308: NEW Lake???

Brad, when I was at that Intel tech tour thing a couple of weeks ago, which by the way, videos up on PC world and the full nerd now, Ooh, we should talk more about that. Adam. Well, I think we'll have Adam on in a couple of weeks. I talked to him about it and he's, it seems game. So.

but i i got to talk to intel we talked to a bunch of intel fellows we only talked a couple of them on camera adam talked to tap about gpu stuff and you know wide computing can i let me stop you real quick when you say fellows Is that like fellas, like fellers, like colloquial, some chums, some pals? Or is that like, is that a fellow, like a distinguished person of import and prestige? It's a distinguished person of import and prestige.

Um, it's like, uh, think about like a, like a university chair. Yes. That's like a collegial. That's what I would describe them. That's what I figured you meant. But anyway, go on. So I got to talk to, um, we talked to tap of course.

uh tom tom peterson who's their gpu guy he's been around for 100 years doing stuff at nvidia and in dell and all sorts of places i uh i got to talk to steven robinson briefly who's in charge of x86 oh it's a big job the instruction set uh-huh which was i was not prepared to have that kind of conversation with someone he was kind of intense been very technical and very nice

But I got to spend some time and interviewed one of their software architects, one of the Intel Fellows software architects named Rajshi Chabushkar, who is in charge of thread director. Oh. Which. i've spent a lot of time running benchmarks on intel cpus and and amd cpus as well and i'm pretty familiar with how the technology on both of those cpus handles the weird nature of their

non-homogeneous architectures now. And we sat down and talked for like 20 minutes about how Thread Director works, why it's important, why it's a really hard problem.

uh like if you are interested in that stuff you should go to the full nerd channel on youtube and watch the video because i would love to be able to do more videos like that and and we're trying to put the kind of the hardcore the more enthusiast deep dive nerd business on that full nerd channel instead of maybe on the PC world channel where people mostly come looking for like laptop reviews and stuff like that.

But also, that's like, yes, that is deep dive nerd business, but it's also something that's just becoming increasingly really relevant to anybody who runs a modern CPU because they're all going heterogeneous in some fashion. AMD's got its split core design with cores on different dyes. Intel has got big and little P&E cores. AMD, I believe on the public roadmap, is also going to start doing big and little cores. Intel is going to start splitting.

If you look at the Nova Lake leaks, Intel's going to start splitting cores across dyes. Everybody's going to have scheduling issues is the point I'm trying to make. Scheduling needs to get better soon. And so like this is something that is going to affect everybody who's buying new PCs. So that's exciting to hear. Well, even even the mobile stuff does it like Qualcomm and Apple Silicon all has a big little and split cores and stuff.

When you mention Apple here, the nature of Apple's tightly vertically integrated approach to hardware and software starts to show its worth because do you ever hear anything about scheduling issues on macOS? You sure don't.

No. Well, one of the things that was interesting talking to Rajshree was that I didn't understand how neither the OS nor the hardware has complete information about what. the state of the CPU is, right? Like that's my understanding of thread director is hardware in the CPU giving some hints or feedback to the OS to the scheduler, right? That's exactly how she described it. Yes. Yeah.

But but as she said, Microsoft owns the scheduler. The thing that the thing that happens is, you know, sometimes it's not worth and I'm paraphrasing. So if you want to hear her actually explain this much better than me. um go go look at the video but um the the gist is When they look at a thread and they're like, oh, this is on the wrong core, the thread director sends a hint. And then the OS thread scheduler decides if it's going to act on the hint or not based on things that it knows.

much longer that thread is scheduled to run because like if the threads only scheduled to run for another 50 000 clock cycles which is apparently like the time frame that they're talking about in a lot of these cases which just to be clear billions of clock cycles per second so 50 000 is like one hundred thousandth of a second yep then ends up it like the cost of moving it to another another core might be higher

than the time that it's gonna take to continue running on the non-optimal core. And so we talked about other stuff too, like one of the things they're doing on mobile processors is they're using the E cores more for like gaming because it turns out. The E cores in games are pretty analogous to what is happening on consoles. If you put eight.

e cores on a game that requires eight cores you're going to get better performance than four p's and eight and four e's interesting um stuff like that so anyway it was it was a really interesting conversation i will definitely pull that up

Most of the stuff we talked about there was about Phantom Lake and about their upcoming. That's a new Panther Lake. I keep waiting to be Panther Phantom Lake. I'm envisioning the YouTube thumbnail. New Lake. Look, look. uh scooby-doo just is rolling out to fortnight at the end of the month so or later this week or something so i got phantom lake on my brain there um they also talked about clearwater forest which is the data center part which is like

a whole buttload of these 18A compute tiles. And then by the time you hear this, there'll be a video with me and Adam and Mark Hockman up on the PC world channel. I think maybe a full nerd. I don't know where we talk about what it was like to go inside the 18 a fab. And like bunny suit up and get to walk and walk in the floor where they make the CPUs and see wafers. But did you turn into footage of you in a bunny suit? There is not footage. They did not take a picture. So.

They had some try on bunny suits in like the waiting room that I put on. I have pictures of that. I'll send you pictures of that. All right. But we didn't we didn't get to have the real bunny suit pictures because they taken away our cameras and phones and all that stuff. It's a highly sensitive facility. I get it anyway. That's hey. Yeah, I'm excited to be excited about CPUs again. Yeah.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad, today we're doing something a little different. Are we? No, it's the same thing we always do. i feel like you know you gotta have a when you when you when you listen to the radio they're always like let's do it let's let's kick this off a brand new way um

No. So we have stuff that we that we like. We're doing a toolbox episode. We haven't done one in a minute. We like episode or, you know, things we've been tinkering with, like things we've dug into and are enthusiastic about and might want to pass on to other people who might also like them. Yeah.

Good vibe stuff. Can I start? I got a good kickoff with one of the very first recommendations we made years and years and years ago that the people craved. And it became a defining characteristic for a while. When I went to Amazon and I looked at this particular product, it also then would show me a bunch of other shit tech pod people liked. I think I know where this is going. Proceed. So.

I used to buy nanotape in sheets or rolls sheets. Yeah, I've never seen it in sheets. I've only seen rolls. What is a sheet? Oh, just like a square shape kind of situation. Do you buy it in stacks? So before I could buy it, before Amazon had it, before Alien Tape or whatever was advertising on late night TV, I used to get nanotape from Inventables, which is they make CNC routers, home CNC routers.

And they were selling sheets of it as like a way to finish the bottom of things that you make with it. So this sticks in place. Interesting. So that's where I had one of those that lasted for years and years and years where I just cut out little strips that I needed here and there.

But then the tape, the tape stuff is good. It's really, really stickier, a lot stickier than the inventable stuff because it's a little bit squashier, I think. And that gives you more room to push the air out of the bubbles. For people who don't know, nanotape is just a kind of soft, squishy.

bubbly tape that has really really small uh bubbles on on either one or both sides that when you push on it it suctions stuff onto you can stick a smooth thing to another smooth thing with it and it'll stay on forever for a really long time until you scrape it off. And then when you scrape it off, it just comes right off. There's no residue or anything. I started buying it in dot form so you can get it on like a sheet, like an eight by 12 sheet with like a bunch of dots just stuck on.

and you peel them off and it's much easier to manage than the than the wide tapes than the than the uh because because a the round size usually is about what i need for like one or two of those will do exactly what i want And I don't have to have scissors because it's hard to cut because it always sticks to the scissors. And like the dot form is pretty good. Occasionally they'll like roll up and get crumpled in on each other.

But for the most part, you can just peel off a dot, jam it onto something and then jam the thing you want to stick to it on that and you're good to go. You put like a little grid shape, I guess, if you've got a bigger surface, you can just kind of arrange them in a pattern that you think is. Yeah. So I have a couple of things that are longer. I have one on either end, maybe one in the middle. Okay. It's nice because the dots are easier to pry off than the tape to. As always.

Be thoughtful about surfaces you put this stuff on because it will pull like finish off of things. If you're not care if it's if it's a delicate finish, I definitely seen people pull the paper off their sheetrock before, which you don't want.

Interesting. Does nanotape stick to it? I would think there's just enough surface variation in sheetrock that it wouldn't stick super well. Because these are suction cups, to be clear, for people who have not used it. There's no adhesive here. You can envision how a suction cup behaves. It needs to...

have a pretty clean flat surface to stick to. Well, so it depends on your paint is my is my guess. So if you have a like a shiny paint finish, it's probably going to be less porous and more likely to stick. Sure. Also, it depends on how you try to remove it. Like if you get in there with a putty knife and kind of slide it in between the paint and the wall, it'll pop right off the tape in the wall. It'll pop right off. If you.

uh don't do that and just pull it straight off like a like a ham-fisted tyro you're probably gonna pull a chunk of wall off with it if you're not careful so uh so yeah dot nanotape in dot form okay big fan all right that sounds good

Yeah. What do you got? You got anything? We bouncing back and forth. I can go all at once. I've only got two things, but they're kind of bigger things. I bought a raft of new SD cards, micro SD cards for my Raspberry Pis. that are the SanDisk Max Endurance. I just became aware of SanDisk's high and max endurance line of micro SD cards recently and decided to give them a shot. What occasioned this is the new version of Raspberry Pi OS just came out.

Trixie based. Yes, based on. So Debbie and Trixie came out in early August and here we are two months later and they have now put out the first Raspberry Pi image based on it. So I was just like, you know, like some of my pies are pretty old around here. And you're using them for stuff like your nut server. So I'll just, I'll do the inventory here. I've got, I've got a PI four. Yeah. That runs one blocky instance, home assistance.

Yeah. A CUPS AirPrint server. CUPS is the common Unix printing system or something. It's a thing that enables AirPrint support for my printers. I'm surprised you have a printer, honestly, Brad. Why? You don't seem like a printer guy.

dude i bought i bought the brother laser everybody bought in 2008 and it's still going just fine i i finally had to retire my brother laser that everybody bought in 2008 because it it was making a squeaking noise that i couldn't fix yeah mostly use it for printing shipping labels that's Oh, about 90% of what we use it for. Anyway, that Pi 4, that's what I will do if I ever get around to doing this NAS backup to external target. Have you not done it yet?

Okay. What I got hung up on was trying to decide if I want to encrypt the backup drives or not. And if I do, then that's a whole, that's a whole new, that's a whole new stack of learning how DM crypt works and Lux and. making a bunch of decisions around drive encryption that I just don't have the energy for. And I'm the one who has the Linux podcast. So I'm putting it off for another couple of months. Anyway, I've got a Pi 2 in here that runs another blocky instance and nut.

which is hooked up to the UPS to monitor that. And I've got a Pi 1 that has been out of service for a while, but I'm about to put it back into service as an AirPlay target. Wow. Which ironically is what I bought it for in 2012. I don't want to derail this with much Raspberry Pi talk. But my first Raspberry Pi 1 Model B that I bought in 2012, I bought to run something called SharePlay on, which basically just becomes an AirPlay target.

Doesn't it have kind of a crappy audio processor, though? Yes. I don't know if this has changed, actually, but yeah, the first at least couple generations of Pi have got terrible analog audio output. But the fix back then was to buy a little no-name $5 USB sound card. I mean, people call them sound cards. They're not cards. They basically look like a USB thumb drive. It's a DAC, basically. Yeah, it's a USB DAC is what it actually is. But even in...

2012, you could buy a $5, like, literally unbranded no-name USB DAC that sounded infinitely better than the terrible. I think it's like, I forget the audio terminology. It's a PWM output, I think, on the original Pi. Yeah, they do something about that. There is no DAC. There is no DAC on the original Pi that uses PWM output, which sounds god-awful. Anyway, I'm going to dig that little USB DAC out. What this is for is...

When I get back to tinkering with desktop Linux again. Oh, I like to listen to music while I'm sitting around tinkering with stuff. Yeah. And if you're doing a bunch of rebooting back into the UEFI and like running Linux installs and. Being at a command line in a fresh install, you can't listen to music on your PC. So I'm going to set this Pi 1 back up as an AirPlay target again to sit here and I can plug my speakers into it and stream music off my NAS to it.

While the PC is in some like frequently rebooting state. Okay. Anyway, I was put my headphones on for that, but I appreciate that. Well, but I have nothing to play the music off of. You have a phone. Not the same. Okay. Okay. I get it. What's the deal with the high endurance? Like there's a lot of work happening in SD cards right now.

So these I randomly stumbled on these just searching around and they are targeted. They're advertised. SanDisk like advertises them as being primarily for like car dashboard cameras. And other sort of like constantly recording, constantly writing scenarios, which as a sidebar, like. I kind of can't believe manufacturers make dash cams that write to SD card because SD cards die constantly when you write to them all the time. I'm like.

So I'm of two minds here, right? Because like one mind says if they did an SSD, it's going to constantly wear out too. It's just going to take a little bit longer than the SD card. Yeah, fair. But if it was internal, then you probably just have to throw out the dash cam and buy a new dash cam. You're not wrong.

You're not wrong. So like, is it better to just have an infinite supply of SD cards going in and out of this thing or better than having to junk a camera with integrated storage? Absolutely. I wonder, are we ripe for some kind of low-cost user-insertable NVMe, like enclosed NVMe sort of situation? It kind of feels like it, but I don't know. Let me pitch an idea to you. What if you had...

a really small spinning disc, and then you had these magnetic reed write heads that kind of rode above the disc, and they wrote bits onto the circular tracks of that disc, almost like a record or a CD. Interesting. And they just spun really fast. So you get the data on and off and you could like write to them forever and they would never degrade.

Well, I mean, forever is a long time, but yeah, let's say sure. Maybe the mechanics of the drive would fail long before the writable aspect of them would fail. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably a good way to think about that. We could call them. platter storage or something. I don't know. I don't know what we'd call them. We'll workshop that one. That's weird.

So, yeah, I did a little looking around before I bought these. They're not much more expensive than regular SD cards, to be clear. Okay. Like a 32 gig high endurance card is 10 bucks. A 32 gig max endurance card, I think is 14 or like not too far out of line of what you would pay for regular SD cards. And also like, I know that you can boot raspberry pies off of other things now, like you can enable.

usb boot but i i just i didn't want to hang an ssd off the side of this raspberry pi like i wanted it to be tidy it's all the pies are crammed into very small spaces Like I don't want a bunch of extra cable cruft and device cruft hanging off of them because I want them to fit in the tiny cubby holes and nooks where they live. It's really unfortunate that they don't have that, that.

uh that little ssd header yeah so they're getting there like um the pi 5 does ship with an nvme capability through the i guess it's the gpio pins or there's there is a header on the pi 5 that gives you yeah very basic NVMe support, but you still need like a hat for that. You still need to like integrate that into a case. Well, yeah. So like my home assistant, Yellow, has on it an NVMe socket.

But it uses the socketed version of the Pi 5, so it's the compute module, not the typical board. Yeah, the Pi 4, there are cases out there that have little USB bridges to an SSD mount on the case, so you can put an SSD in. The case I bought for my Pi 4 was pretty that, and I don't feel like buying another case. Like, anyway. Also, like, I just have a bit of an indignance about things not working right or, like... Yeah. Features being included that don't work as... Like, I, like...

Yeah, these things are these things are supposed to boot off of SD cards like I'm going to make the fucking SD card work. Right. Yeah. And just to be clear, like for the stuff that you're using, the only problem is writing logs probably. Right. Yeah. And I put a log to RAM on all my pies. So that helps mitigate them anyway. But I was using a very old crappy SD card in my Pi 4, which is the important one because it needs to run home assistant. Gotcha. If all the lights stop working.

Yeah, there's problems. That's very annoying. That's why I bought a yellow is because I didn't want to think about this anymore. And that Pi 4 had been getting weird. Like when I would do like an app update or whatever, it had been getting very slow. This is a very old SD. It's like that's not what you want. That's always the warning sign. It's like a 10 year old SD card.

And it was getting like very noticeably slow to do disc operations on. And Trixie, the Trixie Pi OS came out and I was just like, it's just time to do a wipe and everything. I did some. Have you done the migration yet for the home system? Yes. So actually home systems running on my NAS right now. Oh, wild. I moved it over there and it's like when you, when everything's containerized, it's like amazing how fast it is to.

to migrate something like that. I literally, uh, in preparation for wiping that PI four, I copied the home assistant config directory over to the NAS copied the system D unit file over that I used to spin up the container and like ran the container.

ran the service and it just started right up and went and i i don't you don't have any like z wave or zigbee radios or anything like that on your home assistant so that's yeah that's that's the difference i don't i don't pass any hardware in to the, uh, yeah, if I was doing like Bluetooth or had, had one of those, yeah, like USB radios that you're talking about, it would have been certainly a bit more of a fig thing, but.

It's still not hard, but it's a pain in the butt. It's more difficult. I like having it on its own device, honestly, for that reason. So I did a little Googling around before I bought these. I found a blog post. Another is another one of these like amazingly incredibly in-depth like this person must be an engineer type posts of somebody who tested these things.

And by tested, I mean, this is kind of fun because I didn't even know what an SD card looks like inside. By tested, I mean they literally removed the outer epoxy layer on the card to expose all the test pads on the card. That's wild. And built an interface board and soldered the board they built, the diagnostic board to the test pads on there and like pulled a ton of information. And basically, like, you know, I'm certainly not educated enough to check this person's work.

But they determined that these cards are actually using a better, higher quality, more durable form of NAND storage than the cheaper cards.

I forget, do SD cards have controllers on them or are they relying on the device to be the controller? This person goes into that in this blog post. I don't have it in front of me right now. I think it's all one unit, I believe, was the determination there. The controller and the storage are... all one monolithic unit got it on an SD card I guess I guess that makes sense because they're so tiny that would kind of have to be right yeah anyway the the this person to the best of their determination

found that these cards are using the sandisk toshiba 3d tlc flash which is like i guess again somewhat higher quality and more durable than what's in the cheaper cards yeah i went to the launch for the 3d flash really oh yeah It was at the Exploratorium. Oh, wow. I guess that was a big deal. I'm really excited about it. And apparently the max endurance cards are using that 3D flash in a slightly even more durable way than the regular high endurance ones.

Yeah, he does say that he wasn't able to tell what the controller is doing because of the way the whole thing works. This is also I don't know if you consider the scientific testing or not. I mean, the methodology seemed sound, but it was just one person. But I also found a person on the Raspberry Pi forums who had done some informal testing with these things where they basically set up a test that they like.

automated test that kind of wrote, you know, like 164 kilobyte files and then 110 megabyte files, blah, blah, you know, like kind of like that and let it run. They didn't say what regular SD card they tested with. They just said it was a known brand. I wish they had said kind of the brand and model they used, but they managed to kill the mainstream like regular SD card after.

several hundred write cycles or so i don't have the i should pull the thread up in front of me like they don't last long if you're doing a lot of small rights is the tldr they managed to kill a regular mainstream name brand SD card like relatively quickly with this and then they tried tried the high endurance card and basically like it ran several times more of the test cycles than the regular card had and did not kill the card so they actually just killed the test and didn't

get it to the point where it would kill it so it seems like it seems like these things do work as advertised based on all the stuff that i looked into and like i said they're not that much more expensive than the regular ones they are seemingly a little bit slower i will say like the like if you look at this even the the quoted read write speeds the sandisk lists are a bit lower than like your kind of ultra or extreme sd cards

And even in practice, I've put Trixie on the Pi 4 and have been setting it up. And like when you do an app update, you know, and it has to kind of like build package manifests or whatever and read them like that does seem a little bit noticeably slower than. On the old kind of like extreme card I had in there. But like how often are you actually working with stuff like that? Like I'll take I'll take slightly slightly slower disk operations in exchange for.

Ideally, never buying an SD card again for these pies, because also this is a bigger topic that we shouldn't get into on this episode, but I think I'm done buying Raspberry Pis. I don't see myself kind of ever buying another one. considering considering how expensive the proposition is getting versus what you can get in like a small x86 box so like i think i'm good on pies and i just basically wanted to like buy a round of high quality se cards to hopefully

The last round. Hopefully never. Yeah, I did not buy one of these for my Pi KVM because that one it has it has. I put a brand new SD card in it when I set it up. But that thing that thing uses an entirely read only file system. Oh. So it should be fine. So it kind of never writes to the disk unless you're doing updates on it. So like that one's probably going to be fine for a long time anyway. So I was going to say the other option and this is what I used for my for my free NAS box when.

It was because, you know, you booted the FreeNAS box off of USB thumb drives usually. And they had the same problem. If you were writing a lot, I was, I was, I bought, I bought a stack of USB thumb drives when I was running true NAS and I was averaging about like six or eight months per pair of drives before they would die. Yeah. They would just, they just didn't last long. So I bought USB SSDs so you can get like a 2230 NVMe SSD that's in a USB shell.

that you just hang off the front and it solved the problem for me entirely yeah i ended up doing the same except just internal sata ssds because i have a post bus adapter in there that handles all the hard drives so i had spare motherboard sata ports so at some point

At some point, I just bought a pair of $20 Crucial SSDs. Like 128 gig SSDs or something. Basically the same price as a USB thumb drive. And they've been going for years without problems. Yep. Last thing I'll say really quick here for.

Linux nerds who really care, like Wendell, if you're listening, might care about this. We got to get Wendell on this podcast, man. Look, man, one of the... i got to spend time with a bunch of really interesting folks at at that tech days thing the tech tech door thing and and getting to talk to wendell about linux

for, for lunches and dinners sometimes was a delight. Yeah. Wendell's a delightful human being. I listened to the dual boo diaries with him on it. And like every single thing he brought up on there is something I wanted to talk to him further about. But, um, I, the thing I was gonna say really quick is the, it looks like.

The Raspberry Pi people may have done some basic mitigation for SD card wear in Trixie or in their version of Trixie that they're putting out because it's about damn time. It's not like it's not. I don't understand why they don't do log to RAM. So that's exactly where I'm going with this. I've been installing log to RAM.

On my pies for ages, which is something you can set up. It would not be hard to do yourself. This just packages up in a nice script that just does it for you. But all log to RAM is doing is creating a RAM drive and then mounting the log path on that RAM drive so that you're logging all goes into RAM rather than ever. I think it does get written out to disk like on an interval that you can configure, but not constantly.

And that's the thing. It's like one big write is better than 100,000 small writes. And the tradeoff there is you're giving up some amount of RAM, but it's not that much RAM. I mean, we're logging text files here, basically. Well, and if it crashes while there's. log in memory then you'll lose that log so it makes it hard to diagnose that stuff but for the kind of applications you use on these things it probably doesn't matter probably don't need your logs that badly

But but Trixie out of the box on pies is mounting the journal D log path in slash run. Is that the RAM drive? So, yeah, slash run is typically mounted on a temp FS, which is a which is a RAM. based file system in Linux. It's weird. Cache mounts external drives on run slash media slash something now. Yeah, like...

Anything can get mounted anywhere in Linux, as we know. Right, right. They could just be doing something custom there. But I have my Pi 2 is still running the bullseye version and they were not mounting the journal D log path in run. In Bullseye. Okay. So this is a change they have made at some point. It may have been the case with Bookworm, the last version. But at any rate, they are taking some steps to mitigate this themselves. But it's just...

It's just the journal D logging. It's not anything else that logs to the classic logging path of slash var slash log. It's still written to disk and there's still plenty of other stuff that still writes there. And so it's still worth installing log to RAM, I think there. But between these higher endurance cards and getting pretty much all the logging mounted into RAM.

I'm pretty optimistic. I will just never have to buy an SD card again for these things or ever worry about it again. Yeah. Which is pretty exciting. We'll see. That sounds good. Stay tuned. I'll check back in five years. On the SD card front.

this is a small note i saw that lexar announced that they have one terabyte switch to compatible cards those express cards now okay which like for people who just have like two games installed on their switches is no problem. And the switch, the switch two games are still pretty reasonable sized for the, for the amount of capacity on the drives that they ship with. But this was exciting because I wasn't going to buy.

Like I did not buy an extra card for my switch to out of the gate because they only I think the biggest they had was 256 gigs, which basically doubled your capacity on that on that device. And that didn't. feel like it like i didn't i i hate buying a launch card

And then six months later, having a second one and then having this extra launch, this extra small card that I'm just never going to do anything with. Yep. That's how you end up putting an old used card into something like a Raspberry Pi down the line because you have an old one that's been used a bunch and then like, oops, that was a mistake.

But also like 256 gigs is too big for a Raspberry Pi. Right. Like I'm not going to put 256 gigs on my Raspberry Pi. But when you have a smaller card that's a that's a cast off or a hand me down because you bought a bigger one, then you got to find something to do with it. Yeah, I am.

Anyway. Okay. So that, that, I just wanted to hit that on the switch two front. Oh, go ahead. I was, I, well, go ahead. I'll, I'll, I'll mention my switch two thing at the end. I was going to say on the switch two front, I finally, I've, I've. I bought and sent back a bunch of grips over the last two, three months. And I finally got ones that I like. The Switch Grip Exclamation Point by Savage Raven.

Sorry. Switch grip exclamation point. Savage Raven by skull and company is great. I'm looking at the Amazon page now skull and company, Neo grip and ergonomic grip, hard shell with replaceable grips. Or Nintendo Switch 2 is the product name on Amazon. Amazon product names are so bad. It's bad. So it has all the requirements that I needed. You can dock it with the grips on. Oh.

Okay. Which is important. That's good. The kickstand still works with the grips on. Is that the case that there are some that you can't dock with grips on? That seems bad. Some of them have the full back and then that'll block the slot so you can't put it in the slot. That seems like a real pain. I mean.

That's the way both all of the switch one grips that we had were for both my, my switch, my wife's OLED and my daughter's daughter's like, doesn't have a doc, but you just like, they pop on and off. It's not like. It's, you know, there's clips that kind of be sliding in and out of. It's not like taking a phone case off or something like that. Nothing that complicated. But this one has, it ships with three different grip shapes.

There's a shallow one, a medium one, and a big chonky boy with almost like a finger spot at the top. And of those three, we found something that everybody in the house that uses the Switch likes. Okay. All right. And it makes holding it much more comfortable for extended play sessions. It was 30 bucks, which is kind of more than I wanted to pay for this. But like compared to.

fucking up my hands playing Switch games, I'm all for it. Yeah, so Switch Grip seems like it's been a fairly contentious subject so far, although mainly that's based on people not being happy with the dbrand one. yeah the dbrand one i didn't like at all i was really disappointed did you try it yeah okay like that was the one that where the grips were like falling off i think like it was like the switch was like falling out of the grips which is kind of not what you want yeah like

The problem I had was either it was too hard to take all of them. Either they were too hard to take off so that you couldn't get like standalone. You couldn't pop the grips off easily or. Like it blocked the kickstand or blocked the, um, the X, the, the, the, the dock, or it was like a big giant rubber silicone thing that you had to like.

wedge the whole thing in and then it collects a bunch of grime around the edges when it's in there which is gross um so yeah like this is this is the one of the ones that i have tried this is the one i like the most i really really really detested of all of them the ones that are just like silicone wrappers for the joy cons that have like lumps on the bottom to make them a little more grippy those those were the absolute worst of all of them because then they just made the

the joy cons not fit right and they were uncomfortable and the grips were too squishy and like the whole thing just stunk so yeah highly recommend good to know i think i might finally go ahead and buy a switch too it's like I'm going to tell you Donkey Kong Bonanza. Oh yeah, no, that's, that is, that's the game to buy it for. Like, yeah, like I know multiple people who have said it's their game of the year. Like I absolutely need to play Bonanza. It is, it is a remarkable game.

Is not at all what I was expecting. It is follows the legacy because that's the Odyssey team, right? Yes. Yeah, it is definitely follows that lineage in the most positive way. I'm also going to pick up that. remaster for galaxy and galaxy two because like i think i have galaxy one and some switch one collection that i bought

3D All-Stars that came out about five years ago has Galaxy 1 in it, but I verified that they actually have done more work on these new versions. Well, Galaxy 2 never came out on the Switch, so this is new. the galaxy one version here is better than the one that was in 3d all-stars they did more work on it so it runs at 4k and stuff like that and and switch too

Does it do they do they work on the control stuff so you don't have to do the waggle stuff as much? I think that was already done for the three all stars version. But yes, that is you can. I mean, yeah, these are fully playable on switch to control schemes. Awesome. But I'm getting I'm getting like review code offers for other switch to exclusive games now. Like I need to just get that damn hardware in here. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't have a good sense of how.

like non Nintendo games are doing on that thing yet. But it seems like it's like it seems like they've slowed down the. the number of indies that have access to the store in a way that there may be being a little bit more thoughtful about it and there's not as many like hentai games in there oh that that has been i mean lack of um

lack of dev kit distribution has been kind of a major topic of discussion in the nintendo community oh yeah i knew that over the last few months because there are plenty of indie developers who still don't have dev kits look there's a there's a couple of discords i'm in with a bunch of indie developers and the

yo who has a nintendo switch to dev kit threads are extensive really so yeah interesting anyway um i i I've talked about these before. I want to hit them again because I got them for my AirPods Pro and they're really, really good. The comply soft foam tips for IEMs. You can get them for pretty much any in-ear monitor headphones. And they replace the kind of silicone soft flanged, like the rubber that kind of loops back on itself. And then you jam it in your ears.

I can't use in-ear monitors without these at this point. Really? The soft stuff makes my, I actually, it honestly irritates the skin in my ears generally. I think I have some sort of mild reaction to whatever plastic they use for that. But the foam tips are seal in better. They make them feel like they're in more securely, which is great for standalone non-tethered earbuds because I feel like I'm less likely to lose them. And they do a much better job isolating. And they're like.

They don't last forever is the only knock against the comply tips. They're like good for probably two, three months each. I usually buy one like three pack a year for about 20 bucks. And that lasts me the whole year. And you're still on AirPod Pros 2, correct? I am on AirPod Pros 2. I don't plan to upgrade until these wear out. So you're not commenting on because they did do new tips for the 3s, which you have not tried?

So the tips on the threes are a hybrid of the rubber and foam behind them to kind of give you the best of both worlds. I don't. My the reviews I read looked at them and were like, hey, these are already ripped for some like I think Linus Tech Tips famously ripped one of the one of the test buds when they were when they were testing those.

I, I really, I just, I really strongly like the reason I don't like IEMs generally is those, those shitty tips. Sure. Yeah. I think I might still get some pros three. I hate the naming on those things. I hate like the. airpod pros three well it's just hard to say for whatever reason you go to the apple store they only have one kind of airpod pro there i'm sorry it's not airpod pros it's airpods pro right

Look, this is like an attorney's general situation, I guess. Let's just move on. This is the kind of shit people argue about in newsrooms. I think I'm still, yes, we had arguments all the time. We're not arguments. We had discussions all the time about how much to adhere to the stupid branding of various companies. Do you honor their branding when it says that the game name should be entirely capitalized? Probably not. Nope. Intercaps are fine, though.

Oh, see, we didn't do intercaps. It was all first cap. You get to get a proper noun, just like everybody else at maximum PC. Does the C in Starcraft get capitalized? All right. Anyway, call of duty, call duty, not of. Even if it's on the box. Sure. I think I'm still going to get some pro threes. I have, I have seen like, I don't put a lot of stock in this stuff like the, like the extreme.

obsessive headphone community has got thoughts about the sound stage on them or the you know frequency response or whatever but like I I find I am very not picky about how things sound like if it If it sounds quote unquote good to me, I'm generally fine with it. The bigger one, and this is probably not a deal breaker, but I have been looking at the Switch 2 subreddit, people testing Bluetooth headphones with the Switch 2. Did I talk about this recently?

This seems like there is probably still just enough latency, even with the Switch 2 Bluetooth headphones, that it might be too much for like 150 milliseconds or something. I don't know. So I loaded up the Zelda version of Crypt of the Necrodancer on the Switch 2 to see how it was. Sure. And it didn't impact my ability to play that game, but also I am super shitty at that game. So maybe it's a bad...

bad test for me. I've played a ton of Crypt of the Necrodancer on Switch. I love that game. Did you do the calibration? Oh, actually... Does it have calibration in handheld mode? I don't think it does the calibration in handheld mode, but I can't remember. Because they can make assumptions about the response time of the handheld hardware. Anyway. But so here's the thing. In terms of usability and lifestyle and the amount of like I use those every single day. Yeah. The.

A and C stuff is so good that when it's like loud here and I want to take a nap, I just put them in my ears and close my eyes. And it's maybe a little dangerous because I don't hear people like people have to come touch me to wake me up because I won't hear them come into the room. I think that the assumption that I read, I think it was MKBHD.

said that he thinks that the increase in ANC that they said from the twos to the threes were because of the new tip design, not because of anything that changed in the actual electronics, really? Yeah, I think they said that too, that the better isolation was a big part of the new ANC. Yeah.

so if you're using the soft foam if you if you get the aftermarket soft foam tips you're going to be like two-thirds of the way there with the old ones which is why i'm not upgrading sure um like i they are phenomenal it's a phenomenal Oh, yeah, I believe sound quality aside in terms of like what it does, the transparency and adaptive modes when you're walking around out in the world, like if I'm walking around with them on and I want to not have people sneak up on me.

you put the transparency mode on or the adaptive mode on it just filters out like the filters out the traffic noise of the city But you still hear people talking in footsteps and dogs barking and stuff like that. Yeah, they would be so much more convenient for travel and on flights that I think I would, frankly, if I care enough about switch latency, I would rather I could still just bring my old wired.

noise canceling buds for the switch if I really care that much, but the otherwise the AirPods would be so much more convenient. Yep. do you want to talk about let me let me hit uh one or two more updates one is that i bought after giving you a bunch of grief for it when i was at central computer a few weeks ago i bought this guy which is

When did you give me grief for it? What is grief of griefable about that? Those things are super useful. When we were at a micro center and you were like, Oh, and I was like, Hey, you can just buy a USB adapters for your external. drive problem that you were having back making your your backup images. I was like, why don't you just buy five of these external USB-C to SATA docks?

And so I went ahead and bought one because it was a central and they had me there. It was like 10 bucks. This thing is freaking awesome. This is OK. This is USB-C to SATA. Be clear. Yeah, it's USB to C to SATA and it has like a hard connector that just lines up with both the power and the data. So I had one of these before.

that was an external dongle and you had to have a big giant power brick with a molex to the sata connector and all the huge pain in the ass kind of was iffy working sure this thing is a packaged product i just plug it into the front port of my computer and plug whatever Physical spinning hard drives, SSDs, doesn't matter. Everything works. That's the distinction here, then, because I've had a couple of those that are old USB-A 3.0 SUSATA for years.

Not enough power. Right. So they're great for SSDs. There's no way they would power these 7200 RPM hard drives. These might be 5400, but still, I don't think they would power three and a half inch platter drives.

is that thing like explicitly designed to do that it says on the back ssd uh 2.5 inch hard drive and ssd with any capacity i have not tried to put a 10k hard drive onto it sorry did you say 2.5 inch 2.5 and 3.5 inch hard drive it says on the package it'll do three and a half inch yes okay that's all right well if they're saying i mean you know usbc can deliver quite a bit of power yeah

It's been pretty good so far. I put several big giant old 7200 RPM hard drives on and it worked. And this is a Unitech SmartLink Manta is what it is. I mean, now motherboards just need to start shipping more. high power usbc ports yeah yeah that's true that would be nice because they're usually only like one or two on there um

Yeah, this this saved me from having to open up the case when I wanted to pull some stuff off of an old SSD that was my daughter's computer that I pulled out. Yes. Yeah, that's useful stuff to have around. I inherited. A kind, a kind friend, uh, handed down his, um, it's a Sabrent, like two hard drive doc. You definitely, you definitely saw these things around the wiki media office. Like we definitely, it's basically the little.

You plug the hard drive in like it's a video game cartridge. This is a two-bay one, and this one is powered. It does have an external brick, and it's USB 3 out, but... It's nice to have some option, whether it's the newer USB-C adapter you just bought or this dock that I've got now. It's nice to have an option to just plug loose hard drives into a machine without having to open the machine up and potentially turn it off to plug a hard drive into the board.

Absolutely. I had one of those docks that I ended up getting rid of just because it was it was so big and it had a huge giant power brick. And like I didn't it took up more space than for the amount of times I used it.

It took up a lot of space. This thing I can coil up and put in a drawer. And when I need it, I'll just go buy another one because I won't be able to find it in the drawer probably. So there you go. Yep. You want to talk about VR? Virtual reality? This is somewhat random. I'm not quite sure what spurred me to this other than I was just kind of curious about it. Have you heard about the Oasis driver for the Windows Mixed Reality headsets?

Yeah, this is the thing that un-jailbreaks the mixed reality headsets and makes them work without that bad... Mixed reality interface thing that Microsoft had. Well, yeah, so there's no jailbreak involved. This is in fact, I don't have this in front of me, but I'm positive I have read at some point this driver was written by a Microsoft employee, I believe.

This was written by somebody who worked on the mixed reality headsets. It seems like a thing. Yeah, I'm honestly, I'm kind of surprised that Microsoft didn't just open source the whole thing and be like, hey, community, here you go. There might be some weird thing there because the driver he has written is explicitly closed source.

Yeah. Like he said, he's not going to open source it. There might be proprietary stuff in there that is dodgy to make open. I'm not sure. I think we've talked about this in the past, though. The Microsoft fully. entirely killed support for the windows mixed reality headsets i think it was 24 h2 it was 24 h2 of windows 11 that removed entirely removed the software stack that you need to run those things so they were basically just completely dead useless e-waste

Now this driver is out and I did some digging into what it would actually require to use it because I was really curious. I have not actually set this up myself for reasons I will explain in a minute. Okay. But I did look into it. The driver, it's called Oasis driver for Windows Mixed Reality is the full title. It's on Steam. It's free. You can just go on Steam and add it to your library and run it.

And then at that point, once you have it installed, it just runs SteamVR games like anything else, right? So in a lot of ways, this is better than the old setup, I think. Oh, yeah. This is what everybody wanted. Did you have a Windows Mixed Reality? Yeah, I had to have one to test stuff. So I have a Lenovo headset. OK, yeah. So I've also got the Lenovo Explorer. I bought it because like it was it was one of those deals where like.

Shortly after it came out, it became clear the whole product line was kind of moribund. So they immediately fire sale priced it. It was like a hundred bucks or something ridiculous. I got the like deluxe package with controllers that launched at four 50, except I paid one 99 for it two months after it came out. Um, but, um,

You remember it had the whole Windows. It was a huge mess using it with stuff like SteamVR because it had the Windows Mixed Reality Portal that was Microsoft's own SteamVR home-like space. You remember that?

like yeah well and it was like a layer that lived on like basically you had to launch into that and then you launched steam vr it was it was a huge mess because you loaded into microsoft's version was you were on top of a skyscraper remember that yeah Like a mid-century modern house with a bunch of screens everywhere.

So you had to load into one virtual environment and then from within that environment load into the other SteamVR virtual environment like it was just a giant mess. It was the bad version of Cyberpunk. This driver, yeah, yes, you had to incept deeper. This driver removes that entire... thing like the whole windows mixed reality portal the entire microsoft stack is gone like effectively running this driver turns a mixed reality headset just into a generic steam vr headset so like

Sounds great. Room setup is all done through SteamVR. Like everything that you would do to configure the headset is all effectively just a SteamVR experience now. It's almost like if they had done this in the first place, people would still be making those headsets. Maybe. But then they wouldn't be able to embrace and extend into the headset. Anyway, the compatibility matrix for this is slightly rough. It does not work on any version of Windows 10, unfortunately.

But also the mixed reality portal still works on Windows 10, so you don't need it. Oh, did they not deprecate it from 10? They didn't deprecate it on 10. Oh, interesting. Okay, well, that's fine then.

On NVIDIA, you need 23H2 or newer of Windows 11. On AMD, you need 24H2 or newer, and it does not work on Intel GPUs at all. Okay, so the Intel GPU thing sucks, but needing 24H2... is fine because it goes away on 24 h2 if you're on 23 h2 just stay stay on the old portal and it works well and also um i should say 23 h2 i'm still running 23 h2 and support for that ends in a month so yeah

It's time to it's time to move on. 25 H2 is in the is in the wings. It's just waiting. They're ready to break your shit. Yeah, there's a little unlock process you have to do, which, again, I have not done myself, but I went through the tutorial for it per headset and per computer.

It's a one-time process, but it's basically just like launching the thing from Steam, clicking unlock, and then it like pops up a terminal window and you have to plug and unplug the headset and then it just does the thing and that's it. That's the jailbreak, as I understand it. It looks like it takes 10 seconds and you only have to do it once per computer or per headset. Even if you unplug and replug the headset, you don't have to do it again.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, it's not every time you use the headset it's once, unless you wipe and reinstall windows or change to a new computer, you do it once and that's it. Okay. That's awesome. So like, it seems awesome that this exists. And like I have everything I've read from people using it, it seems like it works just fine. Um, it's.

I love resurrecting old hardware, just like pulling that Raspberry Pi one out of a box to turn it back into an AirPlay target is very satisfying to me. Like I put my previous router that I was using before I got this edge router.

uh i'm using that as a wireless bridge for my mister which is across the room not near ethernet you know like it's just nice to use old stuff for new purposes So it's rad that people can use their mixed reality headsets now in a kind of better, more convenient fashion than they used to.

I will pull this out of the to go to e-waste pile and put it back in the give to a friend pile. Yes. Now, the reason I have not tried this myself, I started to, but there's two things. Number one, my mixed reality headset is buried deep in the closet now.

Like it would be pulling out a lot of boxes and going through pulling stuff out. The other reason is I was I started to do that. And then I was like, you know what? Before I do that, I should give the PlayStation VR to PC adapter another shot. Oh, because I tried that thing when it came out. Was that a year ago? You're one of the eight people that bought a PlayStation VR 2, it seems. I mean, it's a nice headset.

I know there are nicer PC headsets now, but it's way nicer than that Lenovo Explorer I've got. I will tell you for the price, it is a pretty banger headset. Yeah, that's the vibe I've gotten from the... VR enthusiast community on PC is it's not the best headset out there but for and especially because they've discounted the hell out of it now. Yeah. It's even cheaper than it was at launch and like for the price it's a very good headset. I had a lot of problems with that adapter when it came out.

I think that was a year ago. I think it was last fall. I had stuttering, bad tracking on the controllers. It just was not a usable experience for me. For whatever reason, I tried. So again, I was like, let's just do the due diligence and see if that ESVR 2 stuff is any better before I get out the MR. Worked fine. Worked basically flawlessly.

As awesome as it is that that Oasis driver is out for the MR headsets now, I guess I don't need it because I went through the whole onboarding pairing process for the PSVR 2 again yesterday on the PC, and it all just worked.

Like, I don't have a lot more to say there other than like, oh, it did pull updates for both controllers and the headset pulled updates through the PC app, the Sony PC app that launches out of Steam. So I don't know if maybe they've updated some things to make it work better. That makes sense. Like I said, I had major controller tracking issues a year ago, but they have a little utility in there that tests like Bluetooth quality and I was getting like 97, 98% signal strength on the Bluetooth.

for the controllers so like it just kind of worked is the only way to buy that thing still in the horizon call of the mountain bundle the adapter or the the vr thing Wait, what do you mean VR thing? The headset? The VR headset. Oh, no, it looks like there's a standalone SKU. Yeah, there should be. Oh, it's not any cheaper is the thing. It's like 400 bucks for the bundle or for the standalone headset. Okay.

Do you have to buy a separate dongle to work with the PSVR on the PC? The dongle is, I can't remember how much, it might be like 50 bucks. That seems like the cheapest they would be willing to sell you something. Let me just 60 bucks. It's $60. It's just a little USB breakout box that you that you plug DisplayPort and USB into and then headset in. So it's basically 450 bucks and you get a.

460, yeah, 460 to use it on a PC. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's not bad. I mean, I don't know if you were only buying it for PC, I don't think I'd say to get this one necessarily. I don't know how well Sony's going to support it over time. I'm guessing I would not hold my breath for there to be a lot of long-term support for that adapter. Like if you really just want a PC headset, I think you're probably better off getting a PC headset, but.

I mean, if you want to play one of the five PSVR two games on PlayStation as well, then it's a better option, I guess. I mean, the thing is, the PC headsets have gotten really expensive, like the big screen and all those are all like they're premium for real enthusiasts. So it seems like that market has skewed upward toward the people who really want a premium VR experience because those are the only people still using VR.

And I think I'd buy the PlayStation thing rather than buying like the Quest 3S. So basically this is the same price as a MetaQuest 3 because that's $4.99. So like, yeah, I don't know. That feels pretty good. Yeah. I mean, again, like I, my experience has been better now, but like a lot of people have Bluetooth issues with like adapters not working and stuff. Like, I don't know that it's the most compatible PC VR experience.

Like it might be worth a shot if you're looking for a PC headset, but it is wired still, right? Yes, it is wired. So that is the, that is the knock. Yeah, that's not, not my favorite, but I didn't use it a ton yesterday, but I will say like. Stop me if you've heard of this one before. The SteamVR home sure looked way better than on that old Windows X-Reality headset.

The much, much higher resolution OLED screens versus the lower res LCDs and that thing. Like it was just like, oh, wow, this is what this is supposed to look like. Yeah, even. Even like the last wave of mixed reality headsets, like the Samsung mixed reality headset, the last wave one was fucking great compared. It was up there with the index compared in terms of image quality. It was the Samsung Odyssey Plus was like the.

mr headset to get i kind of wish i had like gotten that on fire sale but well and like the and like it was comparable to the index and then the index is now not not the state of the art obviously anymore because it's been five years since that thing came out but

anyway like i vr it's back get back to me in like two years there's so many games coming out right now that i will never have time for this but i think i could actually like play half-life alex now finally on this psvr 2 it would be a good experience dude that you should play half-life alex is so freaking good yeah it's it's like

Like one day we're going to look back on Half-Life Alyx like we do the Vectrex now, right? I walked around. This was basically all I did after I got it working yesterday was, you know, all those environments that you can download in SteamVR Home to walk around in. There's one in there that's like somebody, I don't know, I forget the character's name, but it's...

somebody's lab from half-life 2 or from half-life alex oh is it kleiner's lab it's not kleiner it's somebody else i don't remember the name it's alex's dad then maybe i i can't remember but um you may have seen it there's there's like a button on a shelf that you can press to the shelf

descends and reveals the hidden lab and you can walk around anyway you can see the hand attachment from that game you remember that the little mechanical glove that has your like hearts the health meter on it and stuff yeah like just walking up to and looking at that little Hand controller in like the diegetic health meter stuff made me really want to play Half-Life Alyx all of a sudden. You should do an Alyx stream. I've streamed VR before. I don't know.

eager to go back to that you there are ways you can do that that will work and be a better viewing experience than you've had in the past maybe maybe anyway the main thing there is An unbelievable amount of stuff in this room right now. Well, that's true. A lot of it that I need to prep for donation or storage in the closet or selling. And if and when I ever get that done in five years, there will be a ton of floor space in this room. So actually, it's true. It will be a very good.

your space at that point. That's true. I think that says, oh, I have one last hit. So I've moved everything hanging under the PC and I got rid of that spine that was doing my cable management from the floor to the desk. So for the sit stand desk.

mainly because the spine broke eventually, which was disappointing because it was not an expensive thing. But I got a Vivo heavy duty under desk mount for the PC. I talked about this a little bit a couple months ago, but I've had it up now long enough that I'm willing to like. Give it a wholehearted endorsement. It's it's I got rid of the spine because now I'm hanging the PC and most of the cables are just all at desk level, not going to the floor. Got it.

So, yeah, I have this under desk mount is basically like two metal loops with some grabbers on the bottom and a couple of slides and you kind of slide one side off to get access to the PC. You can actually. slide it open enough that i don't have to take it all the way out if i just want to open up the side and like dust it out or whatever um it's been it's been super good i'm a big fan of of how it works and um it's made the sit stand much more manageable oh sure

So now I've also gone and there's a bunch of people that sell like 3D printed mounts for specific audio devices that you can then use them to fasten things up underneath the desk. So like. I got one for my SteelSeries headset box. I got one. It's a little more generic, I think, for the Motu. I couldn't find one that was specific for the Motu M4. Oh, wait a minute.

Yeah. What are these, what are these attached to? Like I am, I am like obsessed with mounting things under my desk. I, I am just, I'm obsessed with just hiding all of my technology so I don't see it. I like a nice tidy desktop and like I've got an Astro. pro tr mix amp i've got this motu m4 i've got this rack mounted dbx like uh-huh

Not all of it is mounted currently. Some of it is. But like, anyway, go on. What is this thing called that you're talking about? Well, so they're just like little, they're little 3D printed, basically their sides. Oh, these are all just like, I thought you meant this was like some commercial product line. This is all just like user.

design stuff. Well, no, they're commercial printed. Like, like that's the thing is commercial printing is a real thing now. Like there's print farms. I thought you meant this was like, I need to just go on thing a verse and download a thing and print it myself or something. I mean, I'm sure you can do that for a lot of this stuff. The ones that I figured was worth $12 to just pay somebody to do that work for me. Of course.

But, you know, when we're talking about some of the equipment we're talking about is not light. Like this Motu M4 is largely made of metal. Like it needs a pretty sturdy mount. And so you want something that's strong enough. The things that I bought are printed like 100% infill, so they're solid plastic. I had to kind of eyeball it to realize it was a 3D printed item.

So basically it's just you get the two sides. And I think the Motu one is they do the same one for the M2 and M4 because they're the same shape, but just wider. And then you place them further apart and then you can either screw them into the bottom of your desk. You can put like double sided foam tape or something on them if you want. I suppose you could do nanotape if you wanted to live on the edge.

But they just go up underneath the desk and then you have access to them at the depth that you want without having to do anything else. So I have like my headphone. dongle thing is there my um my headphone i have a hook to hang the headphones on underneath the desk i have the motu down there

All of that stuff is just under the desk. So now my desk is free to get filled with crap just the way I like it. Great. And it's fantastic. Great. Highly recommended. Is the motorized desk, the sit-stand desk you're using, like it doesn't have any problem with the extra weight of the PC? uh that hasn't so far it's rated for up to 250 pounds and i know we're near 250 pounds true okay yeah um i and i do i did make an effort

So I think at some point I'm going to move the streaming PC over here, too, and hang it on the other side, just down low. Just balance the center of gravity on the desk. Well, but also the streaming box, I'm getting ready to move it to an ITX machine. uh because i've been testing external and internal capture cards lately and it turns out the usbc 3.2 external capture cards are indistinguishable from the internal capture cards um so anyway

If I ever moved more fully to Linux, I might have to think about that because I'm in the worst possible situation of using an internal Elgato capture card, which has the least possible Linux support. Look, I will tell you my Avermedia 4K.

internal capture card is just a PCI express to USB bridge and it works perfectly in Linux. I believe it. The one we should wrap this up. I don't need to go down this rabbit hole. The one nice thing about that Elgato card I use is that, and I don't remember how they're doing this exactly.

does not present an exclusive video source to Windows. Like, you know, most devices, it's like if OBS is using it, then you can't also open it as a device in like a video call because it'll just be like device in use or whatever. That Elgato card is able to...

multiplex the video source so that you can use it in as many apps as you want simultaneously which is super nice but it works like the virtual cam that obs basically kind of seamlessly which is it turns out to be really convenient but anyway I guess that'll do it for us today, then. Yeah, hopefully there's some stuff in there that you, the listener, found useful or interesting to follow up on. Yeah, I'll put links for the stuff I talked about. We'll put them in show notes, I guess.

Whether you see them in your client or not is up to your client because you can always go to techpod.content.com and they'll be there or we'll put them in. I'll put stuff in the thread in the Discord if you're in the Discord too. And if you want to get in the Discord and you're not in there, you can do that.

by joining the Patreon and supporting the podcast. We're listener supported. So we're not here. If it were for you, we wouldn't be here. And if you want to find out how you can support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod again. It's patreon.com slash techpod, where for five bucks a month, you get access to the discord. You get the monthly patron exclusive episode. And you support the show. Like I said.

we appreciate each and every one of you um we do but we especially uh appreciate our executive producer to your supporters including jason lee in felicitous rips jason andrew slosky jordan lippett Bunny Money, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Thank you to everyone.

And that'll do it for us this week. We'll be back next week with another edition of the tech pod. As always, please consider the environment for printing this podcast.