00:00SPEAKERI used my pine-sil to fix something for my daughter
00:03SPEAKERthe other day, and I'm gonna go ahead and tell you,
00:06SPEAKERfelt pretty good, 'cause she was like,
00:08SPEAKERDad, what's that?
00:09SPEAKER- Father of the year moment?
00:10SPEAKER- Eh, let's not get crazy, but it was,
00:13SPEAKERthe pine-sil, for people who don't know,
00:14SPEAKERis a little USB-powered electric soldering iron.
00:19SPEAKERUsually, like, I use it for small work,
00:21SPEAKERusually 'cause I have a fairly fine point on it,
00:23SPEAKERbut she had a piece of jewelry
00:25SPEAKERthat needed to be soldered closed, basically.
00:28SPEAKERLink had broken, I was like, I can do this.
00:31SPEAKERAnd I grabbed it off my desk and I just plugged it
00:33SPEAKERinto the USB, and she's like, wait, is that a USB thing?
00:35SPEAKERI was like, yeah.
00:36SPEAKERShe was like, huh.
00:38SPEAKERAnd then I started working on it,
00:39SPEAKERand she was like, that is really cool.
00:41SPEAKERHow are you melting the metal?
00:42SPEAKERI was like, it is insanely hot.
00:44SPEAKERAnd we talked about soldering, went through the whole thing.
00:45SPEAKERSo anyway, fast forward a few days,
00:48SPEAKERand we're going to Maker Faire,
00:49SPEAKER'cause we went to Maker Faire yesterday.
00:51SPEAKERThere you go, Maker Faire.
00:52SPEAKERIf you're listening on Sunday morning, you can still go.
00:55SPEAKER- There's still time.
00:56SPEAKER- Get in the car, drive over to Vallejo.
01:00SPEAKERWe're going to talk about it a little bit,
01:01SPEAKERbut it's a great event.
01:03SPEAKERThis is her probably sixth or seventh Maker Faire,
01:06SPEAKER'cause they didn't have them during the pandemic
01:07SPEAKERfor a couple of years,
01:08SPEAKERbut she's been every year since she was like three.
01:10SPEAKEREvery year I've been like, hey,
01:11SPEAKERdo you want to learn how to solder?
01:12SPEAKERIt's like, you're melting metal.
01:14SPEAKERYou're gluing metal together.
01:15SPEAKERAnd she's like, oh, no, I'm good, Dad.
01:18SPEAKERAnd this year we walked by the Learn to Solder tent,
01:20SPEAKERand I was like, hey, do you want to learn to solder?
01:21SPEAKERAnd she's like, yeah, let's learn to solder.
01:23SPEAKERBut let's not do it here.
01:24SPEAKERJust why don't we get one of the kits
01:25SPEAKERand then take it home
01:26SPEAKERand you can teach me at home sometime
01:27SPEAKERwith that thing that you'd fix my thing with the other day.
01:29SPEAKERI was like, heck yeah.
01:31SPEAKER- The time has come.
01:32SPEAKERI'm picturing now a very practical dad pocket protector
01:37SPEAKERthat you could walk around with at all times
01:38SPEAKERwith the pine sole and like a tied pen,
01:42SPEAKERjust both in the pocket, ready to go for emergencies.
01:45SPEAKER- Look, if you think I even know how to use a tied pen,
01:48SPEAKERWes, you are wildly mistaken.
01:51SPEAKER- I feel like your daughter would probably be capable
01:53SPEAKERof using the tied pen.
01:54SPEAKERYou just keep it on your person so that when she needs it.
01:59SPEAKER- My wife had COVID a couple of weeks ago,
02:00SPEAKERso I got to do a lot more laundry
02:01SPEAKERthan I usually just do my stuff.
02:03SPEAKERAnd I got to do everything for a couple of weeks.
02:06SPEAKERAnd she has this stuff called,
02:08SPEAKERit's like Granny something's miracle stain remover.
02:12SPEAKERAnd it's just this gel that you smear on whatever you want
02:15SPEAKERthe stain to go away from.
02:16SPEAKERAnd sometimes you have to do it twice,
02:18SPEAKERlike through the wash twice.
02:19SPEAKERBut it took out everything, man.
02:20SPEAKERIt took out grass, it took out grease,
02:22SPEAKERit took out like black gnarly shit from the shop.
02:25SPEAKERIt was crazy, it was really good.
02:27SPEAKER- I feel like your product has to be good
02:29SPEAKERif you're invoking granny power.
02:30SPEAKERLike that is like a dark art that,
02:33SPEAKERif you're lying about that, people are gonna come for you.
02:35SPEAKER'Cause like grannies are powerful stuff.
02:38SPEAKERGranny Smith apple, like you can't just bite into one
02:40SPEAKERof those and be like, that's a mild apple.
02:43SPEAKERLike that shit punches you in the face.
02:45SPEAKER(upbeat music)
02:52SPEAKER(upbeat music)
03:13SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
03:16SPEAKERI'm Will and joining us today.
03:19SPEAKER- I'm Wes.
03:20SPEAKER- Wes is our substitute Brad for the week.
03:22SPEAKERBrad is on his way back from North Carolina now, finally.
03:26SPEAKERSo I think his folks got power.
03:28SPEAKERAnd what we're gonna, my guess is, let's see,
03:31SPEAKERI think next week is supposed to be our Q and A episode.
03:33SPEAKERBut my guess is we're gonna talk about North Carolina
03:35SPEAKERsome next week, so.
03:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm your substitute Brad.
03:38SPEAKERI'm your substitute Southerner.
03:40SPEAKERI'm the- - That's true.
03:41SPEAKER- Maybe the only tech pod regular
03:44SPEAKERwho's also a transplant from the South, like you and Brad.
03:48SPEAKER- So Adam, Patrick Murray has moved around a lot as a youth.
03:52SPEAKERAnd I think he spent some time in Texas,
03:54SPEAKERbut I don't really, like it is Southern,
03:56SPEAKERbut it feels like its own separate subset of the South
03:58SPEAKERas somebody from Tennessee.
04:00SPEAKER- That's its own South for sure, yeah.
04:03SPEAKERYeah, I was actually in Georgia
04:05SPEAKERwhen the big hurricane passed through.
04:07SPEAKERBut we, unlike North Carolina, we were very fortunate
04:11SPEAKERthat it kind of just went overhead and, you know,
04:13SPEAKERtook some trees out, but like nothing catastrophic,
04:17SPEAKERat least in like Central and Northern Georgia,
04:19SPEAKERbut obviously North Carolina got it real bad.
04:22SPEAKER- Yeah, it's still, I mean, it still seems awful.
04:28SPEAKERSo, and it seems like it's gonna be a multi repair process
04:31SPEAKERof months or years, even in some cases.
04:35SPEAKERAnyway, we'll hear about that next week.
04:38SPEAKERThis week, we got a twofer for you
04:39SPEAKER'cause Wes and I were talking about things
04:42SPEAKERwe could talk about on a podcast.
04:43SPEAKERAnd we realized that Windows 24H2 is out now
04:49SPEAKERfor a lot of people, but not a lot of other people.
04:52SPEAKERI have a computer still on 22H2 back behind me right now,
04:55SPEAKERand we'll talk about that later.
04:57SPEAKER- This is the classic Windows thing, right?
04:58SPEAKERThere's an update out there in the world.
05:00SPEAKERA lot of people probably don't even know
05:02SPEAKERif they have the update 'cause it's not really that obvious.
05:05SPEAKERLike you can find out in Windows,
05:07SPEAKERbut it doesn't just tell you in, you know, big bold letters,
05:11SPEAKERhere's the version of Windows you're on.
05:12SPEAKERIf you right click the start menu and go to system,
05:15SPEAKERthen it's down there under Windows specifications.
05:18SPEAKERIt'll say addition, Windows 11 Pro or home,
05:21SPEAKERversion 23H2 is what this computer is on.
05:24SPEAKERAnd we actually, we should just talk about this.
05:25SPEAKERWhy do you sometimes not get a Windows update, Wes?
05:28SPEAKERHave you had them explain this dark magic to you before?
05:33SPEAKER- I mean, I know in general, they'll do phased rollouts
05:37SPEAKERto make sure updates aren't going apocalyptically bad
05:39SPEAKER'cause there have been many Windows updates in the past
05:43SPEAKERthat have just borked a ton of people 'cause computers
05:46SPEAKERwhen they rolled out, right?
05:48SPEAKERBut I can't say I know like all the minutia
05:51SPEAKERof system compatibility and their sort of,
05:55SPEAKERI guess, selection matrix for like who gets stuff first.
05:59SPEAKERI mean, I don't have this update yet
06:00SPEAKERand I'm on the Windows Insider beta tier.
06:04SPEAKERSo I'm not in, there's like Canary and dev tiers,
06:07SPEAKERwhich are like super bleeding edge, right?
06:09SPEAKERBut I'm on the tier that comes before like release candidate
06:14SPEAKERbut it hasn't pushed it to me
06:15SPEAKERand I'm on a fairly modern system, so.
06:17SPEAKER- So they have a bunch of criteria for when you get them.
06:21SPEAKEREven all the way down to things like,
06:23SPEAKERhave you pressed the check for updates button lately?
06:26SPEAKER'Cause like they assume if people press
06:27SPEAKERthe check for updates button,
06:28SPEAKERthat means they're more interested
06:29SPEAKERin getting early access to stuff.
06:32SPEAKER- Yep.
06:33SPEAKERSince they went to the dev Canary beta live rings
06:39SPEAKERon that Insider, like there's basically four different rings
06:42SPEAKERreally three 'cause most people shouldn't run dev.
06:44SPEAKERIt's Canary beta and live basically now.
06:48SPEAKERAnd the idea is that the Canary gets stuff
06:50SPEAKERbefore it's really tested.
06:52SPEAKERIt just rolls out everything to everyone.
06:54SPEAKERThe beta is stuff that's been tested and profiled.
06:58SPEAKERAnd what they do is they build a profile of your machine.
07:00SPEAKERSo they look at like your driver ecosystem
07:03SPEAKERand what hardware is on your machine.
07:05SPEAKERAnd they detect when there's problems on Canary machines
07:09SPEAKERwith specific drivers and specific hardware
07:11SPEAKERand stuff that's supported or unsupported or whatever.
07:15SPEAKERAnd then they flag machines that have similar configurations
07:18SPEAKERand they don't dole it out to you
07:21SPEAKERuntil those configurations are resolved.
07:23SPEAKERSo for example, my streaming machine behind me
07:27SPEAKERhas a couple of Blackmagic video capture cards in it.
07:29SPEAKERAnd I haven't updated the video card driver
07:31SPEAKERin like five years probably.
07:33SPEAKERThe video capture driver in five years.
07:35SPEAKERAnd it's not gonna give me 23H2
07:38SPEAKERuntil I update the video capture driver
07:40SPEAKERfor those Blackmagic cards.
07:42SPEAKERAnd like, this is a good thing.
07:44SPEAKERLike this isn't, it seems like if you're a Windows,
07:46SPEAKERif you're a computer nerd
07:47SPEAKERand you're like playing with the latest version of the OS,
07:48SPEAKERit's annoying.
07:49SPEAKERThere's a ways around it.
07:50SPEAKER- Yeah.
07:51SPEAKERYou can always do a manual install, right?
07:53SPEAKERBut I'm trying to decide,
07:54SPEAKERshould I feel like Microsoft is protecting me
07:56SPEAKERor judging me for my driver and hardware situation?
08:01SPEAKER- I feel like this is a,
08:04SPEAKERlike look, Microsoft has a billion people using computers.
08:08SPEAKERSo they are, they err on the side of protection.
08:10SPEAKERThat's why they do annoying things.
08:12SPEAKERLike when you install Windows, it says,
08:14SPEAKER"Hey, we're gonna store everything in OneDrive,
08:16SPEAKER"in your OneDrive folder.
08:17SPEAKER"Your documents, your desktop, your video."
08:19SPEAKERIt's all on OneDrive.
08:20SPEAKERAnd it has a convenient side effect of like them saying,
08:23SPEAKER"Hey man, you're out of OneDrive space.
08:24SPEAKER"You gotta pony up some money for us."
08:27SPEAKER- $5 a month, it'll be great.
08:28SPEAKER- Yeah, but the real thing is,
08:31SPEAKERlike 99.9% of people who are using computers
08:35SPEAKERdon't know how to back shit up
08:36SPEAKERand saving their important stuff in OneDrive
08:38SPEAKERsaves them a lot of hassle when they lose their laptop
08:41SPEAKERor smash the screen or something.
08:43SPEAKERSo, like it's, you have to,
08:45SPEAKERyou just assume that Microsoft is always going to err
08:48SPEAKERon the side of helping people who don't understand
08:50SPEAKERwhat a computer is, have a better time.
08:52SPEAKERAnd that's what this is, right?
08:54SPEAKERAnd they got to that practice the hard way,
08:56SPEAKERlike I was saying back in,
08:58SPEAKERI feel like in the Windows 7 era and before especially,
09:02SPEAKERthere would just be so many Windows updates
09:03SPEAKERwhere people would be like,
09:05SPEAKER"Great, it completely broke my installation.
09:08SPEAKER"I have to reinstall now because of this update."
09:11SPEAKER- Well, and having that testing infrastructure
09:13SPEAKERis really good.
09:13SPEAKERSo, okay, so that's part one of the two for,
09:15SPEAKERthe other thing is, my wife last week was like,
09:17SPEAKER"Hey, it's Maker Faire week."
09:19SPEAKERAs we were talking about sending this out,
09:20SPEAKERI was like, "Aw, crap, I forgot it was Maker Faire week.
09:22SPEAKER"That's awesome."
09:23SPEAKERSo we trucked it down for a school field trip yesterday
09:27SPEAKERand went to Maker Faire and got to explore
09:31SPEAKERthe kind of preview VIP day/school field trip day
09:37SPEAKERof the Bay Area Maker Faire, which, like I said,
09:39SPEAKERif you're listening to on Sunday morning,
09:40SPEAKERon right now, you can turn off the podcast, okay?
09:45SPEAKERGo to, I think it's MakerFaire.com, buy some tickets,
09:49SPEAKERgo down there, take the fam, it's a great day.
09:52SPEAKERIt's like four or five hours of really good stuff to see
09:54SPEAKERand then they have, you can get, look,
09:57SPEAKERyou can get fried shit with cheese
09:58SPEAKERif you want some fair food.
09:59SPEAKERThey got it all.
10:01SPEAKER- Funnel cake.
10:02SPEAKER- They had to have funnel cakes.
10:03SPEAKERI was kind of, "What?"
10:04SPEAKERNo, but I, so they had, there was a cookie bakery
10:07SPEAKERthat was there that's like the brown buttered cookie,
10:10SPEAKERbrown buttered bakery, I think is what it's called,
10:12SPEAKERthat made, we got some bomb snickerdoodles.
10:15SPEAKER- Okay, acceptable.
10:16SPEAKER- And there was a waffle cookie place there that was like,
10:20SPEAKERthey were like big thick cookie, but no funnel cakes.
10:23SPEAKERThat was a letdown.
10:24SPEAKERNo, and no, they had shawarma, but no paella.
10:28SPEAKERThat's the other Maker Faire classic
10:29SPEAKERfrom the San Francisco, San Mateo Maker Faire days that.
10:33SPEAKER- I feel like, I feel like paella is a bit of a gambit.
10:36SPEAKERI don't know.
10:37SPEAKERI've had paella in Barcelona, it was okay.
10:41SPEAKER- Well, okay.
10:42SPEAKER- It was okay, it wasn't worth it.
10:43SPEAKERHonestly, paella I feel like is a dicey dish.
10:47SPEAKER- For me, for me in fair food times, paella is like,
10:52SPEAKERyou're like, oh yeah, paella, I'm gonna get it.
10:54SPEAKERIt's like, it's like the healthy option.
10:55SPEAKERIt's the thing that's not fried.
10:56SPEAKERSo anyway.
10:57SPEAKER- It sounds great, I just feel so often let down,
10:59SPEAKERbut yeah, what are we doing first?
11:00SPEAKERWe doing Windows first?
11:02SPEAKER- Let's do Windows first.
11:03SPEAKER'Cause I think, I think it's pretty straightforward.
11:05SPEAKER- Yeah.
11:06SPEAKER- This one feels like a big update.
11:07SPEAKERThis is so that Microsoft does theoretically two big,
11:10SPEAKERtwo Windows updates a year.
11:11SPEAKERAnd there's like a big one in the fall
11:14SPEAKERand a smaller one in the spring.
11:16SPEAKER- Yeah, this is the one that people were actually saying,
11:18SPEAKERthere was some kind of a bit of buzz beforehand
11:21SPEAKERthat they might actually launch this one as Windows 12
11:25SPEAKERor like at some point it seemed like there was a possibility
11:28SPEAKERthey were gonna do that.
11:29SPEAKERAnd obviously they didn't go that way.
11:30SPEAKER- Yeah, but yeah, it feels like a big update.
11:33SPEAKERThey've done some significant kernel stuff.
11:35SPEAKERThey've rewritten nerds.
11:37SPEAKERHey, but shout out for all the nerds.
11:38SPEAKERUsually we leave the nerdy shit till the end,
11:40SPEAKERbut here we go.
11:41SPEAKER- Dive it in.
11:42SPEAKER- Yeah, they rewrote some of the Windows kernel in Rust
11:45SPEAKERspecifically stuff that handles high,
11:48SPEAKERit's high security threat issues like font handling oddly
11:52SPEAKERis a place where people get in trouble.
11:56SPEAKERCouple other things and they described it
11:58SPEAKERas their first kind of dip into,
12:01SPEAKERhey, how does this Rust thing work
12:03SPEAKERinside an enormous software generation organism
12:05SPEAKERlike Microsoft, which I thought was interesting.
12:09SPEAKER- Yeah, it's really cool.
12:10SPEAKERThe one project that I really know anything about
12:13SPEAKERthat's written in Rust is a ruffle,
12:15SPEAKERwhich is the flash emulator for browsers primarily.
12:20SPEAKERAnd I've talked to some of the people who worked on ruffle
12:24SPEAKERand they've kind of described like,
12:26SPEAKERwhy would you write this in Rust?
12:27SPEAKERAnd the reason they did it at the time was just,
12:29SPEAKERit was a new programming language people are excited about.
12:32SPEAKERAnd so that was kind of a way to draw people to the project
12:34SPEAKERand like learn a new language.
12:36SPEAKERBut another part of it was that it was a very safe language
12:39SPEAKERto write in just kind of the way the language was structured.
12:44SPEAKERSo that seems like a good thing for the kernel of Windows,
12:48SPEAKERwhich is used by a few billion people.
12:50SPEAKER- Yeah, so, okay.
12:51SPEAKERSo that's the one big giant nerdy thing.
12:55SPEAKERThe AMD, the other one is that AMD and Microsoft
12:58SPEAKERhave been working together for a long time
13:00SPEAKERto fix some Ryzen perf problems around branch prediction.
13:04SPEAKERSo there's an update.
13:05SPEAKERIt's also available for 23H2 now if you're on 23H2
13:10SPEAKERand have a Zen 3, 4, 5, which are Ryzen 5000, 7000, 9000,
13:15SPEAKERand then also the even numbers in between those
13:18SPEAKERif you're on a laptop.
13:20SPEAKERBut it'll do like a 10% perf boost in some games.
13:24SPEAKERAnd that's just baked into 24H2 now.
13:28SPEAKERYou can get it on 23H2 in an optional update.
13:31SPEAKERIt'll be like KB, I actually meant to pull this out
13:34SPEAKERand I didn't grab it, but it's,
13:35SPEAKERthere's a knowledge base that's,
13:37SPEAKERif you search for AMD branch prediction optimization
13:39SPEAKERknowledge base, it takes you right there.
13:41SPEAKER- Yeah, and this was what people were really bummed
13:43SPEAKERwith the 9000 series performance, right?
13:46SPEAKERAnd this is not a night and day makeover,
13:49SPEAKERbut it is a significant little bump
13:51SPEAKERto how well those chips are doing.
13:53SPEAKER- 10% is nothing to sneeze at.
13:55SPEAKERThe secret is you also get it on the older chips too.
13:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
13:59SPEAKER- Less so on the 3s than 3s,
14:02SPEAKERmore on the 7s do pretty well though.
14:05SPEAKERPhone link.
14:08SPEAKEREverybody, do you use phone link Wes?
14:10SPEAKER- So I set it up a few months ago.
14:13SPEAKERSo I've been using a phone as my webcam for years.
14:16SPEAKERLike I was using an old pixel phone
14:18SPEAKERand more recently I'm using like an iPhone,
14:22SPEAKERlike a modern iPhone that is no longer my dedicated webcam.
14:25SPEAKERI just like hook it up when I need it basically.
14:28SPEAKERAnd I was using that through a couple different programs
14:32SPEAKERthat were fine, but weren't like my favorite bits
14:35SPEAKERof software to use.
14:36SPEAKERAnd when I saw phone link was offering the ability
14:39SPEAKERto do the webcam connectivity, I was like, that's great.
14:42SPEAKERI'll install that.
14:43SPEAKERAnd I think that was actually part of the reason
14:45SPEAKERI upgraded to Windows 11,
14:48SPEAKEReven when I built a new system a couple of years ago
14:51SPEAKERand installed phone link,
14:53SPEAKERgot it hooked up with my old pixel camera.
14:56SPEAKERAnd it just didn't recognize that the phone had a webcam
15:00SPEAKERor wouldn't offer me that feature.
15:02SPEAKERAnd so then I installed like a, I was like,
15:04SPEAKERoh, it's a pixel three, maybe the version of Android's too old
15:07SPEAKERthere wasn't really great documentation out there.
15:09SPEAKERSo I installed like a newer version of Android on the phone,
15:13SPEAKERlike a custom one, 'cause Google doesn't support it anymore
15:16SPEAKERand it still didn't work.
15:17SPEAKERAnd so that was the last that I attempted to use phone link.
15:21SPEAKERSo in theory seems like cool software,
15:23SPEAKERbut it didn't do the one thing I wanted it to.
15:25SPEAKER- So it's funny, I've never used the video camera thing
15:27SPEAKER'cause I have webcams out the wazoo here,
15:29SPEAKERbut the like decent cameras.
15:32SPEAKERBut the thing I use it for is getting texts on my windows PC
15:37SPEAKER'cause like, if you use a Mac for work
15:40SPEAKERand you have an iPhone,
15:41SPEAKERyour messages just show up everywhere.
15:43SPEAKERIt's really nice. - Yes, beautiful.
15:45SPEAKER- Yeah, look, I got addicted to that.
15:48SPEAKERAnd then things would happen,
15:51SPEAKERlike my partner would send me a text message and be like,
15:53SPEAKERhey, can you click this, can you go here?
15:55SPEAKERAnd it's like clearly a thing I need to do in the desktop,
15:57SPEAKERbut then it's like, okay, I have a discord channel
16:00SPEAKERand I'm gonna share this to myself with from my phone
16:03SPEAKERso that I can then open it on my desktop.
16:04SPEAKERAnd it's like a three-step process.
16:05SPEAKERIt's kind of pain in the ass.
16:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so you can get messages through phone link, right?
16:09SPEAKERI use Google's messages for web,
16:11SPEAKERthe like Android browser thing.
16:12SPEAKER- Oh, you're an Android person.
16:14SPEAKER- So I have an Android and an iPhone,
16:16SPEAKERbut like primarily, one's the work phone,
16:18SPEAKERbut like Android is my like 90% usage.
16:21SPEAKERAnd I'm curious now to see with this new version
16:25SPEAKERof phone link, if it's a better experience
16:27SPEAKERthan having the messages for web, like tab in my browser.
16:31SPEAKER- Yeah, my bet is that they end up being equivalent.
16:34SPEAKERSo the upshot is if you're on Android,
16:36SPEAKERthe phone link menu, phone link is now in the start menu.
16:40SPEAKERIt's just like on the right side of the start menu
16:42SPEAKERwhen you open up the start menu when your phone's connected
16:45SPEAKERand it tells you like what your battery is,
16:47SPEAKERit lets you control your media player.
16:49SPEAKERIt gives you your most recent notifications and calls,
16:51SPEAKERstuff like that.
16:52SPEAKERI don't think on iOS it's still using the old interface
16:56SPEAKERfor right now, the change is coming soon.
17:01SPEAKERI don't think they fixed the problem with iOS
17:02SPEAKERwhere you only see non-group messages.
17:06SPEAKERSo on iOS, you can reply to text messages,
17:09SPEAKERyou see everything, but you can't reply to group messages
17:12SPEAKERon the Windows machine.
17:14SPEAKER- So if it's an iMessage individual message,
17:17SPEAKERit comes through, but not an iMessage group.
17:20SPEAKER- Yeah, or a mixed iMessage SMS, RMS group, yeah.
17:25SPEAKER- Interesting, interesting, interesting.
17:27SPEAKER- The group message comes through.
17:28SPEAKERHold on, I'm gonna go look now 'cause this is like,
17:32SPEAKERit looks like, well, I don't have a group text
17:35SPEAKERthat's gone in a while, so.
17:36SPEAKER- I'm very curious to see how this new version of phone link
17:39SPEAKERplays with the new version of iOS,
17:41SPEAKERwhich now supports the RCS messaging
17:44SPEAKERdepending on your carrier.
17:46SPEAKERLike we've hit several potential variables here
17:49SPEAKERthat could make it really nice to have this
17:52SPEAKERalways connected to your PC or really messy potentially.
17:55SPEAKER- Well, so the phone link thing connects
17:56SPEAKERwith Bluetooth to your phone.
17:58SPEAKERSo it uses, it shows up just like it does
18:02SPEAKERin your car head unit.
18:03SPEAKERIf your head unit notifies you of SMS messages,
18:06SPEAKERit works just like that.
18:07SPEAKERAnd I haven't had any problems with RMS, SMS
18:12SPEAKERkind of weirdness aside from the standard,
18:14SPEAKERhey, group messages are janky on this.
18:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
18:17SPEAKER- But the rest of it, the rest is pretty good.
18:18SPEAKERYou also see your phone notifications
18:20SPEAKERand Windows gives you control over filtering out
18:23SPEAKERthe ones that you don't need to see.
18:24SPEAKERSo like, it's kind of nice
18:25SPEAKER'cause I get the doorbell notification on my PC now
18:28SPEAKERand I get the washing machine notification on my PC now
18:31SPEAKERand I need to go change the laundry.
18:32SPEAKERSo anyway, phone link,
18:35SPEAKERI'm excited to see what that looks like.
18:37SPEAKERThey've added a thing called energy saver mode,
18:41SPEAKERwhich I think I'm gonna say that this works the way
18:43SPEAKERI think most people thought that the battery saver mode
18:46SPEAKERalways worked, but it has not.
18:49SPEAKERSo one of the things that changes the 24H2
18:52SPEAKERis that a lot of the things that used to be in,
18:54SPEAKERyou know how Windows has two control panels,
18:56SPEAKERit has the old school control panel
18:58SPEAKERand then it also has the new settings app?
19:00SPEAKER- I think they finally got rid
19:01SPEAKERof the old school control panel, right?
19:03SPEAKER- It's still there. - No, they didn't.
19:04SPEAKER- It's still there.
19:05SPEAKER- Oh my God, they can't kill it.
19:06SPEAKERIt's immortal.
19:07SPEAKER- Yeah, there's still like, if you wanna adjust your path,
19:09SPEAKERyou still gotta go to that.
19:10SPEAKERIf you wanna put new things in your path,
19:12SPEAKERyou gotta go there.
19:12SPEAKERBut they moved a lot more of the power stuff
19:16SPEAKERout of the old place and into the new place.
19:20SPEAKERAnd they added this thing called energy saver mode,
19:23SPEAKERwhich seems specifically built for people
19:26SPEAKERthat have processors that have like,
19:29SPEAKERlet's say you have a newer Intel machine
19:31SPEAKERthat has both performance cores and efficient cores.
19:34SPEAKERIt's more intelligently able to dump stuff
19:37SPEAKERover to the efficient cores
19:38SPEAKERwhen it's running in the background and stuff now,
19:40SPEAKERbased on a setting in this tab.
19:41SPEAKERSo for example, I was testing a lunar-like laptop
19:45SPEAKERthe other day, which is Intel's new disaggregated
19:49SPEAKERmobile architecture.
19:50SPEAKERThat means multiple chips inside the CPU package.
19:54SPEAKER- Really killer battery efficiency in these things, right?
19:57SPEAKER- It's like the breakdown,
20:00SPEAKERhaving sat through all the reviews of these now,
20:03SPEAKERtalked to Gordon over at PC World a lot about this,
20:05SPEAKERis it seems like the AMD option is the performant option.
20:09SPEAKERThe Intel option is like the good battery life option
20:13SPEAKERand still decent performance,
20:16SPEAKERbut just like a little bit slower.
20:19SPEAKERAnd the Qualcomm Snapdragon stuff is just like,
20:23SPEAKERif you wanna roll out a corporate fleet
20:24SPEAKERthat can't do anything but the things
20:26SPEAKERthat you wanna tell them to do, go nuts.
20:29SPEAKERBut maybe don't--
20:29SPEAKER- You can use these six applications really well.
20:32SPEAKER- It's more than that,
20:33SPEAKERbut I joked about it a couple times on the podcast.
20:36SPEAKERWhen they were doing the Computex presentation
20:38SPEAKERand they were like, "Hey man,
20:40SPEAKER"we've tested 1,200 games on these."
20:42SPEAKERI was like, "Tested 1,200 games is different than,
20:45SPEAKER"hey, there are 1,200 games playable on this."
20:48SPEAKERAnd that turned out to be the case.
20:49SPEAKERAnyway, the point is it knows,
20:53SPEAKERthe Windows can tell if you have an OLED screen
20:57SPEAKERand the energy saver mode will say,
21:00SPEAKER"Hey, do you wanna use dark mode?
21:02SPEAKER"It will make your battery life better."
21:04SPEAKERWithout explaining why or any of the other stuff,
21:05SPEAKERbut it makes sense, right?
21:09SPEAKER'Cause OLEDs obviously, there's no backlight.
21:12SPEAKERDark pixels don't use as much energy
21:14SPEAKERas light pixels on OLEDs.
21:15SPEAKER- Yes.
21:16SPEAKER- It also reduces the power consumption
21:18SPEAKERfor background tests,
21:19SPEAKEReither by dumping them off to the E-cores
21:20SPEAKERor by putting them on slower running cores on a Ryzen.
21:25SPEAKERIt'll just put them on the slow cores, which is nice.
21:28SPEAKERNow, it's a little janky.
21:29SPEAKERWhen I was doing some testing on it the other day,
21:31SPEAKERI saw some real weird performance stuff
21:34SPEAKERwhere the stuff running on P-cores just never throttled up.
21:39SPEAKERSo I was running a benchmark
21:40SPEAKERthat normally takes about five minutes
21:42SPEAKERand was taking 40 minutes
21:44SPEAKERbecause the CPU was running at 800 megahertz.
21:46SPEAKER- Ideal.
21:47SPEAKER(laughing)
21:48SPEAKER- Yeah, not ideal.
21:49SPEAKERMaybe use that on mobile.
21:52SPEAKERI would say probably don't use that on desktop at this point.
21:55SPEAKER- That feels like a pretty good answer
21:57SPEAKERto my thing I was just thinking about,
21:59SPEAKERwhich was how much...
22:01SPEAKERWe've got these kind of brand new PC processor architectures
22:06SPEAKERlanding now.
22:06SPEAKERIt really feels like the dynamic is changing,
22:08SPEAKERespecially for laptop stuff.
22:10SPEAKERAnd I was thinking how much headroom is there gonna be
22:13SPEAKERon the OS or software side
22:16SPEAKERto optimize for this new hardware, right?
22:18SPEAKERHow much more efficiency can we get
22:20SPEAKERjust from making Windows Taylor built
22:23SPEAKERfor something like Lunar Lake
22:25SPEAKERor AMD's new chips or Snapdragon?
22:28SPEAKERAnd it sounds like maybe there's a lot of room
22:30SPEAKERto dial in how these things are interlinked.
22:34SPEAKER- I'm gonna go and tell you,
22:35SPEAKERI hooked it up to the watt meter
22:36SPEAKERand I watched the CPU just run at the idle power draw
22:43SPEAKERfor 40 minutes to do a five-minute benchmark.
22:46SPEAKERIt was amazing, but also not a desired outcome, right?
22:51SPEAKERI think the change here that's good
22:52SPEAKERis that they're giving users control over this stuff
22:54SPEAKERso you can bump it up automatically.
22:57SPEAKERThe next step is when game mode turns on,
23:00SPEAKERit should jump it up to the performance mode, right?
23:02SPEAKERStuff like that.
23:03SPEAKERAnd this is an example of the convergence
23:08SPEAKERof desktop OSes and mobile OSes
23:13SPEAKERactually making desktop OSes better
23:15SPEAKER'cause this is something that mobile OSes
23:16SPEAKERjust kind of inherently have known how to do
23:18SPEAKERsince the beginning.
23:19SPEAKER- Yeah, it turns out that the real learnings there
23:23SPEAKERwere about how to work with the hardware
23:25SPEAKERand not just like, we should make everything for touchscreens.
23:28SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
23:28SPEAKERWell, and so the other thing that's happened with Microsoft
23:31SPEAKERthat they're finally,
23:34SPEAKERthe example of the branch prediction thing for AMD,
23:36SPEAKERthat took a long time 'cause it's like kernel level changes
23:38SPEAKERand you don't just write kernel patches
23:40SPEAKERfor the Windows kernel, it turns out.
23:43SPEAKERIf you're a vendor, Linux, no problem.
23:45SPEAKERBut this is taking advantage of these newer processors.
23:52SPEAKERMicrosoft was excited about the copilot plus stuff.
23:54SPEAKERI bet this was probably the conversation
23:56SPEAKERthat happened as a result of,
23:58SPEAKERhey, we want you to build a bunch of copilot
24:00SPEAKERplus PC compatible processors.
24:03SPEAKERAnd the vendors were like,
24:04SPEAKERhey, you gotta support the stuff we've had in here
24:05SPEAKERfor a long time now
24:06SPEAKER'cause you're kind of hosing us on battery, guys.
24:09SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:10SPEAKER- Anyway, speaking of copilot.
24:13SPEAKER- Oh, must we?
24:14SPEAKER- So, okay.
24:16SPEAKER- No, we should.
24:16SPEAKER- We should.
24:17SPEAKERIt's a button on the taskbar just like any other app
24:20SPEAKERand you can just right click on it and go to,
24:22SPEAKERwell, you have to go to the start menu
24:24SPEAKERto right click on it and go to uninstall,
24:25SPEAKERbut you're able to do that.
24:27SPEAKERI haven't actually done it yet to know if it works
24:29SPEAKERbecause I'm using the machines that have 24H2 on them,
24:32SPEAKERI'm using for testing and I don't wanna jack it up
24:34SPEAKERif I need to test copilot plus stuff.
24:37SPEAKERAnd I don't wanna have to reinstall Windows to get it back
24:39SPEAKERif they've messed something up in a tragic and hilarious way.
24:42SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:44SPEAKER- It's mostly, there was a bunch of stuff,
24:49SPEAKERit's funny, while we were setting up for this,
24:51SPEAKERI went back and read a bunch of previews
24:53SPEAKERthat they did like six, four months ago of 24H2
24:57SPEAKERto see what stuff actually shipped and is in
24:59SPEAKERwith a copilot plus laptop sitting on my lap testing stuff.
25:04SPEAKERAnd there's some stuff like,
25:06SPEAKERhey, you can tap the copilot button
25:07SPEAKERwhile you're in the Windows snipping tool
25:09SPEAKERafter you've grabbed a snip and get it to do things
25:11SPEAKERlike describe the picture or blur out the background
25:14SPEAKERand none of that stuff's in there.
25:17SPEAKER- And you have a appropriately powerful NPU
25:20SPEAKERthat would unlock all of the features it can supposedly use?
25:24SPEAKER- I'm sitting here, PC world loan me a MSI laptop,
25:31SPEAKERI don't know how I'm supposed to talk about
25:33SPEAKERwhich one this is yet 'cause it might be embargoed still,
25:34SPEAKERbut yeah, it's a copilot plus NPU powered
25:39SPEAKERLunar Lake laptop and it does the copilot plus stuff,
25:44SPEAKERbut it doesn't do a lot of the stuff that was at.
25:46SPEAKERNow, in fairness, it's not stuff that Microsoft is saying
25:49SPEAKERnow that it's doing, this is all stuff
25:50SPEAKERfrom like third party writeups of what's coming in 24H2,
25:53SPEAKERwhich is subject to change, yada yada,
25:56SPEAKERbut it's interesting.
25:58SPEAKER- To some extent, it feels like the story of this,
26:01SPEAKERI mean, obviously AI stuff in general
26:03SPEAKERis the story of this year in tech
26:05SPEAKERand probably next year in tech,
26:07SPEAKERbut this just reminds me of how many of the things
26:10SPEAKERApple was showing at their event a few weeks ago
26:13SPEAKERfrom iOS 18 were like asterisk coming later, right?
26:15SPEAKERThey're like, it's gonna do all these AI things eventually.
26:18SPEAKER- Well, and the weird thing about the Apple thing
26:20SPEAKERis usually there's like one feature that's coming later
26:22SPEAKERthat's like, hey, new photos app coming this fall,
26:26SPEAKERthis year it was like everything that we talked about
26:29SPEAKERcoming this fall, the double press on the button
26:33SPEAKERcoming this, anyway.
26:35SPEAKERSo this one is, I'm starting to come around
26:39SPEAKERa little tiny bit on the Copilot Plus stuff on some of it.
26:44SPEAKERI talk to a lot of programmers in my day to day
26:47SPEAKERand a lot of programmers really love Copilot Plus
26:50SPEAKERfor like, hey, generate the framework of a Python app
26:54SPEAKERthat does this and then it just does that and you go,
26:56SPEAKERand that's, I think that's the Copilot Plus
26:58SPEAKERthat's part of GitHub because,
27:00SPEAKERor Copilot that's part of GitHub because there's,
27:02SPEAKER'cause Microsoft is just calling everything
27:04SPEAKERthat's AI related at all, Copilot at this point,
27:07SPEAKERit's a little confusing.
27:08SPEAKER- Yeah, that's not gonna be a problem long-term.
27:12SPEAKER- Probably not.
27:15SPEAKERBut anyway, the fact that you don't have to go through
27:17SPEAKERa bunch of registry bullshit and all that to get rid of it
27:20SPEAKERis a big improvement, honestly.
27:22SPEAKER'Cause a lot of people just don't want it, which I get.
27:24SPEAKER- So as a Windows assistant, how does it kind of fare
27:29SPEAKERagainst, they had Cortana before, right?
27:32SPEAKERAnd they sunset, or Cortana sent her off into space
27:36SPEAKERand they've replaced her with Copilot, is that right?
27:38SPEAKER- There's a word for that, isn't it?
27:39SPEAKERDidn't she go rampant, that's what happens to AIs.
27:43SPEAKER- If only the Windows Cortana had gone rampant
27:45SPEAKERand then infected a billion computers,
27:48SPEAKERwhat a story that would be.
27:49SPEAKER- Arguably.
27:50SPEAKER- But yeah, so she's gone, right?
27:52SPEAKER- Yeah, fired into the sun.
27:53SPEAKER- You know, how does Copilot do the kind of stuff
27:56SPEAKERthat she was doing before?
27:57SPEAKERDid you even use Cortana?
27:58SPEAKERI was not really a Cortana user.
28:00SPEAKER- I did not use Cortana 'cause I don't want to talk
28:03SPEAKERto Windows ever, but you could do stuff
28:06SPEAKERlike turn off your computer with your voice,
28:08SPEAKERwhich was fun 'cause you could walk into somebody's office
28:10SPEAKERand yell, "Hey, Cortana, turn off my computer,"
28:12SPEAKERand then everybody's computer would turn off,
28:13SPEAKERwhich was always hilarious.
28:16SPEAKERThey've, oddly enough, with 24H2,
28:18SPEAKERthey've pulled all of the Windows control out.
28:22SPEAKERWith 23H2 and Copilot Plus, you could change to dark mode.
28:28SPEAKERBut now all that stuff is gone.
28:29SPEAKERYou can still talk to it, you can still do voice commands,
28:31SPEAKERbut it's more like, "Hey, I need you to summarize
28:34SPEAKER"this picture," and it's like,
28:35SPEAKER"Hey, you gotta give me the picture."
28:36SPEAKERIt doesn't even really look at your screen,
28:39SPEAKERwhich is one of the big things
28:40SPEAKERthat they were kind of selling as,
28:41SPEAKER"Hey, this is a useful thing you can do."
28:44SPEAKERI feel like maybe that you're looking at the screen
28:46SPEAKERand parsing out what's happening is maybe the hard part
28:48SPEAKERof this whole thing 'cause Apple's having similar issues.
28:51SPEAKER- I mean, does it feel like just chat GBT
28:55SPEAKERintegrated into Windows, basically?
28:57SPEAKER- I mean, imagine a chat GBT
28:59SPEAKERthat spent a lot of time training under Bing.
29:02SPEAKER- Oh my, let's figure out how we can make chat GBT
29:06SPEAKERmore depressing, what a perfect summary.
29:08SPEAKER- Yeah, so, yeah, I don't know.
29:13SPEAKERI'm not gonna, the place I used it that was really good
29:16SPEAKERwas when I was asking it for how to do stuff in Windows,
29:19SPEAKERwhen I wanted to know how to do a background blur
29:21SPEAKERin the snipping tool, it was like,
29:24SPEAKER"No, you can't talk, you can't do that."
29:26SPEAKERSo that's pretty good, it told me which settings to go to
29:29SPEAKERto find specific things and how to turn some stuff on,
29:32SPEAKERit told me how to turn on some phone link stuff
29:33SPEAKERwhen I was trying to experiment with some stuff.
29:35SPEAKERSo maybe instead of going to the knowledge base
29:39SPEAKERand searching for your answers
29:40SPEAKERand talking to Microsoft certified advisors,
29:43SPEAKERyou can just ask Copilot for how to fix
29:45SPEAKERyour janky Windows install.
29:48SPEAKER- I guess this isn't technically Copilot,
29:50SPEAKERbut they've added quite a few AI features
29:53SPEAKERinto some of the core apps like Photos, right?
29:56SPEAKERSo you can do your background replacement,
29:59SPEAKERcircle something to delete it from a picture
30:01SPEAKERand upscaling and all that, right?
30:03SPEAKERHave you messed with any of that stuff much?
30:05SPEAKER- I haven't spent a lot of time with that stuff yet.
30:09SPEAKERI just got the laptop the other day,
30:10SPEAKERso it's been a little, I've had a lot of time with it,
30:13SPEAKERbut that stuff's also only tied to Copilot plus PCs.
30:18SPEAKERSo even if you have, so that means it's a PC
30:21SPEAKERwith a brand new CPU in it, probably a mobile PC,
30:25SPEAKERand it has to have an NPU
30:26SPEAKERthat's capable of 50 tops or more.
30:28SPEAKERAnd that basically means you've bought
30:31SPEAKEReither a Lunar Lake, sorry, Core Ultra 2 Intel machine,
30:36SPEAKERa Snapdragon Elite X machine, or a Ryzen AI machine.
30:41SPEAKER- Is it 40 tops maybe?
30:43SPEAKER- I thought it was 50, maybe it's 40.
30:44SPEAKER- I think it's 40, but it's also, I don't know,
30:46SPEAKERtops feels like yet another made up statistic
30:50SPEAKERor spec to me, so.
30:52SPEAKER- I used to collect the basketball cards,
30:53SPEAKERso it's probably still good.
30:56SPEAKERThere are a bunch of Copilot plus PC changes in 24H2,
31:00SPEAKERincluding recall is turned on,
31:01SPEAKERthat's the thing where it takes,
31:03SPEAKERit used to take unencrypted screenshots of your desktop
31:05SPEAKERand save them and then look at them
31:07SPEAKERso you could search for things
31:09SPEAKERthat you'd looked at in the past.
31:10SPEAKERI'm turning this off, dog, it's still a bad idea.
31:13SPEAKERI think they've fixed some of the security problems.
31:15SPEAKERLike I would not use this.
31:18SPEAKER- Yeah, it does sound like they fixed the,
31:23SPEAKERlike fundamentally it does not work
31:24SPEAKERin the wildly insecure way that it did before,
31:27SPEAKERwhich is good, but it feels like there's probably,
31:32SPEAKERit feels like fundamentally
31:33SPEAKERthey fixed the glaring security flaw
31:37SPEAKERwith the way they had designed recall and it's better now,
31:40SPEAKERbut it feels like they've lost the trust on this thing
31:42SPEAKERand I haven't seen anything from Microsoft
31:44SPEAKERthat's really convincingly making the case for like,
31:48SPEAKERhey, it's totally better now and we're so sorry
31:51SPEAKERthat we thought we should do it this other way
31:53SPEAKERthat was so stupid, our bad.
31:56SPEAKERLike please, please trust us and give recall a try.
31:59SPEAKERLike I just don't see the pitch
32:01SPEAKERfor this thing really manifesting.
32:02SPEAKERThey just sort of like went back
32:04SPEAKERand kind of quietly made it a little bit less horrifying.
32:08SPEAKER- Well, okay, so there's two things.
32:10SPEAKEROne is I wanna see an independent security audit
32:12SPEAKERby somebody who has access to this
32:14SPEAKERon one of these Copilot Plus machines.
32:16SPEAKERThe part of the early problem was that you can't run it
32:19SPEAKERon a, like the other Copilot Plus stuff,
32:22SPEAKERyou can't run it on a desktop machine.
32:24SPEAKERI think people figured out how to actually run
32:26SPEAKERon a desktop machine that had an actual GPU in it
32:30SPEAKERfor the like the neural processing stuff,
32:34SPEAKERbut it's not like the hardware is new enough
32:37SPEAKERthat not everybody has it, right?
32:39SPEAKER- Yeah.
32:40SPEAKER- I'm opening this up.
32:42SPEAKERI'm gonna go on this laptop.
32:44SPEAKERI wanna see if it's, it's supposed to be off by default.
32:47SPEAKERI think that's a vendor specific choice though.
32:49SPEAKERSo the vendors can choose probably to turn it on, I guess.
32:52SPEAKER- The one thing about recall
32:53SPEAKERthat does seem appealing to me though,
32:56SPEAKERI kind of struggle to think of use cases
32:58SPEAKERwhere I would want to scrub back
33:00SPEAKERthrough what I was doing a month ago
33:03SPEAKERwith any kind of specificity,
33:05SPEAKERbut I do like the idea of being able to use AI
33:08SPEAKERfor like the natural language recognition
33:11SPEAKERof not just having to search for a file and being like,
33:15SPEAKERoh, I guess I didn't name that picture,
33:17SPEAKERred wheelbarrow.jpg, like how am I gonna ever find it,
33:21SPEAKERbut being able to type in red wheelbarrow
33:23SPEAKERand Windows recall being able to look through your history
33:27SPEAKERand like recognize an image of a wheelbarrow
33:30SPEAKERand pull it up for me, right?
33:32SPEAKERLike that in sort of the broad strokes
33:36SPEAKERis an appealing concept, but I just,
33:39SPEAKERI don't really see the practical use case for this thing.
33:43SPEAKERMaybe it's one of those things
33:44SPEAKERwhere just once you have it as part of your daily life
33:47SPEAKERand you can scrub back through stuff you were doing
33:49SPEAKERand you realize all of the uses for it,
33:51SPEAKERbut it doesn't, like I'm not convinced
33:55SPEAKERthat it's really something
33:56SPEAKERthat I would get much value out of.
33:58SPEAKER- So there's two things for me.
34:00SPEAKEROne is that since it's only on Co-Pilot Plus PCs
34:03SPEAKERfor right now, and my desktop PC is not a Co-Pilot Plus PC,
34:07SPEAKERbut my laptop is, and I do 95% of my computing
34:11SPEAKERon my desktop PC, the place that it's valuable
34:14SPEAKERis not the place where it lives, right?
34:17SPEAKERThat's the fundamental practical problem.
34:19SPEAKERThe other big issue is that I don't wanna have,
34:23SPEAKERlike, hey Wes, can I come over to your house
34:26SPEAKERand watch the football game?
34:27SPEAKEROh yeah, sure.
34:28SPEAKERHey, I wanna use your computer
34:30SPEAKERto look something up real quick.
34:31SPEAKERMy phone's not working.
34:32SPEAKERYour cell signal's bad in your neighborhood.
34:35SPEAKEROh, okay.
34:36SPEAKERHey, Co-Pilot Plus, what's my checking account number?
34:39SPEAKERAnd then it just pulls up the checking account number, right?
34:41SPEAKERLike it's just exposing yourself
34:46SPEAKERto an enormous threat surface for no reason.
34:47SPEAKERThis is why I wanna see the independent security audit
34:49SPEAKERfrom people who actually are good at this stuff
34:51SPEAKERto figure out where it is.
34:53SPEAKERAnd I looked for one before we started the show.
34:56SPEAKERI haven't seen anybody do one yet,
34:58SPEAKERbut I would hope that Microsoft would be seeding this
35:00SPEAKERwith people who are incredibly skeptical
35:03SPEAKERto get them to say, hey, here's what the problem is.
35:05SPEAKERAgain, with this, I think this is a feature
35:07SPEAKERfor the 99% of normal people
35:10SPEAKERwho don't think about this stuff probably,
35:12SPEAKERbut it also still feels irresponsible for them to roll out.
35:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that arguably makes it worse to me, right?
35:19SPEAKER'Cause the idea,
35:22SPEAKERone of the things they did to solve the security complaints
35:24SPEAKERor not solve, but address the security complaints
35:27SPEAKERwas you can just blanket,
35:29SPEAKERI guess you would call it blacklisting apps
35:32SPEAKERand things in Windows that you don't want it to record, right?
35:35SPEAKER- Yeah, disallow. - Yeah, disallow.
35:37SPEAKERSo by default, it won't record a private browsing session,
35:41SPEAKERbut obviously we don't all open a private browser
35:43SPEAKERevery time we're going to our bank.
35:46SPEAKER- I never do, 'cause I don't want to have to log,
35:48SPEAKERI want cookies, I want the cookie to be there for that.
35:51SPEAKER- Yeah, and so you can,
35:53SPEAKERmaybe there's some degree of granularity there
35:55SPEAKERfor what you can say, don't record this site
35:59SPEAKERor don't record, I use Firefox for all of my banking stuff,
36:03SPEAKERso don't record Firefox.
36:04SPEAKERBut then if we're going back to what you're saying is like,
36:07SPEAKERthis feels like something pitched to normal people
36:10SPEAKERwho would just find it convenient, normal people
36:14SPEAKERwho've just find this convenient are not going to go
36:16SPEAKERinto Windows Recall and customize the like 18 cases
36:20SPEAKERwhere they should probably not be letting Windows record
36:23SPEAKERwhat they're doing on their computer, right?
36:25SPEAKERSo yeah, it still feels like a very suspect concept to me,
36:29SPEAKEReven if they have at least gone to some lengths
36:32SPEAKERto make it safer.
36:33SPEAKER- So now the one thing I will say is I open up the laptop
36:36SPEAKERand it's not actually installed in the laptop.
36:38SPEAKERSo this is the other thing about this update
36:41SPEAKERand Microsoft updates in general at this point
36:46SPEAKERare like this.
36:48SPEAKERThere's no, they're rolling,
36:50SPEAKERwith this update they're able to roll out features
36:53SPEAKERindependently of each other.
36:55SPEAKERSo we're not necessarily like your 24H2 version
37:01SPEAKERand my 24H2 version might have slightly different things.
37:03SPEAKERYou might get phone link before I do
37:05SPEAKERfor inexplicable reasons, which is like,
37:10SPEAKERit's gotta be a support nightmare for them,
37:13SPEAKERbut also it's nice that they can disconnect,
37:16SPEAKERsay something like Recall and hold that
37:19SPEAKERand don't have to hold the entire 24H2 update
37:21SPEAKERbecause one small subset of it is broken.
37:23SPEAKERThis is something that mobile OS's have had
37:24SPEAKERfor a long time too.
37:26SPEAKER- Yeah, so we've got a fun list we can get into
37:28SPEAKERin a second of like the kind of little things
37:30SPEAKERthat this update adds that people who just use computers
37:33SPEAKERa lot will appreciate.
37:35SPEAKERBut I'm like left thinking about all of this AI stuff
37:40SPEAKERand kind of their big, the features that they're pushing
37:42SPEAKERand advertising for these new Co-Pilot Plus PCs.
37:46SPEAKERAnd like, I don't know, it all kind of feels to me
37:49SPEAKERlike features that you see at stage keynotes
37:55SPEAKERthat are just like destined to be removed from Windows
37:58SPEAKERin two to five years, just like,
38:01SPEAKERoh, these are the big exciting features,
38:03SPEAKERchange how everybody uses Windows.
38:05SPEAKERAnd then five years later, we're like,
38:07SPEAKERactually we kind of still wanna just use Windows
38:10SPEAKERmore or less the way we used it 10, 20 years ago.
38:14SPEAKERAnd we don't really like this AI image generator
38:18SPEAKER'cause it kind of looks like ass
38:19SPEAKERand we don't really need like AI background removal
38:24SPEAKERbuilt into photos because it doesn't work that well
38:26SPEAKERand you should probably use Photoshop
38:28SPEAKERif you're serious about editing your photos in that way.
38:31SPEAKERAnd I don't know, it just feels like
38:31SPEAKERthere's all these little elements they're adding
38:34SPEAKERthat are gonna get quietly erased in a few years
38:36SPEAKERonce we sort of come to the realization
38:39SPEAKERthat like this AI stuff actually sucks, I don't know.
38:42SPEAKER- Wes, are you suggesting they're gonna fire a Co-Pilot
38:45SPEAKERdown the Cortana hole?
38:47SPEAKER- I feel like they will both be buried
38:49SPEAKERin the same unmarked grave at some point.
38:52SPEAKER- It's like Bob the Clippy, Cortana, Co-Pilot.
38:56SPEAKER- And I could be totally wrong.
38:57SPEAKERMaybe all this AI stuff does get to the point
39:00SPEAKERwhere average people just like to use it day to day
39:02SPEAKER'cause it's good enough.
39:04SPEAKERYou know, I certainly have a distaste for it
39:06SPEAKERjust from sort of an artistic and perspective
39:10SPEAKERand as someone who is a journalist
39:13SPEAKERand whose entire industry is threatened
39:14SPEAKERby the existence of this stuff
39:17SPEAKERand how bad it seems to be at its job currently.
39:20SPEAKER- Wes, I'm not worried about you're better than average.
39:24SPEAKERSo using AI would bring your work down.
39:27SPEAKERThat's the thing to remember.
39:28SPEAKERIt reverts to me.
39:29SPEAKER- I agree and I appreciate the compliment,
39:32SPEAKERbut at the same time, there's so many use cases.
39:36SPEAKERThere are so many cases in the world
39:38SPEAKERwhere like people will just take good enough, right?
39:40SPEAKER- No, I know.
39:41SPEAKER- And so maybe these features
39:43SPEAKERwill hit that point of good enough
39:44SPEAKERand they will be a major component of Windows going forward.
39:47SPEAKERBut I don't know, so much of it to me
39:49SPEAKERjust makes me wanna look into the versions
39:54SPEAKERof like tiny windows or whatever
39:56SPEAKERthat people are running these days
39:58SPEAKERwhere you install a stripped down version.
40:00SPEAKEROr maybe I should just use Linux.
40:01SPEAKER- It's time to switch to Linux.
40:03SPEAKERRather than use some bootleg ass version of Windows
40:06SPEAKERthat somebody has done all the minifying on,
40:08SPEAKERjust switch to Linux and that.
40:09SPEAKER- Look, there's a guy on YouTube named Greg
40:12SPEAKERand Greg's tiny windows.
40:14SPEAKERNo, I'm making it look Greg,
40:15SPEAKERbut I'm not gonna install a ghost specter
40:18SPEAKERor whatever version of bootleg Windows is out there.
40:21SPEAKERBut I kinda wanna build my own just to try it.
40:23SPEAKER- I just assume that anybody making a custom version
40:25SPEAKERof Windows has deep ties to the Russian info state
40:28SPEAKERand you're causing yourself future problems.
40:31SPEAKERAnyway, the one thing I do wanna shout out
40:33SPEAKERon the MSI, on the MPU based laptops
40:37SPEAKERis they built in the kind of video call enhancements
40:40SPEAKERyou get with Nvidia broadcast
40:42SPEAKERand the other tools that are akin to that
40:45SPEAKERinto the camera control panel.
40:47SPEAKERSo you can just, you can literally,
40:51SPEAKERwhen you connect a camera,
40:52SPEAKERwhen you turn on the camera
40:54SPEAKERon one of these copilot plus laptops,
40:56SPEAKERit pops up a thing in the notification tray that says,
40:58SPEAKERhey, do you wanna enhance your video call?
41:02SPEAKERAnd it'll do like background,
41:03SPEAKERdifferent levels of background removal and blurring.
41:06SPEAKERIt'll do like eye line correction,
41:09SPEAKERwhich I find fucking nightmarish,
41:11SPEAKERbut people turn that on.
41:14SPEAKERAnd then it also does like the head tracking.
41:15SPEAKERSo it'll like follow your head so you stay centered
41:18SPEAKEReven if you lean around in your chair, which is nice.
41:21SPEAKER- There is one kind of similar implementation
41:23SPEAKERthat does seem like it has quite a bit of potential,
41:25SPEAKERwhich is the auto SR stuff.
41:27SPEAKERI don't know if you've messed with that.
41:28SPEAKER- The subtitle stuff, right?
41:30SPEAKER- No, so this is the, I think it's auto SR,
41:33SPEAKERauto super resolution.
41:34SPEAKERIt's their version of like a DLSS or FSR,
41:37SPEAKERbut it works a bit differently than those techniques
41:40SPEAKER'cause those are like integrated
41:41SPEAKERinto the rendering pipeline of a game, right?
41:44SPEAKERWhereas auto SR is basically taking the final image.
41:47SPEAKERIt doesn't have any sort of insight
41:49SPEAKERinto the game's rendering process,
41:51SPEAKERbut it's taking the final image and doing AI upscaling,
41:54SPEAKERwhich is not as good as DLSS,
41:56SPEAKERbut has the advantage of not requiring
42:00SPEAKERlike custom implementation from a game developer.
42:03SPEAKERIt's basically just turning on AI upscaling
42:06SPEAKERfor a game on your computer.
42:08SPEAKERAnd it should work with basically everything
42:12SPEAKERas far as I understand.
42:13SPEAKER- Better upscaling than you're getting.
42:15SPEAKEROkay, that's cool.
42:16SPEAKER- Yeah, and like from,
42:17SPEAKERI think Digital Foundry has done some tests on it and stuff.
42:20SPEAKERAnd I think we're still early days for this thing,
42:22SPEAKERbut like generally it's pretty good.
42:24SPEAKERSo if you're on a laptop with an NPU and you're like,
42:28SPEAKERI don't give a shit about any of this recall stuff.
42:31SPEAKERLike I don't want any of these AI features.
42:33SPEAKERI just like playing my games on my laptop.
42:35SPEAKERThis could actually be a use case
42:38SPEAKERfor the NPU on your chip.
42:41SPEAKERLike I was thinking about buying a new laptop
42:43SPEAKERand I was like a little salty
42:45SPEAKERthat AMD put these NPUs on their chips
42:48SPEAKERwhen I'm like, they could have had some more,
42:50SPEAKERlike eCores on there or some more.
42:51SPEAKER- You could have had more GPU on the APU.
42:53SPEAKERI mean, yeah.
42:54SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
42:55SPEAKERSo I was like, that's kind of frustrating, right?
42:57SPEAKERBut then maybe this is a reason for the NPU to exist
43:01SPEAKERand maybe this is a justification for it
43:05SPEAKERfor people who play games on their laptops,
43:07SPEAKERbut don't care about any of this other AI stuff.
43:09SPEAKERSo we'll see.
43:10SPEAKER- And the nice thing,
43:12SPEAKERso there's a couple other things that I've pulled with
43:14SPEAKERthat use the NPU that are pretty good.
43:16SPEAKERLike there's a thing that'll basically caption
43:18SPEAKERany audio that's playing out of your Windows machine.
43:21SPEAKER- That's great.
43:22SPEAKER- Which is fantastic.
43:23SPEAKERLike even just for me, like laying in bed
43:26SPEAKERwatching YouTube videos and not wanting to bother my wife
43:28SPEAKERor have to put on headphones,
43:29SPEAKERit's been nice for that kind of stuff.
43:31SPEAKERSo it's also funny when you play music by accident
43:35SPEAKER'cause it's like, if you play your lo-fi ambient,
43:40SPEAKERchill music, it's like soothing electronica,
43:45SPEAKERyou know, with the little musical notes on the side.
43:47SPEAKERSo anyway.
43:47SPEAKER- I wanna play some meatloaf on it
43:49SPEAKERand see how close it gets the lyrics.
43:51SPEAKER- Nope, we're not gonna talk about that here.
43:54SPEAKERI won't do that.
43:56SPEAKERLet's see, okay, so you had mentioned the small,
43:59SPEAKERbut oh, okay, last thing on the big points.
44:01SPEAKERYou can get it, if you hit the update button
44:04SPEAKERand it doesn't offer it to you.
44:06SPEAKERA, update all your drivers first.
44:08SPEAKERIt's better to go through Windows Update if you can
44:10SPEAKERthan doing the manual install.
44:11SPEAKERI strongly advocate just waiting until Windows
44:14SPEAKERgives you the Windows Update and being patient
44:16SPEAKERand not caring about this stuff.
44:18SPEAKERThat said, if you're on like 22H2
44:20SPEAKERand you have a Ryzen 5 or a Zen 5,
44:24SPEAKERor Zen 4, Zen 3, Zen 4, Zen 5,
44:26SPEAKERyou probably wanna get to 23H2 at least
44:28SPEAKERso you can put that update on.
44:31SPEAKERYou can, once you've updated all your drivers
44:34SPEAKERand you press check for update again
44:35SPEAKERand it still doesn't give it to you,
44:37SPEAKERyou can go get the media creation tool,
44:39SPEAKERmake a thumb drive, put the installer on the thumb drive,
44:42SPEAKERplug the thumb drive into Windows
44:44SPEAKERand start the install process from inside Windows
44:47SPEAKERand then it'll give you the upgrade option.
44:51SPEAKERIt's risky, it's entirely possible.
44:54SPEAKERIt's not risky that you're gonna wipe out your machine
44:55SPEAKERor anything most likely, backup before you do
44:58SPEAKERa big Windows upgrade always,
45:00SPEAKERbut it's likely that you'll boot it up
45:02SPEAKERand then something won't work.
45:03SPEAKEREither some piece of software, some driver,
45:06SPEAKERsome piece of hardware, some weird USB thing
45:08SPEAKERthat you have plugged in that you completely forgot
45:10SPEAKERwas there, like any non-standard weird hardware,
45:13SPEAKERyour space orb isn't gonna work after this, okay?
45:16SPEAKERSo your mileage may vary.
45:20SPEAKEROkay, let's do small but interesting things.
45:24SPEAKER- Yeah, first one that I'm glad to see
45:27SPEAKERis Windows can now zip and not just unzip,
45:32SPEAKER7-zip and tar files.
45:35SPEAKERThough after I wrote this down, I was like,
45:37SPEAKERwhen was the last time I zipped something?
45:40SPEAKERI unzip stuff all the time 'cause I'm downloading stuff
45:43SPEAKERfrom Google Drive and unzipping it,
45:45SPEAKERbut zipping it, it's been a minute
45:47SPEAKERsince I've had to zip something.
45:48SPEAKER- Oh man, I zip stuff, I'm always moving stuff around.
45:51SPEAKERI zip stuff four or five times Thursday night.
45:54SPEAKERI zip like crazy.
45:56SPEAKER- That's an exciting Thursday night.
45:57SPEAKER- Look man, I can't talk about it right now,
46:00SPEAKERbut it was an exciting Thursday night.
46:04SPEAKERI tested out a little bit of performance.
46:05SPEAKERI have a couple of big gnarly zip files
46:07SPEAKERthat I use, so often, if I'm sharing
46:11SPEAKERsome sort of unreal bullshit, you'll zip up a folder
46:16SPEAKERand it'll be like a thousand tiny little files,
46:19SPEAKERand if you use the default Windows zip app,
46:21SPEAKERthat takes an hour, and if you use 7-zip,
46:23SPEAKERit takes like 18 seconds.
46:27SPEAKERSo I tested it out to see if they fixed the perf stuff
46:30SPEAKER'cause there's some really specific things
46:32SPEAKERthat 7-zip does that make it fast.
46:34SPEAKERThey, it's still slow as shit on the Windows one, so.
46:36SPEAKER- Is it like single-core?
46:38SPEAKERWhat are they doing with their zipper?
46:40SPEAKER- The Windows zipper is single-threaded,
46:41SPEAKERand I think it has something to do
46:43SPEAKERwith how file access works at a, like,
46:46SPEAKERI wanna say 7-zip is looking at the file table
46:49SPEAKERand pulling where the files are from that
46:50SPEAKERrather than parsing individual files.
46:53SPEAKERI don't understand what the difference is.
46:55SPEAKERAll I know is 7-zip good, Windows zip bad,
46:59SPEAKERand 7-zip's still buried in the secondary menu
47:02SPEAKERbelow show more things, so.
47:04SPEAKER- Isn't it amazing when a piece of freeware from 1999,
47:09SPEAKERit can still consistently outperform, like,
47:12SPEAKERsoftware from the biggest company in the world?
47:14SPEAKER- I know, I'm gonna say that 7-zip
47:17SPEAKERis still under active development.
47:19SPEAKERThey released a new version-- - Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.
47:20SPEAKER- Like two weeks ago, 2811, so there was a new version
47:25SPEAKERas of like a month and a half ago.
47:27SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, obviously they're keeping up
47:28SPEAKERwith how hardware, they can use hardware, right?
47:31SPEAKERBut like, it's just astounding
47:32SPEAKERthat this is just a little piece of free software
47:35SPEAKERthat can just so easily outperform forever.
47:40SPEAKERIt has always been better
47:41SPEAKERthan Windows built-in zip tools, right?
47:44SPEAKERAnd that's still the case, even though Windows is, you know,
47:48SPEAKERhas a little money behind it.
47:50SPEAKER- So I was at an AMD, I was at an AMD event last week,
47:54SPEAKERand I think some folks who are big into perf
47:59SPEAKERwere running 7-zip, they were running a bunch of benchmarks
48:02SPEAKERto get some world records on some new Threadripper machines,
48:05SPEAKERand they were running 7-zip on 92 cores,
48:11SPEAKERand like knocking in world record 7-zip time,
48:14SPEAKERso it was fun.
48:16SPEAKER- Awesome.
48:17SPEAKER- Anyway, they redesigned the context menu
48:20SPEAKERand put text where copy, like, this annoys me.
48:22SPEAKERI'm gonna be honest, I liked the no text copy paste icons
48:26SPEAKERin the right-click menu. - Did you?
48:28SPEAKER- I liked them in theory, but I found them a little bit
48:32SPEAKERtoo small that I would always sort of, like, cut easy.
48:37SPEAKERLike, I see the scissors, like, I know cut, like, easy click,
48:41SPEAKERbut something about, like, I don't know, copy and rename,
48:46SPEAKERlike, if I look at the icons for a second,
48:49SPEAKERI know what they are, but I would always hesitate.
48:51SPEAKERLike, I never built, I guess, the muscle memory
48:53SPEAKERfor exactly where those buttons would be.
48:57SPEAKERI guess I've only had Windows 11 for, like, a year,
48:59SPEAKERa couple of years, but yeah, I don't know.
49:01SPEAKERI just, it never quite worked for me.
49:03SPEAKER- So here's the thing.
49:04SPEAKERI don't ever use the right-click menu to copy and paste,
49:08SPEAKER'cause I just use the keyboard shortcuts, right?
49:11SPEAKER- Well, then what do you even care about these icons for?
49:13SPEAKER- I use rename every single day.
49:16SPEAKERI rename stuff because the single click in to rename
49:19SPEAKERis fiddly and I can never remember that you have to press F2
49:22SPEAKERto open the rename, to switch to rename mode.
49:25SPEAKERSo, yeah, that's where I am.
49:28SPEAKERI just think it's goofy that you put, like,
49:31SPEAKERthe thing I like about them is they put the things
49:33SPEAKERthat theoretically people use the most often at the top.
49:36SPEAKERI wish it was a smart menu so it would learn over time
49:39SPEAKERthat, like, the thing I use most often is to right-click
49:42SPEAKERand go down to show more options and then go to 7-Zip
49:45SPEAKERand then go to add to archive or, yeah,
49:49SPEAKERcreate archive here or whatever, and like, yeah, anyway.
49:54SPEAKER- I mean, think about it, it feels like we're really
49:57SPEAKERpast due for the Windows context menu
50:00SPEAKERto just work the way, like, control centers do on phones
50:03SPEAKERwhere you can just choose what icons you show.
50:06SPEAKERLike, why can I not just customize my context menu
50:09SPEAKERwithout using one of these weird, you know, registry edit,
50:13SPEAKERlike, freeware programs that have been around
50:15SPEAKERfor ages and ages? - Yeah.
50:17SPEAKER- I don't even know how well those work with Windows 11,
50:20SPEAKERbut, like, why can't I just choose the five icons
50:22SPEAKERthat go at the top or have no icons up there?
50:26SPEAKERWhy do I have convert to Adobe PDF in my context menu
50:31SPEAKERwhen that's not a thing that I ever do, you know?
50:35SPEAKER- Why can't you turn that off?
50:38SPEAKERLike, there's no easy way to turn that off.
50:40SPEAKERIt's all, anyway, yeah, shell extensions are weird.
50:44SPEAKERThe quick settings taskbar menu, do you know what this is?
50:47SPEAKERI didn't know what this was called
50:48SPEAKERuntil I was starting to read about this.
50:51SPEAKER- You mean the, so not the system tray.
50:53SPEAKER- Not the system tray, it's in the system tray.
50:56SPEAKERYou access it by going to the system tray,
50:57SPEAKERbut it's the thing you get when you click on,
51:00SPEAKERyou know how, like, you have your system tray icons
51:02SPEAKERor, like, your microphones down there,
51:04SPEAKERand, like, I have fan control down there,
51:05SPEAKERso I see how hot my liquid is in my cooling loop?
51:08SPEAKER- Sure, sure, sure. - And then there's the clock
51:10SPEAKERwith the Do Not Disturb next to it,
51:12SPEAKERbut the thing with the little network logo
51:14SPEAKERor your Wi-Fi logo and the volume
51:17SPEAKERand battery, like, maybe if you're on a laptop.
51:19SPEAKER- Yeah, that's quick settings, okay.
51:20SPEAKER- Yeah, that's called quick, when you click on that,
51:22SPEAKERyou get quick settings, and it has, like,
51:23SPEAKERhey, you can turn your Wi-Fi or Bluetooth off,
51:25SPEAKERairplane mode, all that stuff.
51:27SPEAKERIt scrolls now, and you can drag and drop
51:30SPEAKERand move stuff around, so you can have, like,
51:33SPEAKERthe things you actually use at the top,
51:34SPEAKERwhich is nice, I think.
51:36SPEAKER- So we can customize this, but we can't customize
51:38SPEAKERthe right-click menu that we use 7,000 times more a day
51:41SPEAKERthan quick settings.
51:43SPEAKER- Mike, I would bet that that right-click menu
51:45SPEAKERis, like, some real ancient dark magic code
51:48SPEAKERfrom the before times, it's like somebody wrote in,
51:51SPEAKERwell, like, Windows NT4 or something.
51:53SPEAKER- That feels completely correct, because when you have to go
51:56SPEAKERto the, you know, the old menu with the show more options,
52:00SPEAKERit just feels like it shunted you back
52:02SPEAKERto Windows 7 era stuff, basically,
52:06SPEAKERlike, that hasn't really changed.
52:07SPEAKERSo it feels like they just, they just, like,
52:09SPEAKERbuilt a new house on top of the old house,
52:11SPEAKERbut anytime you need to do something serious,
52:14SPEAKERyou have to go into the old house to find your old tools.
52:17SPEAKER- Well, and when you have to change anything,
52:18SPEAKERespecially in that old one, it's like,
52:20SPEAKERyou gotta dig into the bits of the registry
52:21SPEAKERthat are, like, run DLL semicolon 80,
52:25SPEAKERsemicolon 42 AB, you know, some real dark magic in there.
52:30SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:32SPEAKERThe quick settings, more customizable, woo.
52:34SPEAKER- Yeah, this seems nice.
52:35SPEAKER- This feels like more of a laptop thing, right?
52:37SPEAKERLike, you can use this on desktop,
52:38SPEAKERbut it's kind of just for the volume controls,
52:41SPEAKERI feel like, for the most part.
52:42SPEAKER- Yeah, the thing I like there is that you can change
52:44SPEAKERthe sound output by clicking that and then right-clicking
52:47SPEAKERthe little slider doober next to the volume bar,
52:51SPEAKER'cause I use that a lot on desktop,
52:53SPEAKERbut that's pretty much it, yeah.
52:55SPEAKERWhat else we got?
52:56SPEAKERWe got unified work and personal MS Teams.
52:59SPEAKERDo people use, wait, has anyone in history
53:02SPEAKERever used Teams to, like, hey, hey, honey,
53:06SPEAKERcan you stop at the grocery store and pick me up,
53:07SPEAKERpick up some milk and bread on the way home?
53:10SPEAKERNo.
53:11SPEAKER- We're a Teams household, that's what.
53:14SPEAKER- Wait, no.
53:15SPEAKER- I'm not, I'm not.
53:16SPEAKERI'm just saying, there could be a person out there
53:18SPEAKERwho's like, we're gonna be a Teams household,
53:20SPEAKERthat's how we're gonna communicate.
53:22SPEAKERMe and my friends, we're not gonna use Discord,
53:24SPEAKERwe're gonna use Microsoft Teams.
53:25SPEAKERNo, I don't know.
53:27SPEAKER- If Satya Nadella is a Teams household,
53:29SPEAKERI will give you $500, Wes.
53:33SPEAKER- Well, so the thing about this for me
53:35SPEAKERis I don't use Teams at work,
53:38SPEAKERwe're on, like, the Google workplace ecosystem,
53:40SPEAKERbut occasionally I'll have meetings
53:42SPEAKERwith, like, people at Microsoft or some other company
53:45SPEAKERthat uses Teams, and they'll send me, like, a Teams link,
53:48SPEAKERand if I try to open it through the computer,
53:52SPEAKERthrough Windows, it will open, like, personal Teams,
53:57SPEAKERwhich is, like, what you get if you're just a normal person,
54:00SPEAKERbut if you're working with a company
54:02SPEAKERthat uses corporate Teams, it was, until now,
54:06SPEAKERfor some weird reason, corporate Teams,
54:10SPEAKERand so you couldn't open those meeting links
54:13SPEAKERin that version of Teams, which is insane,
54:17SPEAKERbut that's how it worked for some reason.
54:19SPEAKER- So, when I started at Stray Bomb Bay,
54:21SPEAKERwe used Teams 'cause it's a Seattle company
54:24SPEAKERand Chet loves Microsoft, shout out to Chet.
54:27SPEAKERThey, like, it would let you log in
54:34SPEAKERwith the personal Teams using your Stray Bomb Bay
54:36SPEAKERemail address, and then it'd be like,
54:38SPEAKER"Hey, you can't use this."
54:39SPEAKER- Yeah, what, why does it do that?
54:42SPEAKER- It makes no sense.
54:44SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, shout out to Microsoft
54:47SPEAKERfor finally unifying the two,
54:50SPEAKERbringing two Teams' together.
54:53SPEAKERAlso, if your house runs on Teams,
54:54SPEAKERI would love to hear from you.
54:55SPEAKERSend emails to techbot@content.down.
54:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I would like my $500 Satya Nadella,
55:01SPEAKERif you're listening, please.
55:02SPEAKER- Yeah, 500 bucks to Les. - Please let us know.
55:04SPEAKER- If Satya Nadella, if you have proof
55:06SPEAKERthat Satya Nadella runs his house on Teams,
55:09SPEAKERWes gets paid.
55:10SPEAKER- To be fair, giving Microsoft a lot of shit for this,
55:12SPEAKERbut like, Google has launched
55:14SPEAKERabout 17 different chat applications over its lifetime.
55:18SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - One of which
55:18SPEAKERtalked to each other, so, you know,
55:21SPEAKERMicrosoft is still ahead of them on this front.
55:23SPEAKER- I still don't understand the difference
55:25SPEAKERbetween Google Chat and Duo or whatever that one was.
55:28SPEAKERLike, anyway, yeah, it's, yeah, yeah.
55:31SPEAKER- I was a Google Aloe household for about a year.
55:33SPEAKER- Oh, I'm so sorry.
55:36SPEAKER- And then they killed it.
55:37SPEAKER- If you have an HDR monitor,
55:38SPEAKERyou can get HDR wallpapers now for Windows with 24H2.
55:41SPEAKERThat's sick.
55:42SPEAKER- That's cool, nothing to complain about there.
55:44SPEAKER- Yeah, hey, Wes, how do you feel about WordPad?
55:47SPEAKERDo you remember WordPad?
55:49SPEAKER- Oh, I remember WordPad.
55:50SPEAKERI mean, my computer still has it
55:51SPEAKER'cause I haven't gotten 24H2 yet.
55:53SPEAKERThey haven't taken it from me.
55:56SPEAKERI think some people care about WordPad, to be honest.
55:58SPEAKERI think about, I think of WordPad as the annoying program
56:03SPEAKERthat I accidentally opened documents in sometimes
56:06SPEAKERwhen I either just wanted to open them in Notepad
56:09SPEAKER'cause it was just a text file
56:11SPEAKERor because it was a Microsoft Word document
56:14SPEAKERand I didn't have Word,
56:16SPEAKERand then it showed up in WordPad as like garbled code
56:20SPEAKERor something.
56:20SPEAKERMaybe they wouldn't do that with Word docs,
56:22SPEAKERbut there's some format of document
56:24SPEAKERthat I would open in WordPad
56:25SPEAKERand it would just show up as complete garbled mess.
56:27SPEAKERAnd I'd be like, why are you here then?
56:28SPEAKERYou can't even open this document.
56:30SPEAKER- Yeah, that's like,
56:31SPEAKERI would much rather have a Word document viewer
56:33SPEAKERthan a thing that I can do a bad job,
56:36SPEAKERthat I can mess up all my Word documents formatting
56:38SPEAKERin with WordPad.
56:39SPEAKERSo anyway, never forget WordPad.
56:41SPEAKERSorry, gone, forgotten.
56:44SPEAKERYou can go down the Cortana hole too.
56:47SPEAKER- We're putting a lot of stuff in the Cortana hole.
56:50SPEAKER- I'm beginning to regret the phrasing on that,
56:52SPEAKERbut we'll see how this goes.
56:56SPEAKERSupport for new technologies like Wi-Fi 7
56:59SPEAKERand USB 480 gigabit per second.
57:02SPEAKERThat's nice.
57:03SPEAKER- This is cool.
57:04SPEAKERWi-Fi 7 seems very promising
57:07SPEAKERwith the thing it's called MLO multi-link operation
57:11SPEAKERto sort of bridge your connectivity
57:13SPEAKERacross different wireless channels, right?
57:16SPEAKER- And that's the part that's like,
57:17SPEAKERyou could use a Wi-Fi 7 adapter,
57:18SPEAKERbut you don't get the multi-link
57:20SPEAKERon previous versions of Windows.
57:22SPEAKER- Yeah, so big speed if you have all of the gear
57:26SPEAKERneeded for this, which no one does right now probably.
57:28SPEAKER- Well, we talked about this maybe a month ago
57:32SPEAKERwhen we did the Wi-Fi 7 episode.
57:33SPEAKERSo it was our lowest viewed episode,
57:36SPEAKERlowest downloaded episode that month.
57:37SPEAKERSo people don't care about Wi-Fi 7 is the thing we learned.
57:39SPEAKERNot by a lot, but just by a small--
57:41SPEAKER- We should keep talking about it then.
57:43SPEAKER- Let's move on.
57:45SPEAKERAs an Android user, you'll probably love this.
57:46SPEAKERYou can browse your Android phone's file system now
57:49SPEAKERfrom Windows, the thing you'd need to do all the time.
57:52SPEAKER- Can I just plug my phone into the computer and do that?
57:55SPEAKER- Look, man, I'm an iPhone person.
57:58SPEAKERI don't have a file system as far as I know.
58:00SPEAKERThe elves in there move things around when I want them.
58:04SPEAKER- An actually exciting feature they added
58:06SPEAKERis Bluetooth low energy support,
58:08SPEAKERwhich is part of the Bluetooth 5.3 spec.
58:10SPEAKERThis means people who have hearing aids
58:12SPEAKERcan now use their hearing aids with a Windows computer.
58:15SPEAKER- Oh, that's nice.
58:16SPEAKEROh, audio, Bluetooth LE audio, that's nice.
58:18SPEAKER- Yes, yes, yes, yes.
58:20SPEAKER- Oh, that's awesome.
58:21SPEAKER- It's really, really cool.
58:22SPEAKERSo this kind of is like on the same wavelength
58:24SPEAKERas Apple announced that the AirPod,
58:29SPEAKERwhat tier is it of AirPods that can be used?
58:31SPEAKERPro 2s can be used as hearing aids, right?
58:33SPEAKERAnd I think that's because they're on the same
58:37SPEAKERBluetooth spec that supports this functionality.
58:40SPEAKER- There's two parts of it.
58:41SPEAKEROne is that, yeah, the LE lets you do a lot of audio
58:44SPEAKERover a long period of time without eating a lot of battery.
58:47SPEAKERThe other part of it is that you have to talk
58:49SPEAKERto the FDA a lot to get over the counter hearing aid
58:52SPEAKERqualifications for your thing.
58:54SPEAKER- Gotcha, gotcha.
58:55SPEAKER- So this is the technical part of that equation.
58:59SPEAKERSo if you have a pair of whatever brand new earbuds
59:06SPEAKERor AirPods, they do not automatically become hearing aids,
59:09SPEAKERbut you can use them with your Windows laptop.
59:12SPEAKERAnd if you had some hearing aids,
59:13SPEAKERyou can use them with your Windows laptop.
59:14SPEAKER- Well, and also Bluetooth LE has been around since four,
59:18SPEAKERI think, Bluetooth four.
59:20SPEAKERI think the audio spec has just came out with five.
59:23SPEAKERSo yeah, I can't remember we got it.
59:25SPEAKERWe still, I've had, I've had, I have literally
59:29SPEAKERlike 3,000, 4,000 words of notes for the Bluetooth.
59:33SPEAKERLike we might, we might have to just do a year
59:35SPEAKERof Bluetooth at this point.
59:36SPEAKERIt's such a fucking complicated thing.
59:39SPEAKERI love, and File Explorer, you can right click
59:42SPEAKERand dupe a tab for File Explorer Windows,
59:45SPEAKERwhich is really nice.
59:46SPEAKERLike tabbed browsing in the File Explorer.
59:49SPEAKERI wish that there was a way to just say,
59:51SPEAKERhey, always open new File Explorer Windows
59:53SPEAKERin the current window.
59:54SPEAKERThat's the one thing that's kind of missing so far.
59:57SPEAKER- Is there any, I'm sure with like third-party tools,
1:00:00SPEAKERyou can use this.
1:00:01SPEAKERIs there any of just like save all your tabs
1:00:03SPEAKERand always have the same tabs open option?
1:00:06SPEAKER- That's madness, Wes.
1:00:07SPEAKERThat's absolutely out of control.
1:00:08SPEAKERThat would be nice though.
1:00:09SPEAKER- I guess, I guess what I'm really looking for
1:00:11SPEAKERis just like pinned tabs, you know,
1:00:12SPEAKERlike every time I start my computer, realistically,
1:00:15SPEAKERI'm gonna use like my downloads folder,
1:00:18SPEAKERmy like PC gamer images folder,
1:00:21SPEAKERyou know, one or two like basic ones.
1:00:23SPEAKER- There's like five folders where most people live.
1:00:26SPEAKERIt's interesting 'cause the version of File Explorer
1:00:28SPEAKERI have on 23H2 has the duplicate tab option in it.
1:00:32SPEAKERSo, and you can middle click to just close tabs.
1:00:35SPEAKERI didn't know that.
1:00:36SPEAKERThat's cool.
1:00:38SPEAKERA pseudo and terminal.
1:00:41SPEAKER- Shout out to Brad.
1:00:42SPEAKERBrad would be very excited for this, right?
1:00:44SPEAKER- I just, I just, man, I just run native admin
1:00:46SPEAKERall the time 'cause I get 3% better performance
1:00:48SPEAKERacross the board.
1:00:49SPEAKERI'm just admin, admin.
1:00:50SPEAKERThat's my, that's how I run Windows, baby.
1:00:54SPEAKERYeah, pseudo and terminal's good.
1:00:55SPEAKERI like, I still feel like the Windows,
1:00:59SPEAKERlike the Linuxification of the Windows terminal
1:01:03SPEAKERstill is weird to me 'cause like sometimes I type LS
1:01:06SPEAKERand it works and sometimes I type DIR and it works.
1:01:10SPEAKERI don't, I don't know, man.
1:01:12SPEAKER- I feel like this is just a thing people will use for fun.
1:01:15SPEAKERLike you don't even need, you don't even need it.
1:01:17SPEAKERYou'll just go in terminal and type in pseudo
1:01:19SPEAKERand be like, ah, that's cool.
1:01:20SPEAKERI'm doing Linux stuff, but it's Windows.
1:01:22SPEAKER- I wonder, I wonder if it'll,
1:01:24SPEAKERI wonder if this lets you run scripts
1:01:25SPEAKERthat work on other OSs or something.
1:01:28SPEAKERAnyway, it's, Brad will tell us if you are,
1:01:30SPEAKERif you're interested in knowing why this is exciting,
1:01:32SPEAKERsend an email to techpod@content.town.
1:01:34SPEAKERBrad and I'll talk about it next week.
1:01:36SPEAKER- Woo hoo.
1:01:37SPEAKER- Let's see, we got a refresh button
1:01:39SPEAKERat the bottom of the wifi connection menu.
1:01:40SPEAKERThis is the stupidest ad that they've ever had to make
1:01:44SPEAKER'cause it's maddening that you just can't force a refresh.
1:01:47SPEAKERBut yeah, good job, I guess.
1:01:52SPEAKER- Sometimes it's nice to just have a button.
1:01:54SPEAKERIt's nice to not have to open that menu,
1:01:57SPEAKERnot see the wifi thing you're trying to connect to,
1:02:00SPEAKERreopen the menu, just be able to press a button.
1:02:03SPEAKERThat's better.
1:02:04SPEAKER- No, no, it's like, it is asinine
1:02:06SPEAKERthat you couldn't just press a button
1:02:08SPEAKERfor the 20 years that wifi has been a thing.
1:02:12SPEAKERAnyway, new Super Mario Brothers security defaults.
1:02:16SPEAKER- Perhaps I should have written the notes
1:02:17SPEAKERfor that one slightly differently.
1:02:19SPEAKERThis is another shout out to Brad.
1:02:21SPEAKERSamba security is better in Windows now by default.
1:02:25SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
1:02:26SPEAKERLike the defaults for file shares are more appropriate?
1:02:30SPEAKER- Yes, so they changed it, so let's see.
1:02:33SPEAKERBy default, SMB signing is required on all connections.
1:02:37SPEAKERThis is basically to stop people
1:02:39SPEAKERfrom like connecting to a NAS that has, I don't know,
1:02:43SPEAKERis full of viruses or something on an unsecure network.
1:02:46SPEAKERI mean, I feel like realistically,
1:02:48SPEAKERtech pod listeners don't have much-
1:02:50SPEAKER- This doesn't apply.
1:02:51SPEAKER- This won't affect you.
1:02:52SPEAKERYou don't have anything to gain here really
1:02:54SPEAKERbecause you probably know what you're doing,
1:02:56SPEAKERbut there are occasionally people who are, I guess,
1:02:59SPEAKERusing Samba to connect to a NAS on a random network
1:03:03SPEAKERthat they shouldn't be.
1:03:05SPEAKERSo yeah, they're making that more secure
1:03:07SPEAKERand they disabled guest fallback on Windows 11 Pro
1:03:13SPEAKERto make sure that you're not just like connecting
1:03:15SPEAKERto untrustworthy devices.
1:03:17SPEAKER- Oh, to wide open.
1:03:19SPEAKERSo you don't think you're connecting to something secure
1:03:21SPEAKERthat is actually just a wide open network?
1:03:23SPEAKERThat's good.
1:03:24SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's sort of just like changes
1:03:26SPEAKERto the default stuff.
1:03:27SPEAKERIt's not really adding new functionality.
1:03:30SPEAKERIt's just making it, they're sort of updating, I guess,
1:03:33SPEAKERwhat was probably a very ignored part of Windows
1:03:38SPEAKERnetwork connectivity, right?
1:03:39SPEAKERThis is not something that Microsoft focuses on.
1:03:43SPEAKER- There's a couple of known issues.
1:03:45SPEAKERSome of these stuff, some of this stuff may be actually
1:03:47SPEAKERfixed by the time you listen to it.
1:03:49SPEAKERThe big one I think is the missing,
1:03:52SPEAKERyou lose like nine gigabytes, basic 8.63 gigabytes
1:03:55SPEAKERwhen you install Windows in place.
1:03:58SPEAKERCan you get rid of it now?
1:04:00SPEAKER- Yeah, so apparently you could always get rid of it.
1:04:03SPEAKERBut when you then went into disk,
1:04:06SPEAKERyou would go into disk cleanup,
1:04:08SPEAKERremove it after you've updated.
1:04:10SPEAKERAnd then if you checked again,
1:04:11SPEAKERit would say it was still there.
1:04:13SPEAKERAnd apparently it was not still there,
1:04:15SPEAKERbut it was just being reported.
1:04:16SPEAKERAnd so of course people were like,
1:04:18SPEAKER"Oh my God, Windows won't let me delete this thing,
1:04:20SPEAKERit's stuck."
1:04:21SPEAKER- My 8.63 gigabytes.
1:04:23SPEAKER- Yep.
1:04:24SPEAKERSo it's all good.
1:04:26SPEAKER- Okay, don't worry about that, that's good.
1:04:29SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, that's the other normal list of stuff.
1:04:32SPEAKERLike there's some easy anti-cheat problems.
1:04:36SPEAKERThere's blue screens with certain Western Digital SSDs.
1:04:40SPEAKERThis is why if it doesn't say,
1:04:41SPEAKER"Hey, you should upgrade," you should not upgrade.
1:04:44SPEAKER'Cause if you have easy anti-cheat
1:04:46SPEAKERthat's gonna cause problems with your machine,
1:04:47SPEAKERit will probably prevent you from upgrading your machine.
1:04:50SPEAKERLike it won't offer it to you.
1:04:52SPEAKER- And it's the Western Digital SN 770 and SN 850,
1:04:56SPEAKERI think are both VRAM. - The 580, SN 580.
1:04:58SPEAKERAnd those are both DRAM-less SSDs.
1:05:01SPEAKERAnd apparently there was something going on
1:05:03SPEAKERwith the way they were doing the caching in system memory
1:05:07SPEAKERthat was just like causing a blue screen.
1:05:09SPEAKERSo I'm sure they'll fix that pretty quick,
1:05:11SPEAKERbut also a good reminder to maybe not buy a DRAM-less SSD.
1:05:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems like a mistake.
1:05:18SPEAKERAnd of course the sort of Damocles
1:05:22SPEAKERhanging over everyone on Windows 10's head at this point,
1:05:25SPEAKER'cause this has been a real boring episode, I guess,
1:05:27SPEAKERfor you Windows 10 people,
1:05:28SPEAKERis that on October 15th next year,
1:05:33SPEAKERthey're killing Windows 10 goes end of life.
1:05:37SPEAKER- End of life, what does that mean for...
1:05:41SPEAKEROkay, so I looked at the statistics.
1:05:43SPEAKERApparently this year, this might be like a few months ago,
1:05:47SPEAKERbut like 60% of PCs are still on Windows 10,
1:05:51SPEAKERwhich is not a great statistic for Windows 11
1:05:54SPEAKERand also seemingly not a great statistic
1:05:56SPEAKERfor October 15th, 2025,
1:05:59SPEAKERwhen Microsoft stops supporting Windows 10.
1:06:02SPEAKERDo you think they're gonna push that back?
1:06:04SPEAKER- So stop supporting means they're not gonna provide updates
1:06:06SPEAKERor security updates anymore after that point.
1:06:09SPEAKERIf you're a corporate customer,
1:06:10SPEAKERyou can buy for X number of dollars,
1:06:14SPEAKERaccess to ongoing support for I think another year.
1:06:19SPEAKERBut the upshot is you're going to want to upgrade
1:06:22SPEAKERor make a change in your life after that happens,
1:06:25SPEAKER'cause it wasn't inexpensive.
1:06:26SPEAKERIt was like 80 bucks for the first year
1:06:28SPEAKERand it goes up each additional year after that,
1:06:30SPEAKERpresumably 'cause they assume more people will drop off.
1:06:33SPEAKERNow, the catch is that Microsoft
1:06:36SPEAKERhas some hardware requirements
1:06:38SPEAKERthat mean machines from before like 2015,
1:06:42SPEAKERbasically you can't upgrade
1:06:44SPEAKERwithout doing some hardware updates.
1:06:47SPEAKERAnd in some cases, not even with hardware updates.
1:06:50SPEAKERSo a lot of those machines,
1:06:53SPEAKERand the bummer about this is
1:06:57SPEAKERif you're just browsing the web,
1:07:00SPEAKERI put Flex OS on my old 2014 MacBook Pro
1:07:04SPEAKERand gave it to my daughter a couple years ago
1:07:06SPEAKERwhen she needed a laptop for school.
1:07:08SPEAKERAnd Chrome OS Flex is the Google version of Chrome OS,
1:07:17SPEAKERChromebook OS that just runs on any x86 computer basically.
1:07:21SPEAKER- Nice.
1:07:21SPEAKER- And it's fucking awesome.
1:07:23SPEAKER- It's really good.
1:07:24SPEAKERIt's fast.
1:07:25SPEAKERIt just runs the browser.
1:07:26SPEAKERYou can do their weird app plug-in browser extension things.
1:07:30SPEAKERAnd it's a fine computer for just doing stuff
1:07:33SPEAKERon the internet and watching YouTube.
1:07:34SPEAKER- And probably still will be for several years, right?
1:07:38SPEAKERLike the thing that's going to kill it
1:07:39SPEAKERis the battery, honestly.
1:07:42SPEAKERSo we're in a situation,
1:07:46SPEAKERwe talk about this in the full nerd over at PC World a lot,
1:07:49SPEAKERbut it seems like they're going to have to blink
1:07:51SPEAKERand extend that if they don't get that number up from 60%
1:07:55SPEAKERto like, sorry, down from 60% to like 20%.
1:08:00SPEAKERLike it is an enormous number of computers
1:08:03SPEAKERthat they're basically going to say,
1:08:04SPEAKER"Hey, we're going to make a giant virus problem
1:08:06SPEAKERfor everybody."
1:08:07SPEAKERBecause the thing that happens
1:08:08SPEAKERwhen they stop doing security updates,
1:08:09SPEAKERjust so people understand is you have,
1:08:13SPEAKERall of a sudden you have a computer that was fine.
1:08:15SPEAKERAnd then three months later,
1:08:17SPEAKERyou have a computer that you plug into the raw internet
1:08:19SPEAKERand it's compromised in like 45 seconds.
1:08:22SPEAKERSo it seems bad.
1:08:25SPEAKER- Yeah, and I don't know,
1:08:27SPEAKERwhen they first released the requirements
1:08:32SPEAKERfor Windows 11, all of the hardware requirements
1:08:34SPEAKERyou're going to have, everything,
1:08:37SPEAKERI thought it was ridiculous.
1:08:39SPEAKER- The TPM and the secure boot and all that stuff?
1:08:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, and I say this not as someone
1:08:45SPEAKERwith a security background,
1:08:46SPEAKERbut like it felt like such an absurdly high bar
1:08:49SPEAKERfor what the average person's computer would be capable of,
1:08:54SPEAKERthat it felt like they were dooming the vast majority
1:08:57SPEAKERof PCs to not be able to upgrade to Windows 11.
1:09:00SPEAKERAnd they seemed like they were either,
1:09:05SPEAKERI'm sure they weren't ignorant to that,
1:09:06SPEAKERbut they thought that was okay.
1:09:08SPEAKERThey thought that was a good idea for their new OS.
1:09:10SPEAKERAnd it feels like the adoption has borne out
1:09:13SPEAKERhow bad of an idea that was and how bad of an idea
1:09:16SPEAKEReverybody, all the people like us were saying like,
1:09:18SPEAKER"This seems ridiculous that they're not backing down
1:09:22SPEAKERfrom this," and this feels like another instance
1:09:26SPEAKERof that being borne out, right?
1:09:28SPEAKERThat the adoption is not there for Windows 11.
1:09:31SPEAKERAre you really gonna just let everybody be on a janky,
1:09:35SPEAKERunprotected old version of Windows 10 starting next year?
1:09:39SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and the gist is the TPM is basically,
1:09:44SPEAKERthe thing that's required, the chip that is required
1:09:47SPEAKERthat's causing this problem for these older machines
1:09:50SPEAKERis like a secure store for digital keys.
1:09:54SPEAKERSo it's a security thing.
1:09:57SPEAKERI think they're gonna blink or I think,
1:10:01SPEAKERsometimes you have to make difficult choices.
1:10:02SPEAKERMicrosoft has typically erred on the side
1:10:04SPEAKERof remaining backwards compatible.
1:10:06SPEAKERThis is the first time I ever remember them going
1:10:08SPEAKERin a big way.
1:10:09SPEAKERLike the last one was the 64-bit shift.
1:10:12SPEAKERAnd it's just with Windows 11 that you couldn't get
1:10:14SPEAKERa 32-bit version of the OS.
1:10:16SPEAKERThere's 32-bit versions of Windows 10 out there.
1:10:18SPEAKERYou have to work to find them, but it's unusual
1:10:23SPEAKERthat they're making this hard a line.
1:10:25SPEAKERAnd I don't exactly understand what the motivation for it is
1:10:29SPEAKERother than it lets them do things that are secure
1:10:33SPEAKERthat other important vendors probably want
1:10:36SPEAKERmore than end consumers.
1:10:38SPEAKERSo I don't know.
1:10:42SPEAKERI joke on the full nerd that this means that 2025
1:10:45SPEAKERis finally gonna be the year of Linux.
1:10:47SPEAKER- Just like last year and the year before that
1:10:49SPEAKERand the year before that.
1:10:49SPEAKER- 2005 was totally the year of desktop Linux, but.
1:10:54SPEAKER- I'm actually with you though.
1:10:55SPEAKERI feel like I really wanna get a framework laptop
1:10:59SPEAKERnext time they put out a substantial hardware revision.
1:11:02SPEAKERAnd I think I'm gonna dual boot Windows
1:11:05SPEAKERbecause I probably have to have it for work
1:11:07SPEAKERand just certain things and try to learn
1:11:11SPEAKERa distro of Linux as sort of my daily driver.
1:11:15SPEAKERIt just feels like it's time.
1:11:16SPEAKER- Well, I've been testing out stuff like Bizite,
1:11:18SPEAKERwhich is the Fedora core, the version of Fedora
1:11:25SPEAKERthat uses, that includes all of Valve's Proton
1:11:27SPEAKERand playing games on Linux stuff.
1:11:30SPEAKERIt also includes the Steam OS UI
1:11:31SPEAKERif you wanna boot straight to that.
1:11:32SPEAKERBut you can also just boot into a Gnome desktop
1:11:34SPEAKERor KDE desktop and use like a normalized Linux computer.
1:11:39SPEAKERAnd it's not, the only thing that you can't get to work
1:11:42SPEAKERare things that are intentionally not compatible
1:11:45SPEAKERwith Linux because Tim Epic is pissed off at Valve's,
1:11:49SPEAKERthe amount of money Valve takes from game developers, right?
1:11:52SPEAKERLike it's not an issue anymore.
1:11:57SPEAKERIt's much more straightforward.
1:11:58SPEAKERSo anyway, I think that's pretty much it.
1:12:01SPEAKER24H2, maybe you can get it now, I don't know.
1:12:05SPEAKERHit the update button and see what it says.
1:12:08SPEAKERLike I said, if you can't update your drivers,
1:12:11SPEAKERupdate your software, 'cause you may have some old piece
1:12:14SPEAKERof software that's incompatible,
1:12:15SPEAKERremove anything you don't use,
1:12:19SPEAKERand then hit the button again and see what happens
1:12:21SPEAKERor just wait, 'cause it doesn't matter.
1:12:23SPEAKERThere's nothing in here except for that,
1:12:24SPEAKERexcept for that really, really,
1:12:29SPEAKERI don't think you need any of this stuff
1:12:30SPEAKERif you're not on like a brand new laptop.
1:12:32SPEAKER- Yeah, just wait unless you're super psyched about recall
1:12:36SPEAKERor you really need to zip up some files
1:12:39SPEAKERand you hate 7-Zip for some reason.
1:12:41SPEAKER- But you're not gonna get recall
1:12:43SPEAKERunless you have one of the brand new laptops
1:12:44SPEAKERthat ships with it.
1:12:45SPEAKER- That's true, that's true.
1:12:46SPEAKER- Anyway, can we talk about Maker Faire for a minute,
1:12:49SPEAKER'cause it was really fun.
1:12:49SPEAKERThis is a long podcast, I apologize, Wes.
1:12:53SPEAKER- It's all good for me.
1:12:54SPEAKERNo, I'm feeling nostalgic just thinking about Maker Faire,
1:12:58SPEAKER'cause the last time I went to Maker Faire
1:12:59SPEAKERwas with you and Norm in,
1:13:01SPEAKERwell, we did New York Maker Faire a couple of times,
1:13:03SPEAKERbut the last time I went to the one here in SF
1:13:05SPEAKERwas probably like 2013 or something like that.
1:13:08SPEAKER- Was it the shawarma year?
1:13:10SPEAKER- So there was the Churros Avengers year, right,
1:13:14SPEAKERand then we went at least one year after that.
1:13:17SPEAKER- Okay, well, I mean, Norm and Joey and I
1:13:19SPEAKERwent every year pretty much,
1:13:20SPEAKERor Ana or whoever was our producer at the time, but.
1:13:24SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, but it's been a long time for me,
1:13:25SPEAKERso I would love to hear about some Maker Faire.
1:13:27SPEAKER- Okay, so Maker Faire went away in 2020
1:13:30SPEAKERfor fairly obvious reasons.
1:13:31SPEAKERI think it was gone until last year,
1:13:33SPEAKERand then they like two months before,
1:13:36SPEAKERa month before the event or something,
1:13:37SPEAKERthey were like, "Hey, we're having Maker Faire,
1:13:38SPEAKER"it's gonna be up on Mare Island in Vallejo,"
1:13:41SPEAKERwhich is like an old naval shipyard
1:13:44SPEAKERrefurbishing base from World War II.
1:13:46SPEAKERIt's where they made a bunch of ships
1:13:48SPEAKERon the West Coast in World War II.
1:13:50SPEAKER- All I know about Vallejo is I've taken
1:13:51SPEAKERthe Vallejo ferry once, and it was a nice ride,
1:13:54SPEAKERand then I walked around Vallejo a little bit.
1:13:56SPEAKER- So the Mare Island is across the way
1:13:58SPEAKERfrom the ferry building where you get off in Vallejo,
1:14:02SPEAKERand it's where Battle, the first season
1:14:07SPEAKERof the redone battle bots that our old company
1:14:10SPEAKERworked on was. - Oh, no kidding.
1:14:12SPEAKER- So they have a bunch of big warehouses,
1:14:16SPEAKERand it's like a cool industrial vibe up there.
1:14:20SPEAKERAnd so we trucked up yesterday morning,
1:14:24SPEAKERgot there, it opened at 10, we went in,
1:14:26SPEAKERsaw just a ton, so they have a mixture
1:14:29SPEAKERof big Burning Man-style art install stuff,
1:14:32SPEAKERlike cars that shoot fire out of the top
1:14:34SPEAKERand big inflatable, there was a,
1:14:39SPEAKERit looked like an old fire truck body
1:14:41SPEAKERthat had huge nylon, inflatable, illuminated fins
1:14:47SPEAKERoff the side, like legs, so it kind of moved
1:14:49SPEAKERlike a millipede or something, but it was like
1:14:52SPEAKER40 feet long, it had big, it was cool.
1:14:54SPEAKERIt was for people who were into specific kinds of drugs.
1:14:58SPEAKERBut then you also got to walk around,
1:15:00SPEAKERthere were people who just made cool shit
1:15:02SPEAKERthat they wanted to bring and show off,
1:15:03SPEAKERor maybe talk to people and see if they should
1:15:06SPEAKERdo a Kickstarter to make a small run of stuff or whatever.
1:15:09SPEAKER- So that stuff was always at Maker Faire,
1:15:11SPEAKERbut I imagine there's probably kind of a different,
1:15:14SPEAKERmaybe not a different vibe, but a different set
1:15:16SPEAKERof regulars now after the COVID break, right?
1:15:21SPEAKERSo I'm wondering if there's some people
1:15:23SPEAKERyou see there every year doing the same stuff
1:15:25SPEAKERor coming with new stuff, and you're like,
1:15:27SPEAKER"Oh, I remember that person,
1:15:28SPEAKER"they're always doing something cool."
1:15:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so yes, yes to both of those.
1:15:37SPEAKERLike the Mentos and Coke guys are there
1:15:39SPEAKERand do a show every year.
1:15:40SPEAKERThey've done a show every year forever.
1:15:41SPEAKERAdam Savage, a friend of the show,
1:15:44SPEAKERAdam Savage does his Sunday sermon on Sunday mornings
1:15:48SPEAKERpretty much every year.
1:15:48SPEAKERI think he was out of town last year
1:15:50SPEAKERand couldn't do it last year, but anyway.
1:15:52SPEAKER- You took some notes here of things
1:15:53SPEAKERthat as soon as I looked them up,
1:15:55SPEAKERI was like, "This is so Maker Faire,"
1:15:57SPEAKERbut not an exact thing I saw before,
1:15:59SPEAKERbut I'm like, "Ah, the spirit is still very much there."
1:16:02SPEAKER- Yeah, the vibes are real good,
1:16:04SPEAKERand they do a really good job of getting stuff
1:16:08SPEAKERthat is familiar and you wanna see,
1:16:10SPEAKERand also stuff that's crazy and new
1:16:12SPEAKERand you've never seen before.
1:16:12SPEAKERSo for example, I've seen a couple of these on the internet,
1:16:16SPEAKERbut this is the first time I've gotten to handle one.
1:16:19SPEAKERThere's a Raspberry Pi Cyber Deck,
1:16:21SPEAKERlike a William Gibson/Neil Stevenson "Snow Crash"-style thing
1:16:27SPEAKERthat you jack your shit into.
1:16:29SPEAKERAre we talking briefcase size,
1:16:32SPEAKERor is it a more compact size than that?
1:16:34SPEAKER- It's bigger than a Game Boy, but smaller than a laptop.
1:16:37SPEAKERSo imagine a portrait orientation thing
1:16:40SPEAKERwith a pretty good-sized hardware keyboard
1:16:42SPEAKERand a trackpad and a gamepad stuff,
1:16:45SPEAKERand then a bunch of different USB and HDMI ports
1:16:49SPEAKERand shit up the side.
1:16:51SPEAKERI wanna say it had a serial RS-232 port on it,
1:16:54SPEAKERif you wanna get real old-school and plug into the console,
1:16:57SPEAKERand then a four-inch screen on top,
1:17:00SPEAKERand it runs off of a Raspberry Pi compute module.
1:17:03SPEAKERI think they were saying they were doing CM4s right now,
1:17:06SPEAKER'cause the five is a little bit different.
1:17:09SPEAKER- They shoulda hooked that shit up
1:17:10SPEAKERto a dot matrix printer,
1:17:12SPEAKERprinted out some pixel art or something.
1:17:14SPEAKER- What if you just hooked it up to a 4G modem
1:17:16SPEAKERand you have an always-connected little computer
1:17:18SPEAKERthat fits into a holster on your nerd belt?
1:17:23SPEAKER- Ooh, okay. - Yeah.
1:17:24SPEAKERIt's pretty hot business.
1:17:25SPEAKER- The company that makes this is called Clockwerk.
1:17:27SPEAKERIt's called the U console.
1:17:28SPEAKERIt's the one that I got to spend a little bit of time with,
1:17:30SPEAKERand it's cool.
1:17:32SPEAKERIt's like 169 bucks plus the compute module,
1:17:36SPEAKERand you can do different, you can...
1:17:39SPEAKERI wanna say they posted the designs for the cases.
1:17:41SPEAKERI might be thinking of somebody else I talk to later,
1:17:44SPEAKERbut so you can print your own cases
1:17:46SPEAKERif you wanna make something different.
1:17:48SPEAKER- Looks like they also sell
1:17:50SPEAKERwhat is basically a Game Boy case
1:17:52SPEAKERif you wanna make a pie boy kinda system
1:17:56SPEAKERwith a few extra buttons on it.
1:17:57SPEAKER- Yeah, and the people who were making it were really cool.
1:18:01SPEAKERI had a nice chat with them.
1:18:03SPEAKERThere was a chocolate 3D printer called the CocoPress.
1:18:06SPEAKERI've seen them before.
1:18:07SPEAKERThis is the second rev of this,
1:18:09SPEAKERbut they were showing off their new printer.
1:18:10SPEAKERIt's a lot faster.
1:18:12SPEAKERAs the person who was working in the booth said,
1:18:15SPEAKERwe've gone from 10 years behind the current state of the art
1:18:17SPEAKERfor plastic 3D printers to five years behind now,
1:18:21SPEAKERbut basically you can print, it works like any 3D printer.
1:18:25SPEAKERIt's just designed to print chocolate,
1:18:27SPEAKERand you take a tube of chocolate
1:18:29SPEAKERthat's about an inch around, inch and a half around,
1:18:33SPEAKERand kinda taper it on the end and jam it in this hole,
1:18:36SPEAKERand then there's a thing that just heats it up
1:18:37SPEAKERto the right temperature
1:18:38SPEAKERand applies a little bit of pressure from the top,
1:18:41SPEAKERand you can print like...
1:18:43SPEAKERAs I was walking around with my wife,
1:18:44SPEAKERshe's like, "Man, if you had one of these,
1:18:46SPEAKER"you could sell the, like, printing your corporate logo
1:18:49SPEAKER"as a bed pillow chocolate at events and stuff,
1:18:53SPEAKER"and you could just do that full-time as a job."
1:18:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I gotta say, like,
1:18:58SPEAKERnot as practical as an actual 3D printer,
1:19:01SPEAKERbut way more appealing to me personally.
1:19:04SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:19:04SPEAKER- Just to have permission to eat chocolate
1:19:07SPEAKERat any point in time, right?
1:19:08SPEAKERIt's like, well, you printed it.
1:19:09SPEAKERYou can't, like, what are you gonna do?
1:19:11SPEAKERLet it go to waste?
1:19:12SPEAKERNo, you gotta eat that.
1:19:13SPEAKER- Well, and plus, think of how nice it would be
1:19:14SPEAKERto be able to be like, "Oh, man, everybody's coming over
1:19:17SPEAKER"to watch 'Iron Man' tonight.
1:19:18SPEAKER"Let's print a bunch of little 'Iron Mens,'
1:19:19SPEAKER"and then we can eat him."
1:19:21SPEAKER- Heck yeah.
1:19:22SPEAKERAlways wanted to eat 'Iron Man.'
1:19:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it's what the people crave.
1:19:24SPEAKERThat's a Cocoa Press.
1:19:25SPEAKERI think it's about 1,500 bucks,
1:19:27SPEAKERand the thing I wish I had asked, I didn't ask,
1:19:30SPEAKERis if there's a way for you to, like,
1:19:31SPEAKERtemper and mold your own chocolate,
1:19:33SPEAKER'cause I didn't, I didn't, they didn't,
1:19:35SPEAKERfor obvious reasons, with thousands of people there,
1:19:38SPEAKERthey weren't handing out chocolate samples,
1:19:41SPEAKERbut I was curious how the chocolate tastes.
1:19:43SPEAKER- Yeah, I would hope that they would have many options,
1:19:46SPEAKERor you could use any chocolate, like you're saying, right?
1:19:48SPEAKERI wanna, you know, I don't wanna be printing milk chocolate.
1:19:51SPEAKERThat would be, what a waste.
1:19:52SPEAKER- Well, so they definitely had dark light and milk,
1:19:57SPEAKERand white chocolate, just cocoa butter or whatever.
1:20:01SPEAKER- Sure, sure.
1:20:02SPEAKER- You could do multiple colors, too.
1:20:04SPEAKERSo you could do, like, a base with one thing,
1:20:06SPEAKERand then do the next layer in white,
1:20:08SPEAKERand it would let you switch and pause.
1:20:09SPEAKERSo you could do, like, you know,
1:20:11SPEAKERfor low-going purposes, I assume.
1:20:13SPEAKER- Now, if you could mix in, like, some food coloring,
1:20:15SPEAKERyou could make your dark chocolate look like milk chocolate,
1:20:18SPEAKERand then give someone a really pleasant surprise
1:20:20SPEAKERwhen they bite into it, expecting garbage,
1:20:22SPEAKERand finding it was perfect, delightful chocolate.
1:20:24SPEAKER- I didn't expect the chocolate strawberry from U.S.,
1:20:26SPEAKERbut I'm here for it.
1:20:28SPEAKERThe Struder, that's with the Umlaut U,
1:20:32SPEAKERis, and this is, this was a prototype.
1:20:34SPEAKERThis was a guy who has, like, a real day job,
1:20:36SPEAKERand he just does this for fun, 'cause he saw those old,
1:20:39SPEAKERlike, I don't know if you remember the three doodler,
1:20:42SPEAKERbut it was a, it was, like, a 3D printing pen
1:20:45SPEAKERthat you--
1:20:45SPEAKER- I don't know how I feel about that name.
1:20:47SPEAKER- What, you don't want to talk about your doodler?
1:20:50SPEAKER- I looked at a picture of this, and it, yeah,
1:20:53SPEAKERit sort of looks like a soldering iron for 3D printing.
1:20:58SPEAKER- Yeah, so it has, like, a heating element.
1:21:00SPEAKERIt has a power source and a heating element on a,
1:21:02SPEAKERa power source in a box that connects with a feed tube
1:21:06SPEAKERand a wire to, like, a, it's like a big soldering iron.
1:21:08SPEAKERIt has a button on it and a hot end.
1:21:12SPEAKERBut the neat thing is it has a rack on the back
1:21:15SPEAKERthat you just put a normal spool of filament on
1:21:16SPEAKERand feed as much filament as you want into the extruder,
1:21:21SPEAKERand you just hit the button and it just rolls out.
1:21:22SPEAKERAnd, like, my daughter was like, "Can I try that?"
1:21:24SPEAKERAnd I was like, "Yeah, you can try whatever you want.
1:21:25SPEAKERThis'll make her friend go nuts."
1:21:27SPEAKERAnd she sat down and just started drawing
1:21:28SPEAKERand made, like, a little cube in, like, 10 minutes
1:21:32SPEAKERwhile I was talking to this guy.
1:21:34SPEAKER- That's pretty awesome.
1:21:35SPEAKERI mean, anything that brings down that level of,
1:21:38SPEAKER'cause 3D printing is still pretty complicated, right?
1:21:40SPEAKEREven when you're buying a, you know, a high-end machine.
1:21:44SPEAKERSo, or at least it's not as, like, intuitive
1:21:47SPEAKERand immediate as drawing something.
1:21:50SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and so his point was
1:21:54SPEAKERthe doodler was a neat idea,
1:21:57SPEAKERbut they kind of electric razored it.
1:21:59SPEAKERI mean, they kind of did razor marketing for it.
1:22:02SPEAKERSo the, the filament-- - By cartridges.
1:22:05SPEAKER- Well, the filament was a non-standard size.
1:22:09SPEAKERSo in order to use it, you had to buy these sticks
1:22:11SPEAKERfrom them, and because the sticks were only good
1:22:13SPEAKERfor, like, 2/3 of it before you ran out of room to feed,
1:22:17SPEAKERyou'd waste, like, 2/3 of your filament,
1:22:20SPEAKERand also you had to keep buying filament from them.
1:22:23SPEAKERAnd the markup on the filament was, like, 15, 16X.
1:22:26SPEAKERSo it was really, like, where a one-kilogram spool
1:22:29SPEAKERof filament is, like, 10 bucks.
1:22:31SPEAKERFor them, it was crazy expensive.
1:22:33SPEAKERAnd he said you could use whatever filament you want,
1:22:35SPEAKERbut he was doing PLA there.
1:22:38SPEAKERAnd so he's deciding if he's gonna do a Kickstarter
1:22:40SPEAKERor what with that, but it was, I thought it was really cool.
1:22:42SPEAKERIt was a neat project. - Yeah.
1:22:43SPEAKERIt feels like that could be, like,
1:22:46SPEAKERthis could be 3D printing for kids, you know,
1:22:48SPEAKERor 3D making for kids.
1:22:51SPEAKER- Well, so there were a couple of cosplayers there
1:22:53SPEAKERwhen I was doing, when we were getting the demo
1:22:55SPEAKERwho were, like, I would love to have this
1:22:57SPEAKERjust to touch up prints and to, like,
1:22:59SPEAKERadd different color elements on top of things,
1:23:02SPEAKER'cause you can kind of just smush it on and it works, so.
1:23:05SPEAKER- Way more portable, too, right?
1:23:06SPEAKERYou can take this thing with you to a convention
1:23:09SPEAKERor something.
1:23:09SPEAKER- This is a little bigger than that, probably,
1:23:11SPEAKERbut because it has the spool of filament on it.
1:23:13SPEAKERIt was something you'd put on your,
1:23:15SPEAKERit's like a big soldering station, basically.
1:23:17SPEAKERAnyway. - Okay.
1:23:19SPEAKER- We played "Refrace," which is, basically,
1:23:22SPEAKERthese people had these two,
1:23:24SPEAKERthey're, like, vertical circle mazes
1:23:27SPEAKERthat you put a ball in the top
1:23:28SPEAKERand you have to make the ball come out the bottom.
1:23:30SPEAKER- And you, like, rotate them, is that right?
1:23:32SPEAKER- And they had, like, a big wheel that you'd turn
1:23:35SPEAKERto rotate the maze from across the way
1:23:37SPEAKERusing, like, a series of, like, links, linkages.
1:23:40SPEAKERBut it felt like you were playing "Survivor."
1:23:43SPEAKERLike, it was like, you know, you watch "Survivor"
1:23:45SPEAKERand Jeff Post is like, "Okay, you know, do your thing, go."
1:23:49SPEAKERIt was very much like that, so my wife and daughter
1:23:51SPEAKERwere competing against each other, it was really fun.
1:23:53SPEAKER- I was looking at this and I was thinking,
1:23:56SPEAKERthese folks really need to do, like, a crossover
1:24:00SPEAKERwith Jelly's marble runs.
1:24:02SPEAKERAre you familiar with the Jelly's channel on YouTube?
1:24:05SPEAKER- No.
1:24:06SPEAKER- One of the great YouTube channels.
1:24:08SPEAKERJelly's marble runs, I found out about it
1:24:10SPEAKERthrough "Last Week Tonight," the John Oliver show
1:24:13SPEAKERa few years ago 'cause they sponsored, like, a season of it.
1:24:16SPEAKERIt's this guy, he's in Europe somewhere, I forget where,
1:24:20SPEAKERwhose thing is just marbles and he designs
1:24:23SPEAKERthese insanely elaborate race courses for marbles
1:24:27SPEAKERand then they just send, like, 20 marbles down it
1:24:30SPEAKERand they commentate it completely seriously,
1:24:33SPEAKERlike it's a, you know, an Olympic event, basically.
1:24:36SPEAKER- Oh, this is brilliant.
1:24:37SPEAKER- Yeah, it's real fun.
1:24:38SPEAKER- I love the internet.
1:24:39SPEAKER- If you like marbles rolling downhill, you will love this
1:24:44SPEAKERbecause it is the ultimate form of that idea.
1:24:46SPEAKER- Who doesn't?
1:24:49SPEAKEROkay, so the electric hot dog derby,
1:24:52SPEAKERthis is the stupidest good thing I saw.
1:24:55SPEAKERImagine a Pinewood derby track, and this was, like,
1:24:58SPEAKERa high school kid and his dad, I think,
1:25:01SPEAKERthat was my guess, I didn't talk to them for long,
1:25:03SPEAKERbut they built these little cars, you put a hot dog in it,
1:25:06SPEAKERit has electrodes on either end that go into the hot dog,
1:25:10SPEAKERand you run it down a track that has copper lining
1:25:12SPEAKERon the side and they put, I assume, a fair amount of charge
1:25:16SPEAKERinto the track because the hot dog starts raw
1:25:21SPEAKERand finishes cooked and it's, like, a 15-foot-long track.
1:25:26SPEAKER- Will, are you familiar with the hot dogger?
1:25:29SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, is the hot dogger the toaster
1:25:32SPEAKERthat you put the hot dogs in and the buns in
1:25:33SPEAKERand then you make a grease fire in the bottom?
1:25:36SPEAKER- I think that's a pretty fair description.
1:25:40SPEAKERThe one that I've used does not have space for buns,
1:25:44SPEAKERbut it is a 1960s, '70s-era device
1:25:48SPEAKERthat is basically a hunk of plastic
1:25:51SPEAKERwith what looks like a metal torture device inside it.
1:25:54SPEAKERThey're just big metal prongs and you put the hot dogs,
1:25:59SPEAKERyou puncture each end of the hot dog onto the prongs
1:26:02SPEAKERso that they're sort of curved upward in an arc,
1:26:06SPEAKERand then you plug the thing in and it uses the hot dogs
1:26:11SPEAKERas the connection to just run raw,
1:26:16SPEAKERjust take that power straight out of the wall
1:26:18SPEAKERand run it through the hot dog.
1:26:20SPEAKERAnd in about 30 seconds, it starts steaming up in there
1:26:26SPEAKERand then the hot dogs start to kind of split apart
1:26:29SPEAKERand it is a horrific device, but I bought one as a,
1:26:35SPEAKERI guess you would call it a gag gift
1:26:37SPEAKERfor a friend who really likes hot dogs,
1:26:38SPEAKERand we plugged it in and we were like,
1:26:41SPEAKERwe should maybe have a fire extinguisher on hand
1:26:43SPEAKER'cause we don't know how this thing is gonna go.
1:26:44SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems scary.
1:26:46SPEAKER- And it cooked the hot dogs and they tasted terrible.
1:26:50SPEAKERNot a recommended hot dog cooking method,
1:26:53SPEAKERI would say boil before even using a hot dog,
1:26:57SPEAKERor look it up on YouTube 'cause it is horrifying.
1:27:00SPEAKER- I assume, when you were describing how this worked,
1:27:02SPEAKERI assumed this was something from like the '50s or the '20s
1:27:05SPEAKERthat had just carried forward
1:27:07SPEAKERand not an actual product you could buy today.
1:27:10SPEAKER- Can you still buy it today?
1:27:11SPEAKER- I don't know, I'm sure-
1:27:12SPEAKER- The one I bought was like, I bought it at a flea market,
1:27:15SPEAKERyeah, at an antique store, it was from the '70s for sure.
1:27:20SPEAKERI doubt the Presto Hot Dogger is still around today.
1:27:23SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no, I don't see it anymore.
1:27:25SPEAKER- It looks super dangerous, I don't know.
1:27:26SPEAKERLike you're just running raw current through those dogs.
1:27:29SPEAKER- It's basically up there like right below the lawn dart
1:27:31SPEAKERin terms of shit that will kill you.
1:27:34SPEAKER- So I'm amazed that someone did basically this exact thing,
1:27:37SPEAKERbut in race car form at Maker Faire, it's pretty awesome.
1:27:40SPEAKER- This is the beautiful thing about Maker Faire, right?
1:27:42SPEAKERIs like there's no Consumer Product Safety Commission
1:27:44SPEAKERat Maker Faire, you can do what you want, man.
1:27:48SPEAKER- Did anyone eat the hot dogs after the race?
1:27:50SPEAKER- I did not ask to eat the hot dogs,
1:27:52SPEAKERbut I did ask them what their ketchup
1:27:54SPEAKERversus mustard rule was, and they were like,
1:27:56SPEAKER"This is not a ketchup race."
1:27:58SPEAKER- Got it, good to know.
1:28:01SPEAKER- The Fernside Dragons was the next thing we saw.
1:28:03SPEAKERThis is a DIY inflatable costuming community.
1:28:07SPEAKERSo you know like the inflatable dinosaur costume
1:28:11SPEAKERthat you see on Halloween where the head's bobbing around,
1:28:13SPEAKERyour arms are sticking out the arms
1:28:15SPEAKERand it looks like a T-Rex.
1:28:17SPEAKER- Or like the big Santa people put in their yard
1:28:19SPEAKERat Christmas, yeah.
1:28:20SPEAKER- These people teach you how to make those,
1:28:22SPEAKERwhich I did not think was an option
1:28:25SPEAKERhaving looked at a bunch of these.
1:28:29SPEAKERApparently, you just have to be able to sew
1:28:31SPEAKERthe kind of structured nylon.
1:28:33SPEAKERAnd we talked about how they come up with patterns
1:28:36SPEAKER'cause they had a bunch of really good ones.
1:28:38SPEAKERThey had like, they had an Elmo,
1:28:40SPEAKERthey had made some Among Us ones,
1:28:42SPEAKERwhich I guess now you can buy from China, but whatever.
1:28:45SPEAKERThey also had like wavy tube man Grover and Elmos,
1:28:50SPEAKERwhich were really funny.
1:28:53SPEAKERThey had a bunch of other ones, mostly were costumes,
1:28:56SPEAKERbut some that were just decorations.
1:28:57SPEAKERThey had a Nyan cat, they had some other stuff.
1:29:00SPEAKERBut the way they started out to figure out the patterns
1:29:04SPEAKERwas they would buy the stuffed animal
1:29:05SPEAKERfor the design they want
1:29:06SPEAKERand they would disassemble the stuffed animal,
1:29:09SPEAKERtrace and scan the structure of the pattern
1:29:14SPEAKERof the stuffed animal,
1:29:15SPEAKERand then just scale it up and laser cut the nylon.
1:29:19SPEAKERAnd so the nylon, and it just worked.
1:29:21SPEAKER- That's very smart.
1:29:22SPEAKERI looked on their website 'cause I'm like,
1:29:26SPEAKERah, I'm not super into the dragon thing.
1:29:27SPEAKERBut then I looked on their Instagram
1:29:29SPEAKERand the first picture on there currently
1:29:31SPEAKERis the little prince from Katamari with a Katamari.
1:29:35SPEAKER- Yes. - Awesome.
1:29:37SPEAKER- Yes. - Love it.
1:29:37SPEAKER- I was gonna say that was the thing that I was like,
1:29:39SPEAKERoh, fuck yeah.
1:29:40SPEAKERSo they had the, the Katamari was its own thing
1:29:43SPEAKERand the prince was running around pushing the Katamari
1:29:46SPEAKERand there's a video of it on their Instagram
1:29:47SPEAKERthat's incredible.
1:29:48SPEAKERThat's Fernside Dragons
1:29:50SPEAKERfor people who wanna look up more about that one.
1:29:52SPEAKER- Love it.
1:29:53SPEAKER- They have a Discord too for people
1:29:54SPEAKERwho are into learning more about this,
1:29:56SPEAKERwhere they were, I joined and they are very helpful.
1:30:00SPEAKERR2D2 builders are always there.
1:30:02SPEAKERNo BB-8s this year, but there was a couple,
1:30:04SPEAKERthere was an R5, which was cool.
1:30:06SPEAKERLike a couple of R5 variants.
1:30:08SPEAKER- Who's the, the bot from Andor?
1:30:10SPEAKERHas anybody built a--
1:30:11SPEAKER- Oh, B2Emo? - A B2Emo?
1:30:13SPEAKER- Yeah, has anybody built a good one yet?
1:30:15SPEAKER- I don't know if there's a B2Emo building,
1:30:17SPEAKERI'm sure there is,
1:30:18SPEAKERbut I don't know that anybody's gotten one yet.
1:30:20SPEAKERI know that there's a bunch of choppers these days.
1:30:24SPEAKERI think, I think actually, I think somebody from,
1:30:27SPEAKERI know, is it Mike McMasters or Mike Senn?
1:30:29SPEAKERI can't remember which mic it is,
1:30:30SPEAKERbut one of the mics built the chopper when Rebels,
1:30:34SPEAKERwhen the Rebels run was going,
1:30:35SPEAKERthat they had around the parks even for Disney.
1:30:38SPEAKERBut, but maybe, maybe after season two of Andor,
1:30:41SPEAKERwe'll see some B2Emos out there.
1:30:43SPEAKER- It's been almost long enough now.
1:30:45SPEAKERIt takes a long time to kind of get everything going.
1:30:48SPEAKERAlthough I talked to one of the R2 builders
1:30:50SPEAKERand we were talking about how 3D printing
1:30:52SPEAKERhas made it much more accessible.
1:30:53SPEAKER'Cause it used to be that like,
1:30:55SPEAKERyou'd have to wait until somebody did a machining run
1:30:57SPEAKERto get like domes and stuff like that.
1:31:00SPEAKERAnd he said, now people are even like printing domes
1:31:03SPEAKERand then, and then, you know, rub and buff or whatever,
1:31:06SPEAKERto get them to be the right amount of shiny.
1:31:08SPEAKERThought that was cool. - Awesome.
1:31:10SPEAKER- Last couple of things.
1:31:11SPEAKERThe Chomp Shop is a kid safe cardboard cutting tool
1:31:16SPEAKERthat works kind of like our scroll saw or a band saw,
1:31:18SPEAKERbut it's like a flat platform
1:31:20SPEAKERand you can cut cardboard with it.
1:31:22SPEAKERAnd it's just like a solenoid with a hole punch in it
1:31:27SPEAKERthat goes up into a stopper.
1:31:28SPEAKERAnd the trick is the gap is big enough
1:31:30SPEAKERto put the cardboard in,
1:31:31SPEAKERbut not big enough to get a finger into.
1:31:33SPEAKER- Nice. - It was super cool.
1:31:35SPEAKERIt was a really, it was way easier
1:31:36SPEAKERthan even using like big giant scissors to cut cardboard.
1:31:39SPEAKERSo.
1:31:40SPEAKER- Did your daughter try this one out?
1:31:41SPEAKER- She did.
1:31:42SPEAKERShe cut a heart and a bunch of,
1:31:44SPEAKERlike you can, when I say it's like a scroll saw,
1:31:46SPEAKERyou can work the shape into the thing at different angles,
1:31:50SPEAKERthe material, the thing at different angles
1:31:51SPEAKERto get exactly like the angles and curves and stuff you want.
1:31:54SPEAKERIt was nice clean cuts.
1:31:55SPEAKERSo it was really cool.
1:31:56SPEAKER- Cool.
1:31:57SPEAKER- That's, I want to say they, those are,
1:31:59SPEAKERthat was a Kickstarter last year under a different name.
1:32:01SPEAKERThey had to change their name because of legal things.
1:32:05SPEAKERTheir new name is way better than the old name though.
1:32:07SPEAKERSo shout out to Chomp Shop, shout out.
1:32:11SPEAKERShout out to Chomp Shop.
1:32:13SPEAKERI'll edit that.
1:32:14SPEAKER- Chomp out to Chomp Shop.
1:32:17SPEAKER- Yeah, it used to be called the inventables.
1:32:20SPEAKERInventables, I think is what it used to be called.
1:32:23SPEAKERBut it turns out accents are trademark,
1:32:26SPEAKERor not trademarkable or something.
1:32:28SPEAKERAnd then the last person I saw was Jen Schachter,
1:32:30SPEAKERwho I used to work with that tested on stuff occasionally.
1:32:33SPEAKERAnd she was doing some of her little houses.
1:32:37SPEAKERJen did the, she worked on Project Egress,
1:32:41SPEAKERwhich was the maker community rebuild
1:32:47SPEAKERof the Apollo exit door.
1:32:52SPEAKERWell, you can see it at the Air and Space Museum now.
1:32:55SPEAKERThe, in DC, she also worked on the Rosie the Riveter,
1:32:59SPEAKERlike a huge giant maker project where everybody submitted
1:33:03SPEAKERa bazillion pieces from around the world
1:33:05SPEAKERto make this giant Rosie the Riveter statue.
1:33:08SPEAKERBut she had her little spooky houses there, which I love.
1:33:11SPEAKERShe does laser, a lot of cool laser cut stuff.
1:33:14SPEAKER- Right on.
1:33:15SPEAKERSeems like a good group of people at Maker Faire this year.
1:33:17SPEAKER- Yeah, you can find Jen either,
1:33:19SPEAKERshe's on tested videos all the time,
1:33:20SPEAKERbut her Instagram is Schachattack, S-C-H-A-C attack,
1:33:25SPEAKERunderscore attack, and she's great.
1:33:28SPEAKERHer stuff's really good.
1:33:29SPEAKERSo yeah, Maker Faire was good.
1:33:32SPEAKER- Wes, you know what else was good?
1:33:35SPEAKER- No, I don't, Will, what else was good?
1:33:37SPEAKER- Having an excuse to hang out and talk to you.
1:33:39SPEAKERIt's been too long, my friend.
1:33:40SPEAKER- Oh, thank you, Will.
1:33:41SPEAKERIt was great to hear about Maker Faire.
1:33:43SPEAKERI have fond memories of the years we went to it together.
1:33:46SPEAKERThe New York Maker Faire trips we took,
1:33:49SPEAKERincluding the one where we walked through New York City
1:33:53SPEAKERas absolute zombies until we saw the movie Dread,
1:33:57SPEAKERand then it revived us.
1:33:59SPEAKER- I, look, I'm not gonna lie,
1:34:01SPEAKERI fell asleep during Dread, 'cause we took a red eye in.
1:34:05SPEAKERNorm was like, that was the year Norm was like,
1:34:07SPEAKER"Hey, let's take a red eye, it'll be great.
1:34:11SPEAKER"We're gonna get there, we'll have a whole day
1:34:12SPEAKER"to futz around in New York."
1:34:14SPEAKERAnd then when we got there,
1:34:16SPEAKERour Airbnb wasn't ready until four,
1:34:20SPEAKERwhen it was supposed to be ready at noon.
1:34:22SPEAKERAnd we were like, "Well, what are we gonna do now?
1:34:25SPEAKER"We have all this luggage and camera gear and stuff."
1:34:27SPEAKERAnd we called, didn't we call Russ?
1:34:30SPEAKER- Yeah, my friend Ross Miller,
1:34:32SPEAKERformerly of Engadget and The Verge and that lineage,
1:34:35SPEAKERand he graciously stored our luggage for us
1:34:37SPEAKERat like 6.30 in the morning.
1:34:39SPEAKERBut then we had to walk around New York
1:34:41SPEAKERjust exhausted for the next seven hours or whatever.
1:34:44SPEAKER- Well, I remember it was a lot of luggage too,
1:34:47SPEAKERso thank you, Ross, again, for 10 years,
1:34:51SPEAKER10, 15 years ago, whatever it was.
1:34:53SPEAKERBut yeah, we went to see Dread,
1:34:54SPEAKERand we hung out in a park for a while,
1:34:56SPEAKERthen people started looking at us like we might be
1:35:00SPEAKERJoey was nodding off.
1:35:02SPEAKERAnd then we went to see Dread
1:35:04SPEAKER'cause it was quiet and dark and cool.
1:35:06SPEAKERBut Maker Faire was great.
1:35:07SPEAKERThat Maker Faire was incredible.
1:35:08SPEAKERWe met a bunch of cool projects,
1:35:10SPEAKERand saw some fantastic people.
1:35:12SPEAKER- Great memories of all things Maker Faire.
1:35:14SPEAKERSo yeah, thanks for having me on.
1:35:15SPEAKERIt was good talking about Windows too.
1:35:17SPEAKER- Always a pleasure.
1:35:19SPEAKERWes, if people wanna find you,
1:35:20SPEAKERwhere can they find your work?
1:35:21SPEAKER- Well, you can find me at PC Gamer.
1:35:24SPEAKERAnd also I write a biweekly newsletter about emulation.
1:35:28SPEAKERIt's free.
1:35:29SPEAKERI would love it if you subscribe.
1:35:31SPEAKERThe website is readonlymemo.com.
1:35:34SPEAKER- And the thing I like about your newsletter
1:35:36SPEAKERis it gives me the stuff that I need to know
1:35:38SPEAKERabout what's going on in the emulation scene
1:35:41SPEAKERat any given moment, so.
1:35:43SPEAKER- That's the goal, yeah.
1:35:44SPEAKERAnd I try to write it for people who do not have time
1:35:47SPEAKERto follow a bunch of projects,
1:35:50SPEAKERupdates on GitHub and that kind of thing.
1:35:52SPEAKERAnd when I have time,
1:35:53SPEAKERI do interviews with emulator developers
1:35:56SPEAKERand people who do fan translations
1:35:58SPEAKERand kind of anything around the emulation scene.
1:36:02SPEAKERThere's been a lot of news in the past six months to a year
1:36:06SPEAKERwith Nintendo basically suing one emulator into oblivion
1:36:11SPEAKERand threatening another one into oblivion
1:36:13SPEAKERand all kinds of crazy stuff happening.
1:36:15SPEAKERYeah, it's been quite a year.
1:36:16SPEAKERBloodborne is becoming playable on the computer.
1:36:19SPEAKER- Whoa.
1:36:20SPEAKER- Yeah, some wild stuff.
1:36:21SPEAKER- What's it, I feel like we should talk about this
1:36:24SPEAKERat some point in the future,
1:36:25SPEAKERbut it's kind of, we didn't do it this week
1:36:27SPEAKER'cause it was a little speculative,
1:36:28SPEAKERbut do you feel like Nintendo's gonna keep going
1:36:31SPEAKERafter other emulator makers
1:36:32SPEAKERor they just go after Yuzu and those guys
1:36:35SPEAKER'cause they were A, taking money from people
1:36:37SPEAKERand B, emulating the currently selling console
1:36:40SPEAKERthat they sell games to?
1:36:42SPEAKER- I think the short version is the Switch
1:36:46SPEAKERis where their concerns are
1:36:49SPEAKERand they had a pretty good case against Yuzu
1:36:53SPEAKERfor complex reasons.
1:36:56SPEAKERSo they were able to go after Yuzu quite effectively.
1:37:00SPEAKERThe other one, Ryujinx, they,
1:37:02SPEAKERI feel like just strong-armed the developer
1:37:06SPEAKER'cause the developer is in,
1:37:09SPEAKERthe lead developer of that emulator is in Brazil.
1:37:13SPEAKERThey did not sue them,
1:37:14SPEAKERbut they apparently either showed up at their house
1:37:16SPEAKERor got in communication with them in some very direct way
1:37:20SPEAKERand made them an offer and the offer was not,
1:37:24SPEAKERwe'll give you a bunch of money.
1:37:26SPEAKERThe offer was, to my understanding,
1:37:29SPEAKERwas whatever the godfather version of an offer is.
1:37:33SPEAKER- You've got some real nice legs here.
1:37:34SPEAKERIt'd be a pity if something happened to 'em.
1:37:36SPEAKER- So I don't have any insight into the real details of it,
1:37:39SPEAKERbut the people around it made it clear
1:37:42SPEAKERlike they were not bought off and given a great deal
1:37:46SPEAKERto stop developing the emulator.
1:37:48SPEAKERIt was a you should stop this or something else bad
1:37:53SPEAKERis probably gonna come down the pike
1:37:56SPEAKERand so they chose to stop developing it.
1:37:57SPEAKERBut the answer to your question is
1:37:59SPEAKERI don't think they're gonna start going after
1:38:01SPEAKERlike Super Nintendo emulators and that kind of stuff.
1:38:03SPEAKERI think that is like that ship has sailed for them,
1:38:06SPEAKERbut my guess is the hardware of the Switch 2
1:38:09SPEAKERis gonna be obviously much newer
1:38:11SPEAKERand more powerful than the Switch 1,
1:38:13SPEAKERbut I think like fundamentally
1:38:15SPEAKERit's gonna work quite similarly.
1:38:17SPEAKERAnd I think those Switch emulators
1:38:19SPEAKERprobably would have been able to get Switch 2 games
1:38:23SPEAKERup and running in a not ridiculous timeline
1:38:27SPEAKERlike within a year or two.
1:38:29SPEAKERAnd they probably did not wanna see that happen, yeah.
1:38:33SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like they had, from a piracy standpoint,
1:38:37SPEAKERthe Switch had a hard row because of the Nvidia problems
1:38:40SPEAKERwith the first 20 million consoles or whatever they shipped.
1:38:44SPEAKERSo yeah, okay, that's good to hear.
1:38:47SPEAKERFor me, I feel like the SNES stuff is probably safe
1:38:51SPEAKER'cause it seems like Nintendo has benefited
1:38:53SPEAKERfrom the SNES emulation scene
1:38:55SPEAKERbased on how their emulators work.
1:38:57SPEAKERSame thing for N64 even.
1:38:59SPEAKERThe thing that worries me is the Dolphin era
1:39:01SPEAKERmore than anything 'cause I feel like the GameCube
1:39:04SPEAKERand Wii stuff is prime, like, I mean,
1:39:08SPEAKERthey've made commercial HD revamps of like Metroid Prime
1:39:13SPEAKERand stuff like that recently.
1:39:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:39:15SPEAKER- So it seems like that's a potential commercial target.
1:39:19SPEAKERSo I'd hate to see something happen to Dolphin.
1:39:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think it will,
1:39:23SPEAKERbut that is a whole complex topic
1:39:25SPEAKERwe could get into at some point.
1:39:27SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:39:28SPEAKERWere either of the Switch emulators open
1:39:30SPEAKERor were they all closed source?
1:39:31SPEAKER- They were both open source.
1:39:32SPEAKER- Oh, so then they're just gonna keep getting forked
1:39:34SPEAKERindefinitely and people will start working on them and--
1:39:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, they've been like doing DMCA's
1:39:41SPEAKERon people who tried to do forks of Yuzu
1:39:43SPEAKERand I think the fallout was so dramatic
1:39:46SPEAKERthat no one, no new group of skilled open source developers
1:39:52SPEAKERwere like, well, we just saw somebody get sued
1:39:55SPEAKERand their lives ruined, let's just pick up the torch
1:39:58SPEAKERand continue from there, right?
1:39:59SPEAKERLike it scared the people who have the skills
1:40:02SPEAKERand the passion in this area are like looking at this
1:40:06SPEAKERas a radioactive thing, right?
1:40:08SPEAKERLike they're not gonna just immediately jump on it.
1:40:10SPEAKERMaybe someday, maybe in 10 years
1:40:13SPEAKERwhen Nintendo doesn't give a shit about Switch emulation,
1:40:16SPEAKERyou know, maybe that there's a case for it
1:40:19SPEAKERgetting tons more development.
1:40:21SPEAKERBut I think right now both of those projects are,
1:40:24SPEAKERif someone picks it up, it's gonna be someone who's very,
1:40:28SPEAKERyou know, it's gonna be like a single developer
1:40:30SPEAKERor a very small group of people
1:40:31SPEAKERwho are just absolutely fearless.
1:40:33SPEAKER- Or somebody who lives in a country
1:40:34SPEAKERwhere Charles Martinet can't get to him.
1:40:37SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
1:40:38SPEAKER- Wes, it's always a pleasure to see you.
1:40:39SPEAKERThanks again for coming by.
1:40:40SPEAKERAnd please go check out his work over at PC Gamer
1:40:42SPEAKERand also subscribe to Read Only Memo.
1:40:45SPEAKERIt's a great newsletter.
1:40:46SPEAKERYou'll enjoy it, I promise.
1:40:48SPEAKERThis reaches the end of the show
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1:40:51SPEAKERthat this is a listener-supported podcast.
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1:41:24SPEAKERIt's like sometimes it's projects we're working on.
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1:41:50SPEAKERIt's five bucks for the Discord and the patron episode.
1:41:54SPEAKERWe appreciate everybody so, so much.
1:41:56SPEAKERAnd especially appreciate our executive producer
1:41:59SPEAKERto your patrons including Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett,
1:42:03SPEAKERBuddy Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamik,
1:42:06SPEAKERand Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:42:10SPEAKERThat'll do it for us this week.
1:42:12SPEAKERThanks again to everybody for listening
1:42:13SPEAKERand supporting the show.
1:42:14SPEAKERAnd thanks to Wes for coming by.
1:42:15SPEAKERIt's always a pleasure to see him.
1:42:16SPEAKERAnd I think Brad will be back next week
1:42:17SPEAKERfor the next edition of the TechPod.
1:42:20SPEAKERThanks, see y'all next week.
1:42:21SPEAKER(upbeat music)