Charmingly Antiquated

[JM]: There is a handy tool I would like to introduce you to, and it is called TextSniper.

[JM]: And I have used it at least twice today.

[JM]: The purpose of TextSniper is to capture text on your screen that's not text, or at least not text that you could drag your mouse or trackpad or finger or whatever and select.

[JM]: And for the purposes of this conversation, I think this only is a MacOS tool.

[JM]: So if you're looking at text on your screen, and you want to select it, but you can't for whatever reason, you invoke this key shortcut, which by default is shift-command-2, and you draw a box around the text that you want to select.

[JM]: And it uses optical character recognition behind the scenes

[JM]: to turn the image -- or whatever non-selectable blob you were trying to turn into text -- into text that you can then go and paste somewhere else.

[JM]: It has some other interesting features, like for example, you can type another key and have it read the text.

[JM]: So there's a text-to-speech component.

[JM]: It works with multiple languages.

[JM]: Just today I used it to extract Japanese for, of all things, a band name.

[JM]: I'm kicking the tires on a new music player, and I'm looking at the name of the artist that's in Japanese.

[JM]: It's an artist that I know well, and I wanted to copy and paste the artist's name to search to see if there were new albums from this artist.

[JM]: And yeah, I could switch to my Japanese input method and type it out.

[JM]: But that would take a little bit more time.

[JM]: I just want to do a quick copy-and-paste.

[JM]: And with this tool, I was able to.

[JM]: This also works on QR codes and barcodes.

[JM]: So if that's something that you want to quickly look up, you can do that.

[JM]: And if you are listening to this and thinking, "Well, wait a minute, isn't this built into MacOS and iOS now?"

[JM]: "Can't you, if you are looking at an image, highlight the text on the image and then copy and paste it?"

[JM]: And the answer is for the most part -- for images -- yes, you can.

[JM]: But in general, there is this new pox on humankind called "text is not selectable anymore".

[JM]: So you might be looking at a page on the web, you might be in the context of a native app running on your computer, whatever it is, you're looking at text, I'm not talking about images, you're looking at text

[JM]: that you should be able to highlight and copy and paste.

[JM]: But seemingly everywhere now, this is becoming something that is harder and harder to do.

[JM]: Because on the web, people want to make it so that this thing you're trying to select, so you can copy and paste it, well, they want to turn that into a

[JM]: tappable control.

[JM]: So even though it's just text, they want to make it so the entire blob around the text is this selectable control so that you can no longer select the text like you used to be able to do.

[JM]: And this happens with annoying frequency these days.

[JM]: And that's why TextSniper is useful even when you have this OS-level, "Oh, I can now extract the text from certain images."

[JM]: And I saw a article the other day titled "I hate screenshots of text" where someone who clearly looks at this trend much like I do and does not care for it, because this person is talking about people, I think probably like in a work context in Slack or some chat where people are just constantly pasting screenshots of things they could just as easily copy the text of and paste the text into.

[JM]: And I see this a lot.

[JM]: I'll be talking to someone on the phone and we'll be going back and forth about something.

[JM]: And then the person will say like, "Oh, here, I'll just take a screenshot."

[JM]: No, no, no, no, no.

[JM]: I don't need a screenshot.

[JM]: You can just copy the text and paste the text.

[JM]: It's I think a side effect of the ease with which we can now take screenshots and the way in which people are now aware of them.

[JM]: Like I remember back when screenshots were something that existed on MacOS, for example,

[JM]: but most people didn't know how to take screenshots at that time.

[JM]: But I think on phones, people are now so used to taking screenshots on them that it's just become normalized and so common that it just happens everywhere.

[JM]: It's so quick and easy to do.

[JM]: And it's now become such common knowledge that it's just proliferated in ways in which sometimes makes life a little bit harder than I would like.

[JM]: But TextSniper, for only $8...

[JM]: can save your bacon when it comes to this kind of thing.

[DJ]: It'll "save your bacon"?

[JM]: Are you not aware of that phrase?

[DJ]: I'm aware of the phrase.

[DJ]: It's just kind of charmingly antiquated.

[DJ]: You're showing off how long ago you did your marketing degree.

[JM]: I think that might be my new tagline.

[JM]: Charmingly antiquated.

[DJ]: Charmingly antiquated.

[DJ]: Okay.

[DJ]: I thought you meant "saves your bacon".

[JM]: "Oh, Justin, he was charmingly antiquated."

[DJ]: I noticed you say "was".

[JM]: Well, you know, it's like my obit.

[DJ]: Yeah.

[JM]: Yeah.

[DJ]: Maybe that could be your epitaph.

[JM]: Yeah.

[JM]: Like right on the headstone, it'll just say, "Justin Mayer died", whatever.

[JM]: "Charmingly antiquated."

[DJ]: Yeah.

[DJ]: Well, and the nice thing about TextSniper is I can take a photo of that and then select your epitaph and copy+paste it elsewhere.

[JM]: You could totally do that.

[DJ]: Yep.

[JM]: All right, moving on.

[JM]: Last week, we talked about games and running games on Linux.

[JM]: And interestingly enough, this week Valve announced a rash of new products: the Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame, all set to be released in early 2026.

[JM]: I'll start with the Steam Controller because of these three products, or at least these categories, it is the only one that I own, as in Steam has made or Valve has made iterations of these three products before. I own the previous iteration of the Steam Controller. I remember when they were selling this, they sold it for a

[JM]: quite low price.

[JM]: Like, it was clear that they were losing money on each one of them.

[JM]: I don't remember what I bought it for.

[JM]: I think it might have been like $25.

[JM]: It might have been less.

[JM]: I don't remember what it was, but I remember thinking they clearly either...

[JM]: are trying to have this be a loss leader, or they just made a whole bunch of these and realize they're not selling well, and it's just like a fire sale.

[JM]: So I bought this Steam Controller at this ridiculously low price.

[JM]: And it's fine.

[JM]: But they made some decisions in terms of where things are oriented, or at least, for example, the original Steam Controller doesn't have two thumbsticks.

[JM]: It has one on the right, if memory serves.

[JM]: I don't have it in front of me at the moment.

[JM]: And then it's got a D-pad.

[JM]: And then where the left stick would be, it's like a circular pad that you can push around and move kind of like a stick, but it's not a stick.

[JM]: It's just, they made some interesting choices that I don't think people appreciated very much.

[JM]: They deviated from the standard

[JM]: PS4 and 5 and all of the Xbox controllers I've ever seen in ways in which I don't think people valued.

[JM]: This replacement or new iteration that they just announced seems much closer to the designs that I think most people are familiar with.

[JM]: And I imagine it will be priced very competitively, at least relative to other controllers that you might buy.

[JM]: So who knows, maybe they'll sell a bunch of them.

[JM]: I have, as I said last episode, a pair of old Xbox 360 controllers that still work great, but I'm going to order one of these when I can and see how well it works.

[DJ]: So you tend to be a controller person when it comes to video games rather than a WASD keyboard-and-mouse person?

[JM]: I am an old school WASD keyboard-and-mouse person and use controllers somewhat begrudgingly.

[JM]: The reality is if I'm at my desk playing a game, which I don't do very often -- the reality is I don't play video games very often, period.

[JM]: But when I do, I tend to not do them at my desk, and playing games while you're reclining on a sofa with a keyboard and mouse is just kind of cumbersome and not great.

[DJ]: Yeah, I do it, but it is difficult, especially the mouse.

[DJ]: Like it's very hard to operate a mouse in an ergonomic position when you're sitting on a couch.

[DJ]: You need some kind of lap desk or some elaborate setup that I've never bothered to construct.

[JM]: And you can work around that in theory by using like a trackball

[JM]: where you're not having to move your hand around and find a surface for the mouse to go on.

[JM]: But then you're kind of dealing with a similar problem, right?

[JM]: Where, okay, it's now a trackball and you're not gonna have probably the same degree of control that you would have with the mouse.

[JM]: And at that point, you might as well just use a controller.

[JM]: If you're not gonna have great control over what you're doing, well, then you might as well not have great control and have better ergonomics in terms of being able to use a device that feels more comfortable when you're reclining on a sofa.

[DJ]: Mm-hmm, that's true.

[JM]: So anyway, I don't think that this Steam Controller is going to change the gaming world.

[JM]: I don't think that it's going to break any real ground in terms of innovation.

[JM]: At least I don't see very much here that's particularly noteworthy, but we'll see.

[JM]: The other two products they announced, however, I think are definitely noteworthy.

[JM]: Let's start with the Steam Machine.

[JM]: The Steam Machine, and again, they produced an earlier version of the Steam Machine and it didn't do very well.

[DJ]: So what is the Steam Machine?

[DJ]: Is it essentially a Steam-branded gaming PC, or is it more than that?

[JM]: It is essentially a Steam-branded gaming PC.

[JM]: And the intention of it, to me, feels like, hey, we recognize that if you are a PC gamer, that you are having...

[JM]: a frustrating experience a lot of the time, compared to console gamers, as we talked about last episode.

[JM]: So we're going to try to make that experience better, we are going to try to fix that problem.

[JM]: Because these machines do not run Windows.

[JM]: And I failed to mention last time that when I mentioned Proton, this emulation layer built on top of WINE that makes it easier to play Windows games on Linux, I forgot to mention that Valve has contributed a decent amount of effort into making Proton better.

[JM]: So Proton has benefited from their support.

[JM]: So yeah, this is Steam's attempt at handing you

[JM]: a console that will play your entire Steam library.

[JM]: So their previous attempt at this flopped, but this looks considerably better.

[JM]: This looks really interesting to me.

[JM]: The specs of the machine are on par or better than the PS5.

[JM]: It has 16 gigabytes of RAM,

[JM]: and a dedicated GPU or graphics processing unit with eight gigabytes of video RAM.

[JM]: The form factor, it is a six-inch cube.

[JM]: So this is really compact.

[JM]: It's about the size of three M1 Mac minis stacked on top of each other.

[JM]: In their marketing copy they write, "Put it under your TV, set it on your desk, hide it under a banana."

[JM]: I suppose the joke being that the footprint is smaller than the width of a banana.

[DJ]: That raises so many more questions than it answers, but okay, hide it under a banana.

[JM]: At least they're having fun with it.

[JM]: One of the things they mentioned is that it is quiet.

[JM]: So as I mentioned last time, this seven-year old gaming rig that I built is the furthest thing from quiet.

[JM]: It has a CPU fan.

[JM]: It has a case fan and it has multiple graphics card fans.

[JM]: So I don't know how many fans that is.

[JM]: I mean, it's at least five.

[DJ]: I think it's more like 10 or 11, but yeah, it's a lot.

[JM]: Probably.

[JM]: So this is not a device that I want to be sitting next to while I'm playing a game or even in the room at all, if I can avoid it, unless I'm wearing headphones.

[JM]: So the idea of being able to have this tiny thing that you could have right next to you and not have it be annoying is

[JM]: a pretty good achievement.

[JM]: And much like the controller, I suspect that Valve will be selling this Steam Machine at a loss because I think the idea is to get more people to buy games on Steam.

[JM]: They're trying to pull people away from the console market.

[JM]: They are trying to broaden

[JM]: their user base by giving console gamers a reason to use this instead.

[JM]: And so if people are buying more and more games on Steam, then it's worth it for them to sell this device at a loss.

[JM]: And what's wild is that you can buy this at this presumably low price, they haven't announced pricing, but hopefully, let's say that my expectation or guess is accurate, and that they're selling it

[JM]: below their costs and therefore it's gonna be very affordable.

[JM]: But it's wild that if that turns out to be the case, you can buy one of these and never purchase anything on Steam because you can install any compatible game from any marketplace.

[JM]: In their own words, they said, "Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC."

[JM]: "Install your own apps or even another operating system."

[JM]: "Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"

[JM]: Can you even imagine a console manufacturer saying this?

[DJ]: Well, no, because that's the whole point of a console is it's not your computer.

[DJ]: It's a console that you play these games on, take it or leave it.

[JM]: So in theory, you buy one of these, you sign into your Steam account, and presumably this device will be able to play the vast majority of the entire library of Steam games, which by sheer game count alone

[JM]: would make this one of the biggest console libraries on the market.

[JM]: And that isn't even counting the fact that you can, as I mentioned before, install alternative marketplaces like GOG, Itch, or anything that the

[JM]: component that allows you to install these other marketplaces, which is called Lutris, will support, for example, Epic Games.

[JM]: Just the other day, a friend of mine mentioned this game --

[JM]: I think it was Alan Wake 2 -- and said that this was this person's favorite game this year.

[JM]: And so I went to look it up in Steam and couldn't find it and thought, okay, well, I guess this isn't available on PCs.

[JM]: This is probably only a console game because I know he uses a PS5.

[JM]: But a little bit more poking around yielded the fact that it is indeed available on PCs, but only if you buy it from the Epic Games Store.

[JM]: So I thought, okay, well, that's kind of lame.

[JM]: But even if you have bought games on the Epic Games Store, it looks like you'll be able to play all of them, or at least the ones that are compatible on this Steam Machine device.

[JM]: And to top it all off, the internal storage of this box is upgradable and can take full-size NVMe drives.

[JM]: So if you buy this, say 512 GB version, or I don't know if this will come in multiple versions, and you decide that that isn't going to be big enough to hold your whole library, you can go out and spend a couple of hundred dollars and get a four-terabyte.

[JM]: Or if you're like, no, actually I need the eight-terabyte drive.

[JM]: You can do that.

[DJ]: I don't even want to think how much an eight-terabyte NVMe drive costs.

[DJ]: I assume it's like a small car.

[JM]: I don't think it's as expensive as you might guess.

[JM]: I think the last four-terabyte drive I bought was $270.

[JM]: And that was for a very nice one.

[JM]: It wasn't like the bottom of the barrel.

[JM]: It was like a Western Digital Black top-of-the-line four-terabyte drive.

[JM]: So I think an eight-terabyte NVMe drive is probably five something, six something, if I were to take a guess, $500, $600.

[JM]: So in addition to the upgradable NVMe drives, if you have a Steam Deck, which is their portable version, their version of, say, a Nintendo Switch, if you pop the micro-SD card out of your Steam Deck, in theory, you can put it into your Steam Machine and get all of those games available to you instantly.

[JM]: And reportedly even the RAM is user upgradable.

[JM]: So I think this is a really exciting product, and I am very pleased to see that this is something that Valve has not given up on. Because their first foray into offering a console to provide this theoretical vision, right...

[JM]: where you can buy this device...

[JM]: you get all of your Steam library.

[JM]: It's just like having a console, but all the games that you've bought over the last 25 years -- or at least most of them -- are instantly playable.

[JM]: The moment you plug this thing in. That's a really compelling vision.

[JM]: And I don't think they nailed it on their first go round, but it sounds like this one, they got a pretty good shot.

[DJ]: That's cool, and I really like the fact that it's so open to being tinkered with and upgraded.

[DJ]: I've had pro and con feelings about Steam over the years, but I appreciate the approach that they're taking, saying, after all, this is your computer, because we can note, and we often have with frustration,

[DJ]: that it feels like computers have been moving more in the direction of consoles or electronic appliances over the years, where there are fewer things you're allowed to do with them. You kind of buy this thing, take it out of the box, and use it the way the manufacturer meant it to be used or, you know, get out. So I like that they're trying to have it both ways, where yeah you can just take this out of the box, plug it in, play your games like it's a game console -- that's the deal.

[DJ]: But actually, if you want to change things about it, up to and including just using it as a generic computer and installing a different operating system and just using it as PC hardware, yeah, you can do that.

[DJ]: I love that.

[JM]: In an era when it feels like everything...

[JM]: is getting locked down more and more...

[JM]: all the things that we feel like we used to be able to do are now no longer possible.

[JM]: I agree.

[JM]: I think it's great that they are introducing a product that is trying to counter that trend -- or maybe not *trying* to -- but *is* countering that trend, whether that's the intention or not.

[JM]: I do think that there is some intention, right?

[JM]: Like they are saying, "Hey, this thing is not some locked-down black box that will only do what we want it to do."

[JM]: "It's your computer, you get to do what you want with it."

[JM]: Good on them.

[JM]: I really think that's cool.

[JM]: And I think a lot of people are going to feel better about buying it as a result.

[JM]: So it serves them to do it.

[JM]: The third product that Valve announced is the Steam Frame.

[JM]: This product had a different name before I don't even remember what it was.

[JM]: But this is their VR headset and VR controllers.

[JM]: Unlike the Steam Machine, the first iteration of Valve's VR headset... I don't think it flopped per se, but I don't know that a ton of people bought it either.

[JM]: Regardless, I'm glad that they are iterating on this product as well.

[JM]: And this iteration has a 64-bit ARM CPU, which is a little strange because the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine both use more conventional AMD chipsets.

[JM]: So that means that SteamOS, which is the operating system that runs on all these devices, if I'm not mistaken is going to be cross-architecture for the first time.

[JM]: And the way that they are going to make this work on the headset is to use

[JM]: an emulation layer called FEX.

[JM]: And I think that the purpose of FEX, F-E-X, is to be able to run x86 code on ARM CPUs.

[JM]: So in theory, the same software that runs on the Steam Machine and Steam Deck could also run on the VR headset, even though they are different architectures.

[JM]: One of the most interesting things about the VR headset is they have implemented foveated rendering.

[JM]: I'm gonna read a quote from Steam that explains what that is.

[JM]: "Foveated streaming is a new feature that optimizes detail where your eyes are looking and typically offers a more than 10-time

[JM]: improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth.

[JM]: Behind the scenes, we're using low-latency eye tracking data to steer the best quality pixels only to where you're looking.

[JM]: This is all happening without you noticing and works for your entire Steam library."

[JM]: So what that means is that they have this really fascinating hack of sorts that takes advantage of the fact that human eyes have the most sharpness and fidelity

[JM]: right at the exact center of our field of vision.

[JM]: Whereas our peripheral vision is terrible at providing sharpness and fidelity.

[JM]: This means that on average, you only have to render about 10% of the frame at maximum quality for it to feel like it's running at full resolution all over the screen.

[JM]: And so if one thinks that the processor in the VR headset is somehow

[JM]: not as strong or not as powerful as the one in the Steam Machine.

[JM]: I don't know if that's true, but let's just say that that's the perception.

[JM]: But if it is true, then it's also kind of irrelevant because you are only rendering the part your eyes are focusing on

[JM]: at full resolution, whereas that's not what happens on say a television screen or your monitor.

[JM]: If you're playing a game in those environments, it's rendering all the pixels on the screen at whatever your maximum level of quality is.

[JM]: The other thing about this product that fascinates me is that last time I mentioned this concept of streaming

[JM]: a game from a more powerful device in one room to a less powerful device in another room.

[JM]: So I have this gaming rig next to me here in the office.

[JM]: It can stay here and then I can stream that game downstairs into the living room, where there's this tiny underpowered Nvidia Shield Pro device that's really just receiving this streamed game.

[JM]: It's not doing the vast majority of the work.

[JM]: It's not rendering the pixels.

[JM]: You can do the exact same thing with this VR headset.

[JM]: But also it can work in standalone mode, where it's not streaming, because the Steam Frame is also a full-blown PC and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon 8 series processor.

[JM]: It's got 16 gigabytes of RAM and it can play a number of

[JM]: VR and non-VR games without needing to stream them from your computer.

[JM]: So in other words, it's like having a Steam Deck in a headset.

[JM]: You could even boot it into a full KDE desktop and use it as a normal computer.

[JM]: They even claim that you can load arbitrary Android apps into it.

[JM]: So it was just wild to me that in theory, without it streaming, just self-contained by itself, as a standalone device, you could play most x86 PC games on this headset.

[JM]: And I hope that long-term,

[JM]: one of the results of this is that game studios will more fully support Linux, whether that's by producing great native Linux ports or by just making sure that running in Proton mode works really well by making a small tweaks to the Windows version to make it work well in a Proton environment.

[JM]: Either way, I hope that the incentive here is that game studios will

[JM]: put more effort into making sure that their games work really well on the Steam Machine and this Steam Frame VR device.

[JM]: So kudos to Valve.

[JM]: These are all really exciting, and I'm looking forward to checking them out once they actually ship.

[DJ]: I'm curious if you've used VR headsets much before, done much VR gaming, because I have never done any.

[DJ]: I don't even know what it's like.

[JM]: I was just going to ask you that question, and no, I have not.

[JM]: Never once have I played any kind of VR anything.

[JM]: And when Valve introduced the first iteration of this product, I think they did it in conjunction or at least in a similar timeframe as releasing

[JM]: this game in the Half-Life universe called Alyx.

[JM]: It was named after one of the characters.

[JM]: And Alyx was made specifically for VR.

[JM]: And I think the game is reviewed rather well.

[JM]: And it's always been something that I thought like, oh, that would be cool.

[JM]: I would enjoy playing that.

[JM]: But not enough to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on a VR headset.

[JM]: But I think that the fact that they are still improving it, and they're still releasing new versions of it, gives me more impetus, a little bit more confidence to say, "Hmm, I don't know, I might try this."

[DJ]: That reminds me of the case with video game consoles themselves, and I suppose streaming services are like that now too, although their barrier to entry is much lower, where there has to be some critical mass, even if it's just one game, that you really want before it's worth adopting a whole new platform, right?

[DJ]: So you wouldn't necessarily buy a whole VR headset just to play one game, although probably some people would.

[DJ]: But once you reach a point where you could see, oh, there's like maybe four or five different games that I might be interested in this, then you might get one.

[DJ]: And to the previous discussion of the Steam Frame, it's also been interesting to watch those devices go from being kind of an outlandish technology device

[DJ]: where it's like really expensive and really clunky and not very performant, but for the people who are like, "Oh my god, VR!" ... They can try it out, to becoming a lot more mainstream, right? Like one of the patterns I see behind these Steam announcements is how much ongoing miniaturization

[DJ]: is paying off, like in computer hardware, continues to pay off.

[DJ]: Like the fact that you can get more and more compute power out of smaller and smaller devices, and especially the ascendance of the ARM architecture.

[DJ]: Like I assume the Steam Frame uses an ARM chip because it is smaller and requires less power, which is necessary in a thing that's gonna have to sit on your face as opposed to being a whole, even a small cube that can be connected into, like plugged into your mains.

[DJ]: It's cool to see that stuff paying off, and now there's pretty cool hardware.

[DJ]: I mean, I have to say, even though I haven't tried it, and I'm not obsessed with the idea of VR in general, VR gaming is pretty cool.

[DJ]: And the fact that it's become more and more accessible, that's been a fun line of progress to watch.

[JM]: Yeah, I saw one person comment on the idea of being able to run standard x86 PC games on the standalone ARM-powered VR headset.

[JM]: They summarized it as, "Wait, so Skyrim in 160 degrees strapped to your face?"

[JM]: "Sign me up!" was their take on it.

[DJ]: That's a funny example in particular because there is a VR version of Skyrim, and that's basically the game I would be thinking of where it's like, hmm, do I want to try VR?

[DJ]: Well, because Skyrim is maybe my favorite video game.

[JM]: Well, now you can have a panoramic version of it strapped to your face.

[DJ]: I'm not sure I need an excuse to play it even more, so we'll see.

[DJ]: I might have to forego that experience just so that I ever get any exercise again.

[JM]: One other thing I wonder about with the Steam Machine is I wonder if you'll be able to install non-game applications as well.

[JM]: And I mention it because one of the things that I didn't mention in the last episode when I was talking about the...

[JM]: Nvidia Shield Pro is I don't use it to stream games for the most part.

[JM]: That's like less than one percentage of its usage time.

[JM]: I use it as a Plex client.

[JM]: It is the device connected to my television.

[JM]: I use it to watch movies and

[JM]: TV shows.

[JM]: And that makes me wonder with the Steam Machine, if you'll be able to do something similar. Like here you have this box, it might be connected to your television, like a lot of game consoles.

[JM]: If you had the ability to use it to stream your collection of movies and TV shows, that would be pretty cool.

[JM]: You wouldn't have to switch back and forth between that and some other streamer that you have attached to your TV.

[JM]: So I guess we'll find out.

[JM]: Speaking of Plex, I am mad at Plex and

[JM]: have been, shall we say, not particularly jazzed about them recently, but now I'm just mad.

[JM]: And the reason that I'm mad is, as you know, I tend not to update applications unless I feel like there's a really good reason to do it.

[JM]: And particularly when, as I have bemoaned countless times at this point,

[JM]: It is related to a iPhone or iPad where updating the software is a one-way ticket, there is no returning, you do not get to go back to a previous version, if for some reason, the new version doesn't work well for you.

[JM]: So having read some really not great things about the direction that Plex had been taking their iPhone and iPad apps.

[JM]: I decided after reading those reviews that I would just stay on the version that I'm on.

[JM]: And that has worked out really well for the last few years.

[JM]: Recently, however, when I start playing certain TV shows or movies, Plex will quit and I'll relaunch it and then it'll crash again.

[JM]: and I'll relaunch it, usually by the third or fourth relaunch, whatever the issue was, resolves itself and plays just fine.

[JM]: This minor annoyance was worth it to me.

[JM]: And then at some point a couple of weeks ago, it started happening and I thought, "Okay, well, listen...

[JM]: Your strategy of not updating things unless it's broken is fine, except now it's kind of broken.

[JM]: It's annoying to launch this thing, have it quit and relaunch.

[JM]: And this is kind of silly.

[JM]: Like maybe this is the point where you say, 'I'm just going to update it and put up with whatever weird interface things they've changed and made worse than they were before.'"

[JM]: So I update the Plex app on my iPad.

[JM]: And the iPad's where I watch a decent amount of content.

[JM]: If I'm cooking in the kitchen or doing something else menial, it's a good thing to have nearby so that I can watch something while I'm doing it.

[JM]: So I update this app and sure enough, there are parts of this new app experience that are worse.

[JM]: It's clear that Plex, given their large influx of venture capital, is trying to

[JM]: make money in different ways.

[JM]: They're no longer focused so much on selling you a Plex Pass subscription to get a better version of their apps, but instead is more focused on trying to get you to watch, I don't know, streaming shows that they're serving so that they can make revenue on it somehow, maybe via ads.

[JM]: I don't know.

[JM]: I don't use any of that part of what they do.

[JM]: And they've made some other annoying user interface changes, but that is not what I wanna highlight.

[JM]: The thing that caused me to bring this up today is after playing this for, I don't know, 20 minutes or so, at some point I picked up the iPad to move it to a different part of the room and was like, whoa, why is this so hot?

[JM]: I realized not only was it hot, but the battery was like single-digits percentage.

[JM]: So what used to consume, say, I don't know, 10 or 20% of battery usage while watching, I don't know, a half an hour show now consumes easily two or three times that amount.

[JM]: And maybe even more.

[JM]: I don't even understand how engineers shipped this thing.

[JM]: How do you ship something that is that much...

[JM]: worse when it comes to battery life? Like, don't you have some kind of internal, I don't know, testing framework, some continuous integration system that can measure this kind of thing and say, oops, you know what, this branch shouldn't be merged because it consumes way more energy,

[JM]: battery than the current code.

[JM]: This needs more work.

[JM]: Or is there someone who just goes, "Yeah, I see that -- YOLO!" and just pushes the merge button.

[JM]: Like I don't even understand how this ships.

[JM]: And every once in a while now I look into the app store to see if there's a new version that says something along the lines of

[JM]: "Oh, yeah, sorry about that, guys."

[JM]: "We fixed a nasty bug that was causing battery drain."

[JM]: No, nothing like that seems to be forthcoming from the fine folks at Plex.

[JM]: So I can't revert back to the previous version, which I would do in a heartbeat.

[JM]: I don't care if it crashes, if at least it doesn't have this show-stopping problem.

[JM]: And so now I'm faced with some rather unpalatable choices.

[JM]: Continuing to use this thing that drains all my battery is just a non-starter.

[JM]: Like, I'm not doing that.

[JM]: So my first attempt has been to use another app that can use Plex media server as its library.

[JM]: So it's basically like a general purpose media playing client that can talk to Plex media server.

[JM]: And this one is called Infuse.

[JM]: I previously tried Infuse on an Apple TV and did not care for it.

[JM]: I think playback was fine.

[JM]: It handled, I think, all of the file formats and codecs and whatnot that I played with it.

[JM]: But I think just from the user interface part, there's something that I just didn't like about it.

[JM]: Maybe it's a question of familiarity, which is going to sound really similar to the experience that I've had with Infuse now on the iPad, because I'm assuming a lot of it is just, I am used to

[JM]: the Plex interface, I know where things are.

[JM]: And I know how to get to what it is that I'm trying to do.

[JM]: I'm sure that's a lot of it.

[JM]: Because there are just times where I struggle to be able to find the things that I want to find.

[JM]: But some of it isn't. Some of it is just different behavior, different assumptions.

[JM]: Just to pick a lame example, if I tap on a particular TV show, it will show me the first season that contains unwatched episodes, which sounds logical.

[JM]: But there are times where, say, for a show that's on like every day, like The Daily Show or Jimmy Kimmel or these shows that are like late-night TV shows that are on almost every day.

[JM]: Oftentimes, I don't watch all of them.

[JM]: And so I might have old seasons that have episodes in them.

[JM]: But I'm not really interested in watching them.

[JM]: I really should just go ahead and delete them.

[JM]: But they're just there for now.

[JM]: And Plex will do the opposite.

[JM]: It will show me the most recent season that has unwatched episodes in it by default.

[JM]: And that's just what I'm used to.

[JM]: And that's what I want it to do.

[JM]: But I don't know how to get Infuse to do that.

[JM]: So there's just these things about Infuse that I don't really love.

[JM]: It doesn't have the crashing problem.

[JM]: And it also doesn't drain the battery.

[JM]: So that's good.

[JM]: But it also is a subscription.

[JM]: And I don't know that it is good enough at what I want it to do to continue paying it.

[JM]: So that takes

[JM]: me to the next option.

[JM]: And I do not have anywhere near the kind of time required to even think about this option.

[JM]: But at some point, I might just replace Plex Media Server with something else like, say, Jellyfin, which is an

[JM]: alternative that presumably hasn't received an excess of $100 million in venture capital funding, and thus has different priorities in terms of the user experience that they are trying to deliver to customers.

[JM]: So I don't know if I will find the time to try that anytime soon, but I have a feeling it is in my future.

[DJ]: Well, I've been thinking about making the same migration for maybe different reasons, but still.

[DJ]: So we can probably, if not collaborate, at least commiserate someday on trying to migrate away from Plex after lo these many years.

[JM]: It's just a bummer, right?

[JM]: When you have a tool that you've been using for years, like I've been using Plex for a long time and I've really liked it and I've recommended it to other people.

[JM]: It's just so frustrating when you see this pattern repeated over and over again.

[JM]: Where a company just decides that in order to really take this company to the next level, we need to get an infusion of capital.

[JM]: And we're going to look to venture capital to do that.

[JM]: And this just doesn't seem to be a story that ends very well by-and-large for at least for the users that started with your product, right?

[JM]: The users that gave you the ability to even consider going to the next level.

[JM]: Like those are the ones that are...

[JM]: apparently not valued enough to really look after as you grow.

[JM]: But I guess that's just the nature of things, the nature of tech.

[JM]: And the good news is that there are other alternatives, and it will take time and effort.

[JM]: And there might be things about Jellyfin, for example, that I don't like as much as Plex.

[JM]: There may be features that Plex has that Jellyfish doesn't have, but at least there are other options, and it does seem like it's going to be time soon to explore them.

[JM]: Okay, moving on, and speaking of things getting acquired and potentially getting worse depending on your perspective, Affinity Studio is a suite of applications for raster image editing, vector image editing,

[JM]: and I believe page layout. I bought Affinity version one and Affinity version two.

[JM]: And I've really enjoyed their suite of applications.

[JM]: And so I think like a lot of people, I was not particularly jazzed when I saw that they had been acquired by Canva.

[JM]: And not too long after that, they pulled their apps from sale and posted some cryptic notice on a web site somewhere that said, "Get ready to be creative" or some other supposedly pithy thing that didn't actually seem to inspire a lot of confidence, at least among the crowd of people that I hang out with, that this was going to be a positive development.

[DJ]: For the record, it said, "Creative freedom is coming."

[DJ]: And there was a lot of not very optimistic consideration of what that might mean.

[DJ]: And it turns out what it meant was that Canva is now apparently offering Affinity Studio for free, but some people don't see this as an unalloyed good thing.

[JM]: On the face of it, it does seem good, right?

[JM]: Like, if you just take it at face value, they're saying, we are taking these three applications that I think I got on sale for $100.

[JM]: I don't remember how much it was, but instead of you having to buy it, now it's free.

[JM]: And we've made improvements to it.

[JM]: So you get something that's better for free.

[JM]: So even though I paid for the previous version of this, I *should* be happy.

[JM]: It seems like their strategy is that they're going to sell certain image generation features.

[JM]: And in theory, I don't really have a problem with that.

[JM]: Like I don't need those features in my image editing application.

[JM]: And if that becomes the way for them to fund the development of the suite of software tools that I now get to use for free because other people want to pay for image generation in these tools, I don't really have too many complaints about that.

[JM]: I think the problem for me is I don't trust it.

[JM]: I don't believe it.

[JM]: I get the sneaking suspicion that at some point they will make other improvements to the software that aren't just about

[JM]: the generative part, the image generation, and those will be subscription gated.

[JM]: So they'll introduce features that I'm interested in and want to have, but that I am not interested in paying for every month because I don't use these tools like that.

[JM]: I don't use image editing tools on a daily basis, much less a weekly or even monthly basis.

[JM]: I just want it to be there when I need it.

[JM]: And that's where subscription pricing doesn't make any sense for me.

[JM]: So even though this is expected, I think, from cynics like myself and others that I know, it still sucks.

[JM]: It would be so much easier to stomach this development if Apple hadn't simultaneously acquired Pixelmator and then proceeded to do nothing with it, which is of course what Apple does best when it comes to the applications that it stewards, which is nothing.

[JM]: They don't do anything with them.

[JM]: They acquire them and then they let them wither on the vine.

[JM]: So in terms of Adobe Creative Suite competitors, we went from two -- Affinity and Pixelmator -- to zero.

[JM]: I will mention that that's not totally fair, because there is a image editing tool called Acorn that I also own

[JM]: and continue to upgrade to when there are paid upgrades every so often, because I want to support the author Gus, who's fantastic, and hopefully Acorn continues to stick around.

[JM]: There's also a Rust-powered application that's very new, I think an alpha, called Graphite.

[JM]: And maybe that will be an option someday as well.

[JM]: Okay, moving on.

[JM]: I wanted to quickly pour one out for Nisus Writer.

[JM]: I think that's how it's pronounced...

[JM]: I never really knew. But Nisus Writer is a word processor.

[JM]: Dan, have you ever used this particular tool?

[DJ]: I have not.

[JM]: Have you heard of this tool?

[DJ]: Yes, I have heard of it before.

[JM]: I have many fond memories of this excellent word processor that I used for years.

[JM]: It was extremely innovative for its time.

[JM]: I remember using it on, I think it was MacOS 7.

[DJ]: Whoa.

[JM]: Because if I remember correctly, MacOS 7 was one of the first in which KanjiTalk was available.

[JM]: Because at the time I was studying Japanese, and being able to compose documents in Japanese was something I really wanted to do and wasn't an easy thing to do at the time.

[JM]: And Nisus Writer was very innovative in that it had excellent multilingual capabilities, where you could write in multiple languages in the same document, supporting both standard -- at least from a Westerner's perspective -- left-to-right, as well as right-to-left languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic.

[JM]: But unfortunately it seems that this excellent word processor has been more or less abandoned. Which I can kind of understand why, because word processors these days just in general, don't seem like tools that are as necessary as they used to be.

[JM]: Like I don't use word processors very often.

[JM]: I think the only time that I ever use word processors is to create flyers to post somewhere.

[JM]: Like, "I'm giving away a sofa, come pick it up this Sunday."

[JM]: Like, that is the extent of how I use word processors, is to be able to draft a flyer and print it out and go tack it up on a bulletin board outside the grocery store.

[JM]: The only other use case that I can think of, and this is probably the much more common one, but I don't even think it really counts because it's not me initiating it, is when someone sends me a Word document and says, hey, can you review this?

[JM]: But me creating a document in a word processor, I just don't do it anymore.

[JM]: So I can understand why the market for word processors is getting smaller and why it's harder for...

[JM]: much less well-known purveyors of word processors to stay in business.

[JM]: I think it would be better if whoever is behind the current version of this company would step forward and say, "Okay, well, this is what's happening."

[JM]: But unfortunately, it seems like there's just silence.

[JM]: And that's probably the part that is the toughest, for folks who still use this tool, to contend with.

[DJ]: That's too bad.

[DJ]: And I haven't really thought about this that much, but I suppose the word processor as a class of application was really prominent before the Internet and in the early days of the Internet, when usually what you would do is create a document where you really cared about page layout and rich text formatting, often because you were going to print it out on this thing called paper.

[JM]: That was the purpose of word processors, for the most part, was to create documents to print.

[DJ]: Yeah, exactly.

[DJ]: And they were the first. Like, word processors were a breakthrough in that they were some of the first so-called what-you-see-is-what-you-get

[DJ]: computer programs, where you could compose a text that would look on the screen basically the same way it would look when you printed it out, which did not used to be true with the very first text-arranging computer programs.

[DJ]: But at this point, where practically all of our written communication just goes through the Internet anyway, and the vast majority of it is probably in email and digital messages of various kinds.

[DJ]: Page layout matters a lot less.

[DJ]: Formatting doesn't matter as much and is usually provided by whatever application is gonna present the text, right?

[DJ]: Like, you don't compose Slack messages in a different application and then put them in Slack.

[DJ]: You just compose them in Slack.

[DJ]: So I'm guessing nowadays that when most people compose text on a computer, they're either doing it in a web application like that, or if they're nerds like us, they're doing it in plain text in a text editor using maybe some kind of lightweight format like Markdown, but probably not rich text.

[DJ]: And anyone else uses Microsoft Word because they don't know any better.

[DJ]: And yeah, in that world, you can see that, like, who needs an alternative rich text word processor, which is kind of sad.

[DJ]: That was Dan's computer history corner for this episode.

[JM]: Okay, moving on to a story that has a headline that I have to say I love.

[JM]: And that headline is "Nike unveils Project Amplify, the world's first powered footwear system for running and walking."

[JM]: And I'm going to read you some of these bullet points.

[JM]: "Nike's Project Amplify is the world's first powered footwear system for running and walking designed to help everyday athletes go a little bit faster and farther, all with less effort."

[JM]: "Engineered to augment natural lower leg and ankle movement, the Project Amplify system breaks the perception of possibility by providing an unparalleled boost to anyone who wants to move, creating a new future for running, jogging, and walking."

[JM]: So this is not a shipping product.

[JM]: So we should just say that out of the gates.

[JM]: This is a research project that they are planning to ship alongside their robotics partner to bring this to a broader consumer launch sometime in the coming years, plural.

[JM]: And I just find this fascinating because of the way that it's being presented.

[JM]: It's not pitched as the way I would expect, right?

[JM]: Like, having had a leg injury recently, this was interesting to me to be like, "Oh, okay, well, they're trying to make people who might have an injury or people who might have mobility problems, they're trying to make it a little bit easier for them."

[JM]: But I don't see one mention in this press release about anything like that.

[JM]: Instead, the way that they are describing it is that, "Oh, if you feel like you want to be able to go a little further, well, this will allow you to walk further or run further."

[JM]: They mentioned that this system makes it feel like it's part of your body and that it makes walking or running uphill feel like moving on flat ground.

[JM]: But I think my favorite is when they say for some,

[JM]: wearing Project Amplify helps them go from a 12-minute mile to a 10-minute mile, which to me is like, wait a minute...

[JM]: If you told me like, "Hey, I just got this cool thing, and I strapped it on my leg, and I just -ent from a 12-minute mile to a 10 minute mile," I'd say like, "No, you didn't."

[JM]: "That thing did that."

[JM]: "You didn't do that."

[DJ]: Yeah, I mean, by the same token, you could say that, "Hey, I started riding a bicycle and now I can run a like six-minute mile or whatever."

[DJ]: It's like, "Well, no, you're doing a different activity using a technology."

[JM]: Right, yeah.

[JM]: It's like if someone told me, "Hey, I can run 80 miles an hour, it's called my car."

[DJ]: Right, exactly.

[DJ]: You still have to operate your muscles a little because you have to depress the gas pedal.

[JM]: I would tell that person:

[JM]: "I think we have different definitions of the word 'run'."

[DJ]: This is both goofy and it is very goofy.

[DJ]: Like, if possible, we should try to put a picture of this thing in the show art for this chapter because...

[JM]: I will do that.

[JM]: I will make it the chapter art for this chapter.

[JM]: Yes.

[DJ]: I can't help looking at this thing and thinking about the movie RoboCop.

[DJ]: You remember RoboCop?

[JM]: Of course.

[DJ]: Do you remember the motion and sound associated with Robocop walking?

[JM]: Of course.

[DJ]: Right?

[DJ]: It's in your head right now, isn't it?

[JM]: The "clunk, clunk".

[DJ]: Yeah, just this very like, "Va-chunk, va-chunk, va-chunk."

[DJ]: I don't know how that sound is going to show up when you try to edit the show.

[JM]: Yeah, I can't wait to see the transcript.

[DJ]: Yeah, when I look at this, it'll be V-A-A-A hyphen chunk.

[DJ]: That'll be how it shows up in the transcript.

[DJ]: So this thing is silly, but it also feels very telling about our current moment.

[DJ]: My first thought when reading this was more and more, it feels like the story of modern technology is solutions in search of problems.

[DJ]: Because Nike, as far as I am aware, has been a very successful company for thousands of years, just like making shoes and other athletic equipment, but like they're very well known for footwear.

[DJ]: They've made all kinds of footwear, and I'm sure they have made like massive advancements in the technology of footwear itself.

[DJ]: But now there's this, and it feels very almost at odds with what I've always thought of as Nike's brand.

[DJ]: And whether you like this messaging or not, it's always felt to me like Nike's brand has been about, "Hey, you're an athlete and you have this like athletic potential."

[DJ]: "That potential is in your body."

[DJ]: And generally people who jog or run or even walk, you can do that for all kinds of reasons, including merely to move from one place to another.

[DJ]: But a lot of people do it for like fitness-related reasons.

[DJ]: And that's generally been Nike's brand.

[DJ]: And certainly it's the reason I pursue things like that is to improve my overall fitness for a variety of reasons.

[DJ]: And so there's something that feels very weird for Nike in particular to be offering a technology that feels like is almost like anti-fitness.

[DJ]: And I'm sure they would debate that claim.

[DJ]: But there's something very strange to me about saying, like, generally the reason you want to go from a 12-minute mile to a 10-minute mile is it indicates the condition of your body is changing.

[DJ]: Right.

[DJ]: And certainly people want to change those numbers just out of a sense of competitiveness, whether it's competitiveness with other people or with themselves.

[DJ]: But there's something that feels very backwards about saying, well, "Attach these robot shoes to your body and you'll be able to go faster."

[DJ]: And it's like, right.

[DJ]: But Nike, I thought you would be the ones to argue that it doesn't matter if you go faster or not, unless you are actually like

[DJ]: using your body in a more athletic way. Because isn't that the point? There's this weird like gamification of things, and people wanting to eliminate effort. I don't actually think that's good. And there's been a lot written about this over the years, especially recently. But again, the whole notion of like well it makes running uphill feel like you're running along flat ground, it's like, you know there's something to be said for everything not being as easy as possible.

[DJ]: And it just feels like such a weird deviation for a company like Nike, whose whole brand I have always interpreted as basically saying like, "Do hard things", right?

[DJ]: Like their slogan, which is like a meme at this point, "Just Do It", has always read to me like, "Yeah, we know this is hard, but just do it, right?"

[DJ]: That's not a bad life-philosophy in a lot of domains.

[DJ]: And so this is such a weird thing to see in general, but it's especially a weird thing to see from Nike, in my opinion.

[JM]: I totally agree.

[JM]: Like I love electric bikes, but I like electric bikes because it allows me to go places I wouldn't otherwise go.

[JM]: Like there are hills that I just find too challenging and just wouldn't even go there without an electric bike.

[JM]: And I just don't know you can say that about this product, right?

[JM]: Like I'm not hearing that here.

[JM]: I'm not hearing them say like, "Oh, well, here's this incline that you might think, 'Oh, that's too steep for me', but this might allow you to do it."

[JM]: Because honestly, if that's what they were pitching here, I'd be like, oh, okay.

[JM]: Actually seems kind of sensible, but it just feels different.

[JM]: Like the way that they talk about, "This is a first-generation product and it's not intended to allow you to shave seconds off your time."

[JM]: Okay.

[JM]: But you're telling me the second-generation product will be intended to do that?

[JM]: I don't know.

[JM]: The focus to me, like you said, is just... running, biking...

[JM]: These are supposed to be things that are not super easy.

[JM]: And I don't understand the purpose of this product, because it's not designed to make you do something you couldn't otherwise do.

[JM]: I don't know.

[JM]: If it would allow you to do something you couldn't otherwise do, it would make more sense to me.

[JM]: But that's just not how they're pitching it.

[DJ]: I'll be real interested to see if this thing actually ever ships, and if so, how do they market it?

[DJ]: How is it priced?

[DJ]: Does anyone actually use it?

[DJ]: What do they use it for, and how does it feel?

[DJ]: Because this is so strange to me, and it's fascinating.

[JM]: If it ever ships, I'm going to buy you a set of these for the holidays.

[DJ]: I look forward to that, although that's generally a bad time of year to do a lot of running, but I could wait until the spring, I guess, to put on my robot shoes.

[JM]: All right.

[JM]: Thanks, everyone, for listening.

[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com, and you can find Dan on the web at danj.ca.

[JM]: Share your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.