318: System B or systemd?

Brad, we watched Home Alone last night. It's a classic. It's the time of year for it. I endorse it. It's damn near a perfect movie. I kind of wonder why nobody's made an immersive sim. video game of home alone interesting i mean there's a bad nes game yes true i mean maybe it's not bad i don't remember but i assume it's bad given the era and the license

You probably could very easily do a sort of recognizable but non-infringing version of Home Alone in video game form. I mean, I bet somebody's actually done that when I think about it. I never realized it. That sounds great. Actually, the more the more the more I think about planted a seed now that actually sounds pretty rad. Just defend a house. There's tools everywhere. Build some traps physics like well, this was when we did.

We had, what's his name? Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan? Yeah. We had him on Tested Once. What? Yeah. Wait, what? Yeah, we had a Vince Gilligan interview untested right after the end of Breaking Bad. What? Well, Adam did that talking room show. Oh, right. Adam, of course. Yeah. Has connections, knows people.

Yeah, so we had Vince Gilligan. Able to pull famous people, of course. We went to LA and had Damon Lindelof. We recorded stuff with Damon Lindelof and Vince Gilligan in the same three-day trip. It was wild. That is wild. But we had Vince Gilligan on. coming off the end of Breaking Bad. Was it to talk about the car shrunk gun thing? I don't know about that. Okay. But one of the things we talked about was...

Their writing strategy for each episode was to write themselves into a hole. And then literally the writers would be on set and they'd walk around the house where they were shooting and look at things that they could...

Like they would look for things in the environment that the set designers had just put there. So it looked like a normal house. And that's how they came up with like the U-lock that they chained the guy to the post in the basement with and all this other stuff. So they showed up to shoot. The episode without an ending written? No, no, no.

The writers would be on set and they would adjust stuff as they went. Oh, okay. So they had an idea for an ending, but they would just tweak stuff. Okay, that's a little less irresponsible. As he said, they had ins and outs that they knew they wanted to hit, but they kind of... Like they were improv-ing the other stuff along the way a lot of times. Or they'd get there and they'd realize something wouldn't work and they'd have to change it or whatever.

And the reason they did that one was because they knew that there was a motorcycle in the house, and they were like, oh, he has a motorcycle, he'll have a U-lock, and we can use the U-lock to keep this guy prisoner in the basement before we have to murder him or whatever. Um, it, and I think, I think a home alone, I think home alone works really well in an M sim way. Yeah. Literally Googling the fro. Oh, somebody already done it. Uh, yes. But are you ready for the monkey's paw to curl?

Oh no. It's in Roblox. Oh fuck. I knew it. I knew it was going to be a Roblox or Fortnite thing. There is full on a thing called the home alone experience in Roblox. I don't think that's going to be what we want. That may not be the same thing actually now that I'm looking at it. No, I want to have like waves of people coming at the house and have like a build period and then a defense period. Yeah. And yeah, maybe I should stop talking about this and just email it to myself so I own it.

Rube Goldberg traps. Yeah. With, with a lot of physics involved. And man, that does sound pretty rad. Like the, the thing about it, watching it is the traps aren't like super complicated, right? It's just like, he puts just like. Glass light bulbs and matchbox cars and paint cans on strings. How many how many systems do you need to model for this? Slippery, sharp, sticky, hot, hot feather.

Yeah, sure. Saran wrap. Yeah. Look, this is all like I played birth of the wild. This is all doable. Yeah. These are straightforward verbs. You just need to be able to combine them in a bunch of interesting, weird ways. Somebody should go make that. Man, if only I knew somebody who made video games.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Happy holidays. Happy, happy holidays. This is, I guess this is the Sunday before Christmas, right? It sure is. fifth day of Hanukkah or something, I think. Sure. Sixth, maybe. I don't know. October. Something like that. It is... We're doing something that we kind of done before, but not really, I think, this time. It's a time for reflection, let's say. Yeah.

And we didn't want to do... I feel like two people does not make a great superlative podcast. If we wanted to do a best tech, A, it's a really broad topic, but B... Us just talking about it ends up being kind of less interesting because there's only two of us. If there were four of us, I think it'd be a different story. Yeah. Also, you know, this is not necessarily like our full time thing. So we are professional on some of these topics and hobbyists on others, you know, like our expertise.

Yeah, but I feel like we are in a unique position to talk about things that we found noteworthy this year. So we're doing a year in review. We're tastemakers. 2025 TechPod year in review. Yeah. Things we like. It's like in the old days when you get a magazine and at the end of the year. They'd be like, hey, if you send us another 25 bucks, we'll just send you a bound copy of all the magazines from this year.

And you're like, wow, that would be great. I'd love to have a bound copy of all my copies of TV Guide for this year. That'd be great. Then I know it was on TV on March 13th, 1983. Look, I know I am getting into my dotage here in my old age. So this is unsurprising. You might be surprised, though, how often recently I have wished that I had TV guides or like the local newspaper listings for our local stations from like the late 80s, early 90s. I have scoured. I've scoured the Internet for.

For example, WHNS, Fox 21s out of Spartanburg, South Carolina, they're a programming guide from, say, like 89 to 93. And those things just don't exist anymore, but I wish they did.

Yeah, this is a I've done done this whole occasionally, but there was a local like kids show There was a local kids show that was broadcast out of an Asheville station that we could only get in the winter months and it was like it was like a crusty the clown style like a cow the host was an old guy that wore a cowboy costume like howdy duty kind of vibes

And it was only on on Saturday mornings, like 6 a.m. when I was really, really little, like six, probably at the oldest. Was that like an atmospheric thing? Like the dry air allowed the signal to reach further or something? I think in the winter we get less solar radiation maybe, so thus the radio signals go farther with less interference. I would believe that. And also it was dark, so the sun wasn't out at six o'clock in the morning in the wintertime. That's for sure. Yeah, anyway.

But yeah, so this isn't the 1981 year in review. This is the 2025 year in review. Maybe we should do a 1981. I was two. We should do a 1981 year in review also. That would be really funny. But yes, we're going to talk about some things we like.

We're going to talk about a couple of things we don't like. We're not going to linger. There's plenty of stuff to not like this year. We are not going to talk about the political situation or the DDR5 supply crunch. We think that they suck, just to be clear. Or AI.

ai shitting everything up i mean ai sucks those are all givens and we've talked about them a lot yeah so we're not gonna but we are gonna get into some things that we don't like and we're gonna do in the middle of the show so we don't end on bummers because i realized the way we have the setup right now

We're ending on bummers, but we'll take a break somewhere in the middle and be like, okay, let's talk about some stuff that sucks for a minute. Yeah, these are more like Andy Rooney bummers, though, and not like society destabilizing bummers. You know what grinds my gears? Uh-huh.

Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to kick it off. My first one, not a surprise. You're in review. Things I like. Yes. Turns out Linux on the desktop, pretty fucking good. Whoa. I know. Is this the year of the Linux desktop? So I started like midway through 2024 joking that 2025 was going to be the year of Linux without, you know, because I've done that for the last 20 years. I figure eventually I'll hit, right? It's like.

You know, you predict, you Nostradamus your way into this and eventually you're right. But no, it's good. It's real good. I had no idea. I think a lot of it is Valve for my personal use cases and the way I use PCs where it's a mix of work and game stuff. The work that Valve's done on Proton and AMD drivers and all the supporting stuff that goes into making that work.

has been really transformative in that now the only things I have to reboot for are like Fortnite games that are explicitly designed to not work on Linux. There's been something really empowering about taking my computer that's the same as it's been for a long time and making it really super duper my own, not just in a cosmetic sense.

but like in the way that i work and the way that i think about the computer and the way that i think about how i work with the computer and um like tiling window managers are a big part of that niri is is like

literally everybody I know that has been like, okay, I thought you were crazy when you were talking about how good the scrolling tiling window manager thing is. And then they try it and they're like, no, you were absolutely right. This is unbelievable. And it's changed the way I think about how computers work. So yeah, it's been really transformative for me. It gave me the impetus to finally drop my Adobe subscription for the first time in like 15 years. Yeah.

I'm appreciating you've talked about this in the past and I think I didn't really internalize what you're talking about, but like there's a difference between. Figuring out how to do something and then actually learning how stuff works. Yes, I have absolutely experienced that arc as well in my Linux trials and tribulations. Yeah. And there's something like one of the neat things.

about Linux is because it's all built on systems that are designed to interact with each other, regardless of whether system A is designed to interact with system B. I'm sorry. Did you say system B or system D? We're not to system D yet. I'm still on system A. But I guess what I'm thinking about is the way Linux is set up, the way it draws desktop is based on all these kind of unrelated things working together through well-defined APIs and methods.

And it's almost all configured in text files, system D aside. We'll talk about that on another episode at some point, I'm sure. But it's actually something you can understand how it works. One person isn't going to understand how the whole thing works, but you can get to a point of deep knowledge on things relatively quickly because there's a lot of documentation.

And also you can kind of just get in and futz with it and figure out, like you can tinker with it in the same way that you tinker with a car, like an old pre-electric car. Yep. It's very good. I've enjoyed it a lot. Especially at an age where everybody's got an old computer or laptop sitting around, or you can just run a virtual machine. There are so many ways to sandbox it in a way you can just play with it and not worry about breaking anything important.

Or that's going to disrupt your workflow that like, yeah, the tinkering possibilities are limitless. The thing you said about making your computer yours. Yeah. Was I don't think I ever really said this because I'm not sure it actually. cohered in my mind until later. That's the reason I got so deep into like trying to master secure boot earlier this year or like why I kind of still am intending to start encrypting all of my drives eventually. Like it is, it's that same.

And I've said before, some of this descends from the state of society, let's say, and the need to feel like you have control over something in your life, but like locking your computer down and making it do exactly what you want and nothing you don't want. is kind of exactly why I got into that stuff. And it's the same reason Linux is exciting or FreeBSD or Haiku or whatever. I kind of feel, and here I go, I'm not joining the Free Software Foundation, I swear.

Oh, here he goes. The beard's coming in. I kind of feel like the future of computing should be non-commercial operating systems. Like hot take, perhaps. Not lukewarm take in present company, I guess. The less profit motive, ideally zero in your operating system, the better. I'm not going to like I'm not I'm going to exclude like everything from Dropbox to.

Steam to, you know, services run by companies that want to make money, fine, whatever. You can install those on top. But like the operating system, I feel like should be kind of sacred ground where.

nobody's trying to make money. They are just trying to give you a solid workable platform to use your computer. And like, that's, I mean, to take it all the way like that's why i tend to lean toward like your debians and fedoras the community distros and not you know there's nothing wrong with ubuntu if it's working for you but like canonical is a company that wants to make money off of linux you know red hat

is a company that makes extraordinary amounts of money off of Linux. And there are plenty of community distros that are just there to be used and not to make money. And that just kind of... It gives you a reassuring purity of focus on their part, you know, like, you know, and to be clear, community distros come with downsides. Like there are certainly, I mean, you know, nothing, stop me if you've heard this, nothing, nothing in computers is perfect. No. And, and.

I was going to say the baggage with community distros is that like in a lot of cases, they're not making like they're not just not making a ton of money. They're not making any money, I think. Framework donate framework sponsored cashy the other day.

And the caching people were really excited. They were like, this is like 10% of all of our revenue. And it was $250 a month. And I was just like, wait, what? That's it? It's insane. Okay, so I've got another unrelated topic on this list that we'll get into funding of open source in a little bit. But if you remember...

Last time we went to the flea market, which I'm also about to talk about, when I talked your ear off about a systemd network debug that made its way into Debian and there was a big fight on the mailing list with some real classic open source sniping at each other.

Yeah. About whose fault it was and how fast it should be fixed and all this stuff. But one of the arguments that really it came down to was somebody that was part of the Debian project saying, this is a bug that is going to affect more of our enterprise and corporate customers. And that is.

very likely to hit the funding that they pump into the donations that they pump into the project. And so, yes, you're right. Like funding is kind of the constant problem with the community distro and that manifests in, you know, like. Packages might not be fully up to date in every case or like the wiki might have gaps in it because nobody wants to spend their free time updating it. So like there are, you know, there are downsides there, but anyway.

I'll get off the soapbox right now, but I'm excited that more people are embracing the idea that the hardware you buy should be made to do what you want it to do. Yeah. And it should be free, as in speech, I guess. Please don't let me turn into one of those people. There's. It's really nice to be able to take something and not just adapt yourself to how it works, but instead adapt it to you. And that feels like.

an essence of tool making that i hadn't like the last time i tried linux desktop it wasn't possible to do that anyway what do you got what's your what you want to hit yeah i've got a couple that actually i just mentioned sort of here so

What is the official name of that flea market? The Saratoga Electronics Flea Market. Saratoga Electronics Flea Market, something like that. Technically, I started going to that last year. This was also my second year going to the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I'm bummed I didn't get to go to that. That sounded amazing. So good. We were in LA, I think, that weekend. It's like the electronics flea market times a thousand.

Yeah. Um, I'm just grateful to, okay. First of all, I have not had a whole lot of a social life since before COVID started. Like the. Lockdown, transitioning into five years of working for myself from home. Maybe not been the best for getting out of the house and seeing people. Look. Yes. I like going to PC world two times a week. It's been healthy for me. To be fair, I'd say about two times a week at an office sounds about ideal, maybe not five.

No. Yeah. Like two, two, three at the most is what I would want. I think. Yeah. But, and also the crew that we go to those things with are like extremely my people. Let's say. Yeah, it's a bunch of sweaty nerds. It's really fun. People who are into exactly the same deeply nerdy shit that I am. Yeah. Anyway, I realize not everybody has the geographical advantage of living kind of.

a stone's throw from the birth of the computing industry. So I'm like very lucky in that respect, but like, you know, there are like what, six finished computer festivals around the country or something. There are probably like.

electronics focused flea markets and screwdriver shops kind of all over the place i don't know how many screwdriver shops there are anymore i might bet is that there's like ham festivals and stuff like that that have some overlap with this yeah But this is, from what I've been able to tell talking about on this podcast and talking about the PC World podcast, this seems fairly unique, the Bay Area Ventures, the Ventures Computer Festival and the electronics market.

Well, you know, look for what's around. Finding your people is good. Finding your people and finding stuff nearby that represents the things you're into. You might be surprised.

The thing I've noticed at the flea market that I really like, and actually my daughter's expressed interest in going because she's a Stranger Things kid and loves 80s stuff as a result and is like... they have cassette players they're dead and i was like yeah they have cassette players yeah we can you want cassette players we got cassette players here gen alpha is way into 80s technology yeah so they they like the analog stuff it's like that uh what's that game routine that has the sony

Like the weapon. Have you played this? The one that just came out? I really want to play Routine. It's on my list. The gun that you use looks like it was designed by Sony in like 1983. It's very good.

But yeah, it's been really fun going to that and seeing those people and seeing more young kids there. And just like... sitting down and talking to somebody who had like i remember we'd one one week i don't remember if you were there but there was a there was a older woman who had a buttload of quantum bigfoot drives which was like a five and a quarter inch hard drive from the late 90s i was like why do you have so many quantum bigfoots she's like oh my dad worked at quantum wow and

just had a bunch left over when they shut down or got sold or whatever that he, that he put in the garage and I found them. So here they are. And I was like, okay. And there's a lot of that. Like, I want to say, I want to say a friend of the show, Steve, when we were down there one time was like, yeah, this seems like.

This seems like the kind of place where people who stole a bunch of stuff from their office like 20 years ago come to get rid of it when they're cleaning their garage. That's like half of that flea market. That's why there's all kinds of deck alphas and SGI machines. Anyway. Again, I know I'm lucky to have access to stuff like that, but if you're into similar stuff, look around. I didn't know about that flea market until late last year, and so this was the first year we went into the year.

geared up and ready to go to every one of them or as many as we could. And it was just, we only missed one or two. Yeah. Well, nice, nice way to get out of the house and kind of have some community again around something that's very fun. Well, and, and like, and just to be clear, I don't, None of us are buying a whole lot there. You bought that porn. Come on. I feel like that still needs to be qualified. It is a BBS-ready CD of vintage erotica from the 90s, which is still in the shrink wrap.

Uh-huh. Sure. Sure it is, Brad. I bought one CRT. My wife would have been much happier if I came home with porn instead of that second CRT, just to be clear. CD doesn't take up a lot of space. I did go on archive.org to see if it was on there, and it's not. Oh, there you go. So I'm actually sort of tempted to open it and image it and put it on there. Put that port on a BBS and then send them a link to the BBS and be like, hey, we got some fresh 90s porn here. Can I spin off of that from...

from CRTs coming back into my life, which is one of my list items. Yeah, so I actually, I'm piggybacking on this one because I also came into a CRT this year and it's fun. Yeah, I went, I went. that first electronics flea market i think we were walking around i saw my vintage like the tv that i grew up playing the nes and ti-994a on which was an old ge like it was i think it was built as a portable

like 10-inch TV or 9-inch TV or something like that. And so I paid $40 for that without hesitation and brought it home and started playing games on it. It's a little janky because it's RF only and not great. And then the last... electronics flea market of the year we were walking around and there was somebody selling like a night what is it a 19 inch trinitron i think yeah or 20 something like 20 inch trinitron it's like it's like i would describe these as

like that is the tv that i wanted when i went to college and i bought a tv and instead of paying 500 for a tv i bought like a 200 sharp probably because it was you know nearly as good and 200 bucks and Oh my God, it is so nice to have a fancy TV to play. It's so much better to play games on. I don't mind saying again that I wish I had bought that TV.

but that guy has been there multiple times and he said he had more TVs. He said that was the last one he had that day. So your time may come in the spring. Yeah. Well, Hey, I, I, a friend of the show kindly gifted me a 14 inch Toshiba though. I think we talked about that earlier this year. 14 inch good size for an apartment good size yeah the 20 like i wouldn't mind i would i would take a 14 over the 20 the 20 is a bit big but it is nice when i'm playing four player

like Mario Kart 64 or something. Yeah. I, you know, for 14, I do kind of have to roll right up to it, but that's fine. Uh, this, this TV was a sidewalk find actually. In San Francisco, but it's got, I think I've talked about this before. It's got a shocking range of inputs. It's got everything from.

RF and composite through S video and component like kind of component on that there's a team components apparently like a very rare component on a screen that small so yeah that's wild pretty excited about it I think Getting back into CRTs is going to be the thing that requires me to at some point get more comfortable with electronics repair because the last couple times I've turned it on, I've heard a little bit of a kind of a ticking sound coming out of it.

Sometimes that's just a piece warming up, but sometimes it's impending doom. Sure, it's just settling in a little bit. It'll be fine. Look, that GE had a real good burning dust smell the first few times I turned it on, and then that worked itself out. Yeah.

And like the switches were a little janky at first. So I blasted them with some contact cleaner and then they were fine. Yeah, I know. I mean, I am also very interested in the other direction of this, which is like modern, you know, the retro tanks of the world using FPGAs to massage. Digital signals to look analog, to look shadow masked, etc. But that's a $700 piece of equipment. The CRT is both more authentic and cheaper to get into. So I think that's a fun place to start.

I will say I really enjoyed the time I spent with one of those high refresh rate OLED monitors and the shaders that blank out. and like mimic phosphor glow basically it was really really nice blurbusters crt beam simulation shader is something i hope to play with one day it is that thing is magic yeah um what else you got you want to um

Speaking of magic, I have spent about a week with these AirPods Pro 3 now. Was I right? I'm not the only one to say this. A couple people on the Discord also, I think, said this in the wake of that last episode, at which point I had not tried them yet. They seem like they might be...

Kind of life-changing. Dude, they would be on the top of my, hey, here's some stuff I love list every single year. I try to be conscious of not coming off too much like an Apple Zealot on this podcast because I know plenty of people that listen don't.

use or care about Apple stuff, but can I describe the extent of my pairing actions regarding these? I mean, you know what they are because you own a pair. Yeah. I pulled them out of the box. I opened the case near my iPhone and a big thing popped up with a.

button on it that said pair. Yeah. And that's it. And now it's also paired with every other Apple device you own. And now whatever Apple device I am using, and I play podcasts directly from my watch all the time because I like to go out and exercise without my phone.

Just because it's a bulky, expensive thing and I want to bounce around in my pocket. And like the idea that audio just plays to those headphones out of whatever device I happen to have on and am using at the time is just kind of insane. Wait until you get a new Apple TV. Yeah. Yes. Like.

oh wait i won't even have to pair it with those right no or with that and like if you guys want to watch something together but not be loud in the room or whatever because it's late or just like you're you know whatever reason You can both pair to the same TV at the same time. They are transformative technology. It's completely changed the way I think about Bluetooth and wireless headphones. And when you're using...

If you get to a point where you're using Linux more, there's even tools like Libripods that lets them work with Steam Deck and... and Linux desktops and laptops in the same way. So I've been afraid to pair them with any non-Apple thing because I'm worried about it kind of interfering with the magic. Is that not a problem? It's... It's usually okay. Sometimes it's weird. I feel like it's gotten better over the years since they came out.

Okay. Like the first pair that I had, it was a little bit of a hassle sometimes. Yeah. Like in particular, I was worried that if I, if I pair them with something else and then come back to the Apple stuff, do you have to pair it again with the phone before? No, no, it'll save multiple pairings, but you might have to connect to it the first time you bring it back. If you pair it with your Switch...

You'll have to go in and connect to it with the switch. And then when you bring it back to the phone, usually you have to connect to it again. Okay. But that's it. And we have had our first kind of magic moment a couple of days ago.

Me realizing we both had the headphones in, excuse me, listening to something and we just started talking to each other. And it works like we were just able to hear each other and it paused our audio as we were talking seamlessly. We can interact and listen to podcasts at the same time. It's. They're expensive, but I mean, they're literally eight times more expensive. I have only ever owned cheap, crappy wireless earbuds, like $20 to $30 earbuds.

And these are quite a bit more than that. But so far, like between the sound quality, also the noise canceling is amazing. The microphone quality is really good when you call people too. Like the gestures on the, there's a tactile pad on there so you know exactly where to press and there's haptics in there so you know when it's registering that you're changing volume or changing modes or whatever. That's new, by the way. That's not in my twos. Really?

yeah so now there's a little like it's just kind of a little indentation on the front of the stem so you know exactly where to touch to The invitation's there, but there's no haptic feedback on it. Oh, really? Okay, so there's just a tiny little click in the same way that the trackpads on the laptops have a fake haptic click? Oh, it might do that, actually. Anyway, they're just incredibly...

Sometimes, again, my MO is always to kind of buy something cheap and disposable because what if I want something better later? And then I always just continue buying the cheap and disposable thing. But sometimes it's nice to trade up to the good thing. I will say I bought mine right when they came out.

Um, cause I had wanted the ones and I, I bought the twos. I might've already, I might've bought the ones and give them to somebody else. I can't remember, but, um, they were immediately good. Like I was immediately thrilled with them and. i kept when my i bought the apple care on when i bought them and they swapped them because the the connection and the ear detection was getting wonky and they just gave me a new refurb pair at the end of the apple care period that's pretty good

Yeah, it's one of my all-time favorite pieces of technology. I'm glad you're enjoying them. Oh, thank you. Now I am staring at the AppleCare notification and settings. which straight up has a timer ticking down. You have 54 more days to sign up for AppleCare. Now I'm thinking for a wearable that are something this tiny. Maybe I don't know. Maybe I should look into that.

So here's the thing. They sell for $250. You can usually get them for $200 if you don't mind waiting a little bit and waiting for them to go on sale someplace. Yeah, that's what I got them for with that gift card back effectively. and like i i think the apple care worked out to two bucks a month when you paid for it a year in advance and i was like it's 50 bucks on 200 to 200 bucks is a little bit iffy for me

But since I was able to go in and be like, yeah, I have this problem that was kind of impossible to replicate. And they were like, oh, yeah, we'll just give you a new one. It's no big deal. Oh, they didn't even care about verifying it. They they looked at the logs on them and were like, oh, yeah, something's weird here.

And they made sure it was clean and all that because the detection areas get dirty and then it doesn't detect right. I wish I could read the logs on my earbud. I'm doing it again. Earpods, earbuds. AirPods. I think you can actually. Wait, what? Yeah. How? I think I could pull them. I think there was a way I could get them from the debug folder in the config on the phone. I can't remember. This bears further investigation. I'll report back.

um okay i gotta shout out communities this year because the launching the dual boot diaries kind of smashed all of my different communities together with one common cause so people in like the twitch community and the tech pod community and the the full nerd dual boot diaries community and all the youtube comments everybody has been incredibly excited and supportive

and helpful and we like there's not been a lot of like yo you should just read the man page or post the right format for the bug report and all that stuff yeah people have been really cool and the linux community has been a delight contrary to every other time i've done this where there's some sassy neck beard saying yeah you gotta have you considered read the fucking manual so shout out to communities communities rule

You know, I like to think the sassy neckbeards are in a distinct minority, but then again, you only remember the sassy neckbeards. I think the other thing is that more new people are coming in and are remembering how much nicer it is if you don't get yelled at by some grumpy old guy. Yeah, I mean, this is not the Gen 2 forums or something. Hey, I think the Gen 2 forums are probably fine. You're probably right, actually. I just picked a hardcore Linux distro out of thin air. I apologize, too.

Slackware. It's the Slackware people that you got to watch out for at this point. You wanted to hit one? You got another one? Yeah, I've got one more. It's not really exact. It's more tangentially Linux related. It's more open source-y, but let's do something non.

open source operating system. I got one for you. Oh, well, okay. Okay. Oh, okay. Go ahead. Let's do this pair of switch related ones. I was going to say that's what I was going to pull out actually. Okay. I got to switch to, as we talked about the thing I'm calling out here.

is screen protectors have gotten kind of foolproof from what I can tell. Did you get the one with the plastic frame that you just snap on? So that's kind of the crazy part. I think they're all the one with the plastic frame now. I think you technically could find like a sub $10 switch to.

Yeah, you can still get the ones without the frame. But even the $12 AmFilm that gets you two of them, I think it was $12 last I checked. An AmFilm is a good one. That's what I had in my Switch 1. Even that one comes with the installation frame now. I buy the Spigen ones, I think. Yeah, that's the other one that I see called out quite a bit as being good.

They're good. I've cracked a couple on my phone, and when you complain to them about it, they just send you another two. Yeah, that happened to me with my set of Amfilm on the Switch 1. I had a minor issue with one of them, and they just sent me a whole new, brand new set of two. It just shows up from Amazon or whatever. Yeah. I'm a big fan. I used one of the Spigen ones on the Switch 2s in the house here. I think the Switch 2 actually only comes with one for the Spigen one. Okay. On the...

uh, phones, they usually, they usually give you a two pack. Yeah. Um, so for the switch too, I paid the D brand surcharge because it was, it was a work purchase and I wanted to see if it was worth the money and. It's a lot for screen protector. It's 35 bucks, but I really, they were talking it up so much. I was like, okay, this is worth, this is worth putting on the company just to see how well this works. Yeah. I got to say it was completely flawless and finally two minutes.

they do the thing where they have like a sticky layer that goes down so that pulls all the crap off right that's the thing i had dust under my i only put on i put the screen protector on the switch one once and it had dust under there forever after and i never quite cared enough to pull it off and try again. It always kind of annoyed me. But yes, this one, the way they describe it on here is that it's got, what do they call it? A statically charged peel layer is what they say. Like when you

The way their frame works, when you pull the tab and pull the sticky part off, supposedly there's some static element to the layer that you're pulling that kind of gathers dust to it as you're pulling it off. And sure enough. Zero air bubbles, zero dust, like it's perfectly aligned. But again, you can get pretty close to this with a screen protector set that is less than half the price of this thing.

Well, so, yeah, somebody told me years ago to do the screen protector, like to steam up the bathroom real good before he gets a shower. I also did that. I pitched Intel when we went to the data set to the to the fab. to see if they'd let us apply some screen protectors inside the fab. Interesting. There's going to be no less dusty place in the world where they're like, no, you can't take your phone into the fab. Whip your Switch 2 out in the Intel 1880 facility.

yeah let's let's here's a multi-billion dollar facility i'm going to put a three dollar screen protector on yeah um anyway i love that yeah it's really cool somebody who struggled with alignment and dust and stuff like that it was really nice to see that like even

Kind of across the price spectrum, these things are getting harder and harder to screw up. It's funny. Screen protectors are one of those things that I really eschewed the first few years of the smartphone era. And then as I've gotten older and I've started keeping phones longer, honestly, is the big thing.

The time and the micro scratches that just are unavoidable from like putting something in and out of your pocket all the time kind of make me crazy. It's the one thing I don't like about my older watch is that the micro scratches on it are.

are super visible in bright sunlight now and it kind of irritates me yeah the series eight that i just traded in for this 11 was just like all the way around the edge was just scratch scratch city but i think it's why i'm gonna get an ultra when i finally replace this the seven that i have yeah So I found, we talked about this briefly, but I wanted to shout it out because I was playing a lot of Metroid Prime recently.

And I found switch to grips that I like. Finally, people ask me about this all the time. It's maybe the thing that people ask me the most about, about the tech bot of anything right now. That's not Linux related. And it's the Skull & Co Neo grips. They come in either all black grips or red and blue, like Nintendo red and blue. And they have three different grabbies on them.

uh like so you can do three different like i want to say like length of protrusions like there's a big one a medium one a small one so you can have the amount of like grip to hold on to that you want and you can still put in the dock with the grip with the grip on the only thing i don't like about it is that it's kind of hard to take the the joy cons off like you have to take the grip grip off to take the joy cons off but i like

I was able to find anything that let you take the Joy-Cons off easily, still go in the dock, and didn't look super janky, or wasn't just soft silicone. that wasn't actually going to give you anything to grip onto. To be clear, I bought four of them and sent three of them back, and this is the one I kept. It's pretty good. It's kind of expensive. It's like $30.

I think the ones that I liked was the Target House brand that I used to buy for the Switch 1 were $14, so it's a pretty substantial increase in price. Some of that may be tariff-related, I don't know. But these are good, and with the three adjustable...

uh, three different grip sizes. They stay on the, the replaceable grips stay on really nicely. Um, and I was able to find something that was comfortable out of those three. So that thing is big. It's not big and it's heavy enough. Yeah. That's like how to invest in your ergonomics.

I mean, I have enough RSI problems that I want to not jack up my wrist making it worse. Let's see. I got a rack for my bike that I can put small amounts of cargo on. And this isn't technology, really. It's just a thing like it's a piece of metal that screws onto the frame. A bike is mechanical technology. That's true. It's just a bike bike, not an e-bike or anything. We'll talk about e-bikes in a minute.

But yeah, it's been nice because it means that if I want to go pick up a quick run for a small amount of groceries or something, I just chuck that on there with a box on the back and run to the grocery store and it takes less time. Actually, it's just nice to have the dead time when I'm pedaling. You know what I mean? So yeah, using the bike a little bit more has been really nice. Exercise, convenience, probably. I would assume it's convenient.

it's kind of a pain in the butt to get out of the garage i need to figure i need to make that easier i was thinking kind of like at the grocery store i assume they have bike racks there you know you'd think that oh they do they're just in a weird spot okay yeah um the uh

But the big thing for me is I live a mile and a half from the grocery store, so it's like a 10-minute ride. Yeah, that's fun. And then it's a nice distance, and it feels like I've done something productive, and it's time to think that's not. That has no other pressure on me, which is nice, especially because it's not like city traffic down there. Right. I assume it's not like crazed drivers every which way.

Oh, people are absolutely unhinged across the Bay Area these days. That's just driving in America these days, it sounds like. Yeah, there's a general lack of civility on the road that is.

uh worrisome to terrifying depending on how big your car is i guess distressing well hey what if you had a car that was less prone to break down yeah i was i put electric cars on my list this is i think our fifth year having an electric car is that right we got the first one in 2021 i think yeah okay so it'll be end of april will be the end of the fifth start of the fifth year i guess okay they're fabulous yeah

I kind of, I wanted to bring this up because I mean, I'm not in a position to buy a car right now, but I feel like I'm at the point where I probably will get an EV by the time I am ready to get one, which it just seems like the benefits just continue to mount up. If you want, they're starting to make EVs that mimic in a...

uh, um, in a skeuomorphic way. Yeah. Manual transmission cars that Ionic five N is wild. That's, that's, that's always been the tension for me as I have. I've always wanted to own one more manual transmission in my life. And like those.

I don't know. Those are cool, but knowing that it's entirely fake, I don't know. I almost wish they would build the car in such a way that you had to do the shifting. And for some reason, then I would have, I don't know, find it more satisfying. But I guess that's just not how electric vehicles work, right?

Well, not really, no. There's no transmission. It's all one gear. Right, exactly. There aren't gears as such. Here's the thing I read recently. I think this was the lightning bolt moment of, oh. It might actually be insane not to buy an EV. And maybe you have more insight into this. This was a thread on Blue Sky. All anecdotal, so correct me or them if this is not actually a thing.

What was being claimed was that dealerships are starting to go out of their way. They're starting to do anything they can to not sell you an EV. A lot of dealerships do not like EVs at all. And the reason for that is that they make so much money from ongoing maintenance of the vehicle you bought from them. 100%. And the EVs require so little maintenance.

that they are just grumpy as hell over the fact that they're going to sell you a car and then maybe never see you again or very rarely the maintenance so like we get free so we bought the hunt we leased the hyundai which comes with free maintenance free free um like scheduled maintenance for a hundred thousand miles or something. And like we bring it in, they rotate the tires, they apply whatever software updates or recalls have applied, have happened to it.

And it's usually there for like nine hours and then I pick it up and it's gone. Now, whether dealers dislike it or not varies wildly from dealer to dealer. So like in the Bay Area, they're pretty pro-electric. And we haven't had those problems either with the Chevrolet or with the Hyundai. I have heard there's the Ionic subreddit gets a lot of horror stories from dealers who.

Do shit that actively damages cars because they don't want out with electrics and stuff like that. That's illegal. Well, it's the normal. It's the normal thing where, like, you only hear the complaints. Yada, yada. Yeah. There's also been a kind of widespread large problem with the IONIQ 5 specifically where they have a component fail that prevents the battery from the 12-volt battery from charging, not the big battery.

But generally speaking, yeah, it's great. We had that Bolt. The Bolt was incredible around town. It was a relatively small battery, charged it off the 120 volt, and we didn't even put a fast charger in for that. It was not great on long trips because the high-speed charging was pretty slow. The Ioniq is incredible on long trips. We drove to LA a couple times this year. It was...

One time we could have made it all the way from San Francisco, from Pacifica to North Hollywood, only stopping to charge once. We would have come in real hot and we weren't sure what the charger situation was like at the hotel. We would have rolled in with like 9% battery left, which is 20 miles. So we did stop and just do a quick two-minute charge someplace along the way.

That's unbelievable. It's 500 miles, 380 miles or something. And when you factor in the progress from the Bolt to that Ionic in five years or so, like imagine how much better they'll be in another five years. Yeah, I kind of wonder if we're actually going to see that because I think we're.

You know, the charging infrastructure is much better now. The thing about the Ionic is it goes from whatever percentage you're at to 80% in like 20 minutes, no matter what. Whereas the Bolt would go... it could take up to like 90 minutes to get to 80 percent yikes um depending on how like worst case if it's really hot out or something like that yeah uh it's a this is a pretty good experience all around yes this whole conversation might make me

ponder the notion that the car dealership is obsolete but perhaps perhaps it's time for direct sale to consumer apologies to any listeners whose family owns a car dealership but that that was the I mean that was the pitch that Elon Musk made for Tesla early on. I know that was one of the big Tesla innovations and you certainly don't have to hand it to Elon Musk, but maybe.

I will say it's really nice having a place to take the car when they need to apply. Like we got the fix for the ICCU problem and I would have. It would have been annoying to have to drive 100 miles to go to a service center or something, right? Assuming the car could even make the 100-mile trip. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. But I think part of it is that the incentive structure and all that needs to change. It is an industry that if the electric shift continues, is going to have problems.

And also, it's also worth mentioning, we do live in a very temperate climate. So it's not like when it's cold out and we run the heater, then you get a lot less mileage. And, you know, it's not it's not ideal. But ninety nine percent of the time it's like. The last time we rented a car and we were like, oh, we should get a gas car, was when we were driving up into the kind of rural western Sierras between Yosemite and Tahoe.

And we were like, I don't know that there's going to be electricity where we're going, much less a place to charge. So we rented a big SUV. four-wheel drive so we wouldn't have to do chains and all that stuff yeah and in fairness the ceiling on ev improvement is largely capped by battery technology and that seems to not be going anywhere anytime soon so yeah um

Do you want to talk? I think that's it. Is that all of our stuff? I've got one more. Oh, and then we have some community noms. Yes. Okay, last one for me. This is the other open source-y one that I wanted to mention. Okay. I got this tip from the Linux channel on the full nerd discord. Somebody posted an episode of the Linux unplugged podcast. Okay. I'm sorry to bring a competing Linux podcast in here. Wow.

But they did score an interview with Kent Overstreet, who is the maintainer and kind of main developer of Bcache FS. Okay. And this is not really about the file system. It's more about something he said that really struck me in that interview. But I'll say very briefly. We should probably do, maybe we should do an episode on copy on write file systems at some point, but Bcache FS is a new kind of next generation mod super modern file system, mainly being developed for Linux right now that.

I think the short version is it's basically looking like it might become what ButterFS never could, which is a ZFS equivalent that is license compatible with the Linux kernel. And lightweight enough that you can actually run it on real hardware. Yeah, he talks about that. Ken talks about that some in that. It's funny. Okay, here I go talking about file systems. I will listen to this interview. This sounds great. It's quite good. He...

lauds ZFS quite extensively in that interview. ZFS, just to be clear, one of the reasons we started this podcast six years ago, five years ago. A primary fixation of mine as I tinker with my server here. He praises ZFS extensively in there. He never utters the word ButterFS once. Okay. And to be clear, look, people use ButterFS for all kinds of things. Like it does.

the jobs that it does seemingly pretty well it has had reliability problems over time that it has not been able to shake whether still extant or in the past it's got a reputation and that's kind of the reason this file system even exists is it's kind of a second stab at But like the hey, reproducibility and like letting you do shadow volumes, that file integrity shots, logical volume management. We'll get into it later, but.

I want to talk more about this. This sounds fun. The conversation was about the funding model for this thing and the way he's supporting himself right now, which is effectively entirely on the support of Patreon. Okay. And like, they didn't get into this too much. Apparently he's like... This sounds crazy. He's apparently like living out of a van in South America right now. Wow. Like by choice.

They didn't go too much into it. It sounds like he's just by choice living kind of a nomadic lifestyle. Is he a van life influencer too? I pulled up a couple talks with him after this. He's got long hair like he seems like a bit of a free spirit. But anyway. Okay.

Here's why I'm bringing this up and what the conversation was actually about was he was lamenting the fact that there has not been a lot of corporate support of development of BcacheFS so far. This may sound reminiscent to you of the conversation with... We had this conversation. Jean-Baptiste Kempf around VLC, for example.

We had this conversation with multiple people whose software was used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Right. So he was kind of saying, you know, we haven't seen a lot of support from companies who might already be. I mean, it's an experimental file system. So it's.

He said it is starting to show up in production, but it's still pretty early. But, you know, he's like, I'm mostly getting by on support from end users right now. And the hosts were like, how does that make you feel? Because if this thing goes where it seems like it's going.

This becomes a linchpin of big enterprise Linux storage deployments in the future. How do you feel about the fact that a bunch of corporations are going to make astronomical amounts of money over the next 10 or 20 years on the work you're doing right now?

Yeah. And he had like the most magnanimous answer I think I have ever heard to something like that, which was effect. I'm paraphrasing, but he was basically like, I don't care about that. I don't think about that. What I care about is writing good, clean code that. end users can run on their computers.

Wow. He's a bigger man than I am. Yeah, right. If I wrote something that 100 million people were using and I was making $30 a month on it, I'd be fairly upset, I think. It's kind of the curl thing, though, again. We interviewed... Oh, my gosh. Daniel...

And Stenberg, the maintainer of curl has like there are billions of installations of curl in the world and it's run on Mars, right? Like it's on practically every device that has an open source operating system on it and is used for something. But you know, like it's, I mean, it's that classic problem, but like he was just.

Kent was just like so open about like, I care about the people on our Discord. Actually, sorry, not Discord, IRC. They have an IRC channel, of course, not a Discord. But like he was like, I care about the people on IRC, the people who are sending me.

bug reports and helping me debug issues and people who are just running things in their home labs. He was like, I love home labbers because they're the ones who actually send you issues and will send you logs to help you fix them. And like, you know, he. He very much was like, I'm doing this for the love of the work and the quality of the work, and I'm doing it for the little guy, the people on the ground who are going to benefit from it, not the...

Not enterprise companies that are going to sell storage appliances for $100,000 using my file system in 10 years or whatever. It was just kind of really refreshing to hear. One of the things that's been really interesting is submitting bug reports to Neary and Noctalia Shell and stuff like that. I submitted a bug report for something that had been fixed, and it was in the fixed but not released yet.

category i just missed it and they were like oh yeah no big deal hey we fixed this it'll be in the in the upcoming release if you want to get it you can subscribe to the get one instead and blah blah blah it's like oh that's amazing thank you so much and like there wasn't a hey noob we fixed this already they were legit thrilled that somebody was willing to take the time to submit a bug report. It's heartwarming. This is awesome. I think I've mentioned this before.

probably the first really eye opening, heartwarming open source experience I had was filing a couple of bugs on GitHub for own tone, which is the, it's the music server that basically emulates kind of iTunes style airplay like it. Yeah.

it serves music to airplay targets in your house. Anything that can play airplay, it'll see that and can stream music to it. And like the maintainer at one point, the maintainer literally just forked the project and made one little change and said, Hey, Hey, pull down this, pull down this.

repo that i just spun off here and build that and run it and then send me send me this log output basically it's amazing and i sent it to him and within like half a day he had fixed the bug i was having and it was just and he seemed very appreciative that i had filed the bug and was

willing to do the testing and like that's another free piece of software you know that's not making billions of dollars but like it's still somebody leveraging their expertise to just make something cool and put it out in the world that people can benefit from i love it it's it's it's a good thing the last real quick

This is like actually newsworthy. It came out of that interview on Linux Unplugged that Valve is sponsoring BcacheFS now. Oh, nice. He didn't go into a ton of detail other than he talked kind of obliquely about... effectively like valve has really stabilized the funding situation here and has made because he said like this it's a file system it needs five or seven engineers on it not just me so it's largely about getting him some help but like

I am a hopeful slash a little desperate for that thing to become the thing. Should we, I was going to say, should we make 2026 the year that we sponsor some Linux projects? Maybe. Maybe. It's not like we're incredibly flush over here. We can chuck 50 bucks a month at something. Should we just become a conduit for some kind of charitable nonprofit something something? But the thing I was going to say, though, is like.

I really hope that dcacheFS gets there because the modern file system situation on Linux is kind of dire and it needs it. And Valve getting behind this and giving it their stamp of approval. presumably helping out at least monetarily, if not also development wise, seems like a very good sign that this thing is going to get where it needs to get to. Does Steam Deck do ButterFS? I think it does. I don't know.

I should say, if we ever do the copyright episode, they're not necessarily the most performant file systems. They're not for that. They're for resilience. They're for making sure that the data doesn't get eaten or that is replicated, etc. Yeah, I mean, it may be that Valve may be putting money behind this because they run Steam servers in addition to Steam client software. So, yeah, it's cool. That's awesome.

Um, okay. So we have a couple more categories here. We have things that weren't great, but then we also have, uh, I started to thread the discord and asked for community noms and we got a bunch of good suggestions. Yeah. So let's do this. Let's do the grind our gears to the Andy Rooney segment first.

And then close with the community stuff. There's just a couple of them. They're not a huge thing. You want to go first? You want me to go first? Again, compared to some of what's going on out there that everybody knows about. Yeah, the larger, like I said, AI, politics. uh economic collapse um climate like we could just go on and shitification uh i fucking hate when parents give their kids i'm air quoting here toys

That aren't really toys or that they don't understand. So we have an e-bike gang in Pacifica. Oh, wait. They're like middle school kids that ride around on. like e-bikes that are effectively electric motorcycles that go about 40 miles an hour damn do they really go that fast they go insanely fast and uh a they're

They're completely unsupervised and the response in the community has been, oh, boys will be boys. But also they're going to fucking die. I was going to say that those are extremely unsafe speeds to be. Oh, that's not a bicycle speed. That's a, that is a, I hope they're wearing helmets at least, but that is a fall off and that is, that's a wreck and potentially kill yourself speed. So it's not even that it's that they're, they're writing.

these 40 mile an hour electric motorcycles in the same way that they would ride bikes, but they're doing stuff like. riding down the middle of us one, which is a four lane undivided highway doing wheelies and shit. What is that? The one that goes by the taco bell. Yep. It's a big road. The one that goes by the beach.

Yep. That's like the highway. And they're like 12, 13 years old. That's like the highway that goes through that area. What the fuck? 50 mile an hour highway. That seems insane to ride a bike on that. They get out on the beach and ride in the surf. Great. which is illegal for a couple of different reasons. And they do things like riding the wrong side of the street. The cars go 25 miles an hour in the neighborhoods, and they're going 40 miles an hour.

like in all sorts of traffic and without lights on and wearing all black and all that it's don't get your kids don't get your kids toys that are that they're going to be unsupervised if you're not going to teach them and make sure that they use them right this also applies just to be clear to things like stuffed animals that use ai to talk to your children for the love of god don't get those for your kids or grandkids or whatever

because they're going to learn all sorts of horrible stuff from from the unregulated ai and like it's just it's a like don't don't give access people like we we know now social media is bad for a whole host of reasons Um, but the, the LLM stuff is, is profoundly damaging. They literally made a horror movie about this like three years ago. Yeah. Like, yeah. Take a lesson. There's three, three of them. Yep. Yep. What you got?

Mine is not a new thing, but I am very frustrated that it's still around. Uh-huh. Which is, I fucking hate when you buy a product that isn't cool. Yeah. And then you find out that they just cheaped out on manufacturing. It's the worst. And so it doesn't work right. But specifically, it's like if the product sucked conceptually, like in the design sense, whatever. It was bad anyway.

What drives me crazy is when, I know I've invoked this many times, but for example, that DBX channel strip I've got, like that thing has a fantastic feature set. Like it's kind of everything that I need in a post processor behind my microphone.

It just doesn't work right. Yeah. And here's the more recent one that is really bumming me out. Oh no. I've had to become familiar with the concept of chattering in the context of mechanical keyboards. Are you familiar with this? No. Have you heard about this? No, you never. OK, well, you've probably maybe have got better mechanical keyboards than me. I bought a really expensive. I own two really expensive mechanical keyboards.

So I have a Keychron K5 Max, and I knew Keychron was kind of an entry-level brand when I got in. I bought it a year ago September, so it was about 15 months of straight usage since I got it. I love the keyboard. It is everything I could want in a starter mechanical keyboard in terms of the wireless features and how it feels. It's a QMK keyboard. I assume you've messed with that.

like the flashable firmware so you can oh yeah my my control drop is a key keyboard so you can you can customize all kinds of right you can like flash all kinds of cool customizations to it and firmware like there's nothing i would change about it design wise

And I would have happily paid like another 50 bucks for it was a hundred bucks or like 110 or something. Like I happily would have paid more for it. Oh, sorry. I should have said what chattering is. Chattering is when the keys start registering multiple presses on one physical press.

I had this happen with my mouse switches a few years ago when Logitech was using those shitty switches. So that's what the mouse switch problem was? Yeah. It was either registering none or doubles. And it would sometimes register singles. but it was sporadic. It was really frustrating. Okay. I think I'd probably take doubles over none. If I had to pay doubles, we're, we're, well, it plays a lot of first person shooters. Doubles were real bad. Depends on what you're doing for sure. But, um,

I need to investigate it some more. I'm not quite sure where I'm at with it right now, but everything I've read about this is I've mostly seen people saying like, yeah, chattering is a way that cheaper mechanical keyboards start to fail. And again, I love this keyboard. I bought a second cosmetic set, a different colored key set, and I was thinking about buying a third. Like, I really like this thing. And I don't know if it's like...

classic cold solder problem or what. It could just be bad switches. So a little bit, yes. That's why the $99, one of these has the kind of non-user or non-hot-swappable switches, I should say, like you have to solder. I paid the extra 10 or 20 bucks and got the one with the hot swappable switches. Yeah. The thing is the switches I have swapped so far have not always necessarily fixed the problem or maybe more to the point.

There are so many keys on this keyboard that are randomly doing the double inputs, but it's hard for me to believe that it's all the switches failing at one time. And it makes me worry that it's more in the electronics of the board itself because like it just...

Does not seem plausible to me that so many, I mean, it's been like two dozen, two dozen different keys on this keyboard. It's at one time or another in the last month have been started doing double inputs and then stopped. Like they'll, it'll, it'll come and go. And.

It's just hard for me to believe it's I should swap some more switches, but I worry that it's an underlying problem with the board and not individual switches. So I had I bought cheap switches at one point to test something out and I had them all fail. and they started they failed on like a um a bell curve distribution where like at first one or two got janky i think this was it actually wasn't a cheap it was it wasn't a cheap keyboard it was an old logitech g pro

that worked with Cherry MX switches. And I had bought a bunch of different types of switches from AliExpress to try them. So they were almost certainly knockoffs of real switches. But they literally started failing on a Bell distribution where like... first a couple were going every once in a while and then a whole bunch failed at once and then it kind of tapered off and then pretty soon i realized i'd switched every freaking switch on the keyboard um

So, yeah, I don't know. It could, it could, it may not be, it may not be disaster. Okay. Switches are not super. I mean, in fact, I have a huge amount of replacement switches that I bought. Yeah. These are Gatorons, which I. think are decent. I think that's a good switch brand and I bought them straight from them so they can't be knockoffs or counterfeit, but just.

Just make sure you keep the bad ones separate from the good ones because that's the real tragedy. I've got a batch of used ones already. Did you ever have them go bad and then stop being bad? Because that's what's happening to me. It'll be... It'll be these six keys one day and then the next day it'll be a couple of arrow keys. That seems like it's not switches. That's exactly what I mean is that it comes and goes on different keys depending on the day.

on the mouse double clicks it once it started getting worse it just never got it was not going to get better oh man yeah i love this keyboard like i don't it's again it's everything i could want in a keyboard that's such a bummer and anyone's like how is soldering The thing that doesn't seem to like. Look, I don't know, man. I don't understand how you can make something that's a soldered board professionally and have it be bad at.

being soldered right or we have so many and dbx and a bunch of other companies have cold solder problems so we we both have the same ish sony receiver that had that problem on the screen that was the same it's just like we've how how many decades have we been manufacturing consumer electronics

i mean how is this still a problem i played kaizen factory manager i know how this works you have the little robots they push the thing there and then the solder happens and then you push it to the next one and save five cents per unit yep

Okay, so we have a handful of community noms that people submitted. I think there's some real bangers in here. Since we're talking about keyboards, I want to talk about Patch's DIY keyboard that he made over this year.

uh pcb design and the whole thing manufactured wow um and and they shouted out uh tate just the whole custom keyboard scene in general on top of the ability to get low volume pcbs manufactured now it's not necessarily new but it feels like it took off in a big way this year and i think that's really rad like what i like we we've come a long way yes absolutely A ton of people talked about Bezite, the immutable kind of, it's not really a fork of SteamOS, but it's like SteamOS for non-Handheld.

consoles and for other non-steam deck handhelds yeah i think it's fedora underneath if i'm not mistaken it's fedora blue yeah but it's got all the gaming stuff you need in it kind of just built in so you basically can just kind of install it and start playing games and and importantly it'll do for handhelds it does it pre it comes with pre-configured mappings for controllers for like the asus rog ally

stuff like that and it will let you boot directly into the 10-foot interface if you want to set it up as like a console for your living room um a lot of people talked about self-hosting stuff moving out of commercial cloud and moving to self-hosting using nasa's and tail scale so you can have

secure, safe access everywhere, which I think is rad. I think that was the most common one in there is people moving to self-hosted music collections or Google photos replacements or setting up their own mass mass.

That B-Link Mi Mini seems to be pretty popular in the Discord. Yeah, people like the B-Link Mi Mini. I think C-Music shouted out the M4 Mac Mini as well, which is a... good call-out because for like the $600 or whatever that thing costs it's pretty incredible yeah yeah that me mini looks is rad have you seen it it's no it's like it's kind of um almost old school mac trash can style yeah it looks very friendly

Yeah, it's kind of got a nice little embedded Apple-ish look to it. It's got six NVMe slots in it. Oh, it's that thing. Yeah, I have seen this. It's basically an N150. It's like the Alder Lake N, you know, like kind of the little embedded x86 router box type things.

I need to get this in to test for PC world. You guys should do it. There is one caveat, and I don't know how many people on the Discord have run into this. Apparently, depending on how power hungry the SSDs are that you use with it, it maybe has issues supplying enough voltage to all of them.

So that might be something that would be worth you guys testing, but it also, it also only has 16 gigs of memory max, I think it's soldered, which stinks. Yeah. So this is, you know, it's, this is a low impact, but there's like perfect for.

a tiny little thing that sits on a shelf that makes no noise because there's no spinning drives is it yeah it's an n150 so that was the other thing is people shouted out the the n-series intel processors have been really good for like low power consumption high power home lab so if you live someplace where electricity is expensive and you don't want to run like a hundred watt machine all the time yes these things are dope and idle at like 5 to 15 watts so yeah yeah

And, you know, like it's just the idea of the all SSD NAS is actually becoming a thing, which is something I've always been interested in because it's we're getting there. I see people occasionally say, like, what do you need with six NVMe drives in a NAS when it's going over like a one gigabit?

network connection and it's not about the speed it's about the quiet and the cool yeah and no moving parts maybe not yes maybe not maybe not cool but like it's the size and yes it's size and noise and stuff like that it's no moving parts it's tiny sits on a little shelf as opposed to a giant case with a bunch of hard drives in it. Yep. I will say real quick on the back of the N150 stuff, I've said it before, very excited about the Wildcat Lake stuff next year.

which all the rumors are that that is the successor to the Alder Lake end chips based on manufactured on 18A. I think we talked about that with Adam a little bit. I asked about it when we were at the Intel thing. Nope, they wouldn't talk about it. I think it's only been basically leaks and presentation slides that have come out about it so far. But as a successor to those little in 100 boxes, it sounds like an absolute beast.

hope to make one my router one day. As somebody who's using one of those N100 boxes as my main server, I'm like, A, that thing's getting a little long in the tooth. Yeah. And I would very much like to have, I'd like to wait until I'm waiting until that hits to replace it. Now, if only there are consumer so dims available for sale by the time that thing goes out to even put in one. Don't even joke. I had an even worse thought.

Yeah. Because like I said, Wildcat Lake is by all accounts fab on 18A. Nova Lake, Intel's next desktop part is going to be 18A. What if 18A is so good or at least good enough? That all of Intel's new fab capacity on 18 and 14A gets consumed by NVIDIA and data center stuff, just like all the RAM storage. What if it's so lucrative for them to fab GPUs for...

AI data centers that the fabrication also starts going the way of the memory. I shouldn't even say this out loud. Don't say it out loud. Look at what you've done. You did this. This is your fault, Ram. Ratman shouted out tiling window managers, which I... Freaking love tiling window managers. I don't know that I can go back now. And Pete and a bunch of other people talked about the AYN Thor, which is that dual screen.

I mean, like software emulator box, the one DS3DS. Yes. I mean, that's, that's in the tradition of the Anbernics and those, those other small Chinese manufacturers that make handhelds that basically are, Hey, this is a DS or, Hey, this is a PSP. Like they're not. they're not ashamed of just ripping off classic handheld designs wholesale yeah it's not hidden really but those those things are very cool um there's a lot of cool stuff out there it's good stuff man it's been a good it's look

It's like they always say, you take the good, you take the bad. You take it all and then you get sad. Is that right? No. I don't remember the rest of the song. Uh, it's been a good, it's been an okay year. Yeah. I mean, look, there's a lot going on. Let, you know, we promise not to get into it. Nobody needs to hear it all related, relitigated again, but hopefully there's some stuff you can find to bring you some comfort. Yeah. To, you know.

and like it's nice because it's not just all stuff to buy linux is free yeah you can just do linux yeah like it's been so fun learning a new os at this level i haven't i didn't expect my brain to get these feelings again and it's like when i first saw windows 95 or windows nt 20 years ago and i'm 30 years ago and i'm kind of getting back in there again so it's been it's been a lot of fun there's a

I don't know if this is a good time to bring this up. There's a principle that I've had in half formed in my mind for a number of years now. I don't have a good name for it necessarily, but do you ever feel like there's like too much compute around or do you ever wish there was less compute?

Do you ever wish you had to make do with less? I've never in my life wished I had less compute. I mean, not one time. Practically, I agree with you, but there's a certain part of me. Okay, maybe this is the Linux on PlayStation principle.

Okay. Like when the PS2 and the PS3 could install Linux, you know, and you could straight up use them as a computer. Yeah. North Korea made nuclear bombs for them. I remember. Right. Yes. The missile guidance, the whole thing. Yeah. Sometimes I wish I had to do that. Oh, do you get what I'm saying? William Gibson version of the future. The what is it? The dystopian dumpster diving cyberpunk future. The Henry Rollins, Johnny Mnemonic future. You have to scrounge.

old video game consoles out of out of yes out of a dump to because there's no more computing to go right don't worry we're getting there but like so yeah it's a kind of a Instead of doing something like that because it's fun and then forgetting about it as soon as you're done because you go back to your real computer, sometimes I wish we had to make do with less because it would present a lot more interesting projects and problems to solve.

I feel like I moved here maybe five years too late to go to the HP campus and dumpster dive. I feel like that was very much a thing. right in the like run up to the beginning of boot magazine in 96 like those guys were going out and doing that some right and by the time i got here they started padlocking all their fucking dumpsters because you know

You don't want the riffraff to get the good leftover CRTs, I guess. I don't know. Or another version of this I've mentioned before. I'm kind of sad that I missed the true multi-user timesharing. era of computing like the oh i don't miss that at all that was awful i probably would have hated it if i ever touched it but like stunk on you know on mainframes and many computers where you know there was only so much computing go around so you had to run multiple users on the same machine like

Yes, that's very limiting, but it also sounds like a really fun, interesting problem to tackle. Nope, it just sucked. I'm sorry. There's good nostalgia and bad nostalgia. What I will say is, I don't mean to take this away from you, Brad. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be so negative. No, it's fine. It's fine. I mean, yes, if I was actually dealing with that day-to-day, I would probably hate it.

There's an idea in the Neil Stevenson book, Seven Eves, the one about the end of the world with the moon exploding. That's not a spoiler. It's literally the first sentence of the book. But they get to a point where he's like, he's talking about...

um ic design integrated circuit design and literally says like we're the peak of this was this period of time because after that the electromagnetic like You have to have such a perfect confluence of events in order to build four nanometer circuits that they're not robust outside of...

this very specific point in time and yada yada and and i think about that a lot i think about like have we built technology that's that's like the technology stack has become more and more brittle as we've added more complexity to it and i look at things like the dual multi-chip packages, a system of chips package designs.

and things like that and look at all the complexity that goes into something that used to be simple like where do threads run and i wonder if we're over complicating things to the point that it's all going to collapse at some point yeah i don't think it will no but probably not But it is getting increasingly complicated in a way that is challenging. It's one of the things I like about Linux is because it buries you back down.

to the kind of bare bones version of things. Anyway, what if, what if the guy, what if that guy who's serving his homepage on a, we, is he still doing that? I think so. It's amazing. I think I've got it bookmarked somewhere. I love loading a webpage that I know is being served off of some guy's hacked Wii, but what if he was doing that not just because it's cool to serve your homepage from a Wii, but because a Wii was all he had to serve a homepage with?

this is like i look i think about the mesh network folk and uh like look this is this is the this is the future we deserve right um anyway i think that's as good a place as i need to wrap it up yeah happy 2025.

Happy 2025. Maybe 2026 will be better in every way possible. One can hope. And that'll do it for us this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. As always, if you would like to talk about this, you could get in the Discord. You can go.

to patreon.com slash techpot and sign up for five bucks a month to get access to the discord where you can let us know what you thought about this this list of things that we we listed here you can give us your own suggestions for things that you think are dope you might do a follow-up in the patron episode

And yeah, we'd love to hear from you. You can go to, again, it's patreon.com slash techpod. And we want to thank all of our patrons, but a very special thank you to our executive producer, to your patrons, including Jason Lee. Nextlander.net, it's .com. I don't know what that's all about. I'm not sure. Does somebody else own the .net? I don't know. Oh, the site does not support a secure connection. I'm closing the tab. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippet, Bunny Jerk, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. And I think I got Jason Lee at the beginning, but maybe I didn't. So thanks to Jason Lee as well. Thank you all so, so much. We appreciate each and every one of you. I sure do. Please, if you can't support the show financially, because times are tough, we get it. Don't sweat that. Go hit a review on iTunes or YouTube or wherever your podcasts are listened to.

Those help us a ton. We appreciate it. If everybody who was listening to this did that for us in one week, it would be a huge impact for us. We would appreciate that. Sure would. thanks again we will see you all next year and as always please consider the environment before printing this podcast