625: Time and Smoke

I am happy tonight because I just... Got on the phone with us. That's what happened. Of course. That's obviously the reason. It's definitely not that I finally found decent barbecue brisket on Long Island. Ah, you know, you now sort of kind of owe me a visit. I think you visited, no, actually you might be even up in lifetime visits, but you should come visit me at some point. And we have several barbecue spots in Richmond that I...

I genuinely think are quite, quite good. Not to say they're better than what you've got or anything like that, but they're very good. They're almost certainly better than what we've got. Oh, all right. Barbecue tends to get better the further south you go in the United States. Well, that is true, but I'm trying to be inclusive.

here. It's the opposite of coffee. In any case, I'd love to take you to a couple of local haunts that I don't think I was aware of the last time you were here because it's been a minute since you've been down here. So if you're looking for a... Barbecue Adventure, you let me know. You can come visit here. And now, at this point, all the North Carolinians and Tennesseans are all getting angry and saying Virginia's not for barbecue, and you're wrong.

It's better than New York, I'll tell you that. I bet you there's some really good spots in New York City, for example, and you're not that far from New York City. The problem with barbecue is it takes so much time and space.

to do right that it really that is true it doesn't really fit into like a lots of things you can do if you just have like a hole in the wall and you know a place to do it and just someone who's dedicated to it but barbecue is just such there's so much i mean so much time and smoke like it just doesn't fit well in the city it's a specialty like you you need special equipment you need like it it is it's a very like

specialized, dedicated stuff just to make this kind of product. Yeah, it doesn't fit in an urban environment that well, like because of all the time and the smoke and the heat and just the... I mean, people do it, just not a lot of people and it's not very good. Yeah.

I mean, it's the same thing with like, oh, why can't we get good pizza outside of New York? And so people who knew how to make good pizza would go to other parts of the country. And you don't need that much space for it. You can just get a little restaurant and get the right ingredients and do it right. I think barbecue is more difficult. And also, I don't think the market for it's that big. People like pizza everywhere, but barbecue is more of a specialized taste, I feel like.

Any person that likes tasty food could enjoy barbecue, but I will agree with you. I'm not saying they wouldn't like it. They just don't know that they, you know what I mean? Like they don't know that they, they don't seek it out because they think what barbecue is is whatever. I don't even know what they think it is, but they don't know what it actually is.

So they have no reason to seek it out. They think it's just a cookout. Like most people think barbecue is meat cooked on a grill, which is not. We're talking about like slow smoked meat. This is not not even it's not even the same food like it. But I mean, it's probably like barbecue is really unhealthy for lots of reasons. Like, you know, all the wood smoke is full of carcinogens and you're eating huge amounts of fatty meats. So like it's not something that you should have like.

I mean, I know pizza is no gem in the health realm either, but I think it's less bad than barbecue. It's going to kill you. If you're going to die of cancer, barbecue is probably worse. If you're going to die of high cholesterol, pizza is probably worse. Right, exactly. one should be a huge part of anybody's diet.

All right, let's do some follow-up. Very, very quickly, a service I provide to you, the audience, is that I mention the once a year, I'm sorry, once a month or two, that Apple releases new immersive content on the Vision Pro. There is a new immersive...

video man versus beast uh this is about rodeo um speaking of things that are perhaps southern or maybe that the three of us are not very familiar with um i was thinking about it we don't need to belabor this but i think one of the things i really love about this series and the videos that apple put out, immersive videos that Apple's put out, is that

A lot of them are exposing me to different activities and sports and whatnot that I'm just deeply unfamiliar with, which I think is really neat. And this was, again, rodeo. It was filmed a lot at night, which, to my recollection, not a lot of what we saw.

seen so far was filmed at night. A lot of it was in very bright daylight, which obviously lends itself to be filmed pretty well and pretty easily. But this was really good. It was 10 minutes, not, you know, do or die, but it's worth checking out. So if you have a Vision Pro or have access to one and friend with one or whatever the case may be. Go have a look, Man vs. Beast. We'll put a link in the show notes. I...

I don't remember where this came from. I don't think this was an original composition of mine, but last episode we were talking about my LED project, which is sort of kind of, but not really on hold. I think I'm going to have more news about that in the future, but not tonight. But that being said, I referred to the fact that the...

historical commission uh had denied my application for modifying my home and there were several several people that wrote in uh john t wrote casey mentioned a historical commission had prevented him from adding three leds to an existing blanked off outlet did he also mention his house is late 1990s. I'm confused about the historical commission involvement. To be absolutely clear, I'm talking about Aaron.

I was trying to be kind about it, but I'm talking about Aaron. Yeah. This is a long-running joke on our show that the Historical Commission approving things in our house is just our spouses being okay with them in our house. In fact, I might have stolen it from you, Marco. I think you might have been the genesis. No, you totally did. It was a Marco thing. It was originally when...

He was talking about potentially getting a low-profile Marantz receiver for an entertainment center, I believe. How do you remember that? Because that's where it came from. I assumed you remembered too. Because John listens to the show.

Yeah, because Sean listens back to the show. That's the difference. Yeah, no, it was many, many years ago. And Marco, if Marco got it from somewhere, I don't know. But I heard it first from Marco, referring to his wife as the Historical Commission, because she had specific demands about what kind of electronic product. were and were not allowed in the entertainment center and uh casey has adopted that and then quickly forgot where it came from so no there's no actual historical commission

Oh, no, I redeemed myself. I halfway redeemed myself. Thank you very much. I award myself half credit. And actually, sort of tangentially speaking of, my terminal has shipped. I will state for the record that Marco paid with his own dollars. I believe I told Aaron that there's something forthcoming.

I haven't said too much about it. I think I described it as an auto-updating version of the calendar that we have on our refrigerator. So I'm curious to hear what the Historical Commission has to say about this when it shows up. We shall see.

All right. We had talked, I think I had brought this up last episode when we were talking about Sonos. I had parroted something that I had heard many, many, many times, but I couldn't tell you where I first began hearing this. And honestly, it might have been Reddit, which is not a good sign.

But I had said that in the new version of the app, which I had colloquially dubbed S3, the volume changes when you change volume in a speaker. It has to round trip across the Internet to like some central warehouse at Sonos or something like that and then come back to your house in order.

to affect your speakers. An anonymous listener wrote in and said, that's a rumor that won't die because it feels right to people when they see that volume changes are slow. There are things that do go through cloud services that didn't before, like account management and some other stuff, but not volume. So I am.

dead wrong about that apparently i tried to save you last show but i couldn't definitively do it so i just waved you off as best i could but now we have a definitive answer volume changes do not go to a server and back

Then they should be faster, but that's neither here nor there. I actually did get also get an explanation of why they're slow and it's not satisfying, but suffice it to say there's not a server involved. So this was sent privately to you then? Cause I don't remember seeing this feedback. Okay.

Well, feel free to privately forward that to me because I'm curious now, but that's okay. Deep Seek Censorship, Matthew Cave writes, it's not really running locally that removes the Chinese political correctness. It's running a sufficiently abbreviated model. I am not an expert on how these things work.

is very likely wrong. And pausing there for a second, I'm not an expert either, but I also don't, I'm not sure that reducing the number of parameters would so radically change the behavior. But anyway, continuing.

Continuing from Matthew, if you ask the 32 billion parameter model politically sensitive questions, you get remarkably astute and well thought out answers. If you supply the exact same prompt to the 70 billion parameter model, you get the roadblocks. Quote, Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China. Quote.

Or let's talk about something else. Or we have always been at war with East Asia. I don't know who looks like Winnie the Pooh. For local, right? For local machines with sufficient RAM, I found the 32 billion model to run acceptably fast and to be surprisingly complete.

70 billion is even more capable if you have the ram to run it but is significantly slower and as mentioned has the roadblocks in place You can also spot answers that are short-circuited by one of these override-type rules as they have no think blocks, or rather the think block is completely empty.

This is the block at the top of most answers that exposes the quote unquote reasoning of the model. For the overrides, it's a hard coded answer. There's no reasoning. Again, these overrides seem to be eliminated in the 32 billion model and smaller. So I confirmed with Matthew that he did actually run.

both the 32 billion and the 70 billion locally to discover this. And it seems super weird to me because like Daniel Jalcott, I guess, ran the 32 billion one. He's like, hey, if you run it locally, you don't get these things. And I was surmising that it was a layer they put on the server. But I guess somehow it's in the 70 billion parameter model, but not the 32. It's so weird. Like, again, I don't.

trying to censor this is a losing battle uh but you know they'll they do what they can but it's it's just weird that they're distributing the weights and one the smaller set of them either doesn't have the political censorship or it's like malfunctioning but the big one does uh anyway there you have it

censorship it's weird and futile uh and although people will say that's what everyone said about the great wall of china like not the actual wall but the great firewall of china like it would be impossible to keep the internet out and somehow the chinese government does it I guess they sort of kind of do but anyway they're trying to do the same with their model but when you run it locally I guess if you use the smaller model you don't have to deal with that.

We got a bunch of feedback with regard to Marco's question about Docker, which I was very, I don't think I said this on the show last week, but I was very proud of you for asking that question. And even if you ignore all of the feedback, I'm pleased that you're investigating. So that makes me happy. But Brian Ryder writes in, you can.

indeed use Rosetta on Docker on Apple Silicon. There are some gotchas, some technologies that themselves use a VM will crash, specifically some versions of Lua and I think latex stuff. Also, older versions of SQL Server on Linux. However, by and large, the whole thing works astonishingly well. Consider the horrifying case of SQL Server on x86-64 Linux on Docker on an M3 Max. This is notably faster than my sad and idle Intel i9. dev machine with no downside that I have experienced.

Under the hood, there's a very minimal Linux virtual machine running in the hypervisor.framework that hosts the Docker stuff and a bunch of magic to obscure this. You may need to twiddle resources allocated to the VM to make stuff go, such as overcoming the Linux OOM killer. or for performance reasons. Yeah, there's something a bunch of people wrote in.

probably either windows or linux users saying um docker is not a vm there's no vm involved that's true if you're running docker on linux like that's part of the the magic of it is it just kind of like exposes your the actual linux kernel you're running on but fences off the processes so they they're in their own machine and can't see other stuff yada yada but of course when you're on the mac even though it's unix based it's not linux so docker on the mac does have to run a i think just one

minimal linux vm under the covers and then it runs all the containers on top of that vm uh in practice it's all transparent you don't have to worry about this but it's just an implementation detail because mac os may be officially certified unix if they ever if they still have that certification but uh linux is not unix and gnu is not unix i don't know like lots of recursive acronyms in there but yeah linux is a little bit different indeed uh then Additionally, from Brian Ryder...

With regard to Docker versus something else, having used Docker Desktop for several years, I recently switched to OrbStack. And quick aside, we've heard a lot of feedback with regard to OrbStack, all positive. Literally everyone has. told us like and i don't mean everyone who's written in or everyone who you know we heard from this week i literally mean everyone in the world has told us about orb stack so thank you literally everyone by the way

We did discuss OrbStack on a show a while ago. I remember because I tried it because I think I had mentioned Docker ages ago and someone said, you should try OrbStack. So I did. And it was fine. At the time, I decided it was not better enough for me to... forego docker desktop but

I'm sure it's gotten better since then, and yeah, lots of people recommend it. Man who compiles from source is unimpressed with a layer on top of Docker. That's not why. I'll finish reading Brian's feedback, and I'll explain my reasoning. All right, let me just start it over since we got ourselves sidetracked. So having used Docker Desktop for several years... recently switched to OrbStack. While not free, it is much more well integrated with the macOS experience and Finder.

It automatically creates an HTTPS reverse proxy for any container that listens on TCP port 80. It has a very useful debug shell for containers. And finally, it has a way to pick one or more Linux distributions to integrate with your shell in the style of Windows subsystem for Linux.

using Mac ports, this feature is probably a viable drop-in replacement for Mac ports or homebrew to give you your preferred full Linux environment for ad hoc CLI stuff instead of installing native Unix packages on macOS.

I think the idea is instead of installing whatever your favorite command line tool is using some Mac package manager, you can install it inside Linux and just use it from your Mac command line as if... it was installed on your mac but it's not it's all all the evil is confined to uh containers uh they that's something you'll see with docker we're just talking about like oh docker it's like a little a little virtual machine or you know a little imaginary machine if not an actual virtual machine

But you can distribute single command line things. as docker containers they're lightweight enough where you might say like oh i don't want you to have to figure out all the python crap that you have to have installed to run my python script so i've just made a container with my little python script and all the stuff and you can run it as a command and it will run it in

the container um the reason i didn't go with orb stack back in the day was i mean the features that it had like this way of running commands inside the linux thing or integration with uh the mac with the automatic listening and stuff like that I didn't need at that point because I'd already done all that with plain old Docker. And my philosophy was with stuff like this is like, when possible, stick to the official thing. Because if I ever have any problems, which I have occasionally.

when i like google for an answer it's easier to find answers for just plain docker or the official docker on mac os than it is to find answers for orb stack it's just one more layer between me and figuring out what's broken right um And like I said, I'd already...

done everything i need to do with docker desktop and i haven't regretted that decision i've just you know docker desktop updates frequently and uh you know it's presumably they're fixing bugs and improving performance but as far as i'm concerned i just run the auto updates and it just continues to work so i've been fine with it but Just please know that everyone who has tried Orbstack seems to love it, except for me.

Then you had mentioned somewhat offhandedly, John, sending email from Docker. And we got some fascinating feedback. I had no idea this was a thing, although it makes perfect sense. We got a triplet or a trio of different pieces or different suggestions.

Matt Barlow writes, last episode, John mentioned not having worked out how to send emails from his Docker setup yet. I've found MailHog to be a great way to deal with this. And we'll put a link in the show notes. Stand it up alongside your PHP and MySQL containers, and then you can send email to it as if it were any other SMTP server.

It then exposes a Gmail-style web frontend to view the emails. Very cool stuff. John Caruso writes, I've been using a tool called MailPit, and again, put a link in the show notes, for when I don't actually want to send mail to anyone, but I do want to verify that it's still working and looks correct. Finally, Yves Severano writes, for mail testing, I use mail dev, excuse me, I use a mail dev container in my Docker Compose stack.

link in the show notes yeah these are all ways to essentially not send mail like it just you want to send somewhere so you can look at it but it's not actually sending email to the to an address so if you send mail to like

you know johnsmith at gmail.com whatever you send the two address to it's all going to go into the mail hog or the mail pit or whatever like it's not going to actually go to john smith at gmail right it's going to go to these and then you can just look at it using a web interface Or you can do what I did and just print it to the air log and look at it there.

Very John answer. Bram Esposito writes, the easiest way to have configurable and reproducible environments for PHP is using ddev.com. It runs on top of OrbStack, there we go, and is very easy to extend. It has HTTPS certificates, networking... mail pit and all pre-configured so you can just start using it right away. Sounds like a good fit for what Marco's looking for, not having tried it myself.

Well, so many people have also pointed out, which I believe you also did, Casey, that to go fully into the Docker lifestyle... I would really want to have the advantage of also running these same containers on the servers. And so I think the more I dive into these specialized tools, and to be fair, I don't know if this tool does this or not, but I don't want necessarily something that is just going to optimize for a demo.

environment or just going to optimize for like macness what i want ideally is closer to what john was saying of like as much of like the the big official tools as possible and ideally if i can ship the same doc to the container? If I can ship the same thing to the servers, then that's really interesting to me.

Here's the thing. Like I said last time, the whole idea behind Bacher is if it works on my computer, fine, we'll ship your computer. That's what we'll run. The place where you develop it is the thing that we deploy it on. But I think what might appeal to you, Marco, is... The easier, more straightforward debuggability.

of a plain production server that you presumably already have you know what i mean you're not starting from zero right if there's something wrong in your production server the ability to hop in there and just mess around and do stuff without having to worry about docker is probably

more straightforward to you than learning how to correctly hop into a docker container and figure out what it's like it's again it's another layer of stuff to deal with if you were starting from zero i'd say well then and you're willing to learn docker stuff then fine but i think probably the path of least resistance is

to leave your production servers the way they are, just plain old servers with files in them that you know how to deal with. And if there's a problem there, you can tackle it the way you always do. And then... make your dev environment look as much like that as possible and no you don't get the advantage of like well i'm sure it's exactly the same because my dev environment is my production environment it's just my container and i run my container and that is a better way to do it overall but

The specific situation you're in where you already have a production server that's already not Docker, it's not that hard to make a Docker container that looks pretty much exactly like that. that still gives you the easy debug ability and by the way orb stack mentioned they have like a debug shell or whatever that's stuff like that is stuff that the official docker desktop has added recently what they mean is like

you don't have to install all your debug tools in your Docker container. Cause like, like, what should I put in my container? Well, I want Emacs in there and I want S trace. And I want like, you think like I need all these tools, but then you're making your container bigger and bigger because they're just like, when I'm in that container, I want all my stuff.

well you can make the container very slim and then also make it so you can hop into the container and debug it and bring with you a bundle of your debugging tools just when you're debugging it but if this sounds complicated to you this is why i'm suggesting it's probably

less fraught especially for production stuff if you're not going to if you're not totally on board learning this to just leave your production server the way it is emulate it like you know make a dev environment that matches that and then

just do it that way so your mac stays clean you have a repeatable dev environment your dev environment is exactly matched to your server you control both of them because the server is not going to update to phpa unless you do it and if you update the server to phpa you can update your container to phpa Now, if you're willing to go on board and say, I'm going to do Docker everywhere, you can do that. But just know that there is a learning curve to how do I run and debug?

Docker containers versus how do I run and debug a bunch of files in the file system on my Linux server, which is I'm assuming what you're used to. Yeah. Finally, with regard to Docker, Dvalt Renecki writes, if you're only going to use Docker images for development, you should have a look at development containers or dev containers, which is at the URL containers.dev because...

Yeah. Anyways, it adds a JSON file to your repo, but the best part is the integration with many editors. I use Visual Studio Code and it works great, or use the CLI tool. The editor will detect the dev container setup in your repo, build the images, link up the source files on your Mac to...

to the container map the ports run all your setup commands scripts etc and all of that my repos are all set up with this on a brand new mac i simply need docker desktop installed and then when i open the local folder or repo in my locally running editor it builds and runs everything so slick

Yeah, there's lots of these things that are integrated with like Visual Studio Code in particular, which again is not going to help Marco if he wants to use TextMate or whatever. But lots of these things are like...

uh you know we'll put some files in there and your ide will see the files and figure out that it wants to run stuff in containers and run them all and we didn't mention this last time but like people keep mentioning docker compose which is a way to make like a set of docker containers that

together make your app because you've got one for a database server and one for a load balancer and one like you're trying to like you know if you're gonna deploy seven different containers to production because you have all these different components you also have them as containers on your dev machine and you don't want to kind of orchestrate them all yourself so you can bring them all up as a unit so they're all talking to each other which is another complication that i think

I don't know how like overcast web situation goes, but the ATP web stuff is so simple that everything is in one container. And I don't have to deal with this at all, but know that Docker can do it with Docker compose. And there are other systems that can also run containers that get increasingly complicated.

But yeah, a lot of people just assumed like, well, if you've got a web server and database, surely you're running two different containers. Nope, they're both in the same container. They're also both in the same machine. Where do you think the ATP server setup script came from?

Yeah, I know. I'm just saying like everyone assumes that like everything is like big fancy production where you've got a fleet of servers. And I've been in that world. But in, you know, to run, for example, ATP.fm, you don't need that. Right. Do you remember overcast.fm? Maybe you do. You tell me, but like... I mean, yeah, I have, I usually maintain like eight to 12 web servers, but it's, they're all each very simple and... They're all, yeah, they're all, yeah.

it's like the the complication of quote-unquote real production web development at scale is so it's it's huge there's just a huge amount to know and do it's extremely complicated And I think people who are in that world think like, well, surely for ATP.fm, you're running Kubernetes. And it's like, no, not like it's just nothing. Whatever you think we're doing, it's not that. You don't need to do that for simple scenarios.

And it really does simplify things like the amount of stuff I no longer have to worry about working on a tiny website versus the massive one that I was working on at my jobby job is just so refreshing and so nice. And I would not give that up in exchange for. being able to say that I use some cool new technology and open up a fleet of Docker containers that all coordinate with each other to run what is mostly a static website.

All right. Unrelated to Docker, we have feedback with regard to Marco's mostly offhanded comment about your TV audio being completely out of sync. We have a listener named Marco Arment who wrote, if you're having trouble with audio sync from your Apple TV to an external soundbar sound system, turn on the match format and match dynamic range in the Apple TV's video settings. I don't know why this makes a difference on my LG C7 OLED, but it really...

really does. In particular, the Apple TV slash LG C7 combo appears to have different audio output delayed depending on whether the output is Dolby Vision HDR or not. So if you calibrate it for one format, it'll be wrong for the other. except if the Apple TV is set to match content, match dynamic range, which for whatever reason suddenly makes the sync perfect. Yeah, this has been driving me nuts. Ever since we upgraded, when we moved to Long Island, we upgraded that.

TV sound system from a Sonos amp with giant floor speakers that I have since given away to other family members. I wanted a smaller setup here, and I got a Sonos Arc soundbar. And it has been a nightmare trying to get the Sonos Arc soundbar to line up with anything that the TV was doing with audio. And I've and I mentioned in the past, like I was I'd asked John about apps to look at TV audio sync and stuff.

No matter what I did, I could not, and I tried the built-in Apple TV wireless audio sync thing. I tried the function built into the TV itself. I tried using both in combination with each other, and nothing I did could get the audio sync right. on every video format. So instead, a few days ago, I tried that setting, and I still couldn't get it right on the Sonos Arc. I still, no matter what, I could not get it right.

And I thought, you know, in the old setup from the old house, I never had sync problems. Let me try bringing out that Sonos amp from my closet and just plug in some regular passive speakers to it. and see if that works. And with those settings, and only with those settings, it is flawless. I'm surprised you have such problems with the arc because my arc, I think I did have to tweak the delay once in settings.

But regardless of if I'm using the Switch or the Apple TV, it's always been consistent for me. Now, I have an LG, shoot, it's a C3? No, C9. It was a 2019 model. two years newer yeah so maybe like and the problem is like every combination of like input device and tv could have different sync problems and and soundbar like all three of those are all and maybe we'll get to this later like all three of those are

are trying to give you one coherent experience with a video and audio lineup. And it's a hard problem, especially with the complexity of all these devices these days and all the, all the different processing they're doing all the different stages. But. The result was I could not get the Sonos Arc to be in sync with my oldish LG TV at all. Whereas...

The Sonos Amp, which is a kind of a simpler product, the Sonos Amp did it just fine. And it's flawless with speakers, with passive speakers, only with those settings turned on. So there we go. Yeah, as I said on the Mastodon when you post this, you should have those settings on anyway because I highly recommend them because they mean that your television is showing the content.

uh the way the content is so if the content is 24 frames per second your television should be refreshing at some multiple 24 frames per second and not converting it from 24 to 30 so then it can display it at 60 or whatever basically you don't want your tv messing with it right if the content is hdr your tv

should be hdr if the content is sdr atv should be sdr and that's what match content and match dynamic range in those settings do now the reason people don't like those settings as everyone said when they replied to you on mastodon is because they cause sometimes horrendous delays.

when changing from one piece of video to another or when changing from video back to the menu because no matter what you pick like your apple tv menu to be in and you can pick like i want my menus to be in you know 30 frames per second hdr w like that's just like what do you want the way you the little squares what do you want that to be shown in whatever you pick for that if you watch anything that is not exactly that your tv's like up time to match dynamic range time to match content and

makes your screen black and you have to count one two three however many seconds then it comes back and people are particularly annoyed like uh with youtube like i don't know if it's a youtube app that's built into tvs or the official youtube app on apple tv but if you're watching youtube tv

stuff whenever there's an ad the ad might be in a different uh dynamic range and frame rate than the thing you're watching so every time there's an ad your screen goes black and you wait a few seconds then it shows the ad and then you wait a second and it's just it's untenable right Back in November of 2022 on ATP episode 507, we talked about, I think for the first time, QMS. John's bringing receipts, y'all.

Yeah, QMS or quick media switching, which was supposed to solve this. But at the time, it wasn't out on a lot of televisions. And also this technology only helps you when the thing that changes is just frame rate. So if you change from SDR to HDR, you're still screwed.

But if you're just changing frame rate, it uses the television's VRR variable or refresh rate capability to not black out the screen and wait five seconds. And finally, someone posted, someone named Nit on Mastodon posted a YouTube video. of quick media switching in action on their TV. It's great. Totally seamless. There's no blackout. It's real nice.

I wish it did it for SDR versus HDR too, but I would love to have this. I don't think it's on my TV. I don't think there's been a firmware update or whatever. I just deal with the blackouts just because like for me, I switch content way less frequently.

then I watch content. So, you know, to watch a thing, yes, I have to watch a black screen. I wait, a thing comes on, but then I watch a show for an hour or half an hour, right? So that three seconds of switching and blackness is worth it for the hour I get to watch the show correctly in the correct format.

Other people have different trade-offs, especially if you're watching YouTube TV and has ads in it that's driving you up a wall. So I believe, speaking on both these issues, I believe the new version of HDMI has a bunch of new features related to... Certainly related to trying to wrangle audio sync better than the current standards do. Like you'll see on lots of devices, they have some feature that says automatically manage audio sync using like HDMI 2.1s or 2.0s features. Those...

don't always work that well, as Marco found out. Hopefully, whatever they're doing in HDMI 2.2 does a better job of that. And then the other thing is, I don't know if HDMI 2.2 brings anything to help with quick media switching or if it enhances it to... deal with HDR versus SDR. But at the very least, if you were to buy a TV today, chances are very good that it will support quick media switching and will save you at least from frame rate switches.

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May I invite you to join me on this endeavor? Yeah, so there is a new app called Apple Invites, obviously written by Apple. And let me read to you from Apple's official announcement, or excuse me, is this from The Verge? What is the providence for this, John? I think that's the press release, right?

Is it the press release? All right. Moving on. All right. So Apple today, on the February 4th, introduced Apple Invites, a new app for iPhone that helps users create custom invitations to gather friends and family for any occasion. With Apple Invites, users can create and easily share... and engage with Apple music playlists. Starting today, users can download Apple invites from the app store, access it through the web at iCloud.com slash invites.

iCloud Plus subscribers can create invitations and anyone can RSVP regardless of whether they have an Apple account or Apple device. Participants can easily contribute photos and videos to a dedicated shared album within each invite to help preserve memories and relive the event. And collaborative playlists allow Apple Music subscribers to create curated event soundtracks that guests can access right from Apple Invites.

So first, we just have to acknowledge that it really annoys some people. Uh, the invite, which is a verb, uh, has been noun, uh, instead of saying invitations because invitations is too long. They say, uh, invites.

That's the name of the app. It's not Apple Invitations. It's Apple Invites. Language changes. Just got to deal with it as much as it... pains me in some other instances this one i can tolerate but it does look better on underneath an app icon uh the second thing is why is apple doing this i i feel like there's like Two interns at Apple who get to build an app like every three or four years. And that's how you get stuff like clips or music memos and now invites. And it's like.

These are all apps that could serve a purpose and could take off in the market, but they never... put any follow through behind these apps they always get like one or two updates and then die forever and just never they just get memory hold they never get mentioned again no one ends up using them they get no traction so you know like i think apple's record

with apps like this is even worse than Google's record of killing all their web service experiments. I'm sure this is a wonderful app, maybe, but why would anyone? assume this would still be here in six months based on apple's traffic record i have no idea yeah this is some some anonymous snark that we got regarding this is can't wait for this to wither on the vine just like journal and clips right yeah exactly yeah so

Setting that aside, I've actually used the app, and it doesn't look like it was made by interns. It is fairly fancy and sophisticated. It looks a lot like if you watch a lot of WWC videos where they do demo apps, imagine... The type of app that would be an Apple demo app at WWDC, but like completed and polished, right?

very much in the same kind of style and vibe where they would describe like let's do this and let's make this here and show this and let's have a nice background backyard birds right everything is a rounded rectangle and everything has pretty backgrounds on it or whatever and i have to say like

as an example of i mean it's hard to pin this all on that but like apple makes so few new apps as as an example of like this is what apple thinks a good ios app should look like kind of like with system settings in the mac i'm not sure i agree with them It is pretty and polished, but... Having used it for its intended purpose, I made a fake Super Bowl party and invited people to it. That's exactly what I did. It's a good time to try the app out. I feel like just...

The information architecture and visual hierarchy makes it more difficult than it needs to be to use the app in a utilitarian way. when it comes to stuff like this you just want it to work and you want just the facts and you don't want anything getting in the way and it's as cute as it is to have a nice background and a playlist and

all these shading and rounded rectangles, I found it to be visually noisy in something that I want to be straightforward. Like, consider the difference between an app like this and something like... apple's calendar or google calendar or something like that calendars are don't really go whole hog into this because like i want to see the days i want to see the events i want to see like i don't need

everything to be shaded or floating or have borders around it or be inset on a rounded rectangle or have fancy backgrounds or anything like that. I just, I don't think this app. I functionally, I think people would find it harder to both use this app to set up a thing and make invitations and also more difficult to.

accept or reject an invitation or look at it to figure out when the invitation is like just the basic functionality of it like i think this app works way better in screenshots and wwdc demos than it does in real life for its intended purpose. And it's not bad. There's nothing like bad or wrong with it. I just feel like sometimes it's, I don't know, too much, too much.

missing the forest for the trees like i want the info it's too cute by half yeah i mean it's not even that cute it's not like they're shredding papers like the wallet thing or whatever it's just i'm not sure they've it's just it's kind of like a it's kind of like visually like really busy wallpaper like on a house right it's just too too much right i just need to know the event who's coming who's not how do i reply how do i sit like and i felt like the app was kind of

visually and interface-wise fighting me. I find it spot a lot of times searching for stuff that was just like beautifully inset and like text on a colored background or whatever. It's too much for me. Yeah, I agree with you. It is very pretty to look at. I think it's a very good showy example of what an iOS app can be. But the thing of it is, is that I feel like a lot of the conventions and...

Maybe affordances, but the way it works is so dissimilar from standard iOS apps that I feel it's almost off-putting. Maybe that's because I'm getting older. I don't know. But I feel like... a really good iOS app to my eyes is one that has the same. conventions as most other apps on the platform, but does it in a very unique style. And I think, Marco, your work over your entire iOS career has been a really good example of this, where I think, generally speaking, you take the...

the kind of gist of what an iOS app is, but put something or several somethings on top. A simple example of this may be a custom font, and I actually don't think that that's particularly necessary these days, and you've said the same in years past.

But as a silly example, you know, take a standard table view, but put a custom font on it or, you know, something along those lines. So you can still look and you don't have to squint to say, oh, yeah, this is a table just like I'm used to. You immediately say, oh, this is a table, but it's a pretty. table and i feel like this app while unquestionably very pretty it's it's cumbersome on account of it breaking the conventions that you're used to um

The other thing I didn't love about it is, so I set up a Super Bowl party for myself. That's a euphemism for something. It's going to be a real exciting part of y'all. I copied the link to it, which I did approve. I approve of the fact that you don't need to send it to an email or phone number or what have you. And then I opened up a Chrome incognito window.

to go to that link and see what happens. And it was very off-putting, not because it required me to create an account or anything like that, which would have been a non-starter immediately, but it wanted to do the like... let's verify this email dance. And, you know, so let's verify the email by sending a six digit code, then you got to type it in. And I'd set my invite to require permission to say, you know, you're attending or what have you, or I guess it was maybe even to answer the question.

you know at all and So once I went through with this anonymous user and said, OK, I would like to be a part of this, please. Then the then the me that's the invite owner, you know, I put that hat on again. So back on my iPhone, I guess you could say I then need to. prove the fact that this person even wants to see what's happening, which I get why they do that because, you know, my, my home address was on this invite, you know, as an example.

but it's a little bit cumbersome. And then once the anonymous user back in Chrome goes to accept the invitation or decline or say maybe or what have you, It's got to do that whole login dance again or not login, but like, okay, I'd like to do this now. Okay. What's the six digit code? Okay. It's one, two, three, four, five, six, you know, and it's just a little bit off-putting and I approve generally.

of the fact that they're trying to do this in such a way that you don't have to full-on create an account. But it's kind of a lot of work. And if you are not in the Apple ecosystem, it's certainly workable. I'm not saying it's impossible. And to be honest with you,

in my experience with Evite, oh my word, this is so much nicer. So much nicer. But I saw somewhere, and unfortunately I didn't think to write it down, but I saw somewhere that somebody had offered an alternative app that does this. I think it started with a...

key but the name is escaping me yeah the app that's complaining that apple essentially copied yes yes yes they cited the part of like the app store guidelines that said don't upload copycat apps don't just take someone else's app and modify the interface a little so they're real bitter that their app this apparently looks and works a lot like their app but i think evite is a good example because i mean maybe there's no avoiding this but like if you are not apple if you do not own a platform

and you are trying to make an app for people to make invitations to events, you're going to make sure that it is... platform agnostic because you don't want anyone not to use your app because someone in their family doesn't use the same platform or some friend doesn't use the same platform you're like look

It doesn't matter what you use. If you want to invite people to a thing, use Evite. We don't care what computer you're on, what device you're on, what OS you're on. We need to make it good and the same everywhere for everybody. apple does not work that way because they are a platform owner and i think it hurts the app like that so this is from uh you should read the next thing from the verge about apple's ecosystem integration

Sure. So from The Verge, the experience has some hiccups for those not fully in the Apple ecosystem, which isn't surprising. For starters, where an iPhone user can go straight to the invitation using your link, assuming they're already signed into iCloud, Android users have to enter their email address and then get a verification code to get in. This is what I was talking about a minute ago. They'll also need to sign up for an Apple account to look at a photo album if you add one.

And Android user or not, your friends need an Apple Music subscription to hear your playlist. Otherwise, they'll only get a preview of it. I mean, that I do kind of get, but I get both sides of that. Like, it's kind of crummy, but what is Apple really supposed to do there?

Anyway, coming back to The Verge, none of that will keep Android users from seeing key details about your event or RSVPing to it, but it'll be obvious that they aren't getting the whole experience. It's kind of like with Apple and like Apple TV Plus or whatever. They just have to get over the idea. Like, imagine if Apple TV Plus was only available if you had an Apple TV hardware puck.

Like that would be ridiculous, right? And I feel like they're in the same spot. It's like, well, what else can we do? Of course the playlist is going to be in Apple Music. And if you want to see the photo album, everyone knows there's no way to share photos without having an iCloud account. So of course we have to make them have an iCloud account.

If you were Evite or something, you'd be like, share a Spotify playlist, share a title playlist, share a YouTube music. You'd support them all because you don't want any reasons for someone to not use your thing. You want to make. like the best experience for everybody involved, right? And Apple is kind of trying to do that, but it's so heavily weighted. Jason, at one point, Jason Snell thought that you had to have an iCloud account to do it simply because if you try to use an email account,

on an apple device that it knows you how that it knows is belongs to an icloud account it forces you to sign into icloud so he thought it was just impossible not to do it like they're just so heavily hurting you towards things and it's like in the end Sending an invitation to an event and accepting an invitation does not require any kind of Apple thing.

You can do it without it. Companies do it without it. But of course, Apple integrates with it and makes that the happy path. And I feel like it's going to have to make people feel like left out. And then I feel like this whole experience doesn't pass the very difficult. I was going to call it a sniff test, but more like the very difficult trial that is.

using any technology product with people who are not technology enthusiasts. Like say you're planning like your parents' 50th wedding anniversary and you being a tech nerd is like, I know, I'll set up an Apple invitation for it. And everyone's like. what is this? What do I have to do? Is this a thing? Like,

Like, what benefit? Like, maybe they would humor you, but they're like, is this helping at all? Or is this just like now another thing we have to deal with? And, oh, Aunt Sue has an Android phone. How is she going to deal? Like, in the end, they'd be like, what benefit are we getting? Why don't we just use Evite?

Everyone knows how to use Evite. We use that for Timmy's birthday party last month. Like just the sort of the, the disappointment and sigh you get from trying to foist any kind of sort of like new shiny.

proprietary apple and but look and he said but look how beautiful look how beautiful this invitation looks on my phone see how the background is color themed to the transparent buttons with a with a bright out and they're like i don't care just people need to know in like very high contrast bold simple text that's easy to find where and when the event is who's going whether they've already RSVP'd it like

And that's where stuff like this falls down. Like I don't, I don't fault the people making the app. I think it's a beautiful app. I think it makes for great demos, but like this approach to making apps is a poor fit for what this app does. Maybe it's a good fit for food trucks or backyard birds, but it's a poor fit for inviting people to an event because that activity has nothing to do with Apple platforms. Nothing.

Yeah. Partyful, by the way, real-time follow-up. Partyful, which we'll put a link in the show notes, is the app that I was thinking of, which was mentioned actually in this Verge article. Yeah, I mean, I respect the idea. I think it's a good idea. I think that certainly by... Apple standards, they have...

far more affordances for other platforms than they typically would. I feel like Apple forgets that Android exists a lot of the time. Oh, they don't forget. They just don't care. Well, okay, fair. But yeah, I mean, this...

It is visually very impressive from a usability standpoint. I didn't love it. It wasn't actively bad, but it was just a little bit too different for my taste. If you haven't... actually participated in it, seen it, what have you, a friend of the show, Stephen Robles, has a good video on it that we'll put a link in the show notes for that.

Um, it's, it's, it's good. It's worth trying. And certainly if I had a situation where I knew everyone involved was in the Apple ecosystem, this is where I would probably turn. But I think perhaps for me, the best thing to come from this is I learned about party full, which is a.

alternative to evite which i freaking hate and thankfully i almost never have to do that that but still i don't like evite at all and to contrast this like when can the like all the same kind of philosophy when can that uh when is that a good fit An example would be something like, maybe this is not a great example. It's an example that for my life is a good example. Flight tracking. Flighty on the iPhone is amazing. And its amazingness can be isolated to the iPhone. and still benefit you.

because yes there's like oh what if i want to share the flight with other people blah blah but in the in the use case where like because parties are always sharing with everybody unless you're having a party by yourself like casey right events events always involve multiple people but flight tracking sometimes in fact i would say frequently

just involves one person, right? Or maybe two people, but not like a huge number of people. And so the goodness of Flighty being confined to the iPhone, I'm assuming it doesn't exist in other platforms, being totally confined to the iPhone does not hurt. that application when you're using it solo to deal with your flights or a flight of one of your loved ones and you're picking them up at the airport. You know what I mean? Like then you can go whole hog, do whatever you want.

require whatever proprietary platform stuff or whatever, because it's just me and my iPhone. And I'm not like, I'm not foisting this on other people. If I was taking a family vacation and it was people, an extended 25 of us were going to Europe or something. I would not say everyone buy an iPhone and get flighty because we're all going to share our flights together. And it's like, that's too much. I mean, like for technology stuff, if you're trying to make other people.

do something so they can use the technology thing that you like because you think somehow this is going to benefit everybody i can tell you most people do not agree that that is going to benefit them and to the extent they humor you you should be thankful but in general it's not

uh a benefit so yeah i just i think this is just the wrong approach so it's a good thing this apple wither and die at some point brutal i mean you're not wrong but brutal uh speaking of brutal uh did you try it on the ipad yet Yeah, I use it on Instagram. It's great. Yeah, exactly. Zero for three on new apps on iPad. No iPad app for sports, journal, or invites as we record this in February of 2025. Yeah, I'm so annoyed. Continue to be.

annoyed that instagram has no ipad app maybe i should just stop using instagram but that hasn't happened yet but anyway uh it's been how many years but then you look at apple and apple not putting its own small apps like they push so hard it's like make your app with this use SwiftUI you can deploy it on every platform and use the same same code base for Mac for iOS for iPadOS for Apple TV it's great and then they come out with three apps in a row

sports journal and invites that are like small apps and it's like no of course there's forget about an apple tv version of it forget about a mac version of there's not even an ipad version of it Not a good advertisement for the amazing cross-platform ability of their UI frameworks when they're just like, yeah, no, these are just on the iPhone. That's it. Yeah, it's not great. It's not great, Bob. If Apple can't be bothered to make its own apps be on the iPad.

What kind of leg do they have to stand on to say, well, you're not the second or third biggest company in the world, but you independent developers working by yourself, make sure you have a version of this for all of our platforms. I mean, see, also Vision Pro. I mean, a large subset of Vision Pro apps that are pre-installed, you know, that come with the OS are just iPad apps rather than Vision Pro apps. You know, it's the same problem.

I don't know, snakes all the way down. At least Vision Pro, like, you know, if you make an iPhone app, making a Vision Pro, a good Vision Pro version of that is much harder than making a good iPad version of an app. Yes. Just, I mean, like, even if it's... Even if you don't make a good iPad version, just make a version that doesn't require you to run the phone version and then zoom it to 2X. It was like just minimal. Maybe it is two interns doing this. I don't know. Again, the app is...

Well implemented. It is a nice app. It is a good app. They should release the source code. I was just thinking that you stole it from me. It's probably way more complicated than we think it is because all real apps are way more complicated. do weird stuff and they're not going to release it. They won't, but I think it would be an interesting case study.

Well, we got the MacPaint source code now. So, you know, fast forward that number of years and we'll have the sports journal invites source code on archive.org. Anything you feel like is missing from it, John? Yeah, so even just within the world of Apple stuff, so forget about this. It's you and your Apple using family. No worry about cross-platform stuff. You love the interface. You don't care that it's hard to find stuff or that it looks weird or whatever. You just love it. It's great.

Even then, this app doesn't do everything that it should because one of the most frequently requested things that people want when there's some event is a place to talk about that event. in real time-ish, a Slack channel or like a message group or whatever. And guess what? Apple has a messaging platform.

It's called messages. There could be a group message thread that would auto add everybody who accepts the invitation and you could discuss, hey, who's bringing potato chips? Who's bringing this? But nope, the app doesn't do that. Now, granted, it's just 1.0, whatever. I understand, but it's just like.

you have to go one direction the other either this is an app for apple users for who use all apple stuff and love apple things and everyone's all apple integrated or it's cross-platform and this is like half apple integrated but doesn't even integrate with all the apple stuff and doesn't even have a way to do one of the most frequently requested things. I think more people want to discuss who's bringing potato chips in a message thread than want to make a playlist for your party.

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All right. Hey, parents, if you are listening with young ones nearby, we're going to talk about that news that's been going around the Apple world recently. So maybe pause the program if you have little ears. I mean, it's not. We're going to be talking about an app that I showed.

There's people in it that just happen to not be wearing anything. I don't think we need to get more hardcore than that. I agree. But in case you have a sensitive and young, very young years nearby, just be aware. So what am I talking about? Yes. So according to. alt store apple has approved their first porn app for the iphone and it's and so reading from the verge the first quote apple approved quote porn app for iphone is rolling out in europe via alt store's pal alternative to the ios

app marketplace alt store pal developer riley tested says that hot tub which describes itself as an ad free adult content browser has made it through apple's notarization review for fraud security threats and functionality and will be available for alt store pal users in the eu to download starting a couple of days ago. So...

Um, alt store had a post on threads, which we will link in the show notes. And there's an image on there that says introducing hot tub, the first Apple approved porn app download now on alt store pal. Uh, Apple was not happy about this at all. So Apple issued a statement to several different outlets. We are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hardcore porn apps of this type create for EU users, especially kids.

This app and others like it will undermine consumer trust and confidence in our ecosystem that we have worked for more than a decade to make the best in the world. Contrary to the false statements made by the marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our app store. Sick burn. Riley tested again, reacted with a toot of his own. It reads as follows. My response to Apple's statement on Hot Tub. There are two screenshots, the first of which...

is a post from 9to5Mac. Riley has highlighted the following passage. Contrary to the false statements made by the marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app. The second screenshot is App Store Connect saying, and I am quoting, the following app has been approved for distribution. App name, hot tub, video player. Riley or AltStore broadly then had a later on response.

That response reads, Apple is claiming we made false statements about the approval of Hot Tub. This is not true. All apps distributed with Alt Star Pal must be submitted to Apple for notarization. Unlike macOS, iOS notarization involves a human review process where Apple employees manually...

review apps that they before they are either quote approved or quote rejected for distribution in apple's own words unfortunately apple has rejected several apps from our store in the past for dubious reasons so the phrase apple approved in our marketing is a reference to the fact that hot tub was approved, not rejected, by Apple for notarization. To be perfectly clear, Apple has not endorsed Hot Tub in any way. However, they did approve it.

Yeah, I mean, this is the stupid situation that Apple has gotten themselves in. Let me just repeat what you just said, because it's important, that Apple has gotten themselves in. Right. Because they are the ones who made notarization editorial for the EU. Again, we've gone over this before, so I'll be quick. What the notarization process has been for years before this was a process on the Mac that software was run through only automated checks.

And it was mainly to look for known malware signatures. And then the main thing about authorization is that if an app was found to contain malware, to be malware... that was notarized. Apple could then revoke that signature server-side, and then all Macs would eventually, I guess, get that revocation and not allow that binary to run. So... That was an automated process that did not involve Apple having human reviewers look at each app. They used the same word.

to describe a very different process with the alternative app stores in the EU. They use that same word to ostensibly do the same thing of like, we're just going to give it a cursory. Check to make sure it isn't literal malware for security reasons. But then they started rejecting apps that were not malware, like the VMAC emulator, which they rejected on trademark grounds. Now... I actually understand why they did that.

Because trademarks need to be defended. And if you don't defend your trademark, and if there's evidence that you're not defending your trademark, somebody could try to get it invalidated. Well, when they say defending your trademark, they mean like suing people, which they still could have done while still... allowing it through you know what i mean like oh yes of course but they could you know but if they decided that this is going to be a human review process on ios because here's the thing

Apple hates that they have to allow the EU. They hate it so much. And Apple is not a good loser. They're a very sore loser when they lose an argument about something. They hate it. They cannot deal. And so they decided to, you know, be Apple about it and have, you know, no flexibility and try to be as weaselly and prickly as possible to try to make the...

alternative app stores fail as much as possible. And so they put themselves in it. They injected themselves into this process that is ostensibly only for automated security checks everywhere else, but they made it a human review. So now... anything that actually gets, quote, approved through notarization on the EU alternative app stores, yes, a human at Apple definitely did look at that and definitely did decide this is okay. And then... It is approved. That is very different from...

passing a scan or being digitally signed. Those are very different things. That's what notification was. This is approval. Now, fewer of the rules are being enforced compared to their, you know, the Apple official app store. But it's still a human approval. It didn't need to be. Apple injected themselves into that role because they couldn't deal. So they put themselves there and now they have to bear the consequences of that. And those consequences include...

If they let something through that infringes your trademarks, they could be held liable for that in a bad way. Or in the case of approving a porn app... Yeah, Apple did approve a porn app. They could have set up the system differently. They still can. It's not too late to change it, but they could have set the system up differently in a way that was more straightforward, but they refused to. They created this problem 100% themselves, and they...

they deserve all of the press that it generates yeah they don't have to defend their trademark in this thing as they say in their statement here the truth is we are required by european commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like old star right so there's like first of all

It's rich for Apple saying suddenly now they care about what the European Commission allows and requires them to do by law. They just ignore it where they feel like it, right? Yeah, if that's required by law, then what happened to VMAC? Yeah, exactly. When it's something they want to do, oh, we just have to follow the law. But it's something they don't want to do. do is like law small but anyway um court court wise

They could absolutely allow things that infringe their copyright through and then deal with it the way you deal with all copyright, which is you sue the people out of existence, you send them a cease and desist, you bring them to court. Like that's defending your trademark. You don't need to, even if you have introduced yourself as a human element, a lot.

that thing to go through you can say well but we have to do this because the european commission as we read many shows ago says here's what you can stop apps for and intellectual property is not one of the things so they're saying look

This is the law in the EU. We are following the EU law. No court is going to say, well, now you didn't defend your trademark, so you don't own Mac anymore. They're fine. That is not an excuse for them doing this. They could have 100% human review of every single thing that goes to the EU App Store.

Let's sail through a bunch of stuff that infringes their own copyright. And no court is going to say, oh, you didn't defend your copyright because the law is clear on this. But anyway, yeah, they're just trying to have it both ways. And this argument is so ridiculous because anybody who is a...

speaker of the english language understands the difference between we approve of this as in philosophically we think this is the right thing to do versus we have approved this which means there is a process and we can reject or approve those are two different things every apple knows different things alt star knows they're doing different things they're just talking past each other and it's very silly

And, you know, maybe, you know, I think all star people might get sued because of like the laws where you can't make it in an advertisement. You can't make it look like some company endorses something when they don't. Because despite the silly difference, saying the first Apple approved porn app. That is probably going to not win in court if Apple decides to fight them on that because in those two definitions of approved, a casual person looking at this ad would absolutely think.

that they're using the other definition, which is Apple philosophically thinks this is appropriate. They would not say, oh, it's so clear that this is part of a process that Apple had to do for the EU. So this ad by Alt-Star is probably extremely ill-advised.

doing anything to anger apple uh around this is ill-advised because apple has a lot of money and they're mean um as jason wrote in a good uh story that we'll link in the show it's alt store pokes the bear doing anything to antagonize apple seems like not a great idea unless you're trying to pull an epic epic and go like we're gonna antagonize them because we know they will crush us and then when we when they crush us we'll be like see look apple's crushing us uh

I don't know. They're picking a silly fight here, but if they want to be the standard bearer for Apple's hypocrisy when it comes to the following EU laws and dealing with the Alt-Star, you know, more power to them. and this is not even getting to the whole thing of like apple's apple statement makes it seem like uh

Any kind of sex-based thing, we would never allow that on the App Store. In fact, Apple humans don't have sex. We don't even know about sex, right? Versus the actual harms involved in pornography. It is a complicated issue. but like it it's kind of as a given and all these things sort of the Disney vacation of like

Of course, Apple would never do or say such a thing and no one at Apple has ever had sex or seen anyone else have sex or anything like that. It's very kind of like prudish and silly. On the flip side, though, do you want your store to be filled with hardcore porn apps and every time you open up the app?

app store app on your phone is just you know hardcore pornography blinking in your face no you don't want that either right so it actually there actually is some nuances issue that neither side of this is really uh willing to tackle they're not even willing to deal with the thing they both understand which is the two different contexts for the word approved in here uh but anyway i don't see this ending well for

anybody it's already not any well for apple because they're just making themselves look stupid and even more hypocritical and i'm not sure it's going to end well for alt store either i know they have epic backing them with the big big uh big uh money bags epic helping them not have to pay the core technology fee or whatever but just this is this is another mess it's entertaining to see people poking at each other like this but like jason says don't poke the bear

Like, I wish I could come up with an animal analogy that was more appropriate. Maybe if you were a cheese mite. I don't know. People don't know what cheese mites are. Cheese mites are very... Maybe you're one of those mites that lives in your eyelashes. No, people don't want to think about that. There are mites living in your eyelashes. No, these are terrible examples. This is getting worse.

Stop, please. Like a microscopic thing, like a tiny thing that's so small you can't see it with the naked eye versus the sun. That is All-Star versus Apple. in terms of how much money they both have to wage punitive lawsuits. Yeah, it's not a stellar look for anyone involved, but I really think that... This would have been so much more cut and dry if, as Marco had said when we first started talking about it, if Apple didn't use notarization for editorializing and just wielding it as a weapon.

when we saw that notarization was going to be involved with the DMA and, or not, not the DMA, whatever this stuff is called. When we saw that they were going to use notarization, you know, all of us thought. Okay, yeah, that should be fine. It may not be fine, but it should be fine. It's been fine on the Mac. It shouldn't be a big deal. They're just going to make sure it's not actively hurting your device, and then everything should go straight on through, right? Right?

Right. And it quickly became obvious that no, since Apple didn't have any other weapons to use, they used notarization. And it's just... I didn't like it then. I don't like it now. And honestly, they are reaping what they sowed. And I don't have a lot of sympathy for Apple on this one.

They've made this bed. Now they get to sleep. They deserve no sympathy because there were so many easily avoidable problems here and they chose not to avoid them. So this is the kind of thing, this is the kind of messiness that their approach is going to keep creating.

Yeah. I'm not sure Apple even sees this as messiness because this is an opportunity for them to, as Gerber was pointing out, to gloat and say, see, this is what we told you would happen. See, if you let other people sell things, someone's going to sell a porn app. I told you what happened. Look, it's happening, a porn app.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Getting into all the things like, well, how many different ways you can get porn on your phone through web apps or through like the Reddit app or whatever. And it's just the world is a complicated place. But the hypocrisy is clear to anyone looking. But I feel like Apple feels like this is a PR win for them because they're like, sure.

everyone hates porn just like we do now we're saying see now you see the violence inherent in the system right like these people we let the european union let them do things and now they're putting out porn apps now the world's gonna end because prior to this no one could get porn but now they'll be able to

That's correct. I want to read from Jason's article because this is a good little bit. Apple claims that their hands are tied by the European Commission, and yet the company has used its lever before to protect users from checking my notes here.

emulators are very old max models seems dangerous so which is it is notarization a tool that apple can use to bypass all european european regulations of whatever apple feels like it's preventing users from running mac paint on an ipad or something out of apple's hands If Apple chose to exercise notarization powers to kill the UTM and mini vMac emulators, well then let Hot Tub through. Doesn't Alt-Star have a point?

It's hard for Apple to argue its hands are tied if it's used those hands in the recent past. And then he says, parenthetically, I've contacted Apple's PR representatives and asked if they can explain the disparity in policies to me. And I'll update the stories if they reply. Last time I checked, they hadn't replied.

not sure what their response is but yeah he gets right to the heart of it like i think apple thinks that this is like a triumph for them and really just anyone who cares about this issue at all looks at it and says you're this is not a good look for you apple

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All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Matthew Fenslow writes, I recently got an ATP membership. Thank you. ATP.fm slash join. And have been going back through past episodes to listen to the bonus content. One recurring theme is that Marklin Casey's number one wish for...

mac is cellular i'm really surprised by this i travel for work both domestically and internationally frequently and work outside my office several days a week these days i rarely find it hard to access decent wi-fi and on the rare occasion i do i just fall back to phone tethering which works much better than few years ago.

Most of my fellow road warriors do the same. My understanding is that cellular Windows laptops are not super popular. I would love to know what are the use cases that make the guys so desirous of cellular Macs, especially since they don't seem to be big travelers. Is there something specific for being a software... developer. This is one of those things that John rightfully brings up, oh, we need to answer this question every year. And I say that I...

probably sound like I'm complaining. I'm not trying to. It seems that we're getting enough new listeners that people either forget, like me, or have never heard the answer before. And so let's cover it again. For me, I want to have a Mac that I know can, you know, asterisk, dagger, double dagger, can always get on the internet. It doesn't need anything else.

don't need to wait for tethering, don't need to worry about tethering, don't need to destroy the battery of two devices simultaneously, only the one. It can always get online. Again, if you're in a plane or whatever, it doesn't, you know what I'm saying. And a great example of this is... I would love to be able to use my Mac in the car easily and whenever I want. And...

I can do that. Yes, I certainly could do that. And I could tether. But it's so nice with my cellular iPad, if I have it in the car, and I'm talking about it as a passenger, in case I wasn't clear. If I'm a passenger in the car... You know what I do to get on the internet on my iPad? I open my iPad. That's what I do because it's already on the internet because it has a cellular connection. Yes, 100%. There are ways around this.

To be fair, to be fair, they've gotten far less egregious over the years. You can have your Mac connect to your phone, and it will magically just start personal hotspot on your phone, usually. Often, but not always. And yes, Wi-Fi does exist in a lot of places, but A, I don't... particularly trust most Wi-Fi that isn't my own, and that's why I have some sort of VPN, in my case, past Pons or Tailscale. But even still, oftentimes, Wi-Fi is not stellar. In fact, I go to places where the Wi-Fi

is actually not as robust as my Verizon cellular connection. And that's kind of an indictment of the places that I sometimes go, but it is what it is. And so for me... I want to be able to open my laptop and immediately be on the internet. And if I can't be on the internet immediately, then it's a...

an annoyance. And it's not so much of an annoyance that, you know, I can't get my work done or whatever. But if I had my druthers, I would 1000% spend the extra 130 or in all likelihood, because it's a Mac, $260 in order to get.

to cellular mode a minute. I don't know. Marco, tell me where I'm wrong or what did I leave out? Zero parts of what you just said are wrong. Go team. So here's some other considerations that I have. So... I think what matters a lot is like when you open your laptop, if you're almost always using it in places that have known Wi-Fi networks, you've got no problem.

If you're taking your laptop from home and you put it in a bag and you go to work and you open it up and in both cases you're on the Wi-Fi, then I understand why you don't think cellular is that necessary. And for most people, that is their use pattern. So I get it. You go to your coffee shop, you open it up, you're on their Wi-Fi already because you've been there before. Fine. For most people...

That is a totally fine use case, and so they wouldn't want to spend $50, $60 a month on a data plan for their laptop or whatever it would be because they don't need it that often. But some people need it a lot. I take the train a lot. Trains don't usually have Wi-Fi. At least New York trains don't. Or...

If they do, at least here in the States, they are so overloaded because it's, you know, hundreds of people on like a single cellular modem and it's just garbage. Yeah. Also, your beloved park bench that you like to work at. Mm-hmm. There's probably no why. there right because it's outdoors um correct and so there are there are places where if you if you frequently want to use a laptop in a place that is away from good wi-fi coverage or any wi-fi coverage then

This need comes up a lot more. I think one of the reasons it came up a lot for business laptops in the early aughts and mid aughts, you see it as an option on ThinkPads and stuff. is because business people who use laptops are often business travelers. And business travelers might be going to all different, you know, they might be going to a new hotel every week or a new city or a new airport or whatever.

And sometimes you don't want to like every one of those Wi-Fi networks that you join by going through their dumb captive portal where you got to like type in your room number and your last name. You are exfiltrating personal data every time you do that. You are granting yet another company. access to whatever data they can figure out about you by your internet traffic and everything else. And yeah, VPNs can help with some of that. But it's an annoyance. It's a privacy exfiltration. And then...

The biggest thing to me is when I open my laptop, everything's out of date. All the data's out of date. Oh, good point. And when you're opening a laptop and you're connecting to Wi-Fi... Both Wi-Fi itself is very fast, typically, or can be, and also the laptop instantly connects to the Wi-Fi. When you open up your laptop after going from your home to your work or your coffee shop...

you don't even notice it connecting most of the time. It's just on. It's so fast to reconnect to Wi-Fi, and everything loads so quickly that when things pop in here and there, you barely even have a chance to notice it. That is not the experience using tethering for cellular. Using tethering for cellular...

You have to open the laptop up. The laptop has to realize that it can't find any Wi-Fi networks. Then, if you're lucky, it will prompt you with a notification thing in the corner saying, do you want to connect to Marco's iPhone? And...

There is, as far as I can tell, no way to make it automatically always connect to your tethering on your phone when you can't find Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, there is no setting. And I looked. When we last talked about this a couple weeks ago, I looked. I dug through the support articles. There's a setting that kind of sounds like it does this, but it doesn't. I don't know what is going on, but as far as I can tell, there is no such setting to say...

always connect to my phone for tethering when you don't see a known Wi-Fi network. So the result is when you're in these situations and you have a laptop and you open it up, the result is you're just looking at out-of-date data and you'll be looking at it for probably at least...

20 to 30 seconds at least and if that's when you have good coverage and good speeds and everything so it's just it's this huge paper cut every time you open your laptop on a train or whatever you want to get work done and you just have to wait and wait

And wait. Do you want to use your connection? Yes. Tap join. Wait. Wait. Maybe it'll join. Maybe it'll work. Sometimes it'll say refuse connection. Sorry. And then you got to try it again. And then once it does connect, you got to wait. You got to wait. And then stuff might then start coming in. And that whole time you're looking at outdated data. And maybe you like...

accidentally hit a keystroke in a note or move an email, and then you create a merge conflict when it does finally load. There's so many paper cuts about that experience. So if you are somebody who... that doesn't happen too very often because you're almost always using your laptop on known Wi-Fi networks, then fine, you don't need this. And that's why most people don't need this. But some of us do. And for the few of us that would use this frequently...

The experience of having a connection built in like you have on your phone and every iPad ever. The experience of having that option versus having to tether to your phone. is night and day tethering to your phone feels like dial-up it feels like okay i've opened the computer up but it's not it's not on the internet of course i have to tell the computer

go to the internet, connect to the internet, log on. You have to say, and then you wait and you wait. And then maybe if you're lucky, welcome, you've got mail. Like it takes a while. And it's just, it's just, it's. It's such a... back-in-time experience. And with all of our amazing technology that we have these days, it feels ridiculous to have that experience with the latest Apple laptops, the latest iPhones. We have tethering. It's the service that we pay for.

Like we're allowed to do it. We're not doing a trick. We're allowed. This is a built in feature. It just is really half assed. And the experience of using it is not amazing. What would be much more amazing? Oh, I know you're also draining your phone battery doing this, by the way.

So usually when I'm on the train doing this, if I'm taking the train to the city, usually I will have to then plug my phone in to a battery pack or the laptop with a cable just to keep the phone topped up so I don't arrive at the city with a phone at 60%. So like it's just – everything about it is a compromise.

And that compromise is fine for people who hardly ever need it, who it's just an occasional need. But when it's a regular need, it sucks. And there are so many better ways to do this. So what would be great? I hope we get this someday. Pray to the spirit of Mark Gurman or whatever. Hopefully, we can have built-in cell modems in laptops. How would this work?

The same way it works on your iPhone and your iPad. It would just always be connected. And every so often in the background, it could wake itself up while keeping the screen off and download data. There have been features to do this in macOS for a very long time, just not over-cellular. So that's what has to happen. There are downsides to this.

the laptop would be more expensive. You'd have to buy a data plan. If you leave cellular on and you leave the laptop unplugged for a week, it will probably drain itself. That's all a trade-off that many of us would make. Because the utility of opening that laptop and having it just be on the same way your phone is just on. Your phone is online.

When you pull it out of your pocket and wake it up, it's online already. You don't have to tell it, go online and update your data. It's already online. And a few minutes ago, it did update its data. So it's already there. Such a different experience. Why can't the Mac do that? And there are no good reasons left. So please, hopefully, Apple, if you can forgive me for all my comments earlier about your stupid notarization thing. Please, for the love of God, please give me a cellular laptop.

Yeah, I don't even travel that much. But having used a cellular iPad while traveling, that's all it takes to convince you. It sounds academic. It sounds like, oh, whatever. I'm sure it's better. But does it really make a difference? If you just use a cellular iPad when you're on the go.

Once you get used to that, it's hard to go back to the other way because it's just and it's the phone doesn't convince people it's like well of course phones are always like that but computer things like but a cellular ipad is such a great like well it's not really a phone it's big and you're doing maybe you have a keyboard connected to or whatever and you look at it and you're like oh I see why tethering sucks now, because I...

Don't have to think about it at all with my iPad. It's just like my phone. It's always on. And, you know, once you once you experience that or I mean, maybe it's worse on PC laptops. Some people say that PC laptops are cellular. It's not good. But I can tell you cellular on the iPad.

works as well as it does on the phone and if you have if you use a cellular ipad where you're actually using the cellular part of it it is a pretty strong convincer that you would want this on a mac yeah and by the way like the argument that it's not very good on pc laptops Nothing is very good on PC laptops, so that's not a valid argument.

No argument here. Yeah, I mean, it's just, I would love it. I would absolutely love it. I would order one, you know, immediately if possible. I would, you know, if I had just bought a MacBook Pro, which I did, what, two years ago? It's an Ivan M3. So I think it was two years ago. Even if I've just bought one, I would immediately sell that to somebody or trade it in and buy another if I could suddenly get a cellular on it. But that's just me. Also, they already have a computer named MacBook Air.

The air prefix used to mean cellular in lots of different products because you're using waves over the air for your connectivity. It's a perfect name for a cellular laptop. Come on. That's all right. uh steven swift writes on episode 620 mentioned issues when users do iphone mirroring on corporate computers which made me wonder

How are people doing that? Are they signing in with their personal iCloud accounts and their corporate Macs? I've long wanted to take advantage of iPad sidecar or iPhone mirroring, but my Mac is a corporate machine. Is it safe to log in with my personal iCloud account on my work Mac if I don't want my employer to have access?

to my personal data. My employer doesn't want their IP on my personal devices. Do you know of any workarounds to use iPad sidecar universal control or iPhone mirror across iCloud accounts? I wish Apple would set up some authorization mechanism that didn't rely on devices signed into this.

into the same account. I do agree with Stephen there. Some sort of alternative auth would be nice, although I understand why Apple does it the way they do. For me, my last couple of jobby jobs, they were small firms that I... trusted, which yes, everyone's starting to fire up their email clients and tell me why I should never trust my employer. And that's true.

In the most recent one, the IT guy was a really good friend of mine, so I really, really trusted him. But if I was working at traditional corporate America, where I'm one cog in a machine that's... 30,000 cogs big or whatever, I would definitely feel very differently about it. Another thing to consider is that, and I don't know how long this has been true, and it's definitely true on the iPhone, and I think it's true on the Mac. If you're...

a device is employer-owned, they can absolutely, without your permission, if they set it up to allow this, they can wipe that machine and you have nothing you can do about it. All your data is just... Gone. And I get why that is. Again, I don't really think that that's necessarily unreasonable. But again, that would give me pause to log into anything personal on it.

I don't know what I would say. And I'm curious, John is the one with the most recent corporate experience and corporate experience with a much bigger corporation than I was used to. How did you handle this? Was I nuts to do this when I was in my little baby jobs? Well, to answer your Matthews question, are people signing in with their personal Apple IDs at work? Yes, they are. People do that all the time. It's not a good idea.

You shouldn't do it, but people do it because it's convenient. It's not a good idea for so many reasons. Casey just outlined some of them. There are many more reasons. It's probably even against your company's policy if you're at a big company, but people want... their stuff and they want access to their stuff and so they do this and it's not a good idea they might do it to get access to universal control or sidecar or whatever and it is kind of annoying that apple's apple's

handling of, I keep saying Apple IDs. It's Apple account now. Apple's handling of Apple accounts. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. It's so primitive. Like Apple accounts slash Apple IDs are not new. They've been around for, I believe, decades at this point, multiple decades, probably. And yet the ability to. deal with them in any reasonable fashion is just so limited can you

merge to Apple accounts? Can you transfer things from one Apple account to another? Can you be signed into multiple Apple accounts at a time? And you would be saying, well, these are complications. They should never do that. It's too complicated. No, you don't do that the first year. or the fifth year, or the 10th year, but the 25th year.

Maybe you should have the ability to merge Apple IDs, right? Or maybe you should have the ability to authenticate with some of your services without an Apple ID. In some respects, they do. I believe they still support VPN with password instead of screen sharing through Apple ID stuff. But they love the simplifying assumption of everything's on the same Apple ID. It drives me bananas here just within this room, within this physical room.

I've complained about this before, trying to airdrop things. I walk over to my wife's computer and I want to airdrop something. It's like, oh, I can't airdrop it from my phone because she's on her account in her computer and I'm on my account in my thing. And I try to airdrop it and for some reason it doesn't see her or whatever. And it's just like, I've got to.

to be logged into this my account to get the thing it's just that's why apps like i saw this go by recently i forget who originally suggested this somebody who posted about it like essentially an app that does what airdrop does Yeah, it was underscore that brought it up, then Gruber picked it up. There you go. But it's not Apple. It is a thing that says, we don't care what your Apple ID is. We have our own system for doing it.

Airdrop is like, oh, Airdrop, great. It's like, yeah, sure. If you live in a world where every one of your devices is signed into your Apple ID, it's great. But I don't live in that world, and so it sucks. And I know you don't have to be in the sample of Apple ID to airdrop. They're in your contacts, and it should work. Oh, it should. Yeah, it should work, but it doesn't.

i don't know why it doesn't it just doesn't and it drives me insane so this is another example of that i want to use this cool feature that you know universal control or sidecar these features that

you think of these as like the mac has this feature the ipad has this feature it's like no this is all threaded through apple ids and if you're not on the same apple id and all these devices it's like nope sorry you don't get to use this and i understand it's a simplifying assumption for their implementation but i feel like apple should set the bar a little bit higher for itself and say in version 2 in version 3 in version 17 maybe think about the complication of you know

people having different accounts even so simple as like a feedback that i filed i think a couple years ago like my complication of my difficulty trying to do simple file sharing in the finder between two computers that are you know seven feet from each other But oh no, I want to sign into my wife's computer where I do have an account, but I want to sign in with her account.

And I wanted to have like an alias that will correctly pull the password for her account that's in my key chain from it. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. You're going to type in that password every time. It will not remember it. There's a checkbox that says put this into the key chain, but that checkbox doesn't.

nothing because every time you want to open that alias or double click that thing or mount that thing or whatever it's going to reprompt you and i filed the bug out they're like oh you should just leave the username out of the uh the smb url you're connecting to and then it will pull from the keychain it's like yeah it'll pull my password on my account from the keychain but i want to log into her account like they can't get it through their the idea of like how why in the world would you

log into someone else's account on their mac when you mount that share it's like because i want to i want to go to a good video store i want to put my 1099s into her tax folder that's what i want to do right it's in her account it's in her documents folder oh my god like and like these are complications these are things you don't do when you first roll stuff out but you should eventually get to them and apple just never gets to them and so

For the situation, I don't specifically know. What's the Sidecar one? There is some app that Sidecar was inspired by that I can no longer remember the name of that you might be able to try that I think is not tied to Apple ID. Oh, yeah. They sold little dongles. I forget the name. Oh, God.

chat room will tell us what it is luma fusion something like that yeah maybe that's right and universal control i there are there before universal control there were a bunch of things from like the linux world that also worked on mac that did something similar to let you like move

pointer from one machine to the other none of those things with the exception of maybe the the that uh sidecar alternative like none of those old things especially like the cursor control stuff or the kvm things or whatever they don't have in theory, the polish that the Apple stuff supposedly has when everything is perfect and just right in a demo, but Luna display. Thank you. Long form in the chat. Sorry. Yeah. Luna display. There we go. We'll try to find a link for that. Um,

They don't have the polish that Apple stuff does in the best case, but a lot of times, as Undersore was discovering and Rubber was discovering, with the thing that does AirDrop, but does it in a way that actually always works reliably, you realize how finicky AirDrop is when you get...

a third-party app with no specific integration that you have to manually launch, but you know what? It just works every time. That kind of reliability has been absent from a lot of these services. Someone was just talking in another one of my slacks about the... ongoing inability of screen time to track the time that you spend on your devices the thing that it's supposed to do as steve jobs would say well why the f doesn't it do that right i know what it's supposed to do but

In practice, if you look at your screen time stats on all your different devices, A, they never agree with each other, and B, none of them match anything having to do with reality. Like, they might as well just be random numbers in bar charts. Like and forget about like across like, oh, well, let me see what my screen times my kids have been using. I can tell you that never matched reality or across multiple devices either. Like I think screen time is just a random number generator.

It's just a bunch of random numbers and a bunch of bar charts based on those random numbers because anybody who has ever tried to look at it and glean information and match it up with their experience of what they actually did with their device says, wait a second.

A, these numbers don't match what I did. And B, they don't even add up. It doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't be surprised if it would say you had like 36 hours of screen time during a single day. Like... stuff like that like you can roll out the feature and advertise it and put a name on it and have a screen on it but like if it doesn't

actually work people just start ignoring and then it just becomes noise this is what i think about the invite apps too it's like it's good for apple to have a first party app in its ecosystem to let people do invitations it's bad for them to roll one out and then lose interest in it

so anyway uh sorry steven we couldn't help you more other than the chat room remembering lunar display there are third party things that you can probably do some of this stuff in uh i do not suggest signing up with your apple id on your work computer i know you want to Everybody wants to. Don't do it.

Oh, actually, the chat room, who's Chris Vanazzo, also brings up Synergy, which I used to use ages ago. There you go. That's the one I was thinking of. That predates Universal Control. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is using the same keyboard and mouse across multiple different devices. And they can be different platforms.

It works pretty well the last time I tried it, which, again, hasn't been for years. But that's another option if you wanted to do something that isn't quite as built-in and seamless as universal control. That doesn't go to an iPad, though. right? Because I'm assuming you can't even run Synergy on an iPad. That might be true, actually. I think I only had used it with full-on computers.

Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Wild Grain, and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership besides our exclusive content and other fun stuff is ATP. overtime. This is a bonus topic every week. This week on overtime we're going to be doing some more Sonos discussion. There was an article that came out I think this morning or yesterday about Sonos and their codenamed Pinewood video player.

Sounds like it might be a high-end competitor to the Apple TV. So that sounds really interesting. So we're going to talk about that in overtime this week. You can join us at atb.fm slash join to hear that and everything else membership gives you. Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.

John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M. N.T. Marco Armin. S-I-R-A-C. USA Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental.

I am happy for more than one reason tonight. In part, I am happy because I had the barbecue brisket earlier and it was delicious. In part because you're here talking to your two best friends. Yes, definitely that. Yes. That's true. Thank you. So three reasons. Okay. The third reason is that I spent this past weekend wiring the restaurant. Oh, this is our first restaurant update, if I'm not mistaken. It is. And more importantly... unwiring the restaurant.

This is – it's a small bar restaurant that is on Fire Island. Everything on Fire Island is kind of slapdash because you can't always get supplies and it's – you kind of just got to deal with what you have and everything is like small. and old. The environment is highly corrosive. The air is salty from being near the ocean. Nothing lasts there. It's a very...

It's a very hostile environment for electronics and wires and things like that. This restaurant also sometimes like on weekend nights will have DJs come in and like plug into the sound system and really get it bumping for late night bar business. I got in there and the DJ system, the music system in general, you know, there's like regular speakers for playing music during, you know, regular dining hours, like, you know, small speakers. And then there's like the big DJ speakers.

And and I get in there and I'm looking at this mess of wires. Oh, and of course, over time, the restaurant has had various point of sale systems. And so there is like, you know, various network wires running around. Every single network wire I see is like the thinnest of thin Cat 5e cable. And the ends are like a little bit pulling out of the connectors and like a little bit fraying. And I'm like, that's not amazing.

And then the audio cables are just a massive, like, there's a thick bundle of cables running throughout the entire, like, running along the ceiling for half the restaurant because, like... That's where the DJ cables plug in from across the way. But then, you know, over time, some cable would flake out or get static or, you know, just the connectors would rust or whatever, or it would get crushed. And so the cable would kind of stop working. So they would just run another one.

But because of the rule of audio systems, like once it works, don't touch it, nobody ever removed the old wires. So what I have inherited here is just an absolute mess of... Tons of wires everywhere. Almost all of them what I would consider legacy wires. And there is a security camera system. There are 16 cameras. It's an old coax system.

which means there are 16 wires oh my there's one for each camera and they all go to like the main box like the dvr thing that records them and so there are these huge wire bundles like just over time this has been there for like 40 years and over time you know when stuff breaks in a restaurant

You don't have a ton of time to like, let me look at Amazon and find the best option and order it and wait for it to arrive on the island, which could be a few days. Like, no, if something breaks in the middle of service, you kind of slapdash fix it however you possibly can because you don't have to. time like so i i get here i had the dj who's been there he's a friend of mine he's been djing there for like 20 years i had him come and like explain the system to me

It's a rack. There's fortunately, you know, like a standard equipment rack, but it was, you know, full of DJ gear. There's like, you know, a little mixer and some compressor and a limiter and a bunch of big DJ speaker amps. The DJ comes, explains the system to me, and he's like, well, that doesn't work. That doesn't work. He's like, but you got to be careful.

because this is your business, not your home. And if it's your home, you'd be tempted to buy all new stuff. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds like me. He's like, but here, you got to be careful with the business. You can't...

Just do that because you'll eat into all your profit and you won't make any money. And I was like, that's good. Thank you. I'll try to have that self-control. Thank you. And he's like, all right. So you're going to be tempted to tear all this stuff out, but don't do it. I'm like, all right. All right.

So over the next half hour, he's walking me through the system. He's like, all right, here's what these speakers do. I would suggest replacing this subwoofer here. You should move this if you can. This wire, I strung this up 15 years ago for a temporary thing. We don't need it anymore. That one doesn't work anymore. That one doesn't work anymore. Within a half hour, he was saying, you know what? Replace it all. Just tear it all out. Get all new stuff. Replace it all. So anyway, I...

So I'm in the process of replacing some of it, not all of it. This past weekend was when I decided, let me tackle network wiring and any wires that are currently not in use. And I wanted to rewire. I wanted to run all new CAT 6A and CAT 6 wiring, you know, all new throughout the place. Get rid of all of the many.

old wires that are not in use. There's like old phone wires that aren't in use anymore. There's old coaxial cable wires that aren't in use anymore. So many. I filled a garbage can. I filled a restaurant garbage can with wires. that I had pulled out of the walls and down from the zip ties. And I must have cut 200 zip ties to take their wires down and replace them over the course of the weekend. Oh, my word. Let me tell you, as a nerd...

This was the most satisfying thing I think I've ever done because it's like deleting code, but in real life, like just being able to take down like old. Crappy or obsolete or unused cables and replace huge wire bundles with like one new wire. That's the right length and high quality and have it just work. Oh, what a pleasure this has been.

I'm having so much fun. And I even, this is, so there's this one, there's a huge cable run that runs from where the TV... system starts like behind the bar and then the whole bunch of stuff runs like around the side of the restaurant to where the djs plug in and where there's another tv on the other side and there's this big thick bundle of like nine cables that goes across that

And I think I have a way to convert those nine cables to zero cables. Like everywhere else, I'm getting reductions. But this, I think I'm going to remove this entire thing. I've known for a while, and this is going to get everybody writing in. I've known for a while there's a system called Dante for audio that basically routes audio signals over your network.

So Dante adapters have XLR plugs on one end and a network hole on the other. And then you run this software that's like Dante controller software on a computer somewhere. And that you can route things across the network. And all this time I thought like I had heard about Dante audio systems and I thought it was just for like big like professional mixers installed in venues and stuff.

But it turns out, I think, I mean, I'm going to find out in a couple of days. It turns out that like you can just get like a $200 adapter and run the apparently free software on a computer and that's it. So. That means I can run the audio signals from the DJ area over the network to the speaker amps and the mixer that are like on the other side of the restaurant. So right now there are like...

seven XLR cables that are snaked all over the restaurant. And I think I can run that over the network, which will mean there will be zero cables.

in a huge area where there used to be a lot because I can just like have a network drop down from the ceiling for that. So I am having so much fun with like... deleting wires and deleting old like you know brackets and mounts and you know running of course you know poe powered as much as possible so i'm getting rid of power adapters in a lot of places too like this is glorious i know

running a restaurant is going to be really hard. But this is like, I can do this part. This is my comfort zone. Like the rest of it, yeah. But also the rest of it, I have like, there are four people running this restaurant. There's me, Tiff. manager and assistant manager so there's four people who can do the day-to-day operations but i can do the wiring and i'm really good at wires so i'm just i'm so happy doing this stuff so far and it's like

I just figured out the Dante thing yesterday, so I'm like, oh my god, now I can go back there and delete five more wires, especially five of the biggest wires. I'm going to play with this stuff and see how it goes, but as an area of... tech. I play with a lot of tech for myself, and some of it I have to use for, quote, my work. When I get a microphone or sound gear to do podcasting, I'm doing that for my work, right? But for the most part, I mostly...

Don't apply tech to many applications besides tech for its own sake or recording podcasts or programming. So when I have this opportunity now that I have an opportunity to apply. tech and actually use it for useful work that is not one of those areas that I've always been doing.

It's actually, it's very fulfilling. It's like, oh, I can, I can fix this. Like they've always complained that, that the wifi coverage in the restaurant was terrible because the way it's arranged, there's like the kitchen on one side, the dining room on the other. And between the kitchen and dining room. are giant walk-in freezers and fridges, which are giant metal boxes. So there's almost no way to cover the entire area with one or even two access points.

And, you know, they've been struggling because they weren't nerds like me. And they would just get whatever the POS vendor would give them, like some weird Cisco Meraki thing. And, you know, it was never well placed because they're not experts in placing them. And they would never had enough of them. So I get in there and I install a Ubiquiti system. Thank God. Thank Ubiquiti. It is so nice and so easy and relatively inexpensive compared to other professional quality gear.

And I can put an AP wherever I want. And I can run these network drops. And I can have these PoE switches to power everything with the one UPS in the rack that's powering all my APs and keeping them up. It's so much fun doing this part. I know the rest of it's going to be less fun in different ways, but this part is really freaking fun and I'm really enjoying it. That's awesome. I'm very excited.

Would love to see photos, even if you can't share them publicly. Sorry, everyone. I would love to see photos of everything once it's all installed. What's your timetable? When does the restaurant open for the summer? We have about a month before a soft open. It's a soft open for St. Patrick's Day and then a full open in late April. Oh, I didn't realize it was for my birthday. That's very kind of you. Am I coming up for that? Are you?

I don't think so, but thank you for offering. Please make sure you have plenty of green beer. No, that's super fun and super awesome. You said it just a moment ago, and it's so true. So much of what I do with my computer and with my home assistant tinkering is... just to scratch an itch and just to give myself an outlet for my nervous energy. But it is just deeply satisfying when you can use your skills, which you've either honed professionally or because of your own...

hobbies or what have you to actually improve something or someone's life. And it is such a satisfying thing. And we nerds. I would argue we don't get it as often as we should. And it's so great to be able to have that moment. So I'm having a lot of fun living vicariously through you, at least for this part. Once the summer rolls around, I'm not so sure I want to live vicariously through you anymore.

It's very fun. I'm even finding other areas. It turns out I have opinions about restaurants because I go to restaurants. So I'm finding other areas that I'm able to... provide some useful feedback or a good idea here and there you know like like earlier today i had i have to replace um two coffee machines i have like a little espresso like a nespresso kind of pod maker for because some some of the cocktails like you know espresso martini

some cocktails use espresso so i had to replace that and i had to get a new one of those like big bun commercial you know coffee brewers for the back for the mostly for staff and like i knew Because the old one's broken. The manager, quote, wants to throw it in the bay. So I said, all right, you can throw the old one in the bay. Because the old one, the old coffee maker, is one of those that you see in every diner.

It has the bun machine with the round hot plates that you put the coffee pots on after they're brewed, and you have this big glass coffee carafe, the orange ones for decaf, and those things. And I know from being a coffee nerd that when you have a hot plate keeping the coffee warm, it makes it taste horrific. And so I'm like, if we're replacing that, they make ones that have thermal carafts.

which it just brews into like an insulated carafe that keeps the coffee warm by insulation, not by continuous heat. And so I asked the managers, I'm like, hey, would this work for our needs? And they said yes. I'm like, great. I'll get a better coffee machine because I know about coffee. And we're still going to have to get food service pouches to go into it. It's not going to be amazing beans.

but it will taste a lot less crappy than the ones that are sitting on the burners all night. So, yeah, I'm finding little areas that I can actually use my skills and expertise. Even though I don't know how to run a restaurant, I do know... a lot about certain components of what it's going to take to run this. And because I am not doing this by myself, I'm part of a team of people doing this. I don't need to do everything for the restaurant.

I can actually mostly just do the stuff I'm good at. And even, you know, a lot of the stuff that we're doing now is setup work. It's permits. It's paperwork. I'm now – well, I'm about to be – certified by the county health department to be a food manager. And I had to learn all sorts of stuff about food safety. A lot of that stuff I already knew because I'm a nerd. I listen to food safety podcasts sometimes, thanks to Dr. Don. And like, you know, a lot of...

The setup stuff. I know how to set up companies. Because I have my own businesses. I knew how to get a sales tax certificate because... My wife sells physical objects in New York State. And so we had to figure out the sales tax thing a couple of years ago. Like there's all these different components of my life that like I've done bits and pieces of this here and there. So I am able to bring some skill into this.

I know how to do paperwork. I know how to set up things electronically. I know how to wire the place to have good Wi-Fi. I know how to wire the POS terminals so that they're reliable. I know how to have a backup internet connection. There's all these different things that...

this is actually all useful information. And so I'm finding this surprisingly interesting and surprisingly engaging. And it's fun to have a project that like, I'm going to make this better in a way that not everybody will spot. but that will benefit a lot of people. And some people will appreciate it. And that is very fulfilling to me in a way that like, I get that fulfillment with making software and making podcasts.

but on a different level and in different ways. And this is a very new way to me to get that kind of fulfillment, to have like an in-person physical thing that like I am helping to make this place. even better, and I'm helping to keep this place going for what people like about it. And so it's a very interesting and fulfilling project, and I'm very happy to be working on it. I realize you more or less described the phenomenon of having a regular job.

Where you're working with other people in person where your skills contribute to the overall success and the things that you know how to do are valued and come in handy because that's why you were hired to do the thing. And it's novel for somebody who spent most of their career like self-employed doing computer stuff by themselves at home. But I think a lot of people listening to this would be like, yeah, you've got a job. You go to it and you do stuff.

And you use your skills and the other people who work there, the other people who work, they use their skills. And granted, you're the owner and it's different and so on and so forth. But like this is actually novel if you've spent your entire career as a self-employed software developer. Yes. In your house making apps. Yeah, well, even simple stuff. I had to ask around to our friends, what do I use to coordinate tasks with people?

Just yell really loud and point. I know how to use to-do apps for myself, and I know there's this entire universe of collaboration platforms and collaboration apps, but I'm like, what should I use? Like, I spent a few days trying out Notion and Basecamp and a couple other, like, you know, I looked at a couple other things. And we ended up just so far on Google Docs because our needs are pretty simple.

That was a whole thing that used some of my tech experience and tech skills. I actually know some names to look at here. So, you know, I think it's... One of those big punch clocks things that you put a card into it, it goes cha-ching. Yeah. One of those. No, now the POSs all have built-in payroll tracking and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. And like there are certain things like when I was, you know, I replaced. So, oh, I forgot to end the DJ story. So DJ friend, he showed me the whole system, tells me at the end, yeah, you probably replace it all. He leaves.

I'm like, you know, let me at least like turn it on and see like what it sounds like and see how it works now based on what he told me. So I turn it on and he had pointed to like the main mixer thing in the rack that, you know, that's how you set all the volume levels and pick the inputs.

And he's like, that thing is full of short circuits. It's like 40 years old. You should probably replace that. I'm like, all right. So I go turn the system on. I connected. Actually, I had brought my old iPod that I have for my blimp speaker dock. I brought the iPod because I needed something that had a headphone output and I didn't...

I didn't have the adapter for my phone. So I just grabbed that on the way out the door, forgetting for the moment that my laptop had one. But I figured that out later. Anyway, so I plugged this iPod in. And I played some music, and I adjusted the volume. And the second I adjusted the volume, I heard a pop, and I never got it to work again. Oh, that's good. It's like I literally moved one volume slider on the mixer.

And then, you know, cracked out and I could never get the sound. Anything else I touched, I just, I'm like, well, I guess I'm replacing that. And because I know sound, you know, I don't know DJ sound. but I do know sound. And so, because I, you know, the rack had contained, like, This 2U tall amp or a mixer thing with a bunch of slider. Or no, I think it was 4U. This 4U mixer thing. And then it had a limiter, a compressor. That's two more rack units there.

And there was one other thing. And I'm like, I looked around and I found there are these QSC zone mixers that do all of that stuff digitally and have all the inputs in the back. And so I just bought one of those. And now I have in one rack unit what was previously taken up like six or seven rack units. And it's even more full-featured and even better and can be remotely controlled from an iPad that we already have there for playing music anyway. So like...

I'm finding ways that my expertise is actually really coming in handy. And I know I still don't know anything about like, how do we order food? How much food do we order? What food do we order? Those are hard questions. And I don't know anything about that. But you know what? I don't need to because they do. The other staff members, they know how much food to order. You know who orders the food? The chef.

He knows how much food to order. I don't need to know those things yet. I will eventually pick up some of that, I assume. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm delegating to them for that stuff forever. But... The Wi-Fi will be rock solid and there will be way fewer wires.