I'm free. Well, congratulations. Thank you. From, like, misery? From suffering? From generalized malaise? Let's not get too ambitious here. Okay, okay. Uh... I am free of my jury service, though. It has completed unexpectedly a little bit sooner than was planned. Oh, thank you for your... Did the case end... Did they settle? No, no, no. We saw the whole thing through. The whole process played out, but... Did you go to a deliberation room? We did. Which was like in the bowels of the building.
Really? It was kind of crazy. The courthouse is pretty publicly accessible. You have to go through metal detectors and stuff, but they don't check IDs or anything. Anybody can just come and go. In fact, I think unless it's a closed... Anybody can just sit in the gallery and watch a trial, I think. Yeah, you can go. In fact, actually, I should do that with my daughter next year and take her for a field trip to watch a trial sometime. Like, I kind of thought that.
Sounds really weird because I just got out of it and I'm like, oh, I've got my free time back. But I kind of... Now I've got a bit of an itch to maybe go sit in on another trial just to watch the process play out again a little bit. Okay, so everything I know about this I learned from watching TV shows. I assume... that there was opening arguments that were heartfelt and impassioned from both lawyers, and then there was some testimony. A lot of it.
Did you go on any field trips? My favorite part of Perry Mason's was when they would take a field trip to see the scene of the crime. No field trip. There was one reenactment in the courtroom, though. Ooh! Uh-huh. Anyway, the deliberation room that I was going to say, the courtrooms are fairly, like I said, publicly accessible. But the deliberation area is deep in the bowels of that courthouse building. You have to badge in. There's this elaborate theme.
No, no, no, like the bailiff has to badge into this big heavy door and like... go through these labyrinthine halls into these back rooms that are way out of sight.
Wow, like a Stanley Parable business. Once they put you in there to deliberate, you can't leave without calling the bailiff again. You're not allowed to go out the door. What if somebody needs to pee? There's a bathroom in each deliberation room. Oh, that's convenient. Does everybody have to stop talking while you go in and pee, though? Yep.
Really? I've been stressed very strongly you have to stop deliberating or talking about the case if somebody goes in the bathroom. Wow. Yes. Did they give you sandwiches? Nope. What? No, you have to provide all of your own food. You can bring food into the deliberation room, though. Like, if you bring snacks, you better bring enough for everybody's situation, you think? Or was it like, there was actually no eating in there. We actually, like, they...
turned us loose to deliberate like 45 minutes past lunchtime. Okay. It was like 1245 when they actually had to like get permission to The judge stopped everything when we hit noon. We were so close. We were basically at the end of everything.
Yeah, and the judge actually stopped for a couple minutes and came back, and he was like, all right, I've gotten, I think he used the word permission or something along those lines. He effectively said, I've gotten permission to run into the noon hour because basically it's like a mandated lunch break, right? Oh, right, because I, well, there's people that are union employees, right?
I assume? I don't know about the attorneys and judges, but I'm sure people like bailiffs and court reporters probably are, right? Clerks and stuff like that probably are unionized anyway. The point is we were so close to wrapping everything up and getting deliberation started that he made special concessions to go past noon. So by the time it was like 1245 when they were like, all right, let's go to the deliberation room. And as soon as we got in there, like everybody was like, what about lunch?
Because the bailiff was telling us how to deliberate, and everybody was like, we need to eat before we do this. So we had to break for lunch because everybody had to go get food. So the point is, we all just went and ate and did not bring the food into the deliberation room. Okay, so then... Okay, so you're in the deliberation room, and what's the scene? Is it like...
Is this like 12 angry men? Is this like people yelling and stuff? No, it was pretty. It was quite... Everyone was aligned enough that it really was actually quite casual and orderly and just sort of got done quite quickly. Oh, that's good. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're like Vinny's like dying to hear about every detail of this thing. So I think the Ramble cast on next slander this week for people who are patrons there. We'll probably be bursting at the seams with more details like this. Okay.
So, okay, but you've got to give me the exciting conclusion, though, like, you know, guilty, innocent. Did you send somebody up the river? I don't think it's in the media yet. It was a civil trial. This was not criminal. You know what? I'm going to tell you. I felt enough responsibility even in this civil trial making this decision that I don't...
I don't know if I'd want to do a criminal trial. No, I think a criminal trial would cause me an incredible amount of anxiety. Yeah, like I have heard from people on criminal juries.
since I've talked about this publicly, who have reached out, like who in one case said they sent somebody to jail for 50 years, prison for 50 years. Yeah, Gina was on, was in the selection pool and was like, but they hadn't gotten through all the vetoes and stuff yet, and they finally kicked her off at the end because they got somebody better, close enough that they could, like... Put them in her seat, basically. Oh, you mean Vardir. Yeah, exactly. And she was like legit concerned.
Because it was like a federal criminal case and it was going to be like an incredibly long time commitment. And like I said, the person was going to... the stakes were the person was going to go away for the rest of their life if it didn't go well. I mean, that's probably legitimate. That's probably dismissal for cause, honestly, if you are very honest. Like, hey, I don't think I can fairly adjudicate this thing because I... Yeah, because my own personal anxiety is such that I can't...
Like, I don't know that I can send somebody. Like, if you literally, if you were to say, I can't, I don't have an enemy to send somebody to prison for life, they absolutely would excuse you on the spot. Yeah. I think that's, like, in my case, that's a true statement. I would have a hard... There are some things that I would definitely be able to send people to prison for life for, but it would be...
It would be a moral challenge for me. Yeah, that's understandable. Congratulations, thank you for your service. Yes, I'm happy to have completed this thing, seen it through, and now... Now you're immune for like five years, right? Technically, it's 12 months.
You give a month, you get 11? That's a bad deal. Yeah, so it ended up being about three weeks, actually. I assume they said May 30th, which is a week from yesterday at the time of this recording, is when it would end, or it was like the longest it would be. I assume they just plan out for it to be the absolute maximal version of what they make sense out just so people don't you know people need to make concessions in their personal lives for it to be that long if necessary but it
Turned out to be faster. Well, and like they excuse you if you have like a vacation planned or something. So if they had said it was going to go after that and somebody had a vacation for June 2nd, they don't want to have to kick jurors out. So they don't actually say excusing you means you are free. You've completed your service and are not in the pool for another 12 months. deferring means if you have travel they defer you which means you
have to put down a make-up date, and they will send you another summons in the next three months. It's always the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. That's the one I do. That's a banger. Sadly, you can't just get out of it. If you have travel booked, you have to make it up.
What if you don't believe in the rule of law anymore? That's probably a good reason to remove you as a potential juror. Yeah, extreme corruption in the United States government has led me to believe. Anyway, before we start, I want to say there's like one... one telltale sign of the effect this schedule has had on my life. I just happened to glance at my downloads folder. Yeah.
There's nothing in it for the last... It's empty. It's completely... I haven't downloaded anything in three weeks. How do you live like this, Brad? The entirety of my use of this computer has been somewhere between like 5.30 and 7 a.m. every day now. I had to be there at 9 o'clock every day. By the time I would get home, it was after 6, and I was just like, I don't want to go sit on the computer anymore after this.
This is the closest you've had to a straight job since probably before the pandemic, right? Or a nine-to-five, have-to-be-in-a-place type of job. I was working at home one day a week. We were not in session on Wednesdays. Still, just looking, I was like, man, I really have not been in my normal routine at all. Wow. But I'm back, and hey, you want to do a podcast? Yeah, and get that download folder filled up too, Brad.
Welcome to Brad Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. How's Sheave Quest going? Sheave Quest. I haven't quite maxed out the battle pass, but I've got everything I care about. I've got General Grievous. You've got Red Road Sheave. I take that back. I do not have red robes. Palpatine. Yeah. I'm sorry. I can't use the word sheave. Look, I've been rolling. I rolled with a squad full of sheaves last night. I just cannot use the word sheave. I'm sorry. And I'm going to say...
When you have a swarm of sheaves descend upon you, first off, we were playing with my friend Mike, and we were playing with his nephew, who's six years old, which... Probably we had some deleterious effects on his MMR would be my guess because... We went from playing, like, all bot games and small children games to kind of getting wrecked to pushing through a dub for him.
But the rolling with the full squad of sheaves, swarming down on people and blasting lightning and rocks at them and all that. was some good chaos that children just didn't know how to cope with. I always like to think that Palpatine was mononymic, you know, that he just has the one name, kind of like Cher.
I mean, I think that's Sidious. If you're going to go one name, it's Sidious, right? I always thought, yeah, sure. Sheev is what his bros call him. Yes. I actually, like, weirdly, once I got him and started using him, I don't know if he's actually, like, the best model in the game because... The robe clips outside of the TIE fighter and he's kind of bland looking. He's just kind of like a dark gray lump.
The best one is the banana that the head pokes out of all the cars through the roof. Sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but the hitbox is bad on that one, so we don't want to use that if you're competitive. Yeah. But I got, well, I guess that red robe one will have a little more pizzazz to it, but I got General Grievous, which is... Maybe the real prize. General Grievous is pretty good. He doesn't have enough arms, so he needs more arms. Fortnite's good.
That's fun. I don't know if I'll probably take a break after the Star Wars stuff is over. Look, there's a giant Death Star in the sky. I think we speculated about this. I assume... that the Death Star means the end of the Star Wars season is the end of this iteration of the map, and they're going to blow everything up and start with a clean map on...
June 8th or whatever. Do you think that the Death Star is to scale? There's been numerous times that I've stopped in the middle of a match and just kind of looked up at the skybox and wondered at, like, I mean, obviously, you know, you don't know how close it is to the planet or whatever weird plane of existence it takes place on, but, like, I...
I like to look at that and be like, man, is that really what it would look like if it loomed over your planet? That's scary as fuck. This is always like, where do they park the Death Star when they're not using it? Like, what's the storage plan for the Death Star? Because, like, if you roll in with the Death Star around, like, my planet, I'm going to freak out.
Even if I think we're cool with the Empire, you never know, man. They might blow you up. What is the means of repulsion of that thing? I've always wondered. What does it look like going into hyperspace? That's always been my question. Yeah, right. Does it leave a wake that sucks everything into hyperspace with it? I don't know, man.
Anyway. We're not qualified to answer those questions, but... Wow, that is a good segue. Yeah, if you have questions, you can send them to us at podcast at techpod at content.town. Again, that's techpod at content.net. I definitely didn't say podcast there because that would be a weird thing to say.
Or if you're in the Discord, if you're a member of the Patreon and you want to submit a question via the Discord where you type a question into a channel and then it just disappears in front of your eyes, you can post it in the Question Seeking Answers channel. We have a mighty crop of questions this month. So if we didn't get to your questions, like apologies in advance, I think we probably have enough to do a whole patron episode of questions too.
next week sometime. There's a lot of questions right now. Yes, man. Man, it just hit me. It's going to be so much easier to work that Patreon episode in now that I'm actually going to be here all next week. Yeah, you have time to play Doom the Dark Age again now. Like, you can... catch up on blueprints. Everything has just been kind of on hold for the last three weeks, but anyway.
Yeah. Hey, you got your life back, man. And no more courthouse tuna sandwiches. So you got that going for you. I brown bag it. I was pretty proud of myself. That's pretty good. I did not buy, I bought a croissant the day I got selected because I was hoping that I would get dismissed immediately and did not.
Yeah, but after that, I was very disciplined and made lunch every day. That's cool. Had a little freezer pack and everything. It was kind of cool. What's your lunch strategy for the courthouse? What do you take? It was a lot of leftovers. It was a lot of pasta or... I was making wraps on the days we didn't have leftover spring. I was making a little turkey wrap and a hummus wrap. Love a turkey hummus wrap. Very healthy. And garbanzos. Always good. How about...
How about we start with an anonymous email? Oh, I like an anonymous one. For reasons that will become clear, please redact my name. Done? Yes. Done. When Will was suggesting ideas for a portable pirate radio station, this was nearly what my mates and I did in college. This was the dawn of MP3 and one of our mates bought from somewhere a 5 watt FM radio transmitter. This had about a 5 or 10 mile radius, so here's what we did.
We placed the antenna off campus on a TV antenna at his parents' house connected to a computer running Winamp. This is brilliant, by the way. This is really good. This email blew my mind, kind of. This was the days of analog TV signals as well. Each Friday, the three of us would each record a two-hour show, burn it to mp3, then broadcast.
That way whatever party we would show up at, we could tune to our station on the radio and listen to our music. This is incredible. By that time, the people at the party were too far into the evening to notice the change in songs. That's incredible. So, yeah, I... That's brilliant, like you said.
Did you have friends in college that worked at the college radio station? No. My sister actually worked at the radio station at her university, but I was graduated and gone by then. So Tatum, who we worked with at Whiskey... worked at his college radio station when we were in college. It was knowing somebody who worked on the radio station. I had another friend who was there at the same time, and you'd call him and ask him to play shit for you at specific times. Sure.
But this is even better because then you have your own DJ show. You can do the whole thing. It's incredible. It's really impressive. It's just a feat of ingenuity. I also just have kind of a fascination with, I mean, we talked about this. Also a federal crime, let's be clear. Yes, we should probably. That's exactly why this person redacted their name. We talked about this a week or two ago. I kind of just love the union of new and old tech.
piping modern digital data through an old analog signal. I think we've talked about on the Q&A before, somebody that... made a TV station in their house. I think in their case it was like 24-7 Simpsons reruns or something. They used the old cable that's in the wall, right? So they could plug into the coax in the wall and tune to channel 13 or whatever they had put it on and just watch Simpsons.
Piping from a computer over an old analog broadcast method like this is just super cool. Well, so we had a mystery pile of VCs in our backyard the other day. A pretty mighty one, fairly substantial. That scat is what I would call this probably. Okay. And, uh, what's the difference? I don't know. I don't know. I assume spore is herbivores and scat is carnivores, maybe? Spore is more generic. Spore is a track, trail, scent, or droppings, especially of a wild animal. Scat is a poo.
So it was a, it was like a good three pound crap and it looked like carnivore crap. And we live in mountain lion area here and we kind of freaked out. So I sent it to the Puma Tracking Project for the peninsula, which is like these volunteers who track sightings and post them on a map. and they were like, that's not Mountain Lion. We were like, woohoo, that's good news. Probably a coyote got in our backyard somehow. That's not great either.
I don't mind single coyotes, no problem. Single mountain lion, real scary. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Generally, when there's one coyote, there's more than a pack of coyotes is a problem. Well, it turns out this time of year is when the young male coyotes, the cubs... get kicked out of their packs oh so um because they're usually females and there's one alpha male and then the baby the young the young males so
The new young males are finding their way this time of year, so it's probably a stupid teenage boy that got stuck in our backyard. Okay. is the kind of TLDR. Anyway, coyotes are nothing to mess with, though. I've heard some grim stories from back home in the more rural areas about the work of coyotes. Yeah, especially if you're walking a small dog or something. It's not good. My parents, my parents, like, good medium-sized dog, almost got got by coyotes.
So I bring it up because I was looking to see if you can use software-defined radios to track mountain lion collars because they're all tagged around here. Oh, really? That's awesome. Yeah, and it turns out you can't because the collars are designed to last for like four years.
They don't, because the tranquilizing and tagging is fairly traumatic for the animal, so they try to minimize it as much as possible. So they broadcast really low wattage signals at a really long interval so it's like every three hours or something and your chance of picking up those if you don't know what you're looking for your chance of picking that up out of the noise is very low so anyway
Do they not collect and aggregate and make available the data themselves? They don't make it available because of poachers. Oh, of course. Yeah. That's a bummer. Yeah. Because it would be really nice to know if the mountain lion is in my neighborhood before I go out in the backyard. Yeah, it sure would. Yeah. Anyway. Okay, question from Alexander.
Between all the stuff you guys do, do you keep track of your work and projects in a work log? Ever since I saw John Carmack's explanation of his work log, I've been trying to implement one myself, even developing an app for it, but I get too lazy with it eventually. I keep everything in a Notion database at this point. I have really...
Like the way Notion works is you can kind of generate, it works almost like a wiki where you can generate pages off of pages and stuff like that. And, you know, I've always had wiki envy over the years. Uh, so yeah, so I have like top level stuff for top level categories for like games consulting and PC world and the podcast and the newsletter and like games I'm working on and other stuff I've been writing.
um and then i put subcategories of all that and i also have like i have a home lab category so i have Like that's where I put the documentation for how to install, you know, Docker containers and stuff like that, that I use on my, on my servers. And it ends up being incredibly useful. It took, this is, I mean, I've tried this 20 times in the past, and this is the first time I've been really consistent and good about it.
Also, it was a necessity because there's enough stuff going on that if I don't actually keep good notes, then I won't remember what I did three days ago. Sure. Because I'm bouncing back and forth. Going back and forth from games consulting to PC World stuff is... Like it's a little, it's a lot sometimes. I feel like I'm kind of getting the vibe from reading comments out there that the inshittification might be setting in on Notion a bit. So...
I still am using the free notion. Um, They don't seem to have hit the Evernote problem where they're like, hey, you can only use this on two things unless you pay us. but they are doing some stuff with the Notion paid now. where they used to have a...
base tier, and then there was a tier you could pay for their terrible fucking AI. Yeah, it's mostly complaints about the AI features getting shoved in more prominently. Yeah, and now they've gotten rid of the cheap tier, and they force you to get the AI tier if you want to have Notion paid. Which, like... For a single person, Notion free is great. The paid features are all around sharing, like having shared workspaces with other people and stuff like that.
I still get the vibe that Obsidian is the thing most people switch to if they're not on. I find Obsidian to be completely inscrutable. The other thing I've been looking at is DocuWiki. DocuWiki? DocuWiki, which is a... Somebody in the Discord recommended it the other day.
it's just a it's like a viewer that you run on a server and it takes a folder full of markdown files and makes a website out of it which seems like like it seems like then you could use something like simple like a simple note or something like that to generate your wiki folder and then view it online with this talkie wiki thing, which seems pretty good. That's cool. Speaking of simple note, my answer to this question is that the best I manage here is a flat to-do list in a simple note document.
which I rarely even look at, let alone update. Yeah, so you don't do this at all then? I'm a bad note-taker. I mostly just keep things in my head, which is of varying degrees of effectiveness. Yeah, I, I, um... The thing that happened to me is when I got busy... I was actually around the time we started this podcast and I was still doing the start of the food stuff. And.
Then transitioning into the game, things where I had a million tasks at any given moment and I had to keep track of them, it became really clear that I had to have more consistent note-taking. When I was just working on Tested, we had a giant whiteboard with all of the...
like the scheduled shoots and upcoming stuff that was in production and like status of that. Yeah. And, and that was our kind of tracking system for that because we were all in the same office all the time. So it worked really well. Sure. Question from Levi. Regarding Apple TV boxes, or other non-Apple streaming TV type boxes as well, and concerns about using an HDMI port on them,
What about using the PS5 or Xbox to stream services? I too have a Hisense TV, and I avoid the smart functions except for Apple casting to the TV, which isn't used often. Yeah, that is worth mentioning. I mean, at least for me, obviously, if you don't have one of those consoles, not an option, but I've got both plugged in already. There's a couple things there. I don't think the PS5 supports Dolby Vision, if I'm not mistaken.
Does it not, really? I'm pretty sure it does not. I would have to triple check that, but I mentally filed it away along with Samsung TVs on my list of things that don't support Dolby Vision. For however much you care about that, you know, it's Some people probably care more than others. That's just kind of slightly better HDR. The other thing about this, though, is that I use Plex and Jellyfin quite a bit these days.
And those apps I have found to not be the best on the consoles, or at least to not get updated quite as often as some of the others. In both of those cases, I found Jellyfin and Plex apps to be of extremely varying quality depending on the platform. I'm guessing the Apple TV ones are probably consistently the best.
I should check again. It's been a while since I looked. But for the commercial services, though, that is absolutely more of a viable option because I've had generally a pretty good experience with stuff like Amazon. I'm trying to think what else have I tried on console. I've definitely done Amazon and Netflix on there, maybe Disney Plus as well at some points. The commercial ones generally I think are pretty good on the consoles. It's funny because
For me, there's a couple of things. One is the remote situation on the consoles is annoying. Yes, like having to use a controller to... manage all that stuff is not great i do i have an old media remote for the xbox which works but it's not amazing either yeah and and like compared to I mean, the way my wife and I interact with the TV is just with the remote app built into the phone, right? Because we use the Apple TV. The other thing is...
I used to not use the consoles for this because the noise was bad, especially last generation and the one before. The consoles were pretty loud. The newer consoles, that's less of a problem. I feel like there's probably... I actually should test this. It would be easy for me to set up and test. But I wonder what the power draw is for the consoles versus like a dedicated Apple TV or something like that that's running ARM. That's another thing I've thought about is that you're burning...
I would guess somewhere between like 15 and 30 watts, maybe 30 watts on Xbox when you're watching stuff. I mean, that's essentially idle, right? Yeah. Minus whatever video decode hardware is active and networking. The PlayStation 5's legal site has active power consumption data, which I assume is probably right. Um, at... Blu- Blu-ray playback is 55.7 watts. And streaming media is 56.1 watts for the PlayStation. That is crazy high. That's for HD.
That's running a disc, though, did you say? Well, Blu-ray playback is 55.7 and streaming media is 56.1 at HD. I would have thought the disc would have been way higher due to having to run the motor. uh, in the disc drive. I think those motors are pretty, like, it's, while they spin fast, they're pretty light. Probably in the momentum. Um,
Anyway, that is definitely an option. There are trade-offs. While they break this out by model, like the digital edition and the pro and all that, this is cool. I didn't realize there were quite so many variants. I guess there are different storage configurations, probably. So yeah, I think the other one is...
The Shield is the thing we didn't talk about. The Shield is... The reason we didn't talk about it is because the hardware is really old at this point. Yeah, people rave about the... That's NVIDIA. Yeah, that's... The NVIDIA Shield TV. People absolutely rave about that thing, but yes, the hardware... It's actually a Tegra, roughly equivalent to the one in the Switch 1. Yeah, just to tell you how old it is.
If they put out a new Shield TV with new hardware in it, I might actually consider getting one because people seem to like it even better than the Apple TV in a lot of cases. So there have been rumors, and they had some hirings a couple weeks ago. It seems like there might be a new Shield TV coming. Man, if they put out a Switch 2 equivalent Shield TV, I might have to...
Yeah. Well, I'd have to. It has really good video quality. It supports all the codecs. It supports all the Dolby Vision stuff. Supporting everything is kind of a thing. And it has a decent remote, which is important. Anyway. Yeah. All right. Here's an email from Brandon that I certainly found interesting.
I just wanted to chime in with some info about some of the courtroom tech you were discussing this week. I manage the recording systems at one of the larger circuit courts in Michigan, and our state actually stopped using stenographers in the courtrooms for the official record around 20 years ago.
Everything was moved over to video recordings of the proceedings, starting with VHS recordings, then moved to digital SD recording around the year 2000, and finally into 1080p in the last five years or so. Wow. All of this was done as a cost-cutting measure. Since the pandemic, a large portion of proceedings are actually held remotely via Zoom, in which case the official record is the Zoom cloud recording.
When a written transcript is requested, a certified court reporter or transcriptionist creates that from the video and audio record. Brad's concerns are correct. This does introduce the possibility for technology failures and inaudible moments. But those are more or less seen as acceptable trade-offs. That's crazy to me because...
Yeah, right. Of how seriously the official record was taken in the courtroom I was in. It's crazy to me that there would be any level of acceptable. Just people half-assing it up in Michigan. I guess. I can't speak to Michigan's intentions, but AI is being looked at by other states to either produce the entire transcript or to assist in human assisted transcription. Well that's out. We had, like, there were actually quite a few witnesses testified over Zoom in this case.
Oh, there was, I was going to say, there were a bunch of people that also posted in the Discord that they work in these spaces. Oh, okay. We had a lot of feedback and offers for information, so thanks to everybody who wrote in. Yes, that's cool. Yeah, there were... four or five, maybe six witnesses of resume in this case. Real size they didn't have to come downtown. Yeah. If only you could end your jury duty over Zoom. Yes. I guess. Yes.
Did they do that during the pandemic? I guess they did that during the pandemic? I don't know. I actually have no idea. Or did they make the jurors come in and sit down and watch Zooms? That's a good question. I have no idea what they did, actually. Maybe people had to produce negative test results or something. I'm not sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. Anyway, so that's interesting.
There was a good thread about the Open Steno Project. I can't remember what it's actually called, but it's the Open Steno Project. Yeah, Open Steno Project was it. Yeah, and then... On the Discord, you mean? On the Discord, yeah. and there were a couple other people that wrote in as well. I didn't pull all of them, but I thought the... like i wonder if they have different criteria for this, like if circuit court is Like if criminal courts do something different, right?
Because it would suck to send somebody to jail because the transcription was bad. But anyway, I don't know. This is mind-blowing to me because I cannot count how many times in that courtroom the reporter... It's weird watching a lot of courtroom dramas. You always think of the reporter as somebody who's just sitting there on a little steno machine and never speaks or is basically invisible.
and not count how many times the reporter had to ask somebody to repeat something or ask them to slow down. Or in a lot of cases, there was a lot of crosstalk where people would start answering a question before the attorney had finished asking it, and they're like, please, please, you have to speak one at a time. Yeah, that makes sense. So having all of that just baked into the official recording of the trial without any human touch to clarify stuff is like...
Yep. I adhere to tell how other states to run their legal systems. Look, at the same time, I look at how the whole process works, the stuff we talked about a little bit before the show, too. It seems phenomenally expensive. for like to run a three-week trial right oh yes oh yes uh especially when like the case i was on was filed in 2022 Jesus, and it's almost three years later before it actually went to trial, so think about the amount of attorney's time spent working on that for the covert.
the course of three. three years. Maybe they should just hire more judges. I could be a judge. I'd be great at it. That came up, actually. Oh, really? The judge was excellent in this case. I won't spend too much time on it, but highly professional.
There were a couple times, though, where there were delays for whatever reason, and if it was a delay where he didn't need to be out of the room. Like, it's very formal in there, and, like, kind of, you know, it's all quiet and everything, but, like... It really might lighten the mood because he basically went into welcome to judge facts mode. Oh, that's fun. Whenever people are out of the room.
Was there a transition for the judge from jury selection when they were kind of inimical to you, all the people trying to weasel out of jury duty, to like... Being a friendly judge? No, this guy was so professional that I would say there was no change in Demeter. Okay.
He dismissed people for cause, even when I kind of felt like they were trying to weasel out of it. But if you say a thing, if you say that you have a bias or that you have read about this case prior or something, they have no choice to excuse you. They can't try to... poke holes in what you're saying. They have to take it on good faith that you're being honest even if you're not fair. Okay. Anyway, he went into some judge facts stuff like he...
Basically it was like here's how many Superior Court judges are in San Francisco and like I was just in LA last Friday for something and they have 10 times as many as we do. Granted, LA is a little bit bigger than San Francisco. I think there's like 50, low 50s, superior court, there's like 52 or 4 superior court judges in San Francisco. Wow, that's a lot.
a big building. LA has it for $500. I mean, LA is 10 times as high as he is. Yes. That makes sense. Anyway. Okay, here's a good question. I don't know that I want to attempt this username. Gerard von... You wanna try it? Uh, Gerard von... Okay, sure. It sounds Scandinavian. I apologize, I'm sorry. Can web rings make a comeback in 2026? Why not 2025, I say? This is a thing that Dave Snyder...
talked about a million times back when we were in the whiskey basement, which is that everything old is always new again. Everything's going to come back. And I think wet brings our due. I think, I hope so. I mean, Wes, our friend Wes Fenlon talked about that on. Yeah. I forget which episode he was on where he brought up the indie one. I think it was the RSS episode. I feel like
That's the prerequisite, though. You need things to form a web ring out of before you can have a web ring, and it seems like people are bringing blogs and websites back to a degree. Blogs are hot, man. I keep thinking about setting one up that I know I'll never have time to update, but it would be cool to have one. This is the nice thing about the newsletter is it encourages you to like
People expect a cadence with a newsletter when they don't necessarily a blog. Yeah, I don't know that I want that kind of responsibility. I mean... Yeah, I want to just do it for fun. I got busy last month and missed some newsletters, and as a result, I felt like I let a bunch of people down. That's exactly it. Mostly, I really want to do it more as an exercise in networking and hosting than actually
a blog. I want to set up the blog and do all of the proxying and web server stuff. I'm learning Nginx right now. Yeah, I set up a Minecraft server for my daughter and one of her friends last night, and I was like, man, if I had Nginx running, I could just run that from the house and have a community server for friends. Yeah, so I have five...
Because of course I did. I've been meaning to set up a reverse proxy for months and I finally got around to it and finally just decided, you know what, I'm just going to go straight Nginx. I'm not going to use any of the GUI frontends or any of the other stuff that integrates. I'm just going to learn plain old Nginx and hey, it's actually... not nearly as complicated as you think.
So I will tell you, I've gone the other way, and I just set up Portainer on my Plex server, the small machine that runs Plex and the heavier stuff. And I installed, oh god, what's it even called? like a minecraft server manager that makes it easy it gives her a web ui that she can log into and like update the server and stuff like that so that i don't have to do that
I'm a big fan. Let the people do their work instead of having me do the work for the people. I'm teaching people to fish over here. Yeah, fair. Okay. Tactical tug. I'm curious, do any of you use some sort of AI assistant regularly? I have Copilot bundled in the office pack at work, but every time I use it I realize how shit it is and why I don't use it.
ChatGPT is fine for the slightly more creative stuff like writing and so on, but I mostly use it to check math and chemical formulas when I'm too lazy to do it myself. It's better than Copilot in my experience, but still far from perfect. Maybe it's just me.
but I generally find this whole AI hype to be a little over the top and that it's mostly useless for things other than just messing around. Yeah, I don't use it for anything because it's generally shit and is useless for everything other than just messing around. I have used AI exactly once to generate something actionable that was useful to me. Okay. And it was...
No, it was when I wanted to test something on my TV, I asked it to generate an FFmpeg command line to generate a video. FFmpeg, if you don't know, has all kinds of generative... Sorry, that's the wrong term to use because people are going to think I mean AI.
I guess procedural is a better way to put it. Yeah, it'll make bars, NTSC bars and stuff, right? I think it does. Yes, it does have test patterns built into it, but you can also just tell it to generate frames of a specific RGB value or whatever. Okay. Or it'll also do a bunch of... sound generation stuff, like sine wave type. You can make it produce a bunch of tones or whatever. You make pink noise.
Probably. Okay. Anyway, what I had to do was just spit out a 15-second video of red, green, and blue frames for like five seconds each. That was literally it. Okay. I just wanted a lossless.
one of those with no compression artifacts. I wanted pure color. I was trying to test, look at some uniformity stuff on my TV. I could have learned to do that myself in 20 minutes, but I decided to just... see if i could get it to generate that video for me and it did but then i tried it on something a little slightly more complicated with ffmpeg a few weeks later Could not figure it out no matter what. It tried.
It could not produce anything usable, and those were the two times I have ever tried to use AI for anything. I've used some stuff. I played that Quake demo, the stupid Quake 2 game that Microsoft released. I wrote a newsletter about that. Yes, I tried the web-embedded version of that, too. That was not great. I played Fortnite and talked to Darth Vader. That was stupid. I did that as well.
I've done a lot of local stuff because of work that we do at PC World. I've done some testing to figure out if there's benchmarks and stuff there. I downloaded DeepSync and used DeepSync. I've run a bunch of stuff local. I generally my feeling on the whole thing is that. the results aren't good enough to be worth the costs, especially for the cloud-based stuff, where the amount of energy and water being used for those big AI data centers is fairly ludicrous.
And when I talk to normie humans about why I don't like this, I've found coming up with some metaphors that help them understand the environmental cost of running it and not to mention the copyright, the theft. of training the models, but the environmental cost tends to put a sharp point on things for people, at least here in Northern California.
So, you know, the example I use is, you know, is the thing that you're asking important enough that you fill in a few square feet of wetland? Or, you know, is your question important enough that you chuck a couple of kittens into a wood chipper to get the answer?
And people react strongly to that, it turns out. I think a lot of people do, especially around here, but I think there are absolutely people out there that will just shrug and not give a shit at environmental cost. I mean, that's really... I really think the thing to hammer on with people is the reliability aspect of it. It's like, hey, you are trusting this thing way more than it deserves to be trusted. Most of the results you're getting out of this thing are not.
are not unimpeachable in the way that you seem to think they are? No, they're absolutely impeachable on almost every axis. The other one I do is the little type-ahead bar on your keyboard on your phone. You start the sentence and then just keep hitting the middle word until you get a full sentence out of it. Any old sentence. And that's basically what they're doing, right? Yeah. Yeah, so, anyway. It's, uh...
Yeah, I'm always surprised. The interesting thing to me is that there's a huge gap between what people who understand how the AI stuff works, how they feel about it. And how people who... are just general computer users and are used to their phones getting better every year. and new software doing amazing new things, and they take it at face value, and it's absolutely shit. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, if we're talking about every use of AI ever, I've used Whisper to transcribe some audio conversations as well. I was sticking more to the more generic, generalized, like, assistant is the word that they used in the question. agents type thing. So it was interesting. I did live streams of the Computex keynotes for PC World last week, and the NVIDIA one was like 30 seconds of consumer talk.
and then two more hours of AI stuff. Yeah, that sounds about right. Compared to last year, when every time Jensen would mention something, you'd get big claps and cheers from the audience. This year, he had to, like, mug for claps and, like, wasn't... He didn't talk about LLMs at all. They'd switch to agentic stuff, which is the idea that you have multiple small agents doing different tasks for you, and they're all doing the thing that they're good at, theoretically.
And people just weren't having it. Because I think a lot of folks feel burned at this point. Yeah. Anyway. Understandable. Question from Patch. Why do so many motherboards still come with a combo keyboard and mouse PS2 port? Is their use really that widespread in 2025 that the people that do need it can't use a PS2 to USB adapter? Well, PS2 to USB adapters are all specific to the keyboard you have. Yeah, so there's no spec for PS2 to USB.
What? Yeah, so it's all, like, the one that comes with one keyboard probably won't work with another unless it's the same vendor. Is that due to pen out not being the same? I believe so. I don't, it's, like, DBI had fallback for VGA built into the spec. So the adapters are universal. I don't... PS2, I don't actually know about. I've always heard... I don't know if this is...
I think this is true. I've always heard that they're technically faster, less latency, because they're not having to go through USB stack. Pro gamers like to use PS2 because it's wired straight to the CPU. I think they're hooked into DMA or something, so it's really low-level access. For a long time, PS2 had better end-key rollover
You could hit all the keys on your keyboard at once and it would work. I think that's been worked around in USB now, more or less. Yeah, modern USB implementations are fine on that front. They are lower latency. They can be, at least. They don't provide as much power, which, if you have a lot of lights and nonsense on your keyboard, doesn't help you at all.
A lot of it's just for backwards compatibility stuff. There's a lot of old... Some people have need for old machines running ancient OSs that may not support USB. Speaking of motherboards, this is an interesting email. Sorry, this is a Discord question from SuperBlueOwlJump. My father last year fell for some social engineering of the sinister kind.
It was an event that led to the hacker slash scammer having full remote access to his computer for at least 40 minutes to an hour. Oh boy. Luckily, before real financial harm was done, he had realized he had been duped. Since he had such a serious breach, I told him not to turn the computer back on unless it was not connected to the internet.
Luckily he had everything backed up, but I was worried that since they had such unprecedented access, I wondered how far they could have tainted any of his hardware on top of just his hard drives. I had read that anything could potentially be compromised, so my father decided to build a new machine.
Now he has a box of computer parts that I wonder if they're actually salvageable. What do you think? Other than the hard drives, would you think even the motherboard was safe to use? I'm hesitant to build anything with those parts, but I'd hate to throw away parts if they can be used.
And that's it. Oh, actually, sorry, there's a PS here. My father was able to save his identity, accounts, and the like over the course of a few weeks. What a pain in the ass. Yeah, I, um, the hard drive is suspect. Yeah, is it? Well, like if you D-ban it or, you know, similar, like secure race, you're probably fine. Well, yeah. I mean, you can also like set it up and install it and I mean, connect it to a machine.
and do a virus scan on it, like run a real virus scanner on it, and clean whatever the problem is. If you do a low-level wipe, I would like, I mean, because if you wipe the media on the drive, you're probably fine, unless they were able to somehow compromise the firmware on the drive.
the drive, which I feel like is probably a pretty big stretch. That's higher level hacking, probably. Because I'm assuming each one of those exploits would be unique to whatever model of drive or manufacturer you're using but but at the same time they're like UEFI and boot exploits and stuff like that that they could have put in that could have hit the motherboard so like
Like bootloader type exploits would still be on the drive. I guess that's right. Yeah. Like the only thing, let's see, what is, I mean, I'm a little out of my depth here, but like what is on a motherboard that can be compromised? Like UEFI? Yeah. There's non-volatile RAM where a lot of temporary settings and stuff are stored, like secure boot keys and stuff like that.
There's probably something else writable maybe on a motherboard. There's a whole category of UEFI malware that runs in the firmware. If you really want to be maximally safe here, I guess don't use any of it or don't use it for anything important.
Well, I was going to say, like, the video cards and the memory and stuff like that's totally fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say anything but the motherboard and the drives should be fine, even CPU and stuff like that. Well, I think you're correct that they can low-level format the drives, and it'll probably be okay, because, like,
realistically, they're not going to have firmware malware for hard drives on a normal phishing job, right? I mean... like we earlier talked about like what the plausible threat model is here for the amount of time they had access to it i'm guessing that like
No offense to her father, but compromising an elderly person's, I'm assuming they're somewhat elderly, like an older person's computer. The identity theft aspect is A, the most valuable thing, and B, such low-hanging fruit in a case like this that they probably... didn't have the time or the inclination to really compromise the hardware is my guess. You know what I mean? Going after the accounts is where the money is. So that's, I would assume, what they spent their time doing.
well they probably had access for longer than you thought That's possible. Probably they had access and then did active phishing after they got to that one on the to-do list. We should probably say we are absolutely not cybersecurity experts. This is just
These are our gut feelings. My gut feeling is that outside the motherboard and the drives, everything is absolutely, totally fine. Yeah, and I would, I mean, there's ways to set up There's ways to test the drive and to get the stuff off the drive if you want, but if you had backups that were current...
I would just trash the drive and then everything else should be fine. Especially if we're talking about not a bleeding edge expensive machine, it's probably worth it for the peace of mind to just move on. In the worst case, you could pop the EEPROM off of the motherboard and put a new BIOS on there, and then you're good to go. I have one more hardware question here. RKHarris62.
If you were building a gaming PC around an AMD 9950X3D and wanted to daily drive Linux on it, what video card would you pick? An AMD 9070XT? Do Nvidia cards play well enough with Linux? So I've been doing desktop Linux with an NVIDIA card for the last couple of weeks now, and it's fine. Well, my hunch, yeah. That's distro-specific, I think, is what we should say here. It is, yeah.
In my somewhat limited experience, but I've tried NVIDIA on two or three or four different distros on something like CacheOS or PopOS where they handle the driver stuff for you. It's totally fine. They just handle it. But if you're going to like... if you're going to do a component install of Debian or Arch from the ground up from the command line, you're going to have to do some work
To make the NVIDIA card work. But I mean, that work is often just adding a repository and then pulling down the package and installing the package and running a script. Even on Arch, where it worked quite smoothly, I still had to sit there on the wiki and figure out exactly which packages to install. and the Debian install was a giant mess that wasn't picking up the video driver. But you have to...
Well, Debian has some specific requirements on the GPL that are going to be incompatible with a lot of the NVIDIA drivers. There's that. That's just adding the non-free repositories to Debian to get those things to pick up. The bigger complication there is that there are... There's an open-source driver set for NVIDIA on Linux called Nouveau, and that's what most of those distros ship by default because they're free and open-source.
and getting it. This is a lot. Linux is a lot if stuff is not automated for you. You basically have to blacklist the Nuvo drivers to get it to pick up the NVIDIA closed source drivers. So like, and Debian was not doing that correctly. And it was all like, The bigger picture thing here is that problems can arise. But if you're going to use one of the distros that handles everything for you, I think NVIDIA is perfectly fine.
If the 9070XT is roughly the level of performance you're looking for at the price you want to pay, AMD just works on Linux by and large because its drivers are truly open source. And, like, you're definitely going to have an easier time. But, like, if you really want a NVIDIA card, I don't think, like, using it in Linux should stop you. Well, I was going to say the...
So pick the distro. It's going to inform your distro choice unless you want to get into the weeds on it. I would advise getting something that handles the NVIDIA drivers for you. It also makes doing upgrades. Basically, you're tied to when the video card drivers are updated to do kernel updates and stuff like that. With the open source AMD drivers, you can just update whenever and it works itself out, is my understanding. I'm curious.
A lot of Linux users on the Discord. Like I said, PopOS and CacheOS are the two that come to mind as ones that just handle NVIDIA for your owner. I'm wondering what other...
what other big distros are out there. A lot of the more user-friendly, user-facing stuff like Ubuntu and stuff like that, there are packages that you can install easily that will handle the nvidia drivers for you as well and it may be that you get the nouveau drivers instead of the blob drivers but yeah like i like i said i think most distros are shipping those out of the box but but anyway
Yeah. For what it's worth, I think the open source drivers are also blob drivers too, right? Because there's still like a package that's not open in there. That is the case. i don't know i'm actually curious what the practical difference is what like nvidia drivers used to be completely close source on
Linux, and like you just said, even when they went open, the actual core of the drivers is still closed, so I don't know how much that's actually helped things. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, I think there's a tiny RISC-V processor on the graphics card that... handles that executes that driver blob, if I'm not mistaken. I think so, yeah.
That's just a fun fact for you, I suppose. Risk V is everywhere, man. 2026, the year of Risk V. That's what we always say. I think it was last year. I think it started already. I mean, yeah, it's definitely started already.
What are some good ways to hide sensitive information on your screen when recording videos or streaming? I've thought about making videos of myself as I work on Homelab or cloud stuff, but I'm always concerned about making sure I have a good way to redact sensitive items like credentials or certain data elements that could help DocsMe in the future.
I don't know that there is a good live solution for that. And if you're recording offline to post later, I think your solution is to go back and edit things out. I mean, the good live solution is to never put anything on the screen that you're going to want to not show everyone. It requires mental discipline. I just don't know if that's actually even feasible.
I've always thought if I were to do something like that, I would probably make a separate dummy Windows account to sign into to do the streaming on. Well, so I've done that stuff in the... So as somebody who's streamed a fair amount of Windows stuff in the past, it's...
Often having the fake Windows account means that you're not actually getting the stuff that you want for the recordings. That's the concern, is you may not have access to enough stuff for that to be useful. Yeah. One of the things I do... OBS lets you capture, for example, you can capture individual applications, you can capture desktops, you can capture your entire desktop, right? I am very thoughtful about when I capture the entire desktop.
um because because that will pull in things like notifications and overlays and all of the different weird things that you have on your screen that you maybe don't want people to like You don't want your signal notifications popping up on a stream, right? If you capture just your Firefox window or just your terminal window or whatever, then you can do that. The other benefit of doing that is you can have those windows on different displays of capturing the individual windows.
And you can do things like have transparency. So if you're doing a stream that involves CLI work, you can have your terminal window captured separately, have its opacity turned down so it's just kind of overlaid on top of whatever your normal screen is. And the overlay that your viewers see and what you see are completely different, which can be handy. Yes. Here's a fun fact about signal notifications. There's a setting in signal that lets you remove the body of the...
message text from your notifications. That obviously makes the notifications less useful because you can only see who's sending a message, not what they're sending, but you can. I've got that turned on so that... That's just one app that doesn't help globally, of course. Yeah, and I also don't want...
People knowing the notifications, who I'm getting them from or anything like that. You don't want to capture your notifications regardless, but it's just a fun fact for you. It's just a fraud. It's just a minefield. There's really no good answer. There's no cure-all for that. Well, yeah, and things like having... Having your password manager in your Chrome browser and stuff like that means that you're two steps away from showing your username and stuff like that. So you just have to...
you have to be really thoughtful and plan stuff in advance. And, and I would do some recording before you start trying to live stream. Yes. Yes. I have had this exact same thought of like, I wonder if I should do some videos of. I don't love the word home lab, but you know what I mean? That type of stuff. But the exact same thing as this question is asking is the thing that stops me. All right. Annoyed and tired. This is an interesting question.
Although the first part has nothing to do with the question. I loved Boston Illegal. I wish there was a modern day show which echoed that drama. Maybe The Good Wife, but I haven't watched it. I watched a lot of The Good Wife when it was new and it was fine, but not that. Alright. I am itching for some more courtroom drama action now. It's what the kids crave. Was there a lot of actual court in that show?
I've never seen it. There was a fair amount of court. It was the normal format where there's a little bit of office drama and then the act two climax was always in a courtroom. Yeah, that's fine. You want something. You definitely want some out-of-court action as well. Trying to think, what is the... Well, the blacklist is more of a crime thing, I think, than a courtroom thing.
Yeah. I don't know. There's not a lot of courtroom stuff these days. NCIS, I guess, maybe? Yeah, maybe. I've seen practically all of the law and order. I've seen all of Boston Legal. You know... Brad, we're aging into the Matlock zone now, and I believe that Kathy Bates' Matlock is on... What? Yeah, did y'all know this? Wait, Kathy Bates is Matlock now? So I've been watching some stuff. I've been watching Voyager on Paramount Plus because I never watched it before. Okay.
And boy, man, that has the roughest first season of any Star Trek I've ever seen, I think. Yep, yep. but yeah there's as a part of this i get to know about the new stuff coming on cbs and Kathy Bates is playing Matlock starting last September. Wow. I kind of like the idea that Matlock is like a James Bond sort of, it's more of a role than a name, like whoever. 20 years from now, we'll be on the fifth Matlock. Yeah, it'll be somebody totally, it's like a Doctor Who situation. Jeez, hold on.
The premise is, wealthy retired lawyer Madeline Kingston returns to practice seeking justice for the death of her daughter Ellie in the opioid epidemic. Kingston gets a job using the alias of needy widow Maddie Matlock at the law firm she believes hid evidence that she could have saved her daughter's life.
To gain the firm's trust, she must first apply her intellect to helping her colleagues with other challenging cases. This is pretty good. Yeah. I might have to check that out. It was really fun being, it was like one of the, probably maybe the most valuable educational thing about this experience was comparing all of my preconceptions about how court works from watching so much courtroom drama.
to how it actually works. That was a fun... I like that the first thing they say when they sit you down in the jury every time I've been in for jury selection, they're like, this is nothing like what you see on TV. Interesting. We didn't get that, but... I would say it's mostly not like what you see on TV. There were a few dramatic moments. Oh my god, Brad.
Within the universe of the series, the original Matlock series aired as it did in the real world, and Ellie's love of the series inspires Madeline's alias. What? That's incredible. That's very good. They call her Maddie. That's pretty good. Uh, okay, alright, here is Annoyed and Tired's actual question. Okay, my question surrounds resolution.
Mythbusters is available on Macs, and it's gotten me thinking, at what point do you think the resolution becomes a detriment and takes away from your experience of whatever media you're considering? I think it's 720p. I think that pre-1080p stuff is hard to watch on a 4K set. I mostly agree with you, but I think I mentioned this a few weeks ago. I watched all of the last season of The Practice, speaking of courtroom dramas. Yeah. a few months ago, and that only ever came out on DVD. That's 480p.
And it doesn't look great. You know, I have a 4K TV. It does not look great, but also you kind of stop, or at least, you know, that show, I think, was shot on film. Like, it looks good other than being low resolution. So, like... I kind of just stopped noticing it after 20 minutes. I think animation probably does better in a lot of cases. Sure. Like old, especially hand-drawn line art animation scales up pretty nicely, even with shitty scalers.
I also think this is variable based on how good the scaler in your TV is. That's probably part of it, yeah. Yeah. I don't know, like... Like my intellectual answer to this is 1080p. Like I don't want lower than 1080p. But again, after that experience of watching the practice, like in practice, I don't think it actually matters as much as my brain tells me that it does, but I agree. If it's 720p, you're going to notice something that would still be watchable, but...
Not great. I also, like, I mean, I think to your point, I think I like, I think I don't care as much if the, um... Like based on the content, right? Like what I'm watching matters here. Yeah. Yeah. Like if it's, if it's a movie that you're like, like, I'm not quite sure how to put this. If it's a movie that you're really interested in or that you really want to take seriously, you want to watch it in the best quality possible, but if it's
some old TV show or whatever, then, like, whatever is fine. Like, when we watched Pirates of Silicon Valley, my copy of that was ripped off of TV, I think, off of a TiVo. And it was 480p, and it was fine. It didn't impact that. That never came out above DVD, I don't believe. That was watchable. Although I believe that was shot on film. They should put out a 4K version of Pirates of Silicon Valley. I watch old Muppet shows. They're off DVD reps. I have a buttload of...
Now that Looney Tunes is off of Max, I've been digging out the old Blu-rays, and I have a bunch of DVDs that I ripped of Looney Tunes shorts, and they all... They all look fine. So maybe it's fine. Yeah. All right. I think this is going to be our last one because it's a very long one. Okay. Going back to the emails here. I'm not quite sure how to approach this because there are about a dozen questions in this email.
Maybe I'll just read the whole thing and then we'll try to address it all. Holistically, it's the duck one. I didn't think we were going to do this. Nobody highlighted it. Yeah, but it's too good. It's very ducky. There are too many different angles to approach this from. It's got some strong Tony Soprano vibes here. Dave and Sheffield. I assume the one in the UK. I would assume, but I don't know for sure. Do they have ducks in the UK? I thought it was more of a swan place. I don't know.
I guess we're about to find out. I'm in the fortunate position that finally in my 40s I can buy a house. A big criterion was proximity to some ducks and geese that we feed with veggie scraps. I love this. Interesting.
item on your wish list but okay but we were even more fortunate to find a house with a river at the bottom of the garden which makes duck feeding a lot easier I'm planning on setting up a live stream of the river and its wildlife and wondered if you have opinions on the following or learnings from Will's bird stream.
Okay, I already have a power over ethernet CCTV cameras with night modes, so the plan would be to set up OBS scenes from the different cameras and use a script to switch them every 10 minutes. I ran outdoor cable through my last garden but only to one camera.
This time, do I have the PoE switch indoors and run multiple long Ethernet cables through the garden, or do I run one Ethernet and one mains cable through to a shed further down the garden and have the switch in there with shorter runs to the cameras?
I'd like a microphone, but actual outdoor mics are expensive. Can I 3D print an enclosure that would keep a power over Ethernet Raspberry Pi Zero and microphone protected enough from the elements, and generate an RTMP audio stream onto the network to add into the scenes? I feel like syncing the video and audio from that might be tough, but anyway, I'll finish the email first. I have a spare Haswell laptop, but I'm not confident that even with quick sync it can handle OBS.
I could put a spare 1060 in my NAS powered by a Ryzen 5600 and run it from that, but would rather not be running OBS directly on it. Does OBS work okay in a VM? The host is Debian, so I guess that would be KVM. Or do I just pick up a secondhand M1 Mac Mini?
Lastly, what do you think the chances are that with something like this is, there's a lot in this email. Yeah. Lastly, what do you think the chances are that with something like Kofi or Kofi, people are pronouncing Kofi. Kofi is high because it's like you get people a Kofi. Yeah. something like coffee i may be able to have a trickle of income from it to pay for duck food equipment upgrades and maybe even a small contribution towards the mortgage. I love this. This is some...
clutch side hustle here from Dave. It would be trivial to add a ticker that thanks the contributors. The dream, I guess, is that people start naming the regular ducks and then I can make merch and completely cover the mortgage. But realistically, I'm not expecting this to be more than something fun for me to tinker around with. I think it's good to have
measured expectations and then see where it goes. Yeah, fun to tinker around with is a good goal here. I think covering the mortgage is probably not realistic. Do this for the fun of it first, although like Have I talked about the otters on this podcast? I know I've brought them up on Next Lander. Are you talking about the aquarium otters?
These are domestic otters in Japan. Oh, no. Apparently, Japan has very narrow laws that in some circumstances, it's legal to own otters as pets. Wow. They ought to close those loopholes. They should. There is a pair of otters that are huge on YouTube, and they do sell merch around those otters, and I actually wonder... If, in fact, those autos are paying for their owner's mortgages in that case. I will tell you, I follow some chinchillas on YouTube. I follow...
Marine Mammal Rescue, which has an otter cam, a 24-7 otter cam on Twitch. Okay. I follow some guinea pigs. There's a guinea pig farmer that has just like An enormous herd of like a hundred guinea pigs that all live in this. Brad, they have a barn. It's like one of those sheds you put in your backyard and it has shelves on the side. And when they open the door to the shed in the morning, there's just like a hundred guinea pigs at the edge of the sheds looking at them and being like,
hey man, where's my lettuce and broccoli? That's great.
i do have to jump in here i'm not absolutely absolutely not accusing anyone of anything here but like the whole idea of monetizing animals does make me feel a little bit icky because Again, not accusing anyone specifically, but it feels like the kind of thing where if there were a lot of money in it, you would immediately, in fact, this probably already happens, like you would have people getting the animals in order to make money from them, not because they want to care for the animals.
The ones that I like of this are ones that are clearly like, we have a farm where we have animals and stuff. It's like, hey, we already have the animals because we love the animals, which is the right reason to have the animals. We decided to put a camera on them, but it does... It's almost like the showbiz kid sort of problem. Well, it's interesting because the chinchilla, the woman who has the chinchillas does some terrible videos, but the chinchillas are fun.
And she does a lot of chinchilla advocacy in the line of, hey, these are difficult pets. She makes it very clear. Every fifth video or something is like, these are difficult pets. You shouldn't get these if you don't know what you're doing. You have to keep the house at 60 degrees or else they die. Well, because they're from the Andes, so they're insulated for cold. Yes, I knew about the chinchillas, like dust bathing thing, which is its own hole.
Yeah, I feel like... So anyway, I feel like there's a positive way to do this and have it be okay. Again, like I said, I'm not... Nobody involved here. I'm not, again, talking about anybody involved in this or anybody that we know or anything like that. I have absolutely less than zero tolerance for people who Mistreat animals for profit. Oh yeah, no doubt. That kind of thing.
In the example here, the duck cam, I think, is totally 100% fine. This is a thing that I have not observed directly here. It's just something that occurs to me anyway. So, okay, so the POE CCTV sealed weatherproof cameras are good. One of the things I didn't know is that every time you open those, pretty much like They're usually packed with silica gel to keep condensation from forming inside the sealed housings.
and that silica gel has a lifetime so like especially if you leave it open for a while it'll suck moisture from the air and you have to then like replace those silica gel packets which you can get Amazon or hardware stores or whatever. Sure. I'll mention real quick since I guess we're going to kind of go through this line by line here, but... He mentions having OBS switch scenes on a timer every 10 minutes. One thing I've actually wondered about.
I never had any actual interest in doing a guinea pig cam, but people would ask for it often enough that I kind of thought through what it would take to set it up when they would ask.
I always wondered if there were a way, and you probably need a plug-in for this or have to build it yourself, if there were a way to use some kind of... motion detection or even like image recognition to have it switch scenes based on what's happening on each feed so like track the motion like whichever one's got the most motion going on or even like
At this point, you could probably use some computer vision to recognize basic animal shapes and try to maybe automate having it focus on whatever is the most interesting. So, yeah, there's a tool called Advanced Scene Switcher. It's a stock OBS plugin that ships with OBS. And you can build macros with that that can fire from any number of other things. Now, you may or may not. So there's two things I was going to say. One is having it switch randomly is going to make people crazy.
or on a timer. Cause it, cause like people will get upset cause they'll be watching something and then the timer will switch and then they'll lose it for 10 minutes. Um, what I would do is maybe set up a, it's, you can do hotkeys on this scene switcher thing. So then you can run a bot on your Twitch or YouTube channel.
that watches for bot commands and triggers those hotkeys on the computer. Oh, yeah. So you can put that on hands of mods or let people vote. Once you have it in a bot, you can do all sorts of weird scripting stuff with it that makes a lot of things easy.
um you can you could like i said you can do timers you can you can do scenes that are like quads you can do a scene that's a quad that's that you let people switch into the one of the blow-ups and then times back after like 10 minutes and then people do it again like there's all sorts of ways you can do that I don't think they have machine vision stuff in here.
But I also think it would be fairly easy to have... a machine vision thing like to pipe these streams out to a machine vision thing and then trigger hotkeys that trigger your scene switcher stuff. Yeah. So that's one of them. I just did one cam on the bird cams that I had up on my front yard. Of course, I mean, the nest is such a small area to cover that one is probably plenty there. Yeah, and there wasn't room to put a second camera in.
There's a, there's a person that does, it's funny. There's a person that posts things on Tik TOK down in Moss beach, which is like the next town South of the, down the coast from me. And they have a backyard that butts up against like the protected wildlife, the protected forest. And they just sit in their backyard at seven o'clock in the morning until like nine o'clock in the morning with their phone. And I...
like drinking coffee and watching animals and like, that sounds pretty good. Like this morning they posted a thing with a whole family of skunks. that just tromped into their backyard like okay like they're sitting there in the chair they're chittering around they're walking up underneath them and moving around and all this and then they're like okay well as long as don't make any noise they're cool all right and the skunks just walked off they see coyotes and all sorts of stuff so you like
You could also start this manually with you just sitting there with your phone where you can see the ducks and see if there's interest. Yeah. The outdoor cable, doing the outdoor cable, the best practice is to put it into a plastic conduit.
and put that up six inches under the ground just trench it in with a with a trenching shovel yeah um but you can also just run the wire if you don't care about it it won't last as long but that's probably fine for this yeah i guess um I get the annoyance with having to run a bunch of long cables through the yard, but like putting a switch in a shed immediately, and I guess it depends on how environment-proof the shed is, but putting like
Expensive electronics, because you're talking about a POA switch there, which is a hundred bucks probably. Putting a nice switch out in a shed is maybe a little sketchy to me, so I might lean toward... multiple long runs to the cameras. From the house? I don't know. So I bet you can buy PoE switch enclosures. Yeah, probably. Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah, Altelex has them that are weatherproof specifically for this purpose. Um...
So, yeah, I would do one run in the switch because it's a pain. I don't know if you've run 100 feet of cable before out in the yard, but it's a lot of trenching. Yeah, like it's definitely cleaner to just run one auto switch. And when I say trenching for this, I'm talking about literally like, stomping down on your shovel, wedging out a wedge of dirt, and putting the cable in the bottom of that slit that you make, and then just pushing it back down with your foot over on top of it.
Would you ever put just bear cat sticks in the dirt like that? I know you said a conduit is ideal or preferable, but... Is that an option? I wonder how resilient that is. So we did bear cat six at my parents' farm. It was probably cat five at the time. And like...
2000, and it was still there when they sold the place three years ago. It's still functional. Yeah, so they used it for the barn cams so that when they had a mare that was foaling, they didn't have to get up and walk over to the barn every hour. Oh, sure. And yeah, it worked fine. That's cool. The infrared, so one thing I found is that the dome cameras that have the infrared lights inside the dome are much, much more susceptible to the glass getting dirty and you not being able to see anything.
than the ones that have the infrared lights outside the dome. So that's a thing to think about. And like a big infrared flood will illuminate stuff at night much better than the little lights inside the dome cameras. The dome cameras are going out to like 15 or 20 feet. And a big flood will go 40 if you set it up right in a way that you don't see.
Cool. This external microphone question, like I said earlier, I'm guessing if you're sending a separate audio stream over the network, you're going to run into too many sync problems between a video feed and an audio feed. It might not matter, though. It's like wildlife stuff. Yeah, like you want those quacks to be accurate. That's true. You want accurate quacks, you want quack-erate.
Look, without quackuracy, where are we? If you don't have quackuracy, then what are we doing? If you're not doing quackuracy, you can just set up a 5090 and generate this video with some video generation tool, and then you don't even have to have real docs. Oh, that's right. Oh, God, that's grim. Jesus. The Haswell laptop is not going to do what you want. You don't think so? It won't do it for streams. Oh, yeah, maybe not. I looked it up. Haswell...
Haswell was the second generation of CPU of QuickSync to support H.264, so yeah, I don't know. Haswell was before Broadwell, right? Well... Yes, Broadwell came after. Yeah, so it's not going to work. I've used Broadwell for... The problem isn't the QuickSync encoding.
The problem is the compositing on the GPU. The GPU won't do the compositing of the four camera feeds. I wondered if that would be an issue. So I think your instinct with the Mac mini is probably good. I don't know what the Mac M1 OBS support is like. The other option is to buy a $100 B-Link 10th Gen Intel box, and that'll be great.
Yeah, that might be what I would do. I don't know what a used M1 Mac mini costs. I have not loved OBS on macOS. The few times that I've used it, it always feels a little bit jankier than the Windows version, although maybe that's unfair. It had problems early on. I don't have a Mac. I don't have an M1 Mac, so I don't really know. It's been a long time since I've used OBS on...
On a Mac, I will say I believe OBS has built-in support for the video acceleration, like kind of the, yeah, like sync equivalents on Apple chips. I'm pretty sure that like as far as hardware encode and decode goes, you'd be fine. But yeah, I'm with you. I think probably one of the... Like, honestly, like probably an N100 based...
little Intel box would probably be enough for this, but you could definitely get something slightly nicer for not a ton of money. Yeah, like under $500, you can get something that's rad, and if you're willing to buy used Those old ThinkCenters and stuff like that that are like 9th and 10th and 12th gen. I think 10th gen is the cutoff on Linux because they're going to stop supporting the QuickSync extensions for 10th gen next year, I think, in the kernel.
That just means you're going to stay on the LTS version of whatever version of Linux you're using for your OBS server. I don't know that Apple... I'm trying to find an M1 Mac Mini on Apple's refurb site, and I don't know that they sell them. It's mostly M4s, which are the current models. What are they doing, Apple? What are you doing, Apple? I mean, M1's pretty old at this point. Three years, four years? Almost four years. Yeah, that's old by Apple standards. M5 is coming out later this year.
So the other thing I was going to say is that... You can't run OBS in a VM. It's complicated because you have to open up, you have to connect to the hardware. If you're just capturing... HTTP, RTMP streams from security cameras, you're probably fine. Actually, maybe if you already have the 1060 and you don't want to spend more money on hardware, you could try throwing it in there, and that's doable. That's true.
But if your NAS doesn't have a way to do a desktop, your OBS is going to be weird because you have to run command line OBS, and that's a challenge. Wait, is that a thing? Yeah, you can run command line OBS. Are you sure?
I thought so. I mean, you could use FFmpeg for that matter. Frankly, if we want to talk about processing audio and video streams purely from the command line, FFmpeg is all you need for that. I can tell you that from experience. I'm wrong. OBS-CLI is just a command line interface. So you can control it from the command line. That's what I thought. But you could remote into some kind of VNC equivalent into a VM.
That's true. The problem is going to be you need a real GPU to do the compositing of the video. So you'll be limited to one video stream at a time. 1060 nautical. enough for that i don't think it i don't think without the desktop environment oh i mean yeah you see a pipe the 1060 through to the vm yeah yeah yeah you'd pass that through
Okay. That might be worth looking at. But also, if you want an easier solution, just buy a cheap x86 box with QuickSync and you're totally golden. And then on the monetization front, I think you'll see some... I saw actually surprisingly good ad revenue on Twitch. for the bird streams. Just because like 30 people are watching it around the clock pretty much. Sure.
The thing I'll say is the ad revenue is not very much like I saw a 30x boost and it was like it didn't pay for the machine that was running the camera or the camera. The thing you could do.
is set up if once you have that bot running you need a little robot that'll chuck some duck food into the pond every time somebody puts five bucks in the kitty now you're talking and then then you're gonna get you let people pay to see the hot duck action there you go Get a fake lady, robot lady duck that goes out there and like the ducks all get excited about.
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with the direction this is going in. I'm just saying, you need to kick this off, launch only ducks, and then see what happens next. Alright, thanks for writing in. Only geese, is that better? Only foul? F-O-W-L? Yeah. Only fouls. Anyway, I guess that'll do it for us this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks for supporting the show. We appreciate you. I'm glad, Brad, that your long national nightmare is now over. Yeah, I mean, look, I am...
Happy to have participated in the process. It's nice to have seen the system working, I have to say. With some exceptions, it was nice to see. I'll say the judge and one side, one set of attorneys were all highly professional. Did you trade info with any of the jurors? Are you going to stay in touch? We went out and got a beer afterwards. Nice. I was just, we got done. It was about four o'clock on a Friday and I was like, I'm done. I'm out. I'm going home. I had to like rocketed out the door.
But then most of the jury was congregating on the front steps, and it was clear everybody really needed to decompress. I can see that. You're not allowed to discuss the case with the other jurors at all. I don't know if people don't know. You kind of have to just... sit there and say nothing for the duration of the trial.
And it had kind of like a dramatic enough finish, I guess I would say, that everybody was just like, oh, we all need to go compare notes now. When they selected you for the jury, they knew that your job is to talk into a microphone, right? Yeah, yes, I made that clear. Yeah, okay. You have to list your profession. I know. They go through a whole vetting process. And to be clear, we had deliberated, but...
All three alternates were there, but who I felt bad for because they never got the closure of getting to deliberate and weigh in on the thing. They agree with you all? Did you do an informal survey of them afterwards? Yeah, they definitely agreed. Okay, that's good.
I think they really wanted to talk everything over because they had not gotten to do that. Oh, did they not get to go into the deliberation room? No, no, no. Alternates, as soon as deliberations start, alternates basically go home and wait by the phone in case they have to be called in. Wow. So they miss the deliberations if somebody gets kicked out of the jury at the last minute.
But presumably they're done. They're good at that point. Yes. Once the verdict is in, they never have to come back in again. Yeah. Interesting. Well, anyway, so we should be back to a more regular schedule. It might take us a week or two to get up and running. I think we have some guests queued up.
some exciting stuff for the next few weeks. Yes. Um, in the meantime, if you would like to find out how to support the show, which is a listener supported show, that means we would not be here without you, the listeners. uh we don't take ads we don't do anything else to make money for the show so um yeah if you would like to support the show you can go to patreon.com slash techpod where for five bucks a month you get access to the discord you get access to
our monthly patron episodes where we sometimes take more questions. It was really hard picking the crop of questions this month. We didn't get through half of the ones we had flagged. I don't think so. We'll probably do some more questions this month. But often we talk about ongoing projects and stuff like that, the kind of stuff we've talked about in the last few weeks while you've been tied up the jury stuff.
Yes. And you can go again to patreon.com slash techpot and sign up for that. It's the end of the month, which means we thank both our executive producer and associate producer to your patrons. I'm going to start. with the executive producers including Andrew Slosky, Bunny Meme, David Allen, James Kamek, Jason Lee, Jordan Lippett, Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer, and Twinkle Twinkie.
And then I'm going to move over to the associate producer tier and thank Alejandro Navarro, Andre M. Burke, P.E., Andrew Dicey, Should Eyes, Shouldice. Andrew Dicey Shouldice. He changed the label so it's not phonetical anymore. It's getting sneaky. I know. Arthur Geese. Ben Tallman. Brutal Kerfuffle. Eric? Felix Kramer. Gem. Grant Banks. Jadrita? Just Associate Wedge. Thank you. so much.
Yeah, thank you. And I guess that'll do it for us this week. I believe it will. I think I'm going to go find a torta. I had a dream last night about a sandwich that I had last year at a party. That's a powerful dream that leads you to go get the thing you
dreamed about i mean dude it was maybe one of the all-time best sandwiches i've ever had we can talk about on the patreon episode now i want one yeah uh but we'll be back next week as always please consider the environment for printing this podcast