No Longer ery Good
Marco:
So I think I actually might be wearing out my MacBook Air keyboard.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
Are you using it that much?
Marco:
Yeah, so I really am.
Marco:
So, because I keep going, you know, I'm doing restaurant stuff, so I'm on the ferry back and forth.
Marco:
I go to the city sometimes, I'm on the train back and forth.
Marco:
So in all these times, if I'm traveling, like taking a weekend trip somewhere, I'll take just the Air.
Marco:
So I'm actually using it a lot.
Marco:
This is the M2 Air.
Marco:
So I'm using it a ton, actually.
Marco:
But...
John:
the v is no longer very good well no longer airy good um the command key is starting to go now to the one that's built that's nearest to the v but we were out of this phase we got rid of the butterfly keyboard these keys are just supposed to work i thought maybe you were talking about your uh alien style acid blood slash finger secretions that are wearing off the paint on the key caps but no you're saying you press the key and the letter doesn't appear on the screen
Marco:
Yeah, like I got to like press it harder and I keep missing pastes.
Marco:
You know, that's no good.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
It's like, I don't know.
Marco:
Are these easy to repair these days?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
They can.
John:
I mean, you can bring it in and they'll, you know, take off the little key cap and put it in a new scissor switch or whatever.
John:
But I'm hoping it's not.
John:
I'm hoping it's just the...
John:
the plastic mechanism that makes the key cap go up and down and it's not the little switch that's below it the key hits yeah god knows because it's out of warranty like by a pretty good amount we see what you're doing here marco we know that the m4 macbook air is coming out soon you're sort of like laying the groundwork for why you of course need to get an m4 macbook air
Marco:
Honestly, so, okay, there are two things that would make me rationalize that very quickly that I think are plausible.
Marco:
Like cellular, I don't think it's plausible yet.
Marco:
That would do it no matter what.
Marco:
Amen.
Marco:
Because, God, another, like, I had to reboot my phone yesterday to make it work on the ferry, like, as a tethering source.
Marco:
Like, there have been so many times in the last few months that, like, I use tethering at least once a week, usually more.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'd say maybe four times in the last few months I've had to reboot either the MacBook Air, the iPhone, or both to get tethering to work.
Marco:
Like, it's so buggy.
Marco:
But anyway, what would make me upgrade?
Marco:
Like, sight unseen would be...
Marco:
a significantly brighter screen because i'm often using it in sunlight or a nanotexture option like if either of those come to the air which i know that's not really an air thing it's more of a macbook pro thing and the macbook pros now do have that i could see them doing the nanotexture since it's pretty cheap now right like
Marco:
it was a couple hundred bucks in the laptops like it's nothing compared to the ssd upgrade prices they have on the macbook air i know but i could i could also like it wouldn't surprise me if they keep that as a macbook pro only feature so i don't know but certainly i would love nanotexture and more brightness because i am often using it like in a sunny train window or on the sunny ferry like and so it that would actually get me to upgrade
John:
yeah i had to wave my dad off from his his uh his mac can't run the current version of turbo tax so that is what's triggering his need to upgrade he has a 10 he has a 10 year old macbook pro and he can't run the latest version of turbo tax because it's tax season so it's like well it had a good run 10 years and he was and i was recommending what he should get i said don't buy a computer because the m4 macbook air is going to come out and that's what you should get blah blah blah and he's like macbook air why not macbook pro and i explained to him what the differences are and
John:
I basically asked him, the only thing that will be relevant to you is if you think your current screen is not bright enough.
John:
Because if you think your current screen is not bright enough, a MacBook Pro will have a brighter screen.
John:
I didn't think about the idea that the MacBook Air could have a brighter screen, but I really doubt it's going to have a 1600 nit HDR, you know, MacBook Pro screen.
John:
But he said he was fine with the brightness, so I told him to wait and he's going to get the M4 MacBook Air when it comes out.
John:
But you, I can imagine if you're using the thing on a ferry with the sun coming in through the window, a brighter screen would definitely help.
John:
But a non-functioning key on the keyboard would probably also make you buy one.
Marco:
Well, it depends on like what will it take to get this fixed?
Marco:
Because like the error rate of the non-functioning key and the fact that it's traveling to the command key now, like the error rate's going up.
Marco:
And so it's starting to get really annoying.
Yeah.
Marco:
So if it can be a quick, easy fix, maybe I'll get it fixed.
Marco:
If it's going to be a $600 fix, there's no way I would do that.
John:
They can do the keycap for you right in the Apple store.
John:
I'm not sure replacing the keycap will fix it for you, but they can definitely do that for a very small fee while you wait, probably.
John:
I hope so.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Stephen Klink writes, I liked John's example of Flighty as an app that doesn't need to involve other people, but wanted to note that one of my favorite features is the ability to share a Flighty card with anyone via a simple URL and have them see the exact same info as me.
Casey:
No app required, not even an email address verification code.
John:
That's a great point.
John:
Flighty even does that part well.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I mean, it's a great app.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
If you fly in an airplane with any regularity whatsoever, you should definitely check it out.
John:
Or if you pick up people at the airport who are flying in an airplane, get the app anyway.
John:
That's the main thing I use it for is picking up other people at the airport.
John:
I'm not the one flying, but still, the app is invaluable.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I think all three of us give it our official two thumbs up.
Casey:
With regard to Apple Invites, Jim Weiner writes, my birthday's coming up.
Casey:
Happy birthday.
Casey:
So I thought I'd try out Apple Invites.
Casey:
Even if you can easily log in without an Apple account, my Android friends cannot figure it out and are giving up.
Casey:
Invites creates different links when I invite someone via their phone number or email.
Casey:
Why can't it use unique links to authorize attendees?
Casey:
Of the 12 people attending my birthday, only three people, two Android, one iOS, have gone through the hassle of RSVPing in the app.
Casey:
Everyone else has just texted me back.
Casey:
I'm so annoyed that I want to write my own Invites app.
John:
i don't think that's the solution but yes this is the the danger of foisting technology onto other people in your life who just want to do a thing that i think does not necessarily involve technology they can tolerate it if it works well enough that doesn't get in the way but the second it is not perfectly easy and seamless it's like i'm just gonna text the person
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to Sidecar, we have a little bit of feedback from Matt West.
Casey:
I'm a software engineer at Google, and while it is discouraged, though not altogether forbidden, to sign into one's corporate Mac with a personal iCloud account, it is possible to use Sidecar on a personal iPad over a USB-C cable.
Casey:
I don't know why I didn't think of that.
Casey:
It's a great point.
John:
I didn't even know it worked over USB-C.
John:
I've always just done it wirelessly, but that's cool.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right, John, you have manifested something, and it's a real boon for a lot of the old-time Mac users.
Casey:
Do you want me to do this, or do you want to take your celebratory lap?
John:
Well, I'll let you do it, but let me just preface this by saying that even though it seems like I complained about a thing on a podcast and then the next episode Apple did something about it, which has happened frequently in the past, this is absolutely a stop clock is right twice a day phenomenon.
John:
I've been complaining about this for decades.
John:
If you just complain about something every single day, eventually something happens to address the thing you were complaining about.
John:
And I was like, oh, look, your complaining worked.
John:
if you just you know it's kind of like that thing where you uh tweet uh that every single team won the world cup and then you just delete all the ones that are wrong well maybe it's not the same it's more like a stop clock but anyway i take no credit for this other than the credit due to everyone who has been complaining about this exact issue for i think 25 years apple ids slash apple accounts have existed it just so happened that one of the very regular times when i and other people complain about this
Marco:
happened to be last week since last week and now apple has finally actually done something to address it yeah this is this is one of those things that like i bet this was a huge pain in the butt for them and this like no no manager is ever going to advance their career by doing features like this but god it was so necessary so i'm glad they did it took 25 years to get done yeah
Casey:
All right, so what we're talking about is migrate purchases from one Apple account to another Apple account.
Casey:
A reading from the Knowledge Base article, which will be linked in the show notes.
Casey:
If an Apple account is used only for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple account to consolidate them.
John:
Now, let's pause right there because I read this when it first came out.
John:
I'm like...
John:
What are they saying?
John:
Are they saying if you have an Apple ID that you've only ever used to make purchases, then you can migrate them?
John:
But what if you've used that Apple ID for something other than making purchases?
John:
Like, it's so weirdly phrased, and we'll get into...
John:
the limitations inherent in this but it's like what i was complaining about last week was the ability to merge apple ids this is not really that but this is the major part that people want which is hey i bought stuff on one apple id but i have another apple id or i bought things on two apple ids and i want to combine them there's a lot more to an apple id than just stuff that you bought there's all your data there's all everything having to do with the history of that account but
John:
truly merging accounts would be very big.
John:
But this article and this feature is clearly focused on just purchases.
John:
And the way they word it makes it seem like if you have this account where you've never done anything except buy stuff, then you can transfer them.
John:
That's not really the case.
John:
You can transfer them no matter what you've done out of an account.
John:
But a lot of that stuff that you've done is not going to come.
John:
Only the purchases will be transferred.
Casey:
And by the way, this feature isn't available to users in the EU, United Kingdom, or India.
Casey:
So, tough noogies.
Casey:
You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you've purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple account to a primary Apple account.
Casey:
However, it's worth now I'm not reading anymore, but there are a lot of limitations here, and let me read from the knowledge base a smattering of limitations.
Casey:
Neither Apple account can be a child account created through family sharing.
Casey:
Neither Apple account can already be used for migrated purchases.
Casey:
You can actually undo a migration of purchases, which is kind of surprising.
Casey:
If you undo a migration of purchases from secondary account, you won't be able to migrate purchases again for a year.
Casey:
You can't migrate purchases if both the primary Apple account and the secondary Apple account have music library data associated with each of them.
John:
Now, that's a pretty big one, because now it's like, okay, well, I want to migrate purchases, but if you ever, like, had music library data associated with one, like, if you have, like, basically an iTunes library on both of them, you can't transfer stuff?
John:
Like, isn't that...
John:
It's that's kind of what they were getting at.
John:
And they're like, if you've only used it for purchases, that seems like a big limitation.
John:
Like just I know they're not going to try to merge the music library stuff.
John:
Fine.
John:
Like they're just trying to transfer purchases.
John:
But it's like, well, well, I'm sorry.
John:
Both of these Apple IDs have music library data associated with them.
John:
So now you can't transfer stuff.
John:
Look, yuck.
John:
That is one of the worst limitations.
Casey:
You can't migrate purchases if you've set your Apple One subscription to provide iCloud storage to a third different account.
Casey:
If your primary account has never been used for purchases or free downloads, you can't migrate purchases.
Casey:
I think the implication there is because you don't have any to migrate.
John:
No, no, it's the other way.
John:
It's the primary account.
John:
It's the one you're migrating them to.
John:
Oh, my bad.
John:
That one has to have been used to do stuff, which makes some sense, but still is a little bit meh.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't catch that.
Casey:
That's a good call.
Casey:
Thank you for the clarification.
Casey:
Neither Apple account can be receiving any special access to apps or content.
Casey:
For example, an Apple account enrolled in the VPP program.
Casey:
What is that, volume purchase program?
John:
Yeah, volume purchase program, I think.
Casey:
The volume purchase program program.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
To receive special access to apps.
Casey:
And then as a lot of people found out shortly after this was released, you also lose all your test flight enrollments.
Casey:
And apparently one of the things that you're shown when you do a migration is on screen.
Casey:
It says the following will not be migrated to the primary account.
Casey:
Personalized recommendations, digital project reviews, and test flight access.
Casey:
And then it continues.
Casey:
Access to test flight won't transfer to the primary account.
Casey:
Continue using test flight.
Casey:
Sign in with the primary account and request beta app access again.
John:
If only that worked, IconFactory is finding out that you can't just request access from the primary account because when you try to enter it, TestFlight says, oh, you can't enter that person.
John:
They're already registered.
John:
And if you delete them, it doesn't help because when they try to register, it thinks like both email addresses or both Apple IDs are associated with the same thing.
John:
So whichever one you try to register with, it thinks they're already registered, including after you delete them.
John:
So...
John:
Some bugs remain.
John:
So, you know, a lot of people are looking at this and like, finally, I can do this big transfer.
John:
And unlike iCloud Photo Library, where I pretty much did it on day one after messing with the betas, I would recommend people wait on this one.
John:
Because this feature did take 25 years or so to arrive.
John:
It is extremely limited.
John:
It has a lot of caveats.
John:
It probably has a lot of bugs.
John:
Maybe let other people go first.
John:
You've been waiting for how many years for this?
John:
You can wait another month just to see, let Apple shake out the stuff.
John:
Because this stuff...
John:
Like messing up purchases and other things associated with your Apple ID historically have not been fun or easy or sometimes possible to get fixed.
John:
You can call Apple support.
John:
You can go through all the different levels.
John:
You can like you're just can somebody like I bought this movie.
John:
Can somebody make it work again?
John:
a year and a half labor and maybe someone will do something about it like it's not it's not the type of thing where you can just fix stuff easily you certainly you can't do it yourself because they're apple servers and then getting apple to fix their server stuff is incredibly difficult so maybe just chill on this one if you've been able to sustain your current split environment with multiple apple ids
John:
Keep these limitations in mind so you don't accidentally trip one, like don't accidentally make an iTunes or make a music library on one of the accounts or whatever, but maybe let some other people go first and see how it works out for them before you transfer stuff.
John:
So anyway, I applaud Apple for doing this, but I don't have a lot of faith that it was done.
John:
uh as well as it could have been certainly it is not the merging of apple ids which would be a union of all of your stuff which would be incredibly difficult but again 25 years is a long time and apple has a lot of money so i feel like they should have been able to do it but transferring purchases it's a good start uh maybe in a year uh it will be ready
Casey:
So you haven't tried it yet then, huh?
John:
I don't have things to transfer.
John:
I do have multiple Apple IDs, but one of them is my developer Apple ID, which I've only used for, I think that was my original Apple ID.
John:
And the only reason I had it was to register for developer discounts back before it was an email address, back in the day when you'd subscribe for ADC Premiere.
John:
I mean, you get a free ticket to WWDC and a hardware discount that was tremendously huge that I used to buy my Power Mac G5 and Cinema Display.
John:
Uh, those that's, that's the era that my original Apple ID dates to.
John:
And then I got another Apple ID when I tools came out.
John:
Uh, and those are the, and I have other ones for testing and stuff or whatever, but those are the two main ones that I use, but there is nothing on my developer account except for developer stuff.
John:
It's my WWDC ticket, all my apps, blah, blah, blah.
John:
That's my developer account.
John:
All of my personal stuff is on my personal Apple ID, all my movies, all my music, TV shows, all that stuff, all the apps.
John:
Um, so I don't have anything to transfer.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got a handful of people who, I don't know why people are so grumpy about Marco and I's desire to have a cellular Mac, but people are maybe not grumpy, but they seem deeply confused that this is something that we would desire.
John:
Like I said, they haven't been convinced because they haven't ever been in a situation where they've seen what a difference it makes.
John:
Like, it's not the end of the world.
John:
Like, you can get things to work.
John:
Marco can reboot his phone.
John:
He can reboot his laptop.
John:
It will eventually work.
John:
But if you haven't experienced how much nicer it is not to deal with that, it just seems like not that big of a deal.
John:
And they'll all those people, all the doubters will be convinced when Apple finally ships this.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the thing is, like I don't like when people tell you in tech, I need capability X. I need this.
Marco:
Here's why I need this.
Marco:
I need this.
Marco:
If you respond by saying no one should need that, that's not a helpful response.
Marco:
Like, I don't know who needs to hear this.
Marco:
Apparently everyone.
Marco:
But like, you know, if someone is telling you, especially like, look,
Marco:
Casey and I, we know computers pretty well.
Marco:
I'd say it's safe for us to say without any modesty, we are computer experts.
Marco:
We are pretty good at computers.
Marco:
So when we say we want a cellular mode built in so we don't have to use tethering because tethering is not working well for us, I think we can say with some credibility that
Marco:
This is what we actually want.
Marco:
So for people to come and say, you don't want that.
Marco:
Why do you want that?
Marco:
That's stupid.
Marco:
No one should need that.
Marco:
That's what you're saying is you don't want that or you don't think you want to pay for that.
Marco:
Maybe that's different from no one needs that.
John:
Well, a lot of people writing in have another solution that they say, why don't you just do X?
John:
I'm doing X. I think it's fine with me.
John:
I'm solving the problem in this other way.
John:
If you two only tried this other way that I'm recommending, you wouldn't want this anymore.
John:
I think that is the more common one, which is, you know, again, assuming that you either have never tried the thing that they're doing or that if you did try it, you would find it satisfactory.
Casey:
Yeah, so a lot of people wrote in and said, hey, why not use a hotspot, man?
Casey:
You should just use a hotspot.
Casey:
A hotspot will fix all your problems.
Marco:
So right now, yeah, there are those standalone, like, basically little tiny Wi-Fi routers with cell modems in them.
Marco:
That don't drain your phone battery because it's got its own battery.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It has its own battery to drain and to keep charged.
Marco:
I actually currently own one of those.
Marco:
I bought it for a trip two years ago or one year ago.
Marco:
And I've been using it since then as a backup internet connection, as for my home internet.
Marco:
They are fine.
Marco:
In certain ways, they're better than tethering.
Marco:
In certain ways, they're worse.
Marco:
They are not as good as built-in cellular.
Marco:
And the main reason why is because, once again...
Marco:
It is a separate device that requires you to, first of all, carry it.
Marco:
Second of all, the data plans on it are actually very expensive.
Marco:
Like the AT&T ones, I think what I pay is I think 50 bucks a month for that.
Marco:
And they're like, you know, limited data caps and everything.
Marco:
They're not great plans.
Marco:
And obviously, this will vary by carrier and country and things like that.
Marco:
But like here in the US, the plans for those are not amazing, at least if you want decent coverage.
Marco:
So sorry, T-Mobile people, that's not going to work for me.
Marco:
Anyway, so yeah, separate plan and it's an expensive plan.
Marco:
Now, granted, whatever they would offer on a computer, maybe it would be the same plans.
Marco:
Maybe it would be something between the iPad plans and that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Whatever corporate laptops have, I'm sure it would be the same plans as that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Like, the handful of corporate laptops that I have built-in, I don't know what they charge.
Marco:
But I'm sure that would not be that different.
Marco:
But it is a separate device that you have to carry.
Marco:
And they're not small.
Marco:
They're the size of, like...
Marco:
you know basically like a tiny wifera you know like the one i have a deck of cards uh i'd say mine is like two decks of cards or like you know maybe like a novelty deck like a large print uno or something like so it's it's not they're not small and it's just one more thing to charge and you have to like turn it on and as long as it's on it is using power and draining itself slowly so like
Marco:
Yeah, I could put it in my backpack when I'm going to go on the ferry for the day.
Marco:
But I still have to remember to go reach in there, turn it on.
Marco:
It's going to take up space in there.
Marco:
I have to make sure it's charged before I put it in there.
Marco:
And then am I going to remember to turn it off when I'm done, like when I arrive?
Marco:
And then what if I accidentally leave it on all day and it's dead?
Marco:
It's another thing to manage.
Marco:
And that is better in the sense – it's better than tethering in the sense that the laptop will indeed connect to it fairly quickly because it is basically broadcasting a tiny Wi-Fi network.
Marco:
So the laptop treats it more like Wi-Fi.
Marco:
So that's good.
Marco:
But it comes with all those other burdens that I'm not sure are worth it.
Marco:
And this should tell you something.
Marco:
I literally just said I own one of these devices and I don't bring it with me for my daily ferry trips because it's too much of a hassle.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
So I had realized, I'm pretty sure I talked about this on the show.
Casey:
I realized a while back that at my local library or libraries, which they're all incredible and I'm so lucky to have them.
Casey:
But one of the things they offer is you can check out a hotspot from the library and you get it for three or four weeks and you pay nothing for it.
Casey:
And when you're done, you bring it back.
Casey:
And our library in the county in which I live,
Casey:
They distribute T-Mobile hotspots, which are okay.
Casey:
They're physically, you know, the devices themselves are clearly a little bit older and T-Mobile coverage is okay.
Casey:
Then there's a neighboring county that's like a 20-ish minute drive from where I am.
Casey:
And they actually offer, not only do they offer reciprocity with cardholders from my county, but they also offer Verizon hotspots.
Casey:
And they're a little bit bigger, but they're way more modern and they work really well.
Casey:
And so this is relevant because I tried my darndest to make sure I had a hotspot available for football tailgates.
Casey:
Because if you recall, I did that whole tailgate tub thing.
Casey:
And I have a portable router in the tub, which, yes, I know that's a little redundant.
Casey:
We're not going to talk about it right now, but there's reasons.
Casey:
And what I'll do is I'll plug one of these Wi-Fi hotspots via USB into that travel router to distribute internet.
Casey:
And it is nice and convenient.
Casey:
But I echo everything that Marco said.
Casey:
It is not as convenient.
Casey:
It is one more thing to manage, both physically and charge level.
Casey:
It's not small, particularly the nicer Verizon one is quite a bit bigger than the T-Mobile one.
Casey:
The T-Mobile one really is like a deck of cards.
Casey:
But I concur with your assessment of the Verizon one.
Casey:
It's, you know, like a couple of decks or, you know, a big Deca Uno or something like that.
Casey:
And no matter what, it's one more thing to worry about.
Casey:
And I think I would feel very differently if I was doing like long car trips with the children all trying to use iPads or something like that.
Casey:
And that's where something like, you know, a little MiFi, they're often called colloquially, but one of these little portable hotspots, that's where it shines.
Casey:
But I...
Casey:
Don't care about that yet.
Casey:
Maybe I will in the future, but not today.
Casey:
And today, what I want to do is I want to open my laptop and have it be immediately connected to the internet.
Casey:
And that is, and not have to worry about any freaking thing else.
Casey:
And that's not a hotspot.
Casey:
So this is what I want.
Casey:
I want a cellular Mac.
Casey:
That's what I want.
Casey:
Ryan Powers writes,
Casey:
I was genuinely surprised to hear that anyone cared whether the Sonos app worked or not.
Casey:
It's totally irrelevant to my Sonos use case.
Casey:
What am I missing here?
Casey:
Is there some amazing thing in the Sonos app that makes it a must use?
Casey:
I think, strictly speaking, I believe in order to have a lossless playback, you need to use Sonos app, but I could not possibly care less about that.
Casey:
Just to be clear, I don't care.
Casey:
I don't think I'm capable of hearing the difference.
Casey:
I don't think you are either.
Casey:
You're not.
Casey:
But I don't care.
Casey:
So in any case, the reason I like it, I feel like I might have glanced off of this last episode, but the reason I like using the Sonos app is because I don't want to...
Casey:
I don't want my phone or other device to be in the midst of playing anything when I'm trying to use it.
Casey:
I view the ambient music in the house to be a house thing, not a Casey's phone thing.
Casey:
There's nothing wrong with what Ryan is saying.
Casey:
And if that works for you, then keep on keeping on.
Casey:
I mean, that's great.
Casey:
But to me...
Casey:
I like having everything in the Sonos app, the playback, the management of speakers, the management of volume.
Casey:
I like having it all in there.
Casey:
And for all of the foibles that the Sonos app has, and this does have many, managing which things you're playing and the volume of each is so much better, even in the crummy versions of that app, than it is for me anyway in AirPlay 2.
Casey:
I find when I start an AirPlay 2 speaker, it's... Um... Um... Um...
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
Okay, yes.
Casey:
I'll play music now at a volume that is nowhere near the volume you expect.
Casey:
It will either be exceedingly loud or almost silent.
Casey:
And that is just not what I want.
Casey:
And so for me, I don't care for using AirPlay 2.
Casey:
And the only time I do, coincidentally, is with this podcast app I like called Overcast.
Casey:
That's pretty much the only time I ever use AirPlay 2 for any of my Sonos stuff.
Casey:
So that's my use case.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, you might have the opposite opinion of me because I thought you were mostly AirPlaying.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I almost never open the Sonos app for any reason.
Marco:
The only reasons I open it are to change configurations.
Marco:
Basically, like if I want to like, you know, either if I've added if I'm adding or moving a product or if I like I like the other day, I move some stuff around to different rooms.
Marco:
I didn't modify some stuff there or if I want to change some settings like, oh, I want to change the EQ on this speaker.
Marco:
Like otherwise, I am never in that app.
Marco:
Like there is never a time when I think I would like to play music.
Marco:
Let me dive into that mess and connect it to all my stuff.
Marco:
Like, no, that never happens.
Marco:
I use Sonos for TV sound and for AirPlay sound, and I never open the app for anything else.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to say that I'm right and you're wrong.
Casey:
It's just not the way I think of and want to manage my music.
Casey:
This is actually very similar to the opinions that I had about Spotify versus Apple Music.
Casey:
Bear with me here.
Casey:
One of the things I loved about Spotify before their app got...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I liked having iTunes, Apple Music, the non-streaming form of Apple Music, the Apple Music app.
Casey:
I liked that as being my music, the stuff I brought.
Casey:
Maybe it's Dave Matthews concerts, or maybe it's stuff I paid for, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And one of the things that really turned me off about Apple Music originally when I first started converting to it was that there was no delineation between my music and their music.
Casey:
Over time, I've started to feel differently about that, and I don't think it really matters because my music is kind of everything, right?
Casey:
The distinction was always kind of synthetic or arbitrary anyway, but it's that sort of delineation.
Casey:
I like compartmentalizing the home music playback to the home, and my playback, be that Instagram or maybe I'm watching something while there's ambient music playing, that can happen on my phone.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to DeepSeq censoring in different models, Sebastian Raschke writes, while the 671B DeepSeq R1 flagship models based on 671B DeepSeq V3, the smaller DeepSeq R1 models have different base models.
Casey:
That's a lot of models in one sentence, but that's okay.
Casey:
A possible explanation is that the difference in censoring could already be taking place on the base model level.
Casey:
The 70 billion model is based on Llama, which is Meta AI's model.
Casey:
Then the 32 billion model is based on Quen, Q-W-E-N.
Casey:
I'm sorry, I butchered that.
Casey:
A model by another Chinese company.
Casey:
You can confirm this via the official technical report, page 14, table 5, which is in GitHub, and we will link in the show notes.
John:
That makes a lot more sense to me.
John:
I didn't realize the $70 billion one was based on Lama, so that one probably doesn't have Lama as Meta slash Facebook's AI model.
John:
That one doesn't have Chinese government censoring in it versus the $32 billion model based on another Chinese model.
John:
yeah that's a lot of this is i think branding is uh was is the confusing thing like oh these are all deep seek uh lms but it's like well what is the base model and is the base model for the big one you're using through the app the same as the base model for the small ones you can download and apparently it's not so uh that does make more sense but it is still kind of weird that this one company is fielding these different models with different base models with very different censorship behaviors but that's apparently the way it is now
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Screen time, we talked about, I think, was it John?
Casey:
You had like some sort of throwaway comment about that.
Casey:
What was the genesis?
John:
Yeah, it's another one of those things that is complained about all the time by me and others.
John:
And so last episode, I made my, I don't know, annual, biannual screen time unreliability complaint because it's unreliable.
Yeah.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So Jonathan writes, I don't see anything wrong with screen time numbers.
Casey:
And they provided an image where it says screen time, all devices, daily average, 2,395 hours and 49 minutes.
John:
That's a high daily average.
Casey:
That is indeed.
Casey:
That takes a lot of work.
John:
Even if you have like, if you buy every product that app loans and you leave them open and running all the time, setting aside the fact that it shouldn't be counting that as your screen time if you're not in front of that computer...
John:
I still don't think you can hit 2,300 hours a day.
John:
That would be a lot of open devices with a lot of open apps all counting at the same time.
John:
This was not the only feedback we got about screen time.
John:
My offhanded aside about how screen time has never been reliable, so many people sent screenshots of their completely absurd...
John:
ridiculous numbers that don't make any sense even when the numbers were within the realm of imaginable reason of like well 30 something hours and maybe it's counting multiple apps that i'm running on my mac at the same time blah blah the numbers never made sense to the people reporting them it's like this doesn't feel like i can't connect this these numbers to things that i did and so what's the point of this feature like i said it might as well be a random number generator that just makes a bunch of
John:
graphs uh this has never worked i used it tried to use it for my kids to track to track and control the control part by the way also doesn't work very well but the tracking definitely doesn't work to say like what apps are my little kids using and how long are they spending on who knows because the little numbers and bar graphs are basically meaningless they've had this feature in their operating system for years they advertise it and as far as i could tell it just does not work and has never worked cool
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Last episode, you had made mention of Apple's Unix certification of macOS.
Casey:
And Paulo Pinto writes, it is still certified as Unix 03, but there are several things that have to be enabled or changed so that macOS actually works as a certified Unix.
Casey:
Also, the latest standard is version Unix 07.
Casey:
There was recently a very ranty article on OS News going over how Apple has achieved its certification.
Casey:
We'll link that from Tom Huelda, I believe.
Casey:
Anyways, Tom writes,
Casey:
which dates all the way back to the ancient times of 2004 when Marco and I were just graduating college.
Casey:
And as such, macOS is only Unix 03 on both Intel and ARM.
Casey:
However, you can argue that this is just semantics since it's not like Unix and POSIX are very inclined to change.
John:
I'm kind of surprised Apple was keeping this up because if you read the article, which is provocatively titled Apple's Mac OS Unix certification is a lie.
John:
They like basically there are a bunch of settings in Mac OS that you have to toggle to make it so that Mac OS passes whatever the certification is.
John:
Uh, and I'm kind of amazed that Apple is still doing that because the settings are probably annoying to maintain to like, we got to make sure we, you know, they went through the effort to certify what was then Mac OS 10 as a real trademark Unix, all caps UNIX.
John:
And they've just kept up that certification by every time they add something to Mac OS that would make it not comply.
John:
They have a switch that says, put it back to the compliant mode.
John:
And most of the things that like that they've switched or whatever, uh,
John:
It's better the way macOS does it out of the box, but to pass the test, it has to do with the slightly worse old way.
John:
And so they have a way to do it.
John:
They have a way, okay, turn it back on, turn this thing off, turn this performance enhancement off, change this behavior back to the way this Unix specification wants it.
John:
Now, they're not keeping up with the certifications.
John:
It's not like they're, you know, I don't know how much what difference is between Unix 03 to Unix 07.
John:
But I'm actually very surprised that Apple has kept this up.
John:
And I think they're putting in a surprising amount of effort there.
John:
And I don't mind that these things have to be settings.
John:
I would prefer I would be just fine if they left it behind and say, you know, we're not going to bother complying with that.
John:
All those settings, remove them, remove that code, remove those conditionals.
John:
Because in most cases, when you look at what they are, they're things that are not relevant to the average person's life.
John:
Or they're things that no end user would ever, like, if they had some software that wasn't working right because that setting was wrong.
John:
Like, a lot of them require, like, disabling system integrity protection and stuff like that.
John:
It's like, no thanks.
John:
I'd like to leave.
John:
System integrity protection enabled.
John:
And I would like modern behaviors.
John:
I don't really care about compliance with a 2004 Unix spec.
John:
But there you have it.
John:
Apparently, they're still complying.
John:
I don't know if it's just corporate inertia, but Apple, I think you can safely leave that one behind.
John:
You don't need to keep maintaining all those feature toggles.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I mean, I think Tom was particularly worked up about the fact that, yes, you have to flip these switches, but I agree with you.
Casey:
Like, this is the march of progress, and things are better the way it ships by default.
Casey:
I guess unless you're a purist, but for any regular or reasonable human, it's better this way, and at least a fallback is provided.
Casey:
Now, I concur as well with you, John, that I think it's probably long since time that they just walk away from all this, but...
Casey:
I don't really understand why we are all so worked up about this.
John:
It could be like a government contracts.
John:
You can only use this software if it's Unix compliant in some government application.
John:
But honestly, if that was the case, there would be people in government taking macOS and making it worse and less secure to pass government compliant stuff, which, again, is not too surprising.
John:
There's always reasons for this type of stuff, but it would be nice if they moved on from this.
John:
But apparently they're still doing it.
John:
So there you have it.
Casey:
We had talked a couple of weeks ago.
Casey:
Was it over time, I believe, that we were talking about this?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
The Switch 2 intro.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
We were talking about the Switch 2 introduction.
Casey:
And I believe, if memory serves, Marco was convinced that the Joy-Cons would not support any sort of mouse movement.
Casey:
And John was convinced that they absolutely would.
Casey:
And it turns out that John is owed a dollar from Marco because...
John:
I don't know that yet, but it's leaning in my direction.
Casey:
It's certainly looking, all signs point to yes.
Casey:
So reading from Ars Technica, the Japanese language patent about the Switch 2 Joy-Cons, whose illustrations match what we've seen of Switch 2 Joy-Cons precisely, features an English abstract describing, quote, a sensor for mouse operation, quote, that can detect reflected light from a detected surface, the light changing by moving over the detected surface.
Casey:
much like any number of optical computer mice.
Casey:
Schematic drawings in the patent show how the light source and light sensor are squeezed inside the Joy-Con with a built-in lens for directing the light to and from each.
Casey:
A machine translation of the full text of the patent describes the controller as a novel input device that can be used as a mouse and other than a mouse.
John:
I love patent language.
Casey:
That could also be the translation, but yes.
Casey:
In mouse mode, as described in the patent, the user cradles the outer edge of the controller with their palm and places the inner edge on, for example, a desk or the like.
John:
Side mousing.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I think it's a thing.
Casey:
I mean, we'll see.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
It's not a done deal.
Casey:
That certainly seems like a thing.
Casey:
We had talked about at some point how it's difficult to hear dialogue on TV shows these days because the three of us are old.
Casey:
And Nicholas Carrente writes, on the topic of poor dialogue mixing in streaming shows and movies, I've been using the solution for years now and it works great.
Casey:
Use AirPods with your Apple TV.
Casey:
The sound quality is excellent, and I can understand dialogue clearly every time.
Casey:
What makes it even better is that Apple TV lets multiple people connect their AirPods simultaneously.
Casey:
My partner and I have made this our default way to watch TV.
Casey:
We only switch back to regular speakers when we have multiple guests over.
Casey:
It's become such a game changer that I consider Apple TV's best feature.
Casey:
Have any of you ever tried the setup either solo or with someone else?
Casey:
I do do this probably once or twice a week when it's just me.
Casey:
A great example of this is from my kitchen, you can see into the living room.
Casey:
And since slash R slash TV too high, you can see the TV from the kitchen.
Casey:
But in order to hear it, I either need to grab one of my Sonos portable speakers, which occasionally I'll do, or I'll just throw in my AirPods.
Casey:
And then I can hear it much better without having to crank, you know, the main sound system.
Casey:
But I can't say that I've ever done this with Aaron, and it sounds like it would be awfully burdensome to start and stop every time.
Casey:
But again, I've never tried it, so I might have that totally wrong.
John:
Yeah, this is kind of a testament to how difficult it is to get good audio in home.
John:
home uh television watching environment because i mean i think most people just move use their tv speakers and tv speakers are usually terrible uh and that means that whatever sound was recorded in the show setting aside how well the dialogue is mixed in or whatever it has to pass through your cruddy tv speakers and bounce off the back of the plastic casing and the wall and the floor and everything and eventually get to your ears and by the time it gets there it's substantially changed from what was originally put into the show again setting aside whether what was put into the show was good or not that
John:
what the AirPods are doing for you there is they're cutting out all that in between stuff.
John:
We'll get the audio digitally to very close to your ear, and then we will amplify it and play it into your ear holes.
John:
And so all that stuff that I talked about, the shape of your room, your walls, your cruddy TV speakers, that is all eliminated from things that can make the dialogue hard to hear.
John:
And you were left only with how well was dialogue mixed.
John:
If everybody had a like theater quality, uh,
John:
you know, speaker setup for their television, this wouldn't be as big an issue.
John:
When you were sitting on your couch, you'd still only have the problem of how was the audio mixed on the show and you wouldn't have those other problems.
John:
So most people just don't do that.
John:
Even if people have something like a soundbar or whatever, it's not like that is even calibrated in any way or may actually be making things worse when it comes to dialogue legibility than the television speakers, which are often tuned to make dialogue understandable at the cost of other things.
John:
Uh, so yeah, uh, most people don't have a fancy hi-fi setups and it actually is surprisingly difficult to get a home theater setup to do a good job on audio because most of the audio comes out of the center channel speaker.
John:
And for a variety of reasons, the center channel channel speaker in home theater setup is like the unloved stepchild.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It is not the glory speaker.
John:
It is not the one that people think about.
John:
And yet it is the most important speaker when you're hearing people talk on a television show.
John:
And so, so many things about the design, the physical design of center channel speakers.
John:
I think I talked to this on a show a while ago when I was talking about it, my home theater setup, conspire to make the center channel very bad at what it does.
John:
And yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Headphones are a great solution to that.
John:
If the pairing works well and if you have a small number of people, that's great.
John:
And also, if you don't want to disturb people elsewhere in the house.
Casey:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
And also to get ahead of follow-up, you had said uncalibrated soundbars.
Casey:
I get the point of what you're saying, but I can do, I forget what it's called, it's not True Tone, but it's something where I take my phone and wave it around the room while the Sonos is playing some sort of particular tone, and it will do, maybe not the kind of calibration you're talking about, John, but some modicum of calibration.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, no, I think people just don't even do that.
Casey:
That's fair.
John:
It's too burdensome.
John:
They don't look it up.
John:
Most soundbars do have something that you can do to help.
John:
Now, does that process help and how good is it compared to the fancy ones?
John:
But still, I bet most people who have a soundbar take it out of the box, hook it up, sound comes out, sit down, that's all.
John:
They're not seeking.
John:
Only home theater nerds or actual professional installers are going to even bother launching an app and trying to do it.
Casey:
Definitely.
Casey:
All right, I have a little bit of news with regard to my status board project.
Casey:
Apparently, a listener of ATP reached out to James from Home is Where the Smart is, which is mostly a UK – well, it's a business in the UK as well as a –
Casey:
like video and YouTube channel and website and whatnot.
Casey:
And James was kind enough to reach out to me after doing so.
Casey:
But let me read what Home is Where the Smart Is is all about.
Casey:
This is what James had written.
Casey:
The trouble was most guides I found to doing LED stuff seemed too involved, even for me, usually with soldering and jumper wires all over the place.
Casey:
So my dad and I set about making the easiest starter boards we could, as he is the brains behind the circuit board designs.
Casey:
So we've designed these very small boards, which can be powered from USB if you wish, or mainly for strips that are different voltages, like 12 volts and 24 volts.
Casey:
You can leave the USB alone and power the strip instead with an external power supply, and the board will power from the strip.
Casey:
So James was kind enough to reach out and send me, all the way from across the pond, send me a couple of the Homes Where the Smart Is boards.
Casey:
And what these are, are...
Casey:
hilariously, ridiculously, absurdly tiny ESP32 boards with a little bit of electronics around them.
Casey:
It's ridiculous how small these things are.
Casey:
I cannot overstate how impressively tiny they are.
Casey:
It's basically the ESP32 and the teeniest little bit of electronics around.
Casey:
I know I just said that, but I cannot stress enough.
Casey:
I'd never seen an ESP32 before, and they're so freaking small.
Casey:
They're less than the size of an American post stamp.
Casey:
So anyways...
Casey:
James had sent me one of these and sent me a small strip of, you know, nanopixels or what is, I forget the name of it, but it's like the, whatever I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, the 8212 or something like that.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Forgive me.
Casey:
I forget exactly what these are, but what this allows me to do is, you know, he, James had pre-assembled all of this for me and we
Casey:
What it is, is it's this ESP32, which he has preloaded with WLED, which is a home assistant style, like open source project with the best URL I've ever seen in my life.
Casey:
The URL for the WLED project is KNO.WLED.GE, which spells out knowledge.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
So good.
Casey:
So good.
Casey:
Anyway, so it's this WLED software.
Casey:
And what I did was I plugged in the strip to a USB port.
Casey:
I connected to the Wi-Fi that this little itty-bitty postage stamp size chip is broadcasting.
Casey:
I gave it my actual Wi-Fi credentials.
Casey:
And the next thing you know, I have...
Casey:
a web interface for controlling the strip of like 10, 10 LEDs, which is cool.
Casey:
And I guess there's a open source iPhone app that you can download from the store or whatever, and you can control them that way as well, which is also cool.
Casey:
But the key though, is that as soon as I went back to home assistant, have I told you guys I'm into home assistant these days?
Casey:
Maybe we should talk about it.
Casey:
I went back to home assistant and I opened it up and I said, Hey, I just detected a new WLED device.
Casey:
And so I think you might want to use it.
Casey:
And I said, yes, yes, I do.
Casey:
And within not too terribly long,
Casey:
I now have my status board insofar as a strip of little LED lights that are addressable and the hue or the color is configurable and the brightness.
Casey:
And so I have a red LED for when the garage door is open, a white LED that changes the brightness based on the inverse of how charged the car is.
Casey:
It's very, very dim, and it goes off when it's charged.
Casey:
When it's not very charged at all, it's as bright as the sun, or at least that's what it seems like sometimes.
Casey:
And then finally, a blue LED for when the mail is waiting for us.
Casey:
Now, you might ask, where have I mounted this?
Casey:
And right now, it's just sitting freeballing on my desk.
Casey:
because I haven't figured out where to put it.
Casey:
But this is such cool tech.
Casey:
And the historical commission is not aware of much of this happening at this time because I haven't figured out where to mount it.
Casey:
I think, to be honest with you, I might just mount it on like the incredible forehead of one of my LG 5Ks.
Casey:
It's just so it's in the office because as Marco was chuckling and remembers, the forehead in the LG 5K is quite, I mean, it's only like an inch, but it seems just obscenely large when you look at it.
Casey:
And so I might just mount it there and then, you know, plug the USB power into the back of the studio, or excuse me, the LG 5K.
Casey:
I just got to say, this tech is so cool.
Casey:
And getting these components individually, again, James was kind enough to send these for free and didn't ask for a plug or anything, but I'm genuinely plugging because I enjoyed it.
Casey:
But you can get these boards, and I think Americans, you'd have to dispatch them from Amazon UK, which is probably a little bit pricey.
Casey:
But nevertheless, you can get these itty-bitty teeny-tiny boards, and you can get these pretty affordable LED strips, and you can do whatever you want.
Casey:
And this WLED software is super cool.
Casey:
You can configure it through MQTT.
Casey:
You can configure it through Home Assistant.
Casey:
I'm sure there's like a REST API or something if you want to go that route.
Casey:
All extremely cool stuff.
Casey:
And as if that wasn't good enough.
Casey:
Our friends at Terminal delivered my terminal.
Casey:
And I believe John's as well.
Casey:
And so I set mine up, and I'll let John talk and speak to whether or not he did anything with his yet.
Casey:
This thing is really freaking cool.
Casey:
Now, they are a future sponsor, and they did send me a freebie.
Casey:
So I'm telling you my genuine, honest opinion.
Casey:
But to be fair, they did send me a free one, and they will be sponsoring in the future.
Casey:
But it is very cool.
Casey:
And the only thing that kind of bummed me out a little bit about it was I didn't realize that for purposes of keeping the battery to last more than five minutes,
Casey:
It only refreshes at most every 15 minutes.
Casey:
And so at first, before mine showed up, I'd like coded up this whole web sockets based thing that showed the status board in the corner of the terminal.
Casey:
And I was all excited for it.
Casey:
And then I plugged it all in and I opened the garage door and...
Casey:
Nothing happened.
Casey:
And it took me a while to realize, oh, nothing happened because it only updates every, like, 15 minutes.
Casey:
And it does that for perfectly good reason.
Casey:
It's because if you refresh even every 15 minutes, it's dramatically less battery life than it would be otherwise.
Casey:
And once I took that status board off and told it, no, no, no, no, no, anything else you're showing, you can refresh once an hour, maybe even more than that.
Casey:
Battery life has been phenomenal.
Casey:
And so since I optioned the bigger battery...
Casey:
I got to imagine this is going to last at least a couple of months, maybe even as much.
Casey:
I think they quoted six months.
Casey:
But we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I really like this terminal thing.
Casey:
And it's very affordable.
Casey:
So even if I had paid for it, I think I would be saying all the same stuff.
Casey:
It is very slick and very cool.
Casey:
And the fact that you can cause update, or I shouldn't say cause updates, the fact that you can give their servers updates, which eventually the terminal will go and request, via WebSockets is super cool.
Casey:
Not WebSockets.
Casey:
I keep saying WebSockets.
Casey:
What am I thinking of?
Casey:
Webhooks?
Casey:
Webhook.
Casey:
Thank you, John.
Casey:
Gosh, you saved my life there.
Casey:
Anytime I've said WebSock in the last few minutes, I meant Webhook.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
That's 100% my fault.
John:
AKA an HTTP request.
Casey:
AKA an HTTP request.
Casey:
You're exactly right.
Casey:
But anyways, very cool stuff.
Casey:
I really enjoy the stuff that James had sent.
Casey:
Again, home is where the smart is.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I've really enjoyed this terminal thing.
Casey:
And even if you're not interested in...
Casey:
Either of those devices, ultimately, they're both powered by the same stuff, which is the ESP32, which is that little teeny tiny chip.
Casey:
Very good.
Casey:
John, have you any updates on your terminal?
John:
I got mine and I set it up.
John:
I tried a bunch of different display settings once the terminal website fixed its broken CSS because their CSS was 404-ing over the weekend.
John:
Somebody pushed a bad update there.
John:
But anyway, they fixed that.
John:
What I landed on was weather and calendar, but not the month calendar because I found that the month calendar with the amount of stuff our family has on our shared calendar with all our stuff in it
John:
It's just too much information for that small of a display, especially if you want anything else to be there.
John:
So I kind of wish they saw one that was four times as big.
John:
Yeah, I hear that.
John:
I do.
John:
Right?
John:
Because then I would have more room for them.
John:
So what I have is that I have the calendar showing just the day's activity.
John:
Well, it shows like the next couple of days, but it's not the whole big grid of the calendar month or whatever.
John:
And then the weather.
John:
And I was trying to find out where I'm going to put this in the house.
John:
I ended up putting it basically like over the thermostat in the dining room.
John:
It's in a place central in the house.
John:
You walk by it a lot.
John:
When we get ready in the morning, people are eating breakfast at that table.
John:
They can glance up and see what the weather is and what's on the schedule for the day.
John:
But usually the question is, for me, they're asking me, do you have a podcast tonight?
John:
I say it's on the calendar.
John:
It's not a quite like they'll be shocked that I have a podcast on it for something that's been on the calendar for like months at a time or in the case of ATP is just always like what?
John:
Anyway.
John:
it it's on the calendar but they don't see the calendar or they you know so anyway now there is slightly less of an excuse because they're walking literally walking by the thing every day that says what my podcast schedule is and also you know it's got everyone else's schedule on there as well so i am enjoying it i'm also curious to see how long the battery will last i also got the bigger battery i just stuck it on the wall it was fully charged when i put it there and we'll see how long it lasts
Marco:
Yeah, I have mine set to only refresh, I think, every 30 minutes or hour.
Marco:
Yeah, I think mine's close to that.
Marco:
And I have yet to have to charge it.
Marco:
I stuck it on the wall with Velcro strips, and it's still there.
Marco:
That was, I think, a month and a half ago or two months?
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Casey:
Yeah, a couple of quick notes on that.
Casey:
First of all, my setup is during the morning when it's like the high transit getting out the door sort of situation.
Casey:
I have the left hand side show the next day's calendar.
Casey:
The right hand side is then split in half again.
Casey:
So it's the weather at the top and countdown until spring break for the kids on the bottom.
Casey:
And then once everyone is kind of migrated out of the house, the kind of steady state of it is the monthly calendar, which for me, I totally understand what you're saying, John.
Casey:
But for us, that's still simple enough that we can get away with it.
Casey:
And then the other thing I was going to say is I am, I believe, and I check my math on this, but I think that a lot of terminals back-end stuff is either is or will be open source.
Casey:
So hypothetically, John, you could get your own E-Ink display, you know, of a different size and use a lot of their software or maybe fork their software to power it.
Casey:
Now, I know that you probably don't have any interest in that, nor do I, but that is something that I think they would enable you to do in
Casey:
If you wanted to go down that route, again, check my math on that.
Casey:
I might be lying to you by accident.
John:
Yeah, probably.
John:
Although I would imagine an e-ink screen of the size that I want actually would be kind of expensive.
John:
Because if you think about the biggest e-ink devices, like the Remarkable tablets or whatever, they do start to get costly when the screens get big.
John:
So I'm not even sure how big they may make e-ink screens these days.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, John, any hyperspace updates for us?
John:
Yep.
John:
The test flight is ongoing.
John:
We passed an important milestone this past week, which is that the test flight version will now reclaim one file for real in your updates.
John:
I was trying to figure out what would be the first step between not actually making any changes, but we would do all the work right up into it, but then it would just throw away the work that it did because I didn't want to mess with people's disks until I had some confidence.
John:
i figured one file was the best choice because at the end of reclaiming it can point you to you know this big button to reveal it in the finder here is the one file look at the one file make because if i if i did like more than one i was like oh i don't want to manually check those files but you can manually check one file and what i want you to do all the testers i want them to reclaim one file for real and look at that file and make sure it's not destroyed
John:
i i disabled the setting that that like skips the trash can or whatever if it is destroyed pull out the original from the trash right but so far no one has reported any kind of uh damage or problem with the restoration process uh i think people are reclaiming people have said they successfully crammed they said oh it looks fine to me it looks fine works fine i tried it you know like so good thumbs up i'm gonna be in the one file mode for a little while
John:
partially because we're going on a family trip soon and during that time i don't want to be messing with too much test flight stuff so there'll be a little bit of a pause here uh while i paused everybody who is a beta tester uh please keep reclaiming one file you if you have a thing that says oh i found uh you know 10 000 files you can reclaim all of them you just got to do 10 000 separate runs
John:
and it'll do one file for real each time uh as i said in the testing notes if you want to pick which file that is just deselect everything except for a single file group and then within that file group only select one file and then you can guarantee which one file it will do otherwise i think it picks the biggest file um but yeah the bug i've burned down all the outstanding bug reports as far as i'm aware there's some enhancement requests and stuff like that but i'm getting close to uh being ready to ship this like i said my uh my trip will probably put uh
John:
a little delay in this but probably early next month i'm probably going to be shipping this or maybe even before then uh because i'm i'm i've more or less drawn a line in the sand that i'm not going to add more features at this point although i did sneak one in a couple days ago uh but i'm really getting to the point where i just want to say what's there is what's there make sure it works and then i got to do all the other stuff of you know try to find some way to make screenshots for this i do such a bad job on the screenshots it's not a very exciting app
John:
Make a web page, an announcement thing, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Yeah, it's getting close.
John:
The testers, testers have been great.
John:
I did start a Slack for it, by the way.
John:
I mentioned that in the test flight notes.
John:
Slack has been so weird.
John:
Like I made a Slack for it.
John:
I have a Slack for Switch Class as well.
John:
But like the invite link that I put in there,
John:
For some people, it has never worked.
John:
And yet other people have been joining successfully with that link as recently as today.
John:
Some people say, oh, this link has expired.
John:
I tried it myself and it worked for me when I did it in an incognito window.
John:
But other people say, yeah, that link never works.
John:
So anyway, if you want to join the Slack, as I say in the notes, you can just email the address that's listed there and just say, hey, I want to join the Slack and the link didn't work for me.
John:
I don't know why the link doesn't work for you.
John:
I can't figure out what's wrong with Slack these days, but it's an issue.
John:
But anyway, yeah, people have been following great reports.
John:
Some people have joined the Slack because they prefer to give feedback that way.
John:
Some people are emailing me.
John:
Some people are using test flight feedback.
John:
It's all systems are go.
John:
Oh, and I will release a version of the app that reclaims everything for real after I have a little bit more confidence with the one file thing.
John:
But so far, so good.
Casey:
You know, as a quick aside with regard to Slack, I was using Slack on my iPad, which I do somewhat regularly.
Casey:
And for the eight millionth time...
Casey:
I hit the up arrow in order to, I think I was in the midst of editing a multi-line thing, and I hit the up arrow to go up within the context of the thing I had written.
Casey:
And of course, what does it do?
Casey:
But it goes to the most recent message that I had posted rather than where it should go, which is up within the editing space that I'm working within.
Casey:
And I fired off like a help message in Slack for iPad.
Casey:
And I threw it across the wall, assuming you went into DevNull.
Casey:
And within like two hours or something like that, I got a response from a human saying, huh, this doesn't seem right.
Casey:
We'll look at it.
Casey:
It was unreal.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Slack actually responds to bug reports.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Imagine a world where bug reports are actually responded to.
Casey:
And maybe it wasn't two hours, but given that what I'm comparing it to is Apple, which is literally never, it was effectively instant.
Casey:
It was unbelievable.
Casey:
I was so impressed.
John:
Yeah, I've got a lot of good.
John:
I've filed a lot of those.
John:
I've actually probably should have filed the thing on the links that I don't understand.
John:
But why does this link work for some people and other people?
John:
It doesn't.
John:
What am I doing wrong?
John:
But it's honestly not that important.
John:
Again, if people want access to Slack, they could just email me.
John:
But the other times that I have filed things.
John:
It's totally like you will get a response from someone who seemingly read and understood what you wrote, which is just mind boggling compared to the Apple experience where if you do get a response, it's so hard to tell.
John:
Did the person who's responding to this –
John:
even read what I wrote or if they did read it, how did they fail to comprehend it?
John:
Like you started questioning everything about what you're writing.
John:
Like it was my writing unclear.
John:
Like it's just, it's really a terrible experience.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk about some other terrible things, which is to say Apple has apparently been ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally to UK spying.
Casey:
That's fun.
Casey:
Not U.S.
Casey:
We're doing everything wrong in the world except this one thing.
Marco:
Not yet.
Marco:
I mean, don't worry.
Marco:
We'll get there.
Marco:
Well, I mean, give it time.
Casey:
I feel like I really want to rant about this, and I know in the middle of the show is not the place to do it, and I'm trying to not make a lot more work for Marco, but maybe in an after-after-after show I can pop off about this ridiculous coup that's happening right now.
Casey:
Anyways, reading from The Verge.
Casey:
I'm sorry, let me read that again.
Casey:
If implemented, British security services would have access to the backups of any user worldwide, not just Brits, and Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their encryption was compromised.
Casey:
The Washington Post reports that the secret order issued last month is based on rights given under the UK's Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, also known as, and I love this, the Snoopers Charter.
Casey:
Officials have apparently demanded blanket access to end-to-end encrypted files uploaded by any user worldwide rather than access a specific account.
Casey:
Apple's iCloud backups aren't encrypted by default, but the advanced data protection option was added in 2022 and must be enabled manually.
Casey:
It uses end-to-end encryption so that not even Apple can access encrypted files.
Casey:
In response to the order, Apple is expected to simply stop offering advanced data protection in the UK.
Casey:
This wouldn't meet the UK's demand for access to files shared by global users, however.
Casey:
Apple has the right to appeal the notice on the basis of cost of implementing it and whether the demand is proportionate to the security requirements, but any appeal cannot delay implementation of the original order.
Casey:
This is such a bonkers set of rules.
Casey:
My goodness.
Casey:
The UK has reportedly served Apple a document called a technical capability notice.
Casey:
It is a criminal offense to even reveal that the government has made a demand.
Casey:
Similarly, if Apple did accede to the U.K.
Casey:
's demands, then it apparently would not be allowed to warn users that its encrypted service is no longer fully secure.
Casey:
Now, in case you think the Washington Post is crazy, let's talk about the BBC, who writes, This misguided attempt at tackling crime and terrorism will not make the U.K.
Casey:
safer, but it will erode the fundamental rights and civil liberties of the entire population, privacy campaigners Big Brother Watch said in a statement.
Casey:
Another quote, the main issue that comes from such powers being exercised is that it's unlikely to result in the outcome they want, said Lisa Forte, a cybersecurity expert from Red Goat.
Casey:
Criminals and terrorists will just pivot to other platforms and techniques to avoid incrimination.
Casey:
So it's the average law-abiding citizen who suffers by losing their privacy.
Casey:
An entire country that loves security cameras more than anyone in the entire world decides that they get to security cam anything they want in our iCloud backups.
Casey:
Color me surprised.
John:
well they're not deciding this but here this is a situation where uh we've talked about apple dealing with like uh difficult government uh demands and uh you know just navigating various laws in different countries but this one i feel like is just so incredibly clarifying given how incredibly dumb this law is which you outlined well that like
John:
that it doesn't just apply to the UK, but they want access to everybody worldwide.
John:
So even disabling advanced data protection in the UK does not satisfy it.
John:
The answer is Apple pulls out of the UK.
John:
No more Apple products will be sold in the UK.
John:
That is the only answer to this.
John:
Because anything else is inconceivable unless the Diverge article is wrong about what it requires to comply.
John:
Because if it was just a matter of, okay, people in the UK can't get advanced data protection, oh, well, sucks for them.
John:
But if that doesn't do it and the only solution is they want a backdoor to everything worldwide, no more Apple products in the UK.
John:
Like, that is the direct, very straightforward, only possible consequence of...
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, I think the most likely outcome here is that most countries, like most, especially kind of like, you know, similar countries in like, you know, development and law enforcement status as the U.S.
Marco:
and Europe and everything.
Marco:
I think most countries are going to make advanced data protection illegal.
Marco:
And Apple's going to have to disable it or not offer it in those regions.
Marco:
And I think the U.S.
Marco:
is right behind them.
Marco:
Like, there's no way we...
Marco:
We have – the culture of law enforcement is that they feel genuinely entitled to everything from everyone all the time.
Marco:
They do not like having roadblocks put in their face like the constitution or rights or due process.
Marco:
And the last thing they want is a technical roadblock which they cannot get around.
Marco:
So law enforcement worldwide –
Marco:
would love to just have access to whatever they demand.
Marco:
And the more they can just have it on everybody and get these pesky judges and processes and constitutions out of the way, the better.
Marco:
And look, they're not like evil people.
Marco:
They think they're doing it for good reasons.
Marco:
They think they're protecting us from terrorists and stuff.
Marco:
And in their world, they are justified in their thinking here.
Marco:
Unfortunately, that conflicts with rights and constitutions and
John:
And reality because – And security.
John:
Like they think – even within their world, if their world was just expansive enough to realize what the reality of their world is, is that when you make a backdoor like this, the bad people get access to it and you get compromised in a worse way than you can possibly – which happened recently with China finding a way into one of the backdoors that was mandated into some telecom system in the US, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
There is no way to make a backdoor just for the good guys.
John:
So by demanding that a backdoor exists, you are essentially self-owning.
John:
You are compromising your system because the bad people will get access to it.
John:
And if you're a law enforcement agency, that doesn't help you.
John:
It's not actually justified even within their world of like, well, if we just look at what our needs as a law enforcement agency are, this is the right thing to do.
John:
It's not even right then.
John:
It is just wrongheaded in every possible way.
John:
But I agree that they think
Marco:
It's the right thing to do.
Marco:
This has been happening in a lot of the developed world.
Marco:
And so I think the culture of law enforcement and government having full control over people and the erosion of freedoms is happening in a lot of places, especially in technology.
Marco:
And the tech companies are never – like there is not a chance in hell Apple pulls out of a market.
Marco:
No, Apple will keep making all their money in every single market they possibly can.
Marco:
And what they will do is just the same thing they've done with so many other things.
Marco:
China, the Gulf of America, like what they're going to do is they're going to say we have to follow the laws in the countries in which we operate.
Marco:
And they're going to just not offer the encryption in these countries like that's what's going to happen.
John:
No, that won't solve it.
John:
According to what is written here, they can't do that.
John:
That's what I was going to say before.
John:
In China, they're able to bend over backwards and do what the Chinese government wants.
John:
The Chinese government does not want as much as the UK government wants.
John:
The Chinese government asks for something that they could actually get, which is within China, we have all these rules, we get access to all your servers, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But the UK is asking for more than that.
John:
They're saying you have to compromise everybody in the entire world to satisfy our law.
John:
Even China didn't ask for that.
Marco:
In all fairness, I think that detail is very likely to say nevermind.
Marco:
I think that one particular detail, I think in a month that detail is gone.
John:
When does that nevermind happen?
John:
Does that nevermind happen in the appeal process?
John:
Because I don't think the law can be changed in the appeal process.
John:
Anyway, we're just going by this article here, but by what is written in the article, Apple can't do what it has historically done.
John:
Its only choices are,
John:
backdoor every single apple customer worldwide in perpetuity without telling anybody or pull out of the uk and that's why i think they won't do what they did in the u in china if they could do that you're right they would if they can just say okay well there's a simple change we can make it's different for the people in china now it's different people in uk that's their deal that's their problem their justification for china is like well it's better than us not being there because as compromised as we are we're still the least compromised in
John:
in all of China which I think is true but it's a low bar and they could say the same thing in the UK but it seems like again I don't I'm not a lawyer and I have not read this law I'm just going by the articles in The Verge it seems like they can't do that which is why the only option is pull out of the UK
Marco:
Well, or the option also, I mean, again, not a lawyer, but the other option could be they will comply within the UK and they just won't comply with people outside the UK and the UK can sue them and they'll see what happens and they'll challenge it.
John:
Yeah, I suppose.
John:
You're learning lots of lessons from the current administration of just like, what if I just ignore the law?
John:
Then what happens?
Yeah.
John:
Uh, that tends not to be Apple's, uh, MO anywhere.
John:
They're much more likely to fall.
John:
Like I would imagine what would happen is that this, this law is so wrongheaded and Apple is so large and powerful.
John:
And the threat of pulling out is so, um, so powerful to elected people in the UK because if Apple did pull out and everybody in the UK knew it was because of this dumb law, a lot of people aren't getting reelected.
John:
So I imagine what will actually happen is big, important people will have big, important discussions and this will be changed.
John:
Uh,
John:
And at the very least, they'll change it so that all of the badness is confined to the UK, which sucks if you're in the UK.
John:
But that is absolutely what Apple will do in that case.
John:
They'll be like, fine, if we don't have to do it worldwide, we'll just do it in the UK.
John:
Everybody will know that it's happening in the UK because we leaked this or whoever leaked this.
John:
Like, it's not...
John:
Apple can't technically say anything about it, but now we all know about it.
John:
So when advanced data protection disappears in the UK, we'll be like, oh, that's why.
John:
But the problem is with this law, if advanced data protection disappears in the UK, but doesn't disappear anywhere else, how do we know that Apple hasn't
John:
compromised all its customers everywhere we would assume they wouldn't because that just doesn't seem like something apple would do but the law says that they can't say anything either way so all these laws that that require you not to say anything about something the government is making you do are terrible i feel like the terribleness of those laws should be confined to the company to the country that a company is in
John:
like the US government can make Apple do that.
John:
But I don't feel like it's tenable to have any government in the world be able to do that.
John:
So I really hope that if they can't come to agreement, Apple will just come out and say, look, this is what they asked us to do.
John:
And we said no.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's just...
Casey:
It's just crummy.
Casey:
It's gross.
Casey:
I mean, as much as I'm getting fired up about this, I mean, honestly, we have no like to stand on as Americans right now.
Casey:
I'm doing everything in my power.
John:
It is very similar in that it is like what kind of decision can we make that everybody who has a brain knows is bad and wrong?
John:
But can we just force that through because we won an election?
John:
And will there be any consequences from that?
John:
And we're all in that finding out phase right now because a bunch of bad people with bad ideas were elected and they're doing stupid stuff.
John:
And now it's a question of how far can you go with that?
John:
Because...
John:
there are, at least in the UK, I would imagine, would definitely be electoral consequences of forcing Apple out of your country.
John:
Because I think a lot of people in the UK who vote like Apple products.
John:
That would not be a good move for you as a politician or as a political party.
John:
And yet I feel like that is the inevitable consequence of holding the line on this one, which is probably why they will back off and do something and, you know, change it around or whatever.
John:
But boy, like just...
John:
Dumb people are going to be dumb, man.
John:
I mean, like – and the US does exactly the same thing.
John:
There's always things going through the legislature in this country of like, we want to have a backdoor but only for the good guys.
John:
And just like how many times do we need to have this conversation?
John:
That's not how math works.
John:
Like it's just – you can – because that sells well.
John:
You can get people to vote for you and say, I'm going to protect you.
John:
I'm going to make sure that the good guys blah, blah, blah because it's too – like –
John:
It's too nuanced and weird and techy to explain to people why this is terrible.
John:
And so we just keep coming back to that same thing around and around and around.
John:
Like every government in every part of the world will just keep coming to the same thing for the reason Marco said.
John:
Law enforcement wants it.
John:
You can run on it and seem like you're going to get elected because you're helping protect the people.
John:
And then when the rubber hits the road, hopefully you'll get enough smart people to talk and say, this is impossible.
John:
It can't be done.
John:
It's not a thing.
John:
This is not a thing, right?
John:
And sometimes it gets forced through anyway.
John:
I wish I could find a link to that, the U.S.
John:
thing where we got owned because we did force through our law that required government to have backdoor access to some telecom system.
John:
And oh, look, China found the backdoor.
John:
No one could have guessed that would have happened except everybody who ever looked at it and said, the bad guys will get the backdoor because it's the best thing to get.
John:
If there's a backdoor, everybody wants it and they'll get it.
John:
That's just...
John:
It's it's maddening, but we are doomed as a species to have this debate over and over again.
John:
And the only thing we can hope is that, you know, smarter heads will prevail eventually on this issue, even if we have degrees of backsliding.
John:
So.
John:
Fingers crossed that the UK dodges this one and fingers crossed that enough people notice what happened in the US with the telecom thing getting compromised.
John:
And maybe the next time one of these laws comes up, someone in Congress will bring this up.
John:
Not that it matters because Congress doesn't vote based on reason.
John:
Anyway, it's totally a tribal thing.
John:
Our country is broken.
John:
But anyway, UK, good luck.
John:
We need it.
John:
And so do you.
Casey:
So last week, I think it was, or thereabouts, we got a very surprising release from Apple at machinelearning.apple.com.
Casey:
We got Elegant, E-L-E-G-N-T, Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robots.
Casey:
And this is a short, uh, webpage.
Casey:
It's not even really a full website.
Casey:
It's really just a webpage for the most part.
Casey:
Um, it has a link to the full publication and it has a very cute five minute video.
Casey:
And in that five minute video, you see, what is it locks that I'm thinking of from Pixar?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Luxo Jr.
Casey:
Luxo Jr.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
It's a lamp very similar to Luxo Jr.
Casey:
And the TLDR of this video is, look, if you're writing the code or you're effectively like piloting a robot, then the most efficient thing for the robot to do is go from point A to point B. And that is fine, but it's kind of clinical when perceived by a human.
Casey:
And what Apple is saying is, hey, if we take a kind of circuitous way from point A to point B and maybe overshoot or, you know, kind of like brace ourselves to get ready to go and then launch out and go, if we have these sort of human qualities to it, it's a much more enjoyable experience for the humans observing it.
Casey:
And they have this video that demonstrates this.
Casey:
And honestly...
Casey:
the difference between the kind of clinical standard robot and the, uh, the, the more emotional, if you will, robot was really stark for me.
Casey:
And I really preferred looking at an interact.
Casey:
Well, not that I was interacting, but like imagining interacting with the more emotional robot, uh, rather than the one that is arguably more efficient.
Casey:
And they even showed an example of where the robot is housing a voice assistant.
Casey:
And, you know, when,
Casey:
when they asked the robot the question and it kind of like, if I remember right, it kind of like leaned back and thought about it for a second and it didn't just immediately answer the question.
Casey:
And they're doing the side by side and split screen with the clinical version, as I keep calling it, although that's not what they called it.
Casey:
And the emotional version, again, not what they called it.
Casey:
And the clinical version was done quicker, but the emotional version was so much more pleasurable to interact with, or at least that's, that's what I got from it.
Casey:
Uh, John, I'm sure you saw the video.
Casey:
So am I bananas or does this ring true to you?
John:
well first i want to talk about the fact that this web page exists at all because if you've been listening to the show for the past several months we've talked about the rumor of like a table sitting apple home device with a screen and the screen is robotically controlled and there's that apple framework that currently works with that belkin uh camera pointy thing where there's an api from a mac or other devices where you can control a like a
John:
A robot servo type thing or it's not really a robot, but anyway, a mechanical thing that points a camera in a particular direction.
John:
There's a whole framework for that.
John:
So many rumors about Apple products potentially using that.
John:
Again, there's the Belkin third party one you could buy right now that actually does use it.
John:
And then, you know, the home thing with the screen where the screen points at you and emotes and so on and so forth.
John:
And I guess it's a fun tie-in with the iMac G4, the flat-screen iMac with the cool spring-loaded, like, metal arm thing that they had in the commercial.
John:
And it was sort of gesticulating and motioning or whatever.
John:
Those were all rumors on, like, Mac Rumors and, you know, Bloomberg from German stuff or whatever.
John:
Uh, usually Apple doesn't put up web pages showing technologies that, uh, for things that have been rumored patents.
John:
Sure.
John:
Cause those have to be public and Apple patents everything.
John:
And just because there's a patent doesn't mean there's going to be a product, but given half a year or more of rumors of a thing that has like a, a screen slash camera on an arm that does like, you know, that points at things and like moves in an emotive way.
John:
And then having, having Apple put this up, uh,
John:
it's it's almost like it's so out of character for apple because they don't tend to like the the analogy is often been used in the apple community is like apple doesn't make concept cars a concept car is that car shows or like a car manufacturer will come with a car that they're never going to make that is usually just like a a model with nothing on the inside of it whatever but that points in a future direction here's some ideas we're thinking about here's some design ideas here's some technology ideas it's a concept car it's not a product it never will be a product
John:
But here it shows the direction of our thinking.
John:
And if you squint at this, you can see what our future products might have some of these qualities.
John:
Apple doesn't do that.
John:
They only show something when they have an actual product.
John:
So they don't show their research and development.
John:
They don't show their Orion glasses that they're working on in the lab that cost $10,000 that they're not going to ever really sell to consumers.
John:
Just show like, look, we're working on stuff and we're making some headway.
John:
And we're like, they could do that.
John:
The whole time they were developing the vision pro, they could have been having little tech demos of the various technologies as they advanced or whatever, but that's not how Apple goes.
John:
But here we have seemingly pretty concrete rumors of a thing with the screen where the, where something moves the screen to point at stuff.
John:
Uh,
John:
And then this research thing that says, hey, we've been doing some research on how to make things point at things in a motive kind of way.
John:
So weird.
John:
And, like, it almost makes me think, oh, I guess they're not making that product.
John:
Because if they were making it, they would never do this.
John:
But maybe, like, the machine learning research people, like...
John:
I know they let them publish stuff because, you know, obviously with all the LM stuff or whatever, they publish papers about things or whatever.
John:
But I feel like publishing papers versus making a video, and it's not particularly slickly produced.
John:
Like if you've watched like a SIGGRAPH video or like a video made by like graduate students or PhD students, not that I'm saying it's a bad video, but it's not like...
John:
apple polished like wwdc video video it is looks for all the world like a siggraph or a phd student video and that's what it smells like and it's just like how did this get out of apple like how it really does make me think that they've decided not to make that product with the little emotive arm thing but anyway sorry for that big long aside because it's just boggling my mind that this thing exists but here it is i'm looking at it right now and the web page is still up so there you have it um
John:
For the difference between the car welding robot, if you've ever seen a car assembly line with the giant robotic arms that weld things on cars, they just move in straight lines.
John:
They're not trying to be a motive.
John:
They're going from one welding position to the next.
John:
as quickly as possible because time is money uh they're not trying to impress anybody but for something that might sit on your desk and you know move around and do things uh having it look more friendly makes a difference but here's the thing well two things one the thing about mechanical moving things that i'll get to in a second i've talked about in the past but the other thing is
John:
having a personality and being uh you call it you called it emotional less clinical whatever you want to describe this being more disney imagineering because disney imagineering is 100 like they do this amazingly well getting machines to move in a way that connects with people either by looking like living things or by evoking emotion or whatever that's the art of animation that's how all the you know inanimate objects and uh
John:
And the Beast's castle and Beauty and the Beast can look like things because they're squashing and stretching.
John:
But also because, you know, it's the work of an animator.
John:
And you can do that with physical real-world objects as well to have a better connection.
John:
But there is a baseline level of...
John:
It's actually doing the thing you want it to do that you need to pass before I feel like you get any benefit from being more emotive.
John:
In other words, it has to be able to do the thing before you care about did it do the thing in a way that makes a connection with me.
John:
Because if it fails to do the thing, those emotive qualities either have no effect or make you hate it more.
John:
And I'm not entirely sure, given Apple's history for things like Siri, that...
John:
any product they field with this type of technology is going to pass that baseline bar of, but did it do the thing at all that I wanted it to do?
John:
Before you get to the point where you can consider, and it did it in such an engaging way, you know?
John:
Like, and watching this video, that's all I could think of is how angry people would get at this poor thing if it...
John:
did not do the thing they wanted like so much of apple's so many of apple's like home slash intelligence products don't do it and how all the extra work they're putting into being more emotive would not save it from from the wrath of the user i see it in my own kids when they're trying to talk to our home pod to turn the lights on off and it doesn't work and the things they have to say about siri are not kind and then they talk to the google device and it always works
John:
um it's so that's that's what i'm thinking i think like the people doing this research should go work for disney imagineering because the disney stuff does do the thing people expect it to do but they just expect to be entertained but if you ask this thing to you know whatever the you know this thing was doing stuff that apple's never going to ship because it's too expensive but
John:
um if you ask the apple thing to like look at me or make sure you can get us all on camera or whatever and it doesn't do it you don't care how motive it was in attempting to do your thing you just care that it didn't do the thing and so i my pessimism about this whole approach is uh
John:
Let's work on the baseline functionality and get that nailed down before you worry so much about this.
John:
It doesn't mean you shouldn't be researching this.
John:
It's not like you can just add this on later.
John:
You should be researching it.
John:
But I would be much more impressed by a behind-the-scenes look at somebody making sure that the next home device is responsive and actually does what you ask it to do.
John:
which is a bar that they have not crossed with the current ones.
John:
And as I alluded to before, the mechanical nature of this with all these servos and motors and moving parts or whatever is so incredibly expensive and so requiring of a philosophy that Apple does not currently conform to, which is the repairability and maintenance of something with as many moving parts that I just can't see any product like this being near in the horizon because...
John:
The thing that is difficult about these devices still today is not so much the computer smarts that controls them, but it's the physical reality of anything that works and moves anything like a living thing.
John:
That's why those like Boston Robotics terrifying dog things cost a hojillion dollars.
John:
It is incredibly expensive to do what...
John:
our little fleshy flesh and bones and blood and muscles do so easily with a mechanical device.
John:
And it's even more expensive to make something like that mass market that you can just sell to consumers, have any expectation of the thing not breaking within a year.
John:
So I don't think anything like Luxo Jr.
John:
is coming our way anytime soon.
John:
If we're lucky, we'll get a HomePod with a screen where the screen like rotates and tilts.
John:
And hopefully that won't break.
John:
And hopefully it'll work instead of being like,
Casey:
Hmm?
John:
Sorry, I can't do that right now.
John:
I wish I had recorded the interaction with Siri the other day.
John:
I think one of my HomePods is finally, my original HomePod, is finally just not working.
John:
You can talk to it, and all it will ever tell you is what you just said, Marco.
John:
Various excuses about why things don't work.
John:
It will never actually do anything.
John:
I don't understand it.
John:
I can't even tell what version of the OS it's running.
John:
When I try to use it on the app, it tells me to bring my phone closer.
John:
When I bring my phone closer, nothing happens.
John:
So that one may be, you know, slowly sailing off over the horizon.
John:
But yeah, in the meantime, it is just, it's like sun, sun setting, sun downing, whatever they call it.
John:
You can talk to it and it just talks to you in a series of hmms and ums and not hearing back in responses.
John:
And sorry, I couldn't do that.
John:
And it will keep the conversation going like a telemarketer or whatever, but it will never actually do anything.
Casey:
This week we are sponsored by HelloFresh.
Casey:
With HelloFresh, you get farm fresh pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep.
Casey:
Don't like going to the grocery store?
Casey:
Hey, skip it and just count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun, and affordable.
Casey:
That's why it's America's number one meal kit.
Casey:
So if you're tired of figuring out what's for dinner each night, night after night, especially on those weekdays, you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
You can get dinner done the easy way thanks to HelloFresh.
Casey:
It's easy to find time to eat well with 50 5-0 wholesome, hassle-free meals to choose from each week delivered right to your door.
Casey:
Now, you get to choose what meals you want.
Casey:
But for me, HelloFresh wanted to make sure I got a little sampler of a few different things.
Casey:
So they sent me Mediterranean...
Casey:
chicken and couscous bar, they sent a ricotta tomato ravioli with toasted panko, and finally, one pan cheesy black bean tacos.
Casey:
All three of these meals were good.
Casey:
However, the ricotta tomato ravioli with toasted panko...
Casey:
Holy cow, that thing was delicious.
Casey:
Not only were the ravioli great, but the sauce that they had us make on the side, which was predominantly like tomato paste and cream cheese, doesn't sound like it would be that tasty, but oh my goodness, I cannot even tell you how tasty it was.
Casey:
I am genuinely thinking about it a week or two later.
Casey:
It was really, really, really incredibly tasty.
Casey:
So get up to 10 free meals and a free high protein item for life.
Casey:
at hellofresh.com slash ATP10FM.
Casey:
One limit per box with an active subscription.
Casey:
Free meals applied as a discount on the first box.
Casey:
New subscribers only varies by plan.
Casey:
That's up to 10 free HelloFresh meals.
Casey:
Just go to hellofresh.com slash ATP10FM.
Casey:
That's H-E-L-L-O-F-R-E-S-H dot com slash ATP.
Casey:
Then the number 10FM.
Casey:
Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
All right, let's do a little bit of Ask ATP.
Casey:
And let's start with Glenn Lamb, who writes, what kind of app planning or wireframing tool do you all use when planning an app?
Casey:
Figma?
Casey:
Pen and paper?
Casey:
For me, usually pen and paper, if anything at all, or otherwise, I'll just start throwing stuff against Xcode and start whipping up a bare-bones version of something in SwiftUI.
Casey:
But
Casey:
oftentimes it's pen and paper if anything i've never meaningfully used figma or what's the s sketch sketch something i don't know what i'm thinking of those are both software but sketch is the one you're thinking of thank you there you go um i don't really use any of those personally um so yeah it's just pen and paper for me marco let's start with you and then finish finish with john please
Marco:
I don't do anything like this.
Marco:
I just have an idea and I try to just build it.
Marco:
And I prototype and I design basically by building it.
Marco:
So in the era of SwiftUI, this is actually great for my workflow here, such as it is, because...
Marco:
I can actually just try a bunch of different things really quickly.
Marco:
And this is one of the things I've cited.
Marco:
I talked about it under the radar a bit, but one of the things I've cited about why I like SwiftUI, despite its prickliness at certain points, is that...
Marco:
it allows me to quickly iterate and try different designs and try radically different layouts and techniques fairly quickly so that it's similar to the type of prototyping and design iteration that I think other people are able to use these tools for, but that I'm just not the right kind of designer to ever do that or think that way.
Marco:
For me, if I...
Marco:
For me to tell whether an idea works, I have to build it.
Marco:
And that's my design process of how I get good designs at the end of the day is mostly by just building stuff and trying it and seeing, does this look good?
Marco:
Does this feel good?
Marco:
Does this work well?
Marco:
And if the answer to any of those is no, it's like, well, all right, let me see what else I can do here.
Marco:
And I just try a bunch of stuff until I find something that works well.
Casey:
John?
John:
Yeah, I think Marco hit on an important thing.
John:
SwiftUI makes it so much easier as a programmer to rapidly, I'm not even going to say prototype, but like rapidly get something up on the screen to validate ideas.
John:
And if you are primarily a developer, chances are good that your skills are more suited to writing code for trying things out than they are to trying things out in an app like Figma.
John:
Because apps like Figma or any kind of design app
John:
it's like, it's not like you can just magically use them.
John:
It's like, well, I'm a programmer.
John:
Of course I can use simple media app.
John:
Graphics editors are incredibly complicated.
John:
And if you don't use them day in and day out and don't know how to use them efficiently, it's a massive slowdown to try to use a tool you're not familiar with.
John:
it would be the same thing as taking someone who's an expert at using figment photoshop and sitting them in front of xcode and saying now prototype this they could do it but they'd be way faster in figment or photoshop right so it's really a lot about where expertise lies especially when you're an independent developer you don't have the luxury of like different departments and different people you've got your current skill set and you can expand your skill set but
John:
under time pressure with limited resources normally you're going to lean towards what do i already know how to do it's why marco's got tons of stuff written in php it's like it's more efficient like i could learn a whole new thing or i could just do it in php because i know that'll be done quickly so uh during my web development career
John:
Did I design things using Sketch or Photoshop or any of those other apps?
John:
No, because I'm not as good at using them as I am typing HTML.
John:
I would just write, when I wanted to see a UI, I would have an idea in my head and I would write HTML.
John:
And it's like, why don't you just write it down on a piece of paper first?
John:
And doing it in HTML for me is faster and better than writing it on a piece of paper because the fidelity of the HTML, it's literally the thing I'm going to be making.
John:
Like, it's there.
John:
I don't have to.
John:
There's no other step.
John:
And I can do it faster and better than I can with a pencil, right?
John:
That's the weird thing that people don't think about.
John:
It's like, well, sure, you need someplace to sketch out these ideas and prototype them.
John:
It's like...
John:
I'm faster just doing it, like doing the code, doing the HTML, doing whatever.
John:
It's not like the finished version, but that literally is, for people with that skill set, the fastest, best way to design things.
John:
It's only not that way if you're actually better with a pencil and paper, a pen and paper, Photoshop, Figma, or whatever.
John:
And again, you can learn new skills in those areas, but to be really fast with those design tools does actually require...
John:
lots of use and experience it's not as simple as like i'll just learn what the tools do and i'll be done uh it's just like coding there's there's ways to be more efficient and using the tools that people who do it professionally and repeatedly know that i certainly don't and so yeah how do i figure out the ui how did i figure out the ui for the app that i'm doing i just did it in swift ui uh and it's way faster than doing it it's even faster than doing an interface builder which is another example of like oh you can just mock it up an interface builder
John:
At this point, it's probably faster just to do it in SwiftUI because I'm going to have to do it in SwiftUI anyway.
John:
Like, that's what it's going to be written in.
John:
And so why would I pull out Interface Builder and drag a bunch of little things out and arrange things and say, okay, now I'll go make that in SwiftUI.
John:
I've just wasted my time.
John:
So me and Mark are on the same page here.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I mean, it makes perfect sense to me.
Casey:
All right, this one I think is just for John.
Casey:
Mike Hatfield writes, is HFS Plus still relevant in 2025?
Casey:
If you were adding new spinning drives for media or Linux ISOs in 2025, would you format the file system as APFS or HFS Plus?
Casey:
Context, my Plex library is growing, so I'm adding storage capacity.
Casey:
I'm using a QNAP 4 bay configured as just a bunch of disks connected to a Mac mini via USB.
John:
HFS Plus is still kind of relevant because it is a file system that was designed in the age of spinning disks.
John:
So its behavior with respect to locality of disk head movement is so much better than APFS that it is a faster file system on spinning disks.
John:
Does that mean you should use it on spinning disks?
John:
Hmm.
John:
I feel like, especially in the context given here, if you have a spinning disc and it's connected to, like, a NAS...
John:
don't use any mac file system use btrfs uv ext4 use zfs use something else better suited to that task because then you can just smb mount it on your mac and it will be fine there's a reason we wanted to get away from hfs plus despite the fact that it is very efficient for spinning disks as compared to apfs it is not a great file system it doesn't have lots of file system features that you might want especially for something like a nas uh other file systems are better there
John:
my personal choice even when i had spinning disks uh you know in the age of apfs i would format all my spinning disks as apfs it would make them slower like there's no doubt about it it would but normally what i was keeping on those disks was like large files and other stuff where the performance doesn't really matter because it just boils down to sequential speed which is the same should be the same both of them are close anyway um i just took the speed hit because i was sick of uh problems with hfs plus and i wanted the reliability of apfs despite the performance so
John:
My recommendation, I think it is still relevant for people who want to make that trade off.
John:
Like if you decide, no, I can't stand how slow this is.
John:
I have tons of small files.
John:
HFS is so much faster on a spinning disk.
John:
I'm just going to do that.
John:
But only do that if you're forced to directly connect the disk to your Mac and you can't stand the speed hit of APFS and you're OK with running this utility.
John:
So I'll repair errors.
John:
or you don't care about errors or whatever.
John:
In all other cases, either use APFS on spending disks and just take the hit, or if anything, if at all possible, and you're in a NAS-like scenario, don't use any Apple file system.
John:
Use a good file system that is supported by your NAS.
Casey:
Leon Cowell writes, when discussing John's new app, he briefly mentioned the many aspects of files to consider, metadata, extended attributes, ACLs, et cetera.
Casey:
Would you mind expanding a bit on that?
Casey:
How will your tool handle that as it deletes a file and then replaces it with a copy-on-write clone?
Casey:
What metadata, if any, is preserved or lost?
Casey:
What metadata, if any, is considered in determining whether two files are identical?
John:
I'll take the second question first.
John:
What do you care about when determining whether files are identical?
John:
literally the only thing you care about is the content of the file the data all that other stuff is not uh in the decision making process all that other stuff can and will be wildly different between two files all you care is is this data the same because the data is the thing that you're going to be sharing that's the thing you're going to have one instance of whereas before you had multiple instances of
John:
Everything else is private and will remain private to each individual file with no sharing whatsoever.
John:
So when I'm wandering the disks trying to say, is this file the same as that one?
John:
I'm looking at the data.
John:
I also look at the resource fork, which technically I don't think I have to do, but I'm just doing out of habit.
John:
And honestly, how many people still have resource forks?
John:
I'm pretty sure the resource fork doesn't matter, but why?
John:
I just better safe than sorry.
John:
So for two files to be considered identical, they must have the same data fork and the same resource fork, even though the resource fork is...
John:
access through an extended attribute blah blah blah but setting that aside nobody has resource for it's not a big deal although apparently i do because i have all these ancient files on my from like old mac game classic mac games and my buried in my games folders anyway um so that's how you decide two files are the same once you've decided that two files have the same data in them and you're going to do a space saving clone
John:
Yeah, the job you have to perform is, okay, make a clone.
John:
So it's sharing all the data with whatever the original file was or whatever.
John:
And then the file that you're getting rid of or replacing with the clone, you've got to copy all of that metadata to the new replacement file.
John:
And I try to copy all of it.
John:
every extended attribute, every permission thing, obviously the file name, all the file dates, so on and so forth.
John:
It's not actually possible on modern macOS to copy all of it.
John:
Some things, for example, the file system sort of maintains on its own.
John:
And you can call APIs that supposedly set it, like things like the last open time, last access time.
John:
There are APIs for changing that.
John:
And you can call them and they'll return success.
John:
And the file system will be like, yeah, nah.
John:
I've got that covered.
John:
Because it's like, you're trying to tell me the last time this file was accessed was sometime in the past, but you just accessed it, man.
John:
And so it just doesn't do it.
John:
Which is fine.
John:
Like, most of the time people don't care about that.
John:
And honestly, it is true.
John:
Like,
John:
This file was just accessed right now.
John:
I did it.
John:
I accessed it, right?
John:
And so even though the APIs for setting that return success and there is no error, most of the time the file system will ignore you.
John:
Other things you literally can't set at all.
John:
Like there's a bunch of extended attributes that Apple doesn't really document well that do various things.
John:
If I can't set those, it's an error and I can't reclaim the space.
John:
Like I tried to set all the ones that I can set
John:
but if there are ones that are meaningful that I can't set, like literally can't, especially ones that I don't really know, like it's like binary blob of stuff that I don't understand, my app will throw up its hands and say, look, I tried to save your space in this one, but I couldn't set the com.apple.macl extended attribute.
John:
Sometimes it lets me, sometimes it doesn't.
John:
I don't know why.
John:
Some extended attributes are in fact protected by system integrity protection.
John:
If it's one of those and I can't override it,
John:
I can't override it, man.
John:
Like, you know, another thing is this is a sandbox Mac app.
John:
There is no way that I've been able to find to have any sort of like, why don't you just ask me to authenticate as an admin user and then your app can do anything.
John:
I don't think you can put an app in the Mac app store that does that, even though I'm sure there are ones that are there.
John:
I think there are sort of like leftovers from when Apple used to allow that.
John:
But right now, I don't think they do.
John:
So again, in future versions, I might have an unsandboxed helper app to help out with this.
John:
But right now, if, for example, you want to reclaim space used by a file that you do not own, you can't do that because my app can't set the owner back to whatever it really is, right?
John:
So that's part of the metadata.
John:
Like, oh, I've made a space saving clone.
John:
Now all I got to do is make this file look like the one it's replacing.
John:
And the one it's replacing is owned by somebody who's not me.
John:
Well, you can't CH own a file to somebody who's not you.
John:
uh when you're running is you uh and there's no way for me to ask for an administrator password to do that or whatever so again if i cannot get the metadata to match to the best of my ability what i think is the stuff that it needs to match uh i'll show an error and say i couldn't do that for you or in many cases if i know i won't be able to do it i'll just skip over it and not include it in one of the eligible files like so if i see a file is owned by another user i'm just skipping that or whatever
John:
There are some that I will let go by.
John:
So, for example, if I can't set some date thing, like the last access date, the fact that I can't set that, I'm fine with that.
John:
Like, honestly, because I would never be able to clone a file if people insisted that date stay the same.
John:
Because, look, I am accessing it.
John:
It is truthful that that date should be updated to be the date that I did my thing.
John:
So...
John:
i set it and then i forget it like i i do set it and if the setting call returns an error i would cause an error uh but it always returns success and so i continue on my very way so yeah i'm pretty much doing i'm making best possible effort for a mac sandboxed app nothing that any user really cares about should ever be missing and if it is my app should bail out and say i couldn't do this file and move on to the next one
John:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsor this week, HelloFresh.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the many membership perks is ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This is our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
So members get an additional bonus topic every week.
Marco:
Runs usually like
Marco:
15 to 30 minutes more, you can get that at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about iOS 19 UI rumors and how that relates to Apple invites.
Marco:
So if you want to hear that, once again, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Mastodon, 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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-
Marco:
I have been doing so much restaurant stuff.
John:
Are you an Inferno right now?
Marco:
I assume it's a reference.
Marco:
I'm not kidding.
Casey:
Dante's Inferno.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't get it either.
Casey:
But that actually, that was a much better joke than either of us gave you credit for.
Marco:
I was thinking the coupling direction, which is a very different thing.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So anyway, yeah.
Marco:
So I did ask last week.
Marco:
I had mentioned I discovered this or I had known about this audio technology called Dante that allowed you to route audio signals over the network.
Marco:
I never really used it.
Marco:
And last week I discovered that I can indeed use it for some of the needs at the restaurant.
Marco:
Basically, like, you know, certain like, you know, DJ input area is very far away from the the amps and mixer and control areas and stuff like that.
Marco:
So.
Marco:
And then the subwoofers are really far away from everything else.
Marco:
And so how do we link everything up?
Marco:
And the way it's been done so far is with a large quantity of very old and unreliable cables that are snaked around the entire restaurant, collecting dust and looking bad and stuff.
Marco:
So anyway, I was seeking to reduce some of this cable clutter and simplify certain things, make things more reliable and less reliant on very long analog cables snaked behind God knows what.
Marco:
So anyway, Dante is... I haven't actually had a chance to set up Dante yet, but I have all the hardware.
Marco:
I have a bunch of the little tiny, like...
Marco:
Basically, they're dongles.
Marco:
They're like XLR ports with network ports on the other side, and you just plug them into the network, and there you have XLR in or out.
Marco:
I have a handful of those.
Marco:
We got a lot of feedback from people who are familiar with Dante or who use it professionally.
John:
It's kind of like if we had been listening to a podcast, and we three had been listening to a podcast, and the person on the podcast said, yeah, I've been trying to do this project, and someone told me about this thing called Linux.
Yeah.
John:
And like it's like a different kind of operating system that you might be able to use in this application.
John:
So I'm going to look into that.
John:
We got the feedback like that about Dante.
John:
It's like the whole world except for us knew about Dante.
John:
And once you mentioned it, they came out of the woodwork and it's like, yes, a million people who use Dante for a living listen to this show.
John:
and you're going to hear, but it's like saying, have you heard of this thing called Linux?
John:
It's some kind of other... It's not Windows.
John:
It's not the Mac.
John:
Interesting.
John:
I'm going to look into that for next week.
Marco:
Yeah, so the feedback was pretty universally two types of feedback.
Marco:
There was one that was from people who said...
Marco:
I learned about Dante, not I use it, that's separate.
Marco:
I learned about Dante through some way, and you really should have a totally physically separate network for it.
Marco:
And then the other group of feedback was, I actually use Dante professionally, and this will be fine on your network.
Yeah.
Marco:
So thank you to everybody who responded.
Marco:
Again, I haven't had a chance to actually install it yet.
Marco:
There was a bunch of wiring that had to happen over my last few visits there.
Marco:
But I'm looking forward to trying it probably next week.
Marco:
The feedback we got suggested that, yes, it's very dependent on obviously like your network speeds.
Marco:
your network switching architecture and how you know do you does your do you switch to support qos or do you want to isolate dante onto its own vlan and prioritize that vlan um so i've been doing a bunch of research on you know how to which of these things i should do how do i do that the good thing is i am using all ubiquity gear and all brand new ubiquity gear and i thought
Marco:
This would be a really good opportunity to try something I haven't done before.
Marco:
I am now, in that one context, partially living the 10 gigabit Ethernet lifestyle.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
John:
I'm sure your restaurant needs that kind of bandwidth.
Marco:
So what everyone said with Dante was like, you know, you just got to make sure that your network doesn't get clogged up with other stuff.
Marco:
And we have a gigabit internet connection.
Marco:
The internet connection is used for, you know, there's going to be like wireless terminals here.
Marco:
I'm sure that's not much bandwidth, but still wireless terminals for the POS, the little walk around handhelds.
Marco:
There's going to be, you know, the TV streaming over the Wi-Fi or over the Ethernet rather, but over the network.
Marco:
There's Wi-Fi around.
Marco:
I have a guest network for the Wi-Fi, but I have it right now limited in ubiquity settings to 100 megabits total.
Marco:
I don't know if I'll keep that there, but just for now.
Marco:
But I'm like, you know, the way the wiring is routed through the restaurant, the signals for Dante, in order to get from one location, basically from the DJ plug-in to the speakers and the mixer and everything, it has to go through two switches.
Marco:
And I'm like, well, what's the latency of Ethernet between switches that are, you know, well-performing switches?
Marco:
Like, does 10 gigabit Ethernet actually have substantially lower latency than one gigabit Ethernet?
Marco:
Or does it just run like more in parallel?
Marco:
And I did some quick chat GPT research.
Marco:
Apparently, 10 gig Ethernet has way lower latency.
Marco:
Because it is just running the whole – the whole protocol just runs at faster data rates.
Marco:
So I'm like, well, if my goal is to have lots of headroom and to reduce latency and I have all of this like modern – I have the ability to run modern Cat6A wires just as easily as I'm going to run Cat6 wires.
Marco:
Why don't I just run really good wires and spend the few hundred bucks on Ubiquiti's store to get a 10 gig switch for those two long runs?
Marco:
So not everything is to... Oh, and then the other thing.
Marco:
The other thing that made this decision easier.
Marco:
A couple of years ago, Ubiquiti came out with a switch called the Flex.
Marco:
This is a little five-port switch.
Marco:
These are the ones that I have on the outside of my house running the security cameras and outdoor APs because they are indoor-outdoor rated, John.
Marco:
And I've had them now running very well for, I think, two years.
Marco:
Perfectly well.
Marco:
And they're these little tiny... What makes them great is that they are indoor-outdoor rated, powered by PoE,
Marco:
And also will then re-output PoE to their other four ports.
Marco:
And they're really cheap.
Marco:
They're like $100 or a three-pack for like $280.
Marco:
So I've used these Flex switches.
Marco:
I've used them all over the place at home and different uses.
Marco:
They recently came out with the Flex 2.5G PoE switch.
Marco:
which is only $200, it's 8 ports, its input is 10 gig, and its outputs are all 2.5 gig.
Marco:
And all across the Ubiquiti line, 2.5 gig is all of a sudden everywhere.
Marco:
Like, everything supports 2.5 gig.
Marco:
So I'm like, well, I'm getting faster, and if I just use that switch instead of the regular flex...
Marco:
Then I get 10 gig back to a home switch.
Marco:
So I got the one, they have a like five port 10 gig or a four port 10 gig switch for a few hundred bucks.
Marco:
And they have the Flex 2.5 PoE for 200 bucks each.
Marco:
And I just needed two of them.
Marco:
And so now I have basically like all the other like most devices will be plugged into a 2.5 gig port.
Marco:
I know they're not going to use it mostly, but they will have that port.
Marco:
But then from switch to switch, that's running 10 gig.
Marco:
So for the two long legs where it's going like across the whole restaurant to a switch and then back again to a different part of the restaurant, those like trunk legs of it are 10 gig.
Marco:
And it's glorious.
Marco:
Like it's like I wired everything up today and like – and I mean this is – the wiring process alone has been, as I mentioned last time, like very –
Marco:
Very demanding.
Marco:
I'm crawling around on top of walk-in fridges, crawling through an attic space to run different wires, drilling lots of holes with varying degrees of success.
Marco:
I had to fish a couple of wires through.
Marco:
There was like...
Marco:
a wall, and I had to go from one side of the wall to the other, both of them through holes.
Marco:
So I'm going through hole, gap, hole.
Marco:
How do I get two Ethernet wires through this?
Marco:
I'm looking around.
Marco:
At my house over there, I had one of those wire fish things, and I could not find it for the life of me.
Marco:
So I go back to the restaurant.
Marco:
I'm like, what the heck could I possibly use at the restaurant?
Marco:
And I find there is this like...
Marco:
This metal like the kind of little tiny flagpole that like when you see somebody decorating their lawn for the 4th of July with a row of little tiny American flags stuck in the ground.
Marco:
One of those.
Marco:
And I'm like if I just tie if I just like zip tie the Ethernet cables to the stick.
Marco:
of this i can stick it through the wall and line it up with the other one and pull it through like that's the kind and by the way that worked great and i've done it three times um that's the kind of thing that i've been doing the last week or so at the restaurant but it has been very very fun and now i have everything wired up i have my 10 gig backhaul trunk links i have my 2.5 gigs at the two major points of devices and
Marco:
I have all the APs.
Marco:
I have three APs installed.
Marco:
I think that'll probably end up being enough.
Marco:
Everything is ubiquity.
Marco:
Everything is so nice and so easy and so freaking fast.
Marco:
So, so far it's going very, very well.
Marco:
And thank you everyone for all the Dante feedback and everything else.
Marco:
And hopefully Dante running on a 10 gig backhaul should be plenty for what's probably going to end up being something like four channels or six channels of actual Dante using.
John:
Good question in the chat room.
John:
Is this Wi-Fi only for the employees or is it for the patrons as well?
Marco:
I think it will mostly be used by the employees because it's not like a coffee shop.
Marco:
It's not like the kind of place people would bring a laptop and come work.
Marco:
It's a bar and a restaurant.
Marco:
So it would be like no one's sitting there with a laptop all day.
Marco:
Generally, it's going to be for employees' phones, I think, when they're bored and it's slow.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then separately, again, the walk-around POS terminals.
Marco:
So I created a private network, and I don't intend to give that password out to anybody, including the employees.
Marco:
The private network has full access to the network.
Marco:
I'm going to put the POS walk-around handheld things on that network.
Marco:
Then what I'm going to actually give the employees if they want to connect their phone for whatever reason will be the guest network because that way it limits everything.
Marco:
Then I don't have to worry about them giving out our private network password to someone else and then someone else being able to come in and control our mixer.
Marco:
whatever like that's a terrible idea so I'm going to try to keep those things separate and if I need to so there is there's already a VLAN for the guest mode of the access points if I need to create a second VLAN for the Dante stuff I can
Marco:
But I don't know if I need that level of complexity because I assume that all these modern ubiquity switches support the proper QoS tagging of the packets and everything to probably not need that.
Marco:
But we'll find out.
Casey:
You know, the...
Casey:
way you're describing your backhaul between the basically front of house and back of house that's what i was planning on doing here when i was still i mean i still am fantasizing about like fiber and whatnot but if i actually do it is unlikely more unlikely with each passing moment especially as i get distracted with all things home assistant but anyway uh my thought was i would have uh like fiber to go from the garage which would be you know kind of sort of the command center and
Casey:
and then flow up to the upstairs and into some sort of switch in the attic.
Casey:
And then I would probably bring fiber into the office, but everywhere else would just get probably gigabit Ethernet, maybe not even 10 gig Ethernet, because nowhere else really needs it except the office and wherever the Synology ends up, for example.
Casey:
Ah!
Casey:
It's a very similar approach to what I was thinking about doing.
Casey:
Now, at the time I was thinking about doing it, I would argue that 10 gig Ethernet was far less common.
Casey:
And the thought was I would be forever future-proofing by having fiber, which I know is not quite that simple.
Casey:
But for the sake of this conversation, that was the thought.
Casey:
But I haven't acted on any of this, and I am unlikely to unless Stephen Hackett comes to visit and wires the house with me.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
I mean, the thing is, faster than gigabit internet connections are starting to become available in the US.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
And many of the, I think the latest Wi-Fi 7 stuff, I think the reason why Ubiquiti is putting 2.5 ports on a lot of their switches now, I think is because some of their access points have 2.5 ports.
Marco:
Because Wi-Fi is getting so fast that I think at maximum capacity, some of these high-end enterprise APs can actually exceed 1 gigabit.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think it is worth planning for a faster-than-gigabit infrastructure when you're putting network stuff in.
Marco:
But that being said, you can get 2.5 over regular... I think even Cat 5e might do it.
Marco:
Certainly Cat 6 would do it.
Marco:
A Cat 6a can do...
Marco:
everything um so like there's you don't need too crazy of like a wiring setup to have very high speeds especially if your distances are short like i think regular cat 6 i think can even do 10 gig below something like you know 100 feet or something like that so like it is worth considering all these things if you're putting new wiring in but you don't need to go too
Marco:
nuts with some of this stuff because you can get by with more than you think.
Marco:
You can get a lot faster on regular cables than you think.
John:
Setting aside the Finder's terrible interface to local file sharing in macOS these days, I actually was looking into both 2.5 and 10 gig solely so the two computers that are five feet away from each other in this room that both have 10 gig Ethernet ports on them could talk to each other
John:
at 10 gig um my internet is still one gig uh so instead rather than having like a marco situation where he's got like the the backbone of the network being 10 gig and then it's branching out i would have the backbone of the network being one gig but just in this room these two computers that both have 10 gig ethernet ports they should be able to talk to each other over 10 gig i would get it you know 12 feet of cable and i don't even think i need to replace cables like you said marco the ones i have would probably do it but um
John:
Once I started looking at the prices of like a four or five port 10 gig switch or, you know, even like one with like 10 gig, what do you call it?
John:
Upstream port and then 2.5 between.
John:
It was getting pretty pricey.
John:
I'm like, I hope this will come down over time.
John:
So what I'm probably going to do is just do nothing and then wait until the day when...
John:
uh when 10 gig is uh we either 2.5 gig is my internet connection in which case i'll just replace everything from end to end with at least 2.5 gig because that would be worthwhile um or when 10 gig becomes cheaper but i am looking in that direction like again because like i keep i always buy computers with 10 gig ports on them and every time i have to wait for some large file to transfer from or even like even just the synology i don't think no of my synology actually has a 10 gig port but a new synology that i bought i would be sure to make sure it had one for future proofing
John:
I do wait for file transfers.
John:
And when I'm waiting for them, I start thinking to myself, like you said, Marco, like, would this be faster for Wi-Fi 7 than the wires that I'm using, given that these two computers can see each other?
John:
But yeah, the march of technology comes with infrastructure costs.
Marco:
And to be clear, I can't imagine a situation where this network at the restaurant is going to actually use 10 gig speeds between anything.
Marco:
It's only going to have one computer.
Marco:
It's not transferring large files.
John:
how many tracks of audio would that require how many tracks of like 96 192 kilohertz like audio of like you know high resolution that nobody can hear the difference you read probably thousands upon thousands of those tracks being transferred simultaneously yeah like at least you know cd quality 44.1 which i i haven't configured it but i assume i'm given those kind of options is 1.5 megabits
John:
You get a lot of those streams in 10 gigabits.
Marco:
I don't intend to actually need that kind of transfer.
Marco:
My goal is I want nothing to ever drop out ever.
Marco:
Yes, obviously a physically separate network would probably do a better job of that, but I don't want to run twice as many cables and twice as many switches everywhere.
Marco:
I want the one network that I know will have so much headroom at every possible link
Marco:
that nothing will ever get bogged down and make my audio drop or make my tv frames drop like the internet connection might that's a separate thing but like i don't want the audio to start cutting out you know at midnight when a dj is playing on a saturday night and so to have a whole bunch of headroom everywhere i think will allow that especially because again it was it was a difference of a few hundred dollars at most for like total for all of it so i'm very happy with that