297: The AI-Content Centipede

Okay, I don't do this often, but I have brought a fine beverage to this podcast. I've never seen a can. Wait, really? I don't think so. I've only seen bottles before. The regional classic. Drink cheer wine established in 1917. With apologies to Warbird, it's Cheerwine. Yeah. I did some real good husband business the other day. We were at a fancy candy shop down in Half Moon Bay.

And I was looking as my daughter was perusing the regional candies from around the world. I noticed a cooler in the side with frosty grape soda and cheer wine. Wait, cheer wine on the West Coast. Tierwine on the West Coast is gettable. That seems impossible. Three places now I found it. One is a convenience store out on Sloat all the way out of the zoo. They also have frosty root beer, which is my all-time favorite root beer.

Uh, the, the Half Moon Bay candy shop and Andronico's has tier wine sometimes. All right. Okay. It's like an exotic foreign delicacy. Come to the Bay area. It really is. It's like, the thing is. It's a level of sweet that Western palates just can't handle. Oh, it's bad, man. This old trip has been... I've had trips out here where I was good. Yeah. Where I... Kept myself in check. I exercised every morning, you know, I was like, all right, I'm going to have a salad every night. Yep.

This has not been one of those trips. This trip you exercised your right to drive to Bojangles, get a steak biscuit every morning. So I have not been to Bojangles yet, but it's on the agenda for tomorrow morning. Oh, hell yeah. What about Crystal? Do you have crystals in North Carolina? I don't know. I don't think we have. crystal anywhere near here oh man actually i love it i love a like crystal is the south answer to white castle and it's a magical place

I believe that I would have thought that was maybe the Dairy Queen or something. No, no, no. Crystal makes the small square steamed burgers. They do them on they grill them on the on the onions and the whole deal. Oh, you mean that specifically analogous to White Castle? It is literally White Castle, but also.

Do they have little tiny chicken sandwiches with pickles and mayonnaise? Is this the type of situation where you find out that Crystal is actually owned by the White Castle Corporation, kind of like Hardee's and Carl's Jr.? Look, if you suggest that Crystal is owned by some goddamn Yankees...

yes okay we're gonna have a problem brad i get it yes i've been among such people for the last two weeks the thing about crystal is you you get a couple little gut bomb burgers and you get like maybe a little chicken sando skip the fries although they're good And then instead of fries, you get a side of chili, like a little thing of a light bean chili. It's just there to dunk the burgers in. You just dunk those burgers in that.

Instead of burgers on a side, that's like two entrees. Burgers and chili. Technically. Well, okay, fair. Yeah. It's not good. It's not good, but it is real good, if you know what I mean. You know what? That really sums up the Southern lifestyle about as well as I have ever heard. Yeah. Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hello. Hello. It's Thursday afternoon. We don't often record on Thursday afternoon. Usually it's Thursday morning or Friday morning.

Well, yeah, time difference this week. It's like Thursday dinner time for me, almost. Yeah, that's true. You're in bear country out there. Bear country? Yeah. Did I tell you? No, I didn't see any, but I mean, there are absolutely bears around. Yeah. Did I tell you back when I was here in October during the hurricane, like when they're during the deep power outage phase of the hurricane. So we had no AC. So we had the windows open every night. Yeah. And.

I was sleeping in a bedroom near the deck on this house. I may have, I may have mentioned this. I don't remember this. I woke up in the middle of the night one night. I heard something large moving around on the deck. Not good. And it had the sound of like.

Every time I took a step, there was like a little bit of a like claws clacking on the wood sort of sound. Yeah. And I talked to my parents about it the next day and they're like, yeah, that was probably a pair. Look, you know the saying, right? If it's black, fight back. If it's brown, lie down. If it's white, you're completely fucked and are going to die.

It's a little long for an episode title, but I'll see if I can make it work. Yeah, I don't I don't know. Like they said to say something else about like, I don't know. Polar bears are scary, man. But black bears are pretty like I've seen black bears when I was backpacking and stuff. And there they are.

Unless you make really poor choices, they are generally pretty chill. Yeah. Yeah. Like my mom has seen a black bear out hiking before and she just kind of like regarded it and then moved on. Yeah. The biggest problem with black bears is you have to upgrade your trash can game pretty significantly.

And the bear proof trash cans are real expensive. Wait, hang on. So are black bears just the raccoons of the bear world then? I mean, all bears are the raccoons of the bear world. Some will murder you because they don't like people at all. Sure. But they do like their trash.

They look bears. Bears are equal. They'll eat. They'll eat anything scavenged. They'll they'll eat carcasses. They'll eat honey. They'll eat berries. One time when I was backpacking, we walked through a wild patch of blue, like patch of wild blueberries. they're not like your cultivated blueberries they're very very small but intensely sweet almost like a um i don't know they're like caper sized almost they're they're real small and

We were in there and there was it was pretty obvious walking around that there were bears in the general vicinity. And then we saw a bear at the other end of the stick with all these blueberries. And we're like, OK, you can have the rest of them, buddy. They're all you. Was it already was it already eating the berries?

It seemed to be enjoying berries, yes. Had you been eating the berries? Would you eat those when you just found them? Yeah, yeah. There used to be wild strawberries that grew down the hill in the field below this house, and they were similarly tiny.

So there are a couple of berries right up. There are a couple of berries that where I grew up looked like strawberries, but were real bad. Like there were wild strawberries for sure, but there were also other red berries that looked exactly like the wild berries. Give you the scours. Something fierce is what our scout master would have said. Interesting. Scours.

It means you had real bad diarrhea, Brad. Okay. I don't remember that ever happening, but who knows? Yeah. Blackberries. We had a lot of wild blackberries when I was a kid. Those were pretty safe and they grew like weeds. Yeah. Can't go wrong. Real quick, I'll mention.

You've seen this happen since we've been on this video call. Yeah. Speaking of being in this house, this was also happening during an X-Lander recording earlier today. Yep. Power's getting a little flaky here. Like it's just kind of been flickering in a weird way this afternoon. Look, America's infrastructure is.

Hardy and definitely not crumbling. Everything's going great here, guys. Well, and I mean, there are still occasionally like tree crews around doing work around here as I've been driving around. The weird thing is it didn't take down the internet connection.

during either of these recordings. Are you on cable there? It is a cable modem. Yes. So for a while, I don't know if they still do this, but for a while when cable when cable companies were just starting to roll out digital phone service, they included.

their cable modems included a big old lead acid battery that would keep the phone running while the power was on okay um usually only like that wasn't in the aftermarket modems that you'd buy it like best buy or whatever but that was the one that came from the service that did your TV and then you'd plug it into the POTS line.

And you get phone service as well. Interesting. It's a separate router. It's just an off the shelf router here. And that didn't go down either. I mean, it was like you saw how quickly the lights flickered. It was like. It was a split second, but it made me think about like, I guess every device just has its own individual tolerance for kind of brownout, like very, very brief power interruption, right? For computer stuff that does an AC to DC conversion.

often the power bricks can absorb a fair amount of a fair amount of sag, right? Like an interruption. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, or, or overage too, for that matter. But, but yeah, it's, I mean, my guess is you just didn't go out long enough for the thing to crash. Right. Okay. Yeah. Like I, this is, I mean, I'm getting way, way over my skis as far as my understanding of electricity, but I was talking to some people on the discord about tiny UPSs a few weeks ago. Yeah.

Because I was going to put like a Raspberry Pi and like a Unify access point and some stuff like that on one. And it was one of the ones that, okay, there are two terms. There's line interactive UPSs and I think standby is the other term. Yeah. Line interactive means it conditions the power as it comes out of the wall and goes to the devices. The standby type is the cheaper type where if there's a sag or whatever, it just goes straight to battery power. Yeah. But there is a.

Every UPS and its specs lists, I forget what the term is, but there's a fraction, there's like a small number of milliseconds of interruption when it switches over to battery power. So I was kind of talking to people about like, hey, is this, I think it's like eight milliseconds on the model I was looking at or something like that.

I was like, is this enough to take all these devices down? Like, this is our discord. This is what I love about our discord. People were like, people were responding by talking in terms of like fractions of a sine wave oscillation or whatever, you know, in terms of like, okay, that's less than like one. cycle of the 60 hertz, whatever, you're probably going to be fine. Even a Raspberry Pi can probably tolerate less than one hump on the wave.

or something yeah it's 16 milliseconds is one is one wavelength right right right so yeah you're fine that's that's i never thought about it like that that makes a ton of sense that's what it was that that was the revelation to me was to be able to fractionalize it in that way as literally looking at what the waveform would look like and how much of one cycle you were interrupting and whether...

you know, a device could survive that much interruption or not. This is why you have all those big capacitors in your, in your, in your power supply and your ACTC converters. Yes. Well, anyway, speaking of babbling about things that we partially understand. Oh boy.

You want to take some questions? Yeah, I think it's a good time for that. If you have a question, you can send it to us via email at techpod at content.town. That's email. Electronic mails. People still do them. But if you're a member of the Patreon and want to post in the Discord, we have a channel for that there as well. uh you can join the discord and support the podcast this is a listener supported show by going as always to patreon.com techpod and uh you can sign up there

Indeed. Why don't we start? Actually, I've got a couple of questions here. Why don't we just stay on the electricity tip? Yeah. For a minute. Look, it makes it happen. Electricity is what makes it happen. I suppose none of us would be doing this without it. Have you ever thought about what you would be doing in a pre-computing or even pre-electricity world? I would be completely fucked because my vision is really bad. What would be your thing?

I would probably be a cobbler because I could rest my eyeballs on the shoes and whack the nails into them. Okay. But like, what would you, I don't, I have no idea what I would be as passionate about as I am about computers and video games. I think probably food, finding food, I guess not getting cholera.

I guess the consumption. Sure. Like, what about, would I be like, would I, would I be a machinist? Would I be into like mechanical things? I don't know. I bet, I bet I would be super into hunting rats. I would be, I would essentially live that Charlie day life. I think these rats are like every, you know, whatever to Bill's house right before he got the plague. And there were rats everywhere, man. I bet if we get rid of all these rats, less plague or amateur surgeon. OK, sure.

Yeah. It's just one, just trading one form of tinkering for another. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Okay. All right. Email from Aaron. I have a 4080 super and a be quiet 850 watt power supply in certain games like expedition 33. it tends to trip my power supply to a power off which I can only assume to be a transient power spike. I can work around this by capping frame rate, usually to get well below 300 watts. Should I just get another power supply or undervolt the GPU?

Is this because it's a multi-rail power supply that transient power spikes are happening? So the multi-rail single rail thing doesn't really matter if you have a good power supply, right? There was a lot of conversation about that 100 years ago, and it used to be a problem because it used to be that cheap power supplies were multi-rail and expensive power supplies were single rail.

These days, it's probably fine. What that means is basically multiple circuits inside the power supply, right? Usually when this is a thing we talk about every summer. When your computer is shutting off under load, that means that your computer is expecting more power to come out of the power supply than the power supply can deliver. And typically that's because when it's warm, the efficiency of your power supply drops.

And as a result, your your so your 850 watt power supply is then only providing 780 watts instead of 850 because your room is. Your ambient temperature in your room is 75 degrees, which means the ambient temperature of your power supply is 90 degrees, which means the efficiency goes down a certain amount. Looking at the power requirements for the... 4080 super which are according to uh tech power up it is 320 watts and the minimum suggested power supply is 700 watts so

That to me says either it's really warm in your room. You maybe have the little switch on the back of the power supply that turns the fan off under all circumstances on. You could try flipping that to on so that the fan will spin up. and give you a little more efficiency even in the warm room uh it could also mean the power supply is getting close to dying because that's the other that's a reduction in efficiency can sometimes impact that

Yeah, I just Googled the model of Be Quiet PSU that he mentioned in here, and it is an ATX 3.0. It's been long enough since I built my current PC that I can't remember exactly what the 3.0 spec adds. It's a 12.0. It's a 12.0, 2x6.

Right. But isn't there also, I thought there was some kind of monitoring built into that spec as well, where like the power supply is supposed to detect spikes better in some fashion. It's like I said, it's been a while. I can't remember, but I guess he's got a 3.0 supply and it's still a problem. Yeah, I might, you know, they have a long warranty. Be quiet is a pretty good vendor. This one actually isn't available in our country. It says there's a big label on it. You might call them.

Like I might hit them, hit their warranty and then say, hey, I'm depending on what CPU you have. And if you don't have like 12 spinning platter hard drives in there, you should be well under the limit for this. Um, so I, I would be surprised. Like, I, I think you might have, you might have a dud. Yeah. Like 40, super, really not that demanding of a card. Like you said. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, but also.

Capping the frame rate works. I actually need to test to see. For a while, when they switched over from the GeForce Experience to the NVIDIA app, there's a feature in there that lets you limit your overall wattage. Yes, that was going to be my suggestion. You're talking about what they describe as just like a power limit, quote unquote, because undervolting is a different thing from that. Yeah, it just throttles. It basically sets the throttle to lower.

um is the way it's supposed to work now when we tested at pc world right when the nvidia app was still in beta it didn't work so wasn't that a situation where like it just wasn't applying the setting

Yeah, you could change the setting. It looked like it was changing from inside the thing, but when we put it up to the power meter, it didn't change anything. Okay. I will say, I mean, that may no longer be the case. Hopefully they fixed that by now, but I will say that MSI Afterburner also can do the same thing. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. MSI Afterburner is the other option for this. It's a little more complicated. The real solution is probably consider...

Like I said, call, be quiet, see if they'll send you a new power supply. If they won't, then you might want to get a larger power supply. Yeah, it's definitely worth looking into whether you have faulty hardware or not. But I like to power limit anyway because of. the negligible loss in performance you get by going down to like 90 or even 85%.

Yeah, I don't have your cards capacity. Like you hit such diminishing returns, leaving your card at 100% power that it's just really not worth the insane extra wattage to eke out like an extra three to 5% performance. That's it.

That's exactly it. So I kind of would recommend everybody, at least on the NVIDIA side. I don't know how Intel and AMD handle things. Well, I was going to say, if you're on the higher end, it makes a lot more sense. If you're on a $200 card, you're already power limited out of the box. You're fine. Yes.

But if you're buying a 5090 and you're not doing like there's there's very little right now that requires the full horsepower of a 5090 or even a 4090. And you can you can throttle those a little bit and be in real good shape. Yep.

I'm going to skip down to a Discord question because it's in the same vein here. Whoa. From Tactical Tug. I was helping a friend of mine build a new PC earlier and it got me thinking. What is one thing you absolutely won't and shouldn't save money on when speccing a new build? For me, it's the power supply. I always go for a high quality model and at least one or two capacities higher than what I actually need.

Storage is also another one where having too much is better than not having enough. And as a bonus, what are some things people often overspend on and can save some money on? So I love a big C drive. big fast c drive just because it's a pain to upgrade in the future yeah um i and and at least in the windows case like there are so many things tied to your system drive now like your documents and desktop folders and like

places where large files might accumulate that remapping those to other drives is kind of a pain and can get screwy. So it's nice to just have a bunch of space right there on the system. Yep.

um c drives good i like i like i'm a big fan of buying a nice power supply power supplies last two or three systems usually yep yep um and that is 100 my answer to this too um buying a high efficiency one will help you avoid the problems before, like the difference between the 80 and the 90% power supplies, they're fairly significantly more expensive to get the higher efficiency models you do.

Like when you were, when we were talking about 300 watt machines and 300 watt power supplies, the difference between losing 30 and 20 Watts to efficiency. was less important than these days when you're putting a thousand watt power supply in your computer and a 20 efficient you know that extra 10 is 100 watts right yep um which if you

Like I said, especially if you're someplace where electricity is expensive, then saving that 100 watts will really add up over the eight or 10 year life of that power supply. Yep, for sure. Yeah, I've become pretty maniacal about the system stability over the years based on past experience. And it's like power supply and maybe secondarily, I guess I would say RAM and then motherboard after that are places to.

Pay attention to what you're buying. I really, really like a nice case too. Like if you're. It depends on how much you're digging around in your computer, whether it matters, but having something that's easy to take the filters off and clean and open up and blast the dust out of occasionally. means that i actually do that versus just letting it accumulate under my desk for years and years and years and then it's like a something exploded in there yep uh so yeah those are those are mine i think

I think the bellwether there is just stop at some point and ask yourself, like, am I annoyed every time I open up this case and have to tinker in there? If so, it's probably time for a new case. Conversely, the thing that I think people spend too much money on is probably video cards. i think often i think often you're yeah for a long time the video card the difference between a cheap video card and expensive video card was not

super substantial over the last few years that's changed. You know, we've seen a high-end video card go from $700, $600 or $700 to $2,000 or $3,000. And most people, especially if you're playing like live service games, You absolutely don't need a big, giant, beefy video card. In fact, actually, it's just going to cost you more electricity and generate more heat and be kind of a pain in the butt. Fair. Fair. Did you know? Can I just.

Go back to the case thing for a second. Yeah. I once moved the innards of a computer into a new case without actually upgrading the computer. I've done that before. That feels awesome. It almost felt like by having a new computer, even though the guts and therefore the performance were identical, but just something about transplanting what I already had into a much nicer, more modern case.

Still felt, even though it's kind of a lateral upgrade, it was still, it still felt great. I highly, highly recommend it. We, I did that. So it fit under the secret compartment in the bolt when we were going on a trip one time. Yeah, sure. It's good.

It's like getting a new pair of pants for your computer. All right. Hang on. I have to write that down. That's a pretty good one. Let's see. Adam writes in. I've kind of got a question about this, too. I hope you have an answer. I run into something kind of similar to this. I've got AT&T Air, which is their 5G home internet product. It does a reasonable job and it's cheap, but I've run into a strange problem with them over and over again. I'm based in Phoenix.

but my internet thinks I'm based in Utah, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. It alternates between the three, sometimes with such frequency that any sort of GPS verification security system will get tripped over and over again. I get logged out of accounts. I often can't access certain adult websites due to different state bans. My wife has been IP banned from Google Scholar a few times too. My bank called me to confirm why I made a purchase in Arizona.

then logged in from Tennessee 15 minutes later. My Vizio smart TV outright refuses to connect to this Wi-Fi network as well, although that seems like a different issue. How do I fix this while I wait for fiber to reach my neighborhood? So this happens because cellular networks buy huge blocks of IP addresses and the geolocation databases are bad about understanding that often.

Okay. Some cell providers in the old days, I don't know if they still do this. There's probably somebody that's going to respond and we'll run an update next month. But some cell providers used to do a lot of VPNing. So they'd like... In the early days of 3G and 4G data, they would run everything through essentially a proxy from one cell tower, and then that proxy might be in St. Louis or something, right?

And so your IP address would your phone's GPS would say, hey, I'm here. And your IP address would be a St. Louis one. Do people really geolocate purely off of IP address range? That's how every desktop computer does. That's it? I figured, I assumed they were triangulating off of multiple pieces of data at this point, but that seems a little one note to me.

if you're on wi-fi there's databases of wife where where ssids live in terms of geo ip but if you're on a desktop pc that's connected to internet the only thing it has is your ip address yeah So, yeah, so this is, you know how I often say don't buy VPNs because they're a waste of money and they don't really do the thing that they advertise for most people. This is a situation where actually maybe buying a VPN that is in your hometown, it would be useful for you.

yeah that's that was my first thought here as well um it's it's a it you could also do like some reverse proxy business and set up a linode or something that you run everything through that yep Yeah. Like when I, when I got my VPS last fall, which I swear to God, I'm going to boot back up and actually configure at some point, but I, they let me, they let me pick which data center I wanted it to reside in. And they had like, I don't remember. It was like Chicago.

Dallas. Yeah, I think maybe San Jose was one of them, stuff like that. So if you really want to get technical and set up your own VPN on a virtual private server, you could do something like that and have some control over what state it'll show. So there's two issues here. Things like Hulu, for example, because they do local TV networks and there's rules about that. They only allow you a limited number of location changes a year. So like.

When we went when we went down south to Palm Springs for a month, we would switch our Hulu there and then we'd switch it back when we came back and that would eat all of our changes for the year. Sure. The the the problem here. is that if this is happening multiple times a day, streaming stuff illegally is going to be a real pain in the butt. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised that AT&T hasn't solved this issue. This seems like a...

something that they should have to deal with and you shouldn't have to fool with. So I would actually call them and complain about it and see if they'll give you a fixed IP address that at least stays in the same municipality. um i can't believe i'm saying we now have two answers that are yo consider calling support but sure but this one is like you can fix this it'll be a pain in the butt everybody will have to have all their devices connected um

Did you talk about the Vizio thing? Yeah, I mentioned that. Although he says in this email that he thinks that might be unrelated. I think that is a different issue. That's probably because Vizio thinks that you're connecting to a hotspot. Sure. Like a phone hotspot.

Yeah, I wonder if the problem with complaining to AT&T might be that, I mean, I'm assuming a lot here, but somebody who has to use 5G home internet might not have a lot of options for switching to other providers in the first place. I don't think you do, but you can still wear them out and make them fix your problem.

I guess you don't necessarily have to threaten to leave the service to maybe get some traction. You just have to call and ask for help and be nice and maybe keep calling back until you get somebody who sounds like they know what they're talking about. Yep. Yep.

Bunch of emails about Whirly Ball. We got so much feedback about Whirly Ball, Brad. Whirly Ball still exists almost 30 years after that issue of Wired we talked about. So for folks who didn't listen to the episode a couple weeks ago, whirly ball is a sport where you basically. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me stop you because the email I was going to read has a great description of what it is from somebody who's done it. Perfect. I'll just, I'll just read this email from Brian.

Thanks to everybody who wrote in about Whirly Ball. I just wanted to weigh in that Whirly Ball is still going strong in the Chicago area. I thought it might actually be a Chicago-only phenomenon, so I was surprised to hear you mention it from other states in the 90s. There are several facilities here and it's pretty popular for companies to take their teams out to play. It's exactly what you think it is if you think it's a bunch of bumper cars and a small glass enclosed basketball court.

Banging into each other at full speed while drunk people try to fling a ball into a basketball goal. In between rounds, they deliver wings. Later in my career, a back injury gave me an excuse to opt out, which is probably my actual recommendation. Have a few wings and just watch the mayhem. Okay. So we got a lot of emails like this. A lot of blue sky posts from specifically, kind of surprisingly, a lot of ex-Microsoft and Valve people wrote in to say.

Hey, Whirly Ball was a really popular team building exercise at Microsoft for about 10 years. And then somebody got a serious enough injury at the Redmond one that they banned it for a while. And then somebody else wrote back to say, no, it's back. We're all doing whirly ball again. So still happening. I did not know about the wings, though. The wings are good. I also did not know that this was a drinking activity. But although I guess that makes sense in retrospect.

That does seem a bit dangerous, but you know. We should go to Seattle and play whirly ball, Brad. Maybe. I need better insurance first, I think. Yes. That seems like a good precaution.

We got an insane number of people writing in about Whirly Ball, really. People were talking about the Discord. The entire thread in the Discord was about Whirly Ball for the first three days. And I got... probably 20 blue sky messages about whirly ball over the last week and a half or two weeks passionate fan days i mean it sounds fun bumper cars and whacking into each other and throwing basketballs at a little tiny hole that sounds great indeed and wings

Who doesn't love wings? What situation is not improved by the presence of wings? Can I? Gina stopped at Santung in San Francisco the other day. Okay. Do you know about Santung? I've heard of it. Santang is like a Chinese restaurant in the inner sunset at Irving and Judah and 10th or something, 11th. And they do these ginger scallion.

pepper wings and they're like sweet and molasses and gooey but like unbelievably crispy okay and uh gina brought some home the other day and they were just get them to go you get them to go you might have to look into that You should go get something. You could walk over there probably. Here's the question. Yeah. Flats or drumettes? Oh, both. Really? Yeah, they mix. No, no, I mean you. Oh, my personal preference? Yeah. Depends. If the drums are good, I'll take the drums all day.

But if they're bad, then I want the wings. Wait, what defines a bad drum? Like not enough meat? Yeah, if it's like more skin than meat and like there's that gristly weird thing on the end dangling off. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, but I just gnaw that thing off.

I mean, look, the thing I used to do, the thing we used to do when we lived down there, because we used to live in that neighborhood is we would go stop and grab some wings and then we'd go sit in the park and take a bunch of wet naps and eat wings. That's living. The beard's not compatible with that anymore. Unfortunately, I need like a hose. Basically, I could see that. Yeah. Yeah. I am with you drums all day. Yeah. It's great. My girlfriend likes the wings better. So we get along well.

You get to do stunts with the wings, though. I know people who can put a whole wing in their mouth and just spit bones out. That's incredible. Strip the entire meat. Yep. Right. Yes. The thing where you push it down and like the bones come out and you just have a wing. That's also delicious. Like a little meat flour. Yeah. Yeah. These are all good drums. You don't get that option. now i want some wings you put a whole drum in your mouth you look like as a psychopath fair fair yeah

All right. James wrote in, you had a short discussion a month ago about getting a good power brick for travel. I'm lucky enough to go to Japan semi-frequently due to having some family out there. So I need a phone and laptop charger that will work there as well as here in the UK. The trick is to get a power brick that has a removable mains input, usually a figure 8 or Mickey Mouse plug, which is IEC C5 or C7, and then make sure your brick is multi-voltage.

such as 100 to 250 VAC, 50 slash 60 hertz. So now you have a brick that will work anywhere in the world when you get to the country you're going to. You get a cable that has the local mains plug on one end and your figure eight or Mickey Mouse plug on the other. Boom, you can get locally flavored electricity into your brick. This is incredible. Yeah. Yes. I like back when we were going to TGS in like 2003, four or five. Yeah.

We have a very early primitive version of this, which was just a giant fat brick transformer with a bunch of interchangeable plugs for different countries that you would bring in a little sack along with it. this sounds like a way better more modern version this sounds fabulous yes so thanks james i don't do a lot of international travel myself these days but i guess it wouldn't hurt to be prepared in case you do i keep threatening to

I try not to leave the house, Brad. Yes, fair. Yes, I'm kind of with you. All right, let's see. One more email from Joe.

Okay. I'm in the process of setting up a home NAS for the first time after finally axing Windows from all my machines to make the full-time switch to Linux. After some amount of research, I'm planning on using Unraid for the NAS OS. and tail scale to access it outside my network. Am I overlooking anything from a security perspective? And is there anything I can do on the ease of access side to make the less tech inclined folks in my life want to utilize it more?

I think, I mean, tail scale is the general recommendation for safe external access, right? Because it works like a reverse proxy. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, no. So tail scale is built on WireGuard. It uses. It uses WireGuard as the VPN protocol, but it's basically a mesh network version of WireGuard. Oh, weird. Okay. And I've never used it, but my understanding is it's quite easy to set up. Setting up manual WireGuard is pretty fiddly. You have to...

You have to deal with copying public and private keys back and forth and setting up config files. You can shoot the QR code in your phone, too. I mean, that helps, but it's still quite technical. My understanding is that setting up tail scale is dramatically more straightforward and doesn't need a lot of networking expertise to do.

I'm trying to think like as a security wise, if you're running a tail scale network into your house, like that's probably all you need to worry about as long as you're not opening a bunch of other ports. And make sure you keep your tail scale stuff like whatever you use to get into the house. Make sure you keep it updated. Like don't run a three year old wire guard instance. Yeah, I think I think I would guess that just having people set up whatever tail scale stuff they need to get into your.

VPN is probably enough. Yeah. I guess you could maybe look into like a reverse proxy to make the addresses look friendlier. I don't know, but maybe that's not even necessary. I'm actually, I would like to hear more from people on the discord about, about this.

Well, so like, for example, for me on iOS, when I use WireGuard from outside the house and I set it up for both Gina and the kiddo so that they can get ad blocking basically when they're anywhere, they just have a. they have a switch that flips on that lets them flip the vpn on right when they're out which works which works really well um i kind of thought the interesting thing about this was the was the question about how i can get the less tech and fine folks in my life to utilize it more

And the kind of killer apps inside our house are Plex, obviously, or, you know, some sort of media server, media and music. But also the ad blocking is incredibly like everybody in the house doesn't like using the Internet when they're away from the ad blocker. So sure.

Turns out, good feature. Understandable. Actually, since you said that, I'm just going to jump straight to a related Discord question. It's a nice transition there. From BrettG102. See, this is what happens when I do some prep. I actually read all these questions and think about a logical flow to them. It's amazing. You both come from industries which had or continue to have a large reliance on internet advertising and have to play the SEO game.

Any dissonance in the links that you go to in order to block ads? Like, yeah, I've thought about that quite a bit. I used to not do it at all for that exact reason. The things that changed, and I still feel a little weird about it, but the things that changed are A, display ads are dramatically less valuable than they used to be. Display ads are just there to drive people to subscriptions at this point.

Right. Like they, they display ads do not, you know, back 20 years ago when I was starting at 23 now at GameSpot or whatever, uh, ads were it. Like that was it. Like the whole site ran on display ads and big ad campaigns and stuff like that. But like, the value of those ads plummeted to such a degree that they are not the primary revenue driver anymore. And the other thing is, which we've talked about a million times, is that the amount of malicious activity that now comes along for the ride.

with a lot of the ads that you're letting through and tracking, data tracking. There's so many other things now that are far less palatable than just looking at ads that also come along from those same sources that it's gotten a lot fuzzier for me. For me, there was a specific moment a few years ago when I turned off all the tracking cookies that when they started letting you do that, I flipped the button on all the things to stop having the tracking cookies.

And I started getting ads for toenail fungus with horrible pictures in them. And I didn't need to see people's gnarly toenails all day. And I was like, I don't want that. I can't do this anymore. This is terrible. The security, like I haven't gone so far. We know people who don't like run JavaScript in their browser.

right like they don't allow any javascript or any any kind of code to be run in the browser other than just markup language and i i don't go that far just because i need the web to be relatively usable and a lot of the sites that i use require a fair amount of javascript these days um but but yeah like i think i subscribe to a ton of like i pay for a ton of newsletters and blogs and and larger sites i used to pay for multiple newspapers i've stopped two of those because they

I kind of don't seem to be up to the task in the 2025 and have started paying for more independent reporters as a result of that. So I back a fair number of.

like i i back people who write newsletters i back people who write blogs i pay for um a couple of what what would have been magazines 10 years ago like i pay for wired i pay for the atlantic i pay for the new yorker off and on i don't always pay for the new yorker because it's kind of expensive sure um but yeah like like i would much rather i would

Much, much rather pay somebody a couple of bucks a month for hot takes than let them run arbitrary code on my computer. Yes, for sure. I've been thinking about subscribing to Apple News, actually. Or actually, is it Apple News Plus? I think it's the name of the paid product.

Yeah, it's kind of like a bundle, right? You get a bundle deal for a lot of big publications. Yes, like it's actually kind of crazy how many publications you get for. I mean, it's it's not nothing. It's like 13 to 15 a month or something like that. But. It's a huge range of newspapers and magazines. I wonder what the split is, though. I wonder if they're really taking a bath on what each publication is getting.

Look, how they're slicing up that subscription fee. I wonder if that's actually like kind of a loss for them or a loss leader. I think it's any revenues better than no revenue for a lot of them.

Actually, also to your point about arbitrary code and stuff like that, that couches all the content in an app, in the news app on the iPad or whatever, that is obviously very sanitized and formatted with no ads and no concern about... you know, malicious tracking or stuff sneaking through. For me, like when I was in a position to care about that, the delivery side of ads a lot more than I do now, there's a reason we don't run ads on this podcast, right? But.

Like I used to raise hell about all of those. The rise of demand media was the first one. It's gone now. It's been bought by somebody and subsumed into something else. But they started making ads that looked like the kind of. hey, you might enjoy this content block on your website. And at that point, you're just lying to the to the users, right? When you're making ads that are indistinguishable from editorial content, then.

like you've broken the contract with me as a user and i'm okay i'm okay cutting out ads on that um i i think it's unfortunate that we're in this situation because like the same thing the thing that's happening now is that google

is doing a lot less outbound traffic because they're sucking up all of the information on webpages into their AI results. So what used to be a really good deal for... for publications, you know, hey, we'll let you make a copy of our content on your servers in exchange for sending search results our way if our content is good. like drove an incredible amount of growth in publishing on the web. Now, at the same time, Google was devaluing online advertising and Facebook contributed to that as well.

Now the AI tendency to keep everything inside their silos, both on Google and Microsoft and chat GPT and open AI and everyone is like making publishers reevaluate the value of that. of that contract of that. Hey, you can steal our stuff if you give us content back because the traffic is declining at a precipitous rate. And like we're seeing things like Cloudflare flare a month or two ago.

rolled out a hey you can just block all the ai crawler crawlers if you run all of your web traffic through us it's a free service we provide it for free because we think it's important and they do the thing that would be impossible for like us any small to mid-sized publisher to manage on their own

just because fuck ai yeah and like that's the real like that that's the that's the the first inflection point that we're hitting with the ai stuff i think is that the publishers are going to start blocking everything from google and it's going to completely right

change the way we access stuff on the web. Yeah, like that move from Cloudflare, I looked at that and my first instinct was like, oh, that's like very altruistic of them. Like what a good move on their part. But then, you know, like Cloudflare's business relies on a healthy, thriving, robust web. as much as anybody's, right? Because the web is going to shrivel and die in a negative feedback loop of the things that need to consume all the human-generated content.

in order to derive their own automatically generated stuff are going to run out of human content to continue absorbing and then what's going to come out the other end when they don't have when they don't have valid inputs what is the output going to be anymore like it's going to be yeah it's a content centipede

Yeah, yes, basically. Content Centipede is not a bad title. I have now forgotten the other thing you said that was going to be a good title. I'm on fire today, man. We should do this in the afternoon more often. Do you remember it? I didn't write it down. What was it? yeah it was it was the if the if it's black uh fight back if it's if it's brown lay down if it's white you're fucked and are gonna die basically sure okay i'll sift through there and find something yeah um

Okay, since you mentioned newsletters, here's one from Zella in Alaska that since you write a newsletter, you might be able to answer. I have answers. When writing a blog post about a project, do you write it in parallel with the project or after you complete it?

So I've been writing posts and articles about projects for a really long time now, and I always take notes as I'm doing it. And then like that, those notes end up forming an outline that then gets coalesced into an article almost always. All right. Hard, hardly ever. Usually you want the benefit of the completed project because if you write it as you're going, there's always dead ends and stuff that that doesn't work the way you would expect. Yeah. Then you just end up reworking.

More of the article than you save time on by doing it inline. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Tactical Tug asked, it's been mentioned a few times now that you shouldn't listen to podcasts on Spotify. As someone who exclusively uses Spotify to consume audio content, why not? Because Spotify has built a parallel ecosystem of... for audio podcasts that lives outside the RSS feeds and generates. I think they're not running ads anymore on top of other people's podcasts. They did that for a little while.

Um, it's, it just means that we don't get data about your, like, we don't know your, your listens don't count for us for all intents and purposes there. It doesn't matter for us because we're not a listener. We're listener supported. We don't run ads, but if you're on an ad.

track podcast it means that you the people have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops and and also they spotify could just use rss feeds for their podcast platform and they choose not to it's just shitty yeah And consistent with their other business practices, because, I mean, this isn't really relevant to podcasts, but Spotify is well known for dramatically underpaying musical artists.

I mean, look, the entire music industry has a long history of artists, but sure. But Spotify is really taking it to a whole new level. Yeah. Fair. After after when Ozzy passed. The other day, I was watching some interviews with him that were running in the news, and he was talking about how bad they got screwed by their management in the early days of Black Sabbath. Yep. The classic story of...

They were touring and pulling in huge amounts of money and then looking at their paychecks and going like, wait a minute, where's all this money going? And oh, it was the management. I mean, they also had enormous drug problems back then, too. Well, hey, look, as long as these cereal boxes full of cocaine kept showing up. Look.

That was a direct quote, by the way. You got to eat your Wheaties to keep on the go, Brad. Yes, yes. Rip on Z, by the way. Let's see. Sten writes in, as both of you play Fortnite, will you try and get the Fantastic Four skins? You said Foreskin. Yeah, I think they were trying to do something there, but since it's a legitimate question, I haven't played Fortnite since the Star Wars stuff ended.

This, this, this season, they swung hard in the opposite direction and it's like a complete mobility season. Oh, so what would you say characterized the last season then? I don't have the frame of reference since I don't play much. Last season, the mobility stuff was relatively tame. So like you like often they will have. So this season they have.

Five or six different mobility items. So people are three stacking mobility and just carrying a gun and maybe a little bit of utility. So. The final fights, the final small circles end up being absolute chaos where people are bouncing around like maniacs.

And and it ends in like whoever runs out of mobility first loses basically. Interesting. That does sound quite different. I mean, so what would you say? Was it the guns that were the focus of the Star Wars season? Yes. So Star Wars season, there were no lightsabers. There's no ammo.

One, the lightsabers don't really matter a whole lot in combat, right? You maybe would use them to block or to close on somebody, but you wouldn't use them to, it's like, you're not going to beat somebody to death in a final circle with lightsaber unless you're stunting on them. Right. The thing that they do really, really well with Fortnite that I think all of the other battle royales on most of the other big live service games have is that.

Each season has its own tenor because they have trained the player base to accept weapons coming in and going out constantly. And yeah, and it makes it, it keeps the game really fresh. It's why it's why that's the one that I play honestly is because. If we were just always using the same drum shotgun and.

you know, basic assault rifle, it would get tedious after a while. So yeah, yeah, that's for sure. All that said, I think I have discovered that I am going to be a very fair weather Fortnite fan. I think, I think there's a lot of you. Yeah. Right.

Sure. Also, there's a ton of really good games out right now. I want to play more night rain. That game owns. Yeah. Elden ring. Night rain is a sleeper. I'm not going to say game of the year, but like it's up there. Like it's actually like shockingly high on my favorite games of the year list so far. Brad asked me about peak.

What's up with peak? I beat it last time. I mean, congratulations. Yeah. But also, but also I'm sad we didn't get to beat it together. There's still time. Yeah. Well, but now you've seen it. Now you can.

I want to have the pure survival experience of not having a ringer on the team telling us the best strategies. Look, we will get to the top of the mountain. They're adding more biomes, I think, probably. Of course, yeah. I mean, there's no way they're not going to support that game with the way it's selling.

They made a lot of money with it. Hey, what if they could make even more? Good for them. There's my game of the year right now. It's up there. It's like crazy that that game they made in three months for $10.

Yeah. Is, is high up on that list for sure. Question from Zed. With the somewhat insane news that a retro YouTuber has bought the Commodore company and trademarks. What defunct brand would you rescue from Bolivian? Did you see the Commodore stuff? I had no idea that that's what happened. I had to look it up. I still, it seems like there's a whole story there. It sounds like they may have paid like low seven figures for it. Makes sense.

I hadn't heard of this YouTuber. I don't know how big they are. I don't know if they presumably had some outside investment, maybe. And I have no idea what their plans are for the Commodore brand. I'm going to say, at least for my own part, I'm going to limit this question to other defunct computer.

companies of the past, just to narrow the scope a little bit here. The first one that came to mind was B. Yeah. I think it would be kind of cool to own all of the B trademarks and stuff like BOS, Bbox. I like the look of the B logo a lot. Have you ever seen Serial Experiments Lane, the anime? Did we talk about that? No.

It's, it's, it's a, it is from the late nineties. It is like a very extremely like ahead of its time, cyber, cyber surreal anime. Okay. But there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of nineties computing stuff in there that is like. subtle enough that if you don't know what you're looking at, you won't notice it. But at the end of every episode of Lane, when it says to be continued, they use the B logo in there.

Wow. There are references to like other 90s kind of big iron computer companies in there and stuff. But anyway, like B is one of those like computing, you know, computing companies that wasn't, I guess I would say that I find really fascinating. It's definitely one of the paths less traveled. It's probably what I would have picked. Yes. Maybe SGI, but like I'm here because of B. Sure. Right. I wrote a nasty letter to the Ars Technica folks because I thought their BOS coverage was bad.

And they were like, well, if you think you can do better, why don't you come on and write about it? And I did. And 25 years later, here I am. Yeah. Also, talking about this right now is kind of making me realize I think my entire fascination with operating systems grew out of Windows being so shitty in that period. I mean, you know, like, like everything about looking at operating systems, they could do more than windows and fawning over them.

was just because the Windows experience was so shitty. Well, it was it was a weird that that period of time in the late 90s was weird because both Windows sucked. I mean, Windows 95 was OK, but had huge problems. And Mac OS was terrible then, too. Yes. Extremely.

so like the commercial options were bad and you had people like john carmack talking about how awesome next was right and you had nintendo building games with sgi workstations and and i like i was even like i was very curious about os2 for a long time purely

because like, especially when computers were more limited than they are now and you were upgrading constantly because they were so slow, like you were trying to get as much out of your hardware as you could. Right. And when you saw something like OS two, that was like,

you know, hey, this has real preemptive multitasking. Like, you can do so much more with the same hardware you have if you run this way better operating system. I mean, there were some drawbacks to running OS2, let's say, but like, it was all... All of that was just, man, Windows really sucks ass. Like, I wish I had something better. Well, yeah. So OS2, I ran OS2. I bought a copy of OS2 because it was warp, which I think was four plus.

Okay. It was, it was, I bought it at the school bookstore. Oh, because it was $3 or $6 or something. Cause we got like this student discount just right off the top. And it was bad. It was because you only run Windows 3.1 software on it. You couldn't run Windows 95 and stuff. But the point is, we're in that place again. Yeah. Yes. Like Windows is bad. OS 10 kind of a mess, but better. Is it? I don't have a problem with it. I mean, I use it pretty. I'm using it right now.

Well, congratulations. I mean, people complain about it a lot, but I don't have a Mac currently, so I don't know. I will tell you it is light years better than, well, maybe that's not the right way to put it. It is light years less bad than Windows is. Let's say that.

Like whatever, whatever issues may exist with current Mac OS or absolutely nothing compared to where Windows is at. I think my issue. So my experience with Mac OS right now is mostly due to setting up my wife's Mac, helping her with helping her with computer problems and like.

i'm still frustrated by how much mac os is trying to sell you stuff right like this is this is i think the fundamental problem with computing right now is that once microsoft and apple built large captive audiences The focus went from, hey, we need to make this thing better and more usable and more impactful to people's lives to, hey, what if we could extract $5 a month?

You know what would be better than extracting $5 a month? What about $30 a month? Yeah. I mean, you know, Apple would love to sell you an iCloud subscription or Apple One. Isn't that the name of their everything? Yeah, that's what they call it now. Speaking of Apple News Plus, I was like...

When I looked at the price of Apple News Plus, I was like, maybe I should just get the Apple One, the all-in-one one. Yeah. Although there are tiers of that. Of course, the News product is only on the absolute most expensive tier, which I don't need at all. You can also get fitness, though, and then you can get your workouts with your robot trainer.

Yeah, I don't know, man. The thing I'll say about Mac OS, it absolutely does not hit you over the head with upsells the way that Windows currently does. It does not. Like Apple is not yet at the point where they have a thing in their in Finder that says, hey. You need to use Windows Backup, a OneDrive service. Right, right. They are not commandeering your login process every 25 boots and giving you a full screen splash. Yep.

upsell the way that Windows does. You know, like, hey, what if you signed up for Office 365 even though you just use this computer to play games? Yeah. Anyway, the other one I'll say real quick is Sun is the other. Sun still exists. But that's the thing. Oracle actually owns Sun and the Sun name and Solaris, although actually Solaris, I think, is slowly being retired. Yeah. Like Java still exists. I mean, like...

I think the Sun brand and trademark are still technically in use. And Oracle would send assassins to my house. Yeah, you don't want Larry Ellison upset with you, man. No, definitely not.

All right. Here's another tactical tug one. Oh, wow. This is a three for tactical tug this week. Do either of you have a favorite? Oh, shit. I'm old thing. That's your go to. Mine is probably that I've got a guy at work, a full-time adult employee, drives his own car and all, who is younger than the PS3. How? I turned 33 later this month, but when he mentioned that, I felt at least 70.

Another fun one is that COVID started spreading almost six years ago. Where did all that time go? It just goes faster and faster, man. Is that like an acknowledged cognitive phenomenon? Yeah. It is? It's not just me? No, it's because each season... percentage wise is less of your life than it than the previous one was yeah like that i i think i only really noticed that kicking into high gear

Maybe late 30s at the earliest, but definitely once I got past 40, like the accelerating nature of the passage of time or your perception of the passage of time, like it just feels the older you get, the faster it feels like time is going. Having kids really accelerates that process too. Sure. I could definitely see that. I had a fun one of these on this trip. Okay. Which is that I've had my 94 Civic out driving around quite a bit.

I had no idea you had a 94 Civic still. That's incredible. Have we never talked about this? Have we not talked about this? I saw it on the Discord the other day, but I didn't know better than that. I could have sworn I had. Maybe not. Maybe not. This is incredible information also, by the way. It's not just a Civic. It is a red 94 Civic hatchback, manual transmission. It's an SI model, so it's like the sporty one with the VTEC engine. Yeah.

I think that's all the attributes of it, but the magic part is it's got 100,000 miles on it. Wow, really? Yeah. So I've been out to three fast food places since I've been here, and they were all the type where somebody will walk your food out to you. Yeah. In two of those three instances, these were two different kids. The kid who brought the food out, who looked like they had to be maybe barely out of high school, probably still in high school, both flipped out over the car. I bet.

like like just like lost their minds like oh there's like just kid kid came out with braces carrying my food is just like dude i love this thing like Look at this thing. It's spotless. Like, oh, man. And it's a manual. Like, dang, bro. Like, just, like, losing it. That is really funny. It made me really happy to still have the car, but also made me think, like, man, this car is almost twice as old as this kid.

Well, yeah. And like you couldn't drive that car here because it would get stolen in like 15 minutes. Right. So that that exact thing came up on the discord. When did I talk about this, that this got discussed on the discord? Was it in one of the I think it was in the thread. We talked about the gasoline last week. Oh, that's what it was. Yeah, it was. I still need to go deal with that gasoline. But somebody suggested you should get a rental car and just do it that way.

Most people, let's say the majority of people on the Discord actually said you should. My cousin, who is super into classic cars, like works on cars constantly, also was just like, it's nine months old. It's fine. Just put a gallon or two at a time into the various cars around the house.

on top of a fresh tank and just run it down. But that exact thing, somebody jokingly, I don't think they were super serious, but they were like, come on, you want to just drive that Civic across the country and have it with you in San Francisco, right? And I was like, man, that car would not last a week.

in san francisco i mean it would be gone yeah you'd need to get a real good club you have to have the one that like sticks out of both windows and is bolted onto the thing like i i would never park it on the street full-time there i would

Kind of be afraid to even park it on the street in the middle of the day there because my understanding is like that type of mid-90s Civic is like way up there on the list of the most stolen cars. It's highly desirable and fairly easy to steal is my understanding. Yeah. Yeah, I think my so we have an intern at PC World who was born in 2005. OK. And I was told the other day that playing.

battle royales was a gen z thing okay and i was like i don't i don't know if i agree like fortnight probably is a gen z thing but like There was a period of time in 2017 when you opened up Steam and everyone you've ever been friends with on Steam was playing PUBG. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's just it might be it might have been the last wide cultural phenomena. You might be right about that. Yeah, I don't know. I am. I like look at having a 12 year old kid makes everything you do feel very old.

Yeah, I could see that for sure. It's just a constant reminder of youth grinding you down. Well, all right. Speaking of the youth, one more question. Parallax 55.

I'm transitioning from teaching science to computer technology in my high school this year. And while I have some ideas, I'd love to get your guys' thoughts on some projects I could do with my students. We've got a bunch of Arduinos handy. and I also ordered some Raspberry Pi Zeros that just arrived. I have access to a suite of components, sensors, LEDs, and breadboards, but I'm fairly sure they won't allow us to solder anything in the classroom setting.

Also, projects that could be broken down and the components reused would certainly be a plus. You both seem to happily tool away at a number of projects, so I value any input you may have. So, okay, two things. One is that you can get... uh solderless breadboards but they're that are basically like breadboards that instead of having uh solder points they just have a bunch of holes that you jam jumper wires in with little pins on the end

And you can do those. You can get hats, solderless hats for Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and stuff like that. There's I want to say Adafruit or their blog that goes with Adafruit has a really great curriculum for. like starting out with arduino that starts with hey you you hook up to a breadboard here's how breadboard works by like doing a buzzer or an led or something like that and turning it on and off with a simple c program

The neat thing about Arduino stuff is it teaches you like it's a good way to learn C programming and the basics of stuff like loops and pointers and arrays and all that kind of business. And. You also get to learn how to do a little bit of electronic stuff. But it turns like hardware, it turns like changing the real world into a software problem, which is the, which is the, like, that's the key to using this stuff.

for me at least to learn how to do this stuff yeah like like manipulating something physical with software which is non-tangible yeah it's kind of a magical thing like so projects that i've done like i i started out by doing hey here's a flashy light that blinks every second and makes a buzz every second to sync and then that it turns out clock drift on arduino's is bad so i had to get a special

I had to get a crystal with a timing crystal on it to get more accurate time. And then I changed over to doing a clapboard style timer. And like if you have a project that you can escalate over a period of time, that's really good. If you have to tear everything down every week after the project, then you need a series of individual one-offs that you can then start from scratch and go on to the end. I also would investigate the soldering because it's worth teaching the kids how to solder.

You can do it with no lead exposure now, which is important. You want to use non-leaded solder with kids, especially, but everywhere, really. And you'd have to get like a few modes and stuff like that.

to or smoke filters or whatever um but but maybe that's more of a hey here's the class and then there's a club afterwards that does projects that go like i think i think there's a really interesting pairing that i've seen some folks do where they do the club which is the intro to and then for people who are interested in doing either their own projects under like an independent study site situation or longer longer projects that can't be done in an hour a day um then that's that's a

that's a good option for that kind of stuff too. Sure. I endorse everything you just said. One thing I might add, I'm definitely not going to go down the road of like, oh, Gen Z has no idea how to use, or Gen Alpha has no idea how to use traditional computers anymore, but it might be worth...

assessing the skill level of your students and like just teaching some basic modern computing skills at a really core level or maybe like a lot of the stuff you're describing here is very hardware centric like maybe getting a little more time in on the software end as well whether that's like exploring the nature of file systems or

I don't know. Help me out here. You get the kind of thing I'm talking about, though, right? And like just the basics of the underpinnings of an operating system and like the types of things that the average person doesn't really interface with so much anymore. Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about. about doing these kinds of projects is you have to learn how to, like you kind of have to learn how to do file structure stuff and some real basic stuff.

Sure. Um, just because your thing won't compile and you won't have a way to get it onto the, to burn it onto the, the Arduino otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe you'll do some of this in line with working with Arduinos. And if you've got raspberry pies, the lake.

Kind of Unix basics, maybe a little bit like kind of basics of the standard Unix shell and like kind of like how to build software. I mean, you definitely would do that with Arduino. Yeah. Like light, light coding type stuff. For me, the thing. The Arduino is, hey, I want a switch that's smart, right? You shouldn't, generally speaking, do a bunch of computing stuff on Arduinos. You can, but that's more advanced and more difficult. Generally, you want...

Hey, here's I want to monitor some condition and I want this thing to happen when this condition changes. And that's pretty straightforward. Right. But you'd be doing that on something like a Raspberry Pi or a PC, right? Well, no. So you'd be doing that on Arduino, but it's like. It's a little computer that has like a hall effect sensor that you like you want to make a if you want to trigger something that triggers when you open a door.

right yeah yeah no i know what the arduino is what i mean is like where are you writing the software for the arduino like you're not doing that on the arduino right now you're doing that on a computer and then that's what i mean What I meant is the development environment for the Arduino is going to be on a Pi or a PC or something, and so you'll probably get some shell experience and some writing and compiling software experience there in the course of doing that.

Kind of the way you start with Arduino generally is by writing these little sketches that are basically like C-esque programs. And you can invoke libraries and stuff like that. There's a really good argument for learning C by doing a series of escalating Arduino projects in the same way that like the farmer was replaced, teaches you Python by solving a series of like onscreen computer problems. It's the same basic idea.

When you want to do something that's more complicated that is like a server that runs some software, that's when you get into the Raspberry Pi stuff. generally much more complicated and a little more like you have to have a pretty good understanding of how to write software to do the raspberry pi stuff in my experience um now

The other interesting thing about Raspberry Pi, though, is there's a lot of off-the-shelf applications, stuff like Pi Holes and things like that, that you can run on a Raspberry. It's relatively easy to build a Raspberry Pi-powered emulation machine. and like that's an interesting that's an interesting electronics slash computing project like if you want to make a machine that plays donkey kong in the in your lab so like you know like there's there's a lot of different opportunities

The thing to look for, there's on the explore and learn tab on Adafruits on learn.adafruit.com. They have a ton of stuff, including a whole section for educators that runs you through. Like there's a bazillion lessons that you can use and, and there's, I can't find it out while we're recording, but there, if I recall, there was an escalation that's like, Hey, if you want to do an Arduino.

program. Here's 20 lessons for your weekly class for this, for a year's curriculum or whatever. That's cool. That sounds like a good resource. I started to say, I really wish I had been able to take this class. When I was in high school, although, frankly, I have to actually shout out like the level of computing education that I was able to get in this relatively small town public school system is like pretty shockingly good for the 80s and 90s. So we didn't have that.

No, Tennessee funded, funded slightly better than Arkansas. Yeah. Yikes. Okay. You were right there across the border, but it was like a world of difference, I guess. Yep. Yeah. We had a few. We had a few Apple IIEs in our grade school. We had one Apple IIE in our grade school. It was in the teacher's workroom where the mimeograph and the paper cutters were.

I got I annoyed my sixth or fifth grade teacher enough that he talked to the principal and the solution for getting me out of the classroom and telling him when he was fucking up science education. Was that I got to go fuck around on the computer for a couple hours twice a week. That's pretty good. It worked out. Wait, so that computer was just for teacher use officially? Teacher use only and also me sometimes.

Okay, we had a little lab of like 10 2Es or something that we shared. We got to go do like once every couple weeks or something. We had TI-99 4As in every classroom. Okay. So you would get to go play Hunt the Wumpus or Hangman if that was a reward for good behavior. Yeah. Granted, to be fair, this was when the Apple II was like over 10 years old by the time. Yeah. By the time I was old enough for that stuff. Yeah.

But then I had a programming class. We learned basic and Pascal when I was in 10th grade or something, I think. We had a Pascal class, but I did not. At that point, I evaluated whether I wanted to learn Pascal and it didn't seem super useful. If only I'm taking Fortran. Somebody's angry hearing you say that about Pascal. Sorry, Pascal people. Yes.

Anyway, shout out to shout out to computing educators and education. Stuff can be quite formative. Also, I learned to type on a gigantic ass like IBM Model M or what's the other one? Model F. Yeah. Like the one you could brain somebody with. That sounds nice. Our typing class had typewriters with no labels on the keys. Man. Oh, hey, they were just really testing your metal. I mean, we were pretty hardcore. Yeah. All right.

That's it for questions. I kind of could sit here and reminisce for another 10 minutes about my public school computing experience, but let's wrap it up there. I feel like we took, like I had a basic class in middle school. that the entirety of it was learning how to make a bitmap that was like a 16 by 16 bitmap man in basic that's pretty advanced that's cool and then drawing navigating a maze like to following following all the right walls but i think that's

Probably a little more advanced than what we did, which was like probably mostly building your like average text-based lemonade stand program. Oh, that seems right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

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I saw I saw a longtime somebody I used to play on the future U.S. back in the maximum PC days on our on our TF2 beer league clan. Okay. Uh, popped up in the discord the other day and I was very excited. That's fun. Yeah. It's very fun. Yeah. We, we had, we played in like a CPL feeder league, uh, five V five and seven V sevens.

That's a throwback. Yeah, but it was like it was very clearly a fun league, right? It was not like there was no chance we were going to go to any real tournaments, but it was fun. We played like twice a week and had practices and everything. What was CPL? Cyber Professional League? Cyber... Cyber... Is that right? Cyber Game Professional League, or yeah. What was the other one?

It was CPL and there was another one with an acronym at the same time. There was like the competing league. There were a bunch. The Angel Munoz one is with the other one, right? Yes, that's exactly the one I'm trying to think of. Oh no, Cyber Athlete Professional League. It was his. Oh, that was his? Okay. I don't remember what the other one was, though. It was a weird time. Everybody was trying to get in on that land grab of Proto Esports.

Just about 20 years ahead of their time. Who knew it was just going to take Blizzard owning everything with the Overwatch League. The only esports what matters. That'll do it for us this week. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week. As always, please consider the environment before printing this podcast.