00:00:00 ◼ ► So, update. As I'm sitting here, can you still hear me? Yeah. Oh no. What did you touch?
00:00:07 ◼ ► I didn't touch anything! I'm sitting here, minding my own business. Is anything wet? No.
00:00:12 ◼ ► I mean, other than my forehead now. I'm sitting here minding my own business. And the LG was like, "Eh, I don't know about this." And it turned itself off.
00:00:22 ◼ ► You don't need to see the screen to podcast. And then turned itself right back on. Which is weird though because
00:00:28 ◼ ► I'm talking to you on the USB mix. It's fine. I'm talking to you on the MixPre3. Which is plugged into that, right?
00:00:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't understand what the hell just happened. That was weird. Alright, well, gods beat all of us.
00:00:39 ◼ ► Do you, so, okay, question. Do you have batteries in the battery sled on the back of the MixPre3?
00:00:46 ◼ ► I do. And in fact, I have a reminder in Do, D-U-E, to check those batteries every six months to make sure they haven't exploded acid everywhere.
00:00:55 ◼ ► And that six month reminder just happened a week or two ago. Oh, for god's sakes! Spend the extra four bucks to get lithiums!
00:01:02 ◼ ► Do they not explode everywhere? They don't. No, they're incredibly stable for like ten years.
00:01:07 ◼ ► Oh, I genuinely did not know that. And they weigh basically nothing. They're fantastic. The only problem is...
00:01:12 ◼ ► They don't last as long as alkalines, right? No, lithiums? No, they're great. They're a little expensive and they're not rechargeable.
00:01:20 ◼ ► No, by last as long, I mean like if you tried to drain them, they don't have as many watt hours, do they?
00:01:25 ◼ ► No, I think they still do. Rechargeables don't, usually. Rechargeables don't last as long as non-rechargeables.
00:01:31 ◼ ► Oh, I know what you're talking about. You're not talking about lithium ion rechargeable, but like about the plain old lithium ones.
00:01:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm talking about the single-use non-rechargeable, like Energizer or lithium, whatever, they're awesome for things where weight matters because they're very, very lightweight.
00:01:43 ◼ ► But also for things where long shelf life matters. Here's a life hack. If you have like one of those smoke alarms with 9-volt batteries and they beep every three years,
00:01:56 ◼ ► That too, but if you, you know, assuming, for people who still use 9-volt ones or who are stuck somewhere where they can't control the smoke alarms, put one of those 10-year 9-volt batteries in there because they are awesome.
00:02:08 ◼ ► Because when your smoke alarm beeps for low battery, usually it's not because the battery was used to depletion, it's because the battery is basically slowly self-discharged just with age.
00:02:18 ◼ ► And the lithiums last way longer than that. So yeah, definitely a little life hack there. Use those in your 9-volt smoke alarms instead of the alkaline ones.
00:02:26 ◼ ► So I'm not trying to be funny. This is all new thought technology for me. So you're saying a lithium battery will never just vomit acid every, because you know with an alkaline battery after a long time, oftentimes it'll just like explode acid everywhere.
00:02:40 ◼ ► Yeah, if you leave an alkaline battery in something long enough, it will do that, like every time. It just, it's a matter of how long it will be.
00:02:46 ◼ ► The ones I'm talking about, now this is different from like lithium ion batteries that are rechargeable that are in our computers and phones. That's a different...
00:02:55 ◼ ► Right, yes. But they have other issues, like if you charge them and they might swell and explode.
00:03:00 ◼ ► But what I'm talking about is the single-use, non-rechargeable lithium AA's and 9-volts. Those, I've only used the ones from Energizer. I don't know if there's other brands that make them, probably, but I've only used the Energizer ones.
00:03:11 ◼ ► But they are great because they have very, very, very long shelf lives and weigh nothing. So if either of those things are important to you, oh, and they're very stable and they won't leak crap all over stuff.
00:03:20 ◼ ► So if you're putting batteries into something expensive, where leaking battery acid into it might not be a very good thing, or somewhere that you expect to have to have the batteries in there for a very long time, like multiple years before opening up or replacing them, go lithium, it's better.
00:03:34 ◼ ► Huh, I'll have to do that. Although $15 for Energizer, a 4-pack of Energizer lithium AA's, my word.
00:03:44 ◼ ► Goodness. Well, either way. I guess you guys are worth it, so I'll put that in my shopping cart.
00:03:54 ◼ ► No, it won't, but it'll at least give you a consistent recording when your LG monitor inevitably continues to flake out because it's so fine.
00:04:01 ◼ ► It is ultra fine. Hey, if it, I mean, honestly, if it really is that bad, I'll just plug in the mixpre to the computer if I really need to. I just don't want to. I shouldn't have to, darn it.
00:04:11 ◼ ► And you know, this would all be better if Apple just made a monitor. Have we ever talked about that? We should talk about that.
00:04:40 ◼ ► No, for autocomplete and web forms, which honestly, that's the only thing I ever liked about it. Like that, I totally understand that because it is really nice to have those little autocomplete blobs when you're filling out a web form and you know, you have them on the iOS and you have them in the touch bar and they never brought them to Mac.
00:04:56 ◼ ► Don't you see the autocomplete options in the text field? Like, I mean, I guess it could show the same thing in the touch bar, but aren't they already on your screen?
00:05:03 ◼ ► Well, if it's like a username and password, yeah, but if I'm talking about like filling in like an address or name or email, like those kind of things, you know, where it'll offer the autocomplete just like.
00:05:16 ◼ ► It does. No, Chrome says like if there's a first name field, like, and I just click in it there, it shows a pop up menu with my name, my address or whatever, like all my contact info. And then I just picked that autocomplete and it fills in all the rest of the fields in the form.
00:05:31 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. I mean, Safari has a feature like that, but it doesn't always kick in. By the way, oh my God, this is I just have started using the as part of my new setup, like when I redid everything for the new computers, I enabled the one password Safari extension, like the new one.
00:05:48 ◼ ► Now, every time so I use one password. I also use iCloud keychain. I know I probably should just pick one or the other and go all in on one of them, but I like different parts of each one. And so right now I still use both.
00:06:03 ◼ ► This is the most Casey thing you've ever said in your entire life. I only use one password. I have no other password managers. I only use one password. And you're sitting here saying, well, I kind of like this one. I kind of like that one. So I'm going to use both and make my life a living hell.
00:06:17 ◼ ► No, I think the most case thing would be if I'm like, well, I really want to only use one password, but because I'm paying for iCloud storage, I feel like I should take away the one I like more that works better and switch over to this other one that doesn't work as well because I'm paying for it.
00:06:29 ◼ ► The real case. The answer is you keep a text file on his desktop and every time you need to autocomplete something, he'd open up the text file, which is encrypted, copy and paste the passwords out of it into his form.
00:06:39 ◼ ► Because then he knows where all his passwords are and they're not in an opaque data store that he has no control over. You'll be looking for your passwords, but Casey knows they're all in that file on his desktop.
00:06:47 ◼ ► That's almost too simple, though. I feel like you have to involve the garage door opener somehow. Like how would he know what state his garage door is in if it didn't involve an encrypted text file?
00:06:56 ◼ ► I guess the file couldn't be on his desktop. It would have to be on a Raspberry Pi attached to the outside of his house that he connects to through SSH.
00:07:03 ◼ ► First of all, I'm still here. Second of all, I'm going to need so much therapy after this episode. Oh my god. Anyway, so in your bananas-
00:07:13 ◼ ► Yeah, seriously. In your bananas two system setup, you were trying to do something dumb.
00:07:17 ◼ ► I'm just going to throw it out there. Viewing any webpage that has a text field, it's like my screen gets covered in dialogs. The one password extension is aggressive in how much it covers up on the screen.
00:07:33 ◼ ► It shows a giant floating box under every login form that it finds. Usually it asks me to unlock it because it's not currently unlocked because I haven't used it in a little while. And that seems to fight with the iCloud keychain.
00:07:54 ◼ ► Can you put your one password into iCloud keychain so that you can unlock one password with your iCloud keychain?
00:08:03 ◼ ► I don't know if it'll autofill that. Like the box that's injected into the page from the extension. Yeah, probably not. Oh my god. Let me just tell you people out there, don't do what I'm doing. Pick one or the other and go all in on it.
00:08:25 ◼ ► The ATP store is different now. This is where I would normally say it's gone and you're not allowed to use it anymore. But that's not true. We now are back to the on-demand store and it is slightly different than it was before.
00:08:39 ◼ ► Before you could get the original M1 shirt. Again, this is rainbow colors in the front. Nothing on the back. You may not have John's incredible chip diagram because you missed out on the limited time offer.
00:08:51 ◼ ► Well now, we also have M1 Pro and M1 Max equivalents. Again, nothing on the back. So you cannot have these sweet chip diagrams. But you may have M1, M1 Pro or M1 Max all available on demand in Tri-Blend or 100% cotton whenever you want.
00:09:09 ◼ ► And I believe- I actually should have checked this before I started talking but here we are. I'll just vamp for a little bit while I figure out the answer to my own question.
00:09:17 ◼ ► You can also get these apparently in sweatshirt form which is news to me. But tank top form and also onesies. So that's kind of cool too.
00:09:26 ◼ ► Yeah, these aren't for the people who listen to the show. We said this before. These are the people who don't listen to the show. I don't know why we're talking about it on the show but we should at least mention it.
00:09:33 ◼ ► If you missed out and you want to get a lesser inferior shirt. How much episode did we talk about this on? I don't want to explain it all again but sometimes people wear our shirts in YouTube videos and then people who watch YouTube videos really want the shirts and then they're not for sale anymore.
00:09:49 ◼ ► So we wanted to have some way where if someone sees it in a YouTube video they can at least get the shirt. Because if we don't do this people illegally sell our shirts all over the place.
00:09:57 ◼ ► That's not a joke. That does happen. For real. Like multiple times. I think we're up to five or six times where we had to do copyright takedown notices on people trying to sell our shirts.
00:10:07 ◼ ► This is entirely for that. And those people have no idea what ATP is and they don't listen to this podcast. This on demand store mostly exists just so we can put a legit link in for people who want the shirt.
00:10:17 ◼ ► But you dear listeners to the actual podcast, you can wait until our next sale. Thank you very much if you participated in our recent sale.
00:10:23 ◼ ► Indeed. Thank you very much. That sale actually went really well. And come to think of it I should have done some analytics. I've been doing much better about being on top of things with this show.
00:10:32 ◼ ► And apparently I've just failed with this two show week. But nevertheless I should have done some analytics to see whether the max beat the pro which I'm pretty sure it did and how handily it did so.
00:10:45 ◼ ► Was it two to one? Thank you John. See you're not supposed to be doing any research but here we are.
00:10:49 ◼ ► Alright let's do some follow ups. So apparently someone from within Facebook was trying to defend their honor as much as somebody who works at Facebook can. Tell me John what's going on with meta and enterprise stuff?
00:11:02 ◼ ► Yeah there's a couple of points from an anonymous Facebook employee talking about the meta stuff.
00:11:06 ◼ ► So on the enterprise this person says it was mentioned that Facebook has no experience in the enterprise. I would simply like to point you to workplace.com a website that I had never gone to or heard of until this email.
00:11:17 ◼ ► It's essentially Facebook but for work and has been quite successful so says the person who works for Facebook.
00:11:22 ◼ ► So Facebook does have some experience dealing with and selling services to businesses and meetings and VR directly tie into the same service.
00:11:28 ◼ ► Further Microsoft teams integrates with workplace so many businesses that use workplace also pay Microsoft.
00:11:33 ◼ ► I'm not saying Microsoft/Salesforce don't have more success with business but Facebook isn't entirely new to this either.
00:11:38 ◼ ► If you go to workplace.com and look at it and you see the header on the top of the website it says predictably workplace from meta.
00:11:47 ◼ ► Because they're not going to say from Facebook because the workplace and Facebook do not mix.
00:11:52 ◼ ► So more evidence of the branding being important to trying to sell into the enterprise but I'm assuming this product predates the meta rebranding.
00:11:59 ◼ ► I don't actually know what it is presumably it's like Facebook for work but they don't want to say that.
00:12:12 ◼ ► I'm not you know this doesn't look any better or worse than any other enterprise thing but you know Facebook does have a toe in that market at least.
00:12:23 ◼ ► If you were to both load workplace.com and scroll down do you see the like parallax sort of situation going on there?
00:12:30 ◼ ► So it has this company announcements image in the upper right and as you scroll it also scrolls the company announcements to like give you a sample of what it all looks like.
00:12:42 ◼ ► I hate any kind of scroll based animation like to me any kind of scroll jacking or things like this.
00:12:53 ◼ ► But to me interfering with scrolling is like interfering with text selection and cut copy and paste.
00:13:00 ◼ ► Like this is a fun like scrolling is a fundamental feature of the UI that I feel like the content should be below that layer.
00:13:12 ◼ ► It should just allow you to scroll however you need and want to and the content should just be scrollable content.
00:13:19 ◼ ► So I mostly agree with you however in this case it's not like Apple's oftentimes way overdone scroll jacking where it completely disrupts the way a web page is supposed to scroll.
00:13:31 ◼ ► In this case we're just getting sort of like a parallax sort of effect where it's not interrupting how the web page scrolls.
00:13:36 ◼ ► It's not parallax it's it's trying to make it like oh and by the way you're also scrolling the view in this screenshot because the screenshot is also of a window and the window has scrollable content.
00:13:46 ◼ ► So imagine if when scrolling the page of the screenshot is on you're also kind of sort of tiny little bit scrolling the stuff in that window which is cute and honestly not as offensive as the Apple.
00:13:58 ◼ ► What Mark was talking about is basically like we want it to be because we're funny studies or some people want it to be like you printed out a web page and then put it in a big long scroll behind a viewport and then just move the piece of paper that you printed up and down through the viewport.
00:14:12 ◼ ► Right. That it is essentially a static thing and scrolling just changes where the viewport is.
00:14:17 ◼ ► I'm in and obviously that is a tried and true model and it's very stable and people understand it and it's simple.
00:14:22 ◼ ► The Apple model is more like to give it to use the scroll wheels and that looks as I happen to use a scroll wheel because I'm weird and old.
00:14:29 ◼ ► It's as if the scroll wheel is like turning the crank on a mechanical box that has a bunch of animated toys inside it.
00:14:39 ◼ ► Stop thinking of it as scrolling and start thinking of it as this is a clockwork toy that has an animation that goes forward and backwards.
00:14:51 ◼ ► All right. That's also a thing I find that very frustrating when I'm looking for content because all the tools that we're used to using quickly scrolling from one place to the other home and page up page down the find tool find in browser window work tend to work in strange ways with this clockwork mechanism that used to be.
00:15:08 ◼ ► A static document but is now you know wind up toy so it can be done well it can be done poorly but the worst I feel like is what I'm reading like a news story like a newspaper website that is just simply prose and it's doing that it's like who you trying to impress you have text and maybe you have like two photos.
00:15:26 ◼ ► I know New York Times like oh New York Times interactive snow thing it's like there's a time and a place for that if you want to show off go for it but I'm just reading a 15 paragraph text story with two photos you're not gaining anything by making it a clockwork toy.
00:15:42 ◼ ► So I'm looking I was looking for something to put in the show notes for scroll jacking in case you know people weren't familiar and I stumbled upon in Vato dot com and Vato dot com will be in the show notes.
00:15:52 ◼ ► And as I'm scrolling down just kind of trying to quickly skim this make sure it's not complete matter trash.
00:15:57 ◼ ► Look at what they use as one of the examples of terrible terrible usability if you if you wouldn't mind scrolling down below the delicate delicacy of usability heading.
00:16:15 ◼ ► But like every apple pages like that now we've just gotten used to it like like the mac pro is no worse than all the apple web pages that are on now.
00:16:22 ◼ ► Yeah it says in this in the site let me state that I've seen amazing parallax layouts that perform great when designed properly apples mac pro site is in my opinion one of the worst offenders of bad parallax design and scroll hijacking.
00:16:32 ◼ ► I mean they're saying parallax because it's like the animation technique where the things that are in front of you move more than the things that are far away to make it look like you know a 3D type world you know like.
00:16:43 ◼ ► Anyway but that's not necessarily what a lot of these things do they're not trying to induce parallax like these things are closer to you and those things are farther away so when you scroll the things closer go by faster than things.
00:16:54 ◼ ► They're just like well we have arbitrary number of layers and by turning the crank on this machine some of them fly by faster than others.
00:17:00 ◼ ► Nothing to do with any sort of simulating depth from the viewport or anything like that which is fine again doesn't have to simulate depth it can but these little clockwork machines I feel like they need to be really amusing and engaging or server purchase.
00:17:12 ◼ ► A purpose and a lot of the times when I'm going to the mac pro page at apple.com I'm there to get information like my task is not let me be wowed by your low clockwork toy my task is I want to know information how much what's the maximum amount of ram.
00:17:27 ◼ ► You know what date was this page updated like I don't know like I want to find something out or I want to see a picture of something that's the worst if you want to see like where is the close up picture of the ports in the back of this thing and you realize you can't get to them by grabbing the scroll scrub and
00:17:41 ◼ ► thumb and moving because it'll fly by too fast because it's like an animation that anyway this is a tangent we need to get off this sorry we've been scroll jacked by scroll jacking.
00:17:57 ◼ ► Yes. All right. So next point to be addressed by the anonymous fake Facebook employee would Facebook be the company to solve the hardware problem oculus is the most successful company selling VR headsets today it's still relatively niche compared to smartphones but based on public data meta slash oculus is the leading company in the space.
00:18:13 ◼ ► It does automatically mean no we'll do a better job and win but if you were to think of who's most likely to make VR hardware that's good enough to win oculus should at least be considered as a strong choice.
00:18:21 ◼ ► I did point out that Facebook bought oculus which was a good idea. I did point out that oculus was the leader when they bought them.
00:18:28 ◼ ► But also as we talked about not that they fumbled oculus but they have not it has not been a continued smashing success and other competitors have gained ground on them.
00:18:39 ◼ ► But the more important point is despite oculus being the leader in the space for some time and arguably maybe still now depending on how you look at it.
00:18:46 ◼ ► I neither oculus nor any of its competitors have solved this problem have you know have have cracked the problem in the way that the iPhone did for smartphones right.
00:18:56 ◼ ► We're still in the stage where people are trying things seeing what will work the technology is just not there yet.
00:19:01 ◼ ► We don't have anything that's small enough light enough cheap enough you know like the dream of having a thing that looks like a pair of regular reading glasses that has a high resolution high refresh you know screen going into your eyeballs and all like and can like blank out of your whatever like we're not there yet.
00:19:15 ◼ ► So all of these companies are still you know despite that you've got the leader but no one has figured it out yet so we don't know who's going to figure it out and yes oculus is in the running and it's good that Facebook bought them.
00:19:26 ◼ ► But when I said I don't have faith that Facebook can solve this problem because they haven't before now that's not to say that they won't there's lots of things that Apple hadn't done before Apple had never made his own chips before and they're really good at that and they did it by buying a company like it's not impossible.
00:19:39 ◼ ► But you would like when a company that has never achieved something before boldly proclaims that it will not only do it but be the leader and usher in a revolution before they've actually done anything.
00:19:50 ◼ ► It's worthy of skepticism right like Apple's not out there saying you know five years ago we're going to be the leaders in self-driving cars right they were trying to do that they're buying lots of people and you know working towards it but they didn't sort of pre-announce that we've solved this problem before they even solved it.
00:20:07 ◼ ► And you say well but they bought all you know that I don't know they did probably did buy companies but we've hired all these important people like they didn't give an example and they bought PA semi they didn't say we will soon be the leader in the silicon chip space.
00:20:19 ◼ ► They never said that they just didn't they didn't say anything until they were and even now they don't brag about it because they don't have to because they've got the goods.
00:20:26 ◼ ► And this Facebook employee says this is nothing like Apple and social networks as in Apple is you know notoriously bad at social networks and saying Facebook isn't that bad Facebook at least bought a company that was good at it and hasn't entirely screwed them up so that is true.
00:20:41 ◼ ► But then again Apple has actually tried to field social networks and failed so it's not like Apple has never done anything they've just not shown that they're good at doing it yet and I think Facebook has also not shown that they're good at it.
00:20:52 ◼ ► They've shown that they're good at buying a company that's good at it but that company that they bought didn't sort of continue on its rocket like trajectory and has competitors that are gaining on them I feel like.
00:21:02 ◼ ► To the point that games are creating software people actually want to use Facebook has already been buying companies that make the most successful apps and games for the quest.
00:21:14 ◼ ► Most recently acquired the company behind the supernatural which is a popular VR workout app. Yeah that's as I said it's not that Facebook has to do it itself it could just wait for someone else to do it and buy them.
00:21:25 ◼ ► Buying companies that make good VR games makes sense because if no one is making games or whatever for your platform or if the people doing it aren't successful it behooves you to fund them or buy them.
00:21:36 ◼ ► But I feel like there may be a limit to how successful you can be by acquiring companies that are good at doing the thing that you weren't able to do yourselves.
00:21:48 ◼ ► Again pointing to Apple they've done that many times it's an important thing. How they bought next it saved the entire company it was kind of a reverse takeover.
00:21:54 ◼ ► I'm not saying that's not a viable strategy but it's also not an easy strategy. The history of big companies buying little companies that are more innovative and that working out well is littered with the bodies of companies that just bought up all these great smaller companies and squandered it.
00:22:10 ◼ ► Apple is the exception. That is not the rule. And so far Facebook has been continually like most big companies. They buy small companies you get talent occasionally you can make an important strategic acquisition.
00:22:21 ◼ ► And mostly the most successful acquisitions are buying companies that already have big customer bases like WhatsApp and stuff.
00:22:25 ◼ ► Or really what you're buying is not so much the application or the technology but the people. We want the WhatsApp user base. We want the Instagram user base.
00:22:33 ◼ ► And yeah there are apps and blah blah blah but that's not really the whole story there.
00:22:42 ◼ ► This person says another thing I didn't understand is the assumption that VR needs to be comfortable to wear for many hours at a time to be successful. I don't see that. I think if VR becomes something that you use a few times a day for 15 to 30 minutes each that's likely a success.
00:22:53 ◼ ► I don't believe VR is supposed to replace any of our current devices. It should be a new medium that becomes a new option to take part in. As the hardware gets better it will probably become a big thing to play or hang out in for a little while at a time.
00:23:04 ◼ ► Now it's true that VR doesn't have to be something that's comfortable for hours on end. You could just use it for your one or two meetings per day if you have a very optimistic view of how many meetings people have per day.
00:23:18 ◼ ► Again if VR was used for any kind of meeting the idea that that equals 15 to 30 minutes. Well maybe I just have too many meetings. But the metaverse, the pitch of the metaverse is not that it's going to be a thing you do once per day for 15 to 30 minutes or even three times per day for 15 to 30 minutes.
00:23:43 ◼ ► But more like it would be a place that you want to spend time. In the same way that people don't play World of Warcraft a couple times a day for 15 to 30 minutes.
00:23:51 ◼ ► The reason people have longer sessions with those type of environments is because those are places where they want to be because it's immersive fun. It has all the qualities that the metaverse is going to have.
00:23:59 ◼ ► Or even just as simple as staring at a computer or your phone using your web browser to buy stuff. Shopping, a potential use of the metaverse ties well into Facebook's advertising business.
00:24:11 ◼ ► People don't shop in tiny increments of time. People spend time going through websites looking for sales, clicking around because it's a pleasurable thing to do. To window shop online, to browse for things, to do product research.
00:24:25 ◼ ► Almost anything that has been described as being part of the metaverse that people already do but not in VR. They do for extended periods of time because it's an enjoyable or productive thing to do.
00:24:38 ◼ ► And so for VR to be part of that, it can't be so onerous that you can only tolerate it in small chunks. It should be either completely transparent or else, ideally, desirable.
00:24:50 ◼ ► That I would prefer to do my research on what my next dishwasher will be on my big computer with the big screen with a thousand browser tabs. Because that is a tool that helps me get that job done better.
00:25:00 ◼ ► I don't go there and go, "Oh, I have to endure my computer. I hope I don't get too motion sick during this one hour dishwasher research session." I want to go on my computer instead of my phone because it has a bigger screen.
00:25:09 ◼ ► And that's a useful tool for me to do that task. Shopping, whatever. Repeat for any other activity. If I was hanging out with friends or playing a game or even taking a meeting or something.
00:25:21 ◼ ► I don't want to feel like, "Oh, I have to put on a VR headset again for this meeting and just thinking of that sweaty thing stuck into my face." Same thing with a laptop or a phone.
00:25:31 ◼ ► We don't say that you have to hold your phone in front of your face for eight hours a day and stare at it. But we do have to say, you will feel comfortable having your phone with you all day long and using it whenever you need to use it because you need to use the phone for something.
00:25:43 ◼ ► Same thing with your computer. Doesn't mean you have to sit there in front of it all day long for eight hours and stare at it, but it should be the type of thing that you can sit at with it on your desk at work all day long and use it for its intended purpose without undue effects again.
00:25:59 ◼ ► See also RSI, having a good chair, all that other stuff. So VR needs to fit into that. And right now, even just the ordeal of putting the thing on your face for a couple meetings would start to feel a little bit onerous.
00:26:10 ◼ ► Even if when you're in those meetings, it offers it a superior immersive experience that you wouldn't get by staring at your laptop with Teams. But see past episode where Mark talked about how many people might not want their meetings to be more immersive.
00:26:23 ◼ ► The final point here, the dream for AR is something different and I don't think the two should be confused. That I kind of disagree with because, I mean, obviously they are different.
00:26:32 ◼ ► AR is where you're seeing the real world and it is being augmented with virtual stuff. But in the end, it's more or less the same idea. It's just a question of what canvas you're painting on.
00:26:42 ◼ ► AR is harder, but AR also is potentially richer because all the things that you can do in VR, you can also do in AR and by augmenting the real physical world with this virtual stuff, many new possibilities open up.
00:26:55 ◼ ► Technologically speaking, and in terms of what does this offer that looking at my phone doesn't offer, it's the same. The advantages of AR and VR, what they offer over mediums that don't have an R at the end, what they offer over your phone, your laptop, your computer, is the fact that it's like a 3D world that reacts to where you're looking around.
00:27:14 ◼ ► And yes, the technology is technically different, but the sort of mental, something extra special that AR and VR have, it's the same something extra special. It's just a question of where they're painting that, whether it's just on a blank field of pixels that they control entirely or onto the real world.
00:27:33 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Memberful. Monetize your passion and diversify your revenue stream with membership.
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00:29:25 ◼ ► So we also got a little bit of feedback with regard to Apple TV and Apple TV+. Don Liebes writes, "The Apple TV app is not the only way to watch Apple TV+, which we all knew and I think every single one of us forgot."
00:29:36 ◼ ► Don writes, "I watch it in my web browser at tv.apple.com." Which again, I think we all knew that, we all completely forgot.
00:29:46 ◼ ► Then Igor Makarov writes, "I tried Apple TV+ on a Windows PC and well, the web app is really awful."
00:29:55 ◼ ► Igor continues, "I watched one episode and there were weird black screen blankings at random times."
00:30:04 ◼ ► "And three times the player just halted and wouldn't restart. I had to reload the page to get going again. The app forgot my progress, of course.
00:30:13 ◼ ► There are four identically labeled options for English subtitles, not counting the closed captioning.
00:30:29 ◼ ► And then Joe Mesterhazy writes, "With regard to Marco's HomePod, the HomePod popping is a design problem that will eventually kill your HomePod."
00:30:39 ◼ ► "This guy diagnosed it but there's no cure and there's a YouTube link, which we will put in the show notes. It is a timestamp link to about 40 seconds.
00:30:45 ◼ ► There is a 1 to 3 volt DC offset always being fed to the speaker, which slowly cooks it.
00:30:53 ◼ ► The good thing is, so, I am a little bit validated with the HomePod feedback so far, both that it seems like my HomePod problems happen to a lot of people,
00:31:04 ◼ ► and also there are a lot of people out there who like their HomePods as much as I like mine and are very disappointed also that there seems to be no replacement coming anytime soon, if ever, for the full-sized HomePod.
00:31:17 ◼ ► And so, while I'm sad that it does sound like I'm probably going to lose these HomePods pretty soon, I'm not the only person who likes my HomePod.
00:31:27 ◼ ► You know, because it was such a relative flop in the market, you wouldn't expect many of us fans to really be out there, but there are dozens of us.
00:31:39 ◼ ► This YouTube video, I don't know how much stake I put in it. I don't know enough to judge whether this analysis in this video is correct or entirely wrong.
00:31:48 ◼ ► It's just an example of someone who's got some HomePods that are doing weird stuff and is trying to fix them and getting weird results.
00:31:55 ◼ ► So, take it with a grain of salt, but it does seem like HomePods have a series of potential ailments that are causing them to not be reliable.
00:32:04 ◼ ► The bottom line is people who have HomePods and have had them for a while say it's just not working like it used to.
00:32:09 ◼ ► Where the fault lies, we're not entirely sure, but either way it's not good because, as Mark pointed out, they're not making more of them.
00:32:17 ◼ ► We talked, I think last week, in an aside about Plex and two-speaker feedback, or playback, or two-zone playback.
00:32:24 ◼ ► So what I want to do is I want to have a video playing using Plex in my living room and then have the audio being piped not only to the living room, but to the screened-in porch, or perhaps some other place in the house.
00:32:35 ◼ ► And I've been saying that this with Plex specifically, once I selected the screened-in porch as an additional speaker, the audio would only come out in the screened-in porch.
00:32:47 ◼ ► So Ebernet on Twitter points out the issue is a lack of AirPlay 2 support in Plex and it's not a problem with tvOS.
00:32:54 ◼ ► So I think to myself, "Fine, now I finally have to listen to the entire internet who has told me I really need to use Infuse."
00:33:17 ◼ ► Yeah, so I'm a little ignorant on this because I've only used it for a few minutes, but my limited understanding of Infuse is that it is similar to Plex and it's like an omnivorous consumer, but unlike Plex, it doesn't require server-side software.
00:33:31 ◼ ► So you can just point it at like a network share, for example, and it'll slurp up all the media that's there and is...
00:33:38 ◼ ► And similar to Plex is fairly omnivorous in what it'll eat, you know, it'll play an MP... an MKV, it'll play AVIs, it'll play all sorts of different things.
00:33:54 ◼ ► Well, the thing I use Infuse for, the thing that distinguishes it for me, distinguishes it from Plex.
00:33:58 ◼ ► You're right what you said about what it does and how it operates, but the main reason I install it and the main reason I turn to it is that Plex, being a server, will, depending on your settings and sometimes in ways that are unexpected, try to feed you video that it thinks is appropriate for your device, which may involve transcoding.
00:34:18 ◼ ► Right? Happening on the server. And that can be a problem if you have a weak server or if it's transcoding something in a weird way or if it's transcoding when you didn't want it to be, whereas Infuse, there is no server.
00:34:29 ◼ ► So if you point it to your SMB share, setting aside its whole metadata lookup and all this other stuff, if you point it to your SMB share, you know that the video and audio decompression of that file off of your server is happening on your device.
00:34:43 ◼ ► And so if you think you have a fast device like an iPad Pro, but your Plex server is choking on something, try Infuse because then it's going to give your iPad Pro a chance to do the decoding.
00:34:53 ◼ ► And then you'll know, like, is this file screwed up or is it just because my Plex server is too slow?
00:34:58 ◼ ► Indeed. So in the onboarding for Infuse was not super obvious to me. Maybe I'm just a dummy. I don't know.
00:35:05 ◼ ► But it did eventually slurp up my Plex library by connecting to Plex. And I guess it just basically looked at everything and said, OK, this is what's available and I know how to consume it.
00:35:15 ◼ ► But frustratingly, it doesn't use any of the Plex server's metadata that you kind of alluded to this a moment ago.
00:35:25 ◼ ► And my very limited understanding is for a long time that was really crummy because then every one of your Infuse clients, like your iPad, your phone, your Apple TV, they all need to repeat the same work overnight.
00:35:37 ◼ ► So anyway, but I tried it and sure enough, it worked no problem. So I could broadcast in both living room and the screened in porch video.
00:35:46 ◼ ► Well, the video was only living room, of course, but the audio was going to both destinations.
00:35:53 ◼ ► And he's insisting that it works for him in Plex. And Ryan is not a dope. So I'm really wondering what the hell is going on here.
00:36:03 ◼ ► And it turns out both of us were right. So Ryan's set up and his is a little different because I'm on the Plex beta and he is not.
00:36:11 ◼ ► But his setup was that it was working just fine with Plex as configured out of the box.
00:36:22 ◼ ► And there's an option, which I don't know if this is released or not, so we're just going to pretend that it is.
00:36:27 ◼ ► There's an option for Plex to use its old video player. It's literally called use old video player.
00:36:33 ◼ ► And they encourage you to do that if you need higher compatibility. They're not specific about what compatibility you're talking about, but compatibility.
00:36:41 ◼ ► So I think to myself, hmm, I wonder what this does. And so I turned on use old video player, thus turning off the new video player.
00:36:52 ◼ ► So I suspect, I don't know this, but I suspect that the old video players like the out of the box AV player or something along those lines.
00:37:01 ◼ ► And their new video player is something custom. And because the out of the box, again, this is all supposition, but the AV player out of the box solution.
00:37:09 ◼ ► That obviously will support all the things that Apple supports because it's Apple's video player.
00:37:13 ◼ ► But Plex's new video player only supports the things that Plex supports. And from the rumblings I've heard, they really don't give a crap about AirPlay 2.
00:37:21 ◼ ► So my near term solution until I can't do it anymore is to use old video player. And then if that eventually becomes not an option anymore, then I'll probably switch to infuse on the occasions that I would like to listen to something in two locations.
00:37:41 ◼ ► My favorite thing about this journey is that what you're trying to do is play audio in two rooms that are very close to each other physically in the house. And this would be so easily accomplished with wires.
00:38:01 ◼ ► I mean, literally the door to the screen and porch is on the edge of the living room. Now, Marco's seen my living room. It is a very like squat but wide room.
00:38:08 ◼ ► But nonetheless, your point is completely fair. And yes, if I made the living room loud enough, it would be in as long as this door was open and screened in porch, you could absolutely hear everything in the screened in porch. So you're not.
00:38:17 ◼ ► Yeah. And you could fairly easily run a second pair of speaker wires basically from your entertainment center in the living room out to the porch.
00:38:26 ◼ ► And then you could have just passive speakers there and have a receiver in the living room controlling both.
00:38:31 ◼ ► I mean, we talked about this before. You'd have problems like remotely controlling volume independently with that kind of setup. But there are ways that can be done.
00:38:40 ◼ ► But it's so funny to think like playing music in two rooms is a very simple solved problem like 15, 20 years ago. And now it's very complicated and it doesn't work half the time.
00:38:55 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's funny you say that because literally the speaker wire that is connected to the speakers in the screened in porch, it enters the house right behind my entertainment center.
00:39:04 ◼ ► But the reason I do it this way is exactly the things you said. Like, you know, there are occasions I want to have two different things playing.
00:39:11 ◼ ► There are occasions I would like, well, basically always I would like independent volume control. And again, there's ways I could get around this.
00:39:16 ◼ ► But when this all works, I swear to you, it's delightful. But getting it all to work has been far more to your point of an adventure than I wanted it to be.
00:39:25 ◼ ► Speaking of adventures that are way too long, tell me about your newest case for your iPhone.
00:39:29 ◼ ► All right. So I mentioned last time when I was doing my big case review that there were a couple that hadn't come in yet.
00:39:39 ◼ ► It very much is like the kind of leather cases Apple used to make before they made closed bottoms like the way they do now.
00:39:49 ◼ ► So it really is like a very good alternative to the Apple leather case if what you want is that the bottom is open.
00:39:57 ◼ ► And I will say in my time using it so far, I have really enjoyed that feeling of like feeling the nice sharp phone edge on the bottom swipe when I'm like swiping up instead of having to hit a case there.
00:40:08 ◼ ► So I kind of I hate to admit that John was a little bit right about that, but I think John was right about open bottom being better.
00:40:28 ◼ ► This is why we have him on the show. All right. So a few other things about it are pretty nice and a few things are not so nice.
00:40:34 ◼ ► So the the camera plateau area, most cases for the iPhone 13 series, when they transition from the back of the phone to the camera plateau, usually it's like a hard plastic ridge or it's some other kind of like abrupt rising.
00:40:51 ◼ ► And what they do with the bullsh*t case is they have like a nice gentle like slope upwards, like it kind of curves up.
00:40:57 ◼ ► It makes for a very nice premium feel in the pocket, like so you're not because you're not feeling around that camera, you're not feeling that hard plastic edge or that big sharp bump.
00:41:06 ◼ ► You're feeling just this nice smooth transition. So it's very nice, very nice feeling overall.
00:41:36 ◼ ► So flipping the mute switch in the bullsh*t case is kind of something that you don't want to do very often.
00:41:41 ◼ ► The other thing is that the the color I got, I got the ocean color, and I think their their photographs on the website of the ocean color are generous.
00:41:51 ◼ ► It is in practice much darker than it looks like on their site and has a bit more of a greenish tint along with the blue than their photos suggest.
00:42:00 ◼ ► I don't like their giant bull logo on the back. Maybe it's because I don't like cattle that much.
00:42:11 ◼ ► Yeah, a dime could cover it just barely. The other thing is that the leather they have used has a pretty strong smell.
00:42:18 ◼ ► And leather, part of the appeal of leather, which I'll get to, but part of the appeal of leather is it has that nice smell of whatever the hell chemicals make it what it is.
00:42:28 ◼ ► But this smells a little bit bad. It's not a 100% great smell. It's kind of a bad smell. That's fairly strong.
00:42:40 ◼ ► But ultimately, you know, it's funny, I actually after the last episode where I said it hadn't come in yet, I had ordered it and hadn't come in yet, I emailed them saying, hey, can I cancel this order?
00:42:59 ◼ ► So I'm kind of stuck with it now. But if you want a nice leather case, this is a nice leather case. I think I actually don't like leather anymore for my phone case.
00:43:11 ◼ ► Now that I have tried the other like, you know, better plastic options, I'm really very much enjoying like the soft squishy TPU of the clear case and the whatever the heck the katabe case is made out of.
00:43:25 ◼ ► I'm really enjoying those. So I think ultimately I don't want leather anymore. Most of the time.
00:43:34 ◼ ► Maybe you want a plastic leather because the Bullseye one looks like a leathery leather. Like it's very grainy leathery or whatever.
00:43:39 ◼ ► But this the old XR case I have for my 12 Pro is a very plastic leather. Like if I were to give it to you and not tell you is leather, you would say this is the worst fake leather ever seen.
00:43:48 ◼ ► Apparently it's a real leather. But it looks and feels very much like plastic. But I still like it because it's the experience I've had with all the Apple leather cases and this old XR one is you get it and you're like, oh, no, I've made a mistake.
00:44:00 ◼ ► It's too slippery. But then it breaks in a little bit. And that's true of this leather case as well. Like that it gets tackier over time as the weather as the leather sort of wears a little bit.
00:44:10 ◼ ► But mostly it seems completely uniform, almost like it's a plastic surface. So if I was to design a plastic case, I want a plastic case that's not as grippy as the silicone one.
00:44:20 ◼ ► But a little bit grippy. I would design something that's like this one. Like this old XR leather case and the Apple leather cases do not read like leather. They read like simulated. They read like vegan leather or something.
00:44:33 ◼ ► But I like how they work in the hand. I do feel like I have a good positive grip on it, but it slides in and out of pocket real easy.
00:44:41 ◼ ► Yeah, but ultimately I actually have switched back to the Kada Bay one because I'm going to do some car driving over the next week or so. And so I wanted the nice mag safe.
00:44:52 ◼ ► But I think I'm totally fine with my new plastic lifestyle. Because again, with the leather one I was afraid of setting it down on a wet counter or anything like that. And it's kind of nice with plastic to just know like, "Yeah, this thing can get a little wet and it's fine."
00:45:09 ◼ ► I recognize that the bare bottom is nicer, but because I have had a covered bottom for months now, I...
00:45:28 ◼ ► This kind of convinced me that like, yeah, a bare bottom is better, but I don't necessarily need it. Because when I don't have it, I don't really notice that much.
00:45:37 ◼ ► I can't believe that OXR does not have any iPhone 13 cases still. I just went to the website to check again.
00:45:43 ◼ ► It's a good thing I didn't get this. Well, I guess these are options. There. It says iPhone 12 Pro Max. New. Not new, guys. Sorry.
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00:46:17 ◼ ► Number one, they're isolated from other tools. Getting data into them is limiting and boring. Secondly, it's also way too easy to accidentally delete stuff when you share a spreadsheet with others.
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00:47:50 ◼ ► All right, so we really don't want you to have a bare bottom, Marco. So tell us about your pants.
00:47:55 ◼ ► Going back again to phones and cases and pants. So the original problem I stated was that my new iPhone 13 Pro, which is significantly larger and heavier than the mini I was carrying on last year, it just kept sliding forward in my pocket and was, you know, looked stupid and was uncomfortable on walks.
00:48:15 ◼ ► And I got this wonderful email from Samuel Cohen, who said, I share your frustration with phone slippage in standard jeans pockets. To combat this, I sew the walls of the pocket flap in half to create two separate pocket chambers, one sized perfectly for my phone in the spot where I want it to stay.
00:48:46 ◼ ► But the basic idea I actually had a couple of people suggest this, but Samuel illustrated it best.
00:48:51 ◼ ► The basic idea is turn the pants inside out or whatever, and you pull the actual pocket out, which is this double sided piece of fabric in there.
00:48:58 ◼ ► And you actually sew a seam down the middle of it vertically so that you're basically dividing it into two vertical chambers.
00:49:05 ◼ ► So by making the one closer to the side of your leg just big enough to fit the phone, then it can't slide over into the front of your leg.
00:49:14 ◼ ► Which is a fairly labor intensive solution to this problem where I should have just probably gotten a smaller phone to begin with.
00:49:22 ◼ ► But this is actually a really hilariously clever solution. I have not tried it yet though because I found a different solution.
00:49:31 ◼ ► Before you move on to the different solution, the problem I see with this solution is now you have a line of stitching going down the center of your pants that people can see from the outside.
00:49:43 ◼ ► You're only stitching the inside of the pocket. You're not stitching, I mean you might see like the imprint of having something thicker there.
00:49:49 ◼ ► Oh I see, you're just stitching the liner part? Alright, well anyway. The second problem with this thing is now you can't put your wallet in your front pocket.
00:49:58 ◼ ► I'm just telling you, you're compromising your pocket. Like car trunks that have a divider let you remove the divider because sometimes you need to store larger things.
00:50:14 ◼ ► You can get like maybe like a velcro in there so like when you wanted to you can zip it apart but then put, I don't know.
00:50:22 ◼ ► Well I don't, I mean I don't carry my phone the way you do so. I'm just saying I feel like sewing.
00:50:27 ◼ ► Cause like that other part of the pocket is now wasted. What can you put there? Two pens?
00:50:31 ◼ ► Well that's the thing now, I mean I think this is a bit bananas but with that said in the defense of this bananas idea then you can put something else in the other part of the pocket because you're not worried about it clanging against the phone and scratching it or whatever.
00:50:43 ◼ ► Yeah this actually adds cargo capacity because it has a divider. You know as opposed to this one thing that you don't want anything to touch.
00:50:56 ◼ ► The only reason I haven't attempted this yet, well number one we don't have a sewing machine here and I don't want to do it by hand. And number two.
00:51:15 ◼ ► My only concern with this approach would be that I think inserting and removing the phone from the pocket might be a little more of a sensitive operation there because now you have an opportunity to hit that divider and miss basically.
00:51:31 ◼ ► Now you have to go in with like two fingers like a little pincer like a carnal one of those arcade machines with a claw.
00:51:36 ◼ ► Well you probably don't have to be that tight of a fit on it but anyway. And then next year when bigger phones come out then you have to get on the pants.
00:51:43 ◼ ► You can't put your hands in your pocket anymore. Speaking of things that won't fit in your pocket. You can't do like a cool pose.
00:51:50 ◼ ► You gotta do the uncool pose because everyone knows that smoking is terrible and you'd have to say you'd have one hand in your pocket and the other one flicking a cigarette.
00:52:15 ◼ ► I've stated before on top four that I think jagged little pill is possibly the most influential album of the 90's.
00:52:22 ◼ ► You're trying to keep your music opinions to top four. I don't know if they can survive exposure to a broader audience.
00:52:35 ◼ ► Plus if you really do have cargo related problems with your pants I think there is a style of pant that one could get that would help with your cargo.
00:52:52 ◼ ► Oh god. Every single one of these pants links people have sent me for some other kind of pants that had extra pockets.
00:52:59 ◼ ► There's always a picture of the dude in the photos putting a gun magazine in these extra pockets. I'm like really?
00:53:06 ◼ ► I mean what else? You can sew your pockets so the gun magazine fits exactly and doesn't move towards the middle if you're like.
00:53:15 ◼ ► Also it's not called a magazine. It's important if you're going to talk about firearms that you be technically correct.
00:53:24 ◼ ► I don't know. I'm just making a joke. I actually have no idea what it's called. Nor do I care. Please do not send corrections. I've become our living name.
00:53:33 ◼ ► I actually have solved the pants problem mostly. And that is again dammit I think John was right. I just started wearing tighter pants.
00:53:58 ◼ ► Wow do you have a man bun and a beard and you do handstands? Because that's what's on the front of this website.
00:54:16 ◼ ► Anyway so the pants that I have that I've worn for a few years now at least. I've been a big fan of the Banana Republic traveler line and the quote rapid movement denim.
00:54:31 ◼ ► Because that's what you need when you sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day.
00:54:34 ◼ ► I know right. Now I can assure you rapid movement denim does not necessarily need you to move rapidly in order to enjoy it.
00:54:45 ◼ ► Stretch pants are awesome and I strongly recommend if those of you who are out there wearing jeans right now.
00:55:12 ◼ ► So I've been wearing those forever. I have a few pretty old pairs so they're pretty broken in.
00:55:16 ◼ ► And those I have this problem severely. I know this because I put one of those on today for the first time in a while.
00:55:23 ◼ ► And the problem was way worse. What I realized was so different is that for the last month or so.
00:55:36 ◼ ► Well they I mean they're from London yeah. So I guess they would call them. I guess they do call them trousers.
00:55:44 ◼ ► Yeah but this is they make pants that are not super cheap but not too ridiculously expensive.
00:56:04 ◼ ► Yes no these these are these are you know intact pants but I I got a pair of their corduroys last fall.
00:56:11 ◼ ► And so I knew about them from that. I decided to try their jeans this fall and they're kind of amazing.
00:56:17 ◼ ► So this is why what got me to this company. Yes of course it was an Instagram ad. They work very well on me.
00:56:22 ◼ ► But what got me to this company was that as listeners and certainly hosts know. I am not a tall person.
00:56:30 ◼ ► Now if you try to buy pants that do not advertise their length like a lot of these fancy companies.
00:56:38 ◼ ► No no a lot of these yeah a lot of fancy companies if you if you try to try to buy some pants from whatever people are recommending.
00:56:44 ◼ ► Which I saw a lot of during the recommendation the great recommendation surge of October.
00:56:49 ◼ ► You know a lot of them if they don't sell pants as like their main thing or if it's not a big thing.
00:56:55 ◼ ► If it's some brand that just happens to have made a few a few models of pants they'll sell all the pants at the same fixed length.
00:57:08 ◼ ► My ideal pant size is 32 by 29. And even that leaves some you know some hangover on my shoes.
00:57:18 ◼ ► I just think it looks nice. I you know probably more like 28 but certainly 29 is my ideal length.
00:57:24 ◼ ► Marco you are a wee man but you are not that that much of a wee man. I mean come my goodness you must be in the 30s.
00:57:44 ◼ ► And so anyway one of the things they they have you know like you pick obviously the waist and the length.
00:57:55 ◼ ► Yes I hate it that when you shop for jeans or other men's pants it's two inch increments.
00:58:20 ◼ ► So I I've been wearing five thickness B this winter because I crammed a year of restaurant eating into one summer.
00:58:33 ◼ ► This this this thickness thing is a little bit normative because the options are a narrow thighs B regular thighs.
00:58:45 ◼ ► And then C instead of saying adjective thighs like narrow thighs and regular thighs C says for the wide thigh guys.
00:58:53 ◼ ► Well let me tell you that I think that's accurate because I thought B was a good default.
00:59:06 ◼ ► I later tried a second pair of a different or of a similar model in A. Not only does it fit better and look better.
00:59:21 ◼ ► So it turns out the answer to fixing the phone problem is either so aligned at all of your pockets or by tighter pants.
00:59:36 ◼ ► If you do spend an obscene amount maybe I mean like you you spend a lot and still got pants didn't fit because you picked the wrong option.
00:59:45 ◼ ► Yes and that's why I like this company because it makes it easy for me to get stuff that fits me which is not easy to do in this area.
00:59:52 ◼ ► You know I do like on Spokes website I'm looking at their trousers and it says compare our styles.
01:00:15 ◼ ► So it says you know compare styles and they have fives and cords and heroes and house trousers.
01:00:20 ◼ ► And all of these are like the the the bottom half of an adult male like walking or standing or whatever.
01:00:28 ◼ ► And they really went all in on the sharps because it has a guy with one leg straight down and one leg straight out at a 90 degree angle who has apparently used his sharps pants to cut a watermelon in half.
01:00:47 ◼ ► When I went to the site the main navigation at the top makes me like have flashbacks to my honeymoon where the dress code at the resort we were staying in used a bunch of words I didn't understand.
01:01:09 ◼ ► I know what the word formal means. I know what the word casual means. I do not know what smart means.
01:01:50 ◼ ► Ernest has some of the lowest rates flexible payments and an in-house team ready to help.
01:02:00 ◼ ► With Ernest you could change your interest rate get a lower monthly payment and you never pay fees not even late fees.
01:02:06 ◼ ► By refinancing you can reduce your loan term save money or combine multiple loans into a simple monthly payment.
01:02:17 ◼ ► If you have any questions along the way you can talk to a real live human at Ernest for help.
01:02:22 ◼ ► With Ernest it only takes two minutes to see what your new rate could be and there's no credit impact.
01:02:38 ◼ ► Once again you get a one hundred dollar cash bonus when you visit Ernest.com/ATP to refinance your student loan.
01:03:14 ◼ ► So we wanted to, actually more John than anyone, but all three of us wanted to use a YouTube video that we saw as an excuse to kind of lay out what we think of as the Apple Silicon roadmap.
01:03:27 ◼ ► And so I presume it was John put this Max Tech video in our show notes, which of course will be in the show notes that you guys can see.
01:03:34 ◼ ► And it's kind of a, I don't know, it's a really long video. It was like a 17 minute video which is rich coming from the three of us. I understand that.
01:03:44 ◼ ► But it was a really long video where most of it I didn't think was that new and interesting to me.
01:03:51 ◼ ► But they did do a really good job of taking what we know about today's world and trying to extrapolate actual performance numbers.
01:04:02 ◼ ► But trying to figure out actual performance numbers of what a mythical like iMac or Mac Pro would be like.
01:04:07 ◼ ► And that I did think was pretty interesting. And suffice to say, the mythical forthcoming Mac Pro, if it's what we think it is with the J2 die or whatever, is going to be really frickin' fast.
01:04:21 ◼ ► Speaking of the Max Tech channel, I like this channel because despite the sort of samey cadence that the people who MC the channel have, which is no worse or better than anything else, but it is what it is.
01:04:36 ◼ ► I think they do a good job of, just like you said, distilling available information, summarizing it, and trying to extrapolate.
01:04:47 ◼ ► They'll make a new video when new information comes out and I can relate to that because that's what we do on the show.
01:04:51 ◼ ► We talk about a topic, we say what we have to say about it, and then when new information comes out we talk about it again and again.
01:04:56 ◼ ► And we build towards an understanding. And that's what the Max Tech things do as well, I feel like.
01:05:05 ◼ ► Anyway, that was just a jumping off point for this because when watching it, I felt like the people making this video, A, should listen to ATP.
01:05:12 ◼ ► And B, if they don't already, and B, they were dancing around something that has been in my mind when we've talked about this topic many times,
01:05:26 ◼ ► I think it's worth doing so now just in case everyone else listening doesn't also have this in the back of their mind.
01:05:33 ◼ ► So this is not an incredible insight. This is a thing that was so obvious that I left it unsaid for many episodes.
01:05:38 ◼ ► And we all kind of left it unsaid. And it's not necessarily what's going to happen, it's just the obvious thing.
01:05:44 ◼ ► So the obvious thing in terms of Apple Silicon Roadmap is using past events and what we know of Apple's current roadmap to say,
01:06:05 ◼ ► For many, many years Intel has been the big supplier for chips for personal computers, including eventually Apple computers.
01:06:11 ◼ ► Intel had a particular way of doing things, some of which is like, "Oh, it's the way Intel decided to do things."
01:06:17 ◼ ► But a lot of it has to just do with the nature of the business of making silicon chips.
01:06:25 ◼ ► so it is reasonable to say that Intel wasn't just doing what it did for the hell of it.
01:06:30 ◼ ► There are reasons to do it the way they've done it, which means Apple will probably do it the same way.
01:06:46 ◼ ► all the adders and multipliers and the registers and all your branch predictors and your caches and everything that goes into the CPU.
01:07:02 ◼ ► In Apple's case, they basically do that design for the phone, because it's their biggest product, it's their most important product,
01:07:11 ◼ ► So let's say they make the--I don't remember the numbers on these things--but what are the M1 cores?
01:07:24 ◼ ► If you're building a new chip, like a new CPU, new GPU cores, all that stuff, that is a big investment.
01:07:37 ◼ ► Maybe you build it on a new process node, but either way, that's where you put in your big money.
01:07:43 ◼ ► Then you take that investment and you make the Mac version of that chip, which would be the M1,
01:07:51 ◼ ► You might add some stuff that the Mac needs, use maybe the same GPU cores slightly modified for different texture formats or whatever.
01:08:47 ◼ ► Then the next step up is you're going to release a thing that's two of those dies or four of those dies
01:09:11 ◼ ► Then a little bit later, you release the M1 Pro Max Duo, which has two of those things.
01:09:16 ◼ ► Then a little bit later after that, you launch the M1 Pro Max Quadro in the Mac Pro or whatever.
01:09:50 ◼ ► That's how long it takes from the time the A14 comes out to the time that thing appears in a Mac Pro.
01:09:55 ◼ ► The question people had is, "Does that mean it's going to be two to four years between each one of these computers?"
01:10:04 ◼ ► While that's going on, while we're sitting here waiting for the iMac that's going to have two JCDIs inside them,
01:10:27 ◼ ► The next thing that's going to appear in this pipeline is the MacBook Air with the A14 core.
01:10:33 ◼ ► It's the M1-sized chip, probably going to be called M2, but it's got the A15 stuff in it.
01:10:50 ◼ ► The big iMac that has two of those things in it but also supports the M2 Pro and the M2 Max.
01:11:00 ◼ ► This is the, assuming no surprises, which is not guaranteed, but I just want to say, just laying it out,
01:11:16 ◼ ► Why don't, when the A14 comes in the phone, at the same time, why don't they release the Mac Pro with 40 of those cores in it?
01:11:24 ◼ ► When the A16 system on a chip comes out in next year's phone, why don't they just release all the Macs at the same time?
01:11:35 ◼ ► it takes a while to figure out how to manufacture that thing successfully, economically, without errors,
01:11:43 ◼ ► That's why you have this rollout of, first you make the small chip, then we make the medium,
01:11:52 ◼ ► That's not because they don't sell a lot of the big ones, although that is somewhat of a factor or whatever.
01:11:57 ◼ ► It's mostly because you can't jump right in and make a four-die, giant package thing on day one
01:12:05 ◼ ► for a chip that you've never manufactured before, for cores that you've never manufactured before,
01:12:16 ◼ ► They would make a new chip, and then two years later, the Xeons would be updated with those cores in them.
01:12:24 ◼ ► We're on this lake here on our MacBooks, but the CPU cores in the Mac Pro are two years old.
01:12:37 ◼ ► Once you get into this cadence, you can assume that, assuming Apple stays on a yearly cycle or whatever,
01:12:43 ◼ ► around this time every year, there will be new MacBook Airs with the new cores in them,
01:12:52 ◼ ► By the time you're getting the Mac Pro, it is not going to have the same cores that are in the phone.
01:13:01 ◼ ► but this is the expected cadence of rolling out chips starting from something maybe as small as the watch,
01:13:12 ◼ ► I don't know if there's any way Apple can change that, but there is a possibility that Apple decides not to do that cadence,
01:13:21 ◼ ► but instead, let's say, holds back the Mac Pro until they can put an M2 in it or something like that,
01:13:29 ◼ ► just because the Mac Pro is such a low-volume product that there's no big hurry to get it out.
01:13:35 ◼ ► I don't think they're going to do that this time because they are kind of in a hurry to get it out.
01:13:45 ◼ ► But if you're expecting, you know, when the iPhone 14 comes out with the new A16 system on a chip inside it,
01:13:52 ◼ ► to also have on the same day a Mac Pro with 40 of those cars, don't expect that, especially if it's a new process known.
01:14:00 ◼ ► This is sort of the natural cadence of learning how to manufacture whatever thing you designed in bigger and bigger sizes
01:14:46 ◼ ► Where so far, you know, it seems like if they wanted to -- and we'll see how this plays out over the next year or two --
01:15:00 ◼ ► They could update those every year, either with the launch of the iPhone or a few months later.
01:15:15 ◼ ► We don't actually know that every thing that becomes an M chip, you know, the M2 or M1,
01:15:23 ◼ ► we don't necessarily know that there's always going to be a Pro and Max version of that.
01:15:27 ◼ ► And we don't necessarily know that there's always going to be whatever the Mac Pro 2X and 4X versions are called.
01:15:34 ◼ ► That all is like a maybe. That's probably how it's going to work most of the time and maybe in most generations.
01:15:42 ◼ ► But we also won't be able to depend on that because they've already shown between iPhone and iPad
01:15:51 ◼ ► Maybe it's certain cores not being worth it, or maybe it's certain things like, you know,
01:16:10 ◼ ► And maybe the Pro version that goes -- maybe the Pro and Max version, maybe that's on a two year cycle too.
01:16:21 ◼ ► And it could change over time. So like I wouldn't expect this to always be a reliable thing.
01:16:26 ◼ ► We're like, okay, first you make this one, then the bigger one comes out in this month,
01:16:31 ◼ ► Like years could be different and cycles could be different, or things could go wrong with one of them,
01:16:39 ◼ ► So it's probably going to be roughly this cycle, but there's a lot of details that we don't know yet.
01:16:46 ◼ ► Two things on that. One, like the reason I think it's going to be like that this time is because Apple's on a timeline.
01:16:51 ◼ ► Like they don't have ARM versions of a big iMac or a multi-core thing. They don't have an ARM version of a Mac Pro.
01:16:58 ◼ ► They are on a two year timeline. The timelines basically line up to say, if you do the roll out that I described,
01:17:05 ◼ ► you get your A14, you get your M1, you get your M1 Pro and Max, you get your dual, and you get your quad.
01:17:10 ◼ ► That's two years. That's a two year timeline right there. They will just make their thing.
01:17:17 ◼ ► After that, it's definitely true that Apple could choose, especially on the high end, the M1, whatever they call it.
01:17:25 ◼ ► The one with the A14 cores, but you get 40 of them, you can wait two years between that one,
01:17:31 ◼ ► But the second thing is, part of Apple's frustration with Intel is sometimes Intel just didn't have the chips
01:17:38 ◼ ► And it's frustrating for Apple. If they don't have a high powered one, the Xeons haven't been updated in a while,
01:17:43 ◼ ► they don't have a really low powered one with a good GPU. Apple has always been at the whim of Intel
01:17:59 ◼ ► But a lot of the reason we were unsatisfied with the performance or the incremental year-over-year performance
01:18:09 ◼ ► was because Intel just didn't have chips to offer that were compelling in the computers that Apple wanted to make.
01:18:15 ◼ ► So one of the advantages of Apple making its own silicon is that it is now on the table
01:18:24 ◼ ► And if they don't do it, it's probably not because they can't, or because it didn't work out,
01:18:41 ◼ ► maybe we do that every two years because we can't recoup the cost because so few people buy Mac Pros.
01:18:56 ◼ ► Every year somehow they have a new system on the chip that's better than the previous one.
01:19:29 ◼ ► The main reason I'm not able to put this in here is when the Mac Pro comes out in December of 2022
01:19:49 ◼ ► Stefan writes, "I have a 2015 MacBook Pro, and although it was a great computer in its day,
01:19:54 ◼ ► I've recently begun to notice that it struggles with a few tasks that one would imagine a Pro machine
01:19:59 ◼ ► Running Visual Studio Code in particular seems to be onerous enough to require persistent use of the fan
01:20:14 ◼ ► if you can offload all of the data onto something else, like an external drive or something like that,
01:20:21 ◼ ► This isn't nearly as much like Windows used to be, where literally every six months I would reinstall Windows,
01:20:53 ◼ ► but also things like GPU and SSD speed are going to be way, way, way slower than what we have today.
01:21:28 ◼ ► I think Thunderbolt 2, but you could go that direction and strap a Thunderbolt disc to the back of it,
01:21:40 ◼ ► If there is someone around you or someone else who's comfortable working on the hardware on the inside,
01:21:47 ◼ ► that's a big if, but if you are willing to do that and willing to take the risks associated therein,
01:21:54 ◼ ► after such a long time with a laptop in particular, you are likely having not very good thermals.
01:22:01 ◼ ► If you can open it up and service it and if you're willing to do that and take those risks,
01:22:06 ◼ ► cleaning out the fans and possibly laying down new thermal interface material on the processor
01:22:12 ◼ ► and anything else that has heat sinks on it might be something that it needs by this point.
01:22:26 ◼ ► so unless you're really comfortable opening MacBooks, I wouldn't necessarily take that route.
01:22:37 ◼ ► because it's already old, it's going to get older, but if it still works today, that's great,
01:22:44 ◼ ► and keep using it until it doesn't work anymore or until you can motivate yourself to somehow get an upgrade.
01:22:51 ◼ ► My advice is to do what Marco said, crack the sucker open and try to replace that thermal compound
01:22:56 ◼ ► and totally break the computer, which will finally force you to get a new one because you desperately need a new one.
01:23:00 ◼ ► I know that's not the question. The question is how do I keep the old computer running,
01:23:03 ◼ ► but the thing is, I understand this motive. As someone who kept the same computer for ten years,
01:23:07 ◼ ► I understand why you want to keep the old computer running because you're just not ready to buy one yet,
01:23:37 ◼ ► This is like a discontinuity in the performance characteristics, especially of laptops.
01:24:42 ◼ ► Gilherme Alais writes, "After importing my collection of about 30,000 photos into iCloud Photo Library,
01:24:48 ◼ ► I found myself going through tons of useless pictures such as photos of bank receipts, shopping lists, documents,
01:25:03 ◼ ► Mainly what I am looking for is a 'safe zone' for my pictures that I can show to people
01:25:30 ◼ ► and they accidentally see a screenshot of a weather app or a bank receipt picture or something.
01:25:42 ◼ ► One thing I have found, there are now smart albums that Apple automatically creates for you for things like screenshots.
01:25:49 ◼ ► But if for some reason you don't want to use those or you wanted to go with a little bit different angle on it,
01:26:08 ◼ ► and other EXIF data bits that might apply to one of these types of things more than others.
01:26:17 ◼ ► We've answered similar questions to this before, but I think the particular angle on this one was
01:26:25 ◼ ► So for the receipts things, Apple added the screenshot library a couple versions of iOS ago.
01:26:33 ◼ ► Yes, screenshots are easy, but pictures of receipts, especially now they're doing text extraction,
01:27:14 ◼ ► That gets back to my, "If you're going to do one thing with your photos, fave the good ones."
01:27:18 ◼ ► And once you've faved the good ones, your favorites view, you don't even have to make this.
01:27:39 ◼ ► You have to use it as, "By hitting this heart, I am saying this will go into the collection that is safe for everyone to view."
01:27:48 ◼ ► But the only way to get a truly safe thing, which is making me think you have sexy pictures you don't want to be able to see,
01:28:03 ◼ ► "I've spent some time trying to figure out the differences between a junior and senior developer.
01:28:07 ◼ ► A certain amount of experience in years seems to be a given, but what about technical skills?
01:28:24 ◼ ► I think it would be fun to do this from the least qualified to answer this question to most.
01:28:45 ◼ ► but what I would propose is that anybody talking about design patterns is probably a junior developer.
01:28:52 ◼ ► Junior developers are smart people who maybe don't have enough experience to know how to rein it in
01:29:11 ◼ ► A senior developer, I would expect to have wisdom, which is different from intelligence.
01:29:28 ◼ ► or "how do we avoid having our junior programmers exercise their 20 year old intelligence
01:29:34 ◼ ► by doing all these cool language tricks that actually make it harder to maintain and harder to read code?"
01:29:40 ◼ ► A senior developer should have the wisdom to be able to direct people to do things in a more boring way
01:29:51 ◼ ► I have to confess that that was an astonishingly good answer, which I almost entirely agree with.
01:30:24 ◼ ► They're probably going to be able to deduce what is the most important thing for right now.
01:30:45 ◼ ► I think, yes, if you wanted something more concrete, you could distill it in years of experience
01:31:07 ◼ ► One of them is the way that's probably inspiring this question the way you see the Internet a lot.
01:31:12 ◼ ► Which is basically those nature films when they show the male birds doing displays with their feathers
01:31:29 ◼ ► there is this feather display thing of trying to show that they are the biggest, toughest developer.
01:31:47 ◼ ► It's total, you know, whatever the nature term is for that, like mating dance, feather, plumage, you know, whatever.
01:31:55 ◼ ► That is mostly a sideshow, but still is a bunch of programmers trying to figure out, am I improving?
01:32:04 ◼ ► Like, what am I shooting for, what is my goal, am I still junior, or can I now call myself senior?
01:32:10 ◼ ► The second place this comes into play and this place that I have more experience is in big companies.
01:32:14 ◼ ► In big companies, there are actual titles, they may not be called junior or senior developer,
01:32:29 ◼ ► they might mean different amounts of stock awards if you're in a startup or a public company.
01:32:37 ◼ ► And the second conversation about this is like, I'm in a big company, what do I have to do to get from whatever level I'm at now to the next?
01:32:48 ◼ ► Or, if I'm trying to be hired into a big company, should I try to be hired at level X, level Y, or level Z?
01:32:54 ◼ ► Whether they're called junior, senior, whatever, they have terrible titles that Marco luckily has never had to hear in his life,
01:33:04 ◼ ► And the words are meaningful then, they're meaningful to your life, they're meaningful to deciding like,
01:33:09 ◼ ► if I was in company X and my title was this, when I go to company Y, what title should I be saying that I deserve to get?
01:33:23 ◼ ► And that conversation is, I think, much more important and has life consequences versus just arguing on Reddit
01:33:33 ◼ ► But the third one, which is kind of the question that both of you answered, is setting aside companies and their titles
01:33:40 ◼ ► and real world consequences and setting aside people arguing on the internet about who's the biggest, toughest programmer.
01:33:54 ◼ ► So it shows scenes from, I believe, well, it's the pilot episode of Lost and then I think like maybe episode two or three of Lost.
01:34:01 ◼ ► I don't remember the timeline, maybe it's still episode one. But anyway, Lost is a cool show.
01:34:07 ◼ ► Not spoiling too much in the pilot episode, there is an airliner crashes and a ridiculous number of people survive it,
01:34:15 ◼ ► But anyway, an airliner crashes and there is a girl standing in the, a young lady standing in the rubble crying.
01:34:29 ◼ ► because she's just been in a terrible plane crash. Above that one it says junior developer.
01:34:33 ◼ ► The right side of the image shows that same girl a couple episodes later laying on a blanket on the beach
01:34:50 ◼ ► This reminds me, I'm going to go one more level deep before I start talking about these,
01:34:55 ◼ ► of a quote that I think was from an interview with Gene Hackman, but I could not find it on the internet,
01:35:27 ◼ ► He's kind of balding, got gray curly hair, even at that time, even like 20, 30 years ago.
01:35:32 ◼ ► And they asked him to talk about acting, or maybe he was in the actor's studio on PBS or something.
01:35:43 ◼ ► and you've been in a lot of big movies," again, he was in the original Superman, his Lex Luthor,
01:36:02 ◼ ► Being on a set, working with big directors, seeing other stars that you maybe saw in movies when you were a kid,
01:36:07 ◼ ► reading from a script, memorizing your lines, working with writers, the whole nine yards.
01:36:13 ◼ ► And you also get used to being in front of the camera and doing different dramatic scenes,
01:36:19 ◼ ► And he says, "After doing that for many, many years, you develop a certain kind of poise
01:36:36 ◼ ► So you have a certain level of poise that, say, someone who's on their first big movie doesn't have.
01:36:46 ◼ ► He was trying to basically make a joke that he said, "I'm not a good actor. It's just that I don't panic."
01:36:51 ◼ ► And that poise, people look at that and say, "Wow, this is the world's greatest actor, but really, I'm just chill."
01:36:57 ◼ ► And so this junior/senior developer thing, there's a crash plane with rubble and flames in both of these pictures.
01:37:18 ◼ ► everything's all broken, nobody knows how anything works, everything's crashing all the time.
01:37:22 ◼ ► But when you're the senior developer, it's like the "this is fine" meme, to use a more recent thing.
01:37:34 ◼ ► And you develop a certain amount of poise, and people interpret that poise as seniority.
01:37:47 ◼ ► in that the thing you were talking about, gaining experience, really, there's kind of no amount of knowledge or skills or acronyms that you can know
01:37:58 ◼ ► in your very first job as a programmer that's going to make you "senior" the day you land in your very first job as a programmer.
01:38:11 ◼ ► And not just experience, because on the show Lost, not everyone deals with what happens on that island in the same chill way,
01:38:19 ◼ ► including, by the way, the characters in this scene. It's not a great example, but it works visually.
01:38:23 ◼ ► You can be at a company as a programmer, or multiple companies, for years and years, and never graduate from a sort of junior developer mindset.
01:38:45 ◼ ► You can't help but gain a little bit of experience from that, but to climb the ladder of actual experience,
01:38:52 ◼ ► setting aside the plumage displays on the internet, and setting aside the climbing the corporate ladder and different titles.
01:38:59 ◼ ► If you actually want to develop your skills to a higher and higher level, you have to not only have experience,
01:39:08 ◼ ► You have to have worked on big, complicated systems and successfully created them or made them better.
01:39:14 ◼ ► You have to set goals for yourself and eventually accomplish them, even if you failed the first two or three times you did.
01:39:21 ◼ ► It's not just experience. It is experience doing more and more complicated things and eventually succeeding at them,
01:39:30 ◼ ► Merely doing the same thing for 20 years as a programmer and never getting any better, that's called a career.
01:39:45 ◼ ► and they fix power lines after the first one or two years on the job, they've got all the skills they need to have,
01:39:50 ◼ ► and they work fixing power lines for 50 years, and they never get any better at fixing them,
01:39:55 ◼ ► they're good enough at fixing power lines to fix the power lines. They're doing the job.
01:39:59 ◼ ► Maybe they never wanted to be the person who says, "I have a new way to redesign the whole power grid."
01:40:04 ◼ ► That's not what they want to do. They just want to fix the power lines, and they're good at fixing the power lines.
01:40:08 ◼ ► If you want someone to fix your power lines, that's the person to do it because they've been doing it for years and years.
01:40:13 ◼ ► But they're never going to graduate to the level of, "I'm going to design the power grid for this new city,"
01:40:22 ◼ ► The person who fixes the power lines is the person who designs it. There's not a lot of crossover in those jobs.
01:40:34 ◼ ► one person maybe just wanted to be the person who fixes the power lines when they go down after the winter storm,
01:40:39 ◼ ► and they want to do that for 20 years, and the other person wants to essentially design the solar system.
01:40:49 ◼ ► by trying to design a chair, and then a house, and then a city, and then a government, and then a planet.
01:41:00 ◼ ► because otherwise they're not going to let you design the city if none of the houses you designed,
01:41:08 ◼ ► And so that's what makes an actual junior, senior, whatever, level 2, level 3, whatever.
01:41:15 ◼ ► If you want to climb that ladder, you have to do difficult things and eventually accomplish them,
01:41:23 ◼ ► and do more difficult things, and accomplish them, and do more difficult things, and accomplish them.
01:41:26 ◼ ► And notice I haven't said anything about technology stacks, languages, object-oriented, protocol-oriented,
01:41:38 ◼ ► Every single realm of programming, whether it's writing COBOL, or, you know, programming Perl,
01:41:45 ◼ ► writing C++, or Swift, like it doesn't, you know, client-side, server-side, any of those realms,
01:41:51 ◼ ► pick any one of them, this ladder exists within all of them that you can climb if you want to.
01:41:56 ◼ ► But you don't necessarily have to. If you want to be a "junior developer" your entire career,
01:42:01 ◼ ► that's a perfectly fine career. That's one of the, you know, the final thing I'll say on this topic,
01:42:09 ◼ ► Do you know what a "architect" in your company does? And once you find out, do you still want that job?
01:42:16 ◼ ► Or would you rather, like, think of what you would like to be doing, and then figure out,
01:42:34 ◼ ► It's really important for you to figure that out, because if you, you know, if you just say,
01:42:37 ◼ ► "I'm going to climb the ladder as high as I can," eventually you're the CTO, and let me tell you,
01:42:45 ◼ ► Well, maybe you're the only programmer in the company. You're the CTO, the COO, you're the Marco of the company.
01:43:20 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.
01:43:36 ◼ ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
01:44:15 ◼ ► This is a multi-month thing. I'm just bringing you in on it now, 'cause I feel like, I don't know,
01:44:20 ◼ ► it's either coming to a head or I'm starting to give up and I have to deploy the internet to save me.
01:44:27 ◼ ► There's still one step I really have to take to deploy the internet, but I figure it's time for ATP audience to know.
01:44:33 ◼ ► For the past several months, somewhere in my house, a couple of times a day, we hear three beeps, sometimes four.
01:44:43 ◼ ► And it's a little song, it's like a three-note scale. I can't carry a tune and I do not have perfect pitch.
01:44:54 ◼ ► But it's probably, doo doo doo, maybe, my notes are all off, but it's three notes like that, but it's...
01:45:24 ◼ ► The sound, it only happens a couple times a day, it's not at any particular time, it's not on the hour, it's not on the 15s, it's not on the 30s, it's not a fixed time, it's not, you know,
01:45:34 ◼ ► there is no discernible pattern to the time, except for the fact that you will hear it a couple of times a day.
01:45:49 ◼ ► Because we've been, at various times it's gone off, I've been in every room on the first and second floor when it's gone off.
01:45:54 ◼ ► I've been in the bedrooms, I've been in the living room, I'm in the room I'm in now, in the kitchen, the dining room.
01:45:59 ◼ ► If it was in any of those rooms, you'd be able to tell, no matter what room in the house you're in, it sounds like it's coming from the basement.
01:46:04 ◼ ► A couple of us have been in the basement when it's gone off. I haven't been, but a couple of people have.
01:46:13 ◼ ► There's been various reports when you're in the basement of where it might sound like it's coming from.
01:46:19 ◼ ► Sometimes it seems like it's coming from one place, sometimes it seems like it's coming from another place.
01:46:23 ◼ ► My parents were here recently, we have a finished room in the basement with a guest bedroom, and they were sleeping down there.
01:46:28 ◼ ► They thought it was coming from the room that they're sleeping in, and I said, "Where? Where in the room?"
01:46:33 ◼ ► And they just, you know, it's a type of little ditty that it's hard to isolate because it's a computery type sound, right?
01:46:43 ◼ ► In the beginning it was just kind of amusing, like, "Hey, what is that beeping sound?" But now several months in, now it's a mission, right?
01:47:08 ◼ ► Yeah, so one of the questions is, "What changed?" Because we've been living in this house for 20 years or whatever, there hasn't been three beeps.
01:47:19 ◼ ► That's kind of the first stuff we tried. We got, like, a new carbon oxide detector near the furnace, right?
01:47:25 ◼ ► So, one of the first things I tried was, "Okay, I'm taking that thing and I'm bringing it, I'm taking it out of the basement and putting it into the room where I am for a day."
01:47:33 ◼ ► And it just carried around with me for a day. I'm like, "If this thing goes off, it's going to be two feet away from me, I'll know it."
01:47:56 ◼ ► There's a bunch of other stuff down there. There's both of my synologies. There's a UPS attached to them.
01:48:01 ◼ ► There's an Eero. I shut down all those things in turn, including turning off the UPS, which is kind of a pain because I had to, you know, plug things directly into the wall.
01:48:12 ◼ ► I didn't unplug/replace the switch because if I turn off that switch, wired internet in the house no longer works.
01:48:25 ◼ ► Water heater. Nothing's changed with the water heater recently, but I figured we'd give it a try.
01:48:32 ◼ ► Like, searched on the internet, like, is there any speaker inside the little pilot light?
01:48:37 ◼ ► Does it have a gas water heater in this little box with thermocouple in the pilot light or whatever?
01:48:41 ◼ ► Like, does that box have a speaker, period, right? Like, trying to get the manual for that or whatever.
01:48:45 ◼ ► Obviously, I can't disable that and turn that off because we need hot water, or I wouldn't want to, obviously.
01:48:53 ◼ ► The Fios thing was an option. If you Google for "Fios box beeps," you'll find a million people.
01:49:10 ◼ ► If you get gigabit fiber like I have, they no longer, I think they took away, like, my backup battery.
01:49:15 ◼ ► I think I see where it used to be attached. Like, there's like a DC input on the thing.
01:49:26 ◼ ► And so, you can see where my telephone wire goes to the rest of the house, and there's this Fios box that has a DC input thing on it.
01:49:32 ◼ ► But the battery that used to be there, there used to be like a big, heavy, probably lead-acid rechargeable battery.
01:49:46 ◼ ► "Beep!" Like a smoke detector. You know, smoke detectors would go every 60 seconds or every 30 seconds.
01:49:54 ◼ ► Tons of things will beep, but they will not play a three, possibly four-note song in an ascending scale with the super high-pitched one at the end.
01:50:11 ◼ ► Does it sound like a, is it like a happy song, or is it like discordant to alert you of something, you think?
01:50:15 ◼ ► It's not like a song that you're watching when, you know, the washing machine and dryers play these little songs now.
01:50:19 ◼ ► It's not that kind of a happy song. It is a, is it a more electronic thing, but it is three distinct notes with a fourth higher-pitched note.
01:50:27 ◼ ► But it sounds like it's making like a, like a complete major chord, so it's like a pleasant sound instead of like a "boo-doo-doo."
01:50:35 ◼ ► It's not just, I don't know the music theory for it, but it's not discordant. It sounds like a major scale type of thing.
01:50:48 ◼ ► Now the Fios thing is still potentially suspect. I looked up, like, you know, I have so many pictures of like the serial numbers of all these boxes just so I can Google for like this exact thing.
01:50:55 ◼ ► Like, the first thing I always want to know is, does this thing have a speaker inside it of any kind, right?
01:51:00 ◼ ► As far as I can tell, the very, very tiny modern gigabit Fios thing does not have a speaker anywhere in it.
01:51:06 ◼ ► Nor can I find any reference on the internet to my... the Fios box that I have ever making any noise, because there is no battery backup inside it.
01:51:15 ◼ ► Right, there's no flashing light, there's no alerting thing, there's no battery, there's nothing.
01:51:19 ◼ ► And if any of these things were in distress, when something is going wrong, they're broken, or they have a failing battery or whatever, they tend to get your attention more urgently.
01:51:28 ◼ ► So other things I've done. I have an in-ground sprinkler system for my lawn. That has a battery, replaced it.
01:51:34 ◼ ► All the smoke detectors downstairs, removed them from the basement and brought them up with me, like, took them on a car trip with me, or whatever.
01:51:42 ◼ ► This is the way to take... I was leaving the house, I said, "I'm going somewhere in my car, I'm taking the smoke detectors with me."
01:51:48 ◼ ► If when I'm gone you hear the three beeps, it's not these smoke detectors. Like, this is how I'm limiting stuff.
01:51:58 ◼ ► Today, I was Googling for the N-Star electric meter, because I think some of these are the gas meter.
01:52:05 ◼ ► Because, you know those things where they take the meter reading remotely, or wirelessly, as the truck drives by?
01:52:12 ◼ ► I think there's some kind of wireless connection there, so I'm Googling for N-Star gas electric meter, using the exact model numbers and everything to say, "Is this a sound..."
01:52:22 ◼ ► But again, what changed? We don't have new meters. We haven't put new meters in or anything like that.
01:52:26 ◼ ► Do they have a battery that's dying? And if it's dying, why is it telling me about it three times per day at random times, as opposed to constantly beeping at it?
01:52:38 ◼ ► The high-pitched one is so high-pitched you can't even really hear it unless you're close, right?
01:52:42 ◼ ► So, this is escalating, because months of this is like, now it's like, "Why can't I find it?"
01:52:52 ◼ ► For a long time, during the summer, we thought it was the new dehumidifier we bought, and we were like, "Oh, don't worry, when I unplug the dehumidifier, it'll be fine."
01:53:01 ◼ ► Because that was a new addition to the basement, and it does make noises when its filter needs to be changed or whatever.
01:53:07 ◼ ► But now I'm running out of stuff to remove, so my next step is, and this is an annoying step, and it's a step that Marco would probably enjoy because it involves buying stuff.
01:53:18 ◼ ► And to do that, I need to get a small recorder that can run for essentially eight hours on battery.
01:53:30 ◼ ► I don't know if an iPhone can last that long. And also, on the iPhone, I wonder if the microphone in an iPhone is good enough to pick up this noise.
01:53:41 ◼ ► If it's really far away, like if it's in the other room, I don't know. So I was thinking of buying an SD card powered tiny little recorder that you'd put on the table when you're interviewing someone.
01:53:54 ◼ ► I think you will find, unless you go pretty big on that, I think you will find that the microphones in a modern iPhone are actually better.
01:54:03 ◼ ► Well, I'm not going to use one of our iPhones, because you can't be without your iPhone for eight hours.
01:54:08 ◼ ► I suppose I can look up there to see. Like the old ones the kids are using. You know, we can hand it down. I think that...
01:54:16 ◼ ► I mean, that's a little older, but you know, I think you'd probably still have pretty good luck with that.
01:54:22 ◼ ► I mean, you could get a little recorder. Believe me, I've gone through them. They're very fun.
01:54:26 ◼ ► But unless you get something very nice, like maybe like a Zoom H5 with its awesome little XY capsules, I don't think you're going to get better sensitivity than an iPhone built in mic.
01:54:37 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, the other thing I was thinking of was like, obviously, if you really want to do this right, you get three microphones and you triangulate, right?
01:54:43 ◼ ► So you have to get precisely synchronized clocks and you'd get the three microphones and you get the recordings and you'd get the little song to play and then you'd bring them back and then you'd have them time code synced and you'd be able to triangulate something.
01:54:55 ◼ ► You don't need them that synced. You just line up the waveform to see which one's loudest.
01:54:58 ◼ ► Yeah, you can do that too. But yeah, and the thing is, guessing where I'm going to put this, I'm probably going to put in the room where it seems to be.
01:55:05 ◼ ► The problem is we had reports of it sounded like it was coming from the water heater and then we had it sounded like it was coming to the room I'm sleeping in.
01:55:14 ◼ ► So again, I have never been in the basement when it has gone off, but we have very conflicting reports of people who have been in the basement when it's gone off.
01:55:21 ◼ ► You know, a couple of senior citizens and someone sitting next to a running laundry machine. Beeps are hard to isolate in that way.
01:55:32 ◼ ► I'm not going to leave my laptop down there. No, no, no, no, no. You're going to go down there and work on your laptop tomorrow.
01:55:44 ◼ ► So the goal of recording is mostly so I can post the recording on the internet and so people can say, "Oh, I've heard that little sound. It's from X."
01:55:53 ◼ ► And yes, I'm going to have to endure all the people saying, "Are you sure it's not your dryer singing a song to you?"
01:55:57 ◼ ► I know my dryers and washer songs and these are old appliances that we've had for many, many years.
01:56:03 ◼ ► So yeah, this is the mystery in my house and I figured I would bring this up today just because I'm kind of at my wit's end.
01:56:11 ◼ ► Powering down my Synology, powering down the UPS that they're attached to, powering down my basement Eero.
01:56:18 ◼ ► It's not those things. And if it is the Fios thing, the problem with the Fios thing is all the Googles are also polluted by people with the beeping batteries.
01:56:29 ◼ ► You just can't penetrate. You will just find years and years of people with their failing batteries and their Fios ONTs that are the old version.
01:56:40 ◼ ► And when you start putting in the model number of my thing, nothing having to do with beeping ever comes up.
01:56:45 ◼ ► It's getting to the point of where you do like, what is it called, Google whacking or whatever. You find one result.
01:56:49 ◼ ► It's really brutal out there because if you say beep or song or anything like that, a bunch of legit problems pollute your results.
01:56:59 ◼ ► That's why I feel like I need to get the recording. When I do get the recording, maybe we'll play it on the show and maybe someone will recognize the tune.
01:57:04 ◼ ► But what a weird mystery because it's either a new addition to my basement, which I feel like there hasn't been a new addition.
01:57:12 ◼ ► Or it's something that's been in my day spent for at least a decade that has suddenly decided to start singing a song every once in a while for months, like three times a day.
01:57:38 ◼ ► It's in the basement, you're on the second floor of the house, and if you are attuned to doo doo doo, you can hear it.
01:57:47 ◼ ► It's like when you hear it, you know what, I won't be hearing that again for six hours.
01:57:55 ◼ ► No. Nope. If it was, we'd be like running down there like, where is it? Where is it? Nope.
01:58:26 ◼ ► Obviously you're not in the same place all the time, so it could be going off when we're not there.
01:59:11 ◼ ► Remember you and I, well all of us actually, have visited Underscore's house a couple of times.
01:59:20 ◼ ► And one time, I don't know, it was two or three years ago, I forget what Underscore was trying to ship.
01:59:26 ◼ ► But he did a gray style staycation by basically, actually, Marco, you'd probably remember this,
01:59:31 ◼ ► by sequestering himself in his own basement and basically coming up for food and little else.
01:59:37 ◼ ► And I think what you need to do is an Underscore/gray style staycation in your own basement
01:59:53 ◼ ► And if you really, really do want to fix this problem, and if it is indeed in the basement, you will fix this problem.
01:59:59 ◼ ► It needs to be a recorder though, because say I'm sitting in the finish room and it goes off,
02:00:15 ◼ ► But beyond that, you don't realize how much you rely on the repetition of a sound to get closer to it.
02:00:22 ◼ ► Like if the smoke alarm only chirped once and didn't keep chirping every 30 seconds, you would never find it.
02:00:32 ◼ ► Like, "Alright, try this room. Stand here. The next one, then, oh, it's this direction.
02:00:48 ◼ ► If I get one, I will post it on Twitter, and I will bring it to the show and give it to Marco,
02:00:55 ◼ ► I'm hoping someone somewhere is like, "Oh, I know what that is. It really is the FiOS ONT."