The Strain Provider
Casey:
I am ever so slightly sick.
Casey:
I have a little bit of a cold.
Casey:
I did an at-home test this morning.
Marco:
Wait, you realize you have Omicron, right?
Casey:
So I did an at-home test this morning and said no.
Marco:
All right, so here's a couple things to know.
Marco:
Number one, the symptom profile for Omicron is different than previous variants.
Marco:
it is much more common to get cold like symptoms like stuffy nose than than previous variants were number two it is it's the the at-home rapid tests that we all have hopefully um are less sensitive to omicron than previous variants so it is right like basically i mean i know so many people who in the last couple of weeks have gotten minor cold symptoms and then later got like a pcr test and it turned out it was covid like
Marco:
Basically, if you have a minor cold in the US right now, you probably have Omicron.
Marco:
That's much more likely than not.
Marco:
Even vaccinated and boosted, the vaccine and boost basically means that you're far less likely to die or go to the hospital and you're probably going to have mild cold symptoms for a few days.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So it's funny you say this because I was talking to Aaron about it.
Casey:
I was like, do you think this is the real thing?
Casey:
And she's like, nah, I don't think so.
Casey:
And then I was like, well, I don't know.
Casey:
Trust me.
Marco:
Assume that it is.
Marco:
Take the precautions as if it is that because it probably is.
Casey:
Well, so I took my at-home test just to see, and that said, no, I understand.
Casey:
I understand.
Casey:
You don't have to email me.
Casey:
I understand.
Casey:
That doesn't guarantee it's not by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
But anyway, I bring all this up to say I'm a little snotty in every sense of the word and a little nasally, so I apologize if I sound a little funky.
Casey:
It's not anything wrong with what Marco did, because I know people, anytime any of us sound weird, it's a testament to how good a job you do, Marco, that people immediately pounce on it and are like, wait, what happened?
Casey:
Why is this wrong?
Casey:
And so it's not Marco.
Casey:
It's me.
Casey:
I've got a little bit of a little bit of snots.
Casey:
So I apologize.
John:
I have a mild cold all winter, every winter for my entire life.
John:
So I don't know what that means.
John:
You've had your typhoid Mary.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What else going on?
Marco:
I'm so tired from my baking adventure yesterday.
Marco:
I make Tiff's birthday cake every year.
Marco:
It's our tradition that I make whatever she wants.
Marco:
She sometimes asks for simple things, sometimes complex things.
Marco:
Sometimes she asks for something simple and I make it complex and I want to make it fancy.
Marco:
That's what happened this year.
Marco:
I made a fancy pistachio cake that was kind of a hybrid of a bunch of recipes I found online.
Marco:
And
Marco:
It was a good deal of work.
Marco:
I would imagine if you are a professional cakeologist, it probably would have taken you the morning at most.
Marco:
But because I am not, and I bake once a year, everything takes me longer because I'm being extra careful.
Marco:
Sometimes I have to remake the frosting because it doesn't come together or something.
Marco:
It was a lot.
Marco:
And I am still, a day later, I feel like... So keep in mind...
Marco:
I went to bed on time, a little after 10, woke up at 6.30, my regular bedtime amount.
Marco:
I didn't have any alcohol yesterday, and I had the regular amount of caffeine, which is one cup of coffee in the morning and a small green tea in the afternoon.
John:
and today i still feel hungover like some like i don't know i think it's just from like a lot doing a lot of stuff yesterday you have a baking hangover you baked one cake i know get a baking hangover maybe it's not the baking maybe it's like the stress of like i hope this comes out well like the pressure of you know your once a year baking performance and
Marco:
I mean, I think it could also be that like we don't have a ton of like strong sugar most of the time.
Marco:
And all day I'm like, oh, let me taste a little bit of this, make sure it's right.
Marco:
So all day I'm having little tiny bits of very strong sugary things culminating at the end with a slice of this cake, you know, right after dinner.
Marco:
So that's a lot of sugar right there.
John:
Did you have it for breakfast the next morning as is tradition?
Marco:
I sure did.
Marco:
I had it for breakfast this morning and felt awful all morning.
John:
I was going to say, if you're already feeling bad and you feel like I had too much sugar, having it for breakfast the next morning is probably nuts.
John:
The hair of the cake that bit you.
Marco:
Yeah, all three of us, including Adam, all three of us this morning afterwards were like, maybe this wasn't a good idea to have all this sugar for breakfast.
Marco:
I think Adam's probably fine, though.
Casey:
I bet he rallied fast.
Marco:
Yeah, kids can definitely do it more than we can, that's for sure.
Marco:
But yeah, it's like now, you know, I'm turning 40 this year, and I'm not feeling great about that fact.
Marco:
And I...
Marco:
One of the areas in which this is becoming real to me is just how many things that I can't or shouldn't eat or drink anymore.
Marco:
Like that list keeps getting larger.
Marco:
And it seems to have happened fairly quickly.
Marco:
Like I feel like at 35, I could eat and drink almost anything.
Marco:
And between 35 and now I'm like 39 and a half, that's gotten cut way back.
Marco:
Just because like, oh, if I eat or drink this thing, I'm going to have a terrible night or morning or whatever.
Oh, man.
Marco:
They don't tell you this kind of stuff.
Marco:
No.
Casey:
But as the joke is, the alternative is much worse.
Casey:
Not being around anymore is much worse than getting old and not being able to eat like you used to.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Well, you know what is good news, though?
Casey:
And we can start with some follow-up.
Casey:
I'm back and better than ever, baby, because guess what showed up this week?
Casey:
The 5K?
John:
It's back, baby.
John:
Did they even tell you it was coming back?
John:
Did it just arrive at your doorstep unannounced?
John:
Or did they say, hey, we finished your repair.
John:
It's on its way or whatever?
Casey:
Did you have to ask me that question, John?
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Do you have to ask me this?
Casey:
So a certain somebody, I have many wonderful qualities.
Casey:
And I have a couple of not as wonderful qualities.
Casey:
That's never a good introduction.
Casey:
It's a great intro.
Casey:
And one of my less desirable qualities is that I may not be the most patient human in the entire world.
Casey:
In a rare case of me deleting a tweet, when I was waiting for my MacBook Pro to show up just a couple of months back, I was getting...
Casey:
increasingly impatient and increasingly petulant about the fact that my beloved computer hadn't shown up when I wanted it to in the middle of a pandemic when shipping is a mess and everything around the world is a mess.
Casey:
But damn it, it's my computer and I want it now.
Casey:
So I whined about it on Twitter, which is what people do when they're whiny.
Casey:
And a few people in various ways said, stop being an idiot.
Casey:
And so I was like, you know what?
Casey:
I am being an idiot.
Casey:
And I deleted that tweet.
Casey:
Well...
Casey:
I realized that I had dispatched the monitor just a few days before Christmas.
Casey:
I think I shipped it on the 20th of December or maybe the 21st.
Casey:
And it was now the 20th or 21st of January.
Casey:
And so I thought, okay...
Casey:
it is about time for me to start poking about trying to figure out where this thing is.
Casey:
Now, I have had a tab open John style for a month now with the LG, you know, track your repair status page thing.
Casey:
And it's told me for a month that it's pending.
Casey:
Oh, that's not fair.
Casey:
I think before they acknowledged its arrival, they said, you know, we're waiting on it.
Casey:
And then, you know, after a few days of it having been in city of industry, California, they eventually said, okay, we're going to get to it at some point.
Marco:
Does City of Industry sound like a parody place name from The Simpsons to anyone else?
John:
It absolutely does.
John:
It sounds like something from like a Disney movie.
John:
City of Industry.
Casey:
It very much does.
Casey:
It has a big like Epcot feel to it, right?
Casey:
Experimental prototype community of tomorrow.
Casey:
Well, anyways.
Casey:
Sorry, go on.
Casey:
during the process of me begging lg i don't remember how much we got into this but during the process of me begging lg to take 150 or whatever dollars of my money so they would repair it i eventually and now i kind of regret having gone down this whole road this is all your fault john you had to ask um i eventually used the email the president form on the lg website this was weeks ago did you say do you know who i am no no it's so tempting but no you can't no please never do that because
Casey:
You will regret it.
Marco:
Take heed from Merlin's bad experience.
Marco:
You will regret this.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So I sent that.
Casey:
And then actually, to their credit, within a few hours, I believe I got a phone call from like one of the president's peons.
Casey:
And this very, very kind woman was like, all right, I'm gonna get you squared away.
Casey:
And she followed up via phone like a couple of times over the span of like a week.
Casey:
This is, you know, when I was trying to just get the thing to them in the first place.
Casey:
She was awesome.
Casey:
She was like the only ray of sunshine in this entire repair process was this woman at the president's office.
Casey:
And so I emailed her because we had exchanged a couple of emails because she had actually asked me for something at some point.
Casey:
And so I said, hey, and I was very kind.
Casey:
I truly was very kind.
Casey:
I'm not going to dig up the email because I'm too lazy, but I was kind.
Casey:
I was like, hey, it's been a month.
Casey:
Like, can we can we figure out what's going on here?
Casey:
And I sent that.
Casey:
I think it was like Tuesday morning or something like that.
Casey:
And we exchanged a couple emails back and forth, and she was like, look, I'm going on vacation next week, but I super promise that when I get back, I'll check in.
Casey:
I was like, no, no, no, that's fine.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
I'll talk to you after you get back from your vacation.
Casey:
No worries.
Casey:
And I had raised a little bit of a stink about it, again, very politely.
Casey:
And then I went out to go for a walk that afternoon, and there was a large box on my front porch.
Casey:
a large box on my front porch that I did not expect to see.
Casey:
And on the side of that box on the front porch, it said, repair okay.
Casey:
And it was an LG box.
Casey:
And I was like, oh my God, it's here.
Casey:
So here it was, literally the day that I'm blowing up this poor woman at the president of LG Electronics Office or whatever they are, saying, please, can you find my monitor?
Casey:
I'm a very needy, very spoiled white boy in Virginia.
Casey:
Please find my monitor.
Casey:
And sure enough, it showed up.
Casey:
So that's how talented she is, is that she made it show up immediately.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
How do you know that she didn't somehow make that happen?
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
She flew her own personal helicopter to your house to drop it off.
Casey:
They droned the 30-pound or whatever LG display.
Casey:
So anyway, so it showed up, and there was absolutely zero documentation.
Casey:
There was a packing slip that had my address and whatnot, but that was it.
Casey:
No documentation, nothing that indicated that they had done anything other than the sticker on the outside that said, repair okay.
Okay.
Casey:
But I had faith, and I plugged it in, and I've unplugged it on the computer side a couple times.
Casey:
I haven't unplugged it on the other side yet.
Casey:
But so far, so good, baby.
Casey:
I'm back and better than ever.
Casey:
So I am excited.
Casey:
And all jokes aside, so I'd been rocking two 4K LG displays.
Casey:
All in all, I actually didn't mind it.
Casey:
I kind of liked it.
Casey:
And now having the 5K display back, leaving aside, like I know we all, including me to some degree, kind of hate this particular 5K display, but having a large monitor in front of you is particularly delightful.
Casey:
And I can only fathom how delightful an additional K would be.
Casey:
Like, I'm sure it would be quite nice.
Casey:
But I am...
Casey:
i am all ready to go i've got i'm looking at the 5k right now uh ethernet is plugged into the 5k and that hasn't died yet so that's good um and then i'm using my whatever this breakout box is already forgot which who makes it but i'm using the breakout box for um actually i think they sponsored today iodine sent me a a unit of theirs which was very kind of them which is very cool um it this thing is extremely fast it is super neat and marco will talk about that later
Casey:
And I have that connected to the breakout box.
Casey:
I've got the USB pre connected to the or the I'm sorry, the mix pre connected to the breakout box.
Casey:
So basically, everything about this setup has changed since last week.
Casey:
And it'll be anyone's guess which one of these 74 components causes problems if problems happen later.
Casey:
And this is when Marco gets real angry at me.
Casey:
But but hopefully it'll work out all right.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This thing looks awesome.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This is really cool stuff.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's shipping now in 12 and 24 terabyte capacities, up to three times the size of the largest built-in Mac SSDs.
Marco:
And with the flexibility of their Thunderbolt daisy chaining, many ProData devices can be connected to a single Mac for nearly infinite expansion.
Marco:
ProData even supports connecting up to four computers simultaneously and dividing its unique storage SSD pool into distinct containers with configurable passwords, encryption keys, RAID levels, and file system formats.
Marco:
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Marco:
So supercharge your setup with the fastest Thunderbolt storage for M1 Max and the fastest Thunderbolt rate array, Iodine ProData.
Marco:
To learn more, visit iodine.com.
Marco:
That's I-O-D-Y-N-E, iodine.com.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Iodine for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I have to say, sitting here now before everything collapses on me shortly during the recording of this very episode, once you're willing to basically turn your life upside down and spend heinous amounts of money on things you probably shouldn't need to buy...
Casey:
The USB-C lifestyle is pretty good.
Casey:
Being able to plug in the MixPre-3, two Thunderbolt cables to this iodine box, Thunderbolt to, let's see, I've got a stand, a 12 South or whatever it is, stand for my iPhone that's plugged in.
Casey:
I've got Ethernet plugged in.
Casey:
I've got all sorts of different things, probably like four or five different connections to this computer.
Casey:
that are all riding through two USB-C connections.
Casey:
One of them is to the breakout box, the USB-C Thunderbolt hub, and one of them to the LG 5K.
Casey:
And, you know, if I were to plug all of these things individually, first of all, I couldn't because I'd run out of ports.
Casey:
But second of all,
Casey:
It would be quite a few more cables.
Casey:
So I didn't mention, oh, I've kept the LG 4K that I purchased.
Casey:
Remember, I had borrowed one for my last job, and I'm keeping the other one, the other LG 4K that I purchased, and that's currently off to my right-hand side.
Casey:
My laptop display is off to my left-hand side, so I've got a triumvirate, a trio of monitors, and it is extremely overkill, and I'm kind of loving it.
Casey:
But the 4K is also hooked into the breakout box.
Casey:
So I've got all this different stuff hooked into all these different places.
Casey:
But as long as they can find a way back to my computer, it's pretty great.
Casey:
And so if I want to go into like full-on business mode or whatever, then I plug in the breakout box.
Casey:
That gives me the second monitor.
Casey:
That gives me the mix pre and all that jazz.
Casey:
But if I'm just rolling simple, I only have to plug in the LG 5K and I still have Ethernet on there.
Casey:
And the one 5K monitor, and I can go clamshell or whatever, and it's fine.
Casey:
And so it stinks that I needed to get, like, a bunch of different cables.
Casey:
And gosh, do I ever hate the ambiguity around what USB-C cable handles, what bandwidth, and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But once you get yourself squared away with the right cables and the right $300 breakout box and so on and so forth and the right $1,500 monitor plus $150 for repair...
Marco:
um once you get it all once you get it all squared away it actually is pretty nice but gosh did this if this didn't take me like two months to get this situation squared away to the point i like it well i mean if you trade two months for about four thousand more dollars that's basically the pro display xdr story it's a ton of money uh but if you're if you're willing and able to drop that then this lifestyle can be very nice like the
Marco:
This is why I love the XDR.
Marco:
It's not because I needed a reference grade display for whatever, whatever.
Marco:
Having the slightly dim edge problem that it has still does bother me a little bit.
Marco:
But it's a really giant monitor, which hits upon KC happiness factor number one at the beginning of the episode.
Marco:
And it's my main USB-C hub.
Marco:
At my desk, I don't need a USB-C hub.
Marco:
because i because the monitor itself has downstream ports the computer has downstream ports and i have my my like old usba devices put into a different hub that i already had just you know a usb hub it's not like a usbc or thunderbolt hub and so it's great once you have this set up it's awesome it cost a ridiculous amount of money but it is fantastic if you can swing it um and
Marco:
This is why... This really does make me very, very happy to use.
Marco:
This still remains by far my favorite computer setup I've ever used.
Marco:
I love the desktop-laptop lifestyle still.
Marco:
It's just fantastic.
Marco:
And USB-C is part of that.
Marco:
Because the thing with USB... It's still...
Marco:
It's kind of like your audio setup.
Marco:
Not you, Casey, but it's kind of like one's audio setup.
Marco:
The golden rule of audio setups is once you get it working, never touch anything because if you touch anything, you'll change it in some way.
Marco:
You'll be in a world of hell for weeks and you won't know why.
Marco:
But USB-C and Thunderbolt and everything is like that.
Marco:
I have so many weird conditions that I've had in the past or in different setups in the present where I'll plug something in that should work, some setup that I have that should work, and it just randomly doesn't.
Marco:
I have this problem with our game streaming setup where I'm running all of these USB capture devices and USB webcams through the CalDigit Thunderbolt hub and into my MacBook Pro,
Marco:
But for some reason, like one of the capture things, we have three computers that we capture.
Marco:
So we have three little Legato USB thingies to capture them.
Marco:
And one of them, for some reason, won't work through the Thunderbolt hub sometimes.
Marco:
And if I plug it into my computer directly, like into a different port, it works fine.
Marco:
Now, if I disconnect the computer that's plugged into it, like the input gaming PC, if I put this one particular gaming PC on a different USB capture device, then that capture device will start having the same problem.
Marco:
So it seems to be like whatever...
Marco:
PC, or whatever capture device is connected to this particular PC, can't work all the time from the USB port in the Thunderbolt hub, but will work every time directly.
Marco:
And weird stuff, I have a sound device's MixPre that powers the audio for that setup, so that's also plugged into the USB hub.
Marco:
And that works.
Marco:
All the time.
Marco:
Asterisk.
Marco:
Well, most of the time.
Marco:
Occasionally, very occasionally, it'll blip out for a second and blip back in.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But this is the promise of so much of technology that we have today.
Marco:
it'll advertise like, oh, you can plug in X number of devices.
Marco:
It'll have X number of ports and you can support all these things.
Marco:
And you'll see pictures all over the manufacturer websites of all of these things, the devices, the computer manufacturers, the Thunderbolt hub manufacturers.
Marco:
And you'll see these wonderful pictures of like some laptops surrounded by a million different peripherals all plugged into this one magical box and everything.
Marco:
And in practice, in real life, if you do that, you have maybe a 50-50 shot of it actually working.
Marco:
And when it actually does work,
Marco:
That's why I'm saying like never touch it again.
Marco:
And right now, Casey, you have a setup that right now seems to probably maybe work.
Marco:
I've been using such a setup and it's glorious.
Marco:
And so I hope that this works for you because having been on the other side of it so often, having tried to actually use the equipment in the way that it claims to be able to be used and something just doesn't work so often that when it does work, it is so, so glorious.
Casey:
Right, and that's where I am.
Casey:
And to be clear, you don't need a $1,500 LG 5K.
Casey:
You don't need a $6,000 Pro Display XDR.
Casey:
You can get one of the couple of hundred dollar Thunderbolt hubs or whatever they are.
Casey:
It's still ridiculously expensive.
Casey:
A couple hundred dollars for what is basically four ports.
Casey:
That is absurd.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
When it does work, like you said, when it does work, it is pretty great that, you know, with two cables, I've got power, I've got Ethernet, I've got a USB mic interface, I've got two different displays, I've got two connections, two parallel connections to this 12 terabyte iodine thing.
Casey:
That's seven, eight, seven, eight.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I can't count.
Casey:
Something like that off of just two cables connected to my computer, which is pretty excellent.
Casey:
And so when it does work, when you are a HDMI CEC unicorn, when you are a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 unicorn, it is pretty excellent.
Casey:
John, I think we kind of railroaded you there.
Casey:
It sounded like you were going to say something.
John:
nope i'm fine i'm fine to hear about your exciting usbc life although i i still think the uh the ultimate move is the desktop life because no matter how weird ass your setup is if you have a desk you can spend the time to get it set up the way you want and then just never change it because it never goes anywhere
Casey:
Yeah, but that's the thing.
Casey:
It never goes anywhere.
Casey:
So if you want to move, if you want to move your butt or work somewhere else, you know, you can't.
John:
I would never leave in my comfy chair, my giant screen and my keyboard tray and my nice mouse.
John:
Why would I go anywhere else?
Casey:
A nice mouse, your $10, 40-year-old mouse?
John:
No, man, I guess we got through this.
John:
This is my second replacement Microsoft mouse thing, remember?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Mm hmm.
Casey:
We should move on.
Casey:
I apologize for kind of railroading follow up copyright 2011 John Syracuse.
Casey:
So speaking of John Syracuse, tell me about QD OLED and blue LEDs, please.
John:
This is actually two things about the blue LEDs.
John:
I gave myself a correction on the past show where I talked about QD OLED and QD OLED is the one with the blue backlight.
John:
And I said I wasn't sure why it was blue, but I do know it's easier to make them like bright and high power or whatever.
John:
But there is another reason specifically for QD OLEDs to have blue LEDs in them producing the light.
John:
That's from Simon Webster.
John:
He says, the reason blue LEDs are using QD OLEDs is that blue photons have the highest energy.
John:
A single blue photon can make a red photon, but energetically, you need multiple red photons to make a single blue photon.
John:
Again, this has to do with the way quantum dots work.
John:
See that video that we linked in a couple shows back that it's the photons coming out of the LED.
John:
It's not a backlight, but it's because it's behind every pixel, right?
John:
coming out of that little LED, goes into the quantum dot layer, and knocks a bunch of electrons around at different energy levels.
John:
And if you send in a blue one, it's got the most energy, so you can make all the other colors from the blue one.
John:
Again, this is not filtering or canceling out wavelengths.
John:
This is converting the blue.
John:
Well, it's not converting.
John:
Anyway, it's complicated.
John:
It's quantum whatever.
John:
But yeah, blue, they're easy to make.
John:
They can be really bright.
John:
And also, they have the highest energy, so you can get the other colors from them.
Casey:
Moving right along, John Mason writes, apparently Sony Interactive Entertainment without the rest of Sony is still much higher revenue than Activision Blizzard.
Casey:
This is because we were talking about how big is Sony really?
John:
Yeah, we're getting some guff for saying like, oh, Microsoft will be the third biggest company, but Sony was number one.
John:
I'm like, oh, well, Sony makes tons of stuff.
John:
They don't just do video games, but apparently just...
John:
the video game part and this was in terms of revenue so obviously sony sells consoles as well as getting uh margins on the games but then again so does microsoft so i guess it was more of a fair comparison than i had thought and sony interactive entertainment is actually really really big turns out uh we got a lot of feedback which i thought was reasonable from what little i know about this world uh with regard to xbox game pass in the series s can you explain this to me please
John:
Yeah, this should have been factored into, I think we touched on a little bit, the Activision Blizzard thing with Microsoft buying them.
John:
What do they get from that?
Casey:
Well, and also this came from an Ask ATP, I think, with regard to which system should somebody buy.
John:
Yeah, but it was tied into the Activision Blizzard discussion because it's like, why does Microsoft want to buy all these games and everything?
John:
Obviously, you can get platform exclusions to sell more of your Xbox consoles.
John:
But also, Microsoft has been pushing heavily into...
John:
Selling instead of selling people a console box and then selling people games for 60 bucks each instead Trying to get them on a subscription to say every month you pay a certain amount of money in exchange for that You get access to many many games sort of a Netflix style thing or whatever It's much more like Netflix than it is like Spotify or Apple music because I think with music streaming services
John:
The assumption is that if you pay a monthly fee, you get access to essentially all music.
John:
Not entirely true.
John:
Like if you want Neil Young, you can't get it on Spotify anymore.
John:
But like for the most part, you expect every music streaming service to have like the music, the most popular music.
John:
Almost all music will be there or whatever.
John:
But Netflix or a streaming service like HBO Max or Amazon or Apple TV Plus or whatever, you know they're not going to have everything.
John:
But they have a lot of stuff.
John:
And if you had to buy every movie that you can watch on Netflix or whatever, it would cost you a ton.
John:
But if you pay a small amount per month, Netflix will give you access to all its original content plus any other stuff they have or whatever.
John:
So that's the idea behind these Xbox Game Pass things is you pay a fee per month.
John:
And you get access to a lot of games.
John:
And you can get many, many more people paying that fee if you add lots of popular games to the Game Pass.
John:
Now, that flies in the face a little bit of business models like World of Warcraft, where people are already paying every month for World of Warcraft.
John:
So I'm not sure how they could put that into Game Pass, because Game Pass alone costs about the same or less, I think, as World of Warcraft does per month.
John:
But still, it's a different way to run that business.
John:
You know, PlayStation is winning this generation, and so they're, you know...
John:
Microsoft trying different things because they want to find the best way they can to get a steady revenue stream from you.
John:
In fact, Microsoft will go as far as to... We talked about renting game consoles from Blockbuster.
John:
Microsoft will rent you a game console for no money down.
John:
You just pay them X number of dollars a month.
John:
And part of that X number of dollars a month is they will give you a lesser Xbox...
John:
without you having to pay you know you pay the you pay the first month's 30 bucks or whatever and they get you get an xbox and you get access to a whole bunch of games and then you just keep paying that over and over so it's i'm not sure if that business model is going to win or not but it is definitely attractive and the reason that goes into the ask atp thing is a lot of people were saying look at this great deal you get you can find the lesser xboxes the xbox series s you can actually find them because they don't use as fancy parts as the other ones you can go to a store right now go into a target and buy one off the shelf easy to find right
John:
You don't even have to put down money up front if you don't want to, if you sign up for the Game Pass.
John:
And then once you're signed up for the Game Pass, you have access to this big catalog of games and you didn't have to buy any of them.
John:
So the financial risk to find out what kind of game you like is low.
John:
Unfortunately, like I said, with the streaming service versus game service, Game Pass does not give you access to...
John:
all the games in the world.
John:
It doesn't even give you access to a very big subset of them.
John:
The types of games that are on Game Pass may not actually even be representative of the world of games that's available, even just across PC games and Xbox games.
John:
Because, as you can imagine, the very, very best games have some motivation to be $60 individual purchases for the length of time that they can do that before sort of being relegated to Game Pass.
John:
Of course, if Microsoft owns them, they can choose to...
John:
take the hit quote unquote not really because microsoft would much rather have you pay thirty dollars a month for five years than to buy one sixty dollar game like the math is very easy to do there but microsoft owns the game they can put it into game pass and crank up that services revenue so i think it was worth mentioning if people didn't know how console gaming has changed you do have options now other than just buying a console for a couple hundred bucks and then buying sixty dollars paying each for each game for sixty dollars
John:
um sony is also rumored to be working on a game pass style subscription so this may be the future of console gaming kind of sucks for me because i don't want to do that at all i'd much rather buy the console by destiny and then just use it for five years without having to pay again well that's not really true because destiny sells you expansions every year for probably another 60 bucks and i always get the fancy version and then i buy horse armor in the game and you know how it goes horse armor like that's a gamer joke people will get it who are not you
John:
Is it armor for horses or armor made for or of horses?
John:
It's armor for horses.
John:
You don't know that from back in the day?
John:
No.
John:
This is a big thing in the gaming world.
John:
When the first game company decided, you know what?
John:
We can sell things inside the game but for real money.
John:
And people are like, what are you talking about?
John:
You can't do that.
John:
It's like, no, but boy, what if we found a way to take people's credit card?
John:
And then they would give us money and then in exchange we'd be like...
John:
voila your character has this item and the first thing they sold was armor for your horse it was horse armor and people paid real money for it and they're like you paid real money for thing in a video game and now that's what's what video video games are like that's all video games are like mobile gaming is paying real real money for things inside a video game often the thing you're paying for is just a chance to play the game again sooner you're not even getting horse armor so
Marco:
yeah the first ever dlc downloadable content but downloadable is one word so why is it dl it's so terrible oh my gosh all right let's move on wait but before we get so this this actually does change my recommendation uh like so this came up as cases from the ask atp question from from a person who had said like hey i'm just getting back into gaming after you know a long time away i don't really know where to start what system should i get you know i didn't really know like what kind of games they wanted and
Marco:
I had said get a Switch because, you know, I have a Switch and I came to it from a similar point and I really enjoy it and my family really enjoys it.
Marco:
But I will say I have bought a lot of games that were a lot of money that I ended up, you know, playing for a few minutes and realizing, oh, actually, I don't really like this after all.
Marco:
But it's all just download purchases that I made on the Switch.
Marco:
Some of them have demos, but a lot of them don't.
Marco:
I would say most don't.
Marco:
And so the idea of try before you buy in that kind of context doesn't really exist very much on the Switch.
Marco:
And so to know that...
Marco:
the Xbox Series S, and, like, you know, for a casual person like me and probably this person writing in, the difference between the Series S and the Series X, whatever the impossible one is to get, probably doesn't matter to us so much.
Marco:
But, like,
Marco:
The idea of being able to pay $0 to $300 for the system and then just pay some reasonable monthly fee to have access to lots of games, even if they're kind of older, second-tier, Netflix-quality kind of games, that's fine because that's kind of what we need.
Marco:
People who are not into the cutting edge of everything...
Marco:
That's great, actually.
Marco:
And so this changed my recommendation.
Marco:
I had no idea this even existed.
Marco:
And we got such an overwhelming number of people writing in to say how great it was that, yeah.
Marco:
So now I recommend to this person, anybody in a similar situation,
Marco:
that's probably what you should try first because the idea of being able to try a whole bunch of really good quality games, even if it's not everything, a whole bunch of really good quality games for a flat fee every month, that's very attractive compared to buy this game for $60 that you might like and you have no recourse if you don't.
John:
Doesn't change my recommendation.
John:
But like I said, it's not that these aren't top tier games.
John:
There are there are absolutely top tier games in Game Pass, like super duper top tier, the best of the best.
John:
But it's just not every kind of game.
John:
And because I didn't if you don't know what kind of game you're into, if you're into games that are only on PC, Game Pass is going to do nothing for you because you're not going to like any of the games and you're going to have a crappy console on top of that.
John:
So.
John:
I feel like it is important to know what you like first.
John:
Now that leads to the question, okay, how the hell am I supposed to know what I like?
John:
Unless I'm going to be plunking down 60 bucks for games.
John:
That is the hard part.
John:
My suggestion last time was like, find a game you think you like, play it over a friend's house, see if you do like it.
John:
A lot of people mentioned the person played Halo and liked it.
John:
So hey, if you've decided that Halo is the game for you, then actually this is the solution because you can buy an Xbox and play Halo on it.
John:
It'll work great.
John:
uh but if you don't know like i was trying to like not fence people out of essentially pc games because there are a lot of games that are really only on pc or best on piece like if you want to use i'm trying to think of an example like a a tank simulator like world of tanks world of tanks on uh on xbox maybe how about scorched earth is that this is still thinking of all the franchises i was gonna say flight simulator but i think it's not even a franchise it's one game from dos from forever ago yeah anyway like
John:
If it turns out that you're super into games that are only on PC and you have any console, you're going to be sad.
John:
And if it turns out that the game you like best is Super Mario Brothers, you're going to be really sad on Xbox.
John:
So if possible, find out what you like.
John:
But if you really don't know and you're desperate now, this seems like a good deal.
John:
I'm just not big on the Xbox Series S. I kind of wish that they did Game Pass with the better console and just charged you a little bit more per month.
John:
um i don't know though maybe they'd make you send it back if you didn't go through i don't know i even know how that works like if you can you pay for one month and say i've changed my mind i cancel the service and send it back to them or do they make you buy out the rest of the console not sure what the deal is but anyway like i said sony is almost certainly going to come up with a similar program so this may be the future of consoles for everybody
Marco:
Well, and honestly, I don't think that's that bad of a thing because I look at the games I play and there are certain games like Minecraft or Stardew Valley that I paid 20 or 30 bucks for once like five years ago or something.
Marco:
And I've gotten hours and hours and hours out of those games.
Marco:
I love them so much.
Marco:
And then other games that I paid 60 bucks for and played very little.
Marco:
if there was some way for me to more easily reward the games i'm actually playing over time in a more direct way and not be out the 60 bucks for something i played for five minutes i think that would be more not only more i think fair but it also be a little more like consumer friendly in a lot of ways i should buy some horse armor and stardew yeah and the game developers i actually have a horse it's it's adorable um but you would buy armor for it i bet
Marco:
nothing ever attacks it and that would just make it slower which would get rid of the point of the horse but anyway like I feel like you know obviously there's this kind of business model has its ups and downs as well but if something was based more on the time that you spent on something or if you just paid a flat rate and then you know the service behind the scenes dealt out the money based on what people were playing over time like that I think is probably a better way to go long term
Casey:
Olivier Rui writes, you mentioned SMS interoperability bugs as a key problem with iMessage, but it's a question only Apple gets asked because they've merged their own messaging system with the SMS app.
Casey:
I've never heard of a WhatsApp or Signal user complaining that they can't interact with SMS.
Casey:
Everyone just assumes it's a separate world.
Casey:
This merge with SMS was a great way to jumpstart the iMessage platform, but the downside becomes increasingly difficult to hide as the two systems diverge.
John:
I mean, yeah, Apple does get the benefit of that merge.
John:
I mean, obviously the iPhone launched without iMessage, so it only had SMS.
John:
And when rolling out iMessage, since it was from Apple, I think it would have been kind of weird to say the SMS app is still there, but now it's also an iMessage app.
John:
And like the interoperability was a feature and it still is a feature.
John:
It's just...
John:
it should work better right um and then as sms i'm gonna say as sms ages but obviously sms is not getting is saying the same but what's happening is that as imessage evolves and as the competitive services evolve the distance between sms which is essentially unchanging and these modern messages service becomes greater and greater and then you get sort of these uh disparities between them so
John:
Yes, Apple did sort of sign up for this by merging them, but I think the merge was a good idea.
John:
And I don't think we would prefer to be bouncing back and forth between two separate apps if we could help it.
John:
Although at a certain point, Casey probably would have done that out of frustration alone, just because like, look, does it work in the SMS only app?
John:
Then I will do that for when I'm communicating with my family.
John:
That's something a lot of people have sent feedback.
John:
They're like, I have seven messaging apps.
John:
And I just jump between them.
John:
And I guess that works, but it's not ideal.
John:
Like keeping track of like work people are in this app and, you know, and it's, but we do all do that for various things.
John:
I have to use Slack, Discord, Teams.
John:
But, but, but like one hopes that with the exception of what you are forced to do with work, you don't have like five different apps of the same type, like five different email apps, unless you're Mike Hurley or something.
John:
Five different instant message apps.
John:
Like, are you in Slack, Teams and Discord?
John:
all at the same time for three different sets of people?
John:
Maybe because of the Discord gaming angle or whatever, but that's less ideal than saying, okay, sometimes I'm in Slack, sometimes I'm in messages, sometimes I'm in email, right?
John:
Sometimes I'm in Twitter.
John:
Those are all slightly different.
John:
The idea of having five apps that are all just essentially instant messaging, as we used to call it back in the day, is not what I prefer.
John:
That's why apps like Adium were created, right?
John:
Where it was all the instant messaging, people don't remember, but there used to be tons and tons of instant messaging services
John:
all of which had lots of you know lots of users and they made one meta app that could speak to them all so you could do google talk icq aim uh i think irc didn't admi do irc as well i thought it did yeah like it did like everything you could possibly imagine in a single app because all the protocols were more or less open and or packed those were the days but anyway um the reason that app exists is because who wants to run all those separate apps but if you can put them on one app and do a decent job of it uh that's preferable
Marco:
Everything now is its own little garden, and everybody wants their own garden for everyone to join.
Marco:
TV apps are like this.
Marco:
The streaming services are all like this.
Marco:
We are trying very hard to make podcasts not like this, but the reality is they are becoming like this.
Marco:
This is just how everybody wants...
Marco:
everyone nobody wants to work on open standards anymore nobody wants to interoperate anymore everybody's making their own gardens and everybody wants it to be all theirs only theirs owned by them controlled by them owning the whole stack cutting up distribution taking all the money like that's that's the modern way to do business in the tech world so that i think i feel like this is kind of a reality that we're that we're stuck with in many areas like yeah you're gonna have five different apps to watch tv and
Marco:
You're going to have at least two or three different apps to listen to your podcast or whatever, audiobooks, whatever else.
Marco:
You're going to have 10 different chat apps, 10 different collaboration apps, 10 different messaging apps.
Marco:
That's just how it goes.
John:
I mean, it's not like the messaging platforms were magnanimous back in the day.
John:
It's just that...
John:
apps like ADM were able to figure out how to make it work.
John:
There were third-party Slack clients, for example, too, because Slack technically has an API, but these days an individual or small group of developers trying to ride that bear in a Steve Ballmer parlance is just so much harder.
John:
The degree of difficulty has gone up.
John:
If you tried to make a
John:
meta messaging app that work especially when encryption is involved you probably can't do with iMessage to the end-to-end encryption stuff and the integration it was just it was just easier to do back it was plausible to do back in the day that a small dev team could make an app like adm but it wasn't because aol was super into people making their own clients right or icq or you know i guess irc doesn't care
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Casey:
I made an offhanded comment last week about how—I was wondering how episodes or movies that are released only to Netflix or only to Disney+, how do they end up falling off the back of trucks?
Casey:
And what was the story there?
Casey:
We got, we touched, the three of us touched on it very, very briefly.
Casey:
And one of the things I think John brought up was industry screener DVDs.
Casey:
So what will happen is people in the industry will get, you know, pre-release copies of movies on DVD or perhaps Blu-ray.
Casey:
And
Casey:
You know, somebody could rip that and then upload it and then it'll start falling off the back of trucks.
Casey:
Well, Matt Rigby writes, Indiscreet screener DVDs are still very much a thing.
Casey:
I've gotten dozens this year alone.
Casey:
Not Blu-rays, traditional standard definition DVDs.
Casey:
All but one of them for content available in streaming platforms that I pay for in beautiful 4K resolution.
Casey:
It is, and I'm still quoting, it is freaking annoying and wasteful and I wish they'd go away.
Casey:
Just email me a code.
Casey:
So I thought that was kind of funny.
Casey:
Additionally, a handful of people sent in, but I first saw it through Colin Weir.
Casey:
This is an article from 2019, The Scene, Pirates Ripping Content from Amazon and Netflix.
Casey:
And it's a really, really good article.
Casey:
It's not terribly long, and it'll be in the show notes.
Casey:
But I'd like to read just a few excerpts from it, from the article.
Casey:
Whenever you stream a video online, you are downloading chunks of a video file to your computer.
Casey:
Screeners simply save that content and attempt to decrypt it for non-DRM playback later, an informant tells the author of the article.
Casey:
When accessing the content, legitimate premium accounts are used, often paid for using prepaid credit cards supported by bogus identities.
Casey:
It takes just a few minutes to download a video file since they're served by CDNs with gigabits of bandwidth.
Casey:
Quote,
Casey:
The way the scene handles web releases is by using specialized tools coded by the scene for the scene.
Casey:
These tools are extremely private and only a handful of people in the world have access to the latest version, the source notes.
Casey:
Continuing, without these tools, releasing Widevine content is extremely difficult, if not impossible for most.
Casey:
These tools work by downloading the encrypted video stream from the streaming site and reverse engineering the encryption.
Casey:
Our contact says that the decryption is a surprisingly quick process taking just a few minutes.
Casey:
I did not know about Widevine before now.
Casey:
Apparently, it is very much a thing, and I probably should have known about it.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I found this entire article fascinating, and I've kind of given you the TLDR just now.
John:
They cracked the encryption.
John:
Like I said, it's just from the movies.
John:
If you break the DRM, the world is yours.
John:
It's kind of amazing to me that the crack is apparently as of 2019 not widely distributed.
John:
Yeah, I agree.
John:
I don't quite understand.
John:
There's probably some motivation for keeping that private.
John:
Right.
Casey:
Well, so they talk about in the article that so the scene is kind of to the best I understand.
Casey:
I might get the particulars wrong.
Casey:
The scene is like the broad kind of name for all of these different subgroups that are all like trying to compete to be the first one to release a particular thing.
John:
So I know about the scene.
Casey:
Well, okay, so I'm just saying, so if you're one of these groups, you're going to want to have your own proprietary software that gets the DRM cracked so you can upload stuff and pre-release before anyone else.
Casey:
And you don't want any other knuckleheads having your software that you worked and you put blood, sweat, and tears into.
Casey:
You're going to hoard that for yourself.
John:
Right.
John:
But I feel like, you know, this type of thing, uh, it's hard to keep a secret.
John:
Like you don't want to tell everybody.
John:
And then once it gets out, shouldn't it just be everywhere?
John:
Like not maybe the specific software, but very least like, here's how we cracked it.
John:
Here are the secret keys that we extracted from some hardware device or whatever, or some insider Netflix leaked this private key.
John:
And,
John:
you know and maybe the motivation is if the netflix find out what thing has been leaked they can do some kind of key rotation or something i don't know anyway whole point is drm it prevents things from being pirated so that's why you can't take screenshots yep all right then this is we're kind of getting into the gray area between follow-up and topic uh the netherlands uh has told apple nope
Casey:
So what has happened is the Netherlands has said that for dating apps, users in the Netherlands need to be able to provide payment via alternate mechanisms, you know, not going through the app store.
Casey:
And so Apple came up with a scheme to...
Casey:
satisfy that, and their official group, the ACM, I forget what that stands for now, shoot, ACM has said, no, that's not enough.
Casey:
In fact, they said, quote, Apple has failed to satisfy the requirements on several points.
Casey:
The most important one is that Apple has failed to adjust its conditions as a result of which dating app providers are still unable to use other payment systems.
Casey:
At the moment, dating app providers can merely express their quote-unquote interest.
Casey:
And so this is the authority for consumers and markets from the Netherlands.
John:
That's such an Apple move.
John:
They're like, okay, all right, well, you know, you dinky little country with a population the size of two big U.S.
John:
cities has decided that dating apps specifically have to be allowed to use third-party payment methods.
John:
So...
John:
We'll begin exploring a program which may allow you to use a special as yet unreleased Apple API through which we will extract our percentage to allow you to use third-party payment systems.
John:
Please fill out this form to express your permission in participating in this program at our discretion.
John:
And the Dutch authorities said, okay, well, time's up, and you're not complying, so it's time for you to... The penalty has been initiated, and the penalty is $5 million a day.
John:
Not $5 million a day.
John:
What is it?
Casey:
$5 million... 5 million euros a week, I believe.
John:
Yeah, not dollars.
John:
5 million euros a week, but it's up to a maximum of 50 million euros.
John:
And it's, I think...
John:
Gruber snarked.
John:
It's like, well, Apple could just find that.
John:
Why doesn't Apple just send them the 50 million now that they could find and then lose change in their couch cushions and then just not have to think about it again?
John:
Because as the old saying goes, for the very wealthy, a fine is just a fee.
John:
If you can do something illegal and all you have to do is pay 50 million euros, if you're a multi-trillion dollar company,
John:
okay, apparently the price of us doing whatever we want on the AppStar is 50 million euros.
John:
Done and done.
John:
That's the easiest 50 million euros I ever spent.
John:
Now I don't have to follow your law anymore.
John:
That's the difficulty of trying to find what is an appropriate penalty for violating a law.
John:
You live in a country, you have your own laws, you pass laws, and you say, okay, well, if you do business in this country, you have to follow these laws.
John:
And it's like, okay, well, what if I don't?
John:
What happens to me then?
John:
And it's like, well...
John:
We're not going to send you to jail because your company is based in another country.
John:
And we're probably not going to ban your products because people do like Apple products in our country.
John:
So I guess we'll fine you?
John:
What's an appropriate fine for not following this law?
John:
5 million euros a week for a maximum of 50 million?
John:
I mean, if you're a dinking company, that puts you out of business.
John:
If you're Apple, you might not notice.
Marco:
Well, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, weekly subscription billing can be very misleading.
Marco:
I don't know if Apple is familiar with this problem.
John:
But it caps out at $50 million.
John:
Weekly subscriptions don't cap out.
John:
That's the whole thing.
John:
They just keep getting charged.
John:
So anyway, this is difficult because the Netherlands does not have a lot of...
John:
wait here like apple can just say okay no more app store in that lens how do you like me now right like apple kind of holds a lot of the cards here um but it's interesting to see a country not dealing with apple's bs not giving them seven years to comply not waiting for the appeals court to go through and blah blah blah and just saying just playing this little game of chicken with apple which they're going to lose because netherlands right sorry but uh wow
John:
i mean like apple just fine no more apple products in netherlands is that going to show up on apples i mean i guess it would probably be bad for them but like no more dating apps in the app store in netherlands like there's many solutions that apple can do that hurt people in this country way more than it hurts apple because just because they're small it's it's not easy being small
Marco:
But John, Apple, I'm sure, has the greatest respect for the laws of the Netherlands.
Marco:
No, they didn't say that.
John:
They have the greatest respect for the laws of South Korea, which has way more people and spends way more money.
John:
They do not have the greatest respect for the laws of the Netherlands.
Casey:
My goodness.
Marco:
As I said, we're going to see this play out over and over again as various places regulate Apple to various degrees.
Marco:
Apple is going to drag their feet like crazy and they're going to do the bare minimum they need to do to comply with any of these regulations.
Marco:
Or not comply.
Marco:
Right, and in this case, not complying is so relatively inexpensive and problem-free for them that it's probably better for them not to comply unless the Dutch authority is going to somehow get some more teeth.
Marco:
But as John was saying, their bargaining position is not great, whereas Apple can kind of just do whatever it wants here because what Dutch lawmaker is going to say...
Marco:
you know no more iphones for our people that's going to be a pretty unpopular decision among their voters so you know this is this is going to be apple's going to you know just walk right through this and pretty much nothing's going to happen and it's like it sucks that apple can do that like from the point of view of
Marco:
consumer welfare and respecting the sovereignty of nations and things like that.
Marco:
It's not a good thing that Apple can do this, but the reality is they have way more leverage in this relationship, and they know they don't have to do much, and so they won't do it.
Marco:
Apple will do absolutely nothing optional in this area.
Marco:
They will only do what is 100% required, and in this case, it's not.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I do want to point out, Francisco Tomaski wrote or tweeted, which I thought was very, very well done.
Casey:
They wrote, it must be really frustrating to roll out an entire plan only to be completely at the whim of a reviewer, a regulator, to find out whether it sufficiently meets a set of vague criteria.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
Well done.
John:
Although the thing is I don't think they are particularly annoyed.
John:
Like the thing is Apple did something and they did like maybe this will satisfy them or whatever, you know, but is this good enough?
John:
And the answer was no, it wasn't good enough.
John:
But, you know, even just banning dating apps saying, okay, no more dating apps in the Netherlands, right?
John:
Even that is probably not going to be popular because presumably people in the Netherlands have iPhones and use dating apps.
John:
And if the next day they said, oh, all the dating apps are gone.
John:
uh that would be bad it's like well you still have your iphone and you still have access all sorts of apple stuff but no dating apps doesn't seem like it's the end of the world but it's it's kind of crappy and people in the chat room are saying it's like okay well no one cares if the netherlands does it because they have like 18 million people but what if every country does it well you know things like this are happening in each country but it's it's like
John:
they're not coordinated this is not some global effort it's more kind of like a a building storm of regulation and stuff but as marcus said apple is dragging their feet every step of the way so it's if and when this gets to critical mass yes apple will have to do something but for now they're just being you know crossing their arms and saying
John:
We will fight this as much as we possibly can.
John:
And they just better hope that China doesn't do anything because I'm not going to go as far as Marco to say that they will throw away all their morals and principles, but certainly not all of them.
John:
They try as hard as they can.
John:
It's the thing we talked about in the past shows of like,
John:
what's the correct strategy to deal with china one is to just say f you china we're out of here uh but the other one is to say you know engagement with china is better than isolating them for the world not just for apple and in engaging with them apple is using all the power that it has available to it to try to get its way versus china but that is a much more even match than the netherlands versus apple so the way it ends up is
John:
China ends up getting more of what they want than Apple because in the end, China has the people with the money and Apple wants to sell them the stuff.
John:
And by the way, China makes all of Apple stuff.
John:
So Apple is kind of over a barrel a little bit in the whole China situation, which is why they should get all their manufacturing out of China.
John:
But that is way easier said than done.
John:
So it's a difficult situation.
John:
Apple fights to do the best they can, but the best they can is not great in China.
Marco:
I still maintain that the reliance that Apple still has on China and the lack of movement in that area away from the status quo will be looked back upon as Tim Cook's largest strategic error in his career.
John:
I mean, it's also going to be his greatest victory because all of the growth and amazing things that he's done has been because of how heavily they invested in China.
John:
All the things Apple is able to do is because of the massive investment in China manufacturing.
Marco:
I would say some, some of their growth and some of their success is from that.
Marco:
And that's not a small amount, but it's far from all.
John:
I mean, but who else who else could have done the manufacturing the scale that Apple needed building up anyone else, including the US to do what China does for the amount of money that they do it with the precision that they do it?
John:
I'm not sure what the second choice would have even been because China was well on its way.
John:
It's not like that China came out of nowhere with Tim Cook.
John:
Like he chose to invest heavily in China because they were already in the lead.
John:
Right.
John:
So we'll see how this goes.
John:
Like Tim Cook is not going to live long enough to see.
John:
Not because he's going to be assassinated or anything, but just like he will die of old age, the ripe old age of 111, before Apple is able to move all their manufacturing out of China and into some other country and say, now China doesn't have that.
John:
Because you don't turn that ship that quick.
John:
This is decades and decades and decades of development and huge amounts of money from the Chinese government and everything being invested into exactly the kind of manufacturing that Apple wants done.
John:
So moving that manufacturing anywhere else,
John:
uh you know yeah it will especially if it comes to a crisis it'll be like oh tim cook's folly he got us so invested in china and now we're stuck and we can't get out and like half destroyed the company right but also uh it is impossible for tim cook to get out now because he doesn't have enough time left on this earth to turn that around well but he hasn't even started turning the wheel
John:
Yeah, he might be like, we don't know how, you know, if you're going to start getting out of China, it's probably good for China not to know that you're doing that.
John:
So we don't know how that's going, you know, and what the second or third choice might be and how that's all working out.
John:
But I don't think it's something that Apple would announce.
John:
Hey, by the way, we're investing in a 50 year plan to get out of China.
John:
By the way, China, let's negotiate something now.
Yeah.
John:
I don't think it's a thing you announced, but I'm hoping that like, he's got an envelope that he's going to give to his successor that says step one, get out of China.
Casey:
My bad for that one, but you should fix my mistake.
Casey:
Uh, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So moving right along.
Casey:
So this is going to get a little bit confusing because even as I was reading the show notes, I was getting myself confused.
Casey:
So as we record today on Thursday, what is it?
Casey:
The 27th, um,
Casey:
Today, macOS Monterey 12.2 was released, and I have installed it, and so far, so good.
Casey:
And also, the new betas have come out for both macOS and iOS.
Casey:
So the current shipping version, again, of macOS...
Casey:
is 12.2.
Casey:
The current shipping version of iOS is 15.3.
Casey:
So that's unfortunately not the same, you know, tenths place, but we'll make it work.
Casey:
So with that in mind, Dropbox and OneDrive kernel extensions, or KEXs,
Casey:
are no longer supported in macOS 12.3.
Casey:
So to recap, that's the beta, not the one that came out today, but the beta.
Casey:
So the Dropbox and OneDrive kernel extensions that let them do all sorts of fancy, well, for a varying definition of fancy, things are no longer supported in 12.3.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised these were still supported up until this point.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
at all and and to clarify and i'm sure john has much more much better information on this than i do but to clarify i believe the the problem area is not just you know the the files that sync the problem area is things like their layer where you can have a file that's not downloaded all the time but kind of gets downloaded and edited upon request so you can like partially sync your dropbox and one drive contents but not have everything on your computer all the time but still
Marco:
have it still show up in the file system and be editable like locally just through this translation layer of being network based so i think that specifically is the part that's being targeted here is that right yeah i mean no you got you basically got it but like the whole idea is that you know kernel extensions like the concept that third parties can write code that runs inside the kernel on your mac and
John:
have been going away for a very, very long time, for years and years at every WWDC.
John:
Every session you went through with kernel extensions was explaining to you how things that you used to be able to do, you're going to have to jump through more hoops to do.
John:
And they would eventually start saying, and by the way, kernel extensions themselves are going away.
John:
And why is that?
John:
Because code that runs inside the kernel can do terrible things, including obviously very trivially crash your computer.
John:
Because, hey, if you have a bug in your kernel code and you segfault and you're inside the kernel, it's bye-bye, right?
John:
And there's no protection against that.
John:
And then obviously you have, for security reasons, if you're inside the kernel, you have access to more types of things.
John:
So they don't want any non-Apple code running inside the kernel if they can possibly help it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
To build on that, the kernel is kind of the core of the operating system.
Casey:
And so if you're running around in there, you can do, this is like what you said, you can do whatever you want, kind of whenever you want to some degree.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
What Apple's been doing is trying to provide new APIs that move.
Casey:
So like Dropbox doesn't need to get all the way down deep, deep, deep into the kernel, into kind of the foundation of the OS.
Casey:
They can stay up in the regular living areas of the house, if you will.
Casey:
And not have to go digging into the basement in order to do what they need to do.
Casey:
And so Apple, like you've said, John, has been trying to push people, push companies away from kernel extensions because it is less secure when random other people's code can run inside the kernel.
Casey:
Because when you're in the kernel, you can kind of all bets are off.
John:
And Apple's been doing that itself with Apple's own code.
John:
Apple used to have stuff that used to be inside the kernel that Apple has moved to user space, as they call it.
John:
And user space has its own memory protection.
John:
If you crash in user space, your program crashes, but the computer keeps running because the kernel is still running or whatever.
John:
Now, obviously, you know, some things like the Windows server crashes.
John:
Your computer is still running, and you don't have to reboot, but everything you're doing is gone because the Windows server runs all the UI and everything.
John:
So there's a limit to that, but still, user space is better than kernel space.
John:
And Apple's been dogfooding.
John:
Same thing with sandboxing.
John:
Apple has sandboxed a lot of its stuff.
John:
Apple's moving stuff out of the kernel into user space, and it's been doing that for third parties as well.
John:
And to Apple's credit, what they've done is that they've looked at what popular applications do our users run on the Mac that currently have kernel extensions, and how can we provide a facility for those applications to keep doing what it is they do, but to get out of the kernel, like Dropbox and whatever.
John:
And even in the case of things like Dropbox, where Dropbox was doing not a kernel extension, but a thing where they would sort of invade the memory space of the finder or otherwise hack the finder to put the little...
John:
badges on the finder icons so that it'll show a little green badge with a check mark when the file is synced to dropbox or whatever the original implementation or two of that in dropbox was very hacky and sort of screwed with the finder at a root level and apple you know getting enough clout to be a popular application means that apple didn't just like
John:
ban dropbox or like cause it to stop running what apple did instead is saw the need for some way for third-party applications to put little badges on icons in the finder and they made a public api that any third party can use to put little badges on icons in the finder and then tried to convince dropbox to convert their code to use it i think dropbox did convert to that
John:
um it's difficult because apple you know these companies will say well we already have a way that works we just hacked the finder and it works fine and i don't want to use your stupid third-party api because now i get to change my app but eventually apple i think has been able to negotiate with these people say please use our official supported public api for badging icons and then you won't have to have weird hacks and we promise we'll support it better even though it's a little bit buggier in the beginning
John:
same thing with the the you know the api they provided to say the file might not be on your mac but it totally looks like it's on your mac and we will transparently make it seem like it's on your mac even though when things try to open it we pull it from the network just like you were doing behind the scenes and you don't need your kernel extension anymore we'll do it all for you just use our public api
John:
and dropbox and one drive both have had a long time to know that this day was coming and now they have like it's kind of amazing that you're able to announce you know like a press release you know as of mac os 12.3 if you mention mac os 12.3 in your mac app store app you'll get rejected because you can't talk about future offerings and who says there will ever be
John:
be a mac os 12.3 how dare you how dare you even mention that name but they're able to say it almost got me confused for a second wait a second it's like is 12.3 out like no 12.3 is not out 12.2 just came out 12.3 will eventually come out and when it does that dropbox stuff will stop working unfortunately dropbox being the uh
John:
very agile company it is well not doesn't look like they'll be ready on day one with when 12.3 comes out so they just said yeah dropbox might work a little funny until we figure this out but we do plan to support the new public api because guess what we have no choice because our kernel extension we're literally not running anymore so no look forward to that does anybody still work on the dropbox mac app
John:
I mean, yeah, they got to put all those reminders in to tell you how to upgrade.
Marco:
And all those little hacks to try to integrate and get you to give you their accessibility password and your root password.
Marco:
Hey, you just plugged in a device.
Marco:
You want us to back this up and take the photos off of it all the time?
Marco:
Should we keep asking?
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
When you take screenshots, do you want them to go into Dropbox?
Marco:
Yeah, you should give us full access to your entire system just so you can post everything that you want to Dropbox and we can start taking more and more of your system resources and yeah, it'll be fine.
Marco:
But oh, we're going to do all this through Rosetta because we're not going to actually make an Apple Silicon client.
Marco:
Why would we do that?
John:
I feel like the Apple Silicon version probably get tied up in whatever branch they've been working on to not use the kernel extension.
John:
And maybe they became inseparable and they can't ship one without the other.
John:
And they thought they would be done sooner, but they're not.
John:
And, you know, anyway, software is hard.
Marco:
Given their engineering priorities, it would not surprise me if an Apple Silicon version hasn't actually been started yet.
Casey:
No, no, it's in beta.
Casey:
Where have you been, man?
Marco:
It's in beta.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, okay.
Marco:
There's a lot of good reasons why big companies have been dragging their feet with supporting Mac native apps in many ways.
Marco:
We've had the Electron discussions in the past and everything, but so much of that mentality, I feel like, could lead to the conclusion, like, why don't we just keep building for Intel because it runs fine if we do this, and then that's one less support thing to have to think about.
Marco:
all these same development teams and companies who are deciding you know what it's not worth writing good code let's just write electron code and we'll bloat up our apps on everyone's system and take up hundreds of megs on every single copy of our app that's installed because it benefits us and it's more convenient for us well that same logic could also apply like hey why don't we just keep doing Intel only because that's also more convenient for us and it benefits us and it does cost our users in terms of their system efficiencies and everything like that but we don't care about them
John:
They were always going to do an M1 version.
John:
It's just taking them longer than they thought.
John:
Jeez.
Casey:
I feel like you're the Dropbox apologist of the three of us, John.
John:
I mean, as far as I'm aware, I've never done whatever you do to enable the thing that makes the files look like they're on your Mac but aren't really on your Mac.
John:
Like, I'm still using it in the old style where all the files are literally on my Mac, even though they're also in Dropbox.
John:
So that if I just turn off Dropbox, everything is still just there.
John:
I don't know if that means I'm not running the kernel extension, but if I am running it, it has never caused me any problems.
John:
And, you know, I'm not really an apologist because I do quit Dropbox when I know I'm going to be doing something that hits the file system because it's just like this low level drag on the system that I have to deal with.
John:
Like if I'm doing a time machine backup and it's taking too long.
John:
You know, I quit Dropbox just sort of as a just-in-case type of thing.
John:
So I don't think it's wonderful, but I do like the ability to quit it when I want to quit it and know that it's not running.
John:
And when I launch it, it always syncs things.
John:
And so, you know, I have other things to worry about.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
First of all, you can use whatever light bulbs you want.
Marco:
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Marco:
Each dimmer switch can obviously control multiple bulbs too.
Marco:
So you get, you know, a lot more control over a lot more lights with probably less investment because you're only replacing the switch, not, you know, every bulb in the room.
Marco:
And these are always smart.
Marco:
So a lot of times smart bulbs, you know, you might install them like in a lamp somewhere and then you have to like tape over the switch on the wall because if somebody turns that switch off, the bulb's no longer smart.
Marco:
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Marco:
This problem doesn't exist with Caseta because you're replacing the switch.
Marco:
The switch itself is smart.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So anybody walks into the room, if they don't have the app or they don't know how to operate your house, they can just push the button on the wall.
Marco:
And it still works as a switch.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So speaking of betas, in 12.3 beta and 15.4 beta, you can finally try out universal control between Macs and iPads.
Casey:
And initial impressions are this is pretty cool.
Casey:
i haven't tried it myself i'm just saying basically i was hoping you would try no sorry sorry i i oversold a little bit there uh no i haven't tried it myself but uh i've seen like the teacher had a video i'll try to dig up the tweet and put it in the show notes but i had a video of it and it looked pretty slick yeah i'm not sure when i would have occasion to use this like the times i've had my ipad next to my mac i've been using it as a second monitor with sidecar and that's not what this is about this is you know bringing your cursor over to the ipad but i do wonder like
John:
Having a, you know, having a mouse cursor on my iPad and having it still be iPad running iPad things might be useful if I have if there was ever an iPad thing that I needed to have.
John:
But yeah, I'm not sure I'm ergonomically set up for it.
John:
I'm still I'm so firmly in the one big monitor camp.
John:
I don't really like the idea of having to look elsewhere at a different monitor.
John:
But it's cool.
John:
It's cool that they're finally shipping this feature, at least.
John:
And I, you know, as we've said many times in the past, it's annoying when features are late, but it's better than shipping buggy.
John:
So, you know, kudos on knowing when it's not ready.
John:
And hopefully when it comes out, it will actually be ready.
Marco:
I actually, I've been using not the continuity feature, which just apparently started existing.
Marco:
I've been using the iPad as a monitor feature on the Mac.
Marco:
That's sidecar.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Not on my main desktop laptop setup, but in the game streaming setup, where basically I use it to mirror my laptop screens.
Marco:
My laptop is running the OBS capture software, and it's running all the webcams and everything.
Marco:
And then I use my iPad as a second screen so that Tiff and Adam can see themselves in the webcam view and see the stream view.
Marco:
like in front of them and then my laptop's in front of me and so that way they you know we can all see the same screen and it's the kind of thing like you know any you know any cheap screen could do this but i didn't have to buy one because i already had an ipad that was sitting around doing relatively little and so it it works and just like every other part of both apple's modern software and usb stuff uh it works most of the time not all the time but most of the time it works and when it works it's great
Casey:
So are you running OBS on a Mac then?
Casey:
Am I understanding that right?
Marco:
I run OBS on the 14-inch MacBook Pro and all the USB things plug into that.
Marco:
So all the capture devices plug into that.
Marco:
The gaming PCs are only outputting HDMI and sound.
Marco:
into the capture thingies um so the gaming pcs are not running any capture software themselves and i'm not using their built-in webcams because it's just easier not to like i we just have these little clip-on logitech cheapo ones that go on each one and then those are all plugged in via usb to the mac and running ops so that way the the gaming pcs don't have to think about capture software and
Casey:
I ask because earlier today, actually, it was brought to my attention that there's a GitHub user developer-ecosystem-engineering, which I had not heard of.
Casey:
But apparently this is Apple's open-source contribution-like thing.
Casey:
pseudo person like github account for for issuing pull requests and things and i presume that in the past they would just like throw a patch over the wall and say hey you know we fix this have fun but now it looks like they're they're starting to maybe do it in in the open and i was looking at this earlier and the most recent pull request that they made is to obs studio and they made a 274 changed file pull request from
Casey:
where they basically said, hey, the way in which you're doing capture in macOS sucks, but we fixed it for you.
Casey:
Here you go.
Casey:
And if you click through onto this pull request, they actually have in the PR videos showing memory and CPU utilization as they're doing a capture in
Casey:
specifically on a particular window versus generally capturing the whole screen or something along those lines.
Casey:
I'm getting a little out of my depth because I've never used OBS.
Casey:
But my point is, it's just funny you bring that up because Apple is apparently going and trying to make it better for OBS, and I guess for you, Marco.
Marco:
Yeah, and actually, this particular thing won't affect me because this is only about screen capture, where I'm not doing any screen capture.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true, that's true.
Marco:
But that is still a really cool thing.
Casey:
Yeah, I had no idea that this account was a thing.
Casey:
So it was news to me.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
So in the 15.4 beta of iOS, you can unlock using Face ID with your mask on.
Casey:
And this is where everyone starts firing up their email and saying, oh, contrary, you can do that already with the watch.
Casey:
Well, now in 15.4, you don't have to have a watch.
Casey:
You can just do it with the phone and nothing else.
Casey:
And I guess it does much more specific inspection of the area around your eyes in order to confirm that it's you.
Casey:
I haven't tried this.
Casey:
I wear a watch pretty much always, so this isn't a big deal for me, I don't think.
Casey:
But it is cool.
Casey:
I think the one thing that is different about this, though, is that with the watch-based unlock...
Casey:
The phone is a little bit cavalier about unlocking for basically any face it sees in front of it.
Casey:
And it taps your watch saying, okay, I just unlocked myself.
Casey:
And on the watch, there's a button that you can use to relock your phone to the point that you would have to enter the password physically on the phone.
Casey:
But with this, it appears that it will be much more specific about unlocking only for your face, which is kind of cool.
John:
This is interesting because obviously if you're covering up half your face, the security of it seems like it would be less than seeing your whole face because you just have less data points to confirm a match.
John:
And it's kind of revealing a little bit of the way Face ID may work because Apple doesn't really talk about this too much, probably for security reasons, probably for competition reasons.
John:
Yeah.
John:
When you choose to do this, when you say, yeah, I want it to work with the mask, like you have to opt into it.
John:
It gives you the choice.
John:
Do you want to use it with the mask or not with the mask?
John:
Because it is kind of a security choice.
John:
And then when you do it, you also have the option to add glasses.
John:
You're like, what do you mean add glasses?
John:
Face ID works with and without my glasses now.
John:
Why is there some separate step for me to teach Face ID about my glasses?
John:
Yeah.
John:
um and so the text they they that i'll put on the screen here is using face id while wearing a mask works best when it's set up to recognize each pair of glasses you wear regularly face id where the mask doesn't support sunglasses right so because sunglasses like it uses ir dots or whatever so sunglasses can block them and screw it up but it's like i don't have to register multiple glasses now i myself have two pair of glasses one for close-up and one for like driving
John:
and i never needed to register those glasses separately why would i need to do that now and the best i can come up with is that when you do face id on your full face no mask or anything and you're wearing glasses especially if you trained face id without your glasses what it says is okay for the top part of the face around the eyes i can more or less get a read but there's a bunch of crap there that looks to me like glasses and i can't really confirm one way or the other whether this is the same person because maybe it's a person with different glasses or whatever but thankfully i have the whole rest of the person's face
John:
to confirm and so i can say yeah it looks like it's probably matched so thumbs up but if you take away the bottom of the face because they're wearing a mask and the masks all lumpen and you know different or whatever if you take away the bottom of the face and they just look at the top of the face and they're like i can kind of see the shape of this person's face around their eyes but the glasses are screwing it up for me and so like you don't have anything to fall back on so maybe what this is saying is that we didn't know but everyone who wears glasses is getting slightly less security it's relying heavily on the bottom part of our face
John:
to make up for it and now when that taken away now we have to register the glasses to say i'm going to train you that these are my glasses i have two pairs and one looks like this and one looks like that so when you check me with my glasses on the glasses aren't interfering the glasses are actually new data points um and this would explain why you know it takes like two years into the pandemic for us to get this feature because this stuff's complicated and maybe more complicated than we think it is we just think it's magic we look at our phone and it opens for us but
John:
In order for the security to be good and not able to be fooled, as they emphasize by like a picture of you or a fake model of your face, that's not easy to do.
John:
But anyway, I look forward to this because I am sick of paying with passcode.
John:
As they say, every time I go to a store, of course, we've been wearing masks for a long time now.
John:
And it's annoying typing that in.
John:
And honestly, it's not that like, oh, I'm hassled to do it.
John:
It feels less secure to me because it's a giant light up screen that other people can see.
John:
And it's really easy to shoulder short of someone's like passcode.
John:
And I don't have like a 75 digit alphanumeric code to type in because I'd never be able to buy anything.
John:
So I don't like, you know, the idea of people seeing me type in my unlock code in public face ID.
John:
It would be great to use face ID.
John:
I will very quickly enable this feature so I can do with a mask on.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to this because, you know, not only does it cover people who don't have an Apple Watch, which is, you know, nerds like to think that, oh, everyone has one.
Marco:
I assure you, it's far from it.
Marco:
A lot of people have it.
Marco:
It's a very successful and widespread product.
Marco:
But to give you some, I pulled up my analytics here for Overcast.
Marco:
Overcast is an app used by a lot of nerds.
Marco:
I mean, not all nerds, but a lot of nerds.
Marco:
And I have about 35% of Overcast users have a watch paired to their phone.
Marco:
And that's, that's among nerds, like the number among the average people is probably lower.
Marco:
And so that's, you know, think about at least 70% of iPhone owners don't have an Apple watch.
Marco:
So this brings the convenience that we, you know, watch people have all been enjoying for the last, whatever, 10 months or so that we've had the watch unlock with mask feature.
Marco:
this brings that to way more people and in a better way.
Marco:
Like as John was just saying, even now, you know, or the future we've had for most of the last year, if you have a mask on, it'll unlock your phone, but it doesn't work with Apple pay.
Marco:
So if you're, you know, if you're paying at a, at a pay terminal, you still have to type in the passcode.
Marco:
And I do that when I, when I go to the grocery store and it sucks.
Marco:
And so to have this work this way is very, very nice.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I haven't tried it yet because it just came out a few hours ago.
Marco:
I haven't had a chance to install it yet.
Marco:
But I'm looking forward to this because, you know, Apple is very, very sensitive to anything that would potentially reduce the security of their phones, especially in this area.
Marco:
You know, yeah, we make fun of various security holes they have sometimes like in the software.
Marco:
But when it comes to this kind of thing, you know, the phone unlock process.
Marco:
they do a really good job and they are extremely secure compared to the rest of the industry.
Marco:
You know, whenever there's like a new Samsung, whatever, you know, gadget feature, it usually has abysmal security and no one ever talks about it.
Marco:
Like, you know, whenever somebody, some Android person and it's like, here, here's a new, like, you just hover your palm over the phone and it unlocks it or, you know, some BS like that.
Marco:
inevitably, once the reviews come out, everyone realizes, A, it doesn't work most of the time, and B, it's very easily fooled and can be cracked easily.
Marco:
That kind of stuff never happens to Touch ID and Face ID.
Marco:
Never.
Marco:
We've never had, as far as I know, major security problems with Touch ID and Face ID.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Apple takes this... Oh, and watch Unlock and all the other things.
Marco:
So Apple takes this stuff very, very seriously, and they do a very good job of it.
Marco:
So to have something like this where they are effectively reducing the security of Face ID in some way for this massive practical benefit that we're all demanding, that is, as John said, not only a large undertaking, but I also trust them to have done it pretty well.
Marco:
And I trust that in my life, like...
Marco:
I don't need even half the security that Face ID offers.
Marco:
No one ever has my phone.
Marco:
In my life, I never lose physical access to my phone.
Marco:
It just doesn't happen.
Marco:
I'm very lucky.
Marco:
I live in a place, an environment, in a situation where that doesn't really happen.
Marco:
It's not like it's your bike.
Marco:
Until Touch ID came out,
Marco:
I didn't use passcodes on my phone.
Marco:
Like, at all.
Marco:
I just didn't use one because I didn't need one.
Marco:
And that was when I worked in Manhattan.
Marco:
But it's like, I still, like, I just never... Like, so, I am happy to make the trade-off to enable this.
Marco:
Because even if it is reduced security by only judging, you know, the shape around my eyes and stuff, I am totally happy to make that trade-off because...
Marco:
I so often have had to type the passcode in because either the mask unlock thing with the watch either didn't work or I hadn't done it recently or so it relocked or it tried a few times too many and then it totally locked down.
Marco:
Or as John was saying, having to pay at the credit card terminal and having to type in the passcode for that every time.
Marco:
So I am happy to take the slightly reduced security because knowing Apple, this is probably still a ridiculous level of security for most people.
Marco:
And I can certainly say it's way more than I probably need.
Casey:
In this week's episode of Funny Things Casey Finds in the show notes, it says the following.
Casey:
Marco's mini segment, USB garbage from Amazon.
Casey:
And I am very excited to hear what this is about.
Marco:
So this is about two product categories that I have discovered on Amazon.
Marco:
One of them has turned out pretty well, the other one not as well.
Marco:
But there's this massive world of cheap USB crap on Amazon, some of which is very useful, much of which is not.
Marco:
But it does kind of amaze me as a broad category, like quite how much...
Marco:
really inexpensive stuff that is vaguely USB-related there is on Amazon.
Marco:
And it's all from these no-name companies.
Marco:
It's just like some random manufacturer probably in China...
Marco:
had some random person on Amazon set up an account, and you could tell there's 17 different companies all selling the same manufacturer's products.
Marco:
All the names of the companies are all capitals that contain way more vowels than consonants.
Marco:
The product names and company names
Marco:
change so often that you can't even ever usually buy the same thing twice if you wanted to, if it's separated by more than a few weeks.
Marco:
But there's this whole world and some of this stuff is actually pretty useful and some of it is not.
Marco:
So I have these two products I'm going to talk about now because I've just been using them recently.
Marco:
Because of the nature of this market, I'm not even going to name them or link to them.
Marco:
I'll just tell you what they are and you can find your own because by the time you hear this, the ones I bought won't even be available anymore.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
cool probably so anyway um so the first one so as you know my kid uh uses an ipad mini he's now on his i think third one some second or third one anyway um it's the previous it's not it isn't it isn't the current ipad mini it's the previous generation with the home button and the lightning port
Marco:
And this iPad mini has already been replaced once under warranty.
Marco:
The warranty has since expired.
Marco:
The original time it was replaced was because the charging port was basically wearing out.
Marco:
And when I first tweeted about this forever ago asking for suggestions, I got a number of people explaining to me that basically that what happens when, especially when kids use iPads very heavily, that when you use an iPad as heavily as a typical kid does, especially with typical kid charging discipline,
Marco:
It tends to basically be a 5% battery all the time.
Marco:
So they're often using it with the power cable plugged in, charging while they're using it, out of necessity or whatever.
Marco:
And kids also wiggle a lot.
Marco:
So they're constantly in slight motion and...
Marco:
bending around.
John:
It's not the wiggling.
John:
It's the kids have zero empathy for the machine.
John:
They do not care that that cable is constantly under pressure.
John:
Strain relief is made because they are like the strain.
John:
What's the opposite of relief?
John:
They're the strain provider.
John:
They do not care how much they're kinking the end of that cable.
John:
Have you seen this?
John:
I bet you've seen it if you're watching.
John:
People have kids know this.
John:
So take any iOS device, plug a lightning cable or whatever into the bottom of it.
John:
Then they rest it
John:
on the lightning cable oh yeah like vertically like using that one cable as like a step so the cable comes down and then it turns at 90 degrees and they rest it on that it's like how much more strain can i ride well i could just pull on it at a weird angle but how about i rest the entire ipad's weight on top of the lightning connector it's terrible
Marco:
no empathy for the machine no but anyway so you know the kids are hard on devices especially in this area of just like you know constantly like have operating on an ipad or an iphone but in this case an ipad operating it when it's plugged in is not something apple seems to really design for that's like the charging port if you hold the ipad in landscape the charging port is right where your hand goes
Marco:
So I understand why – like, you know, it's not kids' fault if they're holding near the cable because that's where they put it.
Marco:
Like, that's where Apple designed it.
Marco:
So, you know, it's not in a great spot for that already.
Marco:
So already we have a problem.
Marco:
So anyway, over time, this tends to wear out the ports in various ways because it's hard on the ports.
Marco:
And so –
Marco:
As this is happening again to this iPad that was just replaced by Apple, I think, about a year ago for this problem, it's happening again.
Marco:
We're now out of warranty, and we don't want the new iPad Mini.
Marco:
I'm waiting for the next iPad Air to upgrade them to that instead.
Marco:
But in the meantime, we need this iPad to last a little bit longer, and it's just not.
Marco:
It's dying quickly.
Marco:
So instead, I temporarily gave him my iPad because I'm hardly using it anymore, as I said.
Marco:
So I he now has my 2018 11 inch iPad Pro until we figure out what the heck to get him, you know, when a good option comes along.
Marco:
So.
Marco:
Anyway, as I'm giving him this, you know, my iPad, I kind of want it back at the end of whatever this time period is.
Marco:
I want it to still work.
Marco:
I'd rather it not be destroyed, if possible, because I don't want to buy a new one for myself.
Marco:
So I asked on Twitter, like, hey, what do people recommend to solve this problem?
Marco:
And I got a number of, a huge number of responses with the same two suggestions.
Marco:
Number one, use right angle charging plugs.
Marco:
which actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
Marco:
If they're going to be holding the plug against the device, if there's one that has a right angle plug, then it kind of rests along the device and doesn't protrude out so much.
Marco:
And there's even some that will form a U shape and go behind the device.
Marco:
And this by far was probably the most practical solution.
Marco:
But it's not the one I took.
Marco:
I'm taking it now.
Marco:
I'm still waiting on that delivery from Amazon.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The other much more numerous suggestion I got was for magnetic charging cables.
Marco:
And this is what you'd expect.
Marco:
It's like basically little mag safes for USB charging things.
John:
Have I mentioned that on the show?
John:
I do that for all my kids' laptops.
John:
Oh yeah.
John:
I don't think, I don't think I knew that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I have since, uh, since the day MagSafe went away, I've done it on all the laptops.
John:
I did find a flaw in it.
John:
I mean, you can, uh, I don't want to spoil it for you, but like, uh, if you, if you do this and you do this magnetic lifestyle, cause I always like MagSafe.
John:
I'm like, I'm not giving it up for, uh, uh, things my computer uses.
John:
There's a little USB-C knob that you put in and it has a little MagSafe thing.
John:
Lots of people make them.
John:
Um, but if your kids then take that laptop to school, um,
John:
They have found a way to destroy it, and that way is I'm going to ignore the case you gave me on my laptop, Dad, and put it in my backpack, just loose, and I'm going to put it with the little USB magnetic knob facing down, and then I'm going to drop my backpack from a great height so that it essentially...
John:
crushes the hard plastic inner thing that sticks out a millimeter until it smears that plastic into like a form that the magnetic thing can no longer make contact i should show you i think i have a picture of i'll see if i dig it up my phone a picture of what it looked like after they did this oh god it took it took a couple years but you did it you defeated this magsafe ripoff thing
John:
This is why I can't wait for MagSafe to come back, and why MagSafe, the Puck MagSafe, not the other kind of MagSafe.
John:
Puck MagSafe coming to the iPad, that whole rumor that maybe we'll talk about in a future show, actually is somewhat appealing.
John:
Anyway, continue.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm excited for the same reason.
Marco:
Although, so far, the rumors were only that it was coming to the iPad Pro, which is not promising.
Marco:
But maybe eventually it'll make it to the lower-end models.
Marco:
Anyway, so I decided, you know what?
Marco:
Let me try this magnetic plug thing, because the magnetic plugs...
Marco:
you know there's a bunch of them out there and many of them have these not only 90 degree heads but like automatically rotating heads you just twist them around in any orientation they'll twist around and i figure that is perfect because then any any way this the ipad is going to be held or moved around it'll be fine because this this cable will bend around and it'll it'll be in a in a reasonable position and not be super stressed on the port so awesome
Marco:
So I got one that was well recommended and I got, I got like, you know, three or four cables and a whole bunch of tips that all came in the set for like 25 bucks.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Like typical, you know, awesome Amazon, cheap USB garbage stuff.
Marco:
Awesome.
Marco:
And overall it, it does work.
Marco:
but there's a couple of reasons why i can't recommend at least the one i got um so number one is this is very slow charging uh it's usb a on the other end i this kind didn't seem to have any usb c on the other end um and it seems like to get usb c on the source end you need to have some that have like many different pins in them because some of them try to actually do like data transfer and everything um and higher wattage charging uh this one is a very simple one it's like it's like
Marco:
two conductors it's like you know outside inside like a barrel connector but flat so it was very very simple that's one of the reasons it was so cheap it's one of the reasons why it's so durable the cables are nice and thin so that's all nice but because of those limitations it is it's it only does very slow charging it's like the 2.4 amp old you know 10 watt ipad charging not uh you know anything not like you know usbc pd stuff
Marco:
so it's fine for like a phone or low draw devices and it would be fine for somebody with really good battery hygiene um but for a simple kid using an ipad pro 10 inch ipad pro or 11 inch ipad pro temporarily um that's a big battery to keep charged and it's very very slow to charge this and that's that's kind of a problem um
Marco:
Second problem is that there is no universal standard for these things.
Marco:
So like you kind of have to like pick one brand and just stick with their stuff.
Marco:
Sometimes they will coincidentally have the same brand do more than one copy of these cables or, you know, the same connectors.
Marco:
But usually it's like, you know, you got to buy one brand stuff.
Marco:
And because of the nature of this weird Amazon cheap USB ecosystem, it's very hard to buy the same stuff twice sometimes.
Marco:
So that I feel like is kind of a problem.
Marco:
And then finally, these cables, when they're not connected to a device, constantly glow on the ends with blue LEDs.
Marco:
Lovely.
John:
Not RGB?
John:
Come on.
John:
The world...
Marco:
has not yet gotten my memo that blue leds should require like a license to deploy in products like i they have the highest energy photons yeah you can make the other colors from them yeah and so like with quantum dots yeah and i i just i don't understand is our blue led is really cool to everyone else and i'm just like anyway
Marco:
So that's a problem.
Marco:
These are just always glowing.
Marco:
So that's kind of annoying.
Marco:
So I'm probably not going to keep using these for a long time.
Marco:
So that was kind of a flop.
John:
On this topic of these type of devices, I should mention also that I think...
John:
Both of my parents also use these devices, not because they're not careful with their stuff, because they're very careful old people.
John:
But because ergonomically, it's hard to, especially if you have bad vision, this is especially important for my mother, has really bad vision, to line up the lightning connector with the little tiny slot in the thing in your iPad.
John:
Whereas if it's magnetic, you just kind of throw it in the direction of the connector.
John:
My mother's even got it on her phone.
John:
like her dinky little phone she's got like the like the five size se with a little nubbin sticking out of it because it's just easy for her to stick on the charger and take off the charger um you know yes these you should definitely look at these i put by the way in the in the slack you can see the picture of the oh god the one that my kids destroyed and how it's supposed to look yeah
John:
That is very crushed.
John:
And by the way, can we just take a moment to admire my fingernails?
John:
As someone who chewed his nails obsessively down to the quick for 21 years of my life, every time I see a picture of my fingernails, I go, look at those fingernails.
John:
Look at those long, healthy, good, non-chewed fingernails.
John:
I quit chewing my fingernails cold turkey at age 21 and haven't gotten back to it.
John:
How?
John:
I've told this story before, but I blame it all on MFC.
John:
I was working on my senior project at college, which involves writing an application, a Windows application using MFC, which I hated.
Casey:
Oh, what I would pay to be able to see.
Casey:
Oh, you must have been intolerable.
John:
And I still have the source code printed out.
John:
I still have the source code printed out somewhere if you want to see it.
John:
And yes, I did win best senior design project in my engineering school.
John:
Oh, we have to see this.
John:
There's that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
Do you have screenshots of it?
John:
Yeah, probably.
John:
It looks like Windows 95, shockingly.
John:
And when I was writing that code, I was like up all night in the stupid computer lab, sitting on a backless wooden stool that was way too high, typing away at the terrible Windows PC and hitting F5 to compile and, you know, Visual Studio, whatever the hell it was doing, and chewing my nails constantly because I was like, oh, I got to get this thing done.
John:
Oh, this is my senior project.
John:
It's super important or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I chewed my nails like so far down, it became so painful then to like type with my chewed nails.
John:
Just something just snapped in my mind.
John:
That's it.
John:
I'm not doing this anymore.
John:
I'm chewing my own nails so much that it hurts my fingers.
John:
No more.
John:
And it just stopped.
John:
That was it.
John:
That's great.
Marco:
Yeah, it was exciting.
John:
Anyway, my cuticles look terrible.
John:
Don't look at those.
John:
But my fingernails look pretty good.
Marco:
Yeah, I had to use the bad tasting stuff to stop at like age 30 or something.
Marco:
It was much more recent.
Marco:
I'm still working on it.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm still working on it.
Marco:
The bad tasting stuff really works well quickly too.
John:
Yeah, I think we used that on my younger brother and it did nothing.
Marco:
Anyway, so the USB magnetic charging cable experiment didn't work out so well for me.
Marco:
There's other problems too, but I could see it seemed like there's promise in this world because having one universal set of charging cables that you can just buy 10 of and put them all over everywhere you would need a charging cable and have all your devices charge the same way is kind of amazing.
Marco:
That would be great, but I think maybe I need to find a better
Marco:
standard for that.
Marco:
Certain devices having the little nub sticking out of them does kind of suck.
Marco:
For instance, on the iPad, iPads are so thin that the little rim around this connector actually protruded past the bounds of the iPad.
Marco:
It just makes it thicker and you catch your hand on it when you're holding it.
Marco:
It is kind of...
Marco:
ideally we wouldn't need any of these things and ideally everything would just use usbc or magnetic stuff and we'd be fine um but that's not the world we live in so anyway that that didn't work out super well but i can see possible promise there in in certain ways yeah i think we'll talk about it in future shows when we talk about all the rumors for portless things and magsafe coming to the ipad because this is an area of that could be improved um and third-party solutions are not ideal
Marco:
But that being said, I was very happy that this whole world existed that clearly many people use, and I just never even considered it.
Marco:
So maybe it'll be useful for somebody out there.
Marco:
And then finally, the good part of my USB garbage story, I recently discovered, thanks in part to comments made I think over the last few years by our friend Alex Cox on the Dubai Friday podcast, the world of USB hand warmers.
Marco:
Are you familiar with these?
John:
I know it's the thing, but that's all I know.
John:
It's called your iPhone when you play Pokemon Go.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So these are, they're just USB batteries that happen to have heating coils or whatever in them.
Marco:
And so you're able to use the stored battery power as a hand warmer that you're holding in cold weather.
Marco:
And
Marco:
you know for for years we've had those like hot hands packs those it's basically like a little yeah little like sack of rust powder and it reacts with the air like it oxidizes and generates heat for a few hours and then you throw them away like we've had those forever i have to say about those by the way i had occasion to use those recently um and we had some old ones in the closet it was this is like the ones that go on the small your back but it's the same idea right we had some old ones in the closet and i use one or whatever i'm like oh we ran out we should get some new ones
John:
The new ones are rated for twice the length of time as the old ones.
John:
So apparently in the four years that's been sitting in our closet, they went from last up to eight hours to last up to 16 hours.
John:
And they are not kidding.
John:
The 16 hour one lasts 16 hours.
John:
So I'm like, what has happened?
John:
Because it's not any bigger.
John:
It's the same size.
John:
So that crappy rust technology has really improved.
Marco:
Well, it seems like the main issue is just regulating the amount of airflow so that you can control the reaction so it doesn't get too hot and burn out too fast.
Marco:
So maybe just differences in the materials they're using around it, like for the fabric layer.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
I mean, it was on the small of my back, stuck to my back under two layers of clothes.
John:
But whatever they did worked because it was pleasantly warm for a full 16 hours.
Marco:
yeah and and the thing is like the you know i i have been on a quest for years to find really nice warm gloves for the winter don't get me started i'm convinced these don't exist like i'm convinced not only they exist they don't make them anymore though i have five pairs of course and they're all and they're all worn out we'll talk about
John:
another pro next to your cheese graters and your keyboards i i could search so hard for these gloves i took them for granted i bought maybe five pairs of these gloves like they're always going to make these gloves they're awesome every year i'll just buy a new pair and then i went to look for them one year and they were gone and so now i'm wearing crappy yellow bean gloves and they're not as good
Marco:
Well, I have never found great gloves.
Marco:
I found a number of gloves that are decent when it's not that cold.
Marco:
I have never found great gloves when it's really cold.
Marco:
My hands are always cold.
Marco:
And here, both at the beach and also just having a dog, my lifestyle requires that I go outside a lot year-round.
Marco:
And my hands are always really cold in the winter because a lot of times I can't put it in my pocket.
Marco:
Sometimes one of them might be holding a dog leash in a way that I can't easily pocket or I might be pulling a wagon or something.
Marco:
So my hands are always cold in the winter.
Marco:
It's very cold here.
Marco:
And so I figure I always want good gloves.
Marco:
It's not actually very cold.
Marco:
They're just FYI.
John:
it was like 15 degrees well i know okay boston i know okay anyway or people in canada but still uh my my brief suggestion on hands off because i'm in the same situation my hands are always cold the easy although obviously you do need to wear gloves so get some gloves and wear them even if they're crappy but uh when your extremities are cold uh making sure the core of your body is warm can help your extremities not get closed if your because your body's like reducing circulation to your extremities is trying to keep the core of your body temperature up so
John:
If you sort of over insulate the core of your body by like wearing thermal underwear like I do and being a weirdo, your hands will actually be slightly warmer.
Marco:
So consider that.
Marco:
Well, that's that might work for a lot of people.
Marco:
That's not my problem.
Marco:
Like my core, like I walked back today from the post office with my coat unzipped, but still with gloves and hat and everything.
Marco:
neck warmer everything anyway so by the way actually i joined the neck warmer lifestyle as well um the world of like people using those neck gaiters instead of masks when they thought they would actually do something introduced me to the concept that neck gaiters exist which i never even knew and so now i'm using like this winter like fleece one it's basically just like a fleece tube that i put over my head and and put it around my neck because i've never been a scarf person they always kind of dangle and get in the way i never got a scarf
John:
I've got to get you on board with the scarf thing.
John:
I was a gator.
John:
We call them gators because that's what you call them when you're skiing.
John:
I was a gator person my whole life, and only when I moved up to Boston did I convert from gators to scarves, mostly because I didn't want to take a thing and put it over my head and take it.
John:
I'm like, oh, a scarf.
John:
I don't have to put it over my head.
John:
I just wrap it around.
John:
So I'm heavily into the fleece scarf lifestyle now.
John:
But you have to get a good one.
John:
You can't get like a fancy scarf that looks nice.
John:
You have to get one that...
John:
It does not look nice.
John:
But yeah, fleece gators, if you don't mind, put them... I guess you don't have any hair to mess up, so that's one advantage.
John:
One advantage you have going for you.
John:
Just glides right on.
John:
It's great.
John:
They're very comfy, and I still wear them when skiing.
John:
Not that I've been skiing in ages, but when I did go skiing, I... Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, so gloves have always failed me, and I even briefly tried heated gloves a couple years back.
Marco:
I did the research, found what people thought were the best ones, and they were garbage.
Marco:
And the problem with heated gloves, then you have these giant battery packs that have to go somewhere around your wrist.
Marco:
They had these huge
Marco:
huge cuffs and these thick wires and they don't really work that well.
Marco:
Anyway, so I decided, let me, let me look at hand warmers.
Marco:
And the problem with the disposable ones, I love the disposable ones for like the toe boot warmers.
Marco:
Those are great.
Marco:
You put them in there.
Marco:
You have like, if you're going to like, you know, be out for a while, those are awesome.
Marco:
And I don't, I don't haven't found any better solution for feet yet, but I,
Marco:
The hand warmer is like most of the time I'm just doing like a 15 minute or 30 minute dog walk.
Marco:
I'm not going to bust open one of those pairs of disposable hand warmers for a 15 or 30 minute walk.
Marco:
That feels wasteful to me because it's going to be hot.
John:
It's going to be heating up for 16 hours.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it's like that's that seems ridiculous.
Marco:
And so the reality is, even though I have like I have I got a box of those from Amazon forever ago.
Marco:
So I have probably 25 pairs of those ready to go.
Marco:
And the reality is I almost never use them because every time I would use them would feel like a waste of them.
Marco:
And so instead, I recently discovered these USB hand warmers and there's a bunch of them out there.
Marco:
Again, all sorts of brands, shapes, sizes, all around the $25-ish range.
Marco:
And I thought, well, how well could these really work?
Marco:
And how long could they possibly last?
Marco:
How much warmth could they possibly generate?
Marco:
Are they going to be a pain in the butt?
Marco:
And the pair I got...
Marco:
is um it's it's a pair of them two of them together and they magnetically stick together for storage which i don't oh that's cool i thought it was cool in practice i'm keeping them in in my jacket pockets when not in use so i'm keeping them separate anyways so maybe it's less cool than i thought but i thought it was a cool idea um but it's just they're just two 5 000 milliamp hour usb batteries
Marco:
They have USB-C in.
Marco:
They have USB-A out.
Marco:
So they are also USB batteries.
Marco:
They function as USB batteries if you need them to be, which is nice.
Marco:
And because they're only 5,000 mAh, they're not that big.
Marco:
And to be the hand warmers, they're only barely bigger than a 5,000 mAh battery would be.
Marco:
They're just kind of log-shaped.
Marco:
They're shaped kind of like the bottom half of a hot dog.
Marco:
So you can hold them in your hand without it being too big and bulky, but it's also not so super skinny that you can't get good contact on it.
Marco:
So it's nice, and
Marco:
They, you know, I like walk outside with my dog in the morning and 15 degrees and I got my neck tube on and I reach my pockets and I hold down the buttons with my gloved hands.
Marco:
I can turn them on easily and they warm up within 20 seconds.
Marco:
Maybe they're nice and warm like they warm up quickly and
Marco:
And I can go for a dog walk.
Marco:
I'm holding these.
Marco:
My hands are nice and warm.
Marco:
And then I get, as I approach my house to end the walk, I, I just reach for the buttons, holding the buttons for a few seconds.
Marco:
They turn off, walk inside.
Marco:
I'm done.
Marco:
It's so nice.
Marco:
They work so well.
Marco:
Like I would say they work actually better than the disposable ones because they cover more area and they heat up faster and
Marco:
And then, of course, you can control the heat.
Marco:
They never get too hot because there's like three settings.
Marco:
So, like, if it's starting to get too warm, you can turn it off, you can turn it down.
Marco:
And then when you're ready again, turn it back on or turn it back up.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
So, thank you, Alex Cox at Dubai Friday for recommending this, friend of the show, Alex Cox.
Marco:
And also, thank you to the random Amazon corporations who are making these things because they're really good.
Marco:
And again, like, because, like,
Marco:
They're just USB batteries.
Marco:
And so, and again, like they're not much bigger than a battery of that capacity would normally be.
Marco:
So it's this useful thing.
Marco:
Even if you like, even in the summertime, I'm going to keep this in my backpack because I guess occasionally USB battery.
Marco:
And so it's just, I'm very happy with this product and it's such a simple little thing and solving, solving a need that so far modern technology,
Marco:
technology and fabrics and fashion and things have done a very poor job of solving like why are my hands cold in the winter and what can i do about that that's been a very hard problem for me looks like we can send satellites and stuff we can send robots to mars but we can't make good gloves but you know or hats yeah or hats apparently but yeah this is actually really really good i strongly recommend usb hand warmers and it doesn't really matter which one you get they're probably all the same uh but yeah fantastic product
John:
I still contend that if you wore thermal underwear and had a hat and a scarf on and zipped your jacket and wore warm things on all your extremities, you would eventually get so hot that you would have to take your gloves off to use your hands as radiators to cool your body down.
John:
I assure you it doesn't work that way.
John:
You're just not dressing warm enough on the rest of your body.
John:
I know because my hands are always cold.
John:
Ask anybody.
John:
Ask my wife.
John:
My hands are always cold.
John:
But I can occasionally overdress because I am an overdresser.
John:
You can ask her about that.
John:
Overdress for the weather and be out for a dog walk because I'm in the same situation.
John:
I'm out for the dog walk and we're walking up the big hill in the park and
John:
And I get to the top of the hill and my hands are burning.
John:
And that never happens to me.
John:
And so I take off my gloves and I radiate all the heat out of my body through my hands.
John:
And 30 seconds later, I put the gloves back on and I'm fine.
John:
So it is possible if you sufficiently dress the rest of your body, including potentially wearing wristies, you should try that.
John:
I wear them when I type, obviously, because my hands are always cold in the house.
John:
Do you know what wristies are?
Marco:
Is it like one of those like 80s armbands before your wrist?
John:
no it's just a it's just a fleece tube you know the tube you put around your neck imagine a tube like that shaped like your forearm with one hole in the side for your thumb to go through oh that's a wristy right they so you wear wristies and you also wear gloves it's like thermal underwear for your hands so oh my gosh consider that as well uh and you will eventually find the amount of clothing you need to wear to be incredibly sweating hot and then you'll be back it off one notch from that and you'll be okay
Marco:
but here's the thing the the problem with good gloves also it's like i also want like you know touch sensitivity on the glove because like right now like my warmest gloves that well my my least cold gloves that i have now are not they don't like they're too thick for that so like and there's just also some random amazon gloves also but
Marco:
I've tried the nice ones.
Marco:
I've tried the ones from big brands.
Marco:
I've tried Hestras.
Marco:
I've tried so many gloves that everyone's like, oh, these are the best.
Marco:
And I try them and they're not warm either.
John:
My gloves, for people who want to know, the ones that I wore for years and years and years of my life until I stopped making them,
John:
They were Combi, K-O-M-B-I, Gore-Tex.
John:
Combi still makes Gore-Tex gloves, but they do not make the gloves that I used for years.
John:
They make lots of other gloves that are not as warm and are more annoying.
John:
But the secret to the Combi Gore-Tex gloves is, well, the first secret is buy it in the largest possible size, way bigger than you think you need.
John:
Because the secret to the gloves was they were like down comforters,
John:
for your hands.
John:
Mittens are a lot easier.
John:
Obviously, mittens, your fingers are all together.
John:
Mittens are way warmer than gloves, but then, of course, you have no finger, right?
John:
Dexterity, right?
John:
So making warm gloves is difficult, but the secret of these ones is they were like huge.
John:
huge and pillowy they were just like you know the big like puffy jackets that like the hip-hop stars used to wear when that was in fashion right they were like that for your hands but not shiny um just a huge amount of fluffiness around them they were just and you'd get them a size bigger than you thought because any gloves that are tight will make your hands cold and so you had it was there's enough sort of like
John:
down comforter wrapping around every one of your fingers and your entire hand and your wrist that it would actually keep the heat in um and not let you lose it and those are the only and these gloves uh were time tested by me skiing like skiing up in vermont and when it's like two degrees with the wind whipping through the chairlift as you're sitting there you know for the the uh the i forget what they call them like
John:
They started by calling, oh, the high speed quad.
John:
They used to be, they usually did not talk about the ski lift speed.
John:
It was just like the speed the ski lift is.
John:
But then they came up with a high speed ski lift, which meant that it's faster than the low speed ski lift.
John:
It would disconnect from the thing and you would sit down on it and then it would reconnect to the faster moving cable and you'd go fast, right?
John:
But no, I would be on the slow speed triple going up Mount Snow in three degree weather in the fog with the wind whipping.
John:
And that's the crucible in which these gloves were tested.
John:
Say, can it keep my hands from being cold when I am sitting suspended in the air in the middle of the wind, not moving my body at all?
John:
And these were the only gloves that kept up that I kept buying them year after year until they stopped making them.
Marco:
story of my life do you think somewhere there's another person who is stockpiling these gloves your cheese grater your chicken i'm the person who's stockpiling my cheese grater no do you think like is there someone else who's stockpiling the same items you are and just like no but well if they were i keep buying them from them when they i have so many freaking cheese graters now this is gonna be like maybe maybe did they buy that spatula for 70 that you didn't want to buy was that it was it a spatula
John:
Yeah, I mean, the spatula, I'm not really stockpiling.
John:
I'm okay with that.
John:
Although I feel like I'm going to sort of... My retirement plan is to sell Gruber my collection of Apple Extended Keyboard 2s that I have in my attic.
John:
Because I've got a lot of those.
Marco:
I think that'll work.
Marco:
That'll pay off.
John:
I don't think he's been stockpiling them, but I got a lot.
John:
Well, unfortunately, they seem to last a pretty long time.
John:
I think it might be a while.
John:
He's got to do what I did.
John:
The only Apple Extended Keyboard 2 I ever broke is because I accidentally knocked my Swiss Army knife that had the blade open, because I'm a teenager...
John:
From my shelf above where my computer was.
John:
It fell off the shelf onto my keyboard, like blade point down and hit like the F5 key and like dug into the key and snapped it off.
John:
Wait, but did you get rid of the whole keyboard just for F5?
John:
Like whoever uses that?
John:
No, it's upstairs with the broken F5 key right now.
John:
but i have i have new gruber i have new ones that are not damaged anyway i've like i've got a stash just yeah besides windows people who needs to use that for like their browser refresh is that still a thing or just does like control our work there like the way command r works for us they're probably hitting a five they're still my daughter said she likes to she needed to hit control c to copy something like control c
John:
I didn't raise you to use control.
John:
What's going on?
John:
Like, how did this happen?
John:
Like, we've literally never had a PC in this house, but you know how it happened.
John:
Can you guess?
John:
School, I would assume.
John:
Chromebooks.
Marco:
Oh.
John:
Chromebooks.
John:
You don't think about it.
John:
You're like, you know, Windows uses control and Mac uses command.
John:
What does Chromebook use?
John:
Control C, Control V, copy and paste.
John:
I'm so sorry, John.
John:
A whole lifetime of only ever seeing and using Macs destroyed as soon as she gets a Chromebook.
John:
She can convert as an adult.
John:
It'll happen.
John:
yeah i mean she doesn't prefer the chromebook but it's just to have that the problem is for her whole life being around max she never used cut copy and paste because she was little but once she got long enough to use cut copy and paste the first thing she actually did it on was a chromebook and so control c is copy it's like terrible
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Iodine, Lutron Caseta, and Memberful.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Hey, so, John, what are you going to do about a car the next time you need to buy one?
John:
I mean, I'm assuming by then there'll be more affordable electric choices.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's probably what I'll go with.
Casey:
So no more stick for you.
Casey:
This is it.
John:
I mean, it depends.
John:
Like, obviously, like, as we mentioned, as we were discussing before.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i wasn't really joking about you were saying like oh the civic may be your only choice because you can get a civic with the stick but you can't get the accord with the stick anymore and then new civic is very nice and blah blah so maybe the next time you get a car you have to get a civic and i said by the time i have to get a new car the civic will be the size of my current accord because both the accord and the civic have been growing in proportions like constantly for the past several decades the civic today is way bigger than the accord from like a couple of decades ago right
John:
so and you know if this trend continues i don't think that the accord is going to get bigger without bound because it would just be gigantic but the civic will probably get bigger up to and including the limit of the size of the current accord so yes maybe i will get a civic if it's the one that still comes with the stick maybe uh you know honda will come to its senses and make another accord with the stick like a sporty version for like you know a niche thing or whatever uh but much more likely i'll be looking at electrics when that time comes but that's gonna be a while for now like
John:
As we discussed in past shows, my car is a 2014 and it has 27,000 miles on it.
Casey:
My goodness.
John:
And I plan to sinking a hell of a lot of money into it before I give up on it.
John:
So there's that.
Casey:
Is Tina embracing her future life as a two pedal driver or is she even more angry about it than you?
John:
No, she doesn't care as much about it as I do, but I think she'll be sad.
John:
She does not like automatics though.
John:
We test drove various automatic things and she does not prefer it, but I think she'll, will happily take an electric.
John:
So she's probably more likely to get an electric before I am because she is less picky and more excited about the idea of an electric.
John:
She'll still miss it a little bit,
Marco:
not as much as i will is there a human that is more picky than you john i'm sure that's the one who's also hoarding the cheese graters i've got all the cheese graters i have the market cornered on those suckers so speaking of uh of car stuff um
Marco:
I have a quick question.
Marco:
So it's been, of course, as mentioned, very cold here.
Marco:
And I recently went back to the mainland to go some grocery shopping.
Marco:
And there was a, every time I go back, I currently have the FJ Cruiser parked in the ferry parking lot next to my car.
Marco:
And every time I go back, I just like start it up and drive it around a little bit just to, you know, make sure everything still works.
Marco:
And I think you're supposed to do that for gas cars, right?
Marco:
Like start them up every so often.
Marco:
It's,
Marco:
Usually not a bad idea, yes.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So anyway, when I went back in the very cold weather this last time, when I went to start the car, let's say it was not super willing to start.
John:
It's cold weather for you.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So I want you to tell me... I'm going to describe the situation.
Marco:
I want you to tell me what I need to get serviced or looked at, if anything.
Marco:
So the situation is I go to the car after it's been sitting there for probably two weeks.
Marco:
It's very cold weather.
Marco:
I turn the key, and it goes...
Marco:
battery and then eventually starts up okay now i thought battery possibly too event so eventually it does start after some some reluctance um however i you know go to a store go in for a while come back out start the car again exactly the same thing well it does that every time i'm starting it within a day's worth of errands not just the first start yeah that's not good
Casey:
Well, but slow down, though, because depending on how long you're driving in between stops, you're probably not getting that much charge.
Casey:
No, it's plenty.
John:
I mean, like a healthy car like this is something I didn't know until I moved to Boston.
John:
But like when you're if you haven't driven your car for a while, then it's been really, really cold.
John:
when you try to start it, it will be like, I prefer not to do this, but we'll eventually start.
John:
But if you drive for any amount of time, even a five-minute trip down to the corner to go to the convenience store and you turn it off or to get gas or whatever, it should start up better than it did with the total cold start.
John:
Even just five minutes of running should do it.
John:
So if you go somewhere to run an errand, you go into the store for five minutes, come back out, and still it's just as bad as it was when you first tried to start it, the problem is not just that your car was cold.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that's the symptom.
Marco:
But like, you know, a month ago when I bought the car and it was much warmer, it would start off instantly.
Marco:
Like no delay.
Marco:
How old is your battery?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I asked the previous owner that when I bought it.
John:
He's got the year printed on it.
John:
You can just open it up and look.
John:
I don't think I've ever opened the hood.
John:
That would be a good idea.
John:
Find out where the battery is and look for the year on the battery and see how old it is.
John:
And if it's older than like...
Marco:
four or five years just get a new battery yep i agree with that and i have i i um i have one of those like jumpstart battery things but i i didn't it was so cold and i was in such a rush because the weird winter fairy schedule i didn't even want to try it unless i had to like even the time to like pop the hood connect this thing try try that even that amount of time would have eaten into my shopping time too much and
John:
You shouldn't have to do that.
John:
It's not like we're in the wilds of Canada.
John:
You don't need a battery warmer, as people are suggesting.
John:
You live on freaking Long Island.
John:
You'll be fine.
John:
I don't live on the freaking Long Island.
John:
I live next to freaking Long Island.
John:
You do.
John:
But anyway, just get a new battery.
John:
You should get a new battery every few years.
John:
I'm surprised that cars don't do this.
John:
Probably the fancier cars do, but like...
John:
Cars will warn you about all sorts of stuff, but batteries and cars last a certain amount of time.
John:
And it should, like, after five years or whatever, put a little light on your dashboard that says, hey, your battery seems okay now, but, you know, it's been X number of years, you should consider getting a new one.
Marco:
Because of my reality of, like, you know, how hard it is to get off here and the very quick amounts of time I have to do errands on the mainland with the ferry...
Marco:
I figure like I can bring this to like go get service somewhere, but I can't leave it there all day and I can't leave it there overnight.
Marco:
And so like it's kind of I need I need like faster solutions than that.
Marco:
Something that could be done like in an hour.
John:
No, you can do the battery yourself.
John:
Just just find the battery and order it and go pick it up in your little wagon and you can just do it yourself.
John:
Oh, I'm not going to do that.
Marco:
Yes, you absolutely can.
Marco:
Oh, if I had to or I could, I'm not going to.
John:
No, no, this is, I can't think of an easier, I think washing your car is harder than changing the battery in your car, honestly.
Casey:
I mean, I can't do that either.
Casey:
This is the easiest thing you can possibly do.
Casey:
I can assure you Marco cannot wash his own car.
John:
in case you have seen me try it's it's not a pretty it's a battery it's electronics like especially if you don't care about losing all your codes or whatever and don't do the weird thing that i do where i never let the the current flow stop to the thing you just disconnect the terminals you take the old battery out you unscrew some screws take the old battery out put the new one in screw it back and put the terminals on that's it that's the whole procedure you don't even need to buy any dielectric grease you can just just no tools needed except for a screwdriver and maybe like like look in your car of like what little you know
Marco:
socket or nut you need to unscrew the little holder it is it you can do this you do not need to pay someone to change no you know what right there what you just said that tells me so first of all you don't have any tools first of all i didn't even consider the fact that i might even need dialectic grease for this i don't even know what that is you don't you don't i was just so secondly secondly you said the bolt okay
Marco:
This is a beach vehicle.
Marco:
Every piece of metal in it is corroded or rusted.
Marco:
So I guarantee you whatever's holding the battery down is rusted.
Marco:
And if I try to use my crappy tools on it, it's going to strip immediately.
John:
You can hold the battery down with a zip tie.
John:
The only thing it's doing is literally keeping the battery from jumping out of your car.
John:
It is not a structural member.
John:
You just need something to hold the battery inside the car so it doesn't go flying out.
John:
And there is something that does that now.
John:
But even if the thing is rusted out...
John:
Put a big zip tie around it.
John:
It will be fine.
John:
It's not a structural member.
Marco:
I believe in you.
Marco:
Second question.
Marco:
Is this the kind of thing that I could drive up to any service place and get done quickly?
Marco:
Or are they special batteries?
John:
They'll charge you a million dollars if you try to buy a battery through somebody because they're going to put their profit margin on it.
John:
If you go to the dealer, they're going to charge you $400 for the battery.
John:
Just buy a battery yourself in an automobile.
John:
they're that much from dealers because i what are they new like 100 150 bucks everything is that much a dealer do not buy tires at a car dealer do not buy a car battery at a car dealer they will cost you way more i mean it depends on the car like a honda when i buy i actually bought an official oem honda car battery just because the honda parts place near me has them at like a reasonable price but in general you don't want to buy things like that through a dealer
Marco:
Even before my leasing days, I was mostly a dealer service person because I was so scared of doing something wrong.
Marco:
And growing up, we had relatively little money growing up.
Marco:
And so we would go to the non-dealer mechanics for all of our car services.
Marco:
And we had very mixed experiences that way.
Marco:
Not everything went well there.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I've kind of always been a dealer person.
John:
Yeah, I'm big on going to the dealer.
John:
The main reason I heavily endorse the dealer for doing like maintenance and stuff is because I want someone from my specific car.
John:
I want someone who has worked on a thousand Accords, like exactly.
Casey:
Right.
John:
That's what I want.
John:
Right.
John:
They know every single, like, you know, every little part that is weird, the thing you have to be careful of or whatever, and the highest chance of getting that as a dealer.
John:
But certain things you never get at the dealer.
John:
And those are things that don't require any expertise to install.
John:
Right.
John:
uh and that you can get way cheaper elsewhere tires are probably the biggest one because if you try to buy tires even at the honda dealer they're literally twice the price of buying tires elsewhere right batteries are often hilariously expensive more so on fancy cars like if you try to get the the battery changed on your you know m5
John:
that battery is probably six hundred dollars like i kid you not you know and well they have to figure out where the hell it is yeah it's in the trunk uh and aftermarket ones will cost you much much less but well but with the bmw you absolutely need to have it done at a dealer because then they need to tell the computer it's a brand new battery reset all the codes with the computer thingy and do all this and that's
John:
that's the kind of thing i'd be a little bit afraid of dealing with you don't need to do that on your on your 1990s toyota fj right you have it is a standard size battery just go to auto zone enter in the year make a model of your car it'll say we have these three batteries to choose from pick the second most expensive one i'm pretty sure they'll do it for you actually even at an auto zone i don't know that for sure but i thought i want marco to do this himself just so he knows that oh that's not gonna happen there's no chance of that happening
John:
Let Adam do it.
John:
It is so easy.
John:
I don't do anything to my car.
John:
I do not change the oil.
John:
I don't change brake pads.
John:
I do not do any car repair.
John:
And I have changed so many car batteries.
John:
It is a thing you can do.
Marco:
It is a thing you can do.
Marco:
Again, can and will are different things.
Marco:
It's a thing that I will not do, but I probably could if I really had to.
John:
but it's so inconvenient for you to drive somewhere to do it though but it's even more convenient for me to try to do it myself in the ferry parking lot in 17 degree weather in five minutes well you're gonna be going there anyway to bring whatever your next haul of shipment goods are to back to your house so groceries they're called groceries whatever it is like you're always ordering things from like amazon and stuff it'll the battery will just be one more you've got a wagon it's like bags of kale coconuts
John:
also just throw a car battery on the stack it'll be fine here we go member perk we will record the facetime call between you just record himself doing it someone with warmer hands than him just record with his phone says here's marco he's opening up the the hood he's trying to find where the battery is and now he's realizing you can't just pull the terminals off but they have this little thing on it that's shaped like a octagon and how do i get that off it's probably totally rusted out how much rust is there on it uh
Casey:
How much rust could an FJ rust if a FJ could rust rust?
John:
At least take a picture of the car battery so we can see what condition the terminals are in.
John:
I have to figure out how to open the hood.
John:
That I also believe you can do.
John:
Sit in the driver's seat and probably look down to your left for a thing that you can pull that shows like an outline of a car with a hood opening.
Marco:
Yeah, but there's going to be some weird latch I have to actually then find under the actual hood lip, and that's going to be corroded.
Casey:
You can do that, too.
Casey:
If only you had read the owner's manual.
John:
You need to watch more end-of-the-world media, like movies and TV shows where the world has ended, just to get you up to speed on all the things you're going to have to do, like figure out how to open the hood of your car when no one else is there to do it for you.
Marco:
I'll just walk away at that point.
Marco:
He's like, well, I guess I don't have a car anymore.
Marco:
This one won't start.
John:
It's just going to turn to dust.
John:
Marco's definitely big on the bicycle apocalypse.