00:00:03 ◼ ► the first night of Hanukkah is Christmas day? Yeah, I heard that and that's pretty unusual, right?
00:00:08 ◼ ► It happens every great once in a while. I don't love it. I don't love it, to be honest with you,
00:00:12 ◼ ► because we are a blended household in many different ways. I guess I'm a blended human title
00:00:18 ◼ ► insofar as I think I've said many times on the show. Dad was raised Jewish, although he doesn't
00:00:22 ◼ ► really practice now. Mom was raised Catholic, doesn't really practice. So I was basically raised
00:00:28 ◼ ► feeling guilty for everything. We celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas as I was growing up and
00:00:40 ◼ ► celebrated and of course Christmas and don't love when they overlap like this. Not my favorite.
00:00:46 ◼ ► What's bad about it? What's bad about the overlap? Because then neither one of them, well, Christmas,
00:00:50 ◼ ► first of all, Christmas overshadows everything, which I, fine. I mean, I get it. That makes sense.
00:00:55 ◼ ► But then Hanukkah doesn't have the space to like be its own thing, to like be its own person,
00:01:00 ◼ ► if you will. And that kind of bums me out, but it's fine. It also, you know, how do you
00:01:06 ◼ ► delineate the presents and what's from Santa and what isn't and what's, you know, Hanukkah and what
00:01:11 ◼ ► isn't and it's, I don't know. It's fine. It's just not my favorite. But you know what is my favorite?
00:01:24 ◼ ► the regular episodes, but we did what is probably the worst promo for that member special. When we
00:01:32 ◼ ► recorded it actually happened, I believe at the very end of the episode and through the magic of
00:01:36 ◼ ► editing and Marco, he shimmied it up to the front. But we're going to make an attempt at doing a
00:01:40 ◼ ► better copy this time. So let me tell you, guess what? There's a new member special and it's called
00:01:44 ◼ ► HP Insider Making the Show. And this was Jon's idea, as many of them are. So Jon, would you like
00:01:49 ◼ ► me to summarize or would you like to give the pitch? I can give a pitch. And actually it wasn't
00:01:53 ◼ ► my idea. It was sent from a listener, but that's the whole point of these things. We get asked all
00:01:58 ◼ ► the time questions about the making of the show, the mechanics of making of the show from people
00:02:03 ◼ ► who want to start their own podcast, from people who are just curious. And we sometimes we answer
00:02:09 ◼ ► them and ask ATP. Sometimes we say things offhandedly. We thought it would be a good idea
00:02:13 ◼ ► to have a single episode of the show that we can point people to, to say, if you would like to know
00:02:17 ◼ ► how we make the show from beginning to end each week, here's an episode for you. You'll hear about
00:02:24 ◼ ► our process. You'll hear about the equipment we use. You'll hear about all the different aspects,
00:02:34 ◼ ► posting the episode, things we think about when we're recording it, and just everything you can
00:02:38 ◼ ► imagine. It really is. It might sound boring to you like, oh great, you're going to tell me the
00:02:43 ◼ ► nuts and bolts of how you make a podcast. Why would I care about this? But hopefully there'll be
00:02:48 ◼ ► at least some insight into how we think about the show and certainly lots of tidbits about the gear
00:02:54 ◼ ► we use, which is not particularly exciting. And hopefully when you listen to this, you realize
00:02:59 ◼ ► making a podcast, it's not about the software. It's not about the hardware. Like the holiday season.
00:03:06 ◼ ► It's about the people. It's true though. It's very true. I thought it was a fun episode.
00:03:25 ◼ ► specials thinking this is going to be 45 minutes. You'll say it in the show. You'll say, yeah,
00:03:35 ◼ ► I bet I can come down afterwards and watch some TV with you. So I'm pretty sure this would be like
00:03:39 ◼ ► at most an hour. Right. I'm pretty sure I said the almost verbatim, the exact same thing to Aaron
00:03:45 ◼ ► and like an hour in, I don't think we had even gotten past John and slightly me, but mostly
00:03:50 ◼ ► John assembling the internal notes for the week. And I think I sent Aaron a text like, yep, I'll
00:03:54 ◼ ► see you tomorrow. Anyway, I think I sound like I'm complaining and whining. And if I do, I apologize.
00:04:02 ◼ ► I'm not trying to, it was just one of those things where I was so convinced, so convinced that it was
00:04:07 ◼ ► going to be a quick one and it was not a quick one. So that being said, it was fun and I did
00:04:12 ◼ ► really enjoy it. And I think that there is a lot of fun to be had even for the three of us hearing
00:04:18 ◼ ► how each of us thinks about our different like roles in the creation of the show. Cause obviously
00:04:22 ◼ ► we talk about it, but it's not often that we get to, I don't know, get to the feels behind it.
00:04:28 ◼ ► And it wasn't a heavy feeling show, but there's a little bit of that too. I don't know. It was just,
00:04:34 ◼ ► I do think there's something in there for everyone. So check it out. Now, John, if you aren't already
00:04:45 ◼ ► becoming a member? Very simple. Go to ATP.FM/join and you can become a member. Don't want to pay for
00:04:50 ◼ ► your own membership. Get someone else to do it for you. ATP.FM/gift. Direct them to that page. Tell
00:04:57 ◼ ► them your email address. They can buy you a membership. You can get it for the holidays,
00:05:00 ◼ ► redeem it and have a membership that someone else paid for. It's the perfect time of year for it.
00:05:05 ◼ ► And I believe you can schedule delivery or is it on what, what, how is it set up? Do you only,
00:05:11 ◼ ► you knew how our website works. I know it's been so long since I've looked at this. Cause I did,
00:05:14 ◼ ► I did your user acceptance testing for you. And that was so long ago. I forgot exactly how it
00:05:19 ◼ ► worked. Yeah. We were having pretty good luck with this. Here's how it works. When you buy someone a
00:05:24 ◼ ► gift membership, it does not immediately like send them an email and like spoil it for them or
00:05:28 ◼ ► whatever. And I considered having a thing where like you can schedule for when it's going to
00:05:32 ◼ ► arrive or whatever. But in the end, I picked the simpler method, which so far has been working
00:05:41 ◼ ► after they've successfully bought it, there's a screen that says, here's what you got to do.
00:05:45 ◼ ► Take this link or this promo code or whatever, like the seven different things that explains
00:05:50 ◼ ► and give them to the other person. However you feel like it, you can message them. You can write
00:05:54 ◼ ► it on a piece of paper. You can put it in a card. You can, you know, print this webpage out as a
00:06:00 ◼ ► PDF and send it. You can do anything you want. It's just like, you're, you're never going to lose this
00:06:04 ◼ ► information. It will always be like the gift giver will always be on there. Like there, uh,
00:06:08 ◼ ► there are page at ATP.FM. They can always see the gifts they gave. They can always get the link.
00:06:11 ◼ ► You're not going to lose it if you miss that screen, but it just says you have to give it
00:06:15 ◼ ► to them. Then you can give it to them whenever you want, like whatever holiday you're celebrating,
00:06:19 ◼ ► wherever you are, however you want to give it, you have the choice. Uh, and that's been working
00:06:24 ◼ ► really well. Uh, some people have been getting early presence because I've done a little bit
00:06:28 ◼ ► of support for people who bought a present and they guess they didn't wait for Christmas or Hanukkah.
00:06:32 ◼ ► They're just like, Oh, here you go. Giving it to you immediately. But yeah, you can decide when you
00:06:35 ◼ ► want to deliver it and how you want to deliver it. Uh, and if you want to print it out and put it in
00:06:40 ◼ ► a nice little card, that would be nice. Yeah. Uh, so you should go to hp.fm/join or atp.fm/gift
00:06:46 ◼ ► and check it out. We, we have built up quite the, uh, assembly of pretty solid member specials that
00:06:52 ◼ ► run the gamut from, you know, food, movies, uh, feelings, all sorts of stuff. So you should
00:06:58 ◼ ► definitely check it out. I think there's a lot of good stuff in there. Uh, let's do some follow-up
00:07:01 ◼ ► and speaking of that member special, Martim asks on your latest member special, you forgot one
00:07:05 ◼ ► thing. What's the, what's with the, Hey, future Marco, blah, blah, blah. Goodbye future Marco.
00:07:09 ◼ ► Goodbye. Uh, and so the, the, the, the comments, I think I'd said it off the cuff probably like a
00:07:16 ◼ ► year ago now, but that's my cue to Marco to say, Hey, we're entering in like a, like a huddle to
00:07:23 ◼ ► use football terms. You know, we're, we're going to do some kind of chitchat amongst the three of
00:07:28 ◼ ► us that we don't intend to air on the released version of the episode. Obviously, if you are
00:07:33 ◼ ► a member, you will hear all of this in the bootleg. Uh, but the idea is for Marco to be
00:07:38 ◼ ► able to see or hear this in the future and take out that conversation. And I think a lot of,
00:07:45 ◼ ► I presume the goodbye is in part to try to get a little bit of crosstalk to cue you that, that
00:07:51 ◼ ► something's going on. What does it look like from your end? That's exactly it. Whenever the speaker
00:07:55 ◼ ► changes, it's very visually obvious as I'm skimming through the track. And so I say, bye, because
00:08:00 ◼ ► that'll be like a blip on my track that will show up as a block and it'll be very obvious as I'm
00:08:05 ◼ ► skimming forward listening. Um, that's a point that needs attention. So that's why. Are you at
00:08:10 ◼ ► the point, I meant to ask this during the episode and I completely forgot. I'm so mad at myself.
00:08:15 ◼ ► Are you at the point that you can recognize the waveform for Hello Future Marco? And if it,
00:08:20 ◼ ► whether or not the answer to that is yes or no, what waveforms like verbal ticks or whatever,
00:08:36 ◼ ► I don't look that closely and I don't recognize words that well. What I, what I can do is,
00:08:42 ◼ ► um, you know, so during the live recording for the same reason, um, if somebody swears, Casey,
00:08:48 ◼ ► um, I will say afterwards, beep, same reason. So that just so that I will have a block on my track
00:08:55 ◼ ► so that as I'm skimming through, I'll see, Oh, crosstalk and I'll, I'll pay attention to that.
00:08:58 ◼ ► I'll play it and see what that is when I am beeping out of swear word, obviously, you know,
00:09:04 ◼ ► the, you want it to be bleeped out in such a way that the adults listening get the intention. Um,
00:09:09 ◼ ► but you know, we don't get anybody in trouble. And so I will try to leave in the first consonant
00:09:15 ◼ ► sound or whatever so that adults can figure out what word was there in case it's not super obvious.
00:09:20 ◼ ► Um, I have figured out what the waveforms look like of common swear words so I know which parts
00:09:27 ◼ ► to remove. Otherwise, otherwise I, for a while I would try to remove things like, um, one of the,
00:09:39 ◼ ► one of the peeves I have about modern speech. This is probably not something that I should care about.
00:09:50 ◼ ► Oh, yes. Mm hmm. I really don't like that. And I used to try to edit that out. And it's just,
00:09:56 ◼ ► there's so many of them. It's just impossible. Like it's just, it's way too much of a job. But I used
00:10:02 ◼ ► to look for that. Like for a period, I would actually look for at the end of sentences before
00:10:08 ◼ ► a gap in the waveform. You could often see the right, right? So I would actually try to edit them
00:10:14 ◼ ► out if I could. And they're actually somewhat tricky to edit out a lot of the time. Sometimes
00:10:18 ◼ ► you'd be surprised how often you can just cut it out and the sentence sounds better without them
00:10:26 ◼ ► or the next word or whatever, sometimes you can't cleanly edit it out. Um, but other than those two
00:10:31 ◼ ► things, I don't really recognize individual waveforms, right? I don't think there's enough
00:10:37 ◼ ► information in the track to do that. Like it's mostly amplitude you're seeing in the waveforms
00:10:42 ◼ ► and logic. You don't, you don't have enough frequency information and it's too squished
00:10:45 ◼ ► together on the screen with too few pixels that I don't think you can actually see high pitch versus
00:10:51 ◼ ► low pitch. Like there's no way you could quote unquote recognize a waveform visually except by
00:10:56 ◼ ► like brute force pattern matching of like, well, this is what the amplitude bump tends to look like
00:11:00 ◼ ► for this word when this person says it, which is not quite the same thing, but it's the type of
00:11:05 ◼ ► thing where you could easily fool it by making a totally different word with different frequencies
00:11:10 ◼ ► with similar amplitudes. So. Well, but there are certain words where like, so when I was saying,
00:11:15 ◼ ► you know, the, the, the pieces of the swear word, like for example, the S word, the shh at the
00:11:20 ◼ ► beginning, that's a very distinctive look on, and then the rest of the word doesn't look like that
00:11:25 ◼ ► at all. So that's why you can, you can recognize certain sounds that do look very distinctive in a
00:11:30 ◼ ► waveform, but I'm not looking that closely at everything we're saying, cause that would take
00:11:35 ◼ ► 12 hours to edit a show. That would be ridiculous. But even, even the shh, it's mostly just about
00:11:40 ◼ ► amplitude and because you don't have the frequency information in there. It's too like,
00:11:44 ◼ ► unless you're zoomed all the way in and can literally see like, I don't think the auto editor
00:11:49 ◼ ► even lets you zoom in that far to be able to see the waves and figure out the distance between the
00:11:53 ◼ ► peaks that come up with the frequency to know what frequency the S sound is. Yeah. I mean,
00:11:58 ◼ ► the frequencies we're dealing with would be, would be so, it would be absurd to try to recognize that.
00:12:03 ◼ ► Now there are certain wave editors will allow you to show, instead of the amplitude view,
00:12:08 ◼ ► they'll show you a frequency breakdown, which looks kind of like this, like, you know, colorful,
00:12:13 ◼ ► almost like a histogram kind of, kind of view. It's easier to see different word shapes in that
00:12:19 ◼ ► view in certain ways, but I'm not advanced enough to do that and logic doesn't show that to me the
00:12:24 ◼ ► way I'm editing. So there are many ways to view sound information when you're editing and in
00:12:29 ◼ ► certain contexts, like if I'm, if I'm pulling noise out, like if somebody had, you know,
00:12:33 ◼ ► their leaf blower guy show up next door or they are the air conditioner or the fan running,
00:12:37 ◼ ► if I'm doing noise removal, then I'll pull it into isotope RX, which is, you know, kind of an
00:12:44 ◼ ► advanced wave editor with all the, all different, like, you know, noise removal and fixing tools for
00:12:49 ◼ ► sound problems and an isotope, you know, I will see the frequency breakdown there and I'll be able
00:12:54 ◼ ► to see down like, oh, there's the 60 Hertz, you know, there, that's, that's the, that's the leaf
00:13:00 ◼ ► blower. So I'll pull that one out, you know, like there's, so there, there are different, you know,
00:13:04 ◼ ► techniques to view, to use different views to, to show you what you need to see in audio, but none
00:13:09 ◼ ► of those really work for like seeing the words as you're going by. I think if that's, if that's the
00:13:14 ◼ ► kind of view you want, it's probably better these days to use some kind of editor or editor service
00:13:20 ◼ ► that transcribes the audio and then just puts the words below it, which I don't, I've never seen that
00:13:25 ◼ ► done in like in Logic, but I know there are apps that can do that. Yeah, Descript does it, the app
00:13:30 ◼ ► that Merlin loves, where you actually edit it by, you edit the audio by editing the text because it
00:13:34 ◼ ► just puts a transcript there and if you see a word that you want to remove, you just literally
00:13:38 ◼ ► remove the word from the text and it removes the waveform. It's a different way of doing things.
00:13:42 ◼ ► Oh, that's fascinating. Thank you. Moving on, let's talk about emo Siri. Dan Milcarz writes,
00:13:48 ◼ ► "Siri has definitely gotten sassier in iOS 18. I like it. I sent a text to my daughter about it
00:13:53 ◼ ► when I noticed and the timestamp on the text was only after iOS 18.0, not 18.2. We got a few
00:13:59 ◼ ► different pieces of feedback with regard to this. I had thought it was new in 18.2 because I didn't
00:14:04 ◼ ► notice it before then." Dan obviously says that it was before for him and then a friend of the show,
00:14:10 ◼ ► Guy Rambo, wrote to me, "Pretty sure the Siri thing you've experienced has shipped back during
00:14:15 ◼ ► the 18 betas, but it relies on your devices having to download the updated Siri voice, which happens
00:14:20 ◼ ► at seemingly random times for different people." So that perhaps and probably does explain why for
00:14:26 ◼ ► me it was 18.2, but for others it wasn't. With regard to emo Siri, Dave Martin writes, "Not only
00:14:32 ◼ ► have I noticed some effect in Siri, she just spoke a text message into my ears with a hint of doubt
00:14:38 ◼ ► that the text wanted to portray, but I live in the Boston area like John. I've had cause to ask her
00:14:44 ◼ ► to direct me to addresses in my town lately and my town has a mid-word R in it. I jokingly speak
00:14:52 ◼ ► thought I misheard her the first time, but she did it again. So I guess you do pack the car down
00:14:56 ◼ ► at Harvard Yard. Am I right, John?" Well, John doesn't have a Boston accent, remember? Except
00:15:00 ◼ ► for all those words that have slight Boston accents, but other than those... - The whole
00:15:04 ◼ ► zero of them? - Yeah, sure. Okay. - Once again, of the many, many things that Marco holds dear
00:15:10 ◼ ► to himself, incredibly wrong ideas like the fact that I have a Boston accent, he will go to his
00:15:13 ◼ ► grave believing it despite the fact that it is absolutely not true. - Okay. - It's like, I always
00:15:20 ◼ ► think that you've been dissuaded of these things, but then you bring them up a year later and you're
00:15:23 ◼ ► like, "Well, as we all know, John has a Boston accent." Okay. All right. Marco, take that one
00:15:28 ◼ ► and just remove it, drop it in the trash. - Sure. - And then empty the trash. - In what order should
00:15:36 ◼ ► I do that in, John? - You sound so much like me. Oh my God. It's like I'm talking to myself.
00:15:43 ◼ ► God help me for defending John on this because nothing makes me happier than us making fun of
00:15:47 ◼ ► John. But I think our... I can't even do it right. The ardor or whatever it is, it's not it either.
00:15:57 ◼ ► Long Island accent, see also Mario. That has nothing to do with Boston. That's just Long
00:16:01 ◼ ► Island. - Marco doesn't have a good ear for accents, maybe. - Well, we are products of where we spend
00:16:07 ◼ ► time. I spent the first half of my life in the Midwest and now I live in New York. And so the
00:16:14 ◼ ► way I speak is some kind of probably weird hybrid of some New Yorkish, some Midwestish. John thinks
00:16:21 ◼ ► that he left Long Island a thousand years ago and somehow has not picked up any influence from his
00:16:26 ◼ ► surrounding area. And that's just, it's impossible. - The influence has been a filing down of my Long
00:16:31 ◼ ► Island accent. It has not been the adoption of a new accent for the new region. - No, it's a hybrid.
00:16:38 ◼ ► It's a hybrid. Everyone has a hybrid accent of wherever they've lived. - It's kind of hybrid,
00:16:43 ◼ ► new kind of hybrid accent. - I love this. - It's just the right awe and just the right... - Just the right
00:16:49 ◼ ► sink and just the right bounce. Oh my God. All right. We got to move on, but that is amazing.
00:16:59 ◼ ► Video Alex writes, "This camera is a modification of the Blackmagic Ursa." Oh, I'm sorry. This was
00:17:04 ◼ ► the Blackmagic immersive camera specifically that we talked about last episode. - Yeah,
00:17:08 ◼ ► the Ursa Cine Immersive, I believe, is the full name. - Thank you. So that camera is a modification
00:17:12 ◼ ► of the Blackmagic Ursa, U-R-S-A. "While the standard Ursa has interchangeable lenses and
00:17:17 ◼ ► lens mounts, the lens on this new camera does not appear to be removable. The regular Ursa Cine
00:17:22 ◼ ► is also only $15,000. I think this new camera has two sensors built into the front lens unit,
00:17:27 ◼ ► which would have specific demands for cooling, hence the high price. So no, the lens won't come
00:17:32 ◼ ► off. This is just my best guess. There's not much info on the Blackmagic website so far.
00:17:36 ◼ ► I think Apple has been using the Insta360 Titan for the Vision Pro stuff that they've been doing
00:17:40 ◼ ► so far. I briefly was now Casey speaking. Hi, this is Casey. I looked into this briefly. Hello,
00:17:46 ◼ ► future Mark. I looked into this briefly. And this is a weird, extremely weird looking like
00:18:02 ◼ ► around the like mid-axis of this orb. I don't think I'm doing the best job of painting a word
00:18:11 ◼ ► It shoots full 360 degrees in stereo at 11K resolution. It has very large sensors and you
00:18:18 ◼ ► can choose to shoot just 180 degrees. And by the way, Marco, you can rent the Titan from Lens
00:18:21 ◼ ► Rentals today for $700 per week. The Insta360 Pro 2 is also great, 8K resolution renting at $325 per
00:18:30 ◼ ► week. But the software is fiddly. When I rented the Pro 2 a few years ago for a project, it
00:18:34 ◼ ► included seven SD cards for the recording and then seven SD readers in a seven port USB hub.
00:18:40 ◼ ► Also monitoring is hard. So they all record like individually? Like each... I guess, yes.
00:18:45 ◼ ► You stitch it all together afterwards. I'm sure the software that's great. Oh yeah. One more point
00:18:50 ◼ ► on 3D video, writes Video Alex. In 2016, I worked with a company that had three live VR cameras at
00:18:55 ◼ ► the Indy 500. They were seven GoPros and a custom rig with fiber adapters coming out of them that
00:19:01 ◼ ► ran seven fiber feeds to three computers that did the stitching live and broadcast it to three
00:19:06 ◼ ► headsets next door. They wanted to paint it to the internet, but ABC shut them down immediately.
00:19:11 ◼ ► Cool. Yeah. So all this is to say, like, so we were talking about the new Blackmagic camera
00:19:16 ◼ ► for immersive video that's coming out in the winter or spring this year. And we were speculating,
00:19:29 ◼ ► 180 degree field of view video? And it seems like there are other options out there. We have had a
00:19:35 ◼ ► number of people send in reports like this and showing us different options that exist. But this
00:19:40 ◼ ► is still very early days. Many of them are hacky or limited. And as far as I could tell, the Blackmagic
00:19:49 ◼ ► one, because it has 8K sensor per eye and 8K resolution per eye that's recording, that seems
00:19:57 ◼ ► to be higher resolution than not only everything else that we're seeing from other companies,
00:20:02 ◼ ► but also higher resolution than what Apple's actually serving to the Vision Pro, which probably
00:20:08 ◼ ► makes some sense given that the Vision Pro only has 4K displays per eye. So that's probably fine.
00:20:14 ◼ ► But one thing I noticed when I'm watching the immersive video content is it's not as sharp as
00:20:21 ◼ ► I would like it to be. Like, it's kind of an odd experience with your eyes for lots of reasons.
00:20:27 ◼ ► We've mentioned in the past, like, it's weird because you think you can focus on everything
00:20:31 ◼ ► because in real life you would be able to focus on whatever you wanted. And with VR video, you can't.
00:20:36 ◼ ► You can only focus on what was in focus by the lenses when they shot it. So one of the weird
00:20:40 ◼ ► things about it is you can't focus wherever you want. But another weird thing about it is
00:20:43 ◼ ► it looks so realistic. It looks so much like you are there that when you try to look at something
00:20:50 ◼ ► that should be sharp and you can kind of see the inherent softness of the pixels at that resolution,
00:20:56 ◼ ► you almost feel like your eyes can't focus right. You like rub your eyes or you need to put on your
00:21:01 ◼ ► glasses or something. It feels weird because your eyes aren't focusing as sharply as they would in
00:21:06 ◼ ► real life because it's only 4K and being viewed at such close distances and everything. So anyway,
00:21:14 ◼ ► all this to say, this is still very early days. I think for this, I think we're in right now the
00:21:21 ◼ ► 1X non-retina world here. And hopefully in the near future, hopefully we will be able to upgrade
00:21:30 ◼ ► the resolution of both the cameras going to 8K per eye and then also hopefully the displays inside
00:21:36 ◼ ► the headsets eventually will get higher resolution as well. I'm glad to see the hardware getting
00:21:41 ◼ ► better on the Blackmagic side. But that being said, there are lots of reasons including things
00:21:45 ◼ ► like data size and complexity, why it seems like what almost everyone is doing is 4K per eye.
00:22:02 ◼ ► But they throw around 8Ks if it's like, oh, it's just four plus four. No, that's not what that
00:22:07 ◼ ► means. But okay. And the other thing is that we were, I believe John was speculating about
00:22:13 ◼ ► what possibilities might exist for different lenses on this. The reason the Blackmagic Cine
00:22:24 ◼ ► basically that the 180 degree field of view, pretty much like that is the lens. It's a fixed
00:22:31 ◼ ► perspective where that works. And that if you try any other perspective with any other lens,
00:22:36 ◼ ► focal length or anything, it just doesn't look right. Certainly wouldn't look right if you
00:22:40 ◼ ► tried to project it at 180. And speaking of projecting, like the using of the terms like
00:22:44 ◼ ► 4K and 8K for headset recording of stuff and playing it back is not really appropriate.
00:22:52 ◼ ► Because when we talk about a 4K TV, you can see all 4K of those pixels in front of you.
00:22:57 ◼ ► But when you're seeing something like immersive video and it was shot, quote unquote, in 8K per
00:23:02 ◼ ► eye, you're almost never seeing all the pixels that were shot in any one of your eyes because
00:23:09 ◼ ► it wraps around you. You can't like, if you could move back and like shove the immersive video so
00:23:16 ◼ ► far away from you that it's like this little curved thing that's in front of you. That's
00:23:19 ◼ ► a good point. Then you'd see all the pixels. But when you're looking around, you're like,
00:23:23 ◼ ► oh, well, the screens inside the Vision Pro only have 4K, but you're never looking at the whole
00:23:32 ◼ ► Oh, that's true. They recorded it at 8K, but that 8K takes up 50 feet and you're only looking at a
00:23:38 ◼ ► tiny portion of it at a time, but your tiny portion has 4K per eyeball. So they need way
00:23:43 ◼ ► more resolution if they want to match the resolution that is in the headset than recording
00:23:47 ◼ ► it in 8K per eyeball. Yeah, part of the big challenge with the sharpness and fidelity and
00:23:53 ◼ ► resolution of everything in the Vision Pro is you have to think about like, you know, that effect of
00:23:59 ◼ ► like, yes, it's 4K per eye, but you are not seeing all of those 4K pixels for all the content that
00:24:07 ◼ ► is being used. It's like, you know, the same way where on a regular computer monitor, if you use
00:24:12 ◼ ► one of the scaling modes that is not native to the panel's pixels, everything gets a little bit blurry
00:24:18 ◼ ► in certain ways. And you can, especially if you scale it to be larger than what the pixels can
00:24:23 ◼ ► actually do, where, so it's scaling down a higher resolution image to the lower resolution pixels on
00:24:28 ◼ ► the screen, things get blurry. The way things are shown in a VR headset, you're going through like
00:24:35 ◼ ► multiple different levels of that. Because you have the screens that actually physically exist
00:24:40 ◼ ► in there, those are being projected on, you know, through a system of lenses that kind of bend and
00:24:46 ◼ ► warp it to go around you. And so first of all, the like the pixels per like angular degree
00:24:53 ◼ ► are different at different parts of your eye, like the middle, you have more detail in the middle
00:24:58 ◼ ► than you have on the edges, where they're being like warped out. So you have like the warping
00:25:03 ◼ ► happening there to try to map this, you know, rectangular screen to fill your whole view. And
00:25:08 ◼ ► then you have whatever the software is running inside of that, that is like scaling itself to
00:25:14 ◼ ► some virtual viewport, then projecting it onto the physical screen, which is itself warping it back
00:25:18 ◼ ► around your eyes. So the result is you're going through tons of those like scaling steps. And
00:25:24 ◼ ► there is nowhere near enough resolution yet with the hardware that we that is seemingly possible
00:25:30 ◼ ► to exist today or that we know how to make today. Like we have nowhere near the number of pixels
00:25:35 ◼ ► needed to make that look good for for most things. So it's both a hardware problem in the sense of,
00:25:41 ◼ ► you know, we need that 4k per eye to get a lot bigger, we need those to be at least 8k per eye,
00:25:45 ◼ ► and probably more than that. And that's, you know, given how hard it is to get 4k per eye today,
00:25:50 ◼ ► I think we're a ways off from that. And then after that, once we have higher resolution
00:25:56 ◼ ► displays in the Vision Pro, then you also need higher resolution content, you know, it's and so
00:26:03 ◼ ► it's it's easy to like render the UI higher resolution that you know, we can do that with
00:26:07 ◼ ► computers, we know how to do that. But then you're going to need like the 8k per eye or more in the
00:26:13 ◼ ► video that you're watching. So it's we have a long way to go on all this stuff. You need a lot more
00:26:18 ◼ ► than that. Like if they increase the resolution of the screens inside the headset, that makes it
00:26:23 ◼ ► so much harder for recording because right now as you look around your field of view is 4k per eye
00:26:29 ◼ ► and you're you can imagine taking chunk taking 4k per eye chunks out of the giant thing that is was
00:26:35 ◼ ► wrapping around you, right? So you look a little bit to the left, that's 4k per eye and the part
00:26:39 ◼ ► you can see now look a little bit more to the left, you know, like just you're taking 4k chunks
00:26:43 ◼ ► out every single one of those 4k chunks of your field of view has to be at least 4k in the source
00:26:48 ◼ ► material, right? Suddenly, if those same field of view chunks are now 8k, because they doubled the
00:26:53 ◼ ► well because they doubled the K's quadruple the resolution or whatever of the eyepieces, now you've
00:26:59 ◼ ► just demanded that the source material also increase resolution by the same proportion. So
00:27:09 ◼ ► How many different field 4k, you know, field of view things can you get out of that you can get
00:27:15 ◼ ► like one looking all the way to your left and like the like non-overlapping ones you can probably get
00:27:19 ◼ ► three, four, five of those. So already your the resolution is five times lower than it needs to be
00:27:24 ◼ ► in each dimension. So yeah, there's a long way to go and this is even just for, you know, still
00:27:30 ◼ ► single focal plane images or whatever. And that's also by the way, that's also even more complicated
00:27:35 ◼ ► by the fact that that's also not linear. Like the if you look at like, you know, what the video data
00:27:41 ◼ ► actually is, it's to it's a fisheye view per eye. So if you if you see like a fisheye picture,
00:27:48 ◼ ► like a picture that actually has 180 degree field of view viewed on a flat screen, it looks very
00:27:55 ◼ ► bulbous. Like, you know, the middle of it is where almost all the detail is. And around the edges,
00:28:00 ◼ ► there's way less detail, like once it is kind of re projected onto, like a sphere that you're kind
00:28:06 ◼ ► of looking at it from within when you're in 3d. Because they're recording it on a flat rectangle
00:28:11 ◼ ► instead of recording it on the back of a sphere. Right. So we actually are are closer to the center
00:28:17 ◼ ► of it looking pretty good on higher resolution screens. They still need more than 4k. But you
00:28:22 ◼ ► know, I think I think I bet the black magic one like I bet if you're shooting an 8k, I bet the
00:28:26 ◼ ► middle of it will look pretty good on vision pros hardware. All right, so we have some more feedback
00:28:33 ◼ ► about immersive video. This is from an anonymous visual effects worker. While this is while
00:28:37 ◼ ► certainly the dedicated hardware for capturing immersive videos becoming more accessible,
00:28:41 ◼ ► there's ml based approaches that are also rapidly becoming shockingly good depth anything is a
00:28:46 ◼ ► project one of many that can infer depth from a single monocular image monocular monocular
00:28:52 ◼ ► anyway, while simultaneously being mostly temper temporarily stable. This means that the depth
00:28:57 ◼ ► approximations aren't going to jump around on you between frames. My suspicion is that while it will
00:29:03 ◼ ► be a combination of hardware and software, it's more likely that the solution will lie more in the
00:29:08 ◼ ► software and less so in the specialized hardware. Imagine shooting on your iPhone 18 ultra wide
00:29:12 ◼ ► camera and iOS processing the video into an immersive video in the background or maybe even
00:29:16 ◼ ► real time, or even being able to run a depth process on an old pre iPhone era video and getting
00:29:22 ◼ ► to watch that video on the vision Pro that would be magic can confirm. We're probably a few years
00:29:26 ◼ ► out from the iPhones ultra wide video being of the quality you'd want, but it's only a matter of time.
00:29:32 ◼ ► That definitely sounds like a thing that Apple would try they love to sort of do in software
00:29:36 ◼ ► where they can't quite do in hardware witness the portrait mode, you know, background blur and stuff.
00:29:40 ◼ ► So take a flat image and try to infer depth from it and then let you view it and have it be a little
00:29:47 ◼ ► bit 3D ish. That sounds like something that they would definitely try. They did try it. It's new
00:29:52 ◼ ► in vision OS 2.0. It's already there. Yeah, I know that's the trying to add what do they just do it
00:29:57 ◼ ► for your videos or they do. I thought it was stills. It's I think it's only stills. I did some
00:30:02 ◼ ► stills earlier testing out that feature for the first time. Actually, it's really weird. It's
00:30:06 ◼ ► really weird. I think my personal opinion of that I don't think we've ever talked about on the show.
00:30:09 ◼ ► It is cool. I would not say it's the mind bending like this is the coolest thing I've ever seen that
00:30:15 ◼ ► a lot of people seem to pitch it as. I didn't really get that bowled over by it, but it is very cool.
00:30:21 ◼ ► Yeah, it's an interesting toy to play with. You know, like all of their other early stuff like
00:30:27 ◼ ► portrait mode, it works better with some content than others. So like you can find pictures where
00:30:36 ◼ ► it looks really impressive and it's a pretty cool effect, but that is not universal. So this depth
00:30:42 ◼ ► anything thing is like the reason it's innovative or interesting is that it's like what Apple is
00:30:48 ◼ ► doing with these still images, but now do that on every frame of video and have it not have it be
00:30:54 ◼ ► consistent. So if it thinks the depth map is this in one frame of video, the next frame of depth map
00:30:58 ◼ ► shouldn't be wildly different because it would look all sorts of wacky. So it's got to sort of
00:31:02 ◼ ► figure out where what the depth what a stable depth map is for a moving image of things moving
00:31:08 ◼ ► through the frame and that would be interesting, but I would imagine it's not going to be any
00:31:12 ◼ ► better than the 2D version of it. So if you have whatever quality the 2D one is at the video one is
00:31:19 ◼ ► probably limited by that quality. Indeed. Then continuing on James Laughlin writes, Google
00:31:26 ◼ ► experimented with light field capture. First static captures, see Welcome to Lightfields on Steam,
00:31:32 ◼ ► and then video captures. And there's a video from SIGGRAPH 2020. The technical paper was
00:31:38 ◼ ► immersive light field video with a layered mesh representation. And a couple of pull quotes that
00:31:44 ◼ ► I collected from this video, which is only like five minutes or something like that is very
00:31:52 ◼ ► per second internet connection. So you could stream a full immersive video over a gigabit
00:31:58 ◼ ► connection. Although I guess in retrospect actually this is already happening with Apple's
00:32:02 ◼ ► immersive stuff on considerably less than that. But you know, whatever. Also apparently the way
00:32:07 ◼ ► they made this work was they put 46 times synchronized, I don't think they were literally
00:32:11 ◼ ► GoPros but effectively GoPros, in the sphere and wired them all up together like I said so they
00:32:17 ◼ ► could be time synchronized. And that's the camera they use for this which is very interesting.
00:32:21 ◼ ► Anyways it allows for some six degree of freedom's movement but still in a small bubble around the
00:32:26 ◼ ► capture device. And again you can see that in the demo video. Another quote, I think John pulled
00:32:30 ◼ ► this one, our pipeline produces volumetric free viewpoint video that can be explored with six
00:32:35 ◼ ► degrees of freedom within a spherical 70 centimeter diameter viewing volume. This allows
00:32:40 ◼ ► you to move your head and change your perspective, peek behind objects, and enjoy a greater sense of
00:32:44 ◼ ► depth through motion parallax. Yeah so the camera you were describing that you'll see in the video,
00:32:49 ◼ ► it's like many sort of SIGGRAPH research type, it's one of the jankiest things you've ever seen.
00:32:53 ◼ ► Picture just a big clear plastic sphere with cameras stuck to the inside of it with tape.
00:33:00 ◼ ► Like that's what it is. It's not, you know, it's all through the magic of software. So that just
00:33:05 ◼ ► well and the cameras are stuck not at random but like hand placed roughly equal. It's not
00:33:12 ◼ ► like a precision type of thing. They're just kind of, I mean I don't know how precisely they put it
00:33:16 ◼ ► there but it looked pretty haphazard and pretty like DIY right. And so what this gives you with,
00:33:22 ◼ ► you know, a bunch of cameras and a plastic sphere and a lot of computers, which is the important
00:33:28 ◼ ► part, is the ability to watch a video and while the video is playing you can change your perspective
00:33:37 ◼ ► in the video. You can do the thing that we were talking about last time where like if you if you
00:33:40 ◼ ► have a video of a concert and you want to, you know, if you stand up or you're watching it in
00:33:46 ◼ ► a headset and you stand up on your couch while you're watching it, the camera that recorded the
00:33:50 ◼ ► video of the concert does not stand up. The camera was on a tripod, it never moved and never got any
00:33:55 ◼ ► higher or any lower, never moved to the left, never moved to the right, it was on a tripod the
00:33:58 ◼ ► whole time right. You can't control that by you getting up with your headset right. So you should
00:34:03 ◼ ► just sit still because then your movement will match the movement of the camera which is no
00:34:07 ◼ ► movement. You can turn your head because the camera captured a field that is 180 degrees,
00:34:12 ◼ ► 360 or whatever, you can turn your head up and down left and right and that works fine but you
00:34:16 ◼ ► can't move. So this sort of light field capture thing lets you move your head and have that motion
00:34:24 ◼ ► reflected in the video as long as you move within a 70 centimeters viewing volume. So you can't move
00:34:30 ◼ ► a lot but you can move and there are demo videos of this on the website, we'll put the links in the
00:34:35 ◼ ► show notes, go to the demo video that's just in a web page and you can move your mouse around
00:34:39 ◼ ► essentially to say all right I'm watching this video, if you don't move your mouse it just looks
00:34:43 ◼ ► like a video but if you move your mouse you can be like now I can see more on the top of that
00:34:48 ◼ ► workbench or less if I go down right. You can move around left right up and down in the video
00:34:54 ◼ ► not just turning your head like quick time vr or these things but moving within the video and part
00:34:59 ◼ ► of the thing that is exciting about this paper is like okay the way they do that is essentially
00:35:04 ◼ ► brute force it like they have if you picture a series of concentric spheres a little sphere
00:35:11 ◼ ► then a bigger one then a bigger one like a concentric spherical shells right that's what
00:35:16 ◼ ► they're recording and then when you move around it's sort of moving you through those shells but
00:35:20 ◼ ► as you can imagine that's just incredibly data intensive to do so this paper is about how they
00:35:26 ◼ ► figured out how to compress that down into as Casey mentioned a one gigabit video stream by
00:35:34 ◼ ► figuring out what parts they can throw away and how to efficiently store all of them and that's
00:35:38 ◼ ► the innovative part like instead of just saying we need a giant supercomputer to do this we can put
00:35:43 ◼ ► this on a web page and you can move around in it and it looks okay and it doesn't like break up or
00:35:47 ◼ ► they don't you know you can look at the video you can see what they're constructing the video out of
00:35:52 ◼ ► all the different pieces of the shells as you move around but they do a really good job of blending
00:35:56 ◼ ► them together so it really looks like i don't know how to describe it because there's not really any
00:36:00 ◼ ► parallel like even in vision probably is not really any sort of like thing to compare it to
00:36:03 ◼ ► but like like actually being there if you were really there and you move and you like sat up or
00:36:08 ◼ ► you know stood up or sat down your perspective would change and you can do that with these videos
00:36:14 ◼ ► maybe it's i don't know maybe it's like the harry potter things with the little animated no it's
00:36:17 ◼ ► not even that it's holographic maybe i don't know they can need to come up with a better marketing
00:36:21 ◼ ► name for this but this is what i was talking about like the bahamas thing if they could do this
00:36:26 ◼ ► and make it maybe a little bit bigger than a 70 centimeter diameter viewing volume then you could
00:36:30 ◼ ► walk around on the beach and it would all be captured live video and you're looking at a real
00:36:36 ◼ ► thing it's not a 3d rendered scene it's just concentric spheres of live video from many
00:36:41 ◼ ► different positions again this is what i was getting at with last time with like the real
00:36:44 ◼ ► estate things where they put a camera in six different places in a room put it in like six
00:36:49 ◼ ► million places in the room so now you can just walk into the room and look around and again
00:36:53 ◼ ► different than making a 3d model of it which is probably the much more efficient way to do this
00:36:57 ◼ ► but this would be all real video right somehow all real video i'm not sure what the mechanics are but
00:37:03 ◼ ► it really is kind of like sci-fi fantasy stuff when i look at this even though it is very very
00:37:08 ◼ ► limited tech demo with very janky hardware i'm still very impressed by it yeah it is super cool
00:37:13 ◼ ► and then continuing on in a similar vein uh joseph humphrey writes one technology i find fascinating
00:37:19 ◼ ► and that could shape the future vr capture if the r sticks around long enough is neural radiance
00:37:24 ◼ ► fields it's essentially a photogrammetry based i hope i got that right method for capturing still
00:37:30 ◼ ► 3d images of objects or entire environments what's remarkable is its ability to render realistic
00:37:36 ◼ ► perspectives from multiple angles complete with accurate reflections and specular highlights so
00:37:40 ◼ ► this is nerf which is representing scenes as neural any radiance are fields f for view synthesis
00:37:47 ◼ ► again we'll put a link in the show notes uh to a talk that was given by among other people matthew
00:37:52 ◼ ► tansik uh we present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel
00:37:56 ◼ ► views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse
00:38:01 ◼ ► set of input views so i'm not entirely sure what that means but i can tell you watching having
00:38:05 ◼ ► watched the video what it appears to be is let's take i think it's a couple of stills i don't
00:38:11 ◼ ► recall if it was one or several but one way or another take one or more stills and be able to
00:38:16 ◼ ► figure out okay what is the depth in this very much like you know the the portrait videos on an iphone
00:38:21 ◼ ► yeah it definitely is i think it is more than one picture because the whole point is like
00:38:24 ◼ ► the thing i just described where you can watch a video and view it for different perspectives this
00:38:28 ◼ ► is the photo version of that where it's just one moment in time but it's captured from different
00:38:34 ◼ ► perspectives and then when you look at it you have the ability to look from different angles
00:38:39 ◼ ► at your still image yep so uh continuing on from joseph humphrey while it's not ready for video
00:38:45 ◼ ► capture yet and the quality isn't perfect meta has created an impressive demo for the quest and
00:38:49 ◼ ► there's a meta nerf demo for the quest which is called meta horizon hyperspace demo the description
00:38:55 ◼ ► is this is a demo experience to showcase our vision for photorealism as a profound new way to
00:38:59 ◼ ► feel like you're physically there we created these digital replicas using mobile phone scanning and
00:39:02 ◼ ► cloud-based processing scanning is not available to users today so now we're returning back to
00:39:08 ◼ ► joseph what excites me most in is the potential to fully capture 3d scenes including different
00:39:12 ◼ ► perspectives without the need for manual 3d modeling if future research leads to viable
00:39:16 ◼ ► quote-unquote video version of this the possibilities could be incredible you should check
00:39:21 ◼ ► out that google link because that's what they're doing it's basically the video version of that but
00:39:27 ◼ ► for a while again this is from a 2020 paper um it's you if you have the sort of still image
00:39:35 ◼ ► version of it that works really well for you know to fool you into thinking it's a dynamic
00:39:42 ◼ ► environment you can do what they do in video games it's just like it's basically a bunch of still
00:39:45 ◼ ► textures but then you put like some video of uh rippling water on top of the water thing so the
00:39:50 ◼ ► things that you expect to be moving are moving but um you know or even just like if you look at the
00:39:56 ◼ ► demos of here you can be convinced like that this is video until you notice like none of the blades
00:40:00 ◼ ► of grass are moving or whatever so the google thing is exciting because they're really trying
00:40:04 ◼ ► to do it with video with very limited motion and this nerf thing is exciting because i imagine this
00:40:09 ◼ ► is the type of thing you could actually do on a phone take it you know wave your phone in front
00:40:14 ◼ ► of a person it takes 15 pictures it reconstructs this and now you have what appears to be a 3d
00:40:21 ◼ ► image of the person yeah these these video demos are incredibly impressive all right moving on from
00:40:26 ◼ ► immersive immersive video let's talk about john's app and some feedback with regard to it or things
00:40:31 ◼ ► adjacent to it wait are we talking about storacusa or are we talking about forex space i feel like
00:40:37 ◼ ► forage space did you like the uh the british person pointed out that in uk english those words
00:40:42 ◼ ► don't rhyme forage and storage don't rhyme yes because they they pronounce the o as an a it's
00:40:46 ◼ ► fireage space or whatever it's ridiculous yeah it must be their boston accent it's a hybrid accent
00:40:53 ◼ ► anyway uh all right so i'll stick with storacusa i'm gonna keep calling it storacusa until you
00:40:57 ◼ ► tell us another name i like forage space i also like storacusa for the record but i like forage
00:41:01 ◼ ► space i think that's great and you know they're the same people that can't understand when we
00:41:04 ◼ ► say hover which is bananas so i don't i don't have i don't really care what they have to say
00:41:13 ◼ ► dave nanny in front of the store dave nannian's uh dave nannian writes uh with and this is with
00:41:19 ◼ ► regard to super duper's smart update and making clones uh dave writes to be clear smart update
00:41:24 ◼ ► does not separate clones unless oh excuse not making clones i'm sorry uh using clones on the
00:41:29 ◼ ► file system to be clear smart update does not separate clones unless those clones change which
00:41:34 ◼ ► starts to separate them on the source as well what we can't do is only change the diverged blocks and
00:41:39 ◼ ► also i'm not worried about my support because i can offer solutions i'm worried about things like
00:41:44 ◼ ► migration and again that this is going to be run by those who are out of space not those who want
00:41:48 ◼ ► to optimize their drive storage yeah the thing about a smart update like that's a good nuance
00:41:54 ◼ ► about what i was describing last time like on the first clone with super duper it will faithfully
00:41:59 ◼ ► reproduce your clones so if you have some drive that is essentially over provisioned because
00:42:04 ◼ ► you have you know many many clones of a very large file that if they all took up their individual
00:42:10 ◼ ► space it would overflow your drive when you do that first erasing clone with super duper it will
00:42:20 ◼ ► says hey just copy the stuff that's changed since last time at that point if one of the
00:42:25 ◼ ► clones has changed and diverged on the source it can diverge a little bit at a time based on how
00:42:31 ◼ ► much has differed from the other ones but during smart update if it's a diverged at all you get an
00:42:36 ◼ ► entire complete separate copy during the smart update and that can cause you to slowly fill your
00:42:42 ◼ ► quote-unquote equally sized drive with a series of smart updates of course you can always fix this by
00:42:46 ◼ ► doing an erase update and that will restore all your clones but that's just a fact of life um and
00:42:52 ◼ ► in terms of people over subscribing their disks and having problems during migration yeah that's
00:42:58 ◼ ► that's potentially a problem like i said that could be a problem today because the finder does
00:43:01 ◼ ► the same thing when you duplicate files and depending on how oversubscribed people are on
00:43:05 ◼ ► their drives they could already be in a situation where they can't migrate i would hope that apple
00:43:09 ◼ ► would come up with a way to faithfully reproduce clones during the migration process that would be
00:43:14 ◼ ► very helpful they certainly have the expertise technology and access to the innards of mac os to
00:43:20 ◼ ► do that but i also don't see that as something that is forthcoming so make sure your drives are
00:43:25 ◼ ► always big enough peter marks writes all this talk of ram doubler and disk doubler and atp triggered
00:43:34 ◼ ► finder copies i was working at apple at the time and we were amazed it turned out this is such an
00:43:42 ◼ ► amazing story it turned out that the finder was updating the progress bar so frequently
00:43:52 ◼ ► early in my development of my app that i'm working on i was testing the speed of you know scanning
00:43:59 ◼ ► for duplicates and stuff like that and i for at first tried the naive implementation of every time
00:44:06 ◼ ► you've scanned another item you know convey that information in the ui and scanning especially on
00:44:13 ◼ ► ssd goes really really fast and uh probably faster than 60 frames per second it was a lot of updates
00:44:20 ◼ ► i'm not sure if it was slowing things down but i think it might have actually gotten faster when
00:44:27 ◼ ► i throttled the ui updates because i don't want i mean it's probably not that big of a deal
00:44:31 ◼ ► especially since it's two separate threads and i had a through i have a lot of cores and had a
00:44:34 ◼ ► thread dedicated just updating the ui but it's still kind of a waste so yeah updating the ui
00:44:40 ◼ ► at faster than the refresh rate of the screen is usually not a good idea and then back in the bad
00:44:46 ◼ ► old days i think it was just probably burning cpu because you didn't have multiple cores and i think
00:44:50 ◼ ► it was probably wasting a lot of cpu time you know updating the ui as fast as it possibly could i
00:44:55 ◼ ► think he might be referring to speed doubler the thing i mentioned on on the past show i don't
00:44:58 ◼ ► remember what speed doubler did i only remembered that i ran it and it did make things perceptively
00:45:02 ◼ ► faster and maybe this was one of the things that it sped up file copies by updating the progress
00:45:05 ◼ ► bar less frequently then harvey simon writes why should we care about how much free space we have
00:45:11 ◼ ► if we've turned on desktop and document sync in icloud drive if we run low on storage older files
00:45:16 ◼ ► are offloaded to icloud freeing up space locally especially if one has say a desktop mac with large
00:45:20 ◼ ► ssd and a macbook with an only 256 gig ssd why worry if 256 gigs is sufficient if it looks like
00:45:32 ◼ ► don't personally like i mean on paper this makes sense but i don't think i would trust apple to do
00:45:37 ◼ ► this and do this well personally yeah i mean it looks like everything's there until you need that
00:45:43 ◼ ► one file and you don't have an internet connection and also i will add that some cloud services uh
00:45:48 ◼ ► in my experience icloud drive are not really great about doing the thing you want them to do right
00:45:52 ◼ ► now right now i know they have pinning for icloud now finally where you can say please don't offload
00:45:57 ◼ ► this file i always want it to be local uh but in situations even when you have a network connection
00:46:02 ◼ ► you can be waiting for icloud to take its sweet time to do something i talked about my son's
00:46:07 ◼ ► icloud file icloud drive disaster where he had so many files you could just sit there staring at
00:46:17 ◼ ► you can double click them and it would just sit there spinning and it's like eventually it might
00:46:21 ◼ ► do it or maybe it never will because there's too many files it's not a i'm not a fan of icloud
00:46:27 ◼ ► drive i've never been a fan i continue not to be a fan that big disaster with my son did not make
00:46:30 ◼ ► me fan that's years after icloud drive has been out for a while i know people have a lot of
00:46:34 ◼ ► success with it but i think they're using it lightly they don't have lots of files they don't
00:46:40 ◼ ► have lots of churn and it's just like oh it's magic my files are just always there in my
00:46:44 ◼ ► experience that is not how icloud drive works when pressed even a little bit uh dropbox at the very
00:46:51 ◼ ► least has like i said one of the things i like about dropbox is if you use it the old way i'm
00:46:56 ◼ ► still not using the one with the file providers which i know everyone else is probably using but
00:46:59 ◼ ► somehow i'm still not updated to it but the old one when you launched it it would brute force right
00:47:04 ◼ ► now right now with all its uh you know cpu cycles download all the files locally i'd had it not to
00:47:10 ◼ ► do streaming keep every file locally like the old style old school way you i could see it working it
00:47:17 ◼ ► would go through the files find all the ones that have changed download them all and then be done
00:47:26 ◼ ► when is it going to download is there anything i can make it download faster so yeah as far as
00:47:30 ◼ ► should we care about disk space if you keep everything in like a you know google drive or
00:47:35 ◼ ► one drive or something that you do trust that you think is reliable that you can actually get to
00:47:39 ◼ ► upload and download files when you need them to and you're always connected to the network sure
00:47:43 ◼ ► feel free but i think that for most people they either don't have as reliable network access that
00:47:49 ◼ ► or they don't have fast enough network access that is both or both and even if you do have all that i
00:47:54 ◼ ► have very fast very reliable network access in my house practically speaking i don't want to have to
00:47:58 ◼ ► wait around for something to download if i want to like you know we're doing our member special
00:48:03 ◼ ► on kiki's delivery service and i want to scrub through the movie i don't want to have to wait
00:48:06 ◼ ► for a multi-gigabyte movie to download i just double click it and move the scrubber and it
00:48:10 ◼ ► should be as fast as my ssd can read it and i don't have to worry about oh that file isn't there yet
00:48:14 ◼ ► how fast can you download a gigabyte because remember it's not just your network connection
00:48:17 ◼ ► the server has to serve it to you at that speed your network connection can be as fast as you
00:48:20 ◼ ► want but if the server is doling the thing out to you at a slow data rate because it's overwhelmed
00:48:25 ◼ ► doing a bunch of other stuff or because the network connection between you and it is slow
00:48:28 ◼ ► you're still sol so yeah uh if you if you think local storage is still not relevant uh and you're
00:48:35 ◼ ► leading that life uh that's good for you but i don't think we're there yet all right let's talk
00:48:40 ◼ ► some topics and uh marco you had yet more homework i feel like we've done maybe three out of four of
00:48:47 ◼ ► the last you know episodes you've had uh some sort of vision pro related homework and here we are yet
00:48:52 ◼ ► again with vision pro related homework uh apple right after we uh recorded last week released a
00:48:58 ◼ ► new episode of their adventure series and this one is called ice dive and it's 15 minutes long
00:49:04 ◼ ► uh it's peers off the top of my head are was it the hot no it was the tightrope walker and then
00:49:11 ◼ ► the uh parkour if i'm not mistaken were the two others that's right uh and this one is ice dive
00:49:16 ◼ ► where we follow um an ice diver an ice diver that's trying to set a world record for swimming
00:49:23 ◼ ► 200 yards which is something like 180 meters underwater with you know a fin on but with one
00:49:30 ◼ ► breath of air and so he is swimming hopefully uh 200 yards one breath of air under you know
00:49:36 ◼ ► under ice in the water under ice um so it's probably a little bit cold yeah it's very very
00:49:41 ◼ ► cold he doesn't wetsuit on but still uh anyways it's like 15 minutes and i i wanted to not only
00:49:48 ◼ ► alert some of you that this exists uh but i also wanted to hear your thoughts and i have some
00:49:52 ◼ ► thoughts would you like me to start or would you like to start i think mine will be pretty quick
00:49:55 ◼ ► um i didn't get all the way through it i got about eight minutes in i stopped because i was getting
00:50:00 ◼ ► motion sick oh really oh that's very surprising to me huh yeah so this so this series the you know
00:50:08 ◼ ► i didn't see the middle one the parkour when i i saw the tightrope walking one i got about the
00:50:12 ◼ ► same amount into that one before i had to stop um this series does a lot more camera movement
00:50:18 ◼ ► and a lot more cuts between different scenes and so what i find is like i'm trying to focus on
00:50:24 ◼ ► things uh and then all of a sudden boom we're cut away and then oh now i'm flying over a mountain
00:50:29 ◼ ► like whoa so and it's there's a lot more motion in this and this series too um they focus on
00:50:37 ◼ ► very close-up shots of people and things so similar to like you know the the very first
00:50:42 ◼ ► uh opening scene of the tightrope walking one you i described in the past how like you're like
00:50:49 ◼ ► right in front of this woman's face it's a little unnerving you're like i would never be this close
00:50:53 ◼ ► to a person i was not romantically involved with of you know in any other context in life so it
00:51:07 ◼ ► um so again it's just like it's like whoa this is very intimate a little bit oddly so so they
00:51:12 ◼ ► keep doing all these close-up shots of people and things but i think they are they are doing
00:51:17 ◼ ► the close-up shots with an assumption of sharpness that as i was saying earlier isn't actually there
00:51:22 ◼ ► in the viewing experience so what you get is really close-up people that look a little bit
00:51:27 ◼ ► out of focus or a little bit blurry or a little bit soft and so your eyes it like plays tricks
00:51:32 ◼ ► on your eyes in ways that the other immersive series i haven't had that much of a problem with
00:51:39 ◼ ► um because i think they just shot like a little bit further away from things uh with a little
00:51:43 ◼ ► bit less camera movement so this one this this series i think is just i i can't like my eyes and
00:51:49 ◼ ► my motion brain i think can't handle this series but hey i'm glad they're putting up more content
00:51:55 ◼ ► yeah yeah and i mean again the pace of the new content has been really good uh i'm bummed well
00:52:00 ◼ ► sorry i'm grading on a heavy curve there but you could to be clear you can still watch every single
00:52:06 ◼ ► bit of immersive video on the vision pro the first night you take one home yep that's i think that is
00:52:10 ◼ ► true and certainly underscores uh chart from a few weeks back would probably lead creen
00:52:14 ◼ ► lend creens to it uh anyways i i wanted to call this out partially like i said because it's new
00:52:19 ◼ ► uh but also i thought that this one was possibly my favorite of the like reality or not reality but
00:52:27 ◼ ► like docu-series that apple has done so far it's i feel like it's a bit longer i my recollections
00:52:33 ◼ ► the parkour one was closer to 10-ish minutes and this is like a full 15 or so and i've been
00:52:37 ◼ ► thinking a lot about what do i think made this good and i didn't get a chance to look and see
00:52:43 ◼ ► if the director is the same or not but she did a phenomenal job on this one and i think part of
00:52:48 ◼ ► what i really really enjoyed about this was that the the the tightrope walking one just had the the
00:52:56 ◼ ► the smell of it being completely staged like you know of course at one point she's going to fall
00:53:02 ◼ ► off the tightrope and of course she's tethered to it so it's no big deal but you still have that
00:53:06 ◼ ► moment and whatnot the parkour one was a little of that but they tried to a degree to build a
00:53:13 ◼ ► little bit of a story and toward the end spoiler alert they're trying to do like a really big jump
00:53:17 ◼ ► and you're supposed to be stressed out about whether or not they're going to make the jump
00:53:21 ◼ ► and i mean you are to a degree because you can look down where where the camera is and see how
00:53:26 ◼ ► high up they are but it was kind of a contrived story you know it was clear that it was a story
00:53:32 ◼ ► but it was kind of forced whereas this one there is a a plot and i'm using air quotes here but
00:53:38 ◼ ► there's a plot to it there is a thing a challenge that that is going to be conquered if all goes
00:53:43 ◼ ► according to plan and there's consequences if it doesn't and so you have a hero and and the the
00:53:49 ◼ ► villain i guess to the degree that there is is the situation but there's a hero and you're watching
00:53:54 ◼ ► a hero's journey literally and not only that but i thought i mean i didn't have any motion sickness
00:54:00 ◼ ► problems and i thought that the way it was filmed was good there's some you know annotations on the
00:54:05 ◼ ► video showing how far away everything is and like where the start is where the end is and it's not
00:54:10 ◼ ► overdone it's in that apple style that they're developing over these uh immersive videos that
00:54:15 ◼ ► i like i just thought it was really really really good and i really enjoyed it and i thought it was
00:54:20 ◼ ► it was very captivating and so here again if you live near an apple store have a friend that has
00:54:25 ◼ ► one of these i presume they'll let you watch it if you want to and i think it's worth your time
00:54:29 ◼ ► i thought it was pretty darn good so check that out apple adventure ice dive john thoughts on this
00:54:34 ◼ ► i can't believe marco's getting motion sick and you're not i mean either one of you is particularly
00:54:38 ◼ ► prone to it but you know it's it's one of the i feel like it's one of the limitations of this
00:54:42 ◼ ► this type of content it's just i'm not sure how you can get over that other than just not making
00:54:48 ◼ ► content that moves around too much uh because it's really limiting from the like the recording
00:54:56 ◼ ► perspective to try to do interesting things or show something dynamic uh and again the assumption is
00:55:02 ◼ ► that you know the person who's watching it is not going to know how to move to match the movement of
00:55:09 ◼ ► the camera even if they could which they probably can't because they're sitting on their couch so
00:55:12 ◼ ► there's always going to be this disconnect between what you see and uh what you're actually feeling
00:55:17 ◼ ► as you sit there so yeah uh i i think this stuff is cool and i would like to watch it but i
00:55:22 ◼ ► definitely don't like to feel sick so i'm torn fair enough uh no i just think it's really cool and
00:55:29 ◼ ► again if you have the ability to go check this out i strongly encourage you to uh speaking earlier of
00:55:35 ◼ ► dave nanian and super duper there's been a bit of a brouhaha over bootable backups on mac os and so
00:55:42 ◼ ► to back up a little bit and set the stage uh super duper and i can't speak for a carbon copy
00:55:46 ◼ ► cloner which is a i guess a competitive product to super duper i've only ever used super duper um
00:55:52 ◼ ► but anyway super duper's thing or one of its things is that you can create a bootable backup
00:55:56 ◼ ► of your drive and then update it you know every night every other night you know however often
00:56:00 ◼ ► you want to update it but the key is is that if you plug in this external drive and you know do
00:56:04 ◼ ► whatever incantation and dance you need to do in order to tell your mac to boot from it it should be
00:56:08 ◼ ► able to boot from it and that's worked really really well for a really really really long time
00:56:13 ◼ ► uh but then a week or so ago or whenever i guess 15.2 came out uh dave had problems and so dave
00:56:21 ◼ ► wrote a blog post of which i will read some excerpts mac os 15.2 was released with a surprise
00:56:26 ◼ ► a terrible awful surprise apple broke the replicator or asr apple software restore toward
00:56:31 ◼ ► the end of replicating the data volume seemingly when it's about to copy either pre-boot or recovery
00:56:36 ◼ ► which is to say the system stuff it fails with a resource busy error in the past resource busy
00:56:42 ◼ ► could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake but this new bug means on most systems
00:56:47 ◼ ► there's no fix it just fails since apple took away the ability for third parties for examples the
00:56:52 ◼ ► super duper folks to copy the os it took on the responsibility themselves it's been up to them to
00:56:57 ◼ ► ensure this functionality continues to work and in that they failed in mac os 15.2 because this is
00:57:03 ◼ ► their code and we're forced to rely on it to copy the os os copying will not work until they fix it
00:57:08 ◼ ► to put it bluntly this sucks it's bad enough we have to work around other bugs in this code but
00:57:13 ◼ ► when it breaks completely we're stuck pointing fingers and offering workarounds that don't
00:57:16 ◼ ► involve the replicator now with that said uh we now we had a response to a degree from mike bomb
00:57:24 ◼ ► bitch who is the the or a developer on carbon copy cloner for mac os and we took out some of
00:57:30 ◼ ► the spicier hot takes in this blog post but it was it was a spicy blog post uh so you might might be
00:57:36 ◼ ► worth checking out if you're interested anyways mike writes while some developers seem surprised
00:57:39 ◼ ► by a change in mac os 15.2 there's a little bit spice uh we've known for several years that making
00:57:44 ◼ ► bootable backups would eventually become impossible we shifted carbon copy cloner strategy
00:57:48 ◼ ► away from relying on external boots so our users wouldn't be affected by this inevitable result
00:57:52 ◼ ► several years ago i wrote a blog post about the mac os big sur changes that affected how third-party
00:57:57 ◼ ► developers would be able to make copies of the system in that blog post i made reference to a
00:58:01 ◼ ► conference call that i had with apple on december 2nd 2020 participating in that conference call
00:58:06 ◼ ► was the apfs team lead someone from developer technical support and to my surprise apple's
00:58:10 ◼ ► director of product marketing when i joined the call i was prepared for technical discussion of
00:58:14 ◼ ► what was broken in the asr and whether apple would be able to fix those issues and make it reliable
00:58:18 ◼ ► enough for a commercial backup solution the call didn't quite go in that direction the marketing
00:58:22 ◼ ► director kicked off the call by asking quote so how would it look if someday in the future you
00:58:26 ◼ ► simply couldn't make a copy of the system at all he and the more technical folks on the call
00:58:31 ◼ ► went on to explain that why only a why only asr could be allowed to copy the system and that they
00:58:36 ◼ ► were committed to addressing any problems with it as long as it did not require making a compromise
00:58:40 ◼ ► to platform security platform security is a top priority at apple and one of the keys to that
00:58:44 ◼ ► security is a secure boot environment allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity
00:58:49 ◼ ► for attackers to modify key system components some of this can be mitigated by only allowing
00:58:53 ◼ ► apple's asr utility to make the copy but there's still inherent opportunities to inject changes
00:58:58 ◼ ► when copying system files apple has invested a lot of effort into recovery mood and into the
00:59:02 ◼ ► recovery mode environment and migration assistant it has become trivial to boot a mac into recovery
00:59:06 ◼ ► recovery mode perform a clean secure install the system verified and signed and then recover user
00:59:11 ◼ ► data via migration assistant all that can be done without compromising the security of the boot
00:59:15 ◼ ► environment will apple fix this issue so that bootable backups can limp along a little further
00:59:19 ◼ ► maybe but that's getting to be a moot question apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable
00:59:24 ◼ ► backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with platform security all right so
00:59:29 ◼ ► a couple of things here to start why do we care about bootable backups why do we use something
00:59:35 ◼ ► like super duper uh why is this a valuable thing to have uh and most importantly on mike's post
00:59:41 ◼ ► why is it uh why is recovery mode uh not a sufficient replacement the magic of bootable
00:59:49 ◼ ► backups is that if something goes wrong with your main drive you can just reboot and be back up and
00:59:56 ◼ ► running in the time it takes you to boot from your other drive this was much more important in the
01:00:01 ◼ ► days of spinning disks and also much more reliable in the days before apple silicon because as we
01:00:08 ◼ ► noted on a show a week or two ago apple silicon max cannot really boot from external drives
01:00:15 ◼ ► they always essentially boot from the internal drive and say oh i see you wanted to boot from
01:00:20 ◼ ► an external drive and essentially hand off control and continue to boot from there but the secure
01:00:25 ◼ ► boot environment is all contained within the hardware that apple sells and it's you know
01:00:30 ◼ ► cryptographically as secure as it can be knowing that it's booting off a known good system and
01:00:35 ◼ ► allowing that all to be bypassed by saying just trust whatever's on this drive is a you know a
01:00:41 ◼ ► potential problem all right that's part of that's the secure boot environment that apple is defending
01:00:46 ◼ ► that's why apple silicon max work like they do but what it also means is unlike the old days if your
01:00:51 ◼ ► boot drive like dies dies like you know is totally broken or is fried or like just you know you're
01:00:58 ◼ ► in the old days you're spinning hard drive the heads crashed into the platters like it's just
01:01:02 ◼ ► dead the old days you're like okay i'll take this internal drive rip it out of my computer
01:01:07 ◼ ► throw it in the garbage can and boot for my super duper clone and i'm up and running as of whenever
01:01:13 ◼ ► the last backup was might have been last night right just in the amount of time it takes to boot
01:01:17 ◼ ► i don't have to wait for a whole os install which can take a very long time i don't have to do any
01:01:21 ◼ ► of that stuff i'm just up and running and by the way i just booted my mac that has no hard drive
01:01:26 ◼ ► in it i booted it from an external drive because that hard drive that was broken is now in the
01:01:31 ◼ ► garbage can if your apple silicon mac if the ssd goes bad like totally dead on it you cannot boot
01:01:37 ◼ ► off an external drive that mac will not boot off anything because you need the internal ssd to at
01:01:44 ◼ ► least have enough parts of it working to boot from the little part of the os that's needed to go to
01:01:50 ◼ ► external boot stuff so that is different but still if you hosed yourself accidentally deleted a bunch
01:01:57 ◼ ► of files broke some part of your user directory you know accidentally recursively deleted parts
01:02:04 ◼ ► of your home library directory as root your system could be entirely hosed but your ssd still works
01:02:11 ◼ ► so you will be able to boot from an external backup and that's where having a super duper
01:02:16 ◼ ► bootable backup can get you up and running much faster i mean that that whole like you know as
01:02:21 ◼ ► i developed this app that i'm working on maybe i will accidentally host my you know hose my
01:02:27 ◼ ► directories my files in a way that didn't damage the ssd but it renders my system entirely useless
01:02:33 ◼ ► to me it will be great to boot from my super duper backup in that scenario so i think bootable backup
01:02:38 ◼ ► still is very important and recovery is absolutely not a substitute because if anyone has ever done
01:02:42 ◼ ► recovery mode even though we have fast computers fast internet connections reinstalling mac os
01:02:49 ◼ ► takes longer than you think it does if you're in a hurry or you know if you're trying like you
01:02:54 ◼ ► might as well just write off the whole rest of the day to dealing with that sometimes because it
01:02:58 ◼ ► takes you just be sparing it staring at indeterminate spinners for a long time wondering
01:03:04 ◼ ► how long it's going to take how many more reboots is going to take how many more progress bars am i
01:03:08 ◼ ► going to have to see so i don't think that's a great solution all right given all that this whole
01:03:14 ◼ ► discussion in 2020 with uh was it is phil shiller at the time is the director of product marketing
01:03:20 ◼ ► uh i think that was already past the change yeah i don't know who it is but anyway so the the quote
01:03:24 ◼ ► we know there's a quote or paraphrase or whatever it is uh how would it look someday in the future
01:03:29 ◼ ► if you simply couldn't make a copy of the system at all the conclusions that mike draws from this
01:03:34 ◼ ► that uh that bootable backups are not a thing uh and that apple made it unambiguously clear
01:03:40 ◼ ► that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with platform security
01:03:43 ◼ ► i'm not sure i agree with that so first of all the statement is there's an apple person saying how
01:03:48 ◼ ► would it look someday in the future if you simply couldn't make a copy if you third-party developer
01:03:53 ◼ ► simply couldn't that came to pass third-party developers can't make bootable copies you have
01:03:57 ◼ ► to run apple's asr tool to do it apple can make a bootable cap backup you can't which is why super
01:04:03 ◼ ► duper is in the bind it is because they can't do it they have to use apple's you know privilege
01:04:08 ◼ ► signed secure tool to do it but i i'm not and the second thing is i'm not sure i'm not saying this
01:04:15 ◼ ► is not true only that i have not been convinced that it's true by reading this post the idea that
01:04:22 ◼ ► if copies of system files can be made by anybody including apple somehow this is a security issue
01:04:28 ◼ ► so saying like allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify
01:04:33 ◼ ► key system components some of this can be mitigated by only allowing asr to make a copy
01:04:41 ◼ ► possibly be the case the whole point is you cryptographically sign the whole thing with the
01:04:44 ◼ ► the the sealed system volume or whatever and those cryptographic keys are secured by keys that are
01:04:50 ◼ ► in the hardware and verified over the internet and yada yada like if you modify any part of the
01:04:54 ◼ ► system if you if a nefarious third party modified part of the operating system when copying it
01:04:58 ◼ ► like that would be detected because the signatures wouldn't match by and the secure boot environment
01:05:04 ◼ ► like the apple silicon max booting from their internal drive and making sure they have a secure
01:05:07 ◼ ► boot environment ensures that the thing doing the verification can't be tampered with because
01:05:11 ◼ ► that's the thing that kicks off the boot process on the external drive and it can verify that the
01:05:15 ◼ ► system volume is sealed correctly whatever maybe i'm missing something here but i think the
01:05:19 ◼ ► conclusions being drawn here are at least do not convince me that apple thinks that bootable that
01:05:25 ◼ ► making a bootable drive should not be possible because that doesn't make any sense you make a
01:05:29 ◼ ► bootable drive all the time you make a bootable drive when you install the os that is an example
01:05:33 ◼ ► of apple software making a bootable drive it's no different when they're doing it to the one and
01:05:38 ◼ ► only drive on your mac or doing it to the second and you know another drive on your mac it is still
01:05:44 ◼ ► apple software connecting to the internet and putting in an os there and yes it put it by
01:05:49 ◼ ► downloading off the internet but it's no difference than putting it by copying it from another location
01:05:52 ◼ ► in both cases it has to verify that the os is proper and signed and so on and so forth so
01:05:57 ◼ ► this is unfortunate like asr has broken before by the way super duper has always been dealing with
01:06:03 ◼ ► we've been in the age where only asr can copy the operating system for a while now and it's as dave
01:06:08 ◼ ► says it's broken in the past and it's cruddy because you're a third party you're like look i
01:06:13 ◼ ► can't do it myself i have to use this tool that apple provides and if the apple provided tool
01:06:18 ◼ ► has bugs or does weird things or just plain doesn't work you just have to sit around and
01:06:24 ◼ ► wait for apple to fix it for you i assume that's what will happen in this case i assume apple will
01:06:28 ◼ ► fix it uh like i said i'm not personally convinced that apple was trying to say that it is impossible
01:06:36 ◼ ► to make a bootable version of uh make a make a drive that is able to boot mac os using apple
01:06:42 ◼ ► software because it just doesn't make any sense to me that's what software that's what the os
01:06:46 ◼ ► installation and recovery process do i don't see how cloning is that different worst case scenario
01:06:50 ◼ ► you could say okay it won't copy the operating system from one drive to another it will install
01:06:56 ◼ ► a fresh one from the internet but because the the thing that you boot from is a read-only
01:07:03 ◼ ► cryptographically signed snapshot it's the same for everybody it's a separate volume it's not
01:07:09 ◼ ► where your data is there should be no difference between copying the operating system from one drive
01:07:15 ◼ ► to another and putting a fresh version of that operating system by downloading from the internet
01:07:20 ◼ ► the only place where this is there there are you know questions here is like okay well what if apple
01:07:25 ◼ ► is no longer signing that version of the operating system or you can't get it because it's so old or
01:07:28 ◼ ► whatever in that case a copy would work but a download wouldn't but i don't know i just i
01:07:35 ◼ ► i think and hope that what will actually this is just yet another one of unfortunate bugs in
01:07:45 ◼ ► fix it and super duper will start working again and all will be if not right with the world then
01:07:51 ◼ ► better but i just like again if someone knows someone can explain to me how uh what mike momich
01:07:58 ◼ ► is saying makes any kind of sense uh please do but right now i feel like apple was not trying
01:08:03 ◼ ► to say that it will be impossible to make bootable versions of mac os only that third-party developers
01:08:09 ◼ ► wouldn't be able to do it themselves only apple could do it that's another thing that only apple
01:08:13 ◼ ► can do i would hope that apple provides a mechanism to do this and maintains it but i don't know we'll
01:08:21 ◼ ► see what happens we'll see how this shakes out yeah i kind of wish like so the the promise of
01:08:25 ◼ ► apfs and all the new file system stuff they did is that this type of stuff could get better and it did
01:08:32 ◼ ► get better in many ways like a lot of the parts of the system that deal with this like time machine
01:08:36 ◼ ► and stuff like time machine will now like make a snapshot first and then copy that snapshot
01:08:41 ◼ ► kind of i'm assuming one of the benefits of that is that it helps with the painting the golden gate
01:08:46 ◼ ► bridge problem where in the bad old days time machine would start running and it would start
01:08:51 ◼ ► copying files from your disk to your time machine backup and in the beginning it would copy you know
01:08:56 ◼ ► a bunch of files or whatever two hours pass and it's copying the last files during that two hours
01:09:02 ◼ ► the files that it copied at the beginning could have changed and so you're like oh well when am
01:09:06 ◼ ► i done do i have to go back to the beginning now because i notice some new things changed oh wait
01:09:10 ◼ ► now by the time i get to the end of that there's still things that you keep going back and back
01:09:12 ◼ ► you know it just copies it once and says okay i'm done you may end up writing an inconsistent view
01:09:18 ◼ ► like the source disk never looked like this at any moment in time the beginning of the source
01:09:23 ◼ ► disk looks like this and by two hours later the end of the source disk looks like this but the
01:09:28 ◼ ► thing that you wrote has files that you copied in the beginning look like did an hour ago and
01:09:32 ◼ ► files that you copy the end look like they do right now snapshots avoid that because you can
01:09:37 ◼ ► take a moment in time snapshot and say here's a frozen snapshot of what this drive looked like at
01:09:49 ◼ ► snapshot's never going to change it is literally a moment in time snapshot so even if it takes you
01:09:53 ◼ ► four hours to copy that snapshot the file you copy at the end is exactly from the exact same moment
01:10:00 ◼ ► of time as the file you copied at the beginning stuff like that is great um one of the strategies
01:10:04 ◼ ► time machine uses to figure out what has changed since my last backup so i don't have to scan the
01:10:09 ◼ ► entire disk again one of the strategies is some kind of snapshot diffing thing i really hoped that
01:10:16 ◼ ► they would go whole hog zfs thing zfs has the ability to send block level diffs between snapshots
01:10:23 ◼ ► where not only does it you know know exactly what changed in i'm not sure if it's constant time but
01:10:29 ◼ ► or it might just be linear but anyway an efficient way to tell exactly what changed it does it at the
01:10:33 ◼ ► block level not at the file level so it doesn't if a file change it's not like copying whole files it
01:10:38 ◼ ► says i know this block from this file change and these two blocks and this file change and can
01:10:42 ◼ ► efficiently transfer just those blocks to another thing but there's lots of limitations to doing
01:10:47 ◼ ► that in zfs anyway i was hoping that kind of technology would come to mac os and they've
01:10:51 ◼ ► sort of kind of got a little bit of it but not really and you know cloning is a whole other thing
01:10:55 ◼ ► it would be but anyway it would be great if they continued to advance their file system apis and
01:11:01 ◼ ► support for this type of thing to do efficient um essentially what super duper does efficient copies
01:11:08 ◼ ► like that smart update only copy the things that changed over here and yes to also be able to make
01:11:14 ◼ ► bootable efficient clone copy backup things like i'm not saying put super duper out of business
01:11:18 ◼ ► but i'm kind of saying like eventually technology gets to the point where what was once uh a thing
01:11:25 ◼ ► that only a third party could do because it was so not supported by the operating system eventually
01:11:30 ◼ ► should become something that is so easily supported by the operating system kind of like what i'm
01:11:33 ◼ ► doing my app is doing stuff that is so easily supported by the operating system i'm just
01:11:37 ◼ ► providing like a fancy wrapper on top of it i would hope that's where super duper would get eventually
01:11:41 ◼ ► building on asr to say okay well we can't do it we have to use apple's tool it seems like it's
01:11:47 ◼ ► going in that direction except asr is so much less capable than the code that super duper when it was
01:11:51 ◼ ► doing it itself because asr is just like well i've just got one job i'm called apple software restore
01:11:57 ◼ ► i'm not called uh be the underlying engine for super duper so it is so limited and so brute force
01:12:02 ◼ ► and so not what super duper would want uh but you know maybe someday like it took us so long to get
01:12:08 ◼ ► apfs and we got lots of benefits from it but i still think we're a long way from really realizing
01:12:14 ◼ ► all the benefits of modern file systems to make stuff like this so much better i mean you know
01:12:19 ◼ ► yeah i appreciate the time machine snapshots local snapshots where you can do essentially time machine
01:12:23 ◼ ► backups without having your time machine drive attached so you can go back in time to something
01:12:27 ◼ ► from 10 minutes ago because a local time machine backup was taken that's all well and good but
01:12:37 ◼ ► and yeah asr being the one and only tool that can copy a bootable version of the operating system
01:12:44 ◼ ► from one disk to another it doesn't seem tenable to me and as for only being able to boot off
01:12:47 ◼ ► internal drive and apple silicon i don't know what the solution to that is because i do understand
01:12:51 ◼ ► this i do understand why they do that like that's the security implications of not allowing that
01:12:55 ◼ ► make sense to me but it is very limiting when it comes to the ability to recover quickly from
01:13:02 ◼ ► a disaster it kind of makes the most workable solution for that to essentially have a second
01:13:09 ◼ ► mac right so you know i have two macs that are both as up to date as they can start your project
01:13:15 ◼ ► and if you really if you're like if this mac fails i need to be able to continue work immediately just
01:13:19 ◼ ► throw that whole mac away slide in the new mac and just try to pick up where you left off uh if
01:13:24 ◼ ► apple's cloud syncing was better than it actually is you could probably do that but as it stands
01:13:29 ◼ ► you're probably starting work from wherever you were at the beginning of the day all right let's
01:13:33 ◼ ► do some ask atp sero mazzola writes with the max latest operating system updates to koya 15.2 apples
01:13:39 ◼ ► created a new folder for recording your history it's called recents it's an option in the finder
01:13:43 ◼ ► sidebar how does this fit in with apple's policy of privacy is this really new i swear this is not
01:13:48 ◼ ► new but maybe it is um i i don't i don't i think i might be missing the point here why why is this
01:13:54 ◼ ► not privacy front so this is all right so i think what zero is saying is like if this is in the
01:14:01 ◼ ► sidebar and if you see it in the sidebar and you click on it you may be shocked to see there's all
01:14:06 ◼ ► the files that i've messed with recently and it's sort of like a trail of your activity and if you
01:14:10 ◼ ► thought you were secretly messing with some files somewhere and you have a document that says my
01:14:14 ◼ ► master plan to take over the world dot txt uh and suddenly when someone clicks on something in your
01:14:20 ◼ ► sidebar they see that file and your plans have been revealed um what that recent thing is doing
01:14:27 ◼ ► is the same thing you can do if you hit command f in the finder and you search for files recently
01:14:33 ◼ ► opened within the last 30 days which is the thing that you can do that you've been able to do for
01:14:37 ◼ ► decades on mac os is just finding it's just a saved search finding files that have been
01:14:44 ◼ ► opened recently or whatever the whatever the thing is let me pop in the finder to see the
01:14:47 ◼ ► exact thing i think it is um last open to date last that open date is within the last 30 days
01:14:55 ◼ ► you've always been able to run that search now it's more accessible as a sidebar item in the
01:15:01 ◼ ► finder than having to hit command f pick and pick one item from a pop-up menu type three zero hit
01:15:05 ◼ ► return but practically speaking this is not a privacy invading feature this is just part of
01:15:13 ◼ ► a fact of life if someone else has access to your computer logged in as you they can hit command f
01:15:19 ◼ ► and find files based on any criteria they want they can find image files last opened within the
01:15:25 ◼ ► last 30 days that are jpegs that are larger than this site like and they can save that as a a save
01:15:30 ◼ ► search in a smart folder that looks like a little folder icon but when you double click it it opens
01:15:34 ◼ ► the folder but the contents of that folder are the contents of a saved search this whole idea
01:15:39 ◼ ► was something i really liked back in the days of like bo s where their file system had native
01:15:43 ◼ ► support for this with like indexing in the file system and really fast searches mag s still
01:15:47 ◼ ► supports it some people get a lot of use out of it i think its implementation is a little bit janky
01:15:51 ◼ ► and its integration in the finder is not great so many people don't even know it exists such that
01:15:56 ◼ ► when they put something called recent files in the sidebar they're like privacy invasion where
01:16:00 ◼ ► this come from it's a new feature in 15.2 i kind of see the point but just fyi this has always
01:16:06 ◼ ► been there it's kind of like realizing that your web browser is keeping track of your browser
01:16:10 ◼ ► history if you're not running in incognito mode all the time you can just go and there's a menu
01:16:14 ◼ ► item that shows history and you'll scroll this is every web page i've been doing it's watching my
01:16:19 ◼ ► every move i mean you know google chrome was probably reporting it back to google as well but
01:16:22 ◼ ► yeah that's how computers work to some degree if you don't like it there's not much of a solution
01:16:30 ◼ ► some things in like mac os like within individual applications if you go to the file menu there'll
01:16:35 ◼ ► be an open sub menu with like recent items you can clear that recent items menu which is it used to
01:16:42 ◼ ► be just like a p-list somewhere i don't know where they're storing it these days but anyway you
01:16:44 ◼ ► sometimes you can clear the recent items to clear the last things that you've opened but practically
01:16:48 ◼ ► speaking if it's file system metadata the find command can search based on it and return results
01:16:55 ◼ ► uh you could wipe that metadata if you wanted every file that you last opened go through it
01:16:59 ◼ ► and wipe the metadata or duplicate that file and delete the original or like there's all sorts of
01:17:04 ◼ ► stuff you can do but like what are you trying to do here really if you don't want people knowing
01:17:07 ◼ ► this about your computer don't let them access to your computer logged in as you that's the solution
01:17:10 ◼ ► oh yeah yeah all right tucker writes what is the quote-unquote correct directory location to save
01:17:18 ◼ ► random python shell ruby pearl php etc scripts to keep them organized and easily accessible or
01:17:24 ◼ ► excuse me executable uh i use the fish shell and i typically write my scripts of that sort using
01:17:32 ◼ ► fish and so i there's a particular folder that you're supposed to put them in um and then
01:17:37 ◼ ► occasionally if i write other stuff i'll just put in my home folder because i have very little in my
01:17:41 ◼ ► home folder i'm sure this is going to make john roll over in his not not grave but grave so before
01:17:46 ◼ ► john tells us all what we're supposed to be doing marco what is your approach uh for this kind of
01:17:50 ◼ ► like you know random scripts and stuff for my local mac to run i actually have a folder in
01:17:55 ◼ ► dropbox for those and part of my new mac setup is to add to my well first install bash and then add
01:18:03 ◼ ► to my bash profile to include a bash profile file that is in in this dropbox folder and then that
01:18:12 ◼ ► does everything else for me so that way when i set up a new mac or you know managing between
01:18:16 ◼ ► my desktop and laptop i don't need to like constantly be shuttling things back and forth
01:18:22 ◼ ► manually or resetting things up any of that stuff just lives in dropbox and including most of my
01:18:29 ◼ ► bash profile which again is just included by the actual local batch profile it includes the dropbox
01:18:35 ◼ ► batch profile and that sets everything else so that's where all the all my aliases are and all
01:18:39 ◼ ► all sorts of stuff like that so i suggest whether you use dropbox or you know whatever other file
01:18:44 ◼ ► sync provider you use keep it in there unless you have some really good reason not to all right
01:18:49 ◼ ► john what are we supposed to be doing so there is a correct with the scare quotes like this question
01:18:54 ◼ ► says a correct directory for saving executable scripts from a cultural perspective for everybody
01:19:01 ◼ ► my age and older who cut their teeth on unix in the late 80s or early 90s and that answer is
01:19:07 ◼ ► tilde slash bin b-i-n lowercase you make a directory called bin in your home directory you
01:19:13 ◼ ► put all your executable files there you add your you know tilde slash bin to your path and on every
01:19:20 ◼ ► system you do that and whatever things you want to be executable you put in there that's mostly
01:19:24 ◼ ► just a cultural answer and it's based on the fact that if you were on a multi-user unix system back
01:19:30 ◼ ► in those days probably at your university or whatever you didn't have access to the system-wide
01:19:35 ◼ ► directories so you had to pick some other directory to put things but you did have access to your home
01:19:38 ◼ ► directory but you'd want the directories in your home directory to be structured like the system-wide
01:19:42 ◼ ► ones and so you know the ls command is bin ls and your customized version of the ls command would be
01:19:49 ◼ ► tilde slash bin ls i in fact do have a bin directory in my home directory i make it invisible
01:19:54 ◼ ► so it doesn't show up in the mac side of things with just the hidden attribute but it is in fact
01:19:59 ◼ ► there it is in my path that is the correct location for files that you want to be in your home
01:20:04 ◼ ► directory now if you just want to say it's stuff that you just want to be able to run the other
01:20:08 ◼ ► correct location on your own mac where unlike in the university you do have access to the system-wide
01:20:14 ◼ ► files is user local bin and that's usr not user and it's all lowercase all lowercase slash usr
01:20:30 ◼ ► 2010 uh uh you know attempt no landing there all these words of all these worlds of yours except
01:20:35 ◼ ► user local um they said they won't mess with user local they're not going to put their stuff there
01:20:40 ◼ ► they're not going to accidentally wipe it during an os update that was a promise statement for many
01:20:47 ◼ ► many years ago so far it has still been true if you would like to put system-wide stuff somewhere
01:20:52 ◼ ► for yourself manually user local user local bin user local include user local man user local
01:21:00 ◼ ► lib user local share everything in user local is yours and what do you put there the same directories
01:21:06 ◼ ► that are at the top level a bin a lib a share and include anything you want you put there so user
01:21:12 ◼ ► local bin is where i put the executables that i want to be generally available to everybody on the
01:21:17 ◼ ► system and my path also includes user local bin which is another common thing to have in your in
01:21:22 ◼ ► your shell path on a unix system so those are the answers bin and user local bin for executables as
01:21:29 ◼ ► for keeping them organized that's different than keeping them easily executable you might want to
01:21:34 ◼ ► organize them by category and make subfolders but now you're adding even more files to your path and
01:21:40 ◼ ► maybe you could have sim links up to the top level put them down to other things and if you're using
01:21:44 ◼ ► a package manager all your crap is at opt and it's messing with your path and you're using rvm and
01:21:48 ◼ ► nvm and all these virtual environments to point to different versions of node and different versions
01:21:53 ◼ ► of ruby and different versions of python and there's a whole web of sim links and just i don't
01:21:59 ◼ ► like that it runs me the wrong way but it is how a lot of the world works and speaking of fish every
01:22:06 ◼ ► single one of these freaking things assumes of course you're running zsh bash or fish or some
01:22:11 ◼ ► other posix compliant shell so it's no problem if you want to use nvm just type dot space nvm
01:22:16 ◼ ► dot sh and you're up and running oh but you're not running zsh or bash or sh or fish are you
01:22:22 ◼ ► oh well tough luck because you can't source that file because it's written in the shell that your
01:22:26 ◼ ► thing doesn't support so i guess you just can't use our thing oh well there's no other shells in
01:22:31 ◼ ► the world except for bash the sh and fish as we all know so that will never come up guess what
01:22:35 ◼ ► shall i use not one of those three um what do you use so that i'm used to csh uh because i'm old and
01:22:41 ◼ ► that was on my first unix system and someday i'll be forced to change probably to zsh or bash or
01:22:46 ◼ ► something else i probably won't change the fish a little too weird for me um but yeah a lot of those
01:22:51 ◼ ► systems just assume they know what shell you're using and nothing works you can't use the node
01:22:57 ◼ ► installed by nvm until you source the nvm thing or unless you uh you know port it to tsh or figure
01:23:02 ◼ ► out how it's manipulating your path to do what it's supposed to do this is why i compile everything
01:23:08 ◼ ► from source and put it install it under usually it comes with me across os updates it's always where
01:23:12 ◼ ► i want it to be it's not a web of sim links and everything works fine i think that is a reasonable
01:23:17 ◼ ► organization but i'm an old unix person and uh i don't like these newfangle things and i don't
01:23:23 ◼ ► use homebrew and i don't use any kind of package manager and i kind of wish apple would write a
01:23:27 ◼ ► package manager for macos that was natively supported but so far they haven't all right
01:23:32 ◼ ► john had opinions who knew shocked saul southerland writes do you keep the internet firewall enabled
01:23:37 ◼ ► on your mac it comes off by default on new installs but i make it a habit to enable it to
01:23:42 ◼ ► protect myself from incoming connections on coffee shop wi-fi and when my mac is connected directly
01:23:46 ◼ ► to the internet for testing at work for me i don't turn it on and i don't think i ever have
01:23:50 ◼ ► i'm not that concerned about incoming connections i mean i could make an argument why one should or
01:23:57 ◼ ► and could be but i don't know i'm not that worried about it and no i leave it off um and when i'm on
01:24:02 ◼ ► coffee shop wi-fi i use tailscales not a sponsor of this episode but obviously i'm in love with
01:24:08 ◼ ► them uh tailscales exit node functionality basically says take all of your outbound traffic
01:24:13 ◼ ► anyway and route it through something else and i route it through my house so uh for me no don't
01:24:17 ◼ ► use it again because i think john will have most opinions let's uh start with marco marco do you
01:24:23 ◼ ► use the internet firewall no i i think most software these days is designed to assume any
01:24:30 ◼ ► network you're on is hostile and to not grant open access to others on your network without
01:24:36 ◼ ► your permission um so i i don't i don't think it's super necessary for most people to worry about that
01:24:43 ◼ ► but if you have that kind of extremely high security need for the networks you're on then
01:24:47 ◼ ► you know you might have different priorities but i i think for most people you don't have to yeah
01:24:51 ◼ ► john as someone who essentially never does a clean install and has just simply been uh migrating from
01:24:58 ◼ ► one mac to the next and installing new versions of mac os on top of the old ones since 1984
01:25:04 ◼ ► it's uh sometimes a mystery to me what my settings actually are because the last time i looked at
01:25:10 ◼ ► them may have been a decade or more in the past so i had to actually go to system settings to see do
01:25:15 ◼ ► i have the firewall enabled and this would have been something that i sent back in the mac os 10
01:25:18 ◼ ► days right because it didn't exist in classic mac os the answer to my surprise because i thought i
01:25:24 ◼ ► had it turned off is yes i do have it active why maybe it was the default a long time ago maybe
01:25:30 ◼ ► it's currently the default but i have it active and it has never affected my life so i'm inclined
01:25:34 ◼ ► to keep it that way i don't think about it actively uh in general i agree that like most
01:25:41 ◼ ► sort of network security happens outside the realm of your computer i'm a desktop guy so i'm
01:25:47 ◼ ► not going to coffee shops with laptops uh but my advice for firewall is if it's not on by default
01:25:54 ◼ ► on a new mac which i don't know the answer of if it's not on my default try turning it on and see
01:25:59 ◼ ► if it annoys you if it doesn't annoy you leave it on it's providing some additional measure of
01:26:04 ◼ ► protection if it starts annoying you too much then you can figure out is there a way i can keep this
01:26:07 ◼ ► on and have it be less annoying and if you can't figure it out then just turn it off but i would
01:26:11 ◼ ► advise the default being turn it on leave it on until or unless there's some reason not to uh
01:26:17 ◼ ► torstein writes is marco still using his xt5 or did he go back to his iphone again like he predicted
01:26:22 ◼ ► he would also what are the rest of y'all using these days going into the holiday season iphones
01:26:26 ◼ ► or camera cameras uh i guess since uh marco was quoted in this one or named in this why don't you
01:26:32 ◼ ► start marco and then i'll start i'll continue after you yeah so my my fuji xt5 remains uh my
01:26:40 ◼ ► most commonly used standalone camera that's not an iphone i believe i mentioned a couple times in the
01:26:45 ◼ ► past i did really bite the fuji bug or get bitten by the fuji bug hard and last year uh around the
01:26:53 ◼ ► black friday season i picked up on great sale uh their giant medium format x or a gfx 100 s
01:27:01 ◼ ► it has since been succeeded by the gfx 100 s2 i have the first one whatever i'm willing to
01:27:07 ◼ ► carry around a very big camera i bring the gfx 100 s and it is ridiculous and i only have the uh
01:27:14 ◼ ► i only have two primes for it i have the 110 millimeter portrait and the little the the
01:27:20 ◼ ► relatively little pancake lens for it which is the size of a grapefruit the uh 50 or 55 millimeter
01:27:29 ◼ ► one i i i keep that 50-ish millimeter one on most of the time that is my like landscape everything
01:27:37 ◼ ► camera because it is so big and heavy uh i more often have the fuji with me like if i'm if i'm
01:27:44 ◼ ► going somewhere with a backpack i will often have the xt5 with me is what i mean and on that i have
01:27:52 ◼ ► i have the little tiny prime lens or a little tiny pancake prime for that the uh 27 millimeter which
01:27:59 ◼ ► converts to like a 45 ish i love that combo it's it's a fantastic camera the xt5 even though it is
01:28:07 ◼ ► not technically as amazing as the gfx 100 s um i greatly prefer its controls i think it is my
01:28:16 ◼ ► favorite camera i have ever used in terms of handling and controls and capabilities it has tons
01:28:22 ◼ ► of manual control dials and so i'm able especially when i have a lens which most of most of my lenses
01:28:28 ◼ ► do uh where the lens has an aperture ring on it then i have physical controls for all of the main
01:28:33 ◼ ► things you know i have shutter speed iso aperture and exposure all of those there's rings for if
01:28:39 ◼ ► your lens have an has an aperture ring on it i just love the xt5 because everything is just
01:28:45 ◼ ► clear and obvious you can just you can tell what all the important settings are just by looking at
01:28:50 ◼ ► the top of the camera that's how i like to shoot it handles the way i i want a camera to handle
01:28:56 ◼ ► things are laid out in a great way which is is not what i can say about the gfx but the gfx wins on
01:29:01 ◼ ► on tech detail but anyway uh the the xt5 i absolutely love so to answer the question um
01:29:08 ◼ ► whether i'm still using it or whether i went back to my iphone i never stopped using my iphone to
01:29:13 ◼ ► take pictures now i just when i have the ability to have a big camera with me i do i do take
01:29:20 ◼ ► pictures with the xt5 and i really enjoy it and in fact today i was going on a on like a sunny winter
01:29:28 ◼ ► day walk at the beach and i brought the xt5 and i took some pictures around the beach of the snowy
01:29:34 ◼ ► town and it was delightful so i i do use the xt5 as often as i've used any other big camera
01:29:41 ◼ ► in the last you know 15 years which is not incredibly often but i'm glad i have it when i
01:29:47 ◼ ► when i want it christmas i'm going to be using both of those heavily uh our christmas setup is
01:29:53 ◼ ► kind of a multi-camera setup usually it's a it's a big family ordeal and there's different cameras
01:29:58 ◼ ► for different purposes so i will have the gfx with me with that prime lens on it especially when
01:30:03 ◼ ► light gets low but for other times of the day i'll be using the xt5 with a more versatile zoom lens
01:30:08 ◼ ► on it so the answer is yes i use it and it's great for me i have a olympus micro four-thirds camera
01:30:16 ◼ ► which is why i was my interest was peaked earlier with that um that immersive camera i use i don't
01:30:23 ◼ ► remember what generation it is to be completely honest with you but i use an olympus omd omd em10
01:30:28 ◼ ► i want to say it's a mark 3 but i'm not 100 sure uh the mark 4 appears to be the latest and greatest
01:30:35 ◼ ► that camera while i love it and to my eyes takes incredible pictures i've come to the conclusion
01:30:43 ◼ ► over the last several years i want to say three or four years ago now that if i'm indoors unless i
01:30:49 ◼ ► have a lot of light then the iphone is likely to do a better job taking a photo than this is
01:30:56 ◼ ► obviously the the bokeh won't be nearly as good from the iphone in fact it will either be synthetic
01:31:02 ◼ ► or not great but in general i find that particularly indoors the iphone does better and then outdoors it
01:31:11 ◼ ► depends on what i'm up to because the olympus doesn't have automata my olympus doesn't have
01:31:17 ◼ ► automatic um like hdr anything like that and so i will choose between having subjects that are you
01:31:24 ◼ ► know exposed properly in a washed out sky or vice versa and so i do still use the olympus particularly
01:31:31 ◼ ► when i want a zoom because i have some flavor of zoom lens that i forget off the top of my head on it
01:31:36 ◼ ► which is again less relevant now with the iphone's 5x camera or if i'm outdoors for sure if i'm
01:31:43 ◼ ► outdoors trying to capture like people or whatever i am 100 reaching for the for the olympus but
01:31:49 ◼ ► that's about it if i'm not outdoors in decent light then oftentimes it's just less fuss to use
01:31:55 ◼ ► the iphone and that's typically what i'm doing uh john i need you to keep this to under three hours
01:32:01 ◼ ► which one of your 17 cameras are you using what scenarios please uh so for the holidays uh i just
01:32:08 ◼ ► really for everything except for long island beach photography i use my phone obviously uh and also
01:32:15 ◼ ► what i consider my main camera which is the sony a7iii that marco generously gifted me all those
01:32:22 ◼ ► years ago love it uh still getting great mileage out of it um the lens i use on it is what i
01:32:27 ◼ ► consider my sort of everyday lens it's the most versatile single lens i have for this camera it's
01:32:33 ◼ ► the sony 24 to 70 f 2.8 gm 2 uh what i like about the lens is the zoom range is reasonable the
01:32:42 ◼ ► aperture at 2.8 is reasonable and the size is reasonable you can get lenses with longer ranges
01:32:49 ◼ ► and with a wider aperture they're all bigger and heavier this one is already kind of at the limit
01:32:55 ◼ ► of big and heaviness but it is versatile enough that i can use it in any kind of indoor outdoor
01:33:00 ◼ ► scenario where i'm going to be taking pictures of people at an event or doing a thing so christmas
01:33:05 ◼ ► morning is that camera and occasionally the phone which i will take out for i don't do it don't do
01:33:11 ◼ ► any video on my big camera i do video only on the phone and occasionally i'll take out my phone to
01:33:15 ◼ ► do video and then snapchum uh shots with it as well depending on how quickly i need to get the
01:33:20 ◼ ► shot is the camera around my neck my family complains that all the pictures of me uh christmas
01:33:24 ◼ ► morning i have a camera around my neck like someone's gonna take the pictures and it's gonna
01:33:29 ◼ ► be me so any picture they take of me with their phones which they're terrible quality phones
01:33:33 ◼ ► uh is me with a camera a camera around their neck um yeah so that's my plan for this year as well
01:33:38 ◼ ► same lens same camera it'll be around my neck while opening presents i'm gonna be taking
01:33:42 ◼ ► pictures of everybody else and they're gonna end up going in the calendar that hangs in the fridge
01:33:46 ◼ ► and it's just the way it works plus my iphone pictures my iphone pictures get better every year
01:33:50 ◼ ► because well not every every two years my iphone pictures get better because i get a better phone
01:33:54 ◼ ► and that trend continues but uh it's gonna be a little while before i ever upgrade the big camera
01:34:00 ◼ ► there are obviously many better cameras but like me with my tvs i'm waiting for that right better
01:34:05 ◼ ► cam well first of all a better camera is gonna cost me a whole bunch of money so uh you know and
01:34:10 ◼ ► i'm gonna i'm looking at the sony cameras because i want to be able to reuse all my lenses and i
01:34:13 ◼ ► like sony cameras and so i'm just waiting for that right one like the uh uh the a7r5 was actually a
01:34:20 ◼ ► really good one but i don't know if i want the r series with that much extra resolution i'm not
01:34:24 ◼ ► sure if i want or need that to make my photos bigger the a1 was tempting but super expensive
01:34:30 ◼ ► the new version of the a1 is like oh it's better but they didn't change the really the sensor
01:34:35 ◼ ► then there's the a9 with the electronic sensor it's like maybe i should just wait until they
01:34:39 ◼ ► basically have something with the uh dynamic range of the a1 series but with the uh instant readout
01:34:46 ◼ ► well i forget what the name of it is but like the the electronic shutter instant readout thing of
01:34:50 ◼ ► the a9 and that is a technology that doesn't exist yet so i'm just sitting here waiting i'm saying in
01:34:55 ◼ ► the meantime i love my a7iii take tons of pictures with it i have lots of different interesting
01:35:00 ◼ ► lenses for it that i use in occasions when i have time to prepare but my everyday lens uh the sony
01:35:13 ◼ ► aperture if you have to pick one single lens to use for anything and when i take you know sometimes
01:35:19 ◼ ► like my kids are going to like a dance at school or something like that like where i know i'm going
01:35:25 ◼ ► to be taking pictures of people like all dressed up in their nice outfits i'll put on one of my
01:35:28 ◼ ► prime lenses to get better pictures out of it but most of the time the everyday lens gets me through
01:35:33 ◼ ► all right thank you to our sponsor this week the members thank you so much members you really you
01:35:39 ◼ ► mean a lot to us especially you know now we're getting all sentimental about holidays and
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01:35:47 ◼ ► one of the perks of membership is atp overtime this week in overtime we're going to go through
01:35:53 ◼ ► a wonderful idea john had we're going to name each of us are going to name our best tech thing of
01:35:58 ◼ ► 2024 our worst tech thing of 2024 and the tech thing we are most looking forward to in 2025 if
01:36:06 ◼ ► you want to hear that and every other thing we do in overtime every week and all of our other bonus
01:36:10 ◼ ► content and all the other benefits of being a member you can join us atp.fm/join thank you
01:36:15 ◼ ► everybody and we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin
01:36:25 ◼ ► because it was accidental oh it was accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey
01:36:35 ◼ ► wouldn't let him because it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at
01:36:44 ◼ ► atp.fm and if you're into mastodon you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o
01:37:08 ◼ ► so i thought maybe we could take the opportunity to uh do like a quick catch-up on aaron's car
01:37:29 ◼ ► if you recall uh in june when we were all at wwdc together aaron's old volvo had a catastrophic
01:37:36 ◼ ► engine failure uh i forget which episode we talked about it but you should go and listen to it it is
01:37:40 ◼ ► caused by a very small pebble correct you're not gonna say like you you're just waiting for you
01:37:46 ◼ ► to get to that point you're just gonna say i would have a catastrophic engine failure anyway continuing
01:37:56 ◼ ► encounter with a pebble it was defeated by a pebble it was destroyed by a pebble there's so
01:38:00 ◼ ► many different ways you can do this the important part is the pebble it was it was possibly the most
01:38:05 ◼ ► interesting catastrophic engine failure i've ever heard yeah see there you go uh so anyway you can
01:38:10 ◼ ► hear the details on a prior episode i don't recall which one but uh that was in june and then in early
01:38:17 ◼ ► july we figured out that we really just wanted to stick with volvo and i don't need to hear any
01:38:24 ◼ ► feedback as to whether or not that was smart don't care that's what we did it's already done uh and
01:38:27 ◼ ► what we did this time though was you know aaron had a volvo xc90 it was a 2017 uh we bought a 2024
01:38:34 ◼ ► we leased actually a 2024 uh xc90 but this one is a plug-in hybrid an xc90 t8 uh and basically what
01:38:43 ◼ ► that means is it has a turbocharged four-cylinder engine and it also has a battery electric engine
01:38:49 ◼ ► if your motor i guess strictly speaking if you will uh and anyway so it gets about 30 to 35
01:38:56 ◼ ► miles of range generally speaking uh we can charge it in about five hours from dead uh here at home
01:39:01 ◼ ► because we have a like american dryer style plug which is a 220 volt plug i want to say it's like
01:39:07 ◼ ► 50 amps something like that uh which then gets converted down to uh i think it's a 30 amp which
01:39:13 ◼ ► is all that the car wants because it's not a huge battery i believe it's 18 kilowatt hours or 18
01:39:18 ◼ ► kilowatts excuse me um something like that anyway you were at the first one no there we go i screwed
01:39:24 ◼ ► it up um but i thought it would be interesting to talk about what it's like for uh someone to have a
01:39:30 ◼ ► plug-in hybrid car and i gotta tell you for our particular needs and our particular needs are
01:39:39 ◼ ► relatively unique uh but for us i freaking love this thing and i think it was the perfect solution
01:39:46 ◼ ► for our family so generally speaking aaron drives 10 miles in a day maybe 20 at most on an average
01:39:56 ◼ ► day and i just told you that the battery lasts roughly 30 miles give or take a little bit
01:40:01 ◼ ► generally speaking so that means that almost all of her driving she can do on electricity and that
01:40:09 ◼ ► also means that we bought the car i want to say it was like july 10 or thereabouts i forget exactly
01:40:14 ◼ ► what day it was but it was in the top half of july a couple of weeks ago we put our second tank of
01:40:19 ◼ ► gas in the car how much horsepower is the electric motor you know i honestly don't know i want to say
01:40:25 ◼ ► it's like 100 horsepower but i really truly don't remember off the top of my head because i was
01:40:28 ◼ ► wondering like if you're you like forcing it into ev only mode essentially you get in you put it
01:40:32 ◼ ► into the mode that says don't use the gas engine at all there is that that does exist it's called
01:40:37 ◼ ► pure and uh i have done that a handful of times and oftentimes if i do it it's because i want to
01:40:44 ◼ ► allow myself the full depth of the accelerator pedal you know how in like an automatic you can
01:40:49 ◼ ► just kind of feel not physically feel but you just kind of feel out that oh if i go any further the
01:40:53 ◼ ► car will downshift and you know that unless you're really trying to you know get going somewhere you
01:40:58 ◼ ► can just that that that say 50 percent depth in the accelerator is all you've really got at that
01:41:02 ◼ ► particular moment well the same sort of thing is true here now it is an automatic when it's using
01:41:07 ◼ ► the gasoline engine but that's not what i'm talking about what i mean is you can just kind
01:41:10 ◼ ► of tell that if i go beyond this depth of the pedal it's going to kick on the gas motor not
01:41:16 ◼ ► only that but the but the the tachometer it's the i guess it's the power meter strictly speaking
01:41:22 ◼ ► it has a droplet i'm not sure why it's a droplet but it's a droplet and a line that indicates okay
01:41:27 ◼ ► if you ask for any power beyond this point i'm kicking on the gasoline and so we run it in hybrid
01:41:34 ◼ ► mode 99 of the time and it is exceedingly rare that it will turn on the gasoline for just getting
01:41:42 ◼ ► around town purposes now if we're on an interstate or something like that it will absolutely kick the
01:41:46 ◼ ► gasoline on it from time to time and then also i found that if you use the onboard navigation and
01:41:52 ◼ ► this has android automotive which means it's the google powered thing it has google maps and whatnot
01:41:58 ◼ ► if you tell it if you tell the car the destination rather than using like apple maps on carplay
01:42:04 ◼ ► it will do some sort of computational magic such that it will kick on the gasoline when there's
01:42:09 ◼ ► plenty of battery power left i believe because it thinks okay later in the trip when you're close to
01:42:14 ◼ ► your destination you're going to want the juice for then that being said i'm not sure i really
01:42:19 ◼ ► agree with some of its choices like it would use it would use battery at times where i thought the
01:42:24 ◼ ► gasoline might have served it better like say on the interstate and it used gasoline when i thought
01:42:28 ◼ ► the battery might have served it better like around town maybe it's right and certainly it's
01:42:32 ◼ ► presumably smarter than me but i don't know it just felt weird but that was many words to say
01:42:37 ◼ ► no we don't typically put it in pure mode we typically run it in hybrid mode i'm surprised
01:42:41 ◼ ► though your gas tanks last in that long because like you're essentially not you're not disallowing
01:42:45 ◼ ► the gas engine from turning on so it turns on whenever it feels like it oh it does sound like
01:42:49 ◼ ► you're kind of babying it because you don't want the gas engine to turn on but still it's turning
01:42:53 ◼ ► on in your daily use but i guess just a little bit just briefly and not enough to go through it
01:42:59 ◼ ► does that have a big gas tank how big is the gas thing you know that's a great question which i
01:43:02 ◼ ► also don't know off the top of my head you only filled it up twice yeah i've only filled it twice
01:43:06 ◼ ► let me see if i can quickly find the uh i log our um our fuel uh you know spreadsheet a number
01:43:13 ◼ ► spreadsheet i don't know why i do it i just like doing it uh i have no good justification for it
01:43:17 ◼ ► uh but the last so now yeah right the last time we filled it up it was pretty darn near empty and
01:43:24 ◼ ► we put in almost 16 gallons like just a shade size 16 gallons um and that was a an effective
01:43:32 ◼ ► miles per gallon on that tank of 77.2 and that is by taking the amount of miles driven you know
01:43:38 ◼ ► divided by the amount of gallons burned but again that's not really fair because most of that time
01:43:44 ◼ ► we were running on electricity rather than uh rather than gasoline that's one of the things
01:43:48 ◼ ► that always worries me uh about hybrids and we're so worried about uh marco's i3's range extentra is
01:43:52 ◼ ► like uh if you don't ever use the gas engine a you're just you know wasting electricity hauling
01:43:58 ◼ ► this big heavy thing around and b if you don't run a gasoline engine for long periods of time it gets
01:44:04 ◼ ► cranky like you do have to occasionally start it and you are like you're it's clearly turning on
01:44:08 ◼ ► and although i auto stop start also makes me have empathy for the engine yes being i know they're
01:44:14 ◼ ► designed to auto stop start i know all the things they did to change the engine so they can do that
01:44:18 ◼ ► and more robust starters and yada yada it's still not good for the engine still right so i do worry
01:44:23 ◼ ► that yeah i mean usually sense who cares but like it's one of the strange compromises about hybrids
01:44:29 ◼ ► is you know depending on how you use them in like the quote-unquote best case scenario where you're
01:44:38 ◼ ► around and b that engine is having a sad difficult life that's probably not being run enough they it
01:44:45 ◼ ► wants to be run it's like you know uh you know a thoroughbred horse it wants to get out there and
01:44:50 ◼ ► run and you're just like nope electric motors got it yeah and i mean i would say that it probably
01:44:56 ◼ ► if i were to wager a guess in the six months or thereabouts that we've had the car i would say
01:45:03 ◼ ► the gasoline motor has been on 10 hours or less maybe like it is very rare for the gasoline motor
01:45:09 ◼ ► to run so that's not a good healthy life for a gas engine i know who cares about the whole point is
01:45:12 ◼ ► you don't want to be burning gasoline like i get that but it's like it just that's why i always
01:45:16 ◼ ► feel like a pure ev is so much more of a simple solution but you know hey live and learn yeah
01:45:22 ◼ ► and i mean again i i can't find any particular you know beef that i have with anything you just said
01:45:27 ◼ ► i agree with you um but just so far you know six months in it has been incredible because we almost
01:45:34 ◼ ► never use gasoline and again it's been a couple of thousand miles shoot i already closed the
01:45:40 ◼ ► numbers document but i think we're at like at the time of the last fueling where we're okay
01:45:45 ◼ ► here we go we're at three thousand miles at the time we last fueled it three thousand miles and
01:45:50 ◼ ► we have put in a sum total of 26 gallons of gas which is just bananas and for our uses it is the
01:45:59 ◼ ► best of both worlds because easily 90 plus percent of the time aaron is using it just on electricity
01:46:05 ◼ ► and then the handful of times that we want to go further now admittedly we haven't taken it on a
01:46:11 ◼ ► proper trip yet you know when i say further i'm saying like a sum total of 100 150 miles which i
01:46:18 ◼ ► know most reasonable evs would laugh at but that being said anytime we want to take it further than
01:46:24 ◼ ► like 30 or so um but then the gasoline just kicks on and it's no problem and that's worked out super
01:46:29 ◼ ► duper well and i think we could our family could have a ex90 which is the full electric version of
01:46:36 ◼ ► this car i mean it's strictly speaking a little bit different but it's effectively the full
01:46:39 ◼ ► electric version of the xc90 and i certainly think we could make that work without too much compromise
01:46:44 ◼ ► but i really i wasn't ready for the family hauler to be full electric yet i 100 believe that i should
01:46:53 ◼ ► have years ago gotten a full electric for myself i haven't for several different reasons but uh for
01:47:00 ◼ ► the family hauler i didn't want it to be full electric yet and i stand by that for now um
01:47:04 ◼ ► and i honestly i could make a strong argument about how wrong i am so i'm not you know this this is a
01:47:11 ◼ ► week of loosely right exactly it's a weak opinion held loosely i'll be the first to tell you but
01:47:16 ◼ ► uh certainly for sticking our toe in the water the the plug-in hybrid has been excellent and i'm
01:47:22 ◼ ► really really happy with it the qualms i have with the car are well let me let me ask you guys if you
01:47:28 ◼ ► were to just hazard a guess what do you think my biggest complaint about the car is infotainment
01:47:33 ◼ ► close oh i was gonna say the transmission no no no well there is no transmission 90 percent of the
01:47:39 ◼ ► time we drive it um no it's software the software is not great and it's it's google's android
01:47:46 ◼ ► automotive now maybe it's volvo's application thereof i've never had an android automotive car
01:47:50 ◼ ► before yeah android automotive is is a perfectly solid foundation it's all the crap that the
01:47:54 ◼ ► manufacturers put on top of it that often has bugs by the way that's what i meant by info how am i
01:47:59 ◼ ► close i'm exactly right it's that's the term of art for the thing you're describing it's the
01:48:04 ◼ ► software that runs on the middle things yeah but i i can't put my foot there are times that it's
01:48:09 ◼ ► something at a lower level than the infotainment 90 of my complaints you're exactly right it's the
01:48:14 ◼ ► infotainment but there are there are occasions and of course i can't put my finger on one specifically
01:48:17 ◼ ► right the second but there are occasions that it's something that i think is lower level than that
01:48:22 ◼ ► but definitely most of my complaints are the infotainment and it and i actually liked the
01:48:28 ◼ ► i think they called it census which was the volvo homegrown thing that predated android auto or
01:48:33 ◼ ► excuse me android automotive um i liked it most people did not they've kind of tried to make a
01:48:40 ◼ ► faux census on top of android automotive and it's all right but i just don't love the way some of
01:48:52 ◼ ► i don't particularly care for the radio in any capacity aaron loves listening to the radio in
01:48:57 ◼ ► the car and she really has come to like serious xm i think we've talked about this in the past
01:49:02 ◼ ► but she likes satellite radio and aaron is not one to want to pay money for really anything if
01:49:07 ◼ ► she can avoid it she's she's very frugal maybe is the word i'm looking for i think there's a
01:49:12 ◼ ► even more complementary term than that that i can't put my finger on but she doesn't like to
01:49:16 ◼ ► spend money frivolously meanwhile that's my specialty but that's neither here nor there
01:49:20 ◼ ► but and and i am a mere apprentice to marco's expert level at this but nevertheless um you see
01:49:28 ◼ ► how he snuck in the new version of the the big medium format fuji in there yeah exactly exactly
01:49:34 ◼ ► i didn't know i didn't say i owned the new version of the medium i just i there is a new version i
01:49:38 ◼ ► have the old version oh i thought you'd bought the new version no it's mentioned it as a off
01:49:44 ◼ ► to the side during your story okay that's a good clarification marco did not buy the new one no by
01:49:49 ◼ ► the way remind me to tell you sometime about long island christmas light installation pricing
01:49:55 ◼ ► oh my god anyway like paying somebody else to do it this is okay i'm sorry for the derail this is
01:50:01 ◼ ► go for it go for it this is a thing i don't know how long this has been a thing i'm relatively new
01:50:07 ◼ ► to long island um but this is a thing that there are a lot of houses especially as you get towards
01:50:15 ◼ ► like you know the nicer blocks in town a lot of houses have professionally installed commercial
01:50:22 ◼ ► grade christmas lights and you can identify them pretty easily they're i believe it's the c9 sizes
01:50:28 ◼ ► i think i think it's what they're called but um they're they're they're the large lights that are
01:50:32 ◼ ► perfectly evenly spaced and are all perfectly aligned to outline the roof line and all the
01:50:41 ◼ ► sidelines of a house and usually some of their landscaping maybe maybe their driveway and
01:50:46 ◼ ► everything this is so prevalent i like i'm i'm shocked like how many houses do this and first
01:50:53 ◼ ► of all i respect what they're trying to achieve i do think it kind of goes against the spirit of
01:51:05 ◼ ► somebody you're paying to put them on your house like i feel like that that kind of is against the
01:51:09 ◼ ► spirit of christmas lights and i i i prefer a more organic look uh where somebody just like went out
01:51:15 ◼ ► there themselves and draped some lights over their bushes like i i like that look better i it's a
01:51:20 ◼ ► little more homey and i think that's kind of what i go for but anyway so there's all these like you
01:51:24 ◼ ► know just residential homes our kids saw this one time and was like oh my god we have to have that
01:51:28 ◼ ► how like how did we do that so so we called around some different places that you know we saw signs
01:51:33 ◼ ► for you would not believe what this costs on mon island i'm sure it's thousands yes which greatly
01:51:42 ◼ ► surprised us you know and we were asking for like a very basic thing and it was the the quote blew
01:51:47 ◼ ► us away um we we scaled it back quite a bit um but based on the quote that we got and based on
01:51:56 ◼ ► what everyone else was charging for the same thing and based on what everyone else seems to be doing
01:52:00 ◼ ► to their houses i think there are at least 15 houses within a few blocks of here that have
01:52:09 ◼ ► spent over five thousand dollars possibly over ten thousand dollars for their christmas light
01:52:14 ◼ ► installation and and that's just for the year that's just for this year don't forget about
01:52:19 ◼ ► the electricity believe me that's nothing compared to you know if if you're paying five or ten
01:52:26 ◼ ► thousand dollars for your light installations every year the electricity is not going to matter
01:52:30 ◼ ► at all back when they were incandescents i think i think you could uh compete with that if you left
01:52:34 ◼ ► them on all the time but yeah with leds hopefully it's not that much this shot it's shocking to me
01:52:38 ◼ ► that people would pay like you know five or ten thousand dollars to decorate their house for like
01:52:42 ◼ ► three weeks you see how it works because you just got done saying how you think it's uh you know not
01:52:47 ◼ ► to your taste but then also you're looked into paying for something because the neighbors did
01:52:51 ◼ ► it that's how it works the neighbors have lights and you want to have the lights and just keeping
01:52:55 ◼ ► up with the joneses and it's happening to you too because like why did you even agree just because
01:52:59 ◼ ► adam wanted it and you're like okay well i don't like it but adam wants it so we'll do it yeah i
01:53:02 ◼ ► figure you know we try it for a year and then whoa you could have hung them yourself like i mean
01:53:07 ◼ ► that's the you know the old way i i saw this by just not doing lights at all but when i was a kid
01:53:11 ◼ ► my dad and i did lights we hung them ourselves and it was dangerous and stupid and that's
01:53:15 ◼ ► christmas spirit but these these are somewhat involved to do yourself because like it's one
01:53:21 ◼ ► of those you know to to get the perfect alignment each light has its own bracket it isn't you're
01:53:26 ◼ ► not just like you know stapling a couple of staples for the wires yeah no i understand like
01:53:30 ◼ ► i agree with you i don't like that look i when i'm hanging them i'm saying like you have nails
01:53:34 ◼ ► stuck into like the the the eaves of your house and you hang wires over the nails and nothing is
01:53:40 ◼ ► evenly spaced and you know it's very organic yeah that i i prefer that look but there are a lot of
01:53:46 ◼ ► people who prefer this look and i don't know i like once i learned how much it costs it kind
01:53:50 ◼ ► of ruined it for me now i'm just kind of like oh my god those people wasted so like so anyway
01:53:54 ◼ ► all this is to say that uh believe me casey there are people who are way better at wasting money
01:53:58 ◼ ► than either of us good to know you could put a projector on your lawn marco and have it project
01:54:05 ◼ ► lights onto your house you know those things where they take like you know things on to serve
01:54:08 ◼ ► they won't be as bright as the neighbor's lights but you can have any configuration you want and
01:54:12 ◼ ► it's just one little project there oh my god uh yeah yeah yeah so anyways uh aaron doesn't really
01:54:17 ◼ ► love spending money if she can avoid it which is great because i'm very good at it and uh so she
01:54:23 ◼ ► really likes serious xm and i was starting to say before we got a little sidetracked that um one of
01:54:28 ◼ ► the things that's worse about this new version of census if they're even calling it that now
01:54:33 ◼ ► is that on her old car when you looked at the list of channels and serious xm if you're trying
01:54:38 ◼ ► to flip to like a different channel it would show you what the currently playing song was on each
01:54:42 ◼ ► channel so like on this list it would say you know hits whatever is playing justin bieber and hit then
01:54:48 ◼ ► you know 90s on nine is playing so and so and and zeros on zero is playing such and such and it
01:54:54 ◼ ► would show you whatever's playing on each thing and it doesn't do that on this version of the
01:54:58 ◼ ► software and to john's earlier point i believe that is volvo i don't think that's android or
01:55:01 ◼ ► excuse me i don't think that's google at all that's volvo's work and it's silly things like
01:55:05 ◼ ► that that are frustrating and oftentimes there'll be little bugs and little quirks the end every
01:55:11 ◼ ► great once in a while we'll have to do a hard reset on the infotainment which takes down like
01:55:15 ◼ ► everything including the hback so we can be hurtling down the road and have to pull a marco
01:55:21 ◼ ► and his model s and have to reboot the center console this has only happened a handful of times
01:55:32 ◼ ► volvo if it's 100 google or in all likelihood a combination thereof but that drives me nuts it's
01:55:38 ◼ ► just the software is the issue on this car and it's not bad enough that i would say don't buy
01:55:42 ◼ ► one i really do love this car but it's the software oh another great example this hasn't
01:55:47 ◼ ► happened in a while actually but when we first got the car i don't know if it was where we had
01:55:52 ◼ ► things stored in the garage or something like that we have a fairly spacious garage actually
01:55:57 ◼ ► but aaron would go backing into the garage and it was not infrequent for the car to panic stop
01:56:05 ◼ ► and understandably that drove her up a freaking wall because every time it happened it's intense
01:56:13 ◼ ► you know you're granted she's not bombing into the garage we back in because we're adults and that's
01:56:18 ◼ ► what adults should do and we back into the garage and so she's cutting she's not driving at 15 miles
01:56:23 ◼ ► an hour into the garage in reverse but she's going quick enough that if you get this thing panic
01:56:27 ◼ ► stopping it's all of a sudden you know it's stopped you're going from moving to dead and 90
01:56:33 ◼ ► percent or maybe not 90 percent of the time but a lot of the time she has a kids car and it scares
01:56:36 ◼ ► the piss out of the kids too of course and so we we rearranged a couple of things we had in the
01:56:40 ◼ ► garage that really were not that close to the car but were close enough that i think it might have
01:56:45 ◼ ► been setting this off but like that's a software thing you can't just disable that i you probably
01:56:50 ◼ ► could but i don't think you can permanently you know short of like you know coding the car or
01:56:54 ◼ ► something like that it's like the proximity things like when you know my wife got her new car it's the
01:56:59 ◼ ► first car we had with any of these proximity auto stop thingies and we haven't had the auto stop
01:57:04 ◼ ► thingy but we did have like the beepy things that yell at you if you get too close to something
01:57:07 ◼ ► yeah or yell at you when you're changing lanes with your blind spot and the proximity ones in
01:57:11 ◼ ► particular at least in this car there's a very prominent actual physical button on the dashboard
01:57:17 ◼ ► that you can hit to turn that feature on and off so what you just do is when you're pulling into
01:57:21 ◼ ► the garage you hit the proximity thing off i was telling i tell her is that she has it off by
01:57:26 ◼ ► default i tell her turn it on when you're parking so if you know you're getting close to some stuff
01:57:33 ◼ ► even if it comes on as soon as you start the car like that's what you want so you should check to
01:57:37 ◼ ► see if there's a way to turn off i mean your problem it's not the proximity sensing it's the
01:57:41 ◼ ► emergency stopping that you don't like and volvo being volvo may not let you turn that off but you
01:57:46 ◼ ► should double check exactly uh but i mean i think it was a software thing and i think by rearranging
01:57:51 ◼ ► some things in the garage it has made a big difference but when it does happen it's happened
01:57:54 ◼ ► with me in the car a couple times i don't get driven up a wall by it but unquestionably it's
01:57:59 ◼ ► unsettling and that that's being generous like it's very unsettling to the point that it's almost
01:58:03 ◼ ► scary and that's as a passenger much less as a driver does it beep at you too besides just
01:58:07 ◼ ► emergency stopping well it'll beep beep beep beep and then it'll like slam on the brakes and like
01:58:13 ◼ ► you know sound some sort of alarm or something like that um ryan booker in the chat is saying
01:58:18 ◼ ► that was a bug i think polestar used to do the same thing back into our driveway if there was
01:58:21 ◼ ► a blade of grass in the way uh it's as soon as you go into the reverse gear you can just turn it off
01:58:26 ◼ ► but you have to do it every time and that that i believe it corroborates what my experience was
01:58:30 ◼ ► you have to go through menus on the touch screen to turn it on i don't i don't recall to be honest
01:58:34 ◼ ► with you but um it's not it's not great in that regard but again it's partially our work potentially
01:58:40 ◼ ► partially volvo's work that's gotten better that's that's um you know so volvo again being involved
01:58:45 ◼ ► on being very safety focused i can see how they might turn a lot of these things on by default but
01:58:49 ◼ ► honda trying to do the right thing in its interior is with both the proximity sensor and also the
01:58:56 ◼ ► auto stop start the proximity sensor again a prominent button directly on the dashboard
01:59:01 ◼ ► dedicated to this just turning the proximity on and off and it defaults to on uh but then you can
01:59:07 ◼ ► turn it off or you i think you can set it to default off and then you turn it on but then the
01:59:10 ◼ ► auto stop start has to default to on for them to get the good epa like mileage rating blah blah
01:59:16 ◼ ► blah so it always turns on but it's right by like the gear shift lever like the auto stop start
01:59:22 ◼ ► button uh and there is an 80 thing as i think i mentioned when she got this car there's an
01:59:26 ◼ ► 80 thing you can buy and shove inside your dashboard that will turn it off by default but
01:59:31 ◼ ► honda's trying to to say look we know which features of our car are annoying and we will
01:59:35 ◼ ► give you ways to defeat them that are as convenient as possible very prominently located easy to reach
01:59:47 ◼ ► instrument cluster so you always know when it's on and off it never goes away it's like the most
01:59:54 ◼ ► but they have to turn it on by default for safety reasons so volvo is not really meeting you halfway
02:00:00 ◼ ► about knowing which things are annoying i think they probably just think this emergency stopping
02:00:04 ◼ ► thing is going to save your life someday and you're like i'm just trying to back into the garage
02:00:07 ◼ ► yeah uh the other nice thing about having a plug-in hybrid is that uh even though the car is parked in
02:00:13 ◼ ► a garage with garage door closed overnight and even though you two particularly john seem to
02:00:18 ◼ ► think that we live effectively on the equator because we are south of i don't know philadelphia
02:00:23 ◼ ► um that's obviously correct as it turns out it does actually get cold here uh by any reasonable
02:00:29 ◼ ► definition and so but not cold enough that your water heater isn't in your garage you can't help
02:00:33 ◼ ► yourself can you anyway the point is it's 15 degrees here okay my water heater is not in my
02:00:39 ◼ ► garage at least mine isn't outside like jason's anyway the point is i mean it's it's 24 degrees
02:00:44 ◼ ► here and my water heater is currently air conditioning my garage it's 28 here thank you
02:00:50 ◼ ► very much so it's not like it's that freaking different anyway that's tropical jesus christ i
02:00:55 ◼ ► quit uh anyway so the point is in the mornings uh when it got properly cold here which again happens
02:01:01 ◼ ► more often than you too john think uh i would oftentimes like pull aaron's car out before the
02:01:07 ◼ ► kids and her got in it because she drives them to school um i would pull her car out maybe five or
02:01:12 ◼ ► ten minutes before they were going to leave so the kids don't have to get into a freezing cold car
02:01:16 ◼ ► and aaron too but particularly the kids and um and with this if the car isn't plugged in
02:01:24 ◼ ► you can only run the electric like preheat or pre-cool for three minutes then it turns itself
02:01:29 ◼ ► off probably because the battery is so darn small but if the car is plugged in you can run it for a
02:01:34 ◼ ► solid 30 minutes and so anytime within 30 minutes of them needing to leave in the morning i can just
02:01:41 ◼ ► flip that bad boy on from my phone and it's just perfect in there by the time she gets in and
02:01:46 ◼ ► unplugs it which is great so again there's a lot to be said for battery electric or plug-in hybrid
02:01:53 ◼ ► cars i'm sure there's other things i'm not thinking of that i could say about this but i
02:01:56 ◼ ► gotta tell you if you're in a situation where most of your driving happens within the range of the
02:02:01 ◼ ► battery on your plug-in hybrid but you still want to be able to drive two three four five
02:02:06 ◼ ► hundred miles without having to stop for 45 minutes at a clip then i gotta tell you i am
02:02:12 ◼ ► really happy with our plug-in hybrid and i really do think that my next car will be full on battery
02:02:18 ◼ ► electric and that will actually probably make some very interesting changes in the way aaron
02:02:23 ◼ ► and i drive our cars because right now it is very clear that i have my car and she has hers because
02:02:29 ◼ ► she can't drive a stick and once i get a battery electric when that goes away and there are only
02:02:34 ◼ ► two pedals i'm very curious to see how we split the duty of our cars you know will she generally
02:02:40 ◼ ► speaking take quote-unquote mine when she's doing basic stuff around town because she's not going to
02:02:45 ◼ ► want to haul the i think it's like five thousand fifty five hundred six thousand pound car in order
02:02:50 ◼ ► to do stuff or will she just take hers because she's more comfortable with it how much do you
02:02:54 ◼ ► think your evs gonna weigh one of those three thousand pound evs yeah i have bad news for you
02:02:58 ◼ ► about how much evs weigh you make a very good point even when they're not suvs they're all heavy
02:03:03 ◼ ► yeah that is that is very true you're right about that but you you still take my point though i mean
02:03:07 ◼ ► whatever smaller dimensions would would maybe be better around town for parking and stuff exactly
02:03:12 ◼ ► so i mean i don't know we'll see what happens i'm not currently in the market for a car um and i
02:03:17 ◼ ► do i really do love my car and i know i'm going to desperately miss having a having a stick when
02:03:22 ◼ ► whenever i get something different but uh i am really really happy with her plug-in hybrid and
02:03:28 ◼ ► you know some quibbles here and there for sure but i'm really really glad this is where we ended up
02:03:34 ◼ ► and it may come a time i presume there will come a time that we get both of us full-on electric cars
02:03:41 ◼ ► and i'll say to marco you know what marco you were right we could have done it for that 2024 that we
02:03:45 ◼ ► leased but sitting here now to get our foot in the water i'm really really happy with it and if you
02:03:50 ◼ ► have this situation where you know you work from home or your commute is very very very short i
02:03:55 ◼ ► mean when i was working outside the home my commute was like three miles so if you're in
02:04:00 ◼ ► the situation where you're not where you're not driving a whole ton every day and yet you still
02:04:04 ◼ ► want to be able to drive far if you so desire plug-in hybrid man it's great plug-in hybrids
02:04:10 ◼ ► are great for a lot of people that being said yeah once you once you actually live with a full ev
02:04:18 ◼ ► you're gonna realize how it was so not a big deal the way you thought it would be i'm sure
02:04:23 ◼ ► you're right in terms of like long trips like because look i i get range anxiety i get you know
02:04:31 ◼ ► trying to avoid ev charging infrastructure because it's unfamiliar and scary like i get that and yes
02:04:37 ◼ ► there are downsides for for certain use cases for evs but like it's so much less of a big deal
02:04:46 ◼ ► than people think it will be to take evs on long trips before they own them once you own one and
02:04:52 ◼ ► live with it and actually do it you're like oh that's fine like it's no it's it isn't better in
02:04:57 ◼ ► every way but it's better in a lot of ways and it's it's not that much worse than you think it'll
02:05:02 ◼ ► be in the few ways it is worse so like it yeah it's not a big deal but in the meantime plug-in hybrids
02:05:10 ◼ ► are good like transitional option and so i'm i'm glad you're enjoying it i'm glad it's working as
02:05:19 ◼ ► kind of you know training wheels into the world of electric and i'm glad you're able to enjoy like
02:05:23 ◼ ► you know some of those benefits of electric of electric only use or electric primary use
02:05:27 ◼ ► in the meantime so that's great yeah i i couldn't agree with you more that you know this is
02:05:32 ◼ ► training wheels at the moment and the funny thing about this is is that if i'm honest with you two
02:05:38 ◼ ► there are definitely times that aaron's xc prior xc90 the the pure gasoline xc90 there are
02:05:44 ◼ ► definitely some multi-hundred mile trips we went on with that car but generally speaking in an
02:05:50 ◼ ► average year the longest trip that aaron's car made and in this one will make is 140 miles which
02:05:58 ◼ ► is well within the range of now that's one way mind you so what is that about 300 miles round
02:06:04 ◼ ► trip which is still almost you know i would say most electric cars jump in marco but most electric
02:06:10 ◼ ► electric cars have roundabouts of 250 300 mile range so even round trip we could probably do it
02:06:16 ◼ ► in one charge if we really needed to but um but you know so generally speaking her car does not
02:06:21 ◼ ► go far so that's even more credence that i'm full of it and marco's right that we should just have
02:06:26 ◼ ► a full battery electric for aaron you're currently using an ev with 35 miles of range you realize
02:06:30 ◼ ► that is able to serve all of your needs with an ev with 35 miles of range it just happens to weigh
02:06:37 ◼ ► 5500 pounds i agree you're not wrong uh that being said we are going on a longer trip uh this
02:06:42 ◼ ► upcoming summer which is 320 miles each way but that doesn't mean we couldn't charge when we're
02:06:48 ◼ ► there and it's going to be a week-long trip so you know presumably even if we were plugged into a
02:06:53 ◼ ► standard 110 volt outlet i would assume in the span of literally a week we would be able to top
02:06:59 ◼ ► that thing up so but you would never do that because fast charging is really easy also fair
02:07:04 ◼ ► but my point is that like it could happen i'm not trying to say that it is an impossibility for us
02:07:10 ◼ ► it's just something that i certainly wasn't comfortable with and if i wasn't comfortable
02:07:14 ◼ ► with it there is no chance that aaron would be comfortable with it and actually john is writing
02:07:20 ◼ ► something in our internal show notes as we speak which reminded me of the one thing i meant to say
02:07:25 ◼ ► which i've forgotten to say um aaron the other day when it started to get cold by our standards which
02:07:31 ◼ ► at this point i will concede is not cold by northeastern standards this is like maybe a
02:07:36 ◼ ► month ago aaron gets in the car and is like uh is something wrong with my car and i was like oh god
02:07:41 ◼ ► what why she said well it's not saying i have 30 plus miles range it says like 28 29 27 something
02:07:48 ◼ ► like that i forget what it was and i was like huh and then i stepped outside oh yep yep that's a
02:07:54 ◼ ► thing she said what what are you talking about i was like oh yeah it's cold outside yeah well the
02:07:58 ◼ ► battery doesn't work as well as it's cold when it's cold what now let me be clear aaron is not a dumb
02:08:03 ◼ ► woman i would say she's brighter than me in almost every capacity but she's not as knowledgeable as
02:08:09 ◼ ► me about cars and that sort of thing and she had no idea that she would take a hit for range during
02:08:14 ◼ ► during the winter and yeah the 32 ish miles that we were getting in the summer uh it's now like 27
02:08:21 ◼ ► ish usually when we pull out of the garage in the morning yeah but again like yes that is like a
02:08:27 ◼ ► thing that happens but that it that's less about like inherent shortcomings of evs and more just
02:08:33 ◼ ► about lack of familiarity like i think i always think yeah i agree there was that one blog post
02:08:37 ◼ ► that we linked to a thousand years ago from like it was like written from the perspective of
02:08:41 ◼ ► somebody who's just discovering gas cars for the first time after having evs oh yes that was very
02:08:47 ◼ ► good i forget i don't think we could find it but that was very good dig it up but yeah but it was
02:08:51 ◼ ► like i i love that perspective it's like a lot of a lot of what people consider downsides of evs
02:08:57 ◼ ► are are not considering similar downsides of gas cars or you know it's like it's comparing it
02:09:03 ◼ ► against like a perfect ideal that doesn't exist rather than looking at what actually is you know
02:09:08 ◼ ► there's downsides with everything and with different trade-offs part of the reason why evs
02:09:12 ◼ ► have to you know make their own heat in the winter which is somewhat inefficient and uses more range
02:09:19 ◼ ► is because there isn't a giant inefficient heat reaction happening as it operates to drive itself
02:09:27 ◼ ► forward the way it is in gas like gas cars can heat the cabin for basically for free because
02:09:33 ◼ ► there is just so much waste heat coming out of the engine right and you're like okay well that's great
02:09:39 ◼ ► that's free but you're like well hmm you mean we're wasting all of that energy all the rest
02:09:46 ◼ ► of the time and huh it's it's heating up the world all the rest of the time like like that that isn't
02:09:53 ◼ ► without downside either you know so like there is you know there's there's a lot of of kind of
02:09:58 ◼ ► you know just you know gas car you know bias in our minds because it's like that's we've accepted
02:10:04 ◼ ► that as normal we we have internalized like yeah well this is just how quote normal cars operate
02:10:09 ◼ ► so then when evs come around like we see all the differences without realizing like there's a lot
02:10:13 ◼ ► of downsides to gas cars too oh definitely definitely and and again like i'm not i'm i i will
02:10:18 ◼ ► never say that evs are better at everything i will say that they are better at most things
02:10:25 ◼ ► and and again like the ways the ways they are worse are not as much worse for most people as
02:10:30 ◼ ► they might think um but in almost every other way they're better yeah and and again i think we could
02:10:37 ◼ ► we could absolutely make an ev work and i i say that as though it would be some immense burden
02:10:42 ◼ ► it wouldn't be it wouldn't be and i intellectually i know that but i just wasn't there yet and again
02:10:48 ◼ ► if i'm not there yet i i don't think aaron was either but i suspect what's going to happen is
02:10:52 ◼ ► whenever my car gets replaced and i don't know if that's tomorrow or 10 years from now but whenever
02:10:57 ◼ ► my car gets replaced i'll get some sort of full electric car and once we live with that i think
02:11:02 ◼ ► it'll be it'll quickly become very clear to us that oh we could make this work and it wouldn't
02:11:06 ◼ ► be as burdensome as we fear oh it'll be it'll be better than that you won't just be making it work
02:11:11 ◼ ► you'll love it like give it give it like two months or less and you'll be like oh my god why
02:11:16 ◼ ► do we wait this long well that's that's true too because aaron's car went in full battery mode
02:11:21 ◼ ► either because it's in the quote-unquote pure or because we just haven't kicked on the gasoline yet
02:11:25 ◼ ► it's sufficiently quick but it is not quick i mean it is a very heavy car and it is not a
02:11:32 ◼ ► tremendous motor that's driving it and so it is not fast by any means it's actually surprisingly
02:11:37 ◼ ► peppy once you've got the both of them working together because the gasoline i believe only
02:11:43 ◼ ► drives the front axle and the battery only drives the rear but generally speaking when we drive it
02:11:48 ◼ ► it's it's like i said it's sufficiently quick but it is not quick whereas even slow evs that i've
02:11:53 ◼ ► driven like my parents have a chevy i said bolt i always get it bolt and volt wrong i forget which
02:11:57 ◼ ► one it is but whatever one is the is the one that they were producing up until like a year ago um
02:12:02 ◼ ► maybe it's a vault crap i don't remember it doesn't matter anyways molt fair yeah it's it sheds it
02:12:09 ◼ ► sheds all the every every couple of seasons it's very weird um but anyways whatever their piece of
02:12:14 ◼ ► crap chevy electric is it is a piece of crap chevy electric and yet it's actually delightful and from
02:12:21 ◼ ► zero to 30 miles an hour pretty damn fast you'd be surprised uh and that's not a performance car by
02:12:28 ◼ ► any stretch of the imagination so i am looking forward to whenever we get a full battery electric