Okay, Brad, I got a post breaking containment on the blue sky today. It's reached the discover feed, the accursed land. Yeah, it has it. I'm getting I'm getting replies from people like, well. You know, it started like Twitter in 2010, where like Alex immediately jumps in with a with a better joke than the one that I wrote. Classic. And then everybody else piled on after there. And now it's starting to be random people.
who don't understand the joke. It's doing the Twitter thing, the classic algorithmic sorting of people that we both follow that reply to are floating to the top, you know? So it's like... Also, should we mention what this post is about? They were the first ones, just to be clear, like just to be clear, Alex, number one with a bullet. He was up. He had something up 30 seconds after I made the post. He was he was on it.
Then here's Austin and then here's Ben replying to him. And then here's Danica, you know, when I see this many people that we mutually follow responding to your thing, I see that it is. Gaining some traction. Look, I was walking down the street on the way to GDC last week and I saw a sign on the side of the market street as one does. And they're usually for like startups. So it's like crypto bullshit or. AI bullshit or... The number of AI-related billboards in this city is...
It should be illegal. Yeah, like, hey, hey, you know what? You can fire your whole HR department and use our AI thing to give everybody HR that's probably better for the company and worse for the humans than the existing process. Okay, let's be real here. They knew what they were doing when they chose the name Post Hog, right? Wait, hold on. You can't just drop that. I had a story. I got to build to this, right? Go on. Go on.
So I'm walking down the street on the way to GDC, and I've seen these signs all over the city over the last several months or year. And, you know, like I said, usually they're for some AI nonsense or some crypto bullshit or something skeezy. This one is just something wholesome. It's post hog. Right. And but but the new signs that they put up lately have this guy who's like.
Kilroy was hearing it over the edge of the bottom edge of the sign. And I think there's more text below that, but I did a strategic crop to make it look extra creepy. Sure. And I took this picture of the sign because I thought it was funny on Wednesday. It said post hog experiments. Period. Post Hog does that. And I was like, you know, a lot of people do experiment with Posting Hog. I sure do. Yeah. And I mean, I figured what place is going to appreciate Posting Hog jokes more?
Then Blue Sky, which was founded on a long, long history of hog posting. Yeah, I mean, you know, their extended brand identity features taglines like we're a little hog wild about helping you build successful products. And they appear to have a little cartoon hedgehog mascot.
Oh, I thought that was a bear. No, no, no. It's got spines all over it. Oh, I'm looking at the one that Austin posted replied. You're suggesting there are bears with hedgehog style spines on them. We are in real. We are in worse trouble than I thought. And that's a real that's some real annihilation business there. It sure is. So Austin posted a picture from what I assume is their website that said, why post hog?
because it's literally designed to be a no brainer. And then it's a picture of a bear who's very clearly not wearing pants, sitting at a desk in front of a computer with coffee and like a little cup of pencils. So that's I believe I think the disconnect here is that's not a chair that that hog is sitting on. It's its tail. Oh, you think that's the hog? Absolutely. Because there are other there are other.
Go Google the mascot of post hog. Oh, man, I didn't realize that the post hog, it's a it's a hedgehog. Plenty of other illustrations out there from other angles. And you can see clearly that that is. You know, I mean, it might be a built in chair, I suppose. If your tail was big enough, you would kind of have a chair with you at all times. And I would love to. That would be amazing if you just had a chair with you anywhere you went. I am very curious. Well, first off, I know.
Every time I've joked about this with people who are like front end engineer types, they're like, oh, yeah, we love post hog. They help us get our analytics in order or whatever. And I'm like, oh, OK. But everybody else is went for the childish joke. So I appreciate that. You might say naming that company was a masterstroke.
Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Like, the funny thing about the post-hog thing is that people... Sorry, it's broken containment. Is that people are in... Like, somebody asked me if it implied... That there's a pre it's like postmodernism. It's like post hog. Like we're all living in a post hog world now. I hadn't thought about that. And then and then somebody else asked if it implies the existence of pre hog. Which.
like, I guess also could be true. Um, anyway, I I'm done talking about post hog now. Sorry. I'm just getting started. I'm stinger clicking around their why post hog page, trying to figure out if they have any information about where their name came from.
I assume it's like a groundhog type situation. Like, I guess so. Like, like they, they really going to dig into it. They're going to get the business done, but I bet it's just a bunch of dipshits. We're sitting in a room and we're like, you know, it'd be really funny if we called this the post hog. They don't have a Wikipedia page yet, actually. This is shocking me. That's normally the type of place you would go for some dumb little apocrypha about where their name came from. There is...
I did end up on a Wikipedia page for post hoc analysis. I don't think that's where they got their name from. I don't think it's a play on that, but I don't know. I do have to shout them out because they picked up my dark mode settings from the desktop and I got a dark page instead of a light page.
I mean, that's good. Which I appreciate. I might argue that that has gone from a nice to have to expect it at this point. I'm going to tell you, when you post a lot of newsletter without a dark mode, people let you know. They do. Yeah, I bet they do. How do they let you know?
Well, it's funny you say that they match reply on the email that comes in and say, Hey, what about a dark mode? And I was like, I'll see if I can do that. So then I just made the whole, I like, look, there was no dark mode, light mode toggle on the host that I chose.
So everything's dark mode now. And you know what? Nobody's complained. I was just about to ask. I would love to see some market research on just going default dark mode. And is there a similar size contingent that wants a light mode that wants dark mode? I bet not.
I think one person was like, Hey, I liked the light mode better actually, but it wasn't really a complaint. It was more of a expression of preference. So true. Anyway. Hey, you think your email is a good trade for that free white paper? No, no. That's what post hog. This is I don't understand this. It is absolutely a hedgehog. I'm captivated by this. Sorry. I'm going back. I'm opening a document that's called March 2025 because.
It is the last podcast of the month, which means it is that that time that we turn all of the cues that were sent in this month into A's. Not all of them. It was a lot this month. We got quite a few here. You know, I was surprised we only had one. Star Wars related question, despite I got a lot of positive feedback on that Rob Zachney episode. Yeah. But I think it's just people like Rob a lot. Yes. Even even the one is only kind of tangentially Star Wars related. Yeah. We got a lot of cues here.
Some of them are bolded. Others are highlighted in yellow because that's how we differentiate which emails each of us wants to read. Yeah. See, I gave you the bold because you can just keyboard shortcut that. I have to click like three times to. You could italics.
It's true. I don't think that's as eye catching. Well, I mean, I could like if you want to be egalitarian, I'm happy to switch to highlighting. I often do this on my iPad, though, which is not a good place to have to select. And like, it's a pain in the ass no matter what I do. I'm more annoyed that Google doesn't let you set keyboard shortcuts for colors in Google Docs. Everything should let you set keyboard shortcuts for everything. This is the first 100% fast mail emails.
episode. I took all of the emails that are my fast mail folder for this and I archived the entire month. And now that that that box is clean again. Fresh start. Yeah, that's a good feeling. I also use J and K to go up and down the email list, which I like a lot. Really? Wait a minute. Yeah. I think Gmail does that too. You know what this means? What? You know what J and K to go up and down are, right? No. You don't? No.
Those are Vim keys, dude. Fuck. This is very exciting to me. Oh, no. I hate this. You're getting there. There's a lot. You're getting there. I find myself. i find myself now occasionally using vim controls in regular work processors and stuff and it's becoming a problem for me don't no not okay okay so gmail does up and down with j and k too yeah
Maybe like I'm, I am not, I'm not accepting this. I'm going to say that this predates Vim. I bet the Vim stole this from someplace else and chat's going to let us know. What if you were looking at a thing and you wanted to just copy the next four lines? I never have ever wanted to do that in my life.
Without having to highlight exactly what you wanted. Did you know you can do that in like three keystrokes? I hold down control and shift and press down three times to do that. What if you could just hit the number of lines? What if you just hit three YY and it's in your buffer? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Nope. If you want to delete the next three lines. Look, this is a wholesome family podcast, Brad. Don't bring your weird perversions here. We're here to talk about post hog and answer questions. Did you know that I can delete from the position of the cursor to the end of the document? I can delete with two key presses.
I mean, that sounds dangerous, actually. Why would you want that? You just hit D capital G. You will delete everything from the cursor down to the bottom. Oh, it's great. I don't like this. It's great. I don't like this. All right. Hold on. Can we.
Have you played Utopia Must Fall yet also? Yeah, that game's awesome. Okay, good. I was going to say, everybody should check out Utopia Must Fall. That game rips. It was part of the IDGA stuff. Yeah, I think, did that come up on last week's podcast? Did we talk about it?
We may have or we may have talked about it off air. It's been out for a little bit. It's been out for actually a few months. Yeah, but it came out last year sometime. It's like a vector game and it simulates and it runs really well on OLEDs is what I will say.
It's like, yeah, man, I would love to see that on an OLED. It's like a it's like a hyperkinetic missile command roguelike. Yeah, that's a good way. Basically, it's like it's like missile command with a skill tree. Yeah. Yes, it's very cool. You know what else is cool is answering some questions. Yeah, if you have a question, you can send it to techpod at content.town. It'll show up in my fast mail where I'll read it, copy it, press J to get the next one and paste both of those into the...
into the into the letter into the letter section at the same time and um we do these every month so send them in i think we have an overflow on the patron episode this month would be my guess judging by the oh god we have to do that quality of questions Yeah, well, look, the podcast never stopped, Brad. True. It's very true. All right. Let's start with emails. There are a lot of them. Dave and Sheffield.
I used to hear some developers citing that porting their games to Stadia's Linux environment was not worth the return in revenue. In a post-Steam Deck world and the big improvements in Proton, would Stadia have fared better? If there were an easier route to Stadia via a compatibility layer instead of a full native port, or was it always doomed due to the subscription and game purchasing model? I think it is very much the latter. From my perspective, it was the...
They were just a little bit ahead of the Game Pass model, a little bit ahead of realizing that, hey, people aren't going to want to pay full price for games they can't install locally on their machine, let alone hold in their hand as a hard copy. Well. There was also the problem that, as I understand it, they didn't actually give anyone. They didn't. So they had a platform with no users and no way to project revenue and substantial reporting costs.
hundreds of thousands of dollars for big games and still like a couple months run rate probably for smaller games. And they didn't help subsidize that. So like. Typically, when you have a new platform that has no users and no installed base, you say, hey we're gonna subsidize this and we'll we'll recoup that when you start selling the game but if you don't if the game doesn't sell because our platform sucks then it's on us right right it's what oculus did to get
games on the Oculus headsets, on the Quest and the Oculus headsets for the first few generations. And Google was like, no, man, you're going to have a billion user installed base. And meanwhile, gamers were like, I don't know about that.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing from the user perspective. They did nothing to build a user or an audience by A, charging you to get into the service, then B, making you pay full price for the games. That seems crazy in retrospect. Like these days, if you're launching a service like that, it would probably be...
get in the door for free and here's a free to play game. Like here's a Fortnite-esque thing. Like you need something for people to just try at this point. Like charging an entry fee and then an all the cards game fee. It's just a nonstarter for what people expect these days, which is to try a thing for free. And the broadband situation is still not great for streaming. Like if you live someplace that's not on a on a coast or near has good Internet, you're like.
Xbox game cloud is rough. I just, I don't, it was hubris on Google's part to think that they could spend money on this and then have it work. Yeah, better middleware might have helped, though. I mean, it might have enticed a few more games. Would it have helped the service succeed? Probably not, but they might have had a slightly more robust launch lineup if stuff like Proton had been in place at the time.
The thing I've heard, and this is all like third hand, so I don't know if it's true or not, but the thing I heard was that they hired a bunch of really smart people from games and then didn't listen to any of them and treated it like a tech product, which doesn't work because you like.
You know, the difference is in the world of tech, you build something that's good and it's and you have you have measurements that you can show that it's like if you're if you are the company that that post hog is competing with. and you're post hog you're like hey we're three percent faster than post hog and we run it
And our costs are 25% lower. That's an easy decision. And you can put that in those numbers in a spreadsheet and then look at how long it's going to take you to move your stuff over to post hog. And you're like, oh, okay. So this is going to cost us a little bit of money up front, but we'll make that money back. We'll save that money in the next six months.
So it's totally worth doing. Video games don't work that way because like you can make a game that is like looks great and it's like runs 60 frames a second really solid and just is no fun at all. And nobody will fucking play the game. And often tech people don't understand that. Having straddled both worlds over the last two decades. Unsurprising. Also, pretty clear who won out in the power struggle there. It was not Google. Since we're talking about Steam-related stuff, kind of, sort of. Yeah.
Jason in Central Wisconsin. Have you seen this program on Steam called Lossless Scaling yet? I'm half convinced it's magic. It provides upscaling and frame generation from an easy-to-use program that runs in the background with minimal performance hit. There is some input lag, but that's frame gen, right? It's not perfect, but it's made previously unplayable games playable on my laptop, and they're selling it for $350 during the Steam sale. I feel like there has to be a catch.
But unless I unknowingly sold my soul in the terms and conditions or something, I can't figure out what it is. So all this does is a different kind of it provides different levels of upscaling for work seems to work really well on pixel games.
but it taps into um nvidia and amd's super resolution stuff not the not the dlss but the dlaa and fsr super resolution is this like a post-process thing does this work on any game i'm not i'm not seeing so yeah it it works on most games is my understanding um the It does it without like DLSS gets information from the game. So like it doesn't upscale UI elements, for example, doesn't use DLSS to upscale UI elements because they get corrupted and weird when you do that. So you you.
you know when you have a native implementation it renders the stuff that's like it just renders the stuff that you want rendered upscaled and everything else gets rendered the traditional way with like a nearest neighbor or length source or whatever upscaling I think that this is probably going to work best on pixel art games. I think they show FTL in their promo. Although they also show Cyberpunk, so it's kind of a spread. Doom Eternals in here. I am...
I would not use this if you have a game that natively supports your cards. Yeah. Upscaling like super like a like a DLSS or FSR. Yeah. Or maybe if you're playing anything competitive as well, that is very latency dependent. Absolutely would not use it for anything that's competitive. I'm sorry. I'm laughing because I'm looking at scaling options and it's got usual suspects, you know, fidelity, fidelity effects, some NVIDIA stuff, nearest neighbor. Anime 4K.
That's for anime stuff, Brad. You don't say. Look, anime requires its own special. This is in, what do you call it, too? Handbrake has anime settings. for anime image upscaling yeah i mean i think it would be even funnier if there were a scaling algorithm called anime 4k that had nothing to do with anime but yeah anyway So I flagged this because West Finland's emulation upgrade emulation newsletter a couple of weeks ago, the first March one.
had a thing about, what's it called? Shader glass, I think is what it's called. Have you seen that? No, I've got to subscribe to that newsletter. I don't subscribe to a single newsletter. If Wes, if you're listening to this in my sense, I don't subscribe to any newsletters. I'm sitting right here, man. Yours will be the first. OK, sorry. Wills will be the first. Yours will be the second.
I, it's just not part of my workflow. Like reading things in my inbox is just not something that I do. Well, so by nature. So, well, you need to see, this is why I'm this now that I have fast mail and I'm excited about email again.
um so shader glass yes okay i'm looking at shader glass it's on itch yeah it's a it's an itch thing and it's basically it's the same same idea it's basically a window that you put on top of your display and it applies different uh retro arc kind of state shaders on and you literally drag this window around and it just automatically it's freaking rad underneath it okay i'm trying to try this it is very good so i was playing this with utopia must uh die
utopia must is that what is that what's called utopia must fall with utopia must fall the other day to get even more phosphor glow from the edges it's very good like it's stupid just to be clear it's stupid in a lot of ways but If you're playing like up sampled Mr. Games, like I actually plugged my Mr. into the capture card on the back of my PC and then ran this on top of the capture window. And it gave me a nice kind of CRT representation that.
that really, really hit my GPU hard. So maybe I should not be running it as we speak. I'm running it as we speak. You now look like you're on a CRT. This is rad. Yeah. Right. This is actually shockingly effective.
I don't know how much extra latency I'm introducing into my recording by running this, but we'll see. It's probably fine. Yeah, you know, I'm going to make you a CRT, too. I might actually just sit here and let you be on a CRT for the rest of this podcast. Why wouldn't you? I've got all these cores. I've got this.
Big graphics card. Why not? Yeah. Shader glass. Shader glass. It's on, it's on mouse. Itch.io slash shader glass. I'll try to remember to link this on the show notes. Yeah. Brad, you're. Just your head is in a TV now. The rest of your window is not so much. Yeah, that's cool. So, yeah, like I think there's interesting there's multiple applications like this being used for different stuff like the.
The upsampling one, I'm a little skeptical of. I haven't actually spent a lot of time with it. I installed it and played like 10 minutes of of Doom 2016 on it and was like, oh, this feels OK. But I don't know. I don't know beyond that. Like I probably wouldn't use that just because I have a video card that supports DLSS and FSR and all this stuff. Yeah. If I didn't, I might feel a little bit differently. Like if I was on an Intel machine, Intel card or an AMD card or something like that. Sure.
Here's an email from Alex. This is a good question. I'm someone who doesn't enjoy using social media, but I'm starting a new business and I think it'll be in my best interest to have some sort of social media presence. I like the idea of communicating directly with customers.
but I'm worried about getting sucked in by the endless news feed. Is there a way to use technology to mitigate the bad parts of social media while reaping the benefits of it? Perhaps an intermediate layer that can act as a buffer. Well, I mean, you could just always post and never look at replies. Yeah. Or just look at replies. Yeah. Like just look at replies to your posts and just never look at any kind of algorithmic anything that's serving content to you.
Yeah, I was gonna say the other thing is the reason I've been spending more time on blue sky these days is the lack of the algorithmic feed. I mean, they put one in because people people some people need the algorithmic feed. Yeah, that discover feed is broken. It does not work well at all.
You have to follow a fair number of people for it to take over. It works reasonably well for me, but I just don't use it because it's always bummers. Yeah, I mean, it's well, it works better sometimes than others. Occasionally it runs out of posts or it repeats posts constantly for me. And it also clusters topics in a way that's very.
like painfully obvious, like I'll get 10 posts in a row that are about like the same relatively narrow Linux topic or whatever, you know, like it's, it's not the best discover. Um, but I mean, I guess my point is the algorithmic feed is bad. Just in general, just get a reverse chrono feed. And when you run out and don't follow too many people and then you won't have too much stuff in there. Right. Like that's the that's the thing.
Because if you run out, like the old days of Twitter, you just run out of stuff and then you go do something else. And that worked out well. And then we started following 2,000 people each. You never ran out and the brain was just constantly getting hit by dopamine and that feels nice. And then it feels not nice the more you do it. And then pretty soon you're posting, you know, 250, 350 times a day like Elon Musk and and you.
go completely bad shit crazy. It's a bad way to be. Yeah, it's not good. You don't want to have posters madness. Um, let's, uh, let's dip into the discord questions. Maybe we'll swing back up into emails. Wow. In a bit. OK, I'll spread it around a little bit. This is this is unprecedented. We usually it's usually strictly an email first, then discord. Look, I can go every other if I want it. Maybe I will. OK, Bobby to fish.
What's your cutoff for it's time to get a new phone? I have an S25G. They'll stop delivering security updates for it this year, and the USB-C port no longer functions. I charge using a wireless charger and the phone still works as well as ever. Should I wait until those updates stop sooner or later? I would for how important and centrally located in a person's life a phone is these days and how subjects to.
potential exploits and vulnerabilities it is i would not use a phone that is not getting security updates anymore like flat out yeah that that's my that's the hard line for me but the soft line for me is when the camera on the new one is significantly better than like i didn't upgrade iphones last year partly because it's more of a pain in the ass to upgrade than it is to like the benefits seemed less than the than the upgrade um
But like if the when the camera does something new, especially like types of things that I use, like low light or like like fast traction action in the daytime, I'll upgrade for that. That's that's kind of my big one. Yeah. Yeah. Let me, let me reiterate, don't skimp on security updates, whether it's phone or tablet or your computer, whatever operating system you're running, like don't run something that is not getting security support anymore. Yeah.
Things are too froth these days. I did. I did some research on this because I was talking. I wrote about a recent newsletter was about the. upcoming end of windows 10 and 20 in october um where they're not going to do security updates for it anymore they're not doing updates at all for it anymore and the the like i was like what's the average time to to like if you put an unpatched system on the internet what's the average time to to own it uh and it's still like 18 minutes for really
I don't know about Windows 10. The Windows XP and Windows 7 ones were less than 20 minutes. Now you're talking about connecting the system directly to a WAN connection, right? No firewall. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's obviously making things way more vulnerable than real world. But I wonder if 10 is going to present like a real massive target of opportunity for people that are looking to exploit computer systems out there. Like they're going to know, hey, there's like.
How many 10 hundreds of millions of unsupported devices all on the internet at once all of a sudden? And they're just gonna be like, Hey, it's like open season now. I mean, so I specifically looked at. what the experience was like in the last closest analog to this, the Windows 7 uptick. People actually switched to Windows 8 or Windows 10 by the time they killed Windows 7.
Windows XP is the last time I could remember an enormous number of unsupported machines being on the internet. And it was also at a time before people had routers a lot. so it's a little bit of a not fair example because most machines are behind a firewall now and that helps a lot um but but yeah the the windows xp pre sp2 thing
If you were on a raw internet connection pre-SP2 coming out, it took like 10 minutes before some worm infected you usually. It was incredibly fast. That's pretty frightening. Yeah. My iPad Pro is not getting updates anymore. I just discovered recently because I was like, man, it seems like iPadOS. Also, I hate saying iPadOS. I liked when it was all just iOS. You mean iOS for iPads?
I understand why there is some segmentation there now, but still. Anyway, at some point I was like, man, I feel like I should have gotten iPadOS 18 by now. What the hell is going on? And then I looked and sure enough, my model of iPad Pro was dropped off the support list for 18.
Oh, boy. I don't know if I don't know how Apple I mean, Apple is so security conscious. I wonder, do they still extend like some basic security updates beyond like kind of iOS end of life? I tried to find that information and I could not find a definitive answer on if. 17 would still get security updates. I want to say mine did pull a minor security update in the last couple of months, but I could be wrong. Wikipedia says iOS 17 is no longer is obsolete.
No longer getting security updates. Okay. I guess it's time for a new iPad then. That's a bummer. Tariffs in effect and it's a bad, like it's a down year for iPad updates. So I'm double screwed on buying a new iPad right now. But anyway. You have the first, the first iPad pro is gosh, I lost track of them. It's the last iPad pro that had a home button. I want to say it's the last 10.5 inch one.
Probably the last non, it's probably the last A processor, not M processor one too. I think they still were using A's in the 11 inch for the first year or two. Yeah. They're apparently revving the iPad Pro this year, but keeping the same M4 in it for another year. So I was going to say, I think that the secret, if I were buying an iPad and wanted pencil support these days, I think I would probably buy an air at this point because I don't know that the pro is the air seems really good.
I'm so addicted to the promotion. Like it's literally the only reason I would get a pro is because I want the 120 Hertz screen. I think the iPad airs have 120 Hertz screen. That's right. I'm pretty sure that's still iPad pro, but. Oh, it's liquid retina.
Yeah, that's just a resolution thing, not a refresh thing. I mean, it's it's a dumb reason to get a pro, but I use the iPad like a couple hours a day every day. And I've had this iPad for eight years, I think. I believe it's eight. Spending too much time in the bathroom, dude.
It's a couch device. Oh, it's a consumption device. Okay. Okay. Like if I don't need to type, it's, I'm probably going to just chill out on the couch and browse on the iPad. I can see that. It's probably a new iPad. Um, how about, dude, this is crazy. Is this actually a thing? From Bob the Cannibal? Is it just me or are pay-to-reject cookies the ultimate form of inshittification?
I've never seen this before. I had never seen this either, but I started Googling around and apparently it is a thing that's starting. There are starting to exist websites that will let you reject their cookies, but only if you pay them a fee. That seems that seems like it's not GDPR compliant. That's literally the first thing that came up when I Googled this was, hey, are paid to reject cookies GDPR compliant? Did not find a definitive answer for that. I look.
Everything I do is not ad supported at this point. I mean, I guess the work I do at PC World is ad supported, but I increasingly think that letting people run arbitrary code on our computers in exchange for hot takes was a mistake. It's a thing I've said for a long time. Uh, it's just getting worse. This is insane. You should not be able to do this. Yep. We'll agree. This, this would just be a.
Look, I'm going to tell you, it took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to block those Admiral. Hey, we noticed you're blocking ads on our site things. And now I don't see those anymore. We're using my pie hole. Nobody else does. Yeah, it's great. I should probably look into that too. It was a fairly involved script that I had to put on the thing, but like, but yeah, it works now. And I don't know, man. I think that I think that that should be against the law. Yeah.
Or, you know, I mean, in the EU, it may very well be. We have the CDPR, which is the California equivalent of the law that's modeled on the GDPR. As we are learning rapidly, is the law still the law if nobody enforces it? Well, that's a whole other.
problem um anyway that sucks that is that that feels like a real escalation in the shittiness wars like that really feels like a broadside on the user look it's it's um On one hand, I'm sympathetic to the people who have built businesses around content because it increasingly feels like the only thing big tech companies are good at is racing to the bottom in whatever market they're in.
whether that's ads or phones or video or any number of other things media media yeah streaming media in general um but at the same time like I don't know, maybe support sites that don't do that shit and just stop going to those places because fuck them. Yeah. Did you see did you see the news? The Game Informer is back. Yeah, I didn't get to the bottom of it, though. Somebody like a new parent company bought the IP from GameStop. God help me. I am.
Oh, you did it. You did the thing. It's starting to happen in my head, like frequently in a way that really bums me the fuck out as somebody who worked at GameSpot for five years. I was. I always felt bad about it. Jeff and Ryan used to give me shit about it because I did it all the time. I mean, I always found it repugnant and now I'm doing it myself. Anyway.
A new company bought the bought the property from GameStop and hired all of everybody back that lost their jobs last year. But the reason I bring that up. Yeah, it is awesome. The reason I bring that up, though, is that even they seem like they're pivoting toward a more.
directly user supported. I mean, you know, a subscription always is, has been user supported in a sense, but they're, but they're doing it in a more like tiered way, you know, where they're saying like, Hey, subscribe to the website. You'll get these benefits. We're rolling out more tiers later on. That'll, you know, in a more kind of like. post-patreon style of tiered support thing like they like even they are going more kind of direct to audience well
And the thing, so they're doing print too, right? Yeah, later. They haven't detailed that stuff. I think that stuff is a lot more vague. Like, hey, we're looking to bring back the print publication later this year. It's funny. I don't have a lot of...
I don't have nostalgia for fondness for Game Informer because the entire time I was aware of it, it was kind of like GameStop's house brand. And that always felt... weird weird to me i get that they ran into editorial and like i know a bunch of people who work there and like they're all good people and smart people and jason and dan you know all the folks that were there so like i'm not no knock against them i just um
Like, I don't know. It just felt it's weird. I think it's lovely that they're coming back. That's, that's all, that's where I'll leave it. It's just interesting to see a relatively large established kind of legacy media brand, even pivoting in this more audience supported direction. Yeah. It's like, like I, so I guess.
The origin of my complicated feelings is I worked at a video game, a publisher that predominantly did video game magazines, and every single one of our magazines was competing with Game Informer, but it was like 800 pound gorilla versus. little tiny baby magazines. Yeah, because they were at point of sale in the store. Well, and it was subsidized by GameStop, right? Well, there was two things. They were sitting there by the register in stores and they were also...
Pushing subscriptions on people that have like the kind of GameStop Pro Rewards program, whatever. Yeah. And if you bought two games a month, the Pro Rewards thing made sense. So everybody had it. So their circulation was huge. Their circulation was enormous. Like we, we were doing 500,000 copy circ magazines and they were like 17 million or something ridiculous. Yeah. So like, so part of my, like.
Like I said, this is not a knock against the people who work there because they were great people doing good work. But like, I'm a little raw still because it was like it was like, I don't know. It's like it's like everybody else is like you're you're.
hey on one hand you have taylor swift on the other hand you have like somebody that's playing down under the hill at the at the you know for 50 people and yeah dude it yeah anyway yeah but i'm glad they're back more independent media is a good thing yes Uh, here's a question from feral pug. God, you imagine a feral pug. I mean, I'm pretty sure I've seen them. I think most pugs are feral in my experience.
Gigabit Ethernet switches vary a lot on price. A lot of TP-Link stuff out there for about $20, but then things like Ubiquiti switches that are like $80. Am I going to be sorry I bought the $20 switch, my use case? is putting a switch in my entertainment setup so my TV and consoles can all connect via Ethernet. You absolutely will not be sorry about that. No, the only thing you get... $20 switch, totally, totally fine for that use case.
Yeah, the benefit of buying the more expensive switches is that they're managed, which means you can log into a remote console and see what's connected to each port and turn off ports on and off and turn on things like power. Sometimes they'll have power over Ethernet built in. You can turn that on.
on and off yeah um you can reboot them and update firmware and stuff remotely but most switches are like for home use uh a 20 switch is totally fine the only thing you want to do is make sure you get it a speed that's that lines up with your your internet connection and your uh connection to your pcs and also um uh that you're not uh some you want to switch and not a hub
It's less of a problem these days than it used to be. I don't know that you can really even readily find a hub to buy at this point. So you're probably fine there. I am. It's funny. I had this conversation a few months ago. There are some very, very cheap hubs. And the difference between the switch and the hub is that it's the hubs have shared bandwidth across the entire all the ports. Oh, so it's like one gigabit shared across all five ports. Yikes. The switch will have one gigabit.
point to point for as many ports as are active at a time right which for most people at home probably won't matter um the the the thing that i mean especially since usually your hub has an uplink to the place where the like real internet comes in, that's going to be the bottleneck anyway. Yes, you're probably fine. Entertainment Center, go nuts.
I'm using a number of cheap TP-Link switches in my network here and have been for years. They are 100% fine. You know if you need a managed switch, basically. And if you're just looking to connect some home entertainment devices, you definitely don't. The thing I do, I bought the expensive switches, but it was just because I wanted power over Ethernet because my ubiquity access points are powered over power over Ethernet.
and i have a big switch in the garage that provides power over ethernet so i power like none of my switches are plugged into anything they all just run off downstream power ethernet and then like the switch that my home assistant is plugged into is powered off of power over ethernet and and so in that regard it's really nice uh it does mean that my switch in the garage takes so much power that i can't run it on a ups anymore though so
They were making noise about banning TP-Link in the same way they banned some companies like Huawei. Makes sense. A while back, but I don't know what came of that. Look, we're governing by fiat over here, so. I mean, I think this was even before the current administration, I want to say, or I forget exactly when this talk started picking up. And the main reason I...
Pay attention to that on top of the switches being very cheap and quality. TP-Link was becoming a pretty big access point, Wi-Fi access point competitor to stuff like Ubiquity. Like their remodel line is pretty popular. And I had been looking at maybe getting one of those.
if they're going to get banned in three months that doesn't seem like the best idea so so we we tested some of those um at pc world and i tested some of their mesh network stuff actually and it's really nice it was really good yeah I wonder if we're going to see two and a half gigabit ports on the new consoles. I mean, granted, that's like probably pushing three years away before those are on the market. But that feels to me like a thing that it doesn't like.
There's probably no cost to have given that they'll be in the chipsets. You would hope. Yeah, it almost certainly would be supported at the hardware level anyway. So why not just put the port on? I mean, I don't know. What are we talking to? Ten cent savings or something on the port that you put in your box?
I don't I don't actually know. I mean, I was going to ask if you think we'll have Ethernet on the next gen consoles. Oh, God, please don't even say Wi-Fi only, baby. Fuck that. No, thank you. The fighting game community would not take kindly to that.
I'll tell you that. Oh, yeah, that's true. Competitive games. But if you're really competitive, you're going to be playing on PC anyway, right? Maybe. I don't know. There's plenty of people on console. I'm just spinning like eight different topics out from this one question. What is up with smart TVs still having a hundred megabit ports? They don't use more data than that. Probably practically every smart TV on the market that I've looked at has a, has a hundred. Really? Yeah.
They almost never have gigabit ports on there. Oh, that's weird. Which, I mean, you're not wrong for most use cases. Even streaming 4K from Netflix is not a big deal. It's like 20 megabits, yeah. Maybe if you're trying to play an extra high bitrate file over your LAN, it could be a problem. But anyway.
If you're doing that, you should have a dedicated box. Brad, you're probably right. Brad, you're probably right. All right. Chip Shirley has a question. PC hardware reviewers lately use the term uplift. instead of something like improvement. I've heard one Will Smith use this term as well. Why the preference for uplift over more broadly used terms?
Often when you're saying when you're talking about things and you're talking about a sequence of things and you're like recounting benchmark results over and over and over again, you get tired of saying the same word every single time. So we use different words to vary up the.
The shapes that our mouths make. Yes, but yes, I guess that's one way to look at it. I mean, like a kind of specific term like that can also sort of take on a. connotation over time if you use it enough right like it's kind of a meme right now yeah improvement is a very broad word that is applicable in a million contexts and you don't really hear the word uplift very often except in
the context of improvements in performance and stats in the PC review space. So like you can kind of come to associate that term with your mental model of whatever improvements you're looking for in hardware. Yeah, the other the other one that's happened that I've noticed a lot lately is is like the vendors will describe the kind of meta uplift across all the benchmarks that they test. So it's like a truthy like it feels faster.
Yeah. So they, so they tack in a couple of games that are real, like stone cold, incredible performance boost bangers, like 300%. And then you'll have a bunch of like 2% lifts in there. And then your meta uplift, I can't remember the term they use, is like 30%, right? But not really. Anyway. Sounds like another attempted obfuscation to me.
What is it? You can use statistics for good or you can use statistics for evil. Yeah. All right. Here's a question you flagged from James. I don't have a great answer for this. Why in this age of laptops and small form factor keyboards do alt codes still require a freaking numpad? I have a perfectly adequate series of number keys right here.
If you are in a 10 keyless, I don't know why this is. I think it's goofy. But if you are in a 10 keyless, the thing you do is you make a new layer on your keyboard and you bind like the J-K-L-U-I-O. N comma period keys to be a fake 10 keyless, a 10 keypad. And that's how you do it. That's how you get your problem. That's sounds like a lot of work. I mean, what if you just got a keyboard with a numpad?
I like having my wrist not jacked up and having the numpad hurts me. Check this out. That's too wide, dude. Look at that numpad. That is not an Apple keyboard. That's wireless and it's black. That's right. Are you okay, Brad? Is it black? Can't see the navy blue. Oh, it looks black on camera, but I believe that it's navy blue. I just bought some new keycaps for it. The Olivetti TTY keycaps look nice. Yeah, I like a numpad. I have a removable numpad for spreadsheet days.
Yeah, that's probably fine. I use a numpad every day, though. I use it all the time. Really? Is that how you play games? Not often. I mean, like Caves of Cud used the numpad by default for. Oh, God. Oh, no. I did not become a Caves of Cud sicko. I. For what it's worth. I have tried that game so many times and I always fall asleep. Yeah, I'm fascinated by it in concept. I just don't know if it works for me in the way that I wish it did.
I need to start playing it sometime at like 10 o'clock in the morning when I can stream it and have people tell me how to do it for a little bit, I think.
Stream it? Yeah, actually streaming. It sounds like the way to go. Maybe we should stream it sometime. Maybe we should be Caves of Cud streamers, Brad. Is there multiplayer? It's only single player, right? I don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's single player only for people who don't know. Caves of Cud is kind of like if Dwarf Fortress was a roguelike.
Dwarf Fortress is a roguelike. No, no, no. Dwarf Fortress is a sprawling empire building simulation. But like it's different every time it fills all the rules. What I mean is. Dwarf Fortress is a literal management sim, whereas this is an RPG. You are controlling a character and moving around the world. Yeah, I guess. But it's the same kind of very simplistic graphics, but extremely deep simulation.
It's got a combat log you need to follow just like Fortress. Like it's that kind of thing. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a very interesting game, but it's the kind of game that you feel like you have to watch like 10 videos before you start playing. So you understand what's going on. Oh, 100%. Anyway, good game to have a numpad for. Gross. Question from TJ. What are your thoughts on creating a separate partition on a large SSD that is dedicated to a Windows install?
Short of putting Windows on its own drive, I always thought this was a good practice, as if the Windows install corrupts, it won't take any other data with it, assuming personal files and games are on another partition or drive. But searching around online, I see conflicting opinions on whether it's worth the effort. So that's kind of that's kind of it. I've been it's funny. I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm working on another thing about it.
But remember the old days when you have to, I had to reinstall windows like once a year to kind of keep it running good. And then windows 10 came out and we don't do that anymore. Yeah. It's it's, it's. I think I think this is a direction we're going to end up getting with Windows eventually. My guess is that like OS 10 and a lot of Linux's Windows becomes immutable at some point where the OS is essentially untouchable. Yeah, we.
I mean, this would be a tough subject to dig into because it's intensely technical and it's not something you can really put your hands on, but immutable OSes has become a pretty interesting topic. There is a site I follow, because of course I do, for every macOS release, they... They do the work and document exactly what macOS looks like under the hood on a drive now. It is insane. It is completely insane what a macOS install looks like now. It is so many different little...
partitions and sub-volumes and they are cryptographically signed and sealed and they are combined into snapshots at boot time. Like, I could barely explain it. You're looking glassy-eyed. Are you looking this up? No, no, no. So I was doing research on this and I found the site that I think you're talking about. I can't remember what it's called. Does it have like a big block diagram of what the partition scheme looks like? For each one. Yeah.
Like it's incredible. It's mind bending. Like what, what Apple is doing to keep anybody from tampering with the OS on your drive these days is like complete insanity. Well, but I mean, so there's real benefit to it, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying it's like a bad thing. It's just hard to understand. If you're a lunatic like me and you want to make like a bootable backup of your macOS install drive, for example, like it's pretty trippy. Tricky, not trippy, although both actually.
But also you don't have to because the, your OS 10 install drive is just the same as every other OS 10 machine out there. So that's 11, I guess, or whatever they're on now. That's actually, that's an interesting downstream consequence of the way Apple is doing things. Now you don't. You don't need to wipe and reinstall your Mac OS anymore because every Mac OS install is now a bit exact copy of every other Mac OS install.
Yeah. So you just do a factory reset and it wipes all of the user data and you were back to a fresh, you know, exactly as if you had reinstalled anyway. It's crazy. I will say before we move on, just because I'm rambling about the things I spend my free time on. Apple has a tool for backing up a modern ARM max system drive. It's called ASR. Oh, you might want to look up. It's a full on, it's a command line. It's a command line utility with a full on man page. Like it's that level of low level.
But there does exist the capability to properly back up a Mac OS drive now with that tool. If you want to, you really want to spend the time doing that. Like I probably will at some point, I need to wipe my laptop and I just want to make sure everything's backed up anyway.
It's the Eclectic Light Company is the site that I was talking about. That sounds right. I'm going to send you a link to the post. That is them. Yes, absolutely. I'll put a link to that in as well. It is a lot to wrap your head around. Yeah, but so to answer your question about the Windows thing is...
The benefit of doing a separate partition in the old days was it made it easy to image your C drive and then restore your C drive from an image when something got crufted up, right? I don't know that you have to do that work anymore. Like you, you don't get an easy way. Like if you reinstall on top of that, it's not going to be any different than if it's on the partition with everything else. If the, if the drive fails.
you're not going to like that problem is going to be the same if your drive is corrupting regularly you have a larger problem with your hardware that is not related to windows like you have something jacked up with your memory you're overclocking your cpu too much or something like that
Your Windows install should not get corrupted regularly. That is where we're at with Windows at this point. If you're on Windows 10 or 11, it should be pretty good. And if it is, you can do the SFC space slash scan now. to find the corrupted files and restore them from the restore partition, which is like a hidden 700 meg partition on the on the backside of your drive or gig 70 gig. I can't remember. It's it's a relatively small partition of the back end of your drive.
Yeah, so it's the little add-on partitions like that that actually make me still fairly distrustful of the Windows installer based on past experience. It's funny, all the work I have been doing with UEFI and Linux and stuff over the last couple of months is around trying to...
just finally understand like modern partition schemes and bootloaders and how like a modern pc works once you press power so the point that like i'm installing new linux is by just like dropping into a command line and g disking the partition layout on the disk however I want it and doing like a ch root install or whatever. But I would never do that for Windows because I don't trust what it does when it runs the installer.
Oh, I think he's asking something different than that. I don't think he's saying keep the installer on the drive. I think he's saying. No, no, no. I'm just I'm offering that as a preamble to say, like, I feel very comfortable now working with manual partitioning and manually. putting OSs on different partitions like he's describing. What I'm saying is that the Windows installer is opinionated enough about what it wants to do on its own that once you hit install.
Like I can't predict what it's going to do to the point that I don't think I would actually bother trying to do something like this because I've had I've had the Windows installer put that recovery partition on a whole separate drive from the one it was putting system on before. That's the kind of point that I'm trying to make. I'm inclined to just give Windows a whole drive and let it do what it's going to do. And just work around it. Yes. Because.
It wants to do what it's going to do anyway, and I would just be worried about unsupported behavior if you try to install it in a way other than Microsoft expects you to. And post UEFI Windows also has some really specific requirements about what the last partition on the drive is. So if you if you. If you change that stuff around, like, for example, I have two SSDs, two two terabyte SSDs, and I needed to image one onto the other. And the new one is like 75 megabytes smaller than the old one.
Oh, that's no problem. You just shrink the partition and then you move the old partition back and you do an image across and it works, right? No, it won't boot. Because then the end of the back partition is in the wrong place and you have to do a bunch of boot repair stuff. And it's an enormous pain in the ass. Just just use Windows. Let Windows manage itself.
And like I said, if your C drive is getting corrupted regularly, you need to figure out what is what's wrong with your computer. Something is jacked up. Right. All right. Question from Lovic. Long ago in a console generation, a long time away. The heyday of a voice chat in video games was centered on Xbox Live. I know I personally haven't used it myself since the 360 in favor of things like Discord, TeamSpeak, or Skype, but game developers keep including it.
Is there secretly a large portion of users that still use it or is it a feature that's included to check a box? Well, OK, so cross play games. A lot of players on the console use the default. voice chat that's built into the console so they'll voice with their party if they're in a party but people who play solo often use the in-game chat um to speak to other people in their party all sorts of stuff and for cross play
You really need it until fairly recently. You need in-game voice chat for games to support cross-play. Brad, if you're playing on a PlayStation, I'm playing on an Xbox. we would have to have some sort of weird phone or external based solution to use discord on both of those platforms until fairly recently. Um, the, the PC space has mostly moved away from in-game. However, The other exception is games that use prox chat like that kind of came on.
I feel like Lethal Company was the first thing that I saw that really used Prox Chat recently. Yeah, I can't think of anything before that. It's becoming a thing. Like, it's surprisingly common all of a sudden. Well, hold on. It was a thing a long time ago too. Look, look, I know it's always been, it's been a thing since the first Halo was being demoed right on the Macintosh, but it's never caught on in the way it is now is what I'm saying. Like it's.
It was great on Halo 2 on the Xbox. When you sneak up behind somebody and shove them, you're like, hey, man, I got you. Wow. And then they hear that in their ear coming out of their speakers. I must have played the wrong multiplayer games. I feel like people have never really cared about proximity voice chat that much until.
last year or two so i played i played halo 2 with a group of other magazine editors and xbox people and oxm editors and stuff like that for years and we all used the prox chat because Like it was super fun when you're playing with somebody, you jump in the back of their car and then you start whacking them. You're like, oh, you can give them some grief because, you know, I would never do it in the in the wild Internet because.
No, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think what's different now is that there are very good both gameplay and atmospheric reasons to constrain the voice chat like that. Like people are coming up with design reasons to include it and feature it in a way that they never did before. There was an Among Us mod that was popular during the pandemic for the PC version of Among Us that added Prox Chat. So when you'd sneak up behind somebody and kill them, you could talk to them a little bit beforehand.
uh and that was that was incredible because it went from being a game where everybody had to be silent when they were out doing their tasks to like you can there's table talk and some kind of smack talk yeah but but yeah i think to your point the game's like um uh what's the ghost hunting game uh phasmophobia phasmophobia and lethal company and uh content warning and and void crew and like those have have taken i i think what honestly i think what happened is that
Vivox started doing a voice in game chat and letting you hook it into your main audio system instead of just being its own thing that lived outside. And then you can add like filters and. and make it a gameplay element rather than just a, you know, a way to talk to your friends. Vivox is a middleware for audio communication, right? Yeah. Shout out to Chromehounds.
The OG in this space. Yes. Like Chrome Hounds is a very early example of a game that used voice chat in a clever way to enhance the gameplay and was criminally underappreciated. Well, I mean, the thing that you're referencing is. When you started the game, you didn't have voice chat unless there was a specific goal captured on the map by your team. So you had to go and capture the antenna. And then you'd only have voice chat in a bubble around that. It was amazing. Cool idea.
But that wouldn't work in Discord because people would just cheat now, right? Right. Yeah, that's fair. Let's see. How about I'll go back to the emails for a minute, as promised. David from Holliston, Massachusetts. Okay. Will recently floated the idea of using a NUC. That's the little, you know, little tiny. Nuclear unit of computing. Yes. The formerly Intel, I guess now owned by ASUS, right?
MSI also makes things that they call NUCs. Oh, really? Maybe it's just a generic term now? I don't know what happened there, but yeah. I thought, I thought Asus bought the NUC name, but I guess not. It's a little, it's a little tiny x86 boxes. Yeah. Like Apple TV size. Yes. Yes. We'll, we'll flow to the idea of using a NUC as his daily driver and reserving the power hungry high end PC for gaming.
I'm also interested in this kind of setup, but how would you do it? The KVM is the first thing that comes to mind, but is there any KVM on the market that can handle your average enthusiast system? I have a 1440p 144Hz G-Sync monitor. plus two other displays, wired USB input devices, a USB headset and webcam, and all of the other connected bits on my desk that I want to continue to use on both PCs. Switching monitor inputs alone isn't practical for all that, and KVMs.
seems squarely targeted at other markets like data centers, AV setups, or business home offices where latency is less of a concern. PyKVM doesn't seem quite up to the task yet. As a PyKVM owner, I can attest it absolutely is not suited for this use case. Does a proven, reasonably priced, enthusiast-friendly solution exist? Something that acts as a proxy?
for almost every important peripheral to PC connection has to be rock solid and practically invisible. Yep. The thing you want is called a USB switch, and it's just a stupid switch that connects the USB devices from one computer to another one.
And then you're going to change the input on the monitor. Okay. So that is two steps, which like maybe a little bit of extra management, but not probably not that big a deal. What if you had control your monitor, change the input for you? That's true. I mean, you still got to press a button to do that, but it's true.
It's not so bad. You could just make a desktop shortcut for that or put it on your stream deck or something like I do. Yeah. So the problem is the KVM is a translation layer. So it takes the input from one thing.
and splits it out to the other and typically they don't play well with high refresh rate monitors or things like hdr probably would be my guess so yeah and at the same time they also add latency in the in the input side because it's it basically is showing up It takes a KVM traditionally would show up to your mouse and keyboard as a device, and then it translates those inputs out.
so if you have like a bunch of weird buttons on your mouse or if you have media keys or something like that they may or may not get translated and passed on and things like your logitech g hub controller won't be able to software won't be able to change the dpi of your monitor
from the software stuff like that so so yeah your instincts are good here but a belkin makes dumb usb switches that have you just stick a little button on your desk and you hit the button and it switches between the two computers and you're good to go yep sounds like a nice i like a good dumb cheap portable solution like that you know yeah they're like they're like 40 bucks the only trick is uh there's a there's a cheap one that's usb2 there's a more expensive one that's usb3
If you're using USB-C keyboards that draw a lot of power for lights, you probably need the USB-C one. Otherwise, the USB-C one will probably work fine. Sorry, I don't know if you mentioned, are these typically powered? Unpowered, typically. Okay. Or I think I think technically the one that I have has a micro USB power in that I power from a five amp or 500 milliamp USB plug. Yeah.
Let's do a couple of quick questions about, I don't know, DRM authentication. Oh, I love DRM. Trying to think what bucket these fall into exactly. You'll see what I mean when I read the questions, though. Here's one from flip triples, which is a good username. That is a good username. I recently started studying for the CISSP to access the official study guides online content. You're met with a DRM prompt.
Answer the following question to validate your product. In chapter 11, what is the fifth word of the caption for figure 11.3? That is some 80s video game nonsense. Are there any other products out there still using this kind of MS-DOS era DRM? When was the last time you encountered it?
I have not seen something like that since I was playing like Leisure Suit Larry games in the 90s, probably like 100% like Sierra games or games of that nature in that era. Probably the last time I saw something like that, pretty easily defeated.
Do you ever have one of the ones with the red decoder thing that you put over the manual and it popped up? I don't think I ever had anything other than exactly what's being proposed here, which is just the like eighth word of the fifth page type stuff. I never had any of the fancy ones. I.
The fun part about that was as soon as I got access to the Internet, I realized that all you had to do was search for the because like I that when those games were popular, I lived in a dorm and people would come by and borrow games and stuff all the time. Right. because we were is basically like a casual piracy ring over in the in the freshman dorms and somebody would grab the manual
And then I was just like, well, I'm going to go look and see if this is on Usenet. And I went and looked and it wasn't just the manual that was on Usenet. That would have been a big download. It was like, here are the 20 different prompts that it gives you in the passcode. Of course. And I was like, oh man, this is the...
This is the saddest piracy I've ever participated in. That's pretty good. Yeah. I don't know why this question made me think of this, but I went and looked it up right before this. Have you seen free DOS? Yeah. Okay, are you familiar with it? I might start tinkering with FreeDOS a little bit. FreeDOS is the open source disk operating system that's compatible with like DOS 6.2 or something. Yes, it is a new open source implementation of MS-DOS.
not emulates, but it re-implements all of the system calls of DOS and stuff. So it's fully compatible with basically everything, like every, I think more or less every DOS program and only Windows up to 2.0, unfortunately.
it's it's fun because it's the same they're doing the same thing with open source that microsoft did to ibm or compacted with ibm right microsoft did with ibm i guess yeah yes anyway but you can install it on a modern computer so you could like you could boot free dos on your 9800 x 3d and play x-wing that way native natively i don't have a floppy drive anymore uh you can boot it off a usb stick or whatever as well
Have you tried to play X-Wing on the DOS on the F486 core for the Mr.? No. I'm kind of curious because I think it's a little slow, right? It's like 25 hertz or something? 25 megahertz? I think that... I think the 486 core is like technically actually like a high end 386 in terms of performance or maybe a 486 SX 25. It's not very fast. Yeah. You'd be much better off with something like Frito. So I kind of want to mess with that thing. I'm kind of.
I'm kind of becoming fascinated. This might be an episode topic if maybe we get our hands on free DOS and pull up a couple other things. I found a guy on GitHub who is writing modern drivers for Windows 3.1. Why wouldn't you? Yeah, clearly. He wrote a modern video driver that will work on modern graphics cards and let you run Windows 3.1 on a modern machine. And there are screenshots on that GitHub repo of the Windows 3.1 program manager.
At 1080p end up. Wow. It is mind blowing to look at. I bet that's really, really small. It's like usable, but pretty small. Sure. Yes. Need to get different glasses. There's all kinds of weird stuff going on and people trying to get old OSs working on new computers stuff right now. I love it. Yeah, it's neat. The other question in that vein is from Fernando. How did the new I am a human button prompts work?
I get the ones that make me pick motorcycles and hieroglyphics, but what's the deal with the ones that just make me check a box, think for a bit, and then deem me a soul vessel? Or a human. If they can tell that I'm me just by me clicking a box, why not just make the check automatic? Typically, they look at the cookies that they have access to, and they can profile you as a human based on that.
I'm not sure. Does that, where does the checkbox factor in? I'm still not sure what purpose that serves. I think you have to, I think the machines have a hard time checking the box. I don't know. The point is if, if you're running not a.
Like a lot of the things that are not humans are not running like a graphical interface. So the checkbox won't even show. Oh, you're saying you're saying the checkbox is just one last line for like fully automated scraping or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I see. I see what you mean.
yeah so i'm surprised that there is not some automated way for scrapers to check boxes like visually identify them at this point you could like use computer vision or something Well, it's like if you want to rule out bot answers to a survey for a contest survey, you make the first question.
a yes answer default to you put two questions in and one is a yes and one is a no and the things that always answer the same thing to everything will be ruled out by those two questions because you say hey are you a bot no and it's like are you sure you're not a bot yes
And then you roll out like 90% of the bots because most of them are really lazy. Yeah. Fair. All right. I'm going to say we wrap this one up with a cake batter lightning round. What do you say? I love it. I love it. It's my favorite time of the month. It's cake batter lightning round. Yes. All right.
Some quick hits here. If I were to introduce myself as, quote, being born in the late second millennium, do you think that's a good opener for a PowerPoint presentation? OK, so the first millennium is from zero to a thousand.
And the second millennium is from a thousand and one to 19 to 2000. That's a weird way to put it, man. I think, I think that's a pretty cool way to describe yourself. The problem is that just about everybody with, I mean, obviously there are an increasing number of exceptions. As we get deeper into the 21st century, but a large number of people can make the same claim to fame. So yeah, not super unique at the moment, but it still sounds very cool.
I think about those people that were born in like 1998 or 1999 that might get to see the next century after this one. That sounds optimistic. Probably not. Let's be real. Let's maybe not dig into what we expect life expectancy trends to look like in this century. Yeah, well, okay. Yeah, I guess I've started referring to things as the turn of the century now from like the 1990s to the early 2000s.
I think that's totally valid. Well, but like for the first 20 years of my life, that was the last turn of the century. Right. Yeah. If you're going to do the millennium thing, you've got to grandiose it a little bit. You've got to make it in the waning days of the second millennium or something like that. Next question. How often do you clean your headphones or earbuds?
I find if I don't regularly wipe them down with some isopropyl alcohol, my earbuds get irritated. I can't use the soft, the rubbery tips on my AirPods because they irritate my canals. Oh, that's a bummer.
yeah i think it's there's something in there that my skin doesn't like so i buy uh comply foam tips i have for years because it's always been a problem within years for me and they only last about five months probably on the outside geez well you get it's a three pack for like 10 bucks yeah that's all right so you know they go to the ocean i'm sure which feels bad i actually realistically they aged my girl in my office for a long time and then i throw them all out at once um
But they're very comfortable and they isolate the noise a little bit better. Sure. But usually like every two. Look, they come in colors is what I'm saying. They're not white. So they come in colors. And if I take them out and I go, ew, that's when I clean them. Fair. I think that's probably the standard. I have a decent little like $30 pair of sound cores that I use for exercise. Yeah.
That I probably went like a year, year and a half on before I thought to clean them. Gross. Maybe about a year. At some point I looked at them and was like, yeah, basically what you said. I'm going to say you want to get like one of those.
A, it's nice to have a plunger to go down in the stick hole if you're an AirPod person. So like where the sticks go in the case, you can jam down there and clean all the gunk out of there. Yes, I've noticed that the case actually is perhaps more problematic than the earbud. You need to pick a pick thing to get the goop out of the hole where the sound comes out. And then there's like I have this other little nice little side brush for getting in like the wire meshy places.
Uh, and we talked about my, my air, your pod slash keyboard cleaning thing a few years ago, but it's pretty good. Clean your headphones. I'm going to go and tell you, or maybe don't because my AirPods started getting janky, which I think was probably iOS 18's Bluetooth stack being bad.
And when I was down at GDC one day, I had a couple hours in between meetings. I was like, I'm gonna go up to the Apple store and see what I can do about this. So I went up to the Apple store, which is like two blocks away. And I was like, hey, my...
I have two different problems. My right ear charges sporadically, even though there's no gunk in the case. And the left ear drops all the time when I'm on the subway. And he's like, oh, let me see. And he took it back and test him for like 10 minutes. He's like, well. I couldn't get it to replicate, but I did see some weird stuff in the logs on them. And also you're 20 days away from your warranty expiring. So here's three new here's two new AirPods in a new case. What? Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah.
So two years, I'm at two years or three years, I guess, on those. I can't remember. Well, no, that was to be clear. That was the paid AppleCare Plus warranty. So, yeah, I paid the 50 bucks for the AppleCare Plus or whatever it was when I bought them because I tend to drop them and step on them.
Sure. But I'd never used anything before. And he was like, you haven't used the warranty at all. And like, it's about to expire. So let's go 50 bucks to get a brand spanking fresh new pair right at the end of the warranty period is pretty good. Especially since they haven't updated them. Yeah. Man. Score. Yeah. I was like, shout out to Tony at the Union Square Apple Store. Yeah. He's a band. He's a DJ too. If you need a DJ in the sunset, he's got you.
Made some small talk, huh? We had conversations. Yes. All right. Last cake batter. Green onions as a garnish. Does anyone like green onions? Dude, what the fuck? Dude, green onions are the best onions. Green onions are definitely up there. I literally agree. Yeah, I literally was like, hey, Gina, we need to play this. I saw this email and I was like, Gina, we got to put green onions in the garden because I forgot when we were playing in the garden the other day. So green onions, everything.
You know what's cool? If you buy some like living green onions at the store and chop off the top so you can just kind of set them out and let them keep growing for a while. Just harvest them. Get some more. Keep getting more onions. Yeah. Do you eat the whites too? Whites. The white part of the green onion?
like kind of partially like fried rice or something maybe yeah like a little ways into the bowl like maybe not not the whole thing probably but oh see when I was a kid we used to grow those in the backyard and I would just pick them out of the garden
chomp them and eat the whole thing like like bugs bunny i mean i don't think there's an onion i don't like but that might be a little far even for me well they're pretty sweet when they're little okay they're like it's not like a it's not like a vidalia sweet but they're not like It's not like going to hurt you. I'm very pro onion. Yeah. Love it. All right. Well, there you have it. So if you have questions, you can send them to tech pod at content on town or alternately.
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where it will become one of the questions as a candidate for being answered on the podcast. Again, it's patreon.com slash tech pod. It's a listener supported show. So we wouldn't be here without you all. There's 3212 of you as of today, right now. Which is really nice. It's lovely. We appreciate every one of you. That's a fine number, I think. I think it's a, it's a, it's a pretty, it's a surprising number to me every time I look at it, honestly.
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It's also the last episode of the month where we thank all of our associate producer to your patrons, including Alejandro Navarro, Andre M. Burke, P.E., Andrew Dicey-Scholdice, Arthur Gies, Ben Tallman. Brutal Kerfuffle, Eric, Eric Klein, Felix Kramer, Graham Banks, Jad Rita, Just Associate Red Wedge, Kerp, Matt Walker, parentheses Walkman 8080. close parentheses, Mike Etheridge, Nathan Phelps, P Tibbs, Sanchik Kumar, Steve Lynn, Thomas Shea, Tom Fuller, Tom Hilton, and Xbox Playdates. Whoa.
I don't know who Xbox Playdates is, but shout out to Xbox Playdates. Sure. so that's it thanks everybody so much for supporting the show and we will be back next week with another one patron episode we had so many good questions this month we barely dipped into them so if you want more questions in your life maybe sign up for the patreon get those get those get that question out get that patreon episode because i bet i bet there's going to be more questions this month
Yeah. Yeah. I guess we'll probably stick to discord questions for the patron episode just so that people who ask them can hear the answers. Typically. Yeah. That's what we do. Yeah. Yes. um but anyway uh that'll be it for us this week and as always please consider the environment before printing this podcast