306: The Worst Thing About Bluetooth Is "Sometimes"

I guess we're doing dark mode today. Yeah, I turned on the camera and I turned on the call and I just saw Brad lit only by the light screen of what I assume is a light mode monitor. See, I've got a Google Doc. OK, because as we as we have well documented, Google Docs does not have a dark mode. So I'm staring at our list of questions in this giant white browser window. Check this out. Oh, wow. That's a dark tab.

Oh, hello. There's no lighting in this room other than from these monitors because it's like seven in the morning here. There's one strand of fairy lights in the background behind you. Yeah, true. Yes, I haven't. I didn't do my hair yet. You're wearing a V-neck white T-shirt. The white V-neck T-shirt that I slept in. Straight out of bed. You've got travel coming up, business travel. And so our recording schedule is a bit wonkier than usual.

Yeah, we haven't had to do it early, early in a long time. Like 7 a.m. used to be our go to during the pandemic when I was working at Stray Bombay and had like a full time nine to five job. But yeah, we haven't done it this early in a minute, but it's, you know.

anytime is podcast time all i need is a microphone and a that's right well i guess a microphone last night there was a fun moment last night because we did the patron episode late last night and you commented as we were as we were shutting down you commented that you got to see how off our our clocks were because you surmised that all the lights in this office room went off for me at one time and you surmised that they were all on a smart timer which they are

We were able to see how offset our clocks are by watching my lights go off. Yeah, either my Windows clock hasn't updated in a minute or your Pi or whatever is running your camera is off by about 10 seconds. Yeah, well, there's got to be some amount of latency there, not that much. I have a Raspberry Pi.

for running Home Assistant. So I guess it's going by whatever time that Pi is pulling through NTP. And then what's the latency to the smart plugs? That's got to be measured in dozens of milliseconds at most, right?

It's funny, I actually don't know how often my home assistant Raspberry Pi updates time. I assume it does it daily, probably not more than that. Well, you're on what? Home Assistant OS? Like you're on the all-in-one, like the integrated image? Yeah, I'm running a yellow. But it's whatever your NTP facility on that Linux install is set to query at.

Yeah, I haven't touched it. So I wonder what their default is because it's like time matters for that stuff. Not to just merge this podcast with the dual boot diaries entirely, but I did hear you. I did hear you say the word time date CTL on that.

podcast recently which yeah i did the way that you said not to do i think means that you're using systemd timesyncd to manage ntps so we could probably find out what the query interval is for that that's on my desktop on the pi it's a whole different thing because the pi is managed i don't i don't ever i don't think i've ever logged into a terminal into a shell on the pi

There's a very good chance they're using time sync D on the home system OS as well, because that's kind of the standard built in system D way to do it on most distros these days. Yeah, I wonder if they're based on Raspbian or whatever Raspberry Pi OS or whatever they call it now.

Probably. I don't know, actually. That's a whole other topic. Like distros for Raspberry Pis is his own topic because... It really is. There's like Ubuntu has an official Raspberry Pi image. I think Fedora might. There's probably actually quite a few these days, but... I really still like running the official Raspberry Pi OS just because it seems like the most tailored to the hardware.

Yeah, it just has a Linux based OS. I wonder if they rolled something from scratch. Oh, it's not based on a regular Linux distro like Ubuntu. It's using build root and is optimized to run home assistant. Yeah, they did roll their own. That's cool. It's kind of like the mister, like the mister runs the most stripped down possible Linux install imaginable. Like they also cobbled that thing together from parts, which is pretty cool. Yeah, I think they did this because they use Docker for a lot of.

running like they needed doctor docker optimizations that i bet are not in raspberry pi os by default there's also just like a ton of stuff for an embedded device like a mr or home assistant yellow or whatever you're doing like

There's just a ton of user space stuff that you don't need cluttering up a thing that is meant to just run headless. Well, yeah, I mean, that's that's the Linux benefit, right? You have just what you need. That's right. This is one step closer to doing Linux from scratch. Let's go. You didn't have a response for that. I. Oh, no. All right. I'm just leaving. Oh, yeah. Bye.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech bot. I'm Will. I'm Brad. That was really an amazing thousand yard stare. I'm just, I'm just shaking. I was shaking my head. I was so shook from that. I couldn't even shake my head. I was just like, I don't have anything to say about. The very words Linux from scratch just strike terror into the hearts of everyday users. I had a Gintu phase, right? I used to compile my own Linux kernel on a...

On a Pentium 200 or 266 or whatever it was I had back then, it took like 12 hours. It was not a great experience. Probably a little better now. I might stop invoking Linux from scratch, actually, for people like somebody. Somebody popped it.

Again, sorry to just talk Linux and dual boot diaries constantly, but I've been in it a lot lately. But on the PC World Discord and that channel, somebody popped up who is an engineer by day and was saying like, hey, I don't know what kind of engineer I have. No, it could be some kind of hardware or electrical or something.

Yeah. Also possible. Steam engineer. Yeah. But they said like, hey, I'm an engineer. I'm used to knowing how things work, but I'm moving to Linux and I have no idea how things work and I would love to gain a better understanding of it. And I started to say.

Well, you could go through Linux from scratch if you really want to understand all the component parts. But then the more I started reading about it, the more I got the sense that Linux from scratch is actually about how to build a Linux system from source. Like it's more about... I think it's more about like the build environment and how to compile all the parts. It's more about compiling software potentially than it is about just like learning what your computer is made of. That makes sense.

I think like there are a bunch of books out there, like how Linux works and like the Linux Bible and stuff like that, that I think might be more appropriate. If you just want to like, like, no, what is system D? What is you dev like stuff like that? I think maybe those books might be a better option than, than, than LFS.

the hard part of the whole thing though is that there's like there's there's five things five different things that do the thing that systemd does right so i mean maybe not how do you mean i'm just saying like Most of the core low level systems seem to have multiple variants that do the same thing or similar things or newer versions or older versions or in some domains. Yeah, the network configuration is.

I could I could name six different ways right now to configure a network on Linux. OK, maybe I should save all this. This isn't this isn't the podcast to talk about Linux. This is my stealth like.

I shouldn't say it stealth attempt to get onto that podcast, but maybe that's not a bad idea. It's going to happen. Okay. Adam, Adam is Adam and I talk about it every week. Yeah. We have our first few guests coming up. So, um, Do you know how long that show is going to run or is it open ended until you feel like you've reached the end?

The joke that we made at the beginning was that we're going to end the show by deleting one of the petitions on our hard drive. Oh, yeah, I know that. What I mean is, are you giving yourselves eight weeks or is it like just, hey, we're just going to keep doing this until we feel like it's time? Yeah, like I think it.

My thought is that once it stops being about dual booting and that transition, it just becomes like a practical Linux user podcast or something like that. So it could be open ended. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what people like. If people listen to it, we'll keep doing it. Right. That's the that's the rule of podcasting. So.

You can find it wherever podcasts are found. I'm going to stop plugging this. This is the streams are crossing. Yeah, I apologize. It's just something I'm enthusiastic about on a personal level. It's not even like an attempt to cross pollinate content or something. No, I mean, look, I love cross-politizing content. I mean, that's great. Probably also good. But anyway, yeah, no, we started it because we were kind of both deeply dissatisfied with Windows.

Right. And which brings us to why we're here today, because we have questions from people who are deeply dissatisfied from Windows, among other things. There are also questions from people who want to know if like a gazpacho is a smoothie.

We're not going to do that one. I don't think I really don't know that I am ready for like is blank a soup discourse. It's too early in the morning for that. I feel like we've barely freed ourselves from his blank a sandwich discourse. So anyway, I still I still feel like. Yeah, anyway. Anyway, a lot of questions this month. This is the Q&A episode, by the way, but a lot of emails this month that are not about Linux, just for people who don't want to hear about that endlessly.

If you have questions, you can send an email to techpod at content.town. That's techpod at content.town. Or if you're a member of the Patreon, if you're supporting the show, because we are a listener-supported show. You can go into the Q Seeking A's channel in the Discord and post your questions there. They'll disappear, but we'll see them at the end of the month. And then we will pull them into a blazing white 7 a.m. Google document.

And we'll turn them into A's. So there we go. You got you got a queue lined up. This is an email from Tim. Tim. I know I'm a couple of weeks late on this, but I still wanted to share my stories around Windows 95. Although I started in computers back in the Commodore 64 days and on the IT type side of things in high school with Windows 3.1.1, I have some serious memories of Windows 95 as well.

I especially identified with some of your networking stories as in my last year of college, my university brought internet access to the dorms. My roommates realized the IT staff was small and created a company. That the IT department would send the students to in order to purchase a network card and get it installed and configured in their systems for ResNet access. That is incredible. That is like brilliant. Like what is the term there? That's not a middleman exactly. That's a...

That's a middleman. Is it a middleman? Independent contractor. It's like it's like, OK, independent. My lights just came on. Did your lights also just come on? No, my lights are on. I have to hit a button to turn the lights on in here. You will see that my office is now lit as it's normally lit. Yeah.

Anyway, I feel like a middleman doesn't actually do work. Am I selling middleman short? I always feel like middleman is somebody who just like sits in between and doesn't necessarily do the labor. I mean, look. They're they're an independent contractor is what this is. That sounds more right. But this that this is kind of brilliant. I feel like the independent contract. So it's funny because at my university when they started doing that.

They just made the kids who are on work study in the IT department do that and computer services do that work. And they were miserable. Yeah, if you're doing the work directly for the big entity, then you're at their mercy or the mercy of their terms. But if you create your own company to do that work, then you start commanding the terms.

Yeah, so I'm sure they got paid like 40, 50 bucks an hour, depending on what year it was. And they charged a lovely markup on the network cards, too. Oh, yeah, I bet, man, that's brilliant. Tim goes on here.

I have nightmares of how difficult it was to get a network card into some of those mid-90s desktops. I still have a special hatred for Compaq to this day because of how crammed full their cases were, making it nearly impossible to add an expansion card of any kind. and the scars to prove it. Never mind the ones where the expansion slots were on some kind of vertical daughterboard that plugged in at a 90 degree angle to the motherboard. Actually, like...

This jogged a bunch of memories. I never owned a compact, but I knew people who had them. And I remember always hearing it wasn't just compact. It was like, oh, all the pizza box cases were like that. Yeah. All the big name PC makers in the 90s were doing weird proprietary internals on their systems, right? No, not all of them. Not all of them. Like, I think Gateway was pretty good about being open.

Dell and compact were both notorious and like Packard bell and, um, e-machines and all those kinds of like the cheaper stuff we're doing all weird stuff. And then gateway and HP to a lesser extent we had. pretty good reputations for doing like user serviceable machines. Micron, I think. But yes, I remember hearing how non-standard the guts of all those PCs were back then.

If you cared about upgrades, I guess this is coming from the mid-90s 3D accelerator explosion. The reputation was always like, hey, don't buy a Compaq or something like that if you want to buy a new graphics card to put in it. I had an AST Pentium 60 for a while that was a pizza box with one of those riser cards and getting a voodoo card into that was really challenging because I couldn't.

like the cable that was the jumper cable that did the pass through for the for the vga that came with the voodoo card wasn't quite long enough to reach from one i guess it was a pci slot to another pci slot anyway yeah that was the that was always the problem stuff just didn't fit right well and network cards to tim's point were a nightmare back at this at this period right like you had they had dip switches and all sorts of stuff because plug and play wasn't really a thing yet yep

Last bit from Tim here. I love the references to BBSs as well. I ran one myself. Can't remember the specific software anymore. But because we only had one phone line at my house, it was only up if a friend or user called me on a voice line on the POTS line first to ask me to turn it on. That's really funny. That's amazing. I don't know if that quite meets the bar. Well, I mean, then it is a PBS.

but it counts. But yeah, well, they were, they were asynchronous, right? That was one of the cool things about them is that there were chats and stuff like that, but were there, you could have chats on them. That's my understanding. If I remember, I think the biggest local call BBS we had was four lines, if I'm not mistaken. But I don't remember any kind of synchronous real-time chat features on there. Or if they had that, I certainly never used it, but maybe they did.

But you're right. For me, the BBS experience was log in, see if any new game demos had been posted, play Legend of the Red Dragon, and then log off for the day. The funny thing was the game demos were big enough at that time that it probably would have been faster to drive to the dude's house that hosted the BBS with some floppies. Oh, easily. And then drive back.

Yeah, I think we talked about modem speeds a good bit on the Discord the week of that Windows 95 episode. And my memory is that 28.8 modem is the fastest we ever had, and it was about three kilobytes a second at best on that. Yeah, that seems right. I'm not going to do the math right now, but I think it was about five minutes per megabyte in the best possible conditions.

That seems about right. So, yes, it was it was like I think there were like overnight downloads of some demos for me, if I remember. Oh, I remember if something was 40 megs, it would it was a. Turn it on when you went to bed and it'll be done by the time I get back from class the next day. Oh, my God. Now you're reminding me of the precarity of long downloads. And if anything bad happened to the phone line midstream, you were just screwed. Yeah. Hey, the phone's making that noise again.

Anyway, that's cool. I don't think the downloads were resumable back then. Sometimes they were, but not normal HTTP ones. Anyway, we should move on. But because I am this exact kind of nerd, I occasionally will look up lists of BBS software and try to remember the ones that I used. Wildcat is the one I remember being pretty popular where I lived. I never had access, so I don't know. I think we had at least one or two Wildcat boards, but there was a bigger one that I don't remember.

You just had that week off work. Instead of doing all that hard drive business, you could have set up a tech pod BBS. That's right. I could have probably tracked down a copy of Wildcat and maybe I'll look into that actually. Yeah. It's a good project. Anyway. All right. Nathan from Houston.

You mentioned your phone's losing their trade-in value, and it reminded me of this thing I figured out last time I got a new phone. This is also kind of brilliant. Yeah, it is. We keep phones for a while, so they have pretty much no trade in value when getting new phones, but I realized at least for the carriers, okay, maybe this is a big asterisk here because I don't, I think a lot of people don't want to buy into a carrier contract these days, but anyway.

I realized at least for the carriers, you don't have to trade in the phone you're using. You can trade in any phone. So last time we traded in phones, I looked at what they accepted and was able to get $1,000 off an S23 Ultra by spending $185. And $1,000 off an iPhone 15 plus by spending $325 on used phones and trading those in. That's incredible. I can't confirm it works everywhere, but it worked at AT&T. So the problem with the carrier contracts is that they're usually three years.

yeah and and you can't like typically they don't have a mid mid go upgrade clause right so yeah i mean that for me that's fine because i like to keep a phone for a long time anyway but i guess if you're on like the if you if you like getting a new phone every year that is problematic you know

every other year. You know, do you know how the math, math's out on modern carrier contracts? Like, are you spending more or is it just that it's spread out? But it's, I mean, do you end up spending effectively the same amount in the final tally? i haven't mathed out the normal carrier contract because the um the carriers are so freaking expensive compared to mvnos that i think you i think that you end up paying

Like you paying, you end up paying more twice, right? So you're paying, they're doing 0% financing for 36 months on the thousand dollars of the phone. Right. But. then you're also paying $150 a month, more a month for your cellular service. Yeah. You just reminded me and I'm on an MVNO now. So like that, that alone is a deal breaker because my phone bill is now $10 a month and I'm not giving that up for anything. Yeah. But, but also.

The money you save on the $10 a month, you can buy a lot of thousand dollar phones over over a couple of years. Yeah. Yes. Did I talk about it? We did. We talked about it. But is it going OK? Well, that's the thing. Did I talk about the time I ran out of data? I think I did.

Yeah, you did. Where my carrier when you're in jury duty just cuts you off. I can't say every every MVNO is that way. But in my case, like literally when I ran out of data while I was walking down the street, they don't even let you like. They don't even like allow lists their own app for you to go in and buy more data. I had to get to Wi-Fi before I could pay another $4 to get more data. That's wild. It was it was a little brutal anyway. But you're also on the on the extreme like.

I think if I was doing an MVNO, I'd do the $20 or $25 a month thing that gives me unlimited data. Totally. I'm on the a la carte. You get two gigabytes a month and you pay more, which is fine. It's only $4 for more data, even when I had to double my data. It was still a $14 phone bill. Like that's not a problem, but it would be nice if they, it'd be nice if they let you re up anywhere you are. If that's wild. I think, I think the, it had, it had defaulted to like not auto topping off data. Ah.

I think, I think I turned that on and I'm fine now. Anyway. All right. The second half of Nathan's email.

Hearing about Brad's 16 hard drives really makes me want him to get some kind of smart meter for monitoring his electricity usage. I will jump in here real quick and say the 16 hard drives is not even remotely permanent. Okay.

That was a special case. You know, that's when I had all those extra drives hooked up. Yeah, it's a short term stuff. That's not normally it's 10 anyway. 10 still a lot, though. Sometimes I think he underestimates how much something can cost when running 24 seven. I assure you, I do not. Well aware it is a constant pain point running the server, but frankly, I balance it out by telling myself how much I enjoy tinkering with it.

yeah it's like kind of my only hobby also it's a work expense frankly like i use that server for work constantly so there's like tax write-offs and stuff involved but um but you're not wrong it uses a fair amount of electricity When I was looking at making my own NAS, I could have built it cheaper than a Synology, but couldn't get the power usage as low. After a few years, the custom-built one would be more expensive because of the energy cost.

Supposedly, the average cost of electricity in California is 33.52 cents per kilowatt hour. At 24-7 usage, that would be just under $3 a year per watt. Not including the electricity needed to cool the home back down. When you're going to have something running for five plus years, each watt really adds up. Yes, like you're totally right about all of this. The weird thing is in California, it's 33, or at least for us, it's 33 cents per kilowatt hour at our low rate.

for delivery for energy but then the delivery from pg and e is another 30 cents per kilowatt hour so It's like 70 cents, 65 to 70 cents. And it goes up on peak hours because we're on the EV plan. So it's cheap during off-peak and expensive during peak. This is why I have the Synology and the 5W N100 server.

Yeah. Although, I mean, you have to break down what is consuming power in the boxes. You know, like the hard drives are not a small percentage. Oh, yeah. That's going to be the same in a Synology or a big giant server. That's why I have three hard drives spinning in my Synology and not 10.

Yes. Well, anyway. Yeah, but what's the draw on your server? Have you plugged a wattmeter into it? I have it plugged into a UPS, so I can kind of eyeball it, but I have to mentally subtract everything else plugged into that UPS because it just gives you one flat. Yeah, yeah. Output reading. I don't know. It's hard to say. I bet it's. Gosh, it's probably 100 watts or something, at least maybe more.

You know what? I'm going to skip to a Discord question here because there's one that is quite related to what we're talking about here that I can add on to. This is a Discord question from Brain. It's a great username. I recently came into possession of some large-capacity SAS hard drives. Initially, I wanted to integrate them into my mini PC-based homelab setup, but it appears to be an impossible task.

I don't want to invest in a 24-bay JBOD to use these drives. Is it worth finding a way to use six 12-terabyte SAS drives or just move on? I mean, you know what my answer is going to be. Find a way to use the hard drive. Get that 24 drive bay, right? Well, maybe not that. That's pretty big. I mean, I'm taking mini PC to mean like B-Link style or like kind of tiny Mac mini style box.

So you probably don't want a giant backplane 24 bay thing sitting around if you're trying to keep things small. My assumption, yeah, mini PC. Says small form factor at biggest, which means you're going to have like two drive bays. Yes. I looked this up. SAS drives apparently need like they need a special interface. So like you can. You can plug, God, I'm trying to think. You can plug SATA drives into a SAS interface.

You can't plug SAS drives into a SAT interface. It's a one way, but not the other. Yeah. Basically SAS. I barely, it's what is it? Serial attached SCSI, I believe is the acronym. I think it's, it's basically like a.

It's like data center level storage. So I don't know how you came by these drives. Although if you got them for free, as it sounds like you did, then I extra think you should use them, but you're going to have to buy a card. You're going to have to buy like a SAS interface card, like a host bus adapter to use them. It sounds like.

the problem is if you're on a mini pc or an itx machine you probably only have one pci express slot and they're they're like they have potential ones although i was gonna say there are now um nvme slot to pc like pcie by four adapters yes that you can buy so you could yeah what are we even doing what are we doing it's all pci express lanes they're all the same

You know, I wonder if there's going to be a more formal standard for plugging cards into NVMe sockets at some point. Maybe. It feels like that's all motherboards are shipping these days is NVMe sockets.

we were talking about this on the full nerd a few weeks ago but it feels like the small form factor stuff and itx is kind of in a weird there's a weird it's in a weird state of flux right now because like there's a pretty well established like itx basic shape for computers but then there's also people doing a lot of really weird stuff with like um like putting pci express slots on the back and of those boards and

like building things that are designed to run with with um like bridges that are you know that will let you put your pc express cable someplace else or like so who knows it it feels like we need to have another round of Hey, here's what the standard is because that that ITX standard is spun out of like shuttle cases, proprietary shuttle cases 20 years ago. And it's it's such a mess. Gordon continues to be right. We should have moved on from ATX a long time ago.

Yeah, you're not wrong. It feels like and it feels like. I'm trying to think of the other basic building blocks of modern computing that have modernized. Like we finally replaced BIOS with UEFI like 15 years ago or something. You know what I mean? There's like a bunch of legacy stuff from 30 to 40 years ago that... has been replaced and it feels like the atx standard should have been one of those by now it's even it's even just stuff like hey where the cpu has to be on an atx board

and the orientation of the memory are non-optimal for airflow for a lot of reasons like we're starting to see some different kinds of memory come on board that that'll maybe change that yeah but i'm skeptical whether they'll take off because they're more those the the non the non-stick formats are going to be a lot more expensive and you're gonna have to make some choices and stuff like that so i don't know

There's so much you could do. I mean, the physical form factor is the main thing, you know, making things tidier and adding more capabilities and stuff. But there's also like digital stuff you could like. What about better diagnostic information? Like what if they build that into the spec of CTX or whatever the next standard is where like.

Like what if there was a standard output format for something better than just like BIOS, like two-digit numerical BIOS error codes? Like what if you had some standard interface for getting like real information about what your PC is doing to fix problems? what if what if windows had an interface for uh getting voltages and temperatures and fan speeds back out to software that would be nice for sure um the itx thing though feels more

I feel like ATX is in a pretty good place right now. I feel like the ITX stuff is in a weirder spot. like so so i i guess the question for me on this one is do they have pci express slots and if they do then you just buy a sas pci express card and you're good to go but if you don't

I don't know what the option is, right? Like, are there SAS backplanes that are like USB-C to SAS bridges? I doubt it. Because that seems like it would be not performant and bad. It also, my guess is there's just no use case for that would drive.

reproduction of something like that because sass is again a data center thing and data centers don't give a f about anything except making things work you know like they don't care about tidiness or modularity or whatever so i will say at the flea market couple weeks ago i saw a 24 bay ibm uh uh sas backplane to you or three you i guess rack mount dealy

I was like, Hey, does this work? And the guy said, Oh yeah, it works. And I was like, how much do you want for it? And he told me, and I was like, Oh, that's a good deal. And I didn't buy it. And I kind of regret that, but also I don't have a place for it. So I didn't see that.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing that I feel like you get the rack first and then you source stuff like that. You can just pile the rack stuff up in a pile. It'll be fine. Yes. OK, we'll move on. I will give me 30 seconds to mention one. of my own personal bug bears real quick about this question. Uh, if you're buying old server cards, like we're talking about here, like if you're buying an old host bus adapter and.

For the record to brain, if you really want to go down this road, look up like LSI, host bus adapters. That's the type of thing you're going to need to plug those SAS drives in. The thing I have come to understand is that 15-year-old server cards like that... Do not support modern ASPM, which is like power management at the PCI express level. Oh, like I, like I have, I have a SAS controller and a Mellanox, uh, network card in my.

server that are both like 15 years old. When your PCI Express cards don't support modern ASPM, it also limits the C states, the sleep states, you know, the low power states that your CPU can descend into. Oh. So I'm probably leaving even more electricity usage on the table. This is why I really wanted to address this question. I'm probably burning even more energy because my CPU can't, and I've monitored this, like my CPU can't and the server can't go.

into the deepest sleep that you would want because those cards limited from doing so. There is a blog post called The Curse of ASPM that I'm going to link in the show notes for people who really want to hear. an insanely exhaustive amount more about this. Subhead of this blog post, you either get to see eight or you die trying.

I've looked at this blog post. It's a crazy blog post. It's insane. It is utterly. I bow to this person. They went and bought every card they could find to try to eliminate this problem. It's really.

An incredible amount of detective work. Anyway, enough about my personal madness. Let's read something a little more middle of the road here. Cat will mew. I'm just going to bounce around between emails and discord here. Watching Hollow Knight's Silksong crash Steam and the eShop and even Xbox, and thinking back to how the Switch 2 launch melted down the websites of some of the largest retailers on the planet, I have to ask, how is this still happening? Wasn't the whole premise...

I'm sorry, wasn't the whole promise of the cloud supposed to be infinite scalability? Is it bad architecture? One weak link in the chain? Sites cheaping out somewhere? Yeah, it's wild, right? It is on some level. Yes, it's crazy on another level, though. Like, I mean, this is going back a while, but I remember reading about like MMO launches, I feel like were the prototypical case of this. Well, yeah. And like early MMOs, especially we didn't have.

ways to test the way that we do now like it was hard to spin up a thousand users fake users to hit your login server at the same time to see if it was going to hold the rush now people do like this is why games like battlefield that expect to have big launches do big open betas that they that they gradually roll out access to and it's also i think why they do early access with like higher editions is so they get an initial instead of having one wave they have three waves and it gets a

30% fewer people on each wave, right? Yeah. The answer I always got here about like, hey, why do MMO launches still go sideways all the time? The answer I always got there kind of always amounted to corporations just redlining their infrastructure all the time, which is to say like. They're going to build their infrastructure. They're going to spec it for the 95% environments or use case or load level. They're not going to go out of their way to build for the 2%.

insane load of launch you know what I mean like they're just they're not going to build the extra capacity in because they want to save money they're not going to build in the capacity to handle a one off like one bad night event they're just going to let it do what it's going to do because you know 95 of the time it's not going to be near that level of load and they'll be fine well yes but also

for something like a game. So for example, when you're buying servers for a game that has dedicated servers, typically you do... Well, I mean, there's a bunch of ways to do it. If it's a big game, then you're going to do a mixture of bare metal servers that you actually have like you pay somebody to put some server machines in a data center someplace. And often because of the way game servers work, those aren't like.

those aren't giant um like like they're not thread rippers or something like that because you're not able like often on a game server since game servers are very regularly single threaded you want a smaller number of faster cores because that'll let you have more people on the server at a time or something like that so if you're hosting something like fortnite they're gonna have a bunch of 14 900ks in a data center someplace with like

one shard or two Fortnite instances at a time on them. And then they'll also have, and those hardware machines will be the baseline. And that's what's running all the time. Because you can't turn those on and off, really updating them is a kind of a hassle, yada, yada. They'll also have a cloud solution for like days that Drake shows up to play on some stream and a million extra people play Fortnite that day.

Those machines are more expensive per minute or per hour to run because their clouds are cloud hosts, whereas the data center machines are flat rate plus bandwidth or something like that. But. You can turn them on and off when you're not using them. So so like figuring out that math is a big part of what like a DevOps or or a release release managers or live live live game ops person does these days. Now, the place that Catwoman Mew is talking about is

Hey, we have not 10 times, but a thousand times the number of people that are usually on this site or 10,000 times the number of people usually hitting the site. And then they find the bottlenecks and the weird edge cases that don't exist in the day to day. So. Apple is a good example of this for iPhone launches for a long time. They everything would be great. Apple's website would be going great. You put all your stuff in the cart.

You'd order the phone and then you'd get to the part where you put your credit card in and it's like, oh man, we're not going to do this. Or you'd get to the part where you apply for the Apple financing or Verizon.

verizon's three-year thing and their connections to these outside services would bomb out which is why they started doing the hey you can pre-approve your apple loan your verizon connection your at&t connection your credit card charge that's very smart a week in advance and then just on the morning of you just get up and log in at five o'clock in the morning and hit the give me a phone button sidebar like i guess they're catering to a global

customer base here, but like, why did the, why does Apple continue to set the pre-orders for like insane early in the morning? I mean, like us time, which surely is a huge, huge, I mean, that's their home territory.

I bet it's actually so that they don't have an enormous wave of people all hitting at the same time. Oh, I guess. Sure. That is a good way to, like, naturally filter some people out who don't want to wake up. Yeah, they're going to sell the phones. They're going to sell the phones to the same people. The question is, how can they spread out that over the infrastructure? I bet like the capitalist me says, oh, they looked at which time zones they could hit most effectively at that launch time.

But then the realist me looked at it and was like, oh, people are going to buy the phones regardless. So it doesn't matter. They just did it whichever way it levels out the infrastructure hit the most. So I believe that. Yeah. Anyway, like I think every time they do one of these launches, they find like target.

target probably discovered five new bottlenecks on their, on their checkout process on switch to pre-order day. I am still smarting from that switch to your pre-order experience. And target was the worst of all of them.

yeah because they kept saying that like target was like hey man we got a switch for you and then you go through the chart card and be like no we don't have a switch for you All the others, to their credit, put me in a queue, which also screwed me in different ways because I saw people on my feed who got in the queue way after I did for 10 minutes and then bought a Switch, and I sat in it for an hour and never got the opportunity, but at least...

Those just had me looking at a queue. Whereas target, I got to the confirm order step like four times and it never worked. Yeah. Infuriating anyway. Okay. Next email is from Joel. This is about getting AirPod Pros working with a Steam Deck. I have Magic Pods installed to get my AirPod Pro 2s working right on my Steam Deck. You're a Steam Deck guy. You're going to have to help me out with some of these terms here.

It does require Deki. I have no idea what Deki is, but if you're down with Homebrew, it supports every feature I can think of for the AirPod Pros 2, including conversation awareness. It's pretty amazing. I can't recommend it enough.

I thought conversation awareness happened on the headphones, but I guess it doesn't because I only use my AirPods with Apple stuff. A decky loader for folks who don't know is a homebrew plug-in launcher for the Steam Deck. It lets you extend the Steam Deck. You like the Steam Deck. handheld ui not the desktop ui got it um you can just like style menus you can add other storefronts stuff like that that's cool yeah i'm looking at magic pods here easily control airpods and beats headphones and more

Well, so the Beats headphones use the same chips as the AirPods. Of course, of course. But yeah, this looks pretty good. Oh, actually, it supports a bunch of Samsung Galaxy buds as well, according to this. it looks like it does the, the big thing is, is it, is it fixes the Apple devices, grabbing the AirPods back. And.

The conversation mode is really quite nice. I'm going to have to try this out. I do not have, I don't have Decky Loader on my current Steam Deck, I don't think right now, but I'll put that on because this is worth fussing with. It seems good.

I don't know what the term is for the Apple device grabbing the headphones back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what the term for that is, but that is something I was thinking about as I have thought about getting AirPod Pro 3s for... potentially for switch to use like is that a pain dealing with non-apple devices and having to like control what device is using them at any given time so um yes and no you have to manage you know whereas

With the Apple devices, when I put my iPhone down and pick up my iPad, it just switches over automatically, right?

with non-apple devices on the airpods you have to manually go into the bluetooth menu and hit the connect thing um so it doesn't do it automatically and then what about moving back to an apple device do you have to manually air again there or does is that smart enough to just do it so you don't have to pair but you do have to go into the menu and hit the connect button once you're coming back sometimes it's it's like it's really weird like that's the worst thing about bluetooth is sometimes well

Well, I think the rule is if they're in the case, then it resets the connection and it just goes to whatever thing you're using again. But if you like have them in your ears and you want to use your phone and then you switch to the Steam Deck and then you want to switch back to the Switch and then you want to switch back to the phone.

you're going to have to do some Bluetooth menu work like that. That's the most annoying thing about dealing with Bluetooth pairing is that it's never, it never seems consistent to me. Like, yeah, sometimes. Sometimes my watch will just find the earbuds when I pull them out of the case. Sometimes I have to go in there and tell it to do it again. Yeah. So so it's way better than the traditional Bluetooth method, which is, hey, your headphones support X number of connections.

and everything kind of works okay until you get x plus one number of devices um it's not as good it's not as good as the default i like i want to see what this implementation is because i've not used a non uh a non microsoft a non-apple implementation of this and it looks like they have a windows version of this thing too of magic pods so you can get it for uh other non-apple devices which is exciting i'm gonna

I'm going to set this up on my laptop and my on my Steam Deck. The other thing is after we talked about the AirPods Pro first generation had a hard time connecting to Steam Decks for whatever reason. Multiple people wrote in to let us know that the AirPod Pros 2 didn't have that problem. They changed whatever, either Valve or Apple changed whatever was the issue as people were able to connect with that.

And I've since connected my airpod pros to the switch to, and it works great. Yeah. I'm going to give the threes a little longer to see what people's experiences are with various devices. I did a little bit of cursory looking around on Reddit on the switch to subreddit about.

bluetooth headphones in general on there and the results did not sound super encouraging people said like people said it's basically the same as or similar at least to the switch one you're looking at like 150 milliseconds of latency to bluetooth

headphones because Nintendo uses like old Bluetooth and old codecs and stuff. Uh, I mean, you know, I guess some of that depends on how sensitive you are to that kind of thing, but that sounds like kind of a lot to me. So I don't know if the dream might be dead. I'm not sure.

150 milliseconds is a lot. Yeah, it is. You know, you could just get a wire plugged in headphones. It's true. I don't know, man. Dealing with corded noise canceling headphones on an airplane is kind of getting old. But I mean, I will. Yeah, that's true. Anyway. Yeah. All right. Last email from Mike. Speaking of Nintendo.

Say you managed to get a ticket to the Nintendo Museum in Japan and are salivating at all the exclusive Nintendo merch available from such a trip. At what point would you say that there are too many coffee mugs to take back with you to the United States? I believe they sell 17 or more coffee mugs for a variety of Nintendo systems, I will say, unless something has changed in the last few months, it's 15.

I thought of Brad because on an X-Lander podcast, Brad mentioned wanting to have a complete set. The reason I know the number of coffee mugs is because I now own 14 of them. Really? Yes. Wow. Largely thanks to an incredibly... kind benefactor who was willing to haul some mugs across the ocean for me. Can you go to the museum without? uh having a ticket because the tickets are kind of hard right no you yeah as far as i know it's still a multi-month lead time i think to get a ticket for the museum

I believe this benefactor said they would have brought all 15, but they were sold out of the Switch mug on the day. Ah, boom. And I still owe that person a beer. They were incredibly kind to do that. Wow. I, I, I've, I've been meaning to order that switch one. I found a, I found an exporter in Japan that, that sells them for like not too bad of a markup. Okay. But I never got around to doing it before the tariffs went into effect. And now I don't know how that's going to affect.

something like this oh yeah so they say yeah you can only get in if you have a ticket that's wild yeah yes the museum is is definitely absolutely not just show up and go this it almost seems like if you want to go to the museum and you don't live in japan you have to

You get your tickets and then book your entire trip around going to the museum. Yep. That's wild. Yep. Still quite exclusive. I have to assume in another year or two, it'll probably die down a little bit. I mean, you say that, but maybe not. One would hope, but I don't know. Anyway, to answer your question, no number of mugs is too many. Those are extremely nice mugs. I love them deeply. I was going to say, I'm starting to pare down mugs and I'm keeping.

the couple that i have that are handmade by friends and family members and like the aperture science ones and that's pretty much it everything else is going the old tested mug i still have one of those yes i'm actually i'm packing all of my old giant bomb

glassware and ceramic merch away. Wow. So it doesn't get broken at this point. Anyway, there you go. All right. Late night wreck. How many sets of sheets do you own? How many did you own when you were living alone? How many is too many? Okay, I have, I don't remember how many I owned when I was living alone because that was 100 years ago at this point.

but I have two identical white sheets for each bed, uh, so that you could don't have to take, so I can take the sheets off, put new sheets on and, uh, and not have to like have the bed down all day while we're washing sheets i don't have a i don't have two duvet covers so the duvet cover is is separate from that okay um and then we also have sets of flannel sheets for both beds

I'd say we have probably three or four sets now. Yeah. Uh, we, I, we are on, well, it's, it's gotten a little looser, more loose than I would like lately. We need to get our act back together, but we became like. We became like change the sheets once a week. Oh God, that's too much. What are you talking about? Like once a week. Yeah. Hell yeah. What are you doing in there, man? Nothing. I mean, it's just, I just like sleeping in clean sheets. I do like sleeping in clean sheets, but.

i mean so i guess i guess you're like i do the sheets more often than i do the duvet cover for me for a long time i used to not use a top sheet i would just do the duvet cover so that meant you had to watch the duvet cover every time which is an enormous pain in the ass because you got to take the thing out and you got to tie it back in and it's just a lot um when we switched to using a top sheet again

Then watching the duvet cover became an every other time I watched this sheet situation. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, we only wash the fitted sheets and top sheets regularly like the. Yeah. Duvet or blankets on top of that don't get washed nearly as often. But I tried to get a little sciencey with this and Google around for like tests of, you know, bacteria, dead skin, dust mites, whatever. Yeah.

Cause like everywhere you go, like the feedback seems to be, Hey, you're probably not washing your sheets enough, but couldn't find anything like super definitive. Big laundry detergent wants you to think that, Brad. Probably. What started it for me was becoming a night shower during the pandemic. Yep.

At that point, it was basically, okay, I'm going to bed clean now because I'm showering right before bed every night. And so I want the sheets to be clean as well. But then if you're going to bed clean, then the sheets get dirty a lot slower. yeah but then you just maximize your cleanliness by both showering at night and changing the sheets too far man i uh i gotta say

We switched from kind of fancy sheets that we used to use for a long time when they got really expensive during the pandemic. And we tried a bunch of cheap sheets from different places.

and the the target like the target brand the nice target brand sheets with the deep pockets in that are my favorite sheets we've ever had i think they're they're they're easy to make the bed the the the gussets on the side are deep enough that they work on even the super thick mattresses in my daughter's room and um

They have the top and bottom labeled, which I love. Like, so when you're, when you're trying to figure out which side is which on a queen size bed, which is basically square. It's really nice. That is smart. Yeah.

All right. Ambush Penguin Charlie. Also, don't buy shit from Target, I guess, right now. I forgot. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Ambush Penguin Charlie writes in. What's your process for documenting yourself when you're setting up something like a new operating system or an app install? I've heard you mention this several times on different podcasts, and I'm curious what that looks like for you in practice. Software setup feels one and done and ephemeral enough that it's hard for me to remember.

plan ahead, or take notes as I go. Unlike hardware installs, which feels higher stakes, and so I pre-plan, then I then use the end product to trace backwards to aid in filling in gaps in documentation.

oh so okay i got kind of obsessive about this when i started doing server stuff with with the free nas and true nas years and years ago because i would do something clever and then a year later it would break or need updating and i wouldn't remember how to update it or fix it when it broke and then i'd have to recreate the all the work that was doing that so the tool that i've used has changed off and on over the years i used simple note type um

uh note-taking apps for a long time these days i'm using notion just because it's it's easy it syncs automatically with everything the free version is more than enough for personal note-taking and i have a basically a tree in my notion that's just like one for each one, one, one that's the computers in the house. And then the other one is things I figured out how to do. And my, my bar for that is.

If I had to Google some stuff and read a bunch of forum posts to figure out how to do something, I write it down. And I used to just do links to those forum posts, but I've gotten burned enough by the link rot that now I just copy and paste the relevant shit along with the link.

and put that in the documentation. So it's not like I'm writing docs that I would post on the internet someplace. I'm literally just giving myself enough information to understand what I did and how to recreate it if I need to. And then... Also, if I do something and they're like, here's how to update it, I usually copy that information over to is like, for whatever reason, I can never remember how to update the pie hole, even though I just have to log in with SSH and type pie hole.

Up or whatever. Piehole dash upgrade. Yeah. Maybe it's dash up actually. I've moved on as, as we have mentioned. Yeah. That's a, that's a way better answer than mine, which is that I don't document anything because I just can't be bothered, which is. Is what it is. It leads to every time something breaks, having to go do the detective work of figuring out what broke and what I did and how to recreate it. But anyway.

Yeah, it's, it's, um, you know, I mean, there's never going to be a hard and fast answer for this, but what's more work like doing the documentation as you go or doing extra work to fix something? Cause you don't remember how. on the back end like it's it's more work in both cases so i'm not sure what's worse for me i just do five minutes of copying and pasting and then dump it into the into the notion bucket basically um

I hosed the Debian install on my server a month or about six weeks ago when I was moving to Trixie when it came out to rebuild that entire thing from scratch. So that was kind of an extreme example. Yeah. And then to be clear, the old install was entirely there. It just wasn't working. That's always nice. And so the point is I could copy all the configuration files and stuff over. It was substantially easier than doing literally everything from scratch. But yes, it does bite you occasionally.

Yeah. Tactical tug. Tug boat, just to be clear, is my understanding. They came in and clarified. That's right. They came in and said they also were referring to a tugboat, actually. They they directly cited a military, I think, tugboat that was used in like combat harbors or something. Yeah, we were right. Yeah. All right. It's the British who are wrong, Brad. That's right. Yes.

As always. Yeah. Okay. This is a big question. How do game engines work? You'll hear things like GameX is built on the Unreal Engine or the Unity Engine and so on, but how does that affect the game and what does it mean for me as a gamer? Is it just a bragging right similar to a fuck you, my car has a V8? Or is it something to actually pay attention to as a gamer or user? As a gamer or user, no, absolutely not. Like, if the game is good, if it runs well, that's all that matters.

From the perspective of a player. There's a lot of discourse about this, Brad. Yeah, dude, I don't even know how much I like that stuff drives me up the wall there. Every single topic on the planet has a grifter class attached to it now. you're not wrong yeah and and even the subject even the sub sub category of video game engines has a whole like legion of grifters on twitter now who like outrage bait over like oh the unreal engine sucks ass like oh

based Kojima productions using the godlike Decima engine. There's people out there who basically will just say, hey, if this game uses engine X, it sucks. If it uses engine Y, it's amazing. seem to think it's as simple as that because they get paid on engagement now. So that's not the case at all. I feel a little bit maybe responsible for some of this because at Maximum PC in 2001 or 2002, I wrote a feature that was really popular about game engines and what different ones brought to the table.

But yeah, to your point, the dialogue around Unity blows, Unreal sucks, blah, blah, blah. Like I was watching a streamer the other day and not to put somebody on blast. but they were talking about how Standing on Rocks was slidey in the same way in Rust and Tarkov, both Unity games. But that is... yes that is a physics thing that is probably tied to unity physics the the unity physics engines that they use but also it's because the collider on top of the rocks in those games

is not big enough for the player capsule to fit on. So the physics doesn't know what to do. Right. So like everybody attributes stuff to janky engines or bloat or whatever. and generally speaking these are all decisions made by game developers or by publishers or by expediency and the the game engine what the game engine provides is a framework for making a game right that like that's it it provides a series of apis that you can use to draw things on the screen and take input from users and

uh connect to networks and and server infrastructure and you know handles internal game logic you know that governs everything from upgrade mechanics to menus to world simulation and physics player input like you said rendering like it's a huge part of it sound playback music like but but like but the asterisk on all of that is that all of that stuff also like the game logic stuff no game engines provide game logic stuff that's all written from scratch for every single game ever right physics

is you have a physics engine that you can do basic things with. But for the most part, the game developer says, OK, here's what the jump length is going to like. There's no. The Unreal feel is because Unreal ships a bunch of Unreal Engine demos that a lot of people use as the basis. If you're making a shooter, the common wisdom is start with Unreal Shooter as your template because then you can also use assets from the Unreal Asset Store.

because they're going to be pre-baked for that shooter template because that's what that's what that's everybody has a shared common language there right um so that means that like your capsule your player capsule sizes are all the same as that shooter template and that makes games feel necessarily the same. You don't have to do that. That's an option, right? It's a, you know, if you're making a $300 million game, you're not going to do that. If you're making a game.

that you want to feel like it can compete with a $300 million game, but costs $5 million, then you're probably going to do that. And that's, that's kind of it. I mean, game engines are just software and software can be made to do anything if you modify it. adapt it to your needs enough yeah i mean within reason like you know obviously you're like but you see it all the time like you see developers talking about this like you know they

They used UE5 or whatever, but then they ripped out blank component and rewrote their own or something or modified it. You know what I mean? You can customize and adapt the engine to do things that it wasn't made to do out of the box or to... massage the way it does things. But I mean, like you said, that requires that requires work and that requires scoping around that work and et cetera.

Well, and there's big downstream consequences. So like we rewrote a big chunk of the sound of the Wy's sound engine implementation in Unreal when we were working on the Anacrusis and it turned out to be a huge boondoggle.

because when we needed to take a new uh unreal update to fix a different bug that required a ton of refactoring to support to bring our changes forward into the new version and like so like Generally speaking, if you're working on a budget, if you're working in an indie scale, you don't want to, even if you have source code access, which everybody does now, like don't. You don't want to modify the source code of the engine because you want to be able to take those engine upgrades because like.

If you're say you're shipping a game on Godot and you you've released it on Steam originally and then Sony and Nintendo call and they're like, hey, we'd like to get your game on our platforms. But the plugins that work with the Sony infrastructure and the Nintendo.

infrastructure are on two different versions of Godot. Like you have to be able to port your game to those different engines of Godot, or you have to spend way more time backporting the PlayStation infrastructure plugin and the Nintendo infrastructure plugins. to to to work on the on the on your game so it's like keeping your stuff portable and easily upgradable is makes a ton of sense so but yet just generally speaking the youtubers who bitch about unreal and unity and all that stuff

are not generally particularly well-informed. No, they are definitely not. I feel like Kojima Productions is an excellent test case for people taking the wrong lesson from the situation because, okay, they shipped the two Metal Gear Solid V games on the Fox engine.

And now they've shipped the two Death Stranding games on the Decima engine. Yeah. On a technical level, one of the things that all those games have in common is that they look very good for the hardware and they're also very performant for how good they look. And for some reason. People have taken the lesson from that of, oh, the Fox engine is so godly. Oh, the Decima engine is so godly. Nobody ever seems to stop and think maybe Kojima Productions is just really good at...

building within the scope of what their technology can support. You know, like maybe they are really good at understanding how to get good visuals out of their technology without pushing it so hard that the performance suffers. Like it's never, it's never, hey, these developers are good at their jobs. It's always, oh, the software they're using.

is so amazing or sucks yeah but they make that software too right the the but but also there's two things there there's one there's a novelty aspect so that because it's not using the same Unreal renderer and all that stuff, the same Unreal lighting model, things look different and different. Our brains think different is good, right? Which is good. That's a good thing. Awesome for them.

The other thing is those are not general purpose engines. Those are engines that are built for specific games. And like, there's a reason they didn't bring, I mean, there's multiple reasons they didn't bring Fox forward for the new thing, but. like they spent hundreds of millions of dollars making death stranding it's an enormous amount of money and like you're not you're they built a bespoke engine for that we saw what happened you know uh battlefield

Dice made a bespoke engine for Battlefield years and years ago. And when EA tried to adapt that to general purpose use the same way that Epic turned Unreal over a decade and a half into a multi-purpose game engine.

it was an enormous disaster on almost every front like all of those games that ship with frostbite had problems and and like like it was there were production problems there were delays there was bad crunch there was all the stuff that makes video games shitty because they were taking a bespoke engine that was built to make battlefield games and trying to jam need for speed and and

I can't remember what else. Yeah. Mass Effect and Dragon Age and all these other all these other not fast paced military shooters with vehicles games into them. Anthem. Great. Yeah. Great example. Yeah. So like.

Battlefield is another great example that you still see where these types of people that talk shit about engines all the time or talk shit about game developers will post like they'll post like the intro or that aircraft carrier scene from Battlefield 3. I think it's three or maybe four. And there was like.

Games look like this 15 years ago. What happened? And the subtext is always, why are game developers so bad at their jobs now? That's always what they're never stopping to realize exactly what you just said. That is like an on-rails cinematic sequence of a person.

in a plane on an aircraft carrier like there's no geometry in that scene except for a plane and an aircraft carrier you know what I mean it's not like there's not a big open world environment with all kinds of like with a you know massive possibility space or whatever it is a very constrained effectively hallway scene.

Which, like you said, with technology built exactly around the needs of that scene, it's like the what's like fighting games, fighting games look really good because they blow the entire consoles, poly budget on two characters and a little bit of background and a background with a fixed camera angle. Right.

like Brendan and Sanjay talked about that on the skin deep episode. I was like, you know, why didn't the, why didn't the doom three lighting catch on? Because it looked so much better than everything else at the time. And they were like, because it didn't scale beyond the game with like tight, dark hallways basically. Yeah.

You know, like a lot of game engines are built specifically for the needs of what the game is doing and do not work beyond that. Anyway, like there's just so, so much more nuance to the. technical implementation of modern video games than a lot of the sort of outrage class on social media gives credit to well and and then the last part of it is that the art makes a huge difference right like

If you look at I love I love to reference Star Wars Outlaws for this because that game is art dense in a way that even most AAA games aren't these days. Right. When you walk through one of those cityscapes. There's a bazillion physics-based props everywhere you look, and the game looks grimy and gross the way you want a 70s Star Wars to look. And and that's the that's not engine. That's that is a bazillion people in 10 studios around the world spent five years making pots like bespoke.

pots and trash cans and plants and little guys and weird shit that's on tables and stools that only work for one specific kind of Star Wars alien and like all sorts of nonsense. It's not like the engine, the engine just takes that work and displays it. It's not, it's like praising your word processor, right? Yes. So anyway.

Like, you know, even even a very well architected performance engine can buckle if you cram too much stuff in there at one time. Right. Yeah. But also don't listen to people who yell about this stuff on YouTube because usually they're kind of doofuses. Yep. Yep.

Digital Foundry is the exception. Yes. Well informed. I mean, those folks read white papers. Well, I mean, they are paying attention to what goes on as SIGGRAPH like they are not. They understand white papers is, I think, the more important thing.

Yeah. Right. Yes. Okay. Question from Hornet. Why is it that my phone can recognize what song is being played inside a crowded restaurant from inside my pocket? But when I call someone, I sound like I'm using the microphone that came with the Xbox Live starter kit in 2002.

It's because of the codecs that we use for phone calls. If you use FaceTime audio, it sounds nice. Yeah, sure. I mean, I guess there's a lot of questions here. A, what kind of phone you're using? B, what is facilitating the phone call on the software end? Yeah, but like variables there, but I was going to say like a codec. The codecs are. They upgraded the basic codec for voice calls a few years ago. It used to be a GSM, like a really incredibly low bitrate. And now with the LTE change, they...

changed it to a higher bit rate, but it's still pretty low by modern standards. Voice over LTE is the current thing. And it's like, I'm trying to find the codec. bit rate but it's it's still shockingly low it's like 512 kilobits or something like that uh voice quality You may be unsurprised to hear. It sounds like there are multiple types of like subcategories, even within the voiceover LTE. Shocking. The AMR WB plus codec has a wide bit range from 5.2 to 48 kilobits.

Yeah, you're right. Even 48 is pretty small. Yes, offers a wide range of bit rates from 5.9 kilobits to 128. 128 is like better, I guess. 128 is like... Well, it's the quality we post the podcast at. Yeah. Although, I mean, that's a different, you know, that's using an MP3. Different codec. Yeah. The MP3, you know, the quality is a function of both bitrate and kind of general quality of the codec at encoding data.

Yeah. Compressing it rather. So we can't say for exactly. But anyway, that's a. Oh. Yeah. It looks like Fraunhofer. Remember them? Yeah. Makers of the MP3. Yes, Fraunhofer, the creators of the MP, like notoriously the people you had to pay money to back in the day for an MP3 or MP2 player. Yep. Or, you know. the vanguard of codec licensing fees, let's say. Anyway, apparently they have been in the voiceover LTE game because of course. Anyway.

But, but yeah, their thing doesn't, hasn't taken off. So yeah. So that's, that's been the whole point of like, like you said, you know, kind of voice calls over FaceTime or, I mean, everything, WhatsApp signal. Yeah. They all have built in voice calls that are higher quality. I'm sure. Google has similar stuff on Android to Apple's FaceTime stuff. Yeah, I think so. I mean, you use Signal or FaceTime or WhatsApp is what most people do.

What is, do you know what the, what is the wifi calling option on iPhones? Is that something, is that an Apple level feature or is that a carrier like general phone technology feature? carrier delivering your LTE calls over the Wi-Fi network. It's basically bridging. When you're at home, it'll bridge off of their network and onto yours so that you have better signal.

Got it. Got it. So that's less about better phone call quality and more about just better signal if you're in a shitty cell signal area.

Well, it lets you get SMS messages and phone calls if you're off of off of their grid, which is nice. OK, yeah, that's that's totally different. That makes sense. OK, last question. Yeah. I hope you have a good answer for this because this is a complicated one from Xander. Oh, I thought it was the hair care one. That one's easy. We'll save that one. Okay. Xander.

I've been looking for some new home accessories, lamps and arts, etc. And I'm having a hard time figuring out what is just a drop shipper reselling Alibaba items. versus who are the originators of a piece that got duped by manufacturers in China, versus what is just originally from Alibaba or a dupe of a much more expensive item that isn't made anymore.

I can find posts on Reddit for some items that support all three positions. What do you do to sort through dupes? This is, this is, I like to think of this as the Etsy problem now. Okay, sure. Because Etsy started out as a place that like. Perhaps people would make one-offs and sell them to people who are interested in buying cool art.

Like a like small press expo, but on the Internet. And now it's just a bunch of Alibaba dropshippers and a handful of original artists. Real, real quick dropshipper. I got a dropshipper is a middleman, right? Like to to the earlier points, like the dropshipper is somebody who basically. orders and resell stuff is that correct it depends sometimes they're warehousing stuff like sometimes they're buying stuff and then reselling it but they are a middle middleman yeah okay

I think I don't think middleman has a real hard definition, but I can be wrong. But what I mean is a dropshipper is just somebody who is facilitating the sale of something somebody else made. Right. And like they're just like importing and reselling.

yeah but that's what walmart does too yes but i mean i mean that term has become pretty commonly used i feel like in this era but maybe maybe it's something that's reserved for like small individual sellers Well, I think drop shippers specifically means somebody who's like buying it and having it shipped direct from Alibaba to the customer rather than.

Like, okay. Going through a warehouse, never taking physical possession of the item. Yeah. I think, I think technically probably the Etsy folks who do this are not necessarily doing that. I think that they're probably buying like a run of stickers or whatever. And then.

getting them here and then packaging them up and reshipping them on when they sell them on etsy for a 10x markup um but yeah i i don't know what a good like i look at the reviews I don't buy stuff that looks like it could have come from Alibaba on like if I'm going to do. Honestly, the easiest way to do it is to go look at AliExpress and see if you can find the same thing on AliExpress. And then if that's the case, then you know that's where it came from. And then for stuff like furniture.

I buy either used local, like I watch Craigslist or Facebook market or whatever, or buy direct from Ikea or whatever, you know, I'm not buying designer furniture right now. I have a kid.

um but the the like if i was i would go to local places that are reputable would be my guess yeah best advice i can give here i'm not i'm not buying a lot of like home goods and accessories that would fit into this category but i guess i do run into this with electronics sometimes yeah shoes too oddly yeah like i talked about on the the patron episode that i think

It's probably up by the time this posts. I bought a very specific right angle USB cable. Yeah. It was a right angle USB B 3.0 cable, like very, very specific. Hard to find. The first one I bought didn't work and it has to be returned, but it's a piece of junk. The reason I bring this up is there are sites out there that specialize in weird specific cables like this. Like I found one site that was selling the exact kind of cable I need for $50.

And so there was one other one on Amazon I hadn't tried yet besides the one that didn't work. And I was literally like eyeballing the molding around the cable. Where like the cable meets the connector and stuff. See if there was too much flange or whatever. Well, no, no. Trying to see if that $50 cable on that external site was actually the exact same cable out of the same factory as the $10 one on Amazon that I hadn't tried yet. Yeah.

Because I was trying to find a cable that worked, but I didn't want to spend $50 on it if it was actually just a huge markup on the exact same cable I could have gotten for a fifth of the price. In some cases, I guess it's down to just eyeballing like tiny details on the item to see if it's actually the same thing you'd be getting on AliExpress for way less. The other thing like for cables and electronics and stuff like that, there's also.

like granger and mcmaster's car and like there's a bazillion actual real places that sell good stuff that you can go to the the in my experience the real problems are the ones that allow third-party sellers so like amazon and new egg and etsy and and all of these and ebay frankly at this point which was all third-party sellers but you you like you're not going to get a bad

You're not going to get a knockoff if you're the thing from McMaster's car, right? Yeah. Yeah. But you're going to pay for it. I mean, well, don't pay for expedited shipping is the, is the lesson there because it's real. It's like $75 every time I've done it by accident. Anyway, I think this is as good a place as any. Oh, do you want to do one more? Are we saving that one for next time? Yeah, let's do their one real quick. Okay. Also from Ambush Penguin Charlie getting a two for this month.

How much of your hair care and maintenance is done at home versus at a barber or salon? Do you have beard trimming folks for folks with equally long beards that have grown longer than a wall can keep short? What about long hair tips? Always curious about other people's methods. I recently started going to a haircut place again. Oh, wow. After asking my girlfriend to trim my hair for most of the last five years when the pandemic started. Did you go to a barber or a salon?

It is a neighborhood haircut place that is a block and a half from here. Okay. That has been here for like 30 years and I never even noticed it before. They're doing a nice job. You look good. Well, thank you. They charge $15 a haircut. I need to start coming to your place. My guy is way more expensive than that. I give, I give roughly double that because that's still a third of what a haircut costs around here. Yeah. I mean, 60 bucks is the cheapest I've found one lately. Yes. So I do.

i do um i mean i go to the haircut i get my haircut at the barber and then i occasionally will pay for a beard trim i used to do it more when they were 10 bucks and now that it's 25 i'm less enthusiastic about it um i have a nice set of wall trimmers that i keep a guard on i put the like a three yard on or a two guard on and i use like i i brush the beard when i need to trim it and i

Just freehand it real, real careful off the but I don't touch the guard to the skin. Obviously, I'm just I'm just shaping. It's like it's like using hedge trimmers. You got to glide above everything about just losing the beard. I have asked if that is an option and I've been told by my child who has never seen me without a beard except for in pictures that she would freak the fuck out was the direct quote. I saw a viral post going around the other day of.

I did not see it before. They did not include a before picture of a guy who clearly has had a long beard for a long time, but it was like a, hey, we're picking up our child from school beard reveal kind of thing of like child gets in the backseat.

dad turns around to say hi that is not an okay way to do it man straight up started crying yeah i i think my daughter is old enough now that she wouldn't start crying but it would be disturbing for her yeah and also i like the beard i don't know my face looks like under there anymore it could be a nightmare

That was my real question is, do you like having it? Because it is maintenance like it is. I'm sure it presents some challenges when you're eating soup and things like that. It's less maintenance than shaving every day was, though. And I have a signature look, I think now. I don't know. Is it important to have a signature look at our line of work?

You're probably you ever think about like trimming it way down to like kind of a close cropped. I come up and down as this. He's I like it a little long because I like to I want to lengthen the face just a little bit, you know, but but yeah, I. I've been, let's see, about six months ago, I did the thing where I took like 10% off a week for two or three weeks just to see if anybody noticed and nobody noticed because I did it slowly and gradually and that's fine.

Yeah. If it gets too long, it's a real pain in the butt. And then you have to start like, yeah, you don't want to find food in there. Yeah. Also, I guess, you know, once it grows out, it's not a problem anymore. Like I am perpetually, I hate the feeling of new beard. oh yeah no it's all itchy and no no no what's it like it's soft now i i put oil on it every day to keep it keep it like soft and shiny and and uh

Yeah. It's, you know, it's, it's like the maintenance is low. Most of the time it's like every week or every other week I give it a touch up trim and. bring the sides in the problem. Honestly, the problem is that most barbershops now, when you ask for a beard trim, they're like, well, what number do you want? I'm like, I don't want one number. I want shorter on the sides and on the bottom. Cause like, obviously it's a fricking long beard.

So then they want to do like a scissor cut on it. I'm like, I don't, I'll just do this myself. I got it. The hard part is the mustache is like, you gotta like, you gotta, you can really mess yourself up if you get into the mustache region the wrong way.

Nobody wants, and I can't pull off like an Amish beard where it's just like no mustache, but the beard, that's not, I don't think that's a good look for me. Like that's probably not going to work. Yeah. On that note, I think we'll wrap it up for this month, this week's episode.

Thanks to everybody who sent in questions. As always, you can send them to techpod at content.town or post them in the question seeking answers channel in the discord. If you're a member of the tech pod, Patreon and support the show. If you do that, we appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Yes, we do. If you'd like to find out how you can support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod, where for five bucks a month, you get access to the discord. You get it's full of beautiful nerds, just to be clear. It is wonderful people. Yep. Talking about Linux and nerdy stuff and, and plenty of other stuff too. Like there's a bunch of other things like food. The food channel has been popping off lately. We're coming up on Thanksgiving, which is like prime tech pod food channel.

season as far as i'm concerned yeah thriving video game discussion yeah and old i've been spending a little time in the old ass computers channel recently yeah some fun stuff going on in there friend of the show he uh told me about something called fujinet the other day

which I think there's a hardware and a software component to it. And it's like specific to each old computer, but it's basically an attempt to, okay. Fuji net is a multi peripheral emulator and wifi network device for vintage computers. So it's like, Oh, I saw something similar to this for the MSX is how this conversation started, which was a cartridge for the MSX that has Wi-Fi hardware and a network stack built into it.

It's basically like Wi-Fi support for old computers that predate Wi-Fi by 30 years. Oh, that's cool. But it basically lets you load old software over a network to old computers. That sounds wonderful. I mean, I'm looking right here, you know. Apple II, Atari, Commodore, Tandy, like all old computers are getting support for this where you can basically load like games and other programs from the Internet over a little Wi-Fi plugin that fools the old computer into thinking it's something else.

That sounds wonderful. A lot of neat stuff going on out there. Yeah, it's a good community of people. You also get access to the Patreon exclusive episode. This month, Brad and I just kind of rambled about Linux stuff and some other things that we're working on.

And you can do all that by going to patreon.com slash tech pod. Again, it's patreon.com slash tech pod. And if you're in your car, hey, just tell your phone, hey, leave me a reminder to subscribe to the tech pod when I get out of the car. Yep.

The highest possible use of such technology. Yeah, exactly. As always, thanks to everybody who supports the show. We appreciate you. We are listener supported. But a special thank you goes out to our executive producer, to your patrons, including James Kamek, David Allen. Twinkle Twinkie, Bunny Money, Jordan Lippet, Andrew Slosky, Infelicitous Rips, Jason Lee, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.

It's the end of the month, so we also want to do a shout out to our associate producer tier supporters, including Graham Banks, Thomas Shea, Chad Rita, P-Tibs, Steve Lin, Tom Fuller. Just Associate Wedge. Arthur Gies. Nathan Phelps. Ben Tallman. Tom Hilton. Andre M. Burke P. Andrew Dicey Scholdice. Alejandro Navarro. Matt Walker, parentheses Walkman 8080, close parentheses, Sanchik Kumar, Felix Kramer, Kerp, Brutal Kerfuffle,

And Eric, thanks everybody so much. We appreciate y'all. Yeah, we would not be here without you. Thank you. No, we absolutely would not. And that'll do it for us this week. I hope everybody has a lovely week and we will see you. uh next week with another edition of the tech pod as always please consider the environment before printing this podcast bye everybody