328: Shared Resources, Shared Problems

Brad, I had a really weird dream last night. Hit me. Uh you're familiar with the the humble hedgehog. The humble hed I mean I'm I'm familiar with hedgehogs generally. I think they're humble. I feel like a hedgehog is a humble animal. I was I was just making sure that wasn't a capital H like there's a cartoon character called the humble hedgehog or something.

Hold on, we gotta stop talking about this. I just emailed it to myself. I'm I'm saving that one. That one's really good. But no, I I had a dream last night. That I saw a hedgehog in my backyard and

As far as I know, we don't have hedgehogs. Hmm. Hedgehogs are like a Europe thing. They're they're not endemic to California. Wait, they're not even endemic to the continental United States? I don't believe so. Everybody look, I've You know, I you know how you know how I feel about animal influencers and the fact that I do tend to follow You know, like I have a chinchilla person, I got some guinea pig people, uh got a bunch of corkies and dog and cats and and I have a I have a hedgehog person.

Okay. Uh and and she does uh she builds little hutches, l like little houses that are hedgehog sized in her backyard and then puts things that hedgehogs like to eat inside them and little cameras and they come in and they do hedgehoggy things inside their little house.

But only during certain times of the year, apparently, for some reason, but I'm pretty sure she's in the UK. Yes, you're I mean I'm looking at it right now. There are no hedgehogs native to Australia and no living species native to the Americas. Yeah, I mean I think the closest we get is a porcupine, which also I've never seen in the wild. Oh wait, is there a distinction?

Yeah, porcupines have spines and hedgehogs are just cute. I thought hedgehogs also have spines. Well they have spines, but they're not they're not like barbed and pokey like like porcupine. They're like a little prickly when you pick'em up, not Ouch, get this thing away from me. I don't get the sense that they're prickly even. I think they're just like I think they're just like um what like what's the least prickly prickly thing you can imagine? It's like

Like one of those succulents that doesn't have spines. Sure, yeah. Yeah. I imagine that they're like the the rodent equivalent of a of a succulent. I I'm looking at side by sides. There's definitely a distinction in spine severity. Yeah, like porcupine. Like we we had an Irish setter one time that got into a porcupine.

And it was bad news for her. Like she had barbs all in her face and it was it was awful. That that does not look nice. Uh speaking of animal influencers. Yeah. Where do you land on Punch Coon? What? Punch the monkey? I don't know this. Wait, what? Okay. Maybe you're better off then. Is the punch the monkey's name or do you punch punch? Punch punch is the name of a baby monkey at a zoo in Japan. Oh. It's kinda sad. I don't know if we should get into it.

But I I I haven't I haven't fully consumed all of the lore, I've just kind of encountered it in passing, but the monkey was separated from its mother or its mother died or it was raised as a baby by humans. I'm I'm not clear, but there was definitely a like lack of socialization and parenting. In a natural sense. And then this baby monkey was later introduced into a group of other monkeys that did not know it.

Were they rude to it? They have been rejecting it largely f for the most part, and it's a small baby animal, so of course it's very cute and sympathetic, and also they gave it a stuffed monkey as a surrogate mother.

And so That's messed up. For for large swaths of the last couple of weeks there have been videos of this baby monkey being like I'm gonna say more bullied than brutalized, like not violent, but the other monkeys have definitely been pretty physically unkind toward him, and then he immediately goes and runs and clutches the stuffed monkey that it he is using as a mother. In a way that is like a d Disney movie level tragic.

Watch. Okay, so so two things. One is that when I went to Google and I typed punch the monkey. I got page results and like hearts fall from the sky with punch the monkey's face on them. That's that is that is a route straight to Bonsai Buddy. Yeah, the second thing is no no no, like Google, the search page had had things dropping from it. Oh, like literally. Like like they made an event of it. It's they're celebrating this monkey violence, monkey gun monkey violence.

But the second thing is that I feel like Punch the Monkey's really kind of a metaphor for twenty twenty six and and the state of the world right now. Because I feel like we've all been rejected by our moms and and uh

And like the best thing that we can get is a shitty stuffed animal. Yes, we're all clinging to some kind of surrogate for any amount of solace we can find. Yeah, that we're desperately clinging to, trying to find a moment of peace in in an otherwise grim world. Anyway, welcome to the podcast.

Welcome to Brad Will Made a Tech Bod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. I d strategically made a poor decision to drink in the middle of water, to be clear. I feel like when you I feel like when you use drink as an intransitive verb, people might assume you are drinking. Yep. Which I am not doing at eight in the morning here. I was drinking water, but

Right in the middle of the intro. It could be Jin, it could be vodka. I'm not judging. We're just here to make a podcast. There's a long history of people talking into microphones with uh barely controlled substance abuse problems. Boy, that's for sure. Um but yeah, welcome to welcome. Hello. Um Hi. I'm freaked out by this monkey story. How did I miss I've not I've not seen anything about Punch the Monkey. He's he's he's a macaque?

Yeah. Wow. A snow monkey? You gotta say that real careful. Uh it's I I I I believe he is like slowly being accepted. Maybe he's just an asshole. I yeah, that's definitely come up. That's yes, the the the maybe the child has bad vibes argument has surfaced a couple of times for sure. He could be like the Hitler of monkeys and the other monkeys sussed it out and were like, Hey man, I want nothing to do with you.

I can tell this whole story is getting to me by the gut revulsion I feel when I hear you say that. Well, look, I don't have any personal connection with Punch. Don't you talk about Punch that way. Why why did they call him Punch if all he's doing is getting beaten up by the other monkeys? It's so

questionable, perhaps. Yeah. That's like it's pretty it's pretty rough to watch like when the when the when the human caregivers come in to feed and stuff, he just runs and grabs onto one of their thighs and refuses to let go. Desperate for any con like look if you need something if you need something that's a little cuddlier and a little more warming and endearing.

Uh, the Marine Mammal Rescue on Twitch does uh otter, sea otter live cam twenty four seven. And like, look, if you're pro mollusk, you're gonna have a hard time with it, but otherwise, pretty good. Okay. All right. Um but we're not here to talk about mollusks or otters or or macaq or if people want to write in about those things, I guess we are, but I mean yeah, or other i I think

Wait, are hedgehogs echidnas? I think that's what they are, right? I believe if I can find the tab I just had open yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh actually maybe not. Sometimes laying laying eggs. That's weird. I don't think I want to try to even read most of this taxonomy. What you don't want to talk about the spiny an eaters, quilt covered monotremes, egg laying mammals belonging to the family Tachyglycidae? It is it is of the order yulito yulipatifia? Yep. Or uh something.

Okay. Echidnas aren't actually hedgehogs. Yeah, I don't think that's I think that's a that's that's the whole nut that's the whole Sonic and Knuckles dichotomy, right? Wait, Sonic and Knuckles aren't both hedgehogs? No. Knuckles is an echidna, famously. And not only now that you're saying this do I realize they must have introduced him as an echidna, as a foil.

To the hedgehog protagonist. I mean, I I often have said that the egg laying mammals, the monotremes, are the evil versions of the other non egg laying mammals. Suck it platpus. Yep. Yep.

All right. Should we answer some questions? Yeah. If you have a question, you can send it via email. That's electronic mail to techpod at content.town. Or if you are a member of the Patreon, which you can find out about by going to patreon.com slash tech pod. Uh then you can go into the question seeking answers channel and post it there and it will kind of disappear. Now Let me go ahead and tell you there was some proprietary knowledge dropped in the questions channel this month.

So you should know those questions do disappear after a moment, but if somebody else happens to be in that channel at the same time, they will see exactly what you write. And there's nothing we can do about that. So don't post secret stuff in there. Send secret stuff via email. Did you redact there there's at least one message in here with some large redacteds in it, and did you do that? Someone put

The a place that they worked that I know that they would get in trouble for posting and I did some redacting. It's a big giant company. I think we we can do that one first if you want. Uh that that one, um Is exactly the one I was talking about. Yeah. So all right, well now that we've talked about it, I guess let's go ahead and read it. It's it's this Notepad Plus Plus one? Yeah. Okay. Yes. We got a lot of feedback on Notepad Plus Plus. Uh Yes. J like Some people were of the

Yo, man, this is just one developer doing his thing for free, leave him alone, be nice to him,'cause it like they thought we were mean about the way we said that he kind of muffed the security alert. I thought our discussion was pretty like descriptive in nature and not necessarily judgmental.

I yeah, I mean, look, if there's one thing that doing the FOSS pod taught me, it's that we should all be nice to our open source maintainers and you shouldn't yell at them ever. Yeah. And also like it was well I'm not an expert here, but from my perspective it was largely the fault of the hosting provider, but also it seems like the odd again, as we said last week, the updater was maybe lacking some fundamental checks against integrity.

Yeah of of updates, but anyway. Yeah. Anyway, um to be continued. Yes. Ian is the author of this email. Uh from a security researcher perspective. At Redacted, the Notepad Plus Plus event caused a lot of noise for us, and you were spot on with it being targeted at corporate software developer folks. Notepad Plus Plus is widely used by Software Devs and it also happens to be a common approved editor for production environment machines that can edit, run, and deploy code in production.

While I wasn't directly involved in the investigation at Redacted, a collic a colleague of mine works in containment focused efforts and a lot of folks found themselves with non functional work laptops and production laptops after that event happened. Because we went with the better to be safe than sorry containment approach and just nuked a bunch of laptops. A lot of people were worried it was layoffs, but no just security.

Uh for alternatives to Notepad Plus Plus, you hit on the gold standard of Sublime Texts. Uh you mentioned VS Code, which is pretty heavy for just text editing, but a neat thing there is that you can actually run the text editor piece of VS Code separately. It's called Monaco Editor. It's an NPM package and you use a browser. As a text and code editor essentially with it. So okay, two things. One is I wanna know

Obviously they made the laptops stop working remotely'cause that's a thing you can do in corporate environments. Yeah. And in fact I would guess wiped them. I don't know if you can go that far. I or maybe you just maybe you're just like kind of like barring them from the network until they're wiped or something. I don't know.

Well, I think they can do things like remote bitlock bitlocker keys and stuff like that. So the data's essentially gone. That would effectively be an easy way to wipe it. I I love that. Not not to go off on a tangent here, but I think I've talked about before. That's how That's how N VME drives can be zeroed out. I think it's part of the spec these days is that they have

on hardware encryption at all times and and to quote unquote erase an NVMe drive, you just have it wipe the the decryption key and then the data is effectively gone forever. The um the other thing I think is that

Like like part of the concern with the machine that's been compromised at that level is that then it's compromised in some sort of firmware way, right? Or that there's something living in the firmware of the drives or whatever. So all the hardware is suspect. And I wonder if they just ch Like if these get chucked in the e waste pile or if they end up in the shredder or like what the what the disposal process is for potentially compromised laptops at a big giant fortune a hundred company. Yeah.

Um I wanna see a laptop sh I mean, it's kind of a it would be kind of sad to watch perfectly good piece of hardware be destroyed, but also But is it perfectly good, Brad? That's your question. You can't be sure, man. I guess you'll never actually know. Um I also installed Sublime Text on all my computers this week. Okay.

And holy crap, it's really good. Is it? I I I tried it like years ago and I don't think I still have it installed, but I thought it was pretty good. Yeah. It it might be it's it's weird because Because Linux people t tend to use VI or nano or one of the the T T yeah, the C L I base. um text editors, there's kind of not a ton of really good plain text editors. Now there's a lot of stuff for like editing Markdown and doing like light word processing.

But there's not like there's a weird void there and Sublime fills that really nicely for me. So I've been I've been using that for the last week or so. Uh last thing I'll say real quick, I don't remember who said this, but somebody in the thread for last week's episode on the Discord said effectively I'm paraphrasing I have bad news for you about how widespread Notepad Plus Plus is in government institutions.

Yeah, extremely. It seems like it's around quite a bit. I I thought I mean I thought it was interesting that they seem to be targeting people building software at commercial places. Right. Like that that Like you imagine somebody who's shipping software to millions and millions of people, if you compromise one machine that's in the production pipeline for that in a way that you can put zero days that nobody knows to look for into those those pipelines.

then all of a sudden you turn one hack into an installed hit of hundreds of millions or billions of people potentially. So yeah. Yep. Uh all right. Here's a here's a pair of questions that I find amusing.

Uh Adam writes in first. When I was a child, my mother painted murals in people's homes. These were wealthy and extravagant homes that could afford a bespoke mural of ponies in their child's bedroom, so they usually had crazy tech products. I remember one of these homes having quite possibly the largest TV I had and maybe have ever seen. It looked like a CRT built into a massive cabinet.

Kid brain is not the best at remembering dimensions, but I remember it easily being six feet tall and nearly eight feet wide. This would have been around 2003, give or take a year or two. Did I actually see a massive tube TV or was it some sort of early plasma TV? My wife has a similar story from a similar era, so I definitely didn't imagine it, maybe just exaggerated it.

Uh I I I double checked there was that video going around a year or two ago about you know, we found the biggest CRT ever made, which was a Sony. This was probably not a CRT. It was forty five, so this was probably not a CRT you're thinking of because the biggest CRT screen ever made was only forty five inch and it was like four hundred pounds.

And yeah, and like that was I think it was barely made. I think they didn't even make that many of them. It it was unclear if they even made one. Like before they found the one that was in the Japan Japanese restaurant, it was unclear that it was actually produced yet. Right. Um now there were CRTs that were built into giant wooden cabinets as like furniture back in the day that you could be thinking of, but even that wouldn't be anywhere near the dimensions you're talking about.

So I I went down the other side of this rabbit hole and I looked up when when plasmas started taking off. And in the early two thousands, the biggest plasmas were about forty inches, forty five inches, were about ten grand, fifteen grand a pop. Uh the uh later in the early two thousands, so like tw twenty two that like Sometime between the start of Twitter and twenty ten, twenty twelve

Uh Panasonic sold a hundred inch version of its plasma that was driven by uh two hundred and twenty volt power in the US. Yikes. Um Kevin Smith famously put one at the foot of his bed. I think I've yes, I've heard that story. And I think I think uh with like for a while it was on display in the shopping center in the Westfield downtown where Nordstrom used to be.

So you could go and look at one and it was hanging in that center like that that's a shopping center that has a center column that has escalators that go up around the edge and they hung it in the center there so you could actually see it. It was extremely large. Um, but that would have been too late for this. So I bet what you saw was some sort of projection T V would be my guess. That was my guess. I the the other thing that came to mind when I read this was D L P

Which was getting pretty big around this time, which is a form of rear projection. Yeah. DLP would have been after this, I think, though. No, I I looked it up. The the technology was invented in like eighty seven. Oh right. Pretty sure Pretty sure by the late nineties they were starting to get out as consumer sets. I mean, that wouldn't look like a CRT, so maybe unless you're forgetting what the screen type was. I'm not sure if that would apply, but DLP TV's got huge.

But they were, I think, probably the biggest screens out there at the time. Well, so I bought a rear projection TV in two thousand that was fifty five inches and DLP wasn't an option at that point really. Oh. Cause I would have absolutely bought the thinner one. Because the benefit of the DLPs was that the throw like to get a CRT rear projection TV you had to have three big giant tubes in the bottom that then were projected onto the screen.

Um, the D L Ps th either they didn't exist or the bulbs burned out. Maybe that that might have been why I didn't buy it is cause you had to keep replacing the bulbs every four hundred or thousand hours or something.

Um, but it could have also been front projection is the other thing. A lot of people like I n I know a couple of friends when I was a kid had front projection TVs embedded in those big cabinets that Uh looked like it was built into the wall, but it was actually a projector hanging from the back of the room and you may not have noticed that as a kid.

The mystery giant TVs, man. Yeah, the mystery deepens. Um the other uh the other email here about TV related stuff is a bit more informational, or in fact I kinda want to put this to maybe the audience.

Because I know you and I are both using old solutions for this. Uh Jessica writes in, the bane of my existence is my HDMI switch. I've tried multiple different brands and cost points. However, the ones I've owned have been hot trash. What do you both use for HDMI switching if needed, or do you avoid it entirely? I've got a PS5, Switch two, Series S and a Raspberry Pi five uh used as a retro console and Roku replacement.

I just want something my wife and I can push a button to switch inputs reliably. So I th I think y you and I both are still using pretty old Sony receivers with HDMI inputs, so this is like Not super helpful to Jessica, but I'm hopefully hoping people can write in or on our Discord if you have better options.

Now that you have HDR an HDR TV that does newer HDMI, are you just using the ports on the back of the TV? So so my my receiver is on the cusp where it supports a uh uh four K but not HDR of any kind? So yeah, I would strip HDR if I even ran anything through that. So my T V has four inputs and three are just straight devices, consoles and and stuff, and then the receiver.

currently is getting one input for everything I have that does not need HDR. Okay. Uh but if I get an Apple TV, that's all gonna have to go out the window because then I'm gonna have not enough ports.

Or you could just yeah, pull the receiver out of the pipeline. Yeah, or yeah, I'm I'm trying to avoid having to get up and juggle cables every time I want to use something that's not hooked up. Uh I I see people talk all the time about HDMI switchers these days in relatively positive terms, but I mean Like Jessica here obviously has had a bad experience with those, so I certainly don't have any recommendations for which ones are good.

Yeah, I I don't I used to use physical button HDMI switchers that were like like you hit a clicky button and it would switch the connection. Yeah. Um that was in the pre HDMI two days. Uh I'm using that receiver still'cause I'm still on a non HDR TV, so it's it's great. Um but also the only things I have plugged into the T V these days are a Switch, the Xbox Series S and the and the Apple T V.

So I have enough ports on the back of the TV theoretically. I would look for a switcher that you supports EAC uh sorry, the new what's the new spec called? Um Yeah are you thinking of EARC? EARK, yeah. EARC for audio, there's HDMI two point one for all the video features. There's like

That's another reason I have never bothered upgrading all this stuff. Um part of the reason I wanted to read this is I think I've mentioned this before. I've kind of gotten interested in maybe a more modular form of I need something to drive speakers and I need something to switch HDMI. But I don't necessarily I definitely don't need most of the features and a very expensive A V receiver that does all those things. Yeah.

Some more modular and maybe smaller solution that's like a switcher and some kind of amp that are separate, I'm kind of interested in these days. But but again, I don't have Good recommendations for what switchers are good for the sort of thing. I also I always worry about latency being introduced or Weird processing stuff like interfering with image quality or stripping parts of the HDR signal or whatever. Like I'm always paranoid about. Sending the video signal through too many intermediaries.

It shouldn't like if if the switch is set up right, it shouldn't do any of that stuff. It should just pass straight through no no additional latency. Particularly like the HDMI two point one spec seems so onerous to implement that I would assume if you're compliance then it's doing what it's supposed to be doing, but who knows? Um I what I was gonna say is you should look for one that supports C E C

Oh yeah, yeah. But so that way'cause'cause the beautiful thing is that if all the stuff in your chain supports CEC, which all those devices should, when you hit the button to turn it on, it should just switch to the right input on all the devices in the chain. Um and and it's a the tet technology is a little fiddly.

Um, but I'm sure that there are options out there and I I bet folks in the audience will have some recommendations. So Yeah, that's my hope in reading this is the people will have feedback. The la last thing I'll say real fast about C E C did you see people on the Discord two months, three months ago, something like that?

Linking, I think the last time we talked about CEC, linking a project a guy did to effectively hack the CEC signals in his device chain with like a Raspberry Pi. Whoa, whoa. Like there there are I'd I'd have to go revisit this to fully describe how it worked, but I think over the HDMI port on a Pi, he was able to like Use it as a serial interface to detect the CEC signals coming in, or there might actually be like a Python library that kind of does that for you.

And he full on posted some code examples of him like intercepting and parsing the signals and then wrote a little utility to control them. That is wild. Like to basically it was basically to like adjust the bad behavior of some of the devices that are which which we talk about all the time. But some Some things like some consoles behave badly, like they always want to change inputs when they're, you know, turned on or whatever. There's like undesirable behavior in the way

CEC devices will sometimes take control of the TV and this guy basically was like writing a layer to stop some of that stuff from happening. It was fascinating. I really need to go back and and revisit that. Um Yeah, it's it's I'm looking at a thread on Reddit right now that talks about the best HDMI two point one switch and they're talking about things like drop. drop frames at a hundred twenty you know blackouts at a hundred and twenty hertz four K video and um HDMI C C signals not passing so

Like this this unfortunately, this might be one of those categories where you just have to keep buying and returning things until you find one that works, is the other thing. Yep. Yep. Yeah, like there's no wire cutter review on HGMI switches'cause only weirdos like us have that stuff. Sadly, yes. Um, all right. Uh this is from Francisco.

Uh I'm curious if you guys have ever messed around with MicroTik's stuff. It seems well liked and fairly affordable for brand new switches and routers. Microtik is a network hardware company in the kind of prosumer space I should jump in real quick, if it's kind of Yeah, in the ubiquity vein, TP Linkomato, that kind of stuff. Uh I've heard the interface for managing them is a bit arcane and they make interesting choices on what ports to include and what standards to bake in.

Uh maybe that's how they keep costs down. Some of their gear seems like it's aimed more at small ISPs, but they have plenty of home lab friendly stuff like the RB five zero zero nine router. And CRS-310 and CRS-309 switches that I've personally been eyeing.

Uh there's there's definitely people on our server who like micro in fact, even outside the server, I see a lot of love for microtik for sure. Um the one thing is as as he kind of mentions here, the one thing I've been a little skittish about, and maybe you tell me if I'm getting too like uh zeal too zealous uh in this pursuit or not, but th they use like a custom OS.

And I'm really trying to get away from like kind of vendor specific anything these days and just go as generic as possible on stuff like this. So like you're if you get micro tick stuff, you're learning their OS and their interface. And their way of doing things as opposed to a more generalized solution, much like Ubiquity. So Yeah, it kind of reminds me of your old it's it it reminds me more of the older the last generation of Ubiquity software that your edge router runs.

Not necessarily like the modern GUI'd up yeah, classy version of the Ubiquity software. But my impression of the Microtik software and interface it is is it is definitely pretty networking Krognar, like hardcore. type of stuff. I I don't I think um it has a little bit of a softer edge than that, but yeah, yeah. The folks I know who who are into it are very like

Hey, let's write the rules for our firewall in a text file. Yeah. People seem to love it though. Like I I've kind of seen m almost entirely positive stuff about MicroTick from people who have it. Yeah, I think I like I'm looking at their router page right now and like for two hundred bucks you can get something with a bunch of ten gigabit uh sorry, two point five gigabit Ethernet ports. Oh, and one ten gig SFP cage. So yeah, like

That seems pretty like that's that's that is an appropriate price for that hardware from what I look at. Yeah, you you can get a lot for for a good price from them as I as far as I've seen. Yeah, I I d I don't have any personal experience though. This is an interesting question from Danny.

PCs have more than enough power nowadays to multitasking efficiently. Why as a standard in Windows can't I separate user input devices so I can check emails while my kid is playing Disney Speedstorm? Video games can already take keyboard and controller inputs separately for s same screen multiplayer.

I don't I don't know of any technical reason that couldn't exist. I'm assuming it's just because Microsoft has not built such a feature. The OSs don't sub like Having made games where people are like, Hey man, why don't you have split screen in this game before?

It's really hard to have multiple viewports on modern graphics cards because they're not designed to be time sliced. That's that's the one thing I was gonna say that I realized as I was saying there's no technical reason you couldn't do this is that yeah, if if you're on a single GPU system, like that does exist now. I think that's the type of thing where you need like

Yeah. Or well it it does exist in some stuff. I think S R I O V is the thing you need that lets you partition resources on PCI Express devices, but I don't know how many graphics cards support that. Like I Like you'll see the odd like Linus Tech Tips video where he's, you know, he's got infinite money to throw at some problem like this and makes things like this work.

But may maybe maybe it is actually a harder problem at the hardware level to solve than I'm giving it credit for, but like it I think it it is solvable or will be at some point. But whether Microsoft ever builds a feature like that For something that's like a a pretty

major edge case, I think, for most people, or edge use case uh is remains to be seen. Well so the kind of killer app for consumers for S R I O V is running two GPU like a GPU accelerated host and a GPU accelerated VM and slicing off Some of that. So yeah, in the same way that you can say, Hey, give your virtual machine two of my sixteen CPU cores, with this you can say, Oh, give give the virtual machine ten percent of my GPU, right?

Um it's not shipping in any consumer version of Linux that I'm aware of, and Microsoft hasn't looked at that yet. Yeah. But but I mean I think I th when that comes online, then we'll see a bunch of weird applications where people do, hey, assign this mouse to this VM and assign this keyboard to this VM. And and that's essentially what you're talking about doing. Yeah. Like running a hypervisor with multiple virtual machines running underneath it.

that some run on for your kid and some run on your on your thing. When you like, for example, when you run when you connect to G Force now, I'm sure that's what's happening. You're not getting a whole machine, right? Maybe you're getting a whole GPU but you're probably not getting a whole machine anyway. Yeah.

has access to slightly more exotic hardware to make things like that work than the average consumer at the moment, but Yeah. It's it's hopefully we'll get there. I mean and and the other thing is it's always the business decision, right? Is like how many people are going to use this and is it just cheaper to Like rather than building one giant beefy computer that three people can use at a time, is it cheaper to do that or is it cheaper to use

uh to to buy three cheap computers. Right. And like having having started like when I worked for the for the for my congressman, he had a Wang mini computer, which was a giant like filing cabinet sized computer that had or th three filing cabinet sized computers from being real that had five terminals hung hung off of it and five people could use it at the same time. But if somebody was doing a mail merge, then the whole damn thing got slow. So like

You know, it's it's like shared resources means that you have shared problems and often not desirable. Yes, fair. Uh I d as a as a quick aside, I have kind of enjoyed boning up on I guess you'd call it the colloquial terminology for old computers that were used back in the day. Like when you say mini computer, that was mini to l mini relative to main to like mainframes, to like room sized or refrigerator sized computers at the time.

And then and then I I gather that microcomputer is what Kind of desktop size, like traditional Personal computer sized computers were called when they first came along. The yeah, they quickly replaced that with personal computer because that made more sense, right? Because it was a one person computer versus a shared shared computer. Yeah. But it but it it does it does kind of throw you for a loop when you hear a mini computer these days and have to remind yourself that

Again, it was mini compared to a gigantic computer. So even a mini computer is quite big. It was a trip because that mini computer had some basic software that you could run on it, but it also had a couple of like custom programs that they had had written that were basically for generating mailed responses, like p physical mail responses to letters from constituents. So like

As an intern there, one of my jobs was to open up all the mail and type in what the person was pissed off about or needed help with. Oh God, by hand? By hand. I guess there was no OCR widely available for it. Not in nineteen ninety three and ninety four, no. And so like

You got a fair amount of, hey, my disability got canceled or my VA benefits are having problems or stuff like that. And those you'd hand off to the person in the office who handled that stuff. But then if it was just somebody who was pissed off'cause they worked at a genes factory and NAFTA was gonna destroy their life.

then you you put them in the pro or anti you you went to the NAFTA category and then you went to the pro or anti and you had to suss that the eighteen year olds were in charge of figuring this out. And then and then you had to um type in their name, address and uh name and address and like uh a note from their letter, which was usually handwritten in some unintelligible scratch.

and then send that uh put put that in the database and then at the end of the day we generate a mailing list that was like, Hey

Uh just wanted to let the Congress uh let you know the Congressman got your email. We really appreciate the the feedback. Here's how he feels about this issue that you're upset about. And most of the time it was a like one of twenty form letters that got sent back. But sometimes you had to like You had to come up with a new form letter for a topic that somebody like if somebody was upset about the watershed for a T VA lake, then you had to

take that and the chief of staff had to write an email and then we had to send take it to the Congress. But it was a whole process. Yeah. But the Wing Mini computer, man. At least at least somebody was reading the letters. Yeah. I don't know if that's still the case these days, but anyway. Uh the the point the point though is is I mean that is that is the answer to this question I think for now is that it's

Certainly way easier and probably also cheaper to just get like a two, three hundred dollar mini PC that can run Disney what was it, Disney Speedstorm or whatever it was? Like like you can get very cheap computers to do things like that now. Yeah. I mean th this is also a good opportunity for s for shit running downhill where like you you you next time you get an upgrade, not that that's an easy thing to do and this the time of our the season of our memory discontent.

But um, you know, next time you get an upgrade, you kick that old machine downhill one notch and you the the kiddo gets an upgrade. Yep. All right. Uh real quick, speaking of children playing video games, Antonio

Do you have any video game recommendations for a two year old where they can just move the stick around and see fun things happen on screen? I firmly believe in Patrick Klepik's philosophy of not forcing my interests on my kid, but my toddler is always intrigued when she sees me play games, and she took to fidgeting with game pads around the house at like six months.

I've tried sharing the controller with her a few times in Geometry Wars Retro Evolved, where she moves us and I shoot, but we die in just a couple of minutes. Uh sadly there's no God mode or infinite lives in Geometry Wars Everyday Shooter or even Vampire Survivors. Also, she eventually tries stealing the whole controller from me, so if I ever found a game we could vibe with, I had to even try modifying the controls to split them across two controllers.

Consoles are good for this, though I think I can tinker with something custom. By using software like DS4 for Windows, got any advice or recommendations? Okay, so I think I've been a success at this. My daughter's thirteen now. She plays games with a mouse and keyboard as as the Lord intended. And uh d you know, I hear her yelling about noobs in Fortnite and whatever other games she's playing on on the reg. Um I started her with actually Super Mario Maker.

So we loaded up Super Mario Maker and I put her in one of those levels that Dan Rikert and Patrick Klepig made for those no no, I'm kidding. That would be horrible. Oh god. Uh they made they made they made famously cruel levels to taunt each other with for a series of years. Um

I did the opposite. So I built really simple levels. Like I looked at the the ethos of one one where they teach you to jump and they teach you to run and I dialed it back like fifteen notches. So I just taught her how to move Mario first. with no enemies and nobody on the screen. Um then I gave her a couple of guys to stomp and jump over. I gave her the ability to hit hammers and I just built increasingly complicated levels until she kind of understood what was going on.

Then I eventually gave her um Uh, then I eventually gave her uh uh the access to the building controls, right? And I taught her how to build levels and she built levels to see if I could beat them. which was which was challenging. And uh that led to her wanting to play like Mario and playing more Mario games. We played you know, we played It turns out a lot of the kind of I guess it's we maybe Wii U era on Mario Nintendo platformers have pretty good kid modes where like

In Yoshi's Woolly World? What's the what's the one that came out on the Wii U? Yoshi's Sounds Right. I should remember that. Anyway, one of the one of those y one of the yarn games Uh Ryoshi's Crafted World maybe, I think is what it is. I th that I think those are both games. There's definitely a woolly world. There might also be a crafted Anyway, they had that's correct. They had a mode where you could play both of you once once she got the gist of the platformer controls.

Um, then I then we set her up in one of those where if she fell, then she just got bubbled and then I had to pop the bubble so she could come back out again. And like the penalty, some of those even do things like When you fall down into a hole, it just bounces you right back out again. Yeah, I think like m Super Mario Wonder on the Switch has some like most most of the recent Nintendo games do have some level of assist like that.

Yeah, it it's like an extreme little kid mode, and that was enough to get her over the hump. But then eventually she was like, Hey, why don't you die why do you die when you go in the hole and I don't? And um then you have to have a hard conversation. Well no no no, but it ended up being like sometimes that was really cool'cause like she would fall and get pu she she would fall in and get bounced back out and I would be dead and she'd have to bring me back to life, which was like

a real moment of joy for her. She's like, Look, I did something dad couldn't do and and um like that that was some of the stuff that made her excited to keep playing games. But mostly Like mostly your kids just want to spend time with you. Right, especially at that age, like you're their favorite person and you you and you and their their uh the the other parent are the favorite persons. And spending time with them is incredibly valuable and and

So figure out the things that they're into. Like I play Roblox games with my kid. I play Minecraft, played like the the other big one was Minecraft when she was old enough to get into Minecraft, which was a few years like four or five, I think. I would go in when I was traveling a lot for work and I would build stuff in my hotel room at night so that when she would log into our shared world, she'd see

Like there'd be an enormous thirty foot, you know, th three hundred block tall Mario sculpture or a stormtrooper sculpture or something like that. And uh that was always that was always a kick. That's fine. Yeah. That's fun. There's also I don't have a good specific game recommendation, but you know, there's a ton of games that just have like very highly granular difficulty options these days that let you adjust like

You know, health and damage and like kind of everything you can every knob you can think of to tweak difficulty they expose. I think I think that's good. Like here's the thing. You it's the thing to remember is that kids at that age aren't obsessed with winning. They're just like moving the guy on the screen and watching like having control over the world is really fun. So you don't you don't have to like

You know, you you don't have to bring our old gamer extreme mutt mentality into it, right? Like they don't have to get the pacifism achievement in geometry wars. They can just hang out and have fun. Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right, let's do at least one more email. I'd want to make sure we have time for some Discord questions as well. Here's one from Tim.

I believe you guys mentioned the Apple TV Plus show Pluribus on a recent episode and that it was creepy and you were debating watching it with certain family members. Can you expand on what you heard? I've been about ready to add this to my watch list next, but I don't enjoy creepy at all. I've probably watched about three horror type films in my life, and they were only horror adjacent at best.

I watch these shows on my lunch break from work and have even less desire to creepy s to see creepy stuff then, so I'd love to hear more. Was that you saying that? I don't remember if I don't I don't I don't think I remember saying that'cause I had been avoiding as much about Plurbus as I could. It's not um it's Did you watch it?

Yeah, I watched the whole thing. It's great. It's f it's it's my favorite one of his shows ever. So th so this this email is very well timed because we finally cracked into it and watched I've only seen the first episode so far, but it was one of the strongest first episodes of a T V show I have ever seen. The first episode has some like disturbing

Yeah, it's about a apocalypse, right? Yeah, it's but like a goofy w kind of a goofy one. I mean there's definitely some pretty uh d unsettling elements to what happens. Again, I've only seen the first episode, but like I don't know if I'd quite go as far as to say it's horror ish.

It's like it's adjacent, but it's less adjacent than say something like Cabin in the Woods, which is like a horror a slasher comedy movie. I mean, uh you know, if if your bar it sounds like T Tim's bar is incredibly low, basically non existent for horror, like this might actually

be too much if you like literally have never seen a horror movie and have no desire to, but I I would certainly not rate it as like It's unsettling. Yeah, yeah. I the the thing I would say is the first just the first episode is I think as bad as it gets. Yeah, I could see that. Um like everything afterwards is inching back towards a uh some semblance of normality. Dying to see more of it.

It's it is I had to I had to pace myself'cause I would have gone through and watched it like eight hours in a row. I I easily could have watched another episode. I I we we like to space things out at least, no more than one a day. But uh I I felt like But whatever. gauging reaction to things like T V shows from your social media feed is fraught and higher highly subjective and anecdotal, but I kind of felt like people seemed kinda mixed on it as it was airing.

Hm. Like some some people I I don't know, maybe some people were just expecting another breaking bad or something, but I don't know it's obviously very different compared to some of his past stuff. It it definitely has the breaking bad like we're gonna write ourselves into a corner and then figure out how we get out of it in the next episode vibe. in a way that I really like I really loved that. That was the thing I liked about Breaking Bad.

It it's it's another anti hero show, but it's not uh as as an unlikable anti hero as uh what's his name is in Breaking Bad? Yes. In some ways. In some ways she's much, much worse. I was I was g I was going to say again, with only the benefit of the first episode under my belt, like I would say in some ways she's much more insufferable than Then Walter like Walter White does terrible things, but like he does for mostly well not mostly.

Uh kind of a selfish monster, but uh Yeah. The the the the woe is me, I'm I'm such a unhappy, wildly successful aw s celebrity author stuff in the first episode is a bit insufferable. Or but her but her agent or who well, whatever, I don't want to talk too much about the show, but she is She is called out on her shitty attitude for how privileged she is by a person in the first episode, so

Like the show is very aware of that. It's very good. It opens with some real contact vibes too, which I love. Yeah. Yes. Like the one of the better, like society falling apart rapidly depictions I've seen in a while. It it's It's it's way more fun than something like Don't Look Up, which I found incredibly real and impossible to ever consider watching again. Yeah. Yeah. I I would watch it. I watch the first episode. If the first episode is

is not too much for you, you'll be fine. Yeah. Is the TLDR. Cannot wait to watch more of that. Um, okay. Let's get into some Discord questions here. Tactical Tug, frequent asker.

Uh I know you've touched on uh the subject a couple times over the years, but could we maybe get a full 3D printing episode at some point in the future? I've done a dumb and gotten deep into the rabbit hole of the printing hobby. Would be great to get your opinions and or experiences with it. Maybe ask Norm to join as an expert too.

So I've bought some 3D printed stuff lately. Okay. Just like under desk mounts for stuff that I want to hide that like is specific for that particular piece of equipment and stuff like that. My motu audio interface is held up by a 3D printed like bespoke. Custom designed mount I'm holding it right now in my hand. Yeah, I I um I have a project that I am kind of

excited about right now that's pretty stupid but uh that would really benefit from three D printing. Okay. And also I've been watching the people making whistles. Like uh for a friend from the show Dan Sinker and and uh uh some of his Chicago cronies are printing tens of thousands of whistles a week right now and um Like it it the the utility seems there finally. Oh yeah and the hardware's not that expensive, the plastic's easy to get.

Um, it se it seems like maybe I should get a printer again. Yeah. Yes. It's time. Yes. If if if we do such an episode, I think I will be the interested interrogator of that episode, especially if we have Norm on as well. Like I just

Like I I respect the field and all the the things that it is becoming useful for. It's just probably not something I'm ever gonna get into, or at least certainly not in an apartment, maybe down the line at some point, but I I would be much more in the question asking role.

Ha having sat in a room with a three D printer printing ABS for years and years and years, I don't ever want to be sitting in the room where the printer's going again. Yep. Um I I don't know that Norm's doing all that much printing anymore, but um

Anyway, I I can I can ask him. I'm sure if he is, he'd be willing to come on and talk about it. I think the F DM printers, especially like the stuff that Bamboo and some of those folks are doing with decent speed F DM printing is pretty remarkable. So cool.

Uh question from Max. What purpose do PCI Express retaining clips serve when the cards get screwed into the case anyway? Trying to remove a GPU next to a Noctua NH fourteen brought me to the brink of madness. I've definitely been there. Uh if there weren't a retaining clip on the slot, it wouldn't have been an issue. I don't have a good answer for this. I don't know if you do. I know the answer for this. Well, okay, go ahead.

So in the olden times, back in the day, in the before they started putting the retaining clips, so w what Max is talking about is the little clip on the typically the first or second PCI Express slot. that kind of latches into that U shaped notch at the end of the slot.

Um and you have to push it down to release the card when you when you pull the card out. This is this is on the right end of the slot to be clear. Yeah. And in the old days when you had single slot GPUs where you only had one bracket. You would often when we would get ship systems shipped to us for maximum PC, we would often receive a Dell or an HP or something and it would get to the office and the GPU would be rattling around inside the case.

So they started putting on the second the second the bracket on the end of the clip so that that wouldn't happen, so the the cards wouldn't come loose in shipping. Wait, aga again to the point of the question though, was it not also screwed to the rear Well mounts. With a single slot card, it's a U shaped screw.

It's not uh the screw doesn't go through a hole. It's just like s it just slots in. So there was able to work its way out. They would wiggle loose. Yeah. Wow. Multiple times we had him show up with the with the GPU or the CPU cooler. That was the other big one. Just flopping around in there.

So they added the retention clips so that they could ship more reliably. Interesting. Um, as cards have gotten heavier, it's more important because they will like a a card that weighs as much as a forty ninety or something like that will get loose over time. Uh the thing I will say is that newer, especially nicer motherboards tend to have retention bracket release mechanisms that are away from all that. Yeah, like a button off to the side that you usually can access better, although as you say

As with many nice motherboard features, unfortunately those are often limited to the very expensive models. Yeah. The gor the trick that Gordon and I used to do at the at the Maximum PC lab is that you would grab a um a slot cover and just slide that down the back of the video card and you could hit the edge of the of the pusher with that usually. Okay. Uh to pop'em loose.

The the the there's all sorts of innovation in this space because everybody knows it sucks. Uh Asus has a new thing on some of their new motherboards where you kinda tilt the card once it's unscrewed in a weird way, like you apply a certain ki pressure in a certain direction, it just releases automatically.

Uh, but it that was so confusing to people that they had to put a sticker on the slot before you put the card in so that people knew that the feature was there so they didn't break the retention mechanism apparently.

Uh so yeah, it's not it's not a like look, if I have to ship a PC these days and I'm putting a big giant video card in it, I usually ship the video card and the computer separately. Yep. Yep. Uh that's that's the way to go. In fact I was sitting here thinking, why didn't they just do that in the first place? But of course

the big point of a pre-built computer is you don't have to put it together yourself. So most people would not accept that. Um I'd like honestly, if I'm carrying if I'm carrying a PC someplace even in the car

And it's not laying flat on its back so that the motherboard is down and the gravity's pushing the card into the into the slot. I usually take the GPU out. Yep. Yep. That is the way to go, I think. I d the last thing I'll say real quick, because I've done this before, it is possible to non-destructively remove that clip from the slot.

Uh on the ones that it's just a clip that you can't the ones that there's like a weird button or lever mechanism, you almost never can. Yeah, although although in that case hopefully things are arranged in such a way you don't care because it's easy to to just push the button to get it out.

Um, I had that problem because I bought a um an NVMe drive with a heatsink on it. Mm-hmm and the s the socket on my board was so close to the slot right above it that it could not get the drive into the socket because it was But I you could just get in there this is a cheaper board, but you could just get in there and like very gently bend the

b bend it outward and and take it off, which I did, and then put it back on when I stopped using that board, it was just fine. The new the new my new least favorite thing like that that the usually the good NVMe slot is right next to your video card. It's usually just above the video card slot. Yep.

And on air cooled systems or systems with big GPUs or whatever, you almost always have to take most of the computer apart to change the damn drive, which is just obnoxious. I hate it. Oh, it's terrible.

Uh okay. All right. Uh I've got a pair of phone related questions here that I think are pretty good. Uh Pat McSee. When did the average person start having a cell phone? Granted, I may be a little younger than the average listener, but in my head, most people didn't have cell phones until right before the iPhone came out, so circa 2005 or 6. Then the iPhone happened and suddenly everyone had a cell phone. Or maybe I just happened to live in rural late happening place. Um when I

When I left Tennessee, it was unusual to have a cell phone. That was in two thousand. Okay. Like young people often would have cell phones, but they were very much of the I have this and I'm paying for service that I can use it in an emergency, but I'm not gonna use it to actually talk to people. Yeah, that's roughly my memory as well. This is easy for me to remember because I got my first cell phone shortly after I moved out here, which was early two thousand three.

Yeah. When I moved to California, the Pac at the time Pac Bell, what later became ATT Uh, was charged we like it was the beginning of unlimited talking, basically, or or really high talk times. Sure. And for a while our cell phone we just had we didn't have a home line here. Yeah. That was exactly the calculation I made when I came out here. And I think that's why I finally got a cell phone was I got here and I was like,

Well, I can register a landline now that I've gotten to California, or I could just go ahead and finally get a cell phone and not worry about it. And that's what I did. Although I remember being pretty resistant to the idea of getting one prior to that because I felt like I didn't want to be contactable anywhere I was at any time. Like it felt a little invasive to me, but I I feel like I also remember feeling like I was like

behind the curve of most people I knew. See, I had an happy car, so having a cell phone was really saved me from walking ten miles down the freeway to get some income tow me. Fair. Um the the the yeah, the for me it was the jump from the old C DMA phones because I was on Verizon or Sprint or somebody in Tennessee and getting GSM and having just like m more talk time, honestly, was was like it became a a thing. Eventually we had to get a f uh landline because we needed to get DSL.

Um, but yeah, until then. And then and then the next big jump was when all the phones switched from being phones to smartphones, at least here. That that to me, I have a really distinct memory of standing on a Muni platform in like twenty ten. Around the time we launched tested.

Um, and looking around and being like, wow, every single person on this platform is holding an iPhone looking at the internet right now. That is wild. That was his iPhone four, I think. IPhour, yeah. Right. Yeah. Like three three the The first one didn't the first one was expensive. They didn't subsidize it, so it was it was like seven hundred dollars.

The second one had bad battery life and a kind of crappy c camera compared to a lot of what we now think of as dumb phones. Three G you mean? The three G. Yeah. Three G is the first one I got. But the four was a real was a real jump ahead. And there was three G S in the middle of that, which was just kind of a a minor bump. But yeah, the I I I w I still I kind of regret never having gotten an iPhone four. Like I forget I can't remember why I didn't get one.

It's the one I have on the wall behind me blown up. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean it you know, to a lot of people I think it is still like the iPhone or at least a very major milestone, but Yeah. To m to me it was the thing when it went from being a novelty to um to uh like the

like the a thing a a must have yeah technology device. Yeah, and it w it was the first one to double the pixel density on both dimensions, among other things. So like I know it did a lot of things, but in fact I think probably the thing It did was increasing double again, doubling the resolution on the X and the Y. Like the I think that was when they came up with the retina display term, right? But

I just remember thinking at the time like that is an impossibly high resolution for such tiny screen. Why are you doing that? And then you see it and you're like, oh, that's why. And also at the same time The phones had been around long enough that people were building websites. They worked with the phones and apps were starting to come available for like

the app ecosystem was really taking off at that time. Like it was it was the confluence of of things, right, that made it that made it good. Yeah. And if you held it the wrong way, the cell phone wouldn't work. That's right. You know, you had that going for you too. And and also it was all very exciting to watch it happening and not realizing all the while that it was going to destroy society. Yeah. But anyway.

Uh Hal Sefer has another phone question here. More of an existential question. Are phone numbers becoming functionally useless? Every day my work and cell number get bombarded with at least twenty spam calls. My work service provider does an excellent job making sh uh marking them as spam. My Pixel 9 does an equally proficient job, but what happens when someone you may not know is actually trying to reach you?

Have our Pavlovian reactions to an unknown number and the immediate decision to dismiss the call, or mark it as spam created an environment where the use of a phone for contacting someone is functionally useless. This is I I wish I had a better answer to this question other than to say like yeah, kind of. I... The Verizon anti spam tool. that you get free if you're a Verizon member now marks the spam calls pretty reliably. Yeah.

Uh but it was horrible when I was applying to jobs actively and would get random calls from recruiters and like I had to pick up every friggin' phone call that I got if I was waiting for somebody to call me. Is the spam marking happening at the carrier level, not the I the phone OS level? Oh both. Yeah, so the Verizon tool there's an API apparently that can mark

The interest that can that can tag something as spam from the Verizon tool, but also it seems like the phone does it as well. Got it. Okay. So yeah. Yeah, I mean I've I've had this experience literally in the last two weeks and uh I was In one case waiting for a call from a doctor that I had not called before, so I didn't know what their number was gonna be. Same thing with a financial service.

Well, and often the doctor calls are unknown. Like my doctor's always unknown, which means it's gonna get the spam filter if I'm not careful. Or or the call was coming from a scheduling office, which was not the number of the main kind of front office, and so I had no idea who to expect call from. It led to me picking up and answering what were not entirely spam calls. I mean, they were not like literally like scams. They were other

I guess you'd call them legitimate. They were like upselling type. Yeah, yeah, kind of. Kind of. It was just like it was like a call. Well, it was a call from my bank trying to upsell me on Like, do I want to engage with their f you know what I mean? It was just like it was th they were they were calls targeted to me, not just like random scams, but they were still people I did not want to talk to'cause I had no interest in their services.

And yes, it is a nightmare, and I don't know of a solution other than legislation that currently will never happen.

The w like look, if you wanna win a national public office then come out and say, Hey, I'm gonna fix the phone problem. It that really seems like that could actually gain a lot of political currency in the current climate. Like people are really fucking fed up with stuff like this and like I bet there are a lot of people that would pledge their lives to a candidate who literally ran on an un an unshittification platform.

Look, making phones work again seems like a like remember when the phone used to ring and you were happy about it? You were like, Oh man, somebody wants to talk to me. That's cool. I like talking to people. Yeah, I'll try. That's so long ago. I'm not sure if that ever happened for me, but sure.

I I d I I was playing I was doing a Resident Evil Requiem video for PC World looking at frame times in that game'cause it's kinda wild how how for a not a Twitchy game they've done a really good job making it feel Like it's fast, even at like thirty frames a second with full path tracing and everything turned up. But there's a scene at the beginning where the phone rings and and and one of the heroes has to pick up a phone that's just sitting there and she's to pick it up and it's like

Man, I wouldn't pick up that phone. There's no way I would pick up that phone. It's the most unrealistic part of this whole thing. That's the true horror. Yeah. Um this is an interesting question from the Wadge.

A weird thing happened recently. I found out there's a whole AI generated internet footprint around my high school band twenty years after we stopped playing shows in our hometown. It's built almost entirely of pages scraped from a few lyrics that we posted online as kids. It felt equal parts flattering, eerie, and most importantly out of my control.

Uh, you've both created work that's reached far more people than I ever have. When you see your work echoed back at you through algorithm summaries or content you didn't create. How does that make you feel? Do we really own our work once it lives online? No. Yeah, I guess that's the that's the answer. Once you post it, it's gone. Yeah. You can't get it back. Um I haven't really had that experience though. Maybe you have. I I or maybe I just don't go looking for it.

I see people like I don't go looking for it, but occasionally it pops up. Like my daughter occasionally will come out and be like, Hey Dad, is this you? And I'll be like, Yeah, that's me.

Um, some of the stuff that I did tested has been kind of evergreen, like some of the food stuff and some of the coffee stuff and things like that. Like I think my that AeroPress video that we shot in the in the um Sausolito office like the fifth day I was at work has been James Hoffman pot posted in video like references it in videos occasionally'cause it's one of the first Aeropress videos on YouTube. Um and uh like it's always weird to see that stuff show up.

Uh the the the big one for me I think is the the the picture that Norm took of me wearing the original Oculus Rift. Um, which haunted me for years to the point that like I I've told the story before, I'm sure, but like I went to pitch days where people would pitch their VR startups in on a stage in front of a bunch of a bunch of spectators and also a handful of VCs.

And there were eight pitches that day, I think, or nine pitches that day, and five of them had my picture in them. Great. By the so that like by the time the third one popped up, I laughed out loud and the guy who was doing the pitch was like, What are you laughing at? And I was like, That's me. You everybody's using the same picture of me these pitches. Nobody had put that together. No. That you were sitting in the room. No, that nobody realized that I was sitting in the room. Yeah.

So I I should say I I guess I'd I'd obviously have seen a bazillion references to work we have done. I guess I was I was interpreting this more literally from the the A AI or programmatic angle. Like I I have not seen much or any of my stuff extruded through the algorithm machine and turned into some new type of content, you know? Extruded is such a good word for that. It really i yes, thank you. Like but you know you know what I mean though. Like like he's he's talking about something

Yeah. Minor, like a minor input they put online that has now been turned into something bigger. Like I I haven't seen Other than those those pitch emails we get all the time of people uh or not people, but you know, L L M summarizing things we've said in podcast and turning it into some kind of pitch like I haven't seen much that I've done that's gotten turned into new things.

Look, Brad, I really loved the way that you uh highlighted the charming use of a shed as a place to store your old technology from the twenty third uh twenty th February twenty third episode. That's very flattering. Um Yeah, I I don't for me it's more it's always been human touch at this point'cause I don't I I feel like our stuff isn't big enough to get extruded through the AI machine usually. Yeah, I think that's right.

Uh but also yes, no, you don't own anything you put online, it's just out there for anybody to take and do with what they will. There was an Anacrucis video that Chet and I made that Asmund Gold w embedded in one of his videos. That was bad. That that one was that was not okay. Ugh. Yeah. On many levels, ugh. Yeah.

Uh okay, let's do a few more here before we get out of here, really short ones. Uh lionadar, I guess is how you want to say this. My nephew recently purchased a used PC that took some work to get going. He said he put Atlas OS on the machine and it's performing a lot better. I looked up Atlas OS online and it appears to be a modified Windows eleven install. Am I wrong in thinking that's super sketchy from a security perspective?

Yeah, it'd be a cold day in hell before I use any of that stuff. Yeah, so I'd I've been aware of Atlas OS and there's another one called like Revi OS or like Revolution OS I think, which are which purport to be Windows distributions, which is not a thing that exists. Like yeah, Windows distros is not a thing. They are just modified installs of Windows. I did look up Atlas OS again last night, and I think at this point

I don't think they are distributing modified ISOs to be clear. They'll do an ISO injection for you if you want. Yes, it is I I believe it is a thing you pair with an ISO and install. It's a it's a deep loader. It's a glorified deep loader, which is what most people call things like this. Yeah, but but also they're not signing their executables or anything like that. So

Like their their process is install Windows and then run this thing that you have to d to turn off all your security protections for. Yeah. Like if you're going to do if you want to de bloat Windows, then learn how to de bloat Windows. Don't I I would generally advise against using one of these tools.

Yeah. Uh same thing like running the LTS C version, which is the the basically embedded terminal version of Windows. Yeah, which you're not gonna get security updates for in a timely manner or a lot of the features are Yeah. Implemented in the same way. Things are going to be weird. And and also there's a real chance if they become popular to the point that people are actually using them in large in large numbers.

that Microsoft will just break key things that you need for your OS to work and then you'll be in a hey, I have to reinstall in order to fix this problem situation. Yeah. I I I don't trust these things from multiple angles. There is the obvious one of their Pretty vulnerable to like supply chain malware type attacks, so they're a vector for people to do bad things.

who are bad actors. There's also just the aspect of I don't trust what they are fiddling even even if they are coming from a noble place in terms of intentions, I still just don't necessarily trust them to tinker with the innards of something like Windows because

A lot of the things they would be looking to disable in a modern Windows are liable to break. There's gonna be downstream consequences. Like like edge edge edge the way you might disable edge in a Windows install could very well break functionality you do want in Windows and like I don't trust them to

always have a good handle on what they're doing. And in fact if you go through the Alice documentation, and again, I I hate referring to these things as like a separate name, like they're just windows with modifications. Like they're not separate operating systems. But

If you go through the list of things they can turn off, they have them broken out into sections of okay, here here are things that once you disable them, you can't get back. You're gonna have to reinstall Windows entirely if you want to re enable.

these five things that we turn off. Like here are things that with some hoops jumped through you can maybe restore properly. Like that's a level of modifying my operating system that I'm just not comfortable with. And and it The d the the kind of the difference with something like Linux, where there are actually distros where people have um intentionality about things that they change about how the OS works is that

Fundamentally, uh Linux is designed to be um kind of interoperable with other software. So you can use different systems to do the same things. because it y at a low level the systems are designed to communicate in a generic way. Right. So like when you draw a window in X Windows or Wayland, it's basically the same processes that that uh you're sending commands that are just text commands that get sent over a pipe between one process to another.

And and Windows doesn't have that. So like they're trying to mimic something that doesn't exist on Windows in in a lot of ways. Yeah. Um and the results are gonna like it's it's gonna be fine right up until the moment that it's not. And the way that it is not fine is TBD. Yep. Yep.

Yeah, if if you if you really want to strip down an operating system that to this degree you should just use Linux. Or or or alternately L go to one of the fifty million guides on places like Tom's Hardware, PC World tells you how to turn off c all the copilot stuff and all the Bing stuff.

And'cause there are registry keys for that. And a large part that's what these people are doing. It's the stuff that goes beyond that that's bad. And also it's packaging it as a like the way they present it feels really gross to me. Yep. Yep. Agreed. Agreed.

Also, there there's maybe some self-flagellating aspect of this to me of like, if you're gonna use Windows, you should bear the full brunt of its shittiness because you need to know, but that's more of a subjective position. I I will tell you It's way easier to switch to Linux than you think it's going to be. Yeah. Yeah. Like uh you know, it's it's it is it is much less painful than I expected. Yeah. Yep. Just go go go give Mint a shot and yeah. Go from there.

Um okay, uh a few more quick hits before we get out of here. Modest ghost. Any thoughts on the ESP thirty two? Just wanted to know what your thoughts are. Man, I have seen this pop up so much lately. Uh the TLDR on it is it's a little microcontroller that has Bluetooth and Wi Fi built in.

It's kind of very cheap is the other thing. Very inexpensive. There's also a framework for it called ESP Home that basically lets you connect it to home assistants. So people are using them to make really inexpensive Things like home assistant connected CO2 sensors and air quality sensors and motion sensors and all sorts of other stuff.

Um I I it's been on my list to futz around with it. I haven't had time yet. Same, same. I have I don't know about you. I have a list, I have a I have a tiered list of would of would like to do projects. And it's the top tier is stuff that is critical in some way. It's like getting my NAS backups going finally, because I need backups'cause that's a important thing to have. It's doing something interesting with that VPS I paid for every month.

Besides letting us sit there idling on IRC, which is not a good use. You know what I mean? There's like There's projects that are you protecting a channel or something when you do an IRC. I miss yeah sure. Yeah, we could set up an IRC channel on it. IRC server. What it really is is I missed my calling in the late nineties by not having access to a shell account where I could run like an IRC bot or something. So I just I'm I'm just kind of living out those fantasy. Anyway.

The point is like the projects that have some urgency to them, whether it's to like secure data or stop wasting money on something, always are gonna come first. And I never have time to get through all of those. So the like would be fun to fut with projects like doing something with an ESP32 are kind of just perpetually on the, well, maybe I'll get to that someday list.

I really want to like I've I have wanted to buy a CO two sensor for my office since I was sitting here with the door closed most of the day. So I'm I'm fully with you and I had been looking at them for a while and until recently they were all like two hundred dollars and that was just a little more than I wanted to spend. There are starting to be some like cheapish ones. I think IKEA has like a forty dollar one now.

Like there are finally there's a few options out there for like under fifty bucks for a decent CO two like particulate sensor. Cause it it's funny, like I notice um like recording the dual boot diaries in this podcast, we sit in here for an hour or two, the doors shut, the fans off. I notice that when I turn the fan on after a long recording session and start getting fresh air forced in from the outside, I feel instantly better. Yep.

Um more able to concentrate. So I I we've we've also been doing that every morning, even when it's cold recently. My girlfriend introduced me to the term burping the house. Oh yeah. Which I guess is a a European construction. I can see that. That a lot of Some at least some European countries they call it burping. That's right. Your home.

You just clear fr fr blast all the air out and get fresh air in? Yeah, pretty much. Do you do the thing with the front door where you slam the door open and closed and it works like a bellows? No, but we have a pretty good through line through the house from the back door to the window right next to me that just kinda gets a good cross breeze going.

And and we're close enough to the water that there's kind of always a breeze. Yeah, I just I um I one of the things I wanted to put on and at some point we have to redo the roof and I'm probably gonna put electric heat pump in when we do that'cause it's all up in the attic. I I wanna do a whole house fan so that we can which is a like a high flow, really loud, obnoxious fan.

That will just exhaust all the we open three or four windows and then you flip that thing on and it sucks all the air out of house and you get fresh air on the inside. My my dad installed one of those when I was pretty young in our house, just a giant exhaust fan that like that thing roars when you turn it on. I mean, it is extr you don't want to stand under it, it's so loud, but

But it really cycles the air. The problem is once we got that, he never wanted to use the air conditioning anymore. Well it was it was like if I if it was too hot in the house, he was just like just turn the turn the fan on, cycle the air out, don't turn on, don't waste a

Money and electricity. The the thing about where I live is even on days when it's like ninety degrees out, usually when the fog hits at six o'clock, it gets cool enough that if I could get the air the the co hot air that's trapped inside the house out easily.

I wouldn't need to run the air because she maybe maybe this is a dad thing. Yep. Uh last thing I'll say real quick. The ESP thirty two project I always want to do is I I like LED light strips that are programmable. Mm-hmm. And you can straight up just buy those by the foot now.

On like AliExpress for insanely cheap and they're like cuttable or you know, they're they're you can cut them to size and you can pair each strip with a cheap little ESP thirty two and then those go on your Wi Fi and can hook into home assistant and you can just kinda script'em to do whatever. So that that's the thing I would use those for. Um Okay, we're gonna wrap up here with what I'm going to call the me block. Oh. These are all very short and they're all very me.

Uh DC Actual asks, Hey Brad, what is the software you were or are running to make a Raspberry Pi into an airplay receiver? If if you mean receiver as in a thing you can play audio to and out and then that audio will come out of the audio output on the pie, that's Shareport Sync. S H A I R port? That's a terrible spelling. Oh it's like air port. It's like airport. It's S H A I R port dash sync.

Now you should know, as is common with open source stuff, you want the one that is being updated like frequently today because it was actually forked from the original SharePoint sync, which is no longer worked on and has been kind of morbund for years.

Uh I think it's Mike somebody is the guy who owns the repo of the SharePoint sync you want. That that's probably what's your Mike. Yes. Mike Mike is doing good work, but that's probably the one that'll come up if you Google it. Uh if you mean the thing that can stream two airplay devices That's own tone, but I don't think that's what you're asking for. But anyway, there's that. Uh Wild Rile. Brad, did you RMA that DBX yet? I sure haven't.

I sure haven't. Sure haven't. He's just staring at the camera, just shaking his head. He's disappointed in himself, I can tell. Should should we start RMA watch twenty twenty six? This is I mean, look. It's on the list, man. You don't RMA it soon, you can just put it out on the curb in like six months and then call it a day. I've got until November. Okay. I should really get that done, though.

V I d honestly, I mean since I got this little Triton compressor in line that's keeping me from peaking, like That's most of what I wanted that DPX for. It would be nice. It would be nice to get it back in the chain if I if they sent me a good one. Here's the thing. Even if they don't.

What you do is you RMA it and then you just sell it as used, not knowing whether it's good or bad. You assume that the one they sent you back is good. True. You sell it and you're like, Hey, I ha you know, I replaced this with something I like better. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Probably the last question. Last question from Patch. Uh there's been talk on the show before about mac OS being a certified Unix operating system. Then there's obvious yes. Then there's obviously Linux. But does any other Unix actually exist at this point for a desktop now that IBM and Sun microsystems are gone?

Well, IBM's not gone. They're just not in the Unix business these days. Not exactly in the Unix business. So this isn't quite the question you asked, but I have the entire list of certified Unixes in front of me. Wait, is BSD not a certified Unix? No, absolutely not. He says knowing the answer to the question. Absolutely not. Also, Unixes, UNICs Do you know the original spelling of Unix was U-N-I-C-S?

I because it was based on uh Unix. Yeah. No, it's it's a play on Multics, which was a Oh Multics. I love old operating system history. Uh Multics was an older timesharing operating system that they kind of based Unix on in design. So Unix was just a kind of a joke name, basically. Uh as as if we were making the single version of Multics?

Look, on on this Unix list I see a BSD in here. Okay, well wait, what are you looking at? No, that's that's that's like Unix likes. Oh, we're we're talking about w what we're talking about here is that the Unix name was passed from corporation to corporation and is now owned by somebody called the Open Group and they only will certify your operating system as a Unix if you pay them money. A it has to pass a ton of like technical checks and and functionality tests. B you have to pay them money.

To have the certification. Of course. Here are all the Unixes still in existence Mac OS, IBM's ZOS, and AIX. Hewlett Packard's HP UX Yeah and UnixWare and Open Server release five and six from the SCO group. That's it. Those are the Unixes.

It's funny, those are all the closed source ones too. Well I guess is mixed. Yeah, yeah, they're absolutely like you can you can compile and run the kernel of macOS that's open source, but But yes, most of these are for enterprise and in fact if you filter s I'm sorry.

It's probably more than most people want to know, but there are actually multiple Unix standards, so like some of those I just rattled off are actually part of the Unix ninety five standard. Oh yeah, of course. I everybody loves Unix ninety five. It's everybody's favorite ninety five OS. Let's see. Mac OS, I guess, is part of Unix O three? See, it's funny, this family tree says it's derived from Unix version eight. Which one?

There's one I'll I'll post a link in the in the description. Oh, are you looking at that insane infographic from Wikipedia? Oh yeah, it's fantastic. It's like maybe what the biggest chart I've ever seen in my life.

And it's an SVG too. So you can scale it infinitely. Yes, I've seen this one. I'm sorry. I was thinking of the Linux distro chart, which is way bigger than this. No, that one's that one is true true madness. Any anyway, to answer the actual question though, ma Mac OS is the only certified Unix on the desktop. If you mean Unix likes though, like Minix, Linux all those count I think I think well there I don't think there's a desktop version of Mini Minix Minix was

So m much like Multics informed Unix, Minix is basically what spawned Linux. Like Linus Torvald, if you go back and read his original Usenet post, like he kind of made Linux in the um in the image of Minix. Hmm. Which was another Unix like operating system floating around at the time. Anyway, but yes, on it I think the actual spirit of this question is just like what are Unix likes on the desktop?

It's Mac OS, Linux, like FreeBSD is a desktop. You can run I think you can run most of the op open B or all the all the BSDs. So there's OpenNet and Dragonfly. Open Solaris counts still. Yeah. Yeah. There's yeah, that's dude. Open Solaris and and the Lumos and that whole thing is like its own rabbit hole of operating system family stuff to talk about anyway. There's definitely like other Unix like operating systems you can run on a desktop, but I'd say Linux and Mac OS are the two that matter.

Yeah, that makes sense. I I've been running a Mac at home lately, which we can talk about in a upcoming episode. Yeah, yes, yes. I think we we might do a hands on Apple update here in the not terribly distant future. I I'm running blue bubbles, man. Oh, oh, okay. I was wondering what that way. What are you running it on?

A Mac a Mac Mini. I grabbed one from PC World, it turns out, as a company that has had a bunch of people that work there over the years, had a big giant stack of old Mac minis and I was like, Hey, can I have one of these? Yes. It's not an arm, Mac Mini, right? Uh I did not I felt like that was gratuitous for the use that I'm putting it to. Sure, fair. So I took the like the last of the end I took like a twenty eighteen maximum, basically. Yeah. That's not terrible.

Uh it runs one it runs Sequoia but not Tahoe, I think. Is that? Uh but yeah. Uh any I just needed something that was newer than Ventura was what I was looking for. Sure. Yeah. We'll talk about it on a I think we'll do a project episode soon that we can talk about it on. Yeah, but we'll get back to it. Mac OS is a good operating system. It's neat.

I don't think some somehow it keeps getting swept up in the anti Windows crusade recently and for reasons I don't entirely understand, but we can get to that later. Well s I Yeah, I mean we can talk about that in the in the in the Mac ep the Apple episode, but I was surprised by how kind of lightly it's not as inshitified as Windows is, but it's definitely more in shitified than Mac OS was the last time I messed around with Mac OS. It's in your anyway.

I'll make a list. Yeah, we'll we'll we'll get to it later. Yeah. Um that'll do it for us this week though. If you have questions, you can send them to techbot at content.town or if you're in the Discord, you can post them in the questions seeking answers channel.

And they'll go they'll be there for a minute and then they'll disappear. But other people will see them in there if they're in there at the exact same time. So, you know, Cake Batter is gonna see'em because Cake Batter is in that channel a lot. That's true. Um

This is a great time for us to remind you that if you're not in that Discord, you can get there by going to patreon dot com slash tech pod, where for five dollars a month you get access to the Discord, which is full of beautiful people who are into all sorts of amazing, nerdy stuff. Uh, and talk about things like uh like the notepad plus plus breach. Honestly, we had some fascinating conversations about that that I hadn't really considered, among other things.

Um we also did we also had a what I would describe as a surprisingly measured and reasonable conversation about the challenges of people like us talking about AI in the feedback for last week's episode, which was which was really helpful because like Understanding and distribution of that as a technology is fraught both from a ethics perspective for a lot of folks, but also

Like the way somebody like you or I, who are kind of shade tree pearl uh uh Python programmers at best, are gonna have a different experience with that than somebody who's writing code that ships for hundreds of millions of people to use. So Uh it it was it was uh very helpful. Um yeah, I I have not I've been

A bit ill this week, I'll say I have not had a chance to look at all that stuff yet, but I I need to catch up on it. It was a good conversation. Um but yeah, you can go to patreon.com slash checkpod and and get access to all of that. Uh this is the part of the show where we thank our patrons. So thank you, patrons. Thank you, patrons. We are listening supported so without you patrons we wouldn't

year and and we appreciate each and every one of you. But we want to give it a extra special thank you to our executive producer tier patrons, including Jason Lee, OpenAI Delenda Est, which is very funny. Uh, Andrew Slowski, Jordan Lippitt, Hesitation Fiends, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so so much. We appreciate each and everyone.

Yes we do. Uh and that will do it for us this week. We'll be back next week with another edition of As always, please consider the environment before printing this podcast.