00:00SPEAKERis Christmas in VR land for me. It's a holiday. It's a Christmas miracle.
00:05SPEAKERWait, your Windows Mixed Reality headset has gotten a stay of execution.
00:11SPEAKERSee? Okay. Not to make this cold, overall quasi-religious, "God giveth and taketh away"
00:16SPEAKERVR, because that's a whole other can of worms. Microsoft is deprecating Windows Mixed Reality.
00:21SPEAKERI'm sure you know that. I don't know if- We talked about it a couple of weeks ago,
00:23SPEAKERI think, months ago now, maybe. If they were quite literally rendering
00:27SPEAKERWindows Mixed Reality headsets unusable in Windows 11 later this year as they remove
00:31SPEAKERall of the drivers in support. So what am I going to do with that thing? Is it just e-waste?
00:35SPEAKERElectronics recycling. Is it literally just e-waste? That's terrible.
00:38SPEAKERIt wouldn't surprise me if somebody writes a driver, pulls out the driver and writes a wrapper
00:43SPEAKERfor SteamVR for it or something like that. That would make a lot of sense. Although,
00:46SPEAKERalso those headsets are for the most- There's a couple of relatively new headsets that are going
00:50SPEAKERto get EOL'd with that if you update Windows past a certain point.
00:53SPEAKERYeah. There are newer ones even than the one I have. That Monado, if you remember that,
00:57SPEAKERwe talked about that on the FOSPOD ages ago. That has very rudimentary Mixed Reality support,
01:02SPEAKERbut I don't know that it'll ever get better. It doesn't even support controllers yet.
01:06SPEAKERThe bummer thing about it is that the Mixed Reality part goes, disabling the Mixed Reality
01:12SPEAKERpart is also going to disable the SteamVR, because their SteamVR implementation runs through
01:17SPEAKERMixed Reality. So all those headsets are basically junk unless somebody does the work to update the
01:22SPEAKERdriver to only use SteamVR, which sucks. Yeah. They can't do literally anything. But
01:28SPEAKERSony has now started teasing that the PSVR 2 is probably going to get some kind of PC support,
01:33SPEAKERalthough I am tempering my expectations about what that's going to look like.
01:36SPEAKERWell, given their success on PC with the simultaneous Steam releases or even delayed
01:43SPEAKERSteam releases of a lot of games, but they released Telldivers 2, which I guess is a Sony
01:47SPEAKERpublished game, but not a Sony first. Like Sony Studios is I think what they call that, right?
01:55SPEAKERI'm not sure. On PC, I think it's got even its own publisher name on PC, but yeah,
01:59SPEAKERthey don't own Arrowhead, I don't believe. So it is like a first party publishing deal or something
02:03SPEAKERanyway. Yeah. But the upshot is Sony loves the PC now. They're embracing the PC and it makes a lot
02:12SPEAKERof sense. By all appearances, Telldivers is doing way better on PC than it is. Not that it's doing
02:17SPEAKERpoorly on PS5, but it's blown up on PC in a way that has got to be catching the attention of all
02:23SPEAKERthe executives over there. And anyway, the language is squishy enough. I'm expecting this to be the
02:29SPEAKERworst possible version of this. Yeah. I mean, the way they've described it, it could be anything from
02:35SPEAKERSony first party games that have PSVR 2 plugins and implementations will work on the PC,
02:41SPEAKERbut nothing else will. They'll just make a full ass SteamVR driver for the PSVR 2. Oh, give me
02:47SPEAKERthat. It wouldn't surprise me. I was playing with somebody last night who was playing Telldivers with
02:52SPEAKERsomebody and I was like, "Hey, if you do the DualSense and turn off Steam input, you get the
02:56SPEAKERfancy triggers and stuff with the DualSense." I should try that. It's real good. But when they
03:04SPEAKERplugged in their controller, Steam popped up with the, "Hey, you need to update the firmware on your
03:08SPEAKERcontroller." Now, when it used to do that, it would say, "You have to go to Sony's website and
03:12SPEAKERdownload this installer and do a bunch of nonsense." Now Steam just does it for you.
03:17SPEAKERSo Sony and Valve are like, you know, I think they're buds. I think we've got two faceless
03:25SPEAKERmultinational corporations that are now friends. I love it when my favorite corporations become
03:29SPEAKERbesties.
03:58SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made at TechPod. I'm Will.
04:01SPEAKERI'm Brad.
04:02SPEAKERHello.
04:03SPEAKERHi. Greetings.
04:05SPEAKERI always... We don't have a prepared intro for our podcast. This week on the TechPod,
04:12SPEAKERwe're talking about questions.
04:14SPEAKERI've said it before. Every time I say, "I'm Brad," I then panic and go,
04:17SPEAKER"God, what do I say next?"
04:19SPEAKERYeah. I've been commuting back and forth to PC World. I'm helping Adam with PC World while
04:25SPEAKERGordon's out sick. I'm commuting back and forth occasionally, which gives me time in the car to
04:31SPEAKERlisten to more podcasts. I'm broadening my podcast horizons. Everybody has a different approach to
04:37SPEAKERthis. When I listen to a Rob Zachney joint, he sets up the whole thing in advance. It's like,
04:48SPEAKERyou know exactly what's coming. You know what to expect. Of course, there's still the unexpected
04:54SPEAKERin there. Anyway, we're doing a show this week. It's a questions episode.
04:59SPEAKERMm-hmm. It sure is. And an answers episode.
05:02SPEAKERWe turn cues into A's here once a month at the end of the month. As always, if you would like
05:06SPEAKERto send a question into the podcast, you can send it to techpod@content.town. That's techpod@content.town.
05:13SPEAKEROr, alternately, if you are one of our thousands of listeners who support the show, because this
05:20SPEAKERis a listener-supported podcast, and you would like to support the show and get access to the
05:24SPEAKERDiscord so you can post questions in the fabled Cues Seeking A's channel, where you post your
05:30SPEAKERquestions and they immediately disappear into the void, you can do that by going to patreon.com/techpod
05:35SPEAKERand join in the Discord, get in the Patreon exclusive episodes, all that stuff. We'll talk
05:39SPEAKERabout that at the end of the show. But as we typically do, I think we should start with the
05:44SPEAKERemails. All right. Let's dig into some emails here then. They're electronic.
05:48SPEAKERHere is a question from Nick. I'll be doing a down through the studs, a home renovation at some
05:54SPEAKERpoint, and I am wondering about your thoughts on built-in ceiling speakers. Well, built-in/ceiling
06:00SPEAKERspeakers, he says. I think there are two scenarios here. Part of the home will be a newer kitchen
06:04SPEAKERwith a dining area on the side. I was looking at ceiling speakers for this area, but the spousal
06:09SPEAKERacceptance factor is low on this. The biggest gripe is the inability to control the volume or
06:14SPEAKERturn off the source with buttons if one of us is air playing something. Any ideas on that? I run
06:20SPEAKERHubitat in my home if this helps. For distribution, should I be looking at Sonos Amps, some obscure
06:26SPEAKERnetwork player I've seen online or a second zone feed off of an AV receiver? I had an experienced
06:31SPEAKERAV guy come in who apparently rubbed shoulders with speaker company execs who had a few suggestions,
06:37SPEAKERbut I think we may have appeared too poor for him to take the job. Every fancy AV guy has rubbed
06:45SPEAKERshoulders with the speaker company execs? I think so. Yeah, that's the stock and trade. Every time
06:50SPEAKERI go to somebody's house and they're like, "Hey, check out my AV system," the guy knows the guy who
06:53SPEAKERdoes this. I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Good job." It's probably a small community. I bet speaker
06:58SPEAKERcompanies are maybe not as big in terms of head count as you think. Absolutely. When you go to the
07:05SPEAKERspeaker... It's like when you go to CES, you don't meet Mr. Panasonic or Mr. Sony, but when you go to
07:11SPEAKERNAB and you're in the places where the speaker conferences and stuff like that, you'll guess the
07:17SPEAKERpeople who make the custom speakers and stuff will be there. I can't believe I'm going to recommend
07:23SPEAKERthis, but I actually really like Sonos for what you want to do. They're expensive. They're way
07:31SPEAKERcheaper than a custom installed system that's going to pipe in and off of your AV receiver.
07:37SPEAKERThey're way cheaper than getting a multi-zone AV receiver. Also, doing all the wiring to get the
07:43SPEAKERwires from... Running analog wires from one part of your house to another part of your house is
07:51SPEAKERgoing to be fraught with peril, because every time you cross power or data, it's going to add
07:56SPEAKERnoise and it's going to be problematic. That's why you used to have to get an experienced AV guy
08:00SPEAKERwith this. With Sonos, you bypass all that by using either WiFi or Ethernet. I would just do
08:04SPEAKEREthernet drops to wherever you want to put the Sonos amps, Ethernet and power. You might even
08:09SPEAKERbe able to do power over Ethernet with a splitter on the Sonos amps now. I can't remember how much
08:19SPEAKERpower the Sonos amps draw. The neat thing about Sonos is you can put an iPad or an old Android
08:26SPEAKERtablet or something in kiosk mode, run the Sonos app on that and just have it be the only thing
08:31SPEAKERthat launches when you turn on that iPad or that tablet. That gives you the button control.
08:38SPEAKERThe thing Sonos does that I really love is they have native AirPlay support,
08:42SPEAKERbut you still have control over the streams when you're AirPlaying
08:50SPEAKERwith any of the controllers that are hooked to the system.
08:53SPEAKERI wonder if there are provisions for wall mounting iPads. There must be. You could just build your
08:58SPEAKERown frame. You'd have to deal with running some kind of power and trying to hide that if you
09:03SPEAKERwanted it to look tidy. If you're doing the kiosk iPad, like you mentioned, you could make it part
09:09SPEAKERof the wall and just permanently install it. I think you could do that. I think the thing I
09:14SPEAKERwould do is probably find a stand that you can hang on the wall so you can pull it off and on
09:21SPEAKERwhen you need it. There's a bunch of solutions for that kind of stuff. The thing about Sonos,
09:31SPEAKERSonos had problems a couple of years ago because they removed support for some older,
09:37SPEAKERjust to be clear, 10-year-old devices. They're speakers, so they shouldn't remove support for
09:43SPEAKER10-year-old speakers. That's the thing. Speakers of anything in technology. Speakers should last
09:48SPEAKERmore than just about anything else. Good speakers just last. They ended up making good on it.
09:55SPEAKERThey basically continued supporting the old version of the app. The reason I think they
09:59SPEAKERdropped it is because it didn't have the right Wi-Fi hardware or something in there to do what
10:04SPEAKERthey needed it to do. But the apps should be relatively bulletproof, especially if you wire
10:10SPEAKERthem in with ethernet instead of doing Wi-Fi. Yeah, it's fun. I have a couple of Sonos products,
10:15SPEAKERto be clear, a couple of the higher end speakers. A, it's been years since I did it. I didn't love
10:21SPEAKERthe onboarding going through. They have the very handholdy click next and answer this question and
10:28SPEAKERthen click next and do the really black box style of setup where if something goes wrong with your
10:33SPEAKERnetwork setup or whatever, there's no insight into why it's not working. You just get a generic
10:38SPEAKERclick, something went wrong. That stuff is incredibly frustrating. I finally got it on there.
10:42SPEAKERThe other thing is it's funny if you dig into the hardcore Sonos community, people have
10:47SPEAKERpacket sniffed the traffic going in and out of those things to see what they're doing and stuff.
10:51SPEAKERI think even the newer ones run, for example, they run SMB1, the shared protocol,
10:57SPEAKERwhich is extremely insecure. SMB1 is one of those do not run those on your network type things.
11:03SPEAKERSo there are people now who will use Raspberry Pis to proxy SMB3 to SMB1 traffic,
11:12SPEAKERjust to quarantine that stuff. Well, and just to be clear, I think most
11:17SPEAKERof the people who are doing music streaming with Sonos now probably aren't streaming collections
11:21SPEAKERfrom their NASes or whatever. I think they're probably connecting Spotify or Apple music and
11:25SPEAKERstuff like that. Most people are. I might be streaming from my NAS, but you might be streaming,
11:30SPEAKERI know you're streaming from your NAS, but even I don't stream music from my NAS anymore.
11:34SPEAKERYeah. The other concern about the Sonos stuff and you just outlined this is eventually what happens
11:39SPEAKERif Sonos just goes away. You need that app. You'd have to go through their onboarding literally to
11:43SPEAKEReven get the thing on your network. Yeah. Sonos is a pretty big company
11:46SPEAKERat this point. They employ like 2000 people or something. It's substantial.
11:50SPEAKERBut you say that about, I mean, everybody says that about everything right up until it stops
11:54SPEAKERbeing true. Yeah. 2000 person company a month ago.
11:57SPEAKERSony, right. Or, I mean, the most egregious example recently is Sony and its subsidiaries,
12:03SPEAKERCrunchyroll and God, what was the other, the Funimation? Oh, when they pulled, when they
12:09SPEAKERpulled content from the services? They have been pulling licenses for things
12:12SPEAKERpeople paid money for and quote unquote owned in the digital form. And people literally just cannot
12:17SPEAKERwatch their purchases anymore. And like, that's, that's another example of the type of thing where
12:21SPEAKERyou're like, those are huge companies. Like those will never go away. Right. And then all of a
12:24SPEAKERsudden they do. And that sucks. But I have like checked in occasionally on the efforts to break
12:30SPEAKERthe encryption on the Sonos stuff and try to open it up so that in the event that that stuff,
12:36SPEAKERalthough all the, all the software end of it disappeared, you could still use them as like
12:40SPEAKERbasic speakers at least. But I, there has not been a lot of progress there.
12:45SPEAKEROn the installed ceiling speakers. I love those for areas where you don't want to have speakers
12:50SPEAKERon the shelves. Like, like if you have the space to do it in your ceiling, the ceiling speakers in
12:55SPEAKERthe kitchen is one of the things I would love to do. We don't, we just because of the way my house
12:59SPEAKERworks, it's there's no, the ducting all goes over the kitchen or it's too close to the edge to get
13:04SPEAKERup there. But I would absolutely do that. I also would probably do in wall speakers. If you were
13:08SPEAKERdoing like a home theater room in wall speakers, especially for like rear channels and side channels
13:14SPEAKERand back channels and all that stuff in like a modern seven, one home theater set up seem,
13:19SPEAKERseem like a pretty good compromise between having a room full of speakers and having something that
13:25SPEAKERis like, sounds nice and gives you surround sound. Like I, they're more expensive. You're paying a
13:30SPEAKERpremium for that. But I think ultimately if you care about not having a bunch of giant speakers
13:35SPEAKERaround your house, or even a bunch of small speakers around your house, it's worth spending
13:38SPEAKERthe money on. I've said it before. There's nothing I love more than hidden technology.
13:42SPEAKERSo, so the other wildcard option on this is just to put home pods everywhere. Home pod minis. They
13:48SPEAKERdon't work super well with Spotify. You have to like choose to airplay to them. They work great
13:53SPEAKERwith Apple music, unsurprisingly, and you can, Hey Siri, everything you want to them and from
13:59SPEAKERthem relatively easily. And the sound quality is shockingly good. If you put one big one in a big
14:04SPEAKERroom and little ones in little rooms, then, then they work quite well. And they give you control
14:09SPEAKERover your home automation stuff as well, which is nice. The downside is that they look like little
14:16SPEAKERorange and yellow and white balls all over your house. So, you know, you see them.
14:21SPEAKERWhat are those things? Look, they must've rolled out a new model that I'm I'm I'm.
14:24SPEAKERSo there's, there's the big one that looks like the garbage can Mac.
14:27SPEAKERThat's the one I was thinking of. And then there's the little ones that are like round,
14:30SPEAKERlike spheres with the tops cut off. If you get, if you get the white or black one,
14:34SPEAKERthat would probably fade into your decor pretty well. Just maybe don't get the orange or yellow
14:38SPEAKERone if you don't want. The one thing I will say about the, the home assistant, I don't use habitat,
14:44SPEAKERbut I do use home assistant and the home assistant implementation for for home kit for the, for the,
14:51SPEAKERintegration with home pods is so much better than the Alexa or Google implementations.
14:57SPEAKERCause it runs locally. So the home pod can do the voice recognition stuff on board. And it doesn't
15:03SPEAKERgo back to the, like if the connection is from the home pod to the home assistant in the house.
15:08SPEAKERSo it's like 200 milliseconds faster than a Google home or an Alexa turn on the lights command.
15:16SPEAKERCool. Very good. All right, let's move on to this email from Ivan. The topic of nineties era first
15:22SPEAKERperson shooter binds came up a couple of times in the past few episodes. And I wanted to comment
15:27SPEAKERlike Brad, I all of this blew my mind. I did not remember this. Like Brad, I also used right click
15:31SPEAKERto move forward for the longest time. It wasn't until 2004 or so when games were getting more
15:35SPEAKERand more of a pain to bind to that configuration that I eventually adopted WASD. Also, I think
15:42SPEAKERthere was a debate about the pronunciation of WASD. WASD is how you say it. That's the,
15:46SPEAKERthat's, there's no debate. That's so you just, look, you, you cazamed that. Right. I get the
15:52SPEAKERobjection. It sounds goofy, but also it's just, it's way easier to say. I mean, it's not like
15:56SPEAKERyou're saying as def or something like that. I suspect Brad's use of it was probably influenced
16:01SPEAKERthe same way. Mine was quake by default quake bound, right? Click to forward. I had, I super
16:08SPEAKERdon't remember that, but apparently I guess that's where I got that. And people treated me like it
16:12SPEAKERwas crazy. I did not remember that at all for what it's worth. So I mostly stuck to quakes defaults
16:17SPEAKERwith some tweaks space for jump comment and period for strafing word default. So that's where my
16:22SPEAKERpinky middle and index fingers were right control defaulted to fire, but left-click did that. So I
16:27SPEAKERchanged it to back movements and use my thumb for that. Interesting. Oh, so this was the, this,
16:34SPEAKERthe, the default quake binds were weird. Romero talked about that in his book a little bit.
16:38SPEAKERI was on, yes, they are. Well, they were, they were figuring it out. They, there was no standard
16:43SPEAKERat all. They were literally just making up binds out of thin air. I used, I used left control for
16:48SPEAKERback shift for jump, no shift, shift for runners. I can't remember actually I use shift was run. I
16:56SPEAKERbelieve. So I used the arrow keys for movement and left alt for strafe space for jump, interesting
17:04SPEAKERcontrol for shoot for a long LN shift for a run for a long, long time. And then this, this is an
17:10SPEAKERinteresting fact of weight. I had seen this pop up elsewhere as well as for WASD. That was an
17:15SPEAKERinnovation by nineties pro quake player, Dennis Fong, also known as Thresh, the guy who won
17:19SPEAKERcar max Ferrari in that quake tournament. Those were the binds he used in those days. They then
17:26SPEAKERgained popularity and became the default by quake three. And the rest is history. I remained bummed
17:31SPEAKERthat I didn't go watch that quake tournament. I was at that. Well, it was at, it was just an E3
17:36SPEAKERon the floor of the show or something. Right. Right. It was, you remember what year that was?
17:39SPEAKER96, 96. Oh, that was the, that was the last E3 I didn't go to. Yeah. I was, I still lived in
17:46SPEAKERTennessee then it was in Atlanta. So I was like, and I was writing, like, I, I scammed a press pass
17:52SPEAKERbasically. So yeah, those were the days. Yep. All right. One more email from Autumn.
18:01SPEAKERDo you think people could design a battle pass, but for people using their cars in real life,
18:06SPEAKERwhat would even be on it? How much do you think the premium track would cost?
18:09SPEAKERYou think it's like playing certain music. You gotta like, like, do you think there's
18:12SPEAKERa fuser component to this? There's like, there's a bajillion things about a car you could gamify.
18:18SPEAKERYeah. Think about, think about like you, your mileage, you're keeping your mileage
18:22SPEAKERbelow a certain point for X number of miles, your miles per gallon or miles per kilowatt hour.
18:26SPEAKERYeah. They could probably do some kind of like computer vision image recognition on the, the,
18:31SPEAKERthe reverse camera and like rate your parallel parking ability.
18:35SPEAKERMy car has a top-down camera, so I can like just, you know, one, one spot, it's like a perfect
18:40SPEAKERfive point turn. No, no, no do overs. Like just execute a perfect five point turn like that. That
18:46SPEAKERis, that is an achievement right there. What about like a, like a low deceleration stops,
18:52SPEAKERlike you do X number of low deceleration stops. So it's like a perfectly gentle braking to a stop at,
18:58SPEAKERor, or never run through a stop sign or maybe always run through a stop sign. I don't know.
19:02SPEAKERMaybe the, maybe the car companies are chaotic evil. What about like, what are the rewards
19:08SPEAKERthough? Do you get to like turn on the air conditioning if you do a certain number of things?
19:12SPEAKERGod, that's, that's grim. That is dark, but also we're in this era of cars,
19:17SPEAKERchargers and fees and like having DRM and stuff now. So it's completely believable.
19:22SPEAKERYou think you'd get a sick car skin, like you, like you get an LCD on the outside of your car
19:26SPEAKERand you can change it to, to look like a banana. How far off do you think we are from,
19:31SPEAKERwell, we talked about this, right? It doesn't, I started to say there was a CES demo, right? Like
19:35SPEAKERside panels that have some kind of built-in image, like image display capability, chromatic paint is
19:41SPEAKERthe thing. Yeah. You can display graphics on your car that move and animates. Yeah. I guess I would,
19:48SPEAKERI look, I just want a car that looks exactly like what's on the other side of the car from whatever
19:52SPEAKERyour perspective is. So it looks invisible to other drivers. Nothing could possibly go wrong
19:56SPEAKERwith that. That's, that's an example of what I, I guess I think of this as sort of like
20:02SPEAKERfuture tech that satisfies, satisfies the back to the future to rule of, oh,
20:06SPEAKERdoes this look futuristic in the sense that, or in the way that you watched that movie and thought,
20:12SPEAKERwow, that looks futuristic. Like that's, that's the type of thing I would expect to see in a
20:15SPEAKERmovie like that. It's interesting. Cause like you, we talk about this and like, I didn't,
20:21SPEAKERI didn't really buy the video pass through stuff. Cause it's, I've used on the quest three a little
20:25SPEAKERbit and it's not great. I mean, it's fine, but it's not perfect there that the Apple vision pro
20:30SPEAKERvideo pass through is really good to the point that I could see, like if you have a car with
20:35SPEAKERcameras on all sides, you could potentially get a composited version of your surroundings
20:42SPEAKERand do like third person driving. That sounds, that sounds like it would be really cool right
20:48SPEAKERup until it failed. Well, I mean, yeah, look, and also you don't want to be wearing a giant piece of
20:52SPEAKERglass and metal on your face when your airbag goes off. Right. So you definitely don't want that,
20:56SPEAKERbut also like, like any, any even split second disruption of your perception of your surroundings
21:01SPEAKERwhile you are operating a heavy machine at high speed. Yeah. Not great. Yeah. The, the, the,
21:08SPEAKERthe circle, the circle, the circle of doom on the Apple vision pro would be real bad if you're
21:13SPEAKERgoing to 70 miles an hour on the freeway. Yeah. Anyway, please no battle passes for cars. That's
21:17SPEAKERmy request. Yes, hopefully not. All right. Let's move to some discord questions. Here's one from
21:22SPEAKERPeters, Victor, who is as a returning emailer. They're the one with the sheep shed. Oh man. I
21:29SPEAKERlove a good sheep shed story. Yeah. Yeah. Sheep shed update. Hi again. And thanks for the previous
21:34SPEAKERanswer to answer Brad's question. Yes, there are actual sheep involved and we'll guest the use
21:38SPEAKERcase for the camera spot on our use are set to lamb in April. And it would be great to check,
21:45SPEAKERto be able to check on them for bed instead of going out to the shed once an hour to see if a
21:50SPEAKERU is about to lamb. I ordered a couple of ubiquity nano stations, but haven't ordered a camera yet.
21:56SPEAKERAny suggestions? Are there any good home kit compatible models? So there's a ton of like,
22:02SPEAKERthis is the camera space is not as super competitive. There's a bazillion cameras on the
22:06SPEAKERmarket. Everything from stuff that's cloud connected and has a little bit of latency
22:10SPEAKERall the way down to something you can just plug in and like we'll connect with home assistant or
22:13SPEAKERyour home kit install or whatever. Honestly, buy some stuff from places that you can return it and
22:21SPEAKERsee what works. Cause the thing that I've found with those cameras, the hardest thing about those
22:25SPEAKERcameras is getting the right mount for the area that you have. Cause if it doesn't, if like the
22:30SPEAKERcamera, usually they're weather sealed enclosures for outdoor cameras, even barn cameras, you
22:34SPEAKERprobably want to weather sealed enclosures cause it's wet and cold and all that stuff.
22:39SPEAKERThe articulation inside the weather seal is the thing that's probably gonna determine what works
22:43SPEAKERfor you. 4k, you get 4k, but the camera sensors are often noisy, but like you're probably looking
22:49SPEAKERat like in the U S it would be like a hundred bucks at most for a decent 4k camera. When I,
22:54SPEAKERwhen I set up the bird nest cam last year, I went and bought an Amcrest camera that would connect
23:01SPEAKERto my home assistant. So I didn't have to send it to the web. And it worked, it works great,
23:09SPEAKERlike shockingly well. The, but again, the challenge with it is getting in the mountain,
23:14SPEAKERthe place that it needed to be in Carriana. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff seems to be getting
23:18SPEAKERinsanely short. Like are we're right. I assume we're just fully in the territory of like
23:23SPEAKERabsurdly cheap cameras on AliExpress that you can get like some kind of raw,
23:27SPEAKERwhat is the protocol? I think a lot of them use RTSP to spit out. Yeah. They use RTSP or what are
23:32SPEAKERthe new thing? Some of them do both. What's the new thing? Is it, what do you use on what's,
23:39SPEAKERwhat's the thing on Twitch, the, the, that transport there's a suction. I can't remember
23:44SPEAKERthe name of the protocols. There's a bunch of them now. Like there's, there's, there's HLS,
23:48SPEAKERthere's dash, there's SRT, there's wrist. I've been living in video streaming world hardcore for
23:54SPEAKERa few weeks anyway. So the other thing about this is since you're presumably not going to have the
23:58SPEAKERlights on in the barn so that the animals can sleep you'll, you'll want to make sure that you
24:03SPEAKERlike the reason to buy something that you can, that you can send back if it doesn't work right
24:07SPEAKERis because the infrared cameras have wildly varying qualities. In my experience,
24:11SPEAKERI got three cameras before I found one that would let me see the birds at night.
24:15SPEAKERInteresting. And you'll, you'll want to like, nobody does reviews of these things that are
24:20SPEAKERworth a shit. So, and, and the proliferation of AI generated reviews is so bad. Casey Johnston,
24:28SPEAKERguest, former guest of the show was talking about this this week. Like people magazine is doing
24:34SPEAKERevery mainstream publisher. Somebody is selling services to mainstream publishers
24:38SPEAKERthat says, Hey, we will generate high keyword volume reviews so that you can draft on your good
24:45SPEAKERsearch, search, search juice and make a whole bunch of affiliate money by selling shitty
24:50SPEAKERoverpriced air filters to people on affiliate links to Amazon. And so like, if you search for
24:56SPEAKERbest air filter for pets, you get home home, real simple and people and better homes and gardens and
25:04SPEAKERtime and Newsweek and all of these sites just have ghost pages that aren't linked off their CMS is
25:09SPEAKERreally so you can't use those kinds of reviews anymore. You got to go to like Wirecutter or
25:14SPEAKERsomeplace that are consumer reports or someplace that actually does product coverage for that kind
25:18SPEAKERof review. And none of those sites cover these kinds of cameras because they're like weirdo
25:24SPEAKERniche for, for people like us or people who install them professionally and just buy the
25:28SPEAKERsame kind every time. I need to just buy a camera or two. These things are 20 to $30 now. Like you
25:33SPEAKERcan like, there's, here's a wise, here's a wise camera. That's 10 ADP wifi enabled for 1999. Like,
25:38SPEAKERso that to just play with some of these, the wise stuff goes to the web. So, okay. So yeah,
25:43SPEAKERI would want to find the one that is like fully offline and not cloud connected. Yeah. So the
25:47SPEAKERAmcrest is the low end. Like when I, I got four cameras, the two that I liked were Amcrest ones.
25:53SPEAKERI kept one of the Amcrest ones. The, the, the there's a big jump from like the 20 or $30 cameras
26:01SPEAKERto the 80 or $100 cameras. I'm sure. I have no actual use for one of these things. I just want
26:06SPEAKERto get one and play with it. Put it on the pigs. I thought about, I just, I mean, I work in this
26:10SPEAKERroom. Like I kind of, I kind of don't want a camera running in my house all the time. I mean,
26:14SPEAKERI get it, but it goes public. Put it out on the street. Let's see, let people see the,
26:19SPEAKERwell, that's a bad idea. Then you dox yourself. But anyway, I could, I could mount it out back.
26:23SPEAKERWe have hawks that hang out behind our house frequently. Maybe I could mount it out there
26:26SPEAKERand watch 20, 24 pointed at the big pole. The hawks like to perch on. I like that.
26:34SPEAKERI told you about the time I encountered a hawk fighting some crows midair.
26:39SPEAKERIt's terrifying. It is crazy. Terrible. Yeah, totally. I had no idea that crows and hawks were
26:46SPEAKERlike natural adversaries. Yeah. The, I was driving with a kiddo and scarred her for life one day.
26:52SPEAKERCause I was like, oh look, there's a hawk and some crows fighting. And then the crows down to the
26:57SPEAKERhawk and it was not good. Oh wow. That's crazy. It was like four of them just really wailing on it.
27:02SPEAKERI may have mentioned this before we were at the park one time and a dead, this is grim,
27:07SPEAKERa dead partially chewed rodent landed on the path in front of us. Oh no. And only then did we look
27:12SPEAKERup and realize that a hawk and some crows were going at it and the hawk must have dropped its
27:17SPEAKERprey. Like it was, it was extremely bizarre. Did I, when we were in DC last year, we were
27:23SPEAKERwalking through the garden behind the Smithsonian. I might've told the story in the podcast. If I did,
27:28SPEAKERI apologize, but we were walking through the guardian behind the Smithsonian castle
27:31SPEAKERfrom our hotel to the mall. And I was like, oh look, there's a hawk and a Falcon in the middle
27:35SPEAKERof the, in the middle of the, this grassy spot, this big grassy spot. It's really cool. And then
27:40SPEAKERabout then a squirrel jumped up from where the hawk was, was and it, and it grabbed it and started
27:46SPEAKERripping pieces of it off. And I was like, no, don't look, don't look, don't look, don't look,
27:51SPEAKERthis is bad. Don't, don't look at this. It was yeah. Circle of life, man. Good old,
27:56SPEAKERgood old nature, red and tooth and claw. Yeah, exactly. A question from Jerry.
28:02SPEAKERWhat's your website bookmarking workflow, the star button next to the browser URL bar,
28:09SPEAKERsomething like raindrop.io. Pasting links into a notes page. What is raindrop.io?
28:15SPEAKERI'm going to look at raindrop.io right now. So I, at this point, if I need to keep bookmarks,
28:22SPEAKERif I'm doing a project that requires that I keep bookmarks, I save them in a notion. Like I make
28:28SPEAKERa page for the project and I save the links in a notion document. As, as just as texts links,
28:34SPEAKERlike, does it have facility for keeping like organizing bookmarks or you can make a link,
28:38SPEAKERbut I just make a yeah. I put what it is and then a hyphen and then the link. And that way I have,
28:45SPEAKERthat way I have a searchable database of like, Hey, here's the setup guide for blah, blah, blah,
28:51SPEAKERwhatever service I'm setting up on my, on my NAS or my server or something.
28:54SPEAKERYeah. It's funny like bookmarks were huge at the beginning of the web, you know,
28:59SPEAKERlike straight up next Netscape navigator era favorites and internet Explorer three,
29:04SPEAKERet cetera, et cetera. And then I delicious vaguely, but I kind of gave up bookmarks for
29:09SPEAKERyears and years, like starting, I don't know, early 2000s, maybe like I went like, I think
29:13SPEAKERactually it was around the time of the Firefox. What did they call it? Do they, was Firefox,
29:17SPEAKERthe one with the awesome bar? Is that what they called it? I don't know if they called it the
29:21SPEAKERawesome bar, but like, I feel like I remember that name and thinking it was awful. Well, okay. So
29:26SPEAKERyes, it is. I'm looking it up on the Mozilla Wiki, awesome bar V2. Anyway, that was the thing that
29:31SPEAKERwould it would remember not just the literal text of the URL, but it would remember page titles and
29:36SPEAKERother metadata around the page. And you can kind of just type into the address bar, something about
29:40SPEAKERthe thing you had visited and it would just find it. And that was about the point that I stopped
29:45SPEAKERusing bookmarks. Yeah. Same. Yeah. I have, I have re embraced bookmarks in the last like four or
29:50SPEAKERfive years in a way. I just bookmark things in Chrome though, and just let Chrome sync them
29:56SPEAKERacross devices. And I'm not sure that I love the, I mean, I'm sure there, I'm sure there's data
30:01SPEAKERcollection going on there and I wouldn't mind transitioning to something else, but I don't know.
30:07SPEAKERI have a bunch of links to the Will Smith stories about me from the Oscars a couple of years ago.
30:13SPEAKERThose are the last bookmarks I made, it looks like.
30:15SPEAKEROh, wow. I bookmark stuff constantly these days. Like anytime I, anytime I find like a,
30:19SPEAKERlike a stack exchange thing that I might refer to later or something like that, I just did my
30:23SPEAKERbookmark. I mean, I, you know, I have to gather new stories for the next line or podcast every
30:27SPEAKERweek. Like I use it for that. I, you know, like bookmarks are useful. I wouldn't mind maybe
30:33SPEAKERfinding a way to decouple them from an account where a lot of data is probably being harvested
30:39SPEAKERfrom that, but I don't know. I are they searchable in Chrome?
30:44SPEAKERAbsolutely. Yeah. It's like, like they're, they're very flexible, easy to use, robust, et cetera.
30:52SPEAKERYeah. It's funny. The Firefox ones are searchable too. I don't really use them. I use the bookmarks
30:56SPEAKERbar for the things that I use often enough that I want to have them ready and accessible,
31:01SPEAKERbut not pinned. Like I have a bookmarklet that saves a recipe to paprika and stuff like that
31:06SPEAKERthere. But for the most part, I don't really use bookmarks anymore, but I also have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
31:13SPEAKER6, 7, 8, 9, 10 tabs pinned open right now. So. That's a lot of tabs.
31:20SPEAKERIt's too many tabs, Brad. Don't run so many tabs.
31:23SPEAKERLike when I, when I, whenever I look at memory usage, I have 64 gig in this new machine. Like
31:27SPEAKERit's not a problem, but anytime I look at memory usage, it's Chrome. Like, like of all the things
31:32SPEAKERusing memory, it is kind of like when the WSL2 uses kind of a lot, but it's mostly Chrome.
31:38SPEAKERThat's why, that's why I stopped using Chrome. Honestly, I think that's every browser though,
31:42SPEAKERright? Like browser tabs, like use a lot of memory when you use a lot of tabs.
31:46SPEAKERSo Firefox, Chrome has three tabs open. Firefox has like 25. They're using the same amount of
31:52SPEAKERmemory. All right. Well, whatever. I just stick to Chrome for compatibility reasons. Like we,
32:01SPEAKERwe just, we use too many like web-based video calls and chat things and stuff and Chrome,
32:05SPEAKEReverything is tested against Chrome. Yeah. You have to use Chrome for like Google,
32:11SPEAKERlike, yeah, all of that stuff. Yeah. What else we got here? Catwillmew.
32:18SPEAKERI regularly see stories about hacks where they say they're sponsored by a nation state.
32:23SPEAKERI'm curious, how do they know this? And why isn't that sort of thing a bigger deal if another nation
32:28SPEAKERis intentionally attacking our IT infrastructure? I can't, I don't have a ready answer for how they
32:32SPEAKERknow, but I will say why it isn't a bigger deal is that we are assuredly doing the same thing to them.
32:40SPEAKERWell, but I mean, that's never stopped us from disproportionate responses in the past
32:44SPEAKERas a country. Fair. That is fair. But I mean,
32:46SPEAKERI think it's kind of like espionage though, right? Where like everybody is spying on everybody all
32:50SPEAKERthe time, even, even the sensible allies. Yeah. I think that's true.
32:55SPEAKERAnd like with something, with something like that, you know, they have your secrets just
33:02SPEAKERas much as you have their secrets and you don't necessarily want those getting out.
33:07SPEAKERI also think a lot of times it's yeah, I actually, I have no idea why it isn't a bigger deal.
33:15SPEAKERI also, the, how we know that they're sponsored by a nation state is I think an espionage thing,
33:20SPEAKERright? So we know like we are, we track money through you know, we, we, we track money through
33:27SPEAKERthe international banking system and see that these people are being paid by this shell company,
33:31SPEAKERby this shell company, by this shell company, by this shell company. And then eventually
33:35SPEAKERyou realize it's coming from Russia or Iran or whatever.
33:38SPEAKERYeah. There, there might be like digital networking
33:41SPEAKERfootprints as well that can be followed and stuff. I mean, like a lot of this is probably
33:44SPEAKERjust counter intelligence. Like I mean, you see it make the news occasionally like hacker groups
33:49SPEAKERthat are affiliated with certain countries, like have names and get new stories written about them
33:54SPEAKERbecause they've been identified and stuff, right? Yeah. I, I, I mostly wanted to answer this because
33:59SPEAKERI'm curious if I think there are people probably in our listener base who do this kind of work
34:04SPEAKERand I'd be curious to have follow-up answers if you can do it in a way that won't get you in
34:07SPEAKERtrouble with the, with the man. Yes. Or marked.
34:11SPEAKERYeah. Don't put us on a list. That's all I'm saying.
34:13SPEAKERYes. We shouldn't have taken this question. Can't even ask these kinds of questions.
34:19SPEAKERHere's a good question from Warbird. Oh really? No, I don't think Lane Kiffin
34:24SPEAKERis the best coach of all time Warbird. Okay. Well moving on then. I have to know,
34:28SPEAKERit's actually I'm torn on this one. Okay. Is there a point to the modern Raspberry Pi
34:34SPEAKERin this day and age? It really seems like anything beyond a Pi 3, which had the first 64 bit CPU and
34:40SPEAKERa Pi is just paying more for a less performance solution with the added bonus of getting to play
34:46SPEAKERthe wait for the SD card failure game. Now there's still a good entry point due to standardization
34:51SPEAKERand community support, but dropping the amount of money needed for the later models to just work,
34:57SPEAKERincluding dongles cases, the increasingly specific power supplies, et cetera,
35:02SPEAKERmakes that a losing proposition for the purposes of this argument, let's leave the compute module
35:06SPEAKERline of products off to the side. Before we get into this, I'm going to say, I'm going to
35:11SPEAKERinterpret where he says the, just paying more for a less performance solution. I assume he's
35:17SPEAKERcomparing to other different solutions out there that are not Pis and not to previous Pis because
35:24SPEAKERPis, like Pis from three to four or five, like they have gotten dramatically faster,
35:28SPEAKERright? Probably more performant out of proportion to any increases in price. And in fact,
35:33SPEAKERthe price increases have only been about Ram, I believe like the, doesn't the baseline two
35:37SPEAKERgig model still run at 35, even for a Pi 5? I don't. I think the Pi 5 is more expensive.
35:43SPEAKERDid they raise the price? They did. They did. They raised prices temporarily during the
35:48SPEAKERpandemic due to components. So the four gig model is 60 bucks. There is no two gig Pi 5,
35:54SPEAKERI don't think. Okay. I did not realize that. I'm looking at Wikipedia as my source on this.
36:00SPEAKEROkay. He's right that they are getting more expensive at the baseline, even setting the
36:05SPEAKERextra accessories aside. And then he's also right. Like they need active cooling now. I think the
36:08SPEAKERthree and you could run a four without active cooling, but it was not advised. And I think the
36:13SPEAKERfive, the five straight up has to have a fan if I'm not mistaken. So like the component requirements
36:19SPEAKERare greater. But they are not they all also are not discontinuing the older models. Like I think
36:25SPEAKERthey're still manufacturing the three. Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think they still make the one.
36:29SPEAKERI think they make all of them still. Right. I feel like, I feel like when we talked to Eben,
36:33SPEAKERhe said that, but I can't remember. Yeah. The point is now there's a wide range. Like my,
36:40SPEAKERfor example, my pie hole runs on a three it's fine. It'll continue running there until the
36:45SPEAKERhardware dies, which hopefully will be never, you know, it's got to, I put a,
36:49SPEAKERI had a spare cooler, so I stuck it on the CPU just to give it a little more life.
36:53SPEAKERYeah. My pie hole is a Pi 2, and it's also perfectly performant for that. I like,
37:00SPEAKERI think the main thing here is the rise of these cheap x86 little embedded PCs.
37:05SPEAKERYeah. Like, like when you get into a Pi, when you, for example, when I was buying a CM for my
37:10SPEAKERhome assistant and I paid a hundred bucks for it, cause I got the one with the 16 gigs
37:14SPEAKEREMC thing on it and, and the whole boat below to Ram. So I could run a bunch of Docker containers
37:19SPEAKERthere. No problem. That costs as much as the Beelink that runs Plex. Right. It was like,
37:25SPEAKERit was like 80 to $90. And the Beelink was like a hundred and this was also pandemic time. So it
37:30SPEAKERwas like prices were a little inflated. I did not realize your Beelink was that cheap. I thought,
37:33SPEAKERI thought the, those types of little x86 boxes were like 200 to start.
37:39SPEAKERI got, I, if I recall, I bought it on sale, but it was I think I bought the N5 105 one.
37:47SPEAKEROkay. And it was 120 bucks maybe at most when I bought it.
37:51SPEAKEROkay. Yeah. If you can, if you can get something like that, especially the, these,
37:55SPEAKERthese older Lake N100 x86 boxes that has come out, like those things are,
38:01SPEAKERthose things are stupid performance for the price and the power profile. If you're, you know,
38:06SPEAKERif you're getting into territory where it's a hundred dollars plus for your pie set up, then
38:12SPEAKERmaybe it does make more sense to get one of those, even if they're a little bit more, like if it was
38:15SPEAKERa $200 differential or something, I would say like the pie is still worth it, but.
38:21SPEAKERSo the exception is that a lot of the raspberry pie application, like a lot of people use
38:27SPEAKERraspberry pies for like application in a box app server in a box. Right. So for example, pie hole,
38:33SPEAKERyou can run on a bunch of other things, but it takes a little bit of specialized knowledge to
38:36SPEAKERget it up and running on something that's not a pie. Whereas when you download it and install
38:41SPEAKERthe pie installer, it just says, Hey, do you want to install pile on this? And you hit the button
38:44SPEAKERand it's done. And then you follow like five questions set up process. So it's you know,
38:52SPEAKERI think there's a real, I think there's a real argument in favor of, Hey, this is a single use,
38:57SPEAKERlow power computer that you don't have to think about too much. Yeah. Also lower power than like,
39:02SPEAKERthat's another point. I mean, even the little x86 things are getting pretty low, but yeah.
39:08SPEAKERAnd actually I don't know how high the pie fives power draw is like back in the day, a pie
39:14SPEAKERidle at like a 1.5 Watts or nothing. You know, like, I think, I think they would hit like maybe
39:20SPEAKERfive to seven Watts at load or something. I think that either the newer ones definitely pull more,
39:24SPEAKERbut I think a pie is definitely still for something you run 24 seven is still going to
39:28SPEAKERuse less power than even something that pulls like 30 Watts or something. If that matters to you.
39:34SPEAKERThe other big thing that's changed on the four and the five is I think that they have,
39:39SPEAKERyou can get higher speed data off of the headers now.
39:42SPEAKERYes. I can't remember, I think there's like, I think they are exposing PCI express
39:48SPEAKERand to some degree on the five, I forget how exactly.
39:51SPEAKERYeah. So like there, there are uses for it. It's like, I think it's like any,
39:56SPEAKERlike this is a place where it's weirdly, you don't want to buy more pie than you need. Like, cause
40:01SPEAKERyou know, you buy too much. You're not going to use it. It's just going to take power that you're
40:04SPEAKERnot, you, that you don't, you don't need. I wouldn't put up the pie hole on a five. I think
40:10SPEAKERthe four, like where, however, a home assistant install, especially if you have a whole bunch of
40:15SPEAKERdifferent kinds of devices that are running a bazillion different Docker containers or
40:19SPEAKERcommunity store items probably could benefit from, from the extra Ram and the, and the bigger CPU on
40:25SPEAKERa four or five, which yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, like I'd say, I'd say don't get a pie five just
40:29SPEAKERto run a pie hole, but if you're willing to get in the weeds and containerize things and you wanted
40:33SPEAKERto run like a pie hole and some other stuff on there, then it makes more sense. Yeah. And then
40:37SPEAKERthe other thing is like for, for end user devices, like obviously we're not talking about like
40:43SPEAKERinstalled kind of embedded devices. And cause like the weird thing is a lot of people use pies now
40:50SPEAKERfor manufacturing stuff. Right. When we did the FOSS pod with Evan, he said, he, he looks at,
40:54SPEAKERhe said, he looks at at, at the like industrial devices and sees the, the footprint, the port
41:02SPEAKERfootprint for raspberry pie on the, on the devices where they were like a lot of people just use them
41:07SPEAKERas like the embedded controller for things because it's cheap and easy to get. And I think if you're
41:13SPEAKERtalking about like a home use, like buying a pie five for like an emulation box or something like
41:18SPEAKERthat makes a ton of sense. Cause it probably opens up more, more potential platforms to run and run
41:24SPEAKERyour emulators on than, than like a three or a two obviously would. Yeah. That's, that's the last
41:28SPEAKERargument I would make for it is just the community support is very good. I mean, they're well
41:31SPEAKERsupported by the pie foundation in terms of hardware support and stuff, but then yes, also
41:36SPEAKERthere's retro pie and octoprint and a bajillion things out there that are made to just turnkey
41:40SPEAKERinstall and run on a pie. So community support software availability is quite strong there.
41:48SPEAKERI, I generally like, but I think to Warbirds print, don't buy, don't buy more pie than you
41:54SPEAKERneed. No, no. Or maybe don't buy pie at all. If you need more than a pie and there are
41:58SPEAKERbetter options that give you more for not much more money. So the pie, the pie B and pie
42:08SPEAKERa and a plus are all discontinued. Oh really? The pie one B plus is still available. That's
42:14SPEAKERthe 512 Meg configuration. Okay. And the pie four V one, which is the one that had the
42:21SPEAKERbug that didn't work with a lot of USB cables is also discontinued, but they manufacture every
42:26SPEAKERother pie they've ever made. Other than those five. That's that's impressive. Now you got me
42:31SPEAKERwondering you've got me wondering which version of the model B I've got here because I'm still
42:35SPEAKERrunning a model B it's my nuts server. I don't, I'm uncomfortable talking about your nuts server,
42:42SPEAKERbro. Too late. I need to do some maintenance on that thing. This thing will be fine. Oh,
42:48SPEAKERit's the five 12 gig version. Yeah. If I had a pie model B with 512 gigabytes of memory,
42:57SPEAKERthere would be something very strange going on. Is it, is it the one with the 40 pin GPIO or the
43:03SPEAKER26 pin GPIO? Cause the 26 pin five 12 megabyte version is not being made anymore. But the 40
43:08SPEAKERpin one is, well, that's the differentiator. It's hidden behind my desk. Oh, it has ethernet. So
43:15SPEAKERyou're you're Oh yeah. This one does definitely has ethernet. Oh no, though. Yeah. Nevermind.
43:20SPEAKERThat's not a differentiator. Sorry. Anyway, we should move on. We should move on, but I'm
43:24SPEAKERgoing to bellyache about one thing real fast here. The pie foundation provides no upgrade path for
43:29SPEAKERthe raspberry PI OS, which is just Debian with their extra stuff on it to support the hardware
43:34SPEAKERon there and stuff. But like, if you're running, for example, the Debian 11 version of, of PI OS,
43:43SPEAKERthey explicitly say, Hey, do not do the distro upgrade to 12. Like it will likely break things.
43:49SPEAKERIf you want to upgrade major versions of raspberry PI OS, you have to wipe the card and reinstall.
43:54SPEAKERI mean, look, wiping the card and putting a new card in every few years,
43:58SPEAKERprobably not a terrible idea. I guess so. Also, do I really need to upgrade? Not especially.
44:04SPEAKERAlso, if you're killing a lot of SD cards on raspberry PI's, you should not be writing logs to
44:09SPEAKERthe card. You got to set them up so that most of the modern PI distros do this automatically now.
44:15SPEAKERSo they'll like write, write the log to Ram and then cash it out once or twice a day. Oh,
44:19SPEAKERyou mean like the turnkey ones? Yeah. The turnkey stuff. Those should like retro PI. I hope that's
44:24SPEAKERthe case. Raspberry PI OS does not though. You're like, I definitely go get log to Ram new to log to
44:30SPEAKERRam. I set that up on all of my pies and all those SD cards have been going for years with no problems.
44:36SPEAKERYeah. Next question is going to be as I look for it. I'm filling time now.
44:48SPEAKERWhat are you going to sing a ditty? I don't know. I was thinking about it,
44:51SPEAKERbut I ran out of words. I'm about to sneeze. I think so.
44:53SPEAKEROh, flip triples. I think several people have asked this question. I feel like I need to just
44:58SPEAKERlike state it for the record because people have been curious. Flip triples asks, could we get a
45:04SPEAKERpost-mortem on Brad's AM5 stability issues that led to him switching platforms to Intel? I always
45:09SPEAKERenjoy hearing real world hardware experiences that can't be captured in day one reviews.
45:13SPEAKERAnd I'm curious if the root cause was identifiable. Brad was the root cause identifiable.
45:21SPEAKERWell, well, I'm glad you asked. I'm trying to think where to start with this. There were two
45:26SPEAKERthings here. One of them, I think it was more broad AM5 stuff. And then one of them was specific
45:32SPEAKERto the motherboard I had. Yeah.
45:35SPEAKERThe ongoing problem I had with the Gigabyte motherboard, which was an X 670 E AORUS,
45:41SPEAKERI think people have landed on AORUS as the pronunciation.
45:44SPEAKERAORUS, I believe is the spelling. AORUS. It was an X 670 E AORUS Master Gigabyte. It was,
45:53SPEAKERit was like a constellation of problems. It was like USB networking storage sometimes.
46:00SPEAKERStuff just dropped off, right?
46:03SPEAKERRandomly vanished. Like, like I would, and, and it's hard to define because the behavior was so
46:10SPEAKERnebulous and so like varied as it would happen. Like it's kind of hard to put my finger on exactly
46:14SPEAKERhow it manifested, but it was like you, like you would boot into windows and like all of a sudden
46:18SPEAKERyou would have no Bluetooth and your, and your D drive was not showing up.
46:22SPEAKERThat seems bad.
46:23SPEAKERYou'd be in the middle of something and like all your USB devices would suddenly vanish.
46:27SPEAKERBoth of those things seem bad.
46:29SPEAKEROr yeah, like, or all the networking would stop. Like both my, both the RJ45 going to the internet
46:35SPEAKERand also the, the, the Mellanox card, the SFP plus card that goes straight to my NAS,
46:40SPEAKERboth of those things would vanish.
46:42SPEAKERWas, was did Gigabyte replace these boards for people or were they just like everything's cool?
46:46SPEAKERSo, yeah, like, you know, I saw people out there going like, why didn't you just RMA or whatever?
46:50SPEAKERAnd like, so I spent a ton of time looking at different places that people post about
46:53SPEAKERGigabyte, like their forums or read their subreddits. There were a bunch of people
46:58SPEAKERwith this board who were having this problem. So that's the other thing,
47:01SPEAKERthey had a bunch of people were having this problem. And quite a few of them had stories
47:05SPEAKERabout RMAing the board and they would get a board back that worked. And then several months later,
47:11SPEAKERthe problems would start again. And that's exactly what happened with me. I built the machine in
47:15SPEAKERApril. This didn't start until like September, but once it started, it was persistent enough
47:20SPEAKERthat I was like, dude, fuck this. Like, so do we do like, is there a root cause identified
47:25SPEAKERfor this problem? Is this a specific problem or is this an all AM5 problem?
47:28SPEAKERSo like there and there there's another there's user on our discord who had the same board and
47:32SPEAKERCPU with the exact same problems who also switched to Intel. Alex Batalia at Digital Foundry,
47:38SPEAKERbuilt a 79 or sorry, I think it was a 7800 X3D system with this board. It was funny. I was,
47:44SPEAKERI was on the full nerd with him around the time that he built that. And I mentioned like, oh man,
47:48SPEAKERI hope, I hope you don't run into these problems. Did he have the problems?
47:51SPEAKERSure enough, like a month or two later, he started tweeting about, he was running into the same
47:54SPEAKERstuff. I don't know. I didn't see where his issues ended up. I hope he got those fixed. But anyway,
48:00SPEAKERI'll ask him next time he's on the full nerd. It was, it was all the people saying, yes,
48:03SPEAKERI already made this. And then the problems just started again. Like I was just like,
48:06SPEAKERI am not dealing with this in a machine that needs to do work.
48:09SPEAKERWell, so then why didn't you just keep another AM5 board and switch to a different board?
48:13SPEAKERThat was the decision I came down to when I was like, okay, I can't deal with this anymore. I
48:17SPEAKERneed to do something. The options were stick with, stick with AM5, stick with AMD and just
48:22SPEAKERswap a different board in because that very much seemed to be a gigabyte specific problem.
48:26SPEAKEROkay.
48:27SPEAKERTo be clear, those problems were not, as far as I could tell,
48:30SPEAKERI think there might've been another board or two from Gigabyte having similar issues,
48:33SPEAKERbut I never saw a thing about ASUS or MSI or...
48:38SPEAKERAnyone else.
48:39SPEAKERYeah. Like any of the, any of the major, well, not that there are that many ASRock and they're not,
48:43SPEAKERthat's pretty much all of them.
48:45SPEAKERASUS, MSI and Gigabyte are pretty much the majors at this point, I think.
48:48SPEAKERYeah. ASRock people seem to like, I mean, everybody has up and down periods, but ASRock is
48:52SPEAKERactually like very popular in the sort of like budget or hardcore build community right now.
48:57SPEAKERYeah. No doubt. No doubt. No doubt.
48:59SPEAKERBut, but there were, there were other issues I was having with mostly USB compatibility that
49:04SPEAKERwere more broad AMD related. You know, I use, I use a lot of USB AV stuff.
49:11SPEAKERYeah.
49:11SPEAKERI've got, I've got this Motu, which is a USB audio interface. I've got,
49:15SPEAKERI've got a little May 12 HDMI capture USB three thing that I use to run my camera through.
49:20SPEAKERI've got an Astro mix amp here. The, like all of those had issues on various USB ports on,
49:27SPEAKERon the Gigabyte board. But I gather from talking to people, from looking at feedback out there,
49:31SPEAKERthe like USB compatibility stuff is just kind of not great on AMD. And I had really
49:36SPEAKERhoped that had gotten better with AM5. And I think it got worse instead.
49:40SPEAKERI'm going to say USB compatibility is not great anywhere, but it is, I think Intel,
49:45SPEAKERlike I, like I have on my machine, on my Intel machine, I have the webcam and the,
49:50SPEAKERand the has to be plugged into certain ports or else it just randomly disconnects and reconnects,
49:55SPEAKERwhich is just like, it's a webcam, man.
49:59SPEAKERLike, yeah, like every motherboard is going to have some of that probably,
50:02SPEAKERor every platform is going to have some USB compatibility stuff. But, but for example,
50:06SPEAKERthe Motu, I tried basically every port on that board. I could never get usable audio out of the
50:12SPEAKERMotu. Like the Motu is, is primarily an audio in interface for XLR mics, but it also, you know,
50:16SPEAKERit has a headphone jack and other ways of monitoring. Every time I use that thing as
50:20SPEAKERthe output device in windows, no matter what port it was on, I tried literally all of them,
50:25SPEAKERgarbled staticky mess coming out of the, like no matter what I did.
50:29SPEAKERThat's the main, that's my main audio output, the same exact interface even.
50:33SPEAKERIt was so bizarre. There were, there were, there were weird issues around other stuff like this,
50:39SPEAKERthis AstroMix amp has, it exposes two kind of virtual audio output devices to one of them.
50:44SPEAKERI mean, they're hardware devices, but you know what I mean? Like it shows up in windows,
50:47SPEAKERit shows up as AstroMix amp pro game and pro voice. Those are two separate outputs and it's
50:52SPEAKERgot a little, it's got a little like fader knob on there or that kind of goes between those two.
50:57SPEAKERYeah. So you can, so you can balance your game and your audio without changing the mix in windows.
51:01SPEAKERYeah. It's really nice. Super useful. I use, I put voice on one and game on the other,
51:04SPEAKERand then I can just mop that back and forth when I can't hear people talk or whatever. Anyway,
51:08SPEAKERlike that board had serious issues, like using both of those at the same time,
51:12SPEAKERlike setting different applications to output to the, to different devices.
51:15SPEAKERThat also was super unreliable. Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying when it came down to,
51:21SPEAKERshould I try on different AM5 board from another vendor or should I just
51:27SPEAKERget off this platform? I chose the latter and I will say this Z790 board with this 14900K,
51:34SPEAKERbasically zero USB compatibility issues of any kind. Every device I have that I've plugged into
51:39SPEAKERany port on this thing has just worked. There you go.
51:42SPEAKERAnd like that alone was worth the switchback. I like a lot of what AMD is doing and I still find
51:48SPEAKERlike, I still find their product lineup pretty interesting conceptually.
51:52SPEAKERYeah. But problems like that,
51:54SPEAKERespecially in any kind of work environment or just a non-starter.
51:57SPEAKERI keep thinking about thread rippering, but also I just want a computer that works.
52:02SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. So do you ever watch, I don't know how do you say this guy's
52:09SPEAKERhandle, EposVox, EposVox. Do you know what I'm talking about?
52:13SPEAKERYeah, I'm familiar with the channel, but I don't, I don't remember.
52:15SPEAKERHe calls himself the stream professor. He does a lot of capture card reviews and like codec
52:21SPEAKERquality tests and like hardcore Twitch streaming nerd shit that I'm way into. He just ran a video
52:28SPEAKERrecently where he basically said he's running streaming from windows in general for audio
52:34SPEAKERproduction, video and audio production. And he went and got a max studio, but he, what he was
52:37SPEAKERrunning prior to making that choice was a thread ripper. He was running, he was trying to do all
52:41SPEAKERhis audio, his recording and stuff on the thread ripper. And he said he was having so many issues
52:45SPEAKERwith latency and like buffer underruns causing pops and crackles and stuff that he was just like,
52:50SPEAKERand that was a thread ripper. So like, I don't, I don't know that a thread ripper is great for AV.
52:54SPEAKERWell, I was just saying it's funny because I've, I've had a couple of people that do
52:57SPEAKERprofessional audio stuff who've talked, talked to me about switching to Linux lately because
53:01SPEAKERthey're able to control the drivers that are used and stuff like that at a really high level. And
53:05SPEAKERlike, because a lot of the drivers are open, they're just able like people in the community
53:10SPEAKERare able to fix latency issues rather than like dealing with shenanigans.
53:16SPEAKERWhen I was, I was talking to somebody about this whole thing recently and I jokingly said
53:20SPEAKERsomething about that. Like I jokingly said like, it's two oh your production on Linux,
53:23SPEAKERbut actually that made me wonder because like there are so many different Linux audio subsystems,
53:29SPEAKERlike depending on distro, you can quite literally just decide what, what the underlying audio system
53:34SPEAKERis going to be. Like it used to be also way back when like pipe wire is what a lot of people use
53:38SPEAKERnow. But also like ironically in the era of like live service operating systems, it's also a lot
53:46SPEAKEReasier to have a stable version of Linux where nothing changes, which is like, like you think
53:50SPEAKERabout like the audio, think about the audio machine in your old studios at game spot,
53:56SPEAKERyou know, 15 years ago. And it was probably a windows XP machine that was unplugged from
54:00SPEAKERthe internet because they didn't want anything to jack with the settings on it because it was
54:04SPEAKERalways a problem. So I get it anyway. Yeah. Audio sucks. This is the, yeah, it's always,
54:11SPEAKERalways hard unless you use Mac, I guess, or Linux, I suppose. Let's see. I have so many
54:18SPEAKERgood questions here. It's a good question. Yeah. It is a good, good and a good problem to have.
54:24SPEAKERI actually pulled this question from like December. I've been meaning to answer it every month.
54:29SPEAKERI never quite gotten around to it. It's from Horch. I'm going to say is the pronunciation.
54:35SPEAKERI'll agree with Horch. Horch sounds good. Do you have any viewpoints on mechanical watches?
54:40SPEAKERCould you see yourself moving from the Apple watch to a mechanical watch? Does the technology
54:44SPEAKERof keeping time with only Springs gears and no batteries interest you or does it feel redundant
54:48SPEAKERnow in 2024? I was given an Omega Speedmaster as a gift a few years ago. So that's, that's sounds
54:56SPEAKERlike a nice one. It's the moonwatch. It's one of those. It's one of the watches that when NASA was
55:02SPEAKERlike, Hey, we need a way to tell time and space. They, they sent a guy with a checkbook or a PO to
55:10SPEAKERthe like local jeweler and bought one of every watch that was waterproof on the, at the, at the,
55:16SPEAKERthe Houston jeweler. And then they ran them through vacuum tests and blasted dust at them
55:20SPEAKERand all sorts of stuff. It's there's a, there's a book about this whole, like how they specced
55:25SPEAKERstuff. It talks about like hiring the contracting with Playtex to make the spacesuits because
55:31SPEAKERthe women who had been sewing bras by hand do how to sew stretchy synthetic fabrics and, and,
55:38SPEAKERand stuff like that. So I love the Omega. It's I, I wear it for special occasions these days,
55:45SPEAKERreally. That's a hell of a gift. It was, it was one of my grandfather collected watches and watches.
55:53SPEAKERSo he had a large collection of watches. Like when the thing happened in the late seventies,
55:59SPEAKERearly eighties, when digital watches came to prominence, where a bunch of the old mechanical
56:03SPEAKERwatches that are now worth a shitload of money, people would just sell them for nothing. So they
56:07SPEAKERthought they weren't worth anything anymore. And that experience kind of warped his perception
56:13SPEAKERof things in a way that was a little damaging because then he thought the same thing was
56:17SPEAKERgoing to happen with typewriters and a bunch of other things when they got supplanted by
56:20SPEAKERdigital technology. And it turns out having a giant collection of typewriters in 20, you know,
56:26SPEAKERin 1992, maybe wasn't great. But I don't know, they got rid of them all a long time ago. So
56:35SPEAKERwe were blessedly free of them. They take up a lot more space than watches it turns out too.
56:39SPEAKERBut, but yeah, so I, when mom was clearing out his stuff, she asked which, which watch I wanted.
56:44SPEAKERAnd I was like, I want this, I want this moon watch, please.
56:46SPEAKERNice. That's nice. Cause it's sentimental as well.
56:49SPEAKERYeah. It reminds me of my grandfather, which is nice.
56:51SPEAKERYeah. My, my feeling, I, I, I certainly have great admiration for the mechanical
56:56SPEAKERaspect. Like the, the, the fine engineering, I guess the clockwork precision. And I think
57:03SPEAKERthey look really cool, but the smartwatch is just so useful. Like it just performs so many
57:08SPEAKERother things that a time only watch would not. It's just, it's just too deeply embedded in my
57:15SPEAKERlifestyle now. I will tell you when the power went out here and we were charging phones in the car
57:21SPEAKERand stuff like that for a week during the fires a few years ago, I did dig out the mechanical
57:25SPEAKERwatch. Cause it was nice to be able to tell time because nothing else in our house, let us tell
57:29SPEAKERtime without electricity or turning on a phone. That's, that's a good point. Well, now that you
57:35SPEAKERmentioned it also, it became clear after a few days that we didn't really need to know what time
57:38SPEAKERit was. You just kind of ate when you were hungry and went to sleep when it got dark. So, you know,
57:42SPEAKERit worked out, you know, that, that worked just fine for millennia. It turns out. Yeah. I, I I'm
57:47SPEAKERwith you though, Brad, I think the convenience, like the, the, the convenience of, Hey, I can do
57:53SPEAKERmost of my phone stuff for my watch with my voice is pretty nice. I've said it before. I use it for
57:59SPEAKERfitness tracking. I use it to buy things when I'm out and didn't bring my wallet because I was
58:03SPEAKERexercising and just want to Apple pay something at the register. I've started using it for like,
58:09SPEAKERwhen I'm standing there waiting for the water to boil to, to have coffee in the morning,
58:13SPEAKERI'll pull up the news app and just go through the headlines. Cause it's a nice quick way to
58:16SPEAKERsee what's going on. You know what I mean? That's too much. That's one step too far.
58:20SPEAKERIt's just, it does a lot of things. Do you, do you have cell service on yours?
58:24SPEAKERNo, I don't. Yeah. Me either. I just generally, my lifestyle is so at home that I didn't really
58:30SPEAKERsee a need for it. I didn't, I'm surprised. I didn't know that Apple pay would work without
58:34SPEAKERconnection. That's interesting. Yeah. You have to add everything to the wallet a second time.
58:38SPEAKERIt does not take, for example, credit cards from your Apple wallet on the phone. I assume,
58:42SPEAKERI assume the watch has some version of whatever their security chip is this generation.
58:46SPEAKERYeah. There's that FC thing. Yeah. Oh yeah. You have to, you have to add all your payment
58:50SPEAKERoptions separately to the watch. And I guess, I don't know. I don't, I mean, I guess there's just,
58:54SPEAKERit's validated once and then they just assume it's. I assume it has a token just like a card,
58:58SPEAKERright? I guess so. Because the card doesn't have an internet connection either. Why would,
59:01SPEAKERwhy would you need? Yeah. Right. Right. I guess, I guess it's like that. So that makes sense.
59:05SPEAKERYes. Okay. Last question here from Erickson. How do you remember shower or driving thoughts?
59:12SPEAKERBecause most of the times that I'm done with the driving or the shower, the idea is gone with the
59:16SPEAKERwind. Hey Siri, remind me in 20 minutes of blah, blah, blah. And then I get a message 20 minutes
59:23SPEAKERlater that's blah, blah, blah. From the shower? Yeah. Do you not take your, my phone's sitting
59:28SPEAKERon the vanity in the bathroom probably. What? Wait, do you not leave your phone in the bathroom
59:33SPEAKERwhen you're showering? Dude, I barely look at my phone all day. Like half the time. I don't even
59:37SPEAKERknow what room my phone is in. Do you have your watch in there? In the bathroom, in the shower?
59:42SPEAKERWhat do you do? You don't take it in the shower with you. You take it off when you get in the
59:45SPEAKERshower, right? The watch is also somewhere far from the shower. Oh my God. Okay. So I, there's
59:51SPEAKERalso a Google home in our bathroom because we needed a thing to have the look when you, if you
59:57SPEAKERdon't want to have to stand there and be like, Hey, you have to brush your teeth for two minutes.
1:00:00SPEAKERYou let the machine do that work for you. Okay. Welcome to the ultra connected home of the future.
1:00:05SPEAKERYeah. I mean the thousand square feet of glory speakers everywhere.
1:00:10SPEAKERYeah. Do you know, I, I just, I just, if I'm in the car, this is mostly a car thing for me,
1:00:14SPEAKERI think our car makes more sense. Of course your phone's going to be there. Usually if I'm in the
1:00:18SPEAKERshower, I have a cigar and a beer if I'm being honest. Yeah. And now we're talking. I I also
1:00:23SPEAKERdon't use Hey Siri though. So that wouldn't work for me. Even a phone wasn't there. Well, see,
1:00:27SPEAKERthis is your, your look, maybe you should answer that question about maybe the Amish had it right.
1:00:32SPEAKERYou know, there might be something to that. Yeah. I find the voice stuff to be really useful for
1:00:37SPEAKERthis. Yeah. Yeah. I totally get how useful it is. And just having a microphone on all the time. I
1:00:42SPEAKERtry to not do that with anything. You could also use the voice recorder. True. Yeah.
1:00:49SPEAKERYou can set that up to be a shortcut. You can set that. You can literally do that on the watch face
1:00:54SPEAKERand, and hit a, have a button that you tap on the watch face that lets you do a voice record
1:01:00SPEAKERanytime you want. Yeah. All right. I'm going to call it on questions. That that is, and that'll
1:01:05SPEAKERdo it for us this month. Thanks to everybody who sent questions. And we had a bunch of good ones
1:01:08SPEAKERthis month. Yeah. Thank you to all the askers. Like I I'm actually bummed. We have to stop here
1:01:13SPEAKERbecause there are a bunch more that I would have read. But we've got to go dive into hell in a
1:01:19SPEAKERminute. We've got to record a patron episode in the next few days, which will, I think I want to,
1:01:23SPEAKERI know what I want to talk about, but as always, thanks to everybody who sent in the questions.
1:01:28SPEAKERThanks to all of the patrons. Everybody who supports the show, Brad and Will made a tech
1:01:32SPEAKERpod is a 100% listener supported show. So if you would like to find out how to support us and keep
1:01:38SPEAKERthe show going, you can go to patrion.com/techpod. Again, that's patrion.com/techpod. And as always,
1:01:46SPEAKERwe'd like to thank all of our listeners. Thank you listeners. Thank you. But we want to give a
1:01:51SPEAKERspecial thank you since it's the last episode of the month to our executive producer and associate
1:01:56SPEAKERproducer to your patrons. So executives first, thanks to Andrew Slosky, Paddle Creek Games,
1:02:01SPEAKERmakers of Fractured Veil, David Allen, James Kamik, Joel Krauska, Jordan Lippett, Just Wedge,
1:02:08SPEAKERTwinkle Twinkie, Yabs, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:02:15SPEAKERAlso, a special thank you goes out to our associate producer to your patrons, including
1:02:19SPEAKERAlejandro Navarro, Andre M. Burke, Andrew "Dicey" Schurreis, Arthur Gies, Ben Tallman,
1:02:26SPEAKEREric, Eric Klein, Eric IV, the Cincinnati Eric. I feel that's another new Eric this month,
1:02:34SPEAKERby the way. The Erics are multiplying. Look, you put four Erics in a room together,
1:02:38SPEAKERall of a sudden you have 16. So Felix Kramer, Graham Banks, Jad Rita, Matt Walker,
1:02:43SPEAKERparentheses Walkman8080, Nathan Phelps, Sanchik Kumar, Steve Lin, Thomas Shea, and Tom Hilton.
1:02:50SPEAKERThank you all so much. We really appreciate you. Thank you. We certainly do. Just whatever you do,
1:02:55SPEAKERdon't get an Eric wet, but especially don't feed an Eric after midnight.
1:02:58SPEAKEROh, never after midnight. That'll do it for us this week. Thanks to everybody who sent
1:03:02SPEAKERin questions and thanks for listening to the show. We will see you all next week.