Okay, Brad, I'm breaking precedent. Oh, that's what we do here, right? Care Bear. Look, no laws will contain me is what I'm saying. But Care Bear suggested. We should read the entirety of this Arizona state law as a cold open. It is House Bill 2477, an act amending Title 41, Chapter 4.1, Article 5, Arizona Revised Statutes. by adding section 41-860.08 relating to state emblems. Text a bill begins on next page.
Be it enacted by the legislature of the state of Arizona, Section 1, Title 41, Chapter 4.1, Article 5, Arizona Revived Statute is amended by adding Section 41-860.08 to read. Pluto is the official state planet. What? Period. Oh, man. I think they did. I think what's his name? Discovered Pluto at Lovell Observatory in Arizona. Right. It's one of those state pride things then. Uh-huh.
Take my Pluto as a planet from my cold dead hands. I guess they don't call it a, they could have made it the official dwarf planet of Arizona. That's true. Like first in dwarf, but you know, like Pluto is what ninth in planets, but first in dwarf planets. Yeah. Lord of all dwarf planets. Although, actually, I think one of the many arguments against Pluto's planethood is that it's not even the biggest dwarf planet in the solar system. Oh, right. Because one of the ones in the...
in the asteroid belt is bigger, right? Like Eris? Is Eris one of them? Yes, Eris. Eris is the most massive and second largest known dwarf planet in the solar system. I think Ceres and the... Asteroid belt is also bigger than Pluto. I could be wrong about that. So Pluto is just kind of mid a lot of ways. Wow. I'm not going to stand for this Pluto slander. What is going on in Arizona?
They don't observe daylight savings time. They don't observe astrophysical taxonomy that is widely agreed upon. I think I think their daylight savings time is a is a latitude thing for them. Wait, really? Yeah, because defiance, like some can't tell us how to tell time thing. I didn't realize there was like a physical reason. I mean, it could be that, but I think it's because they're on the west side of the of the mountain time.
The summer mornings would start at like four o'clock in the morning or something. There is the argument against it. I mean, that that is one of the broad arguments against daylight savings is people on the wrong end of each time zone get screwed badly. Look, man, we've done this episode before. The point is the time zones need to be diagonal instead of latitude lined with lines of longitude. Right.
There's a lot of things that were decided on a long time ago poorly that should probably be different. Well, look, we're not going to fix time zones. We're not going to fix dwarf planets, probably.
I don't know, man. I support Arizona. Look, if they want to respect the work of Clyde W. Tombaugh, I salute them. Where do you fall? I mean, it's not... really a debate anymore like i think this was pretty definitively decided some years ago but look we got a children's book about what happened to pluto is all i'm saying wait really yeah i'm a pluto truther what is the tone of that book
The true the tone of the book is, you know, sometimes things change and that's OK. OK, you know, that's probably a good lesson to impart in a lot of different contexts. The subtext of that book, though, is that Pluto totally got raked over. It's just a little guy, you know? Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hello. Ahoy hoy. It is once again the end of the month. True. And you know what that means. Much like ends of time zones don't necessarily line up.
exactly with the sunrise and sunset yeah the last sunday of the month does not always quite line up with the end of the month but close enough it can be as early as the 26th this is the second earliest sunday that we'll see Second earliest last Sunday. We'll see this year. Did you look up stats on that? Well, no, I'm just looking at the dates and look at the calendar and like the next set. Like this is the 26th. The Sunday is the first. The Saturday is the first. So we could have a 25th.
Just theoretically. That's something to look forward to. You know, fun fact. Yeah. Having the power to fully customize the logic for like selecting dates and like first days of months. uh-huh is one of the many things that drove me away from true nas to just start using linux on my nas slash server it turns out
Like what are you as a Monday first day of the month guy? Well, I never like landed on anything specific, but like trueness lacks the ability to say like, Hey, I want to schedule this task to run on the first Sunday of every third month type stuff. Oh, it has like pretty limited logic for, you know, it doesn't have a fully developed crontab.
More or less, yes. Like the web UI thing for selecting dates and days and stuff like that is pretty limited. And I was like, I want to be able to set my tasks a little more granularly. I often think that. For backups and scrubs and so forth. yeah ain't no scrubs that's what i say that's right what if i just ran an os that let me do whatever i wanted with the computer look i've i've look i've tasted that forbidden fruit now i've tasted it on multiple fronts and i'm gonna go and tell you it good
Good to be able to do whatever you want with your computer. That's right. Cory Doctorow was right, man. So it was Kyle Weins. Yeah. Being able to use the hardware that you bought in whatever way you want is pretty liberating. Yeah. Do what you want, man. That's what I say.
You know what I want to do is I want to answer questions. I want to turn cues into A's. I want to answer questions. I want to answer emails or electronic mails. Some people call them. We have both here in quantity. Yeah, it was a banner crop this month. I had to. I had to be extra selective as I was going through because I was like, we have too many. We have too many good emails to answer. Discord has. Oh, no. OK, Discord has changed and added a lot of things lately, let's say.
One of those is that copying and pasting out of the questions channel has gotten worse. There's now like 10 lines of like, I forget what they are exactly what the terminology is, but it's effectively like like and subscribe prompts.
now come out for every comment when you copy and paste out of discord oh i really wish discord had like an export channel option like i wish i wish you could just like export like hey just like give me a nice like html formatted document that is like this range of comments from this discord channel so i have the same i had the same thought with fast mail because like i curate the fast mail tech pod public facing one because it's like 90 percent
Hey, I just wanted to see if you're interested in talking to AI expert, Steve Chadsworth, a Silicon Valley based venture CEO. whose AI dog food company is making dog food with AI, with the power of AI inside it. And I think he'd be a great, I know you guys love talking about old hardware and things like Linux. So I thought you'd probably be interested in talking to Steve about dog food and AI.
So I delete all those just as they come in. Steve Chadsworth of the Silicon Valley Chadsworth. Yeah, exactly. Steve fires Steve Chadsworth into the sun as far as I'm concerned. But anyway, like I have the end result is I have a. nicely curated list of like 20 emails 30 emails at the end of the month that are basically ready to go and then i have to like i have to do the indignity of using the vi hotkeys to switch between them and select all and copy and paste
Don't even get me started. I've got lists. First of all, I am compiling a list of dual boot diaries topics to revisit as I hear you guys talk about them. But like probably the top of the list is my screed about, hey, learning the I keys enables you to do.
About 800 other things in Linux much easier than you currently are doing. I know we talked about having you on as early as next week, but I think we have to push that back a little bit. It's going to probably be only cheating yourself. October. Maybe we'll see. We'll see. We'll see if we can squeeze you in sometime. It's a really busy schedule. Remember when you're talking about how hard it is to scroll back in Alacrity or in the crappy other terminal to find things? Yes.
Piping that output into less and then using Vim style keys to just search that output. I'm more of a more guy, if I'm being honest. All right. That works, too. But you know what I am not is about putting off answering questions. I think we should just get into it. If you have an email or a question, you can send emails to techbodycontent.town or.
if you're in the discord if you're a patron which we appreciate you you can uh go to well you can go to tech patreon.com techpod to sign up for the patreon which we love and then once you're in the discord there you can go into the question seeking answers channel where you can just send questions into the void people do it all day every day just anytime you have a thought like is starburst supposed to be taffy
That's a good one to fire in there. Put that in there. We'll answer that. Thanks, Wild Ralph, for that one. Yes, it is, Taffy. That's the end of the question. Is it a tech-related question? Maybe, maybe not, but we'll probably answer it anyway. Yeah, sure.
You got one queued up? How do you feel on the Starburst Taffy thing before we get further in here? I think of Starburst as a little too brick-like and a little too hard. Isn't Taffy supposed to be a little stretchy and soft out of the box? Do you know how they make Taffy? I don't. So they take warm warm sugar candy.
and then they put it on these two things that turn it's like interlocking uh uh there's like two things on spinning motors with posts and they spin it back and forth looks like a yarn spinner almost okay yeah and uh it stretches it out and aerates it and i think i think that they don't put enough i don't think they aerated enough i think they should taffy eyes it more the starburst yeah the starburst before they make it into the little squares
Starburst, you have to warm up a little bit. Starburst will pull your fillings out. It's a little too hard and chewy, I think, to maybe be taffy to me, but I don't know. I got a hot tip from one of my daughter's friends the other day.
that they like to keep the starburst in their front pocket so it gets warm and then eat it okay i was like that is some next level the kids are all right they know what's going on that works that's physics yeah all right speaking of physics this is not about physics uh nailed it
I don't have a good answer for this, but it's a little chilling. And maybe somebody does listening to this. Earl from Alaska. I have a ResMed BiPAP. First of all, I looked up what a BiPAP was because I have wondered for a long time. The difference is that. CPAP is just constant pressure, constant airflow. BiPAP has at least two, maybe some have more, but BiPAP has variable. Both sucks and blows, right? Pressure in and out. Yeah. Kind of, but the same.
General concept for like sleep apnea and stuff like that. Right. I have a resume at BiPAP. I have never given it internet access, nor have I signed up for any plan or in any way connected it to the internet of things. I currently have owned it for over seven years, used it in different countries, and currently live half of the United States away from where it was originally purchased. Okay, here's the kicker.
If I log into the website provided on a sticker on the side, there is a record of every single night of sleep I've ever had and a rating. The machine judges. I went to a new sleep doctor and they were able to pull the exact same information. How is this possible? I'm not on your Patreon, so I'm not able to ask on your Discord, where I'm sure this would be answered in five minutes.
But I thought it was interesting enough to ask because this is something that's very strange. And I'm genuinely curious how many other devices do something like this. So I looked this up. A lot of medical devices do this. And my initial assumption was correct. It has a SIM card and a cellular modem. And it also stores data locally on a SD card as a backup in case you're someplace like it because you can put it in an airplane mode.
it has this device has an airplane mode there's a fact on their fact page about this but it was kind of buried i had to really look for it um but yeah it's the idea is that the data is really low bandwidth the company that does this is probably buying a incredibly low access data plan for all of these devices that is like, hey, we're going to send 200 kilobytes a day or something like that. Yeah. I wonder what cellular standard this is even using.
Well, I mean, it's all it's LTE for sure. So it's the slowest or cheapest that's still available. Right. Like 3G is not even widespread enough to rely on at this point. Right. Yeah. No. And it doesn't work internationally because radio spectrums are different. But right. um yeah so so it's um like there's a lot of medical devices that do this like some insulin pumps and stuff like that even do that
So anyway, that was it. No mystery, nothing. No, no devilish technology. OK, I mean, I'm actually relieved to hear there is a straightforward explanation for that and not that it's like somehow worming its way onto your Wi-Fi without your knowledge. Yeah, no, no. So my initial thought was, hey, maybe Earl paired it with his phone seven years ago and forgot, which doesn't seem to be the case.
Or there was a cellular connection and yeah, it's just a cheap cellular connection. Should that be more prominently disclosed? Like, do you think that is it? And is there an ethical consideration here that you should let people know more?
directly that hey this device you're buying is going to be sending data through the air i didn't i didn't look at their privacy policy my guess is that this is because this is medical stuff it falls under the medical disclosure rules and you're only allowed to disclose it with doc your your doctor and and stuff like that um i i'm increasingly hinky about having my data places that insurance companies can get to it
But in this case, I don't like this is a this is a question about my pay grade. I don't know. Yeah, it feels like this. We need a medical ethicist. Yeah. Also, the thing I'm about to bring up is kind of tangential to this, not exactly the same thing, but have you been following the situation with the Senate race in Maine? No.
Oh, yeah. The guy who had the Nazi tattoo. Yeah. And like, but before that, it was a bunch of Reddit posts. And like, there's a whole conversation brewing now about how did they track down his old accounts? And like, you can do all kinds of like. like anybody remotely skilled at using the internet can do a lot of manual sort of social media forensics to track people's stuff down. I mean, but, but we should bring this up in a, in a, in a world where.
like Palantir is becoming an enormously valued company on the stock market and stuff. Like people are starting to ask questions about like, what kind of like... what kind of consolidated digital profiles on every human being on the planet exist out there? Like people are starting to really want to know like what, what data has been collected and aggregated on me in a way that there's a lot. Right.
I mean, I guess the thing that's new, like the data collection has been going on for as long as it could be collected, right? But I guess the thing that's new is the kind of aggregation and merging and forming of, like I said, kind of a coherent profile.
I mean, we've known for two and a half decades at this point that if you have somebody's age and their zip code, you can pretty much identify them. Yeah. The difference now. It's funny. I'm reading something about this right now that I don't think I can talk about. But it's it's yeah, there's there's real downsides to making big, deep profiles across the entire Internet. I think, you know.
I think as people become more aware of this, maybe we'll see some right to be forgotten rules like they have in Europe and stuff like that. But even then, even though the EU rules are pretty good, I don't think they go far enough in a lot of cases. Like like there was a threat on blue sky this morning from somebody who isn't on Facebook, doesn't use meta properties and realized that because one of their friends or loved ones uploaded their contact list to Facebook.
when they were finding their friends, they now are in the, like Facebook now knows who they are and can tie their dark profile to their phone number and stuff like that, which is, which is icky. It's like fighting entropy. There's no winning. I mean, look, this is why this is why you move to a cabin in the woods and just get off the Internet entirely, Brad. Except for except for your resume at BiPAP. The other thing I'm going to say, though, is if you want to get politicians who.
guarantee like you know exactly how they've stood on things for a long time you got to get podcasters who've been doing this for a really long time who just talking to mics until they run out of things to say and then you'll know if they're nazis because like you like Like, I guarantee you, I can assure you, you can go back as far as you want in my history. No Nazi tattoos and no questionable posts about, you know, fascist bullshit. So anyway. All right.
Don't don't don't elect that guy. Also, there's better people in Maine. Sorry, Bernie. Wait, Bernie. Bernie is in Vermont. Bernie. Bernie is defending that guy. Oh, I see. Yeah. He's like, he's better now. I don't care. All right. Next email.
From Eric, I would politely disagree with Will's assertion that McMaster Car is a great place to buy stuff from. I work for a company that places orders with McMaster Car, and it's absolutely not for the reason that they are the cheapest or best place to buy the item. Their strength is in their vast in-stock inventory and that most orders can be shipped out the same day. The price for items on McMaster is often two times or more the price for the exact same item from the original manufacturer.
That is not to say that McMaster Car isn't a great place to order from, but I would argue that only applies to businesses or someone deep into a maker hobby. They also have great customer service, but again, only when you have an account with them that spends thousands of dollars a month.
If you want convenience, fast shipping, and somewhere you can order everything you need for your lab, shop, garage, etc. in one place, McMaster is great, but as an individual consumer buying a small quantity, McMaster is much more expensive and not worth it. All my opinion, of course.
So I disagree heartily here because like, I think if you're buying stuff for a shop and you're buying a bazillion of something, yes, absolutely right. You should buy it from the main source and pay the retail price. I think if you're buying something that you need three of for a hobby, like if I'm buying a linear bearing, which I'm going to have a hard time finding a source for linear bearings, a tube.
that has balls in it that you can put a metal shaft through and the shaft will slide back and forth i can get one for 25 bucks here right and like yeah that's a huge markup over the manufacturer price
but they only make me buy one at McMaster car. And if I buy it from the manufacturer, I'm going to have to buy a hundred. So I think for hobby, like when I talk, when we talk about stuff here, we're talking about for hobbyists and for people who are futzing around with stuff. We're not talking about.
to outfit your shop like you're you're absolutely like if you're if you're making a product that uses linear bearings you're gonna make a hundred thousand of them don't buy it from mcmaster car 100 agree yeah this this kind of came up on uh on the next lander podcast recently, not about this vendor in particular, but this vendor sounds like the classic type of B2B sort of place that if you're spending your company's money, you were happy to go to.
If you're spending your own money, you start to think a little harder about it. But like we were what we were talking about was like the ease with which if you are dealing with purchasing in a corporate environment. Well, that's a whole different. Yeah, you're just you're just like.
Fuck it. Yeah, of course I'll pay the 2X markup because this is way easier. Thanks. White glove service that's going to make it much easier to just put this order in and get the thing here because I don't care because it's not my money. Well, and I mean, Vinny lived the hell of big company.
purchasing for a long time which which meant that like there were some vendors that just wouldn't fool with the kind of purchasing the po process that a company as big as cbs interactive or something would deal with or or the opposite was true cbs wouldn't
buy from certain vendors they had preferred vendors that they kind of required you to buy from yeah but but like so like there's a handful of vendors that will deal with small quantities mcmaster's cars one uh i want to say oh god i can't remember the name of the electronics place well The electronic stuff has been largely supplanted by companies that like cater specifically to makers and the kind of quantities that they're interested in. So people are doing one off projects.
So like Adafruit, you can buy a bunch of controllers and like all of if you think about all of the little bits and bobs that are on every circuit board ever. it's like if you if you want to buy those from a real electronic supply company you have to buy 10 000 of each of those little mosfets and transistors and stuff
But if I'm just doing a one circuit board for a project I'm working on, I need three of them. So I'm gonna buy them from Adafruit and I'm gonna pay a huge premium to not have to buy a thousand of them. And that's fine. So I don't have to store a thousand of them. I'm never going to use a thousand. They're just going to be a problem for my kid to get rid of when I croak. So thanks. What? I mean, it's like, look, real talk. I went to a dark place.
look time is ineffable brad we're all gonna die eventually it's fine hopefully not for a while hopefully not for a while i don't know how long you're planning to keep all that stuff i'm not gonna use like If I do every project I ever want to have, I'm never going to use a thousand MOSFETs in the next 50 years. Fair. You're right. I've got a whole drawer full of like little vinyl standoffs that I needed four of. Yep.
and not 300 the the other day i was cleaning out a drawer in here and i was like oh wow yeah i had to buy a bag of 350 vinyl screws for a thing i was doing and did i need 350 vinyl screws i'm never going to use them so i threw out 200 of them. I kept a hundred and that's still more than I'm ever going to need. Yep. Yep. A question from Tim.
Would you guys ever consider using one of the AI type note taker apps while you record the podcast to make it easier to go back and create more fleshed out show notes? Like a lot of people, I listen on the go and making notes for myself of what to go back and pursue is difficult.
The one that consistently catches me is when you're talking about some cool product, but it's not until later in the discussion that I realize I need that. But I haven't taken note of the specific name of the product, which was probably only mentioned in full at the start of the segment. So. I've looked at this before. Well, first off, Juliet in the Discord did transcripts for a while with one of the early AI transcriber tools.
I believe it was one of the AI transcriber tools, which like, just to be clear, this is one of those places where I feel like. the a it's not generative ai it's just doing voice transcription which feels okay to me yeah it's it's kind of it's in that dlss vein of taking an input yeah and doing something with it um I've tried a couple of different tools. I put this in because I would love feedback from the community. I've tried multiple tools, including like I've used whisper, which is.
I want to say Meta's big LLM for audio transcription. I can't remember. I don't think whisper came out of meta, but you might be. I tried whisper. I tried Meta's LLM for audio transcription. I think Google has one, too. That's the one that they use for YouTube. Whisper is open AI. Whisper is open AI. Yeah, I'm sure every major entity has as a text like speech to text transcription is about the most classic example of this you can think of.
So it was relatively easy for me to generate a transcript from each of our stubs or for both of us together. Yeah. The thing that's challenging is it sounds stupid. But getting time codes that would let me merge it into a machine readable format so that I take Brad's transcript and my transcript and merge them with Brad and Will in front of them in a human readable way that doesn't require a ton of editing.
um so if anybody has recommendations for tools that'll do that i'm i'm happy to investigate and i will happily do the time to to put those up every week because i would like like i feel bad like we've done transcripts off and on We stopped either because the quality of them was really bad and unlegible or they were.
taking an incredible amount of work, and I would love to bring them back. So if people have suggestions, things that they've used, things that they know about, please send them in to techpod at content.town, and I will take a look. Yeah, my feeling generally is that the output of AI is untrustworthy enough that it would probably be almost as much work to conduct oversight on what it was spitting out as it would be to just do the notes ourselves.
So the thing for notes, yes. For transcriptions, no, because then at least you have a searchable output. That's a different conversation. Yeah. Notes or summaries require a level of processing that straight transcription does not. You're just turning words into text in the latter case. Agreed. You're actually hashing some new information in the form of a summary.
I'm glad you circled back to that. I don't like the notes apps. I find they are absolutely right there. Unreliable. Right, right. That is potential for the model to then hallucinate meaning or information that was not actually there. Especially given that we...
Talk about stuff that they don't know about. Right. And that's where the that's where the required oversight on our part comes in. And at that point, it's better to just do it ourselves, probably. But the transcription would let you search for the whole search, search the whole thing, which I do think has value.
Yeah, I try to put links for most everything we talk about that seem actionable into the show notes, but sometimes stuff slips through the cracks. A very quick one. Brian wrote in asking for a reminder. I speak of the devil. Yeah. Ryan asked for a reminder on the earbud attachments that you like, although I think you maybe have an update there. Yeah, so I've been buying comply phone tips for years there.
They don't last as long as I would like. I get a three pack and they last about looking at my Amazon history, about a year and a half or two years. And that's with daily use for their pod pros. A couple people wrote in, I think including Mike B, I think, recommended SpinFit medical-grade silicone tips. So they use a higher... less kind of reactive, less irritating grade of silicone than Apple, than Apple and higher grade than Apple. The Apple ones aren't medical grade, so they can.
Look, when I use the Apple silicone ear tips in my ears, they make my ears kind of ooky and gross. It's not good. I thought they were supposed to be the Rolex of technology companies. Well, I mean, look, there's always something nicer. So the spin fits are 16 or 17 bucks. It's for one set of tips. The complies come in a three pack, but the spin fits are supposed to last.
for much longer. Uh, and I, I was curious, so I ordered a pair and I'll let you know how they are in a few weeks. They get here on Saturday, I think. Right. Um, uh, so yeah, that that's, that's that, but the complies. The thing I like about the complies is because their foam, they seal better and they are actually much more comfortable. So you get a better experience, I think. Cool. I'm going to juke down to the Discord queues because we've got a ton of those.
Okay. Dondo. I'm not sure we quite have enough information here to fully address this question, but it's an interesting question. I bought a 20 volt charger for a device. What are the chances that plugging the charger into my wall plants a virus into my network or steals personal information? I'm going to say pretty without knowing the brand of the charger or the device you're trying to charge. I'm going to say pretty low. I think.
Plugging something into your electrical network is probably safe. Unless you're running power line networking, I'm going to say you probably there probably is no route from your wall outlet into your LAN, if that's what you're asking.
If you're running power line networking and you're not being attacked by a nation state or some dedicated entity that's trying to get to you specifically, you're probably fine. And also, if you're in that situation, don't run power line networking. Yep. Yep. And practice good Wi-Fi security. Yeah. Or just don't use Wi-Fi. That also is an option, I suppose. Yeah. Electricity, it turns out, pretty safe. This is a good question from Poochie D1.
I just bought a new car and it came with a lot of paperwork, sales agreements, warranty information, insurance information, etc. And I started thinking, should I digitize all this? Just in case. The effort of doing it seems overwhelming, especially because I'd be scanning with my phone. Is it worth it? Do you do this? I just had to send my car lease to the accountants.
It turns out it comes up sometimes. I don't know. Yeah, I kind of am doing this for just about everything now. Are you keeping paper versions still? I typically I'm trying to think of an example where I have kept a paper version. I was going to say, like, if it was something like insanely important, like a birth certificate or something, I would probably. But by and large, just about everything I.
Turn into a PDF with my phone and then shred. Yeah, I'm increasingly of team on team. Let's get rid of all the paper. Yeah, stuff around is just kind of a pain. Birth certificates you should keep around probably. Yes, like official documents, definitely, for sure. Marriage certificates, birth certificates, stuff like that. Yeah, I'm still using Genius Scan on iOS just because that's what I started using 15 years ago.
Oh, I just use the Dropbox scanner at this point. It's pretty good. Dropbox have one too. Built into the app. Maybe I should use that then. That's probably. Yeah. And like I know the Apple notes.
app on ios and i'm sure they're android equivalents for all this stuff this is one of those places where genius scanner had a really good idea and implemented it really well and then it turns out it was pretty easy to do and everybody did it almost immediately after they got sherlocked yeah sherlocked exactly
There is a self-hosted option called Paperless NGX, I think we've talked about before. Okay. Have you ever looked at that? No, but I like that. I don't know that, like, are the Googles of the world doing any kind of, like, document? I mean, obviously Google Docs exists, but I'm talking more something for like. Organize like Google Docs is more for creating documents and storing them and editing them. Like I'm thinking more like if you have a bunch of like PDFs or something is there anybody.
commercially that is offering any kind of like organization and storage service. Keep kind of does that, but no, I think, I think, I think the idea is you just chuck those PDFs into your online storage folders. Yeah. I mean, I guess it probably indexes them. I guess you can search them, but like that's, that's what paperless is. Is basically a way to, I haven't looked into it too much, but it's a way to store all of your documents for, for safekeeping and.
indexing and searching and everything. Like it kind of, if I understand correctly, it stores the original documents that you give it, but it also kind of hashes new versions that are more easily indexed in its kind of searching capacity. Anyway. Seems like a potentially a nice way if you were to create PDFs of every document you have that was important to maybe store them in one place and make them searchable and stuff. Cool. There's a lot of work though. It is a buttload of work for like wrong.
Like the thing, honestly, I think if I was going to do that, I'd want to document a sheet, like a document scanner with a loader to just dump everything on and then come back when it's jammed or done. It would really be nice to be able to just feed. Of course, if you're.
putting a giant stack in there, then you have to go in and tell it which pages go with which documents like that is some work as well. No, I want the machine to just do that. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah. Sounds like a job for AI. Yeah. Oh, oh, nevermind. I'm good. Yeah. Anyway, I think. I think there is definitely something to this if you're willing to put in some work, but it really depends on your tolerance for having stacks of old papers around. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm.
This might be one where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Is that the right way to use that one? Yes. Yes. That's a good metaphor there. Yeah. Like in my case, I really hate having a bunch of clutter around. And particularly a bunch of papers that like having categorized the papers physically is way worse than having to categorize them on a hard drive for me. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I have a filing cabinet over here that I just.
i pile stuff up on top of and then about twice a year i just load up everything inappropriate hanging folders i guess that's you know if i have room for a filing cabinet i might have a different opinion on this subject but i'd rather just have it be bits on a hard drive
Although my parents have. Yes, exactly. My parents have filing cabinets that have been there for 40 years. And boy, is it a pain moving those things around. But they're really heavy and full of tax returns from 1985. They sure are. Yeah. I support this effort. Mangix. Mangix. Mangix. Mangix. Mangix. Mangix. Mangix. Mangix. Sure. Okay. Have LED backlit TVs meaningfully improved since 2020?
I have a mid-range TCL Roku TV from that year and I'm feeling an ish to upgrade. I'm hesitant on OLED because I stream static content like a lo-fi. I don't know what lo-fi is. Your music, I think, right? Maybe. L W F I probably music with no, uh, like on YouTube would be my guess. And it's just a still image. Yeah. Uh, all right. I'll take that anyway.
I'm hesitant on OLED because I stream static content frequently and it's used in a bright room. How do I know I'll actually see an improvement with my new TV? I mostly stream TV with an Apple TV and occasionally I play PS5 on it. I'm going to say, yes, LED backlit TVs have gotten significantly better since 2020, and it's because that's the time period when mini LED has gotten much bigger and started evolving very rapidly. Yeah, they've gotten insanely bright, too. Yes.
That is the advantage of the MiniLED TVs over OLED is that the brightness is like there is no comparison in how bright they can get. The OLED TVs, they're starting to do stuff like have two layers of OLEDs. On top of each other, so you get double the brightness out of them. Stuff like that. Yeah, like OLEDs are getting brighter, but yes, they are having to pull tricks. Mini LED is the thing where there are like a bajillion tiny little LED backlights that.
And kind of turn on and off in zones that kind of give you not quite the level of contrast of an OLED, but somewhat close. And I don't know. For a while, when the mini LEDs came out, the localized background dimming was kind of iffy. I have a...
Oh, God. What's the one that starts with V? I have a TV from like 2016, 2017 that had localized dimming that I had to turn off because you can't like when there's some when there's like the titles at the end of a movie, you just can't read them because it localizes the whole screen dark.
Right. So, so there is worth pointing out there is, there is an industry distinction between the term local dimming and mini led. That's kind of like the, like if you have a quote unquote local dimming TV, that's sort of the previous like zone based. Got it.
uh, backlight control thing on TVs. Fewer zones, right? Yeah. Yes. Like way fewer, I guess. Like, I mean, I think it's, I think it's more a difference of degree rather than kind. Yeah. It's just many led just started doing way, way, way more zones that can be turned on and off. Like on my TV, you can see like if you have if you have like a generally dark screen with a couple of like really bright elements in it that are moving around, you can kind of see the zones.
turning on and off but that's such an infrequent like i like the xbox ui is a good good place to see this a little spinning throbber in the middle of a dark screen you can kind of see the zones like turning off and on around that but it's such an infrequent thing that i typically don't notice it at all And if you look at like kind of year over year improvements in specific models, like my Hisense is two years old now.
Like kind of every year they have been putting out, not just them, but everybody will like, you know, every subsequent year's model has like more zones, you know, more fine grained control over turning the backlight on and off. Can never have too many zones. Like I would. probably buy an OLED at this point if I were to buy a new TV, but there are some advantages to MiniLED. Like Sony has gone back to MiniLED. I don't know if you saw this. It was like kind of a minor. Yeah.
I don't know if controversy is too strong a word, but Sony's flagship model was OLED for some number of years, and they have now gone back to mini-LED as their kind of top-end, quote-unquote, nicest flagship set, and that was kind of a big deal for some people. I mean, it depends on what budget you're looking at. I was helping somebody buy a TV the other day and we were talking about it and I was like, look.
If you have a perfect room, OLED is going to look incredible. Right. If you have a nice dark room, OLED is going to look really good and you can get a bright enough OLED. It's fine. Yeah. Like the Samsung's are pretty bright, although they've got some downsides of their own. But but like if you.
Like my room is not perfect. I would probably buy a bright mini light at this point. And they're cheaper is the other thing. That's the other benefit. Brighter and cheaper are basically the two advantages. I'm looking at the lo-fi girl channel on YouTube right now. Lo-fi hip-hop, lo-fi hip-hop radio beats to relax slash study to.
Stream started on July 12th, 2022. Has 26,000 people watching it right now. Lo-fi girl is quite popular. Lo-fi girl. And this bops. This is pretty good. Yeah, it's not bad. This is like music to podcast too, Brad. Yep. It sure is. Uh, oh boy. Okay. We've got a profound instance here of somebody's Halloween. Somebody's cutesy Halloween username being unpronounceable. You're looking at it. Do you want to take a shot? It's a only. Okay. Right.
There are a lot of those in there. Yeah. Can we can we do an aside on Halloween names? Sure. Because I've realized both on social media and discord when people change their user profile pictures and their names. At the same time, they basically become a completely different entity to me. They cease to exist. Well, they don't cease to exist, but yes, they become completely anonymous. Yeah, it's challenging. It's a good way to just hide your identity for some period of time. We should change.
You should be Will next year and I should be Brad. Oh, man, that is diabolical. I have never considered that before. Yeah. People just swapping username and profile picture is pretty fucked up, actually. On one of my discords, everybody made their name variations of one of the mods names, which was really funny for like five minutes. And then nobody could tell who the mod was. And like, anyway, it was, yeah, whatever.
Do you ever find yourself making an error on discord or social media where like, okay, I assume you do this as well. Like your brain gets used to people's profile pictures enough that you just don't even look at the username anymore. And you just kind of subconsciously assume, you know who you're reading.
Yeah. Based on seeing out of the corner of your eye, their profile picture. Have you ever gotten like entirely all the way through somebody's post and realized it was somebody else other than who you thought it was? Oh, 100%. Yeah. Because their profile picture looks enough like somebody else's.
Sometimes it's just they change the background color. So it's like orange blob on black is one person and orange blob on white is a different person. Right. Social media is probably bad for the brain. Yeah. So anyway, I only asked if an entirely new novel and fresh OS was to hit the market for computers and or phones, what would you want to see in terms of features, designs, et cetera? Not a new version of Windows or a new distro of Linux or similar.
but a brand new novel OS. This is a real, I don't have a good answer for this. This is an extremely hard question to answer, but it's interesting. I looked at this and you had highlighted it and I was like, we should just do a whole episode about this because this is a fun question. Yeah, like I think this is going to take like weeks of spitballing, brainstorming, like just kind of generally thinking about the topic of what should a new operating system do.
Well, so I will say part of this is informed by my experimenting with tiling OS's tiling window managers on Linux and stuff like that. And thinking about. different novel ways to interact with software rather than, hey, we have windows you can move around the screen. And I had previously kind of thought about that as a limiting thing rather than a powerful thing. And when.
presented in just from my time on ipad like using multitasking on ipad pros uh because it is a little bit limiting there the the the using it in a way when it's when it's really smart and really well implemented and it's designed to be um much more user configurable it's a it's a it's a pretty amazing thing yeah i i think that like i think the the quick answer to this is that you start with um
like something that manages memory more efficient, more, more securely like rust and you build up from there. And I, although that's a super trendy answer and I probably don't know the actual reasons why you would do that. Well, actually, I've brought this up before. There actually is a new and novel fresh OS called Redix. That is exactly what you're talking about. It is another it's another Unix like that is written entirely in Rust.
Welcome to season three of the dual boot diaries. That's the one where it's one of the system 76 engineers is the, Oh yeah. The BDFL for that project. Okay. Benevolent dictator for life. Yeah. That's the Linus term. Which is a slightly too cute term that you occasionally see on open source projects. But yes, he's the Linus of Redix. I don't know if the Redix will ever take off. I think it's an experimental hobby thing.
Yeah, but there's all kinds of other Unix likes that aren't Linux floating around out there just waiting for people to be cool and check them out. Look, I think. I think it's like, I don't know how you evolve a new OS at this point, right? Like we got iOS because there was an inflection point and there was a moment when like the hardware and the software lined up.
and, and there was a thing. And then the Android kind of comment came out of that as well. Um, I don't know if I don't, I don't, do you actually need to like, I, I was thinking about this the other day. Like Windows, Linux, Mac OS are all running underlying systems like kernels that are 30 plus years old at this point, 35 years old. I think that's a strength, not a weakness.
Exactly. Like, and you see all the time, like you actually like, as far as I can tell, like the windows NT kernel to this day is like very highly respected as a piece of software engineering. Dave seems to like it. Yes. Well, he wrote most of them. He's generally a fan. Yes. I mean, he has actually even started poking fun at himself a bit about the, hey, I wrote that thing in Windows. Hey, I wrote that other thing, too. I wrote the copy dialogue. I wrote the zip support. I wrote the.
You format utility. I wrote, I wrote pinball when he wrote, when he said he wrote the zip file or the zip support, I was like, okay, so you're the one to blame for this slow ass zip implementation. Come on, man. Yeah. Anyway. Speaking of Microsoft Dave's, we've talked about this before. I still need to go back and listen to this. He has that like three hour interview up with Dave Cutler. Who was the architect of the, of the NT Colonel back in the nineties. Uh, the.
goes into a bunch of the history around that stuff anyway like you know mac os was based on next step which was a bsd derivative it started in the 80s like linux is famously 35 years old like The underpinnings of all the major operating systems, like just the basic technical ones, seem extremely sound at this point. And I don't know that... And actually, as a corollary to this, listening to the Dual Blue Diaries has been a good reminder that...
For most end users, the operating system is the interface. Yeah, 100%. It's not what's underneath the interface running the actual system. It's just what are the pieces that I touch to engage with using my computer. It's actually been interesting listening to the... Listening to the dual new diaries reminding me how Linux has effectively decoupled the interface from the OS itself in a lot of ways. So like people are, people that are coming to Linux are like, like Adam.
trying fedora and thinking it was very ubuntu like because they use both use gnome and then realizing like he actually said it out loud it was like one of those aha moments i heard the light bulb go off in his voice where he was like oh the things i liked about ubuntu might might have actually just been gnome things
yeah not not ubuntu things because i also have them in fedora here well so for me for me on this question though it's like things that i like about like i think about things i like about the different os's right and i like how easy it is to run software in windows And I like that I don't really have to fool with drivers in Linux, right? That the kernel just kind of takes care of that.
on on mac uh i mean i like how the dock bounces when i when i click an application that that that's always been my favorite no uh seriously though i don't i haven't used a mac in a really long time so i don't have a like a current what i like on mac take but but i think it's like taking the bits and pieces and the way the different things work and i think i think you hit on something there where linux is just this series of like loosely coupled software
uh interfaces that can all talk to each other in in in defined and extensible ways and that's awesome right up until the moment that it's not and like the moment that it's not is when you want to update something and like you don't have the right
sub library and then you end up replacing your entire window manager because you wanted to run a gtk6 thing a qt6 thing and you were saving five or whatever i'm going to say i'm going to save some of this for the patron episode next week i think but your story Your story about Neary breaking because Pac-Man decided to update Qt before Neary was updated enough to handle the new version of Qt and having your GUI just break is why I will never run a harsh. Yeah. Well...
So thanks. Anyway. Yeah. We talked about that this week. I fixed the problem. It turns out into it. Did you pin a package? No, I didn't. I just installed snapper support. And when something like that happens, I just roll back and I don't worry about it. Well, but then you can't update.
But like 12 hours later, it was fixed. It was no big deal. Well, that's fair. One of my. OK, now I'm just getting into it. My understanding on arch is that you shouldn't not update for too long because that can also cause breakages. But. Look, always be updating, but also test your backups is the big lesson from that whole outing. Anyway, I looked at Manjaro after this. I was like, maybe I should just do Manjaro because it's basically the same thing.
uh but it's it's a it's a it's a uh you know stabilized kind of more user-friendly arch right yeah it's it's it before cashy was the more friendly arch it was the more friendly arch like i'd Yes, there's room for that, but I'm sure Manjaro is fine. It's been around forever and people seem to like it. But when you're at the point of running a more stable arch, shouldn't you just run a different distro? At that point, it's just Debian or Fedora or something.
Yeah. Anyway, this is OK. It says robust with rolling releases. We'll get into this later. Yeah. I need to do some more research there. It is. It is still a rolling distro. Anyway, shags my boo. That's. a Halloween username. That's a pretty good name. Speaking of operating systems, I'm having an urge to download 86 box and install windows 95 and 98.
But I don't know what I would do with these after I get the initial nostalgia surge after like 15 minutes. Please give me a reason to indulge in my dumb ideas. The only reason I can give you is that it is fun because... Pretty similar thing here after you get them installed and dink around in the UI a little bit and remember all the stuff you remember. At least in my experience, you kind of stop using them. Yeah.
You're probably not going to set up Internet access in Windows 98 and use it as a daily driver for web browsing or something like that. So once I got Internet access running in that Windows 95 x86 box I made for the Windows 95 anniversary episode. I haven't touched it since. Yeah, same. But it's fun, though. Like, it's fun going through the installs for those things and remembering how things used to work and poking around in the BIOS. I mean, it doesn't take up much space.
is the other nice thing. Like it's, it's like, it's like relatively small. I've kind of been, I have it there to futz around with it. If I want to grab a screenshot or an image or a video or something, I totally can. And yeah. It's a good time to do it. I think I might have mentioned this on the Windows 95 episode, but the 5.0 release of 86Box that just came out a few weeks ago is a huge improvement over the 4.x because they finally have integrated their own way into...
Believe it or not, prior to this, there was no way to manage multiple virtual computers in this thing. Oh, really? You had to get like an external add-on manager that other people had built to like have more than one virtual computer at a time. 5.0 finally added sort of a computer browser where you can just make as many different kind of bespoke computer configs as you want and name them and keep them organized and managed.
Uh, anyway, good time to, to, to tinker with that stuff. But yes, it's, it's mostly, it's, it's, it's basically like the emulation library thing, right? It's like, yeah, as soon as you get the entire library of NES games at your fingertips. You try each one for five minutes and then you probably move on with your life. I got to tell you, I set up that the attract mode thing for the Mr. And I flipped the TV on when I'm sitting in here and kind of when I have a quiet day.
and it's been really good because i occasionally see something that i remember and i'm like oh man i gotta play that a little bit but also i've seen a bunch of stuff that looks rad that i never ever saw before and that's been the best part of having that thing turned on The ratio of interesting to not interesting is not great for it, though. I quite intentionally haven't hooked the watt meter up to it either. Probably for the best. Yeah. Coyote S pumpkins. Oh, boy. Happy Halloween, y'all.
You flagged this one. I assume you had. I assume this is a yes. Have you guys tried James Hoffman's cold brew technique? Oh, I wanted to talk about it. So James Hoffman posted a video the other day with a cold brew technique that used. oh god what's it called it's um I'm finding the link here. It's the stuff that drops fines out of beer when you're making beer to clarify beer. Meaning like the tiny, tiny particles? Tiny, tiny particles. Yeah.
um i have not actually tried it i'm going to i'm kind of interested but i have my cold brew technique i've been doing for a long long time at this point um and like i don't i i'm I mean, I guess the ratio. So his whole point is cold brew wastes a fair amount of coffee because your ratio instead of being like 18 to one is 10 to one or nine to one.
So you're using, sorry, 11 to 1. You're using a lot more coffee per liter of water that you use. Is that for concentrate or for drinkable? Both. So generally speaking, the extraction is less. You get less extraction. I see. With a cold brew process. That makes sense. But like, I think is, I think is like, I'm not a coffee expert. I enjoy coffee a lot. I think his.
Logic is a little flawed because he's talking about using a toddy, which is my least favorite way to make cold brew. I know you were a toddy guy for a minute. Wait. Adi, the branded thing, the branded thing. I've no, I've, I've never used the toddy before. You do, you, you were doing, uh, yeah. Um, I, I think.
Uh, like it's a finding agent is the thing that he's using it's, and it's used in beer brewing. So you put it in your finished beer to, to basically make sediment fall out over 12 hours. Um, I, I'm. I use a Hario cold brewer, which is a nylon filter. And I grind finer than I do for brewed coffee, hot brewed coffee. So I get pretty good extraction. I'm usually doing like a 12 to one or 13 to one.
coffee to water ratio by mass i thought i always thought the recommendation for cold brew was to grind coarser than usual it is but if you use a fine enough filter the reason you do that is because the the water doesn't filter
The water doesn't pass the filter as well when it's cold as it does when it's hot. So if you're brewing in your mason jar and then running it through a filter, it's going to take forever to drain through the filter. That is the reason that I have fallen off cold brew. I'd kind of like to get back to it. I miss it, but... It took all day. Yeah. To what I forget. What is the biggest common size of Mason jar? The court is the normal one. It's like when I do the.
uh egg noggin as a quart you can get bigger than that but that's the one i would use like it basically took all day to pass that much cold brew concentrate through multiple paper fill i would have to change paper filters every three or four hours because they became they get clogged right so saturated that they were useless but it took so long to filter it but like it's it's not pleasant having all that grid in there so you kind of have to do it
so the immersion the hario is an immersion one so you put you you have a tall narrow glass carafe and the nylon filter that holds 100 grams of grounds goes in the top of that and it sits so you're not you're you're diffusing out rather than emerging emerging in you have to stir it up like i usually start up once midway through and do it for 24 hours
but it's it's really highly effective it doesn't have any of the problems that he listed and i get a really nice flavored cold brew with none of the downside just using my normal ass san francisco tap water so I'm kind of curious about the finding agents. I'm skeptical about pouring off and it looked like you wasted a lot of coffee. So they were literally just pouring off the top, letting the sediment settle out and then pouring very carefully.
And that looked to me like you're going to waste a lot more stuff than otherwise. Anyway. Yeah. Cold brew already feels. I don't want to use the word wasteful, but like highly inefficient, like I already felt a little weird about how many grounds I was throwing out every time I did it. Well, I mean, if you're if you're if you're doing concentrate.
at 10 to 1 then that's fine right because you're going to add water to it it'll be okay the downside of the hario one is that unless you grind really really fine you're not going to get something that's concentrated enough to do more than add a little milk to right or put ice in um Uh, so yeah, anyway, that's, that's it on that topic. I've solved this problem by going all the way to the other end of the spectrum and just getting very used to drinking instant coffee. Oh God.
Which like hula girl or something good? Are you into the taster's choice? Typically the Nescafe Classico is the bulk purchase. Oh God. It's fine. Okay. It's a caffeine delivery mechanism. Like you might as well just drink a rock star at that point.
It's not, it's not that bad. It's not amazing. The Starbucks instant is not bad. Starbucks because they're good. Yeah. Last time I was home, there was some around and that's actually quite class goes. Okay. Try the, try the hula girl, the hula girl. I, I.
was shocked in that i could not tell that it was instant really okay especially with milk well the nice instant gets kind of expensive though i mean you treat yourself brad live a little yeah you deserve it well that's the thing though this is we're talking you know like that might be the A couple of times a month, like Saturday morning relaxation instance, but just the, the work day I need to caffeinate. Look in bulk. Nescafe is there for you.
I'm not going to tell you what my coffee budget is because it's not great. But generally speaking, I make the same coffee every day. And it's a it's a way it's a bright point. My otherwise in my otherwise darkest days. It's fantastic. Yeah, I get it. All right, Andrew.
I backed the Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium Kickstarter a while ago, and it seems like the physical book is in the homestretch of production. I got hit with a ton of warm fuzzies, especially since I love when you two flip through old magazines on the show. Seeing those old EGM covers I hadn't thought about in years got me wondering how you feel about projects like this. Would you ever want to see a compendium of your own work, a Maximum PC compendium?
Does that feel weird to think about for you guys? And that we'll probably never make physical archives of things that were only ever digital goods. I, I so wish when we started, so I would love to see a maximum PC compendium. I have no interest in making it myself.
I don't have the rights to it. I don't own the content. I don't really want to work for future again. And then also to the point of this question, the real question here is, does anybody still have the content? Like, does it even exist in a way that you could archive, even if you were willing to do it?
they're the pdf archives that i posted on archive.org for like the first episode the first issue through like 2010 are pretty good 2012 are there and they're they're not they're not like 300 dpi print quality but they're good enough for a compendium i think yeah i guess i guess when it was a print good in the first place there was probably enough of a tidy enough archive format that it was much easier to back up like in the case of
In the case of web-only, digital-only stuff, that stuff is so diffuse and non-standard. And web backups were so nascent and kind of primitive back then that a lot of that content is kind of just gone. So one of the things I pitched when we were coming up with the whiskey media, the whiskey media pass and like 2010 at giant bomb and tested was that we should do a printed yearbook every year.
uh of like the best of giant bomb the best detested the best screen the best of anime vice and put it in a big bound coffee table book and just post our you know that's fun i really wish we had done that i think it would have been incredibly stupid it was really expensive so we didn't we didn't explore it further, but yeah. I would, I would love to see like your, your book. Like, do you remember getting, do you remember seeing like boys life, like a lot of magazines in the eighties?
At the end of the year, they'd be like, hey, you can get a year, a bound annual compendium version of our magazine for like. you know, extra 30 bucks or 20 bucks or whatever. No, I don't think I ever saw that. And I would love to bring that idea back for websites. I think that's really cool. It reminds me of what I think Campo Santo did the annual report every year.
where they where they would do like hey here's how our stuff is going when they were building fire watch and they'd pay somebody to write like a whole like here's what we thought was interesting here's what we called here's what we learned here's the stuff we we were excited about blah blah blah blah
That's really good. Yeah. The biggest problem with a lot of this stuff is that like this sort of archival stuff requires somebody to be forward thinking enough in the moment. Yeah. To make sure that it's all preserved. My universal experience is that people are just too busy doing the thing in the first place to actually take on extra work and have the foresight to also.
do the archiving stuff on the back end while they're doing it you have to make a concerted dedicated effort if you want to like you like it's like the video game history foundation has a librarian whose job it is to like Think about ways to preserve things and present them in interesting ways and stuff like that. And you have to make that kind of effort, which costs a lot of money. Yes. I've never been super big on my coffee table books and compendiums, but a kind friend.
gifted me a spare copy of that Art of Atari book from like 10 years ago recently. Yeah. I'll make an exception for that because that Atari art is so rad. Is it like the cartridge cover art, the paintings? Oh, that's rad. It's basically full of profiles of the artists who did the paintings for all those things. Super full. A bunch of like full color, full page.
printings of those of those covers pratt i'm going to tell you last night i downloaded a bunch of uh 60s and 50s and 70s era paintings of o'neill cylinders and nasa habitats from the nasa from the goddard site For wallpaper purposes. And it's pretty good. Is that a government site? Government site. I should probably also go download that stuff while it's still there. Yeah, well, they are well archived, I will say. OK, all right. I should I should go get in on that, too. Yeah.
I had a weird moment when we did that news roundup a few weeks ago that had the SIM card farm story in it. I ended up on the U.S. Secret Services press site. When I was putting the episode together and needed art or not art, but photos of all the like the banks of SIM cards. And like they straight up like there was their press release with all of their photos attached to it. Some of the photos were like mega, mega high res. Some of them were.
terrible, but those were the official photo releases from the secret service. So when you go, I want the photo I wanted to use was like three, 300 by four 20 or something like that. And I was like, that's come on. the better photo than that secret service look they shot it with their razor flip phone okay maybe the um the one i the the thing i liked about the nasa site was it used the same interface that they use for the telescope images which are sometimes like crazy high resolution
So it was like you can get a small one, you can get a web one, you get a print ready picture of this watercolor painting from like 1962. I like when the official images get up into the five digit dimension range. It's like this, this image is like 12,000 by 16,000. I need an array of 5k monitors to see this in its full glory. Yep. You want to do one or two more? Yeah. All right. Here's one from sex tooth. Oh no.
What's the weirdest or scariest hardware failure you've ever had on your PC or console? Obligatory story. When I was about 11 in 1997-98, we had gotten a new ultra-fast CD-ROM drive, 40X, I believe. I decided to try it out with one of my favorite games, and the first game I ever played, X-Wing. The disc was four or five years old at this point, and I had played the game a lot in that time, so it had some visible scratches, but it still worked up to that point.
I put the disc in the ultra-fast CD-ROM and waited for the game to launch. The game didn't launch, but the CD drive was getting louder and louder. Finally, after about one or two minutes, the drive suddenly opened with no input from me. with the CD still spinning at a very fast speed. When the tray fully opened, the CD then launched into the air like a helicopter, 6 to 12 inches above the CD tray, before descending to the basement floor.
As it reached the floor, it was still spinning and started to wobble, so it spun in place for another 30 seconds or so before it came to a stop. The CD was unusable after this incident. Okay. So... I marked this because we tried, there were always reports when the high-speed CD-ROMs and optical drives started coming out of like disks shattering in the drives.
and at maximum pc of course we are our motto there was always be testing and um we tried to make that happen by a first taking the most damaged busted up cds that we could find and putting them into like a 48x cd-rom drive uh and then that didn't work so then we started cutting notches out of them with a dremel to unbalance them that also didn't work so i'm i'm fascinated to hear another example of this
happening but but yeah we we could not get them to explode which always bummed me out i'm trying to um trying to visualize how this happens because i assume i've certainly i guess i've never seen this in action but i assume like the motor Kind of extends up into the middle of the CD, right? Yeah. Spin it. But then the motor would have to retract before the tray could come out. Right. I think my understanding was that usually the tray kind of exploded out because of the rotational force.
I see. Um, but I, I don't know. I'm fascinated by this. Uh, we, uh, the scariest thing I've ever had to happen was when the magic, when a power supply blew up and the magic smoke came out and it was a lot in it. Oh. a lot and bad the the worst non-computer one though was when i was at battle bots and a robot we were interviewing a person who had built a robot and then the lithium-ion battery pack caught fire while we were doing the interview
And we all had to run away from it because it was making a bunch of really toxic white smoke. Yeah. Anything involving smoke and fire kind of just by default wins this contest. Yeah. I don't think I've ever had anything burn up. I don't have a lot of good stories here. The time I had to hot swap that BIOS was pretty scary. Yeah, that's a terrifying one. Not a lot, though. The lithium smoke in the robot, like a big giant lithium battery pack, like making making fire and like.
being big enough that they couldn't get enough sand on it to put it out, made a truly terrifying amount of smoke. If we had been inside a building, it would have filled the entire thing. Pretty alarming. Yeah, it's fine that we keep them in our pockets, though. Okay, last email or last Discord question, rather. I am just now realizing that Care Bearer is cake batter. Yeah. Because there's a question here about a label maker machine. Oh, boy. But I'm not going to read that one. Okay.
I'm going to read this one instead. You should get a label maker, though. They're really handy. Should I? Do you have one? Yeah. Big batter is big on label makers. Look, I'm going to go and tell you, I was pretty mad about label makers. And then. we went to an airbnb one time where the person who owned the airbnb had labeled every cabinet with the things that were in it it was really nice i could see it yeah sure all right
You ever start budgeting for a closed source system like PagerDuty and then find out that Target open sources its own? What? And then here is a link. Sure enough, yes, Target has a GitHub repo. Here is a link to target slash go alert. Wow. Which is described as open source on-call scheduling, automated escalations, and notifications so you never miss a critical alert.
I assume this is what they use in store for employees? No, I bet this is for their uptime on their storefront. Oh, for the web store? For the web store. Interesting. Yeah, 500 errors is in the screenshot. Okay. The mention of pager duty made me think this was something used in physical space for people out on the floor as well, but maybe not. Pager duty is a service for...
like devops people who are maintained who are like yo the websites is like you know when we used to just text dave when the website was down now you'd have a pager duty service and people turn it like it turns on and off automatically and it just buzzes your phone when when something breaks I love finding unlikely GitHub accounts. This is fabulous. Yeah, Target having a GitHub account and posting open source software that they write and use is weird in a fun way.
I know there are more than enough problems with Target, just to be clear, but still. The Slack channel is called gophers.slack.com because it's GoAlert. Oh, of course. Yes. They have too many things in their root folder, though. Yeah. This is not quite as weird as the time that I found out that Rivers Cuomo of Weezer has a GitHub account that he uses fairly regularly. Wait, what? Have we never talked about this? No. Dude. What does he start? Rivers Cuomo's whole internet. Speaking of like.
Speaking of consolidated activity profiles about everything you've ever done online, Rivers Cuomo's digital footprint on the internet is weird as hell. Like he writes a bunch of Python code that he's used on tours. Somehow he runs a discord. It's one of the weirder discords I have ever seen. His profile picture is just a picture of old him on a blue background. That's amazing. It's the blue album cover with all the other members of the band. It's clone stamped out and just him.
He's done 2,900 contributions in the last year. Yeah. No, he uses his GitHub account quite regularly. He seems to write a fair amount of code. His bot is called Quomputer. Yeah. Yes. Oh. Of course. Of course he wrote that himself. Yes, he has a weird bot on his Discord server and I did not realize he had written it himself. Okay, looking at his stars though, this is the real thing. Background downloader, deep links, flutter.
white box code gpt um spotify astro transitions what is he does a lot of spotify api stuff it looks like okay yeah this is this is fascinating it's weird It's weird stuff. Target having a GitHub repo is not quite as weird as this, but it's still kind of weird. Wow. Microsoft having, you know, Microsoft, you name it, big tech company having a GitHub repo is like whatever, of course. But Target? Yeah. That's a bit strange.
in kind of fun way okay and on that note yeah i think this is as good a place as any to wrap it up for the for the month uh uh if you have a question you can send them to techbot at content.town or if you're in the discord you can go to the question seeking answers channel. And once there you can type something in, it's going to disappear in a minute or two, and then we'll see it at the end of the month. Brad is going to.
Painstakingly copy them, paste them out while I'm overdoing the same on the email side. Discord, give us an export function. Yeah, I don't think they care. They don't. Yeah. But but yeah, it would be great. I mean, the fast mail.
I've looked for bots that'll pull a fast mail folder and turn it into a word document, but it turns out this doesn't exist. Not a normal use case. But anyway, if you want to get in that discord, you can hang out in there. You can talk to us. You can talk to everybody else there. It's a delightful community of folks. um talking about nerdy stuff all day long pretty much whether it's audio stuff or linux stuff or uh phone stuff or old electronic stuff or old console stuff or emulation stuff
We got it all in there. Food stuff. Maker stuff. Yeah. Coffee stuff. So first off, so you go to patreon.com slash tech pot. It's five bucks a month. You also get the patron exclusive episode where. We talk about kind of in progress stuff. It's a, let's see, a less structured chat that we do once a month.
We haven't recorded yet this month because this is an early Sunday, early last Sunday. So who knows what it could be? Could be anything. I can think of some things. It'll probably be. Okay. Brad has Brad has thoughts. I definitely want to talk about something that a listener gave us while I was in Escalon a few weeks ago. But anyway.
Yes, yes. That is the number one thing we have to talk about. Yeah, because anyway, but to be continued. In the meantime, we want to thank our patrons, starting with our executive producer to your patrons, including James Kamek, David Allen, Twinkle Twinkie, Bunny. dot, dot, dot. Or maybe that's bunny ellipses. Jordan Lippett, Andrew Slosky, Infelicitous Rips, Jason Lee, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
And since it's the end of the month, we also want to thank our associate producer to your patrons, including Graham Banks, Thomas Shea, Chad Rita, Pete Tibbs, Steve Lynn, Tom Fuller, Just Associate Wedge, Nathan Phelps, Ben Tallman. Tom Hilton, Andre M Burke PE, Andrew Dicey Schildice, Alejandro Navarro, Matt Walker, parentheses Walkman 8080, Sanchik Kumar, Felix Kramer, Kerp, Brutal Kerfuffle.
Eric and Mark Wilhelm. Thank you also so much. Thank you. Uh, and I guess that'll do it for us this month. Uh, this week also it's, it's the end of a week. It's the end of the month. Brad, what's your Halloween costume this year? You got any, you leave in the house. Probably not. Okay. My girlfriend's doing where's Waldo stuff. Okay. I like that. Yeah. Is she going to be Waldo or is she going to be somebody else? I'm unclear, I think. Okay. Actually, I did have that idea.
I thought it would be funny if people just dressed up like other Where's Waldo characters, but not the stripes. That's a really funny idea. Like, I have to come up with something for the full nerd. Maybe I'll just be another character from a background of a Waldo book. Because that's just clues. Yeah. It's just outfit. It has to be distinctive outfit. It has to be nurse or firefighter or something like that. It's nothing outlandish, but it still has to be a certain thing. I'm into it.
I was thinking about coming to Full Nerd as Tim Robbins' hot dog man. We got to find who did this. Anyway, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see who knows what I'll be. Find out next Tuesday. But we'll be back next week with another episode of the TechPod. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And please consider the environment before printing this podcast.