549: Unauthorized Trash Can

35:44LSP is the thing that lets you plug in like a Swift parser into it or something like that? No, it's a protocol for talking to a language server saying, tell me about this language. Lumpy space princess? Yeah, exactly. It's like, tell me, it's another process that runs that your editor communicates with and it tells you about the structure. Like where are the keywords? Right, okay, we're basically saying the same thing. Anyway, this one, Chime, is kind of like a tiny indie Mac version of VS Code in terms of what the UI looks like. But obviously, this is a bad description of both of them. You should check them both out because they're both small and new and interesting.

36:17And I hadn't heard of either one. And then apparently we didn't want me to suffer just once. Nay, let me suffer twice. John put in follow-up with regard to Nay Leon. Nay Leon? Did you listen to the MP3 that I put in there? I did, but it was hours ago. So you've forgotten what it sounded like, right? Exactly. Who are you again? Hi, this is Casey. So anyway, Nelian wrote the transcript. I'm going to say Nelian. Nelian, okay. That wonderful person writes, the transcription I usually give to English speakers is Nelian. I think that's right. Anyways, also I found a French text-to-speech website that does a pretty good job, And we will link that in the show notes because apparently I am inept.

37:03Yeah. So lots of people sent us, oh, here's a website that has name pronunciations. My point with the whole, like, this is a space right for disruption was not that there are not lots of these sites, it's that all these sites are bad. And so every time, every time someone sent me a site, whether I knew about the site or not, I went to it, looked up this person's name and then sent them a screenshot showing that this site does not know this person's name. But if it did know, it probably had a weird pronunciation. And in terms of the pronunciation, I think is an interesting feature of French, I think, where the pronunciation here is N-E-L-A-Y, and we would say lay, but if you listen to the MP3, it's more like lay.

37:37Anyway, maybe we'll put the MP3 in the show notes, or I guess maybe a link to the toot in the show notes, which has like a little video to hear the name, but nearly end. I think we figured it out kind of sort of finally at the end, and it's a criminal that these websites that supposedly are all about pronouncing people's names don't have your name, because I have a feeling your name is not super-duper rare. Did you know it's called Fully? Anonymous writes,

38:27disrupted the beautiful design of the space somewhat. Eventually, the facilities team caved and put a small, ugly, gray, plastic, Rubbermaid-looking trash can outside every office where they remain to this day. Can we go back to how unbelievably upset I am that people, people who are presumably intelligent to have gotten a job at Apple, are thinking it is okay to throw trash on the ground because you can't be bothered? Don't blame the people. It's a failure of design. What kind of Apple decides to not get up and put their trash in the trash. Oh, we have janitors for that. Screw you. That's not their job to pick up your trash.

39:01It's their job to move the trash receptacles to other trash receptacles. It's not there to pick up after you, you big whiner. I'm not endorsing throwing trash on the garbage, but I will say that I had no idea about the story when I used trash cans as an example of how Apple might not be as good at designing spaces for real humans as Disney is. But in fact, it was not just like, here's an analogy. No, literally trash cans at Apple Park. I find this, first of all, totally unsurprising. that you know this was not properly accounted for but second of all see what i would do is i would i would never throw trash on the ground that's not me at all but thank you i would sneak in like an unauthorized trash can that is big marco energy i was gonna say the supposed solution to having the rubbermaid trash cans outside every office how does that help it's still not near you you still got to get up and go over there and put the anyway that's exactly the type of things that they talk about these parks where like you make this beautiful space and you think this is the way it should be, but then people enter it and people act like people.

39:53And you're like, no, people act differently. And really you need to design the space to account for the people, even the bad people who put trash on the ground. All right. Ezekiel Ellen writes with regard to Mac photos editing, when you're in photos, you can edit in an external program. One of two ways, as mentioned on the show on edit mode, the dot, dot, dot button has a list of apps that support editing in photos, but you can also right click the photo and choose edit with, which has a shortcut command return for last used app. This will open the photo, usually in TIFF format, in that app and save the edited photo back to your library when you're done.

40:28Any app that can open photos can be used this way. In all cases, you can never modify or lose the original. Photos always retains the original image. On the show, you referred to the flatten option in Pixelmator Pro. If you choose flatten, then the resulting image is flattened and saved back to your library as the current edit. If you choose to preserve edits, then Photos retains additional metadata so that it can restore the editing session if you bring Pixelmator Pro's extension back up within photos. Whether you have the ability to finally adjust edits or not, the revert to original button is always present in the editing session if the current photo has ever been modified.

41:02Yeah, that was the distinction I missed, that there's no way to lose the original, but the preserve edits preserves them. So if you go back to the editor, like your, I guess your layers or whatever the hell you did in the editor, that is preserved. I always do the preserve thing, so I didn't actually know what the flattened it and what the distinction was, but it's good to know that no matter what I pick, it's never going to mess with my original photo. And then also from Ezekiel Ellen, with regard to Elin, Ellen, I don't know, with regard to dumb TVs, I have a TCL Roku TV and I keep it disconnected from the internet.

41:30When you do this, an LED flashes forever until it's reconnected. I used a pair of pliers to remove the LED from the circuit board. It's a perfectly good, cheap 4K TV. I mean, I thought this was going to go, I put a piece of tape over it, but sure, pliers. I put this in here just to show how aggressive these companies are getting about insisting you're on the internet. Like a hardware thing with a light flashing in your face that you can't disable is pretty severe. I mean, I guess the next phase is like some giant dialogue in the middle of your television that doesn't go away until you connect to the internet.

42:03But I suppose if someone's like watching something on broadcast television over the air or watching a plastic disc spinning somewhere and they lose internet connection and they can't watch TV, they're going to be pretty angry. Yep. and then finally apple tv dis apple tv plus excuse me disney plus and games let me tackle this one before you go into it because this is something that we uh we talked about on the show where we talked about disney and i i put it in there specifically to remind myself to make a particular point and i didn't make it i made a bunch of other points which i also wanted to make but i missed this one um this was the aaron thomas question that was like you know sony and nintendo have good relationships with game developers what can apple and google learn from them and it's related to the Disney thing in a bunch of ways but the final way that I want to mention is we're talking about like Apple keeping its hands off stuff like Apple keeping its hands off Beats and whether or not they're doing that uh Apple keeping its hands off uh the people who make the Apple TV Plus shows and not telling them that they can't have nudity or violence and stuff like that despite the rumors so I think there is something to the idea that Apple's ability to keep its hands off and this sounds so weird because obviously these things are part of Apple like Apple TV plus the studio is part of apple and beats is part of apple but like when i tell you apple i'm talking about like the apple that acquired those companies so that apple the core apple the apple that does computer products the apple core yeah there you go like that part uh can it keep its hands off when it acquires a business that does something that it previously didn't have expertise in or even when it grows one organically we're going to start our own television and movie studios we have no expertise in this we've never done it before but we're going to hire a bunch of people they're going to be part of Apple, but we're going to let them do what they know how to do because we know that we don't know how to do it and we shouldn't mess with them and we'll give them guidance and some direction, but mostly let them do what they want versus buying something like Beats where it's like, well, we make headphones.

43:50We'll talk to them a little bit or whatever. I think Apple is much better able to keep its hands off stuff when it is far away from things that it does. And I think that's part of its big problem with games. Getting to Aaron's question, why are they so bad at games? Why did Nintendo and Sony have good relationships with developers? Why does Apple and Google not? I can't speak to Google right now, but Apple, I think the reason Apple and games gets messed up is because Apple and gaming impacts directly in all of Apple's core businesses. The Mac, the phone, the Apple TV. It's like Apple's like, well, we know about that stuff.

44:25We're Apple. Of course, we know about making Macs and we know about making operating systems and we know about GPUs and all that stuff. and they feel like they have expertise in that area. So to the extent that there is any overlap between what you need to do to be good at games and existing Apple business and technologies that Apple thinks it already knows, there is conflict. And that I think is a big reason why Apple has such problems with games because games touch so many parts of their business. And Apple says, don't tell us what to do. We know how to do this. Don't tell us that we should have, you know, NVIDIA GPUs or external GPUs at all.

44:58We know what we're doing. We know what's right for this business. Don't tell us that we need open GL an operating system or Vulkan. We don't need that. We're going to do metal. Like there is so much entrenched expertise and knowledge and experience related to gaming related stuff inside Apple, that it's very difficult for Apple to grow organically or allowed to come in from the outside. People who have different ideas and say, well, you know, here's how Microsoft does it and how they interface with game developers. And it seems to work better for them because look at all the games on their platforms and they have a console and so on and so forth.

45:27And here's how, you know other companies interface with sony and we brought in these people from activision or whatever and they're telling us well if you want to do well in the game industry got x y and z and that runs right up against apple folks saying i've been you know working on the mac for 25 years and you're not going to tell me what i need to do to my hardware or software platform to do better for gaming um and that's why it's i think that's related to this question that's part of the reason that apple has such trouble with games it just overlaps too much whereas disney i would imagine theme parks does not overlap too much although if they apple might say we know how to make spaces for humans look at apple park it's perfect except for the rubber made garbage cans consider becoming an atp member today atp membership gets all sorts of fun little goodies but the big two are the ad free feed and bonus content so here's what you get the ad free version of the show you don't hear messages like this or other sponsorships and instead you get an ad free feed that you can add to whatever podcast player you want to use.

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47:34We talked a few episodes ago, I don't recall exactly when, about Marco's quest to get better security cameras. And I guess the quick summary was you had, what did you have that was constantly failing, Marco? I had the Logitech Circle View HomeKit Secure Video Cameras. Thank you. And I've used them for about two years. They would just constantly fall off the network and were constantly not connected or would have long delays and then fail to connect or whatever else. So since talking about this, we got a ton of recommendations for Ubiquity cameras. And also a ton of people saying, I also have Logitech Circle View and it has the same problem for me.

48:16So that was very vindicating that it isn't just me. that everyone's Logitech Circle views kind of suck. And that was kind of the story with almost every consumer grade Wi-Fi camera that we heard about. Everyone basically said the same thing. The Eufy cameras seem to be a little more reliable in people's reports, but still not super reliable. And everyone kept telling me the exact same thing. First of all, because I had asked about Ubiquiti stuff because I already have Ubiquiti networking gear and I like it a lot. And so I had asked, you know, I knew they had cameras. I asked people if they were any good.

48:51Everyone said yes. And everyone also wrote in to basically say pretty much any power over Ethernet wired camera is very good compared to Wi-Fi cameras. And so you don't have to necessarily go ubiquity. There's all sorts of PoE cameras that as long as you can run Ethernet wiring to where you have to be and you have a PoE supplying switch or injectors of some kind, then that's the way to go. Everyone told me that. So, of course, I bought a bunch of Ubiquiti stuff. That's my standard operating procedure. Quick review of how this went. In short, extremely well. I've been using the Ubiquiti and Unify Protect setup now for, I think, about three weeks.

49:37It has been awesome. So, first of all, a couple of drawbacks. This whole thing is super expensive. This is the pro level thing. You know, a while ago, I was trying to help out my town with their meetings. I talked about it very briefly on the show with, like, the microphone equipment they should use for meetings. I was recommending, you know, based on my limited experience with wireless mics, I was recommending a pro-grade Shure, the SLX-D wireless system. Because I had used some of the lower-end consumer-y kind of stuff before. It would always have static or dropouts. It was using 2.4 gigahertz instead of some of the UHF frequencies.

50:19And I'd run into all the limitations of consumer-grade gear in wireless mics. You get the better stuff. It will not drop out. It will not have static. It will just work. And it has just worked. It has been perfect. It has been flawless. There has not been a single dropout. There is not even a blip of static ever. They just work. That's what you pay for when you get pro gear. Pro gear, you know, when you're using a microphone or a camera or whatever, when you're using this stuff professionally, you know, similar with computer gear too, when you're using this stuff professionally, you can't afford to have it not work.

50:56Like, if it doesn't work, bad stuff happens. Like, you know, you have to reshoot a scene or, you know, some high stakes thing gets ruined or gets messed up or, you know, or you look bad because it's, you know, you're trying to be professional and then you show up with amateur gear or whatever. you need it to work 100 % of the time. In the camera business, Wi-Fi cameras are the consumer level gear. They are inexpensive. If you don't have super high needs, and especially if you're price sensitive, they're a great option. But they kind of suck. And you kind of get what you pay for. And now that I've used PoE cameras, no question, this is the pro gear.

51:38And that's why the setup costs more and that's why it has you know a little bit higher startup requirements it's the pro system and when you want it to work a hundred percent of the time or close or very very close to that that's what you go for you go for wired ethernet supplying power and data over a cable no wi-fi and you know these are like you know heavy duty you know materials and enclosures and everything it's pro gear to get started with a ubiquity camera system you need something that acts as the video recorder they have a few pieces of equipment you can do this with um i went with the small version of their nvr the network video recorder they have one that has like a whole bunch of bays i went with the one that only has four bays because it was a lot cheaper and i don't need any more than that a couple little drawbacks here it's a few hundred bucks um couple little drawbacks uh it has four hard drive bays but it does not as far as you can tell does not let you configure the raid it just automatically does it so i bought two hard drives thinking i would run them, you know, in RAID 0, basically, because it doesn't, this data is not super important that I'm worried about a hard drive crash, like, you know, erasing last week's footage, like, it isn't that important that I need to keep it.

52:48So I was thinking just to maximize space and retention time, I'd put two disks in it. Little did I know that two disks in the Ubiquiti NVR will always and only be configured as RAID 1. So I only had the space of one of them. So they're only redundant. and there's no way to make it use two disks as all their space. If you only have two disks in there, it does RAID 1. If you add any more, it does RAID 5. How did you not immediately buy a third disk? Why? Because you're Marco. I decided, all right, you know what, this is fine. Whatever. All right. Start the clock on that third hard drive, everybody.

53:24Yeah, right. Secondly, when you get into Ubiquiti stuff, they have all these Unify apps and my main router is the original unify dream machine which doesn't support uh you know network video functionality directly i thought that by adding an nvr to my network here i thought that it would integrate better into the dream machine so i would have all my like unify apps in one screen it doesn't you just have to access the nvr via its ip address like that's how you access its web interface just the ip you know the one and two dot whatever what i probably should have done is I discussed that for the new house, I got the UDM SE, the Dream Machine SE that has the hard drive bay in it and integrates its functionality into the router.

54:11I probably should have gotten that for here too. I didn't. Oh, well, because that would have actually integrated it all into one interface. But I already had the Dream Machine here. And so this was cheaper, easier, etc. Anyway, it's been working fine. So moving on from the NVR. But if you are doing a new setup, I would get a Dream Machine router that has built-in storage. The new ones either have little SSDs or the big hard drive bay. I would just do that. Anyway, the cameras I got were mostly the G5 Bullet. This seemed somewhat comparable in price and quality to the circle view. Some downsides of the G5 Bullet camera compared to the circle view, it has a much narrower field of view.

54:53So the circle view has an, I think it's officially a 180 degree view. That's why they call it circle view, or at least it's very close to 180 degrees. That would be a half a circle though. Well, that's true. Yeah. Well, the camera's round at least. Speaking of the G5 camera, I know a lot of people wrote in and said, oh, even though the G5 is newer, you should get the G4. And I don't remember the reason. Was it like less glare or was it also a field of view thing? No, the reason people cited was that apparently the G5s were mostly a response to COVID supply chain shortages where they kind of simplified the camera and they actually made it cheaper.

55:28They downgraded some things like from metal to plastic. I don't know too many details because I decided, you know what, for my purposes, I'd rather get the cheaper ones. It's not like you live in a harsh environment. It'll be fine. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah. So I went for the newer, cheaper models because for my purposes, I wanted to have a few of them. And it started to add up if I went to the old ones. Margo's kink is putting electronic devices outside that aren't equipped to deal with the weather. and if he can't put indoor stuff outdoor he's gonna buy the cheapest outdoor stuff he can sounds right g5 versus g4 one of them says it's built more sturdily and the other one is decontented oh i get a thrill from putting the d content one out there oh my god that's amazing i i really want to see the picture of what the what the g5s look like after a year okay ask me to set one of your long-term reminders ask me ask me in a year anyway all right so compared to the Logitech narrower field of view on the G5 bullet which is it depends where you're putting it that could be a plus or a minus I have found with the Logitech with the ultra wide view of the Logitechs you do see more area but it's kind of like the problem with the center stage cameras in the you know the recent cinema display and recent iPads you you can have an ultra wide lens and just kind of crop in when you need to see something further in but that comes at a pretty significant loss in detail and so it's a trade-off i had one spot where i kind of missed the wider angle in all the other spots i put them i enjoyed the increased detail better so anyway it's a trade-off um the the ubiquity cameras are also substantially larger and i would say uglier but that also makes them more visible you know one of the problems the the one of the most important roles that one of these cameras serves is to be visible so that people who are trying to walk under my house to pee under it uh see the camera and maybe get deterred from peeing there i've found the logitech circle views are so small and discreet that a lot of times people would walk right past it at eye level and not see it marco's house is on stilts by the way i just really do wonder what people are thinking like people walk under your house to pee what oh It's very high up in the air.

57:44Yes, it's near the water, so it's on piles. Anyway, the Ubiquiti cameras are much more visible. And so for my purposes, actually, that's good. Like, if you want it to be discreet, don't go with these. But if you want them to actually be visible, to be some kind of deterrent to people or whatever, it's actually an upgrade. You could have a big googly eyes on them. You can get those real cheap. They'll hold up to the salt weather. Just giant googly eyes. Oh, yeah. Cheap adhesives on the back of something made of paper. That'll do great. you got you got you had to tie it there with a rusty piece of wire yeah exactly uh anyway i would say the image quality quality is very good a little bit better than the circle view um and of course you know the narrower field of view helps certain things as well um mostly what's what i have loved about the g5 and all the ubiquity cameras is that they are far more customizable and tweakable for things like activity zones like the way you so you can like draw out you can look at the you can load the image in the app and then you can draw out all right only report person detection in this area and you draw like a polygon of what part of the picture you want to report and you can you can define multiple zones you can set their sensitivity like as a percentage so if you find like you're getting like too many false positives because like your bike seat looks like a person in certain lighting yes that happened to me um you can just turn that down a little bit like turn sensitivity down to like oh defaults 50 make it 30 and you can tweak a lot about it and i found with home kit secure video i have found those settings oftentimes don't stick or after a while they reset themselves i don't know why it's infuriating uh because like one of these cameras i have pointing basically you know the the street in front of my house is in the field of view of one of these cameras where the circle view used to be and i and i want person detection on the part that's like close to my house but sometimes the logitech would just forget that setting and would start reporting every single person that walked by on the street which is not helpful this was a problem with so many settings for the logitechs i would tell them for instance stop notifying me every time you disconnect and go offline and it would remember that for a few days and then forget and then i would start notifying me every time it went offline like that was a constant battle with the home kit cameras it just keeps forgetting my settings or resetting my settings for no apparent reason the so far the ubiquity system has never forgotten a setting you set it and forget it hey you said it and it just remembers like like it should like why is that why is that not even table stakes i don't know and to run a bit of a test on on the smarts of these cameras and the speed of these cameras i've kept one circle view camera in use the one by the bikes because this is the one every time we leave or come back you know we're usually on a bike because it's a bike town and every time we leave or come back this camera alerts me so i got a tap tap on my watch when i or anyone else pulls into the bike area and it's like oh hey tiff's home you know it's great that circle view because it's right next to a wireless access point that circle view has been the most reliable and it's been the most useful because i love that utility so i wanted to see you know one of the advantages of home kit is that almost everything about it runs locally on your network.

1:00:56So notifications and responses to things tend to be very fast with HomeKit. Again, that's one of the best things about it. This should in theory be as fast because it is also mostly on my network. But I figured, well, to send a notification, they have to upload the picture to some service somewhere so that the notification can have access to that image from Apple's notification service to show it on the watch or on the phone or whatever. So I figured maybe it'll be slower. And I wanted to also test how smart is the object and person recognition? Is it smarter than Logitech? Is it dumber? Is it slower?

1:01:28Is it faster? So for these three weeks, I've been running both the Logitech and Ubiquiti G5 Bullet in the bike area. The speed has been nearly identical. They're always within, you know, like occasionally one will come in before the other or the other one or it'll flip around the order that they come in, but they're basically exactly as fast. so that's great they also are about as smart or smarter occasionally the logitech will report a spider web moving in front of it as a person so far the ubiquity cameras have never done stupid stuff like that it did again it did think my bike seat was a person for a while so i just adjusted that sensitivity and that that fixed that problem neither one neither one of them has ever like missed a person like when i when i lowered the sensitivity for the bike area to get rid of the bike seat issue it didn't start missing people it's recognizing us every single time so it's exactly as good for that if not better all the detection that you know the person detection it's all it's all wonderful one thing it does not have the home kit notifications if you you know long press them on the app on the phone screen or whatever it would actually play the video clip these don't do that these you have to tap and load the app like they'll show you the picture but you have to tap and actually view it in their app to see the the actual video clip but with home kit that was not only unreliable but slow a lot of times you'd be waiting a long time for that clip to load or it would never load with the ubiquity cameras those clips load immediately every single time whether you are on your network or not so there have been there's been times during this time where we've been out of town driving box trucks and i was able to see the notifications and load the video clips and see the guys peeing on my house exactly as quickly or and or in most cases way faster even though this was this was then streaming from my own network to the internet rather than you know coming from home kits uh secure video servers or anything like that so the speed of everything is great and then trying to like skim through the timeline uh using the unified protect app is so much faster and more reliable than trying to skim through the timeline of HomeKit stuff.

1:03:38And of course, as I mentioned last time, this has the advantage of 24-7 recording if you want it to, which for some of these I do. HomeKit secure video is only ever motion event based. There is no option in HomeKit for continuous recording. With this, you have that option. So I have a few cameras doing continuous recording, and it is just so fast and so easy and so reliable. It's awesome. As for the physical setup of them. Power of Ethernet is awesome. You know, this is something I already knew from from Wi-Fi access points and stuff, but it continues to be awesome. Running the Logitech cameras, I had to have some kind of power outlet situation for them to supply them with their USB power somewhere within like 15 feet of each camera.

1:04:25And because they're all outside, that involved some logistics like running extension cords in weird places, having those outdoor closed up ceiling boxes around a power strip or something to keep the weather out, John. So there was a whole bunch of just kind of cruft that when I went to POE for these cameras, I could just get rid of all that stuff. Because I could just have these all going into my utility closet and then just run a long cable. Like a long Ethernet cable. And that carries power and data for these. So I got to get rid of all those power adapters, all those extension cords. All those USB power bricks, all those outdoor weather enclosures got rid of all of them.

1:05:07So it's a way nicer and cleaner setup. How are you feeling about the weather sealing on where it plugs into the cameras? For these to be perfectly weather sealed, you have to either use like a mounting box that itself is sealed, or you can use the mounts they come with, but they have like a little rubber gasket in the mount, and it is not wide enough to fit an Ethernet cable end through. true i think the idea is you're supposed to just run bare wire and then splice your own end on you know that's right yeah professionals don't buy pre-made cables right but i do because i've tried making my own cables and i can't do it believe me i've tried so what did you do you just plugged it in without the ceiling thing yeah i just popped the ceiling thing out and then i used i used um dielectric grease around you know some of the main connectors all right i was gonna ask because a lot of people send us things like oh here's what you do for outdoor connections and it's like you pack the thing with gel or some other things to keep the air out, essentially.

1:06:00Yeah, that's what I did. I did put that long-term reminder in for a year from now, by the way, because I can't wait to see what these Ethernet connections look like. RJ44 plus dielectric grease plus ocean air. Yeah, exactly. RJ45, sorry. And otherwise, the only other thing I would say is this did require me to buy a couple more switches, a couple more PoE switches. Ubiquiti has this one called the Switch Flex, which seems to be basically made for this purpose. It's an indoor outdoor compatible switch and it has poe kind of pass through on all the ports i did have to buy some of the really big 60 watt poe injectors at the other end of those so that the switches could have enough power to spread around the the cameras use a few watts each so you know if you're looking into this budget and plan for possibly some switch upgrades or some power injectors somewhere along the way otherwise i'm super happy with this setup it is so nerdy and it is a hundred percent reliable so far and i just like look again because because we're in the middle of like moving selling a house we have a lot going on in our life right now um it's it's fine you know we're good but it's just it's very very busy and to take something that is super unreliable and irritating and full of paper cuts and to just make it super reliable and just take all those problems away from your life is incredibly satisfying and incredibly valuable depending on you know what what what your life has in it right now and this is one thing where like i had this unreliable system that was driving me nuts and now it's gone and in place of it is something that just works super well did you end up using scripted uh no i'm not actually um so so scripted was the app that everyone recommended that allows you to basically bridge any other camera system including poe cameras including ubiquity stuff it allows you to bridge those into home kit secure video i thought i would set that up on something but first of all i don't have any spare hardware to run it on right now and i would look to me like oh should i buy the low-end mac mini or some kind of high-end raspberry pi or intel nuc thing and i realized first of all as previously spoken i don't have time for this crap right now and second of all i don't want to run one of these things just for this and then third of all i realized i don't think i actually need it for anything the only major advantage that would provide me is integrations with features that i don't really use like you know yes it turns your other camera system into something that can for instance show the person at the door on your apple tv well i don't do that i don't use that feature so i don't really need that um the other thing is it would allow you to have an off-site um record of motion events that is valuable and at some point i might like i might look into it for that so that way like you know in case a hurricane destroys my house i'll be able to see the video clips up to that point that contain motion okay i mean i don't know how actionable that is uh but it might be you know it might be might be worth having at some point but from it for now the value is just not there i'm just not having these cameras in home kit and it's fine you couldn't just put a docker container on your synology i know this is like this anathema to you or however you pronounce the word but um i think it's i think it's anathema anathema there we go sorry It's one of those ones like Bazel that I've only ever read and never pronounced.

1:09:13Anyways, the point is, I know that you are allergic, how about that, to Docker and anything like it. But this really is the sort of thing that if you were to accept help from another human being, hello, I'm that person, I could get you set up with this. Assuming there is a Docker container for scripted, which I would assume there is, then it would be minutes to get this squared away. Like I cannot speak highly enough how quickly you could get that running on, say, your Synology, leaving aside like surveillance station or any of that. But you could get that running so fast if you were willing to accept 10 minutes of help.

1:09:46Getting the Docker container isn't the hard part. I think it's setting up scripted with the cameras the way he wants it to be. That's fair. Making sure it doesn't anger them. And, you know, I understand his desire not to overcomplicate it if things are finally working. Well, also, like, you know, look, there's all sorts of things. There's, you know, stuff like Homebridge. Like there's all these, all these, these wonderful, you know, apps that are made to connect different smartphone, smart home things to different systems. And that's great. I'm not in a point in my life where I want to add complexity like that to my setup.

1:10:14For me, like I'd rather just have, I'd rather just use, use the products directly. And to add something like that to my setup, it's a very optimistic thing. Thinking I'll just set this up and then these things will be bridged forever. And that's never how it really works. always in practice, you have some kind of hack or bridge like that. Every few months, you got to reset it or reconfigure it or figure out why something's not working. And then you have a whole other thing to debug or run or operate. Those Docker containers will eventually need to be updated or will eventually break or something like that.

1:10:44Yes, but that's incredibly easy. But I do agree with what you're saying in principle, but it is so easy. Yeah, but that adds more stuff to my plate. And I'm like, I don't, you know, is this additional integration or feature really worth that level of tinkering and maintenance? And to me, oftentimes the answer is no. Yeah, I mean, you're allowed. It doesn't make you wrong. I just, I cannot overstate how easy this could potentially be if you were interested in it. And it sounds like you're just plain not interested and that's okay. I remember how excited you are about the Logitech CircleView camera.

1:11:16So we may be in the honeymoon period. And related to that, we got one bit of very adamant feedback from John McMichael, who said, ubiquity video cameras is hot garbage. Ubiquity video camera singular is hot garbage. Get yourself some Lorex cameras, L-O-R-E-X, and tie them into Security Spy. And I believe I found the correct link for Security Spy. Security Spy looks like the type if you have like an apartment building and you want to have like a station where there's a security guard looking at a bunch of cameras. That's what it looks like. But it's for the Mac. looks like an impressive piece of software but i'm guessing this is not what marco wants what and that too like i didn't want to run a mac server because again like you know what i have now i have yeah i have this ubiquity appliance basically the nvr doing like the recording and everything i know ubiquity gear i know i can just let that run for years and never touch it never update it never have to worry about like is something going to break you know something never falls out of configuration i right now i don't run a mac server at home for any reason and i'm okay with that where's the nvr is the nvr on the water closet uh okay the water is on the floor it is far it's it's up well it i mean closets it's like five feet above any water idea of a server closet is a term of art but like literal closets and houses tend not to have great ventilation i do have some concern about the number that no it's a it's a utility closet so it is ventilated like that's it's where i it's it's where i have other networking gear it's it's fun all right well so when you open the door you don't feel a blast of hot air come out at you no no it's it's actually partially conditioned the way the house is okay um so like you know right like when the air conditioning is on you open the door and you get a blast of cold air um so yes we know water closet is uh term for bathroom that's not what we mean we're see past episodes it's complicated it's really not yeah so anyway this system look if you're a nerd this is awesome if you are if you if you're looking for like a basic easy to set up inexpensive compact home security camera system this is not that but if you want something that's really good like high high-end needs or just you want something that works really well and you're willing to probably spend more than you reasonably responsibly should and have all this gear somewhere in your closet somewhere then this is awesome this doesn't make sense for most people but if it makes sense for you it's really awesome please consider becoming an atp member today so i told you earlier membership gets you the ad free version of the show and occasional member exclusive bonus content those are great reasons to support the show also the most popular possibly thing that we give with membership, a very popular option among our members, is the bootleg feed.

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1:15:33All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And Greg writes, how do you handle getting your kids their first email address? What do you plan to do or did you do about setting them up? Did you use junior at smithfamily.com or from your custom domain? Did you set them down in front of Gmail and let them choose their own laserblaster4567 at gmail.com? wait until their school assigns them student1234 at school.org. When did you decide to do it? Did you reserve them a Gmail address as soon as you had a name picked out? As tech-savvy parents, it feels like we are likely to have our own opinions about the right answer based on our own experiences and values, i.e.

1:16:03avoiding something that you'll likely feel differently about when applying for jobs, or relying on a student or ISP email address that is more fragile than iCloud or Gmail. But I'm curious how you approached it in partnership with your youngsters, given that ultimately they're the ones that own this address and it will come to represent them, not you. I think I signed Declan up for a Gmail account because at the time it seemed like a good idea, but I don't think I needed to, and neither of my children have an email address at the moment. Moving on. Marco, you are the next oldest child. What did you guys do?

1:16:34Our kid has a Google ID, mainly so that we could share the YouTube no ads thing, like the family plan for YouTube no ads, whatever that's called this year. um we you know we once he was watching youtube we wanted to get him that because we didn't want him wasting time watching all these bs ads on youtube so anyway um so we had to get him a google id for that um we had to later create a second one because we accidentally put in his real age on that one and it wouldn't let him because he was under age 13 uh it wouldn't let him watch anything on youtube basically um and so we had to then create a fake second child with a fake second google id who is older and he stays logged in as that most of the time um but anyway he doesn't really use email for anything so he has these email addresses that are both gmail addresses but he doesn't i mean what does he use email for he is you know 11 like he's he's fine he's not he's not you know dealing with gotta go through my inbox every morning from my boss like you know it's not like that um at school he does have an email address for school but i don't see him using that for anything but school related things.

1:17:46And I think that's the way to do, you know, school email addresses are like work email addresses. Just that's the kid's job when they're in school. If you have a job, you probably have a work email address, but that's probably not the one you give your friends. That's probably not the one that you plan to have forever. And I consider a school to be the same way. A school email address is something that you have as a functional purpose that you're required to have when you are in school to do things like submit papers to your teacher in school. But that is not a permanent email address. For a permanent email address, I say if your kid is young, don't worry about it.

1:18:22Maybe reserve a good name for them at Gmail or reserve a good domain name or ideally both because domain names are cheap and Gmail accounts are free. So yeah, reserve their name or some good version of it before someone else takes it. But don't make any assumptions that your kid is going to want, first of all an email address at all but second of all don't make any assumptions that your kid is going to want this particular email address let them be a kid let them goof around with whatever they want to goof around with anywhere else down the road when they're 60 if they don't have the emails they sent when they were nine who cares like that's let them be kids let them mess around with stuff that doesn't matter now and down the road when it comes time to make things more permanent do what parents are supposed to do guide them but let them make the decision ultimately you can tell them you can give them wisdom that they will ignore you can say like you probably shouldn't have boner champ 69 you know in your email address forever you know you can you can guide them but ultimately you know they're going to do their own thing once they're old enough to do it and you can't have too much control over it or too much saying it so you know don't put too much thought into it john casey your kids not watch youtube nope not yet wow you're really holding the line on that well anyway when they do you're gonna have to get them uh google ids just like marco and then you'll have to figure out how to pay for the ad free thing which i believe i use an android emulator to do wait what an android emulator on my mac because at the time i got it it was the only way you could pay for family plan youtube no ads was from an android device so i i think i still have like blue stacks or something it was like an android tablet emulator that i ran on my mac so i could log into my existing google id to be able to get to the screen where it let me pay for this anyway they continue to bill me monthly for that so it worked um i just do it on the website i'm sure it's easier now but remember this i'm doing this back in the past um and i also don't remember what that program was called then or is called now i just know that they bill me every month and it keeps getting more expensive but it's worth every penny because you don't want to see uh youtube ads yeah that's true so here's here's here's the complexity about this thing so what i actually did is i tried to get all my kids reasonable gmail addresses mostly again like margo's saying because i didn't want them to ever see any ads on youtube um but even before that i think i might even got the things before like i wanted to reserve them a name now here's the deal we always say on this program that um and i it's best to have your own domain uh you know buy a domain for yourself and keep it for your whole life and have your email address be something at the domain that you own and control you can have that backed by all sorts of things.

1:20:55You could change, you know, services that back it. You can use Fastmail. You could have it forwarding to Gmail. You could do all sorts of stuff. But having a non-embarrassing email address for yourself that you control that's on your own domain is definitely the way you want to go. But I'm saying that to you as a listener of a tech podcast. The problem with doing that for your kid is what if they don't want to maintain a domain? Someday you're going to die. And then they're going to be like, oh, who the heck controls smithfamily.com? Oh, that was dad. He was doing that. Uh-oh. Every account I've ever made in every service for my entire life is my name at smithfamily.com and I have no idea how the heck smithfamily.com works and now dad is dead.

1:21:32If your kids want to make their own domain for themselves and have bonerchamp69.com and have their email address like that, let them do that. But you can't make a family domain that you control and force your kids to have an email address at it because then you're going to die. And what if they don't want to deal with domains? You'd be like, oh, it's easy. Bealing with domains is easy. It's really easy to control. And fast mail setup is really like you say that because you're listening to ATP. But your kid may not want to have anything to do with computers. So you can't actually, you know, I'm just going to have a family domain because there's like there's no continuity plan unless you have like a chain of younger relations who agree to continue to maintain smithfamily.com in perpetuity.

1:22:13Don't give your kids email addresses on that. Don't make them use it. And as for what kids need email for, I think for the foreseeable future, when you sign up for anything. It wants you to sign up with an email address. And right now it's email address and password. Maybe when our kids grow up, it'll be email address and pass key. But email address is the key to so much stuff. So I think it actually is important for your kids to have a canonical email address. So given that I say you should have it on your own domain, but you shouldn't force your kids to have one, but they're going to need an email address and they're probably going to need a Google ID.

1:22:44My advice is get a reasonable name at Gmail and have them use it. Not with the expectation that it's going to read your email address for life, because like Marco said, they'll pick their own email when they want. And even if you give them like your kids name at gmail.com and like this is your official email address, when they get to the age when they can pick, just like they'll make a Finsta or like a phantom account, they'll make their own secret stuff that you don't know about with their own names. And that's just what kids do. And that's perfectly fine. But they're going to need an email address.

1:23:09And I think it's a nice thing to do as a parent to basically as soon as you have the name picked out, reserve the name at gmail and use that for all their stuff and even before they can even talk sometimes you need to have an email address that's convenient to be theirs and not yours or whatever just don't expect they're going to use that email address their whole life because eventually they'll go off and do their own thing but they are going to need an email address and you know if like me you never want your children to have like digits in their name if you can help it get them you know get get the name early i bet a lot of the gmail ones are taken which is rough but you can probably if you combine their first and last name or first and middle name or initials or whatever you can probably find something just don't use numbers if they want to use numbers they can you can't stop them but at least when you make their email addresses you can do that so uh and it's kind of a shame that i have to say this that like oh the best thing to do is to have your own domain that you control but you can't do that for your kids because you because you don't know whether they're going to be into computers i wish it wasn't something that you needed to be even a little bit interested in computers to deal with again it's not complicated we all can do it really easily right oh fast mail is so easy or forwarding to gmail is so easy but mail delivery is more complicated than you think and even the simplest things even just maintaining and continuing to pay for a domain name which is nothing for people like us who have amassed them like candy and just have way too many domain names if someone's not into computers in their future life that's a burden to them and they're going to mess it up and it's going to cause problems if they're still using their email address michael writes what is your expectation towards subscription apps do you expect new features and active development or should it just not break i don't know if marco or I is, well, not qualified, but in a position to genuinely answer.

1:24:40You have a subscription app, both of you. I know. Yeah, I know, but I have my opinions. That's what people are asking. Well, I feel like I'm deeply biased from the developer perspective, which is, hey, it hasn't broken, you should be happy. But from a user perspective, I'm not so sure that's quite so fair. I think it's tough, right? I think from a user perspective, I think something new at least once a year is a reasonable expectation. but again it's hard and from a from a developer's perspective is the thing that i that i sold you is that still working yes or no if yes then we we have satisfied the contract that's basically it but it doesn't matter to me whether something is adding new stuff all the time what matters to me is am i getting continued value from it now that can mean a lot of things as long as it is working for the reasons I went to pay for it in the first place, as long as that continues to function, I'm fine with it even if they don't add any more features.

1:25:40If it's just like, if I'm paying for working software and it continues to work, that's fine. Certainly, ideally, it would at least keep up with the environment around it. So for instance, if it's an iOS app, Apple announces some new feature for the next OS, and I would expect within a reasonable amount of time after that feature launches, after that OS launches, I would hope that the app would be updated to support it if it made a lot of sense for the app. So that's a lot of conditions. That's a lot of qualifiers. But for instance, this year, iOS 17, big thing is interactive widgets. I would hope that an app that I'm paying an active subscription for, I would hope if it has a lot of value in widgets and if there's a lot of value in those widgets becoming interactive for that app for the actual role that it serves in my life I would hope they would update to that within maybe six months of iOS coming out ideally sooner but you know but meanwhile if it's an app where a widget doesn't really make a lot of sense I don't need them to do that so it all depends what's going on in the environment around it I don't need new features just for the sake of new features but if the expectation of software in this area is moving in this direction.

1:26:59For instance, if the OS gets redesigned, apps look totally out of place and totally wrong until they update. That's a shorter timeline expectation for that. For instance, when they launch dark mode, if your app doesn't support dark mode for a year after they launch dark mode, that kind of sucks. For most apps, as long as what I originally paid for continues to work, and they seem to reasonably fit into the surrounding ecosystem still i'm fine with that i think i think when people if you ask people this question especially tech nerdy type people like academically they might say well kind of what marco said like you know i i don't expect too much but you should add new features every once in a while and keep up with what the os and the platform is doing but it's one of those monkey paw wishes and that if you actually had an app that kept adding stuff eventually it craps up your app like there is a certain point where an app is has not achieved perfection but found the right middle point between having way too many features and way too few features that point is different for everybody but you really don't want an app that just like pursues everything like for example the thing we're talking about marco was talking about the interactive widgets what oh my app doesn't even have widgets but i want to use interactive widgets so i'm going to throw it in and there's some new feature with ml i'm going to throw that and i'm gonna throw it eventually it makes the app worse not better so if you happen to subscribe to an app that's been out for many years and kind of hit maturity i don't think you should expect nor should you want constant new feature additions because maybe the feature set is pretty close to like the right balance and maybe you can adjust it i wish that you had this feature and didn't have this one and it can be sort of like oscillation around the center point but constant addition of feature makes apps that are too crapped up um the flip side of that is if you get an app that you know feels like it's gotten to that stable point but then never revisits that eventually you may be perfectly satisfied with app and keep paying for it but eventually say it's like five or ten years in uh and your friend has an app that does a similar job but it it like looks totally different it does a whole bunch of different stuff you may not realize that the competitive market has moved up around that thing and even though you were perfectly satisfied paying the subscription to that you didn't realize oh actually there's a new way to do this type of app that is better and this app hasn't kept up and it's time for me to jump ship and go elsewhere and those are all like personal decisions but like i definitely do not expect nor want an app to constantly add new features to justify its subscription what justifies its description is what margo said does it still do the thing i wanted to do in the way i wanted to do it uh and some people like eventually get to the point where they hate change so much that even if the entire competitive landscape around your app has moved on and they're all much better you still want to use the old one that works the way it did five years ago because that's what you're comfortable with and that's fine too so that's why it's different for every single person but yeah what i want from the app is continues working fixes any bugs uh and i continue to like it for the reasons i like it and it's kind of what the the fear we have about an update oh my favorite app just got updated a lot of people get filled with dread this is like did they just change the whole interface did they remove a feature that i love did they add a new feature that they think is better but is worse for me, updates are not always a positive.

1:30:13So I absolutely do not expect or want them to constantly add new features. And then finally, Dennis Chapovich writes, I've listened to multiple segments from you regarding backup strategies and password managers, but I never heard you talk about your approach to not losing access to your password manager. I'm asking this because I was recently on a trip in which my phone almost died, which would have caused me to lose access to all my passwords until I returned home. Do you have any specific strategy for having access to services which may be needed when you are not home? The first option is carry more than one device, or travel with more than one device.

1:30:44With that being said, I don't really have a good answer for this. I use 1Password somewhat begrudgingly now, and so all of that stuff is synced with 1Password, and I can get to it via the web if necessary. But I don't have the super secret, like, it's not a GWID, but it's sort of kind of like a GWID. I don't have that memorized or anything like that. I don't have that in an easily accessible place if I was overseas or something like that. So I really don't have a good answer for this. I believe we've started with Marco the last couple of times. So, John, what's your answer? I think you're right.

1:31:15Like redundancy, you know, like if you really need to have access to it on the road, don't just bring one phone or, you know, because what if you drop it in a car runs over it or whatever, have have multiple devices for it. And the broader sense, not losing access means all those things that people click through to get to what they wanted to do that says, oh, print out these backup codes and put them in a safe place. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll do that later. And you don't do it. That's a mistake. Do that. print the backup codes put them in a safety deposit box in a bank right like do like especially for like the things that are the keys to the kingdom like the the things to access your main email account which is what you register at all your accounts and all your other services but so you can use the forgot my password thing or whatever what if you lose all access to that all your devices get wiped your house burns down you don't have any devices with one password or iCloud key chain it's just you know again the cloud sync ones you should still be able to get back by sending into your apple id but whatever disaster strikes physical backup that's why those backup codes exist for for for your key accounts obviously not for everything but for like your key accounts make sure you actually do the thing they tell you to do which is to print out the backup codes and don't pin them to your refrigerator like but you know put them in an actual safe place somewhere um have them off-site if possible if you have a safety deposit box at a bank that's good you could have them over a relative's house and they're safe or something something like that But that's broader than just travel.

1:32:32Travel, I think Casey nailed the redundancy, more than one device. Marco? I also use 1Password. I mean, I use 1Password and Apple iCloud Keychain, which is still exactly as messy as it sounds. I still have not resolved that. But anyway, my 1Password, they have these recovery code things. And I have those in a physically secure place. I have them on paper in a physically secure place. And I would say whether that's a safe somewhere, a lockbox, a bank safety deposit box, whatever it is for you, I would suggest doing that. Humans are pretty good at guarding physical important things. We have important documents that we have to keep as people on Earth and things like that.

1:33:18And so we've gotten good at guard this physical piece of paper as if it's very important to you. um and so whatever mechanism you have in place for that i would say do that the the risk to somebody like like you know most of us is not super high because most risk of like you know losing access or having hackers gain access to our accounts would usually happen remotely it would usually be internet based you know not somebody breaking into your house and finding your lock box and stuff like that so yeah use those recovery codes i don't use those for everything um like a lot of those I will just store in 1Password or Apple Keychain or both in some weird messy way.

1:33:57But, you know, use those, use the backup code, store them somewhere. But for the really important stuff like 1Password itself or maybe Dropbox, you know, depending on like, you know, how you're using these different services, maybe your Apple ID, the really important stuff that you would need to like bootstrap a new device or a new access setup, have actually the physical codes for those things so that you can, you know, if all of your hardware is gone, whether it gets stolen or maybe it gets destroyed in a flood or a fire or whatever, if all your hardware is gone, how do you get back into your digital life?

1:34:28If you can just, if you like, you buy a new laptop or iPhone, how do you get back in? Have a plan for that in some way that does not rely on you just having access to another device. That's it. Alright. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace, and thank you to our members who support us directly. you can join and hear all our fun new stuff at atv.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental or who is accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m anti-marco-r-m-n-s-i-r-a-c USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech podcast so long So, I don't even know what to do.

1:35:59So, I am subscribed to UPS My Choice is what it used to be called. I don't know what it's called now. where what that lets you do is say, okay, I am the resident at such and such an address. Whenever something is shipped to me via UPS, you know, let me know and give me a tracking number and let me know some information about it. So a day or two ago, I got an email saying that something was coming to me and was arriving, I guess, that day or whatever. I was like, well, that's odd. I have no idea what this is. And so I signed into UPS My Choice, and it said that there was a 36-pound package coming to me, which was a little bit confusing, to say the least.

1:36:38Dog food? No, no. I didn't have anything that I knew about that was coming that was heavy. And it is relatively unusual that we get shipments for anything but chewy if it's dog food time, which it's almost, but not yet, and Amazon. So we do get UPS shipments and occasionally FedEx shipments, but it's fairly unusual. And usually Aaron and I will be aware of what's forthcoming. So I see there's a 36-pound shipment, and I was able to log into my choice and get information about where it was shipped from. And I genuinely don't remember the town, but it was quickly apparent to me that Marco has been taking care of things within his house.

1:37:19Now, what's funny is I think it was literally the day before that we had recorded the iMac tier list. So I guess this was Monday because we were, yeah, because we recorded Sunday nights. I guess this was Monday, maybe Tuesday. So it was like a day within 48 hours of recording the iMac tier list where I had thoughts about a couple of iMacs. And most of the iMacs didn't care. A couple of them, though, I had some real big thoughts. And one of them that, and I won't name what it is. Well, I guess I have to name what it is. I will say that I have really big thoughts about the iMac Pro. And I went to the front door after this package was delivered, and it was one of those, not trapezoidal, but one of those pizza wedge-shaped boxes.

1:38:02And I knew immediately, well, actually, my first thought was, oh, he sent me the LG 5K, which actually, I wouldn't mind having another. It would be kind of fun to have that as a porch monitor rather than my beloved but not very remarkable 4K monitor. And then, it occurred to me, oh, no, no, no, no. This is not a rectangle. This is a pie. Oh, God, he sent me an iMac. And I opened it up. And sure enough, I am now the reluctant owner of your old iMac Pro. So thanks, bud. What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Did you open it? I saw that there was what appeared to be an iMac in there. I didn't look closely at it.

1:38:42Oh, God. Oh, no. You're such an amateur about getting junk from Marco. you have to look in the box what are you doing is it is it nearby it's downstairs but i am happy to go get it oh jesus all right do i need to go down there could be a live animal in there carry it upstairs and open it up all right hold on you i'm gonna disappear for minutes so god only knows what you're gonna say while i'm gone but all right i will let you know when i'm back i am disappearing keep the box closed and carry it upstairs carry it upstairs closed no you have to pause we're gonna have to edit this out vamp for a minute because i want to hear about john stuff so I'm leaving, I'm leaving, I'm leaving.

1:39:12All right.

1:39:16Okay, I'm back. I want you to open it up on the air. Okay, okay, hold on. So what I'm going to try to do here, because I don't have the slack on my microphone, so hold on, bear with me. Hold on, I got to undo, I'm going to regret. Just use the microphone on the LG, it'll be fine. Too soon. All right, hold on, I got to take all this goddarn Velcro off. I'm going to have so many regrets when I try to put this together tomorrow. it's a puppy that's not funny it's a 37 pound puppy i'm saying this we have to always do you get a box like that and not actually look what's in it i thought i peeked at it and okay i'm guessing i take everything out come on you don't know what he's hiding in there it could all be packed with kindles it better not be oh my god i think i ran out i sent them all to you all right i can't my microphone okay i can't do this very well i only got some slack but i've got enough oh Jesus, this weighs a ton.

1:40:09Don't drop the iMac and don't put it anywhere near the windshield of any of your cars. Aaron has now come in and is very concerned. Imagine if he shatters his glass desk by touching it with the corner of the iMac Pro. Oh, that'd be amazing. Hold on. She's helping me lift it because I am chained to the desk here. Oh, there's actually Tom Binns in here. Oh, I like that. In the keyboard slot in the iMac box. All right. Did you not send the peripherals because you're using them? I did not look closely enough, clearly. All right, there's the box that once had... Thank you, Aaron. That once had a power supply in it.

1:40:46Hold on. Let me put this back on here. A power supply? What are you talking about? The cord. Oh, there's cords in here. Yeah, the power cord. Oh, mother of God. This looks like the connector for an LG. All right, hold on. How do we get this out? Oh, God. I just lifted the goddamn thing, And I can tell from the stupid lifting mechanism, this is the LG 5K. You're finally rid of it.

1:41:14It fits perfectly in an iMac Pro box. Actually, I need to take a picture of this because it is flawless. Hold on. The live listeners won't be able to see this. And my office is a freaking mess right now. Hold on. I got to take a picture of this because it fits flawlessly in the box. Oh, my God. This is perfect. Well, hey, now I can tell you I am not the reluctant owner of your old iMac Pro. I'm the happy owner of a second LG 5K. That's super delightful. So you looked in the box and you couldn't tell the difference between an LG 5K and an iMac Pro. I only glanced at it. I had like that big like white, like kind of foamy wrapper that goes around the iMac.

1:41:53Exactly. That's all I saw. And it looked right to me. I still had that. So I put that around the LG because it fits perfectly. I'm going to put it in Slack and then maybe, Marco, this is not a great picture because it's dark in here blah blah blah but maybe marco you can uh you can turn the lights on it's okay no because the no well first of all i want to remain sleepy in my sleepy clothes and my sleepy shirt but beyond that you just lifted a 40 pound box i know tell me about it uh but beyond that the more important thing is that there's a piddly little teeny tiny light bulb in the overhead fan which i've now been forbidden to turn on during recording and even if i did turn it on the light bulb is currently blown because i never use it so there is no light in this room it was like a It's like a scene from Blair Witch, the lighting you've got going on in this room.

1:42:36So anyway, so I've just put it in Slack for you two, and maybe we can make it the chapter art for this chapter. Yeah, what's missing there is a gigantic dark silver space gray foot of an iMac Pro. Well, at a glance, it looked like it, especially because you can see more of the foot now, but Marco had intelligently put the cardboard box that slots in that spot. So I saw something that was dark that was the shape of an iMac that was in an iMac Pro box. it's clearly an iMac Pro. And I gotta be honest with you, I was not happy about receiving this iMac Pro because what the f*** am I supposed to do with an iMac Pro today?

1:43:11Are you happier getting a second 5K? Yes, I actually am. I genuinely am, which it's gonna be great. Even after the start of recording today when your 5K may have been to blame? That's true, actually. Now I have a redundant 5K. See, it's perfect. Flawless victory. Thanks, bud. I appreciate it. There's a house in our town that every summer as decoration, they set up a big row of bobbleheads on their front retaining wall. That's going to be your desk. It's just going to be like this row of bobblehead monitors. Just bubble, blah, blah, blah. Series of 5K is all shaking back and forth. The funny thing is, hand to God, I was trying to lift this thing out of the cardboard shell that rests in.

1:43:48And I went to lift because it's sitting upright. And I went to lift up from the base of the screen. and that bastard just came flying up just like that piece of crap LG stand loves to do. And I was pretty damn sure that was the LG 5K, but the moment that thing came flying almost out of the box when I lifted it up, oh, nope, that's 5K. I'd know that piece of crap stand anywhere. Thanks, bud. I feel much better now. And a couple of Tom Bins, too. You love me. You really love me. So when you say Tom Bins, what are they? Like little pouches? Yeah, yeah, like little cable organizer pouches. yeah i had some so yeah so i was you know cleaning out the house to sell it and you know when when you are getting ready to move as you're packing things you're like do i really want to pay to move this and then have this in the new place like do i like this thing enough that i want to actually move it and that can make you make some some real honest decisions and it can be really difficult to make some of those decisions this was not a difficult one this this one was like as i'm you know this is what i was using last week when we recorded and i edited the show last week and as we're doing all that all that i'm like do i want to move this thing that i hate i hate this monitor so much so instead i i had to pack it into something um so instead of packing it into a box on onto the box truck and having to haul it back and forth and take up space and and move it into the new place eventually and deal with it.

1:45:14I mean, you know what? I'm just going to pack this into whatever box I can find in my attic that it fits in and mail it to Virginia. So there you go. Thanks bud. So now I'm happy to report as of minutes ago. Well, actually as of days ago, I just didn't realize it as of minutes ago, if I go to work on the porch, which I actually intended to do today because it was gorgeous here and then never got around to it. Now I can do so by using an LG 5k, which is a much better experience than my LG 4K. So this is delightful. It can be your outdoor rated monitor. Yes, exactly right. Now it's my kink too. Look at that.

1:45:49All right, John, since you apparently did a better job of investigating and interrogating your gift shipment, can you tell me what you learned about what Marco shipped you? I was going to say that if he actually had sent you the iMac Pro, then maybe he sent the wrong shipments to the wrong people. But now that it's the 5K, he sent the right thing because I sure as hell don't want that thing. it might have been a better troll to send it to you yeah and i have to say to start marco occasionally does this and it's a very nice thing that he does he's sending us things and as he makes it sound like oh i'm getting rid of my junk but honestly there's these are things that have value and it's nice that he takes the time and spends the money to ship them to his friends instead of just like free cycling them or trying to sell them or whatever so i just want to say thank you to marco it's a very nice thing that you do when you get rid of your old tech stuff and you send it to us we appreciate it yes especially now that i know what's in there and it's not just an iMac Pro that I was planning to just bring to Apple and get store credit for because I didn't know what the hell else to do with it.

1:46:42But no, I don't even want to think about how much it was to ship this damn thing to me. So thank you. It was like 50 bucks. And best 50 bucks I ever spent, I think. Like, that was worth it. But still, it's a nice thing. But that said, the things that Marco sends aren't always, are sometimes puzzling. And I think this is the biggest stumper that I've gotten ever. Oh no. first when Marco is in this mode and he's like I'm getting rid of my stuff and I'm gonna be nice and pay to ship it to my friends one thing that isn't in his mind is let me find out how I can pack this safely that's why he uses Kindles for example as packing material oh there's a gap between this tech product and the edge of the box what if I just wedge three or four Kindles in there there now it doesn't move around as much that's about the extent of his packing abilities so i have to say the contents of this box it was in a cardboard box and there was no padding whatsoever on anything it was like the thinnest piece of corrugated cardboard you can possibly imagine and then stuff right and it was packed in to try to say well i think he was actually looking in the house what kind of things do i have that i could wedge in here so things don't move around too much but that's again the extent of the packing that is correct yeah because it looks like it looks like i i need something that's skinny that will fit here that will fill this space so what he found let's start he there is something that it's a it's a blu-ray reader and writer it's the buffalo that popular one that everyone was uh saying you should get this one if you want to rip and write blu-ray optical discs uh it's got a you know usb connected dc power connector so that the cables are in there and the things in there i already have a blu-ray reader i think i have a samsung but i don't actually have a writer so it's nice to have this assuming the writer still works and it wasn't just packing material so that one it's like okay i don't think i really need this i've never actually written a blu-ray but i you know i do read them occasionally if my other one dies now i have a second one it's small so whatever although you know it's like micro usb if you remember what that connector looks like it's gross but anyway so there's that then there is a plastic spindle if you remember those from back in the day of writable blu-ray discs hey convenient i don't know i still don't quite know why i would ever want to write anything to a blu-ray disc but if i did i don't have to buy them oh it's thrilling yeah assuming the discs in there aren't all bad at this point oh they won't be because did you see what kind they are no i didn't let's see what does it say they're m discs permanent storage solutions designed to last up to a thousand years oh goodness up to it says though so that could be like 30 seconds right well yeah technically because 30 seconds is also up to a thousand years um so maybe i'll try that maybe i'll try writing some stuff but that's not the main concept of this box that was packing material to be wedged against the main contents of this box those were spacers yeah given that i've described these spacers casey can you think of what might be a similar dimensions to a spindle of optical discs and a blu-ray writer how many optical discs was it it's like a stack it's like an inch high stack and then the the the blu-ray writer is like you know it's a square that's about the size of a blu-ray oh god i don't know a kindles i have no idea uh usb pre why i would never get rid of one of those yeah fair uh what is in this box i'll put the picture in of this amazing packing jog on our slack so you can look at it uh it's two full-size home pods look at this just look at this packing job casey look at the piece of cardboard between them who is he kidding with that piece of cardboard like this is my separator material see it's like padding i'm amazed that these things came to i'm not going to say unscathed because the home pods are a little worse for wear but honestly i can't tell if that's damage if that's damage incurred during shipment or damage incurred when they were at marco's house i don't i can't tell oh my god so now here's the here's the conundrum all right so i already have a full-size home pod i've all got one when they were released right and it's in my living room doing its thing i've got these two things i'm like oh two home pods oh well it was like first i thought are these the ones that were flaking out of marco yeah they're kind of all flaking out they all flake out yeah yeah i mean so far mine hasn't been mostly but i barely use it but I'm like okay well I'm sure I'll be able to find a place for these in the house and since I've got them I've been puzzling it over and I cannot figure out what the hell I'm going to do with these things neither could I that's why I said it to you I even I went into my daughter's room the other day and she was listening to music on her home pod not her home pod her on her google home mini the really really tiny puck thing and she's listening to music on it I'm like oh this is this is it like I immediately go boom perfect would you like me to replace that google home mini with the home pod it'll sound way better and you know you'll have a home pod in your room isn't that cool you could even have a stereo pair and before i could get the words in her mouth she's like nope nope nope nope can you guess why she didn't want it because she likes the google stuff because siri sucks yeah i was i'll go with siri sucks you're not thinking like teenager too big it's too big the google home mini is tiny and unobtrusive and this thing is here's the thing we talk about this with like the iMac like why does it have to be so thin and who cares about that or whatever non-tech people people who aren't into tech things as like a hobby do not want technology products to be to be dominant in their space the home pod is too big for a teenage girl's bedroom if she doesn't care about home pods or like any of that tech stuff or whatever it takes up too much volume it is too prominent it's too ugly it draws too much attention to itself whereas the tiny little puck of the google home mini is practically buried under the other stuff that's there it's like so unobtrusive uh and then secondarily she said because she never wants to do anything that i tell her to do um so at least she's self-aware but it's totally true i mean she is a teenager that's that's their job so i'm like okay what am i gonna do with these i briefly thought about replacing the speakers that are on my desk for for my mac no you can't do that it's too laggy exactly as i remember when we talked about it i'm like no i don't want to deal with the lag and not only laggy but but do i want flakiness involving audio on my computer no i do not like my my speakers are you know cheap cruddy speakers but they're connected directly with an analog audio cable to the back of my mac and there's no latency and they work every single time and you know so that's that's out i'm looking around the house like well i've got one home pod in here if i put the other home pod i'm gonna get a stereo pair but i have surround speakers in that room of the fancy speakers that i bought see past episodes there's not really any home place for like to even just do stereo music and my one big home pod is like buried in the corner behind everything as a punishment for being bad um like it's got like photos in front of it and it's like like we use it to play christmas carols when we're decorating the tree and when we're decorating trees actually relocated to the other side of the room but that's it but like if i'm going to play stereo music i have much better like full surround stereo speaker system that i could run and i don't have a place to put two home pods if i wanted to do like let them do their home potty thing like i don't i don't know where they would go and plus i have two extra ones not just one um i thought about putting them as the tv speakers to the upstairs tv that was mixed immediately my wife said i barely use that tv and i don't want two giant home pods in our bedroom and honestly there's not really a place for them there either the kitchen i mean like there's not a lot of place that we no one really listens to music out loud in the house so i'm still puzzling it over right now they're just sitting on the desk behind me looking very sad but their cords dangling off the end of the desk uh and i don't know what i'm gonna do with them but i'll i'll figure something out i mean worst case scenario i could like i should have offered them to my son we just took him to college the other day uh do you want these for your dorm room he almost certainly doesn't but maybe he would say, sure, why not?

1:54:01Or something like that. But we have to, we're driving a mini fridge out to him in a little bit because we're taking separate trips for various reasons. Oh, because your car isn't big enough to hold it all? Mr. A sedan is all you need? No, it is absolutely big enough to hold it all, but I didn't want to pack it all in. And also you have to remember, so when your kid goes to school close to where you live, the phenomenon of, oh, I don't have to make sure I have everything because I'll just remember what I don't have and ask for a second trip that is absolutely in effect just like by the time we got home i had text messages oh can you bring me this and this and this and we and we legit forgot at least one thing we forgot like his mattress topper thing which we meant to bring with us because it was in the basement so we're going out there a second time no matter what so anyway maybe these will come with me and i'll say hey you want these and he'll probably say no for the same variety of reasons and you know anyway uh i'm puzzling it over but uh yeah now i've got two uh sad looking on big HomePods and a bunch of optical discs.

1:54:58Fun. At least they're not that big. They're the full-size ones. I mean, just like the box. I didn't get a gigantic box arriving in my house or whatever. Honestly, as soon as I saw the package coming, I kind of had a notion of what they might be, but the second I saw it sitting on my porch, I'm like, oh, it's HomePods. Just tell from the weight and the dimensionality, I know what a big HomePod's like. That's what's in here. Yeah, because the big HomePods are very heavy. They're very dense objects like you pick one up you're like whoa so do you have any suggestions for what i can do with these because i'm really it's really stumping me like i'm not against them like i think they're good speakers they're two good speakers and i can airplay to them like they should have a function somewhere in my life i would strongly advise not using them in a stereo pair if that if that changes things so why stereo pair home pods are so buggy standalone home pods are bad enough standalone home pods are themselves quite buggy but the bugginess goes up dramatically with stereo pairs which is a shame because so does the sound quality and so it sucks that you can't really use them in the way they sound the best if you want them to be reliable at all oh i thought of a use i thought of a use go on continue i i would say like anywhere that you might be able to anywhere that you might put a single home pod that maybe could use an improvement in volume or quality put this there or mail them to casey yeah no no i don't want them i don't want to you know keeps sending these like the sisterhood of the traveling uh home pods um but now here's the thought so uh when covid started we made my wife like a little home office downstairs i think we talked about this we got her a nice fancy standing desk motorized thing and she her work gave her a bunch of like work at home equipment including a gigantic like 32 inch dell monitor or something or other it's not retina but it's huge um anyway she's got her office down there and at some point i got the sonos uh toblerone thing um what does that call the rome yeah the rome the rome is the one that looks like a little uh toblerone right the triangle yeah yep yep yep anyway um she's got that down there but that's you know not a good speaker no so that that means she wanted that but she said i you know she had like a little mini bluetooth speaker and she saw that i had my room that i use in the shower she's like oh i want one of those so i got her one so she does listen to music out loud and so i should bring both home pods down there because There's plenty of room down there.

1:57:16Like it's just her office area. There's not a lot of junk down there. The only downside is if they are flaky, I'm going to hear immediately. Just give me back my Sonos thing. Because at least it plays musical and I want it to play. I mean, it's worth a try. Yeah, I'm definitely going to try that. I mean, she knows I got them and she didn't immediately say, can I have them in my office? So I think she might be kind of wary of them too. But she does listen to the program. So I'll make a second attempt at pitching her on having these in her office. But she might also say they're kind of big and, you know, whatever.

1:57:42I mean, they sound amazing for their size too. Like, that's what's what's so frustrating to me about the HomePods is that I love the way they sound. They sound great. They're just really hard to use because they're because, you know, they lack any kind of input. And so, like, I can't I can't bypass their flaky smarts because, you know, you have to you have to still use AirPlay to connect to them. So like so that's that's no good. There's no line in. There's no there's no input method at all besides the flakiness. but once you can actually get them to connect and use them they sound incredible but that's just such a huge asterisk and such a huge downside for them it makes it really hard to use them you could have just gotten a bunch more sonos stuff and that would have been fine i guess marco isn't sending it to you for free though yeah again i didn't have a need for this but yeah i'm just gonna put them down there and not tell her and just like get them get them set up somehow and just like next time she goes down there i'll i'll start playing music and she'll be like whoa where's this great music coming from that's that's optimistic i think that's how we that's how we imagine it will work but it's not how it's gonna actually work i think i think it'll be more like you'll be like standing on the stairs trying to make your phone connect to them and you'll be like hold on hold on just wait just hold on one more second one more second just like let me let me get this going more likely she's gonna go down there and she's gonna say why did you put your junk by my desk get that off of there like she's gonna think i put them down there to store them not that i'm trying to do a nice thing and it's like you can listen to music it's like you know that stuff that marco sent you is your problem don't get it near my office Beep, beep, beep.