Upgrade - 3: I Think You'll Find It's Bazqux

Episode Date: September 29, 2014

This week Jason and Myke discuss the perils of online streaming services and the uniquely modern problem of having 1TB of Dropbox storage.

Hello and welcome to episode 3 of Upgrade on RelayFM. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Cards Against Humanity and Pilot. We'll tell you a little bit about those fantastic companies a little later on in the show. My name is Mike Hurley and I am joined by your host, Mr. Jason Snell. Mike, three is a magic number. It's a magic number. One, two, three. How are you? Here we are. Yes. I'm doing well. How are you? I'm very well. Monday is fast becoming one of my favorite days of the week because of this show. It's a great way to kick off the week, I think. I'm really enjoying having... I don't have a lot of schedule yet or routine in my life since leaving IDG. And having this conversation on Monday is great.

That really grounds me a little bit. I like a Monday show. I think it's quite nice for the schedule, you know. You get all of the last week's stuff that happened. You have the weekend to think about it. And then on Monday you can talk about it again. It does mean that we'll always miss every announcement, every product announcement. Yes.

So we may have to be a bit fast. We won't miss it, Mike. We will have time to think about it. Oh, okay. We have the longest possible time. Or we'll delay it for a couple of days and not record on monday we'll see yeah so your favorite segment of the show follow-up yes yes i love follow-up uh with that that could in itself be follow-up from previous episodes because in the

last episode we did our first follow-up and i was very excited about it anyway um so we did we did a bad thing or as as um one of our listeners joe cab called it pure evil and in all caps pure evil and that's we uh triggered a lot of people's siri by saying the key phrase that uh triggers siri And I attempted to send a text message to your mother saying, everybody's mother, saying, I'm sorry about what I did. And I had several people say it almost went out or we triggered Siri three or four times. The point was not for us to, we weren't actually trying to be evil, but we were trying to make the point that this is perhaps a usability issue with this new

feature where you say that phrase and Siri appears. And I'm not going to try to troll our listeners every week by saying it, but I think it was worth doing. And I'm glad nobody seemed too mad about it. They seemed to take it as sort of a prank slash information. It was the most informative prank you could possibly do. It was like a public service announcement. We were basically... Where we pause our own podcast. We were letting people know about the dangers of that Siri command.

I feel like even just saying Siri is probably enough. I had a bunch of people send me phrases that they noticed triggered Siri when they're in. It seems to happen a lot. People are in their cars with their iPhones plugged in, listening to a podcast. And when it's plugged in, if that feature is turned on, you can trigger it. And that seems to have happened to a lot of people. But, you know, Pure Evil, I guess we'll take it if you want to call us that. But we were trying to help.

We maybe had a little more glee than one would normally expect from a situation like that. I did want to mention, listener Olivier sent in a link, which was really great, to a YouTube video. in a link which was really great uh to a youtube video uh this this was a pay apparently a deal that um the same issue happened uh last year when the xbox one came out that um there was uh you can say xbox one sign out and the xbox one um will sign out and log out of its account and all of that. And the video that listener Olivier sent in is somebody set up their gamer tag to be Xbox One sign out. And then it's just videos of people trying to say their name and accidentally locking themselves out of the game every time they just mentioned this other player's name.

So this is one of the problems with voice recognition and not having it tied to something that you can set yourself. I think that's going to be the solution to making this a better feature on Apple's part is being able to trigger, if Siri can't recognize your voice just as a voice, then let you choose a phrase that uh that siri will recognize that is not just the one phrase for every single iphone in the show notes for this week's episode which you can find at relay.fm slash upgrade slash three um you will find a link that i'm putting in there to an article on ignN in which it speaks about...

There was an advert with Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad. He did an Xbox commercial and he was going through these voice features and it was just activating people's Xboxes and doing things, which was absolutely fantastic. It was turning on the consoles and making them do stuff because you were watching the advert on your television. I just thought it was great.

Yeah, it's early days, right? I mean, really, this is what we're talking about here is it's such early days for this feature and all these devices are struggling with this. And just to bring up the, as we said said the topic that will last for at least six months if voice is a key command on the uh i was so i really was so close on the apple watch do you think this kind of thing is going to continue to just become more of a problem i mean if we're walking around with things and just out in the day you know these things are going to be activated and people are going to be getting phone calls and i think i mean the software is going to get better i think either you're going to be able to train it

for your voice or you're going to pick a passphrase that it is listening for or it's going to get more intelligent about realizing um that you weren't triggering it i mean that's right that's one thing that software can do is it can listen and trigger itself thinking it's going to be a command, realize very quickly that it's not, and just go back to sleep. I think all of those are options and I'm sure they're working on them.

But this seems awfully simplistic as a feature. It's kind of a neat feature, but it's listening all the time, which is why it only works when it's powered. And not only is it a little weird that it's listening all the time, which is why it only works when it's powered. And not only is it a little weird that it's listening all the time, but that you're going to be able to trigger it by saying perfectly innocuous things. But it's going to get better. It will totally get better. Either somebody will have a nice breakthrough in saying, look, we can do your voice print.

We know it's you. Only you can activate this. Or it'll be, you know, you choose a passphrase for it. And then that's, you know, my voice is choose a passphrase for it and then that's you know my voice is my passport verify me and then that'll work that was a sneakers reference if you haven't seen that movie that's what they say yeah i didn't get it sorry you should see that movie it's a good movie sneakers uh i have um oh what's that movie that you really like it's just is it weird science no it's not no it's weird something genius it's real genius No, it's not. No? It's weird something genius.

It's real genius. Real genius, that's it. It is not weird science. I have that on my list to watch. All right. Because you wrote an article about it the other day, didn't you? They're making it into a TV series, which is horrifying. This is a movie from 1985, and it is one of my favorite movies. And NBC is making it into a TV series,

so it's going to ruin it. But the original movie will remain as the 80th of 80s movies. And I do love it. I love it because the characters in it are all really, they're like geniuses at basically Caltech, and they're the heroes.

And that's really nice to see. And then yes, it is the 80s of movies with I think there are three different musical montages in it and there's nothing more 80s than the montage. Yeah, but this is Sneakers.

That's a really good movie. You should check it out with technology that's actually handled pretty well, the tech stuff in it. I'll look for it. That wasn't even follow-up. That was like a tangent within the follow-up.

How about that? Let's see, what else? What other follow-up we got? A listener, Garrett, wrote in who just wanted to thank me for mentioning, I mentioned the leather cases from Apple. And he wrote in a really nice letter, said a lot of nice things about the podcast

and about my Six Colors website. But, you know, he liked – apparently the leather case really hit the spot for him. And that's great. I'm still using it. And that's the most I've gone using an Apple case maybe ever. And it's not for everybody. And it definitely sort of impinges on the sort of swipe from the sides. But it also makes it a little more grippy, which I like. for everybody and it definitely sort of impinges on the sort of swipe from the sides um but it it

also makes it a little more grippy uh which i like because the they these phones are all curvy and nice but that also makes them a little a little slippery what else do we have ah let's see uh i i proclaimed last week my uh that i now need to like links and read RSS, which I have sort of declared bankruptcy on a long time ago. And we got a lot of suggestions about how I should do this, none of which I'm actually following through on yet, but I'm investigating all of them. Listener Shep suggested, he says he uses NetNewsWire on the Mac, and I do have that. I have the old version and the new version. He suggested a service called BlogTrotter, which will email you links. You subscribe to feeds, and then it sends you email if you're very email-oriented. He uses Flipboard, which I

have used but haven't used in a while, and also an app called Nuzzle, N-U-Z-Z-E-L, so don't get too excited, which tries to do some intelligent things about links from your social networks. Not just links from people you follow, but links from people they follow. So trying to create like a slightly larger sphere of social media to mine links from, which was interesting. Listener Chris mentioned Feedbin, which I'm also trying out. There are a bunch of sort of services that sprung up when Google Reader shut down that I'm looking at and that are interesting. And then Listener Perry recommended one that I can't pronounce and did not know existed, but it actually looks pretty interesting. It's B-Aa-z that's zed for you mike b-a-z-q-u-x bazquox i think you'll

find this bazquox what's the problem very clearly it's bazquox i apologize to the bazquoxians for mangling their name anyway he recommended that and that's another you know feed aggregation tool at webapp that was interesting. So my journey through RSS continues because I haven't settled on anything and I'm trying a bunch of different stuff and we'll see how it goes. But that was all good. People were very helpful trying to suggest ways that I could follow RSS feeds. So thank you to everybody. you to everybody. It is Basquax, of course. I mentioned that I have to proofread my site and I don't have copy editors. Although we didn't really copy edit things on Macworld on the website anyway for ages, but we did a lot of peer review. You know, you send it to one of your colleagues

and say, can you look at my story? And they send you their stories stories. And Six Colors, there are no other people. It's just me. And I got a bunch of people. I had some people volunteer to read the site, but we already pointed out that Chris Pepper, who is the internet's copy editor, is doing a great job proofreading my site after I post things and sending me corrections. Thank you, Chris. And Lister Michael, I wanted to mention, and I think somebody else also sent this in, said they use text-to-speech.

So when they write something, they will then have their Mac's text-to-speech engine read their article back to them because then they can listen to it. And I suppose you could read it out loud too, but the computer will be unforgiving. It's not going to fill in any blankss and you may notice some mistakes that way. And I thought that was pretty clever. And I've tried that a couple of times now. It takes a long time, but it does seem to work because it's using a different part of your brain than the reading part. And that's useful when you're trying to find proof.

Most mistakes in stuff that you write, it's because your brain is good at filling in the gaps. And so you omit a word and then, you know, when you read it, your brain inserts the word there and it's because your brain is good at filling in the gaps. And so you omit a word and then when you read it, your brain inserts the word there and it's not there. And that's a problem. So text-to-speech forces you to listen to the computer as if it was talking to you, saying what you've written, and then your brain might not skip over the omissions that way.

So I thought that was good. When you were saying that, it was bugging me. I was like, I know I've seen this as well. It was CGP Grey. He tweeted you. All right. Yeah. So we had a couple of those, yeah.

Yeah. And thanks to them. I will try that. I have tried it. I will try it again. For The Incomparable, I use that really primitive speech, text-to-speech voice because it's the classic, you know, radio head. You know, many people have used that voice. But that means that's my default.

So it's actually really painful to listen to an article in that voice. And there are so many better text-to-speech voices. But I have to turn it and then turn it back. And I will probably do that at some point. You don't want to ruin the incorporable voice with something high-tech. No, he needs to be as low-tech as possible, that voice. So I think we've got some follow-up about the digital crown. That comes directly from me.

Yes, there's a listener, Mike. Listener Mike. Also co-host Mike. Super handsome listener Mike. Do you know he's English? Very English. Some people didn't know that. This was just a rant.

I was walking to work this morning and I think I'd started listening to the talk show and they mentioned the Digital Crown. And I had two questions about it, actually. I've just thought of another one. So I assume that you felt what it feels like to turn. Yes. And I wondered what that felt like.

So does it just spin quite freely? Is there a level of resistance? Or does it click? Can you feel it as you turn it? Okay, I have to admit that I had to sort of search through my memories and I think this is right, although if somebody wants to correct me, please do. My recollection is that it's got some resistance.

It doesn't spin like totally wildly. There's some force required, a little bit of force required to move it, but it also isn't a click, click, click kind of thing that it's sort of a it's not it doesn't feel loose. It doesn't sort of just spin completely freely like you could flick it and it would spin for a while. But it also doesn't feel like it's incrementing tick, tick, tick. It's it's just, you know, kind of a continuous turn. So you get some force feedback just that you're so you can calibrate sort of like how much you're turning it.

But it seemed like, as I recall, a smooth kind of advancement. And also I have one more. On ATP this week, they were having many arguments. Yes, they were. About the Overwatch again. This could be the same Monday. Having this show on Monday means that we can always just deconstruct. This podcast may just turn into a post-game show for ATP,

where we deconstruct everything that the ATP boys talked about on Friday. And then if they want to follow up from us, they do it Wednesday, but then it doesn't come out until the Friday, so we're always going to be ahead. Yep. So they were talking about the color on the apple watch edition you know the digital crown can be a different color and yeah how would that work is the color fixed because in my mind like i'd just for some reason imagined it was like an led that changed color depending on the watch band you have i don't think so i i think it's just a i think it's just a piece of uh

a piece of uh metal um although the you're right there's that picture with the red yeah on it i don't know it just looked like a you know it just looked like a piece of hardware but um they're showing and matching it may be as simple as that the crown comes off, that you get the crown and the band and the crown pops off. On a lot of these watches, if you wheel it backward, it will pop and then you can wind it or things like that. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a way to,

that wasn't like, that was elegant, right? Because especially for the Apple Watch Edition, that you would pop it out and unscrew it and it would come off and you could put another one on to match the fashion. It would be very clever if that was something like an LED, but it's going to take battery and then it's going to glow, which is not going to, your watch band isn't glowing.

So I don't know. That's my guess. My guess is that it may come paired with the bands. There may be a crown that comes paired with it. But I don't know the answer. That's just a guess. Yeah, because then you, I mean, in theory, because on the site you can see there's multiple colors on the edition page on apple's page i thought it was just red but there's a white one and there's a blue one and

there's maybe a black one as well it's hard to see um so maybe yeah maybe you get you get this is interesting to me because then they'll be giving away this little gold thing every time yeah but for the for the edition it costs uh so much we're all guessing that why not make that a feature is that it's matched to order whereas if you look at the sport or the regular apple watch uh those pages those seem to all the crown be the crowns exactly the same so maybe that's the extra bonus thing you get with the edition is um the the uh the crown is swappable or every band that you buy comes with a crown too. I like that. I think that's cool. I mean, if they could engineer that. I mean, like on my dad's Rolex that I have,

you know, you wind it one direction and it feels very much like a crown, but if you wind it backward, it pops out. There's a mechanical sort of unscrews slightly and it pops out and then you can do some stuff from there. So it would seem like they could make it removable like that if they wanted to. In theory, you'll be winding this one

back and forth quite a lot, right? Right. Well, yeah, but it's if there's a motion that you can use that pops it out. It may also be that you pick what you want it to look like and it stays there. But there's this implication that if you've got a red band and it's red and a blue band and it's blue, then perhaps you get to customize it because you can slide those bands on and off. I don't know. Or you just take it to the magical Apple Watch upgrade store that everybody is imagining will exist and they just do it for you. The man in white gloves

will bring out his little special crown tool and he'll just pop it right out. Yep, sure. We'll see. It might be a robot. It probably will be a robot. And the last piece of follow-up is a great thing.

So as well as this show, when you came over to the lovely RelayFM, you also brought Clockwise along with you and we launched Clockwise onto RelayFM. You also brought Clockwise along with you, and we launched Clockwise onto RelayFM this week. Yes, yes. So we did two kind of interregnum episodes, two episodes where sort of nobody was in charge of it. I mean, it's still us doing it.

That actually hasn't changed since the beginning, but we had two after we left IDG, and those two have now been imported into the Relay content management system. And so going forward, starting this week, we'll be doing Clockwise every week and posting it to Relay. And if people haven't listened, it's fun. It's me and Dan Morin, and we bring on two guests every week, and the four of us discuss four topics about technology and the entire show is 30 minutes or shorter with the idea that some people don't have time to listen to lots of two hour long podcasts and you can get four fairly timely hopefully topics covered in uh you

know in short order and so it's a fun uh different kind of podcast format and we hopefully will have lots of interesting guests over the next uh over the next few weeks so we'll see i like the 30 minute format it's nice it's refreshing not every podcast should be two hours long not every podcast should be 30 minutes long but having some variety out there i think is nice yeah very much so so should we take a break let's do it um so i'm very excited to say this episode is sponsored by cards against humanity in lieu of an ad cards against humanity have requested i read the following words to you vitamin rubbish Water bottle, aluminium, mum, strawberry, privacy, schedule, garage, mobile, and advertisement. That's all they wanted me to say.

Some of those, you surprised me because you didn't say advertisement. You didn't say strawberry. Yeah, see, that's the difference. You're trying to catch your Britishisms. Yeah, I think they got them. Yeah, I think they got them. Well, I think I got them. But what I do want to say about Cards Against Humanity, which is just something I didn't ask you to say,

is that I love them very much. I love everything that they do. So please go to CardsAgainstHumanity.com, check out what they do, and buy everything. Thank you so much to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring this week's episode of Upgrade and for supporting RelayFM. Yay. yay so there you go i enjoyed that very much when i received that email uh in my inbox i i laughed i laughed and laughed so but you did say vitamin instead of vitamin yeah so i do it

says vitamin rubbish water bottle aluminium aluminum right yeah mom strawberry mom strawberry strawberry strawberry strawberry there you go no privacy schedule garage you didn't say privacy interesting but you say mobile mobile and advertisement it's great people in the chat room saying you also said privacy wrong that makes me laugh it's not wrong it's just different schedule schedule you know it's all fine schedule yeah people like that one because that does sound it sounds like a totally different word anyhow so what do we want to talk about today mr snell well let's see i don't know mike what do we want to talk about today, Mr. Snell? Well, let's see. I don't know, Mike. What do you want to talk about? I wrote this thing last week that I thought was a little bit silly, but it actually got a really great reaction.

I think people do care about this. It's about streaming services. And I mentioned music, although really music isn't as big an issue, although it has its issues, but about the video services. although really music isn't as big an issue, although it has its issues, but about the video services. And this all comes out of the fact that a bunch of sites last week pointed out that as of October 1st, in the US anyway, Netflix is dropping Battlestar Galactica. The new version of Battlestar Galactica is disappearing from Netflix. And I think like all the Law and Order shows are disappearing and a bunch of movies and a bunch of other stuff is disappearing. And, you know, I'm a Netflix subscriber. I'm an Amazon Prime subscriber. I've been a Hulu plus subscriber and maybe again. So I'm not against these services. But one of the things

that frustrates me about them is that they, stuff comes and goes. And it's not, people talk about the convenience of streaming services and they are very convenient, but when you don't own your stuff, what often will happen is stuff will just vanish. And there's going to be somebody who has no idea that we're talking about this, who's going through their Battlestar Galactica watch or rewatch, watching an episode a day, let's say, and they're halfway through. And on October 1st, they're going to go to Netflix and the show is going to be gone. And who knows where it will be? And maybe they'll go out and buy the DVDs or maybe they'll just get angry. But, you know, this is, I think, one of the problems with streaming media

is as convenient as it is. I had somebody write to me about music too and say, you know, their example is Peter Gabriel, which I was actually going to use in my story, which is he's got a really complex relationship with these streaming services. He seems to not like them very much. And that was always one of the artists I would test when I would try these streaming media services out. And like his,

his catalog just isn't on them or only part of it is on them. That's bad, but it's not quite as bad as having the whole catalog be there of your, of your favorite, favorite artist. And then one day going and having it just be gone, which could happen. I think it doesn't happen in music so much,

but it could happen. And it certainly happens all the time on video. And it's just, you know, it doesn't make those services um less well it makes them maybe a little less compelling but they still have so many advantages it just adds this little sour note like i i can't count on this show being here i can put it in my wish list i can put it in my favorites but if i don't watch it right now it may just not be there when i turn

around and that's that's uh that hurts those products, I think. So you kind of mentioned in the piece that you mentioned here that you subscribe to a bunch of these services, but it doesn't feel like that you rely on them too much. So do you still buy movies, TV shows, stuff like that? Music? Yeah, yeah. I mean, music, I absolutely do. In in fact even when i discover stuff on uh like new releases and things on uh beats or rhapsody you know one of those subscription services

i will usually buy it and part of that is because i don't want to fuss i have so much music that i own and um and to i could like download everything into the beats app and not use the music app and have it auto you know have it automatically saved to my iphone for when i'm offline because that that always comes up when i'm on an airplane or something that i want to listen to music and the streaming services won't do it and you can save them but it's less convenient and uh the rest of my music somewhere else so now I've got some music in some places and some music in other places. And that frustrates me. And I appreciate that part of the reason that this is true is because I do have a music library because I was buying CDs for,

you know, more than a decade and I ripped them all and they're all in iTunes match now. But I do buy music because it just seems more convenient for me to just have it and not worry about it and have it in my iTunes match library. On the video side, I don't buy very much in terms of especially TV shows on DVD or Blu-ray. I don't really do that anymore. I do buy movies, although sometimes it's Blu-ray, sometimes it's iTunes. And in most cases, I'm buying it there because not only do I want to have it, but because those things don't show up on a streaming service for like the free tier of a streaming service, or it's not free, but like the Prime Video or the Netflix versus the iTunes or buy through Amazon version. They don't show up there for a long time.

So I will sometimes buy those movies. If I think I'm going to watch this movie a bunch of times. I want to watch it right now. I'm just going to buy it. And I'm going to have it around. I will do that. So I. You are coming to this from the entirely other side.

Aren't you? I'm pretty much all streaming. I mean. Yesterday I was at a video games expo and i bought some video game music cds like chiptunes and stuff like that i like to work with that sort of music and i came home and i broke out the super drive i had to buy super drive recently because I realized none of my computers have a CD drive anymore. And I needed to burn a CD for a family event. That was hilarious.

Those SuperDrives are expensive. So I had to do that. So I ripped the... So why did you buy a SuperDrive and not like a USB Blu-ray drive for 40 bucks? Because I didn't think about it. Probably. It would appear.

You can get a really good cheap drive that also does Blu-ray for cheap. But anyway. Unfortunately, you've now put yourself into the situation of being the person that I will consult every purchase with. Oh no! I made a horrible mistake.

You've made a terrible mistake. I buy lots of things. So now you will get text messages from me should i buy this just a link on amazon sure to some random i'll do it i will be your personal purchasing consultant and they'll give us material you could ask me right here every week we could have a new segment that's like mike asks jason what to buy mike's buying corner we can workshop that name a little bit. Okay. So I ripped these CDs into, it was one of them, it was like a three CD compilation and I ripped it into iTunes. And I'm not kidding.

It took me 20 minutes to find it. So I ripped it into iTunes, right? And I could not find it. It just wasn't in any of the views. It wasn't in artist. It wasn't in album. None of the songs were wasn't in artist it wasn't in album none of the songs were listed in songs i couldn't work out what had happened so then i tried to rip it again it was like you're going to replace the music do you want to just replace it or rip it again and i

was like but it's not there so then i had to go and find and so i searched on my mac and i found the folders and i found where they should be i went into itunes and it wasn't there the only way i could find it was going to the recently added playlist, finding all of the songs and then manually marking them as a compilation. In doing so, it showed up and I have no idea why this happened. I cannot.

So all of this is to say... iTunes compilations are bad. They have always been bad. They're very confusing. This is like... I cannot stand iTunes Match. I hate it so much. There are so many weird things that it does. And unfortunately, recently, there's that.

And then also the new Jonathan Colton album, the new live albums come out. So I bought that too. So I am now using iTunes Match for a few different albums that I'm enjoying. And I just cannot stand it. I am a user of Beats Music and I love Beats Music. The things that I love about Beats Music is like all their playlist stuff and the curation that they do.

Absolutely fantastic. do it's absolutely fantastic and it's just because i play a fat i pay a flat fee and get all of the music that i want i have had instances where albums disappear or there's a new version of the album so it knocks my one out and then i have to subscribe to it again which is really weird um but just the just buying music and filling up my hard drive with music or filling up my shelves with CDs is just not something that I want to do. And it was something that I did. Like I was kind of in the original iPod generation. I was in the Napster generation.

So I was very used to going onto iTunes. I used to go onto iTunes every week. And with my part-time job salary, I used to buy at least two or three albums on itunes a week wow stuff i'd never heard i used to just go in and be like i want to get that one and i'll get that one oh yeah i mean streaming services are so much better for stuff like that where you want to you want to try something that uh and and before you would have to buy it in order in order to listen to a once and that that's the worst that is the worst i think that's i once and that that's the worst. That is the worst.

I think that's, I mean, I think that's the argument, even for people who buy music to subscribe to a streaming service, just to find recommendations for other stuff, or you heard something on the radio and you want to hear it again, um, you know, and,

and, and follow that artist and see what else is on that album. I mean, that, that was always the problem with music was you, you had to take such a. I mean, that, that was always the problem with music was you, you had to take such a huge risk to, uh, to listen to an album because, uh, you didn't know whether it would be any good or not. And you wouldn't know if you liked it, you heard good things, but you

know, you didn't actually hear the product. So I think that's, I think that's a perfect example. If you're buying three albums a week, uh, unheard to try out, that would be a, you know, you would be really saved by going to streaming. There's no doubt. But then I have a real love-hate relationship with video streaming services because there's never anything to watch. I feel like Netflix these days,

really the only good stuff on Netflix is their original programming. I like the TV. I mean, I use Netflix for TV. I do occasionally watch a movie on Netflix is their original programming. I like the TV. I mean, I use Netflix for TV. I almost, I do occasionally watch a movie on Netflix, but it's rare. Netflix is a TV on demand service for me. It's like a whole libraries of commercial free TV series that I haven't watched that I'm watching now. And that's, that's the number one thing I use it for, which is the frustration with something like Battlestar galactica like i'm watching um my personal example i'm watching bob's burgers right

now which is very good and i didn't when it came on the air i didn't watch it because it was it was on it was sort of promoted along with like family guy and i don't like family guy but i love the simpsons or i did the first 15 years it was on um and and so then bob burgers comes out and the way they promoted it was sort of to fit in thematically with Family Guy made it seem really kind of crude and crass. And then I've had so many people whose taste I respect say it's actually incredibly good and funny. And so we started watching it on Netflix and it's great. And now we've watched the first season, we're into the second season. And that's one of those examples where, you know, a lot of times it's great. And now we've, we watched the first season, we're into the second season. And that's one of those examples where, you know, a lot of times it's, it's late. The kids have gone to bed.

We watched something there's room for a half an hour show before we go to bed. And, uh, we'll just pop on one of those episodes of Bob's burgers and watch it and laugh. And, um, I, I do actually have that little fear in the back of my mind that one day I'm going to come to that Bob's Burgers list and it's just going to be gone. And too bad. Goodbye. It's too bad. Netflix in the UK is definitely not as good for TV. It's kind of like this weird place where it doesn't really have any good movies and it doesn't really have any good movies and it doesn't really have that great tv i mean

because as well bear in mind that you know in the uk obviously a lot of what we consider to be great tv is our tv right sure and that's kind of well known like people like british tv as much as we love american tv too but all of the british tv stuff is available for free on the individual networks. Yes, on iPlayer or the equivalent for the other non-BBC, BBC channels. And especially the BBC stuff. You know my policy, right, about the BBC, which all British television comes from the BBC. I'm an American. Channel 4, Sky TV, BBC.

It's all BBC. Just a shorthand. So it's all on iPlayer is what you're saying. Yeah. But all of the networks. I mean, so except for BBC, the other sort of three main networks, they have their own where they show all their programming, but they have ads. Sure.

I don't know what you're talking about with other than the BBC, but okay. The other BBC channels. Okay, good. They have their own. You're confusing me there. So it's always been strange to me that that that people watch the bbc shows on paid services or the bbc sells their programming on itunes and i've never understood who's buying it um seems very peculiar to me but i guess it's for people like you jason who like to just keep

things forever um well are they you know if you're going on a on a flight let's say they're flying to new york um download you can download from the iPlayer. Not in HD, though, right? Yeah, in HD. You can keep it for 30 days. Well, then you're right. I don't understand those people. I don't think it's always been like that. I don't think it's always been able for HD,

but I did it recently when going on holiday. So, I mean, so for that sort of stuff, for sort of streaming movies and TV in the uk i mean amazon prime is is just as bad as well the the catalogs are very poor um because there's a lot of like us shows that we don't get i mean there are like uh examples of where it works like for example breaking bad so breaking bad did a great thing in the UK. It was so popular on Netflix. It was just incredibly popular on Netflix. I don't think any major network had bought it up

and people just started finding it on Netflix and watching it there. So when it came to the final season, Netflix in the UK did a deal with AMC and they had each episode of the final season within 24 hours on Netflix. And it was incredible. So it was like the next morning, I meanflix and it was incredible so it's like the next morning i mean obviously people aren't watching it at like eight o'clock in the morning

so to watch it in the evening uh so it like i think breaking bad aired on sunday nights and then on monday nights i would be watching it like that was just absolutely fantastic so there are examples where it works like that but most of the time time, it's behind or there's like a couple of seasons behind the US version of Netflix. It's just a struggle. But then, you know, there's no movies at all. I mean, Netflix in the US, what's it like for movies? It's not great. They have some deals with some studios. But I mean, this is again, this is sort of my larger point too, is that what you are is at the whim of these deals that Netflix cuts with studios. And the studios used to cut favorable deals with Netflix. And now they want, they're concerned that Netflix is big and powerful and

they want more money and Netflix doesn't want to give them more money. And so you end up with things, some things come on, like they made a deal with Disney and like all the Marvel movies and things came onto Netflix. And even relatively even relatively recent marvel movies around like the avengers popped on there a few months ago and i thought wow the you know that's a that's a movie from i mean it's yeah it's a couple years old but it's uh that doesn't feel like a catalog movie it feels a little more recent than that but you know they have a deal with that studio other other movies uh from other studios you know if it's older than or if it's newer than five years, it's just not on there. I mean, so it's a smattering of not new releases, but

new-ish releases, and then lots of old stuff and lots of documentaries and things that are really interesting. It's actually a great outlet for a lot of independent stuff, especially documentaries. But for major motion pictures, it's just not. For that, we rent those on iTunes. Honestly, that's what we do most of the time. Unless it's a movie that I want to buy because my kids and I are going to watch it 10 times. Generally, we'll just rent it from iTunes because it's not going to be on Netflix for four years. So all of this is to say,

streaming services can kind of suck. Yeah, you know, and it's the, I just wanted to point out in my piece that it's the ephemerality of the catalog that's the problem. I think if you could, this whole category is plagued by the fact that they can take away your stuff at any moment.

In fact, there was a thing about iTunes at one point where things were disappearing from your purchased downloadable list. Yeah, I think it was Disney. Was that Disney stuff? Yeah, yeah. And it was, I think, a mistake because I think the idea there is that if somebody buys it, even if it's not in the catalog anymore, they can download it again. But that was, I think, maybe it wasn't in their initial contract.

And so there was this thing where people had left it up on iTunes, but didn't have their own copy. And they figured I can just download it later. And then it vanished. And that those got restored. And I think that got worked out that the studios realized that, you know, a purchase relationship is different from a streaming relationship. But, um, but the larger point here is for all of the benefits of streaming services, the thing that, that the thing that risks this entire category is if the streaming services and the content providers can't get along, they're going to sabotage these services because people aren't going to trust them anymore. People are going to not view them as something that they can rely on to provide them with entertainment because that thing that they were planning on watching on Friday when, you know, they saw it in the catalog on Tuesday isn't there on Friday. It's disappeared. And, you know, you hear people talking about this. The other way to view this is people get really frustrated about, like, I don't know where that movie is. I don't know where that

TV show is. Where do I go to get it? I looked on Amazon. I looked, did you look on Hulu? No, I didn't look on Hulu. Oh, it's on Hulu. Well, but you don't have Hulu plus it'll play on your computer, but it won't play on your, your Apple TV. It's just, you know, these things as great as the potential is to have every movie and TV show ever made by, you know, available for all people at all times, if you pay a fee and every bit of music that's been recorded available for everybody for a fee. That's amazing as a promise. But the reality is that these contracts mean things are disappearing and reappearing, and they're trying to create demand for their service by making it an exclusive over here, and you can't get it over there, which forces people to subscribe to like four different

services in order to get everything they want to see. And, you know i understand the business aspect of it but it's really frustrating as a consumer and it makes the whole thing uh just a more sour experience i think the music industry is closer than the like the movie they are they are like most services have pretty much everything pretty much everything yeah like i said they're they're occasional, like the guy pointed out the Peter Gabriel thing, which is totally true, where there's some artists that are problematic.

But we have not yet seen a case where a record studio drops out of a streaming service, I think. But that could happen, right? Imagine if Spotify or Beats or one of the other services, suddenly one day one of the big, you know, four, five, I don't even know how many big labels there are anymore,

just they had a contract dispute, sort of like a cable company and a TV provider, like having channels disappear off the cable system. People would scream bloody murder if that happened. Like, wait a second, half of my favorite artists just vanished. Why is that? They haven't done that. And I think that's smart that it hasn't happened yet, but I wouldn't put money on it never happening. Because again,

if there was, I think if there was actual money in those services, which it seems like maybe there isn't, not like the video services, Netflix seems to be doing okay, but I don't people hear people falling all over themselves about like the incredible financials of these music streaming services i think maybe the music streaming services don't work very well but if they did and their perception was that there was big money to be made there um then we would see these same problems i think i think it might i think apple getting into it might we might see the first first instance of that i mean there's always been sort of anecdotal uh hearsay that that the music labels prevented apple from starting a streaming service right which is one of the reasons they bought beats and it's because they don't want apple to do this because then they will take the biggest

slice of the pie in theory although ironically they might also popularize it so it actually makes sense for a broader consumer base than the people who subscribe. Because I mean, we all know people who subscribe to these things. We all subscribe to these things. I think in a broader sense, it still hasn't caught on as much as it could. There's a huge potential market here. And I think that's their biggest fear is like that Apple will establish this. But at the same time, Apple might establish this and that might be good for the music industry. I don't know. I don't know. I think you're giving music executives too much. Well, no, oftentimes this is exactly it is they shoot themselves in the foot.

And this may be one of those cases where they've played keep away with Apple because they're afraid of Apple's potential dominance elsewhere becoming dominance here. But they may also be preventing this uh part of their industry from succeeding yeah so yeah yeah it's funny it's funny but all this because battle star galactica is not going to be on tv on netflix in a couple days but you know this is the modern world we live in which is you know you can't you just can't rely on them and that's the unfortunate thing about a service streaming service as great as they are you can't rely on them you just can't rely on them. And that's the unfortunate thing about a streaming service as great as they are. You can't rely on them. You just can't.

The stuff that you expect to watch eventually may just disappear. And that's too bad. Aaron Goodwin in the chat has just sent a link to a site called canistream.it. Yeah, canistream.it. It's a really good site. If you ever wonder if a movie is available via free streaming or online rental, that is the place to go. And they're, I think, one of only like a handful of companies that still have access to the Netflix API. Netflix famously used to have an open API and said, hey, let's make a community and everybody can share information.

And then they're like, yeah, we're turning off all the sharing data and now we're turning off the API because we're a big company now and we don't need you. But Can I Stream It? is still attached to the Netflix Firehose. So they've got really good data. And that's where I go.

When we do like an old movie club or something on The Incomparable and I need to find a movie, that's where I go when we do like an old movie club or something on The Incomparable and I need to find a movie. That's where I go. I always go there. It's like then I know if I need to rent it or buy it from Netflix or Amazon or Apple or wherever. So let's take a quick break to thank our second sponsor for this week's episode of Upgrade. And that is our friends at Pilot. Pilot is a design and development studio that was founded in 2009. They create products for startups and enterprise clients across iPhone,

iPad, and the web. They have a team of 50 designers, developers, and producers, oh, and also product directors that are based in Berlin, London, and their head office in Poland, and they are ready and waiting to help you on your next project. Pilot can either help you build a great team that you can work with every day, or they can set you up with a producer who can take care of everything for you. They try and match to the way that you want to work. Pilot works with clients from all around the world, both big brands like Lonely Planet and Macmillan, and smaller companies alike. No project is too big

or too small. Some startups that they have worked with have been backed by world-class investors and accepted into top accelerators such as Y Combinator. The quality of Pilot's work can help companies shine even in the toughest of environments. If you're looking for a first-class team of designers and developers who sweat the little details check out pilot.co thank you so much to pilot for their support of upgrade and relay fm all right pilot yeah indeed so what do you want to talk about next i mean we have we have a couple of topics here yeah i i think we i think we only have room for maybe one more. So, you know, let's talk about Dropbox. Okay.

Let's talk about Dropbox. Why not? We're going to save. We keep talking about the Kindle, and we haven't talked about it yet. But we got time. There is still reasoning in holding it because, you know, at some point you'll get your Voyager. Kindle Voyage. Yes.

I call it the Voyager too. I can't help myself from doing that. I've heard other people doing that. Voyage. Voyage is a weird name. Well, you know, Kindle is a weird name. Fire is a weird name. That's true.

It's just part of the Amazon product line of weird named devices. Prime is the video. But I'm not going to get it for three weeks, I think. So we've got a little bit of time to talk about talk about the kindle um so people want to give us pre follow-up about kindles and if you you know like read with a kindle you could do that um by how do they reach us mike we should say that oh that's that's good there's a couple of ways. We're both on Twitter. Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Or you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade, and you can hit the little contact button, and that will send us an email. Beautiful. Beautiful. Dropbox.

Yeah, so you wrote a little piece. I didn't really know what to expect from it but this wasn't what I expected it to be Good, I'm glad to keep you guessing So I found that, I just found that quite interesting because it was like the Dropbox conundrum I was like, ooh, okay, let's take a look at this and it was, as I say, it was a very good piece I just don't know if it was

I don't know what I was expecting it to be but it wasn't that. So what is your problem with Dropbox? Well, it's a ridiculous problem because it's a problem caused by Dropbox fixing one of the major problems with their service, which is that they weren't competitive on price with the amount of storage they offered.

I think they offered 100 gigabytes of storage for about $100 a year. And if you look at their competitors for that price, you could get a terabyte basically of storage. And so they changed those. They simplified their pricing structure. They eliminated all their other pricing tiers, it seems, and have gone to this $100 a year pricing tier

or there's a monthly fee too that's in the ballpark. And you get a terabyte. So that's great that their personal paid account, there's still a free account, there's still business. And then there's this pro tier, Dropbox Pro, they call it now. And it's got some new features, but the big feature is it's got a terabyte. And I thought that was really great because now they're competitive. But then I started to think about it a little bit more and realized that one of the problems is the Dropbox has this root metaphor, which is there's a folder on your hard drive that is your Dropbox folder and you can put things in it. And one of the funny things is Dropbox, my hard drive doesn't have a terabyte for a Dropbox folder, so I literally can't fill my Dropbox on my computer. I can't take advantage of that. And I realize this is a, you know, my diamond shoes are pinching my feet kind of problem, right?

Oh, no. Oh, all this extra storage they've given me, I can't use it. It's unused because of my beautiful laptop. But it bugs me. It bugs me that I have that storage space and it's cloud storage. I can move things there. But the metaphor for Dropbox is you don't move things into Dropbox. You put them on your computer and they also are on Dropbox.

And, you know, I don't think I have any device with internal... In fact, I looked it up. There is only one system that you can buy as the default configuration from Apple that has more than a terabyte of internal storage.

And that's, believe it or not, the Mac mini server, which you can get by default with two one-terabyte drives. I would not have expected. I think you're going to have maybe Mac pro or maybe an imac or some kind no because the pros are all flash storage now yeah and the imacs all are fusion drive but they all start at one terabyte so yeah so what do you do with a terabyte of dropbox? And again, this is not a bad problem to have

because it's great that Dropbox will essentially, it's essentially unlimited storage for most people, not everybody. If you've got a big external storage and you've put your Dropbox, it makes it kind of hard to put your Dropbox on an external drive, but you can do it. It's kind of a pain

if you've already got it on your internal drive because it wants to move it all and sometimes there are errors, but you can do it. And so for some people people it's it's great but i would say for my guess is the bulk of dropbox's personal users um it's essentially unlimited storage in that you were going to fill up your hard drive before you fill up your dropbox and that's that's that's great um but what what um and you and there are workarounds too, I guess I should say they have this feature called selective sync that lets you turn off syncing on a computer from Dropbox.

So like I have a computer, I have a Mac mini server actually in my house with a Drobo attached to it, this giant hard drive. And that's where my Dropbox folder is. So I can create a folder called like only on the Mac mini and uncheck it on my computer, on my little laptop and throw a terabyte worth in there. And that will work. It's a workaround.

Selective sync is kind of a really lousy interface, but it works. But what I really would like is, and I don't think that Dropbox is ever gonna do it because I think this is like a health club membership where they they're promising it noting knowing that most people will never take advantage of it um what i would really like is dropbox to have a feature where there's also another place i can copy files um that that moves them off my computer and saves them on dropbox for later and uh you, I don't think they'll ever do it

because it kind of goes against their metaphor and their, you know, why would they bother? But it does kind of bug me that it's a terabyte, but I can't really use it. And I certainly can't use it elegantly because I just don't have the room. I could move literally everything I possibly could off of my MacBook Air hard drive into the Dropbox folder. Like, my MacBook Air could be a Dropbox folder, and I wouldn't fill it up. So I had some points that I wanted to ask and some things I wanted to go down, but I just thought of something which I hadn't considered before with the problem with putting a terabyte of stuff on Dropbox.

What do you do when you get a new computer? Like, that's a terabyte of stuff to download. That's going to take an awful long time. Right, if you're doing the whole thing. Although, again, you could do selective sync. And I guess they have the LAN sync as well, right? But still, there's still a terabyte of stuff to move. Yeah, they say they have the LAN sync,

although I've got two devices on my network and I don't ever see them land syncing. I'm skeptical of that. It kind of works sometimes. It kind of works. I've done it before. And you have to be like, there's a lot of rubber chickens that you need to swing to get it to work properly. It's very peculiar as a thing.

It's very peculiar as a thing. So I'm interested, how do you use Dropbox? You know, I throw stuff in it all the time. It is sort of my default place to save things now. I have things on my desktop. We could probably talk about this in another show. I'm going to write that down. In fact, the desktop, that's a good topic. I throw things on my desktop and then John Syracuse occasionally will see my computer and shake

his head and be like, I don't know how you can live like that. But everything eventually ends up either in the trash or in Dropbox. And I use it to share files. We use it to transfer files for this show, for The Incomparable, a lot of podcast files we transfer using Dropbox. I use it for all my screenshots. If I want to show somebody something on my computer, I take a screenshot. It automatically goes to the Dropbox. Dropbox puts the share link on my clipboard, I think, and I just paste and say, here, check this out. So I use it for a lot of stuff like that. It is, yeah, so what it is is like a nice place to sync between different devices and to have things accessible on my phone and my iPad if I want to refer to them elsewhere. When I used to have a desktop PC at work and a laptop at home,

I used it to have file continuity between the two devices, but it's been a while since I had two separate work computers. So I use it for a bunch of different stuff. What I don't do is, you know, use it as a backup or use it to offload files off of the SSD in my MacBook Air, because it's just not made for that. And that's sort of the conundrum here is that, you know, this is so much storage that you could start doing that, but that's not what it's for. If I'm saving a file to my computer, so if you discount media files, if I'm saving any kind of document, it goes in Dropbox. Dropbox is like my file system. Finder opens to Dropbox for me.

It is the place that i put everything i also upload all of my photos via the carousel app so every photo that i take on my iphone which is where all of my photos are taken they're uploaded to dropbox and then i have hazel processing them into folders i used a workflow that Federico Vittici came up with. I'll put that in the show notes. And basically Hazel just takes all of my photos and organizes them into folders. I am probably going to move that to the iCloud

photo library storage drive system because Dropbox doesn't do a great job of it. It doesn't do anything really to surface them i expected so much more from carousel that we just simply did not get the app and the service i was expecting to be uh the everpix that we lost you know but it was kind of like here's an app with a scrolling system that will make you feel nauseous when you use it and that's about it for you i'm tempted to use dropbox for for the photo thing only because i since i'm paying for it i have a terabyte there i might as well use it and that's actually one of those examples where if i don't

sync that to my local system i can just have my mobile devices be shooting photos into it forever and just fill it up with photos and then I can always get them down from there. But you're right. Dropbox is like, using Dropbox as a photo library is a little bit like using the Finder as a photo library. You open your folder, you say, show me the icons and crank up the icon view and say, see, it's a photo management tool.

And it's really not. It's file management. Yeah, it's showing you pictures. It's terrible i just needed somewhere to put them because every picture service i was using kept folding so i it was where i chose always expecting that at some point either dropbox would fix it which we hope that they're done but they they sort of started and never finished it but now i expect apple to do it because i want features like just an easy way to find photos.

Like at the moment, I have to remember the year a month in which a picture was taken. And that doesn't necessarily work as a system. But like, you know, having things like Apple promises this intelligent search with the iCloud photo library stuff and, you know, the locations. So that seems like a good thing for me. That's the other thing that that i guess i use dropbox for so it's like file storage and photo backup so the the photo thing is actually a huge deal because this is an example where um having macbook airs and in my house um our photo library is enormous and it won't fit on a macbook air hard drive it won't we have an external drive that is also backed up and mirrored um that has our photos on it because the photo library is too large and and i'm looking to see looking forward to seeing what apple does

here because that we're back to talking about photos this could just as well be the prompt i suppose um r.i.p poor went out for the prompt um the you guys should do another podcast. Wait a second. You might, you might do one. Um, the, uh, I want to see how Apple does this because this goes back to the same issue. Uh, my hard drive isn't big enough for all my photos, but I need to have all my photos and they need to be backed up in the cloud. So how does that work? Can I have a photo library that shows me everything and might even have lower resolution versions of them locally. But if I want to get the high resolution version, I can, can I do that photo library that shows me everything? It might even have lower resolution versions of them locally, but if I want to get the high resolution version, I can.

Can I do that and have it accessible from my Mac and from the web and from my mobile devices? Can I do that with something? And if I can do that, then that's great. But it runs to the problem where I thought about putting my photo library on Dropbox and Dropbox will now take it. It is big enough that it will take it,

but none of my computer's internal drives, which is where these Dropbox folders live, is big enough to accept it. So we could turn that off with selective syncing. Okay. But then no computer has access to that. So what's looking at the iPhoto library? Nothing. So it's just one of those things that it's not all the pieces are there. And I realized this is a problem that I'm, you know, I'm searching for because it's prompted by the knowledge that there's a terabyte there for me to access that I'm paying for. And that if I just pretend that it's like it was before, because I hadn't filled up my hundred gigabytes, then it wouldn't be a problem. But it does, you know, it just starts to make me think like, what's wrong with this picture? I had somebody, I had a bunch of people recommend Expand Drive, which is a multi-purpose drive utility.

But one of the things it will do is mount your Dropbox as a volume. Oh, that sounds terrifying. And it is a little bit scary. But the idea there is you can, with Selective Sync, you turn off a bunch of folders. And then when you want to copy things to Dropbox and have them not be on your computer, that's what you do is you open it up and go into one of those folders and just move the files over. And you can actually do that through their web interface too. You can drop something on there and it'll upload and then you can delete it. But Expand Drive mounts it as a drive. So there are workarounds like that. But, you know, I don't know. It's not quite the same.

I wanted to mention two other devices that I think are interesting here. There's File Transporter, which has sponsored a whole bunch of podcasts. It's from the same people who do Drobo. Not this one. Not this one. They should. Yet. It's interesting because it's like personal Dropbox.

It's a hard drive with an intelligent enclosure that puts it on the internet. And it syncs. And it behaves very much like Dropbox in that that puts it on the internet and it syncs. And it behaves very much like Dropbox in that you drop something in a folder and it syncs to the file transporter and you can link it to multiple machines. But the other interesting thing that it does is it has a separate folder that it puts on your computer that's actually a mounted, it's a mount point. And you can use your file transporter space to move, to take files that you want to offload. So it's got both metaphors.

It's got the synced folder metaphor that Dropbox offers and this other, you know, just move it and have it only available in the cloud approach. And, yeah, if you're offline, then you don't get to see those files. But it lets you put things in cold storage where you don't want them locally. Your hard drive is too small. And I realized that, you know, storage costs are dropping rapidly, but, you know, cloud storage costs are also dropping rapidly. So I don't think we're going to get to a point, you know, we're going to have terabyte drives and two terabyte drives in our SSDs, but then we'll have like a petabyte free on Google Drive or something. So this is going to keep continuing.

Anyway, File Transporter does this in the way that I sort of described how I'd like Dropbox to do it. And then there's this other thing called Space Monkey, which is a great name. And I had never heard of it. And what it does is it's like a smart dropbox where it looks at your file use, and like the file transporter, it's a hard drive with some smarts in it, and you plug it in,

and it's got a cloud component. But the thing that struck me about it that my friend Greg Noss uses it is it uh watches your file usage and it makes sure that your files you use a lot are stored locally but that the files that you don't really touch it moves them off your system keeps them only in the cloud and when you request them it downloads them and makes them available to you, which is kind of like Fusion Drive, except over the internet.

And it sounds really weird, but it sounds kind of brilliant in the sense that, and it actually very Apple-like of saying, look, we'll figure out which files you actually need. And those will be kept locally. And the rest of them, we're just going to move off because you don't have enough storage space otherwise. So i'm kind of intrigued by that i actually ordered one today because i want to try it out and see how the space monkey uh works also i couldn't resist

any product with a monkey in it pretty much i will buy it i keep hearing curb monkey though when you say space monkey yeah you know the curious george is the reference i keep getting there's a curious george book where he's the first space monkey he puts on a space suit 50s style space suit anyway it's there's lots of different ways to spin this sort of like cloud storage local storage how do they interact and uh i think it's an area of opportunity for apple too i mean i cloud drive is a first step in this direction, but it would be really interesting if at some point Apple embraced the idea

that your file system isn't just what's on your local drive. It's also in their cloud and you pay for that, but you get backed up and versioning and things getting offloaded when your drive fills up and it all happens kind of invisibly. That's a really appealing vision. I don't know whether it would actually be appealing in reality, but as speeds get bigger, network speeds get better, and as the cloud becomes more advanced, wonder i wonder about that about the whether our file systems become um a cache instead of with a cache that we don't manage because with dropbox

we're managing it ourselves in the finder i don't know well i i would like to hear some follow-up on the space monkey oh yeah yeah i i ordered SpaceMonkey is also fascinating because it's actually, they say it's a one terabyte drive. It's actually a two terabyte drive. And one terabyte of it is your data. And the other terabyte of it is like encrypted fragments of other people's data. And so every drive is itself part of their cloud, which is wild stuff. It's kind of creepy, but not creepy, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, you have to know that going in,

but I think it's a really interesting idea that what they're doing is they don't have a central point of failure. It's a little like a peer-to-peer cloud storage network. Yeah, but it's completely peer-to-peer, right? Well, I don't know if they also run their own servers that have some of this data or if it's just on their customers' drives. But it's very – and that way it's accessible.

Even if you can't get to your device, your data should be accessible via like an iPhone app, which is kind of – it's interesting. So I'll try it out. What the heck? Yeah, why not? This is – I mean this is investigative journalism. That's what you're all about now. Yes, apparently. That's what happens when you when you go uh yeah i can't be buying 200 products every on a whim all the time but on this one i did it has monkey in the name mike

what am i supposed to do yeah no i understand it was inevitable really yeah yeah so i think that's about it for this week's episode unless you have anything more you'd like to discuss today sir no no i i uh i think that we've we've done enough damage for one day and we should save some things for for episode four yeah which will be next week and if you want to if you want to tune in live you can definitely do that uh We record this show at 12pm Pacific Time, 3pm Eastern Time, that is 8pm London Time. If you'd like to tune in, that's at relay.fm slash live. And as I mentioned earlier in the show, this week's show notes are at relay.fm slash upgrade slash three. Thank you so much again to our sponsors for this week, Cards Against Humanity and Pilot.

I mentioned it earlier, but I am at iMike on Twitter. I-M-Y-K-E. And Jason is at J-S-N-E-L-L. Not used to spelling your Twitter handle. It's like we need a song for that or something. Yes. Jonathan Mann, please note. And sixcolors.com.

You can read all my things oh I'm sorry sixcolors.com for Jason's fantastic website don't forget Mike don't forget it I won't ever forget it it's in my RSS I restarted RSS just for you and I read everything you write

I appreciate that somebody has to want to be my copy editor? Yeah, sure. You don't want me to be your copy editor. There's a whole website devoted to the misspellings that I make. You definitely don't want that. This is true.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. We'll be back next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.