132: The Coldest Open

00:00SPEAKERHey Brad, you know what happens when rain, it rains, but it's cold out?

00:03SPEAKERUh, for the sake of this cold open, no.

00:07SPEAKERWell, I'm going to call this the coldest cold open.

00:11SPEAKERA true, physically cold open.

00:13SPEAKERMaybe it's, is it the coldest cold open or is it just the coldest open? That's the question.

00:17SPEAKERThe coldest open.

00:18SPEAKERYeah, the...

00:19SPEAKERLook, you can't, you can't seed in a topic or a title for this episode that early. I'm sorry.

00:23SPEAKERLook, I'm, I'm sorry. I apologize for my, for my, for my error, but...

00:28SPEAKERYou're just playing to the crowd.

00:29SPEAKERWe, it's spring break week in the Smith household and we, uh, piled everyone into the family

00:36SPEAKERtruckster and drove up to Tahoe thinking, Oh, have a nice week. We'll see. Well, it's springtime.

00:41SPEAKERWe'll ride some bikes. We'll go on some hikes. Maybe we'll see some, see some animals. It's

00:45SPEAKERgoing to be really pretty. It's gonna be some outdoor nature time. If we want to see a little

00:48SPEAKERbit of snow, we can drive up to 8,000 feet and we'll be able to see some snow.

00:52SPEAKERJoke's on you.

00:53SPEAKERLittle did we know that was like a foot and a half of snow ago. It stopped finally.

00:59SPEAKEROkay.

00:59SPEAKERWe were planning on driving home. I was supposed to be in the car as we record this driving home,

01:04SPEAKERbut we're going to, we're, we're extending our stay for reasons.

01:07SPEAKERYeah. How did, how did this go over with the proprietor of the establishment? I

01:10SPEAKERassume they're probably used to it.

01:11SPEAKERWell, they were planning on coming up this weekend and they are equally hosed. So they were like,

01:16SPEAKERyeah, no, we'll happily take more money if you want to stay longer. It's good. Yeah.

01:20SPEAKERSo it's not, it's not so much that you want to stay longer.

01:23SPEAKERYeah. Look, I didn't, I usually buy chains for, I usually rent a four by four and I buy chains,

01:30SPEAKERor at least an all wheel drive car. And I buy chains for the car, which is kind of expensive.

01:33SPEAKERI don't know if you've noticed rental cars have gotten crazy expensive during the pandemic.

01:38SPEAKEROh.

01:38SPEAKERLike what would have been a 250 or $300 rental,

01:41SPEAKERsay two years ago, three years ago was 700 bucks when we looked.

01:45SPEAKERWow. Holy crap.

01:47SPEAKERYeah. So.

01:48SPEAKERThat's so expensive. I'm moving away from the microphone.

01:50SPEAKERYeah. You lean back, you almost fell out of your chair. So yeah. Anyway, we're up here. It snowed.

01:56SPEAKERThe power was off and on all day yesterday. Came back like this morning for, for good. We think

02:02SPEAKERthe internet, we can make it through this podcast.

02:05SPEAKERI'm on a battery, but the internet will conk out. So probably why if the podcast ends abruptly,

02:10SPEAKERit's probably my fault. The snow on the roof of the house. I don't, I don't,

02:15SPEAKERyou probably didn't hear that, but there's a foot and a half of snow on the roof of the house.

02:20SPEAKERAnd every once in a while, a big chunk of it will melt enough that it breaks off and slides.

02:24SPEAKEROkay.

02:25SPEAKERAnd when I heard it at six o'clock yesterday morning,

02:28SPEAKERI thought we were having an earthquake. Like it sounded like that rumble you get when you get an

02:32SPEAKERearthquake and everybody in the house leapt out of bed. We like ran out. We're like, what was it?

02:36SPEAKERWhat the hell was that? And it was just, you know, 200 pounds of snow rolling off the roof. So.

02:41SPEAKERSo yeah, I thought you were going to say the weight of the snow was making the roof

02:45SPEAKERlike Creek and you were starting to question its structural integrity. So I think snow falling off

02:49SPEAKERthe roof is highly preferable. It's yeah, no, it's, it's been, it's like, just to be like,

02:54SPEAKERit's been awesome. Like I, my daughter, this is the second time my daughter has seen snow at a

02:58SPEAKERtime that she would remember. Cause like, yeah, we live in Northern California. We don't get snow.

03:01SPEAKERYeah.

03:02SPEAKERAnd we've had a, we've had a good time. We have, we went on like a shirt sleeves hike on Tuesday

03:07SPEAKERwhere we're like, I had a fleece and a pair of jeans on and we walked like three and a half,

03:10SPEAKERfour miles and saw some really pretty stuff. And then like went to bed that night and it was still

03:17SPEAKERrelatively clear. And the next morning we woke up and it was like a foot of snow on the ground.

03:21SPEAKERSo now you can, now you can walk like three and a half, four feet.

03:23SPEAKERYeah. And I did, I did the bougie thing

03:26SPEAKERwhere I sat in the hot tub out back while it was snowing yesterday.

03:29SPEAKERWas there a beer involved?

03:31SPEAKERLook, maybe, I don't know. I'm going to tell you it was, it's an okay way to live. It seems like,

03:36SPEAKERso.

03:38SPEAKERHere's the real question.

03:39SPEAKERYeah.

03:40SPEAKERHow are your stocks?

03:42SPEAKERWhich stocks?

03:43SPEAKERHow are your supplies?

03:44SPEAKEROh, well.

03:45SPEAKERYou can't leave, right? Like just to clarify, I mean, you cannot drive to a store, right?

03:48SPEAKERI could probably drive now. I could, we, we, I would have to buy chains to go over the pass,

03:55SPEAKERyou know, over Donner pass where it hits 8,000 feet. Cause it's still pretty snowy up there.

03:59SPEAKERYeah. Did you drive your EV?

04:01SPEAKERWe drove the EV. Yeah.

04:02SPEAKEROh, wow. Wow.

04:03SPEAKERYeah. So we stopped at the grocery store on the way back from the hike and I was like,

04:09SPEAKERI'm going to buy some hot dogs just in case. And I was like, you know, that's so stupid.

04:12SPEAKERThere's a market and like three restaurants down the hill from us. It's like a five minute walk.

04:16SPEAKERIt'd be fine. As soon as the power went off, everything shut down. Like they were like,

04:20SPEAKERno, we don't have a way. I was like, can I buy some matches? They're like, we don't really know

04:23SPEAKERhow to charge for them. I was like, can I just Venmo you five bucks for like this box of matches?

04:29SPEAKERI will massively overpay for the matches. They were like, yeah, you can do that. So I had matched.

04:33SPEAKERWe got matches to light the stove, to light the gas range.

04:38SPEAKERWow. That's like one step away from like a barter system at that point.

04:41SPEAKERIt was close. I realized I wore, I put on one pair of jeans when we were leaving and I'd loaded them

04:48SPEAKERup with like, was like some cash and all that stuff. Cause I don't usually keep cash in my

04:52SPEAKERwallet. And then I changed pants right before we left and I left the cash in the other pants. So

04:57SPEAKERwe rolled all the way up here with like $3 cash on us. I think it's like, look, it worked out.

05:04SPEAKERHey, look, you got hot dogs. You got matches. I think you'll be fine.

05:08SPEAKERThe hot dogs were delish.

05:39SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will.

05:42SPEAKERI'm Brad. I'm wondering how long to keep talking because of the latency. Like I try to,

05:46SPEAKERwe try to practice good mic discipline here and like, you know, the, the cleaner we talk,

05:50SPEAKERthe less editing involved, but when there's like a few extra, maybe a few hundred extra milliseconds.

05:56SPEAKERYeah. It's I'm on a cable modem and it's a bad, it's like a,

06:01SPEAKERby Bay Area standards, it's probably like a mid two thousands, early 2010s cable. Like it's like

06:06SPEAKER30 megabits down and basically nothing up. Maybe functional.

06:12SPEAKERYeah, but it's fine. It's better than, it's better than the satellite we had a few months ago. It's

06:18SPEAKERnot as good as the fiber we had in the desert last year. So.

06:21SPEAKERI mean, you can't beat that desert fiber.

06:22SPEAKERI love that desert fiber. So it gets everything moving. But, but, but you have some interesting

06:29SPEAKERnew hardware. Well, hold on first. We're going to do two, two, two bits this week.

06:33SPEAKERSplit topic.

06:35SPEAKERYeah. Cause you have a play date, which I'm very curious about. I have my, I've paid for

06:40SPEAKERa pre-order and I'm waiting for it to arrive. I've got the first wave whenever they ship.

06:44SPEAKERThey shipped or hang on. I'm burying the lead here. I'm getting out of myself.

06:47SPEAKEROkay. It may be waiting for me when I get home. Who knows? But then we also have this kind of,

06:54SPEAKERwe want to talk about some technology spring cleaning. Cause I, I, the weekend before we left,

06:59SPEAKERI sat down and was like, man, I haven't updated stuff in a long time. And then when I made the

07:03SPEAKERlist of all the things I had to update, it was bad. So I kind of want to talk through that and

07:08SPEAKERfind out what people's strategies are for maintaining increasingly complicated home

07:13SPEAKERlab setups and things like that.

07:14SPEAKERI'm looking at your list of things to update right here. And I just want to close it.

07:18SPEAKERIt's a lot of things.

07:19SPEAKERIt's a lot of things.

07:20SPEAKERYeah. Some of them are, some of them are like urgent. Some of them, not so much. It turns out.

07:23SPEAKERYeah. So this is, it's not quite a potpourri when there are only two types of flowers.

07:27SPEAKERIt's not quite a potpourri.

07:28SPEAKERYeah, no, it's a, it's a, it's a spring mix.

07:30SPEAKERWhat do you think this play date is like a, like a sunflower?

07:33SPEAKERI would call that a sunshine. Sunflowers are a little darker than that. I think that's like a.

07:38SPEAKERThis thing's bordering on an orange. It's not quite yellow.

07:40SPEAKERIt looks bright yellow on the camera. It could be your white balance though.

07:44SPEAKERIt's smaller than I expected.

07:47SPEAKERIt's very small. Like I'd say palm size. We're talking about the play date, the panic play date.

07:51SPEAKERYeah. The, the, the panic play date made designed by teenage engineering in collaboration with

07:56SPEAKERpanic makers of fine Mac software for the last decades and publishers of Firewatch and the

08:03SPEAKERuntitled goose game and something else. I think I can't remember what the other one was.

08:06SPEAKERThe other one is about playing with your food. I forget what it is, but I don't think it's out yet.

08:10SPEAKERSo I don't, I don't think we'll spend a ton of time talking about games here.

08:12SPEAKERWe covered this thing on next Lander quite a bit this week.

08:14SPEAKERPlugging the other podcast, huh?

08:18SPEAKERLet's say there are probably some listeners of both.

08:19SPEAKERI'd say there's overlap. Yeah.

08:21SPEAKERThat stuff. But like I've been,

08:23SPEAKERI think you've also have messed with the SDK for this thing a little bit.

08:26SPEAKERI downloaded it and I wrote, tried to write a hello world program

08:29SPEAKERin about 45 minutes and I didn't quite get there.

08:31SPEAKEROh, you didn't. Okay. I didn't either.

08:33SPEAKERI look that the power went out midway through that. So I was like,

08:37SPEAKERam I going to use my laptop battery to do this? No, I'm going to stop here.

08:40SPEAKERAnd I couldn't look up stuff anymore. And it got complicated.

08:44SPEAKERAlso, I've never really used Lua outside of like ancient wow, UI mod hacking.

08:51SPEAKERSo that was definitely the most prominent example I knew of Lua usage before this thing.

08:56SPEAKEROh, people, Lua is really, really popular in the game design world.

09:00SPEAKERLike like a lot of a lot of like scripting that doesn't need to be performant.

09:06SPEAKERA lot of, a lot of people use Lua for that.

09:09SPEAKERCan I ask, I mean, I don't know if you've been in game development long enough and we're super

09:12SPEAKERgetting ahead of ourselves on the play date, but I was reading up on Lua after I had messed with

09:17SPEAKERthe SDK a little bit and like, it's got a pretty kind of, I guess I'd say full featured C API.

09:26SPEAKERLike it hooks into C quite well. Like you can kind of, kind of run Lua inside of, you know,

09:31SPEAKERlower level compiled languages. Like what is the, cause like you said, when, when you don't need as

09:35SPEAKERmuch speed, it's, it's something you can fall back on, but like what is the upside in a development

09:40SPEAKERcontext? Like it's just easier to use. Is that essentially the main reason? Like, like, like,

09:44SPEAKERit's like, it's harder to write C well than it is to write a garbage collected language like Lua.

09:48SPEAKERThat's exactly it. Usually you have way more people on like, like for example, a lot of every,

09:54SPEAKERevery studio is different, but like some of our level designers are competent are like also

10:00SPEAKERgood programmers in specific, like working blueprints and unreal and stuff like that.

10:05SPEAKERAnd maybe wouldn't feel comfortable working in C is the difference. Also, you can cause real

10:09SPEAKERproblems for yourself working in C and using the more interpretive languages generally protect you

10:13SPEAKERfrom messing up too bad. Now anybody who's used unreal blueprints is screaming at their radio

10:17SPEAKERright now. So I apologize. But yeah, I don't really work on that side of the business at all.

10:23SPEAKERI know just enough to be dangerous. So yes. All right. Well, why don't we talk about the

10:27SPEAKERunit itself and the hardware and any questions you have, and then we'll talk about our, our budding

10:31SPEAKERcareers as game developers. The first thing I'm curious about, like the screen, the choice on the

10:36SPEAKERscreen. Okay. Well, okay. There's a bunch. It's a weird piece of hardware, right? It's like,

10:40SPEAKERit's got a little tiny, it's, it's a little tiny thing. It's got a screen. It's got like Game Boy

10:45SPEAKERcontrols with a D pad and two face buttons, right? Yeah. No triggers. No, that's it. So it is,

10:50SPEAKERit is D pad, two face buttons, a home button, and then the lock button. And then the crank,

10:55SPEAKERlike the crank is basically the only thing that differentiates this thing from an original Game

10:59SPEAKERBoy. Yeah. It's, I mean, it seems it's, it's a, and it has that real teenage engineering vibe of

11:06SPEAKERlike hard edges and, and like it's, it's really clean looking is what I would say probably. So

11:13SPEAKERspeaking of the hard edges my, my most recently discovered favorite use case for this thing. Yeah.

11:20SPEAKERLike the, the edges are... Does it sit up like an iPhone 4? Yes, it will stand up on it. So

11:25SPEAKERalso, so we're talking about the screen. Yeah. Which they describe as one bit. I mean,

11:29SPEAKERI gather one bit just means pixels are on or off, right? No shades of, no shades of gray.

11:34SPEAKERI don't know what type of screen this is. I was trying to find it. I want to say it's made by

11:37SPEAKERSamsung. There's a specific name for this type of screen. It's like a trans-flective thing though,

11:40SPEAKERright? Like it has a reflective thing in the back. It's kind of like the old GBA screen,

11:44SPEAKERbut only one color, the original GBA screen. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, we'll, we'll get to the lack of

11:49SPEAKERbacklight, but the point is when you lock it, the screen does not go off. It says right in the

11:54SPEAKERinstructions, like, Hey, when you lock it, it'll go to a clock because the screen takes almost

11:58SPEAKERno power. So we were like, why not just leave it on? So, so because the clock never goes away

12:03SPEAKERand it stands up nicely on its, on its bottom and it looks super cool. I'm now using it as a

12:09SPEAKERdesk clock. That's awesome. It actually looks like awesome at the back of my desk, just standing up

12:13SPEAKERnext to my phone charger as a, as a little clock. Can you, so you said, is the lock a toggle or is

12:19SPEAKERit like a push button? Is it a push and a hold on lock? So it's like everything about this thing is

12:23SPEAKERjust goofy and quirky. So like when you press the lock button, a little face pops up and you have to

12:28SPEAKERhit it twice to make it open both of its eyes and then it comes on. I like that. That's very cute.

12:33SPEAKERBut yeah. So like this thing, it's weird watching the internet react to this thing as all the

12:38SPEAKERreviews have been coming out. I assume they're all over the place, right? I haven't looked at a ton

12:42SPEAKERof the reviews. They're mostly fairly positive. I mean, some of them are like, you know, it's $180

12:47SPEAKERfor a thing that is like, I use the word toy on the next liner podcast. And I hate to keep saying

12:53SPEAKERthat because like, that sounds more dismissive than I mean for it to it's a very niche enthusiast.

12:58SPEAKERActually, I think hobbyist is the word that I would use. Like it's kind of a hobbyist thing.

13:02SPEAKERI mean, the, the teenage engineering hardware is traditionally really kind of hacker friendly. Like

13:07SPEAKERthe thing that I first heard about them making was a bunch of different sense that, that like

13:11SPEAKERuse specific each one was a specific subset and you could wire them all together and make

13:16SPEAKERlike dope with, but it was very like DIY. And like they were, they sold literal raw boards

13:21SPEAKERthat like the, and, and posted plans. So you could like laser cut or 3D print a case for them or

13:26SPEAKERwhatever, if you want it. Yeah. What is, what is that? The, the big sense they make the OP one,

13:30SPEAKERI want to say that's the fancy industrial design one, the ones that are early ones were all just

13:34SPEAKERlike, it was literally, it looked like it looked like the motherboard from a Game Boy with some,

13:39SPEAKERlike with some buttons on it. Like no, no, no case, no battery, nothing. Like you plugged it

13:45SPEAKERinto a USB power supply and then you could daisy chain a bunch of them together and, and, and build

13:51SPEAKERactual music with like four or five, three or four or five of them, if you want it, I guess.

13:55SPEAKERYeah. So, yeah, I mean like, you know, this, this thing ships with 24 games, not all at once. I

13:59SPEAKERmean, they roll out over time. If you haven't heard, they do this like season model where

14:03SPEAKERyou get two new games a week for, for 12 weeks. I'm kind of into that because the games are kind

14:08SPEAKERof bite-sized, right? Yeah. A lot of them, I mean, some of them are action oriented,

14:13SPEAKERlike arcadey enough that you get it in like 30 seconds. Like some of them are very much like,

14:16SPEAKERokay, I have played this for one minute and I get exactly what this game is. And then some of them

14:20SPEAKERare pretty like deeply story-based, like they've got a lot of writing to them and a lot more depth.

14:27SPEAKERWhat's the fishing game, Sitch? Oh, I don't think there is one.

14:32SPEAKERWow. There's a real, actually real, real void in the market there.

14:36SPEAKERThere is, there's a surfboarding game. Okay.

14:38SPEAKERThe worst with the crank. What does the crank do on the surfboarding game?

14:41SPEAKERYou steer the surfboard left and right by cranking one direction or the other. So it's kind of cool.

14:45SPEAKERI mean, it's like a nice, nice analog control. It's like a one axis analog control.

14:49SPEAKERYes, exactly. Interesting.

14:51SPEAKERScrolling through here. It's, it's a good mix of like arcade games and puzzle games and some

14:58SPEAKERstory-based more, some like overhead Zelda type stuff. Like the games, the games are,

15:02SPEAKERthere's a nice range of stuff. So there are like story, more story-driven,

15:06SPEAKERbecause most of the things I'd seen were pretty arcadey. Like the, the Keita Takahashi

15:11SPEAKERgame looked kind of, it looked pretty arcadey and, and like very crank focused.

15:17SPEAKERYes. Let me see here. I believe so Echoic Memory, which I believe Samantha Coleman worked on.

15:22SPEAKERThat's got a decent amount of story to it. So I'm still scrolling through here,

15:25SPEAKERtrying to remember Saturday edition. Let's see, Ratcheteer? Yeah, Ratcheteer is another one.

15:33SPEAKERSo there's, there's, there's some that have some pretty dense narrative elements. There's,

15:39SPEAKERthere's also, there's even an X-Com clone of sorts. Not, not X, sorry, it's not really X-Com,

15:44SPEAKERit's more Advanced Wars, I would say, like turn-based strategy.

15:46SPEAKERBut a strategy game. That's cool. What, what, like what's, so the screen, you said it doesn't

15:51SPEAKERhave a backlight. So I assume that means you need to have some sort of light on behind you in order

15:55SPEAKERto really see it, right? Yes, there absolutely have been cases where I had to rotate 90 degrees

15:59SPEAKERin my chair because I just couldn't see it sitting up. And is that in like a well lit room or is that

16:03SPEAKERa dark room? So I'm in, I don't get direct natural light in here right now, but there's like kind of

16:10SPEAKERgood bounce lighting from the sun coming in. It's kind of hard to see right now. Okay. So you would

16:15SPEAKERlike rotate 90 degrees off camera. So I'm like holding it pointed at this window now and I can

16:19SPEAKERsee it fine. As soon as I rotate back kind of perpendicular to the way the window is facing,

16:24SPEAKERit's, it's kind of tough to see. That's interesting. So, yeah, that's, that's,

16:28SPEAKERthat's like, does it seem like, does it seem like something you just kind of leave in your bag all

16:33SPEAKERthe time? Like in a world where we still commuted and things like that. Right. From, from which

16:38SPEAKERstandpoint, in terms of durability, like it bouncing around in the bag or the battery life,

16:42SPEAKERor what are you, all of the above. I was thinking about more ease of like, like the way you would

16:46SPEAKERwant to access it. Like, is this something you'd whip out on the bus to play a game or are you more

16:49SPEAKERlikely to pull out your phone? It depends on what kind of game, like if like the bus bounces around

16:54SPEAKERa lot, I've tried to play enough like switch and Vita games over the years. Like anything that

16:58SPEAKERinvolved the crank, I would say is probably not great on public transit. Okay. Like on an airplane,

17:02SPEAKERit would be fine. Assuming you're not experiencing turbulence. Yeah. I used to play 3DS games on the,

17:07SPEAKERon the Bart fairly regularly, but it's a smoother ride than the bus usually. Yeah. And then the,

17:12SPEAKERthe D padded button controls should probably be fine on a bus, but anything where you're getting

17:16SPEAKERjostled, the crank would be tough to, to finesse. Interesting. How like, have they talked about the

17:23SPEAKERmarket? Like what the market for future, like they've, they've released a ton. We'll talk about

17:28SPEAKERthe SDK and stuff later, but they've released a ton of tools just for anybody to build, build stuff

17:32SPEAKERfor it, for the, for the play date. I assume that they have a plan for either future seasons or like

17:39SPEAKERa a la carte store. Have they talked about any of that stuff at all? So an official season two from

17:44SPEAKERthem seems to be up in the air right now. They have a FAQ up and then some of the stuff has

17:47SPEAKERchanged over time as you know, this thing slipped like 18 months or something. Yeah.

17:51SPEAKERThe pandemic was unkind for hardware people. Yeah, it's understandable, but I think a lot

17:56SPEAKERof these details have evolved as the delays have come into effect. As of right now, they

18:03SPEAKERbasically, they had literally in the FAQ have a question about a season two and they're like,

18:06SPEAKERwe're figuring it out. We're not a hundred percent sure yet. Like I would assume if they do sponsor

18:10SPEAKERa season two, they would charge for it, but I don't know. There is no storefront on this thing

18:15SPEAKERor on their website or anywhere. The only thing, and this is one of the things I think is the

18:19SPEAKERcoolest thing about this thing. It's very easy to sideload games onto it. Okay. And literally they

18:26SPEAKERpanic themselves are pointing, basically pointing people at a bunch of itch pages right now, just

18:31SPEAKERlike, Hey, so-so is making a game for this thing. Here's their itch page. Like you can just buy it

18:35SPEAKERfrom the itch page and download the zip file and just sideload it onto your thing. And you just

18:38SPEAKERcopy a zip file, like you plug it in, it's a USB drive and you, and you copy it over? Yeah. There

18:43SPEAKERare two ways actually that you can do it through the website. You have an account on play.date

18:47SPEAKERand you go there and there's a little sideload tab on the page and you drag, you drag the,

18:52SPEAKERthey're actually dot PDX files, which I thought it was very cutesy. That's very cute. Yeah. Them

18:56SPEAKERbeing based in Portland and everything. But you literally drag the PDX file onto the sideload

19:02SPEAKERpage on your account page. And that actually sends it to the cloud. And then you download it

19:07SPEAKERover wifi onto the, onto the play date. You can also side, you can sideload over USB as well,

19:12SPEAKERbut you have to use the SDK for that. So it works like that. So that cloud thing works like the old

19:17SPEAKERwhat Kindle sideloading thing that you could do. I mean, you can still do it, but that's, that's

19:23SPEAKERreally cool. Like that's it. The, the, the, the technical implementation of the sideloading is

19:27SPEAKERcool to me, but it's more of the kind of commerce aspect of it. It's more of that, like they aren't

19:32SPEAKERrunning their own storefront. They're not trying to peel 30% of revenue off of whatever games get

19:37SPEAKERmade for this thing. Right. They're just saying like, like, like Lucas Pope, for example, is

19:40SPEAKERmaking a play day game right now, like the papers, please. And yeah. Return of the Overdin developer.

19:46SPEAKERAnd he's got it on itch. And it's like, when he's done with it, you'll just go

19:49SPEAKERpay him through itch for the game and download it. And panic's like, yeah, whatever.

19:52SPEAKERI mean, there's something really cool about panic saying, Hey, we're putting this thing out here.

19:58SPEAKERIt's I, they didn't call it. I don't think cable ever called it an experiment, but like,

20:01SPEAKERit's kind of implied that it's, they wanted to do something that was more hardware after publishing

20:05SPEAKERa couple of games and like their, their first rev store is not going to be anything anywhere near

20:14SPEAKERas good as something like itches. So why not, why not just, yeah. Why not draft on itch and let the

20:20SPEAKERrising tide lift all ships. Right. Totally. That's really cool. And that's part of what I was going

20:24SPEAKERto mention earlier about the response to this thing is the reviews have come out is that there's

20:28SPEAKERthis whole, like, there's this whole like kind of console warrior response to this thing of people,

20:32SPEAKERlike sneering down their noses. It's like, Oh, that fucking thing is never going to make it.

20:37SPEAKERLike it can't compete against this. You know, you know what I mean? It's like people are treating

20:41SPEAKERthis thing like it's a new video game console. That's trying to compete with other video game

20:44SPEAKERconsoles when it's extremely not that that's, that's what I meant about calling it a hobbyist

20:49SPEAKERdevice. Like I think it is as much for people who want to tinker with a cool device and like

20:54SPEAKERpotentially try to code something for it or go out and find some of the non game things people

21:00SPEAKERwere developing for it and try those out, you know, but it is like something for like serious

21:04SPEAKERhardcore gamers. I mean, there's well, okay. I kind of am offended by the idea that serious

21:10SPEAKERhardcore gamers can't be interested in something that they want to noodle with, but we can get back

21:13SPEAKERto that later. I know what I'm saying. There are a bunch of people out there who are only

21:16SPEAKERapproaching it from that angle and kind of, and kind of sneering at its existence in a way that

21:21SPEAKERis really weird. That's weird because it's not like it's, this isn't like the Ouya or the Stadia

21:26SPEAKERor something where they came out and were like, Hey, we're going to change console gaming forever.

21:30SPEAKERWe're going to make this completely new thing. They've been really transparent from the beginning

21:33SPEAKERwith this where they're like, Hey, we wanted to make a cool, like we want, this is the thing that

21:37SPEAKERwe thought was cool and would like to have because we feel like there's no space for this kind of

21:41SPEAKERgame in the world anymore. And like, I remember I talked to Samantha at some point and I remember

21:46SPEAKERbeing kind of pleasantly surprised by what her take on the dev cycle for this thing was compared

21:54SPEAKERto say, you know, I don't want to say Vita, but like a Switch is at this point, there's no

22:00SPEAKERdifference between building a Switch game and building a game for any other console at this

22:04SPEAKERpoint. And that's the closest thing we have to a handheld right now. So like the idea that,

22:09SPEAKERthat like in the GBA time in the Xbox 360 GBA timeframe, there was an interesting kind of

22:15SPEAKERlo-fi game scene going on on the GBA where people were making what were essentially like modern

22:20SPEAKERSNES games that just happened to be handheld. And we saw it like Capcom made the Minish Cap,

22:27SPEAKERMinish Cap, which is I think one of the better Zelda games in that, in that timeframe and having

22:32SPEAKERthat limitation, having limited resources and limited hardware lets you do different things

22:39SPEAKERand sets different expectations for like production value and stuff like that. So,

22:42SPEAKERso like it, it's, it's an opera. I guess what I'm trying to say in the longest, most roundabout way

22:47SPEAKERis having a mobile handheld indie game platform seems like a win-win for anybody who likes indie

22:55SPEAKERgames. Like Activision is not going to call a duty on this thing, but who like were probably good.

23:00SPEAKER- Yes, probably. Somebody did port Doom to it though, to be fair.

23:04SPEAKER- Of course. I mean, it always runs Doom. Everything runs Doom.

23:06SPEAKER- Here's the best example I would give is, so I downloaded the SDK yesterday and in the space of

23:11SPEAKERan hour after installing the SDK, they include a bunch of projects that you can compile and run

23:16SPEAKERyourself. In the space of an hour after downloading the SDK, I had gone through, I like looked through

23:22SPEAKERthe code in some of those projects and then figure out you'd have to compile them from the command

23:25SPEAKERline. There is a proper compiler for it. And you have to like, you have to set an environment

23:29SPEAKERvariable with the path to the compiler and stuff. Like it's not, it's not dead simple if you've

23:33SPEAKERnever done stuff in the command line, but like in the space of an hour, I figured out, I looked

23:38SPEAKERthrough the code in some of those projects. I figured out how to get them compiled and

23:41SPEAKERsideloaded onto the thing. And like, there I am playing homebrew games that I can look at the code

23:46SPEAKERfor myself on the device in an hour, you know, like that's awesome. Also, one of the examples

23:51SPEAKERthey include is called level one, one. I think you can guess exactly what that is, but like,

23:57SPEAKERit's cool. I mean, like Lua code is very readable. I've never messed with it before,

24:00SPEAKERbut it, you know, it looks like a lot of the other kind of garbage collected languages where it's

24:03SPEAKERlike pretty legible. Yeah. If you, if you understand basic syntax and it's like, it's not,

24:08SPEAKERit's not, it is not overtly complicated in the way that like C or Perl or something like that,

24:13SPEAKERor even Python is. And I was able to go through there and look at like kind of the algorithms

24:17SPEAKERthat control like the movement of this fake Mario character at level one, one and like kind of get

24:21SPEAKERa sense of like, oh, here's other calculating friction and like, and stuff like that, you know,

24:25SPEAKERgravity and things, things like that. Like it's, it's awesome from that perspective,

24:29SPEAKERif you're interested in tinkering with things and seeing how things work, like

24:32SPEAKERit's such a cool gateway into that world. Like the tools are just pretty surprisingly accessible.

24:37SPEAKERI think I had intended to spend, well, then they also have this web-based thing that is

24:41SPEAKERlike one order of magnitude less complicated. It seems like I, I just started poking at that when

24:47SPEAKERthe internet conked out once and for all yesterday. But, but it seemed like, like there was an

24:51SPEAKERopportunity to do some, some like almost like blueprint code in Unreal or something like that,

24:57SPEAKERwhere you set up these visual, set up a module that can do a thing that can handle a thing,

25:02SPEAKERwhether it's motion of the character jumping or something like that. And then you can visually

25:06SPEAKERhook it up to the other modules and, and write little scripts that are then connected in a,

25:11SPEAKERin a kind of flow charty way that seems pretty manageable.

25:14SPEAKER- And I, I'm, I think even those games will save out to a .pdx that you can just

25:20SPEAKERdistribute to your friends. Like, think about that. Like that's kind of awesome. You know,

25:22SPEAKERit's kind of like a mixtape thing almost of just like, Hey, here, just give this game to your

25:26SPEAKERfriends. Don't even bother trying to sell it. Just like, Hey, here's the thing I made, check it out.

25:29SPEAKER- I love it. Do you, do you, so they unlocked all the games early for press units, right?

25:34SPEAKER- Yes. Yeah.

25:35SPEAKER- Do you, do you feel like, like, do you feel like out of that first season,

25:38SPEAKERyou've got as much value as you want out of your, like, if you had,

25:41SPEAKERyou paid 200 bucks or whatever it is?

25:43SPEAKER- Hmm. If the development tools were not so readily accessible.

25:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

25:50SPEAKER- That would be a harder question to answer. I think probably.

25:52SPEAKER- Okay.

25:53SPEAKER- But, but because like I've already side loaded half a dozen free games that people put out for

25:58SPEAKERthis thing out there. So because of that aspect of it, I'd say it's absolutely worth it. If,

26:02SPEAKERif you're interested in tinkering with stuff like this, like.

26:04SPEAKER- I, I really, I think, I think like that idea of, Hey, here's a place that developers and,

26:11SPEAKERor whether professional who want to do side stuff and just noodle or shade tree folks who want to

26:16SPEAKERlearn, have a way to, to like, one of the problems with early VR stuff was that, you know, in order

26:24SPEAKERto do a VR demo and show somebody what you've been working on, you had to schlep around a PC

26:27SPEAKERand a headset on some lighthouses and all this other stuff. And it was really hard to do demos

26:31SPEAKERand, and share work. This is the antithesis of that, right? Like this, you just whip the thing

26:35SPEAKERout of your pocket, put it in, and then there you go. You're, you're, you're, you're up and running.

26:39SPEAKERIt's, it sounds really cool.

26:40SPEAKER- It's neat.

26:41SPEAKER- I'm really excited to spend some time with it.

26:43SPEAKER- Yeah. But if, if you want a handheld video game device and you don't have any intention of like

26:49SPEAKERtrying to write code for this thing, or even going out and finding games for it,

26:53SPEAKERlike again, like from the hardcore gamer angle, like probably a harder sell.

26:58SPEAKER- Is there like an itch.io play date hub for, set up for them?

27:01SPEAKER- No, I found like, I found all those free games I mentioned on like Panic, Panic had a Twitter

27:06SPEAKERthread going off like, Hey, why don't we, why don't we just tweet some games that we know that

27:09SPEAKERpeople are working on.

27:10SPEAKER- So discovery will be a challenge then.

27:12SPEAKER- Like, yeah, there is no centralized discoverability like that's, but that's kind of

27:15SPEAKERrefreshing to me. Like we did the stream the other day and I put this thing called Play Note Studio

27:21SPEAKERon there, which is a crank based player for Flip Note Studio, which was a DSi, a Nintendo DSi thing.

27:27SPEAKER- Wow.

27:27SPEAKER- I don't know if you remember that.

27:28SPEAKER- Yeah, I remember those.

27:29SPEAKER- Yeah, Flip Note Studio was like literally a DSi based flip, flip book animator, right?

27:34SPEAKERAnd so, you know, Nintendo kills everything off, so that's not around anymore, but you can somehow,

27:38SPEAKERI don't know what the process is, but you can dump those files from the old DSi game and load

27:45SPEAKERthem into this thing. So it's like preserving a bunch of old animated works that people did

27:49SPEAKERyears ago. But the, but the reason I brought this up is that I thought the thing I thought was cool

27:55SPEAKERwas I only knew about that because I randomly stumbled across somebody on my feed retweeting it.

27:59SPEAKERLike there's no store to dig through.

28:03SPEAKER- So they need a blog or something, a minimum of blog or something.

28:06SPEAKER- Well, I mean, yes, but like it,

28:08SPEAKERit felt this is some people are going to roll their eyes at this.

28:12SPEAKERIt felt cooler because I just randomly discovered it in a way that I very easily could have just

28:17SPEAKERmissed. You know what I mean? It's like, Oh, this is a thing people are talking about. And Oh wow,

28:22SPEAKERI can just download this file on this random website, load it onto my device. And there it is.

28:26SPEAKER- Have you joined any Playdate discords yet, Brad?

28:29SPEAKER- Not, no, not, not quite.

28:30SPEAKER- Okay. I mean, it seems, it seems like that kind of like seems like having a discord channel for

28:35SPEAKERthis might be interesting if people get enough of them. The other thing is the emulator is available

28:42SPEAKERas part of the SDK. And I don't, I don't think you can load the season one stuff. I assume you

28:47SPEAKERcould load anything you download from itch.io into that and see what it looks like. Although

28:51SPEAKERthe warning on that is really funny because it says, yo, this is going to run a lot faster on

28:57SPEAKERyour computer than it will run on the Playdate. So make sure you run whatever you build on the

29:00SPEAKERhardware to make sure it actually works. Like, did they talk about what kind of CPU and stuff

29:04SPEAKERis in this? I've got the specs here. Let me pull them up real fast. They actually changed out the

29:08SPEAKERCPU late in production due to supply chain issues. Yeah. Cause they had some supply. They were really

29:13SPEAKERtransparent about how this was going all the way through. I've been reading the blogs cause they

29:16SPEAKERpost them. This spec sheet in the SDK does not have the details on the CPU. I really want to know

29:22SPEAKERthat. I thought it was a MIPS thing, but I can't remember for sure. Is it MIPS, not ARM? Might be

29:28SPEAKERARM. It was, I was surprised when I saw. Let's just see here. It is ARM based. It is an ST

29:35SPEAKERMicroelectronics STM32F746. Oh yes. It says 742.6. That's yeah. Okay. I think that's the one that's

29:45SPEAKERin it now. I don't, unless that's the one they started with and then retired in favor of the

29:50SPEAKERslower one. I'm actually not sure. It is ARM based though. Okay. Let me see some other stuff

29:57SPEAKERabout the specs here real fast. Can you put your own OS? Do they let you jailbreak it to the point

30:02SPEAKERthat you can put your own OS on it presumably? Not so far. I doubt that is a thing. That will

30:07SPEAKERcome up with time if it's going to happen. Yeah. Somebody very, very well could find a way to

30:11SPEAKERroute and port other OSs to it. Let's see. So it's 400 by 240. Okay. The screen refreshes at 30 Hertz

30:20SPEAKERby default. It goes up to a maximum of 50. Okay. 16 megabytes of RAM. What is the 16 megabytes of

30:34SPEAKERRAM? Huh? Wow. That's shockingly little. Yeah, it really is. When you think about it,

30:40SPEAKERmy Pentium 75 in 1996 had 16 megabytes of RAM. How, how much storage and how much,

30:47SPEAKERlike, I assume there's like cash built into the SOC, but like how much storage does it,

30:52SPEAKERit doesn't need 3d or anything like that. Right. And so it's just. I don't think so. How does it

30:56SPEAKERsound? Teenage Engineering is usually really good at sound. Sounds great. It's got, I mean,

31:00SPEAKERit's got full digital audio capabilities. So I, I assume, Oh, go ahead. That was, that was an

31:06SPEAKERinteresting thing reading through the SDK guidelines. Like they've got some do's and

31:09SPEAKERdon'ts and stuff. And that was one of the things, first of all, they start off saying like,

31:13SPEAKERlike we'd love it if you kept the size of games down because the storage on this thing is not

31:17SPEAKERinfinite and it will run out. And like, we think kind of 40 to 60 megabytes is maybe the

31:23SPEAKERideal of the top end for game size. And also audio is the thing that will eat all of your,

31:27SPEAKERyour, your space. 40 to 60 megabytes. Wow. So please try to keep your audio assets

31:32SPEAKERcompressed and as minimal as possible. Dude, there is a game in the, in the

31:37SPEAKERshipping season one that is less than a megabyte. It's like 800, 875 kilobytes.

31:42SPEAKERI was going to say, I would assume most of what you would use for something like this would be

31:45SPEAKERMIDI stuff that then you just load a sound bank for or whatever.

31:47SPEAKERI think that's yeah. Or, or synthesis or like, like, like, like wave or, you know, FM synth.

31:52SPEAKERYeah. What, what, um,

31:54SPEAKERThere is at least one game in here that seems to use actual digital music.

31:59SPEAKERWow. What a trip. Um, I'm I assume my assumption also is that people will, if the, if the sound

32:08SPEAKERprocessing stuff is pretty good, then we'll see a lot of like electroplank type like gamey synth

32:13SPEAKERthings that you can use to make some cool music with. Um, because with the analog, with the crank,

32:20SPEAKERyou can control tempo and things like that. Absolutely.

32:22SPEAKERYeah. There's a bunch of interesting things you could do with this from a music standpoint,

32:25SPEAKERI would say. There is a thing it's at the very hang on. Let me crank my way to the top of the

32:29SPEAKERlist. Cause that's way faster than the teabag. Uh, what is it called? Boogie loops.

32:33SPEAKERBoogie loops is a music creator. Okay.

32:36SPEAKERFor this thing. So it ships with one, which is, which is awesome.

32:39SPEAKERYou're going to need like 30 play dates all hooked up into your mixer.

32:42SPEAKERSomebody, somebody will probably make that happen.

32:45SPEAKEROh, I'm, I'm going to tell you, if you go, if you go look up the TNG engineering

32:50SPEAKERsynth setups on YouTube, you'll see some amazing stuff that people have set up, like,

32:54SPEAKERlike pads all around them with the, anyway, it doesn't matter.

32:58SPEAKERYeah. Anyway, this thing is neat. It is very much for like the hobbyist enthusiasts. Like it's not

33:03SPEAKERjust a traditional games player. The games are fine. Like the games are cool, but you can probably

33:08SPEAKERtell I am way more excited about the development tools and the weird, the weird projects people

33:14SPEAKERare going to find to, uh, to gen up for it. And like, I'm pretty inspired to like, keep looking

33:19SPEAKERthrough the code for these sample projects and like, seeing if I can write something where I can

33:23SPEAKERmove a sprite around the screen and stuff, you know, like. I was going to say, is this for old

33:27SPEAKERpeople, Brad? Maybe. Okay. When I get mine in, I will find, I'll talk, I'll, I'll put it in

33:33SPEAKERfront of a nine-year-old and let you know what they think. It's spring time, Brad.

33:43SPEAKEROh, spring has sprung, huh? Well, some places, dude, it's like, I'm going to go put my snow

33:48SPEAKERboots on in a minute. I think it's like 75 degrees here right now. Every once in a while,

33:53SPEAKERlike somebody, my doorbell camera would pop up over the last couple of days and be like,

33:58SPEAKERand I'd look at the picture on it and be like, man, it's really sunny up there.

34:02SPEAKERI'm paying money to be here in the cold. What the hell's wrong with me?

34:06SPEAKERIt's really, it's really pretty cold based on the photos.

34:08SPEAKERIt is exceptionally, like it is gorgeous. I've never, I've never seen, like I grew up in

34:13SPEAKERmountains in Tennessee and we saw snow, but nothing like this is, it's been bonkers. Like

34:17SPEAKERlast night at one point, there were snowflakes about the size of a dime,

34:21SPEAKERjust like, just drifting, wafting down. But you know what I usually do in the springtime is clean

34:31SPEAKERthings. Well, the house, you know, windows get cleaned in the spring, whether they need it or

34:36SPEAKERnot. They always need it. I just made me realize we've never cleaned the windows in this apartment.

34:42SPEAKERYou rent the apartment. You shouldn't have to clean the windows. Just let them,

34:44SPEAKERlet them grime up. You're getting privacy that way. Yeah, exactly. If you can still see out them,

34:50SPEAKERthey're clean enough. But we, we are going to, I went through last weekend and did a bunch of

34:56SPEAKERcomputer maintenance. I updated my NAS server, which I hadn't done in an embarrassingly long

35:02SPEAKERtime. You're still on true NAS? I'm on true NAS still. Yeah. What version were you on?

35:07SPEAKERI was on, it was still called free NAS when I was 11.3, I think.

35:14SPEAKER11.3 was the last major version before the current major version.

35:18SPEAKERYeah. Like, but I hadn't updated. I had, look, so I have my, my theory on internal security stuff

35:25SPEAKERand people are going to yell at me for this. I'm sure is that if it connects to the outside world,

35:28SPEAKERit has to be updated regularly. And if it only lives inside the net, inside the net,

35:33SPEAKERthen, you know, whenever it's convenient, That's kind of where I'm at for the most part.

35:38SPEAKERYeah. So I hadn't updated. I was on you, you, 11.3, you won the initial release version of

35:48SPEAKERfree NAS 11.3. That's less good.

35:51SPEAKERYeah, it wasn't great. So I've updated that. And then that meant that I had to go through

35:55SPEAKERand update all the jails. And when I updated all the jails, I had to update all the apps

35:59SPEAKERrunning inside the jails and like, well, I usually keep the Plex server relatively up to date,

36:03SPEAKERjust in the hopes that one day we'll get hardware and code on BSD, which I think is never going to

36:08SPEAKERhappen. So you can, but not on true NAS. I've done a lot of digging, sadly.

36:15SPEAKERReason number 431 to switch to Linux for Plex. We'll get into this. I've also been doing some

36:21SPEAKERstuff. I updated the pie hole. Like I've been, I keep the gravity lists up to date that runs

36:26SPEAKERautomatically, but updating the pie hole, you have to like, I have to, I have to shell into the

36:31SPEAKERRaspbian install and like, you know, it was an equilibrium. It was working. I didn't want to

36:36SPEAKERfutz with it too much. So did that. I did the home assistant updates, which I do regularly, but

36:44SPEAKERthere's also stuff like they they've been moving the home assistant things out of the configuration

36:49SPEAKERdot YAML and into like a more GUI oriented setup now. So a lot of times if you have the old

36:56SPEAKERcrufty installation with the configuration dot YAML, you either have to clear it out of the

37:00SPEAKERconfig YAML file, or you have to remove it, back it up, remove it, reinstall it, and then redump

37:06SPEAKERin the settings for your, for your integration. I moved, I moved my Z wave from the legacy

37:15SPEAKERdeprecated Z wave install to the new, not deprecated, but still equally janky Z wave install.

37:22SPEAKERThis is in home assistant. This is in home assistant. I get the sense that there's maybe

37:26SPEAKERa bit of strife around the direction of home assistant. I think, I think it may very well be

37:32SPEAKERfrom people who are not happy. They're moving away from simple text-based configuration.

37:36SPEAKERI look, there's the home assistant stuff is better than what I was using closed source stuff for

37:45SPEAKERstill, but it is still janky in a similar but different way.

37:50SPEAKERYes, that's for sure. So I also just updated randomly two nights ago, updated my home

37:54SPEAKERassistant because I was on the version from last June. They do monthly, monthly major versions.

37:59SPEAKERMultiple monthlies.

38:00SPEAKEROh yeah. I think they'll do like a feature release at the beginning of the month and

38:03SPEAKERthen patches throughout. So I was on last June's. First of all, I can only update to

38:09SPEAKERlast December's because they have now changed Python versions.

38:12SPEAKEROh yeah.

38:13SPEAKERI would have to go create a new virtual environment or I'd have to install the newer version of Python

38:18SPEAKERin the container and then, and then make a new, new...

38:20SPEAKERWait, are you running in a jail or are you running a...

38:22SPEAKERI'm running on a Pi in an LXC container.

38:26SPEAKERSo I would have to install Python 3.9 in that container and then make a new virtual environment

38:31SPEAKERwith the newer Python and move the config over. It's a pain.

38:36SPEAKERSo I have a whole Pi dedicated to it because I have a bunch of stuff running. It's actually

38:40SPEAKERkind of heavy. And as a result, it has the, the OS is managed. Like I get OS updates through the,

38:48SPEAKERthrough the UI, which includes the...

38:50SPEAKERDid you install from the image they put out?

38:52SPEAKERYeah.

38:53SPEAKERLike, like home assistant OS or whatever they call it.

38:55SPEAKERWay easier and way less maintenance.

38:58SPEAKERSo each month I get multiple and the core OS updates are less frequent, it seems like,

39:03SPEAKERthan the, than the home assistant updates. So I'll get a core OS update. You do that first,

39:07SPEAKERand then you do the console update and then whatever add-ons or whatever get updated after

39:12SPEAKERthat.

39:12SPEAKERGot it. Yeah. I do a bunch of other stuff on that Pi. So I have to keep everything kind of

39:16SPEAKERcompartmentalized. But the thing I was going to say about Jank though, is that I updated to that

39:20SPEAKERmore recent version, instantly populated my Apple home with like kind of virtual bridges for like

39:26SPEAKERevery device in this house out of nowhere that do nothing. Like they don't actually activate

39:31SPEAKERanything when you flip them on, but there's just like double the number of icons in Apple home now.

39:36SPEAKEROh, really?

39:37SPEAKERIt's for whatever reason, that newer version is exposing those bridges

39:40SPEAKERin a way that it wasn't before.

39:41SPEAKEROh, they should, that, that, that's, that's not working right. So for me, that just pops up.

39:46SPEAKERIt just mirrors my home assistant configuration in Apple home, which means I can use Siri to

39:50SPEAKERconfigure it, to change lights and stuff, which is actually super convenient.

39:53SPEAKERYeah. I like it. It's entirely possible. There's a way for me to go in there and like clear all

39:56SPEAKERthat out that it's like config cruft or something, but who has the time?

39:59SPEAKERIt might be, you might, that you might be in a situation where you are on the bad version

40:04SPEAKERof that particular plugin. Cause last December, maybe when that was having problems, I can't

40:08SPEAKERremember. The thing about home assistant is you always have to read the release notes when you

40:12SPEAKERupdate. Cause sometimes they will just break something that's really crucial to you.

40:16SPEAKERI discovered that in the course of this cause I haven't updated in a while. Like they have now

40:19SPEAKERadded to their release notes every month, a section called breaking changes. And they were

40:23SPEAKERvery explicitly in the update process. Like make sure you look at the breaking changes before you

40:27SPEAKERupgrade to make sure it's not going to break anything you want. And I'm like, what is going

40:30SPEAKERon here when you were breaking that much functionality every month?

40:32SPEAKERWell, it's, it's, it's usually stuff that's like lightly used because they get data about what,

40:38SPEAKERwhat plugins and what integrations are being used. Yeah. So it's usually like, like hue 1.0 was

40:45SPEAKERdeprecated a few months ago in a way that was specific and also rev, revocable if you wanted

40:51SPEAKERto turn it back on and stuff like that. Like it's I feel like they're doing a, I kind of wish they

40:57SPEAKERwould do fewer major updates. Cause I know that like, it feels like it's probably just cause my

41:03SPEAKERsetup is pretty stable now and I don't actually need the changes and the changes almost always

41:08SPEAKERcause me hassle. I guess I don't have to upgrade them, but I also feel like if I don't, if I fall

41:13SPEAKERbehind on that one in particular, I'll be in the situation where you are, where I change it. I have

41:17SPEAKERto read like 4,000 patch notes updates and like, and I'm still wondering if things are going to

41:22SPEAKERbreak in any way. And for, for something that runs all the lights in your house and probably a lot

41:27SPEAKERmore in your case, like that's kind of critical infrastructure. The lights all work without home

41:32SPEAKERassistant, but it is nice when I like fire up a Twitch stream or have a meeting when the lights

41:36SPEAKERgo to the right setting for that. Anyway. Yeah. The, the biggest problem I have is that every

41:43SPEAKERtime I update lately, it's been kicking off all my Zigbee bulbs, which is a huge pain in the butt

41:48SPEAKERbecause you have to change the way you sync those is by doing the on for one second, off for two

41:53SPEAKERseconds, on for one second, off for two seconds on every single bulb. I'm going to replace the bulbs.

41:59SPEAKERI think it's, I think the problem is the bulbs. The, the, the thing I've learned is that on the

42:03SPEAKERZigbee stuff, the firmware is supposed to be updated by the, by the controller. And since

42:09SPEAKERthey're open and the, the Cree, the bulb manufacturer that I used for those bulbs,

42:14SPEAKERdoesn't supply firmware, they can't update your firmware on your bulbs. So if there's some sort

42:20SPEAKERof incompatibility or something, the solution is to pair them to a closed proprietary source that

42:26SPEAKERwill update all the bulbs and then repair them with your home assistant thing, which would be

42:31SPEAKERfine, except for there's like 15 of those bulbs in my house. Anyway, this, this is a first world

42:37SPEAKERproblem. The upgrading the jails was surprisingly complicated. Cause like, I don't know about you,

42:42SPEAKERbut I often, when I load a jail in true NAS, I'll get that, Hey, this is running a different

42:46SPEAKERversion of the kernel. When you, when you do the package update thing. Yes. Oh, wait. Yes. I know.

42:52SPEAKERSo I've wanted to talk about that. That's exactly why I am thinking about getting off of true NAS.

42:56SPEAKERYeah. Is it, is it where you try to update your packages and it's like, Hey,

42:59SPEAKERthese packages are for a newer version than you're running. So the reason that happens is true NAS

43:05SPEAKERlocks in on a given version of free BSD. Currently it's 12.2. The problem is the free BSD group

43:13SPEAKERorganization, whatever you want to call it end of life's old versions, like incredibly fast. Yeah.

43:18SPEAKERThe end of support for a given major version of free BSD is the release of the next version

43:25SPEAKERplus three months. So they only support the last version for three months past the release of the

43:29SPEAKERnext version, which is like pretty short when granted, like it's not a huge development

43:34SPEAKERcommunity. Like I often wonder how healthy the free BSD scene is these days. But so, you know,

43:42SPEAKERthey don't have a ton of resources to support old versions, but, but, but true NAS locks in,

43:47SPEAKERlike I said, on a version and takes forever to move on to another version. So there's the upshot

43:51SPEAKERis there's going to be like three months out of every year where you can't really safely update

43:55SPEAKERthe packages on that thing because the free BSD people are no longer maintaining the repo for that

44:01SPEAKERversion that you're still stuck running for a while. Well, so I'll tell you, it usually works.

44:07SPEAKERIt gets usually fine. Like unless there's like some major ABI changes or whatever,

44:12SPEAKERthe new, the pad, the newer packages than the kernel you're running usually will be okay,

44:15SPEAKERbut there's never a guarantee. Yeah. I, I well, and also I had some jails that were running an

44:22SPEAKERancient version of the kernel. Cause when you update the tree NAS version from 11 point,

44:27SPEAKERwhen I updated from 11.3 to whatever tree NAS 12.1 or whatever it is now, 12.2, it's true NAS

44:34SPEAKER12.0, but it's running on free BSD 12.2. Yeah. I had to update the jails individually to use the

44:40SPEAKERnew kernels, which was terrifying because like, yeah. Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of that.

44:45SPEAKERYeah. So what's actually happening there. If you really care about the minutia,

44:48SPEAKERyou're actually updating like the user land, like the kernel you're running on is the kernel of the

44:52SPEAKERbase system, but all of the packages that are in that jail are for a different version. So that's

44:56SPEAKERwhat they're trying to get you to update, but it's such a pain. It is a huge pain and it's,

45:00SPEAKERit's ambiguously dangerous in a way that makes me uncomfortable. It makes me think that like,

45:06SPEAKERmaybe the Docker people are right. Or the container people are right that, Hey,

45:10SPEAKERjust having your own little chunk of the OS in here is maybe the safer way to do this.

45:14SPEAKERYes. I actually have been thinking about Docker and pod man and a lot of that stuff

45:18SPEAKERlately as I've also been like, we're both in that window right now, but like,

45:21SPEAKERyeah, it's like, is it prox mocks? Is it Docker? What am I going to do? I don't know, but I'm going

45:26SPEAKERto do something I think. So that's what I rolled in here wanting to talk about. I think I'm finally

45:32SPEAKERdone. I think I'm finally officially fed up with being stuck. I hang on. Let me, let me step back.

45:37SPEAKERI want to be fair to the true NAS people. I think we are both using that thing in a way that is like

45:42SPEAKERkind of not super intended. Like it's kind of edge cases for what they would say true NAS should be

45:48SPEAKERused for. I mean, yeah, the, the business of true NAS is work group servers, and we are definitely

45:54SPEAKERnot using it for work group servers in the sense that they would expect you to. And they offer,

45:59SPEAKERexcuse me, vetted, vetted and community plugins. Yeah. And that they say like, Hey, you should use

46:04SPEAKERthe plugins. We offer not like go make your own jails and set up your own stuff. But of course

46:08SPEAKERwe didn't listen to that anyway. Well, but at the time when I made my own jails for all this stuff,

46:13SPEAKERit was because the community plugins were lagging six months to a year behind on services that

46:18SPEAKERactually needed the updates. Yes. So anyway, I am fed up with being boxed in and again,

46:23SPEAKERit's not their fault. It's just that the thing they make is not really appropriate for my use

46:28SPEAKERcase. So here's, here's the revelation that I had last weekend. Yeah. You could boot off of USB

46:34SPEAKERdrives now. Yeah. I've got old SSDs stacked up. Yeah. I've got a SATA to USB cable. Uh-huh.

46:42SPEAKERI was like, why don't I just like screw around with like a SSD that I can check in the trash

46:46SPEAKERand by checking the trash, I mean format. And so I hooked up one of the SSDs and just installed

46:53SPEAKERstraight up FreeBSD 13.0 to it. Oh boy. You just went, but that's not the way I would have gone,

46:57SPEAKERbut okay. And then I hooked up the other SSD and installed Debian stable to it. Oh, okay. Okay.

47:02SPEAKERNow I'm back on board. And so I'm just going to plink around with both of them and decide

47:06SPEAKERwhich direction I want to go. Like, are you hooking up to your ZFS pool? Yeah. Like there's

47:11SPEAKERliterally installed it to the true NAS machine, just to a different drive that I can boot off of

47:15SPEAKERat will. Hold on. Let me, let's go one step deeper here. What if, what if you put a hypervisor?

47:22SPEAKEROh, look, I know the argument. I know the argument. Here's the thing about Proxmox though.

47:26SPEAKERLike I absolutely get the use case of Proxmox, but I kind of don't want to run an appliance

47:31SPEAKERplatform anymore. Like Proxmox still is bound to a UI and you're still pulling your updates on their

47:36SPEAKERschedule, right? Like you're still to some degree are going to be limited by the choices that the

47:40SPEAKERProxmox group makes. Proxmox is just Debian and KVM with web UI on it. I mean, I'm being productive.

47:48SPEAKERWhat if I just ran that stuff for real? What if I could just update anything whenever I want and

47:53SPEAKERI'll worry about anybody saying this is a bad idea. I mean, the point of the Proxmox though,

47:56SPEAKERis that you do run that stuff for real. You just run it one layer deeper. Oh, I know. I know. But

48:00SPEAKERwhat I mean is like, and when I talk to some people on the discord, I'm quoting Y-Cross. Is that how

48:05SPEAKERyou say his name? That's how I would say Y-Cross. Yeah. Like he mentioned like, like he put it in

48:09SPEAKERkind of a way that I'm not at his level, but I am, I'm like kind of aspirationally moving in that

48:15SPEAKERdirection where he was like, because he just runs an ass with Linux on it. And he was like, Hey,

48:19SPEAKERI'm very comfortable in Linux. Like I know how to provision VMs with KVM myself. You know, I can do

48:24SPEAKERall this myself. That's what I'm going to do. And so like, that's kind of the direction I'm going

48:28SPEAKERin. It's just going to take some time. That was my, my thought is replace the big heavy machine

48:33SPEAKERwith a, like a six core Duke. And if you just want to run storage on the box and not do all the other

48:38SPEAKERstuff, like something, something like a prox mocks or a true NAS makes more sense. But like, I'm

48:44SPEAKERsitting here doing like inventory now with everything that true NAS does for you and thinking

48:47SPEAKERabout, Oh, I'm going to have to like replicate that functionality myself if I go through with

48:50SPEAKERthis. And it's like, but it's like, I think the way I would put it is like, I'm figuring out all

48:56SPEAKERthe stuff I'm going to have to do myself, but I'm also figuring out all the stuff I'm going to get

49:00SPEAKERto do myself because like, like as an, as an example, like the scheduling in true NAS is

49:07SPEAKERterrible. Like it's not good. Like the, you mean scheduling, like cron tab type stuff.

49:12SPEAKERSo that's the thing, like the scrub scheduling uses cron, but the smart scheduling uses smarts

49:18SPEAKERbuilt-in scheduling, but they, the interfaces look identical. So you don't realize that they actually

49:22SPEAKERdon't work the same way. And also like the cron stuff is extremely limited in a way that you could

49:27SPEAKERabsolutely do more with. You're just writing scripts yourself. So it's stuff like that,

49:31SPEAKERyou know, where it's like, Oh, like there's scheduling I would like to do for maintenance

49:36SPEAKERstuff on here that you straight up can't do with a scheduler. But if I was just scripting myself,

49:39SPEAKERI absolutely could like, that's kind of exciting. And I want, I'm looking for stuff like,

49:43SPEAKERthat's just built into the, that, that will just work on Linux at this point, like, you know,

49:49SPEAKERvideo transcode acceleration and, and things like that, that are, that you can get to work on BSD,

49:55SPEAKERbut won't work on true NAS. And even if getting the work on BSD seems problematic, it's a pain.

50:00SPEAKERAnd frankly, like the Plex server on BSD is always lagging a couple of versions back. Like, it's,

50:06SPEAKERit's not, yeah, I, I, I think, I think this has become a place where the more, the, the path of

50:15SPEAKERleast resistance is the thing that more people are using because, which, which sucks. I feel bad. I

50:23SPEAKERfeel bad using the thing that is like the thing more people are using just because more people

50:27SPEAKERare using it. But sometimes it turns out that's what I want because I don't want to be hassled.

50:31SPEAKERIt's why, it's why I went with the appliance install for home assistant, frankly.

50:34SPEAKERRight. That's where the support is. Like I get it. Like I really admire the monolithic approach

50:40SPEAKERof FreeBSD. You know, it's like, it's one operating system. There aren't a bunch of different distros.

50:43SPEAKERLike it's got one set of very robust documentation. Like there's like kind of one good way to do

50:47SPEAKEReverything. Like I actually, if all other things were equal, I would feel more comfortable using

50:52SPEAKERthat than Linux. It's just that Linux runs literally everything on the planet and BSD

50:56SPEAKERextremely does not. So it's like a lot of the stuff about going with Linux instead is going

51:01SPEAKERto kind of be a pain to work around, but like that time I wanted to run a Terraria server for

51:06SPEAKERsome friends and then realize like, Oh, the version of mono that's still packaged for BSD is like

51:11SPEAKERyears out of date. This is never going to work on Linux. That would be dead simple.

51:15SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Like just the ability to fire up servers, like have a game server

51:21SPEAKERVM that, that I can run a Linux GSM on and, and start servers that will easily, it seems really

51:27SPEAKERnice. Just never being bound by, Oh, this doesn't run on the OS I'm running is, is extremely

51:32SPEAKERappealing. Here's, here's like another interesting example that, that little music server, which is

51:35SPEAKERnow called own tone that I run for, to do Airplay devices. You have to build that yourself. And on

51:42SPEAKERBSD, it takes like on the 6,700 K that my NAS is, it takes like five to 10 minutes to compile.

51:48SPEAKERI did it in a VM on the same machine and Linux, and it took like 30 seconds. And it's because

51:52SPEAKERthere's like already a bunch of prebuilt binaries. This is my guess. I'm not, I don't know for sure,

51:56SPEAKERbut I assume it's because there's already a bunch of prebuilt binaries that it depends on.

52:00SPEAKERAnd it just like, like that felt very illustrative to me of like, Oh, this is, there's already so

52:05SPEAKERmuch more infrastructure in place on the Linux side. Like that's probably the right choice.

52:10SPEAKERIt's just going to be a much bigger learning curve.

52:11SPEAKERIt's weird because the BSD that, well, the, the TrueNAS, FreeNAS in the beginning that when I

52:18SPEAKERstarted on this path, like 10 years ago now, like I went, I went from a home server to a,

52:22SPEAKERto a FreeNAS server, like a Windows home server to a FreeNAS server. And in the beginning it was

52:28SPEAKERbecause I went with the TrueNAS because of the plugins and because I could use the GUI and

52:32SPEAKERbecause all of that stuff and then quickly outgrew the stuff that I could do with that and wanted to

52:37SPEAKERhave more, more control and more flexibility. Brad, what do you do about Windows stuff? Do you

52:42SPEAKERdo some Windows spring cleaning at all, or do you do you just wait until everything gets real bad

52:46SPEAKERand then format and reinstall? I'm like, I've been thinking about that recently. I think my

52:50SPEAKERWindows install is coming up on like three years old now. Yeah. And I'm trying to figure out what

52:55SPEAKERcrufty looks like in a modern Windows context. Cause there's like, I don't really have anything

52:59SPEAKERabout this machine that I would complain about. Like that would make me want to reinstall. Like,

53:05SPEAKERI'm like, that feels unheard of by old Windows standards. Like there's nothing really super

53:10SPEAKERbroken enough that would make me hose this boot drive at this point. I did the clean install with

53:15SPEAKERWindows 11 when Windows 11 came out, but I was definitely in, I had reached the point where,

53:23SPEAKERwhere like sometimes opening file Explorer was slow for reasons that weren't related to

53:26SPEAKERlike hard drive access times or anything like that. It was just slow, which always is a worrisome,

53:31SPEAKERlike that's not a good, it's not where you want to be. But other than that, yeah, it's weird.

53:37SPEAKERWindows doesn't need reinstalling. I do go through and uninstall stuff that I don't use. Like if I

53:43SPEAKERhave old utilities or something that were attached to a piece of hardware that's no longer attached

53:47SPEAKERto the machine or like it's something that I've replaced with a different beat. Like if I ditched,

53:55SPEAKERstopped using Photoshop, I don't install photo, stuff like that. And then I also do, I do go in

54:01SPEAKERand I have an Intel motherboard, so I use that Intel driver update tool, the web-based one.

54:07SPEAKERIt's very handy and it'll go through and pull all of the stuff that's stuck on your motherboard for

54:12SPEAKERyou with hopefully slightly better drivers than the ones that are built into the Windows update,

54:16SPEAKERdriver update process. But that's pretty much it. Like it's, oh, and I check off say backups

54:23SPEAKERto make sure that, like if I've added a drive or something like that to make sure that I haven't

54:26SPEAKERforgotten to add it to the offsite backup tool. The idea of backing up your Windows machine is so

54:31SPEAKERforeign to me. You just don't keep anything useful on yours, right? There's a bunch on the desktop.

54:37SPEAKERLike I've got, I do have stuff on the C drive, mostly on the desktop that should probably be

54:41SPEAKERbacked up. You should just use, I used to use, before I started doing the cloud backup stuff,

54:47SPEAKERI would use Filebot. Is that it? No. Well, what's the, what's the Windows, it's like a power toy

54:55SPEAKERfor copying entire folders. And I would just clone, it basically works like R sync on Linux.

55:00SPEAKERAnd I would do a copy. Oh, it's not, it's not Robo copy, is it?

55:04SPEAKERThat's one of them. That's not the one I used. I, I I'm, I'm not on my main computer, so I can't,

55:09SPEAKERI can't look and tell you, but it, but basically I would take the folders that were important to me

55:12SPEAKERand copy them to network share on the NAS. So then they, cause in the old days, my strategy was

55:20SPEAKERto back up the NAS and back up everything in the house to the NAS. And then that got kind of

55:25SPEAKERexpensive in terms of NAS storage because the other computers got big and we got more computers.

55:31SPEAKERBut, but yeah, the offsite back, the backblaze offsite is, is really incredibly convenient

55:37SPEAKERand makes me feel good. And when I've had to restore stuff from there, it's worked really

55:41SPEAKEReasily. So yeah, I've never actually restored a whole machine, but I've restored, I've definitely

55:45SPEAKERpulled lost data before, which is nice. And then the last thing is I audited all the machines on

55:50SPEAKERthe network. Yes. Your note, your note here in the show notes, found a few things that I'd forgotten

55:57SPEAKERabout and disconnected. Look, there's, there's for a while at testing, we were reviewing all

56:04SPEAKERthe streaming boxes. And as a result, there are things like, I don't know, Roku sticks plugged

56:11SPEAKERinto the back of the TV or some streaming box, some weird console, like a Android based Android TV

56:18SPEAKERbased thing. That's just plugged in, in the back of the TV console where I'll never see it. And

56:23SPEAKERyeah, so I went and found all that stuff and unplugged it. That's probably a good thing to do.

56:27SPEAKERSeems wise. Like every time I look at the DHCP leases on my router and see a device that I can't

56:33SPEAKERidentify immediately in my mind, like it creeps me out. I'm like, Oh, where the fuck did this go?

56:38SPEAKERI, it's not a pleasant feeling. The jails, it's always jails for me.

56:43SPEAKERThat will happen. Last thing I want to mention real fast, because we were talking about Windows

56:46SPEAKERmachines. I'm in the grip of the fever. Well, not exactly right now, but the, the itch is upon me,

56:57SPEAKERthe upgrade itch is becoming too hard to ignore. There's a bunch of Zen 4 and Raptor Lake news

57:03SPEAKERcoming out simultaneously, like every day right now. Also I was chatting with a friend of ours

57:09SPEAKERwho works at a major CPU vendor the other day who was needling me gently about my lack of

57:16SPEAKERupgrades for yet another year. They're ready to do that.

57:20SPEAKEROh, I mean, I get it. But I was also saying, I was like, Oh, you know, the 7,700 K like,

57:23SPEAKERI don't feel like it's really holding me back. And then our friend was like, yeah, like you're

57:27SPEAKERnot wrong, but also I bet when you upgrade, you're really going to feel it. And I was like,

57:30SPEAKERthat was the thing that got to me of like, Oh man, what if there is just an unknown Windows

57:38SPEAKERperformance that I could be enjoying that I'm not aware of.

57:40SPEAKERYou can't use NVMe drives on that. Can you? No, I boot off one like.

57:44SPEAKEROff of an empty NVMe? Yeah.

57:46SPEAKEROh, I've had a, I've had a Samsung Evo in this thing for like four years now.

57:50SPEAKERI didn't think that they, I didn't realize that they went back that far, the 7,700 series,

57:54SPEAKERbut okay. So it's only, it's only PCI three, but that's fine. You're so you're going to see,

58:00SPEAKERyou're going to see when you have 16 gigs of Ram. Yeah. So going to 32 gigs of Ram,

58:05SPEAKERyou'll notice an immediate improvement because my laptop is 16 gigs of Ram and it feels incredibly

58:09SPEAKERslow after using 64 for a while. Also, it's going to be 32 gigs of DDR5.

58:15SPEAKERYeah. That's just going to cost more. It's probably won't feel that much different.

58:18SPEAKERIn the, in the wake of this conversation, I went and started looking at DDR5 prices

58:22SPEAKERand Holy shit. And apparently they're good right now compared to where they were.

58:26SPEAKERAnytime there's new Ram, it's always expensive. Last, last fall,

58:30SPEAKERapparently 32 gig of DDR5 at a good speed was like $3,000. And it's at least down to just a few,

58:36SPEAKERa few hundred dollars now, but that hurts. And I think, I think, I don't know for a fact,

58:40SPEAKERI think both of those new CPUs are maybe going to be DDR5 only.

58:43SPEAKERWell, they, they, the AMD side definitely will. I would say the, the thing to remember about this

58:49SPEAKERmemory, you should, my recommendation is on new, like when we did the DDR4 transition,

58:54SPEAKERI built a machine right around that time and I actually bought really cheap memory.

58:57SPEAKERCause I knew it was going to be like, as soon as there was supply,

59:01SPEAKERyou'd be able to get something much better for way cheaper.

59:05SPEAKERThat's so I've been, I've been trying to weigh the cost benefit there because even at the high end,

59:10SPEAKEReven for like DDR5, 6,000 right now, the latencies, the latencies are really bad.

59:15SPEAKERYeah. So I, I would go value would be my advice. The, the, cause the, cause the other thing that

59:21SPEAKERhas happened every, and this has happened literally every time. And now some of this

59:25SPEAKERis probably cause I made pre-release hardware. But the DDR3 transition, the DDR4 transition,

59:30SPEAKERthe first machines I built with those, those new memory

59:34SPEAKERspecs, the memory of shit, the bad within like three years, every time.

59:39SPEAKERSo like just, you know, you're going to replace that memory and don't spend a ton of money on it.

59:43SPEAKERThat's my advice. You're going to wait another year now, aren't you?

59:47SPEAKERNo, no, I can't, man. I can't, I'm dying at this point.

59:51SPEAKERIt's you, you, it's you're, you've been at time for a long time now.

59:54SPEAKERI'm desperate to upgrade.

59:57SPEAKERWell.

59:58SPEAKERI mean, I, I could just go get a Zen 3 chip right now, but you know.

1:00:03SPEAKERI mean, here's the thing. You could get a Zen 3 chip now,

1:00:06SPEAKERuse it for a year and then upgrade your NAS to the Zen, put the NAS, the Zen 3 in your NAS.

1:00:11SPEAKERYeah, but see, then I do what I did last time, which I hate, which is taking a heavy gaming

1:00:15SPEAKERpart and putting it in a machine that runs 24/7. Next time I rebuild that NAS, I want it to be

1:00:20SPEAKERwith like a low TDP, low power, like something, something like a 65 watt part that actually is

1:00:26SPEAKERlike somewhat responsible to leave on all the time. Oh yeah. I mean, look, if you switch from

1:00:31SPEAKERBSD to Linux, you'll immediately see power savings because your power management will happen.

1:00:35SPEAKERSomewhat. I don't know. I sat there running a power, a power D-V in from BSD and like,

1:00:42SPEAKERit clocks down. Okay.

1:00:44SPEAKERAnd the BSD has gotten a lot better about that stuff.

1:00:47SPEAKEROkay. Yeah. I didn't do it before and after on the, on the 11.1 to, to, to Treenas 12.2

1:00:54SPEAKERupdate. I should have probably. Anyway.

1:00:55SPEAKERThat 13.0 that I was running like out of the box, it'll clock down to 800 megahertz when it's idle.

1:00:59SPEAKERWell, that's nice. Holy cow.

1:01:02SPEAKERYeah.

1:01:03SPEAKERBrad, we've reached the point of the show, the point of time in the show where we thank our patrons.

1:01:07SPEAKERThank you patrons for listening to that rambly podcast. You're reclining in a bed right now.

1:01:12SPEAKERThere's like a big slab of wood behind your head. I feel like this is a

1:01:15SPEAKERslightly more casual podcast than usual.

1:01:17SPEAKERIt's the only quiet room. Like the rest of the house has really high ceilings. So it's super

1:01:21SPEAKERechoey. Or it's my daughter's room. So both of those are very loud.

1:01:26SPEAKEROkay. I see. That is maybe the most rugged looking headboard I have ever seen.

1:01:30SPEAKERI think it's found wood. And then there's a window behind me that I closed so that

1:01:33SPEAKERyou didn't get blown out. But yeah, thank you patrons so much. As always, Brad and Will Made

1:01:39SPEAKERa Tech Pod is a 100% listener supported podcast. So if you would like to find out how to support

1:01:44SPEAKERthe show, you can go to patreon.com/techpod. That's patreon.com/techpod. And for as little

1:01:50SPEAKERas two bucks a month, you can join the 3000 strong community of beautiful nerds in the Tech Pod

1:01:56SPEAKERDiscord who talk about like actually stuff like we just did this episode about. Maintaining computers

1:02:03SPEAKERand making music and playing games. Oh dude, mechanical keyboards after last week. Holy shit.

1:02:10SPEAKERDid you find out about some Switches? Some people have come aggressively at me

1:02:14SPEAKERabout the idea of replacing this Apple magic keyboard, which is still working fine so far

1:02:18SPEAKERpost spill. Did you find out about the Bobas? Bobas? Yeah, the Boba, the Boba switches are the...

1:02:26SPEAKERIs that the hot, is that the hot switch? That's the hot quiet switch.

1:02:29SPEAKERUh, Ooh, that's the thing they were telling me that there are pretty quiet switches out

1:02:33SPEAKERthere these days. Also, I didn't realize there are keyboards that have hot swappable switches.

1:02:38SPEAKERYeah. So you literally just like pop them off, right?

1:02:42SPEAKERYeah. You have a little, a little grabby thing that you pop them out and you put a new one in.

1:02:46SPEAKERI, not that I'm like married to any particular brand, but I was looking at the Keychron store

1:02:51SPEAKERbecause a lot of people on the server like that brand and like their, even the wireless ones with

1:02:55SPEAKERhot swappable switches are cheaper than I expected by a lot. I would describe Keychron as a wonderful

1:03:00SPEAKERentry point for a wire, for a mechanical, uh, most, a lot of people I know start with,

1:03:07SPEAKERstart there and ended up perfectly happy. And then, uh, some people get further down the hole

1:03:11SPEAKERand end up with like weird keys that look like sausages and stuff. So.

1:03:14SPEAKERYeah, but you could get like a, a pretty much full size, like a 96%

1:03:19SPEAKERwireless for like $69. Like it's crazy wireless.

1:03:23SPEAKERYeah. Well they'll do, they do low profile keyboards now too, I believe. So you can get,

1:03:27SPEAKERyou can get the short throw. They, they do. They, they look cool. I asked around though,

1:03:31SPEAKERand the consensus was you're, you'll be very limited on, you know, the number of,

1:03:36SPEAKERyeah, the selection of switches or key caps in that space is very limited.

1:03:41SPEAKERFor maximum switch compatibility, you want Cherry MX compatible hot swap,

1:03:46SPEAKERand then you can just pop the, pop the switches in and out.

1:03:48SPEAKERYeah. I don't know. I don't know, man. I, this thing works fine.

1:03:52SPEAKERI'm not going to, I'm not going to engage in this conversation. This is a trap.

1:03:55SPEAKERI can tell. Uh, but what I will do is thank our executive producer to your patrons, including

1:04:00SPEAKER802.11, 802.11 B Twinkie, Andrew Slosky, Bunny Thorpe OctoCrimes, Chris DeBone,

1:04:09SPEAKERuh, sorry, Paddle Creek Games, Makers of Fractured Veil, David Allen, Jacob Chappell, James Kamik,

1:04:15SPEAKERJoel Krauska, and Wedge. Thank you all executive producer to your patrons.

1:04:20SPEAKERAnd it's the end of the month. Uh, we'll do a Q and A next week. Uh, we, we decided to do this

1:04:25SPEAKERepisode this week and Q and A next week, just because, uh, this month was short.

1:04:30SPEAKERTechnically this is the last Sunday of the month, but we decided to obey the spirit of the law

1:04:34SPEAKERrather than the letter. Yes.

1:04:36SPEAKEROn this one. So Q and A next week, but we will thank our associate producer

1:04:39SPEAKERto your patrons right now, including Arthur Geese, Dave Julian, E.W. Kinder, Ram Banks,

1:04:46SPEAKERJad Rita, Jason Neland, Jay Mabey, Jorge Pereira, Josh Klein, Julian, Mike Bell, Nathan Phelps,

1:04:55SPEAKERSanchik Kumar, Steve Lind, Terry Cox, Thomas Jay, and Travis Rosner. Thank you all so much.

1:05:02SPEAKERWe really appreciate it. Thank you.

1:05:03SPEAKERAnd, uh, I guess that'll do it for us this week. We'll be back next week with more

1:05:07SPEAKERBrad and Will Made in TechPod. Thanks for listening, everybody.