We're beginning to see a new sensibility, and that is a sensibility for the picturesque. The word picturesque should be easy to remember for you. It means like a picture. So I can remember that. Specifically like a landscape picture. And in the 17th century, landscape painting was becoming all the rage. When we were talking about the Venetian Renaissance, we noticed a painting by Giorgione called the Tempesta, or the storm, the Tempest. And it was a puzzling painting for its time, 1510, because we couldn't quite figure out what the subject matter was. We saw the kind of wild naked woman suckling a child. We saw the indifferent soldier guarding the place. Hard to know what the relationship between these people. The only protagonist in this painting that seems to have any clear purpose is the landscape. And the task at hand for the landscape is storm, weather, atmosphere. Giorgione is beginning to suggest that landscape itself is the proper subject matter for a painting. But at this point it's radical. By the time we get to the 17th century, it becomes all the rage. This is a painting by Claude Lorraine, the embarkation of Ursula. And who was Ursula, you might wonder. Ursula is Saint Ursula. She's an early Christian saint, let's say. The Vatican's not always convinced that she's real. They sometimes include her among the saints. They sometimes expel her. Then they bring her back in. I think because so many Catholic girl schools are called Saint Ursulas, that they really can't get rid of her altogether. Legend has it that she was a Romano-British princess, literally betrothed to Conan the Barbarian, a character made popular, I believe, by none other than Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger. She was sent off from her happy home in Britain to marry Conan the Barbarian. And she brought her friends with her, 11,000 virginal handmaidens. Everybody needs their friends at their marriage time. A miraculous storm permitted them to land in France after only a day's travel. And there Ursula wanted to make a pilgrimage to Rome until she postponed the marriage, all the while hoping to remain maidenly for the rest of her life. Ursula was supposed to marry a Barbarian. She was taken away to marry a Barbarian. She refused and she and her best friends were slaughtered. And that's why she's a saint. Good for you, Ursula. If anybody in this room is named Ursula, I apologize. But I think she could have maybe taken one for the team. Apparently, there's a church in Cologne called the Basilica of Saint Ursula where the ribs, shoulder blades and femurs arranged in zig-zags and swirls and even the shape of Latin words. And that there is a chamber of treasures attached to the basilica that is full of little reliquaries with petrified heads decked out in silver or little velvet caps. Another theory about this cult of Saint Ursula is that she's actually a Christianized version of the Nordic goddess Freyja who had among her tasks that of welcoming the souls of maidens into the afterlife. Anyhow, this is a painting by Claude Lorraine that shows you the sensibility of the picturesque. One thing that's going on is an attitude about light, which we already saw in Giorgione. Typically in Claude Lorraine, instead of getting clear light that illuminates a subject, we get back light. We see these dramatic silhouettes. We see strong shadow. In fact, Claude Lorraine paintings have this kind of yellowy quality to them, maybe because of the varnishes that he put on them, but maybe because most of his paintings are either early morning or evening where the sun is low and things become yellowish.  You probably have done something similar. When you look at the world through your camera, it looks different than if you look at it without putting a frame around it. But since they didn't have cameras, they would make little landscape paintings for themselves as they walked through the countryside. This is a self-portrait of Thomas Gainsborough, a 18th-century painter holding a Claude glass. And you see that he's looking into the Claude glass and making a sketch. One of the things that was advantageous about the Claude glass is that it was a darkly tinted mirror, slightly convex, and it had the effect of abstracting away the scenery. So instead of seeing the complexity of all of nature, you saw this framed view with dimmed tonalities, very much like a landscape painting. Another amusing thing is, in order to properly use the Claude glass, you had to turn your back to the object that you were beholding and look in this very abstracted way away from the natural phenomenon into this artificial construct in order to see the beautiful landscape that's deeply stirring your soul. That's kind of a charming thing to do, and these are the kinds of things they see. So this notion of the vista, this notion of the folly, this notion of architecture as something that is not significant in and of itself, but simply adds atmosphere comes from landscape painting and it becomes very common in landscape painting and interestingly enough gets fed back into architecture. We've been seeing this all along when we looked at the Renaissance. Something happens in architecture, it gets folded into painting. Something happens in painting, architects appropriate it. And in the case of landscape painting, there becomes a strong desire to capture the kind of views, to construct the kind of views that you get in landscape painting. These are some paintings by Poussin. For my money I like Claude better than Poussin. Poussin's a little bit too stiff, but don't get me started on Poussin. Here we see classical things and we also see other kinds of staffage. Staffage is an art history word meaning people or animals stuck in a picture to create a mood. We have some farm animals here, some goats. You get a sense that this is a perfect world before too much culture began to create fences, but shepherds and shepherdesses could run around and simply chase their goats and play their lutes. Those were the good old days. Sometimes things got wild in the good old days, but here we have the picturesque and some of the terms associated with picturesque are the idea of Arcadia. And Arcadia is this mythical time before culture when people lived this agrarian life or this nomadic shepherding life. You had this connection with nature that was unmediated and direct and that people in a sense were living out of time. They weren't caught in history, they were simply part of the natural continuum. The word pastoral has to do with the idea of having sheep being the pastor of a flock of sheep and it's this kind of landscape of the meadow and the clumps of trees and the little babbling brook. The Claude glass is this yellow piece of glass. Contraluce means things that are being illuminated from the back, things that are being silhouetted like these Claude paintings that we have here and that it's such a common feature in this landscape painting. And here's a new word that we can add and that word is romantic. Romantic grows up in the 18th century dialectically opposed to, let's say, an enlightenment interest in hyper-rationality. If the enlightenment is all about progressively acquiring knowledge and categorizing and cataloging and organizing all things in the world, in opposition to that this romantic impulse arises which is about feeling, about emotion, about genius rather than acquired knowledge. So this is my opportunity to read you something in the world of romantic poetry. This is late 18th century. This is, however, a great poem by William Wordsworth. The story of the poem is the story of romanticism which is how can you be part of nature again? Once out of nature, how can you connect to nature again?  And his little sister is maybe ten years younger than he is. She's the age that Wordsworth was when he first saw Tinter and Abbey. And when he first saw Tinter and Abbey, he was blown away. The ruin, the tangle, the strong light, it was a raw emotional experience. And now coming back again, he can't look at Tinter and Abbey without somehow remembering when he saw Tinter and Abbey. There's a nostalgia for the moment when he was fresher and that he could receive emotion in a less layered way. And he looks at his sister and he thinks, his feelings onto her thinking, she now feels what I once felt and I can never feel that again. And what's more, in a few years, she will never feel that again. It's incredibly complex. It's all about the kind of loss of authenticity. Here we go. This is not all of it, by the way. You can read all of it online because it's everywhere. This was considered to be the best poem in the English language until 1930, by the way. So you should at least hear some of it. I asked five summers with a length of five long winters. And again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur. Once again, do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild, secluded scene impress thoughts of a more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with a quiet of the sky. Dot, dot, dot. These beauty forms, through a long absence, have not been to me as a landscape to a blind man's eye. But oft in lonely rooms and mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them in hours of weariness sensations sweet. Therefore, let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk and let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee. That means his sister. And in after years, when these wild ecstasies shall be matured into a sober pleasure, when thy mind shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, thy memory be as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies, O then, if solitude or fear or pain or grief should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts of tender joy wilt thou remember me. That's kind of romanticism. And romanticism is wrapped up in this idea that authenticity has been lost, nature, instead of being thought of as something that corrupts and contaminates and leads you away from this contemplation on the divine, which had been the major mindset for quite a long time, nature begins to present itself as something that removes you, that connects you back to an authentic moment. And in this culture, in this culture where landscape painting becomes important and where this idea of the genius and the original and the work of art for the sake of the work of art becomes important, so too does the whole branch of philosophy called aesthetics become more and more important. Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that has to do with making judgments about what is beautiful, about how do you know if a work of art is good? How do you know if it's bad? How can you judge that? And that's a hard thing to do. I noticed in studio that your critics always get it wrong. You have done something magnificent, and they simply don't get it, what is wrong with them. So the idea of aesthetics existed back in classical times, but it gains great popularity in the 18th century. And one of the major writers on the topic is Edmund Burke, who writes inquiry into the origins of the sublime and the beautiful. Another major contributor is Immanuel Kant, who writes critique of pure judgment. They're trying to get at what is this thing? What is beauty? How do we know it? What is a work of art? Or also another contemporary of theirs, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who begins systematically to write about art history, to write about not so much a theoretical way of judging works of art, but a direct confrontation with works of art that he then elaborates upon. In Burke, he talks about these two terms, the beautiful and the sublime. And the beautiful really confirms your own sense that reason holds the world together. It makes you understand that there's something central about being a human being in the world, that your proportion extends and governs the proportions of architecture, that geometry is clear and understandable. So certain qualities that adhere to the beautiful for Burke would be things like clarity, smallness, proportion. In opposition to that, you have the sublime. The sublime has to do with reason not holding it together, emotions running wild, being confronted with something that puts you into such a powerful mood that you feel something that Burke calls delight, which is, well, that's delightful. Next time you say delightful, use it in Edmund Burke's sense.  Like, that's delightful. What's a delightful cookie you brought me? You probably have this experience. Has anybody been to Niagara Falls? Did you feel delight? It's scary, isn't it? Has anybody been to Grand Canyon? Kind of scary also. I have to be like 20 feet minimum away from the edge of both those places. Otherwise, I will inevitably hurl myself into the abyss. It's so delightful to me. That's what's gonna happen. This painting by Frederick Church of the Niagara Falls exemplifies the sense of wonder and awe at this great natural phenomenon, the power of the waves rushing down. Even the idea of this painting as a long horizontal format was meant to evoke a sense of the sublime. Notice there's no foreground to you. You feel like you're at the precipice.  You are so close to the edge of this powerful engine of water turning away. This painting in 1857 was the subject of a one painting exhibition in New York City. Everyone had to pay 25 cents for the opportunity to look at one painting and within two weeks 100,000 visitors came to see this. This was a way to get a sense of the sublime without leaving New York City. It's difficult to travel to Niagara Falls, but the format of this painting, so long that it exceeds your cone of vision and becomes like a horizon, was a way to allow people to directly enter into the landscape and experience the sublime for themselves. A painter of the sublime is Kasper David Friedrich. This image of wanderer above the Sea of Fog from 1818 is a good example of the romantic in a landscape. Dwarfed by the scale of nature, backlit, solitary, nature itself can barely flourish. The trees that we see off here on the horizon are alone in the wind and barely have any leaves on them. The vista is vast. And as a curiosity, this is a picture of one of the KSA students taken last year in China, standing on the Great Wall of China, which is sublime, I might add. And by chance, he happens to be assuming almost exactly the same pose as Kasper David Friedrich's wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Amazing. A big question that circulates around these ideas about aesthetics is the notion of taste. Taste is the ability to make correct judgments about the beautiful or the sublime. And the question is, is taste cultivated or is taste innate? The Enlightenment would say taste can certainly be cultivated. You can learn things. You can go out. You can acquire knowledge. But you can also cultivate your taste by simply having exposure to excellent examples. The more beautiful works of architecture you see, the more critical you will be about what constitutes a beautiful work of architecture. The more beautiful paintings you see, the more critical you'll be. The more beautiful landscapes you see, the more critical you'll be. As opposed to the romantic impulse, which would say, you're a genius or you're not a genius. If you were born great, lucky you. If you were born not great, you will never improve. Part of this idea about taste comes up in the fact that all countries, not simply France, but all countries are forming academies, people in those countries can be exposed to these great examples. And there's also a new institution coming into play called the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour, in a sense, formalizes what Inigo Jones already did. And that is, you go off to Italy, the home of classicism. It's where the good stuff is. These are the great examples that if you familiarize yourself with them, you too will be able to accomplish greatness. You go off to Italy for at least two years and you look at this stuff. Goethe, the great romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe went off. This is a picture of him reclining in the landscape on the outskirts of Rome, which is, of course, littered with classical ruins and fragments everywhere. Or here's Winckelmann. Winckelmann actually went under the patronage of the court of Dresden to just collect good art. And that's why if you go to Dresden, the art museum there is amazingly fabulous because you had the guy who wrote the first book on art history collecting stuff. This is a portrait of Winckelmann after he spent a little time in Rome studied and got some taste. And you can see how much, much more tasteful his attire is here. The turban, the fur-lined satin robe. His master work is Geschichte der Kunst des Altortums, or History of Art in Antiquity published in 1764. And in it, he has a very particular way of discussing works of art. They're emotional, they're not rational. He talks about the feelings that a highly tuned intellect, someone with excellent taste would have when confronted with a work of art. One of his favorite works was the Apollo Belvedere. And I'm just going to read you a few snippets from what Winckelmann says about this work to give you a sense of this strange tone and this almost rapturous, subliminal erotic take that he has because beauty stirs his soul so greatly. The Statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art. His stature is much loftier than that of a man and his attitude speaks of the greatness with which he is filled. An eternal spring as in the happy fields of Elysium, closed with the charms of youth, the graceful manliness of ripe in years, and plays with the softness and tenderness about the proud shape of his limbs. Let thy spirit penetrate into the kingdom of incorporeal beauties. Neither blood vessels nor sinews heat and stir this body, but a heavenly essence diffusing itself like a gentle stream seems to fill the whole contour of the figure. In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else. My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence like the breasts of those who are filled with the spirit of prophecy and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lecheun Gros, places which Apollo honored by his presence. But he gets rapturous. It's not the kind of lucid analytical discussion of works of art. It's weird art history but what Winckelmann identifies is that there is something more authentic in Greek sources than in Roman sources. So there's another debate that gets spun through between whether you should look at Greek sources which are earlier, which are closer to the truth, which are less littered with historical detritus or should you continue looking at Roman sources. Winckelmann would say Greek sources are closer archeology of the Greek monuments is now available to us because the political situation in Greece has quieted down. Teams of archeologists start going off to Greece to measure Greek antiquities and Winckelmann would say you can get your taste ramped up faster by looking at Greek things because Greek architecture has to do with quiet simplicity and calm grandeur. Opposing Winckelmann's Greek mania is a local guy in Rome called Piranesi and Piranesi is an architect but he's also an engraver. Let's say he's a print maker. He makes these fabulous drawings. This is a drawing of the Colosseum or it's an engraving of the Colosseum by Piranesi and he did a series of sets of these engravings Modern Rome Ancient Rome the Campus Marchus which is a kind of reimagining of what the texture the mapping texture of Old Rome was. He even did some that I think are really spectacular about the hydraulic systems in Italy water coming in from the lake and coming forward. So you have Piranesi promoting in a very strong way the authenticity of the Roman model or the Etruscan model over the Greek model. These are just some drawings from Stuart and Revit who were some of the first archaeologists or architects to go off and measure Greek antiquities and I think these two ways of representing the antiquities are pretty interesting. One measured drawing very precise, very archaeological and the other this romantic landscape something that could have come out of Claude Lorraine with a strong backlight the extensive landscape a couple of follies organizing your view and staffage of like cows and shepherdesses running around. These are a few more Stuart and Revit's plates from the antiquities of Athens showing the Acropolis and again very picturesque but nobody's as picturesque as Piranesi. Piranesi exaggerates the scale. Like could this be the Colosseum or is this thing like seven miles long making things seem bigger than they are. He's taking these vantage points. This is Piazza del Popolo high up in the sky to make the space moving through the trident in Rome seem even more vertiginously accelerated. Piranesi is interested in the ruin. He's not trying to give you images of Roman antiquities in their perfect state like Stuart and Revit were drawing you a perfect plan. Piranesi is giving you the emotional impact of looking at something that was once great that has now fallen into ruin and Piranesi also does a couple of really weird series of drawings. One are these Capriccios that Piranesi does and the Capriccios means Caprice like whimsical thing. The Capriccios tend to be just piles and piles and piles and piles of sources that an architect might look at or an artist might look at the clutter of history. If Piranesi were doing a drawing the title of which was The Burden of History or too many things to think about in the 18th century it could look a lot like one of Piranesi's Capriccios but probably Piranesi's most famous prints are a series on the prisons that he did called the Carcere Piranesi actually did two versions these are engravings and the way you do an engraving is you take a copper plate and you coat it with lacquer and then you incise in the lacquer and you dip it in an acid bath and the place that you've scratched away the lacquer will have a line cut into it through the acid. One thing about these plates is that you can operate on them again and again you simply recode it with lacquer and you add more information. So this is the first printing these are plates from the first printing of the Carcere the prisons and they're crazy spaces and it's a crazy subject matter. This is a new institution by the way the idea of the institutionalized prison where people at the margins of society are isolated. You had dungeons maybe but you didn't have these kind of big mega prisons. In 1760 Piranesi re-engraves he operates again on the plates and what he does is take these things that are already quite quite chaotic. Ramps going nowhere, stairs going nowhere and just clutters them up with more bits and pieces of strangeness. It seems as though what Piranesi is representing here is the impossibility of operating as an architect in a period of time when you are no longer in history in an authentic way but out of history looking back at it and trying to find choices. You look at this and you have an emotional response. You don't really have an intellectual response and in many ways that's what the picturesque is doing. The last of the Piranesi plates that I want to show you are just some things from the imaginary reconstruction of the campus marshes and the campus marshes is this area of central Rome where the forum is located. Here we see the Colosseum for example. It is just totally invented or almost completely invented but invented in a kind of wild and fabulous way. So much so the architect Louis Kahn had a plate of the campus marshes behind his desk and every time he couldn't think of what to do it is said that he would stare at the campus marshes and pull an idea out of there. Piranesi's own work is not as great as his engravings. He's trying hard to think about what the Etruscan temple might look like as a way of making an architecture more authentic, more original earlier than the architecture of Greece and thereby claim authenticity for the Roman moment. And for Piranesi the Etruscan temple is a wall architecture rather than a columnar architecture and because it's a wall architecture he has an opportunity to just shovel the glop on it like he shovels glop everywhere.


Hello, I'm Barbara Archer, I serve on the Davis School Board and I'd like to talk to you about a very important measure on the November ballot, Measure M, the Davis School Facilities Bond. We haven't had a facilities bond for the school district in 18 years and we have critical needs facing our school campuses. We are preparing Davis schools for the future. Over the last 10 months, the district met with teachers, students, parents and community stakeholders at three town halls and school site committees to identify facilities priorities. Many of our schools are over 50 years old. Many of our classroom facilities need to be updated. Safety and security measures are important upgrades we need to make. We need to update our school bathrooms and water fountains at all campuses. Measure M is phase one of the facilities plan and all schools will receive upgrades in this first phase. Some of the other projects included in the Measure M School Facilities Bond are updating Emerson Junior High Science Labs, replacing aging portables at Davis Senior High School with a new science building and modernizing Patwin Elementary, which at 25 years old is eligible for state matching funds. Birch Lane Elementary, Willett Elementary, North Davis Elementary and Cesar Chavez Elementary are slated to get new multi-purpose rooms. To see a complete list of Measure M projects for Davis schools, you can view the entire Facilities Master Plan at yesforourstudents.org backslash more hyphen information. The inkwells, the slide rules and chalk erasers have passed into history. We must upgrade our facilities now to keep pace with 21st century learning and for the safety of our students. Please go to yesforourstudents.org if you have any questions or want to help. What we really need is your yes vote on November 6th. Please vote yes on Measure M for the future of Davis schools. Thank you.


Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Pond. This is episode number 753 for November 30th, 2022. And I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week, our guest is Nick of Nick's HomePod Repair. You might remember the article that Steve wrote about his amazing experience with Nick repairing our big girl HomePod, I don't know, like around a month ago. It wasn't just that some guy repaired our HomePod. It was how he did it and how he broadcast live video of the repair as it was happening that it made it so much more interesting. I wanted to know more about how Nick got into doing this and how he creates his videos. So I thought it'd be fun if he came on the show to talk to us all about it. With that, welcome to the show, Nick. Hi, thanks, and it's an honor to be here, actually. Oh, good, good. Well, I gotta tell you, Steve just loved everything about the experience with having you repair it. And it seems like a funny thing to be excited about a repair, but the way you do it is so interesting. It was really, really fun. Oh yeah, absolutely. And just seeing that reaction that people get when they get it back, and they're like, wow, this is actually working again, and them being able to relive that experience that they had with their HomePod and that they enjoy so much. It's all worth it. Yeah, well, let's start.  Are you a technician or an engineer by trade or did you just figure it out? How did you get into this? Well, my normal day job is actually a sales engineer. So I work a lot with software and just basic computer troubleshooting on a day-to-day basis. But I've always been a sort of tinker in my own free time. Anytime any of my own stuff breaks or any of my friend's stuff breaks, they usually come to me to get it fixed. But I was never really much into actual micro soldering and actual board level repair. But I did watch a lot of Lewis Rossman and Northridge fix and those kinds of channels. And I always wanted to sort of start up my own kind of repair business, but I wasn't really sure exactly how I was gonna do it. I couldn't just like start up a website and say, hey, I'll fix anything you send in, right? Cause there's plenty of people out there. And honestly, for most things, I feel like people should probably just go to someone with the experience working on your specific thing if you really like care about it. So what I did to actually get started and to sort of build up the confidence into like feeling like I could actually charge people money for this as a service was I would just go around social media like Reddit and Twitter and look for people that were saying that their home pod was broken. And I would just let them know, hey, if you cover shipping both ways, I'll fix it for you. And yeah, sort of built up the experience from there. And yeah. That's crazy. Before we get into the details of how you do it and what you do, one thing Steve wanted me to ask you about, your website is nixfix.com. And it's really, really well designed. It's very Apple-like with these cool animations and graphics. He wanted to know, did you design this yourself or? No, no, no, no. So what I actually did was I used this internet tool called the Wayback Machine. I don't know if you've ever used it before. I was able to use that to pull up the old version of Apple's original HomePod website back when they originally launched it and sold it and such. And I really liked the original design of that website. There were a few things here and there that they changed throughout that I didn't really like. There wasn't a single version that I liked the whole thing of. So what I actually did was I downloaded a few different versions of the website that I liked basically and then merged them all into one version and then replaced most of the assets with my own stuff, which is what took about half the time. And then the other half of the time was fixing all the bugs from the site because it seems like there was a lot of stuff broken in there, which that could have been the way that the site was backed up to Wayback Machine or it could have been the way that it originally was. Who knows? I wonder, are you old enough to know what the Wayback Machine comes from, where that name comes from? No, actually. So there was a cartoon when I was a little kid called Bullwinkle. And on Bullwinkle, they had a guy named Mr. Peabody and it was kind of like a sub cartoon, like a cartoon within a cartoon. And he had a Wayback Machine where he would travel back in time and go, we would learn about the ancient Romans or whatever as little kids. And now that's where it comes from. So that was kind of a fun little throwback for us, old people. That's good. So Apple never had a repair program for the home pods, which was inexplicable. I mean, everything they make has, that I know of that they ever made has some kind of repair program. But here we paid all this money for these really cool devices. They were not inexpensive. And yet when they died, they were just, you're done. It's over. So how did you figure out how to fix them if Apple apparently was baffled by how to do it? So I actually didn't think that they were any more fixable than most other people at first. But after I bought my first home pod for myself and I was like, wow, this is awesome. I want more of this. But I don't want to pay full price for it because honestly, they're kind of, they're a fair chunk of change of piece, right? So I was looking into broken ones to buy for myself as a sort of like cheaper way to get my hands on more of them to try to fix for myself. Okay. So from there, I went onto YouTube and Google and just searched around for any information I could find on anybody else that's already taken these apart and done any repairs on them. And that's where I found this YouTube video from a channel I believe called Electronics Repair School. And they're the ones who took a part, albeit not in the best way, but they managed to get a home pod apart and they identified the specific part inside that failed and caused a no power issue. So is that what most of the failures are is just simply no power? Yes. And that's what I came to learn after I bought a few broken ones for myself after seeing that video, I was curious, how common is this actually? Is it the same failure and most of these are not? And sure enough, pod after pod that I kept getting with no power, it was usually the same problem. Oh, that's really interesting. Okay, so they had a way of opening them that you don't approve of, but they did find the root cause and then you were able to replicate in the repair that they suggested. Yes, and credit words do, I don't know, but I believe at the time, there wasn't really a known way of getting into them very gracefully. So his troubleshooting skills are far up there with the best. But I think it wasn't for at least a few months after that until somebody else named Oh, It Me Nick put up their own guide on iFixit on how to actually disassemble the HomePod without destroying it. Oh, okay, so that's available on iFixit?  You'll find their original disassembly or their original teardown video, I should say. Their teardown guides aren't disassembly guides. They're teardowns to show you the guts of the product before anybody else gets their hands on it. And then there's Oh, It Me Nick's guide on there on how you can actually take the thing apart and be able to put it back together again without any leftover pieces or damage, really. Those are critical pieces right there, okay. And I've actually got both of those guides linked within the same paragraph near the top of my website, so. Oh, okay, so the guide that you pointed to, because Steve said you had posted a guide. That's actually the iFixit guide from Oh, It Me Nick. Yep, both of those guides. It's actually, I'll pull up my website here. I go to track 44. It says, yeah, the first set of words there when HomePod first released, everyone thought total destruction was required, and that's the link to iFixit's first attempt. And then it says, thanks to Oh, It Me Nick's work, that's his guide there. Oh, okay, okay. Well, so Steve, Steve is an electrical engineer with a master's degree, albeit more theoretical type work than technician level work, but he knows his way around a soldering iron, but he watched you do a repair and he looked at Oh, It Me Nick's guides and he basically said, nope. The soldering surface mount parts was a bridge too far even for him. So I was really hoping this would be a project that would keep him busy and out of my way for months, and that's not how it worked out. He went, hey, look, I could just pay this really small fee to Nick and he'll do it for me. No, see, it's my first time taking my first HomePod apart.  And I was sweating bullets doing it. And then I didn't even have a hot air station at the time, I just had a plain old soldering iron. And I just wanted to really prove it to myself, like, can I actually fix this or not? And what I ended up doing was not being able to remove the original dead diode off the board with my soldering iron. But what I ended up doing was something rather janky was just taking a knife and just sort of like stabbing the diode into pieces, breaking the pocket. Oh, because it's already dead. Yeah, I was like, it's already broken. And I was able to confirm with a multimeter beforehand that the diode was in fact shorted out. So I had moderate to high hopes that this might actually work. And then I soldered the new diode basically on top of the remnants of the old one with my iron, plugged everything in and it fired right up. And I was just, I was, oh, it was amazing. It was such an amazing feeling. I was immediately like, I gotta get my hands on more of these and see if this is like a common thing or not and maybe like repair this for other people. I might've just found my niche here. So have you graduated beyond stab it with a knife? Oh yeah. As soon as I saw that thing power on, I hopped on Amazon and I bought a hot air station so I could do it, do it more often without going through that again. What's a hot air station? I've never heard of that. So a hot air station or basically just a hot air reflow station or a hot air gun. You hear people call them different things but it's essentially just a mini heat gun. And you have different sized nozzles that you can put on the end of it to focus the area of heat that you're putting out of it. And it's temperature controlled and air flow controlled so you can more or less choose how much you bake your components. Okay, and which components you bake? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Because that's important for not frying a whole bunch of other stuff. Exactly, and it's a lot easier using that tool to transfer a lot of heat through the parts than it is with a tiny little soldering iron. You can cover a wider area, especially reaching solder pads that you can't even reach under components that are like surface mounted. You need hot air to remove a lot of those components. You just can't take a soldering iron and get to some of those parts. Oh, I didn't think about that. I was thinking that you were trying to focus to a smaller area, but you're actually trying to focus on a larger area because you need a couple of things to come undone at the same time.  So you wanna sort of get some of the surrounding board area at least a little warm, so that way when you're trying to take it off, it's less time with total intense heat. You wanna minimize how much time you're putting your board under heat. Wow, so much goes into just that one piece of the repair is just this little diode. Where did you find the diodes themselves? So they just normal components you can buy online? They're pretty standard.  I end up having to buy them like one to 200 at a time now, just so I make sure I don't run out before like 10 pods show up in a day. Wow, that's funny. Now beyond the hot air system, are there any other specialized tools that you use? I wouldn't really, I don't think I have any specialized tools at all that I use. The hot air gun is really, I think the most specialized one. Aside from that, I regularly use the flat head screwdriver to pry the basket off. And then I've got the T6 Torx screwdriver for the majority of the screws in the thing, which is, might I make the point that it's an interesting, the home pod itself is like a really interesting dichotomy of both repairability and irreparability. Because they use the same T6 Torx bit throughout all the screws in the thing to get it apart, but then they glue the thing together. And then they don't let you restore the software on them. So if you ever have any software issues with it, it's a brick. Oh wow. So do you see any reason why they're glued or, I mean, it's not like these go through big vibe. I mean, they do go through vibration crisis by themselves.  So what's interesting is the part that they glue together doesn't seem to have any immediate functionality. So it doesn't actually do anything to seal the home pod together. It seems that all it does is hold that plastic down, that top half of the plastic to the bottom half of the plastic. Underneath of it, there's an actual gasket that does the actual job of sealing the subwoofer into the pod so it doesn't leak sound out. So and I've done a side-by-side comparison of one with, that's never been opened up and one that I've actually cleaned all of the glue out of and put back together again. And there's absolutely no difference. Perhaps they might be thinking long-term durability, maybe as that original rubber gasket fails, they're thinking the silicone adhesive might act as a backup. Maybe they're thinking over time, it'll start to build tolerances and start to rattle so the glue might stop that. I'm not really sure. But... So if we get back to the diode then, when we talk about durability, did they just get a bad batch of diodes or is that diode in particular pretty error prone? Like are we gonna be in constant communication once a year, we get to send our home pod to you or what do you think? So unfortunately, I don't really know for certain. It is at the very least a strange coincidence that out of the hundreds that have showed up for repair, all of the ones with no power have a date code on the diode between 1746 or 1748K. That just simply means when the diode was manufactured. And we've had, again, a few hundred other home pods in for unrelated issues that powered on just fine, but those diodes have date codes far older or newer than that that continue to work just fine. So correlation is an always causation, right? So we got to be careful there before we assume there's a bad batch of those diodes just because we see so many of those fail. Because we simply don't know how many of those diodes in total were used throughout the whole production. A simple explanation could just be that they used or they had more of those in that date range. So they made more of them with that. So we're going to see more of those ones fail. But it still doesn't really explain why I still haven't seen any of them outside of that date range fail when I see so many of them outside of that date range still. Yeah, yeah. I did want to ask one thing for the audience that aren't electrical engineers or technicians. What does a diode look like? How big is it? So it's roughly about half a centimeter long by a quarter of a centimeter. There's diodes. A teeny little thing. Yeah, it's small. It's smaller than your fingernail. Like a quarter of the size of your fingernail for sure. Okay, okay. Just want people to have an image in their head of what these things look like. So we shipped our, the way your service works, we pay for shipping to and fro. And one of the things Steve was also excited about was you tip him off to a, I guess you tip everybody off to a site called pirateship.com. And it's a place that shows you the best price to ship the thing you're trying to ship. And if nothing else, that was worth the price of admission, because we're always saying, they're going, oh, I really want to go research all these sites and find out the right one. Pirateship.com takes you right there. So we paid a ship it to you. We paid a ship it back. And then, which was pretty surprisingly inexpensive because that site. And then what's the repair cost for, just if it's the diode problem? Yeah, so not just the diode problem, but majority of repairs are $60 flat rate. It doesn't matter how long it takes. And to a degree, it doesn't matter what needs to be replaced or repaired on the board or in the pod. The only time repairs are more expensive is if the subwoofer speaker needs to be replaced. Some people send theirs in for base issues or no base entirely. And it's a complete toss-up. Sometimes the base speakers totally fine still and it's reusable. And other times, it's the cause of the no, or it's one of the symptoms of the no base as the speaker itself is actually bad. So that's an extra 20. That's only an extra 20 bucks. Yeah, yeah. I try to keep everything reasonable, but I try to keep my pricing reasonable such that even for people shipping internationally, it's competitive when you factor in the shipping costs versus paying Apple for an out-of-warranty replacement just to get something with the same potentially faulty parts. Yeah, I mean, looking up, what did these normally cost $350? I think they were $400 when they started, but $359 was the last price. And so 60 bucks to replace a $350 device, that is an absolute steal. It's a no-brainer, we thought. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And even if you want to go on eBay or Facebook and you see somebody selling like a broken home pod for an absolute steal, let's say you pay somebody $100 even for a broken home pod. And then that's 25 to 40 bucks in shipping both ways, 60 dollars for the repairs. You're still out the door far less than you would be buying a working used one off somebody else or a brand new one from Apple. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. So are there any kind of repairs that you can't do? Like, do you ever get them where you're like, nope, can't fix it? Yes, unfortunately, there's one major sort of break or umbrella issue that I sort of put a few sub-issues under and that's essentially software issues. So if for whatever reason the home pod needs that software restored, there's nothing we can do about that. What's frustrating really is underneath the home pods rubber base, there are debug pins and those allow you to connect physically to the home pod via USB or UART protocol. And what's even more interesting is if you solder a USB cable to those pins and connect it to your computer via a Windows or Mac, iTunes and Finder actually recognize a home pod is connected.  You click restore and then it says the software could not be found. So all of these home pods that people get where their power accidentally goes out during a software update or the software update just doesn't go as planned and it breaks itself or you come home from work one day and your volume buttons are now blinking and there's nothing you can do about it. Unfortunately, it's that close. It seems physically possible, but there's- You can taste it, it's so close. There's just no access to the IPSW file that you do happen to currently have access with pretty much every other Apple product out there like your iPhones, your Apple Watches, your iPads. All of those have files that you can currently download publicly and use them to restore your device. Even the HomePod Mini, you have access to the files that you need to plug it into your computer and restore the software. Oh, just not the big home pod. Just not the big one. I kind of understand why it's just not publicly available, per se, because for a customer to rip the bottom of the HomePod off, you know you- And solder out the pins. Yeah, I could imagine they could have sold an adapter and made a slight alteration to the design in the first place and at the very least, the stores could restore the software on them. But instead, they're telling people to go kick a bag of pods. Hey, so I wonder if thunder right to repair there that could force Apple's hand to release it. That's a good question. So maybe I fix it could ask for you. I thought about it a lot. And at the end of the day, I can't stop thinking of how Apple can could justify it one way or the other, that technically it's as repairable as legally required because there's nothing stopping us from opening it up and doing whatever we physically want to it. Software-wise, they can they can continue to claim that, you know, there's I forget what's the word for it. But basically, they don't care. Exactly. They don't want their proprietary software and and and, you know, goody goods getting out and people making knockoff stuff and reverse engineering it and all that. But you can get the IPSW for the HomePod Mini. You can, yes. All right, it's now my mission in life to find it for you. I will never hopefully never need it, but I want you to have it. I want it to be out there where you're using it. Oh, you and so many others. I bet. So I have you done any repairs on HomePod Minis? I have actually not very many just for myself, but I bought five minis off eBay for, I think, like 10 or 20 bucks a piece. It was a lot of them. They were all described as won't power on and I got them. I plugged them into a power brick. None of them showed anything. And then I plugged them into my MacBook and they allowed me to restore the software on them and they all they all worked just fine. Oh, wow. Just like that. So that's interesting. Yes, it's amazing. So once once you restored the software, then you could plug them into a power brick and they worked. Yep, they worked just fine. They still work just fine, actually. That was five or six months ago by now. Oh, so that's a hot tip.  Hey, if you're willing to take the gamble, 10 or 20 bucks per HomePod Mini versus like 40 or 50 bucks, at least used per one. That's that's a fun little gamble to me. Yeah, yeah. That makes me want to go buy some more. I like sprinkling them around the house. I don't even listen to music, but I've got them all over the place. Well, so now that we've gotten into this part, I want to I want to talk about the the way you actually do the repair.  And so you can watch it live. And it says Steve's HomePod and you do this running commentary. How did what made you think to do that? That's just such a fun thing. Well, when I was a little kid, one of my favorite things was going with my parents to the mechanic and whenever they are like the tire shop or whatever. And it was really cool to be able to sit in the lobby and watch them working on your car. And, you know, that that was always that was always really cool.  Do all these repairs? And, you know, I've always kind of wanted to do something like that. But like I said earlier, I wasn't really sure how I could break into that sort of market and and really get any any business at all. Because there are already so many other people out there with far more experience than I do fixing a lot of stuff, but not for HomePods. So I saw that as an opportunity to sort of take over that and fill that void. I think there's there's something fun about that from from the producer's perspective, which is what you are in this case, I had did my show.   And I thought, well, all right, I'll go, I'll just broadcast the creation of the show. It's not the show itself, but it's the creation of the show. And this audience gathered around me and it suddenly became more fun every Sunday night. I get to go hang out with these people. I've got friends that are chatting with me and it's a really, really good time. And it changed the nature of producing the show. Every once in a while, I have to do the show without the live audience. And it's really lonely and boring and I don't like it. And so I imagine maybe it's a little bit like that for you. Oh, yeah, I've got I've got quite a few recurring viewers. And it's it's so cool to see people pop in and say, hey, I started watching like your show now, like every day or people popping in to ask questions about doing their own repairs. I absolutely love helping people if they're doing if they're they're working on their own. Oh, that's cool. That's really cool. I think Steve's favorite part was when you were working on his you you were examining it and you sniffed it and you said it smells fresh. Is there some kind of story behind that? Oh, not really. I just let's see.  Yes, I I I really like the smells of a lot of things, I guess. I guess that you could say I'm a little passionate about my my senses. So, but in particular, with the subwoofer speaker, if it's burnt out, I'll say this. A bad smelling speaker won't pass, but a good smelling speaker might still not pass. OK, so if it smells bad, I'm definitely replacing it. OK, OK, it's it's always good to sniff that subwoofer.  No, no, actually, one of those broken homepods that I got smelled absolutely phenomenal. And sometimes you can I can kind of tell I can kind of guess what room people had their pot in based on the smell. You can you can tell if they had it like in the kitchen, because it's and it also sometimes has a bit of like a greasy like film on it.  You know, those came from. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, how interesting. So you really are checking out. Well, good. I guess our kitchen passed muster because it's on top of the fridge till it till it croaked on us. That's so funny. How interesting. Yeah, so there was another another video you have. You have a trailer video called Massacre Found Inside a Home Pod. And we put a link to this in the will be in the show notes, but it's hilarious. Describe it and what the heck had happened to that home pod? So that was one that I had bought for myself off eBay, described as obviously for parts of repair, not working with power on that when I got it, there was no obvious damage on the outside. When I cracked it open, it had looked like somebody had shaken it up with a bunch of like salt water on the inside and let it dry out and corrode. Once I really got into there, I found the power supplies main capacitor had blown up and leaked its juice or whatever all over the insides and just completely wrecked the whole thing from the inside out. It is the video is hilarious because it's done at a macro level and he's and he's just traveling along all these all these components and they just look horrible. Oh, man, as soon as I saw that, that was the music that was playing in my head was this is insane. That's great. OK, so when you're doing the repairs, you've got multi-angle camera shoots. Can you talk about how you do that? Yeah, so I originally started off with just a couple of smartphones. I had my iPhone 11 and my Note 8 using an application called DroidCam for OBS. And I have those all plugged into my machine via USB and they allow me to use my phone camera as a video source for OBS Studio, which is the software that I use to live stream and record my repairs. So also, it's it's a nice little bonus instead of going out and dropping a couple hundred dollars on a USB webcam that's going to give me equal or lesser quality. Why not utilize the pretty decent camera in my in my smartphone? So that's what I started off with. And then recently, I got myself the Sony ZV-E10 for my overhead camera view because I needed something with a more powerful optical zoom and flexibility to zoom in and out of the top view desk workspace. Oh, OK, OK. So are you actively changing that while you're you're working? Yeah, so depending on, you know, how close I want people to be in on from the top view, I will use the physical zoom on the camera, which is just right above the desk. So even with when I'm sitting down, I can reach up there. And then I've also got you can see in and then in OBS which, by the way, is an open source broadcasting application that a lot of podcasters use. That's for the audience. They you can see the camera zooming in and out so you can tell what you're doing. Oh, yeah, I've got a monitor right in front of the workspace that shows me real time what my view looks like. And then I've got a second monitor to the side to see how the YouTube feed is going and keeping up with the chat. OK, OK, so you're actually watching chat as you're doing this, too. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But you've got a side view, too, right? Yes. So I've got imagine the arm that you've got for your microphone there, but with a phone mount. I've got about three or four of those mounted around my desk so that way I can move my phones around at different angles.  I like to play with the video set up and tweak it a lot. So that is really fun.  Yep, it's it's it's a multi purpose. It's an easy place to grab things. It's where the overhead camera is mounted and I've got a couple other computers there, just a sort of an aesthetic thing. But yeah, that's an interesting idea. I'd never thought of something like that. That's that's really cool. You said you do get real time feedback. People are commenting as you as you're streaming the repairs. Oh, yeah, no, I and I keep up on the chat as much as I can.  I got my pod fixed thanks to your information or they're asking for help. They're stuck on a specific step or they might have broken something and they're asking for a part for me to send to them. They're they're just saying this is fun. Yeah. I think you embody what's what's so fun about the Internet. I mean, people talk all the time about the pad parts, but it's the Internet is amazing that there's filled. It's filled with so many people who love what they do and want to share that information. It's not I just don't run into people that often who are proprietary about what they know. You know, you could say, no, no, I'm not going to teach you anything because I want all the business. But what fun would that be? Right? No, I want competition. I'm still waiting for someone within the U.S. to reach out to me and say, hey, would you mind putting me up on your website as a repair partner? Perhaps not. Yeah. But but I the way I see it, it's, you know, no different for me as it is any other big or small business like competition is good.  That's a good point. And by sharing information, you're encouraging other people to share with you. I'm sure if somebody figures something out that would make your life easier, they would let you know. That's the whole point of being alive, isn't it? Is progressing and making everything easier for everybody else to come. So I love that. I love that. Well, I do want to I didn't have it in the notes, but I do want to talk about how do you open a home pod? So all I see is this plastic disc on top and then this netting. And then the bottom is stuck on. And then the and of course, a power cord is hardwired, so you can't replace it. How do you get them open? So you can actually replace the power cable to start. Really, to remove the power cable, just set it on your table. Firmly hold it down with one hand at the top of the pod to the table and then wrap the power cable a few times around your other hand and then build up a little bit of slack and just yank it right out. No way. Yeah. And it'll just a regular connector. Just it's not a standard connector, of course. But you can hop on eBay or wherever you can find spare parts for these things, which isn't very, very many places. But you can buy replacement power cables for these two. And I've been using the same power cable for my repair testing here since I started and it's holding up just fine. So. Oh, wow. OK. So I remember seeing that this netting thing come off was Steve's favorite party kept replaying it over and over again for me. So you get how do you get the plastic piece off the top that's got the buttons? Yeah. So you start with something that you can get a grip like a flat plastic or metal tool that you can get a nice grip on to cut the adhesive that's holding that top plastic layer on. OK.  What you want to do is cut through the adhesive. Keep going around and cutting through the adhesive until it just gives up and it basically pops off on its own. OK. That's the biggest mistake that I see people make in resulting in scratching and cracking their tops. So OK, OK, just keep that. Keep that pry tool level with the plastic top.  And then once you get that plastic off, it's pretty much T6 screws and a little bit of prying here and there to get the rest of the way in. There's a few screws holding the draw string tight at the top. It's a string. Yep. Once you take those out, the top of the mesh loosens up and you can slide it down towards the bottom of the home pod, revealing the whole top half of the pod and the screws holding the basket and the subwoofer in and the logic board and all that. So once you're that far and you continue taking your screws out, you're at the tough part, which is prying that top basket off of the bottom half of the pod. And that's where you take your flathead and a wedge it in between the subwoofer and the plastic frame and sort of split the two halves apart and break that glue holding the two together apart. And as I say in the stream, if it doesn't sound like an Xbox 360, when you're taking it apart, you might not be doing it right. What do you mean by that? So the glue can be very strong and it can make some very concerning noises as you're as you're opening them up sometimes. It sounds a lot like an Xbox 360 if you've ever taken one of those apart. It sounds like you're breaking the thing, but you're really not. It's just the glue screaming and death or something. Yeah. So once you've gone past the hard part, it's all pretty much downhill from there. You can unscrew the subwoofer and lift that out. You can reach in there, get the power supply out and then get to the amplifier, which is usually where most of your problems are going to be. OK. Wow. I it really is funny watching that that netting open up. It just it just goes. Oh, it's so satisfying. Sometimes I make I make little sound effects like. It's it's it's a satisfying experience to slide it down. And then when you're tightening it up again to and you pull those drawstrings tight and get it looking factory again, it's always so satisfying. Oh, yeah. Ours was a little dented from the way he packed it with the power cord. He had it in the original box, but but it was a little bit dented.  It was it was pretty funny. Oh, yeah, the home pod didn't ask to be a home pod. It just is. So you got to take care of him. Like this was at least twice as fun as I hoped it would be. I hoped it would be nerdy, but I didn't realize that I would meet somebody who was just such a genuine person. I I'm really happy we had a chance to get together on this. This was awesome. Oh, thank you. And any time you want me to come back, I'd be more than happy to. Oh, maybe there would be Q&A. So if people want to find your website one more time, where is it? You can go to nixfix.com. That's Nick without a K, nixfix.com. Or you can just actually Google HomePod Repair and track44.moe slash home pods will be one of the first results that shows up and you can click on that and it'll take you there. All right. Well, that sounds pretty easy for people. One more time. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope we don't need your your work again. But if we do, I know where I'm going to go. There's absolutely no doubt. And I suspect you might get some more business from this. Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure being on here in an honor again. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chachat Across the Pond. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because the show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the Podfeat podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeat.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're going to find different ways to contribute. If you like to do a one time donation, you can click the PayPal button. If you want to make a recurring contribution, click the weekly Patreon button. Or another way to contribute is to record a listener contribution. It's a great way to help the NoCillicastAways learn from you. If you want to contact me for any reason, you can email me at Allison at podfeat.com. You can follow me on Twitter at podfeat. Maybe you want to talk to other NoCillicastAways. You can do that in our Slack group at podfeat.com slash Slack. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.