00:00SPEAKERBrad when I was at that Intel tech tour thing a couple of weeks ago, which by the way, videos
00:03SPEAKERup on PC world and the full nerd. Now we should talk more about that. Adam. Well, I think we'll
00:09SPEAKERhave Adam on in a couple of weeks. I talked to him about it and he's, it seems game. So,
00:13SPEAKERbut I got to talk to Intel. We talked to a bunch of Intel fellows. We only talked to a couple of
00:16SPEAKERthem on camera. Adam talked to tap about GPU stuff and wide computing. Let me stop you real quick.
00:24SPEAKERWhen you say fellows, is that like fellas, like fellers, like colloquial, some chums, some pals,
00:30SPEAKERor is that like, is that a fellow, like a distinguished person of import and prestige?
00:36SPEAKERIt's a distinguished person of import and prestige. It's like, think about like a,
00:41SPEAKERlike a university chair. Yes. That's like a collegial. That's how I would describe them.
00:46SPEAKERThat's what I figured you meant, but anyway, go on. So I got to talk to, we talked to tap of course,
00:53SPEAKERTom Peterson, who's their GPU guy. He's been around for a hundred years doing stuff at Nvidia
00:58SPEAKERand Intel and all sorts of places. I, I got to talk to Steven Robinson briefly. Who's in charge
01:07SPEAKERof X 86. Oh, it's a big job. The instruction set, which was, I was not prepared to have that kind of
01:14SPEAKERconversation with someone. He was kind of intense, been very technical and very nice. But I got to
01:19SPEAKERspend some time and interviewed. What are their software architects? What are the Intel fellows,
01:23SPEAKERsoftware architects, architects named Roger, Roger Chabu squire, who is in charge of thread director,
01:31SPEAKERwhich I've spent a lot of time running benchmarks on Intel CPU's and AMD CPU's as well. And I'm
01:37SPEAKERpretty familiar with how the technology on both of those CPU's handles the weird nature of their
01:46SPEAKERnon homogenous architectures now. And we got, we sat down and talked for like 20 minutes about
01:52SPEAKERhow thread director works, why it's important, why it's a really hard problem.
01:56SPEAKERLike if you are interested in that stuff, you should go to the full nerd channel on YouTube
02:00SPEAKERand watch the video. Cause I would love to be able to do more videos like that. And we're trying to
02:05SPEAKERput the kind of the hardcore, the more enthusiast, deep dive nerd business on that full nerd channel,
02:11SPEAKERinstead of maybe on the PC world channel where people mostly come looking for like laptop reviews
02:16SPEAKERand stuff like that. But also I mean, that's like, yes, that is deep dive nerd business,
02:19SPEAKERbut it's also something that's just becoming increasingly really relevant to anybody who
02:23SPEAKERruns a modern CPU because they're all going heterogeneous in some fashion. Like AMD's got
02:28SPEAKERits split core design with cores on different dies. Intel has got big and little P and E cores.
02:34SPEAKERAMD, I believe on the public roadmap is also going to start doing big and little cores.
02:40SPEAKERIntel is going to start splitting. If you look at the Nova Lake leaks, Intel is going to start
02:44SPEAKERsplitting cores across dies. Like everybody's going to have scheduling issues is the point
02:48SPEAKERI'm trying to make like scheduling needs to get better soon. And so like, this is something that
02:54SPEAKERis going to affect everybody who's buying new PCs. So that's exciting to hear. Well,
02:58SPEAKEReven, even the mobile stuff does it like Qualcomm and Apple, silicon all has big little and split
03:05SPEAKERcores and stuff. You mentioned Apple here, the nature of Apple's tightly vertically integrated
03:11SPEAKERapproach to hardware and software starts to show its worth because do you ever hear anything about
03:16SPEAKERscheduling issues on MacOS? You sure don't. No. Well, one of the things that was interesting
03:20SPEAKERtalking to Rajshree was that I didn't understand how neither the OS nor the hardware has complete
03:29SPEAKERinformation about what the state of the CPU is. Right? That's my understanding of thread director
03:33SPEAKERis hardware in the CPU, giving some hints or feedback to the OS, to the scheduler, right?
03:38SPEAKERThat is exactly how she described it. Yes. Yeah. But, but as she said, Microsoft owns the
03:43SPEAKERscheduler. The thing that, the thing that happens is, you know, sometimes it's not worth then I'm,
03:50SPEAKERI'm paraphrasing. So if you want to hear her actually explain this much better than me go,
03:55SPEAKERgo look at the video. But the gist is when they look at a thread and they're and they're like,
04:01SPEAKEROh, this is on the wrong core. The thread director sends a hint and then the OS thread scheduler
04:07SPEAKERdecides if it's going to act on the hint or not based on things that it knows, like how much
04:12SPEAKERlonger that thread is scheduled to run. Cause like, if the threads only scheduled to run for
04:16SPEAKERanother 50,000 clock cycles, which is apparently like the timeframe that they're talking about in
04:20SPEAKERa lot of these cases, which just to be clear, billions of clock cycles per second. So 50,000
04:26SPEAKERis like 200,000th of a second. Then ends up it like the cost of moving it to another,
04:33SPEAKERanother core might be higher than the time that it's going to take to take to continue running on
04:39SPEAKERthe nonoptimal core. And, and so we talked about other stuff too. Like one of the things they're
04:44SPEAKERdoing on mobile processors, they're using the E-cores more for like gaming, because it turns out
04:49SPEAKERthe E-cores and games are pretty analogous to what is happening on consoles. If you put eight
04:56SPEAKERE-cores on a game that requires eight cores, you're going to get better performance than
05:00SPEAKERfour Ps and eight and four Es stuff like that. So anyway, it was, it was a really interesting
05:05SPEAKERconversation. I will definitely pull that up. Most of the stuff we talked about there was about
05:10SPEAKERPhantom Lake and about their upcoming Panther Lake. I keep wanting to be Panther, Phantom Lake.
05:20SPEAKERI'm envisioning the YouTube thumbnail new lake. Look look Scooby-Doo just is rolling out to
05:26SPEAKERFortnite at the end of the month or later this week or something. So I got Phantom Lake on my
05:31SPEAKERbrain. They also talked about Clearwater Forest, which is the data center part, which is like
05:36SPEAKERa whole buttload of these 18A compute tiles. And then by the time you hear this, there'll be a
05:41SPEAKERvideo with me and Adam and Mark Hochman up on the PC world channel. I think maybe a full nerd. I
05:47SPEAKERdon't know where we talk about what it was like to go inside the 18A fab and like bunny suit up and
05:52SPEAKERget to walk and walk in the floor where they make the CPU's and see wavers getting turned into footage
05:58SPEAKERof you in a bunny suit. There is not footage. They did not even take a picture. So they had some try
06:05SPEAKERon bunny suits in like the waiting room that I put on. I have pictures of that. I'll send you
06:09SPEAKERpictures of that, but we didn't, we didn't get to have the real bunny suit pictures because they
06:14SPEAKERtaken away our cameras and phones and all that stuff. Highly sensitive facility. I get it anyway.
06:20SPEAKERThat's Hey. Yeah. I'm excited to be excited about CPU's again.
06:50SPEAKER[inaudible]
06:53SPEAKERWelcome to bread and will made a tech pod. I'm well, I'm Brad today.
07:00SPEAKERWe're doing something a little different. Are we? No, it's the same thing. We always do.
07:05SPEAKERI feel like, you know, you gotta have a, when you, when you, when you listen to the radio,
07:09SPEAKERthey're always like, let's do it. Let's, let's kick this off a brand new way.
07:13SPEAKERUm, no. So, uh, we, we have stuff that we, that we like we're doing a toolbox episode. We haven't
07:18SPEAKERdone one in a minute. We like episode or, you know, things we've been tinkering with, like things
07:23SPEAKERwe've dug into and are enthusiastic about and might want to pass on to other people who might
07:27SPEAKERalso like them. Yeah. Good, good vibe stuff. Uh, I got to, can I start, I got, I got, I got a good
07:34SPEAKERkickoff with one of the very first recommendations we made years and years and years ago that the
07:40SPEAKERpeople, the people craved and it became a defining characteristic for a while when I went to Amazon
07:46SPEAKERand I looked at this particular product, it also then would show me a bunch of other shit
07:50SPEAKERtech pod people liked. I think I know where this is going. Proceed. So I used to buy nanotape in
07:57SPEAKERsheets or rolls. Sheets? Yeah. I've never seen it in sheets. I've only seen rolls. What is a sheet?
08:04SPEAKERLike a square shape, kind of situation. Do you buy it in stacks? So before I could buy it before
08:10SPEAKERAmazon had it before alien tape or whatever was advertising on late night TV, I used to get nanotape
08:16SPEAKERfrom inventables, which is the, they, they make, um, they make, uh, CNC, CNC routers, home CNC routers,
08:23SPEAKERand they were selling sheets of it as a, like a way to finish the bottom of things that you
08:27SPEAKERmake with it. So this sticks in place. Interesting. So that's where I, I had one of those that lasted
08:31SPEAKERfor years and years and years where I've just kind of little strips that I needed to year in there.
08:35SPEAKERUm, but then the tape, the tape stuff is good. It's really, really stickier, a lot stickier than
08:40SPEAKERthe inventable stuff. Cause it's a little bit, uh, squashier, I think. And that gives you more
08:44SPEAKERroom to push the air out of the bubbles for people who don't know nanotape is just a kind of soft,
08:49SPEAKERsquishy, bubbly tape that has really, really small, uh, bubbles on, on either one or both sides
08:58SPEAKERthat when you push on it, it suctions stuff onto, you can stick a smooth thing to another
09:03SPEAKERsmooth thing with it. And it'll stay on for ever for a really long time until you scrape it off.
09:08SPEAKERAnd then when you scrape it off, it just comes right off. There's no residue or anything.
09:13SPEAKERI started buying it in dot form so you can get it on like a sheet, like an eight by 12 sheet with
09:18SPEAKERlike a bunch of dots just stuck on and you peel them off and it's much easier to manage than the,
09:24SPEAKERthan the wide tapes than the, than the, uh, cause you, cause a, the round size usually is about what
09:30SPEAKERI need for like one or two of those will do exactly what I want. And I don't have to have
09:35SPEAKERscissors cause it's hard to cut cause it always sticks to the scissors. And like the, the dot form
09:41SPEAKERis pretty good. Occasionally they'll like roll up and get crumpled in on each other. But for the
09:45SPEAKERmost part, you can just peel off a dot, jam it onto something and then jam the thing you want to
09:48SPEAKERstick to it on that. And you're good to go. You put like a little grid shape, I guess,
09:52SPEAKERif you've got a bigger surface, you can just kind of arrange them in a pattern that you think is.
09:57SPEAKERYeah. So I have a couple of things that are longer. I have one on either end,
10:01SPEAKERmaybe one in the middle. It's nice because the dots are easier to pry off than the,
10:07SPEAKERthan the, the tape too. I, as always be thoughtful about surfaces you put this stuff on cause it will
10:14SPEAKERpull like finish off of things. If you're not care if it's, if it's a delicate finish,
10:19SPEAKERI definitely seen people pull the paper off their sheet rock before, which you don't want.
10:24SPEAKERInteresting. Does nanotape stick to it? I would think there's just enough surface variation in
10:28SPEAKERsheet rock that it wouldn't stick super well. Cause these are suction cups to be clear for
10:32SPEAKERpeople who have not used it. And there's no adhesive here. It's, it's, you can envision,
10:36SPEAKERyou know, how a suction cup behaves like it needs to have a pretty clean, flat surface to stick to.
10:42SPEAKERWell, so it depends on your paint is my, is my guess. So if you have a, like a shiny paint
10:46SPEAKERfinish, it's probably going to be less porous and more likely to stick. Also, it depends on how you
10:51SPEAKERtry to remove it. Like if you get in there with a putty knife and kind of slide it in between the
10:56SPEAKERpaint and the wall, it'll pop right off the tape in the wall. It'll pop right off. If you don't
11:03SPEAKERdo that and just pull it straight off, like a, like a ham fisted Tyro, you're probably gonna
11:07SPEAKERpull a chunk of wall off with it if you're not careful. So, so yeah, dot nanotape in dot form,
11:14SPEAKERbig fan. All right. That sounds good. Yeah. What do you got? You got anything? We bouncing
11:20SPEAKERback and forth. I could go all at once, but I've only got two things, but they're kind of bigger
11:25SPEAKERthings. I bought a raft of new SD cards, micro SD cards for my raspberry pies that are, that are the
11:32SPEAKERSanDisk max endurance. I just became aware of SanDisk's high and max endurance line of micro SD
11:37SPEAKERcards recently and decided to give them a shot. What, what occasioned this is the new version of
11:44SPEAKERraspberry pie. OS just came out. Trixie based yes. Based on, so Debbie and Trixie came out in early
11:49SPEAKERAugust and here we are two months later and they have now put out the first raspberry pie image
11:54SPEAKERbased on it. So I was just like, oh, you know, like some of my pies are pretty old around here.
11:59SPEAKERAnd you're using them for stuff like your nut server. So I'll just, I'll do the inventory
12:04SPEAKERhere. I've got a pie for, yeah. That runs one blocky instance. Home assistance. Yeah. A cups
12:13SPEAKERair print server cups is the, what is it? Common Unix printing system or something. It's,
12:18SPEAKERyeah. It's a thing that enables air print support for my printers. You have a printer, honestly,
12:22SPEAKERBrad. Why? That's dude. I bought, I bought the brother laser. Everybody bought in 2008 and it's
12:29SPEAKERstill going just fine. I finally had to retire my brother laser that I really bought in 2008.
12:34SPEAKERCause it, it was making a squeaking noise that I couldn't fix. Yeah. Mostly use it for printing
12:39SPEAKERshipping labels. That's 90% of what we use it for. Anyway, the pie for that's what I will do.
12:47SPEAKERIf I ever get around to doing this NAS backup to external target, what I got hung up on was trying
12:57SPEAKERto decide if I want to encrypt the backup drives or not. And if I do, then that's a whole, that's
13:02SPEAKERthat's a whole new stack of learning how DM crypt works and Lux and making a bunch of decisions
13:08SPEAKERaround drive encryption that I just don't have the energy for. I'm the one who has the Linux
13:12SPEAKERpod. So I'm putting it off for another couple of months. Anyway, I've got a PI two in here that runs
13:17SPEAKERanother blocky instance and nuts, which is hooked up to the UPS to monitor that. And I've got a PI
13:23SPEAKERone that has been out of service for a while, but I'm about to put it back into service as
13:29SPEAKERan airplay target. Wow. That's what, which is ironically is what I bought it for in 2012. I
13:35SPEAKERdon't want to derail this with Raspberry Pi talk, but I, my, my, my first raspberry PI one model B
13:40SPEAKERthat I bought in 2012, I bought to run something called share play on, which basically just is,
13:45SPEAKERit becomes an airplay target, but you can have kind of a crappy audio process. So the I don't
13:51SPEAKERknow if this has changed actually, but yeah, the first, at least couple generations of PI
13:56SPEAKERhave got terrible analog audio output, but the, the fix back then was to buy a little, no name,
14:01SPEAKER$5 USB sound card. I mean, people call them sound cards. They're not cards they're basically look
14:06SPEAKERlike a USB thumb drive with a DAC. Yeah. It's a USB DAC is what it actually is. But even in
14:12SPEAKER2012, you could buy a $5, like literally unbranded, no name, USB DAC that sounded
14:19SPEAKERinfinitely better than the terrible. I think it's like, I forget the audio terminology. Is it,
14:23SPEAKERit's a PWM output. I think on the original PI, not a, there is no DAC. There is no DAC on the
14:30SPEAKERoriginal PI is that it uses PWM output, which sounds God awful. Anyway, I'm going to dig that
14:35SPEAKERlittle USB DAC out. And what this is for is when I get back to tinkering with desktop Linux again,
14:44SPEAKERI like to listen to music while I'm sitting around tinkering with stuff. And if you're doing a bunch
14:48SPEAKERof rebooting back into the UEFI and like running Linux installs and being at a command line and a
14:53SPEAKERfresh install, you can't listen to music on your PC. So I'm going to set this PI one back up as an,
15:00SPEAKERas an airplane target again, to sit here and I can plug my speakers into it and stream music off my
15:05SPEAKERmask to it while the PC is in some like frequently rebooting state. Okay. Anyway, I was along with my
15:12SPEAKERheadphones on for that, but I appreciate that. Well, but I have nothing to play the music off of.
15:16SPEAKERYou have a phone. Not the same. Okay. Okay. I get it. What's the deal with the high endurance? Like
15:24SPEAKERthere's a lot of work happening in SD cards right now. I randomly stumbled on these just searching
15:30SPEAKERaround and they are targeted. They're advertised. Sandisk like advertises them as being primarily
15:36SPEAKERfor like car dashboard cameras and other sort of like constantly recording, constantly writing
15:42SPEAKERscenarios, which as a sidebar, like I kind of can't believe manufacturers make dashcams that
15:49SPEAKERwrite to SD card because SD cards die constantly when you write to them all the time. I'm like,
15:55SPEAKERso I'm of two minds here, right? Cause like one mind says if they did an SSD,
15:59SPEAKERit's going to constantly wear out too. It's just going to take a little bit longer than that than
16:03SPEAKERthe SD card, but if it was internal, then you probably just have to throw out the dash cam and
16:08SPEAKERbuy a new dash cam. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. So like, is it better to just have an
16:13SPEAKERinfinite supply of SD cards going in and out of this thing or better than having to junk a camera
16:18SPEAKERwith integrated storage? Absolutely. Yeah. I wonder are we, are we ripe for some kind of like
16:23SPEAKERlow cost in via like, uh, like user insertable in VME, like enclosed in VME sort of situation
16:30SPEAKERkind of feels like it, but I don't know. Let me pitch an idea to you. What if you had
16:33SPEAKERa really small spinning disc and, and then you had these magnetic read, write heads that kind of
16:38SPEAKERrode above the disc and they wrote bits onto the circular tracks of that disc, almost like a record
16:45SPEAKERor a CD and they just spun really fast. So you get the data on and off and you could like write
16:51SPEAKERto them forever and they would never degrade. Well, I mean, forever is a long time, but yeah,
16:56SPEAKERlet's say, sure. Maybe the mechanics of the drive would fail long before the writable aspect of them
17:01SPEAKERwould fail. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably a good way to think about that. We could call them
17:07SPEAKERa platter, a platter storage or something. I don't know. I don't know what we'd call them,
17:11SPEAKERbut we'll workshop that one. That's weird. So, yeah, I, uh, I did a little looking around
17:18SPEAKERbefore I bought these. They're, they're not much more expensive than regular SD cards to be clear.
17:23SPEAKEROkay. Like a 32 gig high endurance card is 10 bucks. A 32 gig max endurance card,
17:29SPEAKERI think is 14, but like not too far out of line of what you pay for regular SD cards. And also like,
17:36SPEAKERI know that you can boot Raspberry Pis off of other things now, like you can
17:40SPEAKERenable some USB boots, but I, I, I just, I didn't want to hang in an SSD off the side of this
17:45SPEAKERRaspberry Pi. Like I wanted it to be tidy. It's all the, all the Pis are crammed into very small
17:50SPEAKERspaces. Like I don't want a bunch of extra cable cruft and device cruft hanging off of them. Cause
17:55SPEAKERI want them to fit in the tiny cubby holes and nooks where they live. It's, it's really
18:00SPEAKERunfortunate that they don't have that, that, uh, that little SSD header. Yeah. So they're getting
18:06SPEAKERthere. Like, um, the Pi 5 does ship with an NVMe capability through the, I guess it's the GPIO pins
18:13SPEAKERor there's, so there is a header on the Pi 5 that gives you very basic NVMe support, but you still
18:19SPEAKERneed like a hat for that. You still need to like integrate that into a case. Well, yeah. So like my,
18:24SPEAKERmy home assistant yellow has on it, an NVMe socket, but it's, it uses the socketed version
18:30SPEAKERof the Pi 5. So you're, it's the compute module, not the, not the typical board. Yeah. The Pi 4,
18:35SPEAKERthere are cases out there that have like little USB bridges to an SSD mount on the case. So you
18:40SPEAKERcan put an SSD in, but I, the case I bought for my Pi 4 was pretty that, and I don't feel like
18:45SPEAKERbuying another case. Like anyway, also like I, I just have a bit of an indignance about things not
18:51SPEAKERworking right. Or like, uh, yeah. Features being included that don't work as I've like, I'd like,
18:57SPEAKERyeah, these things are, these things are supposed to boot off of SD cards. Like I'm going to make
19:01SPEAKERthe fucking SD card work, right. Yeah. And just to be clear, like for the stuff that you're using,
19:06SPEAKERthe only problem is writing logs probably, right? Yeah. And I put a log to ram on all my Pis. So
19:11SPEAKERlike that helps mitigate them anyway. But the, I was using a very old crappy SD card in my Pi 4,
19:16SPEAKERwhich is the important one because it needs to run home assistant. Gotcha. If all the lights
19:20SPEAKERstopped working. Yeah. There's problems. That's very annoying. That's why I bought a yellow is
19:24SPEAKERbecause I didn't want to think about this anymore. And that Pi 4 had been getting weird. Like when I
19:27SPEAKERwould do like an app update or whatever, it had been getting very slow. This was a very old SD.
19:31SPEAKERIt was like a 10 year old SD card and it was getting like very noticeably slow to do disc
19:38SPEAKERoperations on and Trixie, the Trixie Pi OS came out and I was just like, yeah, it's just time to,
19:42SPEAKERto do a wipe and everything. I did some. Have you done the migration yet for the home system?
19:49SPEAKERYes. So actually home systems running on my NAS right now. Oh, uh, wild. I moved it over
19:55SPEAKERthere and it's like, when you, when everything's containerized, it's like amazing how fast it is to,
20:00SPEAKERto migrate something like that. I literally, uh, in preparation for wiping that Pi 4, I copied the
20:07SPEAKERhome assistant config directory over to the NAS, copied the system D unit file over that I used to
20:12SPEAKERspin up the container and like ran the container, ran the service and it just started right up and
20:17SPEAKERwent. And I don't, you don't have any like Z-wave or Zigbee radios or anything like that on your
20:22SPEAKERhome assistant. So that's, yeah, that's, that's the difference. I don't pass any hardware in
20:26SPEAKERto the, uh, yeah. If I was doing like Bluetooth or had had one of those, yeah, like USB radios
20:31SPEAKERthat you're talking about, it would have been certainly a bit more of a config thing, but.
20:36SPEAKERIt's still not hard, but it's a pain in the butt. It's like more, it's more difficult. I like having
20:40SPEAKERit on its own device, honestly, for that reason. So I did a little googling around before I bought
20:45SPEAKERthese. I found a, uh, I found a blog post. Another is another one of these like amazingly incredibly
20:52SPEAKERin depth, like this person must be an engineer type posts, uh, of somebody who tested these things.
20:58SPEAKERAnd by tested, I mean, this is, this is kind of fun. Cause I didn't even know like what an SD card
21:03SPEAKERlooks like inside. I tested, I mean, they literally removed the outer, like epoxy layer on the card
21:09SPEAKERto expose all the test pads on the card. And built an interface board.
21:15SPEAKERAnd then soldered the board that they built the diagnostic board to the test pads on there and
21:19SPEAKERlike pulled a ton of information. And basically like, you know, I'm, I'm certainly not educated
21:24SPEAKERenough to check this person's work, but they determined that these cards are actually using a
21:29SPEAKERbetter, well, higher quality, more durable form of NAND than the cheaper cards. I forget,
21:37SPEAKERdo SD cards have controllers on them or are they relying on the device to be the controller person
21:41SPEAKERgoes into that in this blog post, I don't have it in front of me right now. I think it's all one
21:47SPEAKERunit, I believe was the determination there. The controller and the storage are all one monolithic
21:52SPEAKERunit on an SD card. I guess, I guess that makes sense. Cause they're so tiny that would kind of
21:55SPEAKERhave to be right. Yeah. Anyway, this person to the best of their determination found that these
22:02SPEAKERcards are using the SanDisk Toshiba 3D TLC flash, which is like, I guess again, somewhat higher
22:09SPEAKERquality and more durable than what's in the cheaper cards. Yeah. I went to the launch for
22:13SPEAKERthe 3D flash. Really? Oh yeah. It was at the Exploratorium. Oh, wow. Okay. I guess it was a
22:18SPEAKERbig deal then. We were really excited about it. And apparently the max endurance cards are using
22:23SPEAKERthat 3D flash in a, in a slightly even more durable way than the regular high endurance ones.
22:28SPEAKERYeah. He does say that he wasn't able to like tell what the controller is doing because of the way
22:32SPEAKERthe whole thing works. So this is also, I don't know if you've considered the scientific testing
22:37SPEAKERor not. I mean, the methodology seemed sound, but it was just one person. But I also found a person
22:41SPEAKERon the Raspberry Pi forums who had done some informal testing with these things where they
22:46SPEAKERbasically set up a test that they like automated tests that kind of wrote, you know, like 164
22:52SPEAKERkilobyte files and then 110 megabyte files, blah, blah, blah, you know, like kind of like that
22:57SPEAKERand let it run. They didn't say what regular SD card they tested with. They just said it was a
23:01SPEAKERknown brand. I wish they had said kind of the brand and model they used, but they managed to
23:07SPEAKERkill the mainstream, like regular SD card after several hundred write cycles or so I don't have
23:12SPEAKERthe, I should pull the thread up in front of me. It was like, they don't last long if you're doing
23:16SPEAKERa lot of small writes is the TLDR. They managed to kill a regular mainstream name brand SD card,
23:23SPEAKERlike relatively quickly with this. And then they tried, tried the high endurance card and basically
23:27SPEAKERlike it ran several times more of the test cycles than the regular card had and did not kill the
23:33SPEAKERcard. So they actually just killed the test and didn't get it to the point where it would kill it.
23:38SPEAKERIt seems like these things do work as advertised based on all the stuff that I looked into. And
23:42SPEAKERlike I said, they're not that much more expensive than the regular ones. They are seemingly a little
23:49SPEAKERbit slower, I will say. Like if you look at this, even the quoted read write speeds, the SanDisk
23:55SPEAKERlists are a bit lower than like your kind of ultra or extreme SD cards. And even in practice,
24:00SPEAKERI've put Trixie on the Pi 4 and have been setting it up. And like when you do an app to update,
24:05SPEAKERyou know, and it has to kind of like build package manifests or whatever, and read them like that
24:10SPEAKERdoes seem a little bit noticeably slower than on the old kind of like extreme card I had in there.
24:15SPEAKERBut like, how often are you actually working with stuff like that? Like I'll take,
24:20SPEAKERI'll take slightly, slightly slower disk operations in exchange for ideally never buying an SD card
24:29SPEAKERagain for these Pi's. Cause also this is a bigger topic that we shouldn't get into on this episode,
24:32SPEAKERbut I think I'm done buying Raspberry Pi's. I don't see myself kind of ever buying another one
24:38SPEAKERconsidering how expensive the proposition is getting versus what you can get in like a small
24:41SPEAKERx86 box. So like, I think I'm good on Pi's and I just basically wanted to like buy a round of
24:47SPEAKERhigh quality SD cards to hopefully the last round, hopefully never. Yeah. I did not buy one of these
24:52SPEAKERfor my Pi KVM because that one, it has, it has, I put a brand new SD card in it when I set it up,
24:58SPEAKERbut that thing, that thing uses an entirely read only file system. Oh, so it should be fine. So it
25:04SPEAKERkind of never writes to the disk unless you're doing updates on it. So like that one's probably
25:08SPEAKERgoing to be fine for a long time anyway. So I was going to say the, the other option,
25:11SPEAKERand this is what I used for my, for my FreeNAS box when it was, cause you know,
25:18SPEAKERyou put it in the FreeNAS box off of USB thumb drives usually, and they had the same problem
25:22SPEAKERif you were writing a lot to them. I was, I was, I bought, I bought a stack of USB thumb drives
25:27SPEAKERwhen I was running TrueNAS and I was averaging about like six or eight months per pair of drives
25:31SPEAKERbefore they would die. Yeah. They would just, they just didn't last long. So I bought USB SSDs so you
25:38SPEAKERcan get like a 2230 NVMe SSD that's in a USB shell that you just hang off the front and it solved the
25:45SPEAKERproblem for me entirely. Yeah. I ended up doing the same except just internal SATA SSDs because
25:49SPEAKERI have a bus adapter in there that handles all the hard drives. So I had spare motherboard SATA ports.
25:54SPEAKERSo at some point, at some point I just bought a pair of $20 Crucial SSDs.
25:58SPEAKERLike 128 gig SSDs or something. Basically the same price as a USB thumb drive. And
26:04SPEAKERthey've been going for years without problems. Yep. Last thing I'll say really quick here for
26:10SPEAKERLinux nerds who really care, like Wendell, if you're listening, might care about this.
26:16SPEAKERWe got to get Wendell on this podcast, man. Look, man, I just got to spend one of the,
26:21SPEAKERI got to spend time with a bunch of really interesting folks at that tech days thing,
26:25SPEAKERthe tech door thing and, and getting to talk to Wendell about Linux shit for, for lunches and
26:32SPEAKERdinners sometimes was a delight. Wendell's a delightful even being. I listened to the
26:36SPEAKERDolby diaries with him on it and like every single thing he brought up on there is something I wanted
26:39SPEAKERto talk to him further about. But the thing I was gonna say really quick is the, it looks like
26:45SPEAKERthe Raspberry Pi people may have done some basic mitigation for SD card ware in Trixie or in their
26:52SPEAKERversion of Trixie that they're putting out because. It's about damn time. It's not like, it's not,
26:56SPEAKERI don't understand why they don't do log to RAM on the log folders.
27:00SPEAKERSo that's exactly where I'm going with this. I've been installing log to RAM on my Pis for ages,
27:04SPEAKERwhich is something you can set up. It would not be hard to do yourself. This just packages up in
27:08SPEAKERa nice script that just does it for you. But all log to RAM is doing is creating a RAM drive and
27:13SPEAKERthen mounting the log path on that RAM drive so that your logging all goes into RAM rather than
27:17SPEAKERever. I think it does, it does get written out to disk, like on an interval that you can configure,
27:21SPEAKERbut not constantly is the key. And that's the thing. It's like one big write is better than
27:26SPEAKERa hundred thousand small writes. And the trade-off there is you're giving up some amount of RAM,
27:30SPEAKERbut it's not that much RAM. I mean, we're logging text files here basically. Well, and if it crashes
27:35SPEAKERwhile there's log in memory, then you'll lose that log. So it makes it hard to diagnose that stuff.
27:39SPEAKERBut for the kind of applications you use on these things, it probably doesn't matter. Probably don't
27:43SPEAKERneed your logs that badly. But Trixie out of the box on Pis is mounting the journal D log path in
27:50SPEAKERslash run. Is that the RAM drive? So yeah, slash run is typically mounted on a temp FS, which is a
27:57SPEAKERRAM based file system in Linux. It's weird. Cachey mounts external drives on run slash media slash
28:06SPEAKERsomething now. Yeah. Like anything can get mounted anywhere in Linux as we know. Right. Right. They
28:12SPEAKERcould just be doing something custom there, but I have my, my PI two is still running the bullseye
28:18SPEAKERversion and they were not mounting the journal D log path in run in bullseye. Okay. So this is
28:25SPEAKERa change they have made at some point that may have been the case with bookworm than the last
28:29SPEAKERversion, but at any rate, like they are they are taking some steps to, to mitigate this themselves,
28:36SPEAKERbut it's just, it's just the journal D logging. It's not anything else that, that logs to the,
28:42SPEAKERthe classic logging path of slash var slash log, it's still written to disk and there's still plenty
28:48SPEAKERof other stuff that still writes there. And so it's still worth installing log to RAM, I think
28:52SPEAKERthere, but between these higher endurance cards and getting pretty much all the logging mounted
28:57SPEAKERinto RAM, I'm pretty optimistic. I will just never have to buy an SC card again for these things or
29:02SPEAKERever worry about it again. Yeah. Which is pretty exciting. We'll see. Stay tuned. I'll check back
29:08SPEAKERin five years. On the SD card front. This is a small note. I saw that Lexar announced that they
29:14SPEAKERhave one terabyte switch to compatible cards as express cards now, which like for people who just
29:21SPEAKERhave like two games installed on their switches is no problem. And the switch, the switch two games
29:25SPEAKERare still pretty reasonable size for the, for the amount of capacity on the drives that they ship
29:30SPEAKERwith. But this was exciting because I wasn't going to buy, like, I, I, I did not buy an extra card
29:37SPEAKERfor my switch two out of the gate because they only, I think the biggest they had was 256 gigs,
29:44SPEAKERwhich basically doubled your capacity on that, on that device. And that didn't feel like, like
29:49SPEAKERI didn't, I, I hate buying a launch card and then six months later having a second one and
29:55SPEAKERthen having this extra launch, this extra small card that I'm just never going to do anything
29:58SPEAKERwith. Yep. That's how you end up putting an old used card into something like a raspberry pie
30:02SPEAKERdown the line. Cause you have an old one that's been used a bunch and then like, oops, that was
30:06SPEAKERa mistake. But also like 256 gigs is too big for a raspberry pie, right? Like I'm not going to put
30:11SPEAKER256 gigs on my raspberry pie. But when you have a smaller card, that's a, that's a cast off or a hand
30:17SPEAKERme down because you bought a bigger one, then you got to find something to do with it. Yeah. I,
30:20SPEAKERum, anyway. Okay. So that, that I just wanted to hit that on the switch two front. Oh, go ahead.
30:25SPEAKERWell, go ahead. I'll, I'll, I'll mention my switch two thing at the end. I was going to say on the
30:29SPEAKERswitch two front, I finally I've, I've, I've bought and sent back a bunch of grips over the
30:34SPEAKERlast two, three months. And I finally got, uh, ones that I like the switch grip, exclamation
30:41SPEAKERpoint by Savage Raven, sorry, switch grip, exclamation point Savage Raven by skull and
30:46SPEAKERcompany is great. I'm looking at the Amazon page now skull and company Neo grip and ergonomic rip
30:53SPEAKERhard shell with replaceable grips, or Nintendo switch to it's the product name on Amazon product
30:59SPEAKERnames are so bad. It's bad. Like, like it, so it has all the requirements that I needed. It
31:05SPEAKERwill, uh, you can dock it with the grips on, which is important. The case stand still works
31:11SPEAKERwith the grips on. Is that the case that there are some that you can't dock with grips on?
31:17SPEAKERSome of them have the full back and then that'll block the slot. So you can't put it in this,
31:20SPEAKERin the slot. That seems like a real pain. Um, I mean, that's the way both all of the switch one
31:26SPEAKERgrips that we had were for both my, my switch, my wife's, uh, OLED and my daughter's well,
31:31SPEAKERdaughter's like, doesn't have a dock, but, um, you just pop, like they pop on and off. It's not like
31:36SPEAKERit's, you know, there's, there's clips that kind of be slighted in and out of,
31:40SPEAKERit's not like taking a phone case off or something like that. Nothing that complicated.
31:43SPEAKERUm, but this one has, it ships with three different grip shapes. Like there's a shallow
31:50SPEAKERone, a medium one and a big chonky boy with like, uh, almost like a finger spot at the top. And,
31:56SPEAKERuh, I, of those three, we found something that everybody in the house that uses the switch likes.
32:01SPEAKERSo, uh, and it makes holding it much more comfortable for extended play sessions. It
32:05SPEAKERwas 30 bucks, which is kind of more than I wanted to pay for this. Uh, but like compared to fucking
32:12SPEAKERup my hands, playing switch games, I'm all for it. So switch grip seems like it's been a fairly
32:17SPEAKERcontentious subject so far, although mainly that's based on people not being happy with the dbrand
32:22SPEAKERone. Yeah. The dbrand one, I didn't like at all. I was really disappointed. Did you try it? Yeah.
32:27SPEAKEROkay. Like that was the one that where the grips were like falling off. I think it was like the
32:31SPEAKERswitch was like falling out of the grips, which is kind of not what you want. Yeah. Like the problem
32:37SPEAKERI had was either it was too hard to take all of them, either they were too hard to take off so
32:41SPEAKERthat you couldn't get like standalone, you couldn't pop the grips off easily or like it blocked the
32:48SPEAKERkickstand or blocked the, um, the X, the, the, the, the dock, or it was like a big giant rubber
32:56SPEAKERsilicone thing that you had to like wedge the whole thing in. And then it collects as a bunch
33:00SPEAKERof grime around the edges when it's in there, which is gross. Um, so yeah, like this was,
33:06SPEAKERthis is the one of the ones that I have tried. This is the one I liked the most. I really,
33:09SPEAKERreally, really detested of all of them. The ones that are just like silicone wrappers for the joy
33:17SPEAKERcons that have like lumps on the bottom to make them a little more grippy. Those, those were the
33:22SPEAKERabsolute worst of all of them. Cause then they just made the joy cons not fit right. And they
33:27SPEAKERwere uncomfortable and the grips were too squishy and like the whole thing just stunk. So yeah,
33:33SPEAKERhighly recommend. Good, good to know. I think I might finally go ahead and buy a switch too.
33:37SPEAKERIt's like, I'm going to tell you Donkey Kong Bonanza. Oh yeah, no, that's, that is,
33:43SPEAKERthat's the game to buy it for. Like, I know multiple people who have said it's their game
33:48SPEAKERof the year. Like I absolutely need to play Bonanza. It is, it is a remarkable game. It is
33:53SPEAKERnot at all what I was expecting. It is follows the legacy because that's the Odyssey team, right?
33:58SPEAKERYes. Yeah. It, it is definitely follows that lineage in a, in the most positive way. Um,
34:06SPEAKERI'm also going to pick up that remaster for galaxy and galaxy two, because like,
34:11SPEAKERI think I have galaxy one in some switch one collection that I bought 3d all stars that came
34:16SPEAKERout about five years ago has galaxy one in it, but I verified that they actually have done more
34:21SPEAKERwork on these new versions or well, galaxy two never came out on the switch. So this is new, but
34:26SPEAKERthe galaxy one version here is better than the one that was in 3d all stars. They did more work
34:31SPEAKERon it. So it runs at 4k and stuff like that. And does it, does it, do they, did they work
34:36SPEAKERon the control stuff? So you don't have to do the waggle stuff as much. I think that was already
34:40SPEAKERdone for the three all stars version, but yes, that is, you can, I mean, yeah, these are fully
34:44SPEAKERplayable on switch to control schemes. Um, but I'm getting, I'm getting like review code offers for
34:51SPEAKERother switch to exclusive games now. Like I need to just get that damn hardware in here.
34:57SPEAKERYeah, it's, it's interesting. I don't have a good sense of how like non Nintendo games are doing on
35:02SPEAKERthat thing yet, but it seems like it's like, it seems like they've slowed down the, the number
35:09SPEAKERof Indies that have access to the store in a way that they're maybe being a little bit more
35:13SPEAKERthoughtful about it. And there's not as many like anti games in there. Oh, that, that has been,
35:17SPEAKERI mean, the lack of, um, lack of if kid distribution has been kind of a major topic
35:22SPEAKERof discussion in the Nintendo community. Oh yeah. I knew that over the last few months, cause there
35:27SPEAKERare plenty of indie developers who still don't have dev kids. Look, there's a, there's a couple
35:31SPEAKERof discords I'm in with a bunch of indie developers and the yo, who has a Nintendo switched to dev kit
35:37SPEAKERthreads are extensive. So yeah. Interesting. Anyway. Um, I, I, I've talked about these before
35:45SPEAKERI want to hit them again because I got them for my AirPods pro and, uh, they're really, really good.
35:51SPEAKERThe comply soft foam tips for IEMs, you can get them for pretty much any in-ear monitor headphones.
35:57SPEAKERUm, and they replace the, the kind of silicone-y soft flanged, like the rubber that kind of loops
36:04SPEAKERback on itself. And then you jam it in your ears. I can't use in-ear monitors without these at this
36:11SPEAKERpoint. The soft stuff makes my, I actually, it honestly irritates the skin in my ears. Generally.
36:17SPEAKERUm, I think I have some sort of mild reaction to whatever the rub, whatever plastic they use for
36:22SPEAKERthat. But the foam tips are seal in better. They make them feel like they're in more securely,
36:27SPEAKERwhich is great for standalone non tethered earbuds. Cause I feel like I'm less likely to
36:32SPEAKERlose them and they do a much better job isolating. And they're like, they don't last forever as the
36:37SPEAKERonly knock against the comply tips. Uh, they're like good for probably two, three months each.
36:42SPEAKERI usually buy one, like three pack a year for about 20 bucks. And, uh, that lasts me the whole
36:47SPEAKERyear. So you're still on AirPod pros two, correct? I am on AirPod pros two. I don't plan to upgrade
36:53SPEAKERuntil these wear out. So you're not, you're not commenting on cause they did do new tips for the
36:57SPEAKERthrees, which you have not tried. So the tips on the threes are a hybrid of the rubber and foam
37:04SPEAKERbehind them to kind of give you the best of both worlds. I don't, my, the reviews I read looked at
37:10SPEAKERthem and were like, Hey, these are already ripped for some, like I think Linus tech tips famously
37:15SPEAKERripped one of the, one of the test buds when they were, when they were testing those.
37:20SPEAKERUm, I, I really, I just, I really strongly like the reason I don't like IEMs generally is those,
37:27SPEAKERthose shitty tips. Sure. Yeah. I think I might still get some pros three. I hate the naming
37:31SPEAKERon those things. I hate like the AirPod pros three. Well, it's just hard to say for whatever
37:38SPEAKERreason you go to the Apple store. They only have one kind of AirPod pro there. I'm sorry. It's not
37:42SPEAKERAirPod pros. It's AirPods pro. Right. Look, this is like an attorney's general situation, I guess.
37:48SPEAKERLet's just move on. But the kind of shit people argue about in newsrooms. I think I'm still, yes,
37:53SPEAKERwe, yes, we, we had arguments all the time. We're not arguments. We had discussions all the time
37:58SPEAKERabout like how much to add here to the stupid branding of various companies. Like, do you,
38:03SPEAKERdo you honor, do you honor their, their branding when it says that the game name should be entirely
38:07SPEAKERcapitalized? Probably not. Nope. Inner caps are fine though. Oh, see, we didn't do inner caps.
38:12SPEAKERIt was all first cap. You get to get a proper noun just like everybody else at maximum PC.
38:17SPEAKERDoes the C in StarCraft get capitalized? Nope. All right. Call of duty, call duty, not of,
38:24SPEAKEReven if it's on the box. Sure. I think I'm still going to get some pro threes. I have, I have seen
38:32SPEAKERlike, I don't put a lot of stock in this stuff. Like the, like the extreme obsessive headphone
38:37SPEAKERcommunity has got thoughts about the sound stage on them or the, you know, frequency response or
38:43SPEAKERwhatever. But like, I, I find I am very not picky about how things sound. Like if it, if it sounds
38:48SPEAKERquote unquote good to me, I'm generally fine with it. The, the, the bigger one is probably not a
38:54SPEAKERdeal breaker, but I have been looking at the switch to subreddit people testing Bluetooth headphones
38:58SPEAKERwith the switch to seems like, I don't, did I talk about this recently? Like, this seems like there
39:03SPEAKERis probably still just enough latency, even with the switch to Bluetooth headphones that
39:08SPEAKERit might be too much from it's like 150 milliseconds or something. I, I don't know.
39:14SPEAKERSo I loaded up crypto, the crypto, the neck, the Zelda version of crypto,
39:18SPEAKERthe Necrodancer on the switch to see how it was sure. And it didn't impact my ability to
39:24SPEAKERplay that game, but also I am super shitty at that game. So maybe it's a bad, bad test for me.
39:29SPEAKERI've played a ton of crypto, the Necrodancer on switch. I love that game. You should,
39:33SPEAKERdid you do the calibration or actually does it have calibration in handheld mode?
39:38SPEAKERI don't think it does the calibration in handheld mode, but I can't remember.
39:41SPEAKERThey can make assumptions about the response time, the handheld hardware anyway.
39:47SPEAKERBut but so here's the thing in terms of usability and lifestyle and the amount of like,
39:55SPEAKERI use those every single day. The, the ANC stuff is so good that when it's like loud here and I
40:01SPEAKERwant to take a nap, I just put them in my ears and close my eyes. And it's maybe a little dangerous
40:05SPEAKERbecause I don't hear people like people have to come touch me to wake me up because I won't hear
40:09SPEAKERthem come into the room. I think that the, the assumption that I read, I think it was MKBHD said
40:17SPEAKERthat he thinks that the increase in ANC that they said from the twos to the threes were because of
40:22SPEAKERthe new tip design, not because of anything that changed in the actual electronics really.
40:26SPEAKERI think they said that too, that the ice of the new, the better isolation was a big part
40:30SPEAKERof the new ANC. So if you're using the soft foam, if you, if you get the aftermarket soft foam tips,
40:35SPEAKERyou're going to be like two thirds of the way there with the old ones, which is why I'm not
40:38SPEAKERupgrading. Sure. Like I, they are phenomenal. It's a phenomenal sound quality aside in terms of like
40:48SPEAKERwhat it does, the transparency and adaptive modes when you're walking around out in the world. Like
40:52SPEAKERif I'm walking around with them on and I want to not have people sneak up on me, you put the
40:57SPEAKERtransparency mode on or the adaptive mode on it just filters out like the filters out the traffic
41:02SPEAKERnoise of the city, but you still hear people talking and footsteps and dogs barking and stuff
41:07SPEAKERlike that. So yeah, they would be so much more convenient on for travel and on flights that I
41:11SPEAKERthink I would, I think I would, frankly, if I care enough about switch latency, I would rather,
41:15SPEAKERI could still just bring my old wired noise canceling buds for the switch if I really care
41:21SPEAKERthat much, but the otherwise the AirPods would be so much more convenient. Yep. Do you want to talk
41:27SPEAKERabout, let me, let me hit one or two more updates. One is that I bought after giving you a bunch of
41:34SPEAKERgrief for it. When I was at central computer a few weeks ago, I bought this guy. When did you
41:39SPEAKERgive me grief for it? What is griefable about that? Those things are super useful. When we were
41:46SPEAKERat a micro center and you were like, Oh, and I was like, Hey, you can just buy a USB adapters for
41:52SPEAKERyour external drive problem that you were having back making your, your backup images. I was like,
42:01SPEAKERwhy don't you just buy five of these external USB-C to SATA docks? And so I went ahead and
42:09SPEAKERbought one because I was at central and they had them and they were like, it was like 10 bucks.
42:12SPEAKERThis thing is fricking awesome. This is okay. This is USB-C to SATA to be clear. Yeah. It's
42:17SPEAKERUSB-C to SATA and it has like a hard connector that just lines up with both the power and the
42:23SPEAKERdata. So I had one of these before that was an external dongle and you had to have a big giant
42:28SPEAKERpower brick with a molex to the SATA connector and all the huge pain in the ass kind of was iffy
42:33SPEAKERworking. This thing is a packaged product. I just plug it into the front port of my computer and
42:38SPEAKERplug whatever physical spinning hard drives, SSDs, it doesn't matter. So everything works.
42:43SPEAKERThat's the distinction here then. Cause I've got, I've had a couple of those that are old USB-A
42:47SPEAKER3.0 to SATA for years. Right. So they're great for SSDs. They, there's no way they would power
42:54SPEAKERthese 7,200 RPM hard drives that I, or these are maybe 5,400, but still I don't think I would power
42:59SPEAKERpower three and a half inch platter drives, but is that thing like explicitly designed to do that?
43:05SPEAKERIt says on the back SSD 2.5 inch hard drive and SSD with any capacity. I have not tried to put a
43:14SPEAKER10 K hard drive onto it. Sorry. Did you say 2.5 inch? 2.5 and 3.5 inch. It says on the package,
43:22SPEAKERit'll do three and a half inch. Okay. That's all right. Well, if they're saying, I mean, you know,
43:26SPEAKERUSB-C can deliver quite a bit of power. Yeah. It's been pretty good so far. I put several big,
43:33SPEAKERgiant old 7,200 RPM hard drives on it at work. So, and this is a unit tech smart link Manta
43:40SPEAKERis what it is. I mean, now motherboards just need to start shipping more high power USB-C ports.
43:46SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. That's true. That would be nice. Cause they were usually only like one or two on there.
43:52SPEAKERYeah. This, this saved me from having to open up the case when I had wanted to pull
43:56SPEAKERsome stuff off of an old SSD that was my daughter's computer that I'd pulled out.
44:00SPEAKERYes. Yeah. That's useful stuff to have around. I inherited a kind, a kind friend
44:08SPEAKERhanded down his it's a Sabrent like two hard drive dock. You definitely, you definitely saw
44:14SPEAKERthese things around the whiskey media office. Like we definitely, it's basically the little,
44:17SPEAKERyou plug the hard drive in like it's a video game cartridge. This is a, this is a two bay one.
44:22SPEAKERAnd this one is powered. It does have an external brick and it's USB three out, but it's nice to
44:28SPEAKERhave some option, whether it's the newer USB-C adapter you just bought or this, this dock that
44:32SPEAKERI've got now, it's nice to have an option to just plug loose hard drives into a machine without
44:37SPEAKERhaving to open the machine up and essentially turn it off to plug a hard drive into the board.
44:42SPEAKERAbsolutely. I had one of those docks that I ended up getting rid of just cause it was,
44:46SPEAKERit was so big and it had a huge giant power brick and like I didn't, it took up more space
44:51SPEAKERthan for the amount of times I used it. It took up a lot of space. This thing I can coil up and
44:56SPEAKERput in a drawer and when I needed it, I'll just go buy another one. Cause I won't be able to find it
45:00SPEAKERin the drawer probably. So there you go. Yep. You want to talk about VR virtual reality?
45:07SPEAKERThis is somewhat random. I'm not quite sure what spurred me to this other than I was just kind of
45:12SPEAKERcurious about it. Have you heard about the Oasis driver for the windows mixed reality headsets?
45:18SPEAKERYeah. This is the thing that unjail breaks the, the mixed reality headsets and like make some
45:23SPEAKERwork without that bad mixed reality interface thing that Microsoft had. Well, yeah. So there's
45:28SPEAKERno jailbreak involved. This is in fact, I don't have this in front of me, but I'm positive. I
45:32SPEAKERhave read at some point this driver was written by a Microsoft employee. I believe this was written
45:36SPEAKERby somebody who worked on the mixed reality headsets. It seems like a thing. Yeah. I'm honestly,
45:41SPEAKERI'm kind of surprised that Microsoft didn't just open source the whole thing and be like,
45:45SPEAKERHey, community, here you go. There might be some weird thing there because the driver he
45:49SPEAKERhas written is explicitly closed source. Like he said, he's not going to open source it. There
45:53SPEAKERmight be proprietary stuff in there that is dodgy to make open. I'm not sure. I think we've talked
46:00SPEAKERabout this in the past though, the Microsoft fully entirely killed support for the windows
46:05SPEAKERmixed reality headsets. I think it was 24 H two of windows 11 that removed entirely removed the
46:12SPEAKERsoftware stack that you need to run those things. So they were basically just completely dead
46:15SPEAKERuseless e-waste. Now this driver is out and I did some digging into what it would actually
46:21SPEAKERrequire to use it. Cause I was really curious. I have not actually set this up myself for reasons.
46:28SPEAKERI will explain in a minute. Okay. But I did look into it. The driver it's called Oasis driver for
46:34SPEAKERwindows mixed reality is the full title is on steam. It's free. You can just go on steam and
46:38SPEAKERadd it to your library and run it. And then at that point, once you have it installed,
46:43SPEAKERit just runs steam VR games like anything else. So in a lot of ways, this is better than the
46:49SPEAKERold setup, I think. Oh yeah. This is what everybody wanted. Did you have a windows
46:53SPEAKERmixed reality headset? I had to have one to test stuff. So I have a Lenovo headset.
46:57SPEAKEROkay. I've also got the Lenovo Explorer. I bought it because like it was, it was one of those deals
47:02SPEAKERwhere like shortly after it came out, it became clear the whole product line was kind of moribund.
47:07SPEAKERSo they immediately fire sale priced it. Yeah. It was like a hundred bucks or something
47:12SPEAKERridiculous. I got the like deluxe package with controllers that launched at four 50,
47:17SPEAKERexcept I paid one 99 for it two months after it came out. But you remember it had the whole
47:24SPEAKERwindows. It was a huge mess using it with stuff like steam VR, because it had the windows mixed
47:28SPEAKERreality portal that was Microsoft's own like steam VR home like space. You remember that?
47:34SPEAKERYeah. Well, it was like a layer that lived on, like basically you had to launch into that and
47:39SPEAKERthen you launched steam VR. It was a huge mess because you loaded into Microsoft's version was
47:44SPEAKERyou were on top of a skyscraper. Remember that mid-century modern house with a bunch of screens
47:50SPEAKEReverywhere. So you had to load into one virtual environment and then from within that environment
47:54SPEAKERload into the other steam VR virtual environment. Like it was just a giant mess. It was the bad
47:59SPEAKERversion of cyberpunk. This drive. Yeah. Yes. You had to incept deeper. This was this driver removes
48:04SPEAKERthat entire thing. Like the whole windows mixed reality portal, the entire Microsoft stack is gone.
48:10SPEAKERLike effectively running this driver turns a mixed reality headset just into a generic steam VR
48:15SPEAKERheadset. So like room set up is all done through steam VR. Like everything that you would do to
48:20SPEAKERconfigure the headset is all effectively just a steam VR experience. Now it's almost like if they
48:26SPEAKERhad done this in the first place, they'd people would still be making those headsets, but then
48:30SPEAKERthey wouldn't be able to embrace and extend into the headset anyway. The compatibility matrix for
48:37SPEAKERthis is slightly rough. It does not work on any version of windows 10, unfortunately, but also
48:42SPEAKERthe mixed reality portal still works on windows 10. So you don't need it. Did they not deprecate
48:46SPEAKERit from 10? They didn't deprecate it on 10. Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, that's fine then
48:50SPEAKERon Nvidia, you need 23 H2 or newer of windows 11 on AMD, you need 24 H2 or newer, and it does not
48:56SPEAKERwork on Intel GPUs at all. So, okay. So the Intel GPU thing sucks, but the needing 24 H2 is fine
49:04SPEAKERbecause it goes away on 24 H2. If you're on 23 H2, just stay, stay on the old portal and it works.
49:09SPEAKERWell, I can also, um, I should say 23 H2. I'm still running 23 H2 and support for that ends
49:15SPEAKERin a month. So it's time to, it's time to move on. 25 H2 is in the wings. It's just waiting there,
49:22SPEAKERready to break your shit. Yeah. There there's a little unlock process you have to do, which again,
49:26SPEAKERI have not done myself, but I went through the tutorial for it per headset and per computer.
49:31SPEAKERIt's a one-time process, but it's basically just like launching the thing from steam,
49:35SPEAKERclicking unlock, and then it like pops up a terminal window and you have to plug and unplug
49:39SPEAKERthe headset and then it just does the thing. And that's it. That's the jailbreak as I understand
49:44SPEAKERit. Right. It looks like it takes 10 seconds and you only have to do it once per computer,
49:48SPEAKERper headset. Even if you unplug and replug the headset, you don't have to do it again.
49:51SPEAKERYes. Yeah. It's not every time you use the headset it's once, unless you wipe and reinstall windows
49:56SPEAKERor change to a new computer, you do it once and that's it. Okay. That's awesome. So like,
50:00SPEAKERit seems awesome that this exists. And like, if everything I've read from people using it,
50:03SPEAKERit seems like it works just fine. Um, it's I love resurrecting old hardware, just like pulling that
50:08SPEAKERraspberry PI one out of a box to turn it back into an AirPlay target is very satisfying to me. Like I
50:13SPEAKERput my previous router that I was using before I got this edge router. Uh, I I'm using that as a
50:18SPEAKERwireless bridge for my mister, which is across the room, not near ethernet, you know, like it's just
50:23SPEAKERnice to use old stuff for new purposes, but it's, it's rad that people can use their mixed reality
50:29SPEAKERheadsets now in a kind of better, more convenient fashion than they used to. I will pull this out
50:33SPEAKERof the, to go to e-waste pile and put it back in the, give to a friend pile. Yes. Now the reason I
50:39SPEAKERhave not tried this myself, I started to, but there's two things. Number one, my mixed reality
50:43SPEAKERheadset is buried deep in the closet. Now, like it would be pulling out a lot of boxes and going
50:48SPEAKERthrough, pulling stuff out. The other reason is I was, I started to do that. And then I was like,
50:52SPEAKERyou know what, before I do that, I should give the PlayStation VR two PC adapter another shot. Oh,
50:57SPEAKERcause I tried that thing when it came out a year ago, one of the eight people that bought a
51:02SPEAKERPlayStation VR two, it seems, I mean, it's a nice headset. I know there are nicer PC headsets now,
51:07SPEAKERbut it's, it's way nicer than that Lenovo Explorer I've got. I will tell you for the price, it is a
51:12SPEAKERpretty banger headset. Yeah. That's, that's the, that's the vibe I've gotten from the VR
51:16SPEAKERenthusiast community on PC is it's not the best headset out there, but for, and especially because
51:20SPEAKERI've discounted the hell out of it now, it's even cheaper than it was at launch. And like for the
51:25SPEAKERprice, it's a very good headset. I had a lot of problems with that adapter when it came out. I
51:29SPEAKERthink that was a year ago. I think it was last fall. Like I had, I had like stuttering bad
51:35SPEAKERtracking on the controllers. Like it just was not a usable experience for me reason. I tried. So
51:41SPEAKERagain, I was like, eh, let's just do the due diligence and see if that is VR twos and stuff
51:46SPEAKERis any better before I get out. The MR worked fine. It worked flaw, basically flawlessly.
51:53SPEAKERSo as awesome as it is, is that that Oasis driver is out for the MR headsets. Now, I guess I don't
51:58SPEAKERneed it because I went through the whole onboarding pairing process for the PSVR two again yesterday
52:04SPEAKERon the PC. And it all just worked. Like I don't have a lot more to say there other than like, Oh,
52:11SPEAKERit did pull updates for both controllers and the headset pulled updates through the PC app,
52:17SPEAKERthe Sony PC app that launches out of steam. So I don't know if maybe they've updated some things
52:21SPEAKERto make it work better. Like I had, like I said, I had major controller tracking issues a year ago,
52:27SPEAKERbut they have a little utility in there that tests like Bluetooth quality. And I was getting like
52:32SPEAKER97, 98% signal strength on the Bluetooth or the controllers. So like it just kind of worked.
52:38SPEAKERIs the only way to buy that thing still in the horizon called the mountain bundle?
52:42SPEAKERThe adapter or the VR thing. Wait, what do you mean VR thing? The headset?
52:47SPEAKERThe VR headset. Oh no, it looks like there's a standalone skew that just should be,
52:51SPEAKEROh, it's not any cheaper as the, as the thing it's like 400 bucks for the bundle or for the
52:56SPEAKERstandalone headset. Okay. Do you, do you have to buy a separate dongle to work with the PSVR
53:01SPEAKERon the PC? The dongle is, I can't remember how much it might be like 50 bucks. That seems like
53:07SPEAKERthe cheapest they would be willing to sell you something. Just 60 bucks. It's $60. It's just a
53:11SPEAKERlittle USB breakout box that you, that you plug display port and USB into and then the headset in.
53:17SPEAKERSo it's basically 450 bucks and you get a, a 460. Yeah. 460 to use it on a PC. Yeah. That's pretty
53:23SPEAKERgood. Yeah. It's not bad. I mean, I don't know if that, I don't, if you were only buying it for PC,
53:27SPEAKERI don't think I'd say to get this one necessarily. I don't, I don't, I don't know how well Sony's
53:32SPEAKERgoing to support it over time. I'm guessing I would not hold my breath for there to be a lot
53:37SPEAKERof long-term support for that adapter. Like if you really just want a PC headset, I think you're
53:42SPEAKERprobably better off getting a PC headset, but if you, if you want to play one of the five PSVR two
53:46SPEAKERgames on PlayStation as well, then it's a better option, I guess. I mean, the thing is the PC
53:51SPEAKERheadsets have all gotten really expensive, like the big screen and all those are all like,
53:54SPEAKERthey're premium for real enthusiasts. It seems like that market has skewed upward toward the
54:00SPEAKERpeople who really want a premium VR experience. Cause those are the only people still using VR.
54:04SPEAKERAnd I think I'd buy the PlayStation thing rather than buying like the quest three S and so
54:10SPEAKERbasically this is the same price as a meta quest three, cause that's four 99. So like, yeah,
54:17SPEAKERI don't know. That feels pretty good. Yeah. It's yeah. I mean, again, like I,
54:21SPEAKERmy experience has been better now, but like a lot of people have Bluetooth issues with
54:25SPEAKERlike adapters not working and stuff. Like I don't know that it's the most compatible PC VR
54:31SPEAKERexperience. Like it might be worth a shot if you're looking for a PC headset, but it is wired
54:37SPEAKERstill. Right. Yes, it is wired. So that is the, that is the knock. Yeah. It's not, not my favorite,
54:42SPEAKERbut I didn't use it a ton yesterday, but I will say like, stop me if you've heard of this one
54:47SPEAKERbefore that it should, the steam VR home sure looked way better than on that old man. One is
54:53SPEAKERreality headset, much, much higher resolution, low led screens versus the lower res LCDs and
55:00SPEAKERthat thing. Like it was just like, Oh wow, this is what this is supposed to look like.
55:04SPEAKERYeah. Even, even like the last wave of mixed reality headsets, like the Samsung mixed reality
55:08SPEAKERheadset, the last wave one was fucking great compared. It was up there with the index compare
55:13SPEAKERin terms of image quality, which was the Samsung Odyssey plus was like the, the MR headset to get,
55:20SPEAKERI kind of wish I had like gotten that on fire sale, but well, and like the, and like it was
55:25SPEAKERcomparable to the index and then the index is now not, not the state of the art obviously anymore.
55:30SPEAKERCause it's been five years since that thing came out. But anyway, like I VR it's back,
55:35SPEAKERget back to me in like two years. There's so many games coming out right now that I will never have
55:39SPEAKERtime for this, but I think I could actually like play half-life Alex now finally on this
55:43SPEAKERPS VR would be a good experience. You should play half-life. Alex is so freaking good. It's it's
55:49SPEAKERlike, like one day we're going to look back on half-life Alex. Like we do the vet track Vectrex
55:53SPEAKERnow. Right. I walked around this basically all I did after I got, got it working yesterday was,
55:58SPEAKERyou know, all those environments that you can download in steam VR home to walk around in.
56:01SPEAKERThere's one in there. That's like somebody, I don't forget the character's name, but it's
56:04SPEAKERsomebody's lab from half-life two or from half-life Alex. Oh, is it Kleiner's lab or
56:09SPEAKERKleiner? It's somebody else. I don't remember the name. Maybe I can't remember, but you may have
56:15SPEAKERseen it. There's like a button and a shelf that you can press to the shelf descends and reveals
56:20SPEAKERthe hidden lab. And you can walk around. Anyway, you can see the hand attachment from that game.
56:24SPEAKERYou remember that the little mechanical glove that has your like hearts, the health meter on it and
56:30SPEAKERstuff like just walking up to and looking at that little hand controller in like the diegetic health
56:36SPEAKERmeter stuff made me really want to play half-life Alex all of a sudden. You should do an Alex
56:42SPEAKERstream. I've streamed VR before. I don't know if I'm eager to go back to that. You, there are ways
56:50SPEAKERyou can do that that will work and be a better viewing experience than you've had in the past.
56:54SPEAKERMaybe, maybe. Anyway, the main thing is there is an unbelievable amount of stuff in this room right
57:00SPEAKERnow. Well, that's true. A lot of it that I need to prep for donation or storage in the closet or
57:04SPEAKERselling. And if, and when I ever get that done in five years, there will be a ton of floor space in
57:10SPEAKERthis room. So actually it's true. It will be a very good VR space at that point. That's true.
57:15SPEAKERI think that says, Oh, I have one last hit. So I moved everything hanging under the PC and I got
57:20SPEAKERrid of that spine that was doing my cable management from the floor to the desk. So for
57:24SPEAKERthe sit stand desk, mainly because of the spine broke eventually, which was disappointing because
57:29SPEAKERit was not an expensive thing. But I got a vivo heavy duty under desk mount for the PC. I talked
57:36SPEAKERabout this a little bit a couple months ago, but I've had it up now long enough that I'm willing to
57:40SPEAKERlike give it a wholehearted endorsement. It's it's I got rid of the spine because now I'm hanging the
57:45SPEAKERPC and most of the cables are all just all at desk level, not going to the floor. So yeah, I have this
57:53SPEAKERunder desk mount is basically like two metal loops with some grabbers on the bottom and a couple of
57:59SPEAKERslides and you kind of slide one side off to get access to the PC. You can actually slide it open
58:05SPEAKERenough that I don't have to take it all the way out if I just want to open up the side and like
58:08SPEAKERdust it out or whatever. It's been, it's been super good. I'm a big fan of, of how it works
58:14SPEAKERand it's made the sit stand much more manageable. So now I've also gone and there's a bunch of
58:22SPEAKERpeople that sell like 3d printed mounts for specific audio devices that you can then use
58:29SPEAKERthem to fasten things up underneath the desk. So like, I got one for my steel series headset box.
58:34SPEAKERI got one it's a little more generic, I think for the Motu. I didn't, I couldn't find one that was
58:38SPEAKERspecific for the Motu M4. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah. What are these attached to? Like I am,
58:43SPEAKERI am like obsessed with mounting things under my desk. I am, I'm obsessed with just hiding all of
58:48SPEAKERmy technology. So I don't see it. I like a nice tidy desktop and like, I've got an Astro Pro
58:54SPEAKERTR mix amp. I've got this Motu M4. I've got this rack mounted DBX. Like not all of it is mounted
59:00SPEAKERcurrently. Some of it is, but like I, anyway, go on. What is, what is, what is this thing called
59:04SPEAKERthat you're talking about? Well, so they're just like little, they're little 3d printed,
59:07SPEAKERbasically they're sides. Oh, these are all just like, I thought, I thought you meant this was
59:10SPEAKERlike some commercial product line. This is all just like user design stuff. Well, no, they're
59:15SPEAKERcommercial printed. Like, like that's the thing is commercial printing is a real thing now. Like if
59:18SPEAKERthere's print farms, I thought you meant this was like, I needed to just go on thingiverse and
59:22SPEAKERdownload a thing and print it myself or something. I mean, I'm sure you can do that for a lot of this
59:26SPEAKERstuff. The ones that I, I, I figured was worth $12 to just pay somebody to do that work for me.
59:32SPEAKEROf course. You know, what we're talking about, some of the equipment we're talking about is
59:36SPEAKERnot light. Like this Motu M4 is largely made of metal. Like it needs a pretty sturdy mount. And so
59:41SPEAKERwell, so, but if that's something that's strong enough, if the thing that the things that I bought
59:46SPEAKERare printed like a hundred percent infill. So they're solid plastic. And like, I, I had to
59:52SPEAKERkind of eyeball it to realize it was a 3d printed 3d printed item. So basically it's just, you, you
59:59SPEAKERget the two sides and I think the Motu one is they do the same one for the M2 and M4 because they're
1:00:05SPEAKERthe same shape, but just wider. And then you place them further apart and then you can either screw
1:00:11SPEAKERthem into the bottom of your desk. You can put like double-sided foam tape or something on them.
1:00:15SPEAKERIf you want, I suppose you could do nano tape if you wanted to live on the edge. But they just go
1:00:20SPEAKERup underneath the desk and then you have access to them at the depth that you want without having
1:00:26SPEAKERto do anything else. So I have like my headphone dongle thing is there. My my headphone, I have a
1:00:33SPEAKERhook to hang the headphones on underneath the desk. I have the Motu down there. All of that
1:00:38SPEAKERstuff is just under the desk. So now my desk is free to get filled with crap, just the way I like
1:00:42SPEAKERit. And it's fantastic. Great. Highly recommended. Is the motorized desk, the sit-stand desk you're
1:00:48SPEAKERusing like it doesn't have any problem with the extra weight of the PC? It hasn't so far. It's
1:00:53SPEAKERrated for up to 250 pounds. I don't know where near 250 pounds. Okay. Yeah. I, and I do, I did
1:01:00SPEAKERmake an effort. So I think at some point I'm going to move the streaming PC over here too and hang it
1:01:04SPEAKERon the other side, just down low. Just balance the center of gravity on the desk. Well, I, but
1:01:10SPEAKERalso the streaming box, I'm getting ready to move it to a, uh, uh, an ITX machine, uh, because I've
1:01:16SPEAKERbeen testing external and internal capture cards lately. And it turns out the USB-C 3.2 external
1:01:23SPEAKERcapture cards are indistinguishable from the internal capture cards. Um, if I ever moved more
1:01:30SPEAKERfully to Linux, I might have to think about that because I'm, I'm in the worst possible situation
1:01:34SPEAKERof using an internal Elgato capture card, which has the least possible Linux support.
1:01:39SPEAKERLook, I will tell you my Avramedia 4k internal capture card is just a PCI express to USB bridge
1:01:48SPEAKERand it works perfectly in Linux. Yeah, I believe it. The one we should wrap this up. I don't need
1:01:52SPEAKERto go down this rabbit hole. The one nice thing about that Elgato card I use is that, and I don't
1:01:55SPEAKERremember how they're doing this exactly. It does not present an exclusive video source to windows.
1:02:00SPEAKERLike, you know, most devices it's like, if OBS is using it, then you can't also open it as a device
1:02:05SPEAKERin like a video call because it'll just be like device in use or whatever. That Elgato card is
1:02:09SPEAKERable to multiplex the video source so that you can use it in as many apps as you want simultaneously,
1:02:15SPEAKERwhich is super nice, but it works like the virtual cam that OBS basically kind of seamlessly,
1:02:21SPEAKERwhich is, it turns out to be really convenient. But anyway, I guess that'll do it for us today.
1:02:25SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Hopefully there's some stuff in there that you, the listener found useful or
1:02:29SPEAKERinteresting to follow up on. Yeah. I'll, I'll put links for the stuff I talked about. We'll
1:02:36SPEAKERput them in show notes, I guess, whether you see them in your client or not is up to your client,
1:02:40SPEAKERbecause you can always go to techpod.content.town and they'll be there or we'll put them in there.
1:02:44SPEAKERI'll put, I'll put stuff in the thread in the discord, if you're in the discord too.
1:02:48SPEAKERAnd if you want to get in the discord, you're not in there. You can do that by joining the Patreon
1:02:52SPEAKERand supporting the podcast. We're listening to support it. So we're not here. If it weren't for
1:02:55SPEAKERyou, we wouldn't be here. And if you want to find out how you can support the show, you can go to
1:03:00SPEAKERpatreon.com/techpod. Again, it's patreon.com/techpod where for five bucks a month,
1:03:05SPEAKERyou get access to the discord. You get the monthly patron exclusive episode.
1:03:10SPEAKERAnd you support the show. Like I said, we appreciate each and every one of you.
1:03:15SPEAKERWe do. But we especially appreciate our executive producer tier supporters, including Jason Lee,
1:03:22SPEAKERInfelicitous Rips, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Money, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen,
1:03:29SPEAKERJames Kamik, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so much.
1:03:35SPEAKERThank you to everyone.
1:03:37SPEAKERAnd that'll do it for us this week. We'll be back next week with another edition of The Tech Pod.
1:03:43SPEAKERAs always, please consider the environment before printing this podcast.