234: One Step Closer to Bringing Back Webrings

00:00SPEAKEROkay, Brad, I got the problem right now and I'm a little flustered because, you know, at one point I

00:06SPEAKERwas told that this was going to be a forever solution. I had to be really careful when I was

00:10SPEAKERlike lining stuff up right and I was told that the glue was permanent on my headphone hook that

00:15SPEAKERI put on like two or three years ago and you're not going to believe it, it's not permanent. It's

00:20SPEAKERstarting to peel off. Adhesive not living up to its claims? Look, I know that as a society, as a

00:27SPEAKERculture, as a people, we don't really understand glue, right? It's complicated. Like, who knows?

00:33SPEAKERMaybe it's Van der Waals' forces. Maybe it's something we don't have a name for yet.

00:38SPEAKERMy understanding is that glue was one of the great mysteries, but it's like a $3 trillion industry,

00:43SPEAKERnonetheless. Anyway, this headphone hook came with some 3M business. It's a big thick gray pad with

00:49SPEAKERred labels on it. It was like, yo, when you stick this, it's going to be on forever. And the part

00:54SPEAKERthat I stuck to the table is clearly on forever, but the part that came stuck onto the hook, less

00:59SPEAKERso. Maybe that side didn't have the fancy 3M stuff on it. Man, why would they sell one half with the

01:06SPEAKERgood stuff and one half with the not good stuff? If one side is going to be permanent, I want the

01:10SPEAKERother side to be permanent too, man. My first question, which you covered, was did the adhesive

01:15SPEAKERcome in some kind of brand name configuration, which you said yes. It was three. I guess my

01:20SPEAKERsecond question then is even if it says 3M on the label, do you trust that these days?

01:25SPEAKERI think the headphone hook came from a reputable headphone hook kind of vendor. I believe I bought

01:31SPEAKERit at Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com, the number one place that I know of to buy stupid shit like

01:38SPEAKERheadphone hooks. I'm going to find out what the brand name is on the headphone hook. It was a-

01:45SPEAKERIs it pronounceable?

01:47SPEAKERYes. It is the anchor, all caps anchor, from the Elevation Lab store. Elevation Lab, I guess,

01:55SPEAKERis the brand. Look, I paid $13 for it, which feels like a lot for a headphone hook. It's rubbery and

02:01SPEAKERsoft so you don't gouge up your headphones when you put them on and off because you don't look

02:05SPEAKERat it. It holds two pairs of headphones, which is nice because I had two pairs of headphones that I

02:10SPEAKERused on my desk and I like to have them both hanging. But yeah, I got to say, the amount of

02:15SPEAKERstickiness between the anchor and the pad, pretty disappointing. It definitely did come with the pad

02:22SPEAKERpre-attached. It even says, "Mounts in seconds," that was true, "with European-made 3M adhesive."

02:30SPEAKERI don't know its provenance.

02:32SPEAKERFine artisanal European 3M adhesive?

02:35SPEAKERLook, all I know is that I would trust that more than the stuff that's made in America,

02:39SPEAKERprobably, because the American factory goofballs. Everybody's hopped up on goofballs over here.

02:45SPEAKERMan, this thing really does look like an anchor. So this one,

02:47SPEAKERI have a confession. This one mounts on the underside of a surface.

02:52SPEAKERThat's what I wanted. I wanted it to be invisible from the top.

02:54SPEAKERI, too, have a Forever headphone hook that came with pre-applied adhesive,

03:00SPEAKERwhich I'm pretty sure was 3M.

03:02SPEAKERYeah. Was it from Europe? Do you know?

03:04SPEAKERIt may or may not have been from Europe, but I can't remember for sure if it had 3M adhesive or not

03:09SPEAKERbecause it's been so long since I put it on that that memory has long left me,

03:14SPEAKERwhich is to say this thing's been on for like 10 years.

03:16SPEAKERSo I purchased this on December 5th, 2021. I am pretty sure that two and a half years,

03:22SPEAKERwhich is about where we're at from December 22, 23, yeah, two and a half years,

03:28SPEAKERI am pretty sure that that is not permanent adhesive.

03:33SPEAKERWait, wait a second. I just read something about this item.

03:37SPEAKER"Guaranteed to hold strong colon. We recently upgraded to an even stronger European-made

03:43SPEAKER3M adhesive. We guarantee it. Contact us if you have any issues."

03:47SPEAKERI'm gonna have to contact them and get another pad.

03:48SPEAKERAll right. Okay.

03:49SPEAKERBut I bet I have the American-made 3M adhesive made by the people in the factory hopped up on

03:55SPEAKERgood. They're sniffing glue down there at the 3M factory.

03:57SPEAKERWell, hey, lucky for you, customer satisfaction guaranteed.

04:13SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will.

04:32SPEAKERI'm Brad. Hello.

04:33SPEAKERLook, we've reached the point where we're doing this podcast now where I almost forgot the name

04:36SPEAKERof the podcast there. I said welcome and I was like, "Wait, what's the name of the podcast?"

04:40SPEAKERAnd then I got it. I pulled it out. I don't even know what to say to that.

04:44SPEAKERWere you thinking of a different podcast or were you thinking of no podcast?

04:49SPEAKERLook, I took a really good nap this afternoon and I spent yesterday at the water park,

04:53SPEAKERso I'm a little tired. I'm a good tired. I'm a real good level of tired. My legs are

04:58SPEAKERsore from climbing stairs. A bit discombobulated.

05:01SPEAKERA little bit off. There's sun coming in the window beside me. I can't tell if it's morning

05:06SPEAKERor evening is where I'm at right now. I've had naps like that. I know how that goes.

05:10SPEAKERWhen you take a nap that's so good, you're like, "Man, is it breakfast time already?"

05:13SPEAKERAnd you're like, "Wait, no, it's dinner." Yes.

05:15SPEAKERLook, any time is breakfast time if you want it bad enough.

05:18SPEAKERThat's true. But anyway, I pulled it out. I know I'm here to record a tech pod. I'm excited about

05:26SPEAKERour guest this week. This is, I think, his third or fourth time coming back on the show.

05:32SPEAKERLet's see. Hang on. I ran through this earlier. PF Sense.

05:35SPEAKERYeah. Oh, God.

05:37SPEAKERSteam Deck.

05:38SPEAKERYeah. Steam Deck with Norm. God, I had the second one and I've forgotten it again.

05:42SPEAKERHope it's gone.

05:43SPEAKERGo back through our back catalog. Help somebody help us find Wes Fenlon.

05:48SPEAKERBendy phone. Bendy phone.

05:49SPEAKERYeah. Bendy phone. That's it.

05:51SPEAKERYes. I believe Wes Fenlon is now our record setting fourth guest. Kishore's been on three

05:56SPEAKERtimes, right?

05:57SPEAKERKishore might be four. I can't remember.

05:59SPEAKERIs Kishore else before?

06:00SPEAKERKishore might be... They're the Chevy Chase and Steve Martin of our guest cadre.

06:07SPEAKERThat's right.

06:07SPEAKERBut Wes Fenlon, if you don't know him, is an editor at PC Gamer. He does fabulous work

06:12SPEAKERover there. He used to be one of our big feature writers at Tested in the old, old Whiskey

06:16SPEAKERMedia days, and is carrying that kind of legacy forward writing, thoughtful and incisive kind

06:22SPEAKERof "Hey, here's what's going on with games" kind of stuff over at PC World. He also recently

06:27SPEAKERstarted a newsletter that I absolutely love called Read Only Memo. You can find it at

06:31SPEAKERreadonlymemo.com. He gives you basically a weekly rundown of what's going on in the

06:35SPEAKERemulation world, from Mr. Stuff to iOS emulation to what's going on with post-Mr. FPGA emulation.

06:44SPEAKERHe scored the lucrative Taki Udon interview, the first one after that Mr. Clone board was

06:49SPEAKERannounced that I got all excited about.

06:50SPEAKERYeah. If you care about the current state of the art in games emulation, it is a one-stop

06:57SPEAKERshop for keeping up with all of that without having to... As you'll hear in this interview

07:03SPEAKERwhen we talk to him in a moment, you don't have to go read all these GitHub commits.

07:08SPEAKERHe's doing it for you.

07:09SPEAKERHow does one aggregate all the innumerable sources of information that one would have

07:14SPEAKERto go through to write a newsletter like this? Well, listen on.

07:17SPEAKERYeah, it turns out what you do is you bring back the magical power of RSS, which is what

07:22SPEAKERwe're here to talk about with Wes. Wes, welcome to the show. Welcome back. It's good to have you.

07:25SPEAKERHey guys, I am so excited to be back to talk about... Well, should I spoil it?

07:30SPEAKERShould I let you introduce what we're talking about this week?

07:34SPEAKERLet's assume we already teased it a little bit and we said that

07:37SPEAKERwe're traveling back in time to a kinder, gentler internet before social media,

07:42SPEAKERwhen social media was nascent, I guess, and RSS ruled the world. Everywhere news hounds went,

07:49SPEAKERyou found RSS feeds and you plugged them into Google Reader. Then every morning you logged

07:53SPEAKERinto Google Reader and you got a highly customized list of all of the articles

07:58SPEAKERthat were most of interest to you from your favorite websites around the world.

08:02SPEAKERThat sounds like a perfect way to experience the internet. Why would anything ever happen to that?

08:07SPEAKERAll of those articles had the full text in them and you didn't have to click through to anything

08:10SPEAKERelse. Okay, well, let's not get crazy here. Some had click-throughs, for sure. But for the most

08:16SPEAKERpart, it was pretty straightforward. In the days when blogs ruled the world, back when we all went

08:22SPEAKERto Boing Boing and Slashdot first thing every morning, you literally would load them up into

08:29SPEAKERan RSS reader. A lot of people used Google Reader. There were other tools as well. Around 2010,

08:35SPEAKERthe iPad came out and people started making iPad readers that made your whole feed look like a

08:40SPEAKERmagazine. It was a wild time. But then Twitter became the place that journalists went to share

08:48SPEAKERtheir work, and Facebook became the place where you posted your stuff to get mad traffic on it,

08:54SPEAKERand Reddit. Later on, I guess Reddit has been the same for 15 years now. RSS faded,

09:05SPEAKERand people stopped posting RSS feeds. Then somebody looked at the RSS feed and was like,

09:11SPEAKER"Hey man, why aren't there any ads on this thing? They're getting our content for free."

09:16SPEAKERThen people started launching new sites that didn't have websites at all and were just apps

09:21SPEAKERor were a front end for somebody else's app. Here we are. RSS is dead.

09:27SPEAKERYeah, it feels like maybe there was less RSS fading, or some RSS fading, and also some

09:33SPEAKERdeliberately stamping on RSS to try to kill it.

09:38SPEAKERI also think that the general idea of, "Hey, I have a blog and that's a viable thing I can do as

09:45SPEAKERan indie journalist and a business," kind of went away. A lot of that work that you would have

09:52SPEAKERposted on your blog in the early 2000s or late 90s ended up going on Twitter or Facebook or

09:57SPEAKERlater on TikTok and YouTube and other places. I think the internet as a whole has been worse off

10:03SPEAKERfor that for the most part.

10:05SPEAKERHas the resurgence or the rise of the newsletter, the substack and that sort of thing,

10:10SPEAKERkind of brought it back in some way? Although those are also things that need to be monetized,

10:14SPEAKERso I guess they don't necessarily want to give those away free either.

10:17SPEAKERTo me, it feels like sort of a parallel happening where the rise of the newsletter has been part of

10:23SPEAKERthis response to the centralization crumbling. People are seeing the problems and the cracks in

10:30SPEAKERthe foundation of centralization and Twitter going to shit and all that kind of stuff.

10:35SPEAKERAt the same time, I think there's been this big indie web movement of people going, "Okay,

10:41SPEAKERI want to go back to something small and decentralize. Now how do I, from that small

10:46SPEAKERdecentralized little node that is Myspace on the internet, reach out to other people or have them

10:52SPEAKERfind me?" I think that RSS sort of has come back a little bit as people going, "Hey, this really

10:59SPEAKERworked well and it's a great way to follow 100 small websites without having to load them all up

11:06SPEAKERin your browser or get an email from all of them mixed in with your emails from the Gap or whoever

11:13SPEAKERis clogging up your inbox." This all happened in the beginning because of advertising. We've

11:24SPEAKERreached a point with advertising now where if you're not the biggest website in a market or

11:29SPEAKERyou're not super indie and are funded by your readers or your listeners, you probably don't

11:35SPEAKERexist. There's basically no middle ground anymore. There's The Verge, and then there's a handful of

11:41SPEAKERYouTube channels that are quite big and have found a niche there. On the raw web, there's

11:47SPEAKERTom's Hardware and The Verge and a couple other places that do PC hardware and tech-enthusiast

11:50SPEAKERstuff, and then nothing else, really, or very small sites that are side hustles or something

11:56SPEAKERthat people do for fun, or newsletters. It's made the whole thing a little bit less legible,

12:02SPEAKERand it's kind of siloed off all the people that make the different... Gamers Nexus and

12:07SPEAKERTom's Hardware never cross paths anymore, and 20 years ago they all would have, right?

12:12SPEAKERYeah. For me, I have not been a regular RSS user for many, many years and sort of hit a

12:20SPEAKERbreaking point just in the last few months where I felt like I've been going to the same five

12:26SPEAKERwebsites that I load up every day just out of habit and checking them over and over again.

12:30SPEAKERThey're just out of my bookmarks bar or autofill, and I really wanted to diversify my reading,

12:37SPEAKERsort of break out of that habit of reloading them over and over, and also just see what else is out

12:44SPEAKERthere that I'm not even aware of. I realize my experience of discovering new things to read

12:52SPEAKERhas been practically nil for many, many years outside of cool links that I come across on

12:58SPEAKERTwitter and, "Hey, Twitter is dead now, and I don't want to be on it, so where am I going to

13:03SPEAKERfind those things?" And it turns out that's the indie web, and RSS is the way to congregate all

13:09SPEAKERthat stuff. Can I ask, you used the phrase "indie web," the indie web movements in the show notes.

13:14SPEAKERYou've said it a couple times here. Is that the term? Are people coalescing around that? Can I

13:18SPEAKERGoogle that and find this shangri-la you're describing because I also have desired to go back

13:25SPEAKERabout 15, 20 years? I would say yes, and I think you could do a whole other episode that I'm

13:31SPEAKERprobably not the person equipped to talk to it, although maybe I would be in a few months, which

13:35SPEAKERis the - I think you would pronounce it "posse," which stands for post once on your own site,

13:43SPEAKERsyndicate everywhere. And that's what a lot of smaller bloggers are trying to get into now,

13:49SPEAKERwhere you have some sort of system set up for yourself, whether you've programmed it or using

13:54SPEAKERa service to write stuff on your own site, but then send it out to Mastodon, send it out to Blue

14:00SPEAKERSky, send it out to Twitter if you still use that, send it over RSS, send it over email, whatever.

14:07SPEAKERTry to get it out to everyone, and then there's sort of a whole system of stuff that's kind of

14:13SPEAKERtrying to give feedback back from that. There's a standard called "web mentions," where theoretically

14:20SPEAKERsomeone's website could kind of understand that you have mentioned it on a social media network

14:25SPEAKERand feed that into a comment, right? Rather than having to have a comment on your own system.

14:30SPEAKERThat's like a whole complicated thing that is going to take many years, I feel like,

14:34SPEAKERto coalesce into the next era of the internet, if it ever happens. But yeah.

14:39SPEAKERWe had that. We had that in blogs. They were called pingbacks or trackbacks.

14:43SPEAKEROh yeah, yes. And then Tumblr came along.

14:46SPEAKERWes, when you sent me this pitch, you were like, "Hey, I have an idea for the show."

14:51SPEAKERI'm going to read it because it was really good, and I've never said yes to something

14:54SPEAKERfaster than this, I think. But you said, "Hey, I've been dialing in on this self-hosted RSS

15:02SPEAKERsetup the last couple of weeks, and I'm really loving it." And I was like, "Yes,

15:05SPEAKERyes, please. Let's do this. This sounds great." So why are you doing this yourself? Because you

15:11SPEAKERcould just use Feedly. There's a bunch of post-Google Reader RSS tools that kind of

15:18SPEAKERwill do this thing for... Well, I mean, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Maybe, I guess,

15:23SPEAKERthe first thing is, what's the experience for you as a reader?

15:30SPEAKERWhat is the experience for me as a reader? What am I getting?

15:33SPEAKERWhen you pick up your phone or your iPad or whatever in the morning and you're like,

15:35SPEAKER"I want to read some news," what do you see now?

15:38SPEAKERWhat I see now is, I set up two things. One is a self-hosted RSS server that the reason I

15:46SPEAKERpitched it to you and the reason I did it in the first place, something you guys and I'm sure most

15:50SPEAKERof your listeners can relate to, is just like, "Here's a new tinkering project I can do that

15:55SPEAKERsounds fun." Second reason to do it is it saves money because I already have this home server

16:03SPEAKERthat I'm spending electricity on. Why should I go out to some service that does RSS and pay them

16:10SPEAKER$5, $10, $15 bucks a month when I can do it for free? And then I can customize the shit out of

16:17SPEAKERit, right? So my experience is mainly I'm using an app on my Android phone that connects to the

16:23SPEAKERself-hosted RSS server via a Google Reader API that I assume is an API that hasn't changed in

16:31SPEAKER16 years or 20 years or something from whenever they set it up. That API still works and there

16:36SPEAKERare a bunch of open source apps that support that API. So you basically can set up your own

16:41SPEAKERRSS server and there's a few good options. I think most or all of them support this API

16:48SPEAKERand then there are a bunch of open source reader apps that also support the API. So you basically

16:52SPEAKERjust put in your server IP address or whatever hostname you have it set up on and put in some

16:59SPEAKERauthentication info and then you just have your RSS feed on your phone or on your laptop, whatever

17:05SPEAKERdevice you want to use. So I've just set up like a ton of categories for stuff that I want to read

17:11SPEAKERdaily or weekly or intermittently. I use it to kind of get an overview of the news in tech and

17:19SPEAKERgames and pop culture and I use it for cool little indie blogs that I want to push myself to read

17:26SPEAKERmore and I use it as like a big catch-all repository for stuff that I'm reading for my

17:33SPEAKERnewsletter which is about emulation. So I've got like all these GitHubs that I follow right where

17:39SPEAKERpeople will do GitHub commits and like do I want to read every GitHub commit? No it's like hundreds

17:45SPEAKERand hundreds and hundreds of commits across all these different emulators but I just have them

17:49SPEAKERall centralized in one place now so I can just kind of look through that list and go like what's

17:53SPEAKERgoing on with our PCS3, the PS3 emulator, look through a bunch of the commits, maybe I see

17:59SPEAKERsomething related to a particular game or some technical term that I'm like what the hell does

18:04SPEAKERthat mean and click on it and see if I you know find something interesting. Does GitHub really

18:09SPEAKERexpose the entire commit history of a repo through RSS? I have no idea. That's amazing. Oh yeah,

18:14SPEAKERGitHub is really good about it. Like GitHub does mad RSS. I've said mad twice now this episode.

18:19SPEAKERThat's how I'm excited. Like I'm going back to early 2000s slang at this point. One of the fun

18:24SPEAKERthings about this process has been finding out how many RSS feeds are still out there. Like almost

18:30SPEAKERevery website you use has RSS feeds hidden away somewhere. They do not always make it obvious but

18:38SPEAKERmost of them do have RSS and sometimes it's way more specific than you would think like the commit

18:43SPEAKERhistory on a GitHub page. We'll get into this a little more as we go here but I did fresh RSS

18:48SPEAKERwhich is the main one you're here to talk about. I know you've got some others here outlined as

18:52SPEAKERwell but they have they have a live demo that I played with where you can just mess with service

18:56SPEAKERon a test server which got me to go out and look at some video game news blogs because I like I go

19:02SPEAKERthrough video game news all the time for my for the next minor podcast every week. And in some

19:07SPEAKERcases like that classic RSS icon is still right there in like the masthead or whatever. In other

19:12SPEAKERcases like in the case of polygon not to put anybody on blast I found their RSS feed by

19:18SPEAKERgoogling and finding a tweet from 2011 when they was the only way I could find it because it was

19:23SPEAKERnowhere to be seen on their website unless I mean somebody might even be yelling at the radio right

19:27SPEAKERnow that oh it's right there but I couldn't find it on their page but I found a bitly link from a

19:33SPEAKER2011 tweet that actually still got me there. So like you're right it's not it's not always like

19:38SPEAKERsuper easy to find and then like we said the content of what you're going to get in there

19:43SPEAKERalso is not necessarily very consumable either. It is quite funny that like finding RSS for a

19:49SPEAKERlot of websites does feel like this almost you know video gamey or like adventure movie thing

19:56SPEAKERwhere you like open the door into the dusty like closet and you go and you find the treasure chest

20:02SPEAKERthat's like buried under you know 30 pounds of rubble and you open it up and like there it is

20:07SPEAKERlike hidden still in immaculate condition underneath all the dust and the grime right.

20:11SPEAKERThe sacred serial data. So I spent many hours doing that that treasure hunt as I was setting

20:17SPEAKERthis all up and then sort of towards the end of the process I realized like oh people make

20:23SPEAKERChrome plugins and in fact entire services that just immediately surface the RSS feed of any

20:30SPEAKERwebsite that you go to for you. So I did a lot of like going to a website and typing slash feed or

20:37SPEAKERslash RSS on URLs trying to hunt for them when I could have just been clicking a button like in my

20:42SPEAKERbrowser toolbar so it's actually quite easy to find them if you just take the 10 minutes it

20:47SPEAKERtakes to like install the right thing first. So that's a that's a tip for anybody who decides to

20:53SPEAKERgo through this process themselves. Do not waste your time actually looking for the feeds because

20:58SPEAKERthere are things that will help you with that but it was sort of a fun experience at the beginning

21:02SPEAKERof the process of being like where would these guys be hiding their RSS feed? How would they

21:07SPEAKERhave titled it in 2009 when they built this website? For what it's worth the RSS feed is

21:14SPEAKERoften embedded in the header of the HTML page so when you load up the page

21:21SPEAKERPolygon who we put on blast earlier has both an RSS XML version and just an RSS feed

21:28SPEAKERboth available for their front page and for their entire polygon everything tagged polygon I think

21:37SPEAKERit's visible in the header but like the modern browser doesn't really explode like firefox

21:41SPEAKERdoesn't expose that anyway right like you're talking about like in the page source it's in

21:45SPEAKERthe page source yeah I had to open the inspector and dig in but but yeah so okay so and then you

21:50SPEAKERsit down and read these and are you just getting like blank is it like like a ebook formatting for

21:54SPEAKERyour articles and stuff or are you like are you seeing multiple categories how how is this exposed

22:01SPEAKERlike how do you scroll this yeah so there's the actual reading experience in the app that I've

22:07SPEAKERbeen using is pretty good like I can customize you know the fonts and like spacing and padding

22:13SPEAKERand like all of that stuff if I want to get into it depending on the feed it will usually pull in

22:20SPEAKERimages pretty well that kind of varies based on the the website and I don't know if it varies

22:25SPEAKERbased on just the way they've set their site up or the the feed itself I'm not really sure but

22:31SPEAKERlike sometimes you get everything sometimes you're kind of missing some little embeds and stuff but

22:36SPEAKERit's very easy to like click through and read on the website itself if if you want that that

22:42SPEAKERexperience part of my goal with the RSS was having a nicer kind of just reading form in terms of

22:49SPEAKERfonts and presentation than a lot of sites give you with ads or like you know harsh web design

22:56SPEAKERbut then sometimes some sites you click through and like it's a really nice reading experience

23:00SPEAKERright so that's sort of been it's just been nice to have that that option but in terms of sort of

23:05SPEAKERthe overall presentation of this stuff that I'm I'm looking at I've got a bunch of different

23:11SPEAKERcategories set up that when I open my reading app on my phone I usually just like back out to the

23:18SPEAKERunread page and then have all my feeds like closed rather than open so I'm just looking at the top

23:26SPEAKERlevels so I've got like movies and tv gaming newsletters and indie blogs patch notes for

23:33SPEAKERsoftware I use some web comics fan subs for like old 80s anime stuff and then like San Francisco

23:43SPEAKERspecific news and tech and I'll just click on one of those categories and drill down to either the

23:50SPEAKERthe kind of combined feed of the stuff in that category or usually I'll just go by site so like

23:56SPEAKERunder tech I'll pop into the verge and see what stories they have most of them I'll just read the

24:01SPEAKERheadline and then swipe it to to kind of read because I'm not super interested in the individual

24:06SPEAKERstory but then sometimes I'll see one and go I want to read that and then I'll click through

24:10SPEAKERand read it is there a benefit to marking things read in this particular interface like is it is

24:14SPEAKERa kind of thing where if you don't mark things off it's going to get on top of you and make things

24:18SPEAKERmuch of a hassle so the default setup in fresh RSS like purges stuff after I think like a month

24:25SPEAKERor something so it's not going to build up to where I have like 70,000 you know unread articles

24:30SPEAKERor something it's mostly just sort of like for the sites that I'm going through that post a lot

24:34SPEAKERof stuff and that I want to read often it's kind of just like clear out the days or the last couple

24:40SPEAKERdays stuff just so I can kind of see what's what's new right and see the headlines I think there's

24:45SPEAKERalso sort of that just like I don't know that innate satisfaction of just you know swiping left

24:51SPEAKERor right on something to indicate your your interest in it right just like no no don't care

24:56SPEAKERabout that I don't care about that I don't care about that so that when I go back to that unread

24:59SPEAKERfeed it's it's a little smaller. Wes we're both too old to have had that interaction the the

25:06SPEAKERquestion the other question I have is can you use this to organize stuff so like when you're doing

25:11SPEAKERyour newsletter every week are you finding the articles that you want to tag and you can like

25:14SPEAKERapply a tag or something to them so that then you can come back and say okay this these are the

25:18SPEAKERarticles for the week of September 23rd or whatever so fresh RSS does have a ton of power tools if you

25:26SPEAKERwant to use them in terms of like putting labels on stuff a basic favoriting system I've been using

25:32SPEAKERit a bit more simply than that so far in that when I'm working on the newsletter I'll just like load

25:39SPEAKERup the feeds and sort of read through them and then when I find stuff that I want to write about

25:44SPEAKERI'll just like copy it over to my CMS where I'm like drafting the the newsletter but I have been

25:50SPEAKERdoing like you know favoriting some stuff that I either want to read later or that I know will be a

25:55SPEAKERgood you know fit for like the next issue but I'm not like not working on it at that exact moment

26:02SPEAKERbut yeah I've seen some interesting systems people are using to like connect an RSS reader or like

26:09SPEAKERfresh RSS in this case to a read later app if you want to add that like extra level of of reading

26:18SPEAKERspecificity I guess you could say and like I haven't gone that deep yet but we'll see if I

26:23SPEAKERget there. Brad's nodding his head I'm shaking my head. What uh like okay so what's the tech stack

26:30SPEAKERfor this look like what do you have what did you have to set up on your server what what are you

26:34SPEAKERrunning on your devices like what is what how complicated was this all to set up? So this I

26:40SPEAKERimagine this will differ based on like the type of server different people run and what RSS

26:47SPEAKERself-hosting service or which which app you want to go with there are a few other alternatives the

26:52SPEAKERone I went with fresh RSS was widely recommended and also widely recommended as like easy and

26:59SPEAKERsimple to set up so my server now runs on unraid which I god I wish I had done it years ago because

27:07SPEAKERafter hearing you guys talk about Docker and the entire like Linux community talking about Docker

27:13SPEAKERand me just being like oh that's containers for apps well that sounds useful but I'll just keep

27:18SPEAKERlike you know bludgeoning my way through the Ubuntu command line ever since I've switched to unraid

27:24SPEAKERevery time I can just install something by clicking a button and then it's just installed

27:28SPEAKERand working it blows my freaking mind so that was my experience with fresh RSS I literally

27:35SPEAKERlooked in the unraid like community app store it was on there I clicked install and then like

27:43SPEAKERtyped in like a port and a password and then it was running and I could just open it and it works

27:50SPEAKERthat's why I basically did fuck all except click on a button that says install are the uh are the

27:56SPEAKERunraid plugins Docker based yes they are and they have like their own kind of specific subset of

28:03SPEAKERthat that I guess just works with sort of like the templates for for unraid but you can sort of look

28:08SPEAKERat like the wider you can basically search within the unraid store like it's free stuff but like the

28:15SPEAKERunraid repository or whatever and if it's not in there you can look in the wider Docker community

28:20SPEAKERand install stuff that way but you might just have to do a bit more configuration but if it's

28:24SPEAKERsomething that's within the unraid store then it's incredibly easy to set up usually unraid works a

28:30SPEAKERlot like the way the Synology community stuff works or the Synology community packages no

28:36SPEAKERSynology package for fresh RS fresh RSS but I did find a quick and easy install guide that's like

28:42SPEAKER23 steps and has a lot of good pictures so for what it's worth I dug into the documentation to

28:48SPEAKERlook at the manual setup a little bit because of course I did and it's it's full on like you need

28:52SPEAKERto be running your own web server like you need you need the full stack configured yourself if you

28:57SPEAKERwant to run this and it's they're full on like hey we've got sample nginx and Apache configuration

29:01SPEAKERfiles here for you so it's like probably not the easiest thing to set up yeah if I had to do that

29:06SPEAKERlike I would have been absolutely clueless of where to start like I'm looking at the requirements they

29:10SPEAKERlist right and they're like Apache 2.4 or PHP 7.4 I'm like I don't know how to configure any of that

29:16SPEAKERstuff but I do know how to click the install button and then and then create a user account

29:21SPEAKERwhich is basically all I had to do and any any kind of like Docker based solution for this should

29:25SPEAKERbe pretty simple yeah that was my experience are you running this open to the web or are you just

29:31SPEAKERdoing it in your own network for now that was that was my biggest question I'm just doing it in my own

29:35SPEAKERnetwork and I think it would have been fairly easy to set it up so that I could access it

29:42SPEAKERexternally but I already have wire guard on my phone and so I'm just like why go through the

29:49SPEAKERextra effort of trying to expose this when if I don't want to read something that's already cached

29:55SPEAKERI can just put wire guard on and it takes you know 10 seconds to like update the feed on my phone

30:01SPEAKERit really is kind of remarkable how much wire guard obviates the need to open ports and like

30:05SPEAKERleave things exposed to the internet like I was just out of town for three weeks and

30:09SPEAKERlike when you think about it 99 percent of the of the things you're going to access your home from

30:14SPEAKERare devices in your possession anyway it's like a laptop and a phone right you don't really need

30:18SPEAKERthose ports open for the whole internet right when you can just VPN from the two devices you ever use

30:23SPEAKERI just think about the editor revolt we had at future when they made us start using a VPN to

30:28SPEAKERconnect to the the internal mail and stuff and like what a pain in the ass the Cisco VPN that

30:34SPEAKERthey chose was and if we had something that was like you just click the button and it switches

30:38SPEAKERover it would have been like nobody would have complained we would have just done it

30:42SPEAKERCisco, Cisco VPN poisoned the well for the entire concept of VPN for a whole generation

30:47SPEAKERa couple years ago they were going through some some security concerns as we had acquired like

30:54SPEAKERa financial based publication or company and they were trialing getting us to like virtual desktop

31:01SPEAKERin to some remote systems to access like our mail and and everything and you know they ran at about

31:08SPEAKER20, 20 fps something like that with several seconds of of lag and we we did a two-day trial

31:16SPEAKERand then we just said nope we're we will not be able to do this we can't work

31:22SPEAKERthankfully that problem went away so okay so you have fresh RSS running in a in a Docker container

31:28SPEAKERon the unraid is there any other server stuff or is it all just client from here on out that's it

31:33SPEAKERwell there are a few other tools that we can talk about that sort of like support the this RSS

31:39SPEAKERecosystem I'm building for myself but fresh RSS is like the only necessary one the other ones are

31:46SPEAKERsort of just like added bonuses for helping with some cases where like if a website doesn't have

31:52SPEAKERan RSS feed what is the way that you can still kind of create one from that right yeah I was

31:57SPEAKERgonna say that was my big question is what if they don't have an RSS feed if it's if there's a pay

32:02SPEAKERwall if there's if the RSS feed is a truncated one which is a real controversial choice in like 2005

32:11SPEAKERbut you would basically what it means is you'd have like the first paragraph and maybe an image

32:14SPEAKERin the RSS feed and then there'd be a link that was continue reading that takes you over to where

32:18SPEAKERthe ads are displayed on the web page yeah so there's like a few little solutions we can we can

32:24SPEAKERtalk about that I also installed that can help with with some of those cases but like the main

32:30SPEAKERthing is I just installed this thing and like I had 90 of what I wanted kind of out of the box with

32:38SPEAKERwith fresh RSS and a lot of configuration options to to get it set up it was just super duper easy

32:45SPEAKERso much easier than I exactly like possibly expected it to be you know like I feel like

32:50SPEAKERthere's so many times where I want to mess with some home server thing and end up getting in

32:55SPEAKEReither way over my head or like the exact way that I'm thinking I want to configure it like isn't

33:01SPEAKERpossible without a ton of effort you know I can get like 80 of the way there and this one was just

33:06SPEAKERlike bam just like out of the box it's it's great and RSS is pretty you know it hasn't changed a lot

33:11SPEAKERI guess in the 20 or so 30 years that it's been around so a lot of it kind of just works one of

33:18SPEAKERthe things I like about fresh RSS is it has a plugin architecture which I think I think is where

33:22SPEAKERyou get into some of the things that like scrape the pages that don't have RSS feeds and stuff like

33:25SPEAKERthat like I know you said I think you said you hadn't dipped in too much into that but I'm

33:31SPEAKERcurious if you've looked at if you've looked at any of those the list on GitHub is pretty good

33:35SPEAKERyeah so they they have a bunch of plugins or like I think they call them extensions for like

33:40SPEAKERmodifying the way fresh RSS works a little bit so the main thing with fresh RSS is when you're

33:45SPEAKERimporting a feed it has like it sort of assumes that a feed is going to be or like the default

33:52SPEAKERchoice is like it's an RSS or Adam feed right which are like two slight variations on the same

33:58SPEAKERthing from what I've read like Adam is the newer form it doesn't really make a big difference you

34:06SPEAKERknow which which one like most sites do not offer both and there's very minor differences between

34:11SPEAKERthe two so either of those you can just like pop it in and that's your standard RSS feed it also

34:16SPEAKERhas a feature called HTML plus XPath web scraping which is like above my head I tried to mess around

34:24SPEAKERwith a little bit and like didn't really get it to work but that's basically for say a blog that

34:29SPEAKERdoesn't have an RSS feed but has very standardized page elements the way they use headers and

34:35SPEAKEReverything if you kind of have some basic I guess web programming knowledge you can look at the

34:42SPEAKERsource code tell fresh RSS using these XPath kind of like standard forms this is what a header looks

34:53SPEAKERlike this is what an author looks like this is what like the where the date is on the site and

35:00SPEAKERyou can basically configure an RSS feed that way where you're telling it kind of here's how to

35:06SPEAKERunderstand the site and now create a feed for me there are services that do this for you so after I

35:13SPEAKERmessed around with this for a few minutes I was like I'm just going to use somebody else's tool

35:17SPEAKERthat can do this without me having to like learn how to do it myself basically and then there are

35:22SPEAKERalso like a lot of sites now especially sites that are text heavy have a markup in the actual

35:30SPEAKERin the HTML that lets like read later services and things like the the reading mode for your browser

35:37SPEAKERand stuff like that know where to pull out like recipe sites all do this so that you can import

35:42SPEAKERthem into your recipe manager and stuff like that which is which is really convenient is that

35:46SPEAKERsomething they want done because it seems like everything else has moved in the opposite direction

35:50SPEAKERright of like you know truncating the articles in the feed and not wanting you to read the

35:54SPEAKERwhole thing because they want you there clicking the page to see ads like I'm surprised that

35:58SPEAKERfull text is actually even exposed in some way well the thing that the the way that the web browser

36:04SPEAKERpeople kind of bribed them into doing it is they display the inline ads in the read later mode

36:11SPEAKERif you have the tags and you mark them as images appropriately so they'll they'll show static ads

36:16SPEAKERin those pages if you use like like when it became a default browser feature on iOS it became

36:22SPEAKERsomething that like they had to pay attention to and kind of engage with and that was the solution

36:27SPEAKERlike I use that fairly often in safari and and that that's about how it usually works like the

36:32SPEAKERatlantic and economist and stuff like that yeah so there have been a bunch of people building tools

36:39SPEAKERkind of like that for for RSS so the biggest one I've been using which I also installed on my server

36:46SPEAKERagain really simple setup is called RSS hub and it is its own little community of people who are

36:54SPEAKERsuper into RSS who create custom feeds for for websites so it just gives you a little like

37:02SPEAKERbookmarklet more like chrome extension button in your browser and so when you go to a website it

37:09SPEAKERwill do a couple different things it will one look for the native RSS feed on that site and just

37:15SPEAKERsurface it for you which is handy and then two if that site is in their repository of like a couple

37:24SPEAKERhundred I think websites that they have built custom feeds for it will also show you those

37:29SPEAKERso in some cases that's a website that doesn't do feeds based on their like tags or categories right

37:36SPEAKERbut like say you go to the verge and you only want to read like automotive stories I don't know if

37:43SPEAKERthey have a tag for that but someone for RSS hub might have been like a fan of the verge and a fan

37:49SPEAKERof automotive stories and so they created a custom feed that just looks for everything tagged that

37:54SPEAKERand like turns that into a feed right an RSS hub you basically can put in the like connection to

38:02SPEAKERyour self-hosted server so I have a button now on the toolbar where I can just click like preview

38:08SPEAKERto see the feed or I can click fresh RSS and it like deep links into fresh RSS in my browser

38:15SPEAKERand like adds the feed into fresh RSS without me even having to copy paste which would be easy but

38:22SPEAKERit's just awesome to be able to hit that button and then it's just there yeah that was my next

38:26SPEAKERquestion is like how do you do you have to always open up the fresh RSS page to add new feeds to

38:33SPEAKERfollow when you find a new site and that solves that problem it sounds like yeah and the the API

38:38SPEAKERfor the reader app can also do like the the adding stuff like it syncs I guess bi-directionally so

38:46SPEAKERI can just be browsing a website on my phone and go oh I like this site like if I can find the

38:52SPEAKERfeed for it on my phone I can just click the add feed button in the app and put the link in and

38:57SPEAKERthen choose which of my categories I want to put it into and then it's there can I ask real quick

39:02SPEAKERsince we've mentioned google reader and its API and it sounds pretty central to this whole setup

39:06SPEAKERuh a what is the state of google readers even exist it hasn't existed in a while right and b

39:11SPEAKERis assuming it's gone or just knowing google in general is there any concern about

39:17SPEAKERsupport for that API kind of just vanishing one day throwing all this into chaos google reader's

39:22SPEAKERbeen dead for years right that's what I thought yeah so they shut down google reader a really

39:27SPEAKERlong time ago the API though is just a series of calls and and responses and like it doesn't

39:34SPEAKERit lives independent of the service right so like the server the fresh RSS implements the server

39:41SPEAKERside and the clients implement the the client side so I assume somebody recreated the server side

39:50SPEAKERokay so it's google reader shutdown right so it's all just publicly available and open

39:55SPEAKERI don't know about open yeah my I don't really know the the details of that API but it doesn't

40:02SPEAKERit seems like if the people are still using it like it's not contingent on

40:06SPEAKERa google server somewhere that could shut down and like ruin the whole thing I think it's just a

40:11SPEAKERlike a really long held just kind of communication format at this point yeah clients and and RSS

40:21SPEAKERservers and so it's just like people just still use it because it's been around since

40:25SPEAKERRSS has been around more or less got it got it so on the on the google code archive page there

40:32SPEAKERis a pyre feed which is the google reader api wiki and it says hey this document is totally

40:39SPEAKERunofficial you should not rely on anything in this document if you need exact information google

40:44SPEAKERreader api has not been officially released it's been made by reverse engine engineering the

40:49SPEAKERprotocol mainly there's a lot of spelling mistakes too which is always a good sign but like oh

40:55SPEAKERactually okay that that makes more sense because I was reading in the fresh RSS documentation they

40:59SPEAKERwere talking about I think the way they phrased it was like different readers or different clients

41:04SPEAKERunderstand the google reader api so slightly differently and I guess that that would make

41:08SPEAKERsense if they've kind of had to reverse engineer this whole thing so in the old days when google

41:12SPEAKERreader was still a valid thing like you could get there were a bunch of different clients and they

41:17SPEAKEReach implemented some subset of api features some were just readers someone let you add stuff back

41:21SPEAKERsomeone let you tag and sort and favorite and all these things and and some of them kept that stuff

41:26SPEAKERthe the things you did local some of them sent it back to the server my assumption is that they made

41:31SPEAKERthe reader api public and that at some point somebody went through and was like okay here's all

41:35SPEAKERthe here's all the calls that our server needs to respond to in order for these 10 most common google

41:42SPEAKERreader readers terrible way to say that connected to it so so yeah this is just like this is like

41:50SPEAKERwhen the city of heroes people reverse engineered the game server except for I don't know that

41:55SPEAKERanybody ever actually leaked the server code to the to the people doing that that's turned out great

42:01SPEAKERcity of heroes is alive and well and officially recognized now so what you're saying is this

42:07SPEAKERindie web resurgence is going to bring back google reader I love to hear that west it's been great

42:10SPEAKERhaving you we'll see you next time you're on yes but but no okay so then so then I assume that

42:17SPEAKERthere's also solutions for things like you know like I pay money for the washington post and if

42:22SPEAKERI want to read those articles in here I assume I have to do some shenanigans with logins and

42:27SPEAKERrss feeds and all that stuff too yeah you know I haven't messed too much with paid for sites but I

42:35SPEAKERI did as a part of this process like part of this was getting me like to read more stuff right and

42:40SPEAKERone of the things I decided to do was okay I'm gonna finally subscribe to defector like I keep

42:45SPEAKERseeing defector headlines that are fucking great I want to support independent media like I'm gonna

42:50SPEAKERgo for a subscription for them so I subscribed and I can't remember if the rss feed was not surface

42:57SPEAKERto me before I subscribed I think it was but then you would go click through to an article and it

43:02SPEAKERwould say you know like log in to read it but since I subscribed I can't remember if I got a

43:08SPEAKERsubscriber only feed or something but it's like it just has been working fine I can just read full

43:15SPEAKERversions of articles with with no issues and a lot of sites that do the you know click through

43:24SPEAKERto read function the the reader app that I use has a basically like scrape the whole page button

43:31SPEAKERon it so I can just press that and it will usually be able to pull in everything that would be after

43:37SPEAKERthe fold without having to click through it doesn't work great on every single site but it

43:42SPEAKERworks like 90 percent of the time and that that service I mentioned a minute ago RSS hub actually

43:49SPEAKERhas specific feeds on some sites where people have gone on and gone oh there are RSS feed only feeds

43:56SPEAKERyou the first few paragraphs here's our custom feed that we built that does pull everything in

44:01SPEAKERso you can that's like another way to get around that pretty simply and yet it's weird like there

44:07SPEAKERare certain sites you go to that you assume they have a paywall that would affect RSS like vulture

44:16SPEAKERis like a site that I read regularly for tv and movie news and you know once you've read like

44:22SPEAKERthree articles a month they want you to subscribe the RSS feed will just give you everything like

44:28SPEAKERthere's no there's no there's no paywall on that so you know I don't know to what like how ubiquitous

44:35SPEAKERthat is on sites that paywall but it's it's pretty nice to not have to like incognito mode every

44:42SPEAKERstory that you want to read on a website because you've used up your buy article limit or whatever

44:47SPEAKERso for what it's worth it looks like my example the washington post just has on all their index

44:51SPEAKERpages an RSS link at the bottom of the page when you scroll all the way down past the infinite

44:56SPEAKERfeeling part of the page so like that's it's still there like they never turn it off I guess

45:02SPEAKERyeah I don't know whether to feel good or bad about the fact that RSS feels so like forgotten

45:09SPEAKERor like by the wayside now that all of these sites that have locked down the reading experience and

45:14SPEAKERlike monetize the reading experience so many of them just still let you get everything via RSS

45:20SPEAKERlike it's such a minor number of people using it I guess that they just like don't even care or the

45:26SPEAKERpeople building the sites at this point don't notice I don't know I wonder if they even have

45:30SPEAKERtracking on it honestly like like like if there's a if there's a three thousand percent spike in RSS

45:36SPEAKERthis week would anybody notice okay so okay so we've got we've got ways to do paid stuff we've

45:44SPEAKERgot it bypasses a lot of the kind of paywalls on a lot of things which like I said I like

45:51SPEAKERI feel I feel I have mixed feelings about that because I like I'm happy to pay money for sites

45:55SPEAKERthat I that I use a lot like I pay for a multiple half good half dozen or more sites on any given

46:01SPEAKERmonth and but I mean I guess there's nothing stopping you from paying that and still using

46:06SPEAKERRSS too if it's a site you like so that's it's always good yeah I feel like for for me I don't

46:12SPEAKERwant to I think in general if it's a site that is like really a paid site for like most of their

46:18SPEAKERcontent I don't think you can get around that with RSS or maybe you can but that's not what I'm using

46:22SPEAKERit for you know like I'm not using it to like cheat at getting defector articles right I'm using

46:28SPEAKERit to avoid the annoyance of sites that do not make you be a member to read their stuff but do

46:36SPEAKERthrow up obnoxious paywall you know things once you've read an arbitrary number of articles or

46:43SPEAKERthrow lots of ads at you right the the other thing that I miss from the RSS days is I used to have a

46:49SPEAKERsection of blogs like I had a whole category of blogs that were updated pretty infrequently

46:54SPEAKERand but but the the content was always good yeah and in the era of social media where the person

47:00SPEAKERwho posts the most usually gets recognized the most a lot of those you lost a lot of that that

47:06SPEAKERkind of content and like the ability to bring that back and have that low low frequency high value

47:12SPEAKERcolumn back in my in my feed reader is is really really compelling I'm gonna have to start I'm

47:18SPEAKERgonna have to get the docker install and follow the 23 step process for this that has been my

47:23SPEAKERnumber one joy of of using this thing is that I have a like my biggest category is newsletters

47:29SPEAKERand indie blogs and a lot of those blogs are ones that maybe update weekly or monthly or you know

47:37SPEAKERtri-monthly like very infrequent updates but when they do you know it's somebody writing about

47:42SPEAKERsomething interesting that they really care about like I follow cable Sasser's blog the co-founder of

47:48SPEAKERpanic or founder of panic and he I think he probably only writes on his blog like a couple

47:53SPEAKERtimes a year maybe but when he does it's like hey I just preserved like 73 wax records from like a

48:01SPEAKERDisney acapella group Cinderella post yeah like he does incredible shit right yeah and so I'm like

48:06SPEAKERthis is stuff that I just was not seeking out and finding before it's something that I would only

48:12SPEAKERfind because I followed this person on Twitter and they tweeted it and I happened to see it at

48:16SPEAKERthat time but because so much of that is like fracturing now my the frequency of seeing those

48:23SPEAKERlittle you know once in a blue moon like gold nuggets is so reduced that I was just like fuck

48:28SPEAKERit I have to go out and find them so so then the part that's missing from all of this is the

48:34SPEAKERhey what what are the sites like the delicious equivalent do you do I don't know if Brad you

48:41SPEAKERever use delicious we use delicious a lot at future because we used it to share bookmarks

48:45SPEAKERfor that we're going to talk about on the weekly podcast every week so we would

48:49SPEAKERbasically delicious was a link bookmark sharing site and you would you would say okay here I'm

48:54SPEAKERputting these in the in the maximum PC or the PC gamer group and we would dump out 20 things

49:00SPEAKEReverybody would just anytime they saw an article they wanted to talk about the podcast they chuck

49:03SPEAKERit in the group and then whoever was the host would go through and pick the five or six that

49:06SPEAKERthey wanted to read that week that's that's funny we never use delicious but I am sitting here

49:10SPEAKERthinking like maybe I could just make my own RSS of the news from the next later podcast to send

49:14SPEAKERto the other guys every week anyway go on did delicious have much in common with with stumble

49:18SPEAKERupon were those kind of similar offerings so stumble upon was more for dig well we got a lot

49:25SPEAKERof traffic from stumble upon back in the day because it was mostly people who were high and

49:29SPEAKERlooking for something that would entertain them so they'd hit this button and what it was was it was

49:34SPEAKERa browser add-on a browser extension that just gave you a button that was like boom give me a

49:38SPEAKERrandom page on the internet and you'd get some random weirdness so delicious was much more like

49:43SPEAKERhey like this is going to shock you both but in the old days your browser didn't sync the

49:48SPEAKERbookmarks between all the instances of your browser and bookmarks were also very important

49:52SPEAKERback then so you could connect you could connect firefox to the delicious extension and it would

49:58SPEAKERreplace the firefox bookmarks with delicious with all the stuff you'd saved in delicious

50:03SPEAKERwhich meant that when I wanted to save stuff to the maximum pc podcast list I just hit the hit

50:08SPEAKERthe bookmark button and put the right tag on it and it would just be there without me having to

50:12SPEAKERgo to a website or anything anything weird it was it was and also there was a nice web front end for

50:18SPEAKERthat that I could access from literally anywhere there was a computer or share with with viewers

50:22SPEAKERif they wanted or listeners if they wanted you know I think browser based bookmark syncing is

50:29SPEAKERprobably what got me out of using RSS I think I like for a little while used RSS in Thunderbird

50:36SPEAKERand that was kind of my way of tracking a bunch of websites for a few months or maybe a couple years

50:43SPEAKERand then I was just like I'm really only going to the same few sites I'm just going to bookmark them

50:48SPEAKERand now you know it's 2011 I can sync my bookmarks and firefox across browsers or whatever year that

50:55SPEAKERthat became a thing but yeah I was never really a delicious user but thankfully there are now

51:01SPEAKERsites that are really focused on this idea of collecting cool small blogs and giving you like a

51:09SPEAKERgreat place to browse through them and they often have really cool like web design too because all

51:14SPEAKERthe people making this stuff are all like just big like web nerds and their whole thing is like I

51:21SPEAKERwant to make a blog that's beautiful I want to make a website that you know links to all these

51:25SPEAKERother websites and like uses all the latest like you know what whatever like CSS you know design

51:32SPEAKERtricks I can use so yeah there's some really cool stuff out there should we go ahead and talk about

51:39SPEAKERthose websites yeah you got some shout outs go ahead before we do I have to ask speaking

51:45SPEAKERof internet stuff for nerds are you still a thunderbird user by chance not in so long okay

51:51SPEAKERbut I will shout out pc gamers news editor andy chock who is a ride or die firefox thunderbird

52:00SPEAKERuser after the the apocalypse comes and there's no longer an internet he will still be finding

52:05SPEAKERa way to use thunderbird I am quite sure I respect it I just I put about a year year and

52:10SPEAKERa half into thunderbird last a couple years ago and like it's it's still going and he still uses

52:16SPEAKERRSS via via thunderbird like ever since google reader died I think he's been using thunderbird

52:20SPEAKERfor RSS so I was like very excitedly telling him about like my RSS setup and like showing him all

52:27SPEAKERthese feeds and he's like that's a lot of feeds I just like use the ones for to follow the news

52:32SPEAKERwebsites I need to for for work and he's got a simple setup but hey it does the job for him

52:38SPEAKERyeah it was it was a if there was a whole I distinctly remember the moment when I was like

52:42SPEAKERwait I only read seven blogs in my RSS feed now I'm just going to open set firefox to open all

52:48SPEAKERof them when I launch the computer in the morning and then and then those seven blogs became four

52:53SPEAKERblogs became two blogs became twitter and you know here we are yeah you know like this this probably

53:00SPEAKERsounds stupid but just in the last few weeks I've like multiple times had this feeling of just like

53:09SPEAKERshock at how much internet is out there like it's something that you you know but but I've I like

53:17SPEAKERfeel like I've awoken from like a 10-year slumber of just experiencing the internet largely through

53:24SPEAKERthe few sites I would go to all the time seeing headlines on like message boards and links I would

53:30SPEAKERclick on via twitter or like a couple other social media platforms right like there's there are so

53:36SPEAKERmany people out there who just run their own little website where they're writing about their life

53:41SPEAKERor stuff that they think is cool or stuff that they're making and there are so many sites that

53:45SPEAKERare dedicated to bringing those people together or like referencing them so many people have

53:51SPEAKERinterlinked little blogs where they're talking about each other and of course that's out there

53:56SPEAKERlike logically I knew that but I just wasn't seeing it and you have to put in the effort to

54:01SPEAKERgo and see it and then it's just like holy shit the internet that I used to experience by randomly

54:07SPEAKERclicking through categories on yahoo to like find somebody's gaming fan site like that stuff does

54:14SPEAKERstill exist it's just so far on the outer reaches of the internet it's like in ways that we've lost

54:21SPEAKERor at least I have lost like the muscles necessary to get there in my brain that I'm like relearning

54:27SPEAKERhow to walk you know further than the three feet away from twitter you know it takes to find

54:31SPEAKERsomething I mean I love everything I am hearing here it all to me all this just sounds like we're

54:36SPEAKERone step closer to bringing back web rings at this point dude everybody in this like indie

54:42SPEAKERweb sphere has a blog roll on their website where they link like the 30 other blogs that they

54:48SPEAKERlike to read and like their friends and stuff and I just keep stumbling upon these and being like

54:53SPEAKERwell that sounds cool well that sounds cool well that sounds cool do they have like a list of discs

54:58SPEAKERthey have out from netflix at the same time usually the blog roll and then you had like the

55:03SPEAKERlist of discs you had out from netflix maybe you had like the book you were reading I have seen

55:09SPEAKERsome of that I have seen some of the currently reading currently watching and there are the

55:15SPEAKERoccasional blogs where I'll go to where like they're still doing like location check-ins

55:20SPEAKERof some kind you know like you're wow like geolocation geocaching shit also like I don't

55:26SPEAKERknow there's people who are still doing some very 2000s internet stuff out there but which is fine

55:33SPEAKERgood for them but for the most part I'm just like finding cool websites connected to cool websites

55:37SPEAKERand you know there's more out there that I can possibly read but it just has given me so many

55:42SPEAKERchoices and like you know stuff to to save for later in the feed and eventually read on a quiet

55:49SPEAKERsunday or whatever this is this is all very cool do you have um like if people want to do this and

55:54SPEAKERthey want to get started with hey I don't I don't know how to find blogs and like boing boing got

55:59SPEAKERweird in the last 20 years yes um like what's your what's your what's your jumping off spot

56:04SPEAKERso the first one I discovered I believe I found this through the blog roll of my friend Alex

56:10SPEAKERWolcher who's a former editor for edge magazine he works on like Minecraft stuff these days

56:16SPEAKERis a site called ooh dot directory ooh dot directory and they describe it as a place to

56:24SPEAKERfind good blogs that interest you and it straight up looks like yahoo in like 1996 it does right

56:32SPEAKERyeah except with like a weird circa windows 3 1 color scheme of some sort it's not exactly hot

56:38SPEAKERdog but it's kind of in that vein so it has like 2 000 blogs on it separated out into a bunch of

56:45SPEAKERcategories like arts and media humanities recreation science personal blogs like there's

56:52SPEAKERinteresting stuff in in all of those categories well I don't know if the government politics and

56:57SPEAKERlaw category is interesting I haven't ventured into that one but the ones that I have ventured

57:01SPEAKERinto like I've found a couple things that I wanted to to start following from each and it's just like

57:07SPEAKERthis is one of those sites I was talking about where you go on to it and you're just like well

57:10SPEAKERthis is just like a nice looking website like this is cool people are still just making websites that

57:16SPEAKERare not for their benefit like it is not monetized it is just someone who really wanted to collect

57:22SPEAKERa bunch of good links and preserve them for for other people so that's a good one there's another

57:28SPEAKERone this url is a little bit hard to to say it's RSS joy but it's rs.sjoy.lol is the website but

57:41SPEAKERthis one is like a fully RSS based page that will refresh like every few hours and is just like a

57:50SPEAKERbunch of collected links basically so these are just all like raw RSS feeds from a bunch of

57:57SPEAKERdifferent independent bloggers that you can see like some of their most recent articles to get

58:01SPEAKERa taste of whether it's somebody you would want to follow I mean again it's just kind of like a nice

58:06SPEAKERlooking website very simple list of links I clicked on a link that's called inside the plume superpods

58:17SPEAKERwhich I think is a wi-fi mesh network network from virgin media from like five years ago

58:23SPEAKERand it's just a it's just a bunch of really good disassembly pictures but also plume super pods is

58:28SPEAKERa funny series of words I highly recommend molly white's blog role she's the the creator of web3

58:37SPEAKERis going great always fantastic which is really good and like she has built something on her site

58:44SPEAKERthat I really envy because she's actually a programmer and I don't know how to do the kind of

58:48SPEAKERshit she does but she built her own like microblogging service that is part of this

58:54SPEAKERlike post on your own site syndicate everywhere system where she can basic she basically built

59:00SPEAKERher own twitter that's just her twitter feed her micro feed and then it posts to

59:06SPEAKERall of her other channels so like if you follow her on blue sky or mastodon you're seeing the

59:12SPEAKERstuff that she's just posting on her own site and it's being replicated there which is really cool

59:16SPEAKERI feel like I owe her an apology for something that I have only ever thought to myself and never

59:20SPEAKERsaid out loud before but I I've only ever seen it's a blog right web3 is going great yes I've

59:27SPEAKERonly ever seen that reference through its twitter username which is just web3 is it's at web3 is

59:32SPEAKERgreat oh no there are so many earnest like web3 crypto ai grifters on twitter these days but I

59:39SPEAKERtook that to be earnest yeah it is the exact opposite of that I took it to be earnestly

59:44SPEAKERpromoting web3 I had no idea that that was the tone of it now now I am going to look at this yeah

59:50SPEAKERif you go to web3 is going great.com you'll see down in the corner as of recording time

59:55SPEAKERthe number 72.971 billion dollars which I assume is her rough running tally of like how much money

1:00:04SPEAKERhas been wasted in the web3 space I don't know what that is sourced from I assume oh she has a

1:00:10SPEAKERlittle explainer what is the grift counter if you scroll down the page you will see that number

1:00:15SPEAKERgoing down and then as you scroll back up it will go back up so I think it's key to the timeline the

1:00:20SPEAKERchronology of stories it's just all from like the rug pulls and and everything from web3 so that's

1:00:25SPEAKERcool but anyway molly's blog roll links to a bunch of other great sites to to follow and if you're

1:00:32SPEAKERkind of like wanting to dip your toe into this idea of like people who are publishing on their

1:00:37SPEAKERown sites and kind of writing a lot about small websites the kind of re re-rise of blogging I

1:00:46SPEAKERguess you'd call it people who are writing about tech and finance and crypto and just kind of all

1:00:53SPEAKERkinds of web-based you know contemporary media shit like she's a good place to start uh wes can

1:01:01SPEAKERwe post the show notes for this so that people can just click all these links instead of having

1:01:06SPEAKERto read these out is that okay absolutely yeah yeah fine with me your show notes are so much

1:01:09SPEAKERmore professional and well written than ours before we were gonna do this episode I was just

1:01:15SPEAKERlike okay I've gone through the process of setting this thing up if I don't write it out I'm not gonna

1:01:20SPEAKERremember like anything that I did or what I'm using and then I'd get on this podcast and I would

1:01:26SPEAKERjust be like RSS is cool you guys like I wouldn't know what to say so yeah that was just my it was

1:01:32SPEAKERfor my own brain but happy to share it with the with other people if it's this this is like the

1:01:37SPEAKERthe hey when I do something on the server I have to write down what I did so that when it breaks in

1:01:41SPEAKERtwo years I can figure out how to fix it is that is a key part of doing stuff on the server that's

1:01:46SPEAKERthat's like the like you're building your own service it's because going to become an important

1:01:49SPEAKERpart of your life and if it's going to break in the future you need to know how to fix it so it

1:01:54SPEAKERmakes a ton of sense I want to shout out a couple quick ones that I think tech pod listeners will

1:01:59SPEAKERlove one of the indie sites I started following is called 500mile email and it's a list of stories

1:02:08SPEAKERthat people submit to this I guess you'd call it a I guess it's a newsletter but it's like a list of

1:02:15SPEAKERcrazy software bug stories basically like here's something wild that happened with my you know my

1:02:23SPEAKERcompany's server and like you won't believe what the issue was or this looks very good I don't know

1:02:29SPEAKERif you remember the episode of 99% invisible about uh like Roman Mars's voice or something about his

1:02:37SPEAKERpodcast the virus yes I remember I've crashed Mazdas that's on here we've had people on the

1:02:42SPEAKERtech pod server with that same problem with the Mazda entertainment system I think it's like

1:02:45SPEAKERcertain certain characters it couldn't interpret correctly or something like that yeah so like

1:02:49SPEAKERthat's the kind of story that this site collects is really good I started following a blog that's

1:02:55SPEAKERbeen running for for years I had never heard of it called sandwich tribunal where a few people

1:03:02SPEAKERlooked at the Wikipedia list of sandwiches I guess Wikipedia has a list of like everything that is

1:03:09SPEAKERconsidered a sandwich and they were like what if we tasted and reviewed every sandwich on the

1:03:14SPEAKERWikipedia sandwich list and so then they spent years doing that basically wow this is look I

1:03:22SPEAKERdon't want to say anything about what people choose to make the work of their life but anybody who's

1:03:26SPEAKERgoing to put the St Louis hot salami sandwich next to the Nashville hot chicken I can get behind this

1:03:31SPEAKERis this is like this is this is the Lord's work as far as I'm concerned yeah there's one on the

1:03:36SPEAKERhome page called South Australia's fritz and sauce and it just looks like some like raw bologna on

1:03:44SPEAKERwhite bread with ketchup smeared on it and you know they dedicated 500 words or so to reviewing

1:03:51SPEAKERthe sandwich maybe a thousand that looks awful I am going to steal that image for this podcast

1:03:56SPEAKERshow art and credit them and link to their blog that looks horrifying yeah there's so much good

1:04:00SPEAKERshit out there that like I was not reading and yeah it feels like you know the the veil has been

1:04:04SPEAKERlifted to some extent and also I got a cool hobby project out of it like like every everything you've

1:04:09SPEAKERdescribed here sounds super fascinating and I'm sitting here going man I should read more of this

1:04:13SPEAKERstuff if only I could break myself of this like mental need to constantly be scrolling twitter

1:04:18SPEAKERbecause my brain tells me like where else am I going to get this density of people's thoughts

1:04:22SPEAKERin this short of time you know it's like I can read 12 different people saying 12 different

1:04:26SPEAKERthings like 30 seconds you know you know what I mean yeah I'm still fighting that impulse for sure

1:04:31SPEAKERit's it's not a healthy urge but it's something that's like I do you have any advice for breaking

1:04:36SPEAKERyourself of that I mean I just got so disgusted with with twitter you know just Elon Musk in

1:04:44SPEAKERgeneral like can can you know fall in an open manhole as far as I'm concerned and then just

1:04:49SPEAKERthe experience of using the website became so shitty right like there were just so many bots

1:04:55SPEAKERand spammers and everything that I was just like I don't want to read this site unless I absolutely

1:04:59SPEAKERhave to I really do enjoy right now blue sky as an alternative just in terms of the types of people

1:05:06SPEAKERwho are into it but it is so much lower volume that I've have not found it something that I

1:05:12SPEAKERam glued to in the same way right like I follow some people you know there's a few updates every

1:05:19SPEAKERyou know like I probably get you know 30 tweets an hour or something 30 skeets an hour sorry

1:05:25SPEAKERthey're still called tweets it's fine and so that hasn't kind of I guess that kind of weaned me off

1:05:32SPEAKERthe dopamine hit a little bit and yeah I don't know I think maybe just everybody has a different

1:05:38SPEAKERbreaking point for when you get fed up with like your your own browsing habits right like for me it

1:05:46SPEAKERwas realizing that I would just go to the same few websites all the time even when there wasn't

1:05:51SPEAKERanything new on that website and just being really sick of that reflex and then I also got a little

1:05:58SPEAKERbit of a nudge from the fact that for read-only memo which is my emulation newsletter I was using

1:06:03SPEAKERFeedly for a little while to like collect a bunch of RSS feeds but it was quite the free version was

1:06:09SPEAKERlike quite limited in how it would let me categorize stuff and what it would let me do and I

1:06:14SPEAKERkept trying to do things that would be like oh well you can do that if you start paying us you know 10

1:06:19SPEAKERbucks a month and I was just like man screw this like there's I can do this myself without paying

1:06:25SPEAKERthis website and also I can start reading other things other than emulation get hubs and enjoy it

1:06:33SPEAKERa heck of a lot more yeah why would you want to do that it is some it is some juicy reading sometimes

1:06:38SPEAKERyeah really uh really great nuts and bolts stuff wes this is fantastic thank you so much for sharing

1:06:45SPEAKERuh where can folks find more about you and and and what's the url for your newsletter

1:06:50SPEAKERuh the url is readonlymemo.com I'm hoping someday that there's a dot memo tld we'll see if that ever

1:06:58SPEAKERhappens but uh for now it's readonlymemo.com and you can follow me on on blue sky I assume if you

1:07:03SPEAKERjust type my name into blue sky you will you will find me what's the uh what's the top level but who

1:07:09SPEAKERowns the dot mo top level domain you could go you could do or dot emo I guess would be the other way

1:07:14SPEAKERto go I don't think there is a dot emo and I think I looked into dot mo and it was a country

1:07:20SPEAKERit's macau it was a cow that's macau yeah I looked into that and you need to be like a government

1:07:26SPEAKERregistered business or something and I was like probably not worth the complication of that well

1:07:34SPEAKERuh thanks for coming by Wes we'll we will see you soon this is fabulous yes thank you so much before

1:07:39SPEAKERyou go let me ask you one more question yeah for my own edification any what's what's your next

1:07:43SPEAKERself-hosted project to tinker with any other any other fun stuff in that space that you're eyeing

1:07:48SPEAKERthat's a good question I so talking about molly white's like microblogging feed I was just looking

1:07:54SPEAKERinto services that like work help you post across like blue sky and Macedon and stuff that can like

1:08:03SPEAKERdo the web mention shit that we mentioned earlier or a website because like I moved my newsletter

1:08:10SPEAKERfrom substack to ghost earlier this year I don't host that out of my house because that felt like

1:08:16SPEAKERa bad idea to run that on my home server not a great idea so I just run that off like a really

1:08:22SPEAKERaffordable hosting service um so I was looking into like is there some self-hosted thing I could

1:08:26SPEAKERdo to like run the microblogging or be do the web mention stuff and it all seems way more complicated

1:08:35SPEAKERthan than my skill set is really primed for so I think I'm just gonna wait and see if people

1:08:41SPEAKERkind of keep chipping away at those those problems um I don't have any anything yet but uh I don't

1:08:47SPEAKERknow I'm sure I'll come up with an excuse to worm my way back onto the podcast with a another

1:08:52SPEAKERproject in the in the next year or so yeah you know what they say when you have a home server

1:08:56SPEAKEReverything looks like a nail yeah do you guys have any like kind of ones that you're you're eyeing

1:09:03SPEAKERthat you're thinking about doing for a future project no I've been kind of out of the game for

1:09:08SPEAKERa while I've got like Plex and Jellyfence set up and own tone which is a music server for airplay

1:09:12SPEAKERtargets and not a lot else at the moment I was running I was running cups the print servers to

1:09:19SPEAKERmake an old printer airplay or sorry air print air print enabled I should say interesting my my my

1:09:24SPEAKERbrother laser is from 2008 before before air print was a thing so I did that had that working and then

1:09:31SPEAKERmy brother printer that was from 2008 was before air print started making horrible noises every

1:09:35SPEAKERtime I printed so I just replaced the printer with one that didn't make bad noises yeah that's fair

1:09:39SPEAKERand it has air print now yeah our still works I've got to figure out the posting once and blasting

1:09:45SPEAKERit out everywhere thing that's that's my next my next big project it looks like it's gotten

1:09:49SPEAKERa little bit more manageable in the last six or seven months but it's still it's still very much

1:09:55SPEAKERin the hey first install 35 dependencies and then you got to generate oauth tokens and get dev dev

1:10:02SPEAKERdoobers for all the different sites you want to connect so yeah that's that's something that I

1:10:07SPEAKERhope you you get into will because I want to listen to you talking about how to do it because

1:10:11SPEAKERI don't because I don't know how to do it but I'm very into this idea so I think if if there

1:10:17SPEAKERis a tech pod episode about about it in the future I will be uh be right there to listen to it I'm

1:10:24SPEAKERexcited for that future I'll say that the last thing I've thought of which is like I have zero

1:10:28SPEAKERtime to tackle something like this I would love to run some public game servers like specifically

1:10:32SPEAKERfor quakes one through through three and maybe some other older stuff like that but oh really I

1:10:37SPEAKERreally would want to like set up a reverse proxy outside the house to point to stuff like that and

1:10:41SPEAKERthat's a whole can of worms so with the at the risk of uh of running a little bit long I gotta

1:10:46SPEAKERtell you about uh something I did set up on my home server or uh earlier this year so I hit

1:10:52SPEAKER10 years at pc gamer and one of my fondest memories will is feeling uh feeling his age

1:10:59SPEAKERright now I'm sorry I just turned to dust Wes one of my fondest memories of like right when I started

1:11:05SPEAKERat pc gamers we would occasionally play some unreal 2004 in the office near the end of the

1:11:11SPEAKERday always instagib nobody would play anything but instagib and you know the game was 10 years

1:11:17SPEAKERold at that point right it was not the hot shit but you could still pretty easily just kind of

1:11:22SPEAKERjump into it jump on a server servers are all shut down for that game at this point like the whole

1:11:28SPEAKERinfrastructure that epic had running is all gone but you can still totally find custom servers out

1:11:33SPEAKERthere anyway that's a long roundabout way of getting to this service called amp that I'm

1:11:37SPEAKERrunning on my home server that cost like I think I paid about 10 bucks for the software

1:11:44SPEAKERbut they have an incredibly easy to use interface for running game servers so you you pay for the

1:11:50SPEAKERlicense for it it's not a subscription or anything and they have servers for I don't know maybe like

1:11:57SPEAKER75 games and they basically did the work for you of taking all of the weird like ini formatting

1:12:05SPEAKERshit you would have to do for every different game server that does everything differently

1:12:11SPEAKERand built it all into their one like consistent interface so people basically make modules for

1:12:17SPEAKERgames and then if that game has a module in amp it's extremely easy for you to go in and

1:12:22SPEAKERjust like natural language go yes I want to choose ctf from the drop down I want to choose like you

1:12:29SPEAKERknow gravity level I want to choose 50 kills you know to end the match or whatever and that stuff

1:12:35SPEAKERis all really easy to set up so I'm just running that in a like a Debian virtual machine on my

1:12:41SPEAKERserver and we had an afternoon where we played a couple hours of unreal 2004 and it was absolutely

1:12:48SPEAKERdelightful but it supports a ton of games including I'm sure quake is quake 3 is on here

1:12:56SPEAKERit looks like they might not have quake 1 or 2 surprisingly maybe there are just good solutions

1:13:01SPEAKERfor those already but they support a ton of go ahead will I was gonna say Linux GSM supports

1:13:08SPEAKERquake 1 and quake 2 but but it doesn't support but it's kind of sketchily documented and it looks like

1:13:16SPEAKERyou can do quake with the with the the legacy module for this this is really cool yeah it's

1:13:23SPEAKERit's awesome it's you know it was totally worth the small amount of money I paid for it just to

1:13:28SPEAKERplay unreal 2004 but you can also set up modern servers with it really easily so like valheim

1:13:34SPEAKERyou can set up for example and then you can play old stuff like half-life deathmatch and day of

1:13:40SPEAKERdefeat source and I mean they got all kinds of shit on here Conan exiles don't starve together

1:13:50SPEAKERIcarus like stuff new and old open red alert if you want to play some some red alert or original

1:13:57SPEAKERcnc like that sounds great all kinds of stuff that sounds great the stumbling block for me is

1:14:02SPEAKERlike I don't mind exposing my home ip to my friends but if I was going to make it a public thing I

1:14:06SPEAKERwould want some kind of obfuscation there I mean I assume any like it runs on Debian pretty easily

1:14:12SPEAKERI assume you can go to like can you just do like um is it digital ocean like droplets can you just

1:14:17SPEAKERset up that's exactly what I was thinking is like running yeah it probably costs you three bucks a

1:14:22SPEAKERmonth or something five bucks a month yeah just just more just the the the mental cognitive

1:14:27SPEAKERoverhead of figuring out how to set up like a reverse proxy or something like that on a vps

1:14:31SPEAKERlike that and then point it to my house and yeah that would be that would be a lot but it would be

1:14:35SPEAKERa lot of fun yeah a little latency for people who uh who you don't know so your friends have

1:14:39SPEAKERa little bit of a ping advantage too grab I'll give I'll give my friends the direct ip nice yeah

1:14:44SPEAKERum so I highly recommend this this service if you do end up wanting to set up some kind of server

1:14:49SPEAKERbecause god I spent so many hours like trying to understand the unreal 2004 documentation and like

1:14:55SPEAKERhow to set all that stuff up and then I just found this thing and it was like a few clicks and typing

1:15:02SPEAKERin you know first to three flag caps like done games on cool well thanks for coming by wes

1:15:11SPEAKERas always brad we've reached the portion of the show where we

1:15:14SPEAKERtalk about the reason we're here the reason for the season the podcasting season yeah it's spring

1:15:20SPEAKERthe the it's the season of podcast new podcasts are blooming around us constantly listen man I

1:15:24SPEAKERcan tell you from the last um 18 years of my life every season is podcast season

1:15:32SPEAKERtruer words have never been spoken uh we're here for the listeners brad that's right uh it as

1:15:38SPEAKERalways brad and will made a tech pod is a 100 percent listener supported show if you would like

1:15:43SPEAKERto join the cadre of listeners who make the tech pod possible you can go to patreon.com tech pod

1:15:50SPEAKERagain that's patreon.com tech pod and for five bucks a month you get access to the monthly

1:15:56SPEAKERexclusive patron episode where we kind of just ramble on about whatever we're working on whatever

1:16:00SPEAKERwe're thinking about at the moment sometimes those things those those ramblings turn into other

1:16:04SPEAKERepisodes sometimes they sometimes they're just they just live there forever yep occasionally

1:16:09SPEAKERwe'll dig up our old usenet posts or something yeah like there's often they're a venue for

1:16:15SPEAKERembarrassing ourselves uh we also uh you also get access to the tech pod discord which is full of

1:16:20SPEAKERtwo thousand through eight hundred something of the the nerdiest people on earth um set in the

1:16:26SPEAKERliving room the most lovingest way possible yeah like like i absolutely love it there there's

1:16:31SPEAKERalways something interesting like as as somebody i realized the other day when we were talking to

1:16:35SPEAKERwest when we recorded this interview that the thing that i loved about twitter in the early

1:16:41SPEAKERdays was that i got to talk to a bunch of interesting people from all around the world

1:16:45SPEAKERand the tech pod discord is like a microcosm of that there's a bunch of interesting people

1:16:49SPEAKERwho live around the world i find out new things about places in the world i didn't know about

1:16:53SPEAKERpeople people share their their goofy in-joke license plates that they got on their new cars

1:17:00SPEAKERwhich by the way very good the person who sent me that one that was excellent work i'm not going to

1:17:04SPEAKERout you because it was in a private message that i got shown that but um yeah everybody's done uh

1:17:11SPEAKERit's a delightful community people who probably have a lot of interest overlap and you and you

1:17:15SPEAKERmight learn some new things that you're interested in you didn't even know existed before that's

1:17:18SPEAKERright i'm sitting here racking my brain trying to think of like what are some cool things from the

1:17:22SPEAKERthis i know a programmer on there who maintains a dos virtual machine with a fully functional

1:17:28SPEAKERdos build environment because occasionally he still likes to write dos software yeah yeah is

1:17:33SPEAKERit like it's it's wide and deep both which is right so that's right uh you can find out again

1:17:38SPEAKERhow to join by going to patreon.com slash tech pod for five bucks a month you get access to everybody

1:17:42SPEAKERin the you get to get access to the discord you get access to the to the community of people you

1:17:48SPEAKERget access to the patron exclusive episodes and you help support the show which we really appreciate

1:17:52SPEAKERyes we do and i guess uh we've reached the part of the show where we thank our executive

1:17:56SPEAKERproducer to your patrons we thank everybody who supports the show but especially the executive

1:17:59SPEAKERproducers your patrons including andrew slosky jordan lippett paddle creek games makers of

1:18:05SPEAKERfractured veil bunny oh sorry octothorpe bunny redacted twinkle twinkie david allen james kamek

1:18:11SPEAKERand pantheon makers of the hs3 high speed 3d printer thank you also so much thank you yes and

1:18:18SPEAKERuh that will do it for this week's edition of the tech pod we will be back next sunday

1:18:22SPEAKERwith another show we will see you then