The Faceless Knob
Casey:
are we recording everyone i am is your computer maybe that's what we should be asking oh yeah so what is the latest with that actually because you were kicking around doing some sort of like external recording as well weren't you or am i making this up i am actually doing that right now so i learned through some experimentation that the
Marco:
The latency that I hear with using something like the Sound Devices Mix Pre line, which I measured to be something like 3.2 milliseconds of input latency to the headphone jack, that is relative to the sample rate, which makes sense.
Marco:
Whatever the ADC that's going on there, and then back through the DAC after the routing and stuff, whatever is happening on inside there,
Marco:
it takes some number of samples of the sampled audio.
Marco:
And if you run at a higher sample rate, so I usually run my stuff at 44.1 kilohertz, but if you run it at 192, it shrinks it down quite a bit.
Marco:
It seems to be a fixed number of samples, so if you just run the sample rate really high, then it will take less time.
Marco:
So I did learn that I am fine with the way all these things sound at 192.
Marco:
Unfortunately, I don't want to run my interface at 182 because that involves like making absolutely massive files and my entire processing pipeline afterwards, all my templates for logic and everything, the final output file, it's 44.1.
Marco:
So that's not a great solution.
Marco:
So what I've come upon is, you know what?
Marco:
I love the way I sound for my USB Pre 2.
Marco:
I'm going to keep using it.
Marco:
What I have is this little Zoom F3, which is a little tiny recorder.
Marco:
Right now I am running through it and using my headphones through it at 192 kilohertz.
Marco:
So it sounds like almost no latency.
Marco:
If there is audible latency at 182, I can't hear it through this Zoom F3.
Marco:
Whereas I could hear it at 44.1.
Marco:
So anyway, so I'm running the output of the USB pre, which is what my computer is recording from.
Marco:
So my computer is getting 44.1.
Marco:
And I'm running the output of that into the Zoom and using the headphone monitoring on the Zoom.
Marco:
That's a temporary solution until I get my full-time solution, which is going to be either using the headphone outs on the USB Pre 2.
Marco:
Currently, I'm in separated left and right mode so that I'm on track 1 and you are on track 2.
Marco:
But my eventual goal here is going to be to either split my microphone into two before it even goes into the input and run one of my microphone's input branches into a recorder and the other one into the USB Pre 2 and then just listen to that straight.
Marco:
Or I'm going to take the output of the USB Pre 2, which is separated left and right for recording, split that, put the separated version into the recorder and take the other branch, run it into a mono summer to re-monoize it.
Marco:
And then listen to that through my headphone amp.
Marco:
So these things are in progress.
Marco:
I'm waiting on some of these parts to arrive from Amazon over the next couple of days.
Marco:
But that's what I'm doing right now.
Casey:
Can I give you an alternative approach?
Casey:
You could just learn to get used to the MixPre 3 latency, which is what I did.
Casey:
Because I did notice, like this is one of those times where I...
Casey:
I really want to say, oh, Marco, you are so silly.
Casey:
This is not a thing.
Casey:
It's not real.
Casey:
No, it's real.
Casey:
It definitely is a thing.
Marco:
I'm so happy to hear you say that.
Marco:
Honestly, no one else has ever admitted this.
Marco:
Everyone else is like, you can't possibly hear three milliseconds of latency.
Marco:
I hear it.
Marco:
It sounds different.
Marco:
Trust me.
Casey:
No, it's just barely noticeable, but it's enough that it's annoying.
Casey:
And eventually, over literally months, because it took a while, I did get used to it.
Casey:
Now I'm sure it would come roaring back if I plugged the MixPre 2 in again.
Casey:
But since I'm used to it, since I've got like two years of the Pre 3 in, I don't really notice it anymore.
Casey:
And that would be a much simpler solution to your problem, is to just get used to this latency.
Marco:
By far and away, you are correct.
Marco:
That is the absolute right answer is for me to just suck it up and just use one of these modern interfaces that has built-in recording, like the sound devices MixPreline or like the Zoom F3 that I literally just bought.
Marco:
It's sitting like it is an awesome interface.
Marco:
I could totally do that with that.
Marco:
That is the right answer.
Marco:
I don't want to do it.
Marco:
I want to use my USB Pre 2.
Marco:
I like the USB Pre 2 both for its totally analogness of the input path to the headphones.
Marco:
I also like the way its limiters sound and work better than any other limiters that I've found.
Marco:
So I just like it better.
Marco:
And because I have the ability to be a picky jerk with this, I'm going to be.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
In just a few moments during follow up, I will be telling you all the dumb ideas I have that are genuinely the incorrect answer, but I don't care.
Casey:
It's what I think I want to do.
Casey:
We'll talk about that in a minute.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And what I said was the only thing you really have to, you know, potentially worry about for residue that's left by apps are, I kept saying things that are in launch services, but I think I had launch services on the brain because it had been mentioned earlier in the episode and I said it a bunch of times and I just wanted to clarify.
John:
What you're looking for are things that are run by LaunchD.
John:
LaunchD is, if you're familiar with Unix, it's kind of like a,
John:
A replacement for the init process, and it's kind of like xinetd if you're an old-school Unix user.
John:
If you don't know what any of those things are, basically it also replaces cron, kind of, but not really, because cron is still there.
John:
It will run programs for you...
John:
either according to a schedule or on demand.
John:
And so applications can add their own things to LaunchD.
John:
You can make a LaunchAgent or a LaunchDemon.
John:
These distinctions don't really matter that much, but it's a thing.
John:
It's basically like a plist that they put in there that has rules to say, hey, when someone connects to port 123, launch my program, or at 12 a.m.
John:
every day, run this script or whatever.
John:
You can really put anything you want there.
John:
It's very flexible.
John:
I think you can even...
John:
run things in response to devices being connected or maybe even volumes being mounted.
John:
LaunchD does tons of stuff, right?
John:
But the point is, if an application has an installer or if it prompts you to install something or whatever, it's possible that an application may add something to like a job or multiple jobs to LaunchD and lots of applications do this.
John:
So when you throw your application in the trash, you don't care about like, oh, it left a preferences file around.
John:
I don't want that preference file.
John:
And even if you're Marco and can't stand the two kilobytes that's taking on your disk or four because that's the minimum block size or whatever, it's not that big a deal.
John:
And by the way, I would argue that it's good to leave the preferences file around because if you ever reinstall that program, it will remember your preferences from the last time you had it installed.
John:
And if assuming it can still read that preference file format, it's nice to not lose your preferences, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So stuff like that, you don't really care too much about.
John:
Or cache files, those will get cleaned out eventually too.
John:
But if the application left a job, like a job that's run by LaunchD around, lots of weird things could happen.
John:
So first, it could be that that LaunchD job referenced an executable inside the app bundle, but you threw out the app bundle.
John:
But the LaunchD job is still there.
John:
And every once in a while, LaunchD is like, oh, I got to run this thing.
John:
And it tries to run it.
John:
It's like, oh, I couldn't run it.
John:
I couldn't find the executable because it's looking for like slash application slash my cool app.
John:
dot app slash whatever blah blah and it's not there that's not that big of a deal but like every single day or every 10 minutes or every one hour or every time something tries to connect to a particular port this job is trying to run and getting an error that's kind of silly the other thing you could do is it could put an executable somewhere you it could have like on first launch su2 authenticated and it shoved the file into user local bin that's some daemon process or whatever and then it has a launch d job that runs that daemon process in response to something happening or maybe just runs it on a schedule maybe just tries to keep it running all the time
John:
And you uninstalled the application, but now a piece of that application is still running somewhere.
John:
And hopefully that piece of the application running isn't that big of a deal.
John:
But if you were to look an activity monitor or look at one of these tools, lets you look at launch team jobs, you'd be like, what is this?
John:
I deleted this application and yet some piece of this application is still either running or trying to run on my computer.
John:
And as harmless as it might be, if you don't ever, if that happens too much,
John:
You could end up with like, you know, dozens of these things sort of running in the background on your computer doing nothing.
John:
And I can tell you from practice of having done this, because I install a lot of software and I delete a lot of software, it's not usually the cause of any problems.
John:
Usually they just try to run and fail or run and just do nothing.
John:
They don't usually take up a lot of memory.
John:
Failing to run is not that big of a deal.
John:
You probably won't notice it.
John:
But if there's any category of cruft that you might want to look into, it would be things run by LaunchD because that can be an actual real running thing on your computer that serves no purpose after the application has gone.
John:
few applications do this the ones that do it are probably big names that you already know and they have their own uninstallers for example adobe runs tons of crap like that microsoft runs tons of crap but adobe has its own installer and uninstaller uh and microsoft i think they have a good uninstaller that gets rid of stuff like that so i wouldn't go around saying like i'm gonna delete all the i know marco probably does this but
John:
I'm going to delete all the processes that I don't like from Adobe.
John:
I sure do.
John:
There'll be no negative consequences for that.
John:
And then like their Adobe programs crash or do something weird.
Marco:
It's like, well, wait, in my defense, Adobe programs always crash into something weird.
John:
Well, I mean, what I'm saying is like, if you're going to use an Adobe program, just let it run what it wants to run.
John:
And if you're not going to use it, uninstall it.
John:
And especially with Adobe subscription model, they make it pretty easy to be like, if you just, you know,
John:
if an adobe program is annoying to you install it use it for a week uninstall it right you can pay for it for a month or whatever for 30 bucks and then uninstall it when you're done with it it's one of the advantages of the subscription model you don't have to sort of keep a copy of the program around or keep it installed uh and you can even you know creative cloud always wants to run you don't have to let that run take it out of your startup items quit it they don't make it easy to do this but if you launch creative cloud hit command q it'll be like are you sure you want to quit creative cloud yes you're sure um
John:
But how will you collaborate with all of your behancements?
John:
It's not like a lot of updaters don't run.
John:
I think that stuff still all runs in the background.
John:
It doesn't on my computer.
John:
I guess this is a good place to recommend a LaunchD.
John:
Like I said, I don't use these cleaner apps, but I do have an application that lets me look at jobs that are running in LaunchD.
John:
uh and every once in a while i would look at that list of jobs and be like is there anything here that i know is associated with an application that i no longer use that i can delete and the good thing about the launch d tools is you can just disable the job you don't have to delete it you can just say let me just turn it off and see if anything breaks and if you turn it off and nothing breaks and you're sure it's associated with something you uninstalled then you can delete the job so i'll find a link for the show notes for uh
John:
Launch control, which is my preferred application for doing stuff like that.
John:
Warning, if you use launch control, you can totally screw up your computer.
John:
Sometimes things that run as launch agents and launch demons are important for the operation of your system.
John:
If you don't know what it is, don't blindly delete it.
John:
You'll be sad.
Casey:
Moving right along, I have a few quick notes about my Ethernet project.
Casey:
There's been no real motion.
Casey:
There's been a lot of thinking about it, and we might talk about that a little bit later, but there's been no real motion.
Casey:
However, I did get a lot of feedback that I wanted to quickly point out.
Casey:
First of all, a lot of people, a lot, a lot of people recommended the Monoprice Slim Cat 6A patch cables.
Casey:
I don't have much to say about this other than if you're looking for an Ethernet patch cable.
Casey:
Apparently, this is where you need to go because a lot, a lot of people recommended it.
Casey:
Secondly, Jonathan Litt reminded me that fire stops may be a thing.
Casey:
So if you're going down a wall on the interior, I don't recall exactly when this happened.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But at least here in the States, at some point, 10, 20 years ago, they started putting horizontal pieces of wood in between the vertical studs in your wall.
Casey:
And my very limited understanding about this is that it's in order to prevent fires from spreading or something along those lines.
Casey:
honestly it's okay if i've got that slightly wrong but nevertheless um that can be a thing so if you're coming up from the floor you know going up or maybe not the floor but going up from like a box toward the ceiling or perhaps down from the ceiling to uh toward the bottom of the wall where the box will be that your ethernet drop will be a lot of times what you'll need is like a four foot long drill bit that's bendy so you can drill a hole through this fire stop
Casey:
Now, what nobody ever mentions is, you know, whether you should plug that hole or try to put like caulk in that hole or anything.
Casey:
Inside a wall?
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I guess not.
Casey:
I guess people just say, well, I guess this is where the fire is going to go.
John:
Your wall is usually not even any insulation anyway.
John:
So it's just an empty cavity.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
That's true.
John:
I will point out that regardless of when this code is for the fire stop things.
John:
if you have an older house, what you may have like many stud bays in my house is sort of like a little X, like cross bracing of two like smaller pieces of wood and little X's up the wall.
John:
I'm not sure what the purpose was, I guess maybe for stability or like structural stability, but they don't, it's like they're thinner than an entire stud.
John:
So it's not, it's not, you know, you could in theory fish the thing around the little X, but it's going to mess you up.
John:
Like there is a way to get the wire around and through the little X, but yeah,
John:
Since you can't see it and it's way down in the middle of the wall, if you have a very old house, you may also find interesting things inside the stud base.
Casey:
Or razors.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
But anyway, so fire stops might be a thing.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure that my house built in the late 90s, it does not have fire stops.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I will say that in the neighborhood...
Casey:
There's a really genuinely crummy thing about a year and a half ago, something like that.
Casey:
A house got struck by lightning and almost burnt down like it was in car terms.
Casey:
It was pretty well totaled and like the top floor was absolutely destroyed and the bottom floor was not in good shape.
Casey:
And they've been rebuilding it over the last year and a half very slowly, much to my surprise.
Casey:
Thankfully, the family was not in the house when when it.
Casey:
caught on fire.
Casey:
They were actually on vacation, which is a crummy way to come home, but it's better than the alternative, I suppose.
Casey:
Anyways, I was looking as I was occasionally, you know, go on a long walk for exercise.
Casey:
And as I was walking by recently, I thought, wait, I should see if that house has fire stops, which obviously isn't apples to apples.
Casey:
But you would think if it doesn't have fire stops, then mine certainly shouldn't either.
Casey:
And it did not have fire stops from what I could tell.
Casey:
So I don't think that'll be a problem for me, but famous last words.
Casey:
We'll never know.
Casey:
Maybe we'll find out.
Casey:
Also, this is only tangentially related, but shoot, I think it was Daniel Nelson that pointed this out to me.
Casey:
I might have that attribution wrong.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
But somebody pointed out that there are what I'm going to call power over Ethernet Medusa cables.
Casey:
That is not a technical term.
Casey:
But what these things can do is, let's say you have power over Ethernet.
Casey:
So you have an Ethernet line that also carries power.
Casey:
Well, there's these little dongles that you plug your Ethernet cord, your RJ45 jack, into this little dongle.
Casey:
And then out of the dongle comes not only Ethernet, but now only data, but power in a different form.
Casey:
So for example...
Casey:
you could get one that has Ethernet and USB-C coming out the other end.
Casey:
So you plug Ethernet, power over Ethernet, you know, powered Ethernet, you know what I mean, into the dongle.
Casey:
Coming out of the dongle is regular Ethernet RJ45 and empowered USB-C connection.
Casey:
So for like an Eero, for example, even though Eeros don't support power over Ethernet, you can get one of these $15 dongles and then plug power over Ethernet into the dongle, dongle into the Eero in both the RJ45 slot and the USB-C slot, and suddenly you've got a POE Eero.
Casey:
Obviously, there's a lot of complications here that I'm kind of glossing over, but I had no idea these were a thing, and I think this is super cool.
Casey:
And they have it for USB-C connections, for barrel pins, or whatever they're called, you know, the not coaxial, but kind of coaxial-looking things.
Marco:
Yeah, DC barrel plugs.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
There are apparently lots of these.
Casey:
I had no idea this was a thing.
Casey:
I don't have PoE in the house right now.
Casey:
Maybe we will.
Casey:
Maybe we won't.
Casey:
But I thought this was super neat and something I kind of wish I was aware of just in principle.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe you two knew about this.
Marco:
Not only did I know about it, I actually almost bought these last summer because they're very commonly used to do things like power security cameras.
Marco:
If you have a camera that's not PoE, but you happen to have Ethernet running around in various places, you can branch off one of these power plugs and plug in a USB camera or something like that.
Marco:
Actually, I think I might have even bought one.
Marco:
I might have it behind me.
Marco:
I'm not going to look now.
Marco:
But yeah, I actually might already own one of these.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, again, nothing that really helps me right now.
Casey:
But if I were in the listener's shoes, I would want to know that this is a thing because I didn't know.
Casey:
So now you know.
Casey:
And then finally, if we have interest in this, let's leave it for the after show.
Casey:
But my scope creep is a creepin'.
Casey:
And I've started to convince myself that maybe I should put fiber in the walls.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Casey:
No, but there's reasons behind it.
Casey:
There's reasons behind this.
John:
If he never actually does this project, in his head it can be as complicated as he wants.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
This is exactly right.
Casey:
So anyway, I genuinely – I have no problem talking about this.
Casey:
I don't think now is the right moment to talk about it.
Casey:
So if you two have interest, I am happy to bring this up in the after show.
Casey:
But I –
Casey:
If you have run Fiber in any capacity and have experience with it and would like to reach out to me, please let me know.
Casey:
I would love to hear your experience.
Marco:
So you were complaining about the cost and complexity of running Ethernet in the wall.
Marco:
Now, imagine something that's, I would assume, probably more expensive per foot.
Marco:
And most likely... No, not really.
Marco:
Oh, really?
Marco:
Well, anyway, it's at least... It's surprisingly cheap.
Marco:
It's at least most likely more delicate and harder to work with.
Marco:
Definitely.
Marco:
You probably can't just cut it to whatever length you need.
Marco:
I bet there's a process there.
Marco:
Yeah, the bend radius limits.
Marco:
Yep, yep.
Marco:
I would imagine this is not going to make your project simpler.
Marco:
Well, you're probably right.
Marco:
And also, why...
Casey:
Well, and again, I'm happy to talk about this.
Casey:
Let's put it in the parking lot, Marco.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Because I have reasons, and they may or may not make sense, but I've convinced myself they do, and we can talk about it in the after show if we remember.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am having bad thoughts.
Casey:
Yes, you are.
Casey:
Let me just interject my favorite story in the world, which I've told on this podcast a hundred times.
Casey:
When we bought the house in 2008, I was overjoyed to switch from Comcast to Fios.
Casey:
And at the time, I was overjoyed to have 15 megabits symmetric service.
Casey:
This was blazing fast at the time, or at least for home internet.
Casey:
Andrew was talking about getting 650 megabits down and 120 megabits up from the freaking air.
Casey:
Technology is so cool.
Casey:
I can't believe that this is a thing.
Casey:
It's bananas.
Casey:
Anyway, carrying on with what Andrew had said.
Casey:
You might think that since my internet comes from the air, it wouldn't make much of a difference to put everything on Wi-Fi.
Casey:
I found this to be an incorrect assumption.
Casey:
As it turns out, the spectrum licenses that the big wireless companies spend billions of dollars on are superior to Wi-Fi.
Casey:
I have an Euro 6 Pro and still run all the big bandwidth devices and the things that don't move off of a wired gigabit switch.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Because of congestion of Wi-Fi in my apartment complex.
Casey:
Even over wireless, wired still has its place.
Casey:
So, I mean, everyone's mileage may vary, obviously, but I thought this was a really good summary of where you would think that wired Ethernet would be silly, but actually it ended up, specifically in Andrew's circumstance, to be really, really powerful and worthwhile.
Casey:
So I just thought it was a neat counterpoint.
John:
The wireless internet future that we want is still a little bit out of our reach.
John:
The scenario we were spinning up last time was like, what if you were near one of those 5G a millimeter wave things?
John:
Because we know the speeds you get from those are ridiculous.
John:
What if it's outside the window of your apartment complex?
John:
Wouldn't that be great, right?
John:
But that's only great if you also throw in another...
John:
piece of technology that exists but is not, kind of like 5G, it exists but is not particularly widespread, and that's IPv6.
John:
Because with IPv6, you don't have to run Wi-Fi in your apartment because literally every device you own could have its own IP address, and so you don't need to do any NAT stuff, and I guess you still might want to do some kind of filtering or whatever, but in theory, with the magic of IPv6, the average person might, and a good ISP that uses sort of millimeter wave 5G technology,
John:
Everything could be wireless and you wouldn't have to have Wi-Fi in your house.
John:
And if it had it actually had those millimeter wave speeds and you didn't have like deeply nested rooms that the millimeter waves couldn't get to, you get amazing speeds having literally no like equipment in your house to deal with.
John:
Kind of like you don't have any equipment in your house, probably to be able to make cell phone calls or use cell data because it's just it's magically in the air.
John:
But we are obviously not there yet.
John:
And in addition to the problems of like, you know, being in an apartment complex and everybody having a Wi-Fi network and it also being 2.4 gigahertz, which apparently this T-Mobile thing is as well, it would be better if, you know, if people could just, you know, if people could just use the wireless stuff that comes over the air without having to, you know,
John:
without having to everyone run their own network kind of reminds me of the wwc or um macro keynote where everyone was using the my fives in the room oh yes and like everyone just wants wireless and if one this is another tragedy of the commons thing i guess all right well i have a my fi and this is a great solution for me but when everybody has a my fi
John:
it's not that great for anybody so you know and ipv6 we haven't really talked about this on on a show but i think if most people are aware of ipv6 it's only because they were like probably were asked to disable it at some point while debugging their network issues uh it's another you know promise from many years ago that hasn't come to pass for lots of complicated technical and political reasons so it's kind of sad
Marco:
So can I ask the two of you and possibly our listeners a question about that?
Marco:
As you know, I run servers.
Marco:
I'm also a member of the internet.
Marco:
Do I need to understand IPv6?
Marco:
Because I don't.
Marco:
And I'm kind of... I don't do anything to set it up or to use it or to enable it or to disable it.
Marco:
I just kind of pretend like it's not there.
Marco:
I don't have DNS records for IPv6 for any of the sites I run.
Marco:
I don't as far as I know, listen on IPv6, whatever that would even mean.
Marco:
Because when they were designing IPv6, what they probably should have done is just take the IP addresses we know and love and just make them longer.
Marco:
And what they did instead was make it way more complicated and not just do that.
Marco:
And so as a result, you can't just start using, you know, more bits like you have to change the way things are done completely.
Marco:
And I never bothered to fully learn it.
Marco:
Do I have to?
John:
You're not running a service like Google.com or Amazon.com.
John:
Those companies probably do need to understand IPv6 because there are efficiencies of IPv6 that they might want to take advantage of and customers might want to connect to them.
John:
But your customers for your server is the client software that you write.
John:
And as long as you're okay, as long as you're overcast on iOS doesn't expect to connect through IPv6, I think you're probably fine.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So IPv4, the backwards compatibility of IPv4 and the ability to connect with IPv4 is just so pervasive that so many servers just don't support IPv6 at all.
John:
And it doesn't cause a problem because they know like, well, if anyone tries to connect with IPv6, anyone living in that world trying to do that probably has an expectation of, well, if it fails, I'll just connect through IPv4.
John:
Or if there's no DNS for it, I'll connect through IPv4.
John:
but there are advantages to IPv6.
John:
So if you are a big network provider trying to provide the best service possible to a world of clients that you don't control, yeah, you'd have to support it, or you should support it.
John:
And right now you may support it whether you know it or not, because it could be that Linode or something is running an IPv6 gateway that gnats everything down to IPv4 for you and you don't even know it.
John:
There's all sorts of stuff that could be happening in the network layer that unbeknownst to you that allows this to work.
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
The only time that I've found that I really needed to figure out IPv6... This is another story I may have told on the podcast before.
Casey:
When I was running a piehole on Docker on the Synology, if I remember right, that was my first real foray into Docker.
Casey:
And I noticed that all of a sudden...
Casey:
All of the ads were coming back on Google stuff, and particularly AdWords and whatnot.
Casey:
And I'm not 100% sure, but I believe what happened was Google had started to support IPv6 for all their ad paraphernalia.
Casey:
And because I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to Docker...
Casey:
I didn't have my Docker container instance, whatever, whatever, configured for IPv6.
Casey:
And I think there was a real struggle to get it configured for IPv6 on the Synology as the host in any case.
Casey:
And so that was the original impetus for me getting a Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
We probably need a different musical instrument for that too.
Marco:
A Raspberry Pi triangle.
Casey:
We could have a whole orchestra over there soon.
Casey:
We need Plex.
Casey:
We need vinyl.
Casey:
It's a mess.
Casey:
But anyways, so that was the impetus for getting the original Raspberry Pi was moving into a dedicated device such that I could use IPv6.
Casey:
And once I did that, I noticed that I wasn't seeing nearly as many ads anymore.
Casey:
And I think that's because all of these IPv6 lookups were now failing as design.
Casey:
That's the whole point of Pihole is all of them were failing.
Casey:
And so it was working as I wanted it to be.
Marco:
That's never going to stop being a funny name to me.
Casey:
It's so great.
Casey:
It's so great.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
I don't care what anyone says.
Casey:
It's so great.
Casey:
So anyway, so that's the only time I really had to interact with IPv6.
Casey:
It certainly sounds great in the sense that if I understand things properly, and I think this is what you were saying, John, anything can be addressed from anywhere to anywhere.
Casey:
But that also, of course, scares me because, you know, how do you protect things and does everything need to run its own firewall?
John:
It's not that they can be addresses.
John:
There's enough addresses to go around.
John:
So, like, we're used to the idea that things inside our houses have private IP addresses that are not publicly routable, right?
John:
And we feel like that is an extra layer of security, but that's not why it's like that.
John:
It's like that because there aren't enough IPv4 addresses to go around and it has to be this way.
John:
And it doesn't actually provide any particularly additional security if your router is configured wrong.
John:
Like, you know, it's...
John:
it feels good to us.
John:
It's like, aha, this IP address doesn't exist to the outside world, but we're all connected to some sort of like, you know, PNP router thing that NAT stuff to that anyway.
John:
And it's like, are you sure about that?
John:
Cause you know, anyway, I, if I know it feels scary to be like, what do you mean?
John:
Like my random light bulb would have a publicly routable address.
John:
That's the IPv6 world.
John:
And it seems scary because it seems like it's less secure, but I don't think it's any less secure.
John:
And it is certainly more straightforward.
John:
Like that just, you know,
John:
Again, in the very early days of the internet, before it was clear that there weren't going to be enough IPv4 addresses, before NAT was literally everywhere, everything had an IP address.
John:
Well, not everything.
John:
NAT existed for a long time.
John:
The expectation that a device would have a publicly routable IP address wasn't ridiculous.
John:
You'd sit at something at a university and you'd look at what its IP address was and it would have like an actual publicly routable IP address.
John:
It wouldn't be 192.168.
John:
It wouldn't be 10.whatever.
John:
It would be like somewhere under the, you know, class C that your university is.
John:
owned and that doesn't mean from outside the university you could just connect to it because you probably couldn't because there's so many layers of networking between but it did mean that it had and it doesn't even mean that it was a static ip it could have been you know dhcp and it gets a different ip every time or whatever but uh you know it was a regular real ip and it just simplified everything and now with all the nat stuff i mean with modern technology and with good routers and everything it's not that big of a deal but it is an additional complication that i'm sure uh you know it
John:
I shouldn't be frustrated.
John:
This is, I know so little about networking, but like network administrators, like, especially the people who were like, were brought up as network admins in the days that IPv6 was being rolled out to think soon, this will be so much simpler.
John:
And then 20 years later in their career, it's like, nope, still not simpler.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Whatever kind of cloud service you're looking to start, they probably support it there.
Marco:
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Marco:
They're not called cloud compute instances.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, Linode.com slash ATP, create a free account to get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Moving right along, we got some really interesting feedback from Alex with regard to USB-C KVMs and the studio display specifically.
Casey:
So Alex writes that on the show, you called out a bidirectional USB-C switch as a way to share the studio display between two Macs.
Casey:
I'd like to have two displays shared by three computers, two Macs and one PC.
Casey:
So this didn't cover my use case.
Casey:
After much searching, I finally found a single cable that takes, get this, takes DisplayPort 1.4 and USB-A, and that goes into a single USB-C on the other end.
Casey:
This was the missing link in my prior email.
Casey:
With this, you can run a studio display with webcam speakers and microphone all working.
Casey:
This is great for using the display with PCs, but more importantly, with KVMs.
Casey:
Unfortunately, this does not appear to be sold in North America, but I was able to find listings for it on eBay, AliExpress, etc.
Casey:
And I've ordered it for my setup, says Alex.
Casey:
So this is, I think it's like a VR systems cable or something like that.
Casey:
It's a Belkin, what is this?
Casey:
Getting to know the Belkin charge and sync cable for the Huawei VR glass.
Casey:
And so again, on one end, it's USB-C.
Casey:
On the other end, it's DisplayPort into USB-A.
Casey:
So if I understand right, Alex is saying plug the USB-C into the studio display, plug the two USB-A in the DisplayPort into your KVM or switch or what have you, and then suddenly you've got the equivalent of your one cable USB-C.
Casey:
going between the studio display and your Mac, but instead it's one cable with three ends on the other side.
Casey:
This is so weird and kind of confusing, but apparently it works.
Casey:
And Alex actually provided a YouTube timestamp link, which we'll put in the show notes with video evidence of some other fellow trying this and it, and it clearly working unless it's, you know, movie magic.
Casey:
So I just thought this was super neat and kind of fascinating.
John:
I would not want to debug this setup.
John:
I can tell you that.
Casey:
Certainly not.
Casey:
But cool that it exists.
Casey:
Another one on the list of things that if I were a listener, I'd want to know it exists, even if I didn't need it.
Casey:
A lot of people wanted me to comment on what's going on with Google today.
Casey:
And yesterday, I think as we record, Google came to us hat in hand and said, oh, no, we were just kidding.
Casey:
If you're using Google Apps for your domain, whatever it's called now, G Suite or what have you, if you're using it for personal use, then we'll let you keep it for no cost, maybe forever, until we change our minds again.
John:
You get another 16 years.
John:
How long was it?
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Um, so yeah, so that is apparently a thing, which is good for me because I didn't want to lose like Google docs, for example, not because I rely heavily on it other than show notes, but it would be a pain in the butt if I had to like, you know, move all this to a Gmail account or something like that.
Casey:
And so I'm happy, and I did sign up for keeping this forever, but I have already long since moved to FastMail, and I'm super happy at FastMail.
Casey:
So if this had been the case originally, like if they had split off the business people and said, oh, business people, you got to pay, personal people, we're cool, then I don't think I would have moved to FastMail and I would have been just fine staying there.
Casey:
But now that I've done the work of moving to FastMail, which, if you recall, was almost no work at all, it was stunningly simple.
Casey:
Um, now I'm super happy with it and I don't think I want to change anything up.
Casey:
I'm not planning on going back to Gmail or anything like that.
Casey:
I like the fact that I have a direct relationship with fast mail.
Casey:
I give fast mail a little bit of money each month and they give me email.
Casey:
That's the way it works.
Casey:
Like I'm happy with that.
Casey:
And I, I'm not saying anyone else has to feel this way.
Casey:
In fact, John, I know your primary email address is still a Gmail address.
Casey:
Um, but for me, um,
Casey:
I like that I have divorced myself a little bit, just a little bit more from Google.
Casey:
And obviously, I'm hypocritical in a bunch of ways.
Casey:
I still have an Alexa in the house, even though we barely use it.
Casey:
So I'm not perfect, but I am satisfied with where this has ended up.
Casey:
And I'm kind of happy with where this has ended up because FastMail has been super great so far.
Casey:
I've only been on it like a month, but it's incredibly good.
Casey:
The iOS apps are actually surprisingly good, too.
Casey:
They're a
Casey:
basically everything, including a bunch of like rule setting and other things that I would expect to be only on the web.
Casey:
You can do like everything in the fast mail iOS apps, which is super cool.
Casey:
And again, the website is blazing fast.
Casey:
They have easy push email, which when you don't have work email anymore, getting push email isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Casey:
And logging into Fastmail on an iOS device is super easy because they just have you scan a QR code and then it's a profile that you download and you're in.
Casey:
So I am super happy with Fastmail.
Casey:
I'll put my referral link in the show notes one more time just to be safe.
Casey:
That's why this is coming up.
Casey:
Yeah, there we go.
Casey:
But I mean, they are prior and probably future sponsor, to be honest with you.
Casey:
But they didn't pay me to say any of that.
Casey:
Not this episode anyway.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
It really is true.
Casey:
Hand to God.
Casey:
It really is true.
Casey:
I really am enjoying it.
Casey:
So it's worked out fine for me.
Casey:
But if you're in this boat and you were kicking the can down the road as long as possible, that's what I thought I was doing, to be honest.
Casey:
But it turns out I didn't wait quite long enough.
Casey:
I didn't follow Marco's lead of procrastinating until the last possible moment.
John:
Procrastination pays off again.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I procrastinated a lot, but I didn't procrastinate enough.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm glad to hear that you're that you're doing so with a fast mail because like this is how I've been for, I mean, God, 10 years or whatever it's been that I've been on fast mail.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You know, I figured out email hosting once a long time ago and then I just haven't touched it because I haven't had to because email is boring.
Marco:
It doesn't deserve that much thought.
Marco:
It's just one of those things that just works.
Marco:
In the same way, I haven't revisited my home ISP journey any time recently because we got Fios and it's great and it works and I don't want to touch it.
Marco:
I have my wonderful USB Pre 2 for my microphone interface and there might be better ones out there now.
Marco:
I don't know, but...
Marco:
I have it now and I don't want to touch it.
Marco:
It works great.
Marco:
And that's a great place for things to get, you know, and things that are really boring and aren't don't really move forward that frequently, if at all.
Marco:
It's not worth investing tons of your time in trying out all the different options and constantly being on the lookout for different things like you find something that works.
Marco:
That's something boring like email.
Marco:
You stick with it and move on to more interesting things.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
A couple of pieces of real-time follow-up based on the chat room.
Casey:
CMF asks, you don't set the rules on the website and just use mail.app?
Casey:
Odd.
Casey:
No, that is generally what I do.
Marco:
I've never installed their apps before in my life.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
And I did just on a lark, just because I was curious.
Casey:
And I, generally speaking, do not use the fast mail apps.
Casey:
Generally speaking, I use mail.app.
Casey:
Well, I absolutely use mail.app on my computer.
Casey:
But on iOS, my primary and
Casey:
almost effectively only app is is mail.app the thing that i really like about fast mail's app other than being able to tweak settings is that it's really really fast if you want to delete versus archive like with ios you have to hold down on the archive button and you can swipe up to delete and if i'm just like trying to triage email really quickly fast mail's app makes it really really nice to just because there's a button for archive and a button for delete right there in the bottom which is super great
Casey:
And then Jared H. asked, how does FastMail handle multiple tags per message?
Casey:
So are there like N duplicate copies of the message in IMAP folders?
Casey:
It can be like that.
Casey:
So if you recall, if you're not a Gmail user, I should say, the way Gmail works is it only works with labels.
Casey:
It doesn't really have a concept of folders.
Casey:
I'm sure there's a gotcha there.
Casey:
But for the purposes of this conversation, it only works with labels.
Casey:
And so if you translate that to an IMAP world, then...
Casey:
Basically, every label that a message has, that message will be copied into that folder.
Casey:
So let's say, for example, I tagged something as Limitless, which is my business, and Masquerade.
Casey:
Well, then there would be two copies.
Casey:
There would be a Limitless folder that has a copy of that message and a Masquerade folder that had a second copy of that message.
Casey:
That's the way FastMail works by default and the way IMAP works by default and the way almost every mail server works by default.
Casey:
But FastMail, being FastMail and being super awesome, they optionally let you switch into a label mode, which is basically, for all intents and purposes, a Gmail mode.
Casey:
And then it works like Gmail, where everything is a label and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Now, if you're working with a mail app like mail.app that only speaks IMAP, then yeah, you'll see duplicates everywhere.
Casey:
But as far as the one source of truth on FastMail's side...
Casey:
it's it's it's labels just like it would be it's the same experience as gmail like with gmail if you're using mail.app it's the same exact thing so uh it it you certainly can go that route and i tried going back to folders for like a week or two when i first jumped on fast mail and then i realized for better or worse i am so invested in this whole label lifestyle title that uh that i decided to just switch fast mail over to labels and i haven't looked back
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Trade Coffee.
Marco:
Now, most of you know I'm a huge coffee nerd, and people always ask me, hey, what kind of coffee maker should I get to make great coffee?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And almost everything you can buy in a grocery store was roasted like three months ago.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks to Trade for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I wanted to quickly talk about something I noticed over the last few days.
Casey:
I noticed that iJustine, who is a very, very famous and popular YouTuber, had an Apple Fitness Plus Studio Tour.
Casey:
Now, I...
Casey:
am not presently in the midst of doing apple fitness plus workouts but i am probably going to go back to that soon i was going through a different program uh for a little while and for the longest time i've really really wanted to know just out of curiosity's sake like where well not where is the studio it sounds like i'm trying to visit or something and plus i tell you it's in santa monica like every exercise but um but like what what makes the studio tick and i know nothing about you know
Casey:
production or making videos, as Casey on Cars can show you, but I just find it interesting.
Casey:
Like, how do they do this and what are they doing and what does it look like?
Casey:
And especially, what does it look like from the trainer's perspective?
Casey:
Like, we see the view that a consumer would see, but I'd love to see a behind-the-scenes tour and look at the flip side, you know, look at the cameras and look at what they see.
Casey:
And so I just, Dean, whose work is generally very good, did this 10-minute, you know, Fitness Plus press studio tour.
Casey:
And I watched it, and it was fine.
Casey:
So then I go looking, and I thought, well, you know, knowing Apple, this is probably some sort of press tour that they're doing.
Casey:
And sure enough, it is.
Casey:
So some other channel, eTalk, which I think might be Canadian.
Casey:
Uh, they talk, it's pronounced a talk then nicely done.
Casey:
Um, so on a talk, uh, they, they spoke to a couple of the Canadian trainers, one of whom is actually one of my favorite trainers.
Casey:
Um, but it was the same thing.
Casey:
It was like a five to 10 minute puff piece and nothing else.
Casey:
Then I also noticed that KCAU TV from Sioux City, apparently, got access to this as well.
Casey:
I have no idea how or why.
Casey:
As I am recording this, their video of behind-the-scenes at Apple Fitness from May 6, 2022 has 38 views.
Casey:
So we're going to give them a big bump, potentially.
Casey:
But nevertheless, all of these, though...
Casey:
They were total puff pieces.
Casey:
It was so silly.
Casey:
We didn't get any view of what it looks like from the trainer's perspective.
Casey:
They all seemed to be fed the same five-second pan shot of the control room.
Casey:
They were all dumb.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to make fun of the creators.
Casey:
I'm sure iJustine and all these other people did the best they could with what they were allowed to do.
Casey:
But if you're going to do this...
Casey:
Do it properly.
Casey:
Like, let us see some stuff.
Casey:
And it was just so frustrating that we didn't get to see squat.
Casey:
And it's so, it's just so Apple.
Casey:
Like, let's put Jay Blahnik or whatever his name is and some of these trainers in front of somebody, usually a YouTuber, and they can cheer and rah, rah, rah about what Apple Fitness Plus is doing for people, which is all admirable and worth celebrating, I guess.
Casey:
But, you know, if you're going to call the studio tour, then tour the freaking studio!
Casey:
Like, come on!
John:
What were you hoping to see?
John:
I mean, like, it's a bunch of cameras pointed at people, right?
John:
I mean, like, yes.
John:
Are there secrets?
Marco:
It's a TV studio plus some sweat.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's true, but, like...
Casey:
When you're recording one of these programs, a lot of times they will start an exercise when the music beat drops, which, granted, you can change the music a little bit to time it against the video, but it's not often the case.
Casey:
It seems like they just organically...
Casey:
or that's the way they make it.
Casey:
I guess they're doing their job right because they make it seem that way.
Casey:
I'm sure it probably isn't that way, but they make it seem like they organically happen to be saying, okay, three, two, one, go boom.
Casey:
You know, in the pin drops, whatever.
Casey:
And it's just like, how does that work?
Casey:
How do they know how many reps are doing or how much time is left?
Casey:
And yes, I'm sure this could just be as simple as an iPad with a countdown timer, but like, I want to see it.
Casey:
If you're calling it a studio tour, let me tour the damn studio.
Casey:
Like, I just want to see, I just think that stuff is fascinating.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
You're confusing a marketing video with, like, a behind-the-scenes, like, sort of informative education thing.
John:
They're two very different things.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
But that's what I wanted, though.
Casey:
I wanted the studio tour.
John:
There's a little bit of, like, in the 38-view KCAU TV one, they show, like, the control room that shows all the different views in the thing.
John:
And I don't know enough about Apple Fitness Plus or television production to know if this is custom for Apple.
John:
But a couple of the monitors have...
John:
outlines on them and then assuming they're i mean the old days they'd be showing you whatever it was called like the title safe area basically that wasn't covered by the you know back in the days of standard definition television and crts there was an area around the edge of the crt that all video production assumed was potentially not visible to people because of like the plastic bezel that's surrounding the
John:
Even when they didn't have plastic there, it was just like, look, don't put anything in this area.
John:
So the quote unquote title safe area or whatever is here's where you can actually put content.
John:
Yes, the picture will go to the edge, but don't put anything you want people to see there.
John:
So for example, don't put text that high or that low or that far to the right or that far to the left.
John:
Well, and so many cameras would have the title safe area with a little outline.
John:
So if you're in production, you could say, OK, I got it.
John:
Even though this is what the camera sees, make sure that anything I care about is inside this white box.
John:
Well, in this behind the scenes thing, they have a white box, which doesn't make that much sense for HGTV.
John:
And I've ranted about this on past shows where the first round or the first several rounds of high definition televisions
John:
Also assumed you had overscan and they would take the 1080p signal and they would stretch it slightly, making it basically non-native and cutting off the edges because anyway, most TVs don't do that anymore, I think.
John:
But so it's got an outline like that, but it also has like gutters on the left and the right side.
John:
And I'm wondering if that is the area that they're reserving for like the little heart rate.
Casey:
monitor things or stuff is there stuff that appears there casey there is yes and that's now that you say that i wouldn't have picked it out until you said something but yes i bet you're right in the upper left and upper right hand corners on the upper right it shows your rings in the upper left it shows um like the time in that particular set the time in the entire workout if i recall correctly and then your current heart rate i haven't done one of these in a couple of weeks so that's all off the top of my head but i think that's right
John:
I mean, it's got gutters down the whole right and left.
John:
So maybe that's just a standard part of TV production.
John:
I don't know what it is.
John:
But what it made me think is maybe they have custom things that are saying, hey, when you're filming Apple Fitness, whatever, be aware these parts of the screen should be reserved for HUD and, you know, for future HUD stuff.
John:
Maybe if they're going to put more stuff.
Casey:
Well, and also as I'm looking at this KCAU video once again, and I'm looking at 40 seconds in of the minute and 50 second video.
Casey:
But sure enough, I didn't notice this the first time I watched before we recorded.
Casey:
But sure enough, in the upper right-hand corner, the video of the control room, courtesy colon Apple.
Casey:
So they didn't even let them in the control room, which makes sense.
Casey:
Like, I'm not surprised.
John:
It's a marketing.
John:
They're just trying to advertise Apple Fitness.
John:
Like, this is basically an ad.
Casey:
I know it is, but I wanted more.
Casey:
I wanted more.
John:
Casey, all we've learned today is that Casey has a burning desire to see the internal workings of the production of Apple Fitness.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
I find this fascinating.
Casey:
And, you know, I had a listener write in who does work for the company that I do other exercise videos with.
Casey:
And they didn't provide me any particular state secrets.
Casey:
But I found what little they could and did provide utterly fascinating.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
It bums me out.
Casey:
Like, if you're going to call it a studio tour, give me a tour of the studio.
Casey:
Otherwise, just call it the Apple Fitness Plus.
Casey:
They invited me in and nobody else gets to go.
Casey:
So I went.
Casey:
That's what they should have called it.
Casey:
That's all right, though.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Tell me about the Rivian and how it sucks.
John:
All right, so the Rivian, the embargo on Rivian reviews dropped this past week, I think.
John:
So everyone who got there, the Rivian, people know, is a big electric pickup truck.
John:
And they're delivered to people now, and people are reviewing them, and you can see tons of videos about them.
John:
And one of the videos I was watching was a very long...
John:
I don't know what it's called.
John:
Is it an Instagram story?
John:
Instagram reel?
John:
Whatever.
John:
The thing where you do a very long vertical video on Instagram.
John:
And Quinn Nelson of the Snazzy Labs YouTube channel got a review and he's super excited about it.
John:
And he did a really long video of him just like taking his phone around the truck and looking at all the different things.
John:
And at one point he was showing like how the controls work, uh, like around the steering wheel, like the stock controls or whatever.
John:
And I was watching it and I, and something occurred to me that I should have occurred to me a lot sooner.
John:
And I was like, huh, that explains so much.
John:
And I'm going to definitely think about that as I, as I think about more, you know, car stuff in the future.
John:
And then, you know, and then I didn't think about it much anymore.
John:
And then later that same week, somebody was a Jason, I think Jason's now in one of our slacks, uh,
John:
uh posted a video of something that made me think uh like this is this is an issue worth sharing so i'm going to i'm going to share this uh this uh thing that occurred to me which it's not you know it's it's obvious uh and maybe it occurred to everyone else but it's the first time i thought of it as an actionable thing that should be added to the bucket of things that car manufacturers uh think about when designing interior so
John:
The focus is on the left-hand stock.
John:
The Rivian does have stocks in the steering wheel, and the one on the left has controls for your lights and wipers and windshield wiper squirter thing, right?
John:
And Quinn was showing off it in his video.
John:
If you want to look at it, you can see it starts at 1 hour, 10 minutes, and 47 seconds into the video.
John:
I don't know how to do a timestamp link, but we'll provide you the link and the timestamps you can scrub to it.
John:
um and it is a physical stock and on it are physical controls and he was demonstrating how the wipers work like like most wipers and cars they have different speeds slow fast whatever depending on how heavily it's raining and he was praising these because he's like it's not a touch control it's not all on the touch screen or whatever there's there is a stock and on the stock there is a physical thing that you press the thing that you press though i don't know how to describe it it's
John:
It's like a little toggle switch that goes up and down on the stock.
John:
But when you press it, if you press it up and take your finger off of it, it springs back to the center position.
John:
So it's not like a light switch where it goes on and it stays on and it goes off and it stays off.
John:
This thing, you can either press up or press down.
John:
But whichever direction you press it, it's spring loaded.
John:
And as soon as you take your finger off of it, it just springs back to the middle, right?
John:
And the way it works is if you do that on the one that's wiper and you press like up, up, up, or whatever, on the LCD display that is the instrument cluster that's right in front of the steering wheel, you will see a little display on the left side that shows...
John:
One raindrop, two raindrops, three raindrops.
John:
And as you hit up, up, up, a selection state will go, okay, you've selected one raindrop.
John:
Now you've selected two raindrops.
John:
Now you've selected three raindrops.
John:
So you can go up, up, up, down, down, down with this little thing.
John:
It might as well be a D-pad, but it's not.
John:
It's a little toggle switch, but either way.
John:
And that's how you pick how fast you want the wipers to be going.
John:
And I was looking at that and, you know, in Quinn's praising, it was like, he doesn't like, he's had many electric cars, including Tesla.
John:
And he doesn't like the fact that to change the wipers, you'd have to go through a touchscreen.
John:
He loves having it on the stock because it's near your hands and you can mess with it.
John:
But I was like, boy, but it's such a shame.
John:
Like, why wouldn't they just do a regular wiper control instead of having this up, up, up, down, down, down with the touchscreen display?
John:
Like, what a fumble there.
John:
And then it immediately occurred to me, like, no, of course, they have to do it this way.
John:
Like, no...
John:
No car from decades ago would ever put a wiper control like this intentionally.
John:
In fact, if you think about a car that you have this decades old or whatever, the wipers are usually like either you twist something on the knob or you press the stock up or down.
John:
But the differences in all those type of things, if it's a twist thing, it's like you twist it a little bit and that's position one.
John:
Twist it a little bit more, position two.
John:
Twist a little bit more, position three.
John:
Whatever position you twist it to,
John:
there's probably like on the knob there's like a a marking and on another part of the knob there's like the one and two and three raindrops or whatever it stays there right or if you have a knob where like if i press down that's the wipers on slow i push down a little bit more that's faster push down a little bit more it's faster still and there's like three different places where it can stop and if you press it down to the middle place it stays there the stock stays there right but that's not how these work at all this is just a little toggle switch that always re-centers
John:
And the reason it does that and the reason this whole because it seems like a worse experience.
John:
Now I got to look to see what settings it on.
John:
I can't just feel where it is.
John:
I can't look at my stock and tell what position it's in.
John:
I have to like flick the whole thing.
John:
But the reason it does it is obvious is that wipers are potentially controllable.
John:
Anything that is potentially controllable through a touchscreen can't have a physical control.
John:
in the old style.
John:
Because think of what would happen if you had a twisty physical control where it's like, oh, I twist to the two raindrops setting, right?
John:
Then what if you went to the touchscreen and changed it to three raindrops setting?
John:
Now there's a conflict between what the wipers are actually doing and what your little twisty thing is doing.
John:
So any physical control in a car with a touchscreen where that same functionality is controlled by the touchscreen, which basically includes every kind of control,
John:
can't be a control that moves to a position and stays there.
John:
And that's bad for a physical control because for a physical control, moving to a position and staying there provides information.
John:
I can tell that my blinker is on because the stock is down.
John:
And yes, it's a blinking light and a noise or whatever.
John:
I can tell how fast the wipers are based on the position of the stock.
John:
I can tell if my lights are on off based on the position of the twisty thing, which has a flat spot on it.
John:
I could tell by feel.
John:
I can tell by glancing at it.
John:
The physical state of a regular physical control conveys useful information.
John:
But in a car with touchscreens, you can't do that because it has to always sort of return to center.
John:
You can't look at any of the like you can't look at this wiper stock and know if your wipers are even on.
John:
If you look at it, you just see a bunch of switches that are in the middle position and they don't tell you anything about the state of the wipers.
John:
They don't tell you they're on what speed they're on.
John:
Nothing.
John:
It might as well just be another interface to the touchscreen again because of that conflict.
John:
And I was thinking, well, it's such a shame.
John:
That explains why so many, first of all, explains partially why so many of these electronic cars don't have physical controls.
John:
Part of it is obviously cost savings, where once you have a screen and some software, why not just put everything on it?
John:
And Tesla loves to do that.
John:
But the other thing is that if you make a physical control, it's got to be a crappier physical control because you can't have that physical control
John:
be like manifest state in its physical state.
John:
You can't have its position or anything about it convey information because now you have a potential conflict with what someone would do with the touchscreen.
John:
And what Jason brought up was like a video of a Buick from 2001 and
John:
And this Buick had volume controls on the steering wheel, which is something I think we, you know, most people are familiar with in vaguely modern cars.
John:
Up and down volume on the steering wheel, super convenient, right?
John:
And you'd be thinking, oh, but isn't that run counter what you say?
John:
Like normally you have up and down volume of the steering wheel, but in the days before touch screens, you also had a volume knob.
John:
And the way they got around this, you know, once you think to look for this, you'll see it everywhere, is sometime, I don't know, a decade or two ago, all of the knobs on electronics lost the little marking that would tell you where it's pointing.
John:
Right.
John:
There used to be like a little black knob and they used to have a little notch on it.
John:
And if the notch was pointing down, that was off.
John:
And if the notch was all you'd rotate it around.
John:
If it was up at 12 o'clock, it would be halfway.
John:
Right.
Casey:
Not all of them, John.
Casey:
Not all of them, because remember that I have volume controls on my steering wheel.
Casey:
And yet my stupid volume button on my car, which I genuinely, genuinely am happy to have.
Casey:
It has a line on it.
Casey:
Well, no, but it has this stupid vertical line on it.
Casey:
So I have to keep it centered and never touch it.
Casey:
Otherwise, it drives me bananas.
Casey:
I need to get one of those little black stickers to stick over it so I don't ever look at it again.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, I'll ask you more about that because I'm interested to know how that works and how that doesn't end up causing conflicts.
John:
But the way they – well, to get back to what I was saying, like the –
John:
The reason you don't see that notch anymore in lots of things is because there's some other way to change the volume.
John:
So, for example, a remote control, like a receiver.
John:
Once receivers got remote controls, and maybe if you're old enough, you remember, receivers didn't always have remote controls.
John:
You'd have to go up to them and turn the knob to change the volume on your record player receiver thing, right?
John:
Once you got a remote control, now you have a way to change the volume, but it's different than the knob.
John:
And so if the knob had a marking on it and you changed the volume,
John:
Now there's a conflict between where the knob is on the thing and what the volume is actually outputting.
John:
And so what they did was they made the knobs essentially spin forever with no markings.
John:
So you could rotate the knob, but you could just rotate it forever and ever and ever, right?
John:
And there was no marking anywhere on it.
John:
So if you did it clockwise, it would get louder and counterclockwise, it would get quieter.
John:
But there was no notch to saying, here's maximum, here's minimum, here's one through 10.
John:
And that lets you have the remote and go volume up, up, up, down, down, down.
John:
and not have any sort of physical conflict because the knob was just faceless and just a sphere and you never knew which way it was pointing the faceless knob yeah the buick and also many fancy av receivers did the same thing and probably still do what the buick did was when you hit the volume controls on the steering wheel up up up volume it would make the knob with a marking on it on the dashboard on the radio turn
John:
So you'd press up a button on the steering wheel and you'd see the little knob turn like a ghost was turning it, right?
John:
And in that way, they could keep the knob in sync with the actual volume as inputted in the button.
John:
Basically making physical controls whose state conveyed information because there's a little notch on it.
John:
but also having an alternative way to do it on the steering wheel.
John:
And, you know, stereos did the same thing.
John:
For the ones that kept a marking on their volume knob, you'd hit volume up, up, up on your remote, and you'd see the volume knob on the AV receiver move on its own.
John:
i'm not necessarily saying this is the solution to having good physical controls in cars because as you can imagine doing that is expensive delicate finicky like it's way more complicated than just having like a wiper stock that you move up and down through various positions right but as cars increasingly have touch screens this is the the this is part of the thing that's causing car interiors to get so much worse because you want a functionality to be accessible on the touch screen but every single thing you put on that touch screen
John:
basically makes the physical control alternative to it worse or non-existent non-existent is easiest because then you don't have to worry about any conflict but if there is a physical control i don't think people are going to want to put little motors in there to sort of you know motorize every other part of the thing i mean it's neat that this buick did it for the volume knob and some fancy nakamichi stereo receiver probably does the same thing i don't know is nakamichi still a brand it was fancy in the 80s i it was very fancy the 80s i don't think it's still a brand banging all of some i don't know i don't know what fancy uh av brands are
Marco:
I mean, I've seen the motorized volume knob on receivers before and like, you know, earlier in my life.
Marco:
And at that time, there'd be no reason for me to ever see a very expensive piece of equipment.
Marco:
And so chances are, like, I think it made it down to like more reasonably priced options.
John:
I mean, the Buick is, I don't know what Buick model is, they don't say, but it doesn't look like that fancy of your car.
John:
It looks pretty darn plasticky.
John:
So obviously the technology.
John:
It's a Buick.
John:
It's not that fancy.
John:
Yeah, the technology is within reach, but it is probably more finicky and delicate, especially if you're thinking of putting little motors and stocks and everything like that.
John:
And it would be weird to do something on the touchscreen and have one of the stocks next to the steering wheel move.
John:
Also potentially dangerous to have parts of the car near the steering wheel move without you touching them.
John:
So I understand why.
John:
This is not a great idea, but when I saw this video, it's the first time that it occurred to me that there is like a real concrete reason why car interiors are getting worse with the advent of touchscreens, and it's not just cost savings, and it's not just ill-advised leaning too heavily into tech.
John:
There is actually an issue here, an unresolvable, not unresolvable, but a not easily resolvable issue between functionality on screens and functionality in physical controls.
John:
And it's the same issue that has that, you know, that has faced us in all these other devices that have knobs in them, like AV receivers and other things that are out.
John:
It's probably not as big a deal with every receiver because honestly, the remote is better.
John:
We don't want to have to get up off the couch, right?
John:
But when you're driving the car, your hands are already on the steering wheel.
John:
Physical controls and stalks are great.
John:
They are superior in terms of ergonomics and efficiency to having to go to the touchscreen for something.
John:
But if it's also on the touchscreen, suddenly your stalks are crappy and you're going up, up, up and looking at a little graphic change on the screen.
Casey:
See, but the thing that I find so distasteful about this, even though the Rivian looks so freaking cool and I really don't like pickups, but the thing I find so distasteful about this is why do we need to control the wipers via the touchscreen?
Casey:
Why do we need a second control service surface for windshield wipers?
Casey:
What's the purpose?
John:
I mean, that's
John:
that's that's what i was saying like it's so irresistible to put the control on the touchscreen and once you do you have that problem but like for someone to come into the meeting and say exactly what you said it's like how about we just not have that control in the touch screen like what you mean our comprehensive whole car control system why would we not have the touchscreen is the best thing it's the most flexible we can put ads under it if we want sometime in the future we need to make money like
John:
Just the resistance to like, and I kind of understand the philosophy is like, shouldn't the touchscreen be able to do everything like it's software?
John:
Why should we limit certain things to only physical controls?
John:
But like, you know, I don't agree with that.
John:
But I can imagine someone saying that.
John:
And if I had to throw something back in their face, I was like, well, why don't we let them steer during on the touchscreen as well?
Casey:
Right.
John:
Shouldn't everything be on the screen?
John:
Why do I have to use the wheel to steer?
Casey:
Apparently Apple's going to ship a car with no windows and no steering wheel.
John:
I think Johnny Ive doesn't quite understand computers, but anyway.
Casey:
Well, and so another thing I want to bring up is my dad, as I've mentioned several times in the past, has some very fancy stereo equipment and a tonal denim in the chat reminded me that his equipment, like his preamp and stuff like that,
Casey:
It does have a massive physical volume control and it has a remote control.
Casey:
But what it does is it has a series of LEDs encircling the spinners such that as you spin, you know, say you're increasing the volume, there'll be more and more and more of these LEDs lit clockwise.
Casey:
And as you decrease the volume, then...
Casey:
fewer and fewer of them will look like it's falling counterclockwise.
Casey:
And so that's another mechanism by which you can solve this problem.
John:
Yeah, it's like another screen.
John:
You can imagine doing it with e-ink if you wanted to get fancy and stuff like that.
John:
You can even imagine electronic stops in the wheel.
John:
But as what we've seen, if you have a modern car,
John:
your volume knob spins forever.
John:
Like, that's the way they've been for so long.
John:
Even before touchscreens, they were like that, just because it allows you to have basically steering wheel volume controls.
John:
Like, steering wheel volume controls have been around for, you know, probably a decade before any car had a touchscreen in.
John:
But once they put those steering wheel volume controls, everybody's stereo volume knobs just spin forever and don't have marks on them.
John:
And we all just get used to it, and it's fine.
John:
And, like, probably people don't much think about it, but...
John:
And I think that's reasonable because it's not like you're glancing at the volume enough to know what volume level you're at.
John:
But for things like wipers or whatever, it is nice to be able to feel how fast the wipers are going and do I need to go one more level up or one more level down or whatever.
John:
Again, probably not that big deal for wipers, but the Rivian's controls really brought this home for me because it's clear that Rivian is trying to not be like Tesla in this way, trying to have everything be as physical control.
John:
But they can't, they haven't gone whole hog and say, we're going to put tiny little motors in our stocks.
John:
And honestly, I don't blame them.
John:
We're going to put tiny little motors in our stocks to make it like it's a Honda stock and it will rotate the stock for you or whatever.
Casey:
Moving right along, Apple has pre-announced some accessibility enhancements.
Casey:
And they did this, it was either yesterday or today as we record.
Casey:
There was a post in the newsroom, and I'm going to read just a handful of excerpts.
Casey:
People who are blind or low vision can use their iPhone and iPad to navigate the last few feet to their destination with door detection.
Casey:
Door detection can help users locate a door upon arriving at a new destination, understand how far they are from it, and describe the door attributes, including if it is open or closed, and when it's closed, whether it can be opened by pushing, turning a knob, or pulling a handle.
Casey:
Door detection can also read signs and symbols around the door, like the room number at an office or the presence of an accessible entrance symbol.
Casey:
uh they have on their uh newsroom uh page a bunch of like very very short like videos or gifts or something i guess they're videos um which demonstrate this nearly only 15 20 seconds and the door detection one in particular was super cool because it's a it's a woman that appears to be blind walking up to a door and it says you know there's a closed door eight feet away text and meaning there's text written on it text muffin to write home about bakery which by the way is a very good name
Casey:
I'm having to write home about bakery.
Casey:
And so it's helping her figure out exactly where she needs to go in order to enter the bakery.
Casey:
I just think that's super neat.
Casey:
Continuing right along, users with physical and motor disabilities who may rely on assistive features like voice control and switch control can fully control Apple Watch from their iPhone with Apple Watch mirroring.
Casey:
Apple Watch Mirroring uses hardware and software integration, including advances built on AirPlay to help ensure users who rely on these mobility features can benefit from unique Apple Watch apps like blood oxygen, heart rate, mindfulness, and more.
Casey:
So that kind of answers the question, wait, what?
Casey:
Why would you wear an Apple Watch if you can't really operate the Apple Watch?
Casey:
So, yeah, apparently it's so you can get, you know, detection of workouts and exercise and your rings and blood oxygen and things like that.
Casey:
So that's pretty neat.
John:
This kind of reminds me of when you could use iTunes to rearrange the icons on your home screen.
John:
Why would I ever use a desktop app to rearrange icons on my home screen?
John:
But we all know the answer to that because it's a super pain to do it on your phone.
John:
So like this, this quote unquote disability feature, being able to control your watch on a phone with a bigger screen.
John:
I would like to use that because I don't.
John:
Sometimes you want to do something on the watch or with the watch.
John:
but you don't want to use the tiny little screen.
John:
If you've got your phone, why not let me use my phone to essentially VNC control.
John:
Like it's a bigger screen.
John:
It's a better input device.
John:
I don't necessarily have to, and it's important, you know, to your point, it has to be on your wrist to get like your pulse and your blood oxygen.
John:
Like it's, it's still serving its purpose, but I very often would not want to use the tiniest little screen that I have and, you know, hold my wrist up and try to use my fat little fingers and the things.
John:
Please, this is, you know, again, accessibility is for everybody.
John:
And I would like a feature like this because I think, you know, this type of thing where you have something that's difficult to use, whether it be rearranging icons and springboard, which Apple doesn't have to be this hard, please improve this, or using a very tiny screen, which has to be tiny because it's on your wrist.
John:
Let me do it in a larger interface, whether that be, you know, changing springboard around on a desktop Mac, which I still wish you had a way to do, or using your phone, using your watch from your phone.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Deaf and hard of hearing community can follow live captions on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Casey:
So that doesn't sound like much at first, but then here again, you look at the demo video and it's two people talking over FaceTime.
Casey:
And as the woman on the other end of the call is talking, there's a little overlay with exactly what she's saying on the screen, which is super duper cool.
Casey:
And, uh, I can see, I can imagine how that would be super useful.
Casey:
I mean, imagine that here's an example of accessibility for everyone.
Casey:
You know, what if you want to receive a FaceTime call in a, but you're in a place where having the audio play is unwise and you just want to hear somebody talk to you and you don't have to contribute much or you can just shake your head yes or no or whatever.
Casey:
You can turn the volume all the way down and then just read what they're saying.
Casey:
I know this is a little bit of a contrived example, but it is a thing that could happen.
Casey:
As another example, you know, I will sometimes watch video in bed when Aaron is either asleep or nearly asleep.
Casey:
And maybe I'm watching something short, so I don't want to pop in an AirPod.
Casey:
If I can't turn on closed captions or if it doesn't have closed captions on it, then I'm missing most of the video.
Casey:
Or I'll just not watch the video at all.
Casey:
That's part of the reason why when I was doing KC on Cars, I always put in the closed captions.
Casey:
And they weren't perfect, but I at least tried to make them just about right.
Casey:
So yeah, accessibility is for everyone, just like you said, John.
John:
YouTube has auto captions and this is kind of catch up for Apple because most streaming services have some form of auto captions and auto captions aren't always great and it's kind of funny to watch how they try to take proper nouns and turn them into like the example is going around for all the
John:
television review channels that i watch is they very often say c-u-t-i-e like something that is very cute cutie they say cutie oled right they get oled right because i guess it's been added to the dictionary so it says oled for organic light emitting diode right but it's such a cutie oled uh yeah but it's you know this apple apple playing catch up here is important and related to this we didn't cover this we usually don't but google had its io uh conference thing and one of the demos in google io was another uh
John:
Easy to criticize as vaporware, but still interesting technology where it was showing like glasses or whatever.
John:
But the glasses aren't really the point of doing a real time translation.
John:
So rather than just we're going to transcribe what the person is saying in the form of text, which is super useful and, you know, it's coming to all of our devices and I think we're all going to enjoy it.
John:
uh but what if you could talk to somebody who didn't speak your language and see text of what they were saying in your language below their face and again the glasses are like well i can just look right at them but in the glasses i see what they're saying but even if you had to hold up your phone or whatever again live translation apps have existed for years this is the type of thing that google is usually very good at like translate.google.com is extremely impressive and google's been working on it for years and years and obviously they're well positioned to integrate this technology um
John:
A lot of this supposed accessibility features are like... I guess they are accessibility features, but not... Every single one of them, people look at it and say, that's for AR and VR because a lot of the things that make our regular devices accessible are needed when your interface to it is I'm looking through glasses or a headset or whatever because you don't really have a way to get this information.
John:
You don't have a mouse.
John:
You're not touching a screen.
John:
You need like, you know...
John:
Maybe not door detection, but the ability for the AR VR thing to understand the world around it to augmented augmented reality needs to first know what reality is before it can augment it.
John:
So before it can put the name of the person underneath their face, you remember their name, it needs to identify where the person is personal detection, which is an accessibility feature they introduced a while ago.
John:
and it needs to know who they are face recognition something they added ages ago in photos right and putting them all together plus a magic pair of glasses now as i walk around uh in a either a family reunion or a work meeting or whatever it is i can see people's names above their heads and so i won't forget people's names or maybe i'll just have a different form of embarrassing mistake depending on how good the technology is
John:
And the door detection, as far as what I read, uses LiDAR sensors.
John:
So it works on the iPads with LiDAR sensors and works on the iPhones with LiDAR sensors.
John:
You would imagine that a fancy future AR headset would also maybe have LiDAR on it so it could make sense of the world and be able to augment it.
John:
So these accessibility features are like, oh, I don't care about accessibility.
John:
I'm young and healthy and everything's awesome for me.
John:
Like every one of these technologies is accessible.
John:
A future amazing technology that everyone is going to love and use.
John:
And I think the live captions are one of them because, again, from what I've read about this, there was a write up in six colors about it.
John:
That if I'm remembering correctly, it was saying basically like any audio that plays in iOS in any app, you can tell iOS, hey, if audio is playing, try to do that auto captions thing.
John:
And so it's not like the app has to support auto captions.
John:
As far as I'm aware, it's kind of like a system level service.
John:
I'm not sure how this would work.
John:
Is it a control center thing or whatever?
John:
But it's exciting because it's the type of thing you usually don't get an iOS on the Mac.
John:
We're used to having sort of system level things like, oh, install this, you know, install tech sniper and you can extract text from images anywhere.
John:
And obviously Apple kind of added that as a system service.
John:
But before Apple added it, tech sniper had it.
John:
And you could have been using that and you didn't, your app didn't need to support it.
John:
TechSniper would just snipe that text from anywhere, right?
John:
I would love to be able to do auto captions on any single, any app that plays video for exactly the reasons that Katie said.
John:
Sometimes you're in an environment, you don't want to take out the headphones and put them on.
John:
Or you're someplace that's super noisy and you can't understand what they're saying even with AirPods in, even with AirPods with noise canceling in because it's super noisy or whatever.
John:
try the captions, right?
John:
Like, especially if you're talking to somebody, if they say something weird, you can ask them to say it again or whatever.
John:
Eventually, the auto captions will be good enough that you'll be able to understand what they're saying.
John:
So I'm actually very excited about these features.
Casey:
Yeah, there's a couple others real quickly.
Casey:
Apple's also expanding support for its industry-leading screen reader voiceover with over 20 new languages and locales.
Casey:
And this might be interesting for you, John.
Casey:
With Buddy Controller, users can ask a care provider or friend to help them play a game.
Casey:
Buddy Controller combines any two game controllers into one, so multiple controllers can drive the input for a single player.
John:
It's kind of like a thing we used to do when Apple Desktop Bus came out, ADB.
John:
It was the thing that Macs used to connect keyboards and mice before USB existed.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And ADB was Apple desktop bus and it was, you know, it was a cool fancy thing where you could, you know, chain multiple devices.
John:
You'd have one ADB port, but then you'd go from that ADB port into your big Apple extended keyboard, right?
John:
And then your Apple extended keyboard would have another ADB port and then you can connect the mouse to that.
John:
So you didn't have to connect everything together.
John:
I know this doesn't sound exciting to people who live in the world of USB, but at the time this was exciting and novel because the alternative was your mouse would connect to the back of your computer and your keyboard would connect to the back of your computer, but not with Apple desktop bus, right?
John:
And the neat thing about it was you could connect two mice to your Mac.
John:
Neat.
John:
And they both worked at the same time.
John:
And so this is what this sounds like.
John:
Buddy controller.
John:
The two game controllers can drive the input for a single player.
John:
You could have, like in a school computer, you'd have a mouse on the left and a mouse on the right, and each person would be trying to drive the mouse at the same time.
John:
I mean, we didn't have many games back in the day.
John:
This is what we used to amuse ourselves.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it's like mouse wars right because if you were fast with the mouse when the person like would hit the edge of the mouse pad and they'd have to pick it up to move it or whatever you could quickly go and do and click on the thing that you wanted um yeah uh playstation and i think uh nintendo also have a sort of like share play type thing where people can help you through difficult parts of games but the idea of both inputs playing at the same time
John:
I think it could work, but it's also ripe for conflict.
John:
It's my experience of connecting two ADB mice.
John:
If you have two kids trying to do this, even if one is supposedly trying to help the other, there is a potential for sort of, I guess, kind of like if you're trying to steer a ship either to the left or the right of a fork, having the ship go straight into the middle of it and everyone dies because the left and the right were both pressing at the same time and the net force is balanced.
Casey:
This is all good stuff from Apple, and I can't stress enough that the more time you spend on the planet, the more likely that one of these accessibility features will end up being useful for you in some way, shape, or form.
Casey:
And not necessarily because something changes about your body.
Casey:
It's just like John and I have said.
Casey:
It could be a situation that you're in that it just leads itself to…
John:
Or a situation where you didn't realize this would be handy.
John:
I think once live captions appear and people, if they're implemented in a way that people can find them, so many people are going to use them.
John:
Because in contexts where computers have allowed more people to discover captions, I think captions are being used so much more now than they were decades ago just because...
John:
People like them.
John:
How many people do you know who always watch?
John:
This is like a secret weird things people do, but it's not even that weird.
John:
How many people do you know who watch television with captions all the time?
John:
Not because they're hard of hearing or anything like that.
John:
They just like it because, oh, characters whisper too much or it's hard to tell with a sound mix or it's just easier for me to glance at or I can read faster than I can listen.
John:
Some people just do this all the time and having the ability to essentially caption any audio that plays on your device.
John:
Again, if it's implemented in a way that's discoverable, I think a lot of people are going to use that.
Marco:
This is the kind of stuff that Apple does not because – with Tim Cook's famous quote here – not because there is a good return on investment here monetarily.
Marco:
It's not – they don't do this for cynical business or financial reasons.
Marco:
they they lead the world i think the technology world i think they lead the world on accessibility features because they truly believe it's the right thing to do and i i think they get immense satisfaction out of the ways they can help because it's amazing like you know if you have some kind of some kind of need for any of these features and you go from not having that need served by any technology to all of a
Marco:
That's a massive difference in your life.
Marco:
And to to help people that much, you know, for for like, you know, the normally abled people out there, whether you buy an Apple product or not, probably like it's not going to make a life changing difference to you.
Marco:
It's not going to be like, wow, before I couldn't speak to anybody in any way.
Marco:
And now that I bought this Apple product, I can't.
Marco:
No, because, you know, you could just you could have bought an Android phone or, you know, like you had other options.
Marco:
Whereas if you have a certain type of disability or special need, in many cases, like if Apple didn't do this, there literally wouldn't be anything else out there for you to be able to do the same kind of things.
Marco:
Or you would have had to, you know, get different different sorts of assistive technology or different methods of getting assistance.
Marco:
so this you know it really is like it's not a large number of people in the world that this will benefit but it benefits them in an outsized way to them and apple really cares about that and and you can tell i've talked to some of the people in the company who work on accessibility stuff like they really do care a lot because they believe it's the right thing to do and
Marco:
You know we will call out Apple on any of their cynical BS when it's present.
Marco:
We see right through all their cynical BS when they're doing something for cynical reasons.
Marco:
But their accessibility efforts are not that kind of thing at all.
Marco:
They really do an amazing job and they do it really for the right reasons.
Marco:
Really to help people.
Marco:
And yeah sure those people are going to buy their products and they're going to make money from them but
Marco:
that they're not doing it just for that reason alone.
Marco:
If it was a purely financial decision, they would probably decide, oh, it's not worth investing all this money in this kind of stuff.
Marco:
But they do because it's the right thing to do, and that's really admirable.
Marco:
And for a company that they rightly get criticized a lot for not having a ton of those areas anymore where they're just kind of doing it for the good of everything, this is one area that they always have done that, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
John:
And like a lot of sort of, you know, pure science, research science types of things, like doing things like this, or the space program, as the example you see trotted out, doing things like this, it seemed like it's like, okay, well, that's one good, but what if I don't care about space?
John:
What if I don't care about accessibility?
John:
there are dividends from doing this because this work drives basic technology and research that is useful more broadly from the space program you get like you know velcro and the microwave oven and all sorts of stuff right and it's because someone was faced with a problem where this ended up being the solution and oh it turns out the solution is applicable outside the space program right so um
John:
I'm not sure which part of Apple is driving which, whether it's the accessibility team driving the creation of the live captioning or whether it's live captioning being created elsewhere and the accessibility team adopting it.
John:
But I have to imagine there's sort of a virtuous cycle of the need to do better in accessibility
John:
drives technology forward in a way that benefits all of Apple.
John:
And I don't think that's why they're doing it.
John:
But having an accessibility team is like having a space, you know, a well-funded space program in your country.
John:
It's huge dividends that you may not realize.
John:
And it's not why you have a space program, but it sure is a nice side effect.
John:
And for the people who are like, well, you're putting all this money into the space program.
John:
What's the point?
John:
You at least have something to say to them and say, look, aside from all the awesome things that the space program does having to do with space, how do you like your microwave oven?
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP, and let's start with Bill Steinbach, who writes,
Casey:
It keeps track of your place in the album.
Casey:
It shows only albums that I deem as a concert, some smart filter or something, and it has to be compatible with Apple Music.
Casey:
This is a great idea.
Casey:
I have precisely zero recommendations, so start learning Swift, I guess.
Casey:
I mean, that's Marco.
Casey:
Marco, you might know something that would fix this, but I have no idea.
Marco:
I don't actually.
Marco:
There are a lot of Apple Music playing apps out there.
Marco:
Most of them, as far as I know, don't have a Mac and iPhone version.
Marco:
Every time we've talked about this in the past, that's been kind of my holdup.
Marco:
I want to use the same app on the Mac and on iOS because I do a lot of music listening in both of those places.
Marco:
And so that's been one problem for me.
Marco:
But ultimately, I...
Marco:
this is the kind of thing I would love to do this.
Marco:
I would love to build one of these because I don't know if I would ever really find one that fit me right.
Marco:
But the problem is, whatever I would build, it kind of has the to-do list problem.
Marco:
Whatever I would build, if I build it really to fit my needs and wants, it wouldn't really satisfy a lot of other people.
Marco:
So the market for it, I think, would be very, very small.
Marco:
But that's what I would actually want, would be something like this.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I wouldn't want it to just play concerts.
Marco:
I would just want it to be my new music player.
Marco:
And so now we have Casey's Ethernet problem.
Marco:
We have scope creep.
Marco:
I'm not going to just run Cat5 through my music player.
Marco:
I want to run Fiverr.
Marco:
i would want to just you know basically rebuild itunes like but the good version like when it was just music like build rebuild itunes uh for the modern day but then then you get into questions of you know what's feeding it is it compatible with your streaming service of choice and then if if it is then that limits what you can do with the audio because you generally can't get raw sample access if you're playing drm music files through any of these supported apis and
Marco:
and things like that so like there's all sorts of considerations here and the result is there's definitely demand for lots of different music players but i don't think i don't think that demand is um consolidated on anything that like it's like these features are what we have demand for no like everybody demands like 60 of the possible features out there and it's a different 60 for each person
Marco:
So this kind of thing I think would be very, very difficult to ever build for anyone or to sell in any context other than a passion project you're making just for yourself.
Marco:
That would be like exactly what you want and it would be a labor of love because you'd never make any money on it.
Marco:
So that being said, I literally have thought about doing this and maybe someday I will, but I don't think it's very likely.
John:
I mean, it should be a web app because that saves you from having to make it all the different platforms that all people want to listen to it on and dealing with the conventions of the different platforms.
John:
Whereas if you just make it a web app, you can implement it once.
John:
Everybody can use it.
John:
Audio is well within the realm of dealing with web apps.
John:
And yeah, it would still be a pain, but you can imagine a band with a lot of money would say, I'm going to make an awesome, you know, let's say fish where they're
John:
uh you know concerts are their big thing we're gonna hire somebody to make an awesome web-based concert listening experience that we think fish fans will like and it will be the fish concert listening thing because they don't need any other music because they just listen to fish well that actually already exists and i don't like it
Marco:
Fish is a great example because it is a band that produces a large volume of concerts, has a large fan base, many of whom are young and want modern ways to play music and stuff.
Marco:
So you would think it would be a perfect market for that.
Marco:
And there is an app called Live Fish through their officially sanctioned service to sell all the concerts.
Marco:
That's where I buy all the concerts from.
Marco:
And you can pay for their streaming subscription to be able to stream the whole catalog whenever you want.
Marco:
And they have an app to do it, and it's frankly not very good.
Marco:
I've used it before, and it's not something that I want to use again.
John:
But if it was good, people would use it, and it would be accessible to everybody, and you wouldn't have to have seven people implement their own passion project, one for Windows, one for Mac, one for iPad, one for the phone, all this stuff.
John:
Just use the web version.
John:
But I mean, it doesn't surprise me that it's not good because, as you know, making good software takes a lot of money and time and dedication.
John:
And I imagine a band is not in a position to do much more than to throw a bunch of money to someone to make a thing.
John:
And then once it works, they go away.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it's clearly mostly a web view.
Marco:
The app is very much not super native.
Marco:
It's all web crap.
Marco:
and uh it's not super reliable and it's you know it's kind of clunky and so yeah it's but you're right like it's it the the money is not in it to have like a team of people making really good native apps for this for any particular band even one as large as them uh but the problem is the money's not really in it for people to make one in general like even if it plays every band's concerts i mean look at how look at the market look at how many how many itunes alternatives slash apple music alternatives there are
Casey:
again as we talked about they exist but they're not numerous and and there's not a lot of must-haves i i would agree there's not a lot of must-haves but uh the chat room has brought up uh who is this barrowcliff i don't know who this is john barrowcliff something like that somebody barrowcliff anyway they go through and every year they do a music player showcase it's a very interesting post and i at least glance at it every year
Casey:
And maybe one of these would do what Bill wants.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
But there's a fairly robust third-party music player ecosystem, particularly against Apple Music.
Casey:
There's more than one would expect.
Marco:
Ultimately, I mean, if anything, I think the odds of it being reasonable to create one of these are actually better now than ever because you now have the advent of SwiftUI and Catalyst making it easier to make the same code run on Mac and iOS.
Marco:
That being said, these never make for great Mac apps.
Marco:
But that being said, the Apple Music app on the Mac is not a great app.
Casey:
app in so many ways.
Casey:
The Apple Music app is piss poor on every platform as far as I'm concerned.
Marco:
Even the part of it that used to be iTunes, the part that just plays your local collection, if you still maintain one of those, like an old person like me, even that part is so poor.
Marco:
Every time I launch the app,
Marco:
it acts as though it's never been launched before.
Marco:
It instantly loses your place.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
There's no state restoration of where you were, what artist you were in, what song you were playing.
Marco:
There's constant bugs where now, I think the bug is still there, where if you change the star rating of a track about a second and a half later, it jumps to the bottom of the scroll view for some reason.
Marco:
There's just so many little bugs and it just gets worse.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, Apple's clearly not paying attention much to this market either.
Marco:
But I think this market exists, but it's very, very, very small.
Marco:
And so that's going to result only in passion projects and kind of half-assed things.
Yeah, it's a bummer.
Casey:
Robert Bateau writes, what Safari extensions are you running or recommend?
Casey:
I haven't pulled this up yet, so I will stall by asking John, what do you do?
Casey:
What do you recommend?
John:
Of course, my most important Safari extension is the one I wrote, the ever-important reload button.
John:
Of course.
John:
Reloads web pages, high-tech, very sophisticated, available for free on my website.
John:
We will provide a link, and I will not go over the silly story of why I have it, but it exists.
John:
And I do run that.
John:
I also, the other one that is kind of indispensable to me is, it's come under various names and they've been various iterations, but the current one is keyword search, Safari keyword search.
John:
It's just an extension that lets you define sets of characters that you can write.
John:
So if you write, you know, whatever, like,
John:
w space a word it'll do a wikipedia search for that word it comes with a bunch of predefined ones like g space a word they'll search for that in google and that may seem silly you was like hey if you type any word in there it'll search google for it if you have google as your default search engine but you can add any search engine you want you can search any website that has a way to run a search you can put a little keyboard shortcut in there and it's just a convenient way to do that i know lots of people use like
John:
Launch bar or Quicksilver.
John:
There's tons of different ways to do it, but I kind of like to do it in the address bar of the browser and so keyword search provides that.
John:
I use the Instapaper extension that just lets me add things to Instapaper, not too complicated.
John:
And then I just looked at my list here.
John:
I'm kind of surprised.
John:
I have a bunch of extensions that I mostly leave disabled, but when I want them, I enable them.
John:
So for example,
John:
uh and it's not that i i these are things that are part of app bundles right so the way safari extensions work these days is you get a mac app and inside the mac app bundle there's a little nested safari extension and safari like the mac os finds that and tells safari about it right so i have here in my safari extensions list the downy safari extension downy is a thing that downloads like video from youtube and lots of other places and
John:
and inside the downy app i'm assuming is this downy safari extension and so that's in the list and if i want you know i have it disabled but if i want to download something and i'm in safari all i have to do is enable it download it and then disable it and the main reason i leave a lot of stuff disabled is because i just don't want stuff cluttering up like my toolbar or any of my menus or sometimes they have scary security things where they need to see every single web page you visit or whatever and i don't want to deal with that right um let's see what else do i have i have
John:
hush installed but now don't have an active that like blocks like cookie notices and crap like that i have fixerific installed which is an icon factory extension that makes the twitter website less obnoxious in a few interesting ways i have the net newswire subscribe to feed thing installed i think it's just part of net newswiser net newswire lets you do a thing that browsers used to do natively browsers used to back in the day be able to find the rss seed for website and
John:
feed it to your RSS reader or whatever, now there's an extension to do that for you.
John:
You'll notice that nowhere on this list do I have ad blockers, which may surprise you.
John:
I run blockers on iOS in Safari.
John:
Um, and I'm not, I don't think that's what this question is asking about because I don't, I don't know if the people, I guess they call it Safari on their, on their phone.
John:
So I always wonder when people say Safari, do they just mean the Mac version or do they just think of like, and my phone has a web browser too, but what does it even call?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Um,
John:
But on the phone, I think it's much more important to run an ad blocker just because bandwidth is limited and screen space and CPU and battery and all those things are limited.
John:
On the Mac, for the most part, I'm more annoyed when some web app is failing and I realize it's failing because of some kind of content blocker.
John:
And so, you know, my Mac's plugged into the wall and it's big and powerful and has lots of memory.
John:
And so, no, in Safari, I don't run any ad blocker.
John:
So if a website doesn't work, I know it's not because some ad blocker is screwing it up.
John:
And that's the tradeoff we all have to choose.
John:
Are you more annoyed by ads bothering you or are you more annoyed by the five minutes you spend trying to get something to work on a website when the reason it's not working is because of a content blocker that you just realize you need to disable?
Yeah.
Casey:
Marco.
Marco:
The only extension I run in Safari, well, I guess I run two.
Marco:
I run 1Password, which I'm still running both 1Password and Apple Password stuff, but I just turned off the 1Password thing where it automatically pops itself up.
Marco:
So that way I'm only having one pop itself up, which is the Apple one.
Marco:
And that has, I think, mostly solved my problem.
Marco:
And then the ad blocker, one blocker.
Marco:
And one blocker actually is like seven extensions for various categories of things it's blocking.
Marco:
Now, it is really frustrating when something breaks in Safari.
Marco:
I have, however, found that Safari's own built-in weirdness and privacy protection features seem to break sites about as often as one blocker does.
Marco:
So if I'm doing something in Safari and it's not working for some reason or something weird about it is not working, I will just launch a different browser.
Marco:
On my desktop laptop, it's Brave.
Marco:
On my laptop laptop, it's Firefox.
Marco:
I don't know why it's different.
Marco:
I tried different browsers and neither one of them makes me care enough to change the other one over to that one.
John:
So if you're having a compatibility problem with a website, by the way, I would suggest I know Marcos and I just use Chrome because Chrome is the new IE in a couple of interesting ways.
John:
And one of those ways is if a website works anywhere, it probably works in Chrome.
John:
So if I have a site that doesn't work in Safari, even though I'm not running any blockers, I just go right to Chrome.
Marco:
well and to me that's where um brave is is a good choice because brave is one of those browsers that's like based on chromium open source project so without any of google's crap in it um and then but it's so it's kind of chrome but not not quite though that's the thing
Marco:
Well, anyway, so all I do is ad blocker stuff, and it's fine.
Marco:
And really, you know, judgments aside, I mean, I think we're probably past the point where anybody cares if you run an ad blocker or not, but just in case you're not, I mean...
Marco:
And browsing the web is a battle these days.
Marco:
It's not what it used to be.
Marco:
It's not like, oh, I'm not supporting John Gruber by visiting his site with an ad blocker.
Marco:
It's not like that anymore.
Marco:
Now, browsing the web, it's literally, it's like you versus the world.
Marco:
And the entire web is constantly trying to attack you at all times and sell all your crap and track all your crap and burn all your resources.
Marco:
And it's so incredibly...
Marco:
offensive and and full of garbage now um that i think you know safari's built-in protection is very good uh with the tracking prevention and stuff but i think you need to go further in in most cases and so my default browser in its default state has fairly aggressive ad blocking settings and i'm happier for it
Casey:
Yeah, I don't blame you.
Casey:
I run apparently way more than either of you guys, which is not that many in the grand scheme of things, but certainly more.
Casey:
So, of course, I have one password.
Casey:
I also have, and I think a lot of these are actually recommendations from Gruber.
Casey:
I have Noir, which basically lets you force a kind of computed dark mode.
Casey:
I'm a believer that when it's nighttime, you use dark mode.
Casey:
When it's daytime, you use date.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
It's light mode, I guess.
Casey:
It's just called mode.
Casey:
It's just mode.
Casey:
Mode or dark mode.
Casey:
So when I'm in dark mode, then Noir will do its best to try to figure out a dark mode for whatever I'm looking at, which I quite like.
Casey:
I run that on pretty much all my devices.
John:
Does it know when a site has a dark mode?
John:
Does it do detection and then leaves it alone?
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
That's correct.
Casey:
Stop the Madness, which basically stops some really annoying JavaScript stuff.
Casey:
I mean, it does other things too, but it stops really annoying JavaScript stuff.
Casey:
So as an example, there's a service that Michaela's Preschool uses in order to let the teachers send pictures to the class or the parents of the class and send messages back and forth and stuff.
Casey:
And when they send pictures to all the parents...
Casey:
I'd like to save a copy of those pictures, but the website disables right clicks, you know, so you, so you'd have to dive into the like inspector and do all this other junk and it's a real big pain in the butt.
Casey:
Well, stop the madness stops that website from blocking right clicks.
Casey:
So it just allows a right click just like it should.
Casey:
Uh, and it does a bunch of other stuff too.
Casey:
That's just an illustrative example.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
Super Agent for Safari, which is, I think you mentioned one, John, that does this.
Casey:
I think Hush basically just shuts up cookie consent forms because the EU, while meaning, often screws things up for all of us, particularly Americans.
Casey:
And so that's an example of that.
Casey:
And then finally, Vinegar, which I really love.
Casey:
This does an incredibly good job of replacing the totally proprietary YouTube player with just a regular HTML video tag, which, among other things, makes it super easy to put it into picture-in-picture mode, which I really dig.
John:
Does that kill the chapter support, though?
Casey:
I understand the question.
Casey:
It might, actually.
Casey:
I never pay close attention to chapters in YouTube.
Casey:
I think it might kill chapter support.
Casey:
I'd have to look again, though.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure.
John:
As much as I like the idea of those extensions, and I just saw them the other day, I was like, oh, I should get that.
John:
But then I realized, no, because I watch so much YouTube, and as YouTube enhances its HTML5 player or whatever, it's got its own
John:
media player that it built itself as it enhances that with features i like the features so they recently added chapter support and then they added chapter support to the timeline so you could see where the chapters begin in them with little breaks in the bar and it's when you watch like you know hour and a half uh car rebuilding uh videos it's nice to be able to know where the different markers and chapters are and everything like that or the auto captions that we mentioned earlier that came however many years ago
John:
And Apple's native player doesn't have those features because it doesn't understand YouTube, right?
John:
It just thinks it's a video.
John:
And so I understand the appeal of it, especially if the YouTube one has poor performance on your Mac, but I don't run one of those extensions because I want all the neat features that YouTube adds.
Casey:
Yep, that's fair.
Casey:
Finally, Brian Hamilton writes, how do you remember if you've used email, sign in with Apple, Google, or probably not Facebook when you log into a service?
Casey:
For me, I extremely rarely use sign in with Apple, and I know I've done it, and I can't even think of a good example of one I've used sign in with Apple for.
Casey:
If it's something that I consider to be like vaguely ephemeral, like, oh, I just want to try something real quick and I doubt I will ever spend meaningful time here, then I might use sign in with Apple.
Casey:
I never use Google and I absolutely never use Facebook.
Casey:
So it's pretty much, you know, email password with a couple of very rare examples.
Casey:
Marco, how do you handle this, particularly in this weird new world where you're constantly switching up your password manager?
Yeah.
Marco:
Pretty much the same way you do.
Marco:
I really don't use anything besides email and password.
Marco:
Like I never if it offers sign in with Apple or Google or like I never use any of those options.
Marco:
If it has an email based login, I always use that.
John:
John.
John:
Yeah, that's my instinct as well.
John:
Not that I am against the platform logins, but when you use a platform login, you are now tying yourself to that platform.
John:
And all the people who use like, you know, sign in with Facebook everywhere and then came to hate Facebook.
John:
Now you're kind of in a situation where you're.
John:
a little bit stuck and it's annoying to deal with it's not that i think these platforms are going to go away or anything or that i'm going to lose allegiance to them it's just that it's the most flexible to you know use your own email address that you control for your sign in and not tie it to any other platform so that's my default so i don't have to remember because like 99.999 percent of the time it's email and password
John:
I do use sign in with Apple occasionally, like Casey said, for like essentially throwaway stuff where this is not important.
John:
It's not even important enough for me to like generate a password for it or like it's just like I just, you know, I want to try this thing.
John:
And if I'm actually serious about it, I will then make a real account using whatever.
John:
But it's really nice to be able to use sign in with Apple for that.
John:
obviously i never use signing with facebook or anything and even signing with google i don't use that either just because i don't like google's got enough information on me i don't need even more uh more ties to google and the other reason i would say we're from signing with apple occasionally is because my apple id i have multiple apple ids but my main email address is not any one of my multiple apple ids so there is kind of a disconnect there and so
John:
It would be weird for me to sign in with Apple using an Apple ID that's an email address that is different than the email address I use as my main email address.
John:
So there's a little bit of legacy stuff there.
John:
But yeah, having having a default and that default being email address and password has served me well over the decades.
John:
And I think I'm going to be sticking with that.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is like, you know, in all the different online platforms that I've worked on, you know, the topic often comes up of like, oh, should we offer sign-in option XYZ?
Marco:
You know, sign-in with Apple is obviously the newest one.
Marco:
And when we launched the ATP membership thing and that whole CMS we talked about, should we offer sign-in with Apple?
Marco:
Because, you know, we're all Apple-y here.
Marco:
We have Apple Pay.
Marco:
Should we do that?
Marco:
But the problem is when you offer any of these services...
Marco:
as long as you have any other thing like if it's not your only way to log in now you're asking people to remember two things now you have to remember which service you logged in with and then also secondarily like you know your password or whatever if if the answer there was email and so you think you're making it easier if you if you make if you give people these options like oh you can just breeze right through with your facebook or your google login like
Marco:
You think you're making something easier for people, but you're actually causing problems down the road because when they come back to that in six months or a year, are they going to remember which option they picked?
Marco:
And the answer from support email, if you ever see one of these, is no, they don't.
Marco:
Because what will happen is they'll possibly guess wrong and then they'll say, wait a minute, I don't have an account here.
Marco:
Or they'll inadvertently create a new account and then they'll wonder where all their stuff went.
Marco:
So there's so many problems when you have like multiple login options.
Marco:
It's better just to offer one.
Marco:
And the one that everybody can use is the email and password.
Marco:
So that's always like the best one to do, even though the other ones offer certain benefits.
Marco:
I know, I know, but it just causes more problems and confusion when you're actually doing it.
John:
Yeah, if you're like a big service, I think it's a good idea to offer all of them because you can afford a big support staff to deal with the inevitable support things.
John:
And especially if you're like a free service, because like dealing with billing is the worst.
John:
Oh, I created a second account and now I'm being double billed.
John:
And, you know, like those are all the complications.
John:
And you could if you are a small site, one thing you can choose if it's appropriate for your small site.
John:
You can just have one thing and that one thing could be, say, signing with Apple.
John:
Right.
John:
Like, if that's appropriate for your audience, that would be simplifying, and it would be a pretty good system.
John:
But, you know, most even small sites can't do that because, you know, email is the default.
John:
And it occurred to me, like, the changes in the environment of creating accounts on things, because I've been dealing with lots of accounts and life stuff lately, and I'm shocked, I shouldn't be shocked, like, at these...
John:
websites for, let's say, slower moving industries like healthcare and insurance, you know, and I go to them and, you know, I have to set up an account or whatever and they want me to pick a username.
John:
I'm like, are you kidding me?
John:
I'm picking a username in 2022.
John:
And of course, Syracuse is taken.
John:
Jay Syracuse is taken.
John:
Not only are you making me pick a username, but also still all the good usernames are taken.
John:
That used to be the problem for kids who don't remember.
John:
Every website you had an account on, they made you make a username and you had to remember what the username was.
John:
And if you're lucky on a website, you got J. Smith or whatever, or you got Smith on a website, but on the other one, you had to be Smith123, right?
John:
And then other people were just, you know, like, you know, ShinyDiamond97854GoBulls, right?
John:
But they were that everywhere because the username would be the same everywhere.
John:
Like, it was so hard to remember.
John:
Like, if you can't remember, like, oh, what was my, you wouldn't even remember your username.
John:
And then those sites had to implement flows that were like,
John:
forgot my password, but also forgot my username was a flow they had to support.
John:
This was the bad old days of the web before everyone finally decided.
John:
First, they had this medium bad old days where they decided, oh, your username is your email address.
John:
It's like, please stop.
John:
You're confusing people.
John:
email address password and we all figured that out i don't know how many decades ago except for health care insurance and other backwards facing industries like come on don't make me and they make you enter your email address anyway but they make you pick a username and so the real question should be how do you remember your username on sites that still remember username and the answer is it's in keychain i really hope because otherwise i have no freaking idea what it is
Casey:
Uh, comically, I was not the person who put this in the, in the show notes, I don't think, but Ashley Bischoff wrote when I used a platform level login, the approach that I take is to create a stub entry within one password, just to let future me know.
Casey:
That's a very good idea.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
I do that occasionally too, of like, you know, entering a secure note in a cloud key chain or whatever saying, just remember for this stupid website, here's a bunch of information about it.
John:
And so when I, in desperation, try to search for something later in key chain, it will find that.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Linode, and Squarespace.
Marco:
Thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast.
Casey:
So long.
John:
another one of those episodes where i laid a little trap for people if you sent an email or a tweet during the episode telling me that nasa didn't really invent velcro or microwave oven uh you can rescind that email if you if you use the undo feature in gmail maybe see if you can pull that one back because yes technically uh those things were invented either outside of nasa or maybe sometimes decades earlier but nasa did use them in its you know space
John:
flight work uh and that helped advance the technology to the point where it was easier to commercialize whether it is the government paying raytheon to make something or somebody making something in some other country and then nasa adopting it uh you know whatever um so yes i do know that we don't need that uh follow-up for next week it's real-time follow-up in the program with a with a little a little nerd snipe trap someone says nasa didn't invent the microwave i'm gonna write into atp and tell them this we know it's just you know kind of simplifying for the for the sake of the story
Marco:
I wasn't wrong.
Marco:
You were wrong.
John:
No, it's just it's about it's about a nuance and a detail that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
John:
And the main point was like, hey, putting money into NASA made it so that microwave ovens could be in our houses sooner and better.
John:
And that is true.
John:
And that was the point.
John:
Not that, oh, but NASA didn't invent the microwave.
John:
No, but if we didn't put money into NASA and having microwaves on Skylab or whatever, it would have taken much longer for the microwave to appear in people's kitchens.
Casey:
Also, please feel free not to email an apology about falling into the trap.
Casey:
Just let it go.
John:
It's not really a trap.
Casey:
Well, just saying.
John:
That's not what nerd sniping is either, by the way.
John:
Nerd sniping is when you pose a problem and then people are so excited to solve the problem that they solve it for you.
John:
So it's a slightly different thing.
John:
That is also true.
John:
We're talking about your fiber trunk.
Casey:
Do we really want to go there?
Casey:
I'm going to get so much email.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I was thinking, which is dangerous.
Um,
Casey:
I wonder if doing some sort of hybrid approach where some but not all, or maybe all, of my maybe forthcoming Ethernet situation should be fiber.
Casey:
Now, before you jump all over me, let me make an opening statement.
Casey:
I recognize that this is probably overkill.
Casey:
I see that.
Casey:
I understand that.
Casey:
And yet I'm going to potentially march forward anyway because it intrigues me, because I think it's interesting, because it's something to learn, because I know very little about it, and because I'm telling myself, perhaps wrongly,
Casey:
that this may help future-proof things even more.
John:
What future?
John:
Tell me of this future.
Casey:
A future where maybe I want more than 10 gigabit Ethernet.
John:
Maybe I want... I think Ethernet goes up to... What's the fastest Ethernet over copper?
John:
I honestly don't know.
Casey:
I think it's 10 gig.
Casey:
See, I thought it was 10.
John:
I thought 40 you could do over copper.
John:
Let me see.
John:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But my thought was...
Casey:
It seems to me—and here again, maybe my fundamentals are all wrong here—but it seems to me that fiber seems to be the most likely physical medium, even though it's not really a physical medium, but you know what I mean, to last the longest and be able to be current—
Casey:
Because it's just a tube with light in it, and then I can change the ends, or I can change what that light tube is plugged into to make it better and faster and stronger and so on.
Casey:
Maybe that's not how it works, but that's my assumption.
John:
How is it not physical?
John:
You said it was not physical?
Casey:
Well, I mean, it's not like wires or anything.
Casey:
It's just an empty tube with light going through it, right?
John:
That's a wire, kind of.
John:
Anyway, all right.
John:
But here's the thing, though.
John:
What you're proposing is I'm going to have fiber on a trunk, and then it will branch out to be regular copper, ethan.
Casey:
Well, okay, so hold on.
Casey:
So I've got a couple of different things rolling around in my head.
Casey:
So the hybrid approach is exactly that.
Casey:
So if we take the garage to be the new hub of the network, which it is not today, but if it would be, then maybe what I do is I go fiber into the attic and fiber into the crawl space.
Casey:
you know, maybe even at 10 gigabit.
Casey:
And then if I spider many single gigabit lines off of that 10 gigabit trunk, then I have got oodles and oodles of bandwidth and it should be pretty much future-proof, right?
Marco:
Because... It's present-proof.
Marco:
You presently can't use it or do it.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yes and no.
Casey:
I mean, I can't use, well, I mean, I wouldn't use 10 gigabit on any individual device, but having the trunk at 10 gigabit seems like it may not be a terrible idea.
Casey:
And then, so yeah, so I would go into the attic, into the crawl space with fiber potentially, have, you know, like a small fiber to ethernet hub or switch, I should say, in either of those locations, and then spider off of that switch into whatever rooms I think is pertinent to receive an ethernet connection.
John:
But you can do 10 gig with a copper trunk.
John:
Like, why does fiber have to enter this?
Casey:
Because what if I want more than 10 gig?
Casey:
Because what if... Can you use front two?
John:
I mean, like... Well, fair.
Marco:
The amount of effort and cost and, you know, error proneness and fragility... And debugging, like...
John:
Trying to debug your copper to optical transition at all the various points.
John:
I can imagine you doing this big expensive thing and then getting worse than one gigabit because of some weird thing you've never encountered before because you don't know how to set up fiber and neither does anybody you know because it's not a thing for people's homes.
Casey:
Well, and that's fair, but it also comes with some potentially reduced complexity and also increased complexity.
Casey:
So I'm trading complexities, I guess, in the end.
Casey:
But it also may be considerably cheaper or equivalent money.
Casey:
Because if you think about it, I'm in for, and there's debate over whether or not I should use the path I want to use to get into the attic.
Casey:
But if I commit to doing that, it seems clear to me,
Casey:
that the most prudent thing to do is to use plenum-rated Cat 6A, which, as we discussed, I think, last episode, it seems like the best happy medium.
Casey:
And it is not cheap to get... I forget if I can get 500 feet or 1,000 feet of it, but it's like...
Casey:
$300 or $400 just for the cable.
John:
But the wire is not the major cost center here.
John:
Yeah, maybe the fiber wire would be cheaper, but the things you plug the fiber wires into are not going to be cheaper.
Casey:
Why do you say that?
John:
Because the only people who buy there are people who do stuff in data centers and they charge a lot of money for that stuff.
Casey:
So there is, I'm going to get the details wrong because I don't have it pulled up in front of me, but I've been looking into this quite a bit.
Casey:
And the switch that I would use to go from optical to, from fiber to ethernet is like 120 bucks.
Casey:
And I would need potentially two of them.
Casey:
And then, uh, somebody also had, I didn't mention actually somebody who has a whole, a listener, very kind listener, whose name I don't have in front of me, uh, has offered to send me for the cost of shipping an old, uh, Hewlett Packard switch that they have like a rat mount, rack mount switch that they have to,
Casey:
That can, that has something like five or 10 fiber connections, then a whole buttload of, of ethernet connections.
Casey:
So I can get that for almost no money.
Casey:
I can get a couple of the switches, you know, one for the attic, one for the, the crawl space for a couple hundred bucks total.
Casey:
And I'm still probably at this point, I've spent not that much money and it wouldn't be that different necessarily than, I guess it's a little bit more than, than getting ethernet, but it's probably, it's not that much.
John:
Or buying an eight port ethernet switch does not cost a hundred dollars.
Casey:
That's true, but I would need something for the command center in the garage, and I would probably want something that is bigger than this unremarkable 16-port switch I have in the office right now.
Casey:
I mean, I guess I could continue to use this, but I would want something like rack-mounted, for example.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
And additionally, one of the things that also appeals to me about fiber is that I wouldn't be terminating anything because that's a recipe for disaster.
Casey:
So I would just get the I would measure and get the appropriate sized fiber.
Casey:
And that would be that.
Casey:
Now, I'm not I'm not going to be doing any of my own crimping or terminating or anything like that.
Marco:
You can do that with Ethernet cables, though, much more cheaply and easily.
Casey:
Well, but can you get like 300-foot Ethernet cables?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Not 300, but like 100 or 200.
Casey:
I've got a 100-foot one, so I know you can do that at least.
Casey:
No, fair.
Casey:
Maybe I should look into that a little more.
Casey:
And the other thing that scares me a little bit is that I've heard several people say to me like, oh, CAT 6A is the worst.
Casey:
No, not as bad as 7, but it's almost as bad as 7.
Casey:
It's so difficult.
Casey:
Oh, it's so bad.
Casey:
That's the noise we make.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
So I feel like, honestly, the right-ass answer, and maybe that's what I'm really backing myself into, is just not touch anything.
Casey:
Like, why fix what ain't broken?
Casey:
Just figure out a new outlet for this nervous energy.
Casey:
But, I don't know, it just...
Casey:
it seems like fiber is not that unapproachable these days, either financially or from just a regular schmo.
Casey:
I don't think it's necessary, but I don't think it's that unapproachable.
Casey:
And potentially, you know, I don't think if, especially if I go a hybrid route, like I don't think it would be that many fiber runs.
Casey:
Like it would be one to the attic, one to the crawl space.
Casey:
Mm.
Casey:
Maybe, maybe I could go into like the office and the future office with additional runs.
Casey:
Maybe, but that wouldn't be absolutely necessary.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like there's nothing that is clear to me that makes it an utterly terrible idea other than not a lot of people have done it yet.
John:
Do you have two devices that would be on wired Ethernet that could take advantage of your greater than one gigabit per second trunk?
John:
Like they would communicate with each other?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like are you doing a file transfer from a plugged-in Ethernet Mac to a plugged-in Ethernet device somewhere else in the house?
Casey:
Yeah, from the Mac to the Synology constantly or vice versa.
John:
Isn't the Synology and the Mac in the same room?
Casey:
Well, right now they are, but hopefully they wouldn't be.
Casey:
Hopefully they would be – the Synology would be potentially in the garage –
John:
But that's just two devices.
John:
So you're still say you're maxing out one gigabit.
John:
So fine.
John:
But now you need something else that also wants to do a gigabit over the trunk between it and some other device for you to need more than a gigabit on your trunk.
John:
Right.
John:
uh potentially yeah uh and and no to answer your question i don't think i have that not today i don't think you have enough wired devices like everyone else is going to be sipping through the wi-fi straw to get to that well no i have enough i have enough wired devices for sure i mean i have a mac mini but wired devices that need to talk to each other over a gigabit i mean you're watching video from this analogy it's like 10 gigabits it's not you know it's a 10 megabits rather it's not like 100 gigabits or one gigabit sorry i'm getting my gigs in you know what i mean
John:
yeah yeah but like it's surprisingly difficult unless you're doing literal file transfers to saturate a one gigabit trunk in your house unless you actually have a lot of devices that are on wired ethernet or on very fast wi-fi that need to do these big transfers to each other at the same time and are running the traffic jams and to marco's point if that's really the case run three more ethernet cables and now you've solved that problem right because then they can have their own dedicated cables going to wherever they want to go
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the more you waffle about this, the more you waffle about things like the cost of a spool of cable, the more I think the better approach here is to just buy some pre-made cables that are the right lengths and just shove them through the walls in whatever way you can and just call it a day.
Casey:
Well, and to be clear, it's not that I necessarily have a problem with, like, you know, using keystone jacks or anything or crimping if the need arises, although it sounds like it probably wouldn't if I went the pure Ethernet route.
Casey:
It's not that I'm trying to avoid the work of it.
Casey:
It's just I don't – I need – and part of the thing is I tried to make time to do this tonight or earlier today, and I just didn't have the time to do it.
Casey:
But I need to properly –
Casey:
sit down, so to speak, and figure out, okay, how much cable do I really need?
Casey:
Because I have this vision that I need a couple hundred feet of Ethernet cable, and it may be that I need 900 feet or something.
Casey:
I doubt it, but you never know.
Casey:
Maybe I need 900 feet and a 1,000-foot spool wouldn't be so bad, but I have this gut feeling that I need many, many hundreds of feet less than 1,000.
Casey:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
And so it seems silly to me to buy a 1,000-foot spool, which is almost the only thing I can find.
Casey:
Do not buy a 1,000-foot
Casey:
where do you think you live this no that's what i'm saying actual measurements do it like the actual route the wires would take it's way fewer feet than you think it is and we agree and that's why i think i need to stop hand waving and stop and start actually putting numbers down i started to do this a little bit but i haven't done it properly but the other thing to think about though is
Casey:
is, again, if I'm petulantly insisting on plenum rated cable, for better or worse, I mean, I don't think it's for worse, but if I'm petulantly insisting on plenum rated cable, it's a taller order to find Cat 6A plenum rated at exactly 100 feet, you know, already pre-cooked, if you will, than it is just riser rated Cat 6A, which is what everyone else in the entire world wants.
John:
Have you considered the fact that perhaps researching this project is in fact the project that keeps you busy?
John:
You just wanted to find something to keep you busy.
John:
You don't actually, and this will make Aaron happy, you don't actually have to do anything to your house.
John:
Your hobby could simply be exhaustively researching and modeling.
John:
a potential house-spanning fiber optic network.
John:
You can get a 3D program and make CAD files and really model it out and do a fly-through.
John:
We could fly through the plenum and watch the plenum-rated cable and everything.
Casey:
Modeling, you say.
Casey:
I'm putting something in Slack right now.
John:
This is a thing to do.
Casey:
Yeah, so I did this earlier today, I think it was.
Casey:
I put this in Slack.
Casey:
I don't have it easily accessible for the live people, I'm sorry.
Casey:
But I used Monodraw to diagram out.
Casey:
This is not the hybrid approach.
Casey:
This would be the full fiber approach.
Casey:
But I diagrammed this out for myself.
John:
I think this is the project.
John:
You are succeeding in finding something to occupy your time.
John:
It's just that the project isn't what you thought it was.
John:
You thought the project was wire my house for Ethernet.
John:
The project is really planned to wire my house for Ethernet.
Marco:
Why don't you make a new iOS app full of emoji and lots of text that's all about letting people plan out their network upgrades for their house?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.