00:00SPEAKERHow'd you... You don't leave the house. How'd you lose your glasses?
00:02SPEAKER- I left the house.
00:04SPEAKER- God damn it. Okay.
00:08SPEAKER- I'll never... You know what? I'll never make that mistake again.
00:10SPEAKER- Yeah. I hope we've all learned important lessons here today and we can
00:15SPEAKERgo forward with positivity and enthusiasm for our agoraphobia.
00:19SPEAKER- Let's just continue to inhabit this six, 700 square foot space from now on and just to not
00:26SPEAKERhave greater aspirations to inhabit the world.
00:29SPEAKER- Look, even if you just rent a place in like South City,
00:32SPEAKERyou and the inhabitants of your home should vacate for a few days and go spend a weekend
00:40SPEAKERin somebody else's house. It's great.
00:42SPEAKER- In the desert.
00:43SPEAKER- Highly recommend. Desert life is good.
00:44SPEAKER- Go on a vision quest.
00:46SPEAKER- Where'd you leave your glasses, Brad?
00:47SPEAKER- Somewhere in or around the Safeway near my house.
00:51SPEAKER- Don't you need them to see?
00:52SPEAKER- I had contacts in for the first time in 18 months.
00:55SPEAKER- Oh boy.
00:56SPEAKER- So I had some family and friends in town and we were doing a big picnic in Golden Gate Park.
01:02SPEAKERI was walking over there. I had contacts in because I wanted to wear sunglasses.
01:06SPEAKER- Sunglasses are cool.
01:07SPEAKER- Also, it's really weird putting contacts in for the first time in like literally since
01:13SPEAKERbefore the pandemic started.
01:14SPEAKER- I had to stop wearing them like five years ago because they were giving me bad headaches
01:17SPEAKERno matter what the prescription was.
01:19SPEAKER- Contacts are... I'm not convinced they're worth downsides.
01:24SPEAKER- My ophthalmologist thinks that they made my corneas then.
01:27SPEAKER- Yikes. Wow. That's an interesting... Okay.
01:29SPEAKER- Which then prevented me from getting LASIK. But that's it. As he said,
01:33SPEAKERthat's not science. That's just a theory.
01:34SPEAKER- That's intuition.
01:35SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:36SPEAKER- Anyway, long story short, I put my glasses in a case and brought them with me in case
01:41SPEAKERthese were 24-hour contacts. So I was like, whatever, if I just throw them in the grass
01:46SPEAKERand put my glasses on, it'll be fine.
01:47SPEAKER- Literally.
01:48SPEAKER- Excuse me. A trash can. Excuse me.
01:49SPEAKER- God damn it, Brad.
01:51SPEAKER- It would have been a trash can, I assure you. Anyway, I put the glasses in a case and put the
01:59SPEAKERcase in my hoodie pocket.
02:00SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that's a mistake.
02:01SPEAKER- And then stopped, yes. It turned out to be. Which I actually told myself as I was doing it,
02:06SPEAKERI was like, "Hmm, I wonder if these are gonna fall out of here. Oh well, let's go."
02:09SPEAKER- Oh boy.
02:10SPEAKER- And then I went inside the Safeway and bought a case of beer
02:13SPEAKERand then half a block past the Safeway coming out.
02:17SPEAKER- It's a hell of a picnic.
02:18SPEAKER- It was like 30 people.
02:20SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
02:21SPEAKER- Half a block down the street, I realized the case was no longer in the hoodie.
02:25SPEAKER- Have you called Safeway?
02:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I checked, lost and found for a couple of days afterwards, nothing. But I also spent
02:32SPEAKERat least an hour with this case of beer under my arm going up and down the street and all through
02:38SPEAKERthe store retracing my steps and never turned up anything, which really made me wonder, did somebody
02:44SPEAKERpick up a case with glasses in it and take off with it? Why would somebody want prescription
02:49SPEAKERglasses?
02:49SPEAKER- Hey man, you got bad vision, I got some glasses for you, try these and see if they work.
02:54SPEAKER- It's like when you call the locksmith and instead of coming to unlock your lock,
02:59SPEAKERyou lock yourself out of the car, you call the locksmith, instead of them coming with lock picks
03:04SPEAKERin it or a shim, a slim jim, they just come with a big sack of keys for every... My dad locked
03:14SPEAKERhimself in his car one time and the locksmith came and he just brought a sack of Ford keys.
03:18SPEAKER- Wow.
03:19SPEAKER- And he was like, "Yeah, the door keys are only like five tumblers, so if you keep working
03:23SPEAKERit long enough, eventually you get one that works."
03:25SPEAKER- Wait, are you kidding me?
03:26SPEAKER- And he literally went through probably 200 keys before he hit one that worked.
03:30SPEAKER- Okay, that's a decent ratio. I didn't expect every single key out there to be
03:35SPEAKERunique, but I would have thought that there were more variations than that.
03:38SPEAKER- So the thing is the door keys are fewer number of tumblers than the ignition keys.
03:43SPEAKER- Okay.
03:44SPEAKER- And the ignition keys, this was before they started doing the chip thing on the keys.
03:48SPEAKER- Yeah.
03:48SPEAKER- But on the modern cars, the ignition's keyed, so it talks to a crypto chip on the key
03:54SPEAKERbefore it'll actually engage the ignition.
03:57SPEAKER- I mean, yes, it's good to have an extra safeguard to stop somebody from starting the car
04:02SPEAKERand driving it away, but getting into the car, still pretty bad depending on what you have in
04:06SPEAKERthere.
04:06SPEAKER- Well, as he said, the whole point of this is that locks are just to dissuade people who are
04:12SPEAKERmildly criminal. If somebody actually wants to get in your car, all they need is a brick
04:16SPEAKERand about 10 seconds.
04:18SPEAKER- Yes, a tire iron.
04:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:20SPEAKER- Are there genuinely keyless cars now? Like, are there cars that literally do not have a
04:25SPEAKERmechanical lock on them? Like, just the FOB, just the wireless?
04:28SPEAKER- My car is just the FOB. The Bolt is just the FOB.
04:32SPEAKER- Really? Like, I'm surprised there's no, like, physical mechanical...
04:34SPEAKER- When you press the button, there's a secret key inside the FOB.
04:38SPEAKER- Wow. Okay.
04:39SPEAKER- But the key doesn't work the car. Like, the car all starts, there's an NFC thing in the FOB
04:46SPEAKERthat, like, when you get inside the car with the FOB, it's like, oh yeah, okay,
04:49SPEAKERthe button works now if you press the brick when you press it. There's no twist.
04:52SPEAKER- It seems like you'd always want that mechanical fallback, but...
04:55SPEAKER- It seems important if the battery dies, because I don't think there's a way...
05:00SPEAKERLike, if you can't get in the car to do the hood release to charge, you know, there's still a 12
05:04SPEAKERvolt battery. Because, like, the batteries that make the car go don't run the remote start and
05:11SPEAKERall that stuff. So, like, if you didn't have a way to get in the car to open the hood to jump the car,
05:18SPEAKERif the battery dies, I don't know how you would get into it.
05:21SPEAKER- That's what I mean, is that, like, anything electronic, there's always going to be some
05:25SPEAKERpoint of failure, right? That might render it inoperable. You know what always works is...
05:29SPEAKER- Tumblers.
05:30SPEAKER- Metal on metal.
05:32SPEAKER- Yeah. There's a cover. There's a little thing that pops off the door handle in the car that
05:38SPEAKERgives you access to the keyhole. You can't see it normally.
05:40SPEAKER- It's weird.
05:41SPEAKER- But you know what you can find?
05:42SPEAKER- What's that?
05:43SPEAKER- All over the place. Well, you could for a long time. Now, the hipsters have come for it, Brad.
05:48SPEAKER- Oh.
05:48SPEAKER- Cast iron.
05:49SPEAKER- Oh.
05:50SPEAKER- You know, if you want to get a really nice, expensive, like, all clad or some fancy non-stick
05:57SPEAKERpan, it's going to cost you a few hundred bucks. But for a really long time, you could go to any
06:02SPEAKERjunk shop in the south and walk back into the back, usually in the dark corner, and there'd just be,
06:08SPEAKERlike, piles and piles of old cast iron skillets and fryers and, like, griddles and all that stuff.
06:14SPEAKERAnd they'd be, like, four bucks.
06:16SPEAKER- Wow. Like bad shape ones? Like rusted, needing resuscitation?
06:20SPEAKER- Usually it was a mix. Like, you know, there'd definitely be the $1 pile,
06:25SPEAKERwhich is all the rusty ones, and then there'd be, like, the $4 or $5 pile, which was, like,
06:30SPEAKERanything from, like, you know, old Widmer smooth skillets where they'd actually machined the cast
06:36SPEAKERiron down so it was all smooth and awesome. Or, like, just, you know, like your 20-year-old lodge,
06:41SPEAKERwhatever, you know, the lodge-style cast iron.
06:44SPEAKER- Are the smooth ones better? We have my grandmother's old cast iron skillet that could,
06:49SPEAKERfor all I know, it could be 75 years old at this point. And it's great, but it's one of the...
06:54SPEAKERIt's got the dimpled kind of...
06:55SPEAKER- Like the texture.
06:57SPEAKER- Textured surface. It's not one of the ones that is, like, polished down to a mirror sheen.
07:02SPEAKER- So I have both. I have a fryer that's, like, the lodge-style that we bought 20 years ago now,
07:07SPEAKERprobably. And then I have one that my mom found for me in a junk shop in Central Virginia that's
07:15SPEAKERone of the Widmer smooth skillets. I feel like the lodge one is easier to maintain
07:23SPEAKERand you're less likely to fuck it up. I always live in terror because the smooth one is, like,
07:29SPEAKERshiny silver on the edges and everything. It's, like, it's awesome. It's really cool. It is...
07:35SPEAKERI'm much more careful with how I use it than I am with the other ones.
07:38SPEAKER- You know, like, living in terror is how I would describe my entire relationship
07:42SPEAKERwith cast iron. Like, seriously, there's, like, a very high skill floor on that stuff. It's like,
07:48SPEAKERthis thing is incredible and the best thing you can use, if you know how to use it,
07:51SPEAKERbut if you don't, look out because you're probably just gonna ruin it.
07:53SPEAKER- Well, so, as often is the case with food-related stuff, Kenji at Serious Eats did a really good
07:59SPEAKER"here's how to not fuck up your cast iron" article, like, 10 years ago. And the gist is,
08:07SPEAKERlike, everybody says "don't put soap and water on it". You can put soap and water on it,
08:10SPEAKERjust don't do it all the time. And if, like, you notice black stuff starting to flake off,
08:13SPEAKERobviously stop whatever you're doing. The main thing is, instead of using, like,
08:21SPEAKERyou don't want to use anything that's too abrasive. Like, a scotch brite pad is probably
08:24SPEAKERas much as you want to go. And usually I use just, like, kosher salt and oil to clean it,
08:31SPEAKERif it gets stuffed crusted on. And that abrades off whatever the stuff is without eating into
08:36SPEAKERthe surface. And then you heat that back up again and the oil kind of cooks off and burns into it
08:41SPEAKERand makes the surface even better. - You don't want to ruin your seasoning, right?
08:44SPEAKER- Oh man, the seasoning is all, that's what you're there for, is that seasoning.
08:48SPEAKER- Seasoning is the spice of life, you might say.
08:51SPEAKERAre you trying to end the, this was the end. - That was, that could be the end?
08:56SPEAKER- Seasoning is the spice of life is a good end. - I didn't say it in an ending voice,
09:00SPEAKERthough. Here's another one, okay. - Okay, give me another take.
09:03SPEAKER- Go check out Kenji's primer on cast iron because people shouldn't live in fear of their cookware.
09:09SPEAKER- I think the seasoning is the spice of life is better, though.
09:13SPEAKER- That's, you know, this is what they say, seasoning is the spice of life.
09:16SPEAKER- Perfect.
09:47SPEAKER- Welcome to... - Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod, I'm Will.
09:51SPEAKER- I am Brad, how are you doing, Will? - I'm, you know, desert life appeals. I get this.
09:56SPEAKER- Yeah, you see, it seems like week by week, it's just growing on you more,
09:58SPEAKERyou're never gonna come back, are you? - I mean, I didn't go swimming this
10:02SPEAKERmorning because I felt lazy. - What? What?
10:04SPEAKER- I know, but I went swimming last night at like 11 o'clock.
10:06SPEAKER- Well, okay, huh? Okay, 11 o'clock swim sounds incredible.
10:10SPEAKER- It was pretty good. - Being too lazy to get in the pool,
10:13SPEAKERthough, that's just like you were now, you were just, you were taking your good fortune for granted.
10:16SPEAKER- Well, okay, so what happened was, by the time it was cool enough, by the time I was like awake
10:21SPEAKERand like ready to get in the pool, it was too sunny for me to go out without sunscreening.
10:26SPEAKER- Okay, that is reasonable. - And I didn't wanna like have
10:29SPEAKERto come in and then take a shower and stuff before we did the podcast, so I'll go in at
10:34SPEAKERlike lunchtime for like 20 minutes. - Okay, so yeah, like I started to say,
10:38SPEAKERlike, you know, what is your sunburn threshold? Like, couldn't you just go out there for a few
10:43SPEAKERminutes without sunblock? And then I remembered you have the same fair complexion I do where
10:48SPEAKERfive minutes is too much. - Well, Gina was like,
10:51SPEAKERI'm gonna get rash guards for this that are SPF 100.
10:54SPEAKER- What is a rash guard? - It's like a shirt that's
10:57SPEAKERmade of stuff that's supposed to get wet, and it's usually pretty tight. So like imagine a Lycra,
11:02SPEAKERimagine you wear them if you're around coral reefs so you don't fuck up the reef when you touch it by
11:08SPEAKERaccident or cut yourself. But yeah, so it's like a shirt that surfers and snorkelers and stuff wear,
11:15SPEAKERand it doesn't let the sun through so I don't have to sunscreen my back or my shoulders or my arms.
11:21SPEAKERI just do like neck and face and legs, which means that it's like what is normally a 30-minute
11:27SPEAKERprocess or 10, 20-minute process is like a five-minute process. Anyway, rash guards.
11:32SPEAKER- Yes. - What's for dinner?
11:33SPEAKER- I'm still jealous of your pool. We talked about it a little bit on last month's patron episode
11:37SPEAKERif people aren't at the tier where they can hear that in the episode appropriately entitled
11:44SPEAKERPool Before Coffee. We talked about how you have been going in the pool before you have coffee,
11:48SPEAKERwhich... - It's a good way to live.
11:51SPEAKER- I'll just... - I understand this now.
11:52SPEAKER- I'll keep saying it. I have never wanted to own a swimming pool in my entire life until you
11:57SPEAKERfloated the idea of getting in the pool within five minutes of waking up every morning.
12:01SPEAKER- This whole thing is Gina's low-key way to trick me into... Like, I've always been like,
12:08SPEAKER"No, the best thing to have is a friend with a pool. I don't need a fucking pool."
12:11SPEAKERSo, it's a maintenance nightmare. They're a problem. Just give me access. But then just being
12:18SPEAKERable to walk out with like my bathrobe on, then swim trunks and jump in the water, pretty good.
12:24SPEAKER- You know, I'll just as a coda to this conversation before we get into the topic.
12:28SPEAKER- Yeah. - At the very barbecue I
12:30SPEAKERmentioned in the cold open, I was talking to a friend who has a swimming pool,
12:35SPEAKERwho was just complaining about the $15,000 repair that they had just had to do to their swimming
12:41SPEAKERpool out of nowhere. - I mean, look, if you own a house,
12:46SPEAKEReverybody who buys a house, I'm like, "Here's the thing you need to know. You need to have like
12:49SPEAKER10 or 15 grand just in case at any given moment." - Yes. This was some kind of leak,
12:54SPEAKERsome kind of like cannot ignore this. Like this is gonna get way worse if we don't spend this money
12:59SPEAKERimmediately. And I was like, "Yeah, okay, maybe I don't want to pool anymore."
13:02SPEAKER- Just like the amount of fucking water is a liability. Anyway, what are we talking
13:07SPEAKERabout this week, Brad? What's our topic here? - How do we want to define this?
13:14SPEAKERWe have a list of things. Okay, I'll just read what's in this Google doc.
13:17SPEAKER- Yeah. - List of products
13:19SPEAKERthat were way too good for their price. - I think that's, yeah, that's fair.
13:23SPEAKER- The title that I wrote on the actual name of this Google doc is ultimate bang for the buck
13:28SPEAKERproducts. - Yeah. For me,
13:29SPEAKERthis is a category that's like, anytime you feel like you bought something and you've stolen
13:35SPEAKERsomething. - Yes. Yes. I want to feel
13:38SPEAKERlike I'm getting one over on the people who are selling me this product. Like I want to,
13:42SPEAKERI want to feel, I want to feel like I am subverting their intentions for how this is to be used.
13:46SPEAKER- Yeah. I feel like that's never actually the case because like, even, like I feel like
13:54SPEAKERa lot of times stuff that like taking advantage of loss leaders, you know, like those products
13:58SPEAKERthat people sell at a, at a discount or at a slight loss in order to get asses in the seats.
14:05SPEAKERLike that is an intentional thing that is happening by the company to make you want
14:10SPEAKERto be in their presence. And it doesn't happen so much anymore.
14:13SPEAKER- They know they're going to lose money on that. It's part of their strategy.
14:16SPEAKER- Yeah. But they're going to make that money back on something else that I'm not going to
14:19SPEAKERbuy because I'm too smart to buy their, their bad stuff.
14:22SPEAKER- Right. Like this is, this is more stuff where you are extracting extra value that
14:27SPEAKERwas not necessarily intended, not for all of these. Some of these, some of these are just like,
14:31SPEAKERHey, this was an incredibly good product at an incredibly more than fair price. Like some of
14:36SPEAKERthem are just like, Hey, this just felt good to support this company because they made a great
14:40SPEAKERthing for cheap. But some of these, some of these are a little insidious.
14:43SPEAKER- But like, so stuff that we talked about that we decided not to put in this category is like
14:48SPEAKERthe raspberry PI, which is an incredible piece of hardware. Like it's a,
14:52SPEAKERit's a pocket sized arm computer that you can run Linux on and do all sorts of like
14:58SPEAKERstupid, an awesome single use computer stuff.
15:00SPEAKER- Yeah. Like if, if you're, if you are Linux inclined, let's say
15:05SPEAKERraspberry PI might be the most versatile computing product on the market.
15:09SPEAKER- Yeah. These raspberry PI's all, all kind of in that same category.
15:12SPEAKER- Yeah. Like, yeah, totally. Like the number of different uses you can put those things
15:16SPEAKERto for the price is just kind of ludicrous. - Yeah. Like the fact that you can get a $10
15:20SPEAKERcomputer that does, that runs your lights in your house is bonkers. Anyway,
15:24SPEAKERbut we're not talking about that. - Yeah.
15:26SPEAKER- I want, for me, the beginning of this, of this experience,
15:31SPEAKERwell, there were two things in the nineties that really leapt out to me. One was Radio Shack had,
15:39SPEAKERI thought it was just one model, but from talking to people on Twitter today,
15:42SPEAKERit seems like it's a bunch of different models over like the most of the nineties of like just
15:48SPEAKERbookshelf indoor, outdoor speakers that were 20 bucks a piece and were awesome for 20 bucks a
15:53SPEAKERpiece. And they, they developed kind of a cult following, like a bunch of people said they took
15:58SPEAKERthem apart. They put different drivers in them. They changed, changed different bits and pieces
16:05SPEAKERabout them. And some people are even still using them now. And it was like, like, those were the
16:12SPEAKERspeakers I got when I got a stereo from my room when I was in like fifth or sixth grade or eighth
16:16SPEAKERgrade or something. - Yeah. There, there are, I assume these are the ones that are some on eBay
16:21SPEAKERthat are now listed as vintage, vintage Radio Shack indoor, outdoor speakers. I assume these
16:25SPEAKERare the ones you're talking about. Were they kind of ugly? - They had different, they were definitely
16:29SPEAKERugly. They had different grill designs based on year to year. The ones that I had were just like
16:36SPEAKERa flat metal grill with a met with a wooden case or metal case, maybe. And yeah, they were awesome
16:44SPEAKERbookshelf speakers. They got really fucking loud and I had my dorm room and I kind of wish I still
16:49SPEAKERhad them. Gave them to my sister, I think. - As we will cover later in the episode,
16:55SPEAKERgood speakers are good speakers. It doesn't matter how old they are. - It's true. - I swear just
16:59SPEAKERbecause they're beige, get off my back, they still work. - Look, your little cubes are good speakers.
17:07SPEAKERSo that's like the epitome for me. It's like, I've walked out of Radio Shack that day
17:11SPEAKERand I bought a spool of speaker wire to go with them. And I was like, man,
17:15SPEAKERthese are some awesome speakers for 20, for 40 bucks. - Right. Like just getting a thing that is
17:20SPEAKERA, is way better than the price. B is like, you're covered now for that need, for whatever the need
17:25SPEAKERis. It's like, I can't believe how good this thing is for the money I just spent. And like,
17:28SPEAKERI'm not going to have to buy anything else because this just does everything I need, you know?
17:31SPEAKER- Yeah. - Like that is a great feeling. - Is it just what you needed?
17:35SPEAKER- I live, it was exactly, yes. I live for that feeling. There's no greater joy in life to me
17:43SPEAKERthan finding the thing that is way more bang for the buck than it should be. - Yeah. And so like,
17:50SPEAKERthe next one of those for me was price watch, I think. - Price watch. - Do you remember price
17:55SPEAKERwatch? - The name is definitely familiar. I don't remember how much I used it. What era was that?
18:01SPEAKER- So price watch was like late 90s, early 2000s. - I think I used that. - And it was,
18:06SPEAKERI found out about it probably from quake sites, like Blues News or Shack News or something like
18:10SPEAKERthat. - Okay. - And it was a, it basically was a search engine that searched a network of screwdriver
18:17SPEAKERshops for hardware component prices. So you could buy like a case from one place and a CPU from
18:24SPEAKERanother and a memory from another. And it ended up creating like these screwdriver shops that ended
18:31SPEAKERup being like regional wholesalers for computer hardware instead of just like a local computer
18:35SPEAKERshop. - Right. - And you would like, somebody would have the relationship with diamonds. So
18:39SPEAKERthey would have, they would have like white box OEM. It was like, it was a way to get OEM hardware
18:44SPEAKERat OEM prices instead of paying retail prices for like new video cards and new CPUs and stuff
18:49SPEAKERlike that. - I think, okay, the way you were describing this, it is entirely possible,
18:54SPEAKEReven likely that the price watch is how I built my first PC, not the first PC we ever had,
18:58SPEAKERbut the first one I built from OEM parts. Cause I was all about the brown box, unlabeled OEM stuff.
19:04SPEAKER- Yeah. - When I got into PC building in the late 90s and 97, I think is when I built the first one
19:09SPEAKERfrom scratch and I had, there was a good chance price watch was the conduit now that you mentioned
19:13SPEAKERit. - That was where, and this is not the site that moved the airplane ticket place that William
19:19SPEAKERShatner advertised for. - Yeah, that's Priceline. - But yeah, so price watch, there was another one
19:24SPEAKERbefore it that I can't remember the name of, but price watch was the big one. And like, I would,
19:31SPEAKERthere was a period of time in my life when I was building computers for a bunch of people at the
19:33SPEAKERuniversity. And like, I would get up every morning and look at memory prices and just speculatively
19:39SPEAKERbuy memory because I knew somebody would order computers and like, it was a fun game too.
19:45SPEAKERCause like you had to like, you wanted to minimize your shipping costs cause shipping used to cost
19:49SPEAKERmoney. Remember? So you'd like, you'd be like, okay, I'm going to pay $10 more for this hard
19:54SPEAKERdrive here because it'll bundle in the shipping costs. I'm already paying for this case and the,
20:00SPEAKERand the Ram from, from these guys in Nebraska. But if I get from the place in San Jose,
20:05SPEAKERI'll get the CPU and the video card there cause they got better prices than anybody else. - It's
20:09SPEAKERhard. It's, it's been so long. It's almost hard to remember the time before free shipping or like
20:14SPEAKERvery, very cheap shipping because yeah, like shipping per order could easily be like 20 bucks,
20:18SPEAKERright? - Oh yeah. - At that point, 25. - If you wanted it in less than two weeks for sure,
20:22SPEAKERit would be 20 bucks. - Yeah. - And just, just think about like of all the anti-competitive
20:28SPEAKERshit Amazon has done, and I use Amazon a lot, so I'm no place to just talk about this,
20:32SPEAKERlike devaluing, using their scale to devalue shipping in everybody's minds is maybe the
20:40SPEAKERmost evil. Cause it means that nobody small can compete with them. - Yep. Yep. It's dude. I mean,
20:46SPEAKERthat's a whole episode, right? Like Amazon's monopolizing effect on retail and what it's done
20:51SPEAKERto any other possible access to retail. - Sears 2.0, Brad. - Right. Like it's just, it's 21st
20:58SPEAKERcentury Walmart, right? Like it just came in, came in and destroyed. Anyway, yes. - Different topic
21:03SPEAKERfor another day. - Yeah. You know, I guess late, late nineties PC building leads right into what
21:10SPEAKERI consider the err example of this thing. - Yeah, I think so. - Like it was really the focal point
21:14SPEAKERof this whole episode. I know we've touched on it maybe early on in the run of this podcast and
21:19SPEAKERa little bit more here and there. So we're on 300A, dude. - So that was a 300 megahertz processor,
21:26SPEAKERlow cash, single die slot. It started as a slot ended up as a socket, I think.
21:31SPEAKER- Yes. I think that's right. I think that's right. - And you could do, it was when they
21:37SPEAKERstarted locking multipliers right on cheap CPUs, but you could overclock the bus. Is that how it
21:42SPEAKERworked? - I, you know, I thought I would just remember everything about this going into this,
21:47SPEAKERbut I actually don't remember the mechanism of the overclock. Now there were, there were basically
21:51SPEAKERtwo ways to overclock back then, right? - Yeah. - There was, so things have gotten way more
21:57SPEAKERcomplicated with CPUs, right? These days in terms of how the speed is achieved, but back then it was
22:02SPEAKERliterally just a function of front side bus and multiplier, right? - You multiplied one by the
22:06SPEAKERother and the ram ran at the front side bus speed. - Right. So that was the front side bus was,
22:10SPEAKERyou know, it was generally like a hundred megahertz somewhere around there, right? - Well, it was 66
22:15SPEAKERfor the 300A. - Was it? - By default. - Oh, and that's how you overclocked it, right? - So it was
22:19SPEAKERa 66 times a 4.5, which gets you to 300 megahertz. - So yeah, you would, you would just, you would
22:24SPEAKERhave a bus speed and then you had a multiplier, which is just an arbitrary number to multiply the
22:29SPEAKERbus speed by to get your CPU frequency. - Yeah, that's exactly it. - So was it raising? - So they
22:35SPEAKERstarted locking. It used to be that you could just like for the, to go from a Pentium 60 to a Pentium
22:39SPEAKER66 or Pentium 90, you could change the multiplier usually by moving some jumpers. - Yes. That was my
22:44SPEAKERfirst overclock. We got a, we got a Pentium 75. I think I've told this story before. - I'm sure we
22:50SPEAKERhave new listeners. There's new people every day. - Shout out to, shout out to Mac at, I cannot
22:55SPEAKERremember the name of that little PC shop in 1995-ish, 96. - He taught you how to do it. - We
23:02SPEAKERbought a Pentium 75 and before we took it out of the store, he was like, Hey, let me show you. He
23:07SPEAKERwas like, he was like, Hey kid, let me show you something. - You want to know the juice? - He
23:11SPEAKERliterally showed me like, he pulled the side off. He was like, if you just take this little jumper
23:15SPEAKERhere and you move it over one pin, now it's a Pentium 90. And I did it. I totally did it. And
23:21SPEAKERthat was, you know, that was when CPUs didn't have really cooling of any kind. It was, you know,
23:26SPEAKERdefinitely no active cooling, no fan, but there really wasn't even a heat sink. Like it was in
23:30SPEAKERone of those ceramic packages. I don't know if that counts as like a heat dissipator. - That was,
23:34SPEAKERthat was how the, all the pre like Pentium 90s I think shipped. - Right. But was that, was the
23:39SPEAKERceramic there for heat dissipation at all or was? - I mean, probably it helped. I don't know. - Okay.
23:44SPEAKERPoint being, I think, I mean, that machine became very unstable over time. - Weird. - Yeah. Who
23:49SPEAKERwould've thought? - What a coincidence. - But so, okay. So the 300A overclock was a, was a raising
23:55SPEAKERthe bus situation. Was that right? - So, so yeah, the 300A was when you had to switch to changing
23:59SPEAKERthe bus speed, which was traditionally unwieldy and on the Pentium twos, which is I think what the
24:07SPEAKERrange we were in at 300 megahertz. The, remember they were packaged on that slot and the L2 cache,
24:13SPEAKERI think usually ran at half speed. So of the half of CPU clock speed. So, but the Celeron,
24:20SPEAKERbecause of the second, the cache was integrated on the die. The reason it was neat was it ran at full
24:25SPEAKERspeed. The L2 cache ran at full speed. - That's right. - So even though you had kind of a small
24:29SPEAKERL2 cache, it would run at 450 megahertz when you did this overclock and it made it hella fast.
24:36SPEAKER- Not only hella fast, but just an insane value. I, so I just checked the math here just to make
24:41SPEAKERsure. So yeah, I would have had a multiplier of 4.5 because at a 66 megahertz bus that gets you
24:47SPEAKER300 megahertz. But if you up that to a hundred, obviously you're at 450. I don't remember.
24:53SPEAKER- So there was a Pentium model that had the same math and there were specific lot numbers or
25:02SPEAKERmodels of the Pentium 2, 300 that would do the same thing. The SL2W8 is the one that I bought.
25:10SPEAKERThat was a Shaq News recommendation, if I recall right. And that thing ran at 450 megahertz the
25:16SPEAKERentire time I had that computer. It was fantastic. But then, but again, the L2 cache was half speed
25:20SPEAKERon the Pentium 2s. - Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm looking at a 1998 article on a non tech
25:26SPEAKERwritten by Anand himself. I'm trying to figure out what this thing shipped at price-wise because
25:32SPEAKERthis was the... - I think they were 150 or 200 bucks. They were really cheap.
25:35SPEAKER- They were very cheap. But also this was the year I entered college. And this was right around
25:41SPEAKERwhen Quake 2 came out and Unreal came out and a lot of broke college students like myself were
25:47SPEAKERscrapping for, you know, scraping for computing power. Like it was just the most insane value.
25:53SPEAKERLike it was just like manna from heaven to go online and read these articles about like,
25:57SPEAKERhey, you can buy this super cheap Celeron and actually overclock it to like as fast or faster
26:01SPEAKERthan the equivalent Pentium 2. - Pentium 3 even. The price of the introduction was 149 bucks.
26:06SPEAKER- Dude, that's even today. That's, you know. - I mean that you, yeah, you can't like the,
26:13SPEAKERthat's like a Ryzen 3600 pricing basically. - Right. Yes. That's wild. Also like,
26:18SPEAKERis it worth touching on? That was right around the time that Intel CPUs went to the slot design
26:23SPEAKERbriefly. - It is.
26:24SPEAKER- Like which was just ridiculous. - It was a weird choice. The Celerons
26:30SPEAKERcame without a box around the slot. Like the Pentium, Pentium 2s had like a cool plastic
26:37SPEAKERchassis around it. So it looked like a cartridge. - They looked like a video game cartridge.
26:40SPEAKER- Yeah. The Celerons were just raw boards in my experience.
26:44SPEAKER- I think you had to strap a fan on yourself if I remember.
26:46SPEAKER- Yeah. It was a process. Eventually the thing that was cool about the Celeron 3008 was such
26:52SPEAKERa successful thing. They eventually put it in just a normal die, a normal pin package socket. Yeah.
26:58SPEAKERAnd like the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers went crazy with that thing
27:03SPEAKERto the point that at some point I think Abit made a dual Celeron 300A motherboard called the BP6
27:13SPEAKERthat was responsible. Like that literally is why the multi-processor stuff was burned out of future
27:23SPEAKERconsumer Intel chips because they didn't want people putting consumer chips. They wanted to
27:28SPEAKERsell Xeons if you wanted multiple CPUs on one board. The Celeron 300A is incredible.
27:39SPEAKERSo much of our early RS traffic was on Celeron 300A related articles.
27:43SPEAKER- Believe it. I probably gave you some of that traffic.
27:45SPEAKER- So it was probably the first time we were on slash shot. It was probably the first time
27:50SPEAKERwe had anything that hit any kind of... We didn't call it going viral back then,
27:54SPEAKERbut any kind of virality threshold. - Sure.
27:57SPEAKER- Because we did a Celeron overclocking guide that was really, really popular.
28:00SPEAKER- What was the logic behind the transition to the slot design? Wasn't it like a copyright thing?
28:06SPEAKERWere they trying to subvert AMD using their socket?
28:09SPEAKER- Well, okay. So yeah, the official line was they wanted to do bigger L2 caches than they could fit
28:15SPEAKERon a single die. Because the problem with the Pentium Pro was that the L2 cache and the CPU
28:22SPEAKERwere not testable until they were joined to each other and they were built on separate dies and
28:26SPEAKERthen joined in a single package. You didn't know if one was bad until you'd done that. And once
28:35SPEAKERyou'd done that, it was irrevocable. So the yields were terrible on the Pentium Pro, which was full
28:41SPEAKERspeed L2, full speed CPU, L2 running the full speed of the CPU. When they put on the slots,
28:47SPEAKERthey ran the L2 at half speed, but they could put a lot more L2 on it because there was a ton of
28:51SPEAKERspace. And it quickly became a non-issue because the process tech advanced to the point they could
28:57SPEAKERjust put the L2 on the die itself, like by the Pentium 4 era. - Okay. Did you buy that line?
29:04SPEAKERThat sounds legit. - No, the line was they wanted to fucking
29:06SPEAKERkill socket seven because the Cyrix could make shitty chipsets that increase their support cost.
29:12SPEAKER- Right. That was my guess. Was there even something around copywriting the slot design?
29:16SPEAKER- Yeah, the slot was patented and they didn't let anybody else see it.
29:19SPEAKER- Patented. Yes. Right. Yeah. It was a ridiculous situation.
29:22SPEAKER- Yeah. Socket seven was open and as long as you wrote the right chip set and the right microcode,
29:29SPEAKERpeople could clone the Intel chip sets. And at that point, literally you would buy a Cyrix chip
29:34SPEAKERset for an Intel CPU and the thing would run like shit and it would crash all the time. And I'm sure
29:39SPEAKERit caused them an unbelievable amount of support. - Slot one and slot two. Is that right? I think
29:47SPEAKERthat's how they identified the slot two in the brief window before they went back to sockets.
29:52SPEAKER- Yeah. And then they went to BGAs pretty shortly after that.
29:55SPEAKER- Ball grid array. - Ball grid arrays. Yeah.
30:00SPEAKERCan we talk about the Duron? I never had one of these.
30:02SPEAKER- So I did. So like I was in that also occurred a short two years later. So I was still in college,
30:08SPEAKERstill trying to play a lot of Quake on the cheap and like I'm torn.
30:14SPEAKER- Like Natalie in Bruglia? - Yes. Extremely. Yes. We talked a lot about-
30:20SPEAKER- You're all out of faith? - Yes. We're CPU. We're all out of
30:25SPEAKERfaith in Intel and moving to AMD for let's say the next 10 years or so.
30:28SPEAKER- I mean, that was the time for that. Intel- - Yeah, absolutely.
30:32SPEAKER- Pentium 4, Intel made a real... Well, we don't need to get... The Pentium 4 story would be a
30:38SPEAKERgood... We could do a podcast on that too. - I would love to hear about that stuff because
30:41SPEAKERI tapped out. I went from a Celeron 300A to a Duron 600 and that was the beginning of my AMD phase,
30:47SPEAKERwhich I think I'm about to enter a second AMD phase here in the next few months.
30:51SPEAKER- Yeah. AMD looked at what was coming and they were like, "Well, we can't compete with Intel
30:55SPEAKERin process. So what do we do?" And they came out with the Athlon and the Duron and that family
31:00SPEAKERof chips and they ran great and they were reliable and- - That early era of Athlons and Durons was
31:06SPEAKERamazing. But- - So what was the Duron... Why was the Duron 600 special?
31:13SPEAKER- So Duron was to Athlon what Celeron was to Pentium. It was the budget line of the flagship,
31:19SPEAKERthe budget version of the flagship line. - 100 bucks, 250 bucks, 200 bucks.
31:23SPEAKER- I'd have to look up the... Oh, here I have pricing right here in front of me. Wait, really?
31:28SPEAKER- How much was it? - Did I really pay $112 for a Duron 600? That sounds-
31:34SPEAKER- That seems right. - Impossible.
31:36SPEAKER- Those chips were cheap. - They were... Dude. So similar situation,
31:43SPEAKERthe overclocking mechanism may have in fact have even been the same. I forget if it was raising the
31:47SPEAKERbus. No, that might've been a multiplier. Actually, yes, that's exactly what it was. I'm sorry.
31:51SPEAKER- Okay. - I'm talking through my memory
31:53SPEAKERin real time here. So that came out in 2000. - Okay.
31:57SPEAKER- And there were Durons from 600 to 950 megahertz. The multipliers on them were locked because again,
32:06SPEAKERthat's how CPU speed was determined back then. It was just a function of bus against multiplier.
32:12SPEAKERSo you're buying this chip and if you bought a Duron 600, you were buying a chip that I assume
32:16SPEAKERwas... Yes, actually I've got this table in front of me. It was a 6X multiplier on the 600.
32:20SPEAKERAnd you couldn't change it unless you took your CPU package and a mechanical pencil,
32:28SPEAKERor if you really wanted to be fancy, I guess you could solder it if you were good enough.
32:32SPEAKERBut the straight up mechanical pencil that I used in class in college was good enough
32:38SPEAKERto just draw over these two, would you call them traces on a CPU package? I'm not sure.
32:42SPEAKER- It was like you had to connect two tips of two different resistors or something.
32:46SPEAKER- I guess that's what it was leading to. There were just two little contact points on the top
32:49SPEAKERof the package. Two little metal dots, right? - And it worked?
32:53SPEAKER- Literally, you just needed something conductive to connect those two contact points,
32:57SPEAKERwhich the graphite was. And all of a sudden that unlocked the multiplier on the CPU,
33:02SPEAKERand then you could raise it all the way up to 9.5 to get a 950 megahertz CPU instead of the
33:09SPEAKER600 one that you just bought. - 50% performance boost.
33:12SPEAKER- For barely over $100. Yeah, so it's basically the same as the Celeron. So mine was stable at
33:19SPEAKER900 for years. 950 was not unheard of. I couldn't get it stable, but I was happy. I was very happy
33:27SPEAKERwith 900. That played a lot of Quake. - I was able to run my SL2W8 at 500
33:31SPEAKERmegahertz for a really, really long time. And then when it got unstable, I replaced it with two
33:36SPEAKERCeleron 300As running at 450 megahertz and 96. That was a weird motherboard.
33:41SPEAKER- Man, the idea of doing physical multiprocessor is so exotic at this point.
33:47SPEAKER- The machine was really, really loud. The Windows 90X kernel didn't do multiprocessor SMP,
33:57SPEAKERso there was no multicore support. - That's why you needed NT4.
34:00SPEAKER- I had to use NT4 and then later Windows 2000 on that in order to get any benefit from it.
34:05SPEAKERAnd also because no sane people were doing SMD on normal gamer hardware, the Sound Blaster drivers
34:15SPEAKERfor dual CPUs were garbage and with blue screen all the time. It affected every... It was a huge,
34:23SPEAKERhuge pain in the ass, but it was really cool. - How bad do you want that speed?
34:26SPEAKER- I love the speed, man. It's funny, the overclocks back then...
34:34SPEAKERJust to be clear, these overclocks happened because they would basically make the same CPU
34:38SPEAKERand then they binned them at the end of the process to see how fast they run.
34:42SPEAKERAnd if the market demand for the cheap parts outstripped the market demand for the higher end,
34:49SPEAKERfaster parts, they would just figure out a way to lock the lower end part to only run at the lower
34:54SPEAKERend speed and then sell it at the cheap price because it was the same silicon either way.
35:03SPEAKERI bought a pair of headphones, Brad. - Sorry, can I... Real quick before we
35:06SPEAKERmove on. So I tapped out of overclocking, I think after the Duron, if I'm not mistaken.
35:13SPEAKERI don't know about you. - I was using computers for work
35:16SPEAKERand I couldn't afford downtime at that point. - So yeah, like, yes, you were in a position
35:20SPEAKERwhere you just had access to a ton of hardware. I was in a similar spot of like, "Okay, now I'm
35:24SPEAKERcovering games professionally. I just want this computer to work and not have to worry about it
35:28SPEAKERbeing unstable and stuff like that." But also, have you kept up with the scene? I feel like overclocking
35:33SPEAKERhas gotten a lot more complicated in these days, or I don't know if it's that, or if I just spent
35:37SPEAKERthe time when I was younger and had the time to understand it and now I don't, but there are a lot
35:42SPEAKERmore variables in there now. - Well, so the high-end
35:45SPEAKERoverclocking is much more complicated. The weird thing that's happened is everybody has an
35:49SPEAKERoverclocking utility that they... It's not even officially unofficially supported or unofficially
35:55SPEAKERofficially supported. It's just fucking supported. You can download the Intel Extreme tuning utility
36:00SPEAKERfor your Intel CPUs. And it'll be like, "We're going to run some tests and we'll let you know
36:04SPEAKERhow much we can overclock. Oh, you get 200 megahertz." - Plenty of people will tell you
36:08SPEAKERexactly that. They're like, "Hey, it's basically like click a button now and it'll just do it for
36:11SPEAKERyou. So why not?" But like, I don't know. I mean, the returns are so diminishing.
36:17SPEAKER- That's the big difference. - When you really get down to it,
36:20SPEAKERyou're not getting that much more. - Yeah, that's exactly.
36:23SPEAKER- Especially in an age where the hardware we have is running games at 100, 240 frames per second
36:31SPEAKERcomfortably in a lot of cases. Like back then, it was much more of a struggle to eke out every
36:37SPEAKERextra frame back then. - Yeah, you were doing good to hit 30 frames
36:40SPEAKERa second in Quake when some of these chips were new, right? Like it was a little bit of a
36:47SPEAKERdifferent time. And like you said, like getting a 50% clock increase was worth taking your pencil
36:55SPEAKERout and making the mark on the CPU. - Absolutely. That was huge.
36:58SPEAKER- Well, also you were only at 125 bucks if you torched the CPU.
37:02SPEAKER- Right, right. But also now like, you know, you're talking clock speeds of like what,
37:06SPEAKERthree to four gigahertz, like an extra 100 or 200 megahertz is not really worth it if there's
37:11SPEAKERany chance of instability. - Yeah, you're not going to go
37:14SPEAKERfrom three gigahertz to 4.5 gigahertz at this point. And also for me, I was evaluating software
37:22SPEAKERand hardware and all sorts of stuff. So if I made my machine unstable, then I couldn't make
37:28SPEAKERvalue judgments. Like if I had an unstable machine, I couldn't make a judgment about the stability of
37:32SPEAKERa game or a piece of hardware or drivers or some software package I was testing.
37:37SPEAKER- It's totally the same thing for me. Like I couldn't afford to blame a game for being crash
37:42SPEAKERprone when it was actually my stupid overclock causing the crash. We did do a lot of overclocking
37:49SPEAKERin the maximum PC lab, but like it was on machines that were overclocking machines, not machines that
37:53SPEAKERwere used for other kinds of testing. - Yeah, if you're doing AB testing
37:55SPEAKERwhere you're also playing a game on a standard, on a stock machine, that's different. Anyway,
38:01SPEAKERspeakers, headphones. - Yeah, let's talk about headphones. So
38:04SPEAKERI asked in the Discord last night if people had categories like this and a lot of headphones came
38:09SPEAKERup. It seemed like the commonalities were often that it was in the stuff in the 80 to 110 bucks
38:19SPEAKERrange. Sony's had a long series of sub hundred dollar monitor headphones that are spectacular
38:28SPEAKERsound quality that every studio engineer uses. - I've seen a lot of those headphones in my time.
38:34SPEAKER- Yeah, they're like on-ear, pretty comfortable, nicely padded, pretty indestructible. And the
38:42SPEAKERother neat thing is that's the first place you get in the category where you can replace the ear cups
38:47SPEAKERand you can replace the head pads and replace the cords often, which is like the three things that
38:54SPEAKERfail on headphones are the pads wear out and the cord gets broken and then you usually just throw
39:00SPEAKERthem out. But if you can replace the cord, then you buy a new cord for 20 bucks and you're back
39:03SPEAKERin business. - I bought a pair of Sennheiser HD 580s in the early 2000s that fit that category
39:10SPEAKERand it was kind of the first like, holy shit, these sound really good. They're only like 250 bucks.
39:15SPEAKER- So I think I'm Googling the 580s right now. I think these were the most common by far, right?
39:22SPEAKERI think. - It was the first one of these. There's a long line. Massdrop has made a whole business
39:29SPEAKERin making these kinds of like, Hey man, here's a pair of headphones that sound way better than
39:34SPEAKERthey cost. - Totally. So I, in that same period, when I was getting like the Duron and playing a
39:39SPEAKERlot of Quake, I bought a refurbished pair of Sennheisers that were, I think probably a little
39:44SPEAKERearlier than the. - Probably the 500s would be my guess. - I would love to know what those were
39:53SPEAKERactually. They're long gone at this point. They might've been the 500s. I think you're right.
39:58SPEAKER- So the 580s. - I got them refurbished from somewhere. So they were even cheaper than stock.
40:02SPEAKERAnd like, it was another one of those broke college student things of like, I need headphones
40:06SPEAKERcause I have roommates in the same room in a dorm room and I don't have a lot of money. So I'm gonna
40:11SPEAKERget these refurbished Sennheisers that everybody says are good. And then like, like the first time
40:15SPEAKERI put them on, I was like, holy shit, like headphones are not supposed to sound this good.
40:19SPEAKERLike headphones are the shitty $15, like, you know, nothing pair that came with your Walkman
40:27SPEAKERor your Discman. Like they're not headphones. Headphones are not supposed to be high quality.
40:31SPEAKERLike what is this? - That was exactly it. The HG 580s were a budget version of the HG 60s,
40:36SPEAKERwhich is like one of the flagship Sennheiser old school headphones. And yeah, like I'm looking
40:44SPEAKERat them, they actually came out at 150 bucks is what they launched at. So I don't know,
40:50SPEAKERI really liked them. And they had all the replace, like I've replaced the pads and the headband
40:55SPEAKERmultiple times, replaced the cables a couple of times and they still sound great. I love them.
40:59SPEAKER- They're really good. Good headphones. Good headphones are good to have. Yeah. That was,
41:04SPEAKERthat was a definitely just a massive revelatory period of like, oh wow, audio can be good.
41:08SPEAKER- Yeah. The same thing happened in like the mid 20 teens with the earbuds
41:14SPEAKERbefore everybody went Bluetooth when like everybody was like, hey, my Apple, my iPhone's
41:20SPEAKERearbuds suck, what should I get? And there were a bunch of companies that were making really good
41:24SPEAKERearbuds that now have all gone out of business because it really transitioned to Bluetooth and
41:28SPEAKERbeats has destroyed and AirPods have destroyed the market. So bummer. - That's a shame. I guess
41:34SPEAKERthis is just sort of the audio segment of the show. I mean, like headphones were getting good
41:37SPEAKERaround this time and computer speakers were getting good around this time. - But I feel like
41:41SPEAKERlike audio is a place where this is, this category is really like this, this concept applies because
41:48SPEAKERlike every once in a while, somebody just makes something that's accidentally way too good and
41:51SPEAKERthey price it at like 200 bucks or 150 bucks instead of charging like audio file prices for
41:56SPEAKERshit. - Right. I mean, these have come up before because I still use them to this day, but the
42:01SPEAKERCambridge sound works cubes. - The power cubes. - Like, was that the actual name? - I think so.
42:06SPEAKERThat's what we always called them. That was one of the first products that got a 10 in maximum PC,
42:12SPEAKERI think. - Really? - Yeah. - I'm trying to find what the actual name of those was. I don't know
42:17SPEAKERif they had a, they might've just been like, let's see. - It's probably just numbers. - FPS 2000 was
42:23SPEAKERone of the models it looks like. - Those speakers were so good that Sound Blaster bought Cambridge
42:27SPEAKERsoundworks. - Yes, Cambridge soundworks got gobbled up by creative labs, but those original Cambridge
42:33SPEAKERsoundworks cubes, I mean, it was another, it was just like the headphones of like, we had always
42:38SPEAKERonly had these shitty PC speakers that came with the PC, right? Or with whatever multimedia kit
42:42SPEAKERyou bought that had a CD-ROM in it or whatever. - And those were always like beige plastic. They
42:48SPEAKERwere like four inches tall and like two inches wide and they sounded like shit and they usually
42:54SPEAKERweren't even plugged in. They were just amplified. - Like everybody can remember exactly what those
42:58SPEAKERgarbage hollow PC speakers looked and sounded like. I'll take Lansing. - Yeah, I think they
43:06SPEAKERwere like ACS 48 or something like that. Again, one of the quake blogs was like, hey, bloggers,
43:14SPEAKERI probably Redwood was like, I got these amazing speakers and the first influencers is what those.
43:19SPEAKER- Pretty much. - Okay, I'm gonna put this in the podcast. We should, I would love to do a
43:25SPEAKERdocumentary series about those early quake blogs. - Sure. - That's just, it's called the first
43:30SPEAKERinfluencers. - Oh yeah. - Because like Blue and Steve Gibson and Jack News. - Steve Gibson,
43:37SPEAKERSteven Heeslip, if you're listening to this. - Yeah, Billy, what was it? - From Voodoo Exchange,
43:45SPEAKERyeah, he passed away. Billy, don't tell me. - Not Mitchell. - It's on the tip of my tongue.
43:52SPEAKER- Anyway. - Billy Wilson. - Billy Wilson and like Redwood, it stomped.
43:59SPEAKER- It stomped, yeah. - So influential in like
44:02SPEAKERwhat became my computer fascination. - Yeah, totally. Like that is absolutely
44:05SPEAKERwhere I was getting all these product recommendations that led to all these
44:09SPEAKERpurchases. But those Cambridge Soundworks speakers were my first introduction to a subwoofer.
44:14SPEAKER- Oh yeah, saying that my Altic Lansings were my first introduction to subwoofer. And I literally
44:19SPEAKERbought them. I bought them from PriceWatch because I was able to get the higher tier. I paid enough
44:26SPEAKERto get cheaper shipping by spending an extra 80 bucks on speakers or whatever for a big order
44:31SPEAKERof parts I was getting to sell a computer to somebody. I used those Altic Lansings until I
44:37SPEAKERreplaced them with a pair of Klipsch Permedia 2.1s, which I think are still the all-time greatest set
44:42SPEAKERof PC speakers ever made. - Are those still made to this day? - Still made to this day.
44:47SPEAKER- What, sorry, Klipsch Permedia 2.1? - 2.1, yeah. Klipsch, they were
44:53SPEAKERlike a set of bookshelf-style speakers with a subwoofer and they sound incredible.
44:58SPEAKER- Yeah, 129 bucks. - Yeah, we did a,
45:01SPEAKERthey eventually, Klipsch did so well with those that they eventually made a bunch of weird
45:05SPEAKERproducts. They made 4.1s, which is a weird category. And then they made 5.1s, which were,
45:10SPEAKERsounded great, but died eventually because of some electronics failures.
45:15SPEAKERThe funny thing about the Klipschs is eventually they were just like,
45:20SPEAKER"What if we just sold subwoofers for people who want some more subwoofers?" And you could plug
45:25SPEAKERthe subwoofer into an extra port on the back of your other subwoofer. And they sent us like
45:30SPEAKEReight or 10 of them and we set them up in the lab and just did horrible things to include those
45:36SPEAKERthings because they were so fucking loud. - That's a bit silly. That's a bit silly.
45:39SPEAKER- They made your pants vibrate, Brad. - Wow. - Yeah. - Oh, wow. Cambridge
45:45SPEAKERSoundworks was bought by Creative in 1997, really? - It was before I started at Maximum PC. - Oh,
45:50SPEAKERthat's crazy. But those original power cubes or whatever they were called,
45:54SPEAKERyou know, if people haven't seen them, they are literal tiny little cubes. They are
45:58SPEAKERvery small for speakers to sit on your desk. And the subwoofer goes underneath the desk out of
46:02SPEAKERsight. And like, at the time I was not even acquainted with the concept of separating high
46:07SPEAKERand low frequencies. - No, that was, yeah, I guess that was new. - But I distinctly remember
46:14SPEAKERthe first time I plugged those things in and played anything out of them, I was just like,
46:17SPEAKERholy shit, like this is this real, how are these tiny little things that I paid like
46:22SPEAKERmaybe 100 bucks for doing this? - I had a set of those on my bench at Maximum PC for years.
46:27SPEAKERAnd they were, I hooked the speakers. Like we had metal, those metal frame, like utility benches,
46:33SPEAKERlike utility shelves that we made benches out of. And I had them just hanging up. I screwed them
46:39SPEAKERinto the particle board on the top. - Yeah, because they have wall mount. - Yeah, because they have
46:44SPEAKERwall mount holes. And so the wires were all routed out of the way and I just plugged them in when I
46:48SPEAKERwanted to listen to music in the lab or something. It was awesome. - That's great. That's great. I've
46:51SPEAKERgot mine. I mean, I've got the ones I bought in '99 or 2000 to play Quake 3 in my dorm sitting on
46:57SPEAKERthis desk right now, still in use to this day. And then the subwoofer has been, you tell me if this
47:03SPEAKERis a bad idea, the subwoofer for these things has been plugged in and turned on for most of the last
47:07SPEAKER20 years. It's still going. - It's probably wasting an incredible amount of electricity,
47:12SPEAKERbut I don't think it's going to hurt them at this point. - Oh, wait, does it really? I assumed when
47:15SPEAKERit wasn't playing anything that it was kind of... - That's from the era of energy vampires. So you
47:21SPEAKERshould put the watt meter on there and see how much money you're spending on that, keeping that
47:25SPEAKERwarm. - That really sucks. Problem is the power switch is on the subwoofer. You have to like crawl
47:31SPEAKERunder the desk, turn it off, but maybe I should start doing that. - Let's see. Do you want to
47:38SPEAKERtalk about my, like when I was setting up to do streaming at home, somebody, I was like, "Hey,
47:45SPEAKERwhat kind of lights should I buy?" And everybody's like, "Oh, go get these expensive Elgato ones,"
47:48SPEAKERwhich are very nice and very fancy. But then somebody else was like, "Hey," somebody on
47:54SPEAKERTwitter, I wish I remember who it was. It's like, "Go look at Ikea because they have a bunch of
47:59SPEAKERPaper Globe lights that are like 20 bucks, like hanging lights that are like decorative kind of
48:06SPEAKERwhimsical kid room lights. And you put a smart bulb in those that's dimmable or even temperature
48:12SPEAKERcolor controlled, and you have a dimmable fill light for like $30." - Wow. - Which is an
48:19SPEAKERincredible value. - And that will replace something like an Elgato key light or something like that?
48:24SPEAKER- Is fill light a different role? - No, fill light would work for, like I use it where I
48:30SPEAKERhave the key light now for a long time. So, it's the Ikea pairing for this is the RegoLit and the
48:37SPEAKERHema. I think the Hema is the fixture and the RegoLit is the like the poof, the paper poof.
48:44SPEAKERThey're kind of like Chinese lanterns, you know, like they pack flat and you pull them out and it
48:49SPEAKERbecomes a globe. - Right. Love a good Ikea hack. I've never gotten super into
48:54SPEAKERthat community, but Ikea hacks are fun. - Yeah. If anybody has a good like loft bed Ikea hack,
49:03SPEAKERI would love to talk because we're looking at that for my daughter and I'm thinking like,
49:07SPEAKERwhy not just put three dressers and some bookshelves under there and then
49:11SPEAKERput the bed on top of that. That's probably fine, right? - Yeah. Yeah. - Gina's less enthusiastic.
49:16SPEAKER- I think I've talked about it before, but I am pretty fond of that Ikea entertainment center
49:22SPEAKERto guinea pig habitat hack that people came up with, which if we had more space and more
49:26SPEAKERpiggies, I would probably think about doing. - You could solve one of those problems easily.
49:31SPEAKER- That's true. - More piggies. - Yeah. That's not hard. - It turns out. - Yeah. - Let's see,
49:41SPEAKERyou want to talk about, let's see, let's talk about rebate fever, man. Discount fever. - Yeah.
49:48SPEAKERBefore we, before we get out of that late nineties window. - Yeah. That was, there was a period of
49:52SPEAKERtime when like you'd walk into fries and the person that was at the door would hand you a
49:58SPEAKERflyer and it would be like, there'd be a page of shit you could get for basically free.
50:04SPEAKERIf you were willing to jump through a lot of rebate hoops. And I don't know why that stuff,
50:10SPEAKERit was, it was ridiculous for a while. Like you want 50 CD ROMs, CDRs, here you go fill out these
50:16SPEAKER18 forms and wait six weeks and you'll get your money back. They cost $25. - My, my feeling,
50:22SPEAKERthis is just a gut feeling thinking back to that time, there was some kind of weird hubris or
50:27SPEAKERfrenzy building toward the end of the nineties economically, you know, that fed into the .com
50:33SPEAKERboom. - Yeah. - Fed into some of the other stuff we'll talk about here about like ludicrously cheap,
50:38SPEAKERbrand new high demand DVDs being sold on day one, like stuff like you're talking about here,
50:44SPEAKERwhere you could just get like spindles of CDRs for free, essentially. - Yeah. - So there were
50:49SPEAKERso many loss leaders, there were so many deep sales and discounts and rebates going on,
50:54SPEAKERpeople trying to get their foot in the door. - You think it was a retail frenzy? - Kinda,
50:58SPEAKERI don't know. Like I just, there was so much ridiculously discounted stuff back then and it
51:01SPEAKERall stopped after the .com bubble burst. - It was like the, the DVD thing. I remember like even
51:07SPEAKERBest Buy, which was a brick and mortar retail, traditional retailer was trying to compete with
51:12SPEAKERlike buy.com was doing really cheap DVD sales every week. - Yes. - There was like a whole DVD
51:19SPEAKERinfrastructure that built up with like the digital bits doing DVD reviews. And then you'd click on a
51:25SPEAKERlink there and it would take you to a buy.com thing where you could buy the discs and they'd
51:28SPEAKERshow up at your house like five days later and be like, oh man, I've, I've, I've really wanted,
51:32SPEAKERreally excited about watching Lost in Space. And then you'd watch Lost in Space and be like, oh,
51:35SPEAKERwell, that was probably worth $4. - We got, we got Lost in Space free with our DVD player. And
51:41SPEAKERI don't know that I ever watched the entire thing. - Look, you gotta go through the planet, Brad.
51:45SPEAKER- That's true. I, dude, I distinctly, a buy.com, yes, was huge for that stuff. But I distinctly
51:51SPEAKERremember getting stuff like the Matrix and Fight Club and like big name releases on DVD for like
51:59SPEAKERthree, $4 a piece. And just like, that might be the ultimate feeling of I'm getting one over on
52:04SPEAKERthis company that's selling me these things. - Well, and like, so I would buy on the reg and just
52:11SPEAKERlike the stuff that would end up in the $3 bin there was, especially if you cared about old
52:16SPEAKERmovies, was incredible. Cause anything that was a catalog title would come out and be full price
52:21SPEAKERfor like a month. And then it would be $3. Cause it'd just be like, we got to get this out of here.
52:24SPEAKER- Yeah. It's my memory of these online retailers was that they were doing that on day one. It was
52:28SPEAKERlike, wow, this, this movie just came out and you can get it for next to nothing. Cause we just are
52:33SPEAKERtrying to get you in our system. - Wow. It got to get that credit card in.
52:37SPEAKER- It was a heady time. - It was.
52:39SPEAKER- I never got in on the free CDRs, but I remember that going around quite a bit.
52:43SPEAKER- I did. I did a fair number of rebates for like MP3 players and stuff like that.
52:49SPEAKERBack before the iPod destroyed that market. - Sure. Sure. Do you still have any CDRs,
52:54SPEAKERblank ones? - Yeah. There's a spindle in my garage.
52:57SPEAKER- I'm pretty sure I've got like an unopened package of like 50 blank DVDs somewhere.
53:02SPEAKER- It's funny. I just built this. I just moved my computer into this new case. It's the first
53:06SPEAKERcase I've ever had that doesn't have a CD-ROM an optical driver since like 1993.
53:10SPEAKER- I may never get rid of the case that I have now because I did probably will be the last
53:14SPEAKERoptical bay that I ever have access to. - Well, the thing I realized I was sad
53:18SPEAKERabout that at first. And then I was like, Oh right. I can just go in for $18 by a five and
53:23SPEAKERa quarter inch drive cage. - Yeah. Everything is external
53:26SPEAKERthese days. I know I get it. - Yeah.
53:29SPEAKER- It's not the same. - It's I have two big fans and a radiator
53:32SPEAKERin front now instead. Brad. - You have RGB though.
53:36SPEAKER- Yeah. I vertically mounted my video card. - Why?
53:42SPEAKER- Because it looks cool. - I mean, it does look cool.
53:45SPEAKER- It also makes the slots behind that are normally blocked by the video card available.
53:49SPEAKER- That's actually a genuinely functional and a good reason to use one of those things. I've
53:57SPEAKERheard spotty things about those PCI express extenders. - So I once upon a time bought a $3
54:02SPEAKERor $15 one thinking, Oh, this is probably good enough.
54:05SPEAKER- Maybe it was from you that I heard that. - Yeah. It was not good enough is the TLDR.
54:09SPEAKER- Okay. - The $60 one that I bought
54:12SPEAKERto do this that was recommended by the case manufacturer works great. Turns out full speed.
54:17SPEAKER- Yeah. Getting the slots back actually is not the worst thing that you mentioned.
54:22SPEAKER- If you have a half height card, especially it'll fit right in there.
54:25SPEAKER- Yeah. This is what I didn't engage with, this next one.
54:30SPEAKER- Yeah. I didn't either. - Do you remember the cat leap?
54:33SPEAKER- The cat leap. - Cat leap.
54:35SPEAKER- Yamakasi, I believe? - You famously didn't engage with
54:40SPEAKERthis because you were using monitors that were already 10 years old at the time that this would
54:44SPEAKERhave been an option. - What was I doing?
54:46SPEAKER- God. - I want to say from the Googling
54:49SPEAKERI did about this, it was around 2012 when this became a big deal.
54:52SPEAKER- That seems right. Wes Fenlon, friend of the show, wrote an article for us about it on Tested.
54:57SPEAKER- Yes. Also shout out to him for, he suggested this topic for this episode.
55:01SPEAKER- It's a good call out. - Yes. So yes. Yamakasi cat leap.
55:06SPEAKERYamakasi was the manufacturer. Cat leap was the model.
55:10SPEAKER- Okay. - Yeah. The model. Yeah.
55:12SPEAKER2012 is when this really started kicking off. So this would have been... Oh, go ahead.
55:16SPEAKER- Oh, I was going to say the gist is this Korean manufacturer was taking
55:23SPEAKERLCD displays off the panel, off the line that presumably LG or Samsung or somebody was using.
55:30SPEAKERAnd instead of packaging them with LG and Samsung shells and putting like nice scalers and good
55:38SPEAKERelectronics and stuff inside them, they were just plugging them straight into a DVI interface
55:43SPEAKERand selling them for like a third of the price of a comparable monitor.
55:48SPEAKER- Just insanely cheap. I'm trying to find some... I'm on a vintage 2012 form thread
55:54SPEAKERabout it. I'm trying to find what the prices are, but they were like stupid cheap.
55:58SPEAKER- I feel like it was like $150 or something for a 27 inch 1440p monitor in 2012.
56:05SPEAKER- 1440p was like brand new at this time. It was the future. It was a future resolution.
56:13SPEAKER- It would have been DisplayPort, probably not even DVI when I think about it.
56:20SPEAKER- That sounds right.
56:21SPEAKER- But they were really limited. The scaler is the thing that lets you play resolutions,
56:31SPEAKERit's a different resolution than the monitor speaks. So without that, you weren't able to
56:37SPEAKERactually run it at the resolution you were looking for. It just didn't work.
56:40SPEAKER- Right. So if you had something that would only run at a lower resolution than 1440p,
56:45SPEAKERit would just display smaller... Oh wait, no, it couldn't even do that, right?
56:48SPEAKERWould it not even accept a signal lower than 1440p?
56:51SPEAKER- It just would show nothing, yeah.
56:52SPEAKER- Okay.
56:52SPEAKER- Well, you'd have to set the video card to scale.
56:55SPEAKER- Right. And I don't know if... Had they started allowing that at that time?
57:00SPEAKERNowadays, you can set that in like the Nvidia control panel to have the GPU handle scaling
57:03SPEAKERand not even have to worry about using the monitor scaler at all.
57:07SPEAKER- No, I didn't even think about that.
57:08SPEAKER- Back then, that was not something that used to be available back in like 15 years ago,
57:14SPEAKERI don't think. That was a relatively late addition to the GPU feature set.
57:18SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a really good question. I bet I'd have to look, I don't know.
57:23SPEAKER- I might be acquainted with that issue because I ran monitors for so long that could only handle
57:29SPEAKERa very limited number of very old resolutions.
57:31SPEAKER- Well, so when I had my 30-inch Dell, the 2560 by 1600 one that didn't have a scaler,
57:38SPEAKERit absolutely was a situation where that was the only resolution I could run.
57:42SPEAKER- Okay, yes.
57:44SPEAKER- Like I couldn't plug devices in that didn't speak that resolution.
57:48SPEAKER- Right.
57:48SPEAKER- Which was a dual DBI, which meant it didn't work with some laptops even, it was weird.
57:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
57:53SPEAKER- But yeah, so that was like Monoprice eventually kind of took over that business and like came into
57:58SPEAKERthat market and like the cat leap thing especially was a little hinky because you had to buy it from
58:04SPEAKEReBay, I think.
58:05SPEAKER- Yes, I believe that was one of the things that stopped me from getting into it.
58:09SPEAKER- Yeah, so there were a lot of counterfeits that were like
58:13SPEAKERthat there were some really good ones and then there were some ones that like you could really
58:17SPEAKERhose yourself on.
58:18SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
58:19SPEAKER- And then Monoprice got into it and gave you like a normal retail channel for that, which was cool.
58:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I distinctly remember the frenzy around these things and like anytime one of these things
58:31SPEAKERcomes up, anytime the like this should not exist, this is insanely cheap for what it is kind of
58:35SPEAKERsituations, like I have to restrain myself from buying into it. So I was really staring at this.
58:41SPEAKER- Well, we know it's hard for you to choose a monitor, Brad, it's established.
58:45SPEAKER- Yeah, it turns out I should have just bought something.
58:48SPEAKER- We have a couple more quick hits that came from the audience from the Discord.
58:53SPEAKER- Yeah.
58:53SPEAKER- The Geforce 6800 GT to a Quadra 2000. So this is a mid-tier video card, like this would be like
59:04SPEAKERmid to late 2000s probably.
59:05SPEAKER- I think that would have been a Quadro, right?
59:07SPEAKER- Quadra.
59:08SPEAKER- Did they also have a Quadro?
59:11SPEAKER- Quadro was a Mac brand. Quadro was the -
59:16SPEAKER- Yeah, Quadro is the Nvidia.
59:18SPEAKER- So Quadro is the Nvidia like content creator line.
59:24SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the professional workstation card.
59:26SPEAKER- Yeah, so like had CAD drivers and stuff like that, like AutoCAD drivers and guaranteed precision.
59:31SPEAKER- So I've always, okay, so were there actual physical like computational differences?
59:37SPEAKERI always wondered if it was a situation like those old CPUs of where like
59:41SPEAKERsome were just bend higher than others, but they're actually the same thing.
59:43SPEAKER- So on some of the cards, they had ECC memory.
59:47SPEAKER- Okay.
59:47SPEAKER- I don't know if that's the case for this one. I don't believe it was.
59:51SPEAKERThe upshot was you could do a firmware update on this $200, $250, $300 card
59:56SPEAKERand AutoCAD would treat it like a $2,000 card.
59:59SPEAKER- That's a pretty good upgrade.
1:00:01SPEAKER- Pretty good upgrade, yeah. And for 600 bucks, you could get two of them running an SLI.
1:00:06SPEAKER- So to this day, there are situations where you might want to be able to do that. Like I was,
1:00:14SPEAKERwhen I was messing with EDID stuff on monitors last year, which is how the monitor identifies
1:00:20SPEAKERitself to the operating system in terms of what it's capable of. And it's a way to influence the
1:00:24SPEAKERbehavior of the monitor, right? The professional NVIDIA cards to this day in the control panel
1:00:31SPEAKERwill let you fiddle with all that stuff manually yourself.
1:00:34SPEAKER- Really?
1:00:35SPEAKER- Yeah. So if you have a Quadro or whatever, I don't know what their current line of
1:00:39SPEAKERprofessional cards is, but there's a lot of niche behavior about the card and the monitor that you
1:00:46SPEAKERcan influence on these professional cards that like, I assume there's no reason technically
1:00:50SPEAKERthat it couldn't also work on the consumer cards. They just lock it out of the drivers.
1:00:54SPEAKER- Well, or they may do like different DACs and ADCs and stuff like that too.
1:00:58SPEAKER- It's possible, yeah.
1:00:59SPEAKER- But yeah, so that was a good one. Twinkle Tweaky suggested that in the Discord.
1:01:03SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:01:04SPEAKER- A couple of people mentioned the, hey, Windows 10 had a free upgrade period right at launch
1:01:13SPEAKERwhere you could put any Windows 8 key that matched the algorithm, whether it activated or not in.
1:01:20SPEAKERSo if you had like a pirate Windows 8 key, you could upgrade to a full legal version of Windows 10.
1:01:24SPEAKER- Wow. That's amazing.
1:01:26SPEAKER- I thought this was a good call out. Third-party firmwares for routers was a good one.
1:01:32SPEAKER- Yeah. Sure.
1:01:33SPEAKER- I definitely, I got like way more life out of my old WRT54G and the old N66U,
1:01:42SPEAKERboth of those routers last way longer than they would have with, you know, homebrew firmware.
1:01:48SPEAKER- Well, in the time before like high-end configurable prosumer routers,
1:01:56SPEAKERyou didn't, like they gave you access to features that you couldn't get on a
1:02:00SPEAKERlike less than thousand dollar router, right? You could do traffic shaping and stuff like that on
1:02:04SPEAKERDDWRT and Tomato early on. It was cool. - Ah, Tomato.
1:02:07SPEAKER- Tomato just had such a pleasant interface as well.
1:02:12SPEAKER- I liked it, but DDWRT was more powerful, man. You got to get it. I turned on my VPN tunnel and
1:02:18SPEAKERtake the CPU performance on my $80 router. - I chose poorly, apparently.
1:02:23SPEAKER- And then like our friend of the channel, Dan, introduced me to these $5 nanodrones that were
1:02:33SPEAKERavailable from AliExpress and Banggood. Like they were little IR remote for four rotor helicopters.
1:02:43SPEAKERAnd you had to buy, if you wanted like three that worked, you had to buy five of them probably,
1:02:47SPEAKERbut they were still, you still would have spent half what it would have cost to get one
1:02:51SPEAKERthat was from like Walmart or whatever. It wasn't very much longer after I saw these the first time
1:02:57SPEAKERthat you started seeing those little kiosks popping up in the mall where some kid would
1:03:01SPEAKERbe flying a drone around and doing like cool stunts and stuff in the mall, like fruit fare.
1:03:09SPEAKERBut that was my entry. That was also my entry to Banggood, which led me to AliExpress,
1:03:15SPEAKERwhich remain, depending on what you're looking for, remain kind of incredible. So AliExpress,
1:03:24SPEAKERI think it's short for Alibaba express, which is basically a lot of stuff you find in electronics
1:03:30SPEAKERmarkets and stuff like that in China. It's access to cheap manufacturing in China for products that
1:03:36SPEAKERaren't necessarily for a specific vendor or for commodity products. - Yeah. You'll find a lot
1:03:42SPEAKERof stuff on there that is also available on Amazon for a significant markup. Like you can get a lot
1:03:47SPEAKERof the same stuff for way cheaper. - Keyboard switches, for example, if you want to buy some
1:03:51SPEAKERkeyboard switches, you can get the keyboard switches on AliExpress for like a third the
1:03:56SPEAKERprice if you don't mind waiting two months for them to get here on a boat. - Yeah. Those, those
1:04:00SPEAKERlittle, those little fanless x86 boxes that people use as like PF sense devices that like Protectly
1:04:05SPEAKERis the most kind of well-known brand at this point domestically. You can get no-name versions of those
1:04:12SPEAKERon AliExpress for way cheaper if you're willing to buy a no-name one. - So my AliExpress rule is
1:04:18SPEAKERthat I don't buy stuff with logic there that's going to connect into the rest of my system.
1:04:22SPEAKER- Interesting. Does that mean the little RGB magic home light strip controllers I was looking at on
1:04:29SPEAKERthere that can be flashed with Tasmota? Of course, if you're putting custom firmware on there, that
1:04:33SPEAKERprobably... - It's probably okay. - Probably negates any, anything you would not trust to put on your
1:04:39SPEAKERnetwork, right? - But you are going to plug it into your computer to flash the firmware, right?
1:04:43SPEAKER- Oh, I don't think it has an interface for that. I assume you do it wirelessly. I don't know.
1:04:50SPEAKER- Yeah. So... - Of course, it would be on the network. It would be on the network long enough
1:04:55SPEAKERto... I think a lot of people use those things. - You can put it on VLAN. It's probably fine.
1:04:59SPEAKER- That's true. - Anyway, I hesitate to plug USB. I just may be paranoid,
1:05:05SPEAKERbut some friends of Art Fitz, who's famous for not plugging USB things into his computers,
1:05:14SPEAKERhe convinced me that it's probably unwise to plug things from AliExpress vendors. So AliExpress is
1:05:19SPEAKERbasically like Etsy. It's like a front end for manufacturers in China. So you're not really...
1:05:26SPEAKERThe payments go through AliExpress, but you're dealing with an individual store just like with
1:05:31SPEAKEREtsy. - And it can be very... I mean, if you think it's hard on Amazon to figure out who you're
1:05:35SPEAKERactually buying something from, it is damn near impossible looking at an AliExpress product page
1:05:41SPEAKERto see where something is actually coming from in a lot of cases. - So Banggood is a little bit
1:05:46SPEAKERsafer. They're like an intermediary. So they buy the stuff and then they're reselling it directly
1:05:50SPEAKERto you for the most part. And they actually do warehousing in the US even. So sometimes you'll
1:05:55SPEAKERbuy something that shows up two days later. So you're not waiting a month and a half for it to
1:05:59SPEAKERarrive. It has an unfortunate name. And whenever I see a credit card charge from Banggood, I think,
1:06:04SPEAKER"Oh, somebody signed me up for porn." And then I'm like, "Oh, wait, nope, nope. It's just Banggood.
1:06:08SPEAKERIt's fine." - Okay. So speaking of which, if we're being irrationally paranoid for a minute,
1:06:15SPEAKERI almost made my first AliExpress purchase recently. - Ooh, what'd you get? What were
1:06:18SPEAKERyou gonna get? - No, I didn't. - Aspirationally, what are you trying to get? - Well, I'm looking
1:06:22SPEAKERat those light strips. I don't have any real use for them right now, but I would get those
1:06:25SPEAKERat some point if I had a spot for them. The other thing is that extremely cheap PlayStation 5 side
1:06:32SPEAKERplates have made their way onto AliExpress. - That's a perfect AliExpress purchase. - Dude,
1:06:36SPEAKER100% because those dbrand dark plates look fantastic, but they're like $60. And that's
1:06:40SPEAKERjust a little too far north of my stupid cosmetic, you know. - You're gonna get black ones or you're
1:06:46SPEAKERgonna do like a purple GameCube color. - So that's the thing. I think dbrand may have some other
1:06:53SPEAKERdecals or something. They may have other colors. But anyway, the ones on showing up on AliExpress
1:06:57SPEAKERnow are like, they have red ones, they have blue ones. It's like, what do you want? I would
1:07:00SPEAKERprobably get black just 'cause I like black electronics. - What does it look like under there?
1:07:05SPEAKERIf you put a clear one on there, is it gonna look cool? - It's mostly just a big metal housing.
1:07:10SPEAKERThere's not a lot to look at there. - That's disappointing. - I mean, I think I've said it
1:07:14SPEAKERbefore. The thing I'm super disappointed about is nobody has come up with a different shape of
1:07:19SPEAKERplate yet. Like all the replacement plates, whether it's the nice dbrand ones or these
1:07:23SPEAKERno-name ones are all like molded to match the ones that exist. Are you looking at your PS5 right now?
1:07:28SPEAKER- I'm looking at my PS5 right now. It's a pretty intense cast, man. - So I want something that just
1:07:32SPEAKERturns that thing into a box. Like just- - You just want it to be looking like Xbox? - I'm open to
1:07:39SPEAKERwhatever, but something that doesn't require a stand, something that is just flat on the bottom,
1:07:43SPEAKERlike that's what I want. Like make a new bottom plate that just lets that thing sit flat
1:07:48SPEAKERon some little rubberized feet without having a goddamn detachable stand that's terrible, please.
1:07:54SPEAKERAnyway. - Wait, do you use vertical or horizontal? - Horizontal. - Oh, mine's vertical. - Yeah,
1:07:59SPEAKERvertical, if you want to have space for that, but vertical is way less bad. A vertical PS5 looks
1:08:04SPEAKERkind of cool, honestly. - Yeah, mine mostly sits on the desk behind the monitors. And so I don't
1:08:09SPEAKEReven know it's there most of the time. - Yeah, right. In that point, it's fine. But I think the horizontal in particular
1:08:13SPEAKERfor the PS5 is not very attractive. - It doesn't look cool. I can see that. - Anyway, the plates I'm looking at on
1:08:19SPEAKERAliExpress are like 13 bucks, which is like, mwah, like perfect. - Yeah, that's the perfect price for
1:08:25SPEAKERsomething stupid. - Perfect throwaway price to just make your console look like slightly cooler.
1:08:29SPEAKER- Yeah. What are you gonna do with the... Then you have to store the old ones. - Yeah, you put the old ones in the
1:08:33SPEAKERcloset, I know. It's like, whatever. But anyway... - Speaking of consoles... - Well, hang on, they don't
1:08:39SPEAKERtake PayPal. That was my irrational paranoia thing. - Oh, just use one of the burner card, like the card
1:08:44SPEAKERgenerator services. - Is that a thing? - Yeah, my bank does it. And I think I can do it through
1:08:50SPEAKERChase for my credit card or whatever. - So are you essentially generating like a one-time use credit
1:08:55SPEAKERcard? - A one-off credit card number that's only good for whatever time period or whatever amount
1:09:00SPEAKERyou set, usually. - Huh. That's kind of great. - Yeah, if you want to do some sketchy purchases, it's a
1:09:06SPEAKERreally good choice. - I don't even know that it's that sketchy, although I mean... - AliExpress is pretty
1:09:11SPEAKERsafe these days, I would say. - Yeah, I figured it probably was. Like I said, I thought I was being
1:09:15SPEAKERirrational. But you do get a lot of multi-week shipping times on there, and I know you're dealing
1:09:18SPEAKERwith customs and stuff like that. - The assumption, my assumption with AliExpress is it's kind of like
1:09:23SPEAKERmy Kickstarter rules. Like, I assume that whatever I'm buying from AliExpress may not be, may not arrive
1:09:29SPEAKER- it may be broken when it arrives, it may be unusable. So I don't buy shit that's more expensive
1:09:36SPEAKERthat I'm willing to throw away if it doesn't work out. - That was the other part of the appealing...
1:09:40SPEAKERyou know, that's why $13 was appealing, was also like, "Ah, this never shows up, that's okay."
1:09:45SPEAKER- It's like, I bought Joy-Con cases from AliExpress. - Yeah. - Because they had colors that I didn't see on
1:09:51SPEAKERAmazon and I liked. And I was like, "If this works, great. And if not, not." The colors were great.
1:09:57SPEAKERI haven't bothered to take the Joy-Cons apart to swap them out because it's such a pain in the ass.
1:10:00SPEAKER- It is a bit of a pain. - Yeah. - All right. I think we... do you want to call it there maybe?
1:10:07SPEAKER- We can, yeah. I think that's a good... I'd be curious to hear what people think we missed,
1:10:12SPEAKERbecause I'm sure we missed some awesome stuff. - Yes, especially if it's current,
1:10:16SPEAKERthen it's something we can get in on. - Yeah. Like, let us know, man. We won't tell everybody
1:10:22SPEAKERuntil everybody gets theirs. - Maybe shocked with my 15-year-old monitors and 20-year-old speakers
1:10:29SPEAKERthat I love finding bang for the buck stuff that lasts. - Hey, Brad. - Yeah? - Do you still have
1:10:34SPEAKERthat chair? - The chair is gone. Thank God. The chair is gone. - Thank God. Our long national
1:10:41SPEAKERnightmare is over. - The last time it came up, when I feigned ignorance, it was still here.
1:10:46SPEAKER- Okay. - Just to set the stage, but it was a multi-stage process. - I'm glad that we
1:10:52SPEAKERmoved beyond this and can move on with our lives now. - I sat in it a couple more times.
1:10:56SPEAKER- Did you miss it? - Not at all. It was too old to have around. It was
1:11:03SPEAKERin pretty good shape for the day. It was in very good shape, but I played a couple of games from
1:11:08SPEAKERthe era. - Oh, in the chair? - Yeah. - To say goodbye? - Just like, I'm gonna sit in the chair and play
1:11:14SPEAKERWorld of Warcraft one more time. I'm just gonna run around Elwynn Forest one more time. - Did you
1:11:20SPEAKERplay a sad song, like Time of Our Life? - No, no. - Okay. - It turned out that both sitting in the chair
1:11:24SPEAKERand playing World of Warcraft were good for about five or 10 minutes, and I was like, you know what,
1:11:28SPEAKERI'm good. - You saved yourself a lot of pain and heartache there, I think. Your back thanks you
1:11:32SPEAKERfor this in your ass. - Then I took the chair down to the garage in the evening, and then the next
1:11:37SPEAKERmorning I went down and rolled it out onto the sidewalk. - Did you put a sign on it, or did you
1:11:40SPEAKERjust let nature take its course? - Dude, the free sign has been on it since May? May. May is when I
1:11:50SPEAKERput the free sign on it. - How long did it last? - Remember, you saw the sign. - I saw the sign,
1:11:55SPEAKERI know. - And it opened up your eyes that I can't get rid of things. - This is so many songs today.
1:11:59SPEAKERWhat's going on with us? - It opened up your eyes to the fact that I have attachment issues. - So,
1:12:05SPEAKERhow long did the chair last on the curb? - So, I rolled it out there probably about 7 a.m.,
1:12:10SPEAKER730. - Okay. - And I believe when I went down at about noon, it was gone. - It's gone to a better
1:12:17SPEAKERplace now, Brad. - Somebody's using it. - It's making somebody else happy. - You know, that's
1:12:20SPEAKERall I can ask for is that if I don't need it anymore, as long as somebody else can get some
1:12:24SPEAKERuse out of it, I hate throwing things away. - Yeah, no. Throwing things away is bad. - I hate
1:12:27SPEAKERdisposing of things. I don't know, did you guys have this phrase in Tennessee, I like to get the
1:12:33SPEAKERgood out of things? - Nope. - You didn't have that one? - No, Tennessee, we just throw everything out.
1:12:38SPEAKERWe have massive landfills in Tennessee. - Maybe that was a family philosophy. We always want to
1:12:42SPEAKERget the good out of something. If there is good left to get, I can't get rid of it. - Nothing we
1:12:49SPEAKERwouldn't throw away to replace with something slightly better. - So, you know, let me ask real
1:12:56SPEAKERfast before we end the show. I've still got the monitors, not because I want to use them. - You
1:13:03SPEAKERcould make a really big VR headset with them. - Should I just go on Craigslist and say,
1:13:08SPEAKER"Hey, free monitors, come pick them up"? - You're gonna have to engage with humanity if you do that.
1:13:12SPEAKERJust, you know the thing you did where you said goodbye to the chair? - I don't, I'm not gonna,
1:13:16SPEAKERI can't put electronics out on the curb. I just can't bring myself to do it. - It doesn't rain
1:13:20SPEAKERthere, you're fine. Are you gonna give them the cables or you're gonna sell them the cables after
1:13:25SPEAKERthe fact? It's pretty hard to get a DVI cable these days. - Yeah, I was gonna say also I'm using
1:13:31SPEAKERone of the DVI cables. I'm a cable hoarder as well, because I always find uses for things like
1:13:35SPEAKERthat. I mean, they're free and as is, like whatever, take them or leave them, right? - That's
1:13:40SPEAKERtrue. - Like that's the thing. I don't want to donate them because I don't want somebody to pay
1:13:43SPEAKERmoney for them because they're so old that they might, they might crap out in a week. - So here's
1:13:48SPEAKERyour, here's your solution. What you do is you post on Craigslist a picture of the monitors. You
1:13:53SPEAKERsay they're gonna be out on the curb at nine o'clock on Sunday morning. - Interesting. - And
1:13:58SPEAKERthen... - Be there. - Then you put them out on the curb at nine o'clock on Sunday morning.
1:14:03SPEAKER- Okay. - Don't put an email address on the Craigslist posting, because the kind of people
1:14:07SPEAKERthat are gonna email you about some free 20 year old monitors are not the kind of people you're
1:14:12SPEAKERgonna want to engage with on the moment to moment. - Probably. - Yeah. - Well, I mean, is the, is the
1:14:18SPEAKERfree as is not enough protection there of just like, hey, if you want these, take them. That's
1:14:22SPEAKERthe end of our relationship. - I'm just saying you don't want to give them an opportunity for
1:14:26SPEAKERa long-term relationship. - Oh man. That's, you know what? I think, oh, you might be onto something.
1:14:30SPEAKER- Yeah. - If I don't have to actually, oh, this is like the best of all worlds. - This is, this is,
1:14:34SPEAKERthis is one thing that Facebook is actually really good for. I feel like Nextdoor has this too,
1:14:38SPEAKERbut both of those are communities I prefer not to engage with if I don't have to. - Yeah. - Facebook,
1:14:42SPEAKERthere's a Facebook group in Pacifica that my wife's on that is like free shit. And when you
1:14:48SPEAKERhave like, it's, it's, it started out as like, hey, I have kid clothes that I don't want to,
1:14:55SPEAKERlike they're not good enough to sell, but there definitely is life in them. So if anybody wants
1:14:59SPEAKERthem, just, I'm going to put them in a box out at the front of my driveway, come grab them.
1:15:03SPEAKERAnd we do a lot of stuff. Like we, we gotta, we, we pick up stuff that way. We give stuff away that
1:15:08SPEAKERway. And it's a kind of nice community thing. So yeah. But this is the time, speaking of nice
1:15:15SPEAKERcommunities, it's a good segue. - It is. - It's time to thank our patrons, our wonderful,
1:15:21SPEAKERthe wonderful tech pod patrons. - Thank you, patrons. - Thank you, patrons. And also let
1:15:27SPEAKEReveryone know that this Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod is a 100% listener supported podcast. We are
1:15:32SPEAKERhere at the grace of, I think we're at, hold on, let's see, like 2,700 and something patrons,
1:15:41SPEAKERright? 2,711 patrons. - 2,711. - 2,711. That's a good number. - It's a good number. - 2,700
1:15:48SPEAKERbeautiful nerds who support the show every month. Thank you all so much. If you would like to find
1:15:54SPEAKERout how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/techpod, where you find out how
1:15:59SPEAKERto do this. You basically, you give us a couple of bucks and we give you either access to the
1:16:03SPEAKERdiscord or access to the discord and some other stuff like access to our monthly patron exclusive
1:16:08SPEAKERepisode. - Yeah. - Which last month we talked about my drive down to Palm desert at length.
1:16:14SPEAKER- Yeah. And your pool. - And my pool. Like when I hang up this call, I'm going to go get in the
1:16:19SPEAKERpool. - Oh my God. I'm so jealous. It is not your pool, but. - It's the pool that we're,
1:16:23SPEAKERit's my pool for the next two weeks and three days. - Temporary pool is the best kind of pool.
1:16:28SPEAKER- Yeah. No liability, high usage. But a very special thank you to our executive producer,
1:16:34SPEAKERto your patrons, including Andrew Slosky, The Bunny Fiend, Jacob Chapel, Joel Krauska,
1:16:42SPEAKERTwinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and our newest executive producer, your patron,
1:16:50SPEAKERPaddle Creek Games, The Fractured Veil Video Game People. I think that's Krista Bona, but I'm not
1:16:56SPEAKERsure. - We'll just cover. - Yeah. Thank you all patrons so, so much for your support. We really
1:17:03SPEAKERappreciate it. - Thank you. - Thank you. - No, thank you. - Thank you. - What are you thinking,
1:17:07SPEAKERme or them? - Oh, them. - Oh crap. I thought you were thinking me. - Well, thank you too,
1:17:12SPEAKERI guess. - I have no idea what you're thinking me for. - Thanks. - Thanks everybody. But thanks,
1:17:15SPEAKERthanks patrons. We really appreciate it. - Yes. - The community on the discord is fabulous.
1:17:20SPEAKERI came in, I asked a question at like five o'clock last night, and then had a fabulous
1:17:26SPEAKERconversation for like two hours about awesome deals and things that feel like they're stealing,
1:17:32SPEAKERbut aren't. And it's just lovely to be able to partake in like a community full of good...
1:17:43SPEAKEROur people have good brains, Brad. - Yeah. They know a lot and they know a lot about a lot.
1:17:47SPEAKERAnd it's a good place to find out about things or find out more about things. - They're good
1:17:53SPEAKERchairs. I would love it this week. I'm gonna make a thread in... I can't believe I'm making a thread,
1:17:58SPEAKERI apologize, Brad. I'm gonna make a thread in this week's episode where people can chair
1:18:02SPEAKERtheir best things that fit in this category. Like their best deals that feel like steals. - Sure. Oh,
1:18:08SPEAKERthat's... Wow. I thought I had a title for this. - Yeah. - Oh man, I don't know. That's not bad.
1:18:14SPEAKER- Yeah. Anyway, that's gonna be the thread name, but maybe the episode name. I don't know.
1:18:20SPEAKER- I actually don't have... I have another title. I'll let you use that one for the thread. I
1:18:26SPEAKERsurprisingly don't hate the way Discord handles threads. I am very anti-thread on Slack.
1:18:31SPEAKER- So yeah, threads on Slack are awful. - But I am kind of impressed with how
1:18:36SPEAKERDiscord has done them. They're a little bit more... They're quite a bit more approachable.
1:18:40SPEAKERMy only problem is I just don't think to look at them, so I've been missing a lot of conversation.
1:18:43SPEAKER- But that's the thing that worries me. I do like them as a tool that mods can use to
1:18:48SPEAKERseparate out a thread that a handful of people are going into,
1:18:52SPEAKERbut maybe doesn't apply to the whole group. - Sure.
1:18:54SPEAKER- I think that's really... Anyway, this is the stuff we think about. The Discord's fabulous.
1:18:59SPEAKERThe community is wonderful. You should join and come be a part. We would love to have you here.
1:19:03SPEAKEREverybody's welcome. And yeah, the address again is patreon.com/peckpod. And if you don't want to
1:19:12SPEAKERjoin the Patreon, tell your friends on Twitter or Facebook, or if you're on Peach, let your
1:19:17SPEAKERPeach buddies know. - Yes, yes. Hit up your Mastodon
1:19:19SPEAKERinstance. Let all your federated friends know. - Let the... Maybe not Gab. Probably good with
1:19:27SPEAKERno Gab. - Well, yeah.
1:19:28SPEAKER- I got no more social networks, I think. - Gab even still exists.
1:19:31SPEAKER- Instagram. Yeah, if you want to drop a hot TikTok vid promoting the tech pod,
1:19:37SPEAKERsend it to us on Twitter, where we'll see it, and we'll let people know that you made a hot TikTok.
1:19:41SPEAKER'Cause I love to see a good TikTok. But that'll do it for us this week, and I hope you have a
1:19:47SPEAKERlovely week, my friend. - Yeah, same to you.
1:19:49SPEAKER- And we will see you all next Sunday. Bye, everybody.