293: J-ing and K-ing

Okay, yesterday, my personal food safety standards may have faced their greatest test ever. You had a pickle go bad? No. Wait, pickles can't go bad, can they? No, pickles can't go bad. A hundred years from now, you find a jar of pickles, go nuts. It's kind of priced into the whole thing, right? Yeah. It's just pre-grossed. Yes. To eat.

I love pickles, just for the record. Pickles are great. Yeah. You know what I've really gotten on, though, as an alternative to pickles is sliced pepperoncinis. Look, I'm going to level you up one. Jardiniere. Garden here. I don't know how you say it. Garden era. Garden era. Yeah, that stuff. Yeah, that stuff rules. Yeah, it's like pickles and like I can't eat anymore because it almost always has celery in it. And it turns out the celery allergy is impactful in a negative way.

I don't think I could live without celery. Well, sometimes I just take the hit and I'm like, my face is going to be weird for a week or two. I'll just, I'll just eat the celery. Sometimes it's worth it. All right. So, okay. This started maybe a year or two. It was based on like a. There's like a wave of social media posts from people.

Who would know about the subject, like people working in food safety, you know, microbiologist types. Yeah. For mentors. Yes. Like that, like a, like a, a wave of public service announcements started going out on Twitter a year or two ago about mold. Yeah. On food. Yeah.

And how you should have a zero tolerance policy about it. I mean, I like penicillin, but I don't eat mold on my food. That's correct. Well, you definitely don't eat visible mold, but I don't know about you, but I had always been for my entire life, especially on like cheese and bread, a. cut around the mold and toss it and just eat everything else look this is this is where taking microbiology in college really pays off

Because when you understand how the mycelial network grows out of a single visible piece of mold into everything that it can touch. Okay. You don't eat the food when it has a mold on it. I think before you even finish that sentence, it justified the actions that were taken yesterday. Despite.

Yeah. The fact that I was very resistant to them. Uh-huh. We went to Costco a week ago and Costco, at least here, Costco sources like a fair amount of local stuff, I think, or like my understanding is the Costco's inventory is like pretty tailored to the. It's like local adjacent, it seems like what I see. They have they have this amazing sourdough there that you can get in a two pack, two loaves for like seven bucks. Is it is it that.

Is it the one with the mill on the label? Like their big kind of roundish bully loaves? Yes, they're more round than long. It's like a yellow label. We get those from Safeway, too. They have them there, too. It's so good. It's some good sourdough. It's delicious. And in about a week, we got through the first loaf. Both of those loaves have just been sitting out on the countertop. That's fine.

That's a place for bread in the Bay Area. And we got through the first loaf and I went to, we got some excellent avocados from there as well. Oh yeah, this is why you don't own a house. It's all this avocado toast you're eating. I had five minutes to make food in between podcasts yesterday. So excited to go pull the biggest slices out of that loaf and make some really good avocado toast in the short window I had to eat.

Wow. I see where this is going. It's remember that you remember that scene from the first Ninja Turtles movie where they get down on their knees and like, why God, why send off that pizza? That was, I don't remember that actually didn't stick with me that hard. If I'm being honest, that pizza that was gone too soon.

So my girlfriend was immediately there were like two spots of mold on there and she was just like junket whole thing out. Like, again, we had not even opened the loaf and she was like, it's gone. Just put it in the compost. And I was like, no. Yep. You look. At least it was just bread and not something expensive.

I mean, we're talking like three, four dollars worth of food, but like to be clear, Costco is a rare event for us. Like we have to get a zip car like, you know, there's there are arrangements that have to be made to arrange transportation to go to Costco. It's like an every two to three months thing. So it was.

It was not the three to four dollars that we were losing. It was the I really wanted to eat that bread. Let me tell you a secret about the Safeway that's around the corner from your house anywhere in San Francisco. They have the exact same bread. I bet they do. Yeah. It's a dollar more. I bet it's 50 cents to a dollar more. And that's, that changes everything as you know.

That is that is my that is my default. I'm making an egg sandwich bread. Yeah, sure. I'll toast that up real good. You know, put a little scrambled egg on there. Maybe maybe some cheese. I get this yellow bird habanero hot sauce. It's like a little spicy, but not too spicy. I've had it. It's great. That on there. Boom. Perfect. Sando. I wish yellow bird would advertise with one of our podcasts again. So they would send me another.

Gift box of hot sauce. We don't take ads on this podcast. Well, okay. What? Maybe another podcast. They sent, they sent you free hot sauce. Dude, they sent like a sample or like a full size bottle of like their whole product line a couple of years ago. I've been I've been shilling their business for free. It lasted me like a year. My God, it's so good. It was good stuff. Anyway, maybe I'll, you know, my girlfriend's actually traveling this weekend. I'm batching it.

Oh, as they used to say, maybe. Well, yes, but I guess my goblin mode is maybe I'll stroll down to the Safeway and buy another loaf of that sourdough just to make myself happy. You know, anything that makes you happy, Brad. That's true. Uh, actually I have to say one other thing real quick before we go, that was a good place. Every, every week we tried to strategically find a place to end the cold open. And that was, that was a, you teed it up. I, I fired at home.

Normally that would have been the place, but I just wanted to point out there's another two pack of bread that we buy at the same time, typically as the sourdough. I think it's Aura wheat. It's like one of those more commercial. Yeah. That bread last time we bought it sat out on the counter for, let's say, upwards of six weeks. Oh, I can beat that. Never one bit of mold, which I'm just going to say, maybe start questioning whether I want to keep eating bread that never molds on the counter.

So so we we're pretty reliable on like sandwich bread. We like we have some specific tastes and requirements there, but like hot dog buns, hamburger buns, which we use in the summertime season, a fair amount. We just buy whatever is cheap. Right. Sure. So Gina got some ballpark hot dog buns the other day that the date on when I looked at it was April. Huh? They're still good. Okay. Nothing on them. No weird smell. They're not even really very stale.

Well, look, that bread is probably at least 60% food. It's science bread, man.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. i'm brad hello i gotta say brad i i grossed out my daughter the other day because i had forgotten to put we had one leftover slice of pizza after pizza night and i forgot to put it in the fridge at the end of the night so i just put the box like

Usually I don't take the trash out at midnight or 11 o'clock when I'm cleaning up the kitchen just because I don't want to be the loud, annoying neighbor. So I like I put the empty pizza box on top of the toaster oven and then I take it out first thing in the morning. Right. Sure. And I was going to do that.

the morning and i looked at i was like oh man there's a piece of pizza in here my daughter was like you can't eat that it's been out all night i was like but it's just pepperoni it's fine it's pepperoni cheese and sauce it's cured i used to i used to like in the in the olden times in the before times i would just

stored the uneaten pizza in the oven because it's sealed yeah so i ate it she's like your stomach's gonna hurt and i was like no it's gonna be fine and then my stomach hurt she was right oh not bad not bad but like definitely my my intestinal tract was like you have done something unnatural to me what are you doing man okay all right too old for this shit good to know um i have a question for you hit me i've noticed when we were when we got in our call this morning

Above my name, next to my name, there's a little lightning bolt that says tech to indicate my allegiance to the tech pod community. We're talking on Discord, I think. Yeah, on Discord. And I noticed yesterday, I was talking to Alex Navarro, your friend and co-host from the Nextlander podcast and streaming show. And he has a little NXL.

next to his name i noticed so true this technology has come to both of our discords we have it's a two-part question first is there's been some conversation on the discord about what our tag should actually say i just chose tech and a lightning bolt that was purple because

Well, our logo is purple and it's called the tech pod. Yeah, I think that makes sense. People had other ideas. Such as? First of all, what's the character? I mean, the most important thing here is what's the character? Up to four. And I think you can do emoji. Oh, as a character or in addition? As a character. You get an icon that is some subset of their tags. It's not great, if I'm being honest.

Uh, it's like 12 things. None of them, none of them scream tech pod to me, but you do also, you, I think you can put emoji in and, um, like, so people suggested. uh nas which seems like a like you know that's on brand yeah sure um people suggested uh there were a bunch of you know you know as happens with the tech pod discord there were a lot of funny ones

Some less than serious options. There were less than serious options. There was town for, you know, shouting out the content towns. How about this? Yeah. How about pod? I thought about pod or pods with a Z. What if we just like climb the hierarchy and we're sitting right at the top of the mountain underneath all of the other podcasts we have slain on our way to the top and we have claimed the word pod? They're not exclusive. Okay.

My other discord is because we're idiots. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, I should have done a poll, but I just decided not to. Now, what happens on click? Does it just like direct you to the discord? Does it like spawn an invite? You know, you would think that it just pops up your profile. It pops up a window that shows you the TechPod Discord server thing. Oh, and you can adopt the tag right there, it looks like. If you're in that Discord, otherwise you have to go to the Discord. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So anyway, we're working on it. I think I kind of like comp. I kind of like town. I kind of like tech and I like pod. I think tech is probably the way to go, honestly. I mean, it's right there in the name. Yeah. The first part of the name, if you say the short name, which most people do. I think, I think.

I got to look at the emoji. If there's like a pod bay door, like a pot, like a 2001 kind of pod or an iPod, maybe I might do TK pod. And if we think Shatner won't come after us, I don't know. Shatner might come after us. I mean, I think that's probably good press if he does. If I'm being honest, I keep I cannot believe he's still around. We shouldn't get if we have questions to get to. I shouldn't even broach the subject. But how the fuck is William Shatner 95?

I followed him down an escalator to a party that we were both going to at Comic-Con one time, and I was afraid to go up and like... introduce like say hello and do the fan interaction with him because he has such a fucking toxic reputation of being an asshole yes he does uh I'm trying to think like in the range of time within which you would have been professionally going to Comic-Con. This was in like 2014 or 2013. So he was still in his 80s at that point. He was, he was.

He had a fairly large posse for a Star Trek guy. Okay. Because most of the Star Trek people just kind of walk around maybe with one other person, but Shatner had a whole crew. I couldn't know if they were his people or if it was just people walking with him. Sure. But it's pretty spry, I guess, for his age, if he's going to parties. I mean, I'm sure it was not like a rager, but still just anybody in their 80s going to any kind of party, I guess. Yeah. In terms of people I bumped into, like on.

vertical modes of transit at conventions. He's high on the list, right? Yeah. I rode an elevator with Reggie one time at E3 in Santa Monica. It's good. Yeah. I didn't recognize him, which was kind of embarrassing in retrospect. He was new at the point still. I was, you know. I was a PCI, whatever. You know what I do have? I know nobody has questions about that, but you know what people do have questions about?

A lot of other subjects, but like lots and lots of things this month. We have a lot of questions again. So thanks to everybody who sent in the fantastic questions. You can go to, you can send them to techpod at content.town or you can post in the questions seeking answers channel in the discord where they'll disappear until we unearth them several weeks later and turn them into a word.

Google document that we can then scroll through and pick out our favorites. I know we say this every month, but like it's legit. Like there has just been a shocking number of questions the last few months. Like we're not we're not just saying that to flatter the audience. I'm thinking back to the lean years when we didn't get those many questions. I look, I, for one, I'm glad that more people are not doing their own research anymore. Instead, they're asking us verified experts on the Internet.

and uh we're here to help so uh you can send them to techpod at content.town or again the question seeking answers channel in the discord we appreciate y'all a shocking number of emails actually i think we could we will not but we could do an all emails episode this month i i'm I mean, maybe it's just the organization and fast mail is a lot better. I'm just able to hot key through the messages and just VI and up and down, left and right through that thing like crazy. Just copying.

J and K and reckless abandon. Just J-ing and K-ing all day long, huh? Mm-hmm. It's the way to be. Let me tell you about little G and big G. What? G-G. G-G? GG. Also one of my favorite Studio Ghibli characters. Yes. GG goes to the top of the document. Capital G goes to the bottom. Wow. You know, I just use my home and end keys for that. You know. I thought Jang and Kang might be a good episode title, but I just wrote it out. No, it does not. No, it does not read. Nope. Jing and King.

I think you'd have to put the hyphens in there after the J and the K. Yes, I considered that. I may well pursue that. All right. What do we got? Yeah. We'll start with a couple of time questions. Here's one from Kurt.

Just finished the June 22nd Project Potpourri episode and had one question. The discussion of building a network time server versus making an atomic clock was interesting, but I was left thinking to what end? I don't think the why of it all was ever explained. Yeah, you're right. I think we maybe got derailed on the conversation and I never actually said why. The why is implied. I think the why is because you can. Because it would be rad. But I'll finish the email.

Maybe I'm a bit dense, but why would someone want to roll their own time server as opposed to relying on various operating systems already running in your home? What would the potential benefit be? Is it something quantifiable against whatever the input cost of the project would be? You guys have given me plenty of inspiration over the years to tinker with similar ideas, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you for the kind words. Thanks, Kurt. Yes. I, so.

Two things there. First of all, when you say as opposed to relying on operating systems around your house, those operating system. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So like a couple of things here to start with, when you say as opposed to relying on various operating systems already running in your home, those operating systems are themselves relying on NTP servers across the Internet somewhere. Yeah.

Like, you know, the computers in your house are not themselves their own source of time truth. Like they have to hit something on the Internet and like technically there's like some number of milliseconds latency between. sending a time request for the milliseconds of latency, man. I'm sure there's all kinds of stuff there to try to correct things. I'm wearing the most accurate wrist timepiece ever made. Thanks to the miracle of a time sink and latency. I can't amelioration, I guess. Sure.

So, I mean, like, again, the, the, the real answer to why would you do this is because it's cool and you can, and it's actually quite cheap. Like some people, I think I talked about those time machines incorporated boxes last week that are like three 50 and new.

or a couple hundred bucks on eBay used. But some people on the Discord were like, yeah, with the Raspberry Pi and like a $20 GPS receiver, you can actually do this pretty easily yourself. Now, I'm not going to sit here and quantify what the difference would be in time accuracy, but if that...

If you have a thing on your network hitting GPS directly to pull the time down, then everything on your LAN has only got to go across your LAN. That's true. To hit that server. One hop. So theoretically, you're probably getting it down to pretty low. I don't know. single milliseconds of latency between the clients and the thing that has the time.

So I'm reading this book right now called Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn. It's a it's a post. It's like an agrarian post apocalypse. So it's like the apocalypse went bad. Things got gnarly. And now they're like, you know, they're they're they're in a post climate disaster.

agrarian world basically a small community people it seems like maybe the california coast and the technology from the before times it still work is stuff like solar cars and panels still generate some electricity and they use that for things like medical stuff okay imagine if you will, a world where we don't have accurate, accurate timekeeping anymore. And you're the person that has the one atomic clock and NTP server. You could be the timekeeper for your whole little post agrarian society.

Can you hook an NTP server up to a sundial? Yeah, sure. Why not? Absolutely. Sundial is always going to work, right? Look, this is why I want to get a sextant. That's all I'm saying. Sure. You know what a really interesting question would be that I think would have to be answered by a domain expert is if something like that in the event of a technological societal collapse.

How long would GPS satellites continue functioning without any maintenance? I assume they're probably made to go for a very long time without being touched, right? Yeah, but they degrade over time. Right. And maybe there's also software maintenance that has to happen there even outside of like physical mechanical maintenance. But also they have a limited amount of... of a, of a thruster juice, like a propellant. Right. So there's a lot of propellants are, are limited. And that, that defines the.

life of most low leo satellites that didn't drag on the atmosphere i didn't realize those things had to correct their trajectory or velocity or whatever i figured they got put in synchronous orbit and just kind of went Well, so the way most satellites work is that they have gyroscopes, like multiple gyroscopes that they can control orientation with, but they can't do lateral and translational movements with those. So they need some sort of propellant to correct like.

the drag by the micro atmosphere at the high altitudes and stuff like that. And I guess, I don't know if there's maybe a bunch of like very small gravitational tugs from other objects that are constantly being corrected for as well. Yeah. So. According to Crater Moon on Reddit, GPS satellites orbit at 12,600 miles, which is pretty high. Barring collisions with debris, they should last a long time. The current...

Spacecraft that we're adding to the constellation now 12 years ago, by the way, have a design life of 12 years. But in reality, they usually last longer than that. 50 years is their upshot is what they figure. OK, that's still pretty good. Yeah. Yes. I've always I've always read the GPS satellites have to correct for their own relativistic effects. Like they're going fast enough that there is enough. I mean, that's just math. Right. But I mean, we're talking about.

We're talking about, I don't know, billionths of a second or something, but these are devices where time needs to be absolutely accurate so it matters even at that tiny scale. Yep. But they are going fast enough that they are experiencing enough time dilation to... Throw their clocks off from that on Earth. Yep. Which is a fascinating thing. The math is hard. Yep. One more question about time here from James.

Precision time protocol version two is a protocol used for synchronizing clocks in network measurement and control systems, achieving high accuracy time synchronization, often in the sub microsecond range. Wow. It is defined in IEEE 1588-2008 and is not backwards compatible with the earlier 2002 version.

I can't believe they'd throw that out. PTP V2 utilizes a series of messages to synchronize clocks between a kind of central clock and client clocks. I think that's pretty much how NTP works as well, at least there. And this part I don't get. It's also used for transfer of high digital video. I think like uncompressed SDI video over Ethernet. I'm not sure what that part means. I don't know what that means. Anyway, NTP isn't accurate enough. Accurate enough. Smiley face. There we go.

I mean, you could see probably in like scientific computing type situations, you're needing better than NTP accuracy. Look, if you need if you want to synchronize the time on your atomic clock, you need something better than NTP accuracy. That's right. Otherwise, why bother having an atomic clock?

Here's an email from Jim. We got two different emails from people in the UK that said basically the same thing. Yeah. So this must have been somewhat widespread. It happened here, too. We had we had another there was a comment in the message thread about this, about doing the same thing in the US. Wait, did these? Well, I'll read the thing. I'm curious if they use this exact same solution. It was about it was about us talking about jury duty during the early pandemic.

When they didn't want to put people in the same courtroom together. Yeah. This is from Jim. For part of the pandemic, I was back in my home country of Scotland and got summoned for jury service on a criminal trial. The trial was held in the courthouse in my town. but the jury were sent to a closed cinema in a nearby town. The jurors were given assigned seats in the cinema so that we were all adequately socially distanced and the trial was live streamed onto the cinema screen.

There was a camera feed of our auditorium back to the courtroom, but no open mics on our end. So if we had questions, we had to tell a court staff in the auditorium who would send a text to the courtroom. We were brought packed lunches and had to stay in our assigned seats to eat them. The trial lasted four days and was quite a surreal experience. I wonder if they got to use the Coke freestyle machine at the movie theater.

That would have made that day go by a little bit easier, at least in my experience. Like imagine if you were sitting there with like a full on stadium seat recliner. And there and the judge is like, hey, juror number eight, no reclining past 30 degrees. You look a little snoozy. Pay attention. Juror number seven eyes up here, please. Yeah.

man provided lunches that would have changed everything for me I mean not everything but that was certainly getting lunch out of the whole thing would have been nice i gotta imagine i gotta imagine you're like looking at like a piece of white bread and like one piece of turkey and maybe some mustard some like fire fest level of of yeah meal i got paid

For my jury service. What'd you get? Like 35, 40 bucks. The check finally showed up. It was about $228. Damn. 231, somewhere around there. You should quit this podcast game and get on that jury duty business. Yeah, right. It was only three weeks of my life. It was itemized. There was like a per diem and then also like a transit, a daily transit fee. Do you have to report that on your taxes? I don't think so. Okay. I doubt it. Okay. Let's just never speak of it again. Yeah.

The other person, I don't know if I can find it real fast. Who's up at the top? Fraser wrote in. In their case. Each juror had an individual camera pointed at them in the movie theater, it sounds like. But also, we've kind of buried the lead here, which is, I think, the idea of watching a live stream trial on a giant movie screen. That sounds like hell.

It's really funny to me. Think about how big the lawyers would have been. Yep. Dude, yes. Some of the stuff I saw and heard, I don't think I could have handled that on the big screen. Yeah. And, and like, imagine like six months later, you go to see a movie and you roll into that same theater and you're like, Oh God, I spent three weeks in here. That's seat seven. That's where I sat for, for five days a week.

Might just never go to that theater again. Yeah, no, that would be dead to me. Andrew from Maine.

My Wii U still gets used. I think we talked about the Wii U at some point recently, right? Oh, but Wii U. I actually was thinking about taking it out because my daughter is really into 3D, Mario 3D Land. Yeah. 3D World. 3D World is the Wii U one. And I was like, you should play Mario Galaxy because I think that's the best of those. Yeah, well, they're kind of different games, actually. Well, but they're they're 3D in the 3D world of 3D platformers. They're the same, right?

Yeah, I mean, this is my games media long time games Manhattan coming on like Galaxy is in the Mario 64 lineage of like fully 3D. go anywhere platformers. So it's 3d world. 3d world is a little more constrained. Like the camera is more fixed and the levels are short and like, like 3d world is in kind of the new super Mario brothers lineage of like, it was, it was, they were trying to marry.

3d mario with the more the smaller more level based like original super mario brothers style i mean you're you're straight up jumping onto a flagpole at the end right yeah but but yeah i mean You can control the camera in it, though. It has full camera movement. Somewhat. I don't remember if it was fully free camera movement or not. I played it yesterday. It has fully free camera movement. But the levels are more linear and constrained.

yeah okay fair it's it's hybrid more they're cousins let's say there's a whole like there's a project that is figuring out the lineage of all of the mechanics in super Mario brothers. Cause it's such a weird hodgepodge at this point that it's hard to like, anyway, especially in this modern era where they like, like practically every level has its own little like micro mechanic. Well, yeah, but also there's no like, like,

Like the variation in jumps, like the triple jump, the slide jump, the squat and reverse jump, the wall jumps. Some games have those. Some games don't. It's really confusing. Okay. Andrew from Maine. My Wii U still gets used when nieces and nephews come over. Recently, I started thinking about how I've been using it for a long time with some electrical tape over a place where some of the outside casing had opened up at the connection to the power brick.

I ordered a used one from someone off of eBay as I was worried a new knockoff would be unsafe. It wasn't visible on the listing, but the one I received had the same issue, though not as severe as mine. It seems this is not uncommon, and I'm thinking it's probably a design flaw on Nintendo's part, which is a bummer. I'd always thought that wrapping electrical tape around a sketchy part of a cable was the normal thing to do, but now I'm questioning that.

Is this a typical practice and how bad is it and how do you feel about third party power cables? So there's two parts of this, right? One is that wrapping an electrical tape around something that doesn't get a lot of mechanical stress, I think is pretty fine.

Yeah, it seems pretty standard practice. You could put heat shrink on instead if you wanted something a little more permanent. Well, so if you want to do heat shrink, generally you have to dismantle the cable and then reassemble it, which is more fraught.

because you can't get the heat shrink over the fat end of the cable usually yes do they not make giant heat shrink that just shrinks a lot well they do but it doesn't shrink enough generally to do the thing that you want to do also if it's on the mechanical end of the joint that is probably not going to provide the mechanical strength that you want there to solve the problem on a high track anyway like so

Probably you can find third-party replacement power supplies, but if it is a design flaw, then they're all going to have the same problem. I can go look at my Wii U. I don't know if it has the problem or not. I don't recall this. I think the electrical tape solution is fine if it's on the 120 volt or if it's on the main side of the power of the power brick. That's scarier to me than if it's on the low voltage and DC side of the power brick.

Because typically the low voltage end is like some variant of USB. It's not going to be super high. It's not going to hurt you if you get shocked. You're talking about the end between the brick and the console. Yeah. If you're on the other end, if you're on the end.

between the AC power coming out of the wall and the brick, that's where you burn your house down if you mess it up. So keep an eye on it, but I think it's probably fine. And yeah, if you have a tear in the middle of a cable, It's relatively straightforward to cut the cable, put heat shrink tubing on the thing, splice it back together, shrink both individual.

or all three individual wires and then put a bigger piece of heat shrink over the whole thing. And that'll, that'll fix your cable up. Interesting. Okay. The other end is scarier because there's usually more cables and there's a lot of little ones in there. Interesting. That little CRT I inherited recently, which again, thank you. Thank you very much to the benefactor who gave me that. But it had some damage on the power cable because it was a sidewalk find.

And I thought about trying to replace the whole power cable, although I don't think it's necessary, but like that requires opening up the TV and you're probably still going to have to cut the power cable somewhere to attach it even to the TVs stuff.

Unless you can find exactly the right type of cable, which you probably can't. But what you just described sounds like a pretty, like the shrinking each of the three wires inside the cable and then putting more shrink over the whole thing sounds like a pretty robust solution.

So then the other thing you can do is just get a replacement power cable, open the whole thing up, desolder the ends on the or they're probably even just mechanical points on the on the internal end and then replace the entire cable. It's a bigger job. Yeah. Also, then you have to be pretty confident in your soldering, I guess. It's easy soldering. Big power cables are big. They're fat solders. It's no big deal. Sure. Fair.

But also, this TV has been working just fine with the electrical tape that's already on the cable. I kind of gave up or forgot about that project. Yeah, if you use electrical tape for this type of situation, just pay attention to it. like like don't when you move it when you touch it make sure that it's when you vacuum under where the cable might get bumped make sure you're not making knocking the cable loose and because you want to get it before the electrical tape loses its stickiness and like

Leaves an air gap for stuff to get into. Yep. Okay, you flagged this one. I have not read this entire email yet, but here we go. From Ty. Have you ever considered an episode on the tech behind a golf broadcast?

I'm not going to speak for Will. I can't say that I have. Or maybe any large outdoor event. I'm currently driving back from a professional golf tournament I attended over the weekend. I've been watching golf for years on TV, and this was the first time I was able to get on a course for a live event.

I found myself enthralled with the little things that were happening behind the scenes that were clearly in service of both the live broadcast and the long term stats used to track player performance. The main things I could pick out were the TrackMan system used to track balls in the air, which provides stats like ball speed and apex as well as draw the on-screen shot tracer. There were individuals all over with tablets who were recording the location of every shot by hand.

Those on the green seemed to have a small camera set up on a tower that helped them pinpoint. Finally, you had the cameras, microphones, and miles of fiber optic cables to bring it all together. The entire event just blew me away from a logistics and tech standpoint. Seems like it could be an interesting topic if you could find the right sources. Actually, you were not wrong. That does all sound extremely interesting. Yeah. So famously, golf is doing live golf on television.

was a huge technical challenge because the action on the sports takes place over 18 holes. There's a bunch of different teams. It requires a ton of cameras. Like modern video live mixing was. was largely used for live golf on TV, as opposed to say a football game where they would just point one camera at the 50 yard line and aim that at the field. Right. And then they'd have another camera for closeups and they could kind of switch back and forth between those two.

So they didn't do live. It's unfortunately, I tried to look this up beforehand and you can't find it now because of the fucking live golf series, which Google thinks you want when you search for live TV golf. But when I took a broadcast TV class, the 1958 PGA Championship was, I think, the first one that they broadcast on TV live. um which was which was a like like at that time just to be clear at that time a lot of tv shows were shot on film and then um

they would broadcast when they would broadcast them, they would project the film in front of a TV camera and they'd shoot the the video while on live TV using film projection, basically. OK, yeah. So. I'm looking around to see if there's any footage of any 1958 golf. I'm sure the quality is not what you want. Oh, wait. 1958 PGA Championship at I don't even know how to pronounce the location this was held.

That's, there's a little bit of some place in Wales. It has a weird, weird name. Yeah. It does sound Welsh actually. I'm not even going to try to pronounce it, but yeah, there's, I mean, it's a short video. There's like four minutes of footage here. You can kind of get a sense of what it looked like though. Yeah. So. It's it's the ability to do like now we like, you know, now somebody with a desktop PC or a laptop and OBS can do the stuff that was that took millions and millions of dollars.

team of the smartest people in television to do um but uh but yeah now it's now it's a little more straightforward and now the stuff that they're doing with like radar and golf ball tracking and all that stuff makes it look like a video game almost yeah yes that stuff is amazing like i am i am the furthest thing from a sports guy but all that actually turns out to be kind of cool because i watch football like maybe at best once a year for the super bowl but typically longer even than that so

I go long enough between looking at football that every time I turn it on, I get to be like suitably amazed again at all the innovations that they've come up with since the last time of like. Are they putting cameras on like zip lines or something? It feels like or surely they're not using drones. It feels like there's like kind of these like panning, soaring shots over the field these days. So.

That's a Jamie Heinemann patent. I think he's involved with the people who made that. Yeah, it's the camera with what it's called. But yeah, there's. basically cameras suspended on two long wires and they track along or maybe it's four long wires And they, the motors go in and out on either side to consume above the third. I can visualize how that would work. Occasionally people punt the football and it hits the thing and they have to do it over. They have to have a do over.

Wait, they literally do the play. I mean, if the ball is, is the ball is interfered by the wire, the camera or something. Yeah, of course. It doesn't happen that often. They've gotten pretty good at like. placing the cameras in such a way that it's not the same. The other thing that's changed over the last 10, 15 years is that now most stadiums have like a track that a high speed camera goes, that a high speed.

Dolly goes back and forth on so that it stays exactly even with the ball. As the play is happening in the football field or soccer pitch. And yeah, there's a bunch of cool stuff. Having, I've been going to a bunch of basketball games lately and it's, it's been really fun. Baseball has a lot of crazy stuff too. Like they have all the, they've had radar and baseball for years. So they know like.

pitch speeds and back contact speeds and you know where they can draw the picture of the strike zone and you know it's you know it's sports and tv the last bastion of of interesting tv production stuff Yeah, I mean, the way you put it, making it look more like a video game is pretty accurate. Like that. It's pretty cool to watch a live broadcast and just consistently go like, how the hell do they do that? That doesn't seem. Look, and then and then they do things like.

you know put ads on the basketball court yeah great so you know good stuff wait have they actually done that on the court surface look they they project well okay so they've been putting it they've been they've been doing if you go to like a major league baseball stadium these days the area behind home plate is generally like

green screen or keys in such a way so they can put different ads there different sections of the game retaining wall barrier type like behind the action kind of thing i can live with i mean it's not great but i can live with it but like literally on the playing surface is kind of a bit much yeah but it like it shows up

underneath the players and all that so I know it just looks like it's painted on the floor it's still distracting I mean it's it's cool it's cool from a like keying standpoint like the fact that they can do that live that well is cool but like also What if you're watching the basketball game and you're like, man, I wish I had some Bluetooth and then you're like, hey, there's an ad for Bluetooth right there under the player's feet. Perfect.

It's got a funny feeling all of a sudden. I don't know where it's coming from. Yeah, exactly. That's what that's the Bluetooth man. Yes. All right. TK writes in about, I think.

I don't remember when this was some, some weeks back we were talking about blogs and the indie web or the small web and getting away from the four platforms that everybody uses on the internet now. That's a good idea. Yes. TK wrote in. about that subject. First, a little history. Web rings and directories were originally built because search engines didn't exist or weren't very good early on, so in order to find anything online, you had to hear about it from some other source.

As search engines degrade and more and more people get fed up with the modern social internet, they are returning to recommendations from other users, web rings, and directories. Wes mentioned a couple in the episode he was on. That was probably the RSS episode. It's like two years ago. A couple years ago now. God, where does the time go? Wes mentioned a couple like rss.joy and oo.directory. That's O-O-H dot directory.

In the IndieWeb, there's a fair number of web rings as well, set up by users who want to help promote each other's work, whether commercial or not. Another more useful way people in the IndieWeb promote each other is via blog rolls, where whether... somewhere on their site as a static page updated over time or at the end of scheduled posts like weeknotes. Some people even write newsletters or blogs specifically to promote and endorse what others are getting up to on the indie web.

As to Brad's lament that blogs feel very commercial, you are absolutely right. Many, many blogs are trying to sell something, whether it's a book or the blogger's other work. But just as many blogs are much more casual, personal things. One of my favorites is islandinthenet.com, which is obsessively about technology and photography in equal measure, but is mostly just photos of birds.

You just need to know where to look for them. In a lot of ways, I've found that you just need one good rock to turn over to start digging into the indie web. For me, it was the website and personal blog of a person I know from a Discord server. His weeknotes always include a little section of posts he's been reading.

One of these recommendations led me to someone else's work I was interested in. Two weeks later, her weeknotes led me to Shellshark Scrolls newsletters. Shellsharks.com slash scrolls. every edition of which gives me new things to read from new perspectives and none of it is commercial in focus. Too long didn't read. The small weird web never went away. It's just not very searchable with modern search engines and tends to get buried under the layer of the net.

where everyone is hustling to get paid and stay afloat. I mean, there's definitely a lot of the, everybody getting hustling to get paid and stay afloat. It's funny. I do the thing at the end of the newsletter. every week that it's like, Hey, here's the thing I read this week that I liked. Um, and it's, it's, I'm starting to get recommendations for those. I love getting recommendations for those because, um, it's, it's a, it's helpful and B it's almost always something that's worth reading.

So thanks to folks for sending those in. Yeah, those directories, rss.joy and u.directory sound pretty useful also as a starting place. Yeah, like there's a ton of good stuff.

There's a ton of good stuff. And a lot of it is people who are trying to make money doing a newsletter, which is like, look, I get that every, I don't think I've written a newsletter that didn't take me the better part of a day to, to minimum to write much less do the research and stuff for some.

I generally think that a lot of people who consume content maybe underestimate the amount of time it takes to generate content. Yeah. Or at least I have gotten that vibe over the years. Anyway, I keep thinking about putting a blog up.

I highly recommend it. It's nice just to have a place to dump links that you think are interesting, if nothing else. OK, maybe that's a good use for it, because I'm worried I would never update it. But like on my on my like random carousel of half finished projects that occasionally come back up.

Yeah. I'm back to thinking about that VPS again that I got last November and have not touched. It was actually setting up this reverse proxy here gave me enough experience with Nginx that I think I could settle that up on that VPS now to. To proxy it and run it out of your house? Point to like a ghost instance on my NAS here or my server here or something like that. But I'm really worried like...

I'm worried I would kind of just never update it, which is fine. I guess that's fine on a personal blog. I guess you get to update it exactly as often as you want. That's part of the process, man. But I'm kind of worried I would put the blog up and make like three posts and then never touch it again, which is kind of a bummer.

I was going to say there's a couple other places I like for recommending sites. I think it's fine to have a personal blog that you never update. You're doing it for you. It's a place you... go to store links, whatever. That's fine. Um, cocky.org, which is Jason cocky's personal blog. That's been running for like a hundred years now is fantastic for like weird, interesting.

cool shit on the internet how do you spell that k-o-t-k-e i think might be two t's um yeah it's two two t's when i look at it okay um i really like it it kind of fills the void like i used to read boing boing every day back in the early 2000s and You know, it's not quite the same as it used to be. They felt the pressure of monetization in the same as everyone else. And it kind of changed the tenor of the of the thing a little bit. Sure.

Actually, I'm looking at Daring Fireball a couple of weeks ago. Like I only, that's Gruber, right? That's Gruber. Like I basically only look at that site when we do an Apple episode, but I was reminded looking at it, like some of his posts are actually like. First of all, 80% of the post is a quote from somebody else. Yeah. And second of all, the overall post is tiny, which means that he wrote like two sentences attached to a quote and that was a post.

It makes me realize, like, oh, you don't have to sit down and have to write a five paragraph thesis every time you make a blog post like it could kind of just be as minimal as you want. So the thing I will say, having been the person who writes those kinds of news posts for for computer sites for over the years.

The time spent making that kind of blog isn't in the writing up that one post. It's the reading the 80 other things that you didn't decide were worth sharing. You have to just voraciously be reading stuff all the time. The other one I like is Laughing Squid, which I think is still around. Heard of that. Laughing Squid was a project by it was an ISP for a long time.

And it's it's just like a New York culture blog, basically, by Scott Beal, who was started in the 90s in San Francisco. It's probably like some well adjacent thing or something. And it's quite good. It kind of fills that boing boing, the hole that boing boing has left for me. The well is a name I have not heard in a very long time.

I Bruce Sterling still post notable. Well, Dennis and Bruce Sterling has been posting on blue sky again lately, which I quite like. It's very exciting. The whole earth electronic link. Uh-huh. Electronic. electronic yep so that's that is one of the most 90s phrases i think i've ever heard look it was cyberpunk before cyberpunk was cyberpunk sure um

Let's see. Email from Kevin in Toronto. I swear we'll get to some Discord questions. You've mentioned home cameras before, and I've never heard you mention Frigate. I use it for my small self-hosted camera system. It works entirely offline. has object recognition, integrates with Home Assistant, and works with any IP camera that makes its RTSP feed available. Personally, I use an Amcrest AD410 doorbell and a few Raspberry Pis streaming RTSP feeds.

I highly recommend checking it out. That sounds fantastic. I really like it. In the world of Home Assistant integrated stuff that I love, I also added Music Assistant to my Home Assistant install the other day. which basically unifies all of the Apple and Google and whatever other endpoints, Sonos endpoints in my house into one easy interface. And it conglomerates all the places that music come from in my house and podcasts. So I can like...

pipe my audio books, feeds, my Apple music, my local stored music. And I want to say my podcast feed. I can't remember something else that goes in there. Uh, and that they all show up in the same place. So I'll definitely check out forget. Thanks for the recommendation. Okay. Email from Jeremiah. Will, you said you'd be interested for suggestions and what else to use a foot pedal for.

I love playing first and third person games on PC with keyboard and mouse, but I really hate holding down W with my middle finger for an entire evening. Now I use a pedal bound to W to keep walking or running forward while my fingers can hit other buttons like strafe, map, inventory, crouch, jump, switch items, etc. I also liked using auto hotkey to help holding down a key.

but some games manage to prevent the software from working, such as Helldivers. The pedal registers as a keyboard and always works. So auto heart key will get you banned from some games. Just FYI. Yeah. The people look at it as macroing and cheating, which they frown upon. Yeah. I mean, I guess I could see the argument there. Yeah. I got a lot of notes from people that were like, hey, I use my stuff for hell divers.

So some guy was like, I do the, my respawn people macro in hell divers is just bound to my foot stomp pedal so that I can bring people back with no matter what. Um, uh, that's pretty, but you know what? Like. I think of stomping, I mean, you can stomp precisely, but I think of stomping as a bit of like a frantic desperation action. So if you're just like in the middle of the shit, trying to get somebody up as fast as possible, kind of stomping your emergency revive pedal has some appeal.

Well, the thing, the thing I find with the pedal is that I have to not wear shoes in order to be able to detect the difference. Cause it has three buttons. It has one in the middle and two on the sides. Sure. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, the, being able to feel the side ones, I need the, I need the, the size needs to be sock feet. Um, but yeah, like somebody sent a picture of their hell divers, uh, configuration.

for their stream deck which is just a bunch of buttons with the icons and it does all that you just hit the button for the macro you want for whichever gun you have at any given time which i was like that's pretty clever yeah

I've thought for ages about checking out AutoHotKey and just never have. I don't really have a specific use for it at the moment in mind, but it seems like the kind of thing where once you learn to use it, you would think of a bunch of uses for it.

Yeah. When the only tool you have is a hotkey, everything becomes hotkeyable. Yeah. Well, my understanding of it, maybe I have like an over... developed sense of what it can do like i think it can do a lot of like window management type stuff as well right it's not just a it's not just an elaborate like macro hotkey maker i think it isn't it a whole like scripting language that can

You can like tell it to kind of like place and resize windows and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. I always thought it was more for like filling forms and like, and stuff like that. Like, like. Just macro stuff. I used it to play that 64 clicker a few months ago or maybe a year ago now.

Maybe I'll take a look or, you know, people in the Discord thread for the episode like auto hockey and have recommendations that I would be curious to hear them. I did. I did. For what it's worth, I did get a notification when I was playing something. I can't remember what it was. It might have been Valorant.

That was like, hey, you have to turn this off before you play Valorant. It's against the rules. That makes sense. Gives you the freedom to automate any desktop task is how the website pitches it. Yeah. And, and it can move the mouse as well as my understanding. That's the big, that's the big deal. Right. Like it, it sounds pretty powerful. Also we'll move on here, but this, this reminds me, I also never got around to checking out that, um, the text expander expense, a sponsor.

Oh yeah. You remember me talking about it where you could type, like you could create text expansion for like typing colon date. We'll replace that with the current date and whatever you're typing. I like that. Stuff like that. Like that's I've really got to check that out. Like like that kind of stuff, using that to do like the hammer time shortcuts for time and discord and stuff like that would be incredibly useful. Absolutely. Huge. Yeah.

Okay, Louis. I just ran into this yesterday myself. Since January 2025, I have been bombarded by websites asking for or demanding that I spend time setting up passkeys instead of using my password. Some days I can't access my Hotmail account without two or three requests to make a passkey. Hitting the do it later button does not always work. When and why did the IT bozos decide that my password is no longer good enough for me to access their precious websites?

Damn it, IT bozos. Amazon, for whatever reason, has gotten really bad about this. Every time I go to Amazon, I get hit with two prompts. First for... First, Bitwarden prompts me and asks if I want to make a pass key. And when I cancel out of that, then I get a Windows Hello pop up asking the same thing. Well, so that happens because the website's asking you to create a pop. Oh, I know. Yeah.

The part of the failure here is that Windows does a bad job of, well, browsers do a bad job of managing pass keys through external password managers. so like i get the same thing with one password right it sure password prompts me then the browser prompts me and then windows is like hey man you want to pass you want to passkey the the real answer to this question is that is that passkeys are actually really good oh yeah yeah i'm not denying that

No, I know. But I think people are generally kind of skeptical of stuff that's new in this in these areas and a little worried about it. The nice thing about past keys is that they're there. you know you can't make an insecure pass key in the same way that you can make an insecure password right yes if you're already using two-factor the very the valuable whether they're valuable or not is a little bit more questionable but it's like generally speaking

I recommend people do the prompts to set up the passkeys. Now that you can do the thing where the passkeys are portable and they can go in your password vault and all that, and that works pretty well supported across the industry, it seems like now.

I think they're much more practical. Although the other side of it is there's absolutely nothing wrong with having individual pass keys on each device because then the benefit of that is that then if you like lose your phone, your phone gets stolen, your windows gets compromised, whatever. you can just disallow the pass keys that are compromised and keep the ones that aren't yeah

Like, that's probably what I would do. Like, that is what I do with SSH keys. Like, I generate separate keys for my laptop from the ones on my desktop. So, like, I agree. Like, pass keys are good. Like, the only... The only thing to know is you need to, like you just said, you need to manage them in a way that you are not going to lose the passkeys. The reason the IT bozos decided your password is no longer good enough is that like 90% of people use terrible passwords. Yeah, sure.

Like you're in the like if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably in the percentage that's using good passwords. Right. Like I have pretty good password discipline already. I mean, the bigger thing here, though, about this email is just is the amount of like getting in your face about it. Yeah.

Like, how do I disable that prompt on Amazon? I have no idea. Like, is there, you create a passkey and then they stop bothering you on any device. You can use the password on the other devices. But the bigger thing that was like, has Amazon exposed a way to turn off that nag? Probably not. No, of course not.

I can do. They want people to use that now because it reduces the fraud and all that stuff. I get it. I guess when I when I make the transition to pass keys, I'm going to do it globally, not because like one.

corporate platform bug me into doing it enough, you know, like I would rather kind of do it on my own time, but. Well, I got bad news for you, Brad. Yep. Yep. Should we move into, we should do some discord cues. We should do some cues. Yeah. I think we hit the, we hit most of the, most of the.

the emails that got flagged. Yes. We got through a lot of them. We have patron episode coming up very shortly. So maybe we'll clean up some more of these. Yeah. There, there were a bunch of really good, like both questions and cues.

Yes, indeed. How about a question from the Discord from Wesley? I recently updated Ubuntu, and after the update, my second monitor does not show any video after the computer wakes from sleep. After some troubleshooting failed, I gave up. And for the last week, every time I sit down on my PC, I change the resolution of the monitor, then immediately hit revert to go back to the previous setting. So the monitor works again.

This leads me to my question. Have you had any weird workarounds or switch jiggling routines with your PCs over the years? I have my second PC at my desk. sporadically doesn't connect to usb devices right so i just put a usb switch in between the keyboard and mouse and just keep hammering that until it works that's a solution sure it's not great

I don't feel good about it. I'm not proud of my choices. Um, and I wish it was better. Yeah. Yes. Um, I'm talking about your DBX now, Brad. Oh God, dude. Let's not even this fucking channel strip. Has it got probably talked about it before? We've talked about it before. It's the audio processor I go through that occasionally makes me sound fuzzy. Sometimes it makes me like half the volume I should be unless I power cycle it.

I haven't RMA'd it because I did enough reading to see people talking about RMA'ing it and getting one back that was just as bad or worse. Yeah, that seems bad. So it's like the crapshoot of I might actually end up with a worse problem if they don't fix it right. It was just, anyway, whatever.

I don't know. I am, I am very stubborn about annoyances like this to the point that I will like spend an unhealthy amount of time digging into ways to fix them that don't require me to annoy myself constantly. So, so I have another one I realized.

you know do you see my camera that side is darker than that side sure well so i have two lights hung up there on the ceiling that backlight the stuff behind me right yeah and the my wi-fi access point and one of the lights are right next to each other and you're not supposed to have things within a couple of feet of wi-fi access points because you know too much radio i guess i don't know sure

That one about every four days just doesn't turn on in the morning when I hit the button to turn it on over the network. Interesting. And I have to power cycle it. So I have to reach up there and hit the power button and then wait a second and then hit the power button again. And then it works again. I don't feel good about this.

I get it. Yeah. I hate this. Yeah. I'm looking around my room. I don't think I can't think of many other like. This is the kind of thing that makes you crazy. I know. Yes. Yes. I will go to great lengths to defeat whatever thing is getting on my nerves. I got another one. Okay. On my keyboard, I have one LED that's just a little bit dimmer than the others. Oh, no. On the J key.

So I just turned off all the lights. That's look, I don't run the lights on my keyboard in general, just for battery life reasons. Like I just want the keyboard to last longer. Mine's plugged in, so I don't care about battery life. Sure. And I like lights. Yeah, lights are cool.

So now it just lights up when I type. So like the keys light up as I hit them and then it kind of lingers for a minute. So I'm typing really fast. My keyboard gets all lit up and I miss my northern lights, though. How often are you looking at your keyboard anyway? almost never when i sit uh it's nice to have it on if the room's dark and i come into the room because then there's a little bit of light i don't have to stumble around in the dark nope um

I guess the only one I can think of is when I got these new monitors five years ago. Can you believe it's been five years since I got rid of my old monitors? Well, it hasn't been five years since you got rid of the old monitors. It's been five years since you got the new monitors. Since I stopped using them. Yes.

I've been using these new monitors, quote unquote. I don't even know if these monitors count as new anymore. No, they're old monitors now. Yes, they kind of are. Anyway, these monitors have got auto, I've complained about it before, the auto input switching.

if it loses signal on an input and it's getting input for on another, if it's getting signal on another input, it will immediately switch to that other input without asking you. And there's no way to turn that off. And I fucking hate it. Yep. I used to leave this, the NAS plugged into one of the other.

So I could monitor the video output because it's good for troubleshooting occasionally, which meant that these monitors through the monitor could never go to sleep because it was always getting video from a 24 seven headless machine. Nope. Or supposedly headless. Nope. That's bad.

There was no way to, I, I went to great lengths digging into VCP codes and stuff to see if I could figure out how to turn that behavior off. And my ultimate solution was to get a PyKVM and now I don't have to have the server. The server doesn't have to have to be plugged into a monitor anymore because it's being plugged into a video capture device that is network enabled instead. And that's way better. It turns out. Oh my God. Anyway. Yeah. All right. Andy H.

Our Philips Smart TV, smart as in sneer quotes, is driving me mad. The Android TV functionality keeps trying to hijack the screen when we're watching from HDMI, which is exclusively what we do from a UK SkyQ box. Then it refuses to go back to HDMI inputs, however commanded, often until it's hard reset. Also, the CEC is sketchy at best. Sometimes great, sometimes like it doesn't exist. Any way to flash the TV and ditch the smart features?

If all it did was power up in response to the CEC and automatically stay on the HDMI input all the time, I would be as happy as a pig and shit. I don't think I've heard. Do you think pigs are really happy and shit? I don't know. I think this is an unfair categorization of pigs. Maybe, but this is the first time I think that I've ever heard somebody outside of the Southern United States use that phrase. I feel like it's that.

Feels uniquely Scottish, but okay. Really? I heard that. Well, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a, of course, there's a tremendous Scots-Irish population in the South here, but I heard that phrase plenty growing up. That always came from people with suspiciously red hair in my neck of the woods. I see. Okay. Anyway, I think you're hosed. Yeah, I'm...

Kind of surprised there isn't more of a subculture around hacking smart TVs to do weird stuff with them, only because like every other device on the planet with any amount of compute in it, I feel like there's a little pocket community about hacking it to do things. So there's a fairly substantial community of people who buy smart TVs and are really aggressive about never giving them network access.

That is absolutely true. I see that a lot. And I frankly feel like you should at least keep your TV up to date, even if you keep it unplugged the rest of the time. No, I don't think if it works the way you have it when you get it. and it's working the way you want it and all the hg my cc stuff works and everything never plug it in I don't know. I've seen enough cases of stuff like HDR or high refresh getting fixed post-release. I've seen too many cases of TVs with broken features at launch.

But that's not fixed three months later that you should at least update the software probably. But that's not it working when you get it right. Like that's that's it being busted and then them fixing some stuff. There's always at least for me, there's always the nagging feeling of like it might look like it's working, but it might actually.

be subtly not right in some way if you can't tell it's fine that's my new policy look i suppose look um i think you get your tv working the way you want it to and then you disconnect it you ban it from your wi-fi and you never let it back on This problem goes away. I think it would be rad. Of course I do. This is absolutely something I would probably tinker with. I think it would be rad if there was like a kind of like a coordinated effort to root smart TVs and there was some like open source.

smart tv os replacement that did nothing but what you want it to but it doesn't seem like anything that i i assume that i assume that a it's probably somewhat hard to root tvs and b There are just such an endless number of models of different TV out there that it would be like impossible to keep up with everything. Yeah. And probably probably this variations inside the same model even. Right. I'm kind of surprised. So.

Okay. If you want to buy a range or a stove, if you buy a cheap one, they're dumb. If you buy a mid range one, like anything from like a thousand dollars to five, four or $5,000 there, they have all this electronics nonsense in them. They're connected to wifi and a bunch of bullshit. And then if you buy like a $10,000 Viking range.

then those are all really dumb. There's just battles and metal, right? Yep. There isn't really a consumer equivalent of a TV that you can get that's just dumb. Now, like if you want to get... into the really expensive stuff you can get like commercial digital signage tvs but they often are more for like putting on arrival departure signs at airports and stuff like that and they aren't they don't have like

Or at least the last time I looked at them, they didn't have the kind of fancy HDR and all the stuff that you like. They didn't have the HDMI 2.2 inputs and all the stuff that you want for like a modern. that you might hook a game console or watch HDR movies and stuff on. And even if they did, I would worry about something like that. Even if the specs looked good on paper, they might have like bad response time or something that actually made them bad for games. Yeah. Even if.

They looked good on the box. I mean, kind of the place to do this is monitors, computer monitors, but, but also they don't like, they kind of cap out at about 40 inches, 40, 44 inches these days. So like, you're not. Or projectors, maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I had high hopes. So I've talked about it before when Panasonic got back into the consumer TV space with their OLEDs and they were pushing like, oh, ours are like reference quality, you know, like color timed by.

Hollywood professionals type stuff. Like I saw that and I was like, oh man, are they making monitors? Are they just making a giant TV monitor without smart shit? And it's just, hey. Here's the best picture you can get and nothing else. And that's absolutely not what they did. Sadly. The one thing I will say, and I did a little bit of reading about this. There's a, this is like a regular thread on the home theater.

some subreddit and also buy it for life which is one of my new favorite subreddits oh um i like the sound of that yeah i mean Yeah, it's it's they talk about boots a lot on and the Terry Terry Pratchett boots theory of the default image in this. When I pulled up the subreddit is a picture of a hand holding a shoe. Yeah, the.

Their point is the common thread seems to be if you buy really, really cheap, like two TVs that seem too cheap to be real, they're going to do things that push you to connect them because.

they're making their money on stuff that the ads that are pushed to you and data that's collected post-sale right so they need you to keep those devices connected and as a result they're going to be janky and weird when you're not connected if you buy a more expensive tv and the things that are cited are like the samsung and lgo leds and stuff like that you get a better experience generally if you if you leave them unconnected so

You get what you pay for, I guess. Yeah. I should say really quick, I should offer an addendum here and I have not looked into this world much at all. I'm just kind of barely aware of it, but there is plenty of activity and like.

kind of open source TV watching software and stuff, but it's around boxes, not TV. So it's around like there are a bunch of little, I forget any, again, I don't know a lot about this world. I forget the brands that I've seen, but there are a bunch of sort of like Apple TV style little.

boxes that are marketed as like, Hey, this is open. You can just put Android on it. You can put like whatever Linuxy stuff on here to watch TV with. So like you, you can get that kind of thing, but you do need a box for it.

I want to say, I want to say, I think it's craft computing, Jeff over at craft computing, but maybe it's not. I saw a video of an open source, like, Hey, here's a, here's a, i can't find the video on craft computing's channel but um it's it's like a little little set top box that you can use to watch tv in a completely open infrastructure with what looked like a really nice ui and the whole thing so yeah

That's cool. Although I will say when I looked briefly at those boxes, like the good ones that did all the HDR you want and everything and had all the codec support were close enough in price to an Apple TV that I was like, I'd probably look, just get an Apple TV. There's a. There's a, what's your time worth and everything doesn't have to be a hobby, right? You can, you can have some things that are just like, Hey, I just want to sit down and not think about this and watch the baseball game.

And as long as an Apple TV, I mean, they seem like they are flexible enough about what they will allow on the App Store these days.

you can probably do most everything you would need with those plex and jellyfin clients and like streaming game stuff and it's all fine there is a there's a um i'm trying to think the name of it it starts with an eye there is a video playback app that people swear by on ios now look they have i cannot remember the name of it i haven't used them but they have the things that will do like a plex library pulled straight from bittorin or usenet or whatever and

like it's all in the app store. Apple doesn't give a shit anymore. Yeah. I, I, somebody will post it in the discord. I am positive. I just cannot remember the name of that app. People seem to really like it. Okay. Yeah.

That was a perfect segue. Let's do a couple more questions real quick here, but it was a perfect segue into this email that I had wanted to read from Zylo. Do you ever feel like you give yourself too much cognitive load from your hobbies?

I've always been a gamer, but I also really enjoy movies, TV, learning programming. And meanwhile, I still have to keep up with being a dad, husband, brother, podcast enjoyer, family tech support, and so on. Not to even mention the things I'd like to do, like reading and cooking. There's not enough time in the day even for a min maxer and even less when so much of it carries mental weight. Yeah, I am asking myself this question constantly. Yeah, I am.

I try to delineate things that are things I want to think about a lot and things that I don't want to think about a lot. I feel like we talk about this a lot, right? bought a Synology instead of rolling my own NAS last time around because I was just like, I just want this to work and not have to think about it too much. And I have been increasingly thrilled with that choice. Fair. That's fair.

Like there's some stuff like the learning programming I've really been enjoying and it's like, it's like really positive mental, like it's mental load. It's fun and enjoyable to me. Yeah. I mean, that's gotta be the key. Like that's, that's why I did roll my own and run a big server and just put bare Linux on it and don't have any web GUI.

or anything like that. I enjoy learning the internals of stuff and how to administrate it myself. If it's not fun, if you're not enjoying the work part of the hobby, then you absolutely shouldn't be doing it.

I was I was talking to a friend about who has a kid younger than mine about navigating Roblox because Roblox like a when they asked me, hey, should I let my kid get on Roblox when they're sincerely seven or eight and all their friends are there? I said no. under no circumstances let your child be on roblox we talked about why and how it's predatory and yada yada

And if I knew what I knew now, I would have just bought my kids friends switches so that we could they could play Animal Crossing together. Sure. Even if the parents didn't want to buy a switch. But. The upshot was the good thing about my daughter being on Roblox is that we had the conversation about games like the things that you do for fun should make you feel good. Right. So like.

when you when she was playing games on roblox she would come back angry and upset and it's because of predatory monetization and like bad gambling for children and stuff like that And I was like, does playing this game make you feel good? And she was like, no, I feel terrible right now. I was like, yeah, then that's not a game. You should not do that. And the same thing applies to hobbies, right? If your hobby isn't fun, then get another hobby. You should go do something else.

and do what you know if you're doing tech support at work all day and then you come home and you do tech support at home all day that doesn't sound fun to me unless you just really love doing tech support but just like that's fine i'm not going to kink shame anybody

Now, where that breaks down, though, is when you do want to do the thing and you do think it's fun, but you just feel like you don't have the mental capacity to continue doing it. You know what I mean? I don't know if I'm certainly not some cognitive scientist or whatever, but whatever. It feels more to me, maybe this is a, I don't know if this is a symptom of middle age or maybe it's like post COVID thing or what, but like, I feel like I've got a very finite mental store these days.

In a way that maybe I didn't as much when I was younger, but also my hobbies these days have trended much more toward like what, what this person is talking about of like kind of higher cognitive load.

whether it's like running the server or wanting to learn to write code in various languages or like piano or you know what I mean? It's like, yeah, it's all like a lot of fairly technical stuff that you really need to like focus and drill down and concentrate on to learn. And like sometimes when it's like. Sometimes when you've got 45 minutes at the end of a long workday, like you just don't have it, you know, like you're not going to do anything productive there. And, you know.

But I mean, so that's the thing, though, if it's a hobby and it's not something that like is going to mess up everybody in your family, if you don't get it done when you need to, then you can put that aside and go to dinner and do something that's chill and like like.

It's it's when you get in a situation where you're like, oh, God, I fucked up the DNS for the house. And now everybody's Internet's down. How am I going to fix this? I've got a story about that. Oh, yeah. It's always DNS, huh? It was a that was a high pressure situation. Yeah, actually we'll talk about, um, I think it was just a box on the discord had a good, good suggestion for a followup to last week's like aspirational projects episode. Oh yeah. Which was a.

a post-mortem review of projects we've done and whether they were worth the hassle or not. And like what issues we ran into. And I had a, I had a fun, high pressure. I've got to get the internet working immediately situation with the blocky transition recently at a power outage and having a flight I had to pack for and leave for in like 90 minutes. Oh boy. It was a fun one. I love that.

We'll get back to that later. Okay. Okay. The thing I meant though with the hobbies though is like the tension is when you would like to be able to do those things and you just like are too busy or mentally overwhelmed to like, like learning to write code, especially if you're like, want to like. tinker with like amateur game development or something like that is like that is not a light pursuit you know it's like that's something you need to pour a lot of time and mental focus into and like

It can be a bummer when you want to do something like that, that you just kind of had some point have to go like, you know what? I just don't have room in my life to like learn this to a really effective degree right now.

Well, and at the same time, you have to balance your other stuff. Like right now, my daughter just turned 12, which is shocking to me. But it's brought into sharp relief that like her time living here with us as a kid is basically like two thirds done at this point. Sure. And also the time that she's going to want to spend with us is going to decline over the next six years.

I'm much less likely to embark on some enormous project. And when she says, hey, do you want to play a game or do you want to go on a walk or something? My answer is yes. Yeah. You know, and so those priorities change. There'll be time for me to come back and.

you know, do bare metal. Some I'll install the rust version of Linux at some point in the future, I'm sure. But that'll be when she's not around as much. That's fair. Sometimes the decision gets made for you. Yeah. All right. I'm calling it there. That's it. Yep.

That was a lot of questions, man. It was. Thanks to everybody who wrote in. We really appreciate it. It's increasingly difficult to pick the questions every month, and that's because you all are sending in really good questions. Yeah. Thanks to everybody. We might do more of these on the patron episode this month because there are a lot of discord questions here still. It's, it's like, like 80% bangers. I'm going to say.

Yes. And like I had planned to go on there and talk about all these power outages we've been having around here lately and how that's jacked up things around here. But maybe I'll save that. That might be something to save for that postmortem. I don't even. Yesterday was a complete shit show because of power outages down here. It was really bad. Anyway, thanks to everybody who wrote in. If you have a question, you can send it to techpod at content.town. That's techpod.content.town.

Wait, no, it's techpod at content.town. Yes, that's right. I say that right. Well, techpod.content.town is where you go to get this podcast. Yeah, that's you've already gone there. You know that you don't need me to tell you that. Yes. As always, this is a listener supported show. So without you, the listeners, we would not be here. If you would like to support us, you can send five bucks a month to patreon.com slash tech pod.

And we will be eternally grateful. And you will also get access to the patron exclusive episode where we answer more often sillier questions. We sometimes talk about ongoing projects. Sometimes we talk about things that aren't worth a full episode, but we think they're interesting anyway. We talk about them there.

Uh, and, and yeah, so you can go, uh, again to patrion.com slash tech bod and, uh, you also get access to the discord, which is full of delightful human beings who are smart and funny and charming and, and, uh, full of good ideas and good questions. It turns out. True. As always, this is the last episode of the month. So we're going to thank both our executive producer to your patrons and our associate producer to your patrons, starting with the executive producers. Thanks to Andrew Slosky.

David Allen, gbeast.bunnycrimes.com, James Kamek, Jason Lee, Jordan Lippitt, Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer, and Twinkle Twinkie. Thank you all so, so much. We appreciate each and every one of you. We absolutely do. I need to go to gbeast.funnycrimes.com. Is that gbeast or gbeast? I always said it gbeast, but there was a lot of easting as well. That was a .com, right? That was a .com.

The Bunny Grand Cinematic Network is in full effect now. Oh, OK. All right. Let's go to Next Lander. It sure does. OK. Thank you for that. And then a very special thank you to our associate producer, to your patrons, including. Alejandro Navarro, Andre M Burke, PE. Andrew Dicey Shouldice. Joel Dice. Sorry, Andrew. Arthur Gies. Ben Tallman. Brutal Kerfuffle. Eric. Felix Kramer. Graham Banks. Jad Rita. Just Associate Wedge. Curp.

Matt Walker Nathan Phelps P. Tibbs Sanchik Kumar Steve Lin Thomas Shea Tom Fuller Tom Hilton And Xbox Playdates. Thank you all so, so much. We appreciate each and every one of you. We sure do. And I guess that'll do it for us this month. So we will be back next month with another next week, even. with another edition of the tech pod. Thanks everybody for listening and we will see you then. And as always, please consider the environment before opening this podcast.