00:00SPEAKERLunar eclipse, as of 5, 6, 7 hours from now, lunar eclipse, are you staying up?
00:06SPEAKERStarts. No, I'll get up. I'll go to sleep and then I'll get back up.
00:09SPEAKERWait a minute. Starts at like 9.45.
00:12SPEAKERNo, it starts at like 1 am, doesn't it?
00:14SPEAKERNo, no, no. Starts at like 9.45, totality about 11.30.
00:18SPEAKEROh, yeah, I'll stay up for that.
00:20SPEAKERMaybe you're just up that late every night, I don't know.
00:22SPEAKERYeah, I usually am a midnight-ish these days.
00:25SPEAKERReally? Wow.
00:26SPEAKERI only sleep like 5 or 6 hours, dude. It's not great.
00:29SPEAKERThat's not enough.
00:30SPEAKERIt's always, it's what I've always slept, you know?
00:32SPEAKERReally?
00:33SPEAKERYeah, since I was in college, pretty much.
00:35SPEAKERI mean, it's not like I wake up tired or anything.
00:38SPEAKERI mean, some days I'm tired, but if I get 6 hours, I'm pretty good.
00:41SPEAKERWow.
00:42SPEAKERAnd have been for all eternity.
00:44SPEAKERNo kidding. If I, eh, 6 is like my functional cutoff, I guess I would say.
00:49SPEAKERLike, below 6, I can absolutely feel it.
00:52SPEAKERYeah.
00:53SPEAKER7 and a half, like...
00:55SPEAKERI watched an interview with James Cameron one time where he very, he was pushing back, you know, like,
00:59SPEAKERJames Cameron is kind of a hustle grind set kind of guy.
01:02SPEAKERHe's definitely a hustle mindset, yeah.
01:04SPEAKERBut he was pushing back on that kind of toxic notion that like,
01:08SPEAKER"You should sleep 4 hours a night so you can work more" type stuff.
01:11SPEAKERHe was like, "No, I need my sleep. I need my 7 and a half hours."
01:15SPEAKERI always thought it was really funny that he was that specific, that he said 7 and a half hours,
01:19SPEAKERalthough with the, what is it, like 90 minute REM cycles, or...
01:23SPEAKERYeah, it makes sense.
01:24SPEAKERSleep cycles go in 90 minute increments, so I guess he was just basing it on that.
01:28SPEAKERYeah, I, if I sleep less than 5, I definitely feel it.
01:32SPEAKERBut between like 5 and 6 and a half, it's effectively the same for me, it seems like.
01:37SPEAKERAnd I guess some nights I probably sleep a little bit more, and some nights I sleep a little bit less.
01:41SPEAKERI don't know. I actually track all this.
01:43SPEAKERI could tell, I could probably generate a report.
01:46SPEAKERIt's just whatever he wants is your sleep cycle report.
01:48SPEAKERThat's right. I'll expect that in my inbox Monday morning.
01:51SPEAKERBut anyway, Eclipse? What was the last Eclipse you saw?
01:54SPEAKERUh, the solar last year?
01:56SPEAKERWait, you got to see that one?
01:57SPEAKERYeah, did we, weren't we here? Was it, but we saw part of it here.
02:00SPEAKERWe were in the partial zone.
02:02SPEAKEROh, you probably just didn't have thick fog cover over your head.
02:05SPEAKEROh no, yeah, I went out in the front yard and put on my Eclipse glasses and stared up at the sun for a little bit.
02:10SPEAKERAnd then I had to explain to all the neighbors that the Eclipse glasses were safe to use,
02:14SPEAKERand that I bought them from the NASA approved site, because they were like, "I don't know if I trust those."
02:18SPEAKERI was like, "That's fine. I'm going to use them. I'm putting them on my child.
02:21SPEAKERIf you would like to use them, you're welcome to."
02:23SPEAKERYou don't live in the land of perpetual fog, so you actually had sight lines.
02:27SPEAKERIt's always foggy here, man. I think Pacifica is pretty foggy, but we lucked out on that one.
02:34SPEAKERAnd then there was a lunar last year, too, that we saw that was pretty okay.
02:39SPEAKERBut most of the time here, if there's something to look at in the sky, you walk out and you're like, "Oh, okay, never mind. This was fun."
02:47SPEAKERDid you see the auroras when they came last year?
02:50SPEAKEROh, wait, you couldn't see that down here, could you?
02:52SPEAKERYeah. Well, you had to look through your phone, because the phone camera would pick it up.
02:56SPEAKEROh, wow.
02:58SPEAKERSo we went down to the beach by Taco Bell, on the dark corner of the beach.
03:04SPEAKERAnd when you looked up toward the north, then you could see this guy looked pinker than normal or greener than normal.
03:11SPEAKERBut then when you looked at it through your phone, you could just full-on see it, because the phone picked up the stuff that's out of the human visual band.
03:18SPEAKERYes. It was cool.
03:19SPEAKERJust a good old Taco Bell aurora.
03:21SPEAKERLook, man, they're making Baja Blast pie now, and they've made Crunchwrap sliders.
03:28SPEAKERI'll take a Taco Bell aurora. That sounds delicious.
03:51SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a TechPod. I'm Will.
04:02SPEAKERI'm Brad. Hello.
04:03SPEAKERYou know what annoys me?
04:04SPEAKERWhat's that?
04:06SPEAKERAbout eclipse coverage.
04:08SPEAKERWell, people who are bad at science and good at sensationalism come on and they're like, "This is the last one of these for 500 years, man."
04:19SPEAKERAnd sometimes that's the case. Sometimes with a comet, it's like, "This is the only chance in our lifetime to see this."
04:25SPEAKERBut there are usually two or three lunar eclipses, pretty good ones, a decade at minimum, and usually more than that.
04:31SPEAKERYeah, I think the one tonight, I think there was one of these three years ago, so it's not even been that long.
04:37SPEAKERYeah, it's like every three years for a full eclipse with a decent-sized moon, the whole deal.
04:43SPEAKERNow, to be fair, different regions get to see these things each time, so if you don't move around a lot or don't travel much, then an eclipse that your region can see is quite a bit more rare.
04:54SPEAKERYeah, but when you go... I don't know, man. When you look at the whole thing and you see what they're talking about, then there's usually more.
05:03SPEAKERNow, this one is a blood moon according to timeanddate.com, which I guess means it's going to be redder than normal, and also all the monsters I killed in the last session are going to come back to life.
05:15SPEAKERYes, dawn of the first day, 72 hours remain.
05:18SPEAKERYeah, exactly. So anyway, there's one in 2025 that that one doesn't hit here, but there's one in 2026 that is a full total lunar eclipse here.
05:30SPEAKERThis one doesn't say that one's a blood moon. I don't know what a blood moon makes it, but anyway, this one, the TikTok people were like, "It's the only one in 500 years."
05:40SPEAKEROh, I'm grumpy. Sorry.
05:42SPEAKERI can tell. It's okay.
05:44SPEAKERYeah, sensationalize the things that deserve to be sensationalized, and this is cool. You don't need to sensationalize a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse. They're cool on their own. They're cool enough, man.
05:55SPEAKERIt's true.
05:56SPEAKERThat's it. What are we talking about today, Brad? Talking about things that are cool enough on their own.
06:00SPEAKERJust cultivate an enduring fascination with all things that are, and then you can get excited about an eclipse without somebody telling you that it's a once in a millennium event.
06:08SPEAKERYeah. Have a sense of wonder that's not tied to exclusivity, man. That's all I'm saying.
06:14SPEAKERYeah. We're always saying that here.
06:17SPEAKERYeah, it's what we always say here at the TechPod. Have a sense of wonder that's not tied to exclusivity.
06:22SPEAKERYou know what else we're saying? You should fix your email.
06:24SPEAKERYeah, man. Email's a mess. I did a newsletter about this a few weeks ago, which you can find at next.content.town, another part of the fine family of content town network content sites. I don't know. It's not the right way to say that.
06:38SPEAKERThat's a well-practiced pitch.
06:39SPEAKERYeah, clearly. I say it all the time. I talked about how I declared email bankruptcy because my Gmail, which I'm just going to put out there now because everybody knew. It's willsmith@gmail.com. In 2004, whenever I signed up for Gmail, I was like, "Man, I got my name at Gmail. This is going to be sick."
06:57SPEAKERThen it's just been a debacle ever since then because the amount of spam has completely been outpaced by the ability of the anti-spam technologies to give up with it.
07:05SPEAKERYeah. I have a much more mundane Gmail than you do. Even mine is practically unusable from spam and all the newsletters and things that are in marketing that it's signed up for with the additional layer of the celebrity name. I cannot even imagine how useless that address is.
07:22SPEAKERThe impetus for this was that I was talking to a friend, it might have even been you, about this and they were like, "No, your email experience sounds exactly like mine." I just assumed mine was bad and it was hopeless because of choices that I had made, not that everybody's having the same thing.
07:36SPEAKERBut if you have an old email address, especially one that's a first name, last name, or first initial, last name, you're going to get bombarded with spam because people just fire at the common email domains.
07:55SPEAKERI wrote this column about declaring email bankruptcy and people quite liked it. People were enthusiastic about it. I started a new email and I looked at Proton.
08:07SPEAKERI've been using Hay for a long time, despite the fact that the guy who runs that company sucks. Mainly because I had already started paying for it before I realized that he sucked and the cost of changing email addresses is very high.
08:21SPEAKERI know the feeling.
08:22SPEAKERAnd then I looked at Fastmail, which is shout outs to a friend of the show, I guess, Dave Snyder from the Whiskey Media days, was an early proponent of Fastmail, if I remember correctly.
08:33SPEAKERAnd Fastmail is a kind of different, it's kind of an email host for people like us.
08:40SPEAKEROkay, go on. I am a people like us.
08:43SPEAKERYou are. Before we start, I talked about some basic strategies for kind of unfucking your email in the newsletter. One of them is don't use first name, last name, first initial, last name, first name, last initial.
08:56SPEAKERPrevent the automatic spam problem you just described. I didn't realize that was a thing. I assumed that all the spam I was getting was harvested from XYZ source that my actual email address had gotten out there.
09:06SPEAKERNot that I was speculatively being sent, you know, spam according to like some email address generator.
09:13SPEAKERIt's probably some of both.
09:14SPEAKERYeah.
09:14SPEAKERI would think Shoemaker is probably an uncommon enough last name that you might be okay.
09:18SPEAKERBut if you have a relatively common, you know, a Smith or a Jones or a Chan or, you know, any of the 500 most common last names, you're probably going to get blasted.
09:28SPEAKERThe other one that I had found to be helpful is to use one email for like personal correspondence, one email address for personal correspondence.
09:39SPEAKERThat's a secret that you don't use to sign up for any accounts or do anything with.
09:44SPEAKERAnd then the other one, you have at least one more that's your, hey, this is my Amazon account and my bank and my phone and all that stuff.
09:53SPEAKERAnd then you might even want to tear that one further so that there's a super secure one for the services that can unravel the other services.
10:04SPEAKERSo like that's, that's exactly what I do.
10:06SPEAKERI have, I have a, my ring zero email address, my like kernel level email address is like, it's basically just government services and finance and health stuff.
10:16SPEAKERLike it's all just extremely sensitive, private identifying data, you know, like identity theft level data.
10:23SPEAKERAnd then I have another email address above that that is for like retail services, you know, so like video game console backends and Netflix and Netflix, like all the, all the services you subscribe to, like retail, you know, Amazon, stuff like that.
10:35SPEAKERAnd then I have the one above that, that is the one I actually email people from.
10:38SPEAKERThe one thing I would say is anything that is going to be a recovery address that will be the recovery address for other recovery addresses should be in that ring zero.
10:47SPEAKERSo like my Verizon, my, my cell provider lives in that ring zero, stuff like that.
10:52SPEAKERSure.
10:53SPEAKERBut anyway, okay, so fast mail, fast mail is rad.
10:57SPEAKERI signed up for the demo.
10:59SPEAKERThey give you a 30 day free demo and I think I had given them money by about 90 minutes after I started futzing with it.
11:06SPEAKERWow. That's might be a record.
11:08SPEAKERI will, I will say before we get into this too much further, that's a lot of fans on the discord of fast mail as well.
11:13SPEAKERYeah, they're, they're, they're smart people.
11:15SPEAKERYou should, we should have listened to them more highly recommended.
11:18SPEAKERYeah.
11:19SPEAKERSo basically fast mail works to integrate all of your email into one place in a way that works better than forwarding email from a bunch of different accounts into one like Gmail or hay or whatever other normal email account.
11:35SPEAKERIf you're doing it the way they recommend, you set it up at a domain level and you have them host, like it's for people who have multiple non who own multiple domains that have emails coming in.
11:46SPEAKERSo like we have the podcast, the content uptown podcast, email addresses.
11:51SPEAKERI have my newsletter stuff.
11:53SPEAKERWe have business addresses that are tied to the podcast.
11:57SPEAKERAnd then we like, we all have other, several other things that just linger. Like I have an email address that I've had since like 1993 that I talked to friends from college on sometimes.
12:06SPEAKERWow. I'm not going to make you say what that is now, but I want to know later.
12:09SPEAKERIt's yeah.
12:11SPEAKERI don't even want the actual address so much as I just want to know what kind of address you've been able to maintain for 32 years or whatever.
12:17SPEAKEROh, I bought a domain. It was probably 96. I bought a domain in 1996.
12:21SPEAKERAnd you've had it ever since?
12:22SPEAKERI've had it ever since. Yeah.
12:23SPEAKERMan, that's impressive.
12:24SPEAKERYeah. It's not a very good domain, but it's my domain.
12:27SPEAKEROh, you know, like I can imagine a lot of the domains you would have been able to get in the mid nineties, probably pretty desirable these days.
12:33SPEAKERYeah. I mean, look, it was my vanity license plate from when I was in college.
12:37SPEAKERSo anyway what you do, so, so you can, you don't have to do this.
12:43SPEAKERThey can give you just an @fastmail.fm email address.
12:47SPEAKERIf you want to add fastmail.com, they have a bunch of domains you can choose from.
12:50SPEAKERBut the way I, the reason I like it so much, I'm so impressed with it is I just pointed it at some domains that I own and said, hey, I want to have this email at this email address.
13:04SPEAKERAnd then they said, okay, you can do, you can set up the domain one of two ways.
13:07SPEAKERYou can either go in and manually configure all the MX records if you're hosting websites and stuff on here.
13:13SPEAKERYou're talking about DNS to be clear.
13:14SPEAKERYeah, DNS entries. Yeah.
13:16SPEAKERThat's going and editing actual DNS records on your DNS provider.
13:21SPEAKERI guess let's take a step back.
13:23SPEAKERThe way email works is on your DNS records, the things that convert, you know, www.willsmith.com into an IP address that goes to, that knows where the web browser is in the mail and all that stuff.
13:37SPEAKERThere's different types of records that get stored in your DNS file.
13:40SPEAKERSome of them tell you what to do if a web browser hits you, right?
13:43SPEAKERSome of them tell you what to do if your blue sky @proto username is stored there.
13:51SPEAKERSome of them just tell you where to route mail, where your mail servers inbound and outbound are.
13:56SPEAKERAnd then there's all sorts of other stuff around that now that are anti-spam technologies.
14:00SPEAKERYou have two ways of setting up a domain with FastMail.
14:04SPEAKEROne is that you can just say, "Hey, host, you handle all my domain records," and then you need to go do your web host and any other stuff you do in their tool, which is easy to use.
14:14SPEAKEROr, alternately, you can take their MX records and put them in your domain, your normal domain panel, whether it's Hover, GoDaddy, or whatever.
14:23SPEAKERAnd the benefit of doing this is that then they say, once you set that up, you can do things like build catch-all addresses so that brad@verizon.bradshoemaker.com takes every email that is sent to Verizon.
14:47SPEAKERHold on, I've got to open it up because it's confusing how it works.
14:54SPEAKERThis is like a honeypot kind of thing is what you're talking about.
14:56SPEAKERYeah, so you can do it multiple ways. You can have it catch all the email that's sent to the domain if it's something that you actually want that.
15:02SPEAKERI can't imagine why you would ever do that, but it's an option.
15:06SPEAKERYou can also build throwaway email addresses automatically with it.
15:12SPEAKERYou can set it to, for example, accept mail to anything@user.bradshoemaker.com and deliver that to userplusanything@bradshoemaker.com.
15:27SPEAKERSo you do anything as the email address and user.thedomain.com to say it basically lets you make one-off addresses for things that you might want to be able to just kill the address for in the future.
15:43SPEAKERYeah, I get what you're describing conceptually, like visualizing the actual addresses you're talking about and the syntax. It's a little mind-bending, but I think that would make sense if I looked at it.
15:51SPEAKERYeah, and of course, this is all optional. You can just say, "Hey, only send it to people that there's accounts set up for that these users set up for."
15:58SPEAKERRight, but what you're talking about is making a Verizon-specific email address so all of their stuff goes to that address and does not pollute my main address with whatever marketing offers and nonsense and whoever they sell my address to.
16:09SPEAKERExactly. The neat thing about FastMail is you pay them for a year, and you can hook up to 90 domains or 100 domains or something ridiculous to it. I have six domains hooked up to this.
16:27SPEAKERI have it connected to my multiple Gmail accounts, including our business one and the podcast's Gmail, the letter's Gmail. Then, when the emails come in, it's not like a filtering scheme.
16:43SPEAKERIt just knows that anything that comes in on this account is automatically dumped into this folder, and then rules are applied to it. That's important because it means that the BCCs go to the right place.
16:53SPEAKERA lot of your spam and a lot of your weird emails come in via BCCs. If you're just doing two-address filtering, which is what Gmail does, all the spam that doesn't have a two-address ends up in the main bucket, and it doesn't work very well.
17:10SPEAKERBut because they know what account things come in on, they can place it in the right place, and then you can run your filters based on that. You end up with this incredibly powerful email filtering.
17:24SPEAKERI have folders for my job hunt email address and my locked-down Gmail and TechPod reader letters and TechPod business and FOSS pod stuff and the newsletter and comment notifications for the newsletter and my old college mail and my professional mail.
17:44SPEAKERIt all just works without me having to think about it once I set it up. It's incredibly powerful.
17:49SPEAKERThat's all sorting that's happening at the FastMail level, right? It's all happening at the FastMail level. So FastMail, like Gmail and Outlook and all the other modern web services, you can connect to it with IMAP or whatever your open client of choice is, but really you want to use their clients and their web client.
18:04SPEAKERRight, right. Okay. I've got a lot of questions about this thing, but does Gmail work with it was probably the biggest question, so it sounds like it does.
18:11SPEAKERI was just wondering, obviously this thing is at its best when you're using your own domain, you know, when you're using addresses on domains that you own and control.
18:20SPEAKERI was wondering, basically I was wondering like, am I sunk by having 20 plus years in a Gmail address already, but can you just IMAP your Gmail right in there?
18:30SPEAKERSo you can log in. There's multiple ways to suck your Gmail into this. I actually haven't done it for my big Gmail. I chose not to just because I don't want, like the 20 years of email aren't going anywhere.
18:42SPEAKERSure.
18:43SPEAKERI'm just going to leave them there. I check it every once in a while and see if there's anything important. Turns out, there very rarely is. The business email for the podcast, I did ingest fully.
19:00SPEAKERYou connect it to your Google account and say, "Hey, do you want to do this?" It doesn't even use IMAP, it just pulls it direct like an inbox, and then it shows up in your folder.
19:08SPEAKERIt syncs calendars. It'll sync calendars and stuff like that. It'll sync your contacts if you choose to do that.
19:14SPEAKERI keep my contacts on iCloud because of iPhone reasons related to what iCloud uses. iPhones use your iCloud contacts to store a lot of important information that ends up being used by Siri and all the other things about who you are and who your people related to you and all that are.
19:32SPEAKERAnyway, my contacts came in from iCloud. I synced that over. I logged into that with an OAuth login. I logged into most of the Gmails that I use with an OAuth login.
19:42SPEAKERThere's multiple ways to forward Gmail. You have to be thoughtful about how you do it because you don't want to forward everything in such a way that it bypasses.
19:52SPEAKERYou don't want FastMail to think that all of the spam that's being forwarded from your Gmail account on a day-by-day basis is authoritatively from your Gmail account because it won't filter spam on it anymore.
20:03SPEAKERYou have to jump through some hoops to get that working right, but that's doable as well. You could use this to consolidate all of your email conceptually.
20:12SPEAKERWait, hang on. How is it doing spam filtering on the Gmail stuff?
20:22SPEAKERIf you want to do FastMail spam filtering on the Gmail stuff, you have to set up the forwards in Gmail a specific way. It's kind of a hassle. It's not worth getting into.
20:32SPEAKERI would advocate against doing that, and you need to communicate to FastMail when you set up that email address that that is unfiltered.
20:44SPEAKERBasically, there's a FAQ on their page that explains how to start everything up right.
20:48SPEAKEREmail has not gotten any less complicated.
20:50SPEAKERNo, it's actually way more complicated. That's one of the other things. I've been a little bit afraid to host email on my own domains because of all the DKIM stuff. There's a ton of anti-spam technologies that have come up in the last 15 years.
21:04SPEAKERIs that what DKIM is? I've seen that acronym many times.
21:07SPEAKERYeah, DKIM and SPF and DMARC are a series of technologies that I think were driven primarily by Google and Microsoft and companies that host large amounts of free email and are enormous targets for spam that authenticate servers.
21:25SPEAKERDMARC is more about anti-phishing. It lets you know that a sender from in your domain was actually sent from in your domain on the appropriate servers.
21:34SPEAKERBut it's just a way of saying at a domain level, hey, this is the server I use. This is the SMTP server I use. These are the certificates for it and all that stuff.
21:42SPEAKEROkay, that makes sense. Maybe we should have said this at the top. FastMail is something you would want to use if you buy a domain and you want your own email address on it.
21:50SPEAKERDon't run your own mail server.
21:51SPEAKERDo not run your own mail server.
21:53SPEAKERFastMail is something is what you would want to pay for in that scenario. Like I have never heard even in the wildest self-hosting fantasies from the craziest server jockeys, I have never seen anybody who was like hot to host their own mail server.
22:07SPEAKERLike it's like do not enter here.
22:11SPEAKERFortune 500 companies aren't hosting their own mail servers anymore. That's why they're using Google Apps and Outlook and stuff like that.
22:18SPEAKERIt is an enormous pain in the ass. The penalty of messing it up is that you're in the spam hole forever and there's no real upside other than you maybe learn how to run a mail server.
22:31SPEAKERJust so we don't bury the lead, this is the type of solution you would want if you had your own domain?
22:36SPEAKERYeah. It's the easiest way to do that, just to be clear. And unlike say Google, which is $6 per account per domain, this you can pay one flat annual fee and get access to up to 80 or 100 domains or something like that. More than you're going to need.
22:56SPEAKERKind of hard to imagine unless you're a large organization even making use of that many. And just in case it's not clear, the upside of doing this is if you register a domain and make sure you keep auto renew turned on or whatever, just make sure you keep paying to renew that domain every year, you effectively have that email address for as long as you want it. Potentially for the rest of your life?
23:17SPEAKERIf that's what you're into, yeah.
23:19SPEAKERIf you make sure, like you just said, you've had the same domain for 30 years now. If you make sure you hang on to that domain, you can just keep that email address for as long as you keep the stuff going.
23:29SPEAKERYeah. And I was trying to find their homepage so I can see what it actually costs. I don't remember. I think it was 30 bucks a year. It is for an individual for 12 bucks, it's 60 bucks for a year, which is five bucks a month. It's cheaper. Hey was 99 bucks a year when I was paying for that.
23:49SPEAKERYou can do family accounts and duo accounts for which give you, so when you, when I say you get accounts with multiple people, you're getting multiple logins because each account can do up to a bazillion mailboxes, you know, domains with the email addresses. And they get, you get 60 gigs storage per person basically to work with.
24:12SPEAKERTo be clear, there is no free option here, right? You are paying to get in the door at all?
24:16SPEAKERThere is no free option. Yeah. It's all paid to get in the door. And for me, making email work well again is an incredibly valuable service, right? Because I'm sending out resumes to people all the time. I'm talking to people for contracting stuff and I'm terrified that my mail is going to go to spam or that I'm going to miss something important to come through. And because of the way this works, I'm less concerned about that now.
24:43SPEAKERThe other thing that's really nice about the folder scheme is when you set up your folders, you can say what the default account is that you want to use on each folder. So for example, on the, you know, the newsletter, when people match reply on a newsletter, then it goes into the folder for the what's next comments, right?
25:01SPEAKERWhen I see that and I reply to it, the reply comes from the email address that the newsletter goes out to. When I reply to somebody from the tech pod email who sends a tech pod question in or a business inquiry, they get the right email automatically. I don't even have to think about it. And it doesn't matter where those emails came from. So if somebody sends it to my public basing email that's on my Twitter account or my Blue Sky account, and I move it into the proper folder and then respond to it, it gets the right email response regardless.
25:30SPEAKERIt's really good. And the other thing is the web client is faster than Gmail. They don't have a bunch of tracking crap on. They obviously have spent a lot of time optimizing and making it fast. It loads incredibly fast, even when I'm on my phone on mobile. And both the mail client on the mobile device on the phone and the web mail are both really good.
25:53SPEAKERGreat. Do they do desktop apps? They maybe do Mac desktop apps. I don't think they do Windows desktop apps, which is a disappointment.
26:02SPEAKERThey'd probably just be electron apps anyway. So what's the difference? I'd rather have the web client than than just this. And of course, you can set it up with Thunderbird or Windows 10 mail or whatever you want if that's if that's an important thing to you.
26:16SPEAKERI still would like to use a local email app if I could, but there just are not that many options. I did a couple of years on Thunderbird and didn't hate it, but didn't love it. And I don't know a lot of other cross-platform options. I know there are a lot of people on the Discord Discord that like Betterbird, which is a fork of Thunderbird.
26:32SPEAKERYeah, but I don't know a lot of other third party standalone email clients these days. Every time I go looking for them, it's like on the on the best of list. It'll be like, this is the best one for AI assisted writing support and stuff. I'm like, nope, that's not what I'm looking for in an email client.
26:50SPEAKERI know I'm not. No, thank you. I'm good. It has dark theme that's worth mentioning. Everybody always asks about dark theme. There's a bunch of themes available. I downloaded my Gmail. My Gmail archive is an inbox file that I can open up in Thunderbird, which was that's that's my that's my hey, here's how I'm going to access the old email, I think.
27:14SPEAKERWait, Google just lets you do that? Yeah, takeout.google.com. Fitz was responsible for Google Takeout when he was at Google.
27:21SPEAKERYeah, I knew about Google Takeout. I didn't know that that worked for Gmail.
27:24SPEAKERIt's part of it. Yeah. The whole point of takeout is you can take any any individual component of your Google data off.
27:30SPEAKEROK. Yeah, I used I used dummy Gmail accounts to back up all the whiskey media email when that ended. Yep. When those mail servers were about to go away. Yep. I just I mapped it into a Gmail account and it's just been sitting there ever since. And like once a year I sign into those accounts and send an email from them just so they don't get shut down.
27:49SPEAKERSo you can maybe you can pull an inbox from those and you're good to go. I absolutely will do that and then stop worrying about or even close those accounts, actually.
27:56SPEAKERYeah. Just put the inbox in your in your in your different Gmail account drive folder and then you're good to go.
28:03SPEAKERSo this does calendaring as well. There's content storage. I wanted to ask about apps because, I mean, replacing Gmail is one thing.
28:11SPEAKERBut like if you rely heavily on like Google Docs and some of the other Google suite stuff or Office 365 or whatever, I mean, is this I'm guessing this is not a full stack replacement.
28:21SPEAKERI would say the calendar and contacts are very comparable to what Google offers.
28:26SPEAKEROK. And because they're a third party, like my iCloud, my Google and my my podcast business client calendars, which are the three that I actually use, are all synced up in in this one place now.
28:43SPEAKERSo it works like Fantastical does on my on my phone. The contact app is similar. It's tightly integrated with the email. There is no docs equivalent.
28:51SPEAKERRight. So you don't have docs or drive. There's a little bit of storage for files, but like 60 gigs per user.
28:58SPEAKERI'm not going to I'm not going to dump files here on paper, Dropbox or something else instead of that.
29:04SPEAKERSure. They do integrate with they do integrate with other apps in interesting ways, though.
29:09SPEAKERSo there's like a one password integration, which is lovely because it actually just like when I when I sign up for a new account someplace, it says, hey, do you want to use your real email or you want to use a masked email?
29:23SPEAKERAnd if you say I want to use a masked email, it generates a complete nonsense, gibberish email like rare, rare platypus one three seven two at fastmail dot com. And that's the email address that they get.
29:40SPEAKERAnd when you're ready to when you when you start getting too much spam on that address, just turn it off when you want another free trial, make a new one.
29:47SPEAKERIt's fine. Don't tell anybody I said that it's a bad idea, but it does require access to your one password account.
29:53SPEAKERBut that happens inside the one password browser extension. You don't have to do anything special to do it.
29:57SPEAKERYou can you can also create this manually if you want. If you don't have one password. Cool.
30:02SPEAKERSo let's see, I'm trying to think there's there's other stuff that's that's novel here. The migration, like I said, you just log in with an OAuth account to your thing.
30:10SPEAKERIt'll pull it across. It couldn't do that on my extreme security Gmail account, obviously.
30:17SPEAKERSo I set up a forward and just forward. That's that's the one that gets forwarded manually. Oh, right.
30:23SPEAKERSo you still can do just a manual forward if all else fails? Yeah, you can do a manual forward.
30:28SPEAKERYou have to tell it about that address in a different way so that it knows that it's already so it knows that those emails are just being forwarded from Gmail indiscriminately and may or may not have been filtered.
30:39SPEAKERSo dumb question here. But I mean, are we talking about a literal forward as in like the like like, you know, FWD is prepended to the subject line or is this like more transparent than that?
30:51SPEAKERI don't get a lot of email to that account. So let me see what's in here. It doesn't have an FWD.
30:56SPEAKERIt's just like a pass through forward from the server side. Got it. So you set that up in Gmail.
31:01SPEAKERIt looks like an original email is what you're saying. It looks like an original email sent to your Gmail address. It shows up in this inbox as you know, as as as if it was sent to your Gmail.
31:14SPEAKERDo you know if are there integrations for other major services like Office and Proton and stuff like that?
31:20SPEAKERThey have a lot of on their on their sign up page. They have a lot of info about migrating from other services, including Hey and Gmail and Outlook and Yahoo and Proton.
31:34SPEAKERThe integrations vary based on the service is my understanding. I only really use Gmail and Hey, so I didn't try the the Proton and Outlook and Yahoo integrations.
31:48SPEAKERI forgot Yahoo does still do email, don't they? Yahoo is an enormous email provider still.
31:52SPEAKERYeah, just shocking to me because, you know, people people standardize on an email address and they don't want to change.
31:59SPEAKERYeah, I used to have Will Smith at Yahoo, too, but I forgot the password for it about 30 years ago. And I'm sure that's a disaster now.
32:05SPEAKERSo sure. Can you still get an MSN.com address? I don't think so anymore. I think they got rid of all those within the Hotmail.
32:11SPEAKERI don't think you have Hotmail anymore. Maybe not. So, OK, so there's other there's other services that do this that work in similar ways.
32:21SPEAKERWe talked about Hey a little bit. We covered Hey, I think back when you first got on it like three years ago or something like that.
32:27SPEAKERYeah, it was maybe even four at this point, four or five. But it's it's it's basically a loudest email. So you say, hey, I only want to allow you get a queue every morning when you log in. That's here's all the emails that came in that we don't know who they're from.
32:43SPEAKERAnd it only lets emails from addresses you've given the thumbs up to pass their filter. It's fine.
32:50SPEAKERIt's kind of expensive. One hundred bucks a year when compared to fast mails seems pretty expensive or less like.
32:58SPEAKERI mean, you tell me, but it kind of sounds like maybe it's less fully featured. It's it's more.
33:04SPEAKERIt's less for me and more for somebody who has normal email requirements, I would say, like the ability to do because, you know, because I have newsletter and tech pod and consulting business and job hunt and 15 other things that all have their own email addresses.
33:19SPEAKERHaving a client that works well with multiple email addresses is better than having one that works really well with one email address.
33:26SPEAKERRight. And yeah, so you can't use your own domain with. Hey, right. You can, but they charge you like a business. It's priced competitive.
33:33SPEAKERIt's priced like Google apps for your domain is the same same kind of price structure. But so instead of paying six dollars or ten dollars a month, five dollars a month for for fast mail, I'd be paying six dollars a month for each of the accounts that I need or dealing with forwards and aliases and all that stuff.
33:54SPEAKERSure. You know, another advantage to using an email address, attach your own domain that I didn't mention earlier, a social cache that comes along with an email address that looks like it's custom on your own for your own business.
34:07SPEAKERI am not just a Gmail or a hay or something that people are very familiar with.
34:12SPEAKERI've gotten a lot of compliments on the domain that I'm using for my business stuff right now.
34:16SPEAKERLike it's just makes you feel a little more official.
34:19SPEAKERYeah.
34:19SPEAKERWhen you're trying to look official.
34:21SPEAKERIt's you know, you got a brand, you might as well lean into it.
34:24SPEAKERYeah.
34:25SPEAKERThey do do anti spam on hay and it has calendar as well now, too.
34:28SPEAKERSo that was one of the big failings of it originally is that OK, is that they didn't like if you were forwarding from Gmail and you got a calendar invite, you had to go back to Gmail to accept the calendar invite because it would fail in novel and exciting ways if you tried to click on it in a that's fixed now.
34:43SPEAKERYes. As you mentioned earlier, though, it's probably it's probably worth reiterating here that David Heinemeier Hansen sucks, seems to have gone in a profoundly anti woke direction in the last few weeks.
34:55SPEAKEROh, no, he's been like this for like two years now.
34:58SPEAKERMaybe way longer. To be clear, I've never followed that guy, but he would because my Twitter algorithm would get more programming heavy here and there.
35:04SPEAKERHe would show up some and I didn't I didn't see much of what he had to say.
35:08SPEAKERIt was mostly about racing cars or something. Ruby on rails, which is the maintainer of. But yes, lately things have things have taken a turn.
35:15SPEAKERSo this is the company that made base camp, which was one of the first group where apps and we used base camp at Maximum PC for our website planning and website organization stuff and passing files back and forth to each other.
35:27SPEAKEREverything was incredibly powerful tool. And it's a real bummer that he turned out to be kind of a shit bag.
35:33SPEAKERYeah.
35:34SPEAKERSo many such cases in tech.
35:37SPEAKERHe did what he did one of the numbers a few years ago where he's like, well, here's how this is the official policy.
35:43SPEAKERWe're not talking about politics anymore. This was during the end of the Trump days, I believe.
35:48SPEAKERWe're not talking about tech anymore. We're not talking about politics anymore in our in our private slack.
35:53SPEAKEROh, right. I remember anybody who doesn't like this can get the fuck out and then like three quarters of the company quit the next day.
35:58SPEAKERI remember the blow up about that. Yes. Yeah.
36:01SPEAKERSo and, you know, anyway, I was already using hey at that point and it already switched all my important shit over to a new address.
36:10SPEAKERIt seems like he's changed his stance on talking about politics.
36:14SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. I mean, that's good at least.
36:17SPEAKERYes.
36:18SPEAKERWhat about Proton, Brad? You've been a proton user for a bit, right?
36:22SPEAKERYeah, I'm not like a power user. I'm definitely not using like heavy paid features or anything like that.
36:26SPEAKERBut I do use it for just kind of random email addresses here and there.
36:30SPEAKERYour anime mailing lists and such.
36:32SPEAKERYeah. Look, I didn't want to get into it, but fine.
36:36SPEAKERGundamuser69@protonmail.com.
36:39SPEAKERLook, we're moving on now. OK.
36:41SPEAKEROK.
36:42SPEAKERNo, I mean, you know, I had been using Gmail for pushing 20 years at some point and was just like, you know, I should probably have another address or two that are not on a Google service.
36:50SPEAKERYeah. What if something happens to Google? What if they shut down?
36:53SPEAKERWell, or, you know, what if Gmail just incentivize further?
36:57SPEAKERYeah. I mean, that's the real problem, actually, is that the spam it's not getting better.
37:02SPEAKERAnd I went through I jumped through the hoops of turning off all the Gemini features on the next lander Google workspace account.
37:09SPEAKERIt's an enormous pain in the ass, isn't it?
37:11SPEAKERIt took like 30 minutes.
37:12SPEAKERYeah.
37:13SPEAKERTook like 30 minutes because I had to go through all of the automated support that would finally let me talk to a real person because.
37:19SPEAKERYou can't do it from a switch?
37:21SPEAKERSwitch.
37:22SPEAKERYou have to talk to a person to turn it off?
37:23SPEAKEROh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
37:24SPEAKERIt's not in the control, the controls for all the Gemini stuff.
37:28SPEAKERTo be clear, you can turn off like some of the user facing Gemini stuff, but not the deep stuff that like crawls the stuff in your account and whatever.
37:36SPEAKERLike the controls for that literally are not exposed in the Google admin panel.
37:40SPEAKERYou have to escalate in customer service to a human being and ask them to turn on the controls for that stuff so you can disable.
37:46SPEAKERThat sucks.
37:47SPEAKERSo if you want to talk about reasons to maybe have a backup email or two that aren't on Google.
37:52SPEAKERI didn't know that.
37:53SPEAKERThat really is a bummer.
37:55SPEAKERYeah, I've had a couple of proton addresses that I use for this and that for a couple of years now.
38:00SPEAKERTheir big claim to fame is that their email is encrypted with a couple of asterisks.
38:05SPEAKERBut it's only encrypted on their servers, right?
38:08SPEAKERYes, that's what I mean.
38:09SPEAKERThose are the asterisks because it's not built into email.
38:12SPEAKERAnd I kind of would think somebody would have come along and solved this in a standards based institutional way at some point in the last 40 years.
38:20SPEAKERWell, I mean, there are standards for it, but it's just nobody bothers because it's a pain in the ass.
38:25SPEAKERWell, maybe that's the case.
38:26SPEAKERI don't know if maybe there are actual like protocol level encryption options for email.
38:30SPEAKERI'm not sure.
38:31SPEAKERBut but this, like probably most solutions that are actually in use these days is is the one that they rolled themselves.
38:38SPEAKERSo, yes, the email is encrypted on their servers, meaning that even they supposedly can't read it.
38:45SPEAKERYeah, I take them at their word on that.
38:47SPEAKERBut you have to back up keys.
38:50SPEAKERNo, no, you don't touch any of that stuff.
38:52SPEAKERIt's just tied to your account.
38:53SPEAKERThe other place that is encrypted is if you if you it is end to end encrypted, if you send from a proton address to another proton address.
39:01SPEAKERI mean, that's kind of interesting.
39:02SPEAKERYeah, that is something, you know, then it is encrypted in flight, let's say, as the email is transferring.
39:08SPEAKERAn interesting place that I've actually seen that used in practice is I listen to a fair number of the Cool Zone media podcasts.
39:13SPEAKERI don't know if you're familiar with them.
39:15SPEAKERIt's Robert Evans behind the bastards.
39:17SPEAKERYeah, you know, they employ a number of reporters working in human rights and stuff like that now.
39:22SPEAKERAnd they actually posted a proton mail address saying, like, hey, if you if you've got tips for us in these fairly fraught domains that we report on.
39:31SPEAKERYou know, if you work in sensitive areas and want to provide tips to us, send us email from another proton address and it will be encrypted all the way here.
39:39SPEAKERSo so there are some practical uses for that sort of thing.
39:43SPEAKERSo fast mail explicitly says, hey, we don't do end to end encryption because it means that we can't do things like full fast text search for your email and stuff like that.
39:53SPEAKERInteresting.
39:54SPEAKERDo you get search on your email on Proton?
39:56SPEAKERYou do? OK.
39:57SPEAKERYeah, I don't know.
39:58SPEAKERI don't know. Maybe it's working in client or something, because I assume it would have to.
40:02SPEAKERI don't know if the decryption is happening on their server.
40:05SPEAKERI mean, like, you know, on their end or if they are serving it to you and it's getting decrypted locally.
40:09SPEAKERI really have no idea.
40:10SPEAKERDo you have a desktop client for Proton or do you use a web client?
40:13SPEAKERI just use the web client.
40:14SPEAKERI'm not sure if they make a desktop one.
40:16SPEAKERI would assume they do.
40:18SPEAKERNow that you mentioned it, actually, I've never bothered to jump through these hoops, but it is a little more complicated to ingest proton in boxes into things like Thunderbird third party clients.
40:28SPEAKERYeah, like there are ways to do it, but you have to use some kind of like decryption bridge or something.
40:33SPEAKERThere's some there's some like bridge intermediary thing you have to set up to get the email to decrypt and deliver into your email clients.
40:40SPEAKERSo maybe that suggests the decryption is happening in the web client locally.
40:43SPEAKERI'm not sure. Interesting.
40:45SPEAKERYeah. Anyway, OK, that's kind of their big claim to fame.
40:49SPEAKERBut the free account is one address and one gigabyte of storage.
40:53SPEAKERSo it's like pretty pretty limited.
40:55SPEAKERThat's thin. Yeah.
40:56SPEAKERYeah. You can pay like four bucks a month to get more addresses, more storage and some extra privacy features, kind of like mass email addresses like you were talking about to give you some allotment of those.
41:06SPEAKERAnd you can pay higher tiers, too, for even more of that stuff.
41:10SPEAKERThey've started introducing more of like a Google Suite, Google Workspace kind of app assortment.
41:15SPEAKERLike they've got Docs and Calendar and some of the basics there now as well that you get for the higher paid tiers.
41:21SPEAKERThey also offer a VPN for what that's worth.
41:23SPEAKERI think I think Calendar you almost have to have with an email client now just because of how invitations work and how fraught it is to get them from one ecosystem into another.
41:33SPEAKERYeah.
41:34SPEAKERBut Docs is good. That's cool.
41:38SPEAKERYes. So this is not like a strong endorsement of them.
41:41SPEAKERIt's worked fine for me for just having a couple of extra email addresses to use for things that I don't put on Gmail or whatever.
41:48SPEAKERYeah.
41:49SPEAKERBut yeah. So that is another option. I don't know if it's worth mentioning.
41:53SPEAKERIt was a slightly politically fraud situation with them as well.
41:57SPEAKERYeah. Their CEO seems like a tech libertarian.
42:01SPEAKERYeah.
42:02SPEAKERPre-speech absolutist maybe.
42:04SPEAKERSeems like an ideologue.
42:05SPEAKERYeah.
42:06SPEAKERHe took a bunch of flack for praising Trump's pick for the assistant attorney general in the antitrust division of the Justice Department.
42:14SPEAKERThat's very specific.
42:15SPEAKERYes.
42:16SPEAKERMy read on it, I looked into a little bit more because when I saw that, I was like, fuck me.
42:19SPEAKERWell, great. Now I'm now I'm invested in this platform and oops.
42:23SPEAKERIt seems it seems like I said, he just he seems like a like a sort of privacy and antitrust zealot and seemed to think that the pick would be good in that on those very specific grounds just in that context.
42:35SPEAKERBut, you know, I looked into his background like he was a big fan of Lena Kahn in the last administration and precisely pi and the one before that of her net neutrality.
42:43SPEAKERSo, like I said, it seems like he very much is just a single issue kind of guy.
42:47SPEAKERI don't know.
42:48SPEAKERIt's tough to say these days.
42:50SPEAKERBut if that's if that's a concern for you, there is that.
42:52SPEAKERYeah.
42:53SPEAKERAnd, you know, we're not here to endorse any of these services necessarily.
42:57SPEAKERThis is just kind of our experience with what we have used.
42:59SPEAKEROh, I was going to give a fast mail pass bill here.
43:04SPEAKERLet me let me hit you.
43:05SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. It's like, look, fast mail is a product so good that they asked to sponsor the podcast. I would probably say yes.
43:14SPEAKERSure. I get it.
43:15SPEAKERHow's that?
43:16SPEAKERI've had such experiences, you know, like I talk about my ISP here and there because I've had such consistently good experiences in a domain where bad experiences are the norm.
43:25SPEAKERI wouldn't know about that, Brad.
43:27SPEAKERSorry, but it's just, you know, it's weird. You offer a decent product and treat your customers respectfully for a fair price.
43:36SPEAKERThey want to advocate for you or advertise for you for free.
43:39SPEAKERYeah. Right.
43:40SPEAKERIt turns out it makes something good and people will use it.
43:42SPEAKERSpeaking of things that are good, the other options in this space are like outlook dot com, which is bad.
43:50SPEAKERSorry, Microsoft.
43:51SPEAKERYes, I had to use Outlook for four months, five months in the brief time that I worked for Red Ventures and was not a fan.
43:58SPEAKERWell, so there's two different outlooks. Outlook dot com is there is what Hotmail became.
44:02SPEAKERYou can use desktop outlook to connect to that outlook.
44:06SPEAKERThe user Red Ventures is probably their corporate like.
44:09SPEAKERYeah. Yes.
44:10SPEAKERGroupware type thing that was office, which also sucks, like sucks.
44:14SPEAKERThat makes the web version of outlook dot com look really good.
44:18SPEAKERYeah.
44:19SPEAKERWait, it was not a fun time.
44:20SPEAKERYeah, no, it's bad.
44:22SPEAKERThere's other stuff.
44:23SPEAKERI mean, Yahoo Mail still exists if you care about that.
44:26SPEAKERThere's not a lot of stuff that lets you aggregate a bunch of addresses under one roof.
44:29SPEAKERThat's the that's the interesting thing.
44:31SPEAKERThere's a lot of like you can hook mail Thunderbird or mail dot app on on on app on Macs or iPhones even to multiple addresses.
44:40SPEAKERAnd it it handles them in a reasonably elegant way.
44:43SPEAKERYeah. You know, honestly, shout out to Apple because I use mail in Mac OS and on iOS and still perfectly adequate.
44:51SPEAKERLike I pulled multiple addresses into those clients and it's like it's like the one OS level built in mail client that's still totally fine.
44:59SPEAKERYeah. The one that built into Windows, they killed the Windows Mail one.
45:03SPEAKERAnd now it's just like a stripped down version of Outlook, I think.
45:06SPEAKERYes, I tried to launch Windows Mail earlier and it was like, hey, this has been used the word deprecated, but it was something like that.
45:12SPEAKERIt was literally just a link to go install Outlook.
45:15SPEAKERAnd instead I asked out of that and we'll never open it again.
45:17SPEAKERAnd when you look at like what's up with Thunderbird, it's in a it's been in a weird space for a long time, right?
45:25SPEAKERYeah. Like I said, it worked. It was a little clunky as old legacy open source projects like that often are.
45:32SPEAKERThey've done a big UI revamp since I stopped using it a couple of years ago.
45:36SPEAKEROK, so so that might be worth looking at. I might give Thunderbird another look.
45:39SPEAKERActually, I'm not sure.
45:40SPEAKERI think it got spun out of Mozilla a few years ago and it's something now, right?
45:44SPEAKERThunderbird is absolutely part of that Mozilla Firefox legacy in some way, although I'm not exactly sure what the lineage is.
45:51SPEAKERIf you look at it like even the Thunderbird logo is pretty similar to the Firefox logo.
45:55SPEAKERYeah, it's the Firefox logo, but blue and with a less Firefox-y and more birdie.
46:00SPEAKERHere we go. Thunderbird is part of the MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.
46:07SPEAKERThere you go. And they're on the one hundred and twenty eighth version of that.
46:10SPEAKERNow, apparently I didn't realize that. And when I downloaded when I when I went to go download it, I got a Cloudflare error.
46:16SPEAKERSo, yeah, everything's going great. It's in it's they're making it. It's in Rust now, Brad.
46:22SPEAKERWait, they're integrating Rust. Yeah.
46:25SPEAKERAre they rewriting it in Rust or are they just starting to write part of it in Rust?
46:29SPEAKERIt seems like they're writing part of it in Rust.
46:31SPEAKEROK, very different. What happened to version numbers?
46:34SPEAKERWe stopped doing major versions and minor versions and just started iterating based on number, because then bigger number, better.
46:43SPEAKERWho started this version number arms race? Was it Chrome? It was Chrome, wasn't it?
46:47SPEAKERChrome for a long time. You couldn't tell you could hardly it was really hard to know what version of Chrome you had because they updated it silently in the background all the time.
46:54SPEAKERYeah. And then Firefox followed. And now everything just does that because it's like because it turns out if you if you don't automatically update for people,
47:05SPEAKERmost people will never update and most people don't give a shit. And also nobody writes good patch notes anymore.
47:10SPEAKERSo it's like a triple whammy of people not caring about the thing that they're doing, but doing it anyway.
47:15SPEAKERYeah. I mean, I get it in the browser space. I mean, that's probably the most vulnerable place in all of software.
47:21SPEAKERYeah. Right now, like we're in terms of like the rapid deployment of new exploits, like constant security vulnerabilities like that.
47:27SPEAKERLike there's nothing that needs to be kept up to date more than your Web browser. Right.
47:31SPEAKERIt's yeah, it's the front line, man. It's like the battle of the bulge. There's guys in trenches on either side of the wall there.
47:40SPEAKERSo, yeah, like the automatic updates are good. I don't I guess my point is, I don't think that there's anything else quite like fast mail that I've seen.
47:47SPEAKERYeah, that's that's the thing that that was my takeaway out of this. And that's why, like I said, I literally set up signed up for the trial and then signed up to just pay for it.
47:57SPEAKERSo I was like, I'm never not using this within an hour and a half or something ridiculous.
48:02SPEAKERYeah, I think they've been around for quite a while. Right. So there's probably not a lot of concern about them going away.
48:06SPEAKERBut then again, you know, that's like that is, again, the beauty of owning your domain. If they did somehow implode, you could just port that somewhere else.
48:13SPEAKERI'll just start my own. Just open up my own mail server hosted here in the house. It'll be that'll be great. It'll be fine.
48:21SPEAKERI'm sure that AT&T will love that. Yeah, they've been around since like the mid 2000s is my is my recollection. I think 2005 or something.
48:29SPEAKERI think they're Australian, but I'm not 100 percent on that. Here we go. Our company, they've been around leading independent mail service since 1999.
48:37SPEAKEROh, wow. And they're in Melbourne.
48:39SPEAKERGot that good 90s Internet legacy. Yeah. These some of these people look like they've been there. This guy.
48:45SPEAKERYeah. The abuse person looks like he's been there since 1999. He looks like he looks like the person that's been hanging out in the back of the server room for a really long time.
48:55SPEAKERMa'am, I know I talked a lot about the electronics flea market on this week's next land of ramble cast.
49:00SPEAKERWhat can I talk about? I want to talk about the flea market was really good this week.
49:05SPEAKERCan we talk about that Unix sysadmin? Did you talk to him? Oh, speaking of people who administrated email servers in the 90s.
49:12SPEAKEROh, is this the guy you were talking about? That DC alpha machine? Yes. Yes. The guy that he had a digital deck alpha workstation.
49:18SPEAKERYeah. Or actually said it was really more of a server.
49:21SPEAKERHe had a spark station tower there as well. Ultra spark three. Yeah. But he had like good long Unix sysadmin hair.
49:29SPEAKERYep. And basically said he had he was from the Boston area. He had dropped out of like the KPI. Is that one of the schools there?
49:36SPEAKERSure. Is that it was not RPI. It was the other one. I don't know. RPI is in Rochester, so it's in New York.
49:43SPEAKERSo anyway, anyway, he had worked at ISPs in the 90s running email servers on such Unix machines as a deck alpha.
49:51SPEAKERAnd he had he had some great stories. I saw the two versions of Unix sitting on top of that machine,
49:56SPEAKERthe compact Unix and the other one. And I and I asked him if that machine would run Windows NT for just to see what the reaction was.
50:03SPEAKERHe didn't seem super excited about it. He was not enthusiastic about it. Running NT on that machine.
50:08SPEAKERNo, I mean, those machines ran hot for back in the back at that time.
50:13SPEAKERThat was when like dual penny and we had dual penny and 133 servers in the in the Department of Biology.
50:19SPEAKERAnd those things would not have they might have had a little bit of a heat sink, but no fan.
50:25SPEAKERAnd that DC machine had like a had a shoot that was all heat sink, all down the side with fans on either end.
50:32SPEAKERIt was like a wind tunnel. It was amazing. There was good stuff this week, this week at the flea market this month.
50:39SPEAKERIt was a good time. The last thing I'll say about him, he had very strong opinions about the vastly superior floating point performance of the alphas to the Pentiums at the time.
50:48SPEAKERAnd you dug up a 30 year old 30 year old holy war with that.
50:55SPEAKERYeah, that's such great stories like talking to him. It was the two Unixes on that.
51:00SPEAKERThe two box Unixes he had were Compaq, Unix, and I think it was the digital one.
51:04SPEAKERYeah, the DC one. Yeah, I don't know what digital called their Unix, but he said that the people he worked with, like they were right down the road from digital.
51:12SPEAKERWow. They got huge discounts on the workstations because their guys were literally feeding patches to their Unix back to digital.
51:19SPEAKEROh, because digital was a, was a Boston company, right? Because they ran the, but you know, they were a big Unix vendor.
51:25SPEAKERSo yeah, so like that was the kind of shop he was working where they were literally adding to the Unix that they were using and funneling it back to the vendor.
51:33SPEAKERI, the TV I bought, can we get an update? I plugged it in, I turned it on, it made static and sound.
51:42SPEAKEROkay. I don't have any way to get any other picture into it yet. So I'll let you know in a bit.
51:47SPEAKERWhat are the leads on that thing? Just antenna leads?
51:50SPEAKERI have to do RF modulated to get it in. Okay. So the good news is I have a working VCR that can do the RF modulation.
51:57SPEAKEROkay. So I didn't have to buy anything for that or have a weird little box.
52:00SPEAKERTo be clear, I've only ever experienced RF through coax on the back of TVs, but it's the same signal, right?
52:08SPEAKERIt's just different, different connectors, different metallic connectors.
52:11SPEAKERWell, so you have to buy a thing that has a big resistor in it. I think that that does some electronics business and you plug that into the end of the coax and then it has two leads and you put those leads under the antenna screws and then you tune your TV to channel three or channel four.
52:27SPEAKERYeah. I remember that part. To get the signal. Yeah. Okay. Assuming I remember how to do this, right? We'll find out.
52:33SPEAKERWell, how does the snow look on it? It's really good. It's like, it's the remnants of the big bang, big bang. What's not to love?
52:39SPEAKERYeah, of course. You know, I got the Mr. All tuned up. It's ready to go.
52:43SPEAKERThat's exciting. Yeah. I'm very, I'm pretty thrilled. I realized that, that, that I don't have any, like anything that would plug into antenna leads on the back of a TV.
52:54SPEAKERI don't have, I don't have data. I don't have anything that works from that era. Cause I, I, all of the cables that I've ever had as a functioning human that wasn't a child living in his parents' house are RCA or newer. So, so it's a disappointment.
53:09SPEAKERI also, I posted a picture of that, that wafer carrier that we saw. There were a couple of, I think 200 mil wafer carriers that were just on the ground there in the shit I stole from work, but haven't 20 years ago and haven't unloaded yet section of the flea market.
53:23SPEAKERWhich to be clear is like 60% of the flea market.
53:26SPEAKER90% probably. Yeah. I posted pictures of that and then people kept sending me pictures of like different solutions for carrying those caddies around fabs because it's like, they're like packetized, they're like packetized transit systems for wafers and different levels of, of completion.
53:46SPEAKERSo they go into one machine and then they get loaded in one of these caddies and they go up on a conveyor belt and the conveyor belt has like shunts and different places to put stuff.
53:54SPEAKERAnd then it drops it off at the machine and the machine grabs it and does stuff to the wafers. And then it puts it back on the conveyor belt and it goes someplace else. And it's all, it's like, it's like packet switched containers for wafers.
54:05SPEAKERIt's incredible. To be clear, is this all still happening in a clean room or are we beyond that at this point?
54:10SPEAKERSo these things, they make these, my understanding, I'm not an expert on this, my understanding is they make these that can go outside of the clean area, but for the most part, these, this is all inside the clean area. Yeah.
54:22SPEAKERGot it. Okay. We, we badly flubbed what that was. I showed, I did a little show and tell on the RambleCast. I showed some photos.
54:31SPEAKERYeah. We thought that might be LP related or something.
54:35SPEAKEROh no, no, no, no.
54:36SPEAKERDid not realize that was for wafers of microprocessors.
54:39SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. So the inside that will be clean. Right. And I can send you videos. Somebody, somebody replied to that, that post. That was the post I had of that on Blue Sky with a video of an IBM, some IBM.
54:57SPEAKERI'm trying to find it, but it's called, it's called the IBM fish kill 300 millimeter fab promo. If you search for that on YouTube, you'll get it. And it's remarkable.
55:09SPEAKERCause it's just these, it's just these huge bins full of wafers going around the fab and being carried around by robots. And it's, it's the business.
55:20SPEAKERThat's crazy. I will link that in the show notes. Yeah. The flea market was really good. I was stoked to this one. I was worth getting up for, and it fixed, fixed my daylight savings jet lag. So that was nice too.
55:33SPEAKERGot the shiny copy of Return to Zork just sitting here now. I don't know what I'll ever do with it, but I've got it.
55:37SPEAKERYou can go on the shelf next to the fudge hog.
55:39SPEAKERThat's right.
55:40SPEAKERI've had the TV just for people who don't know, I bought the TV that I like played Nintendo on as a child.
55:47SPEAKERA little 13 inch GE with some very nice faux wood paneling.
55:51SPEAKERYeah. Wood, wood grain on the sides. It has a real good clicky knob or three real good clicky knobs, I guess.
55:57SPEAKERThe power knob on that thing. We had, we, I must, I think it may have been a GE. We had like a 19 inch GE growing up.
56:05SPEAKERAnd the knob when you just, from off to on, when you turn that, it's a power knob that doubles as a volume knob, right?
56:13SPEAKERIf I remember. The click when you go from TV off to turning it on and then turning the volume up is unlike anything else.
56:20SPEAKERIt's an incredible click. So I came home, I brought that home and I was expecting, A,
56:25SPEAKERI was expecting that Gina would probably be a little pissed at me for buying something stupid, which she was cool about.
56:31SPEAKERAnd I expected the kiddo to have no interest at all in it. And the kiddo was fascinated because she's like, what is that?
56:37SPEAKERI said, wait. And she said, you mean like that? And she pointed the big giant flat screen on the wall. I was like, yeah, that's what,
56:43SPEAKERthat's what I played Nintendo on as a kid. And she's like, can you make it work? And I was like, well, not yet. It's going to take,
56:48SPEAKERI got to order some specialty parts. But yeah, it was, it was I plugged it in to see if static,
56:55SPEAKERsee if the tube was any good and the static came up and the noise came out and the clicks are the knob clicks are delightful.
57:02SPEAKERYep. I clicked it a couple of times myself. It was, it was like coming home. So was that maybe the actual first time she had ever seen a CRT?
57:10SPEAKERShe's seen arcade games. So she's seen, we've gone to a bunch of classic arcades that have real CRTs,
57:18SPEAKERbut it's the first time she's gotten, it's definitely the first time she's had a TV that you can turn a knob, a volume knob to click it on.
57:26SPEAKERAnd I had to stop her from turning it on and off 50 times. Cause she's like, this is such a good click. I was like, we're going to do that.
57:32SPEAKERI'm going to unplug it, please. Let me, yeah, this is old. This is 50 years old. So anyway,
57:39SPEAKERI guess that's as good a place as any to wrap it up for this week. But yeah, if you have questions about Fast Meal,
57:44SPEAKERhit me in the discord or you can check that the newsletter about it.
57:49SPEAKERThere's comments underneath that and they will explain. There's a lot of people talking about it.
57:54SPEAKERI'm going to take a good look at that because I've got way too, I've got,
57:59SPEAKERI'm trying to sit here and count in my head how many different email addresses I actually use for one thing or another.
58:03SPEAKERAnd it's a lot across multiple hosts, multiple companies, as in companies I co-own,
58:09SPEAKERlike personal email addresses, like, you know, personal for record keeping, personal for personal.
58:15SPEAKERLike consolidating email is a pressing concern for a lot of people, I think at this point. So I may have to look at Fast Meal.
58:21SPEAKERIt's a real, it's a real problem. And it's, I ought to say I didn't realize it until I started looking for jobs last year.
58:28SPEAKERAnd I was like, God, my email's a mess. I got to figure this out. And then I just, it took me a while to get to it.
58:34SPEAKERBut it's nice. It's nice to have it all come in and have the spam filtering, the spam filtering is really good.
58:41SPEAKERThey have the unsubscribe thing where if you have a mailing list that you've signed up for, somebody signed you up for,
58:46SPEAKERyou can just right click on it and go to unsubscribe and it'll, it'll do the auto unsubscribe for you.
58:52SPEAKERAnd if it shows up again, it'll say, Hey, you unsubscribe from this. You want to report spam on them?
58:57SPEAKERAnd then you're like, yeah, report spam on them. Get them out of here.
59:01SPEAKERBut you know what we'll never do is report spam on your emails. If you want to send us email, you can send it to techbot@content.town.
59:09SPEAKERWe do questions at the end of the month. And this is also the part of the show where I remind everybody that this is a listener supported show.
59:15SPEAKERWe wouldn't be here without the support of you, our incredibly generous listeners.
59:20SPEAKERVery, very true.
59:21SPEAKERIf you want to find out how you can support the show and what you get, you can go to patreon.com/techbot where for $5 a month,
59:29SPEAKERyou get access to the fabulous tech pod discord,
59:31SPEAKERwhich is full of delightful nerds and wonderful human beings who talk about stuff like fast mail and old CRTs and what the best update script is to run on your Mr.
59:41SPEAKERAnd probably, I don't know yet, but probably why my PSX cores on the Mr. Aren't working right when I try to play Ape Escape.
59:48SPEAKERWhat's going on?
59:49SPEAKERIt's just black screen. I have a BIOS in there.
59:51SPEAKEROh, you do have the BIOS?
59:53SPEAKERYeah. Well, I mean, I ran update all and there's a BIOS in there now.
59:57SPEAKERThat was my first guess. So beyond that, I'm not sure.
1:00:00SPEAKERYeah, I'll figure it out. I mean, look, these are tractable problems, but sometimes it's nice to have somebody in your corner and the techbot discord has that.
1:00:08SPEAKERThat's right.
1:00:09SPEAKERIf you again, it's patreon.com/techbot.
1:00:13SPEAKERYou also get access to the Patreon exclusive episode where I think at some point we're probably going to talk about making Mr's work with CRTs.
1:00:21SPEAKERYeah, that might be a real episode because I don't want to jinx it or jump the gun, but I may.
1:00:27SPEAKERYou got a source?
1:00:28SPEAKERI may also have a lead on a smaller CRT in the near future.
1:00:32SPEAKERWell, I realized I have this TV now. I still have my 19 inch CRT that I had when I was in college. Like that's in my storage unit.
1:00:42SPEAKEROh, really?
1:00:43SPEAKERIt's just been aging out there. Yeah.
1:00:45SPEAKERIt's just that much better now.
1:00:47SPEAKERYeah, it's going to be so good. And then let's see, I had a 36 inch Panasonic CRT, which realistically I can't imagine any of those have survived because that thing weighed like 300 pounds and it was a disaster.
1:01:00SPEAKERWait, is it still in your possession?
1:01:02SPEAKERNo, when we moved to California, I didn't want to have to carry it up the stairs into the apartment that we lived in. So I gave it to my sister-in-law and she got rid of it when she left Tennessee five years later.
1:01:14SPEAKERI see.
1:01:15SPEAKERBut even if I saw one of those, like Gina was cool about the 11 inch TV. If I came in with the 300 pound 36 inch TV that we have to have the floor reinforced for, she would be rightly upset. And I couldn't argue with that.
1:01:30SPEAKERI've helped move a 36 inch TV before. Nobody should have that.
1:01:33SPEAKERYeah. But then I also had that Mitsubishi 55 inch rear projection. I think I had that when we first, when I first knew you. So like maybe we had gotten rid of it by then. But, but the point is I'm like two TVs away from having every TV I've ever owned.
1:01:48SPEAKERDamn.
1:01:49SPEAKERHaving a complete collection.
1:01:50SPEAKERThat's pretty good.
1:01:51SPEAKERI don't buy that many TVs, it turns out.
1:01:53SPEAKERYeah, that's fair. A little 13 inch Emerson that I grew up, well, actually I didn't grow up with it. I won it from school because of getting interviewed. I got into some raffle for, I think I had perfect attendance.
1:02:04SPEAKEROoh, la-di-da.
1:02:06SPEAKERThe way my mom tells it, I maniacally went to school no matter what for an entire semester so I could get entered into that raffle. And then sure enough won the TV because I wanted my own TV to play video games on.
1:02:16SPEAKERHow many kids were in the raffle? Do you know?
1:02:18SPEAKERNot many.
1:02:19SPEAKEROh, you had like a 50 50 on that one?
1:02:21SPEAKERVery, very few is my understanding.
1:02:23SPEAKERI mean, it was hard to have perfect attendance back then because back then my mom would be like, if somebody had the slightest sniffle, she'd be like, don't go to school. You get real sick.
1:02:31SPEAKERI'm not proud to say it, but my understanding is that I soldier through just about everything to make it to school. Also, I think there was a choice. I think if you won the raffle, there was a choice of a couple things. And so I chose the TV.
1:02:42SPEAKERYou didn't take the elephant?
1:02:44SPEAKERIt was a, it was a crappy little 13 inch Emerson, but it was finally my own TV to play video games on.
1:02:49SPEAKERI respect that. I would never have been allowed to have a TV of my own. That would, the TVs are always in communal areas when I was a child.
1:02:57SPEAKERAnd anyway, yeah, once we, if, if, and when we both have CRTs that we mess with, we should get into that. That's a whole rabbit hole. I've been looking into it a little bit.
1:03:05SPEAKERLike the mister you can only get VGA out of and converting from VGA to, for example, components or S-video, not as simple as you might think.
1:03:14SPEAKERWell, alternately you can buy a new, uh, IO hat for the mister.
1:03:20SPEAKERWell, even there, I mean, it's that's better.
1:03:23SPEAKERYeah. Then cause I have like the, it has the Sega, the Sega 10 pin DIN, which as I recall was a C-tier port, if I think is where we ended up, maybe D.
1:03:32SPEAKERSure.
1:03:33SPEAKERUm, yeah.
1:03:34SPEAKERThe IO board does make it easier than if you use the direct video with the VGA adapter, but it's still, depending on what you're going into, there's still some converting you have to do.
1:03:43SPEAKERYeah. And I'm sure I'm going to have to set up alternate configurations for the mister and all that. So anyway, that's a project for another day though.
1:03:50SPEAKERUm, as always, when we get to the end of the show, we thank our, our, uh, our producer tier patrons.
1:03:56SPEAKERSo thanks to our executive producers, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Cammack, and Pantheon Makers at the HS3 High Speed 3D printer.
1:04:09SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.
1:04:10SPEAKERYeah, thank you.
1:04:11SPEAKERUh, and I guess that'll do it for us this week, Brad.
1:04:13SPEAKERYes, yes it will. Sorry if my voice has sounded a little off. I'm just having a bad voice day.
1:04:17SPEAKERYou sound good. You sound, you sound, once, once you got going, you sounded fine.
1:04:20SPEAKERYeah. Okay.
1:04:21SPEAKERYou just had to, had to work the crud out, you know?
1:04:23SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. It's a constant struggle.
1:04:25SPEAKERUh, we will be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. See y'all next time. And as always, please consider the environment before renting this podcast.
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