PodSearch

ATP

236: Irresponsible Use of Infinite Terabytes

 

00:00:00   Live from Wednesday night, it's a TV

00:00:03   I feel like if I had watched Saturday Night Live more frequently

00:00:07   I would have riffed on that whole announcer spiel. You would have realized how badly he mangled the

00:00:12   quote and reference live from Wednesday night

00:00:15   from Wednesday night, they play

00:00:19   Live from New York. They're definitely not from Wednesday. Yeah fair enough for Saturday. I have some pre-show announcements gentlemen

00:00:29   First of all, for the next few minutes, I'm a single parent.

00:00:33   So it is possible that I will need to depart if Declan wakes up,

00:00:37   as he has done recently, although usually at two or three in the morning,

00:00:41   explaining to me that he doesn't want to be asleep and that he wants to be awake.

00:00:45   - Mm, been there. - So if I disappear momentarily,

00:00:49   that would be why. And before any parents in the room

00:00:53   email me to say, "Oh, you need a sleep-to-wake alarm," we have one.

00:00:57   We have a nice little alarm clock that will turn green when it's time for him to wake up.

00:01:01   And even though I think of him as a...

00:01:04   I was gonna say reasonably smart kid, but you can't tell at almost three.

00:01:07   So as a not moronic kid, even with that said,

00:01:12   he seems to forget in the middle of the night that the green light is not yet on

00:01:16   and that he needs to go the f*ck to sleep.

00:01:18   Which, by the way, is a great bedtime story.

00:01:20   So we have that same alarm.

00:01:22   I have two other parent friends who have that same alarm for their two different children.

00:01:26   All of the children regard that alarm as simply

00:01:29   one input of many. - Suggestion.

00:01:31   - Yeah, yeah, it's advice.

00:01:33   The advice that says, "Hey, it's green,

00:01:35   "you might wanna wake up now."

00:01:36   But when it's not green, it's like,

00:01:37   "Hey, well, I wanna be up now,

00:01:38   "and I wanna go bother Mom and Dad."

00:01:40   So, you know, it's like, it is simply one input of many,

00:01:44   and they will choose to ignore it whenever they feel like it.

00:01:46   It isn't a matter of your kid being smart or not smart.

00:01:48   Your kid is perfectly smart enough.

00:01:50   Your kid is as smart as all the other kids

00:01:52   who have had these same alarms that have said,

00:01:54   Well, it's not green, but I don't care and it doesn't really matter, so I'm gonna go in there anyway.

00:01:59   I think it worked on my son. We of course have the same thing, but we didn't even try it on my

00:02:04   daughter because just personality-wise it would be useless. In fact, we had to remove all clocks. We

00:02:09   had still no clocks in her room. We had to remove all clocks from her room because she would stare

00:02:14   at them and be like, you know, whatever her bedtime was and like five minutes after and I'm still

00:02:19   awake and then so she'd be there like it's it's 134 and i'm still awake it's 247 and i'm still

00:02:24   she would just stare at it and and obsess about the fact that she's still awake so we had to

00:02:28   remove all clocks from her and we haven't put them back yet that was years ago we haven't put them

00:02:31   back yet probably we could but then again maybe not yeah so he actually does do a pretty darn

00:02:38   good job in the actual morning time uh when we really don't want him to like get fussy or

00:02:44   or anything like that before it's time for him to get up.

00:02:48   But in the middle of the night, like Marco said,

00:02:50   it seems to be but a recommendation and nothing more.

00:02:54   And so that's been the festivities of late,

00:02:56   but that's actually not the big announcement.

00:02:59   The big announcement is we have moved.

00:03:01   And by we, I mean just me, and I mean just the office

00:03:04   from one room in the house to another, but--

00:03:06   - You didn't talk about burying the lead.

00:03:09   - Yeah, right?

00:03:10   (laughing)

00:03:11   If I sound like garbage, don't blame Marco, blame me.

00:03:14   I've put up some sound deadening material on the wall

00:03:17   directly behind my 27-inch reflective glass,

00:03:21   but I may need more. - Oh my God.

00:03:23   Casey, for God's sake, why did you move?

00:03:26   - Well, because we need a place for a baby.

00:03:30   - Yes, okay.

00:03:31   Congratulations, it's about damn time.

00:03:33   You said it on the show.

00:03:35   - Yeah, so guess what, Erin's pregnant,

00:03:36   and that's super exciting.

00:03:38   - And based on your recent car purchase,

00:03:40   we can conclude she's having sextuplets, is that it?

00:03:42   - Yeah. - Exactly.

00:03:42   (both laughing)

00:03:44   - Exactly right.

00:03:45   Now, there's only one baby in there,

00:03:47   as has been confirmed numerous times.

00:03:50   But anyway, suffice to say I've relocated rooms.

00:03:53   This room is bigger, potentially more echoey,

00:03:56   maybe less echoey, who knows?

00:03:57   So Marco may be really, really have some fun

00:04:01   to do on this edit with what is the tool chain

00:04:04   that has like the thing that magically erases

00:04:06   John's air conditioner?

00:04:08   What is that called? - Well, there's a number

00:04:09   of tools that can do that that I have used in the past.

00:04:11   Audacity has the most basic one for free.

00:04:14   It's basically, it's like a noise profile remover,

00:04:16   so you select some of the recording

00:04:18   that's just the noise you wanna remove.

00:04:20   Like when no one's talking,

00:04:21   you just hear the background noise.

00:04:22   And then you say, all right, profile this,

00:04:24   and then you select the whole recording

00:04:25   and say remove that noise from this whole recording.

00:04:27   So Audition does it, Audacity does it.

00:04:30   The one I've been using most recently is the iZotope RX.

00:04:34   - That's it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:35   - Which has a number of other tools as well.

00:04:37   And that thing is amazing.

00:04:39   It is not cheap, but if you process audio

00:04:43   and need to remove annoying background noise

00:04:46   or echo or headphone bleed or hum or so many other things,

00:04:51   I have not found anything better than iZotope RX.

00:04:53   It is really something else.

00:04:55   Well, congratulations on the reason you moved

00:04:57   and don't worry about the audio, we'll figure it out.

00:04:59   - Yeah, so, yeah, thanks.

00:05:00   I forgot that we had talked about this in the post show.

00:05:03   I think it was like the post, post, post, post show

00:05:06   last week and it didn't even cross my mind

00:05:08   that that probably didn't make the released recording. So yeah, guess what? Aaron's pregnant,

00:05:11   and so far everything and everyone seems healthy, and we're super excited about it, and we'll

00:05:17   put a link in the show notes with a little bit of background information about that.

00:05:21   And an adorable picture of Aaron and Declan.

00:05:23   And for the people who are just going to listen to the podcast, the gender is sealed in an

00:05:28   envelope and Casey and Aaron don't want to know. Whether they're going to – did you

00:05:34   open it already since last week?

00:05:35   No, we haven't opened yet.

00:05:37   Did you see a clue on a sonogram or something?

00:05:39   Well, no.

00:05:41   But when we were told to turn around so the technician can figure out what the gender was, that took suspiciously little time.

00:05:51   So we'll see. That indicates to me that it was a suspiciously short amount of time to prove a negative.

00:05:59   But you never know. So we'll see what happens.

00:06:02   My kind of farmer's almanac tale or my experience, which is 150% anecdotal, and I recognize that,

00:06:11   is that if the woman tends to carry all of the baby like in the tummy area and doesn't

00:06:17   seem to get any bigger anywhere else, that seems to generally speaking be a boy amongst

00:06:21   the friends of ours.

00:06:22   This sounds not science.

00:06:23   Oh, this is completely anti-scientific.

00:06:24   No, no, no, no.

00:06:25   We're based in science in any way.

00:06:28   No, no, no.

00:06:29   There's no science involved.

00:06:30   This is all bull.

00:06:31   I recognize this is bull, I admit this is bull.

00:06:35   It was like a full moon when the child was conceived, then it's definitely a boy.

00:06:40   Do you know what?

00:06:41   That's rela- no, not really.

00:06:42   I'll tell you Kate's story.

00:06:45   So we went in for one, I guess it was the first ultrasound where you can actually find

00:06:49   out and they said, "Do you want to know?"

00:06:50   And we said, "Yes."

00:06:51   And they said, "It's a girl."

00:06:52   And we're like, "Great, because we already have a boy, so no, I want to eat, so that

00:06:54   would be great, okay."

00:06:55   Was that how I actually responded?

00:06:57   "Great, okay, now we want to meet."

00:06:59   All right, so and then like we were in for like another

00:07:03   Ultrasound I guess later in the pregnancy whenever you like do like the routine second wonder. I don't know but anyway later

00:07:09   We're in it was already we'd like oh

00:07:11   You know picking out girls things and thinking of girls names and stuff like that be going for one later

00:07:15   And they're like oh looks like it's a boy and like what wait

00:07:18   How do you say looks like a boy they told us it was a girl last time like no no looks like a boy

00:07:24   And then the person looks closer and like oh, maybe yeah, maybe you're right

00:07:28   maybe that was just a thumb. And they're like, "All right, anyway, everything's fine. You're

00:07:33   doing it like..." And so that, you know, let me know that it's not an exact science, first of all.

00:07:41   Anyway, she came out, she was totally a girl. It was fine. But not just a little bit. Yeah,

00:07:46   there was no confusion. But there's a lot of stuff. You've seen the ultrasounds. It's a

00:07:51   confusing picture. And it takes some skill and experience as a technician to interpret that as

00:07:56   anything and you know a thumb or a toe ends up in the wrong position with the

00:08:01   baby all twisted up you people can get confused but both people on their

00:08:05   initial proclamation sounded very very sure and the only reason the second

00:08:10   person kind of hemmed in hot after was because we said wait a second we've had

00:08:14   like a month and a half of thinking this is gonna be a girl and now you're telling

00:08:18   me boy yeah so you'll find out or you'll have in my situation it's like well

00:08:24   Well sometimes the baby is resting in such a way, in such a position, and you see something

00:08:29   that makes it very, very clear and it couldn't really be anything else.

00:08:32   And technicians are like, "Well, we're not really supposed to tell you yet."

00:08:34   But I'm like, "But yeah, what's that?"

00:08:35   And they're like, "Well, you know."

00:08:38   Yeah, yeah.

00:08:40   So yeah, so we asked the technician to put it in an envelope, seal it, and we're not

00:08:44   the kind of people that want to do a gender reveal party.

00:08:47   I understand that's very popular and fun and whatever.

00:08:52   But it's not really for us.

00:08:54   We just wanted to be able to change our minds in the future, if we so desire.

00:08:59   And so we have a sealed envelope with the gender in it.

00:09:02   And both of us are very, very Type A, very anal retentive.

00:09:05   So I would say, if you wanted to make a bet, that it's likely that we will probably end

00:09:11   up opening it.

00:09:12   I'm waiting for somebody to start an ATP pool to see what day it is we open it.

00:09:16   But sitting here now, the hope is we will hold out until the baby is born.

00:09:21   And we'll see what happens.

00:09:22   So I don't know.

00:09:23   I don't know.

00:09:24   In any case, so yeah, I didn't mean to make that the entire pre-show, but yeah, that's

00:09:29   a thing.

00:09:30   So let's start with some follow-up, and as it turns out, the follow-up is the Marco

00:09:36   show today.

00:09:37   So…

00:09:38   Wait, what?

00:09:39   Yeah, you know, if you open the show notes…

00:09:40   I should really look at the document.

00:09:41   Yeah, if you open the show notes…

00:09:43   So as I hear Marco saying, "Oh, I should probably open the document," by the magic

00:09:48   of Google Docs, I see a new person open up the document.

00:09:51   Oh, look at that.

00:09:52   It turns out it's Marco Arment.

00:09:55   So yeah, so it turns out that iTunes U collections

00:10:00   are moving to Apple Podcasts, and that got you on,

00:10:03   I don't wanna call it a rant, but kind of a,

00:10:05   'cause that implies negativity, but kind of a,

00:10:08   you got on your soapbox and talked about your thoughts

00:10:10   for the future of iTunes, so can you kinda

00:10:12   talk us through that?

00:10:14   - Yeah, basically there was this little news article

00:10:15   last week that said that iTunes U,

00:10:18   which is like the kind of educational course collection

00:10:21   and iTunes that have been around for quite a long time.

00:10:23   Do you guys remember when those launched?

00:10:25   Not recently, right?

00:10:27   - Yeah, I don't think so.

00:10:28   - Yeah, so anyways, so iTunes U content,

00:10:30   which is actually wonderful and quite extensive,

00:10:33   that's been announced, that's moving into Apple Podcasts.

00:10:36   So it will no longer be a separate section,

00:10:39   it's always been like a section in iTunes,

00:10:41   and now that is moving to Apple Podcasts.

00:10:44   And I interpret this as, you know,

00:10:46   if it was just this by itself,

00:10:47   well, that's kind of a weird thing,

00:10:48   But when you combine it with things like the stopping

00:10:52   selling all iPods that aren't iOS based,

00:10:55   and just some other little moves we've seen here and there,

00:10:58   and just the timing in general,

00:11:00   I think this is just one of many signs

00:11:03   that they are preparing for the abandonment

00:11:07   or total deletion of iTunes.

00:11:09   Probably abandonment.

00:11:10   It's probably gonna sit around forever as like,

00:11:12   you know, in the utilities folder for the very few,

00:11:15   you know, niche use cases that people need it for anymore.

00:11:17   But I think iTunes is finally being relegated

00:11:21   to the dustbin of history,

00:11:22   as it should have been a very long time ago.

00:11:25   And they are, I bet, in the next version of Mac OS.

00:11:29   Not the one that's coming out in a month,

00:11:31   but the one that's coming out probably next year.

00:11:33   I bet we're gonna see, finally, a split up of iTunes

00:11:35   into brand new apps called things like music,

00:11:38   TV, podcasts, things like that.

00:11:41   - Do you remember the screenshots for some of the,

00:11:44   that dialogue box that's saying,

00:11:46   open document in movies or something like that.

00:11:48   Do you remember that?

00:11:50   - Oh, this just went through not long ago, didn't it?

00:11:53   - Yeah, someone had found some dialogue

00:11:55   in some version of Mac OS, some beta version of Mac OS

00:11:58   that in response to trying to open a video

00:12:01   instead of it opening in iTunes or QuickTime Player,

00:12:04   it said, "Do you want to open this in movies?"

00:12:06   - That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:12:09   - And it makes me think, if that's real,

00:12:11   that's why I wish I could still find it,

00:12:12   but I've lost track of it.

00:12:14   Is this a case where the replacements for iTunes were kinda almost ready but just didn't

00:12:20   quite make the cut?

00:12:22   Or is this the case where they're not gonna be ready for a long time but someone got ahead

00:12:28   of the game and did the easy part which is updating a dialogue box or something?

00:12:32   Like what I'm always trying to gauge is how close are we to the death of iTunes?

00:12:37   It's one of those things that probably is not, people don't care enough about it for

00:12:42   it to leak like iPhone parts. So we'll probably just kind of find out either when they accidentally

00:12:47   post a beta that they're not supposed to or when someone announces it on stage. I mean,

00:12:52   at this point, I kind of wonder how many people will even care, like, based on how many people

00:12:59   still use iTunes. I mean, it'll probably be a big deal in the tech press just because

00:13:02   tech press is full of old people who remember iTunes, right? But for everyone else, is it

00:13:06   going to be a significant moment? And what I'm worried about is all of the boringly named

00:13:12   apps, music, what other things would it be like? Music, movies, what else is it gonna

00:13:18   be?

00:13:19   >>T.V. probably, podcasts I would bet.

00:13:22   >>Yeah, maybe. Anyway, if those apps have to travel the same road as the new Photos

00:13:29   app did, I'll be kind of sad because Photos just started off very anemic and weird and

00:13:35   janky and it's a little bit better now and it's getting a little bit better still in

00:13:41   High Sierra, but it was like a big regression for my photo in terms of functionality and

00:13:47   just polish and everything.

00:13:48   Like it was a super simplified, it basically looked like a UI kid application that was

00:13:52   somehow ported to the Mac and everything was all stripped down and removed.

00:13:57   And it wasn't like tiny and quick and lightning fast with that stripping down.

00:14:00   It was like stripped down, but also still sluggish and annoying.

00:14:03   And I don't want that.

00:14:04   Like iTunes, you know, we don't love iTunes, but the functionality that it has for like

00:14:10   Finding a song and playing it more or less works and I can just imagine that exact same function of typing in something in

00:14:17   A search box and having it narrow list down and having me like double click on a thing to hear it

00:14:21   Adding the photos style lag to every one of those operations just a few extra milliseconds

00:14:27   To make you feel better and remove as many controls as possible

00:14:31   I kind of already moved a lot of controls but remove all the controls that you're used to so it's just like a big empty

00:14:35   blank window

00:14:37   Where everything is a little bit slower than you want it to be with less functionality than I had before

00:14:41   I'm hoping that's not the case. I'm hoping these new slim down applications

00:14:45   Give us the benefits that we want from them being slimmed down

00:14:49   Not just the lack of confusion about like this is just an app for playing music and you don't worry about anything else

00:14:53   But that the apps themselves are nicer and not they don't just look like hey

00:14:58   We took the music app from iOS and we put a Mac title bar on top of it

00:15:02   Here you go, because that will make me sad. I

00:15:04   I think the reason I'm kind of looking forward to this happening, assuming that this is on

00:15:09   the table, and I think it probably is, I mean, it does seem like this is the direction they're

00:15:13   moving, but one of the reasons why I'm interested in this is just on a basic level, I just appreciate

00:15:20   seeing significant effort into the Mac platform, you know, because it's so easy to look at

00:15:26   how Apple has operated over the last few years and conclude that the Mac is really being

00:15:30   neglected and they've done a few things in the very recent past, like basically in the

00:15:36   last year, they've done a few things that suggest that no, the Mac isn't being neglected

00:15:41   at least anymore, maybe it was for a little bit but now it isn't being neglected anymore

00:15:45   and here's some good stuff that's happening.

00:15:47   So any sign of significant investment into the Mac platform, which breaking up iTunes

00:15:52   and rewriting all these things as presumably new apps, that's a big undertaking.

00:15:58   It's not like a big undertaking at the low level OS level,

00:16:02   but it is a big undertaking for the app,

00:16:04   for basically the applications teams,

00:16:06   and the people responsible for all these media apps

00:16:09   and their back ends and everything else.

00:16:10   That's a big undertaking.

00:16:12   And so to have that, to take that on

00:16:15   when technically you didn't have to,

00:16:17   they could just keep iTunes going,

00:16:20   even though it's terrible, and they could just say,

00:16:22   "Well, it's not really worth ever fixing iTunes."

00:16:25   And that would be disappointing.

00:16:26   That would show that they don't really care

00:16:27   with the Mac anymore, but the fact that they seem

00:16:31   like they're probably going in this direction

00:16:32   if they do this, that's a very good sign

00:16:34   for the Mac platform in general.

00:16:36   And then secondly, in regards to the actual apps,

00:16:39   the answer will really be it depends.

00:16:40   I mean, a lot of the roles of some of these apps,

00:16:43   like podcasts, there has never been a podcasts app

00:16:46   on the Mac from Apple.

00:16:48   iTunes can play podcasts, but that's, you know,

00:16:50   it's pretty basic and it's really not

00:16:52   very well designed for it.

00:16:54   Similarly iTunes can also play movies and TV shows.

00:16:58   It pretty much sucks.

00:17:00   I've done it, it's not very pleasant

00:17:01   to play these things in iTunes.

00:17:03   Again, it works, you can do it, but it's not very good.

00:17:06   And then the music part of iTunes is this weird,

00:17:11   whatever the multi-headed thing is at the Hydra?

00:17:14   - Mm-hmm.

00:17:14   - Okay, so it's like this weird, thanks, reference check.

00:17:18   It's like this weird Hydra of you have this entire

00:17:21   local management thing, along with iTunes Match,

00:17:24   matches your local music to the cloud and everything. And then you also have this Apple

00:17:27   Music thing, which is really totally separate and works totally separate, but tries to integrate

00:17:32   into the same interface. And the combination of Apple Music into iTunes with your local

00:17:37   music library and things like that is a disaster in the UI. It's so clunky and confusing and

00:17:43   opens people up to weird bugs and accidental data loss and things. It's really not great

00:17:48   at all. So the idea of making a whole new music app I think raises the significant question

00:17:56   of whether it would be Apple Music only. And I think I would prefer if it was. Because

00:18:03   to me if they could remove Apple Music from iTunes and just let iTunes be the legacy app

00:18:10   that does your local music library and has nothing to do with Apple Music, then the Apple

00:18:15   music app could finally have its own coherent design that would be way less confusing, way

00:18:21   more lightweight, would solve people's issues with storage and cloud matching and everything

00:18:25   by basically just not supporting any of that stuff. That would be so much better. So I

00:18:29   hope that's the direction they're going. I don't know if it will be. I would give it

00:18:32   maybe 50/50 odds if they do this.

00:18:34   Are you saying that you wouldn't be able to have a local music collection in the music

00:18:38   app? Would iTunes stay around forever?

00:18:40   I don't know.

00:18:41   There are lots of ancient Mac OS apps that do basically stay around forever.

00:18:48   Many of them are better than the utilities folder, but they're all still there.

00:18:50   So if you wanted iTunes to be your local music player, fine, it can keep being your local

00:18:54   music player.

00:18:55   Also, it isn't the only one that exists in the world.

00:18:57   There are other local music players for Mac OS, and if Apple went in this direction with

00:19:01   the official music app, and also iTunes basically died eventually over time or immediately,

00:19:08   then there would be an immediate large market

00:19:10   for other people to make these apps.

00:19:11   So I wouldn't worry too much about that.

00:19:13   Even though, like I am a person who uses iTunes

00:19:16   almost entirely for local music.

00:19:18   And that's not going to change anytime soon.

00:19:21   But I recognize also that is like a dying breed.

00:19:24   And if Apple Music is able to be its own app

00:19:28   and basically kick it out of iTunes,

00:19:30   that's way better for both Apple Music

00:19:33   and local music libraries.

00:19:35   - I don't like that idea.

00:19:36   I want the, I think just an app just dedicated to music,

00:19:40   like the solution I think is not to say,

00:19:42   oh, it's confusing because you have iTunes match

00:19:43   and local files plus cloud files

00:19:45   and it's all confusing in iTunes.

00:19:46   The solution is not to not let people do local,

00:19:49   it's to make a dedicated music app that,

00:19:51   you know, makes it not confusing.

00:19:54   Like, so it's better about all the things

00:19:58   that we can play about iTunes about,

00:19:59   about not respecting your files on disc,

00:20:01   about improperly matching them,

00:20:03   about not respecting your metadata.

00:20:05   Like it has to serve the needs of the entire range of music you could have.

00:20:10   You could have music that you, from your own CDs or illegally downloaded or whatever, that

00:20:16   you've carefully tagged and organized over many, many years.

00:20:19   You could have a subscription to Apple Music.

00:20:23   All these are things that could be there and it has to respect them.

00:20:26   It has to, you know, it has to treat them, not treat them cavalierly and do a good job

00:20:32   backing things up and be reliable and all the things that you get a chance to do when

00:20:35   you start from scratch with a new application rather than saying oh this is just going to

00:20:39   be an Apple Music streaming player and we'll let you know a third-party opportunity to

00:20:43   do music because I don't think there's enough of a market for there to be you know because

00:20:49   I just don't think that many people have local music collections that they care that much

00:20:52   about for there to be a robust third-party music player especially if that third-party

00:20:57   music player doesn't support streaming services who's gonna make that application and say

00:21:01   say, "We're just going to sell to the diminishing proportion of the user base who have local

00:21:09   music that they care about."

00:21:10   Like, that's not a winning—even without iTunes in the picture at all, that's not a

00:21:14   winning formula.

00:21:15   So I really hope they don't do that.

00:21:16   I hope they have a music app that does everything that it needs to do.

00:21:22   You know, I think you underestimate how much both Marco and Steven Hackett would pay for

00:21:27   this sort of manager standalone music app.

00:21:31   But be that as it may, it's funny because I feel like my heart agrees with Marco and

00:21:37   left--if I were calling the shots, I would want there to be two different apps.

00:21:42   Like let iTunes stick around forever, but slim it down to be just managing your local

00:21:46   music library and/or iTunes match.

00:21:48   And you know, obviously there's some nuances there, but let's--for the purposes of simplicity,

00:21:52   let's call it that.

00:21:53   And then have, like Marco said, a brand new Apple Music app that's just for Apple Music.

00:21:59   And I think I would like that a lot.

00:22:01   And that's part of the reason why I've stuck with Spotify even after Apple Music became

00:22:04   a thing.

00:22:05   Part of it was because I didn't care for much of Apple Music in general.

00:22:10   But I also actually liked having that separation and continue to like having that separation

00:22:14   of the music that is legitimately mine and the music that I'm just renting, basically.

00:22:20   And having Apple Music versus iTunes would satisfy that.

00:22:25   But my brain, even though my heart agrees with Marco, my brain agrees with John, and

00:22:29   I think that the rightest answer to the solution is probably just making iTunes, or whatever,

00:22:34   replaces it not crappy, and have it more eloquently handle remote music versus local music, etc.

00:22:44   And the other thing I'm really wary of is even though I really would love to see iTunes

00:22:50   either die or get revamped such that it's not all things to all people.

00:22:56   I really worry, and Jon you were saying this earlier, I really worry that we're in one

00:23:00   of those photo scenarios when all of us was calling for, you know, "Oh, let's replace

00:23:05   photos.

00:23:06   Photos are so old, nobody's paying attention to it.

00:23:08   Let's fix it."

00:23:09   And then we got the fix and we were all like, "Ugh, this is not what we wanted at all."

00:23:13   Replace iPhotos, you mean, not photos.

00:23:14   Sorry, yes, yes, yes, thank you.

00:23:16   Replace iPhoto.

00:23:18   And obviously it's gotten a lot better, but it still was not really what we wanted.

00:23:22   Look at, what was it, Final Cut X?

00:23:24   Is that right?

00:23:25   Something like that?

00:23:26   I don't really do any video stuff.

00:23:27   Thank you.

00:23:28   Sorry.

00:23:29   Oh no.

00:23:30   Oh no.

00:23:31   I'm sorry everybody.

00:23:32   He does that?

00:23:33   Gray does that, doesn't he?

00:23:34   I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose.

00:23:35   It has to be.

00:23:36   I mean, I totally did that on purpose.

00:23:39   Totally did that on purpose.

00:23:40   Anyway, I'm so sorry to everyone.

00:23:42   But the point is, when Final Cut Pro got redone and everyone was really perturbed about the

00:23:50   things that were dropped—I'm not saying unfairly, but was perturbed about the things

00:23:53   that were dropped, the features that were dropped—I fear that we're in a similar situation

00:23:57   with iTunes, and I don't see any way how we couldn't be, given that iTunes is all things

00:24:02   to all people, and there's so much code there.

00:24:07   And it's like, wasn't it Joel on Software, Joel Spolsky, that wrote a really good post

00:24:11   years and years and years ago about how you should never rewrite anything.

00:24:14   We discussed it on the show and I said it wasn't that good.

00:24:18   Like many things, that is a great rule.

00:24:21   It's a great input when you're making a decision, but like all rules, you have to decide when

00:24:26   you know how to break them or not.

00:24:30   If you say between this release of our product and next release of our product, we should

00:24:33   rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

00:24:35   Is the product still needing to do the same things?

00:24:37   What are you really getting out of that?

00:24:40   Whereas with this, it's like this is,

00:24:43   the needs of these products have changed so much over time

00:24:48   that keeping them around is actually more of a liability

00:24:50   in a lot of ways.

00:24:51   And not only from the code, but even from the design

00:24:54   of having this all be one app.

00:24:56   You're not, like we're not suggesting

00:24:58   that you rewrite iTunes from scratch.

00:25:00   We're suggesting that you break up this app

00:25:03   into like five different other apps,

00:25:05   each of which can be way better at solving the problem

00:25:08   it's meant to solve, then this one app that tries to solve all five of these things badly.

00:25:13   So here's my meta concern about this whole thing, and this is always, I was trying to

00:25:16   think of this while you guys were talking and I can't come up with something, maybe

00:25:19   you can. My question is, does Apple still know how to make really great Mac apps? I'm

00:25:25   trying to think of the last really great Mac app that Apple made. Maybe is it, is it maybe

00:25:33   Final Cut Pro 10 and iMovie, like when they revamped those, because those are pretty good,

00:25:37   But I'm not sure

00:25:39   Like it used to be you know

00:25:42   Apple makes the best Mac apps and if you're a third-party developer try to make your apps as good as them and it's slowly

00:25:46   Shifted to be like if you want to see the exemplars of great Mac applications

00:25:50   You have to look at third parties because all the first party stuff is either

00:25:52   Not half-butted in Marco's parlance, but like it's slight like for example

00:25:58   when they redid contacts and notes on

00:26:01   The Mac I mean you know there are right

00:26:06   They're not bad, but they're pretty slight right no one would say this is a tour de force Mac application of the Mac version of

00:26:12   Notes like it's alright. You know it's there

00:26:14   And now all the great Mac apps. It's like if you want to see an amazing Mac application

00:26:20   like you know look at look at panics you know transmit right or

00:26:23   Something from Omni right where it's like a full featured beautifully designed well thought out stable reliable

00:26:32   You know like the all all the things that you want from a great Mac

00:26:35   Application the kind of applications are BB edit for that matter kind of applications to make people love them and be dedicated to them

00:26:41   No one is known as dedicated to the Mac version of notes, right?

00:26:44   I mean the iOS version of notes is you know gotten way better and they're adding features left and right there

00:26:49   But I'm trying to think of what's the last great man. I suppose Safari Safari is pretty darn good, too

00:26:53   But that's that's all like the last great new Mac app Apple said in the past few years

00:26:58   it seems like every time they make a new Mac application,

00:27:01   it's all right.

00:27:03   - Yeah, I feel like Photos is the best example.

00:27:05   Photos is the app that should have been

00:27:10   a great demonstration of what the Mac can do.

00:27:12   And it hasn't been at all.

00:27:14   And I would even broaden your question

00:27:17   of can Apple still make great Mac apps.

00:27:20   I would remove the word Mac from that

00:27:21   and say can Apple still make great apps.

00:27:25   Apple is remarkably good these days

00:27:28   at being a platform company.

00:27:29   Their OS is amazing, their APIs are amazing,

00:27:33   they keep adding new cool APIs like ARKit,

00:27:36   just to add to their other massive pile

00:27:38   of incredibly sophisticated APIs.

00:27:42   Apple is really good at the platforms,

00:27:45   the frameworks, the OS.

00:27:47   But I really have not gotten the sense from Apple

00:27:52   that they really know how to make great apps anymore.

00:27:54   And to their credit, they haven't made

00:27:56   very many new apps recently.

00:27:57   Maybe they realize this too.

00:27:59   Or maybe they've decided not to do that much anymore.

00:28:02   - They've been making good apps, I feel like.

00:28:05   Especially on iOS, I think they're making good iOS apps.

00:28:07   And I think a lot of the iOS ones are exemplars.

00:28:10   You could say, "Hey, you wanna make a good iOS app?

00:28:13   "Look at Apple's applications."

00:28:15   And that's kind of like the baseline, try to match that.

00:28:18   But none of them, I don't know on iOS,

00:28:20   but on the Mac anyway, I don't feel like any of them

00:28:23   are great. And kind of in the way that iTunes was great in the beginning, like, you know,

00:28:27   when iTunes sort of got the ball rolling and it was like, you could search for your music

00:28:31   so quickly and the interface was so straightforward and intuitive that anyone could figure out

00:28:35   how to do it with a three-pane browser and, you know, and then integrating the store,

00:28:39   that all seemed to work. Like, before iTunes became the jack of all trades, I think iTunes

00:28:44   was a pretty great application too, even though it was just SoundJam or whatever reskinned

00:28:47   to begin with, right?

00:28:48   >> Yeah, something like that.

00:28:50   I'm sure there is still the talent in the company

00:28:53   to make great applications, like what we're talking about,

00:28:57   if they prioritize them.

00:28:58   I think they just haven't prioritized them really.

00:29:00   They've been doing so much else.

00:29:01   They've been launching new platforms

00:29:03   and making new services and making the OSs better

00:29:07   and everything.

00:29:07   They've been doing so much else that it just seems

00:29:09   like they don't really put a lot behind

00:29:12   their first party apps anymore.

00:29:13   And that shows in some big end of life things

00:29:16   like Aperture and also just the kind of languishing nature

00:29:21   of a lot of their other apps,

00:29:22   along with apps that are revamped into new versions

00:29:26   that aren't necessarily as good as the old ones,

00:29:27   like the Photos app, when that replaced iPhoto and Aperture.

00:29:30   I think it is very clear, I would say,

00:29:34   I don't wanna put this entirely on Johnny Ive,

00:29:36   'cause I do that a lot, but in the big shuffle up,

00:29:39   when Forstall was out and Ive's department became head

00:29:43   of software design as well as hardware design,

00:29:46   I would say since that happened,

00:29:48   Apple has seemed to be in a period of flux

00:29:51   with their application design skills

00:29:53   that have not been good.

00:29:55   And even going into iOS 11,

00:29:57   we still don't know what the new phone

00:29:58   and this potential notch is gonna look like,

00:30:00   but if that notch,

00:30:02   basically we're looking at the iOS 11 design

00:30:04   with these giant title bars

00:30:06   with the big white bold text titles

00:30:09   and basically making everything look like Apple Music,

00:30:11   which seems like a terrible idea

00:30:12   'cause if you would have said after last year,

00:30:15   If you would have said after iOS 10,

00:30:16   we're gonna make all the apps in the system

00:30:18   look like Apple Music.

00:30:19   People would have thought you were joking.

00:30:23   But now that's the style.

00:30:25   That might make sense in some big grand vision here

00:30:28   that we have yet to see the final play of

00:30:31   when the new phone comes out.

00:30:33   It's also possible that Apple's just going through

00:30:36   this kind of design puberty period

00:30:38   where they're in between two different eras or ages

00:30:42   or they're trying to find their footing

00:30:44   or whatever the case may be, it seems like Apple has been all over the map with software

00:30:49   design in the last few years and they have not yet found the right place to be yet.

00:30:55   >> Yeah, I feel like Final Cut Pro X and the new iMovie that was before it, those were

00:31:02   actually I think the only Mac applications that could really be called great.

00:31:08   They were after the, you know, the skeuomorphic age, like GarageBand and stuff like that with

00:31:13   the wood paneling like that was you know an iMovie and the original digital hub like there's

00:31:17   a lot of great applications there but those were all definitely in the forestall skeuomorphic

00:31:22   whatever even though you know whatever that that era right and then where we are now is

00:31:28   the place where you know photos and the the revised uh you know contacts and and uh notes

00:31:36   and even calendar and stuff on the mac they're kind of you know they're right they're very

00:31:40   simple, they're slightly more of the Johnny Ive thing, and I feel like in between there

00:31:44   was the iMovie design, which was not super skeuomorphic, but was also not like, oh let's

00:31:50   remove every single control from the interface and make just giant expanses of white, or

00:31:54   in this case black. So I think maybe that is, and that's the last time I can recall

00:31:59   seeing one of those, maybe there's other applications that I don't use them, people keep bringing

00:32:02   up like the iWork suite and everything, but those aren't new applications, like they've

00:32:06   evolved and I could say those had the same kind of problem with syncing up with the UI

00:32:10   kit and syncing up with iOS features and losing stuff and coming back up. They've had their

00:32:17   own problems during their development. I don't think those are great applications yet and

00:32:23   even if they were you'd have to date them back to when they were introduced. So maybe

00:32:26   it's just iMovie and Final Cut Pro X and those were controversial as well.

00:32:33   We are sponsored this week by Hover. Find a domain name for your passion. Go to Hover.com/ATP

00:32:39   to learn more and get 10% off your first purchase. Building your online brand has never been

00:32:44   more important. Show the online community who you are and what you're passionate about

00:32:48   without tying it to whatever publishing platform or social network is popular this year. And

00:32:53   that changes very quickly. I mean, my first email address was @juno.com and my first website

00:32:58   was a big long path name after Geocities.com.

00:33:01   Both of those seemed massive and invincible at the time,

00:33:04   but things changed quickly in this business.

00:33:06   That wasn't that long ago.

00:33:07   The best thing you can do to keep your email

00:33:09   and website timeless and future-proof

00:33:11   is to host them at your own domain name.

00:33:13   And Hover is the best place to find,

00:33:15   buy, and manage domains.

00:33:17   Hover offers over 400 domain extensions,

00:33:20   from the classics like .com to all the new fun extensions

00:33:23   like .plumbing and .diamonds, and there's no tricks,

00:33:26   no shady upsells, and no scammy add-ons.

00:33:29   And Hover offers free Whois privacy as well.

00:33:32   Hover Connect also lets you set up popular web hosts

00:33:34   on your domain with just a few simple clicks.

00:33:36   And if you need it, they also offer full advanced DNS

00:33:39   controls.

00:33:40   And if you need any help with anything,

00:33:41   their customer support is top notch.

00:33:43   I manage the vast majority of my domains at Hover,

00:33:46   and it's a breeze.

00:33:47   Because what you want is a domain registrar

00:33:49   to be really easy to use for like the hour

00:33:52   that you set it up, and then to never bother you or need

00:33:54   attention from you again. And that's what Hover does for me. It's the best compliment

00:33:58   I can pay them. It gets out of the way. It just works. It's there when I need it if I

00:34:02   need to buy another domain name or if I need to change a DNS record or something. And the

00:34:05   rest of the time I can just get on with my online life and not worry about my domain

00:34:09   names because I know Hover has it all under control. Visit hover.com/ATP to learn more

00:34:15   and to get 10% off your first purchase. Hover, find a domain name for your passion.

00:34:24   We have what is possibly my favorite line item that has ever appeared in follow-up ever,

00:34:31   and I will read it verbatim for the listeners.

00:34:34   The topic that we are apparently about to discuss is—

00:34:37   It's not a topic, it's a follow-up item.

00:34:39   Whatever.

00:34:40   Good grief.

00:34:43   The follow-up item, Copyright 2011, John C. Hughes said that we are about to discuss is

00:34:47   as follows, "Advice for Marco's sensitive tushy." Would one of us, I'm assuming John,

00:34:55   like to tell us what his advice would be for Marco's sensitive tushy?

00:34:59   That's not my advice, it's listeners' advice. Last week we talked about Marco's sensitive tushy,

00:35:03   and how his bicycle seat hurt his bum, and people had advice for what he could do to make his bum

00:35:11   feel better. One piece of advice was to buy shorts with a pad in the butt, especially

00:35:17   made for people who ride bikes. I get made for mountain bikers. So apparently that's

00:35:22   a thing that you can get and someone suggested that. But the other suggestion that I think

00:35:27   that is even better is bicycle riders saying don't put all your weight on your butt when

00:35:31   you're riding your bike. Put some of your weight on the pedals and some of your weight

00:35:34   on the handlebars and some of the weight on your butt and then you won't have your entire

00:35:38   weight on the very hard seat and if you do that it will make any seat feel more comfortable

00:35:44   for you.

00:35:45   I would say the latter option of changing my biking technique to put less weight on

00:35:49   my butt, that is a good idea.

00:35:52   If I was a professional bike-ist, but I'm not.

00:35:55   You don't have to be a professional bike-ist in your words to do that.

00:36:00   You can change the way you bike and not be paid to be a bicycle rider.

00:36:04   That's something I will slowly work towards but that's like a gradual technique thing.

00:36:07   So a lot of the riding I'm doing around here is very slowly

00:36:10   because I'm riding with my kid,

00:36:12   who is now very well riding a bike.

00:36:14   That took no time, thank you John, you were right.

00:36:16   And it's awesome, so we're riding around,

00:36:18   but it's riding around very slowly,

00:36:19   so it's kinda hard to hold yourself up all that time

00:36:21   when you're going two miles an hour.

00:36:24   Secondly, the bike shorts with built-in butt padding,

00:36:27   I don't really see the point of that, honestly.

00:36:29   I mean, again, maybe this is something

00:36:30   that professional bike guests have some good reason for,

00:36:33   but if they're saying the seats shouldn't be padded,

00:36:35   your shorts should be padded.

00:36:36   - Well, I think they're both padded,

00:36:38   like you're doubling up the padding.

00:36:41   - I guess.

00:36:41   - Then you get to look like stupid sexy Flanders.

00:36:44   - I appreciate these two options

00:36:47   written in by the professional bike guests.

00:36:49   I'm not going to take either of them.

00:36:50   Instead, I did what I said I was gonna do last week

00:36:53   and I just went on Amazon and spent $18

00:36:55   on a really soft cushy seat and that's great

00:36:59   and it fixed it pretty much as well as anything

00:37:01   besides new tires could.

00:37:02   So, done.

00:37:04   Stupid sexy Flanders for skiing not biking. Wasn't there a Simpsons episode where Flanders had bike shorts too?

00:37:09   Anyway bike shorts you can kind of be an homage to stupid sexy Flanders.

00:37:13   Is this the first time I've ever had a podcast topic about my butt? I think it might be. Not the last.

00:37:18   Probably not.

00:37:21   And just to do a quick status check, how many bikes did you buy in the last week?

00:37:27   Well

00:37:29   How do I measure?

00:37:32   How many bikes did you return honey, but what what are the net bike flow?

00:37:35   Well technically I was asking to be funny and now you're giving me a legitimate friggin answer technically -

00:37:42   But one was a replacement for a defect woman one. All right. Oh my god. Yeah, the other one was the sand bike

00:37:49   It's amazing. I thought you weren't getting one

00:37:51   I thought you borrowed the neighbors and you were like, oh that's the saved me a lot of money now

00:37:55   I'm not gonna buy the thing cuz I know that it's hard work. Yep, and then I bought it

00:38:00   It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. How do we do this John John?

00:38:04   How do we how do we do it? You're gonna say my for Adam? He's got unlimited energy

00:38:07   He could just be whirring away in those pedestals forever. He's riding nine miles a day

00:38:12   Just get him a sand bike. He'll be down to like, you know, four and a half the same amount of effort

00:38:16   It's actually a lot easier to follow him in a sand bike

00:38:18   Because it's like you can go first of all, you can go slowly more easily because the tires are so big

00:38:23   It has five inch tires

00:38:25   And then the other thing is that when when he you know as you're going down, you know

00:38:30   some of the boring parts of the ride,

00:38:31   if you're on the sand bike,

00:38:32   you can go in like the sand berm

00:38:34   on the side of the sidewalk and have more fun

00:38:37   and jump over the various things there

00:38:38   and it makes it a little more fun.

00:38:40   The regular bike with the firm ride

00:38:43   is the way more practical one.

00:38:45   That is the one I should have

00:38:47   and the one I still ride a lot of the time.

00:38:49   The sand bike is the fun one.

00:38:50   That's the one that makes me smile.

00:38:52   - I can't believe you had a serious answer to that question.

00:38:55   I should have known better.

00:38:56   I should have known.

00:38:57   - Just wait until he starts using the sand bike in the snow.

00:38:59   Bring it back home for the winter. I actually was thinking about trying that

00:39:03   Attach jet engines to the side and put skis into the wheels

00:39:10   Okay, let's just move on to ask ATP

00:39:14   Robert

00:39:16   Prejudice, I'm so sorry Robert

00:39:18   Asks OLED or LCD for future iPhone in my experience. Oh, that is inferior burns out

00:39:24   Why does never white but rather pinkish or greenish?

00:39:27   I don't have very many thoughts on this other than to say the only

00:39:31   OLED screen that I'm aware of that I have is my Apple watch because that's OLED right and

00:39:36   And I haven't noticed any of these issues personally that doesn't mean he's wrong by any means

00:39:43   I just it just means I haven't noticed them

00:39:46   So androids been a lot of androids has been OLED for a long time and we were like why why is Apple still have LCD?

00:39:53   The one of the theories is that Apple's standards for color reproduction and

00:39:59   yeah, like just

00:40:02   general image quality

00:40:04   Have not been able to be met by OLED screens. So we're all you know, the practically speaking like

00:40:10   Oh

00:40:11   Well that or LCD future for iPhone. Well, the new iPhones coming out are gonna be all that certainly the pro one

00:40:17   Maybe the other ones as well, right?

00:40:18   So there's that practical thing of like hey the next new iPhones you're gonna get some OLEDs on

00:40:22   Long-term, does that mean like all phones are gonna be OLED going forward?

00:40:26   If Apple puts an OLED in their fancy new phone, it probably means they were able to get

00:40:32   the quality up to their standards, so it's as good as and certainly better in black levels than the LCDs ones to replace them.

00:40:40   So, Apple has waited a long time to jump from LCD to OLED, but they're doing it now,

00:40:45   which probably means they're gonna be good.

00:40:46   And if they are good,

00:40:48   the potential power saving advantages of the mean that there's no reason for them to go back to LCD and

00:40:53   You know and the the black level improvements on so I think that the future of the iPhone line is all

00:41:01   OLED as soon as Apple can swing that in terms of cost

00:41:03   Maybe right now their fancy OLED screen and the volumes they can get produced and mean that they'll have to keep shipping LCD

00:41:10   iPhones for a long time and certainly the step-down models all are going to be LCD for their lives until they get replaced by

00:41:16   step-down OLED models. For burn-in, you know, image retention, whatever, LCD still has that.

00:41:22   OLED is supposedly worse, we'll find out how much worse. But, you know, we've seen LCDs with really

00:41:27   bad image retention and LCDs with not so bad image retention, presumably the same is true,

00:41:32   OLEDs we'll find out. And white being never white or pinkish, that goes back to quality. Like,

00:41:37   presumably the screens that Apple's got don't suffer from that problem. So, short answer, OLED.

00:41:44   Josh Stager writes, "What is Marco's process for reselling his myriad of machines? Would

00:41:49   this work for someone without 100,000 Twitter followers?"

00:41:53   So basically, my process is when I want to sell something, whether it's a laptop or,

00:41:58   you know, something else. When I want to sell something that I think anybody on Twitter

00:42:01   might want, you know, it moves fast. The reason it moves fast, yes, part of it is that I have

00:42:07   a lot of followers, so I kind of have an unfair advantage there. Part of it is that I know

00:42:11   how much it cost me to sell something on eBay.

00:42:14   If you sell something on eBay,

00:42:15   you're gonna lose roughly 15%

00:42:18   in various fees and everything.

00:42:20   So eBay is great if you search completed items

00:42:22   and more specifically, sold items.

00:42:25   It's great to tell you kinda what something is worth.

00:42:27   And I know that if I sell it on eBay,

00:42:29   I'm only gonna net 15 or 20% under that price.

00:42:33   So then I just post it on Twitter saying,

00:42:35   hey, I'll sell this for 20% under eBay's price, whatever.

00:42:38   And it moves fast.

00:42:40   because it's both being shown to a lot of people

00:42:43   and it's also a really good deal.

00:42:45   I value simplicity and speed of the deal

00:42:48   over getting the absolute maximum price for it.

00:42:52   So if you wanna sell things,

00:42:54   you have two tools at your disposal.

00:42:56   You can either go for a big audience,

00:42:59   which if you don't know a lot of Twitter followers

00:43:03   or followers elsewhere, eBay is your best chance there,

00:43:05   or you can just sell it for a very, very attractive price

00:43:08   if you just want it to move fast.

00:43:09   and I choose to do both of those things.

00:43:12   - So I don't think it's really the follower count

00:43:14   that is as big a deal.

00:43:16   I mean, certainly that helps,

00:43:17   but I obviously needed to be above some threshold

00:43:21   to have any idea of selling,

00:43:22   but the key factor for why,

00:43:25   once you get above a certain number of followers,

00:43:27   why Marco in particular has success selling things

00:43:31   in addition to the pricing that he just talked about

00:43:33   is that lots of people feel like they know Marco

00:43:37   from all the things that he does in public.

00:43:38   And so there's a certain level of trust that is implicit, trust that he's not just some

00:43:43   random scammer.

00:43:44   And not just trust like, "Oh, he seems nice on podcasts, so I think he's a nice person."

00:43:49   It's sort of a mutually assured destruction thing.

00:43:51   If you are a "public figure," if you have a public reputation and something to lose,

00:43:57   chances are good that you're not going to be an internet famous nerd person with 100,000

00:44:02   followers and then scam someone by taking their money and never shipping the machine

00:44:05   to them.

00:44:06   Right?

00:44:07   that because that person's gonna be like, "Hey," they'll write a blog post that'll be like,

00:44:11   "I tried to buy Marco Armond's computer and he took my money and never sent me the computer."

00:44:16   And that would get a bazillion hits and it would be all over the internet like, "Marco has

00:44:19   something to lose," his reputation. And people would care about that story. People would listen

00:44:24   to that person's story, but it's like, "Oh, famous person doesn't mean anything." Whereas

00:44:27   random scammer takes your money and doesn't send you the thing on eBay and you write a blog post

00:44:31   about it, no one's gonna post that on Hacker News. No one's gonna, you know, it's not gonna be on

00:44:36   tech crunch front page. It's not going to be in tech meme. No one cares. It'd be like,

00:44:39   "Oh, so you got scammed by someone on the internet. That's great." Right? So I think

00:44:43   the combination of people understanding that Marco has something to lose and people generally

00:44:47   think feeling like they know him from all of his podcasts and his work say that he's

00:44:51   probably really got this computer. He's not lying about it. He's going to ship it to me

00:44:55   like he says he's going to. And that peace of mind does not exist on eBay, whether buying

00:44:59   or selling or Craigslist or anything like that. It's like, "I don't know these people.

00:45:04   This could not be a person at all.

00:45:05   This could be a bot somewhere in Lithuania.

00:45:08   I have no idea about any of this.

00:45:10   Whereas it's not like buying it from a friend because they don't know Marco or know him,

00:45:14   but the combination of mutually assured destruction, public figure thing, and the general nice

00:45:20   feelings people have for people that they read their blog posts and listen to their

00:45:24   podcasts, that is super important on top of the large number of followers.

00:45:27   Now, does that mean all this advice is completely useless for everybody?

00:45:30   I think Marcos advice is the most useful like price it to move and it'll move

00:45:33   but you still have to find some venue for putting your offer in front of people and then you have to

00:45:39   Marcos got this on his side. You have to deal with the person who makes the offer you write the thing on Twitter

00:45:44   Hopefully you're narrowing down to people who follow you on Twitter and know to find your stuff there as it's not just a bunch of random

00:45:50   individuals but you still have to

00:45:52   Deal with that person and hope that they you know

00:45:55   You get the money from then you're gonna send them the thing and all that stuff like that

00:45:57   that. So I don't think there's any easy answers here, but if you can, if you can

00:46:04   at all get yourself a hundred thousand Twitter followers and have a public

00:46:08   reputation on the internet for a decade or two that really helps out with

00:46:11   selling stuff. I'd also like to add that if you're willing to trade a little bit

00:46:17   of lost money, so to speak, for convenience, Gazelle, who I honestly don't

00:46:23   remember if they were a past sponsor of the show, they probably were, but I've

00:46:27   I've used them by choice.

00:46:29   And there are other equivalent people as well.

00:46:31   But Gazelle is super nice for technology-related things, so like old computers, old phones,

00:46:36   et cetera.

00:46:37   And basically you just tell them, "Hey, I've got such and such device.

00:46:40   It's of approximately this quality."

00:46:43   And they mail you a box.

00:46:44   You put your device in the box, you mail it to them, and they will give you, I think it

00:46:47   used to be, I don't know if this is still true, like an Amazon gift card or I think

00:46:51   like a check or something like that.

00:46:54   And typically these prices are not as good as they would be if you did like an eBay or

00:46:58   something like that, but they're not terrible.

00:47:01   And if you're willing to trade a little bit of money for supreme convenience, and you

00:47:08   don't have 100,000 Twitter followers, I definitely recommend looking into one of these places

00:47:13   like Gazelle.

00:47:14   I've heard very good things about some sort of quasi-equivalent thing, or maybe it's more

00:47:18   like eBay that Amazon does.

00:47:20   I don't know anything about it really, but I've heard good things.

00:47:24   But there are ways you can do this,

00:47:25   is what I'm driving at,

00:47:26   there are ways you can do this

00:47:27   without having 100,000 Twitter followers.

00:47:29   - I would also say if what you are selling

00:47:32   is an Apple product, if you're gonna go that route,

00:47:35   check out Mac Me and Offer.

00:47:37   This is something I learned from Paul Haddad of Tweetbot.

00:47:41   I got a great deal on one of my MacBook Pros

00:47:44   that I sold last year by just selling it to them instead.

00:47:46   There's a bunch of these sites that buy this stuff.

00:47:50   Most of the time, the deals that you get are awful.

00:47:54   A big site like Gazelle, the prices you get are hideously bad.

00:48:00   You only sell to them if you really, really don't want to go to eBay or something like

00:48:05   that.

00:48:06   But yeah, sometimes it doesn't work out.

00:48:08   Sometimes one of the things I've found is when you're selling something that is not

00:48:13   that old but not that popular or not selling very well.

00:48:16   So for instance, when I sold my 15-inch touch bar last year or when I sold the 12.9-inch

00:48:23   iPad Pro. Those were things that because I guess they weren't selling that well, Apple

00:48:30   was discounting them pretty deeply in both their refurb store and through partners like

00:48:34   Best Buy and Target that are like Apple's official retailers but that like things go

00:48:40   on sale there mysteriously when Apple needs to move more of them even when Apple themselves

00:48:44   never puts anything on sale. So if the thing you're selling is one of those things, you

00:48:49   might like you might be stuck with something that's not worth nearly what you paid for

00:48:52   or what you think it should be worth.

00:48:54   But if you go to one of these sites,

00:48:56   you can usually get a bunch of offers

00:48:59   and pick whatever one is easiest for you.

00:49:01   - All right, the final Ask ATP for this week,

00:49:06   T. Delm writes, "Have any of you ever seen a doctor

00:49:08   "or physical therapist because of RSI?

00:49:10   "I will start because I have a boring answer,

00:49:12   "which is no, I haven't.

00:49:14   "Every great once in a while,

00:49:16   "one of my wrists will hurt ever so slightly

00:49:17   "and I'll adjust my positioning or whatever the case may be

00:49:20   "and I've been lucky enough that it tends to go away

00:49:22   away very quickly. This is where the entire internet writes in to say, "Oh, you've already

00:49:25   got it. It's too late." That's probably true and that's okay. I will try to do this in

00:49:31   order of severity of RSI problems, so I will move on now to Marco.

00:49:36   I don't think I've ever seen a doctor for RSI. I did have a major back issue that put

00:49:41   me into physical therapy for a little while, about 10 years ago. But that was, you know,

00:49:46   I asked a few RSI related questions during that whole process, but I made a few changes

00:49:50   that happened to be similar because it was about like sitting too much and stuff, but

00:49:54   otherwise the answer is generally no. I've only had very minor RSI problems and I have

00:50:01   solved them mostly by reading a few books and articles and making changes to like, you

00:50:08   know, make sure my desk is the right height, make sure I have an appropriate chair and

00:50:12   I switched to a natural keyboard with the split layout. And those things were basically

00:50:17   enough for me to solve my minor issues so far.

00:50:21   All right, Jon. I'm buckled in. Let's hear the story.

00:50:25   So I have gone to a doctor. My first really bad flare-up was back when I lived in Georgia

00:50:28   shortly after graduating college. And I went to a general practitioner and got referred,

00:50:38   and nothing really came of that. And then everything they recommended was not useful.

00:50:43   I eventually came up to, moved back up to Massachusetts and same deal, went to a general

00:50:48   practitioner, got referred, eventually found a physical therapist who actually helped me

00:50:56   and kept going to see that person for a while and did a bunch of adjustments and life changes

00:51:01   and stuff like that and now I'm basically managing it.

00:51:04   The difficulty with this is it's basically it's hard to find doctors or specialists or

00:51:10   GPs who

00:51:12   Understand RSI like at all right a lot of a lot of doctors have a vague surface level understanding

00:51:20   It's basically at the same level of the average person where think our

00:51:23   RSI synonymous with the carpal tunnel and don't really know about any of the details and give you dumb advice or tell you to take

00:51:29   Advil all which is useless

00:51:31   If you do find someone who actually understands RSI and treats RSI and

00:51:39   and takes it seriously and actually knows what will help people because they have lots

00:51:46   of patients that do this, that's great but it takes a lot of tries to get there.

00:51:53   I don't think anyone ever needs their general practitioner to do anything for them, mostly

00:51:57   you need to find some kind of specialist, whether it's a specialist doctor or occupational

00:52:04   therapist or physical therapist or whatever it may be.

00:52:10   I always tell people that they, I would tell Casey, see a doctor, but it's good advice

00:52:17   because it's something they should do, but it's bad advice because I know if I tell them

00:52:19   that and they go see their doctor, their doctor is almost certainly not going to help them

00:52:22   at all.

00:52:23   But you have to keep going and finding, you have to use the internet, find other people

00:52:28   in your area who have RSI.

00:52:29   I think everyone has learned now in this age where everybody sits in front of something

00:52:34   and types for long periods of time that, you know, if you're certainly in our tech nerd

00:52:39   programming circles, right, but I think just in general, the number of people that we all

00:52:45   know that have RSI is way bigger than people think.

00:52:47   Some people just don't talk about it, but just think about it.

00:52:49   Who do we know that has had RSI?

00:52:51   You both know me.

00:52:52   Marco's had it a little bit.

00:52:54   We know Mike Hurley, who just got through all the Relay family.

00:52:56   Ray has RSI problems, like there's a lot of people have it.

00:53:01   And so there is a market for helping these people.

00:53:05   So you should be able to find, it'll be difficult.

00:53:08   I admit it will be difficult.

00:53:09   It will not be easy, but you should be able to find someone

00:53:11   who could help you in your area.

00:53:15   And what will help you?

00:53:16   What kind of doctor will help you?

00:53:18   What kind of treatment will help you?

00:53:19   I don't know, but you should,

00:53:21   the worst thing you can do is ignore it.

00:53:23   So you have to go through that annoying,

00:53:25   terrible US healthcare system rigmarole of doing whatever you have to do to get whatever

00:53:31   referrals you need to have. And if your referral is crappy, go back to your GP if you still

00:53:35   need a referral and say, "I would like you to refer me to this person." Or sometimes

00:53:38   you just can't, you know, this person is out of network and you have to pay out of pocket.

00:53:42   You have to do what you have to do, but ignoring it is the worst thing you can do. So, short

00:53:46   answer to that question, yes. Some of us have seen a doctor/physical therapist because of

00:53:50   our side.

00:53:51   Oh, my word.

00:53:52   - We should answer the next yes or no question we get.

00:53:55   We should just ask each of us,

00:53:57   give a yes or no answer.

00:53:58   - Yeah, okay.

00:53:59   I'm not sure I'm capable of that,

00:54:01   and with respect, I am positive that you two are not.

00:54:05   - I could totally do it.

00:54:06   - No, you're wrong, sir.

00:54:08   - We are sponsored this week by Aftershokz

00:54:12   bone conduction headphones.

00:54:13   Go to ATP.aftershokz.com to learn more.

00:54:17   Aftershokz headphones work by bone conduction.

00:54:19   Small transducers rest in front of your ears,

00:54:21   not inside or around or on top of them like most headphones,

00:54:24   and they send vibrations through your cheekbones

00:54:27   directly to your inner ear,

00:54:29   which bypasses your ears and eardrums.

00:54:31   So unlike every other kind of headphone,

00:54:33   bone conduction leaves your ears completely open

00:54:35   with nothing in or on top of them.

00:54:38   This brings some major benefits.

00:54:39   So first of all, it's great for comfort

00:54:41   if like me, earbuds actually hurt your ears.

00:54:44   And they're also, as I'm finding this summer,

00:54:46   great for exercise and hot weather.

00:54:49   Because they don't cover your ears,

00:54:50   So they are far less sweaty than regular headphones.

00:54:54   And if I do sweat a little,

00:54:55   or if I get caught in the rain outside,

00:54:57   no problem, they are IP55 certified for water resistance.

00:55:01   And for me, the biggest thing about aftershocks,

00:55:02   the big reason that determines whether they are right for you

00:55:05   is that because nothing is blocking your ears,

00:55:07   you hear all of the sound from the world around you.

00:55:10   So this can be a bad thing if you're in a place

00:55:12   like a very loud subway station,

00:55:14   but this can be a very good thing if you think about it

00:55:17   in different situations, such as if you are taking

00:55:19   phone call while doing things around the house or you need to listen for your

00:55:23   kids while you also listen to a podcast or if you're like I do here walking or

00:55:28   cycling or running when it's really important for safety and practicality

00:55:32   for you to hear the world around you but you might want to listen to you know an

00:55:35   audiobook or a talk show while you're doing that. Aftershocks work great if you

00:55:38   need to generally hear the outside world while you want to listen to a podcast or

00:55:43   take a phone call. If I'm honest you know sound quality for music is not great. You

00:55:46   You want these things for spoken word content

00:55:49   when you're in an environment where you want to hear

00:55:50   what's going on around you.

00:55:52   That's the best, and AfterSocks are so good for that.

00:55:54   Here I am, I'm on vacation for about a month.

00:55:57   I have only brought with me the AfterSocks headphones

00:55:59   for all of my portable use.

00:56:00   Every day I've been walking my dog and taking bike rides

00:56:03   for like two hours using AfterSocks,

00:56:05   and they are the best for this purpose.

00:56:07   I'm so happy with them.

00:56:08   The model I'm using, it's a flagship model

00:56:10   called the Trex Titanium.

00:56:11   I cannot recommend this enough for outdoor activities,

00:56:14   doing stuff around the house,

00:56:15   anywhere where it's not too loud around you

00:56:16   and you want to hear what's going on around you

00:56:18   while listening to talk content.

00:56:20   They are perfect for that.

00:56:22   Battery life is great, they're water resistant.

00:56:24   Check it out, the Aftershokz Tri-Citanium retails

00:56:26   for 130 bucks, but through our link,

00:56:29   ATP.Aftershokz.com, you can get a pair for just 100 bucks.

00:56:32   ATP.Aftershokz.com.

00:56:35   Thank you so much to Aftershokz for sponsoring our show.

00:56:38   (upbeat music)

00:56:40   I got two pieces of bad news this week.

00:56:45   I'm going to start with the easy one, because that's not a

00:56:46   topic, but it's just sad.

00:56:48   And if people have workarounds, I want to hear it.

00:56:51   Apparently, there's a new version of the

00:56:53   Google Photos uploader.

00:56:55   And in that new version, I'm being told by a friend of mine,

00:56:59   it does not recognize network--

00:57:03   or perhaps there's just no place to add a network share.

00:57:07   I have not yet updated, and now I fear it.

00:57:09   But there will probably come a time that I will need to

00:57:11   update, and I don't know what I'm going to do, because I

00:57:14   I currently have it pointed at a folder on my Synology

00:57:17   that has all of our pictures,

00:57:18   because now that we have a child,

00:57:20   there is an insurmountable,

00:57:22   just indescribable amount of photos,

00:57:24   and I need the disk space on the Synology to hold them.

00:57:27   That was bad news number one.

00:57:29   Bad news number two.

00:57:30   - The M5 only comes in automatic now?

00:57:33   - Oh, that's right.

00:57:34   - I didn't tell both of you this like four weeks ago.

00:57:38   - I didn't wanna believe you.

00:57:39   - I didn't either.

00:57:40   - It was not a rumor.

00:57:41   It was like, it's the real news.

00:57:43   Anyway, go ahead.

00:57:44   Well, so that was bad news number two.

00:57:45   And not only that, but I would like to publicly concede to Marco that I believe you and I

00:57:50   had an argument.

00:57:51   I don't remember if it was public or not.

00:57:52   I don't remember if this was neutral time or not.

00:57:55   But you were adamant that the next M5 would have all-wheel drive.

00:57:58   And I don't think I was adamantly opposed, but I was definitely very opposed.

00:58:03   And you were correct, sir, that the next M5--

00:58:06   I can't believe you're conceding this now, because I also believe on this very show,

00:58:09   like a year ago, I said, hey, guess what?

00:58:11   Marco was right.

00:58:12   drive. Like, and again, I wasn't relating to you a rumor. I was telling you a fact,

00:58:16   but apparently only now that it is announced to the public, you're like, "Oh, wow, it's

00:58:21   real."

00:58:22   I was holding out hope.

00:58:23   No, like, when I told you, it was like, this was a done deal. Done. Anyway, you guys don't

00:58:28   listen to me.

00:58:29   Well, why would we? What do you know about anything? Anyway, the actual piece of bad

00:58:34   news that I'm meandering toward that I really wanted to talk about now is that my backup

00:58:39   provider, I don't know if I would even say of choice, I feel like this was kind of a

00:58:45   I have no other options that I cared for so this was the only option I had, which was

00:58:50   CrashPlan, has decided to sunset their consumer business.

00:58:55   So the reason I chose CrashPlan is because you can have it back up a network drive and

00:59:02   it's considered to be part of your computer and thus, I honestly don't remember what I

00:59:07   was paying crash plan a year, but it was somewhere between $5 and $10 a month.

00:59:12   And you could have it back up for, in my case, for example, the Synology, and it is just

00:59:17   part of my $10 a month, or whatever the number may have been.

00:59:21   And perhaps in part because of people like me, they've decided, "Okay, we're not going

00:59:26   to do the consumer side anymore.

00:59:28   We're only going to do small business and enterprise."

00:59:33   And it's not going away for, I think, over a year.

00:59:36   And so I have plenty of time to figure out the answer.

00:59:38   But I've already been wanting to move away from Crash Plan because they have the world's

00:59:46   worst native app, which isn't really that terribly native.

00:59:50   It's a god-awful Java app.

00:59:52   Is god-awful in Java redundant?

00:59:54   I think it is.

00:59:55   But anyway.

00:59:56   I thought they had a real native app.

00:59:57   No.

00:59:58   I believe they promised native apps basically every three months for the last two years

01:00:03   and never actually delivered them.

01:00:04   No, I think they have one, but it might only

01:00:07   be for the business customers and not for the consumer ones.

01:00:09   That's exactly it.

01:00:10   So the thing I've been told-- and again,

01:00:13   I don't know if this is true or not--

01:00:14   is that it is only for the business side.

01:00:16   So one of the options that I have as a CrashPlan user

01:00:20   is I could change to a business plan.

01:00:24   And I didn't think I wanted to do that on account of the fact

01:00:28   that I didn't want their god-awful Java-based client

01:00:32   app.

01:00:33   But as we just established, perhaps the business app or the business side wouldn't be so bad.

01:00:38   But I haven't had an overwhelmingly positive experience with CrashPlan. It just hasn't been

01:00:44   negative enough for me to do anything about it. So at this point, I'm starting to explore,

01:00:48   okay, what are my other options? And not only because they've sponsored the show, and so,

01:00:52   you know, they've given us some money in the past, and I'm kind of endeared to them for that.

01:00:57   But because everyone I know genuinely has said that CrashPlan is, or excuse me, that Backblaze

01:01:02   is phenomenal, I've been looking at Backblaze.

01:01:05   But the problem with Backblaze is you can't do a network share

01:01:10   and have that as part of a regular home Backblaze plan,

01:01:14   which is, if I'm not mistaken, why Marco is running iSCSI,

01:01:17   or was at the very least running iSCSI on your Synology.

01:01:20   There you go.

01:01:21   Because then it's treated as sort of kind of a local drive

01:01:26   as far as Backblaze is concerned.

01:01:28   And so you can upload your Synology

01:01:30   and still have a regular consumer plan. So I could go iSCSI, but I've heard Marco say in the past a

01:01:37   lot of terrible things about it, and justifiably, like, given what you've told me about your

01:01:41   experience, I am fearful of going down that road. Nobody should do it. So there you go. So I've

01:01:48   heard some stories about, well, and somebody's saying in the chat right now, well, you can mount

01:01:53   it as via NFS and do some Munich-sy things and maybe that would work. Okay, maybe. I've had a

01:02:01   lot of people recommend using Backblaze B2. Hold on, Jon. I'm almost done, I promise.

01:02:06   Jon Streeter I was going to say, people saying maybe that will work. It does work. People do

01:02:10   do this. It is the thing you have to futz with, but it absolutely is the thing that works with

01:02:13   Backblaze. You can trick Backblaze into backing up your network share either by using iSCSI like

01:02:17   like Marco, which no one should do, or by using the various means to mount your thing

01:02:22   through NFS or RFS or whatever, and that will work as well, but that's also annoying.

01:02:27   Right, and that's the thing, is I want something that's not fiddly, because for all the bad

01:02:31   things I have to say about Crash Plan, it was not fiddly, which is good.

01:02:34   So what was my final option?

01:02:37   Oh, Backblaze B2, that's what it was.

01:02:39   One of the things that Backblaze is offering is instead of doing the traditional Backblaze

01:02:47   offering, you can do Backblaze B2. And I'm not entirely clear on the delineation between

01:02:52   the two, but for the purposes of the conversation so far anyway, it's basically a different

01:02:57   kind of storage plan, a different kind of setup, where it's half a cent a gigabyte per

01:03:02   month in order to back up to there. And if you were to download more than just a pittance,

01:03:08   then there's a charge for that. But that would hypothetically work for the Synology. And

01:03:13   And in fact, either they have software, or I think it's actually the Synology itself

01:03:17   has a front end that can upload directly to B2, such that it would be very not fiddly.

01:03:25   However, I have personally between four and five terabytes of stuff on the Synology that

01:03:30   I think is worth backing up.

01:03:32   Now, a lot of that is, say, ripped copies of Blu-rays that I still own before anyone

01:03:38   starts calling the RIAA.

01:03:40   MPAA?

01:03:41   That too, thank you.

01:03:43   My bad. But anyway, yeah, I realized that after you said it. But the point being, like,

01:03:48   you know, I'm not even talking about things that have fallen off of trucks. A lot of this

01:03:51   stuff is stuff that I have in Plex for convenience, if nothing else. And I recognize that I could

01:03:55   rebuild it and I could perhaps exclude that from the backup. But here again, my preference

01:04:01   is I am willing to throw some modicum of money at this problem in order to make my life easier.

01:04:08   This probably sounds familiar given our conversation about Marco selling things.

01:04:12   So if I wanted to go to B2, which is my current theory, it equates to roughly 20 bucks a month,

01:04:20   which is a far cry from I think the 60-ish dollars a year that I was giving to Crash

01:04:25   Plan.

01:04:26   So I think the two most appealing options for me, and then I'm going to stop talking,

01:04:29   is go to the Crash Plan small business plan, which is probably approximately the same money

01:04:34   I was paying, and it should in theory capture the Synology like it used to.

01:04:40   And there's a lot of me that's thinking that may be the right answer.

01:04:43   Or finally use this as the excuse to divorce from Crash Plan, and just use a combination

01:04:49   of B2 for the Synology and regular Backblaze for my iMac, and just do it that way.

01:04:54   So that is a lot of—I know that was not a very brief summary, but there's a lot here.

01:04:59   So let me, I guess, start by saying,

01:05:02   Marco, what are your thoughts on iSCSI?

01:05:05   And then John, I think you're in a similar scenario to me,

01:05:07   so I'd like to hear your thoughts

01:05:08   on a more general level after Marco's.

01:05:11   - Well, first let me step back a little bit.

01:05:14   Let me say my opening statement,

01:05:15   'cause I know John's gonna give his.

01:05:17   (laughing)

01:05:18   I have my chance.

01:05:20   I do think it's worth considering how much giant storage

01:05:25   you actually need to keep and back up and everything.

01:05:28   We as nerds and as computer power users have,

01:05:32   for years, many of us have kept these giant media libraries,

01:05:36   giant media collections.

01:05:38   And for some people, if you actually go and watch

01:05:41   those things on a regular basis,

01:05:43   maybe it's worth keeping those things.

01:05:45   But a lot of us, I think, rip them from this

01:05:47   artificial scarcity, like when we were growing up

01:05:50   and bandwidth wasn't a thing, really,

01:05:53   and computer media was hard and rare.

01:05:56   it's like Depression-era grandparents.

01:05:58   Like, you know, you grow up hoarding this stuff.

01:06:00   So now we have these giant hard drives,

01:06:03   giant bandwidth, you know, media that's easy

01:06:05   to rip off these giant disks.

01:06:07   Like, now we wanna hoard it all, right?

01:06:09   But the fact is, like, if you actually want

01:06:12   to finally go back and rewatch something

01:06:15   that you've been saving all this time,

01:06:17   like, is it really worth having paid

01:06:20   all the money in the meantime on disks,

01:06:23   on backups of those disks, on electricity

01:06:26   to power these things in your house that are on all the time.

01:06:29   Suppose you wanna watch one movie a month

01:06:31   from your collection.

01:06:32   You can just pay like five or 10 bucks to buy it

01:06:35   or whatever, each time you wanna watch it,

01:06:38   the very few times that you actually wanna watch

01:06:40   from out of that giant library

01:06:42   and you might very well come out ahead.

01:06:44   And you also gotta think like in that scenario

01:06:46   where like suppose you don't store all these files

01:06:49   and you occasionally have to rebuy something

01:06:52   to watch it again.

01:06:55   might you even not even have to buy it?

01:06:57   Will it probably be available from Netflix

01:07:00   or Amazon Video or HBO or some other service

01:07:03   that you might already be paying for?

01:07:05   Many of the things that I've ripped,

01:07:07   I've ended up never watching because,

01:07:09   oh, I can just get them on Netflix.

01:07:11   Also, then you have to deal with,

01:07:13   suppose you have this library of ripped movies.

01:07:16   Well, suppose you rip them as DVDs.

01:07:19   Then HD comes out, then Blu-rays come out,

01:07:22   then 4K comes out, then 4K HDR comes out.

01:07:26   By the time you actually wanna go back and watch the thing,

01:07:29   is your version of it even still the best quality?

01:07:32   Or can you go on the Netflix app on your TV

01:07:37   that comes with your TV for free

01:07:39   and watch the same thing in 4K now?

01:07:42   I highly suggest that anybody who's dealing

01:07:46   with this problem of how do I back up

01:07:48   a massive collection of media,

01:07:50   really do some introspection here as like,

01:07:53   do I really need to be storing all this stuff?

01:07:56   And if I am storing all this stuff,

01:07:57   do I really need to be backing it up

01:08:00   as much as I'm backing up my family photos?

01:08:03   Or is this a lot less important?

01:08:05   And can I either delete it and stop worrying about all this?

01:08:08   Or not be backing it up in so many different places?

01:08:12   So, that being said,

01:08:15   if you are going to back up stuff like this,

01:08:17   We have these network attack storage devices

01:08:20   from Synology that they sent us a long time ago.

01:08:22   It was very nice of them.

01:08:24   Network attack storage devices are very complicated.

01:08:28   They're a huge solution to what might be a small problem.

01:08:32   If your problem is I need more disk space,

01:08:35   a NAS is massive overkill for that problem

01:08:38   because they are big, they're expensive,

01:08:40   they are entire other computers that you need to manage,

01:08:44   you need to run separate software updates

01:08:46   is they have their own software,

01:08:47   usually they're Linux based or something,

01:08:49   and because they're kind of their own computers,

01:08:51   their own kind of servers,

01:08:52   but they don't quite run Mac OS or Windows

01:08:56   or anything that you're used to using

01:08:58   on a regular computer,

01:09:00   they have their own special applications,

01:09:01   they can't run the applications that you might want,

01:09:04   the processors they run are usually very low end,

01:09:06   so certain things like Plex transcoding are very limited

01:09:09   or you need certain models with certain accelerators

01:09:11   or whatever else.

01:09:12   Running a NAS, they're very powerful

01:09:16   because they are their little app platforms.

01:09:18   But if your main problem is I want more disk space

01:09:22   for apps that run on a Mac,

01:09:25   I would say a NAS is really quite overkill.

01:09:28   In the years since we've all gotten

01:09:30   these network tech storage NAS things,

01:09:32   is it okay to say NAS?

01:09:33   I never quite know.

01:09:35   Is that like saying NAS, or is it actually acceptable?

01:09:39   - I think it's acceptable, unlike Nitrous socks,

01:09:42   no, not, whatever the Nitrous is that you're using.

01:09:44   This is why our car show was never good.

01:09:45   Anyway.

01:09:46   (laughing)

01:09:47   - Yeah, so also in the time since we've gotten

01:09:49   these NAS devices, hard drives have gotten way bigger.

01:09:53   Like we got these when the biggest disk you could buy

01:09:55   at the time was four terabytes.

01:09:57   Now you can get 10 terabyte drives.

01:09:58   And while the 10 terabyte ones are kind of expensive,

01:10:01   they're like about 500 bucks, eight terabyte ones,

01:10:04   which are barely smaller, are like 300 bucks now.

01:10:07   Like these are really, like hard drives are massive.

01:10:11   They're way bigger than they were even just a few years ago.

01:10:14   and they cost very little per terabyte.

01:10:17   The amount of stuff that we need to store,

01:10:20   it seems like if you're able to use

01:10:23   full-size three and a half inch hard drives,

01:10:26   the hardware capacity has dramatically outpaced our needs

01:10:29   for most of the things we're storing.

01:10:32   You're storing, you said about five terabytes.

01:10:34   On my sonology, I have something like 16 terabytes

01:10:39   of usable space with the way I've arranged all the drives

01:10:41   with RAID and everything.

01:10:42   I've used, out of the 16 terabytes,

01:10:44   I've used about 10 or eight,

01:10:47   but I've used it very irresponsibly.

01:10:49   Just like, 'cause I knew I had like infinite space,

01:10:52   so I'm just like throwing stuff all over it.

01:10:54   - Same here, same here.

01:10:55   - Yeah, tons of duplication,

01:10:57   movies that I will probably never watch, stuff like that.

01:10:59   I just use it incredibly irresponsibly.

01:11:01   Now, if I wanted to store my incredibly irresponsible,

01:11:04   roughly 10 terabytes of stuff,

01:11:06   I could get two 10 terabyte hard drives

01:11:08   and put them in RAID 1 and be done.

01:11:10   So a NAS, first of all, I don't think the complexity

01:11:12   of a NAS makes sense if you're gonna have fewer

01:11:14   than about five or even eight disks.

01:11:17   And if you're gonna have it, it's this massive thing.

01:11:20   So if you're gonna have a NAS at all,

01:11:23   I think you need to have a really good reason

01:11:25   for why specifically that's the right approach for you,

01:11:28   as opposed to any other option that's simpler,

01:11:31   that's maybe more local to a computer.

01:11:34   - You know, I understand and mostly agree

01:11:37   with everything you've said.

01:11:38   However, I think I would be remiss to not mention

01:11:43   that there are a lot of things that my Synology does that I am glad I have the Synology to

01:11:49   do it.

01:11:50   So as an example, I really like that I can have my Synology act as a VPN endpoint.

01:11:57   I really like that I can have my Synology act as a downloader for torrents such as Linux

01:12:05   distros and other legal things.

01:12:07   Or if I wanted to download some sort of binary from a news group, again, nothing but legal

01:12:12   things, then I can do that sort of thing.

01:12:15   Now to be fair, all of those can be done on my iMac.

01:12:18   That is also usually on 24/7.

01:12:21   But I do like that there is something off to the side that handles these sorts of things.

01:12:26   And so I agree with you that if all you're looking for is a big hard drive, there are

01:12:32   better ways to solve this problem.

01:12:34   But in a lot of cases, you may want just an absurdly large hard drive, which this functions

01:12:40   as, and that allows you to treat it as infinite storage, because I've done the exact same

01:12:44   thing you've done, or maybe you want to actually leverage some of the features of this computer

01:12:52   that's always on on your network. So there's something to be said for that, too.

01:12:56   Oh, absolutely. And there are other options for that, too. And so before I forget to cover

01:13:03   the iSCSI topic, because I want to then move on to just attaching disks to a Mac, but before

01:13:08   I forget to cover iSCSI.

01:13:10   So for those unfamiliar, the way iSCSI works

01:13:13   in a NAS situation like this is basically

01:13:15   the NAS treats a disk partition,

01:13:20   usually you say like, all right, these four disks,

01:13:22   whatever, make these into like a RAID 5 or RAID 10 set.

01:13:25   This is now an iSCSI volume.

01:13:27   And then you need to get iSCSI software

01:13:29   called an iSCSI initiator for some reason,

01:13:32   not a driver, not software, not an app,

01:13:33   call it an initiator, don't know why, don't care.

01:13:36   Please don't email me about that.

01:13:37   So you get the iSCSI initiator,

01:13:39   which is $200 or so on the Mac,

01:13:43   because it's not built into macOS,

01:13:45   and that allows the Mac to mount that giant block of storage

01:13:50   on the NAS as a local disk.

01:13:53   And it treats it like a local disk,

01:13:54   the Mac, like the applications of the Mac

01:13:56   all see it as a local disk, including backblades,

01:13:59   which is why this works.

01:14:01   And the Mac, you actually format this virtual drive

01:14:05   from the Mac's file system.

01:14:06   Like you format it as HFS Plus or I hope eventually APFS.

01:14:11   And then as far as Mac is concerned,

01:14:14   that's a hard drive put into it.

01:14:15   It's if it happens to be over your network

01:14:17   and being hosted physically by the NAS.

01:14:21   This has a number of advantages.

01:14:23   It does allow things like backblaze to work.

01:14:26   It also lets the Mac think the drive is native.

01:14:29   So if you're only using network shared drives

01:14:33   in the regular NAS way where the NAS

01:14:35   just opens up shares over NFS or SMB

01:14:38   or whatever protocols it's using.

01:14:41   Certain things on the Mac don't work very well,

01:14:43   like because it's a network share,

01:14:45   so it doesn't automap for one usually,

01:14:47   and then things like Spotlight don't work very well,

01:14:50   like searching a network share doesn't work very well.

01:14:51   Certain applications don't like running on network shares

01:14:54   or operating on files on network shares, stuff like that.

01:14:56   On iSCSI volume, because it is just like dumb block storage

01:15:00   over the network, there is no sharing of it.

01:15:02   Like only one thing can be connected to it at a time,

01:15:04   that is its disk, whatever computer is running the initiator,

01:15:08   that's the one that's using it.

01:15:10   There's no sharing, you can share it from that computer

01:15:13   as a Mac share, which I actually do on mine,

01:15:16   but then all the NAS's built-in applications,

01:15:20   if there's a media server application

01:15:22   or a Plex on the NAS or whatever else,

01:15:23   all these applications can't see this data anymore

01:15:26   because as far as the NAS is concerned,

01:15:28   this is just a big block of bits.

01:15:29   It cannot see the file system that's running on it,

01:15:31   it is not interacting with it at all,

01:15:33   So it's really a pretty big waste of a NASA's capabilities to use iSCSI.

01:15:40   Also iSCSI is fragile.

01:15:42   Because you're treating the network like a local disk, it must be on a wired connection.

01:15:47   If that connection drops for a second, it unmounts.

01:15:50   And that could be damaging your data or whatever else if it comes at the wrong time or whatever

01:15:54   else happens.

01:15:55   And it's certainly inconvenient if it unmounts.

01:15:58   And in general, I don't recommend iSCSI to anybody

01:16:01   because you are wasting the NAS's abilities

01:16:04   as an application platform.

01:16:06   You are needing to have another computer

01:16:09   be an always on computer on the network.

01:16:11   You know, like in my case it's a Mac Mini

01:16:13   and this Mac Mini does a few different things for me

01:16:15   and it hosts this giant iSCSI volume off the Synology.

01:16:19   So like you're already using a computer

01:16:22   that's on all the time anyway,

01:16:23   but using a NAS as basically a giant hard drive enclosure.

01:16:26   which is fine if you already have one,

01:16:29   but I would never in a million years

01:16:31   recommend that anybody who's starting fresh

01:16:33   and doesn't already own a NAS do this.

01:16:35   It is a terrible idea and nobody ever should do this.

01:16:38   - All right, Jon, you've been very patient.

01:16:41   I appreciate it.

01:16:42   Tell us your thoughts.

01:16:44   - Well, I was gonna talk about alternatives to CrashPlan,

01:16:48   but now apparently I have to defend the concept of a NAS.

01:16:51   (laughing)

01:16:53   And also the idea of keeping movies on them.

01:16:55   So the one area that I think didn't get mentioned in my market, and one of the main reasons

01:17:02   that I use in NAS, aside from the things Casey was talking about, like having a little computer

01:17:05   and all the applications, which I do use and enjoy, is that, you know, so the hard drives,

01:17:10   these hard drives are big and cheap, 8 terabyte hard drives, 10 terabyte hard drives, whatever.

01:17:15   That whole discussion was about spinning disks.

01:17:17   These are all spinning disks.

01:17:18   They're, you know, 8 terabyte SSDs are not cheap.

01:17:21   All right?

01:17:22   Right?

01:17:23   You can buy them, not cheap.

01:17:24   Right?

01:17:25   spinning disks are big noisy and hot I like big cheap storage especially for

01:17:32   stuff like movies where it's just sequential reads and stuff like that I

01:17:34   do not like spinning disks anywhere near me so I like the idea of bunch of big

01:17:41   cheap hot noisy expensive disks far far away from me and far far away means

01:17:48   network means network attached storage so even if I just wanted the cheapest

01:17:53   bucket of drives to throw crap into and even if a NAS had no applications I would still

01:17:59   want a NAS just to get those disks far away from me and I would only be using them not

01:18:04   for like primary storage but for very large files that will mostly be read sequentially

01:18:09   so I wouldn't put my photo library on a NAS don't do that you'll probably be sad right

01:18:13   I wouldn't put my applications there or anything like that just put big data files there and

01:18:19   of course a NAS doesn't just give me a big bucket of stuff because you know the other

01:18:22   So that's that's why I think about this a lot like at my sonology down there

01:18:24   I think about ripped out all those drives and replace them all with eight terabytes

01:18:28   How much space would I by the way unlike the two of you? I?

01:18:31   Don't know I kind of do know I know how this happened

01:18:34   But I'm I have not been using my we have the same amount of storage. I've not been using my storage for Leslie I've

01:18:40   Been using it carefully like I I delete I don't know

01:18:44   Movies after I watch them right like if I ever watch a movie and it was crap immediately

01:18:49   deleted. If I rip a movie, but then a new version comes out, I delete that and rip the

01:18:56   new version, right? I have been using it frivolously, and yet my Synology has been basically on

01:19:04   the verge of being full, meaning like only a few hundred gigabytes available in various

01:19:08   volumes for almost this entire life. The main reason is I do time machine backups to it.

01:19:15   If you have a couple of machines with a terabyte internal hard drives plus some external drives,

01:19:22   both time machine backing up to your Synology, your backups get pretty big pretty fast.

01:19:27   So I've allocated a chunk of it for backups for my two Macs, right?

01:19:32   That's two terabytes just for their internal drives plus the three other internal drives

01:19:36   that are on my Mac Pro and the external drives that are attached to my wife's iMac.

01:19:40   So that's a couple of terabytes there.

01:19:43   I have that on a RAID set with some redundancy protection.

01:19:48   It's not RAID 0, right?

01:19:49   So there's more drives being used up.

01:19:51   So a lot of my—

01:19:52   Well, slow down, slow down, slow down.

01:19:53   You have your time machine volume with RAID redundancy?

01:19:59   Yes.

01:20:00   Yeah, see, I'm not going to say you're wrong there.

01:20:05   But when I was asking Marco—because I think Marco had either gotten his Synology before

01:20:09   me or maybe just set it up before me—I'd asked Marco, you know, "How did you do this?"

01:20:12   We have 8-Bay Synologies, and what Marco recommended, which I think was a good call, was do, what

01:20:20   was it, RAID 0 for two of the physical drives.

01:20:22   So basically you're making one large hard drive out of two physical hard drives, but

01:20:28   having absolutely no redundancy.

01:20:30   And the only thing that goes on that volume is my time machine backups.

01:20:34   So if I drop one, eh, I lose my time machine backups.

01:20:37   I cannot tell you the last time I've needed a time machine backup.

01:20:41   I still use it because I want it to be there, but I haven't used one in forever.

01:20:46   And yes, this is where everyone writes this and says, "Oh, RAID 0, you should never use

01:20:50   that, blah, blah, blah."

01:20:51   It's just for Time Machine.

01:20:54   That's it.

01:20:55   And--

01:20:56   - Also, I should follow up that I think, I can't tell from here, but I think I actually

01:21:00   switched it over to RAID 1 when I upgraded its storage capacity a few years later.

01:21:06   But I would also say also, it also only makes sense to do RAID 0 on Time Machine.

01:21:10   if Time Machine is not your primary backup.

01:21:13   You know, which for us it isn't.

01:21:15   Like, I have a super duper clone

01:21:17   that's local to the computer.

01:21:18   It's like a little local SSD that I tape under the desk.

01:21:20   And so like, that is my primary backup for my main drive.

01:21:24   Time Machine is a convenience historical backup only.

01:21:28   I also have cloud backup.

01:21:29   Like, there's the, you know, we have multiple things.

01:21:32   So if Time Machine is one of multiple things,

01:21:35   and you are, and you want to not waste

01:21:37   too much hard drive space on it,

01:21:40   that's when I recommend using RAID 0

01:21:41   if you're gonna do something like this.

01:21:43   But even today, again, a lot of this made sense

01:21:46   back when we were doing it,

01:21:48   when we were setting this up, what, three years ago?

01:21:50   But these days with the hard drives just so big,

01:21:55   it really removes a lot of the need to use RAID much at all.

01:21:59   Or if you're going to use RAID now,

01:22:01   you could much more often just use RAID 1,

01:22:03   which is just straight mirroring.

01:22:05   And the loss of the disk space

01:22:06   doesn't really matter as much.

01:22:08   That's less space efficient than the other raid schemes that let you use more of the

01:22:12   space.

01:22:13   But yeah, I'm more inclined to use raid 0.

01:22:15   I don't do this now, but I'd be more inclined to use raid 0 for my media because media has

01:22:18   less churn and there's less versions.

01:22:21   You know, I have Super Duper clones too, right?

01:22:23   But Super Duper don't save all versions.

01:22:25   I want to save as many old versions as possible.

01:22:28   And if I had raid 0 and one of the discs died, I've lost all versions of Time Machine backups

01:22:33   for two entire max.

01:22:34   Right?

01:22:35   Now I have other Time Machine backups too.

01:22:37   Anyway, I have a little bit, I understand I have a little bit of a nice, but anyway,

01:22:39   that, that burns a lot of discs.

01:22:41   And then of course I have my media.

01:22:42   I don't have a lot, a lot of media and I do delete stuff from it, but it adds up.

01:22:47   Cause I also have stuff in there.

01:22:48   Like every WWDC video that Apple has ever released in the highest definition.

01:22:52   Right.

01:22:53   That's the perfect thing for that.

01:22:54   Right.

01:22:54   And it's like, Oh, are you ever going to watch it?

01:22:56   I'm I'm archiving it.

01:22:58   I can't easily get that stuff again.

01:22:59   I have lots of crap like that.

01:23:01   And so that's my Synology basically filled up.

01:23:04   So anyway, I, I like it.

01:23:05   I like having a NAS.

01:23:06   I like the big spinning noisy disk far away from me and despite how huge it is, I would

01:23:12   even want more of it.

01:23:13   And like Casey said before, that's why I'm using CrashPlan and not Backblaze is because

01:23:18   on my Mac I use Backblaze, on my wife's Mac I use CrashPlan and on her Mac I mount the

01:23:25   Synology and I have CrashPlan back up the Synology volumes just like any other thing

01:23:30   because it does network backups.

01:23:31   Now CrashPlan, like Backblaze, is a flat fee for unlimited data.

01:23:36   And like Casey, I take advantage of that and I have about five terabytes pushed off the

01:23:40   CrashPlan.

01:23:41   It's like, you said there's as many times as you want, so I did.

01:23:45   That's just for Jason Snell.

01:23:46   I probably blew the quote.

01:23:47   Sorry, Jason.

01:23:48   So, yeah, so it was a great deal, right?

01:23:51   And maybe that's why they're not offering it anymore.

01:23:52   It was like, we can't afford to do that, right?

01:23:54   So I'm in the same situation as Casey where they're sunsetting their consumer product,

01:23:59   to have to figure out what I'm going to do about it.

01:24:04   I forget how much I'm paying for a crash plan per year, but it's super cheap, especially

01:24:08   for the amount of data I'm putting on it.

01:24:10   The offer they have for the small business thing, it's at least twice as expensive as

01:24:18   the consumer one, but still only like $10 a month per device.

01:24:22   For people with multiple devices, that's a problem, but I've only got one device, it's

01:24:25   my wife's Mac that I'm doing that with, so I don't mind that much.

01:24:29   small business thing we'll have a link to the crash plan fact one of the

01:24:33   questions on the fact is can I still move to crash plan for small business

01:24:36   even if I'm not a small business the answer yes you can anyone can migrate it

01:24:41   like I don't why is it it's just called small business you don't have to be a

01:24:45   small business although annoyingly they make you enter a company name so I

01:24:47   entered some bogus thing or whatever but you do not have to be a small business

01:24:51   use a small business and it's $10 per month per device but if you're a current

01:24:56   Crash Plan subscriber, there's an apology price for one year that is 75% off. So it's $2.50 a month

01:25:05   to upload unlimited data to Crash Plan. And if you already have a Crash Plan thing, you don't have to

01:25:13   re-upload your 5TB. It will migrate your existing 5TB backup and you'll just continue as normal.

01:25:19   That deal was too good for me to pass up. $2.50 a month for a year starting at the end of my current

01:25:25   subscription that was extended for 60 days for unlimited backup? Yes, please, right? Even when

01:25:31   it goes up to $10 a month, I might keep paying it just for the convenience. I'm pretty sure I'm

01:25:35   still running the Java application. And no, it's not the most efficient thing in the world. And it

01:25:39   fills my disk with big files and takes a lot of memory and does stuff. But in general, I have

01:25:43   enough control to make it lay off when I'm using the computer in only room and I'm not using it.

01:25:47   And for the most part, it's done its job they do they do, you know, it does a pretty good job of

01:25:52   finding the files and backing them up. And I just can't beat that pricing, right? And

01:25:57   so after the end of 2018, when my gravy train ends and I have to decide whether I want to

01:26:06   start paying $10 a month for my five terabyte backup, I might be like, "Okay, I'll just

01:26:13   unsubscribe from Hulu or whatever the hell streaming service that I haven't used in a

01:26:17   Take that money and and put it towards this or I might use one of the alternatives you listed

01:26:23   But for now the sort of what's the least I can do to not have to think about this problem until the end of 2018

01:26:29   it was

01:26:30   Do the small business migration a lot of people are mad at crash-plan like oh, I'm never giving them business blah blah blah

01:26:35   They should have handled the transition better

01:26:37   Arguably the 60-day extension could have been like a one-year extension or whatever

01:26:42   but there's no real easy way to do this. I made a plea to Backblaze, which I use and

01:26:48   enjoy but that doesn't do network volumes, on Twitter, which is where you interact with

01:26:52   brands in case you didn't know. Sorry, where you engage with brands. I engaged with the

01:26:57   brand on Twitter, and I said, "Hey, I would love it if you could back up network shares."

01:27:03   And the disembodied voice of Backblaze, the corporation, said on Twitter, "Unfortunately,"

01:27:07   Unfortunately, they left out a comma,

01:27:09   our business model would need a lot of reworking

01:27:12   for us to offer NAS/server for a fixed rate.

01:27:15   So basically it's saying like we don't, you know,

01:27:17   well I said to them back, so obviously they can't,

01:27:21   they would need to figure out how they can pay for that.

01:27:23   I said, well, you don't need to do what CrashPlan did,

01:27:26   which is whatever the thing was,

01:27:27   like $60 a year for unlimited.

01:27:29   All you need to do is match CrashPlan small business

01:27:32   because CrashPlan for home is gone.

01:27:33   You don't have to match their price anymore.

01:27:35   Like apparently that was an unsustainable model, right?

01:27:37   Presumably CrashPlan for small business

01:27:40   is a sustainable model at $10 per month per device.

01:27:44   So I would love it if Backblaze did that.

01:27:46   Even if they put a limit on it,

01:27:47   they said like, you know, five terabytes

01:27:50   for $10 a month per device, including network things.

01:27:55   You know, like I would try that, right?

01:27:58   So I don't know what they're gonna do there.

01:27:59   I think B2 is their preferred solution for that,

01:28:02   which is not really a service.

01:28:04   It's a play on S3.

01:28:06   It's just like a storage backend.

01:28:08   But it has, I think the cheapest rates.

01:28:11   Let me look at that.

01:28:12   I have their pricing page up.

01:28:13   Anyone else have it already?

01:28:14   Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the cheapest, like large online block storage thing.

01:28:17   Yeah, so it's a .005 cents per gigabyte per month for storage and .02, oh no, that's not

01:28:27   the damn dollar sign in front of me.

01:28:30   Sorry.

01:28:31   I was going to say, my calculations are all wrong.

01:28:33   One and a half a cent for storage and two cents per gigabyte for download.

01:28:40   And it is less than S3 and Azure and Google Cloud, which are the ones they put in here.

01:28:44   They also have a price calculator at the bottom where you can say, "Here's what my initial

01:28:47   upload is.

01:28:48   Here's what my monthly upload is.

01:28:49   Here's my monthly delete and my monthly download," and it will price it out for you.

01:28:53   And it's not that bad.

01:28:54   For my data, for reasonable values, it comes out to like $20 or $30 a month.

01:28:58   But that's still three times what $10 a month is.

01:29:02   But that's just storage.

01:29:03   you can back up directly to B2, so I could do that. But when I asked on Twitter, as soon

01:29:09   as this announcement was made, okay, what's everybody's favorite thing that will back

01:29:13   up a Mac, including a NAS? And in that tweet, just to save my—tried to save myself a little—it

01:29:18   didn't work, but tried to save myself a little time, I said, "What's the best thing

01:29:22   on the Mac that backs up to a NAS, or the backup network that drives?" Is it ARC,

01:29:28   or is it something else? Because I knew everyone was going to say ARC. And I know about ARC,

01:29:32   and I wanted to preempt them by saying,

01:29:34   "Yes, I'm aware of Arc.

01:29:35   I'm checking in with everybody to see

01:29:37   is there something else out there that's better?"

01:29:39   And some people did get alternate suggestions

01:29:40   that I looked at, but then a thousand people were applauding,

01:29:42   "You should try Arc."

01:29:43   Anyway, Arc is a Mac application,

01:29:47   a third-party Mac application that will back up your Mac.

01:29:49   It's been in development for a long time now,

01:29:52   and it's sort of novel thing is that you choose

01:29:56   and pay for whatever storage backend you want.

01:29:59   So if you want to pay for Amazon Glacier

01:30:01   or Amazon Drive or S3 or B2, Arc will back up to any of them.

01:30:07   Arc is a backup program.

01:30:08   It just says, just point me at your place where you want me to put the data.

01:30:12   And it will put its data there and its format or whatever it does, blah, blah, blah.

01:30:15   But you have to choose the storage thing and you pay for the storage thing.

01:30:20   So, and you could change, like you could, you know, stop paying for B2 and switch to Amazon Drive or something,

01:30:26   presumably have to, you know, transfer your backup over there, whatever.

01:30:29   So it's a nice divorce from the backup program and the storage backend.

01:30:33   And a lot of people use that and they enjoy it and they've been successful with it.

01:30:37   But given the storage backend pricing, none of these come close to matching

01:30:41   crash plans pricing, pricing or backblazers pricing for that matter, if

01:30:44   you're not doing network attached storage.

01:30:46   So it seems like Arc is sort of the power user fancy thing where you get

01:30:50   to pick the components and assemble it.

01:30:52   But if you have a huge amount of data, like I do, it just can't match the price

01:30:57   of one of these all you can eat things.

01:30:58   And the all-that-you-can-eat things, I'm being subsidized by people who back up like 100

01:31:02   megs, right?

01:31:03   That's how they can be so cheap is because I'm paying the same amount per month for backblazer

01:31:07   for CrashPlan as somebody who backs up like their 100 megabyte little folder of stuff,

01:31:12   right?

01:31:13   And so that's how Amazon can, you know, that's how these services can afford to give you

01:31:16   the flat rate.

01:31:17   Because most people don't upload five terabytes.

01:31:20   It's just the stinkers like me and Casey that are, you know, ruining it for everybody else,

01:31:24   right?

01:31:25   That's how they have to figure out their sort of histogram of how much people upload and

01:31:29   make all the math work out.

01:31:31   Whereas things like S3 and B2 where they're just selling you storage, they just charge

01:31:35   you for the storage.

01:31:36   Like it's all completely chunked out.

01:31:38   It's like, well, we're just a storage backend and you don't get to pay us less for your

01:31:44   storage just because someone else stores a little bit less than our thing, right?

01:31:48   It's exactly dollars per gigabyte, very granular service that doesn't care what you're doing

01:31:53   with the storage, you just pay for what you use.

01:31:56   And plus the paying for transfers is another thing that really bites you depending on how

01:31:59   much transfers you do.

01:32:02   So that was my choice for now, is that basically I'm punting it down the road, I'm going to

01:32:07   continue using CrashPlan for as long as I can.

01:32:10   Also because I don't want to upload 5TBs any of myself again, I mean I have a fast connection,

01:32:14   but that would take a long time and during that time I would have no cloud backups of

01:32:18   my thingies.

01:32:19   To get back to Marco's point about not backing up, not even having stuff on there in the

01:32:24   first place for like ripped movies that you're never gonna watch and other big stuff like

01:32:28   that, you could just, you know, pay $5 to get it online or stream it from Netflix or

01:32:33   whatever.

01:32:35   That only works for the people who aren't using a NAS like Casey was just describing

01:32:39   where they're, or like I have tried to do but had to bail on and may try again.

01:32:45   Blu-rays without recompressing them right because there is nothing I'm recompressing them

01:32:51   I'm not like you are all right well anyway a lot of people

01:32:55   Rip them and don't recompress them just so they don't have to deal with blu-ray discs

01:32:58   Which has been established in the show are terrible right so you just get rid of everything except in the movie

01:33:02   The actual movie file you hit play and it starts playing the movie right that actually is not a bad idea at all

01:33:07   yeah, but the thing is they're humongous and

01:33:11   You know even if you watch them rarely is that oh, it's easy just to buy it on iTunes

01:33:15   you can't get a you know a 4k you know if you have a 4k blu-ray thing UHD

01:33:22   blu-ray and you rip that losslessly there is nothing you can get online

01:33:26   streaming that can match that quality there's just nothing like it's not even

01:33:28   close even like 4k Netflix is just so massively compressed compared to what

01:33:31   you get off of that plastic disc so if you care about that and you have some

01:33:35   giant NAS somewhere with all these 50 to 100 gigabyte rips of these things right

01:33:40   there is no like oh I'll just get it online if you don't care about that well

01:33:44   then why are you ripping a bunch of movies to, you know, I guess to get rid of the menus, whatever,

01:33:48   but then the Marco systems are to look better and better the less you care about the quality of your stuff, right?

01:33:53   I'm kind of in the middle where I do care about it, but I don't have any way to play things like that on there.

01:33:57   So sometimes I have

01:33:59   like

01:34:02   versions of things for kids on there with like English dubs and other more rare materials.

01:34:08   Sometimes I've transferred things from my TiVo to there to free up space on my TiVo,

01:34:12   Which is terrible because the compression is anyway, it's bad. I don't do that stuff, but it has happened

01:34:18   so there's a lot of churn in it, but

01:34:21   It's not always the case that you can or even something like home movies like I have all of my

01:34:27   All my home movies taken with my camcorder because I'm old and my kids are old now and my camcorder, right?

01:34:34   I need to get that the video off of the camcorder is DV at least it's not analog off of the camcorder and

01:34:41   Someplace else it's all ripped to the Synology than all gets backed up

01:34:45   So if I had to do sort of like a trimming and so you can't back up five terabytes anymore deal with it

01:34:50   I would try to stop backing up all of my media that is replaceable

01:34:56   But I would still back up like all my Apple videos. I would still back up all my kids videos

01:35:02   And stuff like that and that's probably like half of the stuff because I don't have that many movies

01:35:07   I mean, I think I've shared my Plex thing with both of you guys.

01:35:11   Like there's not that many movies in there.

01:35:13   Like my movie collection is mostly on shelves on plastic discs and I still take them out

01:35:16   of the containers and put them in.

01:35:17   I just did it this weekend.

01:35:19   I took a plastic disc out of a case and put it into a slot and watched a movie.

01:35:24   It's a thing I still do.

01:35:25   It was a...

01:35:26   Like an animal.

01:35:27   Yeah, really.

01:35:28   It was a Blu-ray.

01:35:29   It was a Criterion Collection and it looked really good.

01:35:32   Not 4K though, but soon, like Marco said, I'll have to be getting the 4K versions of

01:35:36   all of my favorite movies, which is fine.

01:35:38   I'm fine with it.

01:35:40   Anyway, yeah, so Crash Plan, sad.

01:35:45   Don't poo-poo the small business thing.

01:35:46   Take a look at it.

01:35:47   Arc seems to be the consensus for other things

01:35:49   that you might want to try.

01:35:51   And if you don't have network attached, discs back place.

01:35:54   I think you've convinced me that I should just bite the bullet

01:35:57   and move to small business, because that is definitely

01:36:00   the price performer.

01:36:02   Didn't you tweet earlier, Casey, that there

01:36:04   was a five terabyte limit on it?

01:36:06   - No, I don't think so.

01:36:07   - I checked, it's unlimited.

01:36:09   - Okay, so then if it's basically the same thing

01:36:11   you were getting before, just now it's gonna be

01:36:13   10 bucks a month after the apology period instead of five,

01:36:16   that's, you know, yeah, bite the bullet,

01:36:18   that's still a pretty good deal for unlimited space

01:36:20   with network volumes.

01:36:21   Like, Backblaze beats it by I think about half

01:36:25   for local files, but to include network files in that,

01:36:29   that's, yeah, just pay it, that's fine.

01:36:31   Like they're really showing you a price hike here,

01:36:35   but that's totally fine.

01:36:37   Your other alternatives are all going to be

01:36:40   more disruptive and probably more expensive.

01:36:43   We are sponsored this week by Betterment.

01:36:46   Rethink what your money can do.

01:36:48   Visit betterment.com/ATP to learn more.

01:36:52   Betterment is the largest independent

01:36:54   online financial advisor.

01:36:56   It's designed to help improve your long-term returns

01:36:58   and lower your taxes for retirement planning,

01:37:01   building wealth and other financial goals.

01:37:03   Betterment takes advanced investment strategies

01:37:05   and uses technology to deliver them

01:37:06   to more than 270,000 customers.

01:37:10   Betterment gives you personalized advice

01:37:11   for your financial planning needs.

01:37:13   Based on the information you provide,

01:37:15   Betterment makes tailored recommendations

01:37:16   for how much to invest,

01:37:18   how much risk that you want to take on,

01:37:19   and the types of investment account that you should have.

01:37:22   Features like Betterment's socially responsible

01:37:23   investing portfolio can also give you the flexibility

01:37:26   to reduce your investment in companies

01:37:27   that don't meet certain social, environmental,

01:37:29   and governance benchmarks.

01:37:31   And Betterment offers advice that looks at all

01:37:33   of your wealth with a clear view of your net worth

01:37:36   when you sync your outside accounts,

01:37:37   such as bank accounts and other investments,

01:37:39   and they can even show you how much

01:37:40   your outside brokerage accounts might be costing you

01:37:43   in fees and uninvested cash.

01:37:45   Investing involves risk.

01:37:47   ATP listeners can get up to one year managed free.

01:37:49   For more information, visit betterment.com/ATP.

01:37:54   That's betterment.com/ATP.

01:37:57   Betterment, rethink what your money can do.

01:37:59   (upbeat music)

01:38:02   We've talked about doing a NAS,

01:38:05   we've talked about doing a NAS with iSCSI,

01:38:08   we've talked about trying to just not need any of this.

01:38:10   What if you still need lots of storage

01:38:11   and you don't want a NAS?

01:38:13   And I wanted to close my topic, hopefully this topic,

01:38:17   with the other option, which is,

01:38:20   if I were starting over today, how would I do it?

01:38:23   'Cause the only reason I have iSCSI on my NAS now

01:38:25   is because I already had a NAS full of big disks,

01:38:28   And I was like, well, I already have all this hardware,

01:38:30   might as well use it.

01:38:31   What I would do today if I was starting fresh,

01:38:34   I already have a Mac Mini server in my home.

01:38:37   I would just get a small number,

01:38:40   probably either two or four,

01:38:42   eight terabyte or 10 terabyte disks,

01:38:45   put them into very basic enclosures

01:38:47   that have pretty much no intelligence to them whatsoever,

01:38:49   and plug them into the Mac Mini.

01:38:52   And have it be in the basement or garage or whatever else

01:38:56   so the noise doesn't bother me, or it's just in the closet.

01:38:58   And just run either no RAID whatsoever,

01:39:01   or the built-in Mac OS X RAID,

01:39:03   or there's an app called Soft RAID

01:39:06   that is almost certainly the best option

01:39:09   for any kind of advanced use as software RAID on the Mac.

01:39:13   It's kind of expensive, it's 180 bucks

01:39:15   for the full-length RAID 5,

01:39:16   or if you just need RAID 1 or 0, it's 50 bucks.

01:39:20   And again, these days, you can get two eight terabyte drives

01:39:25   for a total of 600 bucks.

01:39:27   You get software aid light edition for 50 bucks,

01:39:31   put them in raid one, and you have really safe

01:39:34   eight terabytes of storage for under $1,000.

01:39:38   - You just build a Mac OS NAS, you realize.

01:39:41   - Yes, I know.

01:39:42   Well, so basically here's where this benefits.

01:39:46   Well, the downside I think is obvious,

01:39:48   that you have to then run on a Mac OS,

01:39:51   you won't get some of the advanced raid features.

01:39:54   Most NASA's these days, including the synologies we have,

01:39:56   have some kind of system to automatically expand,

01:40:00   or at least somewhat gracefully expand capacity

01:40:02   down the road without having to blow away your whole volume.

01:40:05   This is a system similar to what Drobo

01:40:07   has offered for years.

01:40:08   Drobo made it famous, but Drobo is terrible.

01:40:10   Nobody should ever use Drobo's.

01:40:12   They are incredibly unreliable.

01:40:14   If you ask around, you will see so many horror stories

01:40:17   from people who have trusted Drobo

01:40:19   and have had that trust be violated.

01:40:21   So I would not recommend Drobo.

01:40:23   And so other NASs offer features like that

01:40:26   where you can expand volumes over time

01:40:29   by replacing a small hard drive with a big one

01:40:31   and then letting the thing rebuild

01:40:32   and then eventually you can replace the next drive

01:40:35   with another big one, let that rebuild and everything.

01:40:37   It's a slow process but it does indeed work.

01:40:39   You can't do that with iSCSI unfortunately

01:40:42   'cause iSCSI has to be that one big block

01:40:45   and can't resize a file system that it doesn't know about.

01:40:48   You also, as far as I know, can't do that

01:40:50   if you do a direct attached MAC method.

01:40:52   like what I'm saying here,

01:40:54   just get some drivers, plug them into a Mac.

01:40:56   As far as I know, you can't do that in any way on the Mac

01:40:59   that's at all reasonable,

01:41:00   except if you use a drawer by which again,

01:41:01   you should not do.

01:41:02   Other than losing dynamic expansion though,

01:41:06   a lot of the other stuff I actually find

01:41:08   to either be a wash on the Mac or to be better.

01:41:10   So software wise, if you think about all the stuff,

01:41:14   Casey, you run on your Synology,

01:41:16   you run Plex, you run a VPN server,

01:41:19   you run photo hosting,

01:41:21   I honestly don't know what VPN server options exist for Mac OS, but I'm sure they exist.

01:41:25   Oh, definitely. Definitely.

01:41:26   You can definitely run Plex, because I do. And so I know that works. It's even better,

01:41:31   because you have more processing power, right?

01:41:34   Right. To quickly interrupt and to be absolutely clear, the particular NAS that we have, it

01:41:38   is not powerful enough to be the Plex host. So really, my Plex host is the iMac. It's

01:41:46   simply serving the content off of the Synology.

01:41:49   It's totally powerful enough. I use my Synology as my primary Plex server. Only when I have

01:41:55   in the rare case where it can't transcode, I switch to the iMac Plex server.

01:41:59   So you know, this is an aside that I wouldn't have interrupted had I realized we were going

01:42:03   down, but since I've interrupted, here we are. What I noticed was when I first started

01:42:09   using the Synology with Plex being served on the Synology, it could not keep up with

01:42:16   media I was looking at at the time. However, I have been extremely diligent for literally years

01:42:24   that anytime I add something to the Synology, I make sure I convert it to MP4. So,

01:42:30   hopefully it can send that natively to whatever Apple-based client I am viewing it upon. And it's

01:42:37   rare I use anything to look at Plex, other than an iPad or an Apple TV or something like that.

01:42:42   So I wonder if it actually isn't that bad if as long as I'm not doing like an MKV or something

01:42:47   like that, which sometimes is already in H.264 anyway, but I guess that's a roundabout way of

01:42:53   saying I should probably try that again. And mess with the settings. Like go to original quality so

01:42:58   it allows it to do with not transcoding. And it doesn't have to be M4V or MP4. It can be MKV.

01:43:03   Like I've had a lot of success, but obviously H.265, forget it. Like if anything's H.265,

01:43:10   I worry that my iMac is not going to be able to do it until High Sierra or whatever, the

01:43:14   Synology can't do it, but I just, it's my go-to.

01:43:18   When I have the big choice of which Plex thing do you want to pick, Synology is the one I

01:43:22   pick only after I try it first and it fails.

01:43:25   Actually if I try it first and it fails, the next thing I usually try is Infuse on my Apple

01:43:29   TV, where it supposedly does the decoding on the Apple TV's CPU.

01:43:35   And then my third choice is Plex on the iMac.

01:43:39   So the reason I brought all this up,

01:43:41   and I'm sorry for interrupting, Mark,

01:43:42   but the reason I brought this up is to say you're right

01:43:44   that I'm using my iMac to serve Plex,

01:43:48   and that's basically what you're talking about doing as well.

01:43:52   - Yeah, exactly.

01:43:53   Like, you know, if you have, like,

01:43:54   basically a headless Mac that is running

01:43:57   as a server in your house,

01:43:58   and it doesn't have to be a Mac Mini.

01:44:00   It can be just like an old laptop or something.

01:44:03   You know, it can be anything.

01:44:05   I think it's important, though,

01:44:06   that it's serving literally a server role,

01:44:09   that it is not used for anything else,

01:44:10   and then you can put it somewhere so it's out of the way

01:44:13   so you don't have to deal with hard drive noise,

01:44:16   like what John hates, if you don't like

01:44:17   the falsest hard drives, and you can dedicate it to roles.

01:44:21   So not only can you do things like we were talking about,

01:44:25   Plex and stuff, you can also do things

01:44:27   that are exclusive to Apple platforms.

01:44:29   Like I mentioned last week, or two weeks ago,

01:44:31   that I actually have my server Mac Mini

01:44:35   logged into iCloud Photos, and the Photos app

01:44:38   downloads originals to that Mac Mini.

01:44:41   And then Backblaze backs up those originals

01:44:43   from that Mac Mini, even though in addition

01:44:45   to the ones that I have on my main computer,

01:44:47   just 'cause there's one more place

01:44:48   you can have your originals.

01:44:49   And then maybe you can have a laptop

01:44:52   that doesn't have a hard drive

01:44:53   big enough to store your originals,

01:44:55   but you know you have your originals

01:44:56   on this other computer in your house

01:44:58   that is being backed up to a cloud backup service.

01:45:00   Also, because it's a Mac,

01:45:02   you can use any of the cloud backup services.

01:45:05   You can use Arc, you can use Backblaze,

01:45:07   you can use CrashPlan, anything else,

01:45:09   if it runs on the Mac, you can run it on this.

01:45:11   Unlike on a NAS, you're limited to whatever

01:45:15   handful of services have clients for that NAS.

01:45:18   But on a Mac, you can use any of them, right?

01:45:21   And you can also do things, you can do network time machine,

01:45:23   you know, again, NAS is gonna do that too,

01:45:24   but you can do things like Xcode bots that NASs can't do.

01:45:29   You can run other Mac software,

01:45:31   like I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner,

01:45:34   and the ScanSnap software is hideous

01:45:37   and requires the ugliest icon I've ever seen

01:45:39   to be running in your dock all the time.

01:45:41   So I've run them on the Mac Mini,

01:45:42   so I don't have to have it on my main computer.

01:45:45   You can also, there's also occasional other server things

01:45:48   that some people need in their house,

01:45:49   media-related things, development-related things.

01:45:52   I've run my Ubiquiti Unifi controller app on there.

01:45:56   Just stuff that you have to run on a Mac all the time

01:45:59   for some reason for your home.

01:46:01   Having a Mac server is, this isn't for everybody, of course.

01:46:06   I would say it's a luxury, but compared to a NAS,

01:46:11   I think just a Mac server with a small number

01:46:15   of giant hard drives plugged into it

01:46:17   is actually more competitive today

01:46:20   for what most people need than getting something,

01:46:23   getting some big NAS, like a Synology.

01:46:25   The only other thing I will add to this is,

01:46:28   I would say if you run a Mac Mini headless,

01:46:32   which means with no display put into it,

01:46:34   you have probably had weird little issues with the video.

01:46:37   Whether it doesn't wake from sleep,

01:46:38   screen sharing doesn't come up right,

01:46:40   or it comes up all black, or the performance just sucks.

01:46:43   OS X does weird things when there's no display plugged in.

01:46:48   Amazon, you can get a $10 HDMI display emulator.

01:46:54   It's a little black dongle that plugs into the HDMI port

01:46:57   on the back of a Mac Mini or the side of any old laptop.

01:47:01   And it emulates a display with just a couple

01:47:03   of resistors inside.

01:47:04   That's why it's $10, little plug thing.

01:47:07   It makes the Mac think that a 4K display is connected to it.

01:47:11   So it will run at 4K resolution through the screen sharing

01:47:16   thing that you're using or any resolution between zero and 4K.

01:47:20   And it fixes all those problems.

01:47:22   It wakes from sleep immediately with any kind

01:47:24   of screen sharing.

01:47:25   It's fast.

01:47:26   the animations are all smooth, it makes it rock solid.

01:47:30   I ran a Mac Mini Headless for a few years

01:47:32   without one of these, then I learned about this

01:47:34   and got one, it makes a massive difference.

01:47:36   I highly recommend anybody running a Mac Mini Headless.

01:47:40   Go on Amazon, get this here,

01:47:41   we'll put the link in the show notes,

01:47:42   it is called the Compulab 4K Display Emulator.

01:47:46   It's 10 bucks, it completely changes

01:47:49   running a Mac Mini Headless.

01:47:51   - So, sad times with Crash Plan,

01:47:53   but it sounds like we might have a solution.

01:47:57   And the solution is more Crash Man.

01:47:59   - Yeah, right.

01:48:00   Sad times to Crash Man.

01:48:01   The solution is pay them more money.

01:48:03   (laughing)

01:48:04   - Wee!

01:48:05   - Pay them less money is actually half the price

01:48:07   we were paying for for the next year.

01:48:08   Because, you know, $250 a month.

01:48:10   Can't beat $250 on a fraud-limited backup

01:48:12   with network backup stuff. - Yeah, that's true.

01:48:13   - So, you got a whole year grace period

01:48:16   to evaluate Arc and decide what you're doing

01:48:18   and so on and so forth.

01:48:20   That's why, by the way, for, you know,

01:48:21   you mentioned, Marco, about like things

01:48:23   you care most about like you should be backing up your photos way more carefully than you're

01:48:27   backing up like your ripped movies and stuff like that and I totally am and that's why

01:48:31   I like having and paying for all these other things that aren't technically backup things

01:48:37   like paying for a terabyte of Google Drive space and using the Google backup app to backup

01:48:43   my photos like it's not it doesn't think it's backing them up it thinks oh you're using

01:48:47   Google Photos look you have like 90,000 photos on Google Photos you must be using it's like

01:48:51   "No, I'm using you as a backup.

01:48:52   "That you are just another backup of just my photos."

01:48:55   Right?

01:48:56   And you don't know you're another backup

01:48:57   and I like it that way.

01:48:58   And you have redundant copies of pictures

01:49:01   and you somehow slurp down the edits of my photos

01:49:03   in addition to the original.

01:49:04   It's like, I don't care.

01:49:05   Like your purpose is to be one more backup.

01:49:09   And you know, a terabyte of Google Drive space

01:49:12   is more expensive than I'm paying for Crash Planet.

01:49:14   But it's just like, you know, ecosystem variety.

01:49:19   - Don't rely on one thing.

01:49:20   don't rely on one company on one service on one technique on one kind of backup even.

01:49:25   Got incremental backups, clone backups, we've got I don't even know I'm a backup all I know

01:49:29   is I'm getting a bunch of photos uploaded to me backups.

01:49:32   That's what you need and you know all the other hard drive backups and time machine

01:49:36   and everything else.

01:49:37   And that's what helps me sleep at night with my backups is having a lot of them and having

01:49:41   them all be very different in both corporation and even type.

01:49:45   And so CrashPlan not being perfect and being weird and having problems, I'm able to deal

01:49:50   with that because it's like, oh, CrashPlan is not my only offsite backup of the things

01:49:54   I care about most in the world, not by a long shot.

01:49:57   Like I've got photos in the cloud from Apple as well.

01:49:59   So my photos are in three cloud locations, three and a half because I do backup some

01:50:05   of them from my Mac with backplays too.

01:50:07   But anyway, I'm hoping that my drive sizes will get bumped up and I guess that will probably

01:50:13   cause me to pay even more for cloud storage but as you know as the spring hard drive prices

01:50:20   have come down, SSD prices have come down, you can get two terabyte SSDs for about the

01:50:25   same price as I got my one terabyte SSD so things are going in the right direction.

01:50:28   I'm just hoping cloud storage starts dropping as well because I don't want my hard drives

01:50:33   to be creeping up but cloud storage to be about the same price for the next five years

01:50:36   because that will make me sad.

01:50:39   Also my one final tip, do not use Amazon Glacier for anything, it is awful.

01:50:44   Even with Ark, Ark tries its best, it puts in a valiant effort, but Amazon Glacier is

01:50:49   the worst, do not use it.

01:50:50   If you need really cheap storage, use Backblaze B2.

01:50:52   Anyway, thanks to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Hover, and Aftershocks,

01:50:57   and mysteriously not Backblaze, for sponsoring this show this week, and we'll see you next

01:51:02   week.

01:51:03   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:51:10   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:51:16   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:51:20   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:51:26   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:51:31   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:51:40   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:51:45   Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:51:52   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:51:55   They didn't mean to (it's accidental)

01:52:00   ♫ Check my cast so long

01:52:04   - All right, Marco, tell me about

01:52:07   your home security experiences of late.

01:52:10   - A lot of bike thieves are stuck in his house these days.

01:52:12   (laughing)

01:52:13   He's gotta get some new bike every day.

01:52:15   It's a honeypot for bike thieves.

01:52:16   (laughing)

01:52:18   My goodness.

01:52:19   - Well, if you would've asked me

01:52:22   before I had this experience,

01:52:25   which company is best at AI-type problems?

01:52:29   I would have said, you know, Apple is not so good

01:52:31   at AI type problems, you know, and Google is the best,

01:52:34   right, or something like that.

01:52:35   Probably Google would be the best.

01:52:37   - Does it turn out Logitech is the best?

01:52:39   - We were, you know, we were leaving our home

01:52:40   for an extended time, and we had the bright idea,

01:52:43   you know what, let's put up some security cameras

01:52:47   so that we can see if anybody breaks into our house

01:52:50   or whatever, or we can just check on things,

01:52:52   make sure that like, you know, see if there's like

01:52:55   a tree branch that lands in our front yard

01:52:57   or anything weird like that.

01:52:59   let's just put up a couple of cameras

01:53:01   and give us peace of mind while we are away for a while.

01:53:06   I did some research and it did appear from my research

01:53:10   and the world of home security cameras,

01:53:13   or just home video cameras or security cameras at all,

01:53:19   it leads into this community of ultra paranoid

01:53:23   crazy gun people pretty quickly.

01:53:25   - Neat.

01:53:26   So this is a world that I have avoided for some time

01:53:29   because it starts getting into this weird

01:53:31   paranoia community of craziness

01:53:34   that I don't respond well to or want to be a part of.

01:53:39   So I didn't want something that was going to be

01:53:41   too crazy, too complicated.

01:53:43   I could host things myself in my own house

01:53:48   using my crazy NAS and have IP cameras that recorded to it

01:53:53   all sorts of crazy, hideous software packages

01:53:56   that can do this thing for you.

01:53:58   Or you can just buy one of the cameras

01:54:02   that comes with some kind of online retain service

01:54:06   for the archive that basically streams all the video

01:54:09   to their web hosting thing and you pay per month

01:54:11   to have a certain amount of retention of video there,

01:54:14   like 10 days or a week or whatever else.

01:54:17   And it pretty much led me to,

01:54:20   the best ones were the Nest cams,

01:54:22   formerly the DropCams, now it's NestCams,

01:54:24   which is owned by Google, or Alphabet.

01:54:27   I can't even keep track anymore,

01:54:28   but who cares, it's owned by Google.

01:54:30   And NestCams advertise all these wonderful features,

01:54:32   like being able to recognize people in the frame

01:54:35   and be able to only alert you when it sees a person

01:54:38   in the frame and not just a leaf blowing by

01:54:41   or a moth or something.

01:54:42   And in addition to all the AI stuff,

01:54:44   everyone pretty much agreed that the Nest cameras

01:54:46   had the best video quality of pretty much anything out there

01:54:49   and they could see better in the dark and stuff like that.

01:54:51   So I thought, okay, if the only downside of the NESCAMs

01:54:55   seems to be the cost, well, I'll pay more upfront

01:54:59   for something good if it really is better.

01:55:00   So let's give them a try.

01:55:02   So I got two of the advanced ones for inside,

01:55:05   the new crazy IQ ones, where the first review is Merlin

01:55:08   telling you that you can't rotate the image.

01:55:09   And I completely agree with him, by the way, that is BS.

01:55:12   And then I got two of the regular outdoor,

01:55:15   NESCAM outdoor ones for the outside.

01:55:18   - You don't know this yet, but on an upcoming RecDIF,

01:55:21   I talk about my purchase of the selfsame Nest IQ camera.

01:55:25   I just got one of them. - Oh yeah, awesome.

01:55:27   - I argue with Merlin about his review of it,

01:55:29   so I won't go over it all here, but anyway,

01:55:30   I actually have one of these as well, so go on.

01:55:33   - Okay, I cannot believe how incredibly crappy

01:55:38   these cameras are.

01:55:39   The picture quality is not great.

01:55:41   I can't believe this is the best that we can do.

01:55:43   Every phone in the world does better than these cameras

01:55:46   for video quality, so I can't believe

01:55:48   that this is really the best we can do.

01:55:50   the online streaming of these videos from Google,

01:55:54   like from Nest, this is a Google company,

01:55:56   the online streaming is laggy and crappy,

01:55:59   the interface to browsing the videos

01:56:01   is horrendously clunky and crappy.

01:56:04   - You're talking about it from the web or from the app?

01:56:07   - Both.

01:56:08   They're both, they're horrendous and clunky

01:56:09   in different ways, but they're both horrendous and clunky.

01:56:13   The app, typical of Nest, I've had Nest thermostats

01:56:16   for a while, it's one of the reasons I decided to do this,

01:56:18   I was like, well, I already have a Nest account,

01:56:21   I already have Nest devices,

01:56:23   I already have the Nest app set up on my phone

01:56:24   and my wife's phone, so it would be trivial to add this

01:56:28   and then I don't have to deal with anyone else's

01:56:29   crappy apps, I at least, you know, the devil you know.

01:56:32   So, getting it all set up, you know, it was fine,

01:56:37   you know, I was disappointed by all the quality

01:56:39   of the apps and everything.

01:56:41   Then it came time for them to actually do their job

01:56:43   and alert me when they saw people

01:56:46   in certain spots in the frame.

01:56:48   These things are the stupidest things I've ever seen.

01:56:50   There have been apps for the Mac forever

01:56:53   that you can use the built-in webcam on the Mac

01:56:56   to do similar things like this,

01:56:57   to be like a little security camera and stuff.

01:56:59   I'm pretty sure those apps that I used

01:57:01   like 10 years ago to try that out

01:57:03   were better and more advanced than Google

01:57:05   with their advanced AI and everything and Nest.

01:57:07   It is so crappy at trying to recognize

01:57:09   what is a person and what isn't.

01:57:11   Even with their highest end camera,

01:57:13   even with their highest end IQ service

01:57:16   that you're paying every month for,

01:57:18   They're terrible.

01:57:19   It thinks everything is a person.

01:57:22   I guess no one at Google tested the fact

01:57:23   that maybe sun might be in the frame sometimes.

01:57:27   Like maybe you might have windows that let some sun in

01:57:30   and so throughout the day, the pattern of light

01:57:32   on the floor will slowly move.

01:57:34   That they think is a person every time.

01:57:37   They think no motion at all is a person.

01:57:40   I have one that includes a view of the street

01:57:43   in front of my house in the corner of the frame.

01:57:46   every single time a car passes by, it says,

01:57:49   your front yard camera thinks it saw a person.

01:57:52   They are horrendous.

01:57:54   It is totally useless.

01:57:56   Because I have to turn down all the alert thresholds

01:57:59   because everything it sees, every bit of motion,

01:58:02   every leaf that blows by, every time the sun slightly moves

01:58:06   as it does every day, every single thing it sees,

01:58:09   it thinks is a person.

01:58:11   I am stunned at how bad these are,

01:58:14   And I can't, like, I expected so much more from Google

01:58:17   because they're supposed to be good at this stuff.

01:58:19   They're supposed to be like the leaders of the world

01:58:22   in image recognition and intelligence

01:58:24   in these kinds of ways.

01:58:26   And the fact that it works so horrendously,

01:58:28   even, and I'll even help it out.

01:58:30   I'll be like, all right, fine.

01:58:32   I don't care if there's a person in my front yard.

01:58:34   We'll leave that alone.

01:58:35   How about just telling me

01:58:35   if there's a person on my front porch?

01:58:37   Here's the little rectangle.

01:58:38   I'll draw you the porch.

01:58:39   You can tell where it is.

01:58:40   Tell me if you see a person in this area.

01:58:43   Nope, still every time a leaf blows by,

01:58:46   oh, we think we saw a person, the sun moves.

01:58:49   Here's a person, nope, nope, it's never a person.

01:58:52   I give Apple full credit now.

01:58:55   I thought all these years Apple needs to catch up to Google

01:58:58   with image recognition.

01:58:59   Turns out, Google image recognition is total garbage.

01:59:03   I now apologize to Apple for ever insulting their efforts

01:59:09   because my God, the rest of the industry is no better.

01:59:12   So this is Nest and not Google.

01:59:14   I don't know whose image recognition at fault there.

01:59:15   But anyway, I have the same thing

01:59:17   and my expectations were much lower than yours, I think,

01:59:19   'cause I assumed all of these security cameras were crap.

01:59:22   And I was pleasantly surprised.

01:59:24   Mine detected all the faces and I went through the app

01:59:27   and told them all the faces that I recognize

01:59:29   and it never alerts me again about any of the faces

01:59:32   that it already knows.

01:59:33   It tells me when there is a legit person or a legit motion,

01:59:37   which is my dog.

01:59:37   That's why I have the camera,

01:59:38   I'm watching my dog during the day.

01:59:40   has never sent me a false alert at all. Now granted it's pointed an internal room and not

01:59:46   at a window but the sun does move and the sun does move across the room during the time. Like

01:59:52   I agree with you the image quality is not great but people say that this is the best of the

01:59:55   security cameras whatever. But the fact that I can have it on and have it not send me alerts when

02:00:01   anybody in my family walks through the room but do send me alert like when the dog walker walks in

02:00:05   the room because I haven't added the dog walker's face. That's exactly what I wanted for and it does

02:00:09   it exactly as advertised. I've gotten no false alarms. Maybe it's missing the cat burglars

02:00:15   that are coming into my house and it's doing a crappy job there. And obviously the apps

02:00:19   aren't great and I wish they had more control, especially as scheduling interacts with the

02:00:24   geofence alerting. But the geofence alerting works too. When I leave the house with my phone,

02:00:29   it automatically turns the camera on because I'm away. Like I was pleasantly surprised because I

02:00:33   expected the worst because you read all the reviews of all these things and they're all

02:00:36   terrible and I was pleasantly surprised that the IQ features that I thought were

02:00:40   probably gonna be stupid actually make the thing useful for me now I don't have

02:00:43   it pointed outside where there's a lot more motion and I'm not trying to look

02:00:46   for like people on my porch I'm just pointing it at my dog during the day so

02:00:50   it is a more limited use case but for that limited use case I think it's fine

02:00:54   it's overpriced and you're right about the camera being not as good as it

02:00:57   should be for that price but it's doing the job I wanted to do so I'm a little

02:01:03   surprised Marco that you didn't dive into the world of I think it's IP cameras I don't know if that's

02:01:10   the right terminology but my dad he has a different sonology a much smaller one I think it's a 214 play

02:01:18   if I'm not mistaken well anyways he wanted to have a view of his driveway because there's not a lot of

02:01:26   windows in the house that can show him a view of the driveway and so he put an IP camera of some

02:01:32   designation, I'm not entirely clear what it was, and wired Ethernet from that camera through the

02:01:37   house, which admittedly is a pain. I'm not trying to just fluff over that, but he wired it into a

02:01:43   power over Ethernet hub or switch or whatever. Again, I'm talking a little outside my comfort

02:01:46   zone here. And then, coincidentally, bringing this back around, it is now that that camera is

02:01:52   plugged into, in a figurative sense, plugged into the Synology. So the Synology is watching

02:01:57   the camera and taking taking recordings of the camera etc etc and there's

02:02:01   software on the Synology that is built exactly for this and so since you have

02:02:05   the Synology sitting in the house I'm a little bit surprised you can go that

02:02:09   route because I don't see the IQ part in that camera you know it's just a camera

02:02:16   nothing more so like John for you it certainly would not have worked but if

02:02:19   you're just pointing it out the outside world it might have solved the problem

02:02:23   pretty well if and this is a big if you're willing to get an Ethernet cable

02:02:27   to it.

02:02:29   - Well, and I mean, the main reason I didn't look

02:02:31   at solutions like that, I mean, in the past

02:02:33   when I've had like the duck camera in the backyard

02:02:35   and stuff, I actually had a few, I had like two

02:02:37   IP cameras. - Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

02:02:38   - And so I know this world slightly,

02:02:41   and by trying to do this world with those,

02:02:44   that turned me off so much to that world

02:02:48   that when it came time that we wanted to do this,

02:02:50   first of all, we had this idea to do this

02:02:53   like a few days before like we were gonna leave,

02:02:57   or like a week before we were gonna,

02:02:58   it's like I didn't have a lot of time.

02:03:00   So I'm like, all right, you know,

02:03:01   I can't, it was just kind of a blessing.

02:03:03   Like I can't spend a lot of time

02:03:04   on the solution to this problem.

02:03:05   If we're going to do this, I have to do something simple.

02:03:08   I have to just like throw some money at it

02:03:09   and make the problem go away, hopefully.

02:03:11   And that's what we did.

02:03:13   In retrospect, you know, the correct solution

02:03:17   to this problem was something we came up with

02:03:18   a few days after that, which was,

02:03:20   why don't we just get a safe deposit box at the bank

02:03:23   and put expensive stuff in that?

02:03:26   and it costs way less.

02:03:28   (laughs)

02:03:29   'Cause like, the problem is, here's the problem.

02:03:31   What if somebody breaks into my house

02:03:34   and I have a video of that?

02:03:35   What do I do with that exactly?

02:03:38   The video that I'm gonna have

02:03:39   is gonna be pretty low quality.

02:03:42   It might be in the dark,

02:03:43   so it might just be with the IR camera.

02:03:45   And it's gonna be a video of some burglar

02:03:49   whose face is gonna be like 16 pixels total in this video.

02:03:52   And I'm gonna give it to the police

02:03:55   and they're gonna do what exactly with that?

02:03:57   Like, it's not like I'm gonna be dealing with the FBI

02:04:00   with top notch national databases of criminals

02:04:02   and they're gonna be able to swivel their face around

02:04:04   like CSI and see, "Ooh, this is this criminal."

02:04:06   No, it's gonna be like some crazy, desperate person.

02:04:09   Like, it's not gonna be like,

02:04:11   I'm not gonna be able to get my stuff back with this.

02:04:14   It's totally useless.

02:04:15   Like, I'm buying this with the idea

02:04:19   that this will somehow keep my stuff safer

02:04:20   or I'll have some recourse if someone steals all my stuff,

02:04:23   but that's really probably not true in practice.

02:04:27   - Well, you're just doing it to find out

02:04:29   if your house is flooding

02:04:31   or if a tree branch found something

02:04:33   or if a raccoon has somehow penetrated your home

02:04:34   and is busily shredding every one of your cereal boxes

02:04:37   or some other thing where you can have a neighbor come by

02:04:39   and shoot out of the house with a broom.

02:04:40   I don't think it's so much, I mean, for theft,

02:04:43   I know they might be called security camera.

02:04:44   I mean, obviously I'm using my mind to look at my dog

02:04:46   to make sure my dog hasn't escaped its pen

02:04:48   and isn't freaking out

02:04:50   and peeing and pooping all over the house.

02:04:53   peace of mind but definitely not for theft. Although I do have the ring stick up cam like

02:05:00   the ring non doorbell camera. I've been using that to because someone did steal one of my

02:05:07   I think of my second gen iPod touch which is kind of a shame they stole that out of

02:05:10   my car. Oh yeah I remember that. And so now I have a camera on that that zone and you

02:05:14   know of course that means nothing will ever happen again. But you know that one that one's

02:05:19   pretty good with the alerts too. It sends me an alert at work when like the FedEx guy

02:05:23   comes because I use the FedEx app to tell them for one delivery to deliver my packages

02:05:28   to a different location than my front door. And now for every FedEx package they deliver

02:05:33   it to a location that is not my front door. And so every time they walk by that camera,

02:05:37   you know, "Oh, a package is arriving and there's the person." And you know, you see the landscapers

02:05:41   and other stuff like that. So it works okay. But I have no illusions about security. It's

02:05:46   more like knowing, "Oh, hey, did that package come or not?" Like I don't think I even have

02:05:49   notifications on for it. I can just go to the admin and say, "Oh, did that package

02:05:51   come today?" Scroll, scroll, oh yep, there's the guy.

02:05:54   That is the only use I've found for these so far. It's not about security, it's about

02:05:59   basically showing me things are okay. I can see that my house hasn't been broken into

02:06:04   as far as I know. I can see that like there isn't a package sitting on my porch for two

02:06:08   weeks or whatever. That's just a model of the inside of your house like in Ocean's 11.

02:06:13   - Right, yeah. (laughs)

02:06:16   I actually did see that one.

02:06:17   Like, it's mostly for that, or, you know,

02:06:21   oh, look, my house is not flooded or on fire.

02:06:23   Like, that's basically what I want to know,

02:06:25   is like stuff like that.

02:06:27   But that's pretty much all it's good for.

02:06:30   And I'm quite disappointed in the usefulness

02:06:35   of the rest of the system and the accuracy of things

02:06:37   like the face recognition and people recognition

02:06:39   and everything, it was like,

02:06:41   I probably could have gotten by with a much simpler setup,

02:06:43   like an iPhone with a timer that would capture a picture

02:06:48   every day and send it up to Dropbox or something like that.

02:06:51   That would have probably been just as useful

02:06:54   and would have cost way less.

02:06:55   - There's other uses too.

02:06:57   Like my wife was looking at it and she said,

02:06:59   asked if my daughter had left her bathing suit at home

02:07:01   but she could see it on the counter.

02:07:03   Like after everyone was gone and we were all at work,

02:07:06   the kids were all at camp, I was like,

02:07:08   did she leave her bathing suit?

02:07:09   I see it there on the like zoom in zoom in enhance the that's bathing suit bottom. She forgot to pack it. Yeah

02:07:16   It's I mean, I'm glad I only have one of them like and if we didn't have it for the dog

02:07:20   I wouldn't want it. I don't like the idea of you know

02:07:22   Recording devices recording the inside of her house and uploading it to the internet in general because I don't trust that

02:07:28   You know, which is why for the most of the time I have it off like we have it off from her home

02:07:32   Which seems silly it's like oh you're home upstairs asleep. Don't you want to catch the cat burglars?

02:07:35   but I mean probably not like I just don't want video of the inside of my house being uploaded anywhere ever

02:07:42   So it's mostly only on when there is nobody in the house

02:07:45   Yeah

02:07:46   During during like the week that we were there before we actually left when we had these things set up

02:07:49   We would I kept the indoor ones off until we actually left

02:07:53   Like only the outdoor ones I kept running thinking the same thing

02:07:56   What if someone breaks into the house?

02:07:57   But it's like we've lived there for like 10 years and no one's broken into the house ever like my rule is if anybody ever

02:08:03   breaks into my house, we're gonna move. Like I can't live with that stress. If we're in

02:08:06   a place where that's a real thing.

02:08:07   That's a real thing everywhere though. Like there is no place you can move except for

02:08:11   an island, tropical island where you're the only resident and there are no boats. Like

02:08:14   because where are you gonna go? Like, oh, we're in a high crime area. There is no like

02:08:19   the lowest crime area you go to is like you get richer and richer people and those are

02:08:23   prime targets for theft. There's not a lot of them, but they are prime targets, right?

02:08:27   So you can't, there's no place you can go where you guarantee no one will ever break

02:08:30   in or attempt to break into your house. And in certain respect, as you get farther and

02:08:35   farther away from the rest of the population and closer and closer into giant compounds

02:08:40   that are walled off from everybody, the more tempting you are as a target and the more

02:08:44   likely you will have a sophisticated attacker for that one robbery in your entire life rather

02:08:48   than just a random smash and grab person. But most likely you won't have that in any

02:08:52   place because every place we all live is low crime. So I wouldn't move if something happened

02:08:58   you just lost the lottery in that case.

02:09:00   Or won the lottery, I don't know.

02:09:02   You had a rare event actually occur to you,

02:09:05   but it doesn't change the statistical likelihood

02:09:07   in our ritzy, low-crime neighborhoods.

02:09:10   I mean, you should look at the crime statistics

02:09:12   for where you live.

02:09:13   I bet they're ridiculously low.

02:09:16   - As usual, you're frustratingly rational.

02:09:18   - But please, I didn't like it

02:09:20   when someone stole the iPod out of my car.

02:09:22   So don't do that.

02:09:22   (laughing)

02:09:24   I mean, they didn't take anything else.

02:09:25   There's nothing else of value.

02:09:26   I guess they could have taken my tire pressure sensor.

02:09:28   - I love the idea, like, what if someone does break in

02:09:31   and steal your iPod again?

02:09:32   Like, what are you gonna do with that video?

02:09:34   Do you think you're actually gonna be able to tell

02:09:36   who it is on the video?

02:09:37   - Eh, I mean, what I would do with the video,

02:09:40   I would give it to the police.

02:09:41   I mean, they wouldn't do anything with it, but--

02:09:42   - Right, yeah, what would they do with it?

02:09:44   - Well, mostly I wanna know, look, is it teenage kids

02:09:46   who are down the block?

02:09:48   'Cause then I can go tell their parents

02:09:49   and get them in trouble, right?

02:09:50   Or is it just someone who I've never seen before?

02:09:52   (laughing)

02:09:53   You're gonna get some other parents.

02:09:54   Yeah, because like I mean with stuff like this you always wonder like, you know, it looks like this is something that kids would do

02:10:00   because what kind of person

02:10:01   Successfully breaks into my car without breaking a window and the only thing they take is a second generation iPod touch

02:10:07   That's a dumb kid, right? No

02:10:09   like a

02:10:11   Someone who was there for thieving would have taken everything in value out of the car

02:10:14   At least would have opened up every compartment and pulled everything out

02:10:17   Like they didn't even get like the loose change that was in the car like the quarters for parking meters

02:10:21   Like no real car thief leaves that stuff, but a stupid teenager would so that's basically what I'm looking for

02:10:28   [BEEPING]