228. Ahr! Ahr! Ahr!

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast. This week's challenge, read the fucking manual.

MerlinOh, are you loving it? 20,000 Hertz Is that the show?

AlexYes, oh that was Indeed an episode from this morning

Merlin20,000 Hertz It's like Roman Mars for your ears

AlexYeah, oh that's such a good Way to describe it

Speaker AHang on, I'm going to fix my free PC again

AlexOh, well then I'll just Open my

Speaker AHello, hello Hello, hello, I can hear you

AlexHello, there's It is I, hello, hello

Merlinyeah okay and i have water boiling i gotta turn that up oh my god oh oh my yeah this is i mean

Alexwe we are recording i'm recording in many a spot we're gonna we gotta fix this audio hijack thing

Merlini i uh i tried to make this a topic on rodrick online but we have better things to talk about oh that was good episode less this what do we talk about forget uh it was good it was a good

Alexepisode yes what do we talk about oh uh just like the the idea of well both um having you know a mother's daughter's mother slash partner and the idea of taking the edge off which i like so much that i clipped it maybe it was last week and not yesterday oh oh you know we talked about yeah i

Merlindid some rectus style bitching about active working areas oh i remember yes yes you did the active working area also i've now i'm now introducing i'm still working this out i've also introduced the liminal area the storage area and the deep storage i'm not sure i think the system

Alexmight be falling apart is this is is this a show what's what's going deep other than with david

Merlinreese like what if you want to take a party very deep yeah uh i so roman mars oh i'm sorry i'm

AlexI'm running circles. Running, running, running, running, running circles.

MerlinWell, what happened was I was going to introduce – I was going to talk about why I was being so – one would not know. But like I was unusually sort of like energetic and caffeinated and then that led me to two things because it was always two things with me. One is I experienced something that I'm going to call a predatory misdelivery. And then I also wanted to talk about the day that a bunch of records got delivered to my house when I was 10.

AlexA predatory misdelivery. Was that part of the Pharaoh versus Allen documentary? Please explain. What is that?

MerlinYou mean Egypt? Oh, you're talking about – I see. Ramsey is the Pharaoh. A predatory – Okay, Ramsey's Mia Ramsey's. Okay.

Alexthe prince of egypt a very underrated animated movie country stars did a cover and by the way

Merlinjohn syracuse is really in my bad books he was so mean to me when we recorded last night he's he's he's he's he razzed me for taking a nap he was he told he made me talk about pronunciation again and apparently the dawn and dawn thing never ends and and then also last night i'll send you a video for this video i watched an amazing video last night so you know eric what's his name stig larson eric erica the guy with the beard on uh on uh wired and the accents uh no you know that guy the series there's that series that handsome man with the beard does on

wired about basically he's a he's a dialect coach and he helps people actors to like develop the

Alexright accent for something oh uh we will find that for notes you haven't seen this oh my gosh

Merlinyou would love this. Oh, it's, well, gosh, I'm sorry. This is making less than no sense. We'll start the show soon. But he has a new series. It's a little longer pieces where he's doing a tour of some of the most interesting, unusual accents in the US, like going through on a map. And that led something. This is probably the best, most appropriate recommendation that has ever popped up on YouTube for me. And my lady and I watched this last night. It's what appears to be a TV show from the 50s.

I'm going to say the 50s because I peg it to the 50s because it looks real old and there's a lot about this really nice 50s feel. But also that it's back, I think, when people thought TV would be educational and useful. And it's this guy who comes off, well, email John Roderick, but this guy who is obviously a very learned person, he's almost like a Kornacki, he's this middle-aged guy with a pointer and he appears to be a linguist. He knows so much, but he's like a good performer.

AlexCan you appear to be a linguist? What does appearing to be a linguist mean? By the definition of a linguist.

MerlinAside from standing in front of a map, tell me what Steve Kornacki's job is and tell me why he's good at it.

AlexHe is good at calming people down because he can do numbers fast so that the normies don't have to do numbers fast. And he's very good at looking at khaki looking amazing and khakis um and geography arithmetic politics yes well so he was okay and while he's manipulating a shitty microsoft device oh yeah that's touch screen is not that bad so

Merlinyou'll i think you'll know what i mean when you watch this but so so it's this dude in the 50s and it appears to be a tv show he's got a pointer and he's got he's very well prepared and he's got I want to say, what, five or six people there. This is so John Syracuse's wet dream. And it's really, really well done. And this guy's going to explain in some detail differences in American dialect and accents. And he has these people from different parts of the U.S. there. And he asked them to read three words. Like, the first one is Mary, Mary, and Mary, which are, by the way, all pronounced the same.

But these people, there's subtle differences to each one of them. And he has them like pronounce different things and then he talks about it. Then he also asks questions like, you know, I know that you're from less than such place. What do you call a fizzy drink in Boston? It's called a tonic. Like, what? I've never heard that. You know, like soda, pop, Coke, you know, bag, poke, sack, all those kinds of things you learn about. And he goes through all of these. But then he goes deep like David Reese. This is where it gets good because then he starts saying, and this explains so much.

There's certain kinds of vowel sounds, especially, this is so good, that you will, he could predict how you will pronounce a vowel sound based on knowing which side east or west of the Allegheny Mountains you grew up.

AlexOh, I hate that. Oh, wow. Wow. Talk about Gary, the privacy clown. He has not appeared for a while.

MerlinThen he starts bringing in, is it longitudes? Oh, my God. horizontal lines and and he can he gets into the goat fronting like don don stuff he gets into all of these and he ends up with these like eight areas where he can like have a pretty good idea what word you would use for something and what you're not not everybody you know like eric always stresses i call him eric well he always stresses is hey not everybody from the same area speaks the same there's so many differences and he brings in like a different people of different backgrounds and black people to come in and talk about like the miami influence miami's uh accent this is now

I'm back to Eric. But this guy in the 50s was doing it, and he was doing it great, and you should watch it anyway. John Syracuse is on my bad list. Also, he told me more about his toe. You won't believe what happened.

AlexOh, I – oh.

MerlinI made myself – you know my rule, Alex. You know my rule. When somebody comes to you and they present themselves with vulnerability, that is not a time to dunk, score points, or give advice.

AlexVery, very true. I'm glad that your program allows him to show some vulnerability.

MerlinI hope it helps him. I really hope it helps him. He's so – like I said to Dan the other day, if you can't understand why anything happened in America, assume that it's either because of money, fear, or both. And I think he's probably pretty rich. But I do think he is driven by shame and fear. Now, I utilize that. I convert that into a career. He turns it into a way to Hector, the handful of people who are willing to tolerate him as a friend. I'm talking here about John Syracuse.

AlexYes. And as we all know, he is a millionaire. Getting up there into billionaire territory. But, you know, he's not one to brag.

MerlinDo you know how much that special edition of their t-shirt cost? Ridiculous.

AlexOh, to the point where I remember being like, can't afford that. This was a very, very long time ago. But I was still in college. And I'm like, that's a very funny and also mean joke.

MerlinNow we'll talk about a different genre. Let's go back to Monday. And I want to talk about what I'm calling a predatory delivery. This is a predatory delivery. Okay? I'm not even nearly done. You're going to find out why in about 45 seconds.

AlexWell, we're going deep. If you want to finish, you have to go deep.

MerlinGet in the party hole. Get in my party hole.

AlexYes. Okay.

MerlinSo I use the Instacart service.

Speaker AIt's almost exclusively how we get groceries.

MerlinAnd I had a delivery to my office of, you know, various things. Some alcohol, some cleaning supplies. Basically all the things that buoy me. you see I have a note in here about how power puttering is ADHD porn anyhow I got what I'm considering a predatory delivery which is a predatory misdelivery which is I got my stuff and because alcohol was not included they just left it outside and as per my directions good job person and there's my stuff but there's also that thing that happens sometimes

which is that you get somebody else's stuff there's one bag of somebody else's stuff oh no and you know i i use time was that the whatever 15 times that's ever happened or five times or whatever i would always email them and say hey you know i got somebody else's apple jacks i left it outside if you want to come pick it up and they're like that's fine and they always say something odd like we're sorry for the inconvenience and you can keep it so i've even stopped contacting them a bag with two items in it one of the items was asparagus i love asparagus

but I feel weird about eating someone else's asparagus. But the second item is something I would never have thought to buy for myself, and this is why I consider it a predatory, because now I'm going to get it all the time, and that is 48 ounces of medium-grade Starbucks iced coffee.

Speaker AOh, my God.

MerlinWhich is QED. I've talked about this before. Ice coffee can be extremely irresponsible. It's irresponsible as a beverage and it makes you careless as a person. My friend Dave and Kevin, who've been in a band together for a decade, broke up because of one afternoon with canned Cuban ice coffee. Their relationship blew apart because they were so gacked out on ice coffee that it killed their relationship for years.

AlexThis is fascinating and beautiful.

Merlinoh this should not be in my life alex someone should come and take this do you hear this oh all you do i have an ice machine alex all i do is put ice coffee on ice and i drink it up

Alexyeah i'm looking oh my god no i i was thinking it's like oh your iced tea i was gonna make a

Speaker Ajoke which uh seems like a lot of work don't land seems like a lot of work compared to 48 ounces in jar unscrewed drink lose mind oh you ever have a lot of iced coffee woof well no my my secret is

Alexto you're always caffeinated the i mean we can talk about the adhd later but the the uh is my little espresso machine that isn't really an espresso machine it's one of those pods that i know is killing the planet and is it an espresso it's like a it's like one of those that you would see in a hotel room but it's real really tiny so it's just i i use shot glasses yours has a lot

Merlinless uh a lot less uh germans have finished in yours sorry fewer few well well germans thus thus

Alexfewer germans i don't know if i've heard like 13 german porn jokes in the past week and it's a

Merlinwednesday but any i always thought it was funny there's an episode of malcolm in the middle where They refer, I think it's the janitor, they refer to his collection of German dungeon porn. That phrase still makes me laugh when I think about it. And the fact that it was on Malcolm in the Middle still makes me laugh. It's German dungeon porn.

Germans, man, pump the brakes, you guys.

AlexOh.

MerlinThat's not what that area is for.

AlexOh, no. Okay, so my coffee.

MerlinDon't put things in that. Don't put things in that.

AlexNope, nope, nope.

MerlinIf you put it in the back, that's your thing.

AlexNope, nope. Well, I think the Germans, they must have been in deep. because it's a very, the little stuff that comes out of my pod is quite potent. So I only need a literal shot glass. Like it's like it's a like six flag shot glass of espresso that just like squirts into there unpleasantly.

MerlinThat's how it should be. I got into, I think I most got into, I discovered espresso in college and that was sold to me by friends as the most like efficient caffeine delivery mechanism. So we get like Cafe Bustelo from the grocery store. But it wasn't until – I don't know if it came first, Brown Owl Coffee or New Zealand. But New Zealand, man, they don't have – their version of American coffee is basically an Americano. Like you make an espresso and put hot water in it. But their espresso drinks are crazy good in New Zealand.

And then Brown Owl, they roasted – I miss it so much. They roasted – oh, you know, first Miyazaki movie I ever saw was having dinner at their house with my little baby. And we saw Howl's Moving Castle.

Alexoh oh interesting first choice but on laser on laser disc i on a big screen did you time travel to i did not know that the owls had the ability to time travel

Merlini think it was owl i was about i was it was brown brown howls how now brown howl no i might have a little mixed up okay i gotta finish my german translation but i also want to get fix my area in the stack oh yeah but espresso can be great and what i discovered i discovered it doesn't have to be like just bitter like there's different like not flavors but different like roasts oh

Alexthere's there's very even in the pods different flavors but it's it's almost like how like i was

Merlinlike most americans with you know you keep family from the uk the way that we ate brussels sprouts was an atrocity and you don't learn later. Guess what? Brussels sprouts can be amazing. I make amazing Brussels sprouts. Ditto espresso. You get that junky, way too bitter stuff that's the equivalent of like hotel coffee and it can actually be really good. Oh, by the way, capture this for challenge sheet. I think we should have Matthew on the show for Something Something Challenge. Learn what it's like to work at Starbucks.

AlexOh, I was like, which? There's many a Matthew. Do we get the VC gate, The shortcut or the queer one. There's so many.

MerlinJust the one queer one.

AlexI mean, as far as we know.

MerlinYeah. You talking about Tumblr guy?

AlexMarco? I don't know. I have not investigated his lifestyle.

MerlinIs his name David Karp? Stop Karp-ing. So anyway, the point is that predatory. How did I get to coffee? Wait, there's something in between. Espresso.

AlexA jar of iced coffee was delivered to you.

MerlinPredatory. It reminds me of the six or seven albums that RCA accidentally delivered to my house in 1976 that changed my life.

AlexOkay, but real quick, you have the tone of someone who has had a large thing of cold brew. Is it specifically iced coffee and not cold brew?

Speaker ALet me go look it up. So my kid and I were at the cafe down the street, as we are most mornings.

MerlinAnd I was just saying like – when we get my wife, when we get her a coffee, she likes an oat milk latte. And I was just saying like you must feel your first – definitely first week. But I imagine your first two weeks. I don't know if they put you straight on the line or if there's a lot of training. But like I don't know how you work in a coffee place. There's too many combinations. I figure they've got to have a system that's very mature that people are trained into. But you're also you're making breakfast foods in that weird oven and you're jammed up with all these different people and you're making following people's craziest caprice.

It's the treat every normie gets for themselves. And I did hear an ad for Starbucks on a podcast I was listening to today that was very much selling that. Hey, do something nice for yourself. You know, boss around somebody in a mask to make your coffee right. And this is a Starbucks iced coffee, medium roast, smooth and balanced, unsweetened premium coffee beverage. Huh. 1.5 quarts.

AlexOh, well, I guess I forgot that you were off coffee for a while.

MerlinYeah, coffee's definitely not part of my day-to-day necessity in the way that it used to be. And the reason I say predatory is because I'm going to do another Instacart today, and I'm pretty fucking sure I'm going to get another one of these, and I'm not loving it. Da-da-da-da-da.

How many Germans have a... So let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Excuse me. how many Germans have ejaculated in my coffee pot okay no I was trying to do Spanish I don't want that I don't know if I can get it to play where you can hear it oh yeah let's see if you can hear this

Speaker Alet me flip one of these around

Merlinokay ready

Speaker Byep That would be a pretty name for a girl.

AlexThat was a very upsetting voice.

MerlinIt sounded kind of like a teen.

AlexYeah.

MerlinI think I just made a German teen say something.

AlexNo, you made a foreign teen.

MerlinInternational, please.

AlexAn international teen. someone who isn't from oh my god stop grooming i like i i buy boy skins for my international

Merlinteens my god also can we change the name of this podcast to boy skins i'm gonna close that i guess

Alexi could put this in notes since your question is wait no i'm not even gonna ask hold on Do people keep in there? I just need to know the answer. Because I'm sure you're familiar with the phenomena of keeping a placenta after a child has been born. So then you can eat it for reasons.

MerlinSome people eat it and some people, Scott Simpson, one of their kids, they turned into a tree. It's a lot like a Taz episode.

AlexAnd, oh, that's problematic. They killed a lesbian.

Speaker AActually, in my mind, Angus has always been purple and tall.

AlexI didn't know.

Do people keep their foreskin retracted over the penis all the time in their pants? And this is from Quora. Not Yahoo, sorry. There are seven answers. The first one by John Kirkpatrick, who lives in addictions and mental health, Salem, Oregon. Well, from 2015 to present. And this is from two years ago. Are you on LinkedIn? No, I am on Quora.

Speaker AI thought you were talking about Avatar The Last End.

AlexNo, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right. I very commonly keep my foreskin.

Speaker AI stand for Zuko.

AlexOh, there's been a lot of discourse.

Speaker APut this coffee down. Oh, boy.

AlexOh, boy.

Speaker AYou think I'm bad usually? You're right.

AlexMiss Adderall now.

Speaker AOh, my goodness. All right.

AlexWell, John Kirkpatrick says this of his foreskin. I very commonly keep my foreskin pulled back mainly for hygiene, capital H, reasons. When I became more sexually, I was self-conscious about showing my penis with the foreskin down. In the beginning, my penis head was very sensitive to the clothes. Sometimes it was uncomfortable. Sometimes it would actually make me hard. Here's the first period of the sentence.

MerlinI can't believe Cora is having to listen to this.

Alexthe problem i have the problem i have with keeping it pulled back is that i'm a grower not a shower oh god so when i am limp it will sometimes roll down and if i am in public it's

Speaker Avery hard you find a way to hold back when you're in a crowd of five people

Merlinyou need a penis garter you need penis garters to hold it where you want

Speaker AYou know what?

MerlinWe're probably already as penis lawyer and we just haven't learned it yet. You guys, we need to talk about foreskin guy.

AlexOh, I was just a foreskin dad. I feel bad for this guy. I truly do.

Speaker AHe gets soft.

AlexOh, it's he's a grower. Oh, gosh. Oh, there's there's some discord. Oh, I'm going to put this in show notes.

MerlinI don't think we have a discord anymore.

AlexThe no, we don't. Oh, but actually, I would love to plug the unofficial official Minecraft server of Dubai Friday, which you can find. Oh, the one URL that I. This is yes. Legos dot digital. You can go and hang out at in our Minecraft. It's not our Minecraft server, a Minecraft server by the community of people who used to be in the official Dubai Friday discord. But it is so cool. I still don't really know how to play Minecraft.

but you can go walk around. If you follow some of our favorite accidental tech people on Twitter or Instagram, you'll be able to see houses they have built and like shrines to podcasters in a jokey, but not creepy way. And so many gay flags. Anyway, uh, Legos dot digital. It's very good. I love it. We don't have a discord anymore.

MerlinThat's where you go. That's where you. Okay. Sorry. I blanked out a minute. Where, where do people go for that? That's okay. Where do people go to get on the server?

AlexLegos.digital.

MerlinAnd we own that domain?

AlexYes. We do not own it, but I'm here. Legos.digital.

MerlinOh, it goes. But seriously, somebody we know owns Legos.digital, and that goes to the thing that we're encouraging here?

AlexYes. That's kind of cool. Right, right? And they have lovely – I believe Claire wrote this. Thank you, Claire. Thank you, Claire. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, but a gay flag right at the beginning as you open the Minecraft page. I mean, yeah. Oh, all right. So I guess people don't keep their foreskins.

MerlinSo 1976. I need to get this out of my system. 1976.

AlexAll right. Go, go, go. Sorry. I was talking about foreskins.

MerlinOkay. So here's the sole test of this. Oh, my God. Have you heard this anecdote?

AlexGo on.

MerlinNo, no, no. I'm asking you. Did you hear the anecdote about the RCA records I didn't order? had you ever heard this no i have not no this feels important to me and i like to repeat this anecdote once in a while this was not this was predatory in the sense so the the coffee was obviously a way of getting me to buy coffee that's the only way that i can think of it um i do enjoy asparagus but i like it to be my own so one day i come home from school it's got to be 76 maybe 77 you know what it might be 77 because i had a record player that was the year i got the john williams soundtrack so anyway it's in the 70s it's before my terrible stepfather was

on the scene i come home from school and there's delivery it's a it's a you know and you remember when you're a little kid like how exciting it is to get something with your name on it in the mail it's like the most amazing thing uh in this case i can't remember this precisely i've run this over my mind lots of times trying to figure out what happened uh quickly to explain there was a phenomenon started i think in the 60s uh where you you join rca or you join a columbia house and

Alexthese are record labels, right? I'm not being a dick. At first I was like, RCA as in the cars?

MerlinKind of, but not really. That's a very good question.

AlexOh, okay.

MerlinWell, okay. So like Columbia definitely was a label. RCA definitely was a label. So that's, you know, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley respectively. And, but, but you see this in magazines and on TV, mostly in magazines. And it would say you can get, you know, seven albums for a penny and all you have to do is tape a penny here and send this in and we'll send you any seven albums from our available collection that you want and it's like oh man that seems

like a really good deal now there's a couple things they don't tell you you know it's not in the big print it's in a little print but the little print is you're joining something where you you have to buy an album every month uh well here's how it works it's like so for example Like, let's say, okay, you joined the club and you got all these great albums. And then, okay, so now you've selected your favorite kind of music is hard rock. We're going to send you Van Halen 2 next month, unless you specifically tell us not to. And again, this is all done through the mail.

So you basically have to, like, get your ticket punched once a month. Otherwise, they send you an album. Oh, by the way, the album is, like, half again the price of what you pay for it in a record store. And now you do that until you cancel the program. um and but so that was real bad for me the first thing that i remember actively wrecking my credit was i uh i had a copy of uh sports by huey lewis in the news and thunder seven by uh triumph and i hadn't paid for them uh fast enough and and that ruined my credit when i was in high school

Alexhold on so you didn't have to you you paid the penny trying to remember how it works and then Give your information? Like how did they fuck you over? Oh, yeah, yeah.

MerlinBasically, you're – well, okay. So another way to look at this is, hey, would you like to join a thing where you have to buy an album every month that's expensive?

AlexYeah, because it's like an – they essentially app store subscription deal. I'm trying to millennial this up and understand.

MerlinNo, no, no. I understand you're going from 70s to millennial. But so anyway, but then that became something. I think the closest I can work out here is that somebody, people would scam it. So if you could have that delivered to like say a different address, you go and get your seven albums and now that person is signed up for RCA or whatever.

So yeah, I did this again with my actual money when I wrote checks off my little checking account in the 80s. But this is in the 70s. I come home. there is a cardboard box that is the dimensions of several LPs. And I'm like, huh, I wonder what this is. It's weird to me. Cause I, it certainly was not in my name or my mom's name. I'm not sure why I opened up mail for someone else that had used to live at the house or whatever. Here's the important part. There were, I believe seven albums in there.

Now, the least interesting was a Spitfire by Starship, not even Jefferson Starship, not even that great a record by Starship standards, whatever. best of dolly parton glenn campbell's yeah i'm not a big butterfly oh god jolene

Alexgreat on tiktok right now oh god and then have you heard the the story sorry oh i'll put it no go ahead i can go ahead i know where i am the uh dolly parton's not or not her series but the series jad abenrod oh that was terrific that was so good okay all right sorry and also there's

Merlina documentary about her on, I want to say Netflix, that's fucking great. And one of those things, she's almost like the original AOC, where she's entirely aware that she has an image and a brand and she's totally aware of that and it's somehow that she's able to do that in a way that it seems to me, at least from a remove, she's not being somebody whom she is not. I do believe she's probably a very humble person, but she's also a really fucking smart person. Go watch that documentary. It's really good. She was way ahead of her time in a million ways.

Also, she wrote two of the greatest songs of all time in one day.

AlexYeah. Oh, God, it's so good. And oh, it's just I love her.

MerlinI mean, that makes me a normie dad. That's fine.

AlexOh, no. I feel like she has circled back around in terms of norminess, because for a while it was like, yeah, Dele Parton, like who's another?

MerlinBetty White. Is it like it's sort of like liking Betty White?

AlexI feel like now it is like Betty White, except people are exploring her actual statements and how she has evolved as a person.

MerlinBetty White is like human bacon. She's like internet bacon.

AlexYes, exactly. Like, I will not.

Speaker AWhat a horrible image.

AlexYep, I agreed. Betty White is human bacon. I agreed, and then I'm like, nope.

Speaker ANot going to stop me from writing it down, though. Nope, nope.

Alexoh she was a tasty treat both of them very tasty treats as as young women you know everything's better with betty betty white on it i bet she'd go deep all right so you were getting mail from

Merlinrca this is so boring we'll start the show in a minute i got spitfire by starship which is a cool cover not that great of an album back when they were still jefferson starship but after they were Jefferson Airplane. Best of Dolly Parton. Glen Campbell's greatest hits. Now, my late father was a huge Glen Campbell fan, and this hit me right in the feels, even at the age of 10 or 11. You know, I am a lineman for the county. You know? Ready? Ready? Ready? The Monkees' greatest hits.

And I've been watching the TV show of the Monkees. I was recording Monkees' songs through the TV speaker because I didn't have any other way to hear Pleasant Valley Sunday.

AlexI am not going to comment on the monkeys.

MerlinIf you say one word against the monkeys.

AlexI'm not going to. I'm not commenting on the monkeys. Go on.

MerlinOh, Mickey Dolan's Can't Drum. Go ahead. Go ahead.

AlexNo, I don't. I am not commenting on the monkeys.

MerlinPeter Tork, Friends of Charles Manson. What? What are you going to bring?

AlexI'm not going to comment on the monkeys.

MerlinThe monkeys are canceled. Number five. Really?

AlexSorry, number five.

MerlinBest of the Beach Boys.

AlexOh.

MerlinIf it's not obvious yet, every single one of these albums was really, well, except for Starship, was really good and had a huge impact on my life. And the next two albums, this is so important, this will not mean a lot to you, but to have these albums arrive at my house in 1977, Kiss, Rock and Roll Over, and their current hit, Kiss, Destroyer.

AlexOh, my.

MerlinKiss albums are not a thing that would ever have come into my life as a possession. We were super churchy. And the idea of the devil man with the big boots, my mom funding something like that. She was mad in 10th grade when I got 1999 by Prince because she saw there was a wiener on the cover. Did you ever notice that? The one in 1999?

AlexNow I do.

MerlinMet her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine?

AlexWell, I know that.

Speaker AThat's the cover. I guess you could sign to lose a sex queen. So those albums arrived at my house.

Alexi am i played oh that those are most of those are very very good albums but i don't understand how it ruined your credit like did you give them these are different this is earlier sorry this is

Merlin1970 diggity seven maybe i if hughie lewis and the new sports i'm gonna put that as 1984

Alexokay okay yeah i'm i'm sorry it's this is a doctor who of merlin's life episode i there's there's a

Merlinlot of jumping around oh maybe i'm maybe i'm the billy pilgrim now yeah i'm geronimo angels oh it's so sad so sad you you did the one where we're rory and uh you did the the the moment right and you did the one with rory and oh together not at all oh gosh oh my god and he

Alexflips the scarf ready to start the episode yeah do my friday

Merlinwhat else am I going to order I'm going to get some more oh I'm going to get some drain drain cleaner liquid plumber need more pine saw we need more pine saw

Alexdo you liquid plumber do you put things in your pipe Not your pipes, the pipes you have access to.

MerlinMy rented pipes.

AlexYes. Do you get in trouble for doing that?

MerlinYep.

AlexOkay.

MerlinThere are several things that get disappeared anytime I know there's going to be a visit.

Speaker AMm-hmm.

MerlinAnd I'm not – I shouldn't talk about any of them, toilet wipes.

Speaker AYeah, don't.

MerlinSo –

AlexI don't understand. The drill, the ladder. Maybe this is something in age. but i uh still don't understand using a wet wipe i mean i do i do i do but not on a regular basis

Merlinthat seems like a when you start pooping you'll appreciate it oh would you

Alexi uh yesterday we both sent mistaken texts to one another and oh yeah i think i sent i double

Merlinsent you pictures of my kid and what did you send me oh was that a miss yours to me yours to me was

Alexunintentional yeah well because uh it at our home we only have one bathroom and if i love the way

Merlinyou said it i sent you a photograph of my telephone with my new sock a pop you made me get on it

Alexi did it i suggested i suggested you because you were pop curious the thing you made me buy

MerlinAnd then you responded with one word after that, which is fingerings. Well, that was correct. Okay. I don't know. I don't. I said, I now have this, but I have to learn what it is for. And then you said fingerings. One word. And then I said, I think I get it, but I could use your help on the program. And then what did you say to respond?

AlexI'm doing a poop!

MerlinExclamation point.

AlexSo being 10,000.

MerlinWhat did I say?

AlexI can use it again.

MerlinWhat did I say?

AlexYou said nice.

Merlinand I was like, I agree. Whenever I say nice now, you have to imagine that I'm saying it like the guy in the Tim and I think you should leave

Alexfocus group. Oh, that's exactly what I do.

MerlinReally? Because I don't think most people would know to read it that way, but it's when he says, these are good ideas. You should write these down. He goes, I'm writing these down. He goes, oh, nice.

Speaker AYeah.

MerlinMarry your mother-in-law. Stinky.

Speaker AOh, goodness.

MerlinOkay, welcome to Dubai Friday, where we love things. Oh, and did you like my Catholic videos?

AlexOh, yes.

MerlinIsn't he adorable? We should probably save it for the show.

AlexWe should save it for the show. This is an adorable man.

MerlinOh, my God, I love him so much. Did you get to the one where he finally goes from being a brother to a priest? Did you watch the ceremony one?

AlexNo, I only watched Worst Funeral Ever, which I have to say, this.

MerlinThat's not his best one. Not his best one.

AlexOkay, so after I did my poop.

MerlinThis is a guy who was a, what, a Franciscan, right? He's a Franciscan friar. He was a brother. I only became aware of him because he came up in my recos. And he's this gorgeous young man who is now a full-on priest. He seems really nice. He has a great haircut. His image quality and his lighting is fantastic. And he just seems really nice and delightful. And I really, I don't know, I buy that this guy wants to be a good guy and a good priest. But he's also a little bit thirsty on YouTube, so it's sweet.

AlexOh, he is so thirsty. But I don't know. I found it charming. He was like, this is sponsored by Squarespace. I don't know.

MerlinI discovered this because the second thing I sent you was the first thing I saw, which is 18 straight minutes of useless Catholic trivia, which I really liked.

AlexI did, too. I was upset about how many I knew as well as how many I didn't, such as Ash Wednesday isn't something you need to go to.

MerlinSumma Theologica, some of which I have read for my schooling. I don't understand why it's estimated to be approximately a million words. It seems like the opus of St. Thomas Aquinas would be something that has a very finite number of words in it that is knowable.

AlexTranslations.

MerlinWait a minute. Is this about epistemology?

AlexI bet it is. how do we even know what we know what we know they need the steve karnacki word man to get his

Merlinpointer out oh yeah i gotta find that for you okay god i might pass out this is really bad

Alexyou know what i should i should switch to water and drink water oh a lot of problems just like when you can't understand things it's usually someone acting out of uh what what is it fear

Merlinfear anger i would say i see the causes of many things we don't understand first rule out um

Alexstart by ruling out fear and money or i mean i would argue that the two of those often go hand

Merlinin hand so they do they do but like i mean if you say like oh i wonder i wonder if this person is mad at me they haven't called me in a while well one of this could be that like they don't have any money, and we talked about this with our former co-host a while back, like it's, there is a lot of implied money spending that a lot of people with not as much money don't realize. I mean, I don't want to make it sad, but I think that's really true. So that is a case of, as you say, both of like, well, I don't have the money for whatever

it is you're going to want to do. And I'm fearful of the fact that I'm going to have to find some reason to, plausible reason that's not money to say why I can't go. And I feel bad about that.

AlexI mean, my whole car journey was in this. It's not that I was unfortunate enough to be too poor to find a car, but there's a lot of things that go along with leasing a car.

MerlinI like your thing about being a man.

AlexThat's interesting. Oh, that was a little bit snarky. But also it did indeed go. I know, right? I was like, I'm a little grumpy. But yeah. Oh, I mean, I'll save for the after show. But I don't have a complete beep beep, but I have a beep beep slash room.

MerlinYou got a beep beep lead?

AlexStuff it in.

MerlinStuff it in. Put it in my car. Oh, boy. Or penis. 1957 demonstration of American diet. 1957. Okay.

AlexWell, how much time do you have to spend, I guess, like doing things during the day? Like going to the DMV and getting an ID, like for, you know, which you need to apply for a job.

MerlinWell, as you like to say now more than ever, I'm now so acutely aware, especially when I look at the lives of other people, of like the, I mean, it's like we can see the matrix. There's so much bullshit that we now can understand is, wasn't, always has been bullshit. I mean and stuff for like we probably had a niggling notion that this is bullshit but like there's all kinds of things now where you're like yeah I'm not going to do that. No I'm not going to do that thing or like oh boy I can't believe I used to do that thing and you know like people like we used to commute two hours a day for work at one time.

Because we were young and you know had energy and enthusiasm and you know not much else to do other than have a career. But I agree with you. It's always been a smart idea to say, hey, is there a better way to do things we do at the DMZ? Or put it another way. Why are we still having this debate about whether post offices should also be banks? That's silly. First of all, we shouldn't have banks. But we should have a way to do money things that doesn't require – Oh, a hottest of takes. Well, I mean there's a lot of people that don't have the resources for stuff. We know about food deserts.

We know about medical deserts. And I think there are bank deserts. So that's a no-brainer. but it was never critically important to think about it because it was just, oh, you know, banks are happy having bank people, customers, I guess they're called. But like, you know, the DMV, well, okay, well, you know, now it's, I think we're thinking a little bigger. Hey, how about we use stadiums to vaccinate or test people? How about we, you know, there's all these different things where we're like, things that would have been unheard of a year and a half ago are now things that seem not only possible, but smart.

As in like, why wouldn't we do that? What the fuck is San Francisco going to do with all of this retail real estate? Well, I mean, one option would be to think about what else you could do with retail real estate other than have it be retail real estate. But like all those parking garages, like think about how much of every city. I hate to be this guy, but like, no, I don't because I think cars suck. Like how much of every city? Like let's say if aliens came down and looked at a city, they think it's run by the cars.

AlexYeah. Yeah. And hopefully one day that will be the case. But hopefully many of those cars will be called buses and they will be autonomous.

MerlinBut you know what I mean? It's like what do we all this all this stuff that we weren't even allowed. I guess you could call it a version of moving the Overton window. But there's all kinds of things that were not even eligible for discussion without sounding like a weirdo. So like the DMV is just like part of life.

AlexNo, no, you'd sound like a communist is what you would or you'd be called a socialist at the Thanksgiving Day table. Thanksgiving Day. I don't know. Thanksgiving. When you're in the chair sitting next to your racist uncle who really like along with being racist really hates poor people a lot just as much as he hates black people. uh welcome to god you've you really sound like one of my cucks i'm sorry what did i oh god nothing

no no nothing nothing no no this is uh i sound like one of your cucks what did i do no no nothing um but the idea too that well we talked about this last week actually uh that i was i have a lot more confident not not confidence some optimism in the system not the system but in this is going great keep going you're doing terrific it's hard well i don't want to be like everything's going great

but when the world puts all of its forces saying this well what's your what is what is your assertive

Merlinstatement here that you would say if you weren't worried about seeming away i i didn't know there's Hope for things to improve based on developments.

AlexBased on, you know, pure capitalism. If people really want to get stuff done, like have the earth not melt, there is a way to do it. And I don't know if I like all of those ways, but it is possible. And that's optimistic to me. I don't know. Yeah.

MerlinNo, I agree.

AlexI don't have a jug of coffee. I've just got this stupid sparkling water with caffeine and electrolytes.

MerlinDon't be like that.

Alexdon't be like that don't tell me what don't are you language policing i'm being silent this is orwellian i don't know what orwellian means anymore no one does

Merlinuh yeah yeah you know it's funny like orwellian i feel like used to mean uh oh my god can you imagine can you imagine a culture where we tolerate having a camera in our house i'm spending i'm spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to do the home assistant integration for cameras that lets me i have to go into my configuration.yaml to add my arlo camera so i pay for the cameras and then i configure the cameras oh imagine having multiple

Alexcameras directed directly at your bed not for sexy times and not necessarily by your choice just 24 7 as your children about winston smith or you who are you talking about many well many people i only have three uh one two well well i also have oh does an ipad count and then ipad's

Merlinnext i'm losing some okay you know what's exciting is well this is gonna be a big part of my contribution for the challenge this week i think is this related kind of stuff but it's funny how I keep kind of running a little bit hot and cold. One of the things is that like I it's I'm having a kind of enthusiastic frustration with Siri right now that's actually positive, which is I'm willing to try it more. To be honest, the HomePods mini, which I keep accumulating and adding and driving my family crazy with. Could we please not have the replacements playing in the entire house,

including the bathroom at 630.

AlexThis is a good simile for my vaccination and climate change feels.

MerlinThe three words play this. The three words play this everywhere. It can be very dangerous in a multi-person household.

AlexOh, it is indeed that.

MerlinBut, you know, I got to say my order for the Amazon family of products. I still think it's the best at getting, you know, what I want. But I am getting more attracted to the better sounding speaker thing. So I am more inclined. It's still harder with Spotify. Spotify is still such a pain, though, to throw to something else. And I think the interface, I get the interface. The interface for throwing to a HomePod, I feel like, is pretty good if you have one.

And it's tolerable if you have two. But if you are the kind of weirdo who has more than two.

AlexExcuse me. I'm sorry.

MerlinNo, I'm trying to do the thing you... Oh my God. What I'm trying to say is I have too many HomePods.

AlexI so do I.

MerlinAnd I love it. Da-da-ba-ba-ba.

That will key into that. You were talking about we got dialects. So we've got Betty White's Bacon, Catholic Boy. Oh, yeah, I should find that for notes, too. I'll put that into the I'm looking for priest videos.

AlexMy second podcast I ever listened to was a Catholic podcast. Let me. Oh, I should save this for the show.

MerlinFirst one was probably Ricky Gervais.

AlexI don't get it. Is this an off? I've lost thread. I don't I don't have I don't have a jar. I've got you know what? actually hey maddie maddie can you bring me a red bull wow can you bring me a red bull thank you thank you uh matthew's home today because uh the cat had to go to the i can't believe i'm saying this uh francis our dumb cat went to the emergency room yesterday because he

was just p every everything's all right he he's just got a little a little bug um but so he stayed oh god talk about privilege he was able to take a day off to make sure her cat doesn't die thank you merlin has a jug of uh of iced he got a jar of iced starbucks coffee yeah oh my god okay it's misdelivered it was misdelivered he he had a uh a predatory misdelivery a predatory misdelivery all right that's all you can leave also say i love you

for you anymore goodbye say i love you i love i love you goodbye i love no no no gotta go deep gotta finish um in my in my coffee potting season i am very pleased that he went along with that bit ah that's oh lovely but his face of when i said the starbucks thing it's just his whole face dropped in the mouth really because

Merlinhe wouldn't want to do that because wouldn't want that in the house or because it puts people out

Alexof jobs i no no no i think it was a a taste of like like why would a similar like why would you do this to yourself oh boy something just fell well uh thank you quinn for that's a laptop that fell on the floor um why was a laptop in a pile of things what did i this this is not me sub yelling maddie do you need me to call someone no no do you have a do you have a contact you have a person you want me to get in touch with at this point i just i feel like i should have

a text expander snippet for what i'm okay on an emergency i'm okay i'm working on tina's talking

Merlinpoints.

AlexIt's new by Friday. Welcome. We don't have time

Merlinfor any of this. I wanted to talk to you about micro suction sheets, micro suction sheets, pop sockets, and my new fizzy

Alexwater maker. Oh, our excuse me, our friends, our ments, our ments, good lord.

Speaker AOur ments. Our ments. We're back, baby. Our ments.

MerlinIs that A-H-R?

Speaker AHi, I'm Merlin Man, and I'm a seal.

MerlinTechnically, I'm a sea lion. We don't use that word anymore. R, R, R. Oh, God. That'll be good. That'll be good for the true believers. Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, Jeff. Pop socket, socket pop, micro suction sheets, new fizzy water maker. I'm trying to jog your memory.

AlexSo micro suction sheets, I learned about from the R-R-R-Ments, I believe, from some show where Marco was like, oh, I just put like some of this sheet on the bottom.

MerlinThat might have been – that might have – oh, oh, oh, was it the toasters?

AlexNo, it was the MagSafe.

MerlinNo, there was something.

AlexOh.

MerlinYes. This is the stuff that's on – is it Studio Neat or Studio Utility?

Speaker AIt's a thing that sticks a thing to a thing.

MerlinBut it's like it feels like – like it performs like super tape. But it's really just tiny, tiny micro suction cups. And if you clean off a surface, get it dry, push it down good, like you can have a thing stick to a thing. I guess if you're the sort of person who has a car and a phone, it's like the thing that you put your phone on in a car.

AlexNo, no, no, no.

MerlinIs that more of a mat? More of like just a grab you mat?

AlexIt is more skin-like at times than the Apple silicone cases. And they're terrible. And they get gross, nasty stuff on every...

Speaker AThe stuff in the car? The car? Okay.

AlexYeah, the stuff in the car. The non-slip mat where you put your little thing in your old car because now cars apparently have a little place for your phone. I have not been in a modern car for a very long time apparently. But yeah, this is different because there's like no stickiness. You can run like your finger. You can you can finger it and no residue will come off your hand. It was it's great. All right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

MerlinSo I put a photograph into the document. Now, I have a problem. This is my problem statement is that we don't see spirit animal anymore. But my inspirational Marvel character for my life in some ways is Domino. and um well a few things well you know rob leifeld invented good stuff but he didn't draw good stuff

Alexuh oh it was kind of like a uh kirby and leave situation

Merlinwell no it's that rob leifeld can't you know we've gone over this i think but rob just go look up rob leifeld drawings and it's just oh this is the guy who i don't want to say can't draw but it's not as strong he avoids feet his human legs look like frog legs it's he's his captain america is very upsetting anyway domino rules and so i have domino i have a really good i think it's probably a marvel legends uh domino here pretty good uh you know well-priced uh figures and domino sits on my pencil sharpener now the problem is that's also

Alexi hate this pencil sharpener why you you made me ruin my black wing one of my black wing pencils i did that you did that that was you you there it's got you know that that it's got a skitty

Merlinpart on the bottom too the it's got a grab your skid skiddy skiddy skiddy oh skiddy uh which is people people born south of a line and it just kind of runs through like pennsylvania people born south of a line say greasy and people born north of that line say greasy according to the

Alex1957 man well i mean that's uh it's a regional pokemon like you know some are from skiddy is from uh i believe but uh yeah so so you've got the skitties

MerlinGreasy Ball. Greasy Bar? What's his name?

AlexGarbador.

MerlinCorrect, correct. R, R, R.

Now the problem is, that's over in an area. in an area here on my right next to my shipping forecast book and my little Grogu, Baby Yoda. But the problem is that's the vicinity where cords, sometimes cables, as you say, get moved around. By the way, cable was also invented by Rob Liefeld and Deadpool. And then cable was eventually retconned to be Cyclops'

Alexson. Spoilers, but all right. Go on. So my problem

Merlinis that because, and I've got her sitting in a really cool position. She looks, you know what, this could actually almost be show art. This must

Alexnay this must be show art because not looking like that though what do you mean it's not pretty well i mean but it it must be shown what position domino is in because the way you're describing it

Merlinyeah but look when you see her not like this way she looks less foxy and more tough the oh i she

AlexShe has fucking, unlike a lot of characters, she is dressed for battle. Oh, she's so cool. Yeah. And she's lucky.

MerlinShe's lucky.

AlexI'm not familiar with her characters.

MerlinWell, see, canonically, I think you would think of somebody like Longshot as being the primary, what they call probability manipulation. It's like, but somehow Domino knows the thing to do that will work out.

AlexAnd these are all X-Men?

MerlinYeah, I would think of her more as X-Force. But yeah, she is. They did her uncanny X-Force.

AlexAre you back in comics again?

MerlinX-Force does the stuff that X-Men can't do or won't do. They're off the books. The one I like a lot, Art by Opeña, is Deadpool. Also, like I say, Rob Liefeld. Deadpool, Domino. It's the stuff you can't tell Cyclops and Storm about. They go out and do those dirty missions. There's also a man who is himself, Phantom X, he is himself and his spaceship as well as his spaceship being his lover. Phantom X. And so you should read this comic.

Challenge. Please write this down. Uncanny X-Force number one. Go for the juggler. And then I'm texting you this photo. So here's what she looks like when she sits on my pencil sharpener. Now, the problem is, as you can see, in her just sort of native state, it's really easy for Domino to get knocked over, which does not happen much in real life. but this this this chinese cable uh usb cable with three different dinguses on it you know like the belkin ones i was using for a while that are kind of shit yeah i move that a little bit and she gets swept off the pencil sharpener which is a very i'm gonna move look look look under her butt

Alexyou see under her butt you see what that is well that's is the under her butt is the the suction

Merlinright it's like an it's like a quarter or an inch or so square of uh of micro suction tape i put it on her butt i put her butt on the pencil sharpener and guess what now she's on her side yeah she it's that strong and yet you can take it off if you're not timid about it i want this everywhere now i got a sheet of this and i'm gonna put it everywhere everywhere jerry oh everywhere oh all right i'm

Alexgonna i'm gonna put on the woke uh oh oh oh um i michael hurley does that i'm stealing connected valor i think oh i'm sorry um welcome to do by friday everybody where alex gets caught up on tech podcasts and then talks about things that happened months ago uh jason doesn't make the hand that he doesn't do um laser fingers he doesn't do the laser noise anymore he does laser noises but doesn't do the finger guns for the pew pew pew pew you could probably tell uh oh

nope that's the thing it was on a um what is it ask snell um snell talk no snell talk uh he doesn't do the welcome to my friday alex has not listened to tech shows in a while sorry friends uh oh i got my new odbc doc also oh we uh i got my first show comes with the uh

MerlinThunderbolt 04 cable.

AlexOh, wait. Did you do the hover in the dark?

MerlinHover in the dark? I think we need to go into treatment immediately. We should probably get something, probably our stomach's pumped. And I don't mean ripped.

AlexI got, okay, so I've got an AHA, a Red Bull, a Bubbly.

MerlinThunderbolt. Ordered it last year, finally shipped.

AlexOkay, so wait.

Merlinthe hub or the dock oh well i've had well see i had i got the cal digit because i got the m1 laptop and i was like good boy i really need some help with this but i think if memory serves i had already ordered the owc in no no december probably it's real good it's real good the problem is if i go usb a to uh it's really weird it seems overpowered i keep getting that pop-up that says

Alexdisconnect the device that's using too much power oh fuck what i have oh fuck i'm just going well

Merlinand i'm probably doing something wrong but it's probably might be an old cable but i'm going blue blue usb to uh lightning huh so i don't know what i'm doing wait you mean thunder thunderbolts No, I'm trying to get into my phone.

AlexOh, sorry. Okay, there we go. I'm back. All right. Too much caffeine.

MerlinHave you seen this thing? You can daisy chain the living shit out of this thing.

AlexLike Sean's dog. God, this is the worst episode. I'm sorry.

MerlinSean whom?

AlexYour worst best friend has a dog named Daisy.

MerlinOh, John. John's dog Daisy, who's a sweet precious angel. John Syracuse is my worst friend, but his dog's adorable.

AlexIndeed.

MerlinHe stalks it with GPS. Did you know that?

AlexYes. The other friend of the show, David Sparks. I'm just going to plug all Relay FM shows.

MerlinDavid Sedaris.

AlexOh, fuck. David Reese. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Hi. Do you buy Friday? Listen.

Speaker AFat-a-tay is treated.

AlexHi.

Speaker AJust look at me now.

MerlinI may need to buy a new belt.

Alexthis show will never air what most folks have noticed but if you haven't i previously did a podcast called roboism with friend of the show samannah million who is fine everybody is panicking she is amazing she is a dear dear friend but uh she she is too busy for podcasting because she

does like a real fancy tech job it's super cool is there any kind of a unicorn based lady that

Merlincould take her place is the question you're asking you know funny you should ask merlin

Alexbecause i was like you know what i would really like to keep talking about robots uh every other week but who who could i do that with because i need someone to often reins me in because that

Merlindoesn't happen on this show so i reached out to she's very she can be very stern in a friendly way

Alexuh-huh indeed indeed um and so i reached out to my friend mrs soup aka uh kathy campbell kathy campbell aka mrs soup i don't know she is the new official co-host of roboism so go to roboism.fm if you want to hear her voice um and and me shouting about other things hey dick doug welcome

Merlinto Dubai Friday. Dubai Friday. I think I'm crashing a little bit. Oh no. Oh, uh, here's,

Alexhere's what you do. Just take a, um, take a hammer to the top of your knee and get your reflex going.

MerlinUh, Oh, I have a large, I have a large bolt. Yeah. I have a bolt and a rivet by the way. Oh, they're kissing. This is hot. Well, sometimes the metal I find on the street that I collect is too big to put in the main collection of dirty metal I found on the street.

AlexHold on. So you have a collection of dirty metal.

MerlinWell, it doesn't have to be dirty, but I've only recently started putting it in one place, so now it's technically a collection. When I find a piece of metal on the street, I always grab it.

AlexWhen does a – no, I have no bits.

MerlinWhy? Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, how many times when you go outside, how many times have you seen a piece like a washer or a small bolt, a screw? How many times have you seen a piece of metal on the sidewalk? I bet you don't know. I bet you don't know.

AlexOh, well, someone once told me to look at the chimney. So I try to look. That's too much effort. Why do I chose both, though? Oh, yeah.

MerlinDo you want me to send you a picture of my dirty metal?

AlexI do, indeed.

MerlinOkay, I'll send you the rivet. I'll send you the bullet. Fill dead air for a minute. I'll be right back.

AlexAll right. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for listening to what is perhaps one of the most manic episodes of Dubai Friday. And that's saying a lot because I got, I think, enough sleep last night. So it shouldn't be like this. But here we are. Thank you again. Man, Domino sure is hot. Like, I've been trying to find...

MerlinShe might be my type.

AlexOh, Merlin's back. I don't know if she's my type only because I don't know. She's very.

MerlinShe's awfully feminine.

AlexShe's very feminine. And also she I'm fine with someone who can beat me up. But I feel like she would do it.

Speaker AThat's actually something you want to check off on the floor. Would you would you consider ruining me?

AlexWould you consider making me atone for my sins? Oh, gosh. I mean, that's the thing. While we're objectifying women on the Internet or imaginary, both are the same, obviously.

MerlinObjectifying imaginary women.

AlexContraPoints on YouTube, whose name is Natalie Wynn, is back on Twitter, which is a terrible idea. No one should be on Twitter. But she has very good.

MerlinThe tweet was good, though. It was a good tweet.

Alexgood good tweet and um i i would love to be destroyed by her nothing honestly like nothing sexual i just want to be slapped over and over you'd have to earn it though you'd have to really earn i know that's the thing i know it'll never happen because i'm not i just i maybe maybe you

Merlinknow what everyone needs dreams oh well that's a sweet way to put that i agree yeah i don't know if this is gonna help but so few things help but here's except for merlin man i think three well I just want people to be happy. One, two, three, click. Okay, there we go. All right, Sue, first one. Is it sending? Yeah, that's to you.

And I sent something to Emma today that was meant for you, so we're all, we're doing real good. First one, San Francisco, a Golden Gate Bridge rivet on the left, rivet, rivet. On the right is a cool bolt, large bolt that I found on the ground that has two rubber bands around it. And then I sent you the little jar that's just the very beginning of some of the metal things. So I collect small things. I have one thing at home in one of my Aiken Mills, Aiken Mills? Aiken Mills Bastics?

And the label I made for it says, I have one that says a little shit. And then I have another one that says screws and shit. So that's like where I put, I collect things. And that's, I have a gathering spot, a collecting area at home. But I'm eventually going to bring the whole collection to the office. I collect things. I'm a collector.

AlexI have so many. I just I'm going to write it down as a. I do have to say this is much cooler looking than I like. This is aesthetically pleasing.

MerlinYou know, I also have a lot of lab gear, like kind of cheap lab gear. I'm very into beakers and vials and flasks. And then I put collections in those. So, like, for example, right over here. Well, let's see. That's a kikuman soy sauce. But that's got a Pentel mechanical pencil with an Ewok pencil topper.

Speaker AWhat else do I have over here?

MerlinI'm fascinating. You are. Oh, this one. I have a jar full of pencil shavings. You probably can't hear it.

AlexOh, wait. No, do it again. I can. Oh, that's very pleasant.

MerlinNow, let me ask you this. When you were a kid and you'd sharpen your pencil, did you ever smell your pencil after you sharpened it?

AlexOh, 100%. And not only that, when the big class shared pencil sharpener wasn't available and you had to use one of those single things, I would do it so it hopefully wouldn't – the shaving would not break. So you got like one big long one.

MerlinOh, like peeling an apple. Totally. But guess what? Look at that thing I just sent you.

AlexIs that what was making the noise?

MerlinSo guess what I can do? Oh, God. Ready? You open it up. Full of pencil shavings. I'm basically I'm basically like an aging Amelie In a lot of ways

Speaker AAre you tonight with a spoon?

Challenge!

AlexChallenge! this week was your challenge

Speaker Awhoa whoa 67 minutes of gold

Alexoh well after show oh no it's not that

Speaker Ano we gotta do the challenge

Alexno I genuinely want to do this challenge this week it was yours which

Merlinchallenge this week is to RTFM

Alexuh huh which I forgot what it meant until you reminded me, what does RTFM mean? Slash, where did you first learn that term? Or when did you start using that? Because I was asking.

MerlinWell, it's before the era of Google, when people would eventually say, just Google it, right? Which, you know, actually, one doesn't like to say that. I think there's even a website you can go to that where somebody says-

AlexLet me Google that for you.

MerlinYeah, exactly. It's kind of bitchy.

AlexI've used it.

MerlinIt helps no one. It helps no one.

AlexYeah. It's the I told you so of websites, basically.

MerlinWhen people show you a vulnerability, don't send them a mean site.

AlexAnd I am very, very guilty of this.

MerlinSometimes people are just trying to say I love you.

AlexYou know what? Maybe the Toyota people, they're not sexist. They're just having a bad. I'm genuinely like, I felt like a bitch after that tweet. Anyway, so RTFM.

MerlinRead the freight. It's a, you know, like a hacker dictionary kind of thing. Read the expletive deleted manual.

AlexI don't want to lose our clean rating. I can't spell it. I am so smart.

MerlinEverybody loves me. I am so smart.

AlexI called a big one bitey. All right.

MerlinPray for Mojo. Okay. Okay, so. Mojo, what has happened to you? So, and I think, well, RTFM, it's, I see, boy, have I seen a lot this week on various forums and community websites. And it's like, whoa, did you not understand what the person just said to your question? You have to put your log file here. And, you know, it always feels like there's somebody lurking around on whatever the version of Usenet is today to just make everybody feel bad about what they don't know. And RTFM is like a mean guy way of saying like you're asking for help, but like I can promise you what you want to know is in the manual.

AlexOh, OK. I mean, I knew what that was, but that I can totally see that on like Hacker News, Reddit. There we go. All right. I'm yes, yes, yes now.

MerlinAnd where that comes from for me this week is lots of things. um i i let's see so i brought it up here because like i mentioned in the after show last week i've

Alexbeen uh having to i'm trying oh but merlin where could you find the after show back to work dot

Merlinlimo slash 519 no you go to give us your fucking money.com one word no spaces no camel case no dub no w dib dub dob dob dob dob dob i hope and you get that for for you can give us money and you get more show and uh that's mostly it yeah give us your fucking money.com it's how we make money um so oh no no i've nope nope the caffeine's going away nope nope you're here you're here ready

three two one i don't know how to talk about this without talking about this but the thing is like if you look at two um a couple things that are projects that i've been working on one involves photography and videography writ large. And the other one relates to doing stuff with home automation. And what brought me here is, to spoil one ending here, is that I was spending so much time futzing on the, for camera stuff, photography stuff. I've spent so much time

futzing around with the fun gear of wanting to get better at video and returning to photography that I was overlooking the fact that I had kind of, not kind of, that I had forgotten a lot of what I used to know fairly well about the artfulness of taking photographs, but especially of the like what all the terms mean and how they work together.

And so I have to constantly remember like the difference between ISO and aperture, which anybody who does photography would think is insane. And so that RTFM was, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm going to come back to this after we hear your part. But, and the second one does have to do with home automation stuff. And that's very much a, first one was an RTFM of relearning how to use my 7D. And the other amount of RTFM is trying to find out what I need to know to configure these, in particular my Synology, with things that let me do interesting home automation things.

And both have been a very interesting journey that have a lot of similarities and several contrasts. So the notion here is however you interpret it, read some fucking manual, but go back and actually read the directions for something and see if it makes your life better uh and well i

Alexit's okay if you peanut butter you can just say it oh no i i really like are you a direction reader

Merlina direction reader do you read the directions and the manual when you get something or what is the extent to which for an item like obviously if it's something if it's like in my case i don't need to redirect i don't need to read the direction so much for how to pair an eve device and get it on HomeKit. Like I've done that a fair amount, but like, let's say it's a piece of furniture you got to put together or it's some kind of a new, a new Dongus. Um, how likely are you, are you the sort of person who always reads, never reads, sometimes reads, partway reads?

Like what's your, what's your stance on manuals and documentation?

AlexI care very much about manuals to the point that I think both of us scan them and keep them handy.

Merlinuh and they i sometimes get the manual before the item has arrived and that goes into my iCloud

Alexfolder called manuals oh that's such a good why have i never thought about because you're gonna want it if you become a manual person you never look back oh yeah and and a lot of these as you just said obviously are available online but sometimes they aren't like my fucking humidifier one which even after reading the manual i still didn't know like wait you really just pour it in like that you just just like that it is not a sophisticated humidifier and i'm still not sure

Speaker Aif i'm doing it right there's something you can learn from almost every manual and if yes i'm

Merlinsorry i'm interrupting you go ahead so but you're you're a reader yes you're not you're not somebody

Alexwho goes like oh i don't need that oh well there is a like 50 i would say a 50 50 chance almost a 99% chance that I have the manual, about 50% chance that I've actually read it. Like, I am now looking at my blue microphone arm, which for some reason has stopped working.

MerlinI can't clamp it tight enough. I just can't get it tight enough.

AlexYep. And I don't know why it won't stop doing that. Luckily, I have the manual, so I will fix that later.

MerlinThe bottom one, you know, there's the little one on the end for just your angle. That's an easy one. The one in the middle is tricky. But for me, it's the one at the bottom. Maybe I'm just putting things that are too heavy on there. But it feels like it should be better at that because it just droops down like a foreskin penis.

AlexYeah. And it's covered. I have covered it.

MerlinAnd I do have the manual. I do have the manual in my folder.

AlexOh, well, and you said something incredibly smart in the after show. Give us your fucking money.com.

MerlinLearning how it wants to be used.

AlexYes, because most of the stuff that I spend time on doesn't, well, like a computer. I remember when Macs stopped coming with manuals and the way now that the, you know, again, manual very much in quotes for like the AirPods and I mean, basically all Apple products. There is either no manual or.

MerlinMacintoshes.

Alexyes thank you sorry the macintosh computers oh it's so it's so frustrating there's some stuff

Merlini've gotten recently where i'm like oh my god i can't believe you expect me to know how to even if i so you get a car you get a thing that says uh thank you very much for buying product please leave nice review and then you get this like pages of course of warranty stuff but it's like the way to properly configure some pseudo computer devices it's it's just crazy to me that they don't come with any kind. It used to be you get a full manual. Like back in the day, you got a TV and it comes with a book essentially. And some things still do that. But like it's pretty nuts to me

Alexthat you don't even get like a getting started sheet with some stuff. I'm sending you right now.

MerlinI think this is. I kind of like the little manuals that come with stuff like watches and AirPods. I think those are pretty good at saying like at least here's how to get your feet under you with what this thing does exactly and nobody reads them people who don't know how they're watching

Alexsiri work i think people don't i know we do of course i've read that fucking home pod like they're they come they came with like a little manual dingus but oh i've read a lot of things about the home pod alex yeah there's more there's a lot of stuff on the support pages and

Merlinforums and but like just siri in general is so under documented like is there a i mean okay i sure I can find this out. Please don't Google this and then email me. But like, is there a way to do the equivalent of speaker groups? Like, for example, like on the Amazon product, I use a lot of groups and zones. So like the most important one for me is like my area at night is what I call west. So there's like the west lights and I could say, hey, dingus, west lights off. Like, you know, so the lights from here on over turn off or on, or you can direct your, you know, Roomba to a

a certain area that you've defined all that kind of stuff but it drives me a little bit crazy that a company like apple that wants you to get all these home pods then that you're poking around on your phone with your meat fingers all the time trying to make it not go to this room

Alexand i am just constantly surprised by the well this and the echo products uh how little information is in the box because oh yeah you know this amazon if you don't know about amazon skills

Merlinlike you're gonna have to learn that onesie twosie for all this different stuff it's really

Alexweird yeah and i i mean i'm just thinking about the original imac manual which had like oh gosh i i ordered one actually for 20 fucking dollars i can't well because i read that manual over and over and over like like your worst best friend john sircusa who always uh read that article about the original macintosh it just it was this thing of like oh my god this is so cool it's the coolest

Merlinthing i own yeah yeah yeah the original mac the original the original 1984 and 85 mac came with a really cool manual with great photos in it like somebody somebody wheeling around on a bike on the campus at stanford with like a mac in their bath stick oh that's you ever seen it it's really good

AlexI feel like I have like this sort of ET looking one.

MerlinOriginal. I think it was Spiral Bound, if memory serves. Oh, God. Original Macintosh manual. It's back when the logo had that like red and blue design. Yes, the red, blue, and yellow design. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Hang on. Okay, keep going.

AlexOh, but the real thing that I did.

MerlinExcuse me, such wood. Oh, my God. This is so fucking cool.

AlexOh, I mean, this I sent you. Here's a real length. I mean, oh, full mast right now.

MerlinThat's the, yeah, the iMac one.

AlexYeah, and that's what made me just, I mean, look at that. It's so, it's really pretty.

MerlinThat mouse, man, that mouse was bad.

AlexWell, when you have to, I no longer have tiny hands, but when you're 12, it works. Yeah.

MerlinLook what I just sent you. Click that one.

AlexOh.

MerlinIt's not a very pretty scan, but you'll get the idea. Let me find. Oh, my God. Look at this Nerdlinger. Oh, my God. With his digital watch.

AlexOh, yes. I have seen this.

MerlinBut how great is this? On top of all the wonder of a GUI, they have to explain to you how to use a mouse. They have to explain to you how to point, how to click, all these things. But they still thought enough for that. If you're going to spend all this money for a computer, they give you this cool manual. Let me find the Bastic. Where is it?

AlexWell, and I do find it interesting as well how many manuals are kind of digital at this point. And we are talking about Apple.

MerlinI rarely can't find what I'm looking for.

AlexOh, right. But I am talking about when you set up a device, usually it's...

MerlinOh, I see what you're saying. Yes.

AlexSo much of it isn't... It's instructive on not just how you set it up, but how you use it day to day. which when you're trying to just like speed through and make your phone work or or you know like even a microwave or whatever especially a microwave yeah you know there's there's a reason

Merlini mean i feel oh god this is gorgeous uh look at page 16 look at that exploded drawing of the mac or it's exploded maybe painting of the mac page sorry not 16 46 chapter two finding out more

Alexabout macintosh see this is why you don't close tabs this do you want ants because this is how you get how you get ants um 43 did you say 42 i think oh i'll save this into my manuals trying to be quiet with my keyboard i don't know why this is uh this is an ocr come on come on scrolly next roller what were we talking about manuals max

MerlinOh, yeah, it's very frustrating. And because, you know, again, the second part of this, which we do not have time to get into today, but like basically here's the super fast version, and this will be in parallel by the time, well, next week, I guess, that Rectiffs was kind of about this topic too, where I was asking Syracuse, like, what's your thought on expertise? Like, I feel like I'm in this fast yo-yo mode where I make some progress, I have a regression, I make some progress, I make a regression. And he describes that as being a top-down approach to like learning something as opposed to a bottom-up.

Like a bottom-up approach is like you go – you do a two-year course in computer programming or whatever. I don't know. Versus me going like I just want my thing to work. So in the course of like a week and a half, you would not believe – and you'll get this and I think a lot of our listeners will get this. I started off playing. I couldn't get Hoobz to work months ago. I got really frustrated and just kind of threw it away. it was using so it was using apps like and forgive me because i am i'm retro actively pre-repeating myself for something i said to syracusa but here there's there's a couple things

two things that have been very interesting and influential one is that app control plane and you've heard me talk about this have you looked at control plane i haven't oh i'm sorry yes yes yes um yeah you run your you run on a laptop you run on your mac but especially on a laptop and it lets you identify what it calls sources of evidence to say like you should be able to intuit where I am based upon or you know what my context right now is based on certain kinds of things and then you can change my network to do things like change my network settings so

that I get the right IP address I was really interested in the idea of saying like if if I'm attached to this particular cal digit with this MAC address um there's an over 80 chance that I at my office. If I'm at one of those with a different Mac address, I'm at my house. And you contribute all these different... I'll send you some screen grabs that might help. Do you follow?

AlexI do. And this makes me very excited because I'm probably going to be a one-person computer. One computer. I've lost my caffeine too, I guess. I'm probably going to become a one-computer yes one computer person and i want a a docking state station as and you know your worst best friend syracuse does not enjoy laptops but with the new m1 ones i i find that very exciting not

Merlinnot redundant setups but setups oh no no complimentary so what i just sent you is you can see in the in the tabs for this it's an open source app that's no longer i think actively maintained, but it works still. And so it's got these tabs, you know, general context, evidence sources, rules, actions, advanced. So contacts are where you say like, I have a context called, oddly enough, like house and office. Then you get your evidence sources and evidence sources are, look at things like what Wi-Fi network am I on? What's the Mac address for this Wi-Fi network?

What can you see any, what is a certain wifi network is, I'm not on it, but it's available in nearby. Right. Now here you see stuff like you said, USB 10, a hundred thousand. That's me going through the new OWC hub. Wifi BSS ID is that it knows this is my, um, this is the wifi, you know, at my house. And then Bonjour can pick up like, oh, this is your, this is the Eero at, you know, different from being on a particular Wi-Fi per se, but this bonjour has realized there's something

nearby that's only at this place. Are you getting this? And then for each one of these things, you say, okay, that indicates, that's going to indicate what context. So when I'm on this thing, I'm at the house. And then look at the confidence. Then you get a slider to say what level of confidence to assume based on that piece of evidence. So saying something like, you know, I'm on Wi-Fi anywhere isn't super helpful. To say I'm in San Francisco, not super helpful. But I'm here to tell you, Dimes to Donuts, if I'm on that particular Wi-Fi network, I can't get to that from my office, so I must be at home. And then it compiles all of the things based on your level of confidence and picks out where it thinks you are and does things.

And that's where you get into the actions that are associated. Isn't that clever?

AlexThis is like having different omni-focused perspectives, which is why this is very exciting and cool.

MerlinThis came into my life about the same time, the second part, this came into my life about the same time that I was getting balls deep into stuff like HomePlus and HomeDash and all those different apps.

AlexSee, we don't have time to get into part of that, but I have so many questions, not about the tech specs, but the motivation behind your projects. But that's, you know what? I think I'm stealing rec diffs, Valor.

MerlinWell, I think I'm going to answer your question right now, which is that once you start using something like Home Plus, which is a HomeKit, a third-party HomeKit app that's much prettier and half an order of magnitude more functional. Functional part number one, there's so much stuff that HomeKit knows about your devices in particular that it doesn't expose. So, you know, I think I'm guessing, speculating, that in the interest of simplicity, HomeKit wants to basically say,

okay, you hit this button to turn it on, you hit this button to turn it off. Yes, you have automations. If you're a real dork, there's shortcuts, and you can do stuff with all of that. And there's some stuff kind of hidden away deep in shortcuts. But is it intuitively obvious to you? Like, you know, for example, it'll tell you what the level, battery level on this device is. Like, you know that it can't, But like, what can you do with that in HomeKit? Not a ton. So not only do apps like Home Plus expose a ton more information,

but it has its own built-in sort of like shortcuts inside of that app with logic, with conditions, with triggers. And then you can key off all those different kinds of things. And guess what? All of a sudden, when this Eve device detects that the humidity in my office is above 50% or air quality is below this percent, turn on the humidifier until it reaches this level of humidity and then turn it off. That's not trivially easy to do across many devices in HomeKit.

I mean, yeah, you do stuff like that, but it's try and figure out a way to have a motion detected light turn off when motion is stopped for a certain number of minutes. It's so much harder than it seems.

AlexYou need like three different manuals to figure that out. And that's also if shortcuts is working that way.

MerlinIf you try to do it with just home or home kit, you may need multiple automations to do something that feels pretty obvious.

AlexIn different apps, too, which is, like, fucking wild.

MerlinWell, and then you've got to be careful. You've got to start it in home and finish it in Home Plus. Anyway, whatever. The point being that, like, so just to give you my mindset for this, let's abandon the camera and video stuff for a minute and talk about, like, so control plane and being able to use all of these evidence sources. to do interesting things and then being able to say things like level of confidence. So that's what I want. I want this for HomeKit in ways that would take way too long to even explain. But like, you know, imagine,

it's something that, again, OmniFocus was ahead of the curve on this, but something like, if I'm in this area and haven't been in that area for a while at this time of year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, do these kinds of things. so like real quick whistle stop i started off with trying to do hooves i start off trying to do all the arduino-ish things and i was like i threw up my hands i just didn't get it and then you'll remember it was a few weeks ago that i learned about homebridge because that's what

everybody talks about homebridge is cool it's okay it's when i learned about the other thing i ended up saying wow that's actually not very pretty for how functional not that functional it but it works. It'll do mosquito stuff. And then you got to learn about mosquito. There's apps for it, but holy fucking shit. Home assistant is wild. Home assistant like home bridge is, it's a way to basically take a whole bunch of starting with smart home devices, but going way beyond that.

There's so much stuff in this and you can just, it's basically an open source thing. You install somewhere with a thing and then you get a ton of control to do, but tons of stuff. So many different kinds of supported services through integrations plus things that are called add-ons do these crazy things like make certain kinds of like you know beautiful graphical dashboards that could run on an ipad hung on a wall that kind of stuff it's all it's just it's basically just lego for your house

Alexfor your electronics so have you done home assistant no i no no i think most people run on a pie, a Raspberry Pi or similar. So I, you use a Synology, right? For this? Yes. But here's

Merlinthe problem. I want to blast through the most embarrassing dumb part of this because that's always the part everybody loves, which is like, well, I started off with Homebridge and went, okay, but Ooh, Home Assistant. That's cool. So just super quick whistle stop. Okay. There's a package service for this. It runs. Okay. That's cool. Ooh, the version that's in a package service for Synology is not like the version that's super sexy that does all of the things. There's like four, there's these, so there's Home Assistant Core, there's Home Assistant Supervised, there's Home Assistant, something called HASS or HASS, H-A-S-S dot I-O.

It's all really confusing. There's HASS OS, there's all these different things. It's very confusing. My point man for this on the Home Assistant community site who makes some great packages in Docker or stuff explained it well, but it's very fucking confusing. So first of all, HomeBridge, okay, now I play with Home Assistant. Eh, it's not the good version of Home Assistant. Okay, here's another version of Home Assistant. You install a package, and that package installs six Docker containers. The problem is the version of Docker that's in Synology is version 18.x.

You need 19.x for that to work in Docker, even though 20.x, are you following me? The Synology package is two versions of Docker behind. I'm following. Docker is a thing that lets you basically run, let's say like system on a chip. it's basically an operating system in a ball. So like all of the pieces, all the dependencies, everything you need runs. And then on top of it, as I eventually learned, thank Christ, you can also run that on a virtual machine.

AlexOh, that's cool.

MerlinSo here's what happened. Like this is all, I was driving myself crazy, spending hours a day trying to get this to work, top-down learning, right? And I read so much fucking manual. Like there's so many things I've been reading. I just, sometimes I think my ladder wasn't against the right wall because it wasn't until two days ago where I'm reading these incredibly detailed, unscriptable directions for fixing the package that runs on six Docker containers. And it wasn't until I read a little further and did a different Google search that I learned the same guy had put together,

not the same guy, but there's an all-in-one Docker. After all of that agita, after all of that having to learn a little bit of Python, after all of that learning how to do a Samba connection so I can mount it instead of having to SSH in and then sudo-i to escalate to where I could run mount. Run mount. You got to run mount to make the equivalent of a symbolic link so I can now mount that to edit my configuration.yaml.

Okay? But now there's one Docker container that can do that, and it's fucking great. And whatever I went through and the manuals I read to get here, it feels great. And I'm not doing anything technically difficult here. it's well no no i'm just figuring out how to make other people's lego work in the way that i think it'll work like duplos will work with some legos but not all legos oh yeah oh because if you get a six versus an eight like it's not gonna work but duplo duplos are great for making a castle

Alexif it's gonna it either shouldn't work at all or 100 of the time lego used to be good at that oh

Merlinit made me so happy that when i realized that i was like oh man the you know i i i really respect the Lego folks for being able to figure out how to do that. So I don't know. It's just I'm relieved to have this. I sent you a screenshot, right, of what this looks like. Did I mention it has an iCloud plugin? So there's an iCloud. It's called an integration, right? You install the iCloud integration. This works less well some places than others. And some of the distros or whatever you call it, the packages or however dockers that you use of this, it'll be bugging you all day long to log back in.

But so far, fingers crossed, 12 hours into this newest implementation, you put in your name and password you put in your two-factor that it sends and like for example look at that everybody on find my friends is and this is just from some like like you know since last

Alexnight so it's not super interesting but like check that out and is that's the where they have gone that's their location from find my friends and like the well and is it the past like 24 hours

Merlinor how many hours you want oh zero to whatever interesting yeah i mean you should you should

Alexwell i could save you the trouble do you wait you have a synology right i no i that's why home

Merlinassistant fucked me mine is underpowered for what i'm trying to do well what i was doing was way

Alexoverpowered because we had one at my office and it's just so much like super super cool but when you're trying to play with only one Synology and two locations. Well, you know this better

Merlinthan most people. There have been ways they tried to address this with stuff like a remote way to hook them up. But I'm trying not to have to learn everything about Mosquito right now. I'm trying to just... You're already

Alexin Python.

MerlinBut Mosquito is a whole... It's amazing. I mean, the way an API... You know, the way most modern APIs work, if they're put together by really cool, smart people is you have like a destination or a, you know, an API, but what do they call it? A access point? What's it called? But you've got like a thing that stands there and waits for things to be sent to it. And cool APIs like, you know, have like slash things. So imagine if you could do something that involves say slash house or like slash office

slash desk slash Mac or whatever. You basically have ways to send these little packets to these brokers and you can publish and unpublish. It's like a whole thing. I'm trying not to get into that. There are native apps that work with Home Assistant. There's not currently a way to have two instances of this that play nice with each other, so I'm kind of hacked my way around with that. Like on my Eero, it'll tell me Eero packets sent, vice received. It'll tell me the status and detail, obviously, of my Synology, but it also exposes all the stuff

that's normally not at all supported by HomeKit, so all my aware devices are on here. That's all in the suit now.

AlexI know that it all, oh, that's very cool.

MerlinOh, no, that's the whole point of like this stuff is that you're going to get more out of everything you put in here. But also there's more to put in here. So like right out of the box, as soon as you get this thing, you set up your account, you hit OK. The first thing you see is like, oh, hey, I just noticed you have all of this stuff. Do you want to do stuff with that? And you're like, yeah. So like all my Elgato, I instantly recognized all the Elgato lights. So those are all addressable easily now through this.

It lets you have groups. Everything is what's called an entity of devices and entities. This is turned into a different show. But like in that case, like I'm looking at one here and it's just the history of every device. So like when it changed places, I should send you this because it is bananas. But then other kinds of things. This is where it gets interesting and maybe a little bit silly. What is it? Danny O'Brien, somebody used to say.

AlexOh, it's already. Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead.

MerlinWhat? Oh, my God. What are you talking about?

AlexNo, what I'm – this has turned into, I think, a very good but different show. But my main thing –

MerlinYou got to read the manual. You got to read the manual, Jerry.

AlexBut this has become, I think, not an unhealthy obsession, but you have been talking about this for months in the way that I – I know that you get – everybody goes through phases of being really enthusiastic about something. And I am still trying to figure out why you are so enthusiastic about home automation right now. I mean I'm the one who wants my home to be a big old robot.

But this is –

MerlinOkay. So just to – that's a very good question. And just to pop up one level, the thing that I would really like out of home automation is for it to work.

AlexBut I agree because I think it makes everybody's life better, just like accessibility, even if you don't, quote, need it, makes everything better. But you have gone so, so deep.

MerlinBut this is – okay, so this is – I take your point, and I don't know if it's unhealthy or not. It's super fun, and I already have the stuff for it.

AlexYeah, I don't know how to – I don't even know how to phrase it. It is a wholesome thing, but –

MerlinOkay, no, but like – so I'm going to answer your question I think in two ways that I think will make sense for you. The first one is that I want it to work. Well, doesn't it just work? It absolutely does not just work. Like we're back to this basic problem that – let's say for the sake of argument it's unique to me, which is that the two most meaningful geographic areas in my life are impossibly close to each other.

AlexMm-hmm.

MerlinOkay, now ask yourself, how much of the stuff that's really powerful in not just home automation, but in everything you do, how much of that does come down to some kind of estimation about where you are right now?

Speaker AMm-hmm.

MerlinTo do anything really useful, like let's just, like for example, do you want the camera by your bed to be on when you're in bed? Probably not. You want that, what if you want stuff like the very cool functionality with IFTT is saying, only run Roomba when there's nobody at home?

Or, like, what if you say, I for damn sure want my burglar alarm to be on, but I only want it to be armed when I'm not here? And wouldn't it be even cooler if it could turn it off for me when I arrive? That's very difficult to do. And you know what makes it more difficult? See, also number one is it doesn't just work. I don't think it's just me. I mean, have you ever been somewhere and suddenly you get a notification about something that you should not be getting a notification about if it knew where you actually

were? Literally every day. Absolutely. Which is kind of crazy making. And I think it makes you not trust the system. And maybe you don't need the system, but I want the system. So I need it to work? How will it work? One of the very first things is I needed to know where I am to a level of certainty, right? So as with control, if I, if I didn't have control plane at this point, I would either have to manually change my network settings every time I go home, or I would have to get the stupidest kind of hack, which is I would have to get everything

onto 192.168.1 instead of .7. I have two different versions of that. Shouldn't I get to live in a world where even if I'm on 10.0 points, like I can make, I can make it work. Well, guess what? What if you had an array that said, accept connections from any of these kinds of things and be really confident about making that selection. So control have control plane doing that made me go, that's my beef. That's my beef with so much of this stuff. Low quality shit, bad documentation, poor privacy,

gobbling up your contacts and photos, whatever it is, aside, aside from all of that, Like, how do I just make the basic stuff work? How do I know if my mail's been delivered? Why is that so hard? Why is that so hard to know? Like, I have three different motion detectors in my mail slot. And sometimes one of them works.

Eve, with an Eve, with an Eve device. Why does an Eve device not update itself automatically? Why do you have to open the app to update that? They make the best stuff that works with HomeKit stuff and is a total pain in the ass. So, number one, it all has to work. But then, like, once I scratch that itch a little bit, guess what? To make it really work by understanding where I am, by honoring things like sensors, by honoring things like getting better at geolocation, well, fucking A, man. Control plane knows, let's put it this way, if I'm not on this BSSID, I'm not at home.

Now, that's crazy useful to know. Let's start with I'm not at home. Well, there's certain things in life that should only happen when I'm not at home. What about the other two? Oh, yeah. I guess it's super important that I know they're not at home, too. because there's certain stuff we do or don't want to happen based on, you follow the array of madness to this of like, is anybody home? Is everybody home? Is nobody at home? Is dad at work, but the kid is at the mall or whatever? Those kinds of things, once you get granularity

and a system you can trust with that, you eventually get to where you can set it and forget it. It's just that right now you can't. And once you open up HomeDash and go like, holy shit, this is amazing. It just knows to like, I just want to see all the things that need a charge right now. How easy is that to do right now?

AlexOh, that, that's the main.

MerlinDid you remember to set up separate tiles for each of your things that has three different bits? Are they, are they still named?

AlexJust recurrent tasks.

MerlinAre they still named in a way that'll work with each device and how you'd like to use it? It's like, you know, I think it's, it's crazy making to me that, I don't know. Bottom line, Alex, is it's fun.

AlexThat's well, that was pretty much my question is, does it bring you joy?

MerlinYeah. So in order, but in order to make the stuff work, you cannot avoid learning how much better the functionality and experience is of this extremely well-documented community. It's wild. I mean, stuff is stuff as dumb as like speed test. Like I can just go look at speed. I don't have to run speed test anymore. You have dashboards, you have sets of dashboards, you have favorite dashboards. You just go in and say, I have one called Where Am I? And it's a way for me in this early stage to test how well each presence or geolocation thing is working.

It says your iPad thinks you're here. OwnTracks thinks you're here. Locative thinks you're here. This Home Assistant app thinks you're there. And when they all line up and they all say office at the same time, I feel like it just went in Las Vegas. The system fucking works. Now the system works and now the stuff can work.

AlexI'm so happy.

MerlinNo, you're not. I am. You're just like John Syracuse.

Alexyou're like chili no no no no because this is and i'm not doing this is a bit uh but you just went all all merlin man and and not in a way but it must be comforting it it it is oh you're making it sound weird and yes it's a little weird but i like to hear when people are enthusiastic and the enthusiasm you have behind this and you kind of bury not kind of you dug a grave for the lead

which is that it is well the community is awesome uh and it's fun which was like my main thing because it felt like in the past that it was so frustrating you didn't enjoy it and i'm just

Merlinreally happy that you're enjoying this oh thank you yeah i mean it's it's fun and it's again this does actually get back to sort of the nominal topic or challenge. I think we don't have challenges here. We have topics.

AlexI hate that! I mean, sorry. Go on. I love your best worst friend.

MerlinSomebody writes in to tell us a nice thing and then he corrects them on their use of a U, a letter U in the word color. Actually, I think you mean pencils of color.

Thank you.

Show notes

Transcript

228. Ahr! Ahr! Ahr!

Show notes

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