338: Everything for Everything

00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I'm trying a new thing.

00:01SPEAKER- Okay, we like new things here.

00:03SPEAKER- I'm living life to its fullest.

00:05SPEAKERI got a great big mouse pad.

00:07SPEAKERI've been eating truck hibachi.

00:09SPEAKER- Whoa, hang on, this is a lot to take in all at once.

00:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I know, there's a lot going on here.

00:13SPEAKER- How big is the mouse pad?

00:14SPEAKER- Uh, you want me to hold it up?

00:16SPEAKER- Sure.

00:17SPEAKER- I had to clean off the entire right side of my desk.

00:20SPEAKER- The fact that you can hold it up on demand

00:21SPEAKERtells me it's not like a desk mat.

00:23SPEAKERIt's not underneath a bunch of stuff other than a mouse.

00:26SPEAKER- So I still have the desk mat under the keyboard

00:28SPEAKER'cause I like how it kind of deadens the sound.

00:29SPEAKER- Oh, I thought the whole point of a desk mat

00:31SPEAKERwas to be a mouse pad as well.

00:34SPEAKER- It is, but this bigger mouse pad

00:37SPEAKERis even bigger than that.

00:38SPEAKERIt's like, I don't know, 500 millimeters by 480 millimeters

00:43SPEAKERor 19.69 inches by 18.9 inches in America units.

00:49SPEAKER- All right.

00:50SPEAKER- Basically two feet by two feet, it's big.

00:52SPEAKER- That's pretty big, okay, that's way bigger than mine.

00:54SPEAKERI finally bought a, I got a SteelSeries mouse pad

00:56SPEAKERa year or two ago.

00:57SPEAKER- Yeah?

00:58SPEAKER- And they were using my very old funk pad

01:02SPEAKERfor about 20 years.

01:04SPEAKER- I loved a funk pad, but it wore out the skates too often.

01:06SPEAKERYou had to replace your skates all the time.

01:08SPEAKER- That was my concern is that the abrasiveness,

01:11SPEAKERthe mid-aughts were a time.

01:13SPEAKER- Look, the kids do glass mouse pads now.

01:15SPEAKER- Yeah, oh yeah, no, I think the kids are-

01:17SPEAKER- They love glass.

01:18SPEAKER- The kids are unhinged,

01:19SPEAKERthe kids are bordering on feral at this point.

01:22SPEAKER- Did we talk about my goofy glass mouse skates yet?

01:25SPEAKER- Yeah, we talked about that last week.

01:27SPEAKERSo I got the sandpaper out.

01:29SPEAKERI got a real fine sandpaper out last weekend,

01:33SPEAKERand I just did a little light scuffing.

01:36SPEAKER- Oh.

01:37SPEAKER- Much better.

01:38SPEAKER- So the skates you bought to speed up your mouse movement,

01:40SPEAKERyou have now gone out of your way to slow down.

01:43SPEAKER- I've split the difference.

01:44SPEAKER- All right, that's fair.

01:45SPEAKER- It was too much.

01:46SPEAKERYou know, it's like, you remember the stories

01:47SPEAKERabout game developers in the '90s buying Dodge Vipers

01:50SPEAKERand then immediately crashing the Dodge Vipers?

01:53SPEAKERYeah, these mouse skates are the Dodge Vipers of mouse skates.

01:56SPEAKERExactly the same thing.

01:57SPEAKERI think there's nothing wrong with a little user finesse

02:00SPEAKERon your product.

02:01SPEAKERThe mouse pad I got is the,

02:03SPEAKERI don't know if you've looked at the SteelSeries ones,

02:05SPEAKERbut it's the heavy version.

02:06SPEAKER- Okay.

02:07SPEAKER- They make like the regular squishy cloth one,

02:09SPEAKERbut then there's a fat version.

02:11SPEAKERAnd a lot of talk about dimensionality on the Discord

02:14SPEAKERafter last week's episode when we talked about

02:16SPEAKERwhat constitutes one dimension, two dimensions.

02:19SPEAKER- That's true.

02:20SPEAKER- Et cetera.

02:20SPEAKERAnyway, this one's got more thickness on a different axis

02:24SPEAKERthan you might expect.

02:24SPEAKERWell, actually, I don't know how thick

02:26SPEAKERyour average desk mat is.

02:27SPEAKERAre they all?

02:28SPEAKERHere, I've got a bunch of stuff on it

02:30SPEAKERthat I could just hold it up and show you.

02:31SPEAKER- My CQK, the one that I use is like,

02:34SPEAKERI don't know, a couple of mils.

02:35SPEAKERIt's not, wow, that is a thick boy.

02:37SPEAKER- Does this play on the camera?

02:38SPEAKERCan you see?

02:39SPEAKER- Yeah, that's chalky.

02:40SPEAKER- It's a thick, I mean, it's like an appreciable fraction

02:43SPEAKERof a cent, like, I don't know, half a centimeter thick.

02:44SPEAKER- That's a quarter of an inch probably.

02:46SPEAKER- It's a thick mouse pad.

02:47SPEAKERI wasn't sure, but I think I like it.

02:49SPEAKER- Yeah, you've been using it for a year.

02:51SPEAKERYou should know by now.

02:52SPEAKER- Well, I kind of don't think about it, you know?

02:54SPEAKER- I think that's a good sign of a good mouse pad usually.

02:57SPEAKER- Perhaps.

02:58SPEAKER- I'm surprised you didn't ask me about the hibachi.

03:00SPEAKERI thought that's.

03:01SPEAKER- I was gonna say, we gotta get moving here,

03:03SPEAKERbut give me a tight 90 on the truck hibachi.

03:06SPEAKER- You know Benihana?

03:07SPEAKER- Sure.

03:08SPEAKER- You familiar with the American Japanese food of the '50s?

03:11SPEAKER- Yeah.

03:12SPEAKERWait, God, is it that old?

03:14SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a "Mad Men" episode about it,

03:15SPEAKERthem going to Benihana for the first time.

03:17SPEAKER- I really, we watched like two seasons of "Mad Men"

03:19SPEAKERand I thought it was great and then we never finished it.

03:21SPEAKERI really have been thinking about going back to it,

03:23SPEAKERbut also that totally makes sense.

03:25SPEAKERLike that's right in the post-war occupation era

03:28SPEAKERof cultural cross pollination.

03:30SPEAKERSo I guess I'm not surprised.

03:32SPEAKER- And hey, let's take some kind of thing

03:34SPEAKERthat maybe is a little bit Japanese

03:36SPEAKERand then American it up quite a bit so people will eat it.

03:40SPEAKERSo yeah, no, the hibachi truck is down in Daly City

03:46SPEAKERand it's just these two guys in like a food cart.

03:49SPEAKER- Okay, I'm sorry, I thought you said for your truck,

03:51SPEAKERwhich I'd started to say, wait, you have a truck?

03:54SPEAKER- I don't have a truck.

03:55SPEAKER- Which I didn't think you did,

03:56SPEAKERbut I just was willing to go with it.

03:58SPEAKERBut I assumed this was hibachi for your truck.

04:01SPEAKER- Well, I mean, look, I would get a,

04:03SPEAKERnow that you mentioned that, I A, want a truck

04:05SPEAKERand B, want a hibachi for my truck.

04:07SPEAKER- What if you just are on the road

04:08SPEAKERand you want a grill at a moment's notice?

04:10SPEAKER- I mean, so I used to have one of those little portable,

04:13SPEAKERlike a hibachi grill, like a little guy.

04:16SPEAKERAnd then I gave it to a friend

04:17SPEAKER'cause I didn't ever use it 'cause charcoal's a pain

04:19SPEAKERin the butt, but anyway, the hibachi truck

04:21SPEAKERin Daly City owns, highly recommended

04:23SPEAKERif you're in the Bay Area.

04:24SPEAKER- All right.

04:25SPEAKER- It's by Wendy's.

04:27SPEAKER- News you can use.

04:28SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:29SPEAKER(upbeat music)

04:47SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

04:57SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."

04:59SPEAKERI'm Will.

05:00SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

05:01SPEAKER- And I want more hibachi.

05:04SPEAKER- At this hour?

05:05SPEAKERBreakfast hibachi?

05:07SPEAKER- I'm gonna go and tell you,

05:08SPEAKERit's never a bad time for hibachi.

05:09SPEAKERThe best part about the hibachi truck

05:10SPEAKERis they give you so much food,

05:11SPEAKERit's like two days worth of food.

05:14SPEAKERSo you have to have it one day.

05:15SPEAKERAnd then the next day, it's like wild card.

05:18SPEAKERWhen do you need hibachi in your life?

05:19SPEAKERDo you have it for lunch?

05:20SPEAKERDo you have it for dinner?

05:21SPEAKERDo you have it for breakfast?

05:22SPEAKER- Yeah, listen, many people are talking

05:24SPEAKERabout breakfast for dinner.

05:26SPEAKER- Yeah, the kids all love it.

05:27SPEAKER- Who's talking about dinner for breakfast?

05:29SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.

05:30SPEAKERLook, there's no difference between this

05:32SPEAKERand steak and eggs, except for you put some fried rice

05:34SPEAKERunder there and a little bit of sauce

05:35SPEAKERand you chuck it on the griddle and warm it up.

05:37SPEAKERIt gets, that'd be real good.

05:38SPEAKER- What is the best dinner breakfast?

05:41SPEAKERSpaghetti? - Oh, man.

05:42SPEAKER- Maybe like spaghetti at seven in the morning

05:43SPEAKERor like maybe a beef wellington.

05:46SPEAKER- A beef wellington at seven in the morning?

05:47SPEAKERNo, thank you, I can't take that much.

05:48SPEAKERThat's too rich for me.

05:50SPEAKERLike a slice of pizza is the classic dinner

05:52SPEAKERfor breakfast, I think. - Yeah, sure, yeah, sure.

05:55SPEAKER- I don't know, I don't ever do dinner for breakfast.

05:57SPEAKERI've never even considered this before.

05:58SPEAKER- Like I said, we're way out of the curve here.

06:01SPEAKER- Wow, we should start a TikTok channel.

06:03SPEAKERWe should, like this could be the new making food

06:05SPEAKERon your countertop thing from a few years ago

06:07SPEAKERthat made everybody so angry.

06:09SPEAKERYeah, it seems. - No, thanks.

06:12SPEAKER- Brad, we got, it's a cornucopia of news this week.

06:15SPEAKER- It's a news roundup, there's a lot of news.

06:18SPEAKER- But we also wanted to get some like, I don't know,

06:21SPEAKERI don't wanna say offbeat, but like not,

06:25SPEAKERoften we go for the big news stories,

06:26SPEAKERthe things that we feel are important.

06:28SPEAKERBut this time we went for the things

06:29SPEAKERthat we felt were interesting and cool.

06:31SPEAKER- In this era, a lot of the big stories

06:33SPEAKERturn out to be something of a downer.

06:36SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a bummer city out there, man.

06:38SPEAKEREverywhere you look, bummer, bummer, bummer.

06:39SPEAKERHey, there's no gas, hey, the fertilizer's out.

06:42SPEAKERHey, I don't know, those were both real things.

06:46SPEAKERI meant to be no bummers this week, but anyway.

06:48SPEAKER- Hey, here are multiple examples of people

06:50SPEAKERwho spent months in jail due to faulty facial recognition.

06:54SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I bummered that one right off.

06:56SPEAKER- That pinned crimes on them that occurred in states

06:58SPEAKERthey had never visited before.

07:00SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:01SPEAKER- Or something along those lines, like it's, boy, man.

07:04SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like bad things out there,

07:06SPEAKERbut some things are cool.

07:08SPEAKERAnd you know what I think is cool?

07:09SPEAKERI'm gonna start with just the top one on the list.

07:12SPEAKER'Cause I wrote at the top here, canary traps are cool.

07:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I was familiar with this concept

07:17SPEAKERfrom my work in the game industry,

07:19SPEAKERbut I didn't know the name for this technique.

07:21SPEAKER- I didn't realize that the name, so this Ars Technica,

07:24SPEAKERso there's an Ars Technica article titled,

07:26SPEAKERIn Canada Canary Traps Brings Shut

07:28SPEAKERand IDs Election Database League.

07:30SPEAKERAnd the TLDR is that the elections board in Alberta,

07:35SPEAKERin Canada apparently the voter rolls

07:38SPEAKERare allowed to be released to certain political parties

07:42SPEAKERand stuff like that.

07:43SPEAKERBut they're not allowed to be distributed beyond that point.

07:45SPEAKERAnd basically some fringe group had gotten access

07:50SPEAKERto a complete voter roll.

07:52SPEAKERAnd because elections Alberta canary traps

07:56SPEAKERtheir voter rolls when they release them,

07:58SPEAKERby putting a handful of fake voters in,

08:01SPEAKERunique fake voters in each individual reel.

08:04SPEAKERAnd that's, at the end of the day,

08:05SPEAKERthat's what a canary trap was.

08:06SPEAKERI think the first encounter I had with a canary trap

08:09SPEAKERwas in a Tom Clancy book in the '80s called Patriot Games.

08:12SPEAKER- I think that is--

08:13SPEAKER- It's referenced in the Ars article, actually.

08:16SPEAKER- Yeah, isn't that where the term came from?

08:17SPEAKER- That's what they say.

08:18SPEAKERI don't know that I trust,

08:21SPEAKERgenerally I trust Ars on fact-checking stuff.

08:23SPEAKERThat one feels a little fishy to me.

08:25SPEAKER- Etymology of common terms and phrases like this

08:28SPEAKERis very hard to track down.

08:31SPEAKERIn almost every case it feels like

08:32SPEAKERthey are way older than you think.

08:34SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like the "Sweet Summer Child" thing

08:38SPEAKERfrom "Game of Thrones" that people got real excited about.

08:40SPEAKER- Well, that's different because that doesn't actually exist.

08:43SPEAKER- What do you mean?

08:44SPEAKER- That never existed.

08:45SPEAKEROr that came from "Song of Ice and Fire" slash "Game of Thrones."

08:49SPEAKERYes, it 100% did.

08:50SPEAKER- Oh my God, we're not gonna do this.

08:52SPEAKER- We are not doing this, but it absolutely fucking did not

08:54SPEAKERexist prior to those books.

08:57SPEAKERPeople have done the work. - Oh, "Sweet Summer Child."

08:59SPEAKER- People have done the work.

09:00SPEAKER- Anyway.

09:01SPEAKER- But in this case, yes,

09:03SPEAKERthis is a real term that has been around for ages.

09:05SPEAKERThere was one that came up on an "Ex-Lantern" thing recently

09:07SPEAKERthat we were like, "Oh, that's probably from..."

09:09SPEAKERGod damn it, I can't remember what the phrase was.

09:11SPEAKERWe were like, "Ah, that's probably a few decades old."

09:13SPEAKERIt turned out to be like mid 1800s.

09:15SPEAKERLike a lot of these things have been around way.

09:17SPEAKER"Dirty pool," maybe was the phrase that we were looking up.

09:21SPEAKERYes, that's what it was.

09:23SPEAKERAnd it turned out to be like 150 years old.

09:25SPEAKER- Is it about billiards or is it about swimming pools?

09:28SPEAKER- No, I believe it was about a, gosh, neither.

09:32SPEAKERIt was like more of like an abstract pool,

09:34SPEAKERlike a pool of candidates or something or something.

09:38SPEAKERYes, I believe I'd have to pull that back up.

09:40SPEAKERBut anyway, people were probably still yelling

09:43SPEAKERabout the "Summer Child" thing.

09:44SPEAKERSo let's move on.

09:45SPEAKER- I mean, look, I'm gonna enjoy being vindicated

09:49SPEAKERby the comments this week.

09:50SPEAKERBut the point is "Canary Traps,"

09:53SPEAKERthe idea is you have a big long document

09:55SPEAKERand you move some commas around,

09:56SPEAKERyou do a couple of misspellings,

09:58SPEAKERyou make a unique change or two or three in each document.

10:02SPEAKERAnd then maybe you do that

10:04SPEAKERin the kind of the sweet juiciest part of the document

10:06SPEAKERso that people are likely to copy and paste

10:09SPEAKERor directly quote the affected area.

10:11SPEAKER- I think that was the revelation.

10:12SPEAKERI mean, this would be hard to do in a fake voter role entry.

10:15SPEAKER- Well, except for they just put fake voters in.

10:17SPEAKER- No, no, no, but what you're describing,

10:18SPEAKERthe nuance to this, that was the revelation to me,

10:21SPEAKERwas that, at least in the context of like CIA documents

10:24SPEAKERthat used this technique back in the day, like you said,

10:28SPEAKERI think lurid is the term they used.

10:30SPEAKER- Yes.

10:31SPEAKER- Like you want to seed your fake information

10:33SPEAKERin places that will catch the eye

10:35SPEAKERor that are, like you said,

10:37SPEAKERthe juiciest to make people reference them verbatim.

10:41SPEAKER- Well, so the thing I didn't know about

10:44SPEAKERout of the "Canary Traps,"

10:45SPEAKERA, it's cool that the "Canary Traps" is still being used.

10:48SPEAKERB, I didn't realize that there was this team

10:51SPEAKERin Dartmouth, I think, a few years ago

10:55SPEAKERwho made a tool called WeForge, W-E hyphen F-O-R-G-E,

11:01SPEAKERthat uses AI to sauce up the documents to "Canary Trap" them

11:07SPEAKERso that it's basically just rewriting the document

11:10SPEAKERin a fake document, generally,

11:12SPEAKERin I think their example here,

11:16SPEAKERto try to detect who the leakers are,

11:18SPEAKERwhich, like, sometimes detecting leakers is good,

11:21SPEAKERsometimes detecting leakers is bad,

11:22SPEAKERbut I think "Canary Trap" is always kind of a cool idea.

11:25SPEAKER- Yeah, yep, I think you've seen, like,

11:28SPEAKERgaming companies use this in some--

11:31SPEAKER- Everybody who has secrets that they want to keep,

11:33SPEAKERI think, probably does, yeah.

11:34SPEAKER- Everybody, Apple, you see it within tech companies

11:36SPEAKERall the time.

11:38SPEAKERThis reminded me of, I actually went and looked this up

11:41SPEAKERto verify that I actually believe something that was true

11:43SPEAKERand not something that was just buried

11:45SPEAKERin the back of my mind that I thought to be true

11:47SPEAKERbut was actually fake,

11:48SPEAKERwhich is the, like, printer tracking dots phenomenon.

11:51SPEAKER- That's real.

11:52SPEAKER- That was 100% real.

11:53SPEAKER- Yeah.

11:54SPEAKER- There are other terms for it.

11:54SPEAKERI found the Wikipedia page,

11:56SPEAKERwhich is entitled "Printer Tracking Dots,"

11:58SPEAKERbut they also call it printer steganography

12:00SPEAKERor docu-color tracking dots or et cetera, et cetera,

12:03SPEAKERbut it's the--

12:04SPEAKER- Should we explain what these are?

12:05SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the thing where each individual model of printer

12:10SPEAKERbasically prints hidden information on its page

12:12SPEAKERthat encodes, I assume, like, the serial number

12:15SPEAKERand maybe some other information

12:16SPEAKERabout which specific printer unit

12:18SPEAKERwas used to print a document.

12:19SPEAKER- Yeah, basically, if you're gonna do some crimes,

12:21SPEAKERdon't print it on a laser printer or inkjet printer

12:24SPEAKER'cause they're all trackable.

12:26SPEAKER- Yeah, it was unclear to me

12:27SPEAKERif it has to be a color printer.

12:29SPEAKER- Nope.

12:30SPEAKER- Does it not?

12:31SPEAKER- My understanding is that everything,

12:33SPEAKERthat every printer is infected with this.

12:35SPEAKER- Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s,

12:38SPEAKERawareness of these tracking codes became public only in 2004.

12:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

12:42SPEAKER- 2004, big year for--

12:44SPEAKER- Weird. - Surveillance.

12:45SPEAKER- Yeah, what a weird coincidence.

12:47SPEAKER- And stuff.

12:48SPEAKER- 2004, huh?

12:51SPEAKER- So yeah, that's Canary Traps.

12:52SPEAKERI thought that was cool.

12:53SPEAKERA couple, do you wanna go down the list?

12:56SPEAKERDo you wanna bounce around?

12:56SPEAKER- Yeah, let's just go down the list here.

12:59SPEAKER- AMD is adding HDMI 2.1 support to Linux.

13:02SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a huge deal.

13:04SPEAKERThat sounds very mundane, but that's actually a huge deal

13:06SPEAKERbecause they have been prevented from doing so

13:08SPEAKERby the shadowy consortium that controls HDMI.

13:13SPEAKER- Oh boy.

13:15SPEAKER- It sounded like it was basically like an IP thing,

13:16SPEAKERlike the HDMI spec is proprietary and closed

13:20SPEAKERand not like a publicly open thing.

13:23SPEAKERThere's licensing attached to it, et cetera.

13:25SPEAKERAnd they didn't want their closed IP being implemented

13:28SPEAKERin an open source fashion.

13:30SPEAKERSo they've been blocking AMD.

13:32SPEAKERI think, did we talk about this

13:33SPEAKERwhen we talked about the Steam machine that Valve has--

13:36SPEAKER- We talked about it, yeah, last fall.

13:38SPEAKER- Yeah, like Valve has had to do

13:39SPEAKERsome really creative workarounds to get HDMI 2.1-like features

13:44SPEAKERin the Steam machine over an HDMI 2.0 connection,

13:47SPEAKERbut now AMD is finally just getting legitimate support.

13:50SPEAKER- And they were kind of flawed workarounds.

13:52SPEAKERIt was, they were like munging Chroma and stuff like that.

13:54SPEAKERSo the TLDR here is that this is the opening salvo of this.

13:59SPEAKERThere's more to come.

14:00SPEAKER- Yeah, when this first came out,

14:02SPEAKERit was just implementing like some base layer of the spec.

14:06SPEAKERAnd there was some concern

14:07SPEAKERthat maybe the full feature set wouldn't come,

14:09SPEAKERbut an engineer working on this driver chimed in

14:12SPEAKERin the comments on a Pharaonics article and basically said,

14:14SPEAKER"No, we will have a full 2.1 implementation

14:16SPEAKERonce it's all passed like certification."

14:18SPEAKER- Well, and so the things that you didn't have

14:20SPEAKERwith only HDMI 2.0 were like high refresh rates at 4K.

14:24SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it's all the good gaming stuff.

14:27SPEAKER- Yeah, like big, big, the full,

14:31SPEAKERsome HDR stuff was accessible, but some wasn't,

14:34SPEAKERand it would impact the maximum frame rate.

14:35SPEAKERYou lost access to stuff like variable frame rate

14:38SPEAKERand some of that stuff.

14:39SPEAKER- Yeah, VRR, the auto low latency, 4K 120 HDR,

14:44SPEAKERlike 444, I think is all part of,

14:46SPEAKER- HDMI is so bad at branding.

14:48SPEAKERIt is so bad at branding.

14:49SPEAKER- I mean.

14:50SPEAKER- HDMI 2.1 sounds like nothing.

14:52SPEAKERLike not only does putting a version number on your spec

14:55SPEAKERnot communicate anything to the average person,

14:58SPEAKERbut also 2.1 sounds like a very small iteration on 2.0, right?

15:02SPEAKER- Well, yeah.

15:03SPEAKER- But in fact, 2.1 was huge for people who play games

15:06SPEAKERand even the names of their cable branding,

15:09SPEAKERyou know, like high speed, ultra high speed,

15:11SPEAKERlike those have very specific meanings in the HDMI spec,

15:14SPEAKERbut they sound like monster cable to the average person.

15:17SPEAKERThey sound like, oh, somebody's trying to upsell me

15:19SPEAKERon an expensive cable by calling it ultra high speed.

15:21SPEAKERLike it's just so bad.

15:23SPEAKER- I just hope that future spec makers who are out there

15:28SPEAKERthinking about how they're gonna build their specs,

15:31SPEAKERdon't label things with superlatives and speed

15:35SPEAKERand just use a number, man.

15:37SPEAKERJust say, hey, this is a 100 megabit cable.

15:40SPEAKERThis is a 200 megabit cable.

15:42SPEAKERThis is a 10 gigabit cable or so.

15:44SPEAKERI don't know what the solution is,

15:46SPEAKERbut the HDMI answer is not it.

15:49SPEAKER- Can I tell you the good word about USB 3.2 Gen two by two?

15:52SPEAKER- Nope, nope, nope, be quiet.

15:55SPEAKERWait, are you talking about the 20 gigabit one

15:57SPEAKERor the 40 gigabit one?

15:58SPEAKER- That one.

15:59SPEAKER- It's 10 or 20, I think actually.

16:01SPEAKER- But I think that one is 20 because it bonds to,

16:05SPEAKERyes, that is exactly the case.

16:07SPEAKERThat one is 20 because it bonds

16:08SPEAKERto 10 gigabit channels together.

16:11SPEAKER- Of course, why would you not,

16:12SPEAKERthat's perfectly correct.

16:13SPEAKERI mean, look, it's all bad.

16:15SPEAKERDisplayPort does the same thing, it's bad.

16:17SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, DisplayPort at least is open,

16:19SPEAKERif I'm not mistaken.

16:20SPEAKERI think that's open standard. - DisplayPort is open, yeah.

16:23SPEAKER- Versus HDMI being a closed standard.

16:24SPEAKERAnyway, this is good.

16:26SPEAKERThe biggest thing,

16:27SPEAKERwhich the average person doesn't care about,

16:28SPEAKERthey're just gonna be happy that this was happening,

16:30SPEAKERbut I would love to know what changed.

16:32SPEAKER- I think probably Valve is releasing the Steam machine

16:34SPEAKERand they called AMD and AMD was like,

16:38SPEAKERhey, what do we have to do to make this happen?

16:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I would assume it was some AMD making nice

16:43SPEAKERwith the HDMI group.

16:44SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, AMD is part of the HDMI group, I assume.

16:47SPEAKER- Yeah, fair, yeah, I'm sure they have to be.

16:49SPEAKERIt's like kind of every major display related player

16:51SPEAKERin the industry, I think.

16:53SPEAKER- Well, it's not like in the early 2000s

16:57SPEAKERwhen this stuff first started happening,

16:58SPEAKERwhen the HDMI consortium was like,

17:01SPEAKERwe have an unbeatable DRM scheme on our disks

17:06SPEAKERthat will close the analog hole forever

17:09SPEAKERso that people can't copy their perfect DVD copies,

17:14SPEAKERbut that stuff's been busted for years.

17:16SPEAKERSo it's like, there's no, I don't know, it feels weird.

17:20SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

17:22SPEAKER- You wanna talk about open source DOS?

17:26SPEAKER- Sure, sure.

17:27SPEAKER- This is heartwarming.

17:28SPEAKER- Yeah, this is cool.

17:29SPEAKERAnd I guess they've been doing this for a while,

17:30SPEAKERbut this might be the most notable example of it.

17:33SPEAKER- Good job, Microsoft, I guess.

17:34SPEAKERThis is a rare good job Microsoft from us.

17:36SPEAKER- Sure, well, you know, this is probably like,

17:39SPEAKERthis is a good job people inside of Microsoft

17:41SPEAKERwho care passionately about the subject

17:43SPEAKERand are actually doing some like good preservation work.

17:47SPEAKERIt's very heartwarming to me that, I mean, look,

17:50SPEAKERthe two things I care about the most in the world,

17:51SPEAKERcomputers and video games, there is a ton of work going on

17:55SPEAKERto preserve the history of those fields now.

17:59SPEAKERLike you see it all the time in games

18:00SPEAKERwith like the Video Game History Foundation

18:02SPEAKERand stuff like that, but this is kind of that

18:04SPEAKERfor original MS-DOS, and earlier,

18:07SPEAKERbasically Microsoft has been open sourcing

18:09SPEAKERa lot of their very old, you know,

18:13SPEAKERDOSes. - Archaic code, I guess.

18:15SPEAKER- DOSes and related tools, I guess you would say.

18:17SPEAKERLike it's been a while.

18:18SPEAKERThey, I guess the last one I remember

18:20SPEAKERwas when they open sourced DOS for MS,

18:22SPEAKERI should say MS-DOS, not just DOS, 4.0 a couple of years ago.

18:27SPEAKER- Which was, I think, the oldest one

18:29SPEAKERthat they'd released before,

18:29SPEAKERbut this new release is even older.

18:32SPEAKER- So it's 86-DOS 1.0, which is pre-Microsoft.

18:36SPEAKERLike, I don't know if you know the history there.

18:38SPEAKER- I don't know the history there.

18:39SPEAKER- 86-DOS is the CPM clone that Microsoft bought

18:43SPEAKERand turned into MS-DOS.

18:45SPEAKER- Oh, wow.

18:46SPEAKER- So like if you go back and look, and so CPM was the,

18:49SPEAKERI think the reigning disk operating system

18:52SPEAKERon like microcomputers, you know, personally.

18:56SPEAKERNow we call them personal computers,

18:57SPEAKERbut the term PC did not exist

18:58SPEAKER'cause that was a creation of IBM marketing,

19:01SPEAKERbut CPM was the operating system that was predominant,

19:06SPEAKERI believe, on computers it was compatible with at the time.

19:11SPEAKERAnd 86-DOS is effectively a kind of a clone of CPM.

19:15SPEAKER- Oh, that's wild.

19:16SPEAKER- And that's the, you know,

19:18SPEAKERwe watched "Pirates of Silicon Valley" two, three years ago

19:21SPEAKERon this podcast and did a podcast about it.

19:22SPEAKERLike if you go back and watch that,

19:24SPEAKERdo you remember that scene where, oh my God,

19:27SPEAKERwhy am I blanking on Bender, voice actor, Bender,

19:30SPEAKERJohn DiMaggio?

19:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

19:32SPEAKER- Is playing Steve Ballmer

19:33SPEAKERand they pull him out of the boardroom

19:34SPEAKERand like he talks directly to the camera.

19:36SPEAKERAnd he's like, ah, the craziest thing is

19:38SPEAKERwe didn't even have an operating system to sell to IBM

19:40SPEAKERwhen we sold them an operating system.

19:41SPEAKERYou remember that?

19:42SPEAKER- Yeah.

19:43SPEAKER- 86-DOS is the operating system.

19:45SPEAKER- Was their fix.

19:46SPEAKER- They rapidly went and acquired and hired Tim Patterson,

19:49SPEAKERthe guy who wrote it.

19:50SPEAKER- Wild.

19:51SPEAKER- To turn it into MS-DOS and provide it to IBM

19:53SPEAKERas an operating system for the PC.

19:56SPEAKERSo this is, I believe, all like assembly code

19:58SPEAKERwritten for DOS before that even happened, I think.

20:02SPEAKER- It's wild.

20:03SPEAKER- Yeah, it's rad.

20:04SPEAKER- The other thing that's interesting about this

20:06SPEAKERis that this is from a time when source code

20:09SPEAKERwas written down.

20:10SPEAKER- Yeah.

20:11SPEAKER- When the assembly language was written down

20:13SPEAKERand big giant, like, it looks almost like,

20:16SPEAKERthere's a picture in this Microsoft blog post,

20:18SPEAKERbut it looks almost like an old paper ledger

20:22SPEAKERthat an accountant would have used.

20:25SPEAKER- Yes.

20:25SPEAKER- And Tim Patterson donated the artifacts.

20:28SPEAKERApparently they scanned and OCR'd the code

20:33SPEAKERand it's all available on a GitHub repo now,

20:36SPEAKERwhich is pretty rad.

20:37SPEAKER- I love looking at old code, not necessarily.

20:39SPEAKERI mean, I certainly can't read assembly

20:41SPEAKERto any degree of competence,

20:43SPEAKERbut I love looking at the comments and stuff.

20:45SPEAKERLike he's got a revision history in here.

20:48SPEAKERLike he's straight up got dates

20:49SPEAKERand like February 25th, 1981, version 0.42,

20:55SPEAKER32 byte directory entries added.

20:58SPEAKER- Of course.

20:59SPEAKER- In version 0.6, he added control C exit changes.

21:04SPEAKERIt's fun to see kind of contemporaneous information

21:08SPEAKERaround stuff like this, I think.

21:09SPEAKER- Can we do some archeology here

21:11SPEAKERand find out when the 640K limit was that?

21:13SPEAKERThat was probably after this.

21:14SPEAKERNo, that was probably this time period

21:16SPEAKER'cause that was a PC limitation, I think, right?

21:18SPEAKER- Yes, I believe that was a legacy of hardware, right?

21:21SPEAKER- Yeah, wild.

21:23SPEAKER- Yeah, that ledger they mentioned in here,

21:24SPEAKERthat ledger is effectively, I mean,

21:26SPEAKERof course they would say this 'cause they own GitHub,

21:28SPEAKERbut they basically liken that ledger

21:30SPEAKERto like a physical git commit history.

21:34SPEAKERYou can basically go back through that thing

21:36SPEAKERand see all the changes he made

21:37SPEAKERand what was added when and everything.

21:40SPEAKERIt's cool that they're doing this.

21:42SPEAKER- The team of historians that did this

21:46SPEAKERwere led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Sinney

21:50SPEAKERwho located, scanned, and transcribed

21:53SPEAKERthe stack of DOS era source code listings

21:56SPEAKERfrom Tim Patterson who donated them.

21:57SPEAKERSo that's really cool.

21:58SPEAKER- Yeah, that's neat.

21:59SPEAKERBut that whole era is really,

22:01SPEAKERthere's some really interesting stuff there.

22:02SPEAKERLike CPM was written by Gary Kildall.

22:06SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't know that.

22:06SPEAKER- Your maybe one-time colleague

22:09SPEAKERfrom the Computer Chronicles.

22:10SPEAKER- He was not there by the time he had already passed,

22:12SPEAKERI think, by the time I was there.

22:13SPEAKER- Oh God, of course, that's right.

22:14SPEAKERYeah, I forgot.

22:15SPEAKERSo he did die quite young, but I forgot how early that was.

22:18SPEAKERI think that was like mid-90s.

22:20SPEAKER- Might've been, I don't remember, but yeah.

22:22SPEAKERI didn't realize that, that's wild.

22:24SPEAKER- Yes, he wrote, he was the author of CPM

22:27SPEAKERand like I think actually took the whole situation

22:29SPEAKERwith what happened with Microsoft pretty hard.

22:31SPEAKER- I can see that.

22:32SPEAKER- From the looks of things, you know,

22:34SPEAKERthe operating system that was a clone of his OS

22:36SPEAKERbecame the biggest thing in the world.

22:38SPEAKER- Yeah, that would be hard to, that would be a challenge.

22:42SPEAKER- But anyway, yes, he became a co-host on Computer Chronicles.

22:44SPEAKERAnyway, old computing history is fun.

22:47SPEAKER- Yeah, what else we got?

22:50SPEAKER- Keychron releases CAD files

22:52SPEAKERfor almost all of their products.

22:53SPEAKERThis was my first encounter with this phenomenon.

22:55SPEAKER- So they, I read deeper on this

22:59SPEAKERafter I posted this last night,

23:00SPEAKERbut it seems like their goal is to post everything.

23:03SPEAKERLike they're gonna post all of their stuff.

23:04SPEAKER- Like literally everything they make.

23:06SPEAKER- It's like, they've been posting,

23:07SPEAKERthey've posted firmwares for years,

23:09SPEAKERbut they're posting firmwares,

23:11SPEAKERthey're posting the CAD files assembled,

23:14SPEAKERthey're posting the individual component files,

23:16SPEAKERthey're posting the circuit designs, the whole thing.

23:18SPEAKER- Oh, oh, oh, when you say, oh, when you said everything,

23:21SPEAKERI thought you meant CAD files for everything.

23:22SPEAKERYou mean everything for everything.

23:24SPEAKER- I mean the CAD files that like they use to make and,

23:28SPEAKERyeah, it seems like for personal non-commercial use,

23:33SPEAKERyou can download the CAD files

23:35SPEAKERfor almost all of your Keychron devices

23:38SPEAKERand do with them as you please.

23:41SPEAKER- When I say everything, just to be clear,

23:42SPEAKERyou also said firmware and like board designs

23:45SPEAKERand stuff like that?

23:45SPEAKER- Yeah, so if you dig into the folders,

23:47SPEAKERthen you can actually, the firmwares are in

23:50SPEAKERfor most of these that I,

23:51SPEAKERI've just been kind of spot checking through,

23:53SPEAKERbut part of the GitHub repos are like,

23:56SPEAKERI'm looking at this one and this is the GitHub repo

23:58SPEAKERfor the K10HE special edition US model.

24:03SPEAKERAnd they have the bottom case, the full model,

24:06SPEAKERwhich is like the assembled CAD machine

24:09SPEAKERwith the like all the bits and pieces glued onto each other,

24:12SPEAKERthe special edition key caps, the special edition plate,

24:15SPEAKERwhich is the thing between the bottom and the board

24:18SPEAKERand the switches, the stabilizer designs,

24:23SPEAKERthe top case, the wood frame.

24:24SPEAKERActually, I don't know that they have

24:26SPEAKERthe board designs here.

24:28SPEAKERThat would make sense that they're not sharing that,

24:31SPEAKERbut everything else.

24:32SPEAKER- That was the one that leapt out at me

24:34SPEAKERbecause it was like, hey, if you have the CAD files,

24:36SPEAKERthe board designs, the firmware, everything,

24:38SPEAKERthen you could kind of just make your own at this point.

24:42SPEAKERI'm not saying that it would necessarily be cost effective

24:44SPEAKERand definitely not like time effective, but you could.

24:47SPEAKER- No, but like it's cool if you want to be able to,

24:50SPEAKERif you want to integrate a computer keyboard in something,

24:54SPEAKERthis is a really easy way to do it

24:55SPEAKER'cause you can get the board CAD

24:57SPEAKERand then just use that to carve out the holes that you need

24:59SPEAKERin whatever you're building.

25:01SPEAKER- So that was, like I said,

25:02SPEAKERthe key for doing this is the first time

25:04SPEAKERI have become aware of a company

25:05SPEAKERreleasing things like CAD files,

25:06SPEAKERalthough it sounds like it's actually more common

25:08SPEAKERthan I realized, but that is the point, right?

25:11SPEAKERIt's not, oh, go print your own 3D printed version

25:14SPEAKERof our housing, it's now you have

25:17SPEAKERthe very precise measurements of the shape of our stuff

25:20SPEAKERso you can make add-ons that fit properly

25:22SPEAKERwithout having to eyeball or measure yourself.

25:25SPEAKER- So there's a lot of open hardware stuff

25:27SPEAKERthat has posted CAD files for years and years and years.

25:29SPEAKERLike there's enthusiast keyboards that people make

25:31SPEAKERthat have been around for forever.

25:33SPEAKER- Yeah, and it makes more sense when it's like homebrew,

25:36SPEAKERthe way mechanical keyboards started as a community,

25:38SPEAKERbut I guess it's a little more notable to me

25:41SPEAKERwhen a large company that makes a lot of money

25:43SPEAKERselling products does it.

25:44SPEAKER- So 3D printer people have done this for a long time,

25:47SPEAKEReven the big, like Prusa obviously post all their models

25:50SPEAKERand firmwares and board designs and everything for everything

25:52SPEAKER'cause it's all open hardware.

25:55SPEAKERThe interesting thing here is this is,

25:59SPEAKERI think this is, Keychron is a Chinese company,

26:01SPEAKERit's not as big as like a Logitech or something like that

26:04SPEAKERin terms of employees worldwide and all that,

26:08SPEAKERbut it is, they sell a whole lot of keyboards.

26:13SPEAKERSo it's pretty surprising for them.

26:15SPEAKERAnd part of me wonders,

26:18SPEAKERlike there's been a lot of conversation

26:19SPEAKERin the 3D printer community,

26:21SPEAKER'cause like Prusa is coming out and saying,

26:22SPEAKERhey, our printers are being knocked off in China

26:26SPEAKERbefore we can even start selling them, right?

26:29SPEAKERBecause they work in an open way.

26:32SPEAKERAnd I wonder if this is just the Chinese manufacturer saying,

26:36SPEAKERlook, we know everybody's gonna knock these off,

26:38SPEAKERso might as well just put the stuff out there.

26:40SPEAKER- Or, or what?

26:43SPEAKERI actually, I'm really curious

26:45SPEAKERwhat people think about this.

26:46SPEAKERI thought it was really cool.

26:48SPEAKER- I think it's generally,

26:50SPEAKERmore information is better than less.

26:52SPEAKER- Well, and it's weird for like the knock against Keychron

26:57SPEAKERwhen they came into the space

26:58SPEAKERas a cheap way to get mechanical keyboards was,

27:01SPEAKERwell, you don't have any of the other stuff that you get

27:03SPEAKERand they've slowly kind of come back around

27:05SPEAKERto where everybody else is.

27:06SPEAKERSo like they've released firmwares for years,

27:09SPEAKERso you can do QMK firmwares and stuff like that.

27:11SPEAKERThey've, and now releasing the physical design

27:17SPEAKERof the hardware is the last step in that process, I think.

27:21SPEAKER- Yeah, that's cool.

27:22SPEAKERI have no frame of reference

27:24SPEAKER'cause I've owned exactly one mechanical keyboard,

27:25SPEAKERbut I love this K5 Max.

27:27SPEAKERLike it kind of does everything

27:28SPEAKERI could want a keyboard to do.

27:30SPEAKER- The, I think the first mechanical keyboard's

27:32SPEAKERkind of like owning your first electric car.

27:34SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.

27:35SPEAKER- In that like, it's such a huge improvement

27:37SPEAKERover what you had before

27:38SPEAKERthat it feels like it's like getting an SSD

27:39SPEAKERin your computer, right?

27:40SPEAKERYou're like, "Oh wow, my computer's really fast now."

27:43SPEAKERAnd it doesn't matter if you got the fastest SSD

27:45SPEAKERor like the 10th fastest SSD.

27:47SPEAKERIt's so much better than the thing that came before

27:49SPEAKERthat it just feels like a magical upgrade.

27:51SPEAKER- You're not wrong, but there is more to it

27:53SPEAKERthan I would have expected, I guess I would say.

27:54SPEAKERLike what I mean, what I mean is I continue to be delighted

27:57SPEAKERby the amount of functionality it has.

27:59SPEAKERLike, you know, it's got, I'd have to-

28:02SPEAKER- Do you do layers and stuff?

28:04SPEAKER- Not sure.

28:05SPEAKERI think it's 110 key, so I don't know that it needs layers

28:09SPEAKERor it's necessarily, it probably-

28:10SPEAKER- I mean, look man-

28:12SPEAKER- Actually, maybe layers is a different term for,

28:14SPEAKERyes, it does have presets for different OSs, I believe.

28:18SPEAKER- So like on my keyboard, when I hold down the function key,

28:21SPEAKERI get a completely different layout.

28:22SPEAKER- Oh yes, I believe it does, yes.

28:24SPEAKERI think I've seen that.

28:25SPEAKER- That's what layers are.

28:25SPEAKER- Like it's QMK and I've looked at the customization stuff

28:28SPEAKERand yes, it does have that stuff.

28:31SPEAKER- And part of that QMK thing is that you can,

28:33SPEAKERso you can set up a whole bunch of layers

28:35SPEAKERand you can kind of page through them if you want

28:37SPEAKERor you can have ones that are instantaneous

28:38SPEAKERthat you get access by pressing a keyboard shortcut.

28:41SPEAKER- It does that, I think I was mixing that up

28:43SPEAKERwith it also as a physical switch for Mac or Windows.

28:46SPEAKER- Oh, oh, right, right.

28:47SPEAKER- I think that's different than what you're talking about.

28:49SPEAKERBut like, I think we talked about this recently,

28:51SPEAKERlike I said, remember it's got Bluetooth

28:53SPEAKERand I was like, keep it connected to my minister

28:55SPEAKERand that's cool, but I wish I could also

28:57SPEAKERkeep it connected to a Pi.

28:58SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:59SPEAKER- Somebody in the Discord chimed in and they were like,

29:00SPEAKER"Oh no, it actually has three Bluetooth profiles on it."

29:02SPEAKERSo you can sync to three Bluetooth devices at once.

29:06SPEAKERSo like for 110 bucks,

29:08SPEAKERlike it has a shocking amount of functionality to me.

29:10SPEAKERI don't doubt there are more elaborate boards out there.

29:14SPEAKER- Well, the nice thing with the QMK stuff

29:16SPEAKERis you just write your own firmware if you want.

29:17SPEAKER- Yeah. - Right.

29:19SPEAKER- Everything's got an ARM CPU in it now.

29:21SPEAKER- It's all ARM, it turns out.

29:24SPEAKERSo yeah, I thought that was really cool.

29:25SPEAKERYou called out that the Valve just posted

29:27SPEAKERfor the Steam Controller their CAD files as well,

29:29SPEAKERwhich they, I feel like they did that

29:31SPEAKERfor the Steam Deck as well.

29:33SPEAKER- I would believe that, but let me just verify.

29:36SPEAKERYeah, Steam Deck CAD files came out in 2022,

29:41SPEAKERwhich I think is when the Steam Deck ships, right?

29:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that was short.

29:44SPEAKERI feel like they did it shortly after, but yeah.

29:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so I mean, Valve, I'm not surprised,

29:49SPEAKERhas been doing this for a while.

29:50SPEAKERNot a new phenomenon,

29:51SPEAKERbut it's cool to see more companies getting in on it.

29:54SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, I mean, so hardware stores

29:58SPEAKERlike McMaster's car do this as well, right?

30:01SPEAKERSo like, if you're building something,

30:04SPEAKERyou can grab the CAD file for the bolts that you wanna use

30:07SPEAKERand you can get exactly the right shape and all that stuff

30:10SPEAKERso you know what your overlap is.

30:11SPEAKERAnd it's incredibly convenient

30:13SPEAKERwhen you're designing stuff, so.

30:15SPEAKER- I had to laugh because like McMaster car

30:17SPEAKERis traditionally purveyor of like fine well-made tools

30:21SPEAKERand associated trinkets, you know?

30:25SPEAKERBut more recently, more recently they have been recognized

30:29SPEAKERas the gods of web design.

30:31SPEAKERDid you catch that old meme? - I don't know about

30:33SPEAKERgods of web design, but is this a thing?

30:36SPEAKERIs this what people, is this what the kids are saying?

30:38SPEAKER- I'm not entirely serious, but I mean,

30:41SPEAKERI think they were not entirely serious,

30:42SPEAKERbut also they kind of were.

30:43SPEAKERI mean, are you on the website?

30:45SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

30:45SPEAKER- It was being passed around recently as look at how fast

30:48SPEAKERand simple and efficient web design used to be.

30:50SPEAKERLike anything you click on their site,

30:52SPEAKERit all just loads instantly.

30:53SPEAKERLike it's all, the information's all very clearly

30:56SPEAKERand concisely presented.

30:57SPEAKEREvery page loads immediately.

31:01SPEAKER- You're not wrong.

31:01SPEAKER- It's like it was being passed around kind of a lot

31:05SPEAKERon like web design circles on social media as like,

31:08SPEAKERwe need to get back to this.

31:09SPEAKERLike we need to get back to just functional,

31:12SPEAKERwell laid out sites that are very performance.

31:15SPEAKER- And I mean, it is insanely fast

31:17SPEAKERclicking down into these columns.

31:18SPEAKERIt took like three seconds to get down to extra wide

31:22SPEAKERtwo piece shaft collars.

31:23SPEAKERAnd then I'm downloading a solid works file

31:26SPEAKERfor that particular model.

31:27SPEAKER- Clicking into any of these large categories of products

31:30SPEAKERwas like measured in milliseconds in the page load times.

31:33SPEAKERLike it's just very, very fast.

31:34SPEAKER- Hey, here's an interesting factoid.

31:36SPEAKERI'm looking at my ad blocker on this page.

31:37SPEAKERThere's only three blocked things.

31:40SPEAKERWhen I go to Gmail, I think it's like 22,000 or something.

31:44SPEAKERIt's fairly ridiculous.

31:47SPEAKER- The web used to be good.

31:48SPEAKER- Yeah, the web can still be good, Brad.

31:50SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe.

31:52SPEAKER- On the input tip, more mouse vendors

31:54SPEAKERare doing magnetic switches, we talked about

31:56SPEAKERthe Logitech hits sensors in the Super Strike

31:59SPEAKERa few weeks ago.

32:00SPEAKERBoth Keychron, Keychron just teased out a new switch

32:06SPEAKERthat they called the MagOpt switch.

32:09SPEAKERIt's a hybrid optical magnetic sensing mechanism

32:12SPEAKERwith a traditional clicky leaf,

32:14SPEAKERlike you expect in a normal switch.

32:17SPEAKER- I assume that's, they don't have to make this

32:19SPEAKERall about Keychron, but they've had a couple

32:21SPEAKERof magnetic keyboards out for a year or two.

32:23SPEAKERI assume this is a newer type of switch than that though.

32:26SPEAKER- Well, the mouse switches are a different physical design.

32:29SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe it's, also I think those

32:31SPEAKERmight've been just magnetic.

32:33SPEAKERIs this magneto-optical?

32:36SPEAKEROr no, it doesn't make sense.

32:36SPEAKERWhat is the opt here?

32:39SPEAKER- You know, I watched the video

32:41SPEAKERand I didn't understand exactly how it worked, so.

32:44SPEAKER- Oh, it is, yes, hybrid optical

32:46SPEAKERand magnetic sensing mechanism.

32:47SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm interested to see

32:53SPEAKERhow this actually works in practice.

32:55SPEAKER'Cause the click is gonna be physical,

32:56SPEAKERso it's gonna be on the location it always is,

33:00SPEAKERregardless of where you trigger the actuation point

33:05SPEAKERto be on the mouse software.

33:09SPEAKERBut they are saying that they're gonna do the stuff

33:11SPEAKERlike the rapid click, where the release happens

33:14SPEAKERbefore you cross the actuation point and stuff like that.

33:18SPEAKERThe other one is this company called Staptic,

33:20SPEAKERwhich is a Russian streamer's mouse company.

33:25SPEAKERAnd they're doing the full thing with the haptic bumpers

33:29SPEAKERand some sort of magnetic sensor for the switches.

33:35SPEAKERWhether that, like who knows,

33:40SPEAKERRussian streamer mice, I have questions about.

33:45SPEAKERProbably not gonna be in Western markets

33:47SPEAKERis what this terror of article says.

33:49SPEAKER- Yeah, you're probably right about that.

33:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm surprised we haven't seen a hits clone

33:54SPEAKERout of China yet, honestly.

33:57SPEAKER- I'm sure it's coming.

33:58SPEAKER- I kind of expected to see it by now.

33:59SPEAKER- Probably coming.

34:00SPEAKER- Yeah, almost certainly.

34:01SPEAKER- Really feels like we're in kind of like a golden age

34:03SPEAKERof mice products.

34:06SPEAKER- It's a--

34:06SPEAKER- There's so many players in the space

34:08SPEAKERand there's so much tech and R&D development

34:12SPEAKERdown so many different lines,

34:14SPEAKERin terms of weights and switch types and programmability

34:17SPEAKERand all kind of--

34:18SPEAKER- Sensors.

34:19SPEAKER- Like there's really just a mouse for everybody

34:21SPEAKERat this point.

34:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I use two mice.

34:25SPEAKERI use a vertical when I'm doing work stuff usually,

34:28SPEAKERjust to save my wrists a little bit.

34:30SPEAKER- What is the ergonomic rationale for the vertical mouse?

34:33SPEAKERIs it just somehow better for your hand

34:35SPEAKERto be oriented that way?

34:36SPEAKER- So instead of your hand being folded up to use the mouse,

34:39SPEAKERyou're keeping it vertical and sideways.

34:41SPEAKER- Now that I'm flapping my hand in front of the camera,

34:43SPEAKERI have all immediately understood the practicality

34:45SPEAKER'cause you're pivoting your wrist on the up down,

34:49SPEAKERnot the lateral movement.

34:51SPEAKER- You're really supposed to just move your arm,

34:53SPEAKERnot your wrist at all really.

34:54SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.

34:55SPEAKER- It kind of facilitates that 'cause it's like,

34:57SPEAKERthink about how you hold a cup or a can of Coke or something

35:01SPEAKERand when you drink that,

35:03SPEAKERyou're not bending your wrist in or out.

35:05SPEAKERThe problem with using a traditional mouse

35:07SPEAKERis that you end up with your hand flexed up in that,

35:12SPEAKERI don't know how to say it,

35:13SPEAKERbut like where your palms are facing out

35:17SPEAKERis if you're making a stop sign, stop hand

35:20SPEAKERand that adds a lot of tension to the channel,

35:25SPEAKERthe carpal channel where the ligaments

35:26SPEAKERthat control your fingers go through.

35:29SPEAKERAnd so when you bend up,

35:30SPEAKERyou're adding stress and friction to those.

35:33SPEAKERIf you do the vertical, then you don't do that as much

35:35SPEAKERso you can click more basically.

35:36SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.

35:37SPEAKERI've been using wrist rests for keyboard and mouse

35:39SPEAKERfor 20 years to try to basically--

35:42SPEAKER- Force yourself, yeah.

35:43SPEAKER- The goal is to keep your hand parallel

35:44SPEAKERwith your forearm, right?

35:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

35:47SPEAKERI use a wrist rest when I'm using the normal mouse as well.

35:51SPEAKERBut sometimes it's nice

35:51SPEAKERto just have the hand resting on the mouse pad.

35:54SPEAKERIt does funk up the mouse pad more though,

35:56SPEAKERwhich is undesirable.

35:57SPEAKER- Yeah, you find little bits of like rubber from the base

36:00SPEAKERor fibers all over the place.

36:01SPEAKER- Hairs and dead skin and all sorts.

36:04SPEAKERPeople are gross.

36:06SPEAKER- They sure are.

36:07SPEAKERHow often do you clean your desk?

36:09SPEAKER- I don't wanna talk about that.

36:10SPEAKERI'm uncomfortable with this topic.

36:12SPEAKER- Okay, I used to be on a once a week like full dust

36:15SPEAKERand wipe down of the desk.

36:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm on a similar cadence.

36:18SPEAKER- Uh-huh, well, I'm like two,

36:20SPEAKERI'm really, I have roughly every two to three weeks now.

36:22SPEAKER- I haven't seen parts of my desk

36:24SPEAKERin probably two years, Brad.

36:25SPEAKER- Uh-huh, all right.

36:26SPEAKER- Well, mainly because there's a big giant,

36:28SPEAKERI mean, there's a cutting mat on one side.

36:30SPEAKERThere's my, basically my desk is covered in rubber

36:33SPEAKERat this point is the TLDR.

36:34SPEAKER- Yes, that could be a problem.

36:36SPEAKER- Yeah.

36:38SPEAKERDo you wanna talk about Wildcat Lake?

36:39SPEAKERI'm excited about this.

36:40SPEAKER- Yes.

36:41SPEAKER- Let's get some hot biz.

36:42SPEAKER- This is my big one, it happened.

36:44SPEAKER- Dude, you and I have been waiting for this for like,

36:46SPEAKERI don't know, two years now, it seems like.

36:48SPEAKER- I was going to say, I think it's been,

36:50SPEAKERI've been talking wistfully about Wildcat Lake

36:52SPEAKERfor like two years now.

36:54SPEAKERAnd that's mostly because it leaked that long ago

36:57SPEAKERon the roadmap, well, whatever.

36:58SPEAKERCPU roadmaps get out way ahead of time, so that's not.

37:01SPEAKER- Yeah, they're not really leaks, they just post them.

37:03SPEAKER- It's not, well, or an Intel didn't post it.

37:04SPEAKERThis was coming out of associated people around it.

37:08SPEAKERBut in fact, they only, Intel only confirmed it,

37:10SPEAKERI think, a few months ago that it existed, technically.

37:14SPEAKERThis is downstream of Panther Lake.

37:16SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a variant of the Intel Core, what, Core 3?

37:21SPEAKERCan't remember what they call it.

37:22SPEAKERI can't remember the actual name, Core Series 3, sorry.

37:24SPEAKER- Yeah, the branding, the final branding,

37:26SPEAKERbecause these code names don't make it to market,

37:28SPEAKERis, yeah, Core, just plain Intel current marketing.

37:31SPEAKERI'm not a fan.

37:33SPEAKER- Look, it's all bad.

37:34SPEAKERAll of these names are always bad and always have been.

37:36SPEAKERThe only good one ever was the GeForce 3.

37:39SPEAKERThat was the last time this was good.

37:40SPEAKER- Yeah, it's gotten harder to keep track of what's what

37:44SPEAKERsince they dropped the I and all that stuff.

37:47SPEAKER- Honestly, once they start segmenting the product lines

37:49SPEAKERto the point that there's 55 products

37:52SPEAKERto serve various markets, then you're doomed.

37:55SPEAKERThere's nothing you can do.

37:56SPEAKER- Now, granted, I guess in this case, in their defense,

37:59SPEAKERPanther Lake is just a laptop SKU to begin with,

38:01SPEAKERso there are not ultra and desktop variants

38:03SPEAKERto differentiate from here.

38:04SPEAKER- Well, no, so Panther Lake is a soup to nuts mobile SKU,

38:09SPEAKERthough, so it's like mobile workstations, thin and lights,

38:12SPEAKERthe whole thing.

38:13SPEAKER- Oh, well, sure, yeah, but no big desktop.

38:14SPEAKERThere's no, like, you know, 4,900K equivalent

38:18SPEAKERthat we're trying to differentiate from here,

38:20SPEAKERbut yes, these are like plain Core 3s and Core 5s.

38:25SPEAKERWell, it might just be Core 3.

38:27SPEAKERAgain, it's hard to tell from this.

38:30SPEAKER- I think this is Core Series 3.

38:31SPEAKERThis is the--

38:32SPEAKER- That's the main part, yes.

38:33SPEAKERSo what I mean is there might be some upper tier parts

38:39SPEAKERof this that are in Panther Lake, it doesn't matter.

38:43SPEAKER- It's the triplet design, so they could put a bigger GPU

38:45SPEAKERon it for inexplicable reasons.

38:47SPEAKERI don't really know why they would.

38:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so I mean, the big thing here,

38:51SPEAKERand again, I've been wanting, I've been talking about

38:52SPEAKERwanting to build a router out of Wildcat Lake

38:54SPEAKERfor like two years now.

38:56SPEAKERThis was thought to be the successor to Alder Lake N,

39:00SPEAKERwhich is better known as like N100, N150,

39:03SPEAKERwhich has kind of like been the go-to

39:05SPEAKERfor that low tier x86 mini PC for a long time.

39:08SPEAKER- Well, yeah, they were like,

39:10SPEAKERif you think about the kind of computers

39:11SPEAKERthat are in like a hospital room slapped on the wall

39:15SPEAKERor like hanging off the back of somebody's monitor

39:17SPEAKERat a corporate desk job, that's what we're talking about

39:20SPEAKERis a lot of these kind of machines.

39:21SPEAKER- Yeah, now the thing that's a little confusing here,

39:24SPEAKERthe most information I've seen anybody put out

39:26SPEAKERabout this thing is from Serve the Home,

39:28SPEAKERwhich is the very active like home networking

39:31SPEAKERkind of home lab-y sort of site.

39:34SPEAKERAnd they liken it as, they liken it more to a successor

39:36SPEAKERto Raptor Lake U, are you familiar with that line?

39:40SPEAKER- Yeah, that was the-

39:43SPEAKER- Laptop part?

39:44SPEAKER- Yeah.

39:45SPEAKER- So that was the big thing here that kind of surprised me

39:48SPEAKERis that again, the rumor mill has been positioning this

39:51SPEAKERas like an Alder Lake N follow-up,

39:52SPEAKERbut this so far is only debuting in laptops

39:55SPEAKERand I guess like mini PCs

39:56SPEAKERthat are kind of laptop tier performance.

39:59SPEAKER- I think that's, well, I mean,

40:00SPEAKERbut that's what the Alder Lake stuff was as well, right?

40:04SPEAKER- Was that also a laptop chip?

40:06SPEAKER- Yeah, well, Alder Lake was still everything.

40:09SPEAKER- No, no, Alder Lake N specifically,

40:10SPEAKERthose are just the tiny four core or eight core.

40:13SPEAKER- Those were, I'm sure destined for laptops,

40:15SPEAKERlike cheap laptops, I guess.

40:17SPEAKER- Maybe that's where those originated,

40:18SPEAKERbut then, you know, like the little,

40:20SPEAKERa lot of little like kind of no name,

40:23SPEAKERlike Chinese mini PC makers started putting those

40:25SPEAKERin like fanless boxes with lots of network interfaces

40:29SPEAKERon them to use for like home server and router type stuff.

40:33SPEAKERAnyway, this is actually shipping.

40:35SPEAKERIt's got a product name now, it's Core Series 3,

40:38SPEAKERit's in laptops, it's coming to market.

40:40SPEAKER- Yum.

40:41SPEAKER- The specs are exactly what's been rumored

40:43SPEAKERfor like a year now,

40:44SPEAKERso I don't know if we need to get too much

40:45SPEAKERinto that stuff again.

40:46SPEAKERIt's two P, well, the basic,

40:49SPEAKERlike there is one SKU with only one P core,

40:50SPEAKERbut the basic layout is two P cores and four LPE cores.

40:55SPEAKER- Yeah, the LPE cores are on the IO die, so.

40:57SPEAKER- They're separate from the compute tile,

40:59SPEAKERbut they're, my understanding is LPE cores

41:01SPEAKERare basically roughly the same performance as E cores,

41:03SPEAKERit's just where they are on the package is different.

41:06SPEAKERIs that correct?

41:07SPEAKER- They're often that die is clock slower is my understanding.

41:10SPEAKERSo the performance per clock is gonna be the same,

41:12SPEAKERbut the clock speeds will actually be lower.

41:14SPEAKER- That would make some sense, that's,

41:17SPEAKERyeah, that's okay, that's not amazing.

41:19SPEAKERAnd then there are like latency concerns

41:21SPEAKERabout communicating between the P and E or LPE cores, right?

41:24SPEAKER'Cause they're going across.

41:26SPEAKER- Well, so the benefit of these chips

41:29SPEAKERis that they're often really, really inexpensive.

41:31SPEAKERLike those Alder Lake N100 150 chips

41:35SPEAKERin a bare bones B-link style, NUC style case,

41:40SPEAKERlike a small fanless enclosure,

41:42SPEAKERin the good times before RAM prices got out of,

41:45SPEAKERwell, I mean, the bare bones ones are still cheap.

41:46SPEAKERThey're still like 100 and 150 bucks often regularly

41:50SPEAKERif you kind of shop around.

41:53SPEAKERIn the days when RAM and SSDs were still inexpensive,

41:56SPEAKERyou could often get a 16 gig RAM configuration

41:59SPEAKERwith like 100 gig SSD for $150,

42:03SPEAKERwhich is a kind of amazing,

42:05SPEAKERreally, really capable little machine

42:08SPEAKERthat draws five watts at idle,

42:09SPEAKERwhich is like a perfect, hey, I want a home server,

42:14SPEAKERbut I don't want to increase my power bill $25 a month

42:17SPEAKERkind of situation.

42:18SPEAKER- Yeah.

42:20SPEAKER- And this should be a successor.

42:22SPEAKERI think, I mean, we're starting to see the Panther Lake,

42:25SPEAKERlike low power NUC style boxes come out as well.

42:31SPEAKERThose are gonna be much more expensive

42:34SPEAKER'cause they're much more capable machines.

42:37SPEAKERThe power consumption under load will be higher.

42:40SPEAKERFrom looking at the laptop reviews,

42:42SPEAKERit seems like the idle power will be,

42:45SPEAKERit's gonna be more than those Alder Lake machines.

42:47SPEAKER- Yeah, that is the case.

42:49SPEAKERI mean, A, they have more CPU cores, like I said,

42:51SPEAKER'cause those, especially the lower tier,

42:53SPEAKERlike N100 was just four cores and this is six CPU cores.

42:56SPEAKERThis also has an NPU on it, which those did not.

42:59SPEAKER- You just turn that off though, nobody uses that.

43:01SPEAKER- So that's my question.

43:03SPEAKERMy understanding is that for the,

43:05SPEAKERlike the CWWK, you're familiar with that brand?

43:08SPEAKERLike the little kind of no name again,

43:09SPEAKERlike Chinese mini PCs.

43:11SPEAKERMy understanding is the BIOS or UEFI support

43:13SPEAKERfor those things is real flimsy.

43:16SPEAKERSo I'm wondering if you will actually be able

43:18SPEAKERto turn that off 'cause you could see an argument for,

43:22SPEAKERbecause even these LP E-cores,

43:23SPEAKERI don't know if everybody listening has kept up with this,

43:27SPEAKERbut the E-core space is where Intel's like most exciting

43:32SPEAKERkind of performance work has been going on

43:33SPEAKERfor the last few generations.

43:34SPEAKERLike the E-cores are insanely fast now.

43:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I think they're Skylake.

43:39SPEAKER- No, they're way beyond that now.

43:41SPEAKERSo that's what N100 was, that was based on,

43:44SPEAKERI think that was Skymont, I lose track.

43:47SPEAKERI think we're on Darkmont now,

43:48SPEAKERor maybe the generation after Darkmont.

43:50SPEAKERBut so the N100 was roughly comparable per core

43:52SPEAKERto like a 6,500 or an i7 or i5 6,500.

44:00SPEAKERAnd we're like three generations past that now.

44:02SPEAKERSo the point I was gonna make is like just running

44:05SPEAKERwith the LP E-cores on this thing,

44:07SPEAKEReven if you can disable the P-cores,

44:10SPEAKERyou're still gonna have something that for four cores

44:12SPEAKERis like insanely faster than what the N100 did.

44:16SPEAKER- And a much newer GPU that'll do more video transcodes

44:20SPEAKERand stuff like newer codecs and stuff like that.

44:22SPEAKER- That's the big thing, this is the GPU for me.

44:24SPEAKER'Cause the CPU on the types of things I use this for

44:26SPEAKERare relatively minor, like running Minecraft servers

44:29SPEAKERwill take one LP E-core and be fine.

44:33SPEAKERRunning five video transcodes or three video transcodes

44:37SPEAKERor whatever is something that the current machine

44:40SPEAKERjust doesn't have the GPU oomph to do.

44:43SPEAKERAnd with this, the XE-cores are,

44:47SPEAKERthe video engine in the XE GPU cores

44:49SPEAKERis really, really good.

44:52SPEAKERSo yeah, anyway, it's exciting news.

44:55SPEAKER- Yeah, very exciting for a little home servers

44:56SPEAKERif and when that happens.

44:57SPEAKERAgain, this is like very much being positioned

44:59SPEAKERas a laptop chip right now.

45:01SPEAKERLike in fact, all the benchmarks you're seeing out there

45:02SPEAKERare comparing it to things like the MacBook Neo.

45:05SPEAKERLike that's the product category

45:06SPEAKERthis is being positioned for.

45:08SPEAKERSo it does remain to be seen if this trickles down

45:11SPEAKERto the mini PC area.

45:12SPEAKER- I did find a random comment on the big giant

45:15SPEAKERlike 200 page serve the home forum thread

45:17SPEAKERabout the N100s as home servers.

45:21SPEAKERSomebody had said they're getting very hard to buy now.

45:25SPEAKERAnd they had reached out to one of these suppliers

45:26SPEAKERthat makes the little mini PCs.

45:28SPEAKERAnd they basically said like, yeah,

45:29SPEAKERit's getting very difficult to source new N150 chips.

45:34SPEAKERSo presumably maybe this will hopefully slide

45:36SPEAKERinto that category.

45:37SPEAKER- Like those chips are old enough

45:39SPEAKERthat Linux is dropping support for the transcode engine

45:44SPEAKERand the GPU and some newer kernels

45:47SPEAKERjust don't have that support built anymore.

45:48SPEAKERYou have to patch it in if you want it still.

45:50SPEAKERSo like it's seven year old, eight year old,

45:54SPEAKERit's an eight year old CPU, I think at this point,

45:56SPEAKERAlder Lake probably, can't remember.

45:59SPEAKERIt was pre-pandemic.

46:00SPEAKER- No, Alder Lake's newer than that definitely.

46:02SPEAKER- Really?

46:03SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, that's like 2022 I wanna say.

46:06SPEAKER- No, I bought that machine before 2022.

46:08SPEAKER- 2021, November, 2021 is when Alder Lake debuted

46:12SPEAKERthe first SKUs.

46:14SPEAKER- On your comment about the BIOS and UEFI support,

46:17SPEAKERI will say having used one of those Beelinks at length,

46:21SPEAKERthe UEFI support is thin.

46:23SPEAKER- Yeah, that's concerning.

46:25SPEAKER- I've looked at some of the mini's forums boards

46:27SPEAKERthat they sell.

46:28SPEAKERSo they sell both like ITX boards

46:30SPEAKERthat have like mobile processors soldered on.

46:34SPEAKERThey also do small NUC size boxes.

46:39SPEAKERTheir BIOS's and UEFI's are generally much better.

46:41SPEAKERSo we should, yeah.

46:44SPEAKER- The problem there for my very particular brand

46:46SPEAKERof perversion is that they are probably not

46:48SPEAKERputting configurations together

46:49SPEAKERthat are what I would want for like a router.

46:51SPEAKERThat's where you're kind of only seeing on AliExpress,

46:54SPEAKERthat type of thing.

46:55SPEAKER- You want like the four, like a switch built in

46:58SPEAKERand all that stuff?

46:58SPEAKER- Frankly, I just want two SFP plus ports and that's it.

47:01SPEAKERI want, I want.

47:03SPEAKER- Well, that is a specific brand of perversion.

47:05SPEAKER- And there are plenty of N150 machines out there

47:08SPEAKERthat have that.

47:09SPEAKER- Yeah.

47:10SPEAKER- And I mean, they'll have, they'll have like four,

47:11SPEAKER2.5 gigabit ports as well, RJ45, if you want it.

47:15SPEAKERLike I just want, I want 10 gigabit in, 10 gigabit out.

47:19SPEAKERThat's all I need for a router, but that's,

47:21SPEAKERso I don't know if that's likely to show up

47:22SPEAKERfrom a company who's kind of bios support you can trust, but.

47:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I wonder, like I almost wonder

47:29SPEAKERif you're not making a mistake by just buying the older,

47:31SPEAKERlike one for something that's as low power requirements

47:34SPEAKERas a router.

47:36SPEAKER- Well, again, now you can't, like now they're,

47:38SPEAKERnow they're very hard to find and like $150 more

47:41SPEAKERthan they used to be or something.

47:42SPEAKERSo it's like, it's like a basically end of life platform

47:46SPEAKERthat you'd be paying through the nose to get

47:47SPEAKERif you could even find one now.

47:48SPEAKER- Yeah, that's true.

47:49SPEAKER- At this point, I maybe kind of wish

47:51SPEAKERI had just bought one two years ago.

47:53SPEAKER- I mean, there's a lesson there.

47:54SPEAKER- Well, my router still works fine to be clear.

47:56SPEAKERLike I had, there's like, I would gain zero new functionality

47:59SPEAKERby having a better router.

48:01SPEAKERI'm just mad that it's not supported anymore,

48:04SPEAKERthat they kind of dropped support for it very prematurely.

48:07SPEAKERLike my router is running Linux kernel,

48:09SPEAKERI think it's like 4.7 or 4.9.

48:12SPEAKER- Jesus.

48:12SPEAKER- If that tells you anything, like it's,

48:15SPEAKERit's running a stack that has been end of life

48:17SPEAKERand not supported for like five years now or something.

48:20SPEAKER- That's scary on a router.

48:21SPEAKER- Yes, that's why I'm kind of a little antsy

48:23SPEAKERto replace it with something else.

48:25SPEAKER- It's time.

48:27SPEAKERSpeaking of that, that's the end of our list of topics.

48:31SPEAKER- Yeah, it is.

48:32SPEAKER- We've reached time.

48:33SPEAKER- Yes, I will say real quick on the firmware

48:37SPEAKERand UFI support thing, like that's an interesting phenomenon

48:41SPEAKERof this, like, I think it's generally a good thing

48:43SPEAKERthat there was more types of hardware available

48:45SPEAKERrather than less these days.

48:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

48:48SPEAKER- But we're in this era of there just so many little,

48:51SPEAKERwhen I say no name, I'm talking like companies

48:52SPEAKERthat you've never heard of, you know,

48:54SPEAKERlike another space I keep an eye on is off, not off brand,

48:58SPEAKERbut like third party sort of portable Switch 2 docks.

49:02SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

49:03SPEAKER- Like I had that Genki smart dock for Switch 1,

49:06SPEAKERthere's like a ton of companies doing that

49:08SPEAKERfor Switch 2 already and have been for a while,

49:10SPEAKERbut supporting the Switch 2's video output

49:13SPEAKERis like a moving target and Nintendo keeps making changes

49:15SPEAKERin firmware, it's not clear if they're doing that

49:18SPEAKERto try to throw those third parties off their trail

49:22SPEAKERor if it's just totally unrelated

49:23SPEAKERand just happens to be breaking things.

49:25SPEAKERBut the reason I bring that up is a lot of these third party

49:30SPEAKERSwitch video adapters you'll find put out firmware updates,

49:34SPEAKERbut the only way to get them is like some reset era thread

49:37SPEAKERwhere somebody is like, hey, I contacted the company support

49:40SPEAKERand they sent me this Google drive link and here it is.

49:42SPEAKER- Look.

49:43SPEAKER- And it's like, oh, I'm just gonna go download this zip,

49:45SPEAKERthis random zip from a Google drive and run the executable

49:48SPEAKERon my PC to update the firmware on this dock.

49:52SPEAKEROr maybe I'm not gonna do that, you know what I mean?

49:54SPEAKERLike it's the nature of hardware support

49:58SPEAKERfor these like cheap little no-name devices

50:01SPEAKERthat do weird edge casing functionality

50:03SPEAKERis getting real wild west.

50:05SPEAKER- Let me tell you about my fingerprint sensor.

50:08SPEAKER- Uh-huh.

50:09SPEAKER- So I bought that,

50:10SPEAKERI bought a chip sailing CS9711 based fingerprint sensor.

50:14SPEAKERI glued it up under my desk so I could just tap it.

50:16SPEAKERIt works great in Linux,

50:17SPEAKERI had to install a special driver for it,

50:19SPEAKERbut in Windows, it didn't work.

50:22SPEAKERAnd when I dug down to it,

50:24SPEAKERthe hardware IDs, it had the right hardware IDs

50:28SPEAKERand everything, but in order to get the driver to install,

50:31SPEAKERI had to go to the Microsoft update catalog with the USB ID

50:35SPEAKERand put the hardware ID in and run the search

50:38SPEAKERand download the file and unpack it

50:40SPEAKERand manually install it before it would work in Windows.

50:42SPEAKER- Okay.

50:43SPEAKER- And like, I don't know why it doesn't,

50:45SPEAKERwhy Windows update doesn't just do that

50:47SPEAKER'cause it's like the Microsoft update catalog,

50:50SPEAKERit's all there.

50:52SPEAKERBut when you buy weird stuff from Timu,

50:54SPEAKERsometimes you have to jump through some extra hoops,

50:55SPEAKERI guess is the answer.

50:57SPEAKER- But now that did at least come from Microsoft, correct?

51:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I first installed a sketchy one

51:02SPEAKERfrom a Chinese website and I was like,

51:03SPEAKERI don't know if I want to install this, so.

51:04SPEAKER- That's maybe less fine.

51:05SPEAKERLike at least if you know the provenance

51:07SPEAKERof the thing you're installing is from an official company,

51:09SPEAKERthat's one thing.

51:11SPEAKER- I mean, yeah, but also,

51:14SPEAKERlike when you're buying weird edge case,

51:17SPEAKERlike the reason I bought this one is because I found a Timu,

51:20SPEAKERsomebody on Blue Sky recommended a Timu store

51:24SPEAKERthat sold the exact one that's actually supported in Linux.

51:27SPEAKER'Cause that's, the problem is most of the Windows

51:29SPEAKERHello compatible fingerprint sensors

51:31SPEAKERaren't supported in Linux at all.

51:33SPEAKERSo you have to find ones that have specific chipsets.

51:35SPEAKERIt's a whole thing.

51:36SPEAKERI should do a post for something about it

51:37SPEAKER'cause it was a mess.

51:39SPEAKERBut the point is everything's janky now.

51:43SPEAKER- Yep.

51:44SPEAKER- We live in the janky time, unfortunately.

51:45SPEAKER- I guess so, yeah, it's the jank era.

51:47SPEAKER- Yeah, welcome to the era of extreme jank.

51:51SPEAKER- Just to close the loop though,

51:52SPEAKERI think maybe for something as critical as a router

51:54SPEAKERwhere 100% of my internet traffic is going through it,

51:56SPEAKERI should maybe do a little more due diligence

51:58SPEAKERon who sells me a box.

52:00SPEAKER- I really, it's one of the things I wish,

52:02SPEAKERwe've talked about this at PC World a little bit,

52:04SPEAKERbut I wish that more reviews focused on what it's like

52:08SPEAKERto actually do kind of advanced user stuff with a thing.

52:11SPEAKERSo like they do NUC reviews

52:14SPEAKERand they're doing it for a different audience than us.

52:16SPEAKERThey're not doing reviews for home lab people.

52:18SPEAKERThey're doing reviews for people who buy like 500

52:21SPEAKERof those things to jam on the back of every monitor

52:24SPEAKERin their business, right?

52:26SPEAKERBut I would love to know what the UEFI looks like

52:29SPEAKERin all of those, right?

52:30SPEAKERI would love to see which options are in there,

52:34SPEAKERall that kind of stuff.

52:35SPEAKERWhat you can change, can you disable secure boot?

52:38SPEAKERCan you add new secure boot keys easily?

52:40SPEAKER- I mean, that stuff, that's the first thing I want to know

52:42SPEAKERabout a piece of hardware like that

52:44SPEAKER'cause that dictates a lot of what you can do

52:47SPEAKERwith the thing.

52:48SPEAKER- Oh yeah, and even like framework

52:50SPEAKERthat makes relatively good hardware, their UEFI is messy.

52:53SPEAKERI'm kind of, it's to get from the boot area

52:58SPEAKERto the BIOS tip, what you think of as traditional BIOS stuff,

53:02SPEAKERyou have to like reboot the machine

53:03SPEAKERand it's like jumping through hoops that are just goofy.

53:07SPEAKER- Are you saying, I mean, people love to complain about,

53:09SPEAKERyou know, BIOS support from your Asus and MSIs,

53:12SPEAKERbut are you saying we don't know how good we have it

53:15SPEAKERon the PC side?

53:16SPEAKERAt least those work generally, usually kind of.

53:20SPEAKER- I mean, I think the problem with the Asus and MSIs

53:22SPEAKERand gigabytes is that they are presenting people

53:25SPEAKERwith too many options.

53:27SPEAKER- Sure.

53:27SPEAKER- And also they're not explaining what the options are

53:30SPEAKERin any forum, anywhere that's not just some guy

53:35SPEAKERon Reddit posting, oh yeah, this is what the,

53:38SPEAKERthis esoteric setting 17 is.

53:42SPEAKERThis is the opposite problem is on the mobile side.

53:45SPEAKERAnd I think that spills over into the NUC style boxes,

53:47SPEAKERthe little hockey puck boxes.

53:50SPEAKERI don't know.

53:51SPEAKERComputers are weird, man,

53:52SPEAKERbut also sometimes computers are good.

53:54SPEAKERSo here we are.

53:56SPEAKER- Hopefully more often than not.

53:58SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:59SPEAKERWe've reached the end of the show.

54:01SPEAKERIf you have news that you think you would like us to cover,

54:03SPEAKERsend it to techbot@content.down

54:05SPEAKERand we're gonna try to do these more often

54:07SPEAKER'cause people seem to like them.

54:08SPEAKERAnd it's actually, it's kind of nice.

54:10SPEAKERI like talking about stuff that I don't see talked about

54:13SPEAKERon other tech podcasts I listen to, so.

54:15SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe we should make like a thread

54:18SPEAKERor a channel for people to drop links in

54:20SPEAKERif they'd like us to talk about them.

54:22SPEAKER- Oh, that's a good idea.

54:23SPEAKERWe could do that.

54:24SPEAKER- Yeah.

54:25SPEAKER- But anyway, we're listener supported.

54:27SPEAKERWe wouldn't be here without you all, the listeners.

54:29SPEAKERSo if you would like to support the show,

54:30SPEAKERif you enjoyed the podcast,

54:32SPEAKERwe would really appreciate your patronage.

54:36SPEAKERYou can go to patreon.com/techbot

54:38SPEAKERwhere for $5 a month, which is, let's see,

54:41SPEAKERI bought a burrito the other day

54:43SPEAKERand that was a third of a burrito

54:44SPEAKERdown in Northern California.

54:46SPEAKER- Yup, yes, a fully loaded burrito around here

54:49SPEAKERis now pushing $20.

54:50SPEAKER- Yeah, but like 15 bucks plus tip usually, so.

54:54SPEAKERAnyway, yeah, so for five bucks,

54:55SPEAKERyou get access to the Discord,

54:57SPEAKERyou get access to the monthly Patreon exclusive episodes

54:59SPEAKERand you support Brad Me.

55:01SPEAKERSo we get to keep you doing the show,

55:02SPEAKERwhich we like and we appreciate.

55:04SPEAKER- It keeps us eating burritos.

55:05SPEAKER- Yeah, again, it's patreon.com/techbot

55:07SPEAKER'cause well, good vibes are great.

55:09SPEAKERWe can't eat good vibes.

55:10SPEAKERThe burrito lady wants money, it turns out.

55:13SPEAKER- Do you wanna hear an exciting burrito hack?

55:16SPEAKER- Yeah, let's hear it.

55:17SPEAKER- It's the best thing I've done with a burrito in years.

55:21SPEAKERI got a super burrito recently.

55:22SPEAKER- Okay.

55:23SPEAKER- I dropped the sour cream and doubled the guacamole.

55:27SPEAKER- Oh, did they charge extra for that?

55:29SPEAKER- No, so that is- - Wild!

55:32SPEAKER- To be fair, I think that is a feature,

55:33SPEAKERI believe it came out in the wash basically.

55:35SPEAKER- Okay.

55:36SPEAKER- But the feature of the specific burrito place

55:38SPEAKERI was going to is that like removing sour cream

55:41SPEAKERand hitting double guacamole made the price the same.

55:44SPEAKER- What's your burrito order, Brad?

55:45SPEAKERDo you have a standard?

55:46SPEAKER- This, okay, yeah, sure.

55:49SPEAKERMy like most generic one is probably whole pinto beans

55:53SPEAKERand pollo asado.

55:56SPEAKER- Okay.

55:57SPEAKER- I would say, and generally super.

55:59SPEAKERSour cream's okay, I'm not the biggest fan,

56:01SPEAKERbut I'll generally go for super if it's available.

56:03SPEAKER- I like sour cream.

56:04SPEAKER- I like a light super, like I like a light sour cream.

56:07SPEAKER- Yes, that's okay, but I'm telling you,

56:10SPEAKERI'm telling you the double guac.

56:12SPEAKER- Double guac, that sounds good

56:13SPEAKERand probably much better for you too, actually.

56:15SPEAKER- Probably.

56:16SPEAKER- I'm an al pastor super.

56:19SPEAKER- Okay.

56:20SPEAKER- With black beans and extra cilantro usually.

56:23SPEAKER- Okay, ooh, that's a spicy, extra cilantro sounds good.

56:26SPEAKER- Spicy.

56:27SPEAKER- This place, this is a bit of a different,

56:30SPEAKERit was more of like a regional Mexican cuisine.

56:33SPEAKER- They have refried black beans there.

56:35SPEAKER- Oh, that's, if you go someplace with that,

56:37SPEAKERyou know you're in for a treat.

56:38SPEAKER- It's the only place, the only burrito place

56:40SPEAKERI've ever seen with refried black beans.

56:42SPEAKER- Do you ever go to Tom,

56:43SPEAKERthere's a place in the Mission that does that too,

56:45SPEAKERbut do you ever go to Tommy's joint out?

56:46SPEAKERIt's out in your general neck of the woods.

56:48SPEAKER- Oh, well, yeah, it's not a Gary and Van Ness.

56:50SPEAKER- Hold on.

56:51SPEAKER- Are you thinking, oh wait, are you thinking of the Mexican?

56:53SPEAKERI'm sorry.

56:54SPEAKER- I'm thinking the Mexican place.

56:55SPEAKER- Yes, I have been to, that's way out in the avenues.

56:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it's way out in the sunset.

56:58SPEAKER- Yes, I've been there a couple times, that place is great.

57:03SPEAKER- We get different food than I started out.

57:05SPEAKERLook, from Japan to Mexico, you get it all here.

57:08SPEAKER- Dinner and burrito for breakfast,

57:09SPEAKERwell, you know, maybe breakfast burrito

57:11SPEAKERis a covered product category, actually.

57:14SPEAKER- You know, the breakfast food gap

57:16SPEAKERthat we have here is breakfast tacos.

57:17SPEAKERWhen you go to Texas, you get,

57:19SPEAKERlike every gas station has breakfast tacos,

57:22SPEAKERand they're just like foil-wrapped rolled corn tortilla tacos

57:26SPEAKERwith like eggs and sausage and a little bit of potato.

57:29SPEAKERBut it's not like, a breakfast burrito is too much, right?

57:33SPEAKER- Yes.

57:34SPEAKER- Like the two breakfast tacos, perfect amount of food.

57:36SPEAKERIt's like eating a chicken biscuit, basically.

57:39SPEAKERHighly recommended.

57:40SPEAKER- Sold, sold.

57:41SPEAKER- We'll be back next week.

57:42SPEAKERAgain, thanks everybody for supporting us on the Patreon.

57:45SPEAKERApologies if we made you hungry this week.

57:48SPEAKERWe'll be back next week with another edition of TechPod.

57:50SPEAKERAs always, please consider the environment

57:53SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.

57:54SPEAKER(upbeat music)

57:59SPEAKER[BLANK_AUDIO]