302: The System Tray Is No Man's Land

Okay, I'm going to do podcast crossover here. I'm sorry. Wait, two weeks running? Yeah, but it's different. Okay. Well, first go find dual book diaries wherever fine podcasts are found. Second, yesterday over at PC world, we built in that teenage engineering free case, the plastic one that they gave away. Okay.

Friend of the show, Norman Chan, multiple time guests over here, managed to get an order of one of those. And he was like, I'm not going to do anything with this. Do you want it? And I was like, yes, I'll build a mini PC in that thing. Did he get the free one or did he get the $9 one? Well, there's a huge difference. Wait, what's the difference? One of them cost $9. Well, see, he said his cost $16 shipped.

Well, I mean, I'm being facetious, but like what they did, if I understood correctly, because I just saw this from the sidelines, I think they didn't they kind of like surprise drop this and say, hey, free PC case. But we're only doing next number. And it was a very small number. But then. Shortly after that, they were like, oh, by the way, we're going to sell these two. They're $9. So I'm just goofing about whether he got in on that free drop or not. I mean, it's $9. Who cares?

The one that we had had a big giant cardboard thing on the front that said this is a $9 PC case. Okay. Teenage engineering. Maybe he actually bought it then. But also. So they're the same case. It's just like one was like the test run and one is the real thing that they're actually going to sell. Yes, but the free one was very exclusive.

Well, I think he got the free one, but I'm not sure because I don't think the paid one is actually shipped yet. Anyway, maybe not. OK, I built in it yesterday. I built an ITX machine in there over on the PC World's YouTube channel. You can watch that. bearing the lead because the important thing out of all this is that we also got a little taste of selena gomez in that stream whoa yeah wait hang on yeah hi

I don't know how much further we can go down this road of phrasing it that way before this just gets weird. Look, all I'm saying is I went to Target. Okay. Because it's an exclusive partner. I'm not shopping at Target on the reg right now. We went to Target and they're the exclusive partner for Selena Gomez flavored Oreos. Sure, yes. Which are normal Oreos with also a cinnamon cream added to the normal interior goo. So just plain old chocolate.

wafers as usual yeah well i mean they have a cinnamon essence just because they've been next to this like yeah like they're quite good it infuses what i'm gonna say yeah yeah Okay. All right. You know, I could see, I could see Oreo with a tinge of cinnamon beyond like chocolate and cinnamon. Not normally a thing I think of going together, but that sounds okay. I like a little pinch of cinnamon in my hot chocolate sometimes. Okay, sure.

Yeah. Or a cinnamon, a cinnamon, like a spice cake, a chocolate spice cake will have some cinnamon nutmeg in there. Okay. But yeah, I will say. Apparently we missed I missed the other. This is the second celebrity Oreo crossover they've done as far as I know. Who was the first? So they had Post Malone flavored Oreos earlier this year. Yeah, I missed those, but they were salted caramel and also.

reported to be quite good that sounds pretty good yeah i like a salted caramel but the selena gomez ones are delish i'm a big fan i assume my understanding the post malone ones had artificially flavored these did not so i assume that these have Like actual, like there's, she's done something is all I can tell. Real ass cinnamon in there. Yeah. Or hair clippings or something. I don't know what the flavor is, but yeah, we're, we're there.

universally lauded the selena gomez flavored oreos can we get back to talking about pc cases yeah that so you want to you want to talk about the teenage engineering case sure It was much better than I expected. Is this thing made out of plastic? It is plastic. You fold and like there's a couple of places you have to cut, but mostly you just fold it up and snap it into place.

How sturdy are we talking? I don't think I can get the motherboard out of it that I put in there because it snaps into place in a way that I don't think I can get it off without breaking the case. Well, hey, for nine dollars, maybe you just break the case. I mean, but it's a collectible. You could probably order another one. Fair.

Welcome to Brad Will Made a TechPod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. I ended up bringing that machine home. I was going to try to use it as my stream machine. It's a 265K and a 860i860 motherboard. Man, sounds all right. It's fine. It's an Arrow Lake. It's Arrow Lake. Yeah. How was Arrow Lake doing? You know, it's worse than the other guy's CPUs, but it's still pretty good. Yeah. OK. Yeah. I was looking for something I've been I've been working on.

can i make the stream machine like how small can i make the stream machine because right now it's a mid tower and it's like it's in one of those old nzxt h5 510 maybe cases the small ones And it's big because it needed to have a full motherboard. So I need a slot for a capture card. Right. But I've also been testing USB C, you know, high speed capture cards, 10 gigabit capture cards.

I'm sorry, can I pause to be pedantic for just a moment? Yes, hi. I don't know that I love this phenomenon of referring to USB capture devices as capture cards. Okay, fair. That's fair. I'm actually not trying to be super pedantic. It's more confusing. Like when I hear it, my brain kind of short circuits. I'm like, wait a minute. Capture card. It's USB. Oh, you're just calling it a card. Well, so the interesting thing. So there's.

you know i'm i'm paying attention to the linux stuff these days and this is a prime place to put like a lts linux machine set up for me right because obs runs great on linux the weird thing is PCI Express internal capture cards really, really lightly supported on Linux. Really? Interesting. Yeah, like Blackmagic support is there, but the consumer stuff that's set up for gamers that can do gamer resolutions like 1440p.

Generally speaking, not very well supported. Really? The Zogato card that I have might not actually work. Really? The weird thing, though, is that the USB standard includes a video capture spec. Yeah. So the external boxes. Just plug them in and they work. Yeah. Are you talking about UVC? UVC. Exactly. It was a universal video connection. No, not unlimited vacation club. Google. Thank you, man. I wish I had an unlimited vacation club.

Uh, USB video class. I'm sorry. USB video device class. Ah, there you go. That's what that stands for. It's the same as a webcam. Yeah. Yes. That's the thing that makes a lot of USB webcams just work when you plug them in. So anyway. USB saves the day there. I guess so. Yeah. You know, I've thought about USB capture devices for a while now because I do give up a whole slot internally for my capture card. Mm hmm.

And I've really wondered if it's actually worth doing that versus just getting a USB one because they seem to be quite good these days. well so i'm testing those for i'm in the middle of testing those right now for pc world i have two or three of them here okay and i'm doing everything from like testing capture quality which really hard to compare it turns out because like

You know, even if you run the same video source through something, the output's different every time because of the way video compression works. Sure. I guess my thought there has just been like, you know, you avoid any potential like bus contention issues over USB by having the card. straight in the motherboard but how often is that actually going to be a problem these days probably not very yeah how much how much bus contention on usb do you have your 4k camera

Depends on how many devices you have plugged in and also how shitty your USB controller is, as I'd experienced on my last PC setup. Well, that's the that's the big issue anyway. yeah so i i it's that little teenage engineering machine because it's plastic it's really quiet like even with fans in it and everything it's like basically silent vibrations yeah no vibrations only good vibrations of course

You know what else is only good this month? What's that? Electronic mails. Oh, that's every month. I mean, I guess you could say every month is electronic mails month here at the TechPod. That's for sure. Last week of every month. Yep. If you have a question for us, you can send it to techpod at content.town. Again, that's techpod at content.town. We have a ripe crop this month. That's right. A bumper crop. We've said that many times. I got to come up with more.

I don't know. More metaphors for like cornucopia, smorgasbord. Metaphors. Bounty. Yeah. Probably use that one. Metaphors for lots of stuff. Ooh. What do you got? Accumulation. Okay. Yeah. We have an embarrassment of riches. We've done that one before. We have a backlog. We have a boatload. I haven't had a boatload of anything in a while. An abundance.

Did you have Bonanza when you were a kid? We have a Bonanza of electronic males. Oh, I think Bonanza was a local chain in Northeast Tennessee where I grew up. It was like Sizzler. It was that kind of situation. Yeah, I've never heard of that at all. Donkey Kong's favorite restaurant. The restaurants were always shaped like a barn. Okay. Yeah. What about inside? Looked like a barn.

Great. It was barn themed. It turns out you don't have that many barn themed restaurants really, really playing to the audience in that part of the country. Yeah. Like, look, and it wasn't, it wasn't like a classy red barn either. It was the kind of like.

Like, hey, you got some hemlock lumber that turned all gray and real looks like looks like if you just brush up against the side of the outside, you're going to get splinters. That's what Bonanza looked like. So anyway, yeah, let's open the open the email horde. Let's see what we got.

Let's dive in here. A horde. Yes, we have a horde of emails. Yeah, like dragons sitting upon a pile of gold. We roost atop our emails. Okay, I like this. I like the imagery this is evoking. Somebody will draw this now, and we don't need that. Okay, first email comes in from Simeon. This is a little problem that he has posed here that we are putting to the audience to see if anybody else has experienced this. So I've gone back and forth with him on this a lot, and I'm out of ideas.

Because you have not been able to replicate this. I can't replicate it locally. It's a problem specific to our podcast is real inside baseball. But I'm curious if anybody else uses the same stack. And yeah.

I shouldn't say this because A, I don't want to incriminate myself and B, I might actually just be dreaming this up, but I almost want to say somebody on the NextLander Discord said the same thing. About the tech pod or about the NextLander podcast? About a NextLander podcast. I could be wrong.

Oh boy. I could be wrong. Let's find out. You and I talked about this already. So, cause it came in a while ago. Okay. It might've just been this podcast then. Okay. I should actually read the thing we're talking about. Yeah. On the pocket cast web player, the tech pod only has left channel. The other podcasts I listen to aren't affected. Yeah. More information. They use the Brave browser primarily. Okay. And it works right in Firefox, but Brave, it's always left.

And they've tested it with multiple headphones, Bluetooth or wired on the direct link to the laptop and on a desktop. Same problem across the board. Okay. So. Curious if anyone else has experienced this, please write into techbot at content.town if you have, because like if we're doing something wrong with the audio on the podcast, I would like very much to know about it.

I don't see how that's possible. I mean, I encode a mono MP3 and upload it to Simplecast, and then they take over from there. Did you say it does work right in Firefox, though?

I'm not I didn't hear it in Firefox on Windows 11. I tested it with the Firefox on Windows 11. You said for them it works in Firefox, but not brave. They said they've been using Firefox as a workaround, but their everyday browser is brave. OK, I'm going to say I'm going to say if one browser does it right and the other is not.

The problem problem exists between browser and chair. So all of their other podcasts work fine. I wonder if the thing I wondered is if there's a hidden set, like a setting that used to be active where you could do balance on a per podcast basis.

And then they turned it off on the web version of pocket cast or something. So there's like a lingering cookie maybe anyway. Okay. I don't, I don't think it would have anything to do with our file though. Yeah, no, of course. But I'm always, I'm always, I'm always a little paranoid about that just in general. Cause like. like the famous example of the podcast that crashed head units in, I think Hondas or something. 99 P I did an episode about it years ago. Mazdas. Yeah.

Yeah. One, one character that the car's entertainment center didn't know how to deal with in the, yeah. And it just would hang the whole head unit every time you tried to play that podcast. Anyway. Computers. Yeah. I'll read the rest of Simeon's email here just to. Also, Will is right about letting smart TVs onto the internet. I use a Chromecast with my Hisense model, which is common here in the UK. I updated the firmware and the whole system is now fucked. CEC basically doesn't work anymore.

And now there is a stupid art mode, which cannot be turned off. I'm annoyed about it. Yeah. For folks who don't remember, get your TV working, update it when you get it, make it all work. And then the moment it works, cut it off from the internet forever. So my Hisense, which I'm actually coming up on, I think two weeks from now, will be two years since I got it, roughly. Recently, in the last, say, three to four or five months, has developed an issue where occasionally the sound will just stop.

Whoa. And I have to reboot the TV to get sound back. That's wild. So, yeah. Updating smart TVs. I don't know. I don't know. I might. I'm seriously thinking about I happen to look at the Mac Rumors Buyer's Guide. the other day as i sometimes do mistake yeah i dude i'm due for a refresh on practically all of my apple stuff short of like maybe laptop you got a phone a couple years ago right uh yeah i've got it i've got the um

third gen SE. I see. Yeah. So, but I heard that notch is all the rage these days. I might have to see what that's about. Kids love a notch. Yeah. But but I mean, like my iPad is like basically unsupported at this point, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, apparently a an Apple TV hardware refreshes is reportedly imminent. And I might thinking about maybe grabbing an Apple TV when they put out a new one.

It's funny, the one that's hooked up to the bedroom TV is an original 1080p model. And it's, I think, an A4 processor. Oh, that's pretty old. I feel a little pokey these days. And I was looking at swapping out, but I'm going to hold off and see.

Sounds like maybe later this year, they think. Makes sense. Anyway, I'm just thinking about getting the Apple TV and then just never thinking about the capabilities of that TV again. It's incredibly freeing. Yep. Yep. And all I have to do is give up one HDMI port. Mm-hmm.

All right. Here's a good email I thought from Beach Rave. For the person trying to teach a computer class, I suggest using old computers. They can be obtained for cheap or free, can still do useful things. and the kids can bang on them without destroying expensive equipment. Learning how to install and use Linux was a formative experience for me, and it teaches a lot of fundamentals for anything beyond using an iPad.

I think I might add to that that using older hardware might force you to... This thought is not fully formed. You have to go kind of minimal on older hardware. You would have to put a pretty minimal, say, Linux distro or other operating system on there. which might be a good way to teach some basics. Oh, yeah. You're not going to put like a full Windows 11 install on a much older computer, for example. Like it might be a good way to kind of teach from the ground up to have to.

I can see that go a little more minimal on old hardware to start. Well, and if you're doing other kinds of like computer learning, you could do like you could put something like Chrome OS Flex or something on it to do. Sure. Like web-based scratch or whatever coding. And then you're good to go. That's the kind of thing I was thinking. I thought that was a cool idea. Yeah, it's a neat idea. All right. Asmund from Norway.

I was lucky and got my hands on a 28-inch CRT that was about to be thrown out. Oh my God. It has RCA composite, S-video, RF, and SCART, and two big front-pointing speakers. You did get lucky. That's like all of them. I mean, obviously, you're going to get SCART TVs, but that's a banger. Short of component, but you don't really need component and SCART at the same time.

I was wondering about using it with a mister instead of using it with the different consoles I have in storage bins. Guessing my best option is to get a VGA to SCART cable, or is it better to use RCA or S-Video? We can just take these questions one at a time.

I guess that comes down to preference. I don't think I've ever actually seen SCART in person, so I can't speak from experience, but my immediate gut instinct would be, say, SCART, because back in the day when CRTs were new, I always wanted the sharpest, cleanest signal that the TV would support.

Um, but I actually, I know even people that are active as like very active in the retro game space that for example, prefer S video to SCART. Some people seem to think SCART is a little too clean, a little too sharp. You need a little muddy in there.

And then, of course, I mean, I think these people are crazy, but there are people who grew up with composite or RCA and actually prefer that look the best, you know, even though it is by far the fuzziest of all of those short of RF, which I don't think anybody should use. Well, I mean, I use RF because my TV only my one of my CRTs only supports RF. But for Mr. purposes, you can get the analog board and use the VGA to.

to discard adapters like there's they're readily available on the mr add-on site yeah now it is it's worth knowing you um You need a specific VGA discard cable to use with the mister. I forget what the exact, what the specifics are, but it needs a certain resistor in line on the cable to work right with the specific mister setup. Mr. Add-ons or any of Ultimate Mr. like any of those Mr. Vendors have the right SCART cable with the right resistor?

You're in Europe, so my guess is you're probably not going to buy from Mr. Add-ons because they're in North America, and that seems fraught right now. The standard spec has a VGA output, I believe, right? But the Mr. Add-ons new analog card... runs everything out through that saturn mini den uh 10 pin to to summarize mr add-ons has done kind of his own upgraded design to the io board yeah it requires a different cable but if you're getting like the reference mr analog

I.O. board design. I believe that standard VGA discard cable should work anyway. I don't own a Mr. Yet, but I'm wondering about getting one of the clones like the Mr. Pie. I think, I mean, the Mr. Pie seems perfectly fine if you can get a hold of one. Everybody that I have seen that has one seems to like it just fine. There's another company on AliExpress that is also making Mr. Clones like independent of the Mr. Pie outfit. You don't have any idea what I'm talking about, do you?

I stopped paying attention to what's going on on AliExpress because it's basically unattainable to those of us in the United States now. Oh, right. Yes, there is that QM tech. Yeah, that's what I thought. So QM tech is the other company that I fact, I think. Came out with clones for the Mr. Before Retro Remake, the Mr. Pie company did. So those are also out there. As far as I know, all the clones are just fine. Okay. But I can't say for sure.

Lastly, do you know if I could use a PlayStation snack adapter to get light guns to work with the CRT on the mister? The gun connects by the yellow RCA cable, so I can't use SCART, I guess, if I want to use a light gun. That is way outside of my wheelhouse. I looked around a little bit. on Reddit. See what I can find. Here's a random person who says, I use a GunCon 1 with a PlayStation snack adapter and a YC active encoder to hook the Mr. Up to a CRTV. That's all you need.

Oh, I would say I would say more research required there, but I believe it looks like tentatively you can use snack is the thing on the mister that lets you use original controllers, like plug in your actual controllers straight into the thing. Yeah, but my understanding is that like you can't use a zapper with the mister on the snack. Wait, you mean like the NES zapper? Like, yeah, the NES. You can't use like an NES zapper with a snack. Yeah, that may be true. It sounds like.

It sounds like what he's talking about for PlayStation light guns that would work, though. Anyway, sounds like everything he's talking about is possible. All right, next email, Tom from New Jersey. I've heard you discuss your ripped Blu-ray collections. I used to maintain a collection myself, but fell off for some time.

At the time, I used Handbrake and any DVD and was content. After a clean install of Windows, I realized I can no longer install and use any DVD, which has made Handbrake ineffective. What is your process for backing up your Blu-ray collection? So I don't... do a ton of black backing up anymore i don't know where you're at yeah that's what i was gonna say unfortunately at this point my process is that i don't i don't have a process i have to tell you getting a 4k tv

Kind of made it feel pointless to rip Blu-rays because... You're just all streaming services all the time? Well, it's... I mean, 1080p looks just fine on a 4K TV. Yeah, I was going to say, I can't really tell. But well, look, it's less the 4K and more of the HDR, honestly, like the HDR is nice. HDR is a way bigger of like perceptual difference than 4K. I mean, you can definitely tell the difference on a really nice 4K transfer, but.

it's it's it's it's feeling like the 1080p rips are suddenly obsolete and then also 4k discs are i don't want to own more 4k discs and those files are gigantic like i kind of just don't want to deal with it anymore they are really really large Yes. So I've fallen off hard from ripping discs in general and just have kind of been thinking about, I don't know. I'm not sure. Look at all those hard drives in your Plex server and thinking, you know, what if, what if I didn't?

I've kind of been thinking like maybe I bought too many hard drives to be perfectly frank. Oh, wow. But I know, right. But I was using make MKV and I believe you were as well back when I was doing a lot of ripping. I think that's like the de facto standard for.

ripping discs these days yeah so any dvd had um they they realized that they had a finite number of users and did some janky some some unfortunate like basically sunsetting of what should have been lifetime licenses a few about 10 years ago now 10 or 13 years ago and then they uh they did it again okay um make mkv is a single i think it's a single person that makes that it's um it's a really really phenomenal tool

that basically you load up a disk and it gives you the entire structure of the disk and you can pull out just the audio and video streams that you want. And then it dumps them all into an MKV file that you can then feed into Handbrake too. or you can just leave them in an uncompressed MKV and chuck them on your NAS if you want. Now, MKV had some problems too, because Mike, the guy that makes MKV, sometimes disappears for...

weeks or months at a time. Interesting. So I haven't used it in a few months, but it's got this interesting thing where it's technically still in beta. Like you can give him money for it, but it's in perpetual beta. It's always been in beta for years and years. And on the forums, there is a pinned post.

That says make MKV is free while in beta. And every two months the current beta expires. And you have to go on that forum post and grab another key. Yeah. And put it in the client because it won't run every two months. It basically says like this copy is expired and put a new beta key in. Maybe I think I might see where this is going. There have been times where for like a day or two, he hadn't posted the new beta key on the forums. And so nobody can use it for a couple of days.

So and the benefit of paying is that if you pay, then you get a key that's good forever. Yes. The now. So he didn't post the new beta key and also the store ran out of forever keys. Oh, so people kind of panicked for a minute.

Okay. But then he showed back up again and posted a beta key. It's good through the end of September. So we're back on the normal schedule. Everything seems to be cool. But then make MTV again. That is like that's that's that's that's a real XKCD like load bearing Jenga tower block.

situation of a whole lot of people rely very heavily on that software at this point. So there was a big giant thread in the make MKV subreddit that I found that was like, hey, what are you guys using instead of make MKV? And there were a bunch of bunch of people in there, but it is.

like it almost feels like we've gotten to the point where the tools to do the ripping it's such a pain in the butt to rip 4k discs at this point because you have to have specific drives with the right firmwares and like

There's a whole black market in people selling the right firmware on the right drives and optical drives are getting kind of hard to find now, too. Like not they're not like CRT level where they're not making them or anything anymore. But like the number of drives that you can rip. disks with is relatively low and none of them are shipping with the right firmwares on them anymore or or it's not guaranteed that you're gonna get the right firmware on the right drive anymore

So, like, you have to do some shenaniganry to make them work, and people are selling those drives. Sure enough, I'm looking on Amazon the... Oh, my God, you're right. There were never a ton of 4K Blu-ray drives for PCs anyway, in the first place. The internal LG BD ROM that I have, or actually it's writable. Yeah, it is a rewritable. No longer available.

Nor is the slightly more expensive upgraded model. I mean, it was like 50 bucks when I bought it in 2018, according to the Amazon page. It's now third party seller only for $155 and the other model is unavailable. Well, the Blu-rays weren't that hard, but the 4K Blu-rays were challenging always. So so anyway, so it's getting to a point where it's kind of hard to do. And.

Like, I actually think that the people who are, well, A, the pirates are just stripping DRM from the download services files or analog hold, like, you know. Running them through non HGCP monitors and capturing the feeds directly out of the playback video or something like that. I don't I don't know exactly how they're doing that. So it's it's again the situation where the people who buy the disks are going to get screwed and it's not going to impact the pirates at all.

So great. Good job, everyone. So, so I did that firmware flash you're talking about when I bought that $50 drive a few years ago. Yeah. And those, those drives like this, it's mine. Mine was an, um, it's an LG, LG WH-14 NS40. And so those basic Blu-ray drives actually could be upgraded by firmware to read 4K disks. So it was only like 50 bucks and like a little bit of your time to do the firmware flash to get a 4K reader.

But now that those drives are unavailable, suddenly that, yes, that has actually, I'm shocked to see that that has become. substantially more complicated now that these are not so easy to find and have gotten way more expensive. Well, when you look down the case aisle at Micro Center and there's only three cases that have five and a quarter inch external drive bays, you understand why there's not so many optical drives for sale anymore.

And now I kind of wish I had bought a backup. Well, I have three in my garage, so let me know if you need one. We're good. Sounds good. All right. Brian from near Seattle.

My biggest memory of Windows 95 is me in the dorms. I was starting my sophomore year at the University of Illinois, the birthplace of NCSA Mosaic. I was a student net tech. My job was going to other students' dorm rooms and getting them connected to Ethernet and the internet. The previous year, helping people do it via Windows 3.1.

And Trumpet Winsock or Windows for Workgroups 311 with TCP IP often had challenges. Wait, I have to stop this email for a second. Did Windows for Workgroups 311 ship with TCP IP? It had TCP IP, but you didn't have a dialer. Like you couldn't, you couldn't slip, you couldn't do the, you needed other software to get the terminal sign, a hyperterm or something. To actually connect to something. Yeah. Wild. I did not know that. When Windows 95 came out, it made TCP IP way easier.

I helped countless people get online. Oddly, I almost never saw a Windows 95 box or official CD. Everyone just somehow got it installed. That thankfully wasn't my concern. Did we talk about the... The pass key just being one, one, one, one, one, one, one. Yeah. We came to discover that. I don't know if that has to be an official thing. Cause I think these were like official legit ISOs we were downloading to use an 86 box, but like, or maybe somebody hacked the ISO. I had me as possible.

But the thing I read that off of said you can just use one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one to install Windows 95 or plus like all Windows 95 products or however it was phrased. Like they kind of implied that anybody could just do that. I don't know. I was a little confused, but. Anyway, that's that's cool. The people who did that at University of Tennessee, we didn't have wired dorms while I was there. But the kids who did that after they wired the dorms were literally the the.

Like they did. They did really. They were very kind to people because that seemed like a horrible job. Yeah. To go door to door in the dorms and hook people's stuff up. Especially on Windows 3.1. I can't imagine doing it on Windows 3.1. Sam writes in. I recently stumbled onto the concept of Cyberdex. This is essentially scratch building and enclosing a portable computer, usually in a cyberpunk fashion.

Just curious if you guys have ever heard of this, what your thoughts on it are, and would you want to do something like this yourselves? I'm just a tad bit curious, but I've never built a PC, let alone a faux laptop. My understanding of the Cyber Deck is it's like... I don't know. Imagine like the Henry Rollins character from Johnny Mnemonic, for example. It's like, imagine it's like, wait, are you saying you are him? No, I'm just saying you keep imagining. Go on. Okay.

It's like it's like what he would roll around, like with that hanging off of his belt or something or like attached to like the chain on his belt loop or whatever. It's like your little it's like your little portable cyber hacking terminal that you would like.

plug into the local ATM to hack money out of it or you know what I mean it's like like there's a cyberdeck subreddit you can go see what these things look like but people are basically just like making little mini computers look as like cool and compact and cyber as possible So this is a concept directly lifted from William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy. Yeah, I believe that. The Ono Sendai decks were the desirable ones. Somebody made a Sandbenders, I believe, was the...

the one that the hero used. I can't remember. I should really read Neuromancer. You should really read Neuromancer. But yeah, so people build them like in the old days, people would build these as. Kind of cosplay props for people who want to dress up like like cow console cowboys, I think is what we called them back in the 80s. Sure.

but now because socs have gotten really small and you can buy screens and tiny keyboards and all this stuff people are building actual functional computers either off raspberry pies or other similar socs and making these things functional, real computers that you can plug into the network and do all sorts of stuff. They're really cool.

Man, there are some really fucking cool designs on this subreddit. Like a lot of them are just kind of hacked and cobbled together. But like some of these look like there have been actual like injection molding or at least 3D printing done on some. Bespoke cases like that one I just sent you. That's got two screens on it. It looks like a prop out of a movie. Like that's pretty rad. I should, I might, I might just make this the show hard.

The one, um, there's a bunch, there's a, there's a bunch of people that actually sell this stuff to sell kits for these that are like 3d printed, 3d printed, uh, frames for pies and other, uh, microcontrollers, uh, carbon computers.us.

does a bunch of them i've never actually bought anything from them but they've been around for ages and do like runs of um like like uh nice resin printed uh cases they look like real made things yeah and they have both like sandwich style like 90s style pdas like like those old casio pdas that would flip open or sharp pdas would flip open

And then also more kind of slate style designs. And they're kind of cool. Like, honestly, kind of that dolphin that that hacker, the dolphin hacker thing is kind of fits in this category, too, if you ask me. Right. Like the the the dolphin flipper.

Oh, Flipper Zero? Flipper Zero, yeah. Yeah, although that thing, I always feel like I'm going to get arrested if I have one of those and use it for something. I mean, I'm going to go ahead and tell you, it's how they're stealing a lot of cars with them these days. Really? Yeah, because you can clone people's radio signal when they lock and unlock their car. So you have to, I was going to say, do you have to be waiting in the bushes basically to capture the signal when they use it?

Um, my understanding is that depending on the car and the range and where you put your keys in your house, they can stand outside your front door and catch your, your beep. And yeah, anyway, it's, yeah, that's intense. Can you even get cars with like physical keys anymore? They all have physical keys. Do they? Yeah. Oh, like my car has a physical key. You just have to pop open a thing to get to it. Okay. Yeah. I might stick to that. It seems like a real pain in the butt.

Also, all you need to pop most car doors is a pretty good sized screwdriver and enough torque to just force it open. Well, yeah. I guess we're all boned then. Locks are just, you know, locks are not for security. They're for disincentivizing. All right. Neurotica.

At the most basic level, I understand that when I'm playing on xCloud or GeForce Now or whatever, I'm remoting into some kind of virtual machine on a server rack somewhere. My question is more related to the differences in quality that I see between these services and what impacts that. For example, if I load up the xCloud Game Pass version of Avowed, there is that classic streaming haze and streaming artifacts, etc. But the GeForce Now version, also through Game Pass, seems like it's local.

Caveats for this example, same device accessing both services, which is a Steam Deck, same internet speed. I would, I, you know, I assume that comes down to various codec and video compression settings they're using, like probably some streaming protocol stuff plays into that in some way as well, but it's probably primarily video compression, I had to guess.

Well, yeah, so there's I did some research on this this afternoon. I was looking looking in to see if anybody's posted like white papers or anything explaining how their stuff works. and it's all super proprietary and no one shared anything that's that's what i figured i know that google specifically when they were doing stadia wrote a whole new video codex specifically for low latency video streaming and compression yeah i believe that um i also know that the

For a while, when Microsoft started the XCloud stuff, my understanding was that they just had a whole bunch of Xbox Ones in racks in a data center someplace and were connecting people to those remotely. And I'm sure that that's not the case anymore, that they're... time you know they're doing the thing where they have multi gpu uh you know normal rack mount machines that they're time slicing cpus and you know giving one gpu or a slice of a gpu

to each of the Xcode clients. I do know that when you upload your game to Microsoft, you're not. there's not a separate xCloud version, right? So they're using the same package that you use for local play on a normal Xbox on xCloud. But the TLDR on this question is that there's a lot of variability in bit rates and compression settings and codecs that you use and the way they compress.

the balance of quality to latency to speed is going to vary wildly based on your distance to the data center and the connection you get on a given day and what their load is like on any given day. Yeah. Because like there are days that.

GeForce now is just like doesn't accept new connections right when they're really busy and under high load. So, yeah, I guess I'm not surprised to hear the GeForce now is better quality considering all the work NVIDIA has done on the NVENC. It makes sense. Real time. compression for streaming in their cards so they've got a lot of institutional knowledge there low latency high quality streaming is part of part of is it turns out it's funny because when vr stuff started and we were

You know, we were looking at the latency on any kind of HD, HD, H two 64 compression in 2015, 2016. It was so high. You couldn't do like live stream video. with head tracking because it was it lagged too much and people got immediately motion sick sure and the the the difference in compression times per frame over the last 10 years is like once there was a use case for lower compression time per frame.

people started focusing on that and now the now that's fractions of a you know 10 10 12 milliseconds in some cases yeah there's been a tremendous amount of work on that stuff and like you said a lot of it is proprietary like um remember mixer yeah Like Mixer had its own streaming protocol called FTL before they got shut down. Like I know Parsec, if you've ever used Parsec, like they also have their own. I think they have the bud protocol.

Yep. If I'm not mistaken, like all these companies basically, like you said, are kind of writing their own stack for this stuff. So there's a lot of competition in that space. Yeah. And it's all super proprietary and they don't ever talk about it. Yeah. Seems like. Understandably so.

Wash in the wind. I guess you could kind of maybe PS this one off the back of that one is 95 email. This is all caps. Talk about bonsai, buddy. Do you know what Bonsai Buddy was, Brad? Yes, it was a little delightful little purple ape that promised you a prize if you were only to click.

a few hundred times i i can't remember exactly how he would do things for you i never clicked that stupid thing but no wait no it was something you installed right you installed it it was malware i think later it became like a lot of like banner display ads right I think it replaced ads. I think the way it was malware was it replaced ads on your desktop. The guy who made it, the Bonsai system team, rather, it was created by a pair of brothers named Joe and Jay Bonsai.

And it would share jokes and facts, manage downloads, sing songs and talk among other functions. But it was based on the Microsoft agent technology that was originally built for Clippy. Yeah, OK, I was going to say this. I was just imagining a giant paperclip here instead of a purple ape. Yeah, so there was a lot. It's funny. There was kind of a lot of stuff like this that designed that was designed to make computers easier to use, but actually just annoyed you.

And a couple people were talking about Banzai Buddy in a stream I was in the other day, and I wanted to make sure that we talked about Banzai Buddy because... He's a little purple ape, which was his look. And apparently they were sued and fined and all kinds of stuff over the invasiveness of that software. Turns out malware and spyware in the early 2000s is very popular.

It was the Wild West. Yep. All right. Last email before we move on to some Discord questions. From Tommy Tank. I asked this on the Discord. But this is about a previous user, to be clear. This is about a size, presumably a separate user. This is not the same user with a different username, I don't think. But this is about a different frequent questioner on these episodes.

I asked on the Discord, but does Brad know a tactical tug they've sent multiple emails into you means to wank sneakily? Please put my mind at ease and that Brad is just a naive and innocent lad. Okay. I thought that this was some sort of military tugboat. I also. Yeah. You and I talked about this beforehand and we both immediately agreed. We had both visualized a tugboat every time we read that username.

This is one of those classic, hey, thongs mean a different thing in Australia than they do in the United States. Yeah, I've never heard this phrase before in my life. So apologies to all of our... I'm guessing English or Australian or maybe New Zealand listeners for whom we've been reading a wildly inappropriate username for the years. It's maybe lightly. Mildly inappropriate. Yeah. OK. I don't know.

Thanks. Thanks for letting us know. Yeah. Here's a here. All right. Discord questions. Here is a kind of companion question to that earlier question about ripping discs from Narfinger. What do you do with old DVDs that you don't want anymore? Looking on the used market, DVDs are worthless. I would donate those things to a library. So I disagree with the idea that used DVDs are worthless. Okay, go on.

The DVD era represented in many ways the high water mark for bonus features and extra stuff. True. That's actually a pretty good point. Like DVD commentaries are unmatched. The Blu-ray era, we still saw some, but like a lot of those are only distributed on different DVDs. As an example, there are a couple of movies that I have like two or three different versions of on DVD.

uh that i got for pennies on the dollar because of like a commentary by a specific person or people um so yeah like like for example The Criterion edition of Armageddon has a commentary with Ben Affleck where he is just absolutely shit-faced. And just describing everything that happens on the screen. It is very, very good. You know, I've heard about that, actually. I think that's pretty legendary. I should probably check that out. It's an all-timer. But yeah.

The thing I haven't done, which I should do, is probably go out and pull the commentary tracks from the old DVD rips and then re-sync them with the other ones. That's exactly what I was going to recommend. But it just seems like a huge pain in the ass and I'm not going to bother. It's not that hard. The thing I have done so I don't have a bazillion jewel cases around is I've pulled all of the disks out of old jewel cases and I have them in like like hanging files basically for disks.

I did that for Xbox 360 games and PS2 games, PS3 games, and all the old games are in that category, too. Yes, I did the same thing with. I have dozens of old music CDs that I did the same thing with. They're all in a giant case logic. uh binder with all the liner notes just kind of shoved in the front now yep yep um but if you really don't want those discs like i said like see if your local library will take them because a lot of people will still watch dvds yeah it turns out

My library rents, it loans a ton of DVDs out all the time. Yeah, I believe it. SFPL, I always call it SFPL. SF Public Library also still has like huge shelves full of DVDs. Yeah. And Switch games, apparently. When I was in the San Francisco library the other day. Interesting. Yeah. I know that. Also, I think we've talked about this before, but for people who live in California, at least like get library cards every time you go to another city. Yeah.

Um, LA, but do you have to, you have to physically be there. You have to physically be there in person. I think for most of them, but like Sacramento and LA have ridiculous ebook collections. Really? Yeah. Dude, next time I am in LA, I am totally going to the public library. Yeah.

Libraries are cool, man. Signing up for that while libraries still exist. It means that when I hit a library hold on Libby, then I usually get the book that it's like, hey, it's going to take three weeks for this one. I usually get in like four days. I'm reading Mike Drucker's. Mike Drucker's good game. Well played his kind of memoir. Yeah. And I literally was like, hey, you're going to this is going to be 23 days at my.

San Mateo County Library. And then three days later, I got a note that was like, hey, we found this earlier for you and blah, blah, blah. Wait, can Libby just cross-reference multiple libraries that you have memberships at and just give it to you from whichever one is up first? When you search, it tells you which one's going to be first.

then sometimes you get a notification that's like, Hey, we can get this earlier here. Do you want this? That's pretty rad. It's pretty rad. I know that. Yeah. A question from fishy J prefixes or suffixes. Oh, it's a broad question. Man, that's tough. Yeah. Where does your mind go when you hear that question? Well, prefixes, I think about pre as a prefix. Okay. And suffixes, I think about es as a suffix. Yeah, that's, you know, that's quite literal. So like.

It's hard to say, right? Yeah. I mean, my my computer brain, I immediately go to like, you know, Internet protocols and. I'm trying to think, like, what comes immediately to mind is, like, in the open source world, like, lib is a very common prefix, you know? Lib retro, lib... shit out there are 10 bajillion of them and now I can't think of any of them like libpgp or you know like it's short for library right like libc you know for example this is the standard c library like

And the suffix that comes to mind is D. D is what? As in demon. Oh, as in like, you know, I mean, system D is the infamous example now, but I'm trying to think like there, I think there's probably like mail D or journal D or I'm trying to think of anything that ends with a D means it's like a background server process type thing. And that's cool.

i was thinking about file name extensions like as a suffix like you know it's very descriptive right indeed um but then for prefixes i think about like classes when you're writing like python like little functions or something and like you want those you want those prefixes those prefixes are really important because it's how you keep everything organized so

I'm going to go with prefixes because you know what suffixes don't help with? What's that? Type ahead. Tab completion. I guess that's true, actually. Yeah, so suffix is useless for tab completion. But prefixes, vital. You have to use like regular expressions or something to make the suffix work for that sort of thing. I'm never going to do that. No.

Nope. I'm never going to learn how to use regular expressions. I'm looking at what D's I have running on my NAS right now, but they're mostly all components of system D. So that's like kind of boring. Resolve D, system D, network D, login D, Udev D. Never thought you were going to list all of the Ds. Yep. Well, here we are. Avahi DNS ConfD. There's a lot of Ds in there. Oh, that's a pretty good one. Yeah. Yep. Anyway.

PatMac 19, which I wouldn't have known how to pronounce if they hadn't included a handy pronunciation guide here. What is the default pickle relish? Ew. Ew. The other said dill relishes the default. Everyone agreed the menu should have said what kind of relish it was. Okay. I went to the baseball game last night. Okay.

and uh i got a i got a hot dog i brought bratwurst i guess technically as one does all right and they asked me what i wanted on it and i said relish and mustard they said oh no we only have onions and peppers that are grilled or sauerkraut i was like okay give me both of those because that sounds great now my take on this is that the default relish depends on what you're eating so a hot dog default relish definitely sweet relish

Really? But a burger default relish has to be dill. It's too much sweet for a burger. I don't know if I agree about the sweet relish on a hot dog, though. What? I don't know. Sweet, sweet, like...

If you say, hey, I want a hot dog with relish and you don't specify dill relish, it's going to be sweet relish. Ninety nine percent of the time. I guess I guess you're right. I'm not saying I'm not talking about what's common. I'm talking about what I like. Oh, I like dill relish across the board better than sweet relish. Yes. A hundred percent. Extreme same.

But I'm the only one in this house that feels that way. Really? I live in a sad world of sweet. If I want dill pickles on a hot dog, I've got to slice up a couple of dill pickle spears. Yeah, I get it. Which is a fine way to do it. I kind of grew up not liking sweet pickles of any kind. Honestly, my mom made sweet pickles that were real good. I mean, they can be very good. Don't get me wrong. But like I was pretty much all deal all the time in our house. See, we were all.

sweet and sour like burgers would be a jar of mom's pickles and they'd be sweet sweet and sour pickles on a on a burger which is pretty good interesting pretty good thing all right i mean i can i can see the sweet relish on a hot dog if you have enough tart to cut it with

Mustard. Mustard carries it out, right? Yeah, onions and mustard. And I've become very partial to the Chicago hot dog. Chicago hot dog is a god to your hot dog as far as I'm concerned. You tell me if I'm betraying our roots, but. No. Well, chili dog always. Yeah. I mean, okay. Yeah, sure. The chili dog is on the eternal pantheon. Yeah. God to your hot dog. But the Chicago dog is pretty good. Chicago dog for people who don't know.

is like a slice of tomato some pickles some pickled peppers that nuclear mint green relish usually it's a poppy seed bun and then mustard yep it's very good now like a salad So, Brad, next time we're down south, we need to go to Wiener. What we need to do is we need to go to Micro Center and Wiener Schnitzel. Okay. That sounds like a day. Wiener Schnitzel, they do two hot dogs and you can get one Chicago and one chili dog. Wait, what? Yeah.

Yeah, it's it's they don't do the poppy seed buns and their relish isn't as green as I like for a real Chicago dog, but it's OK. I've never been to a Wienerschnitzel before, so maybe we should fix that. Yeah. What is.

What would you say is the quality of a Wienerschnitzel? Like, can you compare it to a different fast food restaurant in terms of like, are we talking like cleanliness? Yeah. Cleanliness, like quality of ingredients, you know, is this should, is this a question I'm better off not asking?

No, I like, I think Wiener schnitzel it's Taco Bell. I think better than your normal Taco Bell probably. Okay. Because it's also a tasty for like Wiener schnitzel are also tasty freezes usually. Okay. So it's like. It's I would say it's generally cleaner than a Dairy Queen. All right. If that gives you anything kind of like not as good as like you're you're in and out or you're five guys. You're kind of fancy.

but better than a Carl's Jr. usually. Okay. They're usually clean. All right. That sounds good. I don't know. I mean, I would have gone regardless. I was just curious. I mean, they're selling hot dogs, but I think that they, I think they give you an all beef option on the hot dog. I think you can choose. Yeah, original premium beef or Polish is your hot dog choice. OK, we should we should make an afternoon out of this sometime. Yeah, I'll go down there. All right. Question from Wesley.

I hate when website login buttons open a new tab for the login screen. Why would they do that? What possible benefit could it provide? Anyway, what small web or computer thing makes you irrationally angry? Yeah, like... hey, let's have a pop-up window that doesn't have a bar so you can't use your password manager to log in easily. Those people just rot in hell. It's the worst thing you can do. Agreed. I hate...

I hate when you install Windows. There's a lot I don't like about the Windows installer these days. I hate that you have to jump through hoops to get a local account made. That makes me a little bit crazy. But what I really hate is that every time Windows doesn't install, it dumps four partitions on the drive that it touches. Yep.

And if you need to reinstall Windows and you want to delete those four partitions, it's like click and then wait a minute and then click and then wait a minute and then click and then wait a minute and click and wait a minute. You can't just say, hey, wipe this entire drive. I got it. I got a tip for you. Oh, what's your tip? You're going to be very excited here.

Okay. Okay. Open. Well, hang on. Do you have to do this from outside of Windows? What are you doing? This is during the install process for Windows. Oh, right. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Okay. In that case. You would have to do this from within Windows, so actually this would not save you any time because you're in the installer at that point. Well, and you can't do it from the disk management panel because the recovery partitions and stuff are protected. Right.

Right. I was going to recommend the command line utility disk part. I love disk part. Okay. Big fan. You literally just select the right disk and disk part and then just run clean and it'll wipe the partition table. I guess you could hit shift F10, open up the terminal.

Before you get to the partitioning page. I bet you can do that thing. Yeah. But you could just wipe that thing. Yeah. Right out of existence. Just wipe that thing. Weird that a lot of our complaints seem to be windows related lately. I fucking hate Windows taking away features like Windows 11 took away like half a dozen little UI tricks that I relied on. Yep. Now I'm already forgetting what some of them were because it's been several months. It's been like a year or more now.

They're just gone. Like a lot of little window management stuff has vanished that was in Windows 10. They made a change recently where I use virtual desktops a lot. And it used to be that if you were on a virtual desktop and you didn't have an app running, like File Explorer is the one that I always run into. If the app was not running on that desktop and you clicked it on the taskbar, it would just launch a new window of it. Yep, that's great.

Now, if you have File Explorer running on any other virtual desktop and you click that bare File Explorer, now we will transition you to the desktop where you already have File Explorer open and raise that window instead. What's the point of having virtual desktops? Yeah, right. What the fuck are you doing? These are supposed to be isolated workspaces. I want to launch this thing in the workspace that I'm in. I go back to a different workspace that I'm very intentionally not using right now.

I had a good one today. I've reached a point with the Linux desktop on the laptop that when I'm using my Windows machine, it feels like I'm going back in time. Great. Okay. You're doing it. I'm getting there. All right. Today, I plugged in another monitor. And so I had three monitors. I wanted to mirror one of them because it's actually the monitor is a capture card. It doesn't matter. The point is I plug this in. I set it up. And when it did the duping.

It put the display panel on a monitor and it set the monitors diagonally. touching at the corner so you couldn't move the cursor from one monitor to the other except through a very tight window through the corner no window not even through the corner wow i couldn't figure out how to get the cursor to the other monitor. And every time it switched resolutions, it moved that back to the monitor that was inaccessible.

And I was like, this is like, this is a Kafkaesque nightmare. I'm just imagining Yakety Sax playing while you're trying to navigate this. It literally took me 20 minutes. Like I was sitting here. The way I ended up fixing it was I was able to. highlight the display settings panel on my main monitor, the one that I could access, right click it and go to the move setting.

And then move it with the cursor one notch and then wiggle the mouse. And then that locked my mouse cursor to the monitor that was otherwise inaccessible. But so then I could move the arrangement of the monitors. So it worked and hit the keep keep it on this monitor button. But it was ridiculous. It was like.

Yeah. And I didn't like why it ended up diagonal. No idea. Super weird. Good stuff. I just remember Windows is my answer. Windows. Yes. I just I just remembered one of those features they took away from Windows 10. You used to be able to shift right click an application in the taskbar.

That doesn't work anymore? Well, no. So they, well, there is a different menu that pops up now, but it's a useless, it's the same menu you get anyway, basically. It used to, they used to have a command array, an option on that menu where if you have multiple windows open for a given application.

If you shift right clicked, you could just minimize all those windows and then you could restore them back to their previous positions with another click. And they have completely just done away with that option. One of my favorite KDE things, speaking of Linux.

Is the pull all the windows onto this monitor. Uh-huh. Like you can just bind a keyboard shortcut to that. Okay. Which is incredibly useful. Yep. Really good. Weird how letting you customize the way you use your software somehow makes it more useful. Sometimes it's a bit much. If you'd like to hear about that, you can go listen to the dual boot diaries. Yes. All right. Desmo double O one has a question that is a good follow up to that question.

So, like, inconsistent... Tray icon behavior is another one for me for sure. Like having to remember what needs a double click, what needs a single click, what I need to right click on to do anything useful with, you know, like which applications minimize to the tray, which ones don't, you know. Like the tray, the tray is no man's land. Well, yeah, this is what happens when you don't have somebody at like the OS headquarters.

saying here are the rules for for accessing this and if you want to be on our platform you have to follow these rules or else standards um I just realized this question made me realize that I never click. I never left click stuff in the tray. I always right click. Interesting. So then I go straight to a context menu that lets me open things automatically.

Hey, I have another annoying thing. Go on. I don't like hardware that installs the drivers for you, whether you want it to or not. So, for example, at PC World, one of the things that we use on the we have a razor mouse on the bench. That no matter if you plug it into a computer, it's going to install some razor software, whether you want it to or not. What the fuck? Yeah. What is the mechanism that's triggering that? I think it has a USB autoplay, but I don't know for sure.

um the the inverse of this is something i quite like is asus now is dumping driver hub the same way they used to do arm recreate and my asus okay and that driver hub thing if you haven't used it before is basically like the intel driver manager the old one in that it's just a little tiny front end that takes you to a web page there's no heavy application running

i mean it will install norton and a bunch of other nonsense if you click the wrong button but it also will do just your driver updates and like me firmware and all that stuff if you if you need that so sounds like an improvement um so that's pretty good but

Like, hey, I don't want my mouse driver ever to install automatically a bunch of nonsense. I'm looking at you, Razer Chroma Hub, which is turning on a bunch of razor garbage in my tray. You talk about ways to convince me to never buy a razor product you have just done. So.

Yeah. No, thank you. Squibworth has a good question here. How often do you clean your keyboards, like just wiping down the tops of the keys or doing a deep clean by popping the keys off, cleaning them and getting everything underneath? I have my handy dandy keyboard cleaning brush right here. Oh, I need to get one of those. And every time I look down, I'm like, oh, there's dust or cruft or like beard or whatever in the gaps of my keyboard. Dander.

yeah dander like i it gets a wipe um i do the keys i have white key caps so when i look down and i'm like oh yeah there's some stuff on there i pop them off and chuck them in the in the old ultrasonic cleaner for a few minutes and yeah blast all the gunk off does that uh does that keyboard brush get down like deeply in between the keys or is that just for the like exposed areas where so on my drop control i bought the one without the edges

Like it's just a, it's just a flat surface with this keys sticking out of it. I can't remember what they call those, but it doesn't have like, it doesn't have, there's no kind of like bezel around the keys, right? Mine is the same way.

yeah like it's like it's like keys all the way to the edges of the keyboard right exactly well and and there's no like rim around the edges of the keys on the edge of the keyboard so there's it's just one plane and then there's switches and then the the caps on top of that so

i bought that specifically because i can get down in between the keycaps and and there's some place for the stuff to go when i brush it off oh okay um i i and if i take the keycaps off it's it's a piece of cake to get that in between sure But then when I take the key caps off, I usually get in with rubbing alcohol and some Q-tips and do like clean off the areas that aren't normally visible underneath the key caps.

I am coming up on a year since I switched to a mechanical keyboard, so I have an answer for this question too. Yeah, how long has it been since you cleaned your mechanical keyboard, Brad? About six months. Okay. I got a Keychron K5 Max, which I quite like a lot. It's a good keyboard. Yeah, I've enjoyed it quite a bit. About six months after I got it, I went and bought a second set of keys because I just wanted to change it up a little bit. That's the benefit.

The aesthetic quality of the mechanical keyboard, it turns out, is somewhat appealing. Anyway, I think I'm feeling like six months is like a good interval for me. I don't know. Is that gross? I mean, this is why I bought the white keycaps, honestly, so I can tell. Mine are all dark, so I don't know. The set that came with it is like the stock Keychron gray.

Yeah. With a couple of orange accents. And the ones I got are actually like a deep navy blue. So they're even harder to see if they're grimy. But maybe I'm better off not knowing. I'm going to take a picture of my keycaps and I'm going to send it to you in Discord. And you can tell me. I'll give you the.

esdf asdw whatever so you can see like the the heavy traffic yeah the the the deep business i don't think it's that bad uh it seems actually pretty good to me if i'm being honest okay and i did the last i i could probably cross cross reference blue sky because i think every time i take the keycaps off and dump them in the the the ultrasonic cleaner which i think you can't use that if you have double shot caps if you have like like specific yeah

certain certain types of like key printings will come off right if you if you um a if there's stick on labels which like fancy keyboards wouldn't have i guess but if you have like like um uh the decal labels on an old on an old style keyboard it'll they'll come off

and if you have double shot keycaps where there's literally two sets of injections if there's any voids the ultrasonic uh uh cleaner can make the those voids get bigger and can cause them to separate oh that's not just obviously not desirable yeah I just I just when I bought this second set, I just checked the first set in a bowl with some dish soap and just kind of that'll that'll work agitated manually. The ultrasonic cleaner does a really great job, but, you know, be careful, I guess.

So this looks yellow because of the light, but... I think the caps are clean. I don't see any finger gunk. Those look too bad. I don't eat a whole lot at my computer. They all look off white. Are they supposed to look that way? They are. I mean, that's the light that you're sitting at.

It needs to be white balance. That's acceptable. That's that's that's just on this side of acceptable. I'm going to say, yeah, like this, the C and the F, there's a little bit of dust on the sides is what I'm seeing in the in the close up. And yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's probably getting close to time, let's say. All right. Oh, OK. I'm glad you flagged this email because I heard this question because I wasn't going to, but I wanted to hear about it from plant a plant. For will.

I remember when the Maximum PC No BS podcast number 100 hit, where you went with a musical format. I thought it was pretty funny and special, then I realized a bunch of people hated it. Can you go into more detail into how that planning went, how the team came up with that idea and the whole recording process? It must have been really funny having a bunch of nerds singing their way through a musical podcast. Thanks for all these years of information and laughs.

So at that point, Kat Auk, who is Dan Amrick of Paloswap Ninja's partner, was one of our art directors. And Dan Amrick was working at OXM just across the hall. This must have been a while ago. So, yeah, this was in 2009, probably. It was 50. It was 100 episodes. It was 2008 or 2009, probably. Um, and I, I, at some point somebody said something stupid, like, man, it would be really funny if we did a musical episode for the hundredth, a hundredth.

episode of the magazine and it's the kind of thing that normally you say and it's like a one-off and then like nobody ever thinks about it again but sometimes like things go in the wormhole. And so for folks who don't know, Dan and Kat and Palette Swap Ninja is a partnership. They do the Dan and his friend Jude started Palette Swap Ninja and they do like Weird Al style parody.

Video game songs. But then a few years ago, they did a Sgt. Pepper Star Wars crossover called Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Got it. And they rewrote all of the songs from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to tell the story of Star Wars. It's a lot. It's really good. Like they spent an incredible amount of time on it. They actually did a full live recording at Berkeley at the symphony.

with an orchestra and the whole thing. Like it's, it's, it's, uh, it's very good and very stupid, like in the best possible way. But Kat was like, Oh, if you guys want to do a musical episode, did you like Dan and I help write the songs? And suddenly the hard part was done. Okay, sure. So we did like a rock opera version of one of our interns or associate editors needing to buy a new computer.

okay like his quest to get a new computer because the computer sucked okay and we pulled a bunch of people in to help with it and we did like six songs or something and uh then we fucked up the backing track and posted it with the wrong the backing track for the wrong key for like half of the songs because we had multiple versions of the backing track that went out live and it went out and also

I don't know if you know, sometimes computer nerds are fairly humorless, so they didn't get the joke. Sure. Okay. And they were like, why if I wanted to hear people sing badly, I could just go listen to myself in the shower. We're like, well, fair, but. Sometimes you swing and you miss. Sometimes you swing and you hit. I still think it was funny. It was very funny. The high point. Nathan Edwards of The Verge these days.

did a really he he took on the scariest part because he's saying some he's saying bohemian rhapsody basically wow um and then veronica belmont of um of uh revision three and cnet i think Fame. And also she does a science fiction podcast called science fiction fantasy podcast with Tom Merritt called. Oh, God, I can't remember. Robot.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. It looks like she was a techzilla at the time because I have found this podcast on archive.org. She was at techzilla and was doing was was also working for PS the PS4 digital thing that we made at future called core. Um, but, uh, yeah, she's saying, she's saying a, uh, uh, the song from the end of portal, uh, a version of that. Okay. Yeah. Here's the talents of Dan Amory, Cadock, Captain Spaulding, Norman Chan, Nathan Edwards, Gordon Mong.

Yeah. Will Smith, Jeremy Williams, and very special guests. Hexhill is Veronica. I need to hear Gordon sing. Gordon didn't sing. He did not? No. He's spoken word. Spoken word. Gordon seems more like a spoken word kind of guy. Look, it started as a normal podcast that broke into song. It was high concept. Yeah. I clicked play on this after I found it. And then you were talking in my ears while you were talking in my ears. And that'll happen.

That was not something I could deal with. So I have not. Could you hear the miles? I have not listened to this yet. Did I sound fresh faced and young? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's fun. I will put that in the show notes. People, people need to know.

I had no idea that you guys had done that. That's pretty wild. It was, I mean, look, it was a different time. It was before Serial came out. By this point, podcasts had already had one big boom cycle and we're already failing again. Like people at the company were yelling at us to stop wasting our time with podcasts. So you'd never be able to monetize. That is. Yep. That is. That is the common experience of doing a podcast in the late 2000s. And also we when we posted in the wrong key.

I was afraid to post the fixed one because like it would have cost us double the money for that episode because we were paying for distribution. And yeah, so anyway. rough yeah i felt i feel really bad poor nathan took the bread of it because he he ended up he's saying it right and then we put the wrong backing track on it and it was yeah anyway mistakes were made yeah no no fault of anybody's but mine i should have i should have held it and not posted it

Should we call it there? Yeah, sure. Shall we call it there?

You don't want to answer questions about macaroni and cheese. Yeah, we could take that. Yeah, we do have a patron episode coming up. Oh, that's true. We might bank a few of these for that this weekend. I mean, yeah, like we usually save the nonsense.

for the Patreon episode. That's true. And we can do a couple more here. I just need to install a second because I didn't open the list of producers. So perfectly fair. All right. Well, now, now I will read this macaroni and cheese question from fishy J. Is macaroni and cheese called Mac because it's short for macaroni or is it because Mac is an acronym for macaroni and cheese? I had never, ever considered this before. Nor had I. I'm going to say it's short for macaroni in my mind.

In my head, it's short for macaroni, but I like the acronym version better. I feel like it would be capitalized if it was an acronym, though. Capitalized and or periods, I think would really set that off a little better. I also think about this is the second time this has come up this week, but the the sitcom that that Matt LeBlanc's character was on in Friends called Mac and Cheese, where he was a human and his cop.

but he was a robot i think called cheese okay i don't know that's all i know all right came up on the live stream yesterday deep friends knowledge yeah yeah uh i guess that'll do it for us this month yeah well you know i'm gonna read one more here oh talking about food RK Harris 62, what's your go-to Waffle House order? Slathered, smothered, and covered. What is slathered? I think it has salsa on it.

Oh, really? I can never keep that. That's just hash browns, though. I mean, like total order, though. I mean, you need more than just hash brown. Yeah. While you look that up, I will say I think you can't go wrong with the all star special. That was what I always got. But I would say. I would say 90% of my Waffle House visits in my life were while I was in college at 3 a.m. Oh, yeah, always 3 a.m. Fairly inebriated.

So yeah, on the way down one or the other. Yes. So also our special was kind of like the big breakfast and that's like kind of what you need in that state, I would say. I there was a Waffle House that was right down the street from the bar that I like to go to, and it was on the walking path between the bar and my apartment or my dorm, I guess. So I would roll into there and. I don't know if people like dark business happens.

in waffle house after about after bars closed it doesn't matter where you are oh yeah it's it's after the time that the bars close oh it's it's become a whole thing on social media i don't know if you've seen the 3 a.m thing there's been there's been this campaign Harada, the producer of the Tekken series, regularly fields questions on Twitter these days. Okay. People have been trying to get him to put Waffle House in as a background in the next Tekken for a long time now.

Oh, I heard about this from a video game podcast, Next Lander, I believe. He seems somewhat receptive to the idea. I've often... One of my dreams... Like if I could if I could get sponsored to do something really, really stupid, I would fly people that I want to have interesting conversations with.

and i would set up a recording booth in like the corner booth at a waffle house at like 2 a.m and we would just record a podcast that starts there and just we just just chat and eat some waffle house see what happens yeah see what happens make it about 2 30. Yeah. Make it about 30 minutes after whenever the local jurisdictions liquor laws require bars to close. Yeah, that's exactly it. So I like scattered, smothered and covered is the thing. Do you have just a good list? So they don't.

I don't think they have a menu. The waffle or the hash brown preparation was like kind of a secret, like you have to be in the know kind of thing, right? No, it's just on the menu. Is it really? Yeah, there's no secret menu at Waffle House. Are you kidding? It's been a while. Hold on. I'm trying to find a it's shockingly difficult to find a Waffle House menu. Here we go. This location is a different time zone to me. That's fine. Hash browns.

Oh, they do bowls now. That's wild. Ash brown bowls. It's like a it's like a it's like a KFC shame bowl. But with hash browns is the base instead of I've got it. OK. Smothered sauteed onions. Yeah, that sounds great. Covered, melted, melted cheese. American cheese. It's important to note. Like smothered and covered is like the classic preparation, right? Like that's the one everybody refers to, but I don't think I want cheese on my hash browns. I like a cheese.

It depends on whether I'm having like a runny egg. If I want a runny egg, then the cheese is good. Now some sausage gravy. I would absolutely want me. Okay. Chunked is grilled hickory smoked ham. Nope. Dice. Nope. What? No ham. Dude. I don't like ham. Diced is grilled tomatoes. Those are good. Peppered is spicy jalapeno peppers. That's fine. What non-spicy jalapeno peppers do they have in mind? I mean, you know. Capped is grilled button mushrooms. I've never heard of that one.

That's a new one. Get them capped. Get them smothered and capped. Yeah. Topped. It has bird's chili. I've never been brave enough to order that, if I'm being honest. Last item on the menu, the one I've been waiting for, country sausage gravy. So I would do scattered, smothered and covered hash browns with two or three sunny side up eggs and then either biscuits or English muffins, depending on how I'm feeling. I'd get and bacon. Hmm.

Countries smothered in country, I think might be enough for me. I don't I'm a little skeptical about their gravy, if I'm being honest. Actually, I'd have to maybe verify. Trust but verify the sausage gravy at Waffle House. The other one I do, the pecan waffle, pretty good. Okay. The pecans get all toasted up in the waffle and you put a butter and your maple syrup and stuff. You know, air quote maple syrup on there. Yep.

The great Southern commentator, Louis Grisard. Oh, yeah. There are so many Louis Grisard books in my parents' house. You have no idea. His daily column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, or weekly column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, got repurposed into a bunch of books. And those books are exactly bathroom reading length. I mean, the columns are exactly bathroom reading length. Yep.

I think Louis Grisard is probably one of my dad's favorite human beings. I mean, I can see that. He was a Waffle House aficionado, also taken before his time. Weird coincidence there. Yeah, weird. Actually, I was just looking him up last month when I was home because all those books were around. I think he had like a congenital heart defect or something. Yeah, he did. He did. But I'm sure the lifestyle did not help. He.

He he famously broke the news that that Waffle House sold more steaks than anybody else in the country. Oh, because those that T-bone deal is a is a classic classic. I'm going to make a bad decision meal. Yeah. So anyway, you are now I've now landed back on. We should just end this podcast. I've now landed back on the now classic Twitter thread from four years ago.

Of the guy who lost the bet and had to spend an entire 24 hours in a Waffle House. Oh, that one was great. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. I think I'm pretty sure I was following along with that one live. That one was that was a pretty.

Having been to Waffle House myself, that was a pretty exciting situation. The guy, yeah, it was a sad tailbone. Apparently, that's a common you lost your fantasy football team. Really? Fantasy football, like the last person, first person in the fantasy football league gets money.

Last person has to spend 24 hours in a Waffle House. I forgot about the key rule, the key component of the situation that made it interesting. Coming to you live from a Brandon, Mississippi Waffle House, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Spend 24 hours. Every waffle I eat shaves an hour off the clock. Yeah. I forgot about that part. That was having eaten a fair number of those waffles. I can't imagine going back in for more.

But anyway, if anybody wants to to sponsor my take interesting people to Waffle House, fly them to Waffle House. I remember at one point during the pandemic, you and I think Austin Walker and I were sitting in discord. having not seen other human faces for ages. I remember that. Coming up with ways, like trying to figure out what the most equidistant Waffle House was so we could meet.

Have a meal and then just leave. Just go our separate ways. Like the TLDRs, we would have to drive to Nebraska, I think, which was maybe too far. Yeah. Yeah. But. That's as good a place as any to leave it. If you want to sponsor a Waffle House podcast or send us email, you can do it at TechBot at content.town. I'd also love to know if people are having the left ear problem with pocket casts on the web. Yeah, same. Waffle House, if you're listening, reach out.

Yeah, please do the time. We love you. Cracker barrel very down on its luck right now. You've got golden opportunity here. Yeah. Like if Waffle House doesn't take advantage of this, this is the first good non-hurricane related Waffle House news in years. So let's lean into that. Yeah.

We'll be back next week with more episodes. As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is listener supported with the possible exception of Waffle House. If you would like to support the podcast, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod. Again, that's patreon.com slash techpod. Sorry, I had a hiccup there. And we, as always, we thank all of our patrons. We love all of you. Thank you also so much because we wouldn't get to do this without you. We would not.

But a very, very special thank you to our executive producer tier patrons, including Andrew Slosky, Bunny Fiend's good friend Yabs, shout out to Yabs, David Allen, James Kamek, Jason Lee, Jordan Lippett, Twinkle Twinkie, and... Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. It's the end of the month, so that means we also give a special shout-out to our associate producer to your patrons, including Alejandro Navarro, Andre M. Burke, PE.

Andrew Dicey Shoal Dice, Arthur Gies, Ben Tallman, Brutal Kerfuffle, Eric, Felix Kramer, Graham Banks, Jad Rita, Just Associate Wedge, Kerp. Matt Walker, parentheses Walkman 8080, close parentheses. Nathan Phelps, P Tibbs, Sanchik Kumar, Steve Lin, Thomas Shea, Tom Fuller, and Tom Hilton. Thank you also so much. Yeah, thank you. And that'll do it for us this month.

This week, rather. We'll be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. Yes. In fact, we'll be back like any minute now. Let's see, I believe. May even be out already. Hosting day for this podcast is also the last day of the month. So the patron episode might also.

be out the same day i hope it's already out we might have it done before yeah but um yeah yeah thanks for listening we'll be back next week with another edition of the tech pod as always please consider the podcast before printing this environment