Brad, I don't know what Windows sounds mean anymore. Did you ever? Yeah, you used to have the little doot doot that was like something disconnected or the doot doot, something connected. Or you had Brian Eno coming on and be like, yo, Windows is booting up. Yep, that's exactly how that went.
Actually, that would be kind of like we should make a Windows sound like a Windows XP sound pack. It's just like I've thought about that before. Yeah, not music. Just yo, Windows is booting up. But yeah, no, I don't. I don't know what any of the I don't. Because they changed the chimes every new version of Windows. I don't think I know what the new ones are supposed to mean other than just like.
general vibes. Yeah. And like outside of USB device connected and disconnected, I feel like they're all used so broadly and generically that it's impossible to learn what they mean anyway. You know? Yeah. Like I just got a one. I don't know what that means. I think that might be maybe that's a discord like that almost sounds like recycled in emptying sound. No, no, no. Whoa. I don't know. I also I don't. Oh, here we go. Sounds here. OK, so.
Asterisk, that's the, I still know what that one is. Would have been really smart for me to set it up so I could just play these into the file. It would have. Let me take two seconds. Okay, so I just got another one. I'm getting all the time. I think we've buried the lead here. You're getting a bunch of phantom sounds as we have been setting up to record here. Yeah, but I have the notifications turned. Do not disturb. Oh.
Oh, no, that's the problem. Windows turn my do not disturb off when it updated Windows yesterday. Wait, do you just roll with do not disturb on 24 seven baby? So you never get notifications at all. I don't, I don't, my phone is for, phones are for notifications. Computers are for leaving me the fuck alone. Man, I've, I've gone the other way. My phone notifications now come through to my windows install, which I have come to regret deeply, but not enough that I've bothered to turn it off.
So, OK, which one are you using the phone link or using a unison? I'm using phone link is unison better. The phone link is the one built in Windows for people who don't know. And unison is the Intel equivalent that you can install.
But the Intel one works on you can put on AMD machines or whatever. It works on everything. Unison is fabulous. Their end of life in June, because anything nice Intel makes, they shut down after like six months. Of course. Well, OK, no reason to switch then, I guess. Don't switch. unison lets you like share your screen so like i hooked my ipad up to my laptop and i use it as a second screen when i'm out out and about and
Yeah. It's so cool. That sounds pretty good. Phone link is distressingly limited. I have found like I installed it solely to try to get basically an iMessage client on my computer. That's what I use it for. Windows machine. But like.
It doesn't work with group chats. It doesn't work with a bunch of like it doesn't always sync messages coming and going after the fact. Like the group chat one is the biggest one. Like you can't you cannot message multiple people at one time with it. Yeah. So I don't use group chats, so it's not really a problem. But. But I do, I am an unwilling participant in several group chats and I have messed them up using it. So anyway, yeah. So I put do not disturb mode on, which like also.
Can we can we can I complain a little bit about the do not disturb icon? What else is this podcast for? Fair. But like the do not disturb icon was on on my taskbar next to the clock and the date.
And then when I went up there, it was like, do not disturb is off at the top. And I was like, oh, let me click the thing that says do not disturb is on. And now I guess it goes away when you when you turn it on. But anyway, yeah, 24 seven do not disturb. Yeah. What if your devices didn't nag you so much?
My devices don't nag me anymore. I did a newsletter about this. I'm down to I'm down under 65 notifications a day on my phone. That's man. That's still a pretty high bar. It's not great. Like the problem is. Like our laundry is in the bathroom, is in the garage, right? And the way that the washer tells us that the load is done because you can't hear the buzzer from outside the house is that I get a notification. Sensible. And we have a kid. Yeah, so we do a lot of laundry, it turns out.
I also set up a camera to have I talked about the coyote situation? A little bit. Yes, we talked about spores and such last week, I believe. Yeah, there was poo. So I set up a camera in the backyard and it's a cheap camera. So it notifies me every time like.
dust flies in front of the camera is it just motion activated it's just motion it's just like when pixels change in the camera image and it's not particularly discerning uh so like like bugs come up because they're interested in the infrared light
And that triggers it. Um, a leaf blowing on my blueberry plants will trigger it. Does it send you an image of, of the motion? Oh, that's a man. That would be cool. It's completely useless. All it does is tell me I need to go log into the thing. Now I will say. night before last i got like it was like boom boom boom boom boom boom boom just hammering me i was like what the hell's going on there was there was a spider right
Right. It's a it's a it's a wide angle camera on a bubble dome bubble dome camera. And there was a spider that was on the glass directly in front of the lens. So it was like I just saw like.
spider body and legs that covered the entire field of view of the thing gross and i was like this is i'm not gonna sleep tonight man this is bad spider did not give an f about your notifications oh no that spider was that spider was just like hell yeah give me that infrared I'm gonna eat all these little bugs. Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad. Hi. Hello.
How was your first full week back out of your mandatory government service? It's going. It's starting to rediscover real life. The chatter, speaking of group chats, the chatter in the jury pool group chat has started to die down.
Oh, you had a, you had a group chat with the jury. Yes. Yes. The jury started a group chat after. Oh, it was never super active, but you know, people have been kind of bouncing stuff around in there a little bit, but I think everybody is like getting back to real life now. Yeah.
Did you share like links covering the trial or anything? That's where I got those articles that we've talked about past events related to the plaintiff and the case and stuff. But the thing I've been meaning to drop in there is that I found on the. SF Superior Court site, like you can just do case searches. So I was able to pull up the case on kind of the back end where you can look at every single milestone that has ever happened with that case since it was filed in 2022.
Of which there are 53 pages. Wow, I'm not going to read that. Maybe 15, 20 entries per page. I mean, that's every single appearance before the judge, motion that was filed, like deposition, blah, blah, blah. It was cool to be able to, you can pull up a lot of documents. Like there are tons of PDFs on there of documents you can pull up of things that happened in the trial. So I can like.
See all the stuff they didn't show you. Yes. Well, it's not so much evidence. It's more like motions that were filed and briefs and declarations and stuff. So it's like.
And I'm going to start forgetting this stuff very rapidly because it's not like I did a daily journal or anything. But as of right now, I can still remember enough. It'll be like, oh, that Friday, that Friday before, like the week before it was done, when they dismissed us all at like three o'clock and they were like, hey, you can go home for the weekend. You're done.
Now I can see the documents that were filed that describe what was going on that turned out to be the reason we had to leave. If that makes sense. which in this case, it turns out is that the city filed, or actually it was an oral motion. I don't know if that counts as filing a motion, but they essentially made an oral motion to get the case tossed out. Oh.
So you might have been cut loose a week earlier. Yes, but apparently the judge did not agree. But the city was the city. Effectively, it was right after the plaintiff rested. The city was basically like, according to the documents I looked at, like I looked up what a judgment of non suit means in California. Apparently, it means they were arguing that, hey, the plaintiff has completely failed to prove their case. Why don't we just stop doing this? The judge did not go for it.
Anyway, it's cool to also that backend, like the superior court backend is ancient. Really? It is the URL. Like it's come to some kind of session based thing. So you can't link to documents to people because it's some like purely. individualized session when you go on there and search for a case like i'm just oh you're you're loading a cgi bin with a token not even the um the url ends in dot dll
So I think it's some windows server based infrastructure on front page or something. That's terrible. Yes, it's, it's fun. Uh, anyway, that's been fun to look through. Uh, before we get into the meat of this week's episode, I also have to issue.
first time ever a correction or an or an addendum we've corrected stuff before and well okay first time for a first time for everything for me okay weird right no we've corrected your stuff before no it's been a while yeah we we posted the patreon episode of eight or two ago yeah uh this is not a huge deal but we talked about reverse proxies on there i made a comment that i just wanted to add to really quickly which is that i i said you can set up https on your reverse proxy
And I think I think the way I put it was like, the only reason you would do that is to make your browser stop nagging you about your sites being insecure. Oh, but you were talking about the in the context of inside your land. Yes, I was. I omitted the part where that's for my use case. That's the only.
reason to do it because I'm not opening that proxy up to the open internet. Yeah. But if you were to actually expose your reverse proxy to the open internet, you absolutely would want to set up HTTPS to encrypt the traffic going in and out of your LAN. Yeah, that makes sense. So that is a much more actually like crucial reason to do that. Although I think we might have mentioned this a little bit. We talked about VPSs on that.
episode if you want to listen to this episode and you're not a patron you can go to patreon.com slash checkpod and give us five dollars and then you get a then you get a whole New feed with 68 or 69 podcasts in it. That's right. And 60, I think two, 62, 62. Okay. So it'll be, so there's a couple of extras in there too. So we had some unnumbered ones, but anyway.
And you'll get access to the fabulous discord where this was said when I mentioned that. And I dropped that in the thread for that episode and networking channel VIP cake batter popped in and mentioned that actually you. probably don't want to expose your reverse proxy to the open internet to begin with that you probably want to put cloud cloud flare tunnel in front of it or you want to like put the proxy on like a a separate server from your home connection so
So the cloud, the cloud fair tunnel, I think I'm going to, I can use that to obscure my home IP address. It seems like everybody games, but it seems like everybody is using it for that. Like I went and registered that VPS last November at black Friday. And then immediately after that, found out about Cloudflare Tunnel, which basically kind of does for free what I was planning to use that VPS for.
Also, shout out to Cloudflare. They have a job opening that is exactly the kind of thing I would like to do. So if anybody listening works at Cloudflare and would like to reach out and refer me, I would love that because I don't know anyone who works at Cloudflare.
It's a black box for me. Well, you might soon. I'm tempted to ask about the details of that job, but maybe I'll let you tell me offline. It's an editor-in-chief of their blog. So they have a really good technical blog. And they need somebody who can do editorial. That hits a wide audience. And it's exactly the kind of thing I've spent the last 20 years doing in my career. That sounds cool. Anyway, I have.
I've reassured myself that this VPS was worth the hassle because now I can tell myself, like, I'm not putting this in the hands of a corporation that might change their policies or start charging for that service at some point. But I'm just trying to make myself feel better. Yeah. Anyway.
Okay, so this week, we got into two things this week. One, so with apologies to our Midwestern listeners and shout outs to a bunch of listeners and readers that I met yesterday, I made my first trip to a micro center ever. Ever. Oh, I figured you would have been the one back in the day. So I don't think I knew about the one back in the day. Okay. And it also was it was only around for a little while because it was so there was one down south and it was open.
And then there was some construction that happened somewhere that ended up shutting, like destroying. They knocked down the shopping center that was in. So they closed it in like 2012. And I was firmly a fries and central person back then. And I don't I don't think I understood. A, my car wasn't super reliable at that time frame, but B, driving down there when I could just go to Central in the city was probably not a thing I was going to do. Sure.
So, yeah, we'll talk about that at the end of the show, though. The grand opening of grand opening like the they had the honchos there. Oh, yeah. No kidding. So Dan Ackerman, who runs the Micro Center blog, but I know him from his days at. Gizmodo and CNET. Wait, that's CNET Dan Ackerman? CNET Dan Ackerman. You know Dan Ackerman. I don't know that I've ever met him. I knew his wife from the games press.
I don't think I've ever met Dan, but I saw the name and just assumed it was a coincidentally somehow like a different person, a different Ackerman. But no, no. So Dan was there. He was he was hanging out and talking to folks and.
Like we got to take the full tour of the store and met a bunch of people who were waiting in line to get in. They had some deal doorbuster kind of deals and stuff like that. So anyway, I started to ask a question, but also I'll reserve it. I think we're going to we're going to do the more universally actionable topic first.
So the reason, but just in general, the reason MicroCenter is interesting is like it is generally it's imagine if Best Buy was a store where people were knowledgeable and excited about DIY PC building. Cool. That sounds good. Yeah, it's pretty good. The thing we're going to talk about first is GeForce Now. The excuse we're talking about is that GeForce Now just released their Steam Deck client.
Previously, it's been a web-based thing, kind of like the Xbox cloud sharing on Edge for the Steam Deck, which is fine. GeForce Now didn't run as well. I think the Edge cloud streaming for Xbox ran pretty well. The GeForce Now web experience was less good when I tested it a year or two ago at this point. When you say edge, you're talking about the browser edge.
the browser edge. So you install edge on Linux. I didn't realize there was a Linux version of edge. Of course there is. Microsoft loves Linux now. It's the 21st century. Yes. Yes. The Balmer Balmer era is long gone. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, so it was a browser-based implementation before, which was fine, but I often had a little bit of jank with controls and stuff like that, especially in docked mode.
The new version is a flat pack, which means it works with most arch and arch with arch and arch derivatives, including the Steam Deck, obviously, which is what it's built for. But it'll work on other distros is my understanding as well. It doesn't work with Bazaik because that's based on Fedora Blue, stuff like that. My assumption is that people will unbundle the packaging that's in the Flatpak and rebundle it and put it in the normal repos.
or other distros pretty quickly because it seems to be pretty desirable um it it works just like geforce now does on the pc so you connect you connect your account to the PC game stores like Steam and Epic, Ubisoft, EA, all the kind of usuals. And then for the stores that for the games that have been flagged as compatible with GeForce now in the back ends.
which is something that developers or publishers have to do, you just kind of hit a button and hit play and the game just runs off of one of NVIDIA's data centers near you and streams the output as video and input back to the game. It works really well. So all that contractual business did get handled at some point. I have not checked in on the business end of GeForce Now since, I don't remember, 2018, 2019. I remember this being a news story we covered on the Bombcast when...
Yeah. When GeForce Now was new, because if you remember when they first started out, they were just letting you stream any game you owned on Steam. through their service you remember that yeah it kind of just works is the thing um well what i'm talking about is the part where developers or publishers now have to opt in yeah so they what the the um
controversy was around them, again, enabling access to literally everything in your Steam library. And then some developers started going, you know, we haven't given you permission to start monetizing our game through your service. OK, so. Two things. And especially since you've worked in development, I was just curious, like what the back end like business is that happens now. But go on. Yeah. So I don't know that it's weird. I don't know that I would call this monetizing.
Is that like, is that a weird thing to get hung up on? I don't know. I mean, I mean, I'm not, I'm just, I'm just describing what happened. I'm not like, I'm not making a value judgment here. I'm just saying that, excuse me, there, there was, there was a lot of ire from certain developers. toward NVIDIA over them including their games on the service without asking.
Well, yeah, and there's some games that like aren't just aren't available. Like I think PUBG is still not available on GeForce now. I'm not 100% about that. I was just curious. I mean, you may not know. I'm just curious if like is there a licensing fee or like what what is going on when a game?
opted into geforce now like are developers getting money for that no okay so the the way geforce now works is it's not like it's not like a streaming service like netflix or xbox cloud or xbox game pass right i know that yeah So so you connect it to your game stores and then you play games that you've bought on those stores. So theoretically, it's just that instead of using a computer sitting in your living room, you're using a computer that you pay them for access to.
And I think a lot of the complaint was actually from developers was actually around the idea that they were selling exclusive streaming service access to their games. Right. Yes. And then NVIDIA coming in and offering this took that. made that was no longer made them in breach of their contracts right with the with the providers that they had signed up for um what i will say is that on the steam back end
There's a checkbox that says, do you want to enable GeForce Now support? Oh, so that's it. And then you press that and then you push those changes to Steam and then your game is on GeForce Now. Interesting. All right. The way it works from Steam side, Steam is the jankiest of the services, I think, which is a little bit unfortunate. You need to have a public profile that lists all of your games.
Like if your if your game list is private by your privacy settings in Steam, GeForce now is like, hey, man, we don't know what games you have. You have to make this public so we can scan them. That's really weird that that relies on a public listing and not just like back end access. It is pretty janky. Yeah.
So I generally my games list is private just because I don't like having that kind of information out. I don't want I don't want people to know, you know, that I'm spending 300 hours playing Hello Kitty Island adventures or whatever. No shame in it. i i don't have any shame but you know it's just uh you know the way i live my life um so
So I just flip it. When I buy new games, I flip the thing private, hit the scan button in GeForce Now, and then set it back private again, set my account private again. I do a lot of streaming from my PC to the Steam Deck. so i have my gaming pc in the office and if i'm sitting on the couch i want to hang out or something while i'm playing a game
I'll I'll do that. It's always it works pretty well these days, especially with Moonlight and Sunshine. It's always a little janky, especially with brand new titles before the the software has kind of like before everything settled out. So I often have to get up and walk into the other room to change a game from borderless to full screen or adjust the resolution or something like that before the Steam Deck before Moonlight or the Steam Link streaming can kind of hook up to it.
And stuff like running at too high a resolution on the desktop, like if I run at the 4K resolution my desktop works at, sometimes you want to actually turn those resolutions down so you get a little bit smoother frame rate because the scaling can introduce some stutter and stuff. this was great geforce now on the steam deck with the client was much better like was was really nice and equivalent in a lot of ways to that local streaming from the good gaming pc
I assume, or at least I would hope it eliminates some of the fiddliness around having to change resolutions and stuff like that. Yeah. Generally speaking, the GeForce Now games, when you launch them, they just work, right? They're optimized, especially with this client. I haven't used the PC client as much, but on this client, it generally set the game to 1280 by 800 and gave you reasonable settings for visual fidelity at that thing. And the nice thing about it is.
Because you're running on GPUs in the cloud and not on the local GPU on the Steam Deck, you can do stuff that isn't supported, like run ray tracing and stuff like that, assuming you're paying for the tier of GeForce Now that includes ray tracing.
Yeah, what are the pricing tiers at this point? So there's a free tier that they don't specify what you get access, like what kind of GPUs you get access to. Okay, so the main differentiators on the tiers are... the features you get access to geforce wise like the high-end ultimate tier is a 4080 class gpu the mid-tier i don't think they specify what it is um but it's it's uh you do have rtx for the mid-tier I don't think it goes, I think it's 1440p is the max resolution for the mid-tier one.
okay so here's the breakdown on the tiers uh the basic tier they list as a four cp four vcpu rig and just to be clear these aren't like dedicated boxes in a data center someplace they're slicing up big giant uh like gpu compute cloud gpus and they're handing them off in small chunks to to to players so the free ones ad supported you can uh the queue times are sometimes pretty long especially at like prime time but it's usually like three or four minutes at most when i've when i've looked at it
The big thing that they use to gate the different tiers is resolution and session length. So free goes up to 1080p and the maximum session is an hour. There's nothing that stops you from like. reaching the end of your first hour and then just disconnecting and reconnecting. So you can do this indefinitely. Interesting. But it'll end the session, right? You couldn't leave the game paused and disconnect and reconnect. It resets the virtual server. Right.
And so you basically save your game, exit out, restart and come back right back where you were. Can I can I jump in here really quick and just reassure that this is not a sponsored episode, by the way? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, they're not. Anytime we just like start running down features on something we've been messing with, like I think like after that Fastmail episode, somebody was like, were you guys being paid by Fastmail for that? Like, absolutely not.
No, if we were being paid by somebody, we'll disclose. Yes. Like it would be extremely obvious if we were to ever do something like that. But this is just you met and testing something and talking about it. Yeah. So I did a PC world video and it was and spent.
Like that video ended up being a three minute YouTube short and I didn't get to talk about all the stuff that I learned. A short, a vertical, a vertically oriented short. Yeah, we do. We do PC world shorts now. Do you crop the footage or do you just letterbox it? I shot that one. Like it was going to be a short when I shot it. I just shot it vertically. Not your face. I'm talking about any game footage that goes in. Does that get cropped?
crops to the vertical orientation so the format that i use for pc where we use for pc world verticals is usually floating head on top of crop zoomed in footage okay yeah um so anyway Maximum session length is our on the performance tier, which is the mid tier. It's up to up to six hours. Oh, wild. They cap the even it's eight for the ultimate, which is the 4080 tier. Like I'm surprised that there isn't a tier that just lets you play as long as you want.
I mean, eight hours, pretty, pretty long time, but still. Yeah, I was going to say it's it's. I like I never hit the eight hours. I've been using it for a couple, three weeks now. My gaming doesn't work that way anymore, unfortunately. Yeah, that's fair. I just if I were paying for the highest tier, I think I might get a little annoyed when it said, hey, you have to disconnect now. But yeah.
Um, so then the other thing is they do, you only get HDR. I think you get RTX at the two paid tiers. Uh, so the ray tracing basically. You don't get things like Reflex and Frame Gen until you pay for the most expensive tier. But also the most expensive tier is capped at 240 frames a second.
On the Steam Deck client, everything's capped at 60 frames a second right now, even if you have one of the handhelds that does higher frame rates. That's something that they had on the list of. Here's the stuff we're going to address. So anyway. It works really well out of the box. It works by default with most games at 1280 bay 800. Sometimes if you have like a game that you've played on a PC that has a higher resolution saved in the cloud save settings.
You'll have to like go in and manually tweak your resolutions and stuff. But also it didn't matter when I tried it. So it was fine. You mean like it just scaled down even if the resolution was too high? Yeah, pretty much. All right. Pretty much. And like the thing that was interesting about this is. You know, the Steam Deck hardware is relatively modest at this point, right? It's basically like console, like this generation of console perf.
at the resolution that you like you can run this generation's console games at 1280 by 800 pretty well on that machine like 30 fps maybe higher maybe a little 30 40 60 somewhere in there yeah apparently people got doom the dark ages running on it yeah I like 30. I think I think it's probably I only know this by passively absorbing information about it as I have been looking at insufferable arguments on Blue Sky about ray tracing. That's a conversation for another day.
the look i don't want to talk about the ray tracing stuff right now but um the yeah i was interested i was curious to see how they managed to make that work the thing that like the thing that bums me out about the dark ages thing is I look at how was it machine games that did Indiana Jones? Yes. I look at how machine games used light in that game.
And it sold the need for ray tracing, right? Like you use your torch to solve puzzles and you like you're you're holding the torch up in front of you to see see things in tombs and stuff like that. I got to play that game at some point. It is incredible. It is it is both a game design and technical technological showcase. Doom has all this cool dynamic light, like ray trace light stuff, and they don't like it's there's no gameplay impact for almost any of it.
Yeah. Did you know that they're using ray tracing, hardware ray tracing in that game to trace individual pellets of the shotgun shots? That makes sense. That's actually something really interesting to me is the non-graphical, non-visual uses of ray tracing hardware.
There was a talk at GDC about somebody using the ray tracing stuff to do positional audio. So, yes, you're starting to see a lot more audio engines that are using that hardware. But this this was a this was specifically the first use of hit detection I've ever seen. And I think.
In this case, they're using it for the location based damage on the meshes, you know, like kind of like trying to. So you get hit reactions based on where the pellets actually hit. Not just reactions, but that game is incredibly gnarly about like. carving chunks of flesh off the enemies depending on where you shoot them. Apparently they're using ray tracing hardware for that. That's really cool. Okay, so the thing that...
The reason I wanted to write about this and the reason I was interested in it is. It seems like PC gaming, it opens up the whole spectrum of PC gaming. If you have like a Steam Deck or one of these little handhelds. then you can play the AAA games. You can play the stuff with anti-pirate CBS that doesn't run right on Linux.
You can play the games that have too high system requirements for this hardware. Oh, let me stop you there. So are you saying, I mean, I don't know if this is apparent by looking at UI or whatever, but are you saying these cloud instances are Windows based? No. Oh, they must be. Because you said. It'll run like, what are the big steam based on it? I played call of duty or actually, yeah, this isn't just steam. It's all the services. So yeah, it's anything. So like Fortnite, which has,
anti-piracy stuff that doesn't run on PC. Right. I think that's Linux. Destiny won't either, right? I could try Destiny. Valorant maybe is another one. Anyway, long story short, you're saying all the big system level anti-cheat games work fine here.
the ones that are enabled for geforce now do for sure sure right um let me see if valorant i'm curious if the if the i don't think valorant is on oh i don't have valor on my account so because i didn't hook my right account up to it but um yeah so so like i was able to play fortnight on my steam deck okay in linux all right running on geforce now which i guess is on windows to your point sure um it like this seems like if you if
if you have somebody if you're somebody who wants to play pc games wants to get it's like it's it's another step up the entry into pc games right so like the steam deck gives you a handheld that's really good at playing like indie games and older games and like low intensity stuff And then this gives you a way that you can plug it into a monitor and get like 4K gaming out of that same box, which is kind of compelling for.
the you know the cost of the steam deck plus a subscription fee or or whatever like like this seems like this would be the best for people who don't have a gaming pc they only have a steam deck yeah like in a world where gpus are like In the US, at least right now, a 30% markup over MSRP and kind of hard to find in a lot of cases, although we'll talk about that in a minute. This seems like an increasingly viable alternative if you're willing to throw a little money at it.
It's good to have options. The perf was really good on the handheld. I was seeing like 30, 60 frames a second on everything I tried. They gave me an ultimate code to put on my account to try that for a bit.
I also tried it with the base free and like I found that the the free settings with the exception of the one hour time limit, which we kind of sucked. The free settings were quite good. OK. um for the 1280 by 800 resolution of the handheld how do the ads manifest on the free tier i like i'm gonna tell you some secret brad oh inside my pie hole i didn't see any ads interesting i assume so i bet
I assume that means those are display ads probably like pop-up style. I bet that you get a pre-roll ad before the game starts or while you're queuing for the game. Interesting. I guess, but I don't know for sure. Weird coincidence. Sorry about that. Sorry to get to test that folks. Okay.
Yeah, the couple of things that I thought were really nice. The client tells you how many gigs per hour you're going to use at the settings you have for any particular game. That's helpful. So if you have bandwidth caps, you can you can kind of plan around that.
I think if you have a really kind of oppressive bandwidth caps, this is definitely not a service for you at the 1280 by 800. I think it was like six gigs an hour. So not like more than you'd want to use over cellular if you don't have an unlimited cellular plan. Yeah, for sure.
But not so much that it was going to it would break you on like a one terabyte Comcast plan or something like that. I still can't believe that data caps notwithstanding. We're even talking about being able to stream video games over cell connection. Right. It's a financial limitation, not a technical one that is stopping you from doing that. Like, it's still insane to me that sell has gotten that fast.
I talked to a listener after we talked about rural broadband the other day who just signed up for 5G home internet. And they were like, it's really good. Like it's it's it is a dramatic improvement in their quality of life because they were someplace they couldn't really get broadband before. Yeah, I can see that. So there's a few things that were kind of janky.
GeForce now doesn't seem to cast shaders for a lot of games. I couldn't I couldn't tell if it's all games or if it's like they have to automatically they have to opt stuff in or whatever. But like I played a bunch of about on this. which is that obsidian rpg that came out earlier earlier this year late last year i can't remember that game rules yeah the game's really good um it compiles shaders every time you launch the damn game oh yeah and it's like
Depending on which server, it's funny because I think the servers that they're on are mostly Threadrippers is my understanding. The ones that are slow clocks, man, it takes forever. The docked experience is kind of a mess in that it doesn't automatically adjust the resolution to suit your docked resolution. It stays at 1280 by 800, so you have to go and kind of manually adjust some stuff. I didn't realize you had a Steam Deck dock.
Yeah, I bought a dock to test stuff when it first came out. Is it the valve dock? I got the valve one. Yeah, it's it's it's fine. It's I like just in general, as a longtime Steam Deck user, the dock's a little janky. Like it often has trouble with figuring out what resolution you're supposed to be on and stuff like that. It just now got CEC support. So it'll start your TV up automatically when you power on the dock, the deck, when it's plugged into the dock. The controller support.
was hit and miss. Like there were a couple of games I had to start multiple times in order to get controllers working, which wouldn't be a big deal, except for if you're on the free tier, then that cue time is kind of like you have to watch another ad theoretically and the cue time is a little bit of a hassle. Yeah. It also is fiddly because of the kind of nested nature of Steam instances, because you have like the Steam controller support or.
the steam deck level and then you're into the geforce now thing which has a steam which has a controller translation layer which then talks to steam on the virtual instance which has a translation layer So like everything has to align for it to work right. And it did most of the time, but occasionally it was weird. I wonder if that adds any significant latency. It did not add any latency that I was able to detect beyond.
Just, hey, it's like six milliseconds to get the video. Right. Probably not enough to surpass the legacy of the stream to begin with. Yeah. It's worth mentioning. I tested this on my home network. which is connected to like its AT&T gigabit fiber. I have Wi-Fi 6 and 60 access points all through the house. There were like short drops when I would switch between access points, but the client would automatically recover pretty much.
The sometimes you actually get access to the NVIDIA hosted Steam interface, which only it's really funny because each of those Steam interfaces only has the single game that's in there. I see what you see. You're seeing the client front end, essentially. Yeah. So like you don't see your Steam, you see NVIDIA's Steam.
with just that one game. So it's not like you can shell back out to their steam and switch games inside your instance. You have to go back out to the web UI to the client UI and close that one and then restart another one, which is weird. I get why they do it. And then the other thing that is super frustrating is the on Steam specifically, you have to have your profile be public so they can keep an updated list of games. Right. Which it feels goofy.
So anyway, that's that's GeForce now. All right. I was pleasantly surprised by it. It's 200 bucks a year for the ultimate one. You can get day passes that are. What is that? Sixteen dollars and something a month. Yeah, it's 16. Yeah, it's it's look, it's less. It's less than the cheapest 1080p GPU you can buy right now. Yeah. Annually, which like is how I like I was talking. It's funny. I was talking to somebody yesterday about this at Micro Center. And.
They, they were like, yeah, I've been using GeForce now since my last PC died in the pandemic. And I was like, oh, how's that going for you? Like, it's great. I pay 150 or 200 bucks a year or something. And I don't have, I didn't have to chase a thing, but then they were taken advantage of some bundles.
At Micro Center, yes. Yeah, I've got a friend that also decided they were done with maintaining a local gaming PC and switched to this and seemed quite happy with it. It also seems like the kind of thing if you are that Steam Deck and no PC owner. Mm-hmm.
hypothetical person you could maybe dip in and out of something like this like there's probably plenty of games that run just fine locally on your steam deck so you could just like turn this on for a month when you want to play something big Well, I was going to say, so that's that's the other thing is like I have a friend who I play Half-Life to DM with once a week, probably.
And he's a longtime Mac user and he just has a GeForce now thing. So we play for an hour and then he disappears and he comes back for a minute and then we play a little bit more and then we're usually done. Sure. They do. If you want to try it and not commit to the full.
The plans are priced based on day passes, one month plans or six month plans. So the day pass for the performance, the 1440 P tier is like four bucks. It doesn't include ads. You can try it out for a day or two and see what you think. I think it's seven or eight for the ultimate one, which seems expensive, but whatever. Yeah. Before we move on to Micro Center, I want to sidebar real quick and ask what kind of access points do you have?
I'm using Ubiquiti 6E. I have one 6E and one 6E. I see. I have a 6E extended range one in the garage that covers the backyard. Kind of surprisingly large chunk of my neighborhood. And then I have the 61 that's like close enough to my lights that sometimes they don't connect. I see. Yeah, I've been. My Wi-Fi is fine, but I'm still on a Wi-Fi five.
slash 802.11ac access points, and I've just kind of been getting the itch to upgrade, but it's not bad enough. It's not bad at all, to be clear. It's more that I'm now two versions behind on Wi-Fi, and I'm like, it might be nice to upgrade. You live in you live in a neighborhood that's dense enough to benefit from the seven stuff to the signal. The competition for spectrum around here is a nightmare. Yeah.
I can pick up whenever I've done a site survey, I can pick up as many networks as that site survey will display at one time, like 100 plus SSIDs. No problem here. Yeah. So. an addendum on the game support stuff. The stores that they support are Steam, Epic, UB, Xbox, Electronic Arts, and GOG. They don't support Battle.net and they don't support League stuff. Riot stuff. So no Valorant.
destiny 2 is on the list but league and riot and valorant and and that is not i think i think counter-strike 2 is so like they can do those kinds of fast games but anyway all right um Should we talk about Micro Center? Sure. You know, you can get an access point at Micro Center. They have them there. I don't know what to get, though. Like, I have become dead set on getting an access point that does not require an external controller. I'm just tired of dealing with it.
Like I really want an access point that runs its management interface on the access point. I don't know if you're going to find that. Unless you go back to a consumer one. It exists. No, there are some. I've never, I still have not, I'm not going to buy one of these. I still have not settled on how to save the company's name. X, Z, Y, X, E, L, Zyzel. Zyzel. I don't know. Nobody seems to know. Yeah. It's impossible. Most of their, most of their access points run.
management on the access point but they got a pretty rocky history with bad security flaws and stuff so i'm not not doing that but but you're right most of the most of the consumer facing access points are evenly prosumer Soho stuff needs a controller and I'm not, I'm just, I'm just tired of dealing with that stuff. I mean, my controller for what it's worth lives in a container on my NAS. Yeah. And it's been relatively like it's. It's like, I just set it up.
three years ago and then haven't touched it since then really yeah now that i'm running actual containers with podman like it would be somewhat easier to just stand up at ubiquity like the whatever they're calling the unified command console or whatever unified network application this month but When I was doing that manually, it was a fucking nightmare getting that thing working. Oh, yeah. It relied on like an old version of MariaDB or MondoDB or whatever database it uses that like.
I had to use like a two versions old Ubuntu install that still included that old version. Anyway, whatever. We don't need to get into it. But it's still just kind of a hassle having to run extra software to administrate your Wi-Fi.
So it's funny, I had just bought the Ubiquiti stuff when all the drama happened with them. And as a result, I never connected to their cloud service. Yeah, yes. That's the other thing is I would love a thing that doesn't even have the option for cloud management, but at least as long as you can opt out of it, I'm fine with it.
I'm increasing. We talked about this about the thermometers and the thermostats. I'm increasingly of the no cloud. Yep. Like just not buying anything that connects to the cloud, the home automation stuff. I don't even want hooks, even if it's optional. I don't even want hooks into the device from somebody's servers.
Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway. So micro center, like I said, build as the people have always talked about this. Like it's like it's Shangri-La. They're right. It's real good. All right. The vibes. OK, so it was grand opening. So people were there. They were really excited. They kind of soft open last weekend. So people have been trickling in and out and like walking in and being like, hey, is this place open? Santa Clara.
This is right on the edge of Santa Clara and San Jose. So that's like an hour south of San Francisco for people who don't know. It took me 40 minutes from Pacifica, I think, to get there. That's not too bad. Should I get a list of locations? I've always been curious about Micro Center because I've heard for years and years. how great they are but they have 29 locations now is my understanding mostly southwest right
No, central, like Midwestern. It's Chicago and they spread out from Chicago is my understanding. What were your apologies to Midwesterners for then? Like they've had Micro Center for so long. This is old hat.
Yeah, us talking about this is like it's like saying, hey, let me tell you about a grocery store. The produce is on the right and the frozen stuff's on the left. I mean, you look, I bet they I bet they are happy to get there to sit there and nod sagely at things we're saying and be like, yeah, it's great. Isn't it right now? Now, you know.
Well, I talked to a friend who like is from Chicago and he was like, I was like, he was in town yesterday and was like, Hey, you want to grab lunch? I was like, I can't, I'm going to the micro center grand opening. He's like, what the hell are you going to a micro center grand opening for? fair and i was like you have no idea how good you've had it man and yeah so anyway i'm looking at some pictures here of the inside i need to go here yeah we i'll tell we should go on a field trip sometime
Even if I'm not going to buy anything, I mean, we'll get into this as you talk about it, but it would really be nice to be able to just go to a place and look at like PC cases. I mean, Central has some of that. But not really the central location, at least the central in San Francisco is very small by comparison to what into these pictures I'm looking at. Yeah. And, and also like, okay, so let's, let's, let's just get into it. Okay. Like.
They have a bunch of the stuff that you want to be able to handle and look at and touch and see how it works. They have out.
for the most part so like so what is what is that like cases keyboards mice okay like keyboards out to type on not all of them but they have a lot of a lot of floor samples like the key chron section had i think a bazillion i i could be misremembering i saw a lot of stuff yesterday i thought that the key chron had all almost all of their models out where you can handle them man that's cool
The cases, they had two or three rows of cases where the cases were just on like wire racks. You could pick them up. You could open them up. You could take them off the shelf. You could you could see like.
which pieces are riveted in which pieces are screwed in all of that stuff great it was really really good uh monitors uh they had a buttload of monitors out that was on the other side of the store like on and so on and i mean it's like normal display mode bullshit though so it was like they were real bright well you could see them
In my case, I've never seen an OLED monitor. I mean, I've seen OLED TVs, of course, so I basically know what the screen is like, but I'd still love to see some OLED monitors in action because I'm really starting to get an itch for an OLED monitor. They had a they had a like a sim sled, like a racing sled set up. OK, with a Samsung G12 extreme ultra widescreen monitor on it that I got to play with. And like a like a.
It wasn't the Fanatec. It was the company that's kind of knocked them off. Moco, I think, is the name of it. Like F1 direct drive racing wheel on it. It was real good. Those ultra wide monitors. I don't think I want an ultra wide monitor for my desktop ever. But if I ever get into sim racing, like when I get a little bit more middle aged, I'm like, yeah, it's time for me to get real into something stupid. I'm going to get into sim racing and.
and get a big giant widescreen monitor for it. Yeah, that works. Um, they had a ton of 3d printers up on the back wall, like up in a lot of them were just running. Okay. So this is, so this is not just a computer store. This is like a, general technology store you would say so they like they didn't have stereos and stuff like that it wasn't like best buy there were no refrigerators it was it was it was computer it was all computer nerd shit at the end of the day yes
like like they had a big they had a whole aisle full of arduino and raspberry pi and like soldering stuff and like you could buy spools of cable there if you wanted oh um they had a big pretty good networking section now hang on this is not like a modern day Radio Shack competitor with like drawers full of capacitors and stuff, right? They had bags full of capacitors. They did not have drawers full of capacitors. I mean, they sell capacitors, though. That's.
Brad, I almost bought some PC speakers. They had PC. They had like Raspberry Pi project speakers that we could have soldered on speakers too. Man, I need to go here. Yeah. We can go there. I wish I had bought. There are two things I wish I bought. They had a whole section of like little.
handheld keyboards for like living room PCs and stuff like that. And I wish I'd bought one of those to use on my Raspberry, my Mr. and my Steam Deck. Like to have a Bluetooth keyboard for those. Yeah, that's neat.
I also wish I had bought the stuff to make PC speakers. The line was really long. I didn't think we were going to buy anything. And then by the time we did, I had forgotten what I wanted to buy. And I just remembered it was the PC speaker stuff. Anyway, good reason to go back. It would take me.
Man. You'd have to ride down to Colma and we'd have to drive together. Two hours and 55 minutes on public transit to get there. Yeah, no, but you'd ride to Bart and I would drive together. That's doable. Yeah. Cause you'd have to write like Caltrain or something down there. This is, this is four or five different connections to get there. Yeah. Yeah. So the, so the other thing is that they have two big.
By again, this is not sponsored. I just think this is cool. I'm stoked that it's here. They have two big DIY PC build areas. One is their knowledge bar. It's not full of geniuses, full of knowledgeable people. where you can bring your busted ass DIY computer in and they'll help you figure out what's wrong with it. They'll also do stuff for you. Like they had a menu up that had like, hey, if you want hard tube water cooling put in your PC, here's how much it costs.
oh just just like they'll like they'll just do it for you for you okay yeah it was expensive it was like 800 bucks i i will do if somebody wants hard tube water cooling put in their pc i'll do it i think that probably includes some of the hardware too i guess yeah My assumption is that's like a prepackaged hardware and labor project. OK, that makes sense. I wonder if I wonder if you could just like.
I mean, I would rather do this at home personally, but I wonder if you could just like go buy a full computer's worth of parts there and then like sit down and put it together in the store in that area and maybe just ask questions as you go or something. Well, so that's the next part. I don't know about that, actually, but the.
the the diy build your own section is like a third of the store quarter of the store probably it's like all the shelves on on one side of the store like rows and rows and rows of stuff And it's like closed cabinets with CPUs and memory and SSDs and video cards and all that stuff in it. And then the cases are done at the other end. And if you go up to the DIY bar, the BYO or build your own bar.
then like there's a, there are people there that will come grab a cart, walk with you up and down those aisles and help you navigate picking compatibility with like CPUs and RAM and motherboards. Man, that's cool. make sure that you're putting everything into a case that fits they had like some small form factor cases including like
The usual kind of they didn't have any like super niche stuff, but they had like like nice fractal cases and stuff like that. That sounds fun. That's I don't know why this comes to mind. That sounds like a fun like retirement job. Like if I were if I were retired and, you know, like when sometimes when people retire, you get like a part time job.
to pass the time like it would be fun to just help people go up and down and make like just ask them what their budget is and what they want to do and just help them spec out a pc like in like kind of supermarket sweep style or toys r us style It's like one of my favorite teachers was a retired chemist who came back to teach high school chemistry. Right. Right. And yeah, like, yeah, I that's that's the equivalent for you and me. Yes. Something to something to aspire to.
Can I talk about the filament selector thing? Because it was really cool for 3D printers. They had they had like it was kind of like paint chips when you go to like a paint store. They had a bunch of 3D printed filament samples with a barcode on them.
and they had like a rack after rack after rack of them like 50 or 100 on a rack and you pulled the color in the in the material you wanted and then you walked over to this other thing about 20 feet away and you scan that barcode and the thing was like do you want you know 1.75 millimeter pla and in crimson red and you were like yes and then it had a big giant rack on like
You know, remember the rack, the shelves in Wally and his house that had all the shit on them and it would like it would like run on like kind of a like the shelves would go up and down on a kind of Ferris wheel type mechanism. It's like that, but for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of spools of filament. So then the shelf would get to the right place on the filament for the filament you selected. And then there were little lights along the front of the table that would light up.
on the the exact section of that big long 25 foot wide shelf with the filament that you wanted i need to see that in action it was really good fully appreciated we're gonna put that so there's gonna be a pc world video next week sometime so we'll I'll post that in the discord when we get it, but I will definitely watch that. And, and on, and on, uh, on, uh, uh, blue sky as well. So, um, yeah, it, it was really nice. It's weird. Like central is a place.
that you can get all this you can buy all the same stuff the deals are probably pretty equivalent like the the deals were the things the things that they had that were like doorbusters for the grand opening were that they had I think they're doing like 30 or 40 founders edition 50 nineties a day at MSRP cheese, which is like a significant discount for a $2,000 video card, which is crazy to say. Um,
They also had a bunch of other like they this was this was the most video cards I've seen in one place since the pandemic. Since Bitcoin mining, honestly. Sure. What were the general price likes? grand opening doorbuster stuff aside like were they being were they all being sold MSRP or do you know no they were being sold at the street prices for like
The the 50 90s ranged up to like thirty seven hundred dollars for the water cooled all in one crazy ones. It was twenty seven hundred dollars. It was they were expensive. The but but like the Intel. And the Intel cards, the 9070 XTs were a little bit marked up, but not too, too bad as it was my recollection. I wasn't paying that much attention to prices, but like.
don't buy a 50 60 but they had a lot of 50 60s at msrp it looked like okay so what about other stuff i mean i know this is a hard question to answer after one day at the grand opening but like non-gpu like non-hostile pricing sorts of goods like ssds and ram and like kind of more
I'm so middle of the road stuff. Like, so I didn't look at any of that stuff. Unfortunately, I wonder, I wonder how competitive their prices are with online retail in general. The, the, my guess is that they're going to be equivalent or a little bit low, a little bit higher rather. The benefit here is like we talked to a lot of people, right? We interviewed a bunch of people and those videos will be up on PC World. You should watch the videos. We had some really we met some really fun people.
And like a lot of people who listen to this podcast and the PC World podcast and even go all the way back to maximum PC days. So shout outs to listeners. But but we had a lot of.
A lot of conversations with people who are like, oh, well, you know, I'm kind of new to PC building. I just started during the pandemic or I just started when I built my last PC because it was hard to get whatever I wanted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it feels like like this feels like a little bit of a safety net.
Right. Because like if you don't you think about how hard I think about how hard it was for me to get into building PCs in the 90s when I didn't have a friend to kind of like ask stupid questions of and even like how often I pick up the like. in after i'd been out of it for a little bit and then started coming back in and needed to build a pc in like 2015 when i would just text gordon and be like hey what what uh i don't understand how this works can you explain this to me
And that, and you get that kind of help when you're, when you're going to a place like this, which is nice. And if you super, even if you super, super know what you're doing, that's still invaluable to just have a place that you can just go and get a thing on short notice if you need it and not have to.
special order it or wait a couple three days if you need it right then well and like central's good central's been good good for that for central's our local like screwdriver shop it's been good for that for a long time but their stock is usually fairly limited and this was This was there's a lot of stock here. Do they do they sell Apple stuff in quantity? Yeah. So they had computers. I didn't see any phone stuff. They had like cases and chargers and stuff like that.
But they had they had a whole big Mac section right when you walk in. They had a we didn't talk about this, but they had a ton of like prebuilt desktop and. Small form factor PCs from like MSI and companies that sell rebuilt PCs. OK, so not not PCs that they're building in house to sell.
I don't actually know if they're doing, I would assume you see like cyber power and I buy power and stuff like that there. I don't know if they have a house brand for PCs. We, we kind of looked through that stuff, did a couple of laps through that stuff. And I looked at some of those machines and like the.
The it felt like the value you were getting on those PCs was like they were they were well, it was it was if somebody came to me and said, hey, I have fifteen hundred dollars, what would you build? They were pretty close to what I would build. And no big emissions for the most part. The other thing is they do a bunch of bundles, is my understanding. They don't do sales on individual components all that much, but if you...
Like their bundles have a reputation for being the bundles that are actually a value and not like two things you want bundled up with one thing you don't want. So there's no like there's no copies of Cameo in those launch bundles, I guess. Don't talk about Cameo that way. I like I like Cameo, actually. But anyway. So, yeah, like and then they also had.
a much wider range of laptops than I've seen at like Best Buys or Eat Targets or whatever. So it's like they had they had a handful of like low end Chromebooks and cheap laptops and stuff like that. They also had a huge selection of really like. compelling gaming laptops kind of ranging from low end apus all the way up to like dedicated with discrete workstation graphics and stuff like that so cool it was cool yeah
And TVs. They had TVs as well. Oh, wow. And then they also had like a three foot by two foot box with. a ps5 pro and an xbox series x and an xbox series s and then a whole bunch of different colored controllers in it oh that's neat yeah so that's micro center okay i wonder i i live for this stuff
And it's too early for this location to have it yet, probably. But I wonder what kind of like clearance stuff they have or will have. Oh, yeah. I live for I live for just rolling into the retail place and just seeing what's like price to move.
Yeah, I will tell you, I don't think they had. I think the price to move stuff, you have to be there at like seven o'clock the night before. I'm talking like months from now, six months from now when they've got stuff they just need to clear out. Yeah, I am.
Here's the thing. Next time we get under the flea market, it's not that far to go over to micro center from there. Okay. So we could go to the flea market in the morning and then zip over to do a field trip to micro center afterwards. Yeah. I had a nice burrito from the place next door to it too. Great. Yeah. So like a real win-win situation. But anyway, I guess that'll do it for us. Exciting things are happening. Yeah. It feels like things like.
Honestly, the nicest thing about the micro center thing and the reason I wanted to talk about in the podcast is it was really fun to be around a group of people like everybody in that store was into PC building yesterday, partly because it was the grand opening, partly because it's micro center and like.
whether it was somebody who was brand new to it and was just figuring it out for the first time and like had questions or like we talked to a guy who's been running Linux as his main OS for the last 20 years. Wow. Wow. Is that a video or going to be on the video? I think so. Yeah. Great. Yeah. So, so like it was, it was, it was the.
I think I've talked about this before, but like the first day I came to Maximum PC in 2000 when they were trying to recruit me to move to California and they were like, why don't you just fly out and hang out and we'll talk and you can see what it's like to be here and all that. And I was like, yeah, sure. Okay. And I worked in that office and it was the first time I'd been around people who were as excited about like PC building and computer hardware as I was.
this whole everybody in this place felt like that all the people that worked there were really excited and like like we talked to a bunch of of their associates who were really knowledgeable and really helpful and like like
when they didn't know something, they told you that they didn't know it. And then we're like, let me go see what I, when you go, let me go talk to somebody or look this up and I'll come back and get an answer for you. And then they got the right answer, which is, which is really nice. A lot of times you don't get that in a retail situation. So that's cool.
Last question. How does this compare to classic fries? Much less sleazy than classic fries. There's an era of grime at a classic fries, right? Both like physical dirt. And also metaphysical in that the, the, the, the, like you feel the, the kind of psychic trauma that happens in a fries. Okay. I never, I never did manage to set foot in a fries. So this is all my God. It sounds scandalous to me, but look.
The thing about fries is you'd be walking down like the power supply aisle. And if you went a little bit too far, you'd be into like the behind the red behind the bead curtain section of the video store where they had a bunch of like weird hentai and tentacle porn and stuff like that. Wow. fries fries look fries didn't fries didn't uh uh sign up for any puritanical uh they'd sell you jerky and porn at the exact same time yeah great
Anyway, I think I think when they did the expansion and they added fries is in like Texas and all the rest of the country. I don't think they had the porn section in those. I think that was a Bay Area experience, but I don't know for sure. I wonder if this is a one off or if Micro Center is going to be expanding more into other territories.
So they said during the ribbon cutting that they try to do one, no more than one or two stores a year. Okay. So they are, that is a reasonable growth. It seems like. And on the site, it says, hey, I have an 18-minute in-store pickup, which means I don't know what that means. I'm curious. 18-minute? Yeah.
Meaning maybe it can be ready to pick up in 18 minutes from time of purchase or something. I think that is correct. They want to have it ready for you within 18 minutes. All right. There you go. And it's not available between Black Friday and Christmas.
Anyway, that's it for this week, I guess. Yeah. Shout outs to micro center. Hey, we're open to sponsorships for micro center. They seem okay. Yeah. Oh, there's, wow. There's one of these in Charlotte, North Carolina. I did not know that. Yeah, there you go. That's cool. Yeah. It's very nice. Definitely check it out. And yeah, if you like the show, please consider subscribing. We're a listener supported podcast. Without you all, we wouldn't be here.
True. And we appreciate everyone's support. You can go to Patreon dot com slash tech pod and give us five dollars a month, which goes to support both us and our families, which we appreciate very much. And yeah, the the thing you get for that is access to the discord, which is full of nerds, just like I met in micro center yesterday.
Again, a knowledgeable group of wonderful people who are excited about sharing the things that they're excited about. Very true. And you get access to 62 and rising patron episodes. Where Brad and I dig into things that maybe didn't quite make the cut for a regular full episode of the show. Yes, we talked this week. I was reminded we talked about the scourge of no-name VPN apps on phones. Oh, God. Yeah.
The children are apparently using in schools to bypass. OK, presumably to bypass like school Internet filtering. But so I've done that, too. When I've been at my daughter's school working, I've used my VPN to bypass their terrible filtering. That's fine. It's just you should know what you should you should vet the VPN that you're connecting to in order to do that is all I'm saying. I think I trust me pretty, pretty quite a bit.
Anyway, uh, patreon.com slash tech pod. It's five bucks a month. We appreciate each and every one of you listeners, supporters, whatever. It's all good. If you, if you don't want to sign up with a patron, maybe, maybe, you know, think about leaving a review. This is something other podcasts always tell people to do, and I've never really done consistently. But apparently...
If you leave a review on something like iTunes, that exposes our podcast to more new audiences and more people, which is good for us as well. We appreciate that too. Yes, we do. And that will do it for us this week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. Thanks for listening. Yes, I don't know what we're doing next week, but I'm leaving for LA for Summer Game Fest on Friday, so it might be... It's a busy time of year. Yes, I don't know exactly.
what I'm saying here. We'll have something, but I'm not quite sure what yet with the travel and so forth. We're shooting for a guest. I'm working on a guest, but we'll see. And as always, please consider the environment before printing this podcast. Thanks for listening.