Okay. You're going to want to hear this. I love hearing things. Okay. We'll buckle up then. I'm okay. Okay. I'm holding on to the chairs or chair arms. I'm ready to go, but. I think you should. This is pursuant to a discussion last week about Zaktronics shutting down. Oh!
Yeah. Wait, I hope you don't know about that. Okay, just act like you don't know about this. I'm going to act real surprised. This is from a user currently called Vomicron Noxus on Blue Sky. Uh-huh. Who... skied at me uh-huh they skeeted you sure they posted that means they're on team skeet would be my guess but i'm not sure we need it we need a new word for posting on blue sky anyway i just say posting
The blue sky came at me, both me and an account called coincidence dot games. Uh huh. Get on each other's podcasts. Oh, so I clicked through to coincidence games. Yeah. Are you ready? Are you ready to hear this? This bio? I. I am. My breath is baited. Coincidence is a cooperative game studio created by ex Zaktronics developers. Cooperative? Zach Barth is no longer teaching high school and is making games again.
That's amazing. You're you're you're making. I don't think those wild arm motions you just made are going to play on the recording. But look, I Zoidberg armed there for a minute. But yeah. They already have a new game up on Steam because, of course, they do. It's not out yet, but it's... Yeah. Are you ready for this? Yeah. What is it? What's it about? It is called Kaizen, a factory story. It appears to be a factory builder game about building giant robots. Yeah, I am. I am.
My mind is blown like Gundam looking giant robots. It would be slightly more blown if this weren't. So we talked about a bunch of stuff last week. The only thing people have been talking about in the thread on the discord has been Zaktronics games and programming games. Right. And it's been a week. I actually, this is like maybe the first time this has ever happened. I have not had time to look at last week's episode thread on the discord at all this week. So that's, that's.
That's kind of exciting to hear if people are excited about programming games. So like people are hot for programming game content. It turns out I on the programming game front, I've been playing that farmer was replaced game that you mentioned casually as an aside last week. Yeah, I keep seeing you play that on discord and going, man, I should play that. I understand I'm working on a bubble sort algorithm right now. Yeah.
You told me that last night. First of all, first I went to the Wikipedia page for bubble sorting and then learned what a bubble sort is. Yeah, I learned how to, I wrote a program that makes my game will play Snake indefinitely. Right. It has error. Teach you to do that. Yeah, pretty much. Oh, it it catches errors. It like it like restarts when something gets broken. It detects that it's broken.
And the difference between this and other programming games that I played in the past, including a lot of the Zachtronic stuff. Is that the documentation for this? who understands how to teach people things and like they do they do a really good job of giving you the base level of knowledge that you need to write something that will be broken but intelligible and let you figure out how to fix it, which works really well for my brain.
That sounds fun. And it's all Python. It's basically just Python syntax and stuff. Is it literally? Like, do they say that? Because like with a little bit of snippets of code on the Steam page I saw looked pretty much indistinguishable, but I don't know if it's like actually literally. So you can use an external editor that does Python.
Like code coloring and all that. Oh, syntax highlighting. Syntax highlighting. You can just hook VS code into your game. You could just point it at your folder. It's not actual Python, I think. There's a couple of things that are different. But for the most part, it's like you have to put colons at the end of loops, you know, statements that start loops and functions and stuff like that. and brackets for establishing certain things and parentheses for other things and all that.
Um, it's, it's interesting because like my thing has always been that I understand enough about how this, like I took CS 100 in college. I understand how recursion works and what an array is and stuff like that, but I don't. I I've never had anything that helped me start with a blank page and turn that into something that's usable. Yeah. I mean, if that thing is teaching like basic sorting algorithms, then it's way more of a like literal teaching tool than I would have expected by a lot.
So in, in fairness, when you get to the end of the page, so the cactuses are the sorting algorithm thing. You can pick them up and move them. You have to get them from like. smallest in the bottom left to largest in the top right sure and uh you can move them you can move them to an adjacent square swap them with the thing in the adjacent square and At the end of the kind of wiki page for cactuses, it just says,
Like you get basically gives you documentation. Then there's a couple of hints at the bottom for the complicated things. And the hints say. you know here's here's a here's a strategy the first one is always an english language like here's a strategy maybe think about this and write some pseudocode that'll that'll like how would you solve this problem if you're writing it describing that in english and then use that to generate your loops and stuff
The last one, the last hint is, yo, go look up sorting algorithms on Wikipedia and think about how you would apply one of those. Okay. A step ahead of you. Yeah, so anyway, it's a trip. Like I said, I've played a ton of these games before, and this is the first one that I've felt like.
I'm learning something actionable instead of just playing a game about making algorithms about logic. Yeah, that sounds awesome. One one aside before we start this podcast, I have to mention you said you said phrase pseudo code. Yeah. In fact, as I just said, the phrase pseudocode, I almost did this. I've come to realize this week that when I read the word pseudo now, and I'm talking the actual, you know, P-S-E-U-D-O, in my head, I pronounce it pseudo.
Oh, I thought you were going to say Suda. No. Like the creator of Deadly Premonition. Sudo is taken. Oh, no. Maybe I shouldn't play programming games. Oh, I'm taking your VI away from you, Brad. I'm sorry. To Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. I'm stoked because this game has like a lot of like it has 1500 reviews and it's overwhelmingly positive, which means like 96% of a large number of user positive on Steam. So yeah, that's that's great.
Might fire it up this weekend. Maybe, maybe. So maybe I don't think they have a Mac version, but it plays really well on my laptop. And it's great for like sitting there playing. You could stream it. Yeah, you could. You could stream. Valve needs to put out an arm native steam client for the Mac. Let's say for those of us maybe who are not equipped to run x86 code on their ARM Mac anyway.
Okay, so put Sunshine on your PC and then run Moonlight for ARM on your Mac and then just stream to the PC and grab it there. There we go. I'm going to say real quick, also Coincidence Games, the new Zach Barth, the new Zachtronics. Kaizen, A Factory Story, is not even their first game. They already have a game released. It's called Ad Astra, A-D-D, Astra. It's a card game, right? Ad Astra is a math game about racing and a racing game about math. I love it.
Well, there's a couple of physical games. Lucky 7 and Chemistry Set are both out. Yeah, they're selling like hard games. Man, the first coincidence game has seven user reviews. This is a crime. Zaktronics deserves better. I didn't realize that Astra was actually out. Yeah, it came out over a year ago, as a matter of fact. Oh, my God. Anyway, can we just start?
Maybe we should do programming game streams. Maybe we should just be Zaktronics game streamers full time. I didn't. Yeah. I don't know that I want to subject myself to trying to figure out logic based stuff in front of an audience. Well. So I've thought about streaming The Farmer was replaced because...
But but also figuring it out as part of the thing that makes learning good for that, if that makes sense. Sure. I mean, everybody's different, but like and some people are going to be going like, yeah, of course, I'm sure you're just like, yeah, I bet. Just making excuses, but like my brain just short circuits when I know that people are watching me do a thing, which immediately hamstrings how well I can do the thing. I remember it. It's funny. That doesn't happen.
I remember you famously playing Super Meat Boy and doing one of those nightmare levels. And, like, you just zone in. You get in there, man. The level of, like, if it's a purely reaction-based manual dexterity-style challenge like that or a Geometry Wars or something, yes, like, the blinders come on because you kind of don't have time to think about anything else. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If it's anything more contemplative and problem solving based, like I'm just immediately like 30% of my brain activity is going to be. focused on going oh god what are they saying about me i bet they're all mocking me right now and like it did well puzzle puzzle games on stream are just not for me So I did actually ask the Discord for help with some basic construct stuff in the CodeCodeCode channel the other day. Um, cause I didn't, I didn't understand the between dicks dictionaries, uh, lists.
sets and arrays in Python and Python and tuples. And tuples because they all seem like basically the same thing. Yeah, a dictionary is a key value pair set. Yeah. A list is just a basic list. A set, I think set is the only one I've never used before. A set is... there i can't i don't i don't know what's up with the set and a tuple a tuple is like ordered and fixed like you can't add to it i believe well tuple is like a stacked variable basically
because some of those and like this is less of a concern in python but some of those come down to processing speed you know like some of them are more efficient from a if you're really worried about shaving like thousands of a second off like some of those are look faster for me like memory access standpoint than others i have 16 cores i don't i don't need to be worried
I mean, I'm a novice programmer, like I shouldn't be opining in this manner. But what I would say is if you're worried about that level of performance, Python is probably not what you should be using in the first place. Fair. Anyway, Brad, it's the last episode of the month, which means it's the time when we turn questions into answers. Cues of days. It's true.
I've got a bunch right here. Yeah, if you have a question, you can send them to techpod at content.town. Or if you're in the Discord, if you're a member of the fine Patreon community, you can go to patreon.com slash techpod, sign up, get access to the Discord. And then you can go to the question seeking answers channel and post your questions there. They'll disappear. We'll see them at the end of the month. We'll pull them out and we'll turn them into. Google Docs document.
That then gets either bolded or highlighted depending on who is enthusiastic. Occasionally both bolded and highlighted. Yeah, that's a double whammy of a question. We do have that godlike power to reach into the void and retrieve questions that have. Yeah. Swirled into the either. They've let loose the mortal coil for everyone but us. And then we can pull them back from the brink.
All right, let's just jump right into it. I've got a bunch here. Start with emails. This is from Bob in Mars, Pennsylvania. After a number of years, I finally decided to cut the cable cord. During the cancellation process, the customer service representative told me that my equipment was too old and there was no need to return it.
Despite him saying that, I do intend to return it just so they can e-waste it. However, the thought occurred to me, is there? This question is extremely after my own heart. The thought occurred to me, is there a homebrew or hacking community for these things, and is there some kind of interesting reuse for it, such as a media server? I did some quick Googling and didn't come up with much. It looks to be your standard modern TiVo box made by Pace. and as a revision of the XG1P series.
Yeah, so I looked this up when this question came up and... I do not think that there's anything you can do with that short of removing components from the board and taking the hard drive out. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking at one on eBay for 1499 right now. It's. No. Also, like a pace. Pace is not even a consumer-facing company, right?
Any electronics maker with a name that just sounds like it's the last name of the founder is probably only making B2B equipment to go to telcos and stuff like that these days. Yeah, and often these are locked to the provider that you bought them from. Uh, so yeah, sadly, I don't believe that you can do anything with an old cable box. It's e-waste for sure.
Take it from me who chronically makes this mistake. Just e-waste it yourself or send it back to them. Let them do it. But like, you're probably not going to find a use for that. I, I wasn't joking when I said this question was after my own heart because it's not been two weeks since I went in the networking channel on the discord. Turned up my old Motorola surfboard. SB 6121. Remember that one? Yeah.
The classic, I think it's a DOCSIS 3.0. It's like curved, stands vertically. It's got a little grade on the front. Yeah. Yep. Like the one everybody bought. I gave mine to a friend of mine when I got fiber. I had this exact question of I was going through old stuff and I was like, okay, surely a cable modem has no use.
Turns out you can turn old cable modems into software-defined radios, apparently. I was going to say, I wondered if you could plug it into the cable cable and make TV come out of your walls. You might be able to do that as well. I'm not sure. But also, I barely understand what a software-defined radio is good for.
I don't know if you have any insight into that question. It's funny you bring this up because I have this analog TV sitting here and has a couple of bunny ears on the back. And as a result, I was looking into this and you can do something like. make a TV channel that only operates inside your house. You could make a thousand watt pirate AM radio station that, you know, maybe operates, you know.
the new voice of America, something like that. That's the thing you could do. Theoretically, how far, how far do you think a thousand 20 miles? What even really? In the evening, especially because of the way AM radio works. But yeah, up to 20 miles for a thousand watts. Enough to maybe get the FCC's attention. Well, so the thing I was looking at is a thousand watt station is a kilowatt.
which means you could power it on like an Anker battery pack. Oh, one of those big boys, which means what you could do is broadcast to that pirate radio, like go put that pirate radio station up on a hill someplace. Use it to broadcast every night from, say, you know, eight to 10. And then when you're when you're when you're 2000, when you're 2000 watt battery runs down.
You hike back up the hill and pick it up and move it someplace else. So it's broadcasting from a slightly different place the next day. It's making it difficult for the man to find you. It's like a modern day max headroom. I mean, kind of. Yeah.
I mean, this is just a theoretical thing. It's not something I've actually done any research in or really looked at, but it's a thing you could do with a software-defined radio. Yes, you could. I mean, we talked about it a little bit on the Discord, but if anybody in this week's episode thread has... Suggestions for what a software-defined radio is good for? I would love to hear them.
Yeah, it's interesting because I thought about doing TV stuff. I thought about doing like digital TV with the software defined radio. Sure. And A, the range is really bad on that. You need a lot more power. But B, nobody has antennas hooked up to their TVs. yeah hardly anybody so like your potential but everybody has an am radio in the car tuned to tuned to 776 am you know that's all i'm saying
Is Max Headroom a reference that plays? Well, our audience is probably a slightly older. My daughter thought Max Headroom. I showed her picture of Max Headroom once and she thought it was Ronald Reagan. So like she's halfway right. Yeah. Wow.
interesting he kind of looks like the point break ronald reagan mask uh sure okay you know like it was tighter yeah okay i get it i feel bad for the guy who had to wear that tight rubber mask it had to be really sweaty in there yeah Actually, here's an email that follows directly from... Questions about how old our audience is from Joshua.
I was wondering if you had any data you could share about the demographic breakdown of your podcast audience by race, gender, profession, country, etc. I find this kind of thing extremely interesting and would love to know more about the profile of a typical listener. Is this email soliciting us? This phrase is not entirely dissimilar to some of the cold email. podcast business solicitations we get. Let me tell you about my client, Steve AI.
man who has a scammy ai company is desperately looking for press so he can raise more money from unsuspecting investors um So I put this in because we don't actually collect like we did a survey right when the show started because we wanted to know a little bit about the audience just so we could make content.
that was appealing to you all yeah but we only collect the minimum data that our that our podcast host will let us like there's a there's a we do not pay for the yo we're collecting a lot of data plan for our podcast for our podcast host yes um so like we know Like we have a map that shows downloads by location and there's a big yellow blob over the United States and a little blob over Hawaii and Iceland.
16 of you in Iceland, by the way. Shout out. Yes, I've got the list here. I've got the top 10 countries. Are we comfortable sharing this data? I chose this data. Yeah. OK. All right. Top 10 countries. Number one, the United States with and this is over. This might just be the last seven days, I want to say, of data. No, no, I'm sorry. This is all time.
Yeah, this is all time. Number one, United States with roughly 61% of our audience. Number two, UK, 10%. Yeah. Canada at eight and a half. Australia, about five. And then it's Sweden, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark. or round out the top 10 in order of countries. So, um, we, I have the all time downloads by location is what I'm trying to load right now. Uh, So we have a couple of dedicated listeners in RakeVic.
We have a lot of Swedish and Norwegian listeners. Oh, I didn't. I didn't. I see this. This map you're talking about now. Yes. Yeah. We have a couple of people in Johannesburg. It looks like South Africa and somebody in. Maybe Kinshasa? I can't tell. Oh, there's actually kind of a lot of downloads from Africa. That's surprising. Interesting. In the last seven days, we've gotten seven downloads in Hanoi.
Yeah. Let's see. One person download the show from Victoria in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Nobody in Madagascar, though. A couple in Sri Lanka, a bunch in India, a bunch in Singapore and Malaysia. We've got one download each in a number of different prefectures in Japan. Yeah. Adelaide in on West Australia, a lot of New Zealand downloads to shout out to Weta. Hi, everybody. Two downloads in Jakarta. Yeah. Not very many Russian downloads. No.
Uh, although I think there might be some, there might be some internet filtration that lay there. I'm not sure. This is all time though. So I expect there to be a few more, a fair number of South Korean. Okay. Not a lot of LADAM South America. Oh, wait, no, they just popped in. Sorry. Yeah. So so, yeah, but we don't we don't collect like profession demographics. We have the cookie turned off as much as it'll let us.
I think I do have Google Analytics on the thing mainly so that I can tell when something's not right with our indexing and make sure we're getting indexed for search so that we show up when people search for TechPod. But yeah, that's pretty much it. And yeah, the most popular episodes of all time.
are actually it's kind of a weird spread anyway yeah so that's it most people download the show between midnight and 1 a.m because that's when we post the show that's that's when it posts yeah another another great demographic brought to you by demographics And oh, and we also do know the most popular listening methods. So Apple podcast, number one, pocket cast, number two, overcast, number three, podcast and radio addict, which I don't know what that is, is number four.
Spotify been doing a lot of growing over the last couple of years is up to number five. Google podcast is in sharp decline because it's not a thing anymore. Thanks, Google. Downcast, Chrome, AntennaPod, and Simplecast, which is our host and the web player rounded out.
Yeah. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that seem to be using Spotify. I mean, you just said that, but like I just in my personal life, I'm sure that, you know, people who already stream from music from Spotify, it's quite easy to just go get your podcasts in the same app. Yeah. My, my, my, my wife loves Spotify and I, I might just, my advice is don't use Spotify to listen to podcasts. Yeah. I've become a big overcast user.
uh is overcast the marker arm at one yeah yeah i i like overcast a lot i think it's It used to have this really great feature where you could make a list of your favorite podcasts and it would just play the most recent one in order. of the like the most favorite podcast to the least favorite podcast and for whatever reason that hasn't worked for me in like three years but i think it's because the carplay implementation is bad anyway yeah yeah i mean i use i mainly use overcast because it is the
It is the least worst way to get podcasts directly on your Apple watch. Yeah. But even there, it's pretty rough. And he he's been very explicit about, hey, I wish it was better transferring.
And I'm talking about like quite literally moving the file to your watch so you don't have to be in range of your phone because I like to go out to exercise without my phone in my pocket. You know the thing about turning off Bluetooth when you're doing the file transfers, right? Yeah, so I have to do that. But even then, it's like infuriatingly inconsistent. It's not great. He's been very explicit in saying like, hey, Apple has insane, ridiculous restrictions on how you can.
kind of access data transfer to a watch so i wish this was better but it's not but yeah like you have to you have to download the file you have to download the podcast to the phone app Hope that they sync because like there is a manual sync, but it doesn't work every time. Sometimes you have to do it five or six times to get it to actually pick up the new podcast.
Then you have to wait for the podcast to start transferring over Bluetooth to your watch, which is incredibly slow. And then, like you said, you have to go onto the phone system settings, turn off Bluetooth. Then the watch will fall back to Wi-Fi to download the podcast. Yep. But if the app goes to sleep, like if you literally have to hold, keep your wrist up long enough for the podcast to download, because if the, if you like set your wrist down, so the watch kind of goes into standby mode.
It kills the downloads and you have to start all over. It is awful. It is awful. Anyway. All right. I like this email from Scott. I was re-watching Robocop for the first time since I originally watched it as a probably too young child in the late 80s. A lot of the movie was very amusing during a modern viewing, the hyperviolence, 80s tough guy stuff, grim corporate future, etc. What prompted this email was the insane data connector spike that comes out of Robocop's hand.
The middle finger basically, which blew my mind. The various police stations, computer stuff already have that spike interface ready to roll for this prototype cop. I don't know if I'm betraying my ignorance and there is actually some data spike connector interface. But I thought it would be funny to write and ask you guys to rate the RoboCop middle finger data spike on the stack ranking of cables and connectors.
Okay. So I looked it up. There is no one has ever made a data spike connector. I kind of assumed that was the case. I did too, but I wasn't sure. I, um, I kind of want to, next time I see Phil Tippett, I'm going to ask him about this because I'm kind of curious. Wait. What? You know Phil Tippett? Like, yeah. From Tested Stuff. Wow. Yeah.
I'm not surprised you've run into or like spoken to Phil Tippett in the course of doing testing, but I wasn't, I wasn't expecting it to be at the level of dropping a next time I see Phil. His kids are our age. So like. oh wow mutual friends right okay i i've got phil tibbett on the brain because we for the next lander watch cast we just did uh jurassic punk what is stress punk oh oh yeah yeah it's about it's it's about some very deep ilm early
It's basically about the abyss to Jurassic Park period of transitioning from model making and physical and practical effects to digital. And there's a specific guy at the center of that stuff who is a fascinating personality. And so you should really watch that documentary. I'll have to look it up. There's also new ILM. There's a new season of the ILM thing on Disney plus right now. So that came up when we recorded the, the watch cast for Jurassic punk. I was telling the, those dudes like.
really should also go watch light and magic on disney plus if you like this yeah and then the day after we recorded that i looked and they just ran posted a season two of light magic which i And I had no idea it was even in production. So I have to watch that. I think the season two one starts with the post Star Wars stuff. So it's like it covers the prequels. So it's it's it's Phantom Menace through. Kind of probably. It's only three episodes.
Well, so the first season is animation, I guess. The first season is like the founding of ILM through Jurassic Park, basically. It's mostly the model making, practical era, and then the transition. the digital through Jurassic Park. Season two is only three episodes and it's, I think it's like Phantom Menace and the prequels.
And then it's like digital photography, you know, because that's when also they were Lucas was using like literal prototype digital cameras to shoot. Yeah. Episode two and three. And then I think the last one is sort of the rise of like. truly viable competitors to ILM like Weta Digital. Got it. I have to watch that stuff. That is like so extremely my shit. I still, I've proposed this before. What if we did podcasts about that thing?
Maybe we should watch light and magic and do podcasts about it. I would do that. I thought I, it's been a while since I watched the first season, but it was really interesting. I was like, it's super interesting. Not to loop back. So. Did you watch the thing that they showed on Star Wars, the making of Star Wars that they showed on Star Wars when they showed it on CBS?
Like when CBS would show back in the 80s. I don't think I ever watched Star Wars on network TV. OK, so after for Star Wars and Return of the Jedi, I don't think they ever showed Empire Strikes Back on TV or if they did, we missed it. Because I didn't see Empire Strikes Back until it was available on VHS years and years later. I'm pretty sure I've read about them doing it in the late 80s.
Well, so this would have been like the Star Wars would have one would have been like 1982 or 83. Probably it was whenever it was aired first. And like literally it went from a showing of the movie to a 30 minute or hour long special.
about how the special effects worked and how they did the models and they showed the motion cameras on the blue screen and then how the compositing like they literally had like matte frames where they would show the way it was shot and then they'd show it with the blue screen stuff replaced and then they'd show it with the star lines put in on the millennium falcon cockpit and the whole thing they talked about creature makeup and like the whole like it was it was An incredibly formative.
piece of content for me. And these ILM documentaries are as close as we've gotten to that. since then i i wish that those original cbs things were available still yeah i there's
There's stuff like that on YouTube. I don't know if that exact one that you're talking about is up there, but there are definitely like, and then they, the YouTube headline usually has like rare or something in it. Yeah. It's like rare, rare network TV making of or whatever. And some of that stuff is floating around out there.
So I've looked for it and haven't found it, but I also haven't looked in a long time. You mean that specific one? Yeah, that specific one. I specifically remember a whole big sequence about how the lightsabers worked and they show like... Alec Guinness and David Prowse standing very still while somebody comes in and switches the no-hilt lightsaber for the lightsaber and the whole thing.
I really want to see that versus blade. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, so they did run empire strikes back on network TV in 1987. The reason I remembered that and I just looked it up is because they got James Earl Jones to do specific voiceover for it. Oh my God. Like, like there's, it's on breaks. NBC Sunday night at the movies. And then there's like stock B-roll of Darth Vader while he's doing the voiceover of him basically telling you.
I'd have to watch it again, but it's something like we have intercepted your transmission. Do not adjust your television set type stuff. That's incredible. So to answer the other, like my assumption is that they made this data spike connector because they looked at the SCOMP plug on R2D2 in Return of the Jedi and were like, what if that was a murder implement? What if R2 could stab somebody to death with his data port thing? I guess I'm kind of impressed that you know the name of a scomp link.
Well, scumblings come up a lot in modern Star Wars. It turns out I I'm straight up on. Oh, wait, this is is this Wikipedia? No, this is fandom, not Wikipedia, but I'm sure it is Wikipedia now. I'm sure I'm sure the look has a page on the scumb link as well. Is that it? I feel like I had something else to say about that. Oh, yeah, I was I was just going to say I'm going to say a data connector that exists due to narrative purposes ranks pretty high for me.
Yeah, there's no downside, right? A data connector that could have been anything but is lethal because they needed it to be lethal is pretty good. Does he kill somebody with that thing or does he just middle finger it? No, he 100% puts that thing in somebody's neck. Perfect. Is it Clarence Bodiker? Is it Clarence Bodiker he kills with it? Wow. He gives him the data. He gives him the spike.
It might be. It might be. It might be Clarence that he takes down with. I forget. I haven't. I'm afraid to watch RoboCop again. It scarred me. I'm going to. After watching that 70s show for years, watching RoboCop is real weird. I'm going to say. I'm sure. I am sure. All right. Let's move to some Discord questions here. Jay Krauska writes in.
Any suggestions for local tech buy-sell trade forums in the Bay Area? Craigslist is hard to sell tech stuff. Facebook Marketplace yields a lot of is this still available ghost.
I have a fair number of things I want to sell that would appeal more to a tech audience, and I don't know where to sell them, such as a Stream Deck, a Steam Deck, PlayStation Portal, gigabit switches, etc. I actually also have this question, and we can extend this beyond the Bay Area, but I've also got some stuff that's kind of old that I want to get rid of, but it's still too new and valuable to just toss. Yeah, I don't actually know the answer to this.
the facebook marketplace is the place that i always see this stuff yeah but as the person said it's like incredibly it's there's so much It's a huge pain in the ass to sell something on Facebook marketplace. That's the main reason I have not gotten around to doing this. I've got half a computer sitting here. It's my I did a big NASA upgrade like three years ago and then a year later decided to upgrade a bunch more of it.
so i basically got like half of a pretty modern functional computer like it's a z690 board and stuff and ram and a power supply Yeah. It's just getting better the longer it ages, Brad. That's right. I mean, I should have sold it two years ago. It would have been worth way more, but it's still like literally you need to plug like a CPU in and
graphics card if you want better graphics and it's basically a computer so it's like too much to just toss well so so my wife has been going through and selling stuff on poshmark lately like just stuff that we like clothes and stuff that she's gotten that she never wore wore once or something And we need that for nerds. Yes. Yeah, Poshmark equivalent. Yeah, maybe this is more of a conversation starter than us having a definitive answer for this. Maybe people on the Discord can chime in.
I do find that Craigslist is... When Craigslist was good for tech stuff, it was awesome. I don't know that Craigslist is particularly good anymore. Yeah. When I've gotten on there to search for things that I was just curious if anybody was selling, I have not come up with a whole lot. Like I was looking for a little AV cart when I got the CRT. and could not, could not find like
But granted, there are like there are AV carts on there, but they're like the giant like came from a high school, like expensive ones. I just I need something smaller. But there was.
There was not a ton to find. So I will say the electronics flea market, if you have stuff, even it's stuff that's relatively modern, it seems to move pretty well there. And I think you'll get. Oh. am i going to become a seller at the flea market already look it's a couple of the people we went with last week we're talking about setting up a table yeah for the last one to just clear out the garages oh man what if we
What if we just do a collaborative table at the flea market and we're just at the flea market all morning? But then we have to get there at like 6 a.m., wouldn't we? I look. Yeah, that's that's the hard part. But also. So, you know, you got that going for you. Yeah, that's true. It could be like a tech pod meetup slash sell our old crap. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still kicking myself. There was a guy, a guy had a stack of Meraki MR-45s.
When we were there a couple weeks ago, which is Meraki is like they're owned by Cisco now, but they're like. very high-end enterprise network here. Yeah. And I thought those were old access points. And then I got home and found out those are like Wi-Fi 6 access points. They're like quite new. And those looked like new in box. I should have inquired about one of those access points.
I sometimes worry about that kind of stuff for fear. It's going to be locked to the admin account that you bought that was originally set up for. I brought that up on the discord and the network professionals were like, fuck Meraki. Like you have to, if they were claimed by the organization that used them, then you're like screwed basically. Yeah. So you're not wrong. Yep. A question from fortune is the Microsoft can being canceled after 48 days, the fastest tech product cancellation.
What products do you remember that vanished from the market almost immediately? And do you think any of them were actually good? The Microsoft Kin's pretty fast. The Kin was a dumb phone that was a little bit smart. K-I-N, to be clear. K-I-N. It was... I want to say it was the thing that Jay Allard worked on after, um, after Xbox or Zoom. He went, he went to Zoom after Xbox, but he maybe, maybe he was involved with this. Oh yeah. He's right here in the.
Top of the Wikipedia page. I think he went from Xbox to Zune to probably this. So I have... I have a kin that they sent us for review, and then when they canceled it, we were like, hey, do you want this back? And they were like, no, you're good. This is weird because it looks like a crappy iPhone 3G knockoff. But then it slides up and has like the... Uh, what were the, was it like a Nokia help me out here? Like a.
Hip-top? I'm just pulling names out of my brain. Oh, the hip-top danger? The thing that Jeff and Ryan always had? Right. Yeah, it looks like the pre-iPhone era of, you know, screen slides up and there's a keyboard underneath, like a physical keyboard. Like, it's like that plus a crappy iPhone. Well, so, but also...
And the one that they made, they made two Kins. They made the Kin 1 and the Kin 2. And the Kin 2 looked like a normal phone with a danger hip-top keyboard that slid up. The Kin 1 was like a puck. Oh, you're right. You can push the screen up and the keyboard was underneath that. You're right. All of these pictures are of the Ken 2. Also, they. They spell out the number in the product name, like Ken O-N-E and Ken T-W-O, which I think is kind of nice.
branding i mean it's very of the time branding i would say sure yeah um so that was pretty fast i also think Uh, HP bought, um, web OS from Palm and then they released some tablets and they killed those. Like I literally, they released the tablets. I have one. Oh, you bought one of those? Yes. The HP touch pad, I believe was the product name, right? Let me double check. That's yes. The HP touch pad. Those things got fire sale. Do you remember that?
Oh, yeah. Like you said, I didn't realize they were that short. I don't remember what the cycle was. God, I completely forgot about this whole thing. So, okay. It launched on July 1st, 2011. Yeah, which to be clear is... Sorry, to be clear, that's like a year after the iPad. A year and a half. This is like still very new for tablets at all. So it launched on July 1, 2011. On August 18th, 2011, they canceled it. Six weeks. They just continue all current devices running webOS.
That puts it at 49 days, which I think means the kin is still the winner. I can't remember how much I paid for that thing, but I think it was less than $100. You could get them for $99 or $150, depending on whether it was the big one or the little one. And to be clear, they launched at between $500 and $600. Yeah, iPad prices. So yeah, they were like roughly iPad prices. And the next thing you knew, you could get one for $100. I used WebOS on it for a long time, which was fine.
I ended up putting my Android on it at some point, which is also fine. Like that was my tablet for a while before I got my first iPad. So the interesting thing is they had two color models. black and white and the black one was slower than the white one so the black one was 1.2 gigahertz and the white one was 1.5 oh i got a black one but oh well sorry you had the crap one Yep. Adreno 220. Wow. The, uh, the products that come to mind.
In a modern context, here are the two little AI like lapel pin. God, those things. Dumbass thing. Like one of them was a rabbit something or other. You know what I'm talking about? And I cannot even remember the name of the other one that came and went so fast. They were deeply unserious products. It was the Rabbit R1. And God, it was a, it was a human humane. It was the humane AI and the rabbit are one, which both like aim and then died within like maybe shorter than this.
I think you can still buy these. So maybe these don't these haven't actually technically died yet. Yeah, they're still looking for a new business. Brad, the the touchpad had beats audio in it, which is funny because it's been before the Apple acquisition of beats. Sure. It was, it was, it was quite a fine, capable tablet for like, that was like early days of Twitter. You know, if you just wanted to like browse Twitter and do some basic, basic.
consumption of internet it was totally fine they launched it in an event they called think beyond i got Maybe a little derivative. Think beyond 49 days. Yeah. Think beyond. Wow. Okay. There's a question from engineer Nate. I will confess. I did like five minutes of research on this. Where do ISPs get their internet? They pay backhaul agreements with other peer two providers. Okay. So you probably already knew that the same stuff I went and read is that they're basically.
ISPs get their internet from bigger ISPs, which get their internet from like backbone ISPs basically. Yeah, there's always a bigger ISP is the lesson. Right. Like the like the backbone companies that basically comprise the base level of the Internet are themselves just giant ISPs that only really.
work in a b2b capacity with other companies but yeah they like they they sell connections between the big routers the like the big big routers um the the we learned about this years ago when there were when I want to say the ISPs wanted to charge somebody, maybe it was the backhaul providers when Netflix started being a double digit percentage of all traffic on the internet. Somebody wanted to charge Netflix and the customer who was paying for their internet.
Like they wanted to double dip on getting paid to carry Netflix across their networks. And they tried it for a little bit and it didn't go well for them. And people just and it went away immediately because they realized they didn't have a leg to stand on because. Like really the only thing propping up Western democracy right now is Netflix. Jesus. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the Internet by its nature is a big decentralized network. So, you know, I guess it stands to reason that at its core, it's just going to be a bunch of big or smaller networks, even even even at the absolute base level. Like it's still just going to be a bunch of. Well, and you'll find that a bunch of the different ISPs pay for different accesses to backhaul and stuff like that. Can you define backhaul?
Does that just mean thing behind the thing? Yeah, the backhaul just means the connection to the upstream network. Yeah, I'm trying to I'm trying to find the names of some. OK, here we go. List of tier one networks. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, GTT, Liberty Global, Lumen Technologies, which used to be CenturyLink, which was level three before that. Uh, NTT communications in Japan. You've probably heard of some of these companies. Yeah. Uh, Verizon is a tier one. AT&T.
Is this all of them? This Wikipedia page, there's only like maybe about 15. I don't think there are a lot here in the US. I don't know what the global situation is. Yeah. Is Google on that list? They are not. Yeah. Wow. This table actually lists like fiber route and kilometers. Also, AT&T has. See, AT&T has 660,000 kilometers of fiber, apparently. A lot of kilometers. That's a lot of fiber. Okay, there's your very well-researched answer to that question. CreeperJR?
I'm getting a new phone soon, a Pixel 9a, and I do not want a bulky case this time around. However, the last few phones I've had have been too slippery to just raw dog. Are you aware of any super thin cases or ways to apply texture so that the damn thing isn't so slick it might as well be covered in lube?
This is a very provocative question. It really is. Are, are pixels, are Android phones going in the, are they have gone in the same direction as iPhones? I mean, I, I, I hate how slippery modern iPhones are. Yeah. So I brought my phone. Yeah. So I've also, after talking about it like five times, I finally did. I took the case off probably about the beginning of the year and have not put it back on and it's feels good. Right.
Well, yes and no. I love how sleek it is. I don't like how slippery it is. Like I said, I do worry about fumbling it. I will say, looking at the back... The main reason I had a case on it was because they went to the glass back and I was worried. I assumed the glass would get like super duper scuffed and scratched up. I kind of don't see anything like this.
The glass back looks kind of pristine to me, so I don't think like superficial damage is actually a good reason to have a case anymore, at least on an iPhone. So I would do screen protector for sure. We've talked about this before. I've never put a screen protector on my phone because the glass is so resilient now. Well, so the micro scratches on the glass make me absolutely crazy. That kind of doesn't bother me, I guess, because I'm not outside with my phone that much.
I mean, look, I get it. So I'm looking up the thing that I have on my phone to make it more holdable. I do a magnetic ring that goes onto the MagSafe adapter. Okay. I used to use an Anker one that I had to replace two or three times because the little flappy part of the ring wore off. I've actually switched to this Toros 2024. which is an Amazon straight from China brand, I guess.
and it has a flip down ring that lets me use it as a stand but it also has this like silicone loop that I can kind of tuck my finger in but also just having the extra thickness on the back like A quarter of an inch of thickness is enough to make it grippier for whatever reason. It's like there's more stuff to hold on to. I used, I believe it was in the iPhone 8 era when I got an iPhone 8, which is the same design as my current SE3. I can't believe I'm on a 10-year-old iPhone design still.
It was made by Dbrand. I think it was a vinyl skin. basically have you seen these do you know what i'm talking about yeah they're like they're like they'll protect from scratches too Yeah, for sure. I mean, getting it on was a real pain. It's basically, it's kind of like an automotive wrap almost. It's basically like a vinyl wrap for the backside of the phone. It just covers, it's like cut to cover the glass exactly without covering the metal around the sides.
It worked. I mean, like it definitely added some nice texture to the back of the phone and made it less slippery. I could never file down like the sides felt like kind of like really sharp. Of the vinyl? Yeah, around the edges of where they cut the vinyl. And I think they even in the application instructions like said, hey, like.
rub it against cloth, like file down the size to make it nice and smooth. But like I could never, I could never get it smooth on the edges where it didn't feel kind of a little bit gross to hold the phone. Um, I, uh, I also, uh, like. I made fun of pop sockets for a really long time. And I think the pop socket has a real valid use in the modern context. Yeah, sure.
I can see it. It doesn't make them, I mean, the phone does not lie flat then, you know, whatever. Uh, let's see. Question from numlock. When it comes to your backed up Blu-rays and UHDs, I believe you guys have stated you will compress. Why? I've always felt I want the highest quality on my Plex and Jellyfin. When you compress, are you seeing any difference? Am I nuts for having an 80 gig copy of Blade Runner 2049?
You might be thinking, well, I don't compress. Actually, I do not. When I when I raise, they just go straight on the server as is off the disk. Yeah, I'm cheap. I don't want to have 100 terabytes of storage on my drives. Also. I mean, you can compress anything down enough to where you can see a quality loss, but also like if you're using remotely sensible compression. settings, you're probably not going to be able to tell the difference, but I also am.
I am uptight about it in the same way where I'm like, I just want the thing on the disc. I want to know there's no difference. Well, so for me, this started because I started out ripping DVDs, which were MPEG-2 compressed, and I would rip them to H.264. at a equivalent bit rate, which gives you much better, sorry, smaller bit rate, which gives you much equivalent quality at a much lower size, right?
typically if i want to watch some extended feature beyond the commentary that's on a disc i get the disc out and put it in because it's too hard to access that stuff at least for a long time now now you have players that can do menus But for a long time, accessing stuff through the menus was hard. So you'd end up with like 300 tiny videos on your on your folder or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, these days when I rip discs, I rip them to 265 or AV1, depending on when I rip them.
And so I'm still going down a level for the most part in terms of what compression is available on. I'm using a more advanced compression algorithm than is on the disc. So you don't really lose anything. Especially on the TV that I'm watching on. Sure. This question has actually just become kind of academic for me because I kind of have stopped ripping at all. getting a 4k tv uh-huh has made my entire collection of 1080p disc rips feel like i like i'm i think i might be like
One step away from actually just deleting all those rips of 1080p disks. Wow. Like it just feels outdated. I might not delete them. I don't know. But like I've completely lost the fire to actually like build a movie collection because. The 1080p one feel kind of outdated. Yeah. Or K ones are too big. Like I'm not, I don't, I've never actually bought a UHD disc and I, even if I did, I would not rip them because the straight rips are gigantic.
like yeah they're like 1500 megs right yeah or gigs he's not wrong when he says blade runner is 80 gig you can easily hit 80 or 100 on a single movie if you don't recompress it and like that's Like even with the amount of storage I have, I don't want to deal with that. So like I might just kind of be done ripping discs. I don't know. Or storing movies. I'm not sure. I'll go ahead and tell you, I built a collection.
A big collection in the DVD era. Yeah, you've got a lot. I've seen your Plex. You've got a lot of stuff on there. And then I made, like, I have a smaller collection of Blu-rays. And then I have a much, much smaller collection of 4K stuff, which is really funny because I don't have a fucking 4K TV. So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm not the right person to ask about this. Yeah. So I like there's a bunch of stuff that came out because DVD was so popular, though, for such a long time.
I have a ton of 480p DVD rips of things that have never been re-released on Blu-ray or streaming or all 4k or whatever. And as a result, like I'm going to keep those. Cause also they're like. except 800 they're eight gigs or yeah i mean the compressed files are one and a half gigs so it's nothing i uh recently super random i watched the final season of the practice do you remember that show
The ABC show with William Shatner. Uh, so he, he was on at the very end. So you might be thinking of Boston legal. I'm thinking of Boston legal. Yeah. They're both, they're both David E. Kelly legal dramas. Oh, God, did he do Ally? He did do Ally McBeal, didn't he? I guess that's like probably still his biggest show, actually. Think about that.
I think the, I think the ABC, uh, lawyer shows probably bigger ultimately. Maybe, uh, Boston legal, Boston legal is one of my favorite shows ever. It's the James Spader, William Shatner, like, like buddy comedy, like. Spader is a very charismatic, but like very left wing, like social progressive crusading lawyer. Shatner is a rifle toting Republican, but I mean, granted like Bush Republican to be clear.
Anyway, the practice, the practice introduced all those characters. Basically, they like I kind of feel bad for the cast of the practice because they hijacked. They hijacked their show to actually just set up another show that was about to start for their entire final season. Anyway, that show never got released on anything but DVD. So like I had the experience of watching a 480p. Kind of MPEG-2-ish compressed. Is that a 16X increase for your 4K TV? Maybe.
or is it 8x it's a 1080 to 1080 to 4k is a 4x increase yeah and 480 to 1080 is 480p to 1080 is a 4x so it's 16. too early to do that much pixel math in my head right now. But, um, it was fine though. Like I like, you know, very old compression. It wasn't just the low resolution. Like the compression is also pretty noticeable, but like. Certainly, it looked ugly for about five minutes when I started watching it, but after a while, I completely stopped paying attention to how old it looked.
So maybe quality resolution and quality are not actually all they're cracked up. The thing is, if the movie's good, the resolution doesn't matter as much. Yes, that's for sure. It's hard for me to think of James Spader as not the guy from The Blacklist now, which is really funny. I've never watched that. I think The Blacklist was the first show he did after Boston Legal. I could be wrong. I love James Spader.
Oh, wow. Okay. Does anybody not love John? He's delightful and weird. Yes, that's what I mean. He's a very high-tier actor like a Sam Rockwell or something to me where he's just like... He's extremely talented, but also like kind of weird and off kilter in a way that is fairly singular. So I think I've talked about this before, but my. When we had a satellite dish before they could scramble the video, they would just not like you had to pay to get audio, but the picture would come through.
So I watched a lot of HBO and stars and stuff in the mid 80s with no audio. So like I saw Rambo three probably 20 times, but no audio. So I had to figure out what was going on just by context because there are no subtitles. and uh sex lies and videotape is one of the movies that i watched with no audio and i was like this is gonna be you know 12 year old me he's like hell yeah let's go i love sex and i love videotape let's lies are fine whatever i just want to see some naked people
Uh-huh. And this is not what I was expecting. I still don't really know what that movie's about. He's in that, I assume. Yeah, he's the lead. It's a Soderbergh. It's a Todd Soderbergh thriller. I thought it's like, it's, was that like the first? Now we're just turning into a movie podcast. I think that was the first big breakout movie for Soderbergh, if I'm not mistaken. I think so, yeah. I think it was shot on video, actually. Okay. I should catch up on some.
some old young James Spader. I have like outside of like Stargate. I have not really seen much of his early film work. Oh, he's real creepy in that. Yeah. Yeah. I believe it. I should. I think I saw secretary actually. He is way. Well, okay. So I don't know that I've ever actually seen sex lies in videotape when.
The audio was on. He was real creepy and sexualized in videotape is my recollection. Creepy and secretary too, if I remember. Yeah. Oh yeah. A hundred percent. Okay. Net tech 5883 writes in, I suspect both of you guys have thoughts on this care to comments. Microsoft has removed the Bypass NRO script from Windows 11 preview builds.
which allowed users to bypass the requirement to use a Microsoft account when installing the operating system. I mean, yeah, it's this is bad to expand on that a little. This is basically one of this was the go to trick for people.
installing windows 11 and bypassing the part where they make you sign in with a microsoft an online microsoft account to even proceed with the installation well yeah and the reason you do this is because there's downstream consequences of signing on with that online microsoft account mainly that
Instead of your profile folders for things like your desktop and documents being in C users, your username documents and desktop and all the places you look for them. They're in some OneDrive subfolder that has some links from the main place and it makes.
it makes shit weird. And the name, the name of the home folder is the first X number of characters of your email address on your Microsoft account and not, not just whatever, like first name you want to supply. It's like, that's, that's a nitpicky issue, but also there's the more, there's the broader. I don't know, like software freedom perspective kind of issue of some people just don't want to use a Microsoft account. And yet you kind of have to like, like windows is.
Modern windows is like barely functional without a sign in, like an online sign in at this point. Well, I want, um, yeah, I like, here's the thing. The, the, the similar thing breaks compatibility with enough applications. I don't want games and other documents that are poorly supported, especially old stuff.
to try to be writing in a safe like i don't want game save files to be in my documents folder on one drive because they're going to take up a shitload of space and it's going to cost me money like i like this this is just to be clear this is one of those things that like It's probably good that they require Microsoft accounts for non-Power users. But they also need to give non-power users a way to avoid this requirement.
I can, I can be trusted to back up my computer. The reason you do this is because they force people to run backups on one drive and it gives them a way to recover passwords on windows logins, especially in a post bit locker world. To be clear, the OneDrive home folder sync you can turn off very quickly. It takes like 10 seconds. Yeah, but then the Windows profile's jacked up forever. Yes, but then your profile is still locked to a bad place. You don't want it.
I think even if you did the bypass, created a local account, and then signed in afterwards, I think it would still turn on. OneDrive sync for your home folders, even after the fact, I'm not mistaken. You can turn that off once it's on. At any rate, you can turn that back off quite easily, but that does not.
That does not allay the broader issue here of this whole mess. But look, Windows is a service now or it's a gateway to other Microsoft services. Like that's how they're monetizing Windows now. So this is like. This is just what Windows is now, so I'm not sure if...
Well, there's already a new bypass for the thing. I think it's even harder now to do, but there is another way to get around it still. But how long will that be the case? I don't know. The bigger point, though, is this is clearly the direction Windows is going. At some point, you have to question how much longer can you work around the undesirable.
aspects of what windows is now versus like maybe it's time to just switch something else and the annoying thing like for me i do a bunch of benchmarking and i have like it means my account touches a lot of machines every single week And there's a limit of 10 devices you can have connected to your Microsoft account, which includes Xboxes for some inexplicable reason.
before you can't download stuff from the Windows Store anymore. So I'm constantly going into the window. And I realize this is like a specific to me problem, but it sucks because there's a bazillion of these edge cases. where I don't want to have all of my machines logged into the Microsoft account. because it's a huge pain in the ass for me to keep disconnecting them and reconnecting them and disconnecting and reconnecting them
Yeah. This is going back years, like 2018 or something. But I, at one point, the giant bomb, the office gaming PC in the studio, I signed into Windows with my Microsoft account on that Windows. that was a huge mistake like things were never the same on my home pc again after that it was it was trying to sync your shit over yeah yes yes it was like trying to sync settings back and forth even after i did everything i could to sign out of that office computer it's still
Was weird with settings trying to get synced back and forth. And so this is one of the fundamental problems, right? Like there's no. I want a way to be able to declare service bankruptcy. My daughter used my Spotify account for years. by accident because I signed into her iPad one time and I couldn't figure out why I kept getting the same 30 songs over and over again added to my recommendations.
And there was no way for me to go in and say, hey, I just want to start fresh from this account on Spotify. Why can't you just reset your Microsoft account to zero? Why indeed? Yeah.
I've said it before, this is why I like the Linux or Unix or POSIX style of just... portable home folder with dot files in it yeah it seems nice like you can you can you can literally move the same home folder around between different linux distros or freebsd or like any of like you know whatever you run will just read those same dot files like it's it's the Like portable and modular and easily nuked, I think.
or the philosophical uh i don't know priorities there it's it's it's nice using i set up linux on a machine the other day and it was really nice having an install process that didn't end with increasingly desperate pleas for me to sign up for some service yeah I've said it for a long time. It was one of my PC world predictions last year. Yep. Uh, okay. Let's do a couple more quick ones here. Uh, Desmo double Oh one.
I was recently laid off after working 27 years for an aerospace company. Condolences. and my job hunting skills are a bit rusty. I hear you need to format your resume now in such a way that it can be understood by the bots and hopefully passed on to a real person. Do you have any tips? To be clear, I can supply the content just asking for help with layout, formatting to avoid, etc.
So I am clearly bad at this because I've been doing it for more than a year. Okay. But I've been using this thing called job scan. It's jobscan.co to do the formatting. And it seems pretty good. It makes an easy way. It gives me an easy way to like track jobs that I've applied to. It helps you feed the description for the job into that. It helps you change the stupid. We have to do this just to be clear. It helps you change the language on the.
on the your resume to more closely match the job description so that you get a you have a better chance of passing the automated screening because that's the the fundamental problem is that everybody Well, A, somebody posted a job to LinkedIn or Monster or wherever, and immediately there are 150 applications set to that job. And from talking to people who are recruiters and hiring managers, 99% of those applications will be AI spam in the same way that a lot of the job postings are AI spam.
So, A, you got to be real fast and B, using a tool to make sure you. Kind of get through the noise helps. That makes sense. Yeah. It's not a great system. The best way is to find somebody, you know, at that place and ask them to do a referral. And even that's not a guarantee these days. Yeah, that's. I mean, the, you know, who you know more important than what you know thing probably still holds true, but that's not easy these days, particularly if you're working remote.
Yeah, I can't even imagine how hard it is to network when you aren't even physically in the same place as a lot of the people that you prospectively want to work with. I mean, look, that's. Possible, but that's what social media is for these days, I guess. yeah i think so i think so What is this world that we have made for ourselves? Yeah. I don't, I don't love it. It seems bad in a lot of ways. Yeah. Um, all right. This might be the final question. It's the final question from dairy guy.
It's March in Ontario, and that means this is a bit slightly older. It's March in Ontario, and that means tapping season. Have either of you had any experience with making maple syrup? There's nothing quite like the smell of burning wood and the sweet sticky aroma of boiling sap. God, I bet that is... I bet that is a sensory experience.
So I have an uncle who has maple trees and he did, he does, he built a sap shack and does it every year. Sapsack. In Virginia. Sapsack. Sapsack. Sapsack. Sapsack. Sapsack. The sap shack, the job thunk, but, um, Shatner's sap shack. Nobody wants to be in Shatner's sap, sap, sap, sap shack. Um, I, It was incredible. It was an incredible amount of work, too, just to be clear. Really? Well, yeah, because you.
You boil down. It's a gallon makes like four ounces of syrup or something. Oh, I had no idea. It was that that kind of ratio. That's crazy. Yeah, it's an incredible amount of. It's an incredible amount of of of sap required to make the tiniest amount of syrup. Yeah, it seems like you just need a ton of true. I don't know how much sap you're getting out of each tree, but it seems like you would need a bajillion trees to get any quantity.
Well, so I want to say he had 40 or 50 trees and you'd go around and collect the bucket every couple of days. And when you got a gallon of sap, then you'd start boiling, basically. Okay. But yeah, like it's incredible. It's really fun. And if you it's on the East coast, at least there were places kind of all over the place. Like there was a place in, in North Carolina that we went. up near your part of the country when I was a kid.
that was a hey let your kids experience the magic of sap shacking oh that's cool and i'm gonna go and tell you i was not super impressed with it as a uh as a young as a young child yeah i mean you're At that age, you'd rather sit in the car and play your Game Boy or something, right? I mean, it's the kind of thing you can appreciate when you get older, though.
Yeah, exactly. We have just in the last few months, we have started using maple syrup around here as a sweetener. We've traditionally been like a honey guy. Oh, yeah. First of all, first of all, I like to lie to myself and. tell myself that using natural sweeteners like honey and maple syrup is somehow healthier. I mean I guess it is technically better than corn syrup. Yeah, I think so, right? You still probably need to moderate your sugar intake.
regardless of where it's coming from you tell me also true but um i like a uh i like a i like a maple syrup Yeah, I don't use a lot of artificial sweetener. I don't use a lot of sweetener these days, except for on pancakes, like mostly. So like we buy a lot of nonfat. Greek yogurt, like plain Greek yogurt. Yeah. I've also tried to get away from artificial sweeteners to be clear because like, yeah, yeah. I really like plain Greek yogurt. I don't even do anything to it. Plain plane?
Plain. Like basically tastes like sour cream, like full on just. So it has its place if you're like making something with it, but I would not just eat it plain out of a bowl. Like you and I are different people. So I will have like, I'll put a little bit of granola in there. Maybe some like freeze dried fruit, maybe some dates or something. Okay. They're a little sweet.
I mean, but we often know often it's just like granola. Interesting. Unsweetened granola. I mean, like some sort of aesthetic. To be clear, I'm putting like a teaspoon, maybe a little like maybe a tablespoon of. maple syrup into like a giant bowl of yogurt. It's not a lot. Okay. Anyway, again, I like to tell myself I'm being healthier by using maple syrups. Maple syrup's pretty good. Maple syrup's great. I'm going to say. The trees do good work. I generally still like honey on bread and butter.
i'll be coming out of the sugar look i don't i don't live in the land of bunny honey and butter i um What do I do? I don't. Yeah, I don't really use sugar. I don't put sugar in coffee or anything anymore. Yeah, I mean, I drink black coffee, to be clear. I eat an ice cream occasionally. I like an ice cream. Mr. Softee comes to town. I'll go visit the truck.
They have caramel this season. So I've been having caramel nut sundaes like it's McDonald's in 1985 again. Yeah. Go ahead and tell you those are pretty good. We've had the ice cream truck has been around a lot lately. Also, it's loud enough that I can hear it in here.
Yeah. Like I'm facing the back of the building here. I can still hear it with the windows closed outside. That's amazing. It's a loud ice cream truck. That's a gift. Are there like... smart ice cream trucks at this point there have to be like there have to be like ice cream truck apps or something now mr softy has an app you can get a notification when he's in your neighborhoods that's of course Of course. Why would you not want that? You know, everybody's got their thing.
All right, I'm going to declare an end to the questions here, I think. even though we've got more we could talk about okay um i guess that'll do it for us this week if you have a question for the show you can send it to techbot at content.town or if you're in the discord you can post it in the question seeking answers channel if you're not in the discord what are you doing
Get in there. Yeah. Five bucks a month. You get access to the fabulous tech pod discord. Is this our new recruiting strategy? We're going to start shaming people who aren't giving us money. No, no. I mean, look, I get it. Times are hard, right? It's tough out there. I get it. No, I absolutely also get it. But yeah, so if you want to get access to that community, I find it to be incredibly positive for me personally.
Not just because everybody that's in there is paying me, but because it's like a giant group of people who are into many of the same things that I'm into and I can chat with and we can talk about topics of interest. I've been spending a lot of time in the in the let's see, what is it called? Star Wars hashtag less laser swords in Star Wars. uh, thread or forum in the movie and TV forum because.
Look, we're talking about and or. OK, don't say anything. I'm not going to say a word. Started it yet. People are doing you should start it because it's real good. People are doing people spontaneously developed a spoiler. tagging method where they put which episode the spoiler is for so that if you're only watching one episode at a time when they dump three on a day, then you know which spoilers are safe and which ones aren't.
A well-defined spoiler taxonomy, I would expect, no less of the TechPod Discord. Yeah, it's a very good place. I made the mistake of... I intended to do a rewatch of season one. I almost never rewatch anything, but that show was so good. I was like, I need to rewatch season one leading into two. So I rewatched season one. I rewatched Rogue One. Okay. I rewatched the end of rebels just cause like it overlaps some with this, I think. All right.
I made the mistake of starting that rewatch the night before the new season started. That's a lot of that's a lot of Andor. So like now I'm kind of dying because everybody's watching the new season and I'm still, but also, you know what? That first season is extremely good. I'm like actually just excited to go watch season one right now.
But I'm going to tell you, when I got to the Eye of Aldani episode, I stood up and I cheered. I cried the whole thing. Yeah. And I watched that on my old TV the first time. So I'm excited to see the full HDR experience of the Eye of Aldani. Very excited about that. The final episodes of those arcs in the first season of that show.
I have all Donnie one, the no way out. And, um, and, uh, the, the bricks road, I think is the last, last one. And, and, and, and we've watched season or episode three last night. Uh, um, The end, the end of the first arc, you know, the first, the setup arc on Farrick's, the escape from Farrick's Lutheran. And yeah, like even, even that, like, dude, it's the show. So good. Yeah. Did not deserve that show. So this new, the new season.
Well, anyway, the conversation we've had in the discord is that the new season feels like they're just dropping a movie every week, which is like fucking hell. I got it. I got to give it up. Like, okay, you look, you absolutely don't got to hand it to Disney. No, the company, but whoever over there made the decision this time to make this just a three week drop basically because it's.
For people who don't know, it's every three episodes is its own kind of self-contained story because it's like one year. I thought there's 12 episodes. There are. There are. Oh, okay. What I mean is the space, the space between the first drop and the last drop is only three weeks. Yeah. So I feel bad for the AMCA folks. It's a lot of podcasts. Yes. Like you don't have to wait three months for the season to finish like the first time, but like.
Each three episodes, they're releasing three episodes a week, but each one, like you said, is kind of its own self-contained arc. So anyway, because that's not how they did season one, but whoever, whoever read Disney decided to just put out three episodes a week. This is a cool way to do it. I am extremely excited that they made that decision. Anyway. Yeah. So.
Yeah, that's it. You can go to patreon.com slash techbot. You get access to the Discord. You can talk to me about Star Wars fan theories. You can ask your code questions. You can hang out with a bunch of cool people and you can support the show, which we really appreciate. Uh, and as always, this is the last episode of the show. So I've got to open up the, I got the wrong list out. Uh, cause I forgot the last episode of the month.
Three seconds more. I'm very bad at filling. No, just talk about how bad you are at filling and then it'll work itself out for just another second or two. Like I can talk all day long until I know I have to talk for a set amount of time and then my mind goes blank. So as always, we want to thank all of our patrons, but a special thank you to our executive producer, to your patrons, including Andrew Slotsky.
Bunny Prime, David Allen, James Cammack, Jason Lee, Jordan Lippett, Twinkle Twinkie, and Pantheon makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Since it's the end of the month, we also want to thank 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, Chad Rita, Just Associate Wedge,
Kirp, Matt Walker, parentheses, Walkman 8080, close parentheses, Mike Etheridge, Nathan Phelps, P Tibbs, Sanchik Kumar, Steve Lin, Thomas Shea, Tom Fuller, Tom Hilton, and Xbox Playdates. Thank you also so much. appreciate each and every one of you thank you for keeping this thing going yeah and uh that'll do it for us this week we'll be back next week with another episode of the tech pod until then please consider the environment before printing this podcast