00:00SPEAKER- Brad, it's time again.
00:02SPEAKER- Oh, I feel like that could be interpreted
00:03SPEAKERin a lot of different ways.
00:06SPEAKER- In this case, I've hit, I guess,
00:09SPEAKERone to two million clicks on my mouse
00:12SPEAKERsince the last time this happened,
00:13SPEAKERand it's time to replace the switches in my mouse again.
00:17SPEAKER- That feels like a since we started this podcast thing
00:19SPEAKERthat you replaced the switches in your mouse,
00:21SPEAKERso maybe you're clicking.
00:23SPEAKERHave you considered that you're clicking too much?
00:24SPEAKER- So technically, I think I replaced the switches
00:27SPEAKERin my first Logitech Pro mouse,
00:29SPEAKERand then I got one of the super light models
00:31SPEAKER'cause I wanted the less weight on the mouse.
00:34SPEAKER- Yes, we went through that whole phase
00:35SPEAKERof like carving parts of your mouse housing
00:38SPEAKERa way to make it lighter.
00:39SPEAKER- Yeah, bays.
00:41SPEAKER- Get those flick headshots.
00:42SPEAKER- Bays.
00:43SPEAKERAnyway, so I was looking and I was like,
00:46SPEAKERI could just buy a new mouse
00:47SPEAKER'cause I have some Amazon credit
00:49SPEAKERfor some stuff that I returned,
00:50SPEAKERand they're on sale right now
00:51SPEAKER'cause it's, you know, 'tis the season.
00:53SPEAKERAnd so the one with the replaced switches are in my drawer.
00:56SPEAKERI guess I actually probably still have some spare switches
00:58SPEAKERaround if I think about it
00:59SPEAKER'cause I think I had to buy five
01:00SPEAKERto get the switches shipped.
01:02SPEAKERSo maybe I should just pop it open
01:04SPEAKERand switch the new switches out
01:05SPEAKER'cause I'm getting the double clicks on the super light.
01:08SPEAKERYeah, not that often.
01:09SPEAKERIt's just often enough that I'm like,
01:11SPEAKERoh, yeah, it's that thing again.
01:13SPEAKERI mean, it could be that my fingers have gotten twitchy.
01:16SPEAKERIt could be that I'm just riding
01:18SPEAKERon a hair trigger, man, everywhere I go.
01:20SPEAKER- Yeah, ready for headshots at any moment.
01:23SPEAKER- You just ready, quick flicks, quick flicks and blasting.
01:26SPEAKERThat's what I do.
01:27SPEAKER- Is this gonna involve soldering to put these in?
01:29SPEAKER- It does involve soldering, yeah.
01:31SPEAKER- That sucks.
01:32SPEAKERWell, I mean, I guess we're not quite at the point
01:34SPEAKERwhere they're designing mice
01:35SPEAKERaround user-replaceable switches yet.
01:38SPEAKER- So one of the things,
01:38SPEAKERas I was looking at switches that are available,
01:40SPEAKER'cause the thing that's happened in the five or six years
01:43SPEAKERsince I did this last, I guess five years,
01:45SPEAKERis that there are a buttload more mouse switches
01:48SPEAKERdesigned specifically for gaming mice now.
01:51SPEAKERSo you can get some real hair trigger,
01:53SPEAKERlike you can't rest your fingers on the buttons
01:55SPEAKERwhen you're not, you know, when you don't wanna be blasting.
01:59SPEAKERI don't think that's probably right for me,
02:01SPEAKER'cause I realized I do like to rest my mouse,
02:03SPEAKERmy fingers on the mouse, just a little bit, just grazing.
02:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I get it.
02:08SPEAKER- But I might, one of the things I realized
02:10SPEAKERis you can actually buy the entire daughter board
02:14SPEAKERthat the switches mount on to now.
02:16SPEAKERSo you don't, 'cause like when I did it last time,
02:19SPEAKERthe mouse switches have three pins,
02:21SPEAKERthey're through-hole mounts.
02:23SPEAKERSo you have to de-solder and suck out the solder
02:26SPEAKERfrom each of those holes, and it's a little bit tricky
02:29SPEAKERjust because getting one off, no problem.
02:31SPEAKERGetting two off, relatively straightforward.
02:34SPEAKERGetting three off, kind of a nightmare.
02:36SPEAKER'Cause like you get one loose and wiggle it,
02:38SPEAKERand then the other, then it chills, it sets back up.
02:40SPEAKER- Yup.
02:41SPEAKER- Anyway, so I don't know what I'm gonna do.
02:43SPEAKERThat's the TLDR, but I guess I could go ahead
02:48SPEAKERand use these red kale switches that I have around.
02:51SPEAKER- Wait, did you say red kale?
02:53SPEAKER- Yeah, K-A-I-L-H.
02:56SPEAKER- Okay.
02:57SPEAKER- Yes, kale.
02:58SPEAKER- Much like we have cherry keyboard switches,
03:00SPEAKERI thought you were going to suggest
03:01SPEAKERthat we have like vegetable-derived mouse switch names.
03:04SPEAKER- No, it's the same companies that make keyboard switches
03:07SPEAKERmake the micro switches that go on mice.
03:10SPEAKER- That makes sense.
03:11SPEAKER- But there's, like I said, there's like YouTube channels
03:13SPEAKERfull of people talking about the different click sounds
03:16SPEAKERand all that business.
03:17SPEAKERAnd then I guess while I'm out in there,
03:19SPEAKERI might as well carve out a few more grams of plastic,
03:21SPEAKERyou know, why not?
03:22SPEAKER(laughing)
03:23SPEAKER- What is a good mouse weight to you?
03:25SPEAKER'Cause I think mine, I looked up the specs
03:27SPEAKERafter the last time we talk about light mice.
03:29SPEAKER- Yeah, you got a chonky boy.
03:30SPEAKER- Mine's like 105, 110 grams or something like that.
03:33SPEAKER- Mine's 58.
03:34SPEAKER- Man.
03:35SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like nothing in your hand.
03:36SPEAKERIt's like nothing at all.
03:38SPEAKER- You know, most of the things that require headshots
03:40SPEAKERI play on a console anyway, so kind of whatever.
03:43SPEAKER- That's true.
03:44SPEAKER- Could I interest you
03:45SPEAKERin some optical mechanical mouse switches?
03:47SPEAKER- I'm curious about this 'cause,
03:49SPEAKERwell, I guess you have to have a mouse that supports this
03:51SPEAKER'cause I don't think it works with a normal.
03:53SPEAKER- I don't think you could retrofit.
03:55SPEAKERWe were talking about this before we started
03:56SPEAKERand I thought I remembered,
03:57SPEAKERI have a Logitech G502X light speed.
04:00SPEAKER- Okay.
04:01SPEAKER- Which the X is the successor to the regular G502
04:04SPEAKERand it had just come out when I bought it
04:07SPEAKERalmost two years ago.
04:08SPEAKER- Okay.
04:08SPEAKER- And I thought I remembered and I looked it up
04:10SPEAKERand sure enough breakthrough hybrid optical mechanical
04:12SPEAKERswitches achieve higher levels of speed and reliability
04:15SPEAKERthrough optical actuation while mechanical actuation
04:19SPEAKERmaintains the crisp tactile feedback that players demand.
04:23SPEAKERI mean, are they literally, I mean,
04:24SPEAKERare they saying exactly what that sounds like
04:25SPEAKERthat the mechanical part is just there to make them feel
04:28SPEAKERlike classic mechanical switches
04:30SPEAKERand that all of the actual signal stuff
04:33SPEAKERis being handled optically?
04:34SPEAKERThat's what it sounds like to me.
04:35SPEAKER- Well, so on the non-electrical switches
04:38SPEAKERthat I'm aware of, they all have stuff in the systems
04:42SPEAKERthat they give you a tactile feel
04:44SPEAKEReven like on a Hall Effect keyboard
04:46SPEAKERor magnetic switches or whatever.
04:48SPEAKERObviously you need that.
04:49SPEAKERBut I guess the reason I asked that is,
04:51SPEAKERdoes that mean is if and when the mechanical part degrades,
04:55SPEAKERit's not going to affect the actual signal getting through.
04:58SPEAKERIt's just gonna change the feel of it.
04:59SPEAKER- You think everything dies eventually, Brad?
05:01SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe so.
05:02SPEAKERI don't know.
05:03SPEAKERThis is apparently like the first mouse they shipped
05:05SPEAKERwith those switches in it.
05:06SPEAKERSo I guess time will tell.
05:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, my guess is for a while
05:10SPEAKERtheir Logitech was shipping these Omron switches
05:13SPEAKERthat had a fairly high failure rate
05:15SPEAKERafter like a couple million clicks.
05:19SPEAKERAnd I think part of that is accentuated
05:20SPEAKERby any pressure you put on the switch
05:23SPEAKERwhile you're just using the mouse.
05:24SPEAKERIf you're just idly like tapping your fingers on the top,
05:27SPEAKERthat can extend the wear.
05:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I can see it.
05:30SPEAKER- I don't know.
05:31SPEAKERI wonder if that mouse is logical for Counter-Strike.
05:34SPEAKERCounter-Strike, they have new rules about which keyboard.
05:36SPEAKERYou can't use those Hall Effect,
05:39SPEAKERthose magnetic keyboards with Counter-Strike.
05:41SPEAKERYeah, did you not know this?
05:42SPEAKER- You mean competitive Counter-Strike?
05:44SPEAKER- No, they ban you from the game.
05:45SPEAKEREven like retail, just sitting in your house
05:48SPEAKERon your purchased copy of Counter-Strike 2?
05:51SPEAKER- Valve bans Razer and Wooting's new keyboard features
05:54SPEAKERin Counter-Strike 2.
05:55SPEAKERIt's time to turn off Snap Tap or Snappy Tappy.
05:59SPEAKER- What?
06:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:00SPEAKER- I don't want any part of this.
06:01SPEAKER- According to The Verge, Counter-Strike players
06:03SPEAKERare banned from using keyboard features
06:05SPEAKERto automate perfect counter strafes.
06:08SPEAKERSo it like lets you do a back and forward
06:12SPEAKERsimultaneous opposing cardinal directions feature.
06:15SPEAKER- Interesting.
06:16SPEAKER- So that you can stop your forward momentum immediately
06:19SPEAKERwhen you stop.
06:20SPEAKER- And they're just detecting that somehow?
06:22SPEAKER- I assume that it's mechanically detectable, yeah.
06:24SPEAKER- That's wild.
06:25SPEAKERBut before we get out of here,
06:26SPEAKERcan I just belly ache about one other thing really quick?
06:28SPEAKER- Yeah, what do you got?
06:29SPEAKER- Speaking of double inputs,
06:31SPEAKERI upgraded my Windows 11 to 24H2 recently.
06:34SPEAKER- Oh wow, living in the last year.
06:36SPEAKER- That's right, to be clear, 24H2, not 25,
06:38SPEAKERwhich just came out.
06:39SPEAKER- They're both bad, but just different scales.
06:41SPEAKER- Yeah, but I felt like bad with a year of post-release fixes
06:45SPEAKERand updates might be a little less bad than brand new bad.
06:49SPEAKER- It's just piling more crap into the,
06:51SPEAKERlike they got a five pound bag
06:53SPEAKERand they're filling it with 13 pounds of AI crap.
06:55SPEAKER- Well, guess what happened promptly
06:57SPEAKERafter I updated to 24H2?
06:59SPEAKERNow I cannot verify causation here.
07:01SPEAKER- Oh boy.
07:02SPEAKER- I know correlation is not causation,
07:04SPEAKERbut shortly after I did that update,
07:05SPEAKERI started getting a bunch of double inputs on my keyboard.
07:08SPEAKER- Hmm.
07:09SPEAKER- And at first I'm on a mechanical
07:11SPEAKERand I was like, oh, it's probably a switch giving out
07:12SPEAKER'cause at first it was one key.
07:15SPEAKERI replaced that switch and it stopped.
07:17SPEAKERAnd then a bunch of other keys
07:18SPEAKERalso started giving double inputs randomly,
07:20SPEAKERbut then they would stop.
07:21SPEAKERAnd now it hasn't happened in like a week on any key.
07:24SPEAKER- That sounds like a...
07:26SPEAKER- And I just blame Windows
07:27SPEAKERbecause that seems like a safe default these days.
07:28SPEAKER- Yeah, double trouble, double trouble,
07:30SPEAKERdouble taps for double trouble.
07:32SPEAKERIt's twice the fun, twice the flavor,
07:34SPEAKERtwice the party in your keyboard socket, I guess.
07:38SPEAKERI don't know, man.
07:39SPEAKERI might be done with computers.
07:41SPEAKERNo, I'm not.
07:43SPEAKERLet's be real.
07:44SPEAKER(upbeat music)
08:09SPEAKER(upbeat music)
08:12SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
08:15SPEAKERI'm Will.
08:15SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
08:17SPEAKER- Brad, we got a...
08:18SPEAKERWell, I'm glad you're not done with the computers
08:20SPEAKER'cause it would make this podcast a little weird one.
08:22SPEAKER- Well, we could, you know,
08:23SPEAKERthere's probably other stuff we could do,
08:24SPEAKERbut you're not wrong.
08:25SPEAKER- Here's Brad this week.
08:26SPEAKERBrad's like, this makes me think of that old giant bomb
08:31SPEAKERyear end thing that you did
08:32SPEAKERabout the day the computers died.
08:33SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - The video games died.
08:34SPEAKER- Yeah, the day the video games, yes.
08:36SPEAKER- And like, what would you do with your time
08:38SPEAKERif you didn't have a server to futz with?
08:40SPEAKERYou'd just like be overclocking the toaster oven.
08:42SPEAKER- Genuinely can't answer that question.
08:44SPEAKER- Yeah, you'd get a hot water kettle and you'd be like,
08:47SPEAKERI think I can get,
08:48SPEAKERI think you can integrate a timer with this.
08:50SPEAKER- Did we talk about that on this podcast at some point?
08:52SPEAKERDid I pose the thought experiment on here?
08:54SPEAKEROr maybe it was a different,
08:55SPEAKERone of the 20 other podcasts I'm on recently,
08:58SPEAKERor I was saying like, I think it was here,
09:00SPEAKERhave you ever thought about what you would have done
09:03SPEAKER200 years ago, 300 years ago,
09:04SPEAKERany time before computing and games
09:06SPEAKERand all the things you like,
09:07SPEAKERlike what would have been your thing instead?
09:09SPEAKER- Oh, I would have definitely hunted humans for sports.
09:12SPEAKER- Okay, we definitely did talk about that
09:13SPEAKERon this podcast recently,
09:14SPEAKERbecause I think you gave the same answer, but.
09:17SPEAKER- I mean-
09:18SPEAKER- Specifically, when I think about that to myself,
09:20SPEAKERthe crux of my issue there is what would I automate?
09:24SPEAKERWhat would I script?
09:25SPEAKERLike what logic-based thing would I get to have fun doing?
09:29SPEAKERYou know, like I don't,
09:30SPEAKERI like things like text expansion and serial automation,
09:34SPEAKERstuff like, you know what I mean?
09:35SPEAKER- Did you-
09:36SPEAKER- Like there was nothing that, there's nothing that,
09:38SPEAKERwell, maybe like some mechanical things probably
09:41SPEAKERwould kind of scratch that itch, right?
09:43SPEAKER- Did you ever watch the old Disney,
09:48SPEAKERSwiss Family Robinson from the sixties,
09:49SPEAKERthe one that is, just to be clear,
09:51SPEAKERsuper racially problematic in multiple ways.
09:54SPEAKER- I did not.
09:56SPEAKER- Wow, this was a formative piece of media for me,
09:59SPEAKERbecause it's the thing that the Swiss Family Robinson
10:01SPEAKERtree house at Disney World in Disneyland in the old days.
10:04SPEAKERI think now it's Pirates of the Caribbean.
10:07SPEAKERI don't know what it is now, it's something else.
10:09SPEAKERIt's Tarzan probably.
10:10SPEAKERBut it was a, basically it's the story
10:15SPEAKERof Swiss Family Robinson Disneyfied in like,
10:20SPEAKERwith like all the actors from like the Shaggy Dog
10:22SPEAKERand a bunch of other like classic live action Disney movies
10:26SPEAKERfrom the fifties and sixties.
10:28SPEAKERThe gist is though, they Gilligan's Island
10:31SPEAKERthe whole thing up.
10:32SPEAKERSo they have this big giant tree that they live in
10:34SPEAKERand they build like a fabulous, fabulous tree house
10:38SPEAKERthat has like water wheels and automation
10:40SPEAKERand monkey butlers and the whole deal.
10:42SPEAKER- I think Disney World has like a recreation
10:45SPEAKERof that to some degree.
10:46SPEAKER- Yeah, they've made it into something else now,
10:48SPEAKERbut it used to be Swiss Family,
10:49SPEAKER'cause nobody has, you know,
10:50SPEAKERmodern children have no connection with this,
10:53SPEAKERwith the works of Robert Louis Stevenson.
10:56SPEAKERWait, is it Louis Stevenson who writes Swiss Family Robinson?
10:59SPEAKER- I don't know.
11:00SPEAKER- No, he wrote Treasure Island.
11:02SPEAKER- It's, maybe it is him actually.
11:06SPEAKER- Johann David Viss.
11:09SPEAKER- Oh, well there you go.
11:10SPEAKER- I don't know.
11:11SPEAKER- Perfect.
11:11SPEAKER- Swiss author.
11:12SPEAKER- Anyway, yeah, so I think you would probably build
11:15SPEAKERa bunch of Rube Goldberg machines
11:17SPEAKERthat do your daily chores for you.
11:19SPEAKER- That sounds like the closest approximation,
11:21SPEAKERbut as much as I like scripting things
11:23SPEAKERand writing light amounts of code and stuff,
11:25SPEAKERlike just that kind of logic game,
11:28SPEAKERI would need some equivalent.
11:30SPEAKER- I would, yeah, you'd build a machine
11:32SPEAKERthat harvests the leeches from the swamp.
11:33SPEAKER- Yeah, there you go.
11:34SPEAKER- On that note, we've harvested some news leeches this week
11:38SPEAKERand we're putting them into the podcast swamp.
11:42SPEAKERI don't know, that's a bad metaphor, but.
11:44SPEAKER- Keep this metaphor going, the whole show.
11:46SPEAKER- There's a bunch of stuff happening,
11:47SPEAKERwe wanted to talk about it.
11:47SPEAKERSo, I don't know, for folks who haven't been paying attention
11:51SPEAKERto the price of PC hardware right now,
11:53SPEAKERRAM prices have doubled or more in the last,
11:57SPEAKERlet's say, month right now.
11:59SPEAKER- Yeah, it's getting bad out there.
12:01SPEAKER- Yeah, prices have gone up,
12:03SPEAKERthey've doubled in the last month or so.
12:07SPEAKEROkay, so I'm gonna take you with what we got.
12:09SPEAKERWe got four stories, I think.
12:12SPEAKERWe've got RAM and maybe SSD prices are going up.
12:15SPEAKERWe've got Microsoft's agentic AI plans for Windows.
12:19SPEAKER- Oh boy.
12:20SPEAKER- We've got Nest, Google abandons the first two generations
12:23SPEAKERof Nest thermostat, but luckily,
12:25SPEAKERhackers are coming to the rescue.
12:27SPEAKERAnd this is the biggest surprise of all of them.
12:31SPEAKERNintendo, once again, is breaking third-party docs,
12:34SPEAKERbut this time, it's for the Switch, too.
12:36SPEAKER- There's some nuance there, but we'll get into it.
12:38SPEAKER- Yeah, so why do you wanna start with RAM and SSD prices?
12:40SPEAKERI feel like this is pretty straightforward.
12:42SPEAKER- Yeah, so then, just for housekeeping,
12:45SPEAKERwe are going to end on our traditional,
12:47SPEAKERsome tech we're thankful for.
12:48SPEAKER- Oh yeah, of course.
12:50SPEAKER- Since American Thanksgiving is coming up
12:53SPEAKERafter this episode posts.
12:54SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, so DDR5 prices up at least 100%,
12:59SPEAKERsometimes as much as 170%,
13:01SPEAKERdepending on which kits you're buying.
13:03SPEAKER- Yeah, that does seem to be retail kits.
13:05SPEAKERI looked at, Gamers Nexus has a big video up about this.
13:08SPEAKERI read an article on PC Magazine, not PC World.
13:14SPEAKER- Wow.
13:15SPEAKER- Is PC Magazine PC World's mortal enemy?
13:16SPEAKERI've always wondered.
13:17SPEAKER- We don't talk about PC Magazine.
13:19SPEAKER- PC Mag, PC World, they're pretty similar names,
13:23SPEAKERpretty similar mission statements, I assume.
13:25SPEAKER- Look, when I was at Maximum PC, they were all the enemy.
13:28SPEAKERThat's all I know.
13:29SPEAKER- Yeah, suck how I look.
13:30SPEAKER- Deep in my heart, we don't need to talk about it.
13:33SPEAKER- Look, dude, I worked for a major video gaming outlet
13:37SPEAKERwhere one year Sun Tzu was quoted.
13:39SPEAKEROh, well, it's like, I'm not joking.
13:42SPEAKERSun Tzu got quoted before E3 one year at GameSpot.
13:45SPEAKERThat's how much the other outlets were the enemy.
13:48SPEAKER- Did you not take, did you take it?
13:49SPEAKERI took a class in college where Sun Tzu
13:51SPEAKERwas one of the things that they taught,
13:53SPEAKERand the professor on the first day described it
13:56SPEAKERas the military guide for fail, noble fail sons.
14:03SPEAKERSo they didn't, so they wouldn't get killed
14:05SPEAKERby their own armies.
14:06SPEAKER'Cause like a full third of that book is stuff like,
14:09SPEAKERhey, maybe consider getting tents for your guys
14:12SPEAKERand like keeping them fed and with good boots
14:15SPEAKERis a good way to keep them from, you know, deserting you.
14:18SPEAKER- There is a very profound school of leadership thought
14:21SPEAKERthat the rank and file eat before the leadership.
14:24SPEAKER- Yeah.
14:24SPEAKER- For good reason.
14:25SPEAKERAnd this is sadly a lot of current leadership
14:28SPEAKERin the business world, let's say,
14:29SPEAKERhas maybe failed to remember that lesson.
14:32SPEAKER- Look.
14:33SPEAKER- Well, you know what, maybe they will,
14:35SPEAKERmaybe the consequences of that position
14:39SPEAKERwill redound upon them at some point.
14:41SPEAKER- It seems like we're firmly
14:42SPEAKERin the fucking round phase here.
14:44SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, anyway, I have sometimes wondered
14:46SPEAKERif PC Magazine is like the Shelbyville
14:48SPEAKERto PC World's Springfield.
14:50SPEAKER- I think, I don't know what it was like in the olden days
14:55SPEAKERwhen print magazines were vying for space on newsstands,
15:02SPEAKERbut there's definitely a little bit of a rivalry there.
15:04SPEAKERAnyway.
15:05SPEAKER- Anyway, sorry about the digression,
15:06SPEAKERbut yes, I read this piece on PC Magazine.
15:09SPEAKERLike the stuff we're talking about is largely retail kits.
15:13SPEAKERWe're not talking about necessarily like the actual ICs
15:15SPEAKERfrom the small number of companies
15:16SPEAKERthat make them in the supply chain.
15:18SPEAKER- So Steve said those prices are going up too
15:21SPEAKERin the Gamers Nexus video.
15:21SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no, I'm sure that's the root.
15:23SPEAKERWhat I mean is when we're quoting numbers like 170%,
15:27SPEAKERthat's largely outlets looking at retail kits
15:30SPEAKERand what they cost this time last year versus now,
15:32SPEAKERlike this specific 64 gigabyte Corsair kit
15:36SPEAKERwas this last year,
15:37SPEAKERand now it is two and a half times more type stuff.
15:40SPEAKER- Yeah, it's wild.
15:42SPEAKERSo why is it happening?
15:44SPEAKERThere's a lot of thought about this.
15:45SPEAKERThe big, big indicator seems to be
15:49SPEAKERthat the growth in data centers
15:52SPEAKERand AI data centers specifically,
15:54SPEAKERwhich require a lot of both video RAM
15:56SPEAKERand DDR RAM for the systems
15:59SPEAKERare basically buying up the entire world supply of DRAM.
16:04SPEAKERThere's only three companies that make DRAM,
16:07SPEAKERSamsung, SK, Hynix, and Micron.
16:10SPEAKERAnd I mean, when I say make DRAM,
16:12SPEAKERI mean make the chips that you see
16:13SPEAKERsoldered onto your RAM sticks.
16:16SPEAKERAnd like that's pretty much the long and short of it,
16:20SPEAKERis it like there's usually a four or five year cycle
16:25SPEAKERwhen a new type of RAM is announced
16:26SPEAKERand rolls out where it starts out really expensive,
16:28SPEAKERand then it gets very inexpensive,
16:30SPEAKERand then as supply starts,
16:31SPEAKERas they stop production and supply starts to wind down,
16:34SPEAKERthen the price goes back up again.
16:36SPEAKERAnd that's been very predictable over the last,
16:38SPEAKERsince DDR became a thing 10, 15 years ago.
16:41SPEAKER- Yeah, why do you think that is?
16:42SPEAKERI mean, there's three companies making memory ICs.
16:45SPEAKERLike we said, there were basically two companies
16:46SPEAKERthat still make hard drives.
16:48SPEAKERThere are effectively two x86 CPU companies.
16:51SPEAKERThere's only now recently three companies
16:53SPEAKERthat make viable GPUs.
16:55SPEAKERLike, is this just a problem of like both complexity
17:00SPEAKERand like difficult to scale business models
17:02SPEAKERthat like it's just natural that not many companies
17:05SPEAKERare gonna be able to get into that space?
17:08SPEAKER- FABs are expensive.
17:09SPEAKERI mean, memory FABs are less expensive
17:11SPEAKERthan like a cutting edge, you know, four nanometer FAB,
17:14SPEAKERbut they're still expensive.
17:17SPEAKERI don't actually know.
17:18SPEAKERIt's one of the things I,
17:20SPEAKERone of the questions I talked to Steve the other day,
17:22SPEAKER'cause he was on a full nerd
17:23SPEAKERand we were talking about this off camera.
17:26SPEAKERAnd like, none of us, nobody,
17:30SPEAKERI don't have a good idea
17:31SPEAKERof why only three companies make RAM.
17:33SPEAKERIt could be because it's a real commodity market.
17:36SPEAKERAnd like, you know, you may not like wanna compete in that
17:41SPEAKERspace with these enormous gigantic companies.
17:43SPEAKER- Established players already have like economies
17:46SPEAKERof scale going, and it's probably hard to break in.
17:48SPEAKER- Well, and they have supply chains, they have deals,
17:50SPEAKERthey have all this stuff going.
17:51SPEAKERSo yeah.
17:53SPEAKERIs there anything you can do
17:54SPEAKERabout the price of RAM going up?
17:55SPEAKERNot really.
17:55SPEAKER(laughing)
17:56SPEAKERYou're kind of hosed.
17:57SPEAKER- Sorry.
17:58SPEAKER- I used maybe?
18:00SPEAKER- Yeah, that's sure.
18:01SPEAKER- I think used RAM is one of the safer components probably.
18:07SPEAKERWhat I've seen looking around at the stuff,
18:09SPEAKERit's not just that the prices are going way up.
18:11SPEAKERIt's also sounds like, I mean,
18:12SPEAKERthis naturally follows from what we're talking about,
18:14SPEAKERbut supply is probably gonna start getting shorter.
18:16SPEAKERSo it's also just gonna get harder to find stuff.
18:18SPEAKER- Well, and then the other thing that's happening in the US
18:21SPEAKERis we're in the finding out phase
18:23SPEAKERof our tariff fucking around now,
18:25SPEAKERwhere people have stockpiled inventory
18:29SPEAKERat the start of this year
18:30SPEAKERbefore the tariffs hit to last through the holidays.
18:33SPEAKERAnd now they're unloading that stuff
18:34SPEAKERat the pre-tariff prices.
18:36SPEAKERAnd we're gonna start seeing tariffs hit anything
18:38SPEAKERcoming into the country after the first few year probably.
18:41SPEAKER- I can't verify this, but some folks on our discord
18:44SPEAKERwere also talking about this the other day
18:45SPEAKERand said that apparently these companies cut production
18:48SPEAKERin the last year or two.
18:49SPEAKER- So that's a normal thing.
18:51SPEAKERThat's a normal part of the whole deal, right?
18:52SPEAKER- I don't mean that in a bad way,
18:54SPEAKERbut like they had overproduced and so they,
18:57SPEAKERbut it just happens to be a matter of bad timing
18:59SPEAKERthat they had made too much.
19:01SPEAKERSo then they cut production
19:02SPEAKERand now this demand is spiking on the tail end of them,
19:05SPEAKERhaving lowered their production rates.
19:07SPEAKER- Well, and one of the things Steve talked about
19:08SPEAKERin the gamer's nexus video, which is worth watching
19:10SPEAKERif you haven't seen it yet,
19:12SPEAKERis that this whole cycle was kind of fucked up
19:15SPEAKERbecause it started in the pandemic and-
19:19SPEAKER- DDR5 rollout was pretty choppy to begin with.
19:23SPEAKER- Yeah, and because that rollout happened
19:26SPEAKERduring the pandemic, everybody's trying to build PCs.
19:28SPEAKERThere was a lot of demand for DDR4,
19:30SPEAKERbut not as much for DDR5.
19:33SPEAKERAnd like, it's just been a weird cycle.
19:35SPEAKERSo there's probably going to be knock-on effects
19:40SPEAKERthat hit VRAM prices as well,
19:41SPEAKERwhich means video cards are going to be harder
19:43SPEAKERto get access to.
19:44SPEAKER- I think AMD said that this week that the rising costs
19:48SPEAKERof RAM are going to have to be reflected
19:50SPEAKERin graphics card prices.
19:51SPEAKER- There's rumors that Nvidia is holding super cards
19:55SPEAKERuntil the volatility settles out.
19:57SPEAKER- Interesting.
19:59SPEAKER- 'Cause like the old rumor was that we would see something
20:02SPEAKERat CES from them, and that I think is probably unlikely now,
20:06SPEAKERbut who knows?
20:09SPEAKERAnd then the other question is,
20:10SPEAKERis it going to impact NAND prices,
20:12SPEAKERwhich will have a knock-on on the SSD prices as well,
20:14SPEAKER'cause you use a lot of SSDs in data centers these days.
20:18SPEAKER- So I don't think that's a question anymore
20:19SPEAKERbecause the Fison CEO this past week,
20:23SPEAKERor it was about a week and a half ago-
20:24SPEAKER- They make controllers for SSDs, just-
20:26SPEAKER- Fison makes very widespread,
20:28SPEAKERwidely used controllers that go on NVME drives.
20:32SPEAKERNot all of them.
20:33SPEAKERI think like some of the players make their own controllers,
20:36SPEAKERbut see a lot of Fison controllers on like-
20:39SPEAKER- Corsair ships those on their SSDs.
20:41SPEAKER- Yeah, like the Silicon Power,
20:42SPEAKERor like some of the kind of off-brand type ones.
20:46SPEAKERHe straight up said in an earnings call to investors
20:48SPEAKERthat this is happening.
20:51SPEAKERThis is starting to hit.
20:53SPEAKERRecently, all the NAND companies started to increase
20:55SPEAKERtheir selling price almost up to 50 or 75%.
20:59SPEAKERThe demand has turned very strong in quarter four,
21:02SPEAKERbut he goes on to liken this to, I mean, here's the quote,
21:05SPEAKER"We believe cloud AI, edge AI is going to need more storage
21:08SPEAKERand hard drive displacement is happening.
21:10SPEAKERSo NAND supply will be tight for many, many years."
21:14SPEAKER- So I guess the TLDR is if you see a deal
21:17SPEAKERthat looks decent,
21:19SPEAKERI don't think they're going to be good deals on RAM,
21:21SPEAKERbut if you need storage, if you need like net buy now,
21:25SPEAKERI mean, buy an SSD now, if you need one.
21:28SPEAKER- One of the things that Lena talks about at PC World a lot
21:30SPEAKERis especially this time of year,
21:33SPEAKERyou have an extended return window for stuff.
21:35SPEAKERSo if you buy it and don't open it,
21:36SPEAKERif you see a good deal, you buy it, you don't open it,
21:38SPEAKERyou can return it up until January 31st for most retailers.
21:43SPEAKERAnd that's a valid way to go.
21:46SPEAKER- I have, you know what, this,
21:48SPEAKERI shouldn't say this out loud, I'm increasing my competition,
21:50SPEAKERbut I have been meaning for a long time to buy,
21:53SPEAKERlike not a top of the line NVB drive,
21:55SPEAKERbut like a decent one and just stick it
21:57SPEAKERin an external enclosure.
21:58SPEAKER- It's really convenient to have, it turns out.
22:00SPEAKER- It'd be super useful to have for like imaging
22:03SPEAKERyour Windows drive onto temporarily,
22:05SPEAKERjust for backup purposes, stuff like that.
22:07SPEAKER- I have one with a Ventoy partition that's bootable
22:10SPEAKERand like, yeah, super nice. - Stuff like that.
22:12SPEAKERAnd like four terabyte drives for now,
22:15SPEAKERuntil this starts to go into effect,
22:17SPEAKERhave been getting surprisingly cheap.
22:19SPEAKERLike four terabyte drives are increasingly pushing
22:22SPEAKERthe $200 barrier downward.
22:25SPEAKERAnd so I think I might try to grab a four terabyte drive
22:28SPEAKERand an enclosure ASAP before this really becomes a problem.
22:31SPEAKER- To give a sense of what we're talking about here,
22:34SPEAKERa 6,000 mega transfer per second, 32 gig DDR5 kit
22:39SPEAKERfrom G.Skill or Crucial are $259 and $300,
22:44SPEAKERrespectively, on Amazon. - Yeah, that's bonkers, dude.
22:46SPEAKERI have basically that.
22:47SPEAKERI have a 6,000 G.Skill 64 gig kit that I got.
22:53SPEAKERWhen did I build that PC?
22:54SPEAKER- You had a 64 gig kit.
22:56SPEAKERThis is a 32 gig kit, just to be clear.
22:57SPEAKER- Oh, that's a 32, what?
22:58SPEAKER- Yeah, the 64 gig kits are 400 plus last time I looked.
23:03SPEAKER- Holy shit, man.
23:04SPEAKERI think that thing was like,
23:05SPEAKERmine might've been around like 200,
23:07SPEAKERbut that was like two and a half years ago almost.
23:10SPEAKER- Here's a Crucial DDR5 6,000 mega transfer kit for $500.
23:16SPEAKER- Like part of the reason I went to 64 gig
23:18SPEAKERrather than 32 on this build
23:19SPEAKERwas because the price was not that different.
23:21SPEAKERLike it was certainly it was more, but it was like,
23:24SPEAKERI think it was under $200 at the time for 64 gig.
23:27SPEAKER- There's a- - It was just like, why not?
23:29SPEAKERI might as well just future proof
23:30SPEAKERand now I'm extremely glad I did.
23:31SPEAKER- There's a DDR5 48 mega,
23:34SPEAKER4800 mega transfer kit for 400 bucks.
23:38SPEAKER- Okay. - 64 gigs.
23:40SPEAKERLike it's bad, just to be clear, it's real bad.
23:43SPEAKER- It's rough.
23:44SPEAKERI mean, there are 24 gig DIMMs now though, right?
23:48SPEAKER- Well, those 48 gig kits are-
23:51SPEAKER- Are those not two by 24?
23:54SPEAKER- No, they do something, I can't remember.
23:57SPEAKERI feel like one of the folks from Patriot told me-
24:00SPEAKER- Or is that a single stick?
24:02SPEAKERThat can't be right.
24:02SPEAKER- No, it's two 24 gig sticks.
24:04SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I thought.
24:05SPEAKER- But they run hot because of something that they do
24:06SPEAKERto make them work off the normal eight bit bus or something.
24:11SPEAKERI don't understand exactly what it is, but they were,
24:14SPEAKERI mean, they sell them, they stand by them,
24:16SPEAKERbut they were like, if you're concerned about Heath,
24:18SPEAKERthen maybe don't get those.
24:20SPEAKER- Well, that's concerning, I had not heard that before.
24:22SPEAKER- Also, those are $467, so you're not saving any money.
24:26SPEAKER- No, but I was gonna say there's at least a middle ground
24:28SPEAKERbetween 32 and 64 now, if you need more memory.
24:31SPEAKER- Look, just run Linux and 32 gigs is fine,
24:32SPEAKERit's all you need.
24:33SPEAKER- Yeah, sure, maybe. - That's the thing.
24:37SPEAKER- Can I read one other quote from this earnings call
24:38SPEAKERbefore we move on? - Yeah.
24:40SPEAKER- This is an amazing quote.
24:41SPEAKERI love the CEO of Fizen.
24:44SPEAKER"We hope, we wish, we ask, we request,
24:47SPEAKERif the NAND company is enjoying a good gross margin,
24:50SPEAKER50, 60%, good, don't try to go to 80%.
24:54SPEAKERThis definitely will kill a lot of the industry."
24:56SPEAKER- Yeah.
24:58SPEAKER- It's good shit.
25:00SPEAKER- So let's see, just to be clear, in the last 10 years,
25:03SPEAKERwe've gone through a couple of video card boom and busts.
25:06SPEAKERWe had a whole period of time where you couldn't buy
25:08SPEAKERanything from a webcam to a CPU and that was messed up RAM.
25:12SPEAKERSo good job, guys.
25:13SPEAKER- That was my thing coming into this podcast,
25:16SPEAKERwas like, could we just have a few years
25:18SPEAKERwithout some insane supply chain disruption
25:21SPEAKERthat makes building PCs out of the grasp of normal people?
25:26SPEAKER- So speaking of things that are gonna make PCs
25:28SPEAKERuse a whole buttload more memory and also suck more,
25:33SPEAKERIgnite, Microsoft's developer conference
25:35SPEAKERthis week in San Francisco, which I gotta,
25:38SPEAKERbefore we get into this, actually,
25:39SPEAKERI'm gonna complain about something else.
25:41SPEAKER- Oh.
25:42SPEAKER- So I have about a 25 minute drive to the PC World offices.
25:47SPEAKERTheir offices are on Second Street
25:48SPEAKERdown by where the old CNET/GameSpot/CBSI offices were
25:52SPEAKERand like where IGN was back when they had,
25:55SPEAKERI guess they're still there, I don't know.
25:57SPEAKERBut it's usually like 25 minutes
25:59SPEAKERand it's about 20 minutes to get to the ballpark
26:02SPEAKERand then you turn left and drive two and a half blocks.
26:05SPEAKERAnd I did that the other day on Tuesday when Build started
26:08SPEAKERand then it took me another 25 minutes
26:10SPEAKERto drive the two and a half blocks.
26:13SPEAKERBecause I think that the Build,
26:15SPEAKEReither everybody who was coming to Build was taking Waymos
26:18SPEAKERor they gave out Waymo credit or something
26:21SPEAKERso people were going on rides.
26:22SPEAKER'Cause what would happen was at every light,
26:25SPEAKERa bunch of Waymos would just spill onto Second Street
26:28SPEAKERand fill all the available space on the street
26:30SPEAKERand there'd be nowhere to go when the light changed.
26:32SPEAKERSo you just sit there through like four, five, six lights.
26:35SPEAKERIt was absolute, I don't generally get angry in the car,
26:38SPEAKERbut I was getting fairly upset.
26:40SPEAKERAnd I was thinking about asking Siri
26:42SPEAKERhow to fire bomb a Waymo.
26:45SPEAKERSo anyway, Ignite was in town this week.
26:47SPEAKER- That sounds very believably like something
26:49SPEAKERthat would happen when a bunch of Microsoft developers
26:51SPEAKERare in town.
26:52SPEAKERI can tell you from experience, I assume you,
26:54SPEAKERwell, you don't live in the city,
26:55SPEAKERso you may not have experienced this.
26:59SPEAKEREverybody who comes through town wants to try Waymo.
27:02SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
27:02SPEAKER- Like everybody I know who has come through town
27:04SPEAKERsince Waymo became a thing really wants to ride in Waymo.
27:08SPEAKER- I haven't ridden in one yet.
27:09SPEAKER- Really? Oh, I've been in several of them,
27:10SPEAKERbut like it was old hat for me
27:12SPEAKERbecause like I was seeing them on the street
27:14SPEAKERfor like months or a year before I ever sat in one.
27:17SPEAKERLike, 'cause I go on walks around here all the time
27:19SPEAKERand they were just like driverless cars
27:21SPEAKERwere just everywhere constantly.
27:23SPEAKERSo by the time I ever had occasion to get in one,
27:25SPEAKERthey were just like, I was kind of, I was used to it.
27:28SPEAKERBut like every time somebody comes through town,
27:31SPEAKERthey have to try Waymo, like people are obsessed with it.
27:33SPEAKER- Have you seen the Zoox ones, the little ones?
27:35SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yes.
27:36SPEAKERThose things swarm around with the Costco downtown.
27:39SPEAKERAnd I don't know why that's the only area
27:41SPEAKERthat I ever see them in.
27:42SPEAKERYou're talking about the symmetrical ones,
27:43SPEAKERlike the kind of bus looking things
27:45SPEAKERthat don't really have an identifiable
27:47SPEAKERlike front end and back end.
27:48SPEAKER- It looks like the tram that you ride
27:51SPEAKERfrom terminal to terminal at the airport almost
27:53SPEAKERwithout rails.
27:54SPEAKER- It looks like the most, I don't know,
27:56SPEAKERlike demolition man ask like 90s sci-fi future car
28:00SPEAKERI have ever seen.
28:01SPEAKER'Cause again, it barely looks like a car
28:04SPEAKERin terms of its shape.
28:04SPEAKER- Imagine you make a scooter.
28:07SPEAKERLike if you made, imagine you made a four seat scooter
28:10SPEAKERand I think the seats face each other on the inside, right?
28:13SPEAKER- I believe that's the case.
28:14SPEAKERSo you're like people who are scratching their heads,
28:17SPEAKERjust go to, I can't believe I'm saying this.
28:19SPEAKERGo type Zoox into Google.
28:20SPEAKER- Zoox with an X, Z-O-O-X.
28:22SPEAKER- Z-O-O-X and you will find a picture
28:24SPEAKERof what we're talking about.
28:25SPEAKERIt is like a symmetrical looking little people mover thing.
28:29SPEAKER- Yeah, they're weird.
28:31SPEAKERAnyway, so, okay.
28:33SPEAKERSo dystopian hellscape continues
28:35SPEAKER'cause Microsoft at Ignite decided
28:39SPEAKERthat they wanted to push their new vision for Windows,
28:44SPEAKERwhich is they want to bring agentic AI to Windows.
28:50SPEAKERThey want Windows to be the platform
28:51SPEAKERon which you run agentic AI.
28:53SPEAKER- They want it to be an agentic OS, in fact.
28:55SPEAKER- Yeah, and for folks who don't know,
28:58SPEAKERthe idea of agentic AI is that instead of having
29:00SPEAKERone big giant monolithic model that relies to you
29:04SPEAKERsomewhere between 40 and 60% of the time,
29:07SPEAKERyou're gonna replace that one big monolithic model,
29:10SPEAKERlike ChatGPT, with a whole bunch of smaller models
29:14SPEAKERthat are specialized.
29:15SPEAKERAnd then you're gonna have one model that recognize tasks
29:18SPEAKERand can identify them and dole them out
29:20SPEAKERto the specialized models autonomously.
29:23SPEAKER- Something something models for your models.
29:25SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, and the idea is
29:27SPEAKERthat the lies aren't gonna compound themselves.
29:29SPEAKERIt's all gonna be better somehow,
29:31SPEAKEReven though we're building everything on this flawed,
29:34SPEAKERfundamentally flawed technology.
29:36SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, the lead on this story going around was,
29:39SPEAKER"Hey, they're shoving AI agents into the taskbar."
29:42SPEAKER- Yeah, and file manager.
29:43SPEAKERDon't forget file manager.
29:44SPEAKER- And file manager, but specifically,
29:46SPEAKERI mean, the taskbar, I feel like is still emblematic
29:49SPEAKERof the whole Windows experience.
29:51SPEAKERIt's the anchor. - You mean the one
29:52SPEAKERthat they ruined by putting Bing search in it?
29:53SPEAKERAre you talking about the-- - Yeah, sure.
29:54SPEAKER- Yeah. - But I mean,
29:55SPEAKERquite literally, it is the anchor of your screen
29:57SPEAKERwhen you're using Windows, visually, perceptually.
30:01SPEAKERAlso, the start button was the focal point
30:05SPEAKERof their marketing when Windows 95 came out.
30:07SPEAKERIt's kind of like the taskbar and the start button
30:09SPEAKERhave been the Windows thing since day one.
30:12SPEAKERAnd for-- - It's true.
30:13SPEAKER- For them to say, "Hey, we're putting AI agents icons
30:16SPEAKERright there in the taskbar is a bit chilling."
30:20SPEAKER- Well, let me tell you,
30:22SPEAKERthis integration isn't about adding agents.
30:25SPEAKERIt's about making the part of the OS experience, Brad.
30:29SPEAKERThis is from Pravan Davuluri, who's the chief of Windows,
30:33SPEAKERand it's from a Verge interview.
30:37SPEAKERBasically, what they want you to do
30:38SPEAKERis to tell your PC to do something.
30:39SPEAKERIt'll go do it without input from you.
30:41SPEAKERAnd they built this model context protocol, the MCP.
30:47SPEAKERThis is what happens when children know memes,
30:49SPEAKERbut had never watched Tron to understand
30:52SPEAKERthat the MCP is not to be emulated.
30:54SPEAKER- Sure.
30:55SPEAKER- Works in a sandbox for now.
30:57SPEAKERSo it basically has its own little section of the OS,
31:00SPEAKERand you can revert stuff,
31:02SPEAKERand if it does something weird, you can go back.
31:05SPEAKERBut the TL;DR is it'll integrate
31:07SPEAKERwith the search in the taskbar,
31:08SPEAKERand then you'll tell it to do something.
31:10SPEAKERIt'll go do that in the background.
31:11SPEAKERYou can talk to Copilot and give it instructions.
31:16SPEAKERHey, Copilot, I want you to go collect a bunch of logos
31:21SPEAKERfor these five services
31:22SPEAKERand get 'em with transparent backgrounds
31:24SPEAKERand put 'em in a zip file for me.
31:26SPEAKERAnd then theoretically, it'll do that.
31:29SPEAKERI could not be more skeptical
31:32SPEAKERbecause everything I've seen of the agentic AI stuff
31:35SPEAKERhas been underwhelming to terrible.
31:38SPEAKERAnd Microsoft's implementation of Copilot,
31:41SPEAKERwell, we'll talk about that in a minute.
31:42SPEAKERBut anyway, it's opt-in.
31:44SPEAKERIt also had an incredible disclaimer that said,
31:48SPEAKERyo, this might install malware.
31:50SPEAKER- Cool.
31:50SPEAKERAre you confused with caution?
31:53SPEAKER- I mean, that really gets to the heart
31:54SPEAKERof my whole problem with this thing.
31:55SPEAKERAnd it's not even a matter of skepticism for me.
31:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
31:59SPEAKER- My problem is that I want nothing to do
32:01SPEAKERwith a non-deterministic computing task.
32:04SPEAKER- That's, yeah.
32:05SPEAKER- I want nothing to do with a computing task
32:07SPEAKERthat you can do multiple times
32:08SPEAKERthat can produce different outputs every time you do it.
32:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
32:12SPEAKER- And that is just completely in conflict
32:15SPEAKERwith the way that LLMs work.
32:18SPEAKERI assume this is all related to LLMs.
32:20SPEAKERI mean, like it's all based on probability, right?
32:23SPEAKER- Yeah, you get different outputs each time.
32:25SPEAKER- Like I just like,
32:28SPEAKERlike that's just kind of the beginning
32:29SPEAKERand the end of it to me.
32:30SPEAKERYou know, as mentioned at the top of the show,
32:31SPEAKERI love automating things and I'm gonna be real.
32:34SPEAKERThere are a million things you can do to fuck yourself
32:37SPEAKERwhen you automate things through a bash script
32:39SPEAKERor code or whatever.
32:42SPEAKERBut A, at least you did it to yourself.
32:45SPEAKERB, at least it's gonna fuck you the same way every time.
32:48SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
32:48SPEAKERLike the computer, that is kind of the thing
32:51SPEAKERthat is both the best and worst thing about computers
32:54SPEAKERis that they do exactly what you tell them to do,
32:56SPEAKERparticularly when at a low level, you know,
32:59SPEAKERif you're writing code or whatever.
33:01SPEAKER- I mean, that's the whole point of doing,
33:03SPEAKERlike that's why we use computers.
33:06SPEAKERSo it says, I found the actual,
33:12SPEAKERI found the actual warning that they gave.
33:15SPEAKERLet me see.
33:16SPEAKERIt is, "Agentic apps like Copilot can request
33:20SPEAKERand get access to six commonly used folders
33:22SPEAKERin your user profile when running in the agent workspace.
33:25SPEAKERDocuments, downloads, desktop, music, pictures, and video."
33:29SPEAKERAnd then it says this one, "Only enable this feature
33:33SPEAKERif you understand the security implications."
33:35SPEAKER- Nope.
33:36SPEAKER- Which like, I do understand the security implications,
33:38SPEAKERwhich is why I'm not enabling this feature.
33:40SPEAKERIt can also search your, well,
33:42SPEAKERI guess we'll talk about this in a sec,
33:44SPEAKERbut it can also search what's on your screen, I believe.
33:47SPEAKERThat might be a separate thing as part of the Copilot.
33:50SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that's recall, basically.
33:52SPEAKERI'm not saying this is literally the recall feature,
33:55SPEAKERbut that's what recall did as well, right?
33:57SPEAKER- Yeah, well, the new implementation is different
33:59SPEAKERthan recall in that you have to give it permission
34:01SPEAKERevery single time you press the button.
34:04SPEAKERYeah, so it can create agent accounts that provide agents
34:06SPEAKERwith their own separate account on your device
34:08SPEAKERwhen acting on your behalf.
34:10SPEAKERThey can create an agent workspace
34:11SPEAKERwhere they work in parallel with a human user,
34:13SPEAKERallowing runtime isolation and scoped authorization,
34:16SPEAKERbut then they also can access the important directories
34:20SPEAKERon your desktop.
34:22SPEAKER- Oh, thank you, oh, thank you.
34:24SPEAKER- This is a hard pass for me.
34:25SPEAKER- I didn't even know about the built-in security warnings.
34:27SPEAKERI mean, like, seriously, even without that,
34:30SPEAKERI was not interested in this,
34:31SPEAKERbut if the people who make the software say,
34:33SPEAKER"Hey, they just know the risks of using this new feature,"
34:36SPEAKERlike, who would do that?
34:39SPEAKER- So in order to get access to this,
34:41SPEAKERyou have to be running, I think, 25H2 or 25, 24H2,
34:45SPEAKERand you have to opt in right now, so.
34:47SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess it is worth noting
34:49SPEAKERthat it is opt-in for now.
34:51SPEAKERWho knows if that will change?
34:53SPEAKER'Cause I did say, we talked about Windows a little bit
34:55SPEAKERon the next Lander podcast this week,
34:56SPEAKERand, like, I did say, like, it's relatively easy
34:59SPEAKERto avoid the bullshit in Windows 11 for the time being.
35:03SPEAKERLike, if I don't open Edge and click the Copilot button,
35:07SPEAKERI don't see AI stuff in Windows 11,
35:09SPEAKERand with that aside, most of Windows 11's bullshit
35:13SPEAKERis pretty similar to Windows 10's bullshit.
35:15SPEAKER- A lot of it is, there's a lot more upsells.
35:18SPEAKER- Yeah, you might be right.
35:19SPEAKERI mean, I got similar splash screen stuff in Windows 10
35:23SPEAKERfrom time to time, but-
35:24SPEAKER- Have you backed up your computer lately, Brian?
35:26SPEAKER- Maybe the frequency is higher now in 11.
35:28SPEAKERYou might be right about that.
35:29SPEAKER- You should consider backing up so your data's safe.
35:32SPEAKERIt's very important.
35:32SPEAKER- I mean, the point I'm trying to make, though,
35:35SPEAKERis that currently it is a difference of degree.
35:37SPEAKER- Fair.
35:38SPEAKER- But this is a difference in kind
35:40SPEAKERif they start pushing this stuff very aggressively,
35:42SPEAKERwhere, again, like, so far,
35:44SPEAKERWindows 11 has just been a mildly shittier 10.
35:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
35:48SPEAKER- But if this stuff starts showing up
35:48SPEAKERin places that are hard to avoid,
35:50SPEAKERthen it becomes a much different conversation about, like,
35:53SPEAKERokay, maybe I actually don't want to use this OS anymore.
35:55SPEAKER- Past history makes me think that this is the precursor,
35:58SPEAKERthat Windows 12 is, that they're testing this stuff now,
36:01SPEAKERand that Windows 12 is when these chickens
36:03SPEAKERcome home to roost.
36:04SPEAKER- That is, that's the, that's the terrifying,
36:07SPEAKERI'll put it this way.
36:08SPEAKERPreviously, my biggest fear about Windows 12
36:10SPEAKERis it's been based on, like, leaked mock-ups and stuff,
36:13SPEAKERis that they were going to make the task bar
36:15SPEAKERpermanently floating.
36:17SPEAKER- I actually don't mind that.
36:18SPEAKERI do that on Linux.
36:19SPEAKER- Which I want fucking nothing to do with.
36:21SPEAKER- But I have a little bit of space above my task,
36:23SPEAKERmy way bar on Linux.
36:24SPEAKER- What are those pixels doing, man?
36:26SPEAKER- They look cool.
36:27SPEAKER- Why, why do I want empty space under my task bar
36:30SPEAKERwhen I could get more webpage in that space instead?
36:33SPEAKER- Look, I have 4,000 pixels.
36:35SPEAKERI have plenty of room. - That's never enough.
36:37SPEAKER- Never enough.
36:38SPEAKER- Okay, so. - Anyway, anyway,
36:39SPEAKERI bring that up to say that, like, if this,
36:41SPEAKERif this becomes a, like, core pillar of Windows 12,
36:44SPEAKERthat is far more terrifying to me than a floating task bar.
36:47SPEAKER- Yeah. - Or that's also bad.
36:48SPEAKER- Okay, so the other thing I wanted to talk about
36:50SPEAKERwith the Microsoft stuff is that The Verge also did,
36:53SPEAKERI think it's paywalled, actually,
36:54SPEAKERbut they did a great article about,
36:57SPEAKERthat was titled Talking to Copilot
36:59SPEAKERMakes a Computer Feel Incompetent.
37:02SPEAKERAnd the author of that went through
37:06SPEAKERand tried all the stuff that,
37:07SPEAKERMicrosoft has been running these ads that are,
37:09SPEAKERthat are, like, the basic gist of the ads is,
37:11SPEAKER"Hey, you can talk to Copilot now."
37:13SPEAKERAnd then it shows them doing a bunch
37:14SPEAKERof really useful features.
37:16SPEAKERAnd then they tried to do that,
37:19SPEAKERthe stuff that was in the ad, and none of it worked at all.
37:23SPEAKERThere's a lot of it that's tied to Copilot Vision,
37:25SPEAKERwhich is where it can look at your screen
37:26SPEAKERand use that as input for Copilot.
37:29SPEAKERBut it was stuff like, "Hey, here's a picture of some caves.
37:31SPEAKERCan you tell me where this picture was taken?"
37:34SPEAKERAnd it consistently wasn't able to do that.
37:37SPEAKERAnd it seemed like it was actually basing the information,
37:39SPEAKERnot on image recognition,
37:41SPEAKERbut on cues that were in the file name,
37:42SPEAKERor, obviously, if there were GPS coordinates
37:45SPEAKERembedded in the tags for the photo,
37:47SPEAKERit would use those as well.
37:49SPEAKERBut also, if you change the file name
37:52SPEAKERof a picture of some caves in Mexico,
37:53SPEAKERor Belize, to New Jersey, it would be like,
37:56SPEAKER"Oh yeah, I think these caves are in New Jersey."
37:58SPEAKERSo, basically, they derided it as,
38:04SPEAKERsimultaneously pandering and incredibly inaccurate,
38:08SPEAKERto the point that they made them lose faith
38:11SPEAKERin their computer, which I thought was pretty grim.
38:14SPEAKER- I, yeah, fully understand.
38:17SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:18SPEAKER- I think, wasn't there a bit in that write-up?
38:19SPEAKERI can't find it right now, but were they saying
38:22SPEAKERthis thing was glazing them a little bit?
38:25SPEAKER- Well, I mean, that's a defining characteristic of AI.
38:28SPEAKER- Well, it doesn't have to be.
38:29SPEAKER- It is now, though.
38:30SPEAKER- Oh, I know it is now.
38:31SPEAKERWe've seen in the past, when OpenAI pulled that back
38:34SPEAKERin Chad GPT-5, and the user base revolted,
38:37SPEAKERbecause it wasn't making them feel good enough
38:38SPEAKERabout themselves, anyway.
38:42SPEAKER- Yeah, they don't, I just searched for glazing,
38:43SPEAKERand they didn't use glazing, because they're not Gen Z, but-
38:46SPEAKER- They did not use that term.
38:47SPEAKER- Shout out to Antonio G. DiBenedetto.
38:50SPEAKERThis is a good article worth reading.
38:52SPEAKER- You know what is sad, is that I can't think
38:54SPEAKERof a better way than glazing to express that concept now,
38:57SPEAKERwhich I think probably means I spend too much time online.
38:59SPEAKER- It's exactly right.
39:01SPEAKER- Like, aggrandizing them, I guess,
39:02SPEAKERis the term I'm looking for.
39:04SPEAKERI don't know.
39:05SPEAKERAnyway.
39:06SPEAKER- Oh, the other thing about the Ask Copilot thing
39:08SPEAKERis they did take the lesson from the recall fiasco,
39:12SPEAKERand you have to opt, you have to give it consent
39:14SPEAKERto look at your screen every single time it does it.
39:16SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's better, but...
39:20SPEAKERI had a similar problem to what I said before.
39:22SPEAKERLike, I'm never going to trust the results of this thing.
39:25SPEAKERLike, when I search for information,
39:27SPEAKERI like to rely on my own human intuition
39:29SPEAKERabout what is good and bad information.
39:31SPEAKERAnd if I have to second guess the results
39:33SPEAKERI'm getting out of this thing, then what good is it?
39:35SPEAKER'Cause I'm basically still doing the work anyway.
39:37SPEAKER- It's funny because, like, there was a...
39:40SPEAKEROn the AI front, there was an article today
39:43SPEAKERabout the CEO of Crafton who's embroiled
39:46SPEAKERin a lawsuit with the founders of-
39:48SPEAKER- Of the Subnautica thing?
39:49SPEAKER- Of the Subnautica 2.
39:50SPEAKER- Oh, dude, that stuff is crazy.
39:51SPEAKER- And apparently, the CEO of this enormous publisher
39:54SPEAKERwas asking Chad GPT for legal advice
39:57SPEAKERon how to get out of paying this payout
39:59SPEAKERthat they owed the founders of the...
40:01SPEAKERAnd now are being sued over.
40:03SPEAKERIt's wild.
40:04SPEAKER- I wonder how they obtained that.
40:05SPEAKERJust regular discovery, I guess.
40:07SPEAKER- Yeah, probably.
40:08SPEAKERI think actually, I think he told them at some point.
40:11SPEAKER- What? - Yeah.
40:12SPEAKER- Man. - Yeah, anyway.
40:14SPEAKER- That's good stuff.
40:16SPEAKEROne last question before we move on.
40:18SPEAKER- Yes?
40:19SPEAKER- How much of the employee base,
40:22SPEAKERor at least the decision-making base at Microsoft,
40:24SPEAKERdo you think is true believers in this technology?
40:27SPEAKERAnd how much is this just them trying to justify
40:30SPEAKERthe already massive investments they have made in AI to date?
40:33SPEAKER- I would bet that there is enormous buy-in from the C-suite
40:37SPEAKERand the further down the chain you get,
40:39SPEAKERthe less enthusiastic people are for it.
40:41SPEAKER- Sure.
40:42SPEAKERWell, I wouldn't be surprised if over time,
40:45SPEAKERthey are selecting for new hiring candidates
40:48SPEAKERthat are on board.
40:50SPEAKER- But I mean, I don't know anybody...
40:52SPEAKEREverybody I know who's engaged with this stuff
40:55SPEAKERoutside of a few people who do web front-end work
40:57SPEAKERand stuff like that that's relatively straightforward,
41:00SPEAKERno one is enthusiastic about it.
41:02SPEAKEREveryone is, this just creates more work for me.
41:06SPEAKERThis makes stuff take more time.
41:07SPEAKERI end up fixing more mistakes than saving time.
41:10SPEAKERAnd I don't know...
41:13SPEAKERI really don't know anybody who actually is doing work
41:17SPEAKERwho uses more than generative fill.
41:20SPEAKERGenerative fill, audio transcription, stuff like that,
41:24SPEAKERtools that actually do well and create good results
41:28SPEAKERpeople engage with and use.
41:30SPEAKERAnd the generative stuff, nobody I know uses anymore.
41:35SPEAKEROr let me put it this way.
41:37SPEAKERAnybody who comes up to me and is like,
41:38SPEAKER"Oh yeah, I really love generative...
41:39SPEAKERI use it all the time at work.
41:40SPEAKERI'm immediately suspect."
41:43SPEAKERSo, yeah.
41:44SPEAKER- I started to say same,
41:45SPEAKERbut I have never had that experience.
41:47SPEAKERSo that's a hypothetical.
41:48SPEAKER- Yeah, it's just, I feel like I've been beating this job
41:54SPEAKERon the PC world on The Full Nerd lately.
41:58SPEAKERBut I can't remember the last time Microsoft had a product
42:02SPEAKERthat I looked at and I was like,
42:03SPEAKER"Oh man, that's something that actually solves a problem
42:06SPEAKERI have that actually does a thing that I want."
42:08SPEAKERAnd I get that from Apple.
42:11SPEAKERI get that from Logitech, right?
42:13SPEAKERI get that from Linux.
42:18SPEAKERI get it from all sorts of other places,
42:19SPEAKERbut I don't get it from Microsoft and haven't in so long.
42:22SPEAKERI can't remember the last time I was excited
42:24SPEAKERto buy a Microsoft product.
42:26SPEAKERIt might've been that Xbox,
42:28SPEAKERthat $90 wireless headset that they made
42:31SPEAKERthat let you connect to Discord on your phone
42:33SPEAKERand the game on the headset.
42:36SPEAKERThat thing was pretty good.
42:37SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
42:38SPEAKERI mean, you know, the Xbox has done some things right
42:41SPEAKERin the console space better than anybody else, but...
42:44SPEAKER- Really? Not lately?
42:45SPEAKER- No, no, it's been a while.
42:46SPEAKERI'm talking platform level stuff like smart delivery.
42:50SPEAKER- What does smart delivery do?
42:51SPEAKER- It's the thing where it just downloads the best,
42:53SPEAKERmost appropriate version of the game
42:55SPEAKERbased on whichever device you're downloading it to.
42:57SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, that's nice.
42:58SPEAKER- Like Switch 2 and PS5 still don't do that.
43:00SPEAKER- Yeah, no, no.
43:01SPEAKER- You routinely see people say like,
43:03SPEAKER"Oh, I remember when they announced smart delivery
43:05SPEAKERand I was like, why are you even announcing this?
43:07SPEAKEROf course, why wouldn't you do,
43:08SPEAKERwhy would you do it any other way?"
43:10SPEAKERAnd then it turned out that five years later,
43:11SPEAKERthey're still the only ones that have done that.
43:13SPEAKERSo like, they do smart things at the Xbox platform level.
43:17SPEAKERThat's about, I will give them credit
43:19SPEAKERfor some of that stuff, but...
43:20SPEAKER- Yeah, on the rest of it,
43:22SPEAKERit seems like they're market leaders
43:23SPEAKERand beings in second place in whatever category they're in.
43:26SPEAKERSo anyway, speaking of giant companies
43:30SPEAKERthat do things that suck,
43:32SPEAKERGoogle abandoned the first and second generation
43:35SPEAKERNest thermostats a couple of weeks ago on October 25th.
43:38SPEAKER- That sucks, do you have one of those?
43:39SPEAKER- I do indeed, it's screwed into my wall.
43:41SPEAKERI've been using it for about 10 years.
43:43SPEAKER(laughing)
43:45SPEAKER- Man.
43:47SPEAKERSo- - Yeah, the idea of end of life-ing a thermostat.
43:50SPEAKER- I mean- - Like before smart things
43:52SPEAKERexisted, you would have thermostats
43:54SPEAKERthat were decades old and still working.
43:56SPEAKER- I mean, a thermostat fundamentally is a piece of metal
43:58SPEAKERthat bends when there's temperature changes.
44:00SPEAKER- Right, there's not a lot to render
44:02SPEAKERa thermostat inoperable until now.
44:05SPEAKER- Well, okay, so I will say it is really nice to either,
44:09SPEAKERlike when we're sitting in here recording
44:11SPEAKERand the heat comes on
44:12SPEAKERand I'm getting sweated out of my office,
44:13SPEAKERit's nice to be able to turn the heat off, right?
44:16SPEAKERWithout having to get up and stop recording.
44:18SPEAKERI, when it's cold in the morning
44:20SPEAKERand I don't want to get my tootsies out onto the cold floor,
44:22SPEAKERit's nice to heat up the house a little bit, I like it.
44:24SPEAKER- I absolutely get the benefits.
44:27SPEAKER- But it was a fairly expensive piece of kit
44:29SPEAKERwhen I bought it, it was like 300 bucks,
44:31SPEAKERI think 10 years ago, 250 bucks 10 years ago.
44:35SPEAKERThey, the justification they gave for killing it
44:37SPEAKERis that the hardware that those thermostats are running on
44:41SPEAKERis basically outside the scope of current Linux kernels.
44:45SPEAKERSo they'd have to back port a bunch of security stuff.
44:47SPEAKERAnd like, I get it.
44:48SPEAKER- I think that that is actually a fairly valid,
44:51SPEAKERI mean, it sucks, like don't get me wrong, this sucks,
44:54SPEAKERbut that is somewhat a thing outside of their control.
44:57SPEAKER- Also, it's a device that lives inside my firewall.
45:01SPEAKERSo I'm a little bit less concerned.
45:03SPEAKER- I, yeah, I don't know.
45:04SPEAKERI still think that good practicing,
45:06SPEAKERgood inter-network security is still advisable.
45:10SPEAKER- But you know, the right solution for this,
45:13SPEAKERthe problem, the fundamental problem with this
45:15SPEAKERis that these thermostats don't work local only.
45:18SPEAKERThey require the external service
45:20SPEAKERto have any kind of connection to another service.
45:23SPEAKER- Also, sorry, that would be
45:24SPEAKERintra-network security, I believe, right?
45:26SPEAKER- Yes, yeah.
45:27SPEAKER- Anyway, go on.
45:28SPEAKER- So, you know, if they had said,
45:30SPEAKERokay, we're gonna do one final firmware,
45:32SPEAKERit'll let it connect to stuff locally, but not remote,
45:36SPEAKERit'd be totally fine.
45:36SPEAKER'Cause like realistically,
45:37SPEAKERI wanted to talk to a home assistant
45:39SPEAKERand that's all that matters to me.
45:41SPEAKERThey didn't do that.
45:43SPEAKERSo they killed it.
45:44SPEAKERIt doesn't, they just shut off the services,
45:46SPEAKERwhich means that everybody who has one of these
45:48SPEAKERfirst or second gen Nest thermostats,
45:50SPEAKERjust to be clear, they're the ones with the twisty screen,
45:53SPEAKERno longer connects to the internet, which is a bummer.
45:55SPEAKER- Real quick, before we move on to the solution,
45:58SPEAKERI just have one question.
45:59SPEAKERDo you think, is there a legal CYA component to them
46:03SPEAKERnot opening it up in the way you suggested
46:05SPEAKERand just saying, hey, we've now unlocked it
46:06SPEAKERand you can just use it in a local only mode?
46:08SPEAKERIs there like, if they were to do that and some-
46:11SPEAKER- Somebody burned their house down?
46:12SPEAKER- Well, that, well, okay, yes.
46:13SPEAKERActually in this case where heat and cold are involved,
46:16SPEAKERI guess there's even more risk,
46:17SPEAKERbut if there were some like Nest worm
46:18SPEAKERthat got out there in the wake of them
46:20SPEAKERopening the platform up,
46:22SPEAKERdo you think it's just like from a legal standpoint,
46:25SPEAKERit's better for them to cover their asses
46:26SPEAKERand shut off support rather than open the possibility
46:29SPEAKERthat somebody could get hacked
46:30SPEAKERand have their house burned down by a virus?
46:32SPEAKER- I mean, I think probably our EULA that we signed
46:34SPEAKERwhen we signed up for that thing said they're like,
46:37SPEAKERwhatever they do to it with software
46:39SPEAKERis they're indemnified from-
46:40SPEAKER- You've already surrendered all your rights probably.
46:43SPEAKER- But also my guess is it's just cheaper
46:46SPEAKERto not have to maintain it, right?
46:48SPEAKER- Oh, definitely, there's definitely that.
46:50SPEAKER- Yeah, so there's multiple ways to solve this problem.
46:54SPEAKEROf course, if you were affected,
46:56SPEAKERthen they would give you like $20 off
46:58SPEAKERof a new $300 thermostat or $150 thermostat,
47:01SPEAKERwhich was nice, I guess.
47:03SPEAKERThere's also a couple of other solutions.
47:06SPEAKERSo there's a bunch of routes
47:08SPEAKERfor those first and second gen thermostats.
47:12SPEAKERAnd one of them, there's one project called No Longer Evil
47:16SPEAKERthat just- - That's a great name.
47:18SPEAKER- Yeah, right?
47:19SPEAKERIt redirects the thermostat software
47:22SPEAKERfrom talking to Google servers
47:23SPEAKERjust to a reverse engineered API that they are hosting,
47:27SPEAKERor alternately you can self-host it on your own LAN.
47:30SPEAKERAnd the self-hosting consists of like three Docker containers.
47:35SPEAKERIt looked relatively light.
47:36SPEAKERI haven't gone through the process of setting it up on mine yet.
47:39SPEAKERHe listed his experimental and says,
47:41SPEAKER"Don't use this if it's the only thing
47:42SPEAKER"you have to heat your house and you live someplace
47:44SPEAKER"that the weather will kill you,"
47:46SPEAKERwhich is good advice.
47:48SPEAKERSo I might go buy a $10 thermostat at the hardware store
47:51SPEAKERand keep that on hand just in case.
47:54SPEAKERThere's no Home Assistant tie-in for that right now,
47:57SPEAKERbut I'm sure that will come soon.
47:59SPEAKERAnd my guess is that given the way Home Assistant works,
48:03SPEAKERespecially if you're hosting it on a Pi,
48:05SPEAKERprobably somebody will put an HACS add-on
48:09SPEAKERthat runs the self-hosting
48:14SPEAKERand hooks it into HA before too long.
48:17SPEAKER'Cause this is all, like there was a bug bounty,
48:19SPEAKERthere was a bounty for this.
48:21SPEAKERThat person, this person claimed the bounty
48:24SPEAKERand released the self-hosting code shortly thereafter.
48:30SPEAKER- Quick digression.
48:31SPEAKERIs it easy to swap a thermostat?
48:33SPEAKERI guess it is.
48:34SPEAKER- For some reason, I never considered
48:37SPEAKERthat they would be $10 at a hardware store.
48:38SPEAKERI always assumed they would be like maybe 100 bucks
48:41SPEAKERand like a little more involved
48:42SPEAKERand not just like maybe a Home Depot purchase
48:45SPEAKERrather than a hardware store purchase.
48:46SPEAKERBut I guess like you said,
48:47SPEAKERit is just a small mechanical do-hickey, right?
48:52SPEAKER- I haven't bought a thermostat in 20 years, 15 years,
48:55SPEAKERbut when I bought the Nest, it was on a wall at Home Depot
48:59SPEAKERwith a whole buttload of other thermostats.
49:03SPEAKERFor whatever reason, sorry, I will let you go move on.
49:06SPEAKERBut for whatever reason, customizing the thermostat
49:09SPEAKERis like one of my top items
49:11SPEAKERif I were to own a house that I think-
49:12SPEAKER- You want one of the round like Honeywell ones
49:14SPEAKERfrom the '50s? - I think would be fun.
49:16SPEAKERI don't know what I would do with it.
49:17SPEAKERJust the idea that you can install your own thermostat,
49:19SPEAKERwhatever that may be is just like,
49:22SPEAKERit speaks to my need to customize and perfect
49:24SPEAKERin a way that I think few other things do.
49:28SPEAKER- I know.
49:29SPEAKERMy daughter is very excited about the idea
49:31SPEAKERof getting another smart thermostat
49:32SPEAKER'cause right now our solve when we're laying in bed
49:34SPEAKERand it's too cold is to text her and be like,
49:35SPEAKER"Hey, go turn the thermostat on."
49:37SPEAKERYou always wanted to be able to adjust the thermostat.
49:40SPEAKERNow you can, go turn the knob.
49:43SPEAKEROkay, so the other one is a hardware solution
49:46SPEAKERwhere they replace the PCB.
49:48SPEAKERThey set.homes, S-E-T-T.homes,
49:52SPEAKERsells a $150 PCB that works with existing hardware.
49:56SPEAKERSo basically you pop out the existing board.
49:58SPEAKERThey have a new board that you put in place.
50:00SPEAKER- Interesting. - That connects
50:02SPEAKERto Home Assistant and a bunch of other stuff
50:05SPEAKERjust using, I think MQTT.
50:07SPEAKER- Okay.
50:08SPEAKER- And you keep the screen, you keep the knob,
50:12SPEAKERyou keep the bracket.
50:13SPEAKERThe only thing that you change is the main board.
50:16SPEAKER- Are the screen and the knob nice enough
50:18SPEAKERto be worth this much trouble?
50:20SPEAKER- The knob's pretty nice.
50:21SPEAKERIt's got a real good knob feel.
50:23SPEAKER- Look, you cannot overstate the importance
50:26SPEAKERof good knob feel.
50:27SPEAKER- In fact, actually I don't like the new Nest
50:30SPEAKER'cause at least the new cheap Nest
50:31SPEAKERjust has a touch interface.
50:33SPEAKERSo you capacitively grab the outside edge of it
50:37SPEAKERand pretend that you're turning it, which feels icky.
50:41SPEAKER- Does yours have infinite knob?
50:43SPEAKER- Oh yeah, all the way around.
50:45SPEAKER- It just turns and turns and turns and that sounds great.
50:46SPEAKER- Spin free and it clicks too.
50:48SPEAKERThis is, remember, this is back from when Nest
50:50SPEAKERwas still a Tony Fidel joint.
50:52SPEAKERSo this is the person who brought you
50:53SPEAKERthe original click wheel on the iPod.
50:56SPEAKER- Oh, no shit. - Yeah.
50:58SPEAKER- Oh, wow. - Yeah.
50:59SPEAKER- Just the click wheel of thermostats, that's great.
51:01SPEAKER- Yeah, it's fantastic.
51:03SPEAKERNow the screen's really small.
51:04SPEAKERThe screen's like an inch and a half
51:06SPEAKERby an inch and a half or something
51:07SPEAKER'cause it's also from back in the day
51:08SPEAKERwhen LCDs were still kind of expensive.
51:11SPEAKERBut it's all disguised so you don't realize
51:13SPEAKERthat the screen's small 'cause it's like in the center
51:14SPEAKERin a circular thing and it works reasonably well.
51:18SPEAKERThey'll give you 20 bucks off on set.homes
51:21SPEAKERif you send them your old board back.
51:23SPEAKERSo they can, 'cause I assume what they're doing
51:25SPEAKERis flashing firmware on it and then sending them back out
51:30SPEAKERor doing something else.
51:31SPEAKERI don't know exactly what's going on,
51:32SPEAKERbut there's something happening
51:34SPEAKERthat they're using the old boards for.
51:37SPEAKER- Is there a scene for, well, whatever,
51:39SPEAKERthis is probably an episode
51:40SPEAKERor half an episode at some point.
51:42SPEAKERI wonder what the fully open thermostats,
51:45SPEAKERoh, we've talked about that before, actually.
51:45SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a bunch of them.
51:47SPEAKER- Yeah, that's right.
51:47SPEAKER- Well, so there's also Honeywell and Ecobee
51:50SPEAKERalso sell varying prices of connected thermostats
51:53SPEAKERthat will live entirely within your land
51:55SPEAKERand connect to Home Assist and SmartThings
51:57SPEAKERand all the other stuff in the ecosystem.
51:59SPEAKER- That's the type of thing I would get.
52:00SPEAKER- Before you spend 150 bucks on this set.homes PCB
52:04SPEAKERis worth noting that right now on Amazon for $100,
52:08SPEAKERyou can get an Ecobee smart thermostat
52:10SPEAKERthat works with Home Assist and all the other stuff
52:12SPEAKERdoesn't require external.
52:14SPEAKER- Yeah, that's exactly why I was asking
52:16SPEAKERif the screen and knob were worth this mod
52:18SPEAKER'cause it seems like a lot of money and work
52:20SPEAKERto resuscitate an old device
52:21SPEAKERif you could get just a new and open one.
52:23SPEAKER- Well, so the reason,
52:25SPEAKERa lot of times you build your thermostat
52:26SPEAKERinto specific places and if you have a round spot for it
52:30SPEAKERand you don't want to have to replace that
52:32SPEAKERwith a big square thing and have to repaint and stuff,
52:35SPEAKERit might actually be worth 150 bucks to not have to repaint.
52:38SPEAKER- Okay, sure.
52:40SPEAKER- So, but that's pretty much it.
52:41SPEAKERI thought it was interesting that I expected this to happen.
52:44SPEAKERI didn't expect it to happen quite so quickly.
52:47SPEAKERI'm gonna, as soon as the No Longer Evil
52:49SPEAKERgets a Home Assistant integration, I'm probably gonna
52:51SPEAKERset it up and see how it works.
52:54SPEAKER- Cool.
52:55SPEAKER- And probably, I think I'm gonna order
52:58SPEAKERone of those chibi kubis to have on hand
53:00SPEAKERand either return it if I don't need it
53:03SPEAKERor you know, whatever, use it to replace the Nest if I do.
53:08SPEAKER- Sure.
53:09SPEAKER- What else we got?
53:09SPEAKERWe got Nintendo once again is breaking third-party docs.
53:13SPEAKER- Yeah, did this happen on the Switch One?
53:16SPEAKER- Yeah, they did it on the Switch One too.
53:17SPEAKER- I guess it did, it did not with mine.
53:19SPEAKERI don't know, we talked about it ages ago.
53:21SPEAKER- There were like two waves of it, right?
53:23SPEAKERThere was the first ones where they had the,
53:26SPEAKERthere were a handful that always worked
53:28SPEAKERand then there were a bunch of what were essentially
53:31SPEAKERlike HDMI and power dongles for laptops
53:35SPEAKERthat worked for a little bit and then they stopped working.
53:38SPEAKER- Yes, that's right, 'cause I guess Nintendo was doing,
53:41SPEAKERas Nintendo will, some amount of weird non-standard stuff
53:44SPEAKERwith the video signal and possibly also the power draw
53:47SPEAKERon the Switch One.
53:48SPEAKER- But the Switch One, the power draw was just
53:49SPEAKERthat they only supported 29-watt USPPD.
53:53SPEAKER- Right.
53:54SPEAKER- So like there were 50 million other different draws
53:57SPEAKERthat they could have done, but that was the only one
53:58SPEAKERthat you could charge at full speed.
54:00SPEAKER- I can't remember the specifics,
54:01SPEAKERbut the video out was not just standard HDMI,
54:03SPEAKERit was some form of display port conversion
54:05SPEAKERor something as well.
54:06SPEAKER- There was shenanigans, yeah.
54:08SPEAKER- Anyway, we covered this years ago,
54:10SPEAKERlike three, four years ago on this podcast.
54:12SPEAKERI had a Genki covert dock, which I still use.
54:16SPEAKERIt's a little charge brick with the flip out plug
54:20SPEAKERthat just looks like your standard kind of iPad charger,
54:22SPEAKERbut it has HDMI and USB-C on it.
54:24SPEAKERAnd that thing never stopped working.
54:27SPEAKERI've used it as recently as a month ago on the Switch One.
54:30SPEAKER- How does it work on the Switch Two?
54:31SPEAKEROh, you don't have a Switch Two.
54:32SPEAKER- I don't know, I really need to buy a Switch Two.
54:34SPEAKERI just keep putting it off.
54:35SPEAKER- I mean, hey, 'cause this is just around the corner, Brad.
54:38SPEAKER- I mean, Metroid's coming out, now I have to get one
54:39SPEAKER'cause I really want to play Metroid.
54:41SPEAKERKirby Air Riders maybe is not quite the impetus.
54:44SPEAKER- I am, the end of the era, I used my last of the Switch,
54:48SPEAKERmy Switch Online membership coupon codes
54:52SPEAKERto get Metroid Prime.
54:53SPEAKER- Aha, I hope it'll be worth it.
54:56SPEAKER- Me too.
54:57SPEAKER- Anyway, system software 21.0.0 came out for the Switch Two
55:03SPEAKERand started breaking compatibility
55:05SPEAKERwith some people's Switch Two docks, third-party docks.
55:09SPEAKER- They're up to 21, 21.0.0?
55:12SPEAKER- So something I think I came to realize
55:14SPEAKERin the course of reading about this
55:15SPEAKERis that apparently they're using the same version numbers
55:17SPEAKERacross Switch One and Two.
55:18SPEAKER- Oh, that makes sense.
55:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so they both are getting the same versioned updates
55:22SPEAKERat the same time now, which is an interesting strategy,
55:24SPEAKERbut it's not all docks, apparently there's quite a few.
55:27SPEAKERLike I saw, there's an Avermedia third-party dock.
55:30SPEAKERAnd be clear, when I say dock, it typically, at this point,
55:33SPEAKERmeans like a little dongle, a little three-inch USB-C cable
55:38SPEAKERto a little breakout box-looking thing.
55:40SPEAKER- It's kind of for people who are traveling
55:42SPEAKERand want to be able to plug in their Switch Two TV
55:44SPEAKERor something, right?
55:45SPEAKER- That's the use case for this.
55:47SPEAKERI mean, a second Switch Two dock is not cheap,
55:49SPEAKERit's 125 bucks, but for me, it's less about the cost
55:53SPEAKERand more about the portability, 'cause who wants to fly
55:57SPEAKERwith the full-size Switch Two dock?
55:59SPEAKERLike that's not gonna happen.
56:02SPEAKERAnyway, this affected some brands, but not others.
56:05SPEAKERAnd I had actually not seen this
56:07SPEAKERuntil right before this podcast.
56:08SPEAKERApparently Nintendo gave Kotaku a statement
56:10SPEAKERthat they are not going out of their way
56:11SPEAKERto do this intentionally, 'cause that was the big,
56:14SPEAKERthat was the big panic moment when this happened was,
56:16SPEAKERoh God, are they just gonna try to play whack-a-mole
56:19SPEAKERthis whole generation and constantly break compatibility
56:22SPEAKERwith non-standard unlicensed accessories?
56:25SPEAKERIt does not seem to be the case, at least according to them.
56:28SPEAKER- Okay.
56:29SPEAKER- And I saw, you know, a lot of these have names
56:32SPEAKERyou have never heard of.
56:34SPEAKERGemdo is one of the main affected brands I saw.
56:39SPEAKER- I think Gemdo is one of the places
56:41SPEAKERthat made the HGCP stripper that we used to use
56:44SPEAKERfor PlayStation 3.
56:46SPEAKER- That is entirely possible.
56:48SPEAKERI'm on their support site and it's mostly in Japanese,
56:53SPEAKERbut not entirely.
56:54SPEAKERAnyway, they have already,
56:55SPEAKERthey were one of the main brands I saw
56:56SPEAKERthat was affected by this.
56:57SPEAKERThey have already put out a firmware
56:58SPEAKERthat they say addresses this problem.
57:01SPEAKER- Okay.
57:02SPEAKER- So it doesn't seem like,
57:04SPEAKERlike this struck terror into my heart
57:05SPEAKERbecause I love that covert dock.
57:07SPEAKERAnd I have not seen Genki talk about a Switch 2 version yet.
57:11SPEAKER- Well, yeah, 'cause the weird thing is
57:12SPEAKERwhen you plug a Switch 2 into Switch 1 power,
57:16SPEAKERit just is like, yo, you can't do this.
57:18SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's not gonna work.
57:21SPEAKERAnd you know, in the absence of a Genki-made dock,
57:23SPEAKER'cause I trust them,
57:24SPEAKER'cause their Switch 1 dock worked very well for me,
57:26SPEAKERI was figuring I'd have to get one of these other
57:28SPEAKERkind of no-name ones
57:29SPEAKERor made by some company you've never heard of.
57:33SPEAKER- That Genki dock, oh, sorry.
57:35SPEAKER- Well, I was just gonna say,
57:36SPEAKERit worried me that this was gonna be a thing
57:38SPEAKERthat Nintendo just started disallowing
57:40SPEAKERand that does not seem to be the case.
57:41SPEAKER- I mean, it's kind of annoying
57:44SPEAKERthat they put industry standard ports onto a device
57:47SPEAKERand then treat them in a non-industry standard way
57:51SPEAKERconsistently and didn't learn their lesson last go round.
57:55SPEAKER- I don't think there was a lesson for them to learn.
57:58SPEAKERThe lesson is, hey, we don't give a shit.
58:00SPEAKERWe make bajillions of dollars on this thing.
58:02SPEAKERWe have the fastest selling console of all time.
58:05SPEAKER- Is it the Switch 2?
58:06SPEAKER- Yes, by far.
58:07SPEAKER- Wow, really?
58:08SPEAKER- Yes, the Switch 2 is by far
58:09SPEAKERthe fastest selling console of all time.
58:11SPEAKER- Jesus, I didn't know that.
58:13SPEAKER- They sold over 10 million units in like four months.
58:15SPEAKER- That is insane.
58:16SPEAKER- Yeah, they're doing quite well.
58:18SPEAKERI mean, how long the tail will be is the real question.
58:20SPEAKERLike, will they hit a ceiling faster
58:22SPEAKERthan they did on the Switch 1?
58:23SPEAKERWho can say?
58:24SPEAKER- I mean, another Animal Crossing and a good pandemic
58:27SPEAKERand they'll sell another 50 or 60 million.
58:29SPEAKER- What if they instead just put out a free update
58:31SPEAKERto the five-year-old Animal Crossing?
58:32SPEAKER- I'm okay with that too.
58:33SPEAKER- 'Cause that's what they're doing.
58:34SPEAKERI mean, it's not a big update to be fair,
58:35SPEAKERbut-
58:37SPEAKER- Look, there were happy tears in my house
58:40SPEAKERwhen they announced that Animal Crossing update.
58:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I can see it.
58:44SPEAKER- The only disappointment was that it wasn't gonna be
58:45SPEAKERin time to get new stuff for New Year's, so.
58:48SPEAKER- Yeah, the thing I was gonna say,
58:49SPEAKERI've been following a thread on Reset Era for some time,
58:54SPEAKERdespite not owning a Switch 2,
58:55SPEAKERI've been following the thread on Reset Era
58:58SPEAKERof people trying out different third-party docs,
58:59SPEAKER'cause I really want a good third-party doc.
59:01SPEAKERLike, I travel enough and work remotely enough,
59:04SPEAKERlargely from family places, my family's house,
59:07SPEAKERthat having a travel doc is actually kind of important.
59:10SPEAKERAnd so I was worried this was not gonna be a possibility,
59:12SPEAKERbut it seems like it will be okay.
59:14SPEAKER- I wonder if it, 'cause the new one has more fans
59:17SPEAKERand stuff in the doc, right?
59:18SPEAKER- So that has come up, certainly,
59:20SPEAKERand the best I can tell, that cooling is just for cooling
59:23SPEAKERthe innards of the doc itself.
59:25SPEAKER'Cause you tell me, I don't have a Switch 2,
59:29SPEAKERbut I can't imagine there's anything
59:30SPEAKERon the back of the Switch 2 and inside the doc
59:32SPEAKERthat would facilitate any kind of efficient heat transfer,
59:35SPEAKERright, like it's not like there's metal plating
59:37SPEAKERin between the two, like you need good surface contact
59:39SPEAKERto transfer heat well.
59:41SPEAKER- I don't even know if it has like open vents.
59:45SPEAKER- Like, I can't imagine that the fan in the doc
59:47SPEAKERis cooling anything inside the Switch, but you tell me.
59:51SPEAKER- I'm opening up my Switch right now.
59:53SPEAKER- Oh, well, while you're doing that,
59:54SPEAKERlet me say that, like I said,
59:56SPEAKERsince I've been following that thread,
59:57SPEAKERthis has been a process over time of people going like,
1:00:00SPEAKER"Oh, the Gemdo doc works fine at 4K 60,
1:00:04SPEAKERbut not 1080p 120.
1:00:07SPEAKEROh, this other one does SDR fine, but not HDR fine."
1:00:10SPEAKERYou know, like, "Oh, this one's got a weird tint to it.
1:00:12SPEAKERThe color space is wrong.
1:00:14SPEAKERDid you get the drift here?"
1:00:16SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems like it's a problematic category.
1:00:18SPEAKER- It is something that these manufacturers
1:00:20SPEAKERhave all been figuring out over time,
1:00:21SPEAKERand it seems like none of them have quite gotten
1:00:24SPEAKERthe spec nailed down yet, but I'm hopeful
1:00:26SPEAKERthat in the next few months,
1:00:28SPEAKERthese things will just kind of work.
1:00:30SPEAKER- So I'm looking at the doc here,
1:00:31SPEAKERand it looks like the fans blow air up into the intakes
1:00:36SPEAKERon the bottom of the thing.
1:00:38SPEAKER- Of the Switch? - Of the Switch.
1:00:39SPEAKER- What do you mean by thing?
1:00:40SPEAKEROh, okay, maybe I'm wrong then.
1:00:41SPEAKERMaybe there is actual additional airflow then.
1:00:44SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think it's just to make sure
1:00:47SPEAKERit gets good airflow while it's in the doc.
1:00:49SPEAKER- That's a bit concerning, actually.
1:00:50SPEAKER- It doesn't ever feel warm when you pull it out of the doc
1:00:52SPEAKERafter playing with it for a while, though.
1:00:54SPEAKER- That feels like a, I mean, I know Gamers Nexus
1:00:55SPEAKERdoesn't really do console hardware,
1:00:57SPEAKERbut that feels like some tech-heavy YouTube channel
1:01:00SPEAKERthat's got thermal imaging equipment
1:01:02SPEAKERshould do some kind of test to see how much,
1:01:05SPEAKERhow crucial the cooling is in the doc for the Switch 2.
1:01:09SPEAKER- It's just, I mean- - For people like me.
1:01:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:01:12SPEAKER- For my use case specifically,
1:01:13SPEAKERsomebody please do a lot of labor
1:01:14SPEAKERto answer this question for me.
1:01:17SPEAKER- The YouTube.
1:01:19SPEAKER- I mean, I don't know what the bottom of my Switch 2
1:01:20SPEAKERand then cook it a month later when I go back home
1:01:23SPEAKERand play a bunch of Metroid there.
1:01:25SPEAKER- Look, it's not like a Windows laptop
1:01:26SPEAKERwhere you put it to sleep, put it in your bag,
1:01:28SPEAKERand you get on the airplane and open it up an hour later
1:01:30SPEAKERand your bag is warm.
1:01:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I suppose not.
1:01:32SPEAKER- Granted, we've reached the end of the show.
1:01:36SPEAKER- Have we?
1:01:36SPEAKER- Well, almost.
1:01:38SPEAKERIt's time to talk about tech we're thankful for.
1:01:40SPEAKER- That's right, one more segment.
1:01:41SPEAKER- One more segment.
1:01:44SPEAKERYou want me to start?
1:01:45SPEAKERI can kick it off.
1:01:46SPEAKER- Yeah, go for it.
1:01:47SPEAKER- I love tiling window managers, man.
1:01:49SPEAKER- Do you?
1:01:50SPEAKER- This is not a surprise for anybody
1:01:51SPEAKERwho's listened to the show lately, but-
1:01:52SPEAKER- Have you converted fully?
1:01:54SPEAKER- It feels, you know how you get a new Mac laptop
1:01:58SPEAKERand you're using Windows most of the time
1:02:00SPEAKERand you switch back and forth
1:02:00SPEAKERand one of them feels like the bad OS
1:02:02SPEAKERand one of them feels like the good OS?
1:02:04SPEAKERYeah, I got that.
1:02:05SPEAKER- Really?
1:02:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:02:07SPEAKER- Interesting.
1:02:08SPEAKER- Neary's some hot, hot biz.
1:02:09SPEAKER- Are you now tiling when you are in Windows?
1:02:11SPEAKER'Cause you can use fancy zones
1:02:13SPEAKERor there's keyboard shortcuts to snap windows.
1:02:15SPEAKERAre you still trying to approximate the experience?
1:02:17SPEAKER- What if I just didn't go into Windows very much?
1:02:20SPEAKER- Also an option.
1:02:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:02:22SPEAKER- Yeah, so I put Neary on my desktop at home.
1:02:25SPEAKERI'm absolutely besmirched.
1:02:28SPEAKER- Is it working well without a track pad?
1:02:30SPEAKER'Cause I've got the sense that the gestures
1:02:32SPEAKERwere probably pretty crucial for window management
1:02:34SPEAKERor maybe not.
1:02:35SPEAKER- That was my concern.
1:02:37SPEAKERThe thing I don't exactly have yet
1:02:39SPEAKERis hotkeys for switching workspaces,
1:02:42SPEAKERbut since I have multiple monitors,
1:02:43SPEAKERI don't really use multiple workspaces as much
1:02:45SPEAKERon the desktop as I do on the laptop.
1:02:47SPEAKER- It's a nice thing about a lot of Linux software though,
1:02:49SPEAKERlike custom hotkeys are a configuration file added away.
1:02:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so I just have to figure out
1:02:54SPEAKERwhat the Neary command is to switch those workplaces.
1:02:58SPEAKER- Do you know how big the input.conf for MPV is for me now?
1:03:01SPEAKERLike I've added so many extra hotkeys to MPV
1:03:05SPEAKERfor video navigation stuff.
1:03:08SPEAKER- Let me go see how big my Neary config file is.
1:03:12SPEAKER'Cause it's getting, it's up to 17K now.
1:03:15SPEAKERSo we're getting there.
1:03:17SPEAKER- Great.
1:03:18SPEAKER- But no, it's, for folks who don't know,
1:03:21SPEAKERa tiling window manager kind of works like the iPad OS
1:03:24SPEAKERin a lot of ways.
1:03:26SPEAKERSo you, instead of having to place your windows
1:03:29SPEAKERon the screen, it just says, okay,
1:03:31SPEAKERthey can be full width, a quarter, a third,
1:03:35SPEAKERthey can be half height, they can be full height,
1:03:37SPEAKERthey can be full screen, they can be maximized.
1:03:40SPEAKER- Let me try this sequentially.
1:03:41SPEAKERYou tell me, is this an accurate flow?
1:03:44SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:45SPEAKER- Like boot into the shell, empty desktop,
1:03:48SPEAKERyou see a wallpaper, you open a browser,
1:03:51SPEAKERit just immediately opens full screen, right?
1:03:53SPEAKER- It actually opens half screen by default.
1:03:54SPEAKER- Oh, really?
1:03:55SPEAKER- You can set that.
1:03:56SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I'm sure you can customize that.
1:03:58SPEAKER- So I do everything half width by default
1:03:59SPEAKERand then you can super key, which is your windows key
1:04:03SPEAKERplus or minus to make them wider or narrower.
1:04:05SPEAKER- Got it.
1:04:06SPEAKEROr if you did have it set where like,
1:04:08SPEAKERsay you open a browser and it's full screen
1:04:10SPEAKERand then you open something else or even a second browser
1:04:13SPEAKERand then it splits it to half screen
1:04:14SPEAKERand then each one is now taking up half the screen, right?
1:04:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:17SPEAKER- It basically is dynamically resizing windows
1:04:20SPEAKERto make the most use of space.
1:04:21SPEAKER- Well, and then what Neary does
1:04:23SPEAKERis it just gives you infinite scroll out to the side.
1:04:25SPEAKER- That's the one that doesn't use multiple desktops.
1:04:27SPEAKERIt just, you just scroll apps forever.
1:04:29SPEAKER- Well, you can do multiple desktops too.
1:04:31SPEAKER- I assume there's some mechanism for jumping way back
1:04:33SPEAKERin the stack to a much earlier app
1:04:35SPEAKERand not having to just manually scroll there.
1:04:37SPEAKER- So I find that I don't get more than five or six
1:04:39SPEAKERon a scroll because most of my work happens
1:04:42SPEAKERinside browser tabs, honestly.
1:04:44SPEAKERSo it's less of an issue.
1:04:45SPEAKERNow, the other thing that I've done
1:04:47SPEAKERis that you can set up rules for workplaces,
1:04:50SPEAKERworkspaces and windows.
1:04:52SPEAKERSo like anytime a window opens that the app ID is,
1:04:56SPEAKERfor example, steam app underscore,
1:04:58SPEAKERthat automatically opens full screen on my game workspace.
1:05:02SPEAKERSo I just, and it switches to it so it focuses.
1:05:05SPEAKERSo basically it solves the problem that Wayland has
1:05:11SPEAKERwhere it doesn't have a primary display equivalent
1:05:13SPEAKERand doesn't know where to launch application, launch games.
1:05:16SPEAKERAnd, and I have it set so it does all that stuff.
1:05:20SPEAKERLike the browser automatically opens on the main monitor,
1:05:23SPEAKERdiscord and slack and OBS and the apps that I use
1:05:27SPEAKERfor communication and stuff all open on the top display.
1:05:31SPEAKERAnd it ends up meaning that I don't spend as much time
1:05:34SPEAKERfiddling with where applications are on the desktop
1:05:37SPEAKERas I do on a windows machine.
1:05:40SPEAKERAnd I never lose windows.
1:05:41SPEAKERI can always hit windows key plus O to go to the overview
1:05:45SPEAKERand then see exactly what I want and click directly into it.
1:05:48SPEAKERIt's very good.
1:05:49SPEAKERYeah.
1:05:50SPEAKER- Pretty easy to rearrange windows, I assume.
1:05:52SPEAKER- Yeah, you hit control.
1:05:53SPEAKERYou hold control when you're pressing the windows key
1:05:54SPEAKERand hit the either drag or you can do buttons
1:05:58SPEAKERand it switches them.
1:05:59SPEAKERIt moves the window that you have focused
1:06:01SPEAKERwhen you have control pressed.
1:06:03SPEAKER- I'll probably give that a shot
1:06:04SPEAKERwhen I get back to desktop Linux.
1:06:06SPEAKERIf I, if and when that happens, I still,
1:06:08SPEAKERI still don't think it's for me,
1:06:09SPEAKERbut I will at least try it just for my edification
1:06:11SPEAKERif nothing else.
1:06:12SPEAKER- It is, it is very Brad.
1:06:15SPEAKER- I think I get it.
1:06:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I kinda.
1:06:17SPEAKER- But also, I don't know.
1:06:19SPEAKERI think I made this point on the discord at one time.
1:06:22SPEAKEROn some level, all of my computing life is just chasing
1:06:25SPEAKERafter the high that I got looking at screens
1:06:27SPEAKERof next step in the nineties.
1:06:29SPEAKER- That's true.
1:06:30SPEAKER- Like when John Romero would post a picture of his desktop
1:06:34SPEAKERand it looked like the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
1:06:37SPEAKERAnd so I'm always, I'm always, I like floating windows.
1:06:40SPEAKERI like, I like a somewhat chaotic desktop full of windows
1:06:44SPEAKERof different sizes in odd places.
1:06:46SPEAKER- Brad, it's time next April.
1:06:49SPEAKERWe're going to see a next cube next year.
1:06:50SPEAKERYou need to buy a next cube.
1:06:51SPEAKER- Oh, we saw one at the last electronics market last year.
1:06:54SPEAKERThere was one, I think it was like,
1:06:55SPEAKERit was like 300 bucks though.
1:06:57SPEAKERThat was too much.
1:06:57SPEAKER- That's, that is, think of how much,
1:06:59SPEAKERhow much that hardware used to cost though.
1:07:01SPEAKER- It might've been more than that actually.
1:07:02SPEAKERI don't know.
1:07:03SPEAKER- I would buy a next cube for 300 bucks.
1:07:04SPEAKERMore than that I'd have to think about.
1:07:05SPEAKER- I don't remember if it was verified working either.
1:07:08SPEAKER- It wasn't a cube also.
1:07:09SPEAKERIt was the other one.
1:07:10SPEAKER- Oh, was it not?
1:07:10SPEAKEROkay, it was, it was one of the smaller workstations.
1:07:13SPEAKERThat's way less interesting then.
1:07:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:07:16SPEAKERYou want to do one?
1:07:17SPEAKERYou want me to do all mine?
1:07:18SPEAKER- Okay, I know we need to end this podcast.
1:07:20SPEAKERCan I ask real quick,
1:07:21SPEAKERhave you done anything with Quickshell and Neary?
1:07:22SPEAKERHave you, have you scripted any of your own desktop widgets?
1:07:26SPEAKER- So I haven't done that.
1:07:27SPEAKERI'm using Natalia shell,
1:07:28SPEAKERwhich lives between Quickshell and Neary.
1:07:31SPEAKER- I think it's built on Quickshell if I understand.
1:07:33SPEAKER- It is built, everything's built on Quickshell.
1:07:35SPEAKERI've adjusted some of the things that they ship,
1:07:37SPEAKERbut I actually realized that that was probably a mistake
1:07:39SPEAKER'cause then it prevents me from taking updates.
1:07:41SPEAKERSo I basically pulled out what I'd done and saved it
1:07:46SPEAKERand I'll make it a plugin at some point.
1:07:47SPEAKERIt's really easy.
1:07:49SPEAKER- That's, to see that, like tiling window managers,
1:07:52SPEAKERI don't know, maybe, but the, I've said this before,
1:07:54SPEAKERthe ability to effectively like script or code your own
1:07:57SPEAKERin a very easy language, your own UI elements
1:08:01SPEAKERis like maybe the most intoxicating thing I've heard
1:08:04SPEAKERabout a computer interface in many years.
1:08:07SPEAKER- Well, and the thing, the Natalia folks are building
1:08:10SPEAKERat a pretty good clip right now and have like,
1:08:13SPEAKERI don't know, like my, the default bar,
1:08:16SPEAKERwhich is like the taskbar equivalent, I guess,
1:08:19SPEAKERhas like CPU utilization,
1:08:23SPEAKERmemory, CPU temperature, memory utilization,
1:08:27SPEAKERlike the applications, media that's playing,
1:08:30SPEAKERthe window that's currently focused,
1:08:32SPEAKERand then like a tray equivalent that's like the applications
1:08:35SPEAKERlike Slack and OBS that have tray bar icons.
1:08:39SPEAKERAnd then it has like a little pop-down control panel thing
1:08:42SPEAKERthat has like the weather and Bluetooth and wifi
1:08:45SPEAKERand wallpaper selectors and which performance mode I'm on
1:08:49SPEAKERand all that kind of stuff.
1:08:50SPEAKERIt's really good.
1:08:51SPEAKERIt like, it solves about 90% of my problems with Linux, so.
1:08:54SPEAKER- That sounds fun.
1:08:55SPEAKER- It's good.
1:08:57SPEAKER- I have written wireless input devices.
1:08:59SPEAKER- Oh.
1:09:00SPEAKER- And I, as mentioned at the top of the show,
1:09:02SPEAKERI am coming up on two years with this wireless mouse,
1:09:05SPEAKERthis Logitech Lightspeed,
1:09:06SPEAKERand I've just passed a year
1:09:08SPEAKERon this Keychron mechanical keyboard.
1:09:12SPEAKERI had the Apple magic keyboard that I used on this PC
1:09:15SPEAKERfor some time before that.
1:09:17SPEAKER- Like 10 years.
1:09:18SPEAKER- No, no, no, no.
1:09:19SPEAKERI've been using Apple keyboards for 10 or 15 years,
1:09:21SPEAKERbut that magic keyboard, like after the pandemic started,
1:09:24SPEAKERbut that was Bluetooth and Bluetooth does not count here.
1:09:28SPEAKER- Oh.
1:09:29SPEAKER- As fuck Bluetooth.
1:09:30SPEAKER- Which is 2.4 gigahertz also though.
1:09:32SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but I'm,
1:09:33SPEAKERwhat I've written here is 2.4 gigahertz only.
1:09:36SPEAKERI'm talking about devices that ship their own
1:09:37SPEAKER2.4 gigahertz dongle,
1:09:40SPEAKERbecause in the case of both the Keychron keyboard
1:09:42SPEAKERand the Logitech mouse,
1:09:45SPEAKERthey each have their own dongle,
1:09:45SPEAKERwhich I've just got plugged into extenders
1:09:47SPEAKERcoming out of the back of the PC.
1:09:49SPEAKERThey are incredibly responsive.
1:09:51SPEAKERLike I cannot tell the difference from wired
1:09:53SPEAKERin terms of latency.
1:09:54SPEAKERLike they wake up immediately, even though they sleep.
1:09:57SPEAKERI charge these things like maybe at most twice a month.
1:10:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:10:01SPEAKER- Like probably more like every three, three-ish weeks
1:10:04SPEAKERfor like 20 minutes each.
1:10:06SPEAKERLike I never turn them off, they sleep all night.
1:10:08SPEAKERLike they last for weeks.
1:10:10SPEAKERThey wake up instantly the second I touch them.
1:10:13SPEAKERThe keyboard, this is crucial.
1:10:15SPEAKERThe keyboard, I can now go into the UEFI or the BIOS
1:10:18SPEAKERwithout having to plug in a wired keyboard.
1:10:21SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that's the reason I have a wired keyboard.
1:10:23SPEAKER- Which was the stealth reason that I bought this Keyfron.
1:10:26SPEAKERI wanted a mechanical keyboard,
1:10:27SPEAKERbut also the real reason was,
1:10:29SPEAKERwhat if I could just use this keyboard
1:10:31SPEAKERfor everything I do in this computer
1:10:33SPEAKERand never have to fish out a wired keyboard again
1:10:35SPEAKERto plug in to like go into the BIOS?
1:10:38SPEAKERHuge game changer.
1:10:40SPEAKERLike wireless input devices, as far as I'm concerned,
1:10:44SPEAKERare like as good as now, like maybe better than,
1:10:48SPEAKERlike they're just default for me now.
1:10:51SPEAKER- The, so I love, I have the same,
1:10:53SPEAKERwell, I have a different wireless mouse,
1:10:55SPEAKERbut I use the light speed dongle.
1:10:57SPEAKERI actually have the power play pad,
1:11:00SPEAKERwhich I thought was kind of gratuitous.
1:11:02SPEAKERAnd I think they sent one to me.
1:11:03SPEAKERI think Logitech at one point was like,
1:11:04SPEAKER"Hey, do you want to try this out?
1:11:05SPEAKER"We're sending these out to people."
1:11:06SPEAKERI was like, "Yeah, sure, I'll take it whenever.
1:11:07SPEAKER"It sounds goofy."
1:11:09SPEAKERMan, I know they're expensive.
1:11:11SPEAKERAnd I know they're like, it's like 150 bucks for the pad.
1:11:16SPEAKERIt works with the entire range of wireless mice
1:11:18SPEAKERthat they sell, at least the gaming ones.
1:11:22SPEAKERIt is so nice to never have to think about
1:11:24SPEAKERcharging my mouse.
1:11:25SPEAKERI mount a wired keyboard still because of the UEFI thing.
1:11:27SPEAKER- Okay, then you already have a cord, so.
1:11:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't, I'm not, look, my desk has piles on it.
1:11:32SPEAKERI'm not really cord-averse.
1:11:34SPEAKER- Yes, well, that's the deal breaker for me
1:11:36SPEAKERis that I am cord free now otherwise.
1:11:38SPEAKERSo I will happily plug in the mouse every two, three weeks
1:11:41SPEAKERto avoid any permanent cords.
1:11:43SPEAKER- Like two or three weeks is fine.
1:11:45SPEAKERFor me, it's the older wireless mice were like,
1:11:48SPEAKERit was like four days when they first started
1:11:50SPEAKERdoing the light speed sensors.
1:11:52SPEAKER- That's way too much.
1:11:53SPEAKERAnd that's just enough that you don't do it every day.
1:11:56SPEAKERLike there's a window somewhere in there that's like,
1:12:00SPEAKERhey, every day, fine.
1:12:03SPEAKEREvery other day, less good.
1:12:04SPEAKEREvery fourth day is a nightmare.
1:12:07SPEAKERBut then once a month, no problem.
1:12:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I'd say it's close to once a month for me, honestly.
1:12:12SPEAKERIt really, I'm shocked how long these things last.
1:12:16SPEAKERAnd last thing about this, I mean,
1:12:19SPEAKERI guess not every keyboard has this,
1:12:20SPEAKERbut the Keychron has its 2.4 gigahertz setting
1:12:24SPEAKERthat I use with PC,
1:12:25SPEAKERbut it's also got a Bluetooth switch on it.
1:12:27SPEAKERAnd so I've got it paired with my mister for Bluetooth.
1:12:29SPEAKERAnd there are a bunch of cases where you need a keyboard
1:12:32SPEAKERon a mister to do something useful.
1:12:34SPEAKERThe ability to be at this PC tinkering with a mister
1:12:36SPEAKERand just flick a switch and immediately type into that thing.
1:12:39SPEAKERLike I never have to dig out a wired keyboard
1:12:41SPEAKERfor basically anything now and it's the fucking best.
1:12:43SPEAKER- That is your argument in favor of.
1:12:46SPEAKERI have one of those 8BitDo Nintendo keyboards
1:12:51SPEAKERand it has the wired Bluetooth 2.4 gigahertz switch
1:12:54SPEAKERand it's delightful.
1:12:55SPEAKER- Yeah, it's great.
1:12:56SPEAKER- Highly recommend it.
1:12:57SPEAKER- Yep.
1:12:58SPEAKER- Okay, I got Lunar Lake on the list.
1:13:00SPEAKERI got a Lunar Lake laptop as a loaner from PC world
1:13:03SPEAKERto do Linux stuff on.
1:13:05SPEAKERAnd holy crap, it is incredible to have an x86 laptop
1:13:09SPEAKERthat has like day and a half battery life
1:13:13SPEAKERand it performs fast.
1:13:16SPEAKERIt feels like a fast computer.
1:13:18SPEAKERI'm a huge fan, love the work that they've done.
1:13:21SPEAKERI'm kind of bummed that it's a dead end.
1:13:24SPEAKERIt's in terms of-
1:13:24SPEAKER- It's like a one off, yeah.
1:13:25SPEAKERIt's kind of sad.
1:13:27SPEAKERI mean, hopefully Panther Lake at least gets close
1:13:29SPEAKERto some of that stuff.
1:13:31SPEAKERI know they're not doing like the solder on RAM
1:13:32SPEAKERor the part of the package RAM.
1:13:35SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think the on package RAM
1:13:38SPEAKERprobably maybe was a good thing, was a bad thing then
1:13:41SPEAKERand as the RAM prices go up,
1:13:43SPEAKERseems like maybe it's a good thing.
1:13:44SPEAKER'Cause I wonder who's gonna start
1:13:45SPEAKERshipping 16 gig laptops again.
1:13:48SPEAKERBut yeah, I thought it was like it's a combination
1:13:51SPEAKERof battery life and performance that exactly hits the spot
1:13:55SPEAKERthat I wanna live.
1:13:57SPEAKERAnd like, just to be clear on a laptop,
1:13:58SPEAKERI'm not doing anything heavy.
1:13:59SPEAKERI maybe do a little bit of light audio editing.
1:14:01SPEAKERI don't do video anymore.
1:14:03SPEAKERI don't do games really.
1:14:06SPEAKERBut it's like competent enough if I switch the VRAM over,
1:14:09SPEAKERshift the VRAM, a little bit of VRAM over from the 32 gigs.
1:14:14SPEAKERIf I put four gigs of VRAM on it,
1:14:15SPEAKERI can even play like basic indie stuff pretty well.
1:14:19SPEAKER- That's cool.
1:14:20SPEAKER- So yeah.
1:14:20SPEAKER- You're basically like getting the benefits of the ARM Max
1:14:23SPEAKERbut on x86 now.
1:14:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:14:25SPEAKER- And that's awesome that that's happening.
1:14:27SPEAKER'Cause like, it's awesome to think that all laptops
1:14:28SPEAKERmight just be that way in five years or so.
1:14:31SPEAKER- I mean, there's no reason they can't be at this point
1:14:34SPEAKERis my takeaway from that device.
1:14:37SPEAKER- That's kind of been a revelation.
1:14:38SPEAKERLike it wasn't ARM so much as like other factors
1:14:43SPEAKERabout the way those things are made.
1:14:45SPEAKER- Well, yeah, as much as like focusing on every watt drawn.
1:14:48SPEAKER- Right.
1:14:49SPEAKERLike you could do the same thing with x86
1:14:51SPEAKERif you had a similar focus.
1:14:53SPEAKER- Yep.
1:14:53SPEAKER- I've seen people on our discord who talk about like
1:14:56SPEAKERgoing to work with their ARM Mac without a charger.
1:15:01SPEAKER- So I don't carry, I never carry a charger to PC World.
1:15:04SPEAKER- Right.
1:15:04SPEAKERLike I've still got, well, of course you're only there
1:15:06SPEAKERfor a few hours, right?
1:15:07SPEAKERNot a full.
1:15:08SPEAKER- Right.
1:15:09SPEAKER- Oh, are you there?
1:15:09SPEAKEROkay, well that's a full day.
1:15:10SPEAKERLike, yeah, like I just, I say, and then they're just like,
1:15:13SPEAKERoh, I've got 40% battery when I leave every day.
1:15:15SPEAKERWhat's the point?
1:15:16SPEAKERAnd I'm just like, that terrifies me, but I guess I get it.
1:15:19SPEAKER- Well, okay, so in fairness,
1:15:20SPEAKERwe also have a buttload of USB chargers around.
1:15:23SPEAKERSo it's not like, not like it's a problem,
1:15:24SPEAKERbut I assume at this point,
1:15:27SPEAKERlike we also have a buttload of USB chargers around
1:15:29SPEAKERfor other people who are working in the office
1:15:31SPEAKERand are doing the same thing, right?
1:15:32SPEAKER- Yeah, that's also something that's changed
1:15:34SPEAKERsince ARM Macs first came out,
1:15:36SPEAKERthe ubiquity of USB-C charging everywhere.
1:15:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, most of the desks in our office
1:15:41SPEAKERhave a USB-C docking thing that plugs into the monitor
1:15:45SPEAKERand keyboard and mouse that are just on the desk.
1:15:47SPEAKER- That's cool.
1:15:48SPEAKER- 'Cause we do floating desks now.
1:15:49SPEAKER- That's cool.
1:15:52SPEAKERI guess I'm up.
1:15:53SPEAKER- Yeah, what do you got?
1:15:54SPEAKER- This is maybe a weird one,
1:15:55SPEAKERbut I put video game consoles here.
1:15:57SPEAKER- Oh, you like the Steam Deck?
1:16:01SPEAKER- Sure.
1:16:02SPEAKER- Okay.
1:16:05SPEAKER- I hope video game consoles continue to be around.
1:16:08SPEAKERFor somebody who likes computers as much as I do,
1:16:10SPEAKERI play basically everything I can on a console.
1:16:13SPEAKER- Yeah, it's funny, like, are you playing,
1:16:15SPEAKERwhen you played arcade, you played that on PC, right?
1:16:17SPEAKER- I played that on PC.
1:16:18SPEAKER- Shooters you play on PC.
1:16:20SPEAKER- There's some stuff where the mouse is kind of key
1:16:22SPEAKERand et cetera, et cetera.
1:16:24SPEAKERBut I mean, there's multiple reasons there.
1:16:26SPEAKERLike, you know, it's pretty much only get to see
1:16:29SPEAKERmy girlfriend at night, so it's nice to play games at night
1:16:31SPEAKERin the place where she is and not in this room
1:16:33SPEAKERwhere I spend the rest of my entire waking life.
1:16:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:16:36SPEAKER- For one thing, she's dancing in the doorway right now.
1:16:39SPEAKER- That's nice.
1:16:40SPEAKER- But something that occurred to me
1:16:42SPEAKERas I was making this list is that consoles, I mean, okay,
1:16:46SPEAKERlike the old thing about consoles is,
1:16:47SPEAKERoh, you just press the button and go,
1:16:48SPEAKERlike there's no drivers to set up,
1:16:50SPEAKERthere's no settings to worry about, et cetera, et cetera.
1:16:54SPEAKERI've come to realize that's valuable to me
1:16:56SPEAKERfor a different reason than the average person
1:16:58SPEAKERwho just doesn't want to deal with that stuff
1:16:59SPEAKER'cause I fut with computers constantly, right?
1:17:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:17:02SPEAKER- And the reason it's good for me is that it helps
1:17:04SPEAKERto kind of head off my worst tendencies about
1:17:08SPEAKERmaking sure I'm like getting the exact best experience
1:17:10SPEAKERon a PC game.
1:17:11SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:17:12SPEAKERLike not having options sometimes
1:17:14SPEAKERis the best option of all.
1:17:15SPEAKER- That's like, I'm never gonna have to go like
1:17:17SPEAKERlook at lists of recommended settings for like,
1:17:20SPEAKERis the SSSAO better on this one
1:17:22SPEAKERor should I switch to this other thing
1:17:24SPEAKERor like what is the performance impact?
1:17:25SPEAKERLike, and I know like GeForce,
1:17:28SPEAKERthere's like the GeForce thing exists,
1:17:30SPEAKERwhatever it's called that optimizes the settings.
1:17:32SPEAKERLike I know there's stuff like that,
1:17:33SPEAKERbut I'm always going to obsess over,
1:17:35SPEAKERI gotta make sure the settings are ideal
1:17:37SPEAKERbefore I get in here.
1:17:38SPEAKER- See, I used to be like that.
1:17:39SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:17:40SPEAKER- But I just stopped.
1:17:42SPEAKERI had to stop.
1:17:43SPEAKER- That's another option,
1:17:44SPEAKERbut look that requires personal growth and discovery.
1:17:47SPEAKER- Well, for me, it was that I had been, yeah,
1:17:51SPEAKERlike working in this space and doing benchmarks
1:17:54SPEAKERand stuff all the time cured me of that pretty quickly,
1:17:56SPEAKERI guess.
1:17:57SPEAKER- Yeah, sure, I could see that.
1:17:58SPEAKERBut like, I mean, I just like to plop down
1:18:01SPEAKERand know that I'm kind of getting the curated experience,
1:18:03SPEAKERI guess is the best way to put it.
1:18:05SPEAKER- That's why you need to switch to a brother.
1:18:06SPEAKER- The advent of the pro consoles has muddied that
1:18:08SPEAKERin some measure, you know, because they're-
1:18:11SPEAKER- Do you want performance mode
1:18:12SPEAKERor do you want a ray tracing mode?
1:18:14SPEAKER- Like there are games shipping
1:18:15SPEAKERwith three or four different graphics modes now,
1:18:17SPEAKERbut even then, like even with four modes,
1:18:19SPEAKERwhich is a lot for a console game,
1:18:20SPEAKERit takes about 30 seconds
1:18:21SPEAKERto pull up the digital foundry article
1:18:24SPEAKERand see what they all do and just pick one.
1:18:26SPEAKERSo I hope game consoles stick around in this era
1:18:31SPEAKERof the next Xbox becoming part PC
1:18:33SPEAKERand the Steam machine being a PC underneath
1:18:36SPEAKERand et cetera, et cetera.
1:18:37SPEAKERI really hope, like I grew up loving the form
1:18:41SPEAKERof the video game console.
1:18:42SPEAKERIt's the first like product I was ever, you know,
1:18:44SPEAKERlike obsessed with or that inspired me.
1:18:46SPEAKERAnd I really hope that that concept
1:18:48SPEAKERdoes not entirely go away.
1:18:50SPEAKER- I think at least two of the three will remain.
1:18:53SPEAKER- Okay.
1:18:54SPEAKER- Or three of the four, I guess, I don't know.
1:18:56SPEAKER- We count Steam Deck.
1:18:57SPEAKERYeah.
1:18:58SPEAKER- I don't know.
1:18:59SPEAKER- My last one on the list is the Pine Seal.
1:19:01SPEAKERI think this was on my list last year, technically,
1:19:04SPEAKERbut I have used it so much this year.
1:19:07SPEAKER- Really?
1:19:08SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I got a battery pack that works with it,
1:19:10SPEAKERwhich was the big jump for me.
1:19:12SPEAKERSo I got one of those big, like 12,000,
1:19:16SPEAKER24,000 watt hour battery or milli watt hour batteries.
1:19:20SPEAKERAnd it means that like when I needed to pull the fan out
1:19:26SPEAKERof one of the blow ups in the front yard
1:19:28SPEAKERand I needed to solder the wires back in place,
1:19:30SPEAKERI was able to just do it.
1:19:31SPEAKERNow all I need is a little,
1:19:34SPEAKERlike a thing that can shrink heat shrink tubing
1:19:36SPEAKERthat also runs off the same battery.
1:19:38SPEAKERThat would be dope, a little hot air blower.
1:19:41SPEAKERBut yeah, I used it for that.
1:19:42SPEAKERI used it to fix a monitor.
1:19:43SPEAKERI used it to fix, like I literally,
1:19:47SPEAKERI pull it out of the drawer twice a month probably.
1:19:49SPEAKER- Wow.
1:19:51SPEAKER- I mean, we have a lot of janky,
1:19:53SPEAKERlike little kid electronics, it turns out.
1:19:55SPEAKER- Sure, sure.
1:19:56SPEAKER- Often need wires replaced.
1:19:57SPEAKER- I'm kind of jealous.
1:19:58SPEAKERI bought mine and I used it like twice ever,
1:20:01SPEAKERwhich is not a knock on the product.
1:20:03SPEAKERI just don't have a lot of use cases for soldering,
1:20:05SPEAKERit turns out.
1:20:06SPEAKER- That DBX is calling you, man.
1:20:07SPEAKER- Hi dude.
1:20:09SPEAKERIf I could, I would.
1:20:10SPEAKERLike if I knew what to fix in there
1:20:11SPEAKERto make this thing reliable, I would do it.
1:20:14SPEAKERBut it seems like there are so many things in there
1:20:15SPEAKERthat it could be that I would basically have to like
1:20:17SPEAKERrebuild the entire thing from scratch.
1:20:20SPEAKERAnd that's not gonna happen.
1:20:22SPEAKER- Yep.
1:20:23SPEAKER- My turn.
1:20:24SPEAKER- Mine's a loans, yeah.
1:20:25SPEAKER- Yeah, okay.
1:20:26SPEAKER- Highly recommend a silicone coated USB cable to go with it.
1:20:31SPEAKER- I bought one of those.
1:20:32SPEAKERI wonder if there are a lot of serious competitors
1:20:33SPEAKERto that thing.
1:20:35SPEAKER- There's a bunch of knockoffs, it looks like.
1:20:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:20:37SPEAKER- The last time I looked.
1:20:38SPEAKER- That's kind of what I mean by serious competitor.
1:20:40SPEAKERLike I would exclude knockoffs from that
1:20:42SPEAKERand only include things that are like substantially
1:20:44SPEAKERdifferent, but similar.
1:20:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:20:48SPEAKER- Things that are their own product
1:20:48SPEAKERand not just an annotation, I guess is what I mean.
1:20:51SPEAKER- For me, like it's weird for me
1:20:52SPEAKER'cause I have like the full Hakko like, you know,
1:20:56SPEAKERsoldering station that I just, it's on my table over there.
1:20:59SPEAKERAnd I pull it out occasionally
1:21:00SPEAKERif I have a big project to do,
1:21:02SPEAKERbut for just the quick touch up that pine sill for $25
1:21:05SPEAKERor whatever it costs is fricking magic.
1:21:07SPEAKER- Yeah, it's crazy for the price, right?
1:21:10SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:21:11SPEAKER- Okay, last one.
1:21:13SPEAKER- Maybe I got mine to have one more, maybe.
1:21:14SPEAKER- Okay, that's one.
1:21:15SPEAKERAll right, well, this was my last one.
1:21:17SPEAKER- Okay.
1:21:18SPEAKER- This is kind of a weird one,
1:21:19SPEAKERbut running my own VPN and VPS.
1:21:23SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I get this.
1:21:24SPEAKER- Like I have a WireGuard endpoint in my house,
1:21:29SPEAKERwhich is Raspberry Pi.
1:21:30SPEAKERSo if I VPN from outside the house,
1:21:33SPEAKERI'm just connecting to that Raspberry Pi
1:21:34SPEAKERthat I set up the config on myself.
1:21:37SPEAKERI have, I've had a VPS for coming up on a year
1:21:39SPEAKERas a Black Friday.
1:21:41SPEAKERAnd sometime I'm going to get around to,
1:21:43SPEAKERI've done some of the work,
1:21:44SPEAKERbut I'm going to finish setting it up
1:21:46SPEAKERto be kind of a proxy in front of my house, right?
1:21:49SPEAKERLike so I can run a blog or game servers or whatever.
1:21:52SPEAKERI can obfuscate my home IP,
1:21:54SPEAKERhave a little bit of separations.
1:21:56SPEAKER- So you can self host things
1:21:57SPEAKERthat you probably shouldn't self host.
1:21:59SPEAKER- Well, it's not for self hosting.
1:22:00SPEAKERIt's for, well, I mean, I guess that's,
1:22:01SPEAKERI guess this is technically self hosting,
1:22:03SPEAKERbut it's for other things that other people would access.
1:22:06SPEAKER- Oh, right.
1:22:07SPEAKER- Like a blog or like game servers
1:22:08SPEAKERwhere it's other people connecting to, let's be real,
1:22:11SPEAKERthis machine sitting right next to my desk
1:22:13SPEAKERthat has like all my storage in it and stuff like that.
1:22:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:22:16SPEAKER- So I'd need a little bit of separation there.
1:22:18SPEAKERAnyway.
1:22:18SPEAKER- Wait, does this mean Brad and Will
1:22:20SPEAKERmight make a quake server sometime next year?
1:22:22SPEAKER- That is the thing.
1:22:23SPEAKERIt's a blog and quake servers.
1:22:25SPEAKERThat's really the only things I want to do.
1:22:27SPEAKER- I don't know if I want to play with you
1:22:28SPEAKERon a zero ping quake server though.
1:22:31SPEAKER- Well, the amount of networking study
1:22:33SPEAKERI'm going to have to do to actually finish this project
1:22:35SPEAKERis so intense that by the time it's over,
1:22:38SPEAKERI bet I could route my quake traffic out
1:22:40SPEAKERthrough some external node out on the internet
1:22:43SPEAKERand back to my own server five feet away
1:22:45SPEAKERso that I could replicate some of the amount of latency.
1:22:47SPEAKER- So you have fair lag.
1:22:48SPEAKER- Yes, just add 50 milliseconds on there.
1:22:51SPEAKER- Okay, okay, I can get behind that.
1:22:53SPEAKER- Okay, I've written CF, AWS and Cloudflare outages
1:22:57SPEAKERnext to this.
1:22:58SPEAKER- Oh.
1:22:59SPEAKER- So I had been kind of questioning the effort
1:23:02SPEAKERI've put in all this stuff and plan to still invest in it
1:23:05SPEAKERbecause for a VPN or even for WireGuard VPN,
1:23:09SPEAKERyou can just use tail scale, for example,
1:23:10SPEAKERlike a bunch of people,
1:23:11SPEAKERa ton of people on our discord love tail scale
1:23:14SPEAKERfor reasons that seem quite understandable.
1:23:16SPEAKERCloudflare tunnel pretty much does exactly
1:23:19SPEAKERwhat I want this VPS to do.
1:23:20SPEAKERAnd in fact, I got the VPS
1:23:22SPEAKERbefore I knew about Cloudflare tunnel.
1:23:24SPEAKERSo I've like, I don't repeatedly looked at this stuff
1:23:26SPEAKERand was like, it's really worth rolling my own
1:23:28SPEAKERwhen these like turnkey services exist,
1:23:31SPEAKERthey kind of do the same thing.
1:23:33SPEAKERAnd then all these outages started recently.
1:23:36SPEAKERAnd like to be clear, these outages did not take down
1:23:38SPEAKERany of the services that I'm talking about necessarily
1:23:40SPEAKERto my knowledge, but they could, or similar outages could.
1:23:44SPEAKERAnd at some point I realized,
1:23:46SPEAKERyou know, at some point I realized
1:23:47SPEAKERlike WireGuard is running in the Linux kernel
1:23:50SPEAKERon that Raspberry Pi 4, that is my end point,
1:23:53SPEAKERunless there literally is no internet access,
1:23:55SPEAKERthere's no route from wherever I am remotely to my house,
1:23:58SPEAKERthat will always just work, you know.
1:24:01SPEAKERThe VPS is a little bit stickier
1:24:03SPEAKERbecause there is a VPS provider there
1:24:04SPEAKERand they could lose a little bit of time.
1:24:07SPEAKERYeah, they could potentially have downtime.
1:24:09SPEAKERLike that's not a perfect solution,
1:24:11SPEAKERbut like it made me feel a little bit better
1:24:13SPEAKERabout all the time and work of thinking
1:24:16SPEAKERlike, ah, this stuff is like,
1:24:18SPEAKERit's maybe rickety in a different way
1:24:19SPEAKER'cause I set it all up myself,
1:24:20SPEAKERbut at least it depends on as few corporate services
1:24:24SPEAKERthat could have outages as possible.
1:24:26SPEAKEROr decide to start charging, right?
1:24:28SPEAKERSo that's the one I've actually consoled myself
1:24:30SPEAKERwith all this time until these outages recently.
1:24:32SPEAKERIt was always like, what if Tailscale gets bought
1:24:35SPEAKERand their business model goes to shit
1:24:36SPEAKERand suddenly they are charging five times more
1:24:39SPEAKERfor the same service or Cloudflare could start charging
1:24:42SPEAKERfor Cloudflare tunnel.
1:24:43SPEAKERLike, you know, you never know when the profit motive
1:24:46SPEAKERis going to assert itself on these things.
1:24:48SPEAKER- To be clear, VPSs are virtual private servers, right?
1:24:52SPEAKER- It's just a VM. - VM slice server.
1:24:55SPEAKER- Yeah, it's just a Linux VM running in a data center
1:24:57SPEAKERsomewhere that you can do whatever you want with.
1:24:59SPEAKER- Yeah. - And with a dedicated IP.
1:25:00SPEAKER- Typically they cost like five bucks a month, is that?
1:25:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I got a very deep discount last Black Friday
1:25:06SPEAKERon this thing, which I've barely used for the last year,
1:25:10SPEAKERbut yes, it was like five bucks a month
1:25:11SPEAKERwith that deal for like pretty good specs.
1:25:13SPEAKER- I don't think there's like, I run, it's funny,
1:25:17SPEAKERI stay connected, I keep my phone connected to WireGuard
1:25:20SPEAKERpretty much any time I'm out of the house.
1:25:21SPEAKERI actually built a shortcut to automate it.
1:25:25SPEAKERAnd I do it so that I have Pi-hole everywhere I go,
1:25:30SPEAKERwhich it turns out I quite like the Pi-hole setup
1:25:33SPEAKERthe way I want it to work and it works really well.
1:25:35SPEAKERAnd yeah, I got no complaints.
1:25:38SPEAKER- Does that hit your battery life?
1:25:40SPEAKER- Not really, I haven't noticed anything.
1:25:42SPEAKERI mean, also I drive on the start and end
1:25:46SPEAKERof almost every time I leave the house.
1:25:48SPEAKERSo like I'm plugged in when I'm driving, but yes.
1:25:52SPEAKER- If I could wish list an item to be thankful for
1:25:54SPEAKERthis time next year, it would be for Apple to implement
1:25:57SPEAKERa kernel level WireGuard solution.
1:26:00SPEAKER- Oh, 'cause the one right now is slow.
1:26:02SPEAKER- Well, it's not slow, it's more that it hits battery life.
1:26:05SPEAKERLike the WireGuard runs in user space on Apple devices.
1:26:09SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:26:10SPEAKER- And so you're, let me get super technical here.
1:26:13SPEAKERMy understanding is that you're effectively like crossing
1:26:15SPEAKERthe user space kernel barrier back and forth,
1:26:17SPEAKERlike at basically every packet, I think like it,
1:26:19SPEAKERit is a less performant option in terms of burning
1:26:22SPEAKERmore battery life than it would be at the kernel level.
1:26:25SPEAKERIt may not be a huge difference, I'm not sure, but.
1:26:28SPEAKER- I have not noticed and I, like I said,
1:26:30SPEAKERI leave it on pretty much all the time.
1:26:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I have seen people talk about WireGuard
1:26:33SPEAKERkind of burning their phone battery pretty fast.
1:26:36SPEAKER- I also have the Pro Max, so I have a,
1:26:38SPEAKERlike it's like 36 hours of battery when it was new, so.
1:26:42SPEAKER- Like man, obsessive optimizer here, okay.
1:26:45SPEAKER- Yeah, no, I'm aware. - It could be better.
1:26:47SPEAKER- I'm aware.
1:26:48SPEAKERI also, this is a tease for an upcoming PC World video,
1:26:52SPEAKERbut I tested a bunch of external USB capture cards,
1:26:54SPEAKERthe USB 3.21s.
1:26:57SPEAKER- Okay.
1:26:59SPEAKER- I, partly because I wanna, I'm thinking about changing
1:27:02SPEAKERmy stream machine from like a full tower
1:27:05SPEAKERinto like a small form factor
1:27:06SPEAKERthat I can just set on a shelf.
1:27:09SPEAKERBut also partly 'cause I was kind of curious
1:27:10SPEAKERto see how they are in a world where USB 3.2
1:27:13SPEAKERis like a pretty good chunk of a PCI express lane.
1:27:17SPEAKERAnd the answer is that they're quite good.
1:27:19SPEAKERAnd the video is interesting, we talk a lot about it a lot,
1:27:22SPEAKERbut I am kind of all in on USB capture
1:27:27SPEAKERor for most stuff actually, 'cause A,
1:27:32SPEAKERthe internal cards often don't work in Linux
1:27:34SPEAKERand B, the performance is roughly equivalent
1:27:39SPEAKERand it doesn't take up PCI express lanes.
1:27:41SPEAKER- Yeah, that's pretty appealing.
1:27:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:27:44SPEAKER- As somebody who burns a PCIe slot on a capture card
1:27:46SPEAKERthat won't work in Linux if I ever switched.
1:27:48SPEAKER- Even Elgato?
1:27:49SPEAKER- Yeah, it's an Elgato.
1:27:50SPEAKERThey have zero Linux support.
1:27:52SPEAKER- The Avermedia ones that I tested two Avermedia ones
1:27:55SPEAKERthat work because they're just basically PCI express
1:27:57SPEAKERto USB bridges.
1:27:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I read that, but I don't wanna buy another card
1:28:01SPEAKERif I can help it.
1:28:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:28:03SPEAKER- If you're Elgato or are supporting Linux, I doubt it.
1:28:05SPEAKER- Nope, I wouldn't hold my breath.
1:28:07SPEAKER- No.
1:28:08SPEAKER- But anyway, yeah, so that's it.
1:28:09SPEAKERThat's the stuff I'm thankful for.
1:28:11SPEAKERThat's the stuff you're thankful for.
1:28:12SPEAKERSome hot news, I kinda wanna go,
1:28:16SPEAKERnobody's at the house right now.
1:28:17SPEAKERI could pull the thermostat off and just update it,
1:28:19SPEAKERbut that seems highly risky,
1:28:22SPEAKERespecially tomorrow morning when it's 50 degrees in here
1:28:25SPEAKERand there's condensation on the walls.
1:28:27SPEAKERI'm like, oh God, I wish we had the heat.
1:28:28SPEAKER- It has turned very cold in the last couple of days.
1:28:31SPEAKER- Yeah, San Francisco cold.
1:28:32SPEAKERLike it's funny, my daughter was making fun of somebody
1:28:36SPEAKERthe other day who was walking down the street
1:28:38SPEAKERwith like a scarf and a big puffy jacket and a hat on
1:28:43SPEAKER'cause she was wearing a t-shirt
1:28:44SPEAKER'cause she doesn't get cold 'cause she's 12.
1:28:47SPEAKERAnd I was like, look, if you only ever lived here,
1:28:50SPEAKERshe's like, I only ever lived here.
1:28:51SPEAKERAnd I was like, well, okay, if you only ever lived here,
1:28:54SPEAKERthe wind and the cold and the high humidity
1:28:57SPEAKERmake it feel so much colder than it actually is.
1:29:01SPEAKER- I would rather be in Tennessee
1:29:03SPEAKERwith an inch of snow on the ground than like February here
1:29:07SPEAKERwhere the wind's blowing 40 miles an hour off the ocean
1:29:10SPEAKERand it's cold as hell.
1:29:11SPEAKERAnyway, that's as good a place as any
1:29:14SPEAKERto wrap it up, I guess.
1:29:15SPEAKERThanks as always for listening to the show.
1:29:17SPEAKERWe are listener supported,
1:29:18SPEAKERso that means we wouldn't be here without you, the listener.
1:29:21SPEAKER- True.
1:29:22SPEAKER- If you would like to find out how to support the show,
1:29:24SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.
1:29:27SPEAKERAgain, that's patreon.com/techpod
1:29:29SPEAKERwhere for five bucks a month you get access to the Discord,
1:29:32SPEAKERwhich is full of beautiful nerds.
1:29:33SPEAKERI think I talked about it last week,
1:29:34SPEAKERbut I'm still blown away
1:29:36SPEAKERthat we had an incredibly in-depth conversation
1:29:38SPEAKERfrom people who work in chip design and fab management
1:29:43SPEAKERabout how different processes work.
1:29:46SPEAKERAnd it was like five pages of people just talking shop
1:29:50SPEAKERabout stuff that I was intensely into.
1:29:53SPEAKERIt's very good.
1:29:54SPEAKER- A lot of expertise in the community.
1:29:56SPEAKERA lot of people last week talking about the Valve stuff
1:29:59SPEAKERand the takes were much less nuclear
1:30:02SPEAKERthan on the rest of the public web.
1:30:04SPEAKERSo if you want a place to talk to people
1:30:06SPEAKERthat are gonna react normally about stuff
1:30:08SPEAKERand not just start screaming like your average YouTuber,
1:30:12SPEAKERhighly recommended.
1:30:14SPEAKERAnd you also get access to the Patreon exclusive episodes
1:30:16SPEAKERwhere every month we talk about
1:30:18SPEAKERkind of just topics of interest.
1:30:20SPEAKERSometimes they're too short for a full episode.
1:30:22SPEAKERSometimes it's stuff we're working on.
1:30:24SPEAKERSometimes we just get in here on low carbon dioxide days,
1:30:27SPEAKERlock ourselves in the office and shoot the ship for a while.
1:30:30SPEAKER- I've taken to opening the windows in here
1:30:32SPEAKERand I get a good cross breeze going across the house
1:30:35SPEAKERbefore I podcast lately.
1:30:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I have a forced air fan in the window
1:30:40SPEAKERthat I can flip on before and after.
1:30:42SPEAKERBut anyway, so that'll do it for us this week.
1:30:44SPEAKERThanks everybody for listening.
1:30:46SPEAKERThanks for supporting the show.
1:30:48SPEAKERA very special thank you to our executive producer,
1:30:50SPEAKERtier patrons, including Jason Lee, Infelicitous Rips,
1:30:54SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Crimes,
1:30:56SPEAKERTwinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamik,
1:30:59SPEAKERand Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:31:03SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.
1:31:04SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:31:05SPEAKER- We will be back next week
1:31:07SPEAKERwith another edition of the Tech Pod.
1:31:09SPEAKERHope everybody in the United States
1:31:11SPEAKERhas a happy and safe Thanksgiving.
1:31:13SPEAKERIf you're gonna fry your turkey,
1:31:14SPEAKERremember to turn that burner off
1:31:16SPEAKERbefore you drop the bird in.
1:31:18SPEAKERThat's my frying, having fried two turkeys lifetime
1:31:23SPEAKERand never doing that again.
1:31:24SPEAKER- Ooh.
1:31:25SPEAKER- A, measure.
1:31:27SPEAKERMake sure that the turkey fits in the amount of oil you have
1:31:30SPEAKERbefore you heat up the oil.
1:31:33SPEAKERAnd turn off the fire before you dunk the bird
1:31:37SPEAKERin the flaming fuel, in the boiling hot fuel.
1:31:39SPEAKER- Man, that's intense.
1:31:41SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:31:42SPEAKER- Can I send off the podcast this week?
1:31:44SPEAKER- Yeah, go for it.
1:31:45SPEAKER(upbeat music)
1:31:46SPEAKER(indistinct)