42: It’s Only a Mistake if You Don’t Learn

00:00SPEAKERI cannot believe what has become of me in 2020.

00:03SPEAKERWhat's wrong, Brad? You sound glum.

00:05SPEAKERI don't know if glum is the right word.

00:08SPEAKERYou sound despondent due to the existential crisis of being in the time of coronavirus.

00:13SPEAKERJust the existential crisis of becoming a middle-aged fan/obsessive of Minecraft?

00:20SPEAKEROoh! I play a shocking amount of Minecraft these days, too.

00:25SPEAKERYeah, you know, it's for all ages. That's what I like to say.

00:28SPEAKERAre you familiar with OptiFine?

00:30SPEAKERNo. It's the texture pack thing?

00:32SPEAKERWell, it's kind of more of a graphics framework.

00:34SPEAKERIt's like a massive tweak pack for Minecraft for graphics options.

00:38SPEAKERYou just actually'd me there, but okay.

00:40SPEAKERNo, no, no. Well, I'm trying to layer it up so you have a fun look.

00:43SPEAKERDude, this podcast is all about obsessively understanding to an excessive amount of detail how things work.

00:51SPEAKERI apologize for shaming you.

00:53SPEAKERI'd just like to spread as much knowledge as I can.

00:56SPEAKERNo, I love that. Okay, so what's OptiFine?

00:58SPEAKEROptiFine, I mean, it doesn't make Minecraft really look any different.

01:02SPEAKERThere's a bunch of optimizations and tweaks for different stuff.

01:04SPEAKERIt increases the frame rate a lot and gives you a bunch of options.

01:07SPEAKERBut then the shader packs that you're talking about are made by other people.

01:11SPEAKERAnd they're layered on top of OptiFine. It's like a framework that enables that stuff.

01:16SPEAKEROn my computer, Minecraft runs... I have to run VSync so that my computer doesn't sound like a jet engine

01:21SPEAKERbecause Minecraft will run at like 600 frames a second or something?

01:24SPEAKERYeah, so this has a lot more tweaks for stuff like that.

01:27SPEAKEREven if you're not going to use shader packs, it's worth installing just to get a bunch of extra options for enabling and disabling stuff.

01:33SPEAKERBut the really nice looking... like that path tracing mod that made a bunch of news a few months ago.

01:38SPEAKERRemember? That runs on OptiFine. It's made by Sonic Ether who is a different guy.

01:44SPEAKERBut it is enabled by... anyway.

01:48SPEAKERYou're talking about Java Minecraft.

01:51SPEAKEROh, did I need to specify?

01:53SPEAKERI played the kid version of Minecraft because I play with my kid.

01:56SPEAKERSorry, this is a...

01:57SPEAKERYeah, I'm a bedrock man now.

01:58SPEAKERThis is a different world. I'm sorry.

02:00SPEAKERI can't do mods because of the Windows application framework, unfortunately.

02:05SPEAKERThat's one of the numerous reasons that we're still using the Java version.

02:09SPEAKERAnyway, I got really into Minecraft shader packs for about a week.

02:16SPEAKERAnd then 1.16 came out.

02:18SPEAKEROh yeah, you got the Nether now.

02:19SPEAKERAnd I traded in my fancy graphics for a Nether update.

02:24SPEAKERI was not aware that mods... every new version of Minecraft breaks all the mods and you have to wait for them to be updated.

02:30SPEAKERYep, that's why the kids all play bedrock because then they don't have to fool with that.

02:33SPEAKERAll I'm trying to tell you is that I got the sweet taste of Ambrosia for about six days with...

02:39SPEAKERI wasn't even using the path tracing mod because I don't have an RTX card.

02:42SPEAKERI don't think it's required actually to have an RTX card, but I don't think it runs very well.

02:46SPEAKERI was using just his previous shader pack, but it looks so good, dude.

02:51SPEAKERIt's like literally one of the best looking games I think I've ever seen with that shader pack installed.

02:55SPEAKERI had it for about six days and then the update came out and now I can't use it anymore.

03:00SPEAKERAnd I am obsessively refreshing the Twitter account for OptiFine every day now.

03:06SPEAKERSo I have a different Minecraft problem.

03:09SPEAKERMy problem is that now because I haven't played a whole lot in the last two or three updates

03:13SPEAKERand my daughter is playing every day with multiple friends and like they have older siblings and they're learning new things constantly.

03:19SPEAKERShe's now teaching me how to play Minecraft.

03:22SPEAKERDude, you got to go where the knowledge, like I just said, you know, you just have to increase your own knowledge from people who know and if that's your daughter.

03:28SPEAKERYeah, she's like, "Dad, soul lights are actually brand new and you can use them to create a blue light source in the world."

03:37SPEAKERAnd I was like, "Oh, I like blue lights. That's much better than red."

03:41SPEAKERWait, no, blue lights are going to keep me awake. Don't put the blue lights in here.

03:44SPEAKERYou don't refine the netherite, you apply it to diamond material, dad.

03:48SPEAKERI wish I could refine the netherite.

03:50SPEAKERI'm kind of excited. I kind of want to go do an adventure.

03:53SPEAKERI want to do a Minecraft adventure where we just like don't build and like have have like dungeon crawl in Minecraft.

04:00SPEAKERI would be. So we've, you know, we've got this six person server running that we've been doing streams with and I feel like it's kind of run out of steam.

04:07SPEAKERPeople are sort of hitting a wall of creativity, like not really sure what to do next.

04:11SPEAKERMy idea is to, you know, we're doing a whitelist situation so only the six of us can get on there.

04:17SPEAKERYeah.

04:18SPEAKERMy idea is to whitelist another six people and let them go build a fort somewhere else.

04:24SPEAKERAnd have a war?

04:25SPEAKERAnd then have a war. That's what I want to do with that server. I don't know what a Minecraft war would look like, but.

04:32SPEAKERSo watching kids play with Minecraft is so we I mean, obviously we do bedrock because most of her friends are playing on like tablets and switches and stuff like I mean, she plays on a switch.

04:43SPEAKERSo so that like being able to play regardless of what console you have is an incredibly powerful thing because that doesn't work for any other game that the kids are interested in playing.

04:52SPEAKERSure.

04:54SPEAKERAnd they do like play dates where at two o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, there's a spreadsheet and you put your name in and those those people fill the 10 slots on the server and they get in and they like some of them are building and some of them are exploring and some of them are mining.

05:10SPEAKERAnd like the big kids are teaching the young kids how to make secret doors and stuff like that. And it's it is it has been a powerful force for good and social interaction in an otherwise dark time.

05:22SPEAKERHere I am over here trying to turn Minecraft into a battlefield and the kids are focusing on the collective good.

05:27SPEAKERIt's just another example of the children being our only hope.

05:57SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod, I'm Will.

06:07SPEAKERI'm Brad.

06:08SPEAKERIt's another morning pod, Brad.

06:09SPEAKERAnother morning, yeah.

06:10SPEAKERI think I'm coming to prefer the morning pods to the evening pods, to be perfectly honest.

06:15SPEAKERI mean, it depends on how.

06:19SPEAKERLook, how morning.

06:20SPEAKERIn the morning, you start at a base level.

06:23SPEAKERBy the time you get to the end of the day, like the days could have gone one of three or four different ways.

06:28SPEAKERYes, that's that's a good point.

06:30SPEAKERYeah, there's a certain predictability to your morning.

06:32SPEAKERLike, you know, there's a little ramp up, but once you ramp up, you're there versus sometimes the evening.

06:38SPEAKERThere's nothing left.

06:39SPEAKERLast night ended with me calling vast swaths of America idiots on Twitter, and people took that really personally.

06:45SPEAKERI was kind of surprised.

06:46SPEAKERI bet.

06:47SPEAKERYeah, I get it.

06:49SPEAKERBut you know what they don't they didn't take personally?

06:51SPEAKERWhat's that?

06:52SPEAKEREmails.

06:53SPEAKEROh, yeah.

06:54SPEAKERNo, emails are for everybody.

06:55SPEAKERNo, everyone loves emails.

06:56SPEAKEREveryone loves and hates emails equally, I find.

07:00SPEAKERI forgot to talk about it in the check-in, like the project check-in patron exclusive episode of Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod that was released last week.

07:11SPEAKERBut I paid for hay.

07:13SPEAKERI decided to keep it.

07:14SPEAKEROh, yeah.

07:15SPEAKERIt's good.

07:16SPEAKERHay.

07:17SPEAKERI like it.

07:18SPEAKERHay.

07:19SPEAKERAt 100 bucks a year, if I catch one email that I would have missed that's like the smallest possible amount of money people would want to pay me to do work, then it paid for itself.

07:30SPEAKERMan, you're getting that many emails from people who want you to do work?

07:33SPEAKERI get a lot of like, "Hey, I need somebody to consult on this thing, but I can only pay you for like a half day," which is like a few hundred bucks.

07:41SPEAKERSure.

07:42SPEAKERWell, that's more than the hay subscription, apparently.

07:44SPEAKERThat covers the hay subscription.

07:45SPEAKERExactly.

07:46SPEAKERThat's just math.

07:47SPEAKERThat's good business sense.

07:48SPEAKERYep.

07:49SPEAKERSo, yeah.

07:50SPEAKERThere we go.

07:51SPEAKERHay.

07:52SPEAKERIt's pretty good.

07:53SPEAKERHay.

07:54SPEAKERSpeaking of housekeeping, did you want to talk before we get into these emails about browser plug-in ad stuff?

08:01SPEAKERYeah.

08:02SPEAKERWhen we did the security episode a few weeks ago and talked about ad blockers and pie holes and things like that, we recommended a bunch of ad blocker plug-ins, and all of the ones we recommended were bad for reasons we don't need to get into.

08:16SPEAKERThey're just selling data or they're charging for things that they shouldn't be charging for or they're icky in general.

08:23SPEAKERThe industry recommended ad blocker for your browser right now, which should work in conjunction with a pie hole to make you super safe and secure, is uBlock Origin.

08:34SPEAKERThat's the one everybody seems to like, and they don't seem to be selling their stuff.

08:38SPEAKERI would strongly encourage you, if you like uBlock Origin and you use it, to pay them money because if you don't, then they will have to start selling your data in order to keep making the product that you use every day.

08:48SPEAKERYeah.

08:49SPEAKERSomebody's got to get paid somewhere.

08:51SPEAKERThat's the secret of ad tech.

08:52SPEAKERYeah.

08:53SPEAKERAgain, Firefox will do some amount of that stuff, right?

08:56SPEAKERWell, Firefox will silo social media cookies and tracking stuff in their own fenced containers.

09:05SPEAKERYeah.

09:06SPEAKERSupposedly, the new Edge will also do some of that stuff.

09:09SPEAKERYeah.

09:10SPEAKEROn Firefox, I think it's installed by default on new installs, the Facebook container, but if you have an old install, you may have to install it manually from the extension store.

09:17SPEAKERI want to say I saw a toggle work its way into Chrome recently, although I can't find it right now for something along the lines of, "Hey, withhold certain cookies," or something like that.

09:26SPEAKERIt just seems like privacy and blocking are becoming a must-have feature in browsers, I think.

09:32SPEAKERPeople are worried and concerned about that stuff in ways that they have not been up until this point.

09:37SPEAKERYes.

09:38SPEAKERAll right.

09:39SPEAKERWell, good to know.

09:41SPEAKERMy neighbor's boat just started, so if I can't edit this out, I apologize.

09:46SPEAKERYou don't even live close enough to water for that to...

09:48SPEAKERWhat is this?

09:49SPEAKERI don't understand.

09:50SPEAKERAre they working on the boat?

09:52SPEAKERYeah.

09:53SPEAKERWhen you take the boat...

09:54SPEAKERThey go camping every year and take the boat with them, and when they de-winterize it and get it ready to...

10:02SPEAKERHaving owned a boat in the past and done this work myself, when you take it out for the first big trip of the year, you have to make sure it runs and change the oil and all of the things.

10:12SPEAKERDe-winterize the blocks so that if it froze, it didn't crack and all that stuff.

10:15SPEAKERIt's like an outboard motor kind of situation?

10:18SPEAKERNo. This is like a 28-foot inboard/outboard. It's a recreational boat. It's not like a fishing boat. It's not like a tour boat. It's nothing huge. It's a tow with a pickup truck.

10:32SPEAKEROkay.

10:33SPEAKERBut it's time. We didn't do it last week because we're bad at calendars, and also the Apple stuff happened and we wanted to talk about that, but it's time for emails.

10:41SPEAKERYeah. Got a bunch of them.

10:43SPEAKERThis time, I think inspired by... Well, it's probably specifically because we asked for them after our Tech Horror Story episode a couple of weeks ago.

10:52SPEAKERWe got a boatload of people sharing their worst mistakes, which has been really entertaining. So I think we should read some of the better ones.

11:02SPEAKERYeah. Do you want to get into some of those first?

11:04SPEAKERYou drive. I'm just here drinking tea.

11:08SPEAKERAll right. Let's see what we got here. This is partially housekeeping and partially because I can never remember myself the email address.

11:15SPEAKEROh, the email address is techpod@content.town.

11:21SPEAKERYes. Got it.

11:22SPEAKERTechpod@content.town.

11:24SPEAKERI will never forget that again. I promise.

11:26SPEAKERBrad, it's the URL for the podcast also.

11:28SPEAKERSure.

11:29SPEAKERTechpod.content.town.

11:31SPEAKERIt's almost like you designed it that way.

11:33SPEAKERI mean, yes. Totally intentional decisions.

11:38SPEAKEREverything we do is 100% intentional and very well thought out. Okay.

11:41SPEAKERYeah.

11:42SPEAKERAll right. I'll read some emails here. Yeah. Let's start with a couple of horror stories, I guess. Here's one from Christian in Norway.

11:50SPEAKERHello, Christian.

11:51SPEAKERI have two stories, one IT related and one just in general biggest mistake. A decade ago, I worked IT at a hospital. It was just regular support.

12:01SPEAKERAnd one day one of the client guys was to push a new ethernet driver to a specific computer model. You might guess where this is headed.

12:08SPEAKERWe started getting a few messages about people losing network connections and being unable to work.

12:13SPEAKERIt spread quickly and it turned out he had not defined the scope correctly when pushing the driver.

12:18SPEAKERSo he hit not only the model he wanted, but also quite a few other computers as well.

12:23SPEAKERI do not recollect specifically, but I believe we were talking 200 or 300 computers down. Everyone in the department ran from the apprentices up to the boss.

12:33SPEAKERWe had drivers on a stick and just jumped from computer to computer with the problem and managed to solve it within a few hours.

12:40SPEAKERJust as a side note, working IT in a hospital is quite a special thing.

12:45SPEAKERI've been in elevators when crash carts were pushed in with doctors sitting on top doing CPR while they were rushing to the emergency room.

12:53SPEAKERI've been called into operating rooms during major operations when things stopped working.

12:59SPEAKERI've fixed computers when hearing women screaming next door giving birth.

13:03SPEAKERDo you think you have to scrub up to go into the operating room to fix a computer in the operating room?

13:08SPEAKERI think absolutely. I could be wrong about that, but I would say what is the downside of making them do that?

13:15SPEAKERI wonder if you have an autoclaved screwdriver to go in and open up the hardware. I want to know what the protocols are there.

13:23SPEAKERBetter safe than sorry is what I would assume.

13:26SPEAKERYeah, if it's like a hip surgery, a hip replacement where they have to wear the bubble domes to keep from aspirating little bits of bone.

13:32SPEAKERI wonder if he has to wear the bubble with the rest of like... This email is making many more questions.

13:39SPEAKERYes, you've got to observe proper procedures.

13:41SPEAKERAnd then here's the second half. On to my costliest failure.

13:47SPEAKERBefore I went into IT, I was working as an electrician in a large refining plant.

13:52SPEAKERThis is while I was still an apprentice.

13:54SPEAKERIn such large companies, there is an unofficial million club where the members are those that have caused stops in the plant that cost the company more than a million dollars.

14:05SPEAKEROh my god.

14:06SPEAKERTo be fair, due to currency conversion, that would be more like $100,000.

14:10SPEAKERBut still, normally this is just downtime of 30 to 60 minutes before you hit a threshold like that.

14:16SPEAKERYou know where this story is going as well.

14:18SPEAKERWe were out doing some small work, just changing some sensor cables, a wire running to an LED lamp and things like that.

14:25SPEAKERBut everything is connected, so if a signal from a sensor is not working anymore, everything can stop.

14:30SPEAKERWe usually like this because it makes things safe, right?

14:34SPEAKERHe sent a picture along to illustrate it. It's just a gigantic patch panel type thing with just a million cables coming out of it.

14:43SPEAKERI was told to unscrew a cable at the top row of a clamp, but loosened the bottom side, pulling out the wire and dead silence.

14:54SPEAKERYou hear room after room, machine after machine, floor after floor stopping.

14:59SPEAKERMy boss quickly understood why.

15:01SPEAKERWe connected the cable, sent a message to the control rooms that they could start up again.

15:06SPEAKERI was feeling like shit and got a clap on the shoulder and welcome to the million club and a grin.

15:13SPEAKERWow.

15:15SPEAKERThat would be a bad feeling, I guess. I don't know.

15:18SPEAKERI wonder if maybe that stuff is so complicated that you don't suffer serious repercussions by screwing up like that.

15:23SPEAKERI mean, you think about that, but then also, well, I mean, look, human mistakes happen constantly, right?

15:29SPEAKERYeah.

15:30SPEAKERHave I wasted a million dollars worth of company money having meetings with too many people that went on too long over the 20 years that I've been working in an office?

15:40SPEAKERProbably.

15:41SPEAKERYeah, but that's a soft kind of waste that the middle management can very easily overlook or sweep out of the rug or pretend it doesn't exist or justify.

15:51SPEAKERYeah.

15:52SPEAKERA full shutdown of production is a lot easier to quantify, right?

15:56SPEAKERYeah. I always wanted to yell, "Stop the presses." It's like the Gonzo joke from one of the Muppet movies. I don't remember which one, but yeah, it seems like it'd be fun until all the paper comes unspooled and you have to re-thread the entire gigantic printing press.

16:11SPEAKERRun around wearing a fedora with a press card in it.

16:14SPEAKERThat one's, yeah. I was pissed when I started as a journalist that I didn't get a fedora with a press card. I've never had a press card. Have you ever had a press card?

16:22SPEAKERNo.

16:23SPEAKERThey don't give press cards to these people or tech people.

16:26SPEAKEROr convention badges and wristbands and stuff like that.

16:28SPEAKERNo.

16:29SPEAKERThat's not the same.

16:30SPEAKERWhen I found out that during the BLM protests, which obviously are still ongoing, that people who were local reporters in New York and Minneapolis and places like that had actual press cards that were issued by the city, I was like, "Ah, what? Really? That's amazing. I want one of those."

16:48SPEAKERSure. I don't know if there's very much that's enviable about what those people are having to go through right now though, but I get it.

16:55SPEAKERI mean, the reporters are just, you know, they're doing reporting and, yeah.

16:59SPEAKERIt doesn't sound like they're having the best time of it either, but.

17:02SPEAKERNo, it's not a good time for anybody, but.

17:04SPEAKERAll right. Here's another story.

17:07SPEAKERHit me with another story.

17:08SPEAKERThis one is from Kat.

17:10SPEAKERAt the time of the story, I was a brand new, about three months in, level one tech at a public school system.

17:16SPEAKERI was directed to remove a couple of desktops out of a computer lab to be allocated somewhere else in the district.

17:21SPEAKERAnyway, I'm in the lab and removing the desktops and I'm admiring the neatly bound ethernet and power cables from my predecessor.

17:27SPEAKERI'm not as neat and didn't want to unbundle some of these cables.

17:31SPEAKERSo at one point I had an extra end to an ethernet cable and I didn't know where it terminated to.

17:35SPEAKERI didn't know any better, so I just plugged all the ethernet ends into the wall and went about my day.

17:40SPEAKEROh no.

17:42SPEAKERI'm curious about the background of this problem.

17:47SPEAKERMaybe you'll have some insight here.

17:48SPEAKERNot long after the network slowed and ground to a halt, my director and systems admin were frantically trying to figure out what happened because the network for the entire town all pointed to our server room at my school.

18:01SPEAKERThis was the newest building with all new servers, fiber connections, et cetera.

18:05SPEAKERIt was also bad because my systems admin had taken a sick day and had to get called in to troubleshoot the issue, but it was a Friday afternoon.

18:10SPEAKERSo the students were thrilled and the staff were over it.

18:13SPEAKERI went home and didn't think much of it.

18:15SPEAKERAt some point the next day during a drive, my husband who also works IT much more knowledgeable than I was explaining that it sounded like a network loop.

18:23SPEAKERI thought that was plausible and then realized that it was me.

18:28SPEAKERAfter I left that afternoon, my sysadmin and director traced the loop to the ports and my director realized that I did it.

18:37SPEAKERMonday morning I rushed into the school and checked the lab and noticed that the ethernet was unplugged.

18:41SPEAKERMy director was not mad and he covered for me to my superintendent about the incident.

18:46SPEAKERMy sysadmin wasn't mad either because we supposedly were paying for a system to prevent loops and clearly it wasn't working.

18:54SPEAKERHe said I exposed a vulnerability and that he was grateful for it.

18:57SPEAKERSo within my first 90 days I brought down an entire school district and all the town offices on a Friday afternoon and I'm still employed, valuable lesson learned.

19:07SPEAKERBoth from a network topology perspective and also from a municipal policy perspective, I wonder what would lead to an entire town being wired through a school like that.

19:20SPEAKERDo you have any insight?

19:21SPEAKERSo in California our school districts and our city governments are separate.

19:30SPEAKERThe school districts overlap with the towns usually but sometimes the district that our high schools are in where I live is across two or three towns where the elementary school district is all in one town.

19:44SPEAKERInteresting. I think back home it was one to one with county and school districts.

19:48SPEAKERYeah. So like in Tennessee when I was a kid the city network and the, I mean when I was a kid they didn't have a network but when they put a network in the city network and the school system network overlapped.

20:00SPEAKERSo my guess is it's a place where the cities are directly funding the school districts rather than just contributing to the school districts along with the county and other places.

20:09SPEAKERI see. Actually I shouldn't get off on this tangent but we actually had county and city schools in the same county. Did you ever see that?

20:14SPEAKERYeah, so did we.

20:15SPEAKERDid we have that? There were four high schools, three of them including mine were part of the county school system and then the odd one out was its own kind of city school. It was a weird system.

20:26SPEAKERSo we had the same thing. I ended up going to the city school even though I lived in the county because the county schools were bad.

20:31SPEAKERYeah.

20:32SPEAKERSorry Brad. But yeah, so network loops happen when you plug a switch into the same switch or another switch connected to the switch.

20:42SPEAKEROkay.

20:43SPEAKERAnd basically what happens is it creates a positive feedback loop so that packets that are trying to go out one port come back in the other and keep going in, keep going in, keep going in and loop.

20:53SPEAKERA broadcast storm is what happens when this happens and it messes up overall traffic on the network.

21:08SPEAKERSo the loop, most switches are supposed to detect loops and just ignore them, especially in the modern, modern era.

21:16SPEAKERYeah, I don't think she didn't mention when this happened, did she? I wonder if this is something that was much more of a danger some number of years ago.

21:25SPEAKERI mean, look, in the days before managed switches, remember in the 90s when you'd buy it, when everybody's running 10 base 2 because 10 base t switches cost $500? Yeah, so I'm sure it was back then.

21:38SPEAKERYou used to have to worry about, God, what was the purpose of a crossover cable? I'm trying to think like all the things that used to be a problem that have been kind of automated or smooth over.

21:47SPEAKERYeah, so crossover cables, so ethernet cables are four twisted pairs, so eight total wires. You use two of those pairs for ethernet.

21:55SPEAKERA normal ethernet cable bridges pair one and two, I can't remember the actual split, but two pairs go straight through. With the crossover cable, you flip the pairs on one end.

22:09SPEAKERYeah, so the transmission pair and the receive, so basically one pair of those cables is a transmission pair, one pair is a receive pair. On a normal cable, they go straight through and the switch does the transmission and receiving flip flopping.

22:22SPEAKEROn a crossover cable, you do it yourself and then you can just plug two ethernet cards into each other. But on modern ethernet cards, they all just detect and adjust no matter what cable you plug in.

22:32SPEAKERThe upshot is a lot of that stuff has been smooth over for the user.

22:39SPEAKERThe thing that bumps me out about this email is that this shouldn't have been a situation where somebody had to cover for someone else. This is the kind of human error that A, the setup wasn't right or else it wouldn't...

22:51SPEAKERIf this did happen in the modern time, this shouldn't have happened because the loop should have been detected and it should have just stopped paying attention to itself unless it was cross switches or something.

23:01SPEAKERObviously people get upset about downtime and mistakes, but this was an honest mistake and not a malicious...

23:15SPEAKERIf you yell at people for making honest mistakes, you're just making problems worse. You're not helping things. So don't yell at people for fucking up.

23:24SPEAKERCrap. I had an email and I totally lost it. I have to find it again. Here we go. We'll dip in and out of some of the horror stories. We've got a bunch of those, but I'll intersperse a few other things here. Here's one from Daniel in an email that he titled The Internet Cartels.

23:46SPEAKERSo he said along as a kind of precursor to this, a story on ours entitled Cox Slows Internet Speeds in Entire Neighborhoods to Punish Any Heavy Users.

23:57SPEAKERYeah, Cox sucks. They're bad at ISP.

24:00SPEAKERI don't know what region... Are they regional?

24:02SPEAKERCanada.

24:03SPEAKEROkay. Well, this is from Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

24:07SPEAKEROkay. Maybe I'm thinking of charter. Anyway, okay. I'm thinking of Rogers. Rogers used to be bad. They're all bad. All ISPs suck. That's the TLDR, except for Sonic.

24:18SPEAKERExcept for mine. Mine is great, but other than that...

24:21SPEAKERDane, if you want to bring Sonic to Pacific, I'll sign up tomorrow.

24:23SPEAKERWe should try to get Dane on the podcast.

24:25SPEAKERWe'll give you a free ad spots on the tech. We don't even do ads on the tech pot. I like Sonic so much, I'd give him free spots.

24:30SPEAKERIt is that rare company that's so good to you that you want to evangelize for them. Anyway, as an aside, sometimes I feel crappy talking about how great they are because you're totally subject to your geography, whether you can actually benefit or not.

24:45SPEAKERThe thing about Sonic is it's a small company and they grew over a long period of time and there's no reason somebody couldn't start that kind of ISP in other places that have a lot of people living in a concentrated downtown area, like Sebastopol.

25:02SPEAKERYes. All right. So basically the upshot of this story is that Cox is apparently implementing a policy where if one person is consuming way too much bandwidth, they just throttle the whole surrounding area, which sounds insane.

25:17SPEAKERI would probably raise hell about that. And specifically this was the, in this exact or the specific example they gave, this is a user who is paying the $50 a month surcharge for unlimited data and they are still throttling the whole area, which seems insane.

25:33SPEAKERThe whole node. That is some grade A horse shit.

25:36SPEAKERThis says that his usage was ranging between eight and 12 terabytes a month.

25:40SPEAKERJesus Christ. That is a lot. I'm not even going to speculate about what would be consuming that much data.

25:47SPEAKERLook, Cod patches are getting smaller, Brad.

25:51SPEAKERThat's true. That's true. Maybe he runs a farm of PS4s in his basement that they do land parties on or something. You have to patch all those Call of Duty installations over and over.

26:03SPEAKERHe's a professional Call of Duty player and every three days it's 85 gigabytes from Blizzard.

26:09SPEAKERYep. That's just the math.

26:12SPEAKERAnyway, regardless of like what you feel about his data usage and what constitutes unlimited, et cetera, et cetera, like punishing the whole neighborhood seems like an insane policy.

26:22SPEAKERAnd also we're talking, let's see, they were throttling upload speeds down to 10 megabits as part of this.

26:32SPEAKERYeah, it's weird. Cable companies are bad, man. Anyway.

26:39SPEAKERI mean, look, I have not liked the cable company for a really long time. I think a lot of people share that feeling.

26:47SPEAKERThe fact that as soon as the coronavirus lockdown started, they're like, well, we're going to throw out the download caps, the bandwidth caps for the next three months because we're all in this together.

26:58SPEAKERAnd I mean, in fairness, congestion during the daytime when people are working and doing Zoom calls all the time meant that kids were dropping off of my daughter's Zoom calls constantly early on while Comcast was cranking up their capacity.

27:14SPEAKERBut all of this stuff is horseshit. Bandwidth caps are horseshit. To be clear, eight to 12 gigabytes seems excessive to me.

27:25SPEAKERYeah, there's a lot. Yeah, I think, I mean, in a perfect world, I'd say go get a different ISP, but your alternative is probably a 20 megabit DSL connection. And that's not great either.

27:40SPEAKERSo here's Daniel's question as a follow up to that article. It really surprised me that Cox was so limited with upload bandwidth. Like I said, they dropped it, they throttled it to 10 megabits, but it sounds like their plan even stock was only 35 megabits up.

27:54SPEAKERSo his question, what is the main difference between the situation in the article and symmetrical service that allows full bandwidth up and down? Is it mostly hardware or is there some other bottleneck?

28:05SPEAKERI don't think I've ever come close to a threshold on upload. Most everything is just download these days. I won't rant about how Cox handled the situation and how they don't specify what is excessive.

28:16SPEAKERI've already mentioned that my impression of all ISPs is that of a criminal enterprise.

28:24SPEAKERSo the DOCSIS spec, as I understand it, lets the cable provider allocate bandwidth however they want. So if you're on the latest DOCSIS 31 or 32 or whatever it is, you can get a symmetrical connection. But since most ISPs don't pay for a massive amount of upstream, they don't actually enable that.

28:47SPEAKERThe older versions of DOCSIS were less symmetrical. So when I first signed up for the Comcast gig service, I was getting 35 megabits up and I could get like 850 megabits down.

29:01SPEAKERBut my understanding is that sometimes that's also because they run one channel on one spec. So the download will be DOCSIS 3 and the upload will be DOCSIS 2.0.

29:17SPEAKERI was going to ask if you have any idea if the bandwidth up and down is a zero sum situation, like the more up you use, the less down you have to work with. Is that the case or are they completely separate?

29:25SPEAKERI don't know. I don't know. I would assume so on cable where it's all shared frequency, but I don't know.

29:33SPEAKERYeah. When I got the Sonic gigabit, it started, I think the upload was like a hundred megabit when I got it. And then after six months or a year, they just kind of randomly increased it to symmetrical. It went to a gigabit upstream.

29:56SPEAKERSeeing how fast YouTube could ingest video. Oh yeah. I never really cared about having that massive upstream until this work from home situation started. And suddenly when I'm having to upload 10, 15 gigabyte video files, it sure is nice having all that extra upstream.

30:13SPEAKERWell, yeah. I mean, when we were doing, so when we were, cause it tested, we were doing long videos, we were doing podcasts and stuff like, like a episode of this is only a test would take me overnight to upload at 10 megabits. And yeah.

30:28SPEAKERLike, yeah, we're talking some situations here, like it's a difference of, you know, a couple of hours in how fast something gets up on the website, just based on how fast people can upload stuff. You tell me my impression of upstream limitations on most consumer internet plans or why they're so constrained compared to download.

30:46SPEAKERI mean, obviously people need download more than upload for the most part, but my assumption is they just want to push you to a business plan. If you really need upstream, it's like, it's a specialized enough thing that they want to lock you into some $200 a month, small business plan to get that.

31:02SPEAKERI think, I think the situation is that, no, I think that's right. I think downloads are what people crave. And if you need uploads, then they know that they have you and you're hosed. Yes, that's exactly what I, my, my thought was.

31:16SPEAKERYeah. This, this, this, the work from home situation has really exposed how variable that stuff is.

31:21SPEAKERYou're a force multiplier, Brad. You're, you're, you're a fancy fiber connection. Cause I think you're the only one on bomb.

31:27SPEAKERJan got it. Jan got it. And Alex just got a different, I don't know what his provider is in New York, but he also just got Gigabit.

31:35SPEAKERYeah. So, so like if you have Gigabit and you work with video or any large files at all, then yeah, you're, you should get a raise.

31:43SPEAKERYes. Maybe they should pay for my internet connection. Yes. There I have definitely ended up running production on some stuff just because I have the bandwidth to handle it. So, but some people on staff are just kind of screwed by their location and what they have access to.

31:58SPEAKERHey, welcome to America.

32:00SPEAKERIt's really unfortunate that there's not a better way to work around that stuff.

32:04SPEAKERThe market will find a solution for this, right? It probably won't cause it's really expensive to roll out infrastructure. And the last 30 years have taught us that it will not at all.

32:13SPEAKERYeah. This, none of this problem will just self-regulate out of existence. Right. All right. Let's I wasn't going to take this one until you said we should, cause you at least, you know what some of this stuff is.

32:25SPEAKERThrow in the shade.

32:27SPEAKERNo, no, I just, I was not familiar enough with this topic to talk about it, but it's it's from Llewellyn.

32:32SPEAKEROh yeah. This is a good one.

32:34SPEAKERI am a mechanical engineering nerd and I have designed and built multiple Lego mechanical computers.

32:41SPEAKEROne of them had the same mechanism as the Curta calculator. My flagship computer not built yet is built of rotational logic gates.

32:50SPEAKERIt would be able to compute 52 digit numbers with long operations that are based on the basic operations. In other words, combining multiplication operations to work with index laws.

33:01SPEAKERWow.

33:02SPEAKERMy question is if given the choice and a job where it is suitable, would you use a mechanical computer for your work?

33:09SPEAKERThis question is based on the fact that mechanical computers are generally easier to learn the code for as they are usually based on punch cards or pegs that use a simple binary of hexadecimal system.

33:20SPEAKERThis can make them easier to use for jobs like accounting and other maths based jobs.

33:25SPEAKERProbably not, but I think they're cool.

33:28SPEAKERI mean, basically you knew what a Curta calculator was and I don't. And that's why you wanted to talk about this.

33:33SPEAKERYeah. So a Curta calculator is a thing that's about, I don't know, they're cylindrical and they're basically like, they, they, they are from the time between slide rules, but before electronic or even like, like before like electronic calculators came to prevalence in the seventies.

33:51SPEAKERAnd they're the, basically you, you can rotate it and it'll do the calculations for pretty complicated math, depending on the one you have. Like I think it can do square roots and stuff like that even.

34:01SPEAKERAnd it's all like clockwork inside. So like, if you think, if you know the history of computing at all, the Babbage engine is the, is the famous example, but basically this, this guy was like, Hey, look, they, they designed computers that used cogs and wheels and things like that.

34:20SPEAKERWe just didn't have the capability to manufacture the, the hardware precisely enough that they worked in the 1800s.

34:27SPEAKERYeah, I was going to say Babbage, but that was like late 1800s, wasn't it?

34:30SPEAKERYeah. And, and, you know, in that, in that regard, like Ada Lovelace and a lot of those people were doing the foundational work that for what became the Silicon microprocessor a hundred years later, you know, a really long time ago.

34:44SPEAKERSo people have made some incredible mechanical computers. There's the Lego ones that Llewellyn was talking about are amazing. And there's boatloads of YouTube videos that show them.

34:55SPEAKERI was just going to say, I didn't look into it, but I'm sure there is a thriving YouTube subculture of people making this stuff.

35:01SPEAKERWell, and, and it's, they're neat because they illustrate the points. They illustrate how the computer works. I think much better than trying to imagine electrons moving through MOSFET gates and stuff like that.

35:14SPEAKERThat's a good point. Like, you know, the, the microprocessor has become such a black box. It's just a, you know, you can't look at it and understand what it's doing anymore. And this is, this is a way to actually visualize and get your hands on that stuff.

35:24SPEAKERWell, and then the other thing that's interesting that's happened in the last couple of decades is that as manufacturing capabilities have gotten incredibly precise, people have made working Babbage engines.

35:34SPEAKERSo like Babbage was never able to get it built because he couldn't get the money and he couldn't, he couldn't make the things work because they couldn't machine gears and cogs at the, you know, thousands and thousands of an inch precision required to make the machine work.

35:47SPEAKERBut there's one at the computer history museum that they run occasionally. And it's, it's amazing. Cause it's like this, it looks like an enormous engine with all these cams and rods and stuff moving around and clicking and clacking and making all sorts of good noise.

36:01SPEAKERAnd then, and then it does like, you know, 69 times 420 and it gives you the answer.

36:07SPEAKERIs that, is that like the ultimate steampunk fantasy, a world where the integrated circuit was never created and instead they just kept machining the mechanical parts of those things smaller and smaller to create computers that could continue to shoot steam out and make a bunch of noises and have grease coming out of them.

36:23SPEAKERYep. We're going to need four pounds of coal to do this calculation.

36:26SPEAKEROh man, the thermal, the thermal design on this thing is a real...

36:29SPEAKERThis one's TDP as a smokestack.

36:34SPEAKERBut, but I mean, so, so there, there are interesting applications for mechanical computers, right? Cause there are places where EM interference prevents normal computers from working well and things like that.

36:44SPEAKERAnd like, I don't think we're going to make space probes that have mechanical computers on them because it seems like it's way more stuff to fail.

36:51SPEAKERBut, but I mean, it is an interesting, like, no, I don't want to use mechanical computers ever again. We used to do mechanical, like my, my grandfather collected mechanical adding machines because he thought they were really cool.

37:07SPEAKERAnd he assumed that they would come back at some point because he didn't understand computers at all.

37:12SPEAKERBut I got to play with them a lot as a kid and it was really fun, but no, I don't need more mechanical computers in my life.

37:18SPEAKERYeah, I get it.

37:21SPEAKERYeah, novelties and teaching. I think they're great teaching tools. It's like using Minecraft to build registers for computers.

37:26SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. It's basically just, it's just physical, a red, a countless, the God, this would have been way better to bring up if I could remember what the stuff in Minecraft was called the red, red stone, red stone.

37:37SPEAKERYeah. Last random tangent I'll bring up about this. I was watching, I can't remember what the Twitch channel is off the top of my head. Somebody brought it up on the discord a few weeks ago. It's like old computer channel or something like that on Twitch.

37:51SPEAKERIt's just, it's just a channel. I think they're just pulling from like archive.org. Just tons of it's where I became aware of the computer Chronicles.

37:58SPEAKEROh yeah.

37:59SPEAKERBut they go way back further than that. We're talking stuff from like the there's material in there from like the sixties.

38:06SPEAKERAnyway, a video came up. This was probably, if I had to guess like directly post world war two, like maybe early fifties, just based on the quality of the footage, I'm kind of guessing here, but it was about your footage.

38:19SPEAKERWhat's that? You think it's prelinger footage? I don't know, but it was, it was footage of basically battleships calculating like kind of heavy gun trajectory, like shelling trajectory type stuff.

38:31SPEAKERAnd the thing that caught my attention was they were using the term computer, except that it was by computer.

38:37SPEAKERThey meant a mechanical, a large mechanical contraption, the size of like a washing machine with like four sailors running around, pulling levers on it and stuff like this.

38:48SPEAKERBut it was, but the narration was talking so glowingly about like the computer is capable of blah, blah, blah, and talking about how like precisely they could site in their weaponry and stuff like that.

38:57SPEAKERIt was just an interesting, interesting, like different application of the term computer from 60 years ago than you're used to.

39:04SPEAKERDo you know the history of that?

39:06SPEAKERWhich specifically?

39:08SPEAKERSo prior to that, prior to having mechanical computers could do that, a computer was a woman who sat in a room and was really good at doing math.

39:15SPEAKEROh, like computer was a job description or a job title.

39:18SPEAKERYeah. So I think Mary Robinette Kowal, who's a dear friend and writes the Lady Astronaut on Mars books that are, that are won the Hugo and the Nebula last year, calculating stars, wrote a book about computers.

39:34SPEAKERAnd she described a computer in the 40s and 50s and 60s as somebody, like if men were good at math, they went into engineering and if women were good at math, they were computers.

39:45SPEAKERSo like in the 60s at NASA, even when people, when we were doing, this is what Hidden Figures is about, is the women who were doing the math that got us to the moon.

39:56SPEAKERSo when they're like, we need to figure out the, what the burn is for this particular orbital insertion to move from earth to the moon or whatever, then there were 15 people sitting in a room doing that math as fast as they could and all comparing notes to make sure they all got the same answer.

40:13SPEAKERAnd then they would send that up to the, to the people in the, in the rocket to tell them where to aim and how long to fire the rocket for.

40:18SPEAKERYeah.

40:20SPEAKERThat's what my grandmother did before the war.

40:22SPEAKEROh, wow.

40:23SPEAKERShe calculated log tables for artillery strikes.

40:26SPEAKERI started to go off on another tangent, but we'll never get to more emails if I do that.

40:31SPEAKERMaybe I should save it for later. It's about, it's about calculating orbital trajectories and stuff.

40:35SPEAKEROoh, you know, Kerbal Space Program made me understand that stuff more than anything else I've ever done.

40:43SPEAKEROkay. I'll just get into it because I already said too much about it.

40:45SPEAKERYeah.

40:46SPEAKERI was reading an old article about, this was from four or five years ago. It was a probe that they landed on an asteroid or maybe it was a comet.

40:53SPEAKEROh, the Japanese one?

40:54SPEAKERI forget which one it was actually. It was, it basically, it intercepted it after, you know, the probe orbited the sun for like a year and then intercepted whichever object it was and actually took a sample and then returned to earth.

41:04SPEAKEROr maybe it's still returning to earth. This article was like four years old. I don't know.

41:07SPEAKERI think it's still on its way back.

41:08SPEAKERI actually don't actually don't know if it's gotten back yet or not, but the thing that occurred to me, like I've always thought like I cannot believe that they can launch a probe that has a transit time of multiple years and hit the thing that they're trying to hit.

41:21SPEAKERAnd I finally realized the reason that that stuff seems so baffling to me because I know that math is incredibly straightforward, right? Like the math has been understood for centuries, right? To calculate that stuff, like since, since Newton, right?

41:33SPEAKERYeah.

41:34SPEAKERMore or less. I think it's, to me, it's baffling because there's so much room for error in the mechanical aspect of executing that math. Does that make sense? Like to me, to me, it's like, like once, once the object is actually in motion, like you can apply thrust as precisely as possible.

41:53SPEAKERYou can change attitude like to the highest precision you can, but it just seems like there are so many variables of things that can go wrong there that like, regardless of how correct your math is, it still blows my mind that they can actually execute on it that well.

42:05SPEAKERWell, and you also have to remember like with that stuff, there's no, like a lot of, a lot of what they get back.

42:13SPEAKERSo we did a thing with, at one of the tested stage shows where we built, we made an RC car work with time delays. So like you would send it a command, like they, like the way that we basically made it work the way that JPL controls the Mars rover, right? The Curiosity.

42:31SPEAKERAnd you'd send a command and then have to wait a minute for their thing to go. And if it was on like, like you assume it's going to drive, if you tell it, Hey, drive 10 meters, you know, the wheels are going to spin enough for it to drive 10 meters. But if the surface is slippery or hard, it may go further or less than that.

42:47SPEAKERThat's exactly the type of stuff I'm talking about. It seems like there are so many practical points of failure, even though your plan is perfect.

42:54SPEAKERYeah. Well, and like on Mars, it's easy cause they can look at the camera and they can see, Oh, it only went, we only went nine meters. Why did that happen? But if you're in the cold, dark void of outer space, like, you know, they, they use sextants to tell, to tell where they are and where they're going and all that kind of stuff. So.

43:13SPEAKERIt just seems like to me, like at any point, if like, if your attitude is off by a tiny fraction of a degree, that would be enough to screw things up down the line. But.

43:23SPEAKERWell, but they can, but so, well, and it's also stuff like if the rocket takes, if the engine takes, you know, a fraction of a second longer than you expect to go, then you're going to have more, more, more momentum than you expected. So, but they constantly adjust.

43:36SPEAKERThat's all. Yeah. That makes sense. Like maybe it's just a matter of having an insane amount of instrumentation and just watching every variable constantly and maybe the, yeah, maybe they correct for way more behind the scenes than we know.

43:46SPEAKERYeah. It's, I mean, this is, this is why, yeah, this is why when there's two people out on a spacewalk on ISS, there's an, there's the Capcom that talks to them, but then there's also another 3000 people in a pyramid structure that are thinking about what they're doing at that moment.

44:01SPEAKERSo you have the full weight of thousands of brains on every single wrench turn every time a astronaut is holding something on the outside of the space station.

44:10SPEAKERYeah. That provides a little more context for sure. All right. You want to do a couple more disaster stories?

44:17SPEAKERYeah. I like a good, I like a good nightmare.

44:20SPEAKERYou like some good schadenfreude? You like somebody else's nightmare?

44:24SPEAKERSo the reason I like these stories isn't because I like human suffering, although, I mean, yeah. It's because this is how we learn, right? You learn by, you tell these, we tell these stories to each other, and this is the thing I've, nerds have always done as long as I've been around nerds.

44:39SPEAKERWe tell these stories to each other so that we don't make the same stupid mistake that somebody else did.

44:43SPEAKERYeah. That's, I mean, this sounds like an excuse, but it's genuinely how I look at like problems and breaking stuff. Like every time I break, every time I break something, yes, it sucks to have to fix it, but also like you learn why it broke and how to fix it and how not to do it again.

44:57SPEAKEREvery, every mistake is a learning experience.

44:59SPEAKERIt's, yeah. It's only a mistake if you don't learn.

45:01SPEAKERRight. Yes. That's a good way to look at it. I should write that down. That's a good episode title.

45:07SPEAKERI got it.

45:09SPEAKERAll right. You ready for another email?

45:11SPEAKERYeah.

45:13SPEAKERHere's one from Matt.

45:15SPEAKERBack in the fall of 2002, I was a college senior slogging through an analytical chemistry lab.

45:21SPEAKERIn this particular course, we were required to turn in printed copies of our lab report for that week's experiment by 5 p.m. each Thursday afternoon or risk a failing grade.

45:29SPEAKERBeing 2002, everyone wrote and printed their reports in the department's computer lab, which for all the things that did have lacked network printers at the time.

45:39SPEAKERAbout once a week, usually around 4.45 on Thursday, someone would invariably save their 20 plus page word document and eject their 100 megabyte zip disc containing said document to take to the printer's computer without first closing the file.

45:55SPEAKEROh.

45:59SPEAKERYou have your face in your hands. Yes, we're all getting flashbacks from the university computer lab.

46:03SPEAKEROh, God.

46:05SPEAKERWhile the file would still appear on the disc, it was irreparably corrupted.

46:09SPEAKERThe glimmer of hope from the still open document on the PC also turned to darkness as that collection of bits was also corrupted and it could not be saved as a readable file.

46:19SPEAKERThe act of pressing that little round button on the front of the PC to eject that least floppy of disks sent so many in the class through the stages of grief at lightning speed.

46:29SPEAKERWhen they hit the final stage of acceptance, they realized that they'd better grind out a couple of measly paragraphs to salvage a handful of much needed points.

46:37SPEAKERWarnings were everywhere starting on the first day of class and repeated endlessly, but it happened regardless.

46:43SPEAKERFrom my classmates' experiences, I learned to never trust portable media to hold the sole copy of anything of value.

46:49SPEAKERA few years later, my PhD dissertation lived on no fewer than seven forms of media.

46:55SPEAKEROh, God.

46:57SPEAKERYeah, that's rough. Also, on top of that calamity, think about the bottleneck of having like a single machine that could access the lab printers and all of those people trying to print at 5 p.m.

47:09SPEAKERWe used zip disks a lot when I worked at the university because they held 100 megs and we were definitely at the time when image files would be bigger than a floppy disk, but people didn't know how to use the network server.

47:23SPEAKERI can't remember if it was zip disks or the side quest version, but one of them was really sensitive to drops.

47:29SPEAKERSo if you dropped the disk in a specific way, I don't know what happened, whether the heads crashed inside the platter or if just the little magnetic bits that aligned on the platters fell off or something.

47:42SPEAKERBut you would just basically format a drive by dropping it on its end. And this is a bad time.

47:49SPEAKERThat sounds like a design flaw to me.

47:51SPEAKERI the thing that always strikes me about the multiple copies on different forms of media is that I always would have horrible versioning problems because we would do that like at the magazine.

48:01SPEAKERWe use jazz drives and those big side quest drives for for the first few years I was there before the network storage was big enough to hold the magazine and be reliable.

48:11SPEAKERAnd yeah, that's it.

48:14SPEAKERYeah, I don't know. Man, Dropbox is real nice for that stuff, I guess.

48:18SPEAKERYes, it certainly is. A lot of backup options these days.

48:22SPEAKEROh, man, that's giving me computer lab flashbacks.

48:26SPEAKERI spent so much time in the computer lab at my school because despite going to a state university with a massive engineering program.

48:34SPEAKERAnd despite being a gigantic computer nerd, I ended up in one of the three dorms on campus that did not have any network wiring of any kind.

48:42SPEAKERSo while all my friends were playing Quake with the lowest of pings, I had a 28/8 dial up connection in my room.

48:51SPEAKERSo I mostly hung out in the computer lab instead. We had we had, I believe, I think there were Spark stations.

48:56SPEAKERWe had with the with the reflective mouse pads.

48:59SPEAKERI can't remember.

49:00SPEAKERSo the ones the ones so in order to get access to the Spark lab, you had to be a CS, you had to be in the CS program, which meant you had to be taking some CS class.

49:08SPEAKEROK. So I signed up for CS 100 or 101 specifically to get access to that machine so I could play Doom on it.

49:16SPEAKERAnd then I made friends with the with the admin for the lab. And he was like, oh, we're putting it in a Linux lab upstairs.

49:24SPEAKERYou can come play there. They all have 3D accelerators. You can play Quake.

49:27SPEAKERAnd I was like, wait, you're doing Linux with 3D accelerators? OK, I'll come up and hang out.

49:31SPEAKERAnd yeah, that's good. That's a good friend to have. Yeah, I guess that was Solaris. All those machines were running.

49:38SPEAKERIt was my first real Unix experience. I learned how to play MP3s from the command line and was very proud of myself.

49:44SPEAKERThe thing that always struck me about those Sun machines was they had they had these laser mice.

49:50SPEAKERBut in order for the laser mouse to work like it wasn't like a laser mouse where the laser was illuminating the surface and then there was a camera.

49:55SPEAKERIt was a laser mouse where the laser was bouncing off of a specially textured mouse pad.

50:00SPEAKERSpeaking of design flaws. Yeah, it sounds like it seems like a bad idea.

50:05SPEAKERIt's you know, what are you going to do? Let's see here.

50:12SPEAKERSo many to choose from. It's a short one from Josh, Jschmuck2 on the Discord.

50:21SPEAKEROK. Just after the new RTX cards were released, I picked up a gently used 1080 TI for a great price to replace my 980.

50:30SPEAKERIt was a stopgap upgrade to my 2500K machine built in 2011.

50:36SPEAKERAfter I put in the card every now and again for a week or so, I would notice a very slight burning smell.

50:42SPEAKERSo slight and fleeting that I even questioned if I was smelling it at all.

50:47SPEAKEREventually I figured out what it was. The new card was drawing significantly more power than the 18 gauge power cable I was using could handle the insulation.

50:56SPEAKERInsulation was slowly melting and the cable was cooking itself from the inside out.

51:03SPEAKERHe includes some pictures here. The PC was fine and save a bad smell and some melted carpet fibers, which thankfully live behind a desk.

51:10SPEAKERI replaced it with a 14 gauge cable and it was fine after that, but it was definitely a tense couple of minutes.

51:18SPEAKERThe lesson here is to make sure you use the cable that comes with your power supply.

51:21SPEAKERWow. I mean, I guess that makes sense, but I didn't realize that like 18 gauge sounds pretty heavy to me.

51:27SPEAKERWell, 18 gauge is smaller. Those are the floppy ones for monitors. Those are the little ones.

51:35SPEAKERIt's funny. The old PC power and cooling power supply is the big one. When you bought like a 1200 watt power supply from them, which is pretty close to the theoretical maximum you can get.

51:44SPEAKERI think the theoretical maximum you can get on a 15 amp circuit at 120 volts in the US is 1600 watts, which means like that 1200 is probably about what you're going to get out of the wall ever on a circuit that has other things plugged into it.

51:59SPEAKERSure. And the PC power and cooling power supplies had had like their power cables were the same three prongs, but they were keyed.

52:09SPEAKERSo you couldn't plug in a normal cable to it. That's smart. Yeah. And I guess this is why I never thought about it before.

52:16SPEAKERBut yeah, I've also, we just talked, I guess it was on our disaster episode that we talked about don't mix and match the modular cables from different power supplies.

52:23SPEAKERYeah. No, don't do that at all. But I never thought about mixing and matching the three prong cable.

52:27SPEAKERI generally, I mean, I guess most power supplies are not going to pull that much current, right? So it's probably not a big deal, but I have, I have not been, what I'm saying is I have not been the best about keeping track of which, which three prong cables go with which devices.

52:40SPEAKERI hope you use it's probably less of a problem, especially if you don't have like, like if you have a bunch of hard drives, I always worry about that because they draw, especially when they first spin up in the morning.

52:50SPEAKERYeah. But Holy cow. Yeah. If you can smell a burning smell, you should investigate that immediately. That burning smells are not anything that the look, the, the lesson we're learning from Josh's mistake here is that if you smell something burning, figure out what it is before the fire rather than after.

53:06SPEAKERYes, that's yes. As soon as you smell the burning smell, maybe turn everything off.

53:11SPEAKERLike electrical burning smells are one of the few things that gets me to stop doing literally anything I'm doing.

53:16SPEAKERYeah. And start snipping around the house. That is a five alarm situation for sure.

53:21SPEAKERYeah. Okay. How about maybe like one more here?

53:30SPEAKERYeah, I think we got one more probably, maybe two. I don't know for a short one.

53:34SPEAKERTrying to find. Oh, this is a good one. It's kind of, it's sort of in this category.

53:44SPEAKERUh, this person didn't request to be anonymous, but since they named their company, maybe I should play it safe. Don't get me fired.

53:51SPEAKERUh, okay. This person starts with quick tech horror story. Uh, the electrical. Yeah, it's fine. I'll, I'll say their company name since I'm not naming them. It's fine. It just feels weird to even out the people that they work for. But here we are.

54:05SPEAKERUh, the electrical engineer on my team at Intel would regularly lean over an open piece of hardware, usually a PC and short stuff out with his lanyard key ring, sparks, smoke, the whole thing regularly.

54:19SPEAKERThat's, that seems like maybe a change of behavior is in order. Uh, but here is the, this is what I've found pretty interesting in this email, which they describe as not a horror story, more of an FYI.

54:32SPEAKERI'm a mechanical engineer and I used to work on the, we talked about this in our horror story episode about CPU sockets and pennies and stuff like that getting bent.

54:39SPEAKERI'm a mechanical engineer and I used to work on the team that made reference designs for all these server grade socket retention mechanisms, meaning back plates and heat sink Springs.

54:48SPEAKERUh, the socket pins that Brad had to bend back are indeed a pain in the ass, uh, customers, which they described as like Facebook and Google. So like big corporate customers want to do away with the sockets because assembly technicians wear gloves and ruin a good percentage of the motherboards, roughly one to 2% by bending pens.

55:06SPEAKERThat must be for servers, right? For data centers, stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. You have a lot of days that you have to wear gloves.

55:12SPEAKERYeah. Uh, the sockets also cost dollars to produce, uh, where soldering a CPU to a motherboard doesn't. Uh, the reason we now have cantilever pins in the socket, uh, on the current land grid array CPUs instead of pins on the CPU in the old pin grid array CPUs is because Intel saves a lot of money by pushing the pins onto the motherboard manufacturers.

55:36SPEAKERThey sell a billion processes a year and each processor has 2000 pins. So yeah, that math checks out. Do the math. Let's just get that in check multiplication. Uh, this is, this is the Pinterest I'm here for. That's right. Uh, that's good to know. I got at least one or two more pin, pin puns probably, but I'm going to stop. Yeah. You can save those. Let's maybe not the last time that'll come up. Um, let's see. Uh, we talked about this a little bit recently. Maybe I'll, let's, here's something.

56:05SPEAKEREmail from Mike, uh, cause I've watched a man with luxurious hair, pull tech items of varying age and usefulness out of his desk. I don't know who he could be talking about.

56:15SPEAKERDid you get a haircut yet by the way? No. Well, my girlfriend cut my hair like a month ago. I'm due for another one for sure. Gina did mine the other day. Yeah. I saw you tweeting about it. One of the better haircuts I've had recently. Yeah. Does it, does it kind of make you question your old haircutting regimen and like whether it's necessary?

56:32SPEAKERI don't feel great about all the times I spent 60 to a hundred dollars on a haircut over the last 20 years. Haircuts in this area are not living wages, but yeah. Even when I get the sides cut here at home, I'm not cutting the top and it's most of the way down the back of my head at this point.

56:48SPEAKERYeah. Anyway, um, he's, uh, he's referring to me pulling all those old hard drives out and stuff like that. Yeah. We've talked about that. Uh, that got me to thinking about the items in my own computing area. Uh, when should I purge old cables and hard drives that I never use anymore?

57:04SPEAKERSome of them have not seen use in over 10 years, but are still around cluttering up space. How do I responsibly get rid of them?

57:10SPEAKERElectronics recycling. I, yes. I don't know that I can get behind your immediately answer though. Get rid of it all. I have two big, I was in the, I was in the garage looking for my cable bucket the other day. My cable rubber, I have a big like 10 gallon rubber made bin that has, that has cables stuck on a sticker on the side. When I open it up, I look at it and I just get sad.

57:31SPEAKERYeah. Like I'm not going to need those ever. I would say use your best judgment. Don't necessarily purge everything.

57:41SPEAKERLook, here's the, here's the, here's the hard, awful truth. Like two years ago when I needed a firewire cable and I wasn't sure that I actually had the one with the two specific ends that I needed, it was way easier for me to go to Amazon and pay $4 to get a new cable the next day than it was for me to go into the garage and spend two hours digging through the cable bucket.

58:06SPEAKERYeah. But then you have to wait a whole day instead of two hours. But, but it took four minutes and cost me no, nothing. $5 is nothing.

58:16SPEAKERIt's, I mean, it's, it's less the money and more of the impatience for me. If I want, if I need something, I want it immediately. I don't want to have to wait. Cause I, I hate having projects hanging over my head that I can't keep working on.

58:27SPEAKERI just, I just, I look a few years ago, I went through and I had bins and bins and bins of old video cards, all sorted and organized. Like it was, it's the equivalent of like Jeff's, here's all of the shit that I reviewed for video games for the last 20 years, you know, and the holes that he's filled in his collection and all that.

58:48SPEAKERAnd I had, I had a complete set of every 3D accelerator starting with the 3D effects of Voodoo and the ATI Rage 2 going forward to like the GeForce, I don't know, 9800 probably.

59:02SPEAKERWhat did you do with them?

59:04SPEAKERI donated what the computer history museum wanted to them. I gave it to some other friends who do video game preservation stuff and then the rest went to the electronics recycling.

59:15SPEAKEROkay. As long as they went to some kind of museum entity, that's, that's, that's understandable.

59:19SPEAKERWell, but the thing is the museum only wanted the weird shit that nobody bought. Like they wanted the weird rendition card that I had that was a review sample and they wanted a Voodoo five, 6,000 and they wanted stuff like that.

59:30SPEAKERThey didn't, they didn't need Voodoo twos. They didn't need Voodoo threes even. They just wanted, they just wanted the stuff that's hard to find.

59:37SPEAKERAnd yeah, I, I just, I just, like when I was at Maximum PC, I thought at some point I might go through and do a here's what it's like to play Quake.

59:48SPEAKERYou know, here's what Quake looks like running on hardware of the time and set up like a Voodoo 2 and, and do all that. But, but I realistically, I was never going to do that. It was an enormous pain in the ass.

59:57SPEAKERSure. Yeah. I think I mentioned I went through all those old hard drives and there was nothing much on them. So I'm at the point where I need to dispose of them.

1:00:07SPEAKERIf anybody in the audience has a hard drive capable shredder in the Bay area.

1:00:12SPEAKERDid we talk about that?

1:00:13SPEAKERYeah. I love watching those videos, man.

1:00:16SPEAKERLike you can, you can, I think I might've mentioned already, you can hire, like you can rent time. You can actually have a mobile hard drive shredder drive out to your house and do it for you. But I don't even know how expensive that would be.

1:00:25SPEAKERSo there are often I feel like every few years I see a company that's like, Hey, we're getting the hard drive shredder out. If you guys want to bring your stuff, bring it over posting on social and stuff.

1:00:37SPEAKERYeah.

1:00:38SPEAKERI've never done it, but I wish I had.

1:00:40SPEAKERSo I, I, it turns out I found a, the right size Torx in my junk drawer to open those hard drives. Is that the way to go? Like open them up, pull the platters out and like what drill through them or something like that?

1:00:49SPEAKERDrill through the platters with a drill press is the recommended.

1:00:52SPEAKERDrill press? I have a cordless drill. Is that good enough?

1:00:55SPEAKERI mean, just clamp it down so you don't huck it across the room.

1:00:58SPEAKEROkay.

1:00:59SPEAKERThe other thing to take out of hard drives is the magnets. Cause there is some really strong neodymium magnets in, in them that control the heads.

1:01:05SPEAKERAnd in a, like they are dangerous to dispose of way or in a useful, they're fun. They're fun to have way. Okay.

1:01:11SPEAKERYeah. They're, they're fun magnets.

1:01:12SPEAKEROkay. I'll I'll, you know, maybe I'll have some fun taking the hard drive apart.

1:01:16SPEAKERI'd watch that stream. That sounds like content to me.

1:01:18SPEAKERYeah, maybe I should. Yeah, you're probably right.

1:01:20SPEAKERNext month's patron exclusive episode.

1:01:23SPEAKERBut then what do you, I guess there's like what, occasional e-waste pickup and stuff like that is the responsible way to get rid of stuff.

1:01:30SPEAKERThey don't do pickup where we are.

1:01:32SPEAKERI think SF does like, well, I think you get like two a year or something like that. It depends on your area, but I guess just Google e-waste at your disposal in your area, probably.

1:01:41SPEAKERSo for us, they have a couple of times a year, like, like places set up that you can just go dump stuff off.

1:01:48SPEAKERThey also at the recycling yard in our town, we can take our e-waste and they'll take it pretty much any time.

1:01:54SPEAKERSo I highly recommend that so that then you don't put a bunch of heavy metals in the groundwater.

1:01:58SPEAKERYes, just, just, yes, please don't just throw it in the trash.

1:02:01SPEAKEREspecially stuff that has bad. So, so the other thing I've been looking at lately is I've got to go through my garage and find all this shit that has batteries in it.

1:02:08SPEAKERI need to recap my Xbox, my original Xbox.

1:02:12SPEAKERI need to open that thing up and check it too.

1:02:14SPEAKEROr at least snip the old ones off so they don't ruin the board.

1:02:17SPEAKERAlthough maybe I should just get rid of that thing because realistically, am I going to play any Xbox original Xbox games?

1:02:23SPEAKERLike what Halo and Halo 2 are both available on backwards compatibility and Master Chief collection.

1:02:29SPEAKERI don't know what else I would play.

1:02:30SPEAKERI have a, I have an old PSP and a cardboard box I found that was pretty swollen.

1:02:36SPEAKERIt was like about to pop the battery cover off. The battery was so swollen.

1:02:39SPEAKERThat was a, I mean, will those eventually rupture or?

1:02:43SPEAKERI don't, having, so the only experience I have with lithium battery fires was at BattleBots when somebody, we were shooting an interview with somebody and all of a sudden the biggest plume of white smoke I've ever seen just started exploding from the robot in the background.

1:02:59SPEAKERAnd.

1:03:01SPEAKERI mean, to be fair, that's pretty high stress situation for those electronics.

1:03:05SPEAKERWell, I mean, yeah, but so the, the problem was that the battery had gotten nicked in the fight and it didn't start, it didn't get, it didn't get it.

1:03:14SPEAKERI think what happens is moisture gets in the interacts with the lithium and that's what causes the fire and then any kind of spark or heat causes the fire.

1:03:22SPEAKERAny exposure to the, even the moisture in the air can cause those things to ignite. So yeah, I would be really careful if they're swollen. Like I know, I know when I took my swollen iPhone 10 and to the Apple store, they didn't even like they didn't even, they don't even service those anymore.

1:03:42SPEAKERIt's not like they have a bucket of sand in the back that they chuck them into. If it goes bad, they send them off someplace where they have fume hoods to do the servicing.

1:03:49SPEAKERSure. Cause the smoke is, it's real bad for you. Just like lithium smoke is super, super dangerous. It's, it's bad for your lungs. They will fuck you up.

1:03:59SPEAKERYeah. My practical advice about getting rid of stuff is I would start by getting organized. That's what I did. Like don't just have boxes and boxes of random crap. Like I basically got three drawers and I was like, all right, this is my video cable drawer. This is my audio stuff drawer.

1:04:13SPEAKERThis is my power cable type drawer. And I sorted everything out. I went through it all. I got rid of duplicates. I got rid of stuff that is like definitely useless, but there is no better feeling than needing a very specific thing and just having it to me.

1:04:30SPEAKERSo I have next to my desk, I bought some of these cheap Ikea metal cabinets with drawers and like each of the drawers is good for different things. So I keep stuff like micro USBs or whatever.

1:04:44SPEAKERLike some stuff like that's worth having around. Like I, the example, like, you know, I told you when I went through those hard drives, I pulled a 10 year old motherboard CPU combo out of the closet that had PCI slots in it and was able to use that. The best one though, is I, I needed, I guess for the first time ever, I needed a DVI to HDMI converter.

1:05:01SPEAKERWow.

1:05:02SPEAKERAnd like, I don't know how I've never needed one of those before. Suddenly I did. And I pulled the drawer out and went through it and I found one still in the package, like still in the little plastic baggy. And it has a, it has a Radeon logo on it.

1:05:16SPEAKERAnd I am fairly certain that that is a roughly Half-Life 2 era Radeon that that came from.

1:05:22SPEAKERYeah, that probably makes sense. Like a 1570 or something.

1:05:24SPEAKERMeaning that I have had a, an unopened HDMI to DVI converter in a drawer for like 15 years and I finally needed it. And it was the best feeling ever.

1:05:34SPEAKERI'm going to, hold on, you're going to hear my keyboard typing. I'm going to go over to amazon.com to HDMI to DVI.

1:05:41SPEAKERIt doesn't matter how cheap it is. It doesn't even matter if you can get it same day. It's still not as fast as, it's not as fast as six foot DVI to HDMI cable, reaching into the drawer and finding it.

1:05:53SPEAKEROh, well, so usually ships will be available by July 7th. So you'd get it on Monday. So we're, we're at a different time right now.

1:06:02SPEAKERI just had it.

1:06:03SPEAKERHere we go. Monday, July 7th.

1:06:06SPEAKERGet rid of excess stuff.

1:06:08SPEAKERBut don't get rid of everything.

1:06:09SPEAKERI have a bunch of old motherboards in my garage that I need to get rid of.

1:06:13SPEAKERWell, those are, yes, that's eventually old computers are just garbage, wasted space, but yeah.

1:06:19SPEAKERAdapters and adapters and cables are forever.

1:06:23SPEAKERI think that's it for today. I think that's a good place to wrap it up.

1:06:26SPEAKERSure.

1:06:28SPEAKERAs always, thank you. Thank you. Thank you to all of our patrons.

1:06:34SPEAKERYes.

1:06:35SPEAKERBut especially the executive producer level patrons, Andrew Cotton, David Allen, Jacob Chapel and Kurt Brownridge.

1:06:41SPEAKERYes.

1:06:42SPEAKERI think our associate producers last week, right? Cause it was the end of the month.

1:06:45SPEAKERI think that's right. Yes.

1:06:47SPEAKERYeah. Okay. So but thanks to everybody. Thanks.

1:06:51SPEAKERYou know, whether you're, whether you're, you know, whether you're putting money in the Patreon, which we appreciate at tech pod, sorry, patreon.com/techpod.

1:07:00SPEAKEROr if you are just hanging out and talking to us and discord or telling your friends about the podcast, we really appreciate all of it.

1:07:10SPEAKERAnd it's, we have a good time doing the show, but it's, it's, it's great to, it's very gratifying to get support and comments and feedback from the audience on the reg.

1:07:22SPEAKERYes, we couldn't and wouldn't do it without everyone listening.

1:07:25SPEAKERAnd we, we, so our patron episode, patron exclusive episode for May just went up, or sorry, for June just went up.

1:07:31SPEAKERWe talked about projects.

1:07:33SPEAKERJune over already.

1:07:34SPEAKERRight. Right.

1:07:36SPEAKERI finished my Mr. Case.

1:07:40SPEAKERYeah.

1:07:41SPEAKERI get the cable that I need because I was able to order it from an internet supplier and it will be here within two days.

1:07:46SPEAKERWhat if you just had it right there?

1:07:48SPEAKERIt's a real weird cable. There's no, it needed a right-handed HDMI to HDMI with mounting holes. It's like, they're only like two of them on Amazon.

1:07:56SPEAKERYeah, I get it.

1:07:58SPEAKERBut yeah, so people are talking about cool tech and projects and, you know, helping each other with their problems and figuring out solutions.

1:08:07SPEAKERIt's, it's fabulous. The discord's really good. You can get into the discord for two bucks a month for five bucks a month. You get the special patron only episode and, we, we appreciate the support. There's 750 backers now.

1:08:19SPEAKEROh.

1:08:20SPEAKERBrad, that's amazing.

1:08:22SPEAKERThat's yeah. Thank you.

1:08:23SPEAKERIt's a very exclusive club.

1:08:24SPEAKERYes. It's a good size. The discord's a good size to, you know, get to know people and get in on conversations, but not be super overwhelmed.

1:08:32SPEAKERYeah, exactly. And I just mute the places that I don't, like if there's, if there's areas that I'm not like doing something or need feedback on, I kind of mute those spots and let those conversations lead themselves.

1:08:44SPEAKERI find it, I find it to be a good pace of conversation that you can still keep up with, but.

1:08:49SPEAKERYeah.

1:08:50SPEAKERWell, and it's really nice cause like the other way for me to find out what's going on with Mr. Like new Mr. Scripts and stuff is basically to read a bazillion Twitter feeds or like have long conversations with a bunch of huge nerds. So.

1:09:04SPEAKEROh, speaking of, speaking of Mr. I don't know if you saw congratulations to Oscar in the community for having, having his first pull request accepted into the Mr. Project.

1:09:13SPEAKERThat's amazing. That's the type of head thing that he posted about yesterday.

1:09:15SPEAKERThat's so good.

1:09:16SPEAKERNot only was the request integrated, but he, this might be the first time I've ever seen this. He got the coveted, like stamp of approval from the creator of the project who is kind of a legendary curmudgeon.

1:09:28SPEAKEROh, that's amazing. That's his response. His response was basically like, Oh, I, Oh, I really liked this contribution. Thank you. I was like, wow, I've never been seen him be so unequivocally friendly to somebody before.

1:09:40SPEAKERIt's nice when like, when you're doing an open source project, I don't, I don't do the code side on this, but I know I've talked to enough people who are like, it's, and it's something that fits and I've talked about on different projects in the past.

1:09:51SPEAKERIt's nice when people are like, Oh, Hey, a new contributor. Thanks for doing this. That's awesome. And being nice to them instead of being like, you didn't follow the formatting guidelines for the pull request.

1:10:01SPEAKERWhat's the point of this?

1:10:02SPEAKERYeah, exactly. That's really cool. That's awesome.

1:10:05SPEAKERYeah. Good times.

1:10:06SPEAKERLittle, little bit, little bit lives in the Mr. Forever now.

1:10:09SPEAKERYes.

1:10:10SPEAKERUm, so yeah, that'll do it for us this week. We will be back next week with another episode of the tech pod. Uh, we need like an outro. We need like a tagline. I was watching my daughter play Splatoon the other day and the girls say, what is it? They say, stay frosty, stay spicy.

1:10:25SPEAKERWhat's your farewell catch phrase?

1:10:26SPEAKERI don't know. We need one.

1:10:27SPEAKERUh, man, this is a lot to come up with on the spot.

1:10:30SPEAKERWell, I, I was saying this so that the audience would suggest things and we don't have to think about it anymore.

1:10:34SPEAKERYes. Yes. Please do all of our thinking for us.

1:10:36SPEAKERYeah. If we're going to be like the person, you know, wrenching the bolt down on the space station with 3000 brains behind us.

1:10:42SPEAKEROh yeah.

1:10:43SPEAKERThere you go. Bye everybody.

1:11:06SPEAKER(upbeat music)