324: The Intel Batman

Okay, Brad, did you see the mushroom story? Okay. About the elves. I'm just gonna pull the curtain back. You messaged it to me on Discord, but as a spoilered URL. Well saying don't click on this, save it for next week, this is cold open material. In fairness,

I originally sent it without the spoiler tag and then I edited the spoiler tag in immediately because I messed up the spoiler tag. Well see here I've spent the entire last week blaming Discord's notifications or maybe maybe the Apple Watch's notifications. At any rate The URL came to my watch unspoiled. Okay, so I got I got uh let's say a little bit of a preview of whatever's going on here. But I yeah, look, five days

Especially in the Kermit climate, turns out to be plenty of time to forget everything about that interaction, so hit me. Okay. So this is from a BBC article that popped up in one of my feeds someplace and I was like, oh, this is cold open material. There's a mysterious mushroom that grows in the Yunnan province of China that when you eat it, if it has not been cooked enough.

Everyone who eats it is is hit with strikingly odd and similar symptoms, uh-huh, which is that you see visions of pint-sized people marching under doors, crawling up walls, clinging to furniture.

The hospital in the region where these mushrooms grow treats hundreds of these cases every year and uh they grow on pine trees and people forage for them and you have to cook them when you go to a hot pot place there, they set a timer for the mushrooms. A This mushroomologist, a mycologist, said, I was there, I heard about this, I went to the hot pot place, a hot pot mushroom restaurant, which like I'm gonna go ahead and tell you.

I would be in for a mushroom hot pot restaurant. Just mushrooms. Okay. But but he's like they they they set a timer and they tell you don't eat this until the timer goes off or you might see little people. Wait. Yeah. It's a selling point to not see little people?

I think generally speaking, hallucinating small people is a bad idea. I don't know. I d I mean that was gonna be my first question. Would you try it? Oh hell yeah. No, no, no. I don't I don't mean the cooked version where you're not going to see the hallucinations. I'm asking would you try I would try it. I don't think I want to see little people. Everyone This sounds like a pretty benign trip, all things considered.

I mean, look, every time I I tried mushrooms like twice in college and it went it was a incredible amount of vomiting both times. So I'm that's a bad one. Yeah, I did not react well to the mushrooms. Interesting. Um So hallucinogenic mushrooms, maybe not my favorite thing. Got it. Uh I wonder I wonder though if this is like where the Icelandic little people and all the different cultures you think these mushrooms are everywhere and people have just been hoaring them down and not realizing that

That it's making him see the little people and then this is where like elves and fairies and everything come from. I mean, can we do some forensic arc archaeology on Jonathan Swift's whole habits? Oh yeah, the Lilputians, yeah. His whole his whole eating and otherwise existing environments. Can we try to figure out what it was he was eating and perhaps perhaps there's a tangible explanation for all of this?

Well so the thing that's interesting about it is that the the the mycologist who's was is quoted in this article Literally is saying, Hey, the fact that everybody has the same exact halluciniz hallucination when they take this, when they eat these mushrooms.

Is really interesting, you know, for science. Yeah, that seems I mean, look, you get you see about to get all serious here, but you see a weird amount of discussion about psilocybin in medical applications these days. So the interesting thing is that this guy Uh the the the mycology uh doctor who is is quoted here is saying that

Because everybody sees the same hallucinations, it's really interesting because most hallucinogenics have wildly different um ac effects on same people. And I wonder, like me, this is a me wondering if this is like the brain control fungus that You know, makes the mice uh suicidal with cats. Like, is this the beginning? Is this a last of us sitch? Are these cordyceps? I I'd look, man, I don't know. I'm not a mycologist. Mm, yeah.

Look, okay. Don't normally talk about things like this. I've also eaten mushrooms a couple times in my life. One of them kind of nothing happened. Yeah. The other time was one of the most amazing nights of my life. Okay. So, you know You're ready to go. You're back in for more. It's about fifty-fifty here, so you know, I'd I'd give it a shot. I mean, look, let's we need to go to China, find a mushro uh a a market, and buy some mushrooms. Sounds like Patreon stretch goal to me.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad, we are we're doing something wild. That's right. We're it's unprecedented. We had too many questions last month last week and couldn't get through them all. Not quite as well. as wild as eating unverified mushrooms, but two Q and A's back to back is pretty close. Yeah, so

Um we had a we had a really like for real, we had a really good crop of questions uh last month and we wanted to come in and the month before. Yeah, and the month before and we wanted to come in and and hit more of them so they didn't weren't lost to time. And uh here we are. Yes. Uh without uh further ado, if you have a question, you can send it to techbot at content.town or you can post it in the Discord in the question seeking answers channel.

And we will get it uh at the next uh next episode. We will. I am getting an insane number of spam phone calls right now, like four at a time. So this is a new frontier. For half a second I was like, Wait, you're getting four phone calls at one time? It literally I got a phone call notification and then I got another phone call notification from a different number and then I got a third phone notification from a third number and a fourth one from a fourth number. The phone system's working great.

Have you seen, real quick, the I don't want to spoil too much of the Next Flander Watchcast next week. Wow. Have you seen the seventy four Francis Ford Coppola film The Conversation starring Gene Hackman? No. Really? That is not a Gene Hackman movie I've seen. You should maybe look that up. A sneakers comparison came up. Hmm. But it's it's about surveillance in the seventies.

Okay. And if you want to see some pretty interesting like phone tapping technology and some stuff like that, I I might recommend that film. Wow, this is fascinating. This um Wait, was that was Enemy of a State a a sleeper sequel to this movie? Uh maybe, I don't know.'Cause it has the same the art on this is the same. Hmm. I don't know. This one ends pretty definitively. Is this set in the Bay Area? Yes, this is also set in for San Francisco.

Oh man. Uh but just a lot of really interesting like analog surveillance technology in that movie that you would probably appreciate. Speaking of phone call uh weird phone call situations. Well,'cause I f I feel like in uh Enemy of the State, doesn't he like He lives in a Faraday cage, right? Gene Hackman does'cause he's he's in that too. Yeah, he's he's absolutely

Wait, isn't he? Uh that's a Will Smith film, I think. Oh wait, no, but Gene Hackman is in that. Gene Hackman's like the like the crotchety old guy. Oh and I wonder Oh wow, that sure. Okay, yes, that very much sounds like he could be playing a spiritual successor to the same character in the conversation.

Yeah, if this is wild. If it's like a crotchety old guy who's paranoid about information security. Different name. Henry R. Call in the conversation and Edward Lyle in Enemy of the State. Anyway, anyway, you want to see some some cool phone hacking tech. Hell yeah. And some long long range microphones and some other fun stuff like that. I I I could I could recommend that film.

Wonder if we could build a laser microphone that you point at the glass window and look into the you know. Huh. I bet that's probably pretty easy to do these days. At the tail not to just keep spoiling that podcast, which will be up Monday for patrons on on the next land or Patreon, but um A a um an entirely passive surveillance device used by the Soviets and invented by Leon Theriman.

Oh, yeah. Theremon fame, yeah. Uh came up at the end of that episode as well that I read up on a little bit. It's called um I believe the Wikipedia page is entitled The Thing. Okay. Like I guess that's just kind of the colloquial name for this thing, also known as the Great Seal Bug, because they hid it inside a gigantic United States seal plaque. that they presented to I think some ambassador. Yes, it was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union in the forties.

Uh, they hid a passive listening device in this thing that had no power source. Hm. Because they were effectively bouncing radio waves off of it from Remote location. That is wild. So they had like antenna that they aimed with the radio at it to energize it. And then they were measuring the kind of modulations in the return radio waves that were bouncing off of it and then deriving sound from those changes.

Wow. That's like that's like planting a bunch of plants in a big hallway that react to, you know, people brushing up against'em and then, you know, transmitting uh yeah. That's wild. Or using Wi Fi to track people's movements for that matter.

I mean that you can buy a thing for fifty bucks that you can do in your house. That's depressing. Or or cool or both. I don't know. It's both I I mean it you know, a little from column A, a little from column B. You could probably home assistant script some fun stuff around that. You you absolutely can like

You can you can write scripts for Home Assistant that let you that can tell when you've fallen asleep on the couch and turn off the lights for you. Yeah. Oh man. Because it it has resolution that lets you tell the screen sitting, standing, laying. All that stuff. I'm gonna be real. It depends on how I'm living. If I'm behaving well and going to bed at ten o'clock like I should every night.

Mm. Then this isn't a problem. But sometimes I get into a rut of falling asleep on the couch and not waking up until It's like clockwork. I wake up about two thirty or three every night that I that this happens. Yeah. And something that detected that and turned the lights off for me at say like eleven or twelve would be kind of useful. And you need like a little robot that comes out and like lifts your head up and jams a pillow under there and puts a blanket on you? Also that.

Also you're good to go. I think falling asleep on that couch is maybe not good for some ongoing nerve issues. But anyway, uh let's read some questions here. Yeah. Yeah.

I look, Brad, I've reached the point now when I'm sitting in my chair and I think I'm about to fall asleep. I'll just gut up and go to bed because I'd rather take a nap in bed and not jack up my neck for four days. Probably the thing to do. I don't know. Am I regressing emotionally? Like I I feel am I Am I turning into the you know, the childish thing of just get angry when you're tired and don't want to do what you're told?

I mean I have some of that in my house. I'm annoyed that I'm tired and don't want to get up off the couch and go to the bed where it's easier to sleep. Anyway, all right. Here's an email signed alpha

I was listening to episode three hundred eighteen and the topic of Will's electric vehicle and range and charging came up, and I have a fun story about that. As a proud owner of a Chevy Bolt Range anxiety is real when driving freeways when you get about half of the expected mileage unless you never go above sixty miles per hour. But on a recent trip to the mountains, the drive home blew my mind. Driving up the mountain turned a 90-mile drive into 200 used miles on the bolt.

After charging it up to about two hundred miles of range, we left to drive home from Wrightwood at six thousand feet uh elevation to Long Beach, California. Mm-hmm. We departed with two hundred four miles of range, and got home with two hundred and twenty five miles remaining. We actually netted twenty plus miles over a ninety mile trip due to battery regeneration,

Uh while the Bolt is the lowliest of EVs on the market, even this cheaper option has proven to be a complete game changer for me. Obviously a pretty unique situation, but still cool as hell. So I was gonna say I I'm looking forward to my Google photos right now, but I had a day where uh we were in Tahoe and we came back and it wasn't wintertime. It was like the roads were clear and and it was safe to regen the whole way down pretty hard.

And I wanna say we got like eighty miles per kilowatt hour on the on the downhill, coming from eight thousand feet to, you know, five uh twelve hundred or fifteen hundred or whatever it is in the foothills. And uh yeah, we same thing. It was it was fabulous. Highly recommended uh not charging up all the way if you're at the top of a big giant mountain. Is that um is that regenerative breaking?

Are you have to do you have to manually engage the brake for that to happen, or is that just taking your foot off the accelerator and letting it coast? Well, it depends on the car. So um if you're doing like one pedal driving then There's no taking your foot off the car. Oh oh I found the screenshot. It's fifty one uh eleven point eight miles per kilowatt hour, going seventy miles an hour.

Which usually you get like three to four somewhere there. Oh. Man, that's crazy. And then and then there's one screenshot five minutes later of forty nine point two miles per kilowatt hour. That seems like something that you could maybe end up obsessing over a little bit, like kind of optimizing. for the most possible efficiency of your car, which I mean I guess that's kind of technically possible in a gas car in some ways as well, but

Well you don't get the moment to moment read on the gas car though. Like the gas is doing some dribblation. Like in the gas car you'd be g going by feel, right? Well, and you you you do your mileage and most modern gas cars have like um um a miles per gallonometer, right? Um, but but yeah, the the direct feed of how it's going on a moment to moment basis makes me think about things like, oh, do I really want the heat on? Is it warm enough that I want the heater turned on?

'Cause you know, the heater in an electric car is isn't like a passive it's not using the warmth of the engine block to warm some water that w warms the air in your cabin. It's turning on a a heating element or a heat pump that that turns it on and that uses that uses power and reduces your range. Um I found in the bolt I cared much more because charging that thing was a pain in the butt. In the Ionic, it's much less of a of a uh on on road trips.

It's much less of an issue'cause it's always twenty minutes to eighty percent. And um so I don't really worry about it as much. Now, what I will say is I do think about things like in the middle of summer, if I'm driving to LA and it's a hundred and twenty five degrees in the Central Valley. if it makes more sense to go down one oh one, which is on the coast where it's s sixty five or seventy degrees all the time, versus driving down five where everybody goes eighty miles an hour.

And like often it's faster to go the thirty miles the the longer way that you drive slower because you have fewer charge stops, especially with the bolt where the charging time was so long. Anyway. That makes sense. Yeah. Uh David Sheffield got one red last week and another one red this week.

Wow. Congratulations. To twofer from Dave. Uh there's some network services and tools that I want to explore and learn, partially for career learning, but also maybe to see if there's a point deploying them in my home lab. I can't decide, however, whether I should pick up a mini PC of some kind. I'm sure you're aware of the go-tos like the Lenovo Think Center and Tiny Dell Optiplex Micros or a Raspberry Pi or an old Nook.

Or should I just use my homemade Debian NAS to host VMs? It was made from an old old PC upgrades, so the Ryzen fifty six hundred X is extremely underutilized in it. I I will say the cores on that thing good for compiling software and stuff at least when you the occasions that you need to do that. Yeah. Anyway, uh he he goes on, what are the pros and cons? The VM solution is cheap slash free and I can spin up snapshots and tear them down easily.

Again, that's on the 5600X, kind of the full-size PC that he was talking about. The physical machine, meaning the mini PC, is not going to break or be broken by a host. The physical machine would look cool in my mini rack on my desk. Is that really a good reason? No. So uh the principle of least functionality would suggest a NAS should be just that, and a VM host ought to be separate. But can use storage from the NAS, what would you do?

So this is a the like this is the eternal question, right? And w w it's funny. I think we should do an episode where we touch it based on like what's going on in our home lab soon. Yeah, I had a request from somebody on the Discord last week I think, about stepping through my so I've got almost exactly what David Sheffield is talking about here. I have a just flat Debian PC with a bunch of hard drives in it as my NAS slash server now, and somebody had asked me to maybe

This is somebody who uses TrueNAS and was like, Hey, I'm thinking about getting off of an appliance style OS like TrueNAS and just going straight Linux, but can you step through all the components of what makes a storage server go without a front end like that? So we might roll that into some kind of home lab update. Yeah, it's it's um I so I have I I have a Synology NAS that's just a low power Intel machine. It's a little soft on the on the tr hardware transcode.

So I don't actually host a lot of stuff on it net natively, although I do host some lightweight stuff like my Ubiquity um my Ubiquity controller and some other stuff lives in Docker containers or Synology plugins. Um, I think that like my argument depends on what this network service is uh as to whether you should run it on its own hardware or whether you should run it in like a VM or I think a Docker container is also the the third thing that you haven't really talked about here.

I I tend my policy generally speaking is that I start by putting it on one of the machines that's floating and available, either that has Docker running on it that I can put in the Docker container or on the Synology in the Docker. uh implementation on the Synology. And then if that's not enough juice for the whatever the application is, then I'll move it over to the to the dedicated uh either a dedicated Raspberry Pi or to something like my B Link, which is a

And one oh one ten, I think, or one oh two or I can't remember. It's one of those one of those low power Intel um kind of embedded E slash mobile CPUs um with like sixteen gigs of RAM. Yeah. I don't I don't know what the recommendation is here because you and I have taken opposite tax uh on this because like I said, mine my my store server is a twelve six hundred K.

Mm-hmm. With sixty four gig of RAM and ten hard drives in it, as I've said, ad nauseum. That's like a million dollars worth of RAM at this point. It's ECC too. Well actually, you know what? I wonder if ECC is like relatively cheaper than the gamer

Off the shelf gamer RAM where the demand is. I'm I'm sure. AI cares about ECC, yeah, but they don't seem to care about lying. So they certainly don't. Why would they care about flipped bits then? Um Uh, but um I will say that it is it is the I would say overwhelming opinion of people on our Discord that separate NAS and separate like VM host or server is the way to go. I think most people think kind of compartmentalizing that stuff.

is I think that's that's it's probably mostly for maintenance if I had to guess. It's mostly just like, hey, if your VM host dies, you don't have to worry about your storage also being down. That's um Yeah. I think there like th potentially there are also security implications there. Of, you know, there's less of a barrier if like if a service gets compromised on your server and the storage is also all in that machine.

They probably have a quicker path to getting to the storage than they would if it was on a separate machine. So like so I have to practice a lot of containerization and security barriers, I guess I would say, on my NAS, which would you know, we'll get into that next next time when we do that home lab thing. Yeah. For for me there's a lot of like what's the most re what are the what are the things I want the most uptime on? And I I tend to put those either on dedicated hardware

Um, like home assistants on its own own uh home assistant yellow. Yeah. The pie holes are on their own Raspberry Pis, et cetera. And then the other stuff like If the Minecraft go server goes down, it's really not that big of a deal.

Yeah, that as the complex server goes down, it's not a huge deal. That is exactly it. I I would say look at what you're planning to run and anything that you would be annoyed if it was down for more than like thirty seconds, do not put it on in fact I wouldn't I maybe wouldn't even put it on that little mini server. I would do what you said and put it on like Like practically its own dedicated hardware.

Yeah, I th I think the the miniser's been pretty reliable. Like the one I have is fanless actually, so there's really nothing to go wrong in it except for the SSD dying. Right. Um But I I do I do the same thing. Like blocky and home assistant are basically the two here. It's like home assistant's down, my lights don't work. Yeah. Blocky is down, internet doesn't work'cause there's no DNS. So stuff like that I run on Raspberry Pis, like that's it's good to separate.

That stuff out, but um I said you know, it's like there are advantages to both. Yeah, I would definitely look at Docker though. It's like I I will say I was a Docker skeptic coming from BSD jails and having used it for a few years now. Like I'm I'm I don't know if I'm a believer But it's very convenient. I I especially for for this kind of stuff. I also and then again this is for the home lab episode, but I also I was so used to using jails that j jails and BSD are basically like a whole

Extra computer running. It's like a VM, except not a VM. It's not virtualized. It's just siloed off from the rest of the host. I clung to that methodology in Linux for I think. longer than our Linux channel on the server would like. But I finally they finally talked me into uh Except instead of moving to Docker, what if you move to Podman instead? Oh God. Well we'll get into I was a Seder.

I I would say if you're learning Docker, you don't know how to do Docker now, don't start with command line Docker, just install Portainer or one of those things that lets you manage it from a web interface and makes it much more straightforward when you're learning. What if you not only started with command line but you used the other tool besides Docker that is basically Docker compatible, except occasionally you'll run into a weird edge case?

Yeah, see, I don't like edge cases, so I I would say just run Docker and Portainer or whatever. There's a there's a There's a l much lower overhead version of Portainer that's better for home labs than I can't remember what it's called, but um yeah. Anyway, that's what I got. Um, all right.

Sticking with the uh the Linuxy stuff here for a second. Here is an email from did they sign this email? I don't think there's a name on this one. Oh wait, hang on. Jay from the East Coast. Jay down here, yes, Jay from the East Coast. There it is. It's a long you know, I don't may not get into all of this too much, but here's a tip for you. Brad mentioned in a recent episode about how much Unix and by extension Linux command line stuff was still present in Mac OS.

If you didn't know, I thought I'd mention PowerShell also aliases many Unix commands. This is not Windows subsystem for Linux or anything, this is a feature of PowerShell itself. Example in PowerShell, if you type man ls, it automatically becomes get help get child item. So translates the man the man page request for the LS command into

That's wild. Yeah, so uh how much PowerShell have you done? None. Very little interesting. PowerShell's like super interesting actually. I don't love everything about it, but some of the things that it's good at are really interesting. So so I did do some PowerShell stuff to um to uh get builds uh to I PowerShell ends up being a thing I have to do for build servers sometimes when I help somebody set up a build server for a game. Sure.

'Cause that's all Windows and it's all Windows compilers and all that stuff and PowerShell has deep for that. And but it's it's very much a I know enough to be extremely dangerous and uh not You can do some pretty wild stuff with it. Like real quick, just to to in fact this touches on the question after this I was going to take, but um the the the most magical, weird, interesting thing about PowerShell is y you know, in you piping commands.

And Linux, you guys have talked about this on the dual boo diaries. Yeah, we live piping. Wait, is Adam piping now? No, Adam's not Adam. I mean, I don't know, maybe I I haven't asked him lately whether it's piping ha he'll get there. For folks who don't know piping commands in you in Unix and and POSIX compliant terminals, I guess, right? Yeah. Let's you take the output from the first command, put a pipe Uh character, the vertical line in between it.

And then it sends the output from one command into the input of the next command on that line. Right. So the difference with PowerShell is that with the POSIX shells, the classic Unix terminal that you're talking about, it's just a a raw text screen stream. What you're sending to the next program is just plain text. Mm-hmm. In PowerShell it's structured data. What really? You can say it's like a JPEG? Well no, no, no, no. S so it's it's internally structured by PowerShell. So it's like um

If you get a directory listing, which is what get child item is, which what which they're aliasing to LS here. So like like that's the der, you know, D I R of the classic command prompt in DOS. Like get child item is basically the dir of uh or the LS of of PowerShell, but when you're sending a directory listing and piping it to the next thing.

You can I I like the vocabulary to describe this. It's sending, like I said, a a structured, like a hierarchical list of like the file names, the creation times, the path, like the parent path. In a way that the next application can understand it. So then you can use like m you can like run methods against the the next like the that data in the next command that you're piping to to select for specific data or manipulate it or transform it, do all kinds of crazy stuff. It's really neat.

Uh it's funny, uh like I remember years ago when I was doing D V D reps, there was a tool that now would be an easy PowerShell tool to make, script to make, that basically let you edit file names in a directory like a like a text file. Mm-hmm. So you just opened up a directory and you could rename the files just by moving up and down the document and and saving at the end and it rewrote all the files to the file name changes.

Um but yeah, this th that's wild. I didn't think you could do stuff like that. So so so bulk, um bulk rename is one of the big things I use PowerShell for for something like this. You can do like you can use like regular expression to replace parts of a bulk list of file names in a loop. Like That even did It's hard to explain unless you kind of see it in action, but it's actually pretty powerful. Uh and I think it's wild it's pretty cool.

I d I didn't know that um this was an intentional choice. I always thought it was weird that all of a sudden in PowerShell, like LS works and PWD works and stuff like that. WSL trying to get those people over. Makes sense. But all the the the last thing I'll say, all those commands like get child item and get uh help. Like man and LS and Linux are separate binaries, you know, those are actual compiled programs that live on your on your storage.

Uh those are commandlets in PowerShell, so like get child item, those are not bind you're not running actual executables. Those are all just they're just part of the shell? Like yes, they they all run as functions of the shell. They call them commandlets, but there's like a bajillion of them built in. Uh all right, actually going to scroll way down to Discord questions here and read this R. K. Harris sixty two question,'cause I know

He has been diving deep into Linux. I think he's a pretty recent desktop convert, uh, who I've seen popping up in the Linux channel quite a bit recently. What's the best shell and why? I use fish, but that's just'cause it's installed by default in Cashie. Yes. When I when I briefly tinkered with Cashey, that was my first exposure to fish, and I was like, What is this? So the thing about uh I think um like my recommendation is bash just'cause like

When you download a script for something for Linux, 99% of the time it's going to be a bash script. Yeah, that's probably the that definitely the safest place to start. Um the thing I will say is that even if you're using in one of the distros that ships something other than bash.

At least on Cashey I can just type bash and then it dumps me in the exact same folder in the you know, and I can run this the bash script from inside bash. Yeah, even if you don't even if you don't use bash, you should always have bash installed on a system just for compatibility reasons. Um I use Z S H or Z Shell. Oh yeah. Which is pretty highly bash compatible, is my understanding. Like it pretty much will run more or less the same scripts, like they'd go out of their way to try to be

compatible with bash, but it has extra functionality. To be frank, the only reason I switched to it is because Mac OS stops shipping bash. Like they default to ZSH uh and have for some years. And for some stupid reason, instead of just installing bash on my MacBook.

You did the new thing. I then installed I instead I went and installed ZSH on every other machine that needed a shell around here and continue to do so, but anyway. You know in Z in ZSH you can use actual color names when you're coloring your prompt? Instead of having to look up the antsy color codes. Which are impossible to remember?

I like the idea that you think I'm adjusting the colors of things in my bat in my in my terminal. Dude, if you're not making a cool looking prompt, what is even the point of using a Unix? I uh have chosen to spend my time in other other ways. The thing I like about fish is that when I open fish, when I open Alacrity and Fish is there, it just gives me

Like it's real simple. I have a carrot and then above the line where the where the prompt is, it's just shows what the current working directory is. So it's very straightforward. Yes. I I also like um can't remember what this is called. Uh there's a I have a little program that runs a it has like the cachie logo and then system stats. when I open a new shell window, which I I quite like. Mm. Um So you do like cool stuff in your terminal. I do, but I you know, not enough to um

Not enough to customize my dot files for the terminal yet. To be honest, I think I've talked about this before. To be honest, the color all the coloring in my prompt is actually functional. It is user name. Username is colored based on whether it's root or an unprivileged user. Ah. Host name is colored based on whether I'm on uh the host or a container. Oh that's nice. Pretty useful. Yeah, I can see. I don't I don't do a lot of containers on this machine, but I do um

The like having yeah, h knowing whether I've SSH into another machine would be nice actually, because I sometimes lose myself there. That kind of stuff. Um the the one place the one thing I do want to do is sync my type ahead cache across all the computers I use. So they when I figure out the history file? Yeah, the history file. Yeah, that sounds complex.

No, it turns out it's just a flat file. So you just dump it you just run a script that pulls it from Git when you turn on the c when you log into the computer. It's it's it's complex if you have a machine that never gets signed out. Like if I I leave my laptop on all the time, it that makes it complicated. Sure. But um uh yeah, people I I Googled why do people use the fish shell and um

B the main thing is that the defaults are good is what people say. Have you have you been to the fish homepage? No. Is it cool? The tagline at the top is finally a command line shell for the nineties. Okay, that's amazing. I'm not sure if that's like some some uh self aware like goofy marketing or if this has actually been around since the nineties and they just never changed it. I do not think it's been around since the nineties, given that version three released in twenty twenty one.

You might be surprised. Maybe some stuff that you think is put like I think Z sh Z S H is from the nineties if I'm not sure. Z H H Z S H has been around forever. Yeah. I'm not I'm not seeing when the very first release of Fish happened here. They don't have dates on their release pages.

Two point and one point two came out in twenty fifteen, so it's probably not actually from the nineties. Fish Beta R two started in twenty twelve. Yeah. There's a there's a bug from twenty twelve in their GitHub. Okay, their point is taken. Yeah. Um I also the b I do I do love that the webpage commits to nineties, straight nineties style. I mean it's not because there's no there's no tables or frames. Yeah. But this could have been a mid nineties webpage, late nineties webpage. Sure.

Um real quick, not to turn this whole episode into terminal and shell talk, but um PowerShell talk. PowerShell is available for everything. You can get it on Linux and Mac OS as well. I ran PowerShell on macOS just for that. And then I rewrote it in Python. I will say

R running the build servers not on Windows would have been really nice every time I've set up a build server. And if if PowerChell gets you there, that would be dope. I don't know what the you unreal Linux compiling situation is these days. I don't know.

Last thing I'll say real quick, if you want to check out that like structured data piping concept that I mentioned for PowerShell, but not in PowerShell, there's also new shell. Have you seen that? No. Uh I haven't touched it in a couple of years, but it's N-U-S-H-E-L.

Uh which is primarily for Linux and and Unix likes, although I think you can get it for Windows and Mac as well. It does the same thing though. It like it has but it uses more traditional Unix style command line commands, but also structures the data that you're piping to other commands so you can select for things.

That's interesting. Yeah. Like a lot of times. I'll just read this command line from the top of their homepage. You can go to new shell.sh if you want to see what I'm talking about. Like you run an LS, which is just a directory listing, right? Mm-hmm. And you pipe it, and then you there's a where keyword. Which is is some kind of like comparison operator basically. So you're piping LS to where a size greater than ten megabytes.

So because it ha because it has a size column in the structured data it's piping about the directory listing, it's able to select for files of or over a certain size as they're doing there. And then and after that they're piping it to sort by modified. So like basically it knows a bunch of metadata about the files you're working with. So you can You can filter and and modify by different parameters instead of just trying to parse a giant block of text every time you pipe.

And it has plugins, so presumably you can add plugins for data types that it doesn't know out of the box. That's cool. Yeah, it's there's some some cool stuff going on with shells these days. Also, I think it's ten uh uh megabits uh on the example that they have there, Brad. Maybe. I don't know. No, no, well you can see it in the in the screenshot. Well, yeah It's a capital it's capital B. Actually sorry, it's not megabytes, it's mebibytes.

M maybe bites. Yeah, but I think in the line line it says lowercase M, lowercase B, which is millibits. I don't know. They might s they might need to work on their syntax a little bit. Yeah, I got I got issues with new shell. They're off my li they're on my list again. Um anyway, all right.

It's maybe enough shell talk for now. Uh actually sorry, I meant to read this earlier since we were talking about racking Mini PCs and stuff. Yeah. Zed writes in with the growing popularity of ten inch racks, has Brad considered buying, building, or printing one to scratch that power efficient home labing itch.

When they say a ten inch rack, do they mean ten inch wide or ten inch tall? I think wide, but I could be wrong. Oh, so it's like a it's like a rack for little guys? It's like a little rack to go on your desk. Uh the short answer is no. The longer answer is that it's not so much the rack I actually desire. of a basement.

Mm it's it's le it's less having the rack and more having space where a rack could go. I don't I don't know if Yeah Because to be honest with you it is I I mean I I would love to have a rack, don't get me wrong, but it it needs to be forty two U for one thing. I mean not really, but that would be nice. the real goal is to get this fucking server and all this other shit out of this office where I never have to hear it again.

Well like a a a full size machine with ten hard drives five feet away is kind of actually pretty loud. Yeah, I I wouldn't do that. And it and it there's so much cable mess behind this desk and like there's just so much extra routing of cables and

Other considerations, the UPS is overloaded because there's too many machines in one room. Like it's just on and on. Yes, I want a rack. A 10 inch rack would not actually solve the problem if I just want all this crap out of here and in a room where I never have to see or hear it. The thing, the thing...

The other thing is I don't know that I would put my computer stuff in the basement. Uh maybe not, actually. I'm gonna be real based on the stuff that's gone on in my parents' basement over the last eighteen months. I I literally said to my mom on a phone last weekend, like I everything you guys have dealt with might be telling me I should never own a house with a basement, actually. Yeah. I I mean

Ye basements basements are fraught. Ask our friend Vinny about his basement. It's like they're up and down. Sometimes basements are great, sometimes not so much. Yeah. My parents' basement in the house that I grew up in was fine for the thirty years that we lived there. Same. The moment somebody bought it, they it rained real bad and flooded almost immediately. So like Uh also there was a sump in there the entire time and I assume it was doing some work that maybe we weren't aware of, so yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, I think ten ten inch racks are neat if you've got stuff to go in them. I can see why like they certainly they certainly would be nice to sit on the corner of the desk if you have like a nuck and a router and, you know, l little do hickeys of that nature. That's a nice way to organize them, but I'd rather just put in a big pile on my garage shelf and not think not have to look at it. Yeah. Well, garage also works, except there seemed to be some thought on the Discord that

Oh yeah. Your Raspberry Pi three's demise may have been hastened by its exposure to the elements in the I got my forty dollars worth out of that machine over the last ten years. Yeah.

Uh I mean the answer is a climate controlled garage. Yes. Or a shed, perhaps. I look I guess you got a climate control to shed too, and that's Yeah. I don't know. You say that, but like I actually looked at it and was looking at what it would cost for me to build a backyard shed, like make pour a slab myself and and build like a fifteen by ten foot or fifteen by fifteen foot square

shed. Like I can't legally put power on it that's hooked up to the mains without getting it without talking to the county and doing a whole bunch of stuff. Mm-hmm. But I can legally put a bunch of panels and a battery on there. Interesting. Uh and uh it all lives within the realm of of possibility. So maybe that's my maybe that's a twenty twenty-seven project, twenty twenty-six project is w Brad and Will made a tech shed. Oh

Um I might need a little more land for that, unfortunately. Well, I mean I'm what I'm saying is you can come down and help me build my limited access to it if you want. Actually by by limited access, do you mean can I just put my my long fantasized about friend Cloud backup solution in there. Yeah, you're off off off site backup. And I just give you the Raspberry Pi with four hard drives hooked up to it, backup.

Mm-hmm. I think eight miles is enough of geographical separation. Look, if both of us get wiped out, you're not gonna care if your data's gone. Yeah. Frankly, yes. Yeah. Uh all right. Man, the latency would be real good. It'd be fine. That's fine. Well you know, I mean realistically I guess we don't we really ever need to Downstream, your downstream is all that would ever matter because you'd only be backing up to the other person and presumably never actually pulling data back off of it.

Unless you're not going to be able to do that. Yeah. That's that's like that's like a good distance actually,'cause then like the the you don't have to email somebody the hard drives for an off site backup. 'Cause that bat is a point of failure in itself. If you have to send the only remaining copy of the data in the mail across the country, that could easily disappear. Well

Yeah, I I I like this idea a lot. I think this is a good idea. I think we should build a shed. She's gotta get the shed first. Let me talk to my wife. She's gonna be thrilled. Oh she can have the office back. Mm-hmm. Um, let's see.

Uh here's a question from John Bob that I'm kind of interested in. What are the downsides to keeping my iPhone on battery saver mode all the time? I made a shortcut automation to turn it on when the phone stops charging, and now my phone seems to use less than half as much battery as normal. The only thing I've noticed is that photos wait to sync to iCloud until the phone is plugged in to charge.

Yeah, I don't think there's a downside really. Yeah, I yeah, I mean I I think it does pause a lot of other background tasks like the iCloud syncing. I don't know if it actually goes out of its way to tell you what those are.

It turns off the always on screen is the big one. Oh, do you use that? I so I I I think I've mentioned like I got an iPhone seventeen, right? Oh Lani Dah. I turn I turned off because it's an OLED screen and those are still prone to burn in, I turned off the always on screen for that reason. Uh if my i iPhone burns in I'm gonna make him replace it. So well I also I I've got time. We should

We might do an episode. We might do an Apple update episode since I've got a n a not a notch, but an a dynamic island in my life now. It's nice, isn't it? And and the AirPods are also pretty life changing. We might be a little hands on Here's my first new phone in a while so soon, but but yes. Uh

I I'm I'm looking at the list of things that they turn off when you do they do they actually spell the they have a list on their on their it's E N dash US one oh one six oh four on their support site. Yeah, I'm looking at it. And uh Uh turns off on most devices that aren't the iPhone twelve and thirteen.

Which I wonder if this is just out of date. That my guess is yeah, this was last updated. No, December three. Um auto lock defaults to thirty seconds. Display brightness is reduced, which will suck if you're outside. The big one for me is that if you have a greater than sixty hertz phone or iPad It turns the refresh rate to sixty hertz. Yes, I was gonna say even my even my my super old iP uh my iPad Pro from twenty seventeen, which has like forty five minutes of battery life now.

Mm-hmm. Uh that thing hits slow battery mode all the time and yes, the screen refresh is noticeably worse, and that's a kind of a deal breaker. Because what's the what's the point of getting the promotion screen if it's not on?

I don't mind only downloading stuff at night. If I could if I could have a feature that lets me only sync stuff to the cloud when it's plugged in, I would a hundred percent turn that on. Like honestly, the real bummer about this feature is that they don't expose these options in a more granular way, so you can turn some on and not others. The other thing is the background app refresh for the apps that don't use the notification based refresh, but

like have a timer that turns let's let tells the OS to turn them back on and off. Yeah. That's that's also won't work. So things like um I wanna say like the Nest app used to do that where if you um left the service the area around your house it would set your thermostat to away and stuff like that. But um but yeah, I I Like if you don't mind the refresh rate thing, I don't there's no downside to turning it on. It's gonna make your battery last a lot longer'cause you'll do fewer charge cycles.

I absolutely turn it on. Like if I'm on a trip or something and don't want to bring in my watch charger, I absolutely turn my watch into low power mode the moment I un uh take it off the charger the morning I'm leaving. Yes. I have um I have used this on my phone a few times when I knew I was gonna be out all day.

Wanted to make sure I had a lot of charge. Um, but you know, th not a lot of downsides, I guess. I I have to say, like I have my iPhone usually is set to cap at the cat stop charging at eighty percent. Um Oh, that was one of the things I was gonna ask was I've been debating, should I just put it to eighty? Like is is is the eighty percent a hard limit or like is eighty five okay, ninety okay? Like is it just not charging to full that is the key?

I mean, I think the more you charge it the full, the worse it is, is my understanding of how the battery chemistry works. Okay. I I don't Even on days when I leave the house I'm I'm usually plugging in in the car while I'm on the way to and from someplace'cause I use car play. So it's it's really only an issue when I'm doing something that involves me being away from

a charger or my desk at home for extended periods of time. So I I've been very impressed with the battery life on this seventeen so far. Like I kind of only charge it every other day right now. It's really battery life on the phone is really not a problem anymore. It's gotten real good. Okay. This is a fan a fascinating question. This is an excellent question from Magic Joe F.

Mm-hmm. What will be the first hundred year old piece of code still used in production? Samba. I'm I'm not sure I'll quite I'm not sure I'll quite make it to C, maybe if I'm part robot. Maybe NTP actually. Uh NTP yeah, or like I d my first thought was like some aspect of the T C P IP stack.

I bet that I bet that's that's relatively new though. That's like a nineties thing. Well that's yeah, it was designed in the or maybe even the late seventies that it was designed. But I mean there are different implementations of it, of course, you know, like different OSs. Yeah, yeah.

Um NTP was written in eighty one. Okay. But of course, I mean that's the s you know, that's the same thing. Every every protocol was defined at a point in time, but then they are implemented in different actual code paths or you know different different Like it's harder to say like whose specific implementation of one of these technologies is still gonna be around and kicking. I don't know. Um That's a it's a fascinating question. I don't I'm not really super qualified to answer it.

I mean T what about what about like Cobalt and Fortran though? Like those are maybe actually the there's got to be assuming there's still a planet in fifty years. I don't think the COBOL and Fortran stuff. There's gotta be some some government server around somewhere running some old COBOL. Um Yeah, I mean look.

Well, I don't think the Voyager probes are gonna make it that long, sadly. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're running fifty year old code at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're halfway there. Um I mean c I don't know that anybody runs COBOL anymore. I I feel like you still see Uh, like calls for engineers that know those languages here and there occasionally. Like there's still like government payment systems and st or banking stuff.

That relies on that here and there. Like I Oh, you know, another another contender is the Sabre system that's used for booking airline tickets. That's been uh the ch travel reservation system. It was originally built for Pan Am by IBM in the sixties. Um or American Airlines rather. Um and uh it's it's the thing that it's the terminal the travel agents log into when they book plane tickets still. So like I don't know, tha I'm sure that they've

ship of Theseus to that thing enough at this point, but it also still feels really the other thing is banking. Banking system has ancient code in it too. Yeah, that's that's what I was getting at. I don't know. That's a tough one, but that's I I would love to hear um ideas in the Discord from people who are more you know, professionally engaged with this subject on this topic. This is almost a question for like somebody at the Computer History Museum. Yes. It absolutely is. Yeah.

You know how they booked airplane tickets before they had the computer system, right? Travel agents called the airline and the airline had uh like a card catalog style series of drawers. for each each drawer represented one flight and it had sections so you could buy a seat like each section was a different day in the drawer and you'd literally put a fucking three by five card in the drawer when somebody bought a seat.

to know that that seat was no longer available. That sounds totally infallible. Yeah. That is totally wild. Uh there's one other thing I want to mention really quick, since you mentioned um like Voyager. Voyager is the one that has left the solar system, right? Voyager one.

Or, you know, has it's furthest past the heliopause. I don't know if it's like fully outside the sun's influence or whatever, but yeah, it's in the interstellar medium. It's you know, they they they keep They're playing like the the how many instruments can we still run on three tenths of a watt or whatever their the ra the radioisotyp or reactor on that thing is still giving.

It's it's a it's an amazing piece of technology and it is far. There is a documentary about that exact subject that I really want to highly recommend called It's Quieter in the Twilight. Oh, okay. Which is for some reason a name I just cannot remember to save my life. I watched this documentary like three years ago. We should maybe think about watching it for this show. It's actually appears to be on free on YouTube movies and T V, free with ads. I just pulled up.

Uh I'll I'll link it in the show notes actually. But it is entirely about It's about the Voyager mission, but it's actually really about the people who have spent literally their entire careers working on the Voyager mission because it is such a long I might have brought this up before. Because it is such a long mission

Yeah. It necessitates people that were working on it at the beginning of their careers, unless they've moved on to other roles, are still working on it at the end of their career. Like they spent their entire professional lives on one mission. It's it's wild. And it is It's about half and half engine like engineering stuff because they get into a lot of a ton of detail about how they are

to this day still shunting and balancing power from other systems just to keep the core functionality going. So they can talk to it for a few minutes a day or whatever. But the other the other side of it is this like incredibly poignant uh like human look at the the people themselves and like what what is very clearly like real loss that they are experiencing as this thing moves toward no longer responding. Yeah. Like it's like very clearly like

in touching these people very deeply that this thing is going to stop responding at some point. So you like it's it's a it's a really really well done thing. There was a lovely article around the time that I wanna say I wanna say Voyager two reached the heliopause'cause I think it was the first first one to cross that kind of threshold. about somebody who started as an intern on the Voyager projects in the seventies and is like holding off retirement to to you know to bring it home.

And that it's wild. That person might be in this documentary for all I know,'cause'cause you get the sense that th that some of them are still hanging around just because they're so Take between you know, three to four weeks and a couple of days to make. Yep. Uh the idea of working on something for fifty years is incredible. Like I I can't even wrap my head around I've said this many times around game development. Like even just spending like one to five or six years on a single product is like

incomprehensible to me. I w I was talking to somebody the other day who's getting ready to start pre-production on a new project and I was they were like, What do you think? Is this long enough for pre-production? I was like, look, man, I'm the wrong person to ask on this. The v vast majority of my career

Uh everything I yeah, I I would work on fifty five things in the space of a typical twelve month pre production for a big triple A game. Yes. Online media will kind of break your brain in terms of like production cycles on things. It is just a constant churn. Yeah. Um, let's see, couple more here. Pronk? Might be a first time questioner. I don't remember that. Pretty good name. Yeah, I don't remember gives that username before.

Uh Brad mentioned owning a Google TV on the podcast. Is that an actual television or a box like an Apple TV? Googling it on the internet, it sounds like maybe Google released physical TVs and a box and an OS all called Google TV. I'm curious what made it interesting compared to the other options back when Brad bought it and is it still supported?

So in my case, Google TV is just the interface on my s on my smart TV. Yeah. Like I have a high sense television and it just happens to have Google TV built into it. But Google TV in this case is just a platform. Like other TVs will have Roku, for example, right? Yeah. Or

Uh LG's LG's o has their own their version of Palm OS that they turned into a T V S. W Web OS actually. Web OS is what it's called. Yeah, thank you. Of course in their case that one's proprietary. They don't farm that one out to other T Vs, just theirs, but Uh there are there are TVs on the market that have Amazon Fire TV on them instead. Don't buy those. Also don't buy Roku's, frankly. They're they're they're real

spy. I I I I yes, okay. My my my girlfriend got a Roku for free from some promotion. And it was fine for that. But yeah, if I was if I was paying the money with all the ads on there and the data collection and stuff, I would probably get something else. Nothing no single device has lit up my pie hole like the Roku did. Oh yeah.

But but but yeah, so I I I I looked into it a little bit. I believe this used to be called Android TV. Yeah, so they've had multiple way goes at this. Um Android TV launched in like twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen. We did some coverage of it. They they had an early version

that they shipped with Sony when we were still in the whiskey media basement in like twenty eleven or twenty twelve. Okay. Um, it had maybe it was right around the same time the Apple TV came out with the first simplified remote, like the hey, we have four buttons, a D like a D five way D pad and a couple of other buttons and a volume control. And then Sony had a thing that l had like a hundred and fifty buttons, a full keyboard, and two kind of circular five way D pads on it for some reason. Um

That didn't last very long, uh unsurprisingly. I could see that. Uh the updated Google TV, so Android TV then shipped a newer version on devices like the Shield, the NVIDIA Shield. And is is this also the same interface that's on a Chromecast? So Chromecast is different. Most Chromecasts in the early days didn't have an interface. Oh. They were just a place that you could cast stuff to. So it was like a thing you plugged into an HD my port.

And then you could send something to that and when you disconnect it, it just turned the TV back off. Oh, interesting. The new, more modern uh Google uh uh Chromecasts have like remotes and interfaces and stuff though.'Cause it turns out being able to run apps on the device and not have it connected to your phone is what people want.

Um, I think goo the Google TV TVs are pretty good. I don't think Google ever actually sold a TV for what it's worth. I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah. Um I will I will say for my part. The OS running on the TV was the last consideration I had when I bought the T V. I bought the TV based on its hardware specs and price. Mm-hmm. Uh it just happened to have Google TV on it, which has been okay. I don't hate it, hate it, and it's not my favorite.

We don't need to get into the ins and outs of it necessarily, but like it's been adequate, but I am still Pretty happy to move to an Apple T V in the near future. From the exposure I've had to them like Airbnbs and stuff. The Roku TV is my least favorite. The Google TV is fine. the LG Web OS thing is quite nice, but I'd rather have an Apple T V than any of those. Yeah. Yes. That's that's where I'm at. Every time I go back to my parents' house and they have an Apple T V, I

And like, what am I doing to myself? Well frankly. I'll tell you when we go you know, my daughter's homeschooled, so we c sometimes go on a l little bit of a longer trip and we'll stay someplace for like a month or twenty eight days or something. And I often just grab the Apple TV from the from the um entertainment center and take it with us when we go someplace. Well that means we plug it into the TV and then our stuff just comes with us. It's quite nice. Even even like UX aside.

Uh that thing is small enough that it's worth the extra clutter just to not have to like sign into apps on a different device, like to just plug a thing in and go. I think well it's all there's also a pretty good cottage industry in Uh both cast and 3D printed things that will screw into the Visa mounts on your TV that will hold the Apple TV just on the back of the TV so you don't have to look at it. Yep. Man, I might I might think about getting one of those actually.

Yeah. I see um I guess radio signals go through TV's just fine, right? Class and plastic these days. I see, yeah, fair. I guess there's actually not a ton of metal in there. I see people putting their consoles standing up behind their TVs a lot.

That's where my uh that's where my PlayStation is when it's in the living room. I just I always feel like there's too much metal in the T V for that to be reliable for the controller signal, but I guess it's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Bluetooth's pretty robust. Yeah, fair. All right, let's do another one more quick quer pair of questions. Okay. And then get out of here. Fishy J Do we know when we can expect the Panther Lake replacement for the N one fifty processor?

It's going to be Panther Lake for the N150 replacement. So I didn't either. I thought so Wildcat Lake is the codename we're talking about here. Yeah. And I agree. I thought it was going to be a Nova Lake. kind of derivative. But is it is it Panther Lake? It is it is Panther Lake. I was surprised as well. So I was really hoping for more information on that thing out of CES. And what we got out of CES was one Intel slide deck that got updo uploaded to the Intel like kind of media center.

That had like a slide at the end of it that just happens to mention Wildcat Lake in a kind of table of different Wildcat and Panther Lake SKUs. So unfortunately not a lot of inf there's like no information about when it's coming out, unfortunately. I will say uh the specs they put out in this slide uh are pretty much ex almost exactly what has been rumored for the last

six months or whatever. Um it is Compared to the um Compared to the M one hundred, N one fifty, which I think are basically four E cores. Four the it's four cores. I think the first one the first gen one was before they did P and E cores if I recall. But so this so Wadcat Lake is going to be two performance cores and two or sorry, two performance cores, two P cores.

And four L P E cores. Yeah, the L P E ones are the ones that that the cores live on the on the IO controller. Is it is it the IO controller? Yeah. Yeah,'cause um Intel typically puts all their cores on a separate compute tile so they can all talk to each other, but yes, now they're doing these low power E cores that are on a separate tile from the big ones. So on this one it looks like it's run on running on the compute the compute and G so

On Panther Lake, the compute tile is one thing that has the P cores and the E cores. There's an IO tile that has like the NPU and the and the L P E cores. And all the IO stuff, the PCI Express lanes, the memory controller, all that stuff. And then there's a third GPU tile uh that lives outside of both of those other things. On this, it looks like the infrastructure is a compute slash GPU tile, which has both the P cores and the LPE cores, as well as the NPU and two XE3.

you know, the the not non celestial um uh what's it called? Starts with the B Battle Mage cores. um all on one eighteen A tile. And then Interesting. And then there's a platform controller tile with the PCI Express lanes, not many. Um probably presumably for NVMEs. It's a six six PCI Gen four lanes. Uh some Thunderbolt ports, some USB three point two and two, and then Wi Fi and Bluetooth. And those are all living on the platform tile, which is

They say built on an external process. So the good like It's eighteen A. It's not the same compute tie ties and IO ties as the as the Panther League. The big Panther league. I think that's fine if it's still if it's still on the new process. I am I am tentatively very bullish about Wildcat Lake for many PCs and and little servers. I mean I am kind of I've been talking about this for like a year. I am dying to get my hands on one of these as a router.

Yeah. Slash kind of little home networking server. I I mean, look, if they if it lives up to the to the kind of history, the N one hundred, which is the alder like version of this was um for Gracemont eCores. You were right it was e cores. Yeah. Um And uh sixteen up to sixteen gigs of RAM. Yes. Like it's it's a really nice for a little home home server router or something like that. It's always on machine. And to put it in a little bit more desktop context, those cores, the Alder Lake e cores

on that N one hundred, both talking to people at Intel and looking at benchmarks and stuff. Those are like in the ballpark of the sixty seven hundred K, sixty five hundred K. Yeah. Which is like granted is now a ten year old CPU, but like it's still That's a lot of CPU heft for the tiny size of of an N one hundred.

It's a ton of lift for five watts. Right. And so the GPU kind of sucks in the in that one specifically. So but so but so now with Wattcat Lake, we're talking about I don't know how many generations newer e cores, but like the into whoever's doing the e cores at Intel is on some shit. Like they've been on one. Because like they have been putting up like r serious IPC gains generation over generation. Well, so the LPE ones will probably be a little you should temper your

Your expectations. Maybe maybe so. Maybe so. That's yeah. I I thought they were just more or less equivalent to E cores, but maybe not. Depends on how they're how it depends on how they're like how they're devote giving power to'em, honestly, is my understanding. That's fair, right? Yeah, there there's still some s some, you know numbers remain to be seen on how exactly how this is gonna stack up, but

Tentatively seems very promising for something like a home router. For for home lab type stuff, like I'm I've been waiting to upgrade the B Link machine that is my NAS Uh th that it has like game servers and Plex and stuff on it because I'm waiting for this particular part. Yes, I've I've been putting off buying an N one hundred for a while because I mean, A I don't like desperately need one. My router still works fine for the time being, but

But also I kind of wanted to wait for this anyway. Now I'm telling you, I'm looking at Intel's site. I searched for Wildcat Lake. And the first result is a software download for the display virtualiz virtualization drivers for Wildcat Late Ca Beta. Really? Yeah. If you're uh oh oh interesting. So if you're if you're a pharaonics reader. Uh huh. Probably the most exhaustive Linux news site on the internet.

Uh they Intel has been adding w some Wildcat Lake bits to the Linux kernel for a little bit now, so it does seem like it's on the way. Um I was surprised to see apparently the first I'm I dude I can't keep track of Intel's branding. Is it Core Ultra three hundred? Is that the new thing? Core Ultra three hundred Panther Lake, I think.

Yeah. Okay, so the first Panther Lake stuff is shipping like now, right? Like Well the embargo was up the other day. Like we had it we cut we talked about in the full nerd this week. Right, right. So that that kind of caught me by surprise. I don't think Wildcat Lake is part of this initial wave. It is not. Uh but yeah. I'm hoping that it's as you can probably tell, I care I care more about this thing than I do the actual Panther Lake.

Yeah, my guess is that they'll that they'll the Wildcat Lake stuff will sneak out later this year. Yeah, like I and who knows how long after that before the the mini PCs of the world start switching to it, assuming they even do. Uh I'm not a hundred percent

Sure all this is gonna pan out the way I want it to. But it it always takes longer than you want for them to show up in like the three hundred dollar B links and stuff like that. And even then are they gonna start shipping ones with ten gigabit networking in them right away? Probably not. Like it could be a while before I guarantee you that Mini's forum as soon as they get this is gonna put it in something that you can use for a home lab. Yeah. You're probably right. Like that is a

a hundred percent their bread and butter. Like like like my excitement here is a a a chip that is potentially as fast as we're talking about, fabbed on a process that is hopefully as low power as we think eighteen A is going to be with ten gigabit LAN built into it.

Especially as we talk a lot about pulling your Wi Fi out of your router. Mm-hmm. Like this kind of could be the last router I ever buy until it dies. Yeah. Cause who's gonna have a connection in their house faster than ten gigabit anytime soon for the next Nope. So it's literally like get this thing and configure it and then never buy another router, maybe.

So the question is would you rather have a uh I mean, also with with six PCI Express lanes, you'd have room for a a half you know, two lanes of NVMe or four lanes of NVMe and two lanes of Nick. Yeah. So like you could put an SF S F card or something like that in there too. So yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's options. Seems like a lot of potential with this platform. I am excited. Yeah, it's cool.

It's a good lake. Yes. Okay. Well, speaking of good lakes, last question real quick here from DC Actual. Do we know why everything at Intel is lake? Uh yeah, they they've done this forever. It used to be places in Oregon, I think. Oh, is that where like Nahalem and stuff like that goes? Yeah, that's what Nahalem and Airmont and all those were. Okay. Um Sky Lake is the first one I remember, but I I'm sure there were some before that.

I think there were m before Skylake for sure. Actually Wikipedia as always has a handy table here. God, going back to the early nineties. Yeah. Of of Intel. Wow, they use planets for a long time apparently. That was before I cared. Would you like to Bay Trail Bay Trail's code name was Bay Lake, apparently. That was motherboards. Would you would you like to know what the Intel Batman was?

What was the Intel Batman? It was a uh it was an Intel Premier PCI motherboard, socket four four thirty LX chipset. That's wild. I need to look up more about the Intel Batman. Um they also have an Intel Batman's Revenge. God. There was a 2006 Bear Lake chipset from other boards as well. Um I don't know why they started using lakes. I think they ran out of other I I want to say they ran out of mountains is what they started with. I would believe that. I am looking rock lakes.

In two thousand three was a motherboard, but it looks like they did not use another lake until Battle Lake. The annoying thing to me is that they have families for their pro their architectures and then they codename the subchips in the families as well. So like Nehalem is a family with like a hundred and fifty processors in it, right? Mm-hmm. Um and it's named after either the net town of Nehalem in Tillamook County or the Nehalem River. It's unclear.

Okay, they've been using lakes off and on for a while, even before the CPUs. I think they're not going to be able to do the lakes with Alder Lake as the modern interpretation of the lake to me. But like there was a Diamond Lake in 2006, which was a controller ASIC at the center of the Robson Flash Cache technology.

Oh that's the one I was thinking about, yeah. Of course. Everybody knows Diamond Lake. Berg Lake turbo memory module in the Robson Flash cache. Uh I I think you're right. I think let me see. Sky Lake More than you ever wanted to know about lakes. Yeah, Skylake, I think Skylake was the beginning of the Intel CPU lake trend. Sky Lake, KB Lake, Cannon Lake, Coffee Lake, uh

My guess is they do it because there's a lot of lakes out there. There are a lot of lakes in the part of the country where the headquarters and stuff are. They're probably never going to run out of lakes. And coves. Lakes and coves.

So there's an article that's copied and pasted into this Reddit thing into this Reddit article'cause it the original source is gone now. But they um the code names are all things the the the bucket category for their code names according to one of their to Jeff Tripp, who was Intel's senior strategic planner whenever this article was written, um, is that it's all geographical place names from the North America.

Okay. Um that checks out. And they they tend to skew towards Oregon where the design team is? Yep. Um, and that goes all the way back to the nineties and was like with Tillamook and and uh you know, all the All of the early W Willamette and all those. So Yeah. I think some of'em I one of these I l actually looked up one of these lakes a while back is in Canada, if I'm not mistaken. Still North America. Yeah, fair. All right. I thought that's it. That's it? Yep.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think uh part of this is that Microsoft didn't Microsoft get in trouble for naming an OS Chicago or something at some point because of the musical. I think so. Did they really? Well Chicago Chicago was the code name for Windows ninety five. Yeah. But it was just a code name. I don't surely they couldn't Trouble for that.

Could they? So here this is another quote from that article. Yeah, it's down here later. That's weird. Um the Intel engineering team decided on a code name, but then you run into legal problems with your code name. So for example, Microsoft had a problem with the Chicago.

So Intel learn that your code name should be something that not many people care about. You don't have to go and fight the mayor of Chicago because you're using the name of their city for one of your products. Weird. I think we should um I think we should probably find out about this Chicago problem that Microsoft had and that that seems topical. Maybe. I c I just I'm I'm still a little too fixated on the Intel Batman, I'm sorry.

Yeah. Well, I mean look, that was probably was it eighty nine? Was it that was that was early nineties. Okay, so it was Joel Schumacher, Batman era, probably. Yes. Let me see you. Batman everybody loves the most. Ninety three was when I was in high school. I feel like I got McDonald's cups for the third one, the one with the uh uh ninety five. Uh Batman Forever was ninety five. So that was was that the fourth one or is that the third one? Third one?

The third one was called Forever. Yes. It really messed that up, huh? Oh yeah. Yeah, well, anyway.

Uh, I think that's as good a place as I need to wrap it up for this week. Thanks everybody for listening. We appreciate each and every one of you. Um if you would like to find out how to support the show, we are a hundred percent listener supported, which means we would not be here without you, our our our trusted and faithful listeners. Um you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod.

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uh leave a review on your favorite podcast platform because that also kicks ass and we appreciate folks who do that as well. True. Um and we also want to give an extra special shout out to our executive producer tier patrons, including Jason Lee. Enwe Felicitas Rips, that's a new that's a new one. Uh Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, with Bunnies, David Allen, James Kamick, and Pantheon makers of the HS three high speed three D printer.

Uh thanks everybody and and thanks for your ongoing support. We appreciate all of you. We do. Uh we will be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. Hey, this is uh this is let's could should we should we tease something? Yes. We should say That if you were feeling like you would maybe like to watch Ca Halton Catch Fire. Uh huh. And then listen to us talk about it. And then listen to us talk about it. Probably a good time to start thinking about that. Yeah. Yeah.

No no specific date in mind yet, but it could be soon. It might be the March of Halt and Catch Fire. Who knows? After talking about this for three or four years, I think, at this point. Uh there's a monkey wrench in the plan,'cause I talked to somebody who is a fan of the show today and also has a lot of knowledge of

of that era of computers. Okay. And he was like, actually. The fourth season is the best season. Huh. And I was like, well, I was kinda interested in the story of the bias. He's like, okay, well then you're gonna like the first season. Okay. But the but they they they tried to madmen the first season. So like from a actual is this a good show or not?

It's it's maybe a little more madmen than the later seasons, which are actually quite good. Okay. Yeah. Well my I guess my biggest question is how computery it remains beyond the first season. My question is well, I've only watched the first season, so I don't know. Okay, so you've seen the whole thing, so you can vouch that it is worth watching and talking about. The first season is rad. I I like I think I think I'm I I kind of

From my perspective, I'm actually in the process right now of looking for a book that I could read that's about the same topic that's a a nonfictional book. Okay. Um, and I wanna see I I wanna read that so that at the same time we're talking about it we have some actual historical data to compare. Yeah. For for p people who don't know and you correct me if I'm wrong, like this is basically a

sort of semi-fictionalized retelling of the rise of Compaq and the reverse engineering of the IBM PC, correct? That's what the first season is about. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so I have to see this. Yeah, so so Yeah, and for folks who don't know, we'll talk about it in the future because it's it's a fascinating topic. Is it is it like do they use the name compact and like names of the actual people is it more dramatized and fictionalized than that?

Specifically hires someone so they have deniability that they reverse engineered the BIOS and lock them in a room with an IBM PC and tell them to figure it out. And they're like and like that's like the first episode. So kind of kind of remarkable to me that a show about that got made. Well it was in the wake of Mad Men. Uh you know AMC was flush. They're just and just looking for other

Period. Period appropriate business stories. They gotta get a lot of period pieces with guys in weird suits smoking. Yep. Smoking and womanizing. Oh that's right. Uh um Yeah, the uh Empire isn't it? Empire. Oh, you haven't watched uh uh Foundation, huh? Oh, I have waited Empire Lee uh Lee Pace. Lee Pace is who I was going to say. That's right. I was going to say I'd forgotten that Lee Pace is in this, which is Dreamboat. Very exciting.

Yeah. That guy's wild. All right. If you if you like Lee Pace and you have a watch foundation, you are missing out, man. top notch Lee Pace. Uh anyway, thanks for listening. Bonus extra content after the pod. Uh but yeah, watch Help and Catch Fire and we'll talk about it in a couple months. Uh and that'll do it for us this week. As always, please consider the environment before pinching this podcast.