Ultra-Wideband Park Bench
Marco:
Do you or your kids or have you or your kids discover Geometry Dash yet?
Casey:
Geometry Dash?
Casey:
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Marco:
Is that like number munchers?
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
No, it's a game.
Marco:
So this is like my kid has been obsessed with this game for a number of months now.
Marco:
And it's one of those games that like spreads to every child's friend.
Marco:
The basic gameplay, it's kind of like Flappy Bird where you're like, you know, jumping up and down, but taken to the
Marco:
The most ridiculous extreme possible to the point where it's this huge world.
Marco:
The game itself, not only does it have a million levels that have just huge amounts of complexity, tons of visual distractions.
Marco:
It's like crack for your brain if your brain works a certain way.
Marco:
It's just this huge...
Marco:
huge amount of stuff on screen all to for this basically you know this like instant death kind of frustrating hardcore kind of jumping game um and what's interesting about so there's also a level editor in it and so of course my kid has gotten into making his own levels and you can submit your levels it's all right in the game and what i love about this thing this is not an app for geometry dash what i love about this thing is that it there are no in-app purchases as far as i can tell
Marco:
it's you pay two bucks for the game and you just have it and that's it impossible yeah and and the guy you know i think he does very well um based on the number of people who who play it and it's you know it's been around for a long time it's but it's still going strong like you know my kid tells me there's like a hundred levels added all like every day or something by people and they get featured every day and like there's all and it's a huge community there's youtubers playing it talking about all that that's presumably how we found it
Marco:
It is kind of a joy to me to see this game succeeding in the way it does because it's succeeding in the way that iOS games used to back before everything was an internet purchase garbage fest.
Marco:
It's just a game that you pay for and you have it and like...
Marco:
there's stuff you can you can like level up to in the game you can get you know better you know suits or skins or whatever but you do that by playing the game and like just by like beating levels it's not by you don't spend 10 bucks on a coin pack to get a treasure loot chest to possibly get you know it's like it's none of that garbage it's just a game that you play and you get stuff in the game and you can make stuff in the game it's this whole thing and
Marco:
It just seems so nice and wholesome that it's just rare.
Marco:
And I mean, this is not a new game.
Marco:
I'm sure anyone out there who's an iOS gamer has probably gotten tired of this game 10 years ago.
Marco:
But as somebody who has only seen it recently, I'm very impressed by just how nice of a little world this game has created.
Marco:
And when you see some of the levels that are made, the amount of...
Marco:
work and complexity and artistry that go into it is is quite something i can't play the game for crap like i this is the kind of game like you know you play you jump a few times you die you jump a few times again you die again and i'm like all right i want to throw the ipad out the window like i i don't have the kind of personality to play this kind of game
John:
Good tip.
John:
She finished Celeste.
John:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But yeah, this is, I'm very impressed by Geometry Dash and the world around it.
Marco:
And it's pretty cool.
Marco:
So if you have kids with iPads, check it out.
John:
That developer should talk to the current Unity CEO, former EA CEO, who recently said that if you don't think about monetization during the creative process, you are a, quote, effing idiot.
John:
So Geometry Dash developer, sorry, the Unity CEO doesn't like you.
John:
Well, EA deserved that guy.
Yeah.
John:
But Unity's got him now.
John:
He's the CEO of Unity.
John:
We talked about 3D engines last time.
John:
Oh, well.
Marco:
I'm curious.
Marco:
So my kid's also trying to get into coding and game creation.
Marco:
And we talked about this probably a year ago.
Marco:
I got a bunch of recommendations from listeners.
Marco:
I don't think he was quite ready for those at the time.
Marco:
We tried a few.
Marco:
Nothing really stuck.
Marco:
But he did recently finish the first, I guess, batch of Swift Playgrounds and wants to jump into making a very simple game now.
Marco:
However, you know, he's still young.
Marco:
I think attention span is still a very challenging thing.
Marco:
And he suggested trying Unity because he heard from YouTubers that you can do that.
Marco:
And then I heard on the talk show this week, John had on, I forget the guy's name, the guy who made the Apple Store time machine thing called Shop Different, which is amazing.
Marco:
I went through it a few days ago.
Marco:
Like, wow.
Marco:
That's the whole thing.
Marco:
I was very impressed with that.
Marco:
Most of them, I was more impressed academically, but then when I went to the Fifth Avenue, New York, Glass Cube recreation, I've been to that store a lot during that time period that it's represented, and it felt like going there again.
Marco:
It was an incredible recreation.
Marco:
It really did nail...
Marco:
exactly how it felt and to walk through that and be like I've been here before like I remember this when it looked like this that was that was really quite something anyway the creator of that mentioned that he made it in Unity and that he's not much of a programmer but you know it was apparently easy to just like import stuff I don't even know
Marco:
You know, I know that Unity is a game engine.
Marco:
Other than that, I don't know anything about Unity.
Marco:
I, like, I, you know, I couldn't pick out a lineup.
John:
It's like a full IDE.
John:
It's like a full IDE for a 3D environment.
John:
So you can do, like, modeling, texturing, arranging, geometry.
John:
It's still hard to do.
John:
It's still complicated.
John:
Like, I remember last time you were looking into, like, pulp the, what do you call it?
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, well, there's the Playdate thing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then we looked into, oh, God, I forget the names of all these things.
Marco:
The, like, little, like, oh, God, Pico something?
John:
Pico 8.
John:
But the pulp you can do all on the web, and it's programming optional.
John:
You're basically dragging tiles around and setting up rules, and then you can dive into the code if you want to.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm looking at we're going to look back into stuff like that again.
Marco:
But but unity, I think, is one of the things that we that's on the table for like he's motivated to do it.
Marco:
And what's good about that is that if he runs into questions or problems, he can just look up the answer on YouTube, which is how he finds information anyway.
Casey:
Oh, no, I can give you one better.
Casey:
He can ask me.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Wait, not because I don't know crap about Unity or 3D programming, but do you know what Unity's scripting engine is written using?
Casey:
C Sharp, baby.
Casey:
It's all coming back.
Marco:
Really?
Casey:
So he can ask, oh yeah, oh yeah.
Casey:
How's that make you feel, Marco?
Casey:
Feel good?
Casey:
Do you need a shower now?
Marco:
So he just needs to learn Java and he basically knows it, right?
Casey:
Oh, sick burn, but mostly true.
Casey:
Honestly, I haven't written C-sharp in 10, 15 years, something like that, 10 years?
Casey:
No, maybe less than that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's been a while, though, and I've probably forgotten everything I once knew.
Casey:
There was a brief window of time that I was a pretty good C-sharp developer, but that was many years ago.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think those muscles have entirely atrophied quite yet.
Marco:
Anyway, so that's going to be an area that we're looking into.
Marco:
But anyway, all this is to say, Geometry Dash, thumbs up.
Casey:
This is news to me.
Casey:
I'll have to check this out.
Marco:
I love there's no in-app purchases.
Marco:
It's just a game.
Marco:
There was this brief period, relatively now in retrospect, this brief period back from 2008 when the apps were launched...
Marco:
until i through i would say the first year or two of the ipads like 2010 and 2011 remember that that first batch of ipad games was also this way it was really they were really good games that had no in-app purchases or at least very few because i think in-app purchase i don't think it was available till ios 5
Casey:
I think.
Casey:
Oh, I don't remember.
Marco:
And the iPad launched with iOS 3.2.
Marco:
So I think, I think there was a two year span there, but anyway, the first year or two of the iPad, um, basically predated the, the use of an app purchase widespread in games and the games that came out during like those early iPad years were,
Marco:
were great.
Marco:
They were so much fun.
Marco:
You had the first versions of Field Runners, Plants vs. Zombies, the plane landing game, what was that called?
Marco:
Flight Control.
Marco:
There were so many great, amazing games, and due to a number of unfortunate factors, most of them you can't even play anymore, even if you wanted to.
John:
Okay.
John:
Was Cut the Rope in that era?
John:
I know it eventually had all in-app purchases, but I wonder if Cut the Rope predated it and then added it later.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
Cut the Rope I think was later.
Marco:
At least I didn't hear about it until well into the in-app purchase era.
Marco:
But those early – man, those early iPad games were so good.
Marco:
And that era is just gone and most of those games are gone and they've all been either totally killed and their companies don't even exist anymore or they got acquired forever ago by somebody like EA and shut down.
Marco:
and or they've been remade as modern sequels that are just in-app purchase casino garbage games.
Marco:
It's just such a shame because those first games were so fun, and that's why something like Geometry Dash comes along, or rather, sticks around, and it's just so refreshing to see that now when you're used to today, like...
Marco:
If somebody recommends an iOS game to me today, I usually won't even play it because I know it's going to be full of in-app purchase garbage.
Marco:
Unless it's a Zach Gage game, I'm usually out.
Marco:
But to see something like this that's still doing well and that has the old model is both rare and refreshing.
John:
Jump to Dash kind of looks like a combination of an infinite runner and VVVVV for kids.
John:
I never got into that one.
John:
What?
John:
Six V's.
John:
It's a very intentionally primitive looking, extremely difficult, unforgiving platformy jumping game.
Casey:
I have not heard of this either.
John:
And it reminded me a little bit of Geometry Dash, but I only played Geometry Dash for two seconds, but it seems like it's mostly left to right, whereas six Vs is all over the place.
Marco:
No, it's also all over the place.
Marco:
And there's different modes that turn you into different objects with different movement characteristics.
Marco:
You can reverse, you can speed up, you can slow down.
Marco:
There's all sorts of craziness in there.
Marco:
Trust me.
John:
Did you show Adam the Vs game, which I'm not going to say the name of again, because if he likes Geometry Dash, he might like this game as well.
John:
i mean i think i think this relies on a little bit of nostalgia that he obviously doesn't have but it is similarly punishing mechanics and you should get him into like from soft games eventually like the uh souls games when he's older he likes unforgiving games yeah he very much does and it's like it's kind of rhythm based because the the levels have music and usually the the jumps that you need to do will correspond to beats in the music and
Marco:
So there, there's that aspect and the, and the music is very like, you know, electronic style, which is right, his right up his alley.
Marco:
So that also helps.
Marco:
So it's, it's a whole, whole picture thing that really, you know, hits him.
Marco:
He loves it.
Marco:
And I love that it's so kind of wholesome and not in at purchase garbage fest.
Marco:
And, and so it's, it's wonderful.
Marco:
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Ah.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
John, you promised us last week, or we assigned homework last week, that you should compare the M1 MacBook Air speakers and the M2 MacBook Air speakers.
Casey:
Have you done your homework, John, that we should never have assigned you?
John:
I have.
John:
Both speakers are not good.
John:
I mean,
John:
I told you.
John:
It goes without saying.
John:
I was comparing them.
John:
I honestly had never listened to them.
John:
Like I said, these are my son's laptops and he uses headphones all the time.
John:
And maybe I hear the system beep if I'm ever doing something.
John:
That's about it.
John:
That makes it difficult to compare which one is less bad.
John:
But I think pretty definitively the M1 MacBook Air is better.
John:
They both sound bad.
John:
The old one is better?
John:
Yes.
John:
Hmm.
John:
I mean, you can try it yourself.
John:
I don't have particularly attuned ears, but it just felt like the M2 was even more inside a tin can than the M1.
John:
I played music on them, right?
John:
And I was playing the same song on both of them.
John:
And I'd play one and I'd play the other and play one and play the other.
John:
And it's like, oh, they're both really bad.
John:
And it's just, you know, I just feel like the M1 is better.
John:
I mean, it could be that because the speakers are like up firing instead of bouncing off the screen.
John:
That could be the entirety of the difference.
John:
But to my ears, the M1 MacBook Air sounded better.
John:
Hmm, wow.
John:
Not by a lot.
John:
They're both bad.
John:
And it was really difficult for me to tell.
John:
I would not play music on either one, that's for sure.
Casey:
It's funny every time that I use my MacBook Pro as a laptop because I don't do that often.
Casey:
It definitely happens, but it's not often that I'm going and doing work and sitting down and doing something serious on my MacBook Pro and using it as it is, you know, not connected to screens and all sorts of other paraphernalia.
Casey:
And today I went to my beloved ultra-wideband park bench, as I described a few weeks ago.
Casey:
And actually, as a quick aside, yesterday, I think it was yesterday, we went to a museum and then went to lunch in quasi-downtown Richmond.
Casey:
And I was sitting at lunch, and I noticed I was on ultra-wideband.
Casey:
And I did a speed test over three gigabits down.
Casey:
over three.
Casey:
That's three times faster than my own connection.
Casey:
It still blows my mind.
Casey:
I don't know what I would ever do with this, but it's still cool that it exists.
Casey:
Technology, baby.
Casey:
Anyway, so I was at my beloved ultra-wideband Parkbench earlier today, and it occurred to me, you know, the screen on these MacBook Pros is really freaking good.
Casey:
And although I only use the speakers for but a moment because it's rude to do that in public,
Casey:
The speakers on the MacBook Pro, all things considered, are pretty darn good too.
Casey:
So I'm not saying that the MacBook Air is wrong for most people or for really everyone, including probably me.
Casey:
It probably is sufficient for my needs for the most part.
Casey:
But no, these computers are really quite spectacular.
Casey:
And I sometimes forget how amazing they are.
Marco:
I will say, the speaker difference between, again, as I mentioned last week, between the MacBook Air and the 14-inch MacBook Pro, it's a different league.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
You would think, oh, they made it one inch bigger, the speaker's a little bit better.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
totally different ballgame not even close i love the macbook air trust me i i love i still still loving the macbook air but the speakers are really god-awful compared to the larger ones so yeah that's it's it's no comparison not even close
Casey:
All right, moving along.
Casey:
I was reminded by an anonymous contributor that you can set up a catch-all email on a lot of services, but including my beloved Fastmail, www.caseless.com.
Casey:
But anyways, honestly, I forget what the context for this was, but we were talking about something last week that brought this on.
John:
You're setting up like the single use email addresses and you had to go to fast mail and click and make one and then you go use it.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
A couple of things here.
Casey:
First of all, you can set up a catch all email, which is a little bit weird the way they have you set it up.
Casey:
It works exactly right.
Casey:
And so what I can do is I can sign up for making this up, but I could sign up for Instagram and have the email address.
Casey:
I give Instagram.
Casey:
Instagram at CaseyList.com.
Casey:
And then Fastmail, and again, this isn't unique to Fastmail, but Fastmail or whatever, will forward that to my actual email address.
Casey:
And so this way I can tell where it came from.
Casey:
Google and Gmail people would often do this where you would do username plus service.
Casey:
So it would be like John plus Instagram at Syracuse.com or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And that also works on FastMiller.
Casey:
I'm pretty darn sure it does.
Casey:
But you can set up a catch-all, which makes this sort of thing pretty neat as well, which is something worth considering.
Casey:
Also, I went back and forth with a few people on Twitter in a happy way, and I was reminded that in 1Password8...
Casey:
which is the Electron 1, which has its whole... You have some issues with that when you go that route.
Casey:
And I had been on 1Password 7 because I had been waiting for the stick to force me into 1Password 8, but eventually they gave me a carrot in the last 24 hours, and they said, oh, by the way, in 1Password 8, in only 1Password 8, you can do the whole fast mail, masked email, or whatever they call it, the hidden email address thing,
Casey:
one-time use email address thing, you can do that automatically within 1Password.
Casey:
So what that means is you're signing up for a new service, say Instagram, using the web on your computer, and you can use 1Password to just automatically generate a, you know, happy.farts at caseylist.com or whatever they come up with in order to get an email that isn't going to be something useful and that you can kill pretty easily.
Casey:
And you can do that all through 1Password with 1Password8, which is worth considering if you happen to be a FastMail user.
John:
That email wildcarding thing really maximizes your surface area for spam, though.
John:
I mean, if they have any kind of auto thing that's trying like well-known addresses at every domain or whatever, you're going to get all that spam because you can put any word in front of the ad sign and it will all go to your one email address.
Marco:
I don't know if they still do this, but FastMail, in their control panel to enable the catch-all email address, they even used to warn you, like, warning, you will get a lot of spam.
Marco:
And I actually used that mode for a number of years.
Marco:
I kept getting more and more spam, and I'm like, you know what, this is stupid.
Marco:
And so what I did was...
Marco:
I like I searched my inbox or sorted it somehow.
Marco:
I forget how I did this to basically find like the only aliases I ever actually used for anything, turned off the catch all alias and just made made that list of all the aliases that I actually needed and just stopped using new ones anywhere.
Marco:
And it was it was a much better situation spam wise.
Marco:
Also, can I just say, from somebody who deals with customers and their email logins, for both my app that I'm trying so hard to not have anybody use emails, but some people still insist, and from our wonderful members who we love, atp.fm slash join, nerds who think they're being clever and they use these custom aliases and so it'll have Overcast at mydomain.whatever or ATPM membership at mydomain.whatever, you always forget
Marco:
And then you write in and then we have to find your account.
Marco:
It's too clever for your own good most of the time.
Marco:
So it's not it's something that like it causes headaches for everybody, for you and for the services you use.
Marco:
And the reality is like, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
You're going to know if somebody sells your email address.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Everyone sells your email address all the time.
Marco:
It's already out there.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
Like the gain that you're getting with that, that you think you're getting with that, I don't think is worth all of the downsides.
Casey:
that's an interesting point for sure so last week was one of those weeks where i thought we were really clear on the things we were talking about and asking about and apparently either nobody heard us or we didn't clarify quickly enough because we got a mountain of feedback where everyone was explaining to us oh did you know you can turn off the notifications for for devices and air tags and things when you leave them behind
Casey:
And I thought that John especially, and I thought I was too, but particularly John, I thought was very clear that, yes, we're aware that that is a thing that can happen, but we don't want to permanently turn it off for like a vacation home or a hotel room or something like that.
Casey:
We just want to maybe turn it off for a few days.
Casey:
And that was the real complaint we had.
Casey:
But half of the internet wrote in to tell us, no, this is what you need to do.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
For the record, John, if you did want to do that slightly dangerous thing of turning off the notifications for a particular location forever, how do you go about doing that?
John:
Steve Stutz gave concise instructions on how to do it.
John:
So you open the Find My app, you tap on Devices, which is down at the bottom, and then you tap on the device you want to deal with, and then you scroll down under the heading Notifications, tap the Notify When Left Behind section.
John:
And what you'll probably see in that section for any of your devices is that it says Notify When Left Behind, and it will say that it's on.
John:
probably and it will say accept at one location and you'll be like wait a second did i already use this feature what is the one location that it's supposed to not know to my face it's like notify left behind accepted this one place what is that one place casey home that's right your home is already there so it's you know it's the home is explicitly put there so you can add a second location or a third or fourth or fifth but your home if you have your home kit stuff set up is already there that's why every time you leave your house you don't get notified that you left all your stuff behind
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then Paul Squires writes on the find my alerts from a hotel.
Casey:
In general, I want to keep those on.
Casey:
I may be going to dinner, but I could also be going to an office.
Casey:
So I want those devices with me.
Casey:
Also, I definitely want them on for checkout day.
Casey:
This is an extremely succinct summary of what John and I were trying to say.
John:
Yeah, that's I mean, that's the tricky part about this feature, because like, oh, I don't want it to keep bothering me unless I'm going to the office.
John:
And I do want them.
John:
And by the way, when I check out, I want it, too.
John:
So it's it's not easy to pull this off.
John:
It's not as simple as we were saying the show, like, oh, just I'm going to be here for a week and just turn them off until a week later.
John:
Right.
John:
Because if you are somewhere for work, you want it on every day that you're going to the office, but not on the days that you're not.
John:
But you definitely want it on for checkout days.
John:
You know, if you left stuff behind, hard problem to solve.
Casey:
And then with regard to HomeKit automation and locations, so the context here is my Apple TV at the beach house deciding that that was my permanent home, which was a little wonky.
Casey:
So we had a few different pieces of feedback about this, but in particular, Derek Martin writes, I recently had my HomeKit home self-identify as two properties at once.
Casey:
The new house we just bought and are in the process of moving into, and the old house that we've had for a while and are in the process of leaving.
Casey:
Whenever I arrived at or left either location, HomeKit would offer to run my location-based automations.
Casey:
You get one guess as to how I fix this.
Casey:
Yes, that's right.
Casey:
I had to go into my contact and rename the old house to something other than home, leaving just the new house named home, and then all of my automations worked properly again.
Casey:
Is there anything to indicate this in the UI?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Did I figure it out by pure fluke on my first try?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
So Derek got very lucky there.
Casey:
Additionally, Jim Bruin writes, if you take your Apple TV outside your home and don't want the off-site device to become the default hub, and this is exactly what I did when I got home, I just didn't know to do this in advance.
Casey:
Anyway, Jim writes, go to Settings, AirPlay, and HomeKit, and under the My Home settings, switch from Connected to Disabled.
Casey:
then the hub will transfer to another device at your home.
Casey:
And like I said, this is what I did to kind of fix everything once I was back home, but it wasn't until I was already, the damage had already been done that I had thought to do this.
Casey:
Also, with regard to the Apple TV, Tor Blund Miranda writes, we've tried many different Apple TV photo apps, Flickr, Plex, and some others.
Casey:
Apple Photos is far and away the one that's the best for looking at photos on Apple TV.
Casey:
It loads photos fast, and as long as it's your own library, they load in high quality.
Casey:
I don't know a single other photos app for Apple TV that does this well.
Casey:
It not being able to handle John's photo library notwithstanding, but let's be real.
Casey:
It's John with his enormous photo library that has the weird way of dealing with photos, not Casey.
Casey:
Boom!
Casey:
Got him.
Casey:
Anyway, I'd love to know if there are any others that are good enough.
Casey:
For the record, I did not put this in the show notes, but I was very happy when I read this email.
John:
I understand what I'm doing is weird.
John:
I'm using Apple's solution in the boring way that Apple says.
John:
Take pictures, put them in your photo library.
John:
It's nothing weird about it.
Casey:
Honestly, I think I actually agree with you, but I was so happy to see somebody defend me, so I'll take the victory nonetheless.
John:
Yeah, all of a sudden, when I saw this, I'm like, okay, well, I complained about the Apple TV Photos thing every few years.
John:
I should look at it again to see how it's doing.
John:
So I loaded it up on my, you know, Apple TV and ran into a couple issues.
John:
Since the last time I did it, I think they changed, like, the way...
John:
the way user accounts work on Apple TV.
John:
Um, I think it used to be that you just, it was just, there was no accounts and you just put which Apple ID do you want to get your photos from and you sign into it or whatever, but now there are accounts and the main user account is mine and that has all the home screen sync stuff and like, you know, everything is set up like that.
John:
I said, OK, I'll just add a user account for my wife.
John:
Why?
John:
Because we're still not over the hump of iOS 16 and Ventura and everything.
John:
And so there's no shared family photo library.
John:
So I have to use her Apple ID because she's got the family photo library.
John:
So I made an account for her and we create an account with her Apple ID.
John:
It's signed in or whatever.
John:
But it seems like the photos app only shows the photos for the default user.
John:
which is me and not her.
John:
If you go into her settings, it shows a bunch of stuff about purchases and so on and so forth, but it doesn't have a section for iCloud photo library.
John:
So I couldn't even see her iCloud photo library unless I was willing to, I guess, maybe delete my account or make her the default user or something like that.
John:
And I wasn't willing to do that for the purpose of this test.
John:
So instead, I use my Apple ID and my comparatively dinky photo library, which consists only of photos I've taken on my phone.
John:
So it's not the 150,000 photo family library.
John:
It's just my phone photos, which is way smaller than that.
John:
And sure enough, most of them are thumbnails and they take forever to load.
John:
And if you were trying to use it to actually show something, you'd just be staring at squares with question marks in them.
John:
for just minutes and minutes while everyone uncomfortably shifted on the couch saying, so are we going to see some pictures?
John:
And the answer is no, you're probably not.
John:
Like one or two thumbnails will load and maybe you can wait.
John:
It just doesn't do what you want it to do, which is you want everyone to sit down and you want to click things on the remote and say, oh, look, pictures.
John:
And then you look at them and smile and go to the next one.
John:
Nope.
John:
I don't know what the problem is.
John:
I don't know why it has a hard time loading them.
John:
I have a super fast internet connection.
John:
It's on the same network via ethernet of all the other devices that have these photos on them.
John:
It just doesn't do the job.
John:
And like I said, it's not because it was 150,000 photos.
John:
It was a fraction of that.
John:
So I don't know what the deal is, but still no good.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know of any particular answers for this, I'm sorry to say.
Casey:
But if somebody has a good suggestion, then please let us know.
John:
29,000 photos, just if you want concrete numbers.
John:
That's how many I've got on my phone.
Casey:
Contacts addressed ordering.
Casey:
Tell me about this, John.
John:
We're still talking about this.
John:
I know, seriously.
John:
This is hilarious, right?
John:
So what was it?
John:
The previous show, we were talking about how a particular application, the existence of a particular application is an indictment of Apple because it's the type of thing that shouldn't be necessary.
John:
Oh, I think it was the sleep aid thing, the thing that keeps track of what's waking and making your Mac sleep.
John:
And it's like the fact that that Mac app has to exist shows that there are
John:
Difficult to solve problems having to do with sleeping and waking in macOS that necessitate a third party application.
John:
It makes a third party opportunity to address the shortcomings in Apple's OS.
John:
Well, we also talked about contacts and how people can have multiple phone numbers and multiple email addresses.
John:
And there's
John:
So there's an order to them in contacts, but it's difficult to discern whether that order has any meaning.
John:
And if you want it to have meaning, you can do what I did and reorder them by deleting them all and adding them back in the order that you want them to appear in.
John:
Well, apparently there is a dedicated application called the reorder it exclamation point, just like Yahoo exclamation point.
John:
on the app store and the only thing this app does is lets you reorder contacts personally by deleting them and re-adding them in the order that you want that boggles my mind because it shows that some people are just annoyed by the fact that they can't reorder them in the contacts app and it's actually if someone has four email addresses deleting them all and re-adding them all is tedious so try reorder it i guess
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Reorder it.
Casey:
Tell me about the default addresses and messages, please, John.
John:
Rob Woodring gets the brass ring by giving me the actual solution to my problem.
John:
So remember, this all started with me talking about multiple addresses.
John:
Everything is like every time I try to share something via messages with my son, if he's not one of the little recently sent message bubble things and I have to hit the actual message.
John:
messages app icon and then i have to type his name a l and let the autocomplete fill it out it would always autocomplete to his contact but underneath his contact he would have his phone number and i wanted it to send to his apple id and not his phone number for reasons we discussed on past shows i couldn't figure out how to make that happen people had a lot of different ideas last week the one that i heard from a lot of people just delete the whole message thread and restart it because whatever you use to start that message thread with the person you
John:
Forever, when you autocomplete in messages, it will autocomplete to that because it's basically saying, hey, do you want to put this in the existing conversation I have?
John:
And the existing conversation that I have in messages was started seven years ago to a phone number, not to an Apple ID.
John:
Well, here's the actual solution.
John:
Rob says you can change what you are messaging without losing your previous message history.
John:
Go to an existing message thread, tap the name of the person at the top, then tap info, then tap and hold the messages bubble icon and select an alternate email or phone number.
John:
This has worked for me to switch between phone number and email and back to a different phone number later when my dad switched to an Android phone.
John:
The message thread was preserved, pictures and all.
John:
I tried this and it worked.
John:
This is the solution.
John:
And it's very close to the thing we talked about before where you go to the contact and hold like long press on the little message bubble and pick.
John:
but that doesn't do it.
John:
That doesn't change the thread.
John:
You have to go to the messages thread, then do the thing at the top and the long press or whatever.
John:
And from now on, whenever I type my son's name, it auto-completes and shows the Apple ID.
John:
And I was glad I didn't delete the message thread before because now I have all my messages preserved and now I know how to fix this.
John:
It only took...
John:
But a month of talking about it on a podcast with dozens of people sending solutions, including people at Apple, Rob Woodring found the real solution.
Casey:
Wait, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Can you walk me through this?
Casey:
Because I don't think I see where this is.
John:
So find a message thread with somebody and messages that you want to change this for.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So I'm just choosing my dad arbitrarily because we exchanged texts like right before the show.
Casey:
So I tapped him.
John:
Tap his name at the top.
John:
Tap the info thing on the right.
Casey:
Oh, that was the piece I missed.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So you have to tap the info thing.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
And then long press on message.
John:
And now you see the list and then pick whichever one.
Casey:
I got it.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
It was the info piece that I missed.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I'm with you now.
Casey:
That is a very good tip.
Casey:
I knew that there was some mechanism by which to do this, but I certainly did not know the exact incantation.
Casey:
So like you said, Rob Woodring gets the gold star for today.
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Casey:
We had a little bit of feedback with regard to unlocking automotive features.
Casey:
A couple of things that I was not familiar with or aware of.
Casey:
Blaine Tubes wrote in, it's not exactly what John meant when he said it's not like they're going to put a V8 when you buy a V6, but my Jaguar F-Type is pretty close.
Casey:
The V6 uses the same engine block as the V8, just with the last two cylinders closed off.
Casey:
This allows for the same mounting points and supercharger to be used for both engines at the cost of hauling around an extra 50 pounds of unused weight with the V6.
Casey:
The extra material cost of the unused bit of the V8 block is offset by only having to engineer and produce one version of the rest of the engine bay.
Casey:
I find this utterly fascinating.
Casey:
This is like a cheaper version of, what was it, Aston Martin, or not, excuse me, not Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo took the Ferrari motor and like lopped off two cylinders and called it a day, but they full on cut them off.
Casey:
In this case, it would be like, oh, we just aren't going to include a couple, or aren't going to use a couple of them, which is fascinating.
Marco:
It's like cylinder binning.
Marco:
It's like the way G-Rings are disabled on the M2.
John:
It's a very Jaguar move, though, because it always, for the past, I don't know, several decades, it always seemed like Jaguar is just kind of like, even though it's supposed to be a luxury brand, they just always kind of got, like, not great technology, a lot of hand-me-downs, maybe some Ford parts bin stuff back in the day.
John:
Like, you don't deserve that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
the things they do with these supposed expensive cars to save weight and you're going to, you're going to leave two unused cylinders in the block only an extra 50 pounds.
John:
That's not good.
John:
You don't want this.
John:
This is, I wouldn't talk about this and say, Oh yeah, sure.
John:
It's great.
John:
Cause no, it's all the weight of a V8, but the power of a V6.
John:
Oh, thanks.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
It's so fascinating to me that this is a thing, though.
Casey:
I just thought that was really cool.
Casey:
And then Josh Rapoport writes, Tesla offers something called acceleration boost on the Model 3 and Y long range.
Casey:
On the 3, it also unlocks a track mode, and supposedly that functionality is coming to the Y as well.
Casey:
It's a $2,000 US in-app purchase.
Casey:
I'm not sure it's really an in-app purchase if it's in your car, but so be it.
Casey:
I get your point.
Marco:
Do they pay Apple 30%?
Casey:
That decreases the 0 to 60 time by about half a second.
Casey:
Looks like these IAPs are unlocked on the car for feature owners as well.
Casey:
Also, rumor has it that at their introduction, the long range and performance variants of the cars had the same motor and drivetrain, though it seems like they may have moved to more of a binning or slightly differentiated set of components in the more recent times.
John:
Tesla has always sold various things that basically you're paying to abuse the internals of your car more like the, you know, acceleration mode or whatever.
John:
Like they lock it out as a premium feature.
John:
But those type of things like, oh, get that extra half second is, you know, stressing the internals and the circuitry and the battery of your car a little bit more to get that extra power.
John:
And for that privilege, you pay them two thousand dollars.
John:
It's like maybe just don't worry about the extra half second.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then finally, Sean Harding writes, on the BMW subscriptions, what happens in seven years when the API gets deprecated and your car can't verify the subscription status anymore?
Casey:
My Audi long ago stopped getting software updates, but the heated seats still work perfectly.
Casey:
Well put, Sean.
Marco:
That is a very good question.
Marco:
I was just mentioning a few minutes ago how all those old iPad games from that first generation of iPad stuff, through various digital unfortunateness, you really can't play those anymore.
Marco:
Unless you happen to have an old iPad that happens to have them already installed on it,
Marco:
there's really no way for you to get those okay i i ran into this problem a couple years ago last year whenever it was i booted up my old iphone and i believe i talked about on the show like my my very first gen iphone and just just tried to figure out like okay what can i do with this what can it still do and of course as you can imagine you know the old the original iphone can't run any recent software i think i think the latest i can run was like ios 3.1 i think
Marco:
But at any rate, it couldn't do anything really because all of the SSL certificates on everything that it was capable of using had expired or had been upgraded to higher levels of encryption that it can't support.
Marco:
And so now that we're in this era of everything is encrypted, everything is secure, everything is signed.
Marco:
Old software on old platforms almost can't run.
Marco:
There's very few cases in which old enough software actually runs because something expires somewhere along the way, and we are so connected with services in the modern world that if your old hardware can't connect to a web service anymore, a lot of times it doesn't work or can't work.
Marco:
And that's something we're thinking about with something that has as long of a lifespan as a car, you know, for, you know, for some of these BMWs, like unless you have Casey's luck with BMWs, they're probably going to last at least 10 years of active service on the road.
Marco:
And, you know, how how many times does a 10 year old computer actually have good luck accessing, you know, its services?
Marco:
And, you know, I think I think it's going to be a problem that we're going to have to deal with.
John:
I wonder if they actually are doing online verification or just flipping a switch internally.
John:
This is the type of thing where if they try to prevent people from hacking it and do all these things, that's when you do, oh, we have to have online checks and we have to have all this, and that'll sort of mess you up.
John:
But if they're smarter about it, they'll just be like, ah, it's a software lockout, and when we unlock it, it unlocks locally, and we never recheck online to see if you have it unlocked and we just take the hit or whatever.
John:
I mean, this is another situation, like any software, where it really depends on
John:
the company that you're buying from.
John:
To give an example, when a good software company stops developing an application, what they normally do is say, we're not going to make this app anymore.
John:
It doesn't make us any money.
John:
It's time has passed or whatever.
John:
But on our way out the door, here it is.
John:
If anyone wants it, here's a version where you don't have to register.
John:
It's free.
John:
You know, you can have it's
John:
You know, we're not going to sell it anymore.
John:
Anyone who paid for it in the past six months will give you a refund.
John:
And forevermore, it's unsupported, but you can download it from our website.
John:
Right.
John:
And so the car version of that would be we're deprecating the API that we used to do online checks for the heated seats, but it's unlocked for everybody now.
John:
Like we send one last thing out that said, hey, all you cars out there that are checking this API endpoint for unlock for heated seats.
John:
We built the system such that when we shut this endpoint down, the way they'll fail is saying, you know, we'll send them one last message that said it's unlocked for everybody and don't bother checking again.
John:
Right.
John:
That would be the good thing to do that a good car company would do.
John:
And the example I had in mind with a good software company was panic.
John:
And the example I have with a good car company in mind was nobody because they're all bad.
Right.
Marco:
I mean, really, the correct good thing to do would be, hey, this feature that's so cheap that you can actually ship it for everyone and just selectively disable it in software.
Marco:
How about just make that a stock feature of the car?
Marco:
Because these aren't expensive.
Marco:
These aren't cheap cars.
Marco:
It's like this is already a premium car.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
Maybe make this just a stock feature if it's that cheap for you.
Marco:
You know, the Unity CEO would say you're an effing idiot.
Yeah.
John:
You're not thinking about monetization when you're making these seats.
Marco:
Because there's no way to monetize a car besides in-app purchases and subscriptions, right?
John:
No, there's no service model for cars.
John:
Car services?
John:
Unheard of.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Have we talked about this?
Casey:
We might have talked about this and I don't remember.
Casey:
But if Apple is obsessed with services and Apple is making a car, if that's true, what are the services for the Apple car?
Casey:
What is that going to look like?
John:
Yeah, all those wear items.
Casey:
Same as everybody.
Casey:
No, I mean like the in-app purchase sort of things or like the subscription sort of things.
Marco:
Yeah, can you imagine Apple like using someone else's tires and brake pads?
Marco:
No way.
Marco:
It's going to be all custom stuff.
John:
That's not how the car industry works and that's why the Apple hasn't made a car yet maybe.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Can you imagine?
Marco:
I'm just thinking about stuff like that.
Marco:
All the parts on a car that have someone else's brand name on them, Apple would not stand for any of that.
Marco:
You know, they're not going to have tires that say Goodyear on the side.
Marco:
Whoever makes their tires for them, they're going to make them give them brandless tires.
John:
No!
John:
I don't know.
John:
Again, I don't think it's really possible to make a car that way unless you're willing to sink way more of Apple's money than they thus far have been willing to sink to this and spend even more time.
John:
Although that's a funny thing on more car rebuilding channel things.
John:
So you've got OEM parts.
John:
I'm watching all about rebuilding BMWs.
John:
And you have whatever company actually made this car.
John:
plastic doohickey, you know, BMW doesn't make it right.
John:
Um, and if you buy it from the BMW dealer, of course it costs 10 times as much or whatever, but you can get that same part from the manufacturer that makes it for BMW.
John:
But when you buy it from the manufacturer, uh,
John:
like the part that they make has BMW stamped on it, right?
John:
BMW didn't make it.
John:
This other company made it, but it's got BMW.
John:
But when you buy it from a manufacturer, they have to file off the BMW.
John:
So they make it with BMW stamped on it, but they're not allowed to sell it with BMW stamped on it.
John:
So they literally take a finished part
John:
And modify it by scrubbing or filing or melting off the BMW logo.
John:
And you get the two parts.
John:
Here's genuine.
John:
Here's the copy.
John:
As opposed to adding it afterwards.
John:
So, yeah, the car industry is weird.
John:
And I really don't think Apple's going to have tires that have apples on the side.
John:
And don't say Goodyear or Michelin.
John:
But...
John:
Apple hasn't made a car yet, so we'll see.
John:
But that's just not the way the car industry works.
John:
And if you're going to say, we're going to do everything ourself.
John:
Look inside Apple's laptops.
John:
The chips say, the memory chips say Micron and stuff.
John:
They don't say Apple on all of them.
Marco:
Yeah, but the customer doesn't see those.
Marco:
You see the tires on your car and you see if they have a brand name on them.
Marco:
There is no way...
Marco:
Mark my words.
Marco:
People can quote this later in 10 years when Apple actually ships the car.
Marco:
There is no way Apple is going to launch a car where the tires have someone else's name printed on the outside.
John:
Apple's going to have to become a tire manufacturer because I'm not sure any tire manufacturer is not going to have their name on that tire.
Marco:
No, they would just, I'm sure they would make a deal.
Marco:
They would custom, you know, order it from whoever would, whoever would say yes first and it would take them a while.
Marco:
But I mean, honestly, maybe this is why.
John:
$2 million hypercars have Michelin, you know.
John:
Because they don't care.
Marco:
Or Goodyear on the side of them.
Marco:
They care.
Marco:
I mean, look,
Marco:
Before the iPhone, $600 smartphones had Verizon logos on the back of them.
Marco:
This is one of those things where Apple's going to go in there with just the most stubborn position in the world.
Marco:
And eventually, somebody will do it for them for the right price.
John:
Some of the desperate singular.
John:
I mean, Apple had the word Verizon on its phones back before the notch when they could fit it.
John:
uh no wait well oh in the status bar a little bit no but i'm saying like on the phone like i understand i'm just saying that brand names have been on iphones you know i guess they're on yes it's on the screen but they could have just put an apple verizon is still on the screen is it yeah on the lock screen anyway yeah i guess it is it's still there i was wondering if there was room at the notch on the lock screen it's not on the you know once it's unlocked but it is on the lock screen
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Casey:
Let's talk about something that is truly important because it has been a long time coming.
Casey:
I feel like, you know, on this show, Adam pre-existed the show, but on this show, Declan was born, Michaela was born, your Mac Pro, your current Mac Pro was born, but perhaps more important than anything else, you've gotten a new television.
Casey:
there's a new birth in the ATP family and it is John's television.
John:
I did get a new television.
John:
I think I had the stats on the last rectus.
John:
I think it's been like eight years ish, something like that.
Casey:
Well, then we might've been there for the last one.
Casey:
It depends on when it was.
John:
Cause it was 2013.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, when in 2013?
Casey:
Cause it was like March ish.
John:
December, December ish.
Casey:
Okay, so then we were here for it.
Casey:
All right, so I apologize.
Casey:
All right, I don't care.
Casey:
Let's move on.
John:
But that was where I panic bought the last great plasma.
John:
I had recently, quote-unquote, recently bought a plasma a couple years before, and I was like, oh, they're going to not make plasers anymore.
John:
I better get the best one right now, and I get the last best Panasonic plasma, and then they stop making it.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
Yeah, I think we were around for this one.
Casey:
All right, well, never mind.
Casey:
I'll take it all back.
John:
Anyway, it's been a long time.
John:
So I had sort of, I'd been working on this, buying, I talked about this in past shows on some of my podcasts, buying the parts because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get them.
John:
I was afraid that if I waited until like everything was ready to come, then I'd be like, all right, let me order everything that I exhaustively researched for the past eight years.
John:
And they'd be like, oh, sorry, not in stock or whatever.
John:
So as soon as I decided what I was getting, I just started buying stuff.
John:
So for literally months, I've had a brand new receiver and a Blu-ray player that we talked about on a past show that,
John:
I did some surgery on sitting in my house.
John:
I bought the stand for the TV because I can't use the one that it comes with because my weird house situation and that, that I half assembled and stuck in a closet gathering dust, all waiting for the TV to come.
John:
Uh, while this was happening, like the day before the TV was supposed to be delivered, which was like delivered by this special courier or whatever.
John:
I bought it from Sony.com directly because it was the only place you could order it.
John:
I don't know if it's available in place else.
John:
I'm sure.
John:
It will be eventually, but I bought it like within 60 seconds of it becoming available on Sony.com.
John:
I was not announced.
John:
So thank you to all the people on Twitter who told me, hey, it's live on Sony because there was no announced date or time that I was aware of.
John:
But anyway, I got my order in and then they had delivered to this courier who then had to call me and arrange for a time for delivery, which was convenient because I was out of town when they wanted to deliver it.
John:
And I said, can you wait until I get back in time?
John:
And they said, fine.
John:
But anyway, while I was waiting for the TV to come,
John:
I can do some stuff.
John:
I can take my old TV off, take everything out because everything has to go.
John:
The only thing that I didn't actually remove from the entertainment center was my TiVo.
John:
Was that staying?
John:
But it's like, you know, move it to clean under it or whatever.
John:
Took out the old receiver, box it up, put it away.
John:
unhooked all the game consoles, took all the other junk off of there, got it all cleaned out, and then I put in the new receiver and the new Blu-ray player.
John:
And the receiver is a pain because I connect all the speaker wires, and it's just a logistical nightmare.
John:
But anyway, I plugged it all in, put everything back that I could, put the Blu-ray player back where the PlayStation 3 was because that used to be my Blu-ray player.
John:
I can have my center channel speaker actually centered on my TV now, which is nice because it didn't fit on top of the George Foreman grill that was the PS3.
John:
LAUGHTER
John:
I had a PS3 slim, but still, it's rounded on top, so you couldn't put a speaker.
John:
It's all relative.
John:
Yeah, you couldn't put a speaker on top of it because it would just skitter off.
John:
So anyway, I was happy with that setup.
John:
And then I put the old TV back temporarily just so I could have a TV to see the screen because what I was going to do is set up my surround thing.
John:
If you haven't set up a receiver in recent years, the way most of them work is you put your receiver in, you hook up all your speakers and everything.
John:
And then they mostly have either a thing that you do with an on-screen menu or in modern days, a thing you can do with like an app on your phone or something where they give you, you might be confused when you see this in the box, a very, very, very long, thin cord with a little like disc or puck or knob at the end of it.
John:
And that's a microphone.
John:
And what they want you to do is run whatever their software is, put that little microphone basically where your head would be as you sit on the couch.
John:
And it will play through all the speakers in your room and it will adjust the volume and phase and all the other stuff of the speakers so that it sounds good in that seating position.
John:
There's lots of different software that does this.
John:
Even my old receiver, which was years and years ago, had a system for doing this.
John:
Hey, what about the people who sit on the other parts of the couch?
John:
Well, so the fancier software says we don't just measure one position.
John:
we can, it has like a 3d model of the room and it says, put it in like, if you can imagine like of the volume of the room with various spots in it, the, the, the software I was using had up to 17 positions that you could measure.
John:
And it would try to sort of average it together and try to make it sound okay.
John:
And most of the positions with no bad things, this is important to me because my room is weirdly shaped.
John:
My speakers are weirdly placed.
John:
This is not like every time you see one of these things on TV, it's like,
John:
I live in a rectangular room and my television is directly in front of me and the couch is right in front of the TV and my surround speakers are exactly at the corner.
John:
Like, I don't know who lives like that.
John:
Maybe you build like a dedicated home theater room, but it's definitely not my room.
John:
My room is weird shape.
John:
My TV is in the corner.
John:
Nothing is at right angles to anything.
John:
Nothing is at the height you expect.
John:
You know, so I have to do this sound adjustment thing.
John:
The receiver I bought supports two different sound adjustment things.
John:
One that's like,
John:
The easier one that's older and easier and built in, I forget what the name of it's called, but it has some acronym, MCCR, something like that.
John:
And then the other one, which is the fancy one that all the reviews, if you look on YouTube, say, oh, this is the best, what do they call it, room compensation.
John:
It's the best room compensation feature.
John:
It's called Dirac Live, D-I-R-A-C, space live.
John:
i think you can do it on your phone i tried to do it on the phone and it seemed to be wanting me to download a mac app so i did it's more comfortable with that anyway and you run the mac app and i was using like my tripod for my camera because the this the little microphone screws into the little tripod top and it tells you where to put it around the room with the tripod you know put it in this seating position that position in front of the couch behind the couch high low 17 different positions this sounds awful
John:
You also do volume adjustment.
John:
It's kind of fun because, I mean, the app takes you through kind of like a wizard and it says, first, we're going to test all your speakers to make sure this is supposed to be left front.
John:
This is the right.
John:
You want to make sure you're getting wired correctly, right?
John:
And then it does volume adjustment and it plays like white noise through each of the speakers.
John:
It reminded me when I had an infant at home, it's just white noise through the house.
John:
And then when it does the sound testing, it's like, don't make any noise.
John:
If like a dog barks or a kid talks or something falls down, it will invalidate the test and you have to adjust the microphone gain.
John:
Anyway, it's not a fun thing to do.
John:
none of this sounds fun nope it makes weird noises like because it does it goes like you know it makes like various frequency noises and like echolocation things and low and high volume and those high frequency noises can hurt yeah they have a whole thing of like be careful start with the volume low and bring it up but you have to have a certain minimum volume if the volume's too low we'll complain and say but this test didn't work because your volume's too low turn the volume up you know
John:
So I spent a while doing that.
John:
Again, this is with the old TV but the new receiver because, you know, the receiver and the speakers aren't going to change and the TV isn't really involved in this process at all except showing me the on-screen menus to set things up basically.
John:
And then I'm sitting there with the Mac laptop which was pretty neat.
John:
It was like wirelessly controlling everything through Wi-Fi because the receiver is on Wi-Fi, of course, in this modern era.
John:
The app...
John:
But when they say like, you know, the simpler one that's built in and this is the more complicated one, I should just use the simpler one.
John:
The more complicated one was really complicated and really time consuming.
John:
And I'm trying to tell everyone in my house, everyone has to be quiet.
John:
My dog was the least one.
John:
My kids were like, I'm just going to walk up and down stairs.
John:
And because if you move anywhere in my house, it makes noise.
John:
My house makes noise if you move.
John:
Right.
John:
It's an old, creaky house.
John:
Every door clanks.
John:
Every floorboard squeaks.
John:
So it was a little bit onerous and didn't particularly enjoy it.
John:
But it's really important because, like I said, my room is weird.
John:
So when delivery finally came, I'm like, oh, this fancy delivery service is expensive to you.
John:
They probably don't want to send it to FedEx or, you know, UPS.
John:
They want to send their own dedicated thing.
John:
It's a courier from the airport.
John:
We're going to call someone up and they're going to arrange for a time.
John:
I did all that.
John:
I double checked because they send all these automated emails like your delivery has been delayed because I was like, is that because I delayed it?
John:
It turns out, yeah, it was because I know.
John:
So I called back up and said, I'm getting a delivery today.
John:
And I said, yeah, you are.
John:
Anyway, who comes to my house?
John:
It's a van with one guy.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
One guy?
John:
You send one guy with a 65 inch television?
John:
He's got a little cart with wheels on it.
John:
But, you know, I went out there and helped him because I'm like, look, whatever.
John:
I don't know what Sony pays for this delivery, but this thing should be carried by two people.
John:
The box had like, you know, your typical sort of something has punched through this box and made a C-shaped hole.
John:
So there's a little flap.
John:
It was like, how far did that go in?
John:
Right.
John:
You know, and I'm like pressing on it or whatever.
John:
Luckily, that was the backside of the TV and it didn't go in very far, but it did.
John:
I took pictures of it just in case.
John:
And interestingly, since I had just boxed up my old TV.
John:
Yes, of course, I had the original box to my old TVs.
John:
since I had just boxed up my old TV.
John:
Those are not small.
John:
Nope.
John:
No, it's not small.
John:
It was a very big box.
John:
That was a 55-inch plasma.
John:
And that 55-inch plasma weighs more than this TV.
John:
And the box is substantially larger.
John:
I was surprised when I saw this box.
John:
I know, you know, OLEDs are way less than plasmas.
John:
Plasmas are big, heavy things.
John:
I mean, this plasma had fans in the back of it, big glass, you know, big bezels around it.
John:
The new box was smaller.
John:
In all dimensions, I think it was smaller.
John:
It just had less stuff.
John:
And, you know, I was like, oh,
John:
Maybe you should put more padding in this thing.
John:
Anyway, the way my old box works, things were so much better back in the old days when Panasonic was still selling things here.
John:
It's a very large box.
John:
And if you read the instructions of how you're supposed to get your TV out of it, it's basically like there's a base where the TV is stuck in a bunch of styrofoam, you know, like vertically.
John:
And then the top of the box comes off.
John:
The top of the box goes onto that base and touches the ground.
John:
And the only thing that's holding that together are four holes that are through both the, the sort of top and the base and these little plastic sort of grommets that go through both of them and snap in.
John:
That's literally the, when you're picking that box up by like the little handles on the side, you are picking up the cover, the top of the box.
John:
And that in turn is pulling on those grommets and it's picking up the bottom part of the box.
John:
And I was like, well, that always seems for like a hundred something pound box with the base and everything that it seems unsafe or whatever.
John:
So the Sony comes, we bring it into the house.
John:
Luckily the guy wasn't some weird setup service thing.
John:
They were just like, all right, I'm done.
John:
I brought it into your house.
John:
I'm like, good.
John:
Anyway.
John:
As if you would let them set it up.
John:
Right?
John:
No, but the plasma people, like we have to open it up and make sure it works.
John:
Otherwise we won't, you know, because if you blame us for a delivery, we have to like confirm that it works or whatever.
John:
And I was like, I don't want it.
John:
But this guy didn't have to do that.
John:
So I'm like, okay, how do you open this one up?
John:
So look at the little instructions and it says, oh, the top lifts right off.
John:
This is going to someone from Sony will explain to me how this works.
John:
But I was like, OK, well, I open up the top of the box and I take some styrofoam out and then I see the piece of paper that says, oh, the top lifts off.
John:
I take the styrofoam out and I can see the boxes.
John:
So I saw, oh, the holes in the back of the box and it didn't hit the TV.
John:
So that's good.
John:
I was relieved about that.
John:
And it said just the top of the box lifts off.
John:
And I lift the top of the box off and I'm left with the base with styrofoam with the TV sticking out of it.
John:
And I, you know, continue to just, you know, take the TV out of the styrofoam and put it down on the ground because I was going to have to attach the stand to the back and all that stuff.
John:
Only later did it occur to me, hey, wait a second.
John:
What was holding the top of the box onto the bottom of the box?
John:
I do not have that answer right now because I can tell you when I, when I reassembled the box,
John:
There is no visible connection.
John:
I didn't cut any tape.
John:
I didn't remove any grommets.
John:
And if you put the box back together and put your hands in the handles inside and pick it up, it just lifts the top back up again.
John:
The bottom just stays behind.
John:
And I know this because the bottom, like the stand that it comes with weighs like 50 pounds.
John:
It's like the heaviest thing in the box.
John:
And I'm not using that.
John:
So I left that in the box.
John:
So I put that in the box, put the top back on, put my hands in the handles, lift it up, and the top comes right off.
John:
It's very confusing.
John:
The only thing I can think of is the styrofoam that's in there.
John:
Your hands go into the handles and grab the styrofoam.
John:
But that styrofoam doesn't extend to the bottom.
John:
Maybe that styrofoam grips the TV somehow.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's confusing.
John:
And it doesn't make me feel safe either.
John:
Anyway, got the TV out.
John:
I'm going to put the stand on the back.
John:
It's a third-party stand because I can't use the one that it came with because it's too wide.
John:
So it's like a pedestal stand.
John:
It's from Amazon.
John:
It's just some random brand.
John:
It is the...
John:
most sturdy looking least embarrassing looking one that i could find uh lots of them are embarrassing like casey's visa mounts sitting in front of that yeah that's that's ugly i would not put that on my thing this is just a rectangle with a thing coming out of it and it doesn't rotate or anything because i didn't want one that like did anything it didn't doesn't move tilt bend rotate it's just everything is perpendicular because that's the way i want it i never want to rotate it i never want to tilt it i never want to do anything with it
John:
Um, and luckily the back of the Sony is flat.
John:
I was excited by that.
John:
Uh, no, no weird humps, nothing weird like that.
John:
And there was lots of different connections, things to put it on with washers and everything.
John:
I attached that, put it on the, the stand connected the cables so much fewer cables than I had before, because before I had so many things connected to it back in my last TV, I couldn't really commit to having everything go through the receiver.
John:
Every game console was directly connected to the TV and also could be connected through the receiver.
John:
And I had like two HDMI things hanging out in the back of ones and I could swap them.
John:
I don't want to like a little lower latency than going through the receiver.
John:
Didn't do that this time.
John:
It's just one.
John:
Well, start off with two and eventually down to one connection from the receiver to the television and everything else goes to the receiver.
Uh,
John:
Most of my game consoles are now decorative, so I removed all the power bricks and everything.
John:
Oh my goodness.
John:
You don't realize how big the power bricks are.
John:
If you have, just to list three of them, if you have the Wii, the Wii U, and the GameCube, they all have giant external power bricks and wads of cords and everything.
John:
It's just a mess back there.
John:
I was glad to get rid of that, but I still have those consoles there as decorations.
John:
Let's see what else did I do to this thing.
John:
The back panels are neat.
John:
There is a place to route the cables, and there's these little sort of snap-on.
John:
Speaking of cars, if you ever know what body clips look like on cars, where parts of the outside of your car... If you see how cars are assembled and disassembled, it really makes you wonder how they don't fall apart more often, because...
John:
Lots of things are glued and lots of things are just clipped with these little plastic clips, like a little, you know, just plastic clips that probably break when you disassemble them because it's something that snaps into a little slot or whatever.
John:
That's how these things work.
John:
And it's pretty nice because it's easy to take on and off and they snap into place and they hold firmly.
John:
Very happy with everything about the setup process.
John:
It went surprisingly smoothly.
John:
It just barely fits in my house.
John:
Like I did all the measurements beforehand.
John:
I'm like, I think it'll clear the radiator.
John:
I think it won't hit the wall.
John:
I think it won't have to move any furniture.
John:
Thumbs up on all accounts, but I cannot get a bigger television.
John:
This is a good, a good wake up call to say 65 is the limit.
John:
My house cannot accommodate a larger television.
John:
It will literally hit walls.
John:
And I do want to leave room for me to like worm behind it to get back there and mess with stuff.
John:
The remote it comes with is nice.
John:
As with so many things, it embarrasses the Apple remote.
John:
Not because it's an amazing remote, but it just shows that it's not hard to do better than the Apple remote.
John:
We loved it so much because the old one was so bad.
John:
But this is, the Sony remote is, it's got sort of like a textured plastic on the back, so it's more grippy than the smooth Apple one.
John:
It's still too small, but it's bigger than the Apple one, both length and width.
John:
It has a pleasing heft to it in the way that they used to make electronics feel expensive by making them feel dense.
John:
They do that with this.
John:
I don't know what it's filled with.
John:
Probably literally like a lead weights or whatever, but hey, it works.
John:
It's got light up buttons that will light up when you pick the thing up.
John:
It's got a speaker on it so you can say something and it will make a beeping noise.
John:
You can find the remote if you lose it.
John:
Not that that would ever happen to me.
John:
I've got a very tricky...
John:
A very clicky circular wheel on it.
John:
It's not as good as a TiVo remote, but it feels expensive.
John:
And it's the first of several remotes that came with this setup that now exist in my house and have Netflix buttons and Amazon Prime buttons and whatever the hell they're branded buttons that are on the things.
John:
It's just the way of the world.
John:
The television itself, it's basically edge to edge screen.
John:
It does have a tiny little chin, like less than an inch high.
John:
And on a 65 inch TV, you don't even notice that.
John:
And it's black.
John:
In terms of condition, the only place I found blemishes on the TV where there's a couple little very small scratches on the metal chin that runs along the bottom.
John:
So small that you have to be like inches away from it to see them.
John:
I noticed them when I was peeling off the little static clear plastic, whatever that stuff is called, that they put in all appliances now.
John:
And that people leave on because they don't realize it's there.
John:
And honestly, I would not have seen this either if I hadn't been really close to the TV, like messing with the stand.
John:
But yeah, there was a little plastic thing over the front.
John:
And I peeled that off as a couple little nicks in the metal chin, but not anything that I would ever do anything about.
John:
And that's where the lights on the front of the television are there, I think.
John:
Maybe one or two of them, both of which you can disable.
John:
Oh, nice.
John:
Software features because, you know, I'm going through the settings and turning everything off.
John:
It also comes with a camera that clips on to the back and, you know, points towards you.
John:
I thought that was like an optional extra, but it's bundled with the TV.
John:
Should be for this price anyway.
John:
I don't know the quality of the camera.
John:
when i was attaching it it's got magnets it's got two little magnets that magnetically it's not mag safe it's got two little magnets that click it into this the thing where it connects it's got a bunch of like little pin connectory things it's a proprietary connection right but just when you click it in like that it's still wobbly i think they made it flexible so you know because it was stiff and you tried to like you know move it or something you could crack it or whatever but it's like flexible and
John:
And the reason I bring this up is because I connected it and the TV didn't seem to see the camera at all.
John:
So I couldn't find out how can I use this camera.
John:
I downloaded like a Google meeting app or something to see if it would do something and it didn't work.
John:
And I was like, is this camera used for anything?
John:
Because I'd read reviews and they said, oh, the TV will scold you if kids sit too close to the TV, if it sees them on the camera or whatever.
John:
But this wasn't, I'm like, is it not connected?
John:
So I kept disconnecting the camera, reconnecting and disconnecting and reconnecting.
John:
Eventually I found out the TV knows the camera is there because there is a mechanical shutter on it.
John:
you know plastic thing that slides in front of the camera that you can keep closed if you don't want it to be on and you're paranoid or whatever and when you close that a message pops up on the tv screen says your camera whatever thing is closed it won't work until you open it it's like aha you know the camera's there and you know that i closed it but nothing uses it someone sent me a picture of their same tv with a feature like in the settings that that sees that the camera's there but mine doesn't see it yet and the manual said you may need a software update or whatever but i'm i've got the latest software up anyway further news on this camera
John:
Eventually, if I can't get it to work, I'm just going to take it off and stick the little panel that covers the plug in it.
John:
But I'm still willing to believe that the camera might do something someday.
John:
Setup process was fine.
John:
It's the first time I've ever used Google TV.
John:
It's Android-y.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's not as responsive as Apple TV.
John:
It makes me appreciate Apple TV a little bit, but it's plenty responsive.
John:
You can download apps.
John:
It's got all the things you would expect built in.
John:
I have yet another way to watch Netflix.
John:
My Blu-ray player has a way to watch Netflix as well.
John:
you know everything has a way to watch netflix what wouldn't i don't know if it has apple t built in but i think it does it it's i think it's also an airplay receiver without the apple tv as well i'd mostly do things for the apple tv but just fyi it has a smart tv os thing that's built in there the only stumbling block i came upon when i was setting things up was a lot of things a lot of tv apps when you set them up
John:
Have a thing where, you know, like if you're trying to sign into a YouTube app or whatever, it's like, just launch YouTube on your phone and you'll see a little notification.
John:
You can just say, let me in.
John:
Right.
John:
That's as opposed to the old ways.
John:
In the olden days, you would say, go to YouTube dot com slash activate and type in this three letter code.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, a lot of apps that do that would say, just make sure your phone is on the same Wi-Fi network as your TV.
John:
And, you know, you'll see a thing pop up and they'll say that may take up to 30 seconds.
John:
So be patient.
John:
apparently i'm not patient because i would launch these things and i would launch the app on my phone and it would say wait 30 seconds and i would look at it and i would look at it and i realized this tv isn't on the same wi-fi network as my phone in fact this tv is not on wi-fi at all because why would i do that ether everything's connected to ethernet back there the apple tv is on ethernet the television the blu-ray player all the game consoles everything is ethernet because
Marco:
They can be.
Marco:
They're better.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I have like a 10-port Ethernet switch by my TV entertainment center.
John:
But that means it's not on Wi-Fi.
John:
So I'm like, oh, I can solve that.
John:
I'll just put it on Wi-Fi during the setup process.
John:
And so I went to Wi-Fi.
John:
It found my network.
John:
I said, enter your password for your network.
John:
I entered the password.
John:
And it shows a little spinner for a while.
John:
And this thing spins for, I guess, 60 seconds, and it says, couldn't find your network, sorry.
John:
I tried my guest network.
John:
I tried re-entering the password for both of them multiple times.
John:
This TV will not connect to any of my Wi-Fi.
John:
I Googled for it, and you Google for Sony TV can't connect to Wi-Fi.
John:
All you find is, like...
John:
SEO spam pages that are just like, I don't know, copy pasta of random things like reboot your router or whatever.
John:
And then real articles from people who just can't get their Wi-Fi to work or whatever.
John:
So apparently it's not a widespread problem, or at least not that I know of, but...
John:
could never get it connected to wi-fi like i don't need it to be connected to wi-fi i don't want it connected to wi-fi it's on ethernet that's fine and in practical purpose i think it probably would have eventually worked because it is on the same network as my phone it's just not on the same wi-fi as my phone and i think when they say make sure it's on the same wi-fi they just assume everyone
John:
it uses wi-fi and not wire connections but it is a kind of a sticking point it's the one thing so far that besides the camera that i absolutely have not been able to get to work the tv just will not connect to wi-fi and each time it tries it spins for like 60 seconds so it's kind of annoying to uh work through all that
John:
I went through all the settings.
John:
Boy, there are a lot of settings.
John:
And for me, you're going through no off.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
I was disappointed to learn.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I hadn't realized this, but Sony is one of the holdout companies that's not doing filmmaker mode in the TVs.
John:
Right.
John:
This is a thing that, I don't know, the entertainment industry convinced the television industry to do.
John:
It's filmmaker mode, all caps.
John:
It's always in all caps, probably because of some branding reason or whatever.
Marco:
Wait, really?
Marco:
That's like a standardized name?
Marco:
Like, mine has it, but I just figured that was just like, you know, what they were calling it.
John:
No, it's like an entertainment industry group, like people who make movies, like the movie studios, got together with the, you know, the TV manufacturers and came up with this thing.
John:
It is a specific trademarked thing.
John:
It's kind of like, you know,
John:
dolby digital or whatever right like that it's not just the individual thing so and it's always all caps right and the idb time filmmaker mode is a mode in television where the television won't screw up the picture basically no motion smoothing no denoising no over brightening no vibrance adding no messing with the dark snow changing the frame rate like
John:
no nothing show it the way it is on the disc or on the stream or whatever right it's the most accurate picture mode you're not allowed to enable like that's in the standard filmmaker mode sony this tv does not have filmmaker mode so you have to basically make it yourself the custom setting what they describe it as is they say this is the most accurate blah blah but you still have to go through in custom mode and turn off
John:
reality creation turn off cinemotion pro blend whatever all these things all the sony brand names for like you know the denoise filtering the sharpening like just gotta turn all that stuff off
John:
And by the way, don't forget, you got to do that for every input.
John:
I don't have that many inputs because of the receiver, but I did.
John:
My receiver confused me.
John:
I should have read the manual part for us.
John:
It had two HDMI outs.
John:
It had one called main and one called sub.
John:
I'm like, why does it have...
John:
I mean, I guess it's so you can put two TVs, but only one of them.
Marco:
Is the sub for HDMI ARC for sending to a sound bar or similar?
John:
No, no.
John:
I forget which one supports eARC, but that's a separate thing.
John:
Yeah, no, there is a dedicated ARC, eARC port.
John:
But in the receiver, you can say one of the settings I found was like, where do you want to do Dolby Vision?
John:
Do you want to do it main or sub?
John:
I'm like, oh, I can see it's kind of like zone two, you know, zone two for the audio.
John:
I think sub is like zone two for if you want to have literally two televisions showing two different things, but only one of them can do double vision.
John:
So like, oh, forget it.
John:
I'm just not connecting anything to sub.
John:
It's just main.
John:
And just just for the obvious thing here, it does not have the subwoofer somehow.
John:
I mean, I suppose.
John:
No, it's an it's an HDMI port.
John:
Now there is a there is dedicated subwoofer ports.
Casey:
No, it wouldn't surprise me if there are subwoofers that accept HDMI for some reason or something like that.
Casey:
I'm right there with you, Marco.
Casey:
I'm not saying that's what it is, but I had the exact same thought.
Marco:
Does it only send the darkest parts of the picture to that port?
John:
Right.
John:
There's a crossover setting you can change there.
John:
So I just have main connected.
John:
I don't have anything connected to sub, but then I had two HDMI ports connected to it.
John:
That was a little bit confusing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I had to set the settings in both places.
John:
Doing this, having, you know, a television screen, a receiver, Blu-ray player, Apple TV box or whatever, there's a lot of fighting for what goes on on the screen.
John:
Because every one of those devices has something they want to display on the screen that relates to the configuration of that device.
John:
The receiver, for example, can take over the whole screen with just its UI, which looks kind of like...
John:
early 2000s web 2.0 kind of like lots of gradients and you know artwork showing things or whatever um and you can configure the receiver that way right um the blu-ray player has like a menu system that's like it looks it looks older than the receiver it looks like a very blurry low resolution web page incredibly slow animation like
John:
slower than any computer has ever been at like moving the focus ring for one thing to the other so slow that you would never want to use it so yeah my blu-ray player will do like amazon prime video and netflix or whatever but you would never want to do anything i think it's so slow so horrible and then of course the receiver also has another way to put ui up on the screen and it's the way uh kind of reminds me of when like mac os 10 was maybe public beta or maybe the developer preview one of the screenshots i included was like
John:
a picture of a Mac desktop or the desktop background or the boot screen or something like the, you know, Mac OS 10 GUI, but with a bunch of Unix text coming down the screen, blacking out, like the text is light text on a black background and everywhere there's text, the line of text has like a black border around it, right?
John:
It's just like,
John:
It's kind of... I'm not describing it well, but it's as if Unix had come and scribbled over macOS.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like when your in-flight monitor on the back of the seat crashes and it starts rebooting its Linux thing and it starts spitting it all over the screen.
John:
Right, but imagine that going over the Mac UI, only blacking out the parts where the lines are.
John:
So if it's a short line of text, it's like a little short blacked out area or whatever.
John:
that's what the receiver also has a mode where it puts up like, it looks like a VCR kind of onscreen display from like the late eighties, right.
John:
Of like a fixed width font, very bit mappy or whatever.
John:
It can put that on the screen as well for a whole other set of features.
John:
So every, everybody has a way to, and the TV itself can do a bar at the bottom, can do multiple different bars at the bottom.
John:
We could also do a full screen thing.
John:
And of course, Apple TV does the full screen thing.
John:
And it's, there's a lot of UI going.
John:
I have not settled this down to the point where,
John:
I'm ready to explain to the family how to use the new TV.
John:
But the good thing about that is that I am now, and hopefully by the time you hear this recording, an HDMI CEC unicorn.
John:
Because now everything in this setup has been replaced except for the Apple TV and the TiVo.
John:
And
John:
it's everything works if you pick up the apple don't touch it i know if you pick up the apple tv remote everything's turned off pick up the apple tv remote hit the power button on it turns tv on switch to the apple tv turns the receiver on just everything works if you turn it off turns everything off the apple i didn't do anything the apple tv remote can change the volume and do everything with that the tv remote can control the volume and can also control the apple tv somehow with like the four-way thing everything just knows about each other and everything works together i'm just like don't touch
John:
anything I didn't do anything to set this up this is just the way it worked the only bad thing is occasionally if you turn stuff on sometimes the TV wants to show its UI there's a setting that says hey when I turn on what do you want me to do and I said show your last input don't go to the home screen but sometimes people like they want to use the TiVo which is the oldest device and
John:
You'll turn the TiVo on.
John:
It'll turn everything on, but it'll show the Google TV menu.
John:
And you have to basically dismiss the full screen Google TV menu.
John:
It's on the right input, but you have to dismiss the Google, you know, UI to get to the TiVo UI that's underneath it.
John:
Kind of confusing.
John:
I'm still working on it.
John:
The reason I mentioned the receiver onscreen display, like Linux crash thing or whatever, is because that's the UI that you have to go to to select the configuration that you saved with Dirac Live.
John:
It's not in the Web 2.0 gradient illustrations of, you know, RCA connector and speakers and stuff.
John:
It's not there.
John:
When you use the Mac app and you save it, it's like saving a game on like, you know, N64.
John:
It's like save this into slot one and you have three slots.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I saved my configuration to slot one.
John:
Then you have to use the weird Linux crash desktop UI to select it from slot one.
John:
And I didn't realize like I'm trying to watch things.
John:
I'm trying to watch shows, test things out, make sure everything works, get the Apple TV to, you know, output Dolby Vision 4K and everything like that.
John:
And it's just a battle every step of the way because you're like, what menu makes this possible?
John:
Like you have to go into the receiver and say, oh, do you want your output to be 4K or 4K enhanced?
John:
Like why does 4K not enhanced exist?
John:
Like change all the outputs to enhanced.
John:
Oh, now it can do Dolby Vision or whatever.
John:
and what we watched we actually watched a television show i watched television show my wife my house watched the new tv or whatever two things one it was a tv show that we had started on disney plus already like not started start but i have i have a habit where i will go to the next episode and get it to like one second into the next episode and pause it so that when we're ready to watch the next episode i don't have to do anything it's already you know ready to go the next episode right this is my way of avoiding this the screen where you know i can never find what i was watching
John:
So we had already started to watch this episode of the show on Disney+.
John:
But we started to watch it on the old TV, which was not 4K and not HDR.
John:
So we watched the whole episode on the new TV.
John:
I'm like, this doesn't look like it's HDR.
John:
I'm like, well, maybe the show is in HDR.
John:
It also doesn't look like it's 4K.
John:
Well, maybe this is not a 4K show or whatever.
John:
We watched the whole episode.
John:
When I'm watching it, the sound is wonky, too.
John:
I'm like...
John:
was my old surround just not configured well?
John:
But this sounds like some of the channels sound louder than they should be, and the mix is weird.
John:
Then it started playing the next episode, and it was 4K and HDR.
John:
I'm like, whoa.
John:
So apparently, because I had started the stream, it just kept streaming the thing that it had been streaming, which wasn't for the new TV.
John:
And the second thing is I figured out, oh, I haven't selected slot one yet.
John:
the dirac live configuration and so i watched that show with it just on the default configuration which doesn't compensate for my room's weirdness and it sounded terrible so it took a few a few attempts to dial things in once i enabled the dirac live configuration slot one it's like oh everything sounds way better uh and there's a there's a lot of that with like the different inputs and making sure things are configured and making sure everything is sending it in the enhanced mode and making sure everything is set to choose the best quality and just
John:
God, so many menus.
John:
So I think I'm on, I did round one of affixing, then I slept on it, did more internet research, did round two of affixing, and I guess I'll do round three, you know, I don't know, like as I watch more things, but I'm getting close.
John:
I'm getting close to everything working correctly, but...
John:
Things went pretty smoothly, I have to say.
John:
Other than not being able to get on the Wi-Fi, everything eventually worked.
John:
Oh, one more barrier was the TiVo remote.
John:
I don't know if people remember the TiVo remotes, but you could make the TiVo remote control the power, volume, mute, blah, blah, blah for your television.
John:
And the way you do that is you have to type in this four-digit code for your remote.
John:
It's like a universal remote code that lets it know how to talk to your TV.
John:
And in the TV, Tivo menu thing, you go through there and you say, what brand of TV do you have?
John:
And you pick and it says, OK, well, it's going to be one of these six codes or one of these 12 codes.
John:
Hold down these two buttons for five seconds to a red light comes on and type the code and then try the power button and just keep doing that.
John:
I did that for all the codes and none of them worked.
John:
And then I'm like, well, this is a brand new TV.
John:
Let me search online.
John:
I found a bunch more codes for Sony televisions, typed them all in.
John:
None of them worked.
John:
And then eventually one of them turned off the TV.
John:
I'm like, oh, that one worked.
John:
OK, but the volume seems wonky.
John:
So I tried some more codes.
John:
I'm like, oh, none of those work either.
John:
Let me go back to the one that worked.
John:
And then that one wouldn't work either.
John:
And that's when I started having, you know, the debugger, the programmer debugger thinking.
John:
And I think, all right, what explains this phenomenon?
John:
Of course, it's like replace the batteries.
John:
And sure enough, it's like depending on like if I was an inch or two, you know, like how far away I was from the television, replace the batteries.
John:
And now like six of the codes work.
John:
And so that problem is mostly solved.
John:
The volume is still wonky, but mostly I just need the power button to work.
John:
But yeah, everything was pretty smooth.
John:
There's a lot to explore on this TV.
John:
I am never going to use the Blu-rays interface except to play Blu-ray discs because that thing is super janky.
John:
I hope I never have to use the receiver interface once I get everything tuned in.
John:
I did try my PlayStation 5 on it.
John:
I played Destiny in HDR 120 frames per second, and it was pretty sweet, but not sweet enough to burn in my OLED and actually not as good in PvP as my gaming monitor because it helps for my old eyes to be really close and see everything in crisp pixels.
John:
I'm really close to my 27-inch monitor, and I'm like 10 feet away from my 65-inch TV.
John:
So it looked real nice, but honestly, 120 frames per second versus 60...
John:
it doesn't affect my reflexes are too slow for that to make a difference like the input the lag difference or whatever it's not going to save me and when you do 120 it drops it to 1080 uh in destiny because the playstation 5 can't do a 120 4k so i honestly prefer 4k 60 but anyway the ps5 went back to the gaming monitor but i did try that out
John:
I played Blu-rays.
John:
I played movies.
John:
I played a bunch of 4K HDR demo footage on YouTube, which was fun.
John:
Oh, and the other thing, I had heard about YouTube TV.
John:
They're like, oh, hey, when you get a 4K TV, you should look at YouTube TV, which is one of those services that lets you, you know, replace your cable with something that in theory gives you like all the regular channels.
John:
You know, you pay for HBO and Showtime.
John:
You get local channels.
John:
And it's like a cable package, but over the internet, right?
John:
There's a lot of those things.
John:
But the YouTube TV selling point is they have 4K channels.
John:
So I pay for whatever the most expensive thing Verizon
John:
and sells me as part of my Fios package to get all the channels, which is nice because I don't have to pay individually for HBO and Showtime.
John:
They come as part of my cable package, but I still get to use the HBO Max app and the Showtime app and all that other stuff.
John:
So that's convenient.
John:
But they're not, when you watch them on a TV, like when I watch them on my TiVo, which is not 4K anyway, but like the signal that comes to my television through my cable card is not 4K.
John:
But if you use YouTube TV and my fast internet connection, also from Verizon, this episode has been sponsored by Verizon.
Marco:
Is it Verizon's ultra-fast nationwide 5G ultra-wideband network?
John:
It's not 5G, thankfully.
John:
It is fiber optic and it's very fast.
John:
And YouTube TV has channels in 4K.
John:
And, you know, so if you want to watch HDTV in 4K, you can, but not through your cable company, only through YouTube TV.
John:
So I tried out YouTube TV, but...
John:
it was like a free trial type thing uh and it seemed pretty expensive because it was like 50 bucks for the base thing plus like you know for each one of the hbo showtime whatever another 12 whatever bucks plus a nine dollar like a blanket surcharge for if you want 4k because that's a thing but anyway i did the free trial with everything enabled 4k blah blah and sure enough you can get 4k versions of channels but their ui for like you know going through the guide and
John:
It only goes one guide slide at a time.
John:
Like, so, you know, you're on channel five, not that that's the channel number, but anyway, you're on channel five and you swipe down or move the five way.
John:
It goes to channel six and seven and eight, like on the big guide grid that you see.
John:
No one's got time to do that.
John:
It's not smooth.
John:
There's no way to flick scroll it, right?
John:
Just one at a time.
John:
And there are so many channels.
John:
At least on TiVo, you have page up, page down.
John:
You go through screen falls at a time when you're looking at the guide.
John:
Or on Apple TV, you would use the touchpad and it would have momentum scrolling.
John:
I'm sorry, YouTube TV, but I, that is literally the reason I canceled that services because I cannot imagine going through this UI to find things to watch or record it.
John:
Like it does a DVR type thing as well.
John:
A server side DVR.
John:
It didn't, it didn't seem to have a season pass manager either.
John:
When I canceled it, they sent me this big survey.
John:
Like, why'd you cancel?
John:
I'm like, just copy everything to you.
John:
Cause you have no idea what you're doing.
John:
helpful good 4k content terrible ui i tried the youtube tv app on the television itself which is a google you know runs google tv and i also tried the youtube tv app on apple tv and they were both very bad so it's not even as good as the netflix ui in terms of recommendations and everything they've got a long way to go so i was disappointed by that but at least it saves me some money
John:
So anyway, I give the whole experience a big thumbs up.
John:
I am much more excited and impressed by this television than anyone else in my family.
John:
I can tell you that.
Casey:
There's the surprise.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's just they don't care.
John:
I mean, I show them the footage of the honey dripping onto the thing on a black background.
John:
How are you not impressed by that?
John:
There's no blooming.
John:
It's HDR.
John:
Every pixel is individually lit up.
John:
It looks amazing.
John:
Nobody cared.
John:
I'm like, do you understand?
John:
I think we need to buy a second worst television to put next to it and say, see what a mess this looks like?
John:
I'll send you guys a picture.
John:
I did take a picture of a beauty shot on my television.
John:
If I can find it, I will send it to you.
Casey:
Now, I'm sorry.
Casey:
I should have asked this a long, long time ago, but I didn't want to ruin your whole moment.
Casey:
What is the actual model number for this TV?
John:
It is the Sony A95K.
John:
In my opinion, unless you are a hardcore gamer with a modern console that you want to play at 4K 120 frames per second, it is the best television you can buy right now.
John:
quantum dot oled television sony a95k the name just rolls off the tongue you can buy it on amazon starting in a couple of weeks really yeah i was wondering when it was gonna appear like amazon says it'll be released on august 11th yeah that's nice so check out the picture you can see what you can see this probably won't be in the show notes because this is a picture of my house but you can see the center channel uh speaker is now in the center see the stand very boring
John:
Yeah, that's a very boring stand.
John:
Here's an important quality of the stand.
John:
I can hide cables behind it.
John:
That is actually really nice.
John:
If you remember before, I had that V-shaped thing without a hole in the middle, so you had to run the cables down the V. This, I just have it stuck to the back of that thing.
John:
Totally hidden.
John:
this actually looks pretty nice i mean i know this is you know right after cleanup and setup and rewiring and everything so of course it's like as nice as it's ever going to look no it never changes from this this is always how it looks you can ask anyone in my family nothing about this setup changes even once i get set along the order of the little dvd things which are also decorative by the way uh those also never change you can see the right edge of the tv see how it's over the radiator and almost touching the wall yep and on the left side there's a big enough channel for if i move those plastic bins i can squeeze
Marco:
squeeze myself through there putting my butt into the window right like to reach behind it for the wiring to get to get behind it to do all the wiring stuff but yeah no you're right this is this is as big as you can go in that spot for sure like unless you somehow rearrange that room to have the tv not in the corner but i don't you can't put it over the left right isn't there a mantle there there's a gigantic fireplace and a mantle there
John:
yeah so you can't yeah so i think this is it this is as big as you can go yeah and that that shade on the left is light blocking shade right so you don't get any light behind the thing you can see this stupid camera on the top of it um i do like this stand it's served me well it's got glass shelves uh holds everything up uh pretty well um i did micro level it uh because of course nothing in my house is level micro level which is micro leveling
John:
It's mostly level.
John:
If you put a level on it and you look at the little bubble, it's between the two lines.
John:
But is it in the middle between the two lines?
John:
Oh my gosh.
John:
Almost.
John:
And so when I micro-leveled it, I leveled everything.
John:
What I wanted to tell was, is the third-party stand level?
John:
Because maybe the third-party stand is wonky, right?
John:
So that's why I was looking at it with the level again.
John:
And I realized...
John:
Man, the right side could go up a little.
John:
And I didn't want to try to put any tiny shims under the right side of the piece of furniture because it's so heavy with all that stuff on it.
John:
And it only needed to go up small.
John:
So what I did was I took some cardboard out of the recycling, like not cardboard, like corrugated cardboard, but like the cardboard that like a cardboard box that plastic Ziploc bags come in, that kind of cardboard.
John:
And I cut one thickness of that one, one tiny square of that.
John:
And I put one of those underneath each of the right hand feet on this, uh, on the stand.
John:
Now it's really level.
John:
Wow.
John:
I'm so happy for you.
Marco:
Does it bother you?
Marco:
I, I don't want to, you know, I won't even ruin it.
Marco:
Nevermind.
Yeah.
John:
No, go ahead.
John:
Tell me, is there something, uh, some problem with my television that needs to address?
John:
I'm prepared.
Marco:
Does it bother you that the bezel is thicker on the bottom than the other sides of it?
John:
Oh yeah, no, that's fine.
John:
Like I said, it is, that's the only place where there's a bezel that there's like that less than one inch wide metal strip across all things.
John:
I think this is also before I turned off the led.
John:
So I think it's on in this thing.
John:
Um,
John:
It's like a status indicator for the microphone because, of course, this thing has a microphone that you can make listening or whatever.
John:
But no, it's a chin, but like it's the smallest chin you've ever seen.
John:
I was saying it was disconcerting to her that the image like went to the edge of the thing.
John:
Oh, and I mean, you know this about Quantum.OLEDs, but like the viewing angle is unbelievable.
John:
plasmas have good viewing angles and so do most OLEDs but like because because this thing is on an angle you can get some pretty harsh angles if you're coming in the room against the wall whatever it never changes it's it's the same brightness the same colors from any direction it's phenomenal looking but yeah no the chin doesn't bother me at all
Marco:
Yeah, our Beech TV is the stupid Samsung frame, which is LCD and not even a very good LCD.
Marco:
It's just like a bog standard kind of edge LED LCD.
Marco:
And every time we go to Westchester and I have my old OLED there,
Marco:
Every time I'm like, whoa, first of all, good to see the Minecraft HUD burned in still.
Marco:
But second of all, oh my God, it looks so much better.
Marco:
When I go from LCD to OLED, oh my God, such a big difference.
Marco:
It is so much better.
John:
And QD OLED versus WRGB OLED is yet a step farther in viewing that because the regular OLEDs do color tint off axis and get a little bit dimmer.
John:
Not as bad as LCDs, obviously, but a little bit.
John:
But this QD OLED just does not change from any angle.
John:
It is really, it's kind of disconcerting.
John:
It's pretty amazing.
John:
We're talking about those plastic bins you see next to the thing that just have a bunch of like
John:
old gamecube controllers and stuff in there and my office is like well now that you don't have the gamecube connecting marker you can get rid of those bins i'm like i don't know they're kind of an important decorative element of the setup wait those just live there for like all the time yeah i mean that's where all if you want to use one of the consoles that's where like the wii modes are and the gamecube controllers which are wired there's a wave bird in there the memory cards like all that stuff is in there
Marco:
Your TV setup is so carefully curated to look nice and everything.
Marco:
You can't just have plastic bins sitting next to it.
John:
But the plastic bins are also carefully curated.
Marco:
Like, for example, that white... You got to have that nicer.
Marco:
If that stuff has to be there, you got to have some kind of like nice little piece there.
Marco:
It can't just be, you know, plastic bins.
John:
No.
John:
So like I said, that white GameCube controller that you can see in the bottom bin with one handle of, that is a brand new, never been used white GameCube controller just sitting there pristine inside the thing.
Casey:
Yeah, that is not on display, John.
Casey:
That's just in a bin.
John:
It's kind of on display.
John:
No, it's just in a bin.
John:
That's just in a bin.
John:
Anyway, they're nicely... Also, the important function is we have to put something there because there's an outlet behind there that things are plugged into.
John:
Not attractive looking things.
John:
So, like there's a...
John:
There's a clock on the mantel, but it's a USB powered clock and it's connected to like a USB cable that plugs into a Walmart type thing.
John:
So I do need something to block, like the speaker wires go by there.
John:
You can't really see them, but the speaker wires are going that direction too.
John:
So I need something there to hide the shame of the un...
Marco:
Well, but you have to put something that doesn't add its own shame.
Marco:
Clear plastic bins full of stuff are their own shame.
John:
I'm comforted by the idea of having clear plastic bins filled with console controllers.
John:
There's also a very slim PS2 inside there as well.
John:
And there's a couple spare HDMI cables.
John:
They could be a little bit neater.
John:
There's a little bit of disruption to the stuff in there, let's say, when I was removing so I could rearrange them a little.
John:
But I actually kind of like...
John:
having bins full of old console controllers next to my television it makes me feel good same reason like what why do i have all those things on the tv the things that are dvd size cases first of all they're dvd size cases instead of blu-rays because dvd cases are taller and they're basically filling space and what they are are games that i really like mostly in the order that i like them uh modulo a an order that makes the color arrangement nice the right hand side i still need to adjust it's a little bit off um
John:
But yeah, that's decorative and also it's displaying favorites.
John:
And if you were to look to the left, you'll see another area filled with decorative slash favorites of more DVD cases than Blu-ray cases.
John:
It's not ideal, but it's kind of what I've gotten used to.
Marco:
See, that's something like, I think your arrangement of anachronistic DVD cases and game discs that you can't play anymore, that actually I think looks nice.
Marco:
But then when you compare it to the plastic bins of crap to the left, those don't look right.
John:
crap that's not crap those gamecube controllers alone could put kids through college oh people want those completely unused original so sell them now while they're still worth anything oh they're they're priceless to me oh my god so you want those is what you're saying no one else wants them as much as you do yeah people like oh another another happy coincidence right so you see the tevo there on top of the tevo is my new blu-ray player which is just a black rectangular whatever
John:
I would have reversed that arrangement, but the TiVo is deeper.
John:
So I got to put the bigger one on the bottom.
John:
And then above that is my center channel speaker.
John:
There is zero space.
John:
That speaker is literally touching the top thing.
John:
You slide it and it goes like it is touching the underside of that table.
John:
I did not plan this, but it exactly fits.
Marco:
Which means that you can never replace the TiVo with a Blu-ray player.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
What would I buy?
John:
They don't make any different Blu-ray players.
John:
And the TiVo, someone's just offering me potentially another TiVo Romeo Pro, which is the model I have, which is the best TiVo that has ever been made.
John:
If you buy a brand new TiVo today, you cannot get one with as much storage space as the one that's sitting there, which boggles my mind.
John:
That thing is, what, five years old?
John:
Six?
John:
Hard drive sizes are huge now, but now they're all smaller and crappier.
John:
Anyway, I hope it never breaks.
John:
If it does, I might just leave it there as a decorative element.
Casey:
You know, we were speaking of, you know, Sean Harding had talked to us about the Audi, you know, endpoints and deprecations.
Casey:
I guarantee that TiVo is not going to be around much longer.
John:
They should have been dead a million times over.
John:
I don't understand how they're still functioning.
John:
And yet they do.
John:
And the TiVo still has an amazing responsive interface that is nicer to use than any of the modern things.
John:
It looks old and dated now.
John:
But just how fast it plays, pauses, jumps forward and backwards and auto skips commercials by hitting the green button.
John:
Like nothing matches that.
Marco:
I mean, it seems like at this point TiVo is kind of undead.
Marco:
Like I think it seems like it should have died so many times.
Marco:
It seems like it shouldn't still be working.
Marco:
And yet it is.
Marco:
At this point, it seems like it's unkillable.
Marco:
And I would expect it to outlast probably everything else in this picture.
John:
We'll see.
John:
I mean, that Blu-ray player is the same one they've been selling for six years or whatever or something.
John:
Let us continue to sell that as a Blu-ray classic.
John:
I really should have taken some screenshots of the UI or some movies of it.
John:
However bad you think it is, it's worse.
Casey:
Well, John, I am genuinely happy for you.
Casey:
I am glad that after a long, arduous eight years, you are finally in a position to get a brand new television.
Casey:
And it sounds like you aren't going to need to buy one again for a long time.
John:
i really hope not or i mean i kind of feel like when i got my power mac g5 i was buying you know the first like the people remember there was a big distant continuity with the power mac g5 because the the g4 was stuck for a really long time with a slow front side bus and it's like when are they going to make a tower computer that's worthy of the processor or whatever and they came out with the g5 which had amazing specs that leaked but no one believed because they were so amazing and it was the very first generation of that product and
John:
And I had problems and it was weird.
John:
Like my power supply chirped and it was, you know, it was like they would work it out.
John:
You know, it produced a lot of heat.
John:
The fans were a little bit noisy.
John:
They would make better G5 tower computers later and eventually much better Intel based Mac Pros in the same case, right?
John:
This is the very first generation quantum dot OLED television.
John:
There's, you know, there's a Samsung one and there's this one.
John:
That's it.
John:
And they come in 55 and 65 in size.
John:
I'm buying a first generation product.
John:
And so that's a little bit scary, but A, I didn't want to wait any longer.
John:
And B, I think for our first gen product, unless there's some catastrophic problem that we haven't figured out yet, I'm doing okay.
John:
And if, if this, you know, if I have to replace this television, like if something goes wrong, it turns out the first gen products, they all died after two years.
John:
I'll just buy another QD OLED, and by then they would have worked out the kinks, and hopefully it won't be as horrendously expensive as this.
John:
So I'm living in your future.
John:
Someday you will all, listeners and co-hosts, have a Quantum.OLED television probably, and you'll like it a lot because it's really nice.
Marco:
Well, I think, too, like, you know, first generation, it would be one thing if this was the first OLED, but it's not.
Marco:
It's the first of an evolution of existing technologies.
Marco:
The very first OLEDs probably had significant more problems with, like, burn-in and stuff like that, or, you know, the blue pixels dying more over time or whatever it is.
Marco:
But, you know, this is, I would expect this being just a minor evolution, really, of OLED technology, I would expect this to be pretty safe, right?
John:
Yeah, I mean, they have learned a lot from the other OLEDs, but technologically speaking, this screen just operates differently than the other ones.
John:
It has a different backlight.
John:
It has different pixel structures and manufactured in a different way.
John:
It's learned a lot from the other ones, but the technologies that are in the very best WRGB OLEDs are actually slightly different than this.
John:
Like the way they deal with their issues, I think the new WRGB OLEDs use like deuterium or something to try to like avoid burn it.
John:
Like they have different approaches, whereas this one...
John:
It has defense against burning for different reasons, because it doesn't have to make the backlight as bright because, you know, because more of the light gets transmitted so they can turn the backlight down and get and they can match the brightness of your RGB OLEDs at a fraction of the power and a fraction of the actual light output because more light actually makes it to your eyeballs.
John:
Same thing with like the polarizer and everything and the pixels being a bit, you know, kind of closer to the surface of the screen.
John:
Not really, but like looking like that because there's less crap between the thing that makes the color and your eyeballs.
John:
That's why the viewing angles are good.
John:
That's why the color purity is good.
John:
There's no white subpixel.
John:
So there's just a red, green, and blue on all of them.
John:
The pixels are in a different arrangement.
John:
So if you look at this next to WRGB OLED, it actually looks definitely different.
John:
So there is a potential of this to be catastrophically terrible and me to regret this in two years, but I really hope not.
Casey:
I don't think you will.
Casey:
I think you're going to be very happy with this.
Casey:
Probably for longer than you should.
Casey:
Ahem, TiVo.
Casey:
Ahem, all your Mac Pros.
Casey:
Ahem, your last TV.
John:
Can you imagine if they made a 4K TiVo Romeo Pro?
John:
Boy, I would love that.
John:
Amazing.
Marco:
You're the only one left who would buy it.
John:
Just me.
John:
But I would pay a lot for it.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Instabug.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at adp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because 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:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-G Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
So forever ago, I put in a thing in the show notes for the after show that I thought we would get to at some point, and we just haven't yet.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
And what I wrote was, is it okay to copy a competitor's API?
Casey:
And I don't remember what specifically got me thinking about this, but I thought about how, like...
Casey:
Android didn't necessarily copy an API as much as they copied all of Java.
Casey:
I probably have the details wrong about that, but you get the idea.
Casey:
And then semi-recently, Cloudflare came out with this R2 thing, which I guess is like an Amazon S3 clone or something like that.
Casey:
And now this is suddenly relevant anew.
Casey:
So Marco, what you been up to lately?
Marco:
So the reason I brought this up, or the reason I thought today was good for this, was literally just today, I used an S3 clone service for the first time.
Marco:
And it was our sponsor, Linode.
Marco:
It was their Linode object storage service, which is another S3 clone.
Marco:
Backblaze has their own too.
Marco:
Backblaze B2, it's called, which I've mentioned before, because that's one of the storage backends that you can use with various backup tools for things like Synology backups and things like that.
Marco:
And so, what most of these services do is they implement the S3 API with an S3-like service behind it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So, Linodes seems to be running this software package called Ceph, C-E-P-H.
Marco:
I don't know how many of them are Ceph-based or what, but...
John:
Based on my experience with Seth, I'd worry about that a little bit.
John:
But I can tell you on this.
John:
So it's not just services like B2 and this Cloudflare thing.
John:
Everybody influenced the S3 API.
John:
If you buy, quote unquote, enterprise storage, like you buy like a hardware with a bunch of boxes that you're going to put in your data center from like EMC or Dell or IBM, they also, all those boxes also support the S3 API.
John:
It has become the standard storage API across the entire enterprise storage industry.
John:
And by the way, when they say we implement the S3 API, they always mean we implement a subset of the S3 API as it existed in whatever we made this.
John:
Because the S3 API is always changing and nobody implements all of it.
John:
Doesn't matter if you're just doing gets and puts and stuff like that.
John:
But the S3 API does not stand still and nobody implements all the features.
John:
But it is standardized.
John:
This is relevant to the discussion.
John:
It is standardized across the entire industry.
John:
Everybody implements the S3 API.
Marco:
For the most part, and you're right, it is always a subset and it is oftentimes outdated.
Marco:
But frankly, when you look at Amazon's full S3 feature set, there is so much complexity available there that almost no users of it actually need.
Marco:
Now, if you're one of the people who needs it, obviously, great, good for you.
Marco:
But most usage of S3 and its various clone services or compatible services, whatever you want to call them, is that just basic stuff, get, put, list, stuff like that.
John:
It's like a million features they have, though.
John:
It's kind of like the thing where like you have a thousand customers, each of which needs one one thousandth of your feature set.
John:
And it's spread over the whole thing because those features don't exist for no reason.
John:
Companies ask for them.
John:
I have this experience on my past job.
John:
We wanted features from S3 that S3 didn't provide.
John:
And through the magic of giving them millions of dollars for AWS services and waiting several years, those features appeared in S3 and we use them and it made our lives better.
John:
we may be the only people who and this probably in our features we weren't the only people i think it's a common thing or whatever but like every one of those features is an s3 is there because some big company that pays aws millions and millions of dollars wanted it and they put it there and those companies use it and they're never going to remove it because you've got multi-million dollar customers using it but when you're using a third party thing like
John:
or I don't know what you want to call it, but like a clone service or whatever, they just implement whatever subset they feel like they want to support.
John:
And they're not as big as AWS and they probably don't have customers paying the million dollars.
John:
So, you know, we do the basic file operations and people are happy, but those, those things that are in S3 aren't there for no reason.
Marco:
Oh, no, agreed.
Marco:
It's not for no reason.
Marco:
But yeah, but I think it's usually very narrow appeal for most of them.
Marco:
And this is true, you know, most of AWS, like when you, you know, if you, like me, originally used AWS, you know, in like 2008 or something, or like back when it was much younger and much simpler.
Marco:
If you look at it today, it's almost unrecognizable with how much complexity there is in various parts of it.
Marco:
But there is a large market for that simpler subset of things.
Marco:
And for most people like me, making a web app that uses some kind of basic storage or something, whatever subset is implemented by these clone services is everything we need plus more.
Marco:
So anyway, the reason I was looking at this is that
Marco:
I've been looking to, with my Overcast servers, I've been looking to both reduce cost if possible and where possible, and also increase resiliency to reduce the amount of headroom I have performance-wise and to reduce the incident of problems that I have to deal with if things get overloaded or whatever.
Marco:
And so one of the ways I was doing that was kind of taking advantage of S3 as both infinite space and cheap space and as kind of infinite load capacity for high requested things and to offload
Marco:
certain high volume requests off of my main infrastructure because you know i've run all these servers at linode i have all these app servers i have a couple of load balancers in front of them um and you know the the more requests i can not even send there the easier the load is on those servers and i can save money on those servers and save resources and have more headroom and stuff like that so
Marco:
using S3 and also putting CloudFlare in front of it, not CloudFront, not the Amazon CDN, CloudFlare, the entirely separate service.
John:
Do you mean CloudWatch?
Marco:
No, I mean CloudFlare.
Marco:
CloudWatch, not CloudFlare, not CloudFront.
Marco:
The trick with Cloudflare is that it's a CDN that is flat rate and does not charge you for transfer.
Marco:
It's unlimited, whatever that means in technology.
Marco:
There's always a bunch of asterisks, but it's at least unmetered, seemingly, transfer.
Marco:
You don't pay per byte served.
Marco:
And it's not that expensive.
Marco:
They have a free plan.
Marco:
I'm using the one that's $200 a month, and I'm sending hundreds of gigs.
Marco:
I'm sending much more bandwidth through it than what that would normally buy.
Marco:
It's like hundreds of gigs per day that I'm serving through there.
Marco:
It's a large amount of bandwidth for a $200 a month plan.
Marco:
And frankly, I think I actually could be fine on the free plan.
Marco:
the downside of cloudflare being your cdn is that its retention is pretty crappy so you get what you pay for in terms of its its cash retention and so it does have to go back to the origin a lot which in my case is s3 and you do pay for that like because amazon charges you not only you know some small amount per request but they also charge you most significantly in transfer costs like whatever egress only though
Marco:
Yes, egress only.
John:
And you can do anything within AWS.
John:
It's so many asterisks on how they charge for S3, including data transfer.
John:
You have to know where you're sending from, where you're sending to.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
However, and that being said, I think you can look at a lot of Amazon Web Services pricing, and some of it's reasonable.
Marco:
The data transfer, the egress fees are exorbitant.
Marco:
They have very...
John:
very very healthy profits on those this is like apple ram pricing for transfer it's different though because in aws people don't pay those prices it's kind of like well i do yes but yeah if you big companies don't pay the prices that you see little people who are doing one thing yeah that's what you pay but nobody nobody is a big company pays the prices that you see listed in aws
Marco:
yeah so anyway so i'm serving a couple of things here uh i'm serving the podcast uh artwork thumbnails from there uh so that way like we know when you bring up the directory when you search those thumbnails load really fast um i'm also in the latest update of overcast
Marco:
I'm serving the kind of like Overcast custom JSON format of episode list data.
Marco:
So like the list of episodes that are in a feed in my data format that is sent to the app, that is now being served from the CDN.
Marco:
And the idea here is when a podcast publishes a new episode, that gets updated.
Marco:
And then the server has sent a push notification to all the copies of the app saying, hey, update this.
Marco:
And then all the copies of the app that are subscribed to that feed all have to pull that same file within a few minutes.
Marco:
So I figured a CDN is perfect for that because not only will it be faster, but that's a whole bunch of cache hits that won't hit any part of my infrastructure.
Marco:
So it'll save on my end.
Marco:
It'll save, you know, those big load spikes, which it does.
Marco:
And it's been great.
Marco:
The downside is that, again, the Cloudflare hit rate is not great because their retention rate isn't very good because, you know, I mean, I'm talking hundreds of gigs of data here that are potentially being cached and they're not going to spend hundreds of gigs of their RAM holding all my data in memory for 200 bucks a month.
Marco:
So that makes sense.
Marco:
You know, I'm not blaming them.
Marco:
You know, it is what it is.
Marco:
So anyway, so I started looking for options that would save money because I learned, I just started doing all of this in the month of July.
Marco:
It is now August and my July bill for AWS is comically large.
Marco:
And so it could almost bite John's TV.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, the part of this that was supposed to be saving me money is not working.
Marco:
It's actually now costing me more to host things this way than it was in the old way.
Marco:
So let me revisit the cost angle of this.
Marco:
And so there's a couple of options.
Marco:
So there's apparently a deal between Backblaze and Cloudflare that if you use Backblaze as clone, the B2 service, they don't charge you for bandwidth when it's being sent to Cloudflare.
Marco:
So that's an option that I can I could use the Backblaze B2 service as my backend instead of S3 and pay no fees in transfer.
Marco:
Another option, which is the one I'm trying first, is Linode, frequent sponsor of the show, including this episode and the place I host all my servers.
Marco:
And by the way,
Marco:
i pay like linode does not pay for my servers for me like they pay us for their ads but my account is a regular account that i just pay for you know overcast pays at full price i don't get any special special discounts or anything like that um so i i buy a lot of linode servers and linode has their um object storage service which is their s3 clone it is something like five times cheaper than s3
Marco:
Like for the transfer fees.
Marco:
And if I'm reading the docs correctly, I think first it exhausts the transfer that I'm already paying for in my Linode plan.
Marco:
Because every Linode server that you buy comes with 2,000 gigs a month or something like that of transfer.
Marco:
And I buy so many servers that I never come close to using all that.
Marco:
I have a massive surplus of transfer every month from Linode that I don't use.
Marco:
So not only is it five times cheaper when you are paying per gig,
Marco:
But I think I am actually not going to be paying much at all because I think I'm going to actually be fitting within my giant surplus that I have from all my servers.
Marco:
So I'm trying that now first.
Marco:
And all this is to say, when I first adopted all of this with my code base over the last month or so, you know, first, I've written against S3 since Tumblr.
Marco:
Like, you know, I've used S3 for a very long time.
Marco:
Tumblr stored every image that people have loaded in S3.
Marco:
So I've written against it using PHP for a very long time.
Marco:
I've been through the various complexities as they, you know, went to their complex ACL system, their complex user system, when they changed the signature method from the old, you know, really basic AWS signature thing to the new, you know, signature version two.
Marco:
I've gone through all that.
Marco:
And when I went to go integrate this,
Marco:
I'm like, you know what, let me look and, you know, let me make sure, you know, Overcast has been using S3 since its beginning because I had the file upload feature, but that was using the old V1 signature method and a couple of these, like, you know, 15-line functions I wrote to, you know, just do basic S3 commands.
Marco:
But I thought, well, if I'm going to be building, you know, this significant part of my infrastructure now on S3, let me make sure I'm doing everything the most up-to-date way.
Marco:
That way, you know, I don't have to worry so much about deprecations for a longer time, etc.
Marco:
So I learned about, you know, the...
Marco:
Various different ways you're supposed to now address S3, including the new signature method.
Marco:
I did all that because I looked at the S3 library for PHP that I'm supposed to be using from them, and it's like 100 files, and it's thousands of lines of code, many thousands of lines of code.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
And because S3 is now this monster of a service,
Marco:
inside of amazon web services which is this monster of a suite of services it's so far beyond what i need which literally what i need is like get put list delete and generate authenticated urls that's it like it's what i need is the feature set it had in 2008 i just need that today like i literally don't need anything else like maybe hdps support like that's that might i don't even need that like that's just optional so anyway so i see like
Marco:
When I look at what I have to do to use their PHP library and the amount of bloat and I look at the code and it's like a middleware factory.
Marco:
I'm like, I don't even know what half these words mean.
Marco:
And I don't even know what this is doing.
Marco:
The old way of doing this was a 15-line function in my utilities file.
Marco:
Clearly, there has to be a simpler way.
Marco:
so of course i wrote my own of course right it's nobody's surprise you and i so i have my entire s3 class that does everything i need to do in the most modern way is 250 lines of code in one file and the class is called s3 there's no like namespace garbage with phps backslashes all this crap like no it's just one file called s3 and it's 250 lines and it's very very simple and it does everything the new signature and everything anyway
Marco:
So all this is to say, of course, I wrote my own and I took a couple days to do it, but it was totally worth it, in my opinion, for my needs and goals.
Marco:
So when I started playing with... When I started deciding, all right, I'm going to use... I'm going to try out these clone services and see what works for me.
Marco:
I thought, well, crap.
Marco:
I wrote all of this to the brand new... I guess not brand new, but to the newest, you know, AWS Signature V2 and all these like new ways of addressing the host name and everything.
Marco:
And I thought...
Marco:
there is no way all these clone services are going to like, I'm going to have to rewrite the old method in my new file and figure out how to do it and everything.
Marco:
But I'm like, let me just try it first.
Marco:
And I tried literally just swapping out the host name to, you know, the Linode endpoint and it just worked.
Marco:
And that was it.
John:
That's because all the stuff you were describing as new was, like, five years ago.
John:
It's like, it's not that new.
Marco:
Right, but even then, like, you know, that's... Who knows how long these services have been around?
Marco:
Who knows, like, if, you know, whenever Ceph started, they probably forked it then and, you know, haven't really updated since.
Marco:
A user in the chat, Heavy Machinery, says, I should write my own S3 called Overcast O2.
Marco:
LAUGHTER
Marco:
That's fantastic.
Marco:
I totally would.
Marco:
I thought about it.
Marco:
I did!
Marco:
Just for my own use, just for cheap hosting reasons.
John:
I kind of did that in my last job.
Marco:
I'm sure this is not an uncommon thing.
John:
Don't recommend it.
John:
Just use S3.
Marco:
But yeah, so anyway, I think ultimately my needs are simple enough that hopefully I can use one of these other services because the cost is literally it's like five times less or even cheaper.
Marco:
So I'm trying that out.
Marco:
But anyway, I was just all this to say I'm very impressed by how it literally was just a drop in replacement.
Marco:
And in fact, all of the like all the documentation for these services to say like how to access them.
Marco:
They even tell you, just use Amazon's library and just change the endpoint to this one hostname, and that's it.
Marco:
So I'm very impressed so far by Leonard Object Storage.
Marco:
I decided not to try Cloudflare R2 because I asked on Twitter, and people say there's actually no way to...
Marco:
serve files publicly from it that's built in you have to like write like a cloudflare worker which is their own custom type of thing that can run on their cdn endpoint nodes which i they're it's a very powerful thing from what i hear but i don't know anything about it and i don't want to i don't want to get into that right now
Marco:
So I'm not going to do Cloudflare R2.
Marco:
I'm going to try Linode's thing first.
Marco:
And if it doesn't end up working for me, I'll try Backblaze B2.
Marco:
But yeah, very, very impressed by these things so far.
Marco:
As for the original question posed in the show notes of, is it okay to copy a competitor's API?
Marco:
With something like this, you know, S3 just became the standard.
Marco:
And then other people made their own alternatives that work with it.
Marco:
Like, I don't think that's that bad.
John:
if you asked aws i think they'd be happy that this happened um and i mean so some sometimes competitors aren't happy when it happens like oh we made this api it's our thing you're copying us you're taking advantage of like we did this work in the market to say hey here's a storage api write your application again so you just copied our api so you can get our customers and they don't have to change their code right but the only reason to really be mad about that is if you're afraid that your customers will do a better job than you do at providing an s3 compatible service so
John:
I don't know the history behind this at AWS, but I can tell you that what has actually happened is everybody into one of the S3 API, all these storage vendors that used to have their own proprietary HTTP-based APIs, because they did, they're like, they saw S3, well, we'll do our own thing, right?
John:
All of them had to add S3 because it became the standard because no one wanted to change their software.
John:
But in the end, Amazon still provides the best, most full-featured, highest specs, and often best-priced if you're a giant corporation.
John:
Highest-priced, at least.
John:
No, the best price, because they send a team of people who are going to be your AWS agents to work with your company.
John:
In the world of big bucks.
John:
That team of people is not coming to Fire Island.
John:
No, they're not.
John:
You do not have a team of people working with you.
John:
Just get on the ferry.
John:
If you spent a few dozen million more dollars in AWS, you would have a team of people.
John:
Anyway, and so Amazon, this has been great for Amazon.
John:
It is the de facto storage API standard, and Amazon 100% controls it.
John:
So when Amazon adds a feature,
John:
that enough of its customers want, now Dell has to add that feature too in the next year or two.
John:
And by the way, they're always perpetually behind what Amazon is doing, because Amazon rolls it out, and Dell and EMC don't find out about it until AWS Invent or whatever, or you hear it announced.
John:
And then, like I said, if it's a popular feature,
John:
customers get cranky like oh i want to use that cool new feature but your supposedly s3 compatible api doesn't have it and then they need to add it you're oh they're always behind right and that would be fine if they could beat them on price or performance and stuff but it's difficult to keep up with adus so adus adus has control of the api that everyone else essentially is forced to use and they're always one step ahead of everyone else and by the
John:
the way s3 and adws are actually pretty good surfaces like in terms of the specs and features and performance so i think uh in the end i mean maybe adfs was pissed about this in the beginning and maybe sued some people i don't know the history behind it but right now they're sitting pretty like who wouldn't want it and it's not even like an industry standard that has a consortium doing it amazon can do whatever they want with s3 and everyone else just has to scramble to copy them
Marco:
Yeah, and there's so many benefits.
Marco:
To just use the tooling, for instance, one of the tools that's been invaluable to me when doing S3 development is Transmit by Panic, which most people know as an FTP app, but Transmit has a ton of other
Marco:
like languages that speaks to servers to interact with them, including the S3 protocol.
Marco:
So you can open up your S3 buckets in transmit and it looks like a file system and you can go and you can browse things and you can quick look things and you can edit and delete.
Marco:
And you,
Marco:
When you're developing an S3-based something, that's actually really useful.
Marco:
And I was able to... They have in their screen to set up a new profile in Transmit.
Marco:
You pick S3 as a protocol, but then you can give it a custom host name.
Marco:
So I just gave it the USEast1LinodeObjects.com in there, and it's talking to my Linode...
Marco:
like object storage just exactly the same way like that's that's awesome like to have all of that tooling support and everything it's just very it's very wonderful as a developer and as to whether it's like you know okay for the source company you know john you're right about you know strategically speaking it's pretty good for amazon because the value that they are providing is not the api it's the service
Marco:
Behind it and all the different capabilities and the integration with other AWS services.
Marco:
That's the value they're providing.
Marco:
So I don't think it really hurts them to have other people offering competing things for the basics.
Marco:
Because you're right, they have all these advantages by having this become the industry standard that they are still in full control of.
Marco:
And all of the high-end use will still go to them.
Marco:
But then, you know, the low end use like this, like it greatly benefits people like me who are more value conscious.
Marco:
And that's that's pretty great for us, at least.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Most of the value services like if you're trying to undercut AWS on cost, it's hard if you're an enterprise because, again, they get the fancy enterprise pricing that, you know, they don't pay the retail thing.
John:
and b they're not they're just not going to match aws's specs because they don't have to if you want to be on lower price you have to give up stuff you can't have 800 storage tiers you can't have 11 nines of data durability which is what s3 has right if you want to save some money you don't need 11 nines of data durability for your things i'm assuming you don't you'd take you know seven nines probably it's plenty of nines for you right some people don't need any nines you know and like although
John:
Although AWS has models for that too.
John:
They have storage tiers where it's only in one location and you don't care if it goes away or whatever.
John:
So it's difficult to compete even on the low end, but that's the place where there's possibility.
John:
Using Ceph, which is an open source cluster file system, using Ceph as the backend lets you not have to
John:
essentially re-implement S3 because some open source thing did.
John:
Is Ceph as good as S3?
John:
No, it's not.
John:
It's absolutely not.
John:
But if you want to undercut AWS on price for regular people who aren't giant enterprises and you don't care about all those fancy features and you don't care about the safety and performance, yeah, that's the little niche that these companies can carve out for themselves.
John:
Honestly, when I see a lot of these services, I do wonder how many of them are just front ends for S3.
John:
And you would think, like, how is that possible?
John:
How can they undercut S3's pricing?
John:
Volume discounts.
John:
Right.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Because you pay them what you think is less than the manufacturer suggested retail price for the service you're getting.
John:
But they pay S3 the, you are a multi-million dollar corporation price.
John:
And so they're just, you know.
John:
That's pretty funny.
John:
Like, just skimming off the top.
John:
And they're essentially giving you access to their, you know, enterprise company discount to S3.
John:
But saving a little bit for themselves.
John:
I don't know if any of them are doing that.
John:
It's just that is a plausible thing that could be done.
John:
That's amazing.
John:
That is kind of amazing.
John:
The magic of enterprise pricing.
John:
The world of enterprise software and corporate services is really weird.