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467: The Strain Provider

 

00:00:00   I am ever so slightly sick.

00:00:02   I have a little bit of a cold.

00:00:03   I did an at-home test this morning.

00:00:05   - Wait, you realize you have Omicron, right?

00:00:07   - So I did an at-home test this morning and said no.

00:00:11   - All right, so here's a couple things to know.

00:00:13   Number one, the symptom profile for Omicron

00:00:16   is different than previous variants.

00:00:17   It is much more common to get cold-like symptoms

00:00:19   like stuffy nose than previous variants were.

00:00:22   Number two, it's the at-home rapid tests that we all have,

00:00:27   hopefully, are less sensitive to Omicron

00:00:30   than previous variants.

00:00:31   So, basically, I know so many people who,

00:00:36   in the last couple of weeks,

00:00:38   have gotten minor cold symptoms,

00:00:40   and then later got a PCR test,

00:00:41   and it turned out it was COVID.

00:00:44   Basically, if you have a minor cold in the US right now,

00:00:46   you probably have Omicron.

00:00:48   That's much more likely than not.

00:00:50   Even vaccinated and boosted,

00:00:52   the vaccine and boost basically means

00:00:54   that you're far less likely to die or go to the hospital,

00:00:57   and you're probably gonna have mild cold symptoms

00:00:58   for a few days.

00:00:59   - Yeah, and the thought, so it's funny you say this

00:01:02   because I was talking to Erin about it,

00:01:03   and I was like, do you think this is the real thing?

00:01:05   And she's like, nah, I don't think so.

00:01:06   And then I was like, well, I don't know.

00:01:07   - No, it is.

00:01:08   Trust me, it is.

00:01:09   - So I took it at home test. - Assume that it is.

00:01:12   Take the precautions as if it is that

00:01:13   because it probably is.

00:01:15   - Well, so I took my at home test just to see,

00:01:17   and that said no, I understand, I understand.

00:01:20   You don't have to email me.

00:01:20   I understand, that doesn't guarantee it's not

00:01:22   by any stretch of the imagination.

00:01:24   But anyway, I say, I bring all this up to say

00:01:26   I'm a little snotty and a little, in every sense of the word,

00:01:29   and a little nasally, so I apologize

00:01:32   if I sound a little funky.

00:01:33   It's not anything wrong with what Marco did,

00:01:35   'cause I know people, anytime any of us sound weird,

00:01:37   it's a testament to how good a job you do, Marco,

00:01:39   that people immediately pounce on it,

00:01:40   and they're like, "Wait, what happened?

00:01:42   "Why is this wrong?"

00:01:43   And so, it's not Marco, it's me.

00:01:45   I've got a little bit of snots, so I apologize.

00:01:48   - I have a mild cold all winter, every winter,

00:01:50   for my entire life, so I don't know what that means.

00:01:53   - You've had, you're typhoid-married.

00:01:55   - I don't know, yeah.

00:01:57   - Yeah, yeah, all right, what else is going on?

00:01:58   - I'm still, I'm so tired from my baking adventure yesterday

00:02:02   'cause like, I'm not a, okay, so,

00:02:04   I make Tiff's birthday cake every year.

00:02:06   She, it's our tradition that like,

00:02:08   I make whatever she wants and she sometimes asks

00:02:11   for simple things, sometimes complex things,

00:02:13   sometimes she asks for something simple

00:02:14   and I make it complex and I wanna make it fancy.

00:02:16   That's what happened this year.

00:02:18   I made it like a fancy pistachio cake

00:02:19   that was kind of a hybrid of a bunch of recipes

00:02:21   I found online and it was a good deal of work.

00:02:26   I would imagine if you are a professional cakeologists,

00:02:29   it probably would have taken you the morning at most,

00:02:33   but because I am not and I bake once a year,

00:02:37   everything takes me longer 'cause I'm being extra careful.

00:02:40   I don't, like certain, sometimes I have to remake

00:02:42   the frosting 'cause it doesn't come together or something,

00:02:44   so it was a lot and I am still a day later.

00:02:50   I feel like, so keep in mind, I went to bed on time,

00:02:55   a little after 10, woke up at like 6.30,

00:02:58   like my regular bedtime amount.

00:03:01   I didn't have any alcohol yesterday,

00:03:03   and I had the regular amount of caffeine,

00:03:04   which is like one cup of coffee in the morning

00:03:06   and a small green tea in the afternoon.

00:03:08   And today, I still feel hungover.

00:03:11   Like some-- (laughing)

00:03:14   I don't know, I think it's just from doing

00:03:17   a lot of stuff yesterday.

00:03:18   - You have a baking hangover, you baked one cake.

00:03:21   - I know.

00:03:22   (laughing)

00:03:23   - You got a baking hangover, maybe it's not the baking,

00:03:25   maybe it's like the stress of like,

00:03:26   I hope this comes out well, like the pressure of,

00:03:28   you know, your once a year baking performance.

00:03:31   - I mean, I think it could also be that,

00:03:34   like we don't have a ton of like strong sugar

00:03:37   most of the time, and all day I'm like,

00:03:39   oh let me taste a little bit of this,

00:03:40   make sure it's right, so all day I'm having little tiny bits

00:03:43   of very strong sugary things, culminating at the end

00:03:46   with a slice of this cake right after dinner,

00:03:50   so that's a lot of sugar right there.

00:03:52   - Did you have it for breakfast the next morning

00:03:53   as is tradition?

00:03:54   - I sure did, I had it for breakfast this morning

00:03:56   and felt awful all morning. (laughs)

00:03:58   - I was gonna say, if you're already feeling bad

00:03:59   and you feel like I had too much sugar,

00:04:01   having it for breakfast the next morning is probably nuts.

00:04:03   The hair of the cake that bit you.

00:04:05   - Yeah, we all, all three of us, including Adam,

00:04:08   all three of us this morning afterwards were like,

00:04:10   maybe this wasn't a good idea

00:04:11   to have all this sugar for breakfast.

00:04:14   - I think Adam's probably fine, though.

00:04:15   (laughing)

00:04:16   I bet he rallied fast.

00:04:17   - Yeah, kids can definitely do it more than we can,

00:04:20   that's for sure.

00:04:21   But yeah, it's like now, you know,

00:04:23   I'm turning 40 this year,

00:04:24   and I'm not feeling great about that fact.

00:04:28   One of the areas in which this is becoming real to me

00:04:36   is just how many things that I can't or shouldn't

00:04:39   eat or drink anymore.

00:04:41   Like that list keeps getting larger.

00:04:43   And it seems to have happened fairly quickly.

00:04:46   I feel like at 35, I could eat and drink almost anything.

00:04:51   And between 35 and now I'm like 39 and a half,

00:04:55   that's gotten cut way back.

00:04:57   Just because like, oh, if I eat or drink this thing,

00:04:59   I'm gonna have a terrible night or morning or whatever.

00:05:03   Oh man, they don't tell you this kind of stuff.

00:05:06   This is gonna happen. - No.

00:05:08   But as the joke is, the alternative is much worse.

00:05:12   not being around anymore is much worse than getting old and not being able to eat like you used to.

00:05:16   Yes.

00:05:17   Oh yeah.

00:05:18   Well, you know what is good news though? And we can start with some follow-up.

00:05:23   I'm back and better than ever, baby! Because guess what showed up this week?

00:05:27   The 5K?

00:05:28   It's back, baby.

00:05:29   Did they even tell you it was coming back? Did it just arrive at your doorstep unannounced?

00:05:33   Or did they say, "Hey, we finished your repair. It's on its way," or whatever?

00:05:36   Did you have to ask me that question, John?

00:05:37   Oh no.

00:05:38   Yes, do you have to ask me this?

00:05:40   So a certain somebody, I have,

00:05:44   I have many wonderful qualities and I have a couple of not as wonderful

00:05:49   qualities.

00:05:50   One of my less desirable qualities is that I may not be the most patient human

00:05:58   in the entire world.

00:05:59   I in a rare case of me deleting a tweet when I was waiting for my Mac book pro

00:06:05   to show up just a couple of months back,

00:06:09   I was getting increasingly impatient and increasingly petulant about the fact that my beloved computer

00:06:17   hadn't shown up when I wanted it to in the middle of a pandemic when shipping is a mess

00:06:21   and everything around the world is a mess, but damn it, it's my computer and I want it

00:06:25   now.

00:06:26   So I whined about it on Twitter, which is what people do when they're whiny.

00:06:31   And a few people in various ways said, "Stop being an idiot."

00:06:35   And so I was like, "You know what?

00:06:36   I am being an idiot."

00:06:37   And I deleted that tweet.

00:06:38   I found out that, or I realized that I had dispatched the monitor just a few days before Christmas.

00:06:47   And this, I think I shipped it on the 20th of December or maybe the 21st.

00:06:50   And it was now the 20th or 21st of January.

00:06:54   And so I thought, okay, it is about time for me to start poking about trying to figure out where this thing is.

00:07:00   Now, I have had a tab open, John-style, for a month now

00:07:04   with the LG Track Your Repair status page thing,

00:07:09   and it's told me for a month that it's pending.

00:07:12   Well, that's not fair.

00:07:13   I think before they acknowledged its arrival,

00:07:15   they said, "We're waiting on it,"

00:07:16   and then after a few days of it

00:07:19   having been in City of Industry, California,

00:07:21   they eventually said, "Okay, we're gonna get to it

00:07:23   "at some point."

00:07:23   - Does City of Industry sound like a parody place name

00:07:26   from The Simpsons to anyone else?

00:07:28   - It absolutely does.

00:07:29   - Yeah, it sounds like something from a Disney movie,

00:07:32   "City of Industry."

00:07:33   - It very much does.

00:07:35   It has a big Epcot feel to it, right?

00:07:37   Experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

00:07:39   Well, anyways.

00:07:40   - Sorry, go on.

00:07:41   - During the process of me begging LG,

00:07:43   I don't remember how much we got into this,

00:07:45   but during the process of me begging LG

00:07:47   to take 150 or whatever dollars of my money

00:07:49   so they would repair it, I eventually,

00:07:53   and now I kind of regret having gone down this whole road.

00:07:55   This is all your fault, John, you had to ask.

00:07:57   I eventually used the "email the president" form on the LG website.

00:08:01   Oh no.

00:08:02   This was weeks ago.

00:08:03   Did you say, "Do you know who I am?"

00:08:04   No, no.

00:08:05   It's so tempting.

00:08:06   No, you can't, no, please never do that.

00:08:08   Because nobody cares who I am.

00:08:09   You will regret it.

00:08:10   Nobody cares who I am.

00:08:11   Take heed from Merlin's bad experience.

00:08:13   You will regret this.

00:08:14   That's right.

00:08:15   Right.

00:08:16   So I sent that and then actually, to their credit, within a few hours, I believe I got

00:08:21   a phone call from like one of the president's peons and this very very kind woman was like

00:08:27   all right I'm gonna get you squared away and she followed up via phone like a couple of

00:08:31   times over over the span of like a week this is you know when I was trying to just get

00:08:35   the thing to to them in the first place she was awesome she was like the only ray of sunshine

00:08:40   in this entire repair process was was this woman at the at the president's office and

00:08:44   so I emailed her because we had exchanged a couple of emails because she had actually

00:08:47   asked me for something at some point. And so I said, "Hey," and I was very kind. I truly

00:08:51   was very kind. I'm not going to dig up the email because I'm too lazy, but I was kind.

00:08:54   I was like, "Hey, it's been a month. Can we figure out what's going on here?" And I sent

00:09:00   that, I think it was like Tuesday morning or something like that. And we exchanged a

00:09:04   couple emails back and forth and she was like, "Look, I'm going on vacation next week, but

00:09:07   I super promise that when I get back, I'll check in." I was like, "No, no, no, that's

00:09:09   fine. That's fine. That's fine. I'll talk to you after you get back from your vacation.

00:09:13   worries. And I, you know, had raised a little bit of a stink about it, again, very politely,

00:09:19   and then I went out to go for a walk that afternoon and there was a large box on my front porch. A

00:09:25   large box on my front porch that I did not expect to see. And on the side of that front, of that box

00:09:31   on the front porch, it said "repair okay" and it was an LG box. And I was like, "Oh my god, it's

00:09:37   here!" So here it was, literally the day that I'm blowing up this poor woman at the president of

00:09:42   LG Electronics office or whatever they are, saying please can you find my monitor?

00:09:45   I'm a very needy, very spoiled white boy in Virginia. Please find my monitor. And

00:09:50   sure enough it showed up. So that's how talented she is, is that she made it show

00:09:54   up immediately. - Yeah exactly. How do you know that she didn't somehow make that happen?

00:09:59   - Yeah exactly. - Like she flew her own personal helicopter to your house to drop it off.

00:10:04   - They droned the 30 pound or whatever LG display. So anyway, so it showed up and

00:10:10   there was absolutely zero documentation. There was a packing slip that had, you know, my address and

00:10:14   whatnot, but that was it. No documentation, nothing that indicated that they had done anything other

00:10:20   than the sticker on the outside that said "repair okay." But I had faith, and I plugged it in, and

00:10:26   I've unplugged it on the computer side a couple times. I haven't unplugged it on the other side

00:10:31   yet, but so far so good, baby. I'm back better than ever! So I am excited, and all jokes aside,

00:10:37   you know, so I'd been rocking two 4K LG displays.

00:10:41   Well, no, I actually didn't mind it.

00:10:43   I kind of liked it.

00:10:44   And now having the 5K display back,

00:10:48   leaving aside, like I know we all, including me

00:10:51   to some degree, kind of hate this particular 5K display,

00:10:53   but having a large monitor in front of you

00:10:58   is particularly delightful.

00:11:00   And I can only fathom how delightful

00:11:02   an additional K would be.

00:11:04   Like I'm sure it would be quite nice.

00:11:06   But I am all ready to go.

00:11:11   I'm looking at the 5K right now.

00:11:13   Ethernet is plugged into the 5K,

00:11:15   and that hasn't died yet, so that's good.

00:11:17   And then I'm using my, whatever this breakout box is,

00:11:20   I already forgot who makes it,

00:11:22   but I'm using the breakout box for,

00:11:25   actually, I think they sponsored today.

00:11:26   Iodine sent me a unit of theirs,

00:11:29   which was very kind of them, which is very cool.

00:11:31   This thing is extremely fast, it is super neat,

00:11:33   and Marco will talk about that later.

00:11:36   and I have that connected to the breakout box.

00:11:37   I've got the USB pre connected to the,

00:11:40   I'm sorry, the mix pre connected to the breakout box.

00:11:41   So basically everything about this setup

00:11:44   has changed since last week.

00:11:46   And it'll be anyone's guess which one of these 74 components

00:11:49   causes problems if problems happen later.

00:11:52   And this is when Marco gets real angry at me.

00:11:54   But hopefully it'll work out all right.

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00:13:53   (upbeat music)

00:13:58   I have to say, sitting here now

00:13:59   before everything collapses on me during,

00:14:01   shortly during the recording of this very episode.

00:14:04   Once you're willing to basically turn your life upside down

00:14:09   and spend heinous amounts of money

00:14:10   on things you probably shouldn't need to buy,

00:14:13   the USB-C lifestyle is pretty good.

00:14:15   (laughing)

00:14:16   Being able to plug in the MixPre-3,

00:14:20   two Thunderbolt cables to this iodine box,

00:14:23   Thunderbolt to, let's see,

00:14:25   oh, I've got a stand, a 12 south or whatever it is stand

00:14:29   for my iPhone that's plugged in, I've got Ethernet plugged in, I've got all sorts of

00:14:34   different things, probably like four or five different connections to this computer that

00:14:38   are all riding through two USB-C connections. One of them is to the breakout box, the USB-C

00:14:45   Thunderbolt hub, and one of them to the LG 5K. And, you know, if I were to plug all of

00:14:51   these things individually, first of all, I couldn't because I'd run out of ports, but

00:14:53   Second of all, it would be quite a few more cables.

00:14:57   So I didn't mention, oh, I've kept the LG 4K

00:15:01   that I purchased, and remember I had borrowed one

00:15:03   from my last job, and I'm keeping the other one,

00:15:06   the other LG 4K that I purchased,

00:15:08   and that's currently off to my right-hand side.

00:15:10   My laptop display is off to my left-hand side,

00:15:12   so I've got a triumvirate, a trio of monitors,

00:15:15   and it is extremely overkill, and I'm kind of loving it.

00:15:18   But the 4K is also hooked into the breakout box.

00:15:21   So I've got all this different stuff

00:15:23   hooked into all these different places, but as long as they can find a way back to my

00:15:28   computer, it's pretty great. And so if I want to go into like full-on business mode or whatever,

00:15:33   then I plug in the breakout box and that gives me the second monitor, that gives me the Mixpre

00:15:38   and all that jazz. But if I'm just rolling simple, I only have to plug in the LG 5K and

00:15:43   I still have Ethernet on there and the one 5K monitor and I can go clamshell or whatever

00:15:47   and it's fine. And so it stinks that I needed to get like a bunch of different cables and

00:15:52   gosh do I ever hate the ambiguity around what USB-C cable handles, what bandwidth, and so on and so forth.

00:15:59   But once you get yourself squared away with the right cables and the right $300 breakout box and

00:16:05   and so on and so forth and the right $1500 monitor plus $150 for repair, once you get it all

00:16:11   once you get it all squared away it actually is pretty nice. But gosh did this if this didn't take

00:16:18   like two months to get this situation squared away

00:16:21   to the point I like it.

00:16:22   - Well, I mean, if you trade two months

00:16:23   for about 4,000 more dollars,

00:16:25   that's basically the Pro Display XDR story.

00:16:28   It's a ton of money, but if you're willing and able

00:16:31   to drop that, then this lifestyle can be very nice.

00:16:35   Like, this is why I love the XDR.

00:16:39   It's not because I needed a reference grade display

00:16:42   for whatever, whatever.

00:16:43   You know, having the slightly dim edge problem

00:16:46   that it has still does bother me a little bit.

00:16:49   But it's a really giant monitor,

00:16:52   which hits upon Casey Happiness Factor number one

00:16:54   at the beginning of the episode.

00:16:56   And it's my main USB-C hub.

00:16:58   At my desk, I don't need a USB-C hub

00:17:01   because the monitor itself has downstream ports,

00:17:05   the computer has downstream ports,

00:17:06   and I have my old USB-A devices plugged into a different hub

00:17:10   that I already had, just a USB hub.

00:17:12   It's not like a USB-C or Thunderbolt hub.

00:17:14   And so it's great.

00:17:15   Once you have this set up, it's awesome.

00:17:18   It costs a ridiculous amount of money,

00:17:21   but it is fantastic if you can swing it.

00:17:25   And this is why this really does make me

00:17:28   very, very happy to use.

00:17:29   This still remains by far my favorite computer setup

00:17:33   I've ever used.

00:17:34   I love the desktop laptop lifestyle still.

00:17:37   It's just fantastic.

00:17:40   And USB-C is part of that.

00:17:42   because the thing with USB, it's still,

00:17:45   it's kind of like your audio setup, not you, Casey,

00:17:49   but it's kind of like one's audio setup.

00:17:52   The golden rule of audio setups is like,

00:17:53   once you get it working, never touch anything,

00:17:55   because if you touch anything, you'll change it in some way,

00:17:59   it'll be in a world of hell for weeks

00:18:01   and you won't know why.

00:18:02   USB-C and all this, and Thunderbolt and everything

00:18:05   is like that.

00:18:06   So I have so many weird conditions that I've had in the past

00:18:09   or different setups in the present

00:18:10   where I'll plug something in that should work,

00:18:13   some setup that I have that should work,

00:18:15   and it just randomly doesn't.

00:18:16   Like I have this problem with our game streaming setup

00:18:19   where I'm running all of these USB capture devices

00:18:23   and USB webcams through the CalDigit Thunderbolt hub

00:18:27   and into my MacBook Pro, but for some reason,

00:18:31   like one of the capture things,

00:18:33   we have three computers that we capture,

00:18:34   so we have three little legato USB thingies to capture them,

00:18:38   and one of them for some reason,

00:18:41   won't work through the Thunderbolt hub sometimes.

00:18:45   And if I plug it into my computer directly,

00:18:49   but like into a different port, it works fine.

00:18:52   Now, if I disconnect the computer that's plugged into it,

00:18:57   like the input gaming PC,

00:19:00   if I put this one particular gaming PC

00:19:02   on a different USB capture device,

00:19:04   then that capture device will start having the same problem.

00:19:06   So it seems to be like whatever PC,

00:19:10   or whatever capture device is connected to this particular

00:19:12   PC can't work all the time from the USB port

00:19:17   in the Thunderbolt hub, but will work every time

00:19:20   directly through it.

00:19:21   And like weird stuff, like I have a sound device,

00:19:25   this MixPre that powers the audio for that setup,

00:19:27   so that's also plugged into the USB hub.

00:19:29   And that works all the time, asterisk,

00:19:32   well most of the time.

00:19:35   Occasionally, very occasionally,

00:19:37   it'll blip out for a second and blip back in.

00:19:39   Why?

00:19:40   I don't know.

00:19:41   But this is like, this is the promise of like,

00:19:43   so much of technology that we have today.

00:19:47   It'll advertise like, oh, you can plug in X number

00:19:50   of devices, it'll have X number of ports,

00:19:51   and you can support all these things,

00:19:52   and you'll see pictures all over the manufacturer websites

00:19:56   of all these things.

00:19:57   The devices, the computer manufacturers,

00:19:59   the Thunderbolt hub manufacturers,

00:20:01   and you'll see these wonderful pictures

00:20:03   of some laptop surrounded by a million different peripherals

00:20:07   all plugged into this one magical box and everything.

00:20:09   And in practice, in real life, if you do that,

00:20:12   you have maybe a 50/50 shot of it actually working.

00:20:16   And when it actually does work,

00:20:20   that's why I'm saying never touch it again.

00:20:23   And right now, Casey, you have a setup

00:20:25   that right now seems to probably maybe work.

00:20:28   - Potentially, yes, Casey. - I've been using

00:20:29   such a setup and it's glorious.

00:20:32   And so I hope, I hope that this works for you

00:20:34   because having been on the other side of it so often,

00:20:37   having tried to actually use the equipment

00:20:41   in the way that it claims to be able to be used

00:20:43   and something just doesn't work so often,

00:20:46   that when it does work, it is so, so glorious.

00:20:50   - Right, and that's where I am.

00:20:51   And to be clear, like you don't need a $1500 LG 5K,

00:20:54   you don't need a $6000 Pro Display XDR,

00:20:58   you can get one of the couple of hundred dollar

00:21:00   USB Thunderbolt hubs or whatever they are.

00:21:03   It's still ridiculously expensive,

00:21:05   a couple hundred dollars for what is basically four ports.

00:21:08   Like that is absurd. - Oh yeah.

00:21:10   - But, but when it does work, like you said,

00:21:13   when it does work, it is pretty great that, you know,

00:21:15   with two cables, I've got power, I've got ethernet,

00:21:19   I've got a USB mic interface,

00:21:22   I've got two different displays,

00:21:24   I've got two connections, two parallel connections

00:21:28   to this 12 terabyte iodine thing.

00:21:30   That's seven, eight, seven, eight,

00:21:34   I don't know, I can't count, something like that,

00:21:35   off of just two cables connected to my computer,

00:21:37   which is pretty excellent.

00:21:39   And so when it does work, when you are a HDMI CEC Unicorn,

00:21:42   when you are a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 Unicorn,

00:21:45   it is pretty excellent.

00:21:46   John, I think we kind of railroaded you there.

00:21:48   It sounded like you were gonna say something.

00:21:50   - Nope, I'm fine to hear about your exciting USB-C life,

00:21:53   although I still think the ultimate move

00:21:56   is the desktop life,

00:21:57   because no matter how weird ass your setup is,

00:21:59   if you have a desk, you can spend the time

00:22:01   to get it set up the way you want it

00:22:02   and then just never change it

00:22:03   'cause it never goes anywhere.

00:22:04   - Yeah, but that's the thing, it never goes anywhere.

00:22:05   So if you wanna move your butt or work somewhere else,

00:22:10   you can't.

00:22:11   - I would never leave in my comfy chair,

00:22:12   my giant screen and my keyboard tray and my nice mouse.

00:22:15   Why would it go anywhere else?

00:22:16   - A nice mouse, your $10 40 year old mouse?

00:22:18   - No, I guess we've gone through this.

00:22:20   This is my second replacement Microsoft mouse thing,

00:22:25   you remember?

00:22:26   - Mm-hmm.

00:22:27   All right, we should move on.

00:22:28   I apologize for kind of railroading

00:22:30   follow-up copyright 2011 John Syracuse.

00:22:32   So speaking of John Syracuse,

00:22:34   tell me about QD OLED and blue LEDs, please.

00:22:36   - This is, there's actually two things about the blue LEDs.

00:22:40   I gave myself a correction on the past show

00:22:42   where I talked about QD OLED,

00:22:44   and QD OLED is the one with the blue backlight.

00:22:46   And I said it, I wasn't sure why it was blue,

00:22:48   but I do know it's easier to make them

00:22:50   like bright and high power or whatever.

00:22:52   But there is another reason specifically for QD OLEDs

00:22:55   have blue LEDs in them producing the light.

00:23:00   That's from Simon Webster.

00:23:01   He says the reason blue LEDs are using QD OLEDs is that blue photons have the highest

00:23:06   energy.

00:23:07   A single blue photon can make a red photon, but energetically you need multiple red photons

00:23:11   to make a single blue photon.

00:23:13   Again this has to do with the way quantum dots work.

00:23:15   See that video that we linked in a couple shows back that it's the photons coming out

00:23:20   of the LED.

00:23:21   It's not a backlight because it's behind every pixel, right?

00:23:23   out of the little LED goes into the quantum dot layer and knocks a bunch of electrons

00:23:28   around at different energy levels. And if you send in a blue one, it's got the most

00:23:31   energy so you can make all the other colors from the blue one. Again, this is not filtering

00:23:36   or canceling out wavelengths. This is converting the blue. It's not converting. Anyway, it's

00:23:41   complicated. It's quantum whatever. But yeah, blue, they're easy to make. They can be really

00:23:46   bright and also they have the highest energy so you can get the other colors from them.

00:23:51   right along, John Mason writes, "Apparently Sony Interactive Entertainment, without the

00:23:56   rest of Sony, is still much higher revenue than Activision Blizzard." This is because

00:24:00   we were talking about how big is Sony, really.

00:24:02   - Yeah, we got some guff for saying like, oh, Microsoft will be the third biggest company,

00:24:06   but Sony was number one. I'm like, oh, well, Sony makes tons of stuff. They don't just

00:24:09   do video games, but apparently just the video game part. And this was in terms of revenue.

00:24:13   So obviously, Sony sells consoles as well as getting margins on the games, but then

00:24:17   again, so does Microsoft. So I guess it was more of a fair comparison than I had thought,

00:24:21   and Sony Interactive Entertainment

00:24:22   is actually really, really big.

00:24:24   - Turns out.

00:24:25   We got a lot of feedback, which I thought was reasonable

00:24:27   from what little I know about this world,

00:24:29   with regard to Xbox Game Pass and the Series S.

00:24:33   Can you explain this to me, please?

00:24:34   - Yeah, this should have been factored into,

00:24:36   I think we touched on it a little bit,

00:24:37   the Activision Blizzard thing,

00:24:40   with Microsoft buying them, what do they get from that?

00:24:41   - Well, and also this came from an Ask ATP, I think,

00:24:44   with regard to which system should somebody buy.

00:24:47   - Yeah, but it was tied into

00:24:48   the Activision Blizzard discussion

00:24:50   because it's like why does Microsoft want to buy

00:24:54   all these games and everything?

00:24:55   Obviously you can get a platform exclusives

00:24:57   to sell more of your Xbox consoles,

00:24:59   but also Microsoft has been pushing heavily into selling,

00:25:03   instead of selling people a console box

00:25:06   and then selling people games for 60 bucks each,

00:25:08   instead trying to get them on a subscription

00:25:11   to say every month you pay a certain amount of money

00:25:13   and in exchange for that, you get access to many, many games

00:25:17   sort of a Netflix style thing or whatever.

00:25:19   It's much more like Netflix than it is like Spotify

00:25:21   or Apple Music because I think with music streaming services,

00:25:24   the assumption is that if you pay a monthly fee,

00:25:27   you get access to essentially all music.

00:25:29   Not entirely true, like if you want Neil Young,

00:25:30   you can't get it in Spotify anymore.

00:25:32   But like for the most part,

00:25:34   you expect every music streaming service to have like,

00:25:38   the most popular music,

00:25:41   almost all music will be there or whatever.

00:25:43   But Netflix or a streaming service like, you know,

00:25:46   HBO Max or Amazon or Apple TV Plus or whatever,

00:25:51   you know they're not gonna have everything,

00:25:53   but they have a lot of stuff.

00:25:55   And if you had to buy every movie

00:25:57   that you can watch on Netflix or whatever,

00:25:59   it would cost you a ton,

00:26:00   but if you pay a small amount per month,

00:26:01   Netflix will give you access to all its original content

00:26:03   plus any other stuff they have or whatever.

00:26:04   So that's the idea behind these Xbox Game Pass things

00:26:08   is you pay a fee per month

00:26:10   and you get access to a lot of games.

00:26:13   And you can get many, many more people paying that fee

00:26:15   if you add lots of popular games to the Game Pass.

00:26:19   Now, that flies in the face a little bit

00:26:21   of business models like World of Warcraft,

00:26:23   where people are already paying every month

00:26:25   for World of Warcraft, so I'm not sure

00:26:26   how they could put that into Game Pass,

00:26:27   because Game Pass alone costs about the same or less,

00:26:30   I think, as World of Warcraft does per month.

00:26:32   But still, it's a different way to run that business.

00:26:37   PlayStation's winning this generation,

00:26:38   and so they're, you know,

00:26:40   Microsoft trying different things,

00:26:41   because they wanna find the best way they can

00:26:43   get a steady revenue stream from you.

00:26:46   In fact, Microsoft will go as far as to, you know, we talked about renting game consoles

00:26:50   from Blockbuster, Microsoft will rent you a game console.

00:26:53   For no money down, you just pay them X number of dollars a month, and part of that X number

00:26:58   of dollars a month is they will give you a lesser Xbox without you having to pay, you

00:27:04   know, you pay the first month's 30 bucks or whatever, and you get an Xbox and you get

00:27:08   access to a whole bunch of games, and then you just keep paying that over and over.

00:27:11   I'm not sure if that business model is going to win or not,

00:27:14   but it is definitely attractive.

00:27:16   And the reason that goes into the Ask ATP thing

00:27:17   is a lot of people were saying,

00:27:19   look at this great deal you get.

00:27:20   You can find the lesser Xboxes, the Xbox Series S.

00:27:23   You can actually find them

00:27:24   because they don't use as fancy parts as the other ones.

00:27:26   You can go to a store right now, go into a Target

00:27:28   and buy one off the shelf, easy to find, right?

00:27:31   You don't even have to put down money up front

00:27:33   if you don't want to, if you sign up for the Game Pass.

00:27:34   And then once you're signed up for the Game Pass,

00:27:36   you have access to this big catalog of games

00:27:39   and you didn't have to buy any of them.

00:27:41   So the financial risk to find out

00:27:42   what kind of game you like is low.

00:27:44   Unfortunately, like I said,

00:27:47   with the streaming service versus game service,

00:27:49   Game Pass does not give you access

00:27:51   to all the games in the world.

00:27:53   It doesn't even give you access to a very big subset of them.

00:27:56   The types of games that are on Game Pass

00:27:59   may not actually even be representative

00:28:01   of the world of games that's available,

00:28:03   even just across PC games and Xbox games.

00:28:05   Because as you can imagine, the very, very best games

00:28:09   have some motivation to be $60 individual purchases

00:28:13   for the length of time that they can do that

00:28:15   before sort of being relegated to Game Pass.

00:28:17   Of course, if Microsoft owns them,

00:28:19   they can choose to take the hit quote unquote, not really,

00:28:23   because Microsoft would much rather have you pay $30 a month

00:28:27   for five years than to buy one $60 game.

00:28:29   Like the math is very easy to do there,

00:28:30   but Microsoft owns the game,

00:28:32   they can put it into Game Pass

00:28:33   and crank up that services revenue.

00:28:35   So I think it was worth mentioning if people didn't know

00:28:38   how console gaming has changed.

00:28:39   You do have options now, other than just buying a console

00:28:42   for a couple hundred bucks and then buying $60,

00:28:44   paying for each game for $60.

00:28:47   Sony is also rumored to be working

00:28:48   on a Game Pass style subscription.

00:28:50   So this may be the future of console gaming.

00:28:53   Kinda sucks for me because I don't wanna do that at all.

00:28:56   I'd much rather buy the console, buy Destiny,

00:28:58   and then just use it for five years

00:28:59   without having to pay again.

00:29:01   Well, that's not really true

00:29:01   because Destiny sells you expansions every year

00:29:04   for probably another 60 bucks.

00:29:06   And I always get the fancy version

00:29:07   and then I buy horse armor in the game

00:29:09   and you know how it goes.

00:29:11   - Horse armor?

00:29:12   Like armor for--

00:29:12   - That's a gamer joke.

00:29:14   People will get it who are not you.

00:29:15   - Is it armor for horses or armor made for or of horses?

00:29:19   - It's armor for horses.

00:29:21   You don't know that from back in the day?

00:29:22   - No.

00:29:23   - This is a big thing in the gaming world.

00:29:25   When the first game company decided,

00:29:29   you know what, we can sell things inside the game

00:29:33   but for real money.

00:29:34   And people are like, what are you talking about?

00:29:35   You can't do that.

00:29:36   "No, but Boyd, what if we found a way

00:29:39   "to take people's credit card?"

00:29:40   And then they would give us money,

00:29:42   and then in exchange we'd be like,

00:29:44   voila, your character has this item.

00:29:46   And the first thing they sold was armor for your horse.

00:29:50   It was horse armor, and people paid real money for it.

00:29:52   And they're like, "You paid real money

00:29:53   "for thinking a video game,

00:29:54   "and now that's what video games are."

00:29:57   Like, that's all video games are.

00:29:58   Like, mobile gaming is paying real money

00:30:01   for things inside a video game.

00:30:02   Often the thing you're paying for

00:30:03   is just a chance to play the game again sooner.

00:30:05   you're not even getting horse armor.

00:30:07   (laughing)

00:30:08   The first ever DLC, downloadable content,

00:30:11   but downloadable is one word, so why is it DL?

00:30:14   It's so terrible.

00:30:15   - Oh my gosh, all right, let's move on.

00:30:16   - Wait, but before the game,

00:30:17   so this actually does change my recommendation.

00:30:21   So this came up as cases from the AskATP question

00:30:24   from a person who had said,

00:30:25   hey, I'm just getting back into gaming

00:30:26   after a long time away, I don't really know where to start,

00:30:29   what system should I get?

00:30:30   I didn't really know what kind of games they wanted.

00:30:33   And I had said get a Switch because I have a Switch

00:30:36   and I came to it from a similar point

00:30:39   and I really enjoy it and my family really enjoys it.

00:30:42   But I will say I have bought a lot of games

00:30:45   that were a lot of money that I ended up playing

00:30:48   for a few minutes and realizing,

00:30:50   oh actually I don't really like this after all.

00:30:54   But it's all just download purchases

00:30:56   that I made on the Switch and you can't really,

00:30:58   some of them have demos but a lot of them don't.

00:31:00   Most, I would say most don't.

00:31:02   And so the idea of like try before you buy

00:31:05   in that kind of context doesn't really exist

00:31:07   very much on the Switch.

00:31:08   And so to know that the Xbox Series S,

00:31:13   and like you know for a casual person like me

00:31:15   and probably this person writing in,

00:31:17   the difference between the Series S and the Series 10X,

00:31:21   whatever the impossible one is to get,

00:31:23   probably doesn't matter to us so much.

00:31:26   But like the idea of being able to pay zero to $300

00:31:30   for the system and then just pay some reasonable monthly fee

00:31:34   to have access to lots of games,

00:31:36   even if they're like kind of old or second tier,

00:31:39   Netflix quality kind of games.

00:31:40   Like that's fine because that's kind of what we need.

00:31:45   Like people who are not into the cutting edge of everything,

00:31:49   that's great actually.

00:31:51   And so this changed my recommendation.

00:31:53   I had no idea this even existed

00:31:55   and we got such an overwhelming number of people

00:31:58   writing in to say how great it was

00:32:00   that yeah, so now I now recommend to this person,

00:32:03   anybody in a similar situation,

00:32:05   that's probably what you should try first

00:32:07   because the idea of being able to try

00:32:09   a whole bunch of like, you know,

00:32:10   really good quality games, even if it's not everything,

00:32:13   a whole bunch of really good quality games

00:32:15   for a flat fee every month, you know,

00:32:17   that's very attractive compared to

00:32:20   buy this game for 60 bucks that you might like

00:32:23   and you have no recourse if you don't.

00:32:25   - Doesn't change my recommendation

00:32:26   because like I said, it's not that these aren't

00:32:27   top tier games, there are absolutely top tier games in Game Pass, like super duper top tier

00:32:32   the best of the best, but it's just not every kind of game.

00:32:37   If you don't know what kind of game you're into, if you're into games that are only on

00:32:40   PC, Game Pass is going to do nothing for you because you're not going to like any of the

00:32:43   games, and you're going to have a crappy console on top of that.

00:32:46   So I feel like it is important to know what you like first.

00:32:48   Now that leads to the question, okay, how the hell am I supposed to know what I like?

00:32:51   Unless I'm going to be plunking down 60 bucks for games.

00:32:54   is the hard part. My suggestion last time was like find a game you think you like, play

00:32:58   it over a friend's house, see if you do like it. A lot of people mentioned the person

00:33:00   played Halo and liked it, so hey, if you've decided that Halo is the game for you, then

00:33:04   actually this is the solution because you can buy an Xbox and play Halo on it, it'll

00:33:07   work great. But if you don't know, like I was trying to like not fence people out of

00:33:11   essentially PC games because there are a lot of games that are really only on PC or best

00:33:15   on PC. Like if you want to use, I'm trying to think of an example, like a tank simulator,

00:33:20   like World of Tanks. World of Tanks on Xbox maybe.

00:33:23   How about Scorched Earth?

00:33:24   Is that still...

00:33:25   I was thinking of all the franchises.

00:33:26   I was going to say Flight Simulator, but I think that's not even a franchise.

00:33:30   It's one game from DOS from forever ago.

00:33:33   Yeah.

00:33:34   Anyway, like, if it turns out that you're super into games that are only on PC and you

00:33:38   have any console, you're going to be sad.

00:33:40   And if it turns out that the game you like best is Super Mario Brothers, you're going

00:33:43   to be really sad on Xbox.

00:33:44   So you know, like, if possible, find out what you like.

00:33:48   But if you really don't know and you're desperate now, this seems like a good deal.

00:33:51   I'm just not big on the Xbox series S. I kind of wish that they did Game Pass with the better

00:33:57   console and just charged you a little bit more per month.

00:33:59   I don't know, but maybe they'd make you send it back if you didn't go through.

00:34:04   I don't even know how that works.

00:34:05   Can you pay for one month and say, "I've changed my mind.

00:34:07   I canceled the service," and send it back to them, or do they make you buy out the rest

00:34:10   of the console?

00:34:11   Not sure what the deal is.

00:34:12   But anyway, like I said, Sony is almost certainly going to come up with a similar program, so

00:34:16   this may be the future of consoles for everybody.

00:34:18   Well, and honestly, I don't think that's that bad of a thing, because I look at the games

00:34:22   I play, and there are certain games like Minecraft or Stardew Valley that I paid 20 or 30 bucks

00:34:30   for once, like five years ago or something, and I've gotten hours and hours and hours

00:34:35   out of those games, I love them so much, and then other games that I paid 60 bucks for

00:34:41   and played very little.

00:34:42   If there was some way for me to more easily reward the games I'm actually playing over

00:34:47   time in a more direct way and not be out the 60 bucks for something I played for five minutes,

00:34:54   I think that would be more, not only more, I think, fair, but it would also be a little

00:35:00   more consumer friendly in a lot of ways.

00:35:02   I should buy some horse armor in Stardew.

00:35:05   Yeah, and the game developers, I actually have a horse, it's adorable.

00:35:09   You would buy armor for it, I bet.

00:35:11   Nothing ever attacks it, and that would just make it slower, get rid of the point of the

00:35:15   horse but anyway like I feel like you know obviously there's this kind of

00:35:20   business model has its ups and downs as well but if something was based more on

00:35:25   the time that you spent on something or if you just paid a flat rate and then

00:35:29   you know the service behind the scenes dealt out the money based on what people

00:35:32   were playing over time like that I think is probably a better way to go long term

00:35:37   Olivier Rui writes you mentioned SMS interoperability bugs as a key problem

00:35:43   with iMessage, but it's a question only Apple gets asked

00:35:45   because they've merged their own messaging system

00:35:47   with the SMS app.

00:35:48   I've never heard of a WhatsApp or Signal user complaining

00:35:51   that they can't interact with SMS.

00:35:52   Everyone just assumes it's a separate world.

00:35:54   This merge with SMS was a great way

00:35:56   to jumpstart the iMessage platform,

00:35:57   but the downside becomes increasingly difficult to hide

00:36:00   as the two systems diverge.

00:36:02   - I mean, yeah, Apple does get the benefit of that merge.

00:36:05   I mean, obviously the iPhone launched without iMessage,

00:36:07   so it only had SMS.

00:36:09   And when rolling out iMessage, since it was from Apple,

00:36:12   I think it would have been kind of weird to say,

00:36:15   the SMS app is still there, but now it's also an iMessage app.

00:36:18   And the interoperability was a feature,

00:36:21   and it still is a feature.

00:36:23   It should work better.

00:36:24   And then as SMS--

00:36:26   I'm not going to say as SMS ages,

00:36:27   but obviously SMS is not getting--

00:36:29   is staying the same.

00:36:30   What's happening is that as iMessage evolves

00:36:33   and as the competitive services evolve,

00:36:36   the distance between SMS, which is essentially unchanging,

00:36:39   and these modern messages service becomes greater

00:36:41   and greater and then you get sort of these disparities between them.

00:36:44   So yes, Apple did sort of sign up for this by merging them, but I think the merge was

00:36:48   a good idea and I don't think we would prefer to be bouncing back and forth between two

00:36:52   separate apps if we could help it, although at a certain point Casey probably would have

00:36:56   done that out of frustration alone, just because like, "Look, does it work in the SMS only

00:37:01   app?

00:37:02   Then I will do that for when I'm communicating with my family."

00:37:04   That's something a lot of people have sent feedback.

00:37:05   They're like, "I have seven messaging apps and I just jump between them."

00:37:09   And I guess that works, but it's not ideal.

00:37:12   They're like keeping track of like work people

00:37:14   are in this app and you know,

00:37:15   and it's, but we do all do that for various things.

00:37:18   - Yeah, I have to use Slack, Discord, Teams.

00:37:21   - But like one hopes that with the exception

00:37:25   of what you are forced to do with work,

00:37:26   you don't have like five different apps of the same type,

00:37:30   like five different email apps,

00:37:31   unless you're Mike Hurley or something.

00:37:33   Five different instant message apps.

00:37:34   Like are you in Slack, Teams and Discord

00:37:38   all at the same time for three different sets of people,

00:37:39   maybe because of the Discord gaming angle or whatever,

00:37:41   but that's less ideal than saying, okay,

00:37:44   sometimes I'm in Slack, sometimes I'm in Messages,

00:37:46   sometimes I'm in email, right?

00:37:47   Sometimes I'm in Twitter.

00:37:49   Those are all slightly different.

00:37:50   The idea of having five apps

00:37:53   that are all just essentially instant messaging

00:37:55   as we used to call it back in the day is not what I prefer.

00:37:58   That's why apps like Adium were created, right?

00:38:01   Where it was all the instant messaging,

00:38:03   people don't remember, but there used to be tons and tons

00:38:06   of instant messaging services, all of which

00:38:08   had lots of users.

00:38:11   And they made one meta app that could speak to them all.

00:38:13   So you could do Google Talk, ICQ, AIM, I think IRC.

00:38:18   Didn't ADM do IRC as well?

00:38:20   I thought it did.

00:38:21   Yeah, it did everything you could possibly

00:38:24   imagine in a single app, because all the protocols were

00:38:27   more or less open and/or packed.

00:38:29   Those were the days.

00:38:29   But anyway, the reason that app exists

00:38:31   is because who wants to run all those separate apps?

00:38:32   But if you can put them on one app and do a decent job of it,

00:38:36   that's preferable.

00:38:37   Everything now is its own little garden

00:38:39   and everybody wants their own garden

00:38:40   for everyone to join.

00:38:41   Like TV apps are like this,

00:38:44   the streaming services are all like this.

00:38:46   We are trying very hard to make podcasts not like this,

00:38:49   but the reality is they are becoming like this.

00:38:51   This is just how everybody wants,

00:38:54   nobody wants to work on open standards anymore,

00:38:56   nobody wants to interoperate anymore.

00:38:59   Everybody is making their own gardens

00:39:00   and everybody wants it to be all theirs,

00:39:03   only theirs, owned by them, controlled by them,

00:39:05   owning the whole stack, cutting up distribution,

00:39:07   taking all the money.

00:39:08   That's the modern way to do business in the tech world.

00:39:10   So I feel like this is just kind of a reality

00:39:12   that we're stuck with in many areas.

00:39:14   Like yeah, you're gonna have five different apps

00:39:16   to watch TV.

00:39:17   You're gonna have at least two or three different apps

00:39:19   to listen to your podcast or whatever,

00:39:20   audiobooks, whatever else.

00:39:21   You're gonna have 10 different chat apps,

00:39:23   10 different collaboration apps,

00:39:24   10 different messaging apps.

00:39:26   That's just how it goes.

00:39:27   - I mean, it's not like the instant messaging platforms

00:39:29   were magnanimous back in the day.

00:39:31   It's just that apps like Adium were able to figure out

00:39:34   how to make it work.

00:39:35   Like, there were third-party Slack clients, for example, too, because Slack technically

00:39:38   has an API, but these days, an individual or small group of developers trying to ride

00:39:44   that bear in a Steve Ballmer parlance is just so much harder.

00:39:49   The degree of difficulty has gone up.

00:39:50   If you tried to make a meta-messaging app that worked, especially when encryption is

00:39:54   involved, you probably can't do it with iMessage through the end-to-end encryption stuff and

00:39:58   the integration.

00:39:59   It was just easier to do back.

00:40:01   It was plausible to do back in the day that a small dev team could make an app like Adium,

00:40:06   but it wasn't because AOL was super into people making their own clients, right?

00:40:11   Or ICQ or, you know, I guess IRC doesn't care.

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00:42:08   - I made a off-handed comment last week about how,

00:42:16   I was wondering how episodes or movies

00:42:21   that are released only to Netflix or only to Disney Plus,

00:42:25   How do they end up falling off the back of trucks and what was the story there?

00:42:28   And we got we touched the three of us touched on it very very briefly and one of the things

00:42:33   I think John brought up was industry screener DVDs that so what'll happen is

00:42:38   people in the industry will get you know pre-release copies of movies on DVD or perhaps blu-ray and

00:42:45   You know somebody could rip that and then upload it and then it'll start falling off the back of trucks

00:42:50   Well, Matt Rigby writes, "Industry screener DVDs are still very much a thing. I've gotten dozens this year alone.

00:42:56   Not Blu-rays, traditional standard definition DVDs. All but one of them for content available in streaming platforms that I pay for in beautiful 4k resolution."

00:43:04   It is, and I'm still quoting, "It is freaking annoying and wasteful, and I wish they'd go away. Just email me a code."

00:43:10   So I thought that was kind of funny.

00:43:13   Additionally, a handful of people sent in, but I first saw it through Colin Weir.

00:43:17   This is an article from 2019 The Scene, Pirates Ripping Content from Amazon and Netflix. And it's a really really good article.

00:43:24   It's not terribly long and it'll be in the show notes.

00:43:25   But I'd like to read just a few excerpts from it, from the article. Whenever you stream a video online,

00:43:31   you are downloading chunks of a video file to your computer. Screeners simply save that content and

00:43:36   attempt to decrypt it for non DRM playback later, an informant tells the author of the article.

00:43:41   When accessing the content, legitimate premium accounts are used, often paid for using prepaid credit cards supported by bogus

00:43:47   identities. It takes just a few minutes to download a video file since they're

00:43:50   served by CDNs with gigabits of bandwidth. "Once the files are

00:43:54   downloaded from the streaming platform, however, they are encrypted in the MP4

00:43:57   container. Attempting to view such video will usually result in a blank screen.

00:44:00   Nothing else. Streams from these sites are protected by DRM. The most common and

00:44:04   hard to crack DRM is called Widevine. The way the scene handles web releases is by

00:44:09   using specialized tools coded by the scene for the scene. These tools are

00:44:13   extremely private and only a handful of people in the world have access to the

00:44:15   latest version, the source notes. Continuing, "Without these tools, releasing

00:44:19   Widevine content is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for most.

00:44:23   These tools work by downloading the encrypted video stream from the

00:44:26   streaming site and reverse engineering the encryption. Our contact says that the

00:44:29   decryption is a surprisingly quick process, taking just a few minutes." I did

00:44:34   not know about Widevine before now. Apparently it is very much a thing, and I

00:44:38   probably should have known about it. But nevertheless, I found this entire article

00:44:42   fascinating and I've kind of given you the the TLDR just now but they cracked the encryption like I said

00:44:47   this is from the movies if you break the DRM the world is yours yep it's kind of it's kind of amazing to me that like

00:44:54   the the crack is not as apparently as of 2019 not like not widely distributed like yeah I agree yeah

00:45:00   I don't quite understand there's probably some motivation for keeping that private right like well

00:45:05   so they talk about in the article that so the scene is kind of to the best I understand I might

00:45:11   get the particulars wrong. The scene is like the broad kind of name for all of

00:45:15   these different subgroups that are all like trying to compete to be the first

00:45:20   one to release a particular thing. So I know about the scene. Well okay so I'm

00:45:24   just saying so if you're one of these if you're one of these groups you're gonna

00:45:29   want to have your own proprietary software that gets you it gets the DRM

00:45:33   cracked so you can upload stuff in pre-release before anyone else and you

00:45:37   don't want any other knuckleheads having your software that you worked in

00:45:40   and you'll put blood, sweat, and tears into,

00:45:42   you're gonna hoard that for yourself.

00:45:44   - Right, but I feel like this type of thing,

00:45:48   it's hard to keep a secret.

00:45:49   You don't wanna tell everybody,

00:45:51   and then once it gets out, shouldn't it just be everywhere?

00:45:53   Not maybe the specific software,

00:45:55   but very least, here's how we cracked it.

00:45:57   Here are the secret keys that we extracted

00:45:58   from some hardware device or whatever,

00:46:00   or some insider in Netflix leaked this private key.

00:46:03   And maybe the motivation is if Netflix finds out

00:46:05   what thing has been leaked,

00:46:07   they can do some kind of key rotation or something.

00:46:09   I don't know.

00:46:10   The whole point is DRM, it prevents things from being pirated, so that's why you can't

00:46:13   take screenshots.

00:46:14   Yep.

00:46:15   All right, then this is, we're kind of getting into the gray area between follow-up and topic.

00:46:20   The Netherlands has told Apple, "Haha, nope."

00:46:25   So what has happened is the Netherlands has said that for dating apps, users in the Netherlands

00:46:32   need to be able to provide payment via alternate mechanisms, you know, not going through the

00:46:37   App Store.

00:46:38   And so Apple came up with a scheme to satisfy that, and their official group, the ACM, I

00:46:45   forget what that stands for now, shoot, ACM has said, "No, that's not enough."

00:46:49   In fact, they said, "Apple has failed to satisfy the requirements on several points.

00:46:53   The most important one is that Apple has failed to adjust its conditions as a result of which

00:46:57   dating app providers are still unable to use other payment systems.

00:47:01   At the moment, dating app providers can merely express their 'interest.'"

00:47:05   And so this is the authority for consumers and markets from the Netherlands.

00:47:09   That's such an Apple move.

00:47:10   They're like, okay, all right, well, you know, you dinky little country with a population

00:47:14   the size of two big U S cities has decided the dating app specifically have to be allowed

00:47:18   to use third party payment methods.

00:47:20   So we'll begin exploring a program which, which may allow you to use a special as yet

00:47:26   unreleased Apple API through which we will extract our percentage to allow you to use

00:47:30   third party payment systems.

00:47:31   Please fill out this form to express your permission and participating in this program

00:47:34   at our discretion.

00:47:35   (laughs)

00:47:36   - Yep.

00:47:37   - And the Dutch authorities said,

00:47:40   "Okay, well, time's up and you're not complying,

00:47:43   "so it's time for you to, the penalty has been initiated,

00:47:46   "and the penalty is five million dollars a day."

00:47:48   Not five million dollars a day, what is it?

00:47:49   Five million dollars?

00:47:50   - Five million euros a week, I believe.

00:47:52   - Five million, yeah, not dollars.

00:47:53   Five million euros a week,

00:47:54   but it's up to a maximum of 50 million euros,

00:47:56   and I think Gruber snarked, it's like,

00:47:59   "Well, Apple could just find that,

00:48:01   "why doesn't Apple just send them the 50 million now

00:48:03   "that they could find and then lose change

00:48:04   in their couch cushions and then just not have to think about it again because as the

00:48:08   old saying goes, for the very wealthy, a fine is just a fee.

00:48:13   If you can do something illegal and all you have to do is pay 50 million euros, if you're

00:48:17   a multi-trillion dollar company, okay, apparently the price of us doing whatever we want on

00:48:23   the Appstar is 50 million euros.

00:48:25   Done and done.

00:48:26   That's the easiest 50 million euros I've ever spent.

00:48:27   Now I don't have to follow your law anymore.

00:48:29   That's the difficulty of trying to find what is an appropriate penalty for violating a

00:48:33   a law like you're living in a country, you have your own laws, you pass laws and you

00:48:36   say okay well if you do business in this country you have to follow these laws.

00:48:39   And it's like okay well what if I don't?

00:48:41   What happens to me then?

00:48:42   And it's like well, we're not going to send you to jail because your company is based

00:48:47   in another country.

00:48:49   And we're probably not going to ban your products because people do like Apple products in our

00:48:53   country.

00:48:54   So I guess we'll fine you?

00:48:56   What's an appropriate fine for not following this law?

00:48:59   Five million euros a week for a maximum of 50 million?

00:49:03   I mean, if you're a dinking company,

00:49:04   that puts you out of business.

00:49:05   If you're Apple, you might not notice.

00:49:07   (laughing)

00:49:09   - Well, I don't know.

00:49:09   I mean, weekly subscription billing can be very misleading.

00:49:12   I don't know if Apple is familiar with this problem.

00:49:13   (laughing)

00:49:14   - But it caps out at 50 million.

00:49:17   Weekly subscriptions don't cap out.

00:49:18   That's the whole thing.

00:49:19   They just keep getting charged.

00:49:20   So anyway, this is difficult because the Netherlands

00:49:24   does not have a lot of weight here.

00:49:27   Like Apple can just say,

00:49:28   "Okay, no more App Store in the Netherlands.

00:49:30   "How do you like me now?"

00:49:31   Like Apple kind of holds a lot of the cards here.

00:49:34   But it's interesting to see a country not dealing

00:49:38   with Apple's BS, not giving them seven years to comply,

00:49:41   not waiting for the appeals court to go through

00:49:43   and blah, blah, blah, and just saying,

00:49:44   just playing this little game of chicken with Apple,

00:49:46   which they're going to lose because Netherlands, right?

00:49:49   Sorry, but--

00:49:51   - Wow.

00:49:52   - I mean, like Apple just, fine,

00:49:53   no more Apple products in the Netherlands.

00:49:55   Is that gonna show up on Apple's, I mean,

00:49:57   I guess it would probably be bad for them,

00:49:58   but like no more dating apps in the app store in Netherlands.

00:50:01   There's many solutions that Apple can do

00:50:03   that hurt people in this country way more

00:50:06   than it hurts Apple just because they're small.

00:50:08   It's not easy being small.

00:50:10   - But John, Apple I'm sure has the greatest respect

00:50:12   for the laws of the Netherlands.

00:50:13   - No, they didn't say that.

00:50:15   They have the greatest respect for the laws of South Korea

00:50:17   which has way more people and spends way more money.

00:50:20   They do not have the greatest respect

00:50:21   for the laws of the Netherlands.

00:50:23   My goodness.

00:50:25   - No, I mean as I said, we're gonna see this play out

00:50:27   over and over again as various places

00:50:30   regulate Apple to various degrees,

00:50:32   Apple is going to drag their feet like crazy

00:50:36   and they're gonna do the bare minimum they need to do

00:50:40   to comply with any of these regulations.

00:50:42   - Or not comply.

00:50:43   - Right, and in this case, not complying

00:50:45   is so relatively inexpensive and problem-free for them

00:50:49   that it's probably better for them not to comply

00:50:52   unless the Dutch authorities are gonna somehow

00:50:55   get some more teeth, but as John was saying,

00:50:57   their bargaining position is not great.

00:51:00   Whereas Apple can kinda just do whatever it wants here

00:51:04   because what Dutch lawmaker is gonna say,

00:51:08   no more iPhones for our people.

00:51:11   That's gonna be a pretty unpopular decision

00:51:13   among their voters.

00:51:14   So this is gonna be, Apple's gonna just walk right

00:51:19   through this and pretty much nothing's going to happen.

00:51:23   And it sucks that Apple can do that.

00:51:26   from the point of view of consumer welfare

00:51:30   and respecting the sovereignty of nations

00:51:33   and things like that, it's not a good thing

00:51:36   that Apple can do this, but the reality is

00:51:38   they have way more leverage in this relationship

00:51:41   and they know they don't have to do much

00:51:44   and so they won't do it.

00:51:46   Apple will do absolutely nothing optional in this area.

00:51:51   They will only do what is 100% required

00:51:55   And in this case, it's not.

00:51:57   Now, China passes some new law,

00:52:00   you can bet Apple's gonna bend over backwards

00:52:04   to do everything possible,

00:52:05   throwing all morals and ethics and strategy out the window

00:52:10   to bend over backwards for China.

00:52:12   But the Netherlands just don't hold

00:52:13   that kind of sway for them.

00:52:15   - I do wanna point out, Francisco Tlomaski wrote,

00:52:19   or tweeted, which I thought was very, very well done,

00:52:22   they wrote, "It must be really frustrating

00:52:25   to roll out an entire plan, only to be completely at the whim of a regulator to find out whether

00:52:31   it sufficiently meets a set of vague criteria. Well done. Well done.

00:52:36   Although, the thing is, I don't think they are particularly annoyed. The thing is, Apple

00:52:39   did something, and they did like, "Maybe this will satisfy them or whatever, but is this

00:52:44   good enough?" And the answer was, "No, it wasn't good enough." And even just banning

00:52:49   dating apps, saying, "Okay, no more dating apps in the Netherlands," even that is probably

00:52:53   not going to be popular because presumably people in the Netherlands have iPhones and

00:52:57   use dating apps and if the next day they said all the dating apps are gone that would be

00:53:01   bad.

00:53:02   It's like well you still have your iPhone, you still have access to all sorts of Apple

00:53:04   stuff but no dating apps?

00:53:05   It doesn't seem like it's the end of the world but it's kind of crappy.

00:53:08   People in the chat room are saying okay well no one cares if the Netherlands does it because

00:53:11   they have like 18 million people but what if every country does it?

00:53:14   Well you know things like this are happening in each country but it's like they're not

00:53:19   coordinated this is not some global effort.

00:53:21   It's more kind of like a building storm of regulation and stuff, but as Margo said, Apple

00:53:28   is dragging their feet every step of the way.

00:53:31   So it's if and when this gets to critical mass, yes, Apple will have to do something,

00:53:34   but for now they're just crossing their arms and saying, "We will fight this as much as

00:53:40   we possibly can."

00:53:41   And they just better hope that China doesn't do anything, because I'm not going to go as

00:53:45   far as Margo to say that they will throw all their morals and principles, but certainly

00:53:51   Not all of them.

00:53:52   They try as hard as they can.

00:53:53   It's the thing we talked about in the past shows

00:53:55   of like, what's the correct strategy to deal with China?

00:53:58   One is to just say, "F you China, we're outta here."

00:54:01   But the other one is to say, you know,

00:54:02   engagement with China is better than isolating them

00:54:05   for the world, not just for Apple.

00:54:07   And in engaging with them, Apple is using all the power

00:54:10   that it has available to it to try to get its way

00:54:13   versus China, but that is a much more even match

00:54:16   than the Netherlands versus Apple.

00:54:17   So the way it ends up is,

00:54:19   China ends up getting more of what they want than Apple because in the end China has the

00:54:23   people with the money and Apple wants to sell them the stuff.

00:54:26   And by the way, China makes all of Apple's stuff.

00:54:27   So Apple is kind of over a barrel a little bit in the whole China situation, which is

00:54:32   why they should get all their manufacturing out of China.

00:54:34   But that is way easier said than done.

00:54:36   So it's a difficult situation.

00:54:37   Apple fights to do the best they can, but the best they can is not great in China.

00:54:41   I still maintain that the reliance that Apple still has on China and the lack of movement

00:54:48   in that area away from the status quo will be looked back upon as Tim Cook's largest

00:54:54   strategic error in his career.

00:54:55   I mean, it's also going to be his greatest victory because all of the growth and amazing

00:54:59   things that he's done has been because of how heavily they invested in China.

00:55:03   All the things Apple is able to do is because of the massive investment in China manufacturing.

00:55:07   I would say some.

00:55:09   Some of their growth and some of their success is from that.

00:55:13   And that's not a small amount, but it's far from all.

00:55:17   I mean, but who else could have done the manufacturing

00:55:20   of the scale that Apple needed?

00:55:21   Building up anyone else, including the US,

00:55:23   to do what China does for the amount of money

00:55:26   that they do it with the precision that they do it?

00:55:28   I'm not sure what the second choice would have even been,

00:55:32   because China was well on its way.

00:55:33   It's not like that China came out of nowhere with Tim Cook.

00:55:35   Like, he chose to invest heavily in China

00:55:37   because they were already in the lead, right?

00:55:39   So we'll see how this goes.

00:55:40   Like, Tim Cook is not gonna live long enough to see,

00:55:43   not because he's gonna be a satan or anything,

00:55:46   which is like he will die of old age,

00:55:47   the ripe old age of 111,

00:55:49   before Apple's able to move all their manufacturing

00:55:52   out of China and into some other country

00:55:54   and like say now China doesn't have that,

00:55:56   because it's just, you don't turn that ship that quick.

00:55:59   This is decades and decades and decades of development

00:56:01   and huge amounts of money from the Chinese government

00:56:03   and everything being invested into exactly

00:56:05   the kind of manufacturing that Apple wants done.

00:56:07   So moving that manufacturing anywhere else,

00:56:10   you know, yeah, it will,

00:56:12   especially if it comes to a crisis,

00:56:14   it'll be like, oh, Tim Cook's folly,

00:56:15   He got us so invested in China, now we're stuck

00:56:17   and we can't get out and it half destroyed the company.

00:56:20   But also, it is impossible for Tim Cook to get out now

00:56:23   because he doesn't have enough time left on this earth

00:56:26   to turn that around.

00:56:27   - Well, but he hasn't even started turning the wheel.

00:56:29   - Yeah, he might be.

00:56:30   We don't know how, if you're going to start

00:56:33   getting out of China, it's probably good for China

00:56:35   not to know that you're doing that.

00:56:37   So we don't know how that's going,

00:56:40   and what the second or third choice might be

00:56:42   and how that's all working out.

00:56:43   but I don't think it's something that Apple would announce.

00:56:46   Hey, by the way, we're investing in a 50 year plan

00:56:48   to get out of China.

00:56:49   By the way, China, let's negotiate something now.

00:56:51   I don't think it's a thing you announce,

00:56:54   but I'm hoping that he's got an envelope

00:56:58   that he's gonna give to his successor

00:56:59   that says step one, get out of China.

00:57:01   - My bad for that one, but you should fix my mistake.

00:57:06   All right, so moving right along.

00:57:10   So this is gonna get a little bit confusing

00:57:12   'cause even as I was reading the show notes,

00:57:13   was getting myself confused. So as we record today on Thursday, what is it, the 27th, today

00:57:20   macOS Monterey 12.2 was released and I have installed it and so far so good. And also the

00:57:29   new betas have come out for both macOS and iOS. So the current shipping version again of macOS

00:57:37   is 12.2, the current shipping version of iOS is 15.3. So that's unfortunately not the same,

00:57:46   you know, tense place, but we'll make it work. So with that in mind, Dropbox and OneDrive kernel

00:57:51   extensions, or Keks, are no longer supported in macOS 12.3. So to recap, that's the beta,

00:57:59   not the one that came out today, but the beta. So the Dropbox and OneDrive kernel extensions that

00:58:04   let them do all sorts of fancy,

00:58:05   well, for varying definition of fancy,

00:58:07   things are no longer supported in 12.3.

00:58:11   - I'm kind of surprised these were still supported

00:58:13   up until this point.

00:58:14   - Yeah.

00:58:15   - Like, it seems like, you know,

00:58:17   with the transition to Apple Silicon

00:58:19   and with the ever further securing of the OS

00:58:24   in the last few years,

00:58:26   I'm kind of surprised these kects still worked at all.

00:58:30   And to clarify, and I'm sure Jon has much more,

00:58:33   much better information on this than I do,

00:58:34   but to clarify, I believe the problem area

00:58:37   is not just the files that sync.

00:58:40   The problem area is things like their layer

00:58:44   where you can have a file that's not downloaded

00:58:46   all the time, but kind of gets downloaded

00:58:48   and edited upon request, so you can like partially sync

00:58:51   your Dropbox and WinDrive contents,

00:58:52   but not have everything on your computer all the time,

00:58:54   but still have it still show up in the file system

00:58:58   and be editable like locally just through

00:59:00   this translation layer of being network based.

00:59:02   So I think that specifically is the part that's

00:59:04   being targeted here.

00:59:05   Is that right?

00:59:06   - Yeah, I mean, no, you basically got it.

00:59:08   But the whole idea is that kernel extensions,

00:59:11   like the concept that third parties can write code

00:59:14   that runs inside the kernel on your Mac,

00:59:17   have been going away for a very, very long time.

00:59:19   For years and years at every WWDC,

00:59:21   every session you went through with kernel extensions

00:59:23   was explaining to you how things that you used

00:59:24   to be able to do, you're going to have to jump through

00:59:26   more hoops to do, and they would eventually start saying,

00:59:29   and by the way, kernel extensions themselves are going away.

00:59:31   And why is that?

00:59:33   - Well, because code that runs inside the kernel

00:59:35   can do terrible things,

00:59:36   including obviously very trivially crash your computer,

00:59:39   'cause hey, if you have a bug in your kernel code

00:59:41   and you segfault and you're inside the kernel,

00:59:42   it's bye-bye, right?

00:59:43   And there's no protection against that.

00:59:45   And then obviously you have, for security reasons,

00:59:47   if you're inside the kernel,

00:59:48   you have access to more types of things.

00:59:50   So they don't want any non-Apple code

00:59:52   running inside the kernel if they can possibly help it.

00:59:54   But-- - Right, to build on that,

00:59:56   the kernel is kind of the core of the operating system.

00:59:59   And so if you're running around in there,

01:00:01   you can do, this is like what you said,

01:00:03   you can do whatever you want,

01:00:04   kind of whenever you want to some degree.

01:00:06   And so what Apple's been doing is trying to provide

01:00:09   new APIs that move, so like Dropbox doesn't need

01:00:13   to get all the way down deep, deep, deep into the kernel,

01:00:15   into kind of the foundation of the OS.

01:00:17   They can stay up in the regular living areas

01:00:20   of the house, if you will, and not have to go digging

01:00:24   into the basement in order to do what they need to do.

01:00:26   And so Apple, like you've said, Jon,

01:00:28   has been trying to push people, push companies

01:00:30   away from kernel extensions because it is less secure

01:00:33   when random other people's code can run inside the kernel.

01:00:38   Because when you're in the kernel,

01:00:39   you can, kind of all bets are off.

01:00:41   - And Apple's been doing that itself with Apple's own code.

01:00:43   Apple used to have stuff that used to be inside the kernel

01:00:46   that Apple has moved to user space, as they call it.

01:00:48   And user space has its own memory protection.

01:00:50   If you crash in user space, your program crashes,

01:00:52   but the computer keeps running

01:00:53   because the kernel is still running or whatever.

01:00:55   Now, obviously, some things like the Windows server crashes,

01:00:58   your computer is still running

01:00:59   you don't have to reboot, but everything you're doing is gone

01:01:01   because the Windows server runs all the UI and everything.

01:01:03   So there's a limit to that, but still,

01:01:05   user space is better than kernel space.

01:01:08   And so, you know, and Apple's been dog fooding.

01:01:10   Same thing with sandboxing.

01:01:11   Apple has sandboxed a lot of its stuff.

01:01:13   Apple is moving stuff out of the kernel into user space,

01:01:15   and it's been doing that for third parties as well.

01:01:17   And to Apple's credit, what they've done

01:01:19   is that they've looked at what popular applications

01:01:22   do our users run on the Mac

01:01:23   that currently have kernel extensions,

01:01:25   and how can we provide a facility for those applications

01:01:30   to keep doing what it is they do,

01:01:31   but to get out of the kernel,

01:01:32   like Dropbox and OneDrive or whatever.

01:01:34   And even in the case of things like Dropbox,

01:01:36   where Dropbox was doing not a kernel extension,

01:01:38   but a thing where they would sort of invade

01:01:40   the memory space of the Finder,

01:01:42   or otherwise hack the Finder to put the little badges

01:01:46   on the Finder icons, so they would show a little green badge

01:01:49   with a check mark when the file is synced to Dropbox

01:01:51   or whatever, the original implementation or two of that

01:01:53   and Dropbox was very hacky and sort of screwed with the finder at a root level.

01:01:58   And Apple, you know, getting enough clout to be a popular application means that Apple

01:02:02   didn't just like ban Dropbox or like cause it to stop running.

01:02:06   What Apple did instead is saw the need for some way for third party applications to put

01:02:12   little badges on icons in the finder.

01:02:14   And they made a public API that any third party can use to put little badges on icons

01:02:20   in the finder and then tried to convince Dropbox to convert their code to use it.

01:02:24   I think Dropbox did convert to that.

01:02:27   It's difficult because these companies will say, "Well, we already have a way that works.

01:02:30   We just hacked the finder and it works fine.

01:02:31   I don't want to use your stupid third-party API because now I get to change my app."

01:02:34   But eventually Apple, I think, has been able to negotiate with these people and say, "Please

01:02:38   use our official supported public API for badding icons and then you won't have to have

01:02:43   weird hacks and we promise we'll support it better even though it's a little bit buggier

01:02:46   in the beginning."

01:02:47   Same thing with the API they provided to say the file might not be on your Mac but it totally

01:02:55   looks like it's on your Mac and we will transparently make it seem like it's on your Mac even though

01:02:59   when things try to open it we pull it from the network just like you were doing behind

01:03:02   the scenes and you don't need your kernel extension anymore.

01:03:04   We'll do it all for you.

01:03:05   Just use our public API and Dropbox and OneDrive.

01:03:10   Both have had a long time to know that this day was coming and now they have that like

01:03:14   It's kind of amazing that you're able to announce

01:03:17   in like a press release, you know, as of Mac OS 12.3.

01:03:21   If you mention Mac OS 12.3 in your Mac App Store app,

01:03:25   you'll get rejected because you can't talk

01:03:26   about future offerings.

01:03:27   Who says there will ever be a Mac OS 12.3?

01:03:29   How dare you?

01:03:30   How dare you even mention that name?

01:03:32   But they're able to say, it almost got me confused

01:03:33   for a second, wait a second.

01:03:34   I was like, is 12.3 out?

01:03:36   Like, no, 12.3 is not out.

01:03:37   12.2 just came out.

01:03:39   12.3 will eventually come out and when it does,

01:03:42   that Dropbox stuff will stop working.

01:03:44   Unfortunately, Dropbox being the very agile company it is,

01:03:48   well, it doesn't look like they'll be ready on day one

01:03:51   when 12.3 comes out.

01:03:52   So they just said, yeah, Dropbox might work a little funny

01:03:54   until we figure this out,

01:03:56   but we do plan to support the new public API.

01:03:59   Because guess what?

01:04:00   We have no choice because our kernel extension,

01:04:02   we're literally not running anymore.

01:04:04   So no, look forward to that.

01:04:06   - Does anybody still work on the Dropbox Mac app?

01:04:09   - I mean, yeah, they gotta put all those reminders in

01:04:11   to tell you how to upgrade.

01:04:13   and all those little hacks to try to integrate

01:04:15   and get you to give you their accessibility password

01:04:18   and your root password.

01:04:20   Hey, you just plugged in a device.

01:04:21   You want us to back this up and take the photos off of it

01:04:23   all the time?

01:04:24   Should we keep asking?

01:04:25   - That's right.

01:04:25   When you take screenshots, do you

01:04:26   want them to go into Dropbox?

01:04:28   - Yeah, you should give us full access to your entire system

01:04:30   just so you can post everything that you want to Dropbox.

01:04:32   And we can start taking more and more of your system resources.

01:04:35   And yeah, it'll be fine.

01:04:36   But oh, we're going to do all this through Rosetta

01:04:38   because we're not going to actually make

01:04:39   an Apple Silicon client.

01:04:40   Why would we do that?

01:04:42   - I feel like the Apple Silicon version

01:04:43   probably got tied up in whatever branch

01:04:45   they've been working on to not use the kernel extension

01:04:48   and maybe they became inseparable

01:04:50   and they can't ship one without the other

01:04:52   and they thought they would be done sooner but they're not.

01:04:55   Anyway, software's hard.

01:04:56   - Given their engineering priorities,

01:04:57   it would not surprise me if an Apple Silicon version

01:05:00   hasn't actually been started yet.

01:05:02   - No, no, no, it's in beta.

01:05:03   Where have you been, man, it's in beta.

01:05:04   - Oh, yeah, okay.

01:05:05   (laughs)

01:05:07   There's a lot of good reasons why big companies

01:05:12   have been dragging their feet with supporting

01:05:14   Mac native apps in many ways.

01:05:16   We've had the Electron discussions in the past

01:05:18   and everything, but so much of that mentality, I feel like,

01:05:21   could lead to the conclusion like,

01:05:23   why don't we just keep building for Intel

01:05:25   'cause it runs fine if we do this

01:05:27   and then that's like one less support thing

01:05:30   to have to think about.

01:05:31   It wouldn't surprise, all these same development teams

01:05:36   and companies who are deciding, you know what,

01:05:38   it's not worth writing good code,

01:05:39   let's just write Electron code and we'll bloat up our apps

01:05:41   on everyone's system and take up hundreds of megs

01:05:43   in every single copy of our app that's installed

01:05:45   because it benefits us and it's more convenient for us.

01:05:48   Well, that same logic could also apply,

01:05:49   like hey, why don't we just keep doing Intel only?

01:05:51   'Cause that's also more convenient for us

01:05:53   and it benefits us and it does cost our users

01:05:55   in terms of their system efficiencies

01:05:57   and everything like that, but we don't care about them.

01:06:00   - They were always gonna do an M1 version.

01:06:01   It's just taking them longer than they thought, geez.

01:06:04   - I feel like you're the Dropbox apologist

01:06:06   of the three of us, Jon.

01:06:07   - I mean, as far as I'm aware,

01:06:09   I've never done whatever you do to enable the thing

01:06:14   that makes the files look like they're on your Mac

01:06:16   but aren't really on your Mac.

01:06:17   Like I'm still using it in the old style

01:06:19   where all the files are literally on my Mac

01:06:22   even though they're also in Dropbox.

01:06:24   So that if I just turn off Dropbox

01:06:25   everything is still just there.

01:06:27   I don't know if that means I'm not running

01:06:28   the kernel extension but if I am running it

01:06:30   it has never caused me any problems.

01:06:31   And you know, I'm not really an apologist

01:06:34   because I do quit Dropbox when I know

01:06:36   I'm gonna be doing something that hits the file system

01:06:38   because it's just like this low level drag on the system

01:06:41   that I have to deal with.

01:06:42   Like if I'm doing a time machine backup

01:06:43   and it's taking too long,

01:06:45   you know, I quit Dropbox just sort of as a

01:06:48   just in case type of thing.

01:06:49   So I don't think it's wonderful,

01:06:51   but I do like the ability to quit it when I wanna quit it

01:06:54   and know that it's not running.

01:06:55   And when I launch it, it always syncs things.

01:06:57   And so, you know, I have other things to worry about.

01:07:00   (upbeat music)

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01:08:55   (upbeat music)

01:08:58   - All right, so speaking of betas,

01:09:00   in 12.3 beta and 15.4 beta,

01:09:03   you can finally try out universal control

01:09:06   between Macs and iPads.

01:09:07   And initial impressions are this is pretty cool.

01:09:10   I haven't tried it myself, I'm just saying basically.

01:09:13   - I was hoping you would try it.

01:09:14   - No, sorry, sorry.

01:09:16   I oversold a little bit there.

01:09:17   No, I haven't tried it myself,

01:09:19   but I've seen, like, Vittiti had a video,

01:09:21   I'll try to dig up the tweet and put it in the show notes,

01:09:23   but he had a video of it and it looked pretty slick.

01:09:25   - Yeah, I'm not sure when I would have occasion to use this.

01:09:28   Like the times I've had my iPad next to my Mac,

01:09:32   I've been using it as a second monitor with Sidecar

01:09:34   and that's not what this is about.

01:09:35   This is bringing your cursor over to the iPad,

01:09:38   but I do wonder like having a mouse cursor on my iPad

01:09:43   and having it still be iPad, running iPad things

01:09:45   might be useful if there was ever an iPad thing

01:09:47   that I needed to have.

01:09:48   But yeah, I'm not sure I'm ergonomically set up for it.

01:09:51   I'm still, I'm so firmly in the one big monitor camp,

01:09:54   I don't really like the idea of having to look elsewhere

01:09:56   at a different monitor.

01:09:58   But it's cool that they're finally shipping

01:09:59   this feature at least.

01:10:00   And as we've said many times in the past,

01:10:02   it's annoying when features are late,

01:10:04   but it's better than shipping buggy.

01:10:05   So kudos on knowing when it's not ready.

01:10:08   And hopefully when it comes out, it will actually be ready.

01:10:11   - I actually, I've been using not the continuity feature,

01:10:14   which just apparently started existing.

01:10:15   I've been using the iPad as a monitor feature on the Mac.

01:10:20   Yeah, yeah.

01:10:20   Not as, not on my main desktop laptop setup,

01:10:23   but in the game streaming setup where basically I use it

01:10:27   as to mirror my laptop screens.

01:10:29   My laptop is running the OBS capture software

01:10:33   and it's running all the webcams and everything

01:10:34   and then I use it, I use my iPad as a second screen

01:10:38   so that Tiff and Adam can see themselves in the webcam view

01:10:42   and see like the stream view like in front of them

01:10:45   and then my laptop's in front of me

01:10:46   and so that way we can all see the same screen.

01:10:49   And it's the kind of thing like any cheap screen

01:10:53   could do this, but I didn't have to buy one,

01:10:55   'cause I already had an iPad that was sitting around

01:10:57   doing relatively little, and so it works,

01:11:00   and just like every other part of both Apple's

01:11:03   modern software and USB stuff, it works most of the time.

01:11:07   Not all the time, but most of the time it works,

01:11:10   and when it works, it's great.

01:11:11   - So are you running OBS on a Mac then,

01:11:14   am I understanding that right? - Yes.

01:11:16   I run OBS on the 14-inch MacBook Pro,

01:11:19   and all the USB things plug into that,

01:11:21   so all the capture devices look into that.

01:11:23   The gaming PCs are only outputting HDMI and sound

01:11:27   into the capture thingies.

01:11:29   So the gaming PCs are not running

01:11:31   any capture software themselves.

01:11:32   And I'm not using their built-in webcams,

01:11:35   'cause it's just easier not to.

01:11:36   We just have these little clip-on Logitech cheapo ones

01:11:39   that go on each one, and then those are all plugged in

01:11:42   via USB to the Mac and running OBS.

01:11:46   So that way the gaming PCs don't have to think

01:11:48   about capture software.

01:11:50   I ask because earlier today, actually, it was brought to my attention that there's a

01:11:55   GitHub user developer-ecosystem-engineering, which I had not heard of.

01:12:01   But apparently this is Apple's open source contribution pseudo-person, like GitHub account

01:12:10   for issuing pull requests and things.

01:12:12   And I presume that in the past, they would just throw a patch over the wall and say,

01:12:18   hey, we fixed this, have fun.

01:12:19   But now it looks like they're starting to maybe do it in the

01:12:24   open, and I was looking at this earlier.

01:12:27   And the most recent pull request that they made is to

01:12:30   OBS Studio, and they made a 274 changed file pull request

01:12:36   where they basically said, hey, the way in which you're

01:12:39   doing capture in Mac OS sucks, but we fixed it for you.

01:12:42   Here you go.

01:12:43   And if you click through onto this pull request, they

01:12:46   actually have in the PR videos showing memory and CPU

01:12:52   utilization as they're doing a capture, specifically

01:12:56   on a particular window versus generally capturing

01:12:58   the whole screen or something along those lines.

01:13:00   I'm getting a little out of my depth because I never used OBS.

01:13:03   But my point is, it's just funny you bring that up,

01:13:05   because Apple is apparently going and trying

01:13:07   to make it better for OBS, and I guess for you, Marco.

01:13:11   Yeah, and this particular thing won't affect me,

01:13:13   because this is only about screen capture.

01:13:15   where I'm not doing any screen capture.

01:13:17   - That's true, that's true.

01:13:18   Yep, yep, yep, you're right.

01:13:19   - But that is still a really cool thing.

01:13:20   - Yeah, I had no idea that this account was a thing,

01:13:22   so it was news to me.

01:13:24   Moving right along, so in the 15.4 beta of iOS,

01:13:29   you can unlock using Face ID with your mask on,

01:13:34   and this is where everyone starts firing up their email

01:13:36   and saying, "Oh, contrary, you can do that already

01:13:37   "with the watch."

01:13:38   Well, now in 15.4, you don't have to have a watch.

01:13:41   You can just do it with the phone and nothing else.

01:13:44   I guess it does much more specific inspection of the area around your eyes in order to confirm

01:13:51   that it's you. I haven't tried this. I wear a watch pretty much always, so this isn't a big deal

01:13:57   for me, I don't think. But it is cool. I think the one thing that is different about this, though,

01:14:02   is that with the watch-based unlock, the phone is a little bit cavalier about unlocking for basically

01:14:09   any face it sees in front of it, and it taps your watch saying, "Okay, I just unlocked myself." And

01:14:13   And on the watch, there's a button that you can use to relock your phone to the point

01:14:18   that you would have to enter the password physically on the phone.

01:14:22   But with this, it appears that it will be much more specific about unlocking only for

01:14:28   your face, which is kind of cool.

01:14:30   This is interesting because obviously if you're covering up half your face, the security of

01:14:33   it seems like it would be less than seeing your whole face because you just have less

01:14:37   data points to confirm a match.

01:14:39   It's kind of revealing a little bit of the way Face ID may work,

01:14:45   because Apple doesn't really talk about this too much,

01:14:47   probably for security reasons, probably for competition reasons.

01:14:50   But when you choose to do this, when you say,

01:14:53   yeah, I want it to work with the mask,

01:14:55   you have to opt into it.

01:14:56   It gives you the choice.

01:14:57   Do you want to use it with the mask or not with the mask?

01:15:00   Because it is kind of a security choice.

01:15:02   And then when you do it, you also

01:15:05   have the option to add glasses.

01:15:07   You're like, what do you mean, add glasses?

01:15:09   Face ID works with and without my glasses now.

01:15:11   Why is there some separate step for me to teach Face ID

01:15:15   about my glasses?

01:15:17   And so the text that I have on the screen here is,

01:15:20   "Using Face ID while wearing a mask works best

01:15:22   when it's set up to recognize each pair

01:15:23   of glasses you wear regularly."

01:15:25   Face ID with a mask doesn't support sunglasses, right?

01:15:28   So because sunglasses, like it uses IR dots or whatever,

01:15:30   so sunglasses can block them and screw it up.

01:15:32   But it's like, well, I don't have to register

01:15:34   multiple glasses now.

01:15:35   I myself have two pair of glasses, one for close up

01:15:37   and one for like driving.

01:15:38   and I never needed to register those glasses separately.

01:15:41   Why would I need to do that now?

01:15:42   And the best I can come up with is that

01:15:44   when you do face ID on your full face, no mask or anything,

01:15:47   and you're wearing glasses,

01:15:49   especially if you trained face ID without your glasses,

01:15:51   what it says is, okay,

01:15:53   for the top part of the face around the eyes,

01:15:55   I can more or less get a read,

01:15:56   but there's a bunch of crap there

01:15:57   that looks to me like glasses,

01:15:58   and I can't really confirm one way or the other

01:16:00   whether this is the same person,

01:16:01   because maybe it's the person

01:16:02   with different glasses or whatever.

01:16:04   But thankfully I have the whole rest of the person's face

01:16:06   to confirm and so I can say, yeah,

01:16:09   it looks like it's probably matched, so thumbs up.

01:16:11   But if you take away the bottom of the face

01:16:13   because they're wearing a mask

01:16:14   and the mask's all lumpen and different or whatever,

01:16:16   if you take away the bottom of the face

01:16:17   and they just look at the top of the face

01:16:19   and they're like, I can kinda see the shape

01:16:21   of this person's face around their eyes,

01:16:22   but the glasses are screwing it up for me.

01:16:25   And so you don't have anything to fall back on.

01:16:27   So maybe what this is saying is that we didn't know it,

01:16:30   but everyone who wears glasses

01:16:31   is getting slightly less security

01:16:32   and it's relying heavily on the bottom part of our face

01:16:35   to make up for it.

01:16:36   And now with that taken away, now we have to register the glasses to say, "I'm going

01:16:40   to train you that these are my glasses.

01:16:41   I have two pairs of them.

01:16:42   One looks like this and one looks like that."

01:16:43   So when you check me with my glasses on, the glasses aren't interfering.

01:16:47   The glasses are actually new data points.

01:16:49   And this would explain why it takes like two years into the pandemic for us to get this

01:16:52   feature, because this stuff's complicated and maybe more complicated than we think it

01:16:56   is.

01:16:57   We just think it's magic.

01:16:58   We look at our phone and it opens for us.

01:16:59   But in order for the security to be good and not able to be fooled, as they emphasized

01:17:03   by like a picture of you or a fake model of your face.

01:17:07   That's not easy to do.

01:17:10   But anyway, I look forward to this because I am sick of paying with passcode.

01:17:15   As they say, every time I go to a store, of course, I've been wearing masks for a long

01:17:19   time now, and it's annoying typing that in.

01:17:22   And honestly, it's not that it's like, "Oh, I'm hassled to do it."

01:17:27   It feels less secure to me because it's a giant light-up screen that other people can

01:17:30   see and it's really easy to shoulder-sharp someone's like passcode and I don't have like

01:17:35   a 75-digit alphanumeric code to type in because I'd never be able to buy anything. So I don't

01:17:40   like, you know, the idea of people seeing me type in unlock code in public. Face ID,

01:17:45   it would be great to use Face ID. I will very quickly enable this feature so I can do it

01:17:50   with a mask on.

01:17:51   Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to this because, you know, not only does it cover

01:17:54   people who don't have an Apple Watch, which is, you know, nerds like to think that, oh,

01:18:00   I assure you it's far from it.

01:18:03   A lot of people have it.

01:18:04   It's a very successful and widespread product.

01:18:07   But to give you some,

01:18:09   I pulled up my analytics here for Overcast.

01:18:11   Overcast is an app used by a lot of nerds.

01:18:13   I mean, not all nerds, but a lot of nerds.

01:18:16   And I have about 35% of Overcast users

01:18:21   have a watch paired to their phone.

01:18:24   And that's among nerds.

01:18:26   The number among the average people is probably lower.

01:18:29   And so that's, you know, think about at least 70%

01:18:32   of iPhone owners don't have an Apple Watch.

01:18:35   So this brings the convenience that we, you know,

01:18:39   watch people have all been enjoying for the last,

01:18:42   whatever, 10 months or so that we've had

01:18:44   the watch unlock with mask feature.

01:18:47   This brings that to way more people.

01:18:50   And in a better way, like as John was just saying,

01:18:52   even now, you know, or the feature we've had for,

01:18:55   you know, most of the last year,

01:18:56   if you have a mask on, it'll unlock your phone,

01:18:58   but it doesn't work with Apple Pay.

01:19:00   So if you're paying at a pay terminal,

01:19:03   you still have to type in the passcode.

01:19:04   And I do that when I go to the grocery store,

01:19:06   and it sucks.

01:19:07   And so to have this work this way is very, very nice.

01:19:12   I haven't tried it yet,

01:19:13   'cause it just came out a few hours ago,

01:19:15   I haven't had a chance to install it yet,

01:19:16   but I'm looking forward to this.

01:19:18   'Cause Apple is very, very sensitive

01:19:22   to anything that would potentially reduce

01:19:25   the security of their phones,

01:19:26   especially in this area.

01:19:28   Yeah, we make fun of various security holes

01:19:30   they have sometimes, like in the software,

01:19:31   but when it comes to this kind of thing,

01:19:33   the phone unlock process, they do a really good job,

01:19:37   and they are extremely secure compared

01:19:39   to the rest of the industry.

01:19:41   Whenever there's a new Samsung gadget feature,

01:19:47   it usually has abysmal security,

01:19:50   and no one ever talks about it.

01:19:52   Whenever somebody, some Android person,

01:19:55   and it's like, here, here's a new,

01:19:57   you just hover your palm over the phone

01:19:59   and it unlocks it or some BS like that.

01:20:02   Inevitably, once the reviews come out,

01:20:04   everyone realizes A, it doesn't work most of the time

01:20:06   and B, it's very easily fooled and can be cracked easily.

01:20:10   That kind of stuff never happens to Touch ID and Face ID.

01:20:13   Never.

01:20:13   We've never had, as far as I know,

01:20:16   major security problems with Touch ID and Face ID.

01:20:19   So Apple takes this, oh and watch unlock

01:20:22   and all the other things.

01:20:23   So Apple takes this stuff very, very seriously

01:20:24   and they do a very good job of it.

01:20:26   So to have something like this where they are

01:20:29   effectively reducing the security of Face ID in some way

01:20:33   for this massive practical benefit that we're all demanding,

01:20:36   that is, as John said, not only a large undertaking,

01:20:39   but I also trust them to have done it pretty well,

01:20:42   and I trust that in my life,

01:20:46   I don't need even half the security that Face ID offers.

01:20:54   No one ever has my phone.

01:20:56   Just in my life, I never lose physical access to my phone.

01:21:02   It just doesn't happen.

01:21:04   I'm very lucky, I live in a place and environment

01:21:06   in a situation where that doesn't really happen.

01:21:09   Like until--

01:21:10   - It's not like it's your bike, I mean.

01:21:12   - Right. (laughs)

01:21:13   Like until Touch ID came out,

01:21:16   I didn't use passcodes on my phone.

01:21:19   Like at all, I just didn't use one

01:21:20   because I didn't need one.

01:21:22   And that was when I worked in Manhattan.

01:21:23   (laughing)

01:21:25   But it's like I still, like I just never,

01:21:27   like so, I am happy to make the trade-off to enable this.

01:21:32   Because even if it is reduced security

01:21:34   by only judging the shape around my eyes and stuff,

01:21:37   I am totally happy to make that trade-off

01:21:39   because I so often have like had to type the passcode in,

01:21:44   'cause either the mask unlock thing with the watch

01:21:46   either didn't work or I hadn't done it recently,

01:21:49   So it relocked or it tried a few times too many

01:21:52   and then it totally locked down.

01:21:54   Or as John was saying, having to pay

01:21:56   at the credit card terminal and having to type

01:21:58   in the passcode for that every time.

01:22:00   So I am happy to take the slightly reduced security

01:22:04   because knowing Apple, this is probably still

01:22:07   a ridiculous level of security for most people.

01:22:10   And I can certainly say it's way more than I probably need.

01:22:14   - In this week's episode of Funny Things Casey Finds

01:22:16   in the show notes, it says the following,

01:22:19   Marco's mini segment, USB garbage from Amazon.

01:22:23   And I am very excited to hear what this is about.

01:22:26   - So this is about two product categories

01:22:30   that I have discovered on Amazon.

01:22:31   One of them has turned out pretty well,

01:22:33   the other one not as well.

01:22:36   But there's this massive world of cheap USB crap on Amazon,

01:22:41   that some of which is very useful, much of which is not.

01:22:45   but it does kind of amaze me as just a broad category,

01:22:49   like quite how much really inexpensive stuff

01:22:54   that is vaguely USB related there is on Amazon.

01:22:59   And it's all from these like no-name companies that,

01:23:03   it's just like some random manufacturer probably in China

01:23:08   had some random person on Amazon set up an account,

01:23:11   and you could tell there's 17 different companies

01:23:13   all selling the same manufacturer's products.

01:23:16   All the names of the companies are all capitals

01:23:19   that contain way more vowels than consonants.

01:23:22   The product names and company names change so often

01:23:27   that you can't even ever usually buy the same thing twice

01:23:30   if you wanted to, if it's separated by more than a few weeks.

01:23:34   But there's this whole world, and some of this stuff

01:23:36   is actually pretty useful, and some of it is not.

01:23:39   So I have these two products I'm gonna talk about now,

01:23:41   'cause I've just been using them recently.

01:23:43   Because of the nature of this market,

01:23:46   I'm not even gonna name them or link to them.

01:23:48   I'll just tell you what they are and you can find your own

01:23:51   because by the time you hear this,

01:23:52   the ones I bought won't even be available anymore.

01:23:54   So. - Oh, cool.

01:23:56   - Probably.

01:23:57   So anyway, so the first one,

01:24:01   so as you know, my kid uses an iPad Mini.

01:24:05   He's now on his, I think third one?

01:24:09   Some second or third one?

01:24:10   Anyway, it isn't the current iPad Mini,

01:24:14   it's the previous generation with the home button.

01:24:16   And the lightning port.

01:24:17   And this iPad Mini has already been replaced

01:24:21   once under warranty, the warranty hasn't expired.

01:24:23   The original time it was replaced was because

01:24:25   the charging port was basically wearing out.

01:24:27   And when I first tweeted about this forever ago

01:24:30   asking for suggestions, I got a number of people

01:24:32   explaining to me that basically,

01:24:34   that what happens when, especially when kids

01:24:36   use iPads very heavily, that when you use an iPad

01:24:39   as heavily as a typical kid does,

01:24:42   especially with typical kid charging discipline,

01:24:46   it tends to basically be a 5% battery all the time.

01:24:49   So they're often using it with the power cable plugged in,

01:24:54   charging while they're using it,

01:24:55   because out of necessity or whatever.

01:24:58   And kids also wiggle a lot,

01:25:01   so they're constantly in slight motion and bending around.

01:25:06   - It's not the wiggling,

01:25:07   it's the kids have zero empathy for the machine.

01:25:10   They do not care that that cable is constantly under pressure.

01:25:14   Strain relief is made because they are like the strain,

01:25:16   what is the opposite of relief?

01:25:18   They're the strain provider.

01:25:20   They do not care how much they're kinking

01:25:22   the end of that cable.

01:25:23   Have you ever, have you seen this?

01:25:24   I bet you've seen it if you're watching.

01:25:26   People have kids know this.

01:25:27   So take any iOS device, plug a lightning cable

01:25:29   or whatever into the bottom of it,

01:25:31   then they rest it on the lightning cable.

01:25:33   - Oh yeah.

01:25:34   - Like vertically, like using that one cable

01:25:36   So the cable comes down and then it turns at 90 degrees

01:25:39   and they rest it on that.

01:25:40   It's like, how much more strain can I provide?

01:25:42   Well, I could just pull on it at a weird angle,

01:25:44   but how about I rest the entire iPad's weight

01:25:46   on top of the lightning connector?

01:25:49   It's terrible.

01:25:50   No empathy for the machine.

01:25:51   - No.

01:25:52   But anyway, so, you know, kids are hard on devices,

01:25:57   especially in this area of just like, you know,

01:25:59   constantly like, operating an iPad or an iPhone,

01:26:04   but in this case an iPad,

01:26:05   Operating it when it's plugged in

01:26:06   is not something Apple seems to really design for.

01:26:10   The charging port, if you hold the iPad in landscape,

01:26:13   the charging port is right where your hand goes.

01:26:16   So I understand why, it's not kids' fault

01:26:19   if they're holding near the cable,

01:26:21   'cause that's where they put it.

01:26:23   That's where Apple designed it.

01:26:24   So it's not in a great spot for that already.

01:26:28   So already we have a problem.

01:26:29   So anyway, over time, this tends to wear out the ports

01:26:32   in various ways, 'cause it's hard on the ports.

01:26:35   And so, as this is happening again to this iPad

01:26:39   that was just replaced by Apple,

01:26:41   I think about a year ago for this problem,

01:26:44   it's happening again, we're now out of warranty,

01:26:46   and we don't want the new iPad Mini.

01:26:49   I'm waiting for the next iPad Air

01:26:50   to upgrade into that instead.

01:26:52   But in the meantime, we need this iPad

01:26:54   to last a little bit longer, and it's just not.

01:26:56   It's dying quickly.

01:26:58   So instead, I temporarily gave him my iPad,

01:27:02   'cause I'm probably using it anymore, as I said.

01:27:04   So he now has my 2018 11 inch iPad Pro

01:27:09   until we figure out what the heck to get him

01:27:11   when a good option comes along.

01:27:13   So anyway, as I'm giving him this, my iPad,

01:27:18   I kinda want it back at the end

01:27:19   of whatever this time period is.

01:27:22   I want it to still work.

01:27:23   I'd rather it not be destroyed if possible

01:27:24   'cause I don't wanna buy a new one for myself.

01:27:26   So I asked on Twitter, like, hey,

01:27:28   what do people recommend to solve this problem?

01:27:31   and I got a huge number of responses

01:27:34   with the same two suggestions.

01:27:38   Number one, use right angle charging plugs,

01:27:42   which actually makes a lot of sense

01:27:44   when you think about it.

01:27:45   If they're gonna be holding the plug against the device,

01:27:48   if there's one that has a right angle plug,

01:27:50   then it kind of rests along the device

01:27:52   and doesn't protrude out so much.

01:27:54   And there's even some that will form a U shape

01:27:57   and go behind the device.

01:27:59   And this by far was probably the most practical solution,

01:28:04   but it's not the one I took.

01:28:07   I'm taking it now.

01:28:09   I'm still waiting on that delivery from Amazon.

01:28:11   But the other much more numerous suggestion I got

01:28:16   was for magnetic charging cables.

01:28:19   And this is what you'd expect.

01:28:20   It's like basically little MagSafes

01:28:23   for USB charging things.

01:28:25   - Have I mentioned that on the show?

01:28:26   I do that for all my kids' laptops.

01:28:28   Oh yeah, I don't think I knew that.

01:28:30   - Yeah, I have since the day MagSafe went away.

01:28:33   I've done it on all the laptops.

01:28:34   I did find a flaw in it.

01:28:35   I mean, you can, I don't wanna spoil it for you,

01:28:38   but like, if you do this,

01:28:41   and you do this magnetic lifestyle,

01:28:42   'cause I always like MagSafe,

01:28:43   and I'm like, I'm not giving it up

01:28:44   for things my computer uses.

01:28:46   A little USB-C that you put in,

01:28:48   it has a little MagSafe thing,

01:28:48   you know, lots of people make them.

01:28:50   But if your kids then take that laptop to school,

01:28:54   they have found a way to destroy it.

01:28:56   And that way is, I'm going to ignore the case

01:28:58   you gave me for my laptop dad,

01:28:59   and put it in my backpack, just loose,

01:29:02   and I'm gonna put it with the little USB magnetic nub

01:29:05   facing down, and then I'm gonna--

01:29:07   - Then drop the backpack?

01:29:09   - Drop my backpack from a great height,

01:29:11   so that it essentially crushes the hard plastic inner thing

01:29:16   that sticks out a millimeter until it smears that plastic

01:29:19   into like a form that the magnetic thing

01:29:22   can no longer make contact.

01:29:24   I should show you, I think I have a picture of it,

01:29:25   I'll see if I can dig it up on my phone,

01:29:26   picture of what it looked like after they did this.

01:29:28   - Oh God.

01:29:29   - Well, it took a couple years, but you did it.

01:29:31   You defeated this MagSafe rip-off thing.

01:29:34   This is why I can't wait for MagSafe to come back

01:29:36   and why like a MagSafe, the Puck MagSafe,

01:29:39   not the magnetic, not the other kind of MagSafe,

01:29:41   Puck MagSafe coming to the iPad,

01:29:43   that whole rumor that maybe we'll talk about

01:29:44   in a future show, actually is somewhat appealing.

01:29:46   Anyway, continue.

01:29:47   - Yeah, I'm excited for it for the same reason.

01:29:49   Although so far the rumors were only that it was coming

01:29:51   from the iPad Pro, which is not promising.

01:29:54   But maybe eventually it'll make it to the,

01:29:56   the lower end models, anyway.

01:29:58   So yeah, so I decided, you know what,

01:29:59   let me try this magnetic plug thing,

01:30:01   'cause the magnetic plugs,

01:30:03   there's a bunch of them out there,

01:30:04   and many of them have these, not only 90 degree heads,

01:30:08   but like automatically rotating heads.

01:30:10   You just twist them around,

01:30:11   in any orientation they'll twist around,

01:30:13   and I figure that is perfect,

01:30:14   because then any way the iPad is gonna be held

01:30:18   or moved around, it'll be fine,

01:30:20   because this cable will bend around,

01:30:22   and it'll be in a reasonable position

01:30:25   and not be super stressed on the port.

01:30:27   So awesome.

01:30:28   So I got one that was well recommended

01:30:30   and I got like three or four cables

01:30:33   and a whole bunch of tips that all came in set

01:30:35   for like 25 bucks.

01:30:36   Great, like typical awesome Amazon cheap USB garbage stuff.

01:30:41   Awesome.

01:30:41   And overall, it does work.

01:30:46   But there's a couple of reasons why I can't recommend,

01:30:50   at least the one I got.

01:30:52   So number one is, this is very slow charging.

01:30:56   It's USB-A on the other end.

01:30:58   This kind didn't seem to have any USB-C on the other end.

01:31:01   And it seems like to get USB-C on the source end,

01:31:04   you need to have some that have many different pins in them,

01:31:08   'cause some of them try to actually do data transfer

01:31:09   and everything, and higher wattage charging.

01:31:13   This one is a very simple one.

01:31:14   It's like two conductors.

01:31:16   It's like outside, inside, like a barrel connector,

01:31:18   but flat.

01:31:19   So it was very, very simple.

01:31:21   that's one of the reasons it was so cheap,

01:31:22   it's one of the reasons why it's so durable,

01:31:24   the cables are nice and thin, so that's all nice,

01:31:26   but because of those limitations,

01:31:30   it only does very slow charging,

01:31:32   it's the 2.4 amp old 10 watt iPad charging,

01:31:36   not anything like USB-C, PD stuff.

01:31:40   So it's fine for a phone or low draw devices,

01:31:45   and it would be fine for somebody

01:31:47   with really good battery hygiene,

01:31:49   But for a simple kid using an iPad Pro,

01:31:53   a 10 inch iPad Pro or 11 inch iPad Pro temporarily,

01:31:56   that's a big battery to keep charged

01:31:58   and it's very, very slow to charge this

01:32:01   and that's kind of a problem.

01:32:03   Second problem is that there is no universal standard

01:32:08   for these things.

01:32:08   So like you kinda have to like pick one brand

01:32:11   and just stick with their stuff.

01:32:13   Sometimes they will coincidentally have the same brand

01:32:16   do more than one copy of these cables

01:32:18   or the same connectors, but usually it's like,

01:32:22   you gotta buy one brand stuff.

01:32:23   And because of the nature of this weird

01:32:26   Amazon cheap USB ecosystem, it's very hard

01:32:29   to buy the same stuff twice sometimes.

01:32:32   So that I feel like is kind of a problem.

01:32:34   And then finally, these cables,

01:32:38   when they're not connected to a device,

01:32:41   constantly glow on the ends with blue LEDs.

01:32:46   - Lovely. - Not RGB, come on.

01:32:49   - The world has not yet gotten my memo

01:32:52   that blue LEDs should require a license

01:32:56   to deploy in products.

01:32:58   - They have the highest energy photons, though.

01:33:00   You can make the other colors from them.

01:33:03   - Yeah, and so-- - With quantum dots?

01:33:05   - Yeah, and I just, I don't understand.

01:33:10   Are blue LEDs really cool to everyone else?

01:33:13   And I'm just, anyway, so that's a problem.

01:33:16   These are just always glowing, so that's kind of annoying.

01:33:20   So I'm probably not gonna keep using these for a long time.

01:33:23   So that was kind of a flop.

01:33:26   - Oh, and on this topic of these type of devices,

01:33:28   I should mention also that I think both of my parents

01:33:31   also use these devices, not because they're not careful

01:33:33   with their stuff, 'cause they're very careful old people,

01:33:36   but because ergonomically, it's hard to,

01:33:38   especially if you have bad vision,

01:33:39   this is especially important for my mother,

01:33:40   has really bad vision, to line up the lightning connector

01:33:44   with the little tiny slot in the thing in your iPad

01:33:46   Whereas if it's magnetic, you just kind of throw it in the direction of the connector.

01:33:49   My mother's even got it on her phone, like her dinky little phone.

01:33:53   She's got like the like the five size SE,

01:33:55   with a little nubbin sticking out of it because it's just easy for her to stick on the charger and take off the charger.

01:34:00   You know, yes, you should definitely look into these. I put, by the way, in the in the slack, you can see the picture of

01:34:05   the, oh god, the one that my kids destroyed and how it's supposed to look.

01:34:10   That is very crushed.

01:34:13   - And by the way, can we just take a moment

01:34:16   to admire my fingernails?

01:34:17   Because as someone who chewed his nails obsessively

01:34:22   down to the quick for 21 years of my life,

01:34:25   every time I see a picture of my fingernails

01:34:27   and go, look at those fingernails,

01:34:29   look at those long, healthy, good, non-chewed fingernails.

01:34:33   - Nicely done.

01:34:34   - I quit chewing my fingernails cold turkey at age 21

01:34:36   and haven't gotten back to it.

01:34:37   - How, how?

01:34:39   - I've told this story before, but I blame it all on NFC.

01:34:42   I was working on my senior project at college,

01:34:46   which involves writing an application,

01:34:48   a Windows application using NMFC, which I hated.

01:34:52   - Oh, what I would pay to be able to see.

01:34:55   Oh, you must have been intolerable.

01:34:57   - And I still have the source code printed out.

01:34:58   I still have the source code printed out somewhere

01:34:59   if you want to see it.

01:35:00   And yes, I did win best senior design project

01:35:03   in my engineering school, so.

01:35:06   - But we have to see that.

01:35:07   - Yeah, anyway.

01:35:08   - Do you have screenshots of it?

01:35:09   - Yeah, probably.

01:35:10   It looks like Windows 95, shockingly.

01:35:12   And when I was writing that code,

01:35:15   I was like up all night in the stupid computer lab

01:35:18   sitting on a backless wooden stool that was way too high,

01:35:21   typing away the terrible Windows PC

01:35:23   and hitting F5 to compile in Visual Studio,

01:35:26   what the hell I was doing,

01:35:27   and chewing my nails constantly,

01:35:29   'cause I was like, oh, I gotta get this thing done,

01:35:30   oh, this is my senior project,

01:35:31   it's super important or whatever.

01:35:32   And I chewed my nails like so far down,

01:35:35   it became so painful then to like type with my chewed nails,

01:35:38   just something just snapped in my mind,

01:35:40   I said, "That's it, I'm not doing this anymore.

01:35:42   "I'm chewing my own nails so much that it hurts my fingers.

01:35:45   "No more," and I just stopped.

01:35:47   That was it.

01:35:48   - That's great.

01:35:49   - Yeah, it was exciting.

01:35:50   Anyway, my cuticles look terrible, don't look at those,

01:35:53   but my fingernails look pretty good.

01:35:55   - Yeah, I had to use the bad tasting stuff

01:35:57   to stop at like age 30 or something.

01:35:58   It was much more recent. - I'm still working on it.

01:36:01   Yeah, I'm still working on it.

01:36:02   - The bad smelling stuff, or the bad tasting stuff

01:36:03   really works well quickly too.

01:36:06   - Yeah, I think we used that on my younger brother

01:36:09   and it did nothing, but yeah.

01:36:10   Anyway, so the USB magnetic charging cable experiment

01:36:15   didn't work out so well for me.

01:36:18   There's other problems too, but I could see,

01:36:22   it seemed like there's promise in this world,

01:36:23   because if having one universal set of charging cables

01:36:28   that you can just buy 10 of and put them all over,

01:36:30   everywhere you would need a charging cable,

01:36:32   and have all your devices charged the same way,

01:36:35   is kind of amazing.

01:36:36   That would be great, but I think I maybe need to find

01:36:39   a better standard for that.

01:36:42   And it also does, certain devices,

01:36:44   having the little nub sticking out of them

01:36:46   does kinda suck.

01:36:47   Like for instance, on the iPad,

01:36:50   iPads are so thin that the little rim

01:36:54   around this connector actually protruded

01:36:57   past the bounds of the iPad,

01:36:58   and so it just makes it thicker

01:37:00   and you catch your hand on it when you're holding it.

01:37:04   So it is kind of,

01:37:07   Ideally, we wouldn't need any of these things.

01:37:09   Ideally, everything would just use USB-C or magnetic stuff,

01:37:11   and we'd be fine.

01:37:12   But that's not the world we live in.

01:37:14   So anyway, that didn't work out super well,

01:37:17   but I can see possible promise there in certain ways.

01:37:20   Yeah, I think we'll talk about it in future shows

01:37:22   when we talk about all the rumors for portless things

01:37:25   and MagSafe coming to the iPad, because this

01:37:27   is an area that could be improved.

01:37:30   And third-party solutions are not ideal.

01:37:32   Yeah, but that being said, I was very happy

01:37:34   that this whole world existed that clearly many people use

01:37:39   and I just never even considered it.

01:37:40   So, you know, maybe it'll be useful for somebody out there.

01:37:43   And then finally, the good part of my USB garbage story,

01:37:47   I recently discovered, thanks in part to comments made,

01:37:51   I think, over the last few years by our friend, Alex Cox,

01:37:55   on the Dubai Friday podcast, the world of USB hand warmers.

01:38:00   Are you familiar with these?

01:38:04   I know it's the thing, but that's all I know.

01:38:06   - It's called your iPhone when you play Pokemon Go.

01:38:08   - Yeah, so these are, they're just USB batteries

01:38:13   that happen to have heating coils or whatever in them,

01:38:17   and so you're able to use the stored battery power

01:38:21   as a hand warmer that you're holding in cold weather.

01:38:23   And for years we've had those hot hands, packs,

01:38:28   it's basically like a little sack of rust powder,

01:38:33   and it reacts with the air, like it oxidizes

01:38:35   and generates heat for a few hours

01:38:38   and then you throw 'em away.

01:38:39   Like we've had those forever.

01:38:40   - I have to say about those, by the way,

01:38:42   I had occasion to use those recently

01:38:44   and we had some old ones in the closet.

01:38:46   It was just like the ones that go on the small year back,

01:38:47   but it's the same idea, right?

01:38:48   We had some old ones in the closet

01:38:49   and I used one or whatever and I'm like,

01:38:51   oh, we ran out, we should get some new ones.

01:38:52   The new ones are rated for twice the length of time

01:38:55   as the old ones, so apparently in the four years

01:38:57   that's been sitting in our closet,

01:38:58   they went from last up to eight hours

01:39:00   to last up to 16 hours and they are not kidding.

01:39:03   The 16 hour one lasts 16 hours.

01:39:05   So I'm like, what has happened?

01:39:06   'Cause it's not any bigger, it's the same size.

01:39:08   So that crappy rust technology has really improved.

01:39:12   - Well, it seems like the main issue is just regulating

01:39:15   the amount of airflow so you can control the reaction

01:39:20   so it doesn't get too hot and burn out too fast.

01:39:23   So maybe just differences in the materials

01:39:25   they're using around it, like for the fabric layer.

01:39:27   - Yeah, I don't know.

01:39:28   - I saw the small of my back stuck to my back

01:39:31   under two layers of clothes, but whatever they did worked

01:39:33   'cause it was pleasantly warm for a full 16 hours.

01:39:37   - Yeah, and the thing is, I have been on a quest for years

01:39:41   to find really nice, warm gloves for the winter.

01:39:45   - Don't get me started.

01:39:46   - I'm convinced these don't exist.

01:39:48   I'm convinced not only--

01:39:49   - They exist, they don't make them anymore though.

01:39:51   I have five pairs of them and they're all worn out.

01:39:54   I'll talk about it in another pro.

01:39:56   next to your cheese graters and your keyboards.

01:39:58   - I could search so hard for these gloves.

01:40:00   I took them for granted.

01:40:01   I bought maybe five pairs of these gloves

01:40:04   and like they're always gonna make these gloves.

01:40:05   They're awesome.

01:40:06   Every year I'll just buy a new pair

01:40:07   and then I went to look for them one year and they were gone

01:40:09   and so now I'm wearing crappy old bean gloves

01:40:11   and they're not as good.

01:40:12   (laughing)

01:40:13   - Well I have never found great gloves.

01:40:15   I've found a number of gloves that are decent

01:40:17   when it's not that cold.

01:40:19   I have never found great gloves when it's really cold.

01:40:21   My hands are always cold.

01:40:22   And here, both at the beach

01:40:25   and also just having a dog, my lifestyle requires

01:40:27   that I go outside a lot year round.

01:40:29   And so, my hands are always really cold in the winter,

01:40:33   'cause a lot of times I can't put it in my pocket.

01:40:34   Sometimes one of them might be holding a dog leash

01:40:37   in a way that I can't easily pocket,

01:40:38   or I might be pulling a wagon or something.

01:40:41   So, my hands are always cold in the winter,

01:40:44   it's very cold here, and so I figure,

01:40:47   I always want good gloves.

01:40:49   - It's not actually very cold there, just FYI.

01:40:51   - It was like 15 degrees, well I know,

01:40:53   Okay, Boston, I know, okay.

01:40:55   - Anyway, or people in Canada, but still,

01:40:57   my brief suggestion on hand-soaked was

01:40:59   I'm in the same situation, my hands are always cold.

01:41:02   Obviously, you do need to wear gloves,

01:41:03   so get some gloves and wear them even if they're crappy,

01:41:05   but when your extremities are cold,

01:41:08   making sure the core of your body is warm

01:41:10   can help your extremities not get cold,

01:41:12   because your body's reducing circulation,

01:41:14   your extremities is trying to keep

01:41:15   the core of your body temperature up,

01:41:16   so if you sort of over-insulate the core of your body

01:41:20   by wearing thermal underwear like I do and being a weirdo,

01:41:23   your hands will actually be slightly warmer,

01:41:24   so consider that.

01:41:25   - Well, that might work for a lot of people,

01:41:27   that's not my problem.

01:41:28   Like, my core, I walked back today from the post office

01:41:32   with my coat unzipped, but still with gloves

01:41:35   and hat and everything.

01:41:36   Neck warmer, everything.

01:41:38   Anyway, so.

01:41:39   By the way, actually, I joined the neck warmer lifestyle

01:41:42   as well.

01:41:44   The world of people using those neck gaiters

01:41:46   instead of masks when they thought

01:41:47   they would actually do something

01:41:49   introduced me to the concept that neck gaiters exist,

01:41:51   which I never even knew.

01:41:53   And so now I'm using this winter fleece one.

01:41:55   It's basically just a fleece tube that I put over my head

01:41:58   and put it around my neck.

01:41:59   'Cause I've never been a scarf person.

01:42:01   They always just kind of dangle and get in the way.

01:42:02   I never got into scarves.

01:42:04   - I gotta get you on board with the scarf thing.

01:42:05   I was a gator. - Yeah, seriously.

01:42:06   - We call them gators,

01:42:07   'cause that's what you call them when you're skiing.

01:42:08   I was a gator person my whole life,

01:42:09   and only when I moved up to Boston

01:42:11   did I convert from gators to scarves,

01:42:12   mostly because I didn't wanna take a thing

01:42:14   and put it over my head and take it.

01:42:15   I'm like, oh, a scarf, I don't have to put it over my head.

01:42:17   I just wrap it around.

01:42:18   So I'm heavily into the fleece scarf lifestyle now.

01:42:21   But you have to get a good one.

01:42:22   You can't get like a fancy scarf that looks nice.

01:42:25   You have to get one that does not look nice.

01:42:27   But yeah, fleece skaters, if you don't mind, put 'em,

01:42:29   I guess you don't have any hair to mess up.

01:42:31   So that's the one advantage.

01:42:32   One advantage you have going for you.

01:42:33   - Just glides right on.

01:42:34   It's great.

01:42:35   - Yeah, they're very comfy

01:42:36   and I still wear them when skiing.

01:42:37   Not that I've been skiing in ages,

01:42:38   but when I did go skiing, I had to.

01:42:40   - Yeah, so anyway.

01:42:41   So, yeah, so gloves have always failed me.

01:42:44   And I even briefly tried heated gloves

01:42:47   a couple of years back.

01:42:48   like I did the research, found what people thought

01:42:50   were the best ones and they were garbage.

01:42:51   And the problem with heated gloves,

01:42:53   then you have these giant battery packs

01:42:54   that have to go somewhere around your wrist.

01:42:56   They had these huge cuffs and these thick wires

01:42:58   and they don't really work that well.

01:42:59   Anyway, so I decided let me look at hand warmers.

01:43:02   And the problem with the disposable ones,

01:43:04   I love the disposable ones for the toe boot warmers.

01:43:08   Those are great.

01:43:08   You put 'em in there, you have,

01:43:10   if you're gonna be out for a while, those are awesome

01:43:13   and I haven't found any better solution for feet yet.

01:43:16   But the hand warmers, most of the time,

01:43:18   I'm just doing a 15 minute or 30 minute dog walk.

01:43:22   I'm not gonna bust open one of those pairs

01:43:24   of disposable hand warmers for a 15 or 30 minute walk.

01:43:27   That feels wasteful to me, 'cause I know

01:43:29   it's gonna be hot for like--

01:43:29   - It's gonna be heating up for 16 hours,

01:43:31   you're gonna just-- - Right.

01:43:32   Right, and that seems ridiculous.

01:43:34   And so the reality is, even though I have,

01:43:37   I got a box of those from Amazon a few years ago,

01:43:39   so I have probably 25 pairs of those ready to go,

01:43:43   and the reality is I almost never use them,

01:43:45   because every time I would use them

01:43:47   would feel like a waste of them.

01:43:49   And so instead, I recently discovered these USB hand warmers

01:43:52   and there's a bunch of them out there.

01:43:55   Also, again, all sorts of brands, shapes, sizes,

01:43:58   all around the like, you know, $25-ish range.

01:44:02   And I thought, well, how well could these really work?

01:44:07   And how long could they possibly last?

01:44:10   How much warmth could they possibly generate?

01:44:11   Like, are they gonna be a pain in the butt?

01:44:13   And the pair I got is, it's a pair of them,

01:44:17   two of them together, and they magnetically stick together

01:44:19   for storage, which I don't--

01:44:21   - Oh, that's cool.

01:44:22   - I thought it was cool.

01:44:23   In practice, I'm keeping them in my jacket pockets

01:44:26   when not in use.

01:44:27   - Ah, okay.

01:44:27   - So I'm keeping them separate anyways,

01:44:29   so maybe it's less cool than I thought,

01:44:30   but I thought it was a cool idea.

01:44:32   But it's just, they're just two

01:44:34   5,000 milliamp hour USB batteries.

01:44:37   They have USB-C in, they have USB-A out,

01:44:40   so they are also USB batteries.

01:44:42   They function as USB batteries if you need them to be,

01:44:45   which is nice.

01:44:46   And because they're only 5,000 milliamp hours,

01:44:48   they're not that big.

01:44:49   And to be the hand warmers, they're only barely bigger

01:44:54   than a 5,000 milliamp hour battery would be.

01:44:58   Like they're just kind of log shaped.

01:44:59   They're shaped kind of like the bottom half of a hot dog.

01:45:02   So you can hold them in your hand

01:45:05   without it being too big and bulky.

01:45:08   But it's also not so super skinny

01:45:10   that you can't get good contact on it.

01:45:12   So it's nice and they, you know, I like walk outside

01:45:16   with my dog in the morning and it's 15 degrees

01:45:19   and I got my neck tube on and I reach in my pockets

01:45:22   and I hold down the buttons with my gloved hands.

01:45:24   I can turn them on easily and they warm up within 20 seconds

01:45:29   maybe they're nice and warm.

01:45:31   Like they warm up quickly and I can go for a dog walk.

01:45:34   I'm holding these, my hands are nice and warm

01:45:37   and then I get, as I approach my house to end the walk,

01:45:41   I just reach for the buttons,

01:45:42   hold in the buttons for a few seconds,

01:45:43   they turn off, walk inside, I'm done.

01:45:45   It's so nice.

01:45:47   They work so well.

01:45:49   I would say they work actually better

01:45:51   than the disposable ones because they cover more area

01:45:55   and they heat up faster,

01:45:56   and then of course you can control the heat.

01:45:58   They never get too hot 'cause there's like three settings,

01:46:00   so if it's starting to get too warm,

01:46:02   you can turn it off, you can turn it down,

01:46:04   and then when you're ready again,

01:46:05   turn it back on or turn it back up.

01:46:07   It's fantastic.

01:46:09   So thank you, Alex Cox at Dubai Friday

01:46:11   for recommending this, friend of the show, Alex Cox.

01:46:14   And also, thank you to the random Amazon corporations

01:46:17   who are making these things, 'cause they're really good.

01:46:19   And again, because they're just USB batteries,

01:46:23   and so, and again, they're not much bigger

01:46:26   than a battery of that capacity would normally be.

01:46:29   So it's this useful thing, even if,

01:46:33   even in the summertime, I'm gonna keep this in my backpack,

01:46:35   'cause I just occasionally need a USB battery.

01:46:38   And so it's just, I'm very happy with this product.

01:46:40   And it's such a simple little thing.

01:46:43   And solving a need that so far modern technology

01:46:48   and fabrics and fashion and things

01:46:50   have done a very poor job of solving.

01:46:52   Like why are my hands cold in the winter?

01:46:53   What can I do about that?

01:46:54   That's been a very hard problem for me.

01:46:56   Looks like we can send satellites and stuff,

01:46:58   we can send robots to Mars, but we can't make good gloves.

01:47:01   But you know.

01:47:02   - Or hats.

01:47:03   - Yeah, or hats apparently.

01:47:04   But yeah, this is actually really, really good.

01:47:07   I strongly recommend USB hand warmers.

01:47:09   And it doesn't really matter which one you get,

01:47:11   they're probably all the same.

01:47:12   But yeah, fantastic product.

01:47:14   - I still contend that if you wore thermal underwear

01:47:16   and had had it in a scarf on and zipped your jacket

01:47:18   and wore warm things on all your extremities,

01:47:21   you would eventually get so hot

01:47:22   that you would have to take your gloves off

01:47:23   to use your hands as radiators to cool your body down.

01:47:26   (laughing)

01:47:27   - I assure you, it doesn't work that way.

01:47:29   - You're just not dressing warm enough

01:47:31   on the rest of your body.

01:47:32   I know because I'm the same, my hands are always cold.

01:47:34   ask anybody, ask my wife, my hands are always cold,

01:47:37   but I can occasionally overdress,

01:47:39   because I am an overdresser,

01:47:40   you can ask her about that, overdress for the weather,

01:47:43   and be out for a dog walk,

01:47:44   'cause I'm in the same situation, I'm out for the dog walk,

01:47:47   and we're walking up the big hill in the park,

01:47:48   and I get to the top of the hill,

01:47:50   and my hands are burning, and that never happens to me,

01:47:53   so I take off my gloves, and I radiate all the heat

01:47:55   out of my body through my hands,

01:47:56   and in 30 seconds later, I put the gloves back on,

01:47:58   and I'm fine, so it is possible,

01:48:00   if you sufficiently dress the rest of your body,

01:48:03   including potentially wearing wristies, you should try that.

01:48:06   I wear them when I type, obviously,

01:48:07   'cause my hands are always cold in the house.

01:48:09   Do you know what wristies are?

01:48:10   - Is it one of those 80s armbands before your wrist?

01:48:14   - No, it's just a fleece tube.

01:48:16   You know the tube you put on your neck?

01:48:17   Imagine a tomb like that, shaped like your forearm

01:48:19   with one hole in the side for your thumb to go through?

01:48:21   - Oh. - That's a wristie, right?

01:48:23   So you wear wristies and you also wear gloves.

01:48:25   It's like thermal underwear for your hands.

01:48:27   So consider that as well.

01:48:30   And you will eventually find the amount of clothing

01:48:32   you need to wear to be incredibly sweating hot

01:48:35   and then you'll be, back it off one notch from that

01:48:37   and you'll be okay.

01:48:38   - But here's the thing, the problem with good gloves also,

01:48:40   it's like, I also want like, you know,

01:48:43   touch sensitivity on the glove.

01:48:44   'Cause like right now, like my warmest gloves,

01:48:46   that, well, my least cold gloves that I have now,

01:48:51   are not, they don't, like they're too thick for that,

01:48:54   and they're just also some random Amazon gloves also,

01:48:56   but like I've tried the nice ones,

01:48:58   I've tried the ones from big brands,

01:48:59   I've tried a hestras. I tried I tried so many gloves everyone's like oh these are the best and I try them and they're not warm

01:49:06   either

01:49:07   But my gloves for people want to know the ones that I wore for years and years and years of my life until I stopped

01:49:12   making them

01:49:13   They were combi kombi

01:49:15   Gore-tex combi still makes Gore-tex gloves, but they do not make the gloves that I use for years

01:49:22   They make lots of other gloves that are not as warm and are more annoying

01:49:25   But the secret to the combi Gore-dex gloves is well

01:49:28   The first secret is buy it in the largest possible size way bigger than you think you need

01:49:32   Because a secret to the gloves was they were like down comforters for your hands mittens are a lot easier obviously mittens

01:49:38   It's when your fingers are all together mittens are way warmer than gloves. But then of course you have no finger, right?

01:49:43   Dexterity, right? So yeah, you're not new loves making warm gloves is difficult

01:49:49   But the secret of these ones is they were like huge and pillowy

01:49:52   They were just like, you know, the big like puffy jackets that like the hip-hop stars used to wear when that was in fashion

01:49:57   Right, they were like that for your hands, but not shiny

01:49:59   Just a huge amount of fluffiness around them

01:50:03   They were just and you'd get them a size bigger than you thought because any gloves that are tight will make your hands cold

01:50:08   And so you had it wasn't there's enough sort of like

01:50:10   down comforter wrapping around every one of your fingers and your entire hand and your wrist that it would actually

01:50:17   keep the heat in and not let you lose it and those are the only and these gloves

01:50:21   were time tested by me skiing like skiing up in Vermont and when it's like

01:50:25   Two degrees with the wind whipping through the chairlift as you're sitting there, you know for the the I think about the calm like that

01:50:33   They they started by calling. Oh the high-speed quad they used to be they usually not talk about the ski lift speed

01:50:38   It was just like the speed the ski lift is but then they came up with a high speed ski lift

01:50:42   Which meant that it's faster than the low speed ski lift

01:50:44   It would disconnect from the thing and you would sit down on it and then it would reconnect to the faster moving cable and you'd

01:50:49   Go fast, right?

01:50:50   But no I would be on the slow speed triple going up Mount snow and

01:50:55   3-degree weather in the fog with the wind whipping and that's the crucible in which these gloves were tested

01:51:01   Say can it keep my hands from being cold when I am sitting

01:51:05   Suspended in the air in the middle of the wind not moving my body at all

01:51:10   And these were the only gloves that kept up with that

01:51:12   and I kept buying them year after year

01:51:13   until they stopped making them.

01:51:15   Story of my life.

01:51:16   - Do you think somewhere there's another person

01:51:19   who is stockpiling these gloves, your cheese grater,

01:51:24   your chicken hats--

01:51:25   - I'm the person who's stockpiling my cheese grater.

01:51:27   - No, do you think, is there someone else

01:51:29   who's stockpiling the same items you are and just like--

01:51:31   - No, well if they were, I keep buying them from them.

01:51:34   I have so many frickin' cheese graters now.

01:51:36   This is gonna be my legacy.

01:51:37   - Maybe did they buy that spatula for $70

01:51:40   that you didn't want to buy?

01:51:42   Was that a spatula?

01:51:43   - Yeah, I mean, the spatula I'm not always stockpiling.

01:51:46   I'm okay with that.

01:51:47   Although I feel like I'm gonna,

01:51:48   sort of my retirement plan is to sell Grüber my collection

01:51:50   of Apple Extended Keyboard 2s that I have them at.

01:51:53   'Cause I've got a lot of those.

01:51:54   - I think that'll work.

01:51:55   - I don't think he's been stockpiling them,

01:51:56   but I got a lot.

01:51:57   - Unfortunately, they seem to last a pretty long time.

01:51:59   I think it might be a while.

01:52:01   - He's gotta do what I did.

01:52:02   The only Apple Extended Keyboard 2 I ever broke

01:52:05   is because I accidentally knocked my Swiss Army knife

01:52:08   from with that had the blade open because I'm a teenager from my shelf above above where

01:52:14   my computer was that fell off the shelf onto my onto my keyboard like blade point down

01:52:19   and hit like the F5 key and like dug into the key and snapped it off.

01:52:23   Wait but did you get rid of the whole keyboard just for F5 like whoever uses that?

01:52:27   No it's upstairs with the broken F5 key right now but I have I have new Gruber I have new

01:52:31   ones that are not damaged anyway I've got a stash just yeah.

01:52:37   besides Windows people who use that for their browser refresh,

01:52:39   is that still a thing or does like Control-R work there,

01:52:42   like the way Command-R works for us?

01:52:43   - No, they're probably hitting F5.

01:52:45   - They're still hitting F5.

01:52:46   - My daughter said she needed to hit Control-C

01:52:50   to copy something, I'm like, Control-C?

01:52:52   I didn't raise you to use Control-C to copy,

01:52:54   what's going on, like how did this happen?

01:52:56   We literally never had a PC in this house,

01:52:58   but you know how it happened, can you guess?

01:53:01   - School, I would assume.

01:53:02   - Chromebooks.

01:53:04   Chromebooks, you don't think about it,

01:53:06   you're like, you know, Windows uses control and Mac uses command, what does Chromebook

01:53:10   use? Control. Control C, control V, copy and paste.

01:53:16   I'm so sorry, Jon.

01:53:18   A whole lifetime of only ever seeing and using Macs destroyed as soon as she gets a Chromebook.

01:53:24   She can convert as an adult, it'll happen.

01:53:26   Yeah, I mean, she doesn't prefer the Chromebook, but it's just, to have that, the problem is,

01:53:32   for her whole life being around Macs, she never used cut, copy and paste because she

01:53:36   was little but once she got all off to use cut copy and paste the first thing

01:53:38   she actually did it on was a Chromebook and so control C is copy it's like

01:53:42   terrible thanks to our sponsors this week iodine lutron caseta and memberful

01:53:49   and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join at FM slash join

01:53:53   we will talk to you next week

01:53:57   now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental

01:54:05   Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research

01:54:11   Margo and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental

01:54:15   It was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

01:54:25   And if you're into Twitter You can follow them at

01:54:30   C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss

01:54:35   M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:54:38   N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N

01:54:40   S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:54:45   It's accidental

01:54:48   They didn't mean to

01:54:51   Accidental

01:54:53   Tech podcast so long

01:54:58   Hey, so John, what are you going to do about a car the next time you need to buy one?

01:55:05   I mean, I'm assuming by then there'll be more affordable electric choices, right? And that's

01:55:12   probably what I'll go with. So no more stick for you, this is it?

01:55:15   I mean, it depends. Like obviously, as we were discussing before, I wasn't really joking

01:55:21   about you were saying like, "Oh, the Civic may be your only choice because you can get

01:55:24   a Civic with the stick, but you can't get the Accord with the stick anymore, and then

01:55:27   new Civic is nice and blah blah blah.

01:55:29   So maybe next time you get a car you have to get a Civic.

01:55:31   And I said by the time I have to get a new car the Civic will be the size of my current

01:55:35   Accord because both the Accord and the Civic have been growing in proportions like constantly

01:55:39   for the past several decades.

01:55:41   The Civic today is way bigger than the Accord from like a couple of decades ago right.

01:55:45   So and you know if this trend continues I don't think that the Accord is going to get

01:55:49   bigger without bound because it would just be gigantic but the Civic will probably get

01:55:53   bigger up to and including the limit of the size of the current Accord.

01:55:56   So yes, maybe I will get a Civic if it's the one that still comes with the stick.

01:55:59   Maybe Honda will come to its senses and make another Accord with the stick, like a sporty

01:56:03   version for like a niche thing or whatever.

01:56:06   But much more likely I'll be looking at electrics when that time comes.

01:56:09   But that's going to be a while for now.

01:56:11   As we discussed in past shows, my car is a 2014 and it has 27,000 miles on it.

01:56:16   My goodness.

01:56:17   And I plan to sinking a hell of a lot of money into it before I give up on it.

01:56:21   So here's that.

01:56:23   Is Tina embracing her future life as a two-pedal driver, or is she even more angry about it

01:56:29   than you?

01:56:30   No, she doesn't care as much about it as I do, but I think she'll be sad.

01:56:32   She does not like automatics, though.

01:56:34   We test drove various automatic things and she does not prefer it.

01:56:37   But I think she will happily take an electric, so she's probably more likely to get an electric

01:56:41   before I am because she is less picky and more excited about the idea of an electric.

01:56:45   She'll still miss that a little bit, but not as much as I will.

01:56:48   Is there a human that is more picky than you, Jon?

01:56:51   I'm sure.

01:56:52   - That's the one who's also hoarding the cheese graters.

01:56:54   (laughing)

01:56:55   - I've got all the cheese graters.

01:56:56   I have the market cornered on those suckers.

01:56:58   (laughing)

01:57:00   - So speaking of car stuff, I have a quick question.

01:57:04   So it's been, of course, as mentioned, very cold here.

01:57:08   And I recently went back to the mainland

01:57:11   to go some grocery shopping.

01:57:13   And there was a, every time I go back,

01:57:16   I currently have the FJ Cruiser parked

01:57:19   in the ferry parking lot next to my car,

01:57:22   and every time I go back, I just start it up

01:57:25   and drive it around a little bit

01:57:26   just to make sure everything still works,

01:57:28   and I think you're supposed to do that for gas cars, right?

01:57:30   Like start them up every so often?

01:57:31   - It's usually not a bad idea, yes.

01:57:33   - Right, so anyway, when I went back

01:57:36   in the very cold weather this last time,

01:57:38   when I went to start the car,

01:57:40   let's say it was not super willing to start.

01:57:44   - It's cold weather for you.

01:57:45   - Right, so I want you to tell me,

01:57:48   I'm gonna describe the situation,

01:57:49   I want you to tell me what I need to get serviced

01:57:51   or looked at, if anything.

01:57:52   So the situation is I go to the car

01:57:55   after it's been sitting there for probably two weeks.

01:57:57   I turn, it's very cold weather.

01:57:59   I turn the key and it goes,

01:58:02   (groaning)

01:58:04   battery.

01:58:06   And then it eventually starts up, okay.

01:58:07   Now, I thought battery possibly too.

01:58:09   Eventually it does start after some reluctance.

01:58:13   However, I go to a store, go in for a while,

01:58:18   come back out, start the car again, exactly the same thing.

01:58:22   - Well--

01:58:23   - It does that every time I'm starting it

01:58:25   within a day's worth of errands, not just the first start.

01:58:28   - Yeah, that's not good.

01:58:29   - Well, but slow down though,

01:58:31   because depending on how long you're driving

01:58:33   in between stops, you're probably not getting

01:58:36   that much charge. - 15 minutes?

01:58:37   No, it's plenty.

01:58:38   I mean, like, a healthy car, like this is something

01:58:41   I didn't know until I moved to Boston,

01:58:42   but like, if you haven't driven your car for a while,

01:58:45   then it's been really, really cold.

01:58:47   when you try to start it, it will be like,

01:58:49   I prefer not to do this, but we'll eventually start.

01:58:51   But if you drive for any amount of time,

01:58:54   even a five minute trip down to the corner

01:58:56   to go to the convenience store and you turn it off

01:58:58   or to get gas or whatever, it should start up better

01:59:01   than it did with the total cold start.

01:59:03   Even just five minutes of running should do it.

01:59:04   So if you go somewhere to run an errand,

01:59:06   you go into the store for five minutes,

01:59:08   come back out, and still it's just as bad as it was

01:59:10   when you first tried to start it,

01:59:13   the problem is not just that your car was cold.

01:59:16   - Right, and that's the symptom.

01:59:17   But a month ago, when I bought the car,

01:59:21   and it was much warmer, it would start up instantly.

01:59:24   Like no delay.

01:59:25   - How old is your battery?

01:59:27   - I don't know, I asked the previous owner

01:59:28   that when I bought it.

01:59:29   - He's got the year printed on it,

01:59:30   you can just open it up and look.

01:59:31   - I don't think I've ever opened the hood.

01:59:33   - Yeah, that would be a good idea.

01:59:34   Find out where the battery is,

01:59:35   and look for the year on the battery,

01:59:37   and see how old it is, and if it's older

01:59:38   than like four or five years, just get a new battery.

01:59:41   - Yep, I agree with that.

01:59:42   And I have one of those jumpstart battery things,

01:59:46   but it was so cold and I was in such a rush

01:59:48   'cause of the weird winter ferry schedule,

01:59:50   I didn't even wanna try it unless I had to.

01:59:53   Even the time to pop the hood, connect this thing,

01:59:56   try that, even that amount of time

01:59:58   would've eaten into my shopping time too much.

02:00:01   - Yeah, you shouldn't have to do that.

02:00:03   It's not like we're in the wilds of Canada.

02:00:07   You don't need a battery warmer, as people are suggesting.

02:00:09   You live on freaking Long Island, you'll be fine.

02:00:12   - I don't live on the freaking line.

02:00:13   I live next to the freaking line.

02:00:15   - You do, but anyway.

02:00:16   (laughing)

02:00:18   Just get a new battery.

02:00:20   You should get a new battery every few years.

02:00:21   I'm surprised that cars don't do this.

02:00:23   Probably the fancier cars do,

02:00:24   but cars will warn you about all sorts of stuff,

02:00:26   but batteries last in cars last a certain amount of time,

02:00:29   and it should, after five years or whatever,

02:00:31   put a little light on your dashboard that says,

02:00:32   "Hey, your battery seems okay now,

02:00:34   "but it's been X number of years.

02:00:35   "You should consider getting a new one."

02:00:37   - Because of my reality of how hard it is to get off here,

02:00:41   and the very quick amounts of time

02:00:43   I have to do errands in on the mainland with the ferry,

02:00:46   I figure like, I can bring this to go get service somewhere,

02:00:50   but I can't leave it there all day

02:00:52   and I can't leave it there overnight.

02:00:53   And so I need faster solutions than that,

02:00:57   something that could be done in an hour.

02:00:59   - No, you can do the battery yourself.

02:01:00   Just find the battery and order it

02:01:01   and go pick it up in your little wagon

02:01:03   and you can just do it yourself.

02:01:04   - Oh, I'm not gonna do that. (laughs)

02:01:05   - Yes, you absolutely can, trust me.

02:01:07   - If I had to or I could, I'm not going to.

02:01:09   - No, no, this is, I can't think of an easier,

02:01:12   I think washing your car is harder

02:01:14   than changing the battery in your car, honestly.

02:01:16   - I mean, I can't do that either.

02:01:17   - This is the easiest thing you could possibly do.

02:01:18   - I can assure you Marco cannot wash his own car.

02:01:20   - In case you see me try, it's not a pretty scene.

02:01:23   - It's a battery, it's electronics.

02:01:25   Like, especially if you don't care

02:01:26   about losing all your codes or whatever

02:01:28   and don't do the weird thing that I do

02:01:29   where I never let the current flow stop to the thing,

02:01:31   you just disconnect the terminals,

02:01:33   you take the old battery out, you unscrew some screws,

02:01:35   take the old battery out, put the new one in,

02:01:37   screw it back in, put the terminals on, that's it.

02:01:38   That's the whole procedure.

02:01:39   You don't even need to buy any dielectric grease.

02:01:41   You can just, no tools needed except for a screwdriver

02:01:44   and maybe like, look in your car of like what little,

02:01:47   you know, socket or nut you need to unscrew

02:01:49   the little holder.

02:01:50   It is, you can do this.

02:01:52   You do not need to pay someone to change the car.

02:01:54   - No, you know what?

02:01:55   Right there, what you just said, that told me,

02:01:57   so first of all--

02:01:58   - You don't have any tools?

02:01:59   - First of all, I didn't even consider the fact

02:02:00   that I might even need dielectric grease for this.

02:02:02   I don't even know what that is.

02:02:03   - You don't, you don't.

02:02:04   I was just--

02:02:05   - So secondly, secondly, you said the Bolt,

02:02:08   Okay, this is a beach vehicle.

02:02:11   Every piece of metal in it is corroded or rusted.

02:02:13   So there is, I guarantee you,

02:02:16   whatever's holding the battery down is rusted.

02:02:18   And if I try to use my crappy tools on it,

02:02:20   it's gonna strip immediately.

02:02:21   - You can hold the battery down with a zip tie.

02:02:24   Like the only thing it's doing is literally

02:02:26   keeping the battery from like jumping out of your car.

02:02:28   It is not a structural member.

02:02:29   You will not, like you just need something

02:02:32   to hold the battery inside the car

02:02:34   so it doesn't go flying out.

02:02:35   And there is something that does that now.

02:02:36   but even if that thing is rusted out,

02:02:38   put a big zip tie around it, it will be fine.

02:02:40   It's not a structural member.

02:02:42   I believe in you.

02:02:43   - Second question, are there like,

02:02:46   is this the kind of thing that I could drive up

02:02:47   to like any service place and get done quickly,

02:02:50   or are there like special batteries?

02:02:52   - They'll charge you a million dollars

02:02:54   if you try to buy a battery through somebody,

02:02:55   'cause they're gonna put their profit margin on it.

02:02:57   If you go to the dealer,

02:02:57   they're gonna charge you $400 for the battery,

02:02:59   just buy a battery yourself in an auto box.

02:03:01   - They're that much from dealers?

02:03:02   'Cause what are they new, like 150 bucks?

02:03:04   - Everything is that much a dealer.

02:03:05   Do not buy tires at a car dealer.

02:03:07   Do not buy a car battery at a car dealer.

02:03:09   They will cost you way more.

02:03:10   I mean, it depends on the car.

02:03:12   Like a Honda, when I buy,

02:03:13   I actually bought an official OEM Honda car battery

02:03:15   just because the Honda parts place near me

02:03:17   has them at like a reasonable price,

02:03:19   but in general you don't want to buy

02:03:21   things like that through a dealer.

02:03:22   - See I was always, even before my like leasing days,

02:03:26   I was mostly a dealer service person

02:03:29   because I was so scared of like doing something wrong.

02:03:32   And growing up, like we didn't,

02:03:33   Like we had relatively little money growing up

02:03:35   and so we would go to like the non-dealer mechanics

02:03:39   for all of our car services

02:03:40   and we had very mixed experiences that way.

02:03:45   Not everything went well there.

02:03:47   So I don't know, I've kind of always been a dealer person.

02:03:50   - Yeah, I'm big on going to a dealer.

02:03:52   The main reason I heavily endorse a dealer

02:03:54   for doing like maintenance and stuff

02:03:55   is because I want someone from my specific car,

02:03:57   I want someone who has worked on a thousand Accords,

02:03:59   like exactly what I want.

02:04:00   - Right, that's what I want.

02:04:02   Right, they know every single,

02:04:04   every little part that is weird,

02:04:06   the thing you have to be careful of or whatever,

02:04:07   and the highest chance of getting that as a dealer.

02:04:09   But certain things you never get at the dealer,

02:04:11   and those are things that don't require

02:04:13   any expertise to install,

02:04:15   and that you can get way cheaper elsewhere.

02:04:18   Tires are probably the biggest one,

02:04:19   'cause if you try to buy tires,

02:04:20   even at the Honda dealer,

02:04:21   they're literally twice the price

02:04:23   of buying tires elsewhere, right?

02:04:25   Batteries are often hilariously expensive,

02:04:28   more so on fancy cars,

02:04:29   like if you try to get the battery changed

02:04:32   on your M5, that battery's probably $600.

02:04:35   Like I kid you not.

02:04:37   - Well they have to figure out where the hell it is.

02:04:39   - Yeah, it's in the trunk.

02:04:40   (laughing)

02:04:42   And aftermarket ones will cost you much, much less.

02:04:45   - Well, but with a BMW, you absolutely need to have it done

02:04:48   at a dealer because then they need to tell the computer

02:04:50   it's a brand new battery.

02:04:51   - Have to reset all the codes with the computer thingy

02:04:53   and do all the--

02:04:54   - See, and that's the kind of thing I'd be a little bit

02:04:56   afraid of dealing with.

02:04:57   - But you don't need to do that on your 1990s Toyota FJ

02:05:00   or whatever the hell you have.

02:05:01   - It's a 24-size battery. - It's a 24-size battery.

02:05:02   - Just go to AutoZone, enter in the year,

02:05:05   make a model of your car, it'll say,

02:05:06   "We have these three batteries to choose from,

02:05:07   "pick the second most expensive one."

02:05:09   - I'm pretty sure they'll do it for you, actually,

02:05:11   even at an AutoZone.

02:05:12   I don't know that for sure, but I thought that would.

02:05:14   - I want Marco to do this himself,

02:05:15   just so he knows that he can do it.

02:05:16   - Oh, that's not gonna happen.

02:05:17   - There's no chance of that happening.

02:05:19   - Let Adam do it, it is so easy.

02:05:22   I don't do anything to my car, I do not change the oil,

02:05:25   I don't change brake pads, I do not do any car repair,

02:05:28   and I've changed so many car batteries.

02:05:30   - It is a thing you can do.

02:05:31   - No, no, it is a thing you can do.

02:05:33   Again, can and will are different things.

02:05:35   It's a thing that I will not do,

02:05:37   but I probably could if I really had to.

02:05:39   - But it's so inconvenient for you

02:05:40   to drive somewhere to do it, though.

02:05:42   - But it's even more convenient for me

02:05:43   to try to do it myself in the ferry parking lot

02:05:45   in 17 degree weather in five minutes.

02:05:48   - Well, you're gonna be going there anyway

02:05:49   to bring whatever your next haul of shipment goods are

02:05:52   to back to your house, though.

02:05:54   - Groceries, they're called groceries.

02:05:56   - Well, whatever it is, you're always ordering things

02:05:58   from Amazon and stuff.

02:05:59   the battery would just be one more, you've got a wagon.

02:06:02   - It's like bags of kale, coconuts.

02:06:05   - Well, so just throw a car battery on the stack,

02:06:07   it'll be fine.

02:06:08   - Here we go, member perk.

02:06:09   We will record the FaceTime call between you two.

02:06:12   - He just recorded himself doing it.

02:06:13   Someone with warmer hands than him just recorded

02:06:15   with his phone, he says, here's Marco,

02:06:16   he's opening up the hood, he's trying to find

02:06:19   where the battery is, and now he's realizing

02:06:21   you can't just pull the terminals off,

02:06:22   but they have this little thing on it

02:06:23   that's shaped like a octagon, and how do I get that off?

02:06:25   - It's probably totally rusted out.

02:06:27   - How much rust is there on it?

02:06:29   How much rust could an FJ rust if a FJ could rust rust?

02:06:34   - At least take a picture of the car battery

02:06:35   so we can see what condition the terminals are in.

02:06:37   - I have to figure out how to open the hood.

02:06:40   - That I also believe you can do.

02:06:42   Sit in the driver's seat and probably look down

02:06:44   to your left for a thing that you can pull

02:06:46   that shows like a little outline of a car

02:06:48   with a hood opening.

02:06:49   - Yeah, but there's gonna be some weird latch

02:06:50   I have to actually then find under the actual hood lip

02:06:53   and that's gonna be corroded.

02:06:55   - You can do that too.

02:06:56   If only you had read the owner's manual.

02:06:57   - You need to watch more end of the world media,

02:07:00   like movies and TV shows where the world has ended,

02:07:04   just to see, just to get you up to speed

02:07:07   on all the things you're gonna have to do.

02:07:09   Like figure out how to open the hood of your car

02:07:11   when no one else is there to do it for you.

02:07:13   - I'll just walk away at that point.

02:07:14   He's like, "Well, I guess I don't have a car anymore.

02:07:16   This one won't start."

02:07:18   - It's just gonna turn to dust.

02:07:20   - Marco's definitely big on the bicycle apocalypse.

02:07:23   [door closes]