619: Master Plan to Take Over the World

Happy almost Christmas and almost Hanukkah. Did you know that Hanukkah and Christmas, the first night of Hanukkah, is Christmas Day? Yeah, I heard that, and that's... Pretty unusual, right? It happens every great once in a while. I don't love it. I don't love it, to be honest with you, because we are a blended household in many different ways.

I guess I'm a blended human title insofar as, as I think I've said many times on the show, dad was raised Jewish, although he doesn't really practice now. Mom was raised Catholic, doesn't really practice. So I was basically raised... Feeling guilty for everything. We celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas as I was growing up and in my family and, you know, with Aaron and the kids, we recognized Hanukkah.

to a small degree celebrate it, and of course Christmas, and don't love when they overlap like this. Not my favorite. What's bad about it? What's bad about the overlap? Because then neither one of the, well, Christmas, first of all, Christmas overshadows everything, which... Fine. I mean, I get it. That makes sense. But then Hanukkah doesn't have the space to be its own thing, to be its own person, if you will. And that kind of bums me out. But it's fine. It's also, you know...

How do you delineate the presents and what's from Santa and what isn't and what's, you know, Hanukkah and what isn't? And it's, I don't know. It's fine. It's just not my favorite. But you know what is my favorite? Doing member specials. And we did a member special, uh, and even before the last recording of the regular episodes, but we did.

What is probably the worst promo for that member special, when we recorded, it actually happened, I believe, at the very end of the episode. And through the magic of editing and Marco, he shimmied it up to the front. But we're going to make an attempt at doing a better...

to copy this time. So let me tell you, guess what? There's a new member special and it's called ATP Insider Making the Show. And this was John's ideas, many of them are. So John, would you like me to summarize or would you like to give the pitch?

I can give a pitch. And actually, it wasn't my idea. It was sent from a listener. But that's the whole point of these things. We get asked all the time questions about the making of the show, the mechanics of making of the show from people who want to start their own podcast, from people who are just curious.

And sometimes we answer them and ask ATP. Sometimes we say things offhandedly. We thought it would be a good idea to have a single episode of the show that we can point people to to say if you would like to know how we make the show from beginning to end.

uh each week here is an episode for you you'll hear about our process you'll hear about the equipment we use, you'll hear about all the different aspects, gathering up the show, writing both versions of the show notes, editing the episode, posting the episode, things we think about when we're recording it, and just...

Everything you can imagine. It really is. It might sound boring to you. Like, oh, great. You're going to tell me the nuts and bolts of how you make a podcast. Why would I care about this? But hopefully there'll be at least some insight into how we think about the show and certainly lots of tidbits. about the gear we use, which is not particularly exciting. And hopefully when you listen to this, you realize making a podcast, it's not about the software. It's not about the hardware.

I like the holiday season. It's about the people. It's true, though. It's very true. I thought it was a fun episode. This is classic ATP because when we sat down, I think all three of us thought...

Eh, it'll be 30, 45 minutes, maybe an hour. And Marco, what was the total? I never think that, but apparently you do a lot. Casey always comes to the member specials thinking this is going to be 45 minutes. You'll say it in the show. You'll say, yeah, we should be done in 45 minutes. It's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. When I came upstairs to record that, I told Tiff, I'm like...

I bet I can come down afterwards and watch some TV with you. Right? I'm saying. I'm pretty sure this would be like at most an hour. Right? I'm pretty sure I said almost verbatim the exact same thing to Aaron. And like an hour in, I don't think we had even gotten past John and... slightly me, but mostly John assembling the internal notes for the week. And I think I sent Aaron a text like, yep, I'll see you tomorrow. Yep.

Anyway, I think I sound like I'm complaining and whining. And if I do, I apologize. I'm not trying to. It was just one of those things where I was so convinced, so convinced that it was going to be a quick one. It was not a quick one. So that being said, it was fun and I did really enjoy it. And I think there is a lot of fun to be had, even for the three of us.

hearing how each of us thinks about our different like roles in the creation of the show because obviously we talk about it but it's not often that we get to i don't know get to the feels behind it. And it wasn't a heavy feeling show, but there's a little bit of that too. I don't know. It was just, it was fun and I really enjoyed it. And even if you're not looking to start a podcast, I do think there's something in there for everyone. So check it out.

Now, John, if you aren't already a member and thus don't have access to this incredible content, how would one go about becoming a member? Very simple. Go to atp.fm slash join and you can become a member. Don't want to pay for your own membership? Get someone else to do it for you. atp.fm slash gift. Direct them to that page. Tell them your email address. They can buy you a membership.

You can get it for the holidays, redeem it and have a membership that someone else paid for. It's the perfect time of year for it. And I believe you can schedule delivery or is it on, how is it set up? If only you knew how our website works. I know, it's been so long since I've looked at this because I did your user acceptance testing for you and that was so long ago I forgot exactly how.

Yeah. We're having pretty good luck with this. Here's how it works. When you buy someone a gift membership, it does not immediately send them an email and spoil it for them or whatever. And I considered having a thing where you can schedule for when it's going to arrive or whatever.

In the end, I picked the simpler method, which so far has been working really well, which is when the person who is buying the gift buys the gift membership, after they've successfully bought it, there's a screen that says, here's what you got to do. Take this link.

or this promo code or whatever, like the seven different things that explains and give them to the other person. However you feel like it, you can message them. You can write it on a piece of paper. You can put it in a card. You can, you know, print this webpage out as a PDF and send it. You can do.

anything you want it's just like you're you're never gonna lose this information it will always be like the gift giver it will always be on there like their uh their page at atp.fm they can always see the gifts they gave they can always get the link you're not gonna lose it if you miss that screen But it just says you have to give it to them. Then you can give it to them whenever you want. Like whatever holiday you're celebrating, wherever you are, however you want to give it.

You have the choice. And that's been working really well. Some people have been getting early presents because I've done a little bit of support for people who bought a present. And I guess they didn't wait for Christmas or Hanukkah. They're just like, oh, here you go. Giving it to you immediately. But yeah, you can decide when you want. to deliver it and how you want to deliver it.

And if you want to print it out and put it in a nice little card, that would be nice. Yeah. So you should go to atp.fm slash join or atp.fm slash gift and check it out. We have built up quite the assembly of pretty solid member specials. that run the gamut from, you know, food, movies.

feelings, all sorts of stuff. So you should definitely check it out. I think there's a lot of good stuff in there. Let's do some follow-up. And speaking of that member special, Martim asks, on your latest member special, you forgot one thing. What's with the, hey, future Marco, blah, blah, blah. Goodbye, future Marco. Goodbye. And so the comment, I think I'd said it off the cuff probably like a year ago now, but that's my cue to Marco to say, hey...

We're entering in like a huddle, to use football terms. We're going to do some kind of chit-chat amongst the three of us that we don't intend to air. on the released version of the episode obviously if you are a member you will hear all of this in the bootleg but the idea is for Marco to be able to see or hear this in the future and take out that conversation and I think a lot of

I presume the goodbye is in part to try to get a little bit of crosstalk to cue you that something's going on. What does it look like from your end? That's exactly it. Whenever the speaker changes, it's very visually obvious as I'm skimming through the track. And so I say bye because that'll be like a blip on my track that will show up as a block and it'll be very obvious as I'm skimming forward listening.

That's a point that needs attention. So that's why. Are you at the point? I meant to ask this during the episode and I completely forgot. I'm so mad at myself. Are you at the point that you can recognize the waveform for Hello Future Marco? And whether or not the answer to that is yes or no, what waveforms, like verbal tics or whatever, especially for me, do you... Can you visually recognize at this point? Are you at the point that you can see my that being said waveform? No.

I don't look that closely and I don't recognize words that well. What I can do is, you know, so during the live recording... For the same reason, if somebody swears, Casey, I will say afterwards, beep, same reason. Just so that I will have a block on my track so that as I'm skimming through, I'll see, oh, crosstalk, and I'll...

I'll pay attention to that and I'll play it and see what that is. When I am beeping out a swear word, obviously, you know, you want it to be bleeped out in such a way that the adults listening get the intention, but, you know, we don't get anybody in trouble. And so...

I will try to leave in the first consonant sound or whatever so that adults can figure out what word was there in case it's not super obvious. I have figured out what the waveforms look like of... common swear words so i know which parts to remove otherwise that's very good otherwise i for a while i would try to remove things like um one of the

One of the peeves I have about modern speech. This is probably not something that I should care about. I don't like how we've all started to end sentences with, right? oh yes i really don't like that and i used to try to edit that out and the it's just there's so many of them it's just impossible like it's just it's way too much of a job but i used to look for that like for a period

I would actually look for at the end of sentences before a gap in the waveform. You could often see the right, right? So I would actually try to edit them out if I could. And they're actually...

somewhat tricky to edit out a lot of the time sometimes you'd be surprised how often you can just cut it out and the sentence sounds better without them every time but sometimes like the way it works with the person's breath or whatever or the next word or whatever sometimes you can't cleanly edit it out um but Other than those two things, I don't really recognize individual waveforms, right?

i don't think there's enough information in the track to do that like it's mostly amplitude you're seeing in the waveforms and logic you don't you don't have enough frequency information and it's too squished together on the screen with too few pixels that i don't think you can actually see high pitch versus low pitch like there's no way you could quote unquote recognize a waveform visually except by like brute force pattern matching of like well this is what the amplitude

bump tends to look like for this word when this person says it, which is not quite the same thing. But it's the type of thing where you could easily fool it by making a totally different word with different frequencies with similar amplitudes. Well, but there are certain words where, like when I was saying the pieces of the swear word, like for example, the S word, the shh at the beginning, that's a very distinctive look.

And then the rest of the word doesn't look like that at all. So that's why you can recognize certain sounds that do look very distinctive in a waveform, but... I'm not looking that closely at everything we're saying because that would take 12 hours to edit a show. That would be ridiculous. But even even the it's mostly just about amplitude and because you don't have the frequency information in there. It's too like unless you're zoomed all the way.

in and can literally see like i don't think the auto editor even lets you zoom in that far to be able to see the waves and figure out the distance between the peaks to come up with the frequency to know what frequency the s sound is yeah i mean the frequencies we're dealing with would be would be so it would be absurd to try to recognize that and now there are certain uh wave editors will allow you to show

Instead of the amplitude view, they'll show you a frequency breakdown, which looks kind of like this colorful, almost like a histogram kind of view. It's easier to see different word shapes in that view in certain ways, but...

I'm not advanced enough to do that. And logic doesn't show that to me the way I'm editing. So there are many ways to view sound information when you're editing. And in certain contexts, like if I'm pulling noise out, like if somebody had their leaf blower guy show up next door or they...

the air conditioner or the fan running, if I'm doing noise removal, then I'll pull it into iZotope RX, which is, you know, kind of an advanced wave editor with all different, like, you know, noise removal and fixing tools for sound problems. And an iZotope, you know, I will see the frequency breakdown there and I'll be able to see down like, oh, there's the 60 hertz. You know, that's the leaf blower. So I'll pull that one out. So there are different...

techniques to use different views to show you what you need to see in audio. But none of those really work for seeing the words as you're going by. I think if that's the kind of view you want, it's probably better these days. to use some kind of editor or editor service that transcribes the audio and then just puts the words below it, which I've never seen that done in Logic, but I know there are apps that can do that.

Yeah, Descript does it, the app that Merlin loves, where you actually edit it by, you edit the audio by editing the text because it just puts a transcript there. And if you see a word that you want to remove, you just literally remove the word from the text and it removes the waveform. It's a different way of doing things. Oh, that's fascinating. Thank you.

Moving on, let's talk about Emo Siri. Dan Mielcars writes, Siri has definitely gotten sassier in iOS 18. I like it. I sent a text to my daughter about it when I noticed, and the timestamp on the text was only after iOS 18.0, not 18.0. 2. We got a few different pieces of feedback with regard to this. I had thought it was new in 18.2 because I didn't notice it before then. Dan obviously says...

that it was before for him. And then a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, wrote to me, pretty sure the Siri thing you've experienced has shipped back during the 18 betas, but it relies on your devices having to download the updated Siri voice, which happens at seemingly random times. different people. So that perhaps and probably does explain why for me it was 18-2, but for others it wasn't.

With regard to Emo Siri, Dave Martin writes, not only have I noticed some effect in Siri, she just spoke a text message into my ears with a hint of doubt that the text wanted to portray, but I live in the Boston area like John. I've had to... I've had cause to ask her to direct me to addresses in my town lately, and my town has a mid-word R in it.

I jokingly speak the town name with a Boston accent, often exaggerated. Siri is doing that now, too. I thought I misheard her the first time, but she did it again. So I guess you do park the car down at Harvard Yard. Am I right, John?

Well, John doesn't have a Boston accent, remember? Except for all those words that have slight Boston accents. But other than those... Zero of them? Yeah, sure. Okay. Once again, of the many, many things that Marco holds dear to himself, incredibly wrong ideas like the fact that I have a...

boston accent he will go to his grave believing it despite the fact that it is absolutely not true okay okay it's like i always think that you've been dissuaded of these things but then you bring them up a year later and you're like well as we all know john has a boston accent okay all right marco Take that one and just remove it. Drop it in the trash. Sure. And then empty the trash. In what order should I do that in, John? You sound so much like me. Oh, my God. It's like I'm talking to myself.

God help me for defending John on this because nothing makes me happier than us making fun of John. But I think our, I can't even do it right. The ardor or whatever it is. That's not it either. Whatever it is that John says, that's just his bananas. just demonstrably terrible Long Island accents. See, also Mario. That has nothing to do with Boston. That's just Long Island. Marco doesn't have a good year for accents, maybe. Well, we are products of where we spend time. I spent the first half

of my life in the Midwest, and now I live in New York. And so the way I speak is some kind of probably weird hybrid of some New Yorkish, some Midwestish. John thinks that he left Long Island a thousand years ago and somehow has not picked up any influence from his surrounding area. And that's just...

It's impossible. The influence has been a filing down of my Long Island accent. It has not been the adoption of a new accent for the new region. No, it's a hybrid. It's a hybrid. Everyone has a hybrid accent of wherever they want. lived kind of hybrid new kind of hybrid accent i love this it's just just the right awe and just the right just the right sink and just the right bounce

Oh, my God. All right. We got to move on. But that is amazing. With regard to filming immersive video, which we're also going to talk about later. Video Alex writes, this camera is a modification of the Blackmagic Ursa. Oh, I'm sorry. This was the Blackmagic. immersive camera specifically that we talked about last episode. Yeah, the Ursa Cine Immersive, I believe, is the full name. Thank you.

So that camera is a modification of the Blackmagic URSA URSA. While the standard URSA has interchangeable lenses and lens mounts, the lens on this new camera does not appear to be removable. The regular URSA Cine is also only $15,000. The new camera has two sensors built into the front lens unit, which would have specific demands for cooling, hence the high price. So no, the lens won't come off. This is just my best guess. There's not much info on the Blackmagic website so far.

I think Apple has been using the Insta360 Titan for the Vision Pro stuff that they've been doing so far. I briefly was now Casey speaking. Hi, this is Casey. I looked into this briefly. Hello, future market. I looked into this briefly. And this. is a weird extremely weird looking like a ball of a of a camera that has apparently

eight micro four-thirds sensors going around it, around the mid-axis of this orb. I don't think I'm doing the best job of painting a word picture, but it is really, really cool and really weird. Anyway, back to Video Alex. It shoots full 360 degrees in stereo at 11K resolution. It has very large sensors and you can choose to shoot just 180 degrees. And by the way, Marco, you can rent the Titan from Lens Rentals today for $700 per week. The Insta360 Pro...

2 is also great, 8K resolution renting at $325 per week. But the software is fiddly. When I rented the Pro 2 a few years ago for a project, it included seven SD cards for the recording and then seven SD readers and a seven-port USB hub.

Also, monitoring is hard. So they all record, like, individually? I guess, yeah. You stitch it all together afterwards. I'm sure the software will do that's great. Oh, yeah. One more point on 3D Video, writes Video Alex. In 2016, I worked with a company that had three live VR...

cameras at the indy 500 they there they were seven gopros and a custom rig with fiber adapters coming out of them that ran seven fiber feeds to three computers that did the stitching live and broadcast it to three headsets next door they wanted to feed it to the internet But ABC shut them down immediately. Cool. Yeah, so all this is to say, we were talking about the new Blackmagic camera for immersive video that's coming out in the winter or spring this year.

You know, we were speculating like what is the state of, you know, VR capture, you know, video capture hardware for VR 180 for, you know, for immersive 180 degree field of view video. And it seems like there are other options out there. We have had a number of people send in reports like this and showing us different options that exist. But this is still very early days. Many of them are hacky or limited.

And as far as I could tell, the Blackmagic one, because it has 8K sensor per eye... an 8K resolution per eye that's recording, that seems to be higher resolution than not only everything else that we're seeing from other companies, but also higher resolution than what Apple's actually serving to the Vision Pro, which...

probably makes some sense given that the vision pro only has 4k displays per eye uh so that's that's probably fine but like one thing i notice when i'm watching the immersive video content is It's not as sharp as I would like it to be. It's kind of an odd experience with your eyes for lots of reasons. We've mentioned in the past it's weird because you think you can focus on everything because in real life you would be able to focus on whatever you wanted.

With VR video, you can't. You can only focus on what was in focus by the lenses when they shot it. So one of the weird things about it is you can't focus wherever you want. But another weird thing about it is it looks so realistic. It looks so much like you are there that when you...

try to look at something that should be sharp and you can kind of see the inherent softness of the pixels at that resolution. You almost feel like your eyes can't focus right. You rub your eyes or you need to put it in your glasses or something. It feels weird. Because your eyes aren't focusing as sharply as they would in real life because it's only 4K and being viewed at such close distances and everything. So anyway, all this to say, this is still very early days.

I think for this... I think we're in right now the... the 1x non-retina world here and hopefully in the near future hopefully we will be able to upgrade the resolution of both you know the cameras going to 8k per eye and then also hopefully the displays inside the headsets eventually will get higher resolution as well.

I'm glad to see the hardware getting better on the Blackmagic side. But that being said, there are lots of reasons, including things like data size and complexity, why it seems like what almost everyone is doing is 4K per eye.

All the other hardware was 4K per eye. People will throw around the term 8K, but that just means there's two 4K... eyes which is not 8k that's not what that means but they they threw her on 8k as if it's like oh it's just four plus four no that's that's not what that means but okay uh and the other thing is that we were um i believe john was speculating about

What possibilities might exist for different lenses on this? The reason the Blackmagic Cine Immersive seems to have fixed lenses, we had a number of people write in to say basically that the 180 degree field of view... pretty much like that is the lens that's it's a fixed perspective where that works and that if you try any other perspective with any other lens focal length or anything it just doesn't look right

Certainly wouldn't look right if you tried to project it at 180. And speaking of projecting, like the using of the terms like 4K and 8K for headset recording of stuff and playing it back is not... really appropriate because when we talk about a 4k tv you can see all 4k of those pixels in front of you but when you're seeing something like immersive video and it was shot quote unquote in 8k per eye you're almost never

seeing all the pixels that were shot in any one of your eyes because it wraps around you. You can't like if you could move back and like shove the shove the, you know, immersive video so far away from you that it's like this little curved thing that's in front of you. That's a good point. It looks like you know what I mean? Then you'd see all the pixels. But when you're looking around, you're like, oh, well.

The screens inside the Vision Pro only have 4K, but you're never looking at the whole... thing that was recorded at once so yeah the resolution is insufficient oh that's true they recorded it at 8k but that 8k takes up 50 feet and you're only looking at a tiny portion of it at a time but your tiny portion has 4k per eyeball so they need way more

resolution if they want to match the resolution that is in the headset than recording it in 8k per eyeball yeah like part of part of the big challenge with with the sharpness and fidelity and resolution of everything in the vision pro is you have to think about like That effect of, yes, it's 4K per eye, but you are not seeing all of those 4K pixels for all the content that is being used. It's the same way where on a regular computer monitor...

if you use one of the scaling modes that is not native to the panel's pixels, everything gets a little bit blurry in certain ways. Especially if you scale it to be... larger than what the pixels can actually do. So it's scaling down a higher resolution image to the lower resolution of pixels on the screen. Things get blurry. The way things are shown in a VR headset, you're going through like...

Multiple different levels of that because you have the screens that actually physically exist in there. Those are being projected through a system of lenses that kind of bend and warp it to go around you. And so, first of all, the pixels per angular degree... are different at different parts of your eye. Like the middle, you have more detail in the middle than you have on the edges where they're being warped out. So you have the warping happening there to try to map this rectangular screen.

to fill your whole view and then you have whatever the software is running inside of that that is like scaling itself to some virtual viewport then projecting it onto the physical screen which is itself warping it back around your eyes so the result is you're going through tons of those like scaling steps and there is nowhere near enough resolution yet with the hardware that we that is

seemingly possible to exist today or that we know how to make today. Like we have nowhere near the number of pixels needed to make that. look good for for most things so it's both a hardware problem in the sense of you know we need that 4k per eye to get a lot bigger we need those to be at least 8k per eye and probably more than that and that's you know given how hard it is to get 4k per eye today

I think we're a ways off from that. And then after that, once we have higher resolution displays in the Vision Pro, then you also need higher... resolution content. It's easy to render the UI higher resolution. We can do that with computers. We know how to do that. then you're going to need like the 8K per eye or more in the video that you're watching. So we have a long way to go on all this stuff.

You need a lot more than that. Like if they increase the resolution of the screens inside the headset, that makes it so much harder for recording. Because right now, as you look around. your field of view is 4K per eye, and you can imagine taking 4K per eye chunks out of the giant thing that was wrapping around you, right?

So, you know, you look a little bit to the left. That's 4K per eye on the part you can see now. Look a little bit more to the left, you know, like just you're taking 4K chunks out. Every single one of those 4K chunks of your field of view. has to be at least 4k in the source material right suddenly if those same field of view chunks are now 8k because they doubled the well because they doubled the k's

quadrupled the resolution or whatever of the eyepieces. Now you've just demanded that the source material also increase resolution by the same proportion. So, and we're not even close to what it is now because like, you know, 8K per eye, right? How many different 4K, you know, field of view things can you get out of that? You can get like one looking all the way to your left and like non-overlapping ones. You can probably get three, four, five of those. So already the resolution is five times.

lower than it needs to be in each dimension so yeah there's a long way to go and this is even just for you know still single focal plane images or whatever and and that's also by the way that's also even more complicated by the fact that That's also not linear. Like, if you look at, like, you know, what the video data actually is, it's too...

a fisheye view per eye. So if you see like a fisheye picture, like a picture that actually has 180 degree field of view viewed on a flat screen, it looks... very bulbous. The middle of it is where almost all the detail is and around the edges there's way less detail once it is re-projected onto a sphere that you're looking at it from within when you're in 3D.

Yeah, because they're recording it on a flat rectangle instead of recording it on the back of a sphere. Right. So we actually are closer to the center of it looking pretty good on higher resolution screens. We still need more than 4K, but... I bet the Blackmagic one, I bet if you're shooting an 8K, I bet the middle of it will look pretty good on Vision Pro's hardware.

All right, so we have some more feedback about immersive video. This is from an anonymous visual effects worker. While certainly the dedicated hardware for capturing immersive video is becoming more accessible, there's ML-based approaches that are also rapidly becoming shockingly good.

DepthAnything is a project, one of many, that can infer depth from a single monocular image. Monocular? Monocular? I don't know. Anyway. While simultaneously being mostly temporally stable, this means that the depth approximations aren't going to jump around on you. between frames.

My suspicion is that while it will be a combination of hardware and software, it's more likely that the solution will lie more in the software and less so in the specialized hardware. Imagine shooting on your iPhone 18's ultrawide camera and iOS processing the video into an immersive video in the back.

background, or maybe even real time, or even being able to run a depth process on an old pre-iPhone era video and getting to watch that video on the Vision Pro. That would be magic. Can confirm. We're probably a few years out from the iPhone's ultra-wide video being of the quality you'd want. But it's only a matter of time.

That definitely sounds like a thing that Apple would try. They love to sort of do in software what they can't quite do in hardware, witness the portrait mode, you know, background blur and stuff. So take a flat image and try to infer depth from it and then let you view it and have it be a little... little bit 3d ish that sounds like uh something that they would definitely try they did try it it's new envision os 2.0 it's already there

Yeah, I know. That's the trying to add. Do they just do it for your videos? I thought it was stills. I think it's only stills. I viewed some stills earlier testing out that feature for the first time, actually. It's really weird.

It's really weird. My personal opinion of that, I don't think we've ever talked about it on the show. It is cool. I would not say it's the mind bending, like this is the coolest thing I've ever seen that a lot of people seem to pitch it as. I didn't really get that bowled over by it, but it is very cool. Yeah, it's an interesting toy to play with. Like all of their other early stuff like Portrait Mode.

It works better with some content than others. You can find pictures where it looks really impressive, and it's a pretty cool effect, but that is not universal. So this depth anything thing is like the reason it's innovative or interesting is that it's like what Apple is doing with the still images, but.

now do that on every frame of video and have it not have it be consistent so if if it thinks the depth map is this in one frame of video the next frame the depth map shouldn't be wildly different because it would look all sorts of wacky so it's got to sort of figure out

what a stable depth map is for a moving image of things moving through the frame. And that would be interesting. But I would imagine it's not going to be any better than the... 2d version of it so if you have whatever quality the 2d one is that the video one is probably limited by that quality indeed

Then continuing on, James Laughlin writes, Google experimented with light field capture. First static captures, see Welcome to Lightfields on Steam, and then video captures. And there's a video from SIGGRAPH 2020. The technical paper was immersive light field video with a layered mesh representation.

And a couple of pull quotes that I collected from this video, which is only like five minutes or something like that. It was very interesting. They said, our videos compress efficiently for streaming over one gigabit per second internet connection. So you could stream a full.

immersive video over a gigabit connection. Although I guess in retrospect, actually, this is already happening with Apple's immersive stuff on considerably less than that, but you know, whatever. Also, apparently the way they made this work was they put 46 time synchronized. I don't think.

they were literally gopros but effectively gopros in the sphere and wired them up all wired them all up together like i said so they could be time synchronized and that's the camera they use for this which is very interesting uh anyways it allows for some six degree of freedoms movement but still

small bubble around the capture device and again you can see that in the demo video another quote i think john pulled this one our pipeline produces volumetric free viewpoint video that can be explored with six degrees of freedom within a spherical 70 centimeter diameter

viewing volume. This allows you to move your head and change your perspective, peek behind objects, and enjoy a greater sense of depth through motion parallax. Yeah, so the camera you were describing that you'll see in the video... It's like many sort of SIGGRAPH research type papers. It's one of the jankiest things you've ever seen. Picture just a big, clear plastic sphere with cameras stuck to the inside of it with tape.

Like, that's what it is. It's not, you know, it's all through the magic of software. So that just, well, and the cameras are stuck, not at random, but like... hand placed roughly equaled it's not like a precision type of thing they're just kind of i mean i don't know how precisely they're putting there but it looked pretty haphazard and pretty like diy right um

And so what this gives you with a bunch of cameras and a plastic sphere and a lot of computers, which is the important part, is the ability to watch a video. And while the video is playing, you can change. your perspective in the video you can do the thing that we were talking about last time or like if you if you have a video of a concert uh and uh

You want to, you know, if you stand up when you're watching it in a headset and you stand up on your couch while you're watching it, the camera that recorded the video of the concert does not stand up. The camera was on a tripod. It never moved.

i never got any higher or any lower never moved to the left never moved to the right it was on a tripod the whole time right you can't control that by you getting up with your headset right so you should just sit sit sit still because then your movement will match the movement of the camera which is no movement you can turn your

head because the camera captured a field that is 80 180 degrees 360 or whatever you can turn your head up and down left and right and that works fine but you can't move so this sort of light field capture thing lets you move your head and have that motion reflected in the video as long as you move within a 70 centimeters viewing volume so you can't move a lot but you can move and there are demo videos of this on the website we'll put the links in the show notes

Go to the demo video that's just on a web page and you can move your mouse around essentially to say, all right, I'm watching this video. If you don't move your mouse, it just looks like a video. But if you move your mouse, you can be like, now I can see.

more on the top of that that uh workbench or less if i go down right you can move around left right up and down in the video not just turning your head like quick time vr or these things but moving within the video and part of the thing that is exciting about this paper is like okay the way they do that is essentially brute force it like they have if you if you picture a series of um concentric spheres a little sphere than a bigger one than a bigger one like a concentric spherical shells right

That's what they're recording. And then when you move around, it's sort of moving you through those shells. But as you can imagine, that's just incredibly data intensive to do. So this paper is about how they figured out how to. compress that down into as casey mentioned a one gigabit uh you know data video stream by figuring out what parts they can throw away and how to efficiently store all of them

um and that's the the innovative part like instead of just saying we need a giant supercomputer to do this we can put this on a web page and you can move around in it and it looks okay and it doesn't like break up or they don't you know you can look at the video you can see what they're constructing the video out of all the different

pieces of the shells as you move around but they do a really good job of blending them together so it really looks like i don't know how to describe it because there's not really any parallel like even in vision probe there's not really any sort of like thing to compare it to but like

like actually being there. If you were really there and you move and you like sat up or, you know, stood up or sat down, your perspective would change. And you can do that with these videos. Maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's like the Harry Potter things with the little animated. No, it's not even that.

holographic maybe i don't know they need to come up with a better marketing name for this but this is what i was talking about with like the bahamas thing if they could do this and make it maybe a little bit bigger than a 70 centimeter diameter viewing volume then you could walk around on the beach And it would all be captured live video. And you're looking at a real thing. It's not a 3D rendered scene. It's just...

Concentric spheres of live video from any different positions again This is what I was getting at with last time with like the real estate things where they put a camera in six different places in a room put it in like 6 million places in the room. So now you can just walk into the room and look around. And again, different than making a 3D model of it, which is probably the much more efficient way to do this. But this would be all real video, right?

somehow all real video i'm not sure what the mechanics are but it really is kind of like sci-fi fantasy stuff when i look at this even though it is very very limited tech demo with very janky hardware i'm still very impressed by it yeah it is super cool And then continuing on in a similar vein, Joseph Humphrey writes, one technology I find fascinating and that could shape the future of VR capture, if VR sticks around long enough, is neural radiance fields. It's essentially a photogrammetry base.

I hope I got that right, method for capturing still 3D images of objects or entire environments. What's remarkable is its ability to render realistic perspectives from multiple angles complete with accurate reflections and specular highlights. So this is Nerf. which is representing scenes as neural, N-E, radiance, R, fields, F, for view synthesis. Again, we'll put a link in the show notes.

to a talk that was given by, among other people, Matthew Tancic. We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views. So I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I can tell you, having watched the video, what it appears to be is, let's take, I think it's...

a couple of stills. I don't recall if it was one or several, but one way or another, take one or more stills and be able to figure out, okay, what is the depth in this? Very much like, you know, the, the portrait videos on an iPhone. Yeah, it definitely is. I think it is more than one picture.

point is like the thing i just described where you can watch a video and view it for different perspectives this is the photo version of that where it's just one moment in time but it's captured from different perspectives and then when you look at it you have the ability to look from different angles at your still image.

So continuing on from Joseph Humphrey, while it's not ready for video capture yet and the quality isn't perfect, Meta has created an impressive demo for the quest. And there's a Meta Nerf demo for the quest, which is called Meta Horizon Hyperspace Demo.

The description is, this is a demo experience to showcase our vision for photorealism as a profound new way to feel like you're physically there. We created these digital replicas using mobile phone scanning and cloud-based processing. Scanning is not available to users today.

So now returning back to Joseph. What excites me most is the potential to fully capture 3D scenes, including different perspectives, without the need for manual 3D modeling. If future research leads to viable quote-unquote video version of this...

The possibilities could be incredible. You should check out that Google link because that's what they're doing. It's basically the video version of that. But the 2D version of it is much more well established. Like Nerf stuff has been around for a while. Again, this is from a 2020 paper.

If you have the still image version of it, that works really well for... you know to fool you into thinking it's a dynamic environment you can do what they do in video games it's just like it's basically a bunch of still textures but then you put like some video of uh rippling water on top of the water thing so the things that you expect to be moving are moving but You know, are...

even just like if you look at the demos of here you can be convinced like that this is video until you notice like none of the blades of grass are moving or whatever so the google thing is exciting because they're really trying to do it with video with very limited motion and this nerf thing is exciting because

i imagine this is the type of thing you could actually do on a phone take it you know wave your phone in front of a person it takes 15 pictures it reconstructs this and now you have what appears to be a 3d image of the person Yeah, these video demos are incredibly impressive. All right, moving on from immersive video, let's talk about John's app and some feedback with regard to it or things adjacent to it. Wait, are we talking about Storacusa or are we talking about Forex Space?

I can't believe you like forage space. Did you like the British person who pointed out that in UK English those words don't rhyme? Forage and starch don't rhyme? Yes, because they pronounce the O as an A. It's forage space or whatever. It's ridiculous. Must be their Boston accent. Yeah.

Well done. It's a hybrid accent. Anyway, all right, so I'll stick with Storacusa. I'm going to keep calling it Storacusa until you tell us another name. I like Forage Space. I also like Storacusa for the record, but I like Forage Space. I think that's great. And, you know, they're the same people that can't understand when we...

say hover, which is bananas. So I don't really care what they have to say. There's this English traditional. We're English modern. Star-Racusa. Dave Nanian, friend of the show, Dave Nanian. Dave Nanian writes, and this is...

with regard to SuperDuper's smart update in making clones. Dave writes, to be clear, smart update does not separate clones unless... Oh, excuse me, not making clones, I'm sorry. Using clones on the file system. To be clear, smart update does not separate clones unless those...

clones change, which starts to separate them on the source as well. What we can't do is only change the diverged blocks. And also, I'm not worried about my support because I can offer solutions. I'm worried about things like migration. And again, this is going to be run by those who are out.

of space not those who want to optimize their drive storage yeah the thing about a smart update like that's a good nuance about what i was describing last time like on the first clone with super duper it will faithfully reproduce your clones uh so if you have some drive that is essentially over provisioned because you have you know many many clones of a very large file that if they all took up their individual space it would overflow your drive

When you do that first erasing clone with SuperDuper, it will faithfully reproduce that. But in subsequent clones, like do using smart update, which says, hey, just copy the stuff that's changed since last time. at that point if one of the clones has changed and diverged on the source it can diverge a little bit at a time based on how much has differed from the other ones

But during smart update, if it's diverged at all, you get an entire complete separate copy during the smart update. And that can cause you to slowly fill your quote unquote equally sized drive with a series of smart updates. Of course, you can always fix this by doing an erase update.

And that will restore all your clones, but that's just a fact of life and in terms of People over subscribing their discs and having problems during migration yeah that's that's potentially a problem like i said that could be a problem today because the finder does the same thing when you duplicate files and depending on how oversubscribed people are on their drives they could already be in a situation where they can't migrate

I would hope that Apple would come up with a way to faithfully reproduce clones during the migration process. That would be very helpful. They certainly have the expertise, technology, and access to the innards of macOS to do that. But I also don't see that as something that is forthcoming. So make sure your drives are always big enough.

Peter Marks writes, all this talk of RAM doubler and disk doubler and ATP triggered a memory of a time in the 90s when someone released software that drastically sped up Finder copies. I was working at Apple at the time and we were amazed. It turned out, this is such an amazing story. It turned out that the Finder was updating the progress bar so frequently that it slowed down the file copy. Amazing.

absolutely amazing still a modern thing when early in my development of the my app that i'm working on i was testing the speed of you know scanning for duplicates and stuff like that and I, at first, tried the naive implementation of every time you've scanned another item, you know, convey that information in the UI.

and scanning especially on ssd goes really really fast and uh probably faster than 60 frames per second it was a lot of updates i'm not sure if it was slowing things down but i think it might have actually gotten faster when i throttled the ui updates because you don't want i mean it's probably not that big of a deal especially since it's separate threads and i had a i have a lot of cores and had a thread dedicated just updating the ui but it's still kind of a waste so yeah updating the ui

at faster than the refresh rate of the screen is usually not a good idea. And then back in the bad old days, I think it was just probably burning CPU because you didn't have multiple cores. And I think it was probably wasting a lot of CPU time.

you know updating the ui as fast as it possibly could i think he might be referring to speed doubler the thing i mentioned on the past show i don't remember what speed doubler did i only remembered that i ran it and it didn't make things perceptibly faster and maybe this was one of the things that it sped up file copies by updating the progress bar less frequently

Then Harvey Simon writes, why should we care about how much free space we have if we've turned on desktop and document sync in iCloud Drive? If we run low on storage, older files are offloaded to iCloud, freeing up space locally, especially if one has, say, a desktop Mac with large SSD and a Mac. with an only 256 gig SSD. Why worry if 256 gigs is sufficient if it looks like all one's files are where they belong and everything's backed up and you're online.

I don't personally like, I mean, on paper, this makes sense, but I don't think I would trust Apple to do this and do this well, personally. yeah i mean it looks like everything's there until you need that one file and you don't have an internet connection and also i will add that some cloud services uh in my experience iCloud Drive are not really great about doing the thing you want them to do right now right now i know they have

pinning for iCloud now finally, where you can say, please don't offload this file. I always want it to be local. But in situations, even when you have a network connection, you can be waiting for iCloud to take its sweet time to do something. I talked about my son's iCloud drive disaster where he had so many files.

you could just sit there staring at them for all day saying when is it going to download the files that are in this folder you can double click them and it would just sit there spinning and it's like eventually it might do it or maybe it never will because there's too many files it's not a

I'm not a fan of iCloud Drive. I've never been a fan. I continue not to be a fan. That big disaster with my son did not make me a fan. That's years after iCloud Drive has been out for a while. I know people have a lot of success with it, but I think they're using it lightly. They don't have... lots of files they don't have lots of churn and it's just like oh it's magic my files are just always there in my experience that is not how icloud drive works when pressed even a little bit

uh dropbox at the very least has like i said one of the things i like about dropbox is if you use it the old way i'm still not using the one with the file providers which i know everyone else is probably using but somehow i'm still not updated to it but the old one when you launched it it would brute force right now right now with all its you know cpu cycles download all the files locally i'd had it not to do streaming keep every file locally like the old style old school way

you i could see it working it would go through the files find all the ones that have changed download them all and then be done i was never staring at like a little cloud icon unless you in the finder wondering when is it going to download is there anything i can make it download faster so yeah as for should we care about disk space

If you keep everything in like a, you know, Google Drive or OneDrive or something that you do trust that you think is reliable, that you can actually get to upload and download files when you need them to, and you're always connected to the network, sure, feel free. But I think that for most people...

that they either don't have as reliable network access to that or they don't have fast enough network access to that is both or both and even if you do have all that i have very fast very reliable network access in my house practically speaking i don't want to have to wait around for something to download If I want to like, you know, we're doing our member special on Kiki's delivery service and I want to scrub through the movie.

I don't want to have to wait for a multi gigabyte movie to download. I just double click it and move the scrubber and it should be as fast as my SSD can read it. And I don't have to worry about, oh, that file isn't there yet. How fast can you download a gigabyte? Because remember, it's not just your network connection. The server has to serve it to you at that speed. Your network connection.

can be as fast as you want but if the server is doling the thing out to you a slow data rate because it's overwhelmed with doing a bunch of other stuff or because the network connection between you and it is slow you're still sol so Yeah, if you think local storage is still not relevant and you're leading that life, that's good for you, but I don't think we're there yet. All right, let's talk some topics. Marco, you had yet more homework. I feel like

We've done maybe three out of four of the last episodes. You've had some sort of Vision Pro-related homework, and here we are yet again with Vision Pro-related homework. Apple, right after we recorded last week. released a new episode of their adventure.

series and this one is called ice dive and it's 15 minutes long uh it appears off the top of my head are was it the hottest no it was the uh tightrope walker and then the uh parkour if i'm not mistaken were the two others that's right uh and this This one is Ice Dive, where we follow an ice diver that's trying to set a world record for swimming 200 yards, which is something like 180 meters, underwater.

With, you know, a fin on, but with one breath of air. And so he is swimming, hopefully, 200 yards, one breath of air under, you know, under ice, in the water under ice. So it's probably a little bit cold. Yeah, it's very, very cold. He doesn't wetsuit on, but still. Anyways, it's like 15 minutes, and I wanted to not only alert some of you that this exists, but I also wanted to hear your thoughts, and I have some thoughts. Would you like me to start, or would you like to start?

I think mine will be pretty quick. I didn't get all the way through it. I got about eight minutes in. I stopped because I was getting motion sick. Oh, really? Oh, that's very surprising to me. Huh. Yeah, so this series... I didn't see the middle one, the parkour one. I saw the tightrope walking one. I got about the same amount into that one before I had to stop. This series does a lot more camera movement and a lot more cuts between different scenes.

So what I find is like I'm trying to focus on things and then all of a sudden, boom, we're cut away. And then, oh, now I'm flying over a mountain like, whoa. So there's a lot more motion in this. This series, too, they focus on very close-up shots of people and things. So similar to, like, you know, the very first opening scene of the tightrope walking one, I described in the past how, like...

You're like right in front of this woman's face. It's a little unnerving. You're like, I would never be this close to a person I was not romantically involved with, you know, in any other context in life. So it kind of feels wrong to be that close to somebody and to have it look so light.

Well, they start this one the same way with the swimmer guy. So again, it's like, whoa, this is very intimate. A little bit oddly so. So they keep doing all these close-up shots of people and things. But I think they are... They are doing the close-up shots with an assumption of sharpness that, as I was saying earlier, isn't actually there in the viewing experience. So what you get is really close-up people.

that look a little bit out of focus or a little bit blurry or a little bit soft. And so your eyes, it plays tricks on your eyes in ways that the other immersive series I haven't had that much of a problem with. Um, because I think they just shot like a little bit further away from things, uh, with a little bit less camera movement. So this one, this, this series, I think it just, I can't.

My eyes and my motion brain, I think, can't handle this series. But hey, I'm glad they're putting out more content. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, again, the pace of the new content has been really good. I'm bummed. Sorry, I'm grading on a heavy curve there. To be clear, you can still watch every single bit of immersive video on the Vision Pro the first night you take one home. Yep.

I think that is true, and certainly Underscore's chart from a few weeks back would probably lend credence to it. Anyways, I wanted to call this out, partially, like I said, because it's new, but also I thought that this one was... possibly my favorite of the like reality or not reality but like docu series is that apple has done so far it's i feel like it's a bit longer i my recollections the parkour one was closer to 10 ish minutes and this is like a full 15 or so

And I've been thinking a lot about what do I think made this good? And I didn't get a chance to look and see if the director is the same or not, but she did a phenomenal job on this one. And I think part of what I really, really enjoyed about this was that... The...

The tightrope walking one just had the smell of it being completely staged. Like, you know, of course, at one point she's going to fall off the tightrope and of course she's tethered to it. So it's no big deal, but you still have that moment and whatnot. The parkour one was a little of that, but they tried...

to a degree to build a little bit of a story. And toward the end, spoiler alert, they're trying to do like a really big jump and you're supposed to be stressed out about whether or not they're going to make the jump. And I mean, you are to a degree because you can look down where the camera is and see how high up. they are, but it was kind of a contrived story. You know, it was clear that it was a story, but it was kind of forced. Whereas this one...

There is a plot, and I'm using air quotes here, but there's a plot to it. There is a thing, a challenge that is... going to be conquered if all goes according to plan. And there's consequences if it doesn't. And so you have a hero and the villain, I guess, to the degree that there is, is the situation. But there's a hero and you're watching a hero's journey, literally.

And not only that, but I thought, I mean, I didn't have any motion sickness problems and I thought that the way it was filmed was good. There's some, you know, annotations on the video showing how far away everything is and like where the start is and where the end is. And it's not.

It's in that Apple style that they're developing over these immersive videos that I like. I just thought it was really, really, really good. And I really enjoyed it. And I thought it was very captivating. And so here again, if you live near... Apple store. I have a friend that has one of these. I presume they'll let you watch it if you want to. And I think it's worth your time. I thought it was pretty darn good. So check that out. Apple Adventure Ice Dive. John, thoughts on this?

I can't believe Marco's getting motion sick and you're not. I mean, neither one of you is particularly prone to it, but you know, it's, it's one of the, I feel like it's one of the limitations of these, this type of content is just, I'm not sure how you can get over that other than just not making.

content that moves around too much uh because it's really limiting from the like the recording perspective to try to do interesting things or show something dynamic uh and again the assumption is that you know

The person who's watching it is not going to know how to move to match the movement of the camera, even if they could, which they probably can't because they're sitting on their couch. So there's always going to be this disconnect between what you see and what you're actually feeling as you sit there.

Yeah, I think this stuff is cool and I like to watch it, but I definitely don't like to feel sick, so I'm torn. Fair enough. No, I just think it's really cool. And again, if you have the ability to go check this out, I strongly encourage you to. Speaking earlier of Dave Nanian and SuperDuper, there's been a bit of a brouhaha over bootable backups on macOS. And so to back up a little bit and set the stage, SuperDuper, and I can't speak for a carbon copy cloner, which is a...

I guess a competitive product to SuperDuper. I've only ever used SuperDuper. But anyway, SuperDuper's thing, or one of its things, is that you can create a bootable backup of your drive and then update it every night, every other night, however often you want to update it. But the key is that if you plug in this external drive and do whatever incantation and dance...

to do in order to tell your Mac to boot from it, it should be able to boot from it. And that's worked really, really well for a really, really, really long time. But then a week or so ago, or whenever I guess 15.2 came out, Dave had problems. And so Dave wrote a blog post of which I will read some excerpts. Mac OS 15.2 was released with a surprise, a terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator or ASR Apple software restore.

Toward the end of replicating the data volume, seemingly when it's about to copy either preboot or recovery, which is to say the system stuff, it fails with a resource busy error. In the past, resource busy could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But...

This new bug means on most systems, there's no fix. It just fails. Since Apple took away the ability for third parties, for example the super duper folks to copy the os it took on the responsibility themselves it's been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work and in that they failed in mac os 15.2 because this is their code and we're forced to rely on it to copy the os

Copying will not work until they fix it. To put it bluntly, this sucks. It's bad enough we have to work around other bugs in this code, but when it breaks completely, we're stuck pointing fingers and offering workarounds that don't involve the replicator. Now, with that said, we had a response to a degree from Mike Bombich, who is the or a developer on Carbon Copy Cloner for macOS.

And we took out some of the spicier hot takes in this blog post, but it was a spicy blog post. So it might be worth checking out if you're interested. Anyways, Mike writes, while some developers seem surprised by changing Mac OS 15.2, there's a little bit of spice, we've known for several years that making bootable backups would eventually become impossible. We shifted carbon clock...

copy-cloner strategy away from relying on external boot so our users wouldn't be affected by this inevitable result. Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the macOS Big Sur changes that affected how third-party developers would be able to make copies of the system.

In that blog post, I made reference to a conference call that I had with Apple on December 2nd, 2020. Participating in that conference call was the APFS team lead, someone from developer technical support, and to my surprise, Apple's director of product marketing. When I joined the call, I was prepared for a technical discussion of what was broken in the ASR and whether Apple would be able to fix those issues and make it reliable enough for a commercial backup solution.

The call didn't quite go in that direction. The marketing director kicked off the call by asking, quote, so how would it look if someday in the future you simply couldn't make a copy of the system at all? He and the more technical folks on the call went on to explain that why only ASR could be allowed to copy the system and that they were committed to addressing any problems with it as long as it did not require making a compromise to platform security.

Platform security is a top priority at Apple, and one of the keys to that security is a secure boot environment. Allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify key system components. Some of this can be mitigated by only allowing Apple's ASR utility to make the copy, but there are still inherent opportunities to inject changes when copying system files.

All that can be done without... compromising the security of the boot environment will apple fix this issue so that bootable backups can limp along a little further maybe but that's getting to be a moot question apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with platform security

All right, so a couple of things here. To start, why do we care about bootable backups? Why do we use something like SuperDuper? Why is this a valuable thing to have? And most importantly, on Mike's post, Why is recovery mode not a sufficient replacement? The magic of bootable backups is that if something goes wrong with your main drive,

you can just reboot and be back up and running in the time it takes you to boot from your other drive. This was much more important in the days of spinning disks. And also much more reliable in the days before Apple Silicon, because as we noted on a show a week or two ago.

Apple Silicon Macs cannot really boot from external drives. They always essentially boot from the internal drive and say, oh, I see you wanted to boot from an external drive and essentially hand off control and continue to boot from there but the secure boot environment is all contained within the hardware that apple sells and it's you know cryptographically as secure as it can be knowing that it's booting off a known good system and allowing

that all to be bypassed by saying just trust whatever's on this drive is a you know a potential problem right that's part of that's the secure boot environment that apple is defending that's why apple silicon max work like they do but what it also means is unlike the old days If your boot drive like dies, dies, like, you know, is totally broken or is fried or like just, you know, you're in the old days, you're spinning hard drive. The heads crashed into the platters like it's just dead.

In the old days, you're like, okay, I'll take this internal drive, rip it out of my computer, throw it in the garbage can, and boot from my super duper clone. And I'm up and running as of whenever the last backup was, which might have been last night, right? Just in the amount of time it takes to boot. I don't have to wait for a whole OS install, which can take a very long time. I don't have to do any of that stuff. I'm just up and running. And by the way...

I just booted my Mac that has no hard drive in it. I booted it from an external drive because that hard drive that was broken is now in the garbage can. If your Apple Silicon Mac, if the SSD goes bad, like totally dead on it, you cannot boot off an external drive. that Mac will not boot off anything because you need the internal SSD to at least have enough parts of it working to boot from the little part of the OS that's needed to go to external boot stuff. So that is different, but...

Still, if you hosed yourself, accidentally deleted a bunch of files, broke some part of your user directory, accidentally recursively deleted parts of your home library directory as root. Your system could be entirely hosed, but your SSD still works. So you will be able to boot from an external backup. And that's where having a super duper bootable backup can get you up and running much faster. I mean, that whole like, you know, as I develop this app that I'm working on.

Maybe I will accidentally hose my directories, my files in a way that didn't damage the SSD, but renders my system entirely useless to me. It will be great to boot from my super duper backup in that scenario. So I think.

bootable backup still is very important and recovery is absolutely not a substitute because if anyone has ever done recovery mode even though we have a fast computers fast internet connections reinstalling mac os takes longer than you think it does if you're in a hurry or you know if you're trying like you might as well just write off the whole rest of the day to dealing with that sometimes because it takes

You'll just be staring at indeterminate spinners for a long time, wondering how long it's going to take, how many more reboots is going to take, how many more progress bars am I going to have to see? So I don't think that's a great solution. All right. Given all of that...

This whole discussion in 2020 with, was it Phil Schiller at the time? Is he director of product marketing? I think that was already past the change. I don't know who it is, but anyway. So the quote, we know there's a quote or a paraphrase or whatever it says. How would it look someday in the future if you simply couldn't make a copy of the system at all? The conclusions that Mike draws from this, that bootable backups are not a thing.

and that Apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible to platform security. I'm not sure I agree with that. So first of all, the statement is, this is an Apple person saying, how would it look someday in the future if you simply couldn't make a copy?

If you, third-party developers, that came to pass. Third-party developers can't make bootable copies. You have to run Apple's ASR tool to do it. Apple can make a bootable backup. You can't, which is why SuperDuper is in the bind it is because... They can't do it. They have to use Apple's, you know, privilege, signed, secure tool to do it. But I'm not – and the second thing is I'm not sure – I'm not saying this is not –

True, only that I have not been convinced that it's true by reading this post. The idea that if copies of system files can be made by anybody, including Apple... somehow this is a security issue so saying like allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify key system components some of this can be mitigated by only allowing asr to make a copy but there are still opportunities to inject changes i don't understand

how that could possibly be the case the whole point is you cryptographically sign the whole thing with the the the sealed system volume or whatever and those cryptographic keys are secured by keys that are in the hardware and verified over the internet and yada yada like if you modify any part of the system if you if a nefarious third party modified part of the operating system when copying it like that would be detected because the signatures wouldn't match

And a secure boot environment, like the Apple Silicon Mac's booting from their internal drive and making sure they have a secure boot environment. ensures that the thing doing the verification can't be tampered with because that's the thing that kicks off the boot process on the external drive and it can verify that the system value is sealed correctly. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I think the conclusions being drawn here are at least do not convince me that. Apple thinks it.

bootable that making a bootable drive should not be possible because that doesn't make any sense you make a bootable drive all the time you make a bootable drive when you install the os that is an example of apple software making a bootable drive it's no different when they're doing it to the one one and only drive on your Mac are doing it

to the second and you know another drive on your mac it is still apple software connecting to the internet and putting in an os there and yes it put it by downloading off the internet but it's no difference than it putting it by copying it from another location in both cases it has to verify that the os

is proper and signed and so on and so forth. So... this is unfortunate like asr has broken before by the way super duper has always been dealing we've been in the age where only asr can copy the operating system for a while now and it's as dave says it's broken in the past and it's cruddy because

you're a third party you're like look i can't do it myself i have to use this tool that apple provides and if the apple provided tool has bugs or does weird things or just plain doesn't work you just have to sit around and wait for apple to fix it for you I assume that's what will happen in this case. I assume Apple will fix it. Like I said, I'm not personally convinced.

that apple was trying to say that it is impossible to make a bootable version of uh make a make a drive that is able to boot mac os using apple software because it just doesn't make any sense to me that's what software that's what the os installation recovery process do i don't see how cloning is that different worst case scenario you could say okay it won't copy the operating system from one drive to another it will install a fresh one from the internet but because the the

thing that you boot from is a read only cryptographically signed snapshot. It's the same for everybody. It's a separate volume. It's not where your data is.

There should be no difference between copying the operating system from one drive to another and putting a... fresh version of that operating system by downloading it from the internet the only place where this there there are you know questions here is like okay well what if apple is no longer signing that version of the operating system or you can't get it because it's so old or whatever in that case a copy would work but a download wouldn't but

I don't know. I think and hope that this is just yet another one of unfortunate bugs in macOS because these parts of the OS are understaffed.

and that they will eventually fix it and super duper will start working again and all will be if not right with the world then better but i just like again if someone knows someone can explain to me how uh what mike bombage is saying makes any kind of sense uh please do but right now i feel like apple was not trying to say that it will be impossible to make bootable versions of mac os only that

third-party developers wouldn't be able to do it themselves. Only Apple could do it. That's another thing that only Apple can do. I would hope that Apple provides a mechanism to do this and maintains it, but I don't know. We'll see what happens. We'll see how this shakes out.

Yeah, I kind of wish like so the promise of APFS and all the new file system stuff they did is that this type of stuff could get better. And it did get better in many ways, like a lot of the parts of the system that deal with this, like.

time machine and stuff like time machine will now like make a snapshot first and then copy that snapshot kind of i'm assuming one of the benefits of that is that it helps with the painting the golden gate bridge problem where in the bad old days time machine would start running and it would start copying files from your disk to your time machine backup and in the beginning it would copy you know a bunch of files or whatever

two hours pass and it's copying the last files, during that two hours, the files that it copied at the beginning could have changed. And so you're like, oh, well, when am I done? Do I have to go back to the beginning now? Because I noticed some new things changed. Oh, right now, by the time I get to the end of that, there's still things that you keep going back and back. You know, it just copies it once and says, okay, I'm done. You may end up writing.

an inconsistent view like the source disk never looked like this at any moment in time the beginning of the source disk looks like this, and by two hours later, the end of the source disk looks like this, but the thing that you wrote has files that you copied in the beginning look like it did an hour ago, and files that you copied at the end look like they do right now. Snapshots.

avoid that because you can take a moment in time snapshot and say here's a frozen snapshot of what this drive looked like at a given moment and now i can take my time leisurely copying that snapshot because that snapshot is never going to change. It is literally a moment in time snapshot. So even if it takes you four hours to copy that snapshot.

The file you copy at the end is exactly from the exact same moment of time as the file you copied at the beginning stuff like that is great One of the strategies time machine uses to figure out What has changed since my last backup so I don't have to scan the entire disk again? One of the strategies is some kind of snapshot diffing thing. I really hoped that they would go whole hog ZFS thing. ZFS has the ability to send.

block level diffs between snapshots where not only does it you know know exactly what changed in i'm not sure if it's constant time or it might just be linear but anyway an efficient way to tell exactly what changed it does it at the block level not at the file level so it doesn't if a file changes it's not like copying whole files it says i know this block from this file change and these two blocks in this file

change and can efficiently transfer just those blocks to another thing. But there's lots of limitations to doing that in ZFS. Anyway. I was hoping that kind of technology would come to macOS and they've sort of kind of got a little bit of it, but not really. And, you know, cloning is a whole other thing. But anyway, it would be great.

if they continue to advance their file system APIs and support for this type of thing to do efficient, essentially what SuperDuper does, efficient copies, like that smart update, only copy the things that changed over here. and yes to also be able to make bootable efficient clone copy backup things like i'm not saying put super duper out of business but i'm kind of saying like eventually technology gets to the point where what was once uh a

thing that only a third party could do because it was so not supported by the operating system eventually should become something that is so easily supported by the operating system kind of like what i'm doing my app is doing stuff that is so easily supported by the operating system i'm just providing like a fancy wrapper on top of it

i would hope that's where super duper would get eventually building on asr to say okay well we can't do it we have to use apple's tool it seems like it's going in that direction except asr is so much less capable the code that's super duper when it was doing it itself because ASR is just like, well, I've just got one job. I'm called Apple Software Restore. I'm not called be the underlying engine for SuperDuper. So it is so limited and so brute force and so not what SuperDuper would want.

uh but you know maybe someday like it took us so long to get apfs and we got lots of benefits from it but i still think we're a long way from really realizing all the benefits of modern file systems to make stuff like this so much better i mean you know yeah i appreciate the time machine snapshots local snapshots where you can do essentially time machine backups without having your time machine drive attached so you can go back in time

to something from 10 minutes ago because a local Time Machine backup was taken. That's all well and good, but Time Machine itself still feels like kind of abandoned and lonely and filled with bugs. And yeah, ASR being the one and only tool that can...

copy a bootable version of the operating system from one disk to another it doesn't seem tenable to me and as for only being able to boot it off internal drive and apple silicon i don't know what the solution to that is because i do understand this i do understand why they do that like that's the security implications of not allowing that make sense to me

But it is very limiting when it comes to the ability to recover quickly from a disaster. It kind of makes the most workable solution for that to essentially have a second Mac. right so yeah i have two macs that are both as up-to-date as they can start your project and if you really if you're like if this mac fails i need to be able to continue work immediately just throw that whole mac away slide in the new mac and just try to pick up where you left off

If Apple's cloud syncing was better than it actually is, you could probably do that. But as it stands, you're probably starting work from wherever you were at the beginning of the day. All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Cyril Mazzola writes, with the Mac's latest operating system updates, Sequoia 15.2, Apple's created a new folder for recording your history. It's called Recents. It's an option in the Finder sidebar. How does this fit in with Apple's policy of privacy?

Is this really new? I swear this is not new, but maybe it is. I think I might be missing the point here. Why is this not privacy-friendly? All right, so I think what Zero is saying is like... If this is in the sidebar, and if you see it in the sidebar and you click on it, you may be shocked to see, there's all the files that I've messed with recently.

And it's sort of like a trail of your activity. And if you thought you were secretly messing with some files somewhere and you have a document that says my master plan to take over the world dot TXT. And suddenly when someone clicks on something in your sidebar, they see that file. And your plans have been revealed. What that recent thing is doing...

is the same thing you can do if you hit command F in the finder and you search for a files recently opened within the last 30 days, which is a thing that you can do that you've been able to do for decades on macOS. It is just... finding it's just a saved search finding files that have been opened recently or whatever the whatever the thing is let me put up in the finder to see the exact thing i think it is um last open to date

Lasted open date is within the last 30 days. You've always been able to run that search. Now, it's more accessible as a sidebar item in the finder than having to hit command F, pick one item from a pop-up menu, type three zero, and hit return. But practically speaking, this is not a privacy invading feature. This is just part of a fact of life. If someone else has access to your computer

logged in as you, they can hit command F and find files based on any criteria they want. They can find image files.

last opened within the last 30 days that are jpegs that are larger than this site like and they can save that as a a save search in a smart folder that looks like a little folder icon but when you double click it it opens the folder but the contents of that folder are the contents of a saved search this whole idea was something I really liked back in the days of like BOS where their file system had native support for this with like indexing in the file system and really fast searches.

macOS still supports it some people get a lot of use out of it i think its implementation is a little bit janky and its integration in the finder is not great so many people don't even know it exists such that when they put something called recent files in the sidebar they're like

privacy invasion where did this come from it's a new feature in 15.2 i kind of see the point but just fyi this has always been there it's kind of like realizing that your web browser is keeping track of your browser history if you're not running an incognito mode all the time

You can just go and there's a menu item that shows history and you'll scroll. This is every webpage I've been doing. It's watching my every move. I mean, you know, Google Chrome is probably reporting it back to Google as well, but yeah. That's how computers work to some degree. If you don't like it, there's not much of a solution. Some things in like macOS, like within individual applications, if you go to the file menu, there'll be an open submenu.

with like recent items, you can clear that recent items menu, which is used to be just like a P list somewhere. I don't know where they're storing it these days. But anyway, sometimes you can clear the recent items to clear the last things that you've opened. But practically speaking, if it's file system metadata. The find command can search based on it and return results. You could wipe that metadata if you wanted. Every file that you last opened, go through it and wipe the metadata.

or duplicate that file and delete the original or like there's all sorts of stuff you could do but like what are you trying to do here really if you don't want people knowing this about your computer don't let them access to your computer logged in as you that's the solution

All right. Tucker writes, what is the quote unquote correct directory location to save random Python shell, Ruby, Pearl, PHP, et cetera, scripts to keep them organized and easily accessible, or excuse me, executable? I use the... fish shell. And I typically write my scripts of that sort using fish. And so there's a particular folder that you're supposed to put them in.

And then occasionally, if I write other stuff, I'll just put it in my home folder because I have very little in my home folder. I'm sure this is going to make John roll over in his not grave, but grave. So before John tells us all what we're supposed to be doing, Marco, what is your approach?

For this kind of random script and stuff for my local Mac to run, I actually have a folder in Dropbox for those. And part of my new Mac setup is... to add to my well first install bash and then add to my bash profile to include a bash profile file that is in in this dropbox folder and then that does everything else for me so that way when i set up a new mac or you know managing between my desktop and laptop i don't need to like constantly be

shuttling things back and forth manually or resetting things up. Any of that stuff just lives in Dropbox and... including most of my bash profile, which again is just included by the actual local bash profile. It includes the Dropbox bash profile and that sets everything else up. That's where all of my aliases are and all sorts of stuff like that.

I suggest whether you use Dropbox or whatever other file sync provider you use, keep it in there unless you have some really good reason not to. All right, John, what are we supposed to be doing? So there is a... correct with the scare quotes like this question says a correct uh directory for saving executable scripts from a cultural perspective for everybody my age and older who cut their teeth on unix in the late 80s or early 90s

And that answer is tilde slash bin, B-I-N, lowercase. You make a directory called bin in your home directory. You put all your executable files there. You add your tilde slash bin to your path. and on every system you do that and whatever things you want to be executable you put in there that's mostly just a cultural answer and it's based on the fact that if you were on a multi-user unix system back in those days probably at your university or whatever

uh you didn't have access to the system-wide directories so you had to pick some other directory to put things but you did have access to your home directory but you'd want the directories in your home directory to be structured like the system-wide ones and so You know, the ls command is bin ls, and your customized version of the ls command would be tilde slash bin ls. I, in fact, do have a bin directory in my home directory. I make it invisible so it doesn't show up in the Mac side of things.

uh with just the hidden attribute but it is in fact there it is in my path that is the correct location for files that you want to be in your home directory now If you just want to say stuff that you just want to be able to run, the other correct location on your own Mac, where unlike in university, you do have access to the system-wide files.

is user local bin and that's usr not user and it's all lowercase all lowercase slash usr slash local slash bin user local apple has essentially pledged uh like uh Europa in 2010, you know, attempt no landing there. All these worlds are yours except user local. They said they won't mess with user local. They're not going to put their stuff there. They're not going to accidentally wipe it during an OS update.

That was a promise statement for many, many years ago. So far, it has still been true. If you would like to put system-wide stuff somewhere for yourself manually, User local. User local bin. User local include. User local man. User local lib. User local share. Everything in user local is yours. And what do you put there? The same directories that are at the top level. A bin. A lib. A share. And include.

Anything you want, you put there. So user local bin is where I put the executables that I want to be generally available to everybody on the system. And my path also includes user local bin, which is another common thing to have in your shell path on a Unix system. So those are the answers, bin and user local bin for executables. As for keeping them organized, that's different than keeping them easily executable.

You might want to organize them by category and make subfolders. But now you're adding even more files to your path. And maybe you could have some links up to the top level, put them down to other things. And if you're using a package manager, all your crap is an opt and it's messing with your path and you're using RVM.

and nvm and all these virtual environments to point to different versions of node and different versions of ruby and different versions of python and this whole web of sim links and just i don't like that it rubs me the wrong way But it is how a lot of the world works. And speaking of phish, every single one of these freaking things assumes, of course, you're running ZSH Bash or phish or some other POSIX-compliant shell. So it's no problem. If you want to use nvm, just type .space nvm.sh.

and you're up and running oh but you're not running zsh or bash or sh or fish are you oh well tough luck because you can't source that file because it's written in the shell that your thing doesn't support so i guess you just can't use our thing oh well There's no other shells in the world except for Bash, CSH, and Fish, as we all know, so that will never come up.

guess which shell i use not one of those three um what do you use so that i'm used tcsh uh because i'm old and that was on my first unix system and someday i'll be forced to change probably to zsh or bash or something else i probably won't change the fish a little too weird for me Um,

But yeah, a lot of those systems just assume they know what shell you're using and nothing works. You can't use the node installed by NVM until you source the NVM thing or unless you, you know, port it to TCSH or figure out how it's manipulating your path to do. what it's supposed to do

This is why I compile everything from source and put it installed under usable. It comes with me across OS updates. It's always where I want it to be. It's not a web of sim links and everything works fine. I think that is a reasonable organization, but I'm an old.

unix person and i don't like these newfangled things and i don't use homebrew and i don't use any kind of package manager and i kind of wish apple would write a package manager for macOS that was natively supported but so far they haven't all right john had opinions who knew

Shocked. Saul Sutherland writes, do you keep the internet firewall enabled on your Mac? It comes off by default on new installs, but I make it a habit to enable it to protect myself from incoming connections on coffee shop Wi-Fi and when my Mac is connected directly to the internet for testing at work.

For me, I don't turn it on. I don't think I ever have. I'm not that concerned about incoming connections. I mean, I could make an argument why one should and could be, but I don't know. I'm not that worried about it, and no, I leave it off. And when I'm on...

coffee shop, wifi. I, use tail scales not a sponsor of this episode but obviously i'm in love with them uh tail scales exit node functionality basically says take all of your outbound traffic anyway and route it through something else and i route it through my house so uh for me no don't use it

Again, because I think John will have most opinions, let's start with Marco. Marco, do you use the internet firewall? No, I think most software these days is designed to assume any network you're on is hostile. and to not grant open access to others on your network without your permission. So I don't...

I don't think it's super necessary for most people to worry about that. But if you have that kind of extremely high security need for the networks you're on, then you might have different priorities. But I think for most people, you don't have to. Yeah. John? As someone who essentially never does a clean install and has just simply been migrating from one Mac to the next and installing new versions of macOS on top of the old ones since 1984.

And it's sometimes a mystery to me what my settings actually are, because the last time I looked at them, they have been a decade or more in the past. So I had to actually go to system settings to see.

do i have the firewall enabled and this would have been something that i said back on the mac os 10 days right because it didn't exist in classic mac os the answer to my surprise because i thought i had it turned off is yes i do have it active why maybe it was the default a long time ago maybe it's currently the default but i have it active and it has never affected my life so i'm inclined to keep it that way i don't think about it actively uh in general i agree that like most sort of

Network security happens outside the realm of your computer. I'm a desktop guy, so I'm not going to coffee shops with laptops. But my advice for Firewall is... If it's not on by default on a new Mac, which I don't know the answer of, if it's not on by default, try turning it on and see if it annoys you. If it doesn't annoy you,

leave it on. It's providing some additional measure of protection. If it starts annoying you too much, then you can figure out is there a way I can keep this on and have it be less annoying. And if you can't figure it out, then just turn it off. But I would advise the default being turn it on, leave it on until or unless there's some reason not to.

Torstein writes, is Marco still using his XT5 or did he go back to his iPhone again like he predicted he would? Also, what are the rest of y'all using these days going into the holiday season? iPhones or camera cameras. I guess since Marco was quoted in this, or named in this, why don't you start Marco and then I'll continue after you. Yeah, so my Fuji X-T5 remains my most commonly used standalone camera that's not an iPhone. I believe I've mentioned a couple times in the past, I did...

Really bite the Fuji bug or get bitten by the Fuji bug hard. And last year, around the Black Friday season, I picked up on Great Sale. their giant medium format GFX100S. It has since been succeeded by the GFX100S II. I have the first one. Whatever I'm willing to carry around a very big camera, I bring the GFX100S, and it is... And I only have two primes for it. I have the 110mm portrait and the relatively little pancake lens for it, which is the size of a grapefruit.

50 or 55 millimeter one. I keep that 50-ish millimeter one on most of the time. That is my landscape everything camera. Because it is so big and heavy, I... more often have the Fuji with me. Like if I'm going somewhere with a backpack, I will often have the X-T5 with me is what I mean. And on that, I have the little tiny pancake prime for that. The 27mm, which converts to like a 45-ish. I love that combo. It's a fantastic camera.

The X-T5, even though it is not technically as amazing as the GFX100S, I greatly prefer its controls. I think it is... My favorite camera I have ever used in terms of handling and controls and capabilities. It has tons of manual control dials. And so I'm able, especially when I have a lens, which most of my lenses do. where the lens has an aperture ring on it. Then I have physical controls for all of the main things. You know, I have shutter speed, ISO.

aperture and exposure, all of those there's rings for if your lens has an aperture ring on it. I just love the X-T5 because everything is just... clear and obvious. You can tell what all the important settings are just by looking at the top of the camera. That's how I like to shoot. It handles the way I... I want a camera to handle. Things are laid out in a great way, which is not what I can say about the GFX, but the GFX wins on tech.

detail. But anyway, the X-T5 I absolutely love. So to answer the question, whether I'm still using it or whether I went back to my iPhone, I never stopped using my iPhone to take pictures. Now I just, when I... have the ability to have a big camera with me, I do take pictures with the X-T5, and I really enjoy it. And in fact, today, I was going on a... sunny winter day walk at the beach. And I brought the X-T5 and I took some pictures around the beach of the snowy town and it was delightful.

So I do use the X-T5 as often as I've used any other big camera in the last 15 years, which is not incredibly often, but I'm glad I have it when I want it. Christmas, I'm going to be using both of those heavily. Our Christmas setup is kind of a multi-camera setup usually. It's a big family ordeal, and there's different cameras for different purposes. So I will have the GFX with me with that prime lens on it, especially when light gets low.

For other times of the day, I'll be using the X-T5 with a more versatile zoom lens on it. So the answer is yes, I use it and it's great. For me, I have a Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera, which is why my interest was piqued earlier with that.

that immersive camera uh i use i don't remember what generation it is to be completely honest with you about but i use an olympus omd omd em10 i want to say it's a mark 3 but i'm not 100 sure uh the mark 4 appears to be the latest and greatest That camera, while I love it and to my eyes, takes incredible pictures, I've come to the conclusion over the last several years, I want to say three or four years ago now, that if I'm indoors, unless I have a lot of light,

then the iPhone is likely to do a better job taking a photo than this is. Obviously, the bokeh won't be nearly as good from the iPhone. In fact, it will either be synthetic or not great. But in general, I find that... particularly indoors, the iPhone does better. And then outdoors, it depends on what I'm up to because...

The Olympus doesn't have automatic or my Olympus doesn't have automatic like HDR or anything like that. And so I will choose between having subjects that are, you know, exposed properly in a washed out sky or vice versa. And so I do still use the Olympus, particularly when I want a zoom because I have some flavor of zoom lens that I forget off the top of my head on it, which is, again, less relevant now with the iPhone's 5X camera. Or if I'm outdoors.

for sure. If I'm outdoors trying to capture people or whatever, I am 100% reaching for the Olympus. But that's about it. If I'm not outdoors in decent light, then...

Oftentimes, it's just less fuss to use the iPhone, and that's typically what I'm doing. John, I need you to keep this to under three hours. Which one of your 17 cameras are you using? What scenarios, please? So for the holidays, I... I just, well, really for everything except for Long Island beach photography, I use my phone, obviously.

And also what I consider my main camera, which is the Sony a7 III that Marco generously gifted me all those years ago. Love it. Still getting great mileage out of it. The lens I use on it is what I consider my sort of everyday. lens it's the most versatile single lens i have for this camera it's the sony 24 to 70 f 2.8 gm2 What I like about the lens is the zoom range is reasonable. The aperture at 2.8 is reasonable.

And the size is reasonable. You can get lenses with longer ranges and with a wider aperture, they're all bigger and heavier. This one is already kind of at the limit of big and heaviness, but... It is versatile enough that I can use it in any kind of indoor or outdoor scenario where I'm going to be taking pictures of people at an event or doing a thing. So Christmas morning is that camera and occasionally the phone, which I will take out for. I don't do it. Don't do any video.

on my big camera i do video only on the phone and occasionally i'll take out my phone to do video and then snap some shots with it as well depending on how quickly i need to get the shot is the camera around my neck my family complains that all the pictures of me uh christmas morning i have

camera around my neck with like someone's got to take the pictures and it's going to be me so any picture they take of me with their phones which they're terrible quality phones uh is me with a camera camera around their neck

um yeah so that's my plan for this year as well same lens same camera it'll be around my neck while opening presents i'm gonna be taking pictures of everybody else and then they're gonna end up going in the calendar that hangs in the fridge and it's just the way it works plus my iphone pictures my iphone pictures

get better every year because well not every every two years my iphone pictures get better because i get a better phone and that trend continues but uh it's going to be a little while before i ever upgrade the big camera there are obviously many better cameras but like me with my tvs i'm waiting for that right

better cam well first of all a better camera is going to cost me a whole bunch of money so uh you know and i'm gonna i'm looking at the sony cameras because i want to be able to reuse all my lenses and i like sony cameras and so i'm just waiting for that right one like the uh uh

The A7R5 was actually a really good one, but I don't know if I want the R series with that much extra resolution. I'm not sure if I want or need that to make my photos bigger. The A1 was tempting, but super expensive. The new version of the A1, it's like, oh, it's better.

but they didn't change really the sensor. Then there's the A9 with the electronic sensor. And it's like, maybe I should just wait until they basically have something with the dynamic range of the A1 series, but with the... instant readout i forget what the name of it is but like the the electronic shutter instant readout thing of the a9 and that

This is a technology that doesn't exist yet. So I'm just sitting here waiting. I'm saying in the meantime, I love my a7 III, take tons of pictures with it. I have lots of different interesting lenses for it that I use on occasions when I have time to prepare. But my everyday lens, the Sony... 24 to 70 gm2 highly recommended lens great compromise between image quality weight and aperture if you have to pick one single lens to use for anything and when i take you know sometimes like

My kids are going to like a dance at school or something like that, like where I know I'm going to be taking pictures of people like all dressed up in their nice outfits. I'll put on one of my prime lenses to get better pictures out of it. But most of the time, the everyday lens gets me through. All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week, The Members.

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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. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them. C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-O-Q It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental So I thought maybe we could take the opportunity to do like a quick catch up on Aaron's car. If you recall.

In June, when we were all at WWDC together, Aaron's old Volvo had a catastrophic engine failure. I forget which episode we talked about it, but you should go and listen to it. Caused by a very small pebble. Correct. You're not going to say like you're waiting for you to get to that point. You're just going to say, oh, it had a catastrophic engine failure anyway. Continuing on, it's like, no, it had a catastrophic engine failure caused by a pebble. It had a.

encounter with a pebble. It was defeated by a pebble. It was destroyed by a pebble. There's so many different ways you can do this. The important part is the pebble. It was possibly the most interesting catastrophic engine failure I've ever heard. Yeah, see, there you go.

So anyway, you can hear the details on a prior episode. I don't recall which one, but that was in June. And then in early July, we figured out that we really just wanted to stick with Volvo. And I don't need to hear any feedback. as to whether or not that was smart. Don't care. That's what we did. It's already done. And what we did this time, though, was, you know, Aaron had a Volvo XC90. It was a 2017. We bought a 2024. We leased, actually, a 2024 XC90. But this one...

is a plug-in hybrid, an XC90T8. And basically what that means is it has a turbocharged four-cylinder engine and it also has a battery electric engine, if your motor, I guess, strictly speaking, if you will. And anyway, so it gets about 30 to 35 miles of range, generally speaking. We can charge it in about five hours from dead here at home because we have a like American dryer style plug, which is a 220 volt plug.

I want to say it's like 50 amps, something like that, which then gets converted down to, I think it's a 30 amp, which is all that the car wants because it's not a huge battery. I believe it's 18 kilowatt hours or 18 kilowatts, excuse me. Something like that. Anyway. You were it the first time. There we go. I screwed it up. But I thought it would be interesting to talk about what it's like for someone to have a plug-in hybrid car.

I got to tell you, for our particular needs, and our particular needs are relatively unique, but for us, I freaking love this thing. And I think it was the perfect solution for our family. Generally speaking, Aaron drives... 10 miles in a day maybe 20 at most on an average day and i just told you that the battery lasts roughly 30 miles give or take a little bit generally speaking so that means that

Almost all of her driving, she can do on electricity. And that also means that we bought the car, I want to say it was like July 10 or thereabouts. I forget exactly what day it was, but it was in the top half of July. A couple of weeks ago, we put our second... Tank of gas in the car.

How much horsepower is the electric motor? You know, I honestly don't know. I want to say it's like 100 horsepower, but I really, truly don't remember off the top of my head. Because I was wondering, are you forcing it into EV-only mode? Essentially, you get in, you put it into the mode that says don't use the gas engine at all. That does exist. It's called Pure. And I have done that a handful of times.

And oftentimes if I do it, it's because I want to allow myself the full depth of the accelerator pedal. You know how in like an automatic, you can just kind of feel, not physically feel, but you just kind of feel out that, oh, if I go any further, the car will downshift. And you know that.

unless you're really trying to get going somewhere. That, say, 50% depth on the accelerator is all you've really got at that particular moment. Well, the same sort of thing is true here. Now, it is an automatic when it's using the gasoline engine, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I mean is... is you can just kind of tell that if I go beyond this depth of the pedal, it's going to kick on the gas motor. Not only that, but the...

The tachometer, or I guess it's the power meter, strictly speaking, it has a droplet. I'm not sure why it's a droplet, but it's a droplet and a line that indicates, okay, if you ask for any power beyond this point, I'm kicking on the gasoline. And so... We run it in hybrid mode 99% of the time, and it is exceedingly rare that it will turn on the gasoline.

for just getting around town purposes. Now, if we're on an interstate or something like that, it will absolutely kick the gasoline on from time to time. And then also I've found that if you use the onboard navigation, and this has Android Automotive, which means it's... the Google powered thing. It has Google maps and whatnot. Uh, if you tell it, if you tell the car, the destination, rather than using like Apple maps on car play,

It will do some sort of computational magic such that it will kick on the gasoline when there's plenty of battery power left. I believe because it thinks, okay, later in the trip, when you're close to your destination, you're going to want the juice for then. That being said, I'm not sure I really agree with some of its choices. It would use battery at times where I thought...

the gasoline might have served it better, like say on the interstate. And it used gasoline when I thought the battery might have served it better, like around town. Maybe it's right. And certainly it's presumably smarter than me, but I don't know. It just felt...

weird. But that was many words to say, no, we don't typically put it in pure mode. We typically run it in hybrid mode. I'm surprised that your gas tanks last in that long because you're essentially not... you're not disallowing the gas engine from turning on so it turns on whenever it feels like it although it does sound like you're kind of babying it because you don't want the gas engine to turn on but still it's turning on in your daily use but i guess

Just a little bit, just briefly, and not enough to go through. Does that have a big gas tank? How big is the gas tank? You know, that's a great question, which I also don't know off the top of my head. You've only filled it up twice. Yeah, I've only filled it twice. Let me see if I can quickly find the – I log our –

our fuel spreadsheet, a number spreadsheet. I don't know why I do it. I just like doing it. I have no good justification for it. Even less so now. Yeah, right. The last time we filled it up, it was pretty... darn near empty. And we put in almost 16 gallons, like just a shade shy of 16 gallons. And that was an effective miles per gallon on that tank of 77.2.

And that is by taking the amount of miles driven, you know, divided by the amount of gallons burned. But again, that's not really fair because most of that time we were running on electricity rather than gasoline. That's one of the things that always worries me about. hybrids and we're so worried about uh marco's i3's range extension is like uh if you don't ever use the gas engine a you're just you know wasting electricity hauling this big heavy thing around and b

if you don't run a gasoline engine for long periods of time, it gets cranky. Like you do have to occasionally start it and you are like you're, it's clearly turning on. And although it. auto stop start also makes me have empathy for the engine yes being i know they're designed to auto stop start i know all the things they did to change the engine so they can do that and more robust starters and yada yada it's still not good for the engine still right so i do worry that i mean usually

so who cares but like as one of the strange compromises about hybrids is you know depending on how you use them in like the quote-unquote best case scenario where you're basically on ev almost all the time A, it's inefficient to lug the engine around, and B, that engine is having a sad, difficult life that's probably not being run enough. It wants to be run. It's like a thoroughbred horse. It wants to get out there and run.

then you're just like nope electric motors got it yeah and i mean i would say that it probably if i were to wager a guess in the six months or thereabouts that we've had the car i would say the gasoline motor has been on

10 hours or less maybe like it is very rare for the gasoline motor to run see that's not a good healthy life for a gas engine i know who cares about the whole point is you don't want to be burning gasoline like i get that but it's like it just that's why i always feel like a pure ev is so much more of a simple solution. But, you know, hey, live and learn. Yeah. And I mean, again, I can't find any particular, you know, beef that I have with anything you just said. I agree with you. But...

So far, you know, six months in, it has been incredible because we almost never use gasoline. And again, it's been a couple of thousand miles. Shoot, I already closed the numbers document. But I think we were at like at the time. of the last fueling. Okay, here we go. We were at 3,000 miles at the time we last fueled it. 3,000 miles. And we have put in a sum total of 26 gallons of gas, which is just... bananas. And for our uses, it is the best of both worlds because...

easily 90 plus percent of the time. Aaron is using it just on electricity. And then the handful of times that we want to go further. Now, admittedly, we haven't taken it on a proper trip yet. When I say further, I'm saying like a... sum total of 100-150 miles, which I know most reasonable EVs would laugh at.

But that being said, anytime we want to take it further than like 30 or so, then the gasoline just kicks on and it's no problem. And that's worked out super duper well. And I think we could, our family could have. a EX90, which is the full electric version of this car. I mean, it's strictly speaking a little bit different, but it's effectively the full electric version of the XC90. And I certainly think we could make that work without too much compromise. But I really, I wasn't ready for...

the family hauler to be full electric yet. I 100% believe that I should have years ago gotten full electric for myself. I haven't for several different reasons, but... uh, for the family hauler, I didn't want it to be full electric yet. And I stand by that for now. Um, and I honestly, I could make a strong argument about how wrong I am. So I'm not, you know, this, this is a weekend loosely, right? Exactly. It's,

A weak opinion held loosely, I'll be the first to tell you. But certainly for sticking our toe in the water, the plug-in hybrid has been excellent. And I'm really, really happy with it. The qualms I have with the car are... Well, let me ask you guys, if you were to just hazard a guess, what do you think my biggest complaint about the car is? Infotainment. Close. Oh, I was going to say the transmission.

No, no, no, no. Well, there is no transmission 90% of the time we drive it. No, it's software. The software is not great. And it's Google's... Android Automotive. Now, maybe it's Volvo's application thereof. I've never had an Android Automotive car before. Yeah, Android Automotive is a perfectly solid foundation. It's all the crap that the manufacturers put on top of it that...

often has bugs by the way that's what i meant by infotain how am i close i'm exactly right it's infotain that's the that's the term of art for the thing you're describing it's the software that runs on the middle things yeah but i i can't put my there are times that it's something at a low

level than the infotainment. 90% of my complaints, you're exactly right. It's the infotainment. But there are occasions, and of course I can't put my finger on one specifically right this second, but there are occasions that it's something that I think is lower level than that. But definitely most of my complaints are the infotainment.

entertainment and it and i actually liked the i think they called it census which was the volvo homegrown thing that predated android auto or excuse me android automotive um i liked it most people did not they've Kind of tried to make a faux census on top of Android Automotive, and it's all right. But I just don't love the way some of it works. And some silly things have been regressions. So a great example of this is... I don't particularly care for the radio in any capacity.

Erin loves listening to the radio in the car, and she really has come to like Sirius XM. I think we've talked about this in the past, but she likes satellite radio, and Erin is not one to want to pay money for really anything if she can avoid it. She's very... frugal maybe is the word I'm looking for I think there's an even more complimentary term than that that I can't put my finger on but she doesn't like to spend

money frivolously. Meanwhile, that's my specialty, but that's neither here nor there. And I am a mere apprentice to Marco's expert level at this. but nevertheless. You see how he snuck in the new version of the big medium format Fuji in there?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, I didn't say I own the new version of the medium. There is a new version. I have the old version. Oh, I thought you'd bought the new version. No. I mentioned it off to the side during your story. Okay, that's a good clarification. Fargo did not buy the new one. No. By the way, remind me to tell you sometime about Long Island Christmas light installation pricing.

oh my god anyway like paying somebody else to do it this is okay i'm sorry for the derail this is go for it go for this is a thing i don't know how long this has been a thing I'm relatively new to Long Island, but this is a thing that there are a lot of houses, especially as you get towards the nicer blocks in town. A lot of houses have...

professionally installed, commercial-grade Christmas lights. And you can identify them pretty easily. I believe it's the C9 sizes. I think it's what they're called. But they're the large lights that are... perfectly evenly spaced and are all perfectly aligned to outline the roof line and all the sidelines of a house and usually some of their landscaping and maybe their driveway and everything.

This is so prevalent. I'm shocked how many houses do this. And first of all, I respect what they're trying to achieve. I do think it kind of goes against the spirit of Christmas lights if they're all perfect and corporate installed by like, you know, like... somebody you're paying to put them on your house. I feel like that kind of is against the spirit of Christmas lights, and I prefer a more organic look.

where somebody just like went out there themselves and draped some lights over their bushes like I like that look better it's a little more homey and I think that's kind of what I go for but anyway so there's all these like you know just residential homes Our kids saw this one time and was like, oh, my God, we have to have that. How do we do that? So we called around some different places that we saw signs for. You would not believe what this costs. On Long Island, I'm sure it's thousands.

Yes, which greatly surprised us. And we were asking for a very basic thing, and the quote blew us away. We scaled it back quite a bit. But based on... the quote that we got and based on what everyone else was charging for the same thing and based on what everyone else seems to be doing to their houses, I think there are at least 15 houses within a few blocks of here.

that have spent over $5,000, possibly over $10,000 for their Christmas light installation. And that's just for the year. That's just for this year. Don't forget about the electricity. So believe me, that's nothing compared to if you're paying $5,000 or $10,000 for your light installations every year, the electricity is not going to matter at all. Back when they were incandescent, I think you could compete with that if you left them on all the time.

With LEDs, hopefully it's not that much. It's shocking to me that people would pay $5,000 or $10,000 to decorate their house for three weeks. you see how it works because you just got done saying how you think it's uh you know not to your taste but then also you're looked into paying for some because the neighbors did it that's how it works the neighbors have lights and you want to have the lights and just keeping up with the joneses and it's happening to you too

Why did you even agree? Just because Adam wanted it and you're like, okay, well, I don't like it, but Adam wants it. So we'll do it. Yeah, I figured, you know, we'd try it for a year and then, whoa. You could have hung them yourself. Like, I mean, that's the, you know, the old way. I saw this by just not doing lights at all. But when I was a kid, my dad and I did lights. We hung them ourselves and it was dangerous and stupid. And that's the Christmas spirit.

But these are somewhat involved to do yourself because it's one of those, to get the perfect alignment, each light has its own bracket. You're not just stapling a couple of staples for the wires. I understand. I agree with you. i don't like that look i when i were hanging them i say like you have nails stuck into like the the eaves of your house and you hang wires over the nails and nothing is evenly spaced and you know

It's very organic. Yeah, I prefer that look. But there are a lot of people who prefer this look. And I don't know. Once I learned how much it costs, it kind of ruined it for me. Now I'm just kind of like, oh, my God, those people wasted so – so anyway, all this is to say that –

Believe me, Casey, there are people who are way better at wasting money than either of us. Good to know. You could put a projector on your lawn, Marco, and have it project lights onto your house. You know those things where they take things on to serve. They won't be as bright as the neighbor's lights. You can have any configuration you want, and it's just one little projector. Oh, my God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, Aaron doesn't really love spending money if she can avoid it, which is great because I'm very good at it. And so she really likes Sirius XM. And I was starting to say before we got a little sidetracked that one of the things.

that's worse about this new version of Senses, if they're even calling it that now, is that on her old car, when you looked at the list of channels in SiriusXM, if you're trying to flip to like a different channel, it would show you what the currently playing song was on each channel.

So like on this list, it would say, you know, hits whatever is playing Justin Bieber and hit then, you know, nineties on nine is playing so-and-so and zeros on zero is playing such and such. And it would show you whatever's playing on each thing. And it doesn't do that.

on this version of the software. And to John's earlier point, I believe that is Volvo. I don't think that's Android, or excuse me, I don't think that's Google at all. That's Volvo's work. And it's silly things like that that are frustrating. And oftentimes, there'll be little bugs and little quirks in every great way. Once in a while, we'll have to do a hard reset on the infotainment, which takes down like...

Everything, including the HVAC. So we can be hurtling down the road and have to pull a Marco in his Model S and have to reboot the center console. This has only happened a handful of times in six months, but every time it does... It's infuriating. And I can't tell if that's 100% Volvo, if it's 100% Google, or in all likelihood a combination thereof.

But that drives me nuts. It's just the software is the issue on this car. And it's not bad enough that I would say don't buy one. I really do love this car, but it's the software. Oh, another great example. This hasn't happened in a while, actually. But when we first got the car... I don't know if it was where we had things stored in the garage or something like that. We have a fairly spacious garage actually, but...

Aaron would go backing into the garage, and it was not infrequent for the car to panic stop. And understandably, that drove her up a f***ing wall, because every time it happened, it's... intense. Granted, she's not bombing into the garage. We back in because we're adults, and that's what adults should do. And we back into the garage, and so she's not driving at 15 miles an hour into the garage in reverse, but she's going quick enough that if you get... this thing panic stopping. It's...

All of a sudden, you know, it's stopped. You're going from moving to dead. And 90% or maybe not 90% of the time, but a lot of the time she has kids in the car and it scares the piss out of the kids too. Of course. And so we rearranged a couple of things we had in the garage that really were not that close. the car but we're close enough that i think it might have been setting this off but like that's a software thing you can't just disable that

You probably could, but I don't think you can permanently, you know, short of like, you know, coding the car or something like that. It's like the proximity things like when, you know, my wife got her new car. It's the first car we had with any of these proximity auto stop thingies and we haven't had the auto. stop thingy but we do have like the beepy things that yell at you if you get too close to something yeah

or yell at you when you're changing lanes with your blind spot. And the proximity ones in particular, at least in this car, there's a very prominent actual physical button on the dashboard that you can hit to turn that feature on and off. So what you just do is when you're pulling into the garage, you hit...

proximity thing off i was telling i tell her is that she has it off by default i tell her turn it on when you're parking so if you know you're getting close to some stuff but in aaron's case i would say turn it off when you're back into the garage

uh even if it comes on as soon as you start the car like that's what you want so you should check to see if there's a way to turn off i mean your problem it's not the proximity sensing it's the emergency stopping that you don't like and volvo being volvo may not let you turn that off but you should double check

Exactly. But I mean, I think it was a software thing. And I think by rearranging some things in the garage, it has made a big difference. But when it does happen, it's happened with me in the car a couple of times. I don't get driven up a wall by it.

But unquestionably, it's unsettling. And that's being generous. Like it's very unsettling to the point that it's almost scary. And that's as a passenger, much less as a driver. Does it beep at you too, besides just emergency stopping? Well, it'll beep, beep, beep, beep. And then it'll like slam on the brakes.

and sounds some sort of alarm or something like that. Ryan Booker in the chat is saying that was a bug, I think. Polestar used to do the same thing backing into our driveway if there was a blade of grass in the way. As soon as you go into the reverse gear, you can just turn it off.

have to do it every time. And that, I believe, corroborates what my experience was. Do you have to go through menus on the touchscreen to turn it off? I don't recall, to be honest with you, but it's not great in that regard. But again, it's partially our work, potentially partially our work.

especially Volvo's work that's gotten better. That's, you know, so Volvo, again, being Volvo and being very safety focused, I can see how they might turn a lot of these things on by default. But Honda... trying to do the right thing in its interiors with both the proximity sensor and also the auto stop start.

the proximity sensor again a prominent button directly on the dashboard dedicated to this just turning the proximity on and off and it defaults to on uh but then you can turn it off or you i think you can set it to default off and then you turn it on but then the auto stop start

has to default on for them to get the good EPA mileage rating, blah, blah, blah. So it always turns on, but it's right by the gear shift lever, like the auto stop start button. And there is an $80 thing, as I think I mentioned.

got this car there's an 80 thing you can buy and shove inside your dashboard that will turn it off by default but honda's trying to to say look we know which features of our car are annoying and we will give you ways to defeat them that are as convenient as possible very prominently

located easy to reach easy to see the auto stop start thing has a gigantic dedicated badge on the uh the lcd instrument cluster so you always know when it's on and off it never goes away it's like the most important thing on the display besides like the amount of fuel you have in your

speed uh but they have to turn it on by default for safety reasons so volvo is not really meeting you halfway about knowing which things are annoying i think they probably just think this emergency stopping thing is going to save your life someday and you're like i'm just trying to back into the garage yeah The other nice thing about having a plug-in hybrid is that even though the car is parked in a garage with garage door closed overnight,

And even though you two, particularly John, seem to think that we live effectively on the equator because we are south of, I don't know, Philadelphia. That's obviously correct. As it turns out, it does actually get cold here by any reasonable definition. But not cold enough that your water heater isn't in your garage.

You can't help yourself, can you? Anyway, the point is... It's 15 degrees here, okay? My water heater is not in my garage. At least mine isn't outside like Jason's. Anyway, the point is... I mean, it's 24 degrees here, and my water heater is currently air conditioning my... garage it's 28 here thank you very much so it's not like it's that friggin different anyway that's tropical jesus christ i quit uh anyway so the point is in the mornings when it got properly cold here which again

happens more often than you two, John, think. I would oftentimes pull Erin's car out before the kids and her got in it because she drives them to school. I would pull her car out maybe five or ten minutes before they were going to leave so the kids don't have to get into it. freezing cold car and aaron too but particularly the kids and um and with this

If the car isn't plugged in, you can only run the electric, like, preheat or pre-cool for three minutes, and then it turns itself off, probably because the battery is so darn small. But if the car is plugged in... you can run it for a solid 30 minutes. And so any time within 30 minutes of them needing to leave in the morning, I can just flip that bad boy on from my phone and it's just... perfect in there by the time she gets in and unplugs it, which is great.

Again, there's a lot to be said for battery electric or plug-in hybrid cars. I'm sure there's other things I'm not thinking of that I could say about this, but I got to tell you, if you're in a situation where most of your driving happens within the range of the battery on your plug-in hybrid, hybrid but you still want to be able to drive two three four five hundred miles without having to stop for 45 minutes at a clip

then I got to tell you, I am really happy with our plug-in hybrid. And I really do think that my next car will be full-on battery electric. And that will actually probably... make some very interesting changes in the way Aaron and I drive our cars, because right now it is very clear that I have my car and she has hers because she can't drive a stick.

And once I get a battery electric, when that goes away and there are only two pedals, I'm very curious to see how we split the duty of our cars. You know, will she, generally speaking, take quote unquote mine when she's doing basic stuff around town because she's.

not going to want to haul the, I think it's like 5,000, 5,500, 6,000 pound car in order to do stuff? Or will she just take hers because she's more comfortable with it? How much do you think your EV is going to weigh? I was going to say, one of those 3,000 pound EVs. Yeah, I have bad news for you about how much.

SUVs away. You make a very good point. Even when they're not SUVs, they're all heavy. Yeah. That is very true. You're right about that. But you still take my point, though. Yes. Smaller dimensions would maybe be better around town for parking and stuff. Exactly. So, I mean, I don't know. We'll see what happens. I'm not currently in the market for a car. And I do, I really do love my car. And I know I'm going to desperately miss having a stick whenever I get something different.

I am really, really happy with her plug-in hybrid and some quibbles here and there for sure, but I'm really, really glad this is where we ended up. And it may come a time, I presume there will come a time, that we get... Both of us, full-on electric cars. And I'll say to Marco, you know what, Marco, you were right. We could have done it for that 2024 that we leased.

But sitting here now to get our foot in the water, I'm really, really happy with it. And if you have this situation where, you know, you work from home or your commute is very, very, very short. I mean, when I was working outside the home, my commute was like three miles. So if you're...

in this situation where you're not driving a whole ton every day, and yet you still want to be able to drive far if you so desire, plug-in hybrid, man. It's great. Plug-in hybrids are great for a lot of people. That being said...

Once you actually live with a full EV, you're going to realize how it was so not a big deal the way you thought it would be. I'm sure you're right. I don't doubt it. In terms of long trips. Look, I get... range anxiety i get you know trying to avoid ev charging infrastructure because it's unfamiliar and scary like i get that and yes there are downsides for for certain use cases for evs but like

It's so much less of a big deal than people think it will be to take EVs on long trips before they own them. Once you own one and live with it and actually do it, you're like, oh, that's fine. It isn't better in every way. but it's better in a lot of ways, and it's not that much worse than you think it'll be in the few ways it is worse. So, like, yeah, it's not a big deal. But in the meantime, plug-in hybrids are good, like, transitional. option.

And so I'm glad you're enjoying it. I'm glad it's working as kind of training wheels into the world of electric. And I'm glad you're able to enjoy some of those benefits of electric only use or electric primary use in the meantime. So that's great.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more that, you know, this is training wheels at the moment. And the funny thing about this is... is that if I'm honest with you two, there are definitely times that Aaron's prior XC90, the pure gasoline XC90, there are definitely some multi-hundred mile trips we went on with that car, but... Generally speaking, in an average year, the longest trip that Aaron's car made in this one will make is 140 miles.

which is well within the range of... Now, that's one way, mind you. So what is that? About 300 miles round trip, which is still... almost you know i would say most electric cars jump in marco but most electric electric cars have roundabouts of 250 300 mile range so even round trip we could probably do it in one charge if we really needed to but um but you know so

Generally speaking, her car does not go far. So that's even more credence that I'm full of it and Marco's right that we should just have a full battery electric for Aaron. You're currently using an EV with 35 miles of range, you realize. That's your living that is able to serve all of your needs with an EV.

EV with 35 miles of range. It just happens to weigh 5,500 pounds. I agree. You're not wrong. That being said, we are going on a longer trip this upcoming summer, which is 320 miles each way. But that doesn't mean we couldn't charge when we're there. It's going to be a week-long trip. So presumably, even if we were plugged into a standard 110-volt outlet, I would assume in the span of literally a week, we would be able to top that thing up. But you would never do that because fast charging...

is really easy. Also fair. But my point is that like... It could happen. I'm not trying to say that it is an impossibility for us. It's just something that I certainly wasn't comfortable with. And if I wasn't comfortable with it, there is no chance that Aaron would be comfortable with it. And actually, John is writing something in our internal show notes as we speak, which reminded me of the one thing I meant to say, which I've forgotten to say.

Aaron, the other day, when it started to get cold by our standards, which at this point I will concede is not cold by Northeastern standards. This was like maybe a month ago. Aaron gets in the car and is like, uh... is something wrong with my car? And I was like, oh God, what, why? She said, well, it's not saying I have 30 plus miles range. It says like 28, 29, 27, something like that. I forget what it was. And I was like, huh. And then I stepped outside. Oh.

Yep. Yep. That's the thing. What are you talking about? I was like, oh yeah, it's cold outside. Yeah. Well, the battery doesn't work as well as it's cold when it's cold. What? Now, let me be clear. Erin is not a dumb woman. I would say she's brighter than me in almost every capacity, but she's not as knowledgeable as me about cars and that sort of thing. And she had no idea that she would take a hit for range during the winter.

And yeah, the 32-ish miles that we were getting in the summer, it's now like 27-ish usually when we pull out of the garage in the morning. Yeah, but again, like... Yes, that is a thing that happens, but that's less about inherent shortcomings of EVs and more just about lack of familiarity. Yeah, I agree. There was that one blog post that we linked to a thousand years ago from...

It was written from the perspective of somebody who's just discovering gas cars for the first time after having EVs. Oh, yes. That was very good. I forget. I don't think we could find it, but that was very good. Let's dig it up. Yeah, but it was...

I love that perspective. It's like a lot of what people... consider downsides of EVs are are not considering similar downsides of gas cars or you know it's like it's comparing it against like a perfect ideal that doesn't exist rather than looking at what actually is you know there's downsides with everything and there's different trade-offs

Part of the reason why EVs have to make their own heat in the winter, which is somewhat inefficient and uses more range, is because there isn't a giant inefficient heat.

reaction happening as it operates to drive itself forward the way it is in gas like gas cars can heat the cabin for basically for free because there is just so much waste heat coming out of the engine and you're like okay well that's great that's free but you're like well hmm you mean we're wasting all of that energy all the rest of the time and huh it's heating up

the world all the rest of the time like like that that isn't without downside either you know so like there is you know there's there's a lot of of kind of you know just you know gas car you know bias in our minds because it's like that's we've accepted that as normal we we have internalized like yeah well this is just how quote normal cars operate so then when evs come around like we see all the differences without realizing like there's a lot of downsides to gas cars too

Oh, definitely. Definitely. And again, I will never say that EVs are better at everything. I will say that they are better at most things. And again, the ways they are worse. are not as much worse for most people as they might think. But in almost every other way, they're better.

Yeah. And again, I think we could absolutely make an EV work. And I say that as though it would be some immense burden. It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be. And intellectually, I know that, but I just wasn't... there yet and again if i'm not there yet i don't think aaron was either but i suspect what's going to happen is whenever my car gets replaced and i don't know if that's tomorrow or 10 years from now

But whenever my car gets replaced, I'll get some sort of full electric car. And once we live with that, I think it'll quickly become very clear to us that, oh, we could make this work and it wouldn't be as burdensome as we fear. Oh, it'll be better than that. You won't just be making it work. You'll love it. Like give it like two months or less and you'll be like, oh my God, why do we wait this long?

Well, that's that's true, too, because Aaron's car went in full battery mode, either because it's in the quote unquote pure or because we just haven't kicked on the gasoline yet. It's sufficiently quick. But it is not quick. I mean, it is a very heavy car and it is not a tremendous motor that's driving it. And so it is not fast by any means. It's actually surprisingly peppy once you've got both of them working together because the gasoline...

I believe only drives the front axle and the battery only drives the rear. But generally speaking, when we drive it, it's like I said, it's sufficiently quick, but it is not quick. Whereas even slow evs that i've driven like my my parents have a chevy is it bolt i always get it bolt and volt wrong i forget which one it is but whatever one is the is the one that they were producing up until like a year ago um maybe it's a volt crap i don't remember it doesn't matter anyway

Malt. Fair. Yeah, it sheds. It sheds every couple of seasons. It's very weird. But anyways, whatever their piece of crap Chevy Electric is, it is a piece of crap Chevy Electric, and yet... It's actually delightful. And from zero to 30 miles an hour.

pretty damn fast. You'd be surprised. And that's not a performance car by any stretch of the imagination. So I am looking forward to whenever we get a full battery electric to have, you know, that instant torque in more than just a small helping of it from zero RPM.