21: Backup Solutions

2002-ish 2001 I used to listen to Pandora quite a lot granted there weren't a lot of options at the time right other than having your own local

Music library running Winamp and shit like that Napster and

Winamp is another throwback. They are coming back. Did you hear that? I did hear that

Really whips the llama's ass

I need a clip of that

That'd be our new segment breaker

Or that could be the cussing well we lot we allow cussing so we're not gonna use that

That would be a funny cuss cover up.

[Music playing]

Welcome back to the cast man, episode number 21.

- Is this 21?

- It's been a while.

- Yeah, it has been a while.

I think the last one we did was a few months ago.

- Happy holidays.

- November came and went

since last time we recorded a podcast.

- It has, yeah.

- I didn't see yours.

Did you grow a stash this November?

I didn't see it.

- I've been told that if I do that,

my wife will wax it off in my sleep,

at least half of it anyway.

She's like, I only have to get half.

- Be willing to pay to see that.

Did you help put it?

I threatened to, if she did that,

that I would just run around with half, half a mustache.

If you only get half, I still get to wear the other half.

It'd be fun.

November's a 30 days of mustache growing,

so it doesn't really matter what you got there.

So you know the holidays have come early.

How's that?

Well, hoody and the blowfish,

you remember them from back in the day?

Oh, sure, yeah.

Hold my hand.

Oh yeah, yeah, exactly.

All those classics.

Well, the good news is,

and we're showing our age here,

that they are going to reunite.

Oh God.

And go on tour.

Oh, that's terrible.

And create a new album.

That nobody's gonna buy.

(laughing)

Everybody's been waiting for it for like 10 years.

Wow. No, 20 years.

Well, a lot of this old is new again.

You have like what,

Fool House that rebooted a couple of years ago.

Yeah. Like,

Fooler House. Yup.

Yeah. What else?

There's other things like that too.

You've got--

Oh, they keep rebooting all kinds of stuff.

This says though, like 25 years,

it's been 25 years since Cracked Rearview,

which was kind of like their big splash hit, right?

That have hold my hand and all the big hits

that you remember, 25 years since that debuted.

So. Holy shit.

So when was that 94?

Yeah, that would make sense, mid 90s.

93? Mm-hmm.

Geez.

So make sure you get your tickets

to Hootie and the Blowfish, everybody.

Yeah, pre-order those albums now.

Do they still have albums these days?

(laughs)

Get it on limited edition, get on cassette, first 10,000.

True, I guess speaking of throwbacks,

you get it on vinyl now.

Yeah, see that's another throw, that is right, the vinyl.

Vinyl is huge now, vinyl,

I don't think they ever stopped making it,

they probably just didn't do it

in this big of quantities for 20 years there.

It slowed down for a really long time,

but I think people are kind of wanting

to get back to simpler times, right?

Like so they feel like, you know,

what did you do back in the day?

like threw on a record and you jammed out to a tune for five minutes and then flipped it.

Yeah when you actually listened to the whole album it wasn't just a Spotify playlist.

Well yeah and you had what four songs on a side? Yeah. Something like that?

Yeah that's about right. Unless it was a what did they what did they call the little ones?

Why don't they call the EPs? Yeah EP and LP right? Is it LP? I think well one was...

'Cause there was the smaller discs

and then there was the big daddies.

Yeah, there was one that was like a 70 millimeter format.

Wasn't that part of it too?

There was like, there's different sizes

and there's different, I don't know.

I know a lot of people that listen to vinyl.

Some good friends of ours, though, that were at the wedding,

they have a huge vinyl collection

and I know other people that are hooking their vinyl collection

up to, or vinyl players, rather,

up to sonal speakers using the amp and stuff like that.

So like it's becoming a big deal.

I've even heard that for whatever reason,

like, and this has got to be just a nostalgia thing,

but like tapes are also coming back,

like good old tape decks.

Really?

So now you're gonna see like Bluetooth cassette decks

and shit. (laughing)

You just have a player that all you see

is the spinning tape in there,

but it's really not playing any tape.

It's just playing it off like a digital format.

Okay, I do know that from an audio file point of view

that having analog, if you have analog footage,

that's gonna be the best.

I mean, there's digital analog conversion still,

there's something lost there, right?

So is this how like, you see like these new,

like these really old movies

or these really old albums or something like that

and they're remastered into like HD

and you're like, how the hell is that possible?

Is it because of the analog format that they use at the time

is still somehow superior in terms of like data compression

data. Not necessarily. I don't, I think there's an upconversion that has to happen there. I don't

think there's anything at source that could capture that kind of resolution, at least for 1080p,

right? You're gonna get, but I don't know, that could be something to do with it. Maybe you could

use better technology now to grab more pixels off of that piece of film. Maybe, yeah.

But at some point, I don't know how much resolution the film captured. Right. So

certainly though, when it comes to the I was watching this this bit on

because Bohemia and rap city is a big deal now in the theaters. Have you seen that yet? I did not.

I haven't either. I'd like to see it. It was it was good. A lot of good reviews on that.

I was watching a piece on YouTube where they went back and looked at the master track for that song

when they when they recorded it back in the 70s or I don't remember when it was what year it was done

and this was a thick piece of tape this was a reel that had two inches thick tape

and it could hold something like 16 or 24 tracks on it. I feel like maybe we must have talked about

this because I think I feel like I remember you or somebody explained this to me. Well that was

cool because then they have it broken down into different segments so you've got

it's like the recording like they could get multiple vocal tracks multiple guitar tracks multiple drums

yeah because one of the techniques they use was they get like a microphone in the guitar one in the

room and one next to the guitar and they put them all together and then it would sound really dynamic

but when you have that level of quality then you could get very high resolution

I don't know how much it matters now that technology being what it is you can probably get

damn near

lossless

digital recording off of

In the studio. Yeah. Yeah. Remember your member hearing about this and it was a it was kind of a groundbreaking

Just recording on a whole a lot more channels kind of than typical recording was done in the day, right?

For them it was for a lot of the other the Beatles and those guys did not use them any tracks

on the recordings at that time. They had to try to compress things down into a few tracks. And so

this was a pretty big deal that how many they needed for the recording. That was a recorded 1975,

by the way. 75. Okay. How the hell did we get here? Well, we were talking about throwbacks and

cassette decks. Alright, vinyl. Vinyl. Yeah, we'll trace it back eventually. The vinyl was, okay,

what I was getting confused on is that there's, it's the speed. So there's three different speeds

that you can play the record back 33 and a third rpm 45 and 78 and the records

themselves are whether all 12 inches but there was a smaller wasn't there a

smaller record - LP was long playing longer than a single and that was based

on speed that you'd have to set on the on the turntable oh maybe that's what it

Maybe I don't know if you want long play then maybe you go we need a vinyl expert

She brings Slayer on he he has vinyl. I don't know how much he knows about these technical terms or not

But he would be a good person to talk to you about that hit us up Slayer when you listen to this

Yeah, let us know let us know about the speeds and the sizes and

All that could

Have a couple of quick hits on the follow-up from all the way back on episode number 20. What do we do on that one?

Mac OS X Mojave. We also talked about the ignite conference and travel stuff that I had done to Universal Disney and Epcot and

To do apps. Oh was that okay? Yeah universal

Okay

Yep, so one quick bit of follow-up. I think I mentioned in that episode was kind of in relation to the ignite conference

Where Scott goo is kind of traditionally known as when he does his?

Keynote addresses he always wears the red polo shirt, right? That's like a signature thing. That's what he's really well known for and I was

Explaining there's another guy that is the lead of DevOps and

He is kind of like trying to commandeer that and do like the black

I think I called him like the black polo dude or something the guy's name is Donovan Brown and

What is actual thing is the man in the black shirt? That's what he's calling himself

So that's what he wears every day is black polo black polo same thing

Black polo so he's just trying to use that but he's the lead of the devops group was zuck the first one to do this

There was one of these guys. I don't know. Did he ever have a same color polo? I don't I don't know if that was his thing

I knew he always kind of did polos right, but no he did hoodies. He just does hoodies. Yeah

Hoodies and jeans. Yeah signature thing Bella check does hoodies

Bella check

Patriots, I don't want to talk about the Patriots. Oh, did I hit a sore spot? What happened?

Well, the only time I root would root for the Patriots was like last weekend for example

They played Minnesota. I would like to see Minnesota go down just because my bears are in the oh boy

In the same division as the NFC north here. We go. You don't hear anything about the bears ever in the history of life

And now suddenly they're good. They're doing great man. I

Talk about them all time. What are you talking about? All right?

Other quick news

We are now in Spotify with this podcast

So if you Spotify to listen to your podcast, they have a podcast section now

I don't know if anybody's noticed that or not, but you can find the coffee code cast on Spotify in addition to iTunes

SoundCloud

Tune in all the other options that we have available. Right. Yeah, this is big

This is something that they just released in the last month or so. This probably did happen in November

It's probably shortly after recording because I'm I feel like this has been on my list for a really long time has it

Yeah, yeah, this was something I read about in the Wall Street Journal. They were talking about well

I think Pandora might be getting into it as well. Oh, no kidding

Don't quote me on that

But I know that the article was spotify was the main bit about how they're bringing in podcasting now to get more users on their site longer

They have a game a Schumer podcast on there now that now they've opened it up

But there were others that were chasing behind to get those brought onto the music subscription services, too

Maybe I did hear about that because remember back in the day Pandora was like the music genome project or something like that

You remember so I think I feel like I maybe read an article about this where Pandora was going to try and be like very good

suggesting

Additional podcast to you using that same kind of logic they used to use in the Pandora app to suggest music to you based on like

Oh, you tend to like

Music with this type of rhythm or you know you tend to like this many beats per second or you know those types of weird

things that you don't really think about but

That would be interesting if they got back to that because I like Pandora for that reason

I always discovered new music and I felt like when everybody else started

blowing up that they tried to change their model to go after that business

And so I don't know how their algorithm working for that

But it seemed like in the beginning at least you could always get some really interesting stuff that you didn't hear before

Yep, I agree back in like the early 2000s. I think probably

2002 ish 2001 I used to listen to Pandora quite a lot

Granted there weren't a lot of options at the time right other than having your own local

Music library running Winamp and shit like that Napster and

Winamp is another throwback. They are coming back. Did you hear that? I did hear that

Really whips the llama's ass

I need a clip of that

That'd be our new segment breaker

Or that could be the cussing well we allow we allow cussing so we're not gonna use that

You have funny cuss cover up.

(laughing)

Let's throw that up on a website with a Patreon link

and see if we can get a few dollars for that one.

On the same token as Spotify,

because we are on Spotify now,

a friend of mine, Andrew Woods,

Found us. He's a pee guy.

Yeah, exactly.

He found us through Spotify,

reached out and was like,

"I didn't know you had a podcast."

Woods didn't know that.

No. Oh.

Thanks to Woods for listening.

I know he caught up on the entire catalog, one through 20.

Whoa.

How did he do that?

(laughs)

Why did he do that?

It's maybe the better question.

- Wow, and he's still, and he's, wow,

and he mentioned it to you.

- Clamoring for content.

- Well, he'd be a great person to have on as well,

just to talk in general about coding

and probably some more interesting stuff there too.

- Yeah, I'm sure he'd be more than willing to do it.

He's usually up for about anything.

So yeah, thanks Woods for reaching out

and thanks for listening.

(upbeat music)

I have a bit of news about, if we're talking about tech news, today Google had a Flutter

conference over in Europe.

It was in, was it on Ireland maybe?

And they announced version 1.0 of the Flutter SDK as live.

So let's take a step back from that for a minute.

Are you still doing mobile development?

Yeah.

I haven't been as active with all of my travels,

but I have a couple of side projects

that are using Flutter.

- Okay. - Yep.

- So what is the new,

what is, this is version one you said.

So you were working on like a pre-release version or what?

- Yeah, that's what I think makes it even more powerful

what they're doing.

This has been pre-release software up until today.

And there's thousands of apps that are already running

on Flutter.

Numerous Fortune 500 companies have Flutter apps

in production running on pre-release version of software.

It had just been in beta.

- So it's real stable, clearly.

I mean, if they can run pre-production,

production apps are running on a non-released version.

- Yep.

- Right?

So what are the primary new features?

Do you have like a, any kind of feature rundown

that they're integrating or is it pretty much just

what already existed, but in like stable 1.0 release?

- Sure, that's a big part of it.

It's more stable.

They made stability improvements.

they did bring on some other partner integration.

So in the early days, if you wanted a real,

real Stripe API, for example,

you would have to look to a third party for that

or develop it yourself.

They've provided a number of key integrations

like Square and Google products, Google Maps.

- So as simple as basically just turning on a toggle,

like that type of like, how integrated are we talking here?

You know, you could just say like,

hey, payment provider equals blah.

Well, a lot of this stuff was already built to work

very similar to NPM on the JavaScript world.

So you would go in and, well, it's even easier than that.

There's a few ways you can do it.

But if you have a in your config file,

you put in your dependencies and you just list what you want.

So if you want the Stripe API or the Square API,

then yeah, you pop that in with the version number

and it will detect that and rebuild the application,

download the dependency for you.

And typically there's some configuration steps,

but it's not, the hardest part in my experience doing it

was always going to the third party site

and getting things set up.

So if you had to go and register for a developer key

and put that token somewhere in the code

and make sure it was registered,

like that was always more,

that's been the more time consuming process

than just downloading the library.

So when you run the npm-ish command for,

let's say the Stripe API,

and you say bring Stripe API into my project,

it's gonna go out and create you a token and a secret

and all the different things that you need to talk

to the API, is that kind of what you're getting at?

- Oh no, I'm not saying that.

I'm just saying that the setup process,

the most cumbersome part of it is when you have to go out

and register with Stripe or Square.

But in terms of getting that application to run

on your Flutter app, it's very trivial.

Most of the heavy lifting's done already

and they have good libraries.

These libraries are really good, really well written.

The third party support was very good.

And I think now that they're one-oh

and they have some other partners,

it's gotten even better.

I think that's a good move.

'Cause if you make it easier for, especially payment, right?

'Cause that's the thing that everybody's gonna want

is a way to monetize.

As long as you have a payment gateway

integrated in an easy way like that,

I think you're gonna get a lot more adoption,

a lot quicker adoption.

Yep.

Same thing with like Apple and Apple Pay.

Right, that's kind of tightly integrated

and tightly coupled.

So.

Yeah, I think it's a good move.

It shows the fact that they've already had

thousands of apps built with this thing.

I think just further shows that there's a need,

there's a niche here for making mobile cross-platform

development easier.

And so I think they're gonna be around.

Yeah, I'm just reading here,

that Square created a new in-app payments plugin for Flutter.

It works on both Android and iOS.

Oh, so it's Square provided even.

It's not even Google developing it for you.

No, no, they have, they partnered and I don't know all the other ones, but I saw something

else about a few other guys, possibly two. Square was the big one.

Yeah. That's huge. I mean, Square is a huge player in the e-commerce point of sale market.

So that's huge. Yeah.

Yeah. I've been, to answer your other question though, I have been working on the Flutter

projects, but really in a different role. So the one project that I've been working on

for a while now I'm more PMing that thing we've got a development group in India that

we're working with and we're just underway. I mean we just signed all the contracts and

got all the agreement and everything like that. The scope of work, put all the documents

together, the workflows and that sort of thing and we're just getting started with that so

I'll have more later but I really hope it goes well because if it does then that'd be

a good way to do more.

I can only scale so much.

- All right, I'm gonna skip back away from news.

I mean, I have some other news items,

but kind of in the spirit of the ask three C segment,

even though we don't have anybody asking any questions,

I'm gonna ask a question.

So I'm curious as to what, if any,

your like backup of photo and video process looks like.

- Google photos.

- Google photos.

- Yeah.

What are you, you just, you only back up your phone?

Do you have any other kind of cameras

or any other things that you back up

or is it strictly photos?

I use Google Cloud and Dropbox.

Yeah, and no, I have, now that I have the Mac, I have iCloud.

You use iCloud Drive?

Yes.

So I pay for iCloud Drive,

and then I have Google Photos, Google Docs.

Well, not Google Docs, Google Drive.

So I'm curious, so tell me a little bit more

about how you're splitting this up.

So Google Photos clearly is your photos

from your iPhone, right?

Yeah, so that's what I do.

I download the Google Photos app

and I use that for all my photos.

Okay, and on my desktop, it's iCloud Drive.

I don't know what it covers.

I think it covers everything.

I just checked all the boxes

or whatever the defaults were.

And Dropbox, I had some stuff, legacy stuff on there,

like from older projects, things like that,

but I don't use that day to day.

- Okay, I'm curious about the iCloud drive decision only

because the only thing I use iCloud for personally

is for backups of my devices.

So I have my iPhone device backups there.

I use a small amount of iCloud storage

for the photos that are on the phone

and that sort of thing, and for syncing between messages

on my phone and on my MacBook.

Yes.

But beyond that, I don't really use iCloud for anything

'cause I personally don't really like it.

Okay.

But I also don't back up my entire machine as a whole.

Like I don't use Time Machine or any of that kind of thing.

So the reason that I brought this particular question up

is recently I got a, what is it, a DCMA, is that right?

DCMA, DMCA.

Oh, digital yet request.

you know, Millennium Copyright something.

- DMCA. - Yeah.

I got a request email regarding that from Vimeo,

which is kind of where I tend to host my videos

that I publish.

And they issued a takedown request

for a couple of my videos.

One being the video that I showed to Christina

as a proposal when we were in the Philippines.

And they took it down mainly

because I was using copyrighted songs,

whatever, not worried about that.

This of course led me to try and find the video in my various backup varieties that I had,

which I also use Google Drive, I use Amazon Drive, I use Dropbox for various different

purposes, and then I also had at home at the time a Western Digital MyCloud device, whereas

I would kind of dump all my big video files and that sort of thing to that as kind of

a mass storage.

thing was six terabytes, something like that, so pretty large.

And even despite all these different types of backup varieties, I could not find this

video to save my life.

And so it started to make me reevaluate all the different types of backups that I had

and what I used.

And ultimately, the way that I settled on is to use Amazon Drive as my primary source

of backup, both for photos and for documents.

And the Amazon Photos works very much like Google Photos does.

So as long as you put it in a specific directory,

the Amazon Photos will pick it up and index them

and try and find faces and do all those types of things,

which that's awesome.

Beyond that, though, I wanted to be

able to kind of have a duplicate that was local.

So kind of in the realm of the Western Digital or My Cloud,

I wanted to have something that was on-prem

that I could access a little more quickly than having

to download from Amazon Cloud, which

can take a long time for a lot of files.

So I ended up ordering a new Synology,

which I'd heard a lot about those,

and that's for those of you that may not know

about a Synology, that's just a dual drive

network storage device is basically what it is.

And then it'll stripe data across to the drive

so that if one dies, you can pull it out,

plug in a new one, and it'll stripe it back across

and you won't lose any data.

That's kind of a easy description, right?

- Yeah.

So the beautiful thing about the Synology is that it has applications built on top of

it.

So it's a server on top of a set of hard drives that can store data.

So it also has a cloud sync application that's built into it that supports Amazon Drive natively.

So now my workflow basically is to go from my MacBook or whatever it is I'm working on

photos with to the Synology, which backs it up on that set of disks.

And then as it's put on there, it's automatically syncing that up to Amazon Cloud.

So the two are in sync constantly and I don't have to manage it at all.

That's excellent.

And so this gives you a local copy, gives you a cloud copy and any devices that are hooked

up to it have copies as well.

That's right.

So that's good.

That's good protection.

So I have two copies at least pretty much at all times assuming that the cloud backup

is up to date and I may have three, if I have it on my MacBook as well.

So I think it's a pretty solid solution.

So far it's worked and then kind of to come back to the beginning of the story where I'd

lost the video, I ended up luckily getting Vimeo to give me a copy of it, even though

it was taken down.

They were able to give me a link that let me download it real quick and get a copy of

it.

So now that's backed up multiple times.

Yeah, I bet.

So yeah, I was just curious as to what your situation looked like because I've definitely

I've gone through many permutations of this and decided to,

oh, I want to put them on Google Drive.

I want to put them on Dropbox.

Oh, I want to go here.

I want to go, you know, I've moved stuff around a lot.

- I've always gotten roped into whatever flavor was free

at the time or special promos.

And so I don't have a consistent one.

And I've lost data too.

I have lost things I couldn't recover.

Old photos that were from old phones

and that sort of thing.

really before they had iCloud syncing the phone.

I remember things like that,

like I lost a lot of stuff on some of those devices.

And back in the day when I had a media center,

losing shit on drives like that too.

Yeah, and the Synology wasn't even necessary,

like a necessary part of this whole package.

However, I had the Western Digital MyCloud device,

which was a single disk.

So as soon as that disk decided to quit,

like I was gonna lose data, right?

I was gonna lose a lot of data.

So that was what made me jump into the world

of network attached RAID devices, right?

And I could even make it even more secure, right?

I could actually even stripe it across more disks,

more than two if I wanted to.

But for now, the two is better than one.

And the cloud mirroring what's on the Synology

is even better yet.

So I feel pretty good about the situation

that I got going on.

- And what's the Amazon offering?

Where do you get that?

Amazon Drive, you said that was called?

- Yep, it's Amazon Prime Photos,

and then Amazon Drive is what it's called.

- Okay.

- It's a very similar package to how the Google Drive works.

I think it's slightly cheaper.

The beauty of Amazon, sorry, Amazon Photos,

is that if you're a photographer of any kind,

your chances are you're shooting in raw format,

and raw format files are very large, comparatively to JPEGs,

which is in Google Drive, or Google Cloud Photos,

what they're gonna do is they're gonna compress your photo

and store it at a certain resolution.

I think it's 1024 by something.

I can't remember.

There's a max resolution that they'll store.

You can opt to keep it original,

but you're gonna pay for that.

That's right, yep.

So in the plan with Amazon Cloud,

you're going to pay for your typical price,

but they'll give you raw format included.

So unlimited photo files in raw format

with no additional charge.

Okay.

which is huge for a photographer, really huge.

And then I think he's like,

I think I have a terabyte plan or something like that.

So I can upload a terabyte of additional data

besides my photos, mainly videos.

But so far so good, it works great.

- I'm just looking at the pricing on Amazon Drive

and it's very competitive.

It's a lot cheaper than Google Drive is

as far as I know now.

100 gig for 11.99 a year.

- Yep.

- For a dollar a month, 100 gigs.

Pretty awesome.

And I used to be on Google Drive and the price kind of scared me away.

I think mainly, because like you said, the promotional pricing,

Amazon had some promotional pricing and I think it was like unlimited storage or unlimited photos or

something unlimited and I was like, "Oh, let's go over there."

And then they took that away, of course, but regardless, the pricing still is more competitive.

Yes.

And not only that, but if you really have huge storage needs, you could also move your stuff to like Glacier or something like that.

That's another Amazon product that's like cold storage kind of.

Okay, so like if you want to back up a ton of data to like a spot where you don't need access to it quickly

Like that that's really cheap like I want to say that's like a dollar per terabyte or something

And you're really paying for IO at that point. That's right to retrieve it to retrieve it. Yeah, it's gonna sit

Yep, I like the image of the glacier glacier storage

Yeah, glacier will speed access. Well, what was the option they had that was the truck?

Maybe it was like glacier delivery

>> Well, I'm not sure.

So, our company has recently gone through

a migration from on-prem stuff to the Cloud using Azure.

Azure has a very similar product like this.

They call it lift and shift.

So, they have a new product that you basically

truck into your data center and you

load this device with all your data and

literally roll it out and ship it to Azure.

and they'll load it into their data center.

A literal lift and shift.

- Yeah, well that's what I'm thinking of.

There was something like that for getting large amounts

of data off a glacier storage.

And I thought it was like where they actually had

a semi truck come, one of those cargo containers

from the cloud that you could plug into your building

and download it because depending on them,

some of these guys have massive, like Paul Allen Institute

is probably a good example too, where our friend Pat's at

because the share size of data is so large

that trying to transfer that over the wire

would take a long time and be really expensive

and it's cheaper to bring a physical box over there.

Drive it over.

Well, and when you start to get to that,

those types of sizes, like you almost have to.

Yeah.

It's just absurd amounts of data.

I wish I could find the name of it.

They demoed it when I was at Ignite.

They actually had one up on the stage.

It was just a big ass box that rolls around on wheels.

Basically giant hard drive.

Oh wow.

So yeah, that's backup storage plans.

It's a good idea.

I like your device.

I saw your device after you got to set up this Synology,

you said that's what it was called.

That's right.

And I was impressed by the server capabilities that it had.

You showed me the list of items you could download.

It's like an app store for this thing.

Kind of to your, yeah, exactly.

It does have an app store.

It certainly does.

And to your point, like you were talking

about having a media center.

I have a whole bunch of old videos, right,

that were on my old Western Digital Drive now

on the Synology, and the Synology can run a service

called Plex, which we've talked about here before,

which is basically a media center.

- Yeah.

- Synology can run that server.

So it has access to the files, it has the server,

it's very easy to make it work,

and to serve those files out to any kind of device

that you want, your PC, your phone, Apple TV,

it doesn't matter.

- It'll stream out.

And other things that are fun,

web serving, get server.

- That's right.

Yeah, just about anything you want to serve from that thing.

You could have a mail server, a web server, a Git server,

a Apache server, like it doesn't matter,

has all kinds of different things.

You just one click set up.

I like that, that's sweet.

Yeah, it's great.

Highly recommended, back up your stuff.

Right, don't do it.

Don't wait till it's too late, 'cause when it's too late,

you're not gonna, what can you do about it then?

Nothing, you screwed, man.

That's right.

You gotta call Vimeo and ask him pretty please.

Then you gotta go pay somebody's shitload of money

to scrape data off your desk.

Yeah, yeah, that's just not,

I haven't had a need for it that badly.

I had the drives and they weren't,

couldn't give them to read.

I thought, well, that'd be a few hundred bucks probably,

or more, I don't even know.

I think those data, what do they call those data?

There's a specific term for those type of people.

I can't think what they're called.

Like disaster recovery data.

Data forensics.

Forensics, yeah.

Yeah, I think those are highly expensive, yep.

Yeah, they don't even know, they're just at the low level

trying to reconstruct bits that used to be on the platter.

Yep.

Yeah, just get a backup device.

Put a Plex server on it and you can be watching TV shows

instead of paying some guy $100 to figure out

if your old wedding photos went to or something.

That's right.

Cool.

What else is going on?

Did you hear that Apple is in a monopoly lawsuit case?

at the Supreme Court.

Oh, in the US?

Yeah.

No, I did not.

You hadn't heard about this.

So have you heard the recent kind of hubbub

about Tumblr removing porn from their platform?

Yes, that adult content,

that was this week, wasn't it, this recently?

Yes.

So that's kind of on the same vein.

And the reason for this is Apple,

they're arguing, I don't know if it's them specifically,

but they're basically saying that Apple

is forcing their hand to do this

because Apple won't allow their app in their app store

until they've removed adult content.

So they're basically saying that Apple has a monopoly

over applications on their platform,

which they kind of do and always have.

But on Monday, the courts was hearing oral arguments

in this particular case over the control of the ecosystem.

- Was that a joke?

Was that pun intended?

- Which I must have missed it.

oral arguments.

(laughing)

- This podcast has an E rating for explicit content.

- Not for everyone.

(laughing)

- Yeah, so there's a Supreme Court case

that I had never even heard of

against Apple for this particular reason

for basically having the walled garden

that they've had ever since the very beginning,

which I thought was kind of fascinating.

I guess maybe just a product of scale at this point

that people are starting to pay attention to it

or worry about it?

- So is that just a personal, is that a,

what am I trying to say?

Why is that so important to the company?

Like what wouldn't it benefit them

to allow those types of things with the proper ratings

or just say, look, you're...

- Who are you talking about, Tumblr specifically?

- I don't know why Apple would not just say to Tumblr,

like we don't care what content you put on there,

we're not gonna be the arbiters of content,

we're just going to let people know

we're gonna give your Apple rating

and then people can decide if they want that or not.

- I've always kind of been a platform

that has allowed adult content without much problem.

And Apple, I think kind of the same way

as Facebook and Google, I think they have a responsibility

to the greater world to filter out content

of various types.

Maybe adult content is questionable,

but they are increasingly becoming the police of content

and what type of content can be published

on their platform.

- Right, yeah, because you have those other situations.

Maybe this is where, because I'm trying to think,

when it comes to strictly adult porn videos, for example,

there are apps out there that you can get for that, I think.

I don't know, I don't have them on my phone.

I'm just saying like--

- Back it up, back it up.

- Might need to delete this too.

I don't, you can look at my phone.

But no, I'm surprised by that.

I mean, I'm just trying to think of what their angle is.

I know that like 4chan, was it 4chan?

I think that they had some stuff that was really bad on there.

- They're pretty horrible.

Yeah, like you can find like beheading videos

and yeah, just--

- Child molestation type of things.

- Throwing kids kittens off of cliffs

and just horrible, horrible shit, right?

- So if that's where, is Tumblr on that realm kind of?

Is that part of the problem?

- Tumblr is like effectively a mini blog platform.

So like you could post audio clips, images, text,

like all kinds of different like small clips of various things,

but it's effectively a blog platform.

- I'm just trying to figure out if Apple's,

what line they're trying to draw here.

And if it's something more specific to Tumblr,

because they have 4chan, like 4chan,

they have this content that's really,

really out there, really graphic,

or not.

And I don't know enough about the platform to say,

but that's interesting.

- Just looking at the article here,

oh, child pornography issues is what this is saying.

So this is an article from the Verge says tumblr was removed from apples app store over child pornography issues

Okay, so that see that to me makes more sense because I thought there were other sites or other apps and things you could get for

If you want to look at boobs on your phone, you could download an app for that

But when it comes to I mean that's a different line in my

Yeah, of course, right mine. So that makes sense to me that they want to say look you got it

You got to clean that up like we're not gonna allow me that on your site

If you're gonna be on our phone

So this says Tumblr has been noted for having a permissive attitude towards not safe for work and adult oriented content on its service

Which it has previously caused it to briefly get banned in Indonesia. However, child pornography is a completely different matter

That is iOS guidelines clearly state that all apps must have a content filter to screen out such material

And that makes a lot more sense. Yeah, okay the two aren't necessarily tightly coupled. I mean Tumblr

Tumblr was removed and it's now being it's removing this content to be re-added to the store

But in addition to that there is the ongoing lawsuit which I don't think involves tumblr

But is kind of like in the same realm right that that Apple is with is holding people hostage to some degree

I guess in terms of the app store

and I thought it was just an interesting legal argument that that

Something that they've had all along that they've always kind of

Advocated that this was a safety and security measure is now being used against them and has made it to the Supreme Court

Which is impressive in its own right? Well, you're starting to see that happen a lot more now these bigger companies bigger cases

I mean this is different but similar to how sales tax on the internet became

Became an issue years ago

Right because I think that was just something when you were small company didn't matter

But then when you became Amazon and you could just ship shit for free no tax included

Now it's like, okay, we have a bigger problem that we have to deal with here.

And it sounds like this is a similar kind of a thing.

When you have that much content, when you have that many people coming to use your devices,

it's not just something that's in the dark web anymore.

It's something that anybody could get their hands on.

Yeah.

At some point when you become so large, you become pretty subject to these kind of monopoly

cases, right?

That's just kind of part of the territory, I guess,

'cause you control such a large portion

of whatever business it is that you're operating in.

Speaking of very large monopolistic companies, GM.

Did you hear about this?

GM laying off thousands of workers.

Yes.

And killing Chevrolet Volt,

which is a electronic slash gas powered vehicle.

It's a hybrid.

Hybrid, yeah.

I did hear that these jobs were mostly in the US,

only in the US and they were around that.

There was another vehicle too, wasn't it?

Would you say the Volt and something else?

The Volt, I don't know if they were gonna kill another one.

I know generally speaking they're killing sedans.

Okay. Kind of as a whole,

but they are gonna keep from what I read the Volt,

which is kind of a smaller version of the Volt,

but I think that one might be purely electric.

That's all electric. I think that's right.

And I think they're keeping that one primarily

because I think that is gonna be used

in testing of their autonomous vehicle capabilities.

So I just thought this was interesting.

We talk a lot about Tesla's

and a lot about electric vehicles on the show.

- Yes.

- And when I saw this, I was just like, whoa,

'cause even before we looked at buying the Tesla,

the Volt was actually a very interesting

and compelling vehicle for us.

We actually really liked it a lot.

The price point was a little high.

We felt for what it was and it had zero backseat room.

So we opted out, but overall we loved the car.

I think we thought it was a great car.

We thought it was a, it felt great to drive.

It got us into kind of the electric vehicle side

of the house, I guess you might say.

And we probably would have been able to use

only the electric vehicle most of the time

'cause we don't take a ton of huge long road trips.

So I was a little sad to see this, I guess.

And not only from this perspective

of losing this particular vehicle,

But one of the things that our fearless president

has always kind of touted is that he's gonna bring

manufacturing back to the US, right?

And unfortunately now, clearly we're losing

a pretty major vehicle make

and a ton of jobs that go along with it.

So I thought it was kind of an interesting story.

Well, I was surprised too, just because, yeah,

the electric market is just starting to take off.

I know that there was some blame going on

that maybe it was because of some of the tariffs being waged,

some of the aluminum tariffs,

but this is just electric.

So I'm not really sure what's going on here.

- And maybe kind of, if you flip the argument,

maybe it's because of the EVs taking off so heavily

is that because this is a hybrid still using gas,

maybe you're kind of on one house or the other,

maybe there's not room anymore in the middle

for these kind of gas electric hybrids.

Maybe you're kind of in one camp,

Like we are with the electric vehicles

or you stay in the gas side.

Maybe there's just no room anymore.

Especially considering the sedan market

seems to be getting squished.

It's all SUVs, crossovers and trucks.

You are correct.

Chevy Cruze is also being killed,

which is another sedan, mid-sized sedan.

Okay.

Well, I'm seeing some things here too.

Like maybe automations playing a role.

I mean, maybe there's something else going on at GM

or they want, there's more automation.

I mean, that's certainly possible in terms of the job loss,

but they're definitely killing these two car lines

at the very least.

For sure, right.

Yeah.

Most of the jobs, or I think there was mention

regarding the jobs being quite a lot of middle management.

See, we'll see how these guys,

they're having to make some big changes right now.

Tesla's numbers have been pretty strong.

Ford, well Ford is competing with Uber a little bit now.

They just bought that, they bought Spin,

that scooter company that's--

Oh, I did see that.

- Yeah, and Uber bought one of them.

They bought Jump, and they were talking about

maybe buying Lime.

- This is a little bit off topic,

but GC Lime now has vehicles,

kind of like Cartagoga and Reach Now?

- Yeah, I did, and I couldn't get one.

I don't know if I need to be on a beta for that,

but the app that I had, the latest version of the Lime app

didn't even offer that, so I don't know if it's a pilot

program in Seattle or what.

- Okay.

- They look kind of like the original Cartagosa,

the smart cars a little bit.

There are a few out 500s, I believe.

Yep.

So, back to the story though, the reduced salary, sorry, not salary, the reduced in staffing

is what I was looking for was reducing salary in contract staff by 15%, which includes 25%

fewer executives to streamline decision making.

Okay.

So, it's the inefficiency thing.

And an estimated 14,000 factory workers and white collar employees will be losing jobs.

pretty pretty significant amount of people. It's a very significant number

and what I'm curious to see how this plays out because it is it gonna be yeah

the vehicles they were probably not doing as well as they could have but

then also there's this bigger thing have this bigger current underneath this

whole thing where it's like we got to be more competitive with the Teslas and

and we've got it we just have too much I think for too long they were so big and

I had a bunch of extra money floating around

that it didn't matter and now it's kind of critical time

where they have to streamline and automate

otherwise they're gonna be out the door.

- Think you're correct.

I don't have a lot more to add to that.

It was an interesting story that came up

and like I said, given how much we talk about Tesla

on the show, figured it was an interesting topic

to throw out.

- On the flip side of this,

since you already got us kicked off on this one,

I was reading something earlier today.

I've been getting a little more interested in,

You've been on Robinhood before?

I have Robinhood on my mobile device here, yeah.

I don't know if we've talked about this on the cast,

Robinhood.

It's a trading application.

Yeah, it's not, it is cool technology though,

because this is the first app of its kind

that I'm aware of where you don't have

the normal brokerage fees associated with trades.

Like you're not Scott trade, it's like, oh, you know,

home of the whatever, you'd pay seven bucks a trade

or something.

So explain, do you know the details of how that works?

like how are you making a more direct trade?

There's no broker, like you said, broker involved to do it.

It's all digital.

Yeah, I don't know the details, but on their app,

they talk a little bit about their product

and they say that one reason why they're able to get rid

of so much of the overhead costs

is because of automation and technology.

So I don't know what exactly that means,

but efficiencies.

And maybe just because it's a more competitive space,

I also think like trading is something

that there was maybe a monopoly on that for a while too.

And so the people that were in charge of it were like,

yeah, we're gonna fucking charge you a ton of money

because you don't have any other options.

- Yeah.

- And now they're disrupting the space and saying,

look, we can do it way cheaper

and we don't need all that money to still be profitable.

So good fucking luck you guys.

- Have you made any trades on the app?

The only thing that I have is the one single.

So when you get a referral to the service,

they give that person one random stock

and you get a random stock.

So I have my one random stock in,

who is it anyway, I can't remember.

It's a game company, Zynga maybe or something?

Yeah, I have Groupon.

Groupon.

Just not doing anything for me.

I think my stock's worth like a solid four bucks.

What I like about this, I decided that I want to put

a little bit of money in there, not much,

just to get into the markets a little bit in other ways.

I already do 401K of course and a company match

and max that out and I do some other things

in Vanguard index funds.

But it would be a fun thing, a fun hobby

to try to get into a little bit and just see,

you know, for like insignificant amount of money,

throw a few hundred bucks in there

and just see if I can make money with it.

- Yeah.

- And one of the, tie this back to what we were talking about

the cars, GM, there's a company that I was looking at

earlier today, BYD.

- So BYD is one manufacturer,

large manufacturer of the largest electric buses.

- Okay.

- I thought this was a cool story.

So I was looking at their stock

because I was reading an article today in the paper

that talked about the Chinese government

is really propping this up.

So right now in Shenzhen,

which is like the tech hub in China,

by the end of the year,

all of their public transportation

be 100% electric.

Wow.

And they have a goal, I think, in the country by 2025

to be 100% electric.

And even picking certain parts, like heavily populated areas

where you have a lot of these smog and congestion issues,

it will be, or if it isn't already,

forbidden to drive gasoline-powered vehicles

within those city limits.

Or they'll flip the script, and it'll be--

you'll be charged a tax for emissions, right?

If they choose to do that, maybe that's

another way around it, it seemed like they were really hard,

like the government was really hard on this to say,

look, like we're just gonna ban them all the time.

- To your point too, to interject one other item,

I was reading an article just the other day that,

to show you how far behind the US might even be,

or even Seattle, like a progressive city like Seattle,

that Metro, which is the local bus line here,

that's kind of one of the bigger ones,

was just putting on an article that says

that they were going to start testing

fully electric buses this year.

So--

- Wow, start testing.

- Yeah.

We have hybrids currently, right?

There's a lot of electric gas hybrids or diesel hybrids,

whatever it is they run.

But yeah, we don't have any all electric.

- Well, right now that the Chinese automakers,

electric, anybody who's involved in electric vehicles,

99% of the vehicles worldwide are coming from China

or being produced in China.

So I got interested in this company BYD.

I thought it was kind of interesting

to look into them a little bit more and see

maybe that'd be some stock to like buy.

Couldn't do it probably on Robinhood.

I don't know if they do stuff on the foreign markets,

but because of what's happening here now,

because we're behind,

I feel like this is an opportunity

if you could invest in something like that.

We don't have manufacturing happening here.

We're gonna be buying buses, Chinese buses.

And so when we finally get on board in five, 10, 20 years,

I could just see that thing taken off big time.

Yeah, yeah, trading like that,

I've always been interested in

and I've never really taken the plunge.

Like the farthest I've ever gone is kind of the,

the, what would you call it,

like the simulated stock trading apps

where they'll give you $30,000 in fake money.

Like right now, for instance,

I have myself a whole shitload of shares of Tesla

in this particular app that I have.

Oh, it's a simulator.

- Yeah, so you don't have to risk real money.

It's just you can play around and like,

you know, say I want to buy this and I buy this,

but they'll work off real time numbers,

like real stock numbers.

- Oh, do tell, what's the name of that app?

- The one that I'm using currently is called Best Brokers.

- Okay, I'm gonna have to download that.

- So I think they give you, what do they give you?

They must give you 25 grand to start to invest.

and I bought a whole shitload of stock in Tesla,

of course, 'cause I'm a Tesla fanboy,

and I don't know how many shares I have,

but currently I'm up about 4,252 bucks.

- Okay.

- So I'm doing all right with my one stock that I invested in.

- Well, but that's fun.

It'd be fun game to play doing this

'cause I'm not really into regular gaming anyway,

and I've been interested in the markets for a while.

I do have some investments, like I said,

but I'm interested in just for fun

doing some other things.

I've been following Bitcoin a lot too

'cause I thought, well, maybe I'll make

some investment in Bitcoin.

And then over Thanksgiving weekend,

that thing just took a shit

and it went from like 8,000 down to 4,000.

- It's been taking a shit for a long time.

- Right, and it's right now, it's around $3,800.

But, and this just depends on your viewpoint, of course,

but I anticipate it to go back up.

Maybe not tomorrow.

I don't think it's gonna be 20 grand in three months.

I'm I'm bullish on Bitcoin in the long run because I just think the technology behind it. They're the leaders

I mean they came out there ahead of everybody else right now and

I think that

For various reasons that you there's been a lot of public interest in it

And so there's kind of a big, you know

Gold Rush Part 2 like digital gold rush to get in on this thing

They kind of blew it up

But I think it's another issue like electric buses in Seattle where we're lagging behind and I think that a lot of banks

Want to kill this shit because it's a threat to their business

But they're not gonna have a choice at some point like we're gonna need to have this kind of digital

Blockchain technology for financial transactions and it's going it already exists in other parts of the world where you can transact on that

And I can send it to you instantly and I think over time it's gonna get to a point where they can't avoid it anymore

You can't kill it and it's gonna be worth the hell a lot of money

Yeah, I think blockchain itself the technology blockchain is here to stay and that's not gonna go anywhere

Even some banks want to utilize it

in various ways for for ledgers and that sort of thing which makes a hell of a lot of sense but the

coin technologies

You know you had that you had the the crazy ramp up with all the speculation and that sort of thing which that's fine

But the problem that there is with any all the coins as a whole is there's just so damn many of them

And it's gonna take a while for it to shake out to see like what actually becomes a

a useful currency in terms of coins.

Maybe it's many of them and maybe they can inter-trade,

but that all has to be figured out

before it can really, really take off.

And once that does occur,

I think that's when you're gonna get this really big spike

and where if you've invested correctly,

you might gain to make quite a lot.

I see what you're saying.

You're saying that because there's so many different types

of currencies, cryptocurrencies that are out there right now

competing, it's like kind of like the beginning,

you're gonna see half of those,

75% of those will be gone and there's only gonna be a few standing probably only one or two or

They'll figure out a way to make them in or interplay right where it doesn't really matter what coin you use

Yeah, they all just have some common language or common

Transactional language that they can trade with each other and it doesn't really matter if you have

Doge a coin or Bitcoin or a theory. I'm it doesn't matter right?

I think they all can trade and work correctly at that point

It'll be like various currencies and in fiat where you've got

but whatever the trading rate is today, right?

Exchange rates.

Right, yeah, like crowns versus pounds versus dollars,

whatever, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Well, interesting.

I wasn't playing on talking about that,

but it's something I've gotten into just for fun,

'cause I need something new when I'm out at the bar,

and I think that'd be kind of a cool thing.

I'm with you on that.

I have a lot of interest in it,

and I think it'd be,

it's something that's fun to play around with,

but I don't have the confidence to invest

even a small amount of money that I am afraid to lose.

So that's kind of why I went with this kind of gamified

version where you can kind of dip your toe in it,

see how you feel like you're doing,

and then maybe later on.

- Well, I would absolutely want to do that

because I don't want to put a lot of money out there.

I'm not a trader and I don't think you can just pick up

trader for dummies and figure it out.

- That book exists.

- It's out there.

I'm sure there's a bunch of huge copies on Amazon.

All Lincoln in the show notes for anybody that wants to pick up a copy.

Mostly for unsale high people that lost their fucking shorts.

Getting out of trading.

They need their quarterback.

Yeah, right.

But a simulation could be a fun way to do it, especially if you want to get a little more

sophisticated and going back to Robinhood, you can actually, they have options available

now, which I'm very not familiar with options, but I know you can do things like buy calls.

So you can say I'm gonna buy I'm gonna pay to say that this stock is gonna go up over the next week

Or I'm gonna pay now to bet that it's gonna go down and if I'm right then I get a return on that

Wow, okay. That's almost gambling basically. I mean it's gambling in the stock market man. It is

It's fucking crazy, but they have several things you can do and

They all look lots of fun. I just don't know what I'm doing. So I want to

Try your app first and you can trade crypto. I believe on on Robin Hood now as well, right?

So crypto you can you can the only caveat to that is it doesn't actually transfer the digital wallet to you so it's really just

It's a trade so if you buy it and sell it you just get that money back

They maybe they have a digital wallet somebody but it's not it's not like you can just take your Bitcoin and put it in your USB

digital wallet

I guess I don't really

Know how that works. Yeah, they're working on changing that soon

And it looks like they have a web interface, of course they have looks like an Android app and an iPhone app

So it's a cross-platform

application for anybody that is interested in

picking up

Robinhood, maybe I'll put a referral link if you want to hook us up with a with a free stock

Yeah, you'll get a free stock as well. So it's worth it do it. It's something fun to do

It's not I would not recommend that being your primary investment strategy, but

I'm I think that it's pretty common to have

if you have a pretty healthy traditional setup in

401 and

IRA and that sort of thing then

Who gives a shit if you threw a few hundred bucks into Robin hood and see what you can do with that well and eventually

You're gonna run into a scenario where you're out of investment options

You know of the standard type so you've you've maxed out your 401k you've maxed out your IRA contributions for the year

Now you got to put money somewhere else, right?

So maybe this is an option. Maybe there's other options as well

But eventually you're gonna have other places that you had to put money. So that's right. Yep. Very cool

Did you know?

Project Phi is now called Google Phi

Google Phi Google Phi and it works with iPhone. Oh my god, boom. You don't sound excited about this

I'm kind of over it right now

All right, detail.

You were like a big Google five guy,

so I'm kind of surprised to hear this.

No, I am.

I've been a big supporter.

I was an early adopter too.

I got on that program quite a while ago.

No, I think the problem was is that,

if you, I lost a lot of phones this summer, man.

Well, that's not Google's problem.

It certainly isn't their problem,

but they're not very good at replacing those phones.

It's all I'm gonna say.

I think that's the harder part.

There's no store to walk into to get service.

- And also you pay for the phone up front, right?

Like you don't pay it over time.

So it's not owned.

- You could do that.

- Can you do that with them now?

- They do.

The Pixel 2 that I had was that way.

So I had a monthly installment.

- Okay. - 25 bucks, whatever.

It's great.

I mean, the nice thing, the bonus for FI is that flat rate.

So it depends on how much data you use though.

Let's say our thing I would say is that

their data prices have become more competitive

in the last couple of years.

And so FI is not the most attractive for heavy data users

because it's like what $20 per line

plus $10 per gigabyte.

And it's just-- - That's to a max of 60 bucks though,

right? - It does max out, yes.

Yeah, they cap it out.

So, okay, if you're really heavy,

maybe 60 bucks is no big deal.

But you're looking, so think about that.

That's 80 bucks for someone who's six gigs or more.

And I think you can get unlimited from, I don't know.

You can get unlimited for about that,

Yeah.

It's close.

It used to be a bigger deal.

And I think going abroad is where that's still

a better product because you still pay the same rate

overseas.

And I think the other thing that they offer

that I have not seen anybody else offer

is free additional data sims.

Like that's an unheard of function of any other carrier.

Like you always get charged, you know, $15 data access line

per sim or something like that.

Oh, if you want to pop it into your iPad or whatever.

Yep.

Yep.

So that's an absurd piece of the plan.

So the story here is that Project Fi used to exist,

but it was only for Google devices.

So the pixels and whatever other devices they had

at the time, while they're opening it up,

changing the name from Project Fi to Google Fi,

and they're opening it up to all Android devices,

or pretty much all of them, and to iPhones,

which I never thought I would see that happen.

There is the features that Mike kind of talked about there,

but then in terms of the way that the iPhone will work,

because one of the things that the pixels do

that made them kind of the de facto standard

for that platform is that they could cellular switch, right?

So they could switch between, I think,

three separate networks on demand,

whereas the iPhone cannot do that,

nor can some of the other Android devices.

So what's gonna happen is you're basically gonna be bound

to, I think, T-Mobile, which is the primary carrier

for the most part.

That's why I'm not too excited about it.

All right.

I switched to T-Mobile.

When I lost my phone, I went to a T-Mobile store

just to get my iPhone working again.

And I just have not been having a good experience.

T-Mobile's no good.

It hasn't been very consistent for me is the problem.

The network says LTE, but it's not LTE speeds.

It's definitely slower compared to what I've experienced

on Verizon or AT&T or even FI.

And then yeah, I've lost messages.

I've had messages show up a couple hours later

or in duplicate.

So I don't know, there's something going on there.

Maybe 5G will fix things for them over there.

- Good.

I think there's some other weirdness too

that because you're using an iPhone versus a Google

or an Android device that aren't gonna work quite as well.

So texts are gonna work a little bit more differently.

I, sounds like you're gonna have to like tweak

bunch of settings to make texts non-i-message texts come to your phone correctly.

Voice mail isn't going to work the same as it does on Google devices, I think,

mainly because I think they rely on what is it, Google voice, a lot for that,

right, for transcription and all that kind of thing. And then there's some

security and network reliability stuff that just flat out will not work

regardless of what you do on the iPhone. So you're gonna lose some capability,

but they are going to allow the phones on their network, which before you could plug

it like I've used your data only SIMs when I've traveled overseas and it allows the

iPhone to operate in a data only mode, you know, no calls.

But now they're going to allow you to be on their cellular network and take calls and

that sort of thing, which is pretty cool, but it comes at a little bit of a restricted

policy.

Well, I like the idea of it for going abroad.

I could keep my Sim that I have, pop it in there,

and probably reactivate or whatever.

I think it's canceled right now, but.

- Well, and you don't even need to do that

because you have T-Mobile

and they have the same type of plan.

- I guess that's right.

It doesn't matter.

So I don't know.

I've been thinking about going to Verizon lately anyway.

We'll see.

- There he goes.

Can't make up his mind again.

- I just like to try them all

so I can talk about them on the CoffeeCodecast

with a little more understanding

of how they operate pros and cons.

I mean, I like to battle test all these things.

- It's all right, it's like to do apps, you know?

What's the to do app of the day?

- I'm using to do lists now.

I'm back 'cause they have dark mode you inform me.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I like that, that's good.

- Good.

- Yeah.

Well, that is good news though.

That is very cool news about coming out of the Google Fi.

I'd like to see them streamline this a little bit more.

It's kind of like their 19 messaging apps that they have.

You know, they're getting down,

they're pairing it down where it was like aloe

and hangouts and messages.

- Oh, that's right.

Didn't they have one called Duo too, maybe?

- Yeah, there's a few of them.

- Yep.

- And the phone thing, my main beef with the Fi service

itself was that I came from Google Voice

and I had Google Voice numbers.

Well, they're not compatible.

You can't forward Google Voice numbers

to a Project Fi number.

Weird things like that.

So it was really hard to have that common fluid experience

For people that had old numbers of mine,

they would get my voicemail every time it never rang through.

And that was a shitty experience.

I'd find out three days later,

someone was trying to get ahold of me

about something important.

- All right, well, I'm not gonna switch to Google Fi then.

- Yeah, that's not a good reason.

If you don't have three numbers,

(laughing)

then you're probably--

- For Momohon, Nebraska.

- Just Momohon numbers.

Nobody uses them anymore, anyway.

Fuck it, I should just get rid of them.

- There you go.

- What else, man?

You got anything else you wanna talk about?

I think we wrapped up all my notes. You got anything? You done?

I'm good. I'm looking at my list right now. It looks like I've checked all the boxes there.

All right, man. Well, let's wrap this thing up. This is a good show today.

So you can contact us at Twitter. You can contact Mike at Shipper SF.

You can contact myself at Kyle P. Johnson and you can contact the show at CoffeeCodeCast.

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