Ethernet Squid
Marco:
So Casey, I feel like I should buy you a drink or something because I saw on Twitter earlier today that you are using watch connectivity in your new secret app that you haven't told us about yet.
John:
Yeah.
John:
WC stands for water closet.
John:
Yeah, that's right.
John:
Yeah, it does.
Marco:
It should.
Marco:
It's that good.
Marco:
So watch connectivity is the framework with which you need to use to communicate between a iPhone app and an Apple Watch app.
Marco:
And I saw you and James Thompson going back and forth on Twitter earlier today.
Marco:
By the way, this is a good thing to throw in.
Marco:
I've actually found a wonderful life hack.
Marco:
The latest version of TweetBot.
Marco:
uh requires a subscription to fully unlock all of its features they finally moved from paid up front i already know where this is going yeah they finally moved from paid up front to like paid once to subscription which makes total sense like it's it's a i love tweetbot it's a great twitter app and it makes total sense that they now do have ongoing costs even more than they did with just you know development which is its own big thing before so it makes total sense to have
Marco:
Subscription pricing, I mean, for almost any app these days that doesn't have any other kind of constant income.
Marco:
But anyway, so when I installed the new version and it became read-only mode until you subscribe.
Marco:
And not that I think you shouldn't subscribe.
Marco:
I think you should.
Marco:
However, this became an accidental feature for me.
Marco:
That now I have, by inaction, a read-only Twitter client on my phone.
Marco:
And I still use it in read-write mode, paid all the way, on my desktop.
Marco:
But on my phone, I have a read-only Twitter client.
Marco:
And it's kind of amazing.
Marco:
I'll think like, oh, I should reply to that.
Marco:
And oh, well, they don't have to subscribe.
Marco:
I'm like, wait a minute.
Marco:
I've been loving read-only Twitter.
Marco:
And so I just haven't subscribed only because I actually love being forced not to engage.
Marco:
And I'm like, oh, this is actually better for me that I post less and react less to things.
Casey:
It's so funny you say that because I love the TweetBot guys.
Casey:
I love TweetBot.
Casey:
It is one of my favorite and most used apps.
Casey:
When they went subscription and when they, I don't know if they like turned off subscribing on the beta or something like that, but basically when I, when I needed to have the real live app.
Casey:
Oh, that's how I discovered it.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
Cause they, they had the beta and it was like with test flight betas, you, you can make like test purchases, but they don't, they're not actually real and they expire in a really short time and everything.
Marco:
But I've had such bad luck in the past with test flight sandbox purchases and
Marco:
resulting in some kind of bug where like i get random pop-up dialogues all the time on my phone saying hey resubscribe sandbox environment and having to re-enter your store password and everything store kits a buggy mess and so i'm like all right i'm not going to subscribe to this during the test flight because i don't want to mess up my sandbox purchase environment with test purchases and so i just never subscribed and and that's when that's how i discovered like oh this is actually really nice
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So what had happened for me was I had subscribed for free during the test flight.
Casey:
And then the test flight ended.
Casey:
And I don't remember if I went to the release version or if the test flight, like maybe their own servers, like wouldn't bless a subscription or something.
Casey:
One way or another, I wasn't subscribed then.
Casey:
And at this point, I had not paid them any money.
Casey:
And so that's fair that I hadn't been subscribed yet.
Casey:
But I noticed, wait a second, I kind of miss being able to fave things because I like to use, you know, a hard, a fave, whatever.
Casey:
It's like a very simple like, yep, thanks, or I see you, or haha, I get it, you know, rather than having to reply to a tweet.
Casey:
And I really miss that.
Casey:
And that was it.
Casey:
But I did end up subscribing just like a week or two ago.
Casey:
And I don't know how long the new tweetbot has been out.
Casey:
I feel like it's been at least a month, probably closer to two months.
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
And I only subscribed like a week ago.
Casey:
And I echo everything you said, Marco.
Casey:
Like, I'm not trying to say you shouldn't subscribe.
Casey:
It's a wonderful, wonderful app.
Casey:
And what got me to subscribe was that I kept the official Twitter app on my phone, which is hot garbage.
Casey:
It is not meant for me.
Casey:
Like, I shouldn't say it's hot garbage.
Casey:
It is not meant for me is a better way of phrasing it.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
It's also garbage.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
You don't need to candy coat this one.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Por que no los dos, right?
Casey:
But I would use the official Twitter app when I really, really, really wanted to reply to something.
Casey:
But it was more the like hearts and things like that that I miss or like DMs, for example, that I really wanted Tweetbot for than it was replying.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Now that you say that, I almost wonder if the TweetBot folks could engage some sort of almost read-only mode where maybe you could throw somebody a fave, but that was it.
Casey:
You couldn't do anything else.
Marco:
I kind of like that it prevents me from... Because I've also had the same habit.
Marco:
I'll throw a fave on things as kind of like an acknowledgement or thank you.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Most people who I interact with or who follow me, I think there's a higher than average chance they're using a third party Twitter client.
Marco:
And if you use a third party Twitter client, depending on how you have it set up, but generally speaking, you don't usually get notified on faves because the third party APIs until very recently didn't have a good way to like stream those in and be notified all the time.
Marco:
And so I have a feeling like my faves don't really mean what I think they mean and almost no one sees them in practice.
Marco:
And so it's almost like, well, if you're going to actually want to give somebody feedback, you should give them real feedback, like with a reply or something.
Marco:
And so I think in practice, faves are fairly useless.
Marco:
And so you might as well not have the ability to leave them because then you feel like you're leaving feedback when in many cases the people will never see it.
Casey:
And that's completely fair.
Casey:
But it's so funny hearing you describe this because I went through the exact same adventure myself.
Casey:
And it was my utter disgust with the official Twitter app that got me to pay for it.
Casey:
That sounds bad.
Casey:
I really, really love Tweetbot.
Casey:
This is not an ad.
Casey:
I don't think they've ever, ever, ever paid us to do anything on this show.
Casey:
I really, really do love it.
Casey:
I'm not trying to imply anything else.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I do agree that this was a feature, not a bug in a lot of ways.
Casey:
So yeah, I totally hear you.
Casey:
But to come back to the actual point you were trying to make, yes, I am working on something very slowly.
Casey:
And I feel like I have like an analog and a half worth of content about how slowly I've been working on this app.
Casey:
And I'm
Casey:
I'm actually, we don't need to pull on this thread right now, but I'm really, really frustrated and kind of disgusted with myself at how long it's been taking me because it's really not a very complicated app.
Casey:
And it really has been taking me entirely too long to get it out the door.
Casey:
But nevertheless, one of the things I am realizing is that even a very, very, very simple app, if you want to include a widget, if you want to include a watch app, if you want to include a watch complication,
Casey:
And I know this is not something novel or new, but it is stunning the amount of stuff you have to manage and the amount of code you have to write in order to make all of those things happen.
Casey:
And Marco, you more than probably anyone know exactly what all this is about, but...
Casey:
Even for an app like this, which I don't particularly want to talk about what it is right now, but suffice to say, it's very, very, very, very simple.
Casey:
The simplest app I've worked on yet.
Casey:
But nonetheless, I'd like to have a widget.
Casey:
I would like to have a very basic watch app.
Casey:
I would like to have a watch complication.
Casey:
And even using all the modern stuff, it's all SwiftUI.
Casey:
It's all combined where appropriate.
Casey:
Even using all the modern stuff, it is still an
Casey:
just astronomical amount of work to get all of these moving parts put together.
Casey:
And I'm really going to try hard not to go on a rant because I've done this too often lately, but it is very frustrating to go digging through Apple's documentation, which for watch connectivity is at least passable, which for Apple is a big compliment.
Casey:
It's passable documentation.
Casey:
But in the case of watch connectivity, which is what they call, you know, sending data back and forth between the watch and the iOS app,
Casey:
there are several different mechanisms by which you can do it, which in and of itself, that's fine.
Casey:
I don't have a problem with that.
Casey:
And there's different trade-offs between each of these different mechanisms, which here again, okay, that's fine.
Casey:
But what they don't do a particularly great job of is telling you, well, if you're doing this sort of thing, this is what you want to use.
Casey:
If you're doing that sort of thing, use the other thing.
Casey:
If you're doing this third thing, you should look over there.
Casey:
And they kind of like get a little vaguely in that direction because
Casey:
But in the documentation that I saw, I never really found a good, clear document, a more high-level document, as to when you're doing this, choose that.
Casey:
And this feels like the sort of thing that has probably been covered in a WWDC session at some point.
Marco:
It hasn't.
Casey:
Okay, never mind.
Marco:
I can tell you the answer though right now.
Marco:
Do you want to know the answer right now?
Casey:
I would love to.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Never use application context.
Marco:
It's unreliable.
Casey:
Oh, that's what I was going to use.
Casey:
Oh, this is good news.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
You can use the message passing interface where it's like send message with a dictionary and you can put arbitrary info in the dictionary.
Marco:
That works great.
Casey:
Now, but slow down though, because there's two different mechanisms for this.
Casey:
There's user info, which is not real time.
Casey:
And then there's what they actually call messages, which is the watch app is actively running as we speak.
Casey:
And you are actively sending a message back and forth while both the watch and iPhone apps are running.
Casey:
So are you talking about that?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Or are you talking about this user info thing where it's, ah, it'll get there eventually?
Marco:
No, that.
Marco:
And the other method is file transfers, which never work.
Marco:
So basically you can't use file transfers because they don't work reliably.
Marco:
You can't use application context.
Marco:
It doesn't work reliably.
Marco:
The only one that works reliably is when both apps are running, the one where they communicate it with dictionaries back and forth, the user info dictionaries.
Marco:
That being said...
Marco:
uh there's size limits of what you can put in there i underscore found that i think it's something like 65 64k something like that um that i'm not worried about in that ballpark and then uh the watch app when it sends a message to the phone app the watch app is able to wake up the phone app with one of those messages but not vice versa the phone app can't wake up the watch app
Marco:
So this is why the entire watch connectivity framework and its real-world performance and pitfalls and unreliability is one of the biggest reasons why I've had so many problems developing watch apps for Overcast over the years.
Marco:
And it's one of the biggest reasons why the current watch app, which was recently rewritten, as we discussed, is...
Marco:
mostly avoiding watch connectivity and trying to communicate mostly over the internet over over my sync servers instead because it's anything you can do to avoid watch connectivity will be better for your mental health
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
So you're saying, have you played with transfer user info?
Casey:
Because there's application context, which you've already spoken about.
Casey:
Then there's user info, which seems to be to be maybe intended to be slightly closer to real-time question.
Casey:
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
Casey:
No, I have that wrong.
Casey:
I think application context is supposed to be closer to real.
Casey:
See, this is what I'm talking about.
Casey:
It's so hard to tell.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And if you read the documentation, it says like, oh, use application context as basically like a persistent version of those back and forth really reliable dictionaries so that if one of the apps isn't running, it'll pick up the latest application context.
Marco:
Which, by the way, is only one way.
Marco:
It only goes from phone to watch, not vice versa.
Marco:
There's so many little exceptions and gotchas.
Marco:
So yeah, try to minimize how much you rely on this framework and the functionality of the phone app talking to the watch app.
Marco:
Because any amount of this that you do, you're going to regret.
Casey:
Super.
Casey:
You know, I knew this was my future, but it's so frustrating.
Casey:
So actually, if you, the listener, have had experience with this and have...
Casey:
that you would like to share with me i would be happy to accept it via twitter please don't clog my email via twitter at casey list don't bother marco don't bother john they didn't ask for this i'm asking for this uh i would love to hear your experience because yeah i was going to as after having spoken to james thompson in front of the show i was going to go down the application context route but if you're telling me that's unreliable and buggy then
Casey:
And to be fair, the only thing I'm really trying to transfer is like something itty, itty bitty, which is basically like, how can I describe this while still being general?
Casey:
You can make one of like 15 or 20 choices within the app.
Casey:
And I basically need to know which choice did you make and what numeral is associated with that choice.
Casey:
And gentlemen, I can tell you about it after the show.
Casey:
But suffice to say, it's like basically a class name,
Casey:
and an integer, and that's all I need to send.
Casey:
So in that sense, I'm not worried about like data, their size limits or anything like that, but that doesn't necessarily negate your point that it's just straight up unreliable to go back and forth.
Casey:
And that's unsurprising, but frustrating.
Casey:
So yeah, documentation, some sort of higher level documentation would be really, really nice.
Casey:
Like some sort of flow chart or like table, you know, if you're trying to do this at such and such a speed, use this.
Casey:
If you're trying to transfer a file,
Casey:
get screwed because you're not going to end up anywhere happy.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's frustrating.
Casey:
All I want at WWDC, which we'll talk about later, all I want, please, please, can we have better documentation?
Casey:
Please, please.
Casey:
And yes, in the chat room, from everything I've gathered, Marco was exactly right, that going through the internet...
Casey:
through the internet is faster than using watch connectivity and certainly more liable if not faster.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe not.
Marco:
Well, it can be faster sometimes.
Marco:
The Apple Watch by default tries to transfer as much as possible over Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi because Bluetooth is much lower power consuming.
Marco:
Bluetooth though, it is lower power, but it's also way slower.
Marco:
And that's why for file transfers...
Marco:
downloading a file directly from the internet uh which will usually prefer a wi-fi connection is faster than transferring the file from the phone to to the watch over the same network um it's it's a whole thing but the main reason thing the big reason is the reliability because the if the watch tries to talk to the phone it's hard to really know whether that communication channel is open and reliable and fast and not clawed with junk
Marco:
as opposed to the internet, you can just make the connection directly with the same APIs that you make any other connection with from iOS, and it just works.
Casey:
Neat.
Marco:
Although background downloads have significantly more restrictions on the watch and are even less reliable.
Marco:
That's a lot of fun, too.
Casey:
Well, see, that I'm not too worried about, for me anyway.
Casey:
But for you, oh, that does not sound fun.
Marco:
Yeah, there's basically no way to make an Apple Watch podcast app that downloads episodes locally that works well for everyone.
Casey:
Cool.
Marco:
I've tried every way to do it.
Marco:
I've seen other apps that do it various different ways.
Marco:
Every single app has a large number of five-star reviews saying this new method works great and a large number of one-star reviews saying they changed it and now it doesn't work for me.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of conditions and problems and it's just a nightmare.
Marco:
So try to avoid making an iOS podcast app for many reasons like competing with me but also try to avoid needing a watch app with local downloads because it's no fun.
Casey:
All right, let's cheer each other up a little bit.
Casey:
Let's talk about the Tesla Wheel of Shame stencil edition, and in fact, other editions as well.
Casey:
So we have had listeners from around the world tell us and send us photographic evidence of all the different kinds of Tesla demarcations and graffiti that they found.
Casey:
John, since you've been so quiet recently, would you like to take us on a tour?
Casey:
Would you prefer me to do that?
John:
Actually, I had some things to say about your Twitter client stuff, but you went on so long we probably shouldn't belabor it.
John:
But I'll just add this.
John:
It's a good thing we have this podcast because Marco would have loved to have told you these things on Twitter, but he couldn't reply.
John:
You had to get advice from James Thompson instead.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And someone in the chat room, Mrs. Smith, when it went by before, had a good suggestion for your app or a guess of what your app might be.
John:
Tweet of you a read-only Twitter client so people like Marco can't mess things up.
John:
There you go.
It's
John:
fear gold all right those are those are my two twitter things but yeah the wheel back to the wheels of shame the important stuff i promise this will be the last time i know we've had wheels of shame on like three shows in a row whatever they're just funny and they come with pictures so i find them appealing and i understand this is a podcast and you don't get to see the pictures except the ones that marco makes the show art but we will describe them for you
John:
So the first one is the aforementioned stencil one we mentioned in the last show.
John:
It does look like a neat stencil.
John:
This particular one we're seeing the stencils on, it looks like someone cut a hole in a piece of cardboard and used a can of spray paint through it.
John:
And they're very, very tiny stencils, just a little Tesla T on the spokes.
John:
I guess that's a deterrent.
John:
It doesn't look as bad as the other sloppy.
John:
It looks like someone, like a kid, like if you're trying to like decorate your BMX bike or something and you like spray painted some stencils on it.
John:
It's clear that you were trying to do something neat, but your skills aren't really up to it.
John:
The next one is from San Francisco.
John:
I like the style of this one.
John:
It is haphazard red spray paint, but only on half the wheel.
John:
And no one would do that on purpose.
John:
So that's definitely a look people wouldn't want on their car.
John:
something about san francisco is haphazard no yeah then there's one from belvedere california where the people who run great people who run this service obviously could not deal with the idea of making the wheel ugly so they tried to do as neat a job as possible and they took like what is that like a 30 degree slight pie wedge out of it basically one spoke well it's making the tesla logo basically yeah it's really i actually like this one a lot it's very clever me too
John:
Yeah, but most people, the style in cars these days is not to have asymmetrical coloring on your wheels, but this has one spoke and the surrounding areas making a little T in red, and it looks pretty neatly done.
John:
I don't know of any car maker that makes wheels like this on purpose, so I think it would still encourage you to swap it for the real one, but kudos to the person who just couldn't stand to look sloppy.
Casey:
No, I love this one so much, and this was sent in by Alistair Logi, and the caption was, Pizza Slice in Belvedere, California, which this is kind of what that looks like.
Casey:
Not only does it look like a pizza slice, but it looks like the Tesla logo.
Casey:
I love this one.
Casey:
I really think this one's great.
John:
Yeah, it's very clever.
John:
And then finally, we have one from the Bay Area from 2016.
John:
Does this predate the spray paint?
John:
When was your first spray paint job, Marco?
John:
2019.
John:
All right, so maybe they hadn't come on the spray paint technique.
John:
This one does have a tiny little Tesla logo.
John:
It looks like it could even be a sticker on the inside rim of the wheel.
John:
And I think that one probably wouldn't encourage people to return it because it's just too small and too subtle.
John:
But those were the before times, before they had the technology of haphazardly spray painting something.
John:
So thank you, everybody from across the world, for sending us your ugly Tesla wheels.
John:
We will treasure these photos forever.
Something like that.
Marco:
Well, we'll laugh at them for a few minutes.
Casey:
Yeah, that's more accurate.
Casey:
But Marco won't be sending you any hearts, I can tell you that right now.
John:
Oh, that was my other comment on the Twitter client thing.
Casey:
Oh, okay, go ahead.
John:
Not to belabor something that I'm sure you all know, but if you want to not reply to tweets, you can do that for free in any Twitter client.
John:
You don't have to.
John:
Have a client that literally stops you from doing it.
John:
I understand that having the software help you is good, but at the point where you're wishing for a mode in an application that will let you fave and not reply, that's the point when I say it's time for you to invoke some tiny degree of self-control.
John:
Never.
John:
What is that?
Casey:
I don't understand what those words mean.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Harrison Krebs wrote us this missive with regard to a genuinely frustrating story about AirPods Max warranty repairs.
Casey:
Generally speaking, I don't like to give too much attention to these sorts of things because we are not here to be everyone's crusaders.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
However, this is a good public service announcement.
Casey:
So in summary, Harrison went and did a warranty repair on bricked AirPods Max.
Casey:
But when he got them back, they didn't include his ear cushions, which is not desirable at all.
Casey:
So apparently it's Apple's policy to remove the ear cushions and not send them back after a repair, which Harrison didn't know.
Casey:
And apparently the Apple store employee was supposed to tell Harrison that and just kind of didn't.
Casey:
So this is a public service announcement for everyone.
Casey:
If you're sending in your AirPods Max for warranty repairs, hey, guess what?
Casey:
You're going to want to take those ear cups off.
John:
Or at least ask the person at the store about it.
John:
Because who knows if this is a universal policy or whatever.
John:
But just FYI, it's a good thing to know.
John:
Because, you know, Apple store employees are people too.
John:
Maybe they forgot to tell you.
John:
Maybe that person didn't even know they weren't going to come back.
John:
I actually kind of understand the policy of not sending you back your things.
John:
I think they should come back with brand new ones.
John:
Rather than just taking your old ones and giving them back.
John:
But either way, since they come off so easily...
John:
If the Apple Store employee had just said, oh, by the way, you'll want to take these home because our policy is not to send them back, that would have solved the problem.
John:
And I assume that Harrison contacted the Apple Store again and said, hey, WTF, and got new earpads to replace it because it was the store's fault.
John:
They didn't tell him they would be gone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this is actually fairly consistent with Apple's other repair methods.
Marco:
Whenever you send anything in to Apple for repair, they don't want any accessories that go with it.
Marco:
And we don't think of ear pads as accessories to headphones.
Marco:
You kind of can't use it without them.
Marco:
But like for Apple repair parlance, like if you send a watch in for repair, you remove the strap first or they do it for you and they hand it back to you.
Marco:
If you send in a laptop, you don't send the power cord.
Marco:
It is consistent with that.
Marco:
So I don't consider this outrageous thing.
Marco:
How dare they not send your ear cups back?
Marco:
It's simply like, oh, the store person messed up.
Marco:
And that happens, human error.
Marco:
And yeah, as John said, I'm sure talking to the store people, I'm sure they resolved it.
Marco:
But the policy is something that you might not expect because you don't think of headphone ear pads as an accessory that you just pop off whenever you want to.
Marco:
But here we are.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so I have good news and bad news for everyone, especially the two of you.
Casey:
There's going to be WWDC this year, which is great.
Casey:
but not in person, which at least for Marco and me, I think is bad news.
Casey:
John, I know you're just devastated that you don't have to travel to California this year for the second consecutive year.
Casey:
Gosh, when was the last time we all saw each other?
Casey:
Was it WWDC in 2019?
Casey:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
anyway there was no question about the wwdc wasn't gonna be in person i think we all knew it was gonna be remote but it's been announced they announced the dates interestingly like i mean i guess it doesn't really matter because whatever it's remote and it's by the way it's also free like it was last year right so it's all online anybody can do it right and they announced the dates but they didn't do anything else really i mean maybe there's nothing else to do did they have us register last year i don't remember no i don't remember no there was there was no like user input basically
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it's just free to everybody.
John:
Here it is.
John:
It's here again.
John:
The only thing we collectively had to look at was the little invitation graphics, which people got a little bit obsessed with as we do.
John:
I mean, they're not it's not an invitation.
John:
It's just a, you know, I don't know, PR image.
John:
And this year it's a bunch of how does Apple say it?
John:
They say Memoji or Memoji.
John:
They say Memoji, right?
Marco:
I believe it varies by presenter, right?
Casey:
Yes, and I think it was officially Memoji, and I used to jokingly call it Memoji, and then I think Tim at some point said Memoji, and I felt like I could claim victory at that point.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, it's got a bunch of those faces looking into a laptop that's slowly opening in the same way that Craig Federighi did in the M1 video, like with all those memes of cracking open the M1 laptop and having the light shine in his face.
John:
um and what people got obsessed with in this uh thing is the fact that all of the people who are opening the laptop but it's kind of from the same angle as the craig thing they're all wearing glasses uh and everyone's like oh glasses how could they all be wearing glasses what are the odds of that apple glasses ar glasses so on and so forth and then reflected in the glasses are the images of various uh
John:
iOS-style application icons, which doesn't make a lot of sense, but I guess the Xcode's in there, too.
John:
Anyway, a bunch of application icons reflected in the glasses, which handily explains why everybody has glasses, because you can't have things reflected in people's glasses without glasses.
John:
You could reflect them in their gigantic eyeballs, because Memoji have giant eyes, because they're very cartoony.
John:
I feel like what no one was talking about, except for maybe one person I saw on Twitter had some part of this, the glasses...
John:
Don't have any, what are they called?
John:
Temples, right?
John:
Temples.
John:
The sticks?
John:
The sticks.
John:
Oh, no sticks.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
At least some of the glasses do not have temples.
John:
They virtually float, not touching any part of the person's face because it's a stylized representation and it's not literal.
John:
So anyway, that's all we've got to go on.
John:
I don't think this says anything one way or the other about Apple glasses.
John:
We all know they're working on AR stuff.
John:
Is this the year they announced it?
John:
If it is, I don't think this image has anything to do with it because all of the rumors, especially since all of the rumors about AR stuff have not been about the imminent release of things that look like glasses people would wear.
John:
They've been more like the semi-imminent in the next year or two release of a giant VR headset that looks like an Oculus.
John:
but weighs a lot less or whatever.
John:
Anyway, so I read nothing into this other than the fact that you need glasses to have reflections.
Marco:
Um, and that's about it.
Marco:
Every time there's an Apple event, people always try to read into the art and the, and like, usually if, if there's some kind of like obvious pun with the name of a special event, um,
Marco:
That usually is relevant to the products, but the artwork chosen is almost never relevant.
John:
And for something like WBDC where... No, it's relevant in an obvious way.
John:
It's not relevant in a sneaky way.
John:
When the art is relevant, it's relevant in like... One of them was like the little rotating silver apple that had like a macOS...
John:
behind it or something and it was because they were going to talk about mac os and right like like whatever the most obvious in this one the most obvious interpretation is hey they're playing on the craig peeking into the laptop from the m1 meme right i i would assume so and that's and that's true that's absolutely true that's what they're doing right but you don't need to go hunting then okay well that seems too obvious what else could it be
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
And that's not to say they're not going to do the AR thing because that AR like goggle thing seems like it's actually getting close to being a product.
John:
If they decide to release it at all, it seems like the tech might be ready not to release the product, but to at your developer conference, tell everybody, hey,
John:
In eight months, we're going to potentially release this thing.
John:
So start developing now.
John:
Here are all the new APIs.
John:
Like that could happen.
John:
But if that happens, this advertising campaign has probably nothing to do with it.
John:
And if it has anything to do with it, it is the most tangential sly nod.
John:
There's even the possibility that if the AR thing is not coming out until three years from now, they would still put glasses on everybody because they've been working on this glasses stuff internally for ages.
John:
So it's kind of cheeky to say, I know that you know that we've been working on glasses.
John:
So here everyone has glasses.
John:
But anyway, here are our announcements for this year.
Casey:
And the only thing that they've kind of announced, at least obliquely, is they said, this year's conference will include announcements from the keynote and State of the Union stages, online sessions, one-to-one labs offering technical guidance, and new ways for developers to interact with Apple engineers and designers to learn about the latest frameworks and technologies.
Casey:
That is all we know.
Casey:
It could be something totally silly and lame, but maybe it isn't.
Casey:
And I'm curious to see what that means.
John:
Yeah, I forgot about that.
John:
I think what I was getting at with the announcement is,
John:
No one was forcing them to announce this now since no one's going to be traveling.
John:
It's not like you need to make plans and you don't need to register and you don't need to do anything else.
John:
But then why have an announcement without concrete information about certain things?
John:
They still want to have a tease aspect of it.
John:
So it's like we've come up with a new way for you to do stuff with us somehow, but we're not going to tell you yet.
John:
Maybe they haven't figured it out yet, but plenty of time to figure it out.
John:
But I think it is important if Apple continues to do these this way.
John:
to try to recapture some of the things that are good about being there in person maybe they'll have a clubhouse or everyone will just join as if we'll still care about clubhouse by june didn't didn't they do last it wasn't last wc didn't they do webex i thought so for labs yeah and that is so so reflective of apple's
John:
non-hipness when it comes to internet stuff that they would use like it's not is it the bottom of the barrel uh corporate uh teleconferencing software probably close i think i've used them all maybe link l-y-n-c is the bottom of the barrel i don't know if that's still made that microsoft isn't that just sucked into skype now or no yeah i don't know but but anyway webex is not certainly is sucked webex is not cool webex isn't cool webex isn't hip webex is a bad app webex destroys your laptop's battery
John:
presumably the only reason apple's using is because apple has no replacement themselves because they have uh remember when it was like iChat where you do iChat with multiple people and share a document they don't have that anymore um and because presumably it's what they use internally for you know apple corporate stuff but boy what a shame that is a terrible application and it's in general a terrible experience to do labs through webex if uh apple had its own cool you know
John:
application that does the type of thing that webex does and skype does and slack does and teams does and i don't know name every other app that lets you do multi-person teleconferences i'm sure they would use it instead but they don't so it's webex so that makes me wonder what like oh we have a cool new way for you to interact with engineers because it's still webex now we're using microsoft teams that's a cool new way anyway i'm i look forward to see what it is
John:
yeah and before everyone writes us yes we are aware that facetime video exists but to the best of my knowledge you can't do like screen sharing or anything like that on facetime so that doesn't really work for this particular context count yourself lucky if you don't know what problem these apps are solving because they they solve a problem that most individual people don't have but if you work for a business and have been working from home especially in a company that normally doesn't work from home you know the problem they solve which is essentially how do i have meetings
John:
Well, you know, when not in person and meetings don't just involve people talking to each other and seeing each other meetings always involve presenting things and sharing documents and all that good stuff.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I'm excited to see what's announced.
Casey:
I'm excited to see what a second cut at an online conference is.
Casey:
I'm really sad.
Casey:
Okay, so COVID notwithstanding, there's no freaking chance if it was in person that I would be going this year.
Casey:
But leaving that aside, I'm sad not to be seeing you guys.
Casey:
I'm sad not to be seeing other friends that typically went.
Casey:
I'm sad not to be doing a live show.
Casey:
I know that John...
Casey:
Really, COVID-19 is John's fault because this is the length that John is willing to go to to avoid doing a live WWDC.
Casey:
It was all down to him.
Casey:
It wasn't anything from overseas.
Casey:
It wasn't a bat.
Casey:
It wasn't a lab.
Casey:
It was John, Syracuse.
Casey:
It was his fault, so you can blame him.
Casey:
All because he doesn't like ATP live shows.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am sad to be missing out on that.
Casey:
I really hope that next year, if it's safe, that they bring everyone back in.
Casey:
I am...
Casey:
Super skeptical.
Casey:
I think, honestly, if they were to do an in-person anything for WWDC, I think they would bring press in for the keynote, and then maybe that would be it.
Casey:
I would love for them to do an old-school style WWDC.
Casey:
And certainly, I just noticed as we were talking that at the tail end of their announcement, they said, to support the local economy, even while WWDC21 is hosted online...
Casey:
And as part of its $100 million racial equity and justice initiative, Apple's also committing $1 million to SJ Aspires, an education equity initiative launched by the city of San Jose.
Casey:
So they're still pouring some amount of money into San Jose, which implies to me that they hope one day it'll come back.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Marco, 2022, what do you think is going to happen?
Casey:
You think it'll be in person, somewhat in person, not all in person?
Casey:
What's your guess?
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
I mean, this year, yeah, I had no doubt this year would be remote as well, because even though the U.S.
Marco:
is doing a pretty impressive job at the speed of our vaccinations being deployed out, it is, after all, a worldwide conference, not a U.S.-only conference.
Marco:
Many people come from other countries, and the rate of vaccinations worldwide is not as fast as it's happening in the U.S., unfortunately, for lots of reasons.
John:
Or there are other countries that don't have the problem that we have at all and wouldn't want to come to the U.S.
John:
because they have zero cases.
Marco:
Yeah, very true.
Marco:
So anyway, so it makes total sense this year.
Marco:
I have a feeling that next year live events like this will be happening on a regular basis and it won't – like –
Marco:
There's some question when we will get, quote, back to normal in most ways, and I think we're going to see a lot of that this summer and fall, but I think by next summer, we're going to be pretty back to normal.
Marco:
I don't think that's an unreasonable bet to make at this point.
John:
An interesting thing about what they've done with the live thing last year is that they in the lead up to that and all of the, you know, the quote unquote normal years before COVID, they slowly essentially made the free real time online for everybody version of WWDC by simply broadcasting the sessions as they air live to everybody for free without needing to register.
John:
Right.
John:
That, you know, obviously when they, you know, last year they recorded them ahead of time and there's a very different vibe from a recorded ahead of time produced video than a live one.
John:
But practically speaking, if you just want the information and you don't want to pay anything and you don't want to travel, Apple was already there.
John:
um so if they go back to in person which again you know i i buy the deal that giving money to san jose like what is apple just going to perpetually give money to san jose every year just out of you know good memories it seems like they still want to have a relationship with the city um which probably means they're going to go back to in person and
John:
They'll go back to, you know, it's like, well, why not keep the online thing for everybody?
John:
Well, they were already doing that, essentially.
John:
The only difference is there's no way for online people to get on a WebEx with an Apple engineer.
John:
And in that respect, like whatever the capacity is for Apple to for Apple engineers to interact with people.
John:
if that capacity is saturated by the in-person people who pay money and go to san jose maybe there's none left for webex meetings like i i wouldn't say that you should take time away from the people who paid to be there because they pay all that money and traveled and so they should get something for that but it does seem more equitable to essentially a raffle off lottery worldwide for anybody who attends for free
John:
Like they were doing... Like they did last year.
John:
Because it wasn't... Wasn't it some kind of like slots are open and it's just a lottery and you just... If you want help, you file in.
John:
There was no preferential system, right?
John:
For admission?
John:
For labs?
John:
For labs, yeah.
John:
Oh, for labs.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I didn't do any.
Casey:
Uh, yeah.
Casey:
I... No, did I do... I don't think I did any last year.
Casey:
I'm not sure, to be honest with you.
John:
But anyway, like...
John:
That's the tension that Apple has here.
John:
There's a limited capacity.
John:
There's only so many Apple engineers, right?
John:
And so there's a limited capacity of help they can give.
John:
Who should they give that help to?
John:
Should it be a random distribution of all developers with no barriers to entry other than having an internet connection like it was last year?
John:
Or should it be for the people who could afford to pay the high entrance fee and travel to WWDC to get that help, right?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's not a clear-cut answer there.
John:
Maybe you could say the people who are there in person...
John:
uh you know some portion of the help will go to the people over there in person and when you do get one in person you get the benefit of you know person-to-person interaction instead of doing it through webex but some portion should be given to people who couldn't attend because otherwise it's not a particularly equitable distribution of apple's limited amount of help
Casey:
You know, I thought I'd heard rumblings last year, the first virtual year, that they actually had way more labs bandwidth, poor choice of words, way more labs availability than they did takers on people who wanted to go to the labs.
John:
I saw that.
John:
I remember at the end of last year, like, hey, we've got labs open if anybody wants them.
John:
I mean, maybe it's like that in person, too, towards the tail end of the week.
John:
I don't partake of the labs, so I don't know what the experience is like.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If there is excess capacity, that argues even more strongly for, like, give all the excess capacity to people online, right?
John:
So have people there in person.
John:
And if there's no in-person takers, certainly, you know, it's like everything is like COVID vaccines.
John:
If you've got leftover vaccines, just give them to whoever wants them, right?
John:
Just call Casey up so he can yell at you about documentation for an hour.
Casey:
Yeah, that sounds perfect.
Casey:
Sign me up.
Casey:
I will yell at anyone at Apple about documentation.
John:
You're yelling at the wrong people.
John:
Don't yell at the developers.
Marco:
Well, sometimes you yell at the developers.
Marco:
Not for documentation, but there is a lot of value in going to the labs and finding the one engineer who's there for your kind of obscure API.
Marco:
And if you have some kind of question or request, you can actually just tell them and it actually can get you somewhere.
John:
I would actually love to do that.
John:
I would love to find the...
John:
This is the problem.
John:
This is the problem in my real company, in my real job, and I imagine in many jobs, and also in the case of the one thing that I would want to talk to Apple engineers about, ownership.
John:
Who owns this part of the thingy?
John:
Who owns this API?
John:
Who owns this framework?
John:
Who owns this application?
John:
And very often the depressing answer in large corporations is, I don't know.
John:
Oh, no, that's not true at Apple, though.
John:
That's a bad situation.
Marco:
That's not true at Apple.
Marco:
Apple has different failure modes.
John:
Like, nobody right now is... That's what I'm saying.
John:
That's what I mean, but I don't know.
John:
Not like, oh, just this person doesn't have the knowledge.
John:
That the company collectively does not know.
John:
Yes.
John:
Because if the application or framework is not broken, and it's an older thing, and it's in between the purview of two possible groups...
John:
Right now, you think, of course, they have to know.
John:
What about when someone files a bug?
John:
Whose queue does that go into?
John:
Obviously, every company knows who owns everything.
John:
I can tell you from experience that is not true.
John:
What happens is there may be a queue for those things, but then different parts of the organization fight over who really owns it because nobody wants that crap in their queue for real.
John:
So it just ends up being like a shoving contest of like, I'm not taking this bug.
John:
Well, it's not my thing.
John:
Well, it's not your thing.
John:
Let's not look at this.
John:
This is my charter of my scrum team.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's just it is it is never ending.
John:
Right.
John:
So for parts of the OS, like the one or two APIs that I need to work for switch glass in front and center that apparently nobody owns and nobody cares about because they don't work reliably.
John:
Who owns that?
John:
That probably hasn't changed in like literally a decade.
John:
Try to find the group.
John:
Oh, it's probably CoreOS, the catch-all group.
John:
And then CoreOS is like, uh-uh, don't try to hoist that in us.
John:
We don't do anything with that.
John:
We haven't touched that in years.
John:
It's fine.
John:
There's no showstopper bugs.
John:
There's no sub ones.
John:
Get that out of my face.
John:
Anyway, I just want like two APIs to work reliably because I like the only two APIs my simple little apps use.
John:
I don't.
John:
And I'm sad.
Casey:
I'm so sorry, John.
Casey:
So my understanding of how Apple works internally, which granted is, you know, hearsay upon hearsay, but for things that matter, and I think this is maybe where the difference is between you and me for things that matter is,
Casey:
There is, and it's so funny talking to people at Apple because just like in government contracting, everything is just acronym soup.
Casey:
You know, there's the ABC and the QRS and the TUV and the WIZ and half the time if I'm talking to somebody.
John:
The DRI, you're looking for the DRI.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
So that's exactly what I was driving toward is there's the DRI, the directly responsible individual.
Casey:
And my understanding, again, hearsay, is that
Casey:
There is one person that may be an engineer, maybe a product or project manager or project owner.
Casey:
I forget what the term is they use internally.
Casey:
But basically one person that the buck stops there.
Casey:
And for anything that matters, my understanding is there really is a directly responsible individual for anything that they care about.
Casey:
But, John, to your point a moment ago, perhaps the things that you care about are not the things that they care about.
Casey:
And maybe there isn't a DRI for that sort of thing.
Casey:
Or alternatively, there's a DRI, but they really just could not care less about your particular problem.
John:
That's probably what it is.
John:
And speaking of that, I should just clear this out because it's been in our potential after show topics in ages.
John:
So I'll just finish clearing this out.
John:
So one of the APIs that I'm talking about, maybe I'll leave some more infielding, but one of them.
John:
is the api for ns running applications which is a very old api that probably is from the next days that in theory tells you information about all the applications that are running and you can imagine i would need that information for switch glass and potentially also for front and center right and this application was described by a very well-known and experienced uh
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I will put in the show notes the radar numbers, the one, two, three, four, five, six radar numbers I got thrown at me from this person when this person was telling me about the API to say, this is the worst API I've been following.
John:
These are radars, not feedbacks, because it was before the feedback error.
John:
These bugs have been there for who knows how many years.
John:
They're never getting fixed.
John:
And all the bugs that I was finding with it, I doubt they're ever going to fix too.
John:
So if you are inside Apple and you think you know who owns NS running application, an API that no one cares about and that it works well enough that no one needs to care about, here's six radar numbers, none of which are for me, six radar numbers that you can look at and then you can decide once again that they're not important enough to fix.
Ha ha ha!
Casey:
I'm so sorry, John.
Casey:
I really honestly am.
Casey:
I really, really honestly am.
Casey:
I don't know what's worse, actually.
Casey:
I go back and forth.
Casey:
Is it worse to have something that a lot of people rely on, like watch connectivity, that they just really don't care to fix?
Casey:
Or is it worse to have something that nobody else cares about?
Casey:
So you care that much more, but they still don't care to fix.
John:
And actually, let me throw in my thing here too, because I think that is an interesting example of what you just described.
John:
The one API that I want to work, well, there's a bunch of APIs that do this, but the thing I want to accomplish on the Mac that is currently impossible to accomplish in a reliable way is to tell an application to bring all of its windows forward.
John:
It seems like an important feature of the two applications that I make.
John:
And there are multiple APIs to do that.
John:
I haven't tried the accessibility APIs because you have to ask for accessibility permission to do that.
John:
And maybe I could do it manually that way.
John:
But this is another thing about sandboxing the Mac App Store.
John:
I haven't been willing to go over the hurdle to say I'm going to request accessibility access because it's like, you want to let this app read all your keystrokes and record your screen and people flip out.
John:
And rightly so, right?
John:
I don't want that access.
John:
I just want to say one thing.
John:
Hey, app.
John:
Bring all your windows to the front.
John:
And again, there are multiple APIs to do that, and zero of them work reliably.
John:
They work about 98%, 99% of the time, but then they just stop working, and there's no error conditioning, there's no log messages, and the only recourse is to quit the app or sometimes restart your computer.
John:
And what do my dinky little apps do?
John:
One really important thing they do is ask applications to bring all their windows to the front, and when that stops working...
John:
it's sad i even hacked in a little thing where you can switch which api my app is using to do that like you can like cycle through them say did that api work try this one try that one try that one none of them work when it stops working it stops working for good and i feel like even though that's a bug that no one cares about if you're going to have any apis on the mac that say hey app bring all your windows to the front i don't understand how that can ever stop working or be unreliable because i feel like the windows server
John:
should own the window layering policy to some degree it should be able to say look app i don't care what you're doing i don't need any interaction with you whatsoever i the windows server own your windows and i put them on the screen and i composite them and everything so i'm simply going to bring as the windows server all your windows to the front you don't even need to be running you could be hung in an infinite loop because this is mac os 10 and not classic mac os i don't care if you're hung app i'm bringing all your windows to the front but no no api does that reliably it makes me very sad
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Casey:
So we heard some breaking news earlier today, I believe, that Apple has added two brand new Siri voices that will no longer default to a female voice in the latest version of iOS, which is now in beta.
Casey:
This is, I think, from TechCrunch.
Casey:
I'm not really sure what the source is here.
Casey:
But Apple is adding two new voices to Siri's English offerings and eliminating the default, quote, female voice, quote, selection in the latest beta version of iOS.
Casey:
This means that every person setting up Siri will choose a voice for themselves, and it will no longer default to the voice assistant being female.
Casey:
Seems good.
Casey:
I haven't heard it yet.
Casey:
I think there's a sample out there, but I just haven't had a chance to hear it.
Casey:
But it sounds good to me.
Marco:
Yeah, like what's nice about this is, you know, like throughout our history as a society of trying to give people more rights, equal treatment, trying to, you know, clamp down on stereotypes and, you know, misogyny and stuff like that, the more like weird old assumptions that we can break –
Marco:
generally the better things are culturally in america most like robot voice assistant things whether you're hearing it like on a phone menu or something like that have been female and that assumption isn't true everywhere like in the uk they're usually male uh like it's it's just different in different places but it's it's this assumption that we've had for you know forever in our society like oh like the the the assistant voice should be female uh
Marco:
And that's based on some pretty terrible assumptions of, you know, general reversals and everything over time.
Marco:
And so what Apple's doing here is effectively breaking that assumption and making you choose which style of voice you want to hear as your Siri assistant, not just assuming and making a default to saying, okay, in America, it's always going to be a female voice.
Marco:
In the UK, it's always going to be a male voice, like breaking that assumption now.
Marco:
And that's generally a good thing, I think.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And there's a I don't know if this was Siri related, but there was a couple of links going around a few weeks ago about like why why do computer voice assistants have to be gendered at all or binary gendered at all?
John:
Like a computer doesn't have like all this is just to make people feel more comfortable.
John:
Right.
John:
Oh, it's a little person is on a computer.
John:
Well, of course, we know it's not actually a person, but it makes us feel comfortable and interact with something that sounds like a person.
John:
Um, but there's no reason that you need to just pick, oh, it's male-ish sounding, meaning a deeper voice or female-ish sounding.
John:
And so there was a bunch of voice assistants demos.
John:
Maybe it was from Microsoft.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Someone will probably find the link.
John:
If not this week, then by next week, showing essentially, uh, you know, non-binary gendered voices.
John:
And I thought they were pretty amazing.
John:
Like, why shouldn't your computer sound like that?
John:
Um, and the, the, the idea of giving you a choice and making you select now, uh,
John:
people may just end up selecting according to the stew, the cultural stew that they've brought up in.
John:
And maybe most Americans will pick female for exactly the same reasons.
John:
The default was unthinkingly female or, you know what I mean?
John:
It's just like, again, the culture of traditional gender roles in your particular country.
John:
And what Apple's trying to do is not perpetuate that by just saying, oh yeah, no, we're just going to, we're going to pick the thing that we think you're comfortable with already, right?
John:
They're not stopping you from picking whatever you're comfortable with.
John:
And maybe the ratio of people picking one or the other will be exactly the same.
John:
And you could even get down to the point of like, OK, well, what order are the options going to be in?
John:
Because the sort of cultural hegemony of the assistant is female and the assistant is subservient to, you know, is the service worker or whatever is so big in this country and probably in the world that if they put the female option first.
John:
That will cause it to be selected even more because that's what people expect.
John:
So it seems to me that they should actually have to randomize the options to give all of us a fighting chance to not succumb to our default programming.
John:
This is like the version of the tyranny of the defaults we talk about.
John:
Where like in your application, whatever you said is the default for some preference, almost everyone's going to go with that because most people don't care enough about that option or aren't even aware that it could be in an option to to dig into your preferences and find the setting for it.
John:
In fact, they might complain that your program doesn't do this thing that it does.
John:
That's the tyranny of the defaults.
John:
Tyrion of Defaults has an analog in real life, which is just like society and culture.
John:
And when you grow up in it, you don't think that there, you might not even think that there is a child.
John:
Well, that's just the way things are.
John:
Secretaries are women.
John:
How do I know that?
John:
Everybody knows that.
John:
Haven't you seen TV and movies and the entire culture of the entire world that I've spent my entire life in?
John:
Of course, secretaries are women and nurses are women and doctors are men and like, you know, unthinkingly adhering to these stereotypes.
John:
And so when some people see this, oh, changing the voice on Siri.
John:
Congratulations.
John:
I'm sure that will help women everywhere.
John:
Every little bit, every one of these things is one tiny, you know, one tiny pebble taken off a pile.
John:
It doesn't fix the world.
John:
But if you don't do this.
John:
then everyone will just continue to assume, oh, well, my assistant has to be female because assistants are females, just like secretaries and nurses, right?
John:
So I applaud this move.
John:
I don't quite know why it took so long.
John:
I also don't understand why the default was male in the UK and female in the US for so long, because it seems like there was some understanding within Apple.
John:
that these cultural differences mean things but like why not take the next step and say but yeah should we should it be our position at apple to unthinkingly perpetuate them or to serve them or should we instead do what we can to try to make things again more equitable by just letting the user pick from a randomly ordered selection of choices and i'll be excited if they throw in a few non-binary choices there too because i think they sound cool
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
And I found a couple of examples, mostly thanks to the chat room, of recordings of these that you can listen to after the fact.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Last week we had an Ask ATP with regard to how we would set up networking in a fantasy, you know, new house or something like that.
Casey:
And Marco, as you want to do, recommended something that you really like.
Casey:
And you had some caveats and some gotchas about it.
Casey:
But you had said in the past, up until about a year ago, Ubiquiti, which is a manufacturer of Unify stuff, you have had really good experiences with them up until semi-recently.
Casey:
And then you had kind of self-backpedaled, if you will, a little bit last week to say, well, it used to be much better than it is now.
Casey:
I'm not so sure.
Casey:
Is that fair so far?
Marco:
Yeah, basically.
Marco:
I've been using Ubiquiti stuff for many, many years for my home networking, and it's been rock solid for the most part for, I mean, geez, maybe six, seven years.
Marco:
I've been using it for a long time.
Marco:
But the latest...
Marco:
hardware from them bit the the ubiquity dream machine router series um it seems like the wi-fi access points are all still fine but the dream machine router and the software that goes with it seems unreliable and they keep moving the software forward in very aggressive ways uh and in ways that they they seem to have adopted a move fast and break things uh attitude which is not generally what you want from your router
Marco:
You kind of want your router to be old and boring and, you know, just work well and not break anything for reasons.
Marco:
So that culture might have come back to bite them slightly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So there was a breach that happened, I guess, late last year.
Casey:
And Ubiquiti seems to have admitted to it to a degree.
Casey:
I think they said like some third party cloud provider had had a breach that's associated with them.
Casey:
And I believe that's pretty much all they said.
Casey:
Well, there was an article that we'll put in the show notes from Krebs on Security wherein a whistleblower reached out to them and they called the whistleblower Adam.
Casey:
And the whistleblower said it was considerably bigger than ubiquities leading on.
Casey:
So I'm going to try to grab just a few quotes from here.
Casey:
In reality, Adam said the attackers had gained administrative access to Ubiquiti servers at Amazon's cloud service, which secures the underlying server hardware and software that requires a cloud tenant or client to secure access to any data stored there.
Casey:
Adam says that the attackers had gained access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the LastPass account of a Ubiquiti IT employee.
Casey:
and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquity AWS accounts, including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on cookies.
Casey:
I could go on and on actually about this.
Casey:
Supposedly they were threatened...
Casey:
They were threatened.
Casey:
The attackers wanted $2.8 million in order to keep quiet.
Casey:
And so they actually wanted it, of course, in Bitcoin.
Casey:
And I had assumed, oh, that must be like a thousand Bitcoin.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
$2.8 million apparently at the time of writing was 50 Bitcoin, which is just preposterous to me.
Casey:
Oh, please don't email me.
Casey:
I don't care about Bitcoin.
Casey:
But anyway, I just thought that was funny.
Marco:
Can we pause on that for one moment?
Marco:
People occasionally request that we talk about the world of cryptocurrency.
Marco:
I could not possibly care less about the world of cryptocurrency.
Marco:
I have very little knowledge of it, but I just have no interest.
Marco:
There's a lot of people out there who absolutely are super into it, super involved, super interested.
Marco:
I almost feel like it's a different world of tech than the world that we live in.
Marco:
And while there might be a very small amount of overlap, I don't think it's much more than that.
Marco:
And it's like people who are super into stock trading and stuff.
Marco:
It's a different form of financial gambling and instruments and everything.
Marco:
And I just couldn't care less about that stuff.
Marco:
I have no interest in it.
Marco:
And it seems like there's so much there to know
Marco:
that if you're going to be into it, you got to be really into it or you have to not be into all the stuff I'm into in order to even have time to keep up with it and to do it correctly and well and everything.
Marco:
And so all of you out there, if whatever portion of our audience is interested in that, I'm sorry.
Marco:
I'm really not.
Marco:
And so I'm never going to want to talk about it.
Marco:
And that's just that there's a lot that we don't cover on the show because tech is a very big world.
Marco:
And for me, that's it's got to be, you know, the whole world of cryptocurrency is part of that.
Marco:
I just have no knowledge and no interest about it.
John:
Well, kind of like the financial instruments that you mentioned before, despite the fact that you have no interest in it, unfortunately, like the stock market and various financial instruments, it does potentially have effect on your life.
John:
If you remember 2008, for example.
John:
So lots of times things that we don't have any interest in that just seem like there are a bunch of people playing in a world that doesn't affect us.
John:
When it starts to get into the financial system, when they mess up real bad, it can affect us.
John:
So it's one of those things where even if you don't actually know anything about it, it would behoove you to know enough about it to know what side you're on.
John:
And what you want to lobby for and who you might want to vote for in elections and so on and so forth, respect to cryptocurrency, just like the financial system, which I'd have no interest in whatsoever, but has in my very short lifetime affected me in very profound ways already and all of us.
John:
Right.
John:
So we can't just let the people over there.
John:
on you know play with their stocks and collateralized debt obligations and everything like the whole reason i even know what a collateralized debt obligation is is because of the 2008 financial crash right i didn't know about what any of those things are but boy eventually we all had to know kind of like we all had to know about like viruses and stuff and with uh with the covet thing so
John:
Yeah, not that having some foundational baseline knowledge of cryptocurrency is probably going to save us, but it's probably better to know something a little sooner rather than to just read about it after the world is totally destroyed by people mining for Bitcoin or whatever.
Marco:
Well, and the small amount of opinion I do have about it is not positive because I am familiar with the general idea of how it works.
Marco:
I am also familiar with the immense amount of energy consumption it's causing around the world.
Marco:
That's all free energy that no one was using, Marco.
John:
Yeah, so... It was going to waste.
John:
If it wasn't for Bitcoin, that energy would just be falling on the floor and rotting.
John:
Do you not want people to use that energy?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
God.
Marco:
Anyway, before we get... I mean, believe me, you think Tesla people are bad with the email?
John:
No, cryptocurrency people don't listen to the show.
Marco:
Anyway, no.
Marco:
That's for sure.
Marco:
Yeah, so to me, that whole world, it's like... I love computers for...
Marco:
What we used to use computers for, like what used to be the only thing we use computers for is like messing around, like making documents and images and audio and video and and, you know, sending things back and forth, communicating back and forth with each other.
Marco:
And this seems like, hey, what if we used computers to generate this entire financial world of complex financial instruments?
Marco:
And I was like, OK, I you've lost me now.
Marco:
You're what you're really talking about is finance.
Marco:
And it doesn't have that much to do with the computers anymore.
Marco:
And that goes well beyond my interest or knowledge.
Marco:
And again, the little bit I do know about it really rubs me the wrong way from lots of reasons.
Marco:
From the attitude of a lot of the people in that world, which it does seem like a lot of them come from the world of finance and stuff like that, which is not my scene at all.
Marco:
um as well as the the environmental issues that causes and it just it seems and just the attitude of like the the presumption that this is going to take over everything and that all of us simpletons using fiat currency are are somehow like wrong or old dinosaurs and it's like you know enough of the of the vocabulary to know the terms that you wouldn't otherwise have any reason to know so it's getting to you
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, literally everything about it that I know rubs me the wrong way, with the sole exception that I think the technological concept of how it works is interesting technologically.
Marco:
But that's where the positive feelings I have about it end.
John:
I predict we will talk about it, yes, even more than we are now.
John:
In a future episode, at some point, related to the NFT stuff, but not this week.
Marco:
Are we still talking about those?
John:
And I wish, not this week, and I wish I could find, we should end by saying, me trying to find the originator of this amazing tweet that I still, this is the problem with the internet, I can't tell.
John:
who originated this tweet because people could just be copying and pasting it or whatever.
John:
But anyway, it was the explanation of Bitcoin from 2018, potentially by the person who will link in the show notes that says, you want to know what Bitcoin is?
John:
Imagine if keeping your car idling 24-7 produced solve Sudokus you could trade for heroin.
Marco:
I've seen that before.
Marco:
It's pretty good.
John:
You have to know a lot of Bitcoin to understand how every part of that sentence makes sense.
John:
But it's also depressingly accurate.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And, you know, so I haven't had a chance to weigh in.
Casey:
I'll be very brief.
Casey:
I agree with almost everything Marco said.
Casey:
If it wasn't for the fact that this is accelerating the heat death of the universe, I would probably be far more interested in it.
Casey:
Just a month or so ago, I went, I didn't do a deep dive, but I started looking into, because I did not understand how it worked at all.
Casey:
And there was a really good video on YouTube that's almost half an hour, but it's excellent.
Casey:
And it's by 3Blue1Brown.
Casey:
And I'd never heard of this channel before.
Casey:
We'll link it in the show notes.
Casey:
If you want to know from a nerd's perspective, but yet approachable from a non-nerd's perspective, you know, how does this actually work?
Casey:
I really, really recommend it because it helped me understand even after having read many, many things about it.
Casey:
It wasn't until I watched this video that I was like, oh, okay, I got it.
Casey:
And yeah, I agree with you, Marco.
Casey:
Like not only is the scene not for me and not only does everyone seem to think much in the same way of Tesla people, that they are the one true people that really understand and all you sheeple just don't get it, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
Exactly.
Casey:
It's just like Tesla people.
Casey:
Oh, you idiots with your internal combustion engines blowing up dinosaurs.
John:
Let's say more charitably.
John:
When people are tech enthusiasts as we are, it's easy to get excited about a new technology.
John:
We are often excited about new technologies.
John:
I certainly am, right?
John:
It just so happens that sometimes some of those new technologies that people get excited about and inform communities around have, let's say, externalities that turn other people off.
John:
Even Tesla, which is doing a good thing.
John:
Electric cars, yay, right?
John:
That's good, right?
John:
And yeah, it is.
John:
But maybe when the fans get a little bit too enthusiastic and too excited about defending the thing that they are a fan of, that gets a little bit toxic.
John:
But in the case of things like Bitcoin or other, you know, where there's...
John:
Anything where there is exciting technology, and like you said, Casey, some of the ideas behind Bitcoin are very clever and interesting and worth pursuing, kind of get overshadowed by the reality of, okay, but then what changes is this actually causing to happen in the world, and how do I feel about those changes as someone who isn't enthusiastic about this technology?
John:
And that's where people end up getting conflicted.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, it is worth checking out.
Casey:
If you listen to the show, if you enjoy the show, it is likely that you have enough of a nerd's brain, and I mean in a complimentary way, that you would enjoy reading up on this and learning about it.
Casey:
And like I said, this 26-minute and 20-second video really helped me anyway understand how it works.
Casey:
All right, leaving all that behind us at least for now.
Casey:
So yeah, apparently Ubiquity really kind of screwed up real bad.
Casey:
Back to Ubiquity.
Casey:
Yeah, back to Ubiquity.
Casey:
Speaking of screw-ups, hey-oh.
John:
Are they using all of our routers to mine for Bitcoin?
John:
What's going on?
Casey:
Maybe that's it.
Casey:
It all comes full circle, guys.
Casey:
It all comes full circle.
John:
You don't need to start that rumor on the show.
John:
That is not true.
Casey:
God, please no.
Casey:
But no, all kidding and snark aside, this is some stuff.
Casey:
This seems to me, and gosh, it's been a long time since I've really run anything server-side.
Casey:
So Marco, jump in on, or actually both of you jump in and correct me, but it seems to me like a lot of this stuff was kind of amateur hour and that they really should have known better than to make a lot of these mistakes.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And golly, if you're already in a position where some of your most, you know, diehard supporters like Marco, and again, and I mean that in a complimentary way, you know, you had said for years, Marco, this stuff is the best.
Casey:
Yeah, it's expensive, but it's the best.
Casey:
It's so good, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And you had already been backpedaling some as of literally a week ago.
Casey:
And now, oh, yikes.
Casey:
I don't know if I want to go anywhere near this.
Marco:
I mean, here's the thing.
Marco:
I mean, we don't know that much about this yet.
Marco:
And honestly, I don't follow this world very closely normally.
Marco:
So it's hard to expect any company to be perfect all the time.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
Something like Ubiquity, they mostly sell networking gear to companies.
Marco:
So they have to be expected to have pretty good security because their devices are...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It is also important that they communicate clearly when there is a problem or when there is a breach.
Marco:
And in this case, you can argue whether they should have had this breach at all.
Marco:
And I don't know enough about it to know what was involved, if they were practicing reasonably secure and responsible practices beforehand.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What I do know is that if this accusation is true, again, that's a big if, because you have to wonder, could this be some kind of stock manipulation scheme?
Marco:
They're a public company, I think, right?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, they are, right?
Marco:
So it could be some kind of weird thing like that.
Marco:
We don't actually know if this accusation is true or not.
Marco:
But if it is true, what it points to is...
Marco:
I don't think anything super damning about their security practices, but it does point to a pretty big problem that they might have underrepresented or lied about, a pretty substantial breach.
Marco:
That is worrisome, if that is true.
Marco:
But that being said, what this means for me and for people out there who have Ubiquity gear...
Marco:
It's one of those moments that gives you pause about some of the features that we have enabled on these routers and stuff and some of the abilities they have and whether we should enable them or not.
Marco:
So, for instance, on my Ubiquiti stuff, I have auto-updates turned on.
Marco:
Whenever there's a software update, I have it installed at a certain time and automatically reboot if it has to at a certain time that won't disrupt things.
Marco:
When something like this happens, you realize, oh, maybe I shouldn't have auto-update on because...
Marco:
If somebody compromises their update channel and has the ability to arbitrarily sign any updates they want as valid and push them out to all customers, well, that could be pretty bad for me.
Marco:
On the other hand, maybe I do want automatic updates because that lets them patch security holes faster as they're found, right?
Marco:
So there's stuff to consider there.
Marco:
There's also...
Marco:
The entire model of Ubiquiti's routers and stuff, I don't know if people who don't have them, they probably don't know about this kind of stuff.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of remote management and cloud-based features of Ubiquiti stuff.
Marco:
You don't just have a router running in your house that you log into at 192.168.11.
Marco:
anymore like you that is there still but they but you can sign into it from anywhere if you have that enabled and you can manage things centrally with like your central ubiquity account where you're actually not just signing into your router signing into like ubiquity as their single sign-on thing for like their service and then you can access your stuff through their service from anywhere you can have all this cloud-based everything about your local network and its management so maybe we don't need to enable those features as home users maybe like you know i've been using that because it's convenient sometimes but
Marco:
But something like this makes me question, do I really need that?
Marco:
Maybe I should be just setting it up once and then just turning off auto-updates and turning off remote stuff and only updating it manually once a year when I think about it and when I feel like it and then going to check.
Marco:
Maybe I should go back to a system like that, which used to be the way I would always do things on routers because...
Marco:
it didn't really matter most of the time.
Marco:
You know, I don't usually enable remote management of anything on my home network because I don't usually need it.
Marco:
So maybe I should go back to something like that.
Marco:
And I think this kind of breach should make all ubiquity customers ask these questions of themselves.
Marco:
And then finally, if you're able to,
Marco:
this probably also should remind you to maybe not assume that your internal network is secure by default.
Marco:
And that might change what kind of services you offer locally inside your network, whether you have passwords on things like file shares or not.
Marco:
I've always just had passwords on stuff because I've always kind of assumed like, well, if some...
Marco:
kid comes over with their weird switch or iPad or whatever and I give them our Wi-Fi password.
Marco:
I don't have a VLAN set up or anything like that.
Marco:
I don't get that complicated.
Marco:
What if their device gets hacked or they share the password and then other people can get on my Wi-Fi network?
Marco:
I don't need to know that every single device on my network is always going to be trusted and secured because all the things I run inside my network I assume to be
Marco:
requiring some base level of security, requiring passwords and user accounts and stuff like that.
Marco:
So it would be a good idea to also revisit those kind of assumptions for people who are looking at this and getting worried.
Marco:
If somebody has access to something running on your network, what do they have access to?
Marco:
And if you can minimize that, that's probably a good idea because even if you run some other router and this problem doesn't apply to you, we live in a world full of like internet of things, crap devices and everything.
Marco:
And it's only a matter of time before something on your network gets hacked by somebody and has some kind of vulnerability that doesn't get passed or whatever.
Marco:
And
Marco:
So something hostile will be on your Wi-Fi network eventually.
Marco:
So this is a good way to kind of like think about what the risks there are and think about how you want to manage those.
Marco:
And then again, going back to Ubiquiti, thinking about with Ubiquiti stuff, like do you want to enable auto-updating and do you want remote access?
Marco:
And I think the answer here is going to, for a lot of people, is now going to be maybe not.
John:
I think this gets to the heart of what you were saying before about communication from the company because, like I said, people get hacked all the time.
John:
It's a thing that happens.
John:
It's essentially unavoidable.
John:
If someone wants to target you and wants to get in, they probably will get in.
John:
I think history has shown that there is no such thing as an invulnerable, completely secure anything that is on any kind of network, which is why
John:
real security you know request as they say air gap although there's all sorts of crazy academic papers that will show you that even an air gap isn't sufficient to protect you but anyway uh the whole point is uh stuff happens as they say um but in in that kind of environment of course you want to have auto updates on because that is your best defense against exploits because exploits are discovered and then they are patched then their new ones are discovered and those are patched then other new ones are discovered and they're patched
John:
And if you opt out of that patching cycle or do it at a much less frequent time interval, like a month or a year, instead of as soon as the patch is available, you are vulnerable for longer.
John:
But then we run into the ubiquity problem, which is not so much that, oh, maybe the signing certificates got stolen and someone can put an update as them.
John:
It's that we don't know because ubiquity, according to the story, has not been upfront about it.
John:
What you want is truthful communication from the company to tell you, if they had told you, hey, our stuff was stolen and people can sign things as us, everybody turn off your auto updates now.
John:
And then the company would later tell you, okay, we've issued new certificates and redone everything.
John:
Now apply this patch manually and re-enable.
John:
That's what you're looking for.
John:
The trust in the company is the thing that is damaged here.
John:
not so much again assuming it's true not so much the breach itself because if you have trust in the company you would know which actions to take because you would just ask the company hey what should i do should i have auto updates on or not but now marco's in a situation of like well i don't know whether i should have them on or not because i don't even know if this is the thing that happened or not because if the story is true then ubiquity is withholding information that's making me not trust them but if i don't trust them should i turn on auto updates or should i not turn them on i don't know what to do and that like
John:
You know, it's probably some business 101 lesson or whatever.
John:
Like, again, stuff is going to happen in your business that's bad.
John:
It's how you handle it that, you know, within reason.
John:
Obviously, if you're running a store and it burns to the ground, you have no insurance.
John:
How you handle it isn't that important.
John:
But in situations like this, how you handle it is a big factor in how your company comes out of this.
John:
So I really hope either parts of the story are true or ubiquity at least comes clean at this point.
John:
So its customers know what they should do going forward, including
Marco:
knowing whether they should just buy new network equipment oh and to answer everyone's questions about like what do i recommend now that ubiquity has a problem the answer is i don't know i i haven't you know we we have things like you know previous sponsor euro i've used those before like in vacation situations and stuff like that and they've been fine um but this kind of world like
Marco:
almost everything has downsides somewhere in the chain, uh, or, or like parties that you have to trust.
Marco:
If you're going to use it, um, you can go the kind of homebrewed route and set up like, you know, like one of those like, uh, like PF sense things, but those sometimes have problems too.
Marco:
Like did, I think they just had a problem recently.
Marco:
So like there's all sorts of gotchas with a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
And I think again, like a, a reasonable way to approach it is probably to keep things pretty simple and,
Marco:
And if you want to be conservative about the security and stuff on your network, don't do things that have remote access.
Marco:
Don't do things that are based on web services.
Marco:
Have things that are more local and local only where you are taking a more active role in their management or there isn't much to manage because they're so simple and local.
Marco:
I think that's the general way to go.
Marco:
And that's probably where I'm going to be heading with my stuff as well.
John:
So interestingly, and totally unrelated to this Ubiquiti thing, I have been doing some thinking and purchasing related to my home network because in this year, I'm not going to say this year of working from home because honestly, I was working from home a lot even before the COVID stuff.
John:
But in this last year, I've had much more occasion to be on, you know, Teams, basically Microsoft Teams, teleconference meetings all day long, right?
John:
And every once in a while, it always seemed to be during like an important teams meeting.
John:
Right.
John:
With like where I'm either I'm giving an important presentation or I'm talking with my bosses or whatever.
John:
I would lose Internet briefly and then it would come back.
John:
And it happened like.
John:
It happened one particularly memorable time, and I was like, if this happens again, I'm fixing everything.
John:
And then, of course, it didn't happen again for months.
John:
I'm like, oh, well, whatever that was, you don't have to worry about.
John:
But then it happened again, and I'm like, okay.
John:
Maybe this happens all the time, and I just only notice when I'm in the middle of an important meeting?
John:
Because it just goes out briefly, but then comes back, right?
John:
And what it looks like from my networking perspective is it looked the same as back in the bad old days when my ISP was like,
John:
you know go down for a second or lose an ip address but it also might look similar to a router rebooting itself because it crashed i have no way to tell because one of the routers i'm using i can't figure out how to get the logs from it unless i do like snmp or whatever and i don't want to deal with that but the whole point is one of these problems that's
John:
It's like testing my resolve by saying, I'm only going to happen.
John:
I'm going to happen in an infuriating time, but then it won't happen again for months, but then I'll happen again.
John:
But then I won't happen again for months.
John:
But now it happened again today.
John:
And I'm like, you know what?
John:
This is not just whatever it's called, like a selection effect, not selection effect.
John:
It was when someone mentioned something and now you start seeing it everywhere.
Casey:
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
I can't think of it there.
John:
Merlin is yelling it right now.
John:
Yep, yep.
John:
Whatever that phenomenon is, I'm like, it's not just that.
John:
Because, yes, there was one particularly very bad BaderMainoff.
Casey:
Oh, there it is.
Casey:
There it is, yep.
John:
Anyway, it was one particular really bad time it happened, but then, like, nothing for a while.
John:
But now, like, I didn't – normally what I should do is, like, start logging it.
John:
Like, let me just write down when it happens to prove to myself that it's not just my – but I'm past that.
John:
It happened today.
John:
I'm like, all right, you're over your limit for the year, which is, like, three or four, right?
Yeah.
John:
And so I want to redo some things in particular.
John:
I think I'm going to finally retire the, uh, Apple airport express that Marco gave me that I've been using for ages.
John:
Um, and just start, basically what I'm going to start doing is eliminating components to narrow it down.
John:
Right.
John:
Cause if it's that Apple thing, which is the oldest component in my thing, and honestly the thing I had the least faith in, uh, let me just remove that from the network.
John:
Cause I don't need it.
John:
Technically it's redundant with the rest of my network.
John:
Um,
John:
And then I'll just start going component by component and taking things out of the loop.
John:
And, you know, now the problem is I have to take one of these variables out and I have to wait a few months.
John:
And then, you know, if it happens again, they got to take another one out and wait a few months.
John:
Like the iteration cycle is going to be low.
John:
But anyway, all this to say is I'm taking that thing out.
John:
And when I take that out, it turns out that I will actually need a few more Ethernet ports because the Apple Airport Express doesn't just have like a WAN port and a LAN port.
John:
It has like four ports on the back of it.
John:
And I'm using every single one of them for a device that I care about.
John:
So I can't just remove that from the network.
Casey:
Slow down, slow down.
Casey:
Before we get a bunch of email, you're talking about an airport extreme, not an airport express, right?
Casey:
Yes, sorry.
John:
Not an airport express.
John:
I forget the name.
John:
Airport extreme.
John:
It's the one that's vertical that some of them have a hard drive in, but this one doesn't.
John:
Yes, airport extreme.
John:
Sorry, I forgot how extreme it was in the 90s.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, airport express was the thing that did like a airplay, uh, music transmission.
John:
All right.
John:
Um, if I take that out of the network, I just have a bunch of loose ethernet cables that I have no place to plug.
John:
Uh, so everyone knows what you need here.
John:
You just need an unmanaged as in not exploitable through ubiquity hacks and unmanaged switch.
Um,
John:
That's the simplest device you could possibly imagine.
John:
There's nothing to configure.
John:
There's no software.
John:
It is an unmanaged switch, Ethernet switch, a gigabit Ethernet switch.
John:
It has a bunch of ports in the back and a place where you give it power.
John:
And you just plug in your Ethernet cable.
John:
And it doesn't matter where you plug them in for the most part because they're all auto-switching and auto-magical.
John:
And just essentially it's like a USB hub.
John:
That used to be back in the day when we had those.
John:
Where you have one Ethernet port and you need more than one Ethernet port.
John:
And it is the simplest and, you know, most straightforward and least complicated way you can get more Ethernet ports.
John:
And yes, there are caveats compared to a managed port and you can get fancier and fancier, but I literally just need one or two or three extra new ports here, right?
John:
So I simply needed to get an unmanaged gigabit Ethernet switch.
John:
I've purchased many, many unmanaged gigabit Ethernet switches in my life.
John:
I've purchased many 10100 unmanaged Ethernet switches in my life, right?
John:
Hell, I've purchased Ethernet hubs.
John:
I've done it all, right?
John:
that seems like such an easy thing to buy but kind of like toasters not that i want to go on that rant again like toaster ovens it's becoming and i guess usb hubs for that matter it's becoming really really hard to find an unmanaged ethernet switch that doesn't have thousands of angry people in the internet telling you how it's a complete piece of garbage and doesn't work
Casey:
I'm looking at one right now and it's fine.
John:
I know.
John:
I have a bunch in my house.
John:
There's like four in my house, right?
John:
They're all different, right?
John:
What I wish is that I could take one of the four that I have in my house and buy another one just like it.
John:
But of course, all the ones in my house were purchased years and years ago because Ethernet doesn't change that much and they're all totally discontinued, right?
John:
And so name the brand, D-Link, Linksys, TP-Link, Netgear, like Cisco, like just whatever brand you think...
John:
go find a consumer priced unmanaged ethernet switch from them and then find how many hateful reviews of people saying this doesn't work nothing worked on my network until i took it off it worked for six months and then died i hate company x you should try company y and then you go to company y and it's just a giant circle and you just go around and around and around in circles because
John:
And in the end, probably the actual contents of all of these devices are made like by one or two companies and they're all just packaging in a different plastic container.
John:
And then you say, okay, well, why don't you just go for the business ones?
John:
problem with the business you know unmanaged ethernet switches is they are made for a business context and in one particular way this is going to sound stupid but you know this this is i just want it the way i want it as they say um the thing in a business context seemed to be to have the power on the opposite side of all the ethernet cables
John:
And the way I have everything arranged and the way this thing is going to be, that's no good for me.
John:
I want all the Ethernet ports and the power all on the same side so all those cables can run off the side or the back of my desk.
John:
That used to be how almost every consumer Ethernet
John:
switch was made somehow in the past 10 years someone decided you know what businesses i understand the business one the business one they're in like a rack and you can see the ports and in the back is the power like i understand that for the business ones but that's not my context and honestly business ones usually have more ports than eight or four or whatever i need for my thing
John:
But then for the consumer one, someone decided that the power should come in the side for a lot of brands.
John:
The side?
John:
The side.
John:
I don't understand.
John:
I mean, they're just cheap plastic consumer things, but someone decided, and not only does it come in the side, but it doesn't come in with like a right angle, you know, like a little DC right angle connector.
John:
No, it comes straight out of the side.
John:
Your Ethernet cable's coming out one side.
John:
I'm just surprised there aren't brands that don't have Ethernet ports in like a circle around them like a big spider.
John:
Because that's about how much... An Ethernet squid.
John:
Exactly.
John:
That's like how much... No, a squid would be better.
John:
How much acknowledgement these companies have of how people actually use it.
John:
Like, you're making a consumer thing.
John:
You're making it pretty.
John:
Don't you think people have desks?
John:
Don't you think they want the cables running off their desk and not like one cable running towards them and the rest running away?
John:
So...
John:
you know of the ones that have all the ports and the power in the back and there are a bunch of models you can find every one of the reviews says they're all pieces of garbage like every brand just no obviously again reviews like 99.9 they're great right but these things have like thousands of reviews on many different sites and so there's hundreds of people saying you should never buy netgear you should only buy linksys and then you go to linksys and you should never buy linksys you could always you should always buy tp link and
John:
oh don't buy teepee length they're the cheapest ones and they're garbage you should buy neck gear and oh my god it goes around and around all i'm looking for is just a straightforward like like i'm willing to pay more because these things cost like 20 bucks right i'll pay 40 bucks
John:
I'll pay $50.
John:
Ooh, big spenders.
John:
Just find me the one that's like, everyone agrees is 100% reliable and has Ethernet ports in the power.
John:
And that just doesn't exist.
John:
Even in the chat room, people are saying, everyone knows TP-Link is good.
John:
They're well regarded by almost everyone.
John:
Almost, but not quite.
John:
Not quite everybody.
John:
In fact, they have the exact same number of people telling you they're pieces of garbage as every other brand.
John:
So...
John:
I made a random choice.
John:
I picked one.
John:
I ordered it.
John:
It's on its way.
John:
And then I went to Monoprice and bought some Ethernet cables for $2 and felt better about myself.
John:
Using my newfound knowledge of Ethernet cables from our vast research on this topic across the day.
John:
Weeks and weeks of shows.
John:
Learned more about it.
John:
I didn't have to say, like, what's the difference between Cat6 and Cat6A again?
John:
I already knew that was nice and they were cheap.
John:
So I'm going to excise the...
John:
airport extreme for my network but the reason i put this in here i'm thinking about marco with his setup was there's never a good time especially in these covet times for me to knock everyone in the house off the internet which is what i would have to do to remove this essential component because the apple airport extreme is in fact the thing that pulls an ip address from my fios rnt right
John:
My Fios thing has an ethernet cable coming out of it.
John:
It goes into the Apple thing.
John:
The Apple thing gets my like public IP address that I get through Fios and distributes IP addresses to everything else.
John:
Then I have Eero for all my Wi-Fi, but that is the linchpin.
John:
So when I unplug that, everything in this house goes offline.
John:
And I was thinking about telling my family, hey, I need to do an upgrade, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But you know how these things go.
John:
Sometimes it doesn't go as quick as you want.
John:
I can't do that in the middle of the day.
John:
The kids have remote school and people are watching, streaming video at night.
John:
So I feel like I'm back at work again.
John:
I have to wait until like off hours, like 2 a.m.
John:
when everyone's asleep.
John:
I've got to sneak down and redo the networking in the house so that when everyone wakes up, allowing for the hour and a half of when something's going to be screwed up or the files thing is going to refuse to give a new IP to my router or whatever.
John:
I have to allow for that and have it built in.
John:
Plus the possibility they're going to be up all night.
John:
And by the time they wake up, I need to go to school.
John:
I haven't fixed the network and now it's just permanently broken.
John:
So there's always that possibility.
John:
So it's feeling more and more, more and more fraught of how to essentially change or update your home network in a way that doesn't cause disruptions.
John:
And I thought this would be a good opportunity to ask Marco how he has handled this in his household, which granted in pre-COVID times when you did your various network redesigns probably wasn't as fraught, but...
John:
What are your plans now?
John:
Say, oh, I'm going to get rid of my Ubiquiti and replace it with something else.
John:
How do you plan to do that?
John:
Or is it just like you just wait for Adam to go to school and just tell Tiff tough luck and then take everything offline?
Marco:
Yeah, I basically wait until no one's using it.
Marco:
And I actually do have...
Marco:
a few chances a week where that happens like in the middle of the day.
Marco:
And so I can do that, but getting back a minute to your, to your switch issue, I, I, I found it amusing.
Marco:
I looked up, um, the switch that runs most of my house here, uh, is an, well, it was until very recently when I, when I upgraded, quote, upgraded to ubiquity stuff, um, an HP 18 or 24 port, uh, HP rack mount switch.
Marco:
And this is something I bought in 2012, uh,
Marco:
For $274 and has been bulletproof.
Marco:
Totally rock solid until I took it offline and upgraded to the Ubiquiti stuff like last year sometime.
Marco:
So it worked for like probably nine years or eight years at least and was totally rock solid.
Marco:
Never had a problem.
Marco:
And at some point I needed an eight port switch in one of my TV stations.
Marco:
Um, and I just got the HP pro curve.
Marco:
It's the HP pro curve, 1810 G line.
Marco:
And I just got the eight port version of that, which is smaller and got that.
Marco:
And that was also totally reliable bulletproof the entire time.
Marco:
Um, so I can suggest if you're willing to go with things that are a little bit larger and might have the power port on the opposite side as the network ports and a fan potentially,
Marco:
I don't think these have fans.
Marco:
I'll double check.
John:
Well, stop it.
John:
Don't don't suggest any rack myself.
John:
Like, obviously, I know if I if I wanted to just buy like business equipment.
John:
Right.
John:
Yeah, it would be fine.
John:
Right.
John:
But I'm but these are for better or for worse.
John:
This networking stuff is happening like on a desk up where people are.
Marco:
so rack mount stuff is well the a port version yeah the a port version is not a rack mount or at least it's one of those like half half wide things yeah i mean but that's why i start to get into fashion like for example the fashion of network switches yeah so the one the one i have the one i have on my knowledge you're gonna have like five network cables coming out of it where's the fashion there isn't like i don't want an ugly box i don't want an ugly box sitting on my desk that's what it comes down it shouldn't be on your desk
John:
it's covered in wires if you're concerned about the appearance of something that's inherently going to be covered in wires you can't even see the wires they all disappear behind the desk oh my god yeah so anyway i had the one i have attached to my synology is sort of the uh the spiritual successor of the the good one that i like the good one that i like is is the one that my mac pro is connected to it's an eight port switch i think i bought it i think i bought it in like 2002 or something i don't even know how old it is right
John:
But it looks nice.
John:
It looks like a rectangle.
John:
It's black.
John:
It has lights on the front with colors that mean something, right?
John:
And it has power that comes out the back, right?
John:
You can't buy that anymore, right?
John:
The company that makes it makes a new model that's ugly.
John:
I bought one of those ugly ones, and that's what my Synologies are on.
John:
Because I don't care.
John:
It's in the basement.
John:
I don't see it.
John:
But I need something up here that is tasteful and discreet and not ugly and, you know, reasonable quality and has the ports on the back and the plug on the back.
John:
If you think about the Airport Extreme, that qualifies.
John:
It is tasteful.
John:
Yes, it has cables all plugged into the back of it, but they're all in the back.
John:
You can't see them because you can't walk around the back of this desk.
John:
It's against the wall.
John:
It fulfills the goal.
John:
It is a reasonable-looking, nice thing that...
John:
has been reliable as far as we know but that i'm deciding to take out of the networking equation just because it's the oldest thing i you know and again i'm not i'm not necessarily blaming uh this particular device but it's the first variable that i'm going to eliminate and i'm going to replace it with something else so the one i got is a black rectangular box with all the ports in the back of it it's from a brand i have not tried before so wish me luck but you know it's a 20 purchase so if it's garbage i'll just try another brand it's not the end of the world and in fact i think i have a spare one of the ugly ones up in the attic because i got a lot of
John:
always have this is a good thing to go when you're buying something like this like networking switches or whatever especially if you if your house is set up like mine where you essentially use all the ports like there is no there's no networking switch in my house that has an abundance of free ports i'm tempted to say that there are zero free ports but i think i have one in this room as for my sort of go-to spare port right but anyway
John:
If something goes wrong in your wired networking and a box dies because you've been using it for 15 years and you don't have a replacement, it can be frustrating when things go offline and kids can't get Wi-Fi anymore because the wire that goes to the satellite thing doesn't work.
John:
And you're like, well, sorry, I'm all out of ports.
John:
It's a good idea to have spares.
John:
And so I do have a couple of spare switches, but they're ugly.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm hoping the one I bought that is less ugly works well, but if it doesn't and it's an emergency, I can swap in one of the uggo boxes.
Marco:
Do you want to be really frustrated?
Marco:
I actually have this problem very well solved in my house because, you know, who makes a really nice little switch?
Marco:
ubiquity ubiquity but they're managed exactly and and you need to you need to like be running their management software to like activate the switch but they make this one called the uh usw flex mini it's a managed five port switch that's very very small they sell it in like i i think i bought a four pack for a hundred bucks yeah they do sell them in multi-packs i noticed that too i'm like why is this so expensive it comes with four of them yeah and
Marco:
And it can be powered either via USB-C, which is on the wrong side of it, or it can be powered by a power over Ethernet feed in.
Marco:
That's also the uplink.
Marco:
And one of the coolest things I ever did for my network was I upgraded my main switch to be a power over Ethernet switch on all of its ports.
Marco:
And that way, I can plug any PoE thing into any Ethernet port around my house, and it gets powered.
Marco:
And what's great about this is that if I need a switch somewhere, I can plug this in to the wall jack, it gets powered, and then I don't have to separately run a power cable to it, and I can plug whatever I want into its other ports.
Marco:
And so it is a very, very nice system.
Marco:
Unfortunately, it requires you to have a PoE infrastructure, or USB-C power, but on the wrong side, or...
Marco:
Either way, it still requires you to have, like, a ubiquity management system set up.
Marco:
But it is a really nice-looking, very small switch.
John:
No, it is.
John:
I looked at it.
John:
In my tour of, like, every networking vendor on the planet, I looked at it.
John:
Hell, I was looking at vendors that sell, essentially, this product, an internet networking switch, for use in factories, like, to build things.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Right?
John:
because there are vendors that specialize in like so on the factory floor of your like you know metal machining shop or whatever you might need ethernet for your cnc machines or whatever and the things they sell they're hilarious like they have their own fashion they look like you know like milwaukee power tools or whatever they have that kind of macho i belong in a factory vibe which is not the look i'm looking for and they're also like you know seven times more expensive than even this ubiquity thing like so you want a four port factory router that's three hundred dollars please
John:
I don't know what's factory about them other than the fact that they seem to have metal cases and, you know, ridiculous flanges and stuff.
John:
But yeah, no, I did look at Ubiquiti.
John:
I looked at a lot of the other managed stuff I don't want and can't support any managed stuff.
John:
Some of the more expensive consumer ones are all about like, hey, this one has all power Ethernet ports, but that doesn't help me because I'm pretty sure...
John:
i don't i don't know if the cat 6 cable that's going from my files thing supports power over ethernet do all cables support it this is another thing of my research like i don't i don't i don't have any power even infrastructure as you were saying like there's zero power ethernet things in my house and applying it after the fact and this is this is what people are going to tell me and they're probably kind of right you should just get a server rack and put it in your base next to all your synology stuff yes that
John:
probably will happen someday eventually unfortunately my the other part of my home networking as we talked about before like the part where you have to get wires to go from point a to point b in your house that is the most sneaky janky ridiculous so you didn't really want to do this the right way situation right i ran all these wires myself
John:
I am not an electrician, and I did it by essentially being sneaky.
John:
Like, I didn't do anything the right way.
John:
It's all about, like, where can I hide a wire where no one will notice it?
John:
And I go from the far corner of my house to the other far corner, and it's this ridiculous... If you saw the network topology, it's like...
John:
god i wish i could find this it's probably in youtube somewhere you've ever seen the uh the thing explaining why a particular nerve in the human body like it's start i forget where it starts like starts in one place then goes down half your body then makes a u-turn and comes back up half your body and connects to something that's like an inch from where it started
John:
And it's like the most – it's like why would – if you need – if this part of your – if this brain, you know, you go from brain to this nerve to the thing.
John:
It's like two inches away.
John:
Why are you going down to my stomach and back up again?
John:
And there's a really good explanation of like, well, this is you with your stupid nerve, right?
John:
Rewind evolutionarily speaking and look, here is a fish.
John:
And here's how the fish biology is set up.
John:
And here how the transitional, you know, the various species that are between fish and us.
John:
And you watch as that nerve gets longer and longer and slowly bends into a crazy U shape until we get to like primates.
John:
And now you say, oh, I see.
John:
It just kind of ended up that way.
John:
That's my home network.
John:
My home network has cable runs to go.
John:
They go from the source.
John:
They go all the other side of the house.
John:
Then all the way back.
John:
Then back again in this direction.
John:
Like you would never make a network this way.
John:
But it's entirely designed like where and how I can hide the wires without actually running them through any of my walls, which are all made of like horsehair plaster and lath and everything.
John:
Right.
John:
So I'm slightly constrained on the networking.
John:
In general, though, I have everything that I need.
John:
It's just that, you know, if I want to replace a thing that has four Ethernet ports on it, I need something else that has at least four Ethernet ports on it.
John:
If I want to replace everything, I have to rerun all new wires and sort of home run them down to my big non-existent networking rack in the basement.
John:
That maybe is a project for another decade.
John:
But for now, I just want to find the culprit.
John:
And by the way, I'm the culprit of what the networking thing is.
John:
I really do think, anecdotally speaking, as far as my working time can tell, it mostly happens when I'm in meetings with the Teams app.
John:
I'm like, how could that be?
John:
What is it about using teams?
John:
It's not particularly network, you know, constrained.
John:
It's not like we're sharing video half the time.
John:
Everyone has their video turned off and we're all staring at one document.
John:
And I do huge downloads and uploads all the time, putting gigs of photos and everything else on my backblaze stuff going up for multiple computers.
John:
Like, what is it about him being in the teams mean that causes this problem to happen?
John:
i don't have an answer i don't know why i'm blaming the apple thing just because it's old but it's the first thing i'm trying so we'll check back in in three months or maybe i'll try and check back the next episode and i'll tell you how nice my black box looks on the desk uh and then after that three months i'll tell you if i've actually solved my problem
Casey:
I just love that you've been stressing about how many nines you've you've implicitly provided your family.
Casey:
I mean, I don't think you knew it, but you're apparently in four to five nine territory.
John:
No, I'm actually the thing is, they're not around or at least they don't.
John:
No one has ever come to me and say, hey, is the network out?
John:
Because it goes down for a second.
John:
But if you're in the middle of giving a presentation, it's a it's a problem.
John:
Right.
John:
So as far as they're concerned, it's, you know, 100 percent uptime.
John:
And I figure I want to maintain, mostly because if I was to just right now kill the network connection, every person in my house would come be knocking at this door and saying what's going on.
John:
Because they're, I guarantee you, they're all on the internet right now in some form, right?
Casey:
Oh, John, I'm sorry.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Michael writes, a long time ago, I read that it was best to have an admin account in your user account, and your user account shouldn't be an admin for security purposes.
Casey:
Is that still best practice?
Casey:
Some commands slash installs require sudo, which my user doesn't have.
Casey:
This is a great question.
Casey:
I think I might have done this once in the Windows era, like 49 years ago.
Casey:
I never have really done this regularly.
Casey:
So, John, what's the right practice here?
John:
This is another question we get occasionally, and I think we're up into like the two or three year rotation where we need to answer it again.
John:
The tradeoff is exactly how people think.
John:
There is no secret thing you're probably not thinking of, right?
John:
It is safer not to have an admin account because then you can't actually do something to hold yourself.
John:
But it's also annoying because sometimes you want to do something as admin, and if your account doesn't have it, then you have to switch one that does, which you can do, but it's a hassle.
John:
So it's that old security versus convenience tradeoff.
John:
What I would say is if you're listening to this podcast and more or less trust yourself to not do something phenomenally stupid with your computer, having an admin account is so much more convenient that I think it is worth the slightly higher chance that you will hose yourself and or be exploited by some program that takes advantage of the fact that you can elevate privileges.
John:
That said, if you want to make the opposite choice, that's fine, too.
John:
It's not that fraud.
John:
Like just decide what your risk, you know, your risk tolerance is.
John:
I personally make my accounts admin accounts.
John:
I made all my children's accounts non-admin accounts.
John:
And I even went back on that because it was too annoying when I was on their account trying to fix something that I couldn't essentially do admin stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
Sometimes when you're prompted for admin stuff, you can enter an admin username and password.
John:
So if I was on their account and I needed to give some app access to the microphone or whatever, I could enter my username and password.
John:
But then I couldn't use Touch ID because their laptops had Touch ID with their finger in it.
John:
Anyway, I have now gone to the entire family has admin accounts just because I am annoyed by the hassle of not being able to elevate to admin privileges with the current user's password in every situation.
John:
Your mileage may vary.
John:
It is, in fact, safer not to do that, but not to a degree that I would have a problem with recommending that people just make admin accounts.
John:
Just be careful out there.
Marco:
I disagree a little bit.
Marco:
I err on the side of just make everybody admin because, first of all, it depends on where the risk is coming from as to whether this makes any difference at all.
Marco:
sandboxed apps for instance on the mac uh you don't you don't need to separate these privileges out because they are already restricted in what they can access and and things like that and so sandbox apps are already kind of implicitly locked down uh for the most part unsandboxed apps if you're not an admin still have access to all of your files and
Marco:
and that's pretty important like they they have so much access to things that matter to you that whether or not they can modify like system files or the files of other users on the system might not matter if they they still have access to all of your documents all of your files like so so you know from from that point of view i i think you're thinking there's more security in making that account than what there actually might be
John:
I mean, the context of my household is that every person has an account on every single computer.
John:
So even though it seems silly, like, well, it's got all access to your stuff.
John:
Well, it doesn't have access, for example, to my wife's stuff if it's not an admin account, right?
John:
So I can hose mine.
John:
Like, it's more relevant for kids.
John:
If kids didn't have an admin account, they could erase all their crap, but they couldn't erase my crap or my wife's crap or whatever, right?
John:
But in the end, you know, like, it's...
John:
How much are you trusting your kids to operate the computer in a safe way?
John:
It's a trade-off.
Marco:
Also, if you run non-admit accounts, lots of weird stuff breaks.
Marco:
That being said, I've had many problems with multi-user support in Big Sur and recent releases.
Marco:
Every time we have to log out of my user account and TIFF logs in to record a podcast or something,
Marco:
After that, the computer is basically broken until I reboot it.
Marco:
Like mail search doesn't work.
Marco:
Touch ID doesn't work.
Marco:
Watch unlock doesn't work.
Marco:
Any kind of spotlight, anything based on the spotlight index doesn't work.
Marco:
It's frankly baffling to me that Big Sur has gotten as far as it has in the release cycle and multi-user support is still completely broken in this way.
John:
I don't think it's broken for everyone though because I'm running Big Sur on all our computers and we perpetually have multiple people logged into them switching accounts all day long and don't experience any of this.
John:
now to be fair we don't use apple mail at all period across the entire family there you go we do we do use things like spotlight and like nothing else seems broken because if it did nothing in our house would function i would have downgraded everybody right so mail may absolutely be broken but the i mean i'm not saying it's not happening to you but whatever it is causing it must be something that we either we don't have or that we aren't doing yeah mail break mail search breaks watch unlock breaks and lots of things based on spotlight break it seems and it's if you are on big sir and you switch users
Marco:
Switch back.
Marco:
It will be broken until you reboot.
Marco:
And that's been persistent through every software update.
John:
But not Spotlight.
John:
Spotlight still does work for us.
John:
We don't use Watch Unlock and we don't use Apple Mail.
John:
So I do wonder what is the deal.
John:
You couldn't use them if you wanted to because they would break in your setup.
John:
Although actually, wait a second.
John:
I do use Apple Mail to download my Gmail.
John:
It's just periodically, but I never do searches from it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Anyway, so multi-user mode is buggy and there's lots of weird stuff that breaks.
Marco:
So anyway,
Marco:
Going back to the question, if you want to have separate accounts, admin versus non-admin, you have to give up a lot of convenience and a lot of things working correctly all the time.
Marco:
And what you get from that is this theoretical security benefit that I think, in practice, you're not really benefiting from in most cases.
Marco:
If it's a single-user computer, you're not really benefiting much at all.
Marco:
And then secondly, you think about the practice of what happens when you have one of these non-admin accounts.
Marco:
you get asked a lot to authorize with admin privileges, or you have to run a lot of things as sudo or enter the root password or whatever.
Marco:
If you're doing this on a regular basis anyway, you are regularly poking holes in that shield of necessity or convenience, it kind of reduces the security that you're actually getting in practice.
Marco:
Because if you're constantly authorizing things to run with root privileges here and there as needed...
Marco:
Are you really being that secure by having this account be in this mode in the first place?
Marco:
I feel like the real-world security benefit of that in most setups is not high, whereas the inconvenience and potential bug exposure and annoyance is high.
Marco:
So I don't think it's worth it for most people to do that.
Casey:
Yeah, I tend to agree.
Casey:
Duncan Wilcock writes, I have about 400 video clips with my son, and I want to join them into one three-hour movie.
Casey:
I want 4K and 60 frames per second, original codec.
Casey:
Recommend a good tool, please.
Casey:
Hi, have you never heard of FFmpeg?
Casey:
How long have you been listening to the show that you've never heard of FFmpeg?
Casey:
I mean, come on, man.
Casey:
That's probably not the best solution to this problem, but it is a solution.
Casey:
Also, it gets a little dodgy.
Casey:
I'm not entirely sure what Duncan is saying.
Casey:
I want 4K and 60 frames per second original codec.
Casey:
I'm assuming that these are 400 video clips coming from various different pieces of hardware across presumably years where not everything started in 4K.
Casey:
This is all stuff that can be handled by FFmpeg, but it does get dodgy kind of quickly.
Casey:
um duncan writes that apparently a photos app slideshow is 1080p max and imovie doesn't preserve date order if exported with edits i mean this is not going to be easy with anything i know how to do you can do it with ffmpeg but it would be semi-manual do one of you have a better answer or do we have to tell duncan to uh to you know ask me to to help them out
John:
This question was totally for you just so you can say FFMPEG again.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
Because, yeah, this is one of those situations where once you get into this type of question where you're like, look, I've got a video.
John:
I want to do a thing to it, but I want to do exactly this thing and exactly this way.
John:
You're basically singing FFMPEG song.
John:
And yeah, it's a painful song.
John:
It is.
John:
There may be other better tools.
John:
I don't know.
John:
The lyrics make no sense.
John:
I'm just familiar with FFmpeg because it's a very common tool and Casey talks about it all the time.
John:
But I'm sure professional video editors or people familiar with different kinds of tools have better ways to do this.
John:
But if you don't want to spend any money but just want to get this job done and you're willing to Google for a while, FFmpeg will probably eventually do what you want once you figure out how to make it work.
John:
and by by google for a while he means a while yeah i mean you'll try a bunch of things that don't work first i here's what i would recommend i mean i don't know if casey does a similar thing but every time i tried to mess with a mpeg i have like test files that are very small and i do all my testing on them they're representative they're the same as the files that i want to deal with but maybe the file i want to deal with is like some like eight gig movie or something don't do all your testing that it'll take a long time right
John:
Test with small files first.
John:
And then when you finally get a working file that has the characteristics that you want and have figured out the, you know, mile-long command line incantation, then do it on your real files.
John:
That's smart.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
Another thing I do is oftentimes I just want to test something.
Casey:
I'll trim it to be, it's dash T, I believe, where you can say only output like 10 seconds or something like that.
Casey:
So you can still use your 8 gigabyte input, but it's only going to output 10 seconds and it's going to quit.
Casey:
But yeah, I mean, you can do this with FFmpeg for sure.
Casey:
It's actually not that complicated an incantation.
Casey:
The complicated thing would be that the way I know how to do this is that you would need a plain text file that lists the names of all 400 videos that you're looking to input.
Casey:
And if you can get that, even if you do it by hand, it's actually a very straightforward incantation that I'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
Um, but that would require again, a file that reads it's plain text and it reads file space and then a file name, new line file space, next file name, new line.
Casey:
And then, uh, you can have FFmpeg concatenate all of those videos.
Casey:
You would probably need to specify by hand, like output resolution and stuff like that.
Casey:
So it's not, I guess it's not quite as easy as I thought, but the idea of mashing 400 video clips together is actually very straightforward in
Casey:
If you're willing to generate a plain text file that has 400 lines in it, that is the names of all the files you're trying to input.
Casey:
So this is doable for sure.
Casey:
And FFmpeg will do it.
Casey:
I don't know if Handbrake will do this sort of thing.
Casey:
Of course, anytime I say FFmpeg, everyone else starts saying Handbrake because Handbrake is in many respects just a user interface, a GUI front end to FFmpeg.
Casey:
Again, it's been a long time since I've played with Handbrake, and it might do this sort of thing.
Casey:
And there is a Handbrake CLI for doing it on the command line, which maybe would do this sort of thing.
Casey:
But yeah, certainly FFmpeg will do it.
Casey:
And it's not that inherently difficult.
Casey:
It is workable.
Casey:
And building on what John was saying about how do you get to be decent at FFmpeg, I think I mentioned this before, but in Apple Notes, which is now my repository of random information, just like Evernote once was, have you heard about WorkChat?
Casey:
Well, in Apple Notes, I have a folder that is FFmpeg, and it's just examples of different incantations that I have used and that I thought I would come back to at some point.
Casey:
And one of them is concatenating files.
Casey:
And I can remember how to do it off the top of my head now, but for the first 10, 15 times I did it, I was like, wait, what do I need to do?
Casey:
And what does that plain text thing look like?
Casey:
And how does that work?
Casey:
And so having that sort of thing handy is very, very useful.
Casey:
And also, if you're not really familiar with FFmpeg, I'll put my primer that I wrote, I don't know, three, four years ago now it looks like, I'll put that in the show notes for you to look at.
Casey:
Moving right along, Brandon Wees writes, how does Overcast scrape iTunes?
Casey:
Does it use the iTunes search API or does it scrape it from web pages?
Marco:
It uses the iTunes search API.
Marco:
It's a very simple answer.
Marco:
It's not that interesting.
Marco:
But yeah, that's it.
Marco:
I use the iTunes search API.
Marco:
It's been around forever.
Marco:
Apple seems to be okay with people using it in this way, and they have been for some time.
Marco:
It has basically never changed.
Marco:
I would not want to build something based around scraping web pages that I was actually making into a product for other people to use.
Marco:
Scraping web pages is both hard to maintain and unreliable and can possibly get you into legal issues with the people you are scraping them from.
Marco:
It's not worth doing anything that requires that if you're
Marco:
intending to like make it a serious effort that you're giving people so uh yeah just i use the api the way i'm allowed to and that's it the api is so old is it like a soap api like what does it return it returns uh json actually wow it's pretty modern fancy yeah it's it's it's super easy to use um it's one of those things like it's kind of like usenet like just don't don't talk about it because it seems too good to be true and we don't want them to like we don't want somebody to realize this exists and shut it down so like we just we don't talk about it
Marco:
Anyway, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, HelloFresh, and Linode.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
You can use our new annual or monthly options in your currency of choice if your choice happens to be U.S.
Marco:
dollars, euro, or Great British pounds.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did enough.
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast So Long
Marco:
I have some bell follow-up.
Casey:
Some bell follow-up?
Casey:
I did not see that coming.
Casey:
All right, tell me more.
Marco:
Did you break another bell?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I fixed the original bell.
Casey:
Whoa.
Casey:
Oh, excellent.
Marco:
So I pulled out of the closet the day because I had a theory.
Marco:
I had heard on one of the recent Merlin podcasts, I forget which one, I'll probably do by Friday, he was playing with a magnet with his bell and
Marco:
Now, these are, you know, metal bells.
Marco:
And I thought, oh, wait a minute.
Marco:
Maybe the reason mine was getting all rattly was that the metal got magnetized in transit.
Marco:
Because if it gets magnetized, maybe like the little hammer thing in there that hits it doesn't pull back correctly and like sticks to it a little too long and or, you know, makes it like rattle weirdly.
Marco:
So I thought I from the world of watches, I have a deep magnetizer.
Marco:
So I thought, maybe I can fix my original bell.
Marco:
Maybe it got magnetized by being transported next to an iPad smart cover or something.
Marco:
And great, I can just run my demagnetizer around it.
Marco:
So I took it out, and I waved it over my compass to test whether it's magnetized or not.
Marco:
And it wasn't.
Marco:
And I thought, okay, well, there goes that theory.
Marco:
But then I took out the working bell, and I held them side by side and compared them.
Marco:
And I realized that the old broken bell, the dome of the main bell-shaped part of the bell, it was not resting level on the broken one.
Marco:
It was tilted, and it was touching the bottom base part, whereas the functioning bell had a perfectly even air gap between those two parts.
John:
Your broken one was muting itself, like you mute strings on a guitar.
Marco:
A little bit, yeah, except rattling itself instead.
Marco:
I thought, well, let me see if I can fix that.
Marco:
This is just, you know, metal.
Marco:
Maybe I can bend it back into place.
Marco:
And sure enough, a like $10 bell is not made of very high quality or thick metal.
Marco:
So I could just bend it back with my hands.
Marco:
And now I have...
Marco:
The original bell, back to its former glory, it works fine.
Marco:
At some point in its various trips to WBC or the beach or whatever, it probably just got compressed in a bag and it bent down slightly and bent the metal.
Marco:
Now, I have repaired my bell.
Marco:
I believe in repairability.
Marco:
and reuse before i recycle things i have my original bell back in service before you order 50 other bells in an attempt to get a new one of the original bell which i'll never be able to get again well that's it's a good thing like my broken cheese graters i keep them around too for parts it's a good thing you kept the original bell around yep yep so here we are i'm back on the original bell yeah i can tell it has a warmer sound