Uncomfortable Truths
John:
So you two are probably slightly too young to remember this, but when I was a kid, there was tons of stuff on TV and in books and everything about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs.
John:
Did you catch the tail end of this craze, maybe?
John:
Probably the same books in your school library.
John:
But anyway, I used to watch these things all the time on TV.
John:
It was like...
John:
Secrets of the Unknown or that thing hosted by Leonard Nimoy and they would, you know, talk about each one of the things.
John:
They'd show that same blurry picture of Bigfoot or they'd show that little like the silhouette of the Loch Ness monsters, like one or two famous pictures of that or like the UFO shows.
John:
They would have like that same blurry picture of a hubcap or like these videos of lights going by or, you know, this blurry black and white photograph of something.
John:
And I would just watch this stuff for hours.
John:
Like, they could do, like, an hour-long network special with, like, one photograph.
John:
And they would just milk that photograph for all it was worth, right?
John:
And I was fascinated by it, because it's like, there's these secret things in the world that nobody knows about.
John:
But people have seen, like, they do tons of interviews.
John:
Like, I saw the lights in the sky, and it came down into the clearing in the woods.
John:
You know, plenty of that.
John:
But then just, like, the one picture, right?
John:
Or, like, the one outline of the Loch Ness Monster, but all the tales from the people who are around the Loch Ness Monster, they heard about it.
John:
And, you know, we still do this, I suppose, with certain other kind of mystery things where you just stretch out a tiny bit of content for, you know, an hour at a time.
John:
But if you had told, like...
John:
you know, the kid version of me, that someday people, like, everybody would have a phone in their pocket.
John:
You know, it's like, we're going to get that Loch Ness Monster now.
John:
Like, UFOs will not escape us now.
John:
Like, the only reason we don't have this footage is because you're just out in the woods, you know, and you're on a camping trip.
John:
Who has their camera with them?
John:
Or if you have your camera with you, like, it's in your camera bag or something, and the UFO goes by and you miss it, right?
John:
Same thing with Bigfoot.
John:
You're out hiking in the woods, you can't get your camera out in time, or who even has a camera with them?
John:
But as soon as we, you know, if you told me that everybody's going to have a camera,
John:
We are going to have so many Bigfoot pictures.
John:
We're going to have so many UFO pictures.
John:
We will have like the Loch Ness Monster will be like documented in high def video.
John:
It would be amazing.
John:
That's what I would have said.
John:
But of course, here we are today where pretty much everybody does have a phone in their pocket.
John:
And what happened when most of the world got a phone in their pocket in the form of a smartphone or a camera, sorry, a camera in their pocket in the form of a smartphone was we didn't see
John:
tons more pictures of UFOs if we didn't see tons more pictures of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
John:
What we did see were tons and tons more pictures of police beating people up.
John:
That's what we saw.
John:
Not what you would have expected to see.
John:
Not what the child in me would have expected to see.
John:
And this is not a new original thought.
John:
I've heard this many times in the past, but I dwell on it.
John:
I think about it from time to time because it is
John:
A strange facet of technology, right from from the Rodney King tape, which I think was probably VHS or whatever the heck it was to today's smartphone videos of police brutality that we see everywhere online.
John:
Technology has made what has been a reality for centuries visible to everybody.
John:
And I think most of us don't like what we see this country.
John:
has a racism problem and it has a policing problem.
John:
And whatever we've done in the past to fix this clearly hasn't worked.
John:
We need to try something new.
Marco:
Yeah, and I'm sorry if talking about this offends anyone.
Marco:
It's not my intention, and I'm not anywhere near an expert in any of this.
Marco:
So I'm actually very nervous and uncomfortable to talk about this.
Marco:
But that is a good thing right now.
Marco:
A lot of us need to be made a little nervous and uncomfortable right now because silence and complacency is worse.
Marco:
So I'm going to start by a quick comment on something that's very uncomfortable for a lot of us to discuss, and that's privilege.
Marco:
When I was first accused of not acknowledging my privilege a few years ago, I didn't know really what it was.
Marco:
I hadn't really thought about it.
Marco:
And I felt a bit defensive when people started saying that as if I was being attacked unreasonably for something that I didn't even think I did anything.
Marco:
And I also felt that it denied the work I've done to get to where I am because I come from a lower middle class, single parent family and I've worked really hard to earn everything I have.
Marco:
But a huge degree of privilege was under all of that.
Marco:
I'm a white, cisgender, heterosexual male.
Marco:
I was born in the U.S.
Marco:
I was raised Catholic.
Marco:
I was put through decent schools.
Marco:
There's basically nothing about me that is widely persecuted by any group.
Marco:
I don't get stereotyped.
Marco:
I don't get treated unfairly by pretty much any part of society.
Marco:
I mean I'm a nerd.
Marco:
That's never been great, but even that these days is fairly reasonable.
Marco:
And I had it hard growing up in various ways, and so accusing me of being privileged felt like it denied me of the ways it was hard for me.
Marco:
And if discussions about privilege frustrate or anger you, that's understandable because it's uncomfortable.
Marco:
It's a whole uncomfortable truth under everything, but it doesn't mean it's not there.
Marco:
And we need to face uncomfortable truths a lot of the time.
Marco:
And privilege doesn't mean that you don't have problems or challenges in your life.
Marco:
But it does mean that you don't have certain types of problems and challenges that a lot of other people have.
Marco:
And you probably don't even ever need to think about those problems because of some inherent aspect of your genes or where you were born or who your parents were.
Marco:
And that is absolutely a real thing.
Marco:
Being privileged in certain ways doesn't mean that your life is easy or perfect, and it doesn't mean that you're a bad person or that you need to apologize for who you are, but it is a necessary concept to keep in mind that you have advantages that other people don't, and that part of your privilege is that you probably never even knew about it until someone pointed it out to you because you never even had to think about it.
Marco:
Now, the flip side to that is that a lot of people are unfairly disadvantaged in society merely because of who they are.
Marco:
Now, I don't need to be afraid to wear a hoodie or go for a jog or hold an object in my hand or be in my own house, in my own bed.
Marco:
I've never had to fear for my life if I saw a police officer.
Marco:
I've been pulled over a few times earlier in life for minor driving infractions, and I was never terrified that my life could be about to end.
Marco:
And the last time I was pulled over was a decade ago or more, and I was let off with just a warning.
Marco:
And now, I'm a white man in my late 30s.
Marco:
I am invisible to the police.
Marco:
Part of the immense privilege I've been given is that I don't need to think about the police at all in my daily life, except occasionally if I see a cop I know, I'll wave hello, and they'll wave back.
Marco:
Millions of people out there are not so lucky.
Marco:
Now, being a police officer, you know, there's it's a risky and it's a hard, it's a thankless job.
Marco:
You know, they're just people.
Marco:
And many cops, possibly even most of them are good people.
Marco:
I know a few cops myself and they seem like good ones.
Marco:
They seem like good people.
Marco:
Some of our listeners are even cops.
Marco:
You know, you've written in before.
Marco:
But there's a lot of cops out there who are assholes at best and often violent assholes.
Marco:
Many cops out there act more like wannabe military soldiers who are battling against the people they're ostensibly there to protect and serve.
Marco:
Like they're at war against their own citizens.
Marco:
And even honestly, making an analogy to soldiers here feels like an insult to actual military soldiers who are usually much better disciplined and probably more accountable to their actions than bad police officers in the U.S.
Marco:
are.
Marco:
And there aren't just a handful of bad police officers in the U.S.,
Marco:
There is something deeply toxic in police culture and their attitude and the power and political structures around the police that not only seems to prevent bad behavior from being punished or weeded out, but actually cultivates and protects bad behavior that's there.
Marco:
And bad police officers have been unnecessarily assaulting and executing citizens that they're supposed to be protecting for decades, especially black people.
Marco:
And the system of weeding them out or bringing them to justice does not work well enough.
Marco:
And when you think about the effects of an under-accountable and under-supervised police force, it's especially damaging because the police are where you go if someone is hurting or threatening you.
Marco:
So if it's the police themselves doing it, most people have no realistic recourse available to them.
Marco:
So because of the police's role and their power, they don't just need to be held responsibly accountable for a basic level of accountability.
Marco:
They need to be held to an especially high standard, way higher than average people.
Marco:
But instead, in most places in the U.S., they're held to a much lower standard than most people are.
Marco:
And nobody in the U.S.
Marco:
suffers more destruction by militant, violent, unaccountable, bad police officers than black people.
Marco:
Now, a well-functioning society tries to put everyone on a level playing field.
Marco:
They try to neutralize as many unfair sources of privilege as possible so that everybody has the same rights and the same opportunities.
Marco:
And I don't know how anybody can look around the U.S.
Marco:
and think that we are anywhere near that.
Marco:
We do not have a well-functioning society.
Marco:
We have a lot of work to do in many different areas, especially how the U.S.
Marco:
treats black people.
Marco:
And a few years ago when the phrase Black Lives Matter came up, it's such a simple and elegant and powerful phrase.
Marco:
Black Lives Matter.
Marco:
It's not about harming anyone.
Marco:
It isn't about putting anyone else down.
Marco:
It's a simple, powerful statement of fact that our society unfortunately needs to be reminded of.
Marco:
Black Lives Matter.
Marco:
And hearing that made so many people so uncomfortable and so angry that they had to immediately counter it with things like All Lives Matter or the, you know, even worse police glorifying version of Blue Lives Matter.
Marco:
And not only do those completely miss the point, they actively fight against it.
Marco:
And that's, you know, most in most cases, it's not people being ignorant.
Marco:
They actually intend to fight against it.
Marco:
Most people who are, you know, have a problem hearing the phrase Black Lives Matter are refusing to acknowledge that the U.S.
Marco:
treats black lives as more expendable or less valuable than white lives.
Marco:
That's a hard thing to think about.
Marco:
But the reality, actual data from many sources over many decades supports that.
Marco:
Nobody should have to assert that their life matters.
Marco:
But the sad truth is that black people still do.
Marco:
And that's awful.
Marco:
Nobody should react negatively or defensively when someone else asserts that their life matters.
Marco:
And yet that's how a lot of people react when black people are the ones making that assertion.
Marco:
Our country is still extremely racist.
Marco:
We have an overtly racist president who empowers and encourages white supremacists in 2020.
Marco:
That is completely ridiculous, but it's true.
Marco:
We have an incredibly long way to go.
Marco:
Black lives matter.
Marco:
And if that makes you uncomfortable to hear, you need to take a moment to examine that.
Marco:
You need to really, truly examine why you have a problem with people fighting to get their society to behave as though their lives matter.
Marco:
Imagine if you had to fight to get your society to value your life simply because of who you are.
Marco:
And then consider why we let our society become and remain so dysfunctional that anyone needs to fight for their life to matter.
Marco:
Black lives matter.
Marco:
Now, we have the immense privilege of being able to talk about tech stuff for the next couple of hours, providing us and you an escape from the really bad realities of what's going on out there.
Marco:
So we're going to try our best to do it and to keep the show going as we've done every week for the last seven years.
Marco:
try to make the world better with whatever way you can, please.
Marco:
Try to help.
Marco:
Try to become aware of what's actually going on.
Marco:
Vote when the time comes to vote.
Marco:
And in the meantime, help any way you possibly can.
Casey:
Yeah, Marco speaks for all three of us in saying that Black Lives Matter.
Casey:
I know that all three of us are deeply upset and concerned with what is going on.
Casey:
We are doing what we can by talking to all of you, amongst other things, to try to do our little part in making things better.
Casey:
I don't know...
Casey:
I don't know what to say to someone who finds that Black Lives Matter is a controversial statement.
Casey:
Like, to me, this is the way it should be.
Casey:
Everyone should be equal.
Casey:
Everyone is not equal, unfortunately, but they should be.
Casey:
And I personally, now I will not speak for the three of us, I have no time or tolerance for people who feel otherwise.
Casey:
And I just wanted to thank both Marco and John for saying so much more eloquently than I could have exactly the things that I am thinking as well.
Casey:
To try to pivot this a little bit toward technology, the three of us thought it would be nice to read a little bit of a memo that Tim Cook had written to Apple employees about George Floyd and kind of what's been going on.
Casey:
We're not going to read the whole thing, but I do think there are a couple passages that are really important.
Casey:
You know, it is coming from a from a gay man who has certainly put up with his own difficulties growing up and even today, the things that I don't have to don't have to worry about, you know, just like I don't have to worry about being right.
Casey:
I don't have to worry about being white.
Casey:
I am a heterosexual, cisgendered white dude.
Casey:
You know, it's pretty easy for me.
Casey:
Life's pretty easy by comparison.
Casey:
So I thought Tim's memo was very interesting.
Casey:
Let me read a couple of passages.
Casey:
To stand together, we must stand up for one another and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd in a much longer history of racism.
Casey:
That painful past is still present today.
Casey:
Not only in the form of violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination.
Casey:
And he goes on a little later.
Casey:
To create change, we have to re-examine our own views and actions in light of a pain that is deeply felt but too often ignored.
Casey:
Issues of human dignity will not abide standing on the sidelines.
Casey:
To our colleagues in the black community, we see you.
Casey:
You matter and your lives matter.
Casey:
This is a moment when many people may want nothing more than a return to normalcy or to a status quo that is only comfortable if we avert our gaze from injustice.
Casey:
As difficult as it may be to admit that desire is itself a sign of privilege, George Floyd's death is shocking and tragic proof that we must aim far higher than a quote unquote normal future and build one that lives up to the highest ideals of equality and justice.
Casey:
So Tim goes on to say Apple is donating to Equal Justice Initiative, among others, and offering a two-to-one match for employee donations in June, especially if you're an Apple employee, but certainly any of you listeners.
Casey:
If you have a couple of bucks to scrape together, I think the Equal Justice Initiative is a great place to throw a few dollars.
Casey:
And if there's other ways that you can help, I absolutely think that that's a great thing to do.
Casey:
Now, John, particularly with a little contribution from Marco and I, has put together a whole ton of links in the show notes that all three of us recommend.
Casey:
And you can, as your homework, you can go through and look at these links and try to learn a little bit more.
Casey:
Certainly, I need to look at some of these links that I have not seen before, and I need to learn a little bit more.
John:
we all do and by the way about the about the uh donation thing like that's that's part of if you're listening to this a lot of people are like oh i care about these things and i agree with you but i don't know what to do that is i think that's a common feeling what do i do i don't know what to do we gotta do something like i guess i can tweet a hashtag but like honestly what can i actually do um so that's kind of what these notes are about and i was personally in a similar situation like one of the things that i know i can do is give money but the question is okay oh boy i give money to paralyzed by choice look at all these different places and it's like
John:
You just have to give it somewhere, right?
John:
And what I personally did, not that I recommend this, I used Apple as a proxy to say, well, I bet Apple's not going to give their own money to some fake fly-by-night charity that doesn't actually do the good work that it claims to do.
John:
So I gave money to the Equal Justice Initiative.
John:
Maybe that's foolish, but honestly, it's better than just being paralyzed by choice and being not sure if you're sending it to the right place or whatever.
John:
Apple's giving it to that.
John:
I didn't get two to one match, unfortunately, but that's what I did.
John:
And these links in the show notes are trying to help answer the question of, I don't know what to do.
John:
What should I do?
John:
And how should I do it?
John:
Like, maybe you don't want to or can't give money, but you can give time and you can or you can just learn about things or whatever.
John:
So
John:
There's going to be a ton of links.
John:
There might be better ones.
John:
If you have suggestions, you can send them and we can add them to the show notes or whatever or just tweet them to people.
John:
But I think they answer a lot of common questions.
John:
I'm just going to go down and read the titles of them.
John:
It'll help say what kind of links there.
John:
First one is 11 things you can do to help Black Lives Matter and police violence.
John:
everyone loves listicles right just give me the list and it's not 10 it's 11 how to safely and ethically film policemen misconduct at the top of the show we're talking about uh the ubiquity of filming there are things to know about how to do that safely and ethically and so there's an article on it how to be an activist when you're unable to attend protests
John:
If you can't go to a protest, you can do other things.
John:
How to protect safety, protest safely in the age of surveillance.
John:
If you are at a protest, how do you protect yourself?
John:
We know that there's tons of ways that, you know, third party companies and the government can protect.
John:
Yeah.
John:
16 podcasts another list to go like there's a lot of them pick one uh listen to a couple episodes learn something uh there was an interesting twitter thread by a data scientist who has a bunch of research-based solutions to stopping police violence basically saying let's look at the data let's look at things that have been tried and measure how effective they had been uh it's a little bit turns outy but there's a lot of good data in there again he's a
John:
check out that Twitter thread.
John:
And there's also a big site that Obama put up, which is a similar type of, hey, you don't know what to do, come to this site and we'll link to a bunch of things.
John:
Again, using Obama as a proxy for probably linking to, you know, some charity that's like a scam or a front or whatever, probably pretty well vetted.
John:
And lots of links to learn more.
John:
And then the final thing I'll add is one of the other things that I've
John:
try to make myself do as as a benefit to myself and my family but also to myself is find a way to talk to if you have kids find a way to talk to your kids in an age-appropriate way about this issue because if you don't talk to them about it no matter what age they are like unless they're like an actual infant they know that something is going on just in the same way like if you didn't talk to your kids about coronavirus they're going to notice why aren't i going to school right like kids know kids know about this stuff and if you don't talk about it at all
John:
I feel like you're missing an opportunity for both you and your kid to come to a better understanding of this.
John:
Because I know it's hard to talk to your kids about this.
John:
Like, I know.
John:
I have kids.
John:
I try to do it.
John:
It's not easy.
John:
But forcing yourself to figure out how to do that, how do you talk to a five-year-old about this?
John:
Forcing yourself to figure out how to do that makes you, like, think about it more.
John:
Like, just like saying stuff on a podcast makes you have to think about it or writing makes you have to think about it.
John:
God, it's even more so when you're talking to your own kid, you don't want to screw it up.
John:
Like you're like, Oh, how do I talk to my kid about this?
John:
Like, so they're not scared.
John:
And so they're not like, they don't have nightmares about it.
John:
And, but like, I don't, I do want them to know, like find a way, you know, practice between you and your partner.
John:
If you have one to try to figure out what you're going to say, practice in your head.
John:
But I found that an important and valuable exercise.
John:
Um,
John:
Obviously, it's a little bit easier when your kids are older, unless they're really ornery teens.
John:
But either way, that's my suggestion.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And definitely patronizing their apps and watching their conference talks and so on.
Casey:
So we will put some links as well in the show notes.
Casey:
There's a lot here.
Casey:
If I remember, I'll also put some book recommendations that I cannot vouch for myself, but I've been told are good.
Casey:
And I've been told by people who would know.
Casey:
So I think that's much better than an endorsement from me.
Casey:
So really...
Casey:
If there's ever a time to let us three nerds assign homework, I think now is the time to try to spend a few minutes and look through these links and see what you can learn.
Casey:
Because all of us, myself extremely included, have a lot to learn.
Casey:
And I think that although this is a terrible, awful situation that we're in the midst of as we record on the evening of June 3rd,
Casey:
I really pray and hope that it will be ultimately for the best and that good will come of it.
Casey:
As far as going forward, this is important to us.
Casey:
We will not be making the show about this, but it's important to us and it may come up again.
Casey:
It likely will come up again and we will not shy away from talking about it if necessary.
Casey:
But that being said...
Casey:
As Marco and John had said earlier, you know, we want to provide some amount of release and some amount of entertainment for ourselves, for you.
Casey:
So once I give these two guys a chance for closing thoughts, we're going to move on with a more traditional show.
John:
I'm ready to do tech podcast now, I think.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Alex Chan writes, they were struck by something that John said on the last episode.
Casey:
John said, if you threw the new ATP website at Netscape Navigator 3.1, it would die horribly and it would look like nothing.
Casey:
And Alex tried it.
Casey:
And Alex said, it turns out what actually happens if you try to view ATP.fm in a very old Netscape navigator is that it looks like nothing because the browser gives you an error.
Casey:
And the error that they got was Netscape and this server cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms, which makes sense, but it's kind of a bummer.
Casey:
That being said, Alex tried the next best thing, which is what I would have tried, which is links.
Casey:
If you're not familiar, links is a text only web browser that is designed for like the command line.
Casey:
And Alex writes, but the site does work in links and is fairly usable, including the flex box on the store page, which looks, which it looks straight past.
Casey:
All of those paragraph and unordered list tags have paid off.
Casey:
I just think this is delightful.
Casey:
I don't have any screenshots, unfortunately, but I do think it's absolutely delightful.
John:
The thing I forgot about Netscape is that SSL slash TLS has changed so much in the years between then and now that they can't agree.
John:
They can't do an encryption handshake between themselves.
John:
And so if your site insists on HTTPS, the browser can just not make a secure connection to modern servers because basically the algorithms and protocols that were used back in the day are now all considered insecure and aren't supported by good websites.
Marco:
So that's a bummer.
Marco:
But yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's one of the weird things that a lot of old devices now, like a lot of older OSs, older laptops, older other devices, are just rendered fairly useless these days because of this particular issue.
Marco:
Like if you try to boot up an old OS, it can still run a lot of old software made for it, but anything that involves the internet will probably fail because of this exact thing.
Marco:
And there's usually no possible way to update super old hardware to any kind of software that would support modern SSL standards.
Casey:
John, what is the component in an OpenDoc thing?
John:
I think the chat room might have gotten this in the last episode and I just didn't see it.
John:
But anyway, I was trying to remember what the heck the name of an OpenDoc thingy is.
John:
Not the container, but the things that bring tools into the container that you can use to edit the document.
John:
And apparently the word I was looking for was parts.
John:
An OpenDoc part.
John:
According to, I think this is from Wikipedia, an OpenDoc part can be anything that a normal application would offer.
John:
For example, a spreadsheet part, a text part, a database part, and so on.
John:
So there you go.
John:
Open doc parts.
Casey:
The world feels better for having known that little piece of trivia.
John:
The world should feel even better about this next one.
John:
Last episode, this is why I have to write things down.
John:
Last episode when we were talking about clipboard managers, I made a mental note to myself as we started to talk about it.
John:
Make sure you mention that Windows has one.
John:
And I didn't write it down.
John:
I was listening back to the episode and we got off on some tangent and I just followed that tangent.
John:
You knew?
John:
Yeah, we collectively got off on a tangent and then I grabbed the tangent at the end and got off and like, oh, well, I guess we're done with the clipboard thing.
John:
And I never mentioned that.
John:
Yes, Windows, like so many things, has built in clipboard manager.
John:
I don't think it's enabled by default.
John:
I think it's been there for a while now.
John:
But if you have Windows and you want a clipboard manager that is part of the OS and is made by Microsoft, it's there.
John:
Consult Google to find out how to enable it.
John:
I think maybe it's just Windows key plus V or something.
John:
But anyway, we'll put links in the show notes to give more information about that.
John:
It's a simple clipboard manager, but it's there.
Marco:
I can't believe you knew about it, and you could have saved us from a week of getting the same follow-up over and over again, and you didn't say anything.
John:
That's why I made a note to myself.
John:
I'm like, oh, make sure you mention that, because you don't want to spend a week hearing that.
John:
And the reason I know about it, of course, is because I'm spending time on Windows, which is basically my destiny launcher on this computer.
John:
That's why I know it's there.
Casey:
oh my goodness that's delightful all right and then um i guess it probably falls to me to do this thing that's that's slightly uncomfortable this particular week but uh the atp store this is the last week for it uh this the pre-orders will end on the 7th which is sunday i believe in the evening so if you would like any of our sweet sweet merch um
Casey:
Please feel free to go and throw a few dollars that way.
John:
This is after you've given to your favorite Black Lives Matter charity.
John:
This is after you've bought a bunch of books about racism that you're going to read and learn all about.
John:
After you've done all of that.
John:
Exactly.
John:
If you still also want like an ATP mug or something, we're selling them to the 7th.
John:
Don't wait too long because it'll be gone.
Casey:
yep so don't forget every single time somebody sends a tweet oh is it too late it's too late isn't it i forgot oh i forgot it's too late the good news is uh the black life matters charity and those books they're on sale forever yep never too late for them one of my favorite things to do is to tell you guys about why i'm a moron and this is casey's an idiot corner episode number 379 you don't need to tell us casey
John:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Sick burn.
John:
You can take that a lot of different ways.
John:
The fact that you chose to take it as an insult is just – I find insulting personally.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
This is going nowhere good.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So we got a new TV on Cyber Monday this past year.
Casey:
So we got an LG OLED 55C9AUA, which is basically the 55-inch 4K HDR OLED.
Casey:
And I really like that TV.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
It's been really good to us.
Casey:
It works really well.
Casey:
And after having had it for, I don't know, maybe a month, I finally got around to putting it on our Apple HomeKit Home.
Casey:
And sometime shortly thereafter, although I don't know exactly when it was, we noticed this thing would just periodically turn itself off.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
Which was really frustrating.
John:
Can I offer the... Can I shortcut your story or do you not want me to spoil it?
Casey:
You always do this to me, but fine, John.
Casey:
Shortcut my story.
John:
I don't want to spoil entirely.
John:
I'll give you a second one, right?
John:
So I've actually had people ask me about this very thing.
John:
They say, hey, this is slightly different.
John:
Hey, when you turn off your TV, does it turn back on in a couple of seconds?
John:
It's kind of the opposite of your problem, right?
John:
Weird.
John:
And I...
John:
i do have that happen and your story i'm not going to spoil it but i had the same thing happen with my receiver uh where i'd just be watching tv with my receiver and then it would just turn off like in the middle of watching a movie yeah yeah yeah yeah and you know of course the receiver turns off and eventually like just everything reroutes and the sound starts coming out of the tv or whatever and at first i was like i have to return this is something wrong with it like it overheats or something or anyway i don't want to spoil it continue with your story i'll be revealed
John:
Thank you.
Casey:
I appreciate your incredible self-control.
Casey:
So eventually both of us, but particularly Erin, has had enough of this because she's a normal human and doesn't want to put up with my bullcrap.
Casey:
And so at some point she basically said to me, look, we either need to get this thing serviced or returned or what have you, or you need to find a way to fix this.
Casey:
So, of course, my natural inclination is I was always an HDMI CEC unicorn.
Casey:
I guess my time has ended, and I no longer have my single horn on my head.
Casey:
I am no longer a CEC unicorn.
Casey:
I am a CEC everyman, and that's the problem.
Casey:
Now, HDMI CEC, if you recall, is this thing.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it stands for.
Casey:
It doesn't matter, but it lets various different devices like power on and off other devices, right?
Casey:
And for the longest time, even on my last TV, my 1080 TV,
Casey:
I, I, it always worked.
Casey:
I never had a problem.
Casey:
So I decide, you know what, I'm going to go nuclear and I'm going to turn off anything that even smells like it's something that would automatically turn the machine, turn the TV off.
Casey:
I'm going to turn, I'm going to turn off the auto, like sleep thing, which I know is probably driving and driving John up a wall, just thinking about it, but I'm going to turn that off.
Casey:
HD by CDC is off.
Casey:
Everything's off.
Casey:
Gets taken out of the Apple home kit home and
Casey:
I forget what else I flipped off, but I flipped everything off.
Casey:
And sure enough, it doesn't turn itself off anymore.
Casey:
Now, this is good because that means it's a, and I'm doing major air quotes here, software problem in the sense that, you know, some setting somewhere has screwed this up.
Casey:
I don't know what it is, but something somewhere screwed it up.
Casey:
So over time, I've been a little, I've been trying to perform a little more science and I've been slowly re-adding different things like the auto power off if you leave it on for a long time.
Casey:
I eventually added HDMI CEC and waited like a month.
Casey:
And that wasn't an issue.
Casey:
And it was the weirdest thing.
Casey:
I realized that only when the garage door Raspberry Pi was on the network.
Casey:
No, I'm just kidding.
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, I was so hoping that was it.
Casey:
That would have been kind of hilarious, but no, that's not it at all.
Casey:
So anyway, so about a week ago, I finally re-added it.
Casey:
After having been off our Apple Home for a long time, I finally re-added it to our HomeKit Home.
Casey:
And sure enough, just a day or two back, it turned itself off.
John:
Remind me again.
John:
I know I asked this when you first brought this up many shows ago.
John:
Remind me again why you want it on your hump get home thing.
Marco:
I would like to integrate it with something that mostly works most of the time and make it less reliable.
Marco:
But he had a reason.
Marco:
Was it just so you could like turn it off by voice?
John:
What was the reason?
Casey:
Yeah, basically so I could turn off my voice.
Casey:
There are occasions that I do not have a remote handy that can turn the TV off.
Casey:
To be clear, it's very unlikely, and I can get off my lazy hindquarters and just go walk across the room and get the remoter.
John:
You should get the clapper.
Casey:
I should get the clapper.
Casey:
Here I am.
Casey:
In any case, I mean, part of the reason I got this TV is because I wanted something that had HomeKit just because I thought it would be like future-proofing.
Casey:
In the same way I've made the speech many times, I would only buy cars that had CarPlay now, ahem, Marco, because I want a future-proof.
Casey:
I only want to buy a TV or perhaps future, you know, home electronics where relevant that have HomeKit support.
Casey:
And you're right.
Casey:
Like, your implied statement here is that I don't need HomeKit.
Casey:
Yeah, correct.
Casey:
No argument.
Casey:
But I wanted it.
Casey:
And so it turned itself off.
Casey:
the other day as we were watching it.
Casey:
And I was upset.
Casey:
And Aaron, of course, bounces all over me.
Casey:
Look, see, see, I told you.
Casey:
But I said, well, wait, hold on.
Casey:
This is the first time it's happened.
Casey:
And I don't know what it was about this particular moment, but it occurred to me, wait a second.
Casey:
It is exactly 6.40 p.m., which to any other family on the planet means nothing, but to the List family means something.
Casey:
Because at exactly 6.40 p.m.,
Casey:
HomeKit runs our nighttime automation.
Casey:
I don't recall ever having added RTV to that automation, but sure enough, when I went into whichever one of the 17 different places you can find a HomeKit automation and found the good night or go to bed or whatever it was called automation, sure enough, guess what was there?
Casey:
Turn the TV off.
Casey:
And so, finally, I think I've solved my problem.
Casey:
And the TV, since I've done that just a few days ago, has not just randomly turned itself off for no reason.
Casey:
And I bring all this up because I was really scared to ask Federico, who I think has the same TV.
Casey:
Marco, I think you have the same TV.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
Didn't want to ask anyone, like, do you have this problem?
Casey:
Because I really had this creeping suspicion that it was something dumb I had done.
Casey:
Now, in my defense, like I said, I don't think I knowingly or willingly added it to the good night automation, but I do think I am using the canned good night automation, and it is very possible.
Casey:
I don't know this for sure, but it is possible that adding a TV to your home to
Casey:
automatically sucks it into the goodnight automation and tells it to turn itself off.
Casey:
If that's not true, it's okay.
Casey:
But I wanted to bring this up as kind of a PSA.
Casey:
If you are also having random issues like this with one of your devices, hey, maybe check out your HomeKit automations.
Casey:
It might be there.
Casey:
In summary, I'm an idiot.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, so the heading of this item says Casey is a moron.
John:
So I thought for sure it was just the sleep timer, which is a feature that like every TV has had forever.
John:
Basically, you can tell it to turn itself off after a certain period of time or at a certain time.
John:
Like like televisions have had this for, you know, decades.
John:
Right.
John:
Why my receiver, it has something similar where it's like it's basically like a timer.
John:
Like once you turn the receiver on after X number of minutes, it will turn itself off as a way to prevent it from just being on all night.
John:
If you just go to sleep.
John:
and forget about it it'll turn itself off but i never set this timer and out of the box it was set for like three hours and if you're watching some tv and then you put on a movie you know depending on how much tv had been watched before that you could be in the middle or towards the end of the movie and it will just shut off um
John:
That's a terrible default.
John:
Yeah, I don't understand why that was.
John:
I mean, I think it was pretty long.
John:
Maybe it was like three hours or whatever.
John:
But, you know, back before the kids were totally addicted to their iPads, they actually used to sit in front of the television and watch stuff.
John:
And then you'd come over and you watch stuff after they go to bed.
John:
And it's totally plausible that television, you know, the receiver at least could be on during that whole time.
John:
Anyway, fixing that timer was like one of the things I did in the first month I had it, which was refreshing.
John:
As for the thing I mentioned before of like, hey, when you turn your television off for the remote, sometimes does it turn right back on?
John:
I have a theory on that.
John:
I don't know what's causing it, but I'm using my TiVo remote to turn my television on and off.
John:
You can train the TiVo remote either by entering a code or it has a learning feature.
John:
Anyway, you can use the TiVo remote to control features of your television pretty much no matter what brand it is.
John:
And the TiVo remote has a power button on it.
John:
And what I always assume is happening is I press the power button
John:
And the TiVo remote sprays out a bunch of IR stuff.
John:
It's like, all right, any Panasonic TV anywhere in my vicinity, turn off now.
John:
And the first little bit of that spray turns my TV off.
John:
And then like I put the remote down on the end table and the last little bit of the spray turns it on.
John:
That's my theory.
John:
I can't prove it, and I don't know if I put my hand over the IR part right after the TV turns off.
John:
Does that not happen?
John:
And it doesn't happen every time.
John:
It happens like once every three months, and you start thinking you're crazy.
John:
So I don't have a solution to that one, but it's not a sleep timer.
John:
And then the great thing is, if you pick up the remote and press the button again, it just turns off and stays off.
John:
It's like, I just did that.
John:
Am I holding the button down too long?
John:
It's very mysterious.
John:
And no, it is not CEC, because there's no CEC in my household.
John:
Have we forgotten to ask Casey why he goes to bed at 6.40 p.m.?
John:
He's got young kids.
John:
Don't you remember?
John:
He's not going to bed.
John:
He's hoping against hope because he is in denial, like all parents of young children, in denial that they're going to keep going to bed around that time.
John:
And it's like, guess what, Casey?
John:
That time of your life is rapidly ending.
John:
so much for we'll have the evening to ourselves because we'll put the kids down and they'll be down by 7 15 and the whole evening will stretch out before us those days are ending don't even don't tell me these things because i know that you're right i know you're right but i am has declan stopped napping yet yes but he has an hour of rest time every day yeah i remember the rest time years yeah that's that's more that's like bargaining how about you just have quiet time it's like we just need a break
Casey:
Yep, that's exactly right.
Casey:
And so far, he seems mostly okay with it.
Casey:
He just basically has the run of the house to do whatever he wants.
Casey:
What's deeply alarming is that I think Michaela's starting to drop her nap, and that, oh, I just don't even want to think about it.
John:
It's only a matter of time before they're trying to figure out how to do donuts with your front-wheel drive hatchback.
Casey:
Excuse me, sir.
Casey:
Excuse me, sir.
Casey:
How dare you blaspheme my car like that?
Casey:
It is a Haldex all-wheel drive system that is extremely front biased, but it can, thank you very much, push torque to the rear wheels, you jerk.
John:
So you've got the best of both worlds.
John:
You've got torque steer and the inability to do easy donuts.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, stop it, you.
Casey:
It does not torque steer.
Casey:
The inability to do easy donuts, that is correct.
John:
If you just go reverse, tell Declan.
Casey:
I was about to say, at least I'm not doing reverse donuts like you are.
Casey:
Your car doesn't even have a locking front diff, does it?
Casey:
I don't think it does.
John:
No.
Casey:
Of course not.
Casey:
You can do that single burnout.
Casey:
You can't leave 11s, you leave 1s.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
I put the power to the road, Casey.
John:
It's all about efficiency.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I can't even.
Casey:
I cannot even right now.
John:
I don't want to waste that power destroying my tires.
Casey:
We are sponsored tonight by Tom Bin.
Casey:
Let me tell you, I like my Apple stuff a lot.
Casey:
But I love my Tom Bin stuff.
Casey:
I have their cadet kind of briefcase-y laptop bag.
Casey:
I have their co-pilot carry-on kind of laptop bag.
Casey:
Two of their parental unit diaper bags.
Casey:
And I also have two of their reusable cloth face masks.
Casey:
Because for the last couple of months, Tom Bin has been making, guess what, reusable cloth face masks.
Casey:
Each of these masks is $13.
Casey:
And for everyone that's purchased, they donate one.
Casey:
These masks have comfortable, stretched, non-elastic ear loops.
Casey:
They have a customizable, conforming nose bridge so you can get it nice and tight around your nose.
Casey:
They have two sizes.
Casey:
And over the past two months, they've made 160,000 of these things for hospitals, government agencies, businesses, etc.
Casey:
And they've donated $55,000 so far to tribal nations, healthcare workers, homeless shelters, and more.
Casey:
What's even better is they have a public Google Sheet where you can see exactly how many have been donated, how many are queued up to be donated, where they've been donated to, etc.
Casey:
If you already have a mask or don't want Tom Bin's excellent mask, let me tell you what.
Casey:
They also are offering, starting this coming Monday at 9 a.m.
Casey:
Pacific, they're going to be offering their Cynic 22 and Cynic 30 backpacks for pre-order because they're finally getting to the point that they can start making bags again instead of just masks.
Casey:
I do not have a Tombin backpack, and I tell you what, I want one because these things look awesome.
Casey:
And I know a lot of people who have Cynics, and they all say that these things are phenomenal.
Casey:
Go to Tombin.com, T-O-M-B-I-H-N.com.
Casey:
And check out all the different travel equipment and accessories that they have.
Casey:
Check out their reusable face masks.
Casey:
Everything there is excellent.
Casey:
I love Tom Bin.
Casey:
They can pay me to talk about Tom Bin.
Casey:
They can't pay me to say, I love Tom Bin.
Casey:
And I do.
Casey:
So thank you so much to Tom Bin, T-O-M-B-I-H-N.com for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
Android versus iOS text-to-speech speed.
Casey:
So this came onto my radar probably because of one of you and in turn because of Dave Mark from The Loop who had found a video from James Cham who said, I don't think that people appreciate how different the voice-to-text experience on a Pixel is from an iPhone.
Casey:
So here's a little head-to-head example.
Casey:
The Pixel is so responsive it feels like it's reading my mind.
Casey:
And so sure enough, James has a Pixel and an iPhone next to each other and they engage the text-to-speech thing.
Casey:
And it is quite obviously like night and day different.
Casey:
It's preposterous.
Casey:
And this is really surprising from Apple because Apple is the self-proclaimed king and queens of accessibility.
Casey:
And this is very much an accessibility feature in my mind.
Casey:
And it's not only an accessibility feature, but it is very much an accessibility feature.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So I have theories, but since I didn't put this in the show notes, I will leave it up to you, John?
Casey:
to tell me what your thoughts are.
John:
Yeah, my thoughts when I first saw this, well, the performance comparison is kind of beautiful because you can just put both phones in front of you and they're both listening to you at the same time.
John:
So it's a very fair test.
John:
Like you're not speaking to one and speaking to the other.
John:
You're speaking to both of them at the same time and you can really see the difference.
John:
So check out that video.
John:
Um, and it brought to mind a question.
John:
We didn't actually do it on an ask ATP, but I remember it flying by in the many hundreds of questions that we get.
John:
It was like, uh, you keep talking about on the show.
John:
This is what the listener was saying about how much faster Apple's system on a chips are in their phone than the competition.
John:
But how does that speed manifest itself?
John:
Like, yeah, it's faster than all these benchmarks that everyone says is faster, but like, what does that do for me?
John:
What is, what is the speed done for me lately?
John:
Um,
John:
I could answer that in a whole bunch of different ways.
John:
Like, for example, JavaScript benchmarks are very relevant to people who try to load complex web pages on your phone and obviously performance in games and other things where you really need every ounce of CPU, like, you know, and arguably also in battery life because you can get more done in a shorter amount of time and go back to sleep faster or whatever.
John:
But this is an example where no matter how much faster your system on a chip is, you know, algorithms win in the end, right?
John:
So for something complicated, like, you know, speech to text is not a simple,
John:
thing not not even as straightforward as like rendering in a game engine or something it is very complicated it's got machine learning and it also may have a server side component to it and in this performance comparison the massive speed difference in the apple system on a chip is not helping apple it you know do well in this test because it's it's more than just
John:
your cpu speed it's your algorithms and it's the speed if you're doing server-side stuff it's the responsiveness of your service that is processing the text and sending it back and when you put the iphone into airplane mode it's the performance of the on-chip implementation versus the one that's over the network now the interesting thing about the follow-up to this is like oh i put an airplane mode and they're both just as fast
John:
try it yourself i did i tried it myself like i didn't have an android phone here to test with although i actually do have one in the house i should have tried that but it's like a 50 android phone so i don't think it would be a fair comparison but anyway um i tried speech to text with you know with everything connected and then also in airplane mode with everything disconnected and they were exactly the same speed to me and that speed was slowish like it wasn't as fast as the android phone in this video
John:
Maybe it wasn't as slow as the really slow phone, but I didn't see any speed difference whatsoever.
John:
So I don't know what that means.
John:
Is mine configured in a way where it's not setting to the server?
John:
I don't know.
John:
A lot of the people responded to this thread saying that when they were offline and did it, the local on-device one seemed less accurate.
John:
But it's very difficult to A-B test that because you might have spoken differently or whatever.
John:
So all this is to say that...
John:
Areas like this are sort of – I mean, we beg on Siri all the time, right?
John:
But this is – and this is arguably not Siri.
John:
It's like, well, that's not Siri.
John:
That's not answering a question for me.
John:
That's speech to text.
John:
It's totally different.
John:
But we all kind of put it under the same umbrella.
John:
I feel like stuff like this makes –
John:
the on paper very very fast iphone feels slow i don't i can't tell from this testing if the problem is that apple's algorithms and machine learning stuff and their their you know model or whatever they're doing this is worse than google's or if it's because apple's server-side implementation is slower less responsive more laggy
John:
or does things in bigger chunks or if it's a combination of all of that but anybody who looks at this video can see there's a gap and that gap really ought to be closed because you know you know facetime is great and facetime is fast and all these things and all the the camera stuff like there's again measurable advantages to having a high performance system on a chip
John:
I think speech text would be one of those things.
John:
And, you know, in addition to lagging behind on how smart Siri is about answering questions like getting directions to London or whatever that was, the last one that went around, there was an embarrassment for Apple where it kept trying to send you to London, Ontario or something.
John:
Or no, what time is it in London?
John:
Wasn't that it that Gruber was posting about?
Marco:
Yeah, something like that.
John:
And it was telling you the time in like London somewhere in Canada, which is probably not what you mean.
John:
stuff like that and straightforward stuff like this uh you know speech to text i use speech to text a surprising amount my mother uses it like crazy because she can't stand typing on that tiny little keyboard and i don't blame her and her vision is really bad and boy if you you know if you've done that in a responsive system versus one that lags it really makes a big difference so i hope in ios 13 plus n uh apple gets their act together on this
Marco:
I hope they do, but honestly, I'm not thinking that's actually going to happen because ultimately, like, this is just a problem with almost everything about Siri, and it always has been.
Marco:
Siri has always been a little dumb, a little unreliable, and a little slow compared to its competitors.
Marco:
We've seen Apple.
Marco:
Apple's done a little bit of hiring here or there.
Marco:
We've heard they're revamping the Siri team or infrastructure or whatever.
Marco:
I really, really hope that Apple realizes how important the quality of Siri is and, despite what they say in public, how it's not there yet.
Marco:
Because performance is a feature, as is consistency, as is actual intelligence of things like the London Query.
Marco:
If you use Google Assistant, or I don't have any experience with Cortana, or if you use Alexa, it is significantly more consistent, and it is usually faster to respond.
Marco:
siri needs to get there and i really really hope apple has just been working on this for a long time behind the scenes and isn't ready to release it yet because so far it has it has seemed to date from just you know what gets out there and how things behave in the real world it has seemed to date that apple is incapable or unwilling to make siri actually fast and consistent and clearly it's possible because all their competitors have done it
Marco:
So really what I want from Siri more than anything, and this is true as somebody who – I regularly use a HomePod and an Amazon Echo, and the Amazon Echo responds to things much faster.
Marco:
The HomePod hears me better.
Marco:
The HomePod music sounds better.
Marco:
The HomePod also randomly butts into conversations a lot more that it thinks I hailed it and it didn't, and it's just slow when I ask it something.
Marco:
Even simple things like, hey, dingus, play, or hey, dingus, pause.
Marco:
It takes so long to respond that you question whether it is going to respond at all.
Marco:
And it hears me immediately.
Marco:
It ducks the volume down on the music.
Marco:
If I'm saying, hey, dingus, pause.
Marco:
It'll hear that immediately and duck the volume.
Marco:
And then, wait, wait, wait.
Marco:
And then it gets paused.
Marco:
and that's that's consistently almost every time like simple stuff like that is just not fast and it should be and and the competitors can do it quickly so apple needs to really prioritize siri quality and performance and consistency way more than they ever have before and so far we don't see any evidence that's actually happening so again i hope we're just not seeing it and it's just not out yet because what's out there now from them is not good enough
Casey:
Yeah, I'm – I don't know.
Casey:
It's so easy to bag on Siri that it's just – it's boring.
Casey:
It's boring to bag on Siri yet again.
Casey:
So instead, can I bag on Catalina?
Casey:
What now?
Casey:
Because I have another thing that I haven't yet publicly –
Casey:
shared and complained and whined about that i'd like to quickly throw out it'll only take a moment uh do you guys use smb shares at all this is like windows style shares perhaps with your synologies or perhaps with other laptops or computers in your in your world do you ever really use smb that's the default for all file sharing if you don't specify a protocol and don't say how you want to connect to like a file share it's smb by default since in a since a couple of versions ago and mac os
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Well, there you go.
Marco:
Yeah, I use it for my Synology archive share.
Casey:
Yeah, so I use it for my Synology.
Casey:
And anything is possible.
Casey:
The following could be true because of something weird on the Synology, although I find it hard to believe.
Casey:
Because I don't recall this ever being a problem with Mojave.
Casey:
That could be the summary of the last year of this show.
Casey:
I don't remember this being a problem in Mojave.
Casey:
Anyways, I have noticed that...
Casey:
On any situation wherein my computer, and this is true of my adorable or my iMac Pro, any situation where my computer loses the connection to the Synology.
Casey:
Now, maybe it's something completely reasonable, like I've closed the lid or it's suspended itself or something like that.
Casey:
You know, some way, somehow it's lost a connection.
Marco:
Your home kid has decided to turn it off.
Casey:
Or ElmKit has decided to turn it off too soon.
Casey:
Anyway, so when I come back, it will more often than not look like the Synology is still mounted.
Casey:
But when I go to actually drill into it in Finder, I see the following error.
Casey:
I see the operation can't be completed because the original item for, quote, in my case, archive, because that's what the root folder is, whatever your root folder is, can't be found.
Casey:
And if I go back in and try it again, it doesn't work.
Casey:
If I kill all Finder and try it again immediately, everything works, no problem.
Casey:
Oh, it's great.
Casey:
Everything's great.
Casey:
What do you mean?
Casey:
There's no problem.
Casey:
Nothing to see here.
Casey:
This is driving me frigging insane.
Casey:
Not to mention that my machine gun trackpad that I've been bemoaning for the last couple of months now...
Casey:
That seemed to be deeply exacerbated by a tremendous amount of network activity, specifically over a network share.
Casey:
So like going and downloading something from the internet, not that big a deal.
Casey:
Throwing a bunch of stuff on and off the Synology would just bring my machine to a screeching halt, and especially my trackpad.
Casey:
This is a rhetorical question or mostly rhetorical question.
Casey:
Has something happened with SMB in Catalina or something around SMB in Catalina?
Casey:
Because this is driving me frigging crazy and I just want it fixed.
Casey:
Please, please, Apple, please, you fix this for your pal Casey.
Casey:
That'd be great.
John:
There's been big complaints about Apple's SMB implementation for years and they have improved it a lot by grabbing more better open source SMB implementations for the client.
John:
On Synology, if you're not aware of this, there are a bunch of settings
John:
I don't know if it's on a per share basis or on the whole machine basis, but there are settings to tell the Synology what versions of SMB to support, what features to support.
John:
I don't know what the right settings are there, but over the years, I have slowly turned them all on, like maximum support all the things, support all the extensions, support the highest versions, because you can just say turn them all on.
John:
i haven't noticed any change in performance i wasn't having any problems before i'm not having any problems now but just fyi maybe if that will help solve your problem so you could try that um machine gun track but i thought i was i would totally subscribe to the theory that people would put out there's like a kernel contention thing with like the usb interface and some kernel lock like that totally made sense to me but now that you don't have that now that like your backup is somewhere else and you know like that that has been eliminated
John:
You're in a similar situation to what I am, which is you have a computer, it's connected over Ethernet to your Synology, and you copy big files back and forth.
John:
And I do that, and I don't have any of the problems you're saying.
John:
I don't have the unmounting problem or whatever that's going on there.
John:
I don't have the stuttering problem.
John:
Everything copies at the speed I expect it to copy, so I don't know what to tell you.
Casey:
To be fair, once I moved all backing up, like all network backups off of the iMac, so now it's being taken care of by the Mac Mini, I haven't had a machine gun trackpad in a while.
Casey:
It has gotten way, way, way better.
Casey:
And it is certainly possible.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's definitely not a Synology problem in the same way that I was saying that my machine gun trackpad is definitely a software problem.
Casey:
I could believe that it's a Synology issue.
Casey:
And
Casey:
If you are the kind of person that knows this stuff, that actually does this sort of thing for a living, and you would like to throw some ideas at me with regard to Synology settings or something like that, I'm all ears.
Casey:
If you're just someone who says, oh, it works for me, here's what I've got, it's okay.
Casey:
I appreciate it, but don't worry about it.
Casey:
But I would love to see this fixed.
Casey:
I don't have a feedback entry for radar, whatever it's called now, feedback assistant thing.
Casey:
I don't have one for this because I don't even know what to say.
Casey:
Like, and it's not, what I've got is not actionable.
Casey:
Like I don't have, I don't have any really good way to report this.
Casey:
But if someone from Apple would like to reach out to me, you know where to find me, I'm happy to do whatever you would like me to do.
Casey:
I'll cyst diagnose until your heart's content, if that's what it takes.
Casey:
But yeah, people are saying this is more of a finder problem.
Casey:
People are saying turn off AFP.
Casey:
I'll try that.
Casey:
I don't know if that's going to make a difference, but I'll try it.
Casey:
But yeah, if you know what this is about, please let me know because it's driving me crazy.
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Casey:
A couple of weeks ago, we had a post from Alan Odgard called Mac OS 1015, slow by design.
Casey:
John, do you want to tell us about this?
John:
First of all, that's the guy who made TextMate, right?
John:
Yes.
John:
Yeah, I thought I recognized the name.
John:
Anyway, it's a big post about slowness related to the design of Mac OS.
John:
He listed as a Mac OS 1015 Catalina issue.
John:
I'm not sure how much is new in Catalina versus what has been existing.
John:
But what it boils down to are...
John:
things that are slow because there's some kind of security check happening before the computer does the thing uh and you know this the in the thread that around the internet that have been discussing this people like oh if you turn off system integrity protection this goes away and then people like i don't want to turn off system integrity protection exists for a reason why should i have to disable all the security to get good performance and
John:
back and forth there's a bunch of stuff listed having to do with spawning a process and getting access to privileged file system locations and keychain access and the context api and and and app launch and all these other things um i thought what was and by the way there's another follow-up post by uh jeff johnson uh lab cat software talking about the same thing and how like
John:
Random shell scripts that you make are also now checked to see that they're malware essentially by contacting Apple's service and saying, hey, someone's about to run this shell script that they just wrote.
John:
Does this have the same signature as malware if it doesn't let it launch?
John:
But if it does launch it.
John:
And, you know, it only does it on the first try, and it caches the answer, and it's tricky to test because people are like, well, I just tried.
John:
I wrote a test.sh script, and it was fast every single time.
John:
I don't know what's wrong with your system.
John:
And it's like, well, you have to give the thing a different name every time and different contents.
John:
Otherwise, it short circuits, and it thinks it's the same as the previous script.
John:
And it's tricky to test when we don't really know the implementation, but...
John:
I thought it was an interesting story because, again, it's another security versus X trade-off, security versus convenience, security versus effectiveness, security versus performance.
John:
And this reminded me of a strain of performance issue.
John:
I always decided to do it with Unix because that's where I always see it, and it's the OS that I know the most about under the covers, but obviously it could be in any OS, where if you take an operating system
John:
that has some operation that is and has always been synchronous synchronous means uh you ask it to do a thing and then you sit there with your arms crossed waiting and saying okay are you done and then eventually it finishes and comes back and while you're waiting for it to do that thing all you can do is just sit there and wait right that's synchronous like asynchronous is you tell it to do a thing and then you go on with your day and then eventually at some point later in the day the thing goes back oh by the way the thing you told me to do i'm done with it now that's asynchronous right
John:
There are lots of synchronous operations in operating systems.
John:
In general, operations that are synchronous tend to be ones that the original designers expected to be very fast.
John:
Or there was no useful thing that you could be doing in this process while you're waiting for it anyway.
John:
So, you know, what's the point, right?
John:
An example of that, a lot of the file system APIs, like the Unix file system APIs, tend to be synchronous.
John:
Read from this file, write to that file, open that file, close to that file.
John:
Each one of those individual read, write, open, close calls.
John:
is synchronous in the unix file io api because like what are you going to do like if you're about to open a file you can't go to the next line where you're going to try to read from the file until you're done opening it so you're just going to wait until the operating system finishes opening it and then you get to your read and same thing i'm going to read from the file well you can't do anything with the contents until you get them so that read call is synchronous dumpty dumpty dum read and then you get your thing back and yes unix does have async io operations and everything like that but anyway there are a lot of synchronous apis
John:
If you take a synchronous API, no matter what it may be, reading from a file, reading from a network, anything that, you know, that has a synchronous API, and you decide because of, let's say, security or whatever, that you want to do something else there, like, ah, ah, ah, before you exec CVP whatever that file, I'm going to add a check that says, oh, before we let exec run...
John:
make sure it's not malware right and do it in a smart way like have a have a cache on locally on the system that we keep track of well i already checked that already it's totally not malware it's fine and make that check be really fast but the very first time you run a thing that we've never seen before we have to contact apple server and get the updated list of malware signatures and blah blah blah blah blah and then after we decide that it's okay we execute that synchronous thing
John:
And that is a formula for things that are terribly slow because everything that's built on top of that, that API, the whole big stack of software, all the way up to like the finder or whatever else you're doing expects that whole chain, that whole synchronous chain to execute quickly.
John:
It's a synchronous API.
John:
Like it's like, Oh yeah, it's synchronous, but it's always really fast.
John:
It's just, I'm trying to do a very simple operation and I can't do anything until it's done anyway.
Yeah.
John:
And if that took like, you know, 25 nanoseconds before and suddenly takes a second and a half, no application design can withstand that kind of inflation in the time taken for an operation.
John:
Like, oh, this entire thing was built around the expectation that this thing will take nanoseconds.
John:
Now it's taking a second?
John:
And we do a thousand of those operations when you like open a folder or, you know, do, you know, whatever, whatever it is you may be doing that will destroy your performance.
John:
Another great example of this.
John:
I always attribute to this.
John:
I'm not sure if it's entirely the case, but back in the day, the Finder had a WebDAV interface.
John:
This is like classic Mac OS.
John:
And I think Mac OS 10 did as well.
John:
And WebDAV basically made synchronous file IO live on top of HTTP.
John:
Like, you know, your program thought it was doing synchronous file I.O., but under the covers, all your I.O.
John:
operations were HTTP calls.
John:
And this was, like, the 90s when I was dealing with this.
John:
And so those were slow HTTP calls to slow servers across a slow internet connection.
John:
And it would destroy the finder.
John:
Like, you know, I don't think we even had beach balls back then.
John:
You know, the equivalent, the little watch cursor, the equivalent, it would just freeze.
John:
Like, because it would be doing something that should take, like, fractions of a second.
John:
And it would take two seconds because it's talking to, like...
John:
Some web server running on a 80 megahertz, you know, Sun 1U box in some university somewhere and it's taking forever.
John:
And it's just a shame to see that same, what I imagine to be that same pattern replaying itself here.
John:
Now, I endorse all these security features.
John:
I understand why they're there.
John:
There's not really a better way to do them because in the end, especially for security, you can't like, oh, we'll just add them on the async IO operations.
John:
A, because pretty much every part of the system uses synchronous ones most of the time.
John:
And B, if you only do it on one kind of file access, that's not much security because anything they wanted to get around it would just use...
John:
the other apis right and you can't do it asynchronously really because the whole point is you want to prevent them from running the malware you can't let them launch the malware and then a second and a half later say wait i just found out that's malware it's like too late you're right um so i feel for apple and i think they're mostly doing the right thing i understand how it can make it seem like mac quote unquote macs are slow because if you run it if i run it on another unix like i run on linux everything is fast there's no problem and you know linux has good security too and yada yada but
John:
I feel like Apple is hardening the Mac in the same way they've hardened the iPhone to survive in a very hostile environment, more hostile, let's say, than like a Linux server in a data center, which wants to have good security, wants to lock things down, but also doesn't have to run like...
John:
every app that a random person can throw at it and isn't subject to the whims of a just regular consumer or computer user who just wants to do whatever the hell they want.
John:
And, you know, it doesn't really have a, it's not, it's not a fixed workload.
John:
It needs to be a general purpose machine willing to withstand, withstand use by humans.
John:
Uh, and humans are inscrutable.
John:
So, uh,
John:
I'm not sure what the solution here is.
John:
Again, the reason it's related to the other one is like, well, if Apple's service that tells me whether it's malware was way faster or if it did a better job of caching the answers locally or, you know, like there are ways to help, you know, mitigate this to be even smarter, but mostly just to be faster.
John:
because i think the people who have like other people testing and say well you know it's slow the first time but it's not that slow it's like well maybe this person has a bad route to whatever host that they need to contact at apple right maybe their internet connection is flaky maybe there's maybe the their local server for this is slower than the one that you're in because you're in california right next to apple's headquarters and you go right to their i don't even know if they're in california but i assume they do anyway
John:
um there are lots of factors i can add into this it's kind of frustrating i can't say i've experienced it myself um i write plenty of shell scripts and pearl scripts and if catalina is checking them against their notarization server i have not noticed that delay because i'm not benchmarking them and it still seems to be fractions of a second but then i do have a good internet connection and i'm not specifically trying to thwart it uh so
John:
I'm not quite sure what the solution is here, except that this seems like another one of those things that we just may have to learn as a part of modern computing.
John:
That disabling system integrity protection is not the right answer for most people, and that having to check an unknown executable before it runs is just going to be a fact of life, again, except for any controlled scenario where you're
John:
running in a data center and the whole machine is locked down and you're not new arbitrary programs aren't arriving on it willy-nilly like in that case yeah you can just run whatever's there as fast as possible but in the general case uh kind of like having to contact a server to do sophisticated text-to-speech because the server you know and data center has better machine learning algorithms than your phone does or whatever or a larger data set in memory and
John:
The roles are all just probably facts of life.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Have you two experienced any of the slowness that is described in these articles or do you just not even know what's happening?
Marco:
I mean, I think for, I haven't noticed the like executable checking slowness.
Marco:
What I noticed is like what I was originally complaining about a few weeks ago when I think we should also prompted this blog post was like open save dialogues.
Marco:
Take a little, a few extra seconds to show up a lot of the time.
Marco:
And that just that makes the whole system feel slow to me.
Marco:
The actual like executable thing being talked about here, I don't think I've noticed it.
Marco:
The open save one doesn't seem like it would be a security thing, but you really don't know.
Marco:
Well.
Marco:
Well, it could be because I don't know too much about how the system is architected, but I think the trust daemon that runs in the background, I think it's TCC or one of those, one of the sandboxing things on macOS, one of the background processes that manages the whole thing, is called in reaction to open save dialogues to see if the app has access to whatever path is being opened or saved to.
Marco:
So that is probably related.
Marco:
Like I'm guessing it's, you know, it just, it feels like either it's that or it's something about iCloud that has changed.
John:
Oh yeah.
John:
The power box process, whatever it is, the power box thing that actually, it's like your app doesn't, I don't know if, I don't know under what circumstances that's used versus when it's not.
John:
But yeah, I remember when that was introduced, it was like, Hey, it used to be that when your app threw up an open save dialogue box,
John:
like your app would call into whatever framework, AppKit or Carbon or whatever, and that would put an open save dialog box on your screen and you would tell it how to configure it and then you'd get the result, right?
John:
But that would be, that would A, all happen inside your process and B, that would literally be a window in your program, like that if you wanted to, you could walk your own window list and you would find that window.
John:
But the security thing that they added many years ago was that's not even going to be your window.
John:
You're going to call the same API in AppKit or Carbon probably wasn't around by then, but
John:
you're going to call the same API to make an open save dialog box.
John:
And then what's going to happen is using XPC, we're going to tell some other demon on the system, Hey, this app wants an open save dialog box.
John:
And that demon is going to display the open save dialog box.
John:
If you did PS on it, or you did a process tree, you'd see that that window that's an open save dialog box doesn't even belong to your app.
John:
Like it's not even the parent process.
John:
The parent process is,
John:
you know whatever tcc thing or powerboxd or whatever the hell it's called and that would present the open save and that would run in a sandbox and be all locked down and only have the permissions that it's allowed to have based on what your app does and yada yada and you would the user would use that open save dialog box to find the file that it won and pick check off all the check boxes or whatever and then hit open or cancel and then it would return again through xpc back to your application oh here's what they did with the open save dialog box so in that scenario i can imagine like oh i'm trying to do xpc to the powerbox demon or whatever the hell and it's
John:
it's asleep or it's swapped out or there's a bug in it where it gets real confused about whether you have permission to do something or not, or it's talking to the lower layer, uh, you know, database to try to figure out if you have permissions.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I can see how that could slow things down, but I haven't, like I said, I haven't seen that one.
John:
So I don't, I don't know.
John:
Like it's, it's, this is the weird thing about Catalina.
John:
Uh,
John:
everyone has their own little variety of bugs i was just gonna say that like if this is a problem wouldn't it be happening to everybody but it's you know everyone doesn't have the same thing it's not like there's some systemic thing that all the open save dog boxes are super slow right i mean just you know here i'm bb at it now i hit commando and the window came up pretty much instantly like i don't know like it doesn't make any sense
John:
that's super weird that's and this by the way i mean i'm assuming i'm surprised that marco hasn't filed a feedback on that uh but i feel the same way as casey did when i think of these surprise these issues that i have that like i would feel bad filing it because it's you know because if you're a developer you know how your heart sinks when you get a report like this and it's like what am i supposed to do with this you had a weird thing happen once on your computer
John:
Like, great, thanks for telling me.
John:
That's not actionable.
John:
I don't know what to do with that.
John:
I suppose they would say, oh, file it anyway, because if we get 1,000 of those, then we'll know it's actually a problem.
John:
But I think the issue is that, A, most people don't know how to send a feedback at all.
John:
And B, the people who do are mostly programmers, and they feel the same way, and they intentionally self-censor by not sending them.
John:
And so Apple thinks that this is not a problem.
John:
But honestly, even if 1,000 people told them, hey, sometimes there's a delay,
John:
It's still unactionable.
John:
It's like, well, I don't know.
John:
What am I doing about that?
John:
I try to do it every time I hit commando.
John:
It works fine on my system.
John:
Works for me.
John:
Like, it's frustrating as a developer to try to not be able to reproduce it.
John:
I mean, you know, I suppose we could all do a sysdiagnose.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
I always wonder if that's just a Bitcoin miner.
John:
You ever think about that?
Yeah.
John:
i think it's just a deflection honestly it's like hey this didn't have a cyst diagnosis so i guess we can demand it and then probably close it a few you know a few weeks later when they don't do it i mean like especially with for a non-actionable problem you're like i don't know maybe if i can see like what kernel extensions they're running like and then like if you get a thousand of them and like all thousand of them are running like the the carbon black kernel extension be glad you don't know what that is uh then maybe you say aha that might be it uh but yeah
John:
sorry apple i don't i mean we want this to be fixed but we don't know how to help you help us help you and it isn't our job to fix it like it's theirs that's it's their product it's their job they have plenty of resources they should be able to fix themselves without us doing this diagnosis i do want them to know it exists hi apple this these things exist i just don't know how to help get them fixed again and not our job but i but i want them to be fixed as a user and so if i could help in that i would i just don't know how
Casey:
So, John, I hear that come around WWDC time, which is approaching, you're going to be getting yourself a sweet, sweet gaming MacBook Pro.
John:
This story has been in here for a while, and we kept avoiding it because it's a sketchy rumor, and it's old.
John:
But what prompted me to push it up in the show notes was...
John:
Quinn Nelson's video he did on it, YouTube video he did about it, which has a clickbaity title.
John:
But, you know, hey, it's YouTube.
John:
What can you do?
John:
Which is called Apple's Next Failure.
John:
And he talks about the prospects.
John:
He talks about the prospects of Apple making a gaming anything.
John:
Like the rumor is that they're going to announce high-end gaming MacBook or iMac.
John:
I love these rumors.
John:
They're like, it could be a laptop or an iMac.
John:
We're not sure.
John:
That's kind of broad.
John:
Right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is the quote.
John:
Apple plans to reduce high-end gaming computer at its Daniel W. Ducey developers conference.
John:
This is how old the story is when it's saying Apple plans to release 2020.
John:
I think this is pre-cancellation, pre-COVID, everything.
John:
according to a questionable and as yet unsubstantiated report from Taiwan's Economic Daily News.
John:
Details are slim, but the report claims the computer may be a large-screen laptop or an all-in-one desktop with a price tag of up to $5,000, suggesting that it could be either a MacBook Pro or an iMac Pro.
John:
This computer would supposedly be tailored toward esports, a.k.a.
John:
competitive video gaming.
John:
Right.
John:
So I think the reason everyone just ignored the story, aside from the sketchy sourcing and aside from the fact that can't even decide if it's going to be a laptop or a Mac, like I look at this and I think, look, if there's any shred of truth in here, I think what it would be is that Apple has computers in the pipeline that have less embarrassing GPUs in them.
John:
And you could imagine someone determining that and saying, aha, that must mean they're making a gaming thing because Apple usually uses fairly embarrassing GPUs.
John:
And now there's some model supposedly in some pipeline somewhere that's using like an actual good GPU.
John:
and it's expensive like the whole computer is expensive although obviously how the hell would they know that like anything with pricing is not probably not going to be in the parts supply chain anyway i can imagine a story spinning out of some piece of information that says basically like apple's using good gpus some of apple's gpus are actually pretty good like the uh the vega 64 when it was introduced in the iMac pro that's pretty good gpu for a computer that doesn't have cards and is an all-in-one right and
John:
Does it make it a gaming PC?
John:
No, not by any stretch of the imagination.
John:
And not to mention that the thing that makes a computer, like, tailored towards esports or competitive video gaming is its ability to play games that are played competitively, and no Macs really have that unless they boot into Windows.
John:
That's a whole other story.
John:
But that's what the video is about.
John:
Quinn's video about...
John:
at the prospect of apple making a gaming pc uh and you know i enjoyed watching it because he starts off saying like this is not going to happen apple doesn't get gaming it's you know here are all the reasons why this is a terrible idea and wouldn't work and he mostly gets most of those like it's
John:
it's fun when i watch his videos i forget the you know one of the things about being old is you forget that you're old and you you look at people and you're like that person's probably my age quinn is not my age he's like half my age i don't want to think about it but like i watch him do the video i'm like look there's a dude like he's yeah i'm a dude he's a dude we're practically the same age um but when when i see when he's talking about like
John:
mac and gaming and he's talking about stuff that's like practically feels like current events to me but literally happened to be like either before he was born or when he was a toddler it's clear that he wasn't actually there and it's like it's like the history effect of like if you weren't there and you just have to sort of research something for a video it's not always easy to get
John:
the straight story on things so at one point he says and I don't want to pick on Quinn because like this can happen for anybody if I had to do research on something that happened when my parents were kids I would get it wrong too and they would correct me right because if you weren't there it's hard to know but it's a quote that says the Mac was actually viewed as a viable alternative to Windows gaming PCs this is around the time of marathon
John:
that was never true no it's never been true like literally never you know mac fans of which i was you know we love marathon because like the mac finally has a good game a game that might make it might make pc people jealous because you don't have this game and this game is really good and there was the whole classic mac gaming scene where i'd argue there were tons of games that were really good and only on the mac
John:
But at no point was a Mac actually viewed as a viable alternative to Windows Gaming PC.
John:
Never, literally never.
John:
Even when the Mac, I would argue, had overall better games, like back in the DOS days, before games got good graphics, the Mac, I think, had a pretty good crop of games.
John:
It was never a viable alternative to gaming PCs.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's like the rose colored glasses of like, well, the Mac used to be a contender of games, but now not.
John:
It never was.
John:
And the reason it never was is mostly not having to do with hardware.
John:
And again, Quinn goes in the video back and forth between what's, you know, hardware isn't really the hard thing, except actually it is kind of hard.
John:
If you don't try to do it, you're going to have crappy hardware.
John:
Witness all the GPUs that Apple has in its computers now.
John:
But the real problem is, what games are you going to run on it?
John:
How are you going to get any software?
John:
You have to court game developers.
John:
You have to support gaming APIs.
John:
You have to compete with Microsoft, which has its own proprietary gaming API that works on Xbox and PCs but does not work on Macs.
John:
Or you can build a shim layer to it like they do in Linux, where there's this Linux front end that emulates DirectX or translates DirectX calls into whatever OpenGL thing that Linux supports.
John:
It's super complicated.
John:
And Quinn also goes into this video.
John:
I thought it's interesting.
John:
The fact that mobile gaming revenue is bigger than console and PC gaming combined.
John:
And, you know, in current days, he has stats from 2019.
John:
We all kind of know that intuitively.
John:
Like, yeah, most people play mobile games because, you know, most people are not quote unquote gamers.
John:
And what do people who aren't gamers play?
John:
Everybody plays games.
John:
Well, they just play mobile games.
John:
We call them casual games, right?
John:
But there are more of them than there are gamers, right?
John:
Mobile gaming marketing is really big.
John:
And unlike the console and PC, well, certainly unlike the PC gaming market, in the mobile market on Apple's platforms, Apple gets 30% of all those sales.
John:
Microsoft does not get 30% of all Windows game sales.
John:
They would love to get 30% of all Windows game sales.
John:
They do not.
John:
And I don't know what the cuts are for the console makers, but it's probably better than than PC game platforms.
John:
Right.
John:
And he also goes into, of course, Apple Arcade is another way for Apple to try to get money out of the gaming world.
John:
But none of those things have anything to do with what we think of as, quote unquote, real games, e-sports, competitive gaming, powerful GPUs.
John:
So I encourage you to check out this video.
John:
Other than disregarding the slightly rose-colored view of the past of the Mac, it's interesting to explore in an entertaining way.
John:
This video is always entertaining.
John:
What the possibilities are for a gaming Mac.
John:
I would love to see Apple rededicate itself to gaming.
John:
Stranger things have happened.
John:
Another thing that might have come up in Quinn's research and might have not made the cut for the video was that at one point in the fairly recent in this old man's memory...
John:
time frame was apple had a push into gaming they had a bunch of apis uh you know fancifully called sprockets input sprockets uh what was it like gaming sprockets like there was a bunch of libraries essentially for interacting with game controllers for drawing things on the screen apple had its own drawing a 3d drawing api called was a quick draw 3d rave i'm getting it screwed up we'll find links for the show notes
John:
But for a while, they had an actual team at Apple who was basically doing what, you know, the equivalent of what the team of Microsoft did in writing DirectX.
John:
We're going to make APIs for the Mac platform whose sole purpose is to write games.
John:
Even today, Apple has SpriteKit, arguably SceneKit, and there's always WWDC sessions about how to build a game.
John:
But in reality...
John:
When people build games, they build them on the big cross-platform engines like Unity or Unreal or whatever.
John:
They use DirectX.
John:
They use OpenGL.
John:
Apple no longer supports OpenGL.
John:
We'll probably remove it from the system sometime soon.
John:
Apple has Metal, which is great, but Metal only runs on Apple platforms and does not help you target consoles or Windows PCs.
John:
apple tends to ship weaker gpus the only machine apple sells with an upgradable gpu is this incredibly expensive monstrosity next to me which i thank you for apple but no one else is buying that computer so if apple decided you know like it did back in the the sprocket days if apple decided we're going to get hardcore into gaming boy they have an uphill road like i don't think they would do what they did
John:
with sprockets and say we're going to do it all ourselves and make proprietary stuff but that's just what they did with metal which granted you know just apple means mac ios apple tv ipad os what am i forgetting home pod i don't know okay it's metal is an important thing for apple metal is great metal is better than their poorly supported open gl was uh
John:
but nobody is writing games on top of metal uh you know big cross-platform games the good thing is that the engines support metal like unity and unreal can support metal and people can build their games on top of that which helps but it's still kind of an uphill battle and it's still very difficult to say like oh here's a game that was made for the pc and it uses direct x and it's available on the xbox and on windows
John:
How do we get that game on the Mac?
John:
It's like, well, reboot your Mac into Windows because there's no way in hell you need to run that on the Mac.
John:
If Apple developed its own DirectX translation layer for those games and found some way to run it, just like Valve did with its Linux gaming thing that I forgot the name of that is talked about in this video...
John:
that could kind of happen uh but boy it would take a hell it would take an effort let's put it this way it would take an effort bigger than their effort to rededicate themselves to the mac which we've talked about a lot on the show it's like oh the mac has been neglected let's have this big round table we hear you pro users you want better macs we're gonna make a better mac about four years from now we'll fix the keyboard and then also we'll eventually make a mac pro and john will buy it and it will be great and like
John:
That was a big effort, and it took them a long time, but they did it, right?
John:
It was like this thing they had neglected, and they announced they're going to rededicate themselves to it, and they have.
John:
We had a couple shows ago where we're like, hey, guess what?
John:
All the Macs are good now.
John:
Apple fulfilled its promise to rededicate itself to the Mac and fix the Mac line from being crappy to being good.
John:
Trying to make a quote-unquote gaming Mac and make Macs viable in the gaming world would take a much bigger effort than what they did for the Mac.
John:
And, you know, again, if mobile gaming is bigger than console and PC gaming combined and Apple already gets a 30% cut of that entire market on its platforms for the most part, boy, that'd be a tough sell inside Apple to say, we're going to dedicate even more resources than we did to the Mac resurgence.
John:
And what we're going to do, we're going to do it about gaming.
John:
The only thing that makes me, gives me a little twitch about this is like, well, Apple is doing a lot with AR.
John:
And yeah, there are uses for AR other than gaming.
John:
Maybe the primary uses are other than gaming.
John:
But they just bought a VR company.
John:
And, you know, at one point they were considering building a car.
John:
So it's really hard to count Apple out on anything.
John:
Obviously, I would love for them to rededicate themselves to gaming.
John:
I would love for them to finally get gaming to court game developers to do what Microsoft did.
John:
But I'm as big a Microsoft curmudgeon as anybody.
John:
But when Microsoft said we're going to get into the console gaming market...
John:
they did they did it they dedicated years and billions of dollars and they are now a player in that market and they learned how to deal with game developers and they learned how to make good games and learned how to buy and support good game companies hell they bought bungee out from under all us mac users even though they kind of you know split off after that anyway microsoft you're upset what year was when they when they bought bungee
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Just, you're not upset about that to this day.
Casey:
Not a bit too.
John:
Yeah.
John:
2000 or something.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Microsoft proves that it's possible.
John:
Like if, you know, again, Microsoft was already in gaming, but they decided to get into console gaming and they did it.
John:
It's possible.
John:
This is a thing you can do.
John:
And Apple certainly has enough money and talent to do it, but I'm not sure if the upside will ever, uh, you know, justify that kind of investment.
John:
So until then, I just have these sketchy rumors and a, uh, snazzy labs video to comfort me in the night.
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Okay, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And we begin this week with the weakest muscle, right?
Casey:
What type of view do you guys use in the Finder?
Casey:
I don't even know the names for these things.
Casey:
Generally speaking, I use just the list view, which is of the four boxes.
Casey:
It is the second one.
Casey:
occasionally and i find i typically do this when i'm digging through like tv stuff that's loaded into plex but i'm looking at the files on this analogy i'll use the um the thing that it looks like a cover flow icon but it's not cover flow it's um like the multi-pane view you know what i'm talking about which is the third of the four uh icon well no actually the color cover flow is literally go to the menu bar please casey you kill me with this you're killing john here
Casey:
first of all don't don't show the toolbar on the vineyard second of all go to the view menu please sorry as list or as uh you can tell how often i use the view menu anyway uh i use the list view uh which i should now from now on call the list view or the occasionally the columns view i pretty much never use the gallery view even when i'm looking at photos and i very rarely use the icons view that is my answer
Casey:
Marco, what do you use?
Casey:
And then, John, after that, you can tell us the correct answer, please.
Marco:
I use ListView for almost everything.
Casey:
You mean ListView?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I think the only time that I don't use ListView is when Finder forgets my preferences and resets it, but otherwise, ListView all the way.
John:
I like that Marco correctly called it ListView.
John:
I think we messed up Casey about making him look at the view menu, and I also don't go to the menu, but at some point in the past 16 years...
John:
mac os 10 put in that menu it says view and this is weird because it would be hard to find this in apple's human interface guidelines but the top items are as icons as list as columns and as gallery and the as is lowercase yeah are there any other places where a menu item appears as a lowercase letter like because because they're trying to it's trying to be a continuation it's trying as if the title is view as icons view as list view as columns and if you were doing that it'd be view and then lowercase as then icons i suppose it's weird
John:
Anyway, back in the day, I'm pretty sure the view menu said icon list, you know, it didn't have column.
John:
Anyway, so all this is to say, don't call it icons view, Casey.
John:
It's icon view.
Marco:
it's yeah it's it's weird that it's u.s list instead of u.s lists because yeah i don't like looking at this menu i'm closing this menu anyway um i mean honestly i i think it should be called view as hamburger because we we are taught that that icon that toggles it on is the hamburger icon right for hamburger menus so this should be hamburger view stop looking at the toolbar
John:
it's so it's so alien to me to think that people use the finder with the toolbar visible all the time and i banish as we know banish the toolbar entirely because i'm trying to recreate the finder of my youth and failing because the finder fights me every step of the way um i use primarily list view in a finder window that has no sidebar and no toolbar thank you very much it just has a title bar and then it has a little strip where it says how many items and how much space is available and then it has a bunch of columns that's it
John:
That's my main view.
John:
If you look at my Finder windows right now, they are all in ListView except for one.
John:
I used to be big on IconView back in the day, back when the Finder was spatial, and I could arrange my icons to look beautiful, and I could arrange my windows to look beautiful, and everything was just arranged just so, and it stayed that way literally forever and never moved.
John:
Then I use IconView a lot.
John:
And of course, I had less stuff on your computer because the hard drive was 10 megabytes or whatever the hell it was.
John:
Right.
John:
I have like a top level set of folders and then applications folders and there were subfolders for games and they all tiled beautifully and all my icons were arranged based on what was my favorites and how, you know, you know how people arrange their home screens on their phones now and all the obsession they have about getting their home scene set up just right and arranging them by color and putting the apps where they're in easy reach and your comment, you know, all that crap.
John:
That was how the Finder worked.
John:
This is the best way to explain to modern people why people would spend time arranging stuff in the Finder and getting custom icons from Icon Factory.
John:
This is all classic Mac OS, mind you, right?
John:
we would do it for the same reason people would arrange their home screens because you were looking at it every day and you wanted to make a nice little place and like springboard on your iphone it would remember you wouldn't turn on your phone one day and like everything's all scrambled up it's like oh like you would never arrange your home screen if that happened right so the mac os 10 finder has never really been nice in that way but the one window that i fight constantly to keep arranged in some way is the applications folder
John:
And the applications folder is in a specific position and proportion on my screen.
John:
I view it as icons so I can see my beautiful app icons.
John:
I don't bother trying to arrange them because that is way too much to ask on the Mac OS Finder.
John:
I just have them sorted by name, and that lets me not deal with that.
John:
And I adjust the grid size to be just so, so not too many names wrap too much, but they're not truncated either.
John:
And it's like my current one on my giant screen is...
John:
six icons across and 10 down right and that's my main icon view and there are other ones too i have a bunch of photos things that are an icon view with big previews at a very large size so i can see the thumbnails and all sorts of stuff like that like it varies but in general it's all list
Casey:
I'm glad we settled that.
Casey:
Stefan writes, as a long and loyal listener from Germany, I have a question.
Casey:
I love my 16-inch MacBook Pro, but I can't always protect the display from the curious little hands of other young family members.
Casey:
How do you clean your display?
Casey:
You know, I don't have a good answer for this, and I think, John, you have a bespoke cloth, or is that only for the super-duper-duper-duper fancy version of your display?
Yeah.
John:
it's not just for the super duper i did get the cloth i mean the the super duper one is like you can't use anything but the cloth but they all come with the cloth so i do have the cloth gotcha gotcha so my advice for cleaning displays like kids have their grimy hands on which i can totally relate to because our laptop screen looks like a disaster a because kids are pigs but b because the kids still pick the laptop they still pick the laptop up by the screen which is oh god it's so painful they don't know they don't know how to treat things nicely anyway um
John:
my suggestion and this is going to sound dumb and also slightly dangerous casey is just use water i don't use any cleaning solutions whatsoever water the good old universal solvent it will not cut grease as well as a any kind of cleaner or alcohol or anything will but at various times apple has more or less strangely suggested just use water eventually the finger grease will come off a mildly damp soft cloth that
John:
It seems like it's not even damp enough to do the job because if you make it real damp and then you try to rub and the fingerprint doesn't come out and you rub harder and then you squeeze out a drop of water and it slides down your screen into your keyboard, now you're Casey.
John:
Thanks a lot.
Casey:
A mildly – Tough crowd today.
Casey:
Tough crowd.
John:
A mildly damp soft cloth.
John:
And then you just have to go over the same spot lots of times.
John:
Rinse the grease off of it.
John:
Rinse the rag out again.
John:
Just plain water will actually get your screen clean unless your kids took a Sharpie to it or something.
John:
In which case, sorry about that.
John:
But just for finger grease, just plain water will do it.
John:
That's my advice.
John:
Not too much.
John:
Water, not too much.
John:
Mostly plants.
John:
That's my advice.
John:
As for my...
John:
My fancy screen, like my television, although this streak has ended, I think, for my TV, but like my television for many years, my Pro Display XDR screen has never been touched by human hands after coming from the factories.
John:
The front screen of my produce bag is where I've literally never been touched by him.
John:
I peeled off the big, gigantic, sticky, static thing that covers it, carefully peeled it off by the big handle and put it on my desk.
John:
And I've touched the side of the display and I've touched the stand and I've touched the bottom, but I have never touched the front and neither have any of my children.
John:
And for the longest time, my TV was like that because I raised my children to be terrified of going anywhere near the TV.
John:
It's like, ah, A, because I could fall on them and killed them, but B, also don't touch daddy's TV.
John:
pretty and that my tv screen has never been cleaned by anything right it unlike a crt it doesn't attract dust remember that was always a nightmare with crt it's like it would attract dust to them with like the static electricity or whatever the hell they charge right that doesn't happen with plasmas anyway so there's no dust on it right i've dusted the top and the sides and everything but i've never dusted the screen and there are no fingerprints on the screen recently i did find a smudge of something on the screen and i have to deal with that and i don't know where it came from
John:
Maybe some kid sneezed or who knows what the hell it was.
John:
So the streak is over for my TV after however many years.
John:
But as far as I'm aware, my Pro Display XDR has literally never been touched.
John:
If someone did touch it, I wouldn't use the soft cloth that came with it because that's packed away and pristine in the original packaging up in the attic somewhere.
John:
I would just get a soft, damp cloth and very gently slowly remove the finger grease using only water.
John:
And actually, I don't have to be that careful because if I make a big bead of water and it drips down, it would just land on my desk and not go into my keyboard.
Casey:
you didn't even give me a chance to finish i asked you a question then you decided to go on a monologue it's a tough crowd today guys tough crowd you can talk now what else do you have to say about oh thank you dad i would love to oh my god uh i have an extremely useful solution for this so i hope you're happy that you delayed me telling you a cup of water on your screen is that it no no
Casey:
You're the one who's saying to put water on the screen.
Casey:
Just a little bit.
Casey:
Here's what you need to do.
Casey:
You need to buy yourself a Volvo XC90.
Casey:
And when you buy that Volvo XC90, it comes with this absurdly overpriced microfiber cleaning cloth, which you can actually buy on Amazon for $17.
Casey:
And that works just delightfully.
Casey:
And so if I ever decide I need to clean the screen, I just use that.
Marco:
Yeah, my solution is almost as bad as Casey's.
Marco:
I just, yeah, microfiber cloths are amazing.
Marco:
Usually, you don't even need any liquid.
Marco:
If you can just rub it gently with a microfiber cloth for five seconds, you can get almost anything off of the screen.
Marco:
In the rare cases that you got some real sticky sneeze blob on there or something that you really need help with,
Marco:
A very, as John said, very slightly damp microfiber cloth can get off pretty much anything.
Marco:
If you need to go past that, which you probably don't, but if you need to go past that, there are a whole bunch of various solutions sold by office stores and Amazon of screen cleaning spray or something like that.
Marco:
Screen cleaning wipes are a thing.
Marco:
I've used those before in the past.
Marco:
They seem fine.
Marco:
uh that being said i'm a little concerned that like you don't you don't really know what the chemical is they're using it might be harmful to your screen's coating it might not it's kind of you're kind of you know rolling the dice with that so it's not a great solution to rely on most of the time especially you know modern days back in the olden days when it was just like you know a basic you know matte plastic covering or a basic piece of glass it was easier to recommend some kind of like spray solution and
Marco:
but nowadays the screens have so many like specialty coatings on them to reduce glare and stuff like that, that you don't really know what's going to damage that coating and what's not.
Marco:
So ideally trying to use chemicals and try to just stick with microfiber cloths and water basically.
Marco:
And that gets almost anything out.
John:
The reason people always suggest microfiber is they don't want you to scratch it, and you would think that if you use something like, say, a paper towel or a tissue, it's like, oh, that's not going to scratch it.
Marco:
Oh, don't do that.
Marco:
No, don't do that.
John:
Right, because people think, oh, it's a paper towel.
John:
Look how soft it is.
John:
I can squish it up in my hand or whatever, but lots of paper products, unbeknownst to you, have tiny abrasive things in them, which is why people say microfiber.
John:
Now, all that said, it doesn't have to be a beautiful, bespoke microfiber.
John:
There are lots of sort of soft-cleaning cloths.
John:
There are like the velvety ones that you use for camera lenses or whatever.
John:
All you're looking for is
John:
Not a textile that has abrasive elements in it.
John:
I don't know what it is that's abrasive, but little pieces of paper pulp or whatever the hell it is.
John:
Something like, don't judge soft.
John:
What I'm saying is don't judge softness by like, I feel it in my hand and it feels soft.
John:
That's not a great way to judge softness.
John:
mostly you'll probably be okay because especially with apple's glass things you're not going to scratch it you're not even going to scratch the oleophobic coating probably with like a a soft tissue that's damp or whatever but if you're going to be there like rubbing away at some greasy fingerprint get a screen cleaning cloth um and the thing about screen cleaning cloths is they don't last infinitely they will slowly fill with finger spoo like it's just the nature like if you're getting it off your screen where do you think it's going
John:
When you throw something away, it wears away.
John:
It's going on the cloth.
John:
So you do have to actually wash those cloths to clean them or get a new cloth at a certain point, too.
John:
That's another thing to keep in mind if you have a seriously gross screen situation.
Casey:
Finally, Peter wants to know, do you use any tools to protect your kids on the Internet?
Casey:
For example, to restrict searches they can do on Google or YouTube.
Casey:
I know about YouTube Safe Search and Cloudflare's DNS for families, but I was wondering if there are tools for Apple Mail or iMessage.
Casey:
I don't really have to worry about this yet because my kids are way too little.
Casey:
So I'm going to get out of the way and let's start with the younger kids.
Casey:
Marco, what do you do?
Marco:
pretty simple really we don't do much yet we have the parental controls on our kids ipad enabled but that's mostly just for the screen time limits of like limiting what hours in which it can be used and you know total time and everything other than that
Marco:
The thing is, it's hard to use technological measures to really 100% restrict what your kids can see online.
Marco:
Because not only do most of the measures not actually work 100%, and not only do kids find ways around them way more than you might think and spread those ways amongst themselves, they're smarter than you think and they figure it out.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
It's kind of a game of whack-a-mole.
Marco:
You never really can get it all.
Marco:
You're never going to protect your kids from seeing something that is adult or inappropriate in nature if they're looking for that.
Marco:
So there's really no, in my opinion, there's no substitute for just parenting, of just monitoring what they're doing, of like...
Marco:
periodically going over and looking at what they're watching or what they're browsing or whatever and talking to them about like, Hey, here's the kind of thing you might run into if you, you know, go looking for it or whatever, or like, you know, tell them actual risks.
Marco:
As you can say, like, you know, there's some stuff out there that isn't appropriate for kids.
Marco:
Like if they're, if they're super young, you know, you don't have to be, you know, gory and detailed about it, but you can just say like, you know, Pete, you might find things of people swearing or, you know, other stuff.
Marco:
God knows what else they might find.
Um,
Marco:
I think you just have to have some idea what your kid is actually looking at, and that's by simply being there and monitoring what they're looking at.
Marco:
And when I say monitoring, I'm not talking about looking through their search history or installing some kind of creepy proxy.
Marco:
I'm saying actually walk into the room and just...
Marco:
Check on them.
Marco:
You should have some idea the kinds of stuff they're watching or consuming or looking at online.
Marco:
I think that's just basic modern parenting.
Marco:
And that's going to be better than any kind of technological barrier you put in place, which is mostly just going to be a thing that's going to annoy them when they try to do something legitimate and they're going to try to get around.
Marco:
And then just as much as you can, prepare your children for the realities of what's in the world, and that takes various forms.
Marco:
It's up to you what that means to you, but the world is a big place with a lot of stuff going on, a lot of stuff on the internet, and it's out there.
Marco:
They're going to run into it, so if you can prepare them for how to deal with it when they do run into it, I think you'll be better off than trying to prevent it from ever happening.
John:
Every parent can kind of draw their own line of how much of their kids' privacy they want to invade versus safety.
John:
But I will just say that looking at a very young kid's search history is hilarious.
John:
Because they'll type in how to fly, how to fly person, how person fly.
John:
Once they learn how to write, they'll search for the most ridiculous things and they will not give up.
John:
Because they won't get the results they expect because they don't know how to formulate search queries or because they're asking a really weird question and they'll just keep trying.
John:
It's awesome.
John:
Anyway, when my kids were younger, most of the major things they're going to be interested in, the OS itself, the YouTube app, Safari, whatever things that they're using, most of those have
John:
some kind of extremely weak sort of advisory level uh restrictions and i've always used those just because i'm not trying to stop my kids from things they're seeking out what i'm trying to do is may reduce the possibility that you know unintentionally they will run across something so you know if there's an age restriction on like music or youtube says restrict content or you know
John:
it's 20 settings like the os has one as well restrict content for under 17 or eight you know just turn all that stuff on because practically speaking my experience has been it doesn't stop the kids from getting like they don't even know it's on it doesn't stop them from getting to anything that they want to get to it also doesn't stop them from seeking out things that they shouldn't be seeing anyway but what it does stop them from is like they're looking for you know daniel tiger and they end up with like
John:
something entirely different because of some unfortunate coincidence of search terms those features are ubiquitous and you should totally use them in fact even though my kids are both teens now i still have those you know restrict to 17 plus settings on on basically everything uh because a well a they're not 17 not that i really care about those age things but b it doesn't stop them from seeing anything really like
John:
I watch rated R movies with them when I think they're appropriate but I rent those myself and they can get to anything on YouTube they want to anyway.
John:
I'm not actually stopping them if they really want to seek out something that's quote unquote not age appropriate.
John:
They're totally going to get to it.
John:
But I feel like kind of like how I pay for whatever this service that takes the ads off YouTube.
John:
I'm just trying to make the sort of default
John:
the i'm trying to make the neutral game god i keep doing destiny things you guys don't understand anyway i'm trying to make the default environment try to try to give them a better neutral game trying to make the default environment without any super oh it's not even working anyway i'm trying to make it uh so that if they just act normally then everything will be normal and they won't suddenly have like you know animal mutilation or porn thrown in their face um
John:
If any of them come to me and say, I've got to see something for school and this is restricted, I'll just turn it off.
John:
Like, I don't, you know, I don't care.
John:
You know, they're old enough now.
John:
But I think that that really helped.
John:
It really helped me not have to be over their shoulder every second because a kid with unrestricted access to the Internet is going to land on things that they didn't want to see by accident.
John:
And like I said, most of the things like YouTube and Apple's OS and
John:
things that let you buy and see apps and buy and see TV shows or whatever.
John:
Those restrictions and age ratings, they work really well, especially for younger kids to just cut out most of the stuff that's egregious.
John:
So that's what I suggest.
John:
And what it requires is everything that your kids are going to be using, like if you use parental controls only if you use three apps or whatever, you have to look in every single one of those apps.
John:
Find out, does this service have parental controls?
John:
How does it work?
John:
Can I make an account for my kid?
John:
Is it a sub-account of mine?
John:
How do I put restrictions on them?
John:
How do...
John:
you know, Apple's good about this.
John:
You know, you can make it so your kids account, put it, make, make a family, you know, the Apple family thing and make your kids, your kids in that family and make them have to ask you for approval to quote unquote, buy applications, even free ones.
John:
And then you'll always know every single app they download because you'll get a notification on your phone that says, you know,
John:
little timmy wants to buy uh this app approve or reject and you can look at the app in the app store and it's going to be something you know if it turns out that's one of those exploitive free-to-play games that's a perfect opportunity to go talk to little timmy about how this thing works and they might still want it anyway and you might be able to give it to them and then you get a notification five minutes later that says little timmy wants to do an in-app purchase for 500 coins or something inside the game and then you can have a
John:
Those are the type of tools I'm talking about here.
John:
They're not stopping anything.
John:
They're facilitating a dialogue and sort of filtering out the worst of the worst.
John:
But you do have to, like Margo said, still be engaged.
John:
As your kids get older, they're going to seek out things that they're quote unquote not supposed to see.
John:
I'm not sure everyone remembers, but we were all kids once too.
John:
Like that's what kids do.
John:
I don't think there's any avoiding that.
John:
I don't think it's healthy to avoid that.
John:
Hopefully by that point you have done well enough in raising your child that like things aren't going to go totally off the rails.
John:
Uh, sometimes it's out of your control.
John:
We're all doing the best we can.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Tom Bin.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
John:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
Tech.
John:
Podcast.
John:
So long.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Please leave me alone.
Casey:
I do not have time.
Casey:
Why are you so mean?
John:
How many times have we talked about this?
John:
Do not edit text in web text fields.
John:
Never edit text in web text fields.
John:
Like, I don't know how long you have to, like, what is it going to take for people to learn that?
Marco:
Never.
Marco:
Especially a web text field with no features, like something I've built.
John:
It doesn't matter how many features it has.
John:
It's just, like, it's just not a thing that you ever do.
John:
Like, because I've been burned by that so many times.
John:
So many, like, web BBSs.
John:
You'd write in an awesome post, and then you'd, like, accidentally close the tab, or the thing would crash, or, you know, like, it's just, you know, it would be gone.
John:
And you'd be like, oh, I have to write that again.
John:
And it was right there.
John:
And I couldn't search all RAM because of stupid protected memory.
John:
This is awful.