The Everything’s OK Alarm
Casey:
moments ago, my wrist started vibrating kind of a lot over and over and over again.
Casey:
And I was very confused.
Casey:
Then I realized, wait a second, this just happened a day or two back.
Casey:
I know what this is.
Casey:
And I have on my Synology, there's a downloader app that you can point an RSS feed at, or you can point it to an RSS feed, and it'll download all the things linked in the RSS feed.
Casey:
And I do that for both ATP and analog.
Casey:
And we're going to talk a little later, but we have changed the ATP website and now my Synology is downloading all of our shows again, which is fine.
Casey:
But what's interesting about that is I have a push notification sent to me when something downloads because typically I want to know these sorts of things, especially when they're automated because otherwise I may not think to check.
Casey:
And so I'm looking at 36 notifications on my iPhone lock screen, 37, and it's still going.
Casey:
The entirety of the ATP back catalog being downloaded on my – 38 being downloaded on my Synology as we speak.
John:
Your relationship with notifications is different than mine.
John:
You want to be notified when your background automation downloads a thing?
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
I don't want to know.
John:
I have the same automation, by the way, for my podcast.
John:
But the idea of getting a notification, let alone a notification that makes it all the way to my wrist, boy, that's the opposite of what I want.
Casey:
Well, but see, the thing is, I do want to know.
Casey:
I totally hear your perspective.
Casey:
You are not at all wrong.
Casey:
I want to know when it happens.
Casey:
I just don't want to be clicking buttons to make it happen.
Yeah.
John:
Everything's okay alarm.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Everything's okay.
Casey:
Everything's okay.
John:
When this alarm is sounding, everything is fine.
John:
If that alarm ever stops, boy, look out.
John:
How about getting a notification if it fails?
Casey:
Yeah, that would be too easy.
John:
How about a Deadman switch where something just checks to see whether the new episode appears once per week, and if it doesn't, then you get a notification.
John:
There's all sorts of things you could do that would not result in the current risk shaking that you've got going on.
Casey:
Hey, man, this is how I like my life, all right?
Casey:
Don't shame me.
Casey:
Don't shame my preferences.
John:
Do you have the little LED on your nightstand?
John:
Should it be on when the garage door is closed and off when it's not so you can wake up in the middle of the night and look to make sure the light is still shining?
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we have to start the show with amazing, amazing news.
Casey:
I could not be happier to tell you that you can buy stuff from us now.
Casey:
You can do that thing that Dubai Friday does so well.
Casey:
You can give us your money if you would like.
Casey:
We have the ATP store back up and we have new shirts.
Casey:
We have mugs and we have a bunch of the old crap we already had or had in the past.
Casey:
So we have, for the very first time, the ATP mug.
Casey:
It is a very good-looking black mug with the M-Style ATP logo.
Casey:
And it has a red interior, which looks very cool.
Casey:
And then, John, would you like to take us through the Pro Max Triumph shirts?
Casey:
And then we'll explain the kind of advanced version after that, please.
John:
sure this this would have been our wwdc sale of course sad you know we're not all going to be at wwdc none of us will be there in fact because it's you know happening online for obvious reasons um but every wwc we try to have some kind of idea for a new shirt and you know in keeping with whatever the theme of the year is or whatever we're talking about on the show uh this year uh
John:
what we decided to do is bring back the, well, I don't know if it ever really left the, the pro max shirt.
John:
The one that's got the silhouettes of a bunch of different sort of pro level max, uh, throughout Apple's history.
John:
Uh, it used to have five silhouettes on it, ending with the trash can.
John:
Right.
John:
And so this year is the pro max triumph shirt because with the, the return of the Mac pro, uh,
John:
the real Mac Pro, the one we were all waiting for, the one sitting next to me at my desk right now, that is the sixth Mac, and that happily gives us all six colors of the typical Apple logo.
John:
So the shirt is now complete.
John:
It looks just like it did before, except now there is a sixth Mac at the end, the current Mac Pro.
John:
And Casey had the brilliant idea, in keeping with past shirts that we've done in this spirit, to say, okay, well, you've got the shirts here with the Pro Max on it ending with the new Mac Pro,
John:
uh but we should make a version of it with wheels so we did so you can get the shirt with wheels or without without wheels is just the standard feet and with wheels you know and you'll see it's got the little wheels in the bottom of course the wheels cost a little bit more right but you know how much would you pay for what is the quote i got to pull it from the website uh how much is a perfect wheel worth it turns out when it comes to t-shirts the wheels are four dollars more so it's one dollar per wheel
John:
So it's proportionally scaled to the horrendously expensive computer that's sitting next to me.
John:
You don't have to pay an extra $400 for your wheels.
John:
On your shirt, you just got to pay an extra four bucks.
John:
So with wheels or without, in black and in white, in 100% cotton and in tri-blend, many, many options.
John:
Please go and rep the fully armed and operational line of Pro Max from Apple.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Yes, we are aware there are only two wheels visible on the shirt.
Casey:
Just go with the joke, please.
John:
No, all four are there.
John:
They're just behind them.
John:
It's a silhouette.
Casey:
I'm just waiting for everyone to well-actually you, John.
John:
You think maybe we're just giving you two wheels and there's just cinder blocks in the backside that you can't see?
John:
No.
John:
All four wheels are on this shirt.
John:
You should read the book Flatline.
John:
Actually, don't.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
But you'll learn about 2D versus 3D.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So we have mugs.
Casey:
We have the Promax shirt, both with and without wheels in black and in white and men and women's in tri-blend and in cotton.
Casey:
We also have the original OG ATP logo shirt.
Casey:
We have brought back the ATP hoodie.
Casey:
We have had like three requests for the ATP polo.
Casey:
You're my people.
Casey:
Of course, nobody needs a polo to go to work anymore, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
But if you want a polo, if you want a collared shirt, that's there as well.
Casey:
We also have the ATP hat and the enamel pins, which, let me remind you, have a locking pin back.
Casey:
So all of this stuff, you pre-order it sort of kind of Kickstarter style.
Casey:
It's the same thing we've always done.
Casey:
You can order it up until June 7th.
Casey:
And then once they have reached a certain threshold, which is very low, then...
Casey:
then our friends at Cotton Bureau will start printing and fulfilling all these orders.
Casey:
Now, one small note.
Casey:
Also news for today, briefly, we are going to be launching a membership program for ATP, and we're going to be doing that sometime soon-ish.
Casey:
So if you have to allocate your money in only one place, that's totally understandable.
Casey:
But please keep in mind that there will be a membership option coming up soon.
Casey:
But for shirts, for mugs, for polos, for hoodies, for hats, for pins, all of those things are available now at ATP.FM slash store.
Casey:
Once again, ATP.FM slash store.
John:
And I would say on the balance here, if you want this merchandise and it's nice and it's cool, buy it, right?
John:
But if you only just want to give us money, you may have an opportunity to do that in the future.
John:
That's it.
Casey:
Also of note, which is probably only interesting to the super nerds amongst us, we have a new website now.
Casey:
And I would like to take credit for absolutely none of it because this was pretty much entirely Marco's work.
Casey:
We are very excited that we have a brand new website that won't mean too much to most of you, I don't think, except that now all, what, 380-ish episodes of this show are all back in the RSS feed.
Casey:
There were very uninteresting reasons why that wasn't the case before, but there was a technical limitation prior to Marco making us our bespoke CMS podcast.
Casey:
But now you can get all of the back catalog in the RSS feed.
Casey:
We have links to all of the best podcast apps on iOS and actually Pocket Cast on Android as well.
Casey:
And we have a new CMS.
Casey:
Marco, would you mind taking us on a little nickel tour as to what's going on here?
Marco:
Well, actually, you forgot to also mention the other big news.
Marco:
Neutral also has the new CMS.
Marco:
So Neutral has also gotten a redesign.
Marco:
Hooray!
Marco:
Our long-retired podcast, last episode of which was about, what, six years ago?
Casey:
Something like that, yeah.
Marco:
So for various reasons, you know, we've had this site on Squarespace since we started.
Marco:
By the way, Squarespace is sponsoring this episode.
Marco:
We've now moved it to Linode, another sponsor of this episode.
Yeah.
Marco:
Each sponsor gets seven years to host the site.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I think some people might view this as like, oh, no, they left Squarespace.
Marco:
But Squarespace covers a lot of needs.
Marco:
And I think it really says something that covered all of our needs for seven years.
Casey:
That's pretty good.
Casey:
All of the needs of three extremely particular, extremely annoying nerds, that website did just fine for us for seven years.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
It is not an indictment at all of Squarespace.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And to replace it, it took me like three weeks of constant work to replace like a 1% of the functionality that Squarespace offered.
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, and theirs is still better.
Marco:
I've wanted to do this for a while for lots of reasons.
Marco:
Mainly, it will be supporting the new membership program that we will be launching.
Marco:
As Casey said, we're not going to really talk about that yet.
Marco:
Frankly, don't get too excited.
Marco:
The details aren't very interesting.
But
Marco:
it's exactly what you'd expect from the three of us yeah but yeah it's not it's nothing interesting and the things that you get for free our current plan is to leave you getting those things for free so anyway so don't worry about anything like that it's nothing bad so yeah so basically wanted to write a new CMS did a couple of super cool custom things people listening on the live stream now notice the live stream now automatically turns itself on and off when we go live and when we don't go live I don't have to like do this weird like shell script copy into an iframe kind of thing
Marco:
I was doing before.
Marco:
It now shows the number of live listeners right there on the page for the rest of the site.
Marco:
It's, you know, just a pretty minimal bare bones CMS.
Marco:
As Casey mentioned, one of the reasons we wanted to do this for a while was the RSS feed limit.
Marco:
So now all of our episodes will show in every podcast player going all the way back to episode one.
Marco:
Although, man, those episodes sound awful.
Marco:
I was going back, testing a few of them and testing the neutral episodes as well because they were recorded around that same time span.
Marco:
And, oh, boy, our microphones are way better now.
Marco:
But, yeah, anyway.
Marco:
It's a podcast website.
Marco:
It isn't that interesting otherwise.
Marco:
I built it all on PHP.
Marco:
It's very minimal, like CSS and JavaScript usage.
Marco:
There's no frameworks on the front end at all.
Marco:
John tried to give it to me to get to use the JavaScript fetch API instead of XML HTTP request.
Marco:
And I looked at an example of the Fetch API and had all these asyncs and .then, .then, .then, .then.
Marco:
No library is required, though.
Marco:
It's built into the browsers.
Marco:
So that I like.
Marco:
I like that a lot.
Marco:
Because this site, there's no use anywhere, as far as I know, of jQuery.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Now, eventually, when we do the membership, we'll have to add Stripes API to it, and that might add some of that stuff.
Marco:
So we'll see how long I can keep that going.
Marco:
But, you know, right now, it's all just, you know, really vanilla stuff.
Marco:
In the version of the site that you all are seeing, there's almost no JavaScript at all.
Marco:
On the backend version that has, like, the editing interface for the post, there's a little bit, but it's, you know, maybe a few hundred lines.
Marco:
It's not much.
Marco:
It's all very, very simple stuff.
Marco:
And it's funny.
Marco:
I looked at the Fetchy for you, as I was saying, and that whole style of the chaining of the do this, dot then, do this, dot then, dot, dot.
Marco:
It's all that stuff.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Let me just stop you there.
Casey:
Let me just stop you there and let me simplify for all of us who are not old and boring.
Casey:
Marco discovered promises and did not like what he saw.
John:
What?
John:
Just a common reaction, to be fair, but we just all had that same reaction, what, six years ago or whatever, but Marco is getting to it now.
John:
Exactly.
John:
And he's having the reaction that I think everybody has upon first encountering promises and futures and all that good stuff.
Marco:
To me, it looks like...
Marco:
apple script oh come on that's a little harsh you look at it and you're like okay this is this is trying to be minimal and readable but is it writable and is it understandable that's it's not that's that's a thing it's not it's not a style it's not a syntax thing it is a actually a functional thing and they're trying to find a way to make the functionality of
John:
palatable and usable but but in the end what it's trying to accomplish is a functional thing which is it's a functional thing that is not maybe not important to you if when you're writing like client-side javascript to do a thing that you would normally do synchronously or whatever but anyway but we don't but i have time to go into futures now i'm not here to sell you on it uh but all i can say is that because you won't yeah i will eventually if i if you gave me you know many months and weeks but the point is everyone goes through this they're weirded out by them it doesn't seem to make any sense you eventually learn how they work you eventually get used to them
John:
your brain does eventually fit around them, and then you realize there are use cases where they do make sense.
John:
You don't need to travel that path.
John:
There's nothing dragging you down it, but I'm confident that you would travel that path if you had occasion to use them in one of the contexts where they are very nice.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
But regardless, my use case for this was very, very simple.
Marco:
I wouldn't have been saving a lot of code at all if I actually went to this.
Marco:
And so it wasn't worth learning a whole new thing just to possibly save 10 lines of code.
Marco:
So I went with the old way and my ready state change handler with state four and it was fine.
Marco:
It was totally fine.
Marco:
No big deal.
Casey:
It's funny to me because I had forgotten that conversation that we had.
Casey:
And just today I wrote my own like super streamlined promise class for Swift because I didn't want to use any of the like very good, but ultimately kind of bloated promises libraries that are available right now.
Casey:
And so I wrote one that's super small, like very Marco style.
Casey:
So on the one side, I should get a thumbs up from you for doing something like, oh, screw it.
Casey:
I'll just roll my own.
Casey:
It'll be fine.
Casey:
I don't need that much from it, but a thumbs down because I was writing my own promise library.
John:
Yeah, I'm going to give a thumbs down on that one.
John:
Casey has gone a little bit.
John:
That path that I described to you, Marco, Casey has continued onward, perhaps unadvisedly further into the woods where now everywhere he is, he needs to not only have all those features available, but he's not satisfied with the libraries that offer them or the built-ins that offer them other parts of Standard Life.
John:
I'm going to write my own promise library.
John:
You've gone too far for me now, Casey.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
I can't follow you into I'm going to write my own promise library for Swift.
Casey:
just async await will come eventually just hang in there stop it's it was seriously like 150 or 200 lines it was not that i know i know but i'm just okay all right in any case so we have this fancy shiny new cms and i'm very excited about it and marco i'm very happy that uh you spent the time putting this together so i didn't have to and john didn't have to
Casey:
And really, ultimately, for the listener's perspective, there's not I mean, it's visually different, but but functionally, it's not really that different outside of the live page.
Casey:
But we are excited about it.
Casey:
And I wanted to publicly thank you, Marco, for putting in all that work, because whether or not you enjoyed it, it was still a lot of work.
Casey:
And I'm very thankful for that.
John:
One thing I think, I mean, again, no one ever goes to the website, but anyway, one thing people can appreciate if they happen to go to it, you might notice that the site loads very fast.
John:
And part of that is, you know, the lack of JavaScript and so forth.
John:
But part of that is Marco's fairly obsessive business.
John:
need to do the fastest thing possible, which is not often the quote-unquote best practice for web design unless your goal is to make the page fast and responsive.
John:
So if you view source, you're like, all the CSS is inlined?
John:
Why is he doing that?
John:
Why?
John:
Because it's faster.
Casey:
And guess what?
John:
It is faster.
John:
the site loads really fast if you go to one of those like test this site to see how fast it is how could you make this site faster they have like no advice because they're like yep you pretty much did it all again this is a simple website it's not a big deal i just you know it's when doing projects like this i find it amusing to set a goal for yourself that really doesn't have any particular you know you don't need to do this but it's a fun thing to do i don't know if this is what marco did but i i appreciated that about the site that there is
John:
It is way higher performance than it needs to be for any reason.
Marco:
Whenever I do something new like this, I try to make some kind of political statement.
Marco:
You?
Marco:
Yeah, with the way that I make certain decisions, the way I build things.
Marco:
With this, one of my statements, as John said, was everything's inlined.
Marco:
It isn't that way in the source tree.
Marco:
In the source tree, it's all neatly separated into files with different roles, but upon render, I just read those files in and inline them all because it's faster and it keeps things simpler.
Marco:
the images are all svg files and they're really tiny i was tempted to even inline those you can do that i haven't yet uh you know don't tempt me i might do that next um and and there's very few images it's mostly just like you know podcast icons for subscriptions um there's a couple little css tricks but not like
Marco:
not like super, you know, crazy stuff.
Marco:
It's fairly minimal.
Marco:
And there's also no custom font.
Marco:
There's no web font.
Marco:
This is just using, wherever possible, it's using the system font.
Marco:
So it's using San Francisco on Mac.
Marco:
Yeah, so it's like very just fast, simple, bare bones.
Marco:
The built-in audio player
Marco:
is not a custom audio player.
Marco:
It's just whatever the browser provides for the audio tag by default with controls on.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
And it's a little bit less nice than a custom player, and maybe in the future I'll make a custom player for it, but it doesn't seem that necessary, so I'm probably not going to do it.
Marco:
And yeah, simple, just keeping everything as simple, fast, bare bones as possible.
Marco:
And it is running on my PHP framework, my custom framework that runs overcast as well.
Marco:
It is running on that on the back end.
Marco:
Not for a ton of reasons, except that it just makes it faster for me to build.
Marco:
And I know how it works.
Marco:
I know how it performs.
Marco:
And it's all running on a $40 a month Linode box with a couple other sites that are going to be on it as well, including my own markers.org is going to be moved there at some point.
Marco:
And the very high traffic neutral.fm is also there, as I mentioned earlier.
Yeah.
John:
Leave it to us to get off into the weeds of implementation of the site.
John:
The point is, buy mugs and t-shirts.
Marco:
It's a tech show.
John:
Unless you're saving your money for your membership in which you don't.
John:
But anyway, I'll just say the final note is my contribution to this website was to add a little bit of modern web dev pee to Marco's pool by using Flexbox on the store page.
John:
You're welcome.
Marco:
oh that's how you did i haven't actually looked at your code for that yet it's modern stuff don't look mark it will burn you i know seriously stay back stay back it looks very nice i don't have any tables except for like the actual list of episodes in the in the editing side but it's fine i do have a couple of floats here and there oh my word sorry
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Moving on, let's actually get the show properly started with some follow-up.
Casey:
And John, a lot of people were very interested in your MiniDV import and more technical details as to how you did that and what you did.
Casey:
So can you take us on a little bit of a journey through how you completed all that?
John:
Yeah, many more people than I thought apparently also have shoeboxes full of mini TV tapes and they wanted to know more detail about how I did it.
John:
I didn't include most detail because I thought it was boring, but I guess people want to know enough information that they feel like they can do it themselves.
John:
So first question is how did you import the movies?
John:
So I still have my original camcorder that I took all the movies on.
John:
And that's how you traditionally import it.
John:
You connect the camera to your computer, and applications on the computer can actually control the camera and make it rewind and fast-forward and play.
John:
And you play it, and then the computer records it.
John:
That's exactly what I did.
John:
The application I used to do that was iMovie.
John:
I was as surprised as anyone.
John:
The modern, most recent version of iMovie, when you plug in a camcorder and go to import...
John:
a ui that i didn't even know existed still exists with the fast forward rewind play record all those controls are still there and you can import people want to know what settings i imported at i didn't change anything i plugged in my camcorder i selected import i rewound and then i clicked whatever the import button is and that's it whatever it's doing by default that's what i did and it seemed fine uh after that things as you might expect to go a little off the rails oh people also want to know how did you connect your camcorder to your crazy mac pro
John:
i managed to do it in three dongles it's like i can name that tune in three notes would be more be more traditional but i managed to find my one dongle i managed to find is the one i connected directly to the camcorder so the camcorder has got a one of those little firewire 400 ports on it like the ones that look like a rectangle with a notch taken out of the long side right um so it's firewire 400 800 is the first dongle that's connected to the camcorder um
John:
Then I go with the second dongle that's FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt 2.
John:
And the Thunderbolt 2 is the one that looks like Mini DisplayPort, but it's Thunderbolt 2.
John:
And then the third dongle is Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3.
John:
And believe it or not, this actually works.
John:
Somehow, someway, you go from FireWire 400 to Thunderbolt 3, and you plug it into your computer, and your computer's like, sure, yeah, whatever, fine.
John:
That works.
John:
All right.
John:
After I do the iMovie import, what I end up with is, like I made a new iMovie library, I end up with like a bunch of files in an iMovie library.
John:
But I do all the imports, takes forever, right?
John:
Then just quit iMovie, just done.
John:
You know, I'm no longer going to touch iMovie.
John:
Now I have this iMovie library, and on disk it's like a package file that's actually a directory.
John:
You go into the directory, you'll find a bunch of folders.
John:
In there, you'll eventually find the actual digital video files.
John:
I think they're .db files, but honestly, I don't remember anymore.
John:
But anyway, you'll see them.
John:
They're the ones that are a couple hundred megabytes or gigabytes or whatever.
John:
One for each clip because when you import an iMovie, it will make separate files for each clip.
John:
A clip is like you hit record and then you hit stop, then you hit record and you hit stop.
John:
iMovie finds those cuts, so you end up with many, many files per tape depending on how many times you stopped recording and started recording again.
John:
What I did with those is I encoded those as H.265, and I wanted to use Handbrake to do it, like the GUI Mac thing or whatever, but I couldn't figure out a way in Handbrake to, like, you know, I made a set of settings in Handbrake.
John:
You can make a save preset, and I picked what I wanted, and, you know, all the different settings would go over in a moment.
John:
and i'm like great i have all these settings now i ought to be able to like select all on all those files and just drag them in here and say just encode all these like this if there's a way to do that handbrake i couldn't figure it out but handbrake has a command line tool i'm like all right well that suits me just fine and handily the command line tool creatively named handbrake cli you can one of the arguments you can give it is tell me the name of the preset that you made
John:
uh in the gui right the gui preset thing save out to like a json file and you can just point to that json file and say look at this json file and use the the the uh settings that i called i you know mini dv import or whatever right and so the command line arguments are not horrendous as they surely would be if i had used casey's favorite ffmpeg it's just like
John:
You know, handbrake CLI, settings file, this, use the setting, iMovie import, giant list of files.
John:
Of course, I didn't do it from the command line.
John:
What I did instead was wrote a script to do it because, you know, again, just like Marco's writing the new site in PHP, I'm writing the script in Perl just because it's the tool I know best and I don't have to bother thinking about it.
John:
So I wrote a Perl script, and I tried to do what I thought would be useful.
John:
It turned out to be totally not useful, which is, all right, write a Perl script, find all the files, run handbrake CLI on them with the proper arguments, all that other stuff, right?
John:
Do proper error checking, which is a, you know, a little, what is it, pet peeve of mine.
John:
uh and then also set the file dates based on the because when imovie imports them it imports them with like the file clip file names that are based on the date range of the clip or whatever so i can pull from the file names and then set the files on disk to be those dates as well so everything you know what i end up with is a bunch of video files that are compressed that all have the right dates you know they're from you know 2002 or whatever um whenever all these videos were taken
John:
so how does the computer know when they were taken that that metadata was it was readable by the computer on that mini dv tape yeah it's got to be in the tape because i think like you can display the date or whatever like the the mini dv tape has that information and when imovie made the clips it put in the file names like i didn't ask it to do this it's just what it did it put in the file names the uh you'll see in a second this is all pointless but but it did this and so i just parsed the dates out of the file names and set the dates in the file right
John:
The settings I used, I used H.265.
John:
I used the video toolbox setting in Handbrake, which is the one that uses the fast H.265 thing that's in Intel CPUs.
John:
I don't think it uses a GPU.
John:
I think it just uses the CPU thing.
John:
I think it's also lower quality than the fancy software one, but I didn't care.
John:
I just wanted to do the one that was fast because I had a lot of video to go through.
John:
I think I did like...
John:
6,000 kilobits per second average.
John:
Uh, I did AC encoding of the audio, probably at too high a bit rate because I think it's like 96 kilobits off the mini DV.
John:
And I think I actually encoded it higher than that, but whatever, it's not a big deal.
John:
Um,
John:
And yeah, I just had it run all those imports.
John:
I wrote a second script to confirm that I got them all just because they're spread all over the place and there's a lot of files.
John:
And I just I ran I made like my own bespoke diffing script to make sure everything's been converted.
John:
I chose the MP4 container format just because I hope that would sort of stand the test of time as like an international standard, yada, yada.
John:
Right.
John:
So H.265 as the algorithm and, you know, because you can play MP2's, you know, MP2 video today.
John:
Right.
John:
So I'm hoping an MP4 container.
John:
Anyway, I can just always change the container at some point in the future.
John:
The final bit was, OK, I've got all these files now.
John:
The total file size was only like 50 gigs, which is way smaller than the file size I imported them.
John:
um and then i'm like my final step is i'm going to drag them into my apple photos library which is what i always wanted to do with them and being the wise person that i am i didn't just drag them all in there i dragged one first and i dragged it in it's like this movie is from 2020 i'm like no it's not why do you think it's from 2020
John:
The dates and the file name, the creation and modification data of the file on disk are, you know, a decade ago.
John:
Like, this is not a thing from 2020, Apple Photos.
John:
Why can't I convince you that this is an old file?
John:
Is it in the EXIF data?
John:
Yes, it's in the EXIF data.
John:
I got it.
John:
Well, you look at the show notes.
John:
No, I didn't.
John:
He never looks at the show notes.
Casey:
Of course he didn't look at the show notes.
Yeah.
John:
the there's metadata inside the file there's track specific metadata on each track that determines the dates and for whatever reason because handbrake made these when handbrake wrote out the file it's like i'm making this movie and it's brand new as of 2020 you know and so i had to use a one final tool exif tool to modify all of the relevant dates on each individual media track um
John:
uh which was tricky because now i'm making like the way xf tool at least the way i was running it it doesn't modify them in place it makes a second copy so now i gotta make sure i do this for all the things and it works and i have all the second copies and distinguish them from the first and rename everything and yada yada yada pearl pearl pearl eventually i ended up with uh you know several several dozen files uh
John:
Actually, it was like 20 tapes worth of files.
John:
Each tape was like 20.
John:
I don't know.
John:
They varied in how many.
John:
Anyway, a lot of files.
John:
Eventually, I got to work.
John:
Threw them into Apple Photos.
John:
And, you know, after doing one test one and seeing that it correctly filed it, you know, 10, 12 years ago, I threw them all in.
John:
So that's how it works.
John:
We'll put the links in the show notes to Handbrake CLI and Exif Tool, iMovie you can get for free from the App Store, I think, and the dongles.
John:
I had most of these.
John:
The Thunderbolt 2-3 was an Apple one.
John:
The Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt 2 was also an Apple one.
John:
The 400-800, I don't even remember where I got it.
John:
It didn't have it in the house.
John:
I had to actually buy it.
John:
I think I just searched Amazon for it.
Casey:
Well, I'm impressed.
Casey:
That is a lot of work, but I am sure that you have quite a bit of peace of mind knowing that all that stuff is now safely in 34 different locations and three different cloud services.
John:
Slowly bit rotting.
John:
Yeah, it's great.
John:
Slowly bit rotting everywhere.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Would one of you like to tell me about other reasons why people might ask for app promo codes?
John:
I'll tell you because I brought it up in the last show.
John:
You get these automated emails.
John:
If you have an app in the App Store and people ask for promo codes, why are they asking, blah, blah, blah.
John:
We didn't touch on what seems like the most obvious but also sort of the most cynical and sad reason.
John:
It's because they want to resell them.
John:
uh they want to get a thing for you for free and they want to charge somebody money for the thing they got for free and if you do that at scale and you send out thousands and thousands and thousands of automated emails and some small percentage gives you a thing for free and then you sell all those three things for a dollar you just made a dollar profit on all of that so that could be a good business uh and then the final one which is a similar thing is to populate uh pirate app stores so if you can get a legitimate app and somehow crack it or strip it or whatever
John:
then you can put it up on a store and resell that same copy over and over again for people who have jailbroken phones.
John:
I'm not quite sure how that works, but I'm just speculating that it's basically just a way to get a thing for free and either sell it once or sell it multiple times to make money.
John:
So that's a bummer, but yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I was very surprised that, first of all, that we didn't think about this.
Marco:
Of course, it's some kind of stupid arbitrage scam.
Marco:
Again, we don't think this way because we're not scammers.
John:
I thought the people who had the fake app store apps, I mean, this is maybe being silly.
John:
I was like, well, surely they have... Why would they be begging for copies of the software they're going to sell on their illegal site?
John:
Surely they have other ways to get them.
John:
I guess someone's got to get it first.
John:
But the apps that are going to sell, it's like trying to find an illegal copy of Photoshop in the 90s.
John:
Like, you don't go asking Adobe for it.
John:
You just go find it online and download it.
John:
But I guess, you know, with the App Store scale, that becomes more difficult.
John:
And maybe this mass emailing works.
John:
Like, I didn't think that this was the source.
John:
The source was mass emails to developers.
John:
I always just thought it was like, oh, they find a copy online.
Marco:
yeah and i was i was more surprised about the like reselling promo codes for less than their list price as as the thing like that that is kind of an ingenious horrible scam uh i i would never have thought to do that and it is totally unethical but
Marco:
That makes a lot more sense why you get a bulk email, why you never hear from the people again.
Marco:
It's just like, just give me codes, give me codes, give me codes.
Marco:
And then if one person says yes, great.
Marco:
Then go sell that code for half of what that app sells for in the store.
Marco:
And eventually somebody might buy it, right?
Marco:
And it costs you nothing.
Marco:
So even if no one ever buys your code, you're still fine.
Marco:
You need to store eight characters in a database somewhere.
Marco:
That's your only cost, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And you can automate it.
John:
Like, this can just run in the background while you're sitting on the beach.
John:
Like, there's nothing.
John:
It's zero touch.
John:
It just runs.
John:
It sends the emails.
John:
When it gets the response, it looks for a promo code.
John:
It puts into a database.
John:
It shows up on a store.
John:
Like, it all just runs by itself.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You really, again, like I said last week,
Marco:
Whenever you have some kind of large ecosystem like this where any kind of scam or grift is even possible, even if it doesn't seem like it would make that much money or even if it seemed like it would be a lot of work to get into, there are people out there for whom it's worth it.
Marco:
And someone out there will do it.
Marco:
If there is a scam to be had, people will do it.
Marco:
And that's why, like, you know, whenever you think about App Store policy or Apple's, like, you know, physical policies about their devices, like things like repair policy, warranty repairs, how they deal with serial numbers and, you know, locked devices, stuff like that.
Marco:
So much of this, you got to think from the angle of, like, what would scammers do with this, given a lot of time and no ethics?
Yeah.
Marco:
A lot of scammers live in places where the cost of living and the expenses of daily life are much lower than ours.
Marco:
It might be worth it for them to run a scam that might not be worth it for us.
Marco:
If it isn't making huge amounts of money, but it's making small amounts of money, that's worth it to somebody.
Marco:
Anything Apple does, they're at such a large scale.
Marco:
Their customer base is at such a large scale.
Marco:
There's so much potential...
Marco:
money to be made in unethical or illegal ways, people will do it.
Marco:
And you kind of have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they make some kind of weird or inconvenient change to one of their policies around something like this.
Marco:
A lot of times it's like, oh, actually, yeah, people were scamming them or us as developers.
Marco:
People were scamming for millions of dollars over time and this change was necessary to reduce that or something like that.
John:
As a software person, there is a kind of a beauty to this type of scam because we always hear about like, oh, someone goes and buys a dozen iPhones and sells them when they're in high demand.
John:
And it's like – in some respects, like that's – people are out there waiting in lines and there's physical goods and like it's real hard work and it's hard to make money.
John:
But this is one of those beautiful – They pay other people to wait in lines for it.
Marco:
You know what I mean?
John:
Yes, yes.
John:
But eventually there's labor involved.
John:
Whereas this one is like an individual person without much programming knowledge can write this little machine and just run it indefinitely.
John:
And because the scale of the App Store is so huge...
John:
They're, you know, the success rate, the response rate of people giving free codes can be very tiny.
John:
I can imagine making a large amount of money, despite the fact that it's a probably illegal and against Apple's terms of service or whatever, and be certainly unethical.
John:
There is a certain beauty to it.
John:
And I can imagine that person sitting on the beach and thinking people are in line to try to get iPhones.
John:
They have to carry around these physical goods and they can get and they're just like, you know, slowly, ambiently getting this trickle of income that keeps their pina coladas coming.
John:
i'm pretty sure that's not that is not the uh the person who's doing this is not probably sipping pina coladas on the beach but uh there is a certain beauty to these kind of sort of pure software scams you think it's maybe like those like bud light like lime arena things whatever what are those yeah yeah yeah yeah
John:
I mean, this is the Superman rounding your banking scam for the modern age.
John:
You don't know that.
John:
That's Superman 3.
Marco:
Is that the thing that's referenced in Office Space?
John:
Yep, yep, yep.
John:
Exactly, yeah.
John:
I can get you one reference away, yeah.
John:
Office Space reference thing.
John:
I can't tell you what the Superman was because I didn't see that, but I saw Office Space a lot.
John:
I had Richard Pryor and I had a scene where a bunch of wires wrap around people and it scared me when I was little.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm assuming that it was Marco that put in this Destiny entry in the show notes.
Casey:
So, Marco, why don't you tell me about Destiny and Cursors?
Marco:
It turns out they have Cursors and Destiny, but they don't call them that.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Marco:
Try to fake it.
Marco:
What's your next line in the joke?
Marco:
I can't even make one up.
Marco:
You can't.
Marco:
Just cat dev you random.
Marco:
They call it that.
John:
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
John:
uh all right so uh last episode i think uh we're talking about uh craig federighi's interview with uh federico vitici where they talked about the cursor design on uh ipad os and i was comparing it to some of the things i talked about i was comparing to certain aspects of the uh aim assist feature not amethyst but aim assist feature in destiny uh
John:
It turns out that what I should have been talking about, silly me, was also the fact that Destiny itself has a cursor in it.
John:
And, you know, many reasons as strange as it occurred to me.
John:
I was talking about the inside the game.
John:
There's an aiming reticle that you use to aim at and shoot people.
John:
That's the main gameplay.
John:
But it has a menu system, too, and it has a has a cursor and it's controlled by thumbsticks.
John:
And guess what?
John:
That cursor looks like a ghost finger.
John:
It is and has been since 2014, a circular blob that's on the screen and use it to select menus and buttons and do all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
Now, the problem space is very different.
John:
The reason I was comparing the iPadOS one with the shooting mechanics is because it's slightly more analogous than this because on iPadOS, you're not controlling the cursor with a tiny joystick.
John:
You have a touchpad, which is a very different interface, which is not quite or a mouse, you know.
John:
But a joystick is a very different problem set.
John:
So I fell into a pretty deep rabbit hole of game developer conference videos, GDC videos on YouTube.
John:
There was a couple ones that I've already seen about Destiny, and there was a couple ones that I reviewed for the...
John:
The thing we talked about last week.
John:
And then there's this one.
John:
It's called Destiny's Tenacious Design and Interface.
John:
Even if you've never used Destiny, it's a really interesting video to watch someone explain how they tackled the design problem of letting people use a cursor automatically.
John:
With a game controller.
John:
If you've ever had a game that tried to do this, you know how badly it can go.
John:
Because a tiny thumbstick with like, you know, three quarters of an inch of travel is not the ideal way to control a cursor on a screen.
John:
So how do you do that?
John:
How do you even...
John:
make that interface so people don't want to tear their hair out because people are going to be using it a lot in destiny i think most destiny players take it for granted as essentially the first decent interface where you have a cursor on the screen like most games we don't even have a cursor they just say oh you use a d-pad up up down down right right left left but that gets tedious as well but at least it works people know how that works like in an rpg final fantasy or whatever you get a menu system you just get used to it you just you know it's fast it's responsive it's a game console
John:
But at a certain point, when your interface becomes very expansive, that itself becomes way too tedious.
John:
You want to have essentially a mouse cursor.
John:
How do you do that on a game console?
John:
And in the case of the original Destiny, they were also... This boggled my mind because I'd totally forgotten about it, but the original Destiny also had to run...
John:
on consoles that supported 4x3 televisions, like non-HD TVs.
John:
You could hook up a PlayStation 3 to a non-HD CRT, and games had to work on it.
John:
So if you've looked at a Destiny screenshot and you ever wondered why there's nothing in the sides of the 16x9 box, it's because they had to keep everything so that it would work on a 4x3 TV, and they didn't want to lay out every screen twice.
John:
Anyway, put the link in the show notes.
John:
Even if you don't even like games, don't even know what Destiny is,
John:
and in the beginning of the video maybe it's a little bit boring, stay with it and watch to the point where they start showing you how they approach this design.
John:
You will see some things that are similar to iPadOS, but other things that are just totally alien in terms of counter-scrolling the screen and finding ways to fit in localized text in these boxes and all the things that if you do UI design, some of them you recognize, but the unique aspects of it that only apply to games are really interesting.
John:
And you will also see in some of the screenshots
John:
icons for our friends at the icon factory in prototypes of the game before there's any artwork they just need a bunch of icons to put on screen for their sort of you know to test the interface and there's a whole bunch of icon factory icons in there which i thought was pretty neat i have a related slight tangent update
Marco:
So first of all, you conflate 4x3 TVs with standard deaf TVs.
Marco:
And as I mentioned before, I owned a 4x3 1080i HDTV.
Marco:
They did exist.
John:
Are you sure about that?
John:
Yes.
John:
I know high-definition CRTs existed, but I thought...
Marco:
thought they were 16 by 9 no no maybe i mean maybe those also existed but i had a 4x3 i think it was a magnavox or something a 4x3 hd tv that was a crt that had component input and supported 1080i you need to look up this device because i need to see this it trust me they lots of these existed uh well maybe not lots they existed for a short time like when hd tvs were coming out but people still wanted inexpensive ones
Marco:
chat room says yes and chat room is never wrong wow four by three hd so did it just had it was just letterboxd i guess yeah yeah well you could choose but yeah that's that's usually how you would set it because nothing supported actual four by three hd content um so you it was you know similar you know you could letterbox it or you could crop off the ends and i usually just letterbox it it was very strange that's that's terrible i would never want that tv like i would hold out for the 16 by 9 crts well it wouldn't have had the problem having now with my tv
Marco:
Oh, your big fancy TV?
Marco:
Yep, my big fancy LG OLED.
Marco:
So I still have my hot blue pixel near the top edge.
John:
Hot pixel.
John:
Hot pixel.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I have sometimes stopped noticing it, but not regularly stopped noticing it.
Marco:
And the other day, Tiff was playing Animal Crossing and going across a light beach area.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
And along the bottom quarter of the screen,
Marco:
we saw a very familiar outline of about 10 hearts, about 10 meat-shaped logs, and then about 8 or 10 squares that form some kind of quick action bar.
Marco:
I told you never to look.
I told you.
Marco:
you i didn't look for it but it would this was clear as day before i thought like zelda would burn in but apparently you just didn't play enough hours of zelda but minecraft you've played enough hours of minecraft i yeah and i don't play on the tv but tiff does like when we play yeah like when we when we play so we we play either on the dubai friday server which is java in which case we're all on pcs you know max or whatever or we play in our family game which is just like a private thing that we have just you know for our family and that's the bedrock edition and for that tiff plays on the switch and
Marco:
We played so much of that recently that now there is the Minecraft HUD burned into the bottom of our TV.
Marco:
Now, fortunately, it is not burned in enough that we notice it most of the time.
Marco:
It was only like when Tiff was walking across this certain light to medium shade flat colored beach area, we saw it very clearly there.
Marco:
But during watching regular TV content where stuff's actually moving all the time, we don't really notice it yet.
Marco:
But I'm hoping it doesn't get any worse than that.
John:
well you know the solution the solution is do not play minecraft on that tv anymore and then wait a year is that yeah yes i was curious like is it permanent i mean i know my hot pixel is permanent and therefore this tv is dead to me even though it's i don't know if the hot pixel is permanent sometimes those things come back to life too weirdly um but yeah i don't have experience with oleds my only experience is with the plasma and with the plasma no it wasn't permanent but it did take a full calendar year for me to stop being able to see my destiny hud
Marco:
As soon as I saw that, combined with my dead pixel, I said, you know what?
Marco:
I wish I had just kept my plasma.
Marco:
The plasmas have burn in, too.
Marco:
You'd have the plasma Minecraft burn in, too.
Marco:
Does it burn at the same rate?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, plasma...
Marco:
I know OLED is a lot more elegant in a lot of ways.
Marco:
It's certainly a lot more efficient, and it's thinner, and the bezels are thinner, and it has 4K, which Plasmas, as far as I know, never went 4K.
Marco:
It has better color reproduction.
Marco:
It has more pixels.
Marco:
Plasmas are way better at motion.
Marco:
And they are significantly, you know, better in a lot of these areas of like retention and dead pixels and everything in my experience.
Marco:
Maybe I just got lucky.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
But I don't know if they're better.
John:
I don't think they're worse than OLED.
John:
Some OLEDs may be worse than others.
John:
But Plasma was the previous champion of image retention.
John:
And OLED is just kind of like I feel like OLED is tying it.
Marco:
oh well anyway i am i so far you know i have i i did what everyone else does a couple years ago and i wanted to buy a 4k oled tv and i went to the review sites and i bought the one that everyone buys the lgc whatever you got the right one i have the c7 i think yeah
Marco:
i got the right tv i did all the research a lot of people have these tvs i have friends who have these tvs i am not very happy with it i gotta say after after three years or almost three years of having it to have two significant image related problems uh not thrilled with that purchase right now especially because it costs like twenty two hundred dollars or something like it wasn't a cheap tv she got the extended warranty oh
Marco:
Honestly, I think for whatever I buy next, if this thing ever dies and actually forces me to buy something new, I would probably do one of those stupid like best buy warranties.
Marco:
That's what I did with my plasma.
John:
I bought the extended warranty despite how ridiculous it was because I knew plasmas have problems and I always wanted the option to be like, oh, this thing goes terribly wrong.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The thing that goes wrong with plasmas a lot is, aside from the image retention, is because they use so much power, they have like a, you know, I don't know, some sort of analog circuit that actually vibrates in use and that eventually it can crack its housing, right, and make a terrible noise just from the vibration of the high power.
John:
You can always hear – if you put a full white screen on a plasma and you have young enough years, you can hear it going –
John:
like that kind of electrical buzzing noise but if that thing cracks it becomes incredibly loud and you don't want that to happen like one year after your warranty is out and the warranties are very short so extended warranty for sure oleds don't use nearly as much power as these plasmas and don't have that buzzing problem but you know things can go wrong with any kind of screen especially you know a 4k screen
Marco:
Yeah, like normally those extended warranties on most things are total ripoffs and I would never recommend buying them on pretty much anything.
Marco:
But I do admit like I'm jealous when whenever I if I mentioned something about like this TV, you always hear from people who are like, yeah, well, you know, I happen to me once and I had the genius squad come over and they just took it right out and swapped it with a new one.
Marco:
No questions asked because I had one dead pixel blue and I'm like, oh, God.
John:
But you know your previous reasoning about why you don't do that still holds.
John:
The idea is, okay, every three years you buy a new $2,000 TV and you don't have this problem, or you buy the extended warranty.
John:
Which one costs more money in the long run?
John:
I guess that's true, but yeah, because a warranty on something that's going to be, what, like $300 or $400?
John:
Yeah, that was multi-hundred dollars for my Plasma, although I used my Plasma for like 10 years.
John:
yeah right i mean i've only ever owned three tvs in my adult life the first one was the crt hd hd crt the second one was my 42 inch plasma and this is the third yeah if you if you had played minecraft on this plasma though you would have burned in the minecraft bar at the bottom of the plasma it's just a matter of like when when did your minecraft time of life begin so it's basically it's on adam adam adam came of age he came of minecraft age and that sentenced the that sentenced your television to death essentially
Casey:
Wow.
John:
Because the blue pixel, I feel like, yeah, it's annoying, but you probably could live with it.
John:
But the burn in is more, you know, more of an issue.
John:
Like it will show up anytime there's kind of gray in that area.
John:
You'll see it.
Casey:
Oh, geez.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We'll move on.
Casey:
And Sir Kathy wrote in to point out something that I missed, but we were talking about multi-user iPads in the last couple of episodes and
Casey:
And in iOS 13.4, apparently shared iPad for business was a thing or became a thing.
Casey:
This is apparently a business version of the Apple Classroom shared iPad thing.
Casey:
So shared iPad for business is from 9to5Mac.
Casey:
Shared iPad for business enables businesses to share devices between multiple employees while still providing a personalized experience.
Casey:
Employees sign in with a managed Apple ID to begin loading their data automatically.
Casey:
The user then has their own mail accounts, their own files, iCloud photo library, app data, and more.
Casey:
The data for the employee is stored in iCloud so employees can sign in from any shared iPad that belongs to the organization.
Casey:
I had no idea this was a thing.
Casey:
I totally missed this.
Casey:
So I just thought I would call it out.
John:
Yeah, I think that makes sense from, you know, just like schools have a use case for this, so do businesses that want to have like a fleet of iPads and a bunch of employees and you just sort of check out an iPad and your stuff is there and then you put it away, you know, rather than buying one iPad for every single employee.
John:
You would think that this would mean, oh, this other use case means that Apple is even more motivated to make the system better.
John:
But because this is essentially enterprise software, there is a high tolerance for, let's say, inconvenient software experiences in that market.
John:
So I'm not sure this actually changes the motivation one way or the other.
John:
But it is interesting to know they're using it someplace other than education.
Casey:
Do we have to do this last follow-up item?
Casey:
I really don't want to do this last follow-up item.
Casey:
We have to.
Casey:
No, we don't have to, but I don't want to.
John:
I'll help you, Casey.
John:
You have nothing to be ashamed of, probably.
John:
Probably.
Casey:
John Inger, thank you, John, writes,
Casey:
I am sure that the answers I'm about to give will be unsatisfactory to somebody.
Casey:
And that's OK.
Casey:
That's OK.
Casey:
It's fine for me.
Casey:
The Raspberry Pi has no incoming connection to the Internet.
Casey:
It is outgoing only.
Casey:
Additionally, the only control for the garage door.
Casey:
Well, I had intended to add control to the garage door via HomeKit and HomeKit only.
Casey:
I tried putting a relay on it.
Casey:
And for uninteresting reasons, that didn't work, which might be user error.
Casey:
So I got to look at that again.
Casey:
But I tried that earlier today and it didn't work.
Casey:
But yeah, there's no mechanism other than HomeKit to control the garage door.
Casey:
And even then, there's actually right now no control at all.
Casey:
And yeah, there's no incoming connection to these Raspberry Pis.
Casey:
And they only talk locally within the network.
Casey:
So I think it's fine and it's fine enough for my use.
Casey:
But I'm sure all of you are going to write in and tell me how I am inviting people to open my garage door.
John:
Are you using HTTPS?
John:
Are all the network connections using some encrypted protocol?
Casey:
No, but they're all internal to my own network.
John:
Maybe reconsider that?
Casey:
First of all, I'm really not interested in having a debate about whether or not this is hard enough.
Casey:
I don't mean to be a jerk.
Casey:
I don't care.
John:
But this is the type of thing where it's like, it probably helps a little bit.
John:
And it's usually easy to do.
John:
It's not like you're writing these protocols.
John:
If you just change a URL from HTTP, HTTPS and install a certificate of something, you know, or use SSH or, you know, it's usually like, it's not like something you have to program or do or worry about.
John:
Very often you have an option.
John:
Like our Synology, for example, like there are apps that Synology gives you for iOS, right?
John:
And when you use one of them, it asks you to sign in your Synology and it has like a checkbox that says use HTTPS or not.
John:
You just check the checkbox.
Casey:
And that's what I do on the Synology because that is exposed to the internet from an incoming – like the internet can get to the Synology if you know where to go.
Casey:
These pies, they're outbound connections to the internet but not inbound.
Casey:
And the thing of it is is that –
Casey:
If something was able to hack into these Raspberry Pis, that means that my entire network at that point has been compromised.
Casey:
Because again, there's no port forwarding or anything like that available to these Raspberry Pis to allow somebody from outside my network into them.
Casey:
So if something has gotten in from outside, that means my entire network is compromised.
Casey:
And I have much bigger worries than these little $10 computers.
Casey:
So, I'm not upset at John for asking the question.
Casey:
I know it was in good spirit.
Casey:
I know he's not trying to be difficult.
Casey:
But, I mean, I don't feel like I'm putting it myself... Well, first of all, there is no control via the Raspberry Pi, like I said.
Casey:
I do want there to be, but there isn't any.
Casey:
It's just a sensor and nothing else.
Casey:
But even if there is control, there is no way to get into that Raspberry Pi from outside my home.
Casey:
There's not.
Casey:
And so, I mean, short of...
Casey:
Something just catastrophically bad affecting Linux installations everywhere.
Casey:
And I'm sure that you, the listener, can write in and tell me about, oh, this one crazy hack that happened.
Casey:
Like, okay, if you really want to get into my garage that bad, fine.
Casey:
Fine.
Marco:
Since there's no inbound port acceptance on it, I think you're right that the attack surface on this...
Marco:
from the outside should be pretty much zero.
Marco:
And yeah, if it's not, you have many other problems, and your computers and other devices will have many other problems.
Marco:
So that's good.
Marco:
So a friend of mine asked me the other day, now that we're working from home a lot more, what should we be doing security-wise to just best practices for home network security?
Yeah.
Marco:
And what I told him was basically like, you know, A, like make sure your Wi-Fi password is, you know, reasonable.
Marco:
You know, that's using whatever modern standards exist for Wi-Fi passwords and it's reasonably long and not easily guessable.
Marco:
That's like the best thing.
Marco:
Just keep people off your network.
Marco:
And beyond that, the one thing I said to him was make sure you're not using any kind of weird like cheap or no name or unnecessary smart home products.
Marco:
Because smart home products so often are attack vectors in people's networks when they're running bad software or when they're made by no-name vendors who have no interest in supporting them and have possibly no ability to write secure software in the first place even.
Marco:
If you're staying with big brand stuff and sticking within the well-known Amazon or HomeKit ecosystems, you're pretty much good.
Marco:
as long as you're not getting too crappier devices that have too crappier software on them.
Marco:
But smart home stuff is a significant vector, but that's because so many smart home devices open up ports to the internet and run local services to the outside world.
Marco:
So if you're not doing that from the Pi, which you're not, then you're pretty good there.
Marco:
The other angle to consider here is...
Marco:
The attack surface or the attack target of the inside of your garage.
Marco:
If somebody really wants to get into your garage, the ability to remotely open it isn't particularly useful.
Marco:
They probably want to be somewhere nearby so they can walk into your garage after they open it and, I don't know, pick up your car and walk away with it somehow.
Right.
Marco:
so that's problem number one problem number two is if they are willing to like sit near your garage to break into it and possibly like get on your wi-fi somehow or something well they can also just like sniff the over the air signals that your garage door opener sends it when you drive up to it and if it's not a pretty modern secure garage door you they can probably just repeat the code that's transmitted and reopen it whenever they want to
Marco:
There are different standards of garage door opener over-the-air protocols, and some of them, especially the old ones, are really insecure.
Marco:
They just transmit a certain pattern once, and that's it.
Marco:
You can just repeat that pattern over and over again, and it'll just keep working forever.
Marco:
The more modern ones have some kind of rotating code system or a single-use kind of thing.
Marco:
I haven't looked too much into it, so forgive me if I'm getting some of this wrong.
Marco:
But if somebody wants to actually get into your garage that badly, and they're local, because why else would they want to get into your garage?
Marco:
There are so many other ways to do it than hacking your smart garage door opener, which, by the way, doesn't open your garage door.
Marco:
It just tells you whether it is open or not.
Casey:
Today, today.
Casey:
I do want it to be able to, but today that is correct.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So the point is, this is a pretty small attack surface to begin with.
Marco:
And then once you look at, well, what's the actual target here?
Marco:
Your Raspberry Pi is not the security hole in this setup.
Marco:
Your garage door opener is the security hole in this setup.
Marco:
By the way, most garage doors, those garage door openers are not pulling thousands of pounds of wood up
Marco:
they're counterweighted or they have counter springs on them.
Marco:
You can lift them by hand if you have to.
Marco:
So unless you're actually going there every night and turning the big metal locking thing that sticks the bars out to lock it against the doors, which no one ever does, somebody who wants to go into your garage door can probably just walk up to it and lift it up with their hands.
Marco:
So again, not a significant surface to worry about for a taxier.
John:
That's how my garage door locks with those metal things.
John:
I do that every day.
John:
Because I don't have an opener.
Casey:
I was about to say, you don't have a garage door opener, do you?
John:
I think, I mean, the takeaway is I was saying, like, if you're setting up something like this, it is a good thing to think about, especially if you go whole hog into home automation.
John:
Because if you don't think about it at all, you could find yourself, especially if you're tinkering in a situation where anyone sitting in a car outside your house has complete control over all your appliances.
John:
And although that's not...
John:
particularly dangerous, it could be annoying.
John:
And the second thing that occurred to me is kind of what Marco was getting at.
John:
You could be in a smoke alarm-like situation where I had installed many years ago, as described on a hypercritical episode whose number I can't remember, I installed a smoke detector that had an IR interface, like if you have a really high ceiling in your house,
John:
And the smoke detector goes off like you have a little remote that you could point at the smoke detector and tell it to stop beeping because, you know, you took the burning steak off your stove and now you just want it to be quiet.
John:
Right.
John:
So they have IR sensors in them.
John:
And my smoke detector kept going off and I couldn't figure it out.
John:
And it turns out that it was somehow getting our signals like while we were all sleeping from like the neighbor watching their TV in their house.
John:
Like they would point their remote at the television.
John:
This is my theory because I mean everyone in our house is asleep.
John:
It's like the middle of the night.
John:
But it was on the second floor and it did have sort of line of sight to a neighbor's window like their bedroom.
John:
And I can imagine them sitting on their bed.
John:
you know, changing channels on their TV with their remote and turning off our smoke detector.
John:
And experiments back this up when I use the super secret as, you know, searched on the internet sequence of button presses that you could tell it to disable its IR sensor.
John:
Never happened again.
John:
So I'm thinking like, oh, it's not a security problem, but it could be annoying if you had something set up.
John:
Or, you know, I guess in Marco's case, it's probably more likely it's just the actual remote and not your Raspberry Pi.
John:
But like a situation where someone's not trying to mess with you, but through some confluence of wireless signaling and events and strange hacks that you'd set up, something happens that causes the garage door to open in the middle of the night and you keep waking up and you're like, I checked before I went to sleep and it was closed.
John:
Why is it open now?
Yeah.
John:
And it's, you know, it's not a person messing with you.
John:
It's just like your neighbor opening their garage door or something.
John:
And it turns out it's opening yours, too.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And now we're in.
Casey:
Let's be done with follow up.
Casey:
And there is a an interesting story that broke yesterday, I believe, as we record this.
Casey:
And I I don't think I dig it.
Casey:
Joe Rogan has announced that he is going to be taking his show to Spotify.
Casey:
Now, Joe Rogan, he was the fear factor guy, right?
John:
He was.
John:
He was the fear factor guy.
John:
He was less puffy then.
John:
But, yeah, that's him.
Casey:
So I guess he's ostensibly a comedian.
Casey:
Like, I have not listened to any of his podcasts.
Casey:
But it seems that by almost anyone's measure, he is literally the most popular podcast in the world.
Casey:
Something to the order of like 192 million listeners and also like three to five million YouTube viewers for each episode.
Casey:
And supposedly Spotify brought a $100 million pile of cash to Joe and said, please come to Spotify at the end of the year.
John:
I don't know if that's a real amount.
John:
That's just the last number I saw being thrown around.
John:
So don't take these numbers as as written.
John:
I was trying to find a link for the story and it's very difficult to find a good definitive report that's not filled with a bunch of garbage.
John:
But anyway, this is as of recording.
John:
This is the number we heard.
Casey:
So Joe Rogan has gone to Spotify and he is taking presumably a large chunk of these almost 200 million listeners to Spotify with him.
Casey:
And, and that really bums me out.
Casey:
And I'd like to get out of the way first so we can just move on and,
John:
if spotify would like to offer the three of us 100 million dollars to go to spotify i i don't know if i speak for my co-hosts but i would absolutely go to spotify for 100 million dollars you should explain what go to spotify means in this context though because like that's that's one of the nuances i had to read several stories before i mostly gathered this when they say when we say go to spotify in this case what we mean is you know joe rogan's got a podcast and you can just go to his feed right now and download it and just listen for free and it's got ads on it right surprise it's a podcast okay
John:
uh going to spotify means his podcast will still be free to download and listen to and it will still have ads in it the only difference is you can't listen to it unless you sign up for spotify which is a thing that you can do for pay but also for free you can sign up as a user for spotify and not give them any money and download the spotify app to whatever device you have and then search for the joe rogan podcast and hit play and listen to it and that podcast will have ads on it
John:
So from your perspective as a listener, the only thing that's changed is now you previously were listening to it in whatever your podcast app was and now you can't.
John:
You have to listen to it through Spotify because that's the only place you can get it.
John:
It basically stops being a podcast and starts being a thing you can get in Spotify because a podcast kind of by definition is a thing that's available on an RSS feed that can be played by a podcast client.
John:
So yeah, he's not going to really have a podcast anymore.
John:
He's going to have a Spotify thing and people will have to sign up for Spotify if they haven't already and listen to it in the app.
John:
But it's not like you have to now pay money to listen to Joe Rogan.
John:
And it's also not like his show won't have ads anymore.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And there's a lot of complicating factors here that are worth knowing.
Marco:
Spotify bought Gimlet this past year, of which I was an investor, disclosure.
Marco:
So I made money from that deal.
Marco:
So Spotify has been making large podcast acquisitions recently.
Marco:
And when you think about it from Spotify's point of view, it makes total sense because they are, as I said back then, and I won't go into it too much, but like they're a music streaming service for every minute that you spend listening to music on Spotify.
Marco:
They have to pay a royalty to, you know, whatever you play.
Marco:
It's like if they can suck away some of that time that you would have otherwise listened to music and make you listen to podcasts instead, they don't pay per listen.
Marco:
They don't pay per stream for podcasts.
Marco:
They run their own podcast directory.
Marco:
Many podcasts are in it.
Marco:
I think including ours, although no one listens to it there, which for a reason I'll get into it in a few minutes.
Marco:
And honestly, we might not keep it there forever.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
Anyway, people can listen to podcasts there for free.
Marco:
And the podcast creators don't get paid by Spotify.
Marco:
Spotify is...
Marco:
almost certainly working on, I think they've even said they're working on some kind of like big ad platform for podcasters.
Marco:
But for the most part, they have their own kind of copy of the podcasting world.
Marco:
You have to opt into it because they do a whole bunch of weird crap with your show that if you opt in, you have your show on Spotify.
Marco:
But Spotify is not, again, they're not paying per listen.
Marco:
So it makes a ton of sense for Spotify, who has always had pretty shaky financials because they have to pay a lot of money to the record companies.
Marco:
to get as many people as possible listening to podcasts instead of music because they will make more money from those people than they will with music people because they're not paying royalties for every listen for podcasts.
Marco:
So they have a huge financial incentive to do this.
Marco:
Additionally, they are building in a huge distribution network
Marco:
uh front end for this medium and they're building their own ad network for it and so they will be able to have podcasters go you know put their show on spotify opt into spots you know spotify's automatic monetization similar to like google ad sense on web pages where you're just like all right well look i have a show i don't have a lot of listeners you know i can't get big sponsors but if i have spotify auto insert ads for me maybe i can make 12 bucks a month right it'll be that kind of thing
Marco:
And do enough of that, you can get pretty big as the platform there, and you can make additional revenue that way.
Marco:
So there's tons of business reasons why Spotify wants to do this.
Marco:
And the people who run Spotify seem pretty smart, and they really know their stuff about music.
Marco:
But the people who run Spotify and who are doing all these deals...
Marco:
don't seem like they really get podcasts.
Marco:
They don't seem, they're certainly not podcast enthusiasts.
Marco:
They're certainly not listening to shows like this or anything even in our world.
Marco:
They're not listening to independently produced small shows like this.
Marco:
They're listening to Joe Rogan.
Marco:
They're listening to, if you go to the top 10 podcasts in Apple Podcasts, they're listening to those.
Marco:
And they think that's the podcasting market.
Marco:
And they're making a player successfully and gaining a lot of market share successfully for other people like that.
Marco:
Spotify launched their podcast thing, I think about a year and a half ago, something like that.
Marco:
And they got a lot of market share really fast.
Marco:
But it's been mostly additive market share.
Marco:
There's almost no people who are leaving their current podcast app and going to Spotify instead.
Marco:
Most of the market share they've gotten has been additive.
Marco:
They have quickly amassed a substantial market share, I think about something like a fifth the size of Apple, maybe a quarter the size of Apple in the podcast space.
Marco:
But those were people who just came out of nowhere.
Marco:
They didn't move from Apple and Overcast and everything else.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
If you look at their demographics also, the kinds of shows that do well on Spotify are those really big, big-name mass audience shows.
Marco:
It's not the specialized shows that are made more casually like ours, made for more specialized interests like tech or whatever.
Marco:
It's not that.
Marco:
It's those big general interest public radio style shows of, hey, this thing's interesting.
Marco:
Here's a bunch of production and a lot of overhead for our format so we can fit seven minutes of content into a 30-minute show.
Marco:
It's that kind of stuff.
Marco:
And that entire market is huge.
Marco:
It's a massive part of podcast listenership.
Marco:
But it's not us.
Marco:
It's not you listening to this show.
Marco:
It's not me and John and Casey producing this show.
Marco:
It's not me as the maker of Overcast.
Marco:
We operate in a whole different world over here.
Marco:
It happens to use the same technology and most of the same apps.
Marco:
but it might as well be a different medium functionally.
Marco:
Like for, you know, when you look at the business, like we are so completely separate.
Marco:
So I ran, I looked at some stats and Joe Rogan is overcast.
Marco:
Number one podcast.
Marco:
And then I looked at the top 100 podcasts in Overcast.
Marco:
And, you know, the top 20 or so match pretty well for, you know, if you look at Apple's top and, you know, Pocket Cast and all the other big players.
Marco:
Like, the top 20 is pretty much the same across all of us, which is good.
Marco:
It means, like, we have, you know, significant market share enough that, like, the average people, you know, work their way in.
Marco:
And we see the same, you know, same rough stats, basically.
Marco:
And I looked at the top 100 list and the only shows in the top 100 that I listened to are this, the talk show, relay shows, and Hello Internet.
Marco:
So it's all of which are shows by people I know.
Marco:
And those shows are big on Overcast disproportionately to how big they are in real life.
Marco:
Like, ATP on Overcast is, I think it's like number 22 or 21, something like that.
Marco:
It is by far not the number 21 most popular podcast in the world.
Marco:
It just happens to be like, Overcast users are overrepresented on Overcast because I make it.
Marco:
Anyway, the world of podcasting is, like, it started out with us.
Marco:
Nerds, hobbyists,
Marco:
And then it grew way past us.
Marco:
In the first wave, it grew past us with, like, This American Life and the first wave of public radio-style shows.
Marco:
More recently, it's grown way past even that to the massive productions, you know, first with big comedians, celebrities, and now it is that.
Marco:
You know, Joe Rogan is big, was big.
Marco:
It's way beyond the initial hobbyist-level stuff.
Marco:
But that hobbyist level stuff is itself a great place to be and a great business to be in.
Marco:
And that's what we're in.
Marco:
And so to some extent, we should be concerned that Spotify is not only trying but succeeding in locking down large parts of this open ecosystem into their own proprietary walled garden.
Marco:
And they're going to mess with it.
Marco:
You better believe they're going to mess with it.
Marco:
One of the ways you can tell how little they understand podcasting or care about it and how little their audience understands and cares about podcasting really is how crappy of an experience it is listening to podcasts on Spotify.
Marco:
It's a terrible podcast player, but they don't care and it doesn't matter.
Marco:
It won't affect them at all.
Marco:
Because the people listening to podcasts on Spotify are mostly casual users listening to those big-name shows who are not like podcast power users.
Marco:
They're not like podcast nerds who want all the different controls and options and features that a modern podcast app would have.
Marco:
So to some extent, we should be concerned.
Marco:
Shows are moving there, and that is going to hurt our ecosystem to some degree.
Marco:
I don't think we know to what degree, though.
Marco:
It could hurt us a lot.
Marco:
It could especially hurt us badly in the money department.
Marco:
It could be really, really bad if a huge portion of sponsorship and ways to monetize your show like that become you have to put it on Spotify and use their ads because that's where all the money's going.
Marco:
That would be really damaging to a lot of people.
Marco:
Although, keep in mind that the vast majority of podcasts out there don't have ads on them at all.
Marco:
It's a huge long tail.
Marco:
And while the top handful of percentage of podcasts have ads, there's a massive amount that don't that either are not monetized at all because people just do them because they like to do them.
Marco:
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Marco:
Or they're monetized in different ways.
Marco:
Maybe they sell merchandise instead.
Marco:
Maybe they have a Patreon or membership program instead.
Marco:
Maybe they sell a book and they're using the podcast to promote their book.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
There's all sorts of other ways people use podcasts to make money that are not just having ads in them.
Marco:
But certainly having ads in them is the way that almost every big show makes money, and it is a way that most of the money is made, period.
Marco:
So anything that affects that and could potentially lock that down into one ecosystem is very damaging.
Marco:
So that we do have to be worried about.
Marco:
However, because this is an open ecosystem, because like what Spotify does, doesn't directly affect my ability to make a general purpose app that reads public RSS feeds.
Marco:
It doesn't affect your ability as a customer to read those feeds and to play the audio files in those feeds.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
We have our own separated islands out here in geek land, and it's fine.
Marco:
That's the beauty of the open ecosystem.
Marco:
It's all decentralized for the most part, mostly decentralized.
Marco:
They can't really do anything that would really kill us.
Marco:
So we will largely be fine as long as people stick around to listen.
Marco:
And I think that's likely to happen, at least for shows like this.
Marco:
Now, if I was an investor in big podcast content right now, like some major show or trying to get some kind of big celebrities, I'd be nervous about Spotify as a competitor there.
Marco:
But in the area that we are operating in, as both us being the host of the show and me being the owner of Overcast...
Marco:
I think we'll be all right, but it's going to be different if Spotify succeeds at what they, what they intend to be doing.
Marco:
And they, they probably will, honestly, like they, they are buying a lot of big content.
Marco:
They are locking stuff down into their platform.
Marco:
They are going to be working on, or already are working on some pretty major monetization things that will definitely threaten everything in our ecosystem and, and, and the money side, especially.
Yeah.
Marco:
But as long as people keep listening to shows like this and keep supporting independent shows by listening, if they have sponsorships, do that.
Marco:
If they have memberships, we're about to do that.
Marco:
However you choose to support them and listen to them, we can be okay if the people are also willing to listen here.
Marco:
So if someone goes to Spotify to listen to one show a week or two shows or five shows a week, I don't care, and they also still listen to shows like this in whatever app they want,
Marco:
we're still fine obviously i hope spotify has less of an impact than that but they might not and that's okay if spotify captures all of the people somehow all of the people who listen to big shows like joe rogan who don't listen to tech shows at all mostly or don't listen to our show at least or any show that i've ever heard that i listen to that doesn't necessarily need to impact us
Marco:
And as I mentioned earlier, it does kind of feel like the podcast market is like two different things.
Marco:
It's the thing it used to be, which is what we are.
Marco:
Smaller, independently produced shows for the most part, all on their own sites and networks with their own RSS feeds, playing in all these different apps.
Marco:
And then there's like the celebrity podcasts, the big mass market ones.
Marco:
Those coexisted in the same ecosystem for a while.
Yeah.
Marco:
But they don't have to.
Marco:
There's no guarantee that because they were unified into one ecosystem for so long that they will continue being in the same ecosystem.
Marco:
If they split off and they go to their own Netflix kind of thing, or if they go off to Spotify and all the regular people out there listen to their podcasts on Spotify, and then all the nerds like us listen to podcast players that actually are good, that's not that bad of a thing.
Marco:
As long as the money part doesn't get too messed up by their moves into the ad system...
Marco:
as long as they don't destroy the ability for other shows to sell ads and make money, I think we'll be mostly okay.
Marco:
Complicating factors, which we'll get to once we talk about membership in a future episode, there are other things that can destroy that sponsorship environment also, some of which are starting to happen.
Marco:
Our world of podcasts that we deal either directly or very close to directly with sponsors most of the time, and you listen and we give them our download numbers and they buy ads and stuff –
Marco:
that system might be going away over the next couple of years for other reasons, not Spotify.
Marco:
And if that happens, we're all going to have to figure something else out anyway.
Marco:
But Spotify's moves in particular are unlikely to affect shows like ours.
Marco:
they definitely will affect bigger shows.
Marco:
But as long as people like you keep listening to shows like this in apps like whatever you're listening to this on, we can keep having fun.
Marco:
We can keep doing this.
Marco:
We can keep our business going regardless of what the big podcasters do with their business.
John:
That's interesting in these sort of battles that we've had in the past between open ecosystems, systems built on protocols and technologies that are not owned by any single commercial entity versus proprietary systems.
John:
in general open has proved very resilient in the scenarios where it has grown enough to live whereas if it's reached viability it's very difficult to kill it uh one example i bring up all the time is email email is terrible and crappy from a technical perspective but it got critical mass before anyone could come in and try to get rid of it and despite many many people trying uh
John:
plain old regular email continues to cling to life because no one is able to sort of get critical mass not hotmail not gmail not aol nobody is able to get everybody into a thing and say email whatever like you're all on aol email now or now hotmail is email and regular old email we don't support that anymore like no one's been able to capture it all and say proprietary we own you all now we have everyone's email address because the
John:
Email is a protocol.
John:
There's a bunch of them.
John:
They're open.
John:
Anyone can implement them.
John:
You can make an email client and an email server.
John:
It doesn't mean there hasn't been consolidation.
John:
Most people's email address probably are Hotmail or Gmail or whatever, right?
John:
But email itself, the protocol, is why you can still have things like...
John:
I was going to say 37 signals.
John:
Basecamp's upcoming hey.com email client.
John:
The only reason they're able to do that is because guess what?
John:
Email is still an open system.
John:
They don't have to sign an agreement with Google to be able to send email to Gmail users or vice versa.
John:
It's an open protocol.
John:
Everybody exchange email.
John:
It has proved resilient, right?
John:
The web is another example.
John:
It's the platform that nobody owns.
John:
Many companies have tried to embrace and extend it.
John:
Microsoft with Internet Explorer, you know, putting proprietary stuff in there like the ActiveX controls back when they had platform dominance.
John:
Can we make that happen and turn the web browser into just a fancy container for running Win32 applications?
John:
Like, people have tried.
John:
There's been lots of junk in the browser.
John:
Flash in more recent memory, right?
John:
But...
John:
All that stuff comes and goes, and the web and HTTP and the standards that underlie it continue to exist and evolve, and nobody can stop you from putting up a website.
John:
There's lots of companies you can do it with.
John:
Hey, Squarespace, sponsor of the show, right?
John:
Most people's websites probably do use one of those types of services because who wants to, besides Marco, do it all yourself?
Yeah.
John:
But the web, as an entity, has been resistant to all those people.
John:
We didn't all get owned by GeoCities.
John:
Even Facebook, which owns, like, the entire planet, could not destroy the web.
John:
They sort of circumvented it and live off of it and, you know, use it to feed their giant evil machine.
John:
But the web continues to exist.
John:
Podcasts are very much like that in that it's an open protocol built on top of the web and RSS and all that other stuff.
John:
There's very little anything can do to kill that technology once it reaches critical mass, and I think it has.
John:
But just like all the other things I mentioned, email, web, or whatever, you can kill individual websites.
John:
You can kill individual email providers like you can kill those things pretty easily.
John:
You can you can really mess with that entire ecosystem.
John:
And the example that I hope you're all thinking of right now when I mentioned all these words is, hey, what about RSS?
John:
Didn't didn't Google Reader basically kill RSS by taking an open protocol and bringing most of the users into Google Reader and then discontinuing it?
John:
And then and then, you know, newsreaders, quote unquote, newsreaders fizzled.
John:
That is, you know, the type of scenario where they didn't kill it outright.
John:
You can download that news about it today and it works great.
John:
It works better than ever.
John:
And you can read feeds with it and sites still have RSS feeds.
John:
But they did put a significant dent in it.
John:
They didn't get everyone into it and change the protocol and suddenly no one has RSS and RSS doesn't exist anymore.
John:
And even when Google Reader existed, you continue to use a thing that was not Google Reader to read news.
John:
Like they didn't actually...
John:
embrace and extend or make proprietary news but they did get enough users into it such that when it went away a lot of people thought oh well if that you know basically what they thought was google reader equals news google reader goes away that means news reading goes away
John:
spot if spotify ever got to the point where people think podcast equals spotify and you know let's say spotify goes out of business or stops doing podcasts or whatever although i don't see why they would um for all the reasons marco mentioned people say oh well now that spotify's gone i guess podcasts are over too because podcast podcast equals spotify
John:
That's not true and never will be true, just the same way the Google Reader is an RSS.
John:
But if people ever get into that mindset, if Spotify ever gets that kind of critical mass, that could be people's thinking, and it could really hurt the ecosystem.
John:
It's taken a while for news reading to sort of
John:
regain its footing and by the way podcasts are essentially news feeds they use the same standard as the quote-unquote news readers you can look at podcasts in an rss reader uh it's it's in the end it's a it's an rss feed with a bunch of audio attachments right uh so it's all kind of wrapped up in the same thing but in these battles with between open and proprietary
John:
despite the fact that it's difficult for proprietary to actually outright win, they can really screw things up.
John:
And it can definitely rock the boat.
John:
And as Marco mentioned, ecosystems built on open platforms, they can have their own sort of earthquakes and tremors totally unrelated to anybody trying to do something.
John:
And the final factor I'll mention here is the industry does learn from the past in a weird way.
John:
There's sort of institutional memory of the people and companies involved.
John:
The best example I can think of is when Apple came in with the iTunes store and convinced all the record companies, I love that we still call them record companies, music companies, whatever, to sign up with iTunes.
John:
And Apple became like the middleman for the entire digital music industry back when people were downloading MP3s, right?
Yeah.
John:
uh and in the beginning they signed up for like sure apple whatever you can do this thing we're making a bazillion dollar off cds you want to sell a bunch of files i don't even understand what you're talking about go ahead here here's our music good luck make sure you give us 70 cents out of every dollar right whatever um
John:
and it turned out the digital selling mp3s the internet turned out to be a really good business and apple very quickly dominated that business and the record companies didn't like it like why why are we going through this middleman it's not even us suddenly the majority of our revenue is coming through apple who the hell is apple why aren't we making that money i don't i don't like this at all um and
John:
When other parts of the industry went through similar transitions, oh, people are going to watch movies digitally somehow now?
John:
The movie companies, sometimes the same companies as the quote-unquote record companies, learned from the past and said, let's not put all of our eggs in the same basket, right?
John:
Even within the music industry, going from downloads to streaming or playing Amazon against Apple, they all looked around and said, we don't want to happen to us what happened to the record companies when Apple came in, right?
John:
Right.
John:
So let's kind of, you know, if we have the content, let's kind of spread it around a little bit, right?
John:
I'm not sure if there is any large, powerful entity, any set of large, powerful entities in the world of podcasting that contain that collective wisdom.
John:
But I'm hoping that either A, Spotify just literally doesn't have enough money to buy its way to that much market share, or B, the content, the things that these people need, they need the content.
John:
The people who own the content start to think at some point,
John:
Is it really a good idea for all of us to put in with Spotify?
John:
Like, you know, especially if they're out there in the world, there's some big, huge popular show like Serial or whatever.
John:
And eventually Spotify comes to them and says, hey, Serial or whoever owns you, wouldn't you like to become a Spotify exclusive and only be available on Spotify and we'll give you umpteen bajillion dollars?
John:
I hope someone involved in that says...
John:
Spotify has really been cranking up in market share and lots of people are listening and people are starting to equate Spotify with podcasts.
John:
Should we do this or should we, in the same way like the movie companies who ever say, well, we'd like our movies not just to be in iTunes.
John:
We want them on other services too, right?
John:
Because we don't want to give Apple all this power.
John:
It's a bad idea for content creators to give a single platform a huge amount of power.
John:
Witness YouTube, which also factors into the Joe Rogan thing.
John:
That's not a great situation for creators.
John:
Yes, everyone loves the fact that YouTube lets them distribute their stuff worldwide and it made billionaires out of big stars and it's a great platform to get your start on.
John:
But in the end, when you look around, you realize, kind of like the App Store or anything else, YouTube owns us.
John:
YouTube owns the entire online video space and I am at their whim.
John:
If they decide they don't want to let me monetize something or want to kick me off their platform or whatever, that's career ending for me as it's how the career is called, quote unquote, YouTuber.
John:
That's a bad situation to be in.
John:
If if your profession is named after a company, that company like owns you practically.
John:
Right.
John:
And so I really hope that I mean, this doesn't apply to us, but this applies to like those big shows, those top 20 shows, those shows with millions and millions of listeners.
John:
Spotify can keep buying them, starting with the number one and the number two and the number three, but when they start going down the top 20, I'm hoping at some point somebody says, this is not good for all of us to go to Spotify.
John:
We need to play Spotify off against whoever that competitor might be.
John:
Some people suggested Apple doing this.
John:
I really hope they don't because I like their current hands-off attitude, but...
John:
I think there is sort of an immune response of the industry to this getting really out of hand for big shows.
John:
This, again, is probably not relevant to us because we may die in an earthquake unrelated to Spotify in the industry.
John:
industry you know related to ad sales or whatever but we won't as a as as a listener of of shows you know i've seen some big shows too like i'll listen i'll listen to you know a uh i was gonna say reply all but like a heavyweight i don't know if that's such a big show i guess most of my shows are kind of obscure um what's the what's the most what's the most mass market show i listen to
Casey:
I listen to 99PI, and I actually really, really like it.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
99% Invisible.
John:
What's the one that I'm not managing to think of?
John:
I'm so bad.
John:
Oh, This American Life.
John:
Duh.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'll listen to This American Life.
John:
I'm not an animal.
John:
But I don't want Spotify to own all those shows, right?
John:
I really don't.
John:
I don't want Spotify to become the Google reader of podcasts.
John:
I don't want them to become the iTunes music store.
John:
Like, I just – I don't –
John:
I certainly sure as hell don't want them to become the YouTube of podcasts.
John:
That is like the nightmare scenario for everybody, for consumers and creators alike.
John:
I know everyone thinks they love YouTube.
John:
Like, oh, YouTube is a place I go and there's great videos there or whatever.
John:
But there are things that you are not seeing and are never going to see because YouTube owns that platform.
John:
They may be things from creators that you already like.
John:
Quote unquote YouTubers who want to do a thing or make a thing, but they can't because of some YouTube policy or because...
John:
it's not monetizable in the same way or because youtube's algorithm herds them toward we hear this from youtube creators all the time that there's what they would like to make and there's what they have to make to continue to make a living on top of youtube's algorithm because youtube's algorithm favors certain things and doesn't favor other things and if you want your video to be seen you have to sort of fit into that mold and that shapes content and i mean it was bad enough when there was three tv network when i was a kid imagine if there was just one
John:
And it was a private company not beholden to anybody.
John:
I didn't want to do a YouTube slamming fest.
John:
But anyway, that's what comes to mind.
John:
So the Spotify situation, like someone asked earlier in the chat, is there some article I can point to to show people who don't care about the podcast ecosystem why they should be sad about Spotify?
John:
I don't have an article like that.
John:
And honestly, it's the type of thing that the average person shouldn't ever need to know.
John:
Just like they never knew, just like nobody, you know, nobody who's not in close enough as industry knows that YouTube is seen as a potential bad actor by people who make their living on the platform.
John:
Like that's all inside baseball.
John:
Nobody knows or cares about that.
John:
Just like nobody knows or cares about the various battles between the big three networks.
John:
When I was a kid, like it's, it's not the solution.
John:
This problem is not going to be get everyone, you know, to understand that Spotify is bad for podcasting.
John:
The solution is, you know, Marco always alludes to and it sounds terrible, but it's like it's the truth.
John:
It's like if you want to continue seeing a thing in your life, support that thing to the best of your ability.
John:
And because podcasting is built on open protocols, that's it.
John:
You don't have to do anything else.
John:
Like there's no other company you have to give money to unless you actually own this American life.
John:
You don't have to worry about decisions about selling to Spotify like you as a consumer.
John:
Just, you know.
John:
use your ears and your wallets to support the things you want to see and continue to exist, and they will continue to exist.
John:
Meanwhile, there could be a big calamity happening over there in the rest of the network, and you may be sad if suddenly you have to listen to This American Life with annoying, dynamically inserted ads that creep you out, but there's not much you can do about that.
John:
If I had a good article that did explain this, I would put it in the show notes, but I don't have one.
John:
If anyone has suggestions, maybe we'll put it in the next episode, but...
John:
in the meantime i guess just you know keep supporting and listening to the things that you like and mostly hope for the best unless you have the ear of people who own one of the top 20 podcasts yeah and just a few other like little you know addendums to that like addenda addenda
Marco:
Anyway, you know, you're right about, you know, how YouTube really has dominated that medium.
Marco:
And I don't know any big players on YouTube who are incredibly happy with YouTube.
Marco:
Like, I don't know any because like that company.
Marco:
I mean, they have a lot of their own problems, but like it's not good to have someone get in the way between you and your audience and or you and your money.
Marco:
And when you get big enough, those problems get pretty big and the risk goes up.
Marco:
And big companies don't want to be beholden to some random platform that doesn't have their best interest in mind necessarily or maybe doesn't care who they are.
Marco:
And so nobody wants Spotify to get between them and their customers or them and their money.
Marco:
If Spotify does do some kind of big ad thing, which, again, they are working on, so if Spotify succeeds in some kind of big ad thing, like a way to monetize podcasts that gets a lot of people to go sign up for Spotify, possibly exclusively, I don't know if it would work that way, but possibly, then
Marco:
I don't see big shows like This American Life.
Marco:
I don't see them going to that.
Marco:
They have their own way to make money.
Marco:
They have their own platforms.
Marco:
They have their own dynamic ad insertion and automatic sales and large-scale deals and all their own data analysis.
Marco:
They don't need Spotify to do that for them.
Marco:
They do that themselves.
Marco:
And they don't want Spotify doing that for them because they don't want some other company getting between them and their money and them and their customers.
Marco:
I don't think most of the large shows would make deals like that which should be exclusive.
Marco:
Also, if you become exclusive to any one platform, whether it's paid or not, as you mentioned, Spotify has a free plan, which it seems like most of its users use.
Marco:
We're not talking about having to pay a special service to go listen to Joe Rogan now.
Marco:
We're talking about having to use a certain app.
Marco:
Instead of using any podcast app, now you have to use this particular app to listen to this podcast.
John:
Which you're likely to have already installed because they have hundreds of millions of users of Spotify already.
Marco:
What it means, though, is some percentage of your audience will get lost in that transition.
Marco:
Granted, with Spotify, it's not going to be as much of a percentage as it was something like Luminary, where...
Marco:
They were asking people to pay, first of all, to pay a period, no matter what, and then also to listen in this app that nobody already had.
Marco:
So it was like starting from zero, right?
Marco:
And that went nowhere, and they burned through $200 million and somehow got a little bit more, but they're going to burn through that too.
Marco:
It's not going to work.
Marco:
Spotify will work a lot better because it is free and because so many people already have it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
there are still a lot of people who they're going to lose.
Marco:
Joe Rogan is going to have a smaller audience there, at least to start, and probably for a few years.
Marco:
I don't know how long his deal is for, but probably for a few years, he can have a smaller audience there than he has currently, because...
Marco:
A lot of people will move to Spotify to listen to him, but not all of them.
Marco:
He might go down by a third or half.
Marco:
It could be a big loss.
Marco:
I don't know any of the big shows who would take on that kind of listener loss unless they were getting paid absurd amounts of money like what he reportedly is getting, but...
Marco:
Spotify can't afford to do that for all the big shows.
Marco:
They can afford to do it for one or two.
Marco:
They're not going to do it for all of them.
Marco:
They can't, even if the big shows were game, which they aren't.
Marco:
Because problem number two is the big shows are already making really good money doing what they're doing on their own.
Marco:
And so was Joe Rogan.
Marco:
He had ads in his show.
Marco:
People are saying he might have made $100 million off this deal.
Marco:
By a lot of estimates, he was probably making somewhere near that already with ads every year.
Marco:
He has a really big show.
Marco:
He sells a lot of ads to a lot of people.
Marco:
So regardless, the big companies are already doing their own thing.
Marco:
They have all their own stuff set up.
Marco:
They have their own servers.
Marco:
They have their own analytics.
Marco:
They have their own ad platforms.
Marco:
They have their own ad sales.
Marco:
And they make that money directly.
Marco:
They don't have middlemen getting in the way and taking some percentage of it.
Marco:
And they're not losing their audience in large chunks because they're locking it down to certain apps.
Marco:
If they could do that, they could do it with their own apps.
Marco:
They could make their own apps.
Marco:
Some of them have.
Marco:
And they could lock people in that way and say, well, now we get 100% of your attention and data and everything.
Marco:
They don't because it's better for their businesses overall.
Marco:
They make more money overall and reach way more people overall by staying in the open ecosystem.
Marco:
So I don't actually see a lot of them moving over and becoming Spotify exclusive.
Marco:
Instead, if Spotify is going to do some kind of major move into ad monetization for podcasts, it's going to be trying to capture small podcasts.
Marco:
This is why they bought Anchor.
Marco:
When they bought Gimlet, they bought Anchor at the same time.
Marco:
And the reason why I think, I wasn't in any of these conversations or anything, but the reason why I assume they bought Anchor is to have some kind of basis with which to make an all-in-one thing.
Marco:
Like, all right,
Marco:
You want to start a podcast?
Marco:
Start it here.
Marco:
That way they immediately get rights to it because that's probably built into Anchor.
Marco:
And they can also immediately have you hook into their ad system and have you start making $0.40 a month using their ad system.
Marco:
And do that enough times or have some of those podcasts get kind of medium-sized and they can make real money there.
Marco:
So I think that's their long-term plan here.
Marco:
But to do all that, they just need a lot of people using Spotify for podcasts and they need...
Marco:
you know, if they keep calling it anchor or whether they eventually just call it, you know, Spotify podcast, they need people making podcasts on there and signing up for their monetization platform.
Marco:
Um, but you know, again, I think if we continue to just run our own thing out here in the wilderness, we'll be fine as long as our listeners stay here.
Marco:
And so far, like,
Marco:
We've had our show on Spotify for a few months at least, and it has effectively zero listeners.
Marco:
No one listens to it there because the type of people who listen to this type of show don't listen on Spotify and seem to not want to.
Marco:
And I'm sure many of our listeners have Spotify memberships and use it for music, but they don't want to listen to podcasts there because they're nerds like us and they want better controls and they want all their stuff in a podcast app and everything else.
Marco:
So
Marco:
We will probably be fine, but there is definitely potential for the industry as a whole to have some pretty significant ripples from this.
Casey:
So are you nervous?
Casey:
Are you scared?
Casey:
Do you think it'll be all right?
Marco:
I'm curious what it does to podcasting as a whole.
Marco:
But again, I think for the things that both that I listen to and that I make, I think they'll be fine.
Casey:
And if Spotify backs a $100 million pile of cash to your house, are you going to say yes?
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Look, everyone has a price, and everyone's price is generally under $100 million.
John:
People could be asking that, but it's such an absurd question.
John:
It's like, what if someone offered you $100 million for your car?
John:
Everyone would do it.
John:
like but no one's gonna offer you that because your car is not worth 100 million dollars so it's an absurd question what if i offered you 100 million dollars to raise your right hand would you raise your right hand oh but you're i thought you were opposed to what if they offered you 100 million dollars to eat fish but you don't like fish yeah there are things you don't do but no one's ever going to offer you that because it's not worth that so yeah you don't have to worry about it no one is going to offer us that much money for our show because our show is not worth that much
John:
but if they did in this absurd scenario yes of course right so that's why i feel like it's you know it's it's not and and honestly you said well but wouldn't that be a breach of your ethics or whatever no because our show wouldn't help us spotify gain any dominance in the industry we would be taking their free money essentially and giving them nothing in return which is why they would never offer us that much money so i think it's kind of a silly scenario but anyway anyway spotify call us we're ready
John:
For $100 million, we're ready.
John:
Exactly.
John:
That's our price.
John:
We could be argued down to $99, right?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
PlayMyJam wants to know, and I also heard this on Upgrade as well.
Casey:
I don't know if this was the same question or not, but PlayMyJam wants to know, what clipboard managers do we use?
Casey:
For me, I use Alfred as my launcher, and it has a basic clipboard manager within that, and that's all I've ever really needed.
Casey:
John, are you using Clipboard Manager?
John:
I could swear we had this question before, but yeah, I am using one.
John:
I'm using Pastebot.
John:
I used some free open source one for a long time, but I like the Tapbots folks, and so I wanted to try a commercial product, and I installed Pastebot, and I've been using it ever since, and I'm fine with it.
John:
The one thing I learned recently, this actually ties into one of my old semi-war stories about my Mac apps.
John:
I couldn't figure out for the longest time why when I logged in, Pastebot would throw up its user interface.
John:
There's like a little window, like a preferences style window or whatever.
John:
It would pop that up and I would just close it.
John:
I was like, why does it do that every login?
John:
It's so weird.
John:
like i do want it to launch on login like i'd want that because i just always wanted to be running it but why does it put the ui and always makes me dismiss that window i thought it was like a weird bug or i'm like maybe my preferences are screwed up or whatever i must have run pay spot like this for over a year before my little monkey brain said hey dummy didn't you just spend uh you know 20 minutes on a podcast explaining how there's two different ways that you can launch applications on login due to weird historical sandboxing things do you remember that show yeah that was you
John:
Pacebot probably is doing the same thing.
John:
And there are two different ways to launch on login.
John:
You being an old school Mac OS X troglodyte, drag it into login items and system preferences thinking, this is how we're going to make Pacebot launch at login.
John:
I'll put it in login items.
John:
But you also have the checkbox checked in the Pacebot preferences that says launch on login.
John:
And that's using the new system that doesn't use login items.
John:
So essentially, it was launching on login.
John:
through like the new quote unquote modern weird ass sandbox system and then login items would run or vice versa doesn't really matter which goes first and it would say please open this app and if you open an app that's already open you basically get a reopen event in your application another thing i learned writing my application
John:
uh and that usually you can applications can respond any way they want to reopen event but usually what they do is they if they don't have any open windows and they're already launched and they reopen event they just show like their main window that's exactly what facebot was doing so over a year later i go into login items select pacebot hit the minus button remove it and guess what now i log in and pacebot does not open its window in my face and i'm a big dummy so here's your free tip
John:
But anyway, PaySpot, it's a for-pay app.
John:
I forget how much it is.
John:
It's cheap.
John:
I think it's in the Mac App Store and also not.
John:
I tend to buy things outside the Mac App Store if I can because, A, they usually have more capabilities and, B, more money goes to the developer.
John:
But do whatever you want.
John:
It's the one I recommend.
John:
Check it out.
Marco:
And I use LaunchBar.
Marco:
There's lots of apps that do this.
Marco:
I like LaunchBar, you know, both as a launcher and as a clipboard manager because it's the one I, like, LaunchBar is the launcher I happen to be using when I started using the clipboard manager.
Marco:
And so it's the one that I develop muscle memory and visual preference for.
Marco:
So I've tried other ones since then and they didn't work the way I wanted to with muscle memory and they didn't look the way that I wanted them to look because they didn't look like launch bar.
Marco:
So this is a wonderful area where whatever, however you want this to look and feel, you can probably find something that looks and feels the way you want it to.
Marco:
And yeah, launch bar is that thing for me.
Marco:
I absolutely love it.
Marco:
And, uh,
Marco:
It's the one thing that, like, if I'm setting up a new computer and I don't have that installed yet, it hurts.
Marco:
It hurts so much.
Marco:
Because, you know, first you hit command space and you get Spotlight Search, which is, like, Spotlight Search is almost a good launcher.
Marco:
Like, it's like an 85% good launcher.
Marco:
You can use it that way.
Marco:
It works roughly most of the time.
Marco:
It's mostly fast.
Marco:
It has many capabilities.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
But not having clipboard history kills me.
Marco:
It makes it so hard for me to work because I'm so used to it now.
Marco:
This is also one of the reasons why I am skeptical of any kind of heavy work on iOS from my preferences because iOS doesn't have anything like this that actually works and continuously runs and everything.
Marco:
It can't.
Marco:
So unless it's not the system level, which Apple probably would never do.
Marco:
So like, I just, I love clipboard history and, you know, both with programming and with just other kinds of general text stuff, images, even it works like it's just, it's so good.
Marco:
And once you get used to clipboard history,
Marco:
Not having it is like not having a clipboard.
Marco:
Your computer feels so broken and so hobbled by not having it once you're accustomed to it.
Marco:
You really start to appreciate what it does for you.
Marco:
It's like a data loss bug.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because if I go on a computer that doesn't have clipboard history, I will literally lose data because I will just assume I can copy and copy and copy and then I can just paste them out later.
John:
And the thing I copied three copies ago is gone now.
John:
And I'm like, oh, well, don't worry.
John:
It's in the clipboard.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
It's a data loss bug.
John:
You get so used to it that it is destructive.
John:
It's not like, oh, you just want that thing that you're kind of used to and it's a habit that you have to change.
John:
No, it will actually cause you to make mistakes that you can't recover from because the data is gone.
Marco:
Yeah, imagine if before you set your computer up the right way or if you were using someone else's computer, imagine if cut was just a synonym for delete.
Marco:
oh i'm gonna cut this thing i'm gonna go paste it over here wait it's not there that's how it feels like when as you're saying like and it was a paragraph of text you just wrote in an email and you cut it and it just deleted it and sent it into nowhere and then you went to paste it and it wasn't there and you're like well can i get that back it's like no it's gone now sorry yeah clipboard history i strongly recommend you use it i don't care what app you use everyone just use it use this phone use this feature somehow
John:
Speaking of data being gone now, here's a story, an old man story from classic macOS, right?
John:
Classic macOS did not have clipboard history built into the OS.
John:
If there were third-party tools for it, I don't really recall any of them, but I know that I didn't run them for most of the history of the operating system.
John:
And I'd find myself in situations like that, where I will have cut something from some application and then, you know, not really been aware of it in my mental buffer and then cut something else and realized, oh,
John:
the thing i had gotten before was like a page of text that i wrote for like a school report and it's like you know that's thinking of me like do i have to write that whole like page of that report again can i write it again you just feel like you just want to crawl in a hole and die right but if you are a nerd and you're on classic mac os and you have found yourself in the situation before because you're a young and foolish child right there's all this was true for me
John:
classic mac os did not have what did it not have everyone say it with me protected memory oh no so that people sold shareware utilities that when you did that you would launch them and cross your fingers and
John:
and tell it what string you're looking for if it was text, and it would search all RAM to try to find the thing that you had cut, and it would find it.
John:
Let me tell you, it would find it, and you'd be like, yes, there's my page of my report, and maybe the encoding would be screwed up, and then maybe you'd have rich text stuff, but you're just so happy to have it back, and then you would copy it out of this app and paste it into a teach text document and save it, and you'd feel like a king of the universe.
John:
protected memory it sucks you should have complete access to the memory space technically you could do that on mac os2 with uh if you had uh system integrity protection turned off or whatever and did something as root but with 96 gigs of ram it would probably take a lot longer and anyway i still remember the good feeling it's like undeleting files on dos which may be to give you upc troglodytes to use troglodytes for a second time this episode another thing to to uh relate to do you remember undeleting dos just
Marco:
This works very similarly to how if you have an SD card recovery utility, which are still a thing.
Marco:
It works similarly to that because you can just read the whole card and read the raw sectors and just pull out whatever data you can.
Marco:
In DOS, the way files would be deleted in DOS was they would overwrite the first character of the file name with either a null or a question mark or something like that.
Marco:
It would show up as a question mark in the undelete utilities.
Marco:
And until those blocks of the disk were written over by something else, the data was still there.
Marco:
And so you could just, like, the underlit utilities would just scan the disk for these, like, abandoned files that were no longer listed in the file system listings, but they were still on disk until something overwrote them, and they could recover them.
Marco:
And this is exactly how all those SD card...
Marco:
recovery things work today where like they will scan the sd card for whatever data happens to be in the in the sections that are like marked by the housekeeping as available but there is still data there from whatever was written to them last the moral of the story is use clipboard history
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Luke Arthur writes,
Casey:
I am finally seeing compelling reasons to upgrade, but I haven't heard much lately about the issues that early adopters were having.
Casey:
So how are you three feeling about the OS today?
Casey:
Has it matured and stabilized yet, or there's still downsides to consider?
Casey:
For me, I ran 13 pretty early, and I think relatively early on, within the first couple of months, it was fine for me anyway.
Casey:
Uh, I would still say that if you're not hurting for Catalina, don't touch it.
Casey:
I genuinely think that Catalina is still not ready, which is really uncomfortable given that we're getting the next release next month in theory, or at least a preview of it.
Casey:
Um, but yeah, iOS 13, I think you're fine.
Casey:
Catalina stay away if you can help it.
Casey:
Marco, what are you doing?
Marco:
I think I'm roughly in the same boat.
Marco:
I've been running 13 for so long now that I kind of forgot how good 12 was in comparison, if it was even really good.
Marco:
So at this point, I don't know.
Marco:
I will say that the bug I'm having where mail does not show, it doesn't correctly insert new messages.
Marco:
So the symptom is on a mail mailbox in Apple's built-in mail app,
Marco:
you might have new mail and it doesn't show up there.
Marco:
And what's actually happening is it's being inserted at the bottom of the list.
Marco:
But you can't see that from your position at the top of the list.
Marco:
And you can only fix it by like hitting the back button, going to like the root folder list screen and then going back into your inbox and then they're there because it gets resorted.
Marco:
So it's basically like a temporary mail data loss in the sense that you're getting new mail and you don't know it, which is a horrible bug.
Marco:
And it's still there in 13.5.
Marco:
It's been there since last July or whatever.
Marco:
It's still there.
Marco:
I cannot believe they haven't fixed it yet.
Marco:
But other than that, I don't have any major problems with iOS 13.
Marco:
However, I agree with you.
Marco:
Catalina is still really just, it's just sloppy.
Marco:
The things I thought would be annoying about it, like all the permissions dialogues, those have proven to be only mildly annoying with things I do.
Marco:
You have an annoying first few days as you have to approve everything for the first time it launches, and then it's mostly fine after that.
Marco:
You don't see a lot of those boxes too often.
Marco:
The things don't get in your way too often.
Marco:
What annoys me about it is...
Marco:
Really common tasks now sometimes just lag for no particular reason, especially around open save dialogues.
Marco:
I don't know what this is.
Marco:
I don't know if it's like some weird new iCloud thing or what, but open save dialogues are just slow.
Marco:
Hiding and showing apps sometimes is just slow.
Marco:
There's a little half-second lag when you try to hide or show something, or a little half-second lag when you display an open save dialogue that wasn't there before under... What was last Mojave?
Marco:
Whatever it was.
Marco:
It feels stupid to have these amazing, powerful computers these days and to have an open save dialogue get noticeably slower between one release and the next.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
This is a basic thing.
Marco:
It just seems like they're incapable of shipping new versions of macOS without significant regressions that often just kind of never get fixed because they don't care about macOS enough to really invest heavily into this kind of stuff and into QA to really avoid these bugs and fix them when they come up.
Marco:
Please, Apple, stop touching it.
Marco:
Stop!
Marco:
For the love of God, I'm hoping, although this is probably not going to happen, I'm hoping this summer...
Marco:
Given all the quarantine stuff, I was hoping maybe they would take this opportunity to say, you know what, we're going to do another refinement year and push off some of the big changes until next year or whatever.
Marco:
They're probably not going to do that, but I kind of hope they do because they really need to fix a lot of the little paper-cut quality issues in macOS.
Marco:
I don't know any Mac power user...
Marco:
who's excited about getting each new OS anymore.
Marco:
Like, if Apple, whatever they want to do with iOS, we don't care.
Marco:
If Apple goes up there on their virtual stage, whatever it is, and they say, we're not going to do any new features on Mac OS this year.
Marco:
We're just going to, you know, improve quality, etc.
Marco:
Not even bump the version number, keep it, you know, make it Catalina .6 or whatever.
Marco:
they would get so many people at home cheering at that because it just needs it mac os does not need rapid pace change it needs quality first and performance first and it doesn't have that catalina is it made a lot of things worse
Marco:
And the releases before Catalina weren't that great themselves.
Marco:
It needs some love.
Marco:
There's no reason for the regressions it has.
Marco:
There's no good reason why open save dialogues and hiding and showing apps should be slow and noticeably slower than they were one version ago.
Marco:
That's like amateur hour, and they need to fix that.
John:
so john tell me about ios 13 poor poor luke asked a question about ios 13 has to hear about catalina for an hour sorry luke um ios 13 i think it's perfectly safe now i've upgraded all my devices long ago i don't have any particular problems marco's point about the mail app being screwed up i'm sure there's other little apps that have those problems but in general for the os i wouldn't hesitate to tell someone to upgrade to it uh catalina
John:
um you know obviously i have to run it on my mac pro i really haven't had any problems with it on my mac pro it is with with one exception for a while my mac pro was a little bit creaky about shutting down you'd shut it down or restart it and it would shut down or restart but it would take a long time and then when you when you come when i would reboot it would bring up like the your your thing crash and it would give you a crash report and basically it was like some job that's waiting for like the last thing to die on the system after everything else is exited
John:
And it just wasn't dying and it was timing out.
John:
And I just kept sending those reports to Apple because, you know, you have the send Apple button.
John:
And the explanation was this seems to happen every time I shut down or restart.
John:
But I eventually got annoyed enough by it to, you know, exert the force of Google on it and just search for a while and figure out other people having the problems.
John:
And an SMC reset seemed to fix it.
John:
So I haven't seen it in a while.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But all the performance problems you just mentioned or all those weird bugs or whatever, I don't see any of that.
John:
But this is not the only machine you're running Catalina on.
John:
I run Catalina on my work laptop, too, which is a 2017 MacBook Pro.
John:
And there I see all the things that Marco mentioned, the stalls, the slowdowns, the inexplicable things.
John:
Today, like, it's actually impacting, like, the functionality of the computer.
John:
Today I was in, surprise, you know, a video conference because we all are, right?
John:
And I had the thing zoomed to full screen because it's a small laptop screen, and I needed to see a document someone was sharing in some blurry little thing.
John:
So zooming the app to full screen is the way to quickly get the document, right?
John:
And I knew I was going to be up next to talk about a thing, and I...
John:
went to minimize the full screen window so i could see some other document that was behind it that i needed to reference when i was talking about what i was going to talk about and so i went up to the top and and i hit the cursor against the top of the screen and the little title bar came down and hit the little green widget to un full screen the window and i should have known because it's been like this forever but catalina for whatever reason after i've been running it for a while takes like
John:
30 seconds to be responsive after I hit that button.
John:
I hit the button, and then you can just sit back and wait and just look at a stopwatch.
John:
30 seconds, 60 seconds.
John:
While this is happening, everything is working.
John:
People on the conference call are saying, John, are you there?
John:
Are you talking into the mute or whatever?
John:
And there's literally nothing I can do.
John:
I can't click on anything on the screen.
John:
The computer is totally unresponsive.
John:
There is nothing happening on the screen.
John:
I just got to wait it out.
John:
So I had to sit there like a chump waiting for my window to go out of full screen mode for hours.
John:
A long time.
John:
30 seconds is not an exaggeration.
John:
They thought I had fallen off the call or I was talking into mute or had left the room or something.
John:
But no, I'm sitting there impotently staring at my screen, waiting for the computer to become responsive again.
John:
And as soon as, oh, finally, the screen changed and my Windows minimized, I immediately hit unmute and had to try to briefly explain what the hell just happened.
John:
That didn't happen to Mojave.
John:
All that sort of slowness and pausing for inaccessible reasons and the open save stuff and the moving files in the finders, throwing up a beach ball, which I did see a couple times on my Mac Pro but haven't seen recently.
John:
That's all happening in spades on my MacBook Pro.
John:
So, sorry, Luke, you just asked about iOS 13.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But Catalina, I would say hold off, not just because of all that stuff, but because...
John:
if there's any downsides to the current version of mac os because the new one is ostensibly coming in less than a month like you know don't don't upgrade my wife's imac has never had catalina on it and at this point probably never will i'm going to skip right over it because i just i'm not going to voluntarily do that upgrade because her computer is working fine
John:
it also it seems to bring no benefit like it seems like you go to catalina for what exactly whatever you're going to it for if there's any good reason i haven't found it i mean the new version of photos has some features that i like but now that the photo library is on my imac problem solved so i don't need to upgrade my wife's imac yeah it's on my mac pro sorry i don't know what's happening with the words today
Casey:
Finally, somebody with a mildly inappropriate name on Twitter wrote, what kind of backlash do you think there will be if Apple has to drop boot camp compatibility in order to transition the Mac to their own processors?
Casey:
You know, this was interesting for me because my initial reaction is nobody's going to care.
Casey:
Nobody runs boot camp.
Casey:
But I can't tell if that's actually my own biases because I don't think I've ever run boot camp.
Casey:
I have run VMs.
Casey:
Like I used to run VMware Fusion all day, every day when I was doing work in Windows.
Casey:
I feel like less speedy virtual machines are potentially a bigger deal than not having boot camp.
Casey:
But that being said, I wonder if it's my own bias.
Casey:
And just because I didn't use boot camp, I assume nobody uses boot camp.
Casey:
So in my opinion, I actually don't think the backlash will be that bad about boot camp.
Casey:
I think it'll be worse about, you know, really dramatically slowing down VMs.
Casey:
But perhaps I'm being a little myopic.
Casey:
Marco, how do you feel about this as someone who probably does not a lot of either except for maybe Minecraft from time to time?
Marco:
Yeah, I have used Bootcamp in the past.
Marco:
I don't currently use it because it just wasn't that interesting to me.
Marco:
But people do use it.
Marco:
It's a thing.
Marco:
I don't think it's a common thing.
Marco:
I think the need for people to virtualize Windows has decreased significantly over time.
Marco:
And the people who still do need to do it are probably largely doing it as virtualization, not necessarily as a Bootcamp partition.
Marco:
Now, there are still a lot of people who do that for games.
Marco:
And for gamers, the other solutions like virtualization are probably never going to be that great.
Marco:
Running it un-virtualized, straight up on boot camp, directly against the hardware is going to always be better for games.
Marco:
So that market, they would have a problem with it.
Marco:
And I don't think there's any way in hell
Marco:
that boot camp makes it through a transition.
Marco:
If Apple goes to ARM on the Mac, boot camp is not going with it.
Marco:
There is no way.
Marco:
So that will be a casualty of this transition, however and whenever it happens.
Marco:
And I think Apple, they're just going to absorb that.
Marco:
They're just going to say, you know what, we're no longer catering to that market that wants to run Windows and PC games on their Macs.
Marco:
I don't think it's that big of a market to begin with.
Marco:
And I think most of those people, with the exception of John Syracuse, are... Finally.
Marco:
They're just getting gaming PCs.
John:
Okay, he's like, I don't know anybody who does that.
John:
Nobody runs boot camp.
John:
I'm right here.
John:
I spent all that time getting the windows onto the external... That's right.
John:
That's right, that's right.
John:
I mean, obviously I would be sad, but, like, the sadness mostly doesn't come from, like, boot camp has gone.
John:
That's a secondary effect of them getting off x86.
John:
All that said, Windows runs on ARM.
John:
I know that doesn't help anybody because who runs Windows on ARM?
John:
That's a wacky thing to do.
John:
But that may be true today.
John:
Not necessarily true in the future.
John:
Depending on how Intel's fortunes go and depending on how AMD's fortunes go, like, things can change in, you know, a decade or two, right?
John:
The idea of...
John:
uh booting into windows natively on an arm you know apple arm derived custom chip is not ridiculous so while it is likely that boot camp as we know it today won't immediately make it through the arm transition not impossible by the way because they can make boot camp and make it boot windows and arm like they could totally do that it's probably not that difficult in the grand scheme of things just not very useful but say they didn't do that
John:
there's no reason bootcamp can't come back in the future when suddenly the entire personal computer industry has transitioned to arm-based cpus right like if that happens it is an option it's an architecture it's not it's not a question of you know bootcamp itself i would be very upset if apple i'd be more upset if apple stopped supporting bootcamp while still shipping x86 max that would cause quite a lot of uproar because i think like
John:
The fact that it exists at all is really important to, yeah, granted, a small subset of people, but it's like, there's no reason for you to drop this.
John:
You're still shipping x86 Max.
John:
If you ship R1s, everyone kind of knows.
John:
All right, well, you know, what can you do?
John:
But I wouldn't be surprised to see it make a comeback because the ability to buy Apple hardware and even if briefly or in special circumstances boot a different operating system is a useful thing.
John:
And I think Apple recognizes that, which is why Boot Camp continues to exist and be supported in
John:
as far as it is right like they they barely support it but they do support it it does drive my pro display xdr it does understand how to boot my weird you know mac pro that wasn't a glimmer in anybody's eye when boot camp was created so i'm i'm mostly that they continue to minimally support it uh and if and when it goes away with some switch to arm uh i don't think there'll be outrage if there's outrage it'll be about switch to arm not about boot camp
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Linode.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U
Casey:
How's everybody holding up?
Casey:
Mostly fine.
Casey:
Tomorrow is Declan's preschool graduation parade where all the children and parents are in cars driving through the preschool parking lot waving at the teachers.
Casey:
And not to completely end the show on a depressing note, but it really bums me out so awful that this is the end of his preschool experience.
Casey:
Because, I mean, ultimately, preschool doesn't friggin' matter.
Casey:
But to him, it's the only thing that matters.
Casey:
And it really bums me out that it was like one day he left preschool thinking he would be back in a week or two.
Casey:
And in retrospect, it was obvious he wasn't coming back.
Casey:
But at the time, we didn't know it.
Casey:
um and so he just walked out of preschool and never walked back in and that's it for him and you know literally tonight aaron registered him for kindergarten online which classically in the area we live that's done in person and there's like this big hoopla about it and i think you like i believe having never done this you like get to go through the school and probably meet the kindergarten teachers and it's this whole big grand thing and
Casey:
You know, that didn't get to happen.
Casey:
I'm extremely skeptical that he'll even go to kindergarten in the fall, which also really, really bums me out.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like, on the surface, we're fine.
Casey:
Like, we still have a roof over our heads.
Casey:
Everyone's still healthy.
Casey:
We mostly still like each other.
Casey:
But, oh, man, it's just some of this.
Casey:
I feel like I'm seeing what's coming, and I'm seeing it be more of the same, and it's really bumming me out a lot.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't... I mean, I'm mostly doing okay, but I'm with you in the sense that I don't really know how long this is going to last.
Marco:
I think everyone is going to try to get back to normal a little too quickly, and it's going to bite us in the ass, and we're going to have to go back into our holes for a while until...
Marco:
until we have probably widespread vaccination, which is not imminent.
Marco:
So I don't know how this is going to go, but I personally am doing mostly okay.
Marco:
I do miss people.
Marco:
I'm a people person.
Marco:
I actually like being around other people.
Marco:
I'm mostly an extrovert.
Marco:
I love going out to restaurants and stuff and just like seeing people, talking to people.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why I am the shopper, the grocery shopper in the family.
Marco:
Partly because I just like going out and doing stuff.
Marco:
I just like it.
Marco:
I like driving around to a handful of stores and getting stuff and saying hi to the beer guy and the good store and everything.
Marco:
I like that stuff.
Marco:
And to not have that hurts.
Marco:
But relative to other people who have a much harder situation, it's hard to complain about my situation.
Marco:
That isn't to say that I like everything about my situation.
Marco:
In the grand scheme of things, I'm fine.
Casey:
John, how about you?
John:
I'm very well equipped to live this kind of life.
John:
I'm an introvert, for sure.
John:
But it's more difficult than I would have predicted, not because of me personally, but it's the stuff that you just mentioned, Casey.
John:
So I'm an introvert.
John:
I have no problem being in the house all day or whatever, right?
John:
But...
John:
The idea that everyone else in my family will also be forced to do the thing that they may not be inclined to do, that's bad.
John:
Like, it's bad because I feel bad for them missing out on experiences.
John:
I worry about what their next school year is going to be like.
John:
I worry about are they getting what they should be getting out of whatever developmental stages they're in, like all that stuff.
John:
And that affects me.
John:
It's like...
John:
You know, it's fine for me to be OK with it, but I'm not in this alone.
John:
And so I spend a lot of time worrying about all that type of stuff.
John:
And then, you know, of course, if they're for the people who aren't accustomed to that or, you know, having problems with it, we're all in the same house and people get grumpy and it's just like go a little stir crazy and then then people want to.
John:
yeah you know rebel against the strictures which is also not a good thing so you got to talk people off those ledges and it's just you know it's it is a more fraught situation and then during all this time and i mentioned this on whenever i talked about last like uh during all this time i am fortunate enough to continue to be employed which is excellent i endorse the idea of continuing to have an income um but it means that i i haven't had a day off i've just been working right and so all the other things that i mentioned are
John:
boohoo me you still get a job but it means I do have to continue working and so I actually I put in today for vacation which was like because normally you know summer I have a bunch of vacation schedules I save all my vacation days during the year to spend them in the summer mostly because that's when I like to be out and about
John:
But all my vacation got canceled.
John:
And so I didn't, you know, I didn't have any things.
John:
And it occurred to me like last week, like, I should take a vacation, which I don't understand what that would even be.
John:
It mostly just means not quote unquote, going to work, which means not, you know, logging on to work and working remotely.
John:
but I feel like I need a vacation.
John:
I know it's nice to be able to be in that situation, but anyway, I put in a vacation.
John:
I am taking a vacation on WWDC week, as I always do, even though I'm not actually going to WWDC, but you know what?
John:
Not having to work and just being able to
John:
Veg out in front of a live stream over what the heck Apple's going to do and then talk about it on a podcast.
John:
That's going to be my vacation.
John:
So like one of the things I've seen a lot of people mention is like, what are we even looking forward to now?
John:
I personally have something to look forward to, along with all my fretting about, you know, next school year and kids going stir crazy in the summer and all their camps being canceled and everything.
John:
Uh, I'm looking forward to my vacation and I'm looking forward to WWDC and it'll be weird and we'll still have all the kind of same stresses that we have, but I'm hoping that we'll get fun announcements and I'll get to watch them on my, uh, big fancy Mac pro.