267: Cold Boot, Fresh Browser
Update: 2024-12-29
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It's our last pod of 2024, and thus, another batch of year-ending questions meets our entirely professional and learned answers. This month we talk about improving your Bluetooth quality in Windows, our personal mouse grip, tech-related anime we've seen, when to throw in the towel on learning new skills, weird freebies with your tech purchases, questionable Black Friday purchases, how many browser tabs is too many, and the oppression of the Elf-on-the-Shelf surveillance state.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Okay, we got to make this quick, I got two gallons of nog in the bath.
00:00:03
It's no time, the nox season was upon us again.
00:00:06
Look, I don't know what date is today for people who are listening, but for me, it's December 18th, 2024, and the nog time is upon us.
00:00:14
That's right.
00:00:15
So I might say the nog time never ends, but you know, I look, I'm going to go and tell you, last year I found a lost jar of nog in the back of the fridge behind all the beer and all the other stuff in June.
00:00:26
What?
00:00:27
How did we not talk about this?
00:00:29
Oh, look, it was a little bit embarrassing.
00:00:32
I didn't want to get into it, but like, it's like, see why you wouldn't want to bring that up.
00:00:36
I'm sorry, just to clarify, again, reiterate six months, roughly, we're talking about it.
00:00:41
Junish.
00:00:42
It was summertime.
00:00:43
Okay.
00:00:44
It was not a nog season.
00:00:44
That's a long time for a milk product to hang out in the fridge.
00:00:46
So I looked at it and I was like, oh, Gina, we made a mistake and she was like, yeah, we did.
00:00:53
And then my initial thought was just, I should just put it back in there and then not think about it anymore.
00:00:58
Yeah, which was not the right, not the right instinct.
00:01:01
Yeah.
00:01:02
My second thought was, oh, it's trash day.
00:01:05
I'm just going to put this directly in the trash and not open it, which is what I did.
00:01:09
Okay.
00:01:10
So I assume that at some point in the future, archaeologists will be digging in the San Francisco municipal landfill and they will find an intact jar of nog and then fossilized.
00:01:21
Yeah.
00:01:22
Like, like, people will extract ingredients from it and try to discern what it was and they'll be like, it seems to be some sort of curdled milk product.
00:01:29
This must be what the people of the late of the early 21st century really enjoyed was.
00:01:33
Yes.
00:01:34
Anthropologists will draw sweeping conclusions about the entirety of our culture based on this one artifact.
00:01:38
The thing I was going to ask is, okay, I fully support your all or nothing, throw in the trash.
00:01:45
Just forget about it and move on with your life strategy.
00:01:47
Yeah.
00:01:48
Yeah.
00:01:49
First of all, it was in glass, right?
00:01:50
I assume.
00:01:51
It was in a mason jar.
00:01:52
I do court mason jars of nog generally, is there, there's nothing about glass that would render that jar unusable though, right?
00:01:59
So is it like somehow porous enough that like bad, bad enough product could soil it forever?
00:02:05
Like the jar was totally redeemable, but the price of a mason jar is such that I did not care to the, the, the mental and psychic trauma of disposing of six month old milk products,
00:02:17
milk and egg products just to be clear.
00:02:19
Oh, yeah.
00:02:20
I get it.
00:02:21
Don't, don't, don't get me wrong.
00:02:22
It was a little bit to see what the consistency was like in there and it was, it was like, it wasn't quite soft cheese yet, but it was, it was chunkier than you want something that, that your nostrils are exposed to is there,
00:02:34
is there both yolk and white in there or all yolk?
00:02:38
So, so I used to separate it at, so look, I've learned a lot making nog over the years.
00:02:42
The first couple of years I did like three or four gallons, I think, and we would just buy palettes of eggs from the, from the restaurant supply place.
00:02:51
And then, I think somebody actually on the podcast, somebody who listens to the podcast is really, hey, you know, you can buy commercially pasteurized and homogenized egg yolks.
00:02:58
Oh, that's right.
00:02:59
In cartoons.
00:03:00
And I was like, wait, what?
00:03:01
Because the hardest part of the nog previous to that was what do you do with the 140 eggs worth of whites?
00:03:09
Well, it's a lot of omelands.
00:03:11
I bet I, I bet I have said that's a lot of omelands something on another podcast.
00:03:15
That is precisely what you said.
00:03:17
And what I will tell you is, there's no way that three people will eat that many egg white omelands before they are horrific.
00:03:24
That is, that is precisely what you said now, but I think, but so, and did we, did we talk about like before you got that, were you self-pasteur on me, were you doing the pasteurization yourself?
00:03:34
Well, I do the pasteurization again anyway, so that's why the, that's why the nog is in the bath now.
00:03:40
It does 90, 90 minutes ish in 162 Fahrenheit bath.
00:03:44
And that's not hot enough to like cook the egg at all.
00:03:47
It does not cook the egg, but it does pasteurize the kills 99, like lower temperature than that will kill 99.99, 99% of the thing, but it's that problem is with that 0.001 hung out in that jar for another six months.
00:04:01
Well, I think the problem is that just the, so there's pasteurization, there's ultra pasteurization.
00:04:07
I don't think we're ultra pasteurizing here.
00:04:09
I think, I think we would have to go longer to get the last, the, the fifth one, right?
00:04:15
But, uh, but yeah, the, the, it wasn't, it wasn't good, so I didn't want to open it.
00:04:19
I didn't want to expose my nostrils to that, that kind of food crime.
00:04:24
And I sacrificed one, one mason jar to the future, understandable.
00:04:28
My, my last question, did you ever consider just dumping enough booze in there that it wouldn't matter?
00:04:35
So the weird thing is, I think if I had boozed the nog, it would have probably been okay.
00:04:39
Wow.
00:04:40
You mean upfront?
00:04:41
Yeah.
00:04:42
So it, like, cause a lot of people do this, like five, six weeks in advance and put booze in and then let it age with the booze and the pasteurization.
00:04:51
And that's a different, that's a different thing.
00:04:53
But I, we have enough people that don't drink or like, there's a big split between, like, do you put bourbon and do you put rum in, do you put spice rum in, do you put dark rum,
00:05:03
do you put a rye, do you put something else that I don't even, like, I haven't even thought of.
00:05:08
So we just don't do, like I, and also we have enough friends who don't drink that I don't want to accidentally give somebody the booze nog when they, they're not, they're, you know, recovering alcoholic or something because that would be uncool.
00:05:20
Yeah.
00:05:21
That's entirely sensible.
00:05:22
So we just don't do the, we don't do the booze.
00:05:24
Yes.
00:05:25
And then you end up with a time bomb in your fridge.
00:05:28
Look, it didn't, it hadn't puffed up the top dome of the, of the, of the mason jar yet, you know, the, like, the pop down and that hadn't popped up.
00:05:37
So I figured, probably okay.
00:05:39
Well, hey, there's always next year.
00:05:40
[Music]
00:06:09
Welcome to brand will made a checkbot.
00:06:12
I'm Will.
00:06:13
I'm Brad.
00:06:14
Hello.
00:06:15
Hi.
00:06:16
Brad, I'm coming off hot.
00:06:17
We did, we did the best of for the full, the, the, the nerdy's yesterday for the full nerd.
00:06:20
Oh.
00:06:21
Has that run that, that was public live, we do live every week, not someone you're keeping on a wraps.
00:06:26
No, you, you can go over to the full nerd channel on YouTube or go to wherever fine podcasts are found and find out I, I brought, I feel like I maybe brought too much energy to that though.
00:06:36
I feel like, I feel like I was too, like I, I, I, I didn't have the pushback.
00:06:41
I was expecting, I, I was expecting like a, like, an old giant bomb war room level of pushback.
00:06:48
Mm-hmm.
00:06:49
And I think I think people were like, I can't argue with that after I said stuff and I was like, this is bad.
00:06:53
I've gone too far.
00:06:54
Maybe your arguments were just that good.
00:06:56
Maybe.
00:06:57
I don't know.
00:06:58
You could not be good enough.
00:06:59
They were just that convincing.
00:07:00
It was fun.
00:07:01
It was a good year for tech.
00:07:02
It was a fun conversation with, with Adam and, and Brad and Elena and, yeah, can I ask, like, can you give me like one or two things that were highlighted?
00:07:09
I'm just curious what asked muster.
00:07:12
Yeah.
00:07:13
So we, they did, I think we did five categories.
00:07:15
We did best CPU, best GPU, best accessory, which is like kind of anything you can plug into a PC software or hardware.
00:07:22
Okay.
00:07:23
We did, we started out with best innovation, but then we realized we'd rather do best trends.
00:07:27
So we changed it to best trend on the fly.
00:07:28
Sure.
00:07:29
And did worst trend, to kind of counterpoint.
00:07:33
Actually, I'm going to stop you with only five categories.
00:07:35
I think people should just go listen for themselves.
00:07:37
I mean, they can, but like, I don't want to give anything away here.
00:07:40
What I will say is the conversation about CPU, like I brought a little bit of wild card energy in there.
00:07:46
And I think we were talking about CPU and I was, you know, their motto over there.
00:07:50
They have two mortos at PC world.
00:07:52
One is, one is bigger bar better than the other one is always be testing, apparently.
00:07:56
They've always said always be testing over there since the very beginning.
00:07:58
That was weird.
00:07:59
It seems familiar to me, whatever.
00:08:03
They, uh, since bigger bars better, I just was like, hey, man, what about the 14900K?
00:08:08
They really give this year.
00:08:09
They fixed the performance problems.
00:08:11
That's really still faster than everything out there.
00:08:15
As a current user of a 14900K, I find this very funny.
00:08:19
It's not catching on fire anymore.
00:08:21
If you have the right updates installed, everything's cool.
00:08:23
I think mine's fine.
00:08:24
I think it's spin.
00:08:25
It's been pretty stable.
00:08:26
Yeah.
00:08:27
Maybe it is the best.
00:08:28
A certain conversation, you know, as, as energy consumption bars go is certainly the biggest bar.
00:08:35
Yeah.
00:08:36
Yeah.
00:08:37
They have so many biggest bars over there.
00:08:38
They can't even keep track of them all.
00:08:39
If they have the biggest bar in every category, most CPUs torched, most power consumed in hell.
00:08:45
Full load, most cores, most CEOs, X-I's, I mean, yeah, that's not, that's not really the reason he got.
00:08:51
No, hostile, but anyway, yeah.
00:08:53
So it was a good conversation, it's worthless.
00:08:55
If you're looking for podcasts to fill your holiday voids, I will definitely hit it, hit it, download.
00:09:00
That sounds right up my alley.
00:09:03
But we're here today to do something a little different.
00:09:06
We don't believe in superlatives here at the tech pod.
00:09:09
We just think that every question submitted is the best question we've ever received.
00:09:12
That's right.
00:09:13
Until the next one.
00:09:14
Yeah.
00:09:15
And then we turn them into A's.
00:09:16
So if you, if you think about it, if you start with our first question and answer episode, like two, three years ago, each question is better than the one that came before it.
00:09:26
So that means these questions now are orders of magnitude better than the ones that we had on those first few episodes.
00:09:32
I have to tell you something.
00:09:34
What's up, Brad?
00:09:35
When you say our first question and answer episode two to three years ago, yeah, this over five years ago, we've been doing this for five, we have been doing this for five years.
00:09:45
Dude, we blew past five year mark, like three years ago.
00:09:48
Oh, wow.
00:09:49
Okay.
00:09:50
Yeah, look, 20 to 2020 to 2022 is basically one three week chunk in my brain.
00:09:56
So yeah.
00:09:57
Anyway, we turning questions into answers this week.
00:10:00
Yes.
00:10:01
I don't know if I should bring this up, but I feel like I have to.
00:10:03
So we don't step in it.
00:10:04
We are recording this out of order.
00:10:06
So if we talk about something this week that we didn't mention last week, and it's any weirdness, it's just because we've never done this before.
00:10:12
We're bad at it.
00:10:13
Yes.
00:10:14
Yes.
00:10:15
Yes.
00:10:16
We are for reasons.
00:10:17
We are recording.
00:10:18
Oh, God, I am losing track.
00:10:19
266 right now.
00:10:21
This is no, this is 267.
00:10:23
We have to do 266 on Friday.
00:10:24
Okay.
00:10:25
Okay.
00:10:26
Currently, the plan is we will do a ranking of connectors and cables and ports.
00:10:31
I'm sure that episode was fantastic.
00:10:33
Yes.
00:10:34
That's what I know.
00:10:35
We've ever recorded or we'll record anyway.
00:10:37
We look, hey, Brad, why aren't we doing a ranking of start up chimes and start up noises for windows, start up noises for consoles and devices and windows this week.
00:10:49
But because remap very fairly beat us to that banger of an idea, and I think you're saying that because you suggested we do that for a holiday episode, and I was like, I thought you knew that they did it.
00:11:00
I did not.
00:11:01
I was like, why isn't, why isn't, well, surely he knows that remap just did this.
00:11:04
No, I think they did it on their, on their, like, and when you're anniversary stream, right?
00:11:10
It was a charity stream.
00:11:11
I can't remember what charity it was for, but it was a very-- Oh, it was a Palestinian charity stream.
00:11:14
I think that's right.
00:11:15
It was a very long stream.
00:11:16
I think they spent like four hours on that ranking or something.
00:11:20
They went to, they met in New York or something for a weekend, I think, and basically streamed all weekend, which was, I watched a bunch of that.
00:11:26
I missed that one entirely, which I was, I, maybe I knew it happened, but it's lost to time now.
00:11:32
I'm lost to my memory.
00:11:33
Yep.
00:11:34
So, yeah, we're ranking connectors on a variety of categories and criteria for last week's episode, which you already heard, no, that we did that.
00:11:44
And it was awesome.
00:11:45
Yep.
00:11:46
There's emails about that in this episode.
00:11:47
If there's anything temporarily incorrect about this episode, though, you know why.
00:11:51
Yeah.
00:11:52
So, if you have a question, you can send it to techpod@content.town.
00:11:55
Again, the email address is techpod.content.town.
00:11:57
Or if you are a patron, you can go into the Discord, which you can get access by going to patreon.com/techpod.
00:12:05
And you can join the Question Seeking Answers channel and post your question there.
00:12:09
It'll disappear into the void a few seconds after you post it, but we'll see it.
00:12:13
It'll be there.
00:12:14
And when we look deep into our hearts and pick the best questions and more than the ones that we had to skip because we either didn't have a good answer or maybe they were sometimes they're a little long,
00:12:27
Brad, or, yeah, it's true.
00:12:29
Do you want to, do you want to hit the first question?
00:12:31
You've got a one off the top for us?
00:12:33
Yeah.
00:12:34
Yeah.
00:12:35
Why don't I peel this one off of the email stack from Nate and four Collins.
00:12:40
Having a job again and joining meetings and doing calls has led me to a very frustrating conundrum.
00:12:45
I like many use Bluetooth headphones at work.
00:12:47
I absolutely hate it when an application swaps to the headset device to handle calls because the earphone audio quality drops and makes everything sound like poop.
00:12:56
Why?
00:12:57
Why in the year of our corporate overlords 2024 can't Bluetooth maintain decent audio quality when using the microphone?
00:13:03
I find myself setting my laptops microphone as the input device so I can get acceptable audio quality otherwise.
00:13:09
Hope you both have a great holiday.
00:13:11
So Windows is traditionally really bad at this.
00:13:14
If you're using Windows Mac is surprisingly good at this.
00:13:17
The Mac and Tosh in my experience, especially if you're using Apple headphones, it just works as you would expect.
00:13:22
Yeah.
00:13:23
Sure.
00:13:24
Yes.
00:13:25
Because the thing that you're having is there's typically there's two profiles, there's the headset profile and then there's the H2DP profile and the H2DP profile is a higher bit rate, higher depth on the audio samples.
00:13:36
It sounds like music versus like Braini s GSM phone calls from 2005.
00:13:45
If you want to force it and your hardware supports it, then you can write, you can go to the devices and printers in your device and go to properties and then there's a services tab if the driver is set up right for it and on that services tab you can disable the hands free telephony and headset audio gateway and you should be able to use,
00:14:11
and then it should default back to advanced audio, which will give you the thing that you want.
00:14:16
Oh, but is that the headset has to support that code act because I will talk about it here?
00:14:21
The answer to that is it's complicated.
00:14:23
It seems like it's the Bluetooth adapter has to support that preferences sheet.
00:14:27
Okay.
00:14:28
Because I looked at two different machines before we did this.
00:14:31
My desktop machine has the preferences sheet and my laptop does not.
00:14:35
And they both have these different Bluetooth controllers.
00:14:38
Okay.
00:14:39
And to connect to the same device.
00:14:41
So Bluetooth audio code X already nightmare like most of the Bluetooth, I don't know how much time you've spent looking into that stuff, but that's probably one reason we have never gotten around to our Bluetooth triptych.
00:14:52
I have a big giant note stock that's like a third of the way done for the Bluetooth triptych but there are a lot of just, just for audio, there are a lot of code X, a lot of Bluetooth code X and like which one does your headset support,
00:15:05
which one does your laptop or adapter support, you know, like which one is it falling back to?
00:15:10
Yeah.
00:15:11
It looks for the least common denominator and often the least common denominator is headset audio, which is the bad one that you don't want.
00:15:19
That makes sense.
00:15:20
When you mentioned earlier that it's like Mac OS just tends to kind of just work with the stuff.
00:15:25
Like I think you were talking mostly about Apple hardware.
00:15:26
So I started thinking about like I have used a number of other kind of lesser Bluetooth audio devices with Mac OS.
00:15:32
I'm like, even in those cases, I think generally the quality is good, the connectivity is good.
00:15:37
Like it is pretty reliable at pairing and staying paired and everything.
00:15:41
Like I think maybe Mac OS just has a better Bluetooth stack in general.
00:15:45
I think that's a fair assessment.
00:15:47
That's a good question.
00:15:48
Like a better audio stack in general.
00:15:50
I can say that for sure.
00:15:52
So I think they have, I think there's a difference in my guess is that Microsoft errors toward this default will work and Apple errors toward this is going to work great with Apple hardware and everybody else can go fuck themselves.
00:16:07
Yeah.
00:16:08
Yeah.
00:16:09
All right.
00:16:10
We've got a lot of good Discord questions this month, so it's a banner crop.
00:16:15
I'm just going to dive in here and pick one.
00:16:19
Now this is an easy one to start with, this one Shags Magoo.
00:16:23
What kind of mouse grip do you find gentlemen use, palm fingertip or claw?
00:16:27
I'm fingertip.
00:16:28
I've never quite been able to answer this question because like even as I'm holding my mouse as we speak, I'm kind of, I feel like I'm halfway between palm and fingertip.
00:16:37
I'm not sure.
00:16:38
You can touch the palm of your hand, touch the mouse.
00:16:41
Just barely.
00:16:42
That's the thing.
00:16:43
Like kind of the ball of my hand sort of is barely resting on the back of the mouse, but otherwise it's kind of like fingertips only.
00:16:49
So it's hard for me to fully palm the mouse if that's what we're talking about with palm grip, like get the whole body of the mouse in the palm, I don't even see how you can move a mouse like that.
00:17:00
The modern ones are too small.
00:17:02
Do you do you move with your wrist or do you move with your arm?
00:17:05
A wrist.
00:17:06
In fact, I've been using, I used to have a lot of wrist problems, RSI, I guess it was like pretty severe ache in my right wrist.
00:17:12
I've been using just a basic little gel wrist rest for ages and pivot off of that.
00:17:17
That's kind of the pivot point that my wrist moves back and forth on and those problems pretty much went away.
00:17:23
So I use a wrist rest as well, but when I got into PUBG friend of mine who was a professional counterstrike player for a while, I was like, hey, when I watch you, it looks like you're aiming with your wrist,
00:17:36
and I was like, yeah, what's wrong with that?
00:17:38
He's like, well, you're going to mess up your wrist real bad, but also you have better precision with your hand and your arm and your fingertips.
00:17:46
So you move your fingertips to do like precise movements and move your arm to do big movements, and he helped me do that and turned my sensitivity way down and it made a fairly substantial difference in how I shoot in multiplayer games.
00:18:02
So I do the fingertip, I always had done the fingertip grip before, but I use the fingertip for like fine up and down inside decide movements and then the whole elbow movement for the faster stuff.
00:18:15
Okay.
00:18:16
Do you use ambidextrous?
00:18:17
Ice, right?
00:18:18
I, my current mouse is a G pro super lighter, two super light.
00:18:22
I can't remember which one it is.
00:18:23
Okay.
00:18:24
It's the first gen one.
00:18:25
So it's, yes, it's ambidextrous, but the buttons are only on the right thumb.
00:18:28
I've, I've been on whatever the MX518 form factor is since that mouse was current.
00:18:33
Oh, yeah.
00:18:34
It was body succession of mice with that.
00:18:36
It's got, basically, it's got the thumb groove kind of carved into the left side.
00:18:39
So it's very much a right hand mouse.
00:18:41
And it's got a big hump too.
00:18:42
Yes.
00:18:43
Yeah.
00:18:44
So that, that, like having that thumb grip on a specific side kind of dictates how you hold it in my case.
00:18:49
Yeah.
00:18:50
The super lights a little bit, a little bit thinner and I, I only use the side button.
00:18:55
The thumb buttons I use for marking, for ping usually and for push to mute when I'm talking to people, when I'm talking to like a stream and leaving the chat, like the people I'm on discord with muted.
00:19:06
So yeah.
00:19:07
That's, that's where I am.
00:19:08
All right.
00:19:09
Cool.
00:19:10
Here's a question from Reichenpo, I think is how you might say your name.
00:19:12
This might have been a good ranking topic, actually.
00:19:15
Well, this is still time.
00:19:17
Yeah, that's true.
00:19:18
Over the years, we have seen the rise and fall of many different processing units.
00:19:22
Some have stuck around and some have faded into the annals of history.
00:19:25
Do you think the NPU is likely to fade or stick around?
00:19:29
What was question, do you think FPGA's could have a place as one of the next additions to CPUs?
00:19:34
Is it so?
00:19:35
Okay.
00:19:36
So other PUs that have been around are the physics processing unit, the PPU, obviously the GPU.
00:19:42
Yeah.
00:19:43
The APU is still a thing.
00:19:45
What's an APU?
00:19:46
I mean, that's what AMD calls.
00:19:47
They're all in one.
00:19:48
Oh, right, right.
00:19:49
That's maybe that's a question for Adam, a PC world or somebody in the network.
00:19:53
It's like an SOC though.
00:19:54
Like, that's, that's what I mean is like it is APU, just kind of a marketing term really because all it really is is just a CPU, GPU, full system, money chip kind of thing.
00:20:01
Yeah.
00:20:02
So maybe that's just a marketing differentiator they came up with.
00:20:05
Yeah.
00:20:06
I don't think APU fits this category, but like, big foot tried to pitch networks as a network processing unit.
00:20:14
Yeah.
00:20:15
They're, they're non-host based network cards that had janky drivers and would reduce your latency.
00:20:20
Oh, interesting.
00:20:21
Because all the compute for the network overhead was on the card.
00:20:23
Yeah.
00:20:24
But by that time, there were already multi-course CPUs and it really didn't matter.
00:20:27
Um, didn't, I mean, you could probably argue there were some like sound processing units on like some of the, some of the more elaborate creative labs cards.
00:20:34
Remember when, remember when on board sounds started becoming a big deal on motherboards and creative kind of got desperate and started trying to like, cram new features and higher quality stuff into their sound cars to stay relevant.
00:20:44
Well, before that, even Ariel had those accelerators that would do HRTFs on the board.
00:20:50
Right.
00:20:51
But I don't think they ever called them PUs.
00:20:52
No, I mean, yeah, I don't think they gave it a name.
00:20:54
I haven't thought about Ariel in a long time.
00:20:56
Yeah.
00:20:57
They're long gone, right?
00:20:58
Um, oh, they got bought by somebody who then got bought by somebody and probably creative labs or HP or somebody owns them now.
00:21:05
Um, I think, I think the NPU, so there's benefit to having dedicated linear algebra and like neural acceleration,
00:21:16
even if AI stuff all goes away, just like the quality of background blur on a Copilot Plus laptop is as good as the Nvidia broadcast stuff and it's just built to support for that.
00:21:29
It's just built into Windows.
00:21:30
It's pretty good.
00:21:31
Same thing for like live transcription and that kind of like, it's like, I kind of think of that as table stakes now for the AI stuff and it's honestly the AI stuff that I like the best.
00:21:44
Yeah, absolutely.
00:21:45
I think we've been on this so box a little bit in the past recently, but I'm people, I think it's becoming more and more pressing for people to make a distinction between kind of, I keep calling it signal processing AI.
00:21:57
That term has not caught on, but you know, something that takes a basic data input and spits it out in a mutated, you know, uh, transformed kind of form, right?
00:22:06
Yeah.
00:22:07
Like talking about like taking the data of your camera background and turning it into something else or blurring it out in a nice, elegant way.
00:22:14
The LSS we keep talking about is a prime example of this.
00:22:17
Yeah.
00:22:18
These removal from microphone input or whatever, like just basic stuff like that, like that, those are good solid productive uses of AI.
00:22:25
It's like, it's the generative AI stuff that obviously is so odious to so many people for understandable reasons.
00:22:31
Yeah.
00:22:32
So I think, I think the NPU, like, here's the thing, the amount of die space they're devoting to this stuff is still relatively low on CPUs.
00:22:42
The die space is a little bit less competitive than say GPUs and I think the benefits of having dedicated, like having a dedicated floor of 40 tops or whatever it is,
00:22:54
that the co-pilot plus stuff requires is probably worth keeping around.
00:23:02
Now that said, if we don't find better uses for it, I think we'll, like that, I think it might get squeezed down until it's 10 tops or whatever, whatever the background blur requires to be pretty good.
00:23:15
Now, the question about FPGAs, I think, is even more interesting, right?
00:23:19
It is interesting.
00:23:20
I don't know that I have a great answer, but I don't see it.
00:23:22
I mean, we're definitely not experts in CPU chip design, but I don't see a pressing reason to put one on CPU die versus dedicated implementations where they're needed.
00:23:32
I don't.
00:23:33
I actually, like, the reason you won't see them is because they're for especially applications really.
00:23:41
Right?
00:23:42
So, like, audio processing and stuff like emulation and things like that, you'll see them be used as add-on cards or as standalone machines rather than integrate.
00:23:54
Like, Intel builds CPUs to sell a billion copies of the same CPU, right?
00:23:59
They don't want to make one-offs that are specials.
00:24:01
Now, if the disaggregated architecture stuff takes off, then maybe you'll be able to buy some specialty, like data center stuff that has FPGAs in it or whatever, but I think that's further down the line.
00:24:11
Yeah.
00:24:12
Yeah.
00:24:13
I think I don't know for me.
00:24:14
This is based on very limited experience.
00:24:15
I think FPGAs have a pretty significant speed limitations compared to your average high-end CPU these days, so I don't know that it would mix well from that perspective.
00:24:23
They're slow and, like, the time, like, shifting them from one mode to another is really expensive computationally in terms of the time it takes, like, think about how long it takes to change cores on the mister or something like that,
00:24:38
and, like, you're not -- it's not -- typically, it's faster to just run it on a CPU than it would be to load up the FPGA with the stuff you need and then switch over to that and then switch back to whatever else it was running.
00:24:50
And, like, it's -- they're not for general purpose computing.
00:24:53
Yeah.
00:24:54
That does seem to be the case.
00:24:55
Question from Bay Food.
00:24:57
Do you have any favorite tech-related anime examples being serial experiments, Lane or Gundam?
00:25:02
Oh, man.
00:25:03
You got anything?
00:25:04
Like, favorite anime.
00:25:06
Wow.
00:25:07
All right.
00:25:08
I mean, I, like, total row.
00:25:09
The gauntlet has been thrown down.
00:25:11
I -- look, it's okay.
00:25:12
I'm old.
00:25:13
Yeah.
00:25:14
We didn't have -- like, we got a little -- Voltron is the thing that they played on Saturday afternoon, if the baseball game got rained out when I was a kid.
00:25:21
Okay.
00:25:22
Sure.
00:25:23
And, like, so the anime that I was exposed to was, like, Transformers and GoBots and -- It's kind of a funny thing about people our age.
00:25:31
We were kind of watching anime without realizing it in the '80s.
00:25:35
They called it -- they had worse names for it back then.
00:25:38
Yes.
00:25:39
For sure.
00:25:40
But, yeah, like, we -- I just -- by the time Dragon Ball and all that stuff kind of exploded onto the scene, I was told -- like, I, like, I, like, I, like, cowboy bebop and all that stuff as much as the next person.
00:25:51
Okay.
00:25:52
I was wondering -- I've never seen that.
00:25:53
I was wondering if that was a good example.
00:25:54
Oh, my God.
00:25:55
You've never seen cowboy bebop.
00:25:56
No.
00:25:57
Oh, my God.
00:25:58
I've gotten the sense that that one might fall into this category pretty well.
00:26:00
You should just watch the Netflix live action thing.
00:26:03
People say it's great.
00:26:04
It's going to be exactly what you want from it.
00:26:05
I've heard it's just as good, right?
00:26:07
Like, you're in the exact same experience.
00:26:08
It's just like that.
00:26:09
But, with that guy from Star Trek -- I, I, largely, I took this question because I have now seen serial experiments lane because we watched that on the next line or watchcast.
00:26:17
Ooh.
00:26:18
And, yeah.
00:26:19
Like that.
00:26:20
I mean, the -- that anime is computer-ish, shit.
00:26:23
It's cyber-ish shit.
00:26:24
Like, it's, like, cyber-punky.
00:26:25
It's like -- It came out in, like, '98.
00:26:27
So, the internet was starting to become more widely available, generally to people, but, like, it does kind of, like, prefigure some of the early online internet communities and the anonymity and global network stuff,
00:26:39
and, like, there's also -- this stuff is much more, like, nebulous.
00:26:43
It's not grounded in any kind of reality, but there's just a lot of really good computing imagery in that thing, as we'll get into, like, spoiling the nature of what's going on exactly, but the girl's bedroom just becomes more and more full of bigger and more gnarly looking computers over time.
00:26:59
Okay.
00:27:00
I like that.
00:27:01
Without any explanation to the point that it's still my phone lock screen, like, a year and change later.
00:27:07
That's pretty good.
00:27:08
Just a shot of her from sitting in that this monitor with all these other monitors and weird tubes and computers around her.
00:27:14
Is it, like, red, NEC, ATXT clones and stuff like that?
00:27:19
It starts getting a little more surreal than that, let's say.
00:27:23
Okay.
00:27:24
It's a lot of, like, weird tubes and monitors at weird angles, and there are some weird red lights and stuff.
00:27:30
It's not -- it's very little, like, recognizable as, like, off-the-shelf computers at that point.
00:27:35
At one point, I asked a friend of the show, like, hey, if I want to get into Gundam, where should I start?
00:27:43
And about an hour later, I was like, I think I'm probably okay.
00:27:47
I think I'm scared now.
00:27:49
This is too much.
00:27:50
Sure.
00:27:51
Let's see.
00:27:52
Yeah.
00:27:53
I don't know.
00:27:54
I'm like you, though.
00:27:55
I have not seen enough anime beyond Lane to really comment on that too much, but...
00:27:59
Drops him.
00:28:00
What should we be up?
00:28:01
What should we be up?
00:28:02
It's good.
00:28:03
You should probably be up.
00:28:04
It's, like, 14 episodes, too.
00:28:05
It's easy.
00:28:06
I should probably watch that at some point.
00:28:08
Like, the problem -- the problem with a lot of the way they showed when you did get something that was anime and you were, like, man, this is really cool, but it was all designed to be watched serially, and it also had bad translations often.
00:28:20
And to the people who were airing it didn't give a shit what order they showed it in.
00:28:24
So you'd get, like, episode one -- it was -- you know, it got the Firefly treatment.
00:28:28
You'd get episode one.
00:28:29
Then you'd get episode 23.
00:28:30
Then you'd get episode four.
00:28:31
Then you'd get episode seven.
00:28:32
And, like, you -- no idea what was going on.
00:28:33
Or if you wanted the real stuff, you had to go to the sun coast video at the mall.
00:28:37
Mm-hmm.
00:28:38
I'd ever engaged in this, but I knew people who were into this sort of thing.
00:28:40
I was, like, $35 for a VHS with, like, two or three episodes of Ronmo 1/2 on it.
00:28:46
Get them.
00:28:47
So expensive.
00:28:48
It was a dark time.
00:28:50
I did watch -- I watched a bunch of legends of the Galactic Heroes.
00:28:55
Okay.
00:28:56
I think I've heard of that.
00:28:57
Which is, like, it's, like, a mill sim, space mill sim type thing.
00:29:01
All right.
00:29:02
So they're a lot of those.
00:29:03
I mean, it was -- I feel like, what is that battleship Yamamoto?
00:29:07
Yamamoto.
00:29:08
This battleship Yamato.
00:29:09
I think that's right.
00:29:11
People are just going to screaming at their radios right now.
00:29:14
Hang on.
00:29:15
If I just type Yamato into -- You can get something else.
00:29:18
Of course, that'll give us exactly what we're looking for.
00:29:21
Yeah.
00:29:22
Space battleship Yamato.
00:29:23
Like, that was one of -- that was another one of the things it was shown on, like, Saturday afternoon, baseball, rain outs, completely out of order.
00:29:31
Ooh.
00:29:32
Okay.
00:29:33
I did it is.
00:29:34
It is, in fact, called Space Battleship Yamato.
00:29:36
That is some good 70s-looking anime right there.
00:29:38
Oh, it's -- it was so -- like, I remember watching that and thinking, "Man, this is the coolest stuff I've ever seen.
00:29:44
I wish I had any idea what was going on."
00:29:47
So yeah.
00:29:48
Anyway.
00:29:49
All right.
00:29:50
We'll let it go.
00:29:51
Let's see.
00:29:52
Here's a question from Ambush, Penguin Charlie.
00:29:55
Considering the interesting times we are and soon will be living in, how useful is an encrypted service like Signal if no one else in your social circle is using it or something similar?
00:30:05
Are encrypted services an all-or-nothing kind of thing or do I get some benefit even if no one else is using them?
00:30:09
No.
00:30:10
They are, in fact, an all-or-nothing.
00:30:11
Well, I think it encrypts your stuff on your end, but the other end will be unencrypt.
00:30:16
Encrypted services in general are only as good as your friends are.
00:30:19
Right.
00:30:20
But I think in the case of something like Signal, I don't think even -- or WhatsApp, you can't even communicate with people unless they are using the same app on the other end.
00:30:28
No, but also your friends on the other end can do stupid stuff, not encrypt their -- they can save logs and not encrypt the logs.
00:30:37
And then you might as well, like I said, you're only as secure as your friends are.
00:30:42
Yes, yes.
00:30:43
But I think that's a different situation than something like the Messages app on iOS where you might be sending eye messages to some people and SMS to other people and maybe even RCS to yet other people.
00:30:52
I think on Signal on Android, you can send SMS -- really?
00:30:56
It can be -- I don't know if you still can't.
00:30:58
For a long time, it could be your SMS client on the Android side.
00:31:03
Okay.
00:31:04
I think Google might have changed that.
00:31:05
I'm not sure if you guys are going to think about it, but -- The nice thing about it, at least like Signal and WhatsApp, is that generally they'll tell you right there in the message window if your conversation is encrypted or not.
00:31:14
That is actually true.
00:31:15
Like it'll just say, "Hey, your conversation is end-to-end encrypted with this person."
00:31:19
It'll just detect that.
00:31:20
So at least you know.
00:31:22
Yeah.
00:31:23
And you want to make sure you have -- you're connected directly to the Signal service with Signal.
00:31:30
I don't think that they let you -- I'm trying to see -- I'm trying to figure out if they let you run archives anymore, and I can't tell you're going to go chats.
00:31:43
You can clear chat history, but I don't think you can turn history off entirely anymore.
00:31:47
So anyway.
00:31:48
We should revisit the subject of RCS at some point.
00:31:51
I don't know if it's quite there yet, but we've talked about it before RCS is the successor protocol to SMS, which is kind of more or less, brings you the features of something like iMessage,
00:32:01
but in a carrier and phone and platform agnostic format.
00:32:05
Kind of asterisk.
00:32:06
Yeah.
00:32:07
The problem is the original spec for RCS did not include encryption.
00:32:11
I think we've maybe touched on this briefly with that.
00:32:13
I think that was an intentional choice by some -- yeah.
00:32:15
Maybe?
00:32:16
Well, but they're working on it now, though.
00:32:17
Like Apple, in particular, was pretty surly about the fact that it didn't have encryption.
00:32:22
And so they were trying to add that to the spec last I checked.
00:32:26
So the point is, who knows how many years it'll take from now, but if they get all that stuff in place and all the phones that don't support it, phase out of the market slowly, like, eventually, we might get to the point where kind of all phone-to-phone communication says 10 years.
00:32:40
10 years?
00:32:41
Yeah.
00:32:42
It could be something like that.
00:32:43
Yeah.
00:32:44
Eventually, maybe everything will just be encrypted as a matter of course.
00:32:46
Yeah.
00:32:47
Be nice.
00:32:48
But we are nowhere near there yet.
00:32:49
No.
00:32:50
Let's see.
00:32:51
Question from Meatball.
00:32:52
Man.
00:32:53
These are big numbers.
00:32:54
I'm looking into waiting -- I'm sorry, I'm looking at waiting into 300-plus gigabytes and over 33,000 personal and family photos that were either scanned or taken digitally in the last 50 to 60 years.
00:33:06
Oh, wow.
00:33:07
I was really hoping AI would be at a point now that I could just point at it and say, find and remove duplicates and then go through an organize and tag all of it so that I and future family can easily find stuff and know who all those old people are in the pictures.
00:33:19
But I don't think we're there yet.
00:33:21
Any experience with any apps that could help or ways to go about cleaning up and organizing all the photos?
00:33:27
So I don't have -- I mean, 33,000, I think when we looked at it, I think we took 10,000 pictures the year that my daughter was born, which is not unusual when we talked to other people about it.
00:33:40
Yeah, but I assume necessarily quite a few of them are not exact duplicates, but pretty close to just kind of rapid fire.
00:33:46
Yeah, there's a lot of 10 pictures to get one good one, right?
00:33:51
And if you're not really fastidious about deleting, you end up with a massive data problem.
00:33:55
My solution for that has been to just upload everything to Google Photos and then not think about it anymore, which worked really, really well until they started hooking Gemini up to it and now it's gone to shit.
00:34:06
Like I'm actively looking at moving something, moving off of Google Photos.
00:34:10
I haven't found any local store, like self-hosted thing that seems viable.
00:34:18
The Apple Photos app seems pretty good now.
00:34:21
It still has some weird problems.
00:34:25
It's one of those things that if you come into it now and you haven't looked at it, it's pretty good.
00:34:29
But if you used to use I photo, then you're like, oh man, they still don't have my favorite feature from 12 years ago.
00:34:35
I don't know that there is a good solution.
00:34:38
This is an insinification situation as far as I can tell because it really, like to be clear, the thing that's happening with Google Photos for me is that when I open up a month and a date that I know that there's a photo,
00:34:51
the photo is just not there.
00:34:54
You used to be able to search by keywords for things inside the photos.
00:34:58
That seems to have degraded.
00:35:02
A few months ago, it just deleted all the face tags in my, I think I must have missed an email that said, hey, you have to reopt into this if you want to keep face tags and now I have to recreate all the face tags that I added over the last nine or 10 years or whatever it's been of using Google Photos.
00:35:17
Yeah, it's like some form of corporate bitrod, like corporately mandated bitrod.
00:35:23
There's no reason this had to happen.
00:35:24
Other policies change.
00:35:26
It's pretty frustrating, yeah, because it seems like there's, it seems like it almost seems like you're losing metadata because like there's big categories of photos that it's like, hey, we don't know what date this photo is,
00:35:37
but it's very clearly on a date when there were 35 other photos taken.
00:35:42
And it's the same line of photos.
00:35:44
It just decided that that one doesn't have the data.
00:35:46
So anyway, I set up, I set up, what is it, G-Sync?
00:35:51
No.
00:35:52
G-Clone.
00:35:53
What's the R-Clone?
00:35:56
R-Clone.
00:35:57
I set up R-Clone and pulled everything off.
00:35:59
I just haven't, I haven't delved into that data pull at this point.
00:36:03
That's a lot of files.
00:36:04
It is a lot of files.
00:36:06
That's a lot of, you know, sometimes, sometimes this massive data that you accumulate kind of ends up hanging around your neck.
00:36:12
I find.
00:36:13
Yeah.
00:36:14
And the thing that I found looking at it briefly is that there's a bunch of open source projects and kind of commercial projects that seem like they're pretty good, but not all the way there.
00:36:23
If people have stuff that they've used and recommend, I would love it if you'd write into TechBoticContent.town.
00:36:28
And I'll take a look at it.
00:36:29
I mean, a value and we'll do an episode about it at some point in the future because there's a problem.
00:36:34
It's a problem.
00:36:35
Yeah.
00:36:36
Yeah.
00:36:37
I actually wonder going back to the question about NPUs.
00:36:38
As that hardware starts to proliferate, as more GPUs have machine learning, and then it starts getting shoved into more CPUs, like, as more of that capability is out there, if more open projects will start springing up to take advantage of it and leverage it for stuff like photo organization,
00:36:54
like the computer's not there yet in a critical mass to be worth making something like that yet, but I mean, get there.
00:37:01
It is.
00:37:02
If you look at it though, it is.
00:37:03
The GPUs have been around for a long time that can do this stuff.
00:37:05
So like, if you have a dedicated machine, it's a piece of cake.
00:37:10
Yeah.
00:37:11
You know, by looking at the way open source projects spring up, I could definitely see people just looking at the amount of extra machine learning capability out there at some point and just going like, hey, we should start using this for good.
00:37:22
That's true.
00:37:23
Start doing something like what we're talking about here.
00:37:25
This is not really in the same category as the photo organization, but have you heard of paperless NGX?
00:37:29
Is this the thing that you scan your documents into and then they become, yeah, that sounds nice.
00:37:35
Or you can feed it existing documents as well.
00:37:37
I haven't looked into it too much.
00:37:38
I am totally going to set it up at some point though.
00:37:40
It's basically a document organization library.
00:37:42
It's an open source project.
00:37:44
I think it will take all the documents you feed it and convert them into some kind of standard PDF form or searchability, but it will also keep all the original documents there alongside.
00:37:54
But it's just like a web interface that indexes all the documents you feed it and makes them searchable and everything.
00:37:59
It seems pretty great.
00:38:01
I'm going to check that out at some point.
00:38:03
So the one, the thing that I've looked at that I think is the one I'm going to start trying is called photo structure.
00:38:11
It was recommended by folks.
00:38:13
There's a thread about this from not too long ago, two years ago in our data hoarders.
00:38:19
And it's a big, it's a big giant project.
00:38:23
It's paid.
00:38:24
It's not super expensive.
00:38:27
It's like, it's one of those ones where like the light version is really good and you get more stuff if you give them a 50 bucks a year or something.
00:38:35
Sure.
00:38:37
I don't know.
00:38:38
I haven't tested it, but it's where I'm going to start and then I'm going to go from there.
00:38:42
All kinds of stuff out there.
00:38:43
Yeah.
00:38:44
Actually, let's see.
00:38:45
I have a question.
00:38:46
This is okay.
00:38:47
This dovetails with the last one pretty well from patch.
00:38:50
There's been a lot of talk over the past few episodes about curbing hoarding habits in meat space, but what about in cyberspace?
00:38:57
Any tips for rationalizing all the data I have across my various, across my NAS, various cloud services and computer hard drives.
00:39:05
I've worked out in total.
00:39:06
I have about 10 terabytes of storage I've accumulated over the past decade or so.
00:39:10
I would decide what to keep versus delete and what's a good way to sort through it all for duplicated data.
00:39:15
I say don't worry about duplicated data.
00:39:17
That's just, that's just free backups.
00:39:19
Yeah.
00:39:20
Like for real though, de-duping stuff is scary and it's how you lose data.
00:39:25
Yeah.
00:39:26
Yes.
00:39:27
I mean, there are applications out there that will find duplicated stuff for you, but you have to be very careful to make sure you know that it's definitely in an exact dupe.
00:39:34
I don't worry about digital hoarding as long as I can find the stuff that I need.
00:39:37
Yeah.
00:39:38
Yeah.
00:39:39
I have four folders.
00:39:40
One is for video, one is for music, one is for documents, and one is for just assorted things.
00:39:46
Okay.
00:39:47
That seems sensible.
00:39:48
Yeah.
00:39:49
That's all the data you need can fit in those four buckets.
00:39:51
Yeah.
00:39:52
This doesn't help for sorting so much, but I mean, we've advocated everything.
00:39:56
The void tools, everything is a great way to index all of your data.
00:40:00
So you can at least search it very quickly, and that could help you sort through and find things to delete.
00:40:04
Then you don't have to sort it though if you index everything appropriately.
00:40:07
Yeah.
00:40:08
Sure.
00:40:09
Of course you have to know what you're looking for.
00:40:10
That's true.
00:40:11
A search tool is great for targeted retrieval of something, but if you just want to browse everything and it's a gigantic mess, it doesn't help so much.
00:40:18
But like if I wanted to find my X-Men Legends 2 ROM disk that I pulled off of a game tuning copy, I'm good to go.
00:40:26
Everything has been amazing for sorting through the gigantic mystery library that I have accumulated.
00:40:31
For example, I wish I had a better answer here because I am also in this boat badly, and I can't think of much besides just forcing it.
00:40:38
You just got to set some time aside and get in there and I've got somebody like whole hard drive backups on my NAS from the last 15 to 20 years of computers.
00:40:48
There are entire windows and stalls in there because I was too lazy to, once I backed up an entire hard drive, go in there and delete application files I don't need.
00:40:57
Here's the way you do it as easy as you have.
00:41:00
On your desktop, you have a folder called my old C drive, and then you go into C users in that old C drive, and on the desktop folder there, there's one that says old C drive there,
00:41:11
and then you just keep going back in time until you're like a 25-meg, 386 hard drive.
00:41:17
I've got countless nested old desktop folders on the NAS from about the time I moved out here in 2003.
00:41:25
The big problem I have right now is that I have in my garage, there's a cardboard box that's on the low shelf that has about 50 hard drives in it because I just pull the hard drive from every old computer.
00:41:36
Yep.
00:41:37
Well, I at least have started disposing of the drives after I back them up now.
00:41:40
Oh, that's good.
00:41:41
You're wasting them.
00:41:42
So that's the real answer to this question is just every three years or so, just wait for a good shaking deal or something, just buy more hard drives and then you don't have to think about it anyway.
00:41:51
You waste it all.
00:41:52
It's a constant problem.
00:41:54
It is a real problem.
00:41:56
Now, let's stay on the theme of old stuff here a little bit.
00:41:59
I got a little old stuff.
00:42:00
A question from Park who may not love old stuff so much.
00:42:04
I have never enjoyed platformers, Metroidvania's, or boomershooters, but it feels like so many of the personalities we love are obsessed with those.
00:42:11
I just don't know how we are supposed to handle that anymore.
00:42:15
It's like the old guy at your job that has radio control that doesn't stop listening to classic rock.
00:42:19
I feel kind of attacked here, but this I don't know that I like boomershooters just to be real.
00:42:26
I like the ones I grew up with, but that's just a retro game.
00:42:31
That's a boomer shooter.
00:42:32
I like doom and quake and to a much lesser extent, Duke 3D and some other stuff like that.
00:42:37
But I got nothing against the current and the modern day retro like throwback first person shooters that come out.
00:42:43
I just don't play a ton of them.
00:42:46
If I had a bumper sticker, it would say I'd rather be playing quake 3.
00:42:50
Yes.
00:42:51
Yes.
00:42:52
I am, I am like, believe it or not, after only two or three years of talking about this, I am inching closer to my ultimate dream of running full-time quake servers out of here.
00:43:01
Oh, I thought you were going to say growing John Romero hair and I tried that, but way lies madness if you're not John Romero.
00:43:09
I mean, the thing that I was going to hook on here is the idea that the personalities we love are obsessed with those and I feel like there are people like, for example,
00:43:20
there are people whose work that I love that are into like cozy games and farming sims and stuff like that.
00:43:26
And like, look, did I play a lot of Rusty's retirement this year?
00:43:29
Yes.
00:43:30
But also when I played Rusty's retirement, it was just kind of running at the bottom of my second monitor and I wasn't, I was engaging with it ever so lightly.
00:43:39
It's not like I find it's okay for me to appreciate stuff without having the same kind of love or obsession or whatever this is really, really into it is.
00:43:49
For sure.
00:43:50
Or just not like, there's some stuff that I, like Brad, there's stuff that you like that I just don't give a shit about and that's fine.
00:43:56
Much to my ongoing chakran, I can't tell you about them whenever I want to.
00:43:59
Look, I don't want to hear about your weird Vim stuff, man.
00:44:02
And it's not telling you how I'm like, I'm way more productive with it.
00:44:06
I'm not.
00:44:07
I'm not joking.
00:44:08
I love your growth hacking and I'm proud of you for engaging and expanding your horizons.
00:44:14
I don't do enough text editing to need.
00:44:16
Yeah, that's fair.
00:44:17
That's totally fair.
00:44:18
I wish I had the study in front of me that has been, I've been seeing some people on social media posting.
00:44:23
I don't even know if it's a new study or not, but it seems to prove like I'm like a very, very definitively that's, in fact, I think you would have heard of this when I brought it up to you off air that the ages between 10 and 15 are pretty much like universally recognized by everyone on earth as the best time in their lives.
00:44:39
In terms of like, you know, the study is asking specific questions about like, when were the best movies released?
00:44:45
What do I like?
00:44:46
You know, when was your favorite music?
00:44:48
And it's like without fail, there's just a kind of build curve right in the middle of like age 12 or for everyone.
00:44:56
So yeah, I'm looking at the Washington Post article that was going around today with this.
00:45:01
It was by Andrew Vendamm, whose profile picture looks like one of those AI-generated user icons, which bumps me out.
00:45:08
But anyway, um, he says that this is a uGov thing who surveyed a bunch of people.
00:45:15
And the, the commonality is that it's when you're 10 to 15 years old.
00:45:19
Basically.
00:45:20
Yeah.
00:45:21
I mean, that's not exactly news to people like that that mom non has been incredibly evident in video games for a very long time.
00:45:26
You know, like you can, you can chart what is popular in a retro sense with like the age of people relative to when they were about that age.
00:45:33
You know, it's like finally, the Final Fantasy 7 remakes fully came about because all the people who were 12 when Final Fantasy 7 came out are in their prime disposable income years.
00:45:44
Yeah.
00:45:45
It's the people who are into retro hardware were watched to this happen with the Ness and this Ness and the Genesis and the Saturn and then we're now moving into late 90s.
00:45:55
And early 2000s versions of that stuff.
00:45:57
Wait, so my GameCube stuff is where Xbox One is worth something now?
00:46:01
Oh, dude, people are modding original Xbox is left and right.
00:46:04
Have we now talked about this?
00:46:05
No, we should do an episode about this.
00:46:06
Are you kidding me?
00:46:07
Yeah.
00:46:08
People are, are people are coming up with homebrew interposers to put a different CPU socket in an original Xbox.
00:46:13
What?
00:46:14
So they can put a faster, yeah, era appropriate Intel CPU in there.
00:46:17
That is nuts.
00:46:18
Yes.
00:46:19
It's, there are some crazy videos on YouTube.
00:46:21
You can go find was the original Xbox like a seller on 700 or something.
00:46:24
I believe that's about right.
00:46:25
Actually, it's like a 733 record.
00:46:27
So, people are putting like 1.4 gigahertz Intel CPUs into the original Xboxes now and like quadrupling the system memory and stuff.
00:46:36
That's crazy.
00:46:37
It's wild.
00:46:38
So yeah, anyway, the point is, Stephen King wrote about this years and years ago in his on writing book, or maybe some, this is one of the other books, but his thesis was always that when you look in the mirror,
00:46:51
you see yourself as you were 19, and I bought it for a long time.
00:46:56
Like, 15 is maybe younger.
00:46:58
I was not, my best years were not when I was 15.
00:47:01
Let's say I was 15 in 1990, so it was like guns and roses and like, for me, 20 was much better than 15.
00:47:08
We'd grunge.
00:47:09
We had alternative.
00:47:11
Hip hop was good.
00:47:13
Yeah.
00:47:14
Anyway, all your favorite personalities aren't obsessed with boomer shooters.
00:47:17
I swear now onto this next question from Ptown 356.
00:47:21
This is a serious question for serious people.
00:47:23
Better Doom shotgun, a single or double barrel, double barrel, baby, my real hesitation.
00:47:28
Oh, I like that.
00:47:30
I think I'm partial to the single shot.
00:47:32
What?
00:47:33
I've just something about it.
00:47:35
Something about the firing rate and the sound effect.
00:47:38
Oh, the truck and then the, then the, like you had to, you had to be thoughtful using that double barrel because it took so long to reload.
00:47:45
Yes.
00:47:46
That's for sure.
00:47:47
I just, I don't, I also don't find the spread on it that useful.
00:47:49
Like, the double barrel is good for running up to an enemy that takes a lot of damage and dumping into them and killing them faster.
00:47:55
Yeah.
00:47:56
But I would never use it on like a crowd of smaller enemies.
00:47:59
No.
00:48:00
Shotguns aren't for crowds.
00:48:01
Like, look, you walk right up a pinky demon in the face and you pop that thing with a double barrel.
00:48:06
It goes to sleep forever, Brad.
00:48:07
Yeah, it's true.
00:48:08
It's true.
00:48:09
I don't know.
00:48:10
I kind of feel like the Doom, the regular Doom shotgun is the quake rocket launcher of Doom.
00:48:14
I mean, I would say the rocket launcher is the quake rocket launcher of Doom.
00:48:18
I mean, the Doom rocket launcher is fine, but it's not necessarily my favorite weapon.
00:48:22
When I used to play a lot of Doom multiplayer, honestly, the big chain gun was probably the thing, like, as a person who almost exclusively played against people who only played with the keyboard and I was using the mouse.
00:48:33
So I was like a god amongst men.
00:48:36
The chain gun was made you an unstoppable killing machine because it was his scan.
00:48:41
It would, you could just stick it on the person, you didn't have to aim, you had to aim, but like, it was really easy with the mouse.
00:48:48
And I was not a big shotgun multiplayer guy at all.
00:48:52
Sure.
00:48:53
I could see it.
00:48:54
You did an unimaginative suit in them one.
00:48:56
Sure.
00:48:57
Well, I was saving that for last, actually.
00:48:59
Oh, okay.
00:49:00
Let's come back to that one.
00:49:01
Okay.
00:49:02
I think that's a good closer for the holidays here.
00:49:04
Okay.
00:49:05
I've got a few that I pulled from past episodes that we didn't get to that I really wanted to.
00:49:09
Let's see.
00:49:10
Here's one from ZXED.
00:49:11
I have a razor orb weaver MMO keypad that has been unsupported for a long time, which I've continually had to reanimate by replacing switches, et cetera.
00:49:20
This is because my while muscle memory is fully tied to it now, even going as far as filming a switch replacement for others in the same predicament.
00:49:28
Oh, man.
00:49:29
What pieces of old technology have you committed to keep running, whether due to reliance or you just prefer them to what's out there, Colonel?
00:49:34
Boy, that's tough.
00:49:36
I did.
00:49:37
I kept, I kept a natural keyboard pro going for a really, really long time.
00:49:42
Sure.
00:49:43
Yeah.
00:49:44
You could see that.
00:49:45
I don't, I mean, my, my sanitizer HD 580s have replaced all the hardware on them.
00:49:52
And this like cables, headband pads, I had to, I had to re, like I broke the arm off of them one time and I had to fix that, but I don't actually,
00:50:03
I don't use them on the day to day anymore, because I use these wireless ones now.
00:50:07
Yeah.
00:50:08
That's understandable.
00:50:09
That is, that is maybe the classic headphone.
00:50:11
I feel like there was an audio file, like an audio file blog that did an article about them.
00:50:17
A retrospective a few years ago that was like, this is the thing that kicked off high-end headphones.
00:50:22
Like it was headphones kicked off the whole high-end headphones scene.
00:50:24
Totally.
00:50:25
Totally.
00:50:26
I got a slightly lower end sanitizer model around the time that was got big and I bought them referred when I was in college because I don't have a lot of money, but yes, like getting my, getting your hands on your first pair of sanitizers around the turn of the century was a very eye-opening or year-opening moment.
00:50:38
Well, there's a video of me going into like the silent sound booth on the CES floor at the Sennheiser booth in probably 2011 or 2012 that I got to put on a pair of $4,000 headphones.
00:50:51
Wow.
00:50:52
I mean, and like part of the value of that was being in a quiet room on the floor of the CES show was real nice, but also they sounded,
00:51:03
the headphones sounded like it was not, it was not a, just to be clear, not a listening environment that you could reasonably compare and evaluate a multi-thousand dollar pair of headphones,
00:51:17
which is a ridiculous purchase there.
00:51:20
They sounded real good, though.
00:51:21
I bet.
00:51:22
I bet.
00:51:23
My answer, the only answer I'd come up with here is actually also sound related.
00:51:26
It's these Cambridge sound works, PC works, and those are classics.
00:51:30
Things are built like a tank.
00:51:32
They still sound quite good.
00:51:33
I'm like, I'm sure they're a bit, well, actually, I don't know if they're a better sounding speaker.
00:51:39
They're the clips from 1.2.1s, probably are better or comparable at worst, but these are still actually quite good for what they are,
00:51:49
and they take up so little desk space, which is great.
00:51:51
Also, I'm just very attached to them from a nostalgic standpoint at this point, like the fact that these are the ones I bought in college when Quake 3 got big, and they're still going,
00:52:02
just kind of makes me feel a little connected to those housing and days, I guess.
00:52:07
Also, the subwoofer has been powered on almost continuously for the last 20-something years, and it's still going.
00:52:14
I, at the same time, bought a set of all-tech lensing ACS-48s, which was the other, like, the 2.1 speaker/subwoofer speaker sets came out at about the same time,
00:52:27
and the sound works was one of them, the ACS-48s with the other.
00:52:31
The ACS-48 subwoofer was wood, and it had this kind of thin, thin stretched nylon, it was almost like foam that was stretched,
00:52:41
but it wasn't, it was cloth, but the cloth broke down over time and turned yellow and got transparent, and then eventually started crumbling, and I got rid of mine when that happened.
00:52:49
That's a shame.
00:52:50
And I have regrets.
00:52:51
Yeah.
00:52:52
Old speakers tend to hold up when they're good.
00:52:56
I found an eBay auction of, I think it was a four-speaker, because remember, they started doing, like, four-point versions of the PC works, didn't they do four-point twos, even?
00:53:04
I think there were some of those, yes, but this, this was a black one, minor beige, and it was, like, a, not new in-box, but a good shape in-box, like, black set of these, and I should have bought it.
00:53:15
It just felt frivolous to buy.
00:53:16
That's true.
00:53:17
That's a lot to have a black set of these things, and maybe I'll keep looking at eBay for that.
00:53:20
Also, the last thing I'll say real quick, I probably have said this exact thing before on this podcast.
00:53:25
It turned out that my sister had also bought these same speakers when she was in college.
00:53:29
That's amazing.
00:53:30
A few years after me, and didn't use them that much, and then I discovered them in the parent and my parents' basement a few years ago.
00:53:38
Oh, man.
00:53:39
And Hoover, that whole set up immediately.
00:53:41
And so now I have an entire backup set that is very lightly used of these same speakers.
00:53:45
Oh, my God.
00:53:46
And considering this set of speakers has lasted me since '99 or 2000.
00:53:50
It's so sounding weird.
00:53:51
It's so sounding weird, but I might never use another pair of other model of PC speakers in my entire life.
00:54:00
It's really funny, because these days I have a set of monitors, like nice studio monitor speakers, that I don't ever use because the number of wires that you need for them to work right is just too much.
00:54:17
So I am jelly of your sound works is, yeah, they're pretty damaged.
00:54:22
You're covered for the rest of your life, man.
00:54:24
Yeah, that's right.
00:54:25
It's kind of a good feeling, you know?
00:54:26
Okay, to go.
00:54:27
It's like that fight club thing with the living room set, you know.
00:54:30
I've got the speakers, whatever else happens, I've got the speaker thing covered.
00:54:33
I don't think that was a good thing, but it's worth it.
00:54:36
No, it was not.
00:54:37
Yeah.
00:54:38
This is a good question from Try.
00:54:40
I recently purchased an entry-level mirrorless camera for photography.
00:54:44
It came with a bonus power bank that focuses on jump-starting dead car batteries.
00:54:49
While yes, it does have USB ports.
00:54:50
It doesn't appear that my camera can charge the battery through USB.
00:54:53
So my question is, what's the weirdest thrown in freebie that you've gotten with a high-cost purchase?
00:54:59
I don't think I've ever gotten a freebie, like some weird off thing.
00:55:04
Yeah.
00:55:05
The only one I could think of, this was not a high-cost purchase by any means, but I bought, um, I had a couple of, I believe it was these network.
00:55:12
I mean, it was either the network, no, I think it was my host bus adapter.
00:55:15
It was one of the server-pulled PCIE cards that is in my PC and NAS now that lets you use a bunch of extra hard drives and do the 40 gigabit networking and all that.
00:55:24
I think it was the, anyway, it came with, you know, like for a one-year rack mount, like half-hite mounting bracket on a PCIE card.
00:55:33
The card I got only had that half-hite and I needed the full height to mount it in a regular ATX case.
00:55:38
So I had to go out there and find the exact right bracket.
00:55:42
Maybe it was these network cards.
00:55:43
I don't remember.
00:55:44
Anyway, I had to go find the right bracket to fit on the cut to replace on the card to mount it in my actual case.
00:55:49
They sent, it was like a pair of the brackets with the brackets came a melon slicer.
00:55:54
Have you ever seen one of these, like, rotating, like on a, like the kind of, like a, I don't know how you describe it?
00:56:00
It's like an old Apple dealer and a slicer and core, but it's like a melon-sized, right?
00:56:04
A series of blades on a, like, a little hedge kind of thing that you just roll it along and slide, like, carve out little chunks of melon as you roll it.
00:56:11
Yeah, that sounds dope.
00:56:12
Like, why did I get a melon slicer with this server mounting bracket hardware?
00:56:17
There was a guy selling those at FogFest last year.
00:56:20
That sounded great.
00:56:21
I almost bought one.
00:56:22
I regret to say we never actually tried it and then we ended up donating it.
00:56:25
Oh, well.
00:56:26
But, you know, it was amazing.
00:56:28
It could have changed your life.
00:56:29
It was, you know, it was fun just to contemplate why the hell they did that.
00:56:33
I remember the first time I bought it, I bought, um, the, my microphone and chalk mount has these rubber bands that occasionally, I mean, I, you know what, I say occasionally.
00:56:43
When I first bought this microphone, I went through, like, six of them in no time and then it hasn't broken it all in three years.
00:56:48
So knock on wood.
00:56:49
Yeah.
00:56:50
But, um, I ordered replacement rubber bands from Sweetwater.
00:56:54
And when I opened it up and there was a little pack of hard candy in there, I was real excited.
00:56:58
That's the best thing I've got.
00:56:59
And I think, do you eat candy?
00:57:00
I mean, I probably had a, I probably had a mint, I, I'm not, I'm, I'm, butterscotch is a, like, like, butterscotch was not hot when I was 10 to 15 years old.
00:57:11
Therefore, I do not feel strong in this knowledge of for it.
00:57:13
Man.
00:57:14
You don't like butterscotch candy?
00:57:15
Oh, fuck.
00:57:16
Butterscotch is bad.
00:57:17
Oh, yeah.
00:57:18
Is where there's original butterscotch or is that its own thing?
00:57:19
I think it's where there's, I think that's where there's original where there's, where there's, I'll give it an exception to it.
00:57:24
I bet my teeth would hurt now if I ate where there's, oh, yeah, you can't, you can't buy down on that.
00:57:28
I mean, even if I just sucked on them, probably, yes, um, let's see here, Western from sea music.
00:57:35
This one is from late November.
00:57:36
Okay.
00:57:37
I am about to buy an eye-racing subscription.
00:57:40
What's the worst thing you've bought on Black Friday?
00:57:42
I bought an eye-racing subscription last Black Friday and then I, we play you use it like four times because setting up the wheels such an enormous pain in the ass that I hardly ever do it.
00:57:50
I can see that.
00:57:51
Yeah.
00:57:52
I need a rec room.
00:57:53
Is the lesson, right?
00:57:54
Yeah, yeah.
00:57:55
I would love to have a basement that I could just chuck a sled in and pick up a spare monitor and that would be so nice.
00:58:02
Yep.
00:58:03
That's the dream.
00:58:04
Um, I don't know if this is like a, this is not a worst purchase necessarily, but I bought a year of a virtual private server on Black Friday.
00:58:12
That seems like an awesome thing to do if you want to host games at home.
00:58:14
Yeah.
00:58:15
Yeah.
00:58:16
Like I said, I'm getting closer to my dream of running Quake servers and related stuff.
00:58:19
I haven't, I haven't spent a lot of time with it.
00:58:22
I'm still working on home stuff that before I can really get into that more, but that was a fun one.
00:58:27
I got a good deal on it.
00:58:29
They, they just send you the hosts that I went with again.
00:58:33
It was a very good deal.
00:58:34
It was maybe not the most recommended host out there, but, uh, it was very cheap.
00:58:37
That's fine.
00:58:38
They just, they just email you the root log in like the default, the stock, I would change that one.
00:58:44
The stock Rocky Linux image that they deployed on my VPS right after I bought it just they just has, it has, it has root SSH login enabled and they just emailed me the login.
00:58:52
That's fine.
00:58:53
That seems fine.
00:58:54
And I, you know, nobody got into it, but I did leave it running overnight the first night.
00:58:58
Got out the next morning and logged back into it.
00:58:59
And it said, roughly, um, there was something like 571 failed login attempts to the VPS overnight while I left it running.
00:59:07
Yep.
00:59:08
And I disabled root log in and changed the SSH port immediately, but if there is much work yet to be done on that thing.
00:59:14
Yeah, that's a, yeah, great power comes great responsibility in that situation, Brad.
00:59:18
You know, it's fun though.
00:59:19
If you spend a lot of time SSHing into machines in your house all the time, yeah.
00:59:24
And then later you get a VPS and you realize, Oh, I'm actually just doing the same thing to a data center in Texas now that I have been doing in my house for the last five years.
00:59:31
It's like, Oh, this is exactly the same stuff.
00:59:34
I've actually prepared myself well for this.
00:59:36
Yep.
00:59:37
I'm excited to mess around with that.
00:59:38
I'm excited to hear that goes.
00:59:40
I hadn't ever considered using one of those as a proxy to host servers, but it's a good idea.
00:59:44
That's well.
00:59:45
So in the case of like the Quake servers, like, those are, you know, that's 30 year old software practically.
00:59:49
Like I could just run those right on the VPS.
00:59:52
They're truly no reason to proxy those to my house other than the wish fulfillment of I would love to know that the Quake servers are running on the box next to my desk.
01:00:00
Well, also, depending on how I can't write Quake might be bigger than your, like often on those V those cheap VPS is the storage is only like 100 gigs or something like that.
01:00:11
You might actually fill it up, depending on, or no, no, it's not even that.
01:00:14
It's like 12 gigs or something.
01:00:15
It's my line out.
01:00:16
I got very good specs.
01:00:17
Like I said, this was not, this was not one of the high end providers.
01:00:20
The charge is a lot.
01:00:22
I got shockingly good specs for about five bucks a month on this one.
01:00:25
Okay.
01:00:26
That's pretty good.
01:00:27
I'm not sure how fast it is though.
01:00:28
It seemed like maybe a little sluggish.
01:00:29
Anyway, we'll talk about that more when I dig into it more.
01:00:32
Yeah.
01:00:33
I'd be interested here.
01:00:34
How it goes?
01:00:35
Let's see.
01:00:36
Here's another shags McGoo question.
01:00:36
How many tabs do you have open at this exact moment?
01:00:39
What do you think is the optimal number of tabs to have?
01:00:41
Any general time?
01:00:42
I can't.
01:00:43
There's no easy way to count, but it's, yeah, I have to scroll and I open up the little list of tabs on the side of Firefox.
01:00:49
I'd say at most I probably end a day.
01:00:53
I'm just ballparking here anywhere from 50 to 100, probably not 100 is like I've been deep down a rabbit hole of pursuing some project that I'm trying to figure out or some dealing with some Linux issue or something like normal,
01:01:06
normal day, like maybe two or three dozen at a time.
01:01:10
You're still counting.
01:01:11
You're just sitting there making mouth.
01:01:12
Sixty two.
01:01:13
I have to talk when you move your mouth.
01:01:14
Sixty two is where I end up.
01:01:16
Okay.
01:01:17
All right.
01:01:18
Yeah, that be sure.
01:01:19
That sounds.
01:01:20
I mean, that's kind of a heavy load for me at a time, but not that many.
01:01:23
That's looking at the start.
01:01:26
It's, yeah, no, I, yeah, this is, this is a several different days worth of searching.
01:01:33
Because I don't use my desktop computer a lot in the middle of the week sometimes.
01:01:36
So.
01:01:37
Huh?
01:01:38
You sleep.
01:01:39
A PC.
01:01:40
No, but I just restore all my tabs and I start mostly I, I, I clean slate everything every morning.
01:01:45
No, I can't.
01:01:46
I would never be able to remember what I was talking like I have everything from where to find Mariah Frozen, Mariah Carey, and Fortnite chapter six to some new stuff to like some gift stuff that I'm looking at to,
01:02:00
um, do you have pins?
01:02:02
Do you do pin tabs that always open not often in fact, kind of never actually.
01:02:06
Oh, man, I keep, I keep all my emails open in pin tabs.
01:02:09
I keep a blue sky in pin tabs.
01:02:11
I keep the Twitch control panel, home assistant.
01:02:13
I know.
01:02:14
Here's a question of the things.
01:02:15
Do you just use one big browser window for and with a million tabs in it?
01:02:19
So it depends.
01:02:20
If I'm doing, the one thing I do do is if I'm doing like a big project, it's going to open up a bazillion tabs like, for example, we already, clearly at the time we're recording this episode,
01:02:30
we already did a bunch of research about connectors and we're preparing to rank a bunch of connectors.
01:02:36
But when I did that, I definitely opened up a new tab, a new window rather, and then put all the tabs in there.
01:02:42
And then that way, though, that, that window is saved as well, because I have an extension that I use that I can just save, um, save an entire window state as a bookmark basically in the notes.
01:02:53
Again, when I want it.
01:02:54
That's, that's cool.
01:02:55
I should look into something like that.
01:02:56
Yeah.
01:02:57
I'll have, I'll have like four to seven different windows open at any given time.
01:02:59
Like I try to keep tabs sort of loosely sorted and windows based on subject.
01:03:04
Oh, yeah.
01:03:05
It's only two windows for me at most.
01:03:06
Yeah.
01:03:07
Well, unless I'm doing a video call, like right now I have Chrome open with our call in it.
01:03:12
And then I have two Firefox windows open.
01:03:14
Yeah.
01:03:15
The thing I'll say is saving the bookmarks as a group is really nice when I'm like, when I've done something on the server and I want to remember what I use to figure out how to do it.
01:03:25
It's a, it's a good, it's a good tool to come back to that.
01:03:29
Sure.
01:03:30
Um, I've, I've kind of become aware via social media recently that some people get like weirdly precious about their browser tabs as in they have hundreds to thousands open at a time and try to maintain them for months on end.
01:03:43
I just seems given hell, given how much memory modern browsers tend to consume, maybe seems a bit dubious.
01:03:52
Well, so that's why I stopped using Chrome and started using Firefox originally as Firefox with sleep tabs that are not, have not been touched in a while.
01:03:59
Yeah.
01:04:00
I think Chrome does that too now.
01:04:01
Chrome does that now too.
01:04:03
You can turn it off in Chrome if you want.
01:04:05
I think I turned it off because I have 64 game memory and I don't keep that many tabs open so I just want them to respond immediately.
01:04:10
Yeah.
01:04:11
See, I'm comfortable waiting 10 seconds, but yeah, I, uh, I don't, I don't worry too much.
01:04:18
Occasionally, I just declare a tab bankruptcy and open the first tab and then right click and say close everything on the right of this.
01:04:25
Yep.
01:04:26
That works.
01:04:27
Yeah.
01:04:28
The blinds it feels good to just purge everything.
01:04:29
Start fresh.
01:04:30
Every day, every morning, cold boot, fresh browser, that's, that's madness.
01:04:34
That way lies madness.
01:04:36
Way to live.
01:04:37
And so you've, you've highlighted this Tyler W, uh, I was just idly clicking, but it's a good question.
01:04:42
Now I've said it.
01:04:43
I have to read it.
01:04:44
I know you guys are deep in the business of learning new skills, especially, um, when they benefit your work or home life, but are there any skills that you have preemptively excuse yourself from ever learning for whatever reason?
01:04:54
For me, it's making espresso.
01:04:55
I love coffee and I love espresso, but once I stared into the abyss of the cost of having my own machine, operating and maintaining it.
01:05:01
I became perfectly fine with letting espresso be a rare treat that someone else makes for me.
01:05:07
What about you?
01:05:08
Man, espresso is precisely where I live with that.
01:05:11
Um, I, I, when I, when I wrote the PC building book at maximum PC, I took some of my money that I made from that and I bought a thousand dollar,
01:05:22
uh, espresso machine that I put on the counter and I kept filtered water around for it and I descaled it every two and a half months or three months.
01:05:32
And I never once, and I bought a good grinder and I learned how to do all the stuff and I went, went to the coffee shop downtown.
01:05:38
I took a class and I still never really got a good cup of coffee out of it.
01:05:43
Like it was okay, but it was not like the best that I ever did was on par with like a shitty Starbucks, um, and,
01:05:53
and as a result, it's just not, it's, it's so much hassle.
01:05:58
It takes so long for the thing to warm up it anyway.
01:06:01
They're better espresso machines on the market now than that one.
01:06:04
Like you can get for 500 bucks of breviled.
01:06:06
It's quite nice.
01:06:07
It's my understanding.
01:06:08
But like Tyler W, I'm happy to just let somebody do that for me.
01:06:13
I also think after trying it a few times, I don't know that I'm going to ever write.
01:06:18
Like, I'm, I think I'm always going to be the kind of person that can look at a script or look at some Python or something and kind of fuck with it until it works the way I want it to.
01:06:25
But I don't think I'm ever the person that's going to start with a blank page and end up with something that's usable.
01:06:30
Really?
01:06:31
Oh, I thought you were saying, okay, because the opposite for me, I don't, I'm not writing a ton of code, but I have very much found in the last couple of years that writing code is infinitely easier than reading it, reading somebody else's.
01:06:40
It's really funny because I have such a hard time knowing where to start with anything and I can always parse out how it works.
01:06:46
Interesting.
01:06:47
Or not always, but, but often, especially with stuff that's human readable like Python and, and, you know, PowerShell script, stuff like that.
01:06:56
Stuff like Python is much easier to parse than like C or whatever, which I dabbled with just a little bit.
01:07:00
But yeah, like, I've, I've got a number of like 75 to 400 line little Python utilities that are for, for all kinds of work stuff these days.
01:07:10
That's cool.
01:07:11
Do you, um, have you looked at like an advent of code and stuff like that?
01:07:14
Yeah, I'm familiar with it.
01:07:15
I've never had time to get into it.
01:07:17
Yeah.
01:07:18
It's embarrassing.
01:07:19
But I guess everybody's got, and maybe this is a good answer to this question.
01:07:21
Everybody's got like hobbies they tap out of due to lack of time and mental energy and stuff.
01:07:25
But I've had, I've had multiple aborted attempts to get into some lower level coding over the last couple of years, like, I got six or seven chapters into the Rust book.
01:07:34
Brad's Rust adventure.
01:07:35
I remember that.
01:07:36
Before I put it down, I got, and I started going through it.
01:07:39
I might pick this back up.
01:07:40
I started going through the classic Kernigan Ritchie, the C programming language.
01:07:43
I remember, yeah, yeah.
01:07:44
Like the one.
01:07:45
Maybe I've talked about that.
01:07:46
But that one, that one also, I was making some good progress, but stuff always just comes up.
01:07:52
And it's, it's hard to stick to something intensely technical like that if it's not your job.
01:07:55
For me, there's something really satisfying about going to the coffee shop and just being like, Hey, here's five dollars.
01:08:01
Yeah.
01:08:02
Sure.
01:08:03
Please make me a nice cup of coffee and you get to watch them doing you have a nice little conversation and like, you know, um, and it's like a special treat.
01:08:09
Yeah.
01:08:10
But the espresso example is a good one of like diminishing returns is not the right phrase, but it's something that requires so much commitment and time and trial and error to get even like modern,
01:08:21
moderately competent at that at a certain point.
01:08:24
Like there are other, there are other disciplines or skills you could gain way more, uh, proficiency in with the same amount of time that you are just barely scrambling to do anything with the spread.
01:08:35
You know what I'm saying?
01:08:36
You know, yeah.
01:08:37
Cause like, if you look, if you compare that to brewed coffee, like, like I am at this point, it takes me longer than a professional.
01:08:45
Like somebody who's good at it would to dial in new beans or whatever and figure out exactly what my temperature and grind and all and like linger time and all that stuff should be in the in the brew bed.
01:08:56
But I can, by the time I get to an end of a bag of coffee, I'm making really freaking good brewed coffee, right?
01:09:04
Like better than I'm going to get in most coffee shops, right.
01:09:07
And I, I did not, after spending two years with the espresso machine, I didn't think I was ever going to reach, I thought I'd probably plateaued, yeah, without spending a lot of money on hardware.
01:09:16
That's probably a good general answer to that question is when the, when the return on time investment does not seem high enough to justify at the time.
01:09:24
Yeah.
01:09:25
Like the neat thing that for me, the hard stuff is always, I think about like trying to learn an instrument as a kid, right?
01:09:32
And I think about, um, I think about.
01:09:37
So it's one of the things that I really like about what Roxmith does actually with teaching you how to play guitar is they give you, they give you a real sense of progress on almost every step along the way,
01:09:49
whether it's like learning a chord, learning how to strum or learning how to pump mute or, you know, whatever, whatever technique it is you're learning, they then turn it around into, hey, why don't you try this song and you can play like the easy version of this song with the thing that you just learned.
01:10:06
And because they have this huge library of music attached to that, that they understand what is being applied at different levels of difficulty and all that in the, in the, in the game.
01:10:16
It makes it, it takes away that, hey, I've been doing the same thing for six weeks and I haven't made any progress feeling that was so common when I was, when I was like learning at taking piano lessons as a kid or whatever.
01:10:27
Yeah, sometimes it's just about finding the right force of study or teaching tool or something.
01:10:32
Yeah.
01:10:33
I still like learning new stuff, learning new stuff is always fun, and if people have recommendations on the programming thing, like I would, I just, I am, I have a hard time looking at a book, I know that works for you,
01:10:44
but it is not the way I, I work on that kind of stuff.
01:10:47
Yeah, it does, it actually doesn't work for me as well as you might think that might be why I tapped out on those, like, I mean, I can learn from books, but it's like the thing that always works for me and this is actually pretty tough to just contrive something in this space,
01:10:58
but having a goal in mind before I start, like, yeah, every time I have learned the most, and it's mostly been Python, but every time I've learned the most of it is when I went, like, man, I wish I could automate this thing that I do all the time for work.
01:11:10
And like the drive to automate that, you know, like the drive to like, man, if I could save myself 30 minutes a week for the next three years, this would be worth it.
01:11:18
Like, having the goal in mind, then you just start learning the things you need to do to accomplish that goal and that's the best kind of the way that I have learned in the most motivated way.
01:11:28
The thing for me is the, is the, so I want, like, the advent of code is a really good example because it's this nice package set of almost puzzles,
01:11:39
right?
01:11:39
Like they're like programming puzzles and they give you a unique data set.
01:11:44
So you have to like parse this huge amount of data and then come up with the answer, which is like a number you type into a field on a website.
01:11:51
And they're all personalized.
01:11:53
The part that it's missing is they expect you to have a base level of competency.
01:11:59
And I wish that they had, there was some, I wish I knew, I wish I could find something that was like that that started with, you know, CS100 stuff.
01:12:08
Like here's how you place your headers and here's how you, here's how you run this and here's how you do this stuff because like that, that's the part that I don't, I don't even, it's, it's often the problem.
01:12:18
We talked about this a lot on, uh, still entitled with Adam.
01:12:21
And when you're looking, it's like when you're making something and you don't, you know what the thing is, you know that the part exists, you know, you've seen it, but you don't know that it's called like a left handed flange.
01:12:31
Right.
01:12:32
So you don't have a way to search for it on the internet and you can't just say, Hey, I want something that looks like this, but it's, it's the other way.
01:12:39
So figuring out what, what the thing is that you're looking for is actually the hard part, not looking for it, I guess.
01:12:45
Yeah.
01:12:46
I mean, that's a constant problem or something like that.
01:12:49
Yeah.
01:12:50
All right.
01:12:51
We're running a little long here so I will spare you this question about Nick's OS.
01:12:55
We can save it for the best for an episode as much as I'm excited to talk, I would like to talk about Nick's OS for the handful of Nick's OS sickos on the discord shout out to Nick's OS some other time.
01:13:05
I don't have time to learn it.
01:13:06
Speaking of learning things, yeah, I don't have time to learn a whole new programming language to demonstrate my Linux install that would let you look.
01:13:15
This is a good example of a thing that the reward is not worth the time.
01:13:18
Yeah.
01:13:20
The next users on the discord would maybe disagree.
01:13:23
I mean, what if you were effectively programming your operating system, which is to say you were like writing a single program that if your entire boot drive ever got hosed, you can reinstall Nick's,
01:13:33
apply that configuration and it would just do everything again.
01:13:37
Like it's, it's, it's declarative Linux is what it is.
01:13:39
It's, we should not get it.
01:13:41
Well, that's what like vagrant and all that stuff does for environment.
01:13:43
Yeah.
01:13:44
It's still like Ansible for, we're just getting IT stuff here now or DevOps or whatever.
01:13:49
Like that's just, it's just like reproducible easily archived configurations for stuff.
01:13:53
But anyway.
01:13:54
Yeah.
01:13:55
I get the appeal as somebody whose Dev environment is a two day setup minimum.
01:14:00
I mean, honestly, the thing that really got me think about Nick's was that EPS, you know, it's like something ever happened to that VPS and frankly, you would hope the corporation with a data center has better backup strategies than you have at home.
01:14:12
And you know, Bill went ahead with hopes and the other, and I, and I could just learn something like Ansible and apply that to any Linux distro, but where you could just put everything in Docker containers and then export your Docker files.
01:14:23
Yeah.
01:14:24
Well, you've always got file sharing and, and firewall and all kinds of, all kinds of base level stuff to set up.
01:14:30
Anyway.
01:14:31
All right.
01:14:32
Maybe we'll, maybe we'll get back to that question another time.
01:14:34
Yeah.
01:14:35
Let's end with the unimaginative pseudonym question that we alluded to earlier.
01:14:40
Was will train his child to accept the surveillance state by having an elf on the shelf in his home?
01:14:45
Fuck that.
01:14:46
Oh, sorry.
01:14:47
Hold on.
01:14:48
You got to put it in here because we got to say if you have kids in the car or something, maybe pause the podcast.
01:14:54
I'll give you a few seconds to hit the pause button.
01:14:56
Yes.
01:14:57
Okay.
01:14:58
That's long enough.
01:14:59
Fuck that elf, man.
01:15:00
That elf is a fucking narc.
01:15:01
Man.
01:15:02
I feel like I feel like the worm has turned hard on the elf on the shelf.
01:15:06
And like this year or maybe last year, I started seeing so a lot of like resentment toward the elf.
01:15:10
Go, man.
01:15:11
Parents.
01:15:12
Okay.
01:15:13
So do you know, do you know, do you know how the elf works like vaguely like, you know, you move it around.
01:15:17
I mean, the elf moves around on its own like one like every night.
01:15:20
Doesn't it appear somewhere else or something?
01:15:22
Okay.
01:15:23
So first off, they marketed it as the elf on the shelf, a Christmas tradition, but it appeared out of nowhere like 10 years ago.
01:15:30
Oh, that sucks.
01:15:31
2005 is when it is when it first came out or they are they like fooling people into thinking this thing's been around since the 60s or something.
01:15:38
That is precisely what's happening is that it's like, it's like they, they manufactured a tradition and sold it with a book and merch.
01:15:46
Oh, that's gross.
01:15:47
And the story is that the elf hides in people's homes to narc on them to Santa Claus when they fuck up.
01:15:54
And when it goes to bed, whenever he goes to bed, it goes to the North Pole, narc's to Santa and then comes back about good and bad stuff and then comes back in a different place.
01:16:05
Okay.
01:16:06
So for real parents with kids in the car, especially if you're in on the elf-narking, turn off the radio now.
01:16:12
So is this thing, is this thing just a behavior control mechanism?
01:16:15
Is that what you're saying?
01:16:16
Yeah, it's a behavior control mechanism.
01:16:18
So, but that means somebody has to move the doll around.
01:16:23
The kids aren't allowed to touch the doll because if you touch it, if you, if somebody moves it and most people don't know this, but if somebody touches it, the magic gets drained away and then it's just a crappy elf doll.
01:16:35
So like if you go into somebody's house and you grab their elf on the shelf and go, "Oh, you have an elf on the shelf."
01:16:40
That's really cool.
01:16:41
You've killed the elf.
01:16:42
Oh, my God.
01:16:43
Yeah.
01:16:44
That's too much responsibility.
01:16:45
Yeah.
01:16:46
So, don't touch me.
01:16:48
My magic might go is what it says in the book and Santa won't hear all I've seen or I know.
01:16:53
Wait, this thing is a siop.
01:16:55
It is, it is super fucked up, dude.
01:16:59
When you, when we, I'd not engage with it at all until we went to elementary school and until my daughter went to elementary school and then she was like, "Hey, why don't we have an elf?"
01:17:09
And I was like, "What the hell is the elf?"
01:17:11
And I looked at it and I was like, "Oh, hell no.
01:17:12
We're not getting an elf.
01:17:13
This is the worst thing I've ever heard."
01:17:15
That's tedious.
01:17:16
Yeah.
01:17:17
That's some full-on like debiers, like Diamond is forever engagement ring.
01:17:21
Like, this has been a thing forever and not just like in the 20s that we ginned up to make people pay five times too much for diamonds.
01:17:28
Yep.
01:17:29
So, okay.
01:17:30
So here's the story on Wikipedia, according to this, it was written by Carol, Carol Abersold and her daughter, Chanda Bell, and that this was based on their family tradition of an elf sent from Santa that watches over the children at Christmas time.
01:17:46
And then they, they used the other daughter's, Krista Pits' expertise in sales and marketing and spent three years promoting their self-published book.
01:17:57
And then they released the toy and now it's in Target.
01:18:00
And it's literally marketed as the elf on the shelf, a Christmas tradition, which is icky.
01:18:07
I don't like that phrasing at all.
01:18:09
It's still big.
01:18:10
Like, I first heard about it like 10, 12 years ago or something, maybe.
01:18:15
My guess.
01:18:16
Okay.
01:18:17
So there's a lot of stuff that you get roped into as parents that, like, so it's like Roblox.
01:18:24
Like, when you're, when your kids like, "Hey, can I play with my friend?"
01:18:26
They're on Roblox and you're like, "Sure, Roblox sounds," like, that's the thing I've heard of before.
01:18:31
We should put them on there.
01:18:32
Not knowing that it's like a toxic hell stew of, like, the worst monetization and micro-transaction box games that, like, worse even than Korean MMOs in terms of,
01:18:44
like, psychological damage and exploitativeness.
01:18:48
Sure.
01:18:49
It's like that.
01:18:50
Like, if you don't do your research before you, you're like, "Oh, yeah, we can get an elf.
01:18:54
That sounds fun."
01:18:55
Look, don't get the elf.
01:18:57
Don't get Roblox.
01:18:58
They're both bad.
01:18:59
That's the, that's the TLDR.
01:19:01
Do your homework.
01:19:02
Like, this is one of the rules I tell people when they have a new kid, when you would, like, don't ever buy a baby, a toy for a little kid that makes noise without listening.
01:19:13
Like, there's a bunch of, like, there's a bazillion things you can squeeze upon, a bear, something like that, and it sings a song.
01:19:19
If you don't sit in the store and listen to that song, like, eight times in the row before you buy it, you've made a mistake.
01:19:24
Because when you give a young child a thing that makes noise like that, it's going to make, they're going to just hammer the button until you go slowly insane.
01:19:32
So, like, don't buy toys that make noise for people.
01:19:36
That's a crime.
01:19:37
Don't bring the elf on the shelf into their house.
01:19:40
Don't give them Roblox gift cards.
01:19:42
Don't do anything that's going to commit them to this kind of lifestyle.
01:19:46
Yeah.
01:19:47
Anyway.
01:19:48
There's a whole, the criticism section on the elf and the shelf Wikipedia page is large or then the history of publication or the plot section.
01:19:58
I've got to read that.
01:19:59
And it starts with the Atlantic columnist Kate Tuttle calls elf on the shelf, a marketing juggernaut dressed up as a tradition whose purpose is to spy on kids.
01:20:08
Yeah.
01:20:09
Anyway, a dangerous, David Kyle Johnson calls it a dangerous parental crutch.
01:20:15
All right.
01:20:16
Well, anyway.
01:20:17
Yeah.
01:20:18
So, there you go.
01:20:19
I hope I didn't ruin Christmas for anybody.
01:20:20
I'm sorry.
01:20:21
Look, maybe you're just setting some children free from the elf's tyranny.
01:20:25
Look, they just, it looks kids.
01:20:26
If your parents have this stuff over, you just grab the elf and shake it and the magical go away.
01:20:31
The elf has no power over you.
01:20:32
Yeah.
01:20:33
The elf, you're free of the elf.
01:20:34
Oh, man.
01:20:35
Brought.
01:20:36
I, uh, yeah.
01:20:37
I don't know.
01:20:38
I feel like, I feel like an effigy elf, an effigy.
01:20:41
Is that a thing?
01:20:42
Sure.
01:20:43
Yeah.
01:20:44
Effigy's bad.
01:20:45
I feel like effigy's probably usually bad.
01:20:46
But in this case, I'm going to allow it.
01:20:47
I think it's, I think the effigy can be used in all manner of ways.
01:20:50
Oh, my god.
01:20:51
There's a food network show to a real condolence of evil.
01:20:54
Yep.
01:20:55
Yep.
01:20:56
All right.
01:20:57
I'm declaring into questions.
01:20:58
Okay.
01:20:59
The questions have been answered.
01:21:00
This is the last show of the year, Brad.
01:21:01
It is.
01:21:02
It sure is.
01:21:03
Happy New Year.
01:21:04
Happy holidays and New Year to everyone.
01:21:05
I guess.
01:21:06
I hope New Year is a holiday.
01:21:07
But anyway, I feel like we're going to do some, I remember about to do some real Douglas Adam's tense work.
01:21:12
But I hope you will have had a good Christmas.
01:21:14
It checks out.
01:21:15
It's until.
01:21:16
And I hope you'll have a happy New Year and I hope everybody who's listening to the show has the same and has had the same, whatever you celebrate and wherever you are.
01:21:24
Yes.
01:21:25
Yeah.
01:21:26
As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is a listener supported show.
01:21:30
We're only here because of you.
01:21:31
I mean, it's nice to talk to you, Brad.
01:21:33
I like talking to you.
01:21:34
But like, getting paid is nice too.
01:21:36
And if you want to find out how you can, how you can support the show, you can go to patreon.com/techpod.
01:21:42
It's five bucks a month.
01:21:43
We get access to the patron exclusive episode where we talk about more of the stuff that we talked about today.
01:21:48
I don't think I'm going to talk about Elf on the shelf again, but maybe who knows?
01:21:52
And you get access to the fabulous tech pod discord, which is full of beautiful nerds, just like you, who talk about things like Nick, so as and Vim.
01:21:59
That's right.
01:22:00
So that Brad has outlets for this behavior that don't, don't include me.
01:22:04
I mean, look, you don't have to ever go into the links channel and then you don't have to worry about any of that crap if you don't care about it.
01:22:08
No, but there's also good channels for other stuff too.
01:22:10
Like to give up.
01:22:11
And headphones and coxers and parenting food and yeah, food.
01:22:16
The food channel is popping off this time of year.
01:22:18
I got to post dog pictures there actually later today when I think about it.
01:22:21
But um, yeah.
01:22:22
So it's patreon.com/techpod.
01:22:26
It's the end of the month, which means in addition to thinking our executive producers to your patrons, we also thank our associate producer to your patrons.
01:22:33
And I'm going to start with the executive producers just because they're at the top of the list.
01:22:36
So thanks to Andrew Salosky, Moneyfeind, Crow, David Allen, James Kamik, Jordan Lippet, Twinkle Twinkie, and Pantheon makers of the HS3 high speed 3D printer.
01:22:49
A very special thank you goes out to our associate producer to your patrons, including Alejandra Navarro, Andre and Burke PE, Andrew Dicey Shoal Dice, Arthur Gees,
01:22:59
Ben Talman, Brutal Kerfluffle, Eric, Eric Klein, Felix Kramer, Graham Banks, Chad Rida, just associate wedge, Matt Walker,
01:23:10
parentheses, Walkman 8080, close parentheses, Mike Etheridge, Nathan Phelps, Sancia Kamar, Steve Lynn, Thomas J, and Tom Hilton.
01:23:18
And I think, um, I think, uh, patreon flipped on the ability for us to do gift sums.
01:23:24
So if you have, if you have friends or family members, you think we'd like to be part of the, of the discord community or would like to pay for episodes.
01:23:31
You're already listening to them.
01:23:32
You can gift them sums now on the patreon.com/techbod, give the gift of us.
01:23:37
Yeah, more bread and everybody needs more bread and will in their lives.
01:23:40
That's true.
01:23:41
I can attest.
01:23:42
Yeah.
01:23:43
Uh, so that'll do it for us this year.
01:23:44
Uh, we'll be next year with more tech.
01:23:46
It's right.
01:23:47
One week of the year, you can say that.
01:23:49
Yeah, I did it right this time.
01:23:50
Uh, as always, thank you all again for listening and I hope everybody had a good holiday season and we will see you next year.
01:23:57
Bye everybody.
01:23:58
[Music]
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