626: No Longer ery Good

33:50But I don't really understand why we are all so worked up about this. It could be like a government contracts. You can only use this software if it's Unix compliant in some government application. But honestly, if that was the case, that there would be people in government taking macOS and making it worse and less secure, to pass government compliance stuff, which, again, is not too surprising. Yeah, there's always reasons for this type of stuff, but it would be nice if they moved on from this. But apparently they're still doing it, so there you have it. We had talked a couple of weeks ago. Was it over time, I believe, that we were talking about this?

34:24Is that right? Yeah, I think so. The Switch 2 intro. Right, we were talking about the Switch 2 introduction, and I believe, if memory serves, Marco was convinced that the Joy-Cons would not support any sort of mouse movement, and John was convinced that they absolutely would. And it turns out that John is owed a dollar from Marco because... We don't know that yet, but it's leaning in my direction. It's certainly looking, all signs point to yes. So reading from Ars Technica, the Japanese language patent about the Switch 2 Joy-Cons, whose illustrations match what we've seen of Switch 2 Joy-Cons precisely, features an English abstract describing, quote, a sensor for mouse operation, quote, that can detect reflected light from a detected surface, the light changing by moving over the detected surface.

35:07Much like any number of optical computer mice, schematic drawings in the patent show how the light source and light sensor are squeezed inside the Joy-Con with a built-in lens for directing the light to and from each. A machine translation of the full text of the patent describes the controller as a novel input device that can be used as a mouse and other than a mouse. I love patent language. That could also be the translation, but yes. In mouse mode, as described in the patent, the user cradles the outer edge of the controller with their palm and places the inner edge on, for example, a desk or the like.

35:36Side mousing. Yep, yep. I think it's a thing. I mean, we'll see. You're right. It's not a done deal. It certainly seems like a thing. We had talked about at some point how it's difficult to hear dialogue on TV shows these days because the three of us are old. And Nicholas Carrente writes, On the topic of poor dialogue mixing in streaming shows and movies, I've been using the solution for years now, and it works great. Use AirPods with your Apple TV. The sound quality is excellent, and I can understand dialogue clearly every time. What makes it even better is that Apple TV lets multiple people connect their AirPods simultaneously.

36:09My partner and I have made this our default way to watch TV. We only switch back to regular speakers when we have multiple guests over. It's become such a game changer that I consider Apple TV's best feature. Have any of you ever tried this setup either solo or with someone else? I do do this probably once or twice a week when it's just me. A great example of this is from my kitchen, you can see into the living room, and since slash R slash TV too high, you can see the TV from the kitchen. But in order to hear it, I either need to grab one of my Sonos portable speakers, which occasionally I'll do, or I'll just throw in my AirPods and then I can hear it much better without having to crank, you know, the main sound system.

36:45But I can't say that I've ever done this with Aaron and it sounds like it would be awfully burdensome to start and stop every time. But again, I've never tried it, so I might have that, you know, totally wrong. Yeah, this is kind of a testament to how difficult it is to get good audio in home home uh television watching environments because i mean i think most people just move use their tv speakers and tv speakers are usually terrible uh and that means that whatever sound was recorded in the show setting aside how well the dialogue is mixed in it or whatever it has to pass through your cruddy tv speakers and bounce off the back of the plastic casing and the wall and the floor and everything and eventually get to your ears and by the time it gets there it's substantially changed from what was originally put into the show again setting aside whether what was put into the show was good or not that what the air pods are doing for you there is they're cutting out all that in between stuff we'll get the audio digitally to very close to your ear and then we will amplify it and play it into your ear holes and so all that stuff that i talked about the shape of your room your walls your cruddy tv speakers that is all eliminated from things that can make the dialogue hard to hear and you were left only with how well was dialogue mixed if everybody had a like theater quality you know speaker setup for their television this wouldn't be as big an issue you'd when you were sitting on your couch you'd still only have the problem of how was the audio mixed on the show and you wouldn't have those other problems so most people just don't do that even if people have something like a soundbar or whatever it's not like that is even calibrated in any way or may actually be making things worse when it comes to dialogue legibility than the television speakers which are often tuned to make dialogue uh understandable at the cost of other things uh so yeah most people don't have uh fancy hi-fi setups and it actually is surprisingly difficult to get a home theater setup to do a good job on audio because most of the audio comes out of the center channel speaker and for a variety of reasons the center channel channel speaker in home theater setup is like the unloved stepchild it is not the the glory speaker it is not the one that people think about and yet it is the most important speaker when you're hearing people talk on a television show and so so many things about the design the physical design of center channel speakers i think i talked to this on a show a while ago when i was talking about my home theater setup um are conspire to make the center channel very bad at what it does uh and yeah headphones are a great solution to that.

39:12If the pairing works well and if you have a small number of people, that's great. And also, if you don't want to disturb people elsewhere in the house. Yep, yep. And also to get ahead of follow-up, you had said uncalibrated soundbars that I get the point of what you're saying, but I can do, I forget what it's called, it's not true tone, but it's something where I take my phone and wave it around the room while the Sonos is playing some sort of particular tone and it will do, maybe not the kind of calibration you're talking about, John, but some modicum of calibration. Yeah, no, I think people just don't even do that like that's fair too burdensome like they don't they don't look it up but most most sound bars do have something that you can do to help now does that process help and how good is it compared to the the fancy ones but still i i bet most people who have a sound bar take it out of the box hook it up sound comes out sit down that's all like they're not seeking only only like home theater nerds or like actual professional installers are going to even bother launching that app and trying to do it definitely all right i have a little bit of news with regard to my status board project.

40:10Uh, apparently a listener of ATP reached out to, uh, James from home is where the smart is, which is a mostly a UK, uh, well, it's a business, a business in the UK, as well as a, uh, like video in a YouTube channel and website and whatnot. And James was kind enough to reach out to me, uh, after doing so, but let me read, uh, what home is where the smart is, is all about. This is what James had written. The trouble was most guides I found to doing LED stuff seemed too involved, even for me, usually with soldering and jumper wires all over the place. So my dad and I set about making the easiest starter boards we could as he is the brains behind the circuit board designs.

40:46So we've designed these very small boards, which can be powered from USB if you wish, or mainly for strips that are different voltages like 12 volts and 24 volts. You can leave the USB alone and power the strip instead with an external power supply and the board will power from the strip. So James was kind enough to reach out and send me all the way across the pond, send me a couple of the Homes Where the Smart Is boards. And what these are, are hilariously, ridiculously, absurdly tiny ESP32 boards with a little bit of electronics around them. It's ridiculous how small these things are. I cannot overstate how impressively tiny they are.

41:23It's basically the ESP32 and the teeniest little bit of electronics around. I know said that, but like, I cannot stress enough. I'd never seen an ESP 32 before. And they're so freaking small. They're like the size, less than the size of an American post stamp. So anyways, James has sent me one of these and sent me a small strip of, you know, nanopixels or what is, I forget the name of it, but it's like the, whatever I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, the 8212 or something like that. I'll put a link in the show notes. Forgive me. I forget exactly what these are, but what this allows me to do is, you know, he, James had pre-assembled all of this for me.

41:57And what it is, is it's this ESP32, which he has preloaded with WLED, which is a home assistant style, like open source project with the best URL I've ever seen in my life. The URL for WLED project is KNO.WLED.GE, which spells out knowledge. So good. So good. Anyway, so it's this WLED software. And what I did was I plugged in the strip to a USB port. I connected to the Wi-Fi that this little itty bitty postage stamp size chip is broadcasting. I set it, I gave it my actual Wi-Fi credentials. And the next thing you know, I have a web interface for controlling the strip of like 10 LEDs, which is cool.

42:41And I guess there's a open source iPhone app that you can download from the store or whatever, and you can control them that way as well, which is also cool. But the key though, is that as soon as I went back to Home Assistant, have I told you guys I'm into Home Assistant these days? Maybe we should talk about it. I went back to Home Assistant and I opened it up and said, hey, I just detected a new WLED device. And so I think you might want to use it. And I said, yes, yes, I do. And within not too terribly long, I now have my status board insofar as a strip of little LED lights that are addressable and the hue or the color is configurable and the brightness.

43:17And so I have a red LED for when the garage door is open, a white LED that changes the brightness based on the inverse of how charged the car is. When the car is almost charged, it's very, very dim, and it goes off when it's charged. When it's not very charged at all, it's as bright as the sun, or at least that's what it seems like sometimes. And then finally, a blue LED for when the mail is waiting for us. Now, you might ask, where have I mounted this? And right now, it's just sitting free-balling on my desk because I haven't figured out where to put it. But this is such cool tech. And And the historical commission is not aware of much of this happening at this time because I haven't figured out where to mount it.

43:54I think, to be honest with you, I might just mount it on the incredible forehead of one of my LG 5Ks. It's just so it's in the office. Because as Marco was chuckling and remembers, the forehead in the LG 5K is quite, I mean, it's only like an inch, but it seems just obscenely large when you look at it. And so I might just mount it there and then plug the USB power into the back of the studio, or excuse me, the LG 5K. I just got to say this tech is so cool and getting these components individually again James was kind enough to send these for free and didn't ask for a plug or anything but I'm genuinely plugging because I enjoyed it but you can get these boards and I think Americans you'd have to dispatch them from Amazon UK which is probably a little bit pricey but nevertheless you can get these itty bitty teeny tiny boards and you can get these pretty affordable LED strips and you can do whatever you want.

44:48And this WLED software is super cool. You can power through MQTT, or not power, but you can configure it through MQTT. You can configure it through Home Assistant. I'm sure there's like a REST API or something if you want to go that route. All extremely cool stuff. And as if that wasn't good enough, our friends at Terminal delivered my terminal. And I believe John's as well. And so I set mine up and I'll let John talk and speak to whether or not he did anything with his yet. This thing is really freaking cool. Now they are a future sponsor and they did send me a freebie. So I'm telling you my genuine, honest opinion.

45:17But to be fair, they did send me a free one and they will be sponsoring in the future. But it is very cool. And the only thing that kind of bummed me out a little bit about it was I didn't realize that for purposes of keeping the battery to last more than five minutes, it only refreshes at most every 15 minutes. And so at first, before mine showed up, I'd like coded up this whole web sockets based thing that showed the status board in the corner of the terminal. And I was all excited for it. And then I plugged it all in and I opened the garage door and nothing happened. And it took me a while to realize, oh, nothing happened because it only updates every like 15 minutes.

45:52And it does that for perfectly good reason. It's because if you refresh even every 15 minutes, it dramatically less battery life than it would be otherwise. And once I took that status board off and told it, no, no, no, no, no, anything else you're showing, you can refresh once an hour, maybe even more than that battery life has been phenomenal. And so since I optioned the bigger battery, I got to imagine this is going to last at least a couple of months, maybe even as much. I think they quoted six months, but we'll see what happens. But I really like this terminal thing. And it's very affordable.

46:22So even if I had paid for it, I think I would be saying all the same stuff. It is very slick and very cool. And the fact that you can cause update, or I shouldn't say cause updates, the fact that you can give their servers updates, which eventually the terminal will go and request via WebSockets is super cool. Not WebSockets. I keep saying WebSockets. What am I thinking of? Webhooks? Webhook. Thank you, John. Gosh, you saved my life there. Anytime I've said WebSocket in the last few minutes, I meant Webhook. I apologize. That's 100 % my fault. AKA an HTTP request. AKA an HTTP request. You're exactly right.

46:54But anyways, very cool stuff. I really enjoy the stuff that James had sent. Again, home is where the smart is. We'll put a link in the show notes. I've really enjoyed this terminal thing. And even if you're not interested in either of those devices, ultimately, they're both powered by the same stuff, which is the ESP32, which is that little teeny tiny chip. Very good. John, have you any updates on your terminal? I got mine and I set it up. I tried a bunch of different display settings. Once the terminal website fixed its broken CSS because their CSS was 404ing over the weekend, somebody pushed a bad update there.

47:31But anyway, they fixed that. But what I landed on was weather and calendar, but not the month calendar, because I found that the month calendar with the amount of stuff our family has on our shared calendar with all our stuff in it is just too much information for that small of a display, especially if you want anything else to be there. So I kind of wish they sold one that was four times as big. Yeah, I hear that. I do. Right? Because then I would have more room for them. So what I have is I have the calendar showing just the day's activity. Well, it shows like the next couple of days, but it's not the whole big grid of the calendar month or whatever.

48:06And then the weather. And I was trying to find out where I'm going to put this in the house. I ended up putting it basically like over the thermostat in the dining room. It's in a place central in the house. You walk by it a lot. When we get ready in the morning, people are eating breakfast at that table. They can glance up and see what the weather is and what's on the schedule for the day. But usually the question is, for me, they're asking me, do you have a podcast tonight? i say it's on the calendar it's not a quite like they'll be shocked that i have a podcast on and i for something that's been on the calendar for like months at a time or in the case of atp is just always like what anyway it it's on the calendar but they don't see the calendar or they you know so anyway now there is slightly less of an excuse because they're walking literally walking by the thing every day that says what my podcast schedule is and also you know it's got everyone else's schedule on there as well so i am enjoying it i'm also curious to see how long the battery will last I also got the bigger battery.

48:58I just stuck it on the wall. It was fully charged when I put it there, and we'll see how long it lasts. Yeah, I have mine set to only refresh I think every 30 minutes or hour. Yeah, I think mine's close to that. And I have yet to have to charge it. I stuck it on the wall with Velcro strips, and it's still there. That was, I think, a month and a half ago or two months? Yeah, a couple of quick notes on that. But first of all, my setup is during the morning when it's like the high transit getting out the door sort of situation. I have the left-hand side show the next day's calendar. The right-hand side is then split in half again.

49:38So it's the weather at the top and countdown until spring break for the kids on the bottom. And then once everyone is kind of migrated out of the house, the kind of steady state of it is the monthly calendar, which for me, I totally understand what you're saying, John. But for us, that's still simple enough that we can get away with it. and then the other thing I was going to say is I believe and I check my math on this but I think that a lot of terminals back-end stuff is either is or will be open source so hypothetically John you could get your own e-ink display you know of a different size and use a lot of their software or maybe fork their software to power it now I know that you probably don't have any interest in that nor do I but that is something that I think they would enable you to do if you wanted to go down that route again check my math on that i might be lying to you by accident yeah probably although i would imagine any ink screen of the size that i want actually would be kind of expensive because if you think about the biggest e-ink devices like the remarkable tablets or whatever they do start to get costly when the screens get big so i'm not even sure how big they may make e-ink screens these days yep all right john any hyperspace updates for us yep uh the test flight is ongoing we passed an important milestone this past week which is that the test light version will now uh reclaim one file for real in your updates uh i i tried i was trying to figure out what would be the first step between like you know not actually making any changes but you know we would do all the work right up into it but then it would just throw away the work that it did because i didn't want to mess with people's discs until i always had some confidence i figured one file was the best choice because at the end of reclaiming it can point you to you know this big button to reveal it in the finder here is the one file look at the one file make because if i if i did like more than one i was like oh i don't want to manually check those files but you can manually check one file and what i want you to do all the testers i want them to reclaim one file for real and look at that file and make sure it's not destroyed i i disabled the setting that that like skips the trash can or whatever if it is destroyed pull out the original from the trash right but so far no one has reported any kind of uh damage or problem with the restoration process uh i think people are reclaiming people have said they successfully claim they say oh it looks fine to me it looks fine works fine i tried it you know like so good thumbs up i'm gonna be in the one file mode for a little while partially because we're going on a family trip soon and during that time i don't want to be messing with too much test flight stuff so there'll be a little bit of a pause here uh while i paused everybody who is a beta tester uh please keep reclaiming one file you if you have a thing that says oh i found uh you know 10 000 files you can reclaim all of them you just got to do 10 000 separate runs and do one file for real each time uh as i said in the testing notes if you want to pick which file that is just deselect everything except for a single file group and then within that file group only select one file and then you can guarantee which one file it will do otherwise i think it picks the biggest file um but yeah the bug i've burned down all the outstanding bug reports as far as i'm aware there's some enhancement requests and stuff like that but i'm getting close to uh being ready to ship this like i said my uh my trip will probably put a little delay in this but probably early next month i'm probably going to be shipping this or maybe even before then uh because i'm i'm i've more or less drawn a line in the sand that i'm not going to add more features at this point although i did sneak one in a couple days ago but i'm really getting to the point where i just want to say what's there is what's there make sure it works and then i got to do all the other stuff of you know try to find some way to make screenshots for this i was such a bad job on the screenshots it's not a very exciting app um make a web page announcement thing blah blah blah um yeah it's getting close the testers testers have been great i did start a slack for it by the way i mentioned that in the um uh the test flight notes slack has been so weird like i made a slack for it i have a slack for uh switch class as well but like the invite link that i put in there for some people it has never worked and yet other people have been joining successfully with that link as early as recently as today some people say oh this link has expired some i tried it myself and it worked for me when i did it in an incognito window but other people say yeah that link never works so anyway if you want to join the slack as i say in the notes you can just email the address that's listed there and just say hey i want to join the slack and the link didn't work for me i don't know why the link doesn't work for you i can't figure out what's wrong with slack these days but it's an issue but anyway um yeah people have been filing great reports.

54:05Some people have joined the Slack because they prefer to give feedback that way. Some people are emailing me. Some people are using test flight feedback. It's all systems are go. Oh, and I will release a version of the app that reclaims everything for real after I have a little bit more confidence with the one file thing. But so far, so good. You know, as a quick aside with regard to Slack, I was using Slack on my iPad, which I do somewhat regularly. And for the millionth time, I hit the up arrow in order to, I think I was in the midst of editing a multi-line thing and I hit the up arrow to go up within the context of the thing I had written.

54:41And of course, what does it do? But it goes to the most recent message that I had posted rather than where it should go, which is up within the editing space that I'm working within. And I fired off like a help message in Slack for iPad and I threw it across the wall, assuming you went into Dev null and within like two hours or something like that i got a response from a human saying huh this doesn't seem right we'll look at it it was unreal yeah slack actually responds to bug reports imagine a world where bug reports are actually responded to and maybe it wasn't two hours but given that what i'm comparing it to is apple which is literally never it was effectively instant it was unbelievable i was so impressed yeah i've got a lot of good i've filed a lot of those i I actually probably should have filed the thing on the links that I don't understand.

55:29But why does this link work for some people and other people it doesn't? What am I doing wrong? But it's honestly not that important. Again, if people want access to Slack, they could just email me. But the other times that I have filed things, it's totally like you will get a response from someone who seemingly read and understood what you wrote, which is just mind boggling. Compared to the Apple experience where if you do get a response, it's so hard to tell. did the person who's responding to this even read what I wrote? Or if they did read it, how did they fail to comprehend it? Like you started questioning everything about what you're writing.

56:05Like, was my writing unclear? Like, it's just, it's really a terrible experience. It really is. All right, let's talk about some other terrible things, which is to say Apple has apparently been ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally to UK spying. That's fun. Not US. We're doing everything wrong in the world except this one thing. Not yet. I mean, don't worry. We'll get there. Well, I mean, give it time. I feel like I really want to rant about this. And I know in the middle of the show is not the place to do it. And I'm trying to not make a lot more work for Marco. But maybe in an after-after-after show, I can pop off about this ridiculous coup that's happening right now.

56:46Anyways, reading from The Verge. Apple has reportedly been ordered by the UK government to create a backdoor that would give security officials access to users encrypted iCloud backups. If implemented, British security services would have access to the backups of any user worldwide, not just Brits, and Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their encryption was compromised. I'm sorry. Let me read that again. Then, if implemented, British security services would have access to the backups of any user worldwide, not just Brits, and Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their encryption was compromised.

57:21the washington post reports that the secret order issued last month is based on rights given under the UK's Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, also known as, and I love this, the Snoopers Charter. Officials have apparently demanded blanket access to end-to-end encrypted files uploaded by any user worldwide rather than access a specific account. Apple's iCloud backups aren't encrypted by default, but the advanced data protection option was added in 2022 and must be enabled manually. It uses end-to-end encryption so that not even Apple can access encrypted files. In response to the order, Apple is expected to simply stop offering advanced data protection in the UK.

57:53this wouldn't meet the uk's demand for access to files shared by global global users however apple has the right to appeal the notice on the basis of cost of implementing it and whether the demand is proportionate to the security requirements but any appeal cannot delay implementation of the original order this is such a bonkers set of rules my goodness the uk has reportedly served apple a document called a technical capability notice it is a criminal offense to even reveal that the government has made a demand. Similarly, if Apple did accede to the UK's demands, then it apparently would not be allowed to warn users that its encrypted service is no longer fully secure.

58:28Now, in case you think the Washington Post is crazy, let's talk about the BBC, who writes, this misguided attempt at, I'm sorry, this is a quote that the BBC has quoted from somebody else, this misguided attempt at tackling crime and terrorism will not make the UK safer, but it will erode the fundamental rights and civil liberties of the entire population. privacy campaigners big brother watch said in a statement another quote the main issue that comes from such powers being exercised is that it's unlikely to result in the outcome they want said lisa forte cyber security expert from red goat criminals and terrorists will just pivot to other platforms and techniques to avoid incrimination so it's the average law-abiding citizen who suffers by losing their privacy uh entire country that loves security cameras more than anyone in the entire world decides that they get to security cam anything they want in our iCloud backups uh It's color me surprised.

59:15Well, they're not deciding this, but this is a situation where we've talked about Apple dealing with like difficult government demands and, you know, just navigating various laws in different countries. But this one I feel like is just so incredibly clarifying, given how incredibly dumb this law is, which you outlined well, that like that it doesn't just apply to the UK, but they want access to everybody worldwide. So even disabling advanced data protection in the UK does not satisfy it. The answer is Apple pulls out of the UK. No more Apple products will be sold in the UK. That is the only answer to this because anything else is inconceivable unless the Verge article is wrong about what it requires to comply.

1:00:04Because if it was just a matter of, okay, people in the UK can't get advanced data protection, oh, well, sucks for them. But if that doesn't do it, and the only solution is they want a backdoor to everything worldwide, no more Apple products in the UK. Like that is the direct, very straightforward, only possible consequence of this thing going through. Now, maybe their appeal, something will happen there. Like it's so difficult to predict what will happen. But given this description of the law, that is the only thing that can happen, right? Like what am I missing? Is there any possible other thing that could possibly happen?

1:00:37I mean, I think the most likely outcome here is that most countries, like most especially kind of like, you know, similar countries in like, you know, development and law enforcement status as the U.S. and Europe and everything. I think most countries are going to make advanced data protection illegal. And Apple is going to have to disable it or not offer it in those regions. And I think the U.S. is right behind them. Like there's no way we – because look, we have – the culture of law enforcement is that they feel genuinely entitled to everything from everyone all the time. They do not like having roadblocks put in their face like the constitution or rights or due process.

1:01:28And the last thing they want is a technical roadblock which they cannot get around. So law enforcement worldwide would love to just have access to whatever they demand. And the more they can just have it on everybody and get these pesky judges and processes and constitutions out of the way, the better. And look, they're not like evil people. They think they're doing it for good reasons. They think they're protecting us from terrorists and stuff. And in their world, they are justified in their thinking here. unfortunately that conflicts with you know rights and constitutions and and reality because and security like the they think what even within their world if their world was just expansive enough to realize what the reality of their world is is that when you make a backdoor like this the bad people get access to it and you get compromised in a worse way than you could possibly which happened recently with china finding a way into one of the backdoors that was mandated into some telecom system in the u.s right there is no way to make a backdoor just for the good guys so by demanding that a backdoor exists you are essentially self-owning you are compromising your system because the bad people will get access to it and if you're a law enforcement agency that doesn't help you it's not actually justified even within their world of like well if we just look at what our needs as law enforcement agency are this is the right thing to do it's not even right then it is just wrong-headed in every possible way but i agree that they think it's the right thing to do They're just absolutely wrong.

1:02:56Right. But the reality of what's going to happen here, we have our own problems here in the U.S., obviously, with our recent politics. But a swing to the right and authoritarianism is not limited just to the U.S. recently. This has been happening in a lot of the developed world. And so I think the culture of law enforcement and government having full control over people and the erosion of freedoms is happening in a lot of places, especially in technology. And the tech companies are never – like there is not a chance in hell Apple pulls out of a market. No. Apple will keep making all their money in every single market they possibly can.

1:03:45and what they will do is just the same thing they've done with so many other things china the gulf of america like what they're going to do is they're going to say we have to follow the laws in the countries in which we operate and they're going to just not offer the encryption in these countries like that's what's going to happen no that won't solve it like according to what's written here they can't do that's what i was going to say before like in china they're able to bend over backwards and do what the Chinese government wants. The Chinese government does not want as much as the UK government does.

1:04:17The Chinese government asks for something that they could actually get, which is within China, we have all these rules, we get access to all your servers, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the UK is asking for more than that. They're saying you have to compromise everybody in the entire world to satisfy our law. Even China didn't ask for that. In all fairness, I think that detail is very likely to say, never mind. Like, like I think that one particular detail, like I think I think in a month that detail is gone. When when does that never mind happen? Is that like, is that never mind happen in the appeal process?

1:04:52Because I don't think the law can be changed in the appeal process. Anyway, we're just going by this article here. But why wasn't it written in the article? Apple can't do what it has historically done. Its only choices are backdoor every single Apple customer worldwide in perpetuity without telling anybody. or pull out of the UK. And that's why I think they won't do what they did in China. If they could do that, you're right, they would. If they can just say, okay, well, there's a simple change we can make. It's different for the people in China. Now it's different than people in the UK. That's their deal.

1:05:23That's their problem. Their justification for China is like, well, it's better than us not being there because as compromised as we are, we're still the least compromised in all of China, which I think is true, but it's a low bar. And they could say the same thing in the UK. But it seems like, again, I'm not a lawyer and I have not read this law. I'm just going by the articles in The Verge. It seems like they can't do that, which is why the only option is pull out of the UK. Well, or the option also, I mean, again, not a lawyer, but the other option could be they will comply within the UK and they just won't comply with people outside the UK and the UK can sue them and they'll see what happens and they'll challenge it.

1:06:01Yeah, I suppose. You're learning lots of lessons from the current administration. I'm just like, what if I just ignore the law? Then what happens? that tends not to be apple's uh mo anywhere they're much more likely to fall like i would imagine what would happen is that this this law is so wrong-headed and apple is so large and powerful and the threat of pulling out is so um so powerful to elected people in the uk because if apple did pull out and everybody in the uk knew it was because of this dumb law a lot of people aren't getting re-elected so i imagine what will actually happen is big important people will have big important discussions and this will be changed and i they'll at the very least they'll change it so that all of the badness is confined to the uk which sucks if you're in the uk uh but that is absolutely what apple will do in that case they'll be like fine if we don't have to do it worldwide we'll just do it in the uk everybody will know that it's happening in the uk because we leaked this or whoever leaked this like it's not apple can't technically say anything about it but now we all know about it so uh when advanced data protection disappears in the uk we'll be like up that's why um but the problem is with this law if advanced data protection disappears in the uk uh but doesn't disappear anywhere else how do we know that apple hasn't compromised all its customers everywhere we would assume they wouldn't because that just doesn't seem like something apple would do but the law says that they can't say anything either way so all these laws that that require you not to say anything about something the government is making you do are terrible i feel like the terribleness of those laws should be confined to the company to the country that a company is in like the u.s government can make apple do that but i don't feel like it's tenable to have any government in the world be able to do that so i really hope that if they can't come to agreement apple will just come out and say look this is what they asked us to do and we said no yeah it's just it's just crummy it's gross i mean and i'm as much as i'm getting fired up about this i mean honestly we have no like to stand on as americans right now it's i'm doing everything in my power it is very similar and it is it is like what kind of decision can we make that everybody who has a brain knows is bad and wrong but can we just force that through because we won an election and will there be any consequences from that and we were all in the we're all in that finding out phase right now because a bunch of bad people with bad ideas were elected and they're doing stupid stuff.

1:08:24And now it's a question of how far can you go with that? Because there are, at least in the UK, I would imagine, would definitely be electoral consequences of forcing Apple out of your country. Because I think a lot of people in the UK who vote like Apple products. That would not be a good move for you as a politician or as a political party. And yet I feel like that is the inevitable consequence of holding the line on this one, which is probably why they will back off and do something and you know change it around or whatever but boy like just dumb people are going to be dumb man i mean like and the u.s does exactly the same thing there's always things going through the legislature in this country of like we want to have a backdoor but only for the good guys and just like how many times do we need to have this conversation that's not how math works like it's just you can because because that that sells well you can get people to vote for you say i'm going to protect you i'm going to make sure that the good guys blah blah blah because it's too like it's too nuanced and weird and techy to explain to people why this is terrible and so we just keep coming back to that same thing around and around and around like every government in every part of the world will just keep coming to the same thing for the reason marco said law enforcement wants it you can run on it and seem like you're going to get elected because you're helping protect the people and then when the rubber hits the road hopefully the you'll get enough smart people to talk and say this is impossible it can't be done you're you it's not it's not a thing this is not a thing right and sometimes it gets forced through anyway like whatever i wish i could find a link to that the uh the u.s thing where we got owned because we did force through our law that required government to have backdoor access to some telecom system and oh look china found the back door no one could have guessed that would have happened except everybody who ever looked at it and said the bad guys will get the back door because it's the best thing to get if there's a back door everybody wants it and they'll get it That's just that's just it's it's maddening.

1:10:16But we are doomed as a species to have this debate over and over again. And the only thing we can hope is that, you know, smarter heads will prevail eventually on this issue, even if we have degrees of backsliding. So fingers crossed that the UK dodges this one and fingers crossed that enough people notice what happened in the US with the telecom thing getting compromised. And maybe the next time one of these laws comes up, someone in Congress will bring this up. Not that it matters because Congress doesn't vote based on reason. Anyway, it's totally a tribal thing. Our country is broken. But anyway, UK, good luck.

1:10:53We need it. And so do you. So last week, I think it was or thereabouts, we got a very surprising release from Apple at machinelearning.apple.com. We got elegant, E-L-E-G-N-T, expressive and functional movement design for non-anthropomorphic robots. And this is a short, uh, webpage. It's not even really a full website. It's really just a webpage for the most part. Um, it has a link to the full publication and it has a very cute five minute video. And in that five minute video, you see, what is it? Lux that I'm thinking of from Pixar. Is that right? Luxo junior. Luxo junior. Thank you. Um, it's a lamp, very similar to Luxo junior.

1:11:35And the TLDR of this video is look, if you're writing the code or effectively like piloting a robot, then the most efficient thing for the robot to do is go from point A to point B. And that is fine, but it's kind of clinical when perceived by a human. And what Apple is saying is, hey, if we take a kind of circuitous way from point A to point B and maybe overshoot or, you know, kind of like brace ourselves to get ready to go and then launch out and go. If we have these sort of human qualities to it, it's a much more enjoyable experience for the humans observing it. And they have this video that demonstrates this.

1:12:17And honestly, the difference between the kind of clinical standard robot and the more emotional, if you will, robot was really stark for me. And I really preferred looking at an interact, well, not that I was interacting, but like imagining interacting with the more emotional robot rather than the one that is arguably more efficient. And they even showed an example of where the robot is housing a voice assistant. And, you know, when they asked the robot the question and it kind of like, if I remember right, it kind of like leaned back and thought about it for a second. And it didn't just immediately answer the question.

1:12:51And they're doing the side-by-side and split screen with the clinical version, as I keep calling it, although that's not what they called it, and the emotional version, again, not what they called it. And the clinical version was done quicker, but the emotional version was so much more pleasurable to interact with. Or at least that's what I got from it. John, I'm sure you saw the video. So am I bananas or does this ring true to you? Well, first I want to talk about the fact that this web page exists at all. Because if you've been listening to the show for the past several months, we've talked about the rumor of like a table sitting Apple home device with a screen and the screen is robotically controlled.

1:13:27And there's that Apple framework that currently works with that Belkin camera pointy thing where there's an API from a Mac or other devices where you can control a like a robot servo type thing or it's not really a robot. But anyway, a mechanical thing that points a camera in a particular direction. There's a whole framework for that. So many rumors about Apple products potentially using that. Again, there's the Belkin third party one you could buy right now that actually does use it. um and then the you know the the home thing with the screen where the screen points at you and emotes and so on and so forth and i guess it's a fun tie-in with the uh the imac g4 the flat screen imac with the cool uh spring-loaded like a metal arm thing that they had in the commercial and it was sort of uh gesticulating and and motioning or whatever um those are all rumors unlike mac rumors and you know bloomberg from german stuff or whatever uh usually apple doesn't put up web pages showing technologies that uh for things that have been rumored patents sure because those have to be public and apple patents everything and just because there's a patent doesn't mean there's going to be a product but given half a year or more of rumors of a thing that has like a a screen slash camera on an arm that does like you know that points at things and like moves in an emotive way and then having having apple put this up it's it's almost like it's so out of character for apple because they don't tend to like the the analogy has often been used in the apple community is like apple doesn't make concept cars a concept car is that car shows or like a car manufacturer will come with a car that they're never going to make that is usually just like a a model with nothing on the inside of it whatever but that points in a future direction here's some ideas we're thinking about here's some design ideas here's some technology ideas it's a concept car it's not a product it never will be a product uh but here it shows the direction of our thinking and if you squint at this you can see what our future products might have some of these qualities apple doesn't do that they only show something when they have an actual product so they don't show their research and development they don't show their orion glasses that they're working on in the lab that cost ten thousand dollars that they're not gonna ever really sell to consumers just show like look we're working on stuff and we're making some headway and we're like they could do that the whole time they were developing the vision pro they could have been having little tech demos of the various technologies as they advanced or whatever that that's not how apple goes but here we have seemingly pretty concrete rumors of a thing with the screen where the where something moves the screen to point at stuff uh and then this research thing that says hey we've been doing some research on how to make things point at things in a motive kind of way so weird and like it almost makes me think i guess they're not making that product because if they were making it they would never do this but maybe like the machine learning research people like like what like i know they let them publish stuff because you know obviously with all the lm stuff whatever they've published papers about things or whatever but i feel like publishing papers versus making a video and it's not particularly slickly produced like if you've Watch like a SIGGRAPH video or like a video made by like graduate students or PhD students.

1:16:34Not that I'm saying it's a bad video, but it's not like Apple polished like WWDC video video. It looks for all the world like a SIGGRAPH or a PhD student video. And that's what it smells like. And it's just like, how did this get out of Apple? Like how? It really does make me think that they've decided not to make that product with the little emotive arm thing. but anyway sorry for that big long aside because it's just boggling my mind that this thing exists but here it is i'm looking at it right now and the web page is still up so there you have it um for the difference between the sort of you know i would think it was the the uh the car welding robot if you've ever seen everything's cars with us ever seen a car assembly line with the giant robotic arms that uh weld things on cars they just move in straight lines like there there's no they're not trying to be emotive they're going from one welding position to the next as quickly as possible because time is money uh they're not trying to impress anybody but for something that might sit on your desk and you know move around and do things uh having it look more friendly makes a difference but here's the thing well two things one the thing about mechanical moving things that i'll get to in a second i've talked about in the past but the other thing is having a personality and being uh you call it you called it emotional less clinical whatever you want to describe this being more disney imagineering because disney imagineering is 100 like they do this amazingly well getting machines to move in a way that connects with people either by looking like living things or by evoking emotion or whatever that's the art of animation that's how all the you know inanimate objects and uh and the beast castle and beauty and the beast can look like things because they're squashing and stretching but also because you know it's that's the work of an animator and you can do that with physical real world objects as well to have a better connection but there is a baseline level of actually doing the thing you want it to do that you need to pass before i feel like you get any benefit from being more emotive in other words it has to be able to do the thing before you care about did it do the thing in a way that i find that makes a connection with me because if it fails to do the thing those emotive qualities either have no effect or make you hate it more and i'm not entirely sure given apple's history for things like siri that any product they field with this type of technology is going to pass that baseline bar of but did it do the thing at all that i wanted it to do before you get to the point where you can consider and it did it in such an engaging way you know like and watching this video that's all i could think of is how angry people would get at this poor thing if it did not do the thing they wanted like so much of apple's so many of apple's like home slash intelligence products don't do it and how all the extra work they're putting into being more emotive would not save it from from the wrath of the user i see it in my own kids when they're trying to talk to our home pod to turn the lights on off and it doesn't work and the things they have to say about siri are not kind and then they talk to the google device and it always works um it's so that's that's what i'm thinking i think like the people doing this research should go work for disney imagineering because the disney stuff does do the thing people expect it to do but they just expect to be entertained but if you ask this thing to you know whatever the you know this thing was doing stuff that apple's never going to ship because it's too expensive but um if you ask the apple thing to like look at me or make sure you can get us all on camera or whatever and it doesn't do it you don't care how motive it was in attempting to do your thing you just care that it didn't do the thing and so i my pessimism about this whole approach is uh let's work on the baseline functionality and get that nailed down before you worry so much about this doesn't mean you shouldn't be researching this it's not like you can just add this on later you should be researching it but i would be much more impressed by uh a behind the scenes look at somebody making sure that like uh you know the next home device is uh responsive and actually does what you ask it to do uh which is a bar that they have not crossed with the current ones and as i alluded to before the mechanical nature of this with all these servos and motors and moving parts or whatever is so incredibly expensive and so in uh so requiring of a philosophy that apple does not currently conform to, which is the repairability and maintenance of something with as many moving parts that I just can't see any product like this being near in the horizon because the thing that is difficult about these devices still today is not so much the computer smarts that controls them, but it's the physical reality of anything that works and moves anything like a living thing.

1:21:28That's why those like Boston Robotics terrifying dog things cost a hojillion dollars. It is incredibly expensive to do what our little fleshy flesh and bones and blood and muscles do so easily with a mechanical device. And it's even more expensive to make something like that mass market that you can just sell to consumers, have any expectation of the thing not breaking within a year. So I don't think anything like Luxo Jr. is coming our way anytime soon. If we're lucky, we'll get a HomePod with a screen where the screen like rotates and tilts. And hopefully that won't break. and hopefully it'll work instead of being like hmm sorry i can't do that right now i wish i had recorded the interaction with siri the other day my i think one of my home pods is finally my original home pod is finally just like not working you can talk to it and all it will ever tell you is what you just said marco like various excuses about why things don't work it will never actually do anything i don't understand it i can't even tell what version of the os it's running when i try to use it on the app it tells me to bring my phone closer when I bring my phone closer, nothing happens.

1:22:31So that one may be, you know, slowly sailing off over the horizon. But yeah, in the meantime, it is just, it's like sun setting, sun downing, whatever they call it. You can talk to it and it just talks to you in a series of hmms and ums and not hearing backing responses and sorry, I couldn't do that. And it will keep the conversation going like a telemarketer or whatever, but it will never actually do anything. This week we are sponsored by HelloFresh. With HelloFresh, you get farm fresh pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Don't like going to the grocery store?

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1:24:46All right, let's do a little bit of Ask ATP. and let's start with glenn lamb who writes what kind of app planning or wireframing tool do y 'all use when planning an app figma pen and paper uh for me usually pen and paper if anything at all or otherwise i'll just start throwing stuff against you know xcode and start you know whipping up a bare bones version of something in swift ui but oftentimes it's pen and paper if anything i've never meaningfully used figma or what's the s sketch sketch something i don't know what i'm thinking of those are both software but sketch is the one you're thinking of thank you there you go um i don't really use any of those personally um so yeah it's just pen and paper for me marco let's start with you and then finish finish with john please i don't do anything like this i just have an idea and i try to just build it and i i prototype and i design basically by building it um so you know in the era of swift ui this is actually great for my workflow here such as it is because I can actually just try a bunch of different things really quickly like and this is like one of the things I've cited I don't know I talked about it under the radar a bit but one of the things I decided about like why I like SwiftUI despite you know its prickliness in certain points is that it allows me to quickly iterate and try different designs and rat and like try like radically different layouts and techniques fairly quickly so that I you know it's it's similar to the type of prototyping that and kind of design iteration that i think other people are able to use these tools for but that i'm just not like the right kind of designer to ever do that or think that way um like for me if i for me to tell whether an idea works i have to build it and that's like my design process of like how i get good designs at the end of the day is mostly by just building stuff and trying it and seeing like does this look good does this feel good does this work well uh and you know if the answer of any of those is no it's like well all right let me see what else i can do here and i just try a bunch of stuff till i find something that works well john yeah i think marco hit on an important thing it was swifty why makes it so much easier as a programmer to rapidly i'm not going to say prototype but like rapidly get something up on the screen to validate ideas and if you are primarily a developer chances are good that you your skills are more suited to uh writing code uh for trying things out than they are to trying things out in an app like figma because apps like figma or any kind of design app it's like it's not like you can just magically use them it's like well i'm a programmer of course i can use simple media app graphics editors are incredibly complicated and if you don't use them day in and day out and don't know how to use them efficiently it's a massive slowdown to try to use a tool you're not familiar with it would be the same thing as taking someone who's an expert at using figma and photoshop and sitting them in front of xcode and saying now prototype this they could do it but they'd be way faster in figma or photoshop right so it's really a lot about where expertise lies especially when you're an independent developer you don't have the luxury of like different departments and different people you've got your current skill set and you can expand your skill set but under time pressure with limited resources normally you're going to lean towards what do i already know how to do it's why marco's got tons of stuff written in php it's like it's more efficient like i could learn a whole new thing or i could just do it in php because i know that'll be done quickly so uh during my web development career i did i design things using sketch or photoshop or any of those other apps no because i'm not as good at using them as i am typing html i would just write when i wanted to see a ui i would have an idea in my head and i would write html like it's like why don't you just write it down on a piece of paper first doing it in html for me is faster and better than writing it on a piece of paper because the fidelity of the html it's literally the thing i'm going to be making like it's there i don't have there's no other step and i can do it faster and better than i can with a pencil right it's that's the weird thing that people don't think about it's like well sure you need some place to to sketch out these ideas and prototype them it's like i'm faster just doing it like doing the code doing the html doing whatever it's not like the finished version but that literally is for people with that skill set the fastest best way to design things it's only not that way if you're actually better with a pencil and paper a pen and paper photoshop figma or whatever and again you can learn new skills in those areas but to be really fast with those design tools does actually require lots of use and experience it's not as simple as like i'll just learn what the tools do and i'll be done uh it's just like coding there's there's ways to be more efficient and using the tools that people who do it professionally and repeatedly know that i certainly don't and so yeah how do i figure out the ui how did i figure out the ui for the app that i'm doing i just did it in swift ui uh and it's way faster than doing it it's even faster than doing an interface builder which is another example of like oh you can just mock it up an interface builder at this point it's probably faster just to do it in SwiftUI because I'm going to have to do it in SwiftUI anyway.

1:29:53Like, that's what it's going to be written in. And so why would I pull out Interface Builder and drag a bunch of little things out and arrange things and say, okay, now I'll go make that in SwiftUI. I've just wasted my time. So me and Mark are on the same page here. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me. All right, this one I think is just for John. Mike Hatfield writes, is HFS Plus still relevant in 2025 if you were adding new spinning drives for media or Linux ISOs in 2025? Would you format the file system as APFS or HFS Plus. Context, my Plex library is growing, so I'm adding storage capacity.

1:30:22I'm using a QNAP 4 bay configured as just a bunch of disks connected to a Mac Mini via USB. HFS Plus is still kind of relevant because it is a file system that was designed in the age of spinning disks, so its behavior with respect to locality of disk head movement is so much better than APFS that it is a faster file system on spinning disks does that mean you should use it on spinning disks i feel like especially in the context given here if you have a spinning disk and it's connected to like a nas don't use any mac file system use btrfs uv ext4 use zfs use something else better suited to that task because then you can just smb mount it on your mac and it will be fine there's a reason we wanted to get away from hms plus despite the fact that it is very efficient for spinning disks as compared to apfs it is not a great file system it doesn't have lots of file system features that you might want especially for something like a nas uh other file systems are better there my personal choice even when i had spinning disks uh you know in the age of apfs i would format all my spinning disks as apfs it would make them slower like there's no doubt about it it would but normally what i was keeping on those disks was like large files and other stuff where the performance doesn't really matter because it just boils down to sequential speed which is the same should be the same both of them are close anyway um i just took the speed hit because i was sick of uh problems with hfs plus and i wanted the reliability of the avfs despite the performance so my recommendation i i think it is still relevant for people who want to make that trade-off like if you decide no i can't stand how slow this is i have tons of small files hfs is so much faster than a spinning disk i'm just going to do that but only do that if you're forced to directly connect the disk to your mac and you can't stand the speed hit of APFS and you're okay with running disk utility everyone's allowed to repair errors or you don't care about errors or whatever.

1:32:17In all other cases, either use APFS on spinning disks and just take the hit or if anything, if at all possible and you're in a NAS-like scenario, don't use any Apple file system. Use a good file system that is supported by your NAS. Leon Cowell writes, when discussing John's new app, he briefly mentioned the many aspects of files to consider, metadata, extended attributes, ACLs, etc. Would you mind expanding a bit on that? How will your tool handle that as it deletes a file and then replaces it with a copy-on-write clone? What metadata, if any, is preserved or lost? What metadata, if any, is considered in determining whether two files are identical?

1:32:51I'll take the second question first. What do you care about when determining whether files are identical? Literally the only thing you care about is the content of the file, the data. All that other stuff is not in the decision-making process. all that other stuff can and will be wildly different between two files all you care is is this data the same because the data is the thing that you're going to be sharing that's the thing you're going to have one instance of whereas before you had multiple instances of everything else is is private and will remain private to each individual file with no sharing whatsoever so when i'm wandering the disk trying to say is this file the same as that one i'm looking at the data i also look at the resource fork which technically i don't think i have to do but i'm just doing out of habit and honestly how many people still have resource forks i'm pretty sure the resource work doesn't matter but why you know i just better safe than sorry so for two files to be considered identical they must have the same data fork and the same resource work even though the resource fork is accessed through an extended attribute blah blah but setting that aside nobody has resource forks not a big deal although apparently i do because i have all these ancient files on my from like old mac game classic mac games and my uh buried in my games folders anyway um so that's how you decide two files are the same once you've decided that two two files have the same data in them and you're going to do a space saving clone yeah the job you have to perform is okay make a clone so it's sharing all the data with whatever the original file was or whatever and then the file that you're getting rid of or replacing with the clone you've got to copy all of that metadata to the new replacement file and i try to copy all of it every extended attribute every permission thing obviously the file name all the file dates so on and so forth it's not actually possible to on modern mac os to copy all of it some things for example the file system sort of maintains on its own and you can call apis that supposedly set it like things like the last open time last access time there are apis for changing that and you can call them and they'll return success and the file system will be like yeah nah i've got that covered because it's like you're trying to tell me the last time this file was accessed was sometime in the past, but you just accessed it, man.

1:35:16And so it just doesn't do it, which is fine. Like most of the time people don't care about that. And honestly, it is true. Like this file was just access right now. I did it. Like I accessed it. Right. And so even though the APIs for setting that return success and there is no error, most of the time the file system will ignore you. Other things you literally can't set at all. Like there's a bunch of extended attributes that apple doesn't really document well that do various things if i can't set those it's an error and i can't say reclaim the space like i tried to set all the ones that i can set but if there are ones that are meaningful that i can't set like literally can't especially ones that i don't really know like it's like binary blob of stuff that i don't understand my apple throw up its hands and say look i tried to i tried to save your space in this one but i couldn't set the com.apple.macl extended attribute sometimes it lets me sometimes it doesn't i don't know why some extended attributes are in fact protected by system integrity protection if it's one of those and i can't override it i can't override it man like you know um another thing is this is a sandbox mac app there is no way that i've been able to find to have any sort of like why don't you just ask me to authenticate as an admin user and then your app can do anything i don't think you can put an app in the mac app store that does that even though i'm sure there are ones that are there i think they're sort of like leftovers from when apple used to allow that but right now i don't think they do so again in future versions i might have an unsandboxed helper app to help out with this but right now if for example you want to reclaim space uh used by a file that you do not own you can't do that because my app can't set the owner back to whatever it really is right so that's part of the metadata like oh i've made a space saving clone now all i got to do is make this file look like the one it's replacing and the one it's replacing is owned by somebody who's not me well you can't ch own a file to somebody who's not you uh when you're running as you uh and there's no way for me to ask for an administrator password to do that or whatever so again if i cannot get the metadata to match to the best of my ability what i think is the stuff that it needs to match uh i'll show an error and say i couldn't do that for you or in many cases if i know i won't be able to do it i'll just skip over it and not include it in one of the eligible files like so if i see a file that's owned by another user i'm just skipping that or whatever there are some that i will let go by so for example if i can't set some date thing like the the last access date the fact that i can't set that i'm i'm fine with that like but honestly if because i would never be able to clone a file if people insisted that date stay the same because i look i am accessing it it is truthful that that date should be updated to be the date that i did my thing so i set it and then i forget it like i i do set it and if the setting call returns an error i would cause an error uh but it always returns success and so i continue on my very way so yeah i'm pretty much doing i'm making best possible effort for a mac sandboxed app nothing that any user really cares about should ever be missing and if it is my app should bail out and say I couldn't do this file and move on to the next one.

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1:39:09They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Accidental It was accidental Accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T-Marco

1:40:07I have been doing so much restaurant stuff. Are you an Inferno right now? I assume it's a reference. I'm not kidding. Dante's Inferno. Oh, I didn't get it either. But that actually, that was a much better joke than either of us gave you credit for. I was thinking the coupling direction, which is a very different thing. All right. So anyway, yeah. So I did ask last week. I had mentioned I discovered this or I had known about this audio technology called Dante that allowed you to route audio signals over the network. I'd never really used it. And last week I discovered that I can indeed use it for some of the needs at the restaurant.

1:40:45Basically, like, you know, certain like, you know, DJ input area is very far away from the the amps and mixer and control areas and stuff like that. So and then the subwoofers are really far away from everything else. And so how do we how do we link everything up? And the way it's been done so far is with a large quantity of very old and unreliable cables that are snaked around the entire restaurant, you know, collecting dust and looking bad. And so anyway, I was seeking to reduce some of this cable clutter and simplify certain things, make things more reliable and less reliant on very long analog cables snaked behind God knows what.

1:41:28But so anyway, Dante is – I haven't actually had a chance to set up Dante yet, but I have all the hardware. I have a bunch of the little tiny like – basically they're dongles. They're like XLR ports with network ports on the other side. And you just like plug them into the network, and there you have XLR in or out. I have a handful of those. We got a lot of feedback from people who are familiar with Dante or who use it professionally. it's kind of like if we had been listening to a podcast and someone on if we three had been listening to a podcast and the person on the podcast said yeah i've been trying to do this project and someone told me about this thing called linux and like it's like a different kind of operating system that you might be able to use in this application so i'm going to look into that like we got the feedback like that about dante it's like the whole world except for us knew about dante and once you mentioned it they came out of the woodwork and it's like yes a million people who use dante for a living listen to this show and you're going to hear but it's like saying Have you heard of this thing called Linux?

1:42:27It's some kind of other. It's not Windows. It's not the Mac. Interesting. I'm going to look into that for next week. Yeah. So the feedback was pretty universally two types of feedback. There was one that was from people who said, I learned about Dante, not I use it. That's separate. I learned about Dante through some way, and you really should have a totally physically separate network for it. And then the other group of feedback was, I actually use Dante professionally, and this will be fine on your network. So thank you to everybody who responded. Again, I haven't had a chance to actually install it yet.

1:43:10There was a bunch of wiring that had to happen over my last few visits there. but I'm looking forward to trying it probably next week. The feedback we got suggested that, yes, it's very dependent on obviously like your network speeds, your network switching architecture, and do you switch your support QoS or do you want to isolate Dante onto its own VLAN and prioritize that VLAN? So I've been doing a bunch of research on, you know, which of these things I should do, how do I do that? The good thing is I am using all Ubiquity gear and all brand new Ubiquiti gear. And I thought this would be a really good opportunity to try something I haven't done before.

1:43:53I am now, in that one context, partially living the 10 gigabit Ethernet lifestyle. Oh, my word. I'm sure your restaurant needs that kind of bandwidth. So what everyone said with Dante was like, you know, you just got to make sure that your network doesn't get clogged up with other stuff. And we have a gigabit internet connection. The internet connection is used for, you know, there's going to be like wireless terminals here. I'm sure that's not much bandwidth, but still wireless terminals for the POS, the little walk around handhelds. There's going to be, you know, the TV streaming over the Wi-Fi or over the Ethernet rather, but over the network.

1:44:31There's going to be, you know, there's Wi-Fi around. I have a guest network for the Wi-Fi, but I have it right now, limited in ubiquity settings to 100 megabits total. I don't know if I'll keep that there, but just for now. But I'm like, you know, the way the wiring is routed through the restaurant, the signals for Dante, in order to get from one location, like from basically from the DJ plugin to the speakers and the mixer and everything, it has to go through two switches. And I'm like, well, what's the latency of Ethernet between switches that are, you know, well-performing switches? is like does 10 gigabit ethernet actually have substantially lower latency than one gigabit ethernet or does it just run like more in parallel and i did some quick chat gpt research and apparently 10 giga ethernet has way lower latency because it is just running the whole the whole protocol just runs at faster data rates so i'm like well if my goal is to have lots of headroom and to reduce latency, and I have all of this, like, you know, modern ability, I have the ability to run modern Cat6A wires just as easily as I'm going to run Cat6 wires.

1:45:44Why don't I just run really good wires and spend the few hundred bucks on Ubiquiti's store to get a 10 gig switch for those two long runs? So not everything is to, oh, and then the other thing, this is, this is the The other thing that made this decision easier, a couple of years ago, Ubiquiti came out with a switch called the Flex. This is a little five-port switch. These are the ones that I have on the outside of my house running the security cameras and outdoor APs because they are indoor-outdoor rated, John. And I've had them now running very well for, I think, two years, perfectly well. and they're these little tiny like they're what makes them great is that they are indoor outdoor rated powered by poe and also will then re-output poe to their other four ports and they're really cheap they're like a hundred bucks or a three pack for like 280 so i've used these flex switches i've used them all over the place in my in you know at home and different uses.

1:46:47They recently came out with the Flex 2.5G POE switch, which is only 200 bucks. It's eight ports. Its input is 10 gig and its outputs are all 2.5 gig. And all across the Ubiquity line, 2.5 gig is all of a sudden everywhere. Like everything supports 2.5 gig. So I'm like, well, i'm already i'm getting faster and if i just use that switch instead of the the regular flex then i get 10 gig back to a home switch so i got the one they have a like five port 10 gig or a four port 10 gig switch for a few hundred bucks and they have the flex 2.5 poe for 200 bucks each and i just needed two of them and so now i have basically like all the other like most devices will be plugged into a 2.5 gig port.

1:47:41I know they're not going to use it mostly, but they will have that port. But then from switch to switch, that's running 10 gig. So for the two long legs where it's going like across the whole restaurant to a switch and then back again to a different part of the restaurant, those like trunk legs of it are 10 gig. And it's glorious. Like it's like I wired everything up today and like, and I mean, this is, the wiring process alone has been as i mentioned last time like very very demanding like i'm like crawling around on top of walk-in fridges like crawling through an attic space to like run different wires drew like lots of holes that you know with varying degrees of success um i had to fish a fish a couple of wires through like there was like you know a wall and i had to go like from one side of the wall to the other, both of them through holes.

1:48:36So I'm going through like, you know, hole, gap, hole. How do I get two Ethernet wires through this? I'm looking around. I had at my house over there, I had like one of those like wire fish things and I could not find it for the life of me. So I go back to the restaurant, like what the heck could I possibly use at the restaurant? And I find there is this like, this metal, like the kind of little tiny flagpole that like when you see somebody decorating their lawn for the 4th of July with a row of little tiny American flags stuck in the ground, one of those. And I'm like, if I just tie, if I just like zip tie the Ethernet cables to the stick of this, I can stick it through the wall and line it up with the other one and pull it through.

1:49:21That's the kind of, and by the way, that worked great and I've done it three times. That's the kind of thing that I've been doing the last week or so at the restaurant. but it has been very very fun and now i have everything wired up i have my 10 gig backhaul trunk links i have my 2.5 gigs at the two major points of devices uh i have all the ap's i have three ap's installed i think that'll probably end up being enough everything is ubiquity everything is so nice and so easy and so freaking fast so so far it's going very very well uh and thank you everyone for all the Dante feedback and everything else and hopefully Dante running on a 10 gig back hall should be plenty for what's probably gonna end up being something like four channels or six channels of actual Dante use sanction the question in the chat room of is this wi-fi uh only for the employees or is it for the patrons as well I think it will mostly be used by the employees because it's not really it's not like a coffee shop it's not like the kind of place people would bring a laptop and come work.

1:50:25It's a bar and a restaurant. So it would be like no one sitting there with a laptop all day. Generally, it's going to be for employees' phones, I think, when they're bored and it's slow. And then separately, again, the walk-around POS terminals. So I created a private network and I don't intend to give that password out to anybody, including the employees. The private network has full access to the network. I'm going to put the POS walk around handheld things on that network. And then what I'm going to actually give the employees if they want to connect their phone for whatever reason will be the guest network.

1:51:06Because that way it limits everything. Then I don't have to worry about them giving out our private network password to someone else and then someone else being able to come in and control our mixer or whatever. That's a terrible idea. So I'm going to try to keep those things separate. And if I need to, so there's already a VLAN for the guest mode of the access points. If I need to create a second VLAN for the Dante stuff, I can. But I don't know if I need that level of complexity. Because I assume that all these modern ubiquity switches support the proper QoS tagging of the packets and everything to probably not need that.

1:51:47But we'll find out. You know, the way you're describing your backhaul between the basically front of house and back of house, that's what I was planning on doing here when I was still, I mean, I still am fantasizing about like fiber and whatnot. But if I actually do it is unlikely, more unlikely with each passing moment, especially as I get distracted with all things home assistant. But anyway, my thought was I would have like fiber to go from the garage, which would be, you know, kind of sort of the command center and then flow up to the upstairs and into, you know, some sort of like switch in the attic.

1:52:23And then I would probably bring fiber into the office, but everywhere else would just get probably gigabit Ethernet, maybe not even 10 gig Ethernet because nowhere else really needs it except the office and wherever, you know, like the Synology ends up, for example. So it's a very similar approach to what I was talking or thinking about doing. Now, at the time I was thinking about doing it, I would argue that 10 gig Ethernet was far less common. And the thought was I would be forever future proofing by having fiber, which I know is not quite that simple. But for the sake of this conversation, that was the thought.

1:52:55But I haven't acted on any of this. And I am unlikely to unless, you know, Stephen Hackett comes to visit and wires the house with me. So we'll see what happens. I mean, the thing is, like, faster than gigabit internet connections are starting to become available in the U.S. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And many of the, I think, the latest Wi-Fi 7 stuff, I think the reason why Ubiquiti is putting 2.5 ports on a lot of their switches now, I think, is because some of their access points have 2.5 ports. Because Wi-Fi is getting so fast that I think at maximum capacity, some of these high-end enterprise APs can actually exceed 1 gigabit.

1:53:30So I think it is worth considering. It is worth planning for a faster than gigabit infrastructure when you're putting network stuff in. But that being said, like you can get 2.5 over regular, I think even Cat 5e might do it. And certainly Cat 6 would do it. Like you don't even, like a Cat 6a can do everything. So like there's, you don't need too crazy of like a wiring setup to have very high speeds. Especially if your distances are short. I think regular Cat 6, I think, can even do 10 gig below something like 100 feet or something like that. So it is worth considering all these things if you're putting new wiring in, but you don't need to go too nuts with some of this stuff because you can get by with more than you think.

1:54:17You can get a lot faster on regular cables than you think. setting aside the finder's terrible interface to local file sharing and mac os these days i actually was looking into both 2.5 and 10 gig solely so the two computers that are five feet away from each other in this room that both have 10 gig ethernet ports on them could talk to each other at 10 gig my internet is still one gig uh so instead rather than having like a marco situation where he's got like the the backbone of the network being 10 gig and then it's branching but just in this room these two computers that both have 10 gig ethernet ports they should be able to talk to each other over 10 gig i would get it you know 12 feet of cable and i don't even think i need to replace cables like you said marco the ones i have would probably do it but once i started looking at the prices of like a four or five port 10 gig switch or you know even like one with like 10 gig uh what do you call it uh upstream port and then 2.5 between it was getting pretty pricey i'm like i hope this will come down over time so i i what i'm probably going to do is just do nothing and then wait until the day when uh when 10 gig is uh we either 2.5 gig is my internet connection in which case i'll just replace everything from end to end with at least 2.5 gig because that would be worthwhile um or when 10 gig becomes cheaper but i am looking in that direction like again because like i keep i always buy computers with 10 gig ports on them and every time I have to wait for some large file to transfer from, or even just the Synology.

1:55:49I don't think none of my Synology actually has a 10 gig port, but a new Synology that I bought, I would be sure to make sure it had one for future proofing. I do wait for file transfers. And when I'm waiting for them, I start thinking to myself, like you said, Marco, like, would this be faster for Wi-Fi 7 than the wires that I'm using, given that these two computers can see each other? But yeah, the March of Technology comes with infrastructure costs. Yeah. And to be clear, like, I don't intend, I can't imagine a situation where this network at the restaurant is going to actually use 10 gig speeds between anything.

1:56:23Like, it's only going to have one computer. It's not transferring large files. how many tracks of audio would that require how many tracks of like 96 192 kilohertz like audio of like you know high resolution that nobody can hear the difference you read probably thousands upon thousands of those tracks being transferred simultaneously yeah like at least you know cd quality 44.1 which i i haven't configured yet but i assume i'm given those kind of options is 1.5 megabits so you get a lot of those streams in 10 gigabits yeah uh but yeah like i don't tend to actually need that kind of like transfer my goal is like i want nothing to ever drop out ever and so yes obviously a physically separate network would probably do a better job of that but i'm not i don't want to run twice as many cables and twice as many switches everywhere like i want the one network that can that i know will have so much headroom at every possible link that nothing will ever get bogged down and make my audio drop or make my tv frames drop like the internet connection might that's a separate thing but like i don't want the audio to start cutting out you know at midnight when a dj is playing on a saturday night and so to have a whole bunch of headroom everywhere i think will allow that especially because again it was it was a difference of a few hundred dollars at most for like total for all of it so i'm very happy with that