00:00SPEAKEROkay. And these hectic times and these hectic shipping times around the holidays, when you
00:04SPEAKERgot to get packages somewhere absolutely positively on time, probably should hand deliver. It would
00:08SPEAKERbe my recommendation. Yeah. I mean, that is one option. Um, just saddle up on the horse
00:13SPEAKERand get riding. You'll be there in three months. Yeah. Pony express baby. Uh, do you, when
00:18SPEAKERyou, when you take a package FedEx or UPS, do you tape over if you print your own label
00:22SPEAKERand they don't print it for you? One of their nice glossy stick on ones. You do you packing
00:26SPEAKERtape over the printed label? No, no. You, I have a big stack of bags that I got from
00:31SPEAKERFedEx last time I went there. You got to use the bags, man. Wait, they'll, well, they just
00:36SPEAKERlet you take them. Okay. Look, you can go into FedEx and they'll just hand you boxes
00:42SPEAKERthat are in FedEx size boxes. Okay. This is, I'm learning a lot. You clearly did not ship
00:47SPEAKERa lot of hardware back in. Like this is the difference between people who reviewed hardware
00:51SPEAKERand people who reviewed games. You never return a game. They almost never asked for, unless
00:57SPEAKERit was like a burned preview copy of something that wasn't out yet. And even then we usually
01:01SPEAKERdidn't send them back anyway. I have a big stack of EA confidential discs in my garage
01:06SPEAKERsomewhere. I'm sure. But like the hardware vet, the hardware people were always like,
01:09SPEAKERHey man, can you send that $5,000 computer? We sent you back and you get a real good relationship
01:14SPEAKERwith FedEx at that point. I believe that. Uh, well, okay. My, my SOP has always been
01:20SPEAKERto print the label out at home and then put packing tape over it on the box. So it doesn't
01:24SPEAKERget wet or whatever that works for FedEx for one or for UPS for what it's worth. FedEx
01:28SPEAKERwon't do that. Or sometimes they complain that X was fine with it, except that my packing
01:33SPEAKERtape job was just wrinkly enough that they couldn't scan the barcode and they were fine
01:38SPEAKERwith it. They were just like, Oh, here's an email address for this store. Just forward
01:41SPEAKERus the PDF. We'll just print out here and you're fine. Well, that's not bad then. Uh,
01:47SPEAKERgetting a PDF out of, I was returning something. So it was from a company's like built in RMA
01:53SPEAKERprocess. Yeah. What they had sent me was a URL and you clicked that URL and it opened
01:57SPEAKERa page that was not in and of itself a PDF, but you could print it. Yeah. Then you can
02:02SPEAKERmake it a PDF. That works. So on the spot, they were just like, Hey, you know, just pull
02:06SPEAKERit up and email to us. You'll be fine. I could not turn that goddamn page into a PDF to save
02:10SPEAKERmy life. I wanted to die. I stood in that FedEx for upwards of 30 minutes. It was a
02:15SPEAKERheavy box that I, I walked it like 12 blocks. I did not want it to end. It was like seven
02:19SPEAKERo'clock at night. I did not want to take it back home and come back the next day. But
02:23SPEAKERI was on my iPhone. I could not like press and hold on the document to save as a PDF.
02:28SPEAKERLike if I tried to save out to files or Dropbox, it was trying to save whatever the webpage
02:34SPEAKERwas, not the actual embedded PDF, like a blob prefix on the file name or URL. That's weird.
02:43SPEAKERAnd so then I tried to print using the iPhone's built in print in Chrome and Safari. And then
02:48SPEAKERthat's rendering. Like that's basically rendering out a PDF, right? If you tell it to print
02:51SPEAKERthe page and if you're good, if you do the print option in iOS, then you can export from
02:56SPEAKERthe print dialogue rather than printing to a printer, you can export to an app. So at
03:00SPEAKERthat point I was like converting the page into a PDF and trying to save that out. That
03:04SPEAKERmakes sense.
03:05SPEAKERYeah, that, that, that should work, right?
03:07SPEAKERYou would think it gave me a PDF that was exactly half of the label and the bottom half
03:11SPEAKERwas just blank.
03:12SPEAKEROh yeah. Cause it probably only showed what was on the screen. If you had a bigger phone,
03:15SPEAKERthis wouldn't be a problem.
03:16SPEAKERSo then I was like, maybe I can just send them because there was no PDF in the email.
03:19SPEAKERI'm sure it's clear by now. So I was like, I'll just send them the URL that this company
03:23SPEAKERsent me. Cause you don't have to log in. They can just click the link and get the PDF themselves.
03:28SPEAKERI sent them, send it to them and they were like, Oh, we were not allowed to click external
03:31SPEAKERlinks. You have to send us the file.
03:32SPEAKERCould you, could you, that's, that's a great corporate policy. Could you, could you not
03:38SPEAKERtake a, could you not get the whole label on your phone screen at once?
03:41SPEAKERThat's what I ended up doing.
03:42SPEAKERCause then you just take a screenshot of and send them the screenshot and call it a day.
03:45SPEAKERThat's what they ended up recommending that I do. I was worried it would be too low resolution
03:49SPEAKERbecause you're limited to whatever resolution you're able to fit onto the screen. And I
03:53SPEAKERhave an older iPhone, which is fairly low res.
03:55SPEAKERYeah. But it's still like, it's still like single pixel. It's still double pixel.
03:59SPEAKERIt's still pretty high DPI. Anyway, that's what they ended up having me do. And it actually
04:03SPEAKERdid work.
04:04SPEAKERSo let me tell you the secret of FedEx, the real down and dirty. Here's what you need
04:09SPEAKERto know. So you never have to worry about this again is if you will pay them $4, the
04:14SPEAKERFedEx guy will just stop at your house and pick up the package for you. What? Yeah. Oh
04:19SPEAKERman. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. I'm learning a lot. You never have to go to FedEx again, Brad.
04:24SPEAKERI guess not. I came out of there. I came out of there a fuming, but B not fuming at people.
04:28SPEAKERThey weren't very nice, but fuming at like web pages and printer dialogues that don't
04:32SPEAKERwork right.
04:33SPEAKERSo for like returns, they may not do that. You may have to pay more for that. Yeah. But,
04:37SPEAKERbut often usually you can just say, Hey man, come pick up. And sometimes if you have like
04:43SPEAKERthree packages, they don't even charge you.
04:45SPEAKERHuh? Wow. Okay. That's good to know, man. Like I've learned a lot in the last 12 hours.
04:49SPEAKERLike what? Okay. What have we learned? Don't take over your label. Okay. I mean, that's,
04:54SPEAKERthat's in the works. When's that se coming out? Okay. Don't take over your label. Yeah.
04:59SPEAKERI will never go ship something like this again without the PDF label in my Dropbox ready
05:04SPEAKERto download if necessary. There you go. But also maybe just grab a bunch of those little
05:09SPEAKERstick on bags.
05:10SPEAKERI mean, so here's the thing. You can also get folding boxes and bags and just have them
05:15SPEAKERready to go for things like returns. Maybe not, but for like, like if you need to FedEx
05:22SPEAKERsomething to somebody, there you go. Or you know what, maybe just pay them to come get
05:25SPEAKERit. Maybe, maybe that's the right at the end of the day, the right way to go.
05:55SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made at TechPod. I'm Will.
06:02SPEAKERI'm Brad. Hello.
06:03SPEAKERHi. Hello.
06:04SPEAKERHello. Happy holidays to you and everyone listening.
06:06SPEAKERUh, happy holidays. I'm I, I know, wait, we don't have any weird time stuff on this episode
06:12SPEAKERfor once. Okay. No, everything's cool.
06:14SPEAKERYes. This episode is in fact posting like the day after we're recording this, not some
06:18SPEAKERnumber of weeks in the future out of order. So.
06:20SPEAKEROh, that's nice.
06:21SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. You know, temporarily sound here.
06:24SPEAKERYeah. Like no causality violations. That's, that's what I'm, that's what we shoot for
06:28SPEAKERhere at Brad and Will Made at TechPod is zero universe ending technologies built. This week
06:36SPEAKERto celebrate the end of the year, we decided it's time to rank some stuff.
06:42SPEAKERThat's right. That's right. And frankly, reality may in fact fold in on itself as we try to
06:47SPEAKERget through this list as I look at it.
06:49SPEAKERYeah. Like we were talking about things that could be mini rankings and then one of those
06:53SPEAKERones on that mini ranking list, I was like, that's not a mini ranking. That's a big giant
06:57SPEAKERhonking project.
06:58SPEAKERYeah. We have like a whole list of, of little mini rankings that were like 15 minutes, like,
07:03SPEAKERah, you know, we could just rank something quickly and move on if it's not fun or whatever.
07:08SPEAKERBut then one of them incredibly skeptical of our ability to mini rank something quickly,
07:12SPEAKERjust, just on the, on the, on the outset. But yes, that's fair. That's fair in a general
07:17SPEAKERsense, but also this, this idea, a ranking of K of connectors, ranking of cables, ranking
07:23SPEAKERof ports, ranking of connectors. It's all ranking of things that plug in.
07:27SPEAKERSo I think cables is too broad. I think this is connectors.
07:30SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, a cable is just a cable that comes out of a connector.
07:34SPEAKERIt's defined by the connector. Of course, at any rate, this idea clearly was not going
07:39SPEAKERto span a mere 15 minutes.
07:41SPEAKERNo. And when we started looking at it, it got bigger and bigger the longer we got. And
07:46SPEAKERso that's what we're doing today. We're ranking connectors. We have, we have a list of like
07:52SPEAKEReverything you can like audio, video, analog, digital data, power, power at the bottom.
08:00SPEAKERThere's a thing that says console cables and, and I don't know, I don't know, console cables,
08:07SPEAKERmaybe not the best, maybe not one. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how we're doing
08:11SPEAKERhere.
08:12SPEAKERI think, I think the console controller cables part, you know, I mean, they're actually,
08:15SPEAKERthere are proprietary like AV ports on some consoles. There's the, the, the long running
08:20SPEAKERNintendo multi-out Sony had their own form of multi-out at one time.
08:24SPEAKERThere's the game cube component, the weird plug that that thing goes into.
08:29SPEAKERYeah. That might be, I think that might be the same form factor as Nintendo's standard
08:33SPEAKERmulti-out. But anyway, there, there is some stuff in consoles to talk about. Although
08:38SPEAKERI think a lot of the console stuff is just going to be like, okay, what's our term for
08:42SPEAKERfeel? Like what's the, what's the, what is the plug in connector equivalent of mouth
08:46SPEAKERfeel?
08:47SPEAKERRight. Okay. So let's talk about the criteria, right? Cause I think mouth feel for the connector,
08:52SPEAKERI'm not going to put the connectors in my mouth, but I think I think connector mouth
08:57SPEAKERfeel is something we should consider here, right? We got ease of use. And for me, ease
09:04SPEAKERof use means can I lay down on the floor and reach behind a computer or TV or monitor and
09:09SPEAKERplug something in one-handed without being able to see it successfully.
09:13SPEAKERDude. Do you know how much time of how much of my life I spend trying to plug cables into
09:18SPEAKERthe backs of things that I can't see all the time?
09:22SPEAKERI have arranged a lot of my life so that I never have to do that smart. But like, but
09:28SPEAKERat the same time, sometimes you got unplugged some HDMI stuff from the back of your TV.
09:32SPEAKERThat's hanging off the wall. And that always involves some potential rotator cuff damage
09:37SPEAKERif you're not careful. So yeah, that's for sure. Okay. So that that's ease of use.
09:42SPEAKERUm, reliability is, you know, our, is this, is this a cable that you're going to trip
09:48SPEAKERover and yank out of the wall and it's going to be fine or are you going to leave chunks
09:53SPEAKERof the connector in the port that it was plugged into under reliability?
09:57SPEAKERI have just written locking mechanism or not. We'll get into it. Maybe, maybe to be evaluated
10:03SPEAKERon a per connector basis, but like, should the cable itself be secured or is that actually
10:08SPEAKERbad in some cases is a topic to explore? And like, is the locking mechanism satisfying
10:12SPEAKERor not? Like, like two screws on the side, thumbs down for me, but what about like duty
10:20SPEAKERcycle? I feel like I looked for some duty cycle data about this and a lot of these connectors
10:25SPEAKERdon't publish duty cycle. So duty cycles, the number of repetitions you can plug them
10:29SPEAKERin and out like HDMI is rated for several hundred typically on a, on a, on a port that
10:35SPEAKERsounds so low, but that's somebody speaking who has spent most of their career plugging
10:39SPEAKERconsoles in and out like every day. But for most people, you're probably going to plug
10:44SPEAKERit in like maybe five times in its lifespan or something.
10:47SPEAKERYeah. Your, your, our use cases for this are strange. USB on the other hand has a really
10:52SPEAKERhigh duty site. Like USB a has a really high duty cycle, right? I should hope so. You wrote
10:57SPEAKERdown here, I distinguish between physical connector and data protocol. I think that
11:01SPEAKERthat is crucial here because that's something, that's something that trips me up generally
11:04SPEAKERand even looking over our kind of big list of connectors here, there were like two more
11:08SPEAKERinstances just, just on this, but I realized I have been getting wrong consistently where
11:13SPEAKERI was referring to a physical cable by the data protocol that it carries instead. Yeah.
11:18SPEAKERIn this case, it was it was DE9, which I think I have known as DB9, but apparently that's
11:23SPEAKERincorrect. But anyway, I always called it the DB9 in a serial context, RS232, but that,
11:29SPEAKERbut that's the serial data standard. And so I, and we'll use the, we'll like, I think
11:33SPEAKERwe'll use the common name for most of these, but we'll also specify that it's the protocol
11:38SPEAKERif we're talking about the cable that we're primarily, we are talking about physical connectors
11:43SPEAKERhere, but I do, I do think like what that connector lets you do is part of a, is a factor
11:47SPEAKERin ranking them. So like and there are a lot of cases here where the same physical connector
11:52SPEAKERcan be used for multiple data standards. Like mini display port can also be old Thunderbolt,
11:58SPEAKERUSB2, USB-C can be USB or Thunderbolt as well. So DE9 can be all kinds of stuff. It could
12:04SPEAKERbe, it could be a serial terminal or a Genesis controller. Yeah. And then, and then the last
12:10SPEAKERcategory I think is the wildcard. Like I want to talk about the sounds that these things
12:16SPEAKERmake when you plug them in. I mean, how satisfying it is to plug in is maybe the most important
12:20SPEAKERpart. Yeah. And, and like whether the clasp is like a good clasp or an annoying clasp
12:25SPEAKERbecause like there's some good clasps, not many, but there's some real, real frustrating
12:32SPEAKERclasps. Oh yes. Yes. I like nostalgia can play a role here as well. I think in the case
12:35SPEAKERof consoles and stuff like that. Yeah. I love plugging in a GameCube controller even to
12:41SPEAKERthis day. It's one of the all time best. Some of those plugs are just fun to use. Okay.
12:45SPEAKERSo, so we have this big long list. I think we should just start at the top and we have
12:51SPEAKERa spreadsheet and I put a bunch of numbers down the side of the spreadsheet. Wait, hang
12:55SPEAKERon. Yeah. Hi. The spreadsheet goes to 62. I just, I can add more like it's, are we ranking
13:02SPEAKERevery connector? I think that was the idea, right? I figured we would maybe do like a
13:07SPEAKERtop 10 and call the rest. Oh no. I think, I think what we should do is just, I think
13:11SPEAKERwe should just do it like, do you, you know, my, my original pitch for tested, right? Sort
13:16SPEAKERof is that we should have a ranking of every piece of consumer electronics made. And we
13:22SPEAKERjust look at it and we're like, Oh yeah, iPhone is better, clearly better than a Canon Mark
13:26SPEAKERthree. Right? Sure. But also a couple of foolish, but well-meaning podcasters once attempted
13:33SPEAKERto rank every soft piece of software against each other. And I think, look, I think I still
13:38SPEAKERthink that's a viable project. That might just be its own podcast. I agree with you.
13:44SPEAKERIt was, it was just an excuse wax nostalgic about old software, but anyway. Yeah. So,
13:49SPEAKERokay. So here's what we got. We're just going to read this whole list. It's it's a lot.
13:54SPEAKERI can, I can go down it real quick. We got in the AV category we got, and some of these
13:59SPEAKERare going to show up in both places. We're going to talk about them one time. Cause we're
14:02SPEAKERtalking about connectors, not cables or protocols or data carried or all that stuff. We got
14:07SPEAKERRCA RCA component, which is just three RCAs XLR BNC, which is like a coax with a twisty
14:15SPEAKERF-type coax with a, which is a coax with a screw on it. Yeah. Well, I I'll, I'll, I'll
14:21SPEAKERwithhold questions. I'm I've got questions about so many of these, but I'll, I'll wait.
14:25SPEAKERWe got Europe's number one, nineties video standard SCART. Hell yeah. We got mini DIN
14:29SPEAKERslash S video, which is like that little five pin a dealy with the, with the vertical prong
14:34SPEAKERin it, but we got VGA AKA DB 15. We got mini VGA, which nobody has ever seen. Probably
14:43SPEAKERI have not. We've got DVI, which, which is like, we got to talk about DVI for me. Cause
14:49SPEAKERDVI is contains multitudes. DBI has got this DBI a, which is analog DBI, which is basically
14:55SPEAKERjust a DB 15 in a different package. We've also got DVI I and DVI D DVI and the shape
15:05SPEAKERof the connector is the same. The differences they're keyed a little bit differently in
15:08SPEAKERthe pin. The pins that are used are different. I think DVI is one full-size DBI connector
15:16SPEAKERtype. I think for the purposes of this ranking, I agree. And we'll just factor all the subtypes
15:20SPEAKERin together. Okay. And then, but to make things more complicated, we also have mini DVI a
15:26SPEAKERand a micro DVI. We have a firewire, firewire 800 mini firewire, display port, mini display
15:34SPEAKERport, HDMI mini HDMI, micro HDMI. We got tip ring sleeve AKA one quarter inch audio. Yeah.
15:43SPEAKERAlthough there can be just, it can be just tip sleeve. Is that TS I guess. Yeah. Like,
15:49SPEAKERso in my, in my, in this for the, for the analog audio cables, the quarter inch and
15:55SPEAKEReighth inch, which can come in tip ring sleeve, tip ring, ring sleeve, tip ring, ring, ring
16:00SPEAKERsleeve, and tip ring, ring, ring, ring sleeve. I believe in the case of the small ones, wait,
16:04SPEAKERthey make four hours. I've seen up to three, but I think for head headsets, head stereo
16:10SPEAKERheadphones that were phone headsets, they also had a control and a, and a microphone
16:15SPEAKERchannel. Okay. Like I know the, the Astro stuff uses T R R R S I believe. It goes all
16:21SPEAKERthe way up to four, but I'm not, I think these are all the same for our purposes today. Right?
16:25SPEAKERYeah. Like, like quarter inch is kinda like in terms of like plugging in and out and basic
16:31SPEAKERcapability is basically the same, no matter how many rings it has on it. So yeah, I think,
16:35SPEAKERI think that's one connector. You could pipe more signals through it. If you add more rings,
16:39SPEAKERthat's the thing that you need to know. Anyway. Okay. We got TOSLINK spit if Oh, on the, on
16:45SPEAKERthe TRS or the audio connectors there there's quarter inch and eighth inch. Yeah. Oh yeah.
16:49SPEAKERSorry. Quarter inch and eight inch or, or 3.5 millimeter as it's also known as your
16:53SPEAKERstandard headphone cable. Yeah. TRS mini is the other, one of the other names for it.
16:59SPEAKERWe got TOSLINK spit if, which is the optical format. There's also an RCA spit if, but it's
17:03SPEAKERjust an RCA port. So we're not going to talk about that one probably. And then we got mini
17:07SPEAKERTOSLINK, which I bet most people don't know about, but everybody has had one of those
17:10SPEAKERand they just didn't realize it. Wait, really? We'll talk about it. Oh, is that the one that
17:15SPEAKERfits into what looks like a headphone port? Look, you can't put the toothpaste back in
17:18SPEAKERthe tube, man. All right. On the data side, we got parallel ATA. Oh, I don't know. You
17:25SPEAKERthink it's internal? What do you mean? You think that doesn't count? It's a ribbon cable.
17:29SPEAKERNo, what I mean is I don't like the term PATA. Oh, it's IDE man. PATA, PATA PON. Anybody who
17:36SPEAKERwas there at the time knows it's IDE. I'm just being pedantic, but nobody said PATA
17:40SPEAKERback when these, when that cable was in use. You might not have, but we did where I was.
17:44SPEAKERWhat? Are you sure? You, you got parallel SCSI, which was a big, big wide boy that came
17:51SPEAKERin ribbon and external flavors. I think we're probably going to talk about external flavors
17:54SPEAKERbecause the ribbon is basically the same as the, as your IDE cable. Yeah. There were multiple
17:59SPEAKERpin, pin outs for SCSI as well. I don't... SCSI is wildly complicated and it's probably,
18:05SPEAKERwe could do a ranking of SCSI plugs if we wanted to get down to it. I think, I think
18:09SPEAKERif E-pin was the common one, anyway, we'll get to it. Yeah. We got SATA, we got eSATA,
18:16SPEAKERwe got the printer port, AKA the IEEE 1284. We got the serial port, AKA RS232, RS, AKA
18:24SPEAKERDE9. Yeah. So that's, that's maybe the biggest example of what I was talking about where
18:28SPEAKERserial can go over all kinds of connectors, but DE9 and again, again, DB9 I think is how
18:37SPEAKERmost people know it, including me. We'll, we'll put links in the, in the show notes.
18:40SPEAKERWe're working off of a couple of good documents that have great photos and explainers for
18:45SPEAKERall this stuff. And this this cable Bible that we're looking at which is just on somebody's
18:50SPEAKERGitHub page is the one that says that that port is erroneously known as DB9 to a lot
18:57SPEAKERof people. And I don't know where that port of lies mistake came from. Okay. So anyway,
19:04SPEAKERso then we got the mini DIN 5/8 pin, which I can't even remember what that one is now.
19:12SPEAKERWe got the midi port, AKA the DA 15, but you know that as a joystick port on the back of
19:17SPEAKERyour creative sound blaster or a game port game port. You got the SAS serial attached
19:22SPEAKERSCSI and mini serial attached SCSI. I just bought one last week. I'm glad you have hands
19:27SPEAKERon with those. I've never actually used one of those. I bought it and my motherboard has
19:30SPEAKERa slim SAS connector that will give you four extra SATA ports with an SFF 8654 cable connector,
19:38SPEAKERwhich I got. Anyway, we got the PS two port, which was used for keyboards and mice back
19:43SPEAKERin the day, not the PlayStation two. We got the Apple desktop bus, which was the Apple
19:48SPEAKERversion of the PS two port, different, different shape, different keying, USB. And then we,
19:55SPEAKERand then enter USB. There's another like a foot of USBs here. We got USB two stuff, which
20:02SPEAKERis USB type, a USB type B mini a mini B micro a and micro B. And then we've got weird, there's
20:10SPEAKERa bunch of weird USB variants. Cause it's really popular that are like the, like the
20:14SPEAKERXbox breakaway cable. Probably not going to talk too much about the weird variants. We've
20:19SPEAKERgot USB three, which is the blue ones. Those are type a with the blue type B with the,
20:25SPEAKERthe tall, the tall it's like a tall B and micro B, which is the wide micro. Yeah. That's
20:31SPEAKERa weird one because type type a is physically the same. I mean, maybe the pen out probably
20:35SPEAKERis not, but the shape of the connector is the same and compatible with USB two type
20:40SPEAKERa, but type B and micro B are physically different, which is great. I recommend following along
20:48SPEAKERin these documents. If you want to visualize what we're talking about, cause I'm sure this
20:51SPEAKERis a lot to follow. And then we got USB 3.1, which brought type C there's a bunch of other
20:57SPEAKERcable power and, and like spec changes past that, but the connector stays basically the
21:03SPEAKERsame. So we're only going to talk about the connectors A's B's and C's here. We've got
21:07SPEAKERApple lightning. We've got Apple's 30 pin dock connector. We've got firewire 800. We've
21:14SPEAKERgot fire. Sorry. We've got firewire 400. We've got six pin firewire 400. We've got four pin
21:18SPEAKERfirewire 400. And then we've got firewire 800, which is a big square nine pin dealie.
21:24SPEAKERAnd that thing is monstrosity. It's scary. We're going to talk about it. It's good. We've
21:30SPEAKERgot Thunderbolt, which used mini display port or USB type C. So we're not going to talk
21:34SPEAKERabout Thunderbolt. It can go straight to hell. Yeah. So, so this is the other example I was
21:38SPEAKERtalking about earlier of, of confusion I've had in the past. I have always referred to
21:41SPEAKERwhat is apparently a mini display port connector as a Thunderbolt connector because that's
21:45SPEAKERhow Apple always build it. But apparently Thunderbolt is just the standard that goes
21:48SPEAKERover the mini display port. Yeah. The weird thing about mini display port is it looks
21:53SPEAKERa lot like a Thunderbolt. It looks like the, the, the, sorry, the mini, the mini display
21:59SPEAKERpart of the mini DVI look a lot like each other. They do. But that, that is a generic
22:03SPEAKERmini display port connector that Apple just co-opted to pipe a Thunderbolt over, except
22:07SPEAKERnow newer Thunderbolt goes over USB-C. I think it was Intel that did it actually. Oh, actually
22:12SPEAKERyou might be right now that you mentioned it. Yeah. Anyway, then, then we got networking
22:17SPEAKERand phones. So we got RJ 45. And if you, if you're old enough to use the modem, you remember
22:21SPEAKERplugging in RJ 11, which is like a skinny RJ 45 into your, into your modem, a little
22:26SPEAKERbrother of RJ 45. But this is another example where different types of data can go over
22:31SPEAKERdifferent connectors because most people know RJ 45 as an ethernet connector. But the IKVM
22:38SPEAKERthat I have uses RJ 45 for ATX signals. Like you connect it's ethernet on one end that
22:44SPEAKERgoes to a little interface board that then connects to the headers on the motherboard
22:47SPEAKERthat handle the power and reset buttons. Oh, so it's just shorting out those, those pairs.
22:51SPEAKERSo it's, you're able to, you're able to effectively activate the power and reset buttons on your
22:55SPEAKERcomputer over this, what looks like an ethernet plug to most people. So it's like lots of
22:59SPEAKERnovel uses for these cables. That's the nice thing about ethernet is it's just a bunch
23:03SPEAKERof pairs of copper wire twisted up together inside a bucket. Right? I believe you can
23:07SPEAKERalso do RS two 32 over RJ 45 in cases. I didn't know that I want to say my edge router four
23:14SPEAKERdoes serial over RJ 45. Anyway, there's a lot here. Yeah. And then we have SFP, which
23:21SPEAKERis the last of the data cables. I threw that on here. Small form factor pluggable. Yeah.
23:26SPEAKERThat's a network thing, right? It may be used for other things. I only know it as a network
23:31SPEAKERcable. It's like mainly, it's mainly like a data center thing, unless you're a lunatic
23:35SPEAKERand start getting data center stuff in your house or like ubiquity. And I think maybe
23:39SPEAKERlike micro tick are starting to throw or have actually been throwing SFP and a lot of their
23:43SPEAKERearly prosumer home Soho stuff for a while. It's the, it's the big giant chunky thing
23:48SPEAKERthat takes a transceiver. It's the giant plug that you then have to buy a module to plug
23:53SPEAKERinto to give you an actual port. If you have a switch that has 2.5 to five to 10 gigabit
24:00SPEAKERports, then you might use those and they let you, the benefit of using those is you can
24:06SPEAKERuse copper or fiber or to connect into them or ethernet. Like you can, you can actually
24:13SPEAKERjust get RJ 45 transceivers for SFP ports and just turn it into a straight up standard
24:17SPEAKERRJ 45 ethernet port. So it's, it's like very versatile. It's hot, pluggable. It's cool.
24:22SPEAKERIt's very satisfying to use. Okay. So then, and then we're into power where we got the
24:26SPEAKERC five C six cloverleaf. This is that thing that plugs into your laptop, into your laptop
24:31SPEAKERpower brick. It looks like it's three plugs and it looks like a clover. The figure eight
24:37SPEAKERis the two is the C seven C eight to two plug version of that. Yeah. Which I think is super
24:45SPEAKERcommon in the U S or you're talking about the three plug cloverleaf. The three plug
24:48SPEAKERone is on laptop is on non Mac laptops. Crazy popular on those. That's right. I've seen
24:53SPEAKERthat on like think pads and stuff like that. Right. Also on monitors. Often if you have,
24:56SPEAKERif you don't have a power AC to DC transformer in the, in the monitor itself, the, if they
25:03SPEAKERhave an external power brick, they'll often use that. Sure. And then the figure eight
25:07SPEAKERis the thing that's on the back of like playstations and con and actually new Xbox has used that
25:13SPEAKERtoo. I believe because they're there. Yeah. Cause they, they have the internal power supply
25:18SPEAKERand then the C 13 slash C 14 IEC cord is the thing that you plug into the power supply
25:23SPEAKERon your computer. Yeah. Like maybe the most common connector on this whole list and I've
25:27SPEAKERnever known what it was called until now. And it, it also there's two, there's multiple
25:32SPEAKERflavors of that. We're probably not going to get into it, but for higher than 1200 watt
25:36SPEAKERpower supplies, I think they have vertical pins instead of the pins that you're accustomed
25:40SPEAKERto with the, it's like a big square connector instead of being a kind of trapezoidal or,
25:48SPEAKERor pentagonal one. And then we also wrote down some console cables here at the end,
25:52SPEAKERthe game, game cube controller cable, the game cube component plug, the NES controller,
25:59SPEAKERthe SNES controller. Yeah. Like every, every controller could be considered here. I mean,
26:03SPEAKERthey're all just plugs. Like that's, that's mostly nostalgia and satisfying click feel.
26:08SPEAKERAnd then once you get to like the Xbox 360 and PS3, they're just USB, right? Pretty much.
26:13SPEAKERYeah. And as we mentioned, the original Xbox had that cool breakaway cable. That's true.
26:18SPEAKERIf it got pulled, it would separate out and not the system off. Not that that thing was
26:23SPEAKERa brick. That thing was not getting pulled off a shelf anyway, but the original Xbox
26:27SPEAKERcontroller port was also real good as I recall. It was weird, like a nice chunk. It was kind
26:33SPEAKERof, but it was like, it was like transparent plastic and had kind of a rubbery feel to
26:37SPEAKERit. But that thing is under the hood is just USB. You can actually cut that cable off and
26:41SPEAKERrewire it to a USB-A and plug it right into your computer. Yep. And then the Genesis master
26:47SPEAKERsystem plug, which was a standard DB DE9, I think Sega retro.org says that I knew that
26:54SPEAKERthe Genesis was just a standard connector. It says it's just DE9, but it's not like the
26:58SPEAKEREGA looking DE9 or whatever. Oh no, that's DB 15. Right. But, but it's not the, it's
27:04SPEAKERnot the like, it's not the serial port on the side. It's just like a rubberized version
27:08SPEAKERof that. Apparently that was used on a bunch of old computers as well as the mega drive
27:12SPEAKERGenesis. It makes sense. And then I put the Wiimote to nunchuck connector here because
27:17SPEAKERthat had that nice little clippy clock. It was pretty good. I actually, my one good Wiimote
27:23SPEAKERset is extremely frayed. I either ran over it with my desk chair or, or perhaps a piggy
27:29SPEAKERmay have gotten to that cable at some point. So I need to test to see if my nunchuck still
27:33SPEAKERworks or not with a chunk taken out of that cable. Well, I think Brad, it's time that
27:38SPEAKERwe start this. We're now 30 ish minutes into this podcast. Well, welcome to the next housekeeping
27:44SPEAKERis done. Yeah. This is, this is the hard work of ranking, I guess. Yeah. I'm going to pull.
27:50SPEAKERI think what I think we should do is pull stuff out of the list and place it on the
27:54SPEAKERnumber line. Okay. And I'm going to pick something that I think is going to be middle of the
28:00SPEAKERroad to start. Okay. Let's let's yeah, I think that's probably a good methodology. Let's
28:04SPEAKERjust go back and forth and, and offer examples and placements and then argue. So I don't
28:10SPEAKERknow how many items we have on this list. Cause I didn't make this a numbered list foolishly
28:13SPEAKERit's bulleted. But I'm going to put firewire 400, like the normal, the one you think of
28:19SPEAKERas a firewire port, I'm going to put it at like 38. I'm not going to argue with that.
28:24SPEAKERAnd then we can go higher or lower. Right. I've never used firewire. I don't think I've
28:29SPEAKERseen it. I think I've, I think I've had maybe a motherboard with a port. No, actually, I
28:34SPEAKERdon't know that I've ever had a PC motherboard with firewire on it. It was mostly an Apple
28:37SPEAKERthing, right? No, you absolutely had a, you had the headers. You just didn't have any
28:41SPEAKERports on the back. Okay. Is what always is, is because like there was a period of time
28:46SPEAKERwhen every PC had to firewire ports, I guess. Yeah, I guess you're right. Actually like
28:51SPEAKERit was mostly, it was mostly like cameras, right? Like early digital cameras in the pre
28:56SPEAKERUSB era, right? It was a digital video cameras mostly. And like the external hard drives
29:02SPEAKERearly on were like that. The neat thing about firewire is it delivered fire, it delivered
29:05SPEAKERpower and data. It wasn't a ton of power, but it was enough to do, I want to say there
29:13SPEAKERwere, you could get external hard drives that were like mobile hard drives that would be
29:16SPEAKERfirewire powered. And it was really fast for the time. Like, like the original iPod was
29:23SPEAKERprobably the thing that shipped most that had firewire. Oh, that's right. That was prior
29:27SPEAKERto the Apple 30 pin connector before they invented the dock connector. I didn't realize
29:32SPEAKERthere were iPods with firewire. That's cool. Yeah. First generation, maybe two, I think
29:36SPEAKERhad firewire and then they switched over. It was around the time they switched to the
29:39SPEAKERsoftware wheel rather than the rather than the mechanical wheel. All right. Yeah. I'm,
29:45SPEAKERyou know, number 38 seems just fine for firewire for now. Yeah. It's it's like, look, it was
29:51SPEAKERnice firmly middle of the road by today's standards. It seems like a, an example that
29:57SPEAKERwe will see repeatedly on here of a kind of stop gap solution before they got to the actual
30:01SPEAKERsolution. You know, it's like clearly a need existed and the IEEE stepped in to meet it.
30:06SPEAKERI think they thought that it was probably the full solution, but you know, it didn't
30:09SPEAKERlast. No firewire was supplanted by USB pretty quickly. Right. For the most part, Apple kind
30:15SPEAKERof stuck with it for a long time. And, and I want to say the video industry went with
30:18SPEAKERit for what worked with it for a long time. I mean, it's not the nice thing. One of the
30:24SPEAKERnice things about firewire is the connector was really well, was really well built. Like
30:27SPEAKERyou could plug that thing in, you could plug it in, you could pull it out, you could yank
30:31SPEAKERit by the cord. It was sturdy. It was a sturdy connector. The default the default, the main
30:37SPEAKERfirewire, not the mini ones were a little more fragile, but the main firewire was pretty
30:41SPEAKERgood. Let's see. I've, I don't know where to go here because there are so many love
30:46SPEAKERand hate ones on here for me. There are so many that are like, okay, that's ubiquitous.
30:49SPEAKERIt serves a need, but also there are so many things about it that are super annoying that
30:53SPEAKERI'm not sure where to put those. We have plenty of choices. So just pick one. How about, how
30:58SPEAKERabout one that I think is pretty easy to put near the bottom. How about the Apple 30 pin
31:02SPEAKERway down somewhere? Oh man. Apple 30 pins. Interesting though. Cause it's, it's digital
31:07SPEAKERand analog. You get analog out into your car stereo. It was a pretty reliable. It had made
31:14SPEAKERa little clicky sound when you plugged it in. I thought I remember it being pretty flimsy
31:17SPEAKERor like it broke consistently. I thought, I thought I remembered like physically it
31:21SPEAKERdid not secure very well and was prone to damage. Well, I mean it didn't, it didn't,
31:28SPEAKERit didn't hold up to abuse. Well, I think is where I would put that, you know, for something
31:31SPEAKERdesigned for mobile applications, I think not holding up to abuse is a pretty big knock
31:35SPEAKERagainst it. I mean, uh, okay. I guess. And I mean, especially for contrasting it with
31:40SPEAKERwhat they replaced it with the lightning connector. It's, it's a pretty pale attempt. I wish I
31:46SPEAKERwill. The lightning connector. I have some real problems with you. Really? Yeah. I think
31:50SPEAKERthe lightning connector is terrible. Okay. I'm just going to put 30 pin Apple. That's
31:53SPEAKERnumber 60 for now. Oh, I think that's going to have to move up a little bit. Okay. Okay.
31:57SPEAKERLet's just talk about lightning. Cause actually I think lightning is pretty great. Oh, so
32:01SPEAKERlightning. My problem with lightning is that a, the, uh, there's too much stress on the
32:06SPEAKERcable to connect or join for a mobile device. They engineered it really poorly. What? Yeah.
32:13SPEAKERSo if you, the first 10 generation, 10 years of lightning connectors, every single lightning
32:20SPEAKERconnector you see in the real world frayed right at the join for the cable to the, to
32:25SPEAKERthe, to the connector. I thought, I thought you were talking to the locking mechanism
32:28SPEAKERin the port. No, the lock mechanism is the fourth. The other problem with it is they
32:32SPEAKERalways corroded. And I don't understand why the fourth pin on them was, was always corroded
32:37SPEAKERon every lightning connector I ever had. I wonder if the fraying was largely a result
32:42SPEAKERof just people's behavior or habits because like the same thing happened. Oh, you know
32:46SPEAKERwhat we have not put on here is, is mag safe. Actually. I was meant to ask about that because
32:51SPEAKERI didn't, I don't, I don't know if that counts. It's not, it's not a real thing, but we can
32:55SPEAKERput it on there. That's it's a connector. It's a form factor. Even if it's just generic
32:59SPEAKERpower. Anyway, that's an aside, but the thing I was going to say is like, remember the early
33:03SPEAKERera of mag safe bricks or Apple laptop bricks and how all those frayed right at the, I made
33:08SPEAKERa video about that, but that was because people were just winding them too tight. Yeah. I,
33:13SPEAKERI will assure you, I did not wind my cables too tight and mine always got busted. Wait,
33:17SPEAKERreally? I also used it in a car. I've never, I've never had, Oh, you're, you're talking
33:21SPEAKERabout the lightning, not the lightning. Yeah. Not the power brick. I never had a power brick
33:26SPEAKERspray because I was very ginger. I have 15 year old power bricks that look brand new.
33:32SPEAKERYeah. I'm telling you the lightning cable is a bad cable. Maybe, maybe the construction
33:37SPEAKERof it in that part, but the connector, the connector itself feels it. I would say the
33:41SPEAKERlightning cable is maybe the most solid feeling connector to plug in on this entire list because
33:46SPEAKERthere is absolutely zero wiggle. Once that thing is in that port. Oh no, I'm zero wiggle.
33:53SPEAKEROh my God. I'm going to scream. It's it's it's look, they, they just redid USB so that
34:00SPEAKERthey could sell expensive cables. And yeah. Was it better than USB micro? Probably. But
34:09SPEAKERyou know what I also don't like is paying 20 fucking dollars for USB cable. Yeah, that's
34:14SPEAKERsucks. But also you accumulated them fast enough on there. There were knockoffs quickly
34:20SPEAKERenough that it's not that big a deal. There weren't knockoffs that you see, you came to
34:24SPEAKERthe lightning cable late when you had an iPhone five and you got a lightning cable with that
34:28SPEAKERthing. I had an iPhone five. I bought one when it was new. That was the most precious
34:31SPEAKERcable you own. Cause it was the only way to use your phone. Yeah, of course. I mean, actually
34:35SPEAKERI think there was hardware in there. Wasn't there like they, people had to either license
34:39SPEAKERor reverse engine. Of course. Yeah. Cause it's Apple it's USB, but worse. I mean, was
34:47SPEAKERthere a reversible cable on the market before lightning though? I don't know of one. And
34:50SPEAKERthat was, I mean, come on, they made a, they made a reversible cable at a time when micro
34:56SPEAKERUSB predominated. I look, I was, okay. So if we're looking at our criteria here, could
35:03SPEAKERI plug it in? Can I reach behind a computer monitor when handed and successfully plug
35:06SPEAKERit in? No. Well, that's what I did. I mean, that's a very high standard to meet almost
35:10SPEAKERnothing on this list is going to meet that standard. But, but was it an overpriced cable
35:16SPEAKERmanufactured by a monopolist, a monopolist tech company just so that they could juice
35:23SPEAKERtheir profits and sell a couple more cables? Come on. That was not just because, I mean,
35:27SPEAKERit was let's, let's be real. It was, it was a wildly better experience than what it was
35:31SPEAKERreplacing. I mean, extremely better, except, except for the fact that the terminals corroded
35:38SPEAKERand the cables broke and like, had I not been buying a new iPhone every year, I would have
35:42SPEAKERspent a hundred dollars in cables over three years. I like this. I am, this is a bottom
35:49SPEAKERhalf cable for me. No way. No way. A hundred percent. I would, I would say I'm going to
35:53SPEAKERtentatively put it at like number 20. It can move. I mean, one, one thing I'll knock it
36:00SPEAKERfor, and I mean, I guess it wasn't really necessary at the time, but they effectively
36:04SPEAKERnever got past USB two speeds on that thing. Oh, it was hella necessary at the time you
36:08SPEAKERcould buy a 256 gigabyte phone. Yeah. And like backing that thing up on USB two speeds
36:15SPEAKERwas was it wasn't fast, Brad. Yeah. You're not wrong. You know what I learned looking
36:19SPEAKERon Wikipedia is that they actually, they're exactly two devices with lightning ports from
36:24SPEAKERApple that do USB three over lightning. I thought they had never done it. In fact, they
36:29SPEAKERdid. And I own one of them the first generation iPad pro, but only the 12.9 inch models. And
36:37SPEAKERthe second generation iPad pro, which is the one I have, we'll both do USB three speed
36:42SPEAKERover lightning, actually lightning. Yeah. Apparently, but, but I, and I think they just
36:46SPEAKERwent to USB C right after that. So they just never proprietary slow and bad. That sounds
36:52SPEAKERterrible to me. Yeah. But it was another, it was another case where the standards on
36:57SPEAKERthe market were awful and they had to do something mini mini micro USB was not awful. It was come
37:03SPEAKERon micro USB. It was entirely adequate. Okay. So what are we going to do next? I am look,
37:13SPEAKERI don't think this 20 is going to hold for lightning. I mean, look, I look, there are
37:17SPEAKERknocks against it. I mean, I have knocks against it. They're even different from yours. Like
37:21SPEAKERit's not perfect, but I think for what was needed at the time, it was pretty good. What
37:26SPEAKERabout XLR XLR? I'm I've I have come pretty late to using XLR as I've just moved to that
37:34SPEAKERform of recording equipment in the last couple of years, XLR is pretty kind of pretty satisfying
37:40SPEAKERto plug in. I would say, Oh yeah. That goes for a lot of these, but yeah. And do all XLR
37:47SPEAKERcables have that little latch release on it or is it just like, are there, are there some
37:51SPEAKERthat do not, you can take it off. It's like the nice thing about XLR is you can just unscrew
37:55SPEAKERthe cable and do whatever you want with it. Yeah. It's a, it's a big old chonky, good
38:02SPEAKERfeeling analog plug to plug in. It makes you feel professional. Yeah. And it makes a good
38:07SPEAKERsound and a good click. It's not going to come loose. Yes. Also my understanding is
38:11SPEAKERit's inherently balanced because it's got, it's got three pins. It's an audio cable with
38:16SPEAKERthree pins. It's got two signal ends on one ground. I was just talking to Vinnie about
38:21SPEAKERthis recently because order inch cables, you explicitly have to buy a balanced cable. There
38:25SPEAKERare unbalanced cables, the balanced thing. I only partially understand it, but it helps
38:30SPEAKERcut down on line noise interference. It helps, it helps filter out and like analog interference
38:35SPEAKERthat is picked up along the way. But my understanding is that that just kind of built into the basic
38:40SPEAKERdesign of XLR, which is part of why it's popular in recording environments. You're looking,
38:45SPEAKERyou're looking pensive. I don't, I don't know that for a fact, but that's what Vinnie said.
38:49SPEAKERIt's got the two signal lines. So I'm, I'm looking at a Reddit post on the audio engineering
38:53SPEAKERsubreddit that says the fact that it has XLR port doesn't mean that it's inherently balanced.
38:58SPEAKERWell now it is that are they talking about the cable or the, because the connector on
39:02SPEAKERthe device, I believe that's relevant. I'm not a hundred percent. We're not recording
39:06SPEAKERengineers here. Yeah, no, that is, that is absolutely correct.
39:10SPEAKERI think XLR is pretty good. Also, how old is it?
39:15SPEAKERIt's ancient. It's really, really old. That might be worth factoring in designs that have
39:19SPEAKERreally stood the test of time. And then the neat thing about XLR is it gets
39:23SPEAKERused for, because it's a physically sturdy connector too. It gets used for a lot of weird
39:28SPEAKERstuff where it's not even being used for signal processing. Like people use XLR cables to
39:33SPEAKERphysically mount things onto walls and things like that.
39:35SPEAKERWait, what? They, yeah. Cause you can just buy the connectors
39:38SPEAKERand you can, and it's the metal to metal is really, really solid. So I think this is like
39:44SPEAKERa top five for me. I'll hear the argument. There are a lot of
39:50SPEAKERgood, there are a lot of good connectors on here, but it's old and good. And it makes
39:54SPEAKERa really good clicking sound. When you plug it in, if we put it like number
39:57SPEAKERseven for now. Wow. Lightning's a 20, but, but XLR is a seven.
40:02SPEAKERI don't know about this. Brad can move. I don't see seven cables on this list better
40:07SPEAKERthan this. Now I'm trying to think if I do. Yeah, you
40:10SPEAKERmight be right. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see when we get there, you want to talk about
40:14SPEAKERthe F-type coax. I started to bring that up as we were talking about this. This is the
40:18SPEAKERtwisty, this is the one with the screw on it, right? Like you used to plug from your
40:21SPEAKERcable from your antenna to the, to the back of the TV.
40:24SPEAKERSo I've always just called that a coaxial cable. I did not realize there was a distinction
40:27SPEAKERto make there. Well, so BNC is also a coaxial. It has like
40:30SPEAKERa little locking twist. I was thinking about that as we were looking
40:33SPEAKERat this, I mean, technically like an RCA cable is also coaxial. I assume any, any, any cable
40:39SPEAKERthat is this form form of single, single plug, single needle.
40:44SPEAKERIt's like a single, single center, center, a center signal with the ground, a sheath
40:50SPEAKERon the outside. Right. And apparently there there's also the
40:53SPEAKERUHF connector, which I don't know if I've ever seen in person. It's definitely too old
40:58SPEAKERfor me. Is that two screws?
41:00SPEAKERIt looks a lot like a coaxial, again, the F-type coaxial, which is okay to, to re reiterate
41:06SPEAKERthe F-type coaxial is what you'll still find on TVs that you can plug an antenna into.
41:11SPEAKERDo they still have that? I believe so. Yeah. I think, yes, my, my TV
41:16SPEAKERtotally does. I've got to run into it right now. It's for digital TV now, you know, they
41:21SPEAKERdon't broadcast analog TV signals anymore, but yeah, absolutely. But it's also going
41:26SPEAKERback 40 years. It's also what you plugged your NES into your TV with.
41:30SPEAKERYeah. If you didn't have a NES had an RCA out too, but most people didn't have RCA ends
41:35SPEAKERat that point. You know, if you were, if you're doing the,
41:38SPEAKERare you playing your NES on channel three for channel four thing, you were doing the
41:41SPEAKERF-type coax, but the UHF coax is prior to that. It looks pretty similar. It's got a
41:47SPEAKERsimilar screen. Oh, it, it looks like the UHF. It's a center thicker pin and it looks
41:54SPEAKERlike it maybe does not have the kind of rotatable screw on the connector. It looks like you
41:59SPEAKERplug, you screw the entire connector into if that makes sense. I, I, I, I refer the
42:04SPEAKERlistener to the photos on the cable Bible cause it's kind of hard to visualize, but
42:08SPEAKERit does say it says it's a world war II era connector or the UHF connector.
42:11SPEAKERYeah. I, I I'm, I didn't include the UHF connector cause it was done basically by the time like
42:18SPEAKERall this other stuff was done. But I think the F-type is bad. Yeah. Like I have nostalgia
42:25SPEAKERfor it, but it's a pain in the ass. You could bend that center pin real easy and it's kind
42:30SPEAKERof sharp. Oh, it's always pointy. It doesn't have a pin in the center. So like a BNC cable,
42:35SPEAKERyou take the center, the center core, the center core of the wire, and then you put
42:39SPEAKERa pin on it and you jam that into the, into the connector. So it's like, so it's like
42:46SPEAKERmechanically stable. Yeah. The, with the, with the, with this, you're just stripping
42:51SPEAKERthe wire and running it through. And then there's just a raw wire poking out, which
42:54SPEAKERis less good. I think. I think that's probably dependent on the quality of the cable, but
42:58SPEAKERsometimes the kind of screw in mechanism on the cable didn't work great. And sometimes
43:03SPEAKERyou would end up having to twist the entire cable along with that thing to screw in and
43:06SPEAKERout. That was terrible. Also, I guess this is another case of cable versus like standard,
43:12SPEAKERbut RF video is what went over this thing, right? I believe is what you called it. Like
43:16SPEAKERRF video looks terrible. The quality of video you got out of this thing is not good. But
43:21SPEAKERwe're not talking about data protocols here. Well, I mean, we're, you know, I think, I
43:24SPEAKERthink the whole experience matters though. Like what the cable lets you do. And if the,
43:28SPEAKERif the quality of what you're getting out of the cable is bad, that's absolutely relevant.
43:31SPEAKERAll I know is if you got a connector that was seized and you had to twist the whole
43:35SPEAKERcable to do it, it was a real pain. And also it was hard to get that thing threaded. It
43:40SPEAKERdefinitely fails that. Can you reach behind the computer monitor one handed and successfully
43:43SPEAKERplug this in test? Yeah, kind of. I mean, I can do it. I have done it plenty of times,
43:48SPEAKERbut it's a pain. We can set up a contest if you want, Brad, we can stream that. Now we're
43:52SPEAKERtalking. I think this is a bottom, definitely a bottom like 10th probably for me. We're
43:57SPEAKERgonna do like double dare for cable connectors. I mean, look, I think if anybody has an audience
44:02SPEAKERfor that kind of content, it's probably us. Am I going to be like thrashing around in
44:06SPEAKERa, in a tub from a bathtub full of pudding, trying to plug a VGA cable in. I'm not here
44:13SPEAKERto kink shame you, but I am not going to get in a bathtub full of pudding. That's that's
44:17SPEAKERwhere I, that's where I draw the line. I could see this in the middle of the pack. This is
44:22SPEAKERthe middle or maybe lower third. This is below Apple 30 pin for me. It's it's look at least
44:29SPEAKERApple 30 pin was a digital connection. You get good, good signal out of that thing. Man,
44:33SPEAKERthat's harsh. Look, somebody has got to be at the bottom of the list, man. And F type
44:38SPEAKERcoax is a defining bad cable. It's not great. Since we're in this category, I'm going to
44:44SPEAKERsay the way that you feel about XLR is how I feel about BNC. I like BNC a lot, man, except
44:49SPEAKERfor it did almost kill me one time. Oh, was that the electrical base? He uses a BNC cable.
44:56SPEAKEROh, and base T ethernet uses BNC. Is it really a hug? What? Yeah. Oh, it's the same connector.
45:04SPEAKERTen base T is 10 megabits, right? 10 megabit, 10 megabit coaxial. You can daisy chain. That's
45:10SPEAKERsomebody hung a ground on a long line for a long time for new listeners. Is that universal?
45:15SPEAKERLike there were no RJ 45, 10 base T. I had no idea. That is way before I ever touched
45:21SPEAKERany networking equipment. So I'm going to go and tell you, I have some pretty strong
45:24SPEAKERfeelings about 10 base T, but I think I can separate my feelings about BNC from the 10
45:28SPEAKERbase T feelings. Yeah. So there's a BNC is another coaxial cable that is largely used
45:32SPEAKERin professional contexts, but where, where the F type coax has the shitty little screw,
45:38SPEAKERthe BNC just has a mechanical kind of a carve out in the metal housing that when you plug
45:43SPEAKERit in effectively, you plug the cable in like a coax cable, and then you just give it this
45:46SPEAKERreally satisfying order twist. It's a quarter twist to a chunk. And then it just like chunks
45:52SPEAKERinto place and is then never coming out of that port. It feels so good. Well, and like
45:56SPEAKERI said, the, the, the BNC connector, you also place a pin over the, over the center wire.
46:01SPEAKERSo it's like structurally, it always is pointed at the right place to plug in easy. It is
46:07SPEAKERBNC is like the most, Hey, I can plug this in without being able to see what's going
46:11SPEAKERon cable we have on this list. Probably my first personal experience with the BNC is
46:15SPEAKERthat the, the Silicon graphics branded Tran Tron monitor that I got off of eBay that was
46:19SPEAKERlike new inbox that is still in my parents' basement that is going to become my like Mr.
46:23SPEAKEROld retro computer monitor someday that that uses BNC connectors. So I have to get like
46:29SPEAKERVGA to two BNC cables for that. So you were plugging five BNCs into the back of that thing.
46:37SPEAKERSo for me, BNC is going to be like up there with XLR like maybe even, even if we're talking
46:43SPEAKERabout like how we're separating stuff out when we get closer, I'll put BNC above. I
46:48SPEAKERmean, wow. I don't know if it's, I think once we get to the top 10, we're going to have
46:53SPEAKERto do some, we're going to have to do some negotiating like putting, putting two of these
46:57SPEAKERold school, like heavy industrial analog locking connectors right at the top feels maybe a
47:02SPEAKERlittle bit indulgent, but I like to think of that as sending him, well, Hey, I use XLR
47:07SPEAKERcables every day. Oh yes. Yeah. Same like, like those, those cables have stood the test
47:11SPEAKERof time. And also like, so something we'll get into with stuff like USB and HDMI. Hey,
47:15SPEAKERremember when signals were just dumb? Yeah. Also, I think that I use XLR every day means
47:20SPEAKERit's probably better than BNC. So I'm moving it up to five. All right. But, but you know,
47:26SPEAKERremember when signals were just electrical and analog and didn't have to handshake or
47:31SPEAKERfeature unidentifiable standards pros and cons beyond what the cable looked like. You
47:36SPEAKERknow, you didn't have to guess at what version of HDMI or USB you were dealing with. You
47:40SPEAKERdidn't have to worry about them handshaking correctly. They just sent electricity and
47:43SPEAKERworked. Look, I did just record like a six minute video for, for a PC world and tech
47:48SPEAKERhive about how to determine whether your HDMI cable is good enough for your TV. So let's
47:53SPEAKERtalk about HDMI. Think about the magic of plugging that thing in the first time and
47:57SPEAKERgetting your audio and video on the same cable. Okay. That's that is a surprisingly positive
48:03SPEAKERangle on HDMI to start with that. I wasn't expecting, but I guess you're, you know what?
48:06SPEAKERYou're right. You're totally right. As much as I often hate HDMI these days, like, yes,
48:12SPEAKERwhen, okay, here's the, here's maybe the best way to frame this. Remember when the Xbox
48:15SPEAKER360 came out and it did not have an HDMI port. Yeah. And then I was stoked. I had a TV that
48:21SPEAKERdidn't have an HDMI port, so that was good for me. Was it a year or 18 months before
48:25SPEAKERthe, I can't remember it was either the Falcon or the Jasper. I think it was the Falcon model
48:30SPEAKERwas the first revision that had an HDMI. Anyway, the point is if you had a launch Xbox 360,
48:36SPEAKERyou really coveted that second revision that had the HDMI port on it because you didn't
48:40SPEAKERwant to deal with all the analog stuff anymore for your fancy new 720P television that had
48:45SPEAKERone HDMI port on it. You wanted to, man. Yeah. You're not, you're not wrong. Like early on
48:50SPEAKERHDMI was pretty awesome. It was just like, would you mean it's just one cable and it
48:54SPEAKERdoes everything and that's it. But then things, things got more complicated. It got complicated
48:58SPEAKERreally fast because remember for HDMI launched at 720P 60 or 1080I 30 or 1080I 60 or 1080P
49:07SPEAKER30, right? You couldn't do 1080P 60 on launch HDMI. That is correct. And it also came with
49:15SPEAKERa lot of baggage because it included, it included a bunch of DRM shit that nobody wanted. Wasn't
49:21SPEAKERgood for us, the users. Yeah. Like HDCP is a scourge. I mean, it doesn't matter. But
49:30SPEAKERlike the exact thing that we said was going to happen with HDCP happened, right? It immediately
49:35SPEAKERwas broken. It's not a problem for, for literally anyone who knows how to get around it. All
49:40SPEAKERit does is impede people who want to use stuff that doesn't have HDCP, which it turns out
49:46SPEAKEReverything has HDCP now. So it's probably not a problem, but well now strippers have
49:51SPEAKERgotten harder to find. Last I checked strippers for new HDCP have, oh, for old, for the previous,
49:58SPEAKERthe point is nobody actually uses the analog hole to make copies of stuff because it's
50:03SPEAKEReasier to just rip the DRM from the, from the materials themselves. Yeah. That's fair.
50:09SPEAKERAnd you know, all modern consoles let you just turn HDCP off. So like capturing those
50:13SPEAKERis not a problem unless you're trying to capture like a movie, which you wouldn't do from a
50:17SPEAKERconsole anyway, typically. There was a shitty period, like the PlayStation three, you cannot
50:22SPEAKERturn off HDCP at all. So unless you have a way to strip the HDCP is just digital copy
50:27SPEAKERprotection in the signal to be clear, unless you have a way to strip that out with hardware,
50:31SPEAKERyou just cannot capture a PlayStation three. You know what though? We're getting into protocols
50:35SPEAKERhere. We're not talking about plugs. The problem with the experience though, the problem with
50:41SPEAKERHDMI though, is that it is an upside. It's a plug that you can't tell which way is up
50:45SPEAKERfrom feel. And also you can't, you can't feel the, the, the female port in the, in the device.
50:53SPEAKERYou cannot, you can, you can run your finger along the bottom of the connector and feel
50:57SPEAKERwhere the notches are. Oh yeah. Yeah. But the, but the problem is you can't tell which
51:02SPEAKERway is up or down on the, on the port and on the plugins and it wasn't part of the standard.
51:08SPEAKERSo HT, HTMI could have said, Hey, the small part is always away from the bottom of the
51:14SPEAKERdevice is always on the upside, but they didn't do that. So some stuff, the small parts down,
51:19SPEAKERsome stuff, the small parts up, it all depends on which, which, which plug people buy for
51:23SPEAKERtheir devices. And I think that makes it bad. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you're not wrong. There's
51:31SPEAKERalso the enormous can of worms of what came later as they updated the spec, but that's
51:36SPEAKERprotocol stuff, right? That's not the connector. I look, we got to, we got to take a more holistic
51:41SPEAKERview here. I think like anything that is working with the connector, I think counts here because
51:45SPEAKERyou know, it's all part of the experience. The fact that, I mean, this, this applies
51:50SPEAKERto a lot of USB stuff as well, especially USB-C like the fact that you can have HTMI
51:55SPEAKERcables or plugs from the last 20 years, and they all have extremely different capabilities
51:58SPEAKERand there's no way to look at them and know what's what is a pretty big knock against
52:02SPEAKERit. It's written on the side of the cable. Usually you just have to be able to decode
52:05SPEAKERit. I mean, the naming, the name, the naming of HTMI standards is his own disaster. Four
52:11SPEAKERthings to know. Yeah, but listen to them high speed, ultra high speed. What do those things
52:17SPEAKERmean? Well, what it means is you can go to Amazon and buy an ultra premium HDMI cable.
52:27SPEAKERThat's the best one you can buy right now for $6. If you know that that's fine, but
52:31SPEAKERyou know, like I've, I've mentioned this recently. I think like those names sound like marketing
52:35SPEAKERbullshit. Like I've had people say like, does it matter if my teacher, which ones I buy,
52:39SPEAKERif they say high speed or not, is that just like your monster cable markup or marketing
52:44SPEAKERspin? Like, no, those are specific data standards. Like here's, here's, here's the one nice thing
52:50SPEAKERabout this video and audio signaling going digital, right. Is that we went from a world
52:55SPEAKERwhere it was like, oh man, I gotta buy these monster cables. Cause I got that low oxygen
52:59SPEAKERcopper and that gold plated connectors. And none of that shit matters anymore. You just
53:03SPEAKERbuy the $6 Monoprice cable. Cause it's digital. Oh, you got that good shit, bro. Man. I don't
53:08SPEAKERneed any of that monster no more. Yes. It has gotten way better in that respect. I mean,
53:14SPEAKERI could snake oil a lot more hassle. I can see HDMI like in the top 20. Oh man. Really?
53:20SPEAKEROr even like around 10 or something. 12 HDMI at number 12 for now. Let me, let me tell
53:27SPEAKERyou, see you're, you're, you're typing early here, man. We got to talk about this. Sometimes
53:31SPEAKERyou just got to make a move and see what happens. Let me tell you a story about HDMI. Did you
53:35SPEAKERknow that that thing has rated for a hundred plugins? That's again, to me, that still sounds
53:40SPEAKERvery low. Yeah. Do you know, do you know what I would happen when I, when my PS4 pros HDMI
53:45SPEAKERport went out after I'd had it for about six months and I called Sony and they were like,
53:49SPEAKERwhat did happen? They said, Hey, if you send us it back to us and we, and send us $200,
53:55SPEAKERwe'll fix it for you. $200? Yeah. You know why that was? Cause HDMI is a bad port, Brad.
54:01SPEAKEROh, Oh, you're arguing. It should be lower. Yeah. Oh, okay. I'm a fully on, but I thought
54:06SPEAKERyou wanted to be higher. Okay. How about 25 then? Yeah, that sounds good. It seems worse
54:11SPEAKERthan lightning to me. Yeah. So I kind of agree with you. I, the HDMI port on my relatively
54:19SPEAKERnice Elgato capture card is starting to feel kind of flimsy and is makes a little click
54:24SPEAKERevery time I put something into it. I'm worried about that port. So let me tell you what you
54:27SPEAKERdo. You're going to go and buy a three inch HDMI male to HDMI female cable and plug that
54:34SPEAKERin and use the $3 cable instead of the expensive one built into your motherboard. I've got
54:38SPEAKERa bunch of those from 2010 years ago from on a price. You got to get new ones. The problem
54:42SPEAKERis I need an HD by 2.1 capable one because I need to put a 4k into that thing occasionally.
54:49SPEAKERYep. Ultra premium. Like this is where I think the wifi people have got done it right. Like
54:54SPEAKERwifi when they, when I thought the retconning of the wifi names was stupid a few years ago,
54:58SPEAKERbut now you know that wifi six is better than wifi five percent. I'm like, yeah, it makes
55:04SPEAKERsense. I mean, even there, even there, they had at least the alphabetical ordering, which
55:08SPEAKERwas already better than HDMI, but now it's even better because a number is pretty obvious.
55:12SPEAKERAnyway, I think we should do a USB speed round. That's that's, that's a lot to take on right
55:18SPEAKERnow. I'm going to say let's do a USB three speed round. The blue, the blue ease. Okay.
55:22SPEAKERSo our way, hang on. So are we, are we putting every single variant of USB into its own slot?
55:27SPEAKERWell, okay. So I don't think USB three type a and USB two type a get their own slots because
55:33SPEAKERthey're the same cable, same connector, but I think all these others are distinct plugs
55:39SPEAKERthat you can't plug in with. Like some of them are forwards compatible. Some ones are
55:42SPEAKERbackwards compatible, but not forwards compatible. Okay. Well that, that cyber hard drive enclosure
55:47SPEAKERthat I talked about on last week's episode has a USB three type B port on it, which you
55:52SPEAKERhave listed as tall B. I call that one tall B. That's just my name. Yes. That's how we,
55:57SPEAKERthat's how you're known on the streets. Yep. They call me tall. They call you tall B. I'm
56:01SPEAKERtall W. Yes. That I'm like, I think that's the only one I've ever used, but I have to
56:07SPEAKERsay it's quite satisfying to plug in. So I hate, I hate these. Really? Yeah. Because,
56:14SPEAKERbecause they look, all they do is add confusion to the marketplace, right? You have to get
56:19SPEAKERa weird cable. Like, okay. If I'm, if I'm rating these in the order in which I hit them,
56:24SPEAKERUSB three type a fine, whatever. It's the same as the same as USB two type a that we
56:28SPEAKERall know and love. We haven't talked about that cable because I use the USB superposition
56:32SPEAKERis a damning phenomenon, but I'm going to say the type a is a God tier cable for a lot
56:37SPEAKERof reasons. We're not going to get into it right now. I think the wide micro is a crime.
56:43SPEAKERThat's that's the micro with the little, the little, the extra, the extra thing for power
56:47SPEAKERdelivery on the side, I think is what it is.
56:49SPEAKERI also hate that thing. I think it is backwards compatible though. I think there's a reason
56:52SPEAKERthey made it micro plus an extra notch. Yeah, they did. But you, so you can plug a micro
56:58SPEAKERinto that port, but you can't plug that cable into a micro port obviously because it doesn't
57:02SPEAKERfit. I think this should be below, below like 30 pin Apple. I think wide micro is a, is
57:07SPEAKERa abomination that should not have existed. I also don't like that one. And every, to
57:13SPEAKERthis day, every external hard drive I buy still has that on it. All those, those new
57:17SPEAKERWestern digital easy stores I just got still have the wide micro on it. They suck. Why
57:22SPEAKERhave they not moved to USB-C for those? I don't know. Because a lot of people don't
57:27SPEAKERhave USB-C ports on their motherboard that are terminated in USB-A though. That's like,
57:32SPEAKERthey don't want to ship two cables with the hard drives. Okay. So that's USB three micro
57:38SPEAKERwould be, I'm putting it at 70. I really, really dislike this cable. It's hard to plug
57:44SPEAKERin. It has superposition problems, meaning you don't know which way is up and you miss
57:48SPEAKERit twice before you get it right. It, it, it, the purpose it serves is supplanted by
57:54SPEAKERbetter cables in every way. And I think tall B is the same thing.
58:00SPEAKERYeah, I don't mind that one so much. I mean, I could see it pretty middle of the pack.
58:05SPEAKERAgain, again, it feels good to plug in. It's just, Hey, we're the USB for, we're gonna
58:09SPEAKERcome around and talk. We're gonna talk to you about the look, we've made a bunch of
58:12SPEAKERbackwards compatible for it's compatible stuff. That's really good. And also we got, no, we
58:18SPEAKERgot no, this end is just going to be weird. It's just a weird cable. Although my understanding
58:23SPEAKERwith USB, the reason that for so many years you never saw it, like you never see a USB
58:28SPEAKERA to USB A cable, for example. Right. And my, my reason understanding is that that's
58:33SPEAKERbecause until USB-C there was no auto negotiation built into the spec. So yeah, host end and
58:39SPEAKERclient end were determined by the, by the cable. Right. So you couldn't give people
58:42SPEAKERthe potential to plug the wrong ends into the wrong ends. It's like, it's like having
58:47SPEAKERa power cord with two male ends on it. It kills drives. Like you had to make it clear
58:51SPEAKERto every end user, which end went where, because the cable itself and the ports weren't able
58:56SPEAKERto tell which way things should go. It had to be unidirectional. Yeah. So that's at least
59:01SPEAKERwhy there are weird shapes. I get it. I like the, like it's maybe a bit strong. I kind
59:07SPEAKERof, I don't mind the tall B. I mean, we can put the tall B on the list. If it's anywhere
59:13SPEAKERnear the top 30, I'm going to scream. I wouldn't say that. How about 39 right after firewire
59:20SPEAKERis do you think the tall B is better than the regular type B it's harder to plug in.
59:25SPEAKERIt's like, it's blue. I mean, they're both, they're both asymmetric. So they're, they're
59:30SPEAKERthey're, they both have the fumbling. In fact, I would say the USB three type B passes the
59:36SPEAKERfumble around behind the monitor test because it has more of a notch to feel with your fingers.
59:43SPEAKERAnd also like once you get the bottom and it's the rest of it's just going to go. What
59:46SPEAKERif I put regular USB type B right after USB three type B. Slightly worse. I like that.
59:53SPEAKERAnd I think we have to save USB a for that's a much larger conversation. Look, I'm going
59:59SPEAKERto rate the USB three type a probably above the, the, the USB two type a, but just cause
1:00:05SPEAKERit's blue and I like blue better than well, again, I think we should rank that one later,
1:00:11SPEAKERbut that does ideas. I also liked the blue port. It's pleasant to look at. Yeah. It does
1:00:15SPEAKERlead to crappy situations where some manufacturers go off spec. I don't know if the blue is mandated
1:00:20SPEAKERor not by those mandated. Then fractal has really committed a crime with their recent
1:00:26SPEAKERcases because all of their front ports, they put USB two and three ports on the front of
1:00:31SPEAKERtheir recent cases, right next to each other. And they're all black just to maintain the
1:00:34SPEAKERlike all black look of the case. So I don't like that unless you memorize which ports
1:00:39SPEAKERare the threes. You can't tell by looking at them from afar on these cases and it sucks,
1:00:43SPEAKERbut that's a, that's a fractal problem. They might, they might, it might be that they specify
1:00:46SPEAKERa colors required. I'm not, I'm not exactly sure about that actually. Yeah. Anyway, cause
1:00:51SPEAKERsome of them are red. Yeah. Let's let's table USB a, um, actually I'm going to make a proposal
1:00:56SPEAKERhere. Yeah. I think this is going to carry over into at least a second week. It's impossible.
1:01:04SPEAKERThe prophecy was fulfilled. We have, let's see XLR and B and C lightning, HDMI, firewire,
1:01:10SPEAKERUSB three type B, USB type B, 30 pin Apple and USB three micro B, the white, the, the
1:01:16SPEAKERaccursed white micro. That's what we have ranked. If we place one more on the list,
1:01:21SPEAKERthen we'll have done 10. Okay, sure. Um, how about, gosh, there are so many to pick from
1:01:27SPEAKERhere. The PS two port, the old keyboard and mouse port. That thing stinks. Does it think
1:01:32SPEAKERthat's um, it's hard to plug in. You could fuck up those cables real bad and ruin your
1:01:36SPEAKERmouse. Yeah, you do making it just purely round. There's no key on the, on the connector,
1:01:41SPEAKERright? Other than, other than the pin out being asymmetric, there's no other, like there
1:01:45SPEAKERshould have been like the point is like the behind the monitor test. You have to like
1:01:49SPEAKERline it up with the round plug and then just sort of spin it until the pin out matches,
1:01:54SPEAKERright? The problem is if the pins were a little bit too long, then you would scrape the pins
1:01:58SPEAKERas you were spinning it and then they'd be all out of whack. Uh, that's IBM created that
1:02:02SPEAKERport is there isn't, isn't it? The IBM PS two that originated with, I think it was the
1:02:06SPEAKERPS junior maybe, but it, but it is an IBM thing, right? Wasn't the PS two was an IBM
1:02:11SPEAKERline, wasn't it? I believe PS two was an IBM line for sure. It was part of the, it replaced
1:02:18SPEAKERthe large computer, the large five pin 180 den connector from the IBM PC 80 line. Um,
1:02:25SPEAKERand the D nine RS two 32 that was used for serial mice. Oh, you know, actually I, so
1:02:30SPEAKERI think the PS two is, is just a standard mini den six pin, right? So does that mean
1:02:35SPEAKERthat there are other non PS two uses for that connector? I think it's keyed differently
1:02:41SPEAKERlooking at it, but okay. The mini den six pin is, um, that, that is also, I don't think
1:02:48SPEAKERwe've been a mini den six pin on the list. I think we've been many didn't five pin on
1:02:51SPEAKERthe list. Yeah. The cable Bible identifies the mini den six pin as purely a PS two connector.
1:02:56SPEAKERUm, I, I do like the colors they chose for mouse and keyboard, the nice little pastel
1:03:01SPEAKERgreen and kind of purple. You know what the problem with having both of them in the same
1:03:06SPEAKERplace was it's, if you plugged the mouse into the keyboard port, bad things happened. Wait,
1:03:10SPEAKERdid it really? Yeah. That seems awful. Like what do you mean? Like it didn't like fly.
1:03:14SPEAKERIt just didn't work. Oh, okay. Well yeah, that makes sense. But yes, having, having
1:03:18SPEAKERtwo connectors side by side that are exactly the same shape, but they're not cross compatible
1:03:22SPEAKERseems pretty bad. Hey, USB did solve some problems. I think the keyboard was always
1:03:26SPEAKERon the bottom, but I can't remember for sure. I think this is a bad cable. Yeah. I think
1:03:32SPEAKERyou're probably right. Like, Oh, the other thing about it was you couldn't hot plug it.
1:03:37SPEAKERYou could, you had to power it off. You had to reboot the computer. If you plugged in
1:03:41SPEAKERa PS two device, didn't you man, it's been a long time. Not only did you have to reboot
1:03:45SPEAKERthe computer and the before for a long time, if you plugged it in while it was hot, you
1:03:49SPEAKERcould fry stuff. Wow. Yeah. That's not great. No, it's bad on the flip side though. Remember
1:03:57SPEAKERoverclocking your mouse ports and I'm being facetious when I say overclocking, but you
1:04:01SPEAKERcould, you could, um, and I can't remember how you did it, but you could, um, and like
1:04:04SPEAKERin the quake era, you could raise the sampling rate of your PS two port to get smoother mouse
1:04:09SPEAKERmovement. But I don't remember how you did that. You, um, I don't remember you ran a
1:04:14SPEAKERsoftware tool as I recall, but you did it in software, but I can't, I might have to
1:04:18SPEAKERlook that up because I did that to make my quake better until they let you do thousand
1:04:22SPEAKERher polling. A lot of, a lot of people use PS two mice because of that. There are still
1:04:27SPEAKERgroup of competitive gamers, like pro E-sports people who use PS two mice actually, because
1:04:35SPEAKERI barely understand it, but I believe like electrically it goes straight to the CPU.
1:04:37SPEAKERIt doesn't have to go through like the USB. It's a DMA thing. Yeah. Yeah. Direct connection.
1:04:43SPEAKERSo theoretically it's a little latency, but, uh, the problem, all the problems you have
1:04:47SPEAKERjust laid out, make it a pretty strong case for PS two being very bottom of the list.
1:04:52SPEAKEROh, what? Yeah. Wow. Something's gotta be there. We'll move it up. If it was something
1:04:57SPEAKERelse is worse, I was gonna say like in the forties or something, but, Oh man, forties,
1:05:02SPEAKERthat's fine. I look, it's not a big deal. We'll revisit perhaps. I don't know if, I
1:05:07SPEAKERdon't know if the PS two port is the worst thing on this list, but I mean, maybe something
1:05:11SPEAKERelse will be worse. We'll put it, we'll make another number below it. It's fine. That's
1:05:14SPEAKERhow the list works. Yeah. Uh, anyway. All right. Well, we've gotten a good solid hour
1:05:18SPEAKERin on this. Should we table it? And this might be the project for 2025, just ranking connectors
1:05:23SPEAKERall year. We're not going to do that for real. We're joking. Let us, let us know what you
1:05:27SPEAKERthink about this. Maybe we'll, we'll condense the remaining ranking a bit if people are,
1:05:33SPEAKERare not loving it. I'm having fun though. I mean, at the end of the day, isn't that
1:05:36SPEAKERall that really matters, Brad? Yes, you're absolutely right. What matters is my personal
1:05:40SPEAKERfulfillment and everybody else can just get in line. Wait, that's not exactly what I meant
1:05:43SPEAKERwhen I said that, but, uh, anyway, um, uh, so we will get back to this. Uh, we have already,
1:05:51SPEAKERwe already prerecorded next week's episode, which is the Q and a, we will have already
1:05:55SPEAKERrecorded this by the time you hear this. Um, so we, we will go ahead and run the Q and
1:06:00SPEAKERa and the standard next week slots, but, uh, the following week, which I believe is the
1:06:04SPEAKERfirst weekend in January. Yeah. CS week actually. Right. That's right. So something interesting
1:06:11SPEAKERhappens to CS. We might actually, cause there's, I'm betting that there's going to be some
1:06:15SPEAKERnew stuff announced that we might want to talk about that. It sure seems like it. So
1:06:18SPEAKERI don't know, maybe we'll, maybe we'll do a one on one off of this thing for the next
1:06:22SPEAKERfew weeks until we get through this mammoth project. Yeah. I think, I think, I think now
1:06:26SPEAKERthat we've established what's going on and gone down the list, it'll move a little faster,
1:06:30SPEAKERbut anyway, there are quite a few connectors on here. I am excited to talk about because
1:06:34SPEAKERwe are just those kinds of nerds. I'm going to go open up my cable box in the garage and
1:06:39SPEAKERdig out some of the weirdos also, cause there's some fun ones in there. Anyway. Uh, this is
1:06:44SPEAKERwhere we'll leave you this week. Apologies for the tenants. Should we give the rankings
1:06:48SPEAKERas we are right now? Uh, sure. Yeah. You want to read them off? Yeah. We have at number
1:06:52SPEAKERfive XLR at number six, B and C at number 20, lightning, the Apple lightning connector
1:06:57SPEAKERat number 25, HDMI, the big, the normal one, uh, at 38, we have firewire at 39. We have
1:07:06SPEAKERUSB three type B, which is the tall B that you plugged into like a hard drive or something.
1:07:11SPEAKERUh, at 40, we have the standard USB two type B at 60. We have the 30 pin Apple dock connector,
1:07:19SPEAKERthe one that used on your iPod and your old iPhones at 70, we have USB three micro B,
1:07:25SPEAKERwhich is the wide micro one with like the little thing hanging off the side. And at
1:07:30SPEAKER76, we have the PS two port, the keyboard and mouse, not console currently dead last
1:07:35SPEAKERcurrently the last, the worst port ever made. Uh, that'll do it for us this week. Thanks
1:07:39SPEAKERfor listening. Everybody. We, as always, Brad and will made a tech pod is a listener supported
1:07:44SPEAKERshow. We would not be here without you, the listeners. And we appreciate each and every
1:07:47SPEAKERone of you, but we especially appreciate our patrons. If you want to find out how you can
1:07:52SPEAKERsupport the show, you can get a patrion.com/check pod where for five bucks a month, you get
1:07:55SPEAKERaccess to the fabulous tech pod discord and our monthly patron exclusive episode where
1:08:00SPEAKERI bet we're going to rank some more stuff, maybe some side side shoots off of this list.
1:08:05SPEAKERThere'll be a secondary ranking or possibly talking about some holiday technology or things
1:08:10SPEAKERwe've been getting up to during the break. We'll see. Yeah. Um, but yeah, thank you all
1:08:14SPEAKERfor listening. Thanks for supporting the show. Again, it's patrion.com/tech pod and we want
1:08:19SPEAKERto thank our executive producer to your patrons, including Andrew Slosky, bunny fiend, pro
1:08:25SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamek Jordan, lipid Pantheon makers of the HS three high speed 3d printer
1:08:31SPEAKERand twinkle Twinkie. Thank you also so much. Yeah, thank you. Um, it's the holiday season,
1:08:36SPEAKERso I hope everybody has a lovely holiday, whatever you wear, whatever, wherever and
1:08:40SPEAKERwhenever you celebrate. And we will see you all next week.