664: Humanity Gets in the Way

43:14I got sent a new developer strap. What is the official name for this? I don't know. The developer strap Mark two or whatever. And I had the occasion to go to a local library this morning and do my ATP prep that I usually do on Wednesday mornings. Instead of going to Wegmans, I went to the library. And I did that in no small part. So I could reserve a study room so I wouldn't be out in the middle of everything. So I could try doing a Mac virtual display with the vision pro. So it is incredible. With the developer strap, there is almost no latency. I feel like the image is great. I know everyone has conflicting opinions about that.

43:49I'm not here to relitigate it, but everything went really, really well. I don't think that the developer strap is absolutely necessary, and it is quite expensive. It's something like$400 or something like that, I believe. But it did work out quite well. And if you are someone who lives in Mac virtual display, and I've talked to a few people that are like that, I do not do that personally, but I know that there are people who do, then I strongly recommend the new developer strap. It's quite good. I didn't do any like speed tests or anything like that. I didn't run any performance tests. I just used it and job well done.

44:24The other nice thing is the new strap. I know everyone is raving about it, and I will repeat what I said a week or two ago. So the new dual knit band, whatever they call it, is incredible. It is so, so much more comfortable than any version of strap that I have tried previously. Really, really good. One curious thing that I noted, and I'd be curious for the three of you that have Vision Pros if you could try this. So I'm on 26.1 on the released version, 26.1. And for whatever reason, and this is not the point, but for some reason, as I was playing music and sound effects were happening and whatnot, I noticed that the balance was somewhere, I would say, like 60 to 70 % to the left channel.

45:08I have no idea why. I have no idea how. This is with both the, what do they call them, the audio pods or whatever that are on the stems or the legs of the Vision Pro. Again, my terminology is all wrong. I'm sorry. Sticks. Okay, there you go. So anyway, on the straps, I guess, strictly speaking, if it's a developer strap. But anyways, Anyways, it's both those speakers in there and my AirPods Pro Mark III. I was getting like weird balance issues where, again, it was like halfway between the center and the left channel. So I was getting some out of the right, but not a lot. So I was casting about trying to figure out what I can do about this.

45:41And I went into accessibility, audio and visual balance. And I thought, oh, I will slide the balance, you know, 60 % of the way to the right to kind of fix this. I also tried or I also wondered if maybe this had something to do with spatial audio. Maybe that is what was happening. But when I tried to turn the balance to in between center and right, I could only slide all the way to the right or all the way to the left. And the little numeral at the top in between L and R showed 1.00. I don't know what's going on here, but it sure seemed like where it was expecting to have a float or something or double or something like that, it was only taking an integer because my options were 0 or 1.

46:21or negative one, I guess, strictly speaking, which I thought was very funny. And I'd be curious for the three of you that have Vision Pros if you run into this. But the point of bringing this up was just that the developer strap is very good. And if you have$400 to light a flame, I recommend it. Additionally, I have upgraded to Tahoe. I had a conversation with Jason Snell where he basically said to me in a very, very kind way, what the hell are you doing? Go ahead and upgrade. This is literally your job. And I was like, you know what, Jason, you're right. so I upgraded well I don't know if you need to do it on your main machine can't you do what I did and have it on an alternate machine or an alternate what alternate machine I have my Mac I mean I have it on my Mac or I don't have it on my Mac Mini I have a Mac Mini an M1 Mac Mini that I suppose I could have done it on but I don't use that no Casey you missed an opportunity to get another laptop this was your chance the thought crossed my mind the thought crossed my mind I need this for my work oh gosh now he's holding out for the M5 MacBook Air 2 yeah right actually as we as we record this i don't recall where i saw it but apparently the m4 like base level macbook air is like 750 or something like that which is still a lot of money but oh man that's time to it's still like that's that's the thing about like the macbook air until they fix the screen like the you know i know the m5 is going to be better and if you're a tech nerd you're like oh i wouldn't i want three times better read speed but you're never going to notice that the m4 macbook air and the m3 macbook air like just amazing machines like that's such a such a good just no nonsense simple machine its main weakness is that it doesn't have a good screen but neither will the m5 one according to the rumors so don't worry about that so if you get a good deal on an m41 snatch it up i will say though casey like remember my nanotexture screen remember how nice that looked uh marco trying to upsell get out of that macbook air class and come up to a machine with a fan no the macbook air would be great if it had nanotexture like that i and and a better screen at hdr you know mini led blah blah blah like it's the macbook air is always kind of getting the short end of the stick on screen which again it's the lowest end machine i get it it makes sense although i do wonder what will happen we talked about this before when they like when the when the low-end laptop with the phone chip in it comes out um are they that one surely will get the cheapest of the cheap screen so does that one become the placeholder for like no you can't have mini led for the next five years and does that allow the macbook air remember how long we had to wait for the macbook air to get retina i feel like that now with like waiting for it to get out of its lcd non-hdr screen uh it's kind of a a long wait but yeah the the low end uh i forget what the rumor was a a19 pro a18 pro i forget what their rumors were but anyway when that laptop comes out i feel like the macbook air should have permission to get a good decent screen with including a nanotexture option for 100 bucks tell you what though i uh i actually i went to an Apple store this morning.

49:11I was breezing through Grand Central and I stopped at the Apple store there. And I got to see for the first time the iPad Pro nanotexture screen option because they have it on display. It is so nice. And now I'm to the point where I'm like, I want nanotexture on all of my screens. Now, the iPad is like my least used Apple device. And so it does not make sense for me to buy a new iPad. But just for the sake of it, I looked like, well, you know, my iPad Pro was a few years old, what would it cost me to get a new iPad Pro setup? Now, what that would mean is I would also need to get the new Magic Keyboard because I have the old keyboard folio.

49:47I would need to get a new Apple Pencil Pro. And because the nanotexture is only available on the one and two terabyte models to get the minute, and of course I need cellular. So to get one terabyte cellular nanotexture, Magic Keyboard and Pencil Pro in the 11 inch, it's like twenty three hundred dollars like oh i don't use my ipad quite that much so that i'm not going to jump on that and people always think that i mean obviously you're getting killed on the ssd which is apple's stupid you know shoving all the margins the ssd but i will point out that that weird ass floppy laptop you have has a better screen than any of apple's laptops yeah it's oled and has a processor that is faster in single core than any of apple's laptops except for the plain m5 uh macbook so it's you know in the in the apple realm it is not excessively priced because if you were to configure any comparably capable similar machine from apple you would get similar prices but uh that's you know you don't want all that you want to mix and match i just want nanotexture i don't care if it has a terabyte give me the lowest possible storage but that's not a thing they offer yeah that's and it's so frustrating it's like nanotexture is so nice.

51:06Like once you get used to it, you want it everywhere. I'm so glad I don't like it. Oh my God. Like I will never buy another non-nanotexture screen if that product is offered with nanotexture. Well, at the Apple store, they're constantly cleaning those screens though. How do you feel about nanotexture with finger spooge all over it? Well, all of my touch screens are always covered in finger stuff. I know, but it's harder to clean off nanotexture and it shows up more. I don't know. I'm not a nanotexture fan. Honestly, I don't think it does show up more like and you know so right now like on on ipads like right now on my ipad on my kind of older ipad pro i have one of those um is it paper like no i don't use paper like anymore there's like an astro pad cover or something like that um that's a little bit easier to apply and it has a little bit different finish um and so for you know for years now before that i used i used the paper like ones i've used these kind of like textured screen covers for the iPad because I like the way that they both feel and the way the pencil feels on them way better than the the flat slick glass and so I've used all the time and they all like nanotexture they all show you know smears and fingerprints differently and they're a little bit harder to wipe off but they're not impossible to wipe off you just you know you wipe them across your pants or whatever you have available you take a cloth or whatever it is like you get it done it's fine it's like when people say like oh don't buy a white car because it looks dirty all the time like every car I've ever had looks dirty all the time and every color like that's just cars like they just get dirty that's how touch screens are touch screens get fingerprints on them and if you look at the wrong angle in the light you'll see all the fingerprints no matter what finish it is I don't think the texture is meaningfully different I will say our friend Steve Trouton Smith recently got an texture iPad Pro and has been posting about on a mastodon here and there And one thing Steve pointed out was that the pencil texture on it, it feels closer to a remarkable.

53:01And I tested that today in the store. I was curious about that. That's part of the reason why I wanted to see it. So I tested it. And indeed, I had two iPads side by side, one with nanotexture, one without. And the pencil texture with nanotexture is way better. Night and day difference. It wouldn't surprise me if that's why Apple added it to the high-end models. not necessarily for like you know video producers but maybe for people using the pencil like high end artists it's a huge difference and a huge improvement and compared to using a paper like or this astropad thing that i have compared to using like a paper screen protector it's way more refined it doesn't have quite as much like friction as a texture but those screen protectors introduce way more blur to the screen image than the nanotexture itself does.

53:54Nanotexture itself, there's honestly almost no blurring of the image. And you do get a little bit of that texture that makes a pretty big difference. So whenever I get a new iPad, that's what I'm getting, even though it's going to be, it's going to cost as much as a MacBook Pro. I just will buy it less often, kind of like the opposite of what I just told John to do with his Mac Pro. But like it's, nanotexture is so good i will absolutely get that whenever it's offered in a product line right so back at the ranch we're going to talk about and i have upgraded my macbook pro the upgrade went fine um my initial impressions after having used this for about 24 hours uh the transparent menu bar it's fine like i i don't have any strong feelings about it.

54:42However, what in the actual hell is up with these folder icons? They are so loud. What is happening? You can pick a different color for them that's also loud. Great. I'm so excited. I don't know what I expected, but these are so much more vibrant and in your face, whereas I feel like a folder should, to a degree, not fade into the background, but certainly be a lot less in your face. Don't love that. Also, what did they do to our baby? What is finder windows look bananas? Generally speaking, I actually don't mind the look of this OS as much as I thought I would. I mostly think it's pretty good, which I know is a relatively hot take.

55:27What did they do to finder windows? There are so many different orbs at different depths and I can't tell what's where in terms of depth. I don't care for it. But Casey, they're spotlighting your content. Finder demonstrates most of the controls that have their appearance changed radically in Tahoe. So you've got sidebar, obviously. You're talking about a sidebar Finder window because that's the kind of person you are. You've got toolbars, which also are changed a lot. You've got tab bars, which also are changed a lot if you have multiple tabs open. And that's all combined into a single windows so you get to see how unharmonious all those first of all you see how how much those controls change because the sidebar is now inset and it's got rounded corners and the tabs aren't tabs anymore they're capsules and the toolbar buttons are different and you did you have a dark mode screenshot here i think it's worse than light mode because it looks like everything is overexposed and they have the weird drop shadows that have been toned down a little bit uh yeah it really highlights exactly how ugly and not not space efficient and you know not harmonious it's just it's just bad i don't like it um yeah uh and of course i think part of the reason the folder icons stand out so much is that the rest of the os has been drained of all color and basically or in this case i mean in dark mode people like it to be dark so i mean actually i think this dark mode looks better than light mode but switch into light mode and just everything looks like it's bone bleached in the desert and everything is all completely white and the only piece of color is your highlight color whatever color you picked and your folder color completely like i said i believe you can change the default folder color and you can also pick on a per folder basis the color you want a specific color folder to be with the labeling system which then the doc will entirely ignore well and it's funny you bring that up so i want to come back to that in just a second but uh for the record i am a grown-up and so i use my devices uh in light mode during the daytime and dark mode at nighttime uh you heathens with the full-time dark mode i don't know what you're doing.

57:28You're lunatics. But nevertheless, so yes, the screenshot, which I'm about to discuss, I did happen to take just a few minutes before recording. It was nighttime, so it's a dark mode screenshot. But my initial, oh, was because I saw Finder in light mode and I just, I don't like it. Again, I actually think for the most part, this isn't bad. Like Safari, it's not stellar, but I was expected to be offended by the entire operating system and I'm really not. I am offended by Finder, though. Finder's real rough. But speaking of Finder and speaking of the sidebar, I use Synology Drive. We've talked about this many times in the past.

58:06Synology Drive is kind of a bespoke Dropbox alike that, among other things, also will sync with Dropbox through other means, but that's not really relevant. But when I put that in my sidebar, which is where I like it to be because this is effectively my Dropbox. Everything in my sidebar looks, you know, muted and black and white, except the Synology Drive folder, which is the icon for Synology Drive in the Squirtle jail. I don't know if this is something that I have done at some point during my time with this Mac, but I tried going in and doing the, like, customize this folder icon by putting a, even though it's not really an emoji, I think they call it an emoji on it.

58:52And that doesn't seem to matter. It matters for like the main finder window, but to your point about the dock, it doesn't affect the sidebar and finder. So if you have a mechanism by which I can make this not look awful, I would love to hear it because I don't want to remove this from my favorites on my sidebar. And I know John, you're about to say, just get rid of the sidebar, but that's also not happening. But if I can make this not look awful, that would be great. rather than trying to do the thing you were describing is the system in tahoe where you can just take a folder icon and give essentially a template image that it will stamp and emboss on the folder icon yeah we talked about this a while ago like instead of you having to make a custom version of this the system will do it for you which is nice um and presumably it'll stay up to date uh with as they change what the folders look like but uh for this case i would suggest that you uh copy and paste a folder icon onto it you know like get info on it and just paste a plain folder not not like try to emboss it or put a thing or whatever like essentially do a custom icon for it like you would do a custom icon for your hard drives like my my hard drive my has a little picture link on it um paste on a but instead of pasting on a custom icon copy a folder icon and paste it on there that that won't be sort of os upgrade proof so like when the next os comes out your drive will look like tahoe but you can try that but the problem is as you noted the sidebar i can't see if you have any other folders in the sidebar but things like um well i guess you have a folder called detritus that that that's that's a regular folder right it's not showing the folder icon top folder icons are those dark blue things you were complaining about it's showing essentially a template image it's like i know this is a folder and i'm going to ignore whatever icon this folder has because god forbid we honor the custom icon stuff that we added our folders anywhere else in the finder uh i'm just going to show uh my little like it looks like an sf symbol or whatever like like a template image just a line art drawing of a folder same thing with desktop it's a line art drawing of desktop downloads does not look like your downloads folder so if you've customized your downloads folder finder doesn't care it's going to be a downward facing arrow in a circle and it's monochrome and so on and so forth then synology drive stands out because not only is it not a template image but as you noted it's in squircle jail because apple hates us all yeah So when I tried copying and pasting, I tried just deleting the icon.

1:01:04Try copying and pasting a folder icon? I'd made a new folder, copied and pasted it. It didn't matter. As soon as I drag from the parent, which is my home folder, so I'm dragging the drive folder onto the sidebar. When I start the drag, the icon that I'm dragging is the standard blue icon. When I get over to the sidebar, it flips into squircle jail icon, and it's driving me crazy. So please, somebody tell me how to fix this, please. Yeah, I mean, if you, that's, what is the Synology Drive thing? Is it just a, is it a mount point? Like, what is it? No, so it's just a vanilla folder on the file system, but there's client software.

1:01:43Think about the way Dropbox used to work. Right, but so it's just a plain folder then? As far as I know, yeah. I mean, I don't think there's anything weird about it. That's so weird that it would do that, yeah. But I mean, I'm not the only one who filed these bugs. Like, these custom folder features they added are just not honored by other parts of the system. like even within the finder finder is the one app that does honor them in some views but not in the sidebar and the dock has no idea and i filed that but i forget if they closed it as works correctly or if they just ignored it but a lot of people filed that if i make a folder red and i put it in the dock why is it not red in the dock i don't know 26.1 didn't change it i think so if i put this in the dock it appears to be just a regular the the correct icon although i haven't I think if you stamped it with the little embossing thing, I'm not sure if the doc shows that either.

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1:04:30Marco, we are too slow and we missed getting first right of refusal with regard to something you discussed on Under the Radar number 330. I think it was the most recent one, right? I think so. Where you and Underscore discussed that you have embraced Reddit, and I am shook by this. Can you give us a very, very quick recap of what's going on there, and if you have anything else to add, I'd love to hear it. Yeah, so for the beginning of time until recently, Overcast did not have an official Reddit presence. I hardly use Reddit. I still hardly use Reddit. but it just was not a place I hung out. It was not a community that never really stuck for me.

1:05:12What happens on Reddit, and we have this for our show too, if you don't create an official community on Reddit, one will be created for you. You have the right to remain silent. One will be created for you, and if you are not there, what tends to happen is that the one that is created by other people tends to be people who are mad or who don't like you. It kind of becomes like a place where your biggest haters will gather. And so whenever I have discovered some subreddit for something that I am a part of, it has not been a good experience to look at any of those posts because it gets very nasty and very personal pretty universally.

1:06:02and so I always had a pretty negative impression of Reddit and any motivation I would have to possibly be there or to put myself into that you know what I perceived as like subjecting myself to that like a long time ago I used to listen to Howard Stern back many years ago and in like the early days of Twitter like he was getting on Twitter and he was it was kind of interesting like listening to him as like a kind of an old school celebrity uh learning about like how twitter can like turn against you and how people are like harassing you constantly and you have all these all these haters that just have you know all this like you know access directly to your attention and one thing that he said on the air one day he's like why am i giving these people access to me like this and that that really stuck with me and so over the years i have occasionally wondered like why do I give the public so much access to my attention?

1:07:05Because a lot of times it is very unreasonable, very negative, very personally attacking. And so it can be pretty weighty on your mood, your mental health. It's a tough thing to deal with in the long term, especially when it gets rude or nasty or personal. And so for a while, my opinion of Reddit was basically, this is a place that is best left ignored for me. Like it is not good for me to go there because the people there all hate me. And it is not good for my mental health. It is not good for my focus. It is not a good use of my time to go there. Before we move on from this, I'd be curious to hear, John, your two cents about Reddit.

1:07:55And for what it's worth, I strongly echo what you're saying with regard to things that one is involved in. Like, you know, there was a period of time where I would at the very least lurk and occasionally interact with the unofficial ATP subreddit. Okay, don't do that. And it quickly became apparent that that was not a place for me. And maybe that's, you can take that however you want. It doesn't really matter. But it was quickly made clear that this is not a place that I would like to be. That doesn't mean the place is necessarily bad. It's just, it's bad for me. But that being said, over the years, I've actually gotten more into Reddit.

1:08:37And there's a handful of subreddits that I've lurked in for a while now. And they're generally pretty good. And I definitely came down of the opinion that all of Reddit was disgusting and hateful and evil and awful. And I think that can be true, but it is not, as I had once thought, always true. And I think that any service that seems to value anonymity, in my personal opinion, you trend quickly towards a-holes. But not all of Reddit, you know, hashtag not all Reddit, not all of Reddit is that way. And I will look at the subreddits that I do browse once every day or two. And sometimes I get really useful and good information from there.

1:09:22So I think I am up on Reddit broadly. Oddly, I am very, very down on Reddit about things that I'm involved in. So not that different from you. And that's fair. Like, they're really cruel to you in that place. But, you know, what you're saying, though, is very valid in the sense that, like, these social platforms and social networks, they're huge. You can't generalize and say, like, everyone on this platform is X. and like I remember like back back when I was at Tumblr you know I would occasionally see people say like oh Tumblr is mad today or Tumblr is really down or whatever and I'd be like you know that's like I'm not seeing that from the people I follow you're seeing that from the people you follow that's a different thing like when you're in a social platform what you see is generally speaking either what you have chosen to see or what the algorithm is feeding you based on your activity but either way it's like Like it's – you're seeing a very narrow slice of a very big platform.

1:10:25And you can't just say like, oh, this entire platform is X because they're bigger than that. It's the same thing like in New York City. New York City is not – like not everyone you see in New York City is involved in the stock market. It's a big industry. There's a lot of people who are involved in finance in New York City. But it's such a big city. Every industry is huge in the city. Like, so everyone you see in the street, like, you don't know, you don't know who they are, what they're involved in. It's too big of a city to assume that. That's how social platforms are. They're so big that there is no one type of person on them.

1:10:59There is no one type of community. So anyway. Well, for the topic of Reddit, I get what you're saying, but there's a couple of things that are a little bit different on the internet. One is that there's no geographic boundary, so you can be much bigger than a single city. And the other is Reddit as a platform is designed to allow people to make sub communities sort of like self governing, self sustaining sub communities. That's what the platform is for. Now, that being said, Reddit was essentially seeded by a particular type of individual in the early days, people who people who were attracted to nerdy things like these type of tech platforms.

1:11:34and also people who continue to be attracted to this form of community building on the internet. There is, you can generalize a little bit about this sort of stereotypical person who would be interested in being very active in Reddit or being a moderator on Reddit or whatever, to some degree. But Reddit is just so huge now, and has been for years and years. And it's made up of sub-communities. And the sub-communities vary widely. There's sub-communities that have strict moderation and rules that everyone has to be nice. There's sub-communities that all they do is scream at each other all day. It doesn't even matter what the topic is.

1:12:11There could be seven sub-communities. There could be the sub-community about model trains where everybody's nice to each other, and there could be the sub-community about model trains where everybody's mean and has flame wars about model trains. That's what Reddit supports. Make your own community that is what you want it to be. Have moderation, don't have moderation, whatever your rules are. There was a blog recently. there's a procreate reddit for like the procreate program for ipad like the graphics art application someone made a reddit for procreate where the people would share their artwork and someone shared a picture that they drew of master chief from the halo game with the trans flag behind him and the moderators took it down because they said we don't want politics in here and as you would imagine that blew up into big thing of saying the existence of people is not political and blah blah blah and the upshot is people who don't like it left the reddit and started their own procreate reddit that's not filled with bigots you know and that's reddit as a platform supports that make the community that you want to have run it the way that you want to have it which is so you know speaking of like the atp subreddit or whatever that they're using reddit correctly they whoever wants to form that sub community on whatever they want to talk about however they want to talk about it there could be five of them ten of them one of them zero of them uh and most of those communities are not for me that i don't use very much at all most of the time i'm just getting it as a google result or whatever for something that i'm searching in which case i'm glad those communities exist and someone is like figuring out the best way to repair my particular dishwasher and writing a big reddit post about it like i love it that's great about reddit but i don't personally participate in most of those communities but i love that it is a platform that provides a way for people to make those communities so i view the atp reddit or however many ones there are overcast reddit or whatever is those are people using this platform which is you know kind of like a nested threaded indented text-based web forum style uh community uh they make the the communities they want to make and uh you know some some of the communities thrive and become popular and big and get lots of structure around them other ones sort of like fizzle out or whatever but like i don't begrudge anybody using that platform to make a community they want to have and in the grand scheme of these type of platforms i think for the most part there's been some kerfuffles about reddit doing evil things with moderators or whatever but like it has mostly resisted becoming a terrible parody of itself and being taken over by uh super duper evil billionaires uh maybe they just have like mildly evil billionaires taking over anyway uh all this to say is that i don't frequent reddit but i I'm glad that it exists and I don't begrudge anyone to make whatever community they want to make in Reddit.

1:14:50And if you don't like a particular subreddit, don't read it. Yeah. And that's kind of what led me to reevaluate. So one thing I realized over time recently is like it was not doing me any good to have places where my customers were gathering to talk about how much I sucked and how much I wasn't listening to them. because for me to not be there reinforces the fact that I'm not listening to them. And the reality is those places usually were so negative that I was not, in fact, listening to them because I decided I was better off ignoring those places and kind of shutting them out because it was too hurtful to read them most of the time.

1:15:35And so this was not really a good solution. Like this was not a good situation that I had this like kind of hate sink, almost like a heat sink. This is where all the hate gets concentrated. And meanwhile, at the same time, I'm realizing over time that, first of all, I want to engage more with my customers. And I used to have a place for that. It was Twitter. And then Twitter became a Nazi bar. So that's – I left Twitter. And Mastodon is the most direct replacement for me, but it's not even close to a replacement. You know, Mastodon is a certain type of community very heavily there. It's very heavily nerds.

1:16:20It's very heavily men. It's very heavily white men. It's not a very diverse community. It's not a very complete community. and granted Reddit does not do amazingly in that area but it's better than Mastodon I think but certainly better than what I've seen on Mastodon and Mastodon it's also just small it's a much smaller community than Twitter was and there's other things like Blue Sky and Threads but they I don't think it's a good idea for me to try to spread myself across all those different platforms and try to build a presence on all of them. It's like, I got work to do. I don't have time for all that.

1:17:02And I'm not convinced that the outcome there was very good. I spent years feeling like I was addicted to Twitter. That's why I made quitter. It was because I was addicted to Twitter. And I was running time tracking software. And I was seeing, wow, I'm spending like five or six hours a week on Twitter. I tried for years to reduce my dependence on that kind of thing. now I finally have because Mastodon doesn't have that much going on and I want to jump right into blue sky and threads like no that's terrible that would be a terrible idea for me so I decided like I'm not really gonna you know invest much or anything in those platforms but Mastodon is still limited I'm like all right I I need to find other ways to engage with my customers and to engage with and to find new users frankly and to engage with other people and so email is one way that I hear from customers.

1:17:51But email has a lot of limits as well. I definitely hear from the most people via email by far. But if I respond to an email, which it's hard to keep up, first of all. And if I'm relying on email as my main communication venue, it all comes to me. So no one else can respond to it except me. And yeah, I could hire somebody, which maybe I'll, I still might do that at some point. But I've had negative experiences with that in the past. I didn't really want to do that. So anyway, email doesn't really scale because it's just me seeing it all. No one else can help respond if they have the same problem or they already know the answer.

1:18:32And when I respond to somebody, only one person will ever see that. So I'm not really creating like a knowledge base. I'm not really creating like, you know, support articles or any kind of equivalent. I'm not creating search results for other people to find. and ai is now here in a big way replacing a lot of help and web search now when you look at what the ai companies are indexing what their data sources are for things like obscure questions about apps and technical platforms reddit is where all that information is coming from that's why reddit is like locking out search engines and starting to license their data like for money because it's very valuable to AI companies.

1:19:16And they're one of the only places that has that kind of value at that scale. So Reddit answers and like Reddit posts are becoming the truth input to AI. Like when an AI model is being trained on a whole bunch of data, what is it being trained on? Reddit. And so if somebody asks ChatGPT, hey, in Overcast, how do I do this? What is it going to be pulling from? read it so i thought this is actually a really good time to reconsider whether i should participate in read it or not because it seems like there's a lot of reasons pointing to maybe i should give it a try but i had such bad experiences you know browsing it in the past i'm like all right well what do i do here you know i don't want to like invade and do like kind of you know join the existing one and say, all right, I'm here, everyone.

1:20:12You know, like that. I felt like that would be like walking into a tomato launcher. Like that's that's not a good, you know, entrance, not a good situation to walk into. So I thought, let me I will create my own and the people who want to hate me can have their own space and they can keep hating me. I'm not going to invade their space. You know, that's that's kind of like one thing I mentioned on the radar is like back like when Twitter was smaller, we would be able to rant about a company on Twitter and we would just rant to each other and it was fine and then as twitter got bigger and all the companies not only got on twitter but then started getting like you know search bots that would crawl for mentions of them so they can intervene with their customer service teams it became a lot less fun to rant about like oh i had a bad flight on united because then like you get a message from united customer support hey we'd love to help please tell us please dm us so we can chat and work this out for you carrot xp or whatever the initials were the people personally you know and it like once the companies were there responding to you and you knew that if you posted something complaining about them you knew they would see it it kind of toned it down a little bit because it kind of like it kind of sucks the fun out of complaining and it it turns it into like okay well i know they're gonna see this if i post if i mention them like mention their name so maybe i'll be a little bit kinder and maybe I'll consider whether I really want to be posting this rant or not.

1:21:35Well, that happens on Reddit too, as it turns out. So I created my own community on Reddit. And what happened was, first of all, it was not the old community. Like I let them be and I created my own space. And I also publicized to my audience, here is my Reddit. And what that created was a very civilized place. Because first of all, it was a lot of my people filling it up. So good. Okay. you know it's my it's my existing audience on my my social platforms i link to it in the app you know so like it's my users filling it up instead of just like you know a small handful of people who don't like me very much but also i was there showing myself to be there i was publicly present and i was i posted a lot i'm still posting not as much now because i just got back from a vacation but i'm posting a lot and by me being there people are automatically kind of instinctively just being a lot more civil.

1:22:29And part of that is because I'm fixing a lot of problems. And that's always a good idea. But part of it also is that they know I'm there. It's the same way like when people are in their cars, they will behave with their driving in a more rude manner oftentimes than what they would do face to face to somebody. Because it's like when you're in your car, the other people are dehumanized. They're just other cars. You don't see them as people driving in cars oh that car's a jerk or whatever and then but if you're like standing in line at the bank you wouldn't like you know aggressively ride behind the person in front of you trying to get them to hurry up and write that check like you know there's there's certain things that like you would never do in person like humanity gets in the way well that's what i'm seeing on reddit like because i am there now with an official presence and an official subreddit and they know that i'm going to be reading most of these posts, they're being a lot nicer.

1:23:21And it's much more like constructive. And look, it's not all roses. People are reporting problems. Sure, I get that. There are problems. That's why I'm there to try to help fix these problems. But they're doing it in a civil way. No one's being unreasonably mean. A couple times somebody posts something a little bit snarky, it gets downvoted before I even see it usually. It's been a much more productive place. and I think people are appreciative that I am there and I'm appreciative of them because they are bringing things to my attention that weren't getting through before and then every single time I write an answer to a question first of all I don't even have to answer them all because other people are answering them which is amazing but then second of all when I do post an answer to a question other people can see it and it gets indexed as a search result it gets crawled by AI trainers And then it becomes an AI answer when people ask it to AI engines.

1:24:19And so I feel like I'm like I'm multiplying my effort here, which as a one person business, you always have to find ways to do that. Like that's that's always a challenge for one person businesses. Like, how do you how do you multiply yourself? How do you scale yourself? And this is way better than trying to solve problems by email because other people can help. And when I if I do jump in and say something, other people can then find that information later. So, so far, it's been a really positive experience. Again, like, it's not all easy because there are certain, you know, hard problems that I have to tackle.

1:24:53But I found, I found, I'm just being honest about that. Like, so, you know, I took a vacation last week. And before I left, I thought, I thought of like whether I should do this or not. But I decided, you know, I'm going to tell the Reddit I'm going to be gone for a week. that way they won't get too mad if i'm not responding for a week to anything that's posted and i was also trying and maybe i'll get back to this later i was trying not to do any work on this trip because this is also kind of a challenge that i've had a personal challenge i am not good at not working and i've been trying to get better at that i'm trying to get better like being able to take a vacation and not bring work with me and not the whole time feel like oh i should be doing work.

1:25:40So that I posted on the Reddit before I left, I said, I'm going on a personal vacation after all this, you know, iOS 26 happened, all this stuff has just happened. I'm going on a vacation for a week. And I was really afraid of how that would be received. And every single comment on it, I think everything was positive. It was all like, good job, man, you deserve it. Take as long as you need. I was shocked. The difference in attitude between the responses to that and how I was picturing I'd be received on Reddit all these years was striking. And I think that's largely because I'm there. I'm present.

1:26:25I'm engaging. I'm actually involved now. And so that seems to have improved everything. Actually being in this discussion, being present in this community, leading my own subreddit. And if people want to go hate me somewhere else, they can do that. I'm not going to interfere with that. but having my place that is like here's where I will see things I will respond to things people have responded to that incredibly well so we'll see how it goes I mean I still you know this is still early days things can always go badly but I'm optimistic I think this will actually be a really good change that I've made and I think that this community you know it's a small community There's not that many people in it so far, but I think it's going to end up being really good.

1:27:13And I think I'm heading in the right direction. And so far, you know, the more I participate, the better it gets. You may be in a honeymoon period, but we'll see. But like that's the kind of the issue with things like Reddit and someone mentioned in the chat room like that we should have like a members only discord or whatever. In the beginning, it looks like everything's all upside and isn't this great and everyone's happened to be here. but running any kind of online community or not even running it but just you know participating in an online community and having that community be sustained in a way that pleases you especially if you're the one who started the community you started it with the purpose you want something out of it you want it to be different than the existing community ideally it should do x y and z for you you're like i did it and so far it's working great it's doing what I want.

1:28:04But how do communities maintain that? How do they, you have a way that you want this community to be. It is that way now. How do you make it stay that way? Inevitably, you run up into the exact same things that anyone who has ever had any kind of community online or otherwise, but especially online because it's been done at scale, runs into. What are the rules of this community? What are the social norms? How are they enforced? Do we need moderators? What are the rules now we argue about the rules are we banning people what are they like i mean look at the procreate community they thought it was great we're just here sharing art for years and years until you know i think they did some kind of like vote like we're going to vote among the community guidelines are and like this is a a subreddit with like a hundred thousand people in it right 43 people voted in the poll about whether they should allow quote-unquote politics and of the 43 people that voted uh the majority of them said no we shouldn't have politics here And that little decision slept there until someone posted message for the trans flag.

1:29:02And now it's like, oh, we didn't realize we were in this community. And now there's a schism and people are branching off and people are angry. And what happens to the old community? And it's a thankless job to try to run a community like that or to try to, you know, make sure that everybody who is participating understands the rules of that community and gets them enforced and doesn't get mad about it or whatever. And in many respects, when a community is small and self-selecting, you don't have to worry about that. but if it as time goes on like outside threats what if people from the other uh community come over and decide they're going to participate in this new community because that's where the action is happening but now they are all mean anything is there some mechanism in place to stop them from doing that would you just leave and start another community would you constantly be fleeing from them would would you think that everyone else would shout them down like and then if it comes a screaming match between the old people and the new people online community is really really hard so i hope that doesn't happen to your reddit but like you always have to think like well what's stopping it from happening just that people have decided not to do that so far right and you know if it doesn't work out doesn't work out you leave like so what like it was good for a time and you know whatever and as you noted the information that is there and getting indexed that is of value even if it only lasts a short period of time and presumably you're getting value out of it now with interacting with customers and so on and so forth like all the things you said are true and that doesn't change even if things go south sometime in the future um although i will point out two things one uh it would have that exact same value without ai like google search index like half the time i'm finding myself on a reddit thing because i'm googling for how to fix some dishwasher and i land on a reddit post or whatever like even the shortcuts thing that solution i found in reddit about like don't overwrite files that was just a google search right obviously ai is uh another greeting because so many people are using it now that who will never actually go to reddit.com which is why reddit wants money from them because they're not actually sending any traffic there and yes it's good that you're participating in that as well um so that has value no matter how this goes but one of the when people ask about discords that i mentioned before one of the reasons we don't have that is because i think all three of us understand that if we were to run an official discord now we're taking on a responsibility for governance in a community of fans if atp fans want to have their own discord they can do that right now like we're nothing we could like we're not stopping them right it's just that we don't want to run that community because it's a lot of work to run any kind of community and there's significant downside if we're seen as the people who are setting the rules for the community and forcing them and people are angry about it and it's like guys if you want a community of atp fans go make one and then you get to run the community and you can see how hard it is you can make seven communities you can have 10 subreddits you can have slack channels you can have hotline channels you can of irc channel like that just but running a community is so difficult so that's why we haven't ever done that as an official type thing i know some people want it but it's a subset and running that community becomes like a huge amount of work for a small number of people and there's only so many things we can all take on since we have so many plates spinning here um so i don't know i i'm i'm wary about your red i'm glad it's working out for you and another thing you mentioned on on uh under the radar which i thought was a good self-knowledge but also uh you know is kind of a bummer is i think underscore s like um oh no you said this yourself like uh like you're not creating a knowledge base like you're not like making uh like a an actual repository of information you're answering people's questions on reddit and those get indexed and that's the system working the way it intended and you said it's because i know i will never actually sit down and make some kind of like official structured knowledge base.

1:32:36It's like, I know myself, I haven't done that in the past. I'm probably not going to do it in the future, but I will do this. I will answer someone's question on Reddit and allow that to be passively indexed. Um, my pitch would be having some kind of self-created set of documentation, knowledge base or whatever will make answering people's questions on Reddit easier because you can then give a quick summary and link them to the length of your explanation instead of writing it over and over again that's the one of the reasons we have a membership fact on atp.fm is because people have membership questions and there's no way in how and lots of people they email for support or whatever because again we don't have a community to do this which is fine but i don't want to write the same email reply seven times so that's why i have anchor links to the specific question that they asked in the membership fact that gives a longer explanation and if five or six people ask a question that becomes frequently asked guess what it goes into the FAQ, which is kind of like a knowledge base, which gets indexed, which yada yada.

1:33:33So I would encourage you to at least, if something keeps coming up, consider at Overcast.fm having a FAQ or something where the most frequently asked questions are and you have a formal longer answer. And you can still informally answer people's questions there. But I think what you'll see then is people who are answering questions for you will start linking to your FAQ. And the FAQ is a living document that you control. So unlike the Reddit post, which you're not going to go back and edit years later, you can keep updating the FAQ to be more accurate and expanded or whatever. So that's my only pitch.

1:34:03I know you're not going to write a knowledge base. I know you're not going to write your own extensive documentation or whatever, but having something that you control to link to from those discussions is very useful. Yeah, I mean, you are correct. That would be great, but the reality is I won't do it. And it's not like some kind of principled stand. I don't have time. and posting you're just not that type of person i get it like you said that in the thing it's a self-knowledge like i get that i'm just saying like i think there's a compromise or maybe like some tiny amount of that you could force yourself to do may again it may scale you better it may it may pay dividends you're not committing to like i'm gonna write giant formal documentation for everything yeah and it's just like it's a time thing like i i barely have enough time to keep up with reading the feedback trying to respond to some of it like i i barely even can can reply to most of it but i try to respond to some of it um to also then go and create all this documentation and everything like it's just it's so much easier to just write stuff in a reddit field and hit submit i know but like you never but what if someone has the same question two months from now it's like i just answered that well if you had it in a single place if it's literally frequently asked put it in the list of frequently asked questions and then you can just linked to the longer answer so you don't have to rewrite the longer answer over and over again because i there is some common stuff that is always coming up now maybe not the way you're using it now because it's more of kind of like feedback and on the fly and what problems are people experiencing or whatever and honestly like the obviously the thing you're much more inclined to do is that if lots of people are being confused about a feature you'll change it in the app to solve that problem and not write a lengthy explanation of how it's supposed to work but as you noted about like priority playlists certain things there is no one obvious solution that you I'll just update the app and this will no longer be confusing.

1:35:49You have to make certain decisions. There's areas where there is no one right answer. And sometimes it's good to just have an explanation of the way you have chosen to make it work and why. And currently you're putting that in Reddit. But, you know, if this community lasts for a long time, three years from now, you're going to get sick of writing that same answer over and over again. Maybe you have to have a paragraph of text somewhere on a website that you can link to. Yeah, we'll see. You might be right over time for now. Or the whole community could be invaded and your lack of formal moderation and code of conductable, you know.

1:36:23And it's not even that. Like, no one is running this. Like, you haven't, like, designated moderators. You're certainly not moderating and banning people, right? So, like, it's a very, it's an informal community. It survives based on norms. And I don't think you are not going to certainly invest the time to be like, no, I'm a full-time community manager for this subreddit. Yes, but also like, so, you know, all of your concerns about like the health of a community, like that's all valid. And, you know, that may come to pass. So far, I don't think the community is big or broad enough to have that be a high risk.

1:37:01Like, first of all, you know, you use the example of the Procreate community. Procreate has substantially more users than Overcast. I don't know what their numbers are. I guarantee you it's way more than me. Yeah, they've got a Reddit with 100 ,000 people. So these are the nerdiest of the nerds and there's 100 ,000 of them. Yeah, their user base is probably 100 times the size of mine. Like it is way bigger than mine. So that's a very different beast already just from size. And again, like, you know, when you're talking about like publishing art people have made. Yeah, that's pretty broad. No one's publishing art they've made in Overcast.

1:37:37The range of potential controversy or ways in which the community can become toxic, it's just a much smaller range for the Overcast subreddit because it's way fewer people and it's way more narrowly focused. It probably won't become a problem. But again, I think I'm too inexperienced on Reddit to really be able to say that for sure. But I think it will probably be fine. I think the bigger risk is that it would die, like just from a lack of traffic. Fizzle out due to inactivity like the Slack did. Yeah. Like I think that's the much bigger risk of like how this fails is it just dies down and there's not enough volume for people to pay attention.

1:38:18Even if it does, like I said, you will still have that content that will be indexed. And like, you know, like it still has produced value that as long as Reddit stays existing and those pages stay on the web and get indexed and so on and so forth, that value will still be there. but it no longer is an active community where you're getting real-time feedback. But we'll see. Slack is definitely way more hidden and difficult to get to. The barrier to entry is higher, whereas people can find a Reddit page in a million different ways. And once they land there, people know how to click on a web page.

1:38:48Maybe they don't know how to use Reddit, but I feel like Slack with their stupid login system and everything is just so much harder to get into. Yeah, it's Slack. I had the beta Slack. I have since shut it down. I thought the Slack would be like more of that kind of community but it just never got the volume it was and and the volume it was never high and it just got lower and lower over time so that that just wasn't going to happen long term but and and I think you're right like Slack is made to be a private walled garden and for this kind of community that's just the wrong model like this needs to like if you're trying to make a community around your app it can't be a Slack it has to be a publicly available website that can be indexed and anybody can join.

1:39:31That's the way to go. So again, we'll see how it goes. It's still early days. Maybe we'll listen back to this in a year and it all burned to the ground and I'll laugh at how wrong I was. But I don't think so. I think it's probably going to be good. I think it's, again, it's either going to fizzle out and be nothing or it'll be sustained and be pretty good. And I think, honestly, I think the latter is more likely. my best guess is one year from now, the Reddit will look very similar to how it does now in terms of like the tone, the traffic, the usefulness to everybody. So hopefully I'm right about that and we'll see how it goes.

1:40:09Well, at least you didn't make a Facebook page. Oh, God, no. Talk about not having control over your community. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Delete Me, and Zapier. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. You will get, of course, as mentioned earlier, that membership discount or the, sorry, the merchandise discount. Whoops. And as well as all of our exclusive content, including Overtime, our weekly bonus topic this week on Overtime. We're going to be talking about Neo, the household, quote, robot. Is it a robot? John will tell us.

1:40:43And maybe Joanna Stern will have also told us. We'll talk about that in Overtime. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was 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

1:41:53I've recently gotten into very early days of 3D printing. Oh, what are you trying to print? And I think that came out sarcastic or about. I don't mean it that way. I'm genuinely asking. For a long time ago, Tiff got me as like an experimental Christmas gift. She got me a 3D printer many years ago. The company, I believe it's Shindo. The company went out of business long ago. They had like proprietary filament, which is the rolls of plastic that you like that get extruded to print stuff. and like nobody like you had to like hack the microchips in their filament with third-party refills to get it to you know so like it maintaining that printer over time is difficult and it was a very early model like for the time it was good but i mean that was probably almost 10 years ago and printers have come a long way since then so our our plan was okay that printer you know we will i never really used it that much i used it basically to print a few home pod cord management stands and a coffee filter holder and that's about all i ever made with it but what happened was as it was sitting you know on a shelf for a while is it over time tiff and adam would play with it and especially around halloween adam would often request a halloween costume that would be based on like a video game character or something and we would be able to 3d print like uh you know a mask or a helmet or something um as part of the costume and then over time Adam learned oh you can also 3D print a bunch of like fun little toys and doodads and stuff and so we would print some of those and the old 3D printer eventually we ran out of first party filament and we got tired of trying to hack it and so we're like you know what this Halloween he had a pretty ambitious costume model to print and I'm like let's get a new 3D printer for the family and my interest in it is much more limited my interest in it has basically been like when i have a need for something to be 3d printed i will i will solve that need that need doesn't happen very often for me but it does like the wi-fi thing at the restaurant that you told us about yeah so one like the first thing i had in a long time was and this was actually with the old printer um was my um yo link temperature monitors that I put in the restaurant fridges, Yoling didn't have any kind of bracket.

1:44:19So I went on, I think it's, is it Tinkercad? Is that what the site? Tinkercad. Yeah. I like, I asked ChatGPT, like, what do people use? Like, what do children use to make 3D models from scratch, basically? And I came upon Tinkercad, which is this like kind of, you know, simplified web app version of like that that's sponsored by AutoCAD that basically is like a web app to make very simple 3D models. And so I went on Tinkercad, I figured out how to use it. I have calipers. And so I like measured the temperature sensor and I made myself a bracket for the Elink sensor. And I printed it out in this like ugly red plastic that's the only filament we had left.

1:44:57But it was, it felt very good to have a problem and to solve that problem myself. And, you know, I couldn't just go on Amazon and buy a bracket for$6 because they didn't exist. Like no one made them. And there was no model existing on like thingiverse or maker world or anything like that and so i couldn't use someone else's model i had to make my own model from scratch and solve this problem myself and it felt pretty good to be honest um but like i'm not i'm not like a maker i'm not constantly thinking about new things to print new things to make that's just kind of not how my brain works um and so i don't really have a frequent use for it but the rest of the time my family is printing fun stuff all the time so we got the new printer and a special thanks to our friend merlin mann who's been talking about 3d printing for a couple of years now on all his various podcasts as he's gotten really into it um and i've been following his post on mastodon about it and everything else and he a couple years ago i asked him like hey whenever i upgrade my printer what should i get and he recommended the bamboo company b-a-m-b-u because they basically have like almost like an Apple-like integrated system.

1:46:08They sell the printers. They sell spools of filament. You can use other filament if you want to, but if you stick within their system and get their stuff, it's very easy. Everything is tagged with RFID, so you put in their filament and it reads it and it knows what it is. It knows what color it is. It knows what material it is. It knows how hot to set the nozzle and stuff like that. All these different variables you need with 3D printing. So, if you are not a 3D printing nerd and just want to like get into it it's a great solution for that because it it takes care of a lot of those details for you if you stick within their system and i don't who cares if i if i have to only buy their filament fine i'm not a power user here i don't need anyone else's filament i'll just stick with theirs so it makes it easier anyway so i can now say with a little bit more experience with it the first of all the bamboo printers are awesome Like they have come 3d printers have come a long way in the last 10 years, a long way, a mile, like, oh my God, it's so much easier now.

1:47:13It's so much better than it used to be. But also now, like I, because it has gotten easier and better and faster, I'm also now finding a few more opportunities to use it. so first of all i'm having fun just like helping my kid with like stuff he wants to make you know we i got a roll of tpu because that's hard to print but we now have a nice printer that can print it so like and tpu can be like a little bit squishy so that's kind of fun you can make you know certain different types of things with different behaviors with that so like we figured out how do we print tpu we figured it out and we printed a few little things and they're squishy and it's delightful um also the other day i had this stupid idea i'm like you know what i have a 3d printer now for the last i don't know year uh ever since we've remodeled this house are our bedside lamps we redid the bed area and our bedside lamps are these like sconces on the walls and the switches to them are those little metal knobs you know the ones that are like about as thick as like a pencil eraser and you and it's a and they're three-way lamps so to turn it off you might have to turn this thing three clicks and they just have those little like you know ridges on these little knobs and next to your bed first of all it's like that's they're annoying they're hard to turn and then like in the winter if i just if i just put moisturizer on my hands before i went to bed i can't turn those knobs you need also good grips for your uh lights or you could have hooked up to a smart thing which i'm sure everyone's gonna write it and say you know you can just clap like the clapper and they'll turn off yeah i tried those things but basically the way they're wired it would be very difficult to have a smart switch um so i'm like all right that's that's that option is out smart light bulb is what people are going to suggest but of course they're like you know custom fixtures with like little tiny those like little tiny round bulbs like not for use in enclosed fixtures that a lot of those smart light bulbs will say it isn't enclosed it's literally they won't fit like if you if i tried to find like a smart bulb It's like it's almost the size of like an oven bulb.

1:49:14It's these little tiny round bulbs that go in these things. They're you know, they're made to be pretty. They're not made to be functional. So I looked believe me. I looked for smart bulbs that would fit this. They don't exist. So I'm like, OK, so my option is deal with the switch. Well, instead, I just you know, for the last year, I had like this little like USB lamp next to my bed. I would just use that instead. I just wouldn't even use these lamps and neither would tip because it was so much for paying the ass. So I finally I had an idea. I'm like, I have a 3D printer now. I wonder if I can just make basically like a wingnut, like something that I could stick on top of these.

1:49:49It would look like a butterfly, so it's still decorative. I could, actually. I didn't, but I could. But I'm like, so I went into Tinkercad, and I got my caliper. I measured like, all right, the metal knob is, you know, whatever it is, like seven millimeters wide, and it's about 12 millimeters tall. So I'm like, all right, I'll make a shape that can fit over that with a hole, and then just two wings sticking out the sides and i'll just make basically yeah basically a butterfly or a wing nut um and i'm like and i figure like i'll have to like really shove it on there and it'll only fit with friction so i'll probably it'll probably take a bunch of tries to get this right and get exactly the right size and maybe i'll have to use tpu so we can like squish around it who knows the very first one i printed worked and i stuck it on and you got a really shove it on there because this is, again, it's a friction fit, but that's by design.

1:50:43I really shoved it on there and I printed a second one and I put it on the one on Tiff's side of the bed and I went to bed that night and I went flip, flip, flip, flip, and I can just flip it. So the satisfaction I have had out of this stupid little thing, like I had this problem in my home and I solved it and I solved it really, really well with this perfect solution, with this weird plastic that looks like wood. Wow. The feeling that gives me, like, I don't, again, I don't have a lot of need for custom printed parts in my life, but the rest of my family can have fun with the printer all the rest of the time.

1:51:22And when I do have a need for something like this, oh man, it's so satisfying. I'm so pleased with myself. And I'm probably not going to get into, you know, again, very frequent needs for this. but when I have that one specific need, it's a great feeling. So anyway, if you're out there, if you're a 3D printer curious, go to Bamboo Labs. It makes everything easy for you and I can recommend it. And thanks Merlin for tipping me off to all this stuff. You know, it's funny you bring this up. This morning I woke up absurdly early for no good reason. I couldn't get back to sleep and so I was looking at YouTube and a friend of mine, Eric Wielander, I've brought him up from time to time on the show.

1:52:02He does a lot of really great YouTube stuff about smart home and largely around HomeKit. And I watched, I'd heard of this kind of obliquely before, but I watched a video of his about grid affinity. Are you familiar with this? No. So what this is, is, and I'm going to, I don't know anything about 3D printing. So I'm probably going to get some of the details wrong. But the idea is you print a like grid, a very, very, not very tall, but a grid thing that you place in like a drawer, for example, right? and then you print little containers that snap into that grid. Does that make any sense at all? So you have like this base plate, if you will, and then you have these bespoke things that you snap into the base plate.

1:52:44So you take a drawer that's just a garbage drawer full of junk, and now it's a garbage drawer full of organized junk. With custom plastic parts. With custom plastic parts. And so I've been looking at this, and this is not a need I have in my life, but this is one of those things where I'm trying to invent a reason to buy a 3D printer. I have no space. I have no idea where I could put one. I don't have the money, or I don't feel like I have the money to just flush on a 3D printer that I'd probably never use, especially since our local library will let you do 3D prints. I've never tried this, but I know that that's a service that they offer, and I don't think it's very expensive.

1:53:21But all that to be said, I'll put a link to this video in the show notes. This Gridfinity thing looks really, really slick, and I'm very intrigued by it. I will say also, let me just check to make sure this company still exists. Yeah, it does. Adam had a lot of fun when we were living at the beach. We got him a little 3D printer called Toybox. I don't know if I ever mentioned on the show. I probably did years ago. So Toybox makes basically tiny 3D printers for children with really easy rolls of filaments and really easy iPad app to control. Oh, that's cool. They can just draw something on the iPad and it'll print an extruded version of that.

1:53:58You draw it in two dimensions and it prints an extruded thing. But also there's this whole catalog on Toybox in their app. You can print a whole bunch of little toys and stuff like that. And it's easy enough for children to use, easy enough for adults to use who aren't 3D printing nerds also, which is nice. And I haven't looked at Toybox in a while because we had the big printer then. but we had a lot of fun with Toybox and Adam really enjoyed it. So if you want to get into baby 3D printing in a very simple way and you don't need to print anything very large, Toybox is something to look at. Just make sure it's still good.

1:54:34It was good years ago. Do some research, make sure it's still good. But it probably is. This maybe is the way that modern children learn their modern modified version of patience. and uh when i was a kid the way you learned the way you learned patience was that uh you would save up your money to buy something that you had seen advertised in the back of a magazine for months and months like in some terrible low resolution postage stamp size ad at the back of a magazine that says get this model plane for just x amount of dollars and you save your allowance and it's got a little thing and you make a little envelope and you get your parents that should give you a stamp and you mail it or whatever and it's supposed to come in four to six weeks and four to six weeks when you're a kid seems like a thousand years eventually usually after yeah after days and days waiting for it you forget that you even ordered it and it seemed what seems like you know years in the future something arrives in your mail you're like what the hell is this you're like oh it's that thing i had forgotten entirely about it anyway that's how my generation learned patience the way i think modern children learn patience is they get a toy 3d printer and they're like i'm gonna have this this cool toy airplane and they're like okay and print and then they run over to the thing and they're like where's my airplane and they have to wait like three hours for it to come and three three hours is the modern equivalent of four to six weeks that's true and it's just 3d printing sucks i want the airplane now like everything else like my television that comes on whenever i want to watch it immediately and if it doesn't it's broken well also and it is kind of exciting too because it doesn't always work yeah like you know you could if you depending on how ambitious you are with with what you're trying to print that's also the experience of like when you wait four to six weeks and it comes and it's a piece of junk that's the 3d print not working i waited three hours and i don't even get the airplane that i wanted yeah it's like you know i had to run this print overnight and you and you wake up you know you know bleary-eyed at 6 a.m you run downstairs this is it done how did it turn out oh it got all stringy or whatever you know but yeah yeah so yes exactly that's that's when the thing comes and it doesn't look like the picture in the magazine because it never ever did i will say that for whatever it's worth.

1:56:35Like the modern printers, they're so much better that the, so far, like, I mean, again, our sample size is not great, but so far the, the modern bamboo printer compared to the old printer ends the toy box. Like the rate of failures is way lower because it's just so much more advanced. Like everything, everything has gotten better. Everything has gotten more precise and more dynamic and more sensitive and all. It's just, it's so much better. So things have come a long way. That's very cool. Now I know if I need 3D prints and stuff, I'm just going to have to ask you. yeah and of course of course i went all in you know i have like the good printer and now i'm all the accessories like i have like the automatic feeder you're gonna you're gonna 3d print your own poop shoot i did i did that today i printed a poop shoot today that's for yeah for the listeners what that is is like when the printer like so the modern bamboo printers they support this thing called the ams which is basically like you can put like four spools of filament in this loader thing that sits on top and you can you can have models that use different filaments you can easily switch between them and so it has to let you so it can like load a different one dynamically and what that does is if you you know suppose you're switching like from red to blue well there's still a bunch of red in like the gun and like the print head and so it like heats it up it squirts it out the back of the machine at this hole in the back and then before it loads in the blue to start printing the next layer in blue or whatever so part of using a modern 3d printer with this is like yeah at the back it's just like shoots out filament sometimes and so you get this pile and so people of course shocker many people have made 3d printable models for accessories for 3d printing so one of the dog even bamboo themselves like in some of their help articles they'd be like well if you want to load this kind of filament or this this kind of thing this bracket really helps here's to a model to print it, which is actually kind of nice.

1:58:34It's only a matter of time before we get the sci-fi thing of 3D printers printing new 3D printers. Probably, yeah. We've talked about this for cars where they 3D print the suspension components because they're made of all these organic shapes or whatever. Basic 3D printing of metal, 3D printing of plastic, TPU. It's going to be a while before we can 3D print 3D printers, but we might live to see it. I will say, too, 3D printing is fun, and satisfying for people who used who used only make software and podcasts because like it's a you're making a physical object you are possibly changing your physical world in your house or whatever that's very satisfying in a way that or repellent if if you're like me and the reason you like computers is because there's a perfection that can be achieved there that cannot be achieved in the real world possibly but the perfection was never going to happen on my bedside lamps like I mean, the example I always use talking about the Mac is, you know, if you draw on a piece of paper and you keep erasing it over and over again, eventually you wear through the paper.

1:59:36You can erase over and over again in Mac paint and you never wear through the paper. That's true. Magic of digital. But yeah, if you don't if you don't like the magic of digital, you want to go back to meat space. You can have some failed 3D prints. Anyway, it's it's a lot of fun. and it is it's fun to have like a new creative exploration space um and one that can also be practical and that's it's it's been a lot of fun for me that's awesome i think one of these days i will get one today is not that day and tomorrow is probably not either but that is super cool i can imagine how janky like a prince from the library would be but i was thinking of a td tv adaptation of the peripheral which sci-fi book that i never read and it was a really good tv series got canceled out to one season which is a shame but anyway one of the main characters works and essentially a like a 3d printing thing where people just send their prints over the internet and get printed on these magical 3d printers that printed all sorts of stuff um the i i feel like the main modern version of that is called etsy uh like the thing that's holding up my wife's mac studio uh i didn't 3d print it but someone 3d printed it on etsy and i bought it from them but a tremendous markup uh so that exists i mean marco probably couldn't find one for his yo link thing but for lots of stuff if you're wondering oh can i just like find a design for this and send it to the library just search etsy there might be somebody selling them already oh yeah i mean that's like when i when i got the uh the bmw um i wanted like a i want like a magsafe mount for my phone and i looked on amazon they didn't really i looked at etsy like yeah here for this exact model of car here is a magsafe mount that fits right in like you know the cup holder area you know like fits it in perfectly leans it the way you want it you can have it faced this way this way or this way and you can pick and yeah i got it they're just 3d printed that's that's what a lot of things are but it's perfectly made for this particular need and 3d printing allows that whereas like you know if you know before 3d printing you would have to just have something like you know injection molded plastic or whatever and that only makes sense at certain volumes like financially so you had fewer options so it's nice to have like to be able to have like custom stuff made exactly for your specific needs or for a very small volume product line or to be very quick was like my mom my my wife's uh mac studio is like it's an m1 max one so it's the first mac studio uh and nobody like the products weren't out for it too i guess i guess because apple unlike the phones apple doesn't share their mac designs with other case manufacturers or whatever so if on day one you wanted a a custom-made bracket that exactly fit a mac studio and made it stick to the underside of your desk etsy 3d prints was the only thing today you can find tons of companies that sell various brackets for your Mac studios because the Mac studio is an existing product that hasn't changed size or shape and you know but like on day one if you wanted something 3d printing was it