482: I Should Probably Get Reading Glasses

So how is the honey-do lists? Evie itself and post her otherwise. Still working on it. There's things like so much longer than you think.

Oh, and I mean, we talked about this and we talked about this. Like anyway, we pre-show COVID has visited my family. I did. I wanted to ask of what the status was.

And I meant to do it to the pre-flight. And I forgot. And then I took a mental note to ask you after the show was over. So now that you've brought it up, how's everyone doing?

Yeah. Well, I mean, everyone's fine. Like it's not a big deal. We're all vaccinated and boosted and stuff like that.

But we did have a positive test. And so far, the rest of us are negative. I'm running in there. But what this does, relevant to your question, all the things that we have like appointments to do, like see people or like sign documents or get things set up or whatever.

Now it just gets pushed out. Because we're not going to go anywhere and do anything. Again, even though most of us are fine. And of course, we're taking tests every single day.

So my streak of never, not only not getting COVID as far as I know, but also not taking a test. That has ended in all the entire family's testing every single day. Good thing we have a pretty big backlog of tests. Testing is not fun.

It makes my eyes tear a lot. Yes. But yeah, that's what we're doing. And so yeah, that's totally screwed up my list of items.

So things that I thought I was going to finally be able to check off. Because again, I only checked them off list when they're actually done done. I did check off the car thing. Like I said, last night, the car is fixed.

You know, although I mentioned on the show that they tried to clean the interior. Yeah. I'm not committed on the show. But I don't know if it was normal.

I don't want to throw that brand under the bus. But the grudges trying to be nice. The body shop is trying to be nice. Like, oh, we'll clean your car for you.

And they vacuumed it. And they washed it. And they tried to clean the interior. And I'm just one of those people who does not approve of the various, let's say greasy, protectants that are often used on the interior cars.

I'm just surprised. I'm surprised. So they did that. And I spent a while cleaning that off.

But the main problem, of course, as anyone who's ever gotten body worked on is that it smells like drying paint, because they've repainted a thing. And that's just you just deal with that. And eventually, the volatile compounds dissipate or react with the air. And you don't smell it anymore.

But anyway, that did get checked off the list. But that, remember, wasn't on the to-do list until something happened to the car. That was a fun, incidental item of the big items that were there. Like, they're all basically still there.

They're just. And many new items have been added. It's just, yeah, the list is getting longer and not shorter. That's what happens.

Casey and I have been unemployed for longer than you. And you'll notice that we don't have tons and tons of free time, right? Indeed. Stuff comes, your time gets filled.

It's like hardware space. It gets filled. You think you're going to have all this time. And then it gets filled up with stuff.

And you're like, wait a minute. The whole rest of my life before this point, I was working all day. Where did that eight hour block go in my current schedule? And yeah, it gets consumed.

I know where it goes. I mean, the problem. I really do think I will shrink this back like the problems before I would just neglect all these things. They were just all being neglected.

So it's no question to me. Like, where did the time go? I just didn't do any of these things. They weren't even on a to-do list.

So I don't have time to deal with that right now. I'll deal with that some point in the future. Well, now is some point in the future. All right.

So let's do some follow up. And we had a person right in by the name of Kyle. And Kyle wrote, all right, I'm going to really try hard. I'm not trying to be sarcastic.

I'm really going to try hard. I'm probably going to screw this up. I'm going to try. So Kyle wrote in about Bartosch, Chihnowsky.

Kyle wrote. I happen to work with Bartosch. And yes, I think Bartosch, who makes the delightful articles explaining how things work. His most recently mentioned article was in Chemical Watch Explainer.

In addition to making these excellent guides, he's one of the best software engineers I've ever worked with. And I'm a watch nerd. And when everyone's saying, look, here's a guide on how Chemical Watch works, I figured it would just be the time hands. Here's an escapement, and a mainspring, and a few gears in the middle.

And that would have been great just by itself. This was, I kept going down. I kept seeing the scroll bar is not reaching the bottom portion of the screen. There's a lot more to go.

And Bartosch, I'm going to explain. And then what if we wanted to show the date? I'm like, really? He's going to do a date movement on here?

And then I keep going, he added quick setting to the date. And then eventually, I'm like, he's going to do automatic. He's going to do automatic. Sure enough, the automatic rotor comes up.

It's a bidirectional winding automatic motor, of which not all watches are that. Not all watches have dates. Not all watches that have dates have quick setting mechanisms to jump quickly between them with a three-tension crown. That's not every watch has it.

You have to go pretty many hundreds of dollars, at least, before you get one that has these kind of features. And usually more than that. And then at the end, I'm like, then he throws a hacking seconds. Like, where you pull the crown and it stops the time?

Oh my god. These are features like, I've bought watches before that don't have these features, like for major brands. So to have all that in the basic explainer, to have an automatic hacking seconds, quick set date movement, that's what he's explaining. That was quite impressive on so many levels.

So that was delightful. I'm very, very glad. And there was a lot of stuff in there I didn't know. I knew that watches did this, but I didn't know how they accomplished that, exactly.

And so it was really cool to go through all that. Yeah, and the entire internet is on my poo-poo list, on my naughty list. Because I'm honest to me, until I think when I was clicking around while we were recording or maybe after the show, there are a bunch of other articles that I'm deeply interested in. I haven't had a chance to read yet.

But more importantly, nobody told me. Where were all of you? Nobody told me that Bartoch has GPS, has current surfaces, naval architecture. The one I did know about was the internal combustion engine, which I cannot say enough good things about.

It's amazing. Cameras and lenses, lights and shadows, gears in general, in a bunch of other stuff. Like this is a treasure. And I was happy to discover.

And in the least slimy way possible, if you look at it as website on the header at the top, you see an RSS email, Instagram, Twitter. And then, oh wait, that's the Patreon P, isn't it? So you bet your ass I decided to be a patron. And so you should do that too.

There's three membership levels. And you get to see Bartoch put up posts about how the posts that he made on his website were made. And I was saying to the guys before that we started recording the post for the mechanical watch one is a screenshot of all the CAD drawings and CAD work that Bartoch had to do in order to make this article. And it is freaking nuts.

So you should definitely be a patron. You should check this junk out because it is delightful. So we will put links in the show notes to all of these things. You should definitely definitely give a whirl.

And in the unlikely event that Bartoch is listening, I'm so sorry that I butchered your name 85 times. But hand to God, I've really been trying really, really hard. So my apologies. Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that the internet used to have a lot more stuff that was really good.

And good in an uncomplicated way. This is just really good. And there's no ulterior motives. There's no ads plastered all over the thing.

Unless my block of block of block of block of block. There's no actually. This is all I'm wicky how. And we're going to try to.

There's nothing like it's just a person who is an expert in something making a really great thing and just putting it out there for the world for free. That's amazing. And again, there used to be so much more of that on the internet. And these days that stuff seems to be not only produced less but harder to find.

And so this is just a gem to find. And this just made me so happy. And like I said, the Patreon wasn't like, hey, smash that. I know this is a Patreon.

You too. But there was no equivalent to smash that bell. Because there was nothing. The only reason I knew that there was a Patreon was because I happened to realize that that little P up in the upper right-hand corner is the Patreon logo.

That was the only mention I saw of Patreon was the little logo. Like there was no, there was no like, HP.fm slash join or anything like that. It was just a little teeny tiny logo in the corner. So well done.

Just five stars, six stars of such a things possible. John, tell us about the Apple Developer Center, if you please. It's a pretty nice new word. So I grew up ahead of post about some information about the Apple Developer Center or some rumors about it.

Is the Apple Developer Center Tan-Tow 14? What's Tan-Tow? Is that like Tan-Tow from the Flophouse? No, it's not.

It's the road that goes along one side of Apple Park, apparently. And the rumor speculation is that building 14 on that road, was it Tan-Tow Avenue? Something like that, yep. Is in fact the Developer Center.

And as we were saying a little later, what the deal is, but based on tips, he thinks it's Tan-Tow 14, an extra visitor center, which makes a lot of sense. So this is Park Orchilani had a post showing a map of where this stuff is and some more information about it. So if you look at the map, it's got the Steve Jobs Theater, which is a little circular thing that's on Apple Park. And if you basically go straight across the street, straight across Tan-Tow Avenue from Steve Jobs Theater, there's a big, long skinny building that's Tan-Tow 14.

The theory is that is the building that is going to be the new Developer Center. And then next door to that is the existing Apple Park Visitor Center, which is a smaller rectangular building. And this makes some sense. If you look at it, this gets into the idea of apples inviting people to Apple Park.

If you think Apple Park is just the ring, the big ring-shaped building and the land that is around that, maybe that is too narrow of a definition, because by that definition, the Apple Park Visitor Center is not, in fact, an apple park. It is across the street from that. Same thing with this building 14 is also, quote-unquote, not an apple park. But I think it's all kind of part of the same campus.

The theory of this building is that it will be, you know, this is the Developer Center that is a fancy new building. It will be where the Apple Developer, like evangelist people, work like their actual office building. And it will also be where they would bring developers in to do whatever it is they do with them in the Developer Center. So we'll see if the speculation proves correct.

Yeah. And we got, I mean, we didn't just get a birdie. We got like a flock of seagulls telling us this stuff. It seemed like this was pretty well supported.

That's before your time, right? The band? Yes. You might have heard it in the Play Pop Hits of the 80s, right?

There you go. There you go. Tell you what, man. The Rock Hits go through of this?

It's so much better. It's interesting. What are the Rock Hits? Like, where does that pull from?

I don't know. I mean, they're Apple Music Playlists. So, you know, somebody curated these lists at some point. I don't know.

But anyway, the Rock version is really good. We significantly better it for our tastes than the Pop version, which given that we've always liked rock music, that's not that big of a surprise. That's a question. And the Run Through Down You did the Pop Hits and then you're doing the Rock Hits.

I'm assuming fish does not appear anywhere. I don't know. I mean, I think the only place they would potentially appear is when Farmhouse was on the radio, I think in the late 90s for a brief time. And that certainly would not have shown up on the Pop List, but maybe it might be on the Rock List.

But I don't think it's... You can try an alternative list. A category music didn't exist until the 90s. Like, alternative hits of 1955.

Well, I mean, Rock didn't exist until... 65. That's when it starts then, right? Yeah.

There was no... There was no Apple Music Rock Hits 1964 or earlier. So, from 55 to 64, we just did Pop Hits again. But this time I'm doing it the right way instead of asking Siri to play whatever and have her walk away after a few minutes.

But this time was just play the Pop Hits, play this from those years. We were actually pretty decent. The only weird thing about them is that you play the Pop Hits of the mid to late 60s. And what you really should be hearing is a heck of a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stones later on like Zeppelin.

But the people who make these lists, they don't want to put like six Beatles songs in a row. And the list is pretty long for each day. It's 20, 30 songs at least. It's like an hour's long, I think.

And so, you end up missing a lot of significant hits, not because they weren't ranked high in the charts, but because they were spread out by a human on this playlist so you didn't hear too much of the same band in a row. So, that's the only downside of this approach. Otherwise, it's not, you know, I have no other fault with these options that I hope I'll keep going. They just ran Marco.

They ran so far away. They're so, they're so dying. I'm still holding on, but this is, I mean, my holding on to these, this is worse than Casey's on at this point. Like it's just rebooting every day.

Like, it's just they're in bad shape. I really should replace them, but I can't, I can't make myself do it. I'm so sorry. Speaking of things, I'm sorry about John.

How's that multi-factor authentication dance going? Yeah, it's a follow up on the college account stuff. So I dealt with that. Where did I leave it at?

I didn't say I was going to have to contact him. I did like contacted the health desk or whatever. So here is what the deal was. So the problem that the college had is that they have the system where there's a page where you say, you know, you know, set up multi-factor authentication or if you already have it set up, it says reconfigure multi-factor authentication and then it's also about this as disabled multi-factor authentication.

And as I said, I was having trouble with it, couldn't figure out why I wasn't working. So I had disabled and, you know, it was disabled and then it said, you know, it changed to say, set up multi-factor authentication and the disabled one was gone and we replaced the button to set it up. But, you know, I wanted to leave it unset up and of course that didn't work every time I tried to log into Kit S and we were from multi-factor. I mentioned a bad of everything.

So that was the problem. And I sent an email to support and explained the situation. It was very clear in my email, I'm pretty straightforward but I disabled multi-factor authentication but now when I log in it asks me to do multi-factor. I feel like it's the same summary of the problem.

So help because I can't log in because it prompts me from multi-factor but as far as I know I disabled it so I don't have anything to enter. And the email reply from human was, oh, if you're having trouble setting up multi-factor, like, you know, do this, that. It was like telling me what I should do to set up multi-factor or like, you know, how different apps I can use for it or whatever and I felt like the response didn't acknowledge my statement which was, I've disabled multi-factor. That's what I opened with.

My opening was, I have disabled multi-factor authentication but when I log in it prompts me, right? And so they were just trying to help me like, oh, why can't you log in with the multi-factor? I'm like, because I disabled it. Anyway, after contacting human by telephone, what they said was, oh, you can't disable multi-factor.

It's required. The college requires it for a log in which, you know, it was a reasonable policy but why is there a big button that says disable multi-factor? Well, it turns out that this third party product they're using for like, you know, some it's some third party product that any college can buy that helps kids organize their schedule or whatever. I'm not actually entirely sure what it does but that third party product has its very own login system and it has its own account page and on that account page it has a bunch of multi-factor stuff.

But the implementation in this college doesn't use its own login. It uses your college login, you know, like your account for the college and then it just does single sign on basically to get you into that other thing. So you never actually log into this third party system but the third party system has an account page and also it's by the way you land on this third party system like when you log in so it makes it seem like you've logged in. Here you are.

Here's your thing and there's a big, you know, you're a little slow of a person and go to account and it makes you think that this is your account. This is where you go to change your password, to set up multi-factor, whatever but that multi-factor stuff has absolutely no effect on your ability to log into your school account. The school account turns out is just Microsoft Active Directory blah blah blah right and it uses single sign on to the third party product but instead of the person you should really remove all those buttons that say change your password, set up multi-factor because those have no effect on your actual account. So it turns out I was just messing with multi-factor stuff for an account that I was never going to log into and because the first time I set it up I deleted the previous multi-factor and entered the new one that I thought was the new one when I reconfigured it right.

I had just deleted the one and only valid multi-factor to actually log into the AD thing thing right and now I was just messing with this third party thing which was never going to have any relevance whatsoever to anything that I ever did. So multi-factor was reset now with my new found knowledge that I should just completely avoid that entire account page and don't touch any of that multi-factor stuff because it's totally irrelevant. I got multi-factor set everywhere and yes I did use the thing. On the phone if you do it in iOS you can just point the camera at the QR code and it reads it.

I still have it to do item to get some stuff together for Ricky who works on the Steam and Apple to figure out why Safari on the Mac wouldn't let me right click after I replaced the URL and I think my suggestion that the Mac be able to also accept QR code input either through the camera or by dragging an image or something like that I think that feedback was also heard. So fingers crossed in the future but anyway it is all sorted out and it just goes to show the dangers of I don't know like slightly too much knowledge, too little knowledge. I still feel like the whole page is a trap because anybody who wanders over to that page and goes to their account and sees all this stuff about passwords and multi-factor it's totally trapped. Almost anything to do there is at best going to have no effect and it works going to confuse you into walking yourself out.

I will say on this topic that this whole story kind of inspired me to try to put some of my most frequently used two factor logins into Apple password system whatever is it called like keychain. I clunky chain. So yeah putting into that because I still use one password but one password is increasingly clunky in my experience. I haven't yet been located to one password yet.

They get to big new release so maybe it's improved there I don't know but the interaction between one password and my browsers on both Mac and on especially iPhone it seems very fragile and it seems to miss a lot. And so I'm interested now in moving some of the most common things to the Apple system just so it fills faster and more reliably and stuff. So anyway I just learned that there's a really nice export process from one password. You can export any item or set of items into an iCloud keychain CSV file.

Now this is commonly insecure while it's on disk because this is literally a file with unencrypted password data sitting in your plain text on your disk. And what's nice is that if you go into the Apple password like prep pane in one of those dropdown boxes there's an option to import this especially for my CSV and it of course yells at you this is way insecure by the way but then once you do it it actually gives you a little button that deletes the file immediately and bypasses the trash system on the Mac. So you know that's nice in the sense that this is only your first short time and this little community is there. Anyway the two factor stuff that I transferred over transferred perfectly.

You know whatever the format is of this file it's just one of the files it's literally a website user name password and OTP basis or whatever. And it worked great. So now I have some of my most common two factor things in iCloud keychain and as far as I can tell it just kind of works. So I might start moving more stuff into that or at least copying it and I've decided finally like literally yesterday.

I remember when I mentioned months ago that I had the ridiculous setup where both one password and iCloud were prompting me to fill in every single password fill in Safari. I maintained that until yesterday. It was a mess. I finally got fed up.

And so I decided I finally turned off the auto prompting of like in every input field for one password. So I'm going to leave Apple to auto prompt me and kind of leave one password as like a look up system and see how it goes. But anyway I just wanted to bring up the migration thing because you can really easily export from one password into iCloud keychain in a way that I didn't think would work at all let alone that everyone would have made so easy. Two things on that one.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have a file that like you know a file is going to be fully your passwords briefly or whatever and if you're super paranoid about it. It's a good idea to have somewhere on your somewhere in your folder structure in your home directory a dedicated directory I just call mine do not backup. It's a folder that you just mark it you exclude from time machine I have lots of stuff excluded from time machine if you don't know how to do this you go to system preferences go to time machine click on like options or something and lets you basically drag in or hit the plus button and select the folder you want to be excluded from time machine right but just having a dedicated location you know is always excluded from time machine like a do not backup folder that is a great place to store these files that you only want to just for brief timing it deleted because you never know maybe time machine was in the middle of running and the time of time machine was just about to go through that folder and it picked it up and shoved into a time machine backup and now on the don't see you have every single one of your passwords and plain text in time machine backup for who knows how long but you put in the do not backup folder you never do that same thing like backblaze you can exclude folders just have this one location that you're sure is excluded from all the backup systems that you use any time you ever need to put something on disk that you don't really want to disk put it in a backup folder. Second thing is related to exports and everything I talked about before you know when we have the two factors set up I just wanted to get that information out and it was set up in the Google authenticator app and I said I basically ran out of time when I was trying to reverse engineering the format because if you do an export from a Google authenticator it will give you a QR code and so like I say that QR code and then I was decoded the QR code and then within the decoding of the QR code there was some more information to code and I was eventually decoded into like a there's a big chunk of it was like a proto buff because Google loves its spreader buffs and I was decoding that and I got that decoded but then there was more like binary data in it and I just ran out of time before I could get it all down and other people were like what are you talking about if you just decode the QR code it's a simple plain text thing and the thing field called secret is just what you put into that sort of set up code in the Apple thing that's true but what Google the Google authenticator app exports is not the whatever is OTP whatever URL scheme it is a special Google authenticator thing and it's not like it's encrypted or like hidden or anything information is there obviously that's how QR codes work information is in the QR code it's not like it's hiding information from you but I think they came up with their format because if you export multiple items from Google authenticator gives you one QR code which is super convenient if you ever need to like copy it to another device I think let's you do 10 or so at a time but that means they're not using the same format because the regular format is like you know it's some URLs plain text URL that says like basically website blah blah secret equals this value looks like a URL right but if you're doing 10 at once you can't just use a single URL so what they do is like some other URL format where it's like data equals giant base 64 encoded thing and that base 64 encoded thing is a protobuf thing and then usually code the protobuf and that's got information inside it including some binary numbers that are you know numbers not encoded as ASCII right actual binary values of 1632 64 bit values I think those are the secret I didn't get to the point where I could decode those but for people wondering why I just decoding the QR code wasn't sufficient it's for this reason because Google authenticator has export format of a QR code that is essentially only understood by Google authenticator because it's to export these things to it like if you want to put it from you know if you want it on two phones or on a phone or an iPad you have Google authenticator and both that's what you use so the information is in there and you could in theory extract it but I never got to that point there's lots of like Python libraries and JavaScript libraries to actually decode them if you really want to again it's technically possible but once I started out all this stuff I knew I had to reset everything anyway because I was sort of locked out so when I reset my stuff I was at the point where I had the real QR code in front of me and then I just put all the devices in front of it you know got it also.

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So Marco has a computer that cannot successfully record a podcast and you are also having some amount of computer trouble it sounds so I can hardly wait to hear what I'm spilling on my laptop or what if what a all means is going to befall me soon since everything happens in the answer anyway but tell me John what's going on with your computer. That's not it's just a follow up from it past thing I'm going to talk about I had this long addition of many many different mice from my computer and I ended up picking the one I wanted that was Microsoft mouse and then I used it for a while and then like the rubber on the side where my thumb touches it started to wear down and I feel kind of gross and I bought a backup one I went through that whole rigmarole where they had to like have me take a video of it that was many episodes ago I couldn't find the episode but anyway a while ago that happened so I've been using the new you know replacement not replacement the backup mouse they sent me I sent my mouse and it was broken they sent me a refurbone I thought the refurbone was kind of gross but I had previously bought a backup mouse I was using the backup mouse and now the backup mouse has worn in that same spot where my thumb goes so I looked at the dates and I ordered this mouse on April 2nd 2021 and on May 8th 2022 the little thing was worn so that's 401 days just slightly over a year so the Microsoft precision mouse my favorite mouse I really really like essentially less a year and it costs $99 so I guess I'm gonna pay $100 a year to keep using this mouse or probably what will happen is I will tolerate the fact there's a little thing that I can feel under my thumb by the side of the mouse but I really wish they had just used like they should talk to Logitech whatever rubber Logitech uses on it's nice I think it's way sturdier maybe it's not it's supple and soft and velvety as the rubber they use in the Microsoft mouse but I think it's more durable you know and I don't dislike the other mice that I bought I have an MX Master 3 I have like a Logitech gaming mouse I have a different some other mouse that my wife is in her computer I still like the Microsoft one the best I just wish it was slightly more durable now it's good feedback with regard to async await and combine which was an HTTP from last week got a feedback with some Patrick Neemeyer and I thought I'd just quote it real quick async await is syntactic sugar for asynchronous callbacks making code simpler more readable by virtue of being more quote unquote declarative APIs like a minor ex-swift generalizes further letting you think of the callbacks extremes of events which are which can be reasoned about over time allowing them to be filtered and orchestrated across multiple sources also in a declarative way when possible it is always better to tell code what you want to do rather than how you want to do it there's generally improves the readability maintainability of the code also simultaneously allowing it to benefit from improving the underlying APIs compilation tools that they improve I thought I was really well put this a lot of the same argument for SwiftUI over UI kit you're just saying you know hey I want a list here I want within the list a text a vertical stack etc etc so there's a lot of same reasons why I've come to like SwiftUI also for me it's worth knowing I think I belabored this point appropriately last week but one of the things I really like about our ex-swift and combined is that in functional reactive programming is that if you're smart about it it's very very easy generally to write kind of state free apps and obviously every app has state but when you're just processing an input and then potentially generating kind of atomically generating a new state of the world you don't have to really store the state it's just you react to the next version of the state this is hard to paint a word picture about so I probably lost everyone and I'll just let it go but suffice to say you can get rid of a lot of state in your app by not having to store things and simply reacting to events that happen which is exactly what Patrick was saying as well so that was pretty cool all right so this is uh in even at corner I got a lot of feedback about this which was good I appreciated all of it I tried to at least acknowledge most if not all of it if I didn't acknowledge your feedback don't think that I didn't read it I absolutely read everything one of the things that I loved about this adventure so far is that I got these two pieces of feedback I think the same day first from Daniel Daniel says absolutely do not bother with cat six a in Daniel writes I'm not sure with price difference between cat six and US but for me in Australia the only thing for me that weren't the extra expensive cat six a would be if the run was longer extremely hard to repeat in the future cat six achieves 10 gig at distance and shorter than 55 meters so that would be fine at home at home network the same day I received the following from Josh Hatter's Lee absolutely use cat six a cable for your interior wall slash adic slash subfloor runs it's a nice bit of future proving and given that you should never have to touch those wires again worth the extra time and pain in the tuckus of working with stickers never take cable uh Josh also pointed out I think was Josh to point out a few other things um including um Josh wrote note that they're both unshielded six a U or UTP and shielded six a F UTP does F UTP sound like a show that our haters would make probably actually very well done indeed uh don't give them ideas please uh so anyway uh just a level shielded cable available like the butterfly keyboard F UATP what would it be all about like Elon Musk NFTs and the butterfly keyboard maybe android there's a digital level of shielded cable available six a SFDP then not that's s slash FDP not SFDP that is not only an outer screen braid but also individually foil wrapped twisted pairs on shielded six a will likely be fine or go for F UTP at the most uh and we'll put a link in the show notes in high now I know we'll put a link in the show notes pictures of all these things follow up you suck here we are again on the F UTP podcast and you still suck why don't they just switch to windows right if they hate the max so much they're so critical if they're so hyper critical anyway uh so a lot of people said to use cat six or even five e cables to get from the jacks to your equipment cat six a is not all flexible compared to other ethernet cables and pain to use in patch length scenarios if you actually need higher rated patch cables down the road for 10 gig each just you'll be opening up a whole new can of worms anyway and you'll need to replace those cables regardless so that was mostly if not entirely from Josh I really appreciate that some more general observations other than everyone disagreeing over what kind of cable to run a lot of people said use pass through crimpers I may not have mentioned this life so I don't recall but when you crimp an RJ 45 and onto a cable when I was doing this 20 years ago you had to get the little teeny tiny wires all the way up to the end of the of the connector and then you had to use a little tool to crimp down and hope that none of those eight wires shimmy diverting you'll forward or back even the tiniest bit and it was a nightmare well apparently there exists now pass through crimpers where you just shove the eight lines all the way through the RJ 45 and then you crimp it and some of the really nice crimpers will just slice off the extra or worst case you don't take water cutters and slice off the rest which is super cool and everyone pretty much universally said use those yeah actually when I was trying to fix my cat seven my couple of bad cat seven cables and jacks myself I actually tried one of these but the problem was I could not for the life of me find a pass through cable ends that would fit the thickness of the cat seven little cables and yeah one more reason not to use cat seven for most people so I can strongly recommend doing this the correct way and not doing what I have and I have heard some people say that six A the individual eight individual wires and six A are often a little bit bigger than five or regular six so you do have to be a little careful with with the components you buy but nevertheless a lot less bad than cat seven I also this was mentioned by Joshua earlier but I also heard pretty much unanimous agreement that I should not do what kind of starting me down this whole path in the first place which was oh I can have the exact length patch cable I want I'm not really clear why everyone is so against this except if you're using big the cable like six A but pretty much everyone agrees that I should not do that and I should just buy patch cables I don't know I mean I think depending on what I end up buying if I do this at all I will see how it goes like I said apparently six A is really crummy for cabling or patch cabling because it is so physically can you buy is it easy to find stranded cable because patch cables are always with stranded we're stranded is that within each individual conductor it's made up of a bunch of tiny little conductors like you've seen this if you ever cut open a wire instead of seeing a solid copper conductor in there you see a whole bunch of little tiny hair thickness copper things that's stranded wire that makes the wire more supple and easier to bend it's not stiff right and so that's what patch cables are made out of you just buy commercial ones if you're gonna make your own patch cables you have to find stranded cable and then crimp the stranded cable I don't even know how that would work right I don't know if that's easy to do or not but I would never want to make setting aside the difficulty of like making it yourself and how stiff it is just like I wouldn't want a patch cable that's not made with stranded and once you're making that a stranded stuff I feel like you might as well just buy it at that point because it just seems like a whole different thing than making maybe it's just the same as making a regular one but anyway coming from office environments like you know okay so like didn't your work also have like someone in the IT department or whatever the networking department made the patch cables and weren't they not pleasing to use you know I don't I spent a long time since I worked at a place that used ethernet like I demanded it because I'm that guy but almost pretty much everyone else at my last job they were just sitting on wireless all day every day we had we had plenty of patch cables that were made by the networking people and they were not stranded wire and they didn't have nice looking connectors on the end and they were just a pain to deal with and they didn't they were just they were not pleasant yeah they don't usually have like nice string or these boots and stuff either like exactly right they're just never they're never nice to use like they self-made cables end up looking like cheap knockoff cables and if they're not and if they're not made with stranded wires they're really stiff and awkward and often have their own kind of bends them from however they were stored and wherever they were and so you try to hook up your thing to them and like for example when you know when we all got the stupid you know macapros without any ports on them and we all got these little like you know USB breakout boxes so we could connect stuff to them often one of the things you would connect was ethernet and you'd put in the non-stranded patch cable and it would lift the thing off the table because they're so like small and light weight the table was so stable was so stiff they could put it be plugged into the ethernet and it would just left off the table or one side would lift off the table and it just liquidy goes you know i'm glad you said that about stranded versus you know solid copper because i never put that together and i didn't i genuinely didn't understand why it would be so much worse to do it with the cable the bulk cable i might be buying but hearing you say that it makes perfect sense and i get it now i'm talking about like a cable you know it's like three feet long or like it goes from your computer to the little you know USB-C breakout box like you don't it doesn't matter you don't need anything fancy so you like Marcus did you want to have the string relief boot because things can get yanked around and you want to look nice and you know aesthetically pleasing you don't want to look like a cable shoved into a little plastic connector yeah a lot of people pointed out oh guess what you're back in the t58 versus b-decision all over again i was wondering if that would come up yeah that may be very sad to realize we're not back into it we resolved this before yeah but what if we resolve it too i don't remember the resolution is it doesn't make a difference so i just pick one and uh which one you pick it doesn't really matter but people you know people have a preference to be just because it's one more than a isn't it well and a lot of people just said b was used for residential and as commercial i remember going through this a couple of months ago i don't need to reopen this was like their compatibility with phone system and things that aren't over to your scenario so it doesn't matter so it doesn't matter so it doesn't matter so it doesn't matter the whole point is do not mix them right because i want to stick to it uh good tip from ron disho he had said mark your cables either use a label maker or mark them with a sharpie or something for example use an increasing number of tick marks that match on both ends something obvious but i don't know if that i would have thought about that so that was great so the tick mark system like i like the idea of doing this but i'm like what if you're in office and you're sitting there can see someone counting the ticks one two three like are you supposed to do the slash of them if you do five you know four verticals no no slash it's like we have numbers just write them in then it's then that yeah anyway i agree uh also a lot of people were sending recommendations or cable which i appreciate but since i'm planning to go through old hvac tubing if i do this at all i should probably get plenum rated cable so i don't know if we talked about this last episode but there's riser rated cable which is about what the fire resistance of it is and with riser rated cable it's somewhat fire resistant and that's not that is not designed to be in like air ducts or anything like that if you're in an air duct certainly an active air duct i think it's a little you know kind of dealer's choice if you're in an inactive air duct like i would be but if you're in an air duct you're supposed to get what's called plenum rated cable and though that is extremely fire resistant as compared to the riser stuff and it's made of materials that one they when they burn off they're not releasing like toxic fumes into the air because if you were in you know if it's in an active atrix and then you're pumping these toxic fumes all over the building or whatever the case may be so i think in my case i if i do this at all i'm probably gonna go with plenum rated cable which of course makes it already expensive cable even more expensive especially if i'm thinking six a while you're not putting in an active air duct yeah but it just seems like why wouldn't i do this especially since it's better at resisting fire and god forbid the house tries to light up i'm sure that even a cable would not be the thing that carries it all around but hey it could be a toaster and that's a reference for some of you um so anyway so the point is i just feel like getting plenum rated would be the right or answer wouldn't that just make it more difficult to work with possibly and also make it more expensive which might make you not do this whole project in the first place yes all of those things and doing it i think it's difficult i think the difficulty yes you're making it more annoying to yourself and i think you don't need plenum rated cable but in the grand scheme of things this project is not too large so i feel like no matter what you do you're gonna get it done because you have like three things to connect and you're done well yeah about that um also the scope expanded oh has it ever it's so funny it's so funny being on the other end of scope creep so if you're not a developer um especially if you're a consultant sorry let me try that again i may notice if you're if you're not familiar with how software development works particularly in the world of consulting what will happen is you know is that software development may be a project manager a couple of other people go to a client and say okay what would you like us to build and they'll say we would like a b and c please and you say okay great that'll take you know 45 hours whatever the case may be inevitably the client that comes to you and says oh whoa whoa whoa we need d e f g h i j k ln okay okay um that's that's what developers call scope creep because the scope of the project has now crept to be larger and typically i joke but typically it's more like oh oh oh we need d fast forward three weeks oh oh oh we also need e fast forward a month oh and fng forgot about fng we definitely need those and that's scope creep well i have scope creep myself to death already and as i was thinking about this project well if i'm gonna be in the walls anyway and if i'm going from like the downstairs to the upstairs i'm gonna do all the possible runs that i that i would need to go between you know upstairs and downstairs at once and well mikela's room was my old office and that's tiny and the guest room is the current office and that's much bigger and wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the future the 35 ports that i'm figuring to be speaking that i need in the existing office well what if i end up meeting those in mikela's current room because when we split yeah what if mikela and i flip flop rooms so that her room is the office and my office becomes her room well shoot then i need like six or eight drops in both her room and the guest room because you never know which one will be the office it's just exploding so um i was in the attic this morning and let's just say the um the historical planning commission is not necessarily on board with the project in the home at this juncture so this may or may not be happening we'll see but it's so curious um which which part of the project would be the most objectionable to a historical planning commission i think the thought of me putting my fist or not even my fist my foot through the ceiling of the upper story because not all of our attic has boards on it especially the parts that i need to be crawling through i think the historical planning commission is extremely unenthusiastic about the idea of having to do a ceiling drywall repair at any point during this project knowing how much of a clod i am that is exceptionally likely to be a plausible outcome don't forget i don't know what your eye looks like but don't forget the hazard in the other direction which is standing up too quickly and getting a roofing nail into the top of your head oh that's that is a fear that i did not have until just now thank you so much you have open sub-base and you're in your uninsulated southern house i mean i don't remember there being nails just hanging down into the living area look up at the when you're in the attic point your eye phone upwards carefully without dropping it i think i'm going to take care of the ceiling and see if you have open sub-base uh you will have roofing nails coming through the sheathing on the outside of your house and pointing downward into the room you're in and if you get up quickly uh that nail going to top your head and you will be sad i would say i would be very sad indeed and so will you two because i will probably not be around for the show anymore maybe you'll be happy you'll just bleed a lot get some stitches snoop in this uh moving right along um so there was also near universal agreement that if i am wiring any room it be at one or ten or whatever if i'm going to any room don't be an idiot wire at least two wires if you're gonna have one have to if you get a half if you think you need to put in four and that's how i got to like eight in the office i think i might legitimately realize with this project like you are essentially in a race with wireless technology i i know that's very good because we've already talked about like people getting ridiculous 5g signals right if they're you happen to be right near one of those millimeter wave things or whatever so um yeah this is this pole project any wiring project is racing against the advancements in wireless and i would do is Wi-Fi standards move not slowly but at a fairly steady pace they don't seem to be accelerating right so you could probably graph out like how much faster Wi-Fi has got over x number years and figure out when is it gonna catch up with 10 gig or whatever um and really doesn't matter too much it doesn't keep up with your internet connection which is moving much more slowly than that but you know it's future proof that's why cat seven is such a you know ridiculous thing it's like it's future proof as you think you're making it like just you know this type of thing assuming wireless technology you know just within the house assuming wireless technology continues eventually you know when this when you're all dead in this house gets sold to the next family presumably Wi-Fi will be like 10 gig or better and normal care about what you're putting your wall and they'll just laugh out of the same way we laugh at the weird old timey things you find in old people's houses like racers in the walls you know counterpoint though look at the history of the two technologies and what actually happens in practice so ethernet doesn't move that quickly um and requires you to put wires in places however those wire standards again like you could like i put cat six in my house 10 years ago 12 years ago whenever it was that's still fine i still don't have networking gear that can exceed the capacity of those wires i put in my house 10 years ago um and and meanwhile 10 years ago they promised gigabit speeds and they delivered gigabit speeds and this entire time they have been reliably delivering gigabit speeds no matter what i have done as technology has moved forward that's always been very reliable 100 of the time the fastest internet service i can get to my house is gigabit and that's something to change anytime soon so then look at Wi-Fi Wi-Fi always promises more more more in practice though Wi-Fi tends to hit a ceiling you know of substantially less than whatever speeds they claim it can hit in most people's actual real world use because you have things like walls and other people's Wi-Fi and the person next door who still somehow has a cordless phone on the two four gigahertz and five gigahertz networks at the same time somehow spreading broad spectrum interference over the place where they have a microwave or something like you know Wi-Fi is better in theory in a lot of cases but in practice rarely matches ethernet so Wi-Fi has a history and probably a future just because of things like physics um of potentially being really good and in certain cases being really good but not being as rock-solid reliable as wired ethernet went available and so for a situation like in your own house where if you have an opportunity to wire things that are generally not moved you know things like your tv setup your office desk you know if you can wire those things wire them because not only will they be more reliable and faster but then they will free up wireless spectrum and bandwidth for your Wi-Fi only devices like your phones and laptops and stuff to you know have more speed for what they are doing so i think they're they're not only is still a role for ethernet today but i think that role will kind of continue indefinitely again i'm not making infinite timescale argument here but i think i think ethernet has still quite a lot of years that we will still want to use it when we reasonably can i'm arguing it's wiring things with all my stuff is why we can't know for those exact reasons what i'm saying is for most people ethernet is already pointless how many people do you know who it's super important in their house that ethernet drops every room only the weirdest of computers everybody uses Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is the whole networking solution despite the fact that it has worse latency that it has worse bandwidth that has interference that your microwave messes it up sometimes like despite all that Wi-Fi has already won that and what i'm saying is for you graph how much better Wi-Fi you know how much faster is Wi-Fi getting better versus ethernet standards which are only tangentially relevant because people don't even have ethernet wires in their house and internet connections which are getting better much more slowly and if you especially if you throw 5g in there and the possibility of 5g penetration especially people who live in urban areas 5g is already faster than gigabit ethernet if you are lucky enough to look out your window and see a millimeter way of thing or whatever and obviously it's not as well penetrating and so on and so forth but like wireless is already won that balance that's what i'm saying like what you're racing against is even for the tech nerd it's possible depending on where you live that either advancements in Wi-Fi or advancements in 5g penetration could give you more bandwidth than wired gigabit still wired is better for reliability for latency which is our human that if you're playing a kind of games put your console at your console to ethernet do not connect your console to Wi-Fi no matter how good your signal is you know get that a little extra edge it's good but i feel like that is what is probably going to you know arguably has already quote-unquote obsolete ethernet because the limitations of ethernet oh i have to have a jack i have to have a wire i have to be near that jack if it's not already in my house i have to have it already makes ether wired ethernet feel like the same kind of relic is having like two phone jacks in every room where if we saw that we're like who cares who uses phones use your cell phone or you get a wireless phone i don't need a phone jack in every room you're like well phone jacks are more reliable than these wireless things you can interference in your wireless like no i don't need a phone jack right um i never mind the phone system is engine engross or whatever but i feel like we're already there with wired ether or he looks weird and for case he's a particular scenario if for example he had chosen a wiring standard that maxed out at one gig i feel like within his lifetime of owning his home it's possible the wireless would be defeating that ten gig he's probably got plenty of headroom but certainly you don't need more than that um and i still think if he does you know go a whole holligan put away wires in every single room the next person to buy this house to be like what kind of person on this wire these holes in the wall what is this like they won't even know what it is like because Wi-Fi is just so ubiquitous and you know this was it an office telephone system you know i don't even know if they'll be able to identify it because you know it's a case point even in many workplaces people don't have use in it that's all just Wi-Fi yeah i i agree with both of you and as a kind of anecdote that puts the period on the sense if you will when we were doing the screen in porch i think i mentioned several times that one of the things i demanded from the electricians and paid them to do was to put an ethernet drop in the screen in porch so it's on what was once the exterior wall that well i guess it's still strictly speaking the exterior wall the house it's just you know undercover now and i will if i'm sitting down on the screen in porch working from which i do often and if i'm doing that for more than like half an hour i will grab an ethernet cable and i will plug it into that port because even though the Wi-Fi is just fine the screen in porch it's still so much faster and so much better even considering the fact that this particular ethernet port has to go through co-acts through two local bridges and co-acts in between them to get to anything it's still so much better more reliable than Wi-Fi and i have the most modern hero hardware one can get and this is not indictment of hero it's just that Wi-Fi is a miracle that works at all and so i agree with what you guys are saying that you know when you have something that is a direct cable to the other things you're trying to reach it's just so much faster and so much more reliable and so speaking of future proofing that vinomer writes forget future proofing for bandwidth the hardest part of running ethernet is running ethernet so if you're fishing a wire through the wall is at least two then worst case if you want to plug in another device in room you don't need to dangle switch off the back of your studio display which here again is just if you're gonna run one run two if you're gonna run two run four etc also patch panels are a thing and i should probably figure out how rack mounts work because i've i've i vaguely understand what one u2 u etc means but i've never really had to understand what all that is and i didn't really think about okay if i'm having a central terminus for all of this ethernet that the historical committee may or may not approve then where is that going to be both in the house and where's it going to be is in what does it look like is it just a bunch of rj-45 connectors hanging out of a wall or ceiling somewhere and so yeah i guess getting a patch panel is a thing and it makes sense i just didn't even think about it and then we had a bunch of suggestions for specifically keystone patch panels so a lot of patch panels apparently have just a gazillion connectors on the back you know each individual ethernet connection has eight strands on the back you know and you're tapping all of these yourself and apparently that's real pain in the butt so what you can do is you can get keystone patch panels were basically it may not literally be a square but basically there's an empty square at each spot and then you slide in in the particular connector you want there now obviously in most cases that would be an ethernet terminus but you could put like HDMI there if you so desired so run to show again if i have 10 draw this with regard to why it's better to do keystone over the other kind of patch panels if i have 10 drops and want to add another i have to pull the entire panel off i have those many wall jacks like marco says wrong and along with dealing with existing 10 cables to get the 11th into place and terminate all of them while hoping on my existing connections loosen etc and with the keystone ones you can just deal with them individually terminate the keystone and pop it in the hole through the through the back not to mention if for some reason you need to have a need for it they make keystones for all sorts connectors hmm i rca usb etc i'm almost done i promise uh camera nike also a great tip camera says i'm glad i had our kids age six eight years old help out with testing the runs they plug the laptop into each port run i have to take a check for a gig of duplex link and then run the ukla speed test app to check for expected performance they loved doing this and felt proud of you trusted with an important job which another great tip uh and then finally something i saw i was uh messing about in the garage just trying to get an eyeball in a rough estimate of okay how much cable am i really going to need if i do this because i think i want to terminate everything into the garage i don't really have a good closet for it um i don't have a basement i have a i think i said last week i have a like a meal space rather than a crawl space um and the attic gets really really hot in the summer so the base or the excuse me the garage seems like the best place to be the central hub and i was looking at it and just because of the way things are laid out in my garage i think i would need roughly 25 feet or about eight meters of cable for each and every drop just to get from the garage either to the crawl space or to the um the ductwork that takes me up into the attic so each and every single one of my runs i think is 25 feet at a minimum and if i think about the runs to the office which is up and across the house each of those runs is probably a little less than a hundred feet i think if i'm doing this math or i might be wrong but just back in the envelope it's like 30ish meters for each of these runs and so i'm not yet hitting the 55 meter wall that is six not six eight but six maximum distance for gigabit or ten gigabit excuse me but i'm close enough that i think i really think i want to go six a and i'm probably gonna regret it but here we go uh so that's that's casey's in that corner again the historical planning committee is not on board with this yet so there may not be any action on this for a while but i will let you two know if there is we are brought to you this week by mac weldon my most worn brand of clothing i'm wearing mac weldens stuff every single day you know it's heating up outside finally thank goodness and when it comes to stylish essentials perfect for the warmer days we have ahead of us there is no better option than mac weldon whether you're hanging out at home to take that much new vacation going from the conference room to the happy hour they have you covered i love mac weldens clothing and one of the wonderful things now that we're going to summer they have these premium polos these elevate your plans with fabric technology they've built into keep you comfortable as the temperature rises they have a new silver peak polo the new super soft pima t-shirt polo these are great for summer i personally 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macweldon.com slash atp pod and into promo code atp pod for 20 percent off stock up on the warmer weather essentials you've been missing thanks to mac weldon for sponsoring our show. i have other problems in my life i gotta be honest a lot of people are getting these delightful looking yellow objects and although i do have one on order i am not in the first batch i am in the second batch at somewhere don't really know where i have no idea when my delightful yellow object is arriving and i'm really jealous john do you have a delightful yellow object i don't really play handheld systems just because the rsi issues make it difficult for me to to like hold a small thing you know like typical handhelds are very small and not particularly ergonomic ergonomically friendly to use so i don't really use handheld stuff but the play dude is just so adorable i just feel like even if i never played anything i just wanted to have one just because it's kind of amazing that it exists at all and i know the people at pinnock and i think it's just wonderful the thing they made so i'm like looking at this like the same reason i got the you know a paper copy of next generation i was next my next generation sorry um edge magazine anyway next time was great magazine edge magazine with plated on the cover i have a nice pristine paper copy of that and i did order myself a plated but i did enough sort of hemming and hoeing over whether i should get one or not that i am just so far back in the line i have no idea when i'm gonna get one 20 23 maybe so you know i can solve myself because i did get to see and play with the play date what a wwc 2018 that the play date's been there's a great podcast about that there's a couple of podcasts about this is the panic podcast that they talked about the plated on now there's a dedicated play date podcast i've tried to find a link for the show notes um to hear the story of play date this is something they've been working on what for a decade now it's not like i just did this this year i'd say kickstart it'll be done soon they've been working out for like at least 10 years so um so yeah i did actually hold and play with the play date very early on and i feel very excited and privileged to have done that and that will tide me over as i wait for my play date to come i mean it'll come after my max studio but maybe before the heat death of the universe so i'm being patient goodness do you know what group you're in or what you're like order numbers or anything my i'm in like the 20 000 and i think like now i don't even know if they broke into the thousands like people who are getting there is there aren't their numbers like the hundreds or maybe the single they're one thousand five thought they were in the thousands i could be dead or 20 000 whatever group that's in like you know i i'm i don't fault i waited too long working oh i mean i'm in the 11 000 i'm way before you go here well what if i did get one though and i'm very jealous hey all right so i got my play date i was in group i was like number four thousand something and uh it's just delightful so here's the thing if you want a cutting edge game system the play date is not one of those um it is it has this monochrome very high resolute and again monochrome is not grayscale the pixels on the screen are just black or white no shades of gray it's very dense like it's a very high resolution screen for its size and it is not backlit which means you're relying on the light of the room around you and you know certain angles that you hold it against the light are much more visible than others and so it does feel a little bit primitive in the screen in the sense that you know it's like i think that the lack of a backlight is is what really makes it feel like different and weirdly old but yet the extremely high resolution of the screen makes it feel newer than that so i don't know it's a fun combo did you ever have a front light for your gameboy i never had a gameboy so like the original obviously the screen technology was way worse i think they used like passive matrix lz that's yes it was a blurry smearing mess but they didn't have backlights and they didn't have edge lights but you could buy like a basically like a reading light for your gameboy they were like attached to your gameboy and shine a light down to think which isn't great because it's not a it's not like it's eating it's not like it was a reflective screen but if you wanted to play in a dark car ride on the way home or something you literally couldn't see the screen without some kind of light shining out so they'd sell you this little attachment i know i mean the play date like to your point the play date is much more modern technology incredibly high dpi i'm sure it's incredibly crisp and much better battery life but it is in the end it is not an ink display and it has no light emitting from it on its own if you were in a completely dark room with it you would not be able to see anything because it doesn't unless you have some source of light yeah exactly um and i will say like you know compared to the black and white lc's vault not only again is it super high resolution but motion is perfectly smooth on you know again like the old gameboy and stuff it was just smury and blurry this does not have that problem this is incredibly fast clear like it's it's almost it's almost like you know like a printed page that is animated it's just extremely clear and sharp it is not written in a sense that like i can see the pixels but they are they are pretty small um so the actual hardware is i can't say enough small everything about it is very very small like it it fits very comfortably in your hands it's almost too small for some adults i think some adults might find it too small i actually i think this might be my first hint that i might be getting slightly far-sighted because it's a little bit hard for me to see some of the really tiny details in some of the games on the screen oh here we go i mean i've never had correct if i anything before and i'm about to turn 40 so you know that's that wouldn't be unheard of so do you need to like i'm assuming you don't need to extend your arms at full extension to see the details but you can't you can't hold it like touching your nose like you used to be able to yeah exactly like i have to hold it like the distance that i'm like looking at down at the keyboard on my desk like that's about the distance that i have to hold it to see everything totally sharp but it's pretty far so that's that's probably that's one advantage to having uh to being uh incredibly near-sighted is that in my old age my distance vision has gotten slightly better and although my close vision has gotten worse i can still hold things way closer than mark out yeah um so anyway so the entire system so far like the the first run experience of course it's what you do from panic very well done very pleasant experience um they i did a software up here earlier today on them and it like shows a little fireworks and stuff like it's just so cute everything is like so nicely done um you know it's the hardware feels great it's you know usb c this yellow plastic like a matte finish it just feels good in the hand but it's nice and clicky the deep heads like clicky and nice it just everything feels solid and intuitive um right now there's only two games for it because the way they stage out the game so that they're i think it's gonna be two games every week or two um that come out for the for the first 24 weeks it's like see they're calling it a season of games the hence the name play date it's like kind of a scheduled releases automatically and all these games are included with every purchase so you don't have to find something so that's a cool idea and what this does you know we we're in a time now where we we live in a world of incredible abundance especially in the area of of games you know we have millions and millions of games we could play now when it comes to like you know hand held games and especially this has kind of like a i wouldn't call it an eight-bit vibe necessarily because the graphics are significantly more advanced and you never seen an 8-bit system um the the sound is 8-bit inspired and the gameplay i think is kind of a combination like 8 and 16-bit but monochrome but anyway um i also have upstairs an NES and a genesis and a super Nintendo that have game cartagony that have hundreds or thousands of games on each cartridge on these ROM cards and i can pick any game i want from thousands of choices and most of the time that means i pick nothing because it's overwhelming and so what's interesting with the play date is that here's this device that right now i only have two games for only two games are available right now for it and next week or whenever they do the next drop there will be a couple more and so what this what this made me do it's kind of like when i got my my Sega Genesis which is my first video game system when i was a kid it came with the game Altered Beast which is not a good game but oh you bite your tongue i love that game i didn't even have a genesis it's yeah anyway i got it from my birthday in june and from june until christmas that year Altered Beast was the only game i had and at christmas for christmas i got two more games and then those that was the only three games i had for a long time this is i feel like this is a good definition of the difference between sega and nintendo the sega nintendo experience um it's one of the complaints about for example nintendo 64 all there's no game sort right so i got nintendo 64 and i had one game for it but that game was mario 64 and i didn't care it was one game because it was like the greatest game of all time you had Altered Beast as your one game so having just one game for your system can seem very limiting but if that one game is mario 64 it's all good yeah that's that's true yeah i had a friend who um got the n64 like at launch and had mario 64 and pilot wings which were the only two games for a couple of weeks or something like that and oh what about wave race wave race it wasn't launch game it was literally just it was just mario 64 and pilot wings for a little while you could put pilot wings that can like if you have a table that's wobbly you could put that under the table and you could play mario 64 that's that's about the use they got yeah but anyway um so by having this limited choice right now there's only these two games right now it's it's this game called white water wipeout which okay a long time ago i had my cousin's had a sega master system which was the most people who don't even exist it was sega's competitor to the original nes so it was before the genesis it was an eight-bit system from sega and they had this game called california games which is basically a mini game collection of like you know hacky sack and surfing and roller skating everything white water wipeout for the plated is very similar to a modern ish interpretation of that surfing game from california games for the second master system and so iron and play it and you basically use the crank to like surf on a wave and and make jumps and make spins and everything to get more points until you crash and that's a really fun little action game it's fun like and this is i would probably not have found this in an app store with a hundred games in it or a million games in it but here it is i i got to play it i take it out and there's two games already on it i have to buy them they're just there and it's two games that's it then this other game casual burger is kind of like a little adventure game we're going around taking pictures of birds and you know solving this these little you know adventure puzzles and i spent like an hour earlier today playing this game i would never have played this otherwise i would never have like again found this like in a giant app list or app store or whatever i would never have gone through that but here i found it and because it's here and it's my only two games so i was forced to play it and i really enjoyed it actually and i'm glad i was forced to play it and what's nice about this system is that you know modern modern gaming i think has a severe lack of fun most modern games are not as fun as we want them to be in fact i would even say i have a very hard time finding almost anything on ios that's fun you know ios games are have been so you know instrumented to be money extraction machines from people that it's really hard to find anything on the iphone that's new that's fun it's they do still exist but they're really few and far between and unless unless like a friend somehow finds it and tells you about it you'll never find yourself on the app store like there's so it's so little fun to be had out there on ios these days and the big consoles you know i think nintendo is still pretty good with fun they still they still do it pretty reliably um the other the others it's hard you know it's there's so many games that are like hardcore let's shoot a bunch of people and that's not my scene and there's so many other games that are like here's a an artsy look at and we're gonna run through a field and you know it's like okay that's that's nice as an interesting experience not sure how fun it is the play is just fun like it's the hardware is fun the the two games that exist so far are fun they're really simple and i'm really glad i have this little stupid thing like it's it's so delightful and fun in the broader world of games where that's hard to find now these games have no in-app purchases they don't want me to sign up for their mailing list they don't want to run the background they don't want me to create an account they don't want you know they don't need me to like buy dlc packs they don't need me to buy coins or gems or any of that crap they're just games that are made to be little fun distractions for a little while on this cute little yellow thing that fits in your pocket and that's fantastic and even though it's not going to take over the world and i probably should get reading glasses to play it i still i'm still really happy that this thing exists and there's a whole other world of it that i haven't explored yet which is they've made some pretty incredible looking developer tools for it and at very different skills they have like a web-based thing where you can you can literally make games with a web app that seem like it might be a pretty approachable thing possibly for my son to start doing which i want to start exploring soon and they also have like a capi and a lua api and all these tools and like so i think this is going to have an interesting developer story as well i don't think like people keep asking like hey you should board overcast do it i don't think that would be a good idea for a number of reasons i don't think this is going to be a device that people ever carry around when they don't have a phone on them and a phone is a much better device to be a podcast player for so many reasons so i don't think that's what this is going to be this is not going to become like this is not going to have a bunch of different types of apps on it for most people to actually want to use it's going to have games on it's going to have fun little games on it for that i think it's it's going to be a really neat thing and i really hope it takes off i hope people make stuff for it i hope the game's take off i hope that maybe my son gets into making you know playing with the you know experimenting with the game maker things maybe maybe i will maybe kt should i don't know like you're gonna make your total violation clone for it yeah that's a call you can use the crank like a man stuff no that's not how ta works anyway so what am i thinking of then you're thinking of scorched earth that's what i'm thinking i'm sorry yeah it's worse actually because yeah because like ta requires a mouse but so and what's what's nice about this too you know it has a d-pad and an a and a b button and so again it's it's simple which keeps it and crank it so it's simple and keeps it fun but it also it allows it to do things like any kind of game that works really well with a d-pad generally sucks on a phone like this would be a great thing for like you know tetra style games you know stuff that you just can't really play very well on a phone because you need you need to de-pad to really do it well um so i'm very much looking forward to what this becomes i'm delighted with what it is already even with just two games on it and and i'm so happy this exists it really is you know it's like gills have a personality like an impromptu it's like this just this force of positive energy shamelessly positive and delightful in a category where we really haven't seen a lot of that recently so i'm very happy to see this it is refreshing and promising and and just fun and delightful and so i strongly suggest you know if you really want one you can buy one on ebay right now for about four hundred and fifty dollars i wouldn't necessarily think it's worth that much but you know i strongly suggest if you if you are on the fence about this put in a pre-order get on the weightless you can always cancel if you want to you know get on the weightless for it because this thing i think is gonna be a lot of fun for a while what is the actual price is it two hundred dollars two hundred bucks or it's like a hundred and eighty or two hundred with a little case and i do have i did buy the flocases little purple things and they're nice too i mean i don't have much to say about them yet they're fine but i'm mostly holding it without the case because it's just this cool little thing it's more to i thought about i think and you're only two games but it's like just to be clear it's it's it's time to release like it's instead of like Netflix dropping the whole season at once they do they're doling out the game slowly so it's supposed to be part of the fun and your your doling out of games begins when you buy your device right so it's not like everyone is in sync with each other they oh i didn't realize that that's a really good smart way to do it well if you listen to the podcast they talk about the debates they have like should they try to make it so there's like you know everyone's on the same schedule or should they try to do it time but there's plus and minus each one's again less than this the podcast but we have a whole first season of games as far as i know is done right so they're just doling them out you a little bit so it's supposed to be like not only the individual game is fun but it's like an on a regular schedule you pick up your thing and oh here's a new game that wasn't there before and you don't have to select the game or whatever the games just arrive on your play date according to the schedule of the season and by the end you have them all and of course you know we talked about this when we talked about it really not only is like they're a web based SDK and a regular one but every single play date is essentially a dev kit there is no special dev kit version of that anyone who owns a play date can make games for it and you don't have to go through an app store to distribute those games you can give them to anybody they can put them on there is no quote unquote side loading it is an entirely open platform so if you make a game for play date you don't even have to tell panic about it you can just give it to all your friends and play it like it is like the pc of handheld consoles really hasn't existed in a popular form anyway like the personal computer has been like that but most game consoles and especially handheld game consoles have been owned by some platform owner that controls what kind of games get to go on it not true of play date so if you get a play date you can make a game for it you can get a game from anyone else you can put the game on there and by the way also you can buy future seasons of these play date games from panic one season was like one season comes with a thing and then after that I think you'll have to buy the seasons if you want to but if you don't you just download free games that people put up on their websites or whatever yeah I think it's gonna be so fun to go through that because like you know part of the appeal as I was saying was I only have these two games and so I'm actually playing them both I'm actually spending a decent time with them both if it just came with 24 or 100 games available for it I wouldn't be doing that I would like pick and choose I would have trouble choosing finding one oh that one looks kind I don't know if I'd like that I'll skip it you know now I'm actually just trying them all and so by having that kind of gradual trickle of new games coming in it is making me try them all just like I used to do with my old consoles back when I you know had no money in games cost $60 so I would like I would get one new game maybe every couple of months you know it wasn't a frequent thing to get a new game and then be able to you know spend a lot of time with it because it's all I had and so to have that thing I think it's a lot of fun and and this has made me smile more than any game I found on my phone in the last year and to be clear there's a blog post on the play date website where they talk about a bunch of other games that you can either buy or get right now like there you can buy not through panic through other people you can buy you can buy other games like there's one called bloom that's $10 and they say in the blog post bloom is the first commercial play the game outside of our season and so there are other things you could get if you so desired but but you certainly don't have to like you said you can wait and just get more when they show up there's also pocket planer which I think is very funny where you can it's like a calendar on your play date I want one I'm glad I pre-ordered because when the pre-orders were starting this was classic hacie fomo right like I don't think I want this oh but everyone else is getting it oh I don't know I don't want to be that guy who doesn't have one it looks neat okay final buy it and I don't know if I'll use it after the first year but for a couple hundred bucks to try some out from some people I at least casually know I think it's worth it and I'm looking forward to getting mine whenever that may be so hopefully sooner rather than later yeah here's a general strategy if all your tech friends are hyping up this thing that you think you might someday want and there's a pre-order thing if you can afford to just place the pre-order because you can really cancel them they usually you cancel them very easily and either get the refund or you know never having charge in the first place and so just put the order in because it can't hurt to have the order in as long as you can afford to actually buy the thing like it can't hurt to have the order in and you can always cancel it if you change your mind down the road we are brought to you this week by collide collide is a new take on endpoint management that asks how can we get end users more involved in contrast to old school device management tools like MDM which lock down your employees devices without considering their needs or even attempting to educate them about the security of their devices collide is built by like-minded security practitioners who in the past saw just how much MDM was disrupting their end users often frustrating them so much they would just give up and switch using their personal app tops without telling anyone and that scenario everyone loses collide is different instead of locking down a device collide it's a user focused approach that communicates security recommendations to your employees directly on slack where they already are after collide device security turns from a black and white state into a dynamic conversation that starts with the end users installing the endpoint agent on their own through a guided process that happens right inside their first slack message from there collide regularly sends employees recommendations when their device is in an insecure state this can be simple problems like the screen lock isn't separately to hard to solve and nuance things like hey your two-footer backup codes aren't secure because they're sitting your downloads folder and because it's talking directly to your employees collide is educating them about the company's policies and how to best keep their device secure using real tangible examples not theoretical boring scenarios so that's collide cross-platform endpoint management for Linux Mac and Windows devices that puts end users first for teams that slack you can visit collide.com slash atp to learn more that's k-o-l-i-d-e dot com slash atp learn more activate a 14-day free trial today you enter your email and prompt to receive your free collide gift bundle and tri-altivation with no credit card required once again collide k-o-l-i-d-e dot com slash atp today to get endpoint management that puts the user first thanks to collide for sponsoring our show uh we do have to pour one out for something that's canceled though the ipod touch is no more it has been discontinued the music lives on gentlemen but the ipod touch does not what an odd what an odd news release it was it was such a weird press release right so the story is that apple's not going to be something i put touch anymore like it's still available once last but once they're all sold out that'll be it right and they have a press release fine whatever the press release spends a long time talking about all the different ways that apple has available to you to listen to music the music lives on is the title and it says the ipod touch subtitle ipod touch will be uh not the ipod touch except we'll never say that ipod touch no article will be available while supplies last and then it just goes on talking about the ipod from 20 years ago and it talks all about different kinds of ipods and has a little slideshow showing them and then saying all the different ways you can listen to music today and just like a couple paragraphs of that and then in the very last sentence of the entire press release it says customer's game purchase ipod touch the rapple.com application is an apple authorizer as well as supplies last that is the entirety of the content of this press release that tells you anything about the fate of the ipod touch other than the subtitle that i just read which is weird but anyway so yeah this you know as as marco said in another channel and i'm sure as many people thought apple's still selling ipod touches yeah apple still talking about touches i mean it hasn't been updated in three years but even that you just apple up update the ipod touch three years ago yeah they did have different guts in it well i mean sort of yeah like so the ipod touch has the guts the current ipod touch the out-out-out-out-out-out-out-out-out has the guts of the iphone seven roughly um you know it's an seven-seven cp i think the camera's probably worse but you know otherwise like no touch id yeah no touch yeah but it's like it's the approximate guts of the iphone seven and so that's already like most people don't realize that the last three major versions of ios 13 14 and 15 all have the same supported hardware so 14 and 15 did not drop any supported devices but like you know when i was 16 comes out presumably you know being in beta in about a month and then you know coming out this fall it would not be unreasonable for them to drop multiple old hardware generations right now the six s is the minimum supported cpu um it's possible i was 16 will drop the success and the seven cpu's so it's possible they're about to release a version of ios that dropped support for that for this version of my touch anyway and that wouldn't be a reasonable given given the take um so anyway um this this announcement you know again number one i think most people were like wait they were still selling ipod touch um but everyone's saying oh now the ipod is finally dead and i understand the sentiment but i think the ipod died as soon as it became ios only product line like the ipod touch is not an ipod it's a cut down iphone and it was never an ipod you know they use the name but really when you say ipod that's not what most people think of most people think of the music players that you know didn't run ios that had some kind of you know wheels or buttons or whatever like even even the later generation ipod nannos that had the the kind of fake ios looking home screen the touch screen most people didn't even know those existed and have never used one when you say ipod you're thinking of the ipod classic the ipod mini the ipod nano like that's maybe the shuffle if you are a glutton for pain that is what you think of and shuffle was one of the best ipods ever made when you're talking about disagree um but that product line uh ended a long time ago to say now that this thing that was basically an iphone that the death of that thing is the death of the ipod line i think is i there's a lot of asterisk on that so i you know i'm not i don't want to want to knock anyone's yum but but i think the end of the ipod happened a long time ago yeah i mean this is this press we said this is the end of the ipod branding like apple to use the ipod brand they slapped it on this thing that's not an ipod because the ipod brand had value and because also people knew what that was and it communicated back in 2007 that you could buy this and it was like an ipod like it was not a phone it's basically what is communicating not phone there's no you're not gonna make any calls from it it's an ipod but it's an ipod touch it's an ipod that you can touch really it's an ipod phone but they put the ipod branding on it because that was a good way to communicate its purpose and to put it into a family of incredibly successful products with the name that people loved and the retiring of the name the retiring of like apple will no longer sell any products with ipod in the name that means that not only is the ipod gone which you know like work is that it's been you know ipod went away a while ago but that the brand is now so like kind of retro that it doesn't it no longer has enough value for apple to continue to stick it on a product and furthermore that the product that they're making here doesn't really have a place in the market anymore for them to be worth making right so arguably didn't have a place in the market for many years which is why they'd go years and years without updating it but basically the role of a touch device that's not a phone that is less expensive than a phone has been filled you know for kids has been mostly filled by cheaper iPads or by hand-me-down phones or used phones now you can say okay well nothing really fills this role and I would agree there is nothing that is exactly as cheap and exactly as small and exactly as convenient and about the caveats about trying to find used phones and their batteries are worse and blah blah blah like you're right that doesn't actually there is kind of a hole but it's a tiny hole and in general I think history has shown that kids would rather have a small iPad or big iPad or any literally any iPad than the stinky thing because kids aren't like on the go and want to have this devices they go off you know like that's a phone right and for not phone kids prefer something with a bigger screen because who wouldn't even an iPod mini iPad mini has a bigger screen of this so this is a product that really no longer has any place in our lives and it goes out and with it leaves the the iPod product line which I feel like hasn't had cash in a really long time and certainly for the kids that you'd be buying this iPod touch for they have never even seen an iPod and have no idea what it is just a thing that their parents tell them about so it's you know it's sad I was as we talked about ages ago on the show I was I love my iPod touch it was what I bought when I didn't want to pay for a plan for my iPhone and I use iPod touches for many years and I still haven't seen anyone mention it a little people came close and I always bring it up there was a very very very very brief moment in time when the iPod touch was the highest performing iOS device that you could talk about before it was called iOS it was called iPhone OS and it ran on your iPod touch which I wasn't even called iPhone OS it was just a firmware right that ran on your iPod touch the I think it was it must have been a first generation iPod touch actually was a little bit faster than the phone they were always thinner as Grover talked about like if you wanted to see the future of the iPhone use the iPhone use the iPod touch because it was the iPhone without the phone and the phone bits you stick up a lot of room in there and so the iPod touch was always thinner so I have an attic full of all iPod touches and iPod touch was stolen out of my car as I mentioned in the previous show I've had a lot of them I had a lot of affection for them but it's very clear that the time for this product has come and gone yeah and if anybody out there is feeling very nostalgic about the iPod era rather than jumping to go try to buy one of these outgoing you know slow old iOS devices I think they're kind of already sold out from what I was saying like yeah I think so and anyone who was even like a lot of people like oh I use this testing device or it's nice to have a slow device or I just want to happen from I get everybody who is just like you know thinking about that but never actually going following through and buying it as soon as they announce canceling all people just say bye because it's cheap enough it's like an impulse and they are very difficult to find out yeah and I have heard you know I said on Twitter like who even used these anymore and and I have heard from a lot of people who said like they have some special use for them like one of them is like people who do audio tours in museums they have these things in special bargain cases or people who have like certain things that have to give like a fleet of them to children and school for some reason like there are people who use these but yeah I think that's a dwindling group and the fact is that this if this market was already being served enough by still selling iPhone 7 guts in 2022 but then it probably was not that big of a market that being said so you know if you want to experience iPod nostalgia here's what you do don't buy one of these things for $200 go on eBay and buy a second generation iPod nano for like 30 bucks because there's always I know this because I did this for as part of a thing I was doing last fall I actually bought an iPod nano from eBay for 30 bucks it had like a you know refurbished with a new battery in it and it was fine and it worked and it was really fun and modern Mac OS still supports syncing to an iPod to an iPod as long as you can dig up a dock cable somewhere or possibly by one of those any days well or it might come with it depending on what kind of sell you buy it from but as long as you still have work and get a dock cable and you can plug it into any modern Mac and you can sync songs to it from the now finder interface for plugging an iPod and it works the iPod nano second gen I think is the epitome of what people think of when they think of what an iPod is you know you're usually not thinking of the later again like the big like kind of all screen models you're even not really thinking of like the ones that have really fancy color to like you know show video and big album art and everything the ones that look iOS like that's not what you're thinking of either an iPod classic or an iPod nano and even then like the earlier nano is not even the later nano's and you can get that experience for 30 bucks on eBay and then you can you can try it for a few days and you can realize okay this this was fun and nostalgic but it's so much better to just use my phone with my wireless earbuds and my streaming services and my cell connection if I forgot to download something and my easier navigation and my much larger collection like you start realizing okay actually there's a reason why we replaced all of this category with phones and that's where really killed the iPod was when we all got iPhones then there was no reason all of us we loved our iPods and when we got our phones we tell ourselves I'm still gonna carry iPod to middle service or maybe I'll keep it in the car whatever and and they just slowly fell out of use because phones are just so much better for this role so this is a wonderful piece of nostalgia it's great to go the eBay route if you want to have some fun with one for a little while but they can move past it because what we have now is better so it was a great era that it is over yeah my first Apple device of any sort was the original iPod nano which I coveted I wanted one so badly and if I'm mistaken it was one of Aaron's like first big gifts to me I think that's correct I'm pretty sure that's right and and I don't even know if I still have it or not but I wanted that thing so bad when I got it I loved it gosh did I love that thing and I take a slight issue with what you said earlier Marco the the iPod I think died with iOS 5 and I was running through those screenshots on Wikipedia I had forgotten that the music app on iOS 1 through 4 iPhone OS 1 through 4 was called iPod and it was iOS 5 that it became music yeah I did not remember that at all oh wow and that's not just the iPod tucked it on the iPhone build as well three separate not three separate devices are you getting it was an iPod app that's internet computer which is safari and is the phone icon yep I completely forgotten about that and so I was five when it became music that's an iPod really true it died all right let's do some ATP oh I got to do one more cancel product no it's gonna take too long it's not gonna take a long and okay here we go okay here we go I have tons to say about about this I have hours of content about this job hours I tell you this is a few weeks old that it's in the in the same category Apple canceling products they finally put the bed Mac OS server you may be wondering what the heck is Mac OS server do you mean Mac OS 10 server no I do not this is another one of those products that Apple had for many years that slowly faded away kind of like the iPod slowly faded away until finally it goes away and people like what's going away what are you talking about um nothing too much history but back before Mac OS 10 there was a product Apple sold called Mac OS 10 server it was based on it was not based on the same code base that Mac OS 10.0 was based on it was based on the Rhapsody code base from ages ago so really confusing they released a product called Mac OS 10 server right but it was not that was not based on Mac OS 10 then Mac OS 10 came out you know we got Jaguar Pumel you know cheetah Jaguar Pumel holding on your rights right and they also introduced a new product called Mac OS 10 server that had really no relation to the previous Mac OS 10 server but was instead the server variant of Mac OS 10 so you know you get Mac OS 10 10.2 Jaguar and you'd get the server I forget what year the server variant came out I don't remember all in the 10 I never reviewed Mac OS 10 server right but it existed as a companion with the regular Mac OS 10 thing and then at some point in the past you know what we're not going to do that anymore we're not going to have a server version in a regular version because we're just tired of supporting the server version you know we're just going to have one version we're going to call it OS 10 by this point I think it was called um and the server part of it will just be an app or a set of apps that will you'll be able to get and install unplained old Mac OS 10 that will provide you server functionality so if people wondering what what does Mac OS 10 server what did it have have like a mail server and you can manage other people's Macs with it and what else did it have like a directory service like it had server type stuff that you could run on a Mac if you wanted a Mac to be a server usually server for a bunch of other Macs but the services would be cross-platform and they just can solve that a lot of stuff into apps or an app called server or whatever and so Mac OS 10 server was no longer a product that you could buy but you could still buy a Mac OS 10 or whatever it was called and then put the server stuff on it this continuation is now we're not even going to give you that server stuff we're tired of having a directory server so time having a mail server a file sharing server a time machine server where we're not going to have that as a separate product most of those things have been built into plain old Mac OS right so you don't need a special server variant it's just part of the OS now and the things that weren't built in we're just not going to make them anymore and apple points you to third parties that do things like this so if you want to use mobile device management there are third party ones for that if you want to use some other feature that is not built into the OS here are some third party companies that provide that and I feel like this kind of this is the sort of end of the road and not really like it's been the running's been on the wall for ages right but apple slowly but surely exiting the server spacing that's not what Macs are for you don't run a Mac to be a server for your fleet of other computers right apple wanted to be in the business back when the PC was kind of the center of gravity of the market and then it tried to play there apple made servers the x server recommended Mac server they made a server OS they said you can use a Mac to be a server and some people were into that but not enough people and just eventually apple said you know what Microsoft because that's what we're talking about here you can have this market and so for a brief moment apple was like we're gonna fight against exchange and act of director and we're gonna have our own products and some of them are gonna be open source and we're gonna be a great server for Macs we'll be in server other things too and you can buy a really nice looking server and rack mounted and pay way more than you'd pay for an Intel Unix or Windows based server but it looks really nice and we'll run our server OS on it and it just never really never really got going for lots of good lots of very good reasons it never really got traction and so not surprised that apple is just finally completely totally exiting and saying we're not even pretending we're doing anything remotely in this space we'll just disband all those teams any part of this that we thought was useful we shoved into Mac OS proper and it is there and it is useful and you can have it but we're not pretending Macs are servers and kind of like the iPad touch like okay this all makes sense you read down a paper like I can see you know this is not a market apple it's to be in but in ten of the same way as apple getting out of the Wi-Fi market well maybe not the same way but like I find it a little bit sad because it is essentially you know receding the market to Microsoft not that I have anything particularly against Microsoft but Microsoft's complete dominance in the world of corporate IT like hey you have a company and people in your company have computers and you need to have like a directory service so people can look up other people's email addresses you need to have a mail server and so on and so forth having Microsoft continue to just completely dominate that field does not make me particularly happy and it's not just because everyone ends up getting slack and liking it and then slack it's replaced with teams that it's part of it that's an example that is so true it's so many places like even before slack and teams like example of just like look you're gonna have to pay Microsoft anyway because every company pays Microsoft because there's something you need for Microsoft and why do you need something well you want your people to have corporate email right and you want to do like anything you think you want to do Microsoft is a default and if you decide well I don't want to pay Microsoft for everything not that it's impossible to find alternatives like Google stuff you all that stuff too right but Microsoft is still dominant in this business Microsoft is the best at it they've been in doing it the longest and when I say the best at it they're the best at selling companies things that companies want to buy or think they want to buy but in my experience using these products cool it's not great at it either but like slack is a great example how about someone who's not Microsoft or Google can they make a product that can help enterprises do the things enterprises want to do and that users don't actively hate yeah they could and for a brief moment there was a product and people didn't you know say thing with Dropbox for a brief moment there was a product that users didn't actively hate that doesn't seem to like but Dropbox was replaced by either box or one drive and the Google stuff was replaced by Microsoft and it just I know I'm kind of out of the corporate you know rat race and this is really not relevant in my life anymore but I look at this and I say there was a moment that people never never really believe was real but it really was when Apple was like you know what we're gonna get right in there and we're gonna fight for this market and we're gonna fight for this market with Apple products unashamed Apple products they fought and they lost and they lost big and then they ran away and I feel like it's not good for no one to be fighting for this you say well Google's fighting Microsoft but on the other hand Microsoft's fighting Google I feel like just the number of competitors is too low and none of them seem to have I don't know I mean there's a reason I'm a Mac user and not a Windows user and that appeals to my tastes and I guess there's a reason that businesses choose Windows for their servers even as businesses increasingly choose Macs for their you know end user things it just I feel like I don't want to live in a world where the only two choices are Microsoft and Google and Microsoft is dominant and I think that is sort of emblematic of the entire enterprise software problem where the people who choose what to buy are not the people who you know use the software right and so users continue to be somewhat put upon by the corporate solutions therefore I should deal with and every other competitor that tries to fight for that market ends up getting squished and wrangling I'm sorry John all right let's do some Ask ATP and Robert Boyle writes in your discussion so the Mac Studio versus Mac Pro you focus on modularity differences in the past you've said that ECC RAM was a big issue for you which the M1 doesn't have do you think Apple will offer ECC RAM and the Apple Silicon Mac Pro so the point of ECC RAM is you know if there are errors that they'll be detected error correcting code right so we can figure out some kind of RAM error in the more RAM you get the more likely you are to encounter a RAM error just because it's a lot of averages you just keep adding more and more bits and if the rate of error is the same as you had more of them chances of one of those bits being wrong goes up and big computers like big pro max and have a lot of RAM so a good idea of ECC RAM but this whole thing of like having ECC RAM is kind of a nomenclature in technology from the distant past but the reasonable past like that was the way we would do it you'd buy you know Sims or Dims there would be these chips that have RAM chips on them you'd shove them into a slot and there was a variety of that had ECC RAM that had error correcting codes that were the extra circuitry to detect when an error was encountered and either correctly error if it could or fail if the error was you know too bad or whatever and that was important for servers because they had a lot of RAM and there were a lot of them if they hadn't already rather haven't failed or you know fix it fix it one bit or if they could or fail if they needed to rather than just to continue with everything's fine with any correct errors like I'd say it's a banking application or something like that where you don't want a bit error causing the wrong amount of money to go somewhere you don't want that to suddenly just happen right so that's what you're trying to do is make a more reliable version of RAM when you can detect when errors happen and correct no possible lots of the more modern RAM technologies if you look at what they're doing under the covers have some internal system for detecting and handling and even sometimes correcting RAM but we don't call those quote unquote ECC RAM because it is not exactly like the RAM of the old days with ECC technology in them so all that said I don't actually know if any of the RAM Apple uses in any of its M1 type things have any kind of error correcting circuitry or technology whatsoever I know they're not advertised or called ECC RAM and they're not the same as the ECC RAM that was in like a 2008 Mac Pro for sure but I don't actually know if the underlying whatever it is you know LPDDR4 RAM itself incorporates some of the sort of circuitry techniques and technologies at ECC RAM that so I think for the Pro Mac I don't think Apple's going to go to any particularly heroic measures but it could be that whatever RAM Apple ends up using perhaps and not in the first ARM based Pro Mac or maybe the second or third one will incorporate some kind of error correcting technology just because the underlying you know industry standard RAM technology that choose but you know like Stansons Future like the high bandwidth entry HBM4 or whatever making some future thing that itself could incorporate some error correcting thing and if so Apple will use it in the appropriate context but I don't think Apple is going to go out of its way to do something entirely exotic and different if there isn't already an industry standard RAM technology that offers error correcting stuff in for the Mac Pro.

John Sousek writes for several years I've used both PC and Mac platforms one of the questions I've always wondered is about cleaning software in the world PCs you often find yourself needing to have something that will go through and remove various applications and file system cruff periodically I was just about to buy some software from my new M1 Mac to handle this very thing and I thought I would ask the experts you see probably know what to look for and remove manually but for those of us who are not as familiar in the world of the Mac are these types of programs make well or would they be worthwhile I can only speak for myself and I have run things like this in the past it's been so long I didn't remember what I ran and this is not something that I personally worry about but I have a feeling one or both of you guys will have some thoughts. I mean this is the kind of thing that you have to be careful about what you install and what their claims are and what you can do yourself you know things like uninstalling apps and cleaning out a bunch of files that actually is a problem on Mac OS like one of the great things about iOS is that when you delete an app on iOS with a couple of weird odd exceptions that mostly clear after a reboot it's gone like that when you delete an app on iOS that's it and that for some reason Apple has never brought that experience to Mac OS you can delete the app on Mac OS but that doesn't mean that it's gone it just means that like the executable the binary is gone but it could have left a whole bunch of crap all over your library or whatever and that that could be there forever basically that being said having much crap in your library doesn't seem to really be a problem with the exception of disk space that it takes up but you know it doesn't like slow your computer down in a meaningful way to have a bunch of crap there but there are apps that will offer you know various like tidiness or cleaning type verb use to describe like deleting files that you probably don't need anymore possibly from apps that aren't sold anymore or whatever that's a perfectly fine thing just if you if you were going to go down that route make sure that you trust the developer because you're you have to give them full disk access to be able to do this and you're having them like go go find stuff to delete off your computer so this is this is not something to be taken lightly and most people find that kind of trade out not to be worth it you know that if you're gonna if you want to go like delete stuff out of your library folder or you know try to delete old gruft you can generally just do that yourself if you are at all technically inclined you can find the handful of places in the file system that these files tend to be and you can delete them yourself and it's usually fine so these these apps they do provide a service that is that is a real useful utility but it comes to significant risks and there is a lot of snake oil in that business where you know certain less scrupulous version of these apps I mean some of them just malware some of them will make claims that are technically unsound or will will try to like always be running so that that way they can like monitor everything and that's that has some security implications and again technical scariness so it is a category where it is useful to have apps in this category for certain people but I think it's probably not most people as well as questions we get every few years and I intentionally put in the program every few years so sorry if you're hearing the same again but you know I think it's important because especially people who are new to the Mac they get a Mac and they're like what things do I need for this and you will see heavily advertised things that like you need this to help maintain your Mac right that is just you know like the same way you have to get an oil change in your car you need an app like this and so people don't even ask whether they need it what they ask is which one of these things should I get the categories virus programs or we're not talking about that right now is I do which one of these Mac clean programs should I get because it seems obvious that I need a Mac clean program and you know the basic answer is that I always say is you don't need a Mac clean program Mac OS is not designed to need a Mac clean program if you literally never use any kind of Mac clean program you use your Mac you'll be fine right anything that you could that you know the bad that could happen and you know that a Mac clean program could save you from it can't actually save you like that that type of badness of something getting wedged in there and running weirdly or spinning out of control that can happen whether or not you run a clean program now the cleaning programs they're like okay well I don't like say you're like a marker so I can just go to least stuff but I don't trust myself to do that I think it's a good instinct if you don't know what you're should be deleting don't just go and look and say I don't think I need this until you leave it because you will screw things up right especially if you you know give yourself a bit of information to delete stuff right but by the same token using one of these cleaning apps does actually require some knowledge of what what's what right because you can mess yourself up with one of these cleaning apps not through any falls of the app but they very often offer features that let you do things that you probably don't want to do like nuking your launch services database there are situations where you might want to do that and having a trusted third party app do it for you was good but you don't want to do that routinely it's going to miss things up because now it's got to re-index all of your apps and do a bunch of stuff that's gonna make your computer slower for no reason it's another opportunity for things to get screwed up if your launch services database was fine you didn't need to mess up and if you don't know what the launch services database is don't buy a map that lets you nuke your launch services database and click the button because you think it somehow making your Mac better or like a cleanliness thing MacOS is not designed to need any of these apps to the extent that it does to marco's point like oh what if it happens also under craft and it's hanging around and it actually is harmful that is a problem for apple to fix not you in general there's not much apps can do these days especially good modern apps to sort of screw up your Mac long-term other than taking up a minuscule negligible amount of disk space which you really shouldn't worry about these days and the other one is and this is gonna be more technically you're probably not but like if if launch services stuff is is left in there that can that can have something that is actually running or trying to run and generally sort of being in the background knowing that you don't need anymore because you deleted the app but the launch services thing is still there very often launch services thing will be there and it will be trying to be run a binary that doesn't exist anymore because it was inside the app bundle um apple's modern practice on the Mac are moving very heavily towards the iOS model where everything is part of the app bundle including all the extensions and everything rather than being in your library folder they will actually be in the app bundle so when you throw out the app it actually throws out all the extensions with it like finder extensions or whatever but because the Mac is an older platform that's not true of all Mac apps so it is still possible for Mac apps to spray files all over your disk which is why by the way one of these sort of instincts that you can you know lean on even as a new Mac user is if i installed the app by dragging an icon into the application folder i can be fairly confident and if it didn't prompt me for some future install process the dragging app out of the application folder into the trash got rid of anything that i really need to care about yes you'll still have preferences and other stuff or whatever but if on the other hand you use an installer or a .pkg thing to install the app that may have sprayed files all over your disk you don't actually know where it's going you can find out if you're technically savvy you can look at it use an app like a pacifist look what the pkg is doing and you can look at what an installer is doing by you know running fs using you know like there's also a second thing you can do but fs usage yeah i guess i'll but like if you you know modern well-behaved Mac apps will not even leave any cruft around that you need to care about and in general MacOS does not require you to have any of these kinds of applications so i would say my default is you don't need one of these don't try to buy one if you find yourself in a weird situation and it seems like oh i have a problem and i see lots of people suggesting one of these apps might be the solution again be careful but if you have people that you trust at that point maybe considering finding one of the reputable ones of these applications someone you trust tells you this one is reputable i know this thing is asking do you have a everyone i honestly don't use these type of applications but they're out there they're reputable ones but only at that point where you are troubleshooting an existing problem and troubleshooting that has led you through a series of things that you trust to potentially look at one of these apps only then look at it but you do not need one of these as a routine part of owning a Mac just let it go. Hey build a mose rights i'm going to build a back-end application that does a lot of service like crawling and has a handful of questions to what degree does your choice of programming language impact server-closs would aesthetically type compiled language with a robust concurrency model like Golang be more efficient to crawling RSS speeds say than say PHP and significantly reduce server-closs if the language choice does matter what about swift and go language benchmarks say that go is faster in many respects but and Golang has a better concurrency model than swift i'm comfortable with swift but i've never written a line of Golang and my code in my life and finally with the savings and server-closs be worth learning a new language i think Marco you're probably most appropriate to answer this question partially because i don't want to hear John go on and on about Pearl for an hour so tell me what do you think Marco in my experience this is very application dependent so you know massive disclaimer here it depends on what you're doing now i happen to have a lot of experience with this particular thing of crawling a bunch of server of RSS feeds basically that i i do you know overcast crawls probably hundreds of feeds per second so i this is not something i had but you know it's probably in that ballpark and and so this is this is an area that i do the crawlers themselves are written in go which and and the role here to be clear the go is not parsing any of the RSS or figuring out what to do with the contents of the feeds all it's doing is fetching the feeds on a regular interval determining whether they have changed since the last time they've been processed and if they have changed stuff into a queue to be processed by PHP so they wouldn't have to deal with go for all the string handling code and because i already written it in PHP and then there's a whole bunch of PHP queue consumers that run on various application servers that that deal with that now as for a cost breakdown the go servers that are crawling all the feeds that costs me in the order of a few hundred dollars a month on our frequency monster linode i have six crawlers that i pay i think 60 a month each so they're like 360 total now for my databases i pay like three thousand dollars a month so it's you know we're like talking like ten times as much cost for databases as for that and there are a few other servers that help out you know like the actual web slash application servers that are running on the PHP you know that's that's an entrepreneurial cost there but databases are a big part of it because databases need lots of everything they need lots of CPU power lots of RAM and when you're crawling this many feeds lots of storage space so it depends again depends on on what you're going to be doing with with your app but in general in my experience so far every single web thing i've worked on so far that's had multiple servers and therefore you know significant costs databases are always the biggest cost because you know when you're doing like you know web servers slash app servers you can usually do like the shared CPU instances at your host which are usually cheaper you can usually do almost no disk space you know just enough to hold the app and whatever temp stuff you might need but for the most part you have no disk space so that that saves on the massive SSD cost there and you're mainly dealing with like CPU and some RAM you don't even get a lot of RAM usually on those application servers and CPU especially the shared CPU plans that's usually the cheapest resource to get at most modern hosts compared to the other ones so you do save in the CPU time by using a very efficient language like go but you're saving the cheapest most available and most easily scaled resource whereas databases are expensive and hard to scale and usually the bottleneck of pretty much everything you're going to be doing and so yes the language choice does matter but not as much as you think for most applications you know that is that obviously depending on your application like you may not like maybe premature to worry about this because trying to get some customer source is where you actually have to worry about scale but it is worth thinking about upfront because if you think there's a reasonable chance you are going to have scale the next thing you need to ask is yeah but is this like am i going to be limited is the language going to be limiting me in some way right so one way to limit you is cost like oh it turns out that if we you know we scale up to 100 billion users this will cost me so much money so it is limiting me because it costs money i gotta rewrite it in cheaper language but the other way i can limit you is in terms of like total performance throughput right that you just can't get the performance you want like you can't scale this thing up without you know doing something ridiculous like say you write this application it becomes gargantuan and it's written in you know PHP or Python or something that is not particularly uh you know stingy with memory and you just you just made this monster and now you need to run on something with like huge amounts of RAM just to run one instance of your thing oh and by the way now you need thousands of those instances just to get the performance you want like on an average day of like i just can't i can't handle the peak load at noon when most people are using my very popular application to do that like i have to you know i have to basically scale vertically because it's easy to scale out horizontally but if it turns out that just to sort of run one instance of your thing on one server you need like a monster instance that with a huge amount of RAM and a huge amount of CPU because of your language choice that's not a good place to find yourself like you've actually written a monolith in an inefficient language and you need huge amounts of them and it becomes sort of untenable that you maybe can't even get that many or like you start getting beat up on the overhead of just having these things you know any kind of sort of side banking with each other right so an early choice up front to know is this the part of the thing that is going to be a performance bottleneck or is that it's going to like scale up like how much RAM is this going to use if we get you know a million times more customers how much to use is going to be used if we get a million times more customers that you can do that back on the floor of math and make some choices early on but very often like in the case of marco's thing you're not it's not like a real-time interactive application and so in that case as long as you can get the crawling done for example like you can get 24 hours with a crawling done in 24 hours you can just you know use wimpy or slower or smaller instances and just take the full 24 hours right yes if you're going to use half the instances for half the time but the bottom line is like painting the golden bridge right you're just going to start over the other way when you go anyway and as long as the throughput is sufficient for you to do whatever batch job you're doing as long as you can get the job done in sort of your time window the inefficiency of using a 10 times slower language doesn't really matter because the mark us point like it's not going to be that that's not your big expense anyway and if it's you know if it was fast for you to write and it was you know it's a language you're familiar with even if it's 10 times less efficient as long as it gets the job done and as long as you don't think like well if I you know are are there are there going to be a trillion podcasts in 10 years probably not like the number of podcasts is somewhat bounded right so you can kind of do the back envelope math and say the job of crawling podcasts how often do I think should they should be crawled for a good experience and how many podcasts are there going to be essentially ever like bounded order of magnitude you can say all right yeah if I wrote it and go I would save a little bit of money each month but you know if I write in PHP it's not the end of the world it will get the job done so it's very difficult to give blanket advice because we don't know what you're doing are you doing a podcast crawl it needs to crawl feeds once every 24 hours once every hour are you writing something that needs to be updated for the moment are you writing an interactive application that users are going to be using and at peak times there's going to be you know one million per second or something very different choices based on those things so unfortunately for server-side stuff there's no one answer other than saying you could probably find a way to do it with AWS. I would like to add one quick thing in that in my experience learning another language even if you don't really do much with it is almost always a worthwhile expenditure of time and you know when I first up with Python 10 15 years ago I didn't think a million years I'd be writing code to figure out if my garage door was open or not and yes that wasn't particularly important but it was still nice to have a little exposure to Python years and years and years and years in the past to get me ahead on that so I don't think it's necessarily bad to explore another language or even learn to some degree another language and I mean Marco I don't see you writing a lot of go willingly these days but nevertheless I still think it I think it was a worthwhile expenditure of your time and I would guess that you do too.

Oh it was a hundred percent worth it because my PHP based crawler before this were not nearly as good for this particular task because like I use Go's whole like channel system of their whole concurrency model for managing this whole thing and it's great and you're right I don't write a lot of it because like I wrote this years ago and then basically haven't really touched it much since then and I have since mostly forgotten the language and whenever I do have to go in there and like change one little thing I have to basically relearn the language again just to be able to make that two lines change or something like that it's kind of funny and a little bit scary like if I ever have to do a bigger change it's kind of going to have to like take a weekend and really like relearn the entire thing again. You guys rewrite it and rest then because that's the good thing like you pick the part of it that you pick the part of it that like actually is performance sensitive that concurrency matters like you said you didn't rewrite the whole like parsing feeds or whatever because you already had that code and that's not the code like you can just queue that out and and parallelize it's like it's the it's the crawler itself a little core of the crawler and so if you needed to write that again you know the job that it needs to do and you could say okay well now it's time to learn rust and you could write it in rust and then you don't have to relearn go and as long as it is comparable in performance and comparable you know mechanisms for concurrency you can just write it in whatever the language of the day that is the most go like right yeah I mean and and frankly you know if I was writing something from scratch today I think I would I would consider a radically different architecture than than what I did here like I I've been brainstorming for a while like can I really can I maybe reduce the amount of like database use that I have here because I put stuff on people's devices yeah and or you know use things like S3 as the storage you know there are things I can do that I've been brainstorming like I think I might want to go in some one of this direction because running all this like I had to deal with some database stuff this week and it was stupid and it was easy but I still hate dealing with it on so many levels and and it's extremely expensive and so I was thinking like maybe I should start you know changing things but there's never a good time to do that so anyway thank you so much everybody for listening thank you to our sponsors this week Hover Mac Weldon and Collide and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join a.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week and if you can follow them at through say what my new I got you a capture set up going with the pc chat enclosure finally got it working now with the mage well card i returned to the black magic deck link card the mage well pro capture h.m. I think is working great i have four capture streams it is a dream to use because not only is this much smaller and simpler than my previous setup of having like four or three different little HDMI capture USB thingies, like it's so much simpler. The enclosure has been great.

I have everything running off of one cable correctly now like you know before I was describing like when I was trying to plug every single thing into the the CalDigit TS3 plus that you know some of the capture things would only work if I plug them in directly to the computer and so I ended up I was using like all three of my computer's ports anyway. Now I can literally just use one. The only downside is that the enclosure only provides 15 watts of power to the computer so that's not great as the only power source so I'm using a second USB support purely for power. I got across using Max-A for that it would be fine.

So anyway that's the only real downside otherwise it's fantastic. It is so far been very reliable. The quality is great and I'm very happy with it so I showed them this earlier honestly. I should have gone straight to the solution because you know it's a decent amount of money but so is the previous setup where I had you know three different the you know Elgato capture thingies plus the TS3 plus that's not cheap either and so having this PCX press enclosure with this dedicated card in it and these USB cards is a dream so I'm very happy with it.

So tell me again it's a generic PCI Express enclosure that lets you basically put what I would consider to be a desktop card in a box and then connect it to your laptop and then remind me what the card is. So the enclosure is it's not almost everything is not you know it's not a tech so it's a Sonic enclosure with three PCIU slots in it. Two of the slots I've put Sonic USB cards in that have four ports each one A, one C, like you know one bank of A, one bank of C's because I have both devices and then the third slot has a Magewell Pro HDMI quad capture card so it captures four HDMI ports and the Magewell was the only thing that required drivers. I wish there was some kind of HDMI capture that didn't require drivers on Mac OS.

I don't know if that exists but as far as I can tell they all require drivers so this required them so that's one thing that could break in the future is like you know if some future version of Mac OS comes out and then Magewell does not have to do the drivers that could mess me up a little bit and I'll cross that bridge if it comes but otherwise yeah it's been great.