Upgrade - 20: You Cannot Win an Effort War

Episode Date: January 26, 2015

Jason and Myke debate the utility of a stylus for the iPad, Jason falls through a time warp into the '90s to convert some VHS tapes to digital format, and we follow up on items from various podcasts... not all of them this one.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 20 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts for a 10-day free trial visit lynda.com upgrade mail route a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. And Casper, because everyone deserves a great night's sleep. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by the one and only Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. How's it going? I am very well, sir. How are you? Pretty good. Starting my week with Upgrade, as always. It's nice.

Nice little routine we're working out here 20 weeks in. I like it. I like that we can look forward to to the week ahead we can look at the week that's just gone like the kind of the it feels different to when you have a show midweek because a midweek show it's like well all you've got is what happened in the last two days but like a monday show it's kind of you've got all of last week and if there's anything exciting coming you can talk about all of that too there's just a different feeling about it, which I enjoy. Take that, ATP. Yeah. And also, Jason, we record and release on the same day.

That's the Mike Hurley promise. That's right. Well, as long as you don't have Casey List doing your QA for your podcast. Oh, yeah, no. I have that experience sometimes. We definitely have that experience. But they do sound very good. that experience but they do sound very good because they do they do sound very good because they do at least somebody has standards on that

show it's casey not you but that's okay i have no standards that's that's the that's the other mike hurley promise we actually have um we should do this now we actually have before follow-up we have something that listener michael uh wrote in and suggested we call follow out which is uh the follow-up from other podcasts that is not our podcast which is a perfect name uh so thank you listener michael uh analog uh you did a music episode episode 23 now you just dropped number 24 i believe right before we recorded this or over the weekend um but the i i wanted to tell, I really loved the music episode. I thought it was really great. You can tell it's a good podcast when you are desperately trying to interrupt the people

who are playing on your car radio and tell them things and you can't because it's a podcast. And that is how I felt. Like, I really enjoyed you guys talking about music and how you listen to music and your guilty pleasures and things that you love and how you process lyrics or don't process lyrics. I thought that was all really, really fascinating. And even though you got the details of Crowded House wrong, you corrected it the next week after I sent you a detailed correction. And that was nice too. It's always amusing when I hear my own name in a podcast because I'm driving, I'm like, oh no no they're talking about me now uh it's very strange but I really loved that episode I thought it was a lot of a lot of fun and yes Neil Finn is the band leader of Crowded House and he's from New Zealand so you might as well

call it a New Zealand band even though a couple of the original members were from Australia and then they have got some Americans in it um when they when they tour these days I'm not surprised you felt like you wanted to to jump in because we got i got about 95 of all of your information wrong yeah well that's true like snation gel or something it just carried on like that it was yeah it was a disaster you did you got my name right so thank you for that that's the only part that's all in it um i enjoyed that episode so much that i i want to do a music podcast i loved talking about it and i loved the edit even though it was more complex like to put little snippets of audio in the songs it's really really fun so the problem with music is the taste of it um and everybody has differing music tastes

so i don't even know what you'd cover it's just too much music to cover new releases and even then like how much can you really learn like for me i don't want to what you'd cover. It's just too much music to cover new releases. And even then, how much can you really learn? For me, I don't want to talk about an album I've listened to for two days. I need to listen to them for weeks to know if they stick. We talked about doing an album draft on the Incomparable, classic music draft, where we would just pick favorite albums and talk about them kind of round robin. I wonder if you could do something like that,

where you just talked about a different release or band every week and found a couple of people who love that band or album or whatever to talk about it. Yeah, I mean, that could definitely work. That could definitely work. Also, you did, I like the undercut music, but you didn't, it was always just underneath

what you were talking about. And, you know, once you're talking about the work, it's actually fair use to, you could have probably taken a, you know, 15 second break in the middle and played a little bit more of it. Because I found it great that like, Casey would mention something

and then it was playing in the background, but it was not quite enough for me to get what it was. But it was still neat to hear. Usually I take breaks. I don't know why I did it that way. It just like a different way to do it when i when i was editing it together i was like oh i like this style because usually like with clips like that i will take a break and just play the play a section of it and then cut back in again like i'm connected yeah yeah but but i thought no let's let's let's have it as like a little bed i do that i do that

too sometimes with the uh video game stuff or other stuff where we're talking about music. You have to make that decision if you want to stop the conversation for a minute to listen to the music or whether you want to just kind of have it on in the background as a nod. Anyway, I enjoyed that episode. That's shameless promotion for another Relay podcast,

but I enjoyed it and I appreciate that you... This doesn't have to be correction follow-out because you you corrected all of that stuff yourself i did i was very sad um i mentioned this on the incomparable this week that um and i think it's in the bonus track that casey um referred to peter gabriel as old people music because on one level you know peter gabriel was one of my all-time favorites and that makes me feel like an old person. On the other hand, and Lisa Schmeiser and I talked about this in the Incomparable bonus track this weekend, that there is that moment where, like, you go to see Peter Gabriel in concert, and she and I actually went to a concert, and you've got your

mental image of Peter Gabriel in 1986 in your head, and then then you see him and he's like bald with a goatee a white goatee and next thing you know he's playing you know versions of his songs with uh with a symphony and you realize oh he he is he is old people now yeah but he wasn't he wasn't back then you look around and see who who you're like you know who your company is. Well, that was my memory when we went with Lisa was that there were lots of gray-haired people there. But we were probably on the younger side of the people who were there because there's people who've been following him since he was in Genesis in the early 70s. But we're on the younger side. But when we went and saw him, we were like 30, 31 in there. So not too up there.

But now if we went back, yeah, it would be people with like walkers and wheelchairs. So old people music. It's sad. But he's reached the point in his career where he seems to not even be trying to do anything new, really. And it's all just sort of like reflections. And when you get these symphonic recreations of your catalog yeah, it's you're just cashing it in. You've run out.

You've run out of stuff. It happens. It happens to everybody. Eventually I suppose. I look forward to our symphonic podcasts one day, Jason. That's right. It's just old episodes. We don't even have to do it, Mike. We'll just have our old episodes and then there'll be symphony music played in a music bed underneath them.

That'll be classic. It'll be classic upgrade. Classical upgrade. Very nice. Very nice. And they'll be upgraded classically as well. Oh, man. Follow-up time, I think. Yes. Smart speed. Again, a little more

boy, we started something when we mentioned that you could look up how much time you've saved in Overcast. Still happening. Unless there's a bug and you can't see it. Still getting it. Yeah. But listener Evan did a blog post on Medium. Are they called blog posts? I don't know.

On Medium? I feel like that'd be called something else. Okay. He put some words at a URL. Can we talk about Medium one day? Because I don't understand Medium. I'm not sure Medium understands Medium, but sure, we can talk about Medium sometime.

But anyway, he wrote a thing about smart speed and Overcast, and what he did that was extremely clever is captured the audio output from Overcast playing an episode of Hardcore History and from iTunes on his Mac playing the same episode of Hardcore History and posted that to SoundCloud. And so the Mac is on one side of the stereo environment

and the iPhone is on the other side. And what you get is you can listen as SmartSpeed saves you time. And by the end of that episode of Hardcore History, I believe he saved 12 minutes, because that's a pretty loose podcast. And one of the things listener Evan points out in this piece is that the tighter podcasts, you don't really save a lot of time. And in fact, he's got smart speed turned off for those podcasts, because once something like 99% invisible, once something is really tight, you kind of almost want to say, okay, if there's a pause in there, they're doing it for a reason. So you just turn off SmartSpeed.

But there are these other podcasts that are super loose and you can turn on SmartSpeed and save, in the case of Hardcore History, 12 minutes. And it is kind of a kick to listen as the sound in your right ear just totally drifts away from the sound in your left ear. I just thought it was an interesting, because sometimes I'm listening and I see Overcast is going, or I look at their stats, and I'm like, I wonder how much it's saving me per episode. And where this doesn't obviously, your numbers may, your mileage may vary depending on the show you're listening to. It was just interesting to see, no, it is like every time you listen, potentially, Obviously, your mileage may vary depending on the show you're listening to. It was just interesting to see.

No, it is like every time you listen, potentially, there is a significant change. You are knocking a couple of minutes off or whatever. And it's like, obviously, as we have seen, Jason, that adds up. I don't know, Mike. It kind of gives me a complex. It makes me want to talk really fast and without any breaks in between. Because if I do that, then SmartSpeak can't do anything, and then I win. But then I can't. I'm only human.

I'm going to run out of breath. And then when that happens, SmartSpeed is going to kick in, and then, oh, no. Next up on the follow-up, what would you like to do, Jason? Let's go for the follow-up. People listening on 2X right now, their heads just blew up. Oh, a telephone. Listener Steve wrote in and said, you guys seem to have something out for the Apple Podcast app.

What gives? So I've been thinking about this, Jason. I used to have a problem with the Apple Podcast app. When it was a reel-to-reel tape, it was really awful, yes. The UI, I can see the problems people have with that, but I found a kind of cuteness in that. It was cute, but it hurt the functionality. That was my a kind of cuteness in that um where it was it was cute but it hurt the functionality that was my problem with it is it i didn't mind that

it was cute i minded that it uh it uh it like pushed other important things away so that it could be cute so the main the main problem that i had with the apple podcast app was it wasn't sync or anything like that that many people had it was it was lack of show notes support and it just displayed your show notes as a list of text that was all you got and there weren't links it was just a list um that's actually been improved now um and and i know that the guys that and girls that make that app have taken great pains to make it work properly uh so i actually don't have a problem with the app like previously i would have said to people do not use it um but now like i'm happy like if somebody wants to get into podcasts it's on the phone like go for it i think the fact that it's on every phone is amazing when

i heard about that happening i needed cartwheels that's fantastic for us to have an app that i know i know they're frustrating but an app that can't be deleted it may be more likely that people will check this stuff out. They go to the iTunes store, they browse around. But just for me, I think if you enjoy podcasts or as soon as you've listened to one and you've decided you want to use another, I think that there are many more options out there that you should look at that I think are superior for somebody who wants to get into listening to podcasts in a serious way. Yeah, I agree. I think there are, it's fine. It's fine. It's way better than it used to be. I like that it syncs. I think the show notes thing is important. In fact, related to this is a listener Gordon wrote in and said, whenever we talk about the show notes, for example, the show notes for this episode can be found at Upgrade, or no, at, see, I blew it, relay.fm slash upgrade slash 20, right?

What we don't say is, or in the app you're listening to, which we probably should mention because most podcast apps will show you the show notes as you're listening yeah um but i so i think the podcast app is fine i like i said i like up i like overcast because um of smart speed and because the uh the speed acceleration that marco is doing is i believe better i think that because he hand-tuned the way he processes the audio in Overcast, I don't hear acceleration artifacts that I hear in every other podcast app. And so if you do want to listen at 1.2, all the other podcast app, I feel like there's like click, click, click, click, click, click, click as you go. And it drives me crazy. So until Overcast, I literally never listened to a podcast in anything but 1X because I just couldn't take it. And now I do. And that's because it sounds acceptable to

me in a way it didn't before. So I think podcast app is great. It's free. It's on every phone. It's good for podcasting. People should start with it. But there are features that something like Overcast is going to be able to give you. It's the same old story as any other Apple product, right? Apple is never going to make a product that is super fiddly, that it's going to satisfy every single use case of power users. That's not what they're there for. They're there for like the baseline to get you started. And that's what the podcast app is. But I don't think it's terrible. I didn't like it originally, but I think it's okay now. Listener Mateo asked if we think that our figures because we were talking about like

how Overcast is has a much larger portion of download numbers than anybody else any other podcast app Mateo wondered if it was because we have our little directory in the directory Marco very kindly has a RelayFM section

which is fantastic and we're very very grateful that we have that there. Because I do believe it helps people bring in new listeners. I think that, yes, we may be skewed because of that in some instances. But I don't know if that would be the sole reason for that. I don't know. It's impossible to tell i think really right and i i looked on um i'm incomparable and like i said um to listener mateo on twitter on incomparable the overcast numbers are still pretty huge and there is no incomparable section in overcast

although incomparable itself is in one of the sections. It's not in its own section. So it's less so. But then again, it's less so dominated by Overcast than Relay in general is. It's, you know, Podcasts app and iTunes are still really strong. In fact, if you put them together, they are the number one client for incomparable shows. And then Overcast is number two. Hmm. Yeah.

I don't know. Different audiences. Anyway, it's worth thinking about. Listener Rajiv wrote in to say, why does Apple require a wired connection for CarPlay? I would rather it work through Bluetooth. I don't know this for certain, but I'm going to take a crack at it, which is CarPlay is basically video out.

The video that's being displayed on these systems is being projected there by your iPhone. And one, I think you can't do that over Bluetooth. I think that sending a video, a whole video thing over Bluetooth is not something that you could do. And somebody is going to write in and say, well, theoretically you could, but it's not actually implemented by anybody. And that's fine. Email markup. How much of AirPlay is Bluetooth? Nothing. Oh, really? AirPlayplay airplay is all wi-fi okay i didn't know that yeah it's all wi-fi right so um and the second thing is if you did a wireless stream your phone would run out of battery yeah i was

gonna say that like yeah i understand why it might be easier to just walk into the car and it connects, but plugging it in, you're charging it, you're powering the phone. Every time you went on a drive, you'd get out of the car, you'd have no battery left on your phone. That's a frustrating experience, I think. So if you force people to plug it in, then they kind of don't know what they're missing. I think it's better.

So my guess is that, you know, I think you can't practically stream video to that thing, and that's what it's doing. It's not just sending data. It is streaming that image you're seeing on the screen is being streamed live from the device, and that doing that wirelessly is impractical, if not impossible, using Bluetooth,

which is what's in the car. But there's just, yeah, the power thing is the other thing, which is even if you did that, your phone would be dead by the time you got where you were going, especially if you were also navigating. So you're using the phone's GPS. So that's why. I mean, it's just not practical. And I agree with you. You get used to just keeping your phone in your pocket and listening to podcasts when you're driving around. And CarPlay, you can't do that. And that's totally true. I totally get it.

But it's just not practical right now to do it any other way. Listener Jeff wrote in to say, so should Apple build a double DIN head unit? Okay, so we'll decode that, which is, that's the one I tested, the thing I tested for CarPlay is what's called a double DIN head unit. Head unit, it's a radio that you stick in a car. Double DIN, if you do servers, you know about a 1U server or a 2U server in a rack.

It's describing the height. Double DIN is essentially a 2U server for car stereo. So my car has a double DIN space in it and i i have a single din sony head unit in it and so i've got like a little uh drawer below it that's just there to fill the space um so that's what he means so basically having two stacked on top of each other yeah so which is what the one that i the carplay thing that i use is that size. For the screen to be big enough, you have to have the two slots worth. And I think most cars do. It's the equivalent of, yeah, it's two high instead of one high in the stack.

So if you had a car that only had a single DIN space, you couldn't put one of these CarPlay units in it because they wouldn't fit. And my answer to that is no. I don't think Apple should get in this business because I don't think that's the problem. I went back and forth with a couple people on Twitter. There was a guy who seemed to want to throw the head unit manufacturers under the bus for bad CarPlay performance and said, well, it's their touchscreen and their unit itself is running some crappy version of Android. And that's all true. But most of the problems I found with CarPlay are not the... I was giving a pass to the bad touchscreen and the laggy touchscreen scrolling because I figured that's probably the head unit's fault. But everything else, all the apps quitting, the head unit has nothing to do with the apps quitting. Bad things are happening on the iPhone, and that's Apple's problem. So I think Apple needs to focus on getting the CarPlay

software right. And honestly, maybe Apple needs to do a better job of validating these devices that are going to be playing their stuff, and if there is a problem with these head units, that they shouldn't approve them. They should say, no, this is not a CarPlay device. It's not good enough.

But right now, I think the problem is that their software is not good enough. And it doesn't even get to the point where they're getting hurt by the hardware. It would be a nice problem to have if the software was solid, rock solid. And the problem you had is buying the right, you know, the right touchscreen to put in your car because you want one that's fast and responsive because that's going to be the thing that holds you back. And they're just not there yet. I got an email that I didn't, actually I didn't put in the document, but we got a really nice email about CarPlay

and somebody who went to the Detroit Auto Show, this is listener Sam, and got demos of Android Auto and CarPlay. And the short version is that Android Auto looks much more functional to him than CarPlay. But the impression he got from the people in the business is that there's not a lot of action right now in Android Auto or CarPlay. Because neither of them is really good enough yet. Which is certainly how I walked away from my time with CarPlay, was this is just not ready.

So anyway, Android Auto was interesting. I'm not going to buy an Android phone and an Android Auto head unit and write that story, but I am intrigued by it, having seen video of it. I think Google is trying to do more. I understand Apple's, I said this last week, reluctance to do more in the car because it's distracting. But what they've got is sort of not enough yet. But anyway, that email from listener Sam was really good. And I do get that impression that it's just not, none of this stuff is really fantastic.

Yeah, I do. fantastic yeah i i do i just just this feeling i don't know where it is that like google may have already done more similar things like this before so we're coming out with more experience i don't know but that's how i kind of felt about the fact that android auto might be better because you know they've done things like google tv and where that where those projects have not been very successful they kind of have done stuff like that. And they're kind of used, more used to dealing with devices they can't control. Yeah, yeah.

I see that. And yet in the end, you know, Apple did set the spec and say, look, basically give us a touchscreen and we will fill it. So they've got a lot of control over this. And yeah, and it is what it is. I realized that I didn't put any of our email that we got in the document.

I'm so focused on hashtag AskUpgrade. I'm going to have to get better at that. Listener Nick wrote in to say, I like it when you guys disagree on the show. A lot of good debate spawns from that. Keep up the good work. Thank you, listener Nick. I disagree, Nick.

Would you like to thank Nick? No, Nick. Thank him. You're wrong, okay? This is terrible. Never write in again. Well, sorry, Mike. I just have to say you're totally wrong and then Nick should totally write in again. Well, so, Mike. I just have to say you're totally wrong and the

Nick should totally write it again. And scene. I got there's a nice email we got from listener Joe who wanted to point out that he had actually, another data point about Overcast, he had never heard of Marco

when he downloaded Overcast. He thought he had heard the name. He didn't really know anything about it. He got frustrated with Apple's app. He actually downloaded Overcast, deleted it after trying it for a day or two, but got frustrated with Apple's podcast app, gave it another shot, and said now it's his go-to app. And he downloaded it because of the great reviews and bought it because it was a great app. So in terms of Marco marketing, maybe he heard about it or maybe those reviews he saw were because of marco's notoriety but in the end he bought it just because um he liked the app which i think is uh i think is good we got a nice email from uh listener tom who i've actually met at comic-con. He is a comic writer and artist. And he wanted to say that Marco Marketing

reminded him of the comics industry. He said his book, which is called Love and Capes, which I mentioned actually on our webcomics episode of The Incomparable, he said it did okay. DC Comics would have canceled it, but Tom isn't paying for office space in Burbank. So what he needs to do to be a success is much less than what somebody. DC Comics would have canceled it, but Tom isn't paying for office space in Burbank. So what he needs to do to be a success is much less than what somebody like DC Comics

needs to do to be a success, which I really liked. And then he also made a Princess Bride reference. Did you get this? Have you seen the Princess Bride, Mike? I'm not really sure what to say right now. Well, you have to tell the truth. We're in a zone of truth here.

I haven't seen it. You've never seen The Princess Bride? I haven't seen The Princess Bride. Well, you should go see it because it's a really funny movie. Mike hasn't seen it. Yeah, so you didn't understand the Holocaust cloak reference at all then. Did not. I Googled it because I thought he was making a really horrible...

I thought he was saying something horrible to us. No, he was not. I googled it because i thought he was making a really horrible i thought he was saying something horrible to us no he was not uh he what he says is um when i hear people say oh but it's it's fine for marco but i couldn't do that what he says is i think people are often ignoring their own assets like the holocaust cloak and there's a funny moment in the princess bride where they list uh the man in black says, what are our assets? And they list the assets. And then he notices that there's a cloak. And he said, you didn't mention the Holocaust cloak.

And that is the key to unlock the entire plan that's going to solve it. It's a funny little moment. And that's what Tom is saying. I can do an entire book myself. I don't have to hire anyone else. I live in Ohio, so I can drive to most of my conventions. Someone in L.A. has to fly to almost all theirs. They have to hire anyone else. I live in Ohio, so I can drive to most of my conventions. Someone in LA has to fly to almost all of theirs. They have to ship their own books.

Marco has a podcast and a lot of notoriety, but he also lives in New York and has a kid. Nothing's even. You can either complain about what you don't have, or you can make the most out of what you do. I thought that was really great. So thank you to Tom for that. And I think that takes us to one last bit of follow-up, which is listener Robert, who, based on episode 18, he said, when we were talking about scripting things, he said,

scripting is like taking back roads when the highway is slow. It might take longer, but you're still glad to be moving. I thought that was, that sounds about right. Sometimes it's just like, at least i'm working on the problem now instead of just getting frustrated by it it might save me time it might not but at least i'm moving we should put that on like one of those motivational posters of a cat i i think i think so a cat sitting at a keyboard scripting it might take longer but at least you're glad to be moving. I had one last piece of follow-out. I just wanted to very briefly mention, if you

haven't seen it already, we have a new show on RelayFM called Rocket. It's sort of a tech, gaming, pop culture-focused show. It's hosted by Brianna Wu, Christina Warren, and Simone de Rochefort. It's a fantastic show. We just did episode two go out today.

I am helping these lovely women out with the editing at the moment, so I get the pleasure of hearing the shows, and episode two is fantastic, including a long discussion about Gem and the Holograms, which was a cartoon show.

It was. Also haven't seen that, Mike? Have you not seen Gem and the Holograms, which was a cartoon show. It was. And about the social... Also haven't seen that, Mike? Have you not seen Gem and the Holograms? I think I may have done when I was a kid, actually. I do know Gem and the Holograms. And there's a good discussion about its social and cultural importance. It's very interesting. What I love about Rocket is the tangents that they go down and nothing like the

tangents on any other show i listen to like they talk about like on episode one they had like a five minute tangent about the color of a handbag it's like i don't listen to any other tech shows that talk about this and that's why i love rocket and that's why you should listen to it because the more i listen to the show the more things that i'm finding myself learning about and it's it's very interesting because it's not that it's it's similar topics but not the same discussion so you should be checking it out so thanks to our friends at relay fm for sponsoring our show with you should listen to rocket they're nice guys those relay fm guys do we have an actual friend mike we do indeed Our friends over at lynda.com back to support this week's episode of Upgrade. lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help you learn

something cool. With lynda.com, you get access to a growing library of thousands of high quality, fantastically produced videos. These can be on software, on hardware, maybe you want to learn a little bit about Adobe Photoshop, maybe you want to learn a little bit about adobe photoshop maybe you want to learn a bit about photography linda if you want it linda's got it because they have these fantastic courses and as i mentioned they're adding adding every single week they have over 3 000 currently and they're adding more all of the time their courses are taught by people that know exactly what they're talking about they can help you look at things like you know i mentioned learning like software and hardware but maybe you want to set some new financial goals. Maybe you want to get better at productivity. Maybe you want to improve on your

job skills this year. lynda.com has something for you. You get access to view their tutorials, of course, on your laptop or your desktop PC or Mac, of course, and you can view them on iOS and Android because they have apps for those platforms too. Lynda.com has highlighted some courses they think that you might enjoy as listeners of Upgrade, like maybe you want to learn a bit about Swift. You may be developing an iOS app or you've been working on a Mac app or an iOS app for some time and you want to learn about how to port that over to Swift. They've got courses there. Maybe you want to get started in development. They have iOS app development training right there so you can learn from start to finish how to build a great iOS app. But let's say you've built the app or you've ported your app over to Swift and you

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trial at lynda.com by visiting lynda.com slash upgrade. Go ahead. I challenge you to learn something new and something awesome. Maybe something blue. Thank you so much to lynda.com for supporting this show and all of RelayFM. Did you just challenge me to a duel? Yes.

Okay. You English people do that sometimes, I think. Yeah, I can't help it. Dueling. I can't help it. That's a problem. Lynda at dawn, I think, is the term. We're topics now. we're in the topics

what should we talk about uh styluses and pens mike pens yes pens pens are a topic near and dear to my heart which i'm sure we will mention or jason will uh mock me for slightly but we'll see how we go with that. You wrote a great post. Something I've noticed about you recently. Oh, geez. You are writing posts after Clockwise about the things that you talk about

on Clockwise, and I think it's really interesting. You're talking to people and... I don't know what you're saying, Mike. What are you talking about? You're talking to interesting people, and they spark off a thought in you and you write really great posts. You should be connecting these together, Jason. Embrace it.

See, the – you know what John Syracuse always says is that podcasts are sort of like the first draft of something you're writing. And he laments the fact that he then never writes the thing almost ever that he's thought of. But I agree with that. Sometimes we talk about things that I've already written on this show. Other times we're talking about things that I'm working on or thinking about, and it helps clarify my thought process. And that's true on Clockwise as well. Sometimes I'll be working on something and I'll bring a topic in,

and other times it'll emerge from the conversation. And with the case of the styluses, it was a little bit of the latter. But yeah, so that definitely happens that there's a creative process involving talking about it and then writing about it or writing about it and then talking about it. It definitely goes together. I just think it's an interesting thing that I see. But I like it, though, because I listen to the show and then read your, and then I can see the two things going hand in hand. That's right. Well, my output is best observed as a whole. Listen to all the podcasts, read everything I write, and then it'll all make sense. It's a fabulous tapestry. So the idea about this is that there are rumors abound, and apparently they're from reliable supply chain sources, that there is going to be an iPad stylus of some description. oh, I don't know, attached to a specific type of iPad, which is larger, or if it's going to work with all iPads in some way, or they're going to redo all of the iPad line to include styluses.

We don't know that kind of detail yet, I don't think, or at least we don't know it reliably. But the idea is that there is going to be an iPad which has a stylus which can be used upon it. And of course, there are significant changes that would need to happen to the iPad to make it as reliable as say a Surface 3 with its stylus because there's a lot about pixel precision or a different type of touchscreen which would need to be thought about. But so basically if we just presume like we have with the MacBook Air stuff, we just presume that all things are simple and it's all doable.ason do you think that apple would likely do this and why would they do it likely is a is a strong word i i um as i wrote in my post i'm not a big fan of of the stylist just because i'm not a big fan of pens in general

sorry mike i i don't really i don't really like writing. My signature has degraded over time. My handwriting ability has degraded over time. I type really fast. I really prefer that. If I had to choose between writing on a piece of paper and typing on an iPad or even maybe typing on an iPhone, I would probably choose the device over the paper. But that's because I have terrible handwriting and I'm just, I don't like it. And so I'm not even motivated to make it good because I hate it. For Apple, so I'm coming at this, I mean, this is why I wrote, my piece was called Typed Thoughts About Styluses. It's like I'm not even writing, just I type things. I think Apple might do it, Two reasons. One is the classic Apple reason, which is other people are out there making money off of this. Maybe we could do it. And because we control the

platform and the hardware and the software, what we could do, we have access to the system at a level that no one else's pen has. So there is that, which is they might say, you know, all these pens are, it turns out people want them. Some people want them because there are all these styluses out there now. But they're really not that good because they're not integrated at a lower level. And why is that, Apple? It's because Apple hasn't bothered to do that. But still, you could use that as an argument and say, but now there's the Apple pen and, you know, Apple stylus.

And it is magical because it's got all this hardware and software and la, la, la. That makes sense to me. Apple has done that in the past. I always ascribe that to Steve Jobs. That always felt like one of Steve Jobs' strategies was find where people are making money off of your products and trump them if you can, because you keep that money for yourself. And he really did feel that way. He did. I think he was actually offended that other people made money off of his great works and felt that they were all just kind of parasites. I mean, I know he felt that way about Macworld, so I assume he felt that way about this Bose sound doc when they did the Apple or the iPod Hi-Fi and et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's

one reason. I think the other reason is that they legitimately think that there are some markets out there that could really use a pen that they've heard from, I don't know where, from hospitals, from the enterprise, from IBM talking to their enterprise customers, from artists, right? Whether it's directly or whether they've looked at the competition and seen that like Surface has a much better story when it comes to this stuff. I think it's more likely that it's stuff like that than that it's, oh, the Galaxy Note has a pen and we're envious of that. Although it is possible that their customers for the iPhone 6 Plus in Asia have said, we would really like it if we had a stylus. I suppose that's possible. I think that sounds weird to me, but that's a market that's very

different and the usage is very different there. So Serenity Caldwell, who I used to work with, she's now at iMore. She likes to draw. She's an artist. She tested every stylus that ever was released and continues to use them. She wrote a nice piece on iMore about this too. to. And for somebody like Serenity, you know, the potential there is really great because right now all the pen stuff is sort of like they have to write, the pen makers have to write their own like software package and get apps to support it. It's all kind of backward where it's a pressure sensitive pen because the tablet screen itself is not pressure sensitive. So they have to make the

pens pressure sensitive and Bluetooth and then relay that. The level of detail in the digitizer is made for fingertips and not really tiny pen sizes. And so that's a place where even if you've got a really nice pen, there's a limit to what you can do because of the digitizer. So there's, you know, the fact is the iPad, iPad especially has been poor at pen support since the beginning and Apple has made no efforts to make it better. So I'm not quite sure what is the motivator here, but it may be if this report is true, that something has tripped somebody at Apple, whether it's the existence of a bigger iPad or it's looking at competitors or it's hearing from customers and said, and made them say, oh, okay, well, we can do that. And when we do that, it'll, it'll be better than all the, all the rest,

because it'll be integrated with what we're doing because we control the hardware and the software. It's very Apple. So the way that I look at it, and you, you kind of spoke about this a bit, but it seems like quite a simple thing to me with if you are looking at creating an iPad or advancing the iPad and you want to have people work on it you want to have people use them in professional environments everything that you can tell them that it has is another good thing that it does so even if you think that somebody won't use, like a doctor won't actually use or need a stylus, if you have one and it's good and you tell them that it's there,

they're more likely to buy it than they're going to buy the competition. Every feature that people think that they need, whether they need it or not, if they think they need it and then Microsoft's doing it, that's a potential sale that you lose to Microsoft. And if that sale is that you've lost that to the CTO of a large company, well, then you're out of luck, boy. You know, that's kind of it. You're done then. You've missed that. And if Apple really want to make the iPad the future of computing, which I'm sure that they do, right? I'm sure that's what they want, because they're the leader in this space. If they can continue that, they are now Microsoft of the 90s, right? And I'm sure that there's an element of wanting to be the complete dominant force in the future of computing, right?

Why would they not want to do that? That's kind of why they exist to a point. Is that wrong to say? Like they're a big company. They want to be the best, right? Yeah, I think that's true the question is when is it worth it so i'm sure that if anybody at apple has talked to and i'm sure they have has talked to artists has gone to comic-con and talked to people who who do uh art

on ipads they've heard these stories right they? They've heard, if they read the Penny Arcade piece that I linked to in my piece about how the guy from Penny Arcade uses Surface, and he was really frustrated with the Surface 3 because the Surface Pro 2 had a better digitizer than the 3, and the 3 had some software problems. But in the end, he loved that because he could use Photoshop, which is what he worked in anyway, and he had this Wacom quality digitizer with pen support. And so for him, the Surface Pro was the perfect product to draw on. And if I'm Apple, you know, and I'm in charge of the iPad, or I'm in charge of, you know, reaching a certain market like that, then yeah, that really bugs me. The fact that all these artists are saying, nope, you know, that, that really bugs me. The fact that,

that all these artists are saying, nope, you know, can't use the iPad. It's not good enough. We try, we use it because we think it's cool, but in the end it's just so frustrating and there are better options. Um, that they probably know all of that and they've known that for years. The question is again, when is it worth it to do something about it? And maybe the answer is the existence of something like the iPad Pro, which they want to sell, and they think that artists are a potential big target market for that product. And it's like the iPhone 6 Plus. It doesn't need to be the definitive iPad.

It's a side iPad for a specific kind of smaller user base. And maybe that's one of the real use cases is, oh, okay, here's one way to differentiate the iPad Pro is, or Plus, or whatever it is, is the pen stuff and a really great digitizer. And maybe that's the thing that finally gets them to move and say, okay, fine, we'll support artists now, even though they knew it all along. Because again, do you ship a better digitizer in every single iPad when one in 50 people would take advantage of it? This is like the battery discussion, right? When is it enough to build that into

every single model because some small group wants it? So I think the answer of that is like, for me, it's twofold. Is it easy to do? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe with the current technology, it's not that much more difficult. And the other point is, will you get some other functionality because of it that you can use now or down the line? Will increasing the digitizer in the iPad allow you to do something else?

And if the answer is yes, then it might be an easier thing to say, here's your stylus. I've been thinking recently about siri quite a bit and trying to think about like when siri started we had it on the phone and now as we're moving down this this road we're seeing it pop up in places so siri is going to be one of the ways probably the main way that you interact with the Apple Watch. If you want to give it any sort of input, Siri is going to be the way that you do that. So I was thinking to myself, oh, well, did they create Siri,

knowing that we would use it in this way in the future and they needed it to get better or they needed us to get used to it? I mean, who knows, maybe. So it makes me think, with something like this, is there another reason that you may give all that you need to give for stylist support because later it enables you to do something else i don't know there's one thing i wanted to bring up about this because obviously the joke if you don't know the joke why this is funny on this show is because i am the host of a show on relay fm called the pen addict i've been doing this show for years it's you don't know the joke, why this is funny on this show is because I am the host of a show on Relay FM called The Pen Addict.

I've been doing this show for years. It's all those years and you haven't kicked your addiction, Mike. Never. So we've been doing the show for like three years. Basically, every network I've been a part of, The Pen Addict, has just come along for the journey. And the thing is, just because I love because I love pens i love pens i love i i love using pens i'll use love you pens on paper and and i like to take notes i take notes on pen and paper when we're recording the shows that kind of thing but just because i yes thank you he's clicking clicking

just because i like pens doesn't mean that i would like a stylus. Because everything I like about pens has nothing to do with writing, with producing written something. So it's not that at the end of the day I have something that's got my handwriting on it. It's the feeling of the pen. It's the design of the pen. It's the ink that goes in the pen. It's the way the pen feels in the paper, the weight of the pen. It's the design of the pen. It's the ink that goes in the pen. It's the way the pen feels in the paper, the weight of the pen. There are just all of these other things, all of the design things, all of the choices that you make,

all of the choices that you make to find a pen that represents you in a certain way. All of that is 100% not there with a stylus because ultimately what you're doing is writing with a specific point on glass. Like there's not, all of the nice stuff is not there for me. Right. But isn't that a little bit like saying, I like to read paper books because, oh, the feel of the paper and the smell of the paper. 100%.

100% what it is. It's experiential. And in the end, digital technology may take all needs for holding an implement and creating content to be digital. But the point is that you're not a fan of pen input. You're a fan of the experience of writing with a pen, which is not the same. Yeah, exactly. It's like if you're a fan of typewriters. You would be, you know i i like a typewriter yeah

i can type on a computer but i i'm a fan of a typewriter because i like to to have it be all clackety clacky and all you know and that that that would be about the experience um not about the output which i i get it i get it yeah just because you like typewriters doesn't mean you're gonna like um tom hanks's typewriter app right oh yeah you probably hate it actually yeah it's probably the worst possible thing you can imagine right right well it'll be i i had a back and forth with a guy who is a little bit feisty on twitter about pen stuff um and he said he is a um uh in higher ed and said that basically iPads are totally not acceptable for note-taking and that the surface is. And he was talking about using pen input to do like essentially

your lecture notes. And I just don't believe that's, I don't, maybe I am being an old fogey here, but I don't, and I also hate pens and I hate paper. I don't think that using a tablet computer to write down notes as if it was a piece of paper is a good use of anybody's time. I disagree with you. I can get it. Oh, all right. Disagreement. Yeah. I see that and i think i think

it seems really impractical like unless you are adding something to it um i can see the value of like if it's recording the lecture while you're writing and you can you can point at the thing you wrote and play back the the the sound that was in the room when you wrote it so you can confirm your notes and all of that but just at some point I feel like you're just replicating paper on this device, and that's not good enough. There should be better experiences than that. You should not – note-taking on a tablet should not be digital paper with digital ink. It should be something else because if it's just digital paper and digital ink,

just get a notepad and a pen, please, right? You need to do something more than that. And I worry that some of the stylus stuff, I mean, that's that's always in the early days of the tablet computers. That's exactly what Microsoft always talked about was that sort of approach. And it's dumb. That's that you need to you need to add to the experience. And and I'm not a longhand writing person. So I would be happy to have an iPad in my lap in the classroom or a keyboard and taking notes that way. But I can understand that some other people might prefer to do it a different way. So with that, like handwriting allows for a more freeform style of note taking.

And there are certain people, myself included, who think better in this way. included who think in it better in this way rather than just taking notes in like a bullet point list of what's happening you can draw things and you can draw bubbles and you can highlight and you can scribble around this part and draw a little key anime like let's see you got little keys so you remember what parts here and so there there are definite benefits that if you think that way that that handwriting notes can can make sense i i understand to a point where you're saying there has to be something more but sometimes just the pure idea of I can take notes in the way that I want and I won't ever lose them because they're backed up to the cloud is enough. Because at the moment, you've got a paper notebook, which is destructible by a zillion different ways.

Right. And even though, of course, a tablet is destructible, if it's connected to the internet, your notes are safe forever. They are then, like you can use ICR scanning on them for searching, something like Evernote. You've got a really good handwriting for that. Yeah, of course. I don't know.

It depends how, I don't know how good the OCR software needs to be to get different people. But then there are more things that you could do. Like, for example, then if they're digital, you can move them around and reorganize them and stuff like that so there are there are basics for why it's good but i agree with you that it can't i don't think it's compelling enough for most people to just say that's that you know oh that's all you're gonna that's all it's gonna be it's just you can take paper notes, but on a glass screen instead. Yeah, I can see that.

I mean, when I take notes, I don't take it on paper. When I was in college, I didn't take it in a really super linear way or like with an outliner. I would write down key phrases and circle them and draw arrows and sorts of things like that. and draw arrows and sorts of things like that. But I would never recommend anybody do my style of note-taking in college because it was indecipherable. Even if you could read my terrible handwriting, it wouldn't make any sense

because I was just not, I think I was not a big, I was a big picture note-taker, not a detailed note-taker most of the time. But I can see that. It's interesting. Yeah, I have some skepticism that when somebody says, oh, well, in higher ed, what students really want is the ability to sit there with a tablet and a pen and take notes. I'm going to profess

some skepticism to that. I'm not sure that that just, it feels a little one-to-one from the old tech to the new tech to me. And maybe the answer is no, just, it feels a little one-to-one from the old tech to the new tech to me. And maybe the answer is no, no, it's not. It's recognizing your handwriting as you write it and that's being indexed as searchable text and all these other fantastic things are happening. Maybe, maybe. And maybe it's just that I look at that and think I just bring a 11-inch error and type instead,. We'll see. It'll be interesting to see what the story is if Apple really does go down the stylus route. Thanks for disagreeing with me.

Anytime. Mr. Pen Addict. Quite literally, anytime. You got ink in your veins. That's dangerous. You should have somebody look at that. You know you're an addict when you do a kickstarter uh to talk about pens yes that's uh which you did put that link in the show notes i will

because congratulations mike you are headed to atlanta it seems like it yes basically my and i brad we have never met in person and there there is a pen show in Atlanta, which is a trade show. So we're looking to get together and record a show in person as I'm going to be at the Atlanta Pen Show. I was thinking it would be like, was more like a gladiatorial duel kind of show where like two pens enter, one pen leaves. There's just like pools of ink everywhere. But it's actually just a trade show. So that's a trade show. All right.

That's less exciting, but fine. Should we talk about some more friends? Please. Jason, we have a new friend today. A new friend? A new friend. All right. Let me tell you about our new friend. It's Casper. I've talked about them before on other podcasts, but it's nice to talk about Casper here. Casper, you may have heard of them.

Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses for a fraction of the price of where you could get a premium mattress elsewhere. These are some tech people who figured that they could do a better job making a mattress and selling it to you on the internet, shrink wrapping it and sending it to you in a box. And then you open it up and it just kind of expands. Open it in the room that you're going to use it because it expands to fill the space. I tried this, the box came to my house, we brought it into the bedroom, opened it up. And for the last couple of months, I've been sleeping on a Casper mattress. It's got two different technologies. It's got latex foam and memory foam. Casper likes to say it's just

the right sink and just the right bounce. I found sitting on the Casper mattress, I had this moment where I realized that the mattress we had before was kind of bouncy. It was like a trampoline kind of thing where like the cat would be sitting on the bed and you'd sit down and the cat would jump off because it would be. And now it's not like that. It's a really comfortable mattress. I was worried that the foam stuff was going to be weird. It's not. It's super comfortable. Really, yeah, really, they say for better nights and brighter days. I got to say, it is a really comfortable mattress.

What's great about it, too, if you're weirded out by the idea of trying a mattress, is they have a risk-free trial. So you don't have this fear that if you don't like it, you're stuck with it for who knows how long, regardless, which is usually what it's like with regular mattresses. You can sleep on a Casper for 100 days, free delivery and painless return. So if you don't like it, you can send it back. The mattresses are made in America and the prices compared to industry averages are outstanding. It's $500 for a twin up to $950 for a king. So I think it's worth checking it out. You can buy it on the internet. I know a lot of our listeners enjoy buying things on the internet and not venturing out and dealing

with people in stores, especially mattress stores. They are the worst. So here's what you need to do. You can get $50 toward any mattress purchase. What you need to do is go to casper.com. That's if you like www, you can stick that in there too,.casper.com slash upgrade and use promo code upgrade to get the $50 discount. You should definitely check it out. 100-day free trial so you can return it if you need to, risk-free. And you may really like it because I really like it and I'm glad that we have a Casper mattress. So thank you to our friends at Casper. They help me sleep soundly at night with their neat mattress that I now have. But open it in the room that you're... Seriously, because it's super shrink

wrapped into a little thing and then when you open it up, it just kind of comes out and goes to full size. Thanks, Casper. Seems like a different kind of magic. That does. goes to full size thanks casper seems like a different kind of magic that does yeah yeah it's i i bought a beanbag chair uh the other the other month and uh it was the same thing it came in this tiny box i'm like really they said this would be a big beanbag chair and then you open up the the uh the super vacuum wrap and it just it's like oh my god it's gonna take over the whole house uh but it's pretty that's that's shipping magic because they because they compact it as much as they can

until it gets to the destination so there you go $50 off use the code upgrade thank you so much thanks Casper I spent a lot of time this weekend with videotapes Mike

welcome to the 1990s, Kost. Well, some of these tapes were from the 80s. Wow. I know, I know. I heard about those 80s, you know. They were a scene, man. They were crazy. Yeah, I have had for a long time.

I saved a VCR. I saved my old camcorder, which I can use to do an analog to digital conversion. It's got a Firewire port on it. And I saved a bunch of these old videotapes that I had never converted to digital. And so I just wrote this up on Six Colors. I decided they were all sitting nearby, and a couple of them I had brought out for some other project. And I looked and thought, huh, maybe I should give that a try now, see if I can get that working. That was hilarious because I had to get the input into my computer. I had to

find, which I still had the iLink to FireWire 400 cable. iLink was like mini FireWire 400. Sony used it on their camcorders. So you had to get a special cable because it was FireWire, but it was a weird port, little port. So I had to get that. Okay, so now I've got iLink in the camera and I've got a FireWire 400 cable on the other end.

So then I need to find my FireWire 400 to 800 converter, which I found. Then it's time for the Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 converter. And then you plug that into the computer and it actually worked. I was able to get the output for my VCR to display on iMovie and Final Cut, the current versions, but they wouldn't record the audio or the video. They, they seem to be thinking like, I'm going to download,

I don't know, a file from this camera. And the, the, the, it didn't work. It didn't. I don't know if they could think.

They were, well, they saw the, the thing is they saw the video. So it was streaming through, but they, there was no ability to record it. So I went,

I downloaded, or actually I still have it on my system, iMovie 9. And iMovie 9 would grab it in these DV file format, which is the most inefficient video file format ever. They're these enormous files for standard definition video. But it worked. But it worked. And so I found a tape that had an appearance that I made on Call for Help, the ZDTV show with Leo Laporte from 1999, where I showed people how to do print preview in the new version of Internet Explorer for Mac for OS 9. Woohoo! Or OS 8, maybe.

It might have been a late 8 and not even 9 yet. Yeah, good times. And I found, like, a concert that I had, I was actually the director. It was a rock concert with students and teachers in my high school, my, I think, like, junior, sophomore, junior year in high school. And I found that and I posted that on my Facebook page to all the people who are in it, who are all friends of friends on Facebook, if not direct friends. And that was really fun. But a 20-year-old videotape, 30-year-old videotape, they're kind of dirty and they're falling apart. And I actually had to unscrew the VCR top and pop it off so that every so often it would just tangle. And VHS, so that I could just every so often it would just tangle.

And VHS, an incredibly inefficient, weird format where it's got to like suck the tape in. It flips open the little thing and sucks the tape in. And it's just so easy for that to go wrong. And it did frequently. I had to get like isopropyl alcohol and some paper to use as like swabs, pieces of paper to clean the heads on the VCR. So i ended up with just like the vcr completely open to the world and would occasionally have to eject the tape and clean the heads and wind the tape back or untangle it because it got tangled all around i had a real joy reading this because it was pretty crazy crazy it was it was pretty it was

pretty insane but in the end you know those people on Facebook who probably only vaguely remember that they did this student teacher rock concert in 1987. And then there was two songs and the intro for the whole band. So, you know, they're all on there being introduced by one of the teachers who is the lead singer for that band. And, you know, they all got to see it on Facebook. And that was actually pretty cool. And I posted the Leo Laporte thing and I've got a whole tape of Tech TV that I at some point will have to pull off too because that was hilarious.

Just, hey, IE 4.5 for Mac is new. Let me tell you about print preview. Me at 29 years old or whatever, 28 years old. I'm pretty sure i could talk to you for about an hour about that that that 10 minute clip or whatever of you and leo maybe maybe we should do that in a future episode that might be uh you know we should do we should we should break it down well we should do riff tracks it could be a connected episode just just break it down like bit for bit what troubleshooting was like in the 90s when's the next anniversary of that we'll make sure we cover

that video oh you know sadly we just we just missed an anniversary for that well you know we got it we got a whole year 15th anniversary of it so i'll pull some other other stuff off of there at some point but uh it's funny, when you've got nothing to lose, it becomes a lot easier to do some of this stuff. Like, I'm not really worried about breaking my VCR or these tapes. It's like either I can get them to work or I can't. So flipping the top off and, like, making my own improvised head cleaner with a piece of paper and some alcohol, it's fine. It's just like I just don't care. It's like, it's not like anybody in my family

is going to be angry because I broke the VCR, right? I mean, nobody cares. So, you know, and it worked. So that's, it's pretty, pretty funny. The other thing I learned, by the way, is that I saved all these, like, David Letterman shows from the 80s that were, like, favorite moments. And I always thought, well, I'll record those

at some point digitally so I've gots that were like favorite moments. And I always thought, well, I'll record those at some point digitally. So I've got those to say these favorite moments. And as I was looking at the tape and saying, oh, that's this episode, I would do a Google search for the show and the names of the guests, because there's like a comprehensive index of all of the David Letterman shows. And so it would say, oh, that's May 20th, 1986. You know, and say, all right, that's cool. But what I discovered is that when I searched for that, I would also find YouTube clips of the whole show. So what I discovered is a lot of these moments that I saved on a videotape for 30 years, figuring, you know, I want to keep that around. I waited so long that somebody else who was a much more obsessive saver and taper and archiver and whatever than I was by far, that person was also way ahead of me in uploading that stuff to the Internet.

So, you know, most of the stuff I didn't need to actually bring it in. I just needed to find it on the internet because it's almost all on. It's kind of crazy. Like I'm sure not every episode of late night with David Letterman from the eighties is on the internet, but the, the two that I was looking for, I found immediately. So the entire episode. So that's pretty crazy.

So, you know, the internet's a big, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird,

weird place. One of the interesting things when looking at this and i've thought of this before i pretty much just assume now that if i have thought of something i want to find a clip of something yeah it's going to be on youtube because somebody else will have already done that if it's something really popular um it may not for copyright reasons. Like it's hard to find Simpsons clips on YouTube. Right. Because they find those and take those down. But, you know, late night with David Letterman episode from May of 1986, not such a problem.

Nobody is looking for that. NBC isn't out there shutting down that stuff. And that's great because I watched an entire episode of that show from 1986 this weekend on YouTube, on my TV. And that was a lot of fun to go back to that point. And I'm feeling a little nostalgic because that was my favorite. That was, you know, in some ways the defining comedy for me of my life was in high school, I'd watch David Letterman's show every night. And, you know, my sense of humor developed because of that. And I think if you look, if you talk to people in the entertainment industry, I mean, he's such an influential figure for people who do comedy and TV and even like stand-up comedy today, just a huge influence. And so he's retiring. And so I've been a little nostalgic for that. That's one of

the reasons I wanted to pull out these videotapes. And it turns out that I don't really have a lot to contribute to the YouTube conversation about the history of this show, because like I said, somebody's gotten there before me and they've done a much more comprehensive job than I did. And so that's great because I can just do searches and find this stuff. And that's cool. So yeah, it's a big world. And there's always somebody more obsessed with something than you. You cannot win an effort war against the internet. I learned this.

I'm going to bring it all the way back around to Crowded House. A friend of mine ran the Crowded House mailing list, the internet fan mailing list, like email mailing list. And he got to know the guy who did the Crowded House fan club. mailing list, the internet fan mailing list, uh, like, you know, email mailing list. And, uh, he got to know the guy who did the crowded house fan club. And he had, uh, my friend build a, uh, we built a web, a webpage that was the archive for the mailing list. And I helped him, I helped him build it. And, um, and the guy in the fan club was like, Oh, that's really awesome. You guys are on the internet doing things about the band because it was early days of the internet and things weren't on the internet. And then at some point, a super madly obsessed fan decided to build a comprehensive site about the band and everything connected to the band.

And my friend Mark and I looked at each other and we're like, okay, we can stop now because we were just, we're like, hey, we're on the internet and we like this band and there's this mailing list. So we'll build a couple of pages. And then all of a sudden, oh my God, there is somebody who is just so far out of our league in terms of enthusiasm. And she just went to town with the, you know, with the fan site. And that was, that was my first real moment of, you can't win the effort war against a totally dedicated fan. And there is always someone more dedicated than you on the internet. And so we were like, okay, we're not going to update this page anymore.

Go over there. She's got it. She's got it all and more. And it was a funny moment. And I just, I relived that again with the guy who uploaded all the David Letterman episodes to YouTube. Crazy. But home movies and stuff, that stuff, I mean, that's what I'm looking for now in these tapes, is stuff that literally nobody else has.

It's possible. Is it possible that I have local Sacramento area TV commercials from the 80s that people would get a really kick out of seeing again? Yeah, probably. Am I going to be the person who puts those on the internet? Yeah, probably not. But stuff like that concert where there are some tapes out there, people on Facebook who said, yeah, I think I have that tape somewhere too.

But it's less likely that nobody's bothered to put it on the internet so far, so maybe I should give it a whirl. Talking about superfans, this is something completely random, but it was in my brain because of Kickstarter. Have you seen the Exploding Kittens card game Kickstarter? Is that past your eye at all? No, no.

One of the people that's involved in the creation of this card game is The Oatmeal, so Sean Damon. It's a card game. It's of this card game is the oatmeal so sure it's a card game it's a crazy card game uh it's it's been going for six days i think five or six days it's up to 3.9 million dollars at the moment wow within the first 48 hours it was one of the i think the top 20 of all time like it's insane because it doesn't i've backed it because it looks like a lot of fun it looks like a silly card game um like in the best possible way right that's what it's meant to be it's meant to be a silly card game it's called exploding kittens but it's just that

amount of money is insane 3.9 it will it will probably make like five six million dollars yeah maybe more maybe they're at four million with 24 days to go yeah it's incredible like really really incredible you just see some things like where are these people coming from i hope they build a profit margin into their uh into their sales because they're going to be making an awful lot of cards they're going to be making a hundred thousand plus sets of cards yeah cards against humanity are doing the fulfillment ah they that in their faq they kind of said the worst thing is when you have to wait like you know that we really want to make our date so we have cards

against humanity doing it for us because they can handle any amount so i wonder if they really can but we'll see about that well they're probably on the press they're probably on the press yeah the great thing about it being funded is that um they can start doing a run now they probably started beforehand to be honest sure like because you know if they're working with the cards people they could probably have just always thought about putting in retail anyway because i think i think the cards against humanity people are becoming a bit of like a publisher as well now. But yeah, I find things like that fascinating. Where are these people coming from?

Where are they coming from to find this project? Anyway, just really, really interesting and cool. Anywho, shall we take our last break for today's episode now? Would you like to do that? Or would you like to talk about something else before that? What do you want to do? I've got one item that I could do really quickly, and then we can just have our last sponsor be sponsoring hashtag ask upgrade segment, which I like.

I would like that. I did a quick link before that about YouTube. Maybe we'll push that one off until next week. Are you okay with that? Yeah, because I really want to talk about this, and I think we'll end up going too long on it. Yeah, so we'll push that one off. We've already talked a lot about YouTube today.

I wanted to mention something funny that happened. I couldn't believe this when I saw it. And I need to explain this because people, I think, are misinterpreting it a little bit. It is fascinating to me. So I got approached. Paul Thorat left the Windows Supersite to start his own site. And I got approached by the company that owns that site.

And they were doing a whole shift with Paul leaving. And they're bringing in a new editor and all of that. And they talked to me about a bunch of different stuff. And I said, I'm not really comfortable. It's not my area of expertise. And they're like, how about you write a column for us about Apple stuff? Because the people who are IT professionals have to deal with Apple stuff and they don't know a lot about it necessarily. And I said, well, they're going to be mad at you because they're going to say, how dare you put Apple stuff on my Windows site? And they said, that's fine. We want to do this. This is something that we think is going to be valuable. And I said, all right, I'll give it a go. And so I wrote a piece. I'm going to be, until somebody stops me, writing a weekly piece on the super site, which is formerly Paul Theriot's site, about Apple stuff for an audience of

basically Windows IT professionals. So that's going to be interesting. And the reaction I told, I mean, I knew what the reaction was going to be. It's actually kind of delightful to not be the editor in charge of the site that's getting the angry reaction because I've been that person. And I know that they're like, I can't believe you're doing this. And why are we, why do we have to read about this? And, and so it's kind of nice to just be the writer because I can just focus on what I'm going to focus on. And, you know, I, I'm not really interested. There are a lot of people who are like, it's exactly what would happen if Macworld did a whole column about Windows,

which I think maybe we did at some point and people were like, ah, this is outrageous. Why are you doing this? And so, you know, my goal with that is to bridge the gap. I mean, my goal is literally like the premise is IT people have to support Apple stuff now, you know, in almost every environment, they're at least supporting iPhones and they may be supporting iPads and

they may be supporting Macs and they don't always know a whole lot about them because they are not Mac people. And if I can bring some perspective about what Apple's doing in general and in businesses, as somebody who used a Mac in a business that was very windows focused for a long time. Cause IDG was always a very windows focused company, um, in terms of the technology. Um, if I can bring some of that kind of Apple knowledge to not to convert anybody,

I don't even want to play the tribalism games and people who are angriest about it are very tribalistic. They're like, I can't believe there's Apple things here. Oh, I hate Apple. It's like, okay oh i hate apple it's like okay whatever i've i've i've met that it person who hates apple and doesn't know why we would use these terrible things that apple makes when they could we could use amazing things that people companies that are not apple make um but my goal is that is to bring is to bring my perspective to a site that is read by people who don't have it and not to convert them, but to arm them with knowledge and information about this thing that they probably need to know more about to be well-rounded professionals. And if it works, then great.

I'm looking forward to giving it a try. It's a little outside my comfort zone, but the Apple subject is not, but the catering to a more businessy and more IT audience is a little different for me. And I'm going to give it a go. And at some point, if the editors of the site say, look, it's not working, they don't want to read it, we don't want to pay you, then so be it. This is a terrible mistake. It's a here in the first place then then they will then i will stop writing it and they will stop paying me for it but uh as it is it's yeah it's a it's a uh you know a weekly freelance thing i have received a couple of tweets that are like i can't believe they hired jason to work no no they did not hire me

they are they are paying me to write them a column once a week. And that's a, I had one person say, what does this mean for six colors? And the answer is there's a reason that I'm paying Dan Morin to do six colors on Thursdays. And maybe, you know, maybe more, more time at some point is so that I can do freelance work. Um, cause, uh, I, I, and I'm doing, this is the first, I think freelance work that's been really visible, but I got, I I've got a lot of other freelance stuff going on that will hit. I've got a story for the wire cutter that should be going up later this month. I did write that story for, for sweet setup. Um, and I, you know, I'm talking to people about some other stuff too. So, um, it seemed like a fun challenge. They really wanted to work with me. And, you know, again, if I kind of over the whole tribalism wars between platforms kind

of thing. And if people want to get angry about that, then, you know, they're welcome to, but I'm not going to get angry about it. I think good IT professionals should be well-armed with knowledge about this Apple stuff. And a lot of them didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it and now they're forced to support it. And if I can interpret what Apple is doing and what Mac and iOS users want to them so that they're better able to understand what those people want, then I think that's good for them. And that's sort of what my goal is. You can appreciate the craziness of it though, right? On the surface of it, how crazy it does seem. Oh, sure. The Mac world you know you're like you're like the

bill gates in the steve jobs scenario you know you're like staring down on win super site and be like yeah i am the mac guy it's cool though the bigger issue is that you know paul the founder of the site left and you know i if i were a loyal reader of that site i'd be like what are they doing what's going on they're ruining everything ruining everything here. But change is hard. Change is hard. I mean, that was true at Macworld. That was certainly true when we were doing things with PC World and the audience was angry.

Macworld's audience was angry that we covered iOS. I mean, people get angry about all sorts of stuff. This would never have happened if Thorot was still alive. One of my favorite things about Six Colors is from day one, you've had other people writing on the site. I just like that because it is you,

but you have other people. Well, I took a page from Federico and I put Jason Snell and friends at the top. Yeah, it's nice. I like it a lot. It is still difficult sometimes because I think you're writing everything. So I have to check.

But there's just nothing you can do about that, really. It's the same problem that the loop has had forever. No matter who writes it, everybody initially thinks it's Jim. Yeah. I put a byline and a bio on all of Dan's pieces now because people keep asking me things about Dan's pieces. That's fine. It's, you know, it happens, but it has been there since the beginning.

You can take that as a compliment to both of you though, because. And Glenn wrote something on that. I posted on Friday and Glenn Fleischman. So, you know, I've had, I've had a few other people on there.

Dan Frakes wrote something and Steve Makino wrote something. And, you know, I'm not, I'm not at the point now where six colorsors is a site with a staff or anything. It's still really me and Dan one day a week. And, yeah, we'll see where it goes. I would love to get to the point where Dan could do even more.

And it would become like a little staff. As we record this, it's Monday. The Apple financial results are tomorrow. Dan and I will be cranking up the live blog machine. Oh, you're going to do the live tweet? For that, yeah. Yes! I loved that last time. That was so much fun. So I'd like to get to the point where I would love it if Six Colors

had a little bit of a staff and it wasn't just me and Dan on Thursdays. And we'll see. What's the Twitter account for the live? I'll put it in the show notes. I think the live... Oh, let's see it's something weird because i don't have six colors on twitter it's um it's six colors event s i x colors event cool but we'll also we'll also embed that tweet stream on the on the site

very cool very cool i like that last time that was that was a lot of fun you two are We'll also embed that tweet stream on the site. Very cool. Very cool. I liked that last time. That was a lot of fun. You two are a good pairing for that kind of thing. So yeah, let's talk about MailRoute. And because MailRoute are bringing you all of your Ask upgrade this week.

All of the Ask upgrade that you could ask for is being brought to you by MailRoute. Yes, and thank you to MailRoute. I've talked about them before. I have MailRoute on my domain and it is the way it works is it is sitting between my mail server

and the internet. And MailRoute's dedicated servers are scanning all inbound mail for spam, for viruses viruses from bounced mail and that stuff just doesn't get through so so my mail server never gets that junk that junk never even reaches the server let alone my client so you open your you open your mail and this is what i do and my inbox is clear and and even my spam folder is pretty much clear because the spam has been incarcerated at MailRoute's servers. The light is green. The trap is clean. That's a Ghostbusters reference. Mike,

have you seen Ghostbusters? Of course I've seen Ghostbusters. Okay. Thank goodness. Well, The Princess Bride for Pete's sake. See it. That's your assignment. That's your homework. See The Princess Bride. So the spam is gone. And because it is happening in the cloud, I don't need to install any special software or hardware. It all just happens before it even reaches me. So it was super easy to set up. I can manage it for all of the users in my domain. And everybody gets their own thing that they can tweak.

There is an optional spam report that can be sent to you that lists everything that has been stopped and hasn't reached you. That can make for some really amusing reading. Sometimes I just like to read the subject lines because it's hilarious to see what spammers are trying to do to get past the front door and failing. And if I do see something that's legit in there, it's one click and it's delivered and that person is whitelisted. So it's super easy to do. If you're an email administrator or IT professional, they are thinking of you. This service is used at large universities and corporations as well. They've built tools with you in mind. There's an API for account management, LDAP support, Active Directory support, TLS,

mailbagging, a bell, nice, and outbound relay, everything you want if you are an email admin or an IT pro pro and so here's what you do remove spam from your life for good by going to mail route.net slash upgrade you'll get a free trial and 10 off for the lifetime of your account so thank you very much to our friends at mail route for sponsoring the show and for filtering the spam out of my mail i'm scared that i'm upping the game with the mailbagging. And eventually, like, I'm going to have to bring in like a brass band. Like, if I start here, if I start here, like, where do I end up going?

Yeah. Well, you're down that path now. It's too late for you. Good luck. Hashtag AskUpgrade. Brought to you by MailRoute. Here we go. You know that guy guy the guy who has the twitter account that just complains about sponsors on podcasts actually said something nice about the fact that we have verticals that are sponsored yeah i don't want to talk about that

i really don't want to get into that again brought to you by mail route listener uh timocus i i i don't know i think that may be a twitter name says if you take the computer guts from a macbook and put it into a small box could apple make a mac nano mac mac what was it mac x what was that x mac there it it is. My brain found it. Do you remember that? Yeah, but that's the mythical mid-range Mac mini tower. Lots of Ms. But in theory, that's what this would probably be, right? No, I think Timicus is thinking of a Mac mini that's even smaller. Like, how small could you make the Mac mini if you took like a MacBook air

circuit board? Although the Mac mini pretty much is that, I mean, the Mac mini is pretty close. How much smaller could the Mac mini be really? Um, and Apple seems to not be interested in making computers that you can open ever, ever again. Uh, but I think the Mac mini could get smaller. I think there, there are some, there are some heat issues and all of that. And I don't know what they're doing with the Mac Mini, but that is essentially what the Mac Mini is. It's a laptop that's just inside that little aluminum shell. It's an interesting idea.

How small? Again, how small does a Mac Mini need to be? Does it really matter how small it is? And yet... I don't think though that the the the case there is the physical size it's the cost barrier so the mac mini now is is we've been through this is very underpowered yes yes it's gotten cheaper the mac pro is for most people way overpowered but it's also way overpriced it's

massive not overpriced it's just way highly priced it's very expensive yes and you have to have a real reason for that but if you want a desktop mac like you don't want a laptop you want a desktop mac like i did mac mini was not powerful enough and then the mac pro is very expensive so having something sitting in the middle there is an interesting idea. And the idea of it being effectively a beefed up laptop sitting inside a box, that is enticing to many people, especially if you maybe want a small Mac

to put in the living room. There are many applications for it. And looking at what Apple is doing with the Mac Mini and what they're doing with the Mac Pro, they are leaving this huge gap in the middle that not for everyone isn't fulfilled by either the iMac or a laptop. But it's a choice to leave that gap. And I'm sure that they've done enough thinking and market research to be happy to leave that on the table. But for people that are looking for an option, there is a space there, I think. Yeah. Yep, I don't think they're ever going to do it.

I think that's the iMac. They just like, you know, the Mac Mini is one edge case and Mac Pro is the other. And then in the middle, how about a monitor attached to that computer? Yeah, I would say that it's perfectly fine to have just a Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, but the Mac Mini's taken a regression, which that's the problem. Right, which we talked about. Yeah. Yeah. Listener Nicholas asks, how do you manage semi-shared media like music and photos in your household with individual organization,

but avoiding duplicates? And there's probably a whole show here but i'm curious uh what you do with your media just the short version of this is what do you do with media and and you know music and photos in you know where do you store that stuff how do you do that um i don't i would love to say i had a really good system for it um i don't know. I put a lot of it in Dropbox, to be honest. A lot of the media goes in Dropbox. And I have an external hard drive that I use for what I call cold storage.

So if I've had something for a long period of time, I'll put it onto the external hard drive for cold storage. But then again again the thing is it's all mine though really i don't that that's just what i do with my stuff i actually don't really have uh a shared system of anyone at the moment i think that sort of stuff comes when you have kids that's true i i have um i have Mini. See, it's all connected. I have a Mac Mini with music files on it, and then that is shared throughout the house because I've got these, you know, squeeze box music players that are like Sonos except discontinued. And so they all have access to that, and I have access to that on my computers, and, you know, we can all listen to music that way. out of my computers and all you know we can all listen to music that way um photos is a disaster um i'm looking forward to the photos app whenever it may arrive because we still have

iphotolibraries that are way too large and are backed up but they're sort of like only in one place and it's actually now you know i i can open them from my computer but they're just it's slow and it's it's painful i can't speak to the truth of this right now, but I saw somebody tweet earlier that all mentions of the Photos app has been removed from the Apple website. Wow, that's interesting. Yes, concerning is what it is. Since that was promised this year and they've stopped working on the other stuff. Well, that's really interesting. I'm now kind of just scanning the Apple website

to see if I can see it anywhere. I definitely cannot. It's not on the Yosemite page. I'll tell you what, I'll take a look on it. It was on the iOS 8 page before, wasn't it? Well, it is possible that they're doing that because they've got something to roll out and when they they roll it out they want it to all be that message and not about this future thing it could be uh hopefully person would say that hopefully currently the

imagery uh shows iPhoto nice which is not good not not good. On the photos page now, on the iCloud slash photos page, there is no imagery of the desktop app. Right, which they had. They sent me a sample, a mock-up of the pro version of the photos app. The aperture replacement version. My memory says there used to be an image which was the phone, the iPad, and the Mac. That imagery does not exist anymore. Oh, dear. version my memory says there used to be an image which was the phone the ipad and the mac that that imagery does not exist anymore oh dear yeah let's just hope that they just they've revamped it a

little bit and they don't want to they don't want to spill the beans let's hope it's that yeah sure think positive uh listener lex who is not lex friedman i thought it was lex friedman it's not lex friedman okay says have you ever had those moments where you felt like you were living in the future i was at a bar i heard a great song i held my phone in the air bought the song with my fingerprint the future is here hashtag relay your feels hashtag ask upgrade he's going for everywhere yeah he wants yeah but you know i just like that just like that moment. Somebody from Apple get Listener Lex on the line.

That demo as well. Yeah, that happens. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but every now and then you get that like, oh, man, how am I doing this kind of feeling? Can you believe that that just happened? I love those moments when they come. And I like, you know, that we were talking, you listen to these shows that speculate about technology. And the funny thing is you realize that, you know, you don't go from dreaming that there's going to be the science fictional thing and then a lot of time passes and then you have that moment where you realize oh you know all the pieces it's no longer like in the future we will instead of telephones we'll communicate via video phone and you think well when's that going to happen when are they going to sell us a video phone and the reality was we all got you know smartphones and facetime and you know that's sort what happened. And it's not the phone system, and it's the internet, and it's not a phone that you're using, or it is a phone, but not the phone as we thought of it back then.

It takes those steps, and you realize that technology now exists to make this thing that we used to think was magical, and now you can see how it will all be put together, if not now, then in the near future. Those are neat moments where you realize, oh, all the pieces of that are here now. They're all plausible now. And that in the next five years, we'll probably see something like that. Whatever it is, some science fictional thing. And those are neat moments, too. They definitely are. And then listener Chris sent us a song

or a parody lyrics to an existing song I'm not going to sing it I don't know what the song is I thought I was going to sing it it's God Bless the USA I don't know if I know where that goes yeah but anyway

proud to be an Upgradian is the key phrase there so thank you to listener Chris and I at one point late last night But anyway, proud to be an Upgradian is the key phrase there. So thank you to listener Chris. And I, at one point late last night, after having had several beers and played Dungeons & Dragons for four hours, I thought that I was going to sing that song to end this episode. And I am not opposed to singing.

In fact, I sang a couple times during the Dungeons & Dragons podcast. I am not going to sing today. Are you not singing today because you had some beers during the Dungeons & Dragons podcast? That's possible, too. It's too late. I left all my singing out there. But thank you, listener Chris, for the parody song lyrics. Hashtag AskUpgrade, American

flag emoji. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. If you'd like to find the show notes for today's show, you can point your web browser at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 20, or of course, go into the app that you're using and click on

the correct button, and they'll be right there in front of you. I think the reason that I do this is because I think most people that are listening in an app know the show notes are probably there and it's more for the people that don't know where to go. I don't know.

That's kind of my thinking. It's good to mention the web address because a lot of people, you know, people listen to podcasts, they don't tie it to the web. And so they may not know that there is a page, that there is a website for Relay.

And so, you know, it's good to reinforce that, that yes, there is a website and you can always go there to look up what we were talking about on a past show. When you get to wherever you're driving right now,

you can go to the web and look it up. Or yes, you can look at it in the app. Because also there is there is additional information on the website sometimes so sometimes there's there's stuff that's like images and stuff that not all clients show but if you want to find the links to contact us or if you want to find us on twitter and stuff like that even though we mentioned a bunch of it it's all there as well so it's it's just an additional use but that is is a very good point. But I don't know enough about all of the apps to give people effective instructions on where to go. It's there somewhere.

Or just go to the web. Or just go to the web. If you want to find us on Twitter, you can do so. I am at iMike. But, of course, I should have introduced at Jsnell first like a gentleman would. Yes. You're backsliding there. I've been trying to do that this week, and then that just slipped out out then i had it in my brain like i've got to do it but

nope totally totally forgot about it so at jay snell on twitter j s n e double o and of course jason writes the fantastic six colors dot com along with some of his friends and spell it you can spell it in the english way if you'd like to uh i think you should um and that will also take you to the fantastic six colors. And as I mentioned, I am Mike Hurley, and you can find many of my shows at relay.fm. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to our sponsors again, Linda, Casper, and MailRoute.

And we'll be back next time. Bye-bye. Say goodbye, Mike. Oh, goodbye, Jason. I finally get to do that.