Is there ever in your mind a situation where it's okay to plug a surge protector into another surge protector? yeah it's anytime you need more plugs on that search protector it's like a network switch done and done thanks for listening no i look there are rules good reasons not to plug things into other things but like
Sometimes I'll put a surge protector at the end of an extension cord. Yeah, that's probably fine. The thing I've never been clear about, because the recommendation has always been don't plug a surge protector into another surge protector. I didn't know if that was a thing about... stacking the surge protection and that presenting an issue or is that more of a general
Forgive me for saying this, but the general public is kind of dumb safety precaution of like, hey, you shouldn't overload a circuit. You shouldn't be running too many things off of one outlet. You shouldn't be, you know, X, Y, and Z. Yeah. Multiplying plugs across, you know what I mean? Like, is it, is it something inherent to the way search protection works and that you shouldn't stack that? Or is it just, Hey, electricity is dangerous. Like be smart.
Oh, man, I don't know that. But my assumption is that it's the. Hey, people will do something stupid, like plug 35 things into one 120 volt outlet. Hey, what if you have like a 10 outlet surge protector and you could just, that's just 10 more surge protectors you could plug in. Yeah. Well, like, so we, Adam and I were building a PC the other day, PC world and. we put a bunch of like we put a lot a lot of it was one of those fish wool cases with like
10 fans, 11 fan slots. I think they're really cool. The kind where like two sides are glass, but it's one, it's one right angle glass panel. Yeah, exactly. Like, man, the structural. the structural lack of integrity to that design like just makes my skin crawl well so the the glass on the front is typically real thick oh yeah so like and and there's metal on the top and bottom so rail you screw it in and it becomes the
you know, the third wall of your house. I mean, admittedly, I'm not a window and PC cases fan to begin with, but like that just feels like a form over function. Yeah. Edge case, like extreme asking for trouble. Well, okay, so I don't stand on my PC case. It hangs under my desk in a structured way. And anyway, we put 10 fans in this thing. And there were plenty of fan headers to plug most of them in with some splitters, but the fans that we had came with these three-way splitters.
And I was like, well, what if we We could plug three fans into each splitter and then we plug. those three splitters into another splitter and then just plug it into one fan header why not look 12 volts should be enough for anybody i think bill gates said that yeah that's what i said yeah yeah exactly that's what bill gates said and i
I expected the fans to run slower than they're supposed to or something, and it was totally fine. I guess they all necessarily have to run at the same speed, but that's probably fine. Yeah, so they all run the same speed when you do that, but... This wasn't a PC for actual use. This was just to do a build on a Thursday afternoon. Show build. The reason I was asking about daisy-chaining surge protectors, I've got the CRT going, as we discussed last week. Yeah.
I've been tidying up what I'm coming to think of as my little Mr. Nook or my analog video game Nook. But you got a nook for that? I do not have a nook for my nook. Okay. You don't have a nook nook. Not yet. Not yet, but maybe at some point you should think about a nook nook. It's in, it's in one square of this little kind of like four by two Ikea sort of shelving unit behind me that you can kind of classic. I've got an old search, but like an old, like.
30 year old? Probably more of a power strip than a surge protector now. I moved it out here. I had it back home, let's say. I'm going to say that's probably not going to do much surge protection. It was a nice enough one to have. We've talked about this before. It was a nice one. Nice enough one to have the little LED light on it that indicates surge protection. Yeah. And that light is not on anymore.
Yeah, that's those are those are my understanding is that those are not directly there. Like they're. correlation not a def not a definite causation between the search like more of a hint than a suggestion Yeah, it's it's like the it's like the air filter light on your it's like the replace the filter light on your dehumidifier that just when you press the hey, I just reset the filter. It sets a timer for three months. But yeah, those are those are like.
Okay, so my theory on surge protectors is... It really depends on what you plug into them. Yeah, I mean, this is this is the TV and a mister and like a USB powered brick. And that's generally about it. Maybe a GameCube or a PS2 once in a while. So my, my mister stuff is all plugged into one of those Anker power cubes with the three, the three, like 25 watt USB ports. And then it's got four, three or four 120, you know, just normal power plugs on it. Okay.
So it ends up being one tight little package. I just started having visions of you modding that old general electric TV for USB-C power. Oh, God. I should do that. That's like a thing in console modding these days. A lot of people like to mod USB-C power support into things like PS2s and GameCubes now.
That makes a lot of sense, actually. Yeah, the EU loves it, I bet. I'm sure. And anyway, so there is another surge protector in the vicinity of that area. And I was just thinking, like, could I just plug that? Old, probably not search protecting strip into the one that is and still get the benefits. I don't have a good sense of how much power the old CRT uses. Yeah, I need to look it up.
Yeah, like if but like if you were using so if you were using like a toaster oven and the microwave and then plug your washing machine into the same surge protector. And then use that last port of the search protector to also plug in a giant gaming PC. That's going to go badly because it's going to trip your breaker. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. I don't I don't actually know. I think you're probably fine. I think it's probably fine. Although.
I've got another suggestion. Yeah. What if I buy a new surge protector instead? I mean, I don't think that there's a lot of use for vintage in surge protection. I found a weird artifact when I was cleaning out my office last week. I love those. So I had in the back of the closet in my office, I had a tote bag that had about 50 pounds of pennies in it. Like, I don't want to get into the whole penny thing. So this is you found several thousand artifacts instead.
Well, so like the I'm my feelings on the pennies is the dollar has become worthless, have started to mirror the feelings of the worst person in the world on pennies. And, you know, look. I just put them in a tote bag because it wasn't worth rolling them up to take them to the bank and get money. Now we have one of those coin machines, which has been at the grocery store for like 15 years now. The coin star. Yeah. So that tells you how long this bag of coins has been in my garage. But.
I mean, in my closet. And I was like, I don't want to have to sort this, but I have a 12 year old who doesn't get to handle real money very much. So she was like, I'll, I'll, I'll go through those and sort those dad. And I was like, Oh yeah. Okay. Is this, is this like the CRT in the old video games thing where she did novel to her? She actually wants to deal with something that we all thought was mundane and annoying. Yeah. Artifacts of a pastime. Exactly.
Well, look, I have I have especially like I when I was in high school, I ran a couple of vending machines around Bristol. Wow. Like like the kind that you put a dime in and get like some candy coated peanuts or something out of actual machines and a dime. Yeah. Dining machine. Yeah. Well, it's like, it's like the kind of, you know, it's like the gumball machine basically.
So like a, like literal turning, like crank, like a crank operated one. Okay. That's like, I bought a, I bought a bunch of them for like 300 bucks. And, uh, do you remember, do you remember when dollar slots became a thing on vending machines? Yeah. Like, yeah, they never worked. You remember? Well, I mean, I'm more thinking about the time when you didn't need multiple dollars to buy things out of machines like a coin slot was enough.
When I was a kid, back in my day, you just dropped a quarter in the vending machine and it would give you a sody pop. So anyway. She was going through all these coins and I told her to pull out anything that doesn't look like the other ones, right? So there were a couple of like, there were a couple of loonies, a couple of Canadian dollars, a couple of toonies.
She's like, these are weird. Yeah. Toonies are $2 Canadian coins with loons, but they have a, they have like a silver outside and a gold inside. Sure. Yes. Yeah. I've got a tiny little drawstring sack of foreign coins around here that I've accumulated on my various work travels. That's what crown royal bags are for, right? You put your foreign money in there. We had some pesos. We had some other stuff, some check money, some stuff like that.
There was a one Chuck E. Cheese token from 2000, which was, I guess, the last time I went to Chuck E. Cheese. That's going to be my new poker card keeper, I think. Right. Is Chuck E. Cheese tokens pretty good. But she also found this. which is a maximum PC kick-ass dog tag. Huh? The kick-ass award was our editor's choice award at maximum PC. Okay. But the interesting thing on it is on the back, it says Maximum PC Party, Hard Rock Cafe, Wednesday, November 17th, 1999, 8pm to 11pm. Wow.
That was at CompDex in 1999. Okay. And I'm going to go and tell you, I would not be sitting here right now talking to you without that dog tag. Because I was working at Ars Technica at the time and Maximum PC was selling our ads. And so when we went to Comdex, we met the Maximum PC for like all the ad network people. Oh, including like Tom's Hardware and some other folks. Big, big, big names.
Had like an ad dinner because we met and went and met the people who were making money for us. Sure. And then they were like, hey, you should come to the party on Thursday night or whatever night it was. Wednesday night. It's at the Hard Rock. And we were like, OK, sure, we'll come to the party. And they gave us all these dog tags because this was the admit one for the for the party. Yes, the Hard Rock, the site of many, many extracurricular functions at Las Vegas trade shows.
Yeah, it's like off the strip, but it's fun. And they had a good they had a good, pretty good vibes. So anyway, we. We went to this party and it's where I met all the editors of Maximum PC who then were like, hey, you should come out. They recruited me away from Ars Technica, basically. And we're like, you should move to California and come be an editor at this magazine. And like we went, we ended up, it was a really fun, like it was a weird party because we got there and it was all dudes.
And then suddenly a bunch of women showed up and they were clearly not computer nerds because it was like the publisher of the of the magazine was like, we got to get we got to get girls at this party. So I think he called somebody. And then we all left and went to, I think the Rio, which was still there then and drank, drank drinks and danced until like.
Basically, I had to go get on the plane to fly home drunk. When I got to Nashville and had to drive the three hours to Knoxville, I had to sit in the parking lot at the hotel. for about 10 hours. So I was sober enough to drive. Wow. 10 hours. It was a good night. I was look, I never went to sleep. I went straight from, I went straight from maximum PC party at eight o'clock.
to getting on the plane at 8.55 the next morning. Look, Vegas will do that to you. It was bad. I mean, look, we also stayed at the Circus Circus that year because we didn't have any money at ours and everybody kind of paid for their own hotel and I was broke. So. I couldn't even afford a room in the circus circus. I was in the circus circus extensions behind the circus circus.
which are like cinder block buildings in the parking lot of the circus circus behind it. Like, I think it's probably where the, Hey, you can drive over cars with the tank places now. Okay, great. Circus Circus is still operating, apparently. Look, Circus Circus is eternal. The Circus Circus Hotel smelled simultaneously like fire and water damage. like wet carpet and fire. Okay. So I assume somebody fell asleep smoking a cigarette and lit their mattress on fire. And then they also put it out.
but they didn't remediate any of the carpet because it was the circus circus. Yep. That's yes. That's how they roll. Uh, anyway, wow. Like full on, like origin story artifact, not, not, not regular career artifact, but full on like. This is where I got my start kind of thing. That's cool. Wouldn't be here without that. Yeah, I found something similar when I was going through waterlogged stuff in the basement a few months ago.
I was very pleased about this like a lot of my 9083 stuff got ruined but then up on a shelf in a duffel bag at some point I found a little bag. of basically everything I brought back from E397, which was my first one. Oh, wow. That's an Atlanta one. Yeah, that was the first Atlanta one. And that was and that that basically is my version of what you just described like that. That E3 was like, I wouldn't be sitting here without that E3 without going to that and meeting people from IRC and.
I had my show badge and everything. It was like, man, this is kind of the beginning. That's it. You should make a shadow box. Yeah, probably. My shadow box would just be this and a bunch of vodka tonics, I think. Well, look, everybody's got to start somewhere. Okay, this one's coming straight out the Discord.
Oh, straight from the episode topic suggestion channel, although suggested by Base Guy GT as something that might not be a full episode, might in fact be good for an episode just such as this. Perfect. A mini topic. Wait, wait, we're doing mini topics. Anyway, the proposal is. That we comb through the lyrics of the Weird Al Yankovic 1999 classic all about the Pentiums to see how they hold up 26 years later.
I think you said right before we started this, you've never heard the song. I find that impossible to believe. I mean, I'm sure I've heard it, but it's not like, look, this is confession time, Brad. Not a huge Weird Al fan. Really? I like UHF okay. Man, how do you... He was pretty... How do you be your type of guy and not like Weird Al?
I, um, look, man, I weird out came with the kind of baggage that would get you beaten pretty good when I was a kid. And yeah, full on eighties, like nerd getting stuff in a locker type thing. Yeah. And, and like. I don't know. By the time I was old, by the time I was old enough that it wouldn't have negative repercussions on my long term survivability.
I probably was. What do you mean? Like the kind of guy you are. There was strength in numbers. OK, I rolled with a lot of weird. Al was my first show. Wow. I was like 13. I went to a Weird Al show. Yeah. No, that wasn't my first show. It was excellent. All right. Anyway, this the song, I believe the song is in the style of All About the Benjamins. Yeah, I believe that's correct. If that's if that's the case, I think I'm just going to take these by couplet.
Yeah, that sounds good. Each rhymed pair of lines And we can just figure out what to do with them as we go. What y'all want to do? Want to be hackers, code crackers, slackers? Wasting time with all the chatroom yackers? Okay. Wait, is this a Puff Daddy song? Yes. That has some extra baggage now. Pretty fraught these days, but look, Weird Al is...
Weird Al, Unimpeachable. Yes, pretty much. Before we get into this, did you watch that Daniel Radcliffe movie? No, God, I forgot that came out. I really should watch that. That's my favorite Weird Al joint. It's really good.
I got the sense. I don't, I don't really know how to ask this without having seen the movie. I got the sense that they did something weird with it. Like, of course, just watch the movie, right? Like it's, it's not just a straight up biopic, right? Like there's something. I mean,
I am not a position to say whether it accurately represents Weird Al's life, but I will say that the movie is riveting. I should. I should. I should. Yes. Okay. Anyway, yes. Wasted lots of time with the chat room. Yakers. Yeah, that we all did that. Nine to five chilling at Hewlett-Packard working at a desk with a dumb little placard. Yeah. I mean, I don't think people have placards on their desk anymore, but yeah. Also, I don't know. Hewlett Packard is something I associate with like the.
When was Hewlett Packard founded? Hewlett Packard is like original Silicon Valley crew cuts and short-sleeved white button-up shirts style. Yeah, pocket protectors and short-sleeved dress shirts. But Hewlett Packard still sells. They sell a buttload of computers still. And they did back then. And also that's what he's lampooning here. Actually, that is the, that is like the rap dis here thing is like, Hey, are you a square that works at HP? No.
But like also at this time, HP would have been the computer you buy. One of the computers you buy if you go into like Walmart. Yeah. Yeah. Paying the bills with my mad programming skills, defragging my hard drive for thrills.
I do miss seeing the little boxes move around on the hard drive. I mean, you can you can go get like fake defragging programs if you want these days. That sounds pretty good. They exist. I think they're on places like itch. I have straight up seen things that just look like the old Windows or DOS defrager. I want a screensaver that does that. I might, I might take, well, I'm not listening to the actual song. I might take issue with the rhythm and meter of the pair of lines, but anyway.
I got me 100 gigabytes of RAM. I never feed trolls and I don't read spam. You can't have 100 gigabytes, Weird Al. I have a 596. That's not a power of two. Well, I guess you can do 96. RAM is not always powers of two, but you know what I mean? Yeah. The non-binary RAM is what the non-powers of two ones are called. Installed a T1 line in my house, always at my PC, double clicking on my Ms. House. I don't know about Ms. House, but I'll allow the rest of that. But T1 line, you know, like that.
You know, the T1 sucks. I wouldn't want a T1. You couldn't pay me to have a T1 now. I don't need that uptime. I need the speed, baby. I think even in 99. t1 was still pretty damn well it was t1 is 1.5 megabits per second so t1 was
Look, I moved to California in 2000 and was freaking stoked that I could get SDSL that was 1.5 megabits each direction. So I like that was still pretty fast in 99. Right. Although that was getting like I was I was close to being on the university network at that point. So.
The T1 was actually getting kind of slow by those standards. If you were on cable, if you had a cable modem, the T1 would have been slow by then. Yes. Met a guy, we met a guy at the flea market last weekend who had a T1 in the 90s. He said it cost him about $2,000 a month. Yep.
Well, of course, I think he was running a little boutique ISP. Homegrown ISP, yeah. Upgrade my system at least twice a day. I'm strictly plug and play. I ain't afraid of Y2K. Okay, those things, that doesn't make any sense. Look, no one could. I mean, I guess you could have been strictly plug and play. I don't know. I don't feel like I don't feel like I feel like picking this apart is against the spirit of the song. Probably.
Upgrade my system at least twice a day. We're talking checking for updates. Did they even do automatic updates back then? Yeah, Windows 98 introduced automatic updates. Okay. Remember having to go download service packs? Oh, yeah. Remember having to go find OSR2 on Microsoft's site somewhere? Shout out to Blues News for letting us know when there were important security updates for your Windows 95 system. Because back then, updates like that meant like, hey, USB works now.
No, stuff like that. 98, 95 never had USB. I mean, maybe OSR2. I think, I mean, okay, now we're just splitting hairs. I'm pretty sure OSR2 actually did add USB support to Windows 95. But I don't think it worked was the problem. Anyway.
I'm down with Bill Gates. I call him money for short. I mean, I think he probably would like that. I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support. OK, like, I mean, look on the nerd hierarchy. I think Weird Al is going to beat up Bill Gates at the end of the day. Probably. It's all about the Pentiums. What? You've got to be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen. You've got Whiteout all over your screen.
Okay. So I don't, I don't like the non-inclusive nature of this. Yeah. Also we're now we're just descending into like very trite nerd cliches with the white hat. I don't know. Yeah, I do feel like I feel like you should try to lift up the dumb newbies rather than like smack them down. We're now. It's not very, not kind. You think your Commodore 64 is really neato? What kind of chip you got in there? A Dorito? Okay, that's pretty good. I mean, sure. Yes, that's like, okay, that is some...
Good dumb rap battle analogy stuff. Sure. I wish I had a Dorito. Although clowning on a Commodore 64 now is a lot different than it would have been in 99. So now everybody wants one. Oh, yeah. You're using a 286. Don't make me laugh. Your Windows boots up in, what, a day and a half? I mean, can't argue with it. Like, legit? Sure. You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette. You're the biggest joke on the internet.
I don't know about diskette and internet rhyming, but yeah. Diskette is a word I have not heard in probably 25 years, probably since about when this song came out. This is pretty good. You think he had like a consultant come in and help him with the nerd business? You think he knew it? I absolutely live in this life. All of this came right off of Weird Al's Dome. Your database is a disaster. You're waxing your modem, trying to make it go faster.
Doesn't make much sense, but I think the person is supposed to be playing this person like a fool. Waxing your modem is a pretty funny image. That's pretty funny, yeah. Hey, fella, I bet you're still living in your parents' cellar downloading pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar. OK, I mean, look, that's a that's a legitimate stereotype, I think. And posting me to like some brain dead brain dead AOL or. I should do the world a favor and cap you like old yeller.
You're just about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller. Well, there's a little bit of unfortunate ableism there, but that all got raw. I mean, he's I don't know why you need to throw down against Helen Keller. OK. And, you know, pour one out for Old Yeller, I guess. Like, straight up talking about killing people, man. Is this the only time Weird Al ever talked about murdering fools? You really need to watch that movie, dude.
All right, there's one more verse. I don't think we should do the whole verse. I think it's too long. Oh, come on. That didn't take that long. Okay, okay, okay. I mean, we can speed through it. Yeah, just... Logging in now. Want to run with my crew? Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do? This is some real Herbert Kornfeld. business here remember herbert kornfeld no i don't
Herbert Kornfeld was the Onion accountant from the streets column from like the early 2000s. Oh, OK. And he basically was like your accounts payable guy, but he talked like a gangster rapper. Yes, I saw. Oh, man, I should go pull some of that stuff up. I have man. Old Onion was great. I mean, Old Onion was very good. The new Onion is also surprising. front that has opened in our war against fascism, but also old, old.
Old Onion was also quite good. The Herbert Kornfeld was just really absurd. It's probably really offensive now, I guess, because it was it was Herbert Kornfeld was not a nice man. They called me the king of spreadsheets, got them printed out on my bedsheets. My new computer has got the clocks. It rocks. but it was obsolete before I opened the box. Is that the truth? A lot of...
A lot of like mid 90s beige box stereotypes in this song, which is probably understandable. Yeah, there weren't any there were no fancy cases. There was no aluminum case in 1999. Really just. Continuing on with the forced, or not the forced, but rather the rapid obsolescence for multiple lines here. You say you've had your desktop for over a week. Throw that junk away, man. It's an antique. Your laptop is a month old. Well, that's great if you could use a nice heavy paperweight.
1999, six video cards launched. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, people were buying new CPUs every like 18 months back then because things were slow and getting faster quickly. You got to get K6 to 200. You're going to get played full. That's right. My digital media is write-protected, every file inspected, no virus is detected.
He's the best. Yeah. That's the theme here. He's on top of the pecking order. Yeah. I beta tested every operating system, gave props to some and others. I dissed them. Wow. You think he dissed BOS? I bet he didn't like Windows ME. Probably not. Yeah. I bet he was way into BOS, actually. In fact, while your computer's crashing, mine's multitasking.
It does all my work without me even asking. So he was definitely way into BOS if he was a multitasking guy. No, he was. This is all about the Pentium. You couldn't get BOS on a Pentium in 1999. Well, I guess you could in 99. Eventually. Eventually they ported it. Yeah. Got a flat screen monitor, 40 inches wide wide. I don't know if these lyrics are... I don't know if the word wide actually appears twice in that line or not. I believe that yours says etch a sketch on the side. Wow.
flat screen monitor like i guess there were that would have been a big deal that would have been an expensive monitor in 1999. 99 were like my first my first lcd monitor was 2005 or 6. Yeah. He's, he's got that, he's got that, uh, that, that pretty fly for a rabbi money to buy a 40 inch flat screen. And he had the bling, uh,
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total loser. Okay, that's not actually the structure for newsgroups, but I'll allow it. Wait, could you not put hyphens in newsgroups? Well, no, they're, they're gonna let you do an alt dot top level. It has to be alt dot something. Yeah. Like the, look, the man, the man will come down on you from trying to make a new top level alt dot. It's only got so many syllables to work with. Okay. I guess, I guess.
Your motherboard melts when you try to send the fax. Where do you get your CPU? In a box of Cracker Jacks? Sick. Yep. Just... Free with purchase. Laying it down. Play me online. Well, you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you, I'll control, I'll delete you.
I look like, yeah, I'm going to say, I'm going to say the repetition of the word you in there that way is pretty good. Like those are some like legit decent. Those are, those are bars. Yeah. I'll control. I'll delete you. I'm going to put that in my vernacular. You know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you, I'll control, I'll delete you. That just flows, man. That's amazing. Yep. All right. That's, that's all the verse.
It's all about the Pentiums. It's all about the Pentiums, baby. Yep. Yeah. The song rips. This sounds good. I'll have to listen to this. I'm going to say the song is more than a little bit of a time capsule, but I'm okay with that. By the standards of the time, pretty good. I don't know about the Commodore slander. Pretty good, I'm going to say.
Good on you, Weird Al. Keep being weird. Brad, what's your thermal goo application method? Man, I've never settled on one, to be perfectly honest. I... key size or smaller dot in the middle and then like a very small dot around each corner well so okay so i did some i had some time i was doing some benchmarks and i was swapping cpus out a lot so i had time to work on this and do some research
And so I usually use the cryonaut stuff, which has a little brochure in the bag that says how to apply the goo. Oh, OK. Well, I mean, yeah, if there were if there were manufacturer recommendations, I would just go with those. Well, but then I went and looked on. Okay, so Cryonaut says, hey, why don't you take the goo? And you use that smear to kind of spread it out over flat over the surface. So you want to get a thin layer. Okay.
And then there's less chance it's going to blast out the sides and all that, which like I avoid that at all costs. I mean, I think we're probably a long way from the days of conductive thermal paste, but still like you just don't want to mess around. You can still get conductive thermal paste if you want, but it's not. You're doing like liquid metal or something crazy, but I think most of the decent like regular heat spreader style stuff is fine these days, but still you don't want to mess.
Yeah, you don't want to miss. Okay, so they said to spread it all flat and they'd give you a little trowel if you buy a big enough tube of the stuff. But then I looked at the internet and the video recommendations are a little different between whether you have Intel or AMD and especially if you have a dual CCD AMD chip.
Because the hot part of the dual CCD AMD chips isn't actually in the middle. It's actually toward the top of the or maybe the bottom of the of the spreader. It was the bottom on Zen 4. I don't know how it is now. I think it's still the bottom. I can't remember.
But the point is they recommend putting the big blob there and then doing like four small blobs in the corner and kind of like give it a little twist when you put it down. So it kind of spreads it around. Yeah, that sounds close to my method. A push and twist. Yeah. I don't know, man. I tried the spread for the first time when I was doing the last few CPU swaps for this benchmark loop. And I'm going to tell you, it's much easier to clean up. There's way less goo, but.
when if you you got to do it while the it works best while the cpu is still warm from the last set of benchmarks sure so that It kind of decreases the viscosity of the stuff so that it's easier to spread. That's what I was going to ask was, what's your cleanup routine? Oh, do you obsessively like isopropyl off every last bit of the old goo before you put more stuff on?
Well, it depends on whether it's AMD or Intel, because the AMD ones have those notches on the side that are impossible to clean out. Yeah, that's terrible. But I actually use Arctic Clean, which is I think it's from the same people that make Arctic Silver. Oh. And it's a, it's like a two, it's two.
solvents basically one is designed to remove the goo and then the other is just like removes a little bit of like is like super cleaning for the very top layer to get a nice clean surface for your for your interface and it's like six bucks it's not expensive and like they the tubs usually last me a couple of decades oh Maybe I should get some of that. And you just put a couple of drops of it on and put a first the one that's labeled one and then you use that to get the first layer of goo off.
And then you kind of polish it with the number two. I see. I just got some 91% ice purple and have been using that, but. Yeah, this this is you put it on both surfaces. So like if there's any kind of tarnish on the copper on your on your on your heat, you know, on the bottom of your heat sink.
it'll it'll clean that off too which is nice and it smells like oranges smells like citrus yeah yeah i mean most people are not switching cpus as much definitely as you or i mean i've only switched two cpus in the last three years but even that is more than most people deal with
The big problem with the Arctic clean is usually when I need it, I can't remember where I put it last. Yep, that will definitely happen. I guess you don't run into this as much as you change CPUs, but I always wonder how long... And I'm sure this varies by brand how long you have before it starts drying out and becoming desiccated and like it's just not serving its purpose anymore. So that that definitely varies by brand. Some of the typically.
So Cryonaut specifically sells formulations that are designed to last a long time or designed for enthusiasts. And the enthusiast stuff will dry out faster because it's designed for more thermal transfer. um like old arctic silver was a classic example that stuff was designed to last for a really long time sure like i but but still if you're if you're at four or five years into a pc and you're starting to see your thermals are looking weird like
The question I have is, do people who keep a CPU for five or six years actually look at thermals? And I kind of wonder if they do. Replacing the thermal goo is an easy way to solve late-stage PC. cpu crashes yeah you know what never changes is a graphite pad but i don't know i i still i still love the graphite pad in practice but i had to stop using one when i got this 14th gen intel it's too hot because
Every every degree centigrade really counted on this thing and even bringing it down like three or four degrees as pace did was very welcome at that point. Yeah, it's it's I totally get that. I. I think the graphite pads are great for stuff like SSDs. Yeah. Where you need like contact between the board and the cooling device. Yeah, right. Or I use one. I still use a graph iPad in my NAS, which is a 12600K, which is not getting super hot and is also not like running at full tilt very much.
Unless I'm compiling a kernel or something. I guess compiling a kernel does burn it pretty good. Actually, I rarely compile a kernel. The only things I compile on a regular basis are ZFS kernel modules and Python and things like that. You don't need to get into it. The runtime manager that I use compiles Python from source every time you install a new version. Anyway.
There's that, I don't know what it's called. I think we've probably talked about it before. It's the type of thing you still have to refer to by it's sort of like industry chemical, like alphanumeric code. I know Linus Tech Tips has pushed this stuff before. It's some kind of other. type of thermal interface material. Oh. I think we've talked about it before in the context of like, hey, people are talking about this instead of paste. I wonder if this is good, but I don't remember.
I don't remember what it's called. I think it's made by Honeywell, if I'm not mistaken, but it's like some other type of thermal compound that has to like cure. Like the longer it stays heated up, the more effective it gets or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so. Thermal interface is a place I don't like to do a lot of experimentation. The one exception is that...
When I was working back in PC, we used to use this stuff in the lab that was specifically for short-term testing because it was easy to clean. And it did a good job, but it definitely would dry out in a period of months. And that stuff was nice. But yeah, I don't like... Every once in a while, I look at the liquid metal on the site, and then I'm like, oh, do I really want to fool with gallium in my computer and then have to deal with...
The repercussions of gallium leaking out of my computer because the because it's on the side and I'm probably good. You know, it's nice when things just work. I like things that just work. You know when you buy storage bins with the intention of stacking them. The one thing they don't really come out and tell you is what the weight limits are on those things. Really? It feels like, well, I mean, I could roll over to the closet here and look at these new bins I bought, but...
I don't remember seeing any recommendations about how heavy to make them and how many high you can stack them. So my experience is the kind you buy at Target. Absolutely don't say that. Yeah, that's where these came from. I mean, they're hefty. It's like they're like reasonably resilient, I would like to think. But. So I like, I've been getting these HDX bins from Home Depot. Are they the black and yellow ones? The black and yellow ones.
You are the second person. I think we had, we had one of these that we stored like guinea pig hay in it for actually, yes, I'm looking the big black bin with the yellow lid. Yep. That's it. You're the second person. God, that, oh, that kills me. That's cheaper.
cheaper and probably sturdier those things are built like tanks right but they're they're built kind of like brick shit houses yeah oh and i started to say the reason i didn't get those i wanted something clear because i want to be able to see what's in the bin That is exactly the knock against me. The problem, I think, is that the clear plastic is always softer than the not clear plastic. You're probably right, actually. I could have just labeled them. You know, that's a real bummer.
I'm also working with very tight dimensions in this closet, in this apartment. Those were too big for... I think it would have gotten less net storage space if I had gotten ones of that size. So they're less efficient because there's a big cutoff down the side. Like they taper in. Yes. The thing I really like about them the most is that they have 27. They have they have. different sizes that stack with each other. So you can stack a 14 gallon with a 27 gallon one.
So like if you have something like books or something heavy, then it'll go in the pile with the other ones. Well, I and but I can still lift it up. I may have made more choices. I don't know. I. I've been re-bending all my stuff as we've talked about. I'm going kind of console generation by generation. Yeah. So I've got like the bottom one is like PS4 and Xbox One era primarily.
Okay. Above that is the... Actually, hang on. I think it might be two generations in that one. I think it's like PS3, 360, and... Xbox One, PS4. Just hardware though, not games. Yeah, mostly just consoles and controllers basically. Yeah. Above that is all the GameCube, Xbox, PS2, but also all my handhelds. Hmm, but that is everything before that basically Super Nintendo in 64 like
PlayStation. How are you separating stuff inside the bins? It's a fun little Tetris game. You know, like generally I pretty much always go anything that's like squarish and flat that can stack well goes in first. So consoles and boxes and. You know, that AV selector, like anything that is squarish and will stack as if it were Tetris pieces and then controllers and cables and stuff like that kind of fill in around the edges.
So I like to have like a box inside the box with all of the Xbox, the original Xbox stuff together and then a box inside the so that. So that then if I want to get to it, I can just pull out that one. I can open it up and pull out that one thing and don't have to dig for power connectors and mess up the whole box. I consider doing something like that, but that's like, like you said, that's just kind of losing a little bit more storage space that way. You do lose a little bit more.
Anyway, that stack is now, I bought eight bins stacked in a two columns by four configuration. The console stack, I've only got three bins, mostly full, and the bottom one is already starting to show some signs of... Oh, no. I mean... The bin itself is not buckling, but the little handles that lock into place, like the handle is coming open slowly because it's bowing enough that the handle no longer grips. So now I'm like, what do I even put in that top bin? Like now I'm afraid to keep stacking.
Look, let me tell you, Brad, $9.98 today, they'll deliver them to your house. Wait, what? Yeah. I'm so you're looking at them. I'd have to look at the dementia. $622 in stock. Just spent $100 on these bins. Well, you know, send them back. They get red lids, red lids or yellow lids. I don't know if I want red, but. So these aren't perfect because, like I said, the taper is there's a lot of wasted space on the side because of the taper in.
And there's structural like grooves and digs and stuff like that. Those, those, those grooves are, yeah, that would not, well, I mean the way I, like I said, the way I'm stacking or not stacking, but cramming a bunch of extra little cables and do hickeys in those would fit into those grooves just fine. Yeah, it helps. But for me, it's the it's the hey, you can get it in 14 gallon or 27 gallon and it's the same like the same stacking size.
is the big deal. So then I don't have to carry a bunch of 80 pound. 27-gallon tubs around when somebody needs one. I bet I would only be able to fit four of these in the closet where I've got eight of these current bins. That's possible. I think it would probably still be a net loss of storage space. I don't know. Any structural engineers on the Discord want to chime in? Brad, do you have Mario mania?
Always? Since I was born? Oh no, you're holding up a copy of the classic Mario Mania Nintendo Player's Guide. I do not. Weird. I just happen to have a PDF of it on my desktop, though. What a shocking coincidence. Yeah, this is this has all the secrets of Super Mario World, plus a whole lot more about Mario only from Nintendo. I believe I could be wrong.
But I think this was something I got for subscribing to Nintendo Power. Oh, so have you had that since? I was going to ask where you got it. Have you had it since it was new? I've had it since the 90s. Yeah. Actually, there is actually a distinct possibility. I do have a copy of that in the basement. But anyway. Yeah. I mean, I.
I asked a friend of the show, Steve Lynn, about it. And he's like, yeah, that's not, we have, we have those. We're good. Oh yeah. I'm at that thing. I sent out a bazillion of them rented by the millions. Have you seen this meat Mario diagram? I'm flipping through it right now. It's on page four. They have a literal diagram. It's like a technical diagram of Mario.
He has a ever peeled Bowser indicators pointing at his eyes. Yes, his nose is labeled as a trouble sniffer. His ears direct line for princesses in peril. His hat is labeled as a custom-made fallout shelter. Are there a lot of nuclear explosions happening in the Mushroom Kingdom? More like the Mushroom Cloud Kingdom.
It's funny. It's funny because having worked at a magazine, I understand how stuff like this happens because you get to a point and you're like, hey, we have this page. We have an extra page to fill. We'll just put a big line art drawing of Mario there, but we got plenty of those. And then... They're like, it's kind of boring. We got to wait. Let's put some captions on it. We'll put funny captions on it. And then here you go. Yes. Captions like the steel steel toad turtle tromper.
The one I liked is the evolution of Mario. This is funny because this is a thing Nintendo's done over the years. Because like they did this with the Hyrule Historia things where they tried to like cohere all of Zelda into one. into one overarching intentional story when it clearly wasn't meant to be that. Sure.
But like this start, this was in like 1991. And this is like showing the evolution of Mario from Donkey Kong to Donkey Kong Jr. When he's the villain, just to be clear, having enslaved Donkey Kong. To Mario Brothers or sorry, Mario Bros. to Super Mario Bros, to Super Mario Bros 2, which I don't know how you even wedge that one in, to Super Mario Bros 3, and then it comes over.
It has like Super Mario Land, Dr. Mario. I wonder where he got his degree. There's a page on the Super Mario Brothers Super Show in here. They put a picture of Captain Lou Albano in this thing. Well, I haven't gotten there yet. Impressive. There's also there's also a Luigi diagram, by the way. Well, hold on. But I want to talk about the cameos because they list like Mario was in pinball. He drives the little thing at the bottom and he was an alleyway on the Game Boy. They're Arkanoid knockoff.
Quicks on Game Boy. Don't disrespect Alleyway, please. Amigo Mario under the sombrero. Like he showed up in a lot of weird places. Wow, this Luigi one. Meet Luigi parentheses player number two. His hat is a Luigi lid. It is. He has a surprise indicators. Those are eyebrows. Lean green and seldom seen. Luigi's head is on a swivel. I can tell you that. They were really worried about Wart. Wart was the bad guy in Super Mario Bros. 2, right? Yep.
He's the giant frog. We don't hear a lot from Ward these days. No. The Super Mario Brothers 2 did not get its due. in my opinion. I need to go back and play it now that I have the CRT again because I think it doesn't play well on the... on the with latency uh yeah well i mean no but no no better or worse than any other game from that era but uh is this all art from the manuals is that what is that where all this line art came from um i don't
This is a lot of art. I think manuals, I bet a lot of this is from the manuals. I wouldn't think, I mean, it's probably all just general key art that they made and put in manuals and things like this. Where's the Lou Albano page? I didn't find that. That's pretty close to the beginning. Hollywood hero. Wow. They were still proud of the Mario Super Show at this point. Right. Yes. Page 28. The real meat and potatoes here is a screen-by-screen breakdown of every single world in Super Mario World.
including the secret worlds. Yeah. I wonder how they did that at this time. This is like pre Photoshop and pre desktop publishing. I'll tell you how they did that. You're having to. You're like, I wonder if they had like development hardware that they were able to dump screenshots from that made it easier to lay this stuff out. Maybe. I know that most of the computer magazines at this time, they had a dark room.
where they well they might use the source art too well i'm talking for the screenshots because they've got like you said they've got these they've got these like giant strips that are the entire levels of numerous levels in here and then they clearly had to lift They clearly had to lift screenshots and stitch them together for this thing. They probably did. The way we did it in the future in those days was we had a really dark room with a TV and a telephoto lens on it.
So you'd stand like 20 feet away from the TV and somebody would play the TV and somebody else would shoot pictures. and you would then have the photos developed and then you would tape them together. and put cellophane tape over the seams.
OK, so that when you laid them out, you could blow them up or shrink them or whatever. You know, I bet it was something like that, because even if even if they did have like development hardware that could get screenshots, what are you going to put them on? You know, like it's like.
What was the dominant computer at this time? It was like a 286? It's not like they could really work with... Even if they could get native digital... images of all the stuff there's not a whole lot they could do with them anyway and was this it doesn't say when this was published 91 right well it could have been after though too but i assume it was time to come out with super mario uh with this nest and super mario world yeah Yeah, I don't know.
like this is a weird time for publishing right because it was like photoshop existed at this point though did it i'm not sure uh you sure about that I managed a Photoshop machine in 1992, probably. Oh, wow. God, 87 was the first version of Photoshop, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So there was some desktop publishing. Quark was around at that point, I bet.
Um, page maker, I think it was the oldest page maker was still a thing. So yeah. Okay. But I, I don't, my guess is that this is a combination of some real analog business. And then also, um, The way you would lay out a page back then in the pre-computer days was you would have it on a big drafting board.
And you would lay out all the components and then you'd take that into a room that had controlled lighting and you'd shoot a picture of that. And then you'd still send the film to the printing press, two separations to send the film to the printing press. That's wild to think all of that was just photographed physically. All analog process. Look, things were simpler back then.
Okay, something happened this week that I am ashamed to admit it's never happened before. It really calls into question my, A, my memory, and B, my, I don't know, notification policies. Uh-oh. How do you know I missed something? I'm just assuming. With your advancing years, it has to be something for getting something. I feel weird saying this on a podcast because I feel like they're going to come arrest me. I missed jury duty.
Oh, hold on. What kind of like local jury duty or like federal jury duty? San Francisco, city, whatever. Criminal or civil? I think that was the jurisdiction. Well, I think that gets determined after you report and if you get. No, no, no, because you go to different places in the city for civil versus criminal court. Oh, no, this was civil. OK, actually, I'm looking at the summons. Yeah, that's nothing. Don't worry about it then. It's fine. I was on standby. I don't know.
I think San Francisco is the only place where I've ever dealt with jury duty. Maybe it's because it's the only place I've I mean, I was an adult for a few years before I came here. But I mean, I guess, does this happen in every municipality? Well, I mean, there's jury duty everywhere in Tennessee. When I got called for jury duty, you basically.
Like they didn't have the system like the system we have here is that you call you go to a website in the morning and put your juror number in or the night before and they tell you if they need you that that next day. So your summons is for a week or your standby services for a week and every night.
Every evening before the next day, you have to check to see if your group number is called to report in. Exactly. I've done this, I don't know how many times. I've had jury duty six or eight, probably at least. Six or eight times since I moved out here. Yeah. Because once you complete it, you're only good for a year. Usually I don't get called for way more than a year. It's been like two or three years. If you're actually seated, you usually have even more time between.
I've never missed anything related to jury duty. I've reported every time they've said to. I had the card out on my desk. Oh, no. It was just like, you know, whatever. Monday night, I was busy getting my taxes done. Yeah. Just forgot to look at the card.
Oh, no, you didn't go? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I forgot Monday night. Well, Sunday night, you know, I checked Sunday night. I was fine for Monday. I've had multiple summons in the past or standby services where I never got called. And if you. If you don't get called for the entire week, you're still just good. Like you're like, okay, that counts. You're released. That counts.
So Sunday night I was fine. Monday night I was up or not up, you know, but I was like busy trying to get my taxes done until like 8 p.m. or something. That's not a valid excuse, Brad. Just just plain forgot to pull up the website despite having my card sitting right here on the desk. About 11 a.m. Tuesday morning, I was just seized by fear and I was like, oh, my God, I forgot to check the website last night. But there's like.
There's like a dozen groups every week and they usually only call one or two groups a day. So I was like, okay, my odds are still very good. It's only day two. I'm probably fine. i was not fine did the did the did the uh the what's the what's the name what was bull on night court the He's not a bailiff, is he? But yeah, the bailiff come to your house. Oh, no. Take your door in. Hey, grab you by the scruff of the neck. Like the one and only group they called for the entire.
port system that day was my group. Wow. It was like I was just like slow motion. feeling sheer terror when I saw that I was supposed to have reported three hours earlier.
So you can always call them and be like, hey, I'm sorry, I'm not there. I have really bad diarrhea because nobody's going to nobody's going to make that up. You're not going to use that as an excuse unless you have really bad diarrhea. OK, look, let me let me just say up front here, I think I could be forgiven for being a little extra skittish about dealing with anything like.
governmentally bureaucratic right now yeah civil court though let's say i mean yeah institutions haven't completely broken down here yet but you know what i'm saying yeah it's it's um so look i've forgotten stuff before too it happens everybody it's fine i called i called and like i mean i should just cut to the chase i called and the dude was just not even
He was not even worried about it. He was just like, we'll just reschedule. You want to do May? Do you want to do June? Look, the secret is to pick Thanksgiving week. Yeah, because they shut down on Wednesday. So you got two days. He did not give me the option of pushing it that far out. Oh, OK. I think, you know, your penance is the idea was your penance is you are going to make it up soon.
Yeah. But, you know, I like I briefly Googled around, like, what are the maximum penalties? It looks like the maximum penalty could have been a two hundred fifty dollar fine. Well, technically, like. If you want to be like technical, like according to the law, the judge could issue a bench warrant for your arrest. But it's probably not going to happen. Well, so I had jury duty one time in San Mateo for the San Mateo criminal court.
And the jury selection took more than one day. So I showed up for the first day and he was like, okay, everybody back here, eight o'clock tomorrow morning. And I was like, wait, really? We have to come back again a second day, even though we're not on the jury yet. And sure enough.
So that next day when he was calling roll for the jurors and like two people didn't show up, he issued bench warrants for them. No kidding. Yeah. He was pissed. Wow. That's exactly what I read in a Reddit thread about San Francisco jury duty was. Somebody saying, I've seen a judge furious before issuing arrest warrants from the bench because he was pissed. Yeah.
That somebody showed up. It was it was specifically somebody showed up the day before and then didn't show up the next day when he gave really explicit instructions that you had to come back the next day. Sure. I almost got put on a murder trial in 2008. don't want that I know I know it was 2008 because it was directly prior to the one Tokyo game show that we went to a giant bomb yeah when giant bomb was about two months old yeah and I was in the very last round of
It was they flat out said like, hey, this is a murder trial. This could take up to a month. I can know that. Know that going in. And we already have the plane tickets booked for TGS. Oh, the plane tickets booked plane tickets will get you out every time the whole thing. But but I wasn't I was close enough to getting put on there that we were in the OK, if you have a valid excuse.
You need to write it for the, like the judge will go through these excuses. Yeah. But I full on said like, Hey, I'm like one out of four people at a brand new startup that has an international business trip coming up. In like nine days, it would be pretty bad for our business if I was not able to go. I got out of the one that the guy didn't show up for because I was doing a we were it was during the food days and we were doing shoots in.
uh texas that were would have overlapped with the trials and he was like well you clearly you can't do this get the hell out yep anyway i i forgot a snow patrol show one time oh Yeah, we were we had bought paper. It was back when you still got paper tickets and we bought the tickets and we put them on the refrigerator. And then like 10 days after the show, Gina looked at the tickets were like, hey, what's today? I was like, it's such and such plus 10 days. And she was like, oh, crap.
We forgot we were supposed to go to a show at the Warfield. Well, that stunk. I'm sure that was an equally crappy, but somehow less legally actionable feeling. I don't think the early 2000s, like garage indie rock. Cops were going to come get me. Probably not. Anyway, you know, maybe it's time to start setting up reminders for things like this. Smooth criminal. Do you not use a calendar? No. Oh, I typically use my brain for things. No, you can't trust your brain.
Your brain's bad. Look, it's gotten me this far. Look, if you don't write it down, it didn't happen. That's the rule. So I killed another monitor, Brad. Another one.
yeah the monitor murderer strikes again i don't like part of it is that my monitors were old i guess because like my this one was more than 10 years old i bought it during the food days okay but also i i'm like it just didn't power on one day like i don't know what to i don't know i don't know what's going on i think i'm going to try the like this one doesn't have any obvious fix this is an acer it's the first acer 4k g-sync monitor basically so it's a 27 inch
uh xb something or other and it's it's just doing the thing where it doesn't power on when you hit the power button which seems bad Well, on my LG ultra wide, that was because the EEPROM was showing a corrupt like the the the cat, the the corruption bit was showing that it was corrupt. So it just didn't boot. And I was able to fix it by just downloading the firmware from the chip and then re uploading it, which reset the corruption bit. Yes.
And I was looking at this one and the EEPROM is the same exact EEPROM as on that LG. Oh. And I have the writer for it right here. All right. So I think I'm going to bust it open and give it a try. Might as well. See what I can do. Yeah.
but i don't i'm like why am i killing all these monitors is it like they just die after 10 years and i just have never had one that long i've been sitting here trying to think of some jack the ripper equivalent for monitors like what do you got and the monitors were asking for it okay whoa uh I mean, would you say 10 years old? Yeah, I bought it in like 2017, 2016 probably. How do we feel about 10 years for a monitor? That's like a decent run, right?
I mean, typically up until this point, like the resolutions haven't stayed the same long enough that I would keep a monitor for more than that. Cause like I went from.
1080p panels or probably the 1024 by 768 or 1020 1280 by 1024 like weird aspect ratio panels to 1080p panels, to like... look man 30 inch panels well documented i was on 1680 by 1050 for about 15 years yeah we don't need to talk about that i was just fine i wasn't gonna bring it up i was gonna let your lazy stew in that one you know these bigger monitors are better
I'm going to say, well, so, so that's the, so I switched. So I have that OLED, the 4k OLED on the bottom now, and I put my old 1080p 360 monitor on the top. And I'm going to say, I don't know how I lived like this. 1080p is not enough pixels. No, it's really not. Like modern UI is not made for 1080p anymore. No, I think you're right.
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm, I'm quite happy on 1440 P 27 inch. I think that's a good, well, you have two of them too. Well, yes, that's fair. But I think I'm always going to have two monitors from now on. It's just too useful not to. I think the 83 at some point. Three is too many. Is it? I've had three before. I've got a I've got a three monitor mount in the closet that I've never used. That's that was I was sent by a company that I've been. Well, I keep I've been thinking more and more that when.
If and when there is a good OLED 27 inch, like same size and resolution as these, but OLED that is like reasonably priced, I might. I might get that three monitor mount out. I think those are under 800 bucks now. Yeah, that's still more than I want to pay for. That's still way more than I want to pay for a monitor. OLED's a premium premium product. These are working just fine. But I spend enough time. These days looking at like white text on black background that I keep thinking like, man.
What if there was no backlight here? What if it was just the text on the screen and nothing else? I'm going to tell you when I have like when I put discord into ultra dark mode and put on the OLED.
It's like it's like it's like the text is just floating in space. Seriously, like I can't even imagine what that looks like to have like just a void of nothing except for some letters appearing on the screen. I want to see that very badly. Maybe maybe the answer to this problem is for me to get a second. OLED 4K and put that on the top. Maybe.
But but yeah, like looking at the OLED, the white text on the black screen with the OLED is like staring God in the face. It's delightful. Yeah, I bet. Are we good on burn in? Like, are we feeling scaring God in the face? Good or bad? I don't know. Depends on what you did. I feel like it's not going to be good most of the time. It really depends on what you did to get there. Yeah. Are we good on burn-in? Are OLED monitors safe long-term now?
This one's a loaner from the company that makes it. So I wasn't really thinking about it in the long term. I'm just enjoying the time I have with it. I think the it does it does every 16 hours of online use. It's like, hey, you should do the. You should do the self-care routine now, or we can just do it the next time you turn off your computer. What does that entail?
It turns off for like five minutes and then turns back on. I don't know. I assume it's looking at the pixel where and is even is like doing some business to even it out. I don't I don't know. OK, how about micro lead monitors? i don't think there's a thing there yet it should be The micro LEDs are the ones that the LEDs produce the light. Micro LED is basically the same as OLED minus the organic compounds minus the O.
Yeah, but it's just a different way of producing the same style of self-emissive pixels. Well, there's also the micro LED backlights with the local dimming and all that stuff is mini LED. Mini LED is that. MicroLED is basically supposed to be the successor to OLED. It's basically OLED without the disadvantages. It's brighter and it doesn't have burn-in issues, supposedly. But I'm going to say it's going to be like if OLED monitors are still $800 and it's probably going to be.
15 years before there are decent micro LED monitors out there. The first micro LED stuff. stuff that people saw at ces they were underwhelmed with the image quality on was my understanding and i think it's mostly for bigger screens and you'd probably use for a desktop monitor probably it's probably a long way off yeah i don't know i might start
staring at OLED monitors a little more intently and not actually doing anything about it, but staring. I'm going to go and tell you, like I said this before, but. If if you have like a decent computer, if you're looking for what to spend money on before the tariffs destroy our economy. like i would and you have a decent video card i would absolutely buy and one of these nice like a thousand bucks spent on this oled monitor if you have a 30 80 or 30 90 or 40 90 or 40 80 or something like that
is going to be way better for you than buying a five series video card. Yeah, it occurred to me the last time you said that, that I wonder if OLED monitors are now in that position that SSDs were 15 years ago, where it was like, this is the single most meaningful upgrade you can get for your computer. You know, it's like. Like incremental speed increases are nice and all.
but they are incremental and this is like a sea change, you know what I mean? It's like this will fundamentally alter your relationship to using the computer. Yeah, it's the only thing that I worry about is the saturation, like the color saturation. I can't tell if it's just because the way the OLED works or if it's because this monitor is. like oversaturated. I feel like the color or because it's an HDR OLED versus HDR LCD on the top, like it feels sometimes it feels a little bit much.
Yeah, I could see that. You know what occurs to me talking about buying an OLED monitor and stacking it next to these two LCDs? What? Am I going to be able to keep using two LCDs next to an OLED? Look, my top monitor has reference material and reading stuff and like discord and things like that. Yes. It's fine. I'm mostly joking. I would play games on the OLED and the discord and, you know.
But yes, would go on the sides. It would be fine. What if you got real into racing games and you and you put three monitors around you and then you put a steering wheel on your desk and you became one of those guys? Yeah. What if? Think about it. That's, you know. Maybe I'll just keep thinking about it. Yeah. Think about it.
We've reached the time when, like, I'd be staring down the barrel of a new Zaktronics game if Zaktronics hadn't shut down. Yeah, Zaktronics, amazingly prolific developer given the type of games they put out. Yeah. Well, I mean, they, so how do you describe Zachtronics? I guess they're programming games. They're like, I mean, that's even that I feel like a selling short. Some of them are, but like they're engineering games, maybe.
yeah that's it there's they're they're really structured right so mechanically complicated like now that i'm looking at their website like even that is selling them short because like some of their games are like Okay. There's TIS 100, which literally has you doing like fake programming, fake assembly language on a fake like calculator or a fake processor that never existed. Yeah. There's Shenzhen IO, which is like having you.
making circuits and writing code to drive them and stuff. And then there's, um, Moloch Sintez and space chem are basically like molecular assembly games. Like, like you're, like you're. building nanomachines basically and last call bbs was their last game before they said hey we're not making games anymore and that's like you running a bbs but then i look at all these other games they've got like
They've got a solitaire collection. They've got Mobius Front 83, which is a full on like X-based tank military. strategy game. Uh-huh. They've got a visual novel. Yeah. This might be the most prolific and what's the word I'm looking for? Like varied. It's a game developer I've ever said they've got. Their oeuvre is wide. Ironclad Tactics is a fast-paced, card-based tactics game set in an alternate history civil war. Yeah, it's always high-concept stuff that has weird meta layers and, like...
I don't know. Also, how many people was Zaktronics? It's a, it was small. Yeah. I always got the sense of, I mean, it wasn't literally one guy, right? I mean, there is a Zach, right? There is a Zach. Yeah. But I think he had a larger team by the end. They made a game called Zachademics.
That sounds great. That sounds pretty good. That's great. Anyway, like I think, how did this come about? You were telling me yesterday that I should play TIS 100 or you were like, hey, there's a Zaktronics game that literally kind of teaches assembly language. Yeah, you should you should play TIS 100. I didn't realize this, but Infiniminer, which is an open source game, sandbox multiplayer game developed by Zektronix inspired.
Minecraft, apparently. Wait, are you thinking of Infinifactory? No, I'm talking about Infiniminer. It's not a game that they sell now. Are you serious? Like, I definitely know Infiniminer as the game that Minecraft kind of... Took its whole thing from, but I had no idea Zaktronics was who made Infiniminer. That's fucking crazy. Yeah, Zach Barth is who made is who is the Zach and Zachtronics. If I were the person who made the game that heavily, heavily, heavily inspired Minecraft.
I might also get out of the game eventually. I mean, that's gotta be a, that's gotta be a tough one. It literally says it on the page right here. Yeah. Infiniminer is a first-person competitive mining game that takes place in a procedurally generated block world, allowing players to mine, build, and explore. Sound familiar?
That's because Infiniminer is the game that started the block genre that everyone knows and loves. Wow. Is this on their page for Infiniminer? That is on the Zaktronics page for Infiniminer. That's got to be rough. making the game that then inspired a game that went on to make billions and billions of dollars wow yeah wow i don't know if there's anything else to say yeah i think i think i think that man
You're not wrong, though. I've looked at Zaktronics from afar with interest for a long time, and maybe I should crack into TIS-100. There's a whole little sub-genre of programming games on Steam now that if I had more time, I would love to dig into. I'm sure you've seen a lot of these like, well, it's, it's interesting. Cause like. I want to say the world of goo people made one too. That's like a, like teaches you algorithms basically.
Tower of Human Resource Machine. Oh, yes. Human. Yes, I've heard of that. Also, seven billion humans is like a. similar. It's the same company, same idea. It's basically teaching algorithm design and how to do sorts and stuff. The one that if I ever have the time to check one of these out, the one I really would like to check out is called The Farmer Was Replaced.
Have you seen this? No, I've never seen this. It's like a combination. It's like a strategy. It's a farming simulation strategy game where the farms are all run by robots and you are programming the robots.
Oh man, this looks fabulous. And from what I've looked at the code, like the syntax is like basically Python. Like it's basically just a simple programming, but a very familiar looking programming language. Oh man, that's cool. Like you're full on writing functions that you can call to have the robots do different stuff. Sounds awesome. So the human resource machine stuff is more abstract than that. It's like if then loops and stuff like that.
But and you can kind of drag them around so you can basically eventually you're building functions and like. calling the function to, to do the, the repeated incur in, in, uh, in, uh, God, I'm so sorry. We're recording this early. Uh, what's the word when, when the thing references itself? Recursive. Recursive. Thank you. So you can use the you can call the function recursively and do all the like you learn. They literally are teaching recursion and all that stuff in this.
like how do you get the people to go from point a to point b and do the thing that you want along the way yeah oh you know what like i'm I'm responsible for playing a lot of video games. Maybe I could carve off like five fewer hours of Assassin's Creed shadows and spend some time programming some robots instead. Look, man, we I would love to do a ongoing.
Like, this would be a fun ongoing thing where we play different programming games and, like, see if we eventually become programmers. Hang on. Have we just birthed a new bucket for types of episodes of this podcast? Oh, man. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe we have. I would maybe watch that. I would, I would listen to that. Okay. All right. If you out there on the discord have thoughts about us playing some programming games and coming on here to talk about them.
Where can people find information about the discord? You know, it's funny you say that this is a listener supported podcast. So we wouldn't be here without you, the listener. And if you would like to find out how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash jackpot where. For the low, low price of $5 a month, you get access to our monthly patron exclusive episode where we talk about other things. I was listening to another podcast and they described their patron episode as.
A looser edit, which I think is correct. I think it's that's like as the person who edits the episodes, I can tell you the episode gets less editing. Well, but it's more that we kind of don't cut. Like sometimes sometimes we go on weird tangents on these episodes and we'll chop them out. It's more, yeah, it's, it's much, it's much looser and more free association. Like here's what we've been up to. Here's what is on our minds. Yeah. Sometimes we take, you know,
We get questions from email. We get questions from the discord. Sometimes we get questions in the discord that are a little silly and we'll sometimes spend some. real serious time thinking about the answers to those silly questions so um so yeah you get that you get the the access to the discord which is full of beautiful people who uh are interested in a lot of the same things i guarantee you you are
It's funny. I was talking to somebody last night on Blue Sky and they were asking me if I knew anything about. putting solar panels on like their deck as a as a like hey how how can i get power for things that i need in case of an emergency or whatever long-term power outage
And I was like, I don't know anything about German solar panels because those products are different. But I guarantee you, I know people were having this conversation in the discord like a month ago. And there will be people who are interested in that kind of stuff, whatever weird project you're into. So it's patreon.com slash tech pod again, patreon.com slash tech pod. And we really appreciate the support because it makes the podcast possible. It sure does.
And we do. We appreciate each and every one of our patrons, but we especially appreciate our executive producer to your patrons. including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippet, Bunny Day, Bunny Days this weekend. Hey, happy Bunny Day, I guess. Yeah, happy Bunny Day. Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Yes, we appreciate you.
And that'll do it for us this week. Brad, until next week, I hope you have a lovely holiday weekend. Thank you. Wait, is it a holiday weekend? I mean, it's Easter. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Yeah. Happy Easter, I guess. I'm going to spend that time.
fedora you should get a chocolate bunny treat yourself all right maybe i'll eat a chocolate bunny while i install fedora 42 there you go and uh we will be back next week with another edition of the tech pod until then please consider the environment before printing this podcast bye everybody