filter out certain email and your thing got caught in there, but you don't have any visibility into it.
Right.
It's not like it ends up in the spam folder.
It just literally doesn't arrive.
Like,
The fact that that has ever happened in the past makes me incredibly wary of using Apple mail for my main mail.
I do have Apple email accounts and I do get mail on them, but I would never want to use them as my main most important email because I just...
the idea that i'm waiting for an email that never comes and i have to go through that dance because you know that dance happens sometimes and when that dance happens one of the variables i don't want to be well maybe they did send it but apple threw it into dev null before it sent it to me and there's no way for me to find that out with like without like six months of pursuing this yep yep and then that's it that's before you get to the idea of like oh and you're going to import 20 gigs of mail good luck with that
Hosting everyone's email, dealing with the spam filtering problems, that's not the kind of stuff that Apple's really great at.
And I don't think that's ever going to change.
To me, look, here's...
So there's what you should do, what you really should do, and what you will do.
I do want to hear your recommendations, but let me set another couple of options in front of you.
So we've got iCloud with Custom Domain.
I agree with everything that you said, John.
I don't think I want to do that for several different reasons.
Oh, yeah.
And the custom domain part, I forgot all about that.
It's a new feature that Apple provides.
It's kind of cool.
But that adds one more thing that like, do I want Apple to control DNS related things?
Because anytime DNS gets screwed with it, that MX record is screwed up for any short period of time.
Talk about email going into dev.
No, like just it's there's so many ways you can mess that up.
And just even with even within Google, there's been many reports, including, I think, from you that like
The fancy one, the one with custom domains, is worse than the free one because it's different and all of the attention and bug fixes and everything go on the free one and sometimes you get weird behavior from the one with the custom domain.
It's really... And then Apple adds that feature.
I just don't think of Apple in that way and everything they've done that's been close to that has made me wary of giving them that kind of thing.
They're not a hosting company.
They don't have tools about... They're not all about...
Hey, Apple will let you create your own identity on the web with your own domain name, which we as tech nerds are always recommending people do, whether or not we all completely follow that advice.
If you want to be completely portable, own your own domain, use one of our sponsors or something to get it, and then move that domain around with you from different email providers.
Then you'll always be the master of your own destiny in exchange for managing a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo.
But hey, you're a tech nerd, you're listening to a tech podcast, you have the ability to do this, and lots of hosting providers make it easier.
And nicer to do that, but Apple is not one of those companies, and kind of neither is Google at this point.
Yeah, so I could do iCloud with Custom Domain.
So two more options, both of which are former sponsors.
I could use Hay, which I know we had a little bit of drama about that a few months ago, but I did try it for a little while as an accessory email, and I actually do really like it, but...
Here again, similarly to what happens with Apple, do I really want to go all in on their completely proprietary setup?
Maybe I do, because there's a lot to like about it.
But I don't know if I do, and that's $100 a year.
The thing is, I would trust them more than Apple, because 37Signals, slash Basecamp, slash whatever they're called, has many, many years' experience supporting web applications, and they have...
shown under current management a willingness to continue to support stuff long after it stops making them money like i think like the original version of base camp they're still running it for the tiny amount of people who still want to use it that is above and beyond anything you'll ever see a company like google or apple do totally and so if you're worried like if i put more eggs in this basket am i going to get screwed i mean eventually yeah like they'll the founders will retire and then some private equity company will own it and they'll screw the whole business up right
But for the lifetime of the people who are currently running the company, assuming they continue to run it, they have a track record of continuing to support their customers way beyond what you would expect from other companies.
And Hey also offers custom domains.
So you could have your own domain, which again is the big out where it's like, oh, if they get evil, I'll just move elsewhere and I don't have to change my email address.
So, but I think Hay is very opinionated in terms of how they do email.
So you have to kind of buy into that part of it.
But I would, you know, this shows how little I trust Apple is that I would trust a tiny little company like Basecamp way more than Apple.
Yeah, and I agree, again, with all of your points there.
And that's the thing is that even though I genuinely do like the opinions that Hay has, I don't know if I want to commit to that.
I mean, I don't have to commit to it forever, but you know what I mean?
Like, I don't want to commit to it forever.
It's a different approach to email.
I still use Hey for one of my email accounts.
And if you want that approach to your email, it works.
But I don't want that approach.
I don't personally want that approach for my main firehose email address.
It's better for a personal email address of someone who doesn't want to or expect to get a lot of email.
Hey, Excel's there, I feel like.
See, it's funny you say that because I actually think it would be good on a firehose email, but we can argue about that another time.
But that's $100 a year.
And here again, I have the problem of, well, what do I do with the last 17 or whatever years of email that I have?
Like, it isn't absolutely required that that ends up online somewhere, but I would like it to be because I do search my email relatively frequently.
Granted, not for 17-year-old emails.
And Google does that search really well, I have to say.
Google does it really well.
It's a reminder to, like, put a note on your calendar.
Yeah.
every six months every year whatever and really you feel like it to use the google checkout feature or whatever where they give you a data dump of all your email that's a good point and they give it to you in a format that is in theory portable uh so if and when my google account gets totally locked and my life is destroyed i will at least have my legacy of email as of on average six months ago
Yeah.
So then the final option that I'm aware of anyway is former sponsor Fastmail.
And I think the code is still valid for what it's worth, even though they haven't sponsored in a little while.
But Fastmail.com slash ATP, 10% off your first year, not a sponsor for this episode.
But hey, here we are.
Hey, here we are.
And that's five bucks a month.
And what's super appealing about Fastmail, other than the fact that they sponsor us, other than the fact that I've heard incredibly good things from a lot of people, and I think we're about to hear more, is that they specifically have a Gmail import thing.
So apparently on the server side, they will go crawling through all your email and just slurp it all up and suck it all in.
So my current theory, calendaring notwithstanding, is...
is why wouldn't I just go ahead and use Fastmail and just switch everything over there?
Because I've got all my archive, hypothetically anyway.
I've got my archive.
I've got my custom domain.
They might even do calendaring for all I know.
I haven't looked into this yet.
And I've got everything I want, and it's $5 a month.
And granted, I don't particularly want to pay any amount of money for my email because I haven't for 17 years, 6 months, and 17 days.
But like you said, John, I've been freeloading long enough.
It seems reasonable.
I'm an adult now, so it seems like a reasonable thing to do.
So, Marco, I kind of cut you off earlier.
I'd like to hear your opinion as to what I should do first.
And then, John, I would like to hear yours as well.
okay well there's what you should do for the maximum comedy value for our show is try to host your own email on your sonology oh no no but you shouldn't actually do that for practical reasons nobody should do well actually just to quickly to quickly
I'll quickly interrupt you.
There was a time that I think I was doing that like years and years and years before this knowledge, years ago.
And what I found even then, like 15 years ago, is that to get around like spam filter, and I don't know anything about this world, but to get around like spam filtering and rules and so on and so forth, it is like genuinely difficult to, or at least it was then, I presume it still is now.
It's probably worse now.
Right, exactly, to host your own email.
I remember there being some for-pay software-as-a-service thing, or maybe it was installable software that was a really good web... Gosh, I wish I remember the name of it.
But it was a really, really, really good web email app.
Oh, shoot, it ran on Linux or something like that.
The server was on Linux.
And I remember wanting to install it so bad and use it so badly.
But it was hard to get your emails to reliably get delivered because they would see...
you know, whatever domain that you were serving from.
And the, you know, recipient service would be like, no.
And so as I know you're joking, Marco, I totally get that you're joking.
But the thought did briefly cross my mind.
And then I realized, no, this is a terrible idea.
And just to elaborate on to explain to people why would it be a bad idea to host an email.
A lot of people probably think like, oh, but if you have a server in your house hosting your email, then like you have a power out, you missed email.
Well, email is store and forward.
So it's not because you'll miss email necessarily, although obviously if you really screw things up, yes, your email can go away in a way that you can't get it back.
But the real problem is what Casey was getting at.
Email is a protocol based on the hippy dippy days of the Internet where everybody trusted everyone else and nothing was encrypted and everybody will just behave themselves.
And as we learned, that's not the case.
Spam is a thing because it is essentially free to send email.
And so in the modern Internet, if you would like to be on the Internet and send and receive email.
Technically, anybody can start a mail server and start sending and receiving email as long as they have all their DNS records set up, but practically speaking,
All of the real things that send and receive email that trust each other that are not known spammers have a trust relationship based on sometimes cryptography, sometimes paying money to do a thing, sometimes, you know, various handshake protocols.
But in general, if you just pop up on the Internet on the IP address vended by your ISP and start trying to send mail, everyone will look at you and say, get the hell out of here because you look a lot like a spammer.
Uh, because it used to be anybody could do that and you could run your Linux server in your basement and send your email from it or everyone would just accept that mail.
But those days are long over.
That's one of the main tools against spam is saying, I'm not just going to trust any old random computer on the internet and accept email from it.
We're going to have to do a thing.
And like, and all these people who provide email, whether it's Google, Apple, fast mail, uh,
They have teams of people whose only job is to make sure that, A, they are not overwhelmed with spam, which is like some of us in the chat were talking about gray listing or whatever.
When I was talking about mail going into Apple and then Apple would just throw it away, everybody's throwing away a lot of mail.
It's just that Apple was more aggressive about it and didn't give you any recourse and didn't tell you they were doing it, right?
But everybody has to do that.
Otherwise, we would all be overwhelmed by spam.
If you think you're getting a lot of spam now, you have to see how much email your email provider is throwing away and not allowing to get to you.
And then B, there's all sorts of other complicated relationships that I don't know all the acronyms for that make it so that you are a super duper trusted, no, really, it's okay, you're not a spammer type of authentication.
So people will make sure your email is delivered reliably.
And that's a problem for people running services.
You can talk to Marco about the services he runs that sometimes have to send email.
And that's a difficult thing to do, which is why AWS and other services like that have sort of trusted mail delivery services where they say, don't try to send email yourself.
Send it through.
I don't know what the AWS one is called, like SendGrid or something.
No, I'm mixing up things.
But anyway, send through this managed service because we have a team of people whose only job is to make sure that that mail...
system is not used by spammers and is still trusted by all the other trustworthy people.
It's the only way that the email system works at all.
You will never want to put in that amount of work for the server running out of your house and having emails not arrive or having to fight with deliverability and being overwhelmed by spam are two things you don't want to deal with.
Yeah.
So what you should do for comedy is host near-sonology, but that would be the only purpose.
There would be no other value to that besides comedy for our show.
And even just making the joke right now, I think we've gotten most of the value out of it, so let's move on from that idea.
The most pragmatic thing you should do
is stop worrying about this and just pay Google what they want and keep going with your life and change nothing else.
But the ideal thing you would do if you can get over the value of that pragmatism is try fast mail.
It's really good.
So just to give you some idea, I have a bit under 15 gigs of email.
My plan allows 100 gigs.
That's the $90 a year professional plan, which is about, what is that, $8 a month?
So we're in the similar price ballpark here.
In practice, I haven't paid FastMail in a very long time because once I posted, or a couple times I posted referral links on my blog to my account because they have a referral program, and I currently have a referral balance of $2,600.
Well, can you send some of that my way?
I don't think I can.
And it just it goes up over time slowly.
So I haven't actually paid a fast minute.
Like it just deducts from that every year when it renews.
So I haven't paid in a very long time.
It's a multi-level marketing scheme.
No, I don't.
I don't even need your referrals now.
I can't use all this.
It would take me 100 years to do whatever.
I'm still so annoyed that I didn't do that with my Dropbox referral code back in the day.
Everyone who bought AdSense keywords for Dropbox and just got unlimited money, I did get a bunch of Dropbox referrals.
That's why I was on the free Dropbox plan for just years and years and years, but eventually I filled it up and had to start paying, and I'm still kind of bitter about that.
well anyway so yeah so what's what's great about the fast mail option is that first of all it is a standard host like when i was looking for this whatever it was a million years ago i wanted a regular imap email host because i could move to and from it freely because that's that's the the wonderful nature of email standards um and
Fast mail, again, yes, previous sponsor, possibly future sponsor.
Some of this is in their ads.
I'm not trying to give them a free ad here or anything.
I'm just genuinely talking about how much I enjoy their service.
This is a great host if what you want is a basic but good email host, which there's...
oh my god, there is so much to be said for that.
In this world of tech companies trying to be everything to everyone and trying to make ever-increasing giant walled gardens that lock you in in all sorts of ways and try to shove more and more enterprise crap onto you all the time, I really appreciate companies that just do a basic thing really well.
And that's what this is.
Now,
They have a lot of features I don't use.
I never use the web interface at all.
I just use Apple Mail on all the platforms, and it's fine.
They do have a web interface if you want it.
One area that's not going to be as good as Gmail is search.
Gmail is really good at search.
I don't know anybody who's good at Gmail search.
One area that FastMail is great is spam, because I'm
again i've never actually used gmail regularly so i don't really know much about it but uh i i will frequently hear my friends complaining about how gmail spam filtering is possibly not working so well sometimes or working too well other times one thing about fastmail spam is that it is um customizable and you can do something like um you can set certain folders to be your spam learning folders for your personal spam filter and
So, you know, whenever I get an email from somebody I would rather never hear from again, like some terrible PR list that somehow I got put on, I just drag it to my learn spam folder and it learns it and that's it.
And I have it set to learn from the junk folder.
and then put its filed spam into a different folder.
That way it's not learning from its own poop or whatever.
Basically, that allows me to use the move to junk shortcut buttons in mail clients, and that's basically a learn spam button for my fast mail setup.
So that's a nice little trick.
But otherwise, I love this because it is just, as I said, it's just an email host.
And I am not an email power user.
I don't want...
all those advanced features that all the cool gmail trendy apps have done over time like snoozing and all like i don't want any of that you can do that on fast mail apparently oh you can well i maybe not from apple mail i don't know but like i i love just using the apple mail using the boring apple mail client for my boring email in my boring way and it just works i don't have to think about it
Now, again, they offer calendars.
I've never used them.
They offer, like, synced notes and stuff.
I've never used any of that stuff.
I just use FastMail for email, and I use it only through Apple Mail's, or Apple's Mail apps.
And that's it.
And it has worked, like, rock solid reliably for, what, a decade, whatever it's been.
Like, it's been so good that entire time.
I just never have to think about it.
And that is the amount of effort and focus that your email hosting choices deserve.
You should never be thinking about them.
It shouldn't matter because email is boring and stupid and you should just get done with it as quickly as possible.
All right, John, what do you think I should do?
You know, when I sort of put all my eggs in the Gmail basket back in the day and, you know, imported all my mail or whatever, over the years I've sometimes regret that I didn't do a custom domain for the reasons that I said.
Like you should have your custom domain.
It makes you portable.
You don't have to change your email address.
Like my email address that I use is my firehose.
It ends in gmail.com.
And it's like, oh, you're going to regret that because eventually something's going to change and Gmail is going to shut down or whatever and you're just going to have to change all your accounts and this will be a giant headache.
But like I said about this Google Apps for Your Domain, it's been a lot of years now, right?
I feel like I've already got my non-money's worth out of Gmail.
Even if they shut down tomorrow, I say, well, that was a good run.
When did Gmail launch?
In like 2000?
It was 2004.
Yeah, it was my last year of college.
so 17 years like i'm gonna i'm just gonna give that a thumbs up i'm gonna say i've already got my money's worth right but i basically trusted that google as a company would be around for a long time and that they would continue to run gmail for a long time and if they did start to charge for it i would pay like this with this whole thing of like i get to continue use it for free because they're not charging for the gmail.com ones right but for you they are charging and i think if it was in your situation i would just start paying
Because I wouldn't be in a situation where I regretted not having customing because you were smart enough to do the custom domain thing.
And that's the email address you use.
And I wouldn't want to give that up.
And I also wouldn't want to do anything that could disrupt email.
And the least disruptive thing is to just start paying.
So that's what I would do.
But fast mail sounds fine.
It's just like, do you want to put in the work to do that?
For me personally, I like the Gmail web interface.
It's the main way I use email.
That doesn't exist in Fastmail.
So that would be a big hangout for me because then I'd have to pick another client, right?
Because, you know, I'm just using the web interface.
So I would definitely stay.
And I think for you, the least disruption option is to stay because I think Google is still a good...
mail hosting provider.
The complaints about the spam thing are valid, but you can try to train it and correct it or whatever.
It's a
Like the search is amazing and the reliability has been very, very solid.
So that's my advice.
My number one choice, stay where you are.
Number two, fast mail.
Fair enough.
Real-time follow-up.
I asked a buddy of mine who was also obsessed with this random email thing that I think he had brought to me.
I think he had found it.
It still exists.
It's called Zimbra, Z-I-M-B-R-A.
And it's like you can do it on-prem.
You can do it in the cloud.
I'll probably look at it for three seconds just to remind myself what it, well, it's surely totally different than it was 15 years ago.
But anyways, that is also an option.
I can't imagine me deciding to go with it, but I guess I could run that on my own server.
Maybe I could put it in Docker on the Synology.
How about that, Marco?
Is that sufficient?
There you go.
I could do that.
But I'm sitting here now.
Can you somehow involve like Rx Swift?
No, at this point, I haven't written Rx.
Casey Greatest Hits.
Yeah, right.
I haven't written Rx in a long time.
Still doing Combine here and there, but no Rx in a long time.
But yes, that would be a Greatest Hits album for sure.
Uh, I, I think sitting here now, what I'm probably going to do is sometime in the next couple of months, I'm going to sign up for a fast mail and I'm going to try to get it to suck in all my email from Gmail and just take it for a spin for, you know, a month or so.
And if I decide it's sufficient, then I'll stick with it.
And if it's for some reason garbage, then I'll go back to, um, I'll go back to Gmail and give them my money.
Did you say what email client you use?
So I use MimeStream on the Mac, which is where I do most of my email.
You won't be able to do that with FastMail.
And I won't be able to do that with FastMail.
Although, isn't MimeStream promising support for non-Gmail accounts?
Yes, hypothetically.
Let me tell you something, Casey.
As a non-Gmail user, every email app always promises that.
It's always coming in a few months.
It never comes, and they get bought or they shut down.
yeah no i i totally don't count on that like if you're gonna if you're gonna jump into any non-gmail host for your email options get used to apple mail or the web interface to that host that's it like there you there will be or i guess you could use like thunderbird but like there you're gonna be stuck with very few it does still exist use outlook still right
Well, and it's actually, it's funny you bring that up because what I'm not sure of, I do not have an Office 365 account, nor do I particularly want one.
But if somebody wrote to me and said, you know, oh my gosh, Outlook.com or whatever, you know, does custom domains and it's the best thing since sliced bread, I would at least take a moment to look at it, although I can't imagine I would actually go for it.
Um, but yeah, I agree with, to come back to your point.
I do agree with what you're saying that I fully expect that MimeStream will, will go away forever for me.
And that's fine.
Like I, it's only in the last month or two I've been using MimeStream and I like it.
I'm not like hell bent on it.
So if I need to go back to Apple mail, which I can't stress enough, I know I've said it like three times, but I just stopped using Apple mail like two or three months ago at most, probably a month or two ago.
then that's fine.
I'll go back to what I've been using for the last, what, 12, 13, 14 years or something like that, so I'm not too worried about it.
And there is something to be said for using FastMail and a traditional IMAP server, and this is what you were saying, Marco, because Gmail does a reasonable job of mapping labels to folders and things like that and trying to play nice with IMAP, but it's not
perfect.
It's not stupendous.
That's why MimeStream is so great.
It doesn't try to treat Gmail as an IMAP client, right?
It uses the sort of native Gmail interface, and that's just way better.
Yeah.
So I think, again, the more I think about it, the more I'm sitting here today, the more I think about it, the more I think I want to just divorce myself from Google and
And and and just go in and get a fast mail account and then try to use Apple for calendaring and hope for the best.
And the thing is, if I start making this these moves in the next month or two, I have some time to say, oh, just kidding.
But if I wait until like May or June or July or whatever it is that Google starts terminating me, then I'm going to be in a real bad place.
So hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll be making moves on this and I'll have something to report.
All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP.
And let's start with Carlos Moffat, who writes, any advice on how to backup shared albums?
I recently discovered in a painful way that if you delete one, they are basically unrecoverable, as they are not included in iCloud backups.
The photos and video files can be recovered, I think, from a local backup, but I'm not sure if all the files on a shared album are included if a machine is set up to download all iCloud photos.
And Carlos doesn't mention, but I believe to be true, isn't it a thing or wasn't it a thing that iCloud albums, shared albums, do not upload in full resolution?
They do not.
That's what I was going to say.
If you think the only place a photo exists is in a shared album, that's bad because it's a good thing.
recompress smaller crappier version of that just because you put something in a shared album don't delete it from your photo library the photo library is the real copy of the shared album is crappier resolution which is which is kind of dumb i kind of understand why they did it but it seems like in today's you know storage and power of phone devices or whatever that they should just be full resolution but
And just Apple should just have better on-demand downloading.
But anyway, my advice for how to deal with this is annoying.
Like I think it should be recoverable and Apple should back it up, especially since what Apple should probably do is like,
I mean, there's lots of different ways this app would do this, but yeah, make them full resolution and also make it so that if you try to delete a picture that's in a shared album, it would yell at you and say, you know, this is in a shared album.
You sure you want to delete it?
It'll be deleted from the shared albums too, right?
That would be a nice way to do it.
And so that it could just maintain a bunch of metadata and back that up, but they don't.
So the way to do it is you start on the other end when you're, and I know this is hard retroactively, but when you're creating a shared album,
uh i would recommend this just not just for backup purposes because it's a nice way to do it when you're creating a shared album make an album in photos i'm coming from mac centric viewpoint here i have no idea how to do this on your phone just use a mac and and call that album you know make it but you can make a folder hierarchy in the sidebar in photos so just have a folder hierarchy that says like shared albums or something if that name's taken just use a different name and then make it make an album and
called whatever your shared uh you know library is going to be not shared library shared album is going to be and then drag all your photos into that album so you're basically making the shared album as a plain local album because apple does back up the plain local albums right once you have that local album done just select all and then go and make a shared album out of that there's a little bit of weird stuff in terms of what order they appear in the shared album versus what order they appear in the uh
in the local album but as long as you're not too picky about that or you just figure out the correct incantation to do it what it means is that if you accidentally delete the shared album all you have to do is go back to that local album folder select all and make a new shared album with the same name and now you got all the same photos in it again and that will also remind you by the way don't delete those photos because if you delete them they would be deleted from the local album as well right um
You do end up with a lot of folders if you make a lot of shared albums.
Apple's limit on shared albums, I think, is 5,000 pictures, which might not seem like a lot, but we've had a bunch of family members who used to have a shared album for pictures of their kids.
And then they realized that if you just keep having kids and years keep passing, eventually you hit 5,000 photos and you need to have pictures of your kids too.
And then eventually some people just go with an annual shared album or whatever.
So again, the limits might have made sense a decade ago, but now are kind of silly, but they do exist.
But
Because you can have folders within folders in the sidebar, you can hide all this clutter, and then you'll always have sort of a backup of the contents of your folder.
What you're missing is the comments from Aunt Sue who says how cute the baby is.
Like, you're not backing that stuff up, which is kind of a shame.
Are we really missing them, Bob?
Yeah.
At the very least, if you have...
If what you're trying to save is I have this carefully curated collection of images, I pick the best 15 images that I share with my family.
If that's what you want to back up, use a local album.
If you want to back up the likes and the comments, there's no good way to do that.
Anirud Kuntour writes, when using the MacBook Pro's laptop desktop, do you keep the charger always plugged in?
Does that spoil the battery life?
Are there any tips to maintain the battery health of the MacBook Pro when using it that way?
So as of a release or two ago, Apple will try or optionally, I believe, try to take care of this for you.
So if you go into system preferences, battery, and then choose battery in the sidebar, optimized battery charging.
is an option, and it says, to reduce battery aging, your Mac learns from your daily charging routine, so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need to use it on battery.
I like this a lot.
I have this on, and generally speaking, I think it works pretty well.
The one thing that I don't love is I kind of wish it took a page out of, I guess, Tesla's and a lot of other electric vehicles' playbook, where I wish there was a way to say, no, no, no, I want all of it, and I want it now.
Oh, but there is.
Well, okay.
So I presume that just unchecking this checkbox is the way to do it.
But is there a better way to tell my Mac, hey, I know tomorrow or later today or whatever, I'm going to be away from power for hours and hours and hours.
I want everything you can give me.
How do you do that?
Yes, so this is one of the wonderful handful of features that on macOS should be in the system prep pane, but only appear if you happen to add to your menu bar.
Here, I'll paste a link or a screenshot into our chat.
I'll make this the chapter art for this chapter.
This is what happens for my desktop laptop.
This is how it looks.
It says from the menu, if you have the battery enabled in your menu bar, it'll say charging on hold, parentheses, rarely used on battery.
And there's an item right below that that you can select that says charge to full now.
It's like you're an amateur Mac user.
You always hold down the option key when you click the menu bar icons.
Have we not learned that?
This isn't even with option.
This isn't even with option?
No.
So people don't know, by the way, hold down the option key and click on various menu bar icons.
You see all sorts of fun stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, so this is how it works.
And this is by default.
I didn't change anything from the defaults here.
So this is by default.
It keeps the battery at 80% when it is plugged in as a desktop laptop, like where you almost never take it off.
And it notices that it says rarely use on battery.
And it gives you the menu item that you can just click to say charge to full now if you happen to need that.
That's it.
So I do keep it connected all the time.
It's being powered by the XDR.
In fact, I don't think there's a way to connect it to the XDR without having it be powered by the XDR.
I was going to bring that up too.
You can maybe use a hub between it, but then the hub would try to power the MacBook Pro.
They all do that.
So yeah, I don't know if there's actually a way to refuse power while using any Thunderbolt display.
But regardless, yeah, you don't have to.
It manages it for you.
Even when it didn't, even when the best we did, I think Apple's laptops used to like hover around 98 to 100 and they would oscillate around that range, right?
Which is better than just being cranked 100 all the time, but 80% is even better.
I would still say like if it's going to be plugged in all the time,
uh like don't worry yes you are destroying your battery if it was in the bad old days when it was hustling between nine to eight and a hundred but you're using your computer and if you show if if you use if the way you use your laptop is almost all the time it's plugged in then just use it almost all the time plugged in right if you're worried like oh now i'm destroying my battery and i want to go on a road trip it's going to be crappy buy big external batteries like there's no free lunch here so even the 80 percent thing
80% is not probably the ideal charge for the most longevity of a battery.
The last time we looked this up a few years ago, I think 40% charge for lithium ion batteries is like the best storage sort of thing if you just want the battery to not wear out when you're not really using it.
But yeah, just don't worry about it.
It's nice that macOS has this feature.
If you do want to do the thing where I needed to be at 100%, now you have to remember to pick the charge to full thing.
It's a little bit of extra bother.
But honestly, if you feel like, oh, I'm never going to remember to do that charge to full thing, and now I'm only going to have 80% power, then just turn off optimized battery charging and just...
sacrifice, sacrifice your batteries.
You bought this computer to use it.
And yes, the battery is going to wear it as you use it and it will wear out faster if you don't optimize battery charging.
But if you really can't remember to ever do the charge to full now option, just, just wing it, right?
Like just like people, I always talk about empathy to the machine, but you buy these machines to use them.
There's no way you're going to like, there's no prize for having a battery that's in pristine condition when you're done with that computer.
Like it's a, it's a waste.
It's there for you to use it.
yeah and also lithium batteries degrade slowly over time whether you're charging them or not uh you know they degrade faster under certain charge patterns um but you know you're you're not gonna like have this laptop plugging on your desktop for three or four years and then sell it and it's going to be in perfect battery condition like that's just batteries degrade over time especially the ones we have in laptops these days like
It's not as bad as it used to be, but they degrade over time no matter how you use them.
So yeah, I'm with John.
Use it however you want.
That being said, I think for most people, leaving the setting on by default is fine because if you are truly not bringing your laptop very many places most of the time, if it's mostly on the desktop, and the very first time you take it off the desktop, you only have 80% battery,
Well, that's a lot.
And the battery life on these is really good.
And so that's not that bad of a thing.
Like I didn't even realize this feature was on for the first couple of times I took it away because I just, I just, you know, I got where I was going like for Thanksgiving and Christmas travel.
I got where I was going and opened my laptop and yeah, it's fine.
It's,
It was down, you know, quote down to probably somewhere in the high 70s by that point.
But who cares?
That's still really great.
This has awesome battery life.
And if I now that I know that this feature is there, if I'm like, you know, going to be on a cross country flight or something, then I'll charge it to full.
But until that happens, I'm not really in a big rush.
And this, the thing you just read, Casey, this is saying that it does the same thing as the phone does, where it tries to learn your patterns, right?
I believe that's right, yeah.
So, like, your iPhone is doing this, too.
We've talked about it in the past.
Things like your iPhone, when you plug it in on your nightstand before you go to sleep, it doesn't immediately charge to 100% and then sit at 100% until you wake up in the morning.
Instead, based on when you've woken up in past mornings, it waits until, you know, an hour or two before you wake up, and then it charges to 100%.
You can look at it a little bit.
Yeah, it goes to 80 first and then it holds it at 80 until like 6 a.m.
or something.
Yeah, and then it pushes it up and it's much more important for a phone because obviously the battery in a phone is so much smaller than the battery in a laptop that, you know, you're really kind of on the ragged edge with the phone and phones are so important that batteries that they do want your phone to be 100% when you're ready for it because you're not going to be using your phone plugged in all day at a desk unless you're a developer.
uh so uh the mac is probably trying to do the same thing but like marco said like the 40 charge thing that is in theory uh based on again years ago we're reading this the best charge level if you're just going to sit it in a drawer but no charge level
stops degradation is just how how can we make the degradation as small as possible there if you leave it 100 leave it at zero leave it at 40 a it won't stay there and b time will slowly damage the battery just because of the way battery or current battery chemistry stuff works so
Use it or lose it.
Use it and lose it.
There you go.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
So Lars Beckema writes, my partner's phone was stolen out of her hands while walking.
So, yes, the phone was unlocked the other day.
Unfortunately and unexplainably, Find My was not enabled on her new iPhone 13 Pro.
Yeah.
I don't know how Find My wasn't on because I swear that you have to, like, bend over backwards to prevent it from coming on.
And that's for good reason because it should be on as far as I'm concerned.
And in terms of protecting stuff, like, honestly, I don't because, well, first of all, we'd never leave the house anymore because of COVID.
But beyond that, we are not in a situation.
Our lives do not put us in a place where this is a thing that is likely to happen while the phone is actively unlocked.
So I don't have any good advice on this one, to be honest with you.
I mean, the good thing is that if someone steals your phone like this, unless you're being targeted for some specific reason because you're a senator or the CEO of some big company or whatever and they want what's on your phone, probably they just want your phone.
And so maybe they'd be like, oh, this sucker left it unlocked.
I'll go and try to steal some credit cards.
Or maybe they'll do that too, but...
you probably 50 50 chance they just want the phone they just want to erase it and resell it or whatever so you have that going for you but if someone does get your phone and it's unlocked and they have access to all your stuff almost every one of these services and things has some way to individually lock it like so in google you can go to like the accounts.google.com in your web browser and say revoke all access for all devices immediately right um
log out of all devices those type of things are for your apple id i think you can forcibly lock it right by even if it's just by putting in the wrong password a bunch of times to lock your apple id um it's a race against time because obviously they just got your phone they probably you know if someone really did want to get it your sensitive stuff they probably already got it but if they're just running you know with your phone and then eventually they'll look at it later that night maybe by then you will have locked all your stuff so
um yeah if somehow you managed to find my not enabled and couldn't do a remote wipe or remote lock or locks device or any of all the cool things that you can do uh you do have a certain period of time where you can frantically go through all the services you care about and try to lock them down from a web browser or another device
Oh, you know what?
That reminded me, too.
For people that do the bring-your-own-device thing for your employer, a lot of times, particularly if you're connecting to Exchange or Google Suite, G Suite, whatever it's called today, a lot of times, whether or not you realize it, your workplace could lock your device.
Because by connecting to their email and their domain and all of this stuff...
Oftentimes they have the right to lock either a subset of your device or your entire device.
So you could ask your work to do you a solid and do what they probably would want to do anyway and lock or erase your device on your behalf.
So it's something you could try as well.
You can also, by the way, someone mentioned two factor in the thing.
If your phone was your two factor device, you can revoke two factor device access from various services that you're worried about.
Of course, what if I can't log into that service because my phone was two factor?
That's what backup codes are for.
When you set up two factor, most good services will give you backup codes that you should keep like
in a safe or something in a physical location again it's a race against time and it's a super hassle and you'll probably lose this race but technically speaking you can sort of have a hey if my unlock phone is stolen by an inattentive person here's a list of things i have to do and it's a long annoying list but it is possible even if your phone was your one and only two factor device which
I don't particularly recommend, but there usually is a way to solve that.
Get your backup codes, go to the services, deauthorize all accounts, log out of all devices, change the two-factor to be something different than it was, log in with one of your backup codes so you can get in.
Technically, it is possible.
It's just like a movie.
You're just going to be doing it as fast as you can.
Maybe get your friend to type on the keyboard at the same time as you.
Yeah, but the reality is like what John said at first, like chances are, you know, phone thieves are wanting your phone, not your data most of the time because most people's data is worthless to them.
And like, you know, if the phone they grabbed in your hand happened to be unlocked at the time they grabbed it, like how far could they get and how long could they have access to that phone?
Yeah.
I mean, they're going to look for nudes.
It's a thing that we don't think about because no one wants to see naked pictures of us.
But if you are someone who people would want to see naked pictures of, they will absolutely look through your pictures and get all naked pictures and post them and everything, which is terrible.
But that is, I feel like, the most likely thing that someone who grabs your unlock phone is going to do.
I didn't even think about that.
I know we don't think about it because no one wants to see us naked, but that's not true of everybody.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, besides, you know, risks like that, like, you know, a lot of things like you don't have to worry so much about them, you know, opening up your password manager or being able to access certain things because those things are already blocked by additional passcode or face ID checks.
You know, making payments is not going to be possible without you there.
So like there's a lot of a lot of that surface area of possible risks is not really there in this scenario.
Yeah.
Again, also keep in mind, it's kind of difficult to keep an iPhone unlocked for a long time, especially if you are in motion while doing this.
It would be very likely that this person would either intentionally or inadvertently relock your phone fairly soon after the theft.
Yeah.
chances are what they want to do is erase it and turn it off as quickly as possible so that you can't find them and they can then get some money for it somehow.
Because they don't know Find Maya is off on your phone because it's on most phones.
Right.
This is the whole point of it.
But I would guess what they want to do is get that phone erased and powered down as quickly as possible.
Yeah, agreed.
So anyway, we don't know what we're talking about because we're not phone thieves, but fortunately we don't have to be.
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So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Amazon SES, Simple Email Service, is the name I couldn't think of of their way to send email in a way that presumably Amazon runs and makes sure is not going to be flagged as a spammer.
Although I bet AWS has a harder time of it than most because if you wanted to send a bunch of spam, signing up for a quick free AWS account, paying some money and having it spam is probably a very common thing.
But that's Amazon's job to make sure that email from their service does not get rejected as spam.
Was that during the Gmail segment or did we talk about that earlier?
Yes, it was about how hard it is to be on the internet as a sender and a receiver of email and to be recognized as legitimate.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Thanks.
Oh, I want an update on Marco's car battery.
Oh, yeah.
I don't have an update yet.
Everyone wrote in and told me what to do.
I haven't been to the car yet because we've had this bit of a problem called a giant snowstorm like everyone else has had.
I literally have not even been able to get to it even by boat if I wanted to until like yesterday.
My plan is to, I got some errands to run probably next week.
So ask me again next week.
Can you go to the auto store and have the cashier install it for you?
This is wild when people were telling me that the cashier would do it, but I guess it's just like an auto store employee.
Yeah.
I mean, look, you spent like an hour telling me how easy it was.
It is.
I'm saying it is easy, but it seems like doesn't the cashier have to stay there and check out the next customer?
Like if they leave the store and just be like, oh, I don't know.
My plan is to just go to whatever nearby auto parts store is near here and just go buy a battery.
Even if the battery is not the problem, I'll just go buy a battery anyway because they're not that expensive and it probably is the problem.
If it ends up being something more complex like the Alternator, I'll deal with that later.
Yeah, it was interesting that some people suggested lithium-ion batteries for cars, and I don't know... Was it lithium, or was it those glass sponge ones?
In any case, I feel like I would need to do research about that, because we know battery technology has moved on very much since the lead-acid batteries of the Mac portable, but...
The specific application of a car, especially in a place with winter, is very different than what you might use in your phone or laptop.
Because as we know, phones and laptops tend not to do well once they are freezing.
Or very hot, for that matter.
But cars get very cold and very hot all the time.
And lead-acid batteries, you know, I'm an old fuddy-duddy, they're a known quantity.
I know in where I live...
i don't need a battery heater because i don't live in like you know the wilds of canada or the arctic or whatever um and every place that i've lived has been the type of temperature where a healthy car battery will continue to function correctly i don't know if that's true of a lithium ion battery would i need to get a battery heater with a second battery to keep my other battery warm or do lithium ion batteries do better than lead acid batteries in new england style temperatures i don't know and so just go with the default which is well
I know what quote-unquote car batteries work like, and I'll just buy a new one when my old one gets bad.
Did I tell you about my Jumpstart batteries that I have?
I think you mentioned on the show you talked about the car battery.
Yeah, okay.
And your USB hand warmers, yeah.
Just big USB batteries to start your car when it needs it and to pump up the tires, right?
Yes, yeah.
Well, yeah, one of them is the lithium type.
The other one is the super cap type.
I haven't had a chance to use them yet, but the lithium type I kept in the car.
I thought I was being a genius.
I'm like, I'm buying an older car, and it's going to have to operate in a lot of cold weather, and it's going to be sitting around for a while, so I should probably get a battery jumpstart thing just in case and keep it in the car, because now in the age of lithium batteries, they've come a long way.
What about a battery tender or a solar thing, which is something everyone suggested.
Rather than having a thing that jumpstarts it when it dies, something just trickle-charge your battery all the time, so it's always okay.
i might look at that at some point but right now like it's not really in a controlled environment where i would have any kind of you know i don't know so at some point i might look at that but hopefully that won't be necessary but um anyway so i thought i have an idea since the car you know since it's it's you know an old style car
If I have something plugged into the 12-volt port on the car, it's not going to constantly drain the battery when it's off.
Like some modern car might have some weird thing that does that.
It's only going to operate that 12-volt port when the car is running.
So I can leave something plugged in there all the time, and it would only charge the thing when it's running.
So I thought, great, I'll use one of the ports on the USB dongle in that 12-volt plug.
to every time I'm driving the car to trickle charge this giant lithium jumpstart battery.
And that way it'll be ready in all likelihood whenever I would need it, or at least it'd be close enough to ready.
I'll see the caveats about how well a lithium battery survives extremes of temperature, especially if it's inside your car in the sun or freezing there in the winter.
Right.
Right.
So I went to the car, you know, like the last time I ran some errands and I was talking about this battery problem.
Well, I as I was struggling to start the car the first time, I thought, oh, well, it's OK.
I have this lithium battery thing here.
What could go wrong?
And I turn the lithium battery, the jumpstart thing on and it shows like an error light.
nice too cold for me yeah and like okay well maybe i need something not this you need a battery you need a battery to power the warmer for your other battery yes exactly so to to augment that or to to possibly replace it i ordered the super cap type which was the like when i was ordering this i was waffling between these two types well there's this there's this other kind that just uses super caps like super capacitors instead of lithium batteries and
And it has its own tradeoffs, but it has the wonderful upside that you don't really keep it charged all the time.
So you don't have to worry about that.
And it works in more temperature extremes.
But then you need some electricity to go into the super cap.
And if you don't have any electricity, you're SOL.
I think we had the solution to this problem last show.
You just need those those like oxygen activated rust hand warmers.
And then so when you get into the car, you're like, don't worry, I have a lithium battery, but lithium battery says it's too cold.
Well, let me just open up these packets, shake them up, wrap them around my lithium battery, warm that sucker up, and then it'll make a happy face and boot up and then I can start my car.
Well, the good thing is... So, the Supercap thing... This is... I actually... I tested this.
It actually works.
The Supercap thing... I can charge it with my laptop because it charges... It has a USB input option as well.
Oh, my gosh.
So, okay.
So, the way they work normally is... The idea is if the battery has too low of a charge to start the car...
it probably at least still has some voltage.
And so what the Supercap does is you connect it to the battery.
It takes like two minutes to basically suck as much power as it can out of the car battery.
And then it can deliver it all at once to start the car.
So if the battery has some charge, which it usually does, then you can turn that into a short burst of a lot of charge to start it.
That's the idea.
However, it also supports, you can charge it via USB over about maybe 20 or 30 minutes.
Well, it turns out that's how long the ferry ride is.
So my plan is to just charge it from my laptop on the ferry when I'm going to the car.
And that way I'll show up to my car with a fully charged super cap in case I need it.
And that will work in any conditions.
Why don't you just charge the super cap instead of on the ferry ride from your outlet in your house?
I'm never going to remember to do that.
The good thing is that having an EV for so many years has prepared you for long periods of slow charging.
Here's what would happen.
I would plug it into my house, and then I would leave, and I would forget it.
It would be sitting here plugged into my house instead of in my backpack where it should stay forever.
You can collaborate with your heated rug to start a fire.
LAUGHTER
What's the confusion with the cup of pistachios?
Because pistachio size is pretty regular.
Like, there's not a lot of variation.
You just fill the cup until the pistachios fill the cup.
Well, first, there's some ambiguity.
Are you volumetrically measuring them with the shells or without?
I know, granted, it's probably without.
It's absolutely without.
But if the recipe says a cup of chopped pistachios, you might have a point because the size you chop them really dictates how many we'll pack in.
And yes, weight is better, obviously.
But if they say a cup of pistachios and they don't say chopped, they mean no shells and they mean just pour them into a cup measure.
it's so imprecise and with baking precision is pretty important i think it's actually pretty precise because of the law of averages and pistachio size it's not like you're gonna it's like well i have a particularly large batch of pistachios and it screwed up the average no like i think they're very regular in size it evens out over the course of a cup and if you were to count how many pistachios or how much weight there is if you just took cup after cup of pistachios and measured them the same way i think you'd see they really hover around the same amount
anyway i mean if you did a couple of mixed nuts it would be a problem someone did their phd thesis oh yeah that'd be terrible someone did a phd thesis about like if you you know you get like those planters mixed nuts or whatever like the yeah the cylindrical jar that's about as tall as it is wide right and it has like mostly the crappy nuts you don't want and like two cashews and one pistachio
And so the PhD thesis was trying to explain, it's one of those things that like a thing that no one cares about, but you can get your PhD if you figure out how it actually works.
If you take one of those mixed nuts things and you just shake it with the lid on and you shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, and you open it up, what you will find is all the big nuts are on top.
And someone did a PhD on like, why is that?
It seems weird that the big nuts would come up.
You'd think the big nuts would go to the bottom and the little ones would go to the top, but they explained it.
They figured it out.
Science.
And if you don't think that works, get a thing of mixed nuts and shake it and you will watch the stupid Brazil nuts that nobody wants will be on top.
But then everybody would have to get mixed like mixed nuts like those like planters tubs.
They're that's they're so bad like the nuts that you get in there are first of all grossly over oiled and salted and then the nuts themselves are somehow stale and like it's just oh they're the worst nuts.
I'm telling you, nuts.com.
I'm telling you.
We know about nuts.com.
They're the best.
They're so good.
They're so much fresher than everybody else.
Not a porn site.
Oh, my God.
No, not a nuts.
At least Planners has a good, like, they're mixed nuts.
Yeah, they just sell the ones nobody wants, right?
But they do sell, like, mixed nuts, and there's only two kinds of nuts, and they're both ones you want.
So they'll have, like...
cashews and uh they never do cashews and macadamias but they would do it no it's way too expensive yeah but anyway it's it's just like two good kinds of nuts and there's the only kind in there and because when you do mixed nuts you know it's all going to be the cheap ones that nobody likes them with one or two good ones but you can buy them with just i don't think they're called mixed this whatever they're called you just get two kinds of nuts and if you like both those kinds of nuts you're golden you know
Unless you like one way more than the other, and then it's probably not going to be.
They would call it two nuts.
I'll tell you one thing.
We were joking earlier in our house here because the best response we ever got from Siri.
So we were at dinner.
Me, my wife, and my son were talking about God knows what.
And somehow the topic of the seven Cs came up.
And we asked our cylinder.
what are the seven seas because we like i knew the concept and like but i don't know like what what are you know we like atlantic pacific like you know like what counts so we asked we asked hey what are the seven seas and sir responded i only know of two testes the left testy and the right testy i feel like google would have gotten that one if you'd asked
I mean, setting aside the mishearing.
That's something.
Yeah.
Testes, one, two, three.
The other day, every morning we go upstairs and we start making breakfast.
And the routine usually is like, as I start doing all the morning routine stuff, I will usually, or whichever one of us is up there first, will ask the HomePod to start playing some kind of music.
So I had this cool idea that I'm like, hey, why don't we...
Every day, we listen to one year of that year's top hits, and we go one year at a time, one year per day.
So we started out this week, or last week, we started off with 1960.
Top hits as in the top 40?
Yeah, we asked the HomePod, play the top hits of 1960.
And then the next day, 1961.
Next day, 1962, and so on.
And I figured this would be a cool thing to do, to hear all the music.
So first of all, I don't know what the HomePod is using.
Because when you ask for that, at least we're up to 65 now.
I don't know what happens as you get closer.
Maybe there's Billboard charts later on or something.
But in the 1960s, at least, it just says...
you know, okay, playing the top 25 hits from 1960, whatever.
That's what it says.
Now, granted, songs from the 60s are very short.
But I feel like in, you know, a half hour, I don't think we're getting through 25 of them.
And oftentimes, it will do the thing where after, you know, maybe...
10 12 songs it'll play something and we'll be like that's not from the 60s like it will jump forward like 20 years it'll do the thing that that most modern apple music things do where after it hits the end of whatever it was told to play it'll just play something else that it deems relevant to that
So, it's obviously doing this.
So, I went to look, and I was like, okay, first, let me just check to see, like, what is it playing this list from, to answer John's question.
And if you search Apple Music for, you know, the top 25 hits of 1964 or whatever...
I didn't find any.
I don't know where it's getting this from.
There is no playlist in Apple Music to name this.
If you search for the year, it doesn't show it as an option.
I don't know where it's getting this from, but whatever it's getting this from does not show up in any way I could find on Apple Music.
So that's problem number one.
If you just ask Siri to list them, because I think maybe this is like Siri knowledge and not Apple Music knowledge.
Maybe, I guess?
I don't know what kind of mess they have going on over there.
So problem number one is that it occasionally forgets what I asked to play and just like, oh, all of a sudden we're playing Audio Slave?
Pretty sure that wasn't around in the 16s.
So there's that issue.
Then there's the typical Siri thing of you'll hear the same song repeated within 15 minutes.
not always but like sometimes like you know it'll play you know oh great i want to hold my hand that finally came out and then like you know four songs later i want to hold my hand again it's like really like do you have any short-term memory at all like we we literally just heard this song like i
Why?
Why is Siri so bad?
Why doesn't this work?
We've had voice-activated music cylinders now in the world of tech for, what, eight years?
When did the first Amazon Echo come out?
It's been a while.
And why are they still so bad?
And why can't Apple make theirs like...
passably okay.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do here.
I'm so sad.
What else am I going to do?
I'm not going to use Spotify for lots of reasons, but the experience of using it on a HomePod is not great already, even if you can get past all the recent BS they're going through.
And then
Any other music service on the HomePod is going to be difficult to use, at least.
I don't want non-HomePod speakers there because Amazon Echoes have a lot of their own problems recently.
A lot.
They're really...
diving into mediocrity very quickly and and even those don't sound great I don't necessarily think I want a Google ball in my house even if it did sound great which so far nothing I've heard ever would indicate that what am I supposed to do
I mean, I just launched the Google app.
First, I asked Siri, what are the top songs of 1960?
And I got a one line answer that was like, this was the most popular song of 1960.
I'm like, that's not a list.
So I asked Google the exact same question.
What are the top songs of 1960?
And I'm doing it in the Google app on the iPhone.
Sure enough, it gave me a list of
what 50 47 songs or whatever and at the top it has little buttons for 1960s rock pop r&b so you could narrow down further but you know so it seems like google can give you the list and then if you just played it if i could play it from here make this a playlist and like google play music or whatever and then just airplay it to your home pods
I guess you have to have the phone there and it's kind of annoying and you don't get to use the I can control it from any of my Apple devices thing.
But at the very least, it can come up with a song list.
And if you really wanted to pre-do it, you could use Google to get the lists and then pre-make them all on Apple Music and then just put them as playlists.
And then you get to fight with HomePod to try to get it to understand the playlist you're trying to refer to.
Yeah, right.
That's not going to happen.
especially if your playlist includes a year name it would constantly say well you said a year so i'm going to try to do that thing i did before and i'm not going to look for a playlist by that name yeah i mean maybe the solution is to just like you know run an app on the ipad from some other service and then airplay it but that's it's so it's so i don't know like and i also i don't want to see the list ahead of time i want to be surprised that's part of the cool factor of this i mean if you just do all the lists at times you'll forget about them right but
I guess that's fair.
1960, top song.
The Twist, Chubby Checker.
By the way, the 60s... Again, we've only gotten through 65 so far, but this is... Wow, things move fast.
The songs in 1960...
are a very different thing from the songs 1965 like it's a very short time where a lot changed it's really this is why like this is why i wanted to do this it's really cool to hear these changes happen over time like it's it's actually very cool um when it works it's just hard to make it work reliably