00:00SPEAKERI guess we're doing dark mode today.
00:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I turned on the camera and I turned on the call
00:07SPEAKERand I just saw Brad lit only by the light screen
00:11SPEAKERof what I assume is a light mode monitor.
00:13SPEAKER- See, I've got a Google Doc.
00:15SPEAKEROkay, 'cause as we have well-documented,
00:17SPEAKERGoogle Docs does not have a dark mode.
00:19SPEAKERSo I'm staring at our list of questions
00:22SPEAKERin this giant white browser window.
00:24SPEAKERCheck this out.
00:26SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
00:27SPEAKER- That's a dark tab.
00:28SPEAKER- Oh, hello.
00:30SPEAKER- There's no lighting in this room
00:31SPEAKERother than from these monitors
00:32SPEAKERbecause it's like seven in the morning here.
00:34SPEAKER- There's one strand of fairy lights
00:36SPEAKERin the background behind you.
00:37SPEAKER- Yeah, true.
00:38SPEAKERYes, I haven't, I didn't do my hair yet.
00:39SPEAKERYou're wearing a V-neck white t-shirt.
00:42SPEAKER- The white V-neck t-shirt that I slept in.
00:45SPEAKER- Straight out of bed.
00:46SPEAKERYou've got travel coming up, business travel.
00:48SPEAKERAnd so our recording schedule is a bit wonkier than usual.
00:52SPEAKER- Yeah, we haven't had to do it early, early in a long time.
00:54SPEAKER7 a.m. used to be our go-to during the pandemic
00:57SPEAKERwhen I was working at Stray Bomb Bay and had like
00:59SPEAKERa full-time nine to five job.
01:01SPEAKERBut yeah, we haven't done it this early in a minute.
01:04SPEAKERBut it's, you know, anytime is podcast time.
01:07SPEAKERAll I need is a microphone and a...
01:09SPEAKER- That's right.
01:10SPEAKER- Well, I guess a microphone.
01:11SPEAKER- Last night, there was a fun moment last night
01:13SPEAKER'cause we did the patron episode late last night
01:15SPEAKERand you commented as we were shutting down,
01:18SPEAKERyou commented that you got to see
01:19SPEAKERhow off our clocks were because you surmised
01:22SPEAKERthat all the lights in this office room went off for me
01:26SPEAKERat one time and you surmised that they were all
01:28SPEAKERon a smart timer, which they are.
01:30SPEAKERAnd you were able to see how offset our clocks are
01:34SPEAKERby watching my lights go off.
01:35SPEAKER- Yeah, either my Windows clock hasn't updated in a minute
01:38SPEAKERor your Pi or whatever's running your cameras
01:41SPEAKERis off by about 10 seconds, so.
01:44SPEAKER- Yeah, well, there's, I mean, there's, well,
01:45SPEAKERthere's gotta be some amount of latency there,
01:47SPEAKERnot that much.
01:48SPEAKERI have a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant.
01:51SPEAKERSo I guess it's going by whatever time
01:53SPEAKERthat Pi is pulling through NTP
01:56SPEAKERand then what's the latency to the smart plugs?
01:58SPEAKERThat's gotta be measured in dozens
02:00SPEAKERof milliseconds at most, right?
02:02SPEAKER- Tony, I actually don't know how often my Raspberry Pi,
02:05SPEAKERmy Home Assistant Raspberry Pi updates time.
02:07SPEAKERI assume it does it daily.
02:09SPEAKERProbably not more than that.
02:10SPEAKER- Well, you're on what?
02:11SPEAKERHome Assistant OS, like you're on the all-in-one,
02:14SPEAKERlike the integrated image.
02:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm running a yellow.
02:17SPEAKER- But it's whatever your NTP facility
02:19SPEAKERon that Linux install is set to query at.
02:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I haven't touched it,
02:22SPEAKERso I wonder what their default is
02:23SPEAKER'cause it's like time matters for that stuff.
02:25SPEAKER- Not to just merge this podcast
02:27SPEAKERwith the dual boot diaries entirely,
02:28SPEAKERbut I did hear you say the word time, date CTL
02:32SPEAKERon that podcast recently, which-
02:34SPEAKER- Yeah, I did the way that you said not to do.
02:36SPEAKER- I think means that you're using system D time sync D
02:39SPEAKERto manage NTPs, so we could probably find out
02:41SPEAKERwhat the query interval is for that.
02:44SPEAKER- That's on my desktop on the Pi.
02:45SPEAKERIt's a whole different thing 'cause the Pi's managed.
02:47SPEAKERI don't ever, I don't think I've ever logged
02:50SPEAKERinto a terminal, into a shell on the Pi.
02:52SPEAKER- There's a very good chance that you're using time sync D
02:54SPEAKERon the Home System OS as well 'cause that's kind
02:56SPEAKERof the standard built-in system D way to do it
02:59SPEAKERon most distros these days.
03:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I wonder if they're based on Raspbian
03:02SPEAKERor whatever Raspberry Pi OS or whatever they call it now.
03:06SPEAKER- Probably, I don't know actually.
03:08SPEAKERThat's a whole other topic, like distros for Raspberry Pis
03:11SPEAKERis its own topic because-
03:13SPEAKER- Really is.
03:14SPEAKER- There's like Ubuntu has an official Raspberry Pi image.
03:16SPEAKERI think Fedora might.
03:18SPEAKERThere's probably actually quite a few these days,
03:20SPEAKERbut I really still like running the official Raspberry Pi OS
03:24SPEAKERjust 'cause it seems like the most tailored
03:26SPEAKERto the hardware.
03:29SPEAKER- Yeah, it just has a Linux-based OS.
03:31SPEAKERI wonder if they rolled some of them from scratch.
03:33SPEAKEROh, it's not based on a regular Linux distro like Ubuntu.
03:36SPEAKERIt's built using build root
03:38SPEAKERand is optimized to run Home Assistant.
03:40SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, so they did roll their own.
03:41SPEAKERThat's cool.
03:42SPEAKERIt's kind of like the Mr.
03:43SPEAKERor like the Mr. runs the most stripped down possible
03:46SPEAKERLinux install imaginable.
03:47SPEAKERLike they also cobbled that thing together from parts,
03:50SPEAKERwhich is pretty cool.
03:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I think they did this because they use Docker
03:53SPEAKERfor a lot of running.
03:55SPEAKERLike they needed Docker optimizations
03:57SPEAKERthat I bet are not in Raspberry Pi OS by default.
03:59SPEAKER- There's also just like a ton of stuff
04:01SPEAKERfor an embedded device like a Mr. or Home Assistant,
04:04SPEAKERyellow or whatever you're doing.
04:05SPEAKERLike there's just a ton of user space stuff
04:08SPEAKERthat you don't need cluttering up a thing
04:10SPEAKERthat is meant to just run headless.
04:12SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I mean, that's the Linux benefit, right?
04:15SPEAKERYou need to have just what you need.
04:16SPEAKER- That's right.
04:17SPEAKERThis is one step closer to doing Linux from scratch.
04:20SPEAKERLet's go.
04:22SPEAKER- You didn't have a response for that.
04:24SPEAKER- I, oh, oh no.
04:28SPEAKER- All right, I'm just leaving that in.
04:30SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
04:31SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:52SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
04:59SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Bot.
05:01SPEAKERI'm Will.
05:02SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
05:03SPEAKERThat was a really an amazing thousand yard stare.
05:05SPEAKER- I'm just, I'm just shaking.
05:06SPEAKERI was shaking my head.
05:07SPEAKERI was so shook from that.
05:09SPEAKERI couldn't even shake my head.
05:10SPEAKERI was just like, I don't have anything to say about.
05:14SPEAKER- The very words Linux from scratch
05:15SPEAKERjust strike terror into the hearts of everyday users.
05:20SPEAKER- I had a Gentoo phase, right?
05:22SPEAKERI used to compile my own Linux kernel
05:24SPEAKERon a Pentium 200 or 266 or whatever it was I had back then.
05:28SPEAKERIt took like 12 hours.
05:29SPEAKERIt was not a great experience.
05:32SPEAKERProbably a little better now.
05:33SPEAKER- I might stop invoking Linux from scratch
05:35SPEAKERactually for people like somebody popped up,
05:37SPEAKERagain, sorry to just talk Linux
05:39SPEAKERand do boot diaries constantly.
05:41SPEAKERI've been in it a lot lately,
05:42SPEAKERbut on the PC world discord in that channel,
05:44SPEAKERsomebody popped up who is an engineer by day
05:47SPEAKERand was saying like, hey, I don't know what kind of engineer
05:49SPEAKERI have now it could be some kind of hardware
05:51SPEAKERor electrical or something. - Be a train driver, yeah.
05:53SPEAKER- Also possible, steam engineer.
05:55SPEAKER- Yeah.
05:56SPEAKER- But they said like, hey, I'm an engineer.
05:58SPEAKERI'm used to knowing how things work,
05:59SPEAKERbut I'm moving to Linux and I have no idea how things work.
06:02SPEAKERAnd I would love to gain a better understanding of it.
06:03SPEAKERAnd I started to say, well,
06:05SPEAKERyou could go through Linux from scratch
06:06SPEAKERif you really want to understand all the component parts.
06:09SPEAKERBut then the more I started reading about it,
06:11SPEAKERthe more I got the sense that Linux from scratch
06:12SPEAKERis actually about how to build a Linux system from source.
06:16SPEAKERLike it's more about,
06:17SPEAKERI think it's more about like the build environment
06:19SPEAKERand how to compile all the parts.
06:20SPEAKERIt's more about compiling software potentially
06:22SPEAKERthan it is about just like learning
06:24SPEAKERwhat your computer is made of.
06:26SPEAKER- That makes sense.
06:27SPEAKER- I think like there are a bunch of books out there,
06:28SPEAKERlike how Linux works and like the Linux Bible
06:31SPEAKERand stuff like that, that I think might be more appropriate.
06:33SPEAKERIf you just want to like know what is systemd,
06:35SPEAKERwhat is udev, like stuff like that.
06:36SPEAKERI think maybe those books might be a better option
06:39SPEAKERthan LFS.
06:41SPEAKER- The hard part of the whole thing though,
06:43SPEAKERis that there's like, there's five things,
06:46SPEAKERfive different things that do the thing
06:47SPEAKERthat systemd does, right?
06:50SPEAKERSo, I mean, maybe not five.
06:52SPEAKER- How do you mean?
06:53SPEAKER- I'm just saying like most of the core low-level systems
06:57SPEAKERseem to have multiple variants that do the same thing
07:01SPEAKERor similar things or newer versions or older versions or.
07:04SPEAKER- In some domains, yeah.
07:06SPEAKERNetwork configuration is,
07:08SPEAKERI could name six different ways right now
07:10SPEAKERto configure a network on Linux.
07:12SPEAKEROkay, maybe I should save all this.
07:14SPEAKER- Yeah, this isn't the podcast to talk about Linux.
07:16SPEAKER- This is my stealth, like I shouldn't say it.
07:20SPEAKERStealth attempt to get onto that podcast,
07:22SPEAKERbut maybe that's not a bad idea.
07:23SPEAKER- It's gonna happen, okay?
07:24SPEAKER- Oh boy.
07:25SPEAKER- Adam and I talk about it every, yeah.
07:28SPEAKERWe have our first few guests coming up, so.
07:31SPEAKER- Do you know how long that show's gonna run
07:34SPEAKERor is it open-ended until you feel like
07:36SPEAKERyou've reached the end?
07:37SPEAKER- The joke that we made at the beginning
07:40SPEAKERwas that we're gonna end the show by deleting
07:42SPEAKERone of the partitions on our hard drive.
07:44SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I know that.
07:45SPEAKERWhat I mean is, are you giving yourselves eight weeks
07:47SPEAKERor is it like just, hey, we're just gonna keep doing this
07:48SPEAKERuntil we feel like it's time?
07:50SPEAKER- Yeah, I think my thought is that once it stops being
07:54SPEAKERabout dual booting and that transition,
07:57SPEAKERit just becomes like a practical Linux user podcast
07:59SPEAKERor something like that, so it could be open-ended.
08:01SPEAKERI don't know, we'll see what people,
08:02SPEAKERlike if people listen to it, we'll keep doing it, right?
08:04SPEAKERThat's the rule of podcasting, so.
08:07SPEAKERYou can find it wherever podcasts are found.
08:08SPEAKERI'm gonna stop plugging this.
08:09SPEAKERThis is, the streams are crossing.
08:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I apologize.
08:13SPEAKERIt's just something I'm enthusiastic about
08:15SPEAKERon a personal level.
08:16SPEAKERIt's not even like an attempt to cross-pollinate content
08:19SPEAKERor something.
08:20SPEAKER- No, I mean, look, I love cross-pollinating content,
08:22SPEAKERthat's great. - I mean, that's probably
08:23SPEAKERalso good, but anyway.
08:26SPEAKER- Yeah, no, we started it because we were kind of both
08:30SPEAKERdeeply dissatisfied with Windows, right?
08:32SPEAKERAnd which brings us to why we're here today,
08:36SPEAKER'cause we have questions from people who are deeply
08:38SPEAKERdissatisfied from Windows, among other things.
08:40SPEAKERThere are also questions from people who wanna know
08:42SPEAKERif like a gazpacho's a smoothie.
08:44SPEAKERWe're not gonna do that one, I don't think.
08:46SPEAKER- I really don't know that I am ready for like
08:48SPEAKERis blank a soup discourse?
08:50SPEAKER- It's too early in the morning for that.
08:52SPEAKER- I feel like we've barely freed ourselves
08:54SPEAKERfrom is blank a sandwich discourse, so anyway.
08:57SPEAKER- I still feel like, yeah, anyway.
09:02SPEAKER- Anyway, a lot of questions this month.
09:03SPEAKERThis is the Q&A episode, by the way,
09:04SPEAKERbut a lot of questions this month that are not about Linux,
09:08SPEAKERjust for people who don't want to hear about that endlessly.
09:11SPEAKER- Yeah, if you have questions, you can send an email
09:13SPEAKERto techpod@content.town, that's techpod@content.town,
09:17SPEAKERor if you're a member of the Patreon,
09:19SPEAKERif you're supporting the show,
09:20SPEAKER'cause we are a listener-supported show,
09:23SPEAKERyou can go into the Q Seeking A's channel in the Discord
09:26SPEAKERand post your questions there.
09:26SPEAKERThey'll disappear, but we'll see them
09:28SPEAKERat the end of the month, and then we will pull them
09:30SPEAKERinto a blazing white 7 a.m. Google document,
09:34SPEAKERand we'll turn them into A's, so there we go.
09:38SPEAKERYou got a Q lined up?
09:40SPEAKER- This is an email from Tim.
09:42SPEAKER- Tim.
09:43SPEAKER- I know I'm a couple of weeks late on this,
09:45SPEAKERbut I still wanted to share my stories around Windows 95.
09:48SPEAKERAlthough I started in computers
09:50SPEAKERback in the Commodore 64 days,
09:51SPEAKERand on the IT type side of things,
09:53SPEAKERin high school with Windows 311,
09:56SPEAKERI have some serious memories of Windows 95 as well.
09:59SPEAKERI especially identified with some of your networking stories
10:01SPEAKERas in my last year of college,
10:03SPEAKERmy university brought internet access to the dorms.
10:07SPEAKERMy roommates realized the IT staff was small
10:09SPEAKERand created a company that the IT department
10:13SPEAKERwould send the students to in order
10:15SPEAKERto purchase a network card and get it installed
10:17SPEAKERand configured in their systems for ResNet access.
10:20SPEAKER- That is incredible.
10:21SPEAKER- That is like brilliant, like what is the term there?
10:23SPEAKERThat's not a middleman exactly, that's a...
10:25SPEAKER- That's a middleman.
10:26SPEAKER- Is it a middleman, I guess?
10:27SPEAKER- It's an independent contractor.
10:28SPEAKERIt's like a...
10:30SPEAKER- Okay, independent contractor.
10:31SPEAKERMy lights just came on, did your lights also just come on?
10:33SPEAKER- No, my lights are on.
10:34SPEAKERI have to hit a button to turn the lights on in here.
10:36SPEAKER- You will see that my office is now lit
10:38SPEAKERas it's normally lit.
10:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
10:40SPEAKER- Anyway, I feel like a middleman doesn't actually do work.
10:46SPEAKERAm I selling middlemen short?
10:47SPEAKERI always feel like a middleman is somebody
10:48SPEAKERwho just like sits in between
10:50SPEAKERand doesn't necessarily do the labor.
10:53SPEAKER- I mean, look, they're an independent contractor
10:56SPEAKERis what this is, right?
10:57SPEAKER- That sounds more right,
10:59SPEAKERbut this is kind of brilliant, I feel like.
11:02SPEAKER- And the independent contract, so it's funny
11:04SPEAKER'cause at my university when they started doing that,
11:06SPEAKERthey just made the kids who were on work study
11:09SPEAKERin the IT department do that
11:11SPEAKERand computer services do that work.
11:13SPEAKERAnd they were miserable.
11:15SPEAKER- Yeah, if you're doing the work directly
11:16SPEAKERfor the big entity and you're at their mercy
11:19SPEAKERor the mercy of their terms,
11:21SPEAKERbut if you create your own company to do that work,
11:23SPEAKERthen you start commanding the terms.
11:25SPEAKER- Yeah, so I'm sure they got paid like 40, 50 bucks an hour
11:28SPEAKERdepending on what year it was.
11:30SPEAKERAnd I bet they charged a lovely markup
11:32SPEAKERon the network cards too.
11:33SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I bet, man, that's brilliant.
11:36SPEAKER- Tim goes on here.
11:37SPEAKER"I have nightmares of how difficult it was
11:39SPEAKERto get a network card into some of those mid 90s desktops.
11:42SPEAKERI still have a special hatred for Compaq to this day
11:46SPEAKERbecause of how crammed full their cases were
11:48SPEAKERmaking it nearly impossible to add an expansion card
11:50SPEAKERof any kind and the scars to prove it.
11:53SPEAKERNevermind the ones where the expansion slots
11:55SPEAKERwere on some kind of vertical daughter board
11:58SPEAKERthat plugged in at a 90 degree angle to the motherboard."
12:01SPEAKERActually like this jogged a bunch of memories.
12:03SPEAKERI never owned a Compaq, but I knew people who had them
12:05SPEAKERand I remember always hearing, it wasn't just Compaq,
12:08SPEAKERit was like-
12:09SPEAKER- Oh, all the pizza box cases were like that, yeah.
12:12SPEAKER- All the big name PC makers in the 90s
12:14SPEAKERwere doing weird proprietary internals on their systems,
12:17SPEAKERright, like they were-
12:18SPEAKER- No, not all of them.
12:18SPEAKER- Not all of them.
12:19SPEAKERLike I think Gateway was pretty good about being open.
12:22SPEAKER- Dell and Compaq were both notorious
12:24SPEAKERand like Packard Bell and eMachines and all those kinds of,
12:28SPEAKERlike the cheaper stuff were doing all weird stuff.
12:31SPEAKERAnd then Gateway and HP to a lesser extent
12:34SPEAKERhad pretty good reputations
12:35SPEAKERfor doing like user serviceable machines.
12:38SPEAKER- Micron, I think, but yes, I remember hearing
12:40SPEAKERhow non-standard the guts of all those PCs were back then.
12:43SPEAKERAnd like, if you cared about upgrade,
12:46SPEAKERI guess this is like coming from the mid 90s,
12:47SPEAKERlike 3D accelerator explosion,
12:49SPEAKERlike the reputation was always like,
12:51SPEAKER"Hey, don't buy a Compaq or something like that
12:53SPEAKERif you want to buy a new graphics card to put in it."
12:56SPEAKER- It was, I had a AST Pentium 60 for a while
13:00SPEAKERthat was a pizza box with one of those riser cards
13:03SPEAKERand getting a Voodoo card into that was really challenging
13:07SPEAKERbecause I couldn't, like the cable
13:09SPEAKERthat was the jumper cable that did the pass through
13:11SPEAKERfor the VGA that came with the Voodoo card
13:14SPEAKERwasn't quite long enough to reach from one,
13:20SPEAKERI guess it was a PCI slot to another PCI slot.
13:23SPEAKERAnyway.
13:24SPEAKER- Yeah, that was always the problem.
13:26SPEAKERStuff just didn't fit, right?
13:27SPEAKER- Well, and network cards to Tim's point
13:29SPEAKERwere a nightmare back at this period, right?
13:32SPEAKERLike you had, they had dip switches and all sorts of stuff
13:34SPEAKER'cause plug and play wasn't really a thing yet.
13:36SPEAKER- Yep, last bit from Tim here.
13:39SPEAKERI love the references to BBSs as well.
13:42SPEAKERI ran one myself,
13:43SPEAKERcan't remember the specific software anymore,
13:45SPEAKERbut because we only had one phone line at my house,
13:48SPEAKERit was only up if a friend or user called me on a voice line
13:51SPEAKERon the POTS line first to ask me to turn it on.
13:54SPEAKER- That's really funny.
13:55SPEAKER- That's amazing, I don't know if that quite meets the bar.
13:58SPEAKERWell, I mean, then it is a BBS, but yeah.
14:01SPEAKER- Well, they were asynchronous, right?
14:03SPEAKERThat was one of the cool things about them.
14:04SPEAKERI mean, there were chats and stuff like that,
14:06SPEAKERbut you could have chats on them is my understanding.
14:10SPEAKER- If I remember, I think the biggest local,
14:12SPEAKERlike local call BBS we had was four lines,
14:14SPEAKERif I'm not mistaken,
14:15SPEAKERbut I don't remember any kind of synchronous,
14:17SPEAKERlike real-time chat features on there,
14:20SPEAKERor if they had that, I certainly never used it,
14:22SPEAKERbut maybe they did, but you're right.
14:24SPEAKERIt was like, for me, the BBS experience was log in,
14:27SPEAKERsee if any new game demos had been posted,
14:30SPEAKERplay Legend of the Red Dragon and then log off for the day.
14:33SPEAKER- The funny thing was the game demos were big enough
14:35SPEAKERat that time that it probably would have been faster
14:37SPEAKERto drive to the dude's house that hosted the BBS
14:39SPEAKERwith some floppies and then drive back.
14:43SPEAKER- Yeah, I think we talked about modem speeds a good bit
14:46SPEAKERon the Discord the week of that Windows 95 episode.
14:50SPEAKERAnd my memory is that 28.8 modem is the fastest we ever had,
14:54SPEAKERand it was about three kilobytes a second at best on that.
14:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems right.
14:58SPEAKER- I don't, I'm not gonna do the math right now,
15:01SPEAKERbut I think it was about five minutes per megabyte
15:03SPEAKERin the best possible conditions.
15:05SPEAKER- That seems about right.
15:06SPEAKER- So yes, it was like, I think there were like
15:09SPEAKERovernight downloads of some demos for me, if I remember.
15:12SPEAKER- Oh, I remember if something was 40 megs,
15:14SPEAKERit would turn it on when you went to bed
15:16SPEAKERand it'll be done by the time I get back from class
15:18SPEAKERthe next day.
15:19SPEAKER- Oh my God, now you're reminding me
15:20SPEAKERof the precarity of long downloads.
15:22SPEAKERAnd if anything bad happened to the phone line midstream,
15:24SPEAKERyou were just screwed.
15:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:27SPEAKER- Hey, the phone's making that noise again.
15:30SPEAKERAnyway, that's cool.
15:32SPEAKER- I don't think the downloads were resumable back then.
15:35SPEAKER- Sometimes they were, but not normal HTTP ones.
15:38SPEAKER- Anyway, we should move on,
15:40SPEAKERbut because I am this exact kind of nerd,
15:42SPEAKERI occasionally will look up lists of BBS software
15:44SPEAKERand try to remember the ones that I used.
15:46SPEAKERI feel like Wildcat is the one I remember
15:48SPEAKERbeing pretty popular where I lived.
15:50SPEAKER- I never had access, so I don't know.
15:52SPEAKER- I think we had at least one or two Wildcat boards,
15:55SPEAKERbut there was a bigger one that I don't remember.
16:00SPEAKERI'll give you this later.
16:01SPEAKER- Greg, you just had that week off work.
16:02SPEAKERInstead of doing all that hard drive business,
16:04SPEAKERyou could have set up a tech pod BBS.
16:06SPEAKER- That's right.
16:07SPEAKERI could have probably tracked down a copy of Wildcat
16:08SPEAKERand maybe I'll look into that actually.
16:10SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a good project.
16:12SPEAKER- Anyway, all right, Nathan from Houston.
16:15SPEAKERYou mentioned your phone's losing their trade-in value
16:18SPEAKERand it reminded me of this thing
16:19SPEAKERI figured out last time I got a new phone.
16:20SPEAKERThis is also kind of brilliant.
16:22SPEAKER- Yeah, it is.
16:23SPEAKER- We keep phones for a while,
16:24SPEAKERso they have pretty much no trade-in value
16:26SPEAKERwhen getting new phones.
16:27SPEAKERBut I realized at least for the carriers, okay,
16:29SPEAKERthis is maybe this is a big asterisk here
16:31SPEAKERbecause I don't, I think a lot of people
16:33SPEAKERdon't want to buy into a carrier contract these days.
16:35SPEAKERBut anyway, I realized at least for the carriers,
16:38SPEAKERyou don't have to trade in the phone you're using.
16:40SPEAKERYou can trade in any phone.
16:42SPEAKERSo last time we traded in phones,
16:43SPEAKERI looked at what they accepted
16:45SPEAKERand was able to get $1,000 off an S23 Ultra
16:48SPEAKERby spending $185 and $1,000 off an iPhone 15 Plus
16:53SPEAKERby spending $325 on used phones and trading those in.
16:58SPEAKER- That's incredible.
16:59SPEAKER- I can't confirm it works everywhere,
17:01SPEAKERbut it worked at AT&T.
17:03SPEAKER- So the problem with the carrier contracts
17:04SPEAKERis that they're usually three years.
17:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
17:07SPEAKER- And you can't, like typically they don't have
17:09SPEAKERa mid go upgrade clause, right?
17:11SPEAKER- Sure, yeah, I mean that for me, that's fine
17:14SPEAKER'cause I like to keep a phone for a long time anyway.
17:15SPEAKERBut I guess if you're on like the,
17:17SPEAKERif you like getting a new phone every year,
17:18SPEAKERthat is problematic.
17:19SPEAKERDo you know-
17:20SPEAKER- Every other year.
17:22SPEAKER- Do you know how the math maths out
17:23SPEAKERon modern carrier contracts?
17:26SPEAKERLike, are you spending more or is it just
17:27SPEAKERthat it's spread out?
17:28SPEAKERBut it's, I mean, do you end up spending effectively
17:30SPEAKERthe same amount in the final tally?
17:33SPEAKER- I haven't mathed out the normal carrier contract
17:35SPEAKERbecause the carriers are so fricking expensive
17:39SPEAKERcompared to MVNOs that I think you,
17:42SPEAKERI think that you end up paying,
17:44SPEAKERlike you're paying, you end up paying more twice, right?
17:46SPEAKERSo you're paying, they're doing 0% financing
17:48SPEAKERfor 36 months on the $1,000 of the phone.
17:51SPEAKER- Right.
17:52SPEAKER- But then you're also paying $150 a month more a month
17:55SPEAKERfor your cellular service.
17:57SPEAKER- Yeah, you just reminded me and I'm on an MVNO now.
18:00SPEAKERSo like that alone is a deal breaker
18:01SPEAKERbecause my phone bill is now $10 a month
18:04SPEAKERand I'm not giving that up for anything.
18:05SPEAKER- Yeah, but also the money you save on the $10 a month,
18:09SPEAKERyou can buy a lot of $1,000 phones over a couple of years.
18:12SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.
18:13SPEAKERDid I talk about-
18:14SPEAKER- Yeah, we talked about it, but is it going okay?
18:16SPEAKER- Well, that's the thing.
18:17SPEAKERDid I talk about the time I ran out of data?
18:19SPEAKERI think I did.
18:20SPEAKER- Yeah, you did.
18:21SPEAKER- I think my carrier-
18:21SPEAKER- When you were in jury duty.
18:23SPEAKER- Just cuts you off.
18:24SPEAKERI can't say every MVNO is that way,
18:27SPEAKERbut in my case, like literally when I ran out of data
18:29SPEAKERwhile I was walking down the street,
18:32SPEAKERthey don't even let you like,
18:34SPEAKERthey don't even like allow lists their own app
18:37SPEAKERfor you to go in and buy more data.
18:39SPEAKERI had to get the wifi
18:40SPEAKERbefore I could pay another $4 to get more data.
18:43SPEAKER- That's wild.
18:44SPEAKER- It was a little brutal anyway.
18:46SPEAKER- But you're also on the extreme,
18:48SPEAKERlike I think if I was doing an MVNO,
18:50SPEAKERI'd do the $20 or $25 a month thing
18:52SPEAKERthat gives me unlimited data.
18:54SPEAKER- Totally, I'm on the like a la carte,
18:56SPEAKERyou get two gigabytes a month and you pay more for,
18:59SPEAKERwhich is fine, like it's only $4 for more data.
19:01SPEAKERLike even when I had to double my data,
19:03SPEAKERit was still a $14 phone bill.
19:04SPEAKERLike that's not a problem,
19:05SPEAKERbut it'd be nice if they let you re-up anywhere you are.
19:09SPEAKER- If that's wild.
19:10SPEAKER- I think it had defaulted to like
19:13SPEAKERnot auto topping off data.
19:16SPEAKER- Ah.
19:17SPEAKER- I think I turned that on and I'm fine now.
19:19SPEAKERAnyway, all right, the second half of Nathan's email.
19:22SPEAKERHearing about Brad's 16 hard drives
19:24SPEAKERreally makes me want him to get some kind of smart meter
19:26SPEAKERfor monitoring his electricity usage.
19:28SPEAKERI will jump in here real quick and say
19:30SPEAKERthe 16 hard drives is not even remotely permanent.
19:32SPEAKERThat was a special case.
19:35SPEAKERYou know, that's when I had all those extra drives hooked up.
19:37SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a short term.
19:39SPEAKER- That's not, normally it's 10, anyway.
19:41SPEAKER- 10's still a lot though.
19:43SPEAKER- Sometimes I think he underestimates
19:45SPEAKERhow much something can cost when running 24/7.
19:47SPEAKERI assure you, I do not well aware.
19:50SPEAKERIt is a constant pain point running the server,
19:52SPEAKERbut frankly I balance it out by telling myself
19:56SPEAKERhow much I enjoy tinkering with it.
19:59SPEAKER- Yeah.
19:59SPEAKER- It's like kind of my only hobby.
20:01SPEAKERAlso it's a work expense, frankly.
20:03SPEAKERLike I use that server for work constantly.
20:05SPEAKERSo there's like tax write-offs and stuff involved,
20:07SPEAKERbut you're not wrong.
20:10SPEAKERIt uses a fair amount of electricity.
20:13SPEAKERWhen I was looking at making my own NAS,
20:14SPEAKERI could have built it cheaper than a Synology,
20:16SPEAKERbut couldn't get the power usage as low.
20:18SPEAKERAfter a few years, the custom built one
20:20SPEAKERwould be more expensive because of the energy cost.
20:23SPEAKERSupposedly the average cost of electricity in California
20:25SPEAKERis 33.52 cents per kilowatt hour.
20:29SPEAKERAt 24/7 usage, that would be just under $3 a year per watt,
20:34SPEAKERnot including the electricity needed
20:35SPEAKERto cool the home back down.
20:38SPEAKERWhen you're going to have something running
20:39SPEAKERfor five plus years, each watt really adds up.
20:42SPEAKERYes, like you're totally right about all of this.
20:45SPEAKERSo the weird thing is in California,
20:48SPEAKERit's 33, or at least for us,
20:50SPEAKERit's 33 cents per watt kilowatt hour
20:52SPEAKERat our low rate for delivery, for energy.
20:56SPEAKERBut then the delivery from PG&E
20:58SPEAKERis another 30 cents per kilowatt hour.
21:01SPEAKERSo it's like 70 cents, 65 to 70 cents.
21:05SPEAKERAnd it goes up on peak hours because we're on the EV plan.
21:09SPEAKERSo it's cheap during off-peak, inexpensive during peak.
21:12SPEAKERThis is why I have the Synology
21:14SPEAKERand the five watt N100 server.
21:16SPEAKER- Yeah, although I mean, you have to break down
21:18SPEAKERwhat is consuming power in the boxes.
21:20SPEAKERYou know, like the hard drives are not a small percentage,
21:23SPEAKERand that's gonna be the same in a Synology
21:25SPEAKERor a big, giant server.
21:27SPEAKER- Well, that's why I have three hard drives
21:29SPEAKERspinning in my Synology and not 10.
21:31SPEAKER- Yes.
21:32SPEAKERWell, anyway.
21:34SPEAKER- Yeah, but what's the draw on your server?
21:36SPEAKERHave you plugged the watt meter into it, just out of curiosity?
21:38SPEAKER- I have it plugged into a UPS so I can kind of eyeball it,
21:41SPEAKERbut I have to mentally subtract
21:43SPEAKEReverything else plugged into that UPS
21:44SPEAKER'cause it just gives you one flat output reading.
21:47SPEAKERI don't know.
21:49SPEAKERIt's hard to say.
21:50SPEAKERI bet it's, gosh, it's probably 100 watts or something,
21:56SPEAKERat least, maybe more.
21:58SPEAKERYou know what?
21:59SPEAKERI'm gonna like skip to a Discord question here
22:00SPEAKER'cause there's one that is quite related
22:02SPEAKERto what we're talking about here that I can add on to.
22:06SPEAKERThis is a Discord question from Brain.
22:09SPEAKERIt's a great username.
22:11SPEAKERI recently came into possession of some large capacity
22:14SPEAKERSAS hard drives.
22:16SPEAKERInitially, I wanted to integrate them
22:17SPEAKERinto my mini PC based home lab setup,
22:19SPEAKERbut it appears to be an impossible task.
22:22SPEAKERI don't want to invest in a 24 bay JBOD to use these drives.
22:27SPEAKERIs it worth finding a way to use six 12 terabyte SAS drives
22:30SPEAKERor just move on?
22:32SPEAKERI mean, you know what my answer is going to be.
22:35SPEAKERFind a way to use the hard drive.
22:36SPEAKER- Get that 24 drive bay, right?
22:38SPEAKER- Well, maybe not that, that's pretty big.
22:40SPEAKERI mean, I'm taking mini PC to mean like B-Link style
22:44SPEAKERor like kind of tiny Mac mini style box.
22:48SPEAKERSo you probably don't want a giant backplane
22:51SPEAKER24 bay thing sitting around
22:54SPEAKERif you're trying to keep things small.
22:55SPEAKER- My assumption, yeah, mini PC says small form factor
23:00SPEAKERat biggest, which means you're going to have
23:01SPEAKERlike two drive bays.
23:03SPEAKER- Yes, I looked this up.
23:07SPEAKERSAS drives apparently need,
23:09SPEAKERand like they need a special interface.
23:11SPEAKERSo like you can plug, God, I'm trying to think,
23:15SPEAKERyou can plug SATA drives into a SAS interface.
23:17SPEAKERYou can't plug SAS drives into a SATA interface.
23:20SPEAKER- It's a one way, but not the other, basically.
23:22SPEAKER- SAS, I barely, what is it?
23:23SPEAKERSerial attached SCSI, I believe is the acronym.
23:26SPEAKERI think it's basically like data center level storage.
23:30SPEAKERSo I don't know how you came by these drives.
23:31SPEAKERAlthough if you got them for free,
23:33SPEAKERas it sounds like you did,
23:34SPEAKERthen I extra think you should use them,
23:35SPEAKERbut you're going to have to buy a card.
23:38SPEAKERYou're going to have to buy like a SAS interface card,
23:40SPEAKERlike a host bus adapter to use them, it sounds like.
23:42SPEAKER- The problem is if you're on a mini PC or an ITX machine,
23:45SPEAKERyou probably only have one PCI express slot.
23:47SPEAKERAnd there are problems.
23:50SPEAKERAlthough I was going to say,
23:52SPEAKERthere are now NVMe slot to PC,
23:56SPEAKERlike PCIe by four adapters that you can buy.
24:00SPEAKERSo you could, yeah.
24:02SPEAKER- What are we even doing?
24:04SPEAKERWhat are we doing?
24:05SPEAKER- It's all PCI express lanes.
24:06SPEAKERThey're all the same.
24:07SPEAKER- I wonder if there's going to be a more formal standard
24:10SPEAKERfor plugging cards into NVMe sockets at some point.
24:14SPEAKER- Maybe.
24:15SPEAKER- It feels like that's all motherboards
24:17SPEAKERare shipping these days is NVMe sockets.
24:20SPEAKER- We were talking about this on the full nerd a few weeks
24:22SPEAKERago, but it feels like the small form factor stuff
24:24SPEAKERand ITX is kind of in a weird, there's a weird,
24:28SPEAKERit's in a weird state of flux right now.
24:29SPEAKERCause like there's a pretty well established,
24:32SPEAKERlike ITX basic shape for computers.
24:36SPEAKERBut then there's also people doing a lot of really weird
24:39SPEAKERstuff with like putting PCI express slots on the back
24:44SPEAKERand of those boards and like building things
24:48SPEAKERthat are designed to run with like bridges that are,
24:52SPEAKERyou know, that will let you put your PCI express cable
24:54SPEAKERsomeplace else or like, so who knows?
24:58SPEAKERIt feels like we need to have another round of,
25:01SPEAKERHey, here's what the standard is.
25:03SPEAKERCause that that ITX standard is spun out of like shuttle
25:07SPEAKERcases, proprietary shuttle cases 20 years ago.
25:10SPEAKER- And it's such a mess.
25:11SPEAKERGordon continues to be right.
25:13SPEAKERWe should have moved on from ATX a long time ago.
25:15SPEAKER- Yeah, you're not wrong.
25:17SPEAKER- It feels like, and it feels like I'm trying to think
25:20SPEAKERof the other basic building blocks of modern computing
25:22SPEAKERthat have modernized.
25:23SPEAKERLike we finally replaced BIOS with UEFI like 15 years ago
25:27SPEAKERor something, you know what I mean?
25:28SPEAKERThere's like a bunch of legacy stuff from 30 to 40 years ago
25:31SPEAKERthat has been replaced and it feels like the ATX standard
25:36SPEAKERshould have been one of those by now.
25:37SPEAKER- It's even, it's even just stuff like,
25:41SPEAKERHey, where the CPU has to be on an ATX board
25:45SPEAKERand the orientation of the memory are non-optimal
25:47SPEAKERfor Airflow for a lot of reasons.
25:49SPEAKERLike we're starting to see some different kinds of memory
25:50SPEAKERcome on board that that'll maybe change that.
25:53SPEAKERBut I I'm skeptical whether they'll take off
25:56SPEAKERbecause they're more, the non stick formats
26:00SPEAKERare gonna be a lot more expensive
26:01SPEAKERand you're gonna have to make some choices
26:03SPEAKERand stuff like that.
26:04SPEAKERSo I don't know.
26:05SPEAKER- There's so much you could do.
26:06SPEAKERI mean, the physical form factor is the main thing,
26:07SPEAKERyou know, making things tidier
26:09SPEAKERand adding more capabilities and stuff.
26:10SPEAKERBut there's also like digital stuff.
26:12SPEAKERYou could like, what about better diagnostic information?
26:14SPEAKERLike what if they build that into the spec of CTX
26:17SPEAKERor whatever the next standard is where like,
26:19SPEAKERlike what if there was a standard output format
26:21SPEAKERfor something better than just like BIOS,
26:23SPEAKERlike two digit numerical BIOS error codes?
26:26SPEAKERLike what if you add some standard interface
26:28SPEAKERfor getting like real information about what your PC
26:30SPEAKERis doing to fix problems?
26:32SPEAKER- What if, what if Windows had an interface
26:34SPEAKERfor getting voltages and temperatures and fan speeds
26:37SPEAKERback out to software?
26:39SPEAKERThat would be nice.
26:40SPEAKERThe ITX thing though feels more like,
26:43SPEAKERI feel like ATX is in a pretty good place right now.
26:45SPEAKERI feel like the ITX stuff is in a weirder spot.
26:48SPEAKERAnd, and like, so, so I guess the question for me
26:52SPEAKERon this one is, do they have PCI express slots?
26:55SPEAKERAnd if they do, then you just buy a SAS PCI express card
26:58SPEAKERand you're good to go.
27:00SPEAKERBut if you don't, I don't know what the option is, right?
27:03SPEAKERLike are there SAS back planes that are like USB-C
27:06SPEAKERto SAS bridges?
27:07SPEAKER- I doubt it.
27:08SPEAKER- Cause that seems like it would be not performant and bad.
27:11SPEAKER- It also, my guess is there's just no use case for,
27:14SPEAKERthat would drive reproduction of something like that.
27:16SPEAKERBecause SAS is again, a data center thing
27:18SPEAKERand data centers don't give a F about anything
27:20SPEAKERexcept making things work.
27:23SPEAKERYou know, like they don't care about tidiness
27:24SPEAKERor modularity or whatever.
27:27SPEAKERSo I will say at the flea market a couple of weeks ago,
27:30SPEAKERI saw a 24 bay IBM SAS back plane 2U or 3U, I guess.
27:40SPEAKERRack mount dealy.
27:42SPEAKERI was like, hey, does this work?
27:44SPEAKERAnd the guy said, oh yeah, it works.
27:45SPEAKERAnd I was like, how much do you want for it?
27:46SPEAKERAnd he told me, and I was like, oh, that's a good deal.
27:48SPEAKERAnd I didn't buy it and I kind of regret that,
27:50SPEAKERbut also I don't have a place for it, so.
27:52SPEAKER- I didn't see that.
27:53SPEAKERYeah, that's the kind of thing that I feel like
27:56SPEAKERyou get the rack first and then you source stuff like that.
27:59SPEAKER- You can just pile the rack stuff up in a pile,
28:01SPEAKERit'll be fine.
28:02SPEAKER- Yes, okay, we'll move on.
28:04SPEAKERI won't give me 30 seconds to mention
28:06SPEAKERone of my own personal bugbears real quick
28:09SPEAKERabout this question.
28:11SPEAKERIf you're buying old server cards,
28:12SPEAKERlike we're talking about here,
28:13SPEAKERlike if you're buying an old host bus adapter
28:15SPEAKERand record to brain, if you really want to go down this road
28:19SPEAKERlook up like LSI host bus adapters,
28:21SPEAKERthat's the type of thing you're gonna need
28:22SPEAKERto plug those SAS drives in.
28:24SPEAKERThe thing I have come to understand
28:25SPEAKERis that 15 year old server cards like that
28:29SPEAKERdo not support modern ASPM,
28:30SPEAKERwhich is like power management at the PCI express level.
28:34SPEAKER- Oh, yeah.
28:35SPEAKER- Like I have a SAS controller
28:38SPEAKERand a Mellanox network card in my server
28:41SPEAKERthat are both like 15 years old.
28:44SPEAKERWhen your PCI express cards don't support modern ASPM,
28:47SPEAKERit also limits the C states, the sleep states,
28:49SPEAKERthe low power states that your CPU can descend into.
28:53SPEAKER- Oh.
28:54SPEAKER- So I'm probably leaving even more electricity usage
28:56SPEAKERon the table.
28:57SPEAKERThis is why I really wanted to address this question.
28:59SPEAKERI'm probably burning even more energy
29:01SPEAKERbecause my CPU can't, and I've monitored this,
29:04SPEAKERlike my CPU can't and the server can't go
29:07SPEAKERinto the deepest sleep that you would want
29:09SPEAKERbecause those cards limit it from doing so.
29:13SPEAKERThere is a blog post called the curse of ASPM
29:16SPEAKERthat I'm going to link in the show notes
29:18SPEAKERfor people who really want to hear
29:19SPEAKERan insanely exhaustive amount more about this.
29:23SPEAKERSubhead of this blog post,
29:25SPEAKERyou either get to C8 or you die trying.
29:29SPEAKER- This is, I've looked at this blog post,
29:30SPEAKERit's a crazy blog post.
29:31SPEAKER- It's insane.
29:32SPEAKERIt is utterly, this person, I bow to this person.
29:35SPEAKERThey went and bought like every card they could find
29:38SPEAKERto try to eliminate this problem.
29:40SPEAKERIt's really an incredible amount of detective work.
29:43SPEAKERAnyway, enough about my personal madness.
29:48SPEAKERLet's read something a little more middle of the road here.
29:51SPEAKERCatwill Mew, I'm just going to bounce around
29:53SPEAKERbetween emails and Discord here.
29:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:56SPEAKER- Watching Hollow Knight's Silksong crash Steam
29:58SPEAKERand the eShop and even Xbox,
30:00SPEAKERand thinking back to how the Switch 2 launch
30:02SPEAKERmelted down the websites of some of the largest retailers
30:05SPEAKERon the planet, I have to ask, how is this still happening?
30:09SPEAKERWasn't the whole premise, I'm sorry,
30:11SPEAKERwasn't the whole promise of the cloud
30:13SPEAKERsupposed to be infinite scalability?
30:15SPEAKERIs it bad architecture, one weak link in the chain,
30:19SPEAKERsites cheaping out somewhere?
30:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it's wild, right?
30:24SPEAKER- It is, on some level, yes, it's crazy.
30:27SPEAKEROn another level though, like, I mean,
30:28SPEAKERthis is going back a while, but I remember reading about,
30:31SPEAKERlike MMO launches, I feel like,
30:32SPEAKERwere the prototypical case of this.
30:35SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and like early MMOs especially,
30:38SPEAKERwe didn't have ways to test the way that we do now.
30:42SPEAKERLike it was hard to spin up a thousand users,
30:45SPEAKERfake users to hit your login server at the same time
30:47SPEAKERto see if it was going to hold the rush.
30:49SPEAKERNow people do, like, this is why games like Battlefield
30:52SPEAKERthat expect to have big launches do big open betas
30:55SPEAKERthat they gradually roll out access to.
30:58SPEAKERAnd it's also, I think, why they do early access
31:01SPEAKERwith like higher editions is so they get an initial,
31:04SPEAKERinstead of having one wave, they have three waves
31:06SPEAKERand it gets 30% fewer people on each wave, right?
31:10SPEAKER- Yeah.
31:13SPEAKERThe answer I always got here about like,
31:15SPEAKERhey, why do MMO launches still go sideways all the time?
31:18SPEAKERThe answer I always got there kind of always amounted
31:20SPEAKERto corporations just red lining their infrastructure
31:23SPEAKERall the time, which is to say like,
31:25SPEAKERthey're going to build their infrastructure,
31:27SPEAKERthey're going to spec it for the 95% environments
31:31SPEAKERor use case or load level.
31:34SPEAKERThey're not going to go out of their way to build
31:36SPEAKERfor the 2% insane load of launch, you know what I mean?
31:39SPEAKERLike they're just, they're not going to build
31:41SPEAKERthe extra capacity in because they want to save money.
31:44SPEAKERThey're not going to build in the capacity
31:45SPEAKERto handle a one-off, like one bad night event.
31:48SPEAKERThey're just going to let it do what it's going to do
31:51SPEAKERbecause 95% of the time it's not going to be near
31:55SPEAKERthat level of load and they'll be fine.
31:56SPEAKER- Well, yes, but also for something like a game.
32:00SPEAKERSo for example, when you're buying servers
32:02SPEAKERfor a game that has dedicated servers,
32:06SPEAKERtypically you do, well, I mean, there's a bunch of ways
32:08SPEAKERto do it.
32:09SPEAKERIf it's a big game, then you're going to do a mixture
32:10SPEAKERof bare metal servers that you actually have,
32:12SPEAKERlike you pay somebody to put some server machines
32:16SPEAKERin a data center someplace.
32:17SPEAKERAnd often because of the way game servers work,
32:20SPEAKERthose aren't like, those aren't giant,
32:24SPEAKERlike they're not thread rippers or something like that.
32:26SPEAKERCause you're not able, like often on a game server,
32:29SPEAKERsince game servers are very regularly single threaded,
32:31SPEAKERyou want a smaller number of faster cores
32:35SPEAKERbecause that'll let you have more people on the server
32:37SPEAKERat a time or something like that.
32:38SPEAKERSo if you're posting something like Fortnite,
32:40SPEAKERthey're going to have a bunch of 14, 900 Ks
32:44SPEAKERin a data center someplace with like one shard
32:48SPEAKERor two Fortnite instances at a time on them, right?
32:51SPEAKERAnd then they'll also have,
32:54SPEAKERand those hardware machines will be the baseline, right?
32:57SPEAKERAnd that's what's running all the time.
33:00SPEAKERCause you can't turn those on and off really,
33:02SPEAKERupdating them is a kind of a hassle, yada yada.
33:05SPEAKERThey'll also have a cloud solution for like days
33:09SPEAKERthat Drake shows up to play on some stream
33:11SPEAKERand a million extra people play Fortnite that day.
33:14SPEAKERAnd those machines are more expensive per minute
33:17SPEAKERor per hour to run cause they're cloud hosts,
33:20SPEAKERwhereas the data center machines are fly rate bus,
33:22SPEAKERbandwidth or something like that.
33:25SPEAKERBut you can turn them on and off when you're not using them.
33:27SPEAKERSo like figuring out that math is a big part
33:31SPEAKERof what like a DevOps or release managers
33:34SPEAKERor live game ops person does these days.
33:40SPEAKERNow, the place that Cat Will Mu is talking about
33:44SPEAKERis, hey, we have not 10 times,
33:48SPEAKERbut a thousand times the number of people
33:50SPEAKERthat are usually on this site
33:51SPEAKERor 10,000 times the number of people
33:52SPEAKERusually hitting the site.
33:54SPEAKERAnd then they find the bottlenecks and the weird edge cases
33:56SPEAKERthat don't exist in the day to day.
33:58SPEAKERSo Apple is a good example of this.
34:00SPEAKERFor iPhone launches for a long time,
34:03SPEAKEReverything would be great.
34:04SPEAKERApple's website would be going great.
34:06SPEAKERYou put all your stuff in the cart, you'd order the phone,
34:09SPEAKERand then you'd get to the part
34:10SPEAKERwhere you put your credit card in and it's like,
34:11SPEAKERoh man, we're not gonna do this.
34:13SPEAKEROr you'd get to the part where you apply
34:14SPEAKERfor the Apple financing or Verizon's three-year thing,
34:19SPEAKERand their connections to these outside services
34:21SPEAKERwould bomb out, which is why they started doing the,
34:24SPEAKERhey, you can pre-approve your Apple loan,
34:28SPEAKERyour Verizon connection, your AT&T connection,
34:31SPEAKERyour credit card charge.
34:32SPEAKER- That's very smart.
34:33SPEAKER- A week in advance, and then just on the morning of,
34:35SPEAKERyou just get up and log in at five o'clock in the morning
34:37SPEAKERand hit the give me a phone button.
34:39SPEAKER- Sidebar, like I guess they're catering
34:41SPEAKERto a global customer base here,
34:43SPEAKERbut why does Apple continue to set the pre-orders
34:45SPEAKERfor insane early in the morning US time,
34:49SPEAKERwhich surely is a huge, huge,
34:52SPEAKERI mean, that's their home territory.
34:53SPEAKER- I bet it's actually so that they don't have
34:56SPEAKERan enormous wave of people all hitting at the same time.
34:58SPEAKER- Oh, I guess, sure, that is a good way
35:01SPEAKERto naturally filter some people out who don't wanna wake up.
35:04SPEAKER- Yeah, they're gonna sell the phones
35:06SPEAKERto the same people.
35:08SPEAKERThe question is how can they spread out that
35:11SPEAKERover the infrastructure?
35:12SPEAKERI bet the capitalist me says,
35:16SPEAKERoh, they looked at which time zones
35:18SPEAKERthey could hit most effectively at that launch time,
35:20SPEAKERbut then the realist me looked at it and was like,
35:23SPEAKERoh, people are gonna buy the phones regardless,
35:24SPEAKERso it doesn't matter.
35:25SPEAKERThey just did it whichever way it levels out
35:27SPEAKERthe infrastructure hit the most, so.
35:30SPEAKER- I believe that.
35:31SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, I think every time
35:33SPEAKERthey do one of these launches,
35:34SPEAKERthey find Target probably discovered five new bottlenecks
35:37SPEAKERon their checkout process on Switch 2 pre-order day.
35:41SPEAKERI am still smarting from that Switch 2 pre-order experience
35:44SPEAKERand Target was the worst of all of them.
35:46SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause they kept saying that,
35:47SPEAKERlike Target was like, hey man, we got a Switch for you.
35:49SPEAKERAnd then you'd go through the checkout card
35:51SPEAKERand be like, no, we don't have a Switch for you.
35:52SPEAKER- All the others to their credit put me in a queue,
35:55SPEAKERwhich also screwed me in different ways
35:56SPEAKERbecause I saw people on my feed who were,
35:59SPEAKERgot in the queue way after I did for 10 minutes
36:01SPEAKERand then bought a Switch and I sat in it for an hour
36:03SPEAKERand never got the opportunity,
36:05SPEAKERbut at least those just had me looking at a queue.
36:07SPEAKERWhereas Target, I got to the confirm order step,
36:11SPEAKERlike four times and it never worked.
36:13SPEAKER- Yeah.
36:14SPEAKER- Infuriating, anyway.
36:15SPEAKEROkay, next email is from Joel.
36:17SPEAKERThis is about getting AirPod Pros working with a Steam Deck.
36:22SPEAKERI have MagicPods installed to get my AirPod Pro 2s
36:25SPEAKERworking right on my Steam Deck.
36:27SPEAKERYou're a Steam Deck guy,
36:28SPEAKERyou're gonna have to help me out with some of these terms.
36:30SPEAKERIt does require Decky, I have no idea what Decky is,
36:32SPEAKERbut if you're down with Homebrew,
36:34SPEAKERit supports every feature I can think of
36:36SPEAKERfor the AirPod Pros 2,
36:39SPEAKERincluding conversation awareness, it's pretty amazing.
36:42SPEAKERI can't recommend it enough.
36:43SPEAKER- So I thought conversation awareness happened
36:45SPEAKERon the headphones, but I guess it doesn't
36:47SPEAKER'cause I only use my AirPods with Apple stuff.
36:49SPEAKERA Decky loader, for folks who don't know,
36:51SPEAKERis a Homebrew plugin launcher for the Steam Deck
36:54SPEAKERthat lets you extend the Steam Deck,
36:57SPEAKERlike the Steam Deck handheld UI, not the desktop UI.
37:01SPEAKER- Got it.
37:02SPEAKER- You can style menus,
37:04SPEAKERyou can add other storefronts, stuff like that.
37:07SPEAKER- That's cool, yeah, I'm looking at MagicPods here.
37:09SPEAKEREasily control AirPods and Beats headphones and more.
37:12SPEAKER- Well, so the Beats headphones use the same chips
37:15SPEAKERas the AirPods. - Of course, of course.
37:18SPEAKER- But yeah, this looks pretty good.
37:19SPEAKER- Oh, actually it supports a bunch of Samsung Galaxy buds
37:23SPEAKERas well, according to this.
37:25SPEAKER- It looks like it does the...
37:27SPEAKERThe big thing is it fixes the Apple devices
37:31SPEAKERgrabbing the AirPods back,
37:33SPEAKERand the conversation mode's really quite nice.
37:37SPEAKERI'm gonna have to try this out.
37:38SPEAKERI do not have, I don't have Decky loader
37:42SPEAKERon my current Steam Deck, I don't think right now,
37:44SPEAKERbut I'll put that on 'cause this is worth fussing with.
37:47SPEAKER- Yeah. - Seems good.
37:51SPEAKER- I don't know what the term is for the Apple device,
37:53SPEAKERwhatever you just said,
37:54SPEAKERthe Apple device grabbing the headphones back.
37:56SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
37:57SPEAKER- I don't know what the term for that is,
37:58SPEAKERbut that is something I was thinking about
37:59SPEAKERas I have thought about getting AirPod Pro 3s
38:02SPEAKERfor potentially for Switch 2's use.
38:05SPEAKERLike, is that a pain dealing with non-Apple devices
38:09SPEAKERand having to like control what device is using them
38:12SPEAKERat any given time?
38:13SPEAKER- So yes and no, you have to...
38:17SPEAKERWhereas with the Apple devices,
38:20SPEAKERwhen I put my iPhone down and pick up my iPad,
38:23SPEAKERit just switches over automatically, right?
38:27SPEAKERWith non-Apple devices on the AirPods,
38:29SPEAKERyou have to manually go into the Bluetooth menu
38:31SPEAKERand hit the connect thing.
38:34SPEAKERSo it doesn't do it automatically.
38:36SPEAKER- And then what about moving back to an Apple device?
38:38SPEAKERDo you have to manually air again there
38:40SPEAKERor is that smart enough to just do it?
38:42SPEAKER- So you don't have to pair,
38:44SPEAKERbut you do have to go into the menu
38:46SPEAKERand hit the connect button
38:47SPEAKERonce you're coming back sometimes.
38:49SPEAKERIt's like, it's really weird.
38:52SPEAKER- That's the worst thing about Bluetooth is sometimes.
38:55SPEAKER- Well, I think the rule is if they're in the case,
38:57SPEAKERthen it resets the connection
38:59SPEAKERand it just goes to whatever thing you're using again.
39:01SPEAKERBut if you like have them in your ears
39:03SPEAKERand you want to use your phone
39:04SPEAKERand then you switch to the Steam Deck
39:05SPEAKERand then you want to switch back to the Switch
39:07SPEAKERand then you want to switch back to the phone,
39:09SPEAKERyou're going to have to do some Bluetooth menu work.
39:12SPEAKER- Like that's the most annoying thing
39:13SPEAKERabout dealing with Bluetooth pairing
39:14SPEAKERis that it's never, it never seems consistent to me.
39:16SPEAKERLike sometimes my watch will just find the earbuds
39:21SPEAKERwhen I pull them out of the case.
39:22SPEAKERSometimes I have to go in there and tell it to do it again.
39:25SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's way better
39:27SPEAKERthan the traditional Bluetooth method, which is,
39:30SPEAKERhey, your headphones support X number of connections
39:34SPEAKERand everything kind of works okay
39:36SPEAKERuntil you get X plus one number of devices.
39:39SPEAKERIt's not as good, it's not as good as the default.
39:43SPEAKERLike I want to see what this implementation is
39:44SPEAKER'cause I've not used a non-Apple implementation of this.
39:51SPEAKERAnd it looks like they have a Windows version
39:52SPEAKERof this thing too, of MagicPods.
39:54SPEAKERSo you can get it for other non-Apple devices,
39:57SPEAKERwhich is exciting.
39:58SPEAKERI'm gonna set this up on my laptop and my Steam Deck.
40:04SPEAKERThe other thing is after we talked about
40:06SPEAKERthe AirPods Pro first-generation had a hard time
40:10SPEAKERconnecting to Steam Decks for whatever reason,
40:12SPEAKERmultiple people wrote in to let us know
40:14SPEAKERthat the AirPod Pros 2 didn't have that problem.
40:17SPEAKERThey changed whatever, either Valve or Apple
40:21SPEAKERchanged whatever was the issue
40:23SPEAKERas people were able to connect with that.
40:25SPEAKERAnd I've since connected my AirPod Pros 2
40:28SPEAKERto the Switch 2 and it works great.
40:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm gonna give the threes a little longer
40:31SPEAKERto see what people's experiences are with various devices.
40:34SPEAKERI did a little bit of cursory looking around on Reddit,
40:36SPEAKERon the Switch 2 subreddit about Bluetooth headphones
40:40SPEAKERin general on there.
40:41SPEAKERAnd the results did not sound super encouraging.
40:43SPEAKERPeople said like, people said it's basically the same
40:46SPEAKERas similar at least to the Switch 1.
40:48SPEAKERYou're looking at like 150 milliseconds of latency
40:50SPEAKERto Bluetooth headphones because Nintendo uses
40:53SPEAKERlike old Bluetooth and old codecs and stuff.
40:57SPEAKERI mean, you know, again, some of that depends
40:59SPEAKERon how sensitive you are to that kind of thing.
41:00SPEAKERBut that sounds like kind of a lot to me.
41:02SPEAKERSo I don't know if the dream might be dead.
41:05SPEAKERI'm not sure.
41:06SPEAKER- 150 milliseconds is a lot.
41:08SPEAKER- Yeah, it is.
41:10SPEAKER- You know, you could just get a wire plugged in headphones.
41:13SPEAKER- It's true.
41:15SPEAKERI don't know, man, dealing with corded noise canceling
41:18SPEAKERheadphones on an airplane is kind of getting old.
41:21SPEAKER- I mean, I will, yeah.
41:23SPEAKERThat's true. - Anyway, yeah.
41:25SPEAKER- All right, last email from Mike, speaking of Nintendo.
41:29SPEAKERSay you managed to get a ticket to the Nintendo museum
41:31SPEAKERin Japan and are salivating at all the exclusive
41:34SPEAKERNintendo merch available from such a trip.
41:37SPEAKERAt what point would you say that there are too many
41:39SPEAKERcoffee mugs to take back with you
41:41SPEAKERto the United States?
41:43SPEAKERI believe they sell 17 or more coffee mugs
41:45SPEAKERfor a variety of Nintendo systems.
41:47SPEAKERI will say, unless something has changed
41:49SPEAKERin the last few months, it's 15.
41:52SPEAKERI thought of Brad because on an Exelander podcast,
41:56SPEAKERBrad mentioned wanting to have a complete set.
41:57SPEAKERThe reason I know the number of coffee mugs
41:59SPEAKERis because I now own 14 of them.
42:01SPEAKER- Really?
42:02SPEAKER- Yes.
42:03SPEAKER- Wow.
42:04SPEAKER- Largely thanks to an incredibly kind benefactor
42:09SPEAKERwho was willing to haul some mugs across the ocean for me.
42:13SPEAKER- Can you go to the museum without having a ticket?
42:18SPEAKER'Cause the tickets are kind of hard, right?
42:19SPEAKER- No, as far as I know, it's still a multi-month lead time,
42:24SPEAKERI think, to get a ticket for the museum.
42:26SPEAKER- Wow.
42:27SPEAKER- I believe this benefactor said they would have brought
42:30SPEAKERall 15, but they were sold out of the Switch mug on the day.
42:33SPEAKER- Ah, boo.
42:34SPEAKER- And I still let him owe that person a beer.
42:36SPEAKERThey were incredibly kind to do that.
42:39SPEAKER- Wow.
42:40SPEAKER- I've been meaning to order that Switch one.
42:43SPEAKERI found an exporter in Japan that sells them
42:46SPEAKERfor like not too bad of a markup.
42:48SPEAKER- Okay.
42:49SPEAKER- And I never got around to doing it
42:50SPEAKERbefore the tariffs went into effect,
42:51SPEAKERand now I don't know how that's going to affect
42:54SPEAKERsomething like this.
42:56SPEAKER- Oh yeah, so they say, yeah, you can only get in
42:58SPEAKERif you have a ticket, that's wild.
43:00SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, the museum is definitely absolutely not
43:03SPEAKERjust show up and go.
43:04SPEAKER- It almost seems like if you want to go to the museum
43:06SPEAKERand you don't live in Japan, you get your tickets
43:10SPEAKERand then book your entire trip around going to the museum.
43:13SPEAKER- Yep.
43:14SPEAKER- That's wild.
43:15SPEAKER- Yep, still quite exclusive.
43:16SPEAKERI have to assume in another year or two,
43:18SPEAKERit'll probably die down a little bit.
43:20SPEAKER- I mean, you say that, but maybe not.
43:21SPEAKER- One would hope, but I don't know.
43:24SPEAKERAnyway, to answer your question,
43:25SPEAKERno number of mugs is too many.
43:28SPEAKERThose are extremely nice mugs.
43:30SPEAKERI love them deeply.
43:33SPEAKER- I was going to say, I'm starting to pare down mugs
43:36SPEAKERand I'm keeping the couple that I have
43:38SPEAKERthat are handmade by friends and family members
43:41SPEAKERand like the Aperture Science ones,
43:43SPEAKERand that's pretty much it.
43:44SPEAKEREverything else is going.
43:46SPEAKERThe old tested mug, I still have one of those.
43:48SPEAKER- Yes, I'm actually unpacking all of my old giant bomb
43:51SPEAKERglassware and ceramic merch away.
43:54SPEAKER- Wow.
43:55SPEAKER- So it doesn't get broken at this point.
43:57SPEAKERAnyway.
43:58SPEAKER- There you go.
43:59SPEAKER- All right.
44:00SPEAKERLate night rec.
44:02SPEAKERHow many sets of sheets do you own?
44:04SPEAKERHow many did you own when you were living alone?
44:06SPEAKERHow many is too many?
44:08SPEAKER- Okay, I have, I don't remember how many I owned
44:10SPEAKERwhen I was living alone
44:11SPEAKER'cause that was a hundred years ago at this point,
44:14SPEAKERbut I have two identical white sheets for each bed
44:20SPEAKERso that you don't have to take,
44:22SPEAKERso I can take the sheets off, put new sheets on
44:26SPEAKERand not have to like have the bed down all day
44:30SPEAKERwhile we're washing sheets.
44:31SPEAKERI don't have two duvet covers.
44:33SPEAKERSo the duvet cover is separate from that.
44:36SPEAKER- Okay.
44:37SPEAKER- And then we also have sets of flannel sheets
44:38SPEAKERfor both beds.
44:40SPEAKERI'd say we have probably three or four sets now.
44:44SPEAKER- Yeah.
44:46SPEAKER- We are on, well, it's gotten a little looser,
44:48SPEAKERmore loose than I would like lately.
44:50SPEAKERWe need to get our act back together,
44:51SPEAKERbut we became like,
44:53SPEAKERwe became like change the sheets once a week.
44:55SPEAKER- Oh God, that's too much.
44:57SPEAKER- What are you talking about?
44:59SPEAKER- Like once a week?
45:00SPEAKER- Yeah, hell yeah.
45:01SPEAKER- What are you doing in there, man?
45:03SPEAKER- Nothing, I mean, it's just,
45:04SPEAKERI just like sleeping in clean sheets.
45:06SPEAKER- I do like sleeping in clean sheets, but I mean,
45:08SPEAKERso I guess you're like, I do the sheets more often
45:12SPEAKERthan I do the duvet cover.
45:13SPEAKERFor me, for a long time, I used to not use a top sheet.
45:16SPEAKERI would just do the duvet covers.
45:17SPEAKERThat meant you had to watch the duvet cover every time,
45:19SPEAKERwhich is an enormous pain in the ass.
45:21SPEAKER'Cause you got to take the thing out
45:22SPEAKERand you got to tie it back in and it's just a lot.
45:26SPEAKERWhen we switched to using a top sheet again,
45:28SPEAKERthen watching the duvet cover
45:30SPEAKERbecame an every other time I watched this sheet situation.
45:35SPEAKERBut yeah, I don't know.
45:36SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, to be clear,
45:37SPEAKERwe only wash the fitted sheets and top sheets regularly,
45:41SPEAKERlike the duvet or blankets on top of that
45:44SPEAKERdon't get washed nearly as often.
45:45SPEAKERBut I tried to get a little science-y with this
45:48SPEAKERand Google around for tests of bacteria,
45:53SPEAKERdead skin, dust mites, whatever.
45:55SPEAKER- Yeah.
45:56SPEAKER- 'Cause everywhere you go, the feedback seems to be,
45:58SPEAKERhey, you're probably not washing your sheets enough,
46:00SPEAKERbut couldn't find anything super definitive.
46:03SPEAKER- Big laundry detergent wants you to think that, Brad.
46:06SPEAKER- Probably, what started it for me
46:08SPEAKERwas becoming a night shower during the pandemic.
46:10SPEAKER- Yep.
46:12SPEAKER- At that point, it was basically,
46:14SPEAKERokay, I'm going to bed clean now
46:15SPEAKERbecause I'm showering right before bed every night
46:17SPEAKERand so I want the sheets to be clean as well.
46:20SPEAKER- But then if you're going to bed clean,
46:23SPEAKERthen the sheets get dirty a lot slower.
46:25SPEAKER- Yeah, but then you just maximize your cleanliness
46:27SPEAKERby both showering at night and changing the sheets more often.
46:29SPEAKER- Too far, man.
46:31SPEAKER- I gotta say, we switched from kind of fancy sheets
46:36SPEAKERthat we used to use for a long time
46:37SPEAKERwhen they got really expensive during the pandemic
46:40SPEAKERand we tried a bunch of cheap sheets from different places
46:45SPEAKERand the Target, like the Target brand,
46:48SPEAKERthe nice Target brand sheets with the deep pockets in that
46:51SPEAKERare my favorite sheets we've ever had.
46:53SPEAKERI think they're easy to make the bed,
46:56SPEAKERthe gussets on the side are deep enough
47:00SPEAKERthat they work on even the super thick mattresses
47:03SPEAKERin my daughter's room
47:05SPEAKERand they have the top and bottom labeled, which I love.
47:11SPEAKERLike, so when you're trying to figure out
47:12SPEAKERwhich side is which on a queen size bed,
47:14SPEAKERwhich is basically square, it's really nice.
47:17SPEAKER- That is smart.
47:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
47:19SPEAKER- All right, Ambush Penguin Charlie.
47:22SPEAKER- Also don't buy shit from Target, I guess, right now.
47:24SPEAKERI forgot. - Yeah.
47:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
47:26SPEAKER- Yes.
47:27SPEAKER- Okay, Ambush Penguin Charlie writes in,
47:30SPEAKERwhat's your process for documenting yourself
47:32SPEAKERwhen you're setting up something like a new operating system
47:34SPEAKERor an app install?
47:35SPEAKERI've heard you mentioned this several times
47:36SPEAKERon different podcasts
47:37SPEAKERand I'm curious what that looks like for you in practice.
47:40SPEAKERSoftware setup feels one and done and ephemeral enough
47:43SPEAKERthat it's hard for me to remember, plan ahead
47:45SPEAKERor take notes as I go.
47:47SPEAKERUnlike hardware installs, which feels higher stakes
47:50SPEAKERand so I pre-plan, then I then use the end product
47:53SPEAKERto trace backwards to aid in filling in gaps
47:55SPEAKERand documentation.
47:56SPEAKER- Oh, so okay, I got kind of obsessive about this
47:59SPEAKERwhen I started doing server stuff
48:00SPEAKERwith the FreeNAS and TrueNAS years and years ago
48:03SPEAKER'cause I would do something clever
48:06SPEAKERand then a year later it would break or need updating
48:08SPEAKERand I wouldn't remember how to update it
48:10SPEAKERor fix it when it broke
48:11SPEAKERand then I'd have to recreate all the work
48:13SPEAKERthat was doing that.
48:14SPEAKERSo the tool that I've used has changed off and on
48:17SPEAKERover the years.
48:18SPEAKERI used simple note type note taking apps for a long time.
48:23SPEAKERThese days I'm using Notion just 'cause it's easy,
48:26SPEAKERit syncs automatically with everything.
48:27SPEAKERThe free version is more than enough
48:29SPEAKERfor personal note taking
48:31SPEAKERand I have basically a tree in my Notion
48:34SPEAKERthat's just like one that's the computers in the house
48:40SPEAKERand then the other one is things I've figured out how to do
48:43SPEAKERand my bar for that is if I had to Google some stuff
48:47SPEAKERand read a bunch of forum posts
48:48SPEAKERto figure out how to do something, I write it down
48:50SPEAKERand I used to just do links to those forum posts
48:54SPEAKERbut I've gotten burned enough by the link rot
48:56SPEAKERthat now I just copy and paste the relevant shit
48:59SPEAKERalong with the link and put that in the documentation.
49:02SPEAKERSo it's not like I'm writing docs
49:04SPEAKERthat I would post on the internet someplace.
49:06SPEAKERI'm literally just giving myself enough information
49:09SPEAKERto understand what I did
49:11SPEAKERand how to recreate it if I need to.
49:13SPEAKERAnd then also if I do something and they're like,
49:18SPEAKERhere's how to update it,
49:19SPEAKERI usually copy that information over too
49:21SPEAKER'cause for whatever reason, I can never remember
49:24SPEAKERhow to update the pie hole
49:25SPEAKEReven though I just have to log in with SSH
49:28SPEAKERand type pie hole up or whatever.
49:30SPEAKER- Pie hole dash upgrade.
49:31SPEAKER- Yeah, dash upgrade.
49:32SPEAKER- Maybe it's dash up actually.
49:34SPEAKERI've moved on as we have mentioned.
49:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
49:38SPEAKER- That's a way better answer than mine
49:39SPEAKERwhich is that I don't document anything
49:41SPEAKERbecause I just can't be bothered which is what it is.
49:46SPEAKERIt leads to every time something breaks
49:48SPEAKERhaving to go do the detective work
49:49SPEAKERof figuring out what broke and what I did
49:52SPEAKERand how to recreate it.
49:54SPEAKERBut anyway.
49:56SPEAKER- Yeah, it's-
49:57SPEAKER- I mean, there's never gonna be a hard and fast answer
50:00SPEAKERfor this, but what's more work?
50:02SPEAKERLike doing the documentation as you go
50:04SPEAKERor doing extra work to fix something
50:06SPEAKER'cause you don't remember how on the backend,
50:08SPEAKERlike it's more work in both cases.
50:10SPEAKERSo I'm not sure what's worse.
50:12SPEAKER- For me, I just do five minutes of copying and pasting
50:15SPEAKERand then dump it into the notion bucket basically.
50:20SPEAKERI hosed the Debbie install on my server
50:22SPEAKERa month or about six weeks ago
50:24SPEAKERwhen I was moving to Trixie when it came out
50:26SPEAKERto rebuild that entire thing from scratch.
50:28SPEAKERSo that was kind of an extreme example.
50:30SPEAKER- Yeah.
50:32SPEAKER- And then to be clear,
50:33SPEAKERthe old install was entirely there.
50:35SPEAKERIt just wasn't working.
50:36SPEAKER- That's always nice.
50:37SPEAKER- And so the point is I could copy
50:39SPEAKERall the configuration files and stuff over.
50:41SPEAKERIt was substantially easier
50:43SPEAKERthan doing literally everything from scratch,
50:45SPEAKERbut yes, it does bite you occasionally.
50:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
50:49SPEAKER- Tactical tug.
50:51SPEAKER- Tug boat, just to be clear.
50:52SPEAKERThis is my understanding.
50:53SPEAKERThey came in and clarified.
50:54SPEAKER- That's right.
50:55SPEAKERThey came in and said they also were referring
50:57SPEAKERto a tug boat actually.
50:58SPEAKER- They directly cited a military, I think, tug boat
51:04SPEAKERthat was used in like combat harbors or something.
51:07SPEAKER- So we were right.
51:09SPEAKER- Yeah.
51:10SPEAKER- All right.
51:11SPEAKER- It's the British who are wrong, Brad.
51:12SPEAKER- That's right, yes.
51:13SPEAKERAs always.
51:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
51:15SPEAKER- Okay, this is a big question.
51:18SPEAKERHow do game engines work?
51:20SPEAKERYou'll hear things like a game X is built
51:22SPEAKERon the unreal engine or the unity engine and so on,
51:25SPEAKERbut how does that affect the game?
51:26SPEAKERAnd what does it mean for me as a gamer?
51:28SPEAKERIs it just a bragging rights similar to a fuck you,
51:31SPEAKERmy car has a V8 or is it something
51:34SPEAKERto actually pay attention to as a gamer or user?
51:37SPEAKERAs a gamer or user, no, absolutely not.
51:39SPEAKERLike if the game is good, if it runs well,
51:41SPEAKERthat's all that matters from the perspective of a player.
51:45SPEAKER- There's a lot of discourse about this, Brad.
51:47SPEAKER- Yeah, dude, I don't even know how much I'd like
51:49SPEAKERthat stuff drives me up the wall.
51:52SPEAKEREvery single topic on the planet
51:54SPEAKERhas a grifter class attached to it now.
51:57SPEAKER- You're not wrong, yeah.
51:58SPEAKER- And even the subject,
52:00SPEAKEReven the sub sub category of video game engines
52:03SPEAKERhas a whole like legion of grifters on Twitter now
52:06SPEAKERwho like outrage bait over like,
52:08SPEAKERoh, the unreal engine sucks ass.
52:09SPEAKERLike, oh, based Kojima productions
52:12SPEAKERusing the godlike Decima engine.
52:14SPEAKERLike there's people out there who basically will just say,
52:16SPEAKERhey, if this game uses engine X, it sucks.
52:18SPEAKERIf it uses engine Y, it's amazing.
52:20SPEAKERAnd like, they seem to think it's as simple as that
52:23SPEAKERbecause they get paid on engagement now.
52:26SPEAKERSo that's not the case at all.
52:28SPEAKER- I feel a little bit maybe responsible for some of this
52:32SPEAKERbecause at Maximum PC in like 2001 or 2002,
52:35SPEAKERI wrote a feature that was really popular about game engines
52:40SPEAKERand what different ones brought to the table.
52:44SPEAKERBut yeah, to your point, the dialogue around
52:48SPEAKERUnity blows, unreal sucks, blah, blah, blah.
52:52SPEAKERLike I was watching a streamer the other day
52:53SPEAKERand it was not to put somebody on blast,
52:56SPEAKERbut they were talking about how
52:59SPEAKERstanding on rocks was slidey in the same way
53:02SPEAKERand Rust and Tarkov, both Unity games.
53:06SPEAKERBut that is, yes, that is a physics thing
53:08SPEAKERthat is probably tied to Unity physics,
53:11SPEAKERthe Unity physics engines that they use.
53:13SPEAKERBut also it's because the collider on top of the rocks
53:16SPEAKERin those games is not big enough for the player capsule
53:20SPEAKERto fit on so the physics doesn't know what to do, right?
53:23SPEAKERSo like everybody attributes stuff to janky engines
53:27SPEAKERor bloat or whatever.
53:29SPEAKERAnd generally speaking, these are all decisions made
53:32SPEAKERby game developers or by publishers or by expediency.
53:36SPEAKERAnd the game engine, what the game engine provides
53:41SPEAKERis a framework for making a game, right?
53:43SPEAKERLike that's it, it provides a series of APIs
53:46SPEAKERthat you can use to draw things on the screen
53:48SPEAKERand take input from users and connect to networks
53:52SPEAKERand server infrastructure.
53:55SPEAKER- Handles internal game logic that governs everything
53:58SPEAKERfrom upgrade mechanics to menus to world simulation
54:01SPEAKERand physics, player input, like you said, rendering,
54:03SPEAKERlike it's a huge part of it, sound, playback, music.
54:07SPEAKER- But the asterisk on all of that is that
54:10SPEAKERall of that stuff also, like the game logic stuff,
54:14SPEAKERno game engines provide game logic stuff.
54:16SPEAKERThat's all written from scratch
54:17SPEAKERfor every single game ever, right?
54:19SPEAKERPhysics is, you have a physics engine
54:22SPEAKERthat you can do basic things with,
54:25SPEAKERbut for the most part, the game developer says,
54:28SPEAKERokay, here's what the jump length is gonna,
54:29SPEAKERlike there's no, the unreal feel is because unreal ships
54:34SPEAKERa bunch of unreal engine demos
54:36SPEAKERthat a lot of people use as the basis of their,
54:40SPEAKERlike if you're making a shooter,
54:42SPEAKERthe common wisdom is start with unreal shooter
54:45SPEAKERas your template, because then you can also use assets
54:47SPEAKERfrom the unreal asset store,
54:49SPEAKERbecause they're gonna be pre-baked for that shooter template
54:52SPEAKER'cause that's what,
54:54SPEAKEReverybody has a shared common language there, right?
54:58SPEAKERSo that means that like your capsule,
54:59SPEAKERyour player capsule sizes are all the same
55:01SPEAKERas that shooter template
55:02SPEAKERand that makes games feel necessarily the same.
55:04SPEAKERYou don't have to do that, that's an option, right?
55:07SPEAKERIt's a, if you're making a $300 million game,
55:10SPEAKERyou're not gonna do that.
55:11SPEAKERIf you're making a game that you wanna feel
55:14SPEAKERlike it can compete with a $300 million game,
55:16SPEAKERbut costs $5 million, then you're probably gonna do that.
55:18SPEAKERAnd that's kind of it.
55:21SPEAKER- I mean, and game engines are just software
55:23SPEAKERand software can be made to do anything if you modify it
55:26SPEAKERand adapt it to your needs enough.
55:29SPEAKER- Yeah. - I mean, within reason,
55:30SPEAKERlike obviously you're like, but you see it all the time,
55:33SPEAKERlike you see developers talking about this,
55:35SPEAKERlike they used UE5 or whatever,
55:38SPEAKERbut then they ripped out blank component
55:40SPEAKERand rewrote their own or something or modified it,
55:42SPEAKERyou know what I mean?
55:43SPEAKERLike you can customize and adapt the engine to do things
55:48SPEAKERthat it wasn't made to do out of the box
55:49SPEAKERor to massage the way it does things.
55:52SPEAKERBut I mean, like you said, that requires work
55:55SPEAKERand that requires scoping around that work and et cetera.
55:58SPEAKER- Well, and there's big downstream consequences.
56:00SPEAKERSo like we rewrote a big chunk of the sound
56:03SPEAKERof the WY's sound engine implementation in Unreal
56:09SPEAKERwhen we were working on the Anacrusis.
56:10SPEAKERAnd it turned out to be a huge boondoggle
56:13SPEAKERbecause when we needed to take a new Unreal update
56:17SPEAKERto fix a different bug, that required a ton of refactoring
56:20SPEAKERto support, to bring our changes forward
56:23SPEAKERinto the new version.
56:24SPEAKERAnd like, so like generally speaking,
56:28SPEAKERif you're working on a budget,
56:30SPEAKERif you're working in an indie scale,
56:32SPEAKERyou don't wanna, even if you have source code access,
56:34SPEAKERwhich everybody does now,
56:36SPEAKERlike don't, you don't wanna modify the,
56:39SPEAKERyou don't wanna modify the source code of the engine
56:42SPEAKERbecause you wanna be able to take those engine upgrades.
56:45SPEAKERBecause like, if you're, say you're shipping a game on Godot
56:48SPEAKERand you release it on Steam originally
56:51SPEAKERand then Sony and Nintendo call and they're like,
56:53SPEAKER"Hey, we'd like to get your game on our platforms."
56:55SPEAKERBut the plugins that work with the Sony infrastructure
56:58SPEAKERand the Nintendo infrastructure
57:00SPEAKERare on two different versions of Godot.
57:02SPEAKERLike you have to be able to port your game
57:04SPEAKERto those different engines of Godot,
57:06SPEAKERor you have to spend way more time backporting
57:09SPEAKERthe PlayStation infrastructure plugin
57:10SPEAKERand the Nintendo infrastructure plugins
57:13SPEAKERto work on your game.
57:16SPEAKERSo it's like keeping your stuff portable
57:19SPEAKERand easily upgradable makes a ton of sense.
57:22SPEAKERBut yeah, just generally speaking,
57:24SPEAKERthe YouTubers who bitch about Unreal and Unity
57:26SPEAKERand all that stuff are not generally
57:29SPEAKERparticularly well-informed.
57:30SPEAKER- No, they are definitely not.
57:31SPEAKERLike, I feel like Kojima Productions
57:33SPEAKERis an excellent test case for people taking the wrong lesson
57:36SPEAKERfrom the situation because, okay,
57:38SPEAKERthey shipped the two Metal Gear Solid 5 games
57:40SPEAKERon the Fox engine,
57:42SPEAKERand now they've shipped the two Death Stranding games
57:44SPEAKERon the Decima engine.
57:46SPEAKEROn a technical level,
57:47SPEAKERone of the thing that all those games have in common
57:48SPEAKERis that they look very good for the hardware
57:50SPEAKERand they're also very performant for how good they look.
57:53SPEAKERAnd for some reason, people have taken the lesson from that
57:56SPEAKERof, oh, the Fox engine is so godly.
57:59SPEAKEROh, the Decima engine is so godly.
58:01SPEAKERNobody ever seems to stop and think,
58:02SPEAKERmaybe Kojima Productions is just really good
58:04SPEAKERat building within the scope
58:06SPEAKERof what their technology can support.
58:07SPEAKERYou know, like maybe they are really good
58:09SPEAKERat understanding how to get good visuals
58:11SPEAKERout of their technology without pushing it so hard
58:13SPEAKERthat the performance suffers.
58:14SPEAKERLike it's never, hey, these developers are good
58:16SPEAKERat their jobs.
58:17SPEAKERIt's always, oh, the software they're using
58:19SPEAKERis so amazing or sucks.
58:20SPEAKER- Yeah, but they make that software too.
58:22SPEAKER- Right.
58:23SPEAKER- But also there's two things there.
58:25SPEAKERThere's one, there's a novelty aspect
58:27SPEAKERso that because it's not using the same unreal renderer
58:31SPEAKERand all that stuff, the same unreal lighting model,
58:33SPEAKERthings look different and different,
58:35SPEAKERour brains think different is good, right?
58:36SPEAKERWhich is good, that's a good thing, awesome for them.
58:40SPEAKERThe other thing is those are not general purpose engines.
58:42SPEAKERThose are engines that are built for specific games.
58:45SPEAKERAnd like, there's a reason they didn't bring,
58:47SPEAKERI mean, there's multiple reasons
58:48SPEAKERthey didn't bring Fox forward for the new thing,
58:50SPEAKERbut like they spent hundreds of millions of dollars
58:52SPEAKERmaking Death Stranding.
58:53SPEAKERIt's an enormous amount of money.
58:55SPEAKERAnd like, you're not, they built a bespoke engine for that.
59:00SPEAKERWe saw what happened, you know, a battlefield,
59:03SPEAKERa dice made a bespoke engine for battlefield
59:06SPEAKERyears and years ago.
59:07SPEAKERAnd when EA tried to adapt that to general purpose use
59:10SPEAKERthe same way that Epic turned unreal
59:12SPEAKERover a decade and a half into a multi-purpose game engine,
59:16SPEAKERit was an enormous disaster on almost every front.
59:19SPEAKERLike all of those games that shipped with Frostbite
59:21SPEAKERhad problems.
59:22SPEAKERAnd like, it was, there were production problems,
59:26SPEAKERthere were delays, there was bad crunch,
59:28SPEAKERthere was all the stuff that makes video games shitty
59:31SPEAKERbecause they were taking a bespoke engine
59:34SPEAKERthat was built to make battlefield games
59:36SPEAKERand trying to jam Need for Speed and I can't remember what else.
59:40SPEAKERYeah, Mass Effect and Dragon Age and all of these other,
59:44SPEAKERall of these other not fast paced military shooters
59:48SPEAKERwith vehicles games into them.
59:50SPEAKER- Anthem grade?
59:51SPEAKER- Yeah.
59:52SPEAKER- That's a great example.
59:53SPEAKER- Yeah, so like.
59:54SPEAKER- Battlefield is another great example that you still see
59:56SPEAKERwhere these types of people that talk shit about engines
59:59SPEAKERall the time or talk shit about game developers will post,
1:00:02SPEAKERlike they'll post like the intro or that aircraft carrier
1:00:04SPEAKERscene from battlefield three, I think it's three
1:00:06SPEAKERor maybe four.
1:00:07SPEAKERAnd they're just like, games looked like this 15 years ago,
1:00:10SPEAKERwhat happened?
1:00:11SPEAKERAnd the subtext is always why are game developers so bad
1:00:13SPEAKERat their jobs now?
1:00:14SPEAKERLike that's always what they're never stopping to realize
1:00:16SPEAKERexactly what you just said of like,
1:00:18SPEAKERthat is like an on rails cinematic sequence of a person
1:00:21SPEAKERin a plane on an aircraft carrier.
1:00:23SPEAKERLike there's no geometry in that scene except for a plane
1:00:26SPEAKERand an aircraft carrier, you know what I mean?
1:00:27SPEAKERIt's not like, there's not a big open world environment
1:00:30SPEAKERwith all kinds of like, with a massive possibility space
1:00:33SPEAKERor whatever, it is a very constrained effectively hallway
1:00:37SPEAKERscene, which like you said, with technology built exactly
1:00:40SPEAKERaround the needs of that scene, it's like the.
1:00:42SPEAKER- Well, it's like fighting games.
1:00:43SPEAKERFighting games look really good because they blow
1:00:45SPEAKERthe entire console's poly budget on two characters
1:00:48SPEAKERand a little bit of background.
1:00:49SPEAKER- And a background with a fixed front camera angle, right?
1:00:51SPEAKERLike, you know, like Brendan and Sanjay talked about that
1:00:53SPEAKERon the skin deep episode.
1:00:54SPEAKERI was like, you know, why didn't the,
1:00:56SPEAKERwhy didn't the Doom 3 lighting catch on because it looked
1:00:58SPEAKERso much better than everything else at the time.
1:01:00SPEAKERAnd they were like, because it didn't scale beyond the game
1:01:02SPEAKERwith like tight, dark hallways, basically, you know, like,
1:01:06SPEAKERlike a lot of game engines are built specifically
1:01:08SPEAKERfor the needs of what the game is doing
1:01:10SPEAKERand do not work beyond that.
1:01:12SPEAKERAnyway, like there's just so, so much more nuance
1:01:15SPEAKERto the technical implementation of modern video games
1:01:18SPEAKERthan a lot of the sort of outrage class on social media
1:01:22SPEAKERgives credit to.
1:01:23SPEAKER- Well, and then the last part of it is that the art
1:01:27SPEAKERmakes a huge difference, right?
1:01:29SPEAKERLike if you look at, I love to reference Star Wars Outlaws
1:01:33SPEAKERfor this because that game is art dense in a way
1:01:36SPEAKERthat even most triple A games aren't these days, right?
1:01:40SPEAKERWhen you walk through one of those cityscapes,
1:01:43SPEAKERthere's a bazillion physics based props everywhere you look.
1:01:47SPEAKERAnd like the game looks, it looks grimy and gross
1:01:52SPEAKERthe way you want a 70s Star Wars to look.
1:01:55SPEAKERAnd that's not engine, that is a bazillion people
1:02:01SPEAKERin 10 studios around the world spent five years making pots,
1:02:07SPEAKERlike bespoke pots and trash cans and plants
1:02:10SPEAKERand little guys and weird shit that's on tables
1:02:13SPEAKERand stools that only work for one specific kind of
1:02:19SPEAKERStar Wars alien and like all sorts of nonsense.
1:02:22SPEAKERIt's not like the engine just takes that work
1:02:26SPEAKERand displays it.
1:02:26SPEAKERIt's not, it's like praising your word processor, right?
1:02:30SPEAKER- Yes.
1:02:31SPEAKER- So anyway.
1:02:32SPEAKER- Like, you know, even a very well architected
1:02:34SPEAKERperformant engine can buckle if you cram too much stuff
1:02:37SPEAKERin there at one time, right?
1:02:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:02:38SPEAKERBut also don't listen to people who yell about this stuff
1:02:41SPEAKERon YouTube 'cause usually they're kind of doofuses.
1:02:43SPEAKER- Yup.
1:02:44SPEAKER- Yup.
1:02:45SPEAKER- Digital Foundry is the exception.
1:02:47SPEAKER- Yes.
1:02:48SPEAKER- Well informed.
1:02:49SPEAKER- I mean, those folks who read white papers.
1:02:51SPEAKER- Well, I mean, you know.
1:02:52SPEAKER- They're paying attention to what goes on as SIGGRAPH
1:02:55SPEAKERlike they are not.
1:02:56SPEAKER- They understand white papers is I think
1:02:57SPEAKERthe more important thing.
1:02:58SPEAKERYeah.
1:02:59SPEAKER- Right, yes.
1:03:00SPEAKEROkay, a question from Hornet.
1:03:02SPEAKERWhy is it that my phone can recognize what song
1:03:04SPEAKERis being played inside a crowded restaurant
1:03:06SPEAKERfrom inside my pocket?
1:03:08SPEAKERBut when I call someone, I sound like I'm using
1:03:10SPEAKERthe microphone that came with the Xbox Live starter kit
1:03:12SPEAKERin 2002.
1:03:14SPEAKER- It's 'cause of the codecs that we use for phone calls.
1:03:16SPEAKERIf you use FaceTime audio, it sounds nice.
1:03:19SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.
1:03:20SPEAKERI mean, I guess there's a lot of questions here.
1:03:21SPEAKERA, what kind of phone are you using?
1:03:23SPEAKERB, what is facilitating the phone call on the software end?
1:03:27SPEAKER- Yeah, but like.
1:03:28SPEAKER- There's a lot of variables there, but.
1:03:29SPEAKER- I was gonna say like codec.
1:03:34SPEAKERThe codecs are, they upgraded the basic codec
1:03:39SPEAKERfor voice calls a few years ago.
1:03:41SPEAKERIt used to be a GSM, like a really incredibly low bit rate.
1:03:46SPEAKERAnd now with the LTE change,
1:03:48SPEAKERthey changed it to a higher bit rate,
1:03:51SPEAKERbut it's still pretty low by modern standards.
1:03:56SPEAKERVoice over LTE is the current thing.
1:04:01SPEAKERAnd it's like, I'm trying to find the codec bit rate,
1:04:04SPEAKERbut it's still shockingly low.
1:04:05SPEAKERIt's like 512 kilobits or something like that.
1:04:10SPEAKERVoice quality, you may be unsurprised to hear,
1:04:14SPEAKERit sounds like there are multiple types of like subcategories
1:04:16SPEAKEReven within the voice over LTE.
1:04:18SPEAKER- Shocking.
1:04:19SPEAKER- The AMR WB plus codec has a wide bit range
1:04:23SPEAKERfrom 5.2 to 48 kilobits.
1:04:26SPEAKERYeah, you're right, even 48 is pretty small.
1:04:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:29SPEAKER- Yes, offers a wide range of bit rates
1:04:31SPEAKERfrom 5.9 kilobits to 128.
1:04:33SPEAKER128 is like better, I guess.
1:04:38SPEAKER- 128 is like, it's the quality we post the podcast at.
1:04:43SPEAKER- Yeah, although, I mean, that's a different,
1:04:45SPEAKERthat's using an MP3.
1:04:45SPEAKER- Different codec, yeah.
1:04:46SPEAKER- The MP3, the quality is a function of both bit rate
1:04:49SPEAKERand kind of general quality of the codec at encoding data.
1:04:55SPEAKERCompressing it rather.
1:04:56SPEAKERSo we can't say for exactly, but anyway, that's a, oh.
1:05:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:05:01SPEAKER- It looks like Fraunhofer, remember them?
1:05:03SPEAKER- Yeah, figures of the MP3.
1:05:05SPEAKER- Yes, Fraunhofer, the creators of the MP3,
1:05:07SPEAKERlike notoriously, the people you had to pay money to
1:05:11SPEAKERback in the day for an MP3 or MP2 player.
1:05:14SPEAKER- Yep.
1:05:15SPEAKER- Or, you know, the vanguard of codec licensing fees,
1:05:20SPEAKERlet's say.
1:05:21SPEAKERAnyway, apparently they have been in the voiceover LTE game
1:05:24SPEAKERbecause of course, anyway.
1:05:28SPEAKER- But yeah, their thing hasn't taken off, so anyway.
1:05:31SPEAKER- That's been the whole point of, like you said,
1:05:34SPEAKERkind of voice calls over FaceTime or I mean everything,
1:05:37SPEAKERWhatsApp.
1:05:37SPEAKER- WhatsApp, Signal, yeah, all that.
1:05:39SPEAKER- They all have built-in voice calls
1:05:41SPEAKERthat are higher quality.
1:05:41SPEAKERI'm sure Google has similar stuff on Android
1:05:45SPEAKERto Apple's FaceTime stuff.
1:05:47SPEAKER- Yeah, I think so, yeah.
1:05:49SPEAKERI mean, you use Signal or FaceTime or WhatsApp
1:05:53SPEAKERis what most people do.
1:05:55SPEAKER- What is, do you know what the,
1:05:56SPEAKERwhat is the wifi calling option on iPhones?
1:05:59SPEAKERIs that something, is that an Apple level feature
1:06:01SPEAKERor is that a carrier, like general phone technology?
1:06:04SPEAKER- That is the carrier delivering
1:06:06SPEAKERyour LTE calls over the wifi network.
1:06:09SPEAKERIt's basically bridging when you're at home,
1:06:11SPEAKERit'll bridge off of their network and onto yours
1:06:14SPEAKERso that you have better signal.
1:06:15SPEAKER- So that's less, I've got it, got it.
1:06:17SPEAKERSo that's less about better phone call quality
1:06:20SPEAKERand more about just better signal if,
1:06:22SPEAKERif you're in a shitty cell signal area.
1:06:25SPEAKER- Well, it lets you get SMS messages and phone calls
1:06:28SPEAKERif you're off of their grid, which is nice.
1:06:31SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, that's totally different, that makes sense.
1:06:34SPEAKEROkay, last question.
1:06:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:06:37SPEAKER- I hope you have a good answer for this
1:06:38SPEAKER'cause this is, this is a complicated one from Zander.
1:06:41SPEAKER- Oh, I thought it was the hair care one, poop.
1:06:42SPEAKER- Oh, that one's easy, we'll save that one.
1:06:44SPEAKER- Okay.
1:06:46SPEAKER- Zander, I've been looking for some new home accessories,
1:06:50SPEAKERlamps and arts, et cetera, and I'm having a hard time
1:06:53SPEAKERfiguring out what is just a drop shipper
1:06:55SPEAKERreselling Alibaba items versus who are the originators
1:06:59SPEAKERof a piece that got duped by manufacturers in China
1:07:03SPEAKERversus what is just originally from Alibaba
1:07:05SPEAKERor a dupe of a much more expensive item
1:07:07SPEAKERthat isn't made anymore.
1:07:09SPEAKERI can find posts on Reddit for some items
1:07:11SPEAKERthat support all three positions.
1:07:13SPEAKERWhat do you do to sort through dupes?
1:07:15SPEAKER- This is, this is, I like to think of this
1:07:18SPEAKERas the Etsy problem now.
1:07:19SPEAKER- Okay, sure.
1:07:20SPEAKER- Because Etsy started out as a place that like,
1:07:23SPEAKERperhaps people would make one-offs and sell them
1:07:25SPEAKERto people who are interested in buying cool art.
1:07:28SPEAKERLike a small press expo, but on the internet.
1:07:31SPEAKERAnd now it's just a bunch of Alibaba drop shippers
1:07:33SPEAKERand a handful of original artists.
1:07:35SPEAKER- Real quick, drop shipper, drop shipper is a middleman,
1:07:38SPEAKERright, like to the earlier points,
1:07:40SPEAKERlike the drop shipper is somebody who basically orders
1:07:42SPEAKERand resells stuff, is that correct?
1:07:44SPEAKER- It depends, sometimes they're warehousing stuff,
1:07:46SPEAKERlike sometimes they're buying stuff and then reselling it,
1:07:48SPEAKERbut they are a middleman, yeah.
1:07:50SPEAKER- Okay.
1:07:52SPEAKER- I don't think middleman has a real hard definition,
1:07:54SPEAKERbut I can be wrong.
1:07:55SPEAKER- But what I mean is a drop shipper is just somebody
1:07:57SPEAKERwho is facilitating the sale of something
1:07:59SPEAKERsomebody else made, right, like they're just like importing
1:08:01SPEAKERand reselling.
1:08:02SPEAKER- Yeah, but that's what Walmart does too.
1:08:04SPEAKER- Well, yes, but I don't know, I mean that term
1:08:06SPEAKERhas become pretty commonly used, I feel like in this era,
1:08:10SPEAKERbut maybe it's something that's reserved
1:08:11SPEAKERfor like small individual sellers.
1:08:14SPEAKER- Well, I think drop shipper specifically means somebody
1:08:16SPEAKERwho's like buying it and having it shipped direct
1:08:19SPEAKERfrom Alibaba to the customer rather than like
1:08:24SPEAKERgoing through a warehouse.
1:08:25SPEAKER- Never taking physical possession of the item.
1:08:27SPEAKER- Yeah, I think technically probably the Etsy folks
1:08:30SPEAKERwho do this are not necessarily doing that,
1:08:32SPEAKERI think that they're probably buying like a run of stickers
1:08:35SPEAKERor whatever and then getting them here
1:08:37SPEAKERand then packaging them up and reshipping them
1:08:39SPEAKERwhen they sell them on Etsy for a 10X markup.
1:08:43SPEAKERBut yeah, I don't know what a good,
1:08:46SPEAKERlike I look at the reviews, I don't buy stuff
1:08:49SPEAKERthat looks like it could have come from Alibaba on,
1:08:51SPEAKERlike if I'm gonna do, honestly, the easiest way to do it
1:08:55SPEAKERis to go look at AliExpress and see if you can find
1:08:57SPEAKERthe same thing on AliExpress and then if that's the case,
1:08:59SPEAKERthen you know that's where it came from.
1:09:01SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:09:02SPEAKER- And then for stuff like furniture,
1:09:04SPEAKERI buy either used local, like I watch Craigslist
1:09:07SPEAKERor Facebook market or whatever or buy direct from Ikea
1:09:11SPEAKERor whatever, you know, I'm not buying designer furniture
1:09:14SPEAKERright now, I have a kid.
1:09:18SPEAKERBut the, like if I was, I would go to local places
1:09:23SPEAKERthat are reputable would be my guess.
1:09:25SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the best advice I can give here.
1:09:28SPEAKERI'm not buying a lot of like home goods and accessories
1:09:31SPEAKERthat would fit into this category,
1:09:32SPEAKERbut I guess I do run into this with electronics sometimes.
1:09:35SPEAKER- Yeah, shoes too oddly.
1:09:37SPEAKER- Yeah, like I talked about on the patron episode
1:09:40SPEAKERthat I think probably up by the time this posts,
1:09:43SPEAKERI bought a very specific right angle USB cable.
1:09:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:09:48SPEAKER- It was a right angle USB B 3.0 cable,
1:09:51SPEAKERlike very, very specific, hard to find.
1:09:55SPEAKERThe first one I bought didn't work
1:09:56SPEAKERand it has to be returned, but it's a piece of junk.
1:09:59SPEAKERThe reason I bring this up is there are sites out there
1:10:01SPEAKERthat specialize in weird specific cables like this.
1:10:04SPEAKERLike I found one site that was selling
1:10:06SPEAKERthe exact kind of cable I need for $50.
1:10:09SPEAKERAnd so there was one other one on Amazon I hadn't tried yet
1:10:12SPEAKERbesides the one that didn't work.
1:10:14SPEAKERAnd I was literally like eyeballing the molding
1:10:16SPEAKERaround the cable where like the cable
1:10:19SPEAKERmeets the connector and stuff.
1:10:20SPEAKER- Oh, to see if there was too much flange or whatever?
1:10:22SPEAKER- Well, no, no, trying to see if that $50 cable
1:10:24SPEAKERon that external site was actually the exact same cable
1:10:28SPEAKERout of the same factory as the $10 one on Amazon
1:10:31SPEAKERthat I hadn't tried yet.
1:10:32SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:10:33SPEAKER- 'Cause I was trying to find a cable that worked,
1:10:35SPEAKERbut I didn't want to spend $50 on it
1:10:37SPEAKERif it was actually just a huge markup
1:10:39SPEAKERon the exact same cable I could have gotten
1:10:41SPEAKERfor a fifth of the price.
1:10:42SPEAKERSo like in some cases, I guess it's down
1:10:45SPEAKERto just eyeballing like tiny details on the item
1:10:47SPEAKERto see if it's actually the same thing you'd be getting
1:10:50SPEAKERon AliExpress for way less.
1:10:52SPEAKER- The other thing like for cables and electronics
1:10:55SPEAKERand stuff like that, there's also like Grainger
1:10:58SPEAKERand McMaster's car and like there's a bazillion
1:11:01SPEAKERactual real places that sell good stuff that you can go to.
1:11:07SPEAKERIn my experience, the real problems are the ones
1:11:10SPEAKERthat allow third-party sellers.
1:11:12SPEAKERSo like Amazon and Newegg and Etsy and all of these,
1:11:15SPEAKERand eBay, frankly, at this point,
1:11:17SPEAKERwhich was all third-party sellers.
1:11:19SPEAKERBut you're not gonna get a bad,
1:11:24SPEAKERyou're not gonna get a knockoff if you order the thing
1:11:26SPEAKERfrom McMaster's car, right?
1:11:27SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, but you're gonna pay for it.
1:11:30SPEAKER- I mean, but don't pay for expedited shipping
1:11:33SPEAKERis the lesson there.
1:11:34SPEAKER'Cause it's real, it's like $75 every time
1:11:37SPEAKERI've done it by accident.
1:11:38SPEAKERAnyway, I think this is as good a place as any.
1:11:40SPEAKEROh, do you wanna do one more?
1:11:42SPEAKERAre we saving that one for next time?
1:11:43SPEAKER- Yeah, let's do the haircare one real quick.
1:11:45SPEAKER- Okay.
1:11:47SPEAKER- Also from Ambush Penguin Charlie,
1:11:48SPEAKERgetting a twofer this month.
1:11:50SPEAKERHow much of your haircare and maintenance is done at home
1:11:52SPEAKERversus at a barber or salon?
1:11:54SPEAKERYou have beard trimming folks for folks with equally long
1:11:57SPEAKERbeards that have grown longer than a wall can keep short?
1:12:00SPEAKERWhat about long hair tips?
1:12:01SPEAKERAlways curious about other people's methods.
1:12:03SPEAKERI recently started going to a haircut place again.
1:12:06SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
1:12:07SPEAKER- After asking my girlfriend to trim my hair
1:12:10SPEAKERfor most of the last five years,
1:12:12SPEAKERwhen the pandemic started.
1:12:14SPEAKER- Did you go to a barber or a salon?
1:12:17SPEAKER- It is a neighborhood haircut place
1:12:19SPEAKERthat is a block and a half from here.
1:12:21SPEAKER- Okay, that's pretty good.
1:12:22SPEAKER- That has been here for like 30 years,
1:12:23SPEAKERand I never even noticed it before.
1:12:25SPEAKER- They're doing a nice job.
1:12:26SPEAKERYou look good.
1:12:26SPEAKER- Well, thank you.
1:12:27SPEAKERThey charge $15 a haircut.
1:12:29SPEAKER- I need to start coming to your place.
1:12:30SPEAKERMy guy's way more expensive than that.
1:12:32SPEAKER- I give roughly double that
1:12:34SPEAKERbecause that's still a third of what a haircut costs
1:12:37SPEAKERaround here.
1:12:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, 60 bucks is the cheapest
1:12:39SPEAKERI've found one lately.
1:12:41SPEAKER- Yes.
1:12:43SPEAKER- So I do, I mean, I go to the haircut.
1:12:46SPEAKERI get my haircut at the barber,
1:12:48SPEAKERand then I occasionally will pay for a beard trim.
1:12:51SPEAKERI used to do it more when they were 10 bucks
1:12:53SPEAKERand now that it's $25, I'm less enthusiastic about it.
1:12:58SPEAKERI have a nice set of wall trimmers
1:13:02SPEAKERthat I keep a guard on.
1:13:04SPEAKERI put like a three guard on or a two guard on,
1:13:06SPEAKERand I use, like I brush the beard when I need to trim it,
1:13:11SPEAKERand I just freehand it real careful off the,
1:13:16SPEAKERbut I don't touch the guard to the skin, obviously.
1:13:19SPEAKERI'm just shaping, it's like using hedge trimmers.
1:13:22SPEAKERYou got to kind of glide above.
1:13:25SPEAKER- Do you ever think about just losing the beard?
1:13:27SPEAKER- I have asked if that is an option,
1:13:29SPEAKERand I've been told by my child who has never seen me
1:13:32SPEAKERwithout a beard, except for in pictures,
1:13:34SPEAKERthat she would freak the fuck out, was the direct quote.
1:13:37SPEAKER- I saw a viral post going around the other day
1:13:40SPEAKERof, I did not see it before.
1:13:42SPEAKERThey did not include a before picture of a guy
1:13:45SPEAKERwho clearly has had a long beard for a long time,
1:13:48SPEAKERbut it was like, hey, we're picking up our child
1:13:50SPEAKERfrom school, beard reveal kind of thing of like,
1:13:53SPEAKERchild gets in the backseat, dad turns around to say hi.
1:13:56SPEAKER- That is not an okay way to do it, man.
1:13:57SPEAKER- She straight up started crying.
1:13:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I think my daughter is old enough now
1:14:01SPEAKERthat she wouldn't start crying,
1:14:02SPEAKERbut it would be disturbing for her.
1:14:04SPEAKER- Yeah, sure. - And also I like the beard.
1:14:05SPEAKERI don't know what my face looks like under there anymore.
1:14:07SPEAKERIt could be a nightmare.
1:14:08SPEAKER- That was my real question is, do you like having it?
1:14:10SPEAKERBecause it is maintenance, like it is, you know,
1:14:12SPEAKERI'm sure it presents some challenges
1:14:14SPEAKERwhen you're eating soup and things like that.
1:14:15SPEAKER- It's less maintenance than shaving every day was though,
1:14:19SPEAKERand I have a signature look, I think now, I don't know.
1:14:21SPEAKERIs it important to have a signature look
1:14:23SPEAKERin our line of work? - Sure, sure, probably.
1:14:25SPEAKERDo you ever think about like trimming it way down
1:14:26SPEAKERto like kind of a close cropped again?
1:14:29SPEAKER- I come up and down as this, I like it a little long
1:14:31SPEAKER'cause I like to, I wanna lengthen the face
1:14:33SPEAKERjust a little bit, you know, but yeah,
1:14:39SPEAKERI've been, let's see, about six months ago,
1:14:42SPEAKERI did the thing where I took like 10% off a week
1:14:45SPEAKERfor two or three weeks just to see if anybody noticed
1:14:47SPEAKERand nobody noticed 'cause I did it slowly and gradually
1:14:49SPEAKERand you know, it's fine.
1:14:51SPEAKERYeah, if it gets too long, it's a real pain in the butt
1:14:54SPEAKERand then you have to start like,
1:14:56SPEAKERyeah, you don't wanna find food in there.
1:14:58SPEAKER- Yeah, also I guess, you know, once it grows out,
1:15:00SPEAKERit's not a problem anymore.
1:15:01SPEAKERLike I am perpetually, I hate the feeling of New Beard.
1:15:05SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no. - It's all itchy and ugh.
1:15:08SPEAKER- No, no, no, what's it, like it's soft now.
1:15:11SPEAKERI put oil on it every day to keep it like soft and shiny
1:15:16SPEAKERand yeah, it's like the maintenance is low most of the time.
1:15:21SPEAKERIt's like every week or every other week,
1:15:23SPEAKERI give it a touch up trim and bring the sides in.
1:15:26SPEAKERThe problem, honestly, the problem is that most barbershops
1:15:28SPEAKERnow, when you ask for a beard trim, they're like,
1:15:30SPEAKERwell, what number do you want?
1:15:31SPEAKERI'm like, I don't want one number.
1:15:32SPEAKERI want shorter on the sides and on the bottom
1:15:35SPEAKER'cause like obviously it's a freaking long beard.
1:15:38SPEAKERSo then they wanna do like a scissor cut on it
1:15:40SPEAKERand I'm like, I don't, I'll just do this myself, I got it.
1:15:44SPEAKER- The hard part is the mustache 'cause like you gotta like,
1:15:47SPEAKERyou gotta, you can really mess yourself up
1:15:50SPEAKERif you get into the mustache region the wrong way.
1:15:52SPEAKERNobody wants, and I can't pull off like an Amish beard
1:15:55SPEAKERwhere it's just like no mustache, but the beard,
1:15:57SPEAKERthat's not, I don't think that's a good look for me.
1:15:58SPEAKER- Like that's probably not gonna work.
1:16:00SPEAKER- Yeah, on that note, I think we'll wrap it up
1:16:02SPEAKERfor this month, this week's episode.
1:16:06SPEAKERThanks to everybody who sent in questions.
1:16:07SPEAKERAs always, you can send them to techpod@content.town
1:16:09SPEAKERor post them in the Question Seeking Answers channel
1:16:11SPEAKERin the Discord if you're a member of the TechPod Patreon
1:16:15SPEAKERand support the show.
1:16:16SPEAKERIf you do that, we appreciate you very much.
1:16:17SPEAKERThank you, thank you.
1:16:20SPEAKER- Yes, we do.
1:16:20SPEAKER- If you'd like to find out how you can support the show,
1:16:23SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod
1:16:26SPEAKERwhere for five bucks a month,
1:16:27SPEAKERyou get access to the Discord,
1:16:29SPEAKERyou get, it's full of beautiful nerds, just to be clear.
1:16:32SPEAKER- It is. - Wonderful people.
1:16:34SPEAKER- Yep.
1:16:34SPEAKER- Talking about Linux and nerdy stuff and--
1:16:37SPEAKER- Plenty of other stuff too.
1:16:38SPEAKER- Like there's a bunch of other things like food,
1:16:40SPEAKERthe food channel has been popping off lately.
1:16:42SPEAKERWe're coming up on Thanksgiving,
1:16:44SPEAKERwhich is like prime TechPod food channel season
1:16:47SPEAKERas far as I'm concerned.
1:16:48SPEAKER- Yeah, thriving video game discussion.
1:16:50SPEAKER- Yeah. - Went old.
1:16:51SPEAKERI've been spending a little time
1:16:52SPEAKERin the old ass computers channel recently.
1:16:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:16:55SPEAKER- Some fun stuff going on in there.
1:16:56SPEAKERFriend of the show, E, told me about something
1:16:59SPEAKERcalled FujiNet the other day.
1:17:00SPEAKER- Ooh.
1:17:01SPEAKER- Which I think there's a hardware
1:17:03SPEAKERand a software component to it.
1:17:05SPEAKERAnd it's like specific to each old computer,
1:17:07SPEAKERbut it's basically an attempt to, okay,
1:17:09SPEAKERFujiNet is a multi peripheral emulator
1:17:11SPEAKERand wifi network device for vintage computers.
1:17:13SPEAKERSo it's like, oh, I saw something similar to this
1:17:17SPEAKERfor the NSX is how this conversation started,
1:17:19SPEAKERwhich it was a cartridge for the NSX
1:17:21SPEAKERthat has wifi hardware and a network stack built into it.
1:17:24SPEAKERIt's basically like wifi support for old computers
1:17:27SPEAKERthat are a predate wifi by 30 years.
1:17:29SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool.
1:17:30SPEAKER- But it lets you, it basically lets you load old software
1:17:33SPEAKERover a network to old computers.
1:17:35SPEAKER- That sounds wonderful.
1:17:36SPEAKER- I mean, this is, I'm looking right here, you know,
1:17:38SPEAKERApple II, Atari, Commodore, Tandy,
1:17:41SPEAKERlike all old computers are getting support for this
1:17:43SPEAKERwhere you can basically load like games and other programs
1:17:46SPEAKERfrom the internet over a little wifi plugin
1:17:49SPEAKERthat fools the old computer
1:17:50SPEAKERinto thinking it's something else.
1:17:52SPEAKER- That sounds wonderful.
1:17:53SPEAKER- A lot of neat stuff going on out there.
1:17:55SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a good community of people.
1:17:57SPEAKERYou also get access to the Patreon exclusive episode.
1:17:59SPEAKERThis month, Brad and I just kind of rambled about,
1:18:02SPEAKERwell, Linux stuff and some other things
1:18:03SPEAKERthat we're working on.
1:18:06SPEAKERYou can do all that by going to patreon.com/techpod.
1:18:09SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com/techpod.
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1:18:15SPEAKERhey, leave me a reminder to subscribe to the tech pod
1:18:17SPEAKERwhen I get out of the car.
1:18:19SPEAKER- Yep, the highest possible use of such technology.
1:18:21SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
1:18:23SPEAKERAs always, thanks to everybody who supports the show.
1:18:25SPEAKERWe appreciate you.
1:18:25SPEAKERWe are listener supported.
1:18:27SPEAKERBut a special thank you goes out
1:18:29SPEAKERto our executive producer tier patrons,
1:18:31SPEAKERincluding James Kamik, David Allen, Twinkle Twinkie,
1:18:35SPEAKERBunny Money, Jordan Lippett, Andrew Slawski,
1:18:38SPEAKERInfelicitous Rips, Jason Lee, and Pantheon,
1:18:42SPEAKERmakers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:18:45SPEAKERIt's the end of the month, so we also want to do a shout out
1:18:47SPEAKERto our associate producer tier supporters,
1:18:49SPEAKERincluding Graham Banks, Thomas Shea, Chad Rita,
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1:19:10SPEAKERparentheses Walkman8080, close parentheses,
1:19:13SPEAKERSanjik Kumar, Felix Kramer, Kerp, Brutal Kerfuffle,
1:19:18SPEAKERand Eric, thanks everybody so much.
1:19:19SPEAKERWe appreciate y'all.
1:19:20SPEAKER- Yeah, we would not be here without you.
1:19:22SPEAKERThank you.
1:19:23SPEAKER- No, we absolutely would not.
1:19:24SPEAKERAnd that'll do it for us this week.
1:19:26SPEAKERI hope everybody has a lovely week,
1:19:27SPEAKERand we will see you next week
1:19:30SPEAKERwith another edition of the Tech Pod.
1:19:31SPEAKERAs always, please consider the environment
1:19:33SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.
1:19:34SPEAKERBye, everybody.
1:19:35SPEAKER(upbeat music)