309: Tivoization

Brad, I experienced a new side effect of electric cars this morning. Oh, good. That's life with a new paradigm shifting product, right? And every day is a new adventure. I mean, it is. I had to get up this morning, go to the grocery store right when they opened at six and.

i walked out and we have skunks in our neighborhood so he's like you kind of take a look when you step out on the front porch and give it an eyeball make sure there's nothing around but i got all the way into the i unplugged the car i got into the car

And as I was sitting down, I see a little white bushy tail just walking right underneath the front right corner of the car. Wait, the car's out on the driveway? This is not in the garage? The garage is full of crap. There's no cars fitting in there. Of course.

Yeah, it's California. We don't have closets. So I see the bushy tail and I'm like, well, shit, what do I do? Because normally you just kind of start the car and then the skunk would scurry out and be like, oh, this is a sound I'm familiar with. but the electric car kind of doesn't make a startup sound. Oh no. It goes whir, whir, whir when you're driving down the street so you don't like tag somebody.

I'm sorry. This is a full category difference on the type of problem that I thought you were going to come in here and talk about. No. So I was sitting in there. I was like, how do I deal with like, I don't want to honk because I don't want to startle it. I turned off the air conditioning in the vent first. That was number one. Right. Your number one priority here is.

prevent spray spray right yeah setting aside the actual priority of you also don't want to run over it which both kills the animal and also still releases the stink that's a sometimes problem oh does that not always happen they do not always release on death ah OK, well, you don't want to run over it or have it spray. I like generally speaking, even though they were incredibly destructive to my yard, which is not beautiful. I kind of like the skunks. They're very cute. They're quite affable.

I think we've talked about before. I had a crazy aunt who had a pet skunk for a while. What? Have I not told you this? No. In the house? Oh, yeah. What? So she was a nature cinematographer and she. found a a baby skunk whose mom had been killed in an accident when she was on a shoot and in like Missouri or Nebraska or someplace one time and violating

But I'm sure are several federal and state laws. She brought it back to Northern Virginia with her and its name was Squirt. It was it never it. She had it for like six years. It didn't spray ever. Not once. Not that I'm aware of. She leaked occasionally, just like a little, little, little taste of. But generally speaking, Squirt was really chill, very affectionate, would like sit on your lap and was very snuggly, almost like a cat where you held.

I've held a pet skunk. Yeah, she found a vet that would help her take care of it, that would give it shots and stuff so it could get, I assume, rabies vaccines. I don't know. I didn't ask. I was young when this happened. And then eventually when it got to a when it got to a point where it was starting to leak more often, she gave it to like nature, like a like a children's.

nature museum type situation good i guess i have to imagine after six years that's probably not easy to part uh i mean i'm gonna go and tell you when it started leaking more it became a pretty easy decision as i recall yes also I say she was a little bit like, look, the house always had a little bit of a funk, right? It was not like skunk free. But anyway, so the skunks under the front of the car and I'm like.

Well, this is an intractable position because I didn't see it come back out. I like I load up the doorbell camera to see if I can see it walking around out there. Nope, nothing.

I put the overhead because the car has the whole round the car cameras. And I hit that button after a minute or two when I realized. But then I was like, well, crap, what do I do? I don't I don't know. I don't know what to do here. So. I sat there for a minute and then I like rolled forward just a smidge and nothing shot out from under the car.

and so then i drove off and it was fine it must have gone out the back when i wasn't looking just okay no idea how it resolved so hang on just to back up or are you saying that skunks in the area have become accustomed to the sound of combustion engines and know to get out of the way

I think generally speaking, animals that live in suburban areas are familiar with the sound of combustion engines and know not to be there. And like I said, electric cars every day is a new adventure. Yeah, it was exciting. Bye.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad, how you doing? I'm doing well. I resisted. I'm kind of glad you brought a skunk story for the cold open because I was all ready to come in here. Linux guns blazing. And talk about the dual boot diaries. Which I guess we could still get into if you want. Look, it's funny. I listen to several podcasts where your name is invoked regularly. I'm on one of them. I think we're going to have...

Yeah. Hang on. Are you talking about podcasts I'm on or are you saying they're podcasts? I'm not on the talk about me podcast. So I was listening to an I've been working my way through the back catalog of AMCA since Rob was on. I mean, since before that, but like. Sure. And I'm going I was on one of the old patron episodes from like maybe the first year that they did it. And I think Austin cited a conversation with you about about the the.

Revenge of the Sith novelization and some Sheev related motivations. That's amazing because I had another conversation with him about the Revenge of the Sith novelization not two weeks ago. I have the Revenge of the Sith novelization in my Libby list. There's only like two copies in the San Francisco Public Library system. So it's good.

Yeah, I'm going to read it. I dearly hope they do an episode about that novel at some point. I am 100 percent positive that they are going to do an episode as many times as he's brought it up over the years. Anyway, that's exciting to hear. Right. I feel like there are two kinds of people. Yeah. When you hear that someone is talking about you, you either get excited or you become incredibly fearful. And I am extremely the latter. Yeah, but like you shouldn't be because you generally speaking.

Generally speaking, you comport yourself well. Thank you. That's okay. I think that you don't live your life in a way that you should be afraid of the things that you've said in the past. Okay. That's good, which is like I try to live my life that way. I think I'm probably less successful than some and more than others, you know, but but yeah, like I don't sometimes sometimes.

When I started doing podcasts a million years ago and we were doing the Maximum PC podcast and it felt like just five people sitting in an office talking to each other and not we didn't realize that like tens or hundreds of thousands of people were listening to that every week. Yep.

The first time somebody came up to me and was like, hey, I listened to your podcast, I kind of panicked. And I was like, it was like a fight or flight moment. I was like, I should run. God, what did I say? Yeah. What did I do this time? But yeah, you know, it's a little more polished experience these days, I guess. But for the most part. So you came up on dual boot diaries this week because we were talking about.

Well, we talked a little bit about your approach to multi-booting different distros of Linux the other day. I was just talking to somebody on the full nerd discord this morning. Ironically, it was someone who is also on our, who I know from our discord. Look, it's a crossover event happening right now. Everything is everything now.

Yeah, they're all they're all merging. I was talking to them about that exact thing about like I'm trying to remember what the specifics were. It was they had a situation where one OS hijacked another OS's boot configuration. Yep. I think it was Windows messed up Linux or I forget. Anyway, it was it was one of those conversations of like, yeah, this is just going to kind of keep happening. Windows loves to overwrite Linux, but it's not just it's not just Windows, though.

Oh, other Linux is over. Linux likes to overwrite Linux. And also your UEFI likes to make seemingly random harebrained decisions about what to do with your boot entries. Like it's all just a mess.

Well, so we were talking about this because Adam's working this out with the framework laptops and the framework desktop, which purport to boot off of their little USB expansion cards, but kind of don't like the UEFI doesn't see them as bootable.

So what I did was I set up Refind on a on a secondary partition on a like a tertiary partition at the end of the drive. And then it just scans all the available drives because it sees those USB drives and you can boot off or whatever on whatever at that point.

But yeah, it was actually actually real quick just to close the loop here. It was actually the refined author that I was quoting to this person on the discord this morning. I'll just read it to you because that the refined site is a trove of information. It's it's it. Yes, it is. But also, it's very clearly this dude's blog, Roderick W. Smith. It is. Yeah. So the guy who writes refined the boot manager. Also, I'm going to resist the ultimate pedantry here.

At some point I have to deliver a screed maybe on the dual boot diaries about how refined is not a bootloader. It's just, it's just a boot manager, but anyway, um, but the TLDR is, it solves a lot of problems. It absolutely is very, it's very useful, but, um, That guy's site, I'll link it in the show notes, is the most... 1993 web 1.0, like original Tim Berners-Lee HTTP design. It really is. It's just plain, like zero style sheets, zero anything. It's just plain.

It's a table, I think. There are some very basic original HTML features in there, but it is just numerous giant walls of text on a white background.

and this sounds like when you say it that way it sounds like a bad thing but it's actually really fantastic because it makes reading it really easy and like the total page load is like a fractions of a second and it's like three kilobytes or something it's crazy but it's a lot of technical information just kind of blasted at you like it's oh yeah it's not necessarily like divided up and segmented in a way that's easily digestible it's just a lot of information in bulk anyway

All of that is to say his site is like, it's like the Bible for UEFI booting and how secure boot works and stuff for me. Like, it's like where I learned everything I know about that stuff, but he has an entire page on there. This is the thing I was going to get at is that.

He has an entire page on there about OSs and UEFI behaving badly and stepping on each other's toes and screwing up your boot configuration. So I'll just read the quote very quickly. Once you've installed Refind, you may face a new challenge. keeping it set as your default boot manager. Users of multi-boot computers have long faced similar challenges because most OSs provide mechanisms to keep themselves booting, even at the cost of disrupting other OSs or overriding your own choices.

So like everything I've had, I've had issues on computers that have just Linux on them that have never been touched by windows and still having like boot entries disappear and having them become unbootable because either. The Debian installer or the UEFI or something made a weird decision and decided to delete some stuff like it's just a constant mess trying to keep OS is behaving.

This is why this is why my general policy is don't mess with the default boot stuff for the OS. And then it's why I like using refined, honestly, for dual boots is because then you set up a separate partition that the OS doesn't know about and doesn't jack with. And that that's just where refined live and lives and stuff kind of just works at that point. But anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

You say that, but this user, this user had Windows install its bootloader on a separate drive that was not the drive that the Windows install was on. So like Windows will still just put things wherever it wants. Well, look, this is why when people say, hey, I want to install.

windows what do i do i was like take every other drive out of the machine first except for the one you want windows to be on yep we had that exact conversation yeah it's the stupidest possible solution to the problem yes okay all right at this point

At this point, we should probably just get to the actual episode topic. I'll save my. Yeah, I was excited to hear you to hear you talking about finding find, though. Oh, yeah. It's incredible. You talked about your first experience with find. And it's good. We'll talk about that at some point. Yeah. Do boo diaries wherever fine podcasts are found. But but on this podcast, we're doing a 2025 end of life extravaganza. A lot of stuff dying.

In 2025. Like, look, this is where we insert the doors into the podcast, I guess. What's, you know, I started to this could that comment could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. We will define this narrowly to recent tech products that are end of lifing. Yeah. Yeah. We're keeping the scope tight today. We're going to talk about Windows 10. We're going to talk about TiVo and we're going to talk about. Blu-ray drives? Like fuzzily, we will talk about like BD-ROMs.

PC Blu-ray drives, which like we've got some announcements there that are official about companies getting out of that business. But then others are more fuzzy, like, hey, these are no longer available anywhere, but no official messaging anyway. Yeah.

But let's start with Windows 10. We've talked about this a bunch over the last year because it's been looming. This is the first post Windows 10. I'm sorry. I'm laughing because I. We had talked about it so much that I figured that by the time we got to the actual dates, we couldn't talk about it anymore because we had covered it extensively. But of course, you're going to have to address it post a date like the.

so on one hand we i joked about this on on the full nerd this week because of course we talked about it there too but the the like there on one hand there's a lot of panic because like you're theoretically not supported anymore on the other hand Microsoft has added a bunch of bypasses to bypass the.

to continue getting security updates for another year, basically. Yeah. So like we had that debate a couple of weeks ago about whether they would blink at the last minute or not. And I feel like we were both right because they didn't officially blink, but they like kind of soft on the backend have like, like. it's almost like, hey, I know a guy. It's like, hey, you want another year of support? Open the trench coat here. You can look at all my illicit wares. Would you want to?

Do you want to use one drive to back up your settings? Do you want to give me a thousand Microsoft points? Or you can pay 30 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. That one, that one they had talked about, but. Well, I thought it was 60 originally, so they've definitely dialed it back some. For folks who don't know, Windows 10 officially ended end of life on Tuesday, the 14th of October, 2025.

That means that they're not getting feature updates. They're not doing security updates unless you do one of three things. Basically you can, it turns out originally they said you have to use windows backup to back up your profile folders, but then they changed that to.

Yo, if you have OneDrive installed and you're logged into an online Microsoft account, it will just back up your settings to the cloud for that machine, which means like it will sync your wallpapers and your dark mode and stuff like that. Your theme settings pretty much. And if you do that, that's good enough. They'll pop up a thing in Windows Update that says, hey, do you want to do this long-term extended security updates daily for Windows 10 since you seem to still be using it?

Yeah, I think that's the value of approaching this or revisiting this post end of life is that now we can see how they have chosen to roll this out. And yeah, I was actually kind of surprised to find that it's just showing up in people's Windows update.

settings panel in windows i kind of assumed that you know we knew that like we said we knew there were going to be ways to opt into a little bit of extended support but i assumed that was going to be visiting some relatively obscure Microsoft web page and maybe having to log in and potentially give money, etc. Like the idea that this is coming straight to people on their Windows 10 PCs in the place where they get Windows 10 updates already.

And it's essentially a single click to just say, yes, I want more security updates is kind of surprising to me. I'm sure it's going to be a notification like they're going to do a pop up as well that says, hey, you should consider upgrading to Windows 11 if you can do that. But if not, maybe do this instead, because it's in.

Microsoft's best interest for these to be these machines to continue getting security updates. Right. Yeah. If you I assume you saw this, but the link to the is this a knowledge base article? I don't know what you call it. It's just kind of have the knowledge base is dead. End of life.

Really? Just add it to the list. Yeah, put it on the things Microsoft killed. This Microsoft.com link that we have in the show notes has a screenshot of the enrollment panel in Windows 10. Oh. Where you actually are picking how you want to enroll. That's nice.

And it literally has, what's the term, radio button? Radio button, yeah. Radio is the one that you can only select one of, right? Mm-hmm. It literally is a panel that just has three radio buttons, which is like, choose how you want to enroll in extended security updates, back up your PC settings. redeem Microsoft rewards points, one time purchase. So like, I guess I shouldn't be surprised like they have.

incredibly extensive telemetry, let's say, right? About how many people are still using Windows 10 because that's kind of what Windows is these days, a telemetry collection machine. So they know. They know better than anybody how many people have refused to update to 11 and how many people are in need of this, right? Like you said, it is in their interest to not have a bunch of millions and millions of insecure Windows installs out there.

There's a couple of gotchas here. One is if you uninstalled OneDrive, you can't do the settings backup thing. Which means. Yes, because that's so I've I've seen people on my feed talking about not getting opted into this. And those people, I believe, in the past have removed one drive. So I wonder if that's actually preventing. But could you just reinstall it? You could just reinstall it from the store, yeah. Okay. You also need to have Windows 10 version 22H2.

um and it needs to be a consumer version not one of the like the long-term support or kiosk code versions or an active directory or connected to an active directory or anything that's like businessy basically um It can't be a child account is the other thing. So you have to be signed into an admin account and that admin account can't be a child account, which means if your kid's PC isn't getting this update and they're on Windows 10,

What you do is you go log in as your admin adult account and then opt into it and then their machine will be opted in as a result of that. So, yeah, the. The three things, we've talked about this before, so I'm gonna be real fast. The syncing your PC settings is free and easy. I would just do that unless you really don't wanna have a Microsoft account on your computer for some reason.

the thousand microsoft i think you probably have to be logged in signed in for all three of these ways with a with a microsoft account though because you can't make the purchase without a microsoft account and you can't have Microsoft rewards points redeemed to your account without that. So, yeah, I'm sure a lot of people listening have seen the headline in the last couple of weeks that they are continuing to close off avenues for creating non-online accounts in Windows. Yeah.

I think you're down to one solution for that now. This is why you can do the active. You can say, hey, I need to connect to an active directory, but I'm not there. That still works, but it's kind of a pain to figure out how to get there. I just gave up. Like, honestly, it feels impossible at this point. Like, it's kind of just a cost of doing business with Windows at this point. You have to have an all like, frankly.

And to be clear, I fully respect the decision to not want to have to make an online account to sign into your OS like that is absolutely reasonable. But I feel like in practical terms, if that's you, you should just run Linux at this point. So like it feels. It feels like a losing battle to continue trying to use windows in this way. Well, so I'm in between because I don't mind having the. I don't mind having the online account. I actually sign in once I install Windows.

I want the install to happen without the online account because of the stupid stuff that they do with the file structure. But yes, that is only because of stupid arbitrary decisions they have made about how it jacks up your home directory and some other related stuff to sign in at install time as opposed to.

signing in after install yeah if the file structure wasn't all one drived up for my profile folders i would absolutely just sign in on the on the login i used to do that before they started doing that and it's only because of this post one drive in one drive a nation of windows that i started doing that so anyway yep um so that's it for windows 10 don't run like you're going to see a lot of blog posts from people who are

making bad decisions and encouraging bad behavior about running the LTSC version. Yeah, that's the long term servicing channel version, which is the. You've written you've like, I think you described it as the airport kiosk version of Windows. Yeah. You know, all those screens you see blue screen at airports that have arrivals and departures on them. That's what this version of Windows is for. It's not for day to day use. Yeah, I look into it a little. I mean, it is run on.

some more serious stuff like a lot of medical imaging systems and air traffic control and stuff like that. But those are still use cases where you need a very bare bones operating environment and it's not a full end user implementation. well and also keep in a key way they're also in places where users may interact with them but they're not interacting with the broader internet right so they're not

They're not machines like if you're on your dialysis machine that you're not browsing the web and playing Candy Crush on that thing, you know? Yeah. So that's the big difference. I looked into it a little bit because I've been seeing people recommend the LTSC version on places like Twitter, which is like, I mean.

Stop me if you've heard this one. Twitter is utterly rife with terrible information about everything. Yeah, of course. One of those things is installing Windows. And like I've been seeing people for like two years now say, just go get LTSC. Like you'll never have to think about it again.

Super bad idea. I ended up on, uh, are you familiar with mass grave? Yeah. Like I think they, they do a lot of like windows activation scripts and stuff like that these days, but I ended up on their wiki about this. And even they. Basically have some misconceptions about LTSC listed here. Common misconceptions, LTSC is fast. It's not fast, although there might be a bit more RAM available because of no store apps running in the background.

You can achieve the same result in the regular editions by turning off background apps and startup apps. It's more privacy oriented. No telemetry options are the same. And then some other stuff there, but basically, and it lacks support for some stuff like some games and newer applications may not run on LTSC because it doesn't get updated as often.

Honestly, you're going to see games that stop supporting Windows 10 shortly. Yeah. Right. We're already seeing like people are pulling their 32 bit versions because Windows 11 doesn't support 32 bit CPUs. Maybe like you have to have a 64 bit CPU to run Windows 11. So like steam 32 bit is going to go away. It was shortly. It hasn't already stuff like that. I don't see on this Microsoft page how long I've seen conflicting.

reports of how long the esu lasts a year i think it's a year is the main one year i've seen I've seen people talk about the three year span, but I think that's the paid support. I think that's the like enterprise level. That's for commercial enterprise. Volume priced. Yeah. Commercial support. So you're only kicking the can down the road for a year, although a year is some decent buffer to.

This page I'm looking at says that the ESU ends on October 13th, 2026. So it's a one year. So I would I would if you're still on Windows 10 and intent on enabling ESU, I would treat that year as a year to figure out what you're going to move on to. Yep. like windows 10 time yes like realistically like windows 10 is not a forever os and you're going to be sol at some point and that some point is next october yeah october 14th 2026 it seems like

You pretty much need to, in the next year, either make your peace with Windows 11 in some fashion or move on to another operating system. So then the, yeah. so the other thing not to do is not to run the versions of this that you download from the internet yeah because people make like install scripted versions that don't have the the checks and stuff installed

Don't run Windows from non-Microsoft sources. I've talked about this before. I hate this phenomenon of people literally using the phrase Windows Distro. Mm hmm. There's stuff like there's stuff like Atlas OS out there and like they're giving themselves like flashy homepages and unique names and stuff like I.

It's a malware distribution system. I mean, you know, we can't say definitively that any of those have malware, but it's certainly prone to that sort of thing. There's no way to know that it's not a malware distribution system. of your windows install install the official windows and do it yourself or just run linux at that point yes that's also i would agree with that um so anyway so that's it that's windows windows 10 it made it uh 10 years almost exactly long live windows 10.

The last version of Windows we'll ever need. Steve Ballmer, 2014. Remember, yeah, remember when they, I mean, didn't they actually say? They said final Windows. They said it was the final Windows. My theory is that it was Apple changing their versioning. At least to an extent that spurred the, you know, they could have kept iterating on Windows 10, but they made the conscious marketing branding choice to bump it to 11. I think they wanted to get rid of 32-bit support.

They could have still, I don't think they had to rebrand to do things like that. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. They could have just kept versioning Windows 10 forever. What if? What if they dropped the number? Yeah, just Windows? What if it just became Windows? The windows, I think, is what is your people. I don't know. I was Googling the phrase Windows 12 again this morning, as I sometimes do. Yeah. There's not a lot out there right now.

people talking it seems like it's oh no in fact like there used to be more rumors about a windows 12 and that seems to have dried up so that maybe seems like that may be a good ways off if if and when maybe windows 11 really will be the last version of windows

Anyway, it'll be for a lot of people. Ha ha ha. Speaking of things that have ended. This one is insane to me. So TiVo like this is just like. I think, I mean, a bunch of sites reported this cord cutters news is the one that a bunch of people cited. I think they might've been the first kind of blog in the space to land on this information. Yeah. Can I just read the first sentence of the story?

In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line. Effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. This news story is dated October 2025. And not like, say... sometime in 2012. I assumed that TiVo ceased to exist like a decade ago. So for people who don't know and don't remember TiVo, I think it's important to provide a little context here.

TiVo was the first DVR. There was Replay TV came out around the same time, but TiVo was the one that made the concept popular through a mixture of good branding and really nice software and a extensible kind of with an asterisk platform. And for folks who don't know what DV for the children in the audience who don't know what a DVR was in the 80s and 90s, you would buy a VCR with a clock in it and you would say.

I want to record The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead, and The Simpsons are on channel 11 at 7 p.m. and 7.30, and then again on Sundays at 8. And Beavis and Butthead is on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. on channel 72. And you would put all those things in using your remote control and usually would record them onto a tape if there was enough room on the tape. And then when you got home.

you would be able to rewind that tape and you'd look at it and you'd be like, oh man, heck yeah, I have most of an episode of The Simpsons except for the part where the football game ran late and then I didn't get the first 10 minutes. Cause it started late and then I, I, you have to watch the end of that one, like a year from then when they rerun it. Yeah. Can I jump in real quick? Have you heard of Marion Stokes?

The name's familiar, but I don't remember who they are. I just became familiar with her. It literally was just like some random post on my feed that somebody was like, you know, people do these little like history explainer threads on social media. Uh-huh. She is a woman from, I think it was the Chicago, no, no, Pennsylvania. She lived in Pennsylvania. She recorded 70,000 VHS tapes worth of local television programming over the course of her life.

Oh, so she's she's a person who has an archive.org collection named after them. Yeah. Oh, really? She's so she's since passed away. I don't know. I did not see what happened to the fate of her. tape collection. Apparently, these tapes were being stored across multiple apartments by the end of the whole project because she was basically just worried about and justifiably worried about television programming.

Not being archived or just vanishing, being lost to history. Wow. So I kind of want to follow up more on this and find out what happened to all her tapes because. Old tapes of tapes of old broadcast TV are priceless. It's wild, the stuff that was on back then. So she did donate it to the Internet. Her son donated it to the Internet Archive after her death. Four shipping containers worth of tapes were required to move the collection to IA's headquarters. And there's been a documentary about her.

And anyway, just to just to this is what things were like before TiVo. Yeah, you you would record stuff, you'd get the ads, the whole thing, and then you just watch it like it was kind of low, a low quality version of what was on the on the TV. TiVo came out in 1999 with a box that was like the same size as a VCR, but didn't have a slot for a tape basically. And it would record.

whole you just tell it you like the simpsons and then it would record the simpsons anytime the simpsons was on so it was a really it was a really novel um experience in that you didn't have to do like normal The perception and this is going to sound crazy, but the perception in the 90s was that normal people didn't know how to work the time recording on their VCR. That was some real nerd business. It was that was like an extreme. Let's say like fixture of late night show comedy routines.

Yeah, you're kind of thing like it was just a it was a extremely common trope of regular people don't know how to program the time on their VCR. Your VCR was blinking midnight because that's what happened if you didn't set the time on your VCR. So TiVo came out with this thing. It cost a few hundred bucks.

It came out in 1999 and it, it really changed the way, like it was one of those things that my, my partner at the time went to a friend's house. They had a TiVo and she was like, she came back and she's like. We're going to Best Buy tomorrow. We're getting one of these things. This is incredible. Because what it let you do is it recorded a constant buffer of TV of whatever channel was on, but then would also record the things you're watching. So if you.

paused it and walked away and made a drink and went to the bathroom came back and sit down you could fast forward through the commercials right which was shocking revolutionary no um it it changed the way we watch tv to the point that like You know, when we moved to California and we had friends who went to the same college as us and we'd get together on Saturday mornings to watch college football.

You only went to the friend's house if they had a TiVo. Sure. Right. And and everybody knew to show up like 30 or 40 minutes late because we'd start. It was before social media. So we start the game recording and then we pause it. And we'd start the game so we didn't have to watch commercials. We could fast forward through halftime and be done in like two hours instead of five. Was that I'm trying to think back. Was that actually maybe kind of a bigger pillar of the marketing than.

the recording shows offline or when you're not paying attention was it was i feel like i remember the you can pause live tv thing actually being like the refrain the you can like they definitely tested a bunch of different things the you can pause live tv was a big part of it

The never miss your favorite show was the other big one. Right. So that was the kind of standard one. But I think it was the more because, you know, you could program VCRs to record things when you weren't around. Kind of. It was. Yeah. But like that was. The point is that was a concept people at least understood as being possible. It was the you can hit pause in the middle of watching something live and walk away thing that felt like magic or felt like the future.

So it was like it was a culture like the TiVo became a real cultural touchstone around that time. Like it was referenced on TV shows. The thing made a sound that's instantly recognizable. It went doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo when you fast forwarded a rewound. The menu beeps and bloops were really good and really well designed. And it... Like kind of has a big giant legacy, even though we've moved to on demand distribution for content over the Internet now.

It invented the PVR, DVR for all intents and purposes. It became a verb, right? Like, didn't people talk about, like people would just talk about TiVo-ing things, right? Yeah. I'm going to TiVo that. Yeah. It was right. Widely regarded as the first non pornographic $10 monthly subscription for a thing. Oh, great. Thanks, TiVo. So, I mean, like, look, some of the legacy is not good. Okay.

They also had a lifetime sub that was usually attached to the hardware, although that varied by region and the service. So like if you have a satellite version of the TiVo, then it would it would be tied to the to your account rather than the device or something. It was weird. And in Australia, they had all sorts of weird rules about that annual sub.

The service that you paid for provided the TV listings that made the season passes work. So without you could use it without paying for the service. But if you did that, then you didn't get the news is on at 6 p.m. and Wheel of Fortune is on at 7. You just got the time. And you had to do it like the old fashioned way. I don't think I remembered that you could use it without the service.

At that point, you were literally just programming channel numbers and times at that point? Yeah, exactly. Honestly, the other thing that this killed was TB Guide. Before TiVo, everybody in the country that watched TV on the reg got a little magazine that was like, I don't know, it was like, I.

I'd call it Reader's Digest size now, but it was like the size of a paperback book, basically. Oh, my God. You were really jogging some memories here. We didn't really get TV Guide, but I assume most local newspapers, ours ran local listings in the paper. Ours absolutely did not.

Really? No, I'm pretty sure I remember our local. I remember looking at the newspaper to look at the local TV listings for the week. But yeah, so so you had a magazine that came once a week that told you what was going to be on TV that week, which football games were going to be on. And it was all local for your region. So if you were in the region and they got Braves games instead of Reds games, you would know that you got the Braves game on ABC on Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m.

TiVo killed that. They got rid of that. It gave you a big giant guide of all the things you could watch at any given time, which cable was kind of already doing at that point, but it wasn't really interactive. It was just a channel that kind of scrolled. Yeah. And then. Also, their response to TiVo is widely regarded as the reason that the GPL version three exists. Yes, I looked this up. The word TiVoization was coined because.

The TiVo ran Linux. Yeah. Linux famously is under the GNU general public license, which requires you to release any changes to source code you make. Which they did. Or so, yes, they, so. They took Linux. They ran Linux on. This is probably the first example of a consumer device running Linux that I can think of.

It was definitely for non-network hardware, for sure. Yeah. So my understanding is they took the Linux source code, they modified it for use on the TiVo. They did release the source code changes they made as required by the license, but there were protections in place on the hardware.

to prevent you from further modifying their source code and putting it back on the device and running it. I think specifically they signed the kernel or something so that you had to run a signed kernel. And if you didn't have their cryptographic keys, then you couldn't write your own code changes. Now, this caused a lot of consternation among certain open source software freedom. The bearded people were upset about this. Which, like, let's be real. I think that I listened to your...

I listened to the conversation with Wendell about practical versus ideological. Like you need the ideological component. Like you need it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You need the ideologues like you can't let them steer every decision, but like you need them backstopping the constant encroaching of like corporate and moneyed interests that would love to shut down everything good about open source.

that said i think that the move toward mit more permissive licenses Like, I think that the GPL three stuff, because it's so viral and this is a whole different topic for another episode, but because it goes so far, we're not lawyers also like, yeah, we're barely. i think qualified to talk about the differences between v2 and v3 of the gpl well but the the big thing is that you had to like it in gpl v3 tends to infect other code that it touches right so if you write something in gpl v3

then you have to the other the other modules of that project also have to be GPL V3 and stuff like anyway. It's like it's like too infectious is my understanding of the V3. Which is why everybody uses MIT and BSD licenses now, which are incredibly permissive. Or GPLv2, which they are still like the Linux kernel is still under V2. In fact, apparently, apparently Linus Torvalds defended TiVo here.

It was Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation that coined the term TiVoization and got really angry about this. Linus was running a TiVo and was really happy because he had lots of back episodes of, I don't know, probably Red. some, whatever Linus watches. Yes. Yeah. I got to be a pedant here again. Linus because he's finished. Sorry. He's finished. Yeah, I know. Canadian Linus finished Linus. Okay. Okay.

That's the title of the episode. Stallman calls it TiVo-ization, but that's a word he has made up and a term I find offensive, so I don't choose to use it. It's offensive because TiVo never did anything wrong, and the Free Software Foundation even acknowledged that. Yeah, so it's not like when Linksys was not posting their GPL code that they used for their routers a few years later. Which was bad. That was against the rules.

um anyway so yeah this thing ran linux uh one of the interesting side effects of that was because it ran linux it's probably the first time i used linux as a user because if you This thing was basically a MIPS. The first one was a PowerPC. The second one was a MIPS processor. It was a little PC. It had a dedicated MPEG-2 encoders.

and giant IDE hard drives, like 14 gigabyte IDE hard drives and 32 gigabyte IDE hard drives at launch. The trick was, if you knew how to run Linux and knew how to run a script that somebody had figured out, You could go to Best Buy or CompUSA and buy a big-ass hard drive, boot into Linux, bless that hard drive with a piece of software that basically said, hey, yo, this drive's cool. And then you could plug that drive into your TiVo and you would have...

Instead of 14 hours of storage on your TiVo for a 14 gig drive, you'd have 60 hours of storage on TiVo for your 60 gig drive. That's pretty good. Did the interface know how to deal with the extra stuff? Yes, it knew how to deal with the bigger drives on. Especially as drives continue to get really, really big during that period, eventually they would be like the index would be too big for the amount of RAM that was in the machine. Right. And you'd have like.

really slow ui problems so like there was a there was an upper limit to the size that you wanted to put into any given unit but they also increased the ram in them over time because it was easy to add ram to them like for tivo not for users it was soldered onto

But anyway, basically these things had RCA or coax inputs on the back and you would plug them into your basic cable service in the analog days. Or your cable box. Yeah, I'm trying to remember. Were there situations where you could run the coax straight out of the wall into the TiVo and not even have a cable box of any kind?

Yeah, so if you had basic cable and you just were watching basic cable channels, that's how you did it. If you wanted to get HBO and paid channels, then you had to use IR blasters and coax or S video outputs to the inputs on the back of the TiVo. And then that went into the MPEG. 2 encoder and it was doing basically dbd quality mpeg 2 encoding on the ntsc video signals

And it used my everyone's favorite technology of the 90s and early 2000s. IR blasters to change the channel. Still around. Yeah, they're great. Everybody loves them. They also eventually made like direct TV versions where they would where they would basically pull the MPEG to stream out of the satellite feed and just save that directly without any kind of encoder. Oh, wild. Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, that's cool.

Yeah. It's, it's weird, right? Yeah. They, they'd worked with cable company. Like if you were lucky enough to be at a place where the cable company.

cable provider like TiVo you could get TiVo boxes straight from your cable company that did the same thing as cable moved from analog to digital yeah I will say this is a bit tangential to what you're talking about here, but this TiVo was also a situation, probably the first example I can think of, of, you know, TiVo came out, revolutionary new features, pretty polished user experience and user interface.

It was the first example I can think of of then like shitty no-name cable boxes from your cable provider having those features trickle down to them, but in a much inferior and more infuriating form. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Cable boxes that were distributed by your cable company started picking up TiVo-like features, but they were always worse. They were always shittier, less well thought out, less performant versions of what the TiVo could do.

Like one of the defining characteristics of the TiVo experience was that when you hit the pause button, it paused immediately. There was no like lag on that kind of stuff. Right. So you got immediate, you got immediate beeps and bloops when you were fast forwarding or rewinding. So you could.

totally if you were good at it you could nail that end of commercial and be really because it would roll back like 10 frames so you'd see the first frame of the tv show you'd hit the play button and it would boop back a little bit and then you'd be right there where you started with no no unwanted advertising right um they ended up uh being one of the reasons that cable card existed so cable card for people who don't know was an fcc mandated uh require like universal cable decryption

standard that basically they were these PCMCIA cards that you would jam in the back of a TiVo or some other DVR type box that let you get decrypted. uh cable channels like on the on the digital cable network and they were required by the i think fcc i could be wrong it might be the ftc or one of the other one of the other

federal agencies. It was the FCC. It was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Yeah. They were required until 2020, at which point they were no longer mandated. And I think everybody pretty much dropped support for them immediately. But by that point, it didn't matter because we'd all moved to the inferior. Hey, you can watch this on Hulu or your streaming box, and then there's no way to skip the ads. TV doesn't exist anymore. Yeah.

They didn't. It's funny. They were really weird about stuff. They didn't have like a cable commercial skip button for a really long time. I wasn't there. Who did that first? I feel like I remember somebody marketing that in their product of replay TV. And wasn't there litigation around that or there was like at least the threat of litigation that like the like a lot of the content providers were or I guess I should say channels back then.

Yeah, they got sued. Were mad about the whole thing. Yeah. So TiVo was really intentional that they gave you control over that. They didn't give you a smart skip button that lets you bypass commercials without by looking at like blank space on the video, stuff like that. They eventually, like I said, they got supplanted by like boxes, by stuff that's built into the TV set top boxes.

2018, they launched TiVo in the cloud, which was a TiVo app that you could pay for on other set-top boxes without hard drives. didn't really work the same, didn't take off. By that point, they were essentially a patent company that was just hitting cable box manufacturers and anybody who had one of the handful of patents that were still relevant for them at that point.

And then they went, they, they turned off the service earlier this week. So we had a TiVo from 1999 until like 2018. It was a 20 year, 19 year run for us. Dude, what? Yeah. I'm sorry, like I just rolled off me for a second and then I stopped and thought like, what? Yeah, it was still an active use.

We well, I mean, it wasn't the same one, obviously, but but any like just using any TiVo all the way through 2018. So I mean, I guess there were still a lot of set top boxes around. well so the thing that killed it for us was we switched from comcast to fiber in 2018 that's when i got that's when we got fiber in our neighborhood and uh the cable cards uh at&t didn't do cable cards and we didn't we didn't do tv through at&t at that point because

Hulu and YouTube and all of those kind of online cable operator type dealies were good enough at that point. So I was hoping that I was going to be able to grab my old TiVo out of the garage. But it's not connecting to the capture thing. So if you stall, if you vamp for like a minute, that sounded bad.

Boy, asking me to vamp is asking for trouble, but I do have like a technical and nostalgic thing I can talk about here. Yeah, let's go. While you're waiting for that thing to boot. I think we've talked about this briefly before, but you could pull recordings off of a TiVo. Yeah, the media access key to do that. That was officially supported, wasn't it? Yeah, they had a tool that you could use to do it. It would pull it across the network. It was.

Very, very slow, even if you are on a wired network, usually, in my experience. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, and I don't have zero memory of doing this, but I found some .tivo files on my NAS a few years ago. Did they come from me, maybe? No, they were mine. Oh, you had a TiVo too? Yeah, my parents had one. I never had one personally, but my parents bought an early one and had lifetime service on it. It was way before the HD models. All these file names have...

I have file names like News 13 This Morning, News 13 Tonight. These are all from 2006. What it was was my dad took part in a thing called Honor Air. Okay. Which was a program. This was in 2006, so this was still more possible then. This is kind of not possible now, but it was an effort to. It was when the World War II Memorial opened in D.C.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And it was an effort in Western North Carolina to organize a mass trip of World War II veterans to D.C. Oh, that's cool. To visit the memorial. And my dad was a chaperone for that trip. And and he ended up on the local news like the local news did some stories about this trip. That's awesome. And so anyway, we had recorded those and I pulled those off of TiVo. But then.

They sat encrypted. This is where I'm going with this. They sat encrypted on my NAS for like 15 years. Did you not have the media access key? Well, A, I grabbed them off the TiVo and then never did anything with them. No, I did not have the media access key, but I also didn't even ever try to play them or look at them or do anything with them until I rediscovered them 15 years later. And shout out to TiVo. I have to say, of course, I mean, here we are in 2025 talking about the fact that TiVo...

has had service running this whole time but shout out to TiVo when I've discovered these files like 15 years after I dumped them off the TiVo my mom was still able to sign into her TiVo account and get the media access key from her account and give it to me and I used a little

I guess I think I found some open source utility that somebody had written to basically decrypt TiVo files once you had the Mac. And so I was able to turn those TiVo files into straight up good old fashioned MPEG-2 files and watch them. It was extra rad to be able to do that that long after they were recorded and dumped off the TiVo. That is super cool. I think I'm having...

HTCP problems, I had to guess. So we didn't say, but you had a whole elaborate setup where you dug your TiVo out of storage and plugged it into your capture card and we were going to boot it live and see what was on your TiVo. Yeah, I can't remember what the there's an order of operations for this little box that we all had from like 2010 to DHCP PlayStation 3s. And you have to plug it in a specific order or else it doesn't it doesn't do the decryption stuff right.

Okay, so it looks like this isn't going to actually work, unfortunately. It's either the capture card that's a problem or the HTCP thing. I keep getting signal flash on and off and it's just not connecting. So that's so that's such a bummer. The idea here was to run your TiVo straight in and we could at least listen to you booting it up and like going through what was on there. I just wanted to hear the beep beep beep beep beep beep one more time. Yeah.

So did you go through the programming? Did you see what was on there yesterday when it worked? I said I wasn't going to, but I did. Well, good. Now that you can't get it to work, what was on there? Uh, it was, it turns out it was a lot of TV from like late 2017, 2018. There was a lot of like, um, there's a lot of like late night talk shows. There was Saturday. Like we always.

One of my favorite things about TiVo is when you would record Saturday Night Live. So if you were out or something, you could come back. And then Sunday morning when you're drinking coffee and kind of hungover, you would watch Saturday Night Live. And if there were skits that just didn't work, you just blast right through them, which was great. um so saturn lives uh uh conan uh there was a bunch of like

series finales of stuff that my wife or I had watched. I was going to ask, was there anything much older on there that you just couldn't ever bring yourself to delete? Oh, I mean, this is the benefit of putting the 150 gig hard drive in the 30 hour machine, right? Is like, yeah, there was like. The whole run of The Expanse was on there. There were a bazillion Simpsons episodes and just a couple of movies. There was a bunch of Kubrick movies that I'd apparently pulled down off of the cable TV.

uh archer season four was prominent and had been watched um there were a couple like local news broadcasts from san francisco uh one of them was about the launch of the playstation vr A virtual reality headset for the original PlayStation 4. Okay. That's pushing 10 years ago now. There was some interesting, weird stuff. There was nothing. There were no treasures, I would say. Okay.

So, yeah, it was but it was an interesting it was it was there was a lot. Actually, my daughter was five when we got rid of it. So there was a lot of kids TV. There was a lot of like Mr. Rogers neighborhood and stuff like that. Hey, I hesitate to say this. But now I have the HTCP warning up and the picture is stable and it's not turning on and off. OK, I'm going to one last time go over there and plug it in and plug it out. All right. Fingers crossed. OK, so I'm at the menu.

First thing to note, this remote has tacky plastic on it, which feels real bad. And you're not going to be able to hear this, but I can. And it's going. Just very satisfying. So top thing on the list, Ellen DeGeneres, some top chefs. portlandia mr robot last man on earth the great british baking show yep that is awesome 2017 era ass programming mr yeah mr rogers america's test kitchen anthony bourdain

Seth Meyers was apparently on TV back then. I didn't remember that. That's funny. You have you have established your bona fides as late period TiVo users. Yep. So I'm going to start a Portlandia episode and people can hear the beeps and the bloops. Okay, we might have not been paying for cable cards by this point because this Portlandia episode looks like it's just black. And it was probably still recording. What is that, a 1080p? 1080p, probably, yeah. Okay, they never made 4K TiVos, I'm sure.

I realize there's not even really 4K cable broadcast, right? I assume there is, but I don't know how it would work. It's a little laggy, the TiVo. I remember it being not great in the in the in the. Like the machines got a little slow and they had a weird UI that you could do like streaming services in here that basically booted to a VM that ran the virtual, the apps for the other services. So yeah, it wasn't a great experience.

all right well it looks like the pictures for the shows aren't coming up because oh there we go okay so here's an ad for something on ifc i'm gonna fast forward now there's the fast forward god that sounds so good Fred Armisen, still a gem also. And Brad, oh my God, a Hearthstone ad. What? I'm sorry you can't see this. Is there a celebrity? Hold on. Yeah, okay.

It's this is people standing. OK, I'm pausing. I'm stopping. Now that remote is really tacky. Yeah. So TiVo is still awesome. I would I would pay for TiVo right now if the service existed. And I mean, and if everyone's viewing habits were such that it was necessary, let's say.

Yeah, if I ever watched TV, it would be more useful to me, I guess. Right. It's less that TiVo fell out of fashion and more that the services that necessitated TiVo haven't ceased to exist yet, but are on their way there, it feels like. Or or they're all like basically on demand services at this point. Right. Like the only things I watch live are sports. Right. Like they're like live TV is kind of rapidly ceasing to exist. Right. I don't have numbers in front of me, but like.

My guess is it's it's streaming has got to be the majority of usage these days. I bet it's I bet it's less than you think, because I bet there's a lot of boomers that still pay for cable. Well, they did just shut down. aol dial up in the last like month so yeah you're probably right actually also i guess rip aol dial up a thing that i had when i went to alaska one time

Oh man, we blew it. We were going to, we're going to talk about the end of blue BD ROM, like a blu-ray PC drive manufacturing, but end of lifing AOL dial up is what we should have ended the show with. Yeah. Um, look. Maybe AOL gets this whole episode at some point in the future. I never, I never, I really never used it. I used it for dial up internet when I traveled to Alaska in like 1997. And that was it. AOL was my first, AOL was what I went to from BBSs.

We got a modem. I dialed into the three local BBSs I had access to. Wow. Then AOL free trial started coming in the mail. Yeah. So AOL was my first like non-local BBS like online experience for quite some time before we got a proper internet. Maybe we should. do an episode about early, early online services. Like CompuServe Prodigy AOL is an interesting. We have we have a friend who might be willing to come on, talk about it.

who was deep into the CompuServe prodigy, like kind of all of that stuff. That would be, you know what, that would be a fun episode. I feel negligent that we did not include AOL dial up on this list of end of life services and products here, but maybe we should revisit. Look, when AOL went to CD-ROM to deliver their software, I was really disappointed because I was feasting on those floppy drives.

like they would send you floppy disks in the mail and that was like those were priceless because it was free 1.44 megabyte floppy disks you just had to know how to move the put a fake tab in so they were recordable again oh were you one of the types who were harvesting the aol floppies and using them interesting all my neighbors i lived in an apartment at the university and all my neighbors knew that when those came, they just chucked the discs outside my door. Sure.

So I was like, hey, if you're not going to use that disk, that garbage they're sending you, let me know. I can figure out something good to use it for. This is one of the situations where you're only four years older than me, but that was a crucial four years. Big four years. By the time those were, I barely saw, I think.

floppy-based AOL trials. It was almost all CD, but also floppies were kind of starting to lose their utility by the time that I would have cared about this sort of thing. Yeah, 100%. Like, it was...

It was a it wasn't a hey, I'm harvesting these and doing a lot with them. It was now I don't have to buy floppies to bring like files to the computer lab and stuff like that. Yeah. You want to talk about blue drives for Blu-ray drives for a minute? Real quick. I don't think there's there's not a ton here. They're ambiguously dead, I guess. It seems like they're heading that way. The actionable information here is that Pioneer sold off their computer Blu-ray manufacturing business.

to a Chinese conglomerate earlier this year. And who knows, maybe they will continue making and selling the drives. It's unclear. I mean, just to be clear, we're talking about PC, DVD, ROM, Blu-ray, DVD, ROM drives, not.

The drives that go into like set-top boxes and consoles and stuff like that. People are still manufacturing those, clearly. Yeah, although I gather that even that is in decline. I think it was a Sony. I think Sony completely got out of the player business. Well, they got out of the...

the recordable disc business a few months ago. I don't know. I mean, presumably they're still making drives for playstations and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. Well, yes, but you know what happened there? Remember the, well, yeah, the newer version of the PS five, there is no, no more.

integrated optical drive it's only the hook on one right it's modular now and if if there even are optical drives for the next generation consoles i'm sure they will be add-ons if there is a playstation 7 i will not be shocked if there is no optical interface whatsoever wow if there's a playstation 7 frankly i won't be shocked if the ps6 doesn't have one yeah i mean i think it probably will but i actually am not 100 sure that

I'm not I'm not banking on that. I think it's going to be hard for them to find retail partners to distribute these giant boxes if they don't have some sort of disk drive in them. But I also don't. Maybe the cost of dealing with that distribution problem is less than the cost of. making optical drives in millions of devices that nobody's ever going to put a disc in because i don't think my ps5 has ever had a disc in it

Yeah, mine very rarely, if ever. Anyway, like there's some scuttlebutt out there that people have reached out to LG and LG has said that they're not making drives anymore either. But that's like I think that's like frontline customer service type communication that's not corporate. So that's my corp com. Somebody tried to buy something, couldn't find it, called the customer service number. And then the poor.

Poor person working in the data in the call center was like, yeah, we don't make those anymore. Well, now what I what I can say definitively, and I think we've mentioned this in the past few months that I noticed is that the go to LG BDROM models that are kind of like some of the most prized ones in these sort of.

make mkv in the ripping ripping disc community yes in the in the in the community that's hardcore about ripping discs uh those that supply does seem to have dried up like the one the lg that i bought for 45 or 50 dollars eight years ago Yeah. Is now $200 on Amazon from a no name third party seller. Oof.

Because it doesn't look like Amazon themselves are stocking it anymore. Is that one of the ones you have to do the firmware hack on to make it so you can rip BD4K disks and stuff like that? You do need custom firmware on there to make it read 4K disks and to do some other stuff like disable the speed lock. Got it. Which I have done on mine and then sort of have started to wonder if that may have reduced the lifespan of the drive.

Because I was ripping a lot of Blu-rays for a while and ripping them at max speed. And I wonder, you know, the motor does not last forever in an optical drive. And I kind of wish I had bought an extra one of these when I had the chance. Well, you know what? I went to... I went to B&H, who I like. I buy most of my serious computer stuff from B&H and not Amazon these days. Of course, we've talked about trying to divest of Amazon in general. B&H is officially listing my model of LG.

Blu-ray drive has discontinued. Ooh. So it seems like this might actually be a thing. We saw some at Micro Center a couple of weeks ago when we were down there. There are still some out there, although, I mean, if you care about such things, not all of them are treated equal in terms of. Yeah.

getting the firmware mods to do 4K disks and faster transfer and stuff like that. But again, this is a much more fuzzy one and not just a definitive, hey, this is no longer happening across industry-wide. It seems like the official... death of you know these are not being made anymore of the internal pc blu-ray drive is probably imminent i would say if you want to have one of these now is the time yeah yeah and again it's like already getting tough to find at reasonable prices

100%. I think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up today, huh? Yeah, sure. I'm going to fast forward to the end of this episode. As always, brand well made a tech pod is listener supported. We wouldn't be here without you all the listeners and we appreciate you all. True. Um, It's it's it's always humbling the support and love that we get from people. I got it. There was a really nice message from somebody the other day on Blue Sky that I.

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The theory is that Patreon has a character limit on. Or maybe I'm supposed to say bunny crimes in cooperation with the excellent Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen and James Kamek. And I like that idea. Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high speed 3D printer. That's clever.

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Oh, wait, can we talk about the thing that Bertrand gave us? Or should we save that for cold open next week? We should probably save that. That's too momentous to cram in at the end. Can you see it? I see that you've mounted yours. Yeah, I put a light on it, but then the light fell a minute ago. That's what that thumping noise was. So I found a better way to mount that light.

Yeah, we'll talk about that next time or maybe the time after. But we have a cool object of power to discuss in the future. Yeah. And on that note, please consider the podcast. Wait. No, no, that's not it. Cut that out, Brad. Don't put that in. Oh, too late. Keep going. Please consider the environment before printing this podcast. See y'all next week.