00:00SPEAKERBrad I experienced a new side effect of electric cars this morning. Oh good
00:03SPEAKERThat's life with a new paradigm shifting product right and every day is a new adventure
00:08SPEAKERI mean it is I had to get up this morning go to the grocery store right when they opened at 6 and
00:13SPEAKERI walked out and we have skunks in our neighborhood
00:17SPEAKERSo he's like you kind of take a look when you step out on the front porch and give it an eyeball make sure
00:20SPEAKERThere's nothing around but I got all the way into the guy unplugged the car
00:24SPEAKERI got into the car and as I was sitting down
00:26SPEAKERI see a little white bushy tail just walking right right right underneath the front right corner of the car
00:32SPEAKERWait cars out on the driveway. This is not in the garage cars of the driveways full of the garage is full of crap
00:37SPEAKERThere's no cars fitting in there. Of course. Yeah, it's California. We don't have closets. So I see the bushy tail and I'm like well
00:46SPEAKERShit, what do I do?
00:47SPEAKERBecause normally you just kind of start the car and then the skunk would scurry out and be like, oh, this is a sound
00:51SPEAKERI'm familiar with but the electric car kind of doesn't make a startup sound Oh No
00:56SPEAKERIt goes whir whir whir when you're driving down the street, so you don't like tag somebody. I'm sorry
01:01SPEAKERI have to yeah
01:02SPEAKERThis is a full category difference on the type of problem that I thought you were going to come in here and talk about
01:07SPEAKERNo, so I was sitting in there
01:09SPEAKERI was like, how do I deal with like I don't want to honk because I don't want to startle it
01:12SPEAKERI turned off the air conditioning in the vent first. That was a meeting number one, right?
01:16SPEAKERYour number one priority here is to not vent spray spray, right?
01:22SPEAKERSetting aside the actual priority of you also don't want to run over it which both kills the animal and also still releases the stink
01:28SPEAKERThat's a sometimes problem. Oh, does that not always happen? They do not always release on death. Ah, okay
01:34SPEAKERUm, well, you don't run over it or have it spray
01:36SPEAKERI I like generally speaking even though they were incredibly destructive to my yard, which is not beautiful
01:41SPEAKERI kind of like the skunks. They're very cute
01:42SPEAKERThey're quite affable and I think we talked about before my I had a crazy aunt who had a pet skunk for a while
01:48SPEAKERWhat did I not have I told you this? No in the house. Oh, yeah
01:53SPEAKERWhat so she was a nature cinematographer and she found a?
02:00SPEAKERBaby skunk whose mom had been killed
02:03SPEAKERin an accident when she was on a shoot and in like Missouri or Nebraska or someplace one time and
02:09SPEAKERViolating what I'm sure are several federal and state laws. She brought it back to Northern Virginia with her and
02:15SPEAKERIts name was squirt. It was it never it she had it for like six years. It didn't spray ever
02:22SPEAKERNot once not that I'm aware of she leaked occasionally
02:26SPEAKERMmm, just like a little little little taste of but generally speaking squirt was really chill
02:32SPEAKERVery affectionate would like sit on your lap and was very snugly almost like a cat where you held the skunk. I've held a
02:39SPEAKERPet skunk. Yeah, she found a vet that would help her take care of it
02:43SPEAKERThat would like give it shots and stuff. So it could get I assume rabies vaccines. I don't know. I didn't ask
02:48SPEAKERI was young when this happened and then eventually when it got to a
02:53SPEAKERWhen it got to a point where it was starting to leak more often she gave it to like nature
02:59SPEAKERLike a like a children's nature museum type situation good, I guess I have to imagine after six years
03:06SPEAKERThat's probably not easy to part
03:07SPEAKERI mean, I'm gonna go and tell you when it started leaking more it became a pretty easy decision. I recall
03:13SPEAKERAlso, I say she was a little bit you like look the house always had a little bit of a funk, right?
03:19SPEAKERIt was not like skunk free. But anyway, so the skunks under the front of the car and I'm like
03:26SPEAKERWell, this is an intractable position because I didn't see it come back out
03:29SPEAKERI like I load up the doorbell camera to see if I can see it walking around out there. Nope
03:33SPEAKERNothing. I
03:34SPEAKERput the overhead because the car has the whole round the car cameras and I hit that button after a minute or two when I
03:40SPEAKERRealized but then I was like, well crap. What do I do? I don't I don't know. I don't know what to do here. So
03:48SPEAKERI sat there for a minute and then I like rolled forward just a smidge and nothing shot out from under the car and
03:55SPEAKERSo then I drove off and it was fine. It must have gone out the back when I wasn't looking just okay
03:58SPEAKERNo idea how it resolved
04:00SPEAKERSo wait, hang on just to back up or are you saying that skunks in the area have become accustomed to the sound of?
04:05SPEAKERCombustion engines and know to get out of the way I think generally speaking animals that live in suburban areas are familiar with the sound of
04:12SPEAKERCombustion engines and know not to be there. And like I said electric cars every day is a new adventure. Yeah, it was exciting
04:35SPEAKERYou
04:47SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and will made a tech pod. I'm will I'm Brad
04:51SPEAKERBrad how you doing? I'm doing well
04:52SPEAKERI resisted I'm kind of glad you brought a skunk story for the cold open because I was all ready to come in here
04:58SPEAKERLinux guns blazing and talk about the dual boot diaries, which I guess I guess we could still get into if you want
05:03SPEAKERbut we we
05:05SPEAKERLook, it's funny. I listen to several podcasts where your name is invoked regularly. I'm on one of them. Mm-hmm
05:13SPEAKERYeah, hang on are you talking about podcasts I'm on or are you saying they're because I'm not on the talk about me
05:18SPEAKERIt's a podcast
05:20SPEAKERSo I was listening to and I've been working my way through the back catalogue of AMCA since Rob was on
05:25SPEAKERI mean no, but since before that but like sure and I'm going I was on one of the old patron episodes from like maybe
05:31SPEAKERThe first year that they did it. Okay, I think Austin cited a conversation with you about
05:36SPEAKERabout the the the
05:39SPEAKERRevenge of the Sith novel ization and some sheave related
05:44SPEAKERMotivations that's amazing because I had another conversation with him about the Revenge of the Sith novel ization not two weeks ago
05:50SPEAKERI have the Revenge of the Sith novel ization in my Libby list
05:54SPEAKERThere's only like two copies in the San Francisco Public Library system. So it's good. Yeah, I'm gonna read it
05:59SPEAKERI dearly hope they do an episode about that novel at some point
06:02SPEAKERI am a hundred percent positive that they were going to do an episode as many times as he's brought it up over the years
06:07SPEAKERAnyway, that's exciting to hear right? I feel like there are two kinds of people
06:10SPEAKERYeah, when you hear that someone is talking about you you either get excited or you become incredibly fearful and I am extremely the latter
06:19SPEAKERYeah, but like you shouldn't be because you generally speaking
06:23SPEAKERGenerally speaking you you comport yourself. Well, I think that's okay
06:28SPEAKERI think that you don't live your life in a way that you should be afraid of the things that you've said in the past
06:34SPEAKEROkay, that's good. Which is like I try to live my life that way
06:37SPEAKERI think I'm probably less successful than some and more than others, you know
06:41SPEAKERBut uh, but yeah, like I don't
06:45SPEAKERsometimes sometimes
06:46SPEAKERwhen when I started doing podcasts a million years ago and we were doing the maximum PC podcast and it felt like just five people
06:53SPEAKERSitting in an office talking to each other and not we didn't realize that like tens or hundreds of thousands of people were listening to
06:59SPEAKERThat every week. Yep
07:01SPEAKERThe first time somebody came up to me and was like, hey, I listen to your podcast
07:04SPEAKERI kind of panicked and I was like it was like a fight-or-flight moment. I was like I should run god. What did I say?
07:09SPEAKERYeah, what did I do this time?
07:12SPEAKERBut yeah, but you know, it's a little more polished experience these days I guess but for the most part
07:16SPEAKERso you came up on dual boot diaries this week because we were talking about
07:21SPEAKERWell, we talked a little bit about your approach to multi booting different distros of Linux the other day
07:25SPEAKERI was just talking to somebody on the full nerd discord this morning
07:29SPEAKERIronically, it was someone who is also on art and who I know from our discord
07:33SPEAKERThere ever look it's a crossover event happening right now. Everything is everything now. Yeah, they're all they're all merging
07:40SPEAKERI was talking to them about that exact thing about like I'm trying to remember what the specifics were
07:45SPEAKERIt was they had a situation where one OS hijacked another OS's boot configuration. Yep
07:51SPEAKERI think it was Windows messed up Linux or I forget. Anyway, it was it was one of those conversations of like, yeah
07:57SPEAKERThis was just gonna kind of keep happening
07:59SPEAKERWindows loves to overwrite Linux, but it's not just it's not just Windows though
08:02SPEAKEROh other Linux is overwriting likes to overwrite Linux and also your UEFI likes to make
08:09SPEAKERSeemingly random harebrained decisions about what to do with your boot entries. Like it's all just a mess
08:14SPEAKERWell, so we were we were talking about this because Adams working this out with the framework
08:18SPEAKERLaptops and the framework desktop which purport to boot off of their little USB expansion cards
08:23SPEAKERBut kind of don't like the by the UEFI doesn't see see them as bootable
08:28SPEAKERso what I did was I set up refined on a on a secondary partition on a like a tertiary partition at the end of the
08:34SPEAKERdrive and
08:36SPEAKERThen it just scans all the available drives because it sees those USB drives and you can build off of whatever I was on
08:41SPEAKERWhatever at that point. Um, yeah, actually actually real quick just to close the loop here
08:45SPEAKERIt was actually the refined author that I was quoting to this person on the discord this morning
08:49SPEAKERI'll just read it to you is that the refined site is a trove of information. It's it's
08:56SPEAKERYes, it is an incredible but also it is very clearly this dude's blog Roderick W Smith it is
09:03SPEAKERYeah, so the guy who writes refined to the boot manager also, I'm not I'm gonna resist my the ultimate pedantry here at some point
09:09SPEAKERI have to deliver a screed maybe on the dual boot diaries about how refined is not a bootloader
09:14SPEAKERIt's true. No, it's just a boot manager. But anyway
09:18SPEAKERBut the TR is it solves a lot of problems. Absolutely. It's very it's very useful, but
09:24SPEAKERThat guy's site. I'll link it in the show notes is the most
09:30SPEAKER1993 web 1.0 like original Tim Berners-Lee HTTP design
09:35SPEAKERReally is just plain like zero style sheets zero anything. It's just plain. It's a table
09:41SPEAKERI think there might be there might be some there are some like a very basic original HTML features in there, but it is just
09:47SPEAKERnumerous giant walls of text on a white background
09:51SPEAKERAnd this sounds like when you say it that way it sounds like a bad thing
09:54SPEAKERbut it's actually really fantastic because it makes reading it really easy and like the total page load is like a
10:01SPEAKERFractions a second and it's like three kilobytes or something. It's crazy
10:05SPEAKERBut it's a lot of technical information just kind of blasted at you like it's oh, yeah
10:09SPEAKERIt's not necessarily like divided up and segmented in a way that's easily digestible. It's just a lot of information in bulk
10:15SPEAKERAnyway, all of that is to say his site is like it's like the Bible for UEFI booting and how scare boot works and stuff
10:22SPEAKERFor me like it's like where I learned everything I know about that stuff, but he has an entire page on there
10:27SPEAKERThis is the thing I was gonna get at is that
10:29SPEAKERHe has an entire page on there about OS's and UEFI
10:32SPEAKERBehaving badly and stepping on each other's toes and screwing up your boot configuration. So I'll just read the quote very quickly
10:39SPEAKEROnce you've installed refined you may face a new challenge keeping it set as your default boot manager
10:45SPEAKERusers of multi boot computers have long faced similar challenges because most OS's provide mechanisms to keep themselves booting even at the cost of
10:53SPEAKERDisrupting other OS's or overriding your own choices
10:57SPEAKERSo like everything I've had I've had issues on computers that have just Linux on them that have never been touched by Windows and still having
11:05SPEAKERlike boot entries disappear and having them become unbootable because either
11:09SPEAKERThe Debian installer or the UEFI or something made a weird decision and decided to delete some stuff
11:14SPEAKERLike it's just a constant mess trying to keep OS's behaving
11:19SPEAKERThis is why this is why I my general policy is don't mess with the default boot stuff for the OS and then
11:26SPEAKERIt's why I like using refined honestly for dual boots is because then you set up a separate partition
11:30SPEAKERThat the OS doesn't know about and doesn't jack with and that that's just where refined live and lives and stuff kind of just works
11:37SPEAKERAt that point, but anyway, yeah. Yeah
11:40SPEAKERYou say that but this user this user had Windows install its bootloader on a separate drive
11:45SPEAKERThat was not the drive that the Windows install. Yeah, and so like Windows will still just put things wherever it wants
11:50SPEAKERWell, look, this is why when people say hey, I want to install Windows. What do I do?
11:55SPEAKERI was like take every other drive out of the machine first except for the one you want Windows to be on
11:59SPEAKERYep, we had that exact conversation. It's the stupidest possible solution to the problem. Yes. Okay. All right at this point
12:07SPEAKERAt this point we should probably just get to the actual episode topic. I'll save my yeah
12:11SPEAKERI was excited to hear you to hear you talking about finding find though
12:15SPEAKEROh, yeah, fine is incredible. Talk about your first experience with find
12:20SPEAKERAnd we'll talk about that at some point. Yeah, do boot diaries wherever find podcasts are found but but on this podcast
12:27SPEAKERWe're doing a 2025 end-of-life
12:31SPEAKERExtravaganza a lot of stuff dying in 2025
12:36SPEAKERLike look, this is where we insert the doors into the podcast
12:39SPEAKERI guess what's um, you know, I started to this could think that comment could be interpreted in a lot of different ways
12:46SPEAKERthis
12:49SPEAKERDefine this narrowly to recent tech products that are end of lifing. Yeah. Yeah, we're keeping the scope tight today
12:56SPEAKERWe're gonna talk about Windows 10. We're gonna talk about TiVo and we're gonna talk about
13:01SPEAKERBlu-ray drives? Fuzzily we will talk about like bd-roms PC blu-ray drives
13:06SPEAKERWhich like we've got some announcements there that are official about companies getting out of that business
13:11SPEAKERBut then others are more fuzzy like hey, these are no longer available anywhere, but no official messaging anyway
13:16SPEAKERYeah, but let's start with Windows 10. We've talked about this a bunch over the last year because it's been looming
13:22SPEAKERThis is the first post Windows 10
13:25SPEAKERI'm sorry, I'm laughing because I we had talked about it so much that I figured that by the time we got to the
13:31SPEAKERActual dates we couldn't talk about it anymore because we had covered it extensively
13:35SPEAKERbut of course we were gonna have to address it post a date like the
13:40SPEAKERso on one hand we I joked about this on on
13:43SPEAKERthe full nerd this week because of course we talked about it there too, but the the
13:47SPEAKERLike there on one hand there's a lot of panic because like you're theoretically not supported anymore on the other hand
13:53SPEAKERMicrosoft has added a bunch of bypasses to to bypass the to continue getting security updates for another year, basically
14:00SPEAKERYeah
14:00SPEAKERso like we have that debate a couple weeks ago about whether they would blink at the last minute or not and I feel like
14:04SPEAKERWe were both right because they didn't actually blink but they likes kind of soft on the back end have like like
14:11SPEAKERIt's almost like hey, I know a guy. It's like hey
14:15SPEAKERYeah, what another year of support?
14:17SPEAKEROkay, the trench coat here. You can look at all my elicit. Where's would you want to do you want to use OneDrive to back?
14:23SPEAKERUp your settings. Do you want to give me a thousand Microsoft points?
14:27SPEAKEROr you pay 30 bucks. Yeah. Yeah that one that one they had talked about but well
14:32SPEAKERI thought was it was 60 originally so like like they've definitely dialed it back some
14:37SPEAKERFor folks who don't know Windows 10 officially ended ended end of life on Tuesday the 14th of October 2025
14:45SPEAKERThat means that they're not getting feature updates. They're not doing security updates unless you do one of three things basically
14:51SPEAKERYou can it turns out originally they said you have to use Windows backup to back up your profile folders
14:56SPEAKERBut then they changed that to yo if you have OneDrive installed and you're logged into an online Microsoft account
15:02SPEAKERIt will just back up your settings to the cloud for that machine
15:05SPEAKERWhich means like it will sync your wallpapers and your dark mode and stuff like that your theme settings pretty much
15:10SPEAKERMm-hmm. And if you do that that that's good enough, they'll pop up a thing in Windows Update that says hey
15:15SPEAKERDo you want to do this long-term support extended security updates dealy for Windows 10 since you seem to still be using it?
15:22SPEAKERYeah, I think that's the value of approaching this or
15:25SPEAKERRevisiting this posts end of life is that now we can see how they have chosen to roll this out
15:31SPEAKERAnd yeah, I was actually kind of surprised to find that it's just showing up in people's Windows Update settings panel in Windows
15:37SPEAKERI kind of assumed that you know, we knew that like we said we knew there were gonna be ways to opt-in to a little
15:42SPEAKERBit of extended support but I assumed that was gonna be visiting some relatively obscure
15:47SPEAKERMicrosoft web page and maybe having to log in and potentially give money etc
15:51SPEAKERLike the the idea that this is coming straight to people on their Windows 10 PCs in the place where they get Windows 10 updates
15:57SPEAKERAlready and it's essentially a single click to just say yes. I want more security updates is kind of surprising to me
16:02SPEAKERI'm sure it's gonna be a notification like they're gonna do a pop-up as well that says hey
16:06SPEAKERYou should consider upgrading to Windows 11 if you can do that, but if not, maybe do this instead
16:11SPEAKERBecause it's in Microsoft's best interest for these to be some these machines to continue getting security updates, right?
16:17SPEAKERYeah, if you I assume you saw this but the link to the is this a knowledge base article
16:23SPEAKERI don't know what you call is just kind of have the knowledge base is dead end of life
16:26SPEAKERReally? Just add it to the list. Yeah, put it put it on the things Microsoft killed
16:31SPEAKERThis microsoft.com link that we have in the show notes has a screenshot of the enrollment panel in Windows 10
16:36SPEAKEROh where you actually are picking how you want to enroll. That's nice. And it literally has what's the term radio button?
16:43SPEAKERRadio button. Yeah radio is the one that you can only select one of right? Mm-hmm
16:47SPEAKERIt literally is a panel that just has three radio buttons
16:50SPEAKERWhich is like choose how you want to enroll in extended security updates back up your PC settings redeem Microsoft rewards points
16:57SPEAKERone time purchase
16:59SPEAKERso like I'm
17:01SPEAKERI guess I shouldn't be surprised like they have
17:04SPEAKERIncredibly extensive telemetry let's say rights about how many people are still using Windows 10 because that's kind of what Windows is these days a telemetry
17:11SPEAKERcollection machine
17:13SPEAKERMm-hmm, so they know
17:15SPEAKERThey know better than anybody how many people have refused to update to 11 and how many people are in need of this, right?
17:20SPEAKERLike you said it is in their interest to not have a bunch of like millions and millions of insecure Windows installs out there
17:27SPEAKERso
17:28SPEAKERThere's a couple couple of gotchas here one is if you uninstalled OneDrive, you can't do the settings backup thing
17:34SPEAKERWhich means yes, because that's so I've I've seen people on my feed talking about not getting opted into this
17:40SPEAKERAnd those same people I believe in the past haven't removed OneDrive. So I wonder if that's actually
17:45SPEAKERPreventing but could you could you just reinstall it from the store? Yeah, okay
17:51SPEAKERYou also need to have Windows 10 version 22h2
17:54SPEAKERand it needs to be a consumer version not one of the like the long-term support or kiosk code versions or an active directory or
18:02SPEAKERConnected to an active directory or anything. That's like business II basically
18:07SPEAKERThey it can't be a child account is the other thing
18:10SPEAKERSo you have to be signed into an admin account and it can't that admin account can't be a child account
18:15SPEAKERWhich means if you have if your kids PC is getting this isn't getting this update and they're on Windows 10
18:21SPEAKERWhat you do is you go log in as your admin
18:23SPEAKERAdult account and then opt into it and then their machine will be opted in as a result of that
18:29SPEAKERSo, yeah, the the three things we talked about this before out so I'm gonna be real fast
18:34SPEAKERThe syncing your PC settings is free and easy
18:36SPEAKERI would just do that unless you really don't want to have a Microsoft account on your computer for some reason
18:40SPEAKERThe thousand Microsoft for I think you probably have to be logged in signed in for all three of these ways with a with a
18:46SPEAKERMicrosoft account though because you can't make the purchase without a Microsoft account and
18:51SPEAKERYou can't have Microsoft rewards points redeemed to your account without that
18:55SPEAKERSo yeah, I'm sure a lot of people listening have seen the headline in the last couple weeks that they are
18:59SPEAKERContinuing to close off having to use for creating non online accounts and Windows. Yeah, like hey
19:05SPEAKERI think you're down to one solution for that now
19:07SPEAKERThis is why you can do the active or you can say hey, I need to connect to an active directory
19:11SPEAKERBut I'm not there that still works, but it's kind of a pain to figure out how to get there
19:15SPEAKERI just gave up like honestly it feels impossible at this point
19:18SPEAKERLike it's kind of just a cost of doing business with Windows at this point. You have to have an all like frankly
19:25SPEAKERAnd I to be clear I fully respect the decision to not want to have to make an online account to sign into your OS
19:31SPEAKERLike that is absolutely reasonable
19:33SPEAKERBut I feel like in practical terms if that's you you should just run Linux at this point
19:37SPEAKERSo like it feels it feels like a losing battle to continue trying to use Windows in this way
19:44SPEAKERwell, so I'm in between because I don't mind having the I don't mind having the
19:50SPEAKERThe online account like I actually sign in once I install Windows
19:54SPEAKERI want the install to happen without the online accounts because I'm stupid stuff that they do with the file structure
19:59SPEAKERBut yes, that is only because of stupid arbitrary decisions
20:02SPEAKERThey have made about how it jacks up your your home directory and some other related stuff to sign in at install time as opposed
20:08SPEAKERTo signing in after install. Yeah, if the file structure wasn't all one drived up for my profile folders
20:14SPEAKERI would absolutely just sign in on the on the login
20:16SPEAKERI used to do that before they started doing that and it's only
20:19SPEAKERBecause of this post one drive in one drive a nation of Windows that I started doing that. So anyway, yep
20:26SPEAKERSo that's it for Windows 10 don't run
20:29SPEAKERLike you're gonna see a lot of blog posts from people who are making bad decisions and encouraging bad behavior
20:35SPEAKERAbout running the LTSC version. Yeah, that's the the long-term servicing channel version, which is the
20:42SPEAKERYou've written you've like I think you described it as the airport kiosk version of Windows
20:47SPEAKERYeah, you know those all those screens you see blue screen at airports that have arrivals and departures on them
20:51SPEAKERThat's what this version of Windows is for. It's not for day-to-day use. Yeah, I look into it
20:55SPEAKERI mean it is run on some more serious stuff like a lot of medical
20:59SPEAKERLike imaging systems and air traffic control and stuff like that
21:02SPEAKERBut but those are still use cases where you need a very bare-bones operating environment and not it's not a full end user
21:09SPEAKERimplementation well and also
21:12SPEAKERKeep in a key way. They're also in places where users may interact with them
21:16SPEAKERBut they're not interacting with the broader internet, right?
21:18SPEAKERSo they're not they're not machines
21:20SPEAKERLike if you're on your dialysis machine that you're not browsing the web and playing Candy Crush on that thing, you know, yeah
21:26SPEAKERSo that's the big difference
21:27SPEAKERI looked into it a little bit because I've been seeing people recommend the LTSC version on like places like Twitter
21:32SPEAKERWhich is like I mean stop me if you've heard this one Twitter is utterly rife with terrible information about everything
21:38SPEAKERYeah, of course
21:39SPEAKEROne of those things is installing windows and like I've been seeing people for like two years now say just go get LTSC
21:44SPEAKERLike you'll never have to think about it again
21:46SPEAKERSuper bad idea. I ended up on you familiar with mass grave
21:50SPEAKERYeah, like I think they they do a lot of like windows activation scripts and stuff like that these days
21:55SPEAKERbut I ended up on their wiki about this and even they
21:59SPEAKERBasically have some like misconceptions about LTSC listed here common misconceptions LTSC is fast
22:06SPEAKERIt's not fast. Although there might be a bit more RAM available because of no store apps running in the background
22:11SPEAKERYou can achieve the same result in the regular editions by turning off background apps and startup apps
22:16SPEAKERIt's more privacy oriented. No telemetry options are the same
22:21SPEAKERAnd
22:22SPEAKERThen some other stuff there
22:24SPEAKERbut basically and and it lacks support for some stuff like certain some games and newer applications may not run on LTSC because
22:30SPEAKERit doesn't get updated as often and
22:33SPEAKERWell, honestly, you're gonna see games that stop supporting Windows 10 shortly. Yeah, right. We're already seeing like
22:39SPEAKERPeople are pulling their 32-bit versions because Windows 11 doesn't support 32-bit CPUs
22:44SPEAKERMaybe like you have to have a 64-bit CPU to run Windows 11
22:48SPEAKERSo like steam 32-bit is gonna go away. It was shortly hasn't already stuff like that
22:53SPEAKERI don't see on this Microsoft page how long I've seen conflicting
22:58SPEAKERReports of how long the ESU lasts a year. I think as a year is the main site one year
23:03SPEAKERI've seen I've seen people talk about the three-year span, but I think that's the paid support
23:07SPEAKERI think that's the like enterprise level commercial enterprise. Yeah, I'm priced. Yeah
23:11SPEAKERcommercial support
23:13SPEAKERSo you're only kicking the can down the road for a year. Although a year is some decent buffer to
23:19SPEAKERThis page I'm looking at says that the ESU ends on October 13th 2026
23:23SPEAKERSo it's a one year so I would I would if you're still on Windows 10 and intent on enabling
23:29SPEAKERYes, you I would treat that year as a year to figure out what you're gonna move on to. Yep, like when you find time
23:35SPEAKERYes, like realistically like Windows 10 is not a forever OS and you're going to be
23:40SPEAKERSol at some point and that some point is next October. Yeah, October 14th 2026
23:46SPEAKERit's like you pretty much need to in the next year either make your peace with Windows 11 in some fashion or
23:52SPEAKERMove on to another operating system. So then the the yeah
23:57SPEAKERAnd so the other thing not to do is not to run the versions of this that you download from the internet
24:01SPEAKERYeah, I think it's people make like install scripted versions that don't have the the checks and stuff installed
24:08SPEAKERDon't run don't get my don't run Windows from non Microsoft sources. I've talked about this before
24:14SPEAKERI hate this phenomenon of like people literally using the phrase Windows distro
24:18SPEAKERMm-hmm, there's stuff like there's stuff like Atlas OS out there and like they're giving themselves like flashy
24:24SPEAKERHomepages and and unique names and stuff like I it's a malware distribution system
24:29SPEAKERI mean, you know, we can't say definitively that any of those have malware
24:33SPEAKERBut it's certainly prone to that sort of thing
24:35SPEAKERThere's no way to know that it's not a malware distribution system
24:38SPEAKERIf you really insist on customizing and ripping out major components of your Windows install install the official Windows and do-it-yourself
24:45SPEAKEROr just run Linux at that point. Yes. That's also I would agree with that
24:50SPEAKERSo anyway, so that's it. That's Windows Windows 10
24:54SPEAKERIt made it
24:55SPEAKER10 years almost exactly. Mm-hmm. Long live Windows 10 the last version of Windows will ever need Steve Ballmer
25:02SPEAKER2014 remember I remember when they I mean didn't they actually say said final windows
25:07SPEAKERThey said it was the final windows. I my theory is that it was Apple changing their versioning that
25:13SPEAKERpartial at least to an extent that spurred the the
25:17SPEAKERYou know, they could they could have they could have kept iterating on Windows 10
25:20SPEAKERBut they made the conscious marketing branding choice to bump it to 11
25:24SPEAKERI think they wanted to get rid of 32-bit support
25:28SPEAKERThey could have still I don't think they had to rebrand to do things like that
25:31SPEAKERYeah, maybe I don't know if I could have just kept versioning Windows 10 forever. What if
25:37SPEAKERWhat if they drop a number? Yeah, just windows. What if it just became windows the windows? I think is what?
25:44SPEAKERYeah, I don't know. I
25:48SPEAKERWas googling the phrase Windows 12 again this morning as I sometimes do. Yeah, there's not a lot out there right now
25:54SPEAKERPeople talking it seems like it's you know
25:56SPEAKERNo, in fact, like there used to be more rumors about a Windows 12 and that seems to have dried up
26:00SPEAKERSo that maybe hmm seems like that may be a good ways off if if and when maybe Windows 11 really will be the last version of
26:07SPEAKERWindows anyway, it'll be for a lot of people ha ha ha
26:11SPEAKERSpeaking of things that have ended this one is insane to me. So TiVo like this is just like I
26:20SPEAKERThink I mean a bunch of sites reported this cord cutters news is the one that a bunch of people cited
26:24SPEAKERI think they might have been the first kind of blog in the space to land on this information
26:30SPEAKERYeah, man
26:30SPEAKERCan I just read the first sentence of the story? Mm-hmm in a seismic shift for the television industry TiVo corporation has quietly pulled the plug
26:38SPEAKERon its storied digital video recorder line
26:41SPEAKEREffectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. This news story is dated October 2025 and
26:49SPEAKERnot like say
26:51SPEAKERSometime in 2012. Like I can't I assumed the TiVo ceased to exist like a decade ago
26:57SPEAKERSo for people who don't know and don't remember TiVo, I think it's important to provide a little context here
27:06SPEAKERTiVo was the first DVR there was replay TV came out around the same time
27:09SPEAKERbut TiVo was the one that made the concept popular through a mixture of good branding and really nice software and a
27:16SPEAKERextensible kind of with an asterisk platform
27:20SPEAKERAnd for folks who don't know what DV for the children in the audience who don't know what a DVR was
27:25SPEAKERIn the 80s and 90s you would buy a VCR with a clock in it and you would say I want to record the Simpsons
27:32SPEAKERand Beavis and butthead and the Simpsons are on channel 11 at 7 p.m. And 730 and then again on Sundays at 8 and
27:39SPEAKERBeavis and butthead is on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. On it on channel 72 and
27:44SPEAKERyou would put all those things in using your remote control and
27:49SPEAKERUsually would record them onto a tape if there was enough room on the tape and then when you got home
27:53SPEAKERYou would be able to rewind that tape and you'd look at it and be like, oh man, heck yeah
27:57SPEAKERI have
27:57SPEAKERmost of a kind of an episode of the Simpsons except for the part where the football game ran late and then I didn't get
28:03SPEAKERThe first 10 minutes because it started late and then I you have to watch the end of that one like a year from then
28:08SPEAKERWhen they rerun it. Yeah, can I jump in real quick? Have you heard of Marion Stokes?
28:12SPEAKERThe name is familiar, but I don't remember who they are
28:14SPEAKERI just came familiar with her like literally was just like some random post on my feed that somebody was like, you know
28:20SPEAKERPeople do these little like history explainer threads on social media. Uh-huh
28:25SPEAKERShe is a woman from I think it was the shock. No, no, Pennsylvania. She was she lived in Pennsylvania
28:31SPEAKERShe recorded a 70,000 VHS VHS tapes worth of local television programming over the course of her life
28:37SPEAKEROh, so she's she's a person who has an archive org collection named after them
28:43SPEAKEROh, really? She's actually said so she's since passed away. I don't know. I
28:48SPEAKERDid not see what happened to the fate of her
28:51SPEAKERtape collection
28:53SPEAKERapparently these tapes were being stored across multiple apartments by the end of the whole project because
28:59SPEAKERShe was basically just worried about and justifiably worried about television programming
29:04SPEAKERNot being archived or just vanishing being lost to history
29:09SPEAKERWow, so I kind of want to follow up more on this and find out what happened all her tapes because
29:15SPEAKERAlso tapes of old broadcast TV are priceless
29:18SPEAKERIt's wild the stuff that was on back then so she did donated to the internet her son donated to the Internet Archive after her
29:24SPEAKERDeath right for shipping containers worth of tapes were required to move the collection ties headquarters
29:30SPEAKERAnd there's been a documentary about her but but anyway, so just to just to this is what things were like before TiVo
29:36SPEAKERYeah, you you would record stuff you'd get the ads the whole thing and then you just watch it
29:41SPEAKERLike it was kind of low a low-quality version of what was on the on the TV
29:46SPEAKERTiVo came out in 1999
29:48SPEAKERwith a box that looks like the same size as a VCR, but didn't have a slot for a tape basically and
29:55SPEAKERIt would record
29:56SPEAKERWhole you just tell it you like the Simpsons and then it would record the Simpsons anytime the Simpsons son
30:01SPEAKERSo it was a really it was a really novel
30:06SPEAKERExperience in that you didn't have to do like normal the perception and this is gonna sound crazy
30:12SPEAKERBut the perception in the 90s was that normal people didn't know how to work the time recording on their VCR
30:16SPEAKERThat was some real nerd business. It was that was like an extreme
30:20SPEAKERLet's say like fixture of late-night show comedy routines
30:25SPEAKERYeah, you're kind of thing like it was just a it was a extremely common trope of regular people
30:29SPEAKERdon't know how to program the time on their VCR your VCR was blinking midnight because that's what happened if you didn't set the
30:35SPEAKERTime on your VCR so TiVo came out with this thing. It cost a few hundred bucks
30:39SPEAKERcame out in 1999 and
30:41SPEAKERIt it really changed the way like it was one of those things that my my partner at the time went to a friend's house
30:48SPEAKERThey had a TiVo and she was like she came back and she's like we're going to Best Buy tomorrow
30:52SPEAKERWe're getting one of these things. This is incredible
30:54SPEAKERBecause what what it let you do is it recorded a constant buffer of TV of whatever channel was on
31:00SPEAKERbut then would also record the things you're watching so if you paused it and walked away and made a drink and went to the
31:06SPEAKERBathroom came back and sit down. You could fast-forward through the commercials, right which was
31:10SPEAKERshocking revolutionary, you know, it changed the way we watch TV to the point that like
31:17SPEAKERYou know when we moved to California and we had friends who went to the same college as us and we'd get together on Saturday
31:22SPEAKERmornings to watch college football
31:23SPEAKERYou only went to the friend's house if they had a TiVo sure, right?
31:27SPEAKERAnd and everybody knew to show up like 30 or 40 minutes late because we'd start there was before social media
31:32SPEAKERSo we start the game recording and then we'd pause it and we'd start the game
31:37SPEAKERSo we didn't have to watch commercials
31:38SPEAKERWe could fast forward through halftime and be done in like two hours instead of five was that I'm trying to think back was that?
31:43SPEAKERactually, maybe kind of a bigger pillar of the marketing then
31:47SPEAKERThe recording shows offline or when you're not paying attention was it but I feel like I remember that you can pause live TV thing
31:53SPEAKERActually being like the refrain do you can pot like they definitely tested a bunch of different things the you can pause live TV was a big
32:00SPEAKERPart of it the never miss your favorite show was the other one
32:03SPEAKERYeah, that was the kind of standard one
32:05SPEAKERBut I think it was the the the more because you know
32:07SPEAKERYou could program VCRs to record things when you weren't around kind of it was yeah
32:11SPEAKERBut like it was the point is that was a concept people at least understood as being possible
32:16SPEAKERMm-hmm
32:16SPEAKERIt was the you can hit pause in the middle of watching something live and walk away thing that felt like magic or felt like
32:22SPEAKERthe future
32:24SPEAKERSo it was like it was a culture like the TiVo became a real cultural touchstone around that time
32:30SPEAKERLike it was referenced on TV shows the thing made a sound that's
32:35SPEAKERInstantly recognizable. It went doo doo doo doo doo doo doo when you fast-forwarded or rewound now
32:40SPEAKERthe menu beeps and bloops were really good and really well designed and
32:44SPEAKERIt like kind of has a big giant legacy even though we've moved to on-demand
32:51SPEAKERDistribution for content over the internet now it did it invented the PVR DVR for all intents and purposes
32:57SPEAKERIt became a verb right like didn't people talk about the only people would just talk about TiVo in things, right?
33:01SPEAKERYeah, I'm gonna TiVo that yeah
33:03SPEAKERIt was right widely regarded as the first non pornographic $10 monthly subscription for a thing. Oh great
33:10SPEAKERThanks TiVo. So I mean like look some of the legacies not good. Okay
33:15SPEAKERThey also had a lifetime sub that was usually attached to the hardware
33:18SPEAKERAlthough that varied by region and the service so like if you have a satellite version of the TiVo
33:24SPEAKERThen it would it would be tied to the to the your account rather than the device or something. It was weird
33:29SPEAKERAnd in Australia, they had all sorts of weird rules about that annual sub
33:34SPEAKERThe service that you paid for provided the TV listings that made the season passes work
33:39SPEAKERso without you could use it without paying for the service, but if you did that then you didn't get the
33:44SPEAKERNews is on at 6 p.m. And Wheel Fortress on at 7. Oh, you just got the times and you had to do it
33:48SPEAKERLike the old-fashioned way. I don't think I remembered that you could use it without the service
33:53SPEAKERAt that point you were you were literally just programming like channel numbers and times at that point. Yeah, exactly
33:58SPEAKEROkay, so so the thing that the honestly the other thing that this killed was TV guide. So
34:04SPEAKERbefore TiVo
34:06SPEAKEREverybody in the country that watched TV on the reg got a little magazine that was like I don't know
34:11SPEAKERIt was like I'd call it readers digest size now, but it was like the size of a paperback book basically
34:16SPEAKEROh my god, you were really jogging some memories here
34:18SPEAKERWe didn't really get TV guide but our I assume most local newspapers hours ran local listings in the paper
34:23SPEAKEROurs absolutely did not really know pretty sure I remember our local
34:28SPEAKERI remember looking at the newspaper to look at the local TV listings for the week
34:32SPEAKERBut yeah
34:32SPEAKERSo you had a magazine that came once a week that told you what was gonna be on TV that week which football games were
34:38SPEAKERGonna be on and it was all local for your region. So like if you if you were in the region
34:42SPEAKERThey got Braves games instead of Reds games
34:44SPEAKERYou would know that you got the Braves game on on, you know, ABC on Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m
34:50SPEAKERso
34:52SPEAKERTiVo killed that they got rid of that it gave you a big giant guide of all the things you could watch at any given
34:57SPEAKERTime which cable was kind of already doing at that point, but it wasn't really interactive
35:00SPEAKERIt was just a channel that kind of scrolled. Yeah
35:03SPEAKERand
35:04SPEAKERthen also
35:07SPEAKERTheir response to TiVo is
35:09SPEAKERWidely regarded as the reason that the GPL version 3 exists. Yes. I looked this up the word TiVo ization was coined because
35:19SPEAKERThe TiVo ran Linux. Yeah, Linux famously is under the GNU general public license, which requires you to
35:27SPEAKERRelease any changes to source code you make which they did or so
35:30SPEAKERYes
35:31SPEAKERThey'd so they took Linux they ran Linux on this is probably the first example of a consumer device running Linux that I can
35:37SPEAKERThink of it was definitely for non network hardware for sure. Yeah, so my understanding is they took the Linux source code
35:44SPEAKERThey modified it for use on the TiVo. They did release these source code changes. They made as required by the license
35:50SPEAKERBut there were protections in place on the hardware
35:52SPEAKERTo prevent you from further modifying their source code and putting it back on the device and running it
35:58SPEAKERI think specifically they signed the kernel or something so that you had to you had to run a signed kernel and if you didn't
36:04SPEAKERHave their cryptographic keys and you couldn't write your own code changes. Um, they now this cause this caused a lot of consternation among certain
36:12SPEAKEROpen-source software freedom the beard. Oh people
36:16SPEAKERYeah, which like let's be real. I think that I listened to your
36:20SPEAKERlisten to the conversation with Wendell about
36:22SPEAKERPractical versus ideological. Mm-hmm. Like you need the ideological component like can't you need it? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely
36:30SPEAKERYou need the ideologues like you can't let them steer every decision
36:33SPEAKERbut like you need them back stopping the
36:36SPEAKERConstant encroaching of like corporate and moneyed interests that would love to shut down everything good about open source
36:42SPEAKERThat said I think that the move toward MIT more permissive licenses
36:48SPEAKERLike I think that the the GPL 3 stuff because it's so viral and this is a whole different topic for another episode
36:54SPEAKERYeah, because it goes so far
36:55SPEAKERWe're not lawyers also like yeah, we're barely I think qualified to talk about the differences between v2 and v3 of the GPL
37:02SPEAKERwell, but the the big thing is that you had to
37:06SPEAKERlike it in
37:08SPEAKERGPL v3 tends to infect other code that it touches right? So if you write something in GPL v3, then you have to
37:14SPEAKERThe other the other modules of that project also have to be GPL v3 and stuff like anyway
37:20SPEAKERIt's like it's like too infectious is my understanding of the v3 which is why everybody uses MIT and BSD licenses now
37:27SPEAKERWhich are incredibly permissive or GPL v2, which they're still like the Linux kernel is still under v2. In fact, apparently
37:33SPEAKERApparently Linus Torvalds defended Tivo here
37:37SPEAKERYeah, it was it was it was Richard Solomon and the free software foundation that coined the term Tivo ization and got really angry about this
37:43SPEAKERbut like
37:45SPEAKERLinus was running Linux on and he was running a Tivo and was really happy because he had lots of back episodes of I
37:50SPEAKERDon't know probably read some whatever Linus watches. Yes. Yeah. I gotta be a pedant here again Linus because he's with us
37:56SPEAKERSorry, it's finished. Yeah, I know. I know the Canadian Linus finish Linus. Okay. Okay
38:01SPEAKERThat's the title of the episode. Stahlmann calls it Tivo ization
38:04SPEAKERBut that's a word he has made up and a term I find offensive so I don't choose to use it
38:09SPEAKERIt's offensive because Tivo never did anything wrong and the free software foundation even acknowledged that
38:15SPEAKERYeah, so it's not like when links this was not posting their GPL code that they used for their routers a few years later
38:22SPEAKERThis was just which was bad. That was actively that was against the rules
38:26SPEAKERAnyway, so yeah, this thing ran Linux one of the interesting side effects of that was because it ran Linux
38:31SPEAKERit's probably the first time I used Linux as a user because if you
38:37SPEAKERLike this this thing was basically a MIPS. The first one was a powers PC. The second one was a MIPS processor
38:42SPEAKERIt was a little PC
38:44SPEAKERit had a dedicated MPEG-2 encoders and
38:47SPEAKERGiant IDE hard drives like 14 gigabyte IDE hard drives and 32 gigabyte IDE hard drives at launch
38:52SPEAKERThe trick was if you knew how to run Linux and knew how to run a script that somebody had figured out
38:58SPEAKERYou could go buy go to Best Buy or CompUSA and buy a big-ass hard drive
39:03SPEAKERboot into Linux bless that hard drive with a piece of software that basically said hey, yo this drives cool and
39:08SPEAKERThen you could plug that drive into your Tivo
39:12SPEAKERAnd you would have instead of 14 hours of storage on your Tivo for a 14 gig drive
39:16SPEAKERYou'd have 60 hours of storage on Tivo for your 60 gig drives pretty good
39:19SPEAKERDid the interface know how to deal with the extra stuff?
39:22SPEAKERYes, it knew how to deal with the bigger drives on especially as drives continue to get really really big during that period
39:29SPEAKEREventually, they would be the like the index would be too big for the amount of RAM that was in the machine
39:34SPEAKERRight and you'd have like really slow UI problems
39:37SPEAKERSo like there was a there was an upper limit to the size that you wanted to put into any given unit
39:42SPEAKERBut they also increased the RAM in them over time because it was easy to add RAM to them stuff like that
39:47SPEAKERFor Tivo not for users. It was soldered onto the boards. But anyway
39:52SPEAKERbasically
39:54SPEAKERThese things had RCA or coax inputs on the back and you would plug them into your basic cable service in the analog days
40:02SPEAKERand
40:03SPEAKEROr your cable box. Yeah, I'm trying to
40:06SPEAKERRemember or there's situations where you could run the coax straight out of the wall into the Tivo
40:10SPEAKERYeah, I don't even have a cable box of any kind
40:12SPEAKERYeah, so if you had basic cable and you just were watching basic cable channels
40:16SPEAKERThat's how you did it
40:17SPEAKERif you wanted to get HBO and paid channels, then you had to use IR blasters and coax or s-video outputs to the inputs on
40:25SPEAKERThe back of the Tivo and then that went into the MPEG-2 encoder and it was doing basically DVD quality
40:30SPEAKERMPEG-2 encoding on the anti NTSC
40:33SPEAKERvideo signals
40:35SPEAKERAnd and it used the my everyone's favorite technology of the 90s and early 2000s IR blasters to change the channel
40:43SPEAKERIt's all around. Yeah, they're great. Everybody loves them
40:47SPEAKERThey also eventually made like DirecTV versions where they would where they would
40:53SPEAKERBasically pull the MPEG-2 stream out of the satellite feed and just save that directly without any kind of encoder Oh wild
40:59SPEAKERYeah, that's crazy. I mean, that's cool. Yeah, it's it's weird, right? Yeah
41:04SPEAKERthey
41:06SPEAKERThey'd worked with cable company
41:07SPEAKERLike if you were lucky enough to be at a place where the cable company
41:09SPEAKERCable provider like to Tivo you could get Tivo boxes straight from your cable company
41:13SPEAKERThey did the same thing as cable moved from analog to digital. Yeah
41:17SPEAKERI will say this is a bit tangential to what you're talking about here
41:20SPEAKERBut this this Tivo was also a situation the probably the first example I can think of of you know, Tivo came out revolutionary new features
41:28SPEAKERPretty polished user experience and user interface. It was the first example I can think of of then like shitty
41:35SPEAKERNo name cable boxes from your cable provider
41:38SPEAKERHaving those features trickle down to them but in a much inferior and more infuriating form
41:43SPEAKERYou know what? I mean, it's
41:45SPEAKERCable boxes that were distributed by your cable company started picking up Tivo like features, but they were always worse. They were always
41:52SPEAKERShitty or less well thought out what less performant versions of what the Tivo could do like one of the defining characteristics of the Tivo
42:01SPEAKERExperience was that when you hit the pause button it paused immediately. There was no like lag on that kind of stuff, right?
42:06SPEAKERSo you got immediate you've got immediate beeps and bloops when you were fast-forwarding or rewindings
42:11SPEAKERYou could totally if you were good at it, you could nail that end of commercial and be real because it would roll back like 10
42:17SPEAKERframes
42:18SPEAKERSo you'd see the first frame of the TV show you'd hit the play button and it would boop back a little bit and then you'd
42:23SPEAKERBe right there where you started with no no unwanted advertising, right?
42:28SPEAKERThey ended up being one of the reasons that cable card existed
42:31SPEAKERSo cable card for people who don't know was an FCC mandated
42:36SPEAKERrequire
42:38SPEAKERLike universal cable decryption standard that basically they were these PCM CIA cards
42:45SPEAKERYou would jam the back of a Tivo or some other GBR type box that let you
42:50SPEAKERget decrypted
42:53SPEAKERcable channels like on the on the digital cable network and
42:58SPEAKERThey were required by the I think FCC. I could be wrong
43:02SPEAKERIt might be the FTC or one of the other one of the other federal agencies. It was the FCC
43:06SPEAKERIt was a telecommunications act of 1996. Yeah, they were required until to 2020
43:11SPEAKERAt which point they were no longer mandated and I think everybody pretty much dropped support for them immediately
43:17SPEAKERBut by that point it didn't matter because we'd all moved to to the inferior
43:22SPEAKERHey, you can watch this on Hulu or your streaming box and then there's no way to skip the ads
43:27SPEAKERTV doesn't exist anymore. Yeah
43:30SPEAKERThey didn't it's funny. They were really weird about stuff. They didn't have like a cable
43:35SPEAKERcommercial skip button for a really long time
43:39SPEAKERWasn't there
43:41SPEAKERWho did that first?
43:42SPEAKERI feel like I remember somebody marketing that in their product of replay TV and then wasn't there
43:48SPEAKERlitigation around that or there was like at least the threat of litigation that like the like a lot of the content providers were or
43:53SPEAKERI guess I should say it say channels back then. Yeah, they got sued were mad about the whole thing
43:58SPEAKERYeah, so Tivo was really intentional that they gave you control over that they didn't give you a smart skip button
44:05SPEAKERThat lets you bypass commercials without by looking at like blank space on the video stuff like that
44:12SPEAKERThey
44:13SPEAKEREventually, like I said, they got supplanted by like boxes by stuff that's built into the TV set-top boxes
44:19SPEAKER2018 they
44:21SPEAKERThey launched Tivo in the cloud
44:23SPEAKERWhich was a Tivo app that you could pay for on other set-top boxes without hard drives
44:28SPEAKERDidn't really work the same didn't take off by that point
44:31SPEAKERThey were essentially a patent company that was just hitting cable box manufacturers and anybody who had
44:36SPEAKEROne of the handful of patents that were still relevant for them at that point
44:40SPEAKERAnd then they went they they turned off the service earlier this week. So
44:46SPEAKERWe had a Tivo from 1999 until like 2018. Mm-hmm
44:50SPEAKERIt was a 20 year 19 year run for us dude. What? Yeah
44:55SPEAKERI'm sorry, like I just rolled off me for a second and then I stopped and thought like blood
45:00SPEAKERYeah, still an active use we well, I mean it wasn't the same one, obviously
45:04SPEAKERBut yes, but any like just using any Tivo all the way through tone with 2018
45:08SPEAKERSo I mean, I guess there were still a lot of set-top boxes around well
45:11SPEAKERSo the thing that killed it for us was we switched from Comcast to fiber in 2018
45:15SPEAKERthat's when I got that's when we got fiber in our neighborhood and
45:18SPEAKERthe cable cards
45:20SPEAKERAT&T didn't do cable cards and we didn't we didn't do TV through AT&T at that point because
45:26SPEAKERHulu and YouTube and all of those kind of online cable operator type dealies were we're good enough at that point
45:34SPEAKERSo I was hoping that was gonna be able to I grab my old Tivo out of the garage, right
45:40SPEAKERBut it's not connecting to the capture thing
45:42SPEAKERSo if you stall if you vamp for like a minute that sounded bad
45:46SPEAKERWe're asking me to vamp is asking for trouble, but I do have like a technical and nostalgic thing. I can talk about here
45:52SPEAKERYeah, let's go while you're waiting for that thing to boot
45:55SPEAKERI think we've talked about this briefly before but you could pull
45:59SPEAKERRecordings off of a Tivo. Yeah
46:03SPEAKERAccess key. Yes, that was officially supported wasn't it? Yeah, they had a tool that you could use to do it
46:08SPEAKERIt would pull it across the network. It was very very slow. Even if you were on a wired network usually in my experience
46:15SPEAKERI'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before and I don't have zero memory of doing this
46:19SPEAKERBut I found some dot Tivo files on my NAS a few years ago. Did they come from me? Maybe they were mine
46:24SPEAKEROh, you had a Tivo - yeah, my parents have one
46:27SPEAKERI never had one personally, but my parents bought an early one and had lifetime service on it
46:31SPEAKERIt was way before the HD models
46:34SPEAKERAll these file names have have file names like news 13 this morning news 13 tonight
46:40SPEAKERThese are all from 2006 what it was was my dad took part in a thing called honor air
46:46SPEAKEROkay, which was a program is in 2006. So this was still more possible then this is kind of not possible now
46:52SPEAKERBut it was an effort to is when the World War two Memorial opened in DC
46:55SPEAKEROh, yeah
46:56SPEAKERYeah, and it was an effort in Western North Carolina to organize a mass trip of World War two veterans to DC
47:02SPEAKERoh, that's cool to visit the memorial and my dad was a chaperone for that trip and
47:07SPEAKERAnd he ended up on the local news like the new local news did some stories about this trip. That's awesome
47:13SPEAKERAnd so anyway, we had recorded those and I pulled those off at Evo, but then they sat encrypted on this is where I'm going with
47:20SPEAKERThis they sat encrypted on my NAS for like 15 years
47:24SPEAKERand
47:25SPEAKERDid you not have the media access key, but that's exactly well a I grabbed them off the TiVo and then never did anything with them
47:30SPEAKERso
47:31SPEAKERno, I did not have the media access key, but I also didn't even never try to like play them or look at them or
47:36SPEAKERDo anything with them until I rediscovered them like 15 years later and shout out to TiVo
47:42SPEAKERI have to say of course
47:43SPEAKERI mean here we are in 2025 talking about the fact that TiVo has had service running this whole time
47:48SPEAKERBut shout out to TiVo when I've discovered these files like 15 years after I dumped them off the TiVo
47:53SPEAKERMy mom was still able to sign into her TiVo account and get the media access key from her account and give it to me
47:59SPEAKERAnd I used a little I guess I think I found some open source utility that somebody had written to basically decrypt TiVo files
48:06SPEAKEROnce once you had the Mac
48:09SPEAKERAnd so I was able to turn those TiVo files into straight-up good old-fashioned MPEG-2 files and watch them
48:15SPEAKERThere's extra rad to be able to do that that long after they were recorded and dumped off the TiVo that is that is super cool
48:22SPEAKERI think I'm having
48:24SPEAKERHTTP problems
48:25SPEAKERI have to guess so we didn't say but you had a whole elaborate setup where you dug your TiVo out of storage and
48:31SPEAKERPlugged it into your capture card and we were going to boot it live and see what was on your TiVo
48:35SPEAKERYeah
48:35SPEAKERI can't remember what the there's an order of operations for this little box that we all had from like 2010 to D
48:41SPEAKERHTTP PlayStation threes and you have to plug it in a specific order or else it doesn't it doesn't do the decryption stuff, right?
48:51SPEAKEROkay, so it looks like this isn't gonna actually work unfortunately
48:54SPEAKERIt's either the capture card. That's a problem or the HTTP thing
48:58SPEAKERI keep getting signal flash on and off and it's just not connecting
49:01SPEAKERSo that's so it's such a bummer
49:03SPEAKERThe idea here was to run your TiVo straight in and we could at least listen to you booting it up and like going through
49:09SPEAKERWhat was on there? I just wanted to hear the beep beep beep beep beep one more time. Yeah, you know
49:14SPEAKERSo did you go through the programming? Did you see what was on there yesterday when it worked?
49:18SPEAKERI said I wasn't going to but I did. Oh, well good now that you can't get it to work
49:23SPEAKERYeah, so I was on there. It was it turns out it was a lot of TV from like late 2017 2018
49:29SPEAKERthere was a lot of like
49:30SPEAKERThere's a lot of like late night talk shows there was Saturday
49:33SPEAKERLike we always one of my favorite things about TiVo is you when you would record Saturday Night Live
49:37SPEAKERSo if you were out or something you could come back and then Sunday morning when you're drinking coffee and kind of hungover
49:42SPEAKERYou would watch Saturday Live and if there were skits that just didn't work you just blast right through them, which was great. Yeah
49:48SPEAKERso Saturday Live's
49:50SPEAKERConan
49:52SPEAKERthere was a bunch of like
49:54SPEAKERSeries finales of stuff that my wife or I had watched I was gonna ask was there anything much older on there that you just couldn't
50:01SPEAKEREver bring yourself to delete. Oh, I mean, this is the benefit of putting the 150 gig hard drive in the 30 hour machine, right?
50:07SPEAKERIt's like yeah, there was like the whole run of the expanse was on there. There were a bazillion Simpsons episodes and and
50:16SPEAKERJust just a couple of movies there was a bunch of Kubrick movies that I had apparently pulled down off of the cable TV
50:24SPEAKERArcher season 4 was prominent and had been watched
50:29SPEAKERThere were a couple like local news broadcasts from San Francisco
50:33SPEAKEROne of them was about the launch of the PlayStation VR a virtual reality headset for the original PlayStation 4
50:40SPEAKEROkay, that's pushing ten years ago. Now. There was there was some interesting weird stuff. There was nothing there were no treasures
50:46SPEAKERI would say okay, so yeah, it was but it was an interesting it was it was there was a lot
50:51SPEAKERActually, my daughter was five when we got rid of it. So there was a lot of kids TV
50:55SPEAKERthere was a lot of like mr. Rogers neighborhood and
50:58SPEAKERStuff like that. Hey, I hesitate to say this
51:01SPEAKERBut now I have the HDCP warning up and if the picture is stable and it's not turning on and off
51:06SPEAKEROkay, I'm gonna one last time go over there and plug it in and plug it out. All right fingers crossed
51:11SPEAKEROkay, so I'm at the menu first thing to note this remote has tacky plastic on it, which feels real bad
51:18SPEAKERMm-hmm, and you're not gonna be able to hear this but I can and it's going to do to do to do
51:23SPEAKERJust very satisfying. So top thing on the list Ellen DeGeneres some top chefs
51:28SPEAKERPortlandia
51:29SPEAKERMr. Robot last man on earth the Great British Baking Show. Yep. That is all some 2017 era ass
51:37SPEAKERProgramming mr. Yeah, mr. Rogers America's Test Kitchen Anthony Bourdain
51:43SPEAKERSeth Meyers was apparently on TV back then I didn't remember that that's funny
51:46SPEAKERYou have you have established your bona fides as late period TiVo users
51:51SPEAKERYep, so I'm gonna start a Portlandia episode and people can hear the beeps in the bloops
51:59SPEAKEROkay, we might have not been paying for cable cards by this point because this Portlandia episode looks like it's just black
52:04SPEAKERI mean, it was probably still reporting. Is that what is that a 1080p?
52:08SPEAKER1080p probably. Yeah. Okay. They never made 4k TiVo's. I'm sure
52:12SPEAKERIs there even there's not even really 4k cable broadcast right like I don't I assume there is but I don't know how it would work
52:21SPEAKERIt's a little laggy the TiVo. I
52:24SPEAKERremember it being not great in the
52:28SPEAKERIn the in the
52:30SPEAKERlike the machines got a little slow and they had a weird UI that you could do like streaming services in here that basically booted to
52:36SPEAKERa VM that ran the virtual
52:38SPEAKERthe apps for the other services
52:42SPEAKERSo, yeah, it wasn't a great experience
52:44SPEAKERAll right. Well, it looks like the pictures for the shows aren't coming up because oh, there we go
52:50SPEAKEROkay, so here's an ad for something on IFC. I'm gonna fast forward now
52:56SPEAKERThere's the fast-forward god, that sounds so good
52:59SPEAKERFred Ormiston still a gem also and and Brad. Oh my god a Hearthstone ad. Well, I'm sorry
53:06SPEAKERYou can't see this. Is there a celebrity? Hold on. Yeah. Okay. It's this is people standing. Okay, I'm pausing
53:12SPEAKERI'm stopping now that remote is really tacky. Yeah, so TiVo is still awesome
53:15SPEAKERI would I would pay for TiVo right now if the service existed sure and I mean and if everyone's viewing habits were
53:21SPEAKERSuch that it was necessary. Let's say yeah, if I ever watch TV, it would be more useful to me, I guess right?
53:27SPEAKERIt's less the TiVo fell out of fashion and more that the services that necessitated TiVo
53:32SPEAKERHaven't ceased to exist yet, but are on their way there
53:34SPEAKERIt feels like or or they're all like basically on-demand services at this point
53:38SPEAKERRight, like the only things I watch live are sports right like that like live TV is kind of rapidly ceasing to exist, right?
53:46SPEAKERI don't have numbers in front of me. But like
53:49SPEAKERIt's it's streaming has got to be the majority of usage these days
53:53SPEAKERI I bet it's I bet it's less than you think because I bet that there's a lot of boomers that still pay for cable
53:58SPEAKERWell, they did just shut down
54:00SPEAKERAOL dial-up in the last like month. So yeah, you're probably right actually
54:04SPEAKERAlso, I guess rip AOL dial-up a thing that I had when I went to Alaska one time. Oh man, we blew it
54:10SPEAKERWe were gonna we're gonna talk about the end of the blue BD ROM like blu-ray PC drive
54:16SPEAKERManufacturing but end of life in AOL dial-up is what we should have ended the show with. Yeah
54:22SPEAKERLook, maybe AOL gets this whole episode at some point in the future. I never I never I really never used it
54:28SPEAKERI used it for dial-up internet when I traveled to Alaska in like
54:31SPEAKER1997 and that was it. AOL was my first AOL was what I went to from BBS's like we got a modem
54:38SPEAKERI dialed into the three local BBS's I had access to then then AOL free trial started coming in the mail
54:44SPEAKERYeah, so AOL was my first like non local BBS like online experience for quite some time before we got a proper internet
54:51SPEAKERMaybe we should do an episode about early
54:53SPEAKEREarly online services like CompuServe Prodigy AOL is an interesting we have we have a friend who might be willing to come on
55:01SPEAKERTalk about it who was deep into the CompuServe Prodigy like all kind of all of that stuff
55:08SPEAKERI feel negligent that we did not include a well dial-up on this list of end-of-life services and products here
55:13SPEAKERBut maybe we should look when AOL went to CD-ROM
55:18SPEAKERTo deliver their software. I was really disappointed because I was feasting on those floppy drives
55:23SPEAKERLike they would send you floppy disks in the mail and that was like those were priceless because it was free
55:29SPEAKER1.44 megabyte floppy disks. You just had to know how to move the put a fake tab in so they were
55:34SPEAKERRecordable again. Who were you one of the types who were harvesting the AOL floppy using them interesting all my neighbors
55:41SPEAKERI lived in an apartment at the University and all my neighbors knew that when those came
55:46SPEAKERThey just chucked the discs outside my door. Sure. So I was like, hey if you're not gonna use that disc that garbage
55:51SPEAKERThey're sending you. Let me know I can I can figure out something good to use it for
55:54SPEAKERThis is one of the situations where you only you're only four years older than me
55:57SPEAKERBut that was a crucial four years because by the time I had those were I barely saw I think floppy based AOL trials
56:04SPEAKERit was almost all CD but also
56:07SPEAKERFloppies were kind of starting to lose their utility by the time that I would have cared about this sort of thing. Yeah
56:12SPEAKER100% like like it was it was it was a it wasn't a hey
56:16SPEAKERI'm harvesting these and doing a lot with them
56:18SPEAKERIt was now I don't have to buy floppies to bring like files to the computer lab and stuff like that
56:22SPEAKERYeah, you don't talk about blue drives for blu-ray drives for a minute real quick. I don't think there's there's not a ton here
56:28SPEAKERThey're ambiguously dead. I guess it seems like they're heading that way like the the
56:34SPEAKERActionable information here is the pioneer. Yeah sold off their computer blu-ray drive
56:39SPEAKERManufacturing business to a Chinese conglomerate earlier this year and who knows maybe they will continue making and selling the drives
56:45SPEAKERIt's unclear. I mean and just to be clear. We're talking about PC DVD ROM
56:50SPEAKERThey're a blu-ray BBD ROM drives not
56:53SPEAKERThe drives that go into like set-top boxes and consoles and stuff like that. People are still manufacturing those clearly
56:58SPEAKERYeah, although I gather that even that is in decline. I think it was a Sony
57:02SPEAKERI think Sony completely got out of the player business
57:05SPEAKERWell, they got out of the the recordable disk business a few months ago
57:09SPEAKERI don't know. I mean presumably they're still making drives for PlayStations and stuff like that, right? Yeah
57:15SPEAKERWell, yes, but you know what happened there remember the well, yeah the newer version of the ps5
57:19SPEAKERThere is no more integrated optical drive. It's only a hook on one, right?
57:24SPEAKERIt's modular now and if if there even are optical drives for the next generation consoles
57:29SPEAKERI'm sure they will be add-ons. Well, if there is a PlayStation 7, I will not be shocked if there is no optical interface whatsoever
57:36SPEAKERWow, if there's a PlayStation 7, frankly, I will be shocked if the ps6 doesn't have one
57:41SPEAKERYeah, I mean it probably will but I actually am not
57:44SPEAKER100% sure that I'm not I'm not banking on that
57:47SPEAKERI think it's gonna be hard for them to find retail partners to distribute these giant boxes if they don't have some sort of disk
57:53SPEAKERdrive in them, but I also don't maybe the cost of dealing with that distribution problem is less than
57:59SPEAKERthe cost of
58:00SPEAKERMaking optical drives in millions of devices that nobody's ever gonna put a disk in because I don't think my ps5 has ever had
58:06SPEAKERA disk in it. Yeah mine mine very rarely if ever anyway
58:10SPEAKERLike there's some scuttlebutt out there that people have reached out to LG and LG has said that they're not making
58:16SPEAKERDrives anymore either but that's like I think that's like frontline customer service type
58:20SPEAKERCommunication that's not corporate
58:22SPEAKERSo that's my corp com
58:23SPEAKERSomebody tried to buy something couldn't find it called the customer service number and then the poor poor person working in the data in the call
58:30SPEAKERCenter was like, yeah, we don't make those anymore
58:31SPEAKERwell
58:32SPEAKERnow what I what I can say definitively and I think we've mentioned this in the past few months that I noticed is that the
58:37SPEAKERGo to LG bd-rom models that are kind of like some of the most prized ones in these sort of making kv
58:43SPEAKERIn the ripping ripping this community. Yes in the in the in the community that's hardcore about ripping discs
58:49SPEAKERThough that supply does seem to have dried up like the one the LG that I bought for 45 or 50 dollars eight years ago
58:56SPEAKERYeah is now $200 on Amazon from a no-name third-party seller
59:01SPEAKERBecause it doesn't look like Amazon themselves are stocking it anymore
59:04SPEAKERIs that one of the ones you have to do the firmware hack on to make it so you can write rip?
59:08SPEAKERBD 4k discs. Yes like that
59:11SPEAKERYou do need custom firmware on there to make it read 4k discs and to do some other stuff like disable the speed lock
59:15SPEAKERgot it, which I have done on mine and then sort of have started to wonder if that may have reduced the lifespan of the
59:22SPEAKERDrive as I was ripping a lot of blu-rays for a while and ripping them at max speed and I wonder you know
59:27SPEAKERThe motor does not last forever in an optical drive and I kind of wish I had bought an extra one of these when I had
59:32SPEAKERThe chance. Well, you know what I went to I went to B&H who I like
59:36SPEAKERI buy most of my like serious computer stuff from B&H and not Amazon these days
59:41SPEAKEROf course, we've talked about trying to divest of Amazon in general
59:45SPEAKERB&H is listing officially listing my model of LG blu-ray drive as discontinued
59:50SPEAKEROoh, so it seems like this might actually be a thing
59:53SPEAKERWe saw some at Micro Center a couple weeks ago when we were down there. There's still some out there
59:57SPEAKERAlthough I mean if you care about such things not all of them are treated equal in terms of yeah
1:00:02SPEAKERGetting the firmware mods to do 4k discs and faster faster transfer and stuff like that
1:00:07SPEAKERBut again, this is a much more fuzzy one and not a just a definitive
1:00:10SPEAKERHey, this is no longer happening across, you know industry-wide. It seems like the official
1:00:15SPEAKERdeath of you know, these are not being made anymore of
1:00:19SPEAKERThe internal PC blu-ray drive is probably imminent. I would say if you want to have one of these now is the time
1:00:25SPEAKERYeah, yeah, and again, it's like already getting tough to find at reasonable prices
1:00:30SPEAKER100% I think this is good places. I need to wrap it up today, huh? Yeah, sure
1:00:35SPEAKERI'm gonna fast-forward to the end of this episode doo doo doo doo doo doo as always bread will made a tech pod is listener supported
1:00:42SPEAKERWe wouldn't be here without you all the listeners and we appreciate you all true
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1:01:00SPEAKERI really enjoyed this you guys have been doing it for a long time and I realized I've never said that and I was like
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1:01:50SPEAKERmeans it's also time to thank our executive producer tier patrons including
1:01:54SPEAKERJason Lee in felicitous rips Andrew Slosky Jordan lipid
1:01:59SPEAKERBut he can't crimes in cooperation with the excellent
1:02:03SPEAKERHold on. It just says the excellent. There's nothing else there. Oh, we ran into that on the next Lander podcasts yesterday
1:02:11SPEAKEROkay. Thank you to bunny
1:02:13SPEAKERBunny dot dot dot for your generous support of both shows
1:02:16SPEAKERbut yeah
1:02:17SPEAKERI think the theory is that patreon has a character limit on or
1:02:21SPEAKERMaybe I'm supposed to say bunny crimes in cooperation with the excellent twinkle Twinkie
1:02:26SPEAKERDavid Allen and James kamek and I like that I get the on makers of the HS 3 high-speed 3d printer. That's clever
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1:03:06SPEAKERAnd on that note. Oh
1:03:08SPEAKERWait, can we talk about the thing that Bertrand gave us or should we save that for cold open next week?
1:03:13SPEAKERWe should probably save that that's too momentous to cram in at the end is it I put you can you see it?
1:03:17SPEAKERI see that you've you've mounted yours. Yeah, I put a light on it, but then the light fell a minute ago
1:03:22SPEAKERthat's what the bumping noise was so I gotta found a better way to mount that light, but
1:03:27SPEAKERYeah, we'll talk about that next time or maybe the time after but we have a cool object of power to discuss in the future
1:03:33SPEAKERYeah, and on that note, please consider the podcast wait. No. No, that's not it. Cut that out Brad. Don't put that in
1:03:40SPEAKEROh, no, too late. Keep going. Please consider the environment before printing this podcast
1:03:44SPEAKERSee y'all next week