Love Batteries
Marco:
hey is america still here because i can't tell this is a horrible day in the uh political slash american world and we're gonna glide right past it actually it started out pretty good uh that's true we had a great morning yes it's been a roller coaster uh but yeah we're gonna glide right past this because you all need a break i'm sure and so do we and so we're gonna have a text show like usual
Casey:
with that happy thing behind us let's start with some follow-up and pared plinstone which i believe is actually supposed to be pronounced fred flintstone right do you want to know how to transform 62 year old years into 16 year old years download one of the free hearing test ios apps and then point uh settings audio visual headphone accommodations audiogram to the resultant audiogram i didn't even know that you could do such a thing that is extremely cool
Casey:
uh fred flintstone continues this eqs the audio output to compensate for frequency loss according to the audiogram even with relatively minor hearing loss this gave the 62 year old his 16 year old ears back and newfound enjoyment of music using the audiogram provides personalized and much more nuanced eq adjustment than the built-in ios presets now just to be clear john you did just have a birthday but you are not yet 62 is that correct
John:
No, and I think my hearing is actually pretty good.
John:
But this is related to someone suggesting that Marco look into the EQ settings for the AirPods Max.
John:
He said he tried them.
John:
They all seem kind of extreme.
John:
Apparently, this is a pluggable system.
John:
So you can, you know, these apps, these hearing test apps, I imagine they're a plague on the App Store.
John:
Like, I don't know this for a fact, but I imagine if there's one of them, there's probably a thousand tests you're hearing free.
John:
Anyway.
John:
I actually made one.
John:
What they'll do is make a personalized audiogram for you.
Casey:
Slow down.
Casey:
We're just going to let that glide right by.
Casey:
What do you mean you made one?
Marco:
I never released it.
Marco:
Back when I had my like temporary hearing injury a few years back, I made a hearing test app so I could tell like as I was getting better, if I was getting better and how.
John:
Huh.
Marco:
you know, one of those things that goes to like, you know, it plays different beeps at different frequencies and different volume levels.
John:
You have to raise your hand if you can hear it.
Marco:
Yeah, basically.
John:
Which ear did it come through?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So anyway, that will give you a, you know, basically an equalizer preset tailored to your hearing ability.
John:
So it won't be too extreme for you because it will be made based on measuring.
John:
Now,
John:
I don't know which, because I suspect hearing test apps are a terrible plague filled with scams on the App Store, like so many categories, I've put in a link to one such app that one listener sent, and I assume this one is not a scam, but honestly, I haven't tried it.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Check it out if you get a chance.
John:
And if you think, if you think your hearing may be going or you just want to play with an app to see what it says about your hearing, if the results turned out that you're, you know, have difficulty hearing certain frequencies, you can make your iPhone accommodate for that and help you hear that better.
Marco:
It seems to me like this is an opportunity here for apps to just help you generate custom EQ profiles for the system.
Marco:
Because if that's all this is doing, this is just saying, all right, well, this frequency range boosts this, or even better if it's parametric.
Marco:
I don't actually know the format.
Marco:
But if it's a way to supply effectively the inverse of the custom EQ that you want, then any app can generate those files, apparently, or possibly, as long as the format is documented somewhere.
Marco:
And then you could...
Marco:
theoretically have an app that's like, all right, what if I want to boost this frequency range only and no others?
Marco:
You know, like, that actually could be really interesting.
John:
This sounds like it should be a feature of Overcast buried in the setting somewhere.
John:
You've already got the code for it.
John:
Just chuck it in there.
Marco:
I mean, ideally, you know, I mean, people don't play a lot of music through Overcast, but, you know, ideally, this would be a system setting.
Marco:
Like, instead of those, like, ancient, what is it, 11 EQ profiles from the iPod era that are just, like, fixed, like, pop, rock, treble booster, or whatever, like, instead of those,
Marco:
Also, just offer an EQ with, like, you know, maybe make it a 10-band EQ, have 10 sliders across, or whatever it is.
Marco:
I mean, you know, I'd go parametrics.
Marco:
I'm a nerd, but no one else would.
Marco:
But, like, you know, the processing power is trivial.
Marco:
To do EQing, I know, because I wrote one into Voice Boost, too, like, to do EQing is trivial on modern hardware, so it wouldn't be, like, a big deal to do it.
Marco:
It also, by offering the presets that they have versus offering it a custom EQ, there's no real difference in how complex that is to run live.
Marco:
The phone is constantly doing all sorts of operations that are way more complicated than running a basic bi-quad filter to have an EQ profile.
Marco:
So it's actually really not that hard to do with modern hardware without even noticing the overhead.
Marco:
So they might as well just offer a custom EQ at this point.
John:
i mean that's basically what this is it is system-wide i mean it says headphone accommodations but i'm assuming this just goes into the system audio pathway and if you install one of you one of these headphone accommodation audiogram things every sound that your phone makes i'm assuming through any of the audio system gets processed through this thing so i think what overcast would have to do is basically be a little miniature hearing test app that produces one of these audiogram files and the only question i have is like okay well then do you have to make the user like download it and install it because i assume
John:
Overcast doesn't have the ability to jam that audiogram into the system preferences thing.
Marco:
Yeah, I would assume there's probably no API for that.
Marco:
That's probably one of those things where you just have to export a file and figure it out yourself.
Marco:
But again, I don't really see this being something that Overcast has to do.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing where...
Marco:
I just need to build in a custom EQ to Overcast for people who want that, which is actually a somewhat frequently requested feature.
Marco:
And I have the entire engine to do that is already written.
Marco:
It's already in Voice Boost 2.
Marco:
It's been shipping to everybody for like a year.
Marco:
There's just no UI to adjust the parameters of the EQ.
Marco:
And that's what I have to do.
Casey:
Moving on, I thought we'd do a quick Big Sur update.
Casey:
Big Sur!
Casey:
And I'd let you know that, Marco, your favorite thing is happening as we speak.
Casey:
This is being recorded on a mostly untested environment because I have upgraded to Big Sur.
Casey:
I did that a couple days ago.
Casey:
I did record Analog yesterday.
Casey:
However, it has not been edited as yet.
Casey:
That being said, Jim, who does the editing for Analog and many other shows that you all enjoy, has said that he did crack open my files and everything seemed all right.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Sorry, Marco, if I make a terrible edit for you.
Casey:
It would not be the first time and unfortunately probably won't be the last.
Casey:
But that actually brings us to the next follow-up item because my Big Sur upgrade seems to have been mostly okay until I rebooted.
Casey:
And it's actually, I guess it was first boot.
Casey:
And I needed to, I believe, bless the audio hijack kernel extension, whatever it's called now.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
And in order to do that, I needed to go into system preferences and unlock the security preference or whatever it is.
Casey:
And I needed to type in my computer password.
Casey:
And so, you know, Audio Hijack, it was either Audio Hijack or the OS itself, knew that I might want to do this, you know, prompted me to do all these things.
Casey:
And when I got to the preference pane and it asked for my username and password, it was not Casey, which is my username on the computer.
Casey:
It was Casey Liss.
Casey:
i thought hmm i've heard about this somewhere i think i know what to do and i think i know what's about to happen and sure enough i typed in my password no dice i changed casey list to casey typed in my password again no dice and as it turns out what i needed to do was reset my smc and
Casey:
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Casey:
So we also got some feedback from Tom Bridge, which is the follow-up item that this all leads into.
Casey:
Tom says, I just had to deal with the same situation as John with regard to the SMC reset.
Casey:
There's even a tech note at Apple for this.
Casey:
Quote, if you can't unlock settings and system preferences...
Casey:
While using Mac OS Big Sur 11.1, your Mac with Apple T2 security chip has an issue that requires resetting the SMC.
Casey:
System preferences should accept your password after you reset the SMC.
Casey:
There's a link in the show notes to all of this.
Casey:
Comically, do you know how you reset the SMC in an iMac Pro?
John:
Unplug it from the wall for five seconds.
Casey:
15 seconds, but yes.
John:
And then plug it back in and wait five seconds and then press the power button.
Casey:
Yep, that is correct.
Casey:
That is the official guidance.
John:
A bunch of other people wrote in to tell us about this.
John:
The reason why SMC reset has anything to do with this or anything to do with T2 stuff is apparently any dialogue that asks for authentication that could potentially be tied into Touch ID, because you know how you can use Touch ID to do some...
John:
Password dialogs on the Mac, but not all of them, but any one of them that sort of triggers the subsystem that says, hey, if you had a Mac with Touch ID and that was all registered, we would ask you for your fingerprint.
John:
That all goes through the T2.
John:
And somehow the Big Sur update hoses something having to do with good old bridge OS running on the T2.
John:
And if it's hosed, when you shut down your computer, the T2 is still there doing its thing.
John:
The only way to sort of reset the T2 is, in the case of a desktop computer, to remove power from it and say, guess what, T2, now you're stopped because you don't have any electricity.
John:
And then the T2 will start back up and presumably operate correctly.
John:
Now, what's wrong with the T2 after the Big Sur update that it needs to be reset?
John:
I don't know.
John:
People have theories about something inside the T2 crashing or whatever.
John:
The bottom line is that those auth dialogues tie into the T2 because of Touch ID.
John:
And if they're hosed, you must reset the SMC T2 subsystem by, in the case of a desktop Mac, depriving enough power.
John:
It's why it's more complicated on laptops because you can't take the batteries out.
John:
because they're sealed inside this.
John:
You've got to do some other dance.
John:
That's why, again, look at the tech note.
John:
Follow the instructions for your specific computer to reset the SMC.
John:
Don't just assume because you have a desktop it's unplugged, because maybe you don't have a thing with a T2 in it.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
Can you tell me, John, about this follow-up with regard to the Famicom?
John:
sure andrew odinger wrote in to tell us that the nintendo famicom had a microphone built into the second controller only famicom is what the we what we know as the nintendo entertainment system in the u.s or the nes first existed as the famicom which was short for family computer in japan and it looked different uh but the controllers were very similar little you know little rectangle the nes rectangle with the d-pad and the two buttons anyway uh
John:
It had two controllers with comically short wires in them that you couldn't remove.
John:
And the second control had a microphone in it.
John:
So Andrew says, like many of us in the US, I first learned of it when playing The Legend of Zelda.
John:
The game manual stated that an irritating enemy, the pole's voice, hated loud sounds.
John:
However, the NES had no microphone, so everybody in the US made futile attempts to use other weapons to defeat it, usually the recorder or flute.
John:
In Japan, however, one only needed to yell into the microphone, eradicating the pole's voice.
John:
And we'll have a link to a YouTube video.
John:
I guess they didn't change the manual because the manual, back in the old days, video games came with manuals that you could read.
John:
I remember those days.
John:
Yeah, you read it in the car on the way home.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right, Marco.
Casey:
Exactly right.
John:
And if you saw like, oh, this enemy hates loud sounds and in the game you find like a flute or something, you're like, oh, I know how to beat that enemy.
John:
But little did you know that what they expected you to do was yell.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But of course, you couldn't yell in the US one.
John:
So they changed the game.
John:
In the US one, you can just shoot them with arrows.
John:
But in the Japanese version of the game, you can't shoot them with arrows.
John:
And the only way you can defeat them is by yelling into the controller.
John:
So that is the oldest instance I've seen of Nintendo, at least, using microphones in games.
John:
You could yell or probably blow because blowing just sounds like static.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Tell me about the PS5 controller's weight, please.
John:
Yeah, I should have taken better notes on my controller comments because I thought of more things once we were off the air that I forgot to mention.
John:
One of them is the PS5 controller is heavier than the PS4 controller, which is mostly just an accessibility issue because it's not heavier enough that anyone will notice, but someone like me who has...
John:
wrists that have slowly been destroyed by RSI over the years, the weight of the controller actually matters.
John:
Like I'm not holding the controller up in the air when I play.
John:
Part of me playing with the console is that I get to rest my sort of my arms on my legs, like the controller's in my lap, right?
John:
But even in that instance, it's like, well, you're not really holding the controller up.
John:
It's still, it is a heavy weight in your hand that's being supported by your fingers and your hands.
John:
And I feel the difference, like a little tiny bit.
John:
It's not the end of the world, but I would prefer a lighter controller.
John:
But the slightly heavier controller is the price you pay for the really cool Rumble stuff.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tell me about the PlayStation 5 UI and following games.
John:
Terrific.
John:
was one of many people to write in to give me some advice on how i could make the ps5 ui less sort of ad bannery i was annoyed that there are things in my face that i didn't want to see when i turn on the ui these big tiles that are telling me about new games or whatever and sometimes they were mostly relevant but other times it was like i don't want to know about that anyway um apparently there's a mechanism in the playstation 5 ui where you can quote unquote follow like like following on twitter a game and
John:
uh and i never did that i never knew about that feature but basically any game that you own becomes followed by default and that makes some sense in terms of why am i seeing things about destiny and stuff because i own destiny right but also if you are a subscriber to playstation plus you get a lot of free games as part of playstation plus you know they're just they're just yours you know for paying the monthly fee which is a great deal actually especially if you haven't played those games usually they're good games but older games anyway
John:
I ended up, quote unquote, following things like God of War or Fortnite and stuff that I don't play on the PlayStation at all.
John:
And so that's why I'm seeing some, you know, Fortnite thing on my face constantly every time I turn my computer.
John:
It was because I was following Fortnite.
John:
So if you go to the game and unfollow it, then you won't see those tiles anymore.
John:
So I did that, and it helped.
John:
But unfortunately, you can't unfollow, as far as I'm aware, the PlayStation Store.
John:
And I don't want to see the store telling me about stuff either.
John:
So the struggle against the PS5 banner-filled UI continues, but I've definitely improved things since last week.
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Casey:
We have to do like a little bit of vocabulary for the next section.
Casey:
So we have a lot of feedback, which is really good, about feedbacks and radar and cyst diagnosis and things of that nature.
Casey:
So we're going to talk about the galaxy's largest black hole, and that is Apple's feedback system.
Casey:
And so we're going to use several different terms, all probably interchangeably.
Casey:
Feedback is what Apple currently calls, to the best of my knowledge, basically a bug report.
Casey:
You use an app called Feedback Assistant, and you create a feedback.
Casey:
In the olden days, and I think still internally within Apple, these were called radars.
Casey:
So radar is the app that Apple uses that they use to track their bugs and things of that nature.
Casey:
An individual instance, an individual bug or ticket, if you will, was also often called a radar.
Casey:
Assist Diagnose is basically, as we discussed before, just if you have something bad happen, Apple needs to be able to recreate to some degree what was going on in your system at the time.
Casey:
And that's not an unreasonable request.
Casey:
And Assist Diagnose basically says when the user does some particular incantation, which varies based on OS and device, then the OS will write a
Casey:
potentially tens of thousands of lines of data and logs to a very, very large file, usually a couple hundred megs at least, which you can then upload to Apple so they can try to piece together what was going on at the time.
Casey:
So that's just a little vocabulary to get out.
Casey:
So hopefully we all are on the same page.
Casey:
And if you recall, all of us were probably me more than most.
Casey:
We're lamenting the fact that if you create a radar with Apple, if you create a bug report with Apple, it just disappears into the ether.
Casey:
It is seriously the galaxy's largest black hole.
Casey:
And it's very frustrating from a user's perspective and especially from a developer's perspective because you want some amounts of feedback and typically you get precisely zero.
Casey:
So we had a bunch of different people, some of whom are at Apple, some of whom are former Apple, write in and say, hey, here's my perspective on this.
Casey:
And what John and Marco and I are going to go through over the next several minutes,
Casey:
is kind of an amalgamation of several different pieces of feedback.
Marco:
I believe you mean several different feedbacks.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Several different feedbacks from several different people.
Casey:
So that's kind of the stage that we're standing on, if you will, right now.
Casey:
So with that said, the first piece of feedbacks that we got...
Casey:
Again, from either a current or former Apple employee.
Casey:
This individual writes, you file a radar and get a reply saying, quote, attach a sysdiagnose, quote.
Casey:
This can optimistically be taken as an acknowledgement that someone believes your bug is real, but that they have no idea how to reproduce it on demand or fix it.
Casey:
It can also have other meanings, though.
John:
I think that is a very optimistic take.
Casey:
Very optimistic.
John:
In the example that I gave, you know, they believe your bug is real, but they have no idea how to reproduce it.
John:
Well, I attached a sample project that you can build.
John:
The only thing this project does is reproduce the bug.
John:
And plus there was instructions on how to use the sample product to reproduce the bug.
John:
So that's not why they asked me for a sysdiagnose.
John:
I can understand, like Casey said in the vocabulary section, here's why they want a sysdiagnose.
John:
But as we'll see in a little bit, even that is not explained well.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And just in case it wasn't clear, like John said, a sample project means it's something that you can run, that an Apple person could run on their device that will specifically tickle the particular bug in question.
Casey:
So hypothetically, there should be no need for anything else because you run this little app, be that for your Mac or for your iOS device or whatever, and perform whatever thing that the developer wants you to perform.
Casey:
And hypothetically, if everything goes according to plan, it will make that bug happen.
Casey:
And so you really shouldn't need anything else.
Casey:
It's probably the best thing that a developer can give Apple in a radar.
John:
It's the gold standard of bug rebrand.
John:
Just to be clear, we keep saying sample projects.
John:
When we say project, we mean an Xcode project.
John:
We give them the source code.
John:
It says, here is the source code for my Xcode project.
John:
So not only do they have an app that they can run after they build it, they have the full source code to your app, which hopefully is like 20 lines long.
John:
Here I'm reproducing the bug.
John:
Sometimes there have to be instructions because like launch the app and do this, then do that.
John:
And here's my expected behavior and here's the actual behavior.
John:
So we're, we're giving them an explicit way to reproduce it.
John:
We've already narrowed the bug down to the smallest possible case and they have the source code.
John:
Like this is what everybody wants for any bug report.
John:
And yeah, so that's, it's all the more frustrating when you take the time to make a new Xcode project, narrow the bug down yourself, get it to the point where you have the minimal set of code that reproduces the problem and still nothing.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And to use a really crummy analogy, imagine you're making like some 50-step recipe and you realize that, oh, I used a bad ingredient somewhere because I can tell it tastes like garbage.
Casey:
Well, then you need to go through this recipe and like do it all over again in order to figure out, okay, which specific one of these ingredients was wrong.
Casey:
And that's kind of what a lot of times happens is, you know, you have a fully functioning app, like take Overcast, for example.
Casey:
I don't remember, Marco, if you know off the top of your head how big Overcast is, but I'd assume it's, you know, several thousand, if not tens of thousands of lines of code.
Marco:
Sounds about right.
Marco:
I think it's like 80,000 or something.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So there's effectively 80,000 ingredients in this casserole, if you will.
Casey:
So in order to find the one or two or 10 things that are really causing the problem can be hours upon hours of work.
Casey:
So imagine how frustrating it is for us on this side of the table when we put in the work to give Apple this just perfect present that they can just run immediately and see exactly what's going on.
Casey:
And then the response we get in return is, oh, can I have a sysdiagnose?
Casey:
No!
Casey:
No, you can't have a sysdiagnose.
Casey:
You've already got what you need.
Casey:
No, you can't.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
So anyway, moving on from the Apple people.
Casey:
Time of bug is important when you take a sysdiagnose because, as you can see in the console app, there are often thousands, if not tens of thousands, of logs per second.
Casey:
This individual writes, I used to be a screener for Apple search bugs, and you wouldn't believe the variation in times between when people experience bugs and when they launch a sysdiagnose.
Casey:
The tools for analyzing sysdiagnosed logs also suck hard.
Casey:
That's the Apple person's quote, by the way.
Casey:
The amount of effort it takes to write down the time you saw a bug is much smaller than the effort it takes to find the bug you're describing in a sysdiagnose.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's the explanation.
John:
Now, here's how Apple asks for a cyst diagnose in the feedbacks that I have.
John:
This is directly quoting for one of my feedbacks, and I'm not omitting anything.
John:
Please capture a cyst diagnose immediately after the issue reproduces.
John:
Additionally, comma, please note the exact time.
John:
EX colon one slash one slash one nine space 12 colon 51 space PM.
John:
So.
John:
All right.
John:
This is another tidbit from someone else, according from another piece of feedback on feedbacks.
John:
If someone asked you when it was taken, that's really interesting because that means someone dramatically misunderstood the directions.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the directions say capture a cyst diagnose immediately after the issue reproduces.
John:
Now, here's God.
John:
There are so many there are so many problems here in terms of this communication.
John:
Right.
John:
Certainly wasn't clear to me, although it is now clear from listening to all these feedback things like capturing a sysdiagnose, like you invoke a thing.
John:
There's different ways to invoke it, as Casey said, but you invoke a thing.
John:
I feel like since sysdiagnose is such a common thing that they're asking for, it's worth the people who work in whatever this department is to have essentially a text expander shortcut or a standard, you know, link to a web page that explains it.
John:
Here's what a cyst diagnosis, right?
John:
A cyst diagnosis, what happens is you trigger this thing and we, unbeknownst to you, while you've been using the system, we've been collecting data.
John:
And when you trigger a cyst diagnosis, it dumps the data that has been collected that whole time, right?
John:
That wasn't clear to me because from my perspective, especially the first few times I did this, I'm like, oh, I invoke a cyst diagnosis.
John:
As soon as I invoke it, it must be taking stock of the whole system and say, I'm just going to dump the current state of the system to a big file or something like that, right?
John:
But apparently that's not what SysDiagnose does.
John:
What SysDiagnose does is take all the data that we've been gathering in the background, or we're always gathering in the background, and dump that for some period of time in the past.
John:
But either way, when you're trying to explain what you want the user to do and why, especially with this whole, you know, do it immediately after the issue reproduces and tell us the exact time...
John:
there is like a fundamental, you know, knowledge gap between like, well, what am I doing here?
John:
And what time am I noting?
John:
Like down to the point of like, you're supposed to be noting the time that the bug happened, not the time you did the cyst diagnose, right?
John:
This is captured immediately after the issue reproduces.
John:
So that means the time of the cyst diagnose would also essentially be the time of the bug because they're telling me to capture it immediately afterward.
John:
That's not really cool.
John:
Now they're saying sometimes the bug was reproduced.
John:
You know, there's a big time gap between when the bug was reproduced and when they launched cyst diagnose.
Yeah.
John:
right this is the perfect opportunity to to do this once have a couple people sit down at a table and say we're going to ask for millions of people for cyst diagnosis can we have a web page that explains what a cyst diagnosis and then have this text expander snippet that says you just type these two keystrokes and it says we need a cyst diagnosis cyst diagnosis x y and z and then use like the magic of hypertext to link one of those words or say if you want more information on what a cyst diagnosis and how to trigger please go to this web page oh you can't get there's no hypertext and
John:
And the feedback system, as far as I can tell.
John:
But either way, it's done so often.
John:
Don't leave it to the discretion of the person sending the thing to say something like this.
John:
Like, please note the exact time.
John:
And the exact time example they give is, you know, month, day, year, hour, minute.
John:
In 60 seconds, there's thousands and thousands of logs.
John:
And if you're expecting me to note down to the second when something happened, the clock in the menu bar doesn't show seconds by default.
John:
And if I'm going to check on my other device, they're not necessarily synchronized.
John:
It's like, well, why do you want to know this?
John:
What are you trying to get at?
John:
It's so maddening, the sort of failure to communicate.
John:
We're not communicating here.
John:
You have a need, but you're not able to communicate that need to me in a way that I can do what you want.
John:
And everyone is just frustrated.
Casey:
So building on that, you said there's no thing that explains this diagnosis.
Casey:
That's half true.
Casey:
There is a page on the Apple developer website that's bug reporting, and it lists, and this is about profiles and logs, and it lists probably 100, maybe even more, different things that you can collect bug reports or cyst diagnosis or whatever for.
Casey:
Now, included in that is different entries for SysDiagnose for iOS, for macOS, etc.
Casey:
The super cool part is, though, if you want instructions on how to do this, guess what the Apple developer site wants you to do?
Casey:
Search for it.
Casey:
Log in.
Casey:
So you need to have an Apple developer account just to see the instructions on how to create a sysdiagnose.
John:
I mean, I'm glad that they have this page somewhere, but, like, you've got to connect the dots.
John:
When you ask for it, that's why I'm saying text expander, stupid.
John:
When you ask for it.
John:
That's the perfect opportunity to link people to more information so they can have background and context.
John:
And you can't link to all of it.
John:
You have to put like one or two sentences minimum in line so that if someone doesn't bother following that link, they at least know why you're asking for this and they have the context.
John:
Things that I think they should communicate is...
John:
When you do this, it's going to dump information that has been collecting in the past.
John:
So like this is an ending thing.
John:
Like it's not a start thing.
John:
It's an ending thing.
John:
And the second is, by the way, if we're going to ask you for something additional like the time, the reason we're asking that for you is because maybe the bug happened five minutes ago and we need to know that, right?
John:
That needs to be communicated in line.
John:
And then you link to the web page you said and then make people not have to be logged in to read it.
John:
Honestly, that is a minor concern because you've got to be logged in to do feedback anyway.
Casey:
On two-way communication, so Apple screeners don't have direct access to your feedbacks.
Casey:
They go through a middle party that, especially with the betas, attempts to consolidate similar feedbacks into one bug.
Casey:
When developers want to ask questions of originators or request more logs, we have to go through that middle party.
Casey:
It's a really clunky setup that makes it feel like there's a lot of time going by without anything happening.
Casey:
So to kind of translate that a little bit, so if I'm an Apple engineer and John has filed a bug that lands on my desk,
Casey:
And I don't know it's John because of this intermediary layer.
Casey:
If I want to get more information from this anonymous source of this bug, I can go to this other intermediary team, which might be dev relations, I'm not sure.
Casey:
And then they can go to John and say, oh, hey, can you provide us a cyst diagnosis or God help us or whatever it is that me, the developer, the Apple developer wanted.
Casey:
But because there's this middle layer, you know, the guy that talks to the engineers, I talk to the engineers.
Casey:
Because there's this middle layer, it makes everything clunkier.
Marco:
So that's just, I understand to a degree why that's there, but... Well, developer relations is not a good middle layer for any kind of reasonable general purpose solution.
Marco:
Because developer relations at Apple does not scale.
Marco:
Most people have no idea who, if anybody inside, might be their relevant developer relations person for a certain thing.
Marco:
Most people have no clue.
Marco:
I've gone through years of my career not having one.
Marco:
Then I would have somebody who seemed to be my dev relations person.
Marco:
And the funny thing is, if you have one of these people...
Marco:
and they eventually contact you about something, or God knows if you have to ask somebody inside, they act so surprised that you had no idea that you had a relevant person to contact.
Marco:
And it's like, you never tell us.
Marco:
And most developers don't have any contacts inside.
Marco:
So any solution that relies on like, oh, well...
Marco:
The real process for this is you contact this person and they contact the real person inside.
Marco:
That's not accessible to most developers most of the time.
Marco:
Again, it's one of those areas where it seems like the impression that people inside Apple have of what it's like to be outside is incomplete or incorrect.
Marco:
They seem to have no idea quite...
Marco:
quite how little visibility and access we have on the outside into the inside.
Marco:
I'm lucky that because of my big loud mouth, I have a little bit more access than most people.
Marco:
Most developers have zero.
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
There's no one they know inside the company that they could email or somebody you know on Twitter you could DM or anything.
Marco:
That's very unusual for most developers.
Marco:
The impression I've gotten over the years is that
Marco:
Apple kind of intentionally keeps it fairly inaccessible because they don't have the developer relations staff size to actually provide like full service access to all their developers.
Marco:
There's too many of them.
Marco:
But I don't think the solution to that is know the secret password and whisper at people in bars in California sometimes and maybe occasionally get an email address.
Marco:
That's not a great solution to this problem.
Marco:
I know why they do it, but I wish they would instead scale the staff in such a way that – I know that's easier said than done, but scale that division so that they can provide real developer support to a bigger level to more people.
John:
It's not even clear to me, because given how little experience I have actually being a real developer for Apple Platforms, that the middle party referred to in this feedback is in fact that relations.
John:
Probably it is.
John:
I mean, if that's your guess, then that's probably a better guess than anything I would have, but...
John:
fact that there is a middle party between there like it makes some sense organizationally and that you don't want your rank and file developers communicating directly with customers because they might say something they're not supposed to right so have a buffer in between there but as this last bit to be read said it can you know it's a clunky setup it makes you feel like there's not there's a lot of time going by without anything happening because what's actually happening is you know
John:
The person inside Apple responsible for the bug has a clarifying question, and they ask the middle party.
John:
And the middle party eventually sees that question and then asks it of you.
John:
And then you see it, and then it goes back.
John:
And so this is all bouncing back and forth.
John:
This is another example of where, like I said last week's show,
John:
uh over communication can help right we don't we're not privy to these internal conversations but how about on the bug to say here's what happened uh you know your the the middle party has seen your bug the middle party has passed your bug down to the responsible team the responsible team has passed a uh you know a response back up to the middle party then the middle party has sent you a response and that would mean you have like six updates or whatever
John:
where previously you had zero and none of them reveal any secret stuff about going inside apple just you know something is happening with your bug and that's reassuring communicate over communicate doesn't mean you need to reveal secrets but let people know something is happening indeed so continuing from the apple people it's also a bit like a game of telephone
Casey:
Maybe the middle party just copies and pastes between the internal and external bug reports, so what you see is literally comments and questions from the person looking at the issue.
Casey:
Or maybe the middle party is paraphrasing what the engineer is saying, and maybe something gets lost in translation.
John:
I mean, this is a downside of having the middle party, and it was mentioned, like, especially in beta, is that part of the responsibility of the middle party is to condense.
John:
So if there's, like, 50 people asking about the same thing, rather than dumping 50 of those on the dev team that's presumably busy working on the thing that's in beta...
John:
condense it down into one so now this middle party is responsible for summarizing paraphrasing passing on which is how you get things like uh you know capture assist diagnose immediately after the issue reproduces and add the time you get that because maybe the middle party doesn't understand why this being asked for and like in the game of telephone it starts to warp over time and maybe they make their own personal text expander snippet that says subtly the wrong thing to make people a angry that they're being asked to know the time and b not understand why they're being asked at all
Casey:
With regard to bugs that linger forever without updates, if you file a bug during the run-up to shipping a new version, it's very possible that your bug will be assigned to the next version, which typically means the perceived risk-reward dynamic doesn't favor fixing this bug in the version we're trying to get out the door right now.
Casey:
Okay, so far so good.
Casey:
If a bug is still in the books when a team gets to the final run-up before shipping a new version, eventually someone on a bug review board will ask the room, would we block the shipment of this version because of this bug?
Casey:
The powers that be will debate the relative merits and risks and come up with an answer to that question.
Casey:
If that answer is no, then the bug will likely be moved out of this version's backlog and into the next version.
Casey:
Again, so far so good.
Casey:
If this bug ever happens to come up for review again, the answer to would we block the shipment of the software because of this bug will almost certainly continue to be no based on the justification that, well, we didn't block it last time.
Casey:
Why should we do it this time?
Casey:
Debates about the logic of this aside, the reality is that a bug that's ever been deemed to not block shipping is exceedingly likely to never block shipping.
Casey:
And this Apple person says, I might go so far as to say that unless there is a specific champion for fixing that bug on the specific team empowered to fix it, it is very likely to remain in this purgatory indefinitely.
Casey:
Cool.
John:
Isn't this like priority queue starvation?
John:
No, this is such a familiar dynamic of software development in large companies.
John:
And it comes down to this basic truth.
John:
Feature work is always valued internally over...
John:
tech debt or fixing bugs or whatever right feature work is you know i'm working on a product it does x now i know i wanted to do x and also do y right whatever that feature is because customers have requests for features features you can come up with ideas for features internally they can give you a competitive advantage feature work is where it's at so when you have to plan your releases and plan what you're going to work on next or whatever feature work is where it's at
John:
right everybody has boat queues and this whole system of like well this doesn't block shipping and you know so we'll just put it in the backlog and then you know it comes up again it's like well it didn't block shipping last time so it probably won't this time and just eternally gets there and the reason it looks like a queue prioritization thing to marco is because in
John:
You know, in computer parlance, the idea of like having a low priority task gets starved because it's always something more high priority happens.
John:
But it's an organizational problem because unlike a queue that has a simple set of rules, organizations have values that are embodied by their plans.
John:
Feature work is prioritized because feature work is what gets you raises and bonuses and recognition and glory.
John:
And, you know, you can brag about on a slide and like everybody in the entire organization is incentivized.
John:
to work on feature work.
John:
Tech debt gets a lot of lip service, but it looks, you know, it's never ending pile, first of all.
John:
And second of all, when you put up on the slide, we reduced our tech debt by 5% this thing, this release.
John:
It's not as exciting for everybody.
John:
And the only time it becomes exciting is when the mountain of tech debt becomes almost company destroying.
John:
And then finally the organization wakes up to the idea of, oh, we're living in a house of cards.
John:
This is a serious problem.
John:
We all need to buckle down and everybody carve out 20% of your schedule for tech debt from now on to the future like that will overhauled.
John:
And we're going to do this big release where we're going to burn down tech debt and everybody's new, you know, OKRs are you must burn down X percent of your tech debt.
John:
And then at the end of that release, everybody gets to go up there and say, we have this much tech debt and we burned it down.
John:
And here's how much better we did.
John:
And then you forget about tech debt for two more years.
John:
Right.
John:
And this ties into the customer sat thing where.
John:
The only time that ever comes to a head is let's work like this where we prioritize feature work over tech debt essentially forever until the accumulation of crap starts to affect our customer satisfaction.
John:
Hey, random stuff that used to be reliable isn't reliable anymore and it's never getting fixed.
John:
Have you heard that on this program before?
John:
I think we talk about it sometimes.
John:
I think Marco has written blog posts about it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
own and obviously we're more sensitive to this and we're you know in the tech world so we're constantly thinking about this stuff but eventually if you neglect this stuff too long organizationally eventually even your regular customers will start to get a feel for maybe your stuff isn't as isn't as reliable as it used to be isn't as nice like it will eventually bubble up but internally it's so hard to like the things that they described here in case he was going through it okay this makes sense makes sense all logical right and
John:
And combine that with the internal incentives for advancement and promotion and recognition, it makes it almost impossible to essentially, quote unquote, do the right thing.
John:
That's why people are responding like if your bug has a champion inside, like if there's someone inside the organization who knows it's the right thing to do to fix this stupid bug.
John:
And they're willing to essentially forego the time they could spend doing something that is more likely to get them a razor or promotion or a good review to do this because they know it's the right thing to do.
John:
That's one way things get fixed.
John:
And this is a sign of an unhealthy organization.
John:
And this dynamic I described plays out in every software company.
John:
forever it will always happen right it's it's the job of the organization to figure out how to counteract that it's a natural force for that to happen so organizations try to have cultures that have countervailing forces that try to be try to systemically oppose this inevitable force because left to people's own devices they will always do the wrong thing in this case
Casey:
So building on that, back to the Apple people, the converse of the quote, once a blocker, never a blocker quote problem is the phenomenon of once noticed by Steve or Tim or someone important, this bug must be fixed no matter how risky or challenging.
Casey:
Fix it now!
John:
That's the shortcut to organizational incentives.
John:
Oh, the organizational incentives is to have a cool feature, whatever.
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
If your boss or your boss's boss or the super duper big boss suddenly notices something,
John:
Oh, suddenly you're now incentivized because now fixing this stupid bug gets me recognition with the big guy.
John:
And that's why, you know, I'm going to get a promotion now because it's and that's that is a not a scalable system be a terrible system in general.
John:
And see, you can't rely on that.
John:
You can't rely on someone important noticing your bug like you can't.
John:
It's not great to rely on champion developers helping as well.
John:
But.
John:
and that's why you know running to the press never helps or whatever as they said in the app store things that's why when something gets big on twitter or something somehow it magically gets fixed because someone who's important suddenly picks their head up from their spreadsheets and says what is everyone talking about they're talking about what what and they're like hey what is what is this thing with name recognition and people getting numbers after their devices in their home and then someone has to explain oh well we just replaced a
John:
Let me explain what DNS is, and we replace this part of the system that does naming, and it used to be called mDNS, and now it's a new thing called DiscoveryDN.
John:
By the time you don't explain it, someone hopefully says, well, if the old thing was working, the new thing isn't, put back the old thing, right?
John:
And then they go back to what they were doing for a few years, right?
Marco:
Wait, wasn't that Bono complaining to Tim Cook to get that one done?
John:
Was it Bono?
John:
I don't remember.
Marco:
It was some big celebrity complaining about Discovery D problems to, I think, directly to Tim Cook, and that's how that got fixed.
John:
Oh my gosh.
John:
And this sounds so dumb, but like...
John:
companies in a capitalist system are much more like monarchies or dictatorships than they are like democracies.
John:
Which is fine.
John:
They're not systems of government.
John:
You're just trying to find a way to make computer products and sell them to people.
John:
It's not a human rights issue or anything like that.
John:
But it does mean that
John:
A lot of important decision making is concentrated in the top of that org chart and the top of that pyramid.
John:
And you can shortcut the whole thing by making Tim Cook notice literally anything that's annoying you.
John:
Like I imagine Tim Cook's, you know, like any high executives, like the people in their life, like their, you know, spouses or relatives or children should like take advantage of this and say, this bug is annoying me.
John:
And then like bug their parents or uncle or something or, you know, aunt about it until their aunt goes back to work and says, I keep getting bugged about this.
John:
Can we just fix this?
John:
And again, not a scalable system.
John:
But in reality, lots of things happen that way.
John:
And it is it is at once embarrassing for like the org.
John:
And it's like if we had a functioning org that really did handle these things in a systemic way, this should never have to happen.
John:
But on the outside, you're like, I'm just glad it's fixed.
John:
So true.
Casey:
All right, so with regard to getting in your feedback, can you see if this repros in the latest version, can you reproduce this in the latest version of macOS, iOS, whatever?
Casey:
The Apple people write, this is something that's sometimes done en masse after a release to all bugs that have been punted out of that version, possibly into next version.
Casey:
It's an attempt to get the bug off the books or otherwise find a reason to close it.
Casey:
If you don't reply in a timely manner saying that it still happens with a new cyst diagnosis attached, hmm,
Casey:
That was created on the very newest version of the OS and software.
Casey:
The assumption will be that it was a side effect fix or it was obviated by something else and it is very likely to be closed, never looked at again.
Casey:
So the person stopped whining, woohoo, it's done.
Casey:
The system works.
Casey:
So the Apple person writes, if the bug isn't fixed and you care about it ever getting fixed, you should reply to these queries.
Casey:
Super guys.
John:
This is a typical bad, like, it should be opt-in versus opt-out system.
John:
Or it's like, if we don't hear for you, we'll assume everything's fine.
John:
Like, why would you assume everything's fine?
John:
Like, you didn't even check whether you fixed it.
John:
You're just like, fingers crossed.
John:
We made a bunch of other changes.
John:
Maybe we fixed your bug, too.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Why don't you check for us and tell us?
John:
And this is what I referred to last time as like a, you know, human resources problem where apparently they don't have enough people.
John:
Oh, every time we do a release, we got to go through the entire outstanding bug backlog and see if we've accidentally closed some of these bugs by stuff that we did.
John:
I mean, no, I suppose you don't have to, but you also shouldn't be like, you know.
John:
This person said it's an attempt to get the bug off the books, right?
John:
This is more organizational and process dysfunction.
John:
Surely one of the metrics that the people in this part of the org are measured on is how many outstanding bugs there are.
John:
How big is the bug backlog?
John:
How much have you burned it down?
John:
How many bugs have you closed?
John:
And so there are massive incentives to close bugs.
John:
So something like this internally makes perfect sense.
John:
You know what?
John:
After we do a release, I know we don't have the ability to check every single one of these bugs, but I bet some of them we fix like by accident because we just change stuff around or whatever.
John:
So I've got an idea.
John:
The system will be just ask everybody, hey, is this still a problem?
John:
If they don't answer, assume it's fixed and then close them.
John:
And that'll really increase our metrics for bug closures.
John:
And that's a bad system.
John:
It's good if your goal is to get as many bug closures as possible.
John:
It's bad if your goal is to make the software quality as good as possible.
John:
And unfortunately, software quality is usually measured by number of outstanding bugs.
John:
So you see the problem with the system.
Casey:
all right another reason that your bug might be closed without being fixed is that someone in a bug review says there's a bug here but knowing what i know about the product i believe the real bug is fundamentally different from what's being described in this report and this report is more likely to create confusion than lead to a solution so write a new better one and close this bug this is another example of how bugs filed by outsiders can disappear behind the wall forever i imagine it's frustrating to the person who filed the original and loses visibility into the fix
John:
Yeah, there's another communication thing.
John:
Like tons of bug reports are going to be bad.
John:
Most of them are going to be bad.
John:
It is an important function of this part of the org to consolidate, rationalize, you know, like to know this, to say, I see what these, you know, 700 people are all saying and they're not really getting at the real bug, but I think I know what the real bug is.
John:
So I'm going to consolidate these.
John:
That's great.
John:
Fine.
John:
Do that.
John:
It's awesome.
John:
Just communicate back and say, here's what happened to your bug.
John:
just like that paragraph that was just written uh this is like what you're describing is uh one part of this giant elephant that is this bug and so we've consolidated them all down to this bug which unfortunately because we're apple you can't really keep track of but just just so you know we didn't just ignore your bug forever what happened is uh it got folded into this larger bug number and then if you're nice apple maybe communicate hey if you want to know what's happening with this larger bug you don't have visibility into it but
John:
I'll tell you when the bug is being passed down to a dev team, when they're looking at it, what state it's in, and when they close it.
John:
Again, these are all communication things that you can do without revealing anything about no secrets, no showing other people source code, all the things they say are the reason why we can't know what's happening with bugs.
John:
Just communicate where it is in the state machine and what happened to it.
Casey:
So another thing that developers especially are told a lot is if you want a change made, file radar, you know, make a feedback.
Casey:
And even if you know that other people are doing the same thing, do it anyway.
Casey:
Because apparently it may or may not be a system of voting within Apple.
Casey:
So if Apple sees that 100 people or 1,000 or 100,000 people have all filed the same feedback, like, for example, if 100,000 people all wanted autocorrect to stop correcting files
Casey:
to ducking, then maybe if there's 100,000 people filing that radar, eventually they will fix it.
Casey:
Not that that annoys me at all.
Casey:
Anyway, with regard to that, the Apple people write, some groups use this bug voting thing by duplicate count.
Casey:
So by figuring out how many duplicates of the same bug there are.
Casey:
Some groups use this to inform their decisions, but other groups don't.
Casey:
It varies wildly.
Casey:
It's mostly true for radars with incredibly large dupe counts, as in the tens of thousands.
Casey:
And those really only happen when they can be automatically duped, which brings this individual to auto-duping.
Casey:
Apple has systems that look at stack traces.
Casey:
Okay, so sorry, another piece of vocab.
Casey:
So stack traces, here's what the system was doing at the time, or what the program, a specific program or app, was doing at the time.
Casey:
And here's how it got to where it was.
Casey:
You know, like a few minutes ago, it had done this, and now it's trying this, and then it's about to try that.
Casey:
And so that's a very...
Casey:
kind of high-level way of thinking of a stack trace.
Casey:
So coming back to this, Apple has systems that look at stack traces and cyst diagnosis attached to radars and automatically dupe radars based on that info.
Casey:
This is the most likely way for any given radar to accumulate a notably high dupe count.
John:
This is another gap in human power versus automation.
John:
this type of automation sounds great.
John:
Again, if your goal is like, oh, we're getting all these feedbacks and radars, we need a way to deal with this flood.
John:
Like how do we rationalize this?
John:
How do we lump them together?
John:
How do we sort of sort through them and find out which ones are valid, which ones are spam, which, you know, like you need to look at them all, but there's just so many of them and it takes expertise to know how to put them together.
John:
So any way you can automate that is great.
John:
And automating by saying, let's have my automated tool look at the stack traces and the sys diagnosis and look for similarities and lump them together.
John:
If that's the only way you can get a high dupe count, that means they don't have enough people looking at them to notice that, all right, let's say there's a bug where the stack trace and the sysdiagnose show no similarities because the bug is not straightforward.
John:
It is a weird second or third order effect.
John:
that is perhaps entirely reproducible maybe 50 of those people put in sample projects or great instructions on how to reproduce it but you can't lump them together in an automated way because the stack traces vary because it happens when people use different programs or it happens in different times like there's no way to do it in an automated way if duping only works or only works well when you're lucky enough that the the problem is straightforward enough to have a sort of an identifiable fingerprint and this is diagnosed in the stack trace
John:
That's bad.
John:
And that shows that we need I mean, having automation is great.
John:
Definitely do that.
John:
But then you need more human power to help that work, because otherwise you could get a very important and terrible bug that is actually been duped perhaps thousands of times.
John:
But you don't know that because your automated system doesn't know how to lump them together.
John:
So now you need an actual human to look at them and do that.
Casey:
It's another plausible reason why you'd get the attach assist diagnose response so often.
Casey:
The most favorable way to interpret that request is that they need more info to diagnose your problem.
Casey:
The less favorable way to interpret that is that it's a request for you to provide information that may automatically reveal the bug to be a dupe.
John:
It's such a desperation ploy.
John:
It's like, look, just I need you to include more information in the hopes that our automated tools will somehow get you into the fast lane of being fixed.
John:
Because I, as a human, don't have apparently the ability to do that.
John:
But maybe if you're lucky, your diagnosis will put you into a bucket with a thousand other things and someone will finally look at this book.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So a couple of thoughts from the Apple people on my specific bugs, which again, the feedback numbers will be in the show notes.
Casey:
Hint, hint.
Casey:
The Apple people write, I don't doubt that this bug happens or that it's extremely annoying, but I'm pretty confident that it's not that widespread.
Casey:
Here's why.
Casey:
There are almost a billion iPhones in active use today.
Casey:
If even 1% of those users experience this bug and then 1% of those users that experience the bug file a radar...
Casey:
it would still be 100,000 radars.
Casey:
And 100,000 radars would definitely get someone's attention.
Casey:
But based on your recounting, it's not getting enough people's attention, which tells me it's probably not as pervasive as it might seem to you.
Casey:
Okay, first of all, that's certainly possible.
Casey:
Second of all, even if it's only for me, it is infuriating that my internet communicator can't frigging communicate.
Casey:
This isn't like a, oh, I'm annoyed at the way this looks, or oh, the dialogues in Big Sur are trash, which they are.
Casey:
It's something that's fundamentally breaking my ability to use this device, which I think I would hope would, if any human ever looks at these bugs, which I know they have, I would hope that someone would have bubbled this up as a big freaking problem.
Casey:
Additionally, to think that even 1% of 1% of 1% people file radars is preposterous.
Casey:
Nobody files radars.
Casey:
I don't usually file radars because I've been trained not to because they're black holes.
Casey:
That's why I don't do it.
Marco:
Also, like that number of like we would notice 100,000 radars only if they're properly categorized as a dupe.
Marco:
They would have to make it through all those filters first, which most of them, the vast majority of them wouldn't.
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
Exactly.
John:
My bit of feedback on this particular thing is it was noticed.
John:
Like there was an iOS release where in the fairly terse... Excuse me, two iOS releases.
John:
Thank you very much.
John:
Well, it's not like Apple gives very extensive release notes.
John:
So anything that makes it into release notes had to be serious enough that they thought to mention it.
John:
So they mentioned it.
John:
They know about it and they're trying to fix it.
John:
So it's not...
John:
You know, the idea is like, oh, I guess not enough people did this.
John:
So they didn't know about it.
John:
Apple absolutely knows about it.
John:
They've tried to fix it.
John:
They just haven't succeeded yet.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So it's very frustrating for anyone.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think the thing that's most frustrating to me, and John, I think you had said this earlier, right at the beginning of this conversation, is that if you take any of these pieces in and of themselves, they're justifiable and make a reasonable amount of sense.
Casey:
Like, obviously, there are problems, and that's what you've been enumerating this whole time.
Casey:
But if you take them at face value, none of these things is necessarily bad.
Casey:
Like, using a dupe count as a kind of ad hoc voting system, I can understand how someone would get to that point of view or get to that conclusion.
Casey:
But what I don't think your average Apple person understands is that even though radar, from what I gather, is actually pretty good on the internal side, it is so incredibly, indescribably, impossibly user hostile in pretty much every measurable way.
Casey:
And yes, I understand for you, the Apple rank and file engineer, it's not so bad.
Casey:
And yes, I understand that you are a special rank and file engineer that knows that it's probably not great for outsiders.
Casey:
But I don't think most rank and file engineers, and I know a handful of them, and I've talked to them about this a little bit,
Casey:
Most of them, I don't think really and truly understand how awful radar is and how offensive it is for Apple to say, give us a sample project, please.
Casey:
And then you spend hours of your time.
Casey:
building that sample project, attaching that sample project, putting that sample project on radar, and then just disappears into a black hole.
Casey:
It is broken.
Casey:
It is fundamentally broken.
Casey:
And for Apple to shrug it off...
Casey:
because it works for them internally, is also fundamentally broken.
Casey:
If you're an Apple person listening to this and you think I'm bananas, then I encourage you to look at it from my perspective for a half second, because I see it from your perspective as best I can.
Casey:
And yeah, it doesn't seem that bad from your perspective.
Casey:
It seems actually probably pretty decent.
Casey:
But from our perspective, it's trash.
Casey:
It's offensive.
Casey:
And it's so frustrating in the same way that I'm so fired up about the god-darned piss-poor documentation that Apple's been putting out lately or lack of documentation that they've been putting out lately.
Casey:
It's offensive.
Casey:
And the fact that nobody cares enough to fix it, it's a problem to me.
Casey:
It's a problem.
Marco:
It's worse than that.
Marco:
They excuse it.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
That's an excellent point.
Casey:
They excuse it, and that's why I've got to burr up my butt about it.
Casey:
They excuse it, and it makes me so angry.
Casey:
Granted, I'm a little on edge, given what's going on this particular Wednesday, but nevertheless, it's just so frustrating.
Casey:
Yes, I'm glad you made that point, Marco.
Casey:
I'm glad you jumped in, because that's exactly it.
Casey:
It's excused within Apple.
Casey:
Oh, well, it's the best we got, and it works for us internally, so whatever.
Casey:
No, that's not good enough.
Casey:
If you want to be the Apple that you think you are, where you can do no wrong, but that you're better than everyone else, then you need to do better at this.
Casey:
I've seen people link me to Android bug reports.
Casey:
Or you can see almost all the internal communication.
Casey:
I understand that's never going to happen with Apple.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
But this is what John was talking about earlier.
Casey:
This is exactly it.
Casey:
There's got to be an amount of communication between all of it and zero.
Casey:
And I got to figure out that... I got to believe that there's some way that Apple can figure this out.
Casey:
You're smart people.
Casey:
Figure it out.
John:
I continue to try to talk Casey down off his ledge to say, Apple does know about your bug and they're trying to fix it.
John:
And your bug, to be fair, as you would say, is surely one of the harder kind of bugs to fix because it has to do with interfacing with a third party thing.
John:
So I think in this case, you're not actually being ignored.
John:
It's super frustrating because it is a fundamental function of the device and it's not something off to the side, is the point you made.
John:
But...
John:
I do think they know about it and are trying to fix it and are having problems.
John:
So even though this particular bug has got to be up your butt, I don't think it's actually emblematic of the larger problem.
John:
The larger problem, what made me think of it again, what made me actually decide to put in this giant follow-up, aside from all the feedback we got about it, was that, spoiler alert for upcoming year-in-review things, but we have some friends who do some year-in-review type things on their websites about Apple.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And one of the questions they ask is to rate Apple's software quality.
John:
And every year, there's a question, how would you rate the software quality?
John:
Whatever it is, one to 10 or, you know, one to five.
John:
Yeah, whatever it is.
John:
It should be one through six, hint, hint.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's a thing, like, this kind of report card is exactly what I was talking about before, about, like, the incentives inside the organization that, you know, feature work gets prioritized, but also there's the customer sat and there's the idea of software quality.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And software quality, like just like in this questionnaire, I was like, well, how do I measure software quality for an entire company?
John:
They make so many things, right?
John:
That is the big question.
John:
And the small question is, well, how do I measure software quality on the level of an individual project, right?
John:
And that gets into all of these sort of systems with metrics and things that are games and perverse incentives.
John:
You have to come up with some way to measure this because if you can't measure it, you can't do anything about it.
John:
If you have no idea what your software quality is, like what are you ever going to do?
John:
But almost every system to measure software quality, especially ones that are internally focused, like how many bugs are or whatever, like there's just so many ways to intentionally or unintentionally game that type of system.
John:
In the end, what actually matters is do customers feel like you're putting out a quality product?
John:
Does your product do what you say it's supposed to do?
John:
If someone got an iPhone and they're trying to talk to their family in SMS and they're missing messages, as far as they're concerned, this product doesn't do one of the basic things that it's supposed to do.
John:
And they're going to rate your software quality low.
John:
But on the flip side of that is if someone gets one of your products and it more or less does what it's supposed to, but there's tons of annoying little minor bugs that make them think maybe they're using the computer wrong or why does this thing look like this or why doesn't this thing work?
John:
But then I click on it the first time and the second time it does.
John:
Those things accumulate, too, and that is the hardest thing to measure.
John:
Like, do customers feel like when I get your thing, it's just, you know, I won't have to think about this stuff, or do they feel like they're being gaslit by your software?
John:
It's like, oh, well, I can drag this, but I can't drag that, and when I click that, it highlights sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't.
John:
And sometimes it pauses for a brief time.
John:
And sometimes, you know, obviously things like crashes and stuff like that are easy to measure, but it's the things that are hard to measure that get you.
John:
And every time I answer the software quality question on this annual survey of Apple things, I think about it mostly in terms of like how many questions have I had to field from relatives about why is my computer doing a weird thing?
John:
How many times have I seen a bug that's
John:
Not a crasher, not a data loss bug, not something that's going to show up on any metrics, but it's an annoying little thing.
John:
How many of them are there?
John:
There's always going to be some, right?
John:
But if they build up to a certain level, you know, a critical mass of sort of malaise of software, all of a sudden people start to get cranky and have these big long rants on podcasts and everything, right?
John:
That's what Apple has to manage.
John:
That sort of dark matter of, you know, dissatisfaction with software quality is
John:
And I understand that it's hard to measure.
John:
I've been working in software my entire life.
John:
It is not easy to get this right.
John:
That's the challenge.
John:
That's why they get all the big bucks.
John:
And I feel like Apple, I mean, there's a separate question about hardware quality.
John:
And in general, I think they do a better job of that.
John:
Butterfly keyboard aside.
John:
But on software quality, I feel like Apple has had quite a roller coaster over these past few decades on software quality.
John:
And it's difficult for me to connect
John:
the software quality that apple puts out with anything that's visible externally hardware quality design uh the products they choose to make and don't choose to make are much easier to connect with the larger environment of the industry and what people say on earnings calls we want to be in this space we don't want to do that uh we're going to stop making printers we're going to start making cars we think ar is the next big thing all that makes sense but software quality is like what's affecting that
John:
Like, they've been making macOS for a long time, and it's basically been the same thing.
John:
A personal computer operating system that has a bunch of windows on the screen and a menu bar and a pointer and, like, runs programs, and it hasn't changed that much, but the software quality is all over the place.
John:
And I just wish...
John:
I just wish they could get a handle on this in the way that I think they have a handle, to give an example, on their hardware quality.
John:
They've been making iPhones for a long time, and the hardware quality of iPhones has been amazingly consistent.
John:
When there's problems, they address them quickly, and they don't repeat the same mistakes, right?
John:
And in general, every year, the iPhone is a good piece of hardware.
John:
And, you know, in many ways, I think we've talked about this in past shows, hardware quality is a little bit easier to do than software quality.
John:
I know the hardware people will disagree, but software is way more complicated than hardware.
John:
And hardware is, you're more able to ratchet up the knowledge curve.
John:
We've never worked with aluminum before, so it's weird.
John:
Oh, now we've worked with aluminum for many, many years, right?
John:
And now we know a lot about working with aluminum.
John:
And, in fact, all our products are made out of machined aluminum.
John:
You can get better at it and ratchet your way up.
John:
Whereas, no matter how long you're doing software,
John:
You never get to the point where like software, that's easy.
John:
It's always going to be hard.
John:
But there's these big wild swings that I feel like have to be related to some internal organizational malfunctions that crop up, become fires and get extinguished, smolder for a while, then flare up again.
John:
Much like the wildfires in California.
John:
Let's make a lovely analogy there.
John:
I don't know.
John:
anyway it's it's frustrating on the outside and i think it's one of the most important things that apple needs to address because they do almost everything else pretty good if not great but software quality they just do not have a handle on it's not the end of the world it's not functional high ground marco blog post or whatever year that was from but i feel like
John:
Because they're so close to being great and because like the M1 hardware is amazing and everything, you just you just feel like, oh, just if you could just spend one release just knocking down bugs, you would fall back down below that threshold of of annoyance and say, OK, now we're back to the regular number of bugs instead of like everywhere you look.
John:
There's some something that doesn't work right or doesn't work consistently.
John:
And Casey, what you're doing with this thing with your messaging thing, I kind of wish you didn't have this problem because you keep putting your bug number and your feedback number in the show notes.
John:
Your problem is so much worse than mine, but I want mine to be fixed, too.
Casey:
I'll put one in for you.
Casey:
Don't worry.
John:
Let's put my feedback number.
John:
It's a cosmetic bug.
John:
I feel bad.
John:
It's a cosmetic bug.
John:
But it's a cosmetic bug that affects like one of my two apps.
John:
And I feel like it would be easy to fix if someone who knew something about the relevant frameworks looked at it.
John:
Like I said in the past show, maybe I'm doing something wrong.
John:
I would love to know that too.
John:
Just after you fix Casey's bug, which is way more important, someone please look at my cosmetic bug.
John:
It's got a sample project.
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:
Thank you so much to Flatfile for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Moving on, can we hopefully find something a little more awesome to talk about?
Casey:
Marco, let me live vicariously through you.
Casey:
There's nothing that retail therapy cannot fix.
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
So what's going on?
Casey:
What's going on with your equipment, your setup, your working world?
Casey:
How's things looking?
Marco:
I actually don't have a ton to report on that front at the moment.
Marco:
I do have the new OWC Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 3, whatever the dock is, the new OWC docking station thing that has the three upstream, or I guess downstream, Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Casey:
Is the Thunderbolt hub?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
No, the hub is like the smaller one.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
The dock, even though I would still call this a hub, but the dock people call it a dock, so whatever.
Marco:
Anyway, comparing it to the CalDigit, it's a little earlier to say because I've only been using it for about three days.
Marco:
So far, it's kind of a mixed bag.
Marco:
So I have this weird... First of all, the good and the bad.
Marco:
It is a nicer shape.
Marco:
It has more bandwidth on certain ports.
Marco:
It's basically the CalDigit in a reasonable competitor, unless you really need that massive Thunderbolt pass-through, which I don't so far.
Marco:
I'm very curious right now.
Marco:
I'm keeping them both for now because I'm curious when my XDR arrives, if I can actually pass it through either of them or if I have to plug it in directly to the MacBook Air.
Marco:
I would love it if I could pass it through it.
Marco:
And I've heard mixed reports from people.
Marco:
Some people say you can't really pass the XDR through anything.
Marco:
Some people say they have an XDR and they're passing it through theirs just fine.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Like everything else with Thunderbolt, once you get to the high end of things, it probably comes down to things like what cables you have and stuff like that.
Marco:
So I'll see how that goes.
Marco:
I'm very curious to see when that arrives.
Marco:
The XDR, by the way, is not supposed to arrive until early next week, so I might have it in time for next week's show.
Marco:
I hope I do, but I might not.
Marco:
Anyway, but the LG passes through this thing just fine.
Marco:
The OWC thing, because it requires Big Sur 11.1 to be supported at all, there's a couple of odd things about it.
Marco:
This morning I was restoring the old Intel Mac Mini so I could send it back for trade-in.
Marco:
If it booted normally, the boot screen would be fine on it, but the restore...
Marco:
i guess app whatever the restore environment is called when you do a mac os system restore by holding down command r at startup that environment doesn't support it yet and so i like i had to stop using it for that environment and plug my monitor directly into my mac the mac mini um that i was restoring rather than going through this dock because like again like certain things support it but it's very new and certain things don't support it
John:
Doesn't that doc only work with Big Sur 11.1?
John:
Yes.
John:
We mentioned that last time, so maybe your recovery environment is not Big Sur 11.1.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I don't know what, if anything, ever updates the recovery environment on a system.
Marco:
Weird stuff like that that happens with it so far, but
Marco:
I also, it seemed, I had like, you know, after I said clamshell mode has been 100% perfect for me.
Casey:
Oh no.
Marco:
The very first day I was using this, which was I think Monday, it was a little bit buggy.
Marco:
Like weird stuff happened when I plugged and unplugged like for a few hours and then it was fine.
Marco:
Now, I had zero such bugs of that type on the CalDigit.
Marco:
And I've had a couple on this one on that first day.
Marco:
So I don't know if it's a coincidence.
Marco:
Maybe I would have had it either way.
Marco:
Maybe it's something else.
Marco:
The other weirdness I'm having with this, if you remember correctly, the issue I had with the CalDigit, it seemed fine in most ways, except that I couldn't get the built-in Ethernet port to connect at more than 100 megabits.
Marco:
And if you just told it to auto configure, it wouldn't connect at all.
Marco:
Like you could force it to 100 and it would connect.
Marco:
If you forced it to gigabit or auto connect, it wouldn't connect at all.
Marco:
This, the OWC Thunderbolt dock, also has an Ethernet port on it.
Marco:
And its Ethernet port also won't connect at gigabit.
Marco:
But its problems are different.
Marco:
So it will auto-connect.
Marco:
If it auto-senses, it will auto-connect.
Marco:
It will connect to only 100 megabits.
Marco:
If I try to configure it manually to gigabit,
Marco:
It will say, okay, and it will report that it is connected via gigabit through the system preferences hardware pane.
Marco:
But if I look on the Switch's control panel, like the Ubiquiti switch I'm plugging it into, the Switch says, nope, this port's 100 megabits right now.
Marco:
I don't know enough about that to know what could cause the disagreement between the device and the Switch as to what speed it's running at.
Marco:
But that's interesting.
Marco:
When I was home, I brought back with me two useful diagnostic things.
Marco:
I have the original Belkin USB-C Ethernet adapter that Apple started selling in 2016 when they went all USB-C on their laptops.
Marco:
So I have this Ethernet adapter.
Marco:
I also have the old Thunderbolt, I think Thunderbolt 1, Ethernet adapter that Apple started selling back in roughly 2012-ish, I guess?
Marco:
Yeah, 2012 was when the first Retina MacBook Pro came out, and that is when they dropped Ethernet off the high-end laptops.
Marco:
And so they started selling a Thunderbolt 1, I believe, a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter.
Marco:
I also have the Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter.
Marco:
So I brought back with me that Thunderbolt adapter because what I had heard is when the little USB-C one came out in 2016, I heard that it was kind of crappy and that it was slower in practice than the old Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter.
Marco:
And that if you have a Thunderbolt 3 slash USB-C Mac, that if you actually connected the old Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter through the 2-3 adapter, it was faster than using the native USB-C adapter.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I did actually try all of these things, and the Thunderbolt 1 adapter plugged in through the Thunderbolt 2-3 dongle works fantastically when plugged directly into my MacBook Air.
Marco:
plug it directly in it loads up instantly and it connects at full gigabit speed so this tells me it's not the cable it's not the jack it connects at full gigabit speed also when i plugged it into the mac mini between its built-in ethernet port full speed gigabit no problem both sides recognize at full speed my old iMac pro
Marco:
same thing it works full speed every time so i know it's not like the problem is not outside of the computer the the cable is fine the switch is fine the wiring that runs through the wall is fine like all that should be fine because many things can connect by gigabit and transfer just fine and you know running a speed test gets me right up approaching gigabit speed so i know the rest of it's okay the cal digit can't do gigabit
Marco:
And the OWC Thunderbolt Hub can't do gigabit on its own built-in port.
Marco:
So I don't know what's going on with Ethernet going over these Thunderbolt dock things.
Marco:
Something's up.
Marco:
I've tried all the things with the Caldigit where they tell you, like, oh, if you just reboot and reconfigure your Ethernet things with the Thunderbolt bridge port 1 and 2 or port 0 and 1, and then if you reset your SMC, then it will all of a sudden start working.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
First of all, I did all that and it didn't start working.
Marco:
But second of all, even if that would ever work, that's not a solution for me.
Marco:
Because the whole reason I want an Ethernet connection is because Ethernet is supposed to work every single time without hassle.
Marco:
And when I plug it directly into a computer with an Ethernet port, it does work perfectly and reliably.
Marco:
I don't know what it is with the things that are built into these Thunderbolt docks, but I can't get it to work through them reliably.
Marco:
And that, to me, is a pretty big value loss for these docks.
Marco:
So I'm a little disappointed in the Ethernet situation on all these Thunderbolt products so far, but I am making it work just fine.
Marco:
And the reality is my computer, where it usually sits, is about, I think, nine feet from the Wi-Fi router.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
granted there's a wall between them but it's so close that really like when i'm on wi-fi it's pretty rock solid so this may all be moot you know obviously when i have a desktop here like when i have the mac mini here i will wire it because it's best to wire stuff if you can if it's convenient to do so just to get it you know
Marco:
not only more reliable and usually a little bit faster but also just gets it off the wireless network to free up the you know radio bandwidth for other devices in the meantime if it ends up this wi-fi situation or the ethernet situation is too finicky through these docks and i have to use use wi-fi when i'm using the laptop that's that's fine too
John:
This is another reason why we always talk about Apple being beneficial for Apple to make a set of products that constitute a complete ecosystem.
John:
We talk about in the context of Wi-Fi docks usually, but things like this, if you're going to make all your laptops have all the same shape ports on them because you're like, well, you can connect anything to a Thunderbolt dock.
John:
All right, well, Marco so far has bought two of the, you know, most commonly recommended, most expensive things that ostensibly plug into one of those cool ports and ostensibly do a thing.
John:
And he's having trouble making both of them do a thing.
John:
And you would imagine that if Apple sold anything like this, something that you could connect a Mac laptop to that offers a bunch of ports,
John:
that their thing would work, that the Ethernet would work without being configured because they're Apple, right?
John:
The benefit of Apple making the whole thing, we talked about in the context of the M1, the great benefits of when you control the entire stack from top to bottom.
John:
We're not getting that benefit for laptops.
John:
In theory, they let you connect anything to it, but in practice, you have to find one that you can buy.
John:
And so you just buy and try, and know it's got a problem, and buy another one and try, and know it's got a problem.
John:
And most people aren't Marco and don't just keep buying products until they find one that works.
John:
Usually what happens is you buy one...
John:
you grit your teeth and buy a $100 or $200 Thunderbolt thing that's supposed to do what it says on the box and you can't get it to work and you Google and you get frustrated and maybe you're like, oh, am I going to go through the hassle of trying to return this and get my money back and go through their tech support?
John:
And just, that's not the experience people want to deal with.
John:
If Wi-Fi was like that, luckily it's not.
John:
Luckily you can buy third-party Wi-Fi things that Mac worked with without much of a problem.
John:
But, you know, I guess the Ethernet is more narrow now that everyone uses Wi-Fi.
John:
But I feel like,
John:
the promise of these laptops hinges on the product the promise of the things you connect to them and for many years and many generations now finding things that you can connect to them that forget about aesthetics forget about price forget about price performance they just simply do the job they're supposed to do reliably all the time has been a problem and so this is something that apple should address eventually
Marco:
because you know if you see them talk on stage about it or if you talk to them in person it's like well we've got these great thunderbolt ports what are you complaining about this this is what we're complaining about he's just trying to get ethernet to work it's not shouldn't be rocket science yeah and and i shouldn't i shouldn't need to be an expert in any of these areas like i shouldn't need to know about well oh well this one this one won't negotiate to gigabit speeds or maybe i have to reset my smc three times every time i want it to work like no that's not that's not a solution that's
Marco:
this is not yeah the whole point of you know having and this is why ultimately this is why i complain about having like multiple having too few ports on the laptops this is why i like desktops whenever i have like a stationary workstation they they tend to work better like when you when you don't need these extra adapters and peripherals and docks and hubs and dongles things tend to work better
Marco:
Many people are totally fine and they're like, hey, what's the big deal?
Marco:
I do this.
Marco:
I use these kind of things and they work most of the time.
Marco:
And to me, there's a massive difference between something that works most of the time and something that works all the time.
Marco:
And I don't have a lot of tolerance in my life for things that work most of the time when there are options that work all the time in that same solution, like in that same role that there is something I can do to get full working Ethernet with no tricks and no jumping through hoops and working at full time at full speed every time.
Marco:
So I know it's possible.
Marco:
I've had it for years.
Marco:
And so, you know, when when something like this comes out and it's like, oh, well, this it's fine as long as you, you know, jump through hoops every so often.
Marco:
Like, no, that's that's not that's not a solution.
Marco:
Anyway, I do want to derail the show slightly.
Marco:
I'm going to go rogue and insert a rogue ask ATP question right here in the show.
Casey:
Oh, this is John's favorite.
Casey:
Carry on.
John:
We've got a lot of Ask ATV backlogs, so I'm actually happy for you to pull one of them out of there.
John:
Oh, great.
John:
Reduce the backlog.
Marco:
So this came in from listener Brian a few days back.
Marco:
Brian asks, how does Marco sell his unwanted computers?
Marco:
He's mentioned in a few episodes that he sells them, and I'm wondering if he uses something like eBay, Craigslist, or some other networking tool to find buyers.
Marco:
Is it just word of mouth and people Marco personally knows who are in the market?
Marco:
I'm asking because I have a bunch of computers and related equipment I'd like to get rid of, but I'm tired of being scammed by bad buyers on eBay and don't really want to go to the hassle of selling on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
So I wanted to address this because I just sold stuff and I have a lot more stuff I want to sell.
Marco:
And a lot of people are going through this of like, oh, crap, the new M1 Macs are out and they're awesome.
Marco:
How do I sell my old Intel stuff and that way I can buy the new M1 stuff?
Marco:
And so I get this question a lot because people see me saying on Twitter, hey, anybody want this?
Marco:
And then it's gone in like 10 minutes.
Marco:
So I figured I'd share what I could here.
Marco:
This is a very common problem of not wanting to deal with eBay or Craigslist or Facebook.
Marco:
Those are all incredibly messy.
Marco:
It is by far the messiest way to sell stuff.
Marco:
But the good thing about going through something like eBay...
Marco:
is that if you have something that's somewhat specialized... You've seen me on Twitter sell computers just fine.
Marco:
I can sell Apple laptops to Apple fans that follow me fairly easily.
Marco:
I'll tell you how in a second, but that's...
Marco:
That's the easy part.
Marco:
What you don't see is me selling more obscure things or I'll try and I usually fail.
Marco:
So something like, you know, I wanted to sell a while back.
Marco:
I had this pair of Rode wireless lavalier microphones with like, you know, the little wireless belt packs and the wireless receivers and everything.
Marco:
And I tried to sell it and I just never got any takers on it like because it's specialized gear.
Marco:
And even though I have a decent number of followers on Twitter where I was trying to sell it, I don't have enough people who are looking for that kind of specialized gear.
Marco:
And so you can kind of tailor how you're selling things, where you're trying to go based on how specialized, how niche is what I'm trying to sell.
Marco:
And if it's something that's fairly specialized, eBay is basically the only game in town because eBay will get you the highest chance to sell the most obscure or specialized or relatively unwanted things.
Marco:
Somebody will buy it on eBay.
Marco:
And then if you have access to more people and if something is more broadly applicable, then you have more options on how to sell that.
Marco:
So what I usually do is...
Marco:
My main interest is in getting something sold as easily off to me as possible.
Marco:
I don't want to deal with anything.
Marco:
I don't want to deal with people like, you know, eBay is the worst.
Marco:
Like, you know, people do get sellers get ripped off on eBay all the time.
Marco:
And, and sell, if you are going on, going to eBay to like sell a laptop, you are taking a risk.
Marco:
Like the, the buyer could rip you off in various ways that there's lots of scam buyers, uh, especially for things like laptops on eBay.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And so it's very, very risky.
Marco:
I would suggest if you want to sell something like a laptop,
Marco:
consider instead doing either apple trade-in or something like a mac be an offer or like one of those various sites that buys let that buys like used apple computers as their business like because what's great about that like you will never get the best price doing that uh at least not usually
Marco:
Oh, and by the way, to judge what something's actually worth, this is another use of eBay.
Marco:
Go to eBay, look at completed items, but look at sold completed items.
Marco:
There's a separate checkbox on the search page for sold items.
Marco:
Because what you want to see is, what is this thing actually sold for recently?
Marco:
What I usually do when I'm trying to sell something is either go through one of those brokers like Apple or Mac Mean Offer or whatever, and just accept that they're going to be a pretty low price.
Marco:
Or see whatever things are going for on eBay and offer it on Twitter for like 20% less than that.
Marco:
And usually people will jump on that soon enough if there's a market for it at all.
Marco:
Now, granted, this is not available to most people.
Marco:
The Twitter option is not available to most people.
Marco:
And honestly, you're not missing out on a whole bunch.
Marco:
Twitter is awful.
Marco:
But the other options are, again, either less money for doing basically the trade-it-into-the-dealer route.
Marco:
These are the same problems when you have to sell a car.
Marco:
If you ever sold a used car, it's exactly the same trade-offs.
Marco:
You can trade it into a dealer or a bulk buying company, and they won't give you a very good price.
Marco:
But the advantage of those things is it's almost no hassle, there's almost no risk, and it's really easy.
Marco:
Like right now, I sold this Mac Mini back to Apple.
Marco:
I probably could have gotten maybe a few hundred dollars more if I would have sold it privately.
Marco:
But it would take much more work, and I'd be taking a risk that the buyer might scam me.
Marco:
And so I actually might not make that much more.
Marco:
Or the amount of time that I would have to spend...
Marco:
dealing with that like putting it up for sale dealing with any inquiries shipping it packing you know all that stuff that time is all valuable to me and so in many in many cases i might actually just choose the cheaper trade-in price so
Marco:
uh, from, you know, Apple or whatever, because it just, it saves you the trouble.
Marco:
You know, again, it's just like, it's just like when you have a car, when you trade it into the dealer, cause you don't want to deal with people, you make less off it, but it is often better in the long run for you.
Marco:
And finally, better than selling it at all.
Marco:
is if you don't need the money for it that much, and if there's someone in your family who needs a computer or a phone or whatever, just give it to them.
Marco:
And you can be the person in your family who gives gently used computers to people who really need new ones but never buy them themselves.
Marco:
So I do that with a lot of my stuff.
Marco:
My family is a family of hand-me-downs.
Marco:
Not Tiff, because she wouldn't let that fly, but it's a family...
Marco:
you know like you know extended family this is kind of a rambling way of saying like there's lots of different ways to sell stuff ebay is best if you want the highest price but are willing to take the most risk and do the most work or if you have very specialized stuff selling it to people you know is generally not recommended but um you know give it giving it away to people you know is okay
Marco:
And if you want something very low effort and low risk, but it'll also give you kind of a low price, that's when you do things like trading into Apple or the various other sites that buy stuff or let you trade stuff in.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Now, making websites, this used to be a really interesting thing for me.
Marco:
I used to want to do it all the time.
Marco:
These days, I really don't want to do it unless I really have to.
Marco:
And when I want to make a really great site...
Marco:
I know that the best way for me to do that to be to make an incredible site as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible to just get something up there that then looks amazing and has amazing functionality and amazing design and looks like I spent a lot of time on it is to go to Squarespace.
Marco:
Because Squarespace sites are so easy to make, no matter what your skill level is.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You start with their amazing templates, and you can customize them to whatever you want them to be.
Marco:
They're always adding more templates.
Marco:
They keep things fresh, and it looks good on any device, of course, any size screen.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They take care of all of that for you.
Marco:
If you need any help, they have great support as well, which I personally have never needed to use it because it's just so easy to use Squarespace, but it's really nice if you're making a website for somebody else, which I do sometimes, then you can set it up on Squarespace and then hand it off to that other person, and then when they need help, they can ask Squarespace instead of you down the road.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
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:
So I mentioned last week that I had two Christmas gifts I wanted to talk about.
Marco:
One of them was the VR headset, the Oculus Quest 2 that I got for the family.
Marco:
I now want to talk about a gift that my wonderful wife got for me.
Marco:
Now, this...
Marco:
i would never if you would have gone back and told me of five years ago that this is actually a gift that i would want and that somebody would get for me not as a joke and that i would actually love and use i would be shocked but here we are tiff got for me for christmas a gaming pc
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Sounds like one of those gifts that you get for someone that's really kind of a gift for yourself.
John:
She got you a bowling ball.
John:
She did.
John:
She got you a bowling ball.
Marco:
Yeah, it's his home run.
Marco:
So a couple years back, maybe a year, year and a half ago, Tiff got a gaming PC.
Marco:
She was getting into certain PC games, and as you know, John, playing games on Macs is painful.
Marco:
So when Tiff needed a gaming PC,
Marco:
She went and got a real gaming PC and notably chose to get a laptop, a gaming laptop from the wonderful Razer with a Z company.
Marco:
Razer.
Marco:
So she had a Razer gaming laptop, a 15 inch Razer.
Marco:
whatever the Razer gaming laptop that's 15 inches is called that was for sale about a year ago.
Marco:
And I made fun of her relentlessly because of all the crazy like RGB keyboard lighting things that it could do.
Marco:
It does a lot of ridiculous stuff.
Marco:
It's like totally over the top with like RGB and everything.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Razer is actually, from what I understand and from our experiences with it, it's actually a pretty decent PC maker and they seem to do things with a with the RGB stuff aside, with a higher degree of taste than what I usually see from PC gaming hardware.
John:
That is not what I would have thought.
John:
I mean, I guess everything's relative, but I would not say that Razer is a conservative brand when it comes to
John:
uh stylized gamer type stuff it's not the most extreme but it is also not very tame there's lots of black and neon colors and jagged edges and a lot of razor mice that look like someone took a lump of coal and shattered it and said here's your mouse not but see that style doesn't really carry into the laptops though the laptops are actually pretty boring black slabs for the most part and they're pretty nicely made
John:
With neon lights that come through the keyboard and, you know, and a green logo on the cover and whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, so Tiff's had this gaming PC, and when the family started playing Minecraft a lot, which started really in full-blown strength this past spring...
Marco:
Tiff played mostly on the Nintendo Switch.
Marco:
Adam played mostly on his iPad.
Marco:
And at some point in the spring, I decided I need to play Minecraft because this is what my family is doing.
Marco:
This is what my son's really into.
Marco:
I want to be able to, you know, relate to my son and know what he's talking about and spend time with him.
Marco:
And, you know, other parents, you know, they maybe like throw a ball with their kid or, you know, like whatever their kid wants to do, the parent tries to do it with them.
Marco:
Well, my kid wants to play Minecraft all day, so damn it, I'm going to play Minecraft all day.
Marco:
So I learned how to play.
Marco:
And Tiff and Adam vowed to teach me.
Marco:
The device that was left for me to play on was Tiff's gaming PC.
Marco:
And she let me use it because she also knew that I was comfortable with keyboard and mouse for that kind of open-world...
Marco:
and you know crafty kind of game like she knew i was comfortable with that and so i said great i would love to learn on that that became basically my family minecraft device all year the entire year every single time that pc woke up
Marco:
And it said, hey, where's Tiff?
Marco:
And it's looking around for Tiff using the Windows Face ID thing.
Marco:
It's looking around saying, hey, Tiff, where are you, Tiff?
Marco:
And every time it was me, and I had to type in the password manually, and I never changed it over to, like, mine.
Marco:
You know, it's still hers.
Marco:
You know, she would graciously let me do it.
Marco:
But Tiff wants her gaming PC back.
Marco:
And so that entire time I was using it, you know, it was, it was being used and that's nice.
Marco:
I was getting used to it.
Marco:
I was really enjoying playing Minecraft, uh, with the family and occasionally by myself.
Marco:
And I started thinking, you know, maybe I, maybe I want to try the new flight simulator or maybe I want to play, you know, whatever new sim cities or, or city skylines, you know, like maybe I want to try some of these other games.
Marco:
Maybe I want to try it in songs with my old games.
Marco:
I used to like, and I didn't really want to do it cause it wasn't my computer.
Marco:
Tiff, sensing this and wanting her gaming PC back, decided as a Christmas gift she was going to get me a gaming PC.
Marco:
And she kind of hinted like, well, if you were going to get one, what would you get?
Marco:
And, you know, I looked at the options.
Marco:
The funny thing is, like, the laptop hardware world has not really changed much since she bought hers.
Marco:
So the one I got is almost identical to hers.
Marco:
The main difference is when I looked at the specs, I saw that there was a slightly higher end trim level that came with an OLED 4K touchscreen.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
And I thought, okay, 4K on a laptop, on a PC laptop, I don't really need.
Marco:
A touchscreen, I'm a little curious about, but I probably wouldn't use.
Marco:
But OLED, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Marco:
because we frequently play in a room that has a lot of sunlight coming into it during the day.
Marco:
And that makes it hard for me to do anything in dark areas in the game on TIFF's LCD gaming PC, because it's, I mean, look, it's not the best LCD in the world.
Marco:
These aren't laptop, these aren't Apple quality laptop displays that Razer's using on their LCDs.
Marco:
So, you know, it's not great for, you know, like dark scene detail, but
Marco:
in a sunny room.
Marco:
I would have to, like, not do my quest in the nether in Minecraft until nighttime because I couldn't see it during the day.
Marco:
And I thought, well, OLED could be better for that because OLED's really good at, you know, dark detail and being super bright in the day and stuff.
Marco:
So let me try that.
Marco:
Let me see, like, you know, hey, if there's an OLED option, I want to try that.
John:
OLED is actually the opposite when it comes to televisions because it can't get as bright.
John:
So the advice for TVs is if you have a sunny room, get an LED backlit LCD television because OLED can't become bright enough to overwhelm it.
John:
But it sounds like what your problem was is, especially on like cheap LCDs where...
John:
It's not like you couldn't make the bright parts bright enough.
John:
It's that the dark parts, I'm assuming you get glare on the screen and the screen looks like it's gray because the sort of matte finish on the screen or whatever, the light is reflecting off of it.
John:
And so you have two problems.
John:
One is, can I see the bright parts?
John:
But two is, do the black parts suddenly look really light gray because it's catching light?
John:
So the OLED, with its actual black blacks, is going to help there.
John:
And hopefully on what I assume is a small laptop screen size, like it's not a 40-inch laptop,
Marco:
hopefully at a small screen size the oled can get bright enough to compete with the sunlight and and the reason i wasn't looking i wasn't considering desktop options here for lots of reasons i mean number one is like like when tiff when tiff got hers i first initially thought like it's a it's going to be a laptop you know a laptop gpu how good could that really be for for you know pc gaming and
Marco:
And the answer was pretty damn good.
Marco:
Like, it could do a lot.
Marco:
Especially, you know, we're not playing incredibly demanding games here.
John:
You're playing Minecraft.
John:
Try Microsoft Flight Simulator on it in 4K.
John:
You'll bring it to its knees.
Marco:
Yeah, well, hold on, sir.
Marco:
I'll get there.
Marco:
So, you know, I figured, like, we don't need the massive, you know, desktop cards.
Marco:
Also, trying to buy a high-end desktop GPU right now is not so easy.
Marco:
Also, you know, a desktop is a much bigger ordeal.
Marco:
Not only is it much larger physically, but then you need a monitor that you can plug into it.
Marco:
And I don't have a spare... I'm not going to plug the LG into it.
Marco:
I don't have, like, you know...
Marco:
extra monitors lying around i don't want to set up a whole desk station for a desktop because this is not something that i'm that i'm doing like super seriously all the time this is something that i do sometimes for fun with my family a laptop is actually perfect for this if it can be anywhere near good enough and these laptops so they both so they're 15 inch models they both have the i guess laptop version of the 2080
Marco:
Max Q, whatever.
Marco:
It's whatever the best 2080 is that Razer offers.
Marco:
That's what I have.
Marco:
And it's actually really good.
Marco:
I don't know what a desktop could get me, but I'm guessing this is getting me at least 50% of what our desktop is getting me like in like high end GPU frame rate stuff on the highest settings and everything.
Marco:
And that's great for me for, for a laptop.
Marco:
Like it's fantastic.
Marco:
I am extremely happy with the performance this gets for my needs and considering that it's in a laptop.
Marco:
and not a particularly large laptop, but, you know, it's, it's a 15 inch.
Marco:
It's, you know, it's a little heavy.
Marco:
It's not too thick.
Marco:
It's, you know, it's, it's a 15 inch laptop.
Marco:
It doesn't feel, you know, too, too ridiculous for that size class.
Marco:
The fan is not super loud.
Marco:
Like, you know, it spins up.
Marco:
You hear it when you're playing games, but it's not like a jet engine or anything.
Marco:
It's not like disturbing.
Marco:
So it's, it's actually a really good balance.
Marco:
And this is why when Tiff kind of floated the idea of whether I wanted mine, I basically said like, yeah, get me yours with the OLED screen.
Marco:
because i've been playing on it for a year and it's been totally great as a laptop like it really does shock me how good it is and that's mostly what we need you know i use an external mouse i use the razor um the mamba wireless these names and it's just a basically you know two button thing i i could even use a more basic one i already killed one by right clicking too much i guess or too hard i don't know oh neat yeah so
Marco:
I killed a mouse over about eight months of Minecraft.
Marco:
I killed the right mouse button.
Marco:
So anyway, and I know as these things go, I could have gotten better bang for the buck if I built a desktop myself.
Marco:
I could have gotten higher frame rates or lower temperatures or whatever if I built a whole desktop.
Marco:
And I used to build desktops.
Marco:
I know that.
Marco:
I used to really enjoy that.
Marco:
But right now, I'm at a point in my life where I wouldn't really enjoy that.
Marco:
And I'm very happy to have the...
Marco:
self-contained complete thing of a laptop and not as a deal with a whole bunch of stuff so anyway all that aside yeah i'm very happy with this with this hardware um so actually using windows and like having to set it up and make my own user account and sign into the microsoft store and all you know all this crazy stuff that was actually a really interesting experience because i have not used windows before
Marco:
really much at all since windows xp like that's that was the last version i really used for more than you know trivial things here or there and so a lot of this stuff is pretty new to me for the most part i i was pretty happy with like the windows setup process you know this is running i guess but what is windows 10 is the latest version whatever it is it wasn't as bad as i thought it would be
Marco:
Certain things have gotten better.
Marco:
Certain things haven't.
Marco:
Certain things are just papered over from the olden days, and they're worse.
Marco:
They're just covered up.
Marco:
But it really wasn't that bad.
Marco:
It was totally – so it was interesting because I was basically approaching it almost the way like a regular non-technical person would approach it because I don't know anything about Windows anymore.
Marco:
again like the last version i used was like you know 15 20 years old so you know it's it's been a while and the way things are done now is a little bit different i actually did have to kind of just like plow through and figure stuff out and it really gave me some i think useful perspective that i haven't had in a long time of like you know what is windows like what is it like to use it what is it like to try to get stuff done on windows um
Marco:
One thing that made it very, very easy to get set up there is that Dropbox, of course, runs on Windows, but also so does 1Password.
Marco:
That made it so much easier to set up my stuff there.
Marco:
Obviously, I'm not going to move my entire computing life onto Windows.
Marco:
Not only would most of it not be compatible, but this is a gaming PC.
Marco:
That's what it's for.
Marco:
So I'm not going to move over a bunch of stuff.
Marco:
But it was nice to be able to...
Marco:
set up one password in Dropbox and be able to transfer stuff back and forth, you know, be able to log into the right accounts at the right times with, you know, all the nice big, long, secure passwords, stuff like that.
Marco:
It was actually really nice and surprisingly easy to get those things running and working.
Marco:
One of the biggest things that I hit was I really missed AirDrop.
Marco:
oh yeah we had i had the you know the the old pc you know i had tiff's pc and there there were a bunch of like minecraft data files that i wanted to move from tiff's pc to my new pc and like all right i have a laptop here four inches away i have another laptop almost just like it how do i move files from this to that and
Marco:
And I could not figure out, like, I assume there was some kind of network way to do it.
Marco:
Just use SCP.
John:
Windows, you may not know this, but Windows has a Linux subsystem now.
Casey:
You can use SMB or, you know, that's... Type command K in the Finder, right?
Casey:
Wasn't...
Casey:
Isn't SMB a Microsoft protocol?
John:
Yes, yes.
John:
I was just thinking that you were using Dropbox to sync files.
John:
It's so strange that you have these two computers that are in the same house on the same network, and the way you're transferring files is by passing them to a third-party company that stores them in a data center somewhere, and then they come back to the other computer.
John:
And they both speak SMB.
John:
It's the default in macOS, and it's what Windows has used forever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
if you knew the right incantations you could simply network the two together via smb and transfer files but because you didn't right yeah windows is like ffmpeg if you know the right incantation it can do a lot wow i mean i bet you can do it in my computer somewhere or whatever the hell but i i don't know either because my computer that i use windows on is the same is my computer so i never have to transfer the files anywhere they're all either there or they're not
Marco:
I couldn't figure out how to do it in any reasonable way, and so I ended up doing it the most basic way possible.
Marco:
I had an SD card.
Marco:
Meanwhile, Tiff's computer doesn't have an SD card slot.
Marco:
Mine does, but
Marco:
And so I had to use my MacBook USB-C SD card dongle, plug the SD card into the old computer, copy the files onto it like a giant floppy disk, unplug it, plug it into mine, copy them off.
Marco:
You didn't have a USB thumb drive?
Marco:
No, what year is this?
John:
You gotta have thumb drives.
John:
Everyone's got thumb drives.
Marco:
I was never a thumb drive person.
Marco:
I've had them here and there that were given to me by freebies from conferences and stuff.
Marco:
But I never used them.
Marco:
I never got into that lifestyle.
Marco:
Because when they first were coming around, I was very much still a CD-burning person.
Marco:
And then in their later days, I would just use the internet to transfer stuff everywhere.
Marco:
And then eventually, SD cards got so cheap that that became a reasonable way to do it as well.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
So after I eventually got my file structured over, I did get to play games and I learned why PC gamers don't like 4K screens.
John:
Oh no.
John:
It's a lot of pixels.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So first of all, the OLED is amazing looking.
Marco:
Like it is so, it looks so awesome.
Marco:
I, I was just blown away.
Marco:
How much better than,
Marco:
the games look on the OLED compared to on the fairly mediocre LCD that the other one has.
Marco:
Uh, it's, it's a massive upgrade in, in like just color, contrast, brightness.
Marco:
Um, it has the glossy finish instead of, because it's, it's duct screen has the glossy finish instead of the like matte thing.
Marco:
And so it looks, you know, just sharper and brighter.
Marco:
It looks amazing.
Marco:
And when you run the games at 4k, you,
Marco:
they look amazing too uh it's like it it's like upgrading to retina you know and and even in my blocky world of minecraft the edges are all really sharp now wow you know every cube has a bunch of edges it looks amazing uh and i'm very happy with it however when you're running games at 4k it makes it harder for the gpu to drive them quite a bit harder actually um
Marco:
The issue I had was when I started playing Minecraft, you know, it looked fantastic.
Marco:
But I noticed that when I would move the mouse to move myself or to look, it would like lag severely to the point.
Marco:
It was like delayed input almost to the point where it almost gave me motion sickness.
Marco:
Just like because it was like, you know, I would move the mouse and it would kind of go over.
Marco:
I had to dive into the world.
Marco:
of trying to debug Minecraft issues on Windows via web search.
Casey:
And you live to tell the tale.
Marco:
I do not recommend going into this world.
Marco:
It's everything you think it would be.
Marco:
It's a whole bunch of, like, you know, forum posts from eight years ago from total idiots who don't know what they're talking about, or at least their information is extremely outdated.
Marco:
A whole bunch of YouTube videos that are the only information about Minecraft that's any good that you would watch, and it's, you know...
Marco:
Hey guys, so if you're having performance problems on my, you know, it's just like, oh God, just get to the point.
Marco:
It was awful trying to figure this out.
Marco:
And what they recommended once I got through all the, hey guys, was
Marco:
you know your your windows gamer greatest hits so first upgrade your video drivers okay how do i do that i knew how to do it 15 years ago how do i do it now i have this nvidia control panel that i have to log into because downloading video drivers now requires a name and an email address and a whole account like i had to tell nvidia what my birthday was i'm like you gotta be kidding me like what
John:
Those are the best.
John:
The video card manufacturers install so much software on Windows.
John:
It's like we need an entire... I know there's a whole bunch of screens in Windows and the control panels and the display settings where you think you can control your video card, but you have no idea.
John:
Here is an entire AMD, ATI, NVIDIA app that includes...
Marco:
screen capture ability and the ability to change features on your video card with scary warnings next to them telling you you can destroy your screen if you do it it's like what what i just want to change the resolution and it's just it's terrifying i was a little a little concerned about and i might still be concerned um about uh oled burn-in on a pc like you know for games that's obviously a pretty big concern my my oled tv back home is indeed permanently burned in with the minecraft heart bar
Marco:
because tiff was playing it on the switch on that tv for the entire quarantine so you know that's that burn is still there we saw it last week it's still there and so i was worried about that but and i noticed one thing that um that i assumed the built-in razor software that came pre-installed on this or something that is pre-installed on this i noticed that no matter what i set it to if you set the start bar to like auto hide and show like auto raise and lower when you just like you're just like dock auto hiding
Marco:
if you set it to not auto hide and to always be there sometime later that day, it will reset itself to auto hide.
Marco:
Neat.
Marco:
So I assume that some kind of, you know, stock software is permanently just going to overwrite that setting over and over again to avoid burning in the start bar to the screen.
Casey:
So anyway, interesting.
Marco:
So back to my, you know, my Minecraft thing.
Marco:
So I'm like looking on, I upgrade the graphics drivers and I try and everyone's like, oh, well, actually, if you have to, you know, enable vSync or disable vSync and just all this crap.
Marco:
And it didn't make sense to me.
Marco:
Like, why would I like, why would I want to turn vSync off?
John:
to fix a performance problem that seems like a bad idea because then it doesn't hold your frame it starts drawing as soon as it's ready even if the bottom half of the screen is still a previous frame so it's pc gamers love to say tearing i don't mind tearing just give me that next frame as soon as it's ready and i think it's ridiculous too i always turn on v-sync but if you want the absolute maximum pc gamers just want to see the fps number go up so if you want the absolute maximum fps number
Marco:
screen tearing who cares and that's that's solved by later technologies but if you're watching older videos and you see these pc gamers saying always turn off vsync because you get one more frame per second i just can't get on that page yeah so anyway i did eventually fix it the fix was to not only it was basically do the opposite of whatever i said not only force vsync on and
Marco:
in the nvidia control utility thing because the other problem is like minecraft we mostly play the bedrock edition that way we can play with the switch and the ipad and the family and the bedrock edition doesn't have a lot of graphical controls it it runs itself at whatever resolution windows is currently running at so the full 4k and
Marco:
And it doesn't have any built-in, like, you know, disable VSync or anything like that.
Marco:
But NVIDIA's giant bloated control panel utility thing does have a way to say either for specific games or for everything, force these settings to override whatever the game says.
Marco:
And so I was able to force VSync on in that way.
Marco:
And then I also, some forum post recommended that you limit the frame rate, like you actually impose a frame rate limit to 60 because the screen refresh rate anyway.
Marco:
And doing those two things, 60 frames a second lock and V-Sync forced on,
Marco:
fix the problem because the gpu was trying to render a billion frames a second and it was doing it was overloading something or other and it was causing input lag basically and that instantly fixed the problem well you're really sacrificing your responsiveness and pv minecraft pvp by locking to 60 i just want you to know that
John:
yeah right because for a 38 year old dad playing minecraft the real limitation is that extra what is it 16 milliseconds of it of my my reaction time right you really what you want for is the game to be to be computing faster that's slightly faster than your refresh because that will help reduce uh your you know your input lag and the peakers advantage and it's really important to you in minecraft i'm sure
Marco:
yeah oh yeah totally so anyway i got it working it was great it looks incredible and i was just playing it uh yesterday with with adam and it's just it's i'm having so much fun with it um i thought it was funny that within an hour of setting up my gaming pc i hit a problem that required diving into video drivers and tweaking my gpu settings and it's like
Marco:
you gotta be kidding me it's like it's still windows it's still gaming it's still like all the crap that you have to put up with lots of it's all still there i you know that stuff was all there 20 years ago i thought maybe by now we would have gotten past some of it and no we haven't other otherwise um i i tried the cool rtx ray tracing mode of minecraft
Marco:
I thought it would be a setting you turn on and it ends up you can only do it on certain maps that NVIDIA made.
Marco:
I assume maybe they baked in the light textures or whatever.
Marco:
Whatever sun position the map starts in, it just stays there forever.
Marco:
You don't have the day-night cycle that you usually do.
Marco:
I'm playing one where it's a sunset map and it's at dusk and it looks really cool.
Marco:
The whole idea that...
Marco:
This computer can do real-time ray tracing.
Marco:
That, as a casual observer to this world, but as enough of a geek to know what ray tracing is, I'm sure they're doing all sorts of hacks to reduce the amount of work they have to do, but my god, that's incredible.
Marco:
Because I remember, like, back, for my first computer, it was a 486, and
Marco:
And I downloaded some ray tracing renderer program.
Marco:
And I remember setting up a scene and hitting render.
Marco:
You'd have to let it go overnight to render a frame.
Marco:
One!
Marco:
Just to render a still picture.
Marco:
With ray tracing lighting, this program had to run all night long for one picture.
Marco:
And the idea that I can play this full 3D game...
Marco:
With live ray tracing.
Marco:
And again, I'm sure there's tricks and hacks and work reductions in place here.
John:
It is very asterisk asterisk on that.
John:
Yes, it's not.
John:
It's a little bit of extra ray tracing special sauce thrown on top of a raster engine.
Marco:
Still, it looked amazing.
Marco:
And to see all those real-time lighting effects and everything...
Marco:
my god even though like playing it as minecraft that way is really weird because you know things like torches don't really work because they generate shadows and so like you need way more torches than before um so it's you know as as like a fun game playing thing it's not so fun because it makes a lot of things about the game not work as well because the game wasn't designed for that but as
Marco:
as an amazing tech demo, I was so happy to see it.
Marco:
It made me almost giddy.
Marco:
Just like, wow, I can't believe hardware is so advanced that it can do this these days.
Marco:
It really was incredible.
Marco:
I also, in addition to playing a 10-year-old game, I tried to play a whole bunch of 20-year-old games.
Casey:
Of course.
Yeah.
Marco:
um and by the way yes i know everybody i know there's a whole bunch of new games i should be playing and i'll get there in time really i will maybe maybe not but um ultimately if all i ever play on this is minecraft it's worth it because we play that much minecraft as a family and i get that much enjoyment out of it but anyway i also thought hey there's all these old games from you know my old pc days that i would love to play let's see how many of them work it was not as many as i would have guessed
Marco:
And the great thing is, you know, you can go on Steam or GOG and download a lot of these old games for like two dollars, like totally legally.
Marco:
You know, just they're just really cheap because they're so old.
Marco:
But it was I had a lot of issues like I couldn't get Total Annihilation, which is my favorite game like of all time back then.
Marco:
I couldn't get Total Annihilation to work correctly like it works a little, but it has some issues that make it pretty hard to play.
John:
The best way to play old games like that is the same way you play them on a Mac or an Intel Mac.
John:
VMs, virtual machines.
John:
Yeah, I was going to ask about that.
John:
Once you get to a certain age and there's no Steam version or the GOG version is weird, just do the thing.
John:
Get a VM, put Windows 95 on it and go to town and that will work and you won't have any performance problems.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I think I might do that because it seemed like they were not working for just software glitchy reasons.
Marco:
These games that were... It's funny, the ones that... In the concept of the game rendering engine thing, if the game uses what used to be called a full screen mode, the game takes over the screen and sets the screen to whatever resolution the game wants to set it to.
Marco:
Anything that works that way...
Marco:
mostly worked fine still.
Marco:
The problem is games that would render basically as a window and let windows render over them sometimes or just take whatever resolution the PC ran at.
Marco:
Those games often seem to not work as well.
Marco:
Also, just certain games that were just even very extra old.
Marco:
I tried running the very first version of Worms, which is a DOS game, but I like it better than many of the newer ones.
Marco:
Worms, man, talk about losing the franchise.
Marco:
Worms started out so good, and I'd say after about Worms World Party or so, really lost its way.
Marco:
It went 3D, which was terrible, and then after 3D, it came back to 2D and just had all this mania on screen constantly.
Marco:
It's not a good scene, but old Worms was really fun.
Marco:
So I wanted to play some of those old games and couldn't get a lot of those to work.
Marco:
As I mentioned, TA had issues.
Marco:
SimCity 3000 and 4 both work great.
Marco:
I don't really enjoy 4 that much, but I do enjoy SimCity 3000.
Marco:
So that was kind of fun.
Marco:
As Casey knows, I was always a big fan, as he was, of Transport Tycoon.
Marco:
And of course... There it is.
Marco:
Of course, OpenTTD works great, but it also works great on Macs and Linux.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I did play a little bit of Transport Tycoon, but again, I could have done that on my Mac.
Marco:
One thing that was a nice surprise is this wonderful game that I love a lot that I believe was once named the best game nobody played of 2002, Moonbase Commander.
Marco:
This is, it's exactly what the award sounds like.
Marco:
It's a game that was like pretty under the radar, didn't sell a lot of copies.
Marco:
My friend found it in a discount bin at like a software store back when those were a thing for like five bucks.
Marco:
And
Marco:
we played it and it's actually a really good game it's it's a turn-based kind of top-down artillery um game and it's i love that game it's so much fun i installed that i played a little bit adam saw me play that he got super into it and then the whole rest of the trip you know in the same way that i had taken over tips gaming pc the year before adam had taken over my gaming pc to play moon base commander and
Marco:
It was a wonderful experience to have all this old nostalgia that was so readily available, ran so well, obviously.
Marco:
Moonbase Commander is a DirectX 8 game, and even that was a stretch only to make the little ripple effect with a pixel shader.
Marco:
um anyway so had a lot of fun it was a it was a wonderful present it was a wonderful diversion i think christmas is a is a great time for video gaming for people who don't play a lot of games the rest of the year because like you know you kind of you don't have a lot else to do everyone's kind of home you get your family together it could be like a fun thing
Marco:
Um, so I had a lot of fun and, uh, haven't done a lot of the old games since I got back, but we have played Minecraft on it and it's, it runs it perfectly.
Marco:
And it's, again, the screen is awesome.
Marco:
Haven't touched the touch screen once, at least not, not, you know, not as an input method.
Marco:
I have found that, uh, whenever I want to like brush a piece of dust off the screen, it interprets that as a touch.
Marco:
So I think Gruber might be right about touch screens.
Yeah.
Marco:
now that now that i have one i'm like oh yeah i don't i don't i mean granted i'm not using it to get any work done so i'm not like you know browsing documents or anything but i yeah i guess i don't really actually need touchscreens on my laptop turns out otherwise like it's a fantastic piece of hardware it is exactly what i want and need for my very specific and limited and casual gaming needs um
Marco:
And it's great.
Marco:
And it's a great gift.
Marco:
And I never would have guessed in a million years that I would have a gaming laptop.
Marco:
But here we are.
Marco:
And I'm really happy with it.
Casey:
If it makes you happy, it makes you happy.
Casey:
What about Flight Simulator?
Marco:
Oh, I haven't actually installed it yet, but that's next on my list.
Marco:
The new one where you can fly around like the real world maps.
John:
Because that's the that's the new PC gaming crusher in terms of like no matter how big a gaming PC you have, you can turn the settings up high enough to make your computer cry.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And look, I don't care.
Marco:
Like, I know I'm not going to run everything at max.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
I actually don't care about flight simulation at all.
Marco:
I just think it would be cool to fly through these real places in the world with that map data.
Marco:
Like, that's what I want to do.
Marco:
It's not about like, I don't care about the planes.
John:
It's all about the weather effects.
John:
The plane models are amazing.
John:
And I think you'll be impressed by especially the interior, but also the exterior of the planes.
John:
They do look amazing.
John:
But the weather effects they put into this game, which I think are also driven by real time stuff, but they look amazing.
John:
So you'll be able to appreciate that at least, even if it's at a slower frame rate.
John:
yeah i almost bought it but it's like there's like six different editions and i don't i'm like i don't know what edition i need so i just gave up and didn't buy anything i figured i researched it later you can get destiny for that gaming bc just fyi oh god or i could not there it is you can use your fancy razor gaming mouse for a game where it might actually have some actual influence
Marco:
This is the thing.
Marco:
Everyone who's going to recommend that I check out certain games, I really appreciate that.
Marco:
Here's the thing, though.
Marco:
I really have no interest in first-person shooters.
Marco:
I just don't.
Marco:
I know, but you will.
John:
As soon as Adam switches from Minecraft to Fortnite, which is coming sooner than you think, you better start honing those skills if you want to keep playing with them.
Marco:
I have like, you know, political opinions about it being kind of a poor taste to play shooting games.
Marco:
Uh, but I, I just, I don't care.
Marco:
Like I, I did like when I was a teenager and a young adult, I didn't play lots of first person shooters and, and yes, you know, it didn't make me a violent person or whatever, but still like,
Marco:
I played a lot of them back then and I turned out, well, I turned out like this.
Marco:
I don't know if I turned out.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I turned out like this, but I just, now I do not have any desire to play games where I'm shooting people.
Marco:
I just don't.
Marco:
And even if it's like, Oh, it's, it's a fun, a fun way to shoot people.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't, it's not for me.
Marco:
If it's for you, fine.
Marco:
It's not for me.
John:
It's going to be for Adam.
John:
I'm saying, if you want to keep playing with him,
Marco:
yeah some someday i'm going to lose him into that world i know you know he's he's a he's a video game kid like it's gonna happen it's coming sooner than you think because he's so acclimated to video games his fortnight transition will happen earlier than other kids i know i know it's like puberty like you don't want like you know he still has his cute kid games i want to keep it at that as long as we can he doesn't play pvp in minecraft
Marco:
He tells me what I want to hear.
Marco:
Because we've expressed to him our sense that we really don't want him playing games where he's killing other players.
Marco:
If he's competing in other ways or building co-op stuff, that's great.
Marco:
We really don't want him playing games where he's killing other players and they're killing him.
John:
You should think back to your childhood playing first-person shooters and how you would have reacted if your parents said that to you.
Marco:
yeah i mean and and i know that he does kind of secretly do that like when we aren't looking i know you know i know he's playing on servers with that and and whenever we ask him like hey are you killing players he'll be like well not exactly you know he'll kind of like soften it because he knows we don't really want him to be doing that but we also don't feel so strongly about it that we would actually police that and actually enforce that and
Marco:
Um, so we, we all kind of have like a, like a, we're going to pretend like you're not doing that too much and you're going to pretend like when you are doing it that you're not.
Marco:
And the result is, you know, I don't like it and you don't do it that often.
Marco:
And so that's kind of a good result for me.
John:
I don't think you have to worry about too much like it's what I would have told my parents if they had a complaint about this when I was a kid is that like it's I know it manifests itself in a way that looks like it has some connection to the real world but the closest analogy is to like freeze tag.
John:
Because there's no consequences and it is just a competitive way to run around and essentially tag your red.
John:
Only the tags are projectiles that may or may not look like bullets.
John:
I also find distasteful the realistic sort of military simulation where it's actual guns from the real world and that's part of the whole thing or whatever.
John:
But in the end, all those competitive online games are much more analogous to sports than they are having to do anything with actual guns.
John:
And honestly, I would rather someone play with
John:
virtual uh photorealistic guns than real ones any day so i'm sure you don't have anything to worry about but you know kids like probably less so than most adults do like the competitive aspect of it just like the same reason kids like to play freeze tag and tag your it and run away from each other and have competitions it's just part of it's just natural part of play only it's happening on the computer so i you know i think you should dive into that with him if only so he can beat you and you can feel the pride slash shame of your own offspring being better at something yeah
Marco:
yeah that's i i know that time is coming but yeah and i also i also do recognize that you know the that video game violence is kind of a a continuum and you know there's like there's over over on one side there's like the call of duty or like and i i'm not i'm super not into that either for myself or for him and fortunately he's not he's not been exposed to that and
Marco:
I think it's going to be a while before that's permitted.
John:
I mean, Fortnite is pretty cartoony, like in that spectrum.
John:
You know, they're avatars that do funny dances and have costumes.
John:
And yes, they use semi-realistic looking guns, but the entire game looks like a cel-shaded cartoon and is on its face very ridiculous.
Marco:
I actually didn't know that.
Marco:
I don't know anything about Fortnite, so that's actually good to know because, again, I know the time is coming soon.
Marco:
He already has some of his classmates in school play it already in third grade.
Marco:
So I know the time is coming.
Marco:
But, you know, again, there is that continuum and the realistic military shooters with real guns, that I'm super not into.
Marco:
And then if it's more like, you know, and then on the other side, it's like Splatoon.
John:
or battle tetris right you ever seen competitive tetris for a year you played that remember those the two-player versions um i i did i did it like on my graphing calculator in in high school like i would i would run the little headphone cable yeah if you get a line on your side it puts junk on the other person's side it's basically it's competitive two-player tetris
Marco:
yeah it's yeah where you're hitting people with bullets anyway yeah I don't again I know that time is coming I'm just trying to last as long as possible in the wonderful world of like let's build things you know or the things that you kill they're like square ghosts like that's fine like I don't care too much about that you know you gotta take what you can get and meanwhile Tiff is over on the giant television screen slicing people's necks open I supposedly when he's not awake I suppose
John:
no oh yeah like she couldn't play that that the last of us she could not play that game with like she would do it while he was at school which was its own adventure in like dark scenes in a light room she had to play it downstairs just to she needs to come over to the gaming monitor lifestyle where my my console was connected to a monitor just like my computer in a much more controlled environment my television has many advantages
Marco:
Yeah, maybe.
Marco:
I guess maybe we'll have some PC monitors in the house pretty soon.
Marco:
She could use the LG 5K after next week.
Marco:
Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Flatfile, Linode, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You too can become one of these members at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-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-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
All right, so I have news.
Casey:
Let me tell you my news by telling a story.
Casey:
When I went to college at Virginia Tech and...
Casey:
This was in the fall of 2000.
Casey:
And one day, I don't know, a few weeks after I arrived, I got an email from my dad, which was not unusual.
Casey:
And the subject line was new lists, which was unusual.
Casey:
And I opened this email.
Casey:
I'll never forget this.
Casey:
And I opened this email, and there's a picture of a dog.
Casey:
And that's it.
Casey:
That's the email.
Casey:
It's a picture of a standard poodle, and the subject line is new list.
Casey:
So naturally, I call my dad and say, what's going on here?
Casey:
And in so many words, he basically said, well, we've replaced you with a dog.
Casey:
Meet Molly.
Casey:
Okay, then.
Marco:
I mean, at least it's less jarring than, like, if it was actually, like, you have a new baby brother.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
That's very true.
John:
Your dad didn't say, new dog, who lists?
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Casey:
It was a bit before that was a popular thing, given that this was the fall of 2000.
Casey:
But still, well done.
Casey:
I still award you full points.
Casey:
So we have a new dog.
Casey:
We have a new list.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Early, I don't know, early-ish in quarantine, Erin started needling me about, hey, you know, we should get a dog.
Casey:
We're going to be home all the time for forever.
Casey:
And we're actually, truth be told, we're home all the time anyway.
Casey:
So we should get a dog.
Casey:
And I said to her, absolutely not.
Casey:
And then after months and months and months of this, I said, well, fine.
Casey:
Okay.
Okay.
Casey:
if we can get a dog that doesn't shed, that is going to be small ish, I'm thinking maybe a little bit bigger than hops, but like not, not necessarily a full on daisy size.
Casey:
Um, a small ish doesn't shed.
Casey:
And I don't want a fricking puppy.
Casey:
I don't want to do the housebreaking thing.
Casey:
I'm over it.
Casey:
Don't want to, I don't, I, you know, even though Aaron did most of the work for both the kids, we just, you know, uh, almost at house program, he just body trained, uh, Michaela this past March.
Casey:
I don't do it again.
Casey:
So let's do not a puppy doesn't shed, not too big.
Okay.
Casey:
We have adopted and we have adopted a rescue who is a puppy.
Casey:
She is what, like 10 weeks old now.
Casey:
She'll probably be anywhere between 40 and 75 pounds.
Casey:
And she is a Sharpay lab mix that will almost certainly shed.
Casey:
So I have failed every measure on my three requirements.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But here we are.
John:
As I said to Casey when this was going on slash when it already happened, this is a political lesson here, which is that you have to engage with the process.
John:
Because if your only position is no dog, no dog, no dog, the process happens without you.
John:
And it seems like the process did happen without you.
John:
The process of selecting a dog, finding out where you're going to get it from.
John:
deciding that a dog is super cute and you need to get that one that happened all while you were saying no dog and so by the time the decision was made you no longer had time to put an input so you should recognize earlier on when your family is going to get a dog whether you like it or not and work within the system to try to get a dog that fulfills your criteria maybe next dog you can do that with
Casey:
Oh, God, please no.
Casey:
So, yeah, so the backstory, which I'll try to make brief, Erin's best friend from college, her name is Dorothy and Dorothy's husband, Daniel, they foster dogs.
Casey:
And this particular dog whom we've named Penny.
Casey:
Uh, Penny was part of the litter where both the parents passed away right after Penny was born.
Casey:
And so our friends, Dorothy and Daniel, they literally nursed, uh, Penny.
Casey:
And I think she had three sisters, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Um, uh, Penny and her sisters back to health or not even back to health, but to health.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Um, so, uh, as this is happening, Dorothy and Daniel, particularly Dorothy were saying to us, you know, I
Casey:
You know, this is a good dog.
Casey:
I'm telling you this is a good dog, which probably sounds preposterous.
Casey:
And I can see that it probably sounds preposterous.
Marco:
Well, it's just one of those things like you expect that they would always – like it's all highway miles.
John:
You expect that they would always say that to everybody.
John:
What are they going to say?
John:
That this adorable puppy is bad.
John:
Usually you don't find, no, this puppy's a bad seed.
John:
It came out and immediately I could see it was a terrible dog.
John:
No, all puppies are precious and beautiful.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
But I think reading between the lines, what they were saying was, you know, this is a pretty well-tempered dog who seems to be pretty chill and isn't exceedingly hyper.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that hyper dogs are bad.
Casey:
I am saying hyper dogs are not for the Casey List family.
Casey:
That's just not our speed.
Casey:
I think something more in the vicinity of a hops is closer to our speed.
Casey:
And I don't mean that in a disparaging way at all.
Casey:
Obviously, I think that, you know, having having a dog that doesn't need to be walked for five hours a day is definitely more our speed.
Marco:
The general advice on this point is to get a dog that matches your energy level and activity level.
Marco:
That's different for everybody.
Marco:
Some people have a small apartment and they don't have a lot of time to go out on big walks and everything.
Marco:
You should probably get a low energy dog in that context and probably a smaller one.
Marco:
Some people have a lot of land and they're on a farm and they need a working dog.
Marco:
Probably shouldn't get hops for that one.
Marco:
Like, that's not a good match.
Marco:
And so, you know, get a dog that matches your energy level, whether it is, you know, a border collie to run around a farm all day or a hops to sit on a rug and be a rug himself.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And I mean, obviously, it's a bit early to know where Penny will end up.
Casey:
But, you know, based on our friends who have fostered many dogs, they have they had four and ended up adopting.
Casey:
What do they call it?
Casey:
They foster failed.
Casey:
They are adopting one of Penny's sisters.
Casey:
So they will have five dogs now.
Casey:
uh, I, I trust their judgment.
Casey:
And yeah, we talked about this on the as yet released, uh, analog that'll be coming out this Sunday.
Casey:
Mike and I talked about this.
Casey:
And if you'll permit me another quick sidetrack, um, when Declan was born, our OB did not deliver him.
Casey:
It was the middle of the night and she was, you know, off duty and to sleep or whatever.
Casey:
When she came in the following morning and Declan was like six months old and, or six months, geez, six hours old.
Casey:
Um, so she comes in, she picks him up and she's holding him for a minute.
Casey:
She goes, wow, this is a chill baby.
Casey:
I looked at her.
Casey:
I'm like, are you freaking crazy lady?
Casey:
They're like,
Casey:
What do you mean?
Casey:
Ah, there I did it again.
Casey:
Hi, Marco.
Casey:
I looked at her and I was like, are you bananas lady?
Casey:
Like, what do you mean this is a chill baby?
Casey:
He's six hours old.
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
What?
Casey:
But as it turns out, I mean, not every kid is exactly the same and Declan definitely has his unchill moments, but he's a relatively chill kid.
Casey:
And so based on that one piece of anecdata, I've now decided that sometimes you can tell a person or animal's disposition based on how they are as infants.
Casey:
That's probably wrong, but that's what I'm telling myself.
Casey:
It's not.
Casey:
And so, you know, Dorothy and Daniel are saying, this is a really chill dog, and I think it's a good fit for you guys.
Casey:
And then they start sending pictures and oh god it was all downhill from there and so next thing I know I'm driving to Bethesda making a day trip up and back to pick up this dog.
Casey:
And we brought her home and so far mostly so good.
Casey:
As it turns out she's a little bit ill.
Casey:
She was on some antibiotics for some things and we thought that was already licked by the time we picked her up but it turns out not so much.
Casey:
So she's still on some meds and that's made for increased amount of accidents inside.
Casey:
She's done very well with what I keep calling potty training, but I really mean housebreaking.
Casey:
And she's gotten to the point that normally, but not always, she'll sit by the particular door we use to take her out to pee.
Casey:
And so she seems to be self-aware enough to say, I need to pee, and I'm going to sit at the door that you will take me to pee, which is great.
Casey:
But obviously accidents are still happening, and one of the things with her sick is she has a urinary tract infection, and so that obviously makes her have difficulty with it and need to go more often and so on and so forth.
Casey:
That's been going okay.
Casey:
Turns out puppies like to nip and bite a lot, which is fine for an adult, but harder to explain to a kindergartner and a toddler.
Casey:
But we're trying to curb that as best we can.
Casey:
And it's been wonderful, especially...
Casey:
Especially today, as I'm listening to our country falling apart, having this nice little bundle of fluff on my lap did make things a little more palatable, which was great.
Casey:
So we've got that going for us.
Casey:
And the kids all in all are completely in love.
Casey:
Aaron and I are completely in love.
Casey:
It's also been funny watching Penny establish her own roles for us.
Casey:
So what I mean by that is when she's interested in playtime, she'll come over to me.
Casey:
But if she's interested in rest time, she's going to Aaron's lap.
Casey:
And oftentimes, like, if she's on my lap out of desperation because Aaron isn't around, you know, she's in a different room or whatever, and then Aaron shows up, she is running right over to Mama so she can sleep in Aaron's lap, which is both adorable and very frustrating.
John:
I was going to tell you, that's one of the best things you can do with a puppy.
John:
And you may be amenable to this based on your sleepy shirt predictions.
John:
To start having a nap time because puppies love to sleep a lot because they're like little babies, right?
John:
Right.
John:
And I remember when I first got Daisy and she was a puppy and I was on sabbatical from work, we would have nap time every day where I would lay down and put Daisy on my chest and we would just sleep for a certain period of time.
John:
And if you can get into that routine, you get to have a nap and the dog gets to have a nap and you get to have a nap with the dog in your chest.
John:
And it's I highly recommend it.
John:
Eventually, like kids, they kind of grow out of that nap.
John:
Or if they're 75 pounds, you're not going to want a 75-pound dog in your chest.
John:
But enjoy it while you can.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
That's very true.
Casey:
The only problem with that, though, is that we are currently a no-dog-in-the-bed family.
Casey:
We are also currently a no-dog-on-the-couch family.
Casey:
I think we're going to stick with no dog on the bed.
Casey:
I don't think we're going to stick with no dog on the couch.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Here's what I recommend for the bed stuff.
John:
I held the line on the bed thing for a long time.
John:
For my first dog, I didn't hold the line at all.
John:
It was dogs in the bed.
John:
And that taught me that this is a line potentially worth holding.
John:
I couldn't hold it for that long.
John:
We lasted like three years with Daisy, but here's where I draw the line.
John:
Dog can be on the bed.
John:
But because I held the line with Daisy from the time that she was a puppy until she was about three, dog doesn't sleep the night on the bed.
John:
There's a difference, right?
John:
So if the dog thinks this is where I sleep for the night, you've got problems.
John:
But if you have a dog bed, eventually you get a place where the dog goes, make that the dog's bed.
John:
Now we are in the best of both worlds, which is we invite Daisy up on the bed and she hangs out with us all night.
John:
But then when it comes time for us to go to sleep, she goes to her dog bed and we are in our people bed.
John:
And I don't have to be kicked in the ribs by a sideways 40 pound dog all night long.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And that's why I think, I really think, and we'll come back to this in somewhere between a couple months and a couple years, I really think we're going to hold strong on the no bed thing.
Marco:
You won't.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Casey:
I am extremely, extremely not confident that we're going to hold strong on the no couch thing.
Casey:
I think we're probably going to cave within weeks.
John:
yeah the couch thing i mean you can you can have a dog couch and a people couch is one way to deal with that and then the people just end up on the dog couch if you have nice furniture and you have a dog it's kind of like having nice furniture and having kids it's like okay well you know there is a it's like the severe weather uh maintenance guide for your car if you live in new england or whatever um yeah kids are kids and or pets change the lifetime of your furniture let's say
John:
Even if you don't let them on it.
John:
So just accept that and be okay with the idea that when the next time you buy a sofa, you're like, well, should we get the super expensive sofa knowing that there's going to be a dog on it?
John:
I think the benefits of snuggling with a dog, especially in the wintertime, on a sofa outweigh the downsides of your dog slowly destroying your sofa.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, the whole point of having a dog is to sit there and pet the dog all day.
Marco:
That's fun.
Marco:
You have this little buddy that you can go on walks with, and they can keep you company.
Marco:
They're basically like little love batteries.
Marco:
You fill them with love, they give it back.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Casey:
So are they love capacitors then?
Marco:
Oh, maybe.
Marco:
Well, you got to charge a battery.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
In any case.
Casey:
So, yeah, I don't think we're going to hold strong on the couch.
Casey:
It's not that we have particularly nice couches.
Casey:
In fact, our couches are falling apart because we've had them for like 10 plus years and now two children and they're just old.
Casey:
And I think we'll replace them sometime in the next couple of years.
Casey:
So it's not because we have fancy, nice couches.
Casey:
it's just that I have a feeling and I learned this with Declan, like what, what mom and dad think is a one-time thing.
Casey:
Like, sure, Declan, I'll let you have this French fry just once.
Casey:
It's never just a one-time thing with the kids.
Casey:
And I'm assuming the dog will be the same way.
Marco:
So that's the number one piece of advice I can give you is, uh,
Marco:
to try to avoid like the begging behaviors by realizing that like just never let the dog's begging result in food or you know like a food reward from any place that you don't want to forever be doing that
Marco:
So like like what most people like right before we got our dog, we had a dog elsewhere in the family that was pretty annoying at begging at the table.
Marco:
And so we made a rule with hops like not only are we never going to feed him from the table, but no one else is ever going to feed him from a table either.
Marco:
That's no one ever like it's never going to be a thing.
Marco:
And as a result, hops doesn't beg at the table.
Marco:
And it's wonderful.
Marco:
Meanwhile, like, you know, if things, like, a few things that have resulted in him getting food, like, you know, if I stand near the fridge, yeah, he's gonna start poking my leg.
Marco:
It's really cute.
Marco:
He doesn't make any noise.
Marco:
He just, like, pokes his nose onto my leg as if he's, like, tapping me.
Marco:
Like, tap, tap, tap.
Marco:
It's so cute.
Marco:
Because sometimes I give him carrots out of the fridge and...
Marco:
Therefore, it's just a thing.
Marco:
That's a thing that happens.
Marco:
We have some other family members who, for their dogs, they basically come over and beg at the table.
Marco:
Then the person, to avoid giving the dog food from the table, gets up, walks to the kitchen, and hands them food.
Marco:
And it's like, okay, well, that whole charade doesn't matter.
Marco:
All that matters is cause and effect.
Marco:
And the whole time they're saying, like, no, this isn't from the table.
Marco:
And they're trying to explain to the dog with words.
Marco:
Like, no, don't expect this every time.
Marco:
The reality is dogs don't care about your words.
Marco:
They don't understand most of them.
Marco:
And any cause and effect, they'll remember.
Marco:
And so if them begging at the table resulted in them getting food, even if it's through a bunch of indirect steps, that doesn't matter.
Marco:
They're just going to keep doing it because it still resulted in the right result.
Marco:
And so like – and yeah, this does apply to kids as well, by the way, as you noted.
Marco:
But yeah, so like just keep that in mind.
Marco:
Like whatever results in the reward –
Marco:
they will remember and they will, and it will be reinforced in their mind the more you do it.
Marco:
And then like those habits are incredibly easy to accidentally develop and incredibly hard to ever break once they're developed.
John:
The coral, the correlation to this though, is even if there's something you never do, like, Oh, we never let the dog on the couch.
John:
Well, do you ever leave the house?
John:
Because unlike being on the couch is something the dog can do by itself.
John:
So if a security cameras do, that's one of the things you can see.
John:
It's like, we never let the dog on the couch.
John:
All right, so leave the house for a few hours and look in the security camera.
John:
Find out where the dog is.
John:
Guess what?
John:
On the couch.
Marco:
No, I mean, you're going to lose the couch thing instantly.
Marco:
Just accept it now.
Marco:
Because, you know, also, you don't want to send the wrong message.
Marco:
Like, it's their house, too.
Marco:
They live there, too.
Marco:
And all they want to do is be with you.
Marco:
yeah and so if you start sending confusing messages like well you can be with me except when i'm sitting on this thing which you desperately want to jump up and be and sit next to me but you aren't allowed for arbitrary reasons like they they don't you can't explain to them why something is the way it is so it's easier to just be to have things be much more consistent and simple for them in the rules and by the way man i wonder if we're gonna get horrible feedback about all this like dog advice oh boy
Marco:
But anyway, as for the bed, my solution is much simpler than John's.
Marco:
I don't know if it would work for a larger dog, but my solution is to just overheat my dog until he leaves if I want the bed to myself.
Marco:
And so, you know, because he always starts out in the bed and he has a dog bed that he loves.
Marco:
And most nights he starts out in the bed and then within the first half hour of us being there, he will usually jump down into the dog bed because I will start like petting him with my feet and
Marco:
And, like, putting my leg up against his back.
Marco:
And so it makes him all hot, and he eventually gets up and leaves.
John:
Yeah, it depends on the dog.
John:
Like, what you really don't want – the reason you don't want the dog in the bed is not because you're mean.
John:
It's because, especially if you have a larger dog, it's uncomfortable for everybody because dogs are not polite.
John:
They're just –
John:
They will lay sideways between the two people and be in the most awkward position and just be annoying.
John:
And you would think some dogs like, you know, like cops apparently, Oh, if you poke them with your feet or whatever, they're like, well, forget this.
John:
I'm not, I'm tired of being poked by these feet.
John:
I'm out of here.
John:
Or they'll get too hot or whatever.
John:
But really what you want is for the bed situation.
John:
Is to make them want to be in their bed as their most secure place to sleep because it's more comfortable for them, too.
John:
And I don't know.
John:
This is just what we did with Daisy.
John:
I don't know if this is what you have to do, but we didn't let her on the bed at all for years.
John:
And then when we finally did let her up, it's just exciting snuggle time before bed.
John:
But when it's like, OK, lights out, everyone goes to bed.
John:
she goes right to her dog bed she doesn't want to be on there she's like well if it's bedtime i'm going to my dog bed even if she's been snoozing with us on the bed while we've just been looking at her ipads or watching a tv show for like hours it's like when it's bedtime she goes to her bed and that's the best of all possible worlds because we get to snuggle with the dog especially in the winter months when it's cold we get all the dog snuggling we want but then we need to go to bed she goes to her bed and we stay in hours
Casey:
I'm surprised there's enough room in your bed for you, Tina, the dog, and your 35 layers of pajamas during the wintertime.
John:
Yeah, and my big down comforter and one or more of my children who may be flopping on the bed at that time, usually to try to pet the dog that's also on the bed.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
It's a crowd.
Casey:
So anyway, so it is going pretty well so far.
Casey:
I'm obviously very sad for her that she's ill, but we have her on meds.
Casey:
Coincidentally, she's on what smells and appears to be, it isn't amoxicillin, but it smells and appears to be what I used to call bubblegum medicine.
Casey:
And turns out, maybe you two knew this, but I didn't know this.
Casey:
It turns out when that prescription was called in, it was called into a human pharmacy.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Because I did not expect that.
Casey:
And again, maybe this is obvious to any dog owner, but I've never owned a dog before.
Casey:
We had dogs when we were kids, but they weren't my dogs.
Casey:
They were the family dogs, which means they were mom and dad's dogs.
Casey:
And so I was talking to the vet and she said, oh, yeah, you know, I'm going to have to call in such and such prescription to help with Penny's issue.
Casey:
Where is your pharmacy?
Casey:
And I'm like, well, what do you mean?
Casey:
Like for people?
Casey:
And she said, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
And it turns out that's the thing.
Casey:
Who knew?
Marco:
No, because like a lot of dog medicines are the same as human medicines, just like different doses or different from, you know, different packaging around them or different forms they take.
Marco:
But, you know, like things like antibiotics and steroids and stuff like that, like, you know, commonly prescribed things for dogs.
Marco:
It's it's usually like it's very a lot of times it's very similar to what humans get.
Marco:
Although I've never had that in particular, like a human because like my vet is also a pharmacy.
Marco:
I don't know if that's like a.
Casey:
See, that's what I had thought was going to happen.
Casey:
And apparently the particular vet we ended up choosing, I guess that doesn't happen.
Casey:
They didn't know what the particular issue was at first, and they had given us amoxicillin at first.
Casey:
And that they just grabbed from their fridge.
Casey:
And so I assume they have the basic array of things there.
Casey:
It isn't amoxicillin, but it's something vaguely similar that got prescribed.
Casey:
I don't remember what it was.
Casey:
And that I had to go to a Walgreens for, which...
Casey:
Which is funny.
Casey:
It was especially funny when the gentleman on the other side of the drive-thru window says, this is for Penny Casey Liss?
Casey:
Because the vet had put in Penny hyphen Casey Liss.
Casey:
And while I'm at this topic, by the way, you do not have to, although I'm sure you already have, you do not have to email me and point out that her name is Penny Liss.
Casey:
She's a dog.
Casey:
We didn't name Michaela penniless, even though, you know, my surname accepted.
Casey:
I really wanted to because I think Penny's a really lovely name.
Casey:
So we chose it for the dog and the dog is indeed penniless.
Casey:
So it was not a deliberate pun, even though I do love a pun, especially with my last name.
Casey:
It was not a deliberate pun, but it was the best and only name we could come up with.
Casey:
So here we are.
Marco:
That's totally reasonable because, like, first of all, yeah, like, penniless for a human is kind of, you know, a negative thing, but penniless for a dog is adorable.
Marco:
And also, no one calls dogs by their last name.
Marco:
So your dog's name isn't penniless.
Marco:
Your dog's name is Penny.
John:
Except for sometimes at the vet.
John:
And also, she's penny-colored, so it kind of fits.
John:
Do you want to, by the way, promote her social media?
Casey:
Ah, yeah.
Casey:
So this is a family issue here.
Casey:
She has to have more followers than just hops.
Casey:
Well, so one of us in the family is of the opinion that your Instagram is your entire person.
Casey:
And if you get a dog and want to post nonstop dog pictures, well, that's part of your person.
Casey:
Put it on your main Instagram.
Casey:
Others of us who may have somewhat more Instagram followers...
Casey:
And feel like you should opt in to the incessant dog photos.
Casey:
And I think part of the problem is those of us who think you don't need a separate Instagram are incapable of having the self-control to not post dog photos every five minutes.
Casey:
Those of us who may have already created this second Instagram specifically for Penny...
Casey:
don't have that self-control and all they want to do is just post dog photos all the time and there's a bit of a familial disagreement so far we're each accepting that we are disagreeing about it in the in the instagram account has not folded uh we'll see we'll see what ends up happening in the long term but at least for now um you can find penny on instagram well certainly i'll put a link to the announcement instagram post um in the show notes and i'll put a link to penny's instagram as well
Casey:
If you're so inclined to look at dog pictures, probably daily, at least for the next few weeks.
Marco:
No, like you have to, like when you have a dog Instagram, like that's totally a fine thing to do, but you can do both.
Marco:
Like right now, like Instagram, your personal Instagram account ostensibly is about things going on in your life.
Marco:
Right now, you just got a dog.
Marco:
That's a big deal.
Marco:
And so you're going to have a lot of dog pictures because you just got one and she's your dog.
Marco:
So that makes total sense.
Marco:
down the road the dog pictures will become less of the like they'll be less dominating of your main feed and so that's when you can start posting like you know if you still want to post every day or two on her account you still can but then maybe maybe you post things to her account that you wouldn't necessarily post to your own because they aren't as interesting for your main account you know
Marco:
but um it makes total sense to have those be separate things also there's a whole community of dogs that follow each other instagram it's adorable like hops follows a bunch of other dogs and then like me and tiff and adam like he doesn't hops doesn't follow other people because he doesn't know other people but i think it's funny to think of like hops following a bunch of dogs and tiff runs that whole account anyway so like whatever happens to it it's it's like always a cute surprise for me to see it because i didn't do it like oh hops posted a new photo he looks so good
Casey:
Yeah, I haven't yet gone down that road of following other dog accounts.
Casey:
I'm sure it's coming.
Casey:
It's only a matter of time.
Casey:
But yeah, so far it's been really good.
Casey:
It's super stressful in the sense that it is so far in a lot of ways not that dissimilar from parenting children, like human children.
Casey:
But yet it is very, very different in ways.
Casey:
I know it's hard for me to put my finger on what's, what's different about it.
Casey:
I mean, other than you can't really talk to it because I mean, you can't really talk to an infant baby either, but you know, it's just a little bit different in that regard, but I am enjoying it.
Casey:
I am very, I think we are very lucky insofar as Penny does seem to be generally speaking, pretty agreeable.
Casey:
For example, we've decided to put her in a crate only in the evenings and
Casey:
Um, I think people tend to have somewhat strong feelings about this.
Casey:
Uh, but she took to it immediately.
Casey:
Like when we put her in, we had put her in there on and off during the first day, but we got home at shoot.
Casey:
I don't know, like two or three o'clock in the afternoon.
Casey:
And, you know, we tried to get her to go to bed at 10 or 11 at night.
Casey:
And, you know, she had only seen the crate for a few hours at that point.
Casey:
And I think she cried for like a minute and then was like, yeah, screw it.
Casey:
I'm going to sleep.
Casey:
which was awesome.
Casey:
And generally speaking, that's been the case.
Casey:
Like she's been super fine with the crate, which is very, very good.
Casey:
Um, overnight I've, I've been waking her up more than she's been waking me up in terms of like, um, taking her out to pee.
Casey:
Uh, Aaron, Aaron, very Aaron, very gently in, in one of those like jokey, but no really ways explained to me that I would be the one handling the overnight issues with this child because she did it for the other two.
Casey:
And I think that's a pretty fair trade.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
That's reasonable.
So,
Casey:
So I've been the one taking her out.
Casey:
Now, Erin, because she's the best and refuses to listen to me, she's been making sure that Penny hasn't peed the bed when we weren't aware of it or anything like that.
Casey:
And oftentimes coming down to grab her from me once I come inside so I can take off my coat and wash my hands and so on.
Casey:
But all told, it's been like I've set alarms on my watch to quietly wake myself up and then take Penny out.
Casey:
And, you know, depending on when we go to sleep, if we go to bed normal time, we'll do it like twice overnight.
Casey:
And if we stay up late enough, like to the extreme end of our early to bed capabilities.
Casey:
So if we stay up late till like 11 or midnight, we can stretch her to like just one overnight pee.
Casey:
And so far, knock on wood, as I jinx everything for tonight, she hasn't had any accidents in the in the in the crate overnight, which is great.
Casey:
And we you know, we've been doing like three and three quarter hours and could probably bump her up to four.
Casey:
And it would probably be okay, especially since she has woken us up a couple times in the past and cried and basically said, I need to go.
Casey:
Uh, which again, like if this is how potty training a dog is, I'm the best potty or I said potty training.
Casey:
And if this is what housebreaking a dog is, I'm the best housebreaker in the world because basically Penny's been doing everything for me.
Casey:
Um, so far so good.
Casey:
Remind me of this in like three weeks when I tell you, I don't know what to do.
Casey:
She's, she's a, she's a monster and I can't get her to do anything I want her to do.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
It'll work out.
Marco:
Dogs are great.
Marco:
Enjoy.
Marco:
And congratulations.
Casey:
Well, thank you.
Casey:
Yeah, we're really pleased.
Casey:
And the kids, by and large, really, really like her and have been really adorable with her.
Casey:
And, you know, both our kids have been a little reluctant or perhaps cautious with dogs.
Casey:
In Aaron's side of the family, there's a German Shepherd who, for the first couple of years of his life, I think was excused for behaviors that he shouldn't have been because even at age two, apparently he was still a puppy.
Casey:
Um, and that eventually has come around, uh, which is good.
Casey:
And the German shepherd is pretty well behaved now, but he's still a German shepherd.
Casey:
So he's like, you know, 90, a hundred pounds or something like that with the bark of like a 300 pound dog.
Casey:
And he's scary.
Casey:
Like he's, he's nice, but he's scary.
Casey:
Um, and, and that's one of the dogs that they were exposed to regularly.
Casey:
And then there's another dog in the family.
Casey:
That's a mutt, uh, who is, who is had, had like a really crummy first year of life before, you know, our family, our extended family got him.
Casey:
Um, and so he's like a very skittish, very nervous dog and about like 40, 50 pounds.
Casey:
And so, uh, he's well behaved, but he's nervous and skittish and, and, you know, both the kids, this is like their dog experience.
Casey:
So they've always been kind of cautious and nervous around dogs.
Casey:
And I think Penny, I think, and hope Penny is going to kind of fix that maybe, or at least make it less, less egregious for the both of them.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Because, like, people's comfort level with dogs is so tied to their own experience level with dogs.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
You know, like, when you don't have a dog in your family yourself, then your only experience is everyone else's dogs.
Marco:
And everyone else sucks at raising dogs and doesn't train them right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so it's very common for people to be exposed to a poorly trained or poorly handled dog in the real world once or twice.
Marco:
And so if that's the only dog experience they ever have, of course they're going to be a little afraid of dogs.
Marco:
That makes total sense.
Marco:
But because you now have a dog in your house who lives there all the time, the kids will become accustomed to her and will generally be more comfortable dealing with dogs as a general result as well.
Yeah.
Casey:
So we're really happy.
Casey:
I'm scared.
Casey:
I'm nervous.
Casey:
I'm worried that I'm teaching bad things, even though I'm trying my darndest not to.
Casey:
I'm worried that, you know, I'm establishing bad habits some way, somehow.
Casey:
It's all the same stuff with parenting a person.
Casey:
It's not really any different.
Casey:
I think I'm just, maybe part of the reason I'm almost more worried about the dog is because I feel like, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like you can work through with a person a bad habit.
Casey:
And you get more than one chance.
Casey:
You know, despite what I said earlier about, oh, sure, you can have this french fry just once.
Casey:
I feel like you get more than one chance to screw up.
Casey:
You can...
Casey:
you can screw up a person and undo it.
Casey:
And I'm sure you can do that with a dog, but again, never having experience with it, I'm worried that like one time something's going to fall off the table and she's going to get it and it's going to be like, that's it forever.
Casey:
And I, and my, like intellectually, I know that's probably not the case, but it freaks me out that, that we're going to make one misstep and then it's going to be committed in Penny's little brain and that's going to be it forevermore.
Casey:
And yeah,
Casey:
And I really hope that's not the case.
Casey:
It's probably not, but that's what like scares the piss out of me.
Casey:
And so I'm trying my darndest to be vigilant, to be loving and to just teach the right things to not only her, but to me and to the rest of us and just try to do right by her.
John:
I think you should be worried more about messing up your kids because dogs, in general, run simpler software.
John:
So people can be messed up in so many ways.
John:
Some of which may be your fault, some of which may not be, but they're so much more complicated.
John:
It can go so much worse with people, whereas dogs...
John:
It's much more straightforward.
John:
Not that I'm saying you shouldn't be worried about it.
John:
Try to do all the right things.
John:
But in general, a simpler set of rules can consistently lead you to success, whereas there is no simple set of rules that can lead you to consistent success raising children because, boy, children are complicated.