00:00SPEAKERand you have to clap on an odd number. It was not a multiple of five or 10. It was not visible by
00:04SPEAKERanything normal. You had us clap on a seven. It was a prime number of seconds.
00:09SPEAKEROh crap. I didn't think about it that way. We have to start doing high-level math as we
00:13SPEAKERtry to synchronize our thing. What? Look, first we can't talk about synchronizing our
00:18SPEAKERthing anymore that's frowned upon. Wait, really? I thought-
00:20SPEAKERI don't know. I thought the world was supposed to be getting more tolerant, not less. We can
00:26SPEAKERsynchronize whatever we want. Hey, I installed a power tool today.
00:30SPEAKERRemember power tools? Wait, like a-
00:32SPEAKERPower toy. Oh, okay. We were talking
00:35SPEAKERlike a power drill or something. No, man. I don't have a drill.
00:38SPEAKERLike a chainsaw or something. Power toys I am very well-acquainted with.
00:42SPEAKERPower toys. I have two power toys in use right now. One of them lets me make frames on my window,
00:50SPEAKERon my tall monitor, a big boy over here on the left. I can put six different chunks in there,
00:55SPEAKERand I can drop windows in there, and it snaps them to the sides.
00:58SPEAKERThat sounds so useful. It's very good. That one,
01:01SPEAKERI can't remember what it's called though, and I can't find it in the taskbar.
01:04SPEAKERIt's like fancy something? It's like fancy corners or something like that?
01:08SPEAKERNo, no, no, no. That would be too fancy. It's actually a Microsoft power toy,
01:13SPEAKERlike a modern version of the old power toys. That is it. Fancy zones.
01:17SPEAKERFancy zones. Fancy zones. That is it. Yeah. And then the other thing I installed
01:22SPEAKERhas a really funny name. I liked it a lot, and it is called Mouse Without Borders.
01:27SPEAKERThese are both Microsoft tools that were shared. Mouse Without Borders is made by Microsoft?
01:31SPEAKERYeah. It's at Microsoft. It's a garage project, I think.
01:34SPEAKERI saw people talking about that thing, and I was like, "Well, that's made by a dude,
01:37SPEAKERand is probably trustworthy." Probably?
01:41SPEAKERSo it's published. It's on Microsoft's download site. It looks like it was made by Microsoft.
01:46SPEAKERIt might be like a 20% project or something, something that they're doing in their free time,
01:50SPEAKERbut it worked shockingly well. Been using it for about two hours.
01:53SPEAKERThat sounds like an exhaustive analysis. Yeah.
01:57SPEAKERWhat could possibly go wrong? I definitely had a real everything old is new again moment when
02:03SPEAKERI saw that the current iteration of power toys has a GitHub page. Setting aside the part where
02:07SPEAKERMicrosoft owns GitHub, but also just the idea of open source power toys. It's like,
02:12SPEAKERhow far we've come, and yet we're still using...
02:17SPEAKERWhat was the power toy? What was the main one? Do you remember what it was called?
02:21SPEAKEROh, man. I feel like we could do a whole episode on old classic Windows power toys.
02:26SPEAKERDid they start on Windows 95?
02:28SPEAKER95. I feel like I downloaded a power tool for OSR2, maybe.
02:33SPEAKERHere we go. Power toys for Windows 95, cab view, CD autoplay.
02:38SPEAKEROh, yeah. Command prompt here, anyone? Was it quick res by any chance?
02:45SPEAKERWhat was quick res? I'll let you change your resolution quickly.
02:47SPEAKERAllowed users to quickly change the screen resolution. It's right there in the name.
02:50SPEAKERNo, I feel like there was one that just exposed a whole boatload of regedit hacks.
02:55SPEAKERWas it TweakUI?
02:56SPEAKERIt was TweakUI. That was the money one.
02:58SPEAKERI'm here on Wikipedia and TweakUI on this list is the only one that is linked out to its own page.
03:03SPEAKERThat makes sense. The rest of them were kind of one-offs, like one single...
03:08SPEAKERAlton Brown would call the other ones single unitaskers and TweakUI was a multitasker.
03:15SPEAKERHang on. I'm sorry. I need to back up for a second. Did you say regedit?
03:19SPEAKERYeah, regedit.
03:19SPEAKERReg?
03:21SPEAKERRegistry. Reg. Regedit.
03:22SPEAKERMr. Reginald Edit?
03:24SPEAKERWhat did you call him? RegEdit?
03:26SPEAKERPlease call me Reg. Mr. Edit is my father.
03:31SPEAKERI hesitate to ask this. How do you pronounce the CompuServe graphics interchange format?
03:38SPEAKERI don't think we're not ready to have this conversation.
03:41SPEAKERBut it's totally GIF.
03:49SPEAKER♪♪♪
04:18SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made at TechPod. I'm Will.
04:21SPEAKERHi, Brad.
04:22SPEAKERWelcome. Hello, Brad. How are you doing today?
04:24SPEAKERI'm doing fairly well.
04:25SPEAKERThis the end of May. Do you know what that means it's time for?
04:29SPEAKERWhat does that mean?
04:29SPEAKERIt means it's time to turn Qs into As.
04:33SPEAKERThat's like a meat grinder. You shove some Qs in the top and turn the crank and then some like fine...
04:39SPEAKERWe're grinding typefaces here. That's exactly right.
04:41SPEAKERSome fine knowledge comes out and some nice ground. Yeah.
04:45SPEAKERYeah. We had a good crop of questions this month.
04:48SPEAKERWhat do we got?
04:51SPEAKERIt was no February, but it's pretty good.
04:53SPEAKERThey can't all be February.
04:55SPEAKERLook, February. February is a banger, but May is okay.
04:58SPEAKERA banner month.
04:59SPEAKERWhat do we got? We should have talked about this before, but are you reading today or am
05:04SPEAKERI reading today? Ask all the questions.
05:05SPEAKERWe really had to roll right into this one.
05:07SPEAKERYeah, it's been busy this week.
05:09SPEAKERIt's kind of the thing about working at home. It's sort of always on and never off.
05:14SPEAKERYeah.
05:14SPEAKERI was doing work stuff at like 1030 last night.
05:17SPEAKERI roll from streams into podcasts and getting ready for other podcasts and projects into
05:22SPEAKERputting a child to bed and then...
05:24SPEAKERBecause it's time for us to get personal assistance.
05:26SPEAKERIf I could afford a person... Look, if I could afford a personal assistant,
05:29SPEAKERI would pay myself more. So that would be great.
05:31SPEAKERIt's fair. You can't pay yourself more hours in the day though.
05:35SPEAKERNo, that's true. But I also... It's nice to be able to pay the house payment. So anyway,
05:41SPEAKERdo you want to do this console question first? I thought this one was pretty good.
05:44SPEAKEROh, sure. Okay. Yeah. How about it?
05:48SPEAKERWhere do these emails come into, Will?
05:50SPEAKEROh, there's an email address at techpod@content.town. That's techpod@content.town.
05:56SPEAKERAnd people can send their questions there anytime, day, night, weekends, holidays,
06:00SPEAKERmornings, evenings, three o'clock in the morning. Just send your questions in.
06:04SPEAKERIt's true.
06:05SPEAKERWe'll read them.
06:05SPEAKERI'm looking at it right now here in this email.
06:07SPEAKERWe've started getting PR spam to that address now too, which is really weird.
06:11SPEAKERI almost pulled one of those in by accident until I actually clicked through. Where is it? Let's see.
06:15SPEAKERThe teledildonics one?
06:16SPEAKEROh, it's not the interview op teledildonics toys during coronavirus.
06:21SPEAKERI've never gotten a serious teledildonics
06:24SPEAKERPR request in 20 years of doing this until now.
06:28SPEAKERI've had this thought many times on the bomb cast. Is it poor form to
06:31SPEAKERmockingly read some of these solicitations we get as if they were emails?
06:35SPEAKERSince our stated policy is to never take advertisements for this show? No.
06:40SPEAKERI don't have to say who said it. Yeah.
06:42SPEAKERYeah.
06:42SPEAKERWhile we all try to social distance at this time, our loneliness has highlighted a key
06:46SPEAKERfactor in human sexuality. It takes two to tango.
06:50SPEAKERI'm not going to go any deeper.
06:53SPEAKERUh, I don't think that means I don't really, I don't think that no, that was,
06:58SPEAKEROh, you know, I started to say that was not even the only like future of dating and
07:02SPEAKERintimacy type of email we got. They just had it twice.
07:05SPEAKERBut then yes, I just clicked through and realized it's the same person sending the same shit,
07:09SPEAKERexcept with a way less eye catching address this time, which is exactly how they got me.
07:15SPEAKERWhat that means is that somewhere in a database,
07:18SPEAKERdespite never having talked about robot sex on the podcast that I can remember,
07:24SPEAKERwe are, we have a robot sex teledildonics tag next to our names. So that'll haunt you forever.
07:31SPEAKERNow, Brad, congratulations.
07:32SPEAKERHow else do you know you've made it than when you're getting unsolicited emails about
07:36SPEAKERteledildonics?
07:37SPEAKEROkay. I've seen that Futurama episode. I know how this ends.
07:40SPEAKERYes. Uh, all right. Here's the first email from Brian in Seattle who says,
07:45SPEAKERI miss windows phone. That's part of his signature. Like he's just,
07:50SPEAKERhe's just deploying that anytime he writes an email to anybody. He's like, Hey,
07:54SPEAKERthanks. Look forward to hearing back from you on this windows phone.
07:59SPEAKERI love this because this is, this is the, this is the one good, like anytime I see
08:04SPEAKERsomebody send an email that says sent from their iPhone and I either assume that they got a new
08:07SPEAKERiPhone that day or they have never bothered to learn how to not send, sent with my iPhone,
08:13SPEAKERwhich takes maybe 45 seconds. And, and this, this is a message. This is really good. This,
08:18SPEAKERI like this.
08:20SPEAKERHe's using it to, uh, to proselytize a little bit. I always like to customizing that thing
08:24SPEAKERas opposed to just disabling it. You know, I like, I like windows phone to put a little,
08:29SPEAKERput a little pizzazz in your emails. All right. Uh, here we go. Uh, when we went from the Xbox
08:34SPEAKERthree 60 on PlayStation three to the Xbox one and PS four, there wasn't immediately,
08:39SPEAKERum, or ever backwards and forwards compatibility. Uh, well, you know, in the case of the Xbox one,
08:45SPEAKERobviously I got some of that later eventually. Yes, but, but I'll, I'll move on, uh, with the
08:49SPEAKERnext one at most, if not all games will work across generations. Uh, when do you think the
08:54SPEAKERXbox series X and PlayStation five exclusive games come out fall 2021, 2022, even later?
09:03SPEAKERI don't know. So he's asking when they're going to leave the current gen hardware behind,
09:06SPEAKERsince everything is both forwards and backwards compatible. Right. I mean,
09:09SPEAKERthat's more of a business question than a tech question, right? Like that's really just when
09:13SPEAKERthey decide that is the time's right to kind of cut people off. I mean, I think, I think it's
09:18SPEAKERgoing to be, it's probably going to be more about, it might, it might actually end up being a tech
09:24SPEAKERquestion. It might be that somebody makes, you know, Spiderman two for the PS five and it needs
09:30SPEAKERthat SSD to, to, to, because of the movement speed for Spiderman, definitely like developers
09:35SPEAKERare going to get to the point where they are probably chafing. If they are still having to
09:38SPEAKERsupport old hardware and they want to do more ambitious things, but like still at some point,
09:43SPEAKERthere's a guy in a suit somewhere saying like, no, we've got to sell it on the old box. Like
09:48SPEAKER80 million of those things out there, you know what I mean? Like, like there's still gonna have
09:50SPEAKERto run it by the bean counters and make sure that they can get away with it before they actually.
09:55SPEAKERWhat is it just dance that still comes out on Wii? Oh yeah, probably just yes. That sounds right.
10:03SPEAKERYeah. So I think it'll be after 2022. I think we'll see. Holy crap. That is.
10:10SPEAKERI mean, I, yeah, I, I think we'll see games. I mean, so let me rephrase. I think we might see
10:16SPEAKERsome like downloadable stuff that's exclusive to one of the other platforms, but I would bet that
10:21SPEAKERif it's a disc based release that you can go to target or best buy and pick up a copy of,
10:26SPEAKERI bet those will continue to work indefinitely. So that's a good long stretch, but I mean,
10:30SPEAKERat some point, like you're not enjoying the full benefits of the new hardware.
10:34SPEAKERIf you're not designing your game exclusively around the new hardware, right? I don't know,
10:38SPEAKERman. You can, I could go out and I could play Fortnite on a like GTX 960, or I could play it
10:44SPEAKERon a GTX 2080 TI or, you know, I can play it. I can, I can play it on a min spec machine or
10:51SPEAKERmy computer. And it's the same game. Well, yeah, it's just going to run slower and look
10:55SPEAKERshittier on the old machines. Graphics scale across a wide range of capabilities, obviously,
10:59SPEAKERbut I'm talking to more like fundamental design stuff that might involve like,
11:02SPEAKERyou know, degrees of simulation that they're not doing right now and stuff like that.
11:07SPEAKEROr maybe, or maybe, maybe like massively deformable world geometry. Like I'm,
11:10SPEAKERI'm certainly no game designer or programmer, but I'm like, I'm trying that stuff on Azure
11:15SPEAKERand it'll work great. Oh yeah, that works. So the infinite power of the cloud is where all the real
11:19SPEAKERcomputation happens. That was certainly proofed out last generation. I mean, I think like
11:26SPEAKERdeformable terrain is an interesting, is an interesting question because a lot of the
11:29SPEAKERcurrent game engines don't handle that particularly well. I don't even know if that's really
11:33SPEAKERapplicable in this situation. It's just something that popped into my mind as something that might
11:36SPEAKERrequire like a lot more compute than we're throwing at games right now. I mean, I think
11:40SPEAKERwhat'll happen is rather than degrade the high-end experience to work on the low end machines. I
11:45SPEAKERthink what we'll end up seeing is that people are degrading the low end experience dramatically. So
11:50SPEAKERlike you'll be in a Turok situation on the older hardware where you're playing on a PS4 and the
11:55SPEAKERload times take six minutes and there's fog. You're, you're surrounded in a 30 meter circle
12:01SPEAKERof fog so that you can't see so that everything else can LOD down. And I, I mean, I'd love to be
12:09SPEAKERproven wrong. I love seeing bad-ass games running on new hardware. And like with the rate, like,
12:16SPEAKERbut if you look at what's coming with this new machines, the big things are SSDs and ray tracing,
12:20SPEAKERray tracing can, can degrade down to be just light maps and, and stuff like that without a whole lot
12:25SPEAKERof hassle. The, the, the SSDs bigger challenge, I think maybe, I don't know. Maybe you just see,
12:34SPEAKERyou see more of those little canyons, you know, you see more shimmying on the last generation,
12:37SPEAKERthey just put in a few extra spots where you have to like cram your way through some kind
12:40SPEAKERof crevice so they can load more level. You don't have to deal with, you're, you're not wrong.
12:46SPEAKERAnd actually when you put it that way, I haven't thought about it like that, but
12:49SPEAKERif anything, historically hardware makers have shown a lot more willingness to just,
12:53SPEAKERlike you said, degrade the experience, like just make shitty versions of games for old hardware,
12:58SPEAKERinstead of ripping the bandaid off and just saying, okay, these games don't run anymore.
13:02SPEAKERYou know what I mean? I mean, that's like, that's a time honored tradition,
13:04SPEAKERall the way back to arcade days. But especially now in this world of like
13:08SPEAKERPS4s versus PS4 pros and stuff like that, or even like Nintendo had that situation with the 3DS and
13:13SPEAKERthe new 3DS where you technically, you had games that would work on all versions of the hardware,
13:19SPEAKERbut you didn't really want to play some of those games on the old hardware.
13:22SPEAKERWell, but I mean, it's a situation that doesn't have to be bad if you, Spider-Man is a great
13:26SPEAKERexample because if you play Spider-Man on a PS4 pro you get, they do cube maps on all the windows,
13:32SPEAKERon a lot of the windows on the skyscrapers and stuff. So you can actually look into the buildings
13:35SPEAKERand it's not just shiny glass on the outside. And it ended up being a really lovely effect,
13:40SPEAKERbut you needed more memory for that to work. On the PS4 stocks, it was just, you know,
13:45SPEAKERshiny glass like you've seen on every video game ever. And it's still like, it doesn't
13:49SPEAKERdetract from the gameplay. It just makes it not look quite as fancy.
13:54SPEAKERYes. Would that every developer paid so much care to all versions of their game.
14:00SPEAKERWell, yeah. All right. Next email. This comes in from Biel. I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
14:09SPEAKERWill, you mentioned that your parents have barn wifi in their rural home.
14:14SPEAKERI have a similar situation where I have a barn about a hundred feet from my house router.
14:19SPEAKERI can get a tiny signal there at the moment, but nothing that is actually usable.
14:24SPEAKERWhat was your parents' solution? Would a nest be a good option?
14:30SPEAKERSo they have a weird situation cause they're on cellular internet at this place. So they have
14:36SPEAKERlike a 5g, a 4g now it'll be 5g soon antenna on a 30 foot telephone pole.
14:42SPEAKERWas that confirmed that it's going to be, they're going to get the 5g upgrade.
14:45SPEAKERLike they've actually, they're going to get the 5g upgrade. Yeah.
14:48SPEAKERI didn't know it was getting rolled out that fast.
14:50SPEAKERWell, so, so this isn't, they're not connected to Verizon. They're connecting. They're using
14:54SPEAKERa directional antenna pointed at a tower on a mountain near there, but it just happens to use
14:58SPEAKER4g as the protocol to connect. And their provider is rolling out 5g because everybody's working at
15:06SPEAKERhome now and they don't have enough bandwidth on the nodes to support all the users and they
15:11SPEAKERneed it as fast as they possibly can. So they had this pole that just was a pole next to their barn
15:20SPEAKERand they put the antenna on top of the pole cause it gave them a better line of sight to the mountain
15:25SPEAKERwith the receiver. And then as part of their ISP service, they run, like they put, they'll,
15:31SPEAKERthey'll put a pole up wherever you need it to get, to get, to get the best shot to the tower.
15:37SPEAKERCause they're in a hilly area. And then they run a fiber ethernet from the pole to the house.
15:42SPEAKERAnd dad just paid the guy extra money to run another fiber to the bar. And he put routers
15:47SPEAKERin each place. It was right at the edge of what you can do. The internet was like 95 feet or
15:51SPEAKERsomething like that. So they, they did it, they did fiber just because, you know, it has infinite,
15:57SPEAKERessentially infinite run in this case is not, not really infinite, but it'll go a long way.
16:02SPEAKERAnd it costs a couple hundred bucks extra basically. But, but your, your mesh networks
16:09SPEAKERare a good bet. If you're at the edge of your wifi range, you're going to want to run an ethernet
16:14SPEAKERcable between one of the nodes and, and the distant node though. I read this email and I was
16:19SPEAKERall excited to jokingly come in here and be like, bury an ethernet line. But it sounds like that's
16:23SPEAKERactually what you need to do. Are there other options for not burying it? Is there any other
16:29SPEAKERsafe way to like run some kind of conduit or is that pretty much all you can do? I mean,
16:34SPEAKERthe nice thing is you don't have to do like a six foot deep trench or something like that for
16:37SPEAKERethernet. If you're not, if you're not putting it someplace that you're going to be digging,
16:41SPEAKERyou can just like, like make a, you know, use a flat edge spade and make like a four inch deep
16:46SPEAKERtrench and just run it down that and then stamp it back down with your feet. Just bare cable? Like
16:51SPEAKERmaybe this is naive, but I figured it would have to go through some kind of conduit or something,
16:56SPEAKERsomething about the idea of ethernet cable coming into direct contact with dirt. It's wrong somehow.
17:02SPEAKERI, as long as the, as long as the shielding is safe, it should be fine. You might want to
17:06SPEAKERget an, a different rating. I mean, we've did, we, we always did exterior, so I don't know. Yeah.
17:12SPEAKERKind of staple it around the baseboard or something. I'm sure somebody is going to tell
17:15SPEAKERme I'm an a-hole. So, but it's, it's worked for them. And the fiber is as long as you don't break
17:20SPEAKERthe fiber is pretty indestructible. Pretty fragile, like bend radius, right?
17:26SPEAKERThe bend radius is like three feet on the, on the coil that they have coming out of the ground,
17:31SPEAKERI think. And I think the secret of what they're doing is that they don't terminate it on site.
17:35SPEAKERSo they just have like fixed lengths in the truck. So it's not like the guy has to be doing the,
17:40SPEAKERthe termination and stuff on the, on the, like actually when he's on the site, he just has like
17:45SPEAKER200 feet of cable and a hundred feet of cable and, and the, you know, coils up whatever's extra at
17:50SPEAKERthe end. Just grabs the pre-made stuff that he needs. Is that good to terminate it on the spot?
17:55SPEAKERIs that where you have to do like the weird fusing of fiber together and stuff like that?
18:00SPEAKERI, I, that seems like dark magic to me. I don't know how that works. Yeah.
18:03SPEAKERYeah. What's the, is it a hundred foot for pretty much all kinds of ethernet?
18:09SPEAKERCopper? I believe you want, maybe it's a hundred meters.
18:14SPEAKERUniversal limit. Is that the, is that the warp 10 of ethernet cable?
18:19SPEAKERJust to make this the most nerdy question ever asked.
18:22SPEAKERStandard ethernet segment is limited to 328 feet or 100 meters in length over a
18:29SPEAKERstandard gauge cat five cable. Oh wow. That's a, that's a lot farther than I thought.
18:34SPEAKERYeah. So they probably could have done just standard ethernet for this.
18:39SPEAKERSure. I mean, the benefit, the other benefit of doing fiber is if water gets into it,
18:42SPEAKERit doesn't break it. So yeah. Okay. There we go. Run a cable. Cables are still good.
18:48SPEAKERI know a lot of people are a pretty anti-cable these days, but cables rule. There is no substitute
18:53SPEAKERfor a hard line. Just as a, as somebody who's done this in the past and messed it up, look up
19:00SPEAKERon the internet, how to have a cable leave your house without leaving a hole. That's going to
19:04SPEAKERlet critters and things get into your walls. That is a consideration I hadn't thought about.
19:08SPEAKERYeah. And you do want to have a conduit going down into the ground
19:11SPEAKERfor sure. Cause they'll need rats and stuff. Chew the cable squirrels,
19:14SPEAKERrats, all that. They love the taste of that insulation.
19:18SPEAKERAh, they love the taste of most things. Let's be, let's be fair. Travis from Denver.
19:26SPEAKERI know you have many home projects under your belts, but is there one that stands out above
19:29SPEAKERthe rest? Mine was a platform I created to collect real time energy usage information from some smart
19:35SPEAKERplugs and store the data in a data warehouse. After about two years, I had to sunset it after
19:41SPEAKERBelkin removed the ability to get this data from their devices as it relied on UPnP, which has
19:47SPEAKERsecurity holes a mile wide. But this project still stands above the rest as my best achievement so
19:52SPEAKERfar. Ooh. And I haven't done anything as cool as that. Yeah. I will say upfront, like watching
20:00SPEAKERa lot of the chatter on the discord, like there are some extreme maker types, extremely talented
20:05SPEAKERmaker types, I should say in the community, both on the software dev end and the, you know, crafting
20:11SPEAKERphysical goods end, like things are being like birthed from nothing there in a way that I'm not
20:16SPEAKERcapable of is what I mean. You know, people are architecting and building things with their hands
20:22SPEAKERand their brains. Not capable of, or haven't gotten to the point that you feel comfortable starting on
20:29SPEAKERis two different things. Currently not capable of. I mean the biggest home project I've done
20:34SPEAKERis probably the home automation stuff in that I've gotten everything working so that you like it. I
20:41SPEAKERsaid this before, it sounds really goofy. You literally don't have to think about lights in my
20:44SPEAKERhouse anymore. They just turn on and off when you need them without you having to think about it.
20:48SPEAKERYou by far have the most elaborate home automation setup I've seen. I haven't been here. It's been a
20:52SPEAKERgood while since I've been to your house, but it seems like, yeah, you've got just about everything
20:57SPEAKERdone. All the lights, all the doors. I haven't done windows cause I don't need windows.
21:03SPEAKERYeah. Speaking of windows, I just became aware of like wifi connected motorized blinds recently.
21:10SPEAKERIf this then that enabled blinds. So if this, then that sucks for home automation though,
21:15SPEAKERcause it's too laggy. But you can get like Lutron makes powered blinds that work with
21:22SPEAKERZigbee. I think I can't remember one of the wireless standards. That stuff like figuring
21:28SPEAKERit out. So it was really fun. It's interesting cause as a result of the wink changeover, which
21:33SPEAKERwe didn't really talk about much here, but a couple of weeks ago, wink, which was like one of
21:38SPEAKERthe smart home hub competitors said, Hey, you've been using our product for free for many years.
21:44SPEAKERWe're going to charge you $5 a month, or we're going to turn you off and you have 30 days to,
21:49SPEAKERto move off of our platform. If you don't want to do that. Wow. And, and, and just to be clear,
21:54SPEAKERmigrating off migrating Zigbee and Z wave devices off of a hub like that is an incredible pain in
22:00SPEAKERthe ass. You have to go reset each bit light bulb manually, all your switches manually,
22:05SPEAKERall that stuff. It takes a lot of time. That's a level of fuck you to your user base that I'm
22:09SPEAKERthat's that's really bold. I mean, I, my assumption is that they don't do something
22:14SPEAKERlike that. If they're not in a absolutely dire business situation. I can't imagine anybody would
22:22SPEAKERdo that as like, you know, we could, we should juice profits 10% this year. But, but yeah, I
22:30SPEAKERsaw that and I was like, man, I'm everything I have is based on the smart things thing.
22:33SPEAKERAnd I started looking at alternatives and set up, tested out a couple of different things. And I,
22:38SPEAKERI think I've landed on doing home assistant, which I finally got the Siri integration working the
22:43SPEAKERother day. So now it's onto Google and Alexa and all the other stuff that's complicated.
22:49SPEAKERIf I have a 98% Apple home enabled devices and like one it's a TB link. I don't even know what
22:58SPEAKERstandard it's like. You use the Casa app, but I don't know if I don't know what standard that
23:02SPEAKERties into anyway. Long story short, if like 90% of my stuff just works by default with Apple home
23:07SPEAKERand I have like one or two extra things, is it worth the trouble of something like home assistant
23:12SPEAKERto get all of those things unified or is it way too involved for like one or two extra devices?
23:16SPEAKERIt is, it is. Well, man, that's, we should do a whole, we could, I could do a whole
23:25SPEAKERin a couple, in a month or two, I'll be ready to do a whole episode on a home assistant.
23:28SPEAKERIt is open source-y in the way that FreeNAS is and that you can, you can, if you have enough time,
23:35SPEAKERyou can do anything you want, but like getting to the point that like it works is sometimes
23:42SPEAKERchallenging. And as is often the case, there's like running it on a FreeNAS jail is one level
23:48SPEAKERof difficulty that's way higher than say plugging in a Raspberry Pi 4 and just putting it on an SD
23:53SPEAKERcard and using the managed install that all the hard shit's already done for you.
23:58SPEAKERFirst of all, I could take this email in like eight different tangential directions right now,
24:02SPEAKERcause there's a bunch of different stuff I want to talk about, but A, I'm like closer and closer
24:07SPEAKERevery damn week to getting off FreeNAS and just slapping Linux on that machine. B, did you see
24:11SPEAKERthat they announced an eight gigabyte Raspberry Pi 4 today? I did. So there's that. That seems
24:17SPEAKERlike a desktop computer at that point. Cause it has like two, two monitor outputs and everything,
24:21SPEAKERright? Yeah. C, I wanted to mention that I feel like we should start compiling a list of companies
24:26SPEAKERlike that wink thing you mentioned kind of very explicitly just screwing over their user base.
24:31SPEAKERLike I think that like Sonos is a big one where they like basically said like, Hey,
24:36SPEAKERif you have a Sonos product older than X, you got to unplug it or it's going to fuck up your
24:40SPEAKERwhole system. Not only are we not going to update in anymore, but if you, if you keep using it,
24:44SPEAKERyou're not going to get to use an even newer stuff. So they backed off on that when people
24:48SPEAKERcomplained. I didn't. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that, that they said they were going to continue working
24:54SPEAKERto figure out a way to gracefully degrade functionality on old hardware without just
24:59SPEAKERoutright turning it off, which is, which is the right, I mean, that's what they should do for a
25:03SPEAKER$500 piece of hardware, $400 piece of hardware. Speakers are good for a long time it turns out.
25:08SPEAKERI mean, the, that there's a reason that that internet of shit account
25:12SPEAKERis, is, is active impression and, and like, it's not just smart home stuff and internet of things,
25:18SPEAKERthings it's like your Apple watch is a perfect example. Those things you spend four or $500 on
25:24SPEAKERa smartwatch and I would expect it to last at least 10 years because I, you know, if you buy
25:30SPEAKERa $600 watch 40 years ago, it's still going to be working today, but you know, they, they started
25:35SPEAKERsunsetting those too. So, you know, that's Apple for the future. We should all go analog. Yes.
25:42SPEAKERUm, I guess to answer this question real fast, that, um, that goofy encoder setup that we talked
25:48SPEAKERabout when we discussed streaming stuff last week, like that's awesome. That's not goofy.
25:53SPEAKERNot only, I mean, I guess I had it mostly working as of this time last week, but like,
25:57SPEAKERit's basically ready to go as far as I can tell. Like, are you using it in production yet?
26:02SPEAKERNo, I, cause I need to do a test stream with live people watching and like,
26:06SPEAKERmake sure it's going to hold up for two straight hours and everything. But, uh,
26:09SPEAKERI've got the end to end latency down to four seconds, which like, I'm not going to complain.
26:14SPEAKERThat's like Twitch, Twitch level.
26:15SPEAKERI couldn't, I could not believe it. I straight up streamed out time.is and like
26:19SPEAKERput them side by side by extremely scientific method and eyeballed the clocks on the two screens
26:24SPEAKERand like, so I'm pretty proud that I got that going after a lot of trials and tribulations. Um,
26:29SPEAKERI guess the other one is like, it's real mundane stuff, like getting something to compile
26:34SPEAKERon the platform where it's not super well supported like this. Uh, I've talked about it
26:38SPEAKERa couple of times, this music, this home music server, which kind of transparently makes, uh,
26:44SPEAKERAirplay devices think that it's iTunes is what it does. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a D A P server
26:49SPEAKERis what it actually is. I forgot. What is that? Digital audio, something protocol. I forget. It's
26:53SPEAKERthe, it's the protocol that the iTunes uses to stream music to Airplay devices. Oh, okay. It's
26:58SPEAKERjust a little system service, you know, it's a little demon level version of that that I believe
27:04SPEAKERrunning on my NAS, but like it was not super easy to get compiled on free BSD. And I, after a bunch
27:09SPEAKERof work and learning and stupid mistakes, I got that done and just, just stuff like that.
27:13SPEAKERIt's funny. You told me about using AirPrint with cups on free NAS to print to non compatible
27:19SPEAKERservers. And I haven't figured that one out yet. I haven't taken a lot of time with it.
27:23SPEAKERThat was tough. Yeah. That was like three different tutorials across probably a span of like five
27:28SPEAKERyears comparing them to each other and trying to figure out what had changed and which one was
27:32SPEAKERstill valid. And like it involved some Python script. Somebody had written at one point to
27:37SPEAKERgenerate a, an AirPrint driver, which I don't know. I can't believe I got that working. That's
27:43SPEAKERthe kind of thing that you immediately image the thing that the jail lives on as soon as you get it
27:48SPEAKERworking. So you don't ever have to do it again. Well, so it's funny, this home assistant thing
27:51SPEAKERthat I've been working on, I've been actually saving links and documenting how I set it up
27:56SPEAKERso that when free NAS inevitably changes the jail structure or I moved to Linux or something like
28:01SPEAKERthat, I don't have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Yes. That's the smart way to go.
28:05SPEAKERAll right. How about the next email from Neil in London? I wanted to ask your opinions on the
28:12SPEAKERreality of how smart we assume big tech companies to be. They know a lot about us and employ the
28:18SPEAKERsmartest engineers without doubt. But I wonder if we give them too much credit according to the
28:24SPEAKERmyths surrounding them. I haven't noticed the ads being served to me getting a much more relevant
28:30SPEAKERfor all the talk around YouTube's algorithms. I have to say that I continually find them to be
28:33SPEAKERuniquely terrible. I can't watch a single MMA fight without endlessly having to say that I
28:39SPEAKERdon't want to see any of Joe Rogan's goop for men videos. I can't watch a giant bomb video without
28:44SPEAKERthe algorithm constantly serving me videos I'm not interested in by people with names like Gamers TV,
28:50SPEAKERet cetera, et cetera. I'm a native English speaker with a mild Irish accent and voice
28:54SPEAKERrecognition continues to be unusable. I resent the fuck out of this by the way,
28:59SPEAKERbut that's another story. My phone keyboard continues to get all the same words wrong,
29:04SPEAKERet cetera, et cetera. Do we give the big tech companies too much credit when in fact they're
29:09SPEAKERjust a bit shit? So this keyboard thing is something that I've been thinking about a lot
29:14SPEAKERlately. Cause I don't know about you, but my phone keyboard has gotten progressively worse over the
29:18SPEAKERlast like five years. It seems like the auto predict specifically the auto, the type of head
29:23SPEAKERprediction. If you don't use the bar that, that like you start typing and you don't use the bar
29:29SPEAKERto select the word, even if you have typed the word perfectly, it often changes it and fucks up
29:34SPEAKERmy sentences for me, which is maddening. Also, I mean, we're you're still on iOS, right? You don't
29:38SPEAKERuse Android. Yep. Still on iOS. I have to assume that the default keyboard does not have any kind
29:43SPEAKERof like training built into it, right? Because the number of times that it thinks I want a different
29:47SPEAKERword, like I would, I would think after like a dozen instances of me typing one thing and it
29:52SPEAKERwanting to do something else and me having to manually specify that it would like learn no,
29:56SPEAKERapparently not like, I mean, it's bad enough that I assume they just didn't even build that in.
30:00SPEAKERWell, so I think what happened is they started doing prediction based on more than just the
30:07SPEAKERimmediately proceeding word a few years ago. And so then it has to understand and be able
30:12SPEAKERto parse English language or at least make predictive analysis based on statistics and
30:16SPEAKEREnglish language. I don't know why it's bad. I would love to know why it's bad.
30:21SPEAKERI know that Google has experimented some with machine learning for that type of head prediction.
30:27SPEAKERAnd I think that, I think, I think a lot of the examples that Neil specifically gave
30:32SPEAKERare because we're, we're in a weird time where machine language, machine learning stuff is kind
30:38SPEAKERof bad still. And we're, we're learning where it works and where it doesn't. We're starting
30:41SPEAKERtrying to apply it in a bunch of weird places like ads and, and, and type of head prediction
30:47SPEAKERand voice recognition. And some of those things it's really good at, and some of them it's not
30:50SPEAKERgood at. And like the voice recognition thing is explicitly a, they haven't trained the models on
30:57SPEAKERyour specific accent enough, or you have a very specific small regional accent from a region that
31:03SPEAKERthey don't cover. And as a result, it's going to be bad. So but, but at the same time, you look at
31:11SPEAKERthe stuff that Facebook does, is able to do where they they're there intentionally. I mean, there's
31:19SPEAKERan article in, I think the New York times earlier this week about how they're intentionally making
31:23SPEAKERpeople more divisive. Like they've known that the algorithms they use make political discourse more
31:31SPEAKERdivisive and push people more toward the extreme edges of the right and the left, especially the
31:36SPEAKERright. And they don't see that as a problem. Cool. Yeah. That's like a very socially responsible
31:42SPEAKERcompany that they have there. I don't, I don't think you mean that, Brad. I think that that is,
31:46SPEAKERI think you're being facetious. What could have took you off?
31:51SPEAKERYeah. So like, it's funny cause like stuff that used to be funny, like you send somebody a link.
31:56SPEAKERI used to send people links to like 50 gallon drums of lube on Amazon. And then all of those
32:01SPEAKERAmazon drop-in ads on every webpage on the internet would be Amazon, a link, Hey, do you
32:07SPEAKERneed more lube? Here's 50 gallons or, or, you know, a 20 pound box of lucky charms mushrooms.
32:13SPEAKERAnd, and like, it's not, it's not as funny anymore. Yes. I miss the days when algorithms
32:18SPEAKERwere just a laughing matter and not a deadly serious. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I, you know,
32:26SPEAKERa lot of the stuff works poorly, but at the same time, we should probably be impressed that it
32:30SPEAKERworks at all considering where we were like 20 years ago. I mean, I, I don't know. I guess,
32:38SPEAKERI don't know. It seems like things were better when people just paid a whole bunch of money for
32:41SPEAKERgood ads on good sites and, and weren't trying to agro algorithmically target precisely, you know,
32:47SPEAKERpeople named Brad that live in the zip code 9 4 1 0 3. What are you dropping my zip code right here
32:53SPEAKERon this podcast? You can't do that. Wait, that's not your zip code. That's not my zip code. I gave
32:58SPEAKERmy zip code. That's my old zip code for when I lived in the city. Yeah. It's a, it's a weird,
33:03SPEAKERI don't, I think I here's my takeaway on all of this is I don't think for the most part,
33:10SPEAKERthe bad behavior that we associate with tech companies and the narrative that's come up around
33:14SPEAKERthem last three, four, two, three, four years is due to malicious behavior on the most part,
33:19SPEAKERespecially by the people working at like low level, just, you know, just making the code.
33:24SPEAKERRight. I think that we have a level of negligence and maybe negligence, maybe just lack of awareness
33:32SPEAKERof the impact of the decisions that are made at all levels in these big tech companies.
33:39SPEAKERThat's impacting society and, and communities and people in both negative and positive ways
33:46SPEAKERthat we haven't really considered. Yeah. And I think that, that like coming to terms with that
33:51SPEAKERis the big challenge for technology companies in general in the next five, 10 years. Yeah. I mean,
33:57SPEAKERthe buck stops with the leadership, right? No, it doesn't never does anymore. I guess not.
34:02SPEAKERIt should. Yeah. It stops with the board. Yes. Anyway. Yes. This one's anonymous actually.
34:13SPEAKEROoh. But it's also completely benign. There's no, nothing scandalous in here whatsoever. They just,
34:20SPEAKERthey set it through an anonymizer. It's about the, the Mandalorian LED video wall. What do
34:27SPEAKERthey call it? The volume that we discussed. Two episodes ago now. Mostly just kind of asking if
34:34SPEAKERwe'd seen it and stuff, but the one thing it has is that article that you talked about,
34:39SPEAKERwhich I think we thought was in Cinefex, but actually let me click through just to triple
34:45SPEAKERcheck. Yes. It's an, it's actually an American cinematographer piece and is in fact on the web.
34:51SPEAKERIt's not behind a paywall. So I haven't read it yet. You did read it though.
34:57SPEAKERI think I read, I think I read it because of this email. I think I was sitting waiting to record a
35:01SPEAKERtested podcast and I was looking at my email and I was like, Oh, this looks interesting. I'll read
35:06SPEAKERthis. And then thought I read it because it was sitting at Adam's shop. I should, I guess I didn't
35:09SPEAKEReven look at the date. I should point out this, this email proceeds are unreal engine five demo
35:13SPEAKERepisode. Yes. So, but two things have come up because of that about the volume. One is that
35:19SPEAKERepisode four of Disney gallery, the Mandalorian, like the making of Mandalorian show, that's
35:27SPEAKERJohn Favreau's dinner for five, but about the Mandalorian and how they made it is up. And it
35:31SPEAKERgoes into a, I would say shockingly deep technical detail about how it works for a mainstream, like,
35:39SPEAKERyou know TV series. And there's a lot of footage of it actually working. You can see it's, it is
35:46SPEAKERastounding how they're, how they, how they use it to generate lights and reflections and all that
35:51SPEAKERstuff. So if you'd like that, so we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, definitely, definitely,
35:55SPEAKERdefinitely go give it a look. It's on Disney plus. And if you don't have Disney plus read this
36:01SPEAKERAmerican, I mean, either way, read this American cinematographer article, cause it is, it is
36:04SPEAKERfabulous. It's dense too. It's huge. There's a lot of information in here that there is a lot, and
36:10SPEAKERyou can actually see the, the trackers on the cameras. They show you some shots of the cameras
36:15SPEAKERthat you're using. So you can see how they're tracking camera movement and all that kind of
36:18SPEAKERstuff. You see more examples of where they're shooting the shots. And there's a couple of shots
36:24SPEAKERof the, I can't remember the name of the ship, the Razor Crest on the volume with the stars in
36:30SPEAKERthe background. But you get to see the stars moving to mimic the ship movement and get the
36:36SPEAKERlighting right on the canopy and on his armor and stuff like that. It's very good. That's super cool.
36:42SPEAKEROnce again, I'll say, I don't know what it says about me, but the Mandalorian itself was not
36:47SPEAKERenough to get me to pop the Disney plus free trial. This behind the scenes stuff totally is.
36:51SPEAKERI will absolutely check that out. That sounds fascinating. So there you go.
36:55SPEAKERYeah. So we'll, I guess we'll put the link to that article in the show notes for this week.
37:04SPEAKEROh, I think we've come to the end. Yeah. Is that okay? We'll talk about PowerShell.
37:09SPEAKERNobody wants to talk about PowerShell. I'm out of time. Okay. That's fair.
37:16SPEAKERBut you know what I do have time for? What's that?
37:18SPEAKERThanking our patrons who make the show possible. As always, if you are one of the 600 and change
37:25SPEAKERpeople who support the show right now, thank you very much. But a special extra special thanks to
37:31SPEAKERour executive and associate producer level patrons starting with the executive producer, patrons,
37:37SPEAKERAndrew Cotton, David Allen, and Jacob Chapel. Thank you all so much.
37:40SPEAKERYes, absolutely.
37:42SPEAKERAnd then our associate producers David Ullian, Graham Banks, Sam Buck, Riek, Ian Bailey,
37:52SPEAKERThomas Shay, Dan Brockman, Jad Rita, still, I think a Star Wars character, Paul Roost and Andrew,
38:00SPEAKERno last name. And then there's another Dave Ullian. So I think maybe we have to help Dave
38:04SPEAKERget his thing down to just one backing a month. But anyway, thank you all so much
38:10SPEAKERfor backing the podcast and backing the Patreon and helping us.
38:13SPEAKERYes. We cannot express our gratitude sufficiently. Do you think our producers
38:18SPEAKERget personal assistance? I mean, they're the producers.
38:22SPEAKERIf they want them. Yeah. Look, they're the money people. They probably need personal assistance.
38:26SPEAKERProbably do.
38:28SPEAKERBut yeah, thank you all so much. And thanks to everybody who supports the Patreon,
38:30SPEAKERwhich you can find at patreon.com/techpod, where you get everybody, everybody who backs the Patreon
38:40SPEAKERgets access to the TechPod Discord, which I turned off accidentally last week.
38:45SPEAKEROh boy, that was a fun one. I got to learn how permissions work on
38:49SPEAKERdiscrete Discord channels per server. Yeah.
38:52SPEAKERTo figure out how we could make sure that that notification got out to
38:56SPEAKERpeople who no longer had access to this Discord.
38:59SPEAKERYep. Yep. That's all fixed now. We won't make that mistake again.
39:04SPEAKERI will not engage Patreon support without making it abundantly clear.
39:08SPEAKERTotally Patreon's fault. Just pass the buck.
39:12SPEAKERYeah. That was, I mean, look, I asked a question that resulted in a chain of events that had some
39:16SPEAKERunforeseen consequences, let's say three times. But it's all working now. And if you are at the
39:25SPEAKER$5 or higher level, you get access to our monthly Patreon exclusive episode. Last month,
39:31SPEAKERwe talked about planning. This month, we're going to try something different, I think.
39:34SPEAKERSo you'll have to find out what that is. Yeah. End of the month.
39:38SPEAKERSo thank you all so much, Brad. Always a pleasure, man.
39:41SPEAKERYes. Thank you. Really enjoying this low latency video conferencing we got going on.
39:45SPEAKERIt's working out pretty well. Yeah. Hey, shout out to Jitsi.org.
39:49SPEAKERYeah. Big ups. Big ups to WebRTC.
39:52SPEAKERYeah. Love that. Love that business. Even without a direct peer-to-peer connection.
39:57SPEAKERHow are we still not? We got to open those ports.
39:59SPEAKERYeah. I looked up the ports today. It's a huge range. It's like 10,000 to 20,000 or
40:03SPEAKERsomething like that. I don't know if I'm open to that many ports.
40:05SPEAKERThat's a gaping hole in your firewall, man. I don't know about that.
40:09SPEAKERBut you know what? It's open source. You can just open up. You can put a Jitsi meet server on your
40:13SPEAKERFreeNAS jail. And we can just pipe a hole. It's right here. Kind of open a port, Chloe.
40:18SPEAKERIt's like five feet away from me. There you go. That's like five feet times three times 10 to
40:24SPEAKEReight meters per second divided by three meters per one foot. It's going to be low latency.
40:30SPEAKERYes. Nanoseconds. Thanks for listening, everybody. See you all next week.
40:48SPEAKERBye.