Some Amount of Futzing
Casey:
Guys, I had a bad afternoon.
Marco:
Did you drop your phone again?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Did I tell you though that I realized I had dropped, I think I said this on the show, I have dropped my 12 Pro only indoors ever.
Casey:
And I've dropped it in such a way that I noticed I did shatter the back ever so slightly.
Casey:
Like if you don't look at it, if you don't look at it up close, I don't know.
Casey:
But I've decided unequivocally, this is the last time I will be caseless, casey-less.
Casey:
I just can't do it.
Casey:
It's just, I can't do it.
Casey:
They're too fragile.
Marco:
Apparently not.
Marco:
So funny that you mentioned that, actually.
Casey:
Uh-oh, uh-oh.
Marco:
No, it's not too bad.
Marco:
So I've been going caseless this year, first time in a number of years.
Marco:
And the other day, I just dropped it.
Marco:
I wish I had some good story, but I never dropped my phone.
Marco:
It's never been a thing.
Marco:
Well, the problem is...
Marco:
Almost every year I drop my phone like once or twice.
Marco:
And normally it's in a case.
Marco:
And so I kind of get forgiven.
Marco:
I hope that was a freebie.
Marco:
And this year AppleCare is my case.
Marco:
Sure enough.
Marco:
So I'm just, you know, walking the dog and like I have like my phone in my hand adjusting something and he pulls right at that moment.
Marco:
And, you know, normally it doesn't happen, but it happened.
Marco:
And I dropped the phone from a height of three feet onto a concrete sidewalk.
Marco:
And it's fine in the sense that neither glass pane has broken, but the edges are pretty scuffed up and they're like they're like rough when you run your finger over them.
Marco:
that's undesirable like it's yeah it's fun like it's not bad enough to invoke the apple care and you know get it replaced but it's just kind of a reminder like oh i guess that's what cases are for i i wish i didn't need them and maybe i still don't if i can like have a phone for almost a year and only drop it once and only have a few scratchers on the outside that result for
Marco:
from that you get some sandpaper or a metal file you can take down those rough edges i thought about that but because it like i have the red finish like if i had just like regular silver aluminum like uncolored red magic marker and color yeah well but touch a touch-up pen from a car you know i don't know yeah well and like and anywhere that the finish gets scratched the aluminum shows through it's like the red's already gone from those sections but i uh i i would i would hate to have to make my this the silver patches larger that are already there
Casey:
Yeah, that's not why my afternoon was bad, but yes, I agree.
Casey:
You know, and I love, I love, love, love, love the look and in many ways the feel of the 12 Pro.
Casey:
And I love the color.
Casey:
Like, I liked the foresty green from last year, but this like...
Casey:
deep blue.
Casey:
I freaking adore.
Casey:
I just absolutely adore it.
Casey:
But I have decided without question that this upcoming next phone for me, I must have a case.
Casey:
And Erin, I didn't get a case for her 12 Pro because they didn't have like the light pink case that she's used for years and years and years.
Casey:
They had other not as good colors.
Casey:
And she absolutely shattered her back within like a week.
Casey:
like I did last year.
Casey:
And so the List family is no longer allowed to go caseless.
Casey:
But I digress.
Casey:
The reason I'm sad is because I went to pick up my car from Safelite Repair, Safelite Replace, because I had gotten dinged by a rock weekend before last on my windshield, and it was starting to spider, so I was getting it replaced.
Casey:
And the Safelite place happens to be sort of kind of downtown Richmond,
Casey:
And right around the corner from there is my favorite barbecue place in Richmond, a place called ZZQ, which is like nationally ranked, one of the best barbecue joints in the entire country, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
It's a Texas-style brisket and other things.
Casey:
And from everything I've read from people who are born and bred Texas, they say this is one of the only places you can get Texan brisket outside of Texas, right?
Casey:
Well, we go...
Casey:
And remember that the List family is not currently eating indoors.
Casey:
We're still being fairly paranoid on account of the kids.
Casey:
And ZZQ has a really good back patio.
Casey:
And so the thought was, you know, the kids and Aaron would go to the back patio and I would run through the line, grab the food, and we would go to the back and eat in the back patio outside.
Casey:
And I'm pulling up to ZZQ, which is this very, very small parking lot.
Casey:
And I'm thinking to myself, oh, gosh, this is going to be a mess.
Casey:
You know what?
Casey:
Because Aaron had to drop me off so we could pick up my car.
Casey:
So we're in two cars.
Casey:
So I send Aaron a text using Siri.
Casey:
You take whatever spot you can find in the lot.
Casey:
I'll go parallel park elsewhere.
Casey:
And I come up to the parking lot.
Casey:
It's empty.
Casey:
I think, oh, this is fantastic.
Casey:
It was early even for the List family.
Casey:
And we eat early as it is, but it was like five o'clock, which even for us is early.
Casey:
And so I pull into the parking lot.
Casey:
There's like one or two other cars.
Casey:
I'm thinking, oh, this is magnificent.
Casey:
The back patio is going to be empty.
Casey:
We'll be able to waltz right through the line.
Casey:
This is great.
Casey:
And we finally get up to the door after unloading the kids.
Casey:
Sold out.
Casey:
We'll see you tomorrow.
Marco:
do you guys have barbecue places that will just sell out it was devastating i was so sad i thought you're gonna say that it was closed down that it wasn't no no no thank goodness oh that happened to mine oh wait the one the one in westchester the one it's gone although i i heard that's really too bad i mean i mean it didn't it didn't survive covet at all they didn't even like as soon as covet started they were gone but i heard that it's being picked up by another barbecue place but i haven't been back to uh in town to see it yet
Casey:
Oh man, that's a real bummer.
Casey:
I really wanted to, I mean, I don't have any plans to come up near you again anytime soon with respect, but I was assuming at some point I would be up in the Westchester area and I would, you know, I was hoping that you could take me and we could go get some of your barbecue and see how it is.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, like it's probably better for my health not to have massive quantities of meat covered in like wood carcinogens every week.
Marco:
like it's probably best ultimately that i'm not that you know having super easy access to it uh but it does that that was a very good time that i kind of miss
Casey:
It makes me sad.
Casey:
But anyway, so if that's the most of my problems, I'd say I'm doing all right.
Casey:
But it did make me sad that I couldn't get my delicious and hilariously expensive barbecue after picking up my car.
Casey:
Interestingly, I couldn't have them just do it in the driveway because I guess with these new fancy schmancy cars these days, they need to do like recalibration of all the sensors that are behind the windshield.
Casey:
So I'm assuming that's why they insisted that I bring it down to their location and they took it for like three hours and did their thing.
John:
You never want them to do it in the driveway.
John:
Come on.
John:
I mean, why not?
John:
Get your car painted in a tent?
John:
Because it's not a controlled environment.
John:
Okay.
John:
You want it to be indoors, first of all, so there's not like pollen and dust and bugs and wind and rain and who knows what else.
John:
And yeah, you want it to be like someplace with controlled lighting on a level surface with technicians who are in a comfortable place, not just randomly gorilla in a parking lot.
John:
I always dislike that.
John:
I love my word.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
Good to know.
Casey:
Yeah, see, but the advantage of John never buying cars ever and buying unremarkable cars when he does is that you don't have radar cruise control, do you?
Casey:
You don't have any of it.
John:
My car is remarkable, Casey, first of all.
John:
And second of all, no, I don't have radar cruise control.
John:
But I've also, I guess I drive between the rocks.
John:
I haven't lost a windshield that I can recall either.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
This is also my opportunity to remind you, those of us who live in places with snow, which John includes me, sometimes, those of us who live in places with snow, please clean off the roof of your car when it snows.
Casey:
Because once, going back to mom and dad's when they lived in Connecticut, I was on the Jersey Turnpike and some lazy...
Casey:
turd in front of me in a lexus uh sedan didn't clear all the snow and ice off of the roof of his car and then a lot of it hurtled into my windshield and absolutely shattered the windshield of the subaru uh to the point that i probably shouldn't have continued to drive it but i was so close to mom and dad's at that point i was like screw it i'm just gonna get get home uh so please if you live in a place with winter don't be a jerk
Casey:
clear off the roof of your car.
Casey:
Please clear the roof of your car.
Casey:
I don't care how tall your car is.
Casey:
If your car is that tall, either get a more reasonable car or get a ladder, but clear off the roof of your car for the love.
Casey:
Please, please do it for me.
John:
Get a ladder.
John:
And this is a good defensive driving lesson.
John:
If you're driving behind a car that has snow on the roof, change lanes.
John:
If you're driving anywhere near a truck, get far out of the lane, away from it, in front of it, ideally, or several lanes to the side as you pass it.
John:
And if you have an iPhone, put it in a case so when you drop it, it doesn't break it.
John:
brutal absolutely brutal but it makes it so much bigger i'm loving the mini lifestyle so much this year my case is so slim i just put a link to my case like honestly someone uh we had a friend's visit and they had a phone like oh how are you liking the big iphone because i thought they had a 12 pro
John:
And they said, I don't have the big iPhone.
John:
I said, yeah, you have the big, like the Pro Max or whatever.
John:
You've got the big Max one, right?
John:
And they said, no.
John:
So I grabbed their phone and then I took out my phone and held them up to each other.
John:
And lo and behold, we had the same size phone, but their case was huge.
John:
It just made the phone seem so much bigger.
John:
My very, very thin, extremely cheap leather case, which so far turned out to be a great purchase because it's holding up great.
John:
It's protecting my phone and it makes the phone barely bigger than it is.
John:
So it's so slim that I thought someone else's phone was the bigger size up just because the case was so chunky.
Marco:
But the current generation of the medium-sized pros, I really don't like the way they feel.
Marco:
I don't like the polished steel bands.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
First of all, they're massive fingerprint magnets.
Marco:
I think they look terrible.
John:
Put a case on it so you don't have to worry about the steel band anymore.
Marco:
yeah i mean i guess like that is the size phone i had for the last few years before this one and i lived with it but i love the mini so much except the battery life does suck and i do miss a 2x camera but it other than those things i do like it a lot like there's never a time when i'm using my mini and i think my phone is too small like that that literally never i never think that at all and every time i handle like tiff's max i
Marco:
like what is this that's not that that is that is that is effectively an ipad i couldn't agree with you more yeah but like and i know there's a middle setting that most people pick there's a reason why but but still like the the mini feels so good even though it has those flaws like yeah the battery life is not good and especially now that it's not brand new you know i have it's almost a year old now i'm so the battery capacity is a little bit less and i'm using it a little bit more because it's summer and i'm walking around a lot but
Marco:
It is still such a great size that I'm willing to tolerate the mediocre battery life.
Marco:
And yeah, and the 2X lens, I do miss that.
Marco:
I would love to have that back.
Marco:
But I love the way this phone feels so much that I'm willing to give that up.
Marco:
But yeah, we'll see this fall.
Marco:
The current rumors are that it's going to be the same sizes and probably roughly the same trade-offs.
Marco:
And if that's the case, I might go back to the middle size.
Marco:
I don't know yet, but...
Marco:
I won't enjoy it.
Marco:
You tell them.
Marco:
This is like the worst, most privileged thing, but still.
Marco:
I want my 2X lens back, but man, I really like the size.
Casey:
If the Mini had all three lenses, which I'm sure would have looked preposterous, I'm sure it's physically difficult to fit at all.
Casey:
I understand why it doesn't.
Casey:
But my goodness, if it had all the standard issue camera setup, I probably would have gotten one this past year.
Casey:
But I am personally unwilling to give up anything in terms – well, I shouldn't say anything.
Casey:
I'm unwilling to give up one of the three available lenses because I feel like I do flip between all three quite a bit.
Casey:
And I know we did research about this when this was an issue, you know, a year ago almost.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I, whether or not the facts bore it out, I feel like I use all three of the lenses enough that I would not sacrifice and get a mini.
Casey:
And now, because, you know, Apple made this compromised device, not unlike the MacBook that I loved so much, nobody's buying them.
Casey:
Who'd have thunk it?
Casey:
And so now the rumors are, well, there's not gonna be more of them possibly ever because nobody's buying them.
Marco:
Well, and one theory I heard that I think makes a lot of sense is that this past year, anybody who bought a new iPhone this year probably did not do so by first handling them in stores because you couldn't.
Casey:
That's true.
Marco:
And like the Mini, you kind of have to feel it to get that kind of like, ooh, I want this kind of feeling because it's – most people, the idea of going super small –
Marco:
sounds risky or they might think that's not what they want.
Marco:
But once you handle it, that's when you realize whatever the benefits of it are and whether that does something for you.
Marco:
You know it when you feel it, right?
Marco:
And so in a year when most people never went into the stores, if picking out a phone this year, it does make sense why a lot of people would not have gone for it.
Marco:
Whereas current rumor, again, is that they're going to stick with these same three sizes for the next year.
Marco:
And I think that might...
Marco:
we might see a different sales breakdown in the next year.
Marco:
That being said, I don't think it's going to take off like wildfire.
Marco:
I still don't think it's going to be the most popular phone and it's probably going to be, you know, a somewhat distant third like it is now across the three sizes, but it's still really nice and it's, they still sell a ton of them in absolute terms.
Marco:
You know, it's, it's not a big percentage, but,
Marco:
They still are selling a ton of them.
Marco:
And so I do hope this size continues and continues to improve over time.
Marco:
But even I, after a year, I'm kind of thinking, maybe I should go back this fall to the middle size just to get that 2X lens and the extra battery life back.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Robert Spivak writes, As a designer slash installer of smart home systems, I think I can contribute a few thoughts and some insight about what was mentioned without being self-promotional or a hidden agenda.
Casey:
Robert writes, I can't prove it, but I swear the problems with Apple HomeKit Wi-Fi devices is rooted in Apple's problems with Bonjour and multicast DNS.
Casey:
HomeKit is totally reliant on MDNS, which Apple uses, but almost nothing else does.
Casey:
Robert apparently has tested 15 different smart plugs from all kinds of manufacturers, and they've all had the symptom of mysteriously dropping off HomeKit Wi-Fi networks.
Casey:
Some in a few hours, some in a few days, some after a few months.
Casey:
But the common symptom is that they still have an IP address and can be pinged.
Casey:
But in any MDNS lookup app, like the free discovery apps for iOS, macOS, etc., they have dropped out of the MDNS section.
Casey:
uh anecdotally after swapping a lot of wi-fi gear and finally methodically upgrading and downgrading firmware and various access points and wi-fi routers it appears that mdns support is simply buggy or poorly implemented when a stable combination of software firmware is found the devices don't drop off anymore i'm not sure i buy this but i certainly have a lot less experience than robert does
Marco:
Yeah, I think – so this was in response to last week how I was talking – I was basically expressing my woes in trying to get smart home devices that were actually reliable and in particular like a smart outlet behind an ice maker that's built in.
Marco:
It's kind of hard to access.
Marco:
And I had said like I've never found anything like smart home-wise that worked 100% of the time or that didn't occasionally require you to like go repair it with things or whatever.
Marco:
And –
Marco:
A couple of pieces of follow-up.
Marco:
Number one, I had forgotten that I have a Lutron Cassetta set up at my house.
Marco:
When they put in my front lights to meet some kind of safety building code, they had to be on some kind of timer so they would always automatically turn on at night.
Marco:
They did that with a Lutron Cassetta set up.
Marco:
And so I actually have that, and I never think about it because it always just works.
Marco:
And there are switches on the wall also to control the lights, so I kind of forgot that that's there.
Marco:
So that's a good sign that maybe that's something I should look into.
Marco:
And I heard from a bunch of other people that Lutron is worth looking into, whether it's the Cassetta or the higher-end Radio Raw stuff.
Marco:
So I ordered the Lutron outlet.
Marco:
They have one that's made for outdoor use that looks like it'll probably fit back there.
Marco:
So I have that on order.
Marco:
I will report back to let you know how that goes.
Marco:
But that's part one.
Marco:
And part two is – I think I probably agree with this feedback.
Marco:
Anecdotally, it does seem like –
Marco:
Wi-Fi is the problem.
Marco:
Whether it's the actual radio layer or the association with the SSID or whether it's IP mapping or DHCP problem, who knows what.
Marco:
But it does seem like
Marco:
wi-fi is the common thread here of like if you avoid wi-fi and you go with something that uses its own radio stuff like you know the zigbee or whatever all that all that stuff um including lutron stuff anything that basically has to have some kind of little like radio base to make its own mesh network or whatever that seem it seems like people have better experiences with that stuff than anything that connects directly to wi-fi itself and
Marco:
If that's the case, apparently the new chip or matter stuff heavily uses Thread as the radio protocol between devices when possible.
Marco:
And I think Thread is one of those things.
Marco:
That being said, I don't know anything about Thread yet.
Marco:
But it does seem like the industry also realized that Wi-Fi was a pretty big part of the problem.
Marco:
And so if we can get more reliable stuff that uses Thread or other radio technologies that can somehow work together and not have a closet full of hubs, then great.
Marco:
If that works, great.
Marco:
But in the meantime, I'm going to try the Lutron stuff and see if that works and report back.
John:
kind of weird that the computer spawned uh stuff wi-fi and bluetooth uh end up not being reliable enough for sort of utilitarian purposes whereas in both cases the less computery like the you know the dedicated radio stuff for the home things or the dedicated little usb rf dongles for logitech mice uh at least in my experience is much more reliable than bluetooth like sort of not purpose built because they're all kind of doing the same job but uh
John:
The ones that, you know, the Logitech thing is not built to be a general purpose wireless networking protocol.
John:
It's made for mice and keyboards.
John:
So they can really concentrate on that one use case.
John:
And in my experience, they nail it.
John:
The range is amazing.
John:
The reliability is great.
John:
You know, I think it's way better than any Bluetooth I've ever used.
John:
And then in the home stuff, what's wrong with Wi-Fi?
John:
All our other devices are Wi-Fi.
John:
Everything's fine.
John:
But if you think about it, like Wi-Fi...
John:
is something that even when it's in a house and it's very reliable, we're used to the idea that a device could fall off of Wi-Fi and then have to get back on it, right?
John:
This is something that happens, right?
John:
Even if just your device is restarted, like it goes off of Wi-Fi, then it gets back on and it reconnects.
John:
And if you get a new device, you have to tell it about your network and your password and the right SSID.
John:
And there's all those sort of steps that involve
John:
getting on your network.
John:
If someone comes and visits your house, which network should they go on?
John:
What's the password?
John:
You know, all this other stuff, the different security levels of this device supports five gigahertz.
John:
This one supports 2.4.
John:
Like a Wi-Fi network is flexible and supports all our devices.
John:
But everything I've just described, I think anyone who's had Wi-Fi for a long time has experienced the sort of
John:
busy work management maintenance of a wi-fi network and no one wants to have any kind of management or maintenance of their light switches like you just just don't want to literally ever have to do anything or for that matter the thermostat right or anything like that like when you're talking about your nest thermostat and how you just like everything i was thinking about my thermostat which
John:
Honestly, I don't know if it was here when we moved in or if we got it when we replaced the furnace in the basement.
John:
But either way, I've literally never thought about it.
John:
I don't think I've ever even changed the batteries.
John:
And I think it just takes like a double A, like one double A battery, right?
John:
Like just there is a zero tolerance for any kind of maintenance work.
John:
And Wi-Fi just isn't like that as great as it is.
John:
Like, I think, you know, I don't really think about my Wi-Fi, but we just had some friends over and I had to tell them which SSID to connect to and what the password was.
John:
Right.
John:
And when I do get new devices, like even just the new Apple TV, I got it.
John:
You know, it asked me which network to connect to or if it doesn't grab the network info from something else or whenever I get a new TiVo when I used to get those back in the day.
John:
there is some amount of futzing to do.
John:
But with appliance stuff, you just want it to always work.
John:
So I don't know how this is going to sort itself out, but the depressing history of Bluetooth does not make me optimistic about the idea of any of these computer technologies ever getting to the point where they are as reliable as the dedicated ones.
John:
So I also don't know anything about Thread, but I really hope Thread is a more purpose-built networking protocol that concentrates on a smart home use case and doesn't care about computer stuff.
Marco:
I think also part of it is the computer standards, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, they are massively more complicated and always changing.
Marco:
When Wi-Fi was first coming around, around 2000, 2010, in that range, when it was first getting ubiquitous,
Marco:
It was a lot more primitive than it is now, and it's also a lot simpler than it is now.
Marco:
Think about, as you mentioned, 2.4 gigahertz versus 5 gigahertz support.
Marco:
The way that's implemented at the Wi-Fi layer is everything broadcast to SSIDs, one for each one, and devices have to figure that out, and they don't always do that right.
Marco:
Now we have...
Marco:
in common usage, multi-point Wi-Fi networks where you're broadcasting from multiple SSIDs, from multiple little routers or boosters around your house.
Marco:
Devices have to manage that and not see them as 19 separate SSIDs and be able to roam if it's a portable device between them.
Marco:
Everything is so much more complicated now than when Wi-Fi was first designed and was first supported.
Marco:
It's kind of no wonder that
Marco:
Some kind of like $4 Wi-Fi chip in a smart home outlet that has to sell for $10 to be competitive might be kind of crappy at dealing with that in practice or it might be a little bit buggy or a little bit off or just like not quite very good or reliable at that.
Marco:
Something like Thread, if you think about the needs of a smart home networking solution versus anything else, it's so different than computer-based things that are mainly focused on things like data transfer rates and stuff like that.
Marco:
Smart home stuff needs to be almost no bandwidth.
Marco:
You need very little data transfer, except maybe cameras.
Marco:
But otherwise, most stuff, you don't need very much bandwidth.
Marco:
And what you do need is...
Marco:
reliability, range, and enough security to keep people out who wouldn't be authorized, but not so much security that you're transmitting state secrets within your house to tell your light switch that it's on or not.
Marco:
So the needs are just so totally different.
Marco:
And it makes sense why...
Marco:
In practice, the actual hardware that you can get for smart home devices might be universally 80% good, but impossible to make 100% good without charging enough that nobody would buy it.
Casey:
All I want to say is that Lutron Caseta, in my limited experience, it's only lasted a couple months, but it is excellent.
Casey:
It's basically bulletproof, and generally speaking, you can have a physical switch as well as control via your phone or HomeKit or what have you, which to me, I think, and we've brought this video up several times, but a friend of the show, Quinn, I think nailed it on the head.
Casey:
You want physical controls in addition to shouting into the air.
Casey:
When you have one or the other, it's really not...
Casey:
the best but when you can hit a freaking button in order to turn the lights on and off you want to have that as a backup always no matter what so moving right along with regard to hsts which may or may not be a list uh jacob writes i don't think safari's automatic https upgrade has much to do with hsts because safari supported that header in the preload list for several years my guess is that it works similar to duck duck go smarter encryption we'll put a
Casey:
And here's a quote.
Casey:
At the center of DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption is a large list of websites that we know have encrypted or HTTPS versions of their websites, which we use to ensure that you can only interact with, that you only interact with these encrypted versions.
Casey:
We automatically generate this list by continually crawling the web.
John:
Yeah, so I don't know if it's from Apple over which one of those things it is, but yeah, having a list that Apple maintains in addition to supporting HSTS sounds plausible.
Casey:
Moving right along, Scott Sutton writes, I just can't wait until Apple allows the webpage to change the color of my physical iMac.
Casey:
It's just so jarring to be looking at that webpage and see that non-color-coordinated keyboard hovering at the edge of my vision.
John:
I put this in here because it was a funny joke, but honestly, first of all, people with PCs probably already do this with all their RGB stuff, right?
John:
It's not too far to think that people are certainly changing the color of their keyboard based on the game they're playing or whatever, changing the color of your computer based on where you're going.
John:
is definitely a thing that I can imagine Apple doing someday, especially as the technology becomes possible and maybe less tacky.
John:
But it's also trying to slam the new Safari UI where they're changing the Safari Chrome to match the website in some sort of, I think, mostly misguided attempt to make the website bleed into the application you're using to render it.
John:
And I'm not sure how much value there is in that.
John:
Like, if you like the way it looks, maybe, but there's so much variability, I really don't want to give webpages that much control over my UI.
John:
I think we talked about this in the past couple of weeks, so just like...
John:
But it's a matter of degree.
John:
When Apple allows you to allow your desktop background to tint your windows or to show through your menu bar, right, or to allow the time of day to influence whether your computer is light mode or dark mode.
John:
I would say even the light mode, dark mode things, these are in general more subtle in terms of how much influence does content you don't control have over your interface.
John:
For the light and dark mode, you would say, that's not subtle.
John:
That's a total flipping of the UI.
John:
But it's just two things.
John:
There's light mode and dark mode that Apple and presumably app developers have tailored to look okay.
John:
The light mode looks okay and the dark mode looks okay.
John:
It's not arbitrary control over your user interface by random people's webpages or even random people's individual apps.
John:
And even the desktop background, which, of course, you control, it just subtly hints the color of things and shows through the menu bar a little bit.
John:
I would say the menu bar goes a little bit too far, right?
John:
But Safari 15 is along that spectrum.
John:
It's just way over at the other edge where you're really giving...
John:
almost total arbitrary control of what color the UI is, and then Safari mightily tries to lay out all of its text and controls on top of whatever color was dictated by the webpage, because they do want to make the webpage, like the background, blend into the UI.
John:
So you can't have the UI just be influenced by green.
John:
It has to literally be the same green for this effect they're going for.
John:
Just don't think it's a great idea.
John:
Again, you can turn off all these features.
John:
You can turn off the window tinting.
John:
You can't, I think you can't turn off the menu bar, which really annoys me.
John:
Although there's that boring old menu bar app that you can use to hack around it.
John:
You don't need to use dark mode if you don't want to, right?
John:
You can turn off this feature in Safari.
John:
But I just, these are, what we're talking about are the defaults.
John:
I'm pretty sure window tinting is the default.
John:
This is the problem with always upgrading your Mac.
John:
I don't actually know what the defaults are anymore because I don't do Mac OS 10 reviews, but I think window tinting might be the default.
John:
it seems like so far the safari thing that we're complaining about it is the default um but yeah along this not too much farther along this spectrum is changing the physical color of your computer if it was possible because hey why not like for the same reason that you have a color coordinated desktop background and keyboard and trackpad like it looks nice
John:
I can imagine if you had all those peripherals be chameleon-like, the exact same philosophy that says if the website is green, Safari's Chrome should be green, should also make your entire Mac green.
John:
It's along that path just a little bit farther down and actually not that much farther down.
John:
I probably wouldn't be in favor of it.
Marco:
What about those TVs that have the edge LEDs that can change color based on the content that's being shown on the TV screen?
Marco:
Those prove to be a great idea.
Marco:
Why doesn't Apple just do that?
Marco:
And of course, as you scroll, it would scroll with it.
Marco:
The whole thing would animate your whole wall.
Marco:
Why don't you just get the entire computer out of the way?
John:
Yeah, like theming is a thing.
John:
Like I remember doing this in the classic macOS days of like picking a kaleidoscope's theme and a desktop background and an icon set that has a look, whether that look is kind of a dark mode or like everything is lime green or the teal, you know, iMac, you know, bluish iMac days, right?
John:
There is something to that aesthetic.
John:
I don't begrudge people theming, and I think all the colored iMacs are a great idea.
John:
It's the connection between something you don't control, like a webpage, and your stuff.
John:
It feels like someone reaching across the internet and changing the lighting in your room or the color of your rug.
John:
That connection is the problem.
John:
The problem is not having a theme or having all your peripherals match.
John:
I think all that is great.
John:
I just feel like it needs to be under...
John:
the user's control more than allowing again arbitrary web pages which is the biggest the biggest canvas of the world to invade your your you know your computing environment and screw with it like because you control your desktop background right and you can turn all these features on and off i suppose but i just think that connection is not the best uh the best strategy we'll see we'll see if apple sticks to it in terms of the defaults do either of you have the beta on your phones yet
Casey:
I have the beta on a non-carry phone, which I've only used very briefly, to be honest with you.
Casey:
But my initial impressions were that I like Safari on the phone.
Casey:
I also have it on my, not carry iPad, but my day-to-day iPad.
Casey:
And I actually don't mind the color.
Casey:
It is jarring, but I don't mind it.
Casey:
I think I would get used to it.
Casey:
However, I would like to echo the entirety of the internet who has been saying that the tabs are garbage because they are straight garbage on iPad.
Casey:
On iPhone, I'm fine with it.
Casey:
On iPad, no good.
Casey:
And I haven't run the Mac beta yet, but I have a feeling that I would feel the exact same way as the iPad.
Marco:
So when you put it on your carry phone, whenever that happens, let's revisit how much you like Safari on the phone.
Casey:
And that's fair.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
Again, I really haven't used it very much.
Casey:
It was a few minutes here and there, and the initial impressions were very, very good.
Casey:
But I will be the first to tell you that you might be exactly right, that if I put it on a phone that I'm using more than a few minutes a day, it might drive me absolutely bananas.
Marco:
You know what's the worst thing about it to me?
Marco:
Now that I know I've complained about it a lot, but just a few new observations.
Marco:
This is the new Safari on the phone.
Marco:
First of all, it seems like the touch targets are smaller now for certain toolbar elements all over the US, but especially in Safari.
Marco:
The touch zone for that dot-dot-dot menu, I feel like I'm missing it sometimes, and a lot of the other controls...
Marco:
since they spaced it more away from edges of things or like bars it seems like you actually have less vertical space on some of the controls so i keep just missing the controls and then also because it does this ridiculous thing where it has the bar on the bottom and then you tap it and then it zooms up to the top so that you can edit the text the location that you have to tap to edit the text moves around the screen all the time
Marco:
And I'm finding it's breaking muscle memory constantly because I keep tapping up top to edit the URL or to do something on the page before the bar is there or something.
Marco:
And I realize, oh, it's at the bottom.
Marco:
Go to the bottom.
Marco:
Tap.
Marco:
Oh, now it's zoomed up to the top.
Marco:
Woo!
Marco:
And you've got to go find it.
Marco:
I'm finding it's breaking tons of muscle memory because Safari on iPhone...
Marco:
You know, it has worked similarly for so long, like in the way it was before this, it was mostly unchanged for so long that there's tons of like just automatic muscle memory from being an iPhone user that you don't necessarily realize will be destroyed when making a radically new UI like this.
Marco:
But that to me is the biggest point of friction is that I don't know where to tap and I don't know where to look.
Marco:
for a certain control for for longer now i have to like refigure it all out and i've had it on my main phone now for about a week and i still i'm still not used to it like i i still think it's terrible but i'm thinking like maybe as i get as i use it more maybe i'll get used to it nope a weekend hasn't happened yet i'll keep you posted but it's i'm finding it incredibly cumbersome and and even simple stuff like like having to do two taps for a reload or
Marco:
One of the most common things I do in Safari is I check pages on my servers that show me statuses of things or show me things I have to go through, like new ad buys I have to approve or something like that.
Marco:
And my workflow for those pages is I go to those tabs and I hit refresh to see what's new.
Marco:
and so i realize now like how often i need to hit refresh in safari on mobile it turns out it's a lot more than i would have guessed if you would have just asked me a few months ago and i have to just like i have to just read i guess redo those pages to reload themselves with with javascript or something because you're not using pull to refresh on those pages does that work
Marco:
we talked about on the show yeah oh i just i mean if you're at the top of the page right so i just hit the but i just hit the the tab square button to pull up my list of tabs and wait where the hell am i did i break it no i broke it i can't get my list of tabs anymore now it just brings up a new page anyway somehow when i can get back to my list of tabs i uh
Marco:
I like scrolled up.
Marco:
Now I guess there's some kind of gesture where a side swipe on your tab I guess closes it.
Marco:
So I scrolled up a little bit off and accidentally closed a tab and I don't know which one it is and I can't get it back.
Marco:
So great.
Marco:
This is a lot of fun.
John:
I love Safari.
John:
Shake your phone.
John:
Shake the undo.
John:
Let me see.
John:
shaking that's always my my desperation is like i only have one move left and it's to shake my phone and hope desperately that whoever made this app is stuck in like 2009 and made shake to undo work to restore a tab yeah shake to undo didn't work first of all and yeah i don't i
John:
i always whenever i have to shake my phone to undo i kind of like do it under the table like i i look around like i am i don't want anybody to see me doing this you can you can do there's a gesture for it now too right isn't like three frame or three finger double tap or something chat room will have it in a second there's some there's some gesture oh yeah yeah because like i just i i always feel like i look like such a fool doing this it's satisfying though you're like you're punishing the phone for making a mistake bad phone bring that text back
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so if my Safari ever works again, I'll keep you posted.
Marco:
But I literally can't do anything now.
Marco:
It's totally broken.
Casey:
So I just installed the Safari technology preview on my iMac at the suggestion of somebody in the chat who has already scrolled off the screen.
Casey:
So I apologize.
Casey:
This fucking sucks.
Casey:
I hate this shit.
Yeah.
John:
The Safari technology preview, I think, is slightly different than actual Monterey in a few areas, but in general, yeah, that's the UI.
John:
I have it installed as well.
John:
The good thing about Safari technology preview is that you can run it alongside regular Safari, and they have separate worlds of everything, as far as I can tell.
John:
At least they have separate state, because when I was trying to test, like, reload button stuff or whatever,
John:
every time you know i would quit and relaunch safari i have it configured to restart all of my windows and that's just too many too many damn windows to be closing and opening but safari technology preview i just had one window and so quit launch quit launch um yeah if that's for everyone we should put a link in the shots if you want to try out the new terrible safari on your mac but don't want to try monterey which i think is the wise thing to do uh safari technology preview that will run on your whatever the hell os we're on now uh i'm just gonna say catalina if that's not right is it
John:
Big Sur?
John:
Big Sur.
John:
Yeah, I'm sorry.
John:
I'm not sure how far back it'll run, but anyway, I'm running it on Big Sur.
John:
Check out Purple Safari.
John:
It's cool.
John:
Is it?
John:
I mean, Purple Safari is cool.
John:
Normally.
John:
This new UI is not cool.
Marco:
oh, I hope they don't ship this.
Marco:
I'm getting scared.
Marco:
I'm getting scared they're going to.
Marco:
At least Gruber complained in large, organized fashion.
Marco:
So they tend to listen to him pretty well, especially with Safari UI stuff.
Marco:
So hopefully, maybe it's getting to the right ears or eyes.
John:
I still think that every change I see is like,
John:
all it needs is some minor tweaks to address the biggest complaints, and it'll be great, right, everybody?
John:
Like, we already put the preference in for you to turn off the window tinting, so no one can complain about that, which I agree with them.
John:
Like, you put a pref in the GUI to turn it off, good thumbs up, that's good.
John:
But the tabs, no preference is getting rid of those, right?
John:
And these minor tweaks are like, here's a reload button, now the share button can be in the toolbar, everything's fixed now, right?
John:
It's like, no, you're not getting it.
John:
It's like when, if someone shows you something... They're the rubber gaskets of Safari UI problems.
John:
Yeah, it's like someone shows you something to critique or something and they're expecting you to give them like, well, you know, maybe change this small thing or that small thing.
John:
What you really want to say is start over.
John:
Nothing about this is good.
John:
Your fundamental idea is bad.
John:
We've added a protective membrane under the keys.
John:
it's similar to that but it's the ui version like yeah like to their credit like i understand what they're going for and there is a a measurable benefit in terms of uh vertical screen real estate but it's just like i i don't think i've seen a single review that has not said the same exact thing which is like here are the benefits here are the drawbacks they're out of balance yeah
John:
people aren't being mean to it just be like oh you're bad and this is bad and you should never try anything it's new oh my god it's new like you tried it yeah there is some part of that because here's what I think I think if we get stuck with this UI we will eventually eventually begrudgingly become accustomed to it
John:
And there is a little bit of that.
John:
I'm trying a new thing, and it's different.
John:
Mark mentioned the muscle memory for the phone version.
John:
The Mac version is all weird.
John:
But I feel like we've had enough time with it now, and enough people have really just sat down and analyzed it and said, it's not all awful, but the tradeoffs don't work, right?
John:
We get benefit, and then we have drawbacks, and the drawbacks are just so much bigger.
John:
And that's a sign of an unsuccessful experiment, I think.
John:
So I really hope they...
John:
try something different eventually.
John:
But I totally feel like they're going to ship this.
Marco:
And I feel like, I think one of my favorite parts of Gruber's critique of the Safari design, is this actually better or did they just redesign it to just be different?
Marco:
And I get that feeling with a lot of
Marco:
um modern apple redesign stuff that you know sometimes it is better but it seems like the design team wants to move forward whatever that means so badly that they they want to redesign stuff like on a certain interval you
Marco:
even if a it doesn't necessarily need it and or be what they come up with might not necessarily actually be better it might just be different like i feel like you know designers you know programmers you know we we're the same way you know we don't like the old and we always try to like justify rewriting something we've done before because we want to do it in a new cool way using some new api or new programming technique or whatever
Marco:
Designers, I think, have a similar problem.
Marco:
They want to do something new because they get tired of the old.
Marco:
It's always fun to redesign something and try to really radically change it.
Marco:
What if we totally rethought XYZ boring thing that we haven't touched in a while?
Marco:
It's very appealing.
Marco:
I get the appeal to do that.
Marco:
But so often, just as programmers, oftentimes when we rewrite things or refactor things, oftentimes we make them worse or we forget to fix all the bugs that we forgot over the last 10 years in the new version.
Marco:
And so the new version actually ends up being buggier and possibly not worth it to the customer or the company.
Marco:
I feel like redesigns have similar problems where like...
Marco:
There's this push, and you want to redesign this as a designer, and you think, I'm going to make my mark on this project or on this product.
Marco:
I'm going to really rethink the way browsers look or whatever.
Marco:
Sometimes that's good.
Marco:
Sometimes that gives you really great results, but not every time.
Marco:
It's very important for an organization to be able to tell the difference and to catch things like this before they ship if it's not actually better.
Marco:
And in this case, it hasn't shipped yet, technically.
Marco:
These are still betas.
Marco:
But I hope that Apple gets it right in their decision-making here that these redesigns of Safari...
Marco:
While they are different and while they have some good ideas, both the desktop and iPhone versions fail in pretty big ways as designs.
Marco:
And I don't think they're better.
Marco:
And I don't know anyone who does, who doesn't work at Apple.
Okay.
Marco:
even people who work there i think many of them don't think so either like i don't know how you could put this out there and see the reaction that the world has given and think all right we're good let's ship it in the fall so i i hope they're they're hearing us at deeper levels than just we'll add a reload button and it's fixed right
Casey:
finally this has been hanging out in the uh follow-up section for i feel like two months or something like that even though it's probably less than that uh so daniel yount writes hey what's going on here and there's a video of the login screen and apparently daniel's um like avatar for his mac is his memoji and the eyeballs on his memoji are following his mouse cursor like super mario style in super mario world
John:
Oh, like from the title screen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This has been, it's X-Eyes, guys, or the eyes in the menu bar on the Mac.
John:
But X-Eyes probably predates it.
John:
Anyway, this was in here for so long just because I initially couldn't tell.
John:
Is this just a joke video of like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if they added this feature?
John:
And then once I got Monterey on a Mac, every time I was on it, I mostly forgot to do this.
John:
I was like, how do you set your Memoji as your avatar?
John:
I didn't quite know how to do it.
John:
Or mostly I just thought of it when I wasn't on that computer and it was rebooted into Big Sur or something like that.
John:
But finally, I saw someone discussing online how to set your avatar to your Memoji in Monterey.
John:
So once I saw that, I'm like, this must be real then.
John:
because you can apparently use your Memoji as your avatar.
John:
And then once you do that, it seems plausible that on the login screen, if you move the cursor around, the eyes of your little 3D Memoji will fire your cursor.
John:
That is a cool feature, even though I think Memoji are, we've talked about this before, are a great example of Apple's
John:
corporate aesthetic taking precedence over the literal size shape and look of people's faces because memoji are standardized in a way that human beings are not and apple essentially doesn't let you make a memoji that actually looks like yourself if you happen to not have the skull shape that apple has decided is the appropriate skull shape for humans um
John:
as compared to Nintendo with their Miis, where you can absolutely make any grotesquerie that matches you exactly.
John:
And that's why people who are good at making Miis can make Miis where someone looks at it and says, oh, yep, that's Uncle Tom, that's Grandpa, that's Susie, right?
John:
You recognize the people because you have enough flexibility to make something that does not fit with the Nintendo aesthetic or whatever.
John:
Whereas everybody in Memoji looks like this...
John:
just cherubic sphere faced you know even apple when they did their they did like little uh memoji for all like the executive team or whatever and like phil schiller looks nothing like phil schiller like the phil schiller memoji presumably done by the best the best minds the best memoji experts inside apple you cannot make a memoji apparently that looks like phil schiller because his head just isn't shaped like that
John:
um and anyway sorry to go on the memoji rant but if you happen to like or if you just want to be an idealized cartoon version of yourself that doesn't actually look like you check out memoji and then your eyes can follow the cursor maybe can i just if you'll from me i don't want to complain this whole episode but is it is it just me or does it seem like apple likes memoji a lot more than everyone else does
John:
I think people like it a lot.
John:
I see a lot of Memoji usage among non-nerd people.
John:
I mean, even before that, remember Bitmoji?
John:
There's been a lot of things online.
Marco:
Bitmoji is huge, but even that, so I feel like Memoji, I think it was a really cool, fun thing, and I think it was a fad for a short time, and I think that time has passed.
Marco:
I mean, maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe everyone's using it.
John:
Because when people pick that or make their Memoji and use it as their avatar, like all of us, once you find an avatar that you are okay with, you just tend to leave it there.
John:
And I think that you're right that people aren't just super excited about it, but it's like, oh, that's my avatar.
John:
I know people who have Bitmoji avatar right now, and they've had them for years.
John:
I think that it's fulfilling its role of give me a tool to make an avatar that I'm comfortable with to present to the world.
John:
And some people aren't comfortable with doing an actual photo of themselves.
John:
They want something more stylized.
John:
And so Momoji provides that.
John:
I think Momoji, it's well implemented.
John:
The feature is well implemented.
John:
It has a lot of cool
John:
things to it it's nicely modeled you can do the whole tongue wagging sticking out things it's just fundamentally flawed as a way to capture people's likenesses which if that's not what you want if you don't want to capture your likeness then fine but if you want to capture your likeness this is not the tool for you yeah i know a handful of people nerdy and non-nerdy that have memoji as their like i message avatar picture whatever and
Casey:
And the funniest thing is I can't remember who it is other than my dad, but there's a handful of people in my life that are all, you know, older white dudes.
Casey:
And I swear, I swear to you, every single one of those emojis looks absolutely identical.
Casey:
Like, oh, it's another old white guy.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
They're exactly the same to John's point.
Casey:
Exactly the same.
Casey:
Every single one of them.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, John, tell us.
Casey:
I know we have all been waiting with bated breath.
Casey:
What's going on with your mouse pad and your mouse?
John:
We just had a few questions and theories from people after last show that I wanted to close the loop on.
John:
They recall it was my mouse pad where the right side of it was not as good for track
John:
as far as my optical mouse was concerned as the left side of it it's not really half and half it's actually like a bad a bad area that's more or less towards the right side so one theory people had was maybe it's not the mouse pad maybe it's the cable because remember my mouse is plugged in and maybe when they're saying maybe when you go to the right side of the mouse pad your cable bends in a certain way and maybe you have like a
John:
you know a break or a flaw inside the conductor and when you do that it causes interference or you know it loses continuity for a short period of time so that so maybe it's your cable uh check that and nope that's not it uh you know it doesn't really matter where the cable is i can move the cable around i can wiggle it it doesn't have any effect it's only that spot in the mouse bed
John:
The next theory was maybe it's not the mouse pad, maybe it's the desk surface or something else emanating from the earth underneath where it is.
John:
To test that one, I just removed the mouse pad from where it is and I put it on an entirely different place on the desk and I rotated it 90 degrees various times and used the mouse on it.
John:
And the bad spot is really on the mouse pad.
John:
Wherever that bad spot is, no matter what surface I put it on, no matter how I rotate the mouse pad,
John:
you can track the bad spot and the mouse has a little bit of trouble tracking on that spot i did mean to this weekend cut myself a new mouse pad from one of my you know sheets of mouse pad material to eliminate this problem but i got distracted at some point and didn't actually do that so i'm still using the bad mouse pad but on my to-do list is to cut a new mouse pad for myself that's an amazing to-do list
Casey:
It's something.
Casey:
It is something.
Casey:
Uh, we had a question from Jason a brew and he writes, my name is Jason and I'm soon to be married to my fiance in the September of this year, which might've even been 2020 for all I know.
John:
But nevertheless, I think we beat it.
John:
I think we got it.
John:
I think September means this fall.
John:
So we may actually be reading and reading feedback in a timely manner.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
As for photos, I currently use Google Photos due to the fact that it's web-based and I refuse to give Apple money for subpar online photo storage.
Casey:
My people.
Casey:
Ideally, I prefer an online self-managed solution.
Marco:
It's pretty good.
Marco:
It's not subpar.
Marco:
It's pretty good.
Casey:
Actually, I have an aside about this.
Casey:
I'll try to remember to talk about it after we get to this topic.
Casey:
But no, you're going to maybe like it.
Casey:
But anyway, coming back to what Jason wrote.
Casey:
Ideally, I prefer an offline self-managed solution, but I'm leaning more and more toward an online solution so I don't have to worry about physically maintaining hard drives.
Casey:
My concern with an online solution is if the service will be around five years from now and are documents actually stored in an encrypted, secure manner.
Casey:
I actually don't have too much to say about this because there's not a lot of documents that I consider to be precious.
Casey:
That being said, things like scans of our passports, our driver's licenses, birth certificate, our wills,
Casey:
So, you know, for wills and things of that nature, we put them in 1Password.
Casey:
That's not to say that that's the best or most perfect place, but that's what I do, and it seems to work.
Casey:
And one of the nice things about 1Password for Families, they're not a sponsor right now, and I don't remember if they've been in a long time, but one of the nice things about 1Password for Families is that you can create different vaults.
Casey:
And so, like, I have a vault, Aaron has a vault, and then my business stuff is in its own vault, and then I also have, like...
Casey:
a vault dedicated mostly to travel documents like passports and birth certificates and driver's licenses and things like that.
Casey:
But also things like, you know, Aaron and I each have our own will.
Casey:
And I'm trying to think of other examples.
Casey:
But for me, I like putting that stuff in 1Password because I'm super selective about what ends up in there.
Casey:
And if it's in 1Password, it's got to be really freaking important.
Casey:
And so that's what I do.
Casey:
For almost anything else that I don't consider...
Casey:
is to be near as important or as critical i just have it on my synology sitting there in a particular folder where i can find that sort of thing easily if necessary but uh it's not like super encrypted or anything like that that's what i do marco i have a feeling that you also don't have too much to say about this famous last word so let's start with you and then then finish with john yeah by the way some real time follow-up we had one password sponsor our show less than one month ago
Casey:
Wasn't that recently?
Casey:
God, I'm such a jerk.
Casey:
It was June 10th.
Casey:
Oh, man, I'm sorry.
Casey:
I love 1Password.
Casey:
Hand to God, I really do love 1Password.
Casey:
It is one of my favorite pieces of software on any of my devices.
Casey:
And I would say that partially because I feel guilty, but I also am saying that because I really honestly believe it.
Casey:
It is really, truly that good.
Marco:
Yeah, and I'm also a 1Password user.
Marco:
I know John's not, but that's cool.
Marco:
You get two of the three of us.
Marco:
It's pretty good.
Casey:
Is it cool?
Casey:
I don't know if it's cool.
Casey:
It's acceptable, but I don't know if it's cool.
Marco:
Yeah, so I use one password.
Marco:
We also have the family account so that Tiff and I can have the shared vault between the two of us for any kind of shared credentials.
Marco:
We put any of our kids' credentials for his account.
Marco:
We put those in the shared vault so that Tiff and I can both have access.
Marco:
If he's like, hey, I've got to log into Minecraft on my iPad or whatever, whichever parent is around can help with that request.
Marco:
um so that's that's very good um i too use it for very sensitive documents things like passports ids and stuff like that but for the most part like the you know the big important stuff like wills and things like that those are just like at lawyers offices and i like i have scans of them but i'm and and they're like we have like one of those
Marco:
fireproof boxes like it's not really it's not safe but it's like a fire it's a fire resistant box and like we have hard copies of all like that kind of stuff in that box so to me like you know anything like that you know things that things that are of the nature of like if i am incapacitated or dead what do what does my family or other people need from me for that
Marco:
That, I think, is still better off living in the physical world as much as possible because the digital world is so much harder for people to get into in that kind of scenario.
Casey:
Actually, let me jump in right there because I would like to echo what you just said.
Casey:
A few years ago, I don't remember what the catalyst moment was for this, but I sat down and I wrote out – I call it my just-in-case document.
Casey:
And the idea of this is if I were to just drop dead spontaneously –
Casey:
Like, what is the bare minimum amount of information that Erin needs to know about things that Erin doesn't typically, you know, manage?
Casey:
What is the bare minimum she needs to know in order to continue her life and the kids' lives and continue paying bills and things of that nature?
Casey:
And, you know, one of the big things on that document is sign into 1Password.
Casey:
That's where all my junk is.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But nevertheless, a lot of that is like, here's where here's who carries our insurance.
Casey:
Here's where our bank account.
Casey:
She knows some of this stuff.
Casey:
But what if Aaron dies to like then my parents or somebody could come in and like recreate our lives?
Casey:
And not only does that document exist, which I think is an extremely smart thing for any family to do.
Casey:
But additionally, I have a paper copy in our fireproof quote-unquote safe, which, like you said, isn't really a safe.
Casey:
It's more of just a fireproof box.
Casey:
But I would like to strongly echo what you said about that.
Casey:
Having some sort of document with the bare minimum in order to get your children or your spouse or whatever able to continue to live, I really, really encourage you to put that physically somewhere in addition to electronically somewhere.
Marco:
Yeah, and legacy planning is a whole different thing of how do you give people your passwords to stuff that is online, and that's a whole thing.
Marco:
But anyway, for the purposes of other documents, I'm not very organized because, frankly, I don't keep many documents.
Marco:
I do have a paperless lifestyle whenever possible for stuff like bills and crap like that, receipts, things like that.
Marco:
And my strategy for that is I have a sheet-fed scanner.
Marco:
Back in my regular life, I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap, which I love.
Marco:
Here in my fake life, I have a Raven scanner, which is okay.
Marco:
That's a whole separate topic.
Marco:
The Raven scanner...
Marco:
is basically an Android tablet glued inside of a scanner.
Marco:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
It's very strange.
Marco:
Like, my scanner has software updates, and where, like, you know, I'll have to, like, you know, I'll open it up one day to try to scan my electric bill or whatever, and...
Marco:
it'll be like so we need a software update uh you know tap here to do it and you tap and it has like the like a little like circle like finger cursor when you tap that android tablets can have and then it has to do like a software that has to reboot itself like an android tablet does it like it's very it's once you realize it's just an android tablet it's it becomes it makes a lot more sense
Marco:
But the way it works is so bizarre as a scanner to work that way.
Marco:
And yeah, this whole, this world of like smart devices that are made, you know, with commodity stuff kind of, it has its downsides.
Marco:
And the downside of this is that it's basically a very, very slow, sluggish Android tablet is powering this not cheap scanner that otherwise scans pretty well, but it's a very weird and awkward and sometimes very slow user experience.
Marco:
But anyway, so I honestly, I don't know if I would recommend this product.
Marco:
I use it, but this is not an endorsement or a condemnation, I guess.
Marco:
It's I have I feel ambivalent towards my Raven scanner.
Marco:
Anyway, so paperless lifestyle.
Marco:
If if the scanner was, you know, stolen or fell into the bay tomorrow, I would replace it with a scan snap with a Fujitsu scan snap again.
Marco:
Anyway, paperless.
Marco:
So I basically scan everything to OCRed PDFs so that they are searchable by text.
Marco:
But I dump them into one giant folder.
Marco:
The files are just named by date that I scan them.
Marco:
So it's just one giant chronological shoebox of everything that I've ever scanned.
Marco:
Because in practice...
Marco:
I hardly ever need to go back and look at these things.
Marco:
So I've tried over the years different organizational strategies for that, and I've never really found it worthwhile to actually categorize them into file folders and everything else.
Marco:
Here's all the electric bills.
Marco:
Here's all of the insurance renewals.
Marco:
I've never found that level of organization worth it or necessary for my scanned documents.
Marco:
Anything that is unscanned, that is just that...
Marco:
originates as an electronic document.
Marco:
Things like email receipts.
Marco:
I tend to just keep those in my email.
Marco:
My email itself is a giant document store and it's all downloaded locally and searchable.
Marco:
And so any kind of important document or confirmation or information I need probably came through an email at some point.
Marco:
And so oftentimes that's how I dig things up is I search through my email for this one email I got 15 years ago or 10 years ago that has this attached PDF that has this receipt on it or something for –
Marco:
Other types of data, a lot of times this stuff just lives in its originating web service, and that's mostly fine.
Marco:
I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, and I can search my past orders on Amazon.
Marco:
And so that, to me, is another place where that's a huge searchable history of...
Marco:
the type of data or document that is my purchase history.
Marco:
So if I need to know, when did I buy that hard drive that just died?
Marco:
Is it still under warranty?
Marco:
First thing I'll do is I'll look at Amazon history to see when I bought it.
Marco:
And then I'll know, okay, did I buy it within the warranty period or not?
Marco:
So stuff like that.
Marco:
I tend to have a lot of stuff in those few different silos where it originated, and I tend to not move stuff out of those very often into new silos.
Marco:
If it originates in a silo that I have ongoing access to, I tend to leave it there because it's just easier and...
Marco:
And as long as I can trust it, it's going to be there.
Marco:
But like, I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep buying stuff from Amazon in the future.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep having email in the future, you know, stuff like, so like it's kind of, it's, that's kind of inherently long-term reliable.
Marco:
Um, as for other types of documents, you know, my code and everything, that's all like in source control and everything, but that's a whole different thing.
Marco:
Um, but you know, other like, you know, other types of like, you know, quote documents that would go like in your documents folder, things like spreadsheets, word processing documents, um,
Marco:
That I just keep in the documents folder or in, you know, a very small number of subfolders of that.
Marco:
Like every year I have a folder for my taxes for that year.
Marco:
So it's like taxes 2021 is the current one.
Marco:
And it lives on my desktop for the whole year.
Marco:
And then once my taxes are filed for the year, I move it into the documents folder.
Marco:
And so I have taxes 2008, taxes 2009, like all my tax documents and everything needed to support my tax documents.
Marco:
Like that's that goes in that year's storage.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
Other than stuff like that, I don't have a large number of these things.
Marco:
I have a few spreadsheets that I kind of update on an ongoing basis.
Marco:
Those live in the documents folder or I think on iCloud maybe.
Marco:
That line is kind of blurred recently.
Marco:
I have a few things I keep in Dropbox so I have easy access to them no matter what computer I'm on.
Marco:
Uh, but otherwise, like I don't really have a lot of organization or strategy to most of this.
Marco:
Most stuff either lives in one of those giant silos that I kind of have ongoing access to, or it is kind of disorganized in my documents folder somewhere because I don't have enough documents, nor do I access them frequently enough for that mess of a system to be a problem.
Casey:
So, John, what's the right way?
John:
I mean, Marco definitely does the most of this stuff of the three of us.
John:
He's talked about his scan snap and stuff like that, and neither one of us do anything like that.
John:
But hearing Marco talk about it, I think my system is very similar to his, except imagine it run by somebody who doesn't want to do things electronically.
John:
And that person is not me because my wife does the finances and the paperwork.
John:
And I say paperwork because...
John:
She likes to do things on paper whenever there is an option for most of her life where it says, hey, we could send you your bill electronically or you can get a paper version.
John:
She always says paper version.
John:
Hey, we could pay your bill automatically if you just give us your credit card number or you can just, you know, do it manually every month.
John:
Does it manually every month.
John:
Like it's just what she's comfortable with.
John:
She manages all the stuff.
John:
So who am I to say, you know, you could just set that up to auto pay and it would be fine.
John:
Um, the only time I've ever won that, uh, debate is when we got a new credit card for my business when I, for my LLC and one month she forgot to pay it, uh, because it wasn't, you know, it wasn't set up to be automatic.
John:
And I said, can I just set this up on auto pay?
John:
Cause I mean, it was like a $20 bill, right?
John:
And
John:
She's like, fine, set it up on it because so little happens on it that she never thinks to look at it.
John:
But she's the one who wants to manage it.
John:
So she does it the way she feels comfortable.
John:
And that involves a lot of paper.
John:
So, yeah, paper things come to the house and they are not scanned in any way.
John:
They just stay in paper form.
John:
The main sort of document management activity we do is much like Marco described, basically for tax purposes each year.
John:
We're collecting together receipts and things that we're going to deduct as business expenses and stuff like that.
John:
And that's tedious, but we basically do the same system, which is...
John:
I have on my Mac a folder for each tax year and I put in whenever I buy something that I know is attributable to the business, I make a PDF of the receipt and I stick it in the folder and do all that stuff, right?
John:
But since I don't do the finance stuff...
John:
over on my wife's computer she's got a similar set of folders and i periodically take my collected things that i've been doing and put them into her to process folder for the tax year so it's like things that you haven't processed yet because she's got a way that she wants to do it i just i organize it the way i want to do it and folder by date by year you know and i know what the receipts are for and then periodically dump them into her sort of inbox and then she grinds through them and
John:
names them the way she wants.
John:
In the end, it's not that many documents, but it's a screen full by the end of the year.
John:
Like, I'm not expensing tons of stuff.
John:
But yeah, things like that.
John:
Now, for almost everything else, like Marco said, email is great for keeping track of stuff because another activity my wife engages in, which is looking at all of our credit card bills
John:
And saying, what's this charge?
John:
What's this charge?
John:
What was this?
John:
Right?
John:
Because you know how things show up on your credit card and many companies try to warn you about this.
John:
Hey, you're going to get a bill on your credit card.
John:
It's going to say something that's not going to make any sense.
John:
Even though you're buying your thing from Acme Pet Store, it's not going to say Acme Pet Store.
John:
It's going to say VNDQXPR or something, asterisk, right?
John:
And so when you see them on a credit card bill, it's not always clear what they are.
John:
um the easy solution to finding the answer to that question is search for the exact amount in the email uh and you know we both use gmail and she's logged into my gmail thing or whatever and if you just search for 1595 in gmail and it'll give you the results sorted by date by default the top item is whatever that receipt was it's instant it always works and it answers your question and then you could say that's what acme pet store was anyway that's really smart
John:
So email is, well, I would say what's smarter is to not worry about the 1595 charge.
John:
But anyway, she really wants to know what every single charge, like she's been doing this for our entire married life.
John:
And so far, she has not caught a single case of a company like charging us for things that were that we didn't actually buy.
John:
Like, I guess that's the fear that like somehow just charges to show up in your credit card.
John:
Now I say this and she's going to tell me once I get off the air.
John:
that there was a case sometime where we got double charged or something and she found it.
John:
But to my recollection, it is not a common enough occurrence.
John:
But anyway, she deals with... This is how she wants to do it.
John:
She wants to know what every charge is.
John:
Fine.
John:
For other documents, like, you know, my whole backup vortex, I've got all of my stuff being backed up in a million different places.
John:
My digital stuff is way better protected than the paper stuff.
John:
The only reason we have any paper stuff is because, A, she wants paper, and B, like...
John:
I forget how many years it is, but you can be audited back to X number of years or something, so you have to, in theory, keep the receipts for that number of years or whatever.
John:
Because we have all this paper, we try to keep a buffer of that number of years, and then we just push off the end and shred, which is another thing that's a hassle with paper things.
John:
You actually shred them if you care about this stuff.
John:
Shred off the end of the thing.
John:
And, you know, we're not running the Fortune 500 company in our house.
John:
It's not it's not actually that complicated.
John:
The amount of actual paper is not that big for our important documents, passports, driver's licenses, all that type of stuff.
John:
It's not particularly well protected.
John:
Yes, I suppose I do actually have scans of most of those things.
John:
But the most of the reason I have them is not because I'm carefully preserving them.
John:
It's because online things very often want you to submit something like that.
John:
like for insurance purposes or like, who knows, you know, if you ever try to do anything with cryptocurrency, they're always trying to get you to scan like your driver's license and upload it, which I generally refuse to do.
John:
In fact, I was trying to buy a domain name recently.
John:
And one of those, you know, semi slimy domain name, like registrar watch services, like, hey, that domain name you asked about in 1997, it's available.
John:
Do you want to bid on it?
John:
And I always go, sure, I'll give you $50.
John:
And they say, would you consider $30,000?
John:
That's how that conversation always goes.
John:
But anyway, this time they're like, you want to bid on this domain name?
John:
I'm like, sure, here you go, $50.
John:
What do you think?
John:
And they said, well, your account has been frozen because you need to upload your driver's license.
John:
I'm like, well, goodbye.
John:
I suppose there's probably some fraud-related reason why they want all this information, but it's like,
John:
I don't want the domain name that much.
John:
Anyway, we're not really particularly obsessive about that stuff.
John:
If our house burned down, we would lose our passports.
John:
We would have to get new driver's licenses.
John:
But in the end, you know, it would be fine.
John:
And then, you know, important documents being with lawyers is another way you can do it.
John:
But, you know, honestly, anything that's really important, I do have in digital form and that is backed up 20 ways to Sunday.
John:
For this question here that Jason had, which gets into more than just digital documents, but also like photos and stuff like that, I would, and we've talked about this in the past, I don't want to go into too much, but I would definitely recommend as part of whatever your sort of data backup strategy is, not to just rely entirely on cloud backup.
John:
You should have cloud backup because it's physically distant and it's generally economical and it's another sort of another factor in your security of like a different thing that would have to fail.
John:
But I would suggest very strongly, as annoying as it is, to have local backups of stuff because the main failure mode is probably not going to be your house burning down.
John:
It's probably going to be you accidentally hosing something or like a SSD or hard drive going bad, right?
John:
So don't say I just have my computers and then cloud.
John:
That's not enough.
John:
You need something in the middle there, which is a local backup.
John:
And I know it's a pain in the butt.
John:
It's expensive.
John:
It's cumbersome.
John:
Where am I going to keep this local backup?
John:
It's another thing for me to futz with.
John:
Do I have to get a Synology now?
John:
Do I have to get a tower computer so I can put internal storage?
John:
Do I have to have a bunch of SSDs dangling off the end of my computer?
John:
I know it's annoying, but I highly recommend it.
John:
including that tier that sort of you know cash that tier in your cash hierarchy of your backup thing because just cloud is not enough i'm not saying cloud is unreliable but it's so distant from you and cloud companies are flaky and the bottom line is it's just one thing you need to have another thing and no two cloud backup companies probably isn't as good either and it's a pain to restore from it's very distant from you yes they will send you a hard drive and stuff or whatever but having it locally
John:
is gives you much more peace of mind and and will let you sort of see the data flowing through more easily because you see both the source and in the place you're backing up to whereas with the cloud thing you're just kind of trusting that you'll notice if like it has been failing to back up for the past 10 days or like some weird problem is causing it to silently fail or whatever so i would recommend the middle tier there
John:
I would not recommend my system of actual paper filing cabinets and paper bills and stuff like that because it's too much stuff to forget or whatever.
John:
But it just goes to show that, like, if, you know, defer to the people, to the person who is managing this stuff.
John:
Most people don't manage their own paperwork sort of equally with their partner.
John:
business partner or life partner just because it's confusing so normally one person sort of says i'm going to be the one to manage the bills i'll make sure we pay them and i'll make sure we don't double pay them or is it both people are equally responsible for the bills i feel like it's a situation where an email goes out at work to five people and that just gives everyone an excuse not to do anything about it because it wasn't addressed to me right that's that's my advice on managing this and then whoever is managing this stuff
John:
use whatever let them use whatever system that they are most comfortable with even if that system seems barbaric to you or whatever because in the end they're doing it and it has to fit their brain and the way they want to do it and I don't think like again with the possible exception of Marco who has
John:
sort of some continuity of functionality of an application that he sells that we'd want to continue after his death.
John:
Most of us, if we die, it's okay for all of our stuff to just drop on the floor.
John:
Like, we're not running... Again, we're not running a Fortune 500 company.
John:
We're not responsible to the lives of thousands of people, right?
John:
You know, it's... I mean, neither is my business...
John:
like true but like i'm saying like it doesn't matter that much what if your family wanted to continue your business as a way of making money you know what i mean like like there is continuity of like income for the family as in when you're gone that thing could still be a going concern and its value would be damaged by it just suddenly falling over and no one having any idea to bring it back how to bring it back up you know what i mean like and it's an asset right i should probably start commenting my code
John:
Yeah, and it's an asset.
John:
Even if you just wanted to sell it or whatever, it loses value if like, oh, Marco died and then overcast broke and never worked again, right?
John:
Anyway, what I'm saying is that of the three of us, at least you have something like that from me and Casey.
John:
If Erin can't get to your source code, honestly, she'll live, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
it's like it's not it's not that big of a deal and i think that's true of a lot of people's stuff again uh passports like i don't even know if the digital version of your passport is worth anything like is that useful for anything just other than making you feel good but either way if our house burns down we lose our passports we can go get new ones like we're not international travelers constantly and certainly not now right so generally i'm chill about the fact that
John:
uh many things in our life are vulnerable to being gone because i don't have i don't even have a fire safe right i don't even have like a a fireproof box like yeah yeah if our house burns down boy we're losing a lot of stuff by the way can we make sure can we not hear from all like the safe people like because i i know i know a fireproof box is different from a safe i know a fireproof safe is different from a regular safe i know these are all very different things i
Marco:
We don't have to hear about it.
Marco:
I actually researched these things a few years back and discovered quite how massive and heavy an actual fireproof actual safe is when it's one thing and all this stuff.
Marco:
We really don't need to hear the details.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Thank you for writing in already.
Marco:
I know if you are using that feature in Gmail where you can unsend the email within a certain amount of time, please go back and unsend the one you sent a half hour ago.
Marco:
We don't need it.
Marco:
Thank you very much.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
Well, you need a saltwater proof safe because when the hurricane comes and washes away your house, like the fire is not your problem.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The saltwater is going to leak in and just destroy all the stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you care, if you actually care about the physical safety of things like paper and stuff, keep it somewhere else, like not in your house, you know, in, in someone else's house, trade with a friend or a relative, uh,
John:
uh rent a storage space like what you're trying to do is say if there's a disaster here at least there won't also be a disaster there i mean i suppose if the nuclear bomb hits new york city like your your storage facility is probably also gone but then losing your passports is probably the least of your worries so i don't spend too much time worrying about this stuff we are probably less protected from silly losses than we could be we're just playing the odds that you know our house isn't going to burn down
John:
And mostly just our main concerns are like pragmatic.
John:
Come tax time, which is the main time we have to deal with family digital documents, come tax time, can we find all the crap that we need to find to do all the things that we need to do and get filed?
John:
Every year it seems like, oh, it's kind of a hassle or whatever, but like the system that we have is enough to get us through tax time every year, right?
John:
And to...
John:
And to feel like from week to week and month to month, we are more or less on top of our finances.
John:
My wife also does the finances.
John:
I think I mentioned this before.
John:
She uses You Need a Budget, which is not pronounced Yabnab, but that's what I call it, which recently moved online.
John:
We had used Quicken before that, mostly at my insistence, but she didn't like it.
John:
And then Quicken 2007 became the latest version for way too long.
John:
And then the new Quicken came and it was weird.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Some kind of program to manage your finances to stay on top of, again, whoever's doing that stuff.
John:
If they just want to go to the bank's website and use that thing, fine.
John:
If they want to use YabNab to make a budget and try to stick to it, fine.
John:
Whatever.
John:
I think...
John:
I think it is not as dire as like, you know, when we talk about this stuff in the past, we tend to be preachy about like, oh, back up all your stuff, back up all your photos.
John:
I think that is so much more dire than keeping track of all your receipts.
John:
Like, if there's some catastrophe that happens, are you going to be more sad that you lost five years worth of receipts or all the pictures of your kids?
John:
That's why we harp on like protecting your family photos so much more than we ever talk about.
John:
Here's my sophisticated filing system for every restaurant I ever ate on and how much I tipped.
John:
So I can put it in a spreadsheet and calculate it and show you trends over time.
John:
Like, no, that's not as important as pictures of your kids or pictures of yourselves or anything like that.
John:
Like photos are so much more valuable than everything else, which is why at least I personally spend so much more time making sure and money making sure all of my sort of
John:
Precious irreplaceable family memories that are in digital form are massively protected.
John:
Meanwhile, my passport's driver's license and electric bills are just going to burn with the house.
Casey:
You know, for someone who is so completely anal retentive and over the top about your digital stuff, I really want to make fun of you for not having basically any protection for physical things.
Casey:
But your logic does make sense, John Syracuse, as it often does.
Casey:
And yeah, I can't entirely blame you.
Casey:
I just wanted to kind of echo a couple of things you said.
Casey:
I am not quite as dedicated to paper stuff as Tina, but that dedication has only been waning in the last year or two.
Casey:
I do plug in all of our expenditures and things of that nature.
Casey:
I do it in former sponsor Banktivity, which has native apps for all Apple platforms.
Casey:
I used to use Quicken 2007 for years and years and years and years, even long after 2007 had come and gone.
Casey:
I personally like having that feeling of, I would say control, but maybe awareness over where our money is going.
Casey:
I don't think... The good news is we're not living paycheck to paycheck, so it wouldn't be critical for me to know, uh-oh, we spent...
Casey:
20 bucks at mcdonald's and that's put us way over the budget for this month and now we might not be able to pay our mortgage like there was a time that was me i think i've mentioned on the show many times that like i would treat myself to one mcdonald's value meal a week when i had first started working and being a real adult and i felt like more than and actually i think it was factual more than one like seven dollar mcdonald's meal in a week would would
Casey:
not financially ruin me, but put me in a genuinely bad spot.
Casey:
So anyway, I bring all this up to say I still like having that awareness.
Casey:
I still like having that control, maybe.
Casey:
And then somebody put in the chat, and I think we should bring it up, former sponsor Backblaze has put together a really good reference to the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which I think is a really good way of looking at how to back up your digital stuff.
Casey:
So, um, what is this?
Casey:
It's how does this work?
Casey:
It's three different copies, two of which can be local, but different things like different drives or like CD and hard drive, whatever.
Casey:
And at least one copy that is not in your house.
Casey:
And for stuff like pictures and whatnot, I think that you, me, and probably Marco as well are easily achieving this.
Casey:
For other things, perhaps not.
Casey:
But for stuff, like you had said, John, like pictures that you really, really, really don't want to lose, that you can't get back from anyone else, I can't stress enough.
Casey:
Be it Backblaze or someone else, try to figure out how to do a 3-2-1 setup for yourself.
John:
The flip side of the picture things, by the way, is one of the reasons that I've spent an ungodly amount of money printing photo books from Apple Photos and Mimeo and Apple Photos is gone now is because it's kind of the reverse backup.
John:
If I have a digital disaster and somehow my 19 copies of my photos all get erased from the Internet, probably through like ransomware or some other terrible malicious thing.
John:
At least I have now, essentially, you know, I have like several feet of physical photo albums in the form of photo books.
Casey:
Several feet?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's the unit of measure for pictures.
John:
Right.
John:
As measured by shelf space of these books sort of lining my shelf.
John:
It's maybe like three feet, maybe.
John:
Anyway, and I try not to calculate the price when I look at that because these books are so expensive.
John:
But you don't have to do it that way.
John:
You could just like making prints, making photo prints of your digital things is a reverse backup of your digital stuff.
John:
Now, granted, I would be devastated if I lost all my digital photos because I have, you know, 130,000 of them.
John:
And it's probably...
John:
Maybe 1,000 photos in those books.
John:
But 1,000 of my best photos is better than zero photos.
John:
And plus, making physical copies of your photos is a good idea.
John:
Obviously, we have pictures and picture frames around the house and everything too.
John:
But having actual albums where you just print your favorite pictures at Walgreens at the end of the year and stick them in an album.
John:
Just something minimal like that.
John:
It doesn't have to be fancy.
John:
You don't have to do these silly photo books that I pay for.
John:
But it's nice to have that as a backup, and it's also nice to have that as a thing that you can just leaf through.
John:
One of the gifts I give my parents frequently is photo albums of pictures of their grandkids, which they appreciate.
John:
I do wonder how much they look at them, but I do know for a fact that they're not perusing my digital pictures online, even though they technically could in various ways.
John:
So I'm hoping that, you know, hey, I give you this photo book and you flip through it when you get it and then you put it on your shelf.
John:
But maybe, you know, you sit down on the couch one day and see the book and take it out and flip through it again.
John:
It's nice to have physical copies of your photos for people who aren't so connected with digital life that they routinely flip through photos on their phone or look at their little memories from Apple.
John:
Like some people do that or even have digital picture frames or whatever, but not everyone does that.
John:
Um, not everyone is accustomed to that.
John:
And even if you are, uh, having physical copies is, is nice as well.
Casey:
So I alluded to earlier that I had a bit of an epiphany with regard to Apple one.
Casey:
And this came because I got my first bill for Apple TV plus, and we are working through the second season of for all mankind, which we are on the penultimate episode, no spoilers, but hopefully
Casey:
Oh boy, things just got serious.
Casey:
And I'm very excited to continue watching that.
Casey:
Ted Lasso comes out in just a couple weeks.
Casey:
So you bet that I'm not canceling Apple TV Plus anytime soon.
Casey:
But I got this $5 bill for Apple TV Plus.
Casey:
And I've been getting $10 a month bills for Apple Fitness Plus.
Casey:
And I've been getting, I think, $10 a month bills for iCloud storage.
Casey:
And it occurred to me as I got this new $5 bill...
Casey:
You know, I'm really approaching the amount of money I would probably be spending on Apple One or whatever they're... That's what it's called, right?
Casey:
Apple One?
Casey:
The, like, get everything... Right, that's right.
Marco:
It's called Apple One because there's more than one plan because that makes total sense.
Casey:
Right, totally.
Casey:
So anyway, so it occurred to me that, you know, if I'm spending, what is that, like $25 a month on various Apple services...
Casey:
why wouldn't i just pony up the extra five bucks to get a whole ton more icloud storage get fine maybe finally put us on a family plan and uh maybe the icloud photo library and give me icloud photo library and apple music which i don't think i care about because i am a devout spotify person you please don't at me um but i
John:
The ultimate luxury of getting Apple Music when you use Spotify is the same reason I have Spotify and Apple Music is just being able to follow other people's links and hear music because the Spotify people think everyone has Spotify and the Apple Music people think everyone has Apple Music and when people send links to songs I don't use either one of those services but I pay for both of them so I can follow people's links.
John:
My daughter is into Spotify so I'm basically paying for her and Apple Music
Casey:
i'm i don't get it because it's part of apple one i guess yeah well and so there's a really great just very quickly there's a really great website i think it's called song whip if that's not right i'll put in the show notes but it can and i'm sure this is not the only one but it's one that's been very reliable for me that will let you go back and forth between um different services so you know you can put in a spotify link and you'll get out a more generic link that that you can share isn't it this service is kind of like song dot link with a
John:
which I think it might be spyware, malware, I don't know.
John:
Oh, cool.
John:
The function of these websites is, the problem I just described with like, hey, if you want to link to something, it just might be natural for you to give a Spotify link.
John:
But then if you actually think about it for a second, like, oh, but what about the people who don't have Spotify?
John:
How are they going to listen to this thing?
John:
Well, I don't know what service everyone subscribes to, so how do I just link to a song?
John:
These meta sites exist that say, if you want to link to a song,
John:
Uh, here link to this webpage on our site and this webpage will say, listen to the song in huge list of services.
John:
So then you land on the webpage and then you just tap on whatever service that you actually pay for, if any of them, and maybe they also have like a free YouTube link or whatever.
John:
And so, you know, in the context of Twitter or whatever, if you want to link to a song, uh,
John:
you link to one of those sites.
John:
I used to use song.link because I saw people using it, but I think it might be shady.
John:
I have seen the Song Whip one, and that's the context I've seen it, where it's just a landing page with 20 links to the same song, which I think is a great thing, and I would love a...
John:
more reliable, like if Apple did something like that, obviously Apple's not going to do it because they're not going to link to Spotify, but like some company that I trusted not to turn that link into terrible malware 10 years down the line would be great.
John:
But in the meantime, I have used those things sometimes when tweeting.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So anyway, so it occurred to me, you know what, it's probably about time that I start actually taking action on this and not just kicking this can further and further and further down the road.
Casey:
So I haven't done anything yet, but...
Casey:
To recap, the current setup is I have my own Apple ID and my own store account.
Casey:
Erin has her own Apple ID, but she is riding on my app store account.
Casey:
So the good news is she doesn't have like a bunch of her own purchases and things like they're all our purchases or really strictly speaking, they're my purchases.
Casey:
And so I think it'll be relatively straightforward, he says, famous last words as he knocks on wood, that in order to convert mine to be like the family, I don't know, maven or boss, I don't know what the correct term is in Apple parlance, but...
Casey:
family organizer, if you will.
Casey:
And then just add Aaron's like iMessage ID, her standard Apple ID to that new family.
Casey:
And then hopefully that'll work out.
Casey:
But if you're in this situation, you have this exact situation where you had the like the complete picture Apple ID or your spouse did.
Casey:
And then the other one of you joined a new family.
Casey:
Like if you're in this scenario and you've lived this
Casey:
Only if you've lived exactly this, please reach out via email or Twitter and let me know what you've done.
Casey:
Because sometime in the next couple weeks, I think I'm going to try to take the plunge.
Casey:
And so that means I'll do a family plan, finally, that'll give Aaron iCloud backups, which he hasn't had in forever, I don't think.
Casey:
It'll give me iCloud backups, potentially, because I'll finally have the space for it.
Casey:
And then the next step is to get, more likely than not, to get some big, huge, honking SSD to put all my pictures on.
Casey:
And I don't even remember how many...
Casey:
how much space my pictures take up.
Casey:
But I don't think I want to sacrifice all that space on my iMac for reasons I can't even put my finger on.
Casey:
So if I don't just put them on my iMac, then I'm going to need some sort of big hard drive to put them on, big SSD to put them on, which is going to be several hundred dollars.
Casey:
So suddenly I've gone from $15 a month to several hundred dollars and $30 a month.
Casey:
Oh, that's what happens these days.
Casey:
But yeah, I think it's time.
John:
You should listen to ATP because we talked about the exact scenario many shows ago.
John:
I did the thing you're describing.
John:
I have the Apple ID that owned everything in the entire family, just like you do now.
John:
And my wife had an Apple ID, but she'd never purchased anything on it.
John:
And we made a family and I became the family organizer and my wife joined the family.
John:
And then we had kids and they joined the family.
John:
Like, it'll be fine.
John:
We talked about it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I remember talking.
Casey:
I couldn't remember what the details were with either.
Casey:
To be honest, I thought it was Marco that had the same situation.
John:
I mean, you could potentially screw it up if you do something weird during it.
John:
But I was saying like the scenario you just described, I did that.
John:
That's exactly what I did.
John:
And so far, it's been fine.
John:
Now, the other weird thing about it is we continue to purchase things through my Apple ID.
John:
We don't have to.
John:
My wife could purchase things on her Apple ID and sometimes does.
John:
you know but in general just for simplicity's sake i continue to buy most of the stuff on my apple id because everyone has access to it you know if i buy it and you know in-app purchases are i think you can opt into that or whatever and it's changed over the years but in general i buy it and then everyone in the family has access to you don't have to keep doing that you can switch after you do the family to doing individual purchases and that's fine too and the kids sometimes purchase their own stuff when they get like gift cards for itunes or whatever but as we said on past shows it works surprisingly well
Marco:
Yeah, I've had, I mean, geez, I've been doing Apple family sharing for years and years and years.
Marco:
I mean, I think within a few months of them introducing it, I think my whole family was in it.
Marco:
And it's been great.
Marco:
I've had no problems.
Marco:
Like, you know, Tiff and I are the adults on the account.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure us using family sharing predated Adam existing, but once Adam existed, he was added to the account.
Marco:
It's been totally fine, and there's all sorts of great things, like with the parental ask for permission for in-app purchases or for screen time extensions on limits and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
It works very, very well, and I commend Apple for getting that really right really early on because it's been great.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Or do it all yourself, just raw with their API and with your own Linux setup.
Marco:
That's what I do.
Marco:
And it's just wonderful.
Marco:
I've been with a lot of hosts.
Marco:
Linode is by far my favorite one.
Marco:
They have the best price-to-performance ratio for all their compute instances, including their specialty plans, GPU instances, high RAM, memory, dedicated CPUs, as well as their block storage service, managed Kubernetes support, and their upcoming bare metal services release.
Marco:
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Marco:
Visit linode.com slash ATP and create a free account with either your Google account, your GitHub account, and your email address, and you get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
let's move on and do some ask atp i don't know how much we're going to get through but carlos luis portillo writes portillo i actually would suppose uh what is the latest on y'all's desk chairs a few years back marco talked about his experience with the embody and john had just purchased one have any of y'all tried anything new or is the embody still the one to get
Casey:
I will start because I'm extremely boring and simple.
Casey:
I still have a gifted desk chair that I am sitting on that is fine.
Casey:
And I probably should get a better one, but I'm cheap and I haven't.
Casey:
So that's my story.
Casey:
Same as it ever was.
Casey:
Marco, what do you got going on?
Marco:
I still like the embody for most desk usage.
Marco:
That being said, for the beach, I got an air on.
Marco:
I had a couple of summers here where I just got like a cheap, you know, Amazon basics, whatever.
Marco:
And cause I, you know, it's the beach, you know, there's a lot of moisture and heat here.
Marco:
I didn't want to like ruin a nice chair with that.
Marco:
But I,
Marco:
Once I started spending longer times out here in the summertime, having the Amazon basic share was killing my back.
Marco:
Like I noticed the difference.
Marco:
It sucked.
Marco:
It's fine for whatever, you know, 50 bucks that it cost.
Marco:
And it's fine for temporary short term use or, you know, not very many hours in a day.
Marco:
But I noticed the difference when I was sitting in that for, you know, my full time job.
Marco:
So, I upgraded to, I wanted to get a Herman Miller chair for here, and I know the Embody is great, but because it's so hot and humid here, the Embody has a lot more, like, fabric that's thicker and touching your body compared to the Aeron, which is very cool and, you know, mesh-like.
Marco:
So I went Aeron for this.
Marco:
I'd used them back in my days when I worked for actual other people.
Marco:
And so I knew that Aeron's were good for me and they fit me well.
Marco:
And yeah, so I went with that and it's great.
Marco:
Again, it's Herman Miller.
Marco:
It's expensive, but it's very well made.
Marco:
It has a, I think, 10 or 12 year warranty and it's awesome.
Marco:
So no regrets.
John:
John?
John:
So, I mean, one of the advantages of buying a horrendously expensive chair is that you don't have to think about chairs for a while.
John:
So I'm still using the Embody.
John:
I liked it when I bought it.
John:
I still like it now.
John:
It is the same as when I bought it.
John:
That's why you spend a lot of money on a chair, I suppose.
John:
my wife had the steel case gesture and i have to say despite the fact that she liked that chair better than this one it is not held up as well it has more creaks and more things that are you know wearing a little bit on that chair the creaks really annoying because we spent a lot of money for that for the gesture and i don't want anything to be creaking and there's like this plastic panel that keeps like popping off that i have to tuck back in whereas the embody
John:
is like the day I got it.
John:
Like it shows nowhere, it does not make any noises, there's no extra play or slop in any portion of it.
John:
Yeah, so, but that doesn't mean that you should get an Embody.
John:
Like remember what I did with the chairs, I tried to do as much research as I could.
John:
I went to stores and sat in lots of different chairs, and then we bought two different chairs, hoping that one of us would like one, at least one of us would like one, then we could return the other one.
John:
It just so happens we got lucky that my wife liked the gesture and I liked this one, so hey, we just, we're all set, we didn't have to return anything.
John:
But honestly, you have to sit in chairs with your body, ideally for longer than five seconds in the store, but at least for five seconds in the store, because I went to lots of these fancy ergonomic chair stores and sat in a whole bunch of chairs.
John:
And you could tell sometimes, no, this one doesn't fit my body or this one's a maybe or whatever.
John:
So don't just buy the embody because you hear a bunch of podcasters got it, at least of which is because it's so expensive.
John:
You really have to like this chair to do that.
John:
But you should get, to Marco's point, a good chair that you like.
John:
that's comfortable for you.
John:
And yes, money is somewhat of a proxy for durability and comfort, but not always.
John:
There's lots of very expensive chairs that I sat in that I would be miserable in, right?
John:
So don't just buy based on price and don't just buy because you hear us talk about something, but please do buy.
John:
A decent chair that fits you well.
John:
And that chair was not a high-quality chair, but, hey, $250 in 1998.
John:
Like, that's, you know, I don't know what that translates to, but it's not a cheap chair.
John:
It's not a $50 chair.
John:
And that one did slowly deteriorate and get creaky or whatever.
John:
But I was glad that I spent that money on that because I was going to be working from home at that time, and I didn't want a $50 chair.
John:
The $250 chair lasted me until, what, you know, just a couple years ago.
Yeah.
John:
Definitely get a decent chair.
John:
Spend a little bit more money than you think you should spend, but don't necessarily buy the specific fancy chair that a bunch of podcasters you listen to bought.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Stephen Kim writes, I'm thinking about getting a dedicated camera.
Casey:
My biggest gripe with this kind of photo taking process is the ingest process.
Casey:
Oh, don't even get me started.
Casey:
I connect the SD to my M1 iMac and then go through the photos in Finder, deleting the bad shots, and then importing the rest to photos.
Casey:
This is sounding all too familiar.
Casey:
The problem is previewing a photo in Finder.
Casey:
These are not instant.
Casey:
There's an ever so slight lag going from one photo to the next.
Casey:
The Photos app itself is better, so I can import these photos and prune them there.
Casey:
But it feels wasteful to import a bunch of photos that will automatically start uploading to the cloud when I know a vast majority of them are bad shots and are going to be deleted.
Casey:
It's like I wrote this.
Casey:
I'm curious to know what each of you do when taking photos from your big cameras and ingest them into your photo library.
Casey:
That's lowercase photo library because this is what Steven wrote.
Casey:
That's lowercase photo library because I believe Casey still needs to switch over to iCloud photo library.
Casey:
Well, look at what we just talked about.
Casey:
um i have talked on and off about my photo ingest process for a while but in broad strokes it's kind of sort of what what you're talking about uh i go through an sd card using finder i don't love it especially when i'm loading raws especially when i'm doing it on anything but my imac pro um i don't tend to keep very many raw photos it's only things that i think are like really really fantastic shots but i shoot in jpeg and raw just in case
Casey:
To come to think of it, I don't think I've ever used a RAW photo in the seven years I've had a big camera.
Casey:
This is why you have 1.2 terabytes of photos.
Casey:
I know, it's true.
John:
I still have less than a terabyte of photos, but I have way more photos than you.
John:
And you know why?
John:
No RAWs or very few RAWs.
John:
I think you're right.
John:
You've got a RAW problem.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
I think you're right.
John:
I think there's a cream for that.
Casey:
Oh, lordy.
Casey:
Anyways, so yeah, so I get them down to what I think is reasonable on the SD card.
Casey:
Then I use an app called Geotag, which is sufficient.
Casey:
I don't love it, but it works in order to Geotag the photos that have come in off the big camera because it's really important to me
Casey:
to have geographic information on those photos because it's not unusual for me to look up things by where they were taken.
Casey:
So I use geotag to tag them to at least an approximation of where they were taken.
Casey:
And then I use my bespoke app that I wrote that is not going to be open source because the code sucks.
Casey:
It's not going to be for sale because it sucks.
Casey:
But it does work for me, and that's the thing that files it away on my Synology into folders for years, folders for months, and then a, what is it, ISO, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
So it's 2021-07-07, and then the time after that.
Casey:
Um, it's not great.
Casey:
I don't love it.
Casey:
I don't know what I'm going to do when I get to using iCloud photo library.
Casey:
I guess I would import to the Synology and then drag from the Synology into photos, which is super convoluted and weird, which is part of the reason I've never used iCloud photo library, but here we are.
Casey:
Uh, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's, it's wonky.
Casey:
Marco, I've given you first shot for the last several.
Casey:
So John, what are you doing these days?
John:
Yeah, I'm speaking to Stephen, but I'm also speaking to Casey here.
John:
So I don't know why either one, well, I know why Casey is.
John:
Importing into the Finder when you're planning on putting in photos, don't do that.
John:
Just import directly into photos.
John:
If there's one thing the photos actually does a reasonable job at is imports.
John:
It has a separate dedicated section showing your photos organized by when you imported them, which is essential for organizing because they're not necessarily the order that they were taken in.
John:
There's not date order because you might be importing for multiple cameras.
John:
Important to photos.
John:
Yes, I understand.
John:
Like, oh, I import them, but I'm not going to keep most of them, and I don't want to waste time uploading it.
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
That's what the computer is there for.
John:
Just delete the ones you don't want.
Casey:
Hey, I have empathy for the computer, John.
John:
Well, I can tell you that the upload speed, especially if you don't have gigabit fiber like I do, but even if you do...
John:
you're gonna probably be able to go through them faster than your computer can upload them just because photos is lackadaisical about getting around to pushing your stuff up or whatever but even if it doesn't it's fine like i swear it's fine and sometimes it'll save your butt because you'll be like oh i delete i want this one this one and you go through it and you realize you know what i you know i thought i had more angles in that one shot and even though i picked the one i like i actually would like those ones back guess what look in your recently deleted things and it'll be in there
John:
And if it's not in recently deleted, it might be on another computer recently deleted because it got uploaded.
John:
But don't worry about it.
John:
Like, it's the whole point of a cloud library.
John:
Just import into photos, sort in photos, delete in photos.
John:
They'll go into recently deleted 30 days or whatever later.
John:
They'll get purged from recently deleted.
John:
Like, it takes care of itself.
John:
That's why you want a photo library.
John:
That's why you don't want a...
John:
hand organized shoebox of files like uh casey has and guess what photos does a pretty good job of previewing images quickly like don't use the finder and quick look as your way of going through photos it's just no and and by the way once you get into any kind of workflow with apple photos or literally any other program that manages photos you'll get into a nice workflow of
John:
hitting the period key to mark thing as a fave or knowing the keyboard shortcuts to quickly crop or do whatever, or applying adjustments to multiple photos or tagging things or getting into a workflow with an actual dedicated photos app is way, way better than using the finder.
John:
Please stop using the finder.
Casey:
Sorry, dad.
Casey:
All right, Marco, what do you got?
Marco:
So in an ideal world, I can see a pretty good argument for shooting raw plus JPEG.
Marco:
And the reason why is that in most cases you would just import the JPEG and leave the RAW alone.
Marco:
And the idea would be that you would go through your JPEGs and you would pick and choose the ones you like best and you would be able to tell pretty quickly...
Marco:
Are there any of these that I'm going to need to or want to edit to such a degree that the RAW would be beneficial?
Marco:
So am I making large changes to the color temperature or color balance?
Marco:
Or do I need to pull a whole lot of detail out of the shadows or highlights?
Marco:
And you can tell that pretty quickly in your first pass going through them.
Marco:
Am I really going to need the RAW for this ever?
Marco:
And for the few that you do, keep those.
Marco:
For all the rest of the ones that you don't, get rid of the RAWs and then you just have all the JPEGs.
Marco:
and then put those into Apple Photos for long-term storage after maybe sending them through something like Lightroom for the raw tweaking and everything.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
That's what I would do in an ideal world.
Marco:
In the real world, I basically never use big cameras anymore in part because this process is so cumbersome and I sucked so badly at having any kind of discipline to actually do it.
Marco:
So in reality, what I did for a while was...
Marco:
Try to occasionally shoot photos on a nice big camera.
Marco:
See how awesome they were.
Marco:
Import them into photos as raw.
Marco:
Never do anything with them, really.
Marco:
Forget to ever pick through them.
Marco:
And then eventually, you know, I would I would forget about them.
Marco:
And then, you know, there's this massive like 30 gig block of photos from this day, like sitting in my photo library forever, taking up space on all my devices forever.
Marco:
um i would have duplication problems where like okay well i would want to edit the raws in lightroom which i now now what is now known as lightroom classic um you know old lightroom i want to edit them there because that had the better raw editor of anything i'd used but then i want to like actually have my photo library live in icloud photo library so everything could be in one place and the iphone could be you know automatically included in that and everything but
Marco:
So I would ideally edit in Lightroom and then ship everything over to Photos app and then delete them out of my Lightroom, whatever.
Marco:
In practice, didn't do that right either.
Marco:
In practice, I would just have two copies of everything and not know, like, can I safely delete this from here?
Marco:
Is this my only copy of this photo?
Marco:
Am I going to have three or zero copies of this photo that I'm trying to have one copy of?
Marco:
It was a mess.
Marco:
And so the reality is I just don't use big cameras anymore for multiple reasons.
Marco:
But this was a big one that I just never really nailed this process.
Marco:
I was always sloppy about it.
Marco:
And I would always have all the best intentions and very ambitious ideas of what I would do.
Marco:
And then what I would do in real life was very different and inferior and much lower effort and sloppier.
Marco:
I actually, I know this is not the time to wedge us in, but hey, it's our show.
Marco:
I think it would be really interesting to consider the idea.
Marco:
I know this would never actually happen, but just to consider the idea, what if Apple made a dedicated camera?
Marco:
Now I know why they don't.
Marco:
I know that basically the phone is their dedicated camera in addition to being a phone and that it's already this $1,000 thing that we upgrade every few years and it takes great pictures and uses all their AI and everything.
Marco:
But wow, can you imagine?
Marco:
How amazing it would be if you could give Apple's silicon and integration benefits to a device that could have bigger glass and bigger sensors.
Marco:
Can you imagine what it could do?
Marco:
Look at what it does with little tiny garbage glass and little tiny garbage sensors that you can fit in the phone.
Marco:
And just make it the size of a point and shoot.
Marco:
I'm not even saying make it like a giant SLR or even mirrorless.
Marco:
Obviously, Apple doesn't even need that much physical space for their stuff to make it amazing.
Marco:
Just make it like the size of like a Sony RX100 series thing.
Marco:
Imagine what they could do with that.
Marco:
uh but i i recognize that's not the world that we live in but if they would ever do that that would be such a dream setup of like imagine that apple makes a camera that just uploads to your photo library like a phone that would be just automatically you just take the pictures and a few seconds later they're there
Marco:
oh my god, that would be incredible.
Marco:
And I think that's part of the reason why iPhones are everyone's camera for the most part.
Marco:
Not only is it always with you, and not only is it a better camera now than most cameras most people can buy that are operated in most people's hands,
Marco:
But also, what do you want to do when you take a picture?
Marco:
You might want to share it somewhere.
Marco:
You might want to send it to somebody or post it on Instagram or something.
Marco:
That's such a common thing.
Marco:
What's the next step you want to do with this picture?
Marco:
And when you're working with a regular non-phone camera, that process is so cumbersome and heavy and time-consuming and data-consuming.
Marco:
And it's so easy to basically fall out of it like I did.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
My answer to this question is I don't have a process to ingest photos from my big camera to my photo library because I no longer even do that at all.
John:
It sounds like you never really had much of a process.
John:
You had an idea of a process, but you weren't actually executing on it.
John:
I would not recommend trying to use Lightroom and photos.
John:
I realized I kind of skipped over what my process is.
John:
My process is I take pictures with my big camera.
John:
I connect my camera to my computer with USB and import the photos into photos.
John:
And I only shoot in JPEG.
John:
that's it that's the whole process like there is no importing into another app there's no manual organization the new camera does have a geotagging app i'm not sure if it's working i think it might be but in the end like i don't care as much as casey about the the geotagging integration if i did i would try harder to get this weird sony app to to work like i can look at the picture and more or less tell where it is but uh
John:
But yeah, that's my workflow.
John:
And I've talked about how annoying it is that I have to import my phone pictures into my wife's library because she owns the library.
John:
But that's a problem that no one has solved as far as I'm aware.
John:
And I'm willing to deal with that annoyance, you know, in the hopes that someday Apple remedy this in exchange for using what for me has been a very reliable system of
John:
maintaining my photo library i've printed books from it back from back when it was called iPhoto it lets me organize my stuff the minimal amount of editing that i do i can do within the application i have complaints about the application but in general it has the trend although it has been very bumpy with a big dip when they ios-fied everything it has been positive over time and
John:
you know i i keep expecting someday apple photos to just totally fall over and fail me and then i'll have to find some new solution but that day hasn't come yet it's just always you know teetering on the edge of falling over for my like i said 130 140 000 photos there's some raws mixed in there but generally not that many mostly because i don't want to end up in a situation where my photos can't fit because i do want my photos on the main hard drive the main thing that i back up i don't want it to be a separate thing so
John:
I don't if I took everything in raw, this would be, you know, terabytes.
John:
Right.
John:
But because they're mostly JPEGs with a smattering of raws thrown in, I'm able to have a huge number of photos and not take up that much room.
John:
And it really does make a difference.
John:
Like Marco said, you know, when I first got a camera that shot raw, I did a bunch of raw shooting and I saw what this would look like if you do this at the volume I take pictures.
John:
And it's just too much.
John:
Right.
John:
not just the processing over there but just the plain like how much space is taking up on disk and it makes you be so much more brutal about deleting stuff i prefer in in my ingestion flow to mostly keep anything that is not you know like i'll keep the seven different versions of the same picture unless they're out of focus or something or whatever but i'll keep them just because hey they're jpegs it's really not that big i'm not as brutal as i would be if i had raws i would really really want to narrow it down
John:
and then so that's my ingest flow and my and my out jess i don't know the the outward flow like again i had some friend visit recently and we hadn't seen them in a while took a whole bunch of pictures that day on my big camera connected my big camera with the cable to my computer imported into photos pick delete crop edit chuck the bunch into a temporary folder shared to my shared photo library everybody sees them
John:
done it's like you know 15 minutes worth of activity then that includes also importing for my phone which involves connecting my phone to my computer with a wire importing into image capture because photos is broken dragging it into photos but they all just go into photos organize pick crop select shared photo album share done that's a privilege i have as someone who's like relatives all use iphones and can see all the photos but
John:
you know either way like it it is a the the all apple all jpeg straightforward workflow even if you have both a dedicated camera and a bunch of iphones can work and it's it's reasonable please avoid the finder and please please don't try to use lightroom and photos at the same time
Casey:
Marco, does Tiff ever use the big camera, her big camera, y'all's big camera?
John:
She uses it all the time.
John:
I see that part of Marco's retirement from fancy cameras is suddenly Tiff has access to all the cameras.
John:
I was surprised when I saw her using the Sony in a recent some social thing.
John:
I was like, oh, she's not using the Canon for these things.
Marco:
she needs some better long lenses for the whale pictures though so you don't realize how long it is so i do i know how far you are from the beach and i know where that whale is but i'm just saying like the lens is the sony 200 to 600 and we have a 2x teleconverter on it to bring it to 1200 which does also drop off tons of light and makes the photos i mean it's it's not a super sharp lens to begin with yeah they're they're they're plenty bright but they're very soft
Marco:
it's yeah and that's that's part it is part of the lens problem like if you look at the reviews of this lens it's not amazing even though it is massive and it's overall a high quality lens but just serving the 200 to 600 range with any degree of like super sharpness is not an easy thing to do and then also just stabilization at that range you know it has image stabilization in the lens and in the camera body you're not you're not on a tripod
Marco:
Well, usually it's resting on the railing of the deck or something like that.
Marco:
But even with that, it's a significant challenge to just stabilize it.
Marco:
So it's certainly a challenge getting those pictures to be good.
Marco:
And most of it would not be improved by an even more expensive lens.
Marco:
That's actually not the problem here.
John:
It might be improved by a tripod, though.
Marco:
Possibly, yes.
Casey:
So what is her workflow?
Casey:
Do you know, Marco?
Casey:
Because if she's taking shots with the big camera constantly, she's got to have some sort of fix for this problem.
Marco:
She uses her computer to import stuff from it.
Marco:
But the first thing she usually does is take a picture with her phone of the viewfinder on the camera displaying the picture that she wants to post on Instagram and post that first because it's faster.
Marco:
Because otherwise, it's like, all right, okay, now I have to...
Marco:
bring the bring the sd card to my computer plug in the dongle find the dongle or plug in or connect the camera with a usbc cable all right so like it's like then do the whole import thing uh you know get it into photos or whatever or adobe bridge or you know whatever editing thing she wants to do with it i think i think she still uses bridge last time i talked to her about this was granted was a little while ago
Marco:
Yeah, I mean it's not – it's a cumbersome process as we've just been talking about.
Marco:
So usually she will get it into her photo library within a day or two, but it's very different from like, oh my god, I just shot this amazing picture.
Marco:
I want to post this on Instagram right now or send this to somebody right now like an iMessage.
Marco:
So it's – I feel like because that second step is so often like, oh my god, I just took this amazing picture.
Marco:
I want to do something with it on my phone right now.
Marco:
Usually it's showing someone, whether it's a lot of someone's through a social media thing or whether you're messaging it to your partner or whatever.
Marco:
You want to show it to someone.
Marco:
And it's so often that involves being on your phone so that the process of just getting the camera to give the picture to your phone somehow –
Marco:
usually having to involve a computer or some kind of awful app from the camera manufacturer.
Marco:
Like it's, it's such a cumbersome process and nothing has ever made it better.
Marco:
Like nothing, like all the different, you know, my five cards and direct wifi connections that the cameras have.
Marco:
Sometimes it can be controlled through their apps and everything.
Marco:
They're all garbage.
Marco:
They're all cumbersome, clunky, terrible, fragile, and slow.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
believe me i've used many of these things they're terrible and so that's what i'm saying like i would just love if apple just made a camera that that would just upload directly to your icloud photo library whatever it took that would be incredible but the answer is they do make that it's called the iphone and that's that's it and if that's not what you want or it doesn't come with any good lenses
Marco:
right yeah exactly that's the problem someday someday maybe you know that maybe that'll be like you know Schiller's project on the roof is like you know he's finally getting Apple to release because like I mean look Apple likes charging $5,000 for really boutique expensive high-end things like
Marco:
look at what people like sony or you know higher and look at what leica charges for their little their little you know mirrorless or fixed lens point and shoots like apple could do something amazing in that market for like two thousand three thousand bucks oh my god like imagine what they could do and it would have all the advantages of you know being able to be integrated with your phone somehow but i know the reality for for so many reasons i know that that's really a pipe dream they're never going to do that but
Marco:
One can dream in pipes.
Marco:
What is a pipe dream?
Marco:
Is it a dream in pipes or of pipes or containing pipes?
Casey:
I don't know, actually.
John:
I think that you got me confused by talking about it.
John:
The way it's phrased is normally it's like a dream that's not going to happen.
John:
Yeah, but pipes happen all the time.
Casey:
Oh, God, we're so sheltered.
Casey:
So Wikipedia for Pipe Dream, very, very bottom.
Casey:
Wild dreams induced by inhaling from an opium pipe.
John:
There you go.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
Wow, we're all way too straight-edged.
John:
The main association I had is the video game, which I really loved.
John:
That was a great game.
John:
Remember Pipe Dream?
John:
No.
No.
John:
yeah yes you absolutely do remember pipe dream you just don't remember the name it's a it's a you're it's a like a grid and you get to put tiles on them that have pipes right and then eventually water is going to start flowing so you get it's like pieces drop and it's like oh i have a horizontal pipe and a vertical pipe and a t pipe and an x pipe and you have to just put them anywhere on the board before the water starts flowing and once the water starts flowing you've hopefully made a pipe sequence so the water won't come out oh yeah it's a great game
Marco:
I would have known about that before I knew about the other meaning.
Marco:
The opium pipe, yes.
John:
Pipe Dream the game was definitely more of a factor in my childhood than an opium pipe.
John:
I hope so.
Casey:
Speaking of games, as far as Zahar writes, imagine Nintendo came to Apple and asked for an M1 license for their next Nintendo Switch Pro.
Casey:
Why would Apple refuse and why would Nintendo not attempt this?
Casey:
And this is also relevant on account of the new OLED Switch having come out, which I want, if for nothing else, just because of the kickstand, which is so much nicer.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I don't see Apple licensing the M1 to anyone for any reason, even somebody in a different industry, because I think they think of this as their...
Casey:
What's the opposite of an Achilles heel?
Casey:
Like their superpower, that this is what gives them a competitive edge and advantage over everyone else.
Casey:
And I don't think they would want to give that to anyone regardless of industry.
John:
I mean, it's not an obscure industry with Apple, you know, 85% of Apple's profits in the App Store coming from games.
John:
Nintendo is a direct competitor.
John:
Don't give your competitor like your best hardware asset, which are these amazing
John:
cpus that they've made for their phones ipads and macs yeah so obviously that's why apple would refuse uh is you know why would you help a competitor to be better than they otherwise would be um the other reason i feel like they would refuse is apple needs all the chips it can make for its stuff especially now that they're using the same chips and all their stuff um and then why would nintendo not attempt this um
John:
I mean, if Apple offered, Nintendo would be just, you know, incredibly foolish to refuse.
John:
Apple would never offer.
John:
Nintendo is also a very proud company and tends to not be on the bleeding edge of technology very intentionally.
John:
In the past, various people who have made very popular products, like there was a good article recently about the person who made the Game Boy, like very intentionally make a product with established, essentially older technology that it's inexpensive to make and very reliable and
John:
and rely instead on things that don't have to do with cutting-edge technology to make your games fun.
John:
Witness the Wii, not so much the Wii U, but even the Switch, which uses an extremely old, off-the-shelf chipset, slightly modified, that is massively less powerful than its competing consoles, and yet the Switch is selling like hotcakes because the games are really good, and Nintendo had a good idea for a product, this handheld slash TV thing, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
They made a good product, they made it with older technology, and Nintendo is proud of the fact that they sort of go their own way.
John:
So Nintendo would not come begging to Apple.
John:
Sony and Microsoft might, although Sony's also very proud.
John:
Microsoft would totally do it, though.
John:
But yeah, Apple's not giving this stuff to anybody.
John:
Who wouldn't want a chip that's incredibly low power and incredibly fast?
John:
Every game console maker could do amazing things with this chip, but...
Marco:
nope you don't get it only apple does yeah and a couple other reasons too i mean whatever amount of money nintendo would would make them in this deal i don't think would be worth apple having a customer for the chip that's not them and therefore having to do things like you know make contracts to make this chip available for a certain amount of time in a certain volume and and you know have to then answer to this customer and
Marco:
and deal with them and and you know what if there's a problem with the chip then you know apple has to deal with that i just i can't see apple wanting to take on the burden of a customer on that level um and then secondly you know the whether nintendo might not want this uh cost i think would be a pretty big problem
Marco:
The Switch is a $300-ish, $200-ish game console.
Marco:
I guess I know about the new one that's $350, and I know about the little one that's $200, but suppose they would put this in the high-end new one for $350.
Marco:
There aren't any M1 devices that are anywhere near that price point.
Marco:
I don't know what Apple pays for the M1, but...
John:
They would use an A12 and it would still be faster.
John:
That's true.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Like the Nintendo is not buying top of the line anything, right?
John:
So the cost wouldn't be a factor because they wouldn't be using an M1.
John:
They would be, you know, your other point about the needs of the customer, the real difference, because Nintendo, what Nintendo would ask for is
John:
Apple would be like, well, we don't have anything that does that.
John:
And Nintendo would say, well, can you make something like that and sell it to us?
John:
And Apple would say no, because they don't want to have a customer, right?
John:
Yeah, Nintendo could use an M1, and that would be great, but that would be, quote-unquote, expensive, right, compared to the price.
John:
But, like, the Tegra X1, whatever they're using, probably costs Nintendo, like, $7.
John:
It's like, it's...
John:
It's so cheap, and the power reflects that.
John:
It is not a powerful chip, but it is designed to do game-like things.
John:
If Nintendo went shopping in Apple's portfolio, it would have to choose from the older Apple TV chips, essentially.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And also, the M1 is not necessarily what Nintendo would even want.
Marco:
Obviously, it's probably a larger chip than what they're using.
Marco:
It might have different thermal and just board space needs.
John:
It has way more CPU power and not enough GPU power, probably, in terms of the balance.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Game chips are usually lopsided in that way.
Marco:
They usually...
Marco:
put as much chip real estate and budget, both for power and heat and money, into the GPU as possible.
Marco:
And the CPU is usually okay, but they need a lot more GPU power and not as much CPU power, typically, as you'd put in a MacBook Air.
Marco:
And so the M1 is not even the right chip for them.
Marco:
But even if they did all this stuff...
Marco:
Part of the reasons why Apple's chips are so incredibly fast for Apple is that they're Apple's chips running Apple's compiled software on Apple's operating systems.
Marco:
And you wouldn't have all those advantages if you just popped an Apple chip into someone else's hardware device running someone else's software with someone else's whole ecosystem.
Marco:
They're still fast, competitive chips, but...
Marco:
it wouldn't necessarily be as compelling.
Marco:
Even if all the other issues were worked out, it's not going to be what you think it would be by having all of a sudden Apple's chip in someone else's device.
John:
Well, it would be pretty amazing, but you'd be totally wasting the image processor, the neural engine.
John:
Nintendo doesn't need those.
John:
That's just a waste of money.
John:
And those are a big part of the chip.
John:
And they're powerful and significant.
John:
Nintendo would be in the situation that Apple has been like sometimes, where it's like,
John:
Well, the chip we're getting has this stuff on it, and we don't actually have a use for it, but I guess we could put better cameras on the Switch.
John:
Does the Switch even have a camera?
John:
I think it does, right?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I didn't think so.
John:
Anyway, the neural engine, can we use that in games somehow?
John:
But this is not what they want or need, right?
John:
And yet Apple has invested a huge amount of time and money making it, and they invest real estate on their chips and putting it there because it's incredibly important to the iPhone, which is what these chips are made for, or arguably to the Mac.
John:
um but still like go look at any benchmark of the m1 versus the tegra x1 that's in a switch it's it's night and day right so it's and the m1 and the thing about the m1 is it would probably also fit within a similar power envelope that would work in the switch given how big it is so it you know it
John:
the technology apple has access to let's put it that way it's cpu cores it's the manufacturing that gets through tsmc the preferential treatment it gets for having its chip on the newest process when other people can't get their chips all that stuff anyone would love to have access to that secondarily i think they would like to have access to apple's parts bin of crappy old chips just because those are also better than the tegrax one in many many ways uh
John:
But yeah, none of this is ever going to happen.
John:
I can't imagine why Apple has ever thought about it, and I can't imagine Nintendo has ever thought about it, just because that's not how the companies work.
John:
But it is fun to think about.
John:
I mean, the general disappointment over the OLED Switch is because people thought they were going to get potentially a more powerful system, they could do better stuff, and I'm kind of in the same camp of I'm always wondering, what could Nintendo do with more power, right?
Yeah.
John:
One example of that is Breath of the Wild.
John:
Breath of the Wild is a game that's not possible in the N64.
John:
It's not possible on the GameCube.
John:
It's probably not possible on the Wii or Wii U class of things, although it starts to get close.
John:
But the point is, games like Breath of the Wild became possible when Nintendo finally crawled up the power curve high enough that, hey, now we can do an open world game.
John:
Power for the sake of power isn't just like, oh, I don't need fancy graphics.
John:
No, it's gameplay.
John:
You can make more interesting, better games the more computing power you have.
John:
Nintendo travels that path.
John:
They're just behind everybody else.
John:
So every time I see an amazing Nintendo game, I think, imagine what Nintendo could do with PlayStation 5 power.
John:
Imagine what they could do with Xbox Series X power.
John:
We'll find out in seven years.
John:
40 years.
John:
Right.
John:
Because they'll get there eventually.
John:
But I am always looking for, I wish Nintendo would have a little bit more power.
John:
But if you look at Nintendo's balance sheet, they're saying we use incredibly cheap components that are reliable in known quantities.
John:
And we're selling every Switch that we can make.
John:
And I think they're approaching 100 million Switch sold.
John:
I think they're up to like 85, 86 million.
John:
which is close to the number of Wiis they sold.
John:
And the Wii was a standard def console in the HDH, if you remember that.
John:
So you can't really fault Nintendo's strategy, but I am always looking for, I'm always fantasizing about, imagine if the Nintendo first party game creators had access to modern day computing power rather than always being stuck with, you know, five years ago computing power.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, ExpressVPN, Hover, and Linode.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you all next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S so that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse it's accidental accidental they didn't mean to accidental accidental tech podcast so long
John:
i love summer it it's not like there are parts of it that are a little you know clumsy but otherwise i i love summer it's my favorite season i'm always happiest in summer oh speaking of summer and things you don't like and sweatiness and your air on chair so this all connects in my mind um i'm sure i asked about this when we talked about errands in the past but i always found the stupid bar on the front digs into my legs do you find that
Marco:
So it depends on how you sit.
Marco:
I mean, by the way, there's a reason why none of Herman Miller's chairs made after the Aeron have that bar.
Marco:
Like, it's not a great part of the design.
Marco:
It would be hard to get rid of with this particular design.
Marco:
But yeah, I agree.
Marco:
That is a problem.
Marco:
Many people don't know that Aeron's come in three different sizes.
Marco:
There's like an A, B, and C size.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
If you have the wrong size chair for you, like if you have one that's too big for you in particular, then that bar will dig into your legs more than it necessarily might need to.
Marco:
But also it just depends on how you sit.
Marco:
Like whatever you're doing with your legs, like, you know, if you're like crossing one and sitting on it or whatever, like that bar can get in the way.
John:
Or sticking your legs out way in front of you.
John:
Like sometimes I do that and I think that exacerbates it.
John:
Like putting your legs straight essentially so they go way out under your desk, you know.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm trying that now.
Marco:
It doesn't really do it for me.
Marco:
But yeah, I mean, it depends like how much you would squish the fabric down.
Marco:
So yeah, like it, you know, like any chair, it's going to be really good for most people.
Marco:
But, you know, some people it's going to have like a little bit of a weird fit on them.
Marco:
And so that's why like typically, ideally, you know, in the good old days, we could go to stores.
Marco:
It was always useful to like go find a showroom for whatever brand you're looking at or somebody that sells it and go sit in one.
John:
Yeah, the air-ons were everywhere as the dot-com bubble was popping and I was working in the industry.
John:
So they were easy to get cheap by the crappy companies that I was working at.
John:
We weren't buying new air-ons, but as the other companies around us went out of business and they liquidated their stuff, we got a bunch of used air-ons.
John:
And they're pretty sturdy and they hold up pretty well, so they were all over the office.
John:
So I got to try all different sizes and shapes and textures of chairs, including air-ons.
John:
And that's how I learned that they were not the chair for me.
John:
Although I do appreciate the mesh thing.
John:
Although your house is air conditioned.
John:
So what do you like?
John:
Don't you keep it at a little temperature?
John:
It's not like, you know, like sweating like I am in this little un-air conditioned cube here.
Marco:
I mean, so we use the air conditioning when it's really hot.
Marco:
It's on actually right now because it's both very hot, very humid and going to storm.
Marco:
So like it's obviously good for that kind of situation.
Marco:
But I don't, and we talked about this before, I don't like using air conditioning in
Marco:
if I can get away without it and be somewhat comfortable.
Marco:
Because I have a ceiling fan, which I love, and I would so much rather just have this fan on all day, blowing on me at medium speed, up to about 78 to 80 degrees.
Marco:
Unless it's super humid, then maybe a little bit lower than that.
Marco:
Because I don't like air conditioning because, first of all,
Marco:
The way air conditioning works is it's blowing like 40 degree air into the room to chill the room down.
John:
40 degrees?
John:
How powerful is your air conditioning system?
John:
I hope it's not blowing 40 degree air.
John:
Maybe a frost.
Marco:
It's blowing very cold air into a room through some ducts to try to cool the room down to a low average temperature.
Marco:
And it's doing this in a cycle.
Marco:
So the result is you have this cycle of very cold air blowing in, and then it slowly warms up to the point where it's almost too hot.
Marco:
Then you have very cold air blowing in again.
Marco:
During that time, there's no wind.
Marco:
I mean, you could turn the ceiling fans on in addition, but there's not a lot of air movement.
Marco:
You're in this isolated place where you're missing out on the natural environment outside.
Marco:
You're missing out on the natural breeze and the sound of the waves and the sound of the drunk people yelling outside.
Marco:
So I miss all that.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
I go outside and I get blasted by this super hot temperature difference.
Marco:
And then when I get back to my house, I'm blasted by the super cold temperature difference.
Marco:
There is no outfit I can wear.
Marco:
Because if I'm wearing shorts, then I'm cold in the house.
John:
Maybe you have the AC on too high or making it too cold in your house because your house should not be like a refrigerator.
John:
You're just trying to take the humidity out.
Marco:
No, but because the house is... Because when you have the AC on, you seal the house up, you kind of have to keep it a little bit lower than you would be able to tolerate if it was open.
Marco:
Otherwise, it gets too stuffy because then it doesn't cycle on enough.
Marco:
So it's a whole thing.
Marco:
Like, I...
Marco:
I'm very glad we have air conditioning.
Marco:
There are times like this where it's really nice to have and I would never go without it if I had the choice.
Marco:
But I try to minimize how often I actually really use it because I like...
Marco:
natural air i like the breeze i like when it's a little bit warm uh you know like i i like all that it's summer it's supposed to be warm and and this is all things i like so ultimately i consider air conditioning like a necessary evil sometimes but i would i'm not going to use it all the time if i can help it
John:
I'm assuming your house has an air-to-air heat exchanger, so you're not just recycling the same air.
John:
And I'm guessing that maybe it has a dehumidify function that doesn't change the temperature, which is a thing you can also have.
John:
You shouldn't be stuck in the situation that people with crappier air conditioning are, where you have to choose between freezing cold but dry and too hot.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
As far as I know, it doesn't have a way to dehumidify... So, like, the systems, they're heat pump air conditioners.
Marco:
So, like, because it's mostly air conditioning with occasional heating.
Marco:
And so, you know, it's regular heat pump air conditioners.
Marco:
And I don't think...
Marco:
There's any mode on them that I can access that is just dehumidified.
John:
Maybe you don't have the heat exchanger.
John:
The heat exchanger thing is where it takes fresh air from outside and changes that air to be the temperature that you want so you can get some fresh air in so you're not just literally recycling the same air.
Marco:
And that really helps get rid of the... I have, we had to get something, like for modern energy codes, we had to get an ERV, which I think does that function.
Marco:
I'm still not entirely clear on why we needed the ERV and what exactly it does besides make noise.
Marco:
It's some kind of fan that is like up in like the ceiling.
Marco:
And I don't know what it does, but I'm pretty sure that is the goal it's trying to achieve.
John:
Energy recovery ventilator, effective ventilation for humid climates.
John:
Yep, you definitely qualify.
Marco:
Yep, that's the one.
John:
Yeah, it's the air-to-air heat exchanger.
John:
It's exactly that you can see the little diagram on the thing.
John:
It's a little diamond-shaped box with the air.
John:
Yep, that is exactly what I'm talking about.
John:
I mean, that should help things.
John:
And the air conditioning with the fan, you scoffed at that, but that is definitely a way to go.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Having spent many summers on Long Island in various rental houses, some of which had air conditioning, some of which didn't,
John:
I can tell you you want the ones with air conditioning.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
That's why we put it in.
John:
It's very hot and humid.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Especially at night.
John:
Like, not being able to sleep because it's too hot and too humid is just the worst.
John:
So, I'd have wouldn't call it a necessary evil, I would say.
John:
Like, again, spend a lot of time without air conditioning and you'll never call it evil again.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
I get what you're saying about wanting the fresh air.
John:
Yeah, like, I won't go without it.
John:
I just don't like when I have to use it.
John:
You should try just putting the air conditioning on, but at a slightly lower temperature.
John:
We'll still take most of the humidity out of there.
John:
You should never feel cold in your house.
John:
I know this is a problem in the South.
John:
Sorry, Casey.
John:
Where the air conditioning is on, like... I always feel like there's only one setting, which is, like, maximum.
John:
It's like, how cold can the HVAC system in this building make it?
John:
Whatever the maximum is.
John:
Just that's what I want it to be all the time.
John:
Because, I don't know, people are always sweaty.
John:
And it's so cold that, like...
John:
if you stay in there for a long period of time, just die of hypothermia.
John:
Like in the beginning, you come in from the 90 degree, 90% humidity, like, ah, it's so nice and cool in here.
John:
But you see the person working behind the counter and they've got like earmuffs on because they're like, no, you can't stay in this building for any period of time.
John:
You'll die.
John:
It's too cold for humans.
John:
That's the bad rap that air conditioning gets.
John:
And what are the worst ones that you
John:
used to be movie theaters were really guilty of that or like it's to save money they have stopped that more recently um what are the other worst offenders it's usually like smaller stores the mall the mall it costs too much money to make that cold but anything that's like you know like a mattress store or something go into like a mattress store in georgia and it's you know negative 27 degrees in there no good it's cold in my office it's not cold in my office marco
John:
How much sweat is on your upper lip right now?
John:
Is it non-zero?
John:
Because mine is non-zero.
John:
I think I'm getting a blanket.
John:
I like air conditioning.
John:
It's too cold.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Only a monster, or either a monster or someone who is just impossibly spoiled would say, oh, no, air conditioning is too much.
John:
I get what he's saying.
John:
A lot of people don't like air conditioning, and I generally don't like it when it's too cold, but just...
John:
well that's the thing too like air conditioning takes on a whole other level when you have to share the space with other people or other people are controlling it yeah there's this disagreement about what the livable temperature for humans is because here's the problem the hot people of which i am not one in many ways i don't think we have a lot of experience in that area on this show right
John:
the people you know this usually isn't like in the bed of like who who's always cold at night and who's always hot i'm always cold i have bad circulation i'm always cold it's just the way i am right but the people who are hot do any amount of activity in the outdoors like literally any amount i took the garbage cans to the curb like now they're so overheated they need to be in a freezer in a meat locker for two hours to recover and so that's why they always want the house to be a meat locker it's like you don't understand i moved recently now i'm hot
John:
Now the nuclear furnace that is my body is going to burn and I will literally melt through the floor and journey to the center of the earth in a molten trail if I don't live in this meat locker for two hours to get back to normal.
John:
And then God forbid they move again, right?
Marco:
Well, I think also there's the problem that people have of the thermostat psychology.
Marco:
Two issues, I think.
Marco:
Number one is people often think that if they turn it way past where they want it to be, it'll somehow get there faster.
Marco:
Yeah, it'll make it work faster, not realizing it's just an on-off switch.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
also then there's like the thermostat battles between people where you know if you're like keep adjusting it and then someone else comes up and adjust it a different way and then you go back and adjust it again i feel like you adjust it also in bigger swings in that context than then you might necessarily want to so like you walk up to a thermostat and it'll be set to like you know 62 you're like what
Marco:
Who would set this?
Marco:
That makes no sense.
Marco:
And then someone else comes over and sets it up to like 85.
Marco:
And you're like, no, this is not how this thing works.
Marco:
But at this point, it's become a human problem much more than an HVAC problem.
John:
The rental houses we used to have, it was always a challenge, especially when we had lots of people in a really big rental house with lots of extended family in one house.
John:
Inevitably, once we upgraded to houses that had air conditioning in them, which was a big upgrade,
John:
The air conditioning would work way better in one corner of this sprawling house than the other.
John:
And so now you have like, OK, who gets to be comfortable tonight?
John:
Because if you set it to this temperature, these two rooms will be comfortable and the rest will be incredibly hot.
John:
And you set it to this temperature, they'll freeze in there, but everyone else will be comfortable.
John:
So you really just kind of have to alternate nights of like.
John:
Or not alternate.
John:
I mean, what it boils down to usually is the old people get to be comfortable, which is a rule set that I'm becoming much happier with now that I am entering the class of the old people.
Marco:
The best beach houses here that we rented for air conditioning were the ones where each room had its own mini split unit, like each bedroom.
Marco:
Because it's houses that weren't built with central air because they're too old.
John:
Well, that depends on who you're sleeping with, because if you're sleeping with one of the people who disagrees with the temperature, even a one room sort of grain size is not sufficient.
Marco:
Are you a like dual zone climate control in the car couple?
John:
it's like the smoking section in restaurants that's not a thing i'm sorry like we don't have a glass wall down the middle of our car oh bs it is absolutely a thing you just have crappy cars it's not a thing you're sitting a foot from them in one interior space it makes no i never take it off of sink it's always on sink because what the hell is the point like it's like literally a foot and a half away
Casey:
I understand what you're saying, but I strongly disagree.
Casey:
It is not flawless.
Casey:
It's not perfect, but it absolutely works.
John:
Then next time you're sitting next to Aaron, why don't you strike up a cigarette and see how great this dual zone thing works for you.