Brad, how's Sheev Quest going? Sheev Quest 2025 is proceeding apace. In fact, more than apace. I'm pretty proud of it. You want to know what level I am? I'm curious. We're talking Fortnite here, to be clear. Fortnite is having a summer of Star Wars. It's the... Like when I see Star Wars stuff coming into Destiny, I'm kind of like, ah.
When I see Star Wars stuff coming into Fortnite, I'm a woohoo. I made that exact point on the Next Liner podcast this week. I hate Darth Vader and Destiny. Yeah, makes no sense. I love this stupid shit. Also, I think I just play Fortnite now. I've been telling you this for a long time. Fortnite is secretly the good one of the Battle Royales.
pub g has problems with management and like like sweaty sweaty population war zones just not particularly fun i don't think yeah apex has technical problems and is like really it's like dota levels of complexity almost in a battle royale Fortnite is just fun. I just needed that one afternoon session with you last weekend. Yeah. You helped me get my feet wet and once I knew what was going on I just kind of have been playing it for 20-30 minutes a day.
Every day. And guess where it's brought me to? It's honestly, my biggest complaint about Fortnite right now is that it takes like six minutes to start the game. Yes, it really, the downtime from match to match is a bit much. No, I mean just opening the game and clicking on it in the Epic Store and it being like, oh, I'm going to load 16 different layers of anti-cheat and entitlements and stuff like that.
So I actually started out on PC, but I've been doing most of my leveling on the PS5 lately. I noticed that. Which is just like auto-aim, huh? Is it all just one hopper? Am I still seeing people from anywhere? I've gotten two Victor Royals on the PS5. I think you have to opt in on the consoles to be cross-play. Okay. But yeah, it's just all one big pool of players. It's their secret.
That's just, it's nice to come home, especially come and talk about it after the intro music. Yeah, I'm from court every day. It's nice to just flop on the couch and do my dailies in a relaxed posture. So the thing about it is, and I said this years ago when we started talking about it, is I think that their team...
where, you know, PUBG was optimizing to be an e-sport for a while, and Warzone is trying to extract as much money from you with, like, Jane Silent Bob and Seth Rogen skins as they can. I mean, Fortnite definitely is extracting money from people with skins as well, but... They seem to make most of their game balance decisions to optimize for fun, and if it breaks the game for a little bit, that's fine, because they change the meta of the game and the weapons of the game so frequently.
that like the law, even if you don't like the current meta of the game, you'll have like till the end of that season. And then it's going to all change and everything's going to be different again. So it works out. I have been having fun with it. Like it's kind of exactly what you said. Like, especially when you get down to that like tense last.
three to five players thing like I'm getting exactly that feeling of suspense and like creeping around and listening for every sound like exactly the thing you want out of the good tense battle royale it's like oh this is This is a real video game, actually. And it has the same thing that Austin Walker said about PUBG years and years ago, which is that, like,
Solo, it's a horror game. I think Fortnite's a little bit less of a horror game because it's kind of cartoony and goofy and you get back into the next game real fast. Alex calls a video game McDonald's. Yeah, that's kind of right. But like in a duo, it's like a buddy road trip movie. And in a squad, it's just a wacky summer comedy. Okay, so you didn't guess where I've gotten to, though. I bet you're 33. Oh, man. Okay, well, now I feel...
crappy because no, I'm not actually that far. I think I've been 26 or 27, but I was proud of that in a week. As of this recording, it's been one week since I started playing and only like six days since you showed me what to do and I've actually started making real progress. So like, and what level is she 40? She was 50. Is it 50? Yeah, she was the final thing in the main battle pass.
My Battle Pass, so I'm leveling fast enough that I am now confident I'm going to get there, so I went ahead and bought the Battle Pass last night. Oh, wow. Palpatine said I only need, the number of levels it said I needed would have only brought me to, like, low 40s. So I haven't actually looked to see... sometimes they sometimes the last thing in the battle pass is you have to unlock everything else in the battle pass which would make it level 50.
Sometimes you have to unlock everything on that page. but you can skip earlier pages. I see. So it depends on how they, I didn't pay attention to how they set up this season. And then there is also that bonus separate tier that's got like Republic, Chancellor Palpatine with the red robes. Those are Sith robes, dog. He's got Sith signs on them.
Anyway, I am secretly actually here for General Grievous, but... I mean, that's what we're all... At the end of the day, it's Mace Windu and General Grievous are the... I want Darth Jar Jar he's coming to, apparently. But yeah, so... This is a short season. It's like a month long. Yeah. Usually they're level to a hundred to get the stuff in the main pass and it's 12 or 14 pages, but it goes for like three months. Oh, okay. Okay. Well,
So now that you're Fortnite-pilled, hit me up if you ever want a game. I'll play with console people. I'm cool. Well, thanks. I mean, look. I'm enjoying my time with it, and I will be very happy to get Palpatine. I'm pretty sure once I unlock all this stuff, though, I may not touch this game for another year or something. Well, you know, Shiv will be there waiting for you. He always is. Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad.
Hey, Brad, it's been a while since I've seen you. You seem like you've been really busy. What's going on, man? Yeah, hello. Hi. Should we just get into it for people who don't listen to my other stuff? Yeah, we should explain. The next couple weeks are going to be a little bit weird for reasons that we can't get into full details, but I think you can say what you're doing. I can say what I'm doing, and by couple weeks, you mean four weeks.
three to four, I think was what I was told. Yes. All those goofs about jury duty. Uh-huh. Stopped being goofs. Yeah. I have been empaneled. I've never been impaneled before. I... I... I have now. Yeah, I am full on in a jury that's on a trial that's going to last up to four weeks.
Thank you for doing your civic duty. I don't think you're allowed to talk about anything else other than the fact that you have to go down there like three or four days a week and it's kind of wreaking havoc on our schedules. Your patience is appreciated in the audience the next
I'd say the next two to three episodes are going to be a little looser, if that's okay. I mean, it's going to have to be okay. We do not have nearly as much time to put things together while this is going on, so we're going to be a little more grab-baggy, a little more patron-episode-esque. It turns out a lot of what makes this podcast work is that we both have fairly non-traditional schedules and thus we're able to record at like eight o'clock in the morning or, you know, at times when...
When most people will be going to the office. Yes. Anyway. And also being home all the time and having buckets of recording and stuff. I have time in between those things to tinker with stuff that we will then... Yeah, or read about things that we will then go on to talk about on this podcast. But when I'm just out of the house and in a courtroom... From about 8 in the morning until like 5 or 6 in the evening.
The research time is very limited, you know what I mean? You need some handheld gaming devices that you can take for those breaks and that can be your project. I guess so. They should be here just in time for the trial to be over and you need to be free again. Anyway, that's what's going on right now. Also, I picked up illness at the courthouse already.
If you can't hear it in my voice, so this week is going to be extra loose. Apologies for that. We sound pretty good today, actually. But I think yesterday, judging by your messages, you sounded pretty puny. Yesterday was rough. Today I'm doing a little bit better.
I was wondering, is the whole thing about your immune system atrophying if you don't expose yourself to pathogens on a regular basis? Yeah, that's a true thing. Is that real? That's the common wisdom, but I don't know if that's actually scientifically supported. I will tell you that when my daughter went to elementary school, we spent the next like 18 months sick all the time.
And it was because she hadn't, like her preschool was all outside, so she was pretty lightly exposed to stuff there. Oh, I see what you're saying. And when she was around 20 other children for the first time. It was, it was like a festering hell stew of bacteria and viruses and like,
just constantly oozing out of her. Yes. Like I, I haven't been sick in years, like literal years. That's exactly what I'm saying. And then the last time I was sick was COVID. So that was like a kind of a unique situation or, you know, COVID is a thing you can get just by being in a room with it. Right. But like, I haven't had a regular cold flu type thing, and I could not tell you how many years. And like you said, it's like I've been sitting in this room by myself for five years.
I really did wonder, does your immune system actually become less effective? Are you actually more susceptible to getting sick? Because sure enough, two, three days in that courthouse and I started feeling it. Yeah. I mean, look, that's just justice, man. Yeah, I guess so. So what are we doing today? You alluded to this. We're going to do a grab bag episode of things we're working on, things that we've been doing, things that we have to figure out.
It's kind of like what our patron episodes often are, and some of these may turn into more fully-fledged episodes in the future, at least one of them will, maybe two even. But yeah, you want to jump? We can jump into the thing I've been working on. I have a couple of PC World projects that have been really fun to figure out. one of them the video is not done yet so i'll just i'll just tell you what it is and then we can talk about it when the video is done i'm going to do a tease
But I benchmarked a clean version of Windows, a clean install of Windows, and a dirty year-old install of Windows on the exact same hardware and changed CPUs throughout. I tried a couple different CPUs with that. Exact same config. to see what the performance differences were, and the results were fascinating. Okay, I'm very excited to hear how that goes, because I've always wondered about that sort of thing. Where were they? All CPUs of the same make.
So I tested a 9800X 3D and a 9950X 3D. So you didn't mix Intel and AMD on the same Windows install? No, no, no. That would be really interesting. So I've done that before by doing the thing where you open up Device Manager and show the hidden stuff and then delete all the Intel stuff once you have the new machine running. In fact, actually, my daughter's computer has been running like that for like four years now. Oh, man. um with like shockingly few problems yeah uh the um the big thing for me
was I installed Windows on this machine last April, I think, when I got a 7800X3D. I did some 7800X3D, 9800X3D tests earlier this year to see if there was a noticeable difference in games and stuff like that. And then for another video that'll come much later, cause we haven't even shot it yet. Um, I tested the 9950 versus the 9800. Um, Just to see what the impact of having more cores is for the kind of workloads I use.
And yeah, so the results on that were interesting. The thing that I posted yesterday that I'm really stoked about, and you'll like this. Yeah, before you get into that, let me ask, did you go out of your way to further synthetically filth up the dirty windows, or did you just take it exactly as you had been using it? All organic. Just windows that I've used without thinking about maintaining. Like, there's a bunch of crap. Like, like...
Look, there's probably 15 different Zoom clients installed. I got Teams running. I've got Intel Unison. Like, it's Power Toys, everything. It's all the crap we talk about on the podcast. And I left it all running in the background when I was doing these benchmarks because I wanted the pure clean install versus the dirty install. I did do it on a 64 gig machine because that's what I run because of Unreal being kind of a hoss.
So that could have had an impact as well. I think at some point I'll probably go back and redo some of these tests with... 32 gigs to see if this makes a difference. I feel like I see a lot more people talking about having 64 these days. I mean, it's not like strictly necessary for most people, but also the prices have gotten such that it's not like totally extravagant to do so.
Well, yeah, 64 gig DDR5 6000. When I bought this one, it was not expensive. I distinctly remember thinking, oh, this isn't expensive. Now they're $200. So that's up a little bit from where I bought. Oh gosh, there's some... Oh, these are DDR4. I'm sorry. You can get DDR4 64GB for like $90. Yeah, but those are going to be like $5,300 or something probably. Sorry, that's just the first thing that came up. Yeah, there's like the cheapest Corsair DDR5.
Vengeance kit is 2x32 is 156, so it's like 64 is getting there. So if you're running a higher-end CPU, I would probably do the 6000 MT megatransfers. Anyway. Yes, the other project. The other project, which I'm really stoked about and came out quite well, is I got early access to Doom. NVIDIA sent me a code. to test it out and to spend some time with it.
I, instead of playing the game like a normal human being, I was like, why do Doom games always feel fast? And then I started coming and testing, running different kinds of benchmarks on Doom and other games to figure out. Just see if I could measure microstutter in a meaningful way that would let me demonstrate.
Because fundamentally the problem with showing Microsoft on a YouTube video is that you are running a game at 120 or 130 frames a second, or 200 frames a second, and it sags down to 100 frames a second. and then you take that capture and you munch it through Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, and you turn it into a 60Hz 4K video for YouTube, and none of the stutter is apparent because it all gets smoothed out in the transition from... up 60 plus hertz to 60 hertz on the YouTube video.
So I ran this thing called FrameView, which we've talked about before off and on. It's an NVIDIA tool that measures the length of time each frame takes to render. and in milliseconds and then tracks that and you get a giant, if you run it for a minute, you get a CSV with thousands of entries for each frame. So you can do things like
see what the average, get the distribution of frames, right, of frame time. So you can see what the 1% fastest frames are, you can see what the 1% slowest frame frames are, all this stuff. You can also do something really neat, which is compare the delta from one frame to the next in rendering time.
And there's a tool called CapRamax that does this, that you feed these frame view outputs, and it just generates a whole bunch of nifty graphics, and then you can extrapolate some more information from there. And the thing that was fascinating is I tested, so I tested Doom, I tested Oblivion, I tested Fortnite, I tested Rocket League, and I tested Call of Duty. Call of Duty was the other one, yeah, yeah.
And most of those games had, they all were 80%, except for Oblivion, were like 80% or higher. frames within two milliseconds of each other right so the so the the variance from one frame to the next was less than two milliseconds for for the vast majority of frames now doom the difference between doom the dark ages which is out on tuesday thanks nvidia and bethesda The difference between frames, 99% of the frames were less than 2 milliseconds delta between them.
And I think that that was the big telling thing because like Fortnite, which is a stuttery game on occasion, as I think you're probably aware now on the PS5. Okay, fair. With Fortnite, you'd see a delta from the average frame rate to the 1% lows. was like half so like it's a 300 300 frames per second average on my machine and it sags down to 150 for the 1% lows. And you feel that. That's the thing you feel when somebody comes into frame of view or whatever, even when the lows are still...
I mean, that 150 is still higher than my monitor can even refresh. So this is the thing that shocked me. I think it was Outlaws last year when I was playing that. That game was showing average frame rates that were pretty high, like 200 in some cases, if you turn ray tracing a little bit down. Or I guess I was playing at 1080p at the time. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It felt chunky and messy because the 1% lows were so low. And when I ran outlaws through this process,
You saw it because the spikes were incredibly high. Like you were seeing frame times that were taking three times as long or four times as long as the next. as the previous frame. Basically, we came up with a way to visualize... micro stutter in a way that's meaningful and repeatable and so then I took the graph that you laid that you get with that And I synced up the display of that graph with the video clips that I captured at the same time I was doing the frame capture.
So when you're playing the video, you're seeing the frames come across and you're getting a representation of the frame time for maybe not exactly, but more or less those frames, like within a couple of frames on either side. In the Doom example, the one that I picked, you turn a corner and you see this big portal with a demon head thing in it.
And it's the only spike on the whole one minute sample, right? And I believe it's probably when the shader that runs the transparent force field looking thing in front of this big demon head pops up. on oblivion and call of duty you see huge frame spikes when the ui loads which is fine because like the ui's loading it doesn't matter if the frame rate goes to shit
because the game's in the background. But it's interesting because it was representative of what's going on in the actual sequence, and you can see where they sync up. Fortnite, you saw lags when other characters came into view. Um, which was, which was interesting. Even if you preload all that, like I have Fortnite set to preload all the assets. So like every skin that you can buy is pre-cached on my computer. It's like 50 gigs of skins, right? Yeah, it is.
I went through the shop yesterday, and good God, man. Have you bought anything besides the pass yet? No, I'm not spending. I had enough V-Bucks to just buy the Battle Pass. Sorry, I just turned this into a Fortnite podcast. I don't know where I had. I have like 1,300 V-Bucks. I don't know why. Maybe from Rocket League? Oh, maybe so.
And you earn a few, right? Don't you earn a few? You earn enough with the battle pass to buy the next battle pass. Oh, interesting. Anyway, I thumbed through the store just to see some of the models, and there was a lot of garbage in there anyway. Proceed. Yeah, so...
um anyway it's interesting because it gives you a visual representation of frame lag and it lets you see like i was talking to some game developer friends yesterday after i posted the video and they're like hey uh can you tell me how you did this because i want to be able to do this when we're having when we're doing perf profiling. And the next step is to connect Perfmon up to it, which is an Intel tool. And I believe I can export the same kind of frame data out of there.
Even if I can't, I can use frame view to do the frame data and then... Perfmon recording that they start at the same time. Yeah, I was going to ask for the end user. I mean, obviously seeing this stuff is educational. You can look at the graph.
against the footage and say like oh that's that's why that may be why it spiked I can see that thing came into view and that's probably why this hitched for a second there but is there anything actionable about the data like is there anything you can use or can you take this and go like to smooth things out? I don't know. I was talking to folks in the PC World Discord about this. I think the next thing I'm going to do is do a...
Here's how to test MicroStutter on your machine because everybody's computers are a little bit different. Different video cards, different CPUs, different memory are all going to have an impact. Different stuff installed, like you said, with who knows what else is running in your Windows. Yeah, and then Linux for that matter. Well, let's not get crazy. I don't know if FrameView runs on Linux. Probably not.
But the point is, you can then test settings inside a game to see what actually minimizes your microphone. Once you have a way to visualize it, then you can tune your settings to get something that minimizes your... And one of the first things I did was actually lock... the frame rate in fortnite to just over what i'm seeing is the minimum one percent
And it already felt an incredible amount smoother. So yeah, high average is better than equal 1%. I have to run the frame views on that to see what actually ended up happening. But yeah, so it was...
first first dip into this i think we'll probably do more um but it was it was fun and i learned a lot and i'd love people have questions about it please send them to me in the discord or post on the comments on the youtube video we'll put the put the link in the description you said that video is up now it's up I went up to the Doom embargo yesterday. I watched it. It was nice to see that visualization. Nice to have visual data to go against the footage. Having the visual...
presenting the data. The other thing somebody asked me to do is to do a Fourier transform, I don't want to say that, on the frequency distribution. So you can see where... So it gives you a better view into the... basically the distribution of the different frame times. Brad, I heard your receiver is... Are we still receiver buddies? Do you still have the same receiver that you had 10 years ago?
Yes. Oh, wait, I forgot. Yours is not quite the same model as mine, but close, right? No, we bought exactly the same one. The 840? Yeah. Oh, that's all. Hang on. And I see here in the notes, your receiver screen does not work. My receiver screen stopped working about a year ago. I talked, we talked a little bit then. Yeah, we've talked about this. My screen also stopped working and I had it fixed at a local repair shop for a hundred bucks.
Oh, that's more than I'm going to spend? Yeah, at this point, it's way too old to think that this was years ago. My screen started blinking out like a year after I got it or something. Oh, see, mine... So mine lives in a cabinet, so I didn't realize it had conked out until my daughter was like, does this have a screen? I was like, yeah, it has a screen. And she was like, I don't think it has a screen, Dad. And I was like, oh, you must press the button that turns it off. I was like, no.
It's just the 10 years of whatever the cold cathode tubes or whatever is in there. Yeah. I might be done with Sony receivers after this experience. I mean, it's lasted 10 years. Well, again, the screen on mine, like I said. Within a year or two of buying it, it started crapping out. I had it fixed probably seven years ago or more. Okay.
The point is, it's like an endemic quality control issue or build quality issue. I have pretty low tolerance for shoddy manufacturing on stuff where that's like a... I'm having problems with this preprocessor, this DBX, that are pretty common to the model, it seems, and that is... I have zero tolerance for that kind of thing. If you're going to poorly make your product to the point that...
There's a high probability you're going to run into these problems because you just didn't, like you did not spring for the good solder or whatever. Like, no thank you. This is why I don't use Focusrite audio interfaces anymore. It's because they traditionally have really terrible Windows problems. My receiver's starting to sound weird. Oh, I don't have that. I was talking to some people on the Discord about it, and, like, it's...
This has increasingly been watching a lot of TV this spring, and it's increasingly been revealing itself as we have watched Shogun and... severance and it's kind of really jacking up our and or run right now oh no um it's just this is like really it's subtle like my girlfriend really doesn't hear it but i it's like nails on a chalkboard to me it's just like this subtle high-pitched like sort of
screeching kind of it's like distortion when the audio gets pretty loud like you can just hear a really high-pitched like screech that's not good and the consensus on the discords seem to be that like you know this is i've had this thing for 11 years like the
electronics might actually just be going at this point, like it just might need new capacitors or something. I mean, look, stuff does wear out over time, right? Of course, absolutely. The bigger question, though, is that I have opened this thing up myself. before for reasons I can't remember it might have been related to the screen not working but The question is, is it actually worth trying to fix at this point? Probably not.
The question for me is, do you still have your channels hooked up? No, that's a whole other topic. I've got two speakers. I've got a 2.0 setup, so in some sense, any amount of receiver is almost too much for me. Like, that's where I'm at, too, because we've talked about this a lot, and I think we're just going to buy a soundbar next time. Yeah, I can get that. I mean, the biggest reason I like a receiver is to multiply HDMI ports at this point.
and to drive speakers I mean I need something to drive speakers and I need something Ideally, to add more HDMI ports. So you still play games. So my consoles are all plugged into the PC in my office because the contention for the TV is high. Right. So I've got, ideally... What?
At a minimum, ideally, I'm going to have an Xbox PS5. It would be nice to have a hookup for a PC, although I don't have a PC in there currently, although I would like to, and a Switch 2, yeah. And so this is very much going to get to the next topic on my list here, which is also TV-related.
I'm probably going to get an Apple TV or something similar. It'll probably be an Apple TV. I'm going to go ahead and tell you, I am a strong advocate for the Apple TV. I think it's So it's funny, I realized the other day, because I was laying, the kiddo felt bad, and we were laying in our bedroom watching TV back there, which has an older Apple TV plugged into it. And I realized I didn't know how to change the volume on that TV anymore because I almost always just use it with headphones in.
And that process of using headphones on it is so seamless that, like, you don't... And the other big benefit is they don't track stuff, right? Like, the... The amount of data that comes off of a Roku these days is remarkable. There is one device that consistently triggers an alarm in my PyHole dashboard, and it's the Roku. Yeah, I got rid of my Roku because of that. The Roku gets rate-limited a lot by the PyHole, or not rate-limited, but it did.
throws a flag saying like hey this device is like really trying to contact something constantly yeah and and so the apple tv doesn't do that stuff which is really nice yeah so i'll i'll so i'll get to the apple tv thing in a second but just to finish on the receiver uh the
Consensus, and this was like 6 in the morning before I was about to leave for the courthouse one morning this week, so I didn't have time to get too deep into it, but the consensus talking to people in the Discord was that an oscilloscope might reveal the problem. with the receiver, and that made me realize that I don't actually even know how an oscilloscope would interface with something like that. Are there leads that you hook up to, like...
Yeah, you connect it to certain... The service manual tells you where to connect it. And it tells you what shape the curve should be. Oh, is there like a standard diagnostic port or... or diagnostic contact, or are you hooking it up to each capacitor? I guess let me step back and say I barely know what an oscilloscope is even measuring other than what signal integrity or something.
It shows you the signal, right? It lets you visualize the signal that's going across a wire. So you connect it to, like, pin 3 and pin 7 on an EEPROM, or the two leads on a capacitor, or whatever. You want it to be square, or sine-shaped, or cosine-shaped, or whatever. So, but like, I think troubleshooting something with an oscilloscope is a skill.
Is a skill job not... I mean, look, flea markets next weekend, there's always oscilloscopes for sale down there. You know, you could get an oscilloscope. Get three, come back with three oscilloscopes, be good to go. Now we're talking. Yeah.
What do kids crave? And looking around a little bit, there's a Denon receiver that's like $400 that pretty much meets my needs. The bigger thing is isolating the problem and saying, yes, it's definitely the receiver that's causing the problem because I don't want to... I don't want to replace that box and then find out the problem is still there because it was actually something else, but it seems like the receiver is the most likely culprit.
If it is, opening that thing up and trying to fix it seems like probably a fool's errand at this point for an 11-year-old receiver when I could just buy a new one that's got more modern features. I mean, just because you're using it as an HDMI multiplexer the version of HDMI on that receiver is going to be your problem.
Like you can't plug the PS5 and the Xbox series in there. Yeah, so those two consoles go straight into the TV because I've only got two 2.1 ports on the TV. And so anytime I run the cable down the hall from the PC, I have to unplug one of the consoles. Yeah. Limited duty cycle on those HDMI cables too. But anyway, it's probably time to replace it. It's a bummer to me that no soundbars have multiple HDMI ports.
Or alternately, the thing that has kept me from doing this is that I can't find a soundbar that has as many HDMI ports as I want. What I really want is one for the Apple TV, one for the Switch, and or Steam Deck. and one for Steam Deck dock, I guess, technically, and then an extra one for the times that I do drag the PS5 into the living room to play a game with the kiddo or something.
And nobody has three. Everybody has two or maybe just one. It almost feels like there's a segment of the market that is underserved in AV and living room AV. I mean, almost certainly. I'm trying to figure out what that even is, though. It's like basic speaker amp or basic amp for some number of speakers.
I mean, honestly... I'm trying to think what is not being served by the receiver market already or the soundbar market. There's like some combination of like, I need like a couple extra ports and like... two speakers or two speakers and a subwoofer or something like that? I mean, honestly, an HDMI switch that worked with the consumer, with the CEC stuff would be fine, or ARC, ERC, whatever, would be fine too, probably, right?
Yeah. But I don't know that those exist. I haven't looked for them in a while. It's a weird space. That interference or that distortion could not be speaker-related. It could be something on the wire between your speakers.
Because that's an analog wire. It's not really well shielded. I haven't touched anything in the setup in years. But the speaker wire, I believe, is from before I moved out here. It's like 20... like 25 years old but it's like it just sits there you know unless it's like corroded on the ends or something well I think it's fine I think it's more likely that you have something that's bleeding signal into those wires It's like... if you if you run those
Like I said, those wires aren't particularly well shielded generally. They're definitely not balanced or anything like that, so they don't cancel out noise. So you're going to want... lift honestly what i would do is make it loud enough that you hear the problem and then lift the wires up off the floor or remove the route and see if that changes things um
Part of the problem is it's so intermittent that it's one of those things that's hard to reproduce. I can't force it to happen, or it doesn't even necessarily happen on the same sound over and over. It seems very sporadic. So that to me says it could be signal interference too. Because if it's only happening when your PS5 is pulling an update down...
Because it's crossing the network wire in a weird place or something like that, and that can do it. Okay, actually, yes. If it was network activity or something, because there is a cheap monoprice gigabit switch plugged into the receiver, or vice versa, like the receiver's got an Ethernet cable.
So for all I know, it could be something like that switch going bad and passing interference along or something, but I don't think it's anything upstream of the receiver because it seems to happen with any given source. Whether it's the TV sending audio to the receiver, or whether it's like air playing something straight to the receiver, you know what I mean? It's not any one device that is generating it. So it's between the receiver and the speakers. Yes, that's what it seems like.
So yeah, move the wires. Yeah, maybe I'll give that a try. See if that helps. Maybe I thought about chopping the ends off and stripping some new wire to expose some... If you're going to go to that much hassle, I'd just buy another $5 spool of wire. Yeah, maybe. This is RadioShack speaker wire, and I have a certain... There's like a certain place in my heart for all the Radio Shack products I still use around here because they don't exist anymore.
My favorite thing I ever bought at Radio Shack was a set of these $20 indoor-outdoor bookshelf speakers. That were awesome. And I gave them to my father at some point. And then when he moved on from where he was using them, he left them. That's sad. Yeah, that's sad. Let me fill in the detail that's got me thinking about the Apple TV again. Yeah! I encountered, I don't know how new this is, but that Hisense TV is a Google TV, as you know.
Is it powered by Gemini now? I believe it is. That sounds bad. I couldn't find the word Gemini anywhere. But, you know, Hisense is not the only one. Like, TCL also makes Google TVs. I'm not sure who else. Everybody but Samsung and LG makes Google TV at this point, I believe. They're either Google or Roku and sometimes both. TCL does Roku versions and Google versions. Hisense does Google versions and Roku versions.
I don't hate the interface by and large. It's fine. I'm guessing most smart TV dashboard interfaces are all created equal at this point. People seem to like webOS quite a bit. I would rather... My feelings about this are just I would rather pay $150 and not see ads on my TV, my TV UI. Yeah, in my case, it's not the paying for an Apple TV, it's the giving up an HDMI port for it. Like I said, that's the thing for me is that I'm already out of ports, so...
If it's built into the TV and I don't have to burn a port on it, I'm going to use it even if it's not ideal, but it's becoming even less ideal over time. Um, So I assume they all do this, but the Google TV aggregates at the very top of the dashboard when you turn it on. It aggregates every app and service you have installed. There's like a...
really, you're shaking your head. I mean, I know Apple TV doesn't do that. Apple TV just has a grid. Right, because you're just launching apps there. I'm talking all the built-in ones like the Amazon Fire TV and Roku. Oh, yeah, yeah. It shows up like an input on your device, I think, is what I've seen.
Maybe Google TV is unique in this, but what it's doing is it's pulling content out of every app I have installed. So like YouTube, Disney+, I know you're sticking your tongue out. I kind of agree with you. It'll be like, it's a carousel, it's a standard. yourself content a horizontal one but it'll be like
Here's a video from YouTube based on your recommendations on YouTube. Next unit over, here is Andor from Disney+, and if you click it, it'll launch the Disney Plus app. Here's something from Tubi. Like, it's aggregating. Everybody loves Tubi. Like, oh, yeah, and we'll get to that. But, like, it's specific pieces of content, but from all these different services just, like, all mashed together into one carousel, right? I was scrolling through that last night.
There's some real interesting knockoff material on Tubi, let's say. Oh, really? I came across a movie called Terminatrix. Is that about a lady Terminator? It sure is. Oh man, that sounds amazing. I was just like, alright, I gotta know who's in this. Oh, it was the art. Are you looking it up?
No, I just got to Reckless Summer. Okay. There's a lot of saucy foreign films on their homepage for this. On Tubi? On Tubi. Tubi sounds like an interesting story. I've never watched anything on Tubi. I hear it's quite popular, though. I mean, look, I love...
Because it's free, right? Isn't that the whole thing with 2B? It's fully free and ad-supported. I think it's pretty big, actually. I think it quietly does huge numbers. That makes sense. Anyway, sorry, I'll cut to the chase. I saw the Terminatrix. like kind of key arts and I thought I recognized one of the actors in it. I was like, who is that?
And so I clicked through to try to expand the summary. I clicked through to the page to get the full screen. Here's all the info you're going to show me about this thing. There were units, there was like a description unit, like a technical whatever unit. In the description unit, I can see enough of the preview of the text. This is a little bit hard to explain, but try to bear with me.
There was what appeared to be a human-written description of this movie, right? Okay. It is very much a Terminator knockoff, but in this description, I could see part of an actor's name in parentheses, so I was like... Okay, if I just click through and expand this to full screen, I'm gonna be able to read this whole blurb and figure out who that actor is that I thought I recognized. Expanding the human written description? For this movie? Yeah. Instead opens an AI generated summary of
the movie based on whatever data they have decided to feed to the AI. There was no way to actually... Again, I could see the preview of the normal human-ridden thing. I just couldn't read the whole thing because instead... It, like, Kool-Aid manned its way into, like, the AI-generated Kool-Aid man burst in and said, hey, what if you read the summary instead? And it's, like, the most boilerplate, useless,
information-free summary you can imagine. No acronyms, no nothing. I could not find any way to get to the actual full description, which again is in their back end because I saw the first line and a half of it. In the little preview box. This is the, like, this is, you've hit one of the things that really makes me crazy about bad streaming apps, because just to be clear, Apple TV is not immune to this. The HBO, or sorry, the Max app.
is notorious for this because they'll have a abbreviated description of the movie that you're watching and then when you click on it it just starts playing the movie It doesn't actually expand the description. Yeah.
Like, there's no page that you can see that full description on. I've seen stuff like that, too, and that's also annoying, but this is, like, a whole extra level of offensive. This is, this is, this is, but this is on Tubi. This isn't, to be clear, this is not Tubi's fault. This is Google's fault. This is in the Google interface. Toomey has the text and Google is showing their AI generated nonsense. That's exactly what it was. Like I said, this was at the top level.
Google TV dashboard when you first turn the TV on. Like I said, it's pulling content from all of it. So it would do the same thing for a Disney Plus show or a YouTube video, presumably. Maybe they have it disabled for YouTube videos, but like I couldn't find any kind of global toggle to just turn off AI-generated descriptions and hints and whatever. And again, the content, the...
The short descriptions they're generating are slop, just like a lot of the other things that come out of AI. It's useless. It told me next to nothing about that actual movie when I saw, again, a description that was specific and did have actors in it. I mean, look, it's grim. The other thing you tagged on there is when they don't put actors, when they don't have the list of actors in the film on the description pages for the streaming services. because like sometimes i'm like oh
This has, you know, this is a, it's a Brad Pitt movie. I'd like to watch it. I've seen this one before. Maybe I'd see another Brad Pitt movie or when Val Kilmer died, I was like, I'm going to watch some Val Kilmer movies. And I, and honestly, the only one that gives you a really good interface for that stuff is Plex.
because you can drill through right right through into the like the actor pages and see everything on plex and the services that you subscribe to that has that actor in it it's it's anyway yeah this This is, like, we've kind of balkanized video delivery systems. to the point that some of them are good, some of them are bad, and I often end up watching stuff on Disney Plus or Paramount. No, not Paramount. Netflix because the apps are pretty good.
Just because the user experience of using those apps is less painful than using Max or Paramount or Peacock or... God help you if you have to go look at something on Amazon. It's the worst. And anyway, this is what's got me thinking about buying an Apple TV again, because as far as I know, it is the least shitty version of what I'm describing. It sounds like they have very, very little of this kind of thing. And again, I went to the root of my Google account.
Actually, maybe I should still drill in on the PC. I was using the Google app on iOS and couldn't find any settings there. Maybe there are some... There's no settings, dude. Are there not? I guarantee you they don't let you give you granular control over that. It doesn't exist inside the Android TV interface. Okay, yeah, because I went through every single setting on that TV and could not find a way to turn this stuff off, so I'm guessing...
There's just no global toggle for the Gemini shit. I had a really dark moment when that happened last night of just like... We're heading for a new Dark Age, aren't we? Because the way that description read was that they had tuned the model to... spit out the shortest and most generic thing it possibly could. What it reminded me of was the, I'm sure you've heard about this move in content creation at places like Netflix to make sort of
I guess lower engagement content is the way to put it. Like they want to make movies that people can watch while they're on their phones. Yeah. You've heard about all this shit. Audio dramas with pictures attached. Right. Like it very much, very much read like that.
sort of thing of just like we need to make something that is as short and generic as possible because people are not even going to pay attention to what they're reading anymore like any amount of like depth or nuances just being sanded off now like I I had a really dire moment of just, like, knowledge and information are just being destroyed systematically, aren't they? I, um... Well, that's a grim thought. I think it's more...
So I tend to go with the less malicious thought that... somebody was like hey we need to get our ai usage and google up and they're like well where can we jam it in and it's just like the um It's just like why your Windows start menu started searching Bing results a few years ago, right? Somebody needed Bing numbers to go up, and that was an easy way to make Bing numbers go up.
putting every Android TV... I'm going to go ahead and tell you, somebody who hasn't really engaged with any of the Android TVs or Roku's, when we go to an Airbnb, and often we don't turn the TV on to Airbnbs, but sometimes you're caught in a snowstorm or something, and you've got to watch some TV. I'm always blown away by how shitty the Roku and Google TV experiences are just in general. Like the number of the volume of ads that you get when you log into the homepage of one of those things.
is shocking. And I think Roku was the one that was worse about this. Roku, Roku, like the ads are like embedded in the dashboard. And those are, to be clear, those are like traditional display ads. Like, web page style like CPM style display ads like Google TV at least does not have that like they're definitely they're definitely shunting like sponsored content at you but that's
But that carousel is algorithmic, and they can be promoting stuff based on what people pay them. Yeah, but the difference is, in the Roku example, you've got a carousel of sponsored content and then a banner ad around that, which at least Google TV does not have.
Maybe I've become somewhat a nerd to the experience on the Google TV. By and large, it's usable, but this AI thing has been a bridge too far. Okay, so this is a good bridge into what I was going to talk about next. I got so... I had to reinstall Windows on a laptop that I used the other day, and as part of doing the testing for the clean versus dirty Windows thing, I had to reinstall Windows a couple times and move some stuff around.
And I got kind of annoyed at Windows, at the amount that Windows is trying to sell me stuff at the, at the, like, The latest version of Windows now pops up a thing if you're not using OneDrive to backup your profile folders, which actually doesn't backup any of the data that I actually use, as we talked about last week. And they finally added a way that you can turn off the little bug that says, hey, your computer is not backed up every time you're in File Explorer.
But I shouldn't have to do that. I shouldn't have to have these terrible experiences. I installed Windows 7 on a VM to test something out. And, man, Windows 7 was real good, Brad. Yeah, it was fun. I mean, I think a pair of experts once said it was the best Windows ever made. That seems like something we would send. But, um, anyway...
I installed Linux. We talked about it a little bit on the Patreon episode last month, I think. I'm still working on getting it to a point that I can use it as a daily driver, and unfortunately a lot of the stuff I've been doing, like the microstarter testing, I couldn't do in Linux, obviously. A lot of my day-to-day has been in Windows, but I think I'm at the point now that I can record the podcast and stuff like that in Linux. All right.
I have this bootloader issue where I have two Linuxes and two Windowses popping up on my... I can't remember which bootloader I'm using. Reunify, maybe? Say again. My bootloader is re... It's something re-something. Refined. Refined, yeah. Okay, can I... This might be my most pedantic moment. Yeah. Like, seriously, and I know I've probably had a few.
As you know, technically, Refind is a boot manager, not a boot loader. Okay. Thank you, Brad. But a boot loader is a thing that loads an operating system kernel. Uh-huh. Refind is basically an intermediary that just loads... It scans for bootloaders. Yeah, so it's like the Refind is a boot manager that then loads a bootloader that then loads an operating system. Thank you for the correction. I appreciate it. You're welcome. But anyway, so it has It has a Windows EFI partition that doesn't boot.
And it has a Linux EFI partition that doesn't boot. So there's four things in this boot manager. But only two of them work. Yeah, it's because Refind scans for anything it thinks it possibly could, or sorry, let me rephrase that. It scans for anything that possibly could be a bootloader. So if it finds other EFI executables,
Yeah, that may or may not actually be valid for loading an OS. It'll list those two just because it's giving you everything. You can go into the configuration file and tell it, like, You can only show these two. You can set all kinds of exclusions based on path or type or all these other ways to tidy up that list.
Because I'm okay with them being there, but it's kind of annoying to look at them every time I boot the computer. And when you first load it and you're looking at all these icons, it's not always apparent which one is the one you should actually run to load the OS.
Well, I mean, it's clearly the second Linux in the first Windows. That's what I know now. It took me a little bit of trial and error. There have been moments when I was deep into my Linux tinkering a couple months ago, which I really need to get back to when I have time. There were points when I had like three different USB Nix installers for like, I don't know, I think I had like PopOS, Fedora, and maybe NixOS all at the same time. And I had installed multiple distros.
There were, like, 20-plus icons, 20-plus different things to boot that Refine found between different bootloaders. And then, like, you know... secure boot, key utilities, like any EFI binary it found, it listed on there, and it gets extremely messy very quickly. And I assume I haven't dug into the config files for this, but I assume I can do things like adjust the names for the...
names and thumbnails and stuff for the images and all that. You can customize it and actually make it look pretty nice. Mine is pretty slick looking now, but I actually ended up turning off the auto-detect entirely. and instead I just go in and manually make a new entry every time I want to add an operating system to boot. Refind is really neat. To be clear, it's really neat for the type of person who wants to manually manage their
EFI system partition and really know how the operating system boots and customize that behavior. If you're happy with the way your computer works out of the box, then forget this thing exists. But if you want a neat little graphical menu at the...
When you start a computer to choose between operating systems, you can do a lot with it. It's much easier than using Grubb. Yeah, I'm not a big Grubb fan at all. In fact, I can't use Grubb. We should not get into it, but Grubb has got this persistent issue on this machine.
I think it's something about this specific ASUS board that I'm using. Oh, it doesn't like it? Grub throws an out-of-memory error with a ton of different distros booting on this machine. Unless I finally figured out if I disable the entire TPM. Oh, that's really weird. Literally turn off the whole trusted platform subsystem in the BIOS, then Grub will work on this machine. I think it's one of those things where Linux is still not great on bleeding-edge hardware.
You know, like a motherboard that just came out in the last year, you're probably still going to run into issues here and there. Yeah, well, I mean, Grubb seems like it's not great with GPT also, which is, you know... Yeah, even in the Linux world, I mean, we're really getting into it here, but systemd boots, seems like it's probably it's more popular than Grub these days or like maybe it's more minimal and more reliable I gather that's what it's funny the cache EOS install guide
had a really good, which boot manager slash loader should you use? And they went through all of them. It was like, and, and the recommendations were, uh, system debut. And, um, Refined. For numerous reasons, I kind of intend to never use Grub again if I can help it. Yeah, seems like it's the right choice. Um, Brad, do you think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up? I think so. What do you think, audience? Pause for a reply.
Yeah, like we said, sorry if this one's a little shorter and less focused. Also, apologies if the editing is slightly less tight over the next couple weeks. Time is short. It seems it is. If people have questions about the Linux stuff, I'm doing more Linux stuff in the newsletter. I'm not going to do how to install Linux guides because I assume that people are going to be able to follow. I'll say, hey, go to this, follow the instructions on this page.
But if people have specific questions about stuff further down the pipeline, I'd love to know what you're curious about. We'll write about it, we'll talk about it in the podcast. We will do a real proper desktop Linux episode at some point, although at this point it's going to be mid-July, I think, before I can get back to this. Well, it's been interesting to me finding out the places where...
There's a lot of stuff that just works. There's a lot of stuff that I think is probably never going to work. Like Fortnite. But then there's a lot of stuff that's kind of in the more stuff than I expected in that in between. I expected to have everything just work or everything be in between. I mean, everything not work at all. And there's a lot of gray area of like. kind of user compiled ports of software that vendors have... There's a version of Notion for Ubuntu and for Fedora.
And the people have recompiled that for, repackaged that rather for the distro that I'm using. So if I choose to use that, then I can, or I can just, you know, I can put it in a, what do you call it, shell myself. So anyway, it's been fun learning. It's a lot different than the last time I tried to use Linux on the desktop in, I think, 2004. Oh, yeah. The desktop of Linux or just Linux world in general has gotten crazy in the last few years with
different container formats for applications and stuff like that. It's pretty good. Yeah. Pretty good. Yeah. That'll do it for us this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. As always, if you want to support the show, we are a listener-supported show, so we wouldn't be here without you all, our patrons. If you want to find out how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash techpod. It's five bucks a month.
You get access to the Discord. You get access to the Patreon exclusive episodes. which if you liked this episode, you will find a lot more of those in the feed for the patron episodes. Although that one, fair warning, gets way more rambly even than this. Yeah, that's true. Sometimes not. Sometimes it's quite serious. Other times we're talking about... Revenge of the Sith or Weird Candy for 20 minutes.
I think that, yeah, I mean, look, man, we can talk about Weird Candy anytime you want. I did go see Revenge of the Sith in the theater. You talked about that. Did I tell you that I had to... Oh, I was thinking when we talked, I was debating whether to go. Had I already been when we talked about it? Oh, we did. I missed it. I screwed up and was a day late. That's right. But also, I finally got my daughter to watch the first one, Phantom Menace. And? She's 12. Uh-huh.
generally pro. She was like, I like Padme. She seems better than Princess Leia. And I was like, oh man, you're in for some disappointment later on. And she thought Jar Jar was fine. Okay. But was not repulsed by Jar Jar. Okay. She said the graphics were okay, and I was like, you realize this is the first movie that they ever shot on digital all the way through? And she was like, but I don't know what that means. And I explained it, and then she was like, okay, that's kind of cool.
i'm resisting an old man yelling at cloud moment here Nothing against your daughter. I see people doing this all over the place. People referring to graphics in movies. Yeah. I think that is a battle I am going to lose. I got bad news for you, Brad. Her TLDR on it, though, was... She was like, oh, so people cared about tariffs back then too. And I was like, well, I've got bad news for you. George Lucas, thought leader, saw it all coming. Anyway.
Thanks to all of our patrons for supporting the show, but a very special thank you to our executive producer, to your patrons. including Jason Lee, Pantheon makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Fiend for FIA president, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, and James Kamek. Thank you also so much.
and that'll do it for us this week. Again, if you want to find out how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash techpod. I don't remember if I said that, but there's the URL. We appreciate each and every one of you. Whether you listen, support, whatever, if you want to leave a review for the show, that helps us a lot, too, so we reviews on wherever podcasts are from but especially iTunes it seems like is the important
because we always talk about Deezer on the phone now for some reason. I don't know. Anyway. Also, I just said thank you to the patrons, but my mic was muted, so nobody heard it. Thank you, patrons. I thought I saw your mouth moving. Brad, I hope you feel better. Thank you. Enjoy your next week at, sorry, doing your civic duty. True. will be back next week with another Please consider the environment before printing this podcast. Brad made a face.