TD Dawn Patrol: Recent Episodes
Technical Difficulties
Dawn Patrol features the entire Technical Difficulties gang in an unscripted discussion on technology and life. Hosted by Gabe Weatherhead, Erik Hess, Bob VanderClay and Potatowire.
Nationaal Archief
Gabe, Potatowire, and Erik talk about Coffee DRM, Breathalizers, Python, Ruby, Pythonista, Editorial, thumb typing, iOS and Android app cultures, styluses, and spider bites.
Truth in Advertising
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 0:00
- Fussy coffee. Exemplar
- The move from crack to fine coffee roasting
- The inevitable slide towards coffee mediocrity
- Tonx
- Blue Bottle
- K-cups
- Coffee with DRM
- HP Ink coffee synergy
- Did someone ask for an avenging angel to be added to Boards of Directors?
- Board of Average People
Drunk Modes
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 5:19
- Temper tantrums overhead
- Shell inception
sudo- Dagerous commands
- Gmail Goggles
- Breathalyzers
- Legally drunk
- PSA (with bonus callback)
- Hazel needs a drunk mode
Python Guy
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 10:25
- College nicknames
- Pythonista
- Reasons to use Python
- Good science support
- Whitespace matters
- AppleScript is a dumb language
- Node.js and learning through problem solving
- Ruby
- _why or why the lucky stiff (not unknown anymore)
- Nothing really disappears from the internet
- why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby
- “Some jerk researched him”; Lots more
- Sad hipster
- Related, anonymous people on the internet are weird
Seriously, Back to Python
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 18:25
- Resizing and cropping images for fun and profit
- Macdrifter Editorial workflow for images
- Workflow distorts images
- The fiddler
- Breaking iOS within the Rules
- Ruin your life with Pythonista
- Doxing oneself
- Peak scripting
- “Exhaustive” app research instead of scripting
- Kids ruin Daddy’s concentration
- Actually creating script on iOS
- “It’s all Ole”, i.e. genius
- Tasker as Android’s uglier utilty tool
- Scripting: The Nerd’s Song
- Inability to read documentation indicates a lack of seriousness
- “Big-boned phone”
Forcing Apple Evolution
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 28:08
- Constraints foster creativity
- Android’s freedom and iOS’s artisanal app market
- CyanogenMod
- Android text editors are nothing special, however,
sshplus Vim is wonderous - iOS-only as clickbait
- Quitting the internet as clickbait
- The misjudged Federico article
- Peak iPad
- Thumb-typing
Rumors!
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 38:26
- 12” MacBook Air
- We want a small device with a built-in keyboard
- 13” MBPr vs. MBA
- Airline seats are getting smaller](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-narrower-airline-seats-20150206-story.html)
- “And Leon is getting larger”
- iPad apps that should be on OS X
- Editorial
- Pinswift
- Mr. Reader
- Drafts
- Rosetta
- Android apps on Chrome OS
- Some officially
- The rest unofficially
- Webapps are fine (or awesome)
- Fastmail
- Feedbin
- Trello
- Slack
- Pocket Casts
Styluses…Stylii?…Digital-Marker-thingies
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 45:28
- FiftyThree
- Wacom
- Bob’s Surface Pro 3 replacement
- Finger-painting
- The software is better even if the hardware isn’t
Spider bites and Farewells
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 50:14
- Blizzards in Boston
- Tauntaun survival
- Trains in the snow
- One-handed keyboards
Florida Memory
Gabe and Potatowire brave the Storm of the Century to talk storms, taxes, Amazon Prime, movies, and Lego.
The Taxman Cometh
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 1:33
- Accountants
- Scary Letters
- Leaving money on the table
- The Man
- 1040EZs
- TurboTax
- Flat Tax
Navel gazing
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 17:33
- Asynchronous podcasting
- Recording under a bowling alley
- Sound booths and moving blanket igloos
- Podcast business models
Amazon Prime
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 21:50
- Delivering to USPS Shipping deals
- Uber for packages
- Add-on items
- Sharpies and beer
- Digital services
- Netflix
Movies and Kids Shows
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 33:30
- Thee-act structure
- Personal time management
- Other rental options
- Lucy
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Wrong opinions
- Avatar
- Tumble Leaf
- Wolf Children
Lego
Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 41:28
- Legoing above one’s age
- Step one
- Step two
- Step three
- LEGOLAND Discovery Center
- Lego Friends
- What if your daughter likes pink, purple, fairies, and princesses?
- “Expectations” on Invisibilia
- Turns out
National Library of Medicine
Gabe, Erik, and Potatowire discuss file storage and time travel literature. Along the way, they touch on Erik's broken DAS, Crashplan restore speeds, Gabe's new Synology, WD Blacks vs. Reds, SMART Failures, two-factor authentication, building your own NAS from first principles, thumb drives, digital hoarding, bullet-time, hyperlapse, and the utopian optimism of Paul Verhoven's RoboCop.
Smithsonian Institution
Gabe, Erik, and Potatowire talk about bringing their mobile email workflow into the 21st century. Along the way, they discuss circumventing ancient work browsers with portable Firefox and Chrome, collaborative TaskPaper workflows, Erik's Sunrise, Evernote, Todoist, and CloudMagic combination, using enterprise Exchange servers with your iPhone, mobile email search, sorting email vs searching through the big bucket, FastMail on Mail.app, filtering email notifications, and how old everyone is now.
Library of Congress
Gabe and Potatowire talk about home and personal improvement projects. Along the way, they touch on their basement offices, the dangers of electricity, plumbing, working with contractors, virtual assistants, outsourcing your life, oversubscribing to learning sites, and deciding to do something yourself.
Royal Museums Greenwich
Bob, Erik, and Potatowire are joined by special guest Gabe Weatherhead to talk about Dr. Bunsen's oddments.txt post, the stress of the holiday season, vacation projects, Bob's purchases, sales, and returns of the week, Authy, USPS deliveries, Uber Trains, and other compelling topics.
Internet Archive
Bob, Erik, and Potatowire talk about their compulsive buying and collecting habits. What causes those collecting tendencies, how do they deal with it, and what makes the difference between what they keep and what goes?
Internet Archive
It's the day after Thanksgiving, and Bob, Potatowire and Erik get together to chat about some of their newest devices. Erik laments that his WeMo stack is stuck at Bob's house, Potatowire ponders building a fleet of solar-powered Arduino-based WeMo replacements, then Bob explains why he's buying an NVIDIA Shield instead of the Nexus 9, discusses what it's like to use a keyboard and mouse with his 13-inch Wacom Cintiq, and talks about his new Note 4 doesn't disappoint him. Potatowire moves on to explain why he finally ordered a Nexus 6, before the guys discuss the pros and cons of the Toshiba Chromebook 2 vs. the Acer C720, chroagh vs. crouton, i3 vs. other window managers. Finally, Erik talks about trying out Nozbe, Mailbox, Cloud Magic, Acompli, and concurrent inbox management solutions.
US National Archives
Potatowire brings Erik along for a surprisingly coherent analysis of his personal tech setup. They discuss laptops, file servers and mobile devices. Along the way they touch on file syncing services, tech boredom driving purchases, Erik's work toolchain, Creative Cloud, Chromebooks, MailSteward, Linux, Solaris, FreeNAS, FreeBSD, BitTorrent Sync, Raspberry Pi Remote Backup Servers, Nexus 6 vs. Nexus 5 with a broken screen, Alarm Clock Pro, AMOLED vs. LED, unrealistic expectations, and whether you should pay attention to product reviews.
Nationaal Archief
Gabe triumphantly returns to Dawn Patrol as he, Potatowire, Bob, and Erik explore their favorite naming schemes. From there they ponder the viability of the .plumber domain, Bob's late-'70s throwback pop-soul band, getting stuck in traffic at the checkout lane, Bitcoin, an economics discussion that is wrong on so many levels we won't go into it here, all the great shows on Relay FM, idea guys, what people tune in for, Bob coming out of the closet, listening to books, Bob's new mic, Potatowire's Raspberry Pi project, and Potato Sack, the Eventual Potato Syncing System, currently in Potato-beta 5.
Smithsonian Institution
Potatowire, Bob, and Erik think out loud about note-taking. Along the way, they touch on Gabe's new app TapCellar, Bob's decision to sell his iPhone 6 Plus, minimizing platform-dependent apps, plain-text workflows on mobile, Dropbox, Drafts, Editorial, things we want to use vs. the things we actually use, Evernote, Byword, Potatowire-Flavored Markdown, Google Drive, hierarchies, Calca, Trello, fancy notebooks with fancy things in them, and breaking free of tool fetishism.
Nationaal Archief
With Gabe and Potatowire out, Bob and Erik trudge on by themselves. They talk about decaffeinating, fitness trackers, RSI, ergonomic mice and keyboards, learning to type, alternate input methods, VR, helmet mounted sights, modular smartphones, smartwatch battery life, devices that improve over time, discarding (not-so-old) devices, and what Erik's doing with his first-gen iPhone.
State Library of New South Wales
Gabe is nowhere to be found, but Bob, Erik and Potatowire charge ahead anyway. Together they discuss why there wasn't an episode last week, Bob's new fanny pack, the Toshiba Chromebook 2, Chrome OS, touchscreens, platforms, commuting, and Heretics.
San Diego Air and Space Museum
With Bob out on his honeymoon and Erik calling in from the front seat of his car in a hotel parking lot, the guys look at the state of desktop and streaming audio services, and talk a bit about wireless service provider lock-in.
Along the way, they try to figure out if Elon Musk knows how many submarine cars he may (or may not) own, and discuss getting buzzed by a quadcopter in a kayak, podstalkers, TV dramas and their understanding of the inner workings of the Air Traffic Control system, Gabe’s wife stealing his iPhone 6 Plus, where to draw the line between a tablet and a phone, accidentally deleting your iTunes library, and most importantly whether Potatowire is a hipster.
San Diego Air and Space Museum
It's Bob's wedding day, but he and Erik are still up for talking about phones and quadcopters at 5 AM from the lovely Double Eagle Lodge in June Lake, California.
The guys start with some follow-up on the iPhone 6 vs 6 Plus, then charge ahead into the challenges of iCloud Family Sharing, avoiding phone-killing updates, fun with quadcopters, and privacy. Along the way they discuss yeti hands, the dangers of cleverness, transcending iOS, and hybrid toast-cat perpetual motion generators.
Center for Jewish History
Stuck in a hotel room in San Diego, Erik tries to find a working microphone and cell connection. Eventually he joins Dawn Patrol for their second episode, which largely focuses on Gabe's shiny new iPhone 6 Plus and its implications for the future of humanity.
While sorting out Erik’s Skype issues, the guys ponder the possibilities and challenges of microphone helmets, idea guys, the King Fire, the microphone show redux, Potato Hacks, what potatoes drive, and the frightening dangers of irresponsible anthropomorphization.
Then they get down to business, discussing Gabe’s first foray into mobile macrotelephony, Potatowire, Bob, and Erik’s experiences in the world of Android, whether many of the greatest iOS apps would ever have been developed on Android in the first place, and whether the new phones and iOS 8 are cool enough to make any of them want to switch back.
Smithsonian Institution
In this inaugural episode of Dawn Patrol, Gabe, Erik, Bob, and Potatowire gather early on a Saturday morning to catch up on a wide range of unrelated and uninteresting topics.
After helping Potatowire learn how to add friends to Skype, the guys discuss how much they want a Dr. Drang bobblehead, catching up on Roderick on the Line, Heretics, the mirror universe, the definition of “in the can”, the TD fall schedule, self-muting, peerage within the Potato Kingdom, the Watch, the roots of fanboiism, and lock-in.