00:00SPEAKERWill, do you have good RAM or do you have a bad RAM?
00:03SPEAKERMan, all I know is that RAM drama seems to be the most dramatic drama of any scene drama I've ever seen.
00:11SPEAKERDo you know how hard I try to combine RAM and drama into some kind of pithy, I don't know.
00:19SPEAKERIt's not even drama-rama.
00:20SPEAKERI guess it's not it's not really a portmanteau when when drama literally contains RAM, right?
00:25SPEAKERLike that doesn't you can't combine two things when one of them already exists inside the other.
00:29SPEAKERBut you know what I mean, like drama-rama, S.D. drama, nothing works.
00:36SPEAKERYou've got a Ramadama, Ramalama ding dong in there, I think.
00:40SPEAKERWhat's going on with Mr. Ram, Brad?
00:41SPEAKERI'm really confused.
00:42SPEAKERIt's more like what went on with Mr. Ram and it's over already.
00:47SPEAKERI missed it?
00:48SPEAKERYou missed it.
00:48SPEAKERYou missed the scene drama.
00:50SPEAKERThat's the scene drama comes and scene drama goes.
00:53SPEAKERSo fast.
00:54SPEAKERIt's so fleeting.
00:55SPEAKERIt is often fleeting.
00:56SPEAKERYeah, you got to be there at the right time.
00:58SPEAKERIf you want front row seat, if you want to watch the sparks fly, it's I don't know.
01:02SPEAKERIt's not really super worth getting into.
01:04SPEAKERThere was some controversy in the Mr.
01:05SPEAKERScene about the quality of the RAM modules that are being built by hand and sold by a number of resellers.
01:12SPEAKEROK, one of the popular one of the popular Mr.
01:15SPEAKERDevelopers was like, this RAM sucks, make a better RAM.
01:19SPEAKERThat's why my cores are crashing on it.
01:21SPEAKERAnd then some other of the other developers behind the project were like, no, you're just not using the RAM, right?
01:27SPEAKERAnd it turned into a big controversy where, like for a hot weekend or something, maybe maybe a week or so, everybody was freaking out, going like, did I get bad RAM?
01:38SPEAKERLike, is my RAM shitty?
01:40SPEAKERBut it seems like through software, they have pretty much addressed the problems and everything is fine now.
01:45SPEAKERBut oh, well, there is a new RAM tester app out there.
01:50SPEAKERSo even though it seems like they have gotten it stable on basically everybody's RAM, as far as I can tell, you can still go get that RAM tester and technically find out if you have the bad RAM or not.
02:01SPEAKERHuh. So so I actually have two sticks of RAM because shipping from Portugal was incredibly slow at the start of the pandemic.
02:10SPEAKERYeah, it was.
02:11SPEAKERAnd I bought I needed to buy something else.
02:13SPEAKERI just was like, you know what, I'll check an extra 50 bucks in at Mr.
02:17SPEAKERAdd-ons. And then that package came like two days later.
02:20SPEAKERAnd then when did the Portuguese RAM come three days after the Mr.
02:23SPEAKERAdd-ons package arrived?
02:25SPEAKERIt wasn't worse.
02:26SPEAKERIt wasn't my best moment, perhaps a bit foolhardy.
02:29SPEAKERBut now you've got double the RAM just in case.
02:32SPEAKERYeah, just like maybe the yeah, there have I'm talking way out of my depth here.
02:37SPEAKERThere have been suggestions that certain situations may end up requiring two different RAM kits installed at the same time, which I'm ready to go.
02:44SPEAKERThat's the end coach.
02:45SPEAKERThat's months old information that may not actually come to pass, but that was about PlayStation Core or something.
02:49SPEAKERThat was the talk, which I think is I think is progressing, by the way.
02:53SPEAKERYeah, they can post it in the whole thing now, right?
02:55SPEAKERYeah. The developer of the PlayStation Core posted footage over the holidays of, I believe, booting the BIOS and like booting an application, basically software.
03:03SPEAKERLike they took the BIOS and booted it and then ran an application on it.
03:08SPEAKERI'm pretty stoked about that.
03:10SPEAKERI never had a PlayStation.
03:12SPEAKERWhat?
03:12SPEAKERYeah, no, I that was right around the time that I was in college and was flat ass broke.
03:18SPEAKERYeah, that'll happen.
03:19SPEAKERLike by the time by the time I had money to spend on a PlayStation, it would have been a foolish purchase in terms of like the PlayStation 2 being on the cusp of coming out.
03:29SPEAKERAnd yeah, so I never had a PlayStation.
03:31SPEAKERWell, especially in that case, the PS2 just ran the PS1 games anyway.
03:35SPEAKERYeah, exactly.
03:36SPEAKERYeah, that makes sense.
03:37SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. The stuff's exciting.
03:39SPEAKERBut, you know, maybe go get the RAM tester and run it for 30 minutes and see if it turns red or not.
03:46SPEAKEROr if it stays green, there is no drama in your... drama.
04:17SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made of TechPod, I'm Will.
04:20SPEAKERHi, Brad. What's up?
04:22SPEAKERHey, man, it's been four weeks since I looked at emails, something, something, something, the emails.
04:30SPEAKERIt's been four weeks and 16 days.
04:33SPEAKERSo, oh, wow, we were going to very different, very different pop music representations of the phrase.
04:41SPEAKERIt's been X amount of time.
04:44SPEAKERLook, the other option for me was this is the summer of our discontent.
04:47SPEAKERSo I was I was going to Prince and you were going to something unmentionable.
04:52SPEAKERLook, we don't need to talk about my brief and deep love of the Bare Naked Ladies in the early 2000s.
04:58SPEAKERI am teetering on the brink of that song getting stuck in my head for the rest of this episode.
05:02SPEAKERSo we have to move on.
05:03SPEAKERI'm sorry. OK, just think about Train instead.
05:05SPEAKERThat'll fix it for you.
05:08SPEAKERHow about we think about emails?
05:09SPEAKEREmails are great. I love emails.
05:12SPEAKERIf you have a question for us, Brad and Will who make a tech pod, you can send it to techpod@content.town and we will answer them.
05:24SPEAKERLike, well, the question we have is, is it should it be every four weeks or should it be at the end of the month?
05:30SPEAKERYeah, we have really gotten off of our schedule here.
05:32SPEAKERThis was supposed to be in every kind of last week of the month type show.
05:37SPEAKERThat was the initial plan.
05:38SPEAKERAnd we figured, like, hey, if we just do it every four weeks, that'll line up with the end of the month every time.
05:42SPEAKERRight. No, no, no, it did not.
05:45SPEAKERStupid calendar doesn't work that way.
05:47SPEAKERIt turns out. But anyway, we are.
05:50SPEAKERYeah. Send your emails to techpod@content.town.
05:53SPEAKERIt's the number one address on the Internet for technology emails.
05:57SPEAKERIt's the number one email address for getting your email read on this podcast.
06:00SPEAKERIt is the exclusive way.
06:03SPEAKERYou can send them to Patreon comments and they might get noticed and remembered.
06:07SPEAKERWe look at all of those.
06:09SPEAKERBut you could ask a question on the Discord.
06:11SPEAKERI might make it on here.
06:13SPEAKERBut there's no chance I'm going to remember where how to find a question from the Discord.
06:17SPEAKERBut anyway, what's our first email, Brad?
06:18SPEAKERI mean, we've got we've got this Gmail tasks workflow figured out now.
06:22SPEAKERSo it's a good workflow.
06:23SPEAKEREmails are now the most efficient possible way to do this.
06:26SPEAKERYeah. All right.
06:27SPEAKERFirst email in the Jan 21 emails task that I created.
06:33SPEAKERI like that you put the apostrophe before 21, too, in the appropriate place.
06:37SPEAKERThat's right. I like to keep it professional.
06:40SPEAKERAP style.
06:42SPEAKERThis email is from Harith, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, from Toronto.
06:48SPEAKERThis this has to be a follow up on the last email episode we did, which feels like it
06:51SPEAKERmight have been six months ago at this point.
06:55SPEAKERAt least one failed insurrection ago.
06:57SPEAKERSo I don't remember what this is in reference to because he doesn't specify.
07:02SPEAKERBut he does say just following up on some things for Brad killed by Google dot com.
07:08SPEAKERI think, oh, that was probably when we were talking about tasks last time.
07:10SPEAKERRight. We talked about using Google products in important workflows because they have a
07:17SPEAKERtendency to kill low, low, you know, from reader on.
07:21SPEAKERI think we talked about stadia, maybe.
07:22SPEAKERI don't know. Maybe. Yes.
07:24SPEAKERBut I mean, yes, obviously, Google has a probably well earned reputation for killing
07:28SPEAKERoff various products of theirs.
07:30SPEAKERRight. But I knew the site existed and I guess I couldn't remember the address.
07:33SPEAKERAnd that's probably why he sent this in.
07:35SPEAKERBut it is killed by Google dot com.
07:37SPEAKERAnd a holy crap, there are a lot of these be really love that some of these have a grave
07:44SPEAKERstone next to a headstone next to them and some of them have a guillotine next.
07:48SPEAKERWow. I'm really not sure what the distinction is there.
07:51SPEAKERBrad, there are two hundred and twenty three things.
07:54SPEAKERI mean, some of these are like app frameworks and stuff like that.
07:56SPEAKERI'm hovering over the guillotine and there is no alt text popping up.
08:00SPEAKERSo I'm not quite sure what they're trying to apply with that.
08:02SPEAKERWhat do you think? Versus the headstone.
08:05SPEAKERGot any ideas? Yeah.
08:06SPEAKERI'm curious, like what what died of natural causes and what was executed by Google app
08:12SPEAKERmaker was a tool that use allowed its users to build and deploy custom businesses easily
08:17SPEAKERand securely on the web without writing much cold.
08:19SPEAKERIt will be about four years old.
08:21SPEAKERIt was killed in two days.
08:23SPEAKERI don't know how Stan.
08:25SPEAKERThat's impressive. Oh, it's going away.
08:28SPEAKERSo here it is. The guillotine are ones that are on the chopping block.
08:32SPEAKERYes. OK. And the the the yes, you're right.
08:35SPEAKERThose are ones that are already dead, already in the ground.
08:38SPEAKERYeah. Already in the Google graveyard.
08:41SPEAKERYeah. What do we got here?
08:43SPEAKERAndroid things, I have heard people complaining that that's going away.
08:46SPEAKERScience Journal, Hire by Google, Focals by North.
08:51SPEAKERWhat? Pigeon Transit.
08:54SPEAKERThat is less OK. Pigeon Transit is less interesting than it sounds.
08:58SPEAKERI mean, I thought they were sending data on like a little tiny flash drive strapped to
09:02SPEAKERpigeons. That was my hope.
09:04SPEAKERBut remember, there's you know, there's an RFC for that.
09:06SPEAKERActually, apparently Pigeon Transit was a transit app that tracked, among other things,
09:10SPEAKERescalator outages. Have you ever been on an escalator when it broke?
09:15SPEAKERNo, I was on one at CES one year and like CES escalators.
09:20SPEAKERThere are people on every step and you just stand there and ride.
09:23SPEAKERYeah. And it's like juddered to a halt and everybody like slammed into each other.
09:28SPEAKERAnd I couldn't help myself because it was right for that Saturday Live Skip.
09:31SPEAKERBut I yelled, oh, my God, the humanity, really loud because I'm a dumb ass and
09:36SPEAKERand got a pretty good laugh from the CES crowd.
09:39SPEAKERI mean, I have heard some genuinely horrific things about escalator accidents.
09:42SPEAKERSo maybe we should move on from there.
09:45SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Anyway, touring bird, another avian Google product here.
09:52SPEAKERI'm an area 120 incubator project, which helps.
09:55SPEAKEROK, I don't need to read all these. Most of these are, oh, man, YouTube for Nintendo
09:59SPEAKER3DS rip. That's sad.
10:02SPEAKERI think that's probably OK.
10:04SPEAKERLike some of these are OK. What's at the very bottom of this list?
10:07SPEAKERLike rightly.
10:10SPEAKEROh, I remember rightly. Hello.
10:13SPEAKERRightly was a web based.
10:14SPEAKERRightly became Google Docs.
10:16SPEAKERIt became the word processor in Google Docs.
10:17SPEAKEROh, OK.
10:19SPEAKERGoogle Deskbar. Remember that you can put that on the toolbar
10:21SPEAKERand type shit into Google and it would just pop up a browser with the answer.
10:25SPEAKERGrand Central. That sounds familiar.
10:27SPEAKERGrand Central was there is what became Google Voice.
10:31SPEAKEROK. They bought it.
10:33SPEAKERGoogle Browser Sync was a Firefox plugin that let you sync your Firefox
10:38SPEAKERsettings across. I used that.
10:39SPEAKERTo be fair, some of these evolved into better products that still exist.
10:43SPEAKERThis was not. Yeah.
10:44SPEAKERDodgeball. Hmm.
10:46SPEAKEREverybody's favorite social network.
10:48SPEAKEROh, I remember Google Talk.
10:49SPEAKEROK. All right. Enough of this.
10:51SPEAKERYeah. Have you noticed that more people are using Stadia lately?
10:54SPEAKERNo, I'm I'm seeing friends like talk about using Stadia to play.
11:00SPEAKEROh, let's say large live service games that maybe you don't want to have
11:03SPEAKER180 gigs of worth installed on your computer necessarily.
11:07SPEAKERThey removed like a third of the content in that game.
11:09SPEAKERIt's much smaller.
11:11SPEAKEROh, OK. Perfect.
11:12SPEAKERIn case you haven't heard.
11:14SPEAKERThat was like kind of a big story out of CES is that LG is adding Stadia
11:18SPEAKERto all of their TVs this year.
11:20SPEAKERYeah, well, all of this year's TVs, I should say, not all their TVs.
11:24SPEAKERI believe it's the 2020 models will get Stadia in the software update.
11:28SPEAKERAnd then the 2021 models may ship with it or also get an update.
11:31SPEAKERBut the older TVs will not get it, is what I'm saying.
11:34SPEAKERI so they've been paying streamers to play games on Stadia lately.
11:39SPEAKERI've noticed. Oh, like there's there's something like
11:43SPEAKERI think they might be trying to make it happen. I don't know.
11:45SPEAKERHang on. Are those streamers capturing the Stadia feed locally
11:49SPEAKERand streaming it back out?
11:50SPEAKEROr is there some provision where they can just stream it straight out
11:53SPEAKERof the data center because it's locally because there's like a heads
11:58SPEAKERpop up on top of it and stuff?
11:59SPEAKERWell, yeah, but I would think you could still
12:02SPEAKERthey could figure they could figure that out, right?
12:04SPEAKERYou can get your overlays, dog, send your send your webcam feed
12:07SPEAKERand to the data center and they could sync it up somehow.
12:10SPEAKERI don't hate shout out to X, X, 69, big dog, 420, X, X for the follow.
12:16SPEAKERYou're new here, Matt.
12:17SPEAKERSlam that follow button.
12:18SPEAKEROh, Harith again, I hope I'm getting your name right.
12:22SPEAKERAlso, boy, did I take some shit
12:25SPEAKERover this on the discord and elsewhere over my pronunciation of toque
12:31SPEAKERas someone which apparently is, in fact, took
12:35SPEAKERas someone who has never pronounced anything incorrectly in his life.
12:38SPEAKERI'm going to say, yes, the authority.
12:41SPEAKERThere's there's nothing wrong with mispronouncing words
12:44SPEAKERthat you've learned from reading.
12:46SPEAKERYeah, but haven't heard, especially when they're French.
12:49SPEAKERYeah. Get people's names right, though.
12:51SPEAKERTook, like the hobbit, he says, is how you say that.
12:55SPEAKERIs that took or took to in the movie?
12:58SPEAKERThey pronounce it to get a lot of.
13:01SPEAKEROh, how well I don't know, I don't know,
13:04SPEAKERI don't know how the good professor would have would have actually pronounced it,
13:07SPEAKERbut I'm just going to keep calling it a beanie or toboggan.
13:10SPEAKERDid you know that none of the names in the Lord of Rings
13:12SPEAKERare actually the names of those characters?
13:14SPEAKERWait, why are you familiar with the whole conceit behind Lord of the Rings?
13:18SPEAKERIt's a metaphor for for the rise of fascism in Europe and World War Two.
13:22SPEAKEROh, to talking hated allegory.
13:24SPEAKERLike he fucking despised it.
13:26SPEAKERHe very strongly came out and said, no.
13:30SPEAKEROK, that's a metaphor for racism.
13:34SPEAKERTalking about the the meta narrative conceit, which is that
13:37SPEAKERGod, I, I can't even keep this straight myself.
13:41SPEAKERI'm just going to get the correction ready for next week.
13:43SPEAKERI've read about this more times than I would like to admit.
13:46SPEAKERSo the Lord of the Rings is in the meta narrative
13:49SPEAKERis a translation of a book called The Red Book of Westmarch.
13:55SPEAKEROh, it was translated by Tolkien from the original Western,
13:59SPEAKERI believe is the language that is supposedly actually written in.
14:03SPEAKERSo the book you are reading is like an Englishman
14:06SPEAKERtranslating this long lost home in this mythical language.
14:10SPEAKERAnd all the names such as Frodo Baggins are actually like sort of
14:15SPEAKERanglicizations of the original Western names.
14:19SPEAKERSo like I'm just going to what is this podcast even about?
14:24SPEAKERI'm going to go to Google and type Frodo Baggins real name
14:30SPEAKERand see.
14:32SPEAKERI don't even know how to pronounce this exactly.
14:35SPEAKERI don't know what the pronunciation is in Western.
14:37SPEAKERWe don't have the right phonemes, it turns out.
14:39SPEAKERMalra Labingy is my stab.
14:42SPEAKERThat's a pretty good hobbit name.
14:43SPEAKERI got to say that's better than Frodo Baggins.
14:45SPEAKERThat's that's my stab at how to pronounce Frodo's actual real name
14:48SPEAKERas it would have been pronounced in the era appropriate Middle Earth.
14:53SPEAKERThere's a there's a Brad.
14:55SPEAKERThere's my contribution to this real name.
14:59SPEAKERWhen I play PUBG, there's a squad of people
15:02SPEAKERthat we run into occasionally in games whose names are all variants on Baggins.
15:07SPEAKERBut they're like they're obscene, obscene rifts on Frodo and Bilbo Baggins.
15:14SPEAKERLet's let's maybe pretty good.
15:15SPEAKERI'm not going to I'm not going to say what the names are, but they're pretty funny.
15:18SPEAKERLet's stay. They're not like offensive.
15:19SPEAKERThey're just rude anyway.
15:21SPEAKERShit. We've got to close the loop on this now that we've come this far.
15:24SPEAKERWhat is Pippin's actual name in Western?
15:27SPEAKERI've got to figure this out.
15:29SPEAKERI don't know what Tom Bombadil's name is.
15:31SPEAKERAh, Bombadil, Bombadil.
15:36SPEAKERRosinartook. Wow.
15:38SPEAKERApparently, is his real name is the same, though.
15:40SPEAKERThat's the Western name of OK. We have to move on.
15:43SPEAKERThis is this is a death spiral.
15:45SPEAKERWe could do this for hours. I'm sorry.
15:47SPEAKEROK, well, you know that Gandalf the Brown's name isn't really
15:50SPEAKERor Gandalf the Grey's name isn't really Gandalf the Grey.
15:53SPEAKERYeah, it's Oleran.
15:55SPEAKERWell, and Mithrandr, he has a bunch of different names.
15:57SPEAKERYes. Excuse me, Mithrandr is, I believe, the Sindarin
16:01SPEAKERor is it the Quenya name for the physical manifestation of Gandalf in Middle Earth?
16:09SPEAKEROleran is or however you say it is his like actual angelic name.
16:13SPEAKERLike our next question comes from Brian.
16:16SPEAKERWhen he was actually born in heaven, when he was created
16:20SPEAKERby Iluvatar in the in the magical song, The Einolendle.
16:27SPEAKERHaving never engaged with anything beyond the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books,
16:31SPEAKERI'm very happy about my choices right now.
16:33SPEAKERLike it's actually really interesting.
16:35SPEAKERLike I totally get that, like a lot of video game lore is incredibly tedious.
16:39SPEAKERBut like if you if you walk all the way back to the era that Tolkien was writing in,
16:43SPEAKERlike a lot of it is so derived from his like really devout Catholicism and stuff
16:47SPEAKERthat there's actually like a real world theological element to a lot of it.
16:51SPEAKERSo you're saying there are reasons for lore?
16:55SPEAKERYes, religious, religious lore.
16:58SPEAKERWe should do a podcast.
16:59SPEAKERYeah, I'm just well, whatever.
17:00SPEAKERI mean, there is like some like some legit scholarship.
17:03SPEAKERThere is all I'm trying to say.
17:04SPEAKERYeah, I don't doubt that.
17:06SPEAKERBut, you know, it's not it's not a bunch of dime store
17:09SPEAKERfantasy pulp garbage is what I'm trying to say.
17:11SPEAKERBut, you know, that all came that all derived from that.
17:15SPEAKERIt's a third third tier derivation of a second tier.
17:18SPEAKERI was so busy rambling about this stuff that I accidentally close the Gmail window.
17:24SPEAKEROK, I've got it. OK, thank God we are.
17:28SPEAKEROff the rails. Nineteen minutes in and we have only answered one email.
17:31SPEAKERI'm going to click the check mark next to that email.
17:35SPEAKERRead the next one from Brian.
17:36SPEAKERIt's a pretty good animation when you click the checkmark, just for the record.
17:39SPEAKERWait, can you see that in real time?
17:40SPEAKERYeah, it was cool. That's cool.
17:43SPEAKEROK. Brian asks.
17:48SPEAKERRecently, I've had an issue with my ISP and streaming to Twitch.
17:51SPEAKERI typically get speeds of about 900 megabit per second down and 35 up.
17:56SPEAKERAnd I have a fairly high end DOCSIS 3.1 modem
17:59SPEAKERand a newish ASUS router, a SUSE router, excuse me.
18:03SPEAKERI've had zero issues for months and randomly last week
18:05SPEAKERI am unable to keep a stable bit rate from OBS to Twitch.
18:10SPEAKERAfter tinkering, I'm led to believe that my ISP
18:12SPEAKERhas somehow flagged Twitch on my connection and throttled it.
18:16SPEAKERMy ISP says they don't throttle speeds, but I'm beginning to suspect
18:20SPEAKERI am beginning to suspect that they do at a certain point for certain services.
18:25SPEAKERI am also not exceeding my data cap with them.
18:28SPEAKERMy question is, since both of you are very active on Twitch
18:31SPEAKERand likely burn through a ton of data each month, what do you guys do, if anything,
18:34SPEAKERwith your ISP or network to ensure that you are able to reliably stream
18:38SPEAKERseveral times a week without your ISP giving you the middle finger?
18:43SPEAKERSo there's a bunch of things happening here.
18:46SPEAKEROne is that streaming to Twitch,
18:50SPEAKERthe max you can stream to Twitch is like six megabits per second.
18:54SPEAKERIf you're partnered, it's eight. But yes, if you're not, it's six.
18:57SPEAKEROh, I can't. It complains to me if I do more than six.
19:00SPEAKERAnd I'm a partner. Really?
19:02SPEAKERLike it actually complains?
19:04SPEAKERYeah. In the control panel, it pops up a red flag that says, hey,
19:07SPEAKERyou're exceeding the maximum bitrate. That's weird.
19:09SPEAKERSo I haven't tried it in a few months,
19:10SPEAKERbut like the giant bomb channel on Twitch is partnered
19:12SPEAKERand I've tried pushing the bitrate past eight to see what it would do.
19:16SPEAKEROh, you can. And it took it.
19:18SPEAKERBut the weird thing is it dropped the resolution.
19:21SPEAKERLike I was I was like I was like I was like, oh, let's try like 1080 at twelve.
19:26SPEAKERI think I tried and it did take it and rebroadcast it.
19:29SPEAKERBut 720 was the max resolution it was outputting.
19:33SPEAKERWhich is weird. Anyway.
19:37SPEAKERSo. Yeah, like if you're
19:41SPEAKERif you're running six megabits per second, you're generating what?
19:45SPEAKERIt's like six times 60 times 60 divided by eight is like.
19:52SPEAKERTwo gigs. That's not right.
19:54SPEAKERYeah, it's like two gigs an hour, 2.5 gigs an hour or something like that
19:58SPEAKERor 2.7 gigs an hour.
20:00SPEAKERThe the you're you're going to have a hard time
20:03SPEAKERhitting your caps with that unless you're doing a lot of streaming.
20:06SPEAKERWell, so hang on, I have a somewhat ignorant question and forgive me.
20:10SPEAKERYes, I know I sound like an asshole by saying this,
20:13SPEAKERbut I don't have any data caps to deal with.
20:15SPEAKERSo I genuinely don't know how this works.
20:17SPEAKERBut does upstream
20:19SPEAKERunder most ISP policies actually contribute to your cap?
20:23SPEAKERSo I always assumed it was just download.
20:25SPEAKERSo one of the problems with data caps in general
20:28SPEAKERis that they're policed poorly and they're measured inconsistently.
20:32SPEAKERSo like your router, if it tracks data caps, will sometimes report
20:36SPEAKERdifferent things than your ISP's control panel and stuff like that,
20:40SPEAKERbecause they're measuring on their router
20:41SPEAKERand you're measuring on your router and probably there might be like some services
20:44SPEAKERthat are exempt under different policies and stuff, right? Yeah, exactly.
20:48SPEAKERSo, for example, like with Comcast, if you're using Comcast IPTV stuff,
20:52SPEAKERall of that data is supposed to be exempt.
20:54SPEAKERAll of the streaming data from like here's here's a here's a wonderful thing.
20:58SPEAKERIf you watch HBO from your Comcast app on HBO,
21:01SPEAKERon on a Comcast connection, that data doesn't count.
21:05SPEAKERIf you watch HBO now from the HBO now app, that data does count.
21:10SPEAKERSo it puts you in like the TLD are here is the data caps are jacked.
21:15SPEAKERIt's a stupid it's a stupid way to measure.
21:17SPEAKERIt's not like you're buying a finite resource.
21:19SPEAKERThey should they should not exist. Should not exist.
21:23SPEAKERMost ISPs have a clause, including our good ISPs.
21:27SPEAKERLike your ISP probably has a clause that says
21:29SPEAKERyou can't run a server on your gigabit fiber at home.
21:33SPEAKERGenerally, they don't care if it's small and low traffic.
21:36SPEAKERLike my AT&T fiber explicitly says don't run servers.
21:38SPEAKERThey say that, OK? Yes.
21:39SPEAKERMy ISP is pretty laid back.
21:41SPEAKERYour ISP rocks. I love your ISP.
21:43SPEAKERI wish I could get your ISP here now.
21:45SPEAKERThey're pretty good, but but
21:49SPEAKERrunning Twitch streams is not running a server.
21:51SPEAKERYou're not you're not delivering bits from your machine
21:54SPEAKERto all the other people watching your Twitch stream.
21:57SPEAKERYou're sending bits to a Twitch server that then repeats those bits out
22:00SPEAKERand transcodes them on the fly to build zillions of other people around the world.
22:06SPEAKERSo that shouldn't get judging looking at the date.
22:09SPEAKERThis email is sent at the end of December.
22:10SPEAKERTwitch had some problems toward the middle middle to end of December last year.
22:15SPEAKERSo my guess is probably that that's what you had often.
22:18SPEAKERYou'll if they have transcoding problems,
22:20SPEAKERif they're getting DDoS or something like that, they keep partner.
22:25SPEAKERThey sacrifice everything to keep the partners
22:27SPEAKERand then the affiliate streams running, which is shitty.
22:31SPEAKERAnd when they are under heavy load, then you get less transcodes.
22:38SPEAKERYou get fewer transcodes resources put on free and even affiliate accounts.
22:44SPEAKERAnd that causes what seems seems like frame drops and stuff like that.
22:48SPEAKERNow, the other thing that can cause frame drops
22:51SPEAKERis if your CPU or GPU are spiked on whatever you're whatever you're streaming.
22:57SPEAKERSo if you're playing a game that's really, really CPU bound,
22:59SPEAKERlike like a good example is cyberpunk.
23:03SPEAKERIt can cause drop frames on your OBS and OBS will tell you OBS
23:07SPEAKERtells you whether you're getting network lag or CPU or GPU latency.
23:12SPEAKERYeah, let me fire up OBS real quick here.
23:14SPEAKERIt's been so long since I set this up.
23:15SPEAKERI can't remember if this is on by default.
23:17SPEAKERI don't think it is.
23:18SPEAKERBut the stats panel in OBS is very useful.
23:21SPEAKERDo you use that thing?
23:22SPEAKERYeah. When I so I have it set up.
23:26SPEAKERSo it gives me like a pops an error and when it does, I can click a button.
23:29SPEAKERIt shows me the stats panel.
23:30SPEAKERI usually don't leave it up on the day to day streams because I do do busy streams.
23:34SPEAKERSo it's right.
23:35SPEAKERLike I'm not doing the heavy math on the gaming computer.
23:37SPEAKERYeah, I'm all in one machine.
23:38SPEAKERSo I really have to eyeball that stuff to make sure it's OK.
23:41SPEAKERBut you can dock it permanently in the OBS window if you want or just pop it up.
23:45SPEAKERBut yeah, that thing that thing will tell you I'm sitting here, look at it like CPU
23:48SPEAKERusage, how much time left until your disk is full from archiving the stream.
23:54SPEAKERAverage time to render frame frames missed due to rendering lag.
23:58SPEAKERSkip frames due to encoding lag.
23:59SPEAKERLike, you know, you can tell in a pretty granular way how your stream is performing.
24:04SPEAKERThe other one that's really useful is on the Twitch, the Twitch creator dashboard,
24:08SPEAKERwhich is at dashboard.twitch.tv.
24:10SPEAKERYou can now add a stream health panel that shows you a graphical representation of the
24:15SPEAKERbit rate that Twitch is getting, your frame rate.
24:17SPEAKERAnd you can you can click into the inspector link and get like frame by frame analysis
24:24SPEAKERbasically of what's going on.
24:25SPEAKERI love analytics.
24:26SPEAKERIt's really fun. I love it's useful and good.
24:29SPEAKERI love the like YouTube and I want to say maybe some others like even in even the
24:33SPEAKERembedded apps on a lot of devices will have the like this is a shitty way to phrase it.
24:37SPEAKERBut YouTube, I think, calls it like stats for nerds or something like that.
24:40SPEAKERBut like, I'm amazed that they expose that information on like a Roku, for example, or
24:45SPEAKERwell, it turns out it's really impossible for troubleshooting.
24:48SPEAKERHaving that stuff, that makes it much easier.
24:50SPEAKERLike the hard part of a lot of this stuff and I don't have a good solution for this.
24:53SPEAKERI'd be curious if anybody in the audience does.
24:55SPEAKERBut when you're streaming to Twitch, it's really hard to tell sometimes when stuff is
24:59SPEAKERon your end and when stuff is on their end.
25:01SPEAKERYeah. Also, the other thing I was going to mention is he's talking in DOCSIS terms.
25:05SPEAKERSo that means he's on cable.
25:07SPEAKERYeah. Which is subject to its own kind of weird variables, right?
25:11SPEAKERLike, yeah, like kind of neighborhood load, I think, will affect that and stuff like that.
25:15SPEAKERRight. Well, so upstream you should be there should be plenty of bandwidth upstream.
25:19SPEAKERThe thing that I will say is that if you have somebody in the house that's doing something
25:22SPEAKERelse that is upstream heavy and like a zoom doesn't necessarily count.
25:27SPEAKERBut but there are I'm trying to remember Gina used to do something.
25:30SPEAKEROh, Gina used to do something that would that would cause frame drops on my Twitch stream
25:38SPEAKERwhen she was doing it on her computer.
25:39SPEAKERIt might have been like Google Photos sync, because that was pretty much all the upstream
25:44SPEAKERthat you have if you have 4K videos and stuff in your camera roll.
25:47SPEAKERYeah. And and thirty five megabits per second is a lot for like normal web browsing.
25:53SPEAKERIt is not a ton for blasting video to the Internet, especially at 1080p 60.
25:58SPEAKERYeah. Short answer, there's a lot of things that could be going wrong.
26:03SPEAKERYeah, my guess is usually in my experience, when Twitch is being janky, it's on Twitch's end.
26:09SPEAKERYeah. All right, next email here, Stuart from British Columbia.
26:18SPEAKERWhy is Toslink keyed? It only plugs in one way and there doesn't appear to be any reason for that to be the case.
26:24SPEAKERThere is absolutely no reason for that to be the case because it's just a fiber that has light coming through it.
26:30SPEAKERThere's no. So I did some research on this.
26:35SPEAKERI feel like before we get into that, I feel like we should say what Toslink is because it's so old at this point.
26:39SPEAKERI feel like a lot of people might not know. It's all it's optical audio.
26:42SPEAKERIt's like, yeah, it's the thing from before HDMI that people used to transmit digital audio in home theaters.
26:50SPEAKERAnd specifically, Toslink is the physical form factor for an optical audio cable that transmits SPDIF data.
26:57SPEAKERI was about to ask, I would literally have got a page that I just pulled up in front of me called SPDIF versus Toslink because I was curious.
27:03SPEAKERSo SPDIF is a standard and Toslink is the physical connection. Is that right?
27:07SPEAKERYeah. And you can get so Toslink was, I think, owned by Philips and Sony.
27:12SPEAKERSo, yeah, I was I was going to say I just looked that up like a month ago for some weird reason.
27:16SPEAKERIsn't that what SPDIF actually means? Yes, Sony Philips digital interface.
27:21SPEAKERYeah. And it was a way to get the actual digital bits off of high end CD players.
27:25SPEAKERThe weird thing is Toshiba, I think, owns Toslink because the T in TOS is for Toshiba.
27:32SPEAKERAnd so they had to license that as a result.
27:36SPEAKERYou can also do SPDIF over RCA analog copper wires as well.
27:44SPEAKERWondered about that because a lot of subwoofers will do 5.1 that way over what looks like just an RCA cable.
27:51SPEAKERYes, just a normal SRCA cable. It's a fairly low bit rate.
27:55SPEAKERIt's probably my guess is it's probably Redbook bit rate.
27:57SPEAKERYeah, but I could be wrong. So it's like a few hundred kilobits per second, probably.
28:02SPEAKERI don't know what the numbers are, but I just became of this became aware of this recently that.
28:06SPEAKEROh, per channel. Sorry. Per channel.
28:08SPEAKERThat optical is like actually obsolete as a standard.
28:11SPEAKERIt's not like you can't you can't use optical and get the same quality you can with HDMI.
28:14SPEAKERLike it actually is pretty limited in bandwidth.
28:17SPEAKERYeah, like it can't carry uncompressed 5.1, for example.
28:21SPEAKERYeah. And you can't do you can't do seven more than 5.1 channels.
28:26SPEAKERLike you're basically you're limited to Dolby Digital or DTS.
28:29SPEAKERLike the old the old compressed Dolby Digital, like the kind of inferior.
28:33SPEAKERThe true HD stuff, the 24 bit stuff doesn't work.
28:35SPEAKERYeah. Well, I'm sorry.
28:38SPEAKEROh, no. I was just going to say. So the thing is, you can get unkeyed round TOSLINK cables that lock into place.
28:45SPEAKERHmm. They're they've they've been on the market for a few years and plug in anyway.
28:50SPEAKERWell, there's two there's many TOSLINK, which is a format that was on old.
28:55SPEAKERThe only place I've ever seen it was on old MP3 players and old Sound Blaster cards.
29:00SPEAKERIf you had a Sound Blaster that had an optical out or an optical in, it didn't use the TOSLINK plug.
29:06SPEAKERIt used a mini TOSLINK, which was basically just a round plug with a with a light duber on the end that you jammed into the into the three point five mil plug on the back of a sound card.
29:15SPEAKERThere's also full sized TOSLINK now that are round and still lock into place.
29:20SPEAKERThe true style. But the speculation I read is there was a duplex standard that uses the same connector as TOSLINK, but it's like double wide and has two prongs and is keyed so that the left channel always goes in the left side and the right channel always goes in the right side.
29:34SPEAKERAnd the assumption is that when the TOSLINK standard was made, they just said, oh, let's just use this thing that we can already get off the shelf and and get the single channel variant of it.
29:44SPEAKERThat is keyed, even though they didn't need a keyed plug for TOSLINK.
29:49SPEAKERBut there's no that speculation. I don't know that that's true.
29:52SPEAKERI was just looking up. I'm kind of surprised that this is still in use for how old it is, but like even like the current LG OLEDs, which is kind of like the top of the line TV you can get right now, like they still have optical out on them.
30:04SPEAKEROr like an audio return to a receiver or something?
30:07SPEAKERYeah, like if you instead of using the ARC HDMI port.
30:10SPEAKERDo modern, do new TVs still have component inputs?
30:13SPEAKERI assume they highly doubt it.
30:16SPEAKERI don't think I was looking at that rear panel on that 2020 OLED and I believe it did not.
30:22SPEAKERI think it just had HDMI.
30:23SPEAKERAnd that's a bummer for old consoles.
30:25SPEAKERYeah, kind of that's why I like the mystery not to harp on the mystery, but like the the lack of having to deal with old ass cables and analog signals that you need to convert and stuff like that is like that's that's one of the biggest draws to that project for me is just like it kind of solves the video problem.
30:43SPEAKERWell, so what what if if you don't have component inputs, does that mean it means you lose like game like original Xbox GameCube and PS2 era?
30:54SPEAKERI mean, you mean like what is the newest console that you can't use on a modern TV?
31:01SPEAKERLet's see, 360 and PS3 definitely had HDMI.
31:04SPEAKERThe Wii did not.
31:06SPEAKERNo, but you can play Wii games on a Wii U, which does.
31:09SPEAKERYes, that's true.
31:11SPEAKERI'm trying to think.
31:14SPEAKERSo an Xbox 360 launch didn't have HDMI, it was component only at launch, so it was like the Rev A or whatever.
31:20SPEAKERIt's like a big deal when they came out with the 360 that had HDMI on it, that feels like it was 100 years ago.
31:27SPEAKERThat was when we were in the in the Sausalito office.
31:30SPEAKERYes, I mean, I was literally at GameSpot in my first job at that point.
31:35SPEAKERAnyway, yeah, I'm glad that they still have the optical out on TVs because I might end up using it when I get a new TV.
31:45SPEAKERYeah, it's it feels weird to use an HDMI cable for an audio return.
31:49SPEAKERYeah, even though that's probably the right thing to do.
31:51SPEAKERSome some TVs also in soundbars also use USB is my understanding.
31:55SPEAKERInteresting.
31:56SPEAKERI mean, I don't I don't have much experience personally with ARK and ERK, which is the newer variant, but I feel like I see a whole lot of complaining about those standards not working very well.
32:05SPEAKERWell, so it's funny, I want to do an HDMI episode in the next month or so, but I don't have one of the new TVs.
32:13SPEAKERYeah, well, I mean, I think it's important, though, because people have questions and it's really confusing.
32:17SPEAKERYou're totally right. Maybe I'll see if Robert Heron or somebody who has expertise in that area will pop on the show with us and answer questions since we don't have a lot of firsthand experience.
32:26SPEAKERI mean, another reason to not use ARK if you don't have to is that that eats up one of your HDMI ports on your TV.
32:33SPEAKERYeah, that's exactly right. But anyway.
32:35SPEAKEROK, there we go. Question from Matthew.
32:40SPEAKERWhat do all the numbers mean? 50, 70? Is that the graphics card or the processor?
32:46SPEAKEROh, I thought this was an R numbers real question.
32:50SPEAKEROh, no. I missed a paradigm shift at some point after Intel switched from x86 to Pentium.
32:56SPEAKERHow do I tell how powerful the processor is? How fast? What about AMD? I'm lost. Can you guys help?
33:02SPEAKERI have always, always found the numbering, the naming schemes on processors and graphics cards to be like I started to use the word arbitrary,
33:12SPEAKERwhich I guess is maybe a little harsh because I'm sure somewhere in the marketing department they feel like they have like a good logical reason for the way they name things.
33:20SPEAKERBut it's pretty tough to keep up with.
33:21SPEAKERSo so when I was at Maximum PC, I asked the Intel people in the Nvidia people at different times about how they did there, because when Intel rolled out the after the Pentium 4, they rolled out the core name with Nehalem.
33:36SPEAKERI can't remember one of the early I believe that's right.
33:39SPEAKERNehalem was second gen core, I think they had something in before that was like a bad dual core with separate packages that they had to talk across PCI Express or what.
33:46SPEAKERAnyway, Larrabee? No, no. Larrabee is different. Larrabee is the the graphics card thing.
33:53SPEAKEROh, right. Right. Right. Well, so Nvidia straight up said we really like German cars.
34:00SPEAKERSo we wanted to have a naming scheme that was reminiscent of German cars where like the first number told you what series it was and the second number told you how fast it was.
34:09SPEAKERWithin that series. And the third numbers didn't mean anything.
34:12SPEAKERYou know what? I actually respect this answer way more than what I thought was the case, which is that it was just made up.
34:17SPEAKERYeah, because like like like they basically looked at how BMW and Mercedes and I think Audi named their cars and are like, OK, yeah, the six series.
34:27SPEAKERSo 3000 means it's this this year.
34:29SPEAKERYeah. Right. And 80 means it's the mid range.
34:33SPEAKER70 means it's the low mid range.
34:35SPEAKER60 means it's slower than that.
34:37SPEAKERAnd 90 means it's super duper fast.
34:39SPEAKERAnd if there's a five after, that means it's fast, a little bit faster or a little bit different than the next one.
34:43SPEAKEROK, Intel, I have to always look up CPUs because CPUs are crazy and batshit.
34:50SPEAKERAnd there's so many more skews in like where Nvidia has four or five consumer graphics cards at any point named, he has four or five consumer graphics cards.
34:59SPEAKERThere's usually like seventy five Intel CPUs at any moment available.
35:03SPEAKERYeah, I mean, they use a go ahead.
35:06SPEAKERWell, I was just say they do have an overarching scheme, though.
35:09SPEAKERYeah, it's kind of a four tiered system that they've been on for a while.
35:12SPEAKERYou know, they've got the three, five, seven and nine, which kind of roughly maps to the media stuff you just rattled off.
35:17SPEAKERIt's kind of entry level, like mid range.
35:19SPEAKERGood enough. Seven.
35:21SPEAKERThe I7 was kind of the top of the line for a while.
35:24SPEAKERI want to say the I9 came along later.
35:26SPEAKERWell, so for a long time, the three, the five, the seven, the nine is relatively recent and it replaces what was like consumer Zeons before.
35:35SPEAKERI think I'm sure. Yeah, the the it used to mean that like I think three and five didn't have hyper threading.
35:43SPEAKERThree would have really small caches compared to five.
35:47SPEAKERAnd and seven was kind of the enthusiast price place, place point.
35:51SPEAKERAnd then the numbers would mean increasing speeds within those ranges.
35:54SPEAKERBut sometimes you'd get like. Sometimes you would get a K or or an X, which meant that they were unlocked for overclocking or tested for overclocking.
36:08SPEAKERI don't know that any of that stuff is true anymore. It seems completely arbitrary now.
36:12SPEAKERYeah, I know that the three is definitely like like it also used to be that they had a different product line name for the low end product.
36:23SPEAKERSo like Celeron in the 90s was the low end product and it was limited cash and all sorts of other stuff.
36:28SPEAKERAnd then when you got into the Pentium, that was the premium line.
36:31SPEAKERAnd that all changed when they added when they launched the core products as well.
36:35SPEAKERFor a while, you could still buy Pentiums that were like these not really particularly multitasking friendly CPUs, but were real low power.
36:42SPEAKERDid they stop doing that? I thought you could still get modern Pentiums that were kind of still that.
36:47SPEAKERI don't believe that they still sell modern Pentiums, but I'm not like like I said, it's confusing and arbitrary.
36:53SPEAKERThey have a really good site is the good news.
36:55SPEAKERArc dot Intel dot com is with a K.
36:58SPEAKERYes, ARK dot Intel dot com is a very information rich database of basically every Intel chip ever made.
37:06SPEAKERAnd then the other the AMD has a similar site.
37:10SPEAKERIt's called the Product Resource Center, which is AMD dot com slash E.N. slash products slash specifications.
37:17SPEAKERA little bit less intuitive.
37:19SPEAKERIt's not as good a URL.
37:21SPEAKERSo their their their naming scheme is pretty similar, right?
37:23SPEAKERLike they've got the Ryzen five, the Ryzen seven, Ryzen nine.
37:27SPEAKERI think AMD, because they have a simpler product line, especially right now, is way more intelligible.
37:34SPEAKERYeah, sure.
37:36SPEAKERAnd they do I believe they do the Xs to indicate that they're like unlocked overclocking friendly processors as well.
37:41SPEAKERYeah, they just announced I mean, not to get off on a tangent, they just announced lower TDP versions of those new Ryzens.
37:48SPEAKERIs that the X ones?
37:49SPEAKERThere's a no.
37:50SPEAKERSo I want to say they are not X.
37:51SPEAKERI could be wrong.
37:53SPEAKERBut so there's like a sixty five watt version of the fifty nine hundred coming out.
37:57SPEAKERBut oh, apparently you can only get them in pre-built machines.
38:00SPEAKERThat makes sense.
38:01SPEAKERWhich is a real bummer because that sounds like an incredible chip to run a NAS or server with.
38:05SPEAKERI mean, that's also kind of the only place you can get the new AMD CPUs right now.
38:10SPEAKERDo you think those are clocked down?
38:11SPEAKERLike how would the how would the because the the original the fifty nine hundred X, the TDP is like one hundred and five, I think.
38:17SPEAKERThey could be re-spins.
38:18SPEAKERThey could be chips from the center of the core of the center of the dies that are more efficient.
38:23SPEAKERThere's also like if they're bidding the chips, like sometimes like toward the edges of the die, they they you have to put more power into them to get them to run, which means you generate more heat at the same clock speeds.
38:34SPEAKERSo it could just be like center of die versus edge of die.
38:37SPEAKERAnd they're differentiating those products more.
38:39SPEAKERI would I would think I would think those would be more valuable, though, not the ones that you would put into just kind of pre-built.
38:46SPEAKERWell, pre-built, wouldn't you say in this case, pre-built means like origin and Northwest and stuff like that.
38:52SPEAKERSure. Alienware, Dell, whatever.
38:54SPEAKERSo maybe maybe you are going to pay a premium for those.
38:57SPEAKERI would I don't know. I wouldn't I generally I don't for consumer, sorry, I'm making weird mouth noises for consumers at that price range.
39:09SPEAKERIt probably doesn't matter the difference between one and the other, unless you're planning to do some really crazy overclocking would be, I guess, I guess my uninformed read on that situation.
39:18SPEAKERWhat if you were going to run like a NAS that was going to stay on 24/7, that lower TDP would be pretty nice.
39:25SPEAKERThat's interesting. I think I just rearranged emails by accident, idly clicking.
39:30SPEAKERAll right. Well, whatever. I'm just going to read the next one.
39:32SPEAKERYeah, sounds fine.
39:33SPEAKERA question from Brian, a different Brian this time.
39:37SPEAKERBrian 2.
39:38SPEAKERRecently, my blue snowball broke.
39:41SPEAKERYou were talking about them last week and I thought I could ask you and you may know the answer.
39:46SPEAKERThe USB input on the back of the mic is what broke.
39:49SPEAKERThe small plastic square that keeps the four metal prongs apart seems to have fallen out.
39:54SPEAKERHave you ever fixed something like this and is it even possible?
39:57SPEAKERHave you ever replaced that type of port?
39:59SPEAKERIs it worth it to do?
40:01SPEAKERI can't really afford to buy a new one right now, so I thought you might have the answers.
40:05SPEAKERI think didn't you explicitly say that's what breaks on the snowball?
40:10SPEAKERThis is the number one thing.
40:11SPEAKEREvery I've had three blue snowballs and this is broken on two of them.
40:14SPEAKERAnd the third one I gave away before it broke.
40:16SPEAKERSo, ticking time bomb. Forgive me, is the snowball the little round kind of orb looking thing on a stand?
40:25SPEAKEROkay, the TLDR on the snowball is it is basically the best $50 microphone you can buy until it breaks.
40:34SPEAKERThere are a buttload of tutorials on YouTube about how to fix this.
40:38SPEAKERThe thing I will say is if you are good at soldering, it's probably pretty easy to fix.
40:45SPEAKERYou may be even able to put a rubber band around the cable and hold it in place so it's touching the contacts right.
40:52SPEAKERI am not... soldering this kind of connector is hard.
40:57SPEAKERYou can probably get a replacement connector for under five bucks.
41:02SPEAKERAnd if you're really bold, you might be able to solder the wires directly on.
41:06SPEAKERIt's only four points.
41:08SPEAKERI don't know that I would recommend doing that because if you mess it up, you'll torch the USB bus on your computer.
41:14SPEAKERBut yeah, I googled this and found four microphones repair videos, including one with a guy that is doing a pip, seemingly recording it from inside his car.
41:26SPEAKERI'm not going to endorse any of these.
41:32SPEAKERAbsolutely, if it doesn't work, try to fix it.
41:35SPEAKERMy feeling on fixing things that are fundamentally broken and don't work is go for it.
41:42SPEAKERWorst case, you'll learn something and it still won't work.
41:45SPEAKERYou're not going to make it worse.
41:48SPEAKERIf you're going to desolder it, and you don't have a decent soldering iron, maybe find a friend who you can borrow one from for a couple of days who has a temperature controlled soldering iron.
42:00SPEAKERBecause when you're desoldering stuff, it's much easier to do it if you can basically get the tip of your soldering iron right at the temperature.
42:09SPEAKERYou want the soldering iron exactly at the temperature that's going to melt the solder without going any hotter.
42:15SPEAKERThis sounds like kind of a lot for my first soldering project though.
42:19SPEAKERIf that's the boat you're in, I'd say it's maybe time for a new microphone.
42:23SPEAKERSo looking at how this thing comes apart, the good news is it's the big A female USB connector.
42:33SPEAKERSo it's not one of the micros or minis or Cs, which are almost impossible for somebody who isn't really good at soldering to fix.
42:41SPEAKERSo you might be okay.
42:44SPEAKERYeah, if you're down to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, this might be a good learning opportunity.
42:50SPEAKERYeah, and if you have one of these microphones and you're worried about breaking it, the problem is putting stress on that USB port where it goes in and out, it wiggles and it breaks it over time.
43:00SPEAKERSo if you put it on a shock mount or something like that and support that cable so the cable doesn't move when the microphone moves, you're totally fine.
43:07SPEAKERYou can get a $25 desk clamp shock mount for your microphone.
43:12SPEAKERIt'll make the microphone sound better because it means when you bang on your table, that sound isn't transmitted to the mic.
43:19SPEAKERAnd you can get the microphone at the right distance from your face no matter where you sit on your desk versus the little 20 cent stand that they ship with that thing.
43:27SPEAKERAnd the added benefit is it'll protect the USB cable connection so it doesn't break on the back of the mic.
43:32SPEAKERThat's right.
43:34SPEAKERAll right, let us know how it goes.
43:35SPEAKERYeah, Brian.
43:37SPEAKERI have not fixed it. He did ask if we have fixed similar things to that.
43:40SPEAKERI mean, the most complicated thing I've ever repaired via soldering was like some speaker wire.
43:46SPEAKERSo no, I've never tried something that difficult.
43:50SPEAKERYeah, I did. I mean, I've soldered switches onto keyboards before. I desoldered the switches on my Logitech mouse a few weeks ago, which was the hardest soldering job I've ever done.
44:01SPEAKERBut I think we talked about it.
44:03SPEAKERYeah, it was intense.
44:07SPEAKERYeah, it's a lot.
44:09SPEAKERYeah, a couple of people have said they've done the same thing, though.
44:12SPEAKERSo, yeah. Email from Steven. He's 21. He is a May graduate, he says, and he says he has a job lined up coming out of school.
44:23SPEAKERHowever, my wife and many of my friends in my graduating class have not been so lucky, as many firms in the state are in a hiring freeze or downsizing due to COVID, etc.
44:33SPEAKERMany of these new graduates are taking up side hustles, whether it be in YouTube, Twitch, game development or Etsy and Shopify, etc.
44:42SPEAKERMy question is this.
44:44SPEAKERAs two who have made careers doing precisely the cool crap I am into, where would you start if you were around this age with similar economic resources to a newly employed graduate?
44:55SPEAKERI think it would be cool to learn a little bit more about how you two got started and maybe where you think the opportunities are for hobbyists in 2021 to make something of their work.
45:03SPEAKERPersonally, I have been working on a low poly mobile game in Unity in my free time.
45:09SPEAKERThat is a cool thing to do.
45:10SPEAKERThat is cool. I wish I had a better answer for this, but I assume I can speak for both of us here when I say that we got started at a time when there were like 0.001% as many people trying to do stuff like this.
45:26SPEAKERBoth watching and doing, yeah. It is so crowded out there. I sympathize with anybody trying to get noticed in social media, especially at this time with the economy and COVID being what they are.
45:40SPEAKERPeople trying to promote side projects of theirs. Nothing comes to mind as advice right off the top of the head for how to get noticed.
45:50SPEAKERHere is the thing. If you want to do stuff like this, the number one thing is avoid debt as much as you can. Avoid credit card debt, school debt, whatever you can because having debt limits your ability to do work for practically nothing for the time it takes to get this stuff going.
46:12SPEAKEREven with established audiences, I have been streaming on Twitch for like five years. They sent the year in review thing the other day. They are like, "Hey, you stream for 1200 hours." I was like, "Wow, that is three quarters of a full time job."
46:24SPEAKERI was doing tech stuff at the exact same time. I was like, "Oh, wow. If I was doing this to make money, I would have been much better off driving an Uber or fucking delivering pizzas or literally anything else on like a dollars per hour basis."
46:43SPEAKERYou're not going to make money doing this stuff for a long time. That's starting with a 15 year audience behind me of people who aren't necessarily into the thing that I do on Twitch but enough of them are that there's a couple hundred people watching me play games at night.
47:05SPEAKERIt's also not my full time job. It may be different if you come out and say, "Hey, this is what I'm doing for a living." The secret is to do it as a hobby and be in a position where you don't need that to make money to pay your bills. Then you're able to take chances.
47:26SPEAKERI talked to a friend of mine who's a big time streamer now a few months ago. When we were talking about this, I was like, "How did you decide you're going to do this for a living?" He's like, "Well, I was working this job. I want to take a sabbatical for my job over the summer." He was like, "I'm going to try streaming Twitch for that three months and see how it goes."
47:48SPEAKERHe got on and just busted ass and did 10, 12 hours a day for three months and also was really good at the game he was playing. In that time, he was able to build enough of an audience that he didn't have to go back to the "real job" at the end of that three months.
48:05SPEAKERAlso, he was a competitive CS player when he was younger and stuff like that. You're in a rare category if you're that type of person. Their competitive gamers do very well on Twitch just because they are showcasing a skill that very few people have.
48:19SPEAKERIt's funny. Some of them do it, some of them don't. There's a bunch of people who are really good high tier PUBG or Counter Strike or Cod War Zone or whatever players that have 50 or 100 people watching them. They're able to sustain because they live someplace that's very inexpensive and they don't have family or whatever to support. It's tough.
48:45SPEAKERA lot of it, it sucks to say, but a lot of it comes down to right place, right time. There is definitely an aspect of luck. I can't offer any firsthand experience. He asked us, "How did we get started?" The way I got started is not really possible these days because I ended up in a random IRC chat room that happened to be full of people who worked at video game magazines and websites. At some point, they were like, "Hey, you want to try freelancing for us? Why don't you try writing up a sample?"
49:13SPEAKERI wrote a letter to the Ars Technica guys when the site was four months old that was like, "Hey, you're doing a bad job with this coverage." They were like, "Do you want to come do it? This is a pretty good letter."
49:28SPEAKERThat was very gracious of them.
49:30SPEAKERWell, I wasn't rude. I was just like, "Hey, here's why I think that you're inaccurate on this and this and this and this and this."
49:44SPEAKERThe point I was going to make is, first of all, that was 1996, '97 when that was going on. Even then, I just happened to luck into a place where there were people with connections that I could try to get my foot in the door.
50:00SPEAKERThere is definitely an element of luck to all of this stuff, unfortunately.
50:05SPEAKERYeah. Also, being in a position that you can afford to take those big jumps. When I was at Ars, I had enough free time and I had a day job that was demanding while I was there, but didn't require a lot of time afterwards.
50:23SPEAKERI was able to write news stories for them at night for nothing for six months before we started making any money at all.
50:30SPEAKERWhen Maximum PC called and was like, "Hey, we would like you to come out and be our technical editor," I was like, "Well, okay, here's what I need to get paid," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
50:37SPEAKERI was able to do that because I didn't have a lot of college debt because I installed networks for people all through college to pay for school.
50:47SPEAKERThat's less possible now because school has gotten so spectacularly expensive.
50:53SPEAKERIt's really hard. I don't have a good answer.
50:58SPEAKERThe example, my friend who's a streamer, because he didn't have a lot of debt, he was able to say, "Okay, I'm going to eat ramen for three months and get going, see if this does anything," and it's worked out really well for him. That's cool.
51:13SPEAKERBy no means a certain thing, though. There's no...
51:17SPEAKERThat should be... If you get an opportunity, be ready to jump, but make sure you don't do something.
51:24SPEAKERAt this point, I worked for ours for no money for a year, and it was a little bit different time.
51:31SPEAKERIf you're working... It was okay because ours wasn't established. Nobody was making money on
51:36SPEAKERours when we started. We were barely paying server bills with the ads that we were running,
51:40SPEAKERand our server bills were a divinity server, a school stashed in the closet of the divinity
51:46SPEAKERschool at Harvard. When we had to go to full-time hosting, we got big enough that we had to pay
51:52SPEAKERhosting. It got incredibly expensive really fast. As a result, I was willing to work for nothing
51:57SPEAKERbecause I was building something, I was getting a part of it, whatever.
52:03SPEAKERIf somebody is coming to you from an established business where they're running ads and making
52:06SPEAKERmoney on your labor, you should not work for free ever, even when you're just starting out.
52:14SPEAKERThe only time you should do that is when you're doing it for yourself.
52:19SPEAKERYou're building something that you have full control over.
52:22SPEAKERYeah, exactly.
52:24SPEAKERAnd even then, it's very tough.
52:26SPEAKERYeah.
52:28SPEAKERAll right, last email from Scoot on the Discord. Let's see. He describes this as an ethical
52:38SPEAKERquestion. Oh boy. You know how they have lab-grown meat, like they're trying to make it so a company
52:45SPEAKERwon't have to pay to raise and kill animals to have beef or chicken, and hopefully one day it
52:48SPEAKERtastes 100% like the real thing and they can sell it at scale. Well, here's the disturbing question.
52:57SPEAKERI'm starting to have second thoughts about this email.
52:59SPEAKERIt's too late. You've started it now. You've done this to us. This is your fault.
53:03SPEAKERHere's the disturbing question. Would you try lab-grown human meat
53:06SPEAKERif it was made available to you? Not in a survival situation.
53:09SPEAKERIs this an army hammer situation?
53:11SPEAKEROh God.
53:14SPEAKERFollow-up questions. How would it make you feel if you enjoyed it? And what if you started craving
53:20SPEAKERit the way you might crave a burger or chicken fingers? Bonus follow-up question. How do you
53:26SPEAKERthink the food industry would do with it? What kind of products do you think they'd make? I'm
53:29SPEAKERjust going to answer no to the first part of this question and ignore the rest.
53:35SPEAKERSo my general food policy is that I'll try anything once, maybe twice, depending on what it is.
53:43SPEAKERI would not eat synthetic human meat. I just want to put it out there. It's too much. That's
53:49SPEAKERcreepy as hell. Well, hold on. Let's think about this though. There are a lot of health problems
53:54SPEAKERthat come from eating from cannibalism, like mad cow diseases caused by prions that come from
54:01SPEAKERthe animals eating food that includes bits of other animals of the same species, right?
54:12SPEAKERYeah, I guess I probably would be skeezed out. Like I don't think there's anything wrong with
54:14SPEAKERit, but I don't think I would do it probably. I'm not going to say it is morally wrong
54:22SPEAKERnecessarily if it came out of a lab. I mean, I guess what are the basic moral elements to
54:28SPEAKERa question like this? Is anyone being harmed by this? I suppose not. So I guess on that level,
54:32SPEAKERit's okay. But it's just fucked up, man. No. What's the source for the human... Is this a
54:38SPEAKERHeLa situation? You know the Henrietta Lacks story, right? So Henrietta Lacks is this woman
54:44SPEAKERwho had cervical cancer and died and her cells were reproducing uncontrollably. Basically,
54:51SPEAKERthey made a strain of a cellular tissue that they can reproduce in labs to test stuff on
54:59SPEAKERfor generations. There's a book about this called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
55:05SPEAKERI think is what it's called. She died of cervical cancer in the '50s, but her cells have lived on
55:12SPEAKERfor the last 70 years because of this weird specific cancer growth that she had. She didn't
55:20SPEAKERgive consent for any of this. Her tissue remains alive 70 years after she died. I think that's
55:28SPEAKERprobably wrong. I think, yes, it has produced a lot of good medically because this specific thing
55:35SPEAKERthat happened to her ended up making these cells really good for testing, doing a lot of science.
55:42SPEAKERBut was it right to do this without getting her consent? Probably not.
55:46SPEAKERYeah. I mean, society as we have established it would agree with you, right? Because you have
55:50SPEAKERto opt into being an organ donor, right? We've already laid out that you need to give your
55:55SPEAKERconsent for use of your body after death. I mean, is one cell of her body that then
56:02SPEAKERwas cloned over and over and over again over 70 years use of her body after death?
56:09SPEAKERI am extremely not equipped to answer that question. But I mean, for the sake of this
56:13SPEAKERgod awful thought experiment, I was just assuming that the human lab tissue was produced ethically.
56:18SPEAKERSo let's say somebody consented. What if you knew who you were eating?
56:24SPEAKERLike you say I could buy some Kevin Costner if I wanted?
56:26SPEAKERI'm going to add on to his horrific question here and say, what if you knew who the cell donor was?
56:35SPEAKERIt was already a no from me, so it is extra not... God, I wish I hadn't read this.
56:40SPEAKERWhat if they just have a picture of the person's face on the front of the package?
56:44SPEAKERIt's funny. When I was going through these emails, when I read this email, I was just like,
56:47SPEAKER"Oh, that'll be a fun gateway to talk about lab meat." Because that seems like an interesting
56:51SPEAKERsubject. I completely glossed over the human meat aspect of this email. I was just like,
56:56SPEAKER"Oh, lab beef and chicken is an interesting topic. Let's talk about that."
57:02SPEAKERYeah. Look, I think the lab beef and chicken is fantastic and that stuff is progressing nicely.
57:08SPEAKERI'm not super clear on the kind of carbon neutrality of it. It's way less
57:16SPEAKERenvironmentally intensive than growing a cow just to kill the cow and eat it.
57:19SPEAKERGranted, just about anything would be right. It would be hard to be worse than that,
57:24SPEAKERI guess. But the question is, how much better is it? Is it better enough that it's worth scaling it
57:29SPEAKERto cut the kind of demand that our society has for meat? Or who knows?
57:38SPEAKERI think lab-grown meat is a fantastic thing to be spending money and energy and time figuring out.
57:43SPEAKERI would have no problem trying lab chicken or lab beef.
57:47SPEAKERYeah. I was first in line for those impossible burgers. They're just plant-based. They're a plant
57:52SPEAKERthat's structured to have a texture and consistency of meat.
57:55SPEAKERI think probably the interesting version of this question that is not
58:01SPEAKERmaking me raise my hackles.
58:03SPEAKERJust to be clear, you're making real weird squirmy noises and faces during this whole
58:07SPEAKERconversation.
58:07SPEAKERThis is a gross email, man. I really don't enjoy this. I think the actual debatable
58:13SPEAKERversion of this question is, would you eat synthetic animal that you would not eat in
58:18SPEAKERreal life if the animal was killed? Like dolphin, for example, or eagle or something like that.
58:23SPEAKERLike an endangered species or an intelligent species.
58:25SPEAKERWould you eat panda? Would you eat synthetic panda? They look delicious. They're probably
58:30SPEAKERreally tender. Probably greasy though.
58:32SPEAKERThey eat all that bamboo.
58:34SPEAKERWhat about, imagine if you could get koala that wasn't just loaded with chlamydia.
58:39SPEAKERI bet it's so tasty.
58:40SPEAKEROh, I bet koala is greasy as hell.
58:43SPEAKERWhat's the best? You think there's anything out there that tastes better than pig?
58:48SPEAKERConsistently pig is pretty much the most delicious animal.
58:52SPEAKERAre you declaring pork the best of meats?
58:54SPEAKERI mean, maybe.
58:55SPEAKERAre there some fish I maybe like more than pork?
58:58SPEAKERWow. Really?
58:59SPEAKERYeah. Honestly, I really miss the high mercury fish. I don't eat them anymore.
59:05SPEAKERThe top line predator is the shark and the swordfish and all that stuff.
59:08SPEAKERShark is delicious.
59:10SPEAKERWait, shark and swordfish have a lot of mercury?
59:13SPEAKERYeah, because they eat all the other fish.
59:14SPEAKEROh, well, that was like shit runs uphill.
59:16SPEAKERI just always assumed tuna was the worst because that's the one you always hear about.
59:20SPEAKERTuna is bad. It's another apex predator, right?
59:23SPEAKERLike they eat all the other smaller fish and yeah, anyway.
59:27SPEAKERI guess they are pretty big.
59:29SPEAKERYeah. And they're old, so they accumulate over their lifespan.
59:34SPEAKERYeah, I don't know.
59:37SPEAKERLook, would you eat yourself, Brad?
59:40SPEAKERFuck this, man. We're done.
59:43SPEAKERClicking the check mark next to this email. I can't do this anymore.
59:47SPEAKEROh, I just I just.
59:51SPEAKERDo you think do you have any sense of whether we will see lab meat products
59:55SPEAKERavailable to the consumer anytime soon?
59:57SPEAKERDo you think they brand the people that the meat comes from?
1:00:00SPEAKERI'm trying to ask a legitimate question about this that might have a bearing on our everyday life.
1:00:04SPEAKERYes, I think we will see that in the next in the next 10 years.
1:00:08SPEAKEROK, that's not as close as I was hoping, but it's not as far off as it could be.
1:00:13SPEAKERI think there will be significant regulatory issues that come up around it that will
1:00:17SPEAKERthat we will probably see like we've already seen people who have tasted this stuff
1:00:22SPEAKERin incredibly expensive to produce quantities that are grown in labs on like collagen scaffolds
1:00:28SPEAKERmade by hand and all that stuff.
1:00:30SPEAKERThe next phase is productizing it to the point that we can do it
1:00:33SPEAKERand that regulators will let it happen and all that.
1:00:34SPEAKERYeah, that's what I was going to say, like they are still in a phase where this is not
1:00:37SPEAKEReven feasible at scale, right? Like they're they're still trying to solve like fundamental
1:00:41SPEAKERchallenges, right?
1:00:42SPEAKERYeah, like like the is my understanding because there was a story about this last year,
1:00:45SPEAKERthe year before where they made $150,000 steak that was literally somebody like lining up
1:00:51SPEAKERcollagen by hand and then growing the meat on that scaffold and then doing another layer of
1:00:54SPEAKERcollagen growing on the scaffold. And like it was the representative of millions of dollars
1:00:59SPEAKERof research and an incredible amount of time and they were like it tastes bad.
1:01:04SPEAKEROh man.
1:01:05SPEAKERYeah, so that's another interesting angle on this is would you eat it for the ethical
1:01:13SPEAKERadvantages if it was a worse product, if it was a dramatically worse version of that meat?
1:01:18SPEAKERI mean I think at that point you're you're better off going to plant-based analogs.
1:01:24SPEAKERYes, actually that's that's the right answer.
1:01:26SPEAKERYeah, because like like like for hamburger and stuff like burgers and meatloaf and sausage,
1:01:31SPEAKERanything where there's maillard on the outside of a of a like a product like those the the
1:01:37SPEAKERfake ground beef stuff is really good.
1:01:39SPEAKERYeah, that's true.
1:01:40SPEAKERBut but you're paying a premium and people seem to be happy to pay a premium even at
1:01:43SPEAKERsome place like Burger King to get the no the environment to get the environmental impact
1:01:49SPEAKERof their burger down. It's you know it's like it's like they say the the liberals are coming
1:01:54SPEAKERfor your burgers.
1:01:55SPEAKERThat's right.
1:01:57SPEAKERI'm just to be clear that is a joke.
1:02:00SPEAKERYeah.
1:02:00SPEAKERNot a true thing.
1:02:03SPEAKERThat's it for emails.
1:02:04SPEAKERIf you have non-eating human meat related questions for us, we found our first we found
1:02:09SPEAKERour first our first first verboten topic I guess.
1:02:14SPEAKERYes, we will talk about just about anything else.
1:02:17SPEAKERYou you can send them to techpod@content.town.
1:02:21SPEAKERAgain, that's techpod@content.town. Brett, always a pleasure.
1:02:25SPEAKERYeah, first first email episode of the year. Now we have to we have to figure out from
1:02:29SPEAKERhere do we stretch out the the episode schedule to try to get the next one of these right
1:02:34SPEAKERat the tail end of February.
1:02:36SPEAKERWe can just do it all human meat episode next month and we'll do two email questions and
1:02:40SPEAKERit'll it'll too many email episodes it'll work itself out.
1:02:42SPEAKERThat's right.
1:02:44SPEAKERAs always, this is the the point in the show where we let you know that if you would like
1:02:47SPEAKERto support the show you can by using the Patreon it's at patreon.com/techpod.
1:02:55SPEAKERYou can join hold on let's see I think 1400 and hold on active.
1:03:05SPEAKER1445 other of our closest friends of our closest friends yeah exactly on the Patreon for as
1:03:12SPEAKERlittle as two bucks a month and for that two dollars a month you get access to the fabulous
1:03:17SPEAKERtechpod discord which is just chock full of fascinating conversation all day every day.
1:03:25SPEAKERMan the the I don't know how much we want to talk about it I don't want to out anybody
1:03:28SPEAKERbut the range of interesting professions that keep coming up on there.
1:03:32SPEAKERIt's pretty good.
1:03:33SPEAKERLike like just in the in the course of conversation it's not like somebody's jumping on
1:03:37SPEAKERthere going like I'm a nuclear physicist look at me but like people will allude to things
1:03:42SPEAKERand then like somebody will ask him a question it's like oh yeah I do this.
1:03:45SPEAKEROh yeah I you know I won't yeah I regularly break the speed of sound from work.
1:03:50SPEAKERI won't say what was discussed the other day because it might have national security
1:03:54SPEAKERapplications or something but it's like no but yeah just there's some very interesting
1:03:59SPEAKERpeople on there.
1:04:00SPEAKERYeah we've had we've had our next patron spotlight will be pretty good I think we
1:04:05SPEAKERgot to figure out who we're gonna ask do it yeah but yeah if you want to if you want to
1:04:09SPEAKERparticipate again it's patreon.com/techpod in addition to like people who have super
1:04:14SPEAKERcool jobs like I went in and was like hey I have a question about about this headphone
1:04:20SPEAKERcable there and someone's like oh yeah you need to do it like this and this and this
1:04:23SPEAKERand and like it's just there's an incredible range of expertise and everybody it turns
1:04:29SPEAKERout when you take people who have interesting hobbies and interesting interests and put
1:04:32SPEAKERthem together then there's good conversations and it's nice to have a community to hang
1:04:35SPEAKERout with when we're all stuck at home especially I think.
1:04:38SPEAKERAnd everybody's just uh extremely chill.
1:04:40SPEAKERYeah.
1:04:41SPEAKEREven even through all the recent strife I feel like things have been you know.
1:04:45SPEAKERI I said it last week I we added the politics channel kind of hesitantly last year uh we
1:04:52SPEAKERhaven't had to moderate really anyone I did ask people not to you know uh not to do
1:04:59SPEAKERcrimes for threatened to do crimes and everybody took that really well um and we
1:05:05SPEAKERhaven't had any other issues since then so that was rad and and thank everybody who
1:05:09SPEAKERparticipates um I think I looked the other day there at any given time there between
1:05:13SPEAKERthree and four hundred people who are active posters on the discord.
1:05:17SPEAKERYeah.
1:05:17SPEAKERAnd and a whole bunch more that lurk at least once or twice a week so that's that's
1:05:21SPEAKERreally cool um as always thank you to our executive producer to your patrons the Bunny
1:05:26SPEAKERFiend, Jacob Chappell, David Allen, and James Kamik.
1:05:30SPEAKERYou all are fantastic but also everyone else who chucks in a couple bucks a month to the
1:05:34SPEAKERtech pod discord we appreciate everybody um and uh yeah it's it's a thank you all so
1:05:39SPEAKERmuch uh and we'll be back I guess next week with another episode of Brad and Will Made
1:05:45SPEAKERa Tech Pod.
1:05:45SPEAKERYep.
1:05:45SPEAKERSee you then.
1:05:47SPEAKERBye.
1:06:04SPEAKERBye.