321: How to Charge Your Knife

Okay, let me ask you a question, Brad. Ask away? Am I being unkind by having my daughter in this 2025, 20 years after it came out, play Shadow of the Colossus? That's a big question. The question I am uniquely unqualified to answer. Well, you've played Shadow of the Colossus. I certainly have. I reviewed it, as a matter of fact. You had emotional feelings as a result of playing that game, I'm assuming. And then had another incident with that game many years later.

What was the other incident? Let's not talk about it. Okay, okay. A quick look snafu, let's say. Oh. Let's say I maybe went in blind and forgot a core mechanic for most of the video. Oh. Oh no, it was finally the story can be told. It was one of those, Hey, we're going to PAX. Yeah. We just need extra content to go up over the break. Yeah. What do you got?

everybody find shit to quick look as fast as possible. Oh, I've got a preview build of this on my desk. Is the video embargo up? Yeah, it will be. Let's throw that in and play it. It was just a, an overly rushed production of the remaster. No, no, this was, ah, I don't remember what. It came out in 2018. No, because it was way before that. I'd have to go look, actually. Did they re-release it for PS3 or something? I'd have to look. There was a collection, I think.

Maybe that's what it was. It was like an eco in Shadows of the Colossus collection. I think that might be what it was. Yeah. I think that might be what it was. It was around the time The Last Guardian came out, if I remember, right? It was one of those things of just, oh, we just need to produce some video, and I...

I have not prepped for this at all. Let's just throw it in there. Oh, crap. Boy, I flubbed that one badly. Oh, well, we don't have time to re-record it. It's funny because watching somebody who's grown up playing... like a mixture of really, really old games, like 80s and 90s games, and then also modern stuff like Peak and Breath of the Wild. When she was presented with that first, hey, here's where you learn to climb section, utterly flummoxed her.

really are you climbing on a beast at that point or is it like a cliff or something they make you climb up to a beast to get to the first climb up a wall to get to the first thing and she was just going at the rocks like you could climb the rocks i was like i don't think you can climb the rocks

Saying she also forgot about the stamina mechanic? Well, I don't know if she forgot about the stamina mechanic, but I explained the stamina mechanic to her. But the thing is, she saw the big giant colossus, and her first instinct was... well, it's a video game, time to get blasting, and started just wailing it with arrows. And the health bar was going down a little bit, and I was like, I don't, like, this is not going to be a fun experience if you sit here and spend two hours.

bombing this thing with arrows does the game not lead you at all to climbing and doing the actual thing it says over and over again hey you might consider climbing up on this but like you know The early 2000s were a gentler time, a kinder time perhaps. There was no yellow paint on that Colossus. No. In fact, actually, there was no yellow paint in the world. The yellow paint was white paint back then.

The ledges were like when you when you failed instead of giving you a different message that like hinted and implied that you should try something else. It just gives you the same message over and over and over again. Sounds like some late PS2 era tutorializing. I don't mind yellow paint and concepts. Like I have no problem with it when it's there and it's yellow paint. I do admire when they come up with something more diegetic for it though. Like I'm trying to think, was it?

It's honored or some game I was seeing people posting screenshots of where it's like, or no, this was a valid. I think a valid uses ropes. Yeah, Valet has ropes, like dangly ropes everywhere. Instead of, again, you know, yellow paint's fine, it's just a little arbitrary, but, you know, make it some, like, in-world object is a nice, elegant way to kind of hide it, but still make it what it is.

I'm going to tell you, we had on the Anacrusis, we had one corridor that was like a section at the end of one of the episodes that was just a really long corridor. The whole level, basically, you snake in and out of this really long corridor, right? So you're starting at one end and you're going to the other end. And when we were playtesting it, the number of times people would come out of a door and they'd turn left instead of right or right instead of left was...

It's like a 50-50 chance every time. And it got to the point that the poor environment artists were like, had giant 15 foot arrows that were animated and moving in the right direction and pointing in the right direction we did smoke on the bad end and light on the good end and more light on the good end and dark dark on the bad end and like

Players are real stupid, man. Players, and just to be clear, this is our fault, right? But players, you cannot spell it out. I'm never going to fault anybody for using yellow paint. Yellow paint, vital. You know, Double Dragon figured this out 35 years ago. Pop up a big flashing cartoon pointing hand in their face. Yeah. You can't overdo it. Can't miss that.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. It's 2020. God, I almost said 2025. Yeah. It's 2026. This is our second episode of 2026, I guess. Yes, technically. Yes. But the last one we recorded so long ago that I've forgotten what your voice sounded like. Honestly, what even is doing this podcast?

I'm glad people seem to enjoy the ranking of startup sounds. We missed a couple, which we may or may not address at some point in the future. I plan to self-flagellate this weekend over the Neo Geo startup sound. I did not have any access to Neo Geo stuff and I did not know that it had a startup sound so I didn't look for that. And you got it in the arcade even because the arcade is the only place I ever played a Neo Geo but even there you heard it and it's that's a it might be S tier.

that's our bad yeah it's our bad um but but this week this is the first real week of uh 2026. is also the week that tech journalists and companies and nerds and seemingly AI people and also Lego descend upon Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. And while many of these shows in different categories have waxed and waned over the years, CES seems unstoppable. I don't want to start the show with a showstopper. Yeah. Since you mentioned AI.

We have maybe our first example of a very major company in here kind of poo-pooing AI in a fashion. Are you talking about Dell talking to PC Gamer before CS and saying, hey, man, people don't buy computers because of AI? I sure am. Yeah, I sure am. You know, that seems like a sign. Well, look, on one hand, you have Dell saying that. On the other hand, you have Satya Nadella coming out with a blog post the week after Christmas that said, hey, man, when you call AI slop, you're hurting everybody.

I'm not even going to respond to that. I made a t-shirt that says micro slop in the Microsoft logo. Oh, man. People seem to be enjoying that. Oh, man. Can you also make the S in slop a dollar sign? I see now. I literally thought about doing that when I was doing the design for it. I was like, that's a step too far. It's too much. Yeah, you know, I guess it's kind of crossing the streams, right? That's very mid to late 90s era.

That's classic Microsoft hate. This is modern Microsoft hate. Yeah, every generation needs its own hate of Microsoft, right? Yeah, we all, for different reasons. Did you see my shirt? I know you're not on the internets as much these days. No, I did not. I will put a link for it in the Discord so you can see. I had to learn how to use Inkscape to do vector editing to make it look right. Wait, can people actually buy this shirt?

yeah i i posted it as a share and then some people asked if i would post it so they could actually because i like i printed it because i wanted to make one for myself and then i shared it with a couple people like hey will you post this and then next thing i know i've sold like kind of a lot of them wow

Not like a life-changing a lot, but a couple bucks a pop. That seems like a good facsimile of the Microsoft font. The current Microsoft font, though. Yeah, the current one. I looked at, I'll be honest, I started out with the 80s one with all the angles. Yes. Is that the one with a little notch cut out of one of the letters? That's the late. That's the 90s one. That's the 90s one. The 80s one is like the it looks like a trapezoid kind of. Oh, yeah. It's much more. I don't. Oh, wait.

The one that looks like a heavy metal band logo? Kind of, yeah. That's a good way to describe it. Wow, that's extremely... That's like two steps away from a Metallica logo or something. Yeah, I couldn't get that one. I couldn't make that one work, unfortunately. Um, that's actually, I kind of like that logo. I shouldn't say that, but early, early Microsoft at least made like real products that people could use like basic. Yeah.

That was a fine era of Microsoft. We wouldn't have the PC we have today if it weren't for that era of Microsoft, probably. We might have a better one, though. I mean, OK, yeah, that's true. But, you know, sometimes you got to roll with the punches you got. Yeah.

Uh, anyway, I've watched a talk. I shouldn't get into this. Maybe we'll save this for, I watched a talk over, I watched a lot of YouTube as we discussed on the patron episode. Yeah. Really just ringing the, all I can out of that free month of YouTube premium. Yeah. I watched a whole ass talk by Brian Cantrell, who was an old school son guy. Yeah, I remember Brian. I don't know him, but I remember his name. One of the best speakers who was like a hardcore computer guy I've ever seen.

Anyway, we should talk about this some other time, but he gets into it's about the BIOS. His talk is about the BIOS and what his current company is doing to effectively circumvent the BIOS slash UEFI. What? Because he is a guy who comes from, again, from the Sun era where operating systems and hardware were married together. Computers were products top to bottom where the OS was made to support the hardware, not an OS that was made.

independent of hardware, you know, that could be run portably on whatever. And that's, they are, they are trying to swing back in that direction where the OS is the only arbiter of what happens on the hardware. I'm not sure about that one, Brad. Yeah, it's a philosophical thing that you could certainly debate the pros and cons of. But anyway, in that talk, he goes into a lot of history about CPM and early Microsoft stuff and how the BIOS came about and the compact thing.

and all kinds of stuff. It's fascinating. I would watch that. We'll get into that later. Well, okay. So anyway, I, um, let's see, I hosted the talkovers for the CS keynotes on Monday for PC world. So I watched Intel. And NVIDIA Part 2 and AMD's two-hour death march. Yikes. Yikes, I said.

Look, we'll talk about it. Who had the death march? AMD AMD was the intro keynote for CS. And there are some requirements for things. They have to bring in partners from every aspect of the show. And that includes like health care and also. But it was just. They said the word AI 207 times by my count. Did you have a clicker? I did.

Nice. I put a, I put a, I stopped my pedal every time that Dr. Lisa Su said AI. Great. And the number went up on the screen because of a little Linux script I wrote. Of those three, was there anything actually consumer facing at all? So, okay. Intel announced Panther Lake, which is shipping soon. That matters to real regular people. Yeah. The big takeaways, they didn't really get into the hardware a whole lot.

They didn't have any like demo. They didn't have like partner hardware on the stage. It was a relatively short talk. But they had, they announced a handheld game console initiative, you know, all of the stream deck.

sorry, Steam Deck, and the AMD X2 chips designed for handheld games, handheld PC consoles. Yeah, we should remind people Panther Lake is the... first part on 18a their new fab process their first like new super efficient tsmc competitor supposedly it's a competitor with tsmc's four nanometer processes and beyond so uh and and it's laptop only this is not

relevant to desktop, although presumably Nova Lake, the next desktop part will descend from this in some fashion. I think it's laptop only asterisk in the same way that like Strix Halo is laptop only. So the thing about this is that it scales across a wide variety of product SKUs. We talked about it a little bit when Adam was on the show earlier last year, but they have.

You know, it's a system of chips is what they're calling an SOC now. And it's like a core low power IO chip, some big high power compute cores, and then a variable speed GPU core that uses. I think they're calling it a third generation, but it's actually technically a second. It's a Battlemage core GP with up to 12 GPU cores, which is a lot for mobile.

And that puts it when paired with a giant pool of memory, puts it in the kind of Strix Halo category is what they're saying. The kind of early benchmarks that people ran on the floor because they were letting people do that look really promising.

um especially for that 12 core gpu part remains to be seen like what how much availability they're going to have when that stuff's going to ship because i think that that's not one of the first parts of shipping but that that part was all really unclear um That's cool. That seems like maybe a big deal. Obviously, handhelds are getting huge. It would be pretty interesting if Intel became a player in that space successfully.

Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting about the Intel one versus the Ryzen, because Ryzen has been doing, you know, disaggregated chip designs for a while now with AMD has. And the interesting thing is that. Most of their compute is on one chiplet inside that package. So they don't theoretically have the stuttering and the kind of scheduling problems that the Ryzen's have, especially the dual CCD Ryzen's have.

when you're trying to move threads from one part of the package, from one chiplet to another chiplet, basically, inside the package. So anyway, TBD, we'll get hardware there soon and have benchmarks, and we'll talk about that over at PC World, I'm sure. But, but yeah, so that was, that was the Intel thing was interesting. It was pretty fast. They said AI, I think 50 times, 47 times by my count.

It's pretty low, lower than the other guys. Yeah. It was a shorter keynote, but they were, they were on the same pace, basically AMD and Intel. So not sorry to keep preventing you from moving on. No news about arrow leak refresh. Huh? I wonder if that's even still happening or not.

No news about Arrow Lake Refresh. No news about Nova Lake, which is the desktop 18A part. Yeah, Nova Lake is the actual next desktop part. But there were rumors last fall that they were going to do another round of Arrow Lake this spring.

modest bump to you know whatever core clocks and who knows what else but i wonder if that's even still happening or not we'll talk about that in a little bit the the weird thing i've been hearing rumor wise from a bunch of people is that we might see older DDR4 parts make a resurgence because of the rise of memory DDR5 prices in the last two months, three months.

there are people posting shots of DDR for memory on our discord now. Yeah. Cause that's what they're buying. Cause that's what there is. We'll talk about it in a minute. AMD. So AMD had the main key. So. NVIDIA, Jensen also did an NVIDIA keynote that was the typical, hey, we're going to talk about AI a bunch and get the stock price to go up. They had some robots and stuff there. They had some other, like the self-driving, they have a self-driving car partnership with Mercedes.

where they have instrumented cars like the Waymos and the Zooxes and all that driving around downtown San Francisco right now. Wait, does that mean NVIDIA is doing the AV part themselves, the autonomy? Like, are they devising their own self-driving algorithms or stack?

I don't know. I don't know what the division of labor is on that. All I know is that when you look at it, there's a big giant disclaimer on the side. I took a photo of it. It was so weird. I'll send it. You can be show art. But it literally says this is a partnership between Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA.

for a self-driving car prospect. And by standing in the street, you're consenting to have your photo taken. If you don't want that, you can email this address and they'll take your photos out of the pool. Interesting. Okay. Anyway.

So that's really interesting how NVIDIA is just becoming such a household word because it's so valuable. Because it's an enormous company, yeah. Like people who had no reason to know what NVIDIA was five years ago in my life just randomly mention it now. Let me tell you. The people who watch CES live streams are very enthusiastic about NVIDIA remembering their roots. I can see it. And supporting the gaming market. Yeah, I would be too. Yeah.

So Jensen did that keynote actually before the Intel one. We skipped that because those are usually a death march for consumer hardware and not particularly worth watching. But they did a Nintendo Direct style. stream uh that was pre-recorded uh later that night they'll talk about in a sec that's smart actually just from a from a kind of audience or gamer relations standpoint let's say like it was smarter than to just break that out and put it somewhere else

It's a huge, huge win because they got a lot of attention on that. And it's a thing that they've been doing for a little bit. I don't think a lot of people know about. And, you know, it was 30 minutes. It was dense with stuff that I was actually interested in.

They showed off footage from a handful of new games that are part of the GeForce experience program or whatever. Yeah, I saw some of that Resident Evil 9 footage going around. It was Resident Evil 9. They showed the IO Interactive James Bond game more than I'd seen anywhere else, I think.

and a couple other things, some stuff out of China that looked cool. And then what we're talking about, let's just go into it. They also announced the G-Sync Pulsar stuff, which we've heard rumors about for a while. it's basically black frame insertion g-sync is a kind of an oversimplification um but the idea is that instead of having

The glow decay over time, you flash the correct image on for the time that it's correct and then flash off, like actively turn that off and then flash on. They've been working on it for a long time. They weren't able to get it to work without Flickr. until they got above a certain refresh rate it seems like and it seems like they're targeting um 60 to 70 frames per second for the insertion for the minimum insertion frame rate because they need to have

They need to have some time in between the frames for it to go. We should say black frame insertion is one method of reducing motion blur on modern displays like OLEDs in particular. Yeah, and I think these initial wave of panels aren't OLEDs. I think they're IPS panels. Yeah, I'm sure it works just as well with LCDs. I think LG OLEDs were where that feature first started popping up, but I think it works on any kind of low-persistence display.

It's really weird. Oh, they're IPS panels, yeah. And they're launched with like three or four IPS 27-inch panels. My guess is that they're all the same panel, all basically the same hardware, just with different trim. But I don't know that for sure. Sorry, really quick. I have to correct myself. Low persistence is the opposite of what you need for this sort of thing. Yeah, you want it to turn on and off quickly. OK, so the other thing that came out on the G-Sync front.

front is that media tech that makes a company makes a lot of monitor controllers is now making g-sync compatible controllers for monitors interesting okay i think my tv has a media tech soc in it for example exactly um it should open up g-sync to a lot more monitors the interesting thing about the pulsar thing is it seems like now there's like three tiers of g-sync because you had g-sync before and then you had g-sync compatible with free sync monitors and you had just normal vrr

And now these Pulsar monitors are going to be probably above that because they require some special panels basically to work is my understanding. Okay. Do you know if this might be getting in the weeds technically, but is it the... Are the frames just being inserted by the monitor itself? Like, does this require any intervention on the part of the game or the graphics card? Or does this just work purely on the monitor? So they haven't released a white paper yet. I think it's coming.

typically g-sync stuff is a conversation between the monitor and the panel and the and the card so this might be newer graphics cards only or something like that my guess is typically the g-sync stuff they'll everything like Everything is support. Typically, that doesn't have a level of support. My guess is in order to use this, you can have a certain amount of performance and that's probably going to be your gate. So I don't know for sure. Okay. The other thing that they announced was, well.

G-Sync they're putting brightness sensors like ambient light sensors and monitors now The pulsar monitors all have this so that you get the same kind of dimming and dim rooms and brightening and bright rooms and matching the color temperature of your ambient light potentially even like a very apple like feature to take to a gaming monitor but okay

Yeah, it's like it's one of those things that like I was looking to say I was like, oh, my phone and laptop have done this for a decade. Right. Like that's kind of nice. Yeah, it's not a bad thing. Like ambient color temperature. I don't think I want, but the ambient brightness sounds pretty good, actually.

Especially when you're talking about HDR monitors that get kind of bright. Because one of the other things that came out of CS, not on the PC space, but on TVs, like a lot of companies are announcing 4,500 net monitors now. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot. Extreme high end, but still. Dude, what the, my TV is somewhere between like 1500 and 2000 and I can't, I almost can't look at it at the max brightness and that's not even half of what you're talking about. Yeah.

So that's coming. Let's see, GeForce Now for Linux. They released a Steam Deck client a few months ago, and now they're doing just a generic Linux client that we'll work with. It's launching on Ubuntu. We'll come to other distroses as they expand the beta. Is there an advantage to the standalone client? I would think that stuff would all just be web-based these days, but I mean, I guess you could build better.

i don't know hardware acceleration support into a client than a browser can do etc yeah so you get better hardware acceleration you get support for more controller types one of the things they're talking about is adding support for hotasses and stuff like that or i assume wheels will probably come after that

Is it interesting? I mean, you live in the Linux world more than I do these days to see software that is like distro specifically compatible. Is that common? That's pretty normal. Yeah. If you look at like discord and slack and stuff like a notion. They all ship Ubuntu packages. And then what people do is they unpack those and repackage them for distro, like in AUR or whatever. Yep. Of course.

So yeah, that's it for that. Then the AMD keynote was two hours long. The only thing of interest there, they released and announced the 9850X3D, which is a 7% speed bump on the 9800X3D. That's the eight core single CCD with huge V-cache Ryzen chip. They didn't talk about that at the keynote at all. It was literally two hours of hell. They did announce a Strix Halo, the Ryzen AI Halo box, which is like a Mac Studio size kind of box, like a two and a half liter maybe thing.

that has a Strix Halo, the new Strix Halo bump in it that's like a little, they called it an AI compute box basically. Yeah, I saw that thing and I thought it looked pretty interesting until I clicked through and realized it. is basically for AI development is how they're positioning it, I think. Yes. So one of the things that's happened over the last year, and the reason Strix Halo is interesting, is what is typically a detriment.

for these for like small form factor and integrated graphics machines which is that they have to use slow ass ddr5 system memory is actually a real bonus for AI because it means you can run 128 gigabytes of slow-ass DDR5 memory, which lets you load a greater than 32 gigabyte model into RAM, which means it'll actually run and be functional.

So, yeah, it's more AI bullshit. When you say slow ass, are we talking like 4,800 MTs, like kind of the Jetic DDR5? No, no, no. I just mean slow compared to like GDDR7 VRAM. On card, on card, faster, yes. Yeah, so if you're playing games, then running an integrated GPU with slow DDR5 versus GDDR7, you're getting much less. fill rate and much less much less memory bandwidth but on ai workloads that is much less important than just having a whole shitload of ram so um

So that was pretty much it. Literally the AMD when they had people from OpenAI and they had a bunch of other AI model places. They had a place that was doing 3D worlds that looked like complete bullshit. They had a place that was doing video generation. that looked like complete bullshit. They had a place, they had some healthcare stuff.

The open AI guy came on and was like, hey, you know what people love to do is ask Chad GPT about child rearing questions, baby questions. And I was like, that sounds like a good way to end up in the hospital. So don't do that. It sure does. maybe less fragile things than your infant child just to test out AI on. The interesting thing was the comments on the chat, and this was on the PC world chat, not on the AMD chat, but the comments on the PC world chat were.

Just overwhelmingly negative. I appreciate everybody who stuck through that with us because it was nice to have the company. It's going to say that sounds like a rough talk over. It was it was like if I I understood.

You know, you hear those stories about wolves that chew their own legs off to escape a trap. Uh-huh. Yeah, I understand that now. Woof. Okay, so let's get to something I'm super duper crazy excited about. Okay.

We like those. The Lego smart bricks slash smart play initiative. Smart Legos. It's so fucking cool, dude. So there are three components of this thing. There's smart bricks, which is like a. a little two by four brick height, normal ass brick with sensors and logic and like positional tracking for NFC or some sort of contactless sensor.

radios, speakers, lights, all that kind of stuff. The top is transparent, so you can see through it and lights can shine on the top in different configurations. And the next component are smart tags. And smart tags and smart minifigs are the last two components. They kind of sound like the same thing. They're just trackable. uh little little little guys that the smart bricks can track and be aware of both their position in 3d space and like proximity to other things and stuff like that

Those tags in the minifigs contain code that determines what happens when they interact with other items. So one of the things they showed was a game where you had like little cars and the person who. got the car closest to a trophy that had the smart brick in it, won. And the device could tell which, it would show the color of the car on the smart brick.

that got closest to the trophy when you're rolling them from across the table, stuff like that. It kind of looks like what they do with those... with those Super Mario Brothers games, the Lego Super Mario Brothers games that they do. I think that mostly works through barcodes and stuff like that, but it seems like they built an expansion of that concept that's user programmable.

And the upshot is because the bricks have compute and the tags are trackable and the bricks can talk to each other too. So if you have one smart brick, it works with the tags. But if you have multiple smart bricks, they can talk to each other.

to the point that like that one of the, one of the kits they showed was a star Wars kit that had an X-wing and a tie fighter in it. And like the kids were flying around when the tie fighter aimed at the X-wing, it would make pew, pew, pew noises and vice versa. And, and like,

Some of this is a bummer because it's like taking out the play for the kids. Sure, yeah, I can see that. But the idea that you can write code, dump it on one of these tags with your phone, and then have that code... have hooked that to a Lego build and make that Lego do something interesting when it's in the right proximity to other stuff or the smart bricks or whatever is really, really exciting to me about this.

I watched the, I'm surprised they didn't put out a presentation of this themselves. I mean, that's not what CES is for. The best one I could find or the one you linked was the best one I saw, which is a pretty off angle shot of a screen. Yeah.

It was kind of hard to see the Legos actually lighting up or changing colors the way the guy was describing. But like the very most basic expression of this was like two Legos that were programmed to change colors across the RGB spectrum depending on their distance. So you could just kind of. move them closer and farther away and they would change colors. One of the other demos I saw somebody talk about on Blue Sky was making like a xylophone. Okay, sure.

I think the bricks were in the hands and you put the tags on the top of the devices. And when the bricks got close to the tags, then it would bong the right sound. It's neat. I think the one place I mean. I guess I'm having a hard time conceptualizing the part where these things need to move around in order to change state. Yeah. There's not a lot of like mechanized Lego stuff that I'm aware of. So this is basically just you manually.

moving blocks around to make things happen i guess is that correct a part of it is yeah there's there's a fair amount like there's a lot of adult lego that has motors okay for example like gina has a train set that has a trolley car that has a motor in it that

can toodle around the tracks. Okay. See, I'm, I am way behind on what the Lego product lineup is like these days. Well, but I think the interesting thing to me is that it doesn't require that stuff because that stuff's kind of expensive. Like when you start motorizing your Lego, you get into real money real fast. For me, this is interesting because I saw a Unity developer, Scott Anderson, was on Blue Sky talking about just running Johan Sebastian Joust on bricks alone. Sure. Right.

Like that becomes a thing that you just play the music and here's the music. And then when the music stops, you have to stop moving. And if it doesn't, then your your one makes the bad sound kicked out of the game. Sure, sure. I guess I'm thinking too small or too rigidly. We're talking about divorcing the blocks from the standard rigid single Lego constructs, right? You're talking about loose blocks moving around in a room and that kind of thing.

So there have been a bunch of toys that kind of have similar behavior. There's this thing called Little Bits that has like a series of sensors and a series of... motors and actuators and servos and solenoids and stuff like that. You can kind of hook up with magnetic. They have like, they have point to point magnetic clips that are almost like pogo pins that can snap onto each other.

But those, the sensors, like those in order to build a bunch of sensors, you have to have a bunch of those units. It's not like this thing where all the sensors are jammed into this one standard size two by four. Lego brick, right? And I think that's the... That and the fact that Lego is really ubiquitous makes it interesting to me, right? The idea that you could have...

Say like one of the things they showed was a smart tag that they suggested that you could put a smart tag on your brother and have an alarm go off when he gets near your bedroom door. Right. Yeah, that is.

I mean, I didn't have a brother, but that still immediately makes me eight years old again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you want to build like if you wanted to use this to build an alarm system for your for your bedroom as a kid, that's a totally doable thing. Yes. Yes. Add that to your home alone immersive sim.

and it kind of it i hope i my hope i don't know what the pricing is on this stuff yet but my hope is that it will fill the gap between the the lego robotics stuff and like the base lego toys so yeah just just reiterate now that you have

Again, I was envisioning this as like, oh, these are all supposed to be used on one Lego play set, but that's a rigid block based thing. How do these work? And I see these are much more like you're taking these Lego blocks into the real world and making things happen there.

They're also putting them on Lego play sets. To be clear, one of the play sets is like Rock'em Sock'em robots with Luke and Darth Vader fighting each other with laser swords in the Emperor's Throne room from Return of the Jedi. One person stands on one side and you can kind of control the guy. The guys are on little sticks. So when their lightsabers touch, then it makes a lightsaber noises for the appropriate ones.

stuff like that so did any of these have batteries in them i wonder yeah so the the smart bricks have batteries the tags and the smart minifigs don't right um the smart bricks i think they said 45 minutes of play on a single charge if you go at it really hard you kind of shake it to wake it up just like your 8-bit dough Switch 2 controller. And...

They turn off. They seem to be aggressively power saving is what the people I saw who experienced on the show floor said. And they come with a charger. That's a contactless charger. You just set them on for a few minutes to charge them back up. That sounds neat. It sounds it sounds like. Phenomenally cool. And I talked about Johann Sebastian Joust. For people who don't know what Johann Sebastian Joust is, it's a game. It was part of that Super Friends.

PS4 bundle years and years ago. Yeah, they did it with PlayStation Move controllers there, I think. Yeah, but for a long time, it was a staple of the indie game show circuit. And you play it by holding a PlayStation Move controller in each hand and they play music. It's hooked up to a computer laptop that plays music over like a Bluetooth speaker or something.

And when the music is going fast, you can move fast. When the music stops, you have to freeze or not move your hand. You can move the rest of your body if you want. And as soon as you move your body while the music stops, you get kicked out of the game. So what ends up happening is... Being able to build this on Lego so it's just using bricks that you hold is super fascinating and opens the door for all sorts of weird experiments. Anyway.

Definitely worth watching the video. It's on a channel called Bricks by... Bricks by... Hold on. It's loading slowly. Build with Peter is the name of the channel.

Okay. Yeah, I'll just put our whole note stock up with this episode so people can get that link. Perfect. Next one is Solid State Batteries. Yeah. This is rad. Yes. Yes. This stuff sounds... I don't want to say it almost too good to be true. I mean, I looked into this just enough to know that the tech has existed for like 150 years in concept. It's just that it's never been quite

massage to the point that it's useful for consumer applications, but it sounds like somebody might have finally gotten there. Yeah. So the TLDR on solid state batteries is that instead of a liquid electrolyte, like we've used in pretty much every battery you've ever used. you use a solid component, which means the energy density is higher and theoretically the kind of life cycle of the batteries should be a lot better. Sounds like also a lot less prone to fire.

related incidents they're much less likely to build up hydrogen and then explode um the down the problem has always been this thing called the dendrite problem which uh is basically like Little little they I think they're called dendrites because they look like dendrites in your brain Because they make little conductive

paths from the anodes to the cathodes inside the batteries like tiny little spurs that form in there effectively and it shorts out the battery basically rendering it useless in a relatively low number of cycles traditionally So this company called Donut Labs, which is a great name for a company, has said they've said they've cracked the chemistry of the problem. And they're selling the batteries to this company called Verge Motorcycles, not related to the website.

And a friend of the show, Robbie Baldwin over at SAE Labs wrote about this. It's basically a solid electrolyte battery. It charges in about 10 minutes for the motorcycle. And the verge motorcycles saying the battery will last for 10,000 charge cycles. The battery people are saying it's good for a hundred K probably, which would be like multiple motorcycle lifetimes in my.

It seems like a lot of charge cycles. It sure does. I thought 10,000 sounded a little low until I saw that apparently it's about 1,500 cycles for traditional lithium ion. So traditional lithium ion in consumer electronics is typically 1,500 charge cycle rating. Okay. Like a phone. Car batteries work a little bit differently than that, so they're potentially higher. Okay.

And since they have more storage, you can afford to lose a little bit more than you would. But the point is, 10K charge cycles is pretty amazing. And they don't use rare earths that are only mined in China right now. which is also a bonus. Do you have any idea why vehicles seem to be the first venue for solid state batteries to be deployed? Is it a size thing? Is it like, hey, these still can, let me rephrase this. These cannot be miniaturized enough to put them in consumer electronics yet.

I think that the benefits for vehicles are much greater than the benefits for phones. Okay. Actually, maybe I should clarify. Is this mainly a charge speed improvement? Charge speed and capacity per weight. The reason the motorcycle people like it is because you get the same amount of capacity and a much lower weight, which also has the knock-on effect of increasing your range. Oh, we're talking weight, not volume. Or not mass, rather. Well, mass, weight, same thing.

Point being, you're not necessarily going to be a lot smaller. I don't know about the volume. I know that the mass is lower for the same amount of charge capacity. Because of that, you're getting... Like there's two things that decrease your range, right? The amount of charge your battery holds and the weight that you're having to haul around. So reducing weight on one of the heavier items that's part of the motorcycle will increase the range commensurate amount as well.

My assumption, the Donut Labs people, I think there was a Verge article about this too, and the Donut Labs people seem to be optimistic that it's going to come to everything. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, it seems like a unilateral improvement for every use case where you would use a battery eventually. It seems like stuff like whole house battery storage and municipal battery storage, there's huge gains.

to be had by something that has a longer life cycle for bigger capacity for bigger capital investments. Yeah. I mean, that's even greener for a phone, you know, like that would. theoretically allow you to keep a phone for much much longer of course i mean other other advancements and obsolescence might force an upgrade anyway but yeah whereas your whole house battery you upgrade much less frequently right um

Okay, so that's Donut Labs and Verge Motorcycles. We have Lenovo's repairable ThinkPad. Yeah, is this literally just framework is making enough waves that other people are getting in now? I think this is not upgradable, just to be clear. Okay. So they're not committing to shipping new hardware that you can buy and put it into this thing. Got it. What they have done is made a laptop that you can...

That it's designed so that a normal human can open it up and replace components. So in other words, it's exactly what laptops used to be 20 years ago. it's what it's what think pads were as recently as 10 years ago yeah when you remember when you could just open up your laptop and replace parts in it except except they still solder on the ram yep but like the daughter boards for the usb ports which is one of the like they looked at

what they were doing and if they could do a little bit more to make the parts that fail most often more easily repairable. So you can swap out the keyboard really easily. You can swap out the USB port. daughterboards really easily. You can pop the battery out, stuff like that.

I wonder what the impetus for this is because, you know, the cynical conventional wisdom is that the less repairable it is, the more likely you are to just have to buy another laptop, which is probably what they would prefer. But is this a right to repair thing or? Well, I mean, right to prepare is important. Lenovo is generally pretty progressive about this stuff. I would say it's probably the market for this particular ThinkPad. The X1 is really popular with nerds. Yes.

Probably more than anything else when I see people talking about Linux laptops, the wisdom is just go get a ThinkPad. It's ThinkPad or System76 or Framework are the... the ones that are doing really good support where if you're not if you're not like system 76 and framework or for the ultra ultra yeah or nerds well and system 76 tends to lag a little bit in hardware i think their newest machine is still an arrow like machine or something like that

So anyway, so I thought that was interesting. It's good. Adam posted a good video that shows like he field strips it. It's also simple stuff like them labeling the screws inside. so that you don't have to have a repair manual to know which screws have to unscrew to take out each individual component, stuff like that. Let's see. HP put a keyboard in a, sorry, a computer in a keyboard. Yeah.

This is kind of similar to the Raspberry Pi 400, 500, that whole series of Raspberry Pi and a keyboard type stuff. Or frankly, it's what computers were. at the dawn of home computing right well except for it's like a little low profile keyboard it's like not a big chunky boy right but same concept of the the keyboard and the computer are the same unit yeah this one is um it's an amd kraken point which is uh what

Kraken? They're just making things up now. Look, all words are made up from a certain level. Fair. It's basically Ryzen AI 5 350 to Ryzen AI 7 370 Pros. So they're like mid-range mobile parts, basically. I wonder what the market is for this or who they're positioning this for.

well think about think about like a uh i i was thinking about like hospitals when you go into a hospital room and they have that they usually have a little knuck size machine smacked onto some sort of post with a monitor and a keyboard what if it's just the keyboard right or just very very light office needs that kind of thing but i mean look this should be as capable as a laptop yeah right yeah that's cool and imagine imagine a world where

Instead of being issued a laptop at work, they just give you a keyboard and you take that and plug that in at home. You plug it in at work, whatever. I mean, that is tweaking my TV VCR combo hangups a little bit of like the keyboard craps out and suddenly your computer is useless.

Well, but if you're in a corporate environment, you just get another keyboard in that case. And also, I'm sure these things are probably relatively cheap. So, yeah, they're like, they're not like they're nice mechanical keyboards. They're still, you know.

They're keyboard-ass keyboards. Yeah, like this is not a place I live in terms of computing needs, but I think this is kind of an increasingly super interesting category because compute is getting so... significant and also miniaturized or it's becoming vanishingly small at this point, you know, like you can just hide it places now, like the idea of, you know, watching the business machine shrink over time, I guess is what I'm saying is kind of fascinating to watch.

There's a good video from Antonio at The Verge over on TikTok of this. It's linked in the story that's in our notes. Yeah, that's cool. Shout out to Antonio. He did good stuff at CBS this year. Let's see, we got... uh corsair put a stream deck in a gaming keyboard which is like the most obvious thing in the world speaking of uh yes sure i i'm

I like to choose my gaming keyboard really thoughtfully, and I like having a Stream Deck separately on my desk, but I understand why people would want this. Yeah, sure.

350 bucks so it's kind of a little bit you maybe save a couple of bucks there maybe maybe of course yeah corsair elgato stuff kind of pricey i was gonna say speaking of tv vcr stuff yeah keyboard and your stream deck in one unit i mean not that either of those is super likely to die but the the thing that's happened in the last couple years with the stream deck stuff is that it's kind of taken over a lot of the production work like you look at you look at

people doing not just twitch streamers but people doing like video production and stuff like that and like they have a rack mount button box now that goes into your av rack and you can use to turn on all your stuff and do all your business and it integrates with all your other stuff so like i i get it it makes sense for a production like if you're sitting on a production machine in a in a control room it makes a lot of sense and i think it's three dials a touch bar

And nine nine or 12 keys. I can't remember exactly. 12, 12 buttons, two, two, two dials, two dials, 12 buttons. Yeah. So yeah, let's, you know. $150 worth of Stream Deck plus $150 worth of keyboard, I guess. Segway announced eBikes. Segway's been around. This is like the Segway, right?

This is the segue. Yeah, the one's going to change the world. We're going to redesign our cities around this thing. How did they refer to that thing before it was announced when the hype was at its peak? Weren't they calling it it? Oh, it had a woman's name. Oh, I thought people were like, for a while, weren't some like tech magnates that had seen it? Like maybe Steve Jobs?

or people like that. I thought people were just calling it It. No, no, no. It had a name. Well, it may have also had a name, but I'd swear there was a phase in that cycle where they were just referring to it as It. Was it Karen? No. Too soon. No, it was... God, we used to make fun of it at Maximum PC a lot. When was that? 2001? 2001 is when the first one came out. Yeah, we started getting...

They started trying to sneak it into tech magazines earlier in that. They were very excited about it. But it's owned by Ninebot, I think, now. Good on them. They stuck around. It wasn't all hype. apparently yeah i mean look those personal the people mover things they sell a lot of like suitcase size things now that you kind of stand on and they'll kind of roll you along on a single wheel

Yeah, sometimes I see groups like tour groups in Golden Gate Park. They seem to rent these out to tourists and that sort of thing. I've done that through Pacifica. They called it Ginger was the code name. Oh, right. Yes. Okay. So, yeah. So, the Segway announced a couple of e-bikes.

uh 80 mile an hour range they have like turn signals and you can get rear-facing radar and stuff like that if you don't want to look over your shoulder but 80 mile 80 mile range sounds pretty good for an e-bike i could use that to commute to work hang on two grand i'm looking

This is a very ignorant question. It's hard to tell from these product shots. These things still have pedals, right? Yeah, that still has pedals. Okay. They're just not very prominent on here. Yeah, if you look at the second shot, you can see it. It's just straight forward and back. Yeah, I see it now. And they, like, two grand is, I mean, look, I'm old enough that I remember when a bicycle costs like 100 bucks. Uh-huh.

But when you look at a nice bicycle costing $1,500 now that doesn't go for you, this seems nice to be able to go up hills and stuff. I assume the range quoted is purely on the battery. That's not counting any human locomotion. Also, do those things pick up any charge off of pedaling at all? Some of them do, some of them don't. I don't know about this one in particular.

But typically you charge going downhills. Okay. Just like an electric car. Sure. Anker. makers of battery backups for your phone that sometimes explode recently. I was going to say, recent events maybe don't inspire a lot of confidence in this next item, but...

I had one of those. I sent them a note. They were like, hey, take it here to dispose of it. We'll send you a new one. And they sent me a new one. Okay. All right. No complaints. Better than not sending you a new one or saying anything about it. Yeah. They're moving into whole home batteries. Okay. So like that seems it's that's good because right now the market leader in that is Tesla, which I'm not interested in participating in. Sure. Same.

But looking at the price of power at peak versus off peak times here, it seems like you could kind of arbitrage your way into paying for that in like two years at the outside. Oh, wow. Okay. I wish I had made a note of this. I saw a headline. passed over it. I don't think it came out of CES, but about portable solar is apparently becoming cheap and ubiquitous enough that people are starting to use it in apartments quite a bit.

Yeah, it's really popular. And I think Germany is where I read. Okay. I would believe that like people with balconies in particular, you know, any kind of surface outside in an apartment, you can. Put a thing on. Yeah. The idea is you buy four or $500 worth of panels and hang them off your balcony facing south and then just plug that into the wall. And and you.

you get electricity from the sun that you don't have to pay for, which sounds nice. Yeah, it sure does. Maybe I should just do that in my backyard. You should. 8-Bit Doe announced the Ultimate 3E, which is an Xbox controller with swappable X, B, A, Y buttons. Okay, because they have the Pro 3 is out, but the Ultimate 2 was, we've been talking about this.

company a fair amount recently for whatever reason so it's interesting to see this they have the this one has the tmr joysticks which are like the next stage tunneling magneto resistance yep that's the one that's short for What exactly is the utility of the swappable face buttons though? Is it purely for the, not aesthetics, not the right word here, but purely for the visual cue of which letter is, is which button?

I think so. That would be my guess. Was that basically swapping A and B between Switch and Xbox, for example? That's kind of the feeling I get. My guess is that they'll also probably sell or you could 3D print additional buttons if you wanted. Yeah.

I'm worried that the swappability would change the mechanical feel of the button a little bit, but maybe I'm sure they've thought that through. I don't know. I'm sure they'll send us one if you want to test it out and see what you think. Sure. They're generally pretty good at... I've been...

Of all the third-party controllers I've ever used, the 8-bit 2 ones are the ones that I've been most consistently impressed by. People love them, for sure. I don't know that this is a pretty low-impact feature for me, but it's interesting. It looks like it has pogo pins and the buttons are in a pad and then you can kind of swap them out. They also have, oh wow, it says it contains two interchangeable button modules, one with squishy silicone membrane buttons.

And one with clicky microswitches. Interesting. Okay, so that's wild. That's getting a little more interesting then. Yeah. Silicone buttons. Silicone face buttons. Wow. Well, the silicone pads are always in there because it's like when you take a controller, that's always silicone. Yeah, the underneath part. Yes. Yeah. But the microcontroller, that sounds interesting.

A small company called Seattle Ultrasonics invented Star Wars Vibroblades. Okay. So this is a chef's knife that vibrates ultrasonically and... I saw multiple people talking about this. I think we linked to The Verge here. No, we didn't. But Sean Hollister at The Verge said it was like the knife just fell through a tomato. Yikes. Yeah.

That sounds very cool, but also a little frightening. I just want a katana. That's all I'm asking for. Wow. They've got a picture of cutting through some French bread that I have to assume is pretty crumbly enough. The crust is... flying everywhere enough to assume that it's a pretty crumbly, uh, what in the world? This is a little frightening. Yeah. This seems like you'd really mess yourself up with it. I, yeah. I mean, just, just to be clear, the video you're talking about is a,

cutting through bread with a chef's knife without sawing. Yeah. Now they're holding up some green onions and in the air, not against the surface and just like waving the knife at the green onions and they are, and it's shearing them right off. This thing looks. This is mesmerizing, actually. Yeah. The scaling of the fish? I started to say I kind of want one of these. It's a $400 knife, though, so I don't know.

Look, 400 bucks isn't a ton for a good chef's knife. Also, I've never cut myself that badly chopping things, but I have done it a few times enough that this might be a little scary. This looks like it might go straight through everything. You might just come back with a stump. Yeah, I wonder if.

I wonder if like working trained chefs are interested in something like this. I don't know. I bet like most of the chefs I've known are either really pro or really anti technologies. There's not a lot in between. And my guess is that when you come into the kitchen with this knife, everybody's going to gather around for a minute and they're going to be very device. It's going to be very divisive. Okay. There's part of this demo where.

I was confused what was going on because they're sort of like grazing a sliced tomato with it. You're making the steam come off of it. Yeah. So it looked like I thought that was like, I was like, what is smoking there? What is going on there? And then, yes, I realized what was actually happening. That tomato vapes, man. Yeah, I don't know. I'm interested. Like you said, 400 bucks. That's high, but it's less than a really nice chef's knife, as much as a nice chef's knife, I would say.

It has a USB-C charged, we should say. I don't know that I need more charging things in my life. Especially a knife. It has a wireless charging tile that you can hook, I assume, hook into your knife block or something. Yep. Pebble. Remember Pebble? I do. The first wearable company, the first smartwatch company. Yeah. Didn't they get bought by somebody? They got bought by Google. Right. Last year, Google open sourced the original Pebble OS. That's cool.

And the original Pebble co-founder, one of them, Eric Migikofsky, is back with a company called Core Devices, I think. And they announced the Pebble round two. which is a smartwatch with like a two week battery and buttons and color and all that stuff. It looks really good. Wait, is this a Google affiliated? How do they have the Pebble name?

So I think that they bought it back or it was given up when he left Google. Probably. That's cool. The website is re pebble.com. It's pretty nice. It's 200 bucks. It looks good. Yeah. As well. I'm not seeing a lot of side views because I find that as an avid Apple watch user, I find like the thickness of the smartwatch to be probably the biggest drawback. And this looks like it might be thinner than that. The benefit of the ink.

I don't know if they're still doing e-ink. I guess it looks like an LCD now. This says e-paper on the specs. I don't know if that's a distinction to be made or not. Yeah, so the e-paper screen, it uses less power, so it needs less battery. Right. But they are doing that.

suspicious two-thirds picture of all of it. I don't know, man. It looks pretty small compared to a modern Apple watch. That's a pretty nice-looking watch, actually. Yeah, it's definitely got the round bezel kind of to trick you a little bit, but that's fine. 200 bucks. It's out. You can order it now. All right. I loved my first gen Pebble in 2015. That thing ripped.

uh the hyperspace trackpad pro this is a kickstarter product that's now shipping oh um i'm sure adam is excited no he's a trackball guy oh oh that's right he's trackball not he's a weirdo

We don't talk about trackballs on this podcast, sir. Yes, okay. I'm fine with that policy. It's got the haptics. It's just like your magic trackpad on your MacBook or one of those. So this is basically just an Apple competitor? It's basically, hey, we wanted to make the Apple trackpad for Windows users. Yeah. It's $129. I was not familiar with Hyper as a company until I bought that NVMe enclosure from them last month.

around Black Friday. That thing is extremely, that's like the nicest enclosure I can imagine. I think they do docks and hubs is where I first saw them. Yeah, with a single data point, I can say the one hyper thing I have bought seems quite nice. There you go. um you know it seems like they're good at manufacturing is the takeaway i have um see i think that's that's the stuff that was good that i thought was cool or interesting

There's some stuff that nobody's talking about, from what I can tell. Price of memory being number one. Nobody's like, oh yeah, laptops are going to cost $6,000 this year. I guess there's not, I mean, they could do some messaging. I started to say there's not a whole lot for them to say, but obviously like in interviews and stuff, they could message the problem. Let's try to allay some concerns, but.

On the other hand, there's probably no good news to relay about it, right? No, it's all bad. What the memory and storage situation will do to PC and component prices also kind of off the radar, except. Nvidia is selling the 3060 again for some reason. So is that real? I tried to find that. That's real. Last I looked, that was rumored, but have they confirmed that?

My understanding is that's confirmed. I could be wrong. What does that mean? Did they have supplies sitting around that they're able to just put straight into the channel? Like they can't be fabbing these things again all of a sudden, right? Well, maybe they can. They probably aren't doing 4060s because that's on TSMC4, and I bet they're constrained on those wafers.

Oh, maybe there's, I don't know what process the 3060 was on. That was 8 nanometer, wasn't it? Yeah. I know the 3080. Those apps are probably idle. Yeah, 3080 launched on Samsung 8 nanometer. So if they're still using that, maybe there's capacity just sitting around. Or the capacity they could buy, at least, so they have video cards to sell. AMD's bringing back Zen 3 CPUs, it seems like. DDR4. Do they ever go away, though? Well...

They stopped making them. Did they stop making them? Maybe there were just so many in the channel because I still would see people talking about buying them here and there. I mean, it may be that they found a warehouse full someplace and we're like, oh shit, we have 20,000 CPUs we got to unload. This is grim, man. it seems bad when two of the three major pc part makers or icy you know cpu gpu makers are dipping into okay what are we talking here zen 3 debuted late 2020 i think that seems right

And the 3060 was probably like early 2021-ish. I think it was before that. I think it was 2019 or 2020. No, because the 3080 came out at the end of 2020. Okay. I remember because it came out right around the same time as the PS5 and Series X. But the point being, we're talking about roughly five-year-old hardware being brought back prominently.

Yeah, it's grim. Seems not good. They didn't. Nobody talked about tariffs. AMD had a guy from the Trump administration on to talk about how great technology is. Cool. One more good thing I forgot. People like this. Dell's bringing back XPS as a brand. They killed XPS as a brand a few years ago. This is their performance gaming brand. Oh, right. Of course. They're bringing it back.

I mean, did they get out of the market or just change the branding? They just changed the name. They call it Delpro or something. Is this just a nostalgia play? Yeah, pretty much. All right. I mean, it's cool. It was gone for one product cycle, I think, was it.

And then the worst thing I saw out of all the stuff I looked at for CES to pull this list together was this robot that cuts your hair for you with AI. And it's not bad because the robot's bad, but the fake head that they use to do the haircut demos is a nightmare. Oh. Did you not click on this one? Oh, yeah. No, I'm looking at it. It looks like CG.

Yeah, it's not. That's a real thing. The pig, this is one of the better pictures and it's, it's a thing that you clamp onto your head and then it, it kind of gives you a, it looks like a bad fade with the robot. So I don't know. I don't know. It seems bad. I would just shave my head before I started using this. Okay, so the one big thing on TVs and monitors we didn't talk about yet too is OLED monitors are, there's a new pixel or sub-pixel arrangement. Oh.

that's actually just some meat and potatoes, useful stuff. Like that's not flashy, typical CES prototype, never come to market stuff. That's just like, for people who don't know, OLEDs don't use the same subpixel layouts typically as your classic LCDs. And all of the text anti-aliasing is typically designed around standard LCD sub-pixel layouts. Yep. So depending on the OLED you get, you get weird fringing or other artifacts on text that some people find very eye-straining and so forth.

So new QD OLED subpixel layout just dropped. This one's called vertical stripes, I think. And instead of having the subpixels in kind of a triangly shape, they're just three vertical. lines that are next to each other with the red being the long one and the blue being the small one and the tree being mid-sized presumably because of the differences in brightnesses on those on those color ranges because red would be the dentist right yeah

So they're saying it's better if it makes the text clearer on OLEDs. Who's the manufacturer on that?

LG and Samsung are both doing them right now. Oh, wow. Cool. All right. Well, maybe that just kind of fixes the problem. Asus and MSI both have monitors that are using the new layout next year. Man, I was so hot on getting a... oled pc monitor until i watched a video about burn in and i just don't think i can do it ever i uh try not to think about it too much yeah that's one option for sure they're just they're still expensive enough that if i started seeing burn in after 18 months like

Some tests indicate I might. I just don't think I could handle it emotionally. What if you just used an OS that didn't have Windows Chrome and you were just all tiling all the time? Yeah, the tiling is still a standard size, though. You're probably still going to see seams. I just, for, you know, 98% of my computer uses productivity and Windows stuff. Like I don't do a lot of gaming in here. So that would not be great. So. Samsung Display is displaying these panels to seven.

Global manufacturers, according to, I think this article is on The Verge. Okay, that's good news. I very quickly skimmed the TV roundup because TVs at CES are one of my favorite topics, but it doesn't seem like much this year. Obviously, mini LEDs and OLEDs are getting incrementally better as always, but as far as the future-looking tech, the microLED or the self-emissive quantum dots that we talked about last year, it doesn't seem like.

I think there's some more prototype stuff there from the looks of things, but it doesn't look like anything close to like shipping reasonably priced products. So the stuff I saw, the big stuff I saw, the big kind of trends I saw were that people are shipping. what was generally considered to be kind of unwise brightnesses. Like I said, up to 4,500 nits. Yeah. Eye blasters. And then the other one is that the cheap monitors and the good monitors are the gap between the cheap.

cheap tvs and the good tv and the and the good tvs seems to be closing pretty dramatically that's a good thing um yeah so i think we're going to start seeing more differentiation based on features that maybe are more more kind of transient and less

hardware specific. Sure. So anyway, TVs are weird, man. Yeah. That's the TLDR. So that's a CES. I'm sure we missed some stuff. If you had favorites that you were curious about, send them in to TechPod at contact.town, and we'll talk about them at the end of the month on the questions episode. This one was pretty good. Yeah. Bunch of terrible AI shit. Yeah, of course. But I think that's just par for the course now. Nothing like super mind-blowing, though, on any front, really. No.

I don't feel like there's not really any one everybody's talking about thing this year. Yeah, I think that those Lego bricks, I'll be curious to hear what people say who've been at the show more. I haven't talked to Adam or any of the folks from PC World who were there, but I think that Lego...

I think that Lego thing is one of those ones that seems like a kind of interesting, neat thing now. And in like 15 years, we're going to be talking about it like it was an inflection point for toys being smart. Because it's a smart way to make toys smart. Yeah. Honestly, the solid state battery shipping in an actual vehicle seems like it might be small, a small fry right now, but it seems like in terms of potential future impact, that's probably the biggest deal. 100%.

I mean, look, Dave Filoni came out for that Lego thing, though. He wasn't there for the solid state batteries. Did he have his hat on? He did. And Chewbacca was there too. Wow. Wow. You mean all the characters, they don't have to pay like an expensive actor.

It's interesting. What a coincidence. Look, Chewbacca threw his arms up and made the sound. That's all I cared about. Anytime I see Chewbacca, Chewbacca's getting a hug. That's all I'm going to say. Wait, you've hugged Chewbacca before? I've hugged Chewbacca, yeah. I have not hugged a Wookiee. Would you not hug a Wookiee? I'm not saying I wouldn't. Okay. Don't Wookiee hug shame me. If conditions were right. Okay. On that note, the conditions are right for us to wrap this episode up.

Thanks, everybody, for hanging out. Thanks for listening. We will be back next week with another episode. But before we go, it's time to encourage everybody to go. visit patreon.com slash techpot and sign up for the Patreon. When you do that, you get access to our Discord, which is full of beautiful nerds just like you who talk about stuff like CES stuff. And let's see.

insulation we had a big fence talk when my fence blew down over the break it's been it's been good times in the discord this month yeah um uh you also get access to our monthly patron exclusive episodes where we talk about I don't remember what we talked about on our patron exclusive episode last month. A lot of stuff. Yeah. The crazy San Francisco power outage and storms and UPS battery replacement and topics of interest. Other stuff that I'm forgetting.

Yeah, we talk about, usually it's stuff that's too small for a full episode, but still of interest to the audience. Small projects. Yeah, and you can, again, get access to that by going to patreon.com slash checkpod. We're listener supported, so we wouldn't be here without you all. True. We appreciate everybody who supports the show. Also true. But we especially appreciate our executive producer to your patrons. So we're going to say their name.

every week, just like we do every week, starting with Jason Lee, nextlander.net, it's .com, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Hate Machine, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so, so much. Yes, thank you.

Thank you. I just want to say I think Bunny Hate Machine is probably going through their revisiting early 90s Nine Inch Nails. Maybe late 80s Nine Inch Nails. Okay. Yes. Sure. Yes. That didn't click with me until you said it. Now, of course. Yeah. You know, the one thing we didn't say, the one word I considered saying on this thing out of CES and did not is Wi-Fi 8. Oh, you want to do a post? We can talk about Wi-Fi 8. I don't know if there's much to say.

I mean, we'll do another on it at some point. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get around to it. I just, I'm still on wifi five, but like the pre-spec hardware is shipping and, um, So there's a bunch of Wi-Fi routers that are Wi-Fi 8. They are pre-spec, which means you probably will be able to upgrade them to Wi-Fi 8 when the time comes. But really, I always assumed you were gated by the hardware on that stuff and that you might miss out on features.

No, so the hardware is final. Oh, okay. The software is still being finalized. Got it. That makes sense. Okay. I don't buy pre-release Wi-Fi stuff for pretty good reasons. I don't think I even buy early to mid-finalized Wi-Fi stuff. I always feel like buying into the tail end or close to the end of a Wi-Fi generation is usually the safe bet.

I think in the old days, when you were going from B to G to N, it made sense to get on as early as you could because those jumps were enormous. Now, unless you have a specific need to upgrade, there's very little reason to upgrade. Like, like already my wifi six stuff is faster than my upstream internet connection is. So yeah. Yeah.

I was all ready to buy a TP-Link Amada Wi-Fi 7 access point. Yeah, you mean enemies of the state TP-Link Amada? Yes, enemy of the state TP-Link. Now I'm having second thoughts. Yeah, I mean, look, they're not going to turn it off. It'll just... I guess we'll just be on a list. Yep. Cool. Well, that'll do it for us this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And as always, please consider the environment before pitching this podcast.