315: Work-in-Progress Till I Die

Let me show you. I'm going to give you a something weird is happening. Funny Linux bug. You're skipping bad. Really? Oh, it's when I opened the share thing, I think, on Jitsi. Wait, are you in one? Is this a Linux issue? Look, this might be a Linux issue. So sometimes Linux has funny bugs. Sometimes it has annoying bugs. You don't say you see my audacity window here. Totally normal audacity window. You see my mouse cursor moving around in there.

No, because this window capture does not capture your mouse cursor. Great googly moogly. Okay, hold on. This entire endeavor is for naught, but I am leaving all that Linux bug stuff in there. We're recording now, by the way. Yeah, no, I know. OK, so I'm just going to share my screen so you can see the cursor because fuck it. You'll see my. OK, so you're going to see here's my screen. This is my whole screen.

And look, you see the cursor moving around. Everything looks normal. Normal size cursor. It's like floating around in the place where the audio files go in Audacity. But when I get over the window, Chrome. Oh, look at that. It's a big boy.

It's like on Mac OS when you shake the cursor around a bunch. Yeah, well, so that's my favorite of the Linux features is on KDE. If you shake the cursor, it just keeps getting bigger. And you can put handles on either side of that so it doesn't get too, too big.

But if you don't, you can make it larger than the entire space that all of your screens take up and it'll fill up every monitor on your desktop. And it's amazing. Great. It takes like two minutes of shaking for that to happen. But you should stream that sometime. I should really. It's really it's pretty good. But.

What I really wanted to talk about was I went to the grocery. We're recording this the day before Thanksgiving in the United States, which I have learned over the years is the worst grocery store day of the year. Well, crap. I have to go myself in a couple hours.

I got bad news for you because it's only going to get where you got to go like seven o'clock in the morning if you want to have a decent grocery store experience. I only need one thing, though. I went I went in and it was like the end of the fucking warriors in there about 20 minutes ago. Well, great. Like there were there was a fire back by the by the frozen turkeys. There were people stabbing each other in the stuffing aisle. I saw I literally saw this thrown over a bag of marshmallows.

It was bad. It was bad. But there were about 50 times as many people as are normally in there. And the line for the normal non. So we have both self-checkout and express aisles. And. the self checkout aisles are sometimes full service and sometimes they're like express 15 items max. The line for the long aisles was so long that it merged into the self-checkout aisle and there had to be a whole negotiation with the self-checkout person to like.

get everybody in the right place where nobody was skipping a line. It was terrible. It was really, really bad. I really wish I had gone yesterday and gotten my one thing yesterday. Always go. Always, always be grocery shopping on Monday. But I had to go get broccoli because we forgot to get broccoli. So anyway.

The thing I need is from the deli, so we'll see. Yeah, the deli will be a little quieter once. Here's I got a pro tip. Well, one thing is sometimes you can buy stuff at the deli. You can just pay for it there if it's like a sandwich counter deli. Not at the Safeway, sadly. The other option is if you have a Starbucks inside, if you only have like three or four things, you can just check out, just get an iced tea.

Or coffee at the Starbucks. They'll check out your groceries. They will check out your groceries. They're wild. I know. Well, because it's a Safeway. It's not a Starbucks. Can we talk about what is this? It's not brand new. This has been at least probably a year now. Yeah.

What is this California state law that you can't take more than 15 items to the self-checkout? It's not a California state law, is it? That's what the Safeway signage says. Huh. The hell is that? Come on, Gavin Newsom. What the fuck? I think that's part of the BS. Hey. hey, we have a problem that is mostly imagined about people stealing stuff through self-checkout. It's a loss problem. So there are some local laws like Long Beach.

So part of that is a jobs thing, right, is that they don't want those checker jobs to go away. So like Long Beach has a law about self checkouts being for 15. people max but i don't see anything about a state state law that's what their signage says i don't know we just are there are never lines at the self-checkout at our safeway and our we've gotten the process down to like 30 seconds you can just whip through that thing and get the hell out of there look

There was a period of time in my life when I lived like two blocks from a Whole Foods where I actually enjoyed going to the grocery store. I'm done. I don't enjoy that process anymore. I get it. It's the worst of humanity in there every single time. Well, when we finally move to our cabins in the woods, time to start a garden. Look, one quarter acre per person. That's a subsistence farm right there. Think about it.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. It is the end of the month, Brad. It is the end of the month. It's the time that we traditionally look deep into our hearts, dig deep into the discord, delve. into the email minds and pull out only the prime cuts of cues, which then through the power of the internet and magic are turned into A's.

Give thanks for this glorious bounty of questions that has been delivered to our podcasting table. We there are some bangers in here this month. I'm just going to say you're not going to want to miss this. I felt a little weird when I was going through the discord questions and was just like flagging.

Question after question, like five questions in a row that were. Yeah. Let me stop here for a second. Yeah. Do you ever, do you ever wonder if the audience thinks we are blowing smoke month to month about how many good questions. Are we turning into LLMs or like chat GPT of look.

podcast Q and A's like, those are some amazing questions you've provided audience. This is very perceptive of you. Look, it's just like Adam says, this is the best technology podcast on the internet. And I think that our audience is the best podcast audience on the internet. That's right.

Whether they're just yelling at their radios as they drive down the freeway or taking the time to sit down and share a story about playing Gears of War in 2006 with Danny O'Dwyer from Malaysia to Ireland. We are... Franking this one out a little quickly here on late on Wednesday or Thanksgiving. So I didn't actually read that entire email, but Oh, I don't hear about the Danny O'Dwyer connection. Maybe I will read that. Yeah. I will say.

If we sound overly effusive about the quality of the questions every month or the number of questions or both, at least for me, it's straight up because it makes our job easier. Like full on the better.

The more and better questions we get, the easier this episode is. And I always am very appreciative when we just have a giant crop of great questions to talk about. But for me, it's the thing that I love about the question episode. And the thing I love about questions is questions on podcasts in general. It's the only kind of feedback. We don't get a lot of feedback. You don't get a lot of feedback on what you're doing. And the thing that I love about a questions episode is that we get to hear.

Like we get a different filter through the things that we talk about. Yeah. Well, yeah, I would mostly agree. I mean, you know, we do get feedback on the discord and we talk to people there, but in terms of, in terms of dialogue with the audience through the podcast itself, this is it. Well, the discords are relatively small slice of the audience, right? It's like it's like a couple of thousand people of a much larger pie. So anyway, true indeed.

Um, if you have questions, you can send them to tech pod at content.town or alternatively you can post them in the discord. I will, I will say there's a trend that has happened over the last several months, especially on the emails where they're starting to get real long. The likelihood of having a question read is directly proportional to the.

Inversely proportional to the length of the of the question that is that is a global podcast rule or at least on every podcast I've ever been on. If you if you send us like I read them all, if you send me a 3000 word thing, I'm going to read it and I'll be like, wow, that was really cool.

No chance in hell I'm ever going to read that on the podcast unless it's just like the like we've we've read a couple of those, but usually keeping it short and sweet has a much better chance of getting your question read. So anyway, yes, without any further ado. Oh, so yeah, Tech Body Content of Town or the Questions Seeking Answers channel in the Discord are the two ways to send us questions. You can send them other ways, but they are never going to get read. So anyway.

I'm going to start with an email or two that are feedback on previous episodes. Perfect. There's one from Nathan. I had an original Nest thermostat that I purchased and used for the duration of the product's life. Eight months ago, I moved from my old house into another older house. I left the nest at the previous house, factory reset it, and thought I'd never have to think about it again.

I still get monthly reports from the Nest reporting for the old house despite factory resetting it. Concerned about the privacy of the person that currently owns my old house, I contacted Google. I could only ever get in touch with our old friend, the AI chatbot, who AI-splained over and over that I had to remove it from my account and factory reset it. I have no ability to do so as it doesn't show up on Google Home.

and I have no access and do not know the person, I asked for them to submit a ticket. I'm sorry. By them, I think they were talking about the AI chatbot here. Oh, maybe. Not the previous owner of their house because they just said they'd...

Oh, they don't know the person who bought the house. Yeah. They don't know the person. I asked for them to submit a ticket to the tech ops side to look into this. It said it could do that, but would never confirm that it had actually done it. So I still get the reports and have no way to stop it despite.

support discontinuing ain't google great i would just file a can spam lawsuit against google because you've not a no that's bad that's bad advice uh this sucks i don't know that there's a way to fix it I'm never buying another Nest product again. And I will say we got so much feedback about thermostats after talking about my Nest thermostat going end of life and apparently everyone else's also that we could do an entire thermostat.

Like maybe a thermostat episode is, is worth doing. I think, well, do you mind if I just, if I just expense a mortgage? Yeah. Yeah. So I can put that right on. Yeah. Thermostat. Look, look, I'll just put, I'll just put a new house on.

Yeah, just on the company. Look, I wanted to get a laptop a couple of years ago. And you're like, I don't know about that one. But yeah, mortgage is probably fine. I actually I shouldn't do this because it's the whole point of renting. We've talked about this before, but. When you told me that a new thermostat is $10, I kind of thought about going out and getting a new thermostat for this apartment just to be able to install a thermostat because it sounds fun.

It's just two wires and some screws. Yeah. Also, I busted the faceplate on our current very old thermostat. So look, if you want, if you want a vintage one, you can go over to urban or in Berkeley and get one. Probably that's the exact same one that you have in there now because they have.

They have bins and bins of old thermostats, like cool round ones from the 50s. Oh, God, I could get a smart thermostat for this place and just take it with me if we move. Yeah. Now that you mention it. Yeah, you can do whatever you want. So, yeah, we got a lot of notes about thermostats. We got a couple of notes about ESP Home.

Yeah. And ESP 32 based devices. That is a whole, I think I might've said this on a recent podcast, but ESP 32 and ESP home are a whole rabbit hole that I would love to go down at some point if I ever had the time. So I did some reading about it and I think, I think at some point.

It's on the I put it on my list of things I want to do episodes about in the future. It's going to be more we did. We're not reading any of those questions because we're going to do a whole episode. I guess the TLDR there. And I mean, I can't speak for you. I just don't know enough about it to give any kind of detail.

So I would block those emails from Google and I would send a paper letter to the send a paper letter to your old address and tell them to factory reset the thermostat because you're still getting emails for it.

to claim it on their account. That's probably a good idea. But also if it's the first gen nest thermostat, it's no longer supported and shouldn't be generating those emails anymore. So something's really broken. True. Yeah. And I have, I don't want to digress too much here. We should move on, but.

There is no worse feeling of helplessness that I can think of, at least aside from like actual really bad ones. But it's a terrible feeling to have something like this slip through the cracks of a company's kind of Byzantine. backend or support structure or what have you, you know what I mean? Yeah, no, it stinks. Like the cloud saves on my PlayStation account got super jacked up on the PS4. I think I basically had too many games is what it was.

Oh, wow. Because this is not a situation people run into. I'm so sorry, Brad. Oh, I'm so sorry. What a big problem you've had. Yes, I know. Games media problems. I had several hundred games on my PS4 account.

But it kind of like broke cloud safe functionality at some point where you used up all the space that they allotted. It's not space. It is number of items. That's the kind of error I was getting was like too many items, too many individual files or whatever. And it's a problem that's still occasionally.

Rears its head. So which cloud saves did you delete? That wasn't the problem. It was a little more nuanced than that. Like I could eventually, I could manually go in and make the save sync, but they would always fail to auto sync is what the problem was. Oh, that stinks.

Kind of defeats the whole purpose. That's a stinking sink, if you ask me. The point is, or like, you know, I had a driver's license get lost in the California DMV system for three months one time, which took a lot of time on the phone to finally track down and get. Yeah. The point is, like, I just mean that feeling of that Kafkaesque feeling of just having something slip through the cracks like this is the worst. Terry Gilliam made a whole movie about that. He sure did. It's pretty good.

I just saw it for the first time a few months ago. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, man. We're talking about Brazil for people. Which version did you watch? Gosh, I'd have to listen to the next Lander Watchcast to find out more. I don't know. I mean, we would definitely say on there it might have been. It's probably the director's cut. There's like a TV cut that's terrible that has a happy ending. Yes, we talked about that, but definitely not that. It was.

Probably a director's cut. The original cut is kind of OK, but not great. Robert De Niro is a delight in that movie. Yeah. Anyway. All right. Email from Corey. I heard the words Sega and channel together, and it prompted me to write this email. I loved the Sega channel. I would stay up until midnight on the last day of the month to see the game list roll over and see what was new. I got to try so many games that I never would have if the service didn't exist.

There were even exclusive games like Mega Man, the Wily Wars. That's a good example. I totally forgot that existed. Wow. This is crazy. I did not know about this. One of my favorite memories was the preview build of Mortal Kombat 3. The full game was too big to download to the Sega Channel's memory, so they broke the game up into two ROMs, each with half the characters. It was such a weird and unique thing to experience. I've been looking for these special MK3 ROMs since then with no luck.

With the new MK collection out, I've emailed Digital Eclipse to see if they might have any leads. They were able to obtain the special WaveNet version of MK3 Arcade, so anything is possible. This is incredible. I didn't know this existed. And like... What a weird way to shape how you think about that game, right? I often think about old game demos and how much people played Q3 DM17 because that was one of the maps that shipped with the demo.

And I wonder, like, I wonder if this person, if Corey ended up with like, oh yeah, no, I only like this with these, with this half of the characters, the other half, not so much. Yeah, I only play the version with Cabal, but the Striker version is bullshit. Exactly. I did a quick Google here. I spent literally 10 seconds on this, so I can't give you much detail, but on a site on forums.sonicretro.org.

in a thread entitled, More Sega Channel Prototypes Dumped, which has been going since 2011, by the way. Wow. From last November, about a year ago, here is a big list of what I take to be new ROM dumps. Mortal Kombat 3 contest demo, Mortal Kombat 3 demo, Mortal Kombat 3 two parts. And that one is listed as, that one is like file name or short name, MK3 part A, MK3 part B. There you go.

Seems like those weird Sega Channel versions might have actually been dumped at some point. Who was in each part, do we know? I don't have that information here. Oh, might be out there somewhere. Like, I wonder if that's like the, if you think that's like the Ed Boon tier list for model MK three characters, or you think that's like, you wouldn't want to, you'd probably, you would want to put half of your S tier characters in each version, right?

I mean, I don't know. You want to make sure no matter what version you play, you want to make sure people are getting to play some of the best characters. I get, I mean, I guess I don't like it. Look, there's a bunch of ways to slice this pickle. Yeah, that's true. You know? Anyway, that's a fun factoid. I didn't know about that. Like what a weird, what a weird time. What a weird artifact of a weird time. Yes. Okay. This is another email from the multiplayer gaming episode.

When I moved to Malaysia in 2006, the halos on the various Xboxes became Skype with headshots, a way for me to keep in touch with my best mate back in Ireland. With no family in Malaysia and few regular commitments, I'd often hop online for a game after a very late night out with new friends before going to bed. One morning when I stumbled home without having organized a play date with anyone back home due to the seven to eight hour time difference.

I jumped online for a few games of Gears of War 2. As it was early morning Koala Lumpur time, I was getting matched with players in the EU and Australia. This was also the height of headset play and online jibber-jabber, so active chat was not unexpected. but I was surprised to hear a familiar voice on chat. One half of Citizen Game and later GameSpot, Giant Bomb, and no clip, Danny O'Dwyer.

Danny and his mates were also a little worse for wear. Late night Ireland equaled early morning in Malaysia. We played a couple of mutually drunken rounds before signing off. This is the only famous person I've ever met online, but what truly made this stick in my mind is how this shortened the distance between players. But from the other side of the world, I could accidentally link up with players from home. That's amazing. There's a link here to a post from Danny.

On Blue Sky, apparently verifying this whole thing. Danny literally says, oh yeah, McNasty Prime's burned in my mind. Your username is burned into my brain like the kids in my first classroom. Yeah. So there you go. That's good stuff. I love I love this because like, yeah, it's number of magical moments that happen because of Xbox Live plus one. Yeah. Cool. Thanks for sharing. Yes, indeed.

One more email here, at least, before we move on to the Discord stuff. James in the UK. I have a question about thermal paste. I have a mid-age PC build. Asus Z690 board. 4080. 12 seconds. 12700K, which is air-cooled by one of the bigger heat exchangers. I've not touched the CPU since building. My idle temps remain around 35C, but I've noticed my light use temps are starting to rise from 45 to more like 55+.

which is noticeable because my fans are kicking up a gear at 60. I recently finished an extensive playthrough of Star Wars Outlaws, during which my temps sat at about 75C. That game is notoriously CPU-heavy. I think I may have cooked my paste. I've never had to remove thermal paste before, but YouTube makes it look reasonably simple. Should I try and what are the dangers? Alcohol everywhere? Tissue? Thanks in anticipation.

Yeah, so thermal paste doesn't last forever. This is the thing that it's important to remember is that you do like every, it depends on the paste, but at least if you leave it on for more than a couple of years, you're going to have to replace.

and that that sign that you're getting with where the light use temperature idle temperatures are stable light use temperatures are going up either means your fans are really you're you're you've got dust problems something clogging up your your air cooler and or your fans Or alternately, the paste has dried out and it's not conducting the heat as well. The 12700K came out. Depending on when you bought it, it was, what, five years ago now? Not quite.

You know, I typed 12, 700 K and I don't get a Wikipedia link anymore. So thanks Google. Actually, I think it might've been about three years. Oh no, it's good. Well, anyway.

the point is you're you're in the window for when you need to start thinking about that it's really easy to do there's a couple of um you can use isopropyl rubbing alcohol i usually use a very high percentage and step 90. 90 or higher is good that's that's what i think i've got 91 i've seen you could get up to 99 if you can find it when you use those high percentages of isopropyl anything above 75 you need to wear gloves because it'll it's bad for your skin really um

But the other option is that, I mean, if you don't do a lot of PC building, it's less important. But if you're swapping coolers and stuff all the time, Arctic Clean, the Arctic Silver folks make a two stage.

cleaner for removing dried thermal grease from your from your from your uh cpus and coolers and the first stage takes off the grease and then the second one is just a little bit acidic and kind of polishes off the copper or the the interface materials um it's it's cost practically nothing it's less than 10 bucks for a tub

The last one I bought has lasted me more than a decade and I build a fair number of PCs and they're just in little eyedroppers. So if you're using rubbing alcohol, what I usually do is put the alcohol onto a paper towel. or a lint free, a clean, relatively lint free cloth. And then I use the moist paper, the wet.

paper towel to take the stuff off and it takes three or four passes if you're doing the arctic clean it's in an eyedropper type bottle and you can just put like three drops right on the top and smear it around you want to make sure the pc is unplugged but like it's pretty hard to mess up

and if you're even if you're on like a ryzen or something that has those cutouts in the side of the heat spreader and the excess old thermal goo gets in the side there you don't have to worry about it i mean you can you can pop it out with a q-tip or a or a toothpick or something like that

or you can just leave it. It's fine. It's not going to hurt anything. Yep. Won't hurt anything. I was once gifted a hand-me-down CPU from a friend quite a while ago. That's not going to name any names. Had a God awful pace mess all over it. Some people who maybe listen to this podcast like to use too much paste. This was not one of the recent AMD with the holes on the sides. It was an older Intel, so no mess inside the heat spreader.

The point is I use 90% alcohol and just a tissue. Like this was bad enough that by the time I got it out of there, a tiny little bit was around on the underside, like on the, um, uh, Those are not BGA. The bracket thing? The LGA. I guess those are LGA pads. Yeah. Like the actual contact pads. A BGA pad. Yeah. Anyway, I straight up just 90% alcohol and tissueed all over that CPU until it...

Oh God, don't do the pads. That's scary. Then I microfibered them. That's yeah. Just, I mean, I figured it was, I figured it was better than leaving paste on there. Um, probably. Yeah. If you're, if you have to take stuff off the pads.

What I've always done anytime that's happened is used a Q-tip that's been dipped in the isopropyl. I'm terrified of using... fiber cloths on that for fear it'll generate static across the yeah okay sure it might have been a q-tip i used anyway point is i never had a problem with that cpu after i cleaned it it's like generally you're going to be fine it's pretty it's

it's surprisingly difficult to kill something you're much more likely to mess up the pins inside the thing yes and and just to be clear when you're doing this you don't have to take the cpu out you can leave the cpu in the board lay it flat and uh you then because the thing you're going to do the like you may damage something with wet you're much more likely to damage the pins taking the cpu in and out if you don't do it fairly regularly so which is infinitely more horrifying than yeah

The CPU is way, way, way more resilient than those pans. And you can use 75% isopropyl for this as well if you want. Just give it a little extra time to dry because it has more water in there. Yeah. I think I've talked before about, I mean, that PC I had for the longest I've ever had a PC. I bent a bunch of the pins on that socket with my t-shirt leaning over the board. Yep. And spent like an hour meticulously bending pins back.

That's why I always do all my builds in the nude. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that will work. But that machine ran for seven years, eight years, just fine. Oh, the, so the other thing is if you don't want to have to fool with this, there are. Thermal pastes that are built for long duration. Or you can use a graphite pad. You know what does last forever? It's a graphite pad.

Well, there's actually two different things now. There's the graphite pad and then there's also this like, God, I can't remember the name of it. It's some Honeywell. It's that straight up like research material. on a thermal interface material that's like got an alphanumeric name.

Yeah, Thermal Grizzly actually resells it now. Oh, they do. Interesting. I was waiting for somebody to make that more commercial for PC builders because it was not for that application originally, I don't believe. So, yeah, it was originally for like industrial type stuff. The minus pad, I think, is what it's called. PTM 7950, I believe, is the original material name. Yep, that's the one.

And yeah, so it basically is a phase change material that at the temperatures the CPU operates, gets a little more liquidy. And then when it cools back down, it turns into a solid again. but you can also use the graphite pad you can get uh thermal grizzly sells a long duration uh thermal paste called duronaut that's for uh long long-term use that doesn't dry

So, yeah, there's a lot of options. Yeah. All right, let's move on to some Discord questions because there are a ton of them. Aeoli writes in.

This is a good question. Smartphones seem to have stagnated a fair bit in that each generation is mostly minor improvements to existing hardware and software. I've read a few articles saying that the current type of smartphone may have plateaued and found its optimal form. What other product categories have hit a similar plateau? And what product categories can we expect to see drastic updates or improvements in the coming years? It's like carcinization, but for phones. You know about this?

Oh yeah. The, the, the cancerization rather. No, it is. It is carcinization. It's the tendency of numerous. disparate life forms to all turn into crabs. The evolutionary shape of crab is very good. It turns out it turns out crabs are highly adapted to a lot of things. I think I think if if the I think there's room for phone technology improvements. but i think we i think there needs to be some material stuff that changes as a result so like we don't have like

We need we need better batteries and like folding screens for things to change on phones. I like I see those folding flip the flip. phones with the folding screens in them and i'm like that looks rad and then i see what it looks like after somebody's used it for like three months i'm like this would make me absolutely crazy there's no way i can buy this um but i would love to have a slightly smaller phone that has the same

Like volume, but that can be folded in half. So it fits in my pocket better. Sure. Yeah, I can see it. I kind of I kind of like where phones are at. And when I saw the iPhone 17 at the store a few months ago, I was just like, you know, this is kind of all I would need in a phone probably ever. personally but my phone needs are pretty light to be fair yeah i i um i mean i i think this is the place like i didn't i haven't i'm i'm on a 15 i think still 15 pro and

I don't really see any reason to upgrade for the foreseeable future. My wife has the one with a good camera and when we need to take a picture of something, I borrow her phone if we want it to be good. uh but even for normal stuff mine's my phone camera's fine yeah and then the rest of it is like i would like it to be lighter and smaller so i looked at the airs this year and i was like oh no i'm not it's not enough not enough camera for me

I get it. Anyway, I think I think my girlfriend's going to get a 17 soon. So we'll have one of those in here for me to see. She's still on a 10 or which is becoming extremely creaky. Wow. At this point. So it's time. Other categories that have hit the same spot. I think the PC gaming handhelds, we're seeing some explosive, like I think we're going to see a lot of evolution there.

i do and i'm not talking about the steam deck in this case i'm talking about the smaller stuff from like the the chinese electronics markets right the um your amber necks and so forth yeah those those because those those folks are making They're doing mad science stuff with those form factors to the point that like now there's dual screen devices and there's all sorts of cool stuff that's happening over there. And they're working at a scale that like Asus and Lenovo just can't.

can't sell machines like they can't they can't sell machines at at the in the kind of volumes that amber nick is happy to sell volumes at yeah um yeah i think i've read that a lot of their products they sell like 10 000 units or something like that and that's like fine for them

I think Russ from retro game core, I think is where Russ is from told me that, that like 10, 10,000 is a pretty good number for those guys. Yeah. That's cool. It's cool that that can exist. Um, and then the other one is, I think the, the, the, uh what do you call the fpga stuff is i think those i think i think we're getting to a point where people are selling enough of those that we'll start seeing some interesting low-cost applications for them now finally in the same way that like

The Arduino and Raspberry Pis of 15 years ago begat a whole bunch of really interesting microcomputer and kind of microcontroller applications. Yeah, I would be curious to see if we get any FPGA based stuff that's not gaming oriented at some point.

like uses for those things like we wouldn't and and the thing that the thing that this happened before like when you look at what happened with the with the arduinos especially that kind of microcontroller becoming inexpensive and becoming a thing that people were buying for like home projects and and diy electronic stuff made it possible for a lot of the the keyboards to the mechanical keyboard stuff that's happening right now because they're all using the same kind of controllers and and like

When something gets cheap for one category, it can spin off a bunch of other interesting categories. Yeah, that's cool. Another thing I would add here that I think maybe has plateaued, but definitely should plateau, in my opinion, is TV standards.

Let me make a distinction here. I'm not talking, I'm not talking about TV display technology. So like your, your like OLED still has room for improvement. Like micro LEDs, not even widely available yet. And that's even better. I'm not talking about the physical medium. for displaying the image talking about like resolution and color standards like 4k and current hdr i think is pretty goddamn good like i was actually thinking this the other day

If we were on 4K and current HDR standards for the rest of my life, I think I'd probably be fine with that. I think we finally hit the point of diminishing returns where at the size of screen I'm likely to ever have. I don't...

think i'll ever need better than that i just want a screen that's painted over every wall in my house like in back to the future and yeah and i want phone calls to pop up on that automatically because that doesn't sound like a nightmare yes now again like i'll point out like

HDR might be great, but you might still need a TV that can get brighter than TVs currently get to truly appreciate it. So again, there's room for improvement there, but on the standards end, I feel like TV is in a pretty good place. Yeah, I want to, I want. Um, it's funny in the Simpsons fortnight, they put the giant Mr. Burns TV, the biggest TV in the world. And I saw that and it cracks me up every time I see it. And I can't imagine that I would ever want that.

anything like that that's that size is that from the show that's yeah it's from an episode i never saw that episode yeah but yes that is that tv is too big yeah I think like 65 is a pretty good size for me. Like if I had a bigger room, I could see maybe going to like 77, but I think that's probably about the biggest TV I could ever imagine owning. Like if we lived someplace where we had basements.

I would love to have a room with like six or eight recliners and risers for the people in the back and like a big giant projector. And some loud ass speakers so I could watch big ass movies or play games in, in, in like an optimal situation. I get it. I mean, everybody's different, but for me, I found that there is a minimum distance to size ratio.

Oh yeah. Like the bigger, the bigger something gets the farther away I need to sit from it to still enjoy it. So yeah, there is a cap on that stuff for sure. I could just rest my eyeballs on the screen. I'm fine. It turns out. All right. More power to you. Yeah. Okay.

Sergeant Sphinx, how long before a work in progress stops being in progress? I ask because an old computer I have that I had intended to get up and running again has been a work in progress for almost five years now. Well, look, it's an even older computer now, so it's... You know, I'm going to say, not to get too macabre here, I'm going to say it's still in progress until you're dead in the ground. Wow. Because you might always get back to it at some point. Okay.

so this week or last week last thursday thursday's e-waste day at the pacifica recycling yard shout out to the pacifica uh uh recycle revco whatever the company is that does recycling and i've had a printer here perfectly good brother printer uh but the but the a it's a fax machine printer scanner combo and so it's huge and b

it got enough like paper slivers in the rollers that every time you print anything it makes a horrible squeaking sound and see that they don't none of the current printers use the same toner cartridge so the toner was starting to get expensive

or i'd have to buy the cheap bootleg toners that were like often i would buy two and one of them would be worth a and the other one i'd have to send back and complain and like it's just more so i anyway tldr is like last year and a half ago i bought another printer

And I've had that the old printer sitting next to my desk for a year and a half. Cause I was like, well, you know, I could take this apart and clean out the paper slivers. And then I have a perfectly good printer that I can give someone. And the other day I was going to electronics, e-waste recycling.

And I was like, you know what? I've tripped over this printer for the last year and a half. I'm getting rid of it. I'm not going to think about it. I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to feel bad about it because I'm not going to realistically, I'm not going to go through the hassle of disassembling this thing.

to commit to create a printer that will be a problem for some other poor bastard that i gift it to so it's in the e-waste now okay yeah so sometimes you just have to let go that's what i'm saying yes i mean You could argue that my separating myself from this plasma television is still in progress. I still have my plasma television. Well, you use it. Yeah, I love it. Does this TV look like it's in use to you? Oh, no, Brad. Oh, no.

Yeah. I didn't even clock that. That's what that was all this time. I've been looking at it for years. I should really get rid of that TV. You know what you should do?

you should put it up on that table behind you and then you have a heater in the winter but also something you put on your screen so you have like cool backdrops i wonder if uh plasma wouldn't flicker on camera oh 600 hertz baby no i mean it does strobe though so i don't know well there's only one way to find out that's true i guess so

Look, you have that game frame. That's like that's a screen for babies. You could have a screen for men behind you. You could have a 55 inch. Yeah. Yeah. And also the best part about that TV that really the only thing that makes me want to replace that TV at this point because I've. I've just given up now is that when you walk by in the summertime, you can feel the heat radiating off of it. Oh, you sure can. Yeah. Yeah. And the nice TVs are really cheap now. You.

I know. The 4K is fine. 1080p still looks good, but the thing that blew me away, I've said this before, is the HDR. The HDR is what you don't know you're missing. I know what I'm missing. My wife likes the old TV and is resistant to change. So that's fine. Therefore, I like the old TV and I'm resistant to change. Well, you have a bunch of nice monitors. So that's true. I am my whole.

Yes, I had my my just real quick before we move on from this question. I have the deadly combo of short attention span and not enough free time. So I am just surrounded by half finished projects from. months to years ago look the secret is to not have enough space to store anything that's not actively being worked on and then it really puts a sharp focus on your on your problems you can only have so many half finished projects around something has to go

We were right about the three year anniversary of me buying that hard drive enclosure to do backups for my NAS on that pie down the hall. And I got to about the 90% mark a few months ago. That's still not done. There's always five other more interesting things to look at every time I'm almost done with something anyway. And it's always the last 10% is harder than the first 90% invariably. Or more boring or whatever. That's actually the real problem. Think.

Has wait for program to respond ever worked? Nope. I generally agree with you. I feel like there's been like a very rare occasion where something actually did come back, but I think there is a, we didn't, we didn't name for this law. If it's past like 30 seconds, it's never coming back. Like if it's going to come back, it's going to do it in the first like 20 seconds. I've had some network stuff that came back.

at a shockingly long period of time but just if if you get that thing pop up just assume it's dead and kill it don't even think about it yep it's it's like it's the zombie rule right that's not your mom anymore you gotta just put one in her in her head and move on

Yes. Same situation. That process is dead to you. Yes. Let it go, man. Agreed. Okay. Cake batter. This is a good two part question. Okay. Will owns a yard. That's true. Okay. Did we talk about you trying to get network somewhere? As a precursor of this email, I have, I put cameras in the, I've talked, I've talked about putting cameras in the backyard specifically to see if it's a coyote or just,

A really backed up raccoon that's crapping in the middle of my yard. Okay, that's right. I was trying to remember if there was an antecedence to this question. Yeah. Will owns a yard. Has Will ever considered trenching direct burial ethernet to the far end of the yard for Wi-Fi or for a PoE-powered Raspberry Pi AllSky camera? Well, okay.

So I have considered trenching direct burial ethernet to the back end of the yard for the aforementioned backed up raccoon slash coyote slash mountain lion poop. Turns out it was a raccoon. Oh, it has some irritable.

raccoon bowel disease or something it was really bad it's not not okay not what you want um the trenching was easy i ended up untrenching it almost immediately because the yard crew that comes in does our mowing fucking mowed over my ethernet cable and i lost a hundred foot flat ethernet cable because i can't really put new ends on that anyway not hashtag not bitter maybe you just gotta mow your own yard

Look, I would love to. The all sky camera is something I was not familiar with. Yeah. So that's the other that's the other part of this question that made me want to read this. I also had to look that up and that's cool as hell. It's like a 60 degree. Kind of point this at the sky and take photos of space all night. Yep. Or all day too. You can do sky photos during the day. Now I live one mile from the Pacific ocean in the San Francisco Bay area region.

we're in a foggy ass foggy zone yep i feel like uh if you have like a one of those gray heather sweatshirts like the classic gray sweatshirt and you took your phone camera and held it like three inches from the sweatshirt and took a picture of it. That's going to be like 300 days a year of sky at my house. Yep. Nighttime or daytime. I think people who don't live near coasts don't appreciate.

Just how much of a craft shoot it is here. Whether you're even going to see the sky on a given day or not. Like, like on, I want to say on the last solar eclipse. we got in the car and drove inland three hours before we got to clear skies enough to see the solar eclipse yeah um so Not super useful where I live. If I lived, I actually have a friend who lives in North Carolina, near your folks, actually. Somebody I used to play PUBG with.

Who has been doing a lot of astronomy photography because he moved up in the mountains and there's no light and it's crazy. Amazing. If, if, if, and when I ever live there again, I might try something like this. Yeah. And, and he's, I think this is exactly his jam. But yeah, no, I don't like it. It would be light gray, dark gray, yellowy pink gray on the foggy nights here. So probably a pass at this time of year. I mean, when it gets cold, there's way less fog for a couple of three months.

Yeah, but it's still you still get like it's still unpredictable when we get fog. We get fog even when it's cold. Yeah. And and a lot of the time the fog comes in at night. Yeah. Now, the thing I will say is often at like one o'clock in the morning, it rolls back out. It's completely clear and really pretty even in the summertime. So who knows? I buried Ethernet speaks to my love of hidden technology.

Yes, you can send internet through the air. Yeah. But what if you sent it underground and it was way faster and more reliable? So we did that at my parents' house when I was a kid. Yeah, you've mentioned that before. We trenched over to the barn that the foals were born in. and it was it's really like you just get a flat-sided spade and dig a slit trench and just put the ethernet at the bottom and mash it down and it's fine until somebody hits it with a shovel yeah

I think that's cool enough that I would almost want a little shed in the backyard just as an excuse to run cable out to it. Not necessarily because I need a shed. The nice thing about living in the Bay Area is that our house... our lot is small enough that i can get like my my long range access point that lives in the garage covers a pretty good chunk of our neighborhood so i have ether i have wi-fi wherever i'm walking in in within like a block of the house

Fair. Yeah. Let me take a couple of networking. Well, I'm already on the networking subject. Let's do a couple more. Okay. Here's a question from Person. Am I realistically going to see a performance benefit with a DIY OpenSense or OpenWRT router on nice hardware versus a high-end retail router? Specifically in terms of moderate local network loads, but nothing wild, moonlight streaming?

file transfers, etc. I can find a lot of Build Your Own Router articles and videos, but no one seems to actually have any performance comparison. I would say probably the reason for that is because there actually probably won't be a huge performance comparison. In my experience, the value of the DIY router is not for speed. It's for stability and reliability, I guess, is the best term I would use. And configuration options. And yes, also, there are way more options typically on there.

A lot of ISP-provided routers especially don't let you do things like set your own DHCP servers and DNS servers and things like that. You also might have trouble with certain kinds of port forwarding or setting up appropriate VLANs or doing like like actually routing stuff to inside the the inside the network versus. say running a separate via running a port forwarding or something like that um i i i question the reliability thing i think it's pretty hard to beat the reliability

on the kind of embedded device style modern router. I think that is highly dependent on which company we're talking about and which model we're talking about. That's true. Some are supported better than others. I mean, the example I would use is the thing that drove me to this. I'm not on a DIY router. I'm on an edge router, which is a whole other topic. But what drove me from the old Asus router I was on to the edge router is that that old Asus had some issue with multicast traffic. Yeah.

I don't remember what it was. It was a thing that I Googled and started seeing a bunch of people going like, oh yeah, if you're trying to do this and this, this line of routers from Asus just... chokes on this traffic or don't turn that on yeah it's bad for for the record multicast is used in things like device discovery on networks so like your printer or airplay speakers or like internal video streaming like smart plugs or something so like if you

Any kind of thing where you get the device on the network and then the thing that wants to see the device just sees it. Like, oh, iTunes just sees your AirPlay speakers or Home Assistant just sees your smart plugs. That's multicast. that was not working right with that old router. So it's edge cases like that is another place where the bigger open source routing packages excel because they tend to handle all those subsystems.

in a more robust way than occasionally some manufacturers like shitty implementation well but okay so there's basically three classes of four classes of routers maybe there's the one that your isp provides which is probably going to be really functional in a vanilla kind of i'm not doing anything weird way uh there's but might have some weird limitations like they might almost certainly they might require you to use that router or there might be

they might not do loop back back properly so like if you hit if you try to hit a port that's external and come back into the thing it's not going to work right um then there's like the high-end consumer routers like the asus the ones with 15 antennas that look like

I don't know. They, they look like weird spiders. Usually there's the prosumer stuff like the ubiquity and the TP sense a TP link. Archer. Archer is the TP link. Yeah. And those are like, those are almost small business home office small office home office kind of routers that are designed for um often they'll have like point-to-point vpn functionality and stuff in them so that like if your it department at work

wants you to VPN directly without using a client on your computer, you'll, you'll, they'll set one of those up for you and give you your own dedicated internet connection for that. Right. And then. there's the diy home build open sense pf sense type type deals um and i think they all have different strengths and weaknesses

I generally advocate for buying a router that's independent of your access points because then you don't have to upgrade that. That hardware is relatively expensive. You don't have to upgrade it every time you want to get a new Wi-Fi standard. which you can't do with the ISP provided or those retail ones like the ASUS one with 15 antennas, right? So that means every time you're replacing that, instead of buying a...

$100 access point and replacing that, you're replacing a $300 router or $400 router. You can get decent $100 Wi-Fi 7 access points now if you just want Wi-Fi 7. We should point out there's nothing to stop you from pairing a standalone access point like that with that 15 antenna ASUS. That's true. You just need to go into the ASUS and turn off the Wi-Fi in that right. You can still.

You can still use like an all-in-one consumer router as just a router and not the Wi-Fi if you just kind of go in and turn the radios off. and use the access point instead yeah yeah and you could do it the other way too you can use this just an access point if you plug it into the land side and turn off the dhcp server yeah you just want to put it in kind of in some kind of bridge mode at that point yeah um yeah

A lot of options there. I guess the thing I would say generally, if you have a commercial router and it's working fine for you, if you're not having problems with it and you can't think of any projects, network projects you want to do with it that it can't already handle.

you're fine. Like you don't need, you don't need to replace your router unless you're having issues with it or it's too feature poor to do things you want it to do. That's exactly it. Like, like, like the place that open sense and PFSense, they do.

Some of them do support the weird things that you might want to like, for example, my ISP requires my router to be in the chain. Right. That was the classic. The AT&T fiber was the classic example I was giving of like, even if you want to use your own router, you still have to have their router plugged into. And that's annoying.

Well, there's ways around that now with OpenSense and PFSense, so you don't have to leave it plugged in. The loopback thing is another classic one where you have to have a separate... internal address for Plex when you're inside your house and use an external address when you're outside your house if loopback doesn't work right.

If loopback works properly, then you can just use that external address everywhere and it should just connect and you'll get internal speeds even when using the external address. Anyway, it's like the basic stuff is fine until it isn't is my kind of answer. I might say in the broadest sense, the move toward more DIY routers is part of this general move toward people trying to take more control of their computing devices generally. I think that's true. And in that vein.

I might suggest there is a fifth category of router. No blame. Which is just hardware running and operating systems such as OpenBSD or Linux. Do not do that. Yeah, don't do that. I am going to do that. The other fifth category, the second fifth category is people running open firmwares on commercial hardware.

yeah which like is a is another thing you can absolutely do so ddwrt or one of those on on asus routers or whatever totally valid a question from tactical tug why are there two different ways of writing a url Some are blank.domain.com and others are domain.com slash blank. Is there any difference between the two? Would setting up chrome.google.com be different to setting up google.com slash chrome?

Are there any practical reasons behind the choice? Technical, does it really matter? Yeah, those are completely different things. The blank.domain.com. Domain.com is the domain there. Blank is a subdomain. You are defining what that subdomain points to through DNS, which is the thing that resolves the domain into a numeric IP, which is the, you know, the IP is what the actual server on the internet is. The other one, domain.com slash blank. In that situation, blank is a...

I mean, this could vary based on the internal setup on the web server, but typically blank is a directory on the machine that is running the web server. So whatever web server is on domain.com. Blank is a directory on there and they are serving a specific page out of that directory. So it's.

Kind of a matter of ultimately they're ultimately there are two different ways of pointing you at a specific Web page with specific assets that are being served to you. But but on the back end, they are extremely different in terms of what is handling directing you to those resources. this used to make a lot more difference than it does now because in a modern context you can use either of these and whichever like like

When you set up your servers, you can use these kind of interchangeably on a, on a, if you have a modern backend. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, now again, the, the setup will be very different because you don't need extra DNS settings for the, just the slash blank directory stuff, but.

Yeah, as a person who is just a consumer of web content going to an address, like it's all exactly the same stuff. It's just different methods of directing you to a web page. Yeah, agreed. Like in the old days, you did that specifically because you had... you wanted to separate your load across multiple servers and now now there's a whole tech back end that will do that load separation for you so now it's more of just a choice yes and then than it was in the old days

Yes, if and when I ever get around to setting up my VPS with game servers and stuff, I still want to do the classic like q1.whatever.com. Oh, hell yeah. q2.whatever.com, even though you don't really have to do that these days.

Just all ports. But I want to. Yeah. Okay, question from ThirdEye. Loved the Valve hardware episode with Norm. What if the successor to the Steam Link was a really nice, fully-fledged media set-top box? Someone with an aging Nvidia Shield? I keep looking for the next big thing, but I haven't seen much movement in the space. When are we getting something with AV1 support, for instance?

Would a box that could play anything you throw at it plus natively stream from Steam get you to move away from the Apple TV? Probably not. Yeah, it's hard for me. Like a valve is too open and too anything goes to want to curate any kind of like. app ecosystem to handle different streaming services. That just seems tangential to their whole thing.

Yeah. And trying to do video streaming from the services on Linux isn't as bad as it used to be. And now it actually works because you can use browsers that have the appropriate kind of DRM in them. However. You still get weird stuff happening, like you only get 1080p streams on Linux for some reason. Yeah, it's just hard for me to see Valve ever investing in that space in a way that would satisfy over the currently available options. And it doesn't make any money for them.

like what's the incentive yeah um i like the thing that you want with av1 support is the apple tv 4k second gen so i was just looking into this i don't know if you've seen there's there is a new apple tv 4k imminent yeah supposedly any day now if you believe mac rumors because the one right now is like an a8 or something it's an ancient processor right no it's not that old it came out three years ago i think i think the current one is three years old i think it's like an a15 okay

Which is not too bad. I mean, it's not certainly not bad. Like if you buy an Apple TV today, it's fine. But you know how Apple does. The new Apple TV is going to come out at the same price. You know, the next day after you buy it, the new one could come out and then you could have gotten a.

three years newer one for the same price. Yep. So the, the current Apple TV 4k does AV one, but it does, it only does software decode. So that's one of the big things I was, cause I want, I have finally gotten sick enough of the apps on my TV. that i think i am in for the next apple tv so i was looking at features and av1 hardware decode is one of the big ones that people think or hope will be in the new uh the new apple tv you know there's other stuff like

I forget like uncompressed Dolby true HD or whatever, you know, different audio standards people are hoping will be supported and stuff like that. There'll be vision profiles, things like that. But, um,

Those are some of the big feature requests I was seeing on Reddit that people were talking about. I think that makes sense. If it was just me in the house... two i'd have a different set of requirements uh and i actually don't watch as much tv and don't stream very much so i just need something that runs plex pretty well pretty much um the having the other people that have to use it having something with a decent remote

can turn the tv on and off and all the other stuff in the chain is the is the big stuff and well i'm sure valve will be able to do that nobody's going to want to use a game pad to control that yeah yeah Sorry, setting setting up those Apple TVs for my parents a couple of years ago was pretty eye opening of just how like elegant and seamless that whole experience is now. Well, and the convenience of being able to just use your phone to turn the TV on and off or.

that hits here you with a hey will you turn the tv off for me or hey put the football game on whatever is super super nice the only thing that it's missing i don't think they've added this yet is the ability to change inputs through the apple tv You can, but it just changes to the Apple TV input. It just changes. When you hit the power button, it always just switches to the TV, the input the Apple TV is plugged into. What I mean is after the TV is on, change it to other inputs.

Yeah, they're not in that business, unfortunately. I know. What I mean is never having to touch your TV remote again and just use it because that's the only thing the Apple TV can't do as far as I know. Well, so the solution is that you don't use any devices other than Apple TVs or other devices that will switch inputs as well. I bet they would love that. So like, but no, no, like for real, like our TV essentially just has a switch.

the Switch dock, a Steam Deck dock, and the Apple TV plugged in at this point, right? And each of those will wake up the TV, turn it on, put it on the right input if you power it on. Well, what if the Apple TV is already on and you turn on your PS5? It doesn't matter. The PS5 will wake it up. We'll switch. I still feel like CEC is inconsistent enough that there's going to be some edge case behavior that's going to drive me crazy.

I don't know, man. I've been doing it for like five years. It's never a problem. Maybe if I get an Apple TV. Well, I mean, I will. I will try it when I get an Apple TV and see if maybe it works the way I want it to. I will tell you what the edge case problem is.

It's when I plugged in my mister to the HDMI port and it crashed the CEC chain on every device in the thing. And I had to unplug the entire thing to fix it. I just get a little dongle that strips the CEC pin for that. I know that now, but you know, there are cases where like. I turn on the PS5, but I don't actually want to use it for a couple minutes. So I turn it on and let it get to the login screen. I don't want it to necessarily take over the second I turn it on.

I'm not letting edge cases shape my decisions anymore. I'm just living that mainstream life on the TV, baby. The thing I'm more curious about is, do you do any Steam streaming to the Apple TV, either with the Steam Link app or Moonlight? No, I use the Steam Deck for that. Okay.

do you have any idea how good it is the last time i tried to use it the latency on the controllers was so bad i couldn't do it that was i don't know that like i have the last i have the last last version of the apple tv 4k okay And also every single release of the Apple TV OS since like three years ago, since they started putting PlayStation controllers on the pictures of the Apple TV page.

They've said, hey, our controller latency is getting better. It's way better this time than it was before. And then I so I haven't tried it. Like once I got the Steam Deck, I stopped bothering because the Steam Deck works great. Yeah, that's that's something I would keep an eye on. Then that might maybe maybe we'll get even better with a new.

hardware model then because i don't have a good way to steam stream to my the steam link app on on my tv is basically unusable yeah no the tv based ones were bad yeah I would love a little a nice little streaming box that I want to use for other things anyway that could also stream from Steam would be fantastic. When I used it, it was fine for stuff that wasn't latency dependent. Like I like we played.

Jackbox games and stuff like that on the Apple TV. I never had any luck, but like I said, I haven't tried. I tried it when we first got that box, which was like during the pandemic. I haven't tried it since then. A couple more questions real quick here.

Wesley? On episode 314, Brad uttered the phrase text expansion. Does this mean he is using Esponso? I'm just going to tell you right now, no, but I've been intending to install it for like two years, and I don't know why I have not. Text expanders are really cool and you should use them. Spanso saves me so many keystrokes for stuff I type all the time. For example, I do a weekly podcast and when I started a decade ago, I made the mistake of using a really long file name for the mp3 files.

And then I stuck with that convention so long that I certainly can't change it now. It is. I know that pain. Yeah. Somebody who names a lot of podcast files every week. I get it. Look, the one for this is only a test was.

this is only a test hyphen a three digit or maybe a four digit episode number and then the date in yyyy mmdd format.mp3 yeah I use that, that little Python utility I wrote to compress and tag podcasts handles all this stuff now, but I've got it down to, I've got it down to kind of podcast short name, which is like eight ish characters, depending on the podcast underscore episode number.

underscore and then the title kind of stripped of special characters down to lowercase. And that's the whole file name now. But anyway, do. Do those survive the clients? Do the clients not rename the file names on the download side? It's very possible. Some of them do and some of them don't. I believe Patreon just serves the MP3 that you upload, if I'm not mistaken. But I think Simplecast, I think, is crunching the file.

I don't remember, but even to have the files locally, it's still useful to have a very legible file name. Anyway, Wesley goes on. My podcast file name is 43 characters long involving eight underscores. As I said, it was a mistake. Now with Esponso, I just type colon EP without the space and it automatically enters everything up to the number that I type in. A small thing that saves me every week from a dumb decision I made years ago that I am too stubborn to change.

Yeah, that thing sounds awesome. ESPANSO is the name of that thing. I believe it is open source and cross-platform, if I'm not mistaken. That sounds fun. But it is literally what he's describing here. It's just a customizable. text expansion for whatever you want. I have a couple of...

You guys really need to talk about shell startup files on the dual boot diaries at some point. I keep trying to get Adam to do it. He's been, he's been dancing around it for the last couple of weeks, but he's not there yet. I heard him falling in love with Neo fetch or I guess it's fast, fast fetches, whatever it is. Fast fetch. Yeah. Yeah. I heard him wanting.

the terminal to do a thing every time, uh, every time he opens it. And I was like, sounds like somebody is ready to open their bash RC, but I, uh, yeah, sorry. I have a couple of aliases there. I have like today and now. Okay. So like now is a formatted, like, what is it? I think I've, I think I've got four digit year dash month dash day underscore, and then the full time out to the seconds. So I can just like.

I could just do a command substitution now into a file name anytime I'm at the command line and have it just dump the current date and time onto the file name or whatever. Stuff like that comes in super handy. Having something globally like that in Windows sounds amazing. Why have I not installed this already? I don't know. Okay. Last question. This is kind of a thorny one. I don't know quite what the answer is here. Oh, boy. Person stuff.

I've been watching some of Gamers Nexus' coverage of NVIDIA. And while I don't think any of their competitors are good guys, between their partnerships with Palantir and their contributions to the weird circular AI economy... I'm not feeling good about putting a new NVIDIA GPU in my PC. A lot of personal opinion and politics, but do we need to start treating NVIDIA like Facebook and just avoid their products whenever possible?

They probably won't feel the hit anyway, since their main product is their stock at this point. But not the first time I've seen somebody on our discord was talking about this like yesterday. So not the first time I have seen this sentiment come up. Yeah, it's it's. It's tough, right? I don't know. I don't buy Facebook stuff for a multitude of reasons, some of which are public and some of which aren't. I don't have the same relationship with NVIDIA.

i guess uh that said i don't like i think that the ai bubble is going to pop and hurt a billion people probably

And Nvidia is one of the companies that's been profiting off of that more than anybody else. Like, I think probably there's other, you know, this is something I talked about with, I've talked about this a bunch over the last year, you know, as there's different boycotts and different things going on about how we as consumers under capitalism interact with those types of things, whether it's the target boycott or.

um the the um the thing that's uh targeting xbox and um disney plus and i can't remember what that one is that's the genocide in palestine one right um And I feel like everybody has to make their own decisions about what they want to support and what they don't. So if you feel that way, I absolutely respect that. I'm probably going to make different decisions, but that's okay.

And like the good thing is there's a bunch of alternatives these days. Yeah, it's getting better. I mean, it is still tricky at the high end. There is there has not been a GPU from another company that competes with NVIDIA's high end for a very long time. Well, it even gets close to this generation, really. That's what I mean. And for a long time, they were so far ahead on stuff like DLSS and ray tracing and...

hardware video and code and like you X, Y, and Z, you name it, other technology on board that it was, it was like genuinely tough to, there were kind of weren't alternatives to a lot of those technologies. So those gaps are closing until recently, like the RDNA four.

cards from amd have finally started catching up in a more profound way although frankly amd is like making some business deals of its own that are yeah like they're they are getting into the you know they bought xilinx a few years ago specifically to get into the ai game in the same way Or not entirely. I mean, they have other purposes as well, but they are attempting to move into similar territory. Like, it's all kind of fraught.

Well, but the other like the thing that's changed in the last generation GPUs specifically is that AMD ships with tensor cores on the GPU now, which they hadn't in the past. So you can do things like AI upscaling and things like that on your games.

and their feature even if they're not performance compatible or comparable with the five series cards from nvidia they are feature compatible so you you get you're not you're not making an enormous it's a much smaller sacrifice than it would have been on the last generation of amd cards i guess that's the way to put it yeah to be clear i can't remember what they the headline about amd it was that i saw a week or two ago but it was something some

partnership or something that a bunch of people were going like, huh, really? So like, I don't want to, I don't want to, I, you know, I, maybe I shouldn't have brought that up without remembering exactly the nature of the deal they were talking about or whatever strategic direction it was, but.

the point is like the entire industry seems to be shifting in this direction right now at the end of the day well i mean it's because there's an enormous amount of money there for the next you know x number of weeks until the bubble burst um i i you know it like i said i go back to there's there being no ethical consumption under capitalism. And, but also at the same time, I have to buy toothpaste somewhere. So, um, you know, you, you, you make your choices and, and

you know, everybody makes their own choices and some of them are good and some of them are bad and we live with our own stuff. Yeah. I mean, you know, again, the good news is that the alternatives are finally getting better. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and honestly, like.

Moving into Linux, I really am feeling the loss of the high end AMD card this generation, because if they had a high end competitor, I would absolutely drop that in just because everything's a shitload easier on Linux these days. Same. Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm I'm I'm only on.

Only. I say I'm only on a 4090 because you're on a 5090. That's the only reason I say only. But the point I was going to make is even for a 4090, which is the last gen flagship card, it's still a pretty big step down to the highest end AMD.

card right now yeah the fastest amd card is like the last gen 7900 xtx and like that's a deeply compromised card yeah or i'm talking about the 1970 xt is still yeah it's still is still behind a 4090 which is a good a good bit older yeah the the 9070 xt is a really good 1440p card or a kind of iffy 4k card in my book

That's what I mean is like to move to AMD at all for me would be a step down pretty significant one from what I have now. So hopefully that improves in the future. Yeah. Anyway. Is that a good place as any to wrap it up, I guess? I think so.

As always, if you have a question, you can send it to techpod at content.town. Or if you are in the discord, you can go to the question seeking answers channel and leave it there and it will disappear. And then in. Anywhere from one to 30 days, we will dig deep into that channel and copy and paste those questions out and select the ones that we want to answer and answer them on the show. And if you're not in that discord, don't know how to do that. You can get into the discord.

for by joining the patreon it's five bucks a month you get access to the discord where people talk about cool nerdy all the time and um it's a it's a lovely community full of of great folks uh you can also get access to the monthly patron exclusive episode where we sometimes take spillover questions sometimes we talk about random projects we have going sometimes uh the carbon dioxide levels in our offices are real high and

And we just get a little loopy for a couple of 30, 45 minutes or an hour. I've taken a cue from you mentioning that a couple of times recently. I mean, I knew about it before, but you reminded me that it's a thing. I don't know how good the ventilation is in this apartment, but I have taken to opening the back door and the window in this office, which creates a good kind of a cross breeze through straight through the house.

I'd swear I feel a little more clear headed and alert in the mornings now than I used to. Well, so for me, it's always the end of the day after I've been in here with the door shut all day and then it gets it gets stuffy. I actually a few years ago, I was in Home Depot and I saw. They have a Vornado, the air circulator people. They're not fans. They're circulators. Have a window slot mounted circulator that.

uh you can you just put in your window you block off the rest of the gaps and you can flip it forward or back so it either sucks or blows and at the end of the day i flip that thing on to get some fresh air in here Or alternately, I'll open the window and just like wave the door open and shut for a couple of minutes to pull air through. It makes a big difference. Yeah. Carbon dioxide. You know, it's good for plants, not for people. It's got its uses, but you know. It does have what plants crave.

Yeah, so patreon.com slash tech pod. If you want to figure out how to support the show, you can go there. We appreciate it. We don't take ads or anything. It's just listener support. So we are here because of you all. And on that note. I would like to thank our patrons, especially our executive producer to your patrons, including James Kamek, David Allen, Twinkle Twinkie, Bunny Jerk, Jordan Lippet, Andrew Slosky.

infelicitous rips jason lee and pantheon makers of the hs3 high-speed 3d printer uh it's the end of the month so we also want to give a shout out to our associate producer to your patrons including Graham Banks, Thomas Shea, Jad Rita, P. Tibbs, Steve Lin, Tom Fuller, Just Associate Wedge, Nathan Phelps, Ben Tallman, Tom Hilton, Andre M. Burke PE.

Andrew Dicey Shoal Dice, Alejandro Navarro, Matt Walker, parentheses, Walkman 8080, close parentheses, Sanchuk Kumar, Felix Kramer, Kerp, Brutal Kerfuffle, And Eric, thank you also so much. We appreciate each and every one of you. Yeah, we are thankful for everybody for keeping us going. Very much so. Very much so. And we will be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. Until then, please. Consider the environment before printing this podcast.