236: Not an Egg, Not Yet a Chicken

00:00SPEAKER- We've done it, Brad.

00:02SPEAKER- What did we do?

00:03SPEAKER- We went to the Bay Area Electronics Flea Market

00:06SPEAKERlast weekend.

00:07SPEAKER- I left the house.

00:08SPEAKER- You left the house.

00:09SPEAKER- I went somewhere.

00:10SPEAKER- You got in a car with two cars, I think.

00:12SPEAKERDid you have breakfast afterwards?

00:13SPEAKER- Yes, we did.

00:14SPEAKER- Wow.

00:15SPEAKER- Boy.

00:16SPEAKER- I'm jealous of the breakfast.

00:17SPEAKERThe Big Bear, Black Bear, Black Bear Diner.

00:18SPEAKER- The Black Bear Diner, what is that, Colma?

00:20SPEAKERIs that where that was?

00:21SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

00:22SPEAKER- Let me tell you, the Black Bear Diner in Colma

00:23SPEAKERdoes not mess around.

00:25SPEAKERI ordered off the, what they described

00:27SPEAKERas the little less menu.

00:28SPEAKER- Yeah, no, it's still two people's worth of food

00:31SPEAKERevery time you get something there.

00:32SPEAKER- I got the ham and cheese omelet

00:33SPEAKERoff of the little less menu,

00:34SPEAKERand it was enough food for most of the day.

00:36SPEAKER- So I went camping one time,

00:39SPEAKERand when we were coming back,

00:41SPEAKERwe stopped at a Black Bear,

00:43SPEAKER'cause it was the first thing we saw

00:45SPEAKERafter we got back to civilization.

00:46SPEAKERWe were like, "I could go for some breakfast,"

00:48SPEAKERand we were like, "Yeah, breakfast sounds good."

00:50SPEAKERAnd it was the only time I've ever gone to that place,

00:53SPEAKERand I was like, "Yes, this is an appropriate amount of food."

00:55SPEAKERFor people who don't know, Black Bear Diners,

00:57SPEAKERI think it's a Northern California chain.

00:59SPEAKER- Oh, it's a chain, okay.

01:00SPEAKER- And it's like Denny's, but enormous portions,

01:04SPEAKERand they have chicken fried steak and stuff like that too,

01:07SPEAKERI think, if you wanna live dangerously.

01:09SPEAKER- Steve said he almost ordered that,

01:11SPEAKERand then he saw somebody else's order of it

01:12SPEAKERand was extremely glad he did not.

01:14SPEAKER- It's an enormous amount of food.

01:16SPEAKERLike everything you get, like even the kids' portions,

01:18SPEAKERbut when we were, when my daughter was very young

01:21SPEAKERand we were starting to take her out places,

01:23SPEAKERbreakfast places are good places to take little kids,

01:25SPEAKER'cause they're usually a little noisy,

01:27SPEAKERand especially in the evening, you go to a breakfast place,

01:30SPEAKERif there's a kid screaming, nobody's gonna flip out.

01:32SPEAKERAnd I would often get,

01:34SPEAKERwe would often get three kids' menu items there,

01:37SPEAKERbecause it was so much food.

01:39SPEAKER- Uh-huh, that seems appropriate.

01:40SPEAKERAnyway. - Yeah.

01:41SPEAKERBut what'd you think of the flea market?

01:42SPEAKERThat's the real question.

01:43SPEAKER- Pretty much lived up to expectations.

01:45SPEAKERI'm gonna say maybe the ratio of,

01:47SPEAKERI don't mean this in a pejorative way,

01:49SPEAKERbut the ratio of old man electronics

01:51SPEAKERto the type of electronics I was looking for

01:54SPEAKERwas maybe a little more skewed than I expected, but-

01:56SPEAKER- Look, I think that the split between old man electronics

02:02SPEAKERand shit you were interested in is entirely defined by you.

02:05SPEAKERAnd to some of the people there,

02:07SPEAKERwe were looking at the old man electronics.

02:09SPEAKER- Also fair.

02:09SPEAKERWell, actually, hang on,

02:10SPEAKERbut also the most heartwarming thing

02:13SPEAKERI saw at that entire thing.

02:14SPEAKEROkay, it was like, I'm gonna say it was like 70/30,

02:17SPEAKERlike oscilloscopes and old audio equipment

02:21SPEAKERand ham radio type stuff to like more modern computing stuff.

02:24SPEAKER- There were like some fab injector stuff.

02:27SPEAKERThere's a lot of ham radio stuff.

02:29SPEAKER- Yeah.

02:29SPEAKER- There's a lot of like mystery electronics thing

02:32SPEAKERthat probably came out

02:33SPEAKERof some semi-industrial factory type place.

02:36SPEAKER- Yes, but all that said, there was a table of MacBooks.

02:40SPEAKERThere was a table of old Intel NUCs.

02:42SPEAKERThere was, what else?

02:44SPEAKERThere was like a table of video.

02:45SPEAKER- Old consoles, yeah.

02:46SPEAKER- Game consoles, yeah.

02:47SPEAKERThere was stuff like that around.

02:48SPEAKERAnyway, the most heartwarming thing I saw

02:50SPEAKERat this whole thing was a prepubescent kid,

02:53SPEAKERmaybe 10 years old, digging through a box of mice

02:56SPEAKERthat were like at least as old as him,

02:58SPEAKERat least as old as him.

02:59SPEAKER- What was he looking for?

03:00SPEAKERDid you find out?

03:01SPEAKER- I don't know what he was looking for,

03:02SPEAKERbut he acted like he knew and was familiar

03:04SPEAKERwith everything he was looking at and was extremely excited.

03:07SPEAKERHe was so stoked.

03:08SPEAKERI was just like, I was like, man,

03:10SPEAKERmaybe the youth are all right.

03:11SPEAKER- He was looking for that,

03:12SPEAKERhe was looking for that Intel mouse explorer 3.0,

03:16SPEAKERthe last good mouse.

03:17SPEAKER- I think he had an Intel mouse in his hand.

03:19SPEAKERActually, when he was getting all excited,

03:20SPEAKERhis dad sounded like he was telling him like,

03:23SPEAKERokay, you can't get all of them.

03:24SPEAKERIt was like, all right, you need to pick one or two.

03:26SPEAKER- I liked, there's a woman in the back

03:29SPEAKERwho last time we were there told us her mom

03:31SPEAKERworked on the Quantum Bigfoot,

03:33SPEAKERwhich was, if you don't remember,

03:34SPEAKERQuantum in the '90s was like,

03:37SPEAKERwhat if instead of making hard drives three and a half inches

03:39SPEAKERwe made them fit in the five and a quarter inch bay

03:41SPEAKERso they hold more stuff?

03:43SPEAKER- Oh wait, that's what the Bigfoot was?

03:44SPEAKER- That's why it was called the Bigfoot.

03:46SPEAKER- Oh man.

03:46SPEAKER- It fit in the big bay.

03:48SPEAKER- I have to look at a picture of this.

03:49SPEAKER- It was big.

03:50SPEAKERIt looks like a three and a half inch drive,

03:51SPEAKERbut wider and longer.

03:54SPEAKER- That's a large hard drive.

03:55SPEAKER- It was a big hard drive.

03:56SPEAKERIt wasn't great.

03:57SPEAKERIt was really, really slow, if I recall,

03:58SPEAKERbecause the extra mass on the platter

04:00SPEAKERmade it not spin as fast as,

04:02SPEAKERI can't remember the details,

04:03SPEAKERbut they were bad drives, okay?

04:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I believe it.

04:08SPEAKER- But this week, this month,

04:09SPEAKERshe had just like a shipping box for hard drives

04:14SPEAKERfilled with, they were mostly one and two terabyte drives

04:19SPEAKERat this point, which it's just on the realm of like,

04:22SPEAKERis this a value or is this e-waste at this point?

04:26SPEAKERIt's right on the cusp of becoming e-waste to me.

04:29SPEAKER- I'm gonna say most of the stuff

04:30SPEAKERfrom the last 15 years there was right on that cusp.

04:33SPEAKER- Well, I mean that laptop, the laptop vendor

04:37SPEAKERwho's I think almost always there

04:39SPEAKERwith refurbed Lenovo and MacBooks

04:44SPEAKERand a couple of Dell like XPS machines,

04:46SPEAKERbut there were a ton of really nice ThinkBooks,

04:50SPEAKERlike eight gig, eight gig,

04:52SPEAKERseventh, eighth, ninth generation ThinkBooks

04:55SPEAKERthat would have been fantastic

04:56SPEAKERif you wanted like a Linux workstation

04:59SPEAKERfor your main Linux driver.

05:01SPEAKER- For sure.

05:02SPEAKER- So yeah, it was good, it was good.

05:04SPEAKERI bought some Kapton tape.

05:06SPEAKERI bought a roll of Kapton tape for $2.

05:08SPEAKER- I thought it was funny that you just got something

05:09SPEAKERthat you could get anywhere.

05:10SPEAKERLike that place also just serves as like,

05:11SPEAKERhey, here's your electronic supply if you need it.

05:14SPEAKERThis is not just old artifacts and interesting curiosities.

05:17SPEAKERIt was also just supplies.

05:19SPEAKER- Well, except the Kapton tape,

05:21SPEAKERa $3 roll of that thickness of Kapton tape is pretty cheap.

05:25SPEAKERLike usually that would be five or six bucks.

05:27SPEAKERSo I got a half price.

05:28SPEAKERI felt pretty good about that.

05:29SPEAKER- Yes, but it's a far cry

05:30SPEAKERfrom the Apple new products flyer from the Apple III era

05:35SPEAKERthat one of our friends bought for like $2.

05:37SPEAKER- That was pretty good, that was pretty good.

05:39SPEAKERI did flip through the laser discs.

05:41SPEAKERThere was a guy there selling laser discs and LPs,

05:44SPEAKERno QED discs, sorry.

05:47SPEAKERHe also had some other interesting artifacts

05:49SPEAKERfrom the BBS era, Brad, anything you'd like to share?

05:53SPEAKER- I don't wanna talk about it.

05:54SPEAKER- Brad, what did you get?

05:55SPEAKER- I guess I should talk about it.

05:56SPEAKER- You gotta talk about it for science.

05:57SPEAKERYou can't deduct it from your taxes if you don't.

05:59SPEAKER- Yeah, so I'm gonna deduct the $2 that it's cost.

06:03SPEAKERI was peer pressured into buying

06:04SPEAKERa compact disc read-only memory.

06:07SPEAKER- Yes, what is on it?

06:08SPEAKERIs it music?

06:09SPEAKERThat was often on, or a video game?

06:11SPEAKER- Called Combined Fantasies 2B.

06:13SPEAKER- Oh, what, like, is it like a fantasy game collection

06:16SPEAKERor some sort of like Zork,

06:17SPEAKERlike a bunch of text games from the early '90s?

06:20SPEAKER- You know, it's still in the shrink wrap,

06:21SPEAKERso I couldn't tell you.

06:22SPEAKER- Well, what is the picture on the cover of?

06:24SPEAKER- It appears to be a CD of vintage erotica

06:27SPEAKERfrom the mid '90s.

06:28SPEAKER- Wow, why would anybody have that on a CD?

06:30SPEAKERThat's a weird thing to do.

06:31SPEAKER- It says right here on the cover, 1024 by 768 images.

06:35SPEAKER- Wow, I would have had to scroll

06:37SPEAKERfor the monitor I had in the '90s.

06:38SPEAKER- On the back, fantasy CD-ROM, easy to use,

06:41SPEAKERall images in Super VGA resolution,

06:44SPEAKERscanned from original 35 millimeter slides,

06:46SPEAKERPC, Windows 3.1, 95, and Mac.

06:49SPEAKER- So you bought a disc compilation

06:53SPEAKERof vintage '90s SVGA porn?

06:58SPEAKER- That's more or less, like I said,

07:00SPEAKERit's more erotica than porn, it looks like.

07:03SPEAKER- Wow, I'm assuming you've opened this, or not so much?

07:06SPEAKER- No, it's still in the shrink wrap.

07:07SPEAKERI looked at it and laughed at it and walked off,

07:10SPEAKERand then I told you guys about it,

07:11SPEAKERand all of you were like, you have to go buy that.

07:13SPEAKER- Yeah, we did peer pressure you pretty hard.

07:16SPEAKER- The real reason I got it,

07:17SPEAKERand the reason I think I will not open it,

07:18SPEAKER'cause I don't want to ruin the shrink wrap,

07:20SPEAKERis because all the stickers on it are on the shrink wrap,

07:22SPEAKERand that's the reason I bought it.

07:23SPEAKER- What do the stickers say?

07:25SPEAKER- There's a shiny sticker that says,

07:26SPEAKERuser certified friendly.

07:28SPEAKER- Okay.

07:29SPEAKER- Or certified, well, the way, okay.

07:31SPEAKERI guess it's meant to be read certified user friendly,

07:33SPEAKERbut the way it's written is top to bottom, anyway.

07:35SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

07:36SPEAKERThe much better one though is, special, BBS ready.

07:41SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I love my BBS ready vintage SVGA porn.

07:45SPEAKER- It's on that sticker, there's a little dollar sign,

07:47SPEAKERas if these stickers are frequently used,

07:49SPEAKERand they would have normally written the price in there

07:51SPEAKERback in the day.

07:51SPEAKER- It's worth mentioning the cover image is a topless lady.

07:54SPEAKER- It is, yes, I should, I should.

07:56SPEAKERBut it was really that BBS ready sticker that I was like,

07:59SPEAKERokay, I can't not get this.

08:00SPEAKERThis is such a bizarre artifact of early nineties,

08:03SPEAKERlike pre-internet online culture.

08:05SPEAKERDoes BBS even count as online culture?

08:08SPEAKER- You have to dial in.

08:10SPEAKER- That's kind of all, you are on a line technically?

08:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I think, look, this is the kind of CD material

08:16SPEAKERthat gave AOL a foothold in America, right?

08:19SPEAKERLike BBS is all, I didn't spend a lot of time on BBSs,

08:23SPEAKERbut the ones that I did, I know the friends of mine

08:25SPEAKERthat did, I know downloaded incredible amounts

08:27SPEAKERof pornography from them.

08:29SPEAKER- I believe that.

08:30SPEAKER- 'Cause you'd go over to their house

08:31SPEAKERand then they'd show you stuff that was like,

08:32SPEAKERoh no, I don't want to see, this is scoring my fragile mind.

08:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

08:36SPEAKER- So yeah, well, congratulations.

08:38SPEAKER- Thank you, I knew some people with stuff like that,

08:39SPEAKERthat the two BBSs in our local calling range

08:43SPEAKERwere not that type of BBS.

08:45SPEAKER- Yeah, probably not.

08:46SPEAKER- Yeah, honestly though, the main reason I got this

08:48SPEAKERis just like, I never actually thought about like,

08:50SPEAKERwhere did the material on BBSs come from back then?

08:52SPEAKERLike, how were these things distributed?

08:53SPEAKERWhere were you going to get this as a SysOp back in the day?

08:57SPEAKER- I think if people have leads on more SVGA,

09:01SPEAKERearly 90s BBS pornography, please send them to Brad.

09:04SPEAKER- Oh, unnecessary, completely unnecessary

09:06SPEAKERbecause this inspired me to go search archive.org

09:09SPEAKERto see if this is the type of thing people back up

09:12SPEAKERand preserve because really sitting here looking at it,

09:15SPEAKERI was like, you know, maybe the only actual use of this

09:17SPEAKERis maybe I should put it on archive.org.

09:19SPEAKER- Yeah.

09:20SPEAKER- There are a bajillion of these things on archive.org.

09:22SPEAKER- There we go.

09:23SPEAKER- Like CD ISOs, scans of the disc and the cover,

09:25SPEAKERjust like, I don't know, man.

09:27SPEAKERI'm not sure this is a world I want to step into.

09:30SPEAKER- Look, we're, they archive it all,

09:33SPEAKERwhether it's good, bad, right, wrong, morally sound

09:36SPEAKERagainst the Christian minority,

09:39SPEAKERit all needs to be archived, Brad.

09:40SPEAKERArchive it all.

09:41SPEAKER(upbeat music)

10:00SPEAKER(upbeat music)

10:09SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made of Tech Pod, I'm Will.

10:12SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

10:13SPEAKER- Hello.

10:14SPEAKER- Hi, I feel, I feel exposed.

10:16SPEAKERI feel, look, we shouldn't have discussed that.

10:18SPEAKERThat should have just gone into the closet

10:20SPEAKERand never to be spoken of again.

10:22SPEAKER- You've gotten a lot of weight off your shoulders.

10:24SPEAKERI, you know, I, you can't put in the closet

10:27SPEAKERin the room with the pigs is all I ask.

10:29SPEAKERThey can't be exposed to such filth.

10:31SPEAKER- That's fair.

10:32SPEAKERI want to make the show art that BBS ready sticker,

10:34SPEAKERbut like you said, the rest of the cover is not,

10:36SPEAKERI guess I could blur it.

10:37SPEAKER- Just put a couple of, put a couple of pink stars over,

10:40SPEAKERover the important bits.

10:42SPEAKER- Okay, I guess, I guess like the 90s vintage effect

10:45SPEAKERwould be to just make a hard oval

10:47SPEAKERand just use the blur tool on that.

10:50SPEAKERJust like a really, a really bad Photoshop

10:52SPEAKERor like an MS Paint effect.

10:54SPEAKER- Or like if it was later in the 90s,

10:56SPEAKERit would be a giant moving thing put on with a video toaster

11:00SPEAKERthat says too hot for TV.

11:03SPEAKERAnd then it would be advertised at night during South Park.

11:05SPEAKER- Yes, yeah.

11:06SPEAKERThe thing I'm really excited about now

11:08SPEAKERis going to the vintage computer festival in a few months.

11:10SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

11:11SPEAKER- Actually, it's not that far away.

11:12SPEAKER- It's next month.

11:13SPEAKER- No, it's August.

11:14SPEAKER- Oh, I thought it was July.

11:15SPEAKERMaybe it's the pinball thing in June.

11:19SPEAKER- That one's going to be bad.

11:20SPEAKER- Yeah.

11:21SPEAKER- Because if there's old paraphernalia from like sun

11:23SPEAKERor next or some of those big heavy iron workstation companies

11:28SPEAKERfrom the 90s there, I'm going to have our time resisting

11:30SPEAKERbuying something like that.

11:31SPEAKER- Last month, there was a guy that had an SGI

11:33SPEAKERthat was kind of banged up on O2, I think.

11:37SPEAKERBut there wasn't as much old, old.

11:41SPEAKERThere wasn't as much old weird this time.

11:43SPEAKERIt was more, there were a ton of oscilloscopes.

11:45SPEAKERThere weren't as many oscilloscopes

11:46SPEAKERand like circuit testers and stuff this time as last time.

11:50SPEAKEROr last time as this time.

11:51SPEAKER- I think if I had one old computer

11:52SPEAKERthat would be like a white whale situation

11:54SPEAKERor that I would actually consider,

11:55SPEAKERit's probably a spark station.

11:56SPEAKERLike the pizza box.

11:57SPEAKER- Really, that over an Eric's box?

12:00SPEAKER- That's what our computer labs at school were full of

12:03SPEAKERback when I was in school.

12:05SPEAKERThat was our workstation in the computer lab.

12:07SPEAKER- With the trans-flective laser mice

12:08SPEAKERand the shiny mouse pad?

12:10SPEAKER- I don't think, no, I don't think so.

12:11SPEAKERI remember, I think they had just ball mice.

12:13SPEAKER- Oh, we had the ones with the laser mouse

12:17SPEAKERthat you had to put on the special pad

12:19SPEAKERbecause it reflected the light back in,

12:21SPEAKERit had to reflect the light back in the same direction

12:23SPEAKERevery time for the mouse to work.

12:24SPEAKER- Wow.

12:25SPEAKER- Yeah, it was very cool.

12:26SPEAKERWe weren't allowed to use them for anything

12:27SPEAKERbut writing C code.

12:29SPEAKER- Mm-hmm, I've said it before.

12:31SPEAKERI've still got the C++ that I wrote on the spark station.

12:34SPEAKER- That's bonkers.

12:36SPEAKERBrad, what are we doing today?

12:36SPEAKERIs it, it's the last episode of the month, I believe.

12:39SPEAKER- Yes, it's the most magical time of the month.

12:41SPEAKER- Traditionally, that means it is the time

12:42SPEAKERthat we turn your cues into RAs.

12:45SPEAKER- It's the question time.

12:46SPEAKER- Yeah, if you have a question,

12:47SPEAKERyou can send it to techpod@content.town

12:49SPEAKERor if you are a member of the Patreon and in the Discord,

12:52SPEAKERyou can go to the Q Question Seeking Answers channel

12:55SPEAKERand post your question there.

12:56SPEAKERWe'll be swallowed by the void

12:57SPEAKERand spit out 20, 29 to one days later

13:02SPEAKERin the form of a Google Drive document

13:07SPEAKERthat we then go through, read all the questions

13:10SPEAKERand select the ones that we wanna answer the most.

13:12SPEAKERWe did, we've noticed something lately though,

13:16SPEAKERwhich is that sometimes there are harder questions in here

13:19SPEAKERthan maybe you fit for a,

13:20SPEAKERhey, we're gonna spend five minutes

13:21SPEAKERtalking about this kind of episode.

13:23SPEAKERI think we're gonna start compiling those harder questions

13:26SPEAKERand maybe doing an occasional long questions,

13:30SPEAKERhard questions episode, long questions episode,

13:33SPEAKERI don't know.

13:33SPEAKER- Yeah, or questions that require more research, let's say.

13:36SPEAKER- Yeah.

13:37SPEAKER- Like some of these I can kind of speak to,

13:38SPEAKERbut not with enough authority to want to commit it to podcast.

13:42SPEAKER- Yeah, they might make a future potpourri episode,

13:45SPEAKERI guess is maybe the way to look at it.

13:47SPEAKERBut yeah, so if you have questions,

13:49SPEAKERif you wanna support the pod, you can join the Patreon,

13:51SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.

13:53SPEAKERIt's five bucks a month to get access to the Discord.

13:55SPEAKERIt's great, a lot of lovely people in there

13:57SPEAKERanswering questions about stuff like audio interfaces

14:00SPEAKERand compressors.

14:02SPEAKER- Yeah, shout out to Tim and Mike B

14:05SPEAKERfor their recent audio advice, for example.

14:08SPEAKER- But that's not what we're here for right now.

14:12SPEAKER- No.

14:12SPEAKER- We are here to turn cues into A's.

14:14SPEAKERBrad, what do you got?

14:15SPEAKER- That's right, that's right.

14:16SPEAKERWell, since we've been talking about question logistics,

14:18SPEAKERI'm going to start with this question from the Discord,

14:20SPEAKERfrom the xylotism.

14:23SPEAKERWe have an issue.

14:25SPEAKERThe firewall has been breached.

14:28SPEAKERI'm now staking out this channel in a pinned browser window

14:30SPEAKERso I can spy on all the questions forever,

14:34SPEAKERor as long as my browser doesn't refresh or kill the tab.

14:36SPEAKER- It's worth mentioning that you post the questions

14:39SPEAKERand the question disappear thing is not infallible.

14:42SPEAKERAnd if somebody is sitting there

14:43SPEAKERand staking out the channel,

14:44SPEAKERthey will see the questions indefinitely.

14:46SPEAKER- That's right, that's right.

14:48SPEAKER- We kind of envisioned it more as the kind of place

14:50SPEAKERthat you dip in and then just leave.

14:52SPEAKERAnd you know, it's, but you do you.

14:55SPEAKER- Yeah, well, you look,

14:56SPEAKERwe've provided the disclaimer many times,

14:58SPEAKERdon't put anything super private in there.

15:01SPEAKERIf there's something you really want only us to see,

15:03SPEAKERsend it to the email address, I guess we should say.

15:05SPEAKER- Yeah, that's probably the best way, us and Uncle Google.

15:10SPEAKER- Yes, it certainly is possible.

15:14SPEAKERThe people will see that stuff.

15:15SPEAKERAll right, Gerard or Gerard from the Netherlands?

15:20SPEAKERNot sure, is that a hard G?

15:22SPEAKER- I don't know how Dutch works with the Gs.

15:24SPEAKER- Dutch is Germanic enough,

15:25SPEAKERI believe that I'm guessing it's a hard G, but who can say?

15:28SPEAKERWhy do you guys like SCART so much?

15:30SPEAKERPlease explain.

15:31SPEAKERI don't know that I can claim to like SCART.

15:32SPEAKERI've never actually like seen it in person.

15:34SPEAKERI don't think I've ever touched a SCART connector

15:36SPEAKERon either end.

15:37SPEAKER- So the reason people liked SCART

15:40SPEAKERfrom like video game preservation people

15:42SPEAKERand old video game playing people in the modern era

15:46SPEAKERlike SCART, because it separates luma and chroma,

15:48SPEAKERlike S-video does.

15:51SPEAKER- Or even separates the individual colors as well, right?

15:54SPEAKERLike S-video is just chroma on one pin, I believe, right?

15:58SPEAKER- Yeah, it's chroma on one pin, luma on the other, right?

16:02SPEAKER- And SCART, yeah, like SCART component

16:04SPEAKERseparates the RGNB chroma onto each separate pins, right?

16:09SPEAKERI think this is right.

16:11SPEAKER- That is correct.

16:13SPEAKERI think, yeah, it does actually separate all three.

16:15SPEAKERSorry, yeah, it was, but SCART also can have component

16:18SPEAKERwith just Y and it's, SCART can be many different things

16:24SPEAKERdepending on what device you plug it into.

16:25SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

16:26SPEAKERIs SCART one of those,

16:27SPEAKERSCART's big in Europe, we should say.

16:28SPEAKERSo Europeans are probably yelling at the radio right now,

16:30SPEAKERlike some territories had tons of SCART.

16:33SPEAKERWe had none here, but is SCART the kind of thing

16:36SPEAKERwhere the SCART is the physical connector

16:37SPEAKERand like how it's wired and how the pin out is used

16:40SPEAKERis variable?

16:41SPEAKER- Yeah, so SCART is a 21 or 10 pin wired connector.

16:45SPEAKER- Okay.

16:46SPEAKER- It's a big, wide looking chunky thing.

16:48SPEAKERAnd depending on whether it's RGB or CVBS,

16:53SPEAKERit's 10 or 21 wires.

16:55SPEAKERSometimes it's bi-directional, oddly.

16:57SPEAKER- Oh, I just saw that recently.

17:00SPEAKERActually, I was generously gifted a RetroTINK 5X

17:02SPEAKERand in the manual it says,

17:04SPEAKERit takes both regular SCART, like RGB SCART,

17:06SPEAKERbut it also does, I think, composite over SCART as well.

17:10SPEAKER- The neat thing, I think, about most things

17:13SPEAKERis if you had SCART, you could get the...

17:15SPEAKERThe worst case was that you would get an S-video-like signal

17:18SPEAKERwhere you had luminance and chroma separated

17:20SPEAKERand it can go all the way up to component

17:22SPEAKERwhere it separates each color onto its own wire.

17:25SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think there are minor differences,

17:27SPEAKERbut this component and VGA, I think,

17:30SPEAKERare roughly equivalent to RGB over SCART, right?

17:34SPEAKER- Component.

17:35SPEAKER- Component, like the three analog RGB plugs and then VGA.

17:39SPEAKER- VGA separates the luminance and each color individually.

17:42SPEAKER- My understanding is those are all more or less the same

17:46SPEAKERin terms of the quality, like perceptual quality.

17:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

17:49SPEAKER- So any of those that you have should be fine.

17:51SPEAKERAnd in the case of SCART,

17:52SPEAKERthat's just what a lot of people use in the retro community

17:55SPEAKERbecause it was so big in Europe and because it...

17:57SPEAKER- It's the best case for analog output, is my understanding.

18:01SPEAKERIf you don't have component before component became common.

18:03SPEAKER- Yeah, they're not like pin or signal compatible though.

18:05SPEAKERLike I've been looking at, like the Mr. does VGA out

18:08SPEAKERand to do that, to convert that to SCART,

18:10SPEAKERyou need a cable that's got like a resistor in it.

18:12SPEAKERIt can't, it's not just a straight like wiring thing.

18:15SPEAKER- Weird.

18:15SPEAKER- I don't understand too much more about it than that,

18:17SPEAKERbut they're not exactly the same,

18:18SPEAKERbut they're pretty equivalent.

18:19SPEAKER- Analog stuff is weird.

18:21SPEAKER- It is.

18:23SPEAKER- It was also required in a lot of Europe,

18:25SPEAKERwhich is why it's common.

18:26SPEAKERLike in the US, we didn't have it and China didn't have it.

18:29SPEAKER- Man, I wish that had been more standardized.

18:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:32SPEAKER- But then I wouldn't get to do that fun CRT mod one day.

18:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:36SPEAKER- Dave and Sheffield, again from the emails,

18:39SPEAKERis mayonnaise chicken?

18:40SPEAKER- Yeah, got eggs.

18:42SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but I don't know.

18:43SPEAKERI just, I would be more inclined to say mayonnaise is eggs.

18:46SPEAKER- But eggs are eggs chicken?

18:48SPEAKER- The eggs are pretty chicken.

18:49SPEAKER- I mean, the eggs come out of a chicken.

18:51SPEAKER- That's not yet a chicken.

18:52SPEAKER- Chicken comes out of a chicken.

18:54SPEAKER- Not an egg, not yet a chicken.

18:56SPEAKER- Hmm.

18:57SPEAKER- That's my determination.

18:57SPEAKER- I bet if you're allergic to chicken,

18:59SPEAKERyou can't have mayonnaise.

19:01SPEAKER- You think?

19:02SPEAKER- I would think so.

19:03SPEAKER- Is there, I've never heard of a chicken allergy.

19:05SPEAKERIs that common?

19:05SPEAKER- I've never heard of a chicken allergy either.

19:07SPEAKERI was just hypothetically saying,

19:08SPEAKERI bet somebody who's allergic to chicken

19:10SPEAKERis also allergic to mayonnaise,

19:11SPEAKERthus making mayonnaise chicken.

19:12SPEAKER- Is mayonnaise egg whites or egg yolks?

19:14SPEAKER- Yolks.

19:15SPEAKER- Whites.

19:17SPEAKER- Whites?

19:18SPEAKER- I'm asking because mayonnaise looks like it would be whites

19:21SPEAKERbecause of the color of mayonnaise,

19:22SPEAKERbut I feel like it's the opposite.

19:23SPEAKERI feel like every time I look this up,

19:24SPEAKERI'm surprised to find that it's actually

19:26SPEAKERthe opposite of what I expect.

19:28SPEAKER- So it's funny, the first recipe on Google,

19:31SPEAKERwhich I don't know if I trust anymore,

19:33SPEAKERsays just use whole eggs instead of separating.

19:35SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

19:37SPEAKER- But it's oil and egg yolks, typically.

19:40SPEAKER- Yeah, and a fair amount of vinegar, right?

19:43SPEAKER- A little bit of vinegar or lemon, acid.

19:45SPEAKERYou need a little bit of acid to emulsify the oil

19:48SPEAKERand the yolk.

19:49SPEAKER- And also to make the raw eggs safe?

19:52SPEAKER- That's, no, raw eggs are safe.

19:54SPEAKERThe only problem with raw eggs is salmonella,

19:56SPEAKERwhich you get from contamination generally.

20:00SPEAKER'Cause the ones we eat now are processed and yeah.

20:06SPEAKERYou have to mess up to get salmonella

20:07SPEAKERfrom store-bought eggs.

20:10SPEAKER- Is that why eggs are so dodgy?

20:11SPEAKERBecause they're through, effectively,

20:13SPEAKERan industrial process at this point.

20:15SPEAKER- Yeah, so eggs, normally in lots of the world,

20:21SPEAKEReggs are not treated after they're picked

20:24SPEAKERfrom the chicken coops.

20:26SPEAKERSo the outsides of the eggs are unclean

20:29SPEAKERand you have to be careful.

20:30SPEAKERYou have to wash your hands and stuff after handling them.

20:32SPEAKERIn the US, we run them through a whole process

20:34SPEAKERthat takes the membrane off of the outside.

20:37SPEAKERAnd that means that they have to be refrigerated

20:40SPEAKERafter that process happens.

20:41SPEAKERIt's why if you get chickens in lots of Asia,

20:45SPEAKEReggs in lots of Asia, you don't have to have them.

20:49SPEAKERThey can just sit on the counter and it's fine.

20:51SPEAKER- Interesting.

20:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

20:52SPEAKER- The more you know about eggs.

20:55SPEAKERJosh from Colorado,

20:57SPEAKER"Why does turning it off and on again fix everything?

21:00SPEAKERI've done tech support for years

21:01SPEAKERand never actually had a definitive answer to that.

21:03SPEAKERJust some theories.

21:05SPEAKERPS, pro tip.

21:06SPEAKERIf you need a customer to check if something is plugged in,

21:08SPEAKERask them to check both sides of the power cable

21:10SPEAKERfor corrosion.

21:12SPEAKERIt lets them save face without admitting

21:14SPEAKERthat the computer wasn't actually plugged in."

21:16SPEAKER- It's the best tip I've ever heard, just to be clear.

21:18SPEAKER- That's pretty good. - It's incredible.

21:19SPEAKERHaving worked help desks for years.

21:21SPEAKER- That's pretty good.

21:22SPEAKER- And gotten the, okay, dipshit.

21:24SPEAKEROf course the computer's plugged in a million times

21:26SPEAKERand then it's not plugged in.

21:28SPEAKER- Yeah.

21:29SPEAKER- It's very good.

21:29SPEAKER- There's some very good soft social engineering.

21:32SPEAKER- The answer is you get a clean state, right?

21:35SPEAKERSo you start from zero.

21:36SPEAKER- Yeah, it reinitializes everything

21:37SPEAKERthat might have gotten, you know, munged up

21:40SPEAKERsince the last time it initialized.

21:42SPEAKER- Yeah, so if you have some component in your machine

21:44SPEAKERthat's hung up on something or that's not talking

21:48SPEAKERto the others in the right way

21:49SPEAKERor one of the buses is jammed up or whatever,

21:52SPEAKERturning the power off stops the electrons,

21:53SPEAKERturning them back on starts them up again.

21:55SPEAKERThis is why if we ever get those magical chips

21:58SPEAKERthat hold the electrons in place

21:59SPEAKERwhen there's no current applied,

22:01SPEAKERwe're gonna be really screwed.

22:02SPEAKERWe'll have to come up with a whole new way to restart those.

22:03SPEAKER- Huh, I didn't know such a thing existed

22:06SPEAKERor is that all theoretical still at this point?

22:08SPEAKER- Theoretical still.

22:09SPEAKER- Got it.

22:11SPEAKERI assume that it's kind of a related or relatedly

22:15SPEAKERthis is why games tend to like if you die

22:18SPEAKERor reload a checkpoint,

22:19SPEAKERthey go through the entire load again more often than not

22:23SPEAKER'cause you're kind of just restarting the entire loop or.

22:25SPEAKER- Yeah, a lot of the time you're like,

22:27SPEAKERif you're talking about, depends on how the games work.

22:30SPEAKERLike if there's a state,

22:31SPEAKERif it's restoring the state of the game,

22:33SPEAKERit often has to go back and load from the very beginning

22:35SPEAKER'cause you can't just roll back.

22:37SPEAKERThere's exceptions, like I'm thinking,

22:39SPEAKERI feel like I wanna say Meat Boy, but I'm not sure.

22:42SPEAKERI feel like they did some novel stuff there

22:45SPEAKERto be able to roll back the state rather than.

22:48SPEAKERBut like when you're talking about using an unreal demo,

22:52SPEAKERlike a demo record where you record the state of the game,

22:55SPEAKERoften you can only go forward.

22:57SPEAKERThis was a problem we had a lot with Foo.

22:59SPEAKERIt took us a fair amount of work to overcome

23:02SPEAKERso that we could do scrubbing forwards and backwards

23:04SPEAKERon Foo Show episodes and stuff like that.

23:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it's all kind of academic now

23:07SPEAKERthat load times have gotten so fast.

23:08SPEAKERIt's not really noticeable anymore,

23:10SPEAKERbut for years, especially in the PS4 era

23:13SPEAKERwas the worst of storage still slow,

23:16SPEAKERbut the size of assets needing to be loaded

23:19SPEAKERballooned enormously exponentially

23:21SPEAKERwhere you would walk five feet from the checkpoint

23:23SPEAKERand then hit reload

23:24SPEAKERand it would still have to go through

23:25SPEAKERthe entire minute long reload again.

23:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you're talking about Skyrim,

23:29SPEAKERI think probably, right?

23:30SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't really any big open world game like that

23:32SPEAKERwhere it felt like it should have cashed all the assets,

23:34SPEAKERbut you still had to wait through the whole thing again.

23:36SPEAKER- Some were better than others.

23:37SPEAKERI think a lot of times now on the engine level,

23:40SPEAKERI don't know if this is something you have to fool with,

23:42SPEAKERbut a lot of times it'll save the assets

23:44SPEAKERand the game state separate

23:46SPEAKERif you set up your project right.

23:48SPEAKER- I remember getting all excited

23:49SPEAKERat the first big technical talk

23:51SPEAKERthat Mark Cerny gave about the PS5,

23:52SPEAKERlike before they had even like really announced the console,

23:55SPEAKERwhich incidentally was a really weird giant bomb talk over

23:58SPEAKER'cause it was like,

23:59SPEAKER"Oh my God, they're gonna talk about the PS5

24:00SPEAKERfor the first time."

24:01SPEAKERAnd then it proceeded to be an intensely technical hour

24:03SPEAKERof Cerny talking about things

24:05SPEAKERthat most of the audience couldn't care less about.

24:08SPEAKER- Was that a GDC?

24:10SPEAKER- It might've been adjacent to GDC.

24:11SPEAKERI think it was their own event

24:12SPEAKER'cause they live streamed it.

24:13SPEAKERIt was kind of something they promoted.

24:15SPEAKERAnyway, part of that talk,

24:17SPEAKER'cause this was before the console had the fast storage

24:19SPEAKERas just like a feature everybody was used to.

24:22SPEAKERNobody was even expecting that to be a thing.

24:24SPEAKERA big part of his pitch was like,

24:25SPEAKER"Hey,"

24:26SPEAKERespecially 'cause they put the custom decompression hardware

24:28SPEAKERin the PS5 that's supposed to speed stuff up even more.

24:30SPEAKERThe big part of his pitch was like,

24:32SPEAKER"Hey, we'll be able to stream assets off the storage

24:34SPEAKERas fast as you can pan a camera,

24:36SPEAKERlike in a first person game."

24:37SPEAKERSo like, "Hey, you'll be able to have

24:39SPEAKERan environment around you that is entirely populated

24:41SPEAKERby unique assets, no repeating of anything."

24:43SPEAKER- And your view frustum can be the camera.

24:45SPEAKERWhat's displayed on camera?

24:47SPEAKER- And we can stream assets faster

24:49SPEAKERthan we have to worry about predicting

24:51SPEAKERwhich way you're randomly gonna look.

24:53SPEAKERAnd then the cap on that turned out to not be

24:55SPEAKERthe speed of the storage,

24:57SPEAKERbut the ability of human beings to generate enough assets

25:01SPEAKERto populate a world like that.

25:03SPEAKERLike it's insane.

25:04SPEAKERIt's impossible to pay people to generate enough assets

25:07SPEAKERto make an entire world full of unique assets.

25:10SPEAKER- Fractal complexity is hard, it turns out.

25:12SPEAKERWho knew?

25:13SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway.

25:15SPEAKERDiscord question from Brian.

25:17SPEAKERI work as a systems administrator,

25:18SPEAKERand the other day I was cleaning out an ancient cabinet

25:20SPEAKERin my server room where I found hundreds of copies

25:24SPEAKERof Windows NT 4.0, NT Server 95,

25:27SPEAKERand three sealed big boxes of Office 97.

25:31SPEAKERWhat would you do with these

25:32SPEAKERaside from disposing of them appropriately?

25:36SPEAKER- So people kept the stuff

25:38SPEAKERbecause the small software business administration

25:41SPEAKERor whatever, the people that used to hit you up

25:43SPEAKERfor license compliance fees to be like,

25:47SPEAKER"Hey, all your stuff's nice and legal, right?"

25:54SPEAKERThey told you you had to keep all this nonsense

25:56SPEAKER'cause there weren't like COAs or anything back then.

25:59SPEAKERSo you'd just get the disk.

26:01SPEAKERLike Windows, I guess NT 4 probably had a code.

26:04SPEAKER- I think so.

26:06SPEAKER- And 95 had a code.

26:08SPEAKERYeah, 95 had a code.

26:09SPEAKER- I feel like I should remember that.

26:10SPEAKER- OSR 2 definitely had codes

26:11SPEAKER'cause you couldn't just download OSR 2.

26:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

26:14SPEAKER- It had activation.

26:15SPEAKERSo yeah, I don't know what you do with those.

26:19SPEAKERMy guess is that they're not rare.

26:21SPEAKERLike finding sealed boxes of Office 97

26:23SPEAKERprobably is not unusual at this point.

26:25SPEAKERBut if it is, maybe call the Computer History Museum

26:29SPEAKERand find out if somebody wants a sealed box of Windows 97

26:33SPEAKERbefore you e-waste it or recycle it.

26:36SPEAKER- Here's a sealed copy of Office 97 Professional

26:38SPEAKERon eBay for 60 bucks.

26:39SPEAKERSo not like super duper hard to come by.

26:43SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think it's a weird spot

26:45SPEAKERwhere the people who would have had this stuff.

26:48SPEAKERLike we saw a couple of these,

26:49SPEAKERlike there was somebody with a complete set

26:51SPEAKERof Visual Studio 97 box down there

26:55SPEAKERthat was unopened this weekend.

26:57SPEAKERAnd we looked at it and we're like,

26:58SPEAKERI don't think I want that.

27:01SPEAKERSo yeah, I don't know.

27:03SPEAKERI bought Visual Studio 97 with my own money

27:07SPEAKERwhen I was in college and it was shipped to my house.

27:10SPEAKER- That can't have been cheap.

27:11SPEAKER- It was expensive.

27:13SPEAKERAnd so I was like, I'm going to write some software,

27:16SPEAKERexpecting it to teach me how to write the software.

27:19SPEAKERAnd it did not teach me how to write the software.

27:21SPEAKER- I have bad news for all of computing at that time.

27:24SPEAKER- I felt every bit as ashamed of spending that much money

27:27SPEAKERon that piece of software as you did

27:29SPEAKERabout your SVGA porn CD, Brent.

27:32SPEAKER- Yes.

27:33SPEAKER- I hid it under my bed.

27:34SPEAKER- As one should.

27:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

27:36SPEAKER- I was talking to somebody on the Discord this morning

27:37SPEAKERabout both of our attempts

27:39SPEAKERto install Slackware Linux in like '98.

27:42SPEAKERSame thing, exact same thing.

27:44SPEAKERIt's not necessarily easy to come by help

27:46SPEAKERfor complicated computer stuff in the late '90s.

27:48SPEAKER- I feel like I got Slackware installed

27:50SPEAKERoff of a boot magazine article,

27:53SPEAKERbut like a lot of stuff didn't work, right?

27:55SPEAKERLike sound never worked, right?

27:57SPEAKER- Yeah, in my case, I downloaded and installed from floppy,

28:00SPEAKERbut then once I did that,

28:01SPEAKERI had no idea how to set up the PPP connection

28:03SPEAKERto the internet, to my ISP, my dial-up ISP.

28:06SPEAKERSo how was I going to get more help

28:07SPEAKERwith this now inert computer with no connectivity on it?

28:10SPEAKER- Well, you disconnected, you rebooted into Windows,

28:13SPEAKERand then you looked up your help and then you booted back,

28:15SPEAKERand you had a lot of free time back then.

28:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:18SPEAKEROkay, this is an interesting one.

28:20SPEAKERAmbush Penguin Charlie.

28:22SPEAKERWhen you drive to someone's house,

28:23SPEAKERdo you park in their driveway?

28:24SPEAKERWhy or why not?

28:26SPEAKERI will park in the driveway,

28:27SPEAKERbut I'm Midwestern enough

28:28SPEAKERto also feel some strange guilt about it.

28:30SPEAKERI never thought to feel guilty about this.

28:33SPEAKER- So like when I grew up in Tennessee,

28:36SPEAKERpeople had big driveways, right?

28:38SPEAKERIt's like a small lot is a quarter of an acre,

28:41SPEAKERhalf an acre, right?

28:43SPEAKERAnd if you've grown a farm someplace,

28:45SPEAKERof course you park in the driveway

28:46SPEAKERbecause they have a big circle or loop

28:48SPEAKERor something that you pull through.

28:51SPEAKERHere, I often will park and block somebody's driveway.

28:54SPEAKERIf I'm going to somebody's house in the city

28:56SPEAKERand I know it's just me going over there,

28:58SPEAKERI'll absolutely park them in

29:00SPEAKERand block them from coming out of their garage,

29:03SPEAKERbut I wouldn't ever park in the driveway

29:05SPEAKERblocking the sidewalk or whatever.

29:08SPEAKERIt's like, this is a different rules situation, I think.

29:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess so.

29:13SPEAKERIn our case, like we would always just move cars

29:15SPEAKERif necessary.

29:16SPEAKERIt's like if somebody needed to get out

29:17SPEAKERand especially if it was a big gathering,

29:19SPEAKERthat was inevitable anyway.

29:21SPEAKERSomebody would always,

29:22SPEAKERsomebody who had gotten there early

29:23SPEAKERwould always want to leave earlier

29:24SPEAKERand then you'd have to go out and move your car

29:26SPEAKERso they could get out and stuff.

29:28SPEAKER- Well, and like,

29:29SPEAKERI went to one of my daughter's friend's house the other day

29:31SPEAKERwho lives on a kind of steep private drive.

29:34SPEAKERLike there's like five houses

29:35SPEAKERon this privately maintained driveway

29:38SPEAKERand it was windy.

29:40SPEAKERThere's a cliff on one side.

29:42SPEAKERThere were a bunch of big flower beds

29:44SPEAKERand a wall on the other side.

29:45SPEAKERIt was really scary.

29:46SPEAKERI would have happily parked at the bottom and walked up

29:48SPEAKERhad I known what the turning around situation

29:50SPEAKERwas gonna be like at the top of that one.

29:52SPEAKERHere's my question, Brad,

29:53SPEAKERis will you back into somebody else's driveway

29:55SPEAKERto turn around?

29:57SPEAKERLike if they're sitting there, their garage door's open,

29:59SPEAKERthey're hanging out watching football or something

30:01SPEAKERand they're in there.

30:02SPEAKER- People you don't know?

30:03SPEAKER- Yeah, people I don't know.

30:04SPEAKER- Oh no, definitely not.

30:05SPEAKER- Yeah, see me either.

30:06SPEAKER- Even if it didn't look like they were even home,

30:07SPEAKERI would still feel weird about it.

30:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't, I'm like if,

30:10SPEAKERif like the motion light turns on in their garage,

30:13SPEAKERI'm gonna be mortified.

30:14SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

30:15SPEAKERI don't think I can't use somebody's driveway

30:16SPEAKERthat I don't know without permission.

30:18SPEAKER- Yeah, no.

30:19SPEAKER- Fernando asks, what are your evergreen games,

30:22SPEAKERmovies, books, et cetera,

30:23SPEAKERyou keep going back to over and over?

30:25SPEAKER- Oh man, I still play Spelunky 2.

30:28SPEAKER- Oh.

30:29SPEAKER- Probably twice a week.

30:29SPEAKER- I feel like that didn't quite catch

30:31SPEAKERthe way the first one did.

30:32SPEAKER- It was, I think the end game for that was insane.

30:40SPEAKER- Like unreasonable?

30:41SPEAKER- Yeah, like beating Yama was a thing people could do,

30:44SPEAKERbut all the shit that you have to do

30:45SPEAKERto actually beat that game was,

30:47SPEAKERmost sane people looked at and were like,

30:49SPEAKERoh no, I'm never gonna spend 10 hours doing this.

30:51SPEAKER- Okay, that kind of helps explain

30:53SPEAKERwhy I felt like I never heard anybody

30:54SPEAKERtalk about the end of that game.

30:55SPEAKER'Cause nobody did it.

30:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I play a lot of roguelikes as comfort.

31:00SPEAKERLike I played Dead Cells and Hades,

31:02SPEAKERbut like on the reg,

31:04SPEAKERjust 'cause I can always pick those games up

31:06SPEAKERand have a nice time.

31:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't really tend to revisit stuff all that much.

31:10SPEAKERLike I did a rewatch of Star Trek,

31:12SPEAKERThe Next Generation in 2015,

31:14SPEAKERwhich God help me was almost a decade ago now.

31:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

31:18SPEAKER- But that's, I rarely ever do the same thing twice

31:21SPEAKERjust because I'm constantly having

31:22SPEAKERto consume other stuff or work.

31:25SPEAKER- I often, like if I'm having trouble sleeping or something,

31:29SPEAKERI'll often put on like a movie that I've seen 100 times,

31:33SPEAKERlike an old Marvel movie or Clone Wars

31:36SPEAKERor something like that.

31:37SPEAKER- Actually, I do have a couple of books recently.

31:38SPEAKERThis is super weird and random.

31:39SPEAKERI started limiting myself to a Kindle when I go to bed.

31:44SPEAKERI stopped bringing screens to bed.

31:46SPEAKER- It's a good policy.

31:47SPEAKER- Which I think has probably helped the quality of my sleep.

31:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

31:50SPEAKER- The problem I found was that if I was reading a new book

31:52SPEAKERthat I hadn't read before that I wanted to absorb and enjoy,

31:56SPEAKERnot a great way to get through a book.

31:58SPEAKERIt's not a great way to get through a book

31:59SPEAKERto read like five to 10 pages tops a night

32:01SPEAKERand be falling asleep during the last two to three pages.

32:04SPEAKERIt makes it take two months to get through a book

32:06SPEAKERand you kind of have a weird fuzzy perception

32:09SPEAKERof what you read, you know,

32:10SPEAKER'cause your brain is shutting down as you're reading it.

32:13SPEAKER- Oh, that's interesting.

32:14SPEAKER- So lately this was super random.

32:17SPEAKERIt's just what was on my Kindle that I had read before.

32:20SPEAKERI've been bouncing back and forth

32:21SPEAKERbetween the old sixties historical tome

32:25SPEAKERof the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

32:27SPEAKER- Wow.

32:28SPEAKER- Which I got free on Amazon, whatever.

32:30SPEAKERWhat's the...

32:31SPEAKER- Oh, Prime reading or whatever.

32:32SPEAKER- Yeah, whatever they call their Kindle service.

32:36SPEAKERAnd the "Star Wars" episode three,

32:38SPEAKER"Revenge of the Sith" novelization.

32:40SPEAKER- Wow.

32:40SPEAKER- It just happened to be two things on my Kindle

32:42SPEAKERthat I've read a long time ago and don't care about,

32:44SPEAKERyou know, I just need something to like mildly occupy

32:48SPEAKERmy brain as I drift off and I've read these before.

32:50SPEAKERSo I'm just gonna read a page or two of these until I sleep.

32:54SPEAKER- Brad, I have a question, follow up question.

32:55SPEAKER- Yeah.

32:56SPEAKER- How does the novelization handle all the child murder

32:59SPEAKERat the end of that story?

33:00SPEAKER- I don't remember.

33:01SPEAKERThat's another weird, weird thing

33:02SPEAKERis I just bounce around in it.

33:03SPEAKERI'm not even reading it straight through.

33:04SPEAKERI'll just like flip to a chapter that's mildly interesting.

33:08SPEAKERLike I said, it's just something to occupy my brain

33:11SPEAKERuntil it shuts down.

33:12SPEAKER- So my problem with reading is that I have to,

33:15SPEAKERlike if I'm reading something that it's too good,

33:17SPEAKERthen I'll get absorbed and I'll never go to sleep.

33:20SPEAKER- Sure, yeah, yeah.

33:22SPEAKER- Like I picked up, I realized that there was

33:24SPEAKERa Iain Banks culture novel that I'd never read

33:27SPEAKERjust 'cause it was like a novella

33:28SPEAKERand I picked that up the other day

33:30SPEAKERand it ruined my sleep for three days

33:34SPEAKERbecause I just stayed up until two o'clock

33:35SPEAKERin the morning reading it.

33:36SPEAKER- That actually has also, I read a horror novel last fall

33:39SPEAKERthat at some point when the shit really hit the fan

33:41SPEAKERin the novel, it was a, oh God, it's two hours

33:44SPEAKERpast the point I wanted to sleep.

33:45SPEAKER- Yeah.

33:46SPEAKER- And I'm still wired in reading this.

33:47SPEAKERLike that can happen too.

33:49SPEAKERShould read that novelization,

33:50SPEAKERespecially having you been watching "Clone Wars"

33:52SPEAKERand listening to. - I've been watching

33:54SPEAKER"Clone Wars" and listening to AMCA for a while.

33:57SPEAKERSo I started listening to AMCA during the Andor,

33:59SPEAKERduring their Andor run,

34:00SPEAKERwhich is an exceptional bout of podcasting.

34:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I kinda, I would like to rewatch "Andor"

34:05SPEAKERwhen season two comes out, which is this year,

34:07SPEAKERbelieve it or not.

34:08SPEAKER- Oh, really?

34:09SPEAKER- Yes, ooh, unless they delay it,

34:12SPEAKERit's supposed to be later this year,

34:13SPEAKERbut I'd like to rewatch the show and listen to that pod.

34:15SPEAKERI'm never gonna watch "Clone Wars" ever,

34:17SPEAKERbut I would like to listen to a limited version

34:20SPEAKERof their podcast.

34:21SPEAKER- So, okay.

34:23SPEAKER- I just don't have the time.

34:24SPEAKER- No, no, no, I know, I know.

34:25SPEAKERI watched, I had the same approach to you as "Clone Wars,"

34:30SPEAKERand then I had listened to the AMCA Andor episodes,

34:33SPEAKERand then they released like a hit list

34:35SPEAKERof like their favorite "Clone Wars" episodes

34:38SPEAKERat some point toward the end there.

34:39SPEAKERI think it was a Patreon thing.

34:41SPEAKERAnd I watched those episodes.

34:43SPEAKERI was like, oh, this is all the character development

34:47SPEAKERthat I wanted there to be in the original,

34:49SPEAKERin the prequels, and like the whole thing,

34:52SPEAKERit sounds terrible, but it's basically like,

34:55SPEAKERit's my favorite retcon ever,

34:57SPEAKER'cause it makes me like the prequels more,

35:00SPEAKERbecause it gives the characters depth

35:02SPEAKERthat just they're completely lacking in the movies,

35:05SPEAKERto the point that like the animated Obi-Wan

35:07SPEAKERand animated Anakin are fantastic.

35:10SPEAKER- Or the canonical ones.

35:12SPEAKER- Yeah, they're the canonical good ones in my head now.

35:14SPEAKER- Okay, you have to read the episode three novelization.

35:18SPEAKER- Okay, okay. - Because it does that

35:19SPEAKERfor episode three.

35:21SPEAKERIf you want to absorb a version of that story

35:23SPEAKERthat is actually pretty good and believable

35:26SPEAKERand sells the fall, like sells the fall pretty well,

35:30SPEAKERI mean, granted, like books have tools to work with,

35:32SPEAKERbut movies do not, right?

35:33SPEAKERLike you can really depict the character's inner life

35:35SPEAKERin a way that you can't on screen,

35:37SPEAKERespecially with George Lucas's direction,

35:39SPEAKERbut you should read that book.

35:41SPEAKERI mean, it's very good for a "Star Wars" novel,

35:45SPEAKERlet me put it that way.

35:46SPEAKERI've shied away from reading "Star Wars" novels

35:49SPEAKERfor professional and personal reasons for many, many years,

35:52SPEAKERbut I did read the fall of Asajj Ventress novel

35:57SPEAKERthat the AMCA did a few months ago, so.

35:59SPEAKER- Wait, they do episodes about books?

36:02SPEAKER- So they did-- - Because I would devour

36:05SPEAKERan episode about this episode three novel

36:07SPEAKERif they ever do one. - They did.

36:08SPEAKERWell, we should tell them.

36:09SPEAKERWe have channels. - Yeah, we do.

36:12SPEAKERAustin is aware of this book and I'm quite sure.

36:14SPEAKER- So they did that because it was like,

36:18SPEAKERif you recall, "Clone Wars" got canceled

36:20SPEAKERwhen Disney bought Lucas and there was like,

36:25SPEAKERthey had a bunch of stuff written and in progress

36:27SPEAKERfor what would eventually be seasons,

36:29SPEAKERwhat was the original season seven,

36:32SPEAKERnot what originally became season seven of "The Clone Wars"

36:34SPEAKERand the novelization of what happened to Asajj Ventress

36:39SPEAKERis the adaptation of what would have been

36:42SPEAKERlike a three episode arc in the original season seven

36:45SPEAKERof what happened to Asajj Ventress is my understanding.

36:48SPEAKERAsajj Ventress is a pretty good character, by the way.

36:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

36:51SPEAKER- "Star Wars" is okay.

36:53SPEAKER- No, "Savage Oppress" though.

36:55SPEAKERIsn't that how you say it?

36:56SPEAKER- Look, "Savage Oppress" is a--

36:58SPEAKER- Is it actually "Savage"?

36:59SPEAKERI wasn't-- - It's "Savage."

37:00SPEAKERThey say "Savage."

37:01SPEAKERIt took me turning on the subtitles

37:04SPEAKERto realize what they'd done.

37:05SPEAKERSo it's also-- - I only ever encountered

37:08SPEAKERthat character through people talking about it online

37:10SPEAKERfor years and didn't know there was

37:12SPEAKERa different pronunciation.

37:13SPEAKERSo I thought it was "Savage Oppress" for a long time.

37:16SPEAKER- So there's that, there's a Mon Cal Prince

37:20SPEAKERnamed Prince Lee Char, Charlie, Tuna, he's a fish man.

37:27SPEAKER- Oh yeah, well.

37:28SPEAKER- There's a bunch of bad names.

37:29SPEAKERThere's a bunch of unfortunate naming.

37:31SPEAKER- Nothing will ever top, nothing will ever top

37:34SPEAKERthe minor episode two character, Alon Sleaze-Bagono.

37:38SPEAKER- That's pretty good.

37:39SPEAKERThat's pretty good.

37:41SPEAKER- He's the Deathstick vendor.

37:42SPEAKER- Oh, yeah.

37:44SPEAKER- I should say the other two prequel novelizations,

37:46SPEAKERno idea, they're not written by the same author.

37:48SPEAKERIt's the guy, specifically the guy who wrote

37:51SPEAKERthe one for three is thought of as like,

37:54SPEAKERmaybe top tier in "Star Wars" novel land, anyway.

37:59SPEAKER- Oh, I'll take it.

38:00SPEAKERYeah, anyway, "Clone Wars," "Clone War" is pretty good.

38:03SPEAKERI'm gonna say you should watch "Clone Wars."

38:05SPEAKERYou should watch the cut list is the thing.

38:07SPEAKERIt's like 20 episodes, you can do that.

38:09SPEAKER- Maybe when I retire.

38:10SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

38:11SPEAKER- If I retire.

38:12SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

38:13SPEAKERWhat else we got?

38:14SPEAKER- No, no to pure.

38:16SPEAKER- Okay.

38:17SPEAKER- A podcast I listened to recently

38:18SPEAKERstated that all great podcasts have an enemy.

38:21SPEAKERIf this is true, what is the tech pods enemy?

38:23SPEAKER- Oh, man.

38:25SPEAKERWho is our enemy?

38:26SPEAKER- We have a nemesis.

38:27SPEAKERI don't think it has to be a who.

38:29SPEAKERIt could be.

38:30SPEAKER- What is our nemesis?

38:31SPEAKER- It could be an abstract conceptual enemy.

38:34SPEAKER- Is it Riekert?

38:35SPEAKER- No, I don't think so.

38:36SPEAKER- I like Riekert.

38:38SPEAKER- I don't know.

38:39SPEAKERWhy would he be our enemy?

38:40SPEAKER- I don't know.

38:41SPEAKERI mean, I was just trying to start some shit, honestly.

38:43SPEAKER- Oh, we need beef?

38:44SPEAKER- Yeah, I was like, what would Riekert do?

38:45SPEAKERHe would start a fake beef

38:46SPEAKERand get the internet all riled up.

38:48SPEAKER- Some kind of stealth marketing campaign.

38:50SPEAKER- Something about boneless wings, I don't know.

38:53SPEAKER- I don't know.

38:54SPEAKERI feel like my enemy has lack of free time

38:56SPEAKERto tinker with all the stuff I want to tinker with.

39:00SPEAKER- I've generally liked living my life in a way

39:06SPEAKERso as not to have enemies.

39:08SPEAKERIt's been a goal of mine for a long time.

39:09SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

39:11SPEAKERIt's a good way to be.

39:12SPEAKER- Yeah.

39:13SPEAKER- All right, question from Tri.

39:15SPEAKERWhy are printers such a pain in the ass to get working?

39:17SPEAKER- It's true.

39:18SPEAKER- Are they?

39:19SPEAKER- Do you have a printer?

39:20SPEAKER- Yeah, I've got an older brother laser,

39:23SPEAKERbut my parents have an HP color ink jets.

39:26SPEAKER- Yeah, how often do they have to replace the ink

39:28SPEAKERevery time they print?

39:29SPEAKER- Oh, well, okay, this question is somewhat broad.

39:33SPEAKERPain in the ass to get working is the question.

39:35SPEAKERI took that to mean installing drivers

39:37SPEAKERand printing to them.

39:38SPEAKER- Okay, so in the modern context, yes,

39:39SPEAKERit is a lot easier than it was to,

39:42SPEAKERyou just plug them in and they kind of work now.

39:43SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

39:44SPEAKERIn fact, I have to say like automatic printer discovery,

39:46SPEAKERnetwork printer discovery has gotten pretty awesome.

39:49SPEAKERI mean, this is only relevant if you try to set up a printer

39:51SPEAKERwith parallel port back in the day

39:53SPEAKERin like Windows 3.1 or something.

39:55SPEAKER- Are you on LPT-1 or LPT-3?

39:58SPEAKER- Are they both in use already?

40:00SPEAKER- My first job out of college was working at a computer lab

40:04SPEAKERand an imaging lab specifically

40:07SPEAKERwhere I had to maintain about 20 printers and plotters

40:10SPEAKERand like dye subs.

40:11SPEAKERAnd we had a coloring jet which was kind of new at the time.

40:15SPEAKERIt was hell.

40:16SPEAKERIt was really, really awful.

40:17SPEAKER- The mechanical aspect of printers,

40:19SPEAKERI will not apologize for.

40:20SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:21SPEAKER- That's always going to suck, I think.

40:23SPEAKER- Well, this would have been like '98.

40:24SPEAKERSo it was pre-USB.

40:26SPEAKERIt was like, like USB was new.

40:29SPEAKERI guess we had a couple of USB printers,

40:30SPEAKERbut mostly it was printer port stuff

40:32SPEAKERor SCSI for in some cases.

40:35SPEAKERAnd it was hard keeping that shit running.

40:38SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

40:38SPEAKERIt feels like it's been probably 10 or 15 years now,

40:41SPEAKERespecially macOS, but Windows also caught up pretty quick

40:43SPEAKERof just like, I need to print.

40:45SPEAKERI'm at somebody's house with a laptop.

40:47SPEAKERI need to print.

40:47SPEAKERI just go to the printer control panel,

40:49SPEAKERhit find printer, and within 30 seconds,

40:51SPEAKERI have installed the driver and printed my thing.

40:53SPEAKER- Wait, would you print

40:54SPEAKERwithout asking somebody to use their printer?

40:55SPEAKER- No.

40:56SPEAKERDefinitely not. - Oh, God.

40:58SPEAKERKind of tempted to just start printing stuff

40:59SPEAKERto people's houses now.

41:01SPEAKER- Even at my parents' house,

41:02SPEAKERI asked, "Hey, is it okay if I use the printer?"

41:04SPEAKER- Wow.

41:05SPEAKER- Before I did it.

41:06SPEAKER- Would you use the printer for your parents' house?

41:07SPEAKER- I don't remember.

41:08SPEAKERWhat was it?

41:09SPEAKERI think it was printing out a schedule

41:10SPEAKERthat we needed to have pinned up somewhere.

41:13SPEAKER- The last time I printed anything at my parents' house

41:15SPEAKERwas probably back before you could do phones for airplanes,

41:19SPEAKERlike phone barcodes for airplane tickets.

41:23SPEAKERIt was a long time.

41:24SPEAKER- I straight up use my watch

41:25SPEAKERto flash my boarding pass QR code now,

41:28SPEAKERand people still seem surprised by it, which is weird,

41:30SPEAKERbecause everybody, well, not everybody,

41:32SPEAKERbut most people use their phones now,

41:34SPEAKERand the watch is just an extension of your phone,

41:36SPEAKERbut I've straight up gotten the gate agents going like,

41:39SPEAKER"Wow, futuristic," or something.

41:40SPEAKER- Every time I've tried to do that,

41:42SPEAKERit's been the thing where you put the phone under the slot,

41:45SPEAKERand my wrist is too thick to go under there,

41:47SPEAKERand it doesn't work.

41:48SPEAKER- Interesting.

41:49SPEAKERI haven't seen one of those yet.

41:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

41:52SPEAKER- Question from Warbird.

41:54SPEAKERWhat's the general guidance on an off-the-shelf server CPU?

41:57SPEAKERIf this microcenter ever opens,

41:59SPEAKERI'm aiming to take advantage of a sale.

42:01SPEAKER- I buy low power, 'cause I don't wanna pay

42:02SPEAKERfor a bunch of electricity that I'm not using.

42:04SPEAKER- Yeah, that was my first response here.

42:06SPEAKERI actually don't have great advice

42:07SPEAKERabout actual server CPUs, other than to say,

42:09SPEAKERI guess, really question whether you actually

42:11SPEAKERneed a server CPU or not.

42:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I wouldn't probably have a thread ripper in my house

42:17SPEAKERbecause I don't wanna pay for that much electricity.

42:19SPEAKER- Yeah, totally, and you have a use case

42:22SPEAKERthat actually needs that much parallelism.

42:25SPEAKERYou might, but in a home context,

42:28SPEAKERit seems increasingly unlikely.

42:30SPEAKER- Yeah.

42:31SPEAKER- I mean, the bigger thing is just commodity CPUs

42:33SPEAKERhave a bajillion cores in them now.

42:35SPEAKERThat's the thing that changed in the last 10 years, right?

42:38SPEAKER- Yeah, but the real thing is,

42:41SPEAKERwhat are you doing at home that requires a giant CPU?

42:45SPEAKERMost of it, you're probably better off

42:47SPEAKERputting a dedicated coprocessor in,

42:48SPEAKEReither using Intel's QuickSync to do video transcodes

42:51SPEAKERor putting an NVIDIA GPU in to do CUDA transcodes

42:55SPEAKERor NVENC transcodes or whatever.

42:59SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, I don't know.

43:00SPEAKER- Even an i5 has got 12 cores now, something like that?

43:07SPEAKER- Yeah, but six of them are crappy.

43:09SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I mean, they're not terrible.

43:12SPEAKER- The little B-Link that I have

43:14SPEAKERthat is a now ancient Celeron is fine for,

43:18SPEAKERlike, it can transcode multiple 4K video streams

43:21SPEAKERbecause it has good acceleration, I think it's bonkers.

43:27SPEAKER- Yeah, and the only other thing I could think of

43:29SPEAKERis like in the past, if you wanted ECC memory,

43:31SPEAKERyou had to get a Xeon, but that's not even the case anymore.

43:33SPEAKERLike all the consumer, like AMD forced Intel's hand on that.

43:36SPEAKERSo even if you want that kind of memory,

43:38SPEAKERyou can pretty much use an off the shelf CPU at this point.

43:41SPEAKERI just, I don't know, I don't know that I see the use case.

43:44SPEAKER- Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.

43:45SPEAKER- The Micro Center everywhere, all of a sudden.

43:47SPEAKER- We're getting a Micro Center here?

43:48SPEAKERHave we talked about this?

43:49SPEAKER- Yes, yes, there's a Micro Center opening

43:51SPEAKERin Santa Clara soon.

43:53SPEAKER- We gotta go to Micro Center, Brad.

43:55SPEAKER- You think Warbird is okay with me outing where they live?

43:57SPEAKER- I wouldn't out them,

43:58SPEAKERjust say they're in the South generally.

44:00SPEAKER- Yes, they are in the South.

44:02SPEAKERLet's say in the general vicinity of where we are from.

44:06SPEAKER- Love Alabama football, that's my understanding.

44:09SPEAKER- But a Micro Center is opening right near there as well.

44:12SPEAKERSo like, I guess Micro Center is expanding

44:14SPEAKERall over the place, which is awesome.

44:16SPEAKER- I hope that that doesn't mean

44:17SPEAKERthey took a whole bunch of investment

44:18SPEAKERand they're gonna Red Lobster themselves

44:20SPEAKERwith a bunch of real estate debt, but.

44:22SPEAKER- Yeah, if I had to guess, I don't know,

44:25SPEAKERbut it seems like they've kind of just organically grown

44:27SPEAKERthemselves to this point.

44:29SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems good, I'm excited.

44:31SPEAKER- They seem to, they seem to be very old fashioned

44:35SPEAKERin that they just offer a good service

44:38SPEAKERat a reasonable price kind of thing, you know,

44:40SPEAKERlike they just have grown their business

44:41SPEAKERby being something people want to take part in.

44:45SPEAKERI know that sounds radical.

44:48SPEAKER- It seems like it's owned by Micro Center Industrial.

44:55SPEAKERMaybe the same company that's always owned it.

44:58SPEAKER- Yeah, that's my guess.

45:01SPEAKERQuestion from Market Zero.

45:03SPEAKER- Micro Electronics Incorporated, sorry.

45:05SPEAKER- That's pretty good.

45:06SPEAKERMan, I miss the computing company names of the '80s.

45:10SPEAKER- Yeah, it's pretty good.

45:11SPEAKER- It's all just like advanced mega systems, you know,

45:15SPEAKERlike Cybertronics.

45:16SPEAKER- Lucky Gold Star.

45:18SPEAKER- Yeah, Circuit, Ultra Circuits Designs Incorporated,

45:23SPEAKERyou know what I mean?

45:24SPEAKERLet's just mash up a bunch of computing terms together

45:27SPEAKERand make a name out of it.

45:29SPEAKERMarket Zero asks, my amazing wife just survived

45:31SPEAKERher 10th round of layoffs over the last decade plus.

45:34SPEAKER- Wow.

45:35SPEAKER- Do you have any interesting layoff stories

45:37SPEAKERor advice for navigating those intensely stressful times?

45:40SPEAKERI have been remarkably insulated from layoffs,

45:44SPEAKERlike not even, I've never even like worked on a team

45:46SPEAKERthat had layoffs directly, like people that I work with.

45:49SPEAKER- You never had layoffs at GameSpot?

45:51SPEAKER- Not the first time I was there, no.

45:52SPEAKERThey had a big round of them right before I started,

45:55SPEAKERsix months before, and then there were none.

45:58SPEAKERI was there for five years and there were none

45:59SPEAKERin that five years.

46:00SPEAKER- Oh, you missed all the 2001s.

46:02SPEAKERSo I started at Future in 2000 and in 2001,

46:05SPEAKERwhen the .com stuff bombed out, we laid off,

46:08SPEAKERwe had seven rounds of layoffs over like a year and a half.

46:10SPEAKER- Yes, so the last, I started in January '03,

46:13SPEAKERso the last round of .com bursting layoffs happened

46:16SPEAKERlike six months before that.

46:17SPEAKER- Yeah, it really sucks.

46:18SPEAKERMy advice would be to go find some ways to work

46:20SPEAKERthat doesn't do layoffs and fuck those people.

46:22SPEAKER- Yeah.

46:23SPEAKER- Like layoffs are, just to be clear,

46:27SPEAKERall that happens would, at least in my experience

46:30SPEAKERworking in the publishing company,

46:31SPEAKERthe thing that happened when layoffs started happening

46:33SPEAKERis that all the people who were really smart

46:35SPEAKERand there were a handful of loyalists who loved the company

46:38SPEAKERand wanted to do, like love their magazines,

46:40SPEAKERlove the work that they were doing

46:41SPEAKERand stayed for a long time.

46:42SPEAKERI think I'd like to slide myself into that category.

46:47SPEAKERAnd I was learning a lot, you know, that was whatever.

46:49SPEAKERBut the thing that happened is that we stopped being able

46:51SPEAKERto hire good people and people were like,

46:54SPEAKERoh, I can go make a lot more money

46:55SPEAKERdoing literally anything else and left.

46:59SPEAKERSo all the people who were good

47:00SPEAKERand could get jobs elsewhere left

47:02SPEAKERand we were increasingly just left with people

47:04SPEAKERwho were not able to do that.

47:07SPEAKERAnd it stunk, it was bad.

47:12SPEAKER- The media landscape is a bit rough,

47:14SPEAKERhas gotten ever rougher, let's say, since that time.

47:17SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it's weird though,

47:18SPEAKER'cause like, I think that there's,

47:20SPEAKERlike we have a lot of friends who work in indie media.

47:22SPEAKERI mean, you work in indie media.

47:23SPEAKER- Hell yeah.

47:24SPEAKER- Like, I feel like the indie space exists

47:27SPEAKERin a way that it didn't really 10, 20 years ago.

47:30SPEAKERAnd, but I also don't know how you start,

47:34SPEAKERhow you get to a point where you can support yourself

47:36SPEAKERin an indie media landscape

47:38SPEAKERwithout having some larger platform

47:42SPEAKERto kind of draft off of to build your initial run.

47:45SPEAKER- That's the problem and we've talked about that before.

47:47SPEAKERIt's if you have no existing audience,

47:48SPEAKERit is an insane roll of the dice.

47:50SPEAKERLike it is just an incredible, incredibly risky bet

47:54SPEAKERto place that you can build a following from nothing.

47:58SPEAKERYeah, I meant when I said media landscape,

48:00SPEAKERI meant like the corporate media landscape

48:01SPEAKERin terms of like salaried positions at large companies.

48:04SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

48:05SPEAKER- It's a real disaster out there.

48:08SPEAKER- Well, and so the thing to remember about layoffs always

48:13SPEAKERis whether you survive the layoffs

48:17SPEAKERor don't survive the layoffs, it's never your fault.

48:21SPEAKERIt's somebody in another office

48:23SPEAKERthat gets paid a lot more money than you,

48:25SPEAKERdid a bad math on their predictions for the year.

48:28SPEAKERAnd then they're like, oh shit,

48:29SPEAKERwe gotta make up this difference somehow.

48:32SPEAKERSo they, depending on the scale of the layoffs,

48:35SPEAKERcut randomly sometimes it seems like.

48:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I've heard about that a lot

48:39SPEAKERjust in the last year and a half it's been, right?

48:41SPEAKERIt was like beginning of last year

48:42SPEAKERwhen they really started right in the tech sector.

48:44SPEAKER- Yeah, the horror stories out of Google

48:46SPEAKERand Microsoft and stuff like that.

48:48SPEAKER- The stories about people getting cut

48:49SPEAKERpurely out of a spreadsheet based on how much they made

48:51SPEAKERor even worse, like in some kind of lottery situation

48:53SPEAKERor just kind of eye-opening.

48:56SPEAKER- Yeah, and so if one of your friends gets cut,

49:01SPEAKERit's not anything they did.

49:03SPEAKERIf you are survivors, the survivor guilt thing is real,

49:06SPEAKERit's hard, it feels bad, go find a better job if you can.

49:10SPEAKERThat's my advice.

49:11SPEAKER- Indeed.

49:13SPEAKERHere's a question from Tactical Tug.

49:15SPEAKERWill there ever be a video version

49:17SPEAKERof the podcast on YouTube or something?

49:19SPEAKER- I'd have to take a shower before we do this

49:21SPEAKERif we were gonna do a podcast video.

49:23SPEAKER- First, it depends on what kind of video you mean.

49:25SPEAKERLike if we're just talking the,

49:28SPEAKERif we're just talking the like still art

49:30SPEAKERof the podcast image, the podcast cover art.

49:33SPEAKERRight, yeah, yeah.

49:35SPEAKERIf you're talking us on camera,

49:39SPEAKERprobably not anytime soon.

49:41SPEAKERMainly because like I do a lot of editing on the show

49:45SPEAKERand like we have this with some of the next lander stuff

49:47SPEAKERlike the Ramblecast, for example, it's very hard to edit

49:49SPEAKERbecause as soon as you have one unbroken shot

49:52SPEAKERof talking heads and then you have to start editing it a lot,

49:54SPEAKERthe video starts looking pretty bad

49:56SPEAKER'cause there's just all kinds of jump cuts

49:58SPEAKERall over the place.

49:59SPEAKERI mean, I guess a lot of people on YouTube

50:01SPEAKERare just used to that style of editing these days, but.

50:04SPEAKER- Yeah, I think so.

50:04SPEAKER- It kind of, it makes the video harder

50:08SPEAKERwhen you have to try to preserve everything you recorded.

50:11SPEAKER- Well, then you have to edit the video first

50:13SPEAKERand output audio from that.

50:15SPEAKERYeah, that sucks.

50:16SPEAKER- Basically, yeah.

50:18SPEAKER- I just don't, we talked about this when we started

50:20SPEAKERand part of our deal was like the idea of this

50:25SPEAKERwas that I would get up in the morning

50:26SPEAKERand drive up to Brad's house

50:27SPEAKERand we'd sit down on Saturday morning

50:28SPEAKERand record a podcast back in the before times.

50:31SPEAKERAnd the Twitter handle was sweatpants tech pod

50:35SPEAKERbecause I was gonna wear sweatpants every day

50:38SPEAKER'cause I wasn't gonna take a shower before.

50:39SPEAKERI think I did take a shower, just general principle,

50:42SPEAKERbut you know.

50:42SPEAKER- Thank you for that.

50:43SPEAKER- You're welcome.

50:45SPEAKERBut we often are recording like seven o'clock in the morning

50:47SPEAKERso I don't, video is bad at the times

50:50SPEAKERthat we do this outside of our normal work days.

50:52SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.

50:56SPEAKERThere's another question from Tri

50:57SPEAKERthat I found pretty interesting.

50:59SPEAKERDo you think we're at the point

51:00SPEAKERwhere a new launch multiplayer game

51:02SPEAKERwill short their server supply on the first day or two

51:05SPEAKERto make it seem like the game is a smash hit

51:07SPEAKERand or to avoid half a dozen articles

51:09SPEAKERsaying the game is dead on arrival?

51:11SPEAKERTo be clear, I was thinking about the less popular,

51:13SPEAKERmore scammy area of games, things like the day before.

51:19SPEAKER- Not having enough capacity to,

51:22SPEAKERlike the amount of energy people spend

51:24SPEAKERfiguring out how much capacity to have,

51:26SPEAKERwhich is always a guess

51:27SPEAKERand has real costs associated with it

51:29SPEAKERwhen you're doing a game that has servers is hard.

51:34SPEAKERI don't think, like there's a lot to unpack here.

51:38SPEAKERSo the whole, the idea that there were people going

51:41SPEAKERinto Starfield's SteamDB listing and looking

51:44SPEAKERand seeing that there were only 1,500 people playing it

51:46SPEAKERat some point and then going in the Steam forums

51:47SPEAKERand posting that this is a dead game

51:49SPEAKERis like ridiculous and laughable

51:52SPEAKERbecause it's a single player game.

51:54SPEAKERThere's no multiplayer component at all to it.

51:56SPEAKERIt's not even like Dead Space or Dark Souls

52:00SPEAKERwhere people can jump into other players' games

52:03SPEAKERand there's a multiplayer,

52:04SPEAKERlike there's a weird multiplayer component to it.

52:06SPEAKERThere's no multiplayer in Starfield.

52:08SPEAKERIt doesn't matter if there's only one person playing it,

52:10SPEAKERthat person's gonna have the same experience

52:12SPEAKERas if there's 10 million people playing it.

52:15SPEAKERSo it's become a meme that people dead game

52:17SPEAKERanything that has less than 5,000 people playing.

52:22SPEAKERThere's a 15,000, 14, 15,000 games

52:25SPEAKERreleased on Steam every year.

52:27SPEAKEROf those, there's maybe a hundredth of a percent.

52:32SPEAKERIt's like 150 or 200 are gonna have

52:34SPEAKERmore than 5,000 people playing at every game.

52:36SPEAKERSo that means by internet logic,

52:39SPEAKERthat means there's 13,900 and some games

52:42SPEAKERreleased every year on Steam that are immediately dead.

52:46SPEAKERI assure you, I played a game this week

52:48SPEAKERthat had 19 reviews on Steam and was fabulous.

52:53SPEAKERBy the way, shout outs to Tents and Trees.

52:55SPEAKERIt is a small puzzle game

52:57SPEAKERin the vein of Minesweeper or Sudoku.

52:59SPEAKERIt has 13 positive reviews right now.

53:02SPEAKERI'm one of them.

53:03SPEAKERIt's fabulous.

53:04SPEAKER- Tents and Trees?

53:05SPEAKER- Tents and Trees.

53:06SPEAKERIt's like, it's just, it would be a great phone game.

53:09SPEAKERI hope it comes out on the phone at some point.

53:10SPEAKERI would buy it again there.

53:12SPEAKER- Yeah, oh, it's on Switch.

53:14SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that makes sense.

53:17SPEAKERBut yeah, like it's, like don't,

53:23SPEAKERespecially for multiplayer games like Helldivers

53:25SPEAKERor Left 4 Dead or the Anacrusis co-op games

53:27SPEAKERthat are like three or four players,

53:29SPEAKERplay those with your friends.

53:30SPEAKERIt doesn't matter if there's a pool of players.

53:32SPEAKERIf you make friends that like those games

53:34SPEAKERand those kinds of games

53:35SPEAKERand you play those games with your friends.

53:36SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:37SPEAKER- That's my advice.

53:38SPEAKER- Probably safe to say anybody who's short

53:40SPEAKERon server capacity is,

53:42SPEAKERit's because of budgetary constraints.

53:45SPEAKER- They are dying.

53:46SPEAKERIf they are short on, like I assure you

53:47SPEAKERthat when Arrow had launched Helldivers

53:49SPEAKERand they had 300,000 people playing

53:52SPEAKERand they flipped the Switch to add double the servers

53:54SPEAKERand then it immediately filled somebody there

53:56SPEAKERwas screaming silently into the void

53:58SPEAKERand it was the worst day of their life, right?

54:02SPEAKERLike it's, you wouldn't do that on purpose.

54:05SPEAKER- Yes.

54:06SPEAKERHere's another technical video game question

54:09SPEAKERalso from Tactical Tug.

54:11SPEAKERHow do game updates work?

54:12SPEAKERI've just had an update to one of my Steam games.

54:14SPEAKERThe download itself was 107 megabytes,

54:16SPEAKERbut the updates or change to disk was a 34.2 gigabytes.

54:21SPEAKERI highly doubt it's all down to compression.

54:23SPEAKERSo what's going on here?

54:24SPEAKERSeeing as you've got experience from the game industry,

54:26SPEAKERI'm hoping you've got an answer.

54:28SPEAKERThat is such an extreme disparity.

54:30SPEAKERI don't have an answer for that one.

54:31SPEAKER- That's how it works all the time now.

54:34SPEAKERSo Steam changed, this came up a lot in like 2022, 2020,

54:42SPEAKERwhen they changed the way they do diffs on the files.

54:47SPEAKERSo they started using a different kind of compression

54:51SPEAKERand an unpacking mechanism

54:52SPEAKERthat I think isn't as supported on older hardware.

54:56SPEAKERSo it got a lot slower on like 8,800 CPUs

55:00SPEAKERand stuff like that.

55:02SPEAKERThe gist is probably that's a game that packs up everything

55:07SPEAKERinto a relatively small number of files.

55:09SPEAKERSo, you know, typically on a,

55:12SPEAKERlike traditionally a dev build and a live build of the game

55:16SPEAKERis that on the dev build,

55:17SPEAKERyou just have the entire Unreal project,

55:19SPEAKERall the assets and stuff are just floating loose

55:21SPEAKERon the file system.

55:22SPEAKERAnd that's great,

55:23SPEAKERbut writing a bunch of small files takes a long time

55:26SPEAKERand you don't get the full throughput transfer

55:28SPEAKERwhen you're downloading from Steam.

55:30SPEAKERSo it takes a long time to do the initial install

55:33SPEAKERof the game.

55:34SPEAKERAnd also if you're worried about people

55:35SPEAKERripping off your assets,

55:36SPEAKERit's not encrypted and all that stuff.

55:39SPEAKERWhen you make a live build of the game,

55:41SPEAKERit typically puts it all into like these giant zip files

55:44SPEAKERthat are often encrypted.

55:46SPEAKERAnd those will download at full speed

55:49SPEAKER'cause it's one big write

55:51SPEAKERinstead of a bunch of small writes.

55:53SPEAKERNow, the bad thing is

55:55SPEAKERwhen you're talking about an encrypted file

55:56SPEAKERand you're doing a diff on the encrypted file,

55:58SPEAKERit has to go through the entire file

56:00SPEAKERstarting at the beginning

56:01SPEAKERand probably touch every bit on that drive.

56:03SPEAKERSo what became a download issue before

56:06SPEAKERsuddenly becomes a disc throughput issue.

56:09SPEAKERAnd if you're on a spinning platter drive,

56:10SPEAKERit's going to be really, really, really slow.

56:15SPEAKERIf you're on an SSD, it's less of an issue

56:18SPEAKER'cause it'll kind of work itself out.

56:20SPEAKERThere's no like kind of disc ordering

56:23SPEAKERthat Windows has to do to make sure

56:25SPEAKERthat the file loads fast.

56:28SPEAKERBut often it's just like scanning the entire file

56:31SPEAKERand looking for the bits that need to change

56:33SPEAKERand then moving on to the next one.

56:36SPEAKERAnd Steam handles this.

56:37SPEAKERThis isn't something that game developers

56:38SPEAKERhave any control of.

56:40SPEAKERWhen you make a build for Steam,

56:41SPEAKERyou package it up, you use some Steam command line tools,

56:44SPEAKERit goes up to the server

56:45SPEAKERand Steam looks deep into its heart

56:48SPEAKERand diffs out all the,

56:49SPEAKERlike makes diff files for the different versions of the game

56:53SPEAKERthat are out there.

56:54SPEAKER- The more you know about video game patches on Steam.

56:59SPEAKERIS 343, with Will loving the driver assist features

57:04SPEAKERon his new car, have either of you heard of

57:06SPEAKERor looked into the comma driver assist technology?

57:09SPEAKERThe whole community is open source

57:10SPEAKERand allows people to tap into the car's computers

57:12SPEAKERand sensors via the ODP port,

57:16SPEAKERalong with the device's own cameras

57:17SPEAKERand sensors with self-driving models.

57:19SPEAKERIt's great for keeping you in lane and sensing other cars.

57:22SPEAKERIt also has cameras pointed into the cabin

57:24SPEAKERto track the driver's face and eyes, yikes,

57:26SPEAKERto make sure they are paying attention.

57:29SPEAKERIt doesn't require any other steering wheel jiggling

57:31SPEAKERor touching, so it's very convenient.

57:33SPEAKERIt also keeps distance with cars in front of you

57:35SPEAKERso it can slow down with the lead car.

57:38SPEAKERI've had it for a few years now and it's been amazing.

57:40SPEAKERIt's always a chore when I have to drive a car

57:42SPEAKERother than my own,

57:43SPEAKER'cause I end up missing all of the features.

57:45SPEAKERNow, because it's open source,

57:46SPEAKERpreviously unsupported cars can be added by the community.

57:50SPEAKERThere are also community forks of the code base

57:52SPEAKERto add other features not supported in the upstream.

57:56SPEAKERSo, I looked at this.

57:58SPEAKERI thought it was interesting 'cause I hadn't heard of it,

57:59SPEAKERand it is supported by my new car.

58:01SPEAKERIt's like a $1,200 phone-sized box

58:03SPEAKERthat you glue onto the windshield of your car,

58:06SPEAKERand it has two cameras facing forward.

58:09SPEAKERIt's like a 360-degree camera

58:11SPEAKERthat kind of faces a wide angle forward,

58:14SPEAKERand then one that's actually pointed off in the distance

58:16SPEAKERfor cars so it detects cars further away.

58:21SPEAKERMy understanding is it taps into the ODP port

58:24SPEAKERand it controls the braking gas and steering,

58:27SPEAKERbut doesn't necessarily use any of the onboard sensors

58:31SPEAKERfor the car.

58:32SPEAKERSo, if you have radar sensors on the car, stuff like that,

58:33SPEAKERit doesn't actually use that.

58:34SPEAKERI could be wrong on that.

58:36SPEAKERIt's a little unclear,

58:37SPEAKERand I think it maybe varies based on the model,

58:38SPEAKERwhat's exposed in the ODP.

58:42SPEAKERBut yeah, it was interesting.

58:43SPEAKERI didn't know this existed.

58:47SPEAKERI don't know how I feel about running.

58:49SPEAKERI think the current version is 0.95 or 0.96.

58:53SPEAKERI don't know how I feel about running beta soft,

58:57SPEAKERbeta open source driving software on the road

58:59SPEAKERand testing that.

59:01SPEAKERI don't think it's any worse.

59:02SPEAKERAt least it's reviewed.

59:04SPEAKERI don't think it's any worse

59:05SPEAKERthan what Musk and Tesla are doing with their stuff

59:09SPEAKERwhere they just kind of cover it up

59:10SPEAKERif they accidentally kill a few people.

59:11SPEAKER- It would be hard to be worse.

59:13SPEAKERDid you see that video going around

59:15SPEAKERof somebody driving, granted in heavy fog at night,

59:17SPEAKERbut rolling up on a railroad crossing

59:21SPEAKERwith a train actively using the track?

59:24SPEAKER- If the fog is heavy at night,

59:25SPEAKERit should say, "Yo, I can't drive right now.

59:27SPEAKERYou have to drive."

59:28SPEAKER- Yeah, like cars just speeding toward this moving train

59:32SPEAKERat full speed until the guy jerks the wheel

59:34SPEAKERat the last second and veers violently off the road.

59:38SPEAKER- So I would also say,

59:40SPEAKERI don't know that I love the driver assist features

59:42SPEAKERon the car.

59:43SPEAKERI'm cautiously optimistic about them.

59:44SPEAKERIt was nice when we did the long drive,

59:47SPEAKERbut the cabin-facing camera is a requirement, I believe,

59:53SPEAKERfor the higher than the L2 systems.

59:58SPEAKERYou need something that maintains,

1:00:01SPEAKERwhether that ensures the driver's paying attention.

1:00:07SPEAKERMy car does that by assuming

1:00:09SPEAKERyou're touching the steering wheel

1:00:10SPEAKERby feeling motions in the steering wheel.

1:00:14SPEAKERSome cars do it with capacitive sensors

1:00:15SPEAKERon the steering wheel,

1:00:16SPEAKERbut just keep your hands on the wheel.

1:00:18SPEAKERI think the eye thing is probably better

1:00:19SPEAKER'cause it does mean you're actually looking forward

1:00:21SPEAKERand not just driving with your fucking phone out

1:00:23SPEAKERor something stupid.

1:00:26SPEAKERBut yeah, they have a bunch of good videos.

1:00:28SPEAKERThe thing that's interesting about this

1:00:29SPEAKERis they're feeding video back to the...

1:00:31SPEAKERThey're training new models with a video

1:00:34SPEAKERfrom the stuff that's out there for the...

1:00:36SPEAKERSo it's two things.

1:00:37SPEAKERComma.ai is the hardware,

1:00:40SPEAKERand then the open...

1:00:43SPEAKERWhat is it?

1:00:45SPEAKEROpenPilot is the open-source project

1:00:47SPEAKERthat theoretically worked with any hardware,

1:00:49SPEAKERbut I think realistically only works

1:00:50SPEAKERwith this for right now.

1:00:53SPEAKERSo yeah, it's an interesting thing.

1:00:55SPEAKERI don't think I'm gonna spend $1,200

1:00:58SPEAKERputting this on my car.

1:01:00SPEAKERBut conceptually, I guess it's interesting,

1:01:02SPEAKERand I guess I like open-source for this better.

1:01:03SPEAKERI don't know.

1:01:05SPEAKER- Yeah, versus, again, what Tesla's got going on.

1:01:07SPEAKERYes, probably.

1:01:09SPEAKERStill maybe a little iffy, but...

1:01:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I'll say,

1:01:13SPEAKERhaving used the Hyundai stuff a little bit more,

1:01:15SPEAKERit definitely...

1:01:16SPEAKERI saw in the videos that they had on their site

1:01:20SPEAKERsome places where the Hyundai definitely has problems.

1:01:22SPEAKEROn a long sweeping curve, it slows way down

1:01:24SPEAKER'cause it detects the wall

1:01:26SPEAKERseparating the two sides of the freeway

1:01:29SPEAKERas an obstacle sometimes.

1:01:33SPEAKERSo it goes from 70 to 55 going around a long curve,

1:01:37SPEAKERwhich I think makes you an obstruction

1:01:39SPEAKERto traffic probably.

1:01:41SPEAKERI don't know that I would ever be comfortable

1:01:43SPEAKERusing this, at least right now,

1:01:48SPEAKERunlike a non-divided highway.

1:01:52SPEAKERI'm anxious about non-divided highways and self-driving

1:01:56SPEAKERas occasionally erratic as mine is.

1:01:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I can see that.

1:02:00SPEAKER- 250 supported cars, though.

1:02:02SPEAKER- That's pretty good.

1:02:04SPEAKERI rode in your car.

1:02:05SPEAKERWe were talking about doing an episode

1:02:07SPEAKERabout your new car at some point.

1:02:09SPEAKER- Yeah, we can do an IONIQ episode

1:02:11SPEAKERif people are interested.

1:02:13SPEAKER- That's quite a screen on the dash, I'll say that.

1:02:16SPEAKER- Too big or do you like it?

1:02:17SPEAKER- Not too big.

1:02:18SPEAKERIt's just I've never seen one that big in a special...

1:02:20SPEAKERWell, now I'm just burning episode here.

1:02:22SPEAKER- Yeah, okay.

1:02:23SPEAKER- It's kind of a two panel.

1:02:24SPEAKERI mean, it spans literally

1:02:25SPEAKERthe entire kind of instrumentation area.

1:02:27SPEAKER- I wish we had a little more time.

1:02:28SPEAKERI'll have to come up and I want you to see

1:02:30SPEAKERthe HUD and stuff too 'cause the HUD is a thing.

1:02:32SPEAKERIt's a stupid thing, but I actually really, really like it.

1:02:35SPEAKER- Yeah, the passenger can't see that from that angle

1:02:37SPEAKERand I'm not surprised to hear you say that actually

1:02:39SPEAKERwas useful and not a nuisance.

1:02:42SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I mean, it just means

1:02:43SPEAKERthat I never looked down at the console, right?

1:02:45SPEAKERLike I'm always eyes on the road.

1:02:46SPEAKER- Yeah, that's actually,

1:02:47SPEAKERthat's probably ultimately a good thing.

1:02:50SPEAKER- It's the same reason we use them in fighter pilots

1:02:51SPEAKERso I can kill people more effectively.

1:02:54SPEAKER- Do you remember, God, was it in the '80s or the '90s,

1:02:56SPEAKERthose dumb little like a gag gift,

1:02:58SPEAKERlike laser gun straps your dashboard things?

1:03:02SPEAKER- Oh yeah, like you had a button and you could, bah!

1:03:05SPEAKER- Yes, yes, you could like laser blast

1:03:07SPEAKERthe car in front of you with this dumb little doohickey.

1:03:09SPEAKER- Yep, you could buy them in truck stops all over the South.

1:03:11SPEAKER- Yep, yep, good times.

1:03:13SPEAKER- I bought one with pocket money on a road trip

1:03:15SPEAKERwith my parents one time and scared the shit out of my dad

1:03:17SPEAKERas we got back in the car.

1:03:19SPEAKER- Sure that went well.

1:03:20SPEAKER- It was great.

1:03:21SPEAKERI was thrilled.

1:03:23SPEAKER- A couple more questions here real quick, Nakbit.

1:03:25SPEAKERHow do you guys deal with all the USB cables

1:03:27SPEAKERyou collect over the years?

1:03:28SPEAKERIf you're like me, you have no less than three drawers

1:03:30SPEAKERor containers in your home with a big ball of USB cords.

1:03:33SPEAKERIs there a good software or hardware solution

1:03:35SPEAKERto identify the spec of the cable

1:03:37SPEAKERin order to determine what speed it's capable of charging at

1:03:40SPEAKERand to a lesser extent bandwidth?

1:03:42SPEAKERYou have any tips on organizing them?

1:03:44SPEAKERI'm not aware of any way to test,

1:03:45SPEAKERI'm sure there are cable testers out there.

1:03:47SPEAKERBoy, would that be useful.

1:03:48SPEAKER- So I, this came up at PC World the other day.

1:03:50SPEAKERGordon had this $15 thing he bought from I think AliExpress.

1:03:55SPEAKERI went and found them on Amazon.

1:03:56SPEAKERIf you search for USB cable tester,

1:03:58SPEAKERthere's a whole bunch of devices that will plug in

1:04:01SPEAKERbetween the PC and the cable and will tell you

1:04:03SPEAKERwhat the charging spec is of the cable

1:04:07SPEAKERor the device that you've plugged in.

1:04:08SPEAKER- Will they also show data protocol?

1:04:10SPEAKER- They do not show data protocol for the most part.

1:04:12SPEAKERThe expensive ones show data protocol.

1:04:14SPEAKERThe $15 ones are mostly just power.

1:04:16SPEAKER- Ironically, this is more of a problem now.

1:04:18SPEAKERLike, you know, pretty much anything prior to USB-C,

1:04:22SPEAKERyou could tell by looking at it, you know, like.

1:04:24SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:04:25SPEAKER- Blue cables were USB three.

1:04:26SPEAKEROf course, not even, even USB three isn't USB three anymore.

1:04:28SPEAKERNow it's like 3.1, 3.2, Gen two.

1:04:32SPEAKER- Well, there's a lot of USB three power cables

1:04:35SPEAKERthat are USB two data.

1:04:37SPEAKER- 'Cause real USB three cables are pretty short.

1:04:40SPEAKER- Right.

1:04:41SPEAKER- At least they were for a long time.

1:04:43SPEAKERThey're getting better.

1:04:44SPEAKER- Under five, no.

1:04:46SPEAKER- It was under three meters,

1:04:48SPEAKERbut for 3.1 or 3.2 or whatever the fast one was.

1:04:51SPEAKER- It's even shorter.

1:04:52SPEAKER- It's really, really short.

1:04:53SPEAKERIt's like a foot and a half.

1:04:54SPEAKER- Yes.

1:04:55SPEAKERYeah, the advent of USB-C though,

1:04:57SPEAKERlike USB-C can be so many different things

1:04:59SPEAKERthat you can't tell without or just by looking at it.

1:05:02SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:02SPEAKER- This is just more necessary than ever, unfortunately.

1:05:06SPEAKER- So the one that I saw is,

1:05:09SPEAKERhold on, I lost the page

1:05:11SPEAKER'cause I went and looked at this Beelink a minute ago.

1:05:13SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I'm looking.

1:05:14SPEAKERYeah, these little USB voltage testers are everywhere.

1:05:17SPEAKERThere's a whole bunch of different models out there.

1:05:19SPEAKERI almost bought one a while back.

1:05:20SPEAKERThere were like just enough Amazon reviews on it.

1:05:23SPEAKERAnd people saying like,

1:05:23SPEAKER"Hey, this fried my mouse," or whatever,

1:05:25SPEAKERthat I was a little weary.

1:05:27SPEAKER- Yeah, the one that Gordon had

1:05:30SPEAKERwas this Maker Hawk one, I think.

1:05:33SPEAKERIt looks similar.

1:05:34SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

1:05:35SPEAKER- I'll find out specifically which one he had.

1:05:37SPEAKERBut he plugged in, you could plug in stuff

1:05:39SPEAKERand it told you what the charge rate was,

1:05:40SPEAKERwhich was really nice.

1:05:41SPEAKER- Yeah, that's cool.

1:05:42SPEAKERI'm starting to think about like kind of filtering

1:05:45SPEAKERor winnowing down my collection of non-C cables.

1:05:48SPEAKER- So I was gonna say, I did that a couple of years ago.

1:05:51SPEAKERI have an old Dopp kit, oddly,

1:05:55SPEAKERlike the thing that you carry your toiletries with

1:05:57SPEAKERwhen you travel.

1:05:58SPEAKERThat was just like an extra one I got as a tchotch

1:06:00SPEAKERwhen I went someplace.

1:06:01SPEAKERAnd I have basically one of everything

1:06:04SPEAKERI might realistically need,

1:06:06SPEAKERor two of things that are important,

1:06:08SPEAKERlike A to C or C to C cables, lightning cables,

1:06:12SPEAKERwhen I had lightning charging devices.

1:06:14SPEAKERAnd I put reusable zip ties on those,

1:06:17SPEAKERbundle them up and put them in there.

1:06:19SPEAKERAnd then when I need to go on a trip or something,

1:06:21SPEAKERI just grab that and I have everything I need,

1:06:23SPEAKERincluding a couple of charging bricks

1:06:24SPEAKERand all the supporting accoutrement.

1:06:28SPEAKER- That's a pretty good idea.

1:06:30SPEAKER- That's pretty nice.

1:06:31SPEAKERIt just feels like the need for mini and micro cables

1:06:34SPEAKERis less and less all the time.

1:06:36SPEAKERAlthough, since I've been working

1:06:37SPEAKERwith much retro game hardware stuff,

1:06:39SPEAKERI'm needing a lot of mini USB again all of a sudden.

1:06:42SPEAKER- I was gonna say the micro, I still have a handful,

1:06:44SPEAKERlike I have a snake camera that I use

1:06:48SPEAKERto poke down gopher holes and look for gophers and stuff

1:06:53SPEAKERthat is still micro.

1:06:56SPEAKERAnd then oddly, it's like Wii U Pro controllers

1:07:01SPEAKERare the mini thing, the only mini thing I have left, I think.

1:07:04SPEAKER- Anything from like '06 to 2012, 2014, 2012, let's say.

1:07:11SPEAKERThat was around when the mini to micro transition happened.

1:07:15SPEAKERLike I needed too many cables the other day

1:07:16SPEAKER'cause I was trying to dump PlayStation memory card saves

1:07:20SPEAKERand the DualShock 3 and that little memory card dumper

1:07:23SPEAKERboth needed mini USB cables at the same time.

1:07:26SPEAKER- I used a mini USB to, I thought I could charge

1:07:30SPEAKERmy old point and shoot camera for my kiddo.

1:07:33SPEAKERAnd it turns out you had to use

1:07:35SPEAKERthe standalone battery charger with that.

1:07:37SPEAKERThe camera didn't have a charger built into the device

1:07:40SPEAKERwhich makes sense, I guess,

1:07:41SPEAKERgiven that they were trying to make them really small.

1:07:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I was thinking, in fact, I was thinking about

1:07:44SPEAKERtossing kind of most or all of my old cables

1:07:47SPEAKERand just getting like three or four retractable.

1:07:49SPEAKERDo you trust the USB A on one end

1:07:53SPEAKERand like three different USBs on the other end

1:07:55SPEAKERlike a micro mini and a, let's say, a C?

1:07:58SPEAKER- Is it one where it's like plug-in dongles

1:08:01SPEAKERthat go on the end and they're just flapping around

1:08:02SPEAKERor is it a split?

1:08:04SPEAKER- Like a split is what I was, well, either or.

1:08:05SPEAKERI guess either or is fine. - I don't know about the split.

1:08:07SPEAKER- Either one is fine.

1:08:08SPEAKERYeah, maybe something with an adapter is probably safer.

1:08:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know.

1:08:13SPEAKERThe thing is I have so little,

1:08:14SPEAKERlike my phone charges on a pad.

1:08:17SPEAKERUsually if I'm traveling, I just take a pad with me

1:08:21SPEAKER'cause like the MagSafe ones are so small,

1:08:23SPEAKERthey just go in my DOP kit.

1:08:28SPEAKERMost of the stuff that I need is C now

1:08:31SPEAKERon like the vast majority of day-to-day items.

1:08:34SPEAKER- Yeah, moderate stuff is almost all C at this point.

1:08:37SPEAKERIt's really just messing with older hardware.

1:08:38SPEAKERWhat's, Digital Ant, is that the one you like for the?

1:08:41SPEAKER- I used Digital Ants for a long time

1:08:43SPEAKERfor the magnetic ones, for the MagSafe ones.

1:08:46SPEAKERJust to only buy, like the advice,

1:08:47SPEAKERif you're gonna use those magnetic ones,

1:08:49SPEAKERonly buy one type of those 'cause they're not guaranteed

1:08:52SPEAKERto be compatible with each other.

1:08:54SPEAKERFor each C, I bought one of those,

1:08:56SPEAKERit was kind of expensive, but it was a silicone,

1:09:00SPEAKERa silicone USB-C to C cable,

1:09:03SPEAKERand I use that for the things

1:09:05SPEAKERthat I plug into my computer with C,

1:09:06SPEAKERand it's been really robust, which was a nice surprise.

1:09:11SPEAKER- That's cool.

1:09:12SPEAKERAll right, last question.

1:09:14SPEAKERYou marked this, so I assume you want it read from GAFO.

1:09:18SPEAKERIs Will aware of the class of permanent adhesives

1:09:21SPEAKERthat have a very low overtime failure rate

1:09:23SPEAKERcompared to traditional adhesives?

1:09:25SPEAKERThey're known as fasteners and they're relatively new.

1:09:27SPEAKERI myself find screws, a subset of fasteners,

1:09:30SPEAKERparticularly useful for attaching things

1:09:32SPEAKERto the bottom of my desk, like headphone hooks.

1:09:34SPEAKERI also have had luck with field-based adhesives,

1:09:37SPEAKERcolloquially known as magnets.

1:09:39SPEAKERApparently no one knows how they work,

1:09:41SPEAKERbut they seem like magic.

1:09:42SPEAKERI would highly recommend you look into these

1:09:43SPEAKERfor your headphone mount.

1:09:44SPEAKER- Well, the magnet wouldn't work 'cause it would come off,

1:09:46SPEAKERlike I'd knock it to the side and the magnetic force

1:09:49SPEAKERwould not hold.

1:09:50SPEAKERI thought about screws, but I wasn't super sure

1:09:53SPEAKERwhere I wanted to have this when I put it on,

1:09:54SPEAKERso I used the permanent adhesive instead,

1:09:56SPEAKER'cause I knew I could heat that up with a heat gun

1:09:58SPEAKERand get it off.

1:09:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:10:01SPEAKER- Looking at a headphone hook, it's kind of annoying

1:10:03SPEAKERto get to the screwing in portion of it,

1:10:06SPEAKER'cause the hook part overhangs the screwing in portion

1:10:11SPEAKERin a way that would require a fair amount of finagery.

1:10:14SPEAKERThe real problem is that when I'm laying underneath the desk,

1:10:17SPEAKERI would rather not have to lay on my back

1:10:19SPEAKERand use the drill above me.

1:10:21SPEAKERIt's uncomfortable.

1:10:22SPEAKER- Yeah, fair. - I mold.

1:10:23SPEAKER- Yeah, I also just, I kind of hate putting holes in things

1:10:26SPEAKERthat if I don't absolutely have to.

1:10:28SPEAKER- I try not to, yeah.

1:10:29SPEAKER- Unless it's like, I mean, this desk is so old,

1:10:31SPEAKERI don't care.

1:10:32SPEAKERI've actually nailed some stuff into the back of it.

1:10:34SPEAKER- Nailed?

1:10:35SPEAKER- 'Cause who cares?

1:10:37SPEAKER'Cause this desk is not moving with me anywhere.

1:10:39SPEAKERIt's just going on the curb.

1:10:40SPEAKER- Okay. - Someday.

1:10:42SPEAKERBut any kind of nice desk with a real wood

1:10:44SPEAKERdesktop or something, I would hate to,

1:10:46SPEAKERI would hate to drive screws into that.

1:10:49SPEAKER- Yeah, so my desk, my desk is,

1:10:51SPEAKERthe good part of my desk is the legs.

1:10:54SPEAKER'Cause it's the sit stand.

1:10:56SPEAKERThe top at some point will change.

1:10:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess. - I like the top that I have,

1:10:59SPEAKERbut it's a...

1:11:00SPEAKER- It's maybe an argument for getting a desk frame

1:11:02SPEAKERthat can accommodate replaceable desktops easily.

1:11:05SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

1:11:07SPEAKER- It's like kind of what a lot of people do now.

1:11:08SPEAKERLike a lot of people like those like

1:11:10SPEAKERbutcher block countertops from Ikea for desktops.

1:11:13SPEAKER- Yeah, the other one that I really liked

1:11:15SPEAKERwas the dry erase top.

1:11:19SPEAKERI think that's a cool idea.

1:11:20SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.

1:11:21SPEAKER- So then you have like a big writing surface

1:11:23SPEAKERon your desktop, which necessarily has to be

1:11:29SPEAKERkind of impermanent 'cause you'll smudge and lose stuff.

1:11:32SPEAKER- That's a very slippery desktop though.

1:11:34SPEAKER- It is a slippery desktop, yeah.

1:11:36SPEAKER- There you go.

1:11:37SPEAKER- I think that's the end of the questions.

1:11:38SPEAKERIf you have questions for us,

1:11:40SPEAKERthe email address is techpod@content.town.

1:11:42SPEAKERThe question channel on the Discord

1:11:44SPEAKERis question seeking answers.

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1:11:47SPEAKERyou can for five bucks a month

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1:11:51SPEAKERWe're a listener supported show,

1:11:52SPEAKERwhich means we take money from you all

1:11:54SPEAKERand no one else, at least for right now.

1:11:56SPEAKERWe've been talking with some potential advertisers,

1:11:58SPEAKERso that might change in the not too distant future.

1:12:01SPEAKERWe'd love to know your feedback on that.

1:12:04SPEAKERBut yeah, thanks to everybody who supports the show.

1:12:06SPEAKERAnd again, it's patreon.com/techpod

1:12:09SPEAKERif you would like to find out how you can support the show.

1:12:13SPEAKERIt's the end of the month,

1:12:14SPEAKERso we would like to thank all of our patrons,

1:12:16SPEAKERbut we wanna give a very special thank you

1:12:18SPEAKERto our executive producer tier patrons,

1:12:21SPEAKERincluding Andrew Slosky, Bunnyfiend,

1:12:24SPEAKERPaddle Creek Games, Makers of Fractured Veil,

1:12:26SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamik, Joel Krauska,

1:12:28SPEAKERwho unfortunately I forgot last week.