00:00SPEAKERSomething tragic happened this morning, Brad. Oh, oh, I reached out to grab my car. I use,
00:05SPEAKERI've used a Colita wave, the stainless steel one for like five, six years to make coffee. Now
00:11SPEAKERthis is high coffee technology to be clear. I mean, I don't know if it's a, it's a, it's a
00:16SPEAKERcup with some holes on the bottom. It's tapered. It's flat on the bottom. You put a basket filter
00:21SPEAKERin it and then you pour water and ground up coffee beans in it. This is one of those,
00:25SPEAKERa pour over things. It is a pour over thing. Yes. It has a little metal handle that was attached to
00:31SPEAKERthe side that has, it's, it's got a little like, like rubber thing on it so that you don't burn
00:35SPEAKERyour fingers when you, when you take the hot, the hot, sorry, your fingers, you don't say fingers.
00:41SPEAKERI, I do now. There you go. So you don't burn your fingers when you, when you take the hot,
00:46SPEAKERthe hot wave off the top of your, of your brew pitcher or your mug or whatever. And when I took
00:52SPEAKERthe handle off this morning, it just came off in my hands and the thing stayed behind.
00:57SPEAKERSo yeah, I was, I was, I was feigning ignorance here cause you actually told me about this before
01:02SPEAKERwe started. I was like, oh you probably dropped it or banged it up against something, but like it,
01:06SPEAKERyou just picked it up and it came apart. Well, okay. So normally if you have like
01:11SPEAKERa ceramic or glass, one of these, it's an integral part of the thing, right? So it's like,
01:14SPEAKERit's like part of the, of the ceramic mold and the, you know, when they fire it, it's just built in.
01:19SPEAKERFor one piece. So I've, I've dropped, like I've dropped, it's funny, the handles on my pour over
01:25SPEAKERthings have a finite lifespan because my, my Hario V60 handle I dropped a few years ago and it
01:32SPEAKERexploded off and I had to glue it back. And it's got like some weird gaps where I didn't find all
01:36SPEAKERthe shards. This one looks like it was soldered into the, there's two holes punched in the side
01:44SPEAKERof the stainless steel. So I bought the, I bought the Kalita in a stainless steel format because of
01:49SPEAKERmy experience with the V60. And I was like, I'm going to, this will be indestructible. I'll have
01:53SPEAKERit forever. It looks like there were two holes punched in the side of the Kalita. And then it
01:58SPEAKERlooks like it was soldered in place, which makes me really anxious. Cause I didn't realize that
02:01SPEAKERthere was such a thing as food safe solder. Is, is there such a thing?
02:05SPEAKERI'm typing into Google right now. Cause I just like, it just occurred to me to look.
02:10SPEAKERYeah. You don't sound very certain here. Food grade lead free, lead free three
02:14SPEAKERmillimeter wire solder. There you go. Okay. There you go.
02:17SPEAKERI probably wouldn't buy that from Amazon. You know, pour over coffee sounds dangerous
02:21SPEAKERto me. I'm hearing about explosions and shards and solder and maybe,
02:28SPEAKERyou know what works pretty well? A drip filter.
02:30SPEAKERIt's more than I shouldn't probably hold things before I have coffee in the morning.
02:34SPEAKEROkay. That's actually a fair point. You always know it's going to be a rip roaring weekend
02:39SPEAKERwhen you wake up on Saturday and immediately break something.
02:41SPEAKERThe weird thing though, is I got to get a new tip for my soldering iron graph. I'm going to fix this.
02:46SPEAKEROh, for the Pinezil?
02:48SPEAKERWell, because I don't, the other I'm unsure if I've used lead solder on the other tips.
02:53SPEAKERCause is there fear of contamination? Is it that dire?
02:57SPEAKERYeah. I don't want to have like any amount of lead you ingest is too much lead to ingest.
03:01SPEAKERYeah. Fair.
03:02SPEAKERIt makes you stupid and more aggressive.
03:05SPEAKERYeah. And other things I'm not, I started to say anyway.
03:08SPEAKERYeah. But, but so I think I got to get a fresh tip because I don't want to do that. Like I don't,
03:14SPEAKERI might just buy a new one. Cause I'm a little anxious about using solder,
03:17SPEAKERlike self-soldering food, safe solder.
03:20SPEAKERMaybe, maybe just do that.
03:21SPEAKERProbably the right choice.
03:38SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will.
03:56SPEAKERWhoa. How do I follow that up?
03:59SPEAKERSay I'm Brad usually.
04:00SPEAKERI'm Brad.
04:03SPEAKEROne syllable names. You don't have a lot of room to do weird shit with them.
04:06SPEAKERYes. I could, I could roll the R maybe.
04:08SPEAKERNo, I don't have an R. I'm a Will.
04:11SPEAKERI'm Brad.
04:12SPEAKERWill.
04:13SPEAKERI don't, there's not, yeah, you're right. There's not a lot, really not a lot to work with here.
04:18SPEAKERWe could go with our full given names. I don't know.
04:20SPEAKERI don't think I want to do that.
04:22SPEAKERThe less said about that, the better.
04:23SPEAKERYeah. Let's just move on. Hi. Hi. So yeah, my morning has been kind of weird.
04:30SPEAKERApparently this was a 900 watt, 950 watt Kalita Wave. The one that I had,
04:34SPEAKERI'm looking at on Amazon. It's 50 bucks to replace.
04:36SPEAKER950 Watts. Did you say?
04:39SPEAKERThat's what it says on the thing. I don't think that's really correct.
04:42SPEAKERSorry. I was a little distracted.
04:44SPEAKERAfter that intro, someone walked down the hall and was laughing hysterically.
04:49SPEAKERThat's always a good sign.
04:50SPEAKERSure. I wasn't sure what to make of that. Anyway.
04:52SPEAKERI see you have an audience, a live studio audience for your half of the show.
04:56SPEAKERYes. Live reacts anyway.
04:59SPEAKERSo today we're going to do something a little bit different.
05:02SPEAKERWait, is it different?
05:03SPEAKERI mean, we're here to recommend.
05:06SPEAKERI guess that's true. We've recommended things, but like.
05:08SPEAKERWe're here to turn people on to things that make their lives a little easier.
05:12SPEAKERThat's true. One of the early episodes of the show that people liked, we kind of,
05:16SPEAKERI think we kind of casually made an aside. I kind of casually mentioned,
05:19SPEAKERHey, there's this stuff called nanotape. That's like reusable and sticky.
05:22SPEAKERAnd you can put it on things, what you don't want to be permanently affixed to something,
05:27SPEAKERbut it'll hold on almost as though it's permanently affixed. People really liked that.
05:31SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. And like, you know, we did that desk set up episode where
05:35SPEAKERmore ideas for routing and mounting and stacking and.
05:39SPEAKERYeah.
05:40SPEAKERYou know, we're, we're offered.
05:42SPEAKERSo it's the, the, the, the, the, the thought this week is here is some stuff like what we're looking.
05:48SPEAKERSo looking around the house, walking around the house, you see a bunch of things that we've done
05:52SPEAKEReach of we've, we've each done to make our lives a little bit easier, better,
05:57SPEAKERyou know, things, just things that we use, you know, things we like.
06:01SPEAKERBut probably don't deserve a whole episode.
06:03SPEAKERSo here is the thing that I, I thought we should call shit. We like as much as we like nanotape.
06:09SPEAKERYeah. That's, you know, maybe a little wordier than life hacks, but I think I like it better.
06:13SPEAKERI don't like life hacks as much these days.
06:15SPEAKERI'm not a fan necessarily.
06:17SPEAKERSo can we talk like the life hack thing? It got like, so.
06:22SPEAKERIt's it's a, that is a very mid teens, early, early to mid teens, like a blogosphere.
06:29SPEAKERIt's before then it's like a it's yeah. Cause that was when it was ruined in like 2005,
06:35SPEAKERGina Trapani and the folks at life hacker, like life hacker started as her blog, as Gina's blog,
06:41SPEAKERtalking about her organization techniques for like how she kept her task lists and stuff like that.
06:47SPEAKEROkay.
06:47SPEAKERAnd then it kind of grew into a general productivity and like,
06:52SPEAKERlike it, it kind of rose with the rise of, of OS X app. Like, like my remember,
07:00SPEAKERI remember when OS X was the hot thing and everybody was building like little apps for it.
07:04SPEAKEROh yeah.
07:04SPEAKERAnd then phones came along and your apps on your desktop would talk to your,
07:08SPEAKERto your phone apps and it produced this whole ecosystem of weird things like
07:13SPEAKERfantastical and wonder list and all these tools that still persist.
07:17SPEAKEROh yeah. Better touch tool.
07:19SPEAKERYeah. And then, and then YouTube took over life hacks and it became like,
07:24SPEAKERHey man, let me show you how to peel a carrot real fast.
07:28SPEAKERI mean, I'm always trying to peel carrots faster.
07:31SPEAKERWell, do I have a life hack for you, Brad?
07:34SPEAKERI'm looking at life hacker, nothing against life hacker, but I mean, some of the headlines
07:39SPEAKERone detoxes are the Tik TOK myth of the week.
07:42SPEAKERI think the post post Gawker owned Gawker blogs have all fallen somewhat to more and less extent,
07:50SPEAKERThe weirdest things you can buy at Teemu, the internet's new favorite jumble sale.
07:54SPEAKEROh, Teemu, I get a lot of ads for them when I'm on, not behind the pie hole. It's all weird stuff
08:00SPEAKERtoo. It's usually like two things that are normal, something that's oddly sexy and then something
08:05SPEAKERelse. Oh boy. Well, I went to Teemu. I've never been to teemu.com before T E M U if people want
08:11SPEAKERto. Anyway, like right on top of the commerce interface, they popped up a big pop-up unit,
08:16SPEAKERspin to win a hundred dollar coupon bundle. And it's straight up a like bonsai buddy style,
08:22SPEAKERlike early to mid aughts, like just like a little gambling game that pops up on the thing.
08:27SPEAKERYeah. And they, they have the cable, the cable, the blue cable organizer thingies that I like
08:35SPEAKERjust right here on the homepage.
08:37SPEAKERWow. Actually, you know, now that I let's like, it's a, a three pack of little USB cable routers,
08:42SPEAKERa pulse oximeter. Yeah. They have a pair of sick, like polarized sports sunglasses,
08:49SPEAKERlike Oakley blades. Yes. Oh, and then a lingerie section as I scroll down.
08:54SPEAKERTold you one thing that's oddly sexy.
08:56SPEAKERMaybe Teemu is the best store on the internet. Here's a key chain that says you're my favorite
09:01SPEAKERasshole. Here's a garlic press. A roll of waterproof anti mildew tape for your toilet rim.
09:08SPEAKERWhy is the father's day section women in tank tops, Brad?
09:11SPEAKERI don't know. You have to move on things for dads. I don't know. Retro. All right. Yeah,
09:17SPEAKERwe're done. Retro handheld game console. It's just like one of those Game Boy style,
09:21SPEAKERbut it's not even branded. They don't even say it's $6 and 88 cents. What could that be?
09:26SPEAKER$6 and 88 cents. It's gotta be like a pi nano or something. Right. Or a knockoff pi nano.
09:32SPEAKERLike the, yeah, I guess so. You know what I mean? Right. It's this,
09:35SPEAKERit's this kind of like analog pocket style, like Game Boy esque design style of retro handheld.
09:41SPEAKERIt looks exactly like that. It has Mario on the screenshot. I'm going to order one of these right
09:47SPEAKERnow. It is $6 and 88 cents. I'm going to order two of these. We're each going to get one.
09:50SPEAKERWhat is this? I'm looking for specs. There are no specs. Can I get a, can I get a red one?
09:56SPEAKERYou want a red one? Oh no. The red one is $7 and 18 cents. Nevermind.
10:00SPEAKERLook, I'll, I'll pay the extra buck. I got you. Father's day ends before long. Okay.
10:05SPEAKERSo maybe we should just do a team episode. I feel like that's a little, little more commercial than
10:11SPEAKERmaybe I want to be, but still zero idea what the specifications of this thing are. I don't think
10:16SPEAKERthey list them anywhere. It's for $6 and 88 cents. You don't get specs. No, probably not. Anyway.
10:22SPEAKERYeah. Hi. So life hack number one, don't go to TMU. Yeah. TMU seems like a place to end up filling
10:28SPEAKERyour house with a bunch of shit you don't need. Number two, here are some things that we like.
10:33SPEAKERSo nanotape is classic example. You might've heard of it on late night TV as alien tape,
10:38SPEAKERbut it's like it's tape with sticky stuff on one or sometimes zero sides and little tiny micro
10:45SPEAKERbubbles that let you suction smooth faced things to other smooth faced things. Don't use it on dry
10:52SPEAKERwall. Cause it'll pull the paint off of your dry wall. P S we learned that from the discord.
10:58SPEAKERI use it to stick things on my desk so they don't wiggle around.
11:02SPEAKERYeah. The surf, the underside of my desk is not the type of surface it works well on sadly.
11:06SPEAKERNo, no. I put on the top of my desk. So I like, so like my wrist rest and my mouse pad and my,
11:12SPEAKERmy steam decks, stream decks and all that stuff doesn't wiggle.
11:16SPEAKERAs you know, I don't put things on the top of my desk. So
11:21SPEAKERnot really a valid use case for me. Anyway, we're here to try to offer some more things
11:26SPEAKERin the nanotape vein. Think of made in our lives better that we like or tricks and tips, I guess.
11:33SPEAKERI have an easy one that actually is not on the list. I'm just going to,
11:36SPEAKERI'm just going to go completely off script here, right at the start. I like USB-C extenders
11:43SPEAKERbecause often USB-C cables like my Apple watch charger or my charger for my phone pad,
11:50SPEAKERor a lot of the charges I use are too damn short.
11:53SPEAKERThat's fair. I've come to be a little distrustful of USB extension cables over time,
11:59SPEAKERthe terms of signal integrity, voltage issues, et cetera, et cetera.
12:03SPEAKERI only use them for power generally, not for data, but yes.
12:07SPEAKERUSB-C charging and power scenarios are typically not prone to that kind of thing.
12:13SPEAKERMost USB-C charging scenarios are actually USB-2 data connections is my understanding.
12:18SPEAKEROh, you know, I could, I could insert, this is also not on the list,
12:21SPEAKERbut I was talking to people on the discord about getting a, a USB voltage tester.
12:27SPEAKERThere are all kinds of them on Amazon. Now there are ones that are like,
12:30SPEAKERthere are like four way ones that are like USB-A in and out, and then USB-C in and out that look
12:35SPEAKERlike a plus configuration. And then there are like eight way ones that'll take like barrel plugs as
12:40SPEAKERwell. And they've all got little screens on them. They're like 15 to $20. You can also get those on
12:45SPEAKERTeemu just FYI. I don't know about the Teemu versions. You can get a thing that plugs into
12:49SPEAKERyour USB port and tells you how much power it'll give you. So that's exactly what it is. As you
12:53SPEAKERplug it, you plug the, you know, device into one end and then the, you know, to the port
12:58SPEAKERout of the other end. And it'll tell you how much voltage it's supplying as I am having issues with
13:04SPEAKERUSB ports and like AV devices. Like it seems like a nice thing to have to, if you're having
13:10SPEAKERsuch problems and be like, okay, well, that's why that's happening. I'm not getting enough
13:14SPEAKERvoltage out of that port here. And that's why I'm distrustful of extenders and anything,
13:19SPEAKERanything where there is a, another connection in the chain feels like it's got the potential to
13:24SPEAKERcause issues. One of the things that has come, has, has become clear to me over the last year
13:29SPEAKERor so is that testers like that, that used to be kind of a specialty equipment and expensive
13:35SPEAKERhave become relatively inexpensive these days. Like our next thing, I didn't realize that this
13:41SPEAKERwas a thing that existed, but if like, I've reached the point now where I have some old
13:46SPEAKERNVMEs laying around, some old SSDs that are of the stick variety. It's a pain in the ass
13:53SPEAKERto put them into it. Like you have to open up the box. You have to usually move some cards around,
13:57SPEAKERslam some things into the slots. And in order to get a plugin SSD and an NVME SSD into a computer
14:05SPEAKERfor about 20 bucks, you can go to Amazon and buy a thing that has a USB port on one end and an NVME
14:10SPEAKERport on the other end. And you jam this, the NVME drives into that and plug it into your computer.
14:14SPEAKERAnd it just works. And the speeds are ridiculous. Generally it's like USB three it's it's 3.3 point
14:21SPEAKERis it 3.0 gen two or 3.2 gen two, 3.2 gen two is the current moniker. Anyway, it's like 20 or
14:28SPEAKER30 gigabits per second. It's really fast. Well, 3.0 tops out at five, right? But that's still
14:34SPEAKERvery fast. Okay. So then it's yeah. But I mean, USB is getting faster. Like motherboards are
14:40SPEAKERshipping with, with 10 gigabit and 20 gigabit ports regularly. And now I believe there are,
14:45SPEAKERthere are boards on the market that have straight up USB four on them now, which are 40 gigabit.
14:50SPEAKERMy guess is that the USB four PCIe four ones are not going to be 20 bucks.
14:54SPEAKERProbably not. So that was, that was my first question here is all the adapters like this.
14:58SPEAKERI've seen our PCI express gen three. Honestly, I was wondering most of the drives you buy are 4.0
15:05SPEAKERthese days. So I was wondering if there are any 4.0 adapters out there yet, but the one that I
15:09SPEAKERhave is not I couldn't find any, honestly, for me, it's less about having fast portable data as it
15:16SPEAKERis an easy way to pull stuff off of old, like it's a migration tool. So it's like you're building a
15:21SPEAKERnew computer or you're upgrading your, like you're upgrading your C drive the old way to do without
15:26SPEAKERthis, the way to do this is copy everything off onto another larger drive. But you know,
15:32SPEAKERback up that original C drive, put the new one in reinstall windows and then copy everything back
15:37SPEAKERover with this. You just pop the old one out, put the new one in install windows and then plug the,
15:41SPEAKERthe old drive into this USB-C adapter and, and and go from there, which I think is pretty nice.
15:47SPEAKERI mean, there are a couple other reasons that these are very valuable. Number one,
15:50SPEAKERit's hard to find USB thumb drives and the kind of sizes you need to do things like that.
15:54SPEAKERYeah. Number two, I think I'm done buying USB thumb drives. I don't think I will ever
15:58SPEAKERbuy another one if I can help it because they are so God damn unreliable.
16:02SPEAKERYou can get more reliable ones in there. You can get the special,
16:06SPEAKERlike loads, like if your board supports them, you can get those special high speed. Like they're
16:11SPEAKERbasically like USB SSDs. So they have right control and all that stuff on them.
16:15SPEAKERSo that's the thing I was going to add here is in addition to getting an NVME adapter,
16:18SPEAKERI would also recommend everybody just get at least one SATA to USB because who doesn't have
16:23SPEAKERa stack of old SATA SSDs lying around and like, obviously they're like, you know, a 10th as fast
16:28SPEAKERas an NVME drive, but they're still pretty fast, faster than a thumb drive and big enough to do
16:34SPEAKERuseful things with. So I've got like five old SATA SSDs sitting here in a stack and I'm just using
16:40SPEAKERthose instead of thumb drives for situations where I need removable storage. And you can get a
16:44SPEAKERSATA to USB three cable for like 10 bucks at this point.
16:48SPEAKERYeah. The, the trick with those, you also need a power plug, but those are relatively inexpensive.
16:53SPEAKERThese are, these are just bus powered. Oh, these are bus powered. Oh, that's nice.
16:56SPEAKERYeah. It's just USB three to a Saturday connector that plugs into, and you know, like
17:00SPEAKERyour average SATA SSD is like, it's not a bare circuit board. It's like kind of
17:04SPEAKERthe enclosure is like a little box. Yeah. The enclosure is kind of portable-esque,
17:09SPEAKERexternal-esque to begin with. So it's, it's funny. I bought, I was looking for it a minute ago. They
17:13SPEAKERdon't sell it anymore, but I bought years ago, a USB three to SATA slash Pata thing for archiving
17:23SPEAKERold hard drives. But, but you can do the big wide ribbon cables. And so if you have a big box of
17:30SPEAKERhard drives in your garage and you're like, I wonder what's on those big, that big box of hard
17:33SPEAKERdrives, you can just go out and plug them in and see which ones are dead, which ones still work.
17:36SPEAKERYeah. Those definitely need external power, right?
17:38SPEAKERThose a hundred percent need external. Well, I mean, you could probably power, you could,
17:41SPEAKERyou could probably power them off of a USB, uh, uh, bus these days. Cause it's, it's just like,
17:48SPEAKERyou know, it's just spinning up the motor, but, but yeah, they usually, they come with a big power
17:52SPEAKERbrick. So old drives, five volts, five volts. Are they, I think, I don't know. I never actually
17:57SPEAKERlooked. Oh yeah. Maybe, maybe they're 12. I don't know. I've been thinking about buying one of those
18:00SPEAKERfor ages because I do have, my parents have some old hard drives lying around that I would like
18:04SPEAKERto go through. Like, do they work pretty well? Like no issues. Well, I mean, every time I've
18:09SPEAKERused it, it's been to plug a hard drive in that's at least five years old. So, you know, your normal
18:15SPEAKERmixed bag of what works and what doesn't on old hard drives, a fair number of them need a pretty
18:20SPEAKERgood whack to get the, the bearings fluid in the, in the lubricant. Cause they, you know, it gets
18:27SPEAKERmore viscous as less as time goes. I have not considered that some of these drives are pushing
18:32SPEAKER30 years old. Yeah. So the trick is to take a small screwdriver and hit it on the side
18:37SPEAKERas you're powering it up, which sounds scary. Just a little tap. You do it while the heads are
18:41SPEAKERparked and it's just enough to jostle the bearings inside the, inside the thing and get the fluid a
18:46SPEAKERlittle bit more viscous. That's, that's a good tip. I mean, all those adapters, I've been reluctant
18:50SPEAKERto get one because they're, you know, none of them are brand names you've ever heard of. And like,
18:54SPEAKERin my case, it's not like I know there was precious data on those drives. It's more like,
18:57SPEAKERI just want to know what's on there. So if they went up in smoke, it would be like, oh, whatever,
19:02SPEAKERit's gone, I guess. But like still you kind of worry about plugging an old drive into a thing
19:07SPEAKERwith like a no name adapter and like something electrically bad happening. So I've never killed
19:12SPEAKERa drive doing that. I it's entirely possible that you could, my guess is once you like,
19:18SPEAKERonce you get it, once it's working correctly with one drive, you're probably safe, right? Yeah.
19:22SPEAKERYeah. I'd say go for it. Probably. I'm going to talk about something on here that I thought about
19:28SPEAKERbringing up before and just have never gotten around to. Okay. It's an app called too good to go.
19:34SPEAKERYou told me about this and it sounded too good to be true. It's kind of been the reaction from
19:38SPEAKEReveryone I've ever told about this thing, especially once they start using it. I believe
19:43SPEAKERwhen you first told me about this, you were like, I'm going to tell you about something,
19:45SPEAKERbut you can't tell anybody. I was like, okay. Didn't want the competition. Okay. What is this?
19:51SPEAKERWhat is this? What is too good to go, Brad? That was when I was right in the middle of the,
19:55SPEAKEROh my God, I can't believe this is real. I have to keep the secret window.
19:59SPEAKERIs this some venture capitalists funding your millennial lifestyle?
20:02SPEAKERNo, absolutely not. This came out of Europe. I told a friend of the show West Finland about
20:08SPEAKERthis a few months ago and like days later, he just messaged me. He's just like, what have I done?
20:15SPEAKERSent me a photo of a like mountain of pastries on a plane. It's an app that it started somewhere
20:22SPEAKERin Europe and then has come over here. It's an app that aims to eliminate food or not eliminate
20:26SPEAKERfood waste. That's never going to happen, but reduce food waste. I like reducing food waste.
20:31SPEAKERI hate food waste. I'm sure. I mean, yes, I hate throwing out food, but I'm sure you know that
20:34SPEAKERthere's like, if you ever look into it, have you ever looked into it? There's like an astronomical
20:38SPEAKERamount of perfectly good food thrown away. The restaurant industry throws out an incredible
20:42SPEAKERamount of food every day, grocery stores as well. It's really, it's kind of upsetting when you
20:47SPEAKERactually look at how much is being wasted, especially when you look at the external
20:51SPEAKERfactors that go into food production, right? Like carbon generation and transport and distribution.
20:58SPEAKERThe amount of carbon that we spend making food that we throw away is truly horrifying.
21:05SPEAKERYes. So the idea, the idea of this app is that restaurants produce vendors and anybody markets,
21:11SPEAKERwhoever can, can sign up on here. And essentially it's a conduit for them to sell food that they
21:16SPEAKERwould otherwise be throwing out. Oh, so like restaurants at the end of like, say lunch service.
21:23SPEAKERI mostly use it. We mostly use it for produce these days. Like we kind of, we kind of had our
21:27SPEAKERlike hot couple of months of like, Oh my God, every restaurant around here, like they'll have
21:32SPEAKERa window at say three o'clock, like right after lunch service ends where they'll just like, like,
21:37SPEAKERlike there's an amazing Burmese place here near here. And it's like, they'll just give you like,
21:41SPEAKERlike beef curry and like a flatbread appetizer that was going to go in the trash or whatever
21:45SPEAKERfor like five bucks. So is this stuff, is this mostly like hot, like, so, so I looked at it
21:51SPEAKERand by us, there's not a ton of stuff because I live in the suburbs, there's fewer restaurants,
21:55SPEAKERbut it's definitely more valuable in the city for sure. Yeah. But it was like the place that
21:59SPEAKERdid it is the, is the steam table Chinese place that is like, like they make a certain amount of
22:04SPEAKERfood every day. And when that batch of whatever, you know, whatever is gone, then it's probably
22:10SPEAKERgone for that service. Right. So that's how you, and this actually requires a little bit of
22:14SPEAKERmanagement because like it varies by restaurant, but typically there's a, there's a like enrollment
22:19SPEAKERwindow for a pickup and then the pickup happens later. And it's often, it's often the next day.
22:25SPEAKERIt's all in fact, in fact, it's almost never the same day. So you have to like kind of pay
22:28SPEAKERattention to it, but it'll be like, okay, at two 30 today, we're going to open up however many slots
22:32SPEAKERwe have. And if you get in there and get one, then the next day at three, you go pick it up and you
22:36SPEAKERhave half an hour to get it. And do they just like, do you get to pick what you want or did
22:41SPEAKERyou just get 1000%? You don't, you have no idea what you're getting. Like that's the other thing
22:46SPEAKERis that it's entirely at the discretion of the vendor, what they give you. And that is
22:50SPEAKERincredibly compelling. It's weird. It's like this weird, it's almost like a blind box for food kind
22:55SPEAKERof thing. Do you know what it is? No, like that's the thing, like for any given vendor at most,
23:01SPEAKERwhat they will tell you is like, you might get this, this, or this, or there'll be like a,
23:06SPEAKERsome kind of algorithmic like customers have reported getting X, Y, and Z from this vendor.
23:12SPEAKERBut do you like, do they like write on the box what it is? You know what it is in case you like
23:16SPEAKERit so you can order it again later. So that's, that's another interesting aspect of this is that
23:20SPEAKERat least some of the restaurants around here, we've tried this with, they're giving you stuff that's
23:24SPEAKERnot a menu item. It's not like they're giving you a nice entree that came right off the menu. It's
23:28SPEAKERlike, what here, here are some of the components that we make meals out of here. We're just going
23:33SPEAKERto like, Oh, so it's like if Taco Bell cleaned out the refried beans and meat and sour cream tubes
23:39SPEAKERinto a tub, but it's not like, it's not like they're giving you plastic containers of
23:43SPEAKERingredients. I mean, it's, it's generally like something that is edible. It's like a,
23:46SPEAKERit's a dish, you know, but it's not necessarily like a fully featured entree. It'll be like I
23:51SPEAKERsaid, like in the Burmese example, it's just like some basic Curry and rice and like maybe,
23:56SPEAKERmaybe this little flatbread thing. So like then the, the entree would have like a fritter or
24:00SPEAKERsomething with it too. Right. Right. Okay. So like, we've pretty much fallen off of doing
24:04SPEAKERit with restaurants around here, mostly just doing it with produce stands, like places that
24:09SPEAKERdeal in produce. And like, I'll tell you, I mean, like the benefit again, the benefit for the vendor
24:14SPEAKERis there is a way for them to make a little more money off of stuff that hadn't already sold and
24:18SPEAKERis just going to get thrown out or whatever. So like generally, like if you're going to get
24:22SPEAKERproduce or something with this, like you need to use that produce pretty fast. And I mean, like,
24:26SPEAKERlike the next day or two. And now that I think about it, I think there have been like delivery
24:30SPEAKERservices, right? Like produce box deliveries for a while, doing the same thing of like,
24:35SPEAKERwell, the produce box deliveries are generally like a farm, a farm to consume like direct to
24:40SPEAKERconsumer farm stuff. So like we, we do one of those that's a farm co-op down south of us a
24:46SPEAKERlittle bit and they bring like every two weeks, we get a box with like, and you can say, I feel
24:52SPEAKERlike you would that you can say, no, I don't like, I'm allergic to celery. I don't want celery, but
24:56SPEAKERyou can't, you don't like, you don't say I want this and this and this. You just say, Hey, don't
25:00SPEAKERget, don't ever give me these things. Oh yeah. This is not even that, like, this is literally
25:04SPEAKERjust like, they hand you a bag and you're done. But the thing I was going to say is there is one
25:08SPEAKERof those produce box delivery services. I can't remember the name that focuses on like, you know,
25:13SPEAKERthere's this kind of like grocery store obsession in this country with like produce that looks nice,
25:17SPEAKERquote unquote. So like this service I'm thinking of delivers produce that like didn't look pretty
25:23SPEAKERenough to go to the Safeway. So that's another example of trying to get use out of food that
25:29SPEAKERwasn't going to get bought traditionally, but this is, this is, this is even a step beyond that,
25:33SPEAKERbecause again, like I said, like the, the places that we go to, it's like the greens they give you
25:38SPEAKERif you don't use them in like two days, three days, you might not be able to use them. It is,
25:43SPEAKERit is very much being filtered by like, this is the stuff nobody bought. The Misfits Market and
25:48SPEAKERImperfect Foods are the two that I knew about. That's, that's, I think Imperfect is the one I
25:52SPEAKERwas trying to think of. The fourth Google result for ugly food business is an Atlantic article
25:58SPEAKERcalled, headlined, The Murky Ethics of the Ugly Produce Business. Oh, oh God. I was a little,
26:04SPEAKERI was a little worried bringing this up that there would be some underside I didn't know about.
26:08SPEAKERYou know about baby carrots, right? You're not really eating babies. They're just carrots,
26:13SPEAKERright? They're just ugly carrots that have been ground up to look like cute little baby carrots.
26:18SPEAKERThat sounds good. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll keep an eye peeled on that. The produce seems like a
26:22SPEAKERbetter, like not living in an area with like, cause your neighborhood is rife with produce
26:27SPEAKERstands and like corner markets that actually have real produce sections and stuff like that.
26:31SPEAKERFor sure. And also those, the typically in my experience, the people who run those kinds of
26:36SPEAKERproduce stands are very keenly aware of what their margins are at any given moment. So always looking
26:42SPEAKERto, to turn waste into profit, I think. Yes, for sure. I mean, there are even,
26:46SPEAKERthere are corporate establishments around here that participate in this though, like Pete's Coffee.
26:50SPEAKEROh, that's cool. I think that's where the pastries came from. Like Pete's Coffee will like,
26:55SPEAKERto give you a sack of, of three day, three day old, I don't know how old the pastries can get.
27:00SPEAKERLike day olds, this might be two day old. Day old they sell in the store, I often.
27:04SPEAKERRight. So that's what I mean. This is probably pastries. This is probably
27:08SPEAKERformerly day olds that didn't sell. They'll give you like a sack of those.
27:12SPEAKERSo, is Safeway near you participate? No.
27:16SPEAKEROur Safeway actually puts stuff out in a way that people come get it. Like they often,
27:22SPEAKERlike they deliver bread and dairy stuff sometimes to local elementary schools so that people can
27:29SPEAKERjust grab a loaf of bread or whatever on the way, on the way out. So it, you know, in that regard,
27:37SPEAKERthis may be, you know, charging people for something that would otherwise be thrown out,
27:43SPEAKERmaybe in a, in a, is maybe, maybe challenging, but I still like this idea a lot.
27:47SPEAKERIt's, it's definitely, there's definitely been a couple that we were like, ah, this,
27:51SPEAKERlike there's, there's been a couple of cases where they gave us something that like would have been
27:56SPEAKERcheaper if we had bought it off their menu, you know? Like a couple of them feel like they're kind
28:01SPEAKERof abusing the system, but generally it's been a really good experience. Also what I have Googled
28:07SPEAKERof this thing, I have never seen anything come up that says there's anything bad about it. And
28:12SPEAKERtypically, typically if there is, that'll come up immediately in the, in the search results.
28:16SPEAKERUsually near the top. Well, I've got another one. I've been using, so a few, few years ago,
28:23SPEAKERI realized that the ability to sign up, like the ability to sign up for things through my phone,
28:29SPEAKERusing Apple's signup process, where I don't have to like create an account or whatever,
28:35SPEAKERactually makes it really easy to turn stuff on and off. So we've been using this for a long time.
28:40SPEAKERLike if something's on Paramount Plus that we want to watch, we'll flip it on for a month or two,
28:44SPEAKERand then flip it off as soon as we're done watching that. And there's no,
28:48SPEAKERthere's no, the overhead for turning that stuff on and off is as little as setting up a reminder
28:54SPEAKERfor 29 days in the future to, to, to remind me to turn it off again. So I don't get billed again.
29:01SPEAKERAnd then just hitting the thing in the, in the Apple subscriptions panel that cancels it,
29:06SPEAKERyou don't have to like, you don't have to jump through any of the normal I'm unsubscribing hoops,
29:10SPEAKERlike calling somebody or like click even like digging into the account UI and finding the
29:15SPEAKERcancel button. Oh, Apple has actually hooked into the cancellation system of these different
29:20SPEAKERplatforms. So if you sign up through Apple and you pay the 30% extra by signing up through Apple,
29:26SPEAKERthen you can cancel through Apple and you never have to talk to the services, which is seems,
29:32SPEAKERthat seems worth 30%. It is for something. So for example, Disney Plus, I have a 10 year old kid,
29:37SPEAKERDisney Plus is always on in our house. I signed up for Disney Plus through the website.
29:44SPEAKERParamount, AMC, like there's a bunch of criterion is one that I flip on and off based on what they
29:50SPEAKERhave on at any given time. Peacock well, max, I get free with my ISP, but HBO, I get free with
29:59SPEAKERISP, but I'd like, that would be what I'd turn on and off. Quick sidebar is, is the HBO name
30:05SPEAKERliterally done? Is it actually being eradicated? It's a header option on the new max app. Okay.
30:12SPEAKERThe new max app is a real piece of shit too. I've heard plenty of things about max in general,
30:16SPEAKERbut okay. So like HBO as a brand, at least is going to exist still. It continues to look,
30:21SPEAKERI'm going to tell you, it's not going to exist for long. The 90 day fiance cinematic universe is
30:26SPEAKERgoing to eat HBO alive. Dude, the idea of HBO not being a name anymore is completely ludicrous.
30:34SPEAKERWhat happens when you let reality TV chuds takeover media brands anyway. Yeah. But what
30:41SPEAKERyou're describing, and then again, to be clear, we're talking about the, we're talking about the,
30:45SPEAKERlike you go and start to make an account for service X and they say, sign in with your Google
30:50SPEAKERaccount, sign in with your Apple account, sign in with Amazon. And we're talking about that thing.
30:54SPEAKERLike what you're describing here is by far the most enticing reason to do that, that I've ever
30:59SPEAKERheard. Well, so, so this is separate from that though. Cause you can, the account creation and
31:04SPEAKERthe billing are two separate things for the billing to work. You just, you set up the billing
31:09SPEAKERon your iPhone or your Android phone, right? For the account creation, you create the account using
31:16SPEAKERthat single sign in thing. The, the Apple one where you use your app, where you can obfuscate
31:23SPEAKERyour email address, but still let them send you emails through a Apple remailer is pretty handy.
31:30SPEAKERLike I use that for, I don't use that for accounts I'm ever going to want to log into again,
31:34SPEAKERcause it's kind of a pain in the ass if I'm not on my phone. But for stuff like the ordering
31:40SPEAKERfast food for pickup and stuff like that, like, like my Taco Bell account is 100% set up through
31:46SPEAKERthe bullshit. I have to click on the, on the phone thing to do excited, but I'm never ever going to
31:52SPEAKERdo that on a PC. The one gotcha on this is that once you sign up a lot of these apps, once you
31:59SPEAKERsign up for the iPhone billing, you're forever locked into the iPhone billing. Oh, interesting.
32:04SPEAKERSo if it's something that you might want to change over to being an always on sub at some point in
32:09SPEAKERthe future, you either have to call them to make that happen, which is a pain in the ass,
32:16SPEAKERand get the requisite 30% discount, just to be clear. Or you have to create a new account and
32:21SPEAKERyou lose all your viewed data and all that stuff, which is a little bit of a hassle, but not the end
32:24SPEAKERof the world probably. So, but yeah, the, the trials, like I used it for, for Phil McPro. I had
32:32SPEAKERto record my daughter's talent show the other day. And I was like, I want to use the fancy app that
32:37SPEAKERlets me control exposure and remote in from my iPad. And so I paid $3 for the Phil McPro trial
32:43SPEAKERand got all the apps for the week that I needed them. And then turned it off as soon as I was
32:46SPEAKERdone recording. That's kind of convenient. Yeah, it was pretty good. What else you got?
32:52SPEAKERWhat should we talk about? Should we talk about cutting mats? Should we talk about desk mats?
32:56SPEAKERSure. Mats. Mats. We love mats. Another single syllable name. I, I, a few years ago,
33:04SPEAKERActually, yes. You, you originally wrote Matt with two T's on these notes. You wrote cutting
33:10SPEAKERmats. Thank you. And I felt, I felt very bad for Matt briefly. What, what, what have you done to
33:16SPEAKERMatt? The cutting mat on the desktop, just to be clear, this is the healing, the self healing,
33:21SPEAKERcutting mats, the rubber, the rubber ones that you use when you're using like an Exacto knife
33:27SPEAKERor for craft stuff or whatever. Did you say self healing? Yeah, they're self healing. They,
33:31SPEAKERyou can slice into them with a thin blade and the, the, they close up. The hole closes up.
33:38SPEAKERIt uses devilry. I don't know how it works. Yeah. Wow. Is that, is that up there on the list with
33:41SPEAKERlike glue or adhesive in terms of things that we don't understand on a molecular level, but still
33:46SPEAKERuse? I think that it's just a dense material. So it doesn't, so it closes back up. I think it's,
33:52SPEAKERI think my guess is that the cuts are still there, but you just can't see them.
33:57SPEAKERBut anyway, so they're usually like black on one side, green on the other. They have
34:02SPEAKERa grid, one inch squares usually. And I have been putting them on my desktop for about 10 years now.
34:11SPEAKERIt's my, one of my favorite things to do because it gives me a place to work that I don't have to
34:15SPEAKERworry. Like if I, if I leave the soldering tip, if the soldering tip hits the desktop,
34:20SPEAKERit doesn't fuck up my desktop. Are these like heat resistant enough to be suitable for that?
34:26SPEAKERYou know, I wouldn't leave a soldering iron on them for a real long time, but I'd rather damage
34:31SPEAKERthe thing that costs 20 bucks than the desktop that costs way more. Right. It gives me a place
34:37SPEAKERto glue. If I want to glue, I don't have to worry about if I drip a little bit of super glue on the,
34:43SPEAKERon the desktop, it's not going to be a problem. The other thing that they're great for doing
34:48SPEAKERstuff like Lego and, and where you have to apply pressure and you don't want to like divot up the
34:55SPEAKERsurface of your desktop. So yeah, highly recommend there. You can get them in all sorts of weird
35:02SPEAKERsizes. I think I usually have an 18 by 36 one on my desk and it covers basically like I have like
35:08SPEAKERcomputer stuff and mouse pads off to the right of me. And then this is the thing that's off
35:12SPEAKERto the left. And also, also you can put your drinks there and if you get rings, it doesn't
35:18SPEAKERmake a ring on your desktop, which is nice. That's a deep heel. So this sits to the side,
35:21SPEAKERyou kind of wheel over to it when it's time. I don't put the keyboard on top of it. If that's
35:26SPEAKERwhat you're, if that's, that's your, where you're going. So different from a desk mat.
35:30SPEAKERIt is different from a mouse pad style desk mat. I experimented with them. I, so I have a charging
35:40SPEAKERmouse pad for my wireless mouse. And for a long time, I couldn't figure out how to make that,
35:45SPEAKERhow to reconcile those two things. Cause the mat made it a little kind of hump up a little bit where
35:50SPEAKERthe, where that charging or that charging pad is. Somebody in my discord recommended a brilliant
35:57SPEAKERsolution for that, which is to buy a roll of cork. That's the thickness of the charging mat,
36:04SPEAKERwhich is like, it's like three mil or something. And then you cut out a hole for the charging mat
36:10SPEAKERin the cork and put the cork down under everything, put the mouse mat on top of the cork
36:18SPEAKERand then the cork will make the mouse mat flush with the top of the charging mat.
36:23SPEAKERAnd it's a very good solution. I wouldn't do like cutting work or gluing work on top of the desk
36:30SPEAKERmat though. I don't think that's fair. It does make the keyboard nice and quiet though. Yeah,
36:34SPEAKERthat's good. Have you ever, I'm sure you've seen some of these kind of maker style projects to
36:40SPEAKERessentially cut out the bottom of the desk as close to the top layer as humanly possible and
36:45SPEAKERmount the mouse charger in there. You can, you can route it out really easily if you have a router.
36:50SPEAKERYeah. So that your mouse just charges by sitting on the desktop itself. You could totally do that.
36:55SPEAKERThe problem with the Logitech mouse pad charger is that it has, so it has the pad where you put
37:01SPEAKERthe mouse pad and the mouse rests, but then there's also a little radio doober at the top left corner
37:07SPEAKERof it that sticks up another, like, I don't know, a couple of millimeters. And that would always be
37:13SPEAKERnot flush, which would, which would annoy me. Love a good doober. I need a, I need a router. That's,
37:18SPEAKERthis is the lesson is I need, I need a router to write out the top of my desk. This is a good idea.
37:23SPEAKERWhy would I be foolish not to do this? That's right. She's buying new coffee stuff,
37:26SPEAKERbuying new woodworking stuff. Look, I told my wife we needed a new router. I think she
37:32SPEAKERthought I meant the one in the garage, but now she's going to be surprised. Why not both?
37:37SPEAKERYeah, exactly. You want to talk about your recent barcode reader experience?
37:42SPEAKERYeah. So I thought this was kind of interesting. So this is a weird,
37:46SPEAKERthe barcode reader is one of those things that tends to be useful in unexpected places and times,
37:51SPEAKERbut what it is, it's, it's, it's quite literally a lifesaver. Yeah. It's, it's, it's incredibly,
37:58SPEAKERit's incredibly helpful. And this was one of those ones, my CPU and my desktop PC has to be RMA'd.
38:04SPEAKERYes. We talked about that on the Patreon episode that just went up. It sounds like
38:08SPEAKERyou can find out about that at patreon.com/techpod. Oh, I think we mentioned last week that you were
38:12SPEAKERhaving issues, right? Briefly. The issues escalated. The issue, the issues have compounded
38:17SPEAKERexponentially since then. Yeah. To the point that the computer is no longer usable.
38:22SPEAKERYeah. So I got to send the CPU back and to get the, the batch code and the serial number,
38:29SPEAKERI could either disassemble the entire thing, take the cooler off,
38:33SPEAKERlook for the tiny printed numbers on the side of the heat spreader or side, not on the top.
38:39SPEAKERIt's on the side. What? Look, man, I don't know. I don't, I don't know why they do this.
38:43SPEAKERThere's like barely any surface area there. It's real small. And I would need like two magnifying
38:48SPEAKERglasses to see that. That's really weird. Or alternately it's on the box, which I cleverly
38:53SPEAKERkept because it was a kind of cool box. And I was like, ah, you know, I never keep CPU boxes. Maybe
38:57SPEAKERI'll keep this one. Oh, that's the reason you kept the box. It's a pretty cool box. I mean, it's,
39:01SPEAKERit's not, it's not the days of the, what were they like octagons or something? Those, those weird
39:06SPEAKERIntel one of those CPU's and I didn't keep the box. I'm kind of like, it didn't fit on a shelf
39:12SPEAKERanywhere. I've still got all the boxes from my build two sitting here. And when is it time?
39:17SPEAKERI mean, yeah, it's, it's probably, it's probably past time, right? Well, I generally, my,
39:22SPEAKERmy feeling is generally once you're past the return window, it's fine to get rid of the box.
39:26SPEAKERSo I put everything, like I put all the parts that fit into the motherboard box.
39:30SPEAKERYes. I do that for sure. Power supply cables, all of that stuff. And I, and the CPU box happened
39:37SPEAKERto fit inside the motherboard box, which is why I still haven't. That's funny. Anyway,
39:40SPEAKERthe problem is the serial number is printed on a label that is also the security label to show
39:45SPEAKERthat you've opened the box and the way the label was applied on my box, it, the cut point was
39:51SPEAKERprecisely over the, the serial number, like the printed serial numbers. Now there's also like
39:57SPEAKEReight barcodes on the, on the box. And I was like, Oh, I've had this barcode directly above the
40:01SPEAKERnumber that's now completely obscured by where I cut the CPU open is probably the number
40:08SPEAKERrepresented in machine readable form. And I opened up my barcode scanner on my phone. I pointed it at
40:12SPEAKERit and it took me a few tries cause I had to, and I had to actually put pieces of paper over all the
40:16SPEAKERother ones. Cause it was read all the other ones first, but I eventually got the barcode and the
40:20SPEAKERbatch number. And I didn't have to take the computer apart to get the, the, the, the serial
40:24SPEAKERnumber and stuff to do the RMA. That's fun and handy. Does the most important question.
40:29SPEAKERYes. Does the barcode reader provide a satisfying beep when it reads?
40:33SPEAKERNo, I was disappointed. No, no beep. And also the barcode readers, I downloaded five of them. I
40:39SPEAKERdon't like any of them, which is why I'm not recommending a specific one. The free ones all
40:44SPEAKERtried to look up like the UPC or whatever. So it eventually would give you the number,
40:49SPEAKERbut at first it tried to tell you what the number meant. And this is a serial number. So it doesn't
40:54SPEAKERmean that it doesn't mean anything. It's not going to show up anywhere. It was a little frustrating.
40:58SPEAKERThe batch number did show up. It was like, Oh, it took me to the, it took me to the Intel arc page
41:04SPEAKERfor the batch number of that CPU is like this CPU is manufactured in November of 2022 at blah, blah,
41:08SPEAKERblah. And it was like, that's pretty cool. Yes. I just have to mention, do you do self-checkout?
41:14SPEAKERI there is something incredibly psychologically satisfying about that beep every time you
41:20SPEAKERsuccessfully scan a barcode. Okay. So we're working on versus mode for the anacrusis right now.
41:27SPEAKERI don't know if you remember playing left for dead versus mode, but when you do damage as an alien to
41:32SPEAKERone of the human players, it does this real good ding sound. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like a quite three
41:37SPEAKERthing as well. Remember that every time you yeah. But in left for dead, because a lot of them just
41:42SPEAKERlike damage over time, you get, it's like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's like,
41:45SPEAKERit's like slot machine dings. Okay. Ding sounds are real good, man. They are quite good. The
41:50SPEAKERdifference in no ding and ding is the difference between like, I want to keep playing. It's like,
41:55SPEAKERit is, dings are psychologically damaging. I mean, EverQuest pioneered this phenomenon
42:00SPEAKER25 years ago. Of course, wow. Famously moved to a bong sound that was also quite good.
42:05SPEAKERNo, but they fucked up because they made it too infrequent. It has to be like,
42:08SPEAKERyou need it to be every like two minutes. You just need to keep that, keep that vibe going.
42:12SPEAKERFair. Anyway. Yes. I love the ding. I don't use the self-checkout because I feel
42:16SPEAKERI like Safeway employs a lot of people in our neighborhood. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah.
42:23SPEAKERLet's see. What do you want to talk about? Foot rests?
42:26SPEAKERSure. I like a foot rest. Foot rests I think are, I have come to realize are probably pretty
42:31SPEAKERimportant for, I've generally kind of finally started looking at the health effects of sitting
42:38SPEAKERtoo much for too long, which I have done for my entire life. I stand for about two hours a day
42:44SPEAKERthese days. I'm up to two hours a day now. That's that's pretty good. That's that's good.
42:49SPEAKERNot, not every day, but most days. Yeah. And but I still use the foot rest.
42:54SPEAKERSo I went through a whole process. I bought one of the cheap Amazon basics one years ago,
43:00SPEAKERand it was great, but I have hardwood and it slid around like crazy and it was making me
43:04SPEAKERlike, it was incredibly frustrating. So, so I went on the hunt for a foot rest and I literally went
43:11SPEAKERto wire cutter and did the thing that I almost always do and just bought the, I was like, okay,
43:15SPEAKERwhat do they recommend? Oh, this one's 130 bucks. No thanks. What's the cheap, what's the cheap
43:20SPEAKERalternative? Perfect. I'll buy the cheap alternative. And I bought the cheap alternative
43:23SPEAKERand it's been really good for about a year now. Yeah, that's good. It's a comfy life memory foam
43:28SPEAKERfoot rest. It's got something sticky on the bottom. So it doesn't slide. And if I want to
43:33SPEAKERflip it over, I can rocker it. And when it gets all dirty and gross and full of lint, I just vacuum it
43:37SPEAKERand it's all cleaned up in like two minutes. Yeah. So, so like a foot rest is good. Obviously,
43:41SPEAKERif you have ergo issues, if your chair height and desk height are not aligned properly and like you,
43:46SPEAKERthere's a whole science to like putting pressure on the back of the thighs against the front of
43:52SPEAKERthe seat pan and how that hinders circulation and stuff like that. So like just having the extra
43:57SPEAKERheight is good for ergo reasons, but looking for a rocker, I think is the thing that you really want
44:02SPEAKERbecause something that has mechanical action where you can actually, what's the word, articulates
44:07SPEAKERyour, your ankles and knees a little bit under the desk. Hmm. Interesting. It's not, you know,
44:12SPEAKERit's not standing. It's not, it's not as good as standing, but at least you are kind of engaging
44:15SPEAKERyour, your muscles. You've got your legs are moving back and forth and there is at least
44:20SPEAKERsome kind of action going on there that hopefully helps with circulation a bit. I think that's
44:24SPEAKERprobably key. Have you ever thought about the exercise bike under there? Just put the, put the,
44:28SPEAKERput the pedals down. Wouldn't that have to just be like a unicycle basically to fit under there?
44:32SPEAKERWell, no, no, they just put like, it's just the, it's just the wheel part and a resistance pedals
44:37SPEAKERand the resistance mechanism. There's no seat. Yeah, no, no. I just mean in terms of the size,
44:41SPEAKERit would have to be a very, very small. Oh, I feel like Joey had one. He had an elliptical one that
44:46SPEAKERwas pretty, that was, it wasn't, it wasn't very big. I was kind of surprised. I've thought about
44:52SPEAKERthe treadmill. That seems compelling, but then also I could just leave the house and touch grass
44:57SPEAKERand go for a walk. I guess that's an option as well. Yeah. Did you settle on anything like you're
45:03SPEAKERkind of going through it right now with some different stuff? I think on the side, I did get
45:07SPEAKERthe upgrade pick from the wire cutter that you mentioned, except that it was on a very deep sale.
45:11SPEAKERSo it was significantly less than $130. Okay. That's good. And I wanted something that was
45:15SPEAKERgoing to last. I really like it. It's a human scale. You can see it on the wire cutter,
45:22SPEAKERthe best foot rests lists. They like a human scale generally. It's extremely quality except
45:28SPEAKERthat it's got a mechanical issue where it is not actually maintaining its full height at the moment.
45:32SPEAKERSo I need to contact them. Oh, boo. And either try to get a replacement or return it. I'm not sure,
45:37SPEAKERbut generally if I think a foot rest is a good thing, if a rocker is a good thing to have,
45:42SPEAKERif you said a lot for your time. So this one, this one, because it has the rounded top,
45:46SPEAKERI wiggle my feet kind of constantly on it. It's like, I'm just like toe down, toe up,
45:51SPEAKERtoe down, toe up, toe down, toe up. The thing I wish I had, and I actually have an old PC sitting
45:57SPEAKERnext to me on my left side is a foot restaurant. I want to lean back so I can kind of like get a
46:02SPEAKERlittle bit of a recline on if I'm playing like I've been playing a little Diablo four, you know,
46:06SPEAKERgetting that controller in my hands and I'll just do the lower, the arm rests a little bit,
46:11SPEAKERdo a little bit of a recline, prop my feet up. That feels pretty nice for you.
46:14SPEAKERDo you start playing it already? I started the other day. Yeah, it is. It is Saturday
46:18SPEAKERmorning. It's time to this recording. I haven't started yet, but I probably will today.
46:24SPEAKERThe controller support is good. I got it working on the steam deck streaming from the PC just by
46:29SPEAKERadding the executable to steam as a non-steam game. And it just worked. And I was like, hell yeah.
46:37SPEAKERI mean, furthest on the list, I guess a number of people, we talked about sunshine and moonlight on
46:41SPEAKERthe patron episode the other day. A number of people have recommended play night as a front end
46:45SPEAKERthat will hook into sunshine too. I mean, I think play night is a front end for a lot of purposes,
46:49SPEAKERbut does it find all your games? Yes. That's, that's the thing that people have recommended
46:53SPEAKERit for is that apparently it will find, you know, windows store, UWP games and battle net games and
46:59SPEAKERoh, hell yeah. Name, name it, you know, if it's a game on a platform, apparently it will pretty much
47:04SPEAKERautomate pulling that in as a game and making it available to the home streaming. That's awesome
47:10SPEAKERfor moonlight. So it's an, apparently that play night PLA Y N I T sounds like a good option for
47:17SPEAKERthat. It's kind of like it's funny. The tools for that kind of stuff are getting really good. The
47:23SPEAKERemu deck we've talked about for the, for the Steve's for the stream deck, steam deck, steam
47:28SPEAKERdeck, emu decks. Sorry. I'm looking at the thing. There's a thing on my desk that has stream deck
47:34SPEAKERwritten on it and I see it and it just gets me anyway. The emu deck thing sets up all of the
47:41SPEAKERemulators you want. And then that combined with the steam ROM manager will even dump like images
47:46SPEAKERand, and stuff in for your, for your old games. So like my link to the past ROM just shows up as a,
47:53SPEAKERas a steam menu, top level menu item when I'm playing, which is rad on this. I mean, look.
48:01SPEAKERHaving, having, having a link to the past ready at all times is a noble pursuit.
48:06SPEAKERLook, I, I make sure I make sure that I have Wind Waker linked to the past
48:11SPEAKERand and that's probably it right now. Anyway. You want to talk about power from it?
48:16SPEAKERYes. Yes.
48:18SPEAKERBy the power of desktop USB and 120 volt ports.
48:24SPEAKERYeah. You have power strips with good USB ports, which I would like to talk about because I
48:28SPEAKERapparently have power strips with bad USB ports. So in the old days when USB was just five,
48:36SPEAKER500 milliamps and it was relatively simple. You could just buy a power strip with some USB ports
48:41SPEAKERand it was probably fine. Once the PD stuff started and they got more complicated, as we
48:46SPEAKERtalked about in an episode, like three years ago now you had to start buying brands to get that
48:54SPEAKERsame, same level. I I've been buying the Anker ones for years now. I've had really good luck with
49:00SPEAKERthem. I have a 10 year old Anker power strip with some USB ports. That's still going. The USB ports
49:06SPEAKERless valuable now than they used to be, but the power strip is still fine and the USB ports still
49:10SPEAKERwork. The ones that I like right now the most, they come in all different shapes and sizes. I
49:15SPEAKERhave a couple that are like 10 to 120 volt plugs with 30 watt USB PD power ports. But the ones
49:24SPEAKERthat I like are called power extend USB cubes. They come in both three USB-A forms. That one
49:33SPEAKERdoes, I want to say it's not 30 watt USB PD. It's one of the one generation older than that.
49:41SPEAKERBut the USB-C one does 30 watts, which means it charges a switch, it charges a steam deck,
49:45SPEAKERit charges an iPad. It'll charge most laptops, but not full speed. It has two USB-As, one USB-C,
49:57SPEAKERand then three 120 volt plugs. It has a flat spot on the bottom. It's like a little cube.
50:05SPEAKERIt's literally a cube. It has a little flat spot on the bottom. You put a piece of nanotape on,
50:09SPEAKERand I just glue that on the top of my desk so I have power accessible when I have something.
50:16SPEAKERIf I want to use my soldering iron, if I want to plug in a laptop, if I want to plug in a steam
50:24SPEAKERdeck or an iPad or a switch or whatever, I can do that just with that thing on the desk in no time.
50:30SPEAKERYeah. I'm currently just using my MacBook Pro charger for that, which is just a single USB-C
50:34SPEAKERout. I've been thinking about looking at something that's got more ports than that.
50:40SPEAKERSo the problem is with the higher wattage USB PD stuff, there isn't an equivalent of the old,
50:48SPEAKER"Hey, here's a thing with 10 USB-A ports that each do 12 watts," right?
50:52SPEAKERYeah. I don't think I'm going to find anything anytime soon where I can power both the MacBook
50:57SPEAKERPro and the PineSole at full heat at the same time. Sadly, no. But also, you're probably never
51:02SPEAKERgoing to run the PineSole at full heat because that's hotter than you want to run soldering stuff.
51:07SPEAKERI guess I should have said any heat because it needs 20 volt output to heat up at all,
51:12SPEAKERor below that, it'll come on and you can do data stuff, but no soldering.
51:18SPEAKERSet your firmware settings.
51:21SPEAKERReal quick, the power strips I've got are kind of intermediate between what you were talking about,
51:25SPEAKERwhere everything was 500 milliamps, and then the current state of PD and USB-C and all that stuff.
51:31SPEAKERThey're kind of no name, mono price power strips I got like five, six years ago, maybe.
51:37SPEAKERYeah.
51:38SPEAKERWhere they've got USB-A ports, but they're like, I think one of them is one amp and the other one is
51:42SPEAKER2.5, what the iPad fast charge was back...
51:46SPEAKER2.5 amps is what the big, the fat, chonky power strip with the fold-in connector was,
51:55SPEAKERoriginal one was. Yeah.
51:56SPEAKERSo these USB, or these power strips are from that era. So I think it's a one amp and a 2.5.
52:02SPEAKERThose two USB ports, and they've also got like 12 three-prong plugs on them.
52:07SPEAKERBut those USB ports, we use them to charge iPads and phones around here. All of a sudden,
52:11SPEAKERiPads and phones no longer charge on those ports, and I have no idea why.
52:15SPEAKERHave you upgraded the iPads and phones?
52:16SPEAKERNothing has changed. Literally the same cables, same power strips, same devices
52:20SPEAKERfor like the last three years. And all of a sudden the phones and iPads are throwing errors.
52:26SPEAKERLike, you know, it'll say not charging. Like it'll know that it's plugged into power,
52:29SPEAKERbut it'll say not charging. Like that just started happening out of nowhere. And I don't
52:32SPEAKERknow if there's just like something failing in that power strip or what.
52:35SPEAKERSo on lightning connectors, they often, the data pins that let them talk to,
52:41SPEAKERlet the charger talk to the phone often would corrode over time for old lightning cables.
52:46SPEAKERSo look at your pins and see if it's like pin three or four, I think gets corroded-y looking.
52:52SPEAKEROften if you flip it the other way, it'll work, but that means you probably, you might just need
52:56SPEAKERto replace the cable. Well, I tested cables with like legitimate Apple chargers, even on the same
53:00SPEAKERpower strip. And that did work. So I did enough AB testing to say that it's almost certainly the
53:07SPEAKERUSB ports on that power strip. Well, so the other thing I was going to say is that once upon a time,
53:11SPEAKERI was talking to a manufacturer of a power strip, like a surge protector company. I think it was APC,
53:20SPEAKERbut I don't remember for sure. And they basically said, if you have expensive stuff on a surge
53:25SPEAKERprotector, you should not use it for more than five years because the surge protectors have a
53:29SPEAKERfive-year, like they're reliably surge protectors for five years. And then after that, they just
53:37SPEAKERkind of become power strips. Does that seem like something they should maybe disclose a little more
53:41SPEAKERexplicitly? It's in the fine print, I'm sure. I mean, there are fuses, so it'll still blow the
53:47SPEAKERfuse. It just may not trip in time or something. It was one of those things that they told me. I
53:52SPEAKERwas like, this sounds a little fishy and then I never looked at it. So I'm a little hesitant to
53:58SPEAKERshare. Yeah. Power stuff seems a little dodgy in general, I feel like. I mean, I know electricity
54:04SPEAKERis hard. I'm at the point now with Amazon selling weird counterfeit shit that I hesitate to buy
54:13SPEAKERstuff like that from Amazon, honestly. And that's why I bring up those Monoprice strips we've got.
54:18SPEAKERI don't think I would buy more Monoprice strips or even from Newegg. Generally, I feel like the
54:24SPEAKERnumber of trusted vendors and retailers- That's a targeted best buy for me, probably.
54:29SPEAKERYeah. Maybe that's the best way to go. I feel like the number of reliable ways to get stuff like that
54:35SPEAKERis shrinking rather than growing. I can't believe that I just said the right place to buy a power
54:39SPEAKERstrip is best buy. Sure. The other thing is the... Yeah, I don't know. It's just weird. Don't buy
54:51SPEAKERoff-brand power strips from Amazon, for sure. There's all sorts of weird shit that is absolutely
54:55SPEAKERnot UL certified there. And UL certification is one of those things that actually is good.
55:02SPEAKERYou can buy mail-to-mail 120-volt extension cords on Amazon that will catch your house on fire.
55:13SPEAKERI think idiots use them to plug gas generators into their power in their house and power circuits,
55:19SPEAKERbut it's a terrible idea and it will burn your house down.
55:22SPEAKERYeah. There are other certifications besides UL that are equally valid. What is the European
55:27SPEAKERone that starts with R? I don't know that. Your local, "Hey, this probably won't burn your house
55:35SPEAKERdown because electricity is scary," certification board is a valid thing. It's not just weird Danny
55:42SPEAKERState stuff. Yeah. I guess in the US, UL is still probably the one you want to look for.
55:46SPEAKERUL is the one in the US. I have a couple of small ones, quickies here. I sometimes like to shoot
55:55SPEAKERdown on things and have a camera that's on my desktop that's movable. I saw a YouTuber had set
56:02SPEAKERup a GoPro or a webcam on a microphone boom. The microphone boom has a cable channel for the USB
56:11SPEAKERcable that it can move within. You screw the camera onto a ball joint on the end of the boom,
56:19SPEAKERand then you have free movement on your $20 newer microphone boom that lets you put the camera
56:25SPEAKERwherever you want really easily and it just stays when you let go of it. That does sound useful.
56:29SPEAKERYou're talking the kind of boom that mounts to the desk, like clamps on the desk? Yeah,
56:33SPEAKERyou clamp it on your desk like the one that your microphone is attached to right now.
56:37SPEAKERRight. Do you leave that camera one there all the time? I don't. I just use it occasionally,
56:42SPEAKERso it's a special use item. I haven't even thought about that. That's pretty good.
56:46SPEAKERYeah. I thought that was... And I don't think I would buy a $120 Rode or something like that
56:51SPEAKERfor that, but you can get a $20, a pretty good $20 microphone arm on Amazon. Yeah. My microphone
56:59SPEAKERarms are insanely cheap and ubiquitous these days. Obviously, that's the most useful if you're
57:05SPEAKERstreaming things that you work on and need to get a good overhead shot for long periods of time or
57:09SPEAKERsomething. It's fairly specialized, but that is a good idea. Well, I mean, it's also nice... I mean,
57:14SPEAKERyeah, for streaming, of course, if you're doing work that you want to show on a Zoom or something
57:18SPEAKERlike that, it'd be handy. The using OBS virtual camera lets you share your desktop really easily
57:24SPEAKERwith everything, it turns out. So if you pipe that into OBS, if you pipe that camera feed into OBS,
57:32SPEAKERyou can put yourself on top of it and you can do drawing or whatever. If you're working on a dry
57:36SPEAKERerase board or something, that works too. Wi-Fi, I replaced all of the Zigbee smart bulbs in my house
57:45SPEAKERwith Wyze Wi-Fi RGB smart bulbs this winter. And it's been a delight. You told me about this
57:53SPEAKERbeforehand and I went and looked it up and those bulbs are getting pretty cheap. If you buy a
57:57SPEAKERfour pack, I think they're about 10 bucks each, which is what I paid for the Cree connected Zigbee
58:02SPEAKERbulbs 10 years ago. I always feel a little weird about the idea of the Wi-Fi electronics or really
58:09SPEAKERany electronics in something that is considered a disposable or consumable item like a light bulb,
58:14SPEAKERbecause it feels pretty wasteful. But I guess these bulbs or LED bulbs are going to last
58:19SPEAKERgenerally a very long time unless they fail. Yeah. I mean, I think 10 years, like the Cree bulbs,
58:26SPEAKERthe Cree bulbs ran really well for a long time. They started getting a little janky at 10 years.
58:30SPEAKERWhen I replaced one a year ago, I was like, "Oh, wow, these have gotten dim." So the trick with
58:37SPEAKERLED bulbs is that they produce less light over time. So you don't notice when they're starting
58:46SPEAKERto die. All of a sudden your house is just dark all the time and you're like, "Why is it so dark
58:50SPEAKERin here?" Yeah. I've seen that really acutely in practice because I bought four strings of LED
58:55SPEAKERChristmas lights like five, six years ago. And one of them, I don't know if you can see it behind me
59:01SPEAKERhere, has been plugged in ever since. I can see the individual bulbs. It's not even blowing them
59:07SPEAKERout anymore. The piggies needs a little bit of light in the evening. I'm not pig shaming you.
59:14SPEAKERAnyway, if I get one of those other strings out of the closet that's barely been used and plug it in
59:17SPEAKERnext to it, I mean, it's just a very stark difference, let's say, in brightness between
59:22SPEAKERthe one that's been on for six years. So the Wyse bulbs have a lifespan of 25,000 hours,
59:26SPEAKERas they're expected. It's going to start dimming after that.
59:32SPEAKEROn the other hand, when I think about what degree of electronics is actually required for Wi-Fi and
59:38SPEAKERstuff like that at this point, it's like a tiny IC in there. So maybe it's actually not that
59:43SPEAKERbig a deal. Well, so the thing to do when I took out all the pre-connected, the Zigbee bulbs,
59:50SPEAKERI took them... You take them to electronics recycling because they actually will take
59:54SPEAKERthem apart and pull the boards out, I assume. Honestly, that's the real thing. As long as
59:58SPEAKERelectronics recycling actually is doing what it says it's doing and it's not like the plastic
1:00:02SPEAKERrecycling that everybody found out was just a huge scam and going into landfills, maybe it's
1:00:07SPEAKERnot that bad. Yeah, I feel like the plastics recycling has damaged recycling in the United
1:00:11SPEAKERStates pretty badly. Anyway, yeah, so I replaced those. We have color. It's been really nice
1:00:21SPEAKERbecause if you want... Basically, any bulb in the house... Both of the bulbs in my daughter's room
1:00:26SPEAKERcan be nightlights now because I can set them to 1% and make them pink in their really nice warm
1:00:34SPEAKERred nightlights. That's exactly what makes me want to get some of these because we have a ton
1:00:39SPEAKERof LED bulbs on smart plugs, so they're just toggles on and off, and then that's great,
1:00:43SPEAKERbut being able to dim and change color sounds kind of awesome. Well, and the nice thing is hooking
1:00:48SPEAKERthem into Home Assistant. There's a plug-in that's... I think it's part of the add-on store.
1:00:52SPEAKERIt's not one of the core ones, but I get full control over them. I can do RGB. I can set color
1:00:58SPEAKERtemperature for the white light, the whole thing. The white light is a little... The warmer end of
1:01:07SPEAKERthe spectrum is a little oranger than I would expect, I think, which is pretty common for RGB
1:01:11SPEAKERbulbs, especially cheap ones. Interesting. But you just don't use that unless you want some orange
1:01:18SPEAKERlights in you. If you want it to look like Dune, then you can make that happen. I do. Okay, so then
1:01:24SPEAKERlet me tell you a secret. I wonder... That would be an interesting experiment, too. What if you
1:01:30SPEAKERstepped your entire house lighting down? Every bulb in the house, what if you stepped from blue toward
1:01:35SPEAKERwarmer... There's a Home Assistant plug-in for that. I know you can do it, but I wonder what
1:01:41SPEAKERthat would be like in practice to kind of have the entire house become more orange over the course of
1:01:46SPEAKERthe evening. Well, so what I've done for years is at 10 o'clock, I just bring the lights down.
1:01:51SPEAKERSo it's like a little bit dimmer. At 10 o'clock, I bring it down, and then I think at 10 30 or 11,
1:01:57SPEAKERI bring it down again. So it's like a gradual darkening. So you start getting a little sleepy
1:02:02SPEAKERaround 11 o'clock or midnight. Yeah, that sounds good. The other thing I did, and I hesitate to
1:02:07SPEAKERtalk about this, but I've been using ChatGPT to write Home Assistant scripts. Hmm. Go on. So
1:02:15SPEAKERI've had for a long time a script that kind of worked the way I wanted, but wasn't exactly right,
1:02:20SPEAKERthat checked the air quality using visual IQ, visual errors, or IQ Air now I think is the new
1:02:27SPEAKERcompany that owns them using their air quality APIs. And then I would change the color of a
1:02:33SPEAKERlight by the door at seven o'clock in the morning so it reflected the current, the day's air quality.
1:02:39SPEAKERI couldn't ever get it to update right. So when visual air updated, it didn't update the signal.
1:02:45SPEAKERSo I was in ChatGPT as one is the other day, and I typed in, "Hey, why don't you write me a script
1:02:50SPEAKERthat does this?" And then it wrote me a script, an automation that triggers automatically every time
1:02:57SPEAKERthe visual air quality changes for my particular location. And it changes the color of the TV
1:03:06SPEAKERbacklight to match that. And then it turns it back to the normal color at like seven o'clock at night
1:03:10SPEAKERwhen we're probably not gonna leave the house anymore. And I've been doing a lot of weird
1:03:17SPEAKERscripting stuff with this forbidden knowledge, Brad.
1:03:21SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, that's fun. Look, I mean, what were you going to do if you didn't have this at
1:03:26SPEAKERyour disposal? Spend six, eight hours hanging on this, trying to do it from scratch?
1:03:30SPEAKER- I mean, I'd spent at least that much trying to get it to work exactly the way I... Like
1:03:35SPEAKERthe stupid thing about this is I was able to say use the color coding from the US air quality
1:03:43SPEAKERstandards and the data from visual air IQ and feed it, pull it from this sensor and change the
1:03:51SPEAKERcolor of this light on this frequency. And it just did the whole thing, right? I did have to debug
1:03:58SPEAKERbecause it fucked up the indents, which are important on the scripts for Home Assistant.
1:04:02SPEAKERBut anyway. - Yeah. I mean,
1:04:05SPEAKERthis is the positive, empowering application of machine learning, right? Is like everyday people
1:04:11SPEAKERjust doing things that would have taken them way longer to do, right? Or that they wouldn't
1:04:17SPEAKERhave been able to do easily at all before. I've used Whisper for transcription, audio
1:04:23SPEAKERtranscriptions a little bit here and there, and that's been useful. I saw somebody I follow on
1:04:27SPEAKERTwitter tweeting about some guy who has been upscaling Ed, Ed and Eddy into 4K for years now,
1:04:34SPEAKERwhich doesn't exist. Apparently the commercial releases of that thing have been kind of fraught.
1:04:40SPEAKERI guess maybe, I think it was like the Blu-ray, they ruined the color or something.
1:04:44SPEAKER- They did a transfer or something, yeah. - Apparently this person's using the DVD
1:04:48SPEAKERsource, which is the best color out there. But obviously a little resin is restoring this entire
1:04:54SPEAKERbeloved animated show into 4K with AI upscaling stuff. There are end user applications that are
1:05:01SPEAKERpretty cool. - So the next phase of this,
1:05:06SPEAKERand the weird thing is, it hit some end points that I hadn't seen. Well, in the research I'd
1:05:12SPEAKERdone trying to get this to work the old-fashioned way, it did some things that I had never seen
1:05:17SPEAKERdocumented in the Home Assistant documentation before. When I went and looked for them,
1:05:21SPEAKERit was there, but I wasn't searching for the right thing and I wasn't able to find it. It
1:05:26SPEAKERknew from presumably other scripts that somebody else had written that this was what you do when
1:05:32SPEAKERyou ask for this sort of thing. I was pleasantly surprised. The next step is to have it write an
1:05:39SPEAKERautomation that automatically turns the bathroom light off 10 minutes after you turn it on.
1:05:45SPEAKERBecause it's on a smart switch, it should know. - What are those scripts written in?
1:05:51SPEAKER- Boy, I don't know, Python maybe? It's not Python. No, no, no, no, that's not right.
1:05:57SPEAKER- I know the configuration is YAML in Home Assistant. - Yeah, it's YAML in the scripts,
1:06:03SPEAKERtoo. The scripts are YAML, too. - Wait, can you script in YAML?
1:06:06SPEAKER- I believe so. Edit in YAML. So here's a... Oh, that's the old one that doesn't work. Here,
1:06:17SPEAKERI'm gonna give you the one that does work. The automations are all YAML. That's why the
1:06:21SPEAKERindentation matters, because YAML cares about indentations. - Scripts can be created via YAML
1:06:25SPEAKERconfiguration, says the Home Assistant scripts page. I didn't realize that was a thing.
1:06:30SPEAKER- So I think with Home Assistant, theoretically, you can put everything in the configuration
1:06:34SPEAKERdoc, but realistically, you wanna have it in sub files for a lot of good reasons.
1:06:39SPEAKERI have a notification. This one I wrote myself the old-fashioned way. When the dryer's done,
1:06:43SPEAKERit pops up a voice prompt on the Google Homes in the living room that's like, "Hey, man,
1:06:48SPEAKERthe dryer's done. These clothes inside me are so damn hot." - That's pretty good.
1:06:54SPEAKER- Well, 'cause the dryer's in the garage and we can't hear the buzzer, so...
1:06:57SPEAKER- Oh, sure. - It's the stupidest thing in the world, but it turns out it's actually really good
1:07:04SPEAKERbecause otherwise we would never know that the dryer's done.
1:07:10SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds like an example of good future. There's a lot of bad future out there,
1:07:15SPEAKERbut that's pretty good. I would probably never use this specific use case 'cause I
1:07:21SPEAKERam the type of sicko that wants to write all that stuff myself 'cause that's the fun part.
1:07:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:07:26SPEAKER- Making and configuring the thing is always more fun than using the thing.
1:07:29SPEAKER- Well, Discord ate the white space in the YAML file, but there's the script that it wrote.
1:07:36SPEAKER- Okay, here's my last tip and trick.
1:07:38SPEAKER- Yeah, you got one more?
1:07:39SPEAKER- Edit this message. You just pasted me your automation for... Which one is that? That's the
1:07:43SPEAKERAQI. The TV shows the AQI quality, the air quality. Edit that message. Put three back
1:07:50SPEAKERticks at the very front.
1:07:51SPEAKER- What the fuck is a back... Oh, wow.
1:07:54SPEAKER- It's the other character on the tilde key.
1:07:56SPEAKER- The other apostrophe.
1:07:57SPEAKER- Yeah, the not shifted tilde key. And then put three more at the end.
1:08:02SPEAKER- Boom. That's amazing.
1:08:03SPEAKER- See, look how nicely mono-spaced that is. Now there is a way to specify in that formatting.
1:08:10SPEAKER- Oh, I can tell it it's YAML?
1:08:12SPEAKER- Yes, you can tell Discord that that's YAML and then it'll syntax highlight all the relevant stuff.
1:08:16SPEAKER- Why do I pay for teams at work? That's what I want to know.
1:08:21SPEAKER- I don't know.
1:08:21SPEAKER- Just use Discord.
1:08:23SPEAKER- Discord's pretty good. It's not perfect, but nothing is.
1:08:26SPEAKER- Yeah, let's see. Anything... I'm looking at the last list.
1:08:29SPEAKER- I think we probably covered most everything.
1:08:31SPEAKER- Reusable zip ties are real good.
1:08:33SPEAKER- Yeah, we talked about those in the desk episode.
1:08:36SPEAKER- Getting a good USB battery pack that does 30 watt power delivery is friggin' awesome
1:08:43SPEAKERbecause you can charge everything off of it and use stuff like... I use... Brad.
1:08:51SPEAKERI use a USB-C adapter and my big battery backup to power the Pine-Syl when I'm not near a plug.
1:08:57SPEAKER- Really? Really? That works?
1:08:59SPEAKER- Uh-huh.
1:09:00SPEAKER- Huh. For how long?
1:09:02SPEAKER- I don't know. It hasn't been a problem yet.
1:09:04SPEAKER- Wow. I might have to... I might have to look into that.
1:09:08SPEAKER- Yeah. So anyway, that's it for this week, I guess.
1:09:13SPEAKER- Mm-hmm.
1:09:14SPEAKER- Oh, the last one is... I talked about it a few weeks ago, but I bought this soft brush
1:09:19SPEAKERfor keyboards to get beard hair and crumbs... Not crumbs, but just general human detritus
1:09:24SPEAKERoff of my keyboard. It's gross. It's real good. And I just brush it off at the end of the day,
1:09:31SPEAKERevery day, and then my keyboard is all nice and tidy and there's no gunge in it anymore, so...
1:09:34SPEAKER- Gunge?
1:09:35SPEAKER- Humans are gross. That's the takeaway.
1:09:37SPEAKER- Is that what you said? Gunge?
1:09:39SPEAKER- Gunge.
1:09:39SPEAKER- Grunge.
1:09:40SPEAKER- Did you say you were using that keyboard brush for something else as well? I can't remember.
1:09:44SPEAKER- I mean, what I bought is a multipurpose one and it has a fine point. I think it's specifically for
1:09:53SPEAKERgetting gunk out of your pods, but it's a good shape to get in other places where stuff gets
1:10:01SPEAKERbacked up. Should we call that an episode?
1:10:06SPEAKER- Yeah, we should probably call it because I'm frantically sitting here trying to tell you how to
1:10:11SPEAKERenable the YAML syntax highlights in that message. We should probably do that on our own time.
1:10:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it's like type equals YAML or something in there after the parentheses. I can't
1:10:22SPEAKERremember. There was a conversation about this in the Discord a couple of weeks ago, but if you
1:10:27SPEAKERwould like to join the Discord and be part of that conversation, you can by going to patreon.com/techbot.
1:10:34SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com/techbot. Brad, one more time.
1:10:38SPEAKER- Did you say patreon.com/techbot?
1:10:41SPEAKER- I did. For five bucks a month, you can join the fabulous techbot community. You can be a part of
1:10:45SPEAKERthe conversation in the Discord. You can get the exclusive patron episodes of the podcast,
1:10:51SPEAKERwhere we talk about such things as my busted-ass CPU. Let's see.
1:10:56SPEAKER- A deep dive on your production process, shooting the talent show at your child's school.
1:11:02SPEAKER- Yeah. Hey, when you find out on Friday before Wednesday that you're shooting a talent show on
1:11:07SPEAKERWednesday, and you're like, "I need two cameras so I can cut between things. How do I make this
1:11:13SPEAKERhappen with no budget and no time?" A little bit about my experience with Filmic Pro. It ended up
1:11:21SPEAKERbeing a fun reason to experiment with some new software. I'm going to tell you, using the remote,
1:11:30SPEAKERI put the Filmic remote thing on my iPad, connected to the iPhone hotspot,
1:11:37SPEAKERbecause the school Wi-Fi sucks. I put the camera 10 feet up in the air, had a live feed of what
1:11:45SPEAKERI was looking at on the iPad while I was sitting in the audience, and could adjust exposure and
1:11:50SPEAKERfocus while I was just sitting there. - Yeah. I don't think I realized
1:11:53SPEAKERyou had a live feed. I thought it was just a control surface on the iPad.
1:11:56SPEAKER- No, it was a live feed, man. It was amazing. - That's super cool.
1:12:00SPEAKER- It was some spy shit. If I had done two iPhones instead of GoPro, I could have theoretically
1:12:07SPEAKERswitched back and forth between them, although I don't know how I would have actually done that in
1:12:10SPEAKERpractice because it would have been a lot. Anyway, we do that every month. We talk about whatever
1:12:16SPEAKERwe're working on. We talk about things of interest. Sometimes we talk about movies and TV shows and
1:12:22SPEAKERstuff. This is the 40th anniversary of WarGames today. - Wow, really?
1:12:28SPEAKER- Yeah. - No kidding.
1:12:30SPEAKER- I think we should do that WarGames episode soon.
1:12:32SPEAKER- Maybe it's time. It's been a while. - Yeah, we're due.
1:12:34SPEAKER- God, what is the last movie we did? Sneakers? - It's been more than a year.
1:12:37SPEAKER- Was Sneakers the last one? - Sneakers was the last one, I think.
1:12:39SPEAKER- Yeah. I watch a lot of movies these days. - Yeah, you started doing a movie podcast,
1:12:43SPEAKERwhich I'm going to go and tell you I'm jealous of the David Lynch sequence that's coming up
1:12:49SPEAKERon the other podcast. - We started with Blue Velvet,
1:12:53SPEAKERwhich was a whole thing. - Blue Velvet's intense.
1:12:58SPEAKER- It was a whole thing. - Have you seen the David
1:13:00SPEAKERLynch Dune movie? - I believe that's next. I have not.
1:13:03SPEAKER- Oh, man. I cannot wait to hear, which anyway. - I can tell you in about five seconds if that's
1:13:08SPEAKERnext. I think that's next. - Either that or Wild Horses, I think is the one.
1:13:12SPEAKER- Wild at Heart is the other one. - Wild at Heart, yeah. The cage.
1:13:16SPEAKERAnyway, patreon.com/checkpod. Every week we thank our executive producer tier patrons.
1:13:24SPEAKERAnd everyone, we thank everyone. We appreciate you all. Thank you, patrons.
1:13:27SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons. - But a special thanks to Nick
1:13:31SPEAKERJohnston, Paddle Creek Games, Makers of Fractured Veil, Andrew Slosky, www.bunnycrimes.com, Just
1:13:39SPEAKERWedge, Joel Krauska, Twinkie Says, Mike B. Is the Jif Lord, David Allen, and James Kamik. Thank
1:13:45SPEAKERyou all so, so much. - I'm attempting to visit...
1:13:48SPEAKEROh, yeah. www.bunnycrimes.com does go somewhere. I won't say where.
1:13:52SPEAKER- Yeah? - I'll leave that as
1:13:54SPEAKERan exercise for the listener. - Wow, I can't wait to see what's there.
1:13:58SPEAKERAnd then, hey, thanks to our newest patron, Sander. Sander, thanks for signing up.
1:14:03SPEAKER- Yeah, thank you. - We appreciate you.
1:14:04SPEAKER- Thank you to Sander and all. - Apparently, we have enabled free
1:14:08SPEAKERtier patrons. I didn't know that we did that yet. - Wait, I didn't do that.
1:14:14SPEAKER- I didn't do that either. Patreon might have done that for us.
1:14:16SPEAKER- Did Patreon decide to do that for us? - I'll have to investigate and see what
1:14:21SPEAKERaccess those folks have to the Discord. - Interesting.
1:14:23SPEAKER- Well, hey, welcome, free tier patrons. Maybe we can put... Look, I don't know.
1:14:28SPEAKERI'll have to figure out how to use this free tier business. But thanks, everybody,
1:14:32SPEAKERfor supporting the show. We appreciate you and enjoy doing this every week.
1:14:36SPEAKER- Could not and would not do it without you. - Hey, one other thing. If you have topic
1:14:42SPEAKERsuggestions, there is a forum in the Discord, or you can send an email to techpod@content.town.
1:14:50SPEAKERAnd we would love to hear what you would like us to talk about.
1:14:53SPEAKERIt's always... We're working on the Bluetooth trifecta, which I think is three episodes,
1:14:57SPEAKERlooking at how it's breaking down right now. - There's a lot about Bluetooth.
1:15:00SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a lot about Bluetooth. I think we should do an episode on pass keys,
1:15:05SPEAKERbecause that's a new thing. That's going to be coming up soon.
1:15:08SPEAKER- I almost started to mention that in this episode. I don't think it's quite in the scope
1:15:12SPEAKERof this. But yes, 1Password has pass keys. I believe they're coming to Bitwarden soon.
1:15:17SPEAKERIt seems like the hotness in password managers these days. And I'm not entirely
1:15:20SPEAKERsure how they work. And I would like to know. - Yeah, your phone is going to support pass
1:15:24SPEAKERkeys out of the box soon. I think iPhones do already. I don't know which version of
1:15:31SPEAKERAndroid is going to support them first. But it is the new thing. You know how we've been
1:15:37SPEAKERsaying for years that passwords are bad and we should get rid of them? This is the thing
1:15:40SPEAKERthat's going to get rid of passwords. - I mean, there'll still be a password
1:15:43SPEAKERin there, right? - Nope. Not that it's human accessible.
1:15:47SPEAKER- Not even at the account registration step? - I don't know. That's why we needed to do
1:15:51SPEAKERan episode. - Yeah, it's confusing.
1:15:53SPEAKER- Yeah. It's a big shift in how this stuff works, so.
1:15:57SPEAKER- I Googled the term pass keys. And the first thing that came up was a blog on 1Password
1:16:01SPEAKERthat literally said pass keys, the future of passwords, or the future of authentication.
1:16:05SPEAKER- Yeah. So we'll do that. But if there's other topics that you all are confused about,
1:16:11SPEAKERyou're interested in, you don't understand, you would like to know more about, that's
1:16:14SPEAKERwhat we're here for. So please post them in the episode suggestions channel. Send an email
1:16:19SPEAKERto techpod@content.town. And we're listening. So thanks for listening, everybody, and have
1:16:25SPEAKERa lovely, lovely week.