The following program is produced by the tech Talk Radio Network. Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Weird, and I'm Matt Jones.
Great to see you, Matt. We missed you last week. You know, we kind of took a little liberty because we knew that you were in wire rewiring.
Heck, I saw the picture. Yeah, the picture was accurate. That was pretty accurate, right, was that was pretty accurate?
Yeah. We went into Dali and we asked it. You know, I know Matt's going through. Showed me a picture of a guy just buried in cables, and one of them that showed the guy's face, and I said, no, no, hide the face. And then that's what.
It came up with.
It's not hiding the face, it's hiding the tears, all right.
So what is pretty amazing, though, is what you ended up coming up with. And we do have photos from last week on the blog of what you eventually created, and I got to say, it's pretty amazing.
When my wife and I first moved into this house, I the basement wasn't finn and that's where I'm at right now. It's done in our basement, So I was in the other bedroom. We had finally got to do the culmination of my dream of like a workplay gaming cave, and it was great. But then you know, the basement
got finished, we had people staying over more often. We ended up having a roommate for a little while, and it was like, why am I hogging this big old honkin room with its own bathroom instead of going to the one downstairs where I probably should be. So I ended up around Actually I think I've been down here for about a year now. But when I moved down one of the things I wanted was a big floating desk, So I used two foot by one inch diameter black just cast iron pipe that you can get at like
home Depot loves whatever. And I got the flanges, you know, just had a little circular disc that they screw into
and mounted all those to the wall. Now, if I could go back listeners, the one thing I would do different would be to lag bolt a two by a four to the studs and then mount the flanges to the two by four As it is to the flanges are now either mounted to the studs or with like four one hundred pound test anchors per flange, right that being said, my gaming tower was pretty beefy, and there would still be days where I'd walk down here and like put my weight on the desk and you just
hear like that the creek hit that one note too high where you're just like, oh, okay, well, what.
Kind of case you were running? A? Not a half nine thirty two or anything like that? Was it? I mean that?
No, I used to run a half nine thirty two. Actually I had the original half air case and I love that thing, but this was a thermal take view thirty seven. I think it still had some weight to it. And then one day I saw this YouTube video and I was like, oh, I could rack mount stuff. Oh I could rack mount stuff. So we used a little bit of money that came in, picked up the cases and you know, some new components, and yeah, we decided just breakdown because my computer was on top of the desk,
my wife's was underneath the desk. So I broke both of them down, racked them because when I was still streaming on Twitch, those computers were actually connected in a various number of ways to be my whole studio, and I was like, oh, if I rack them, then like doing that. So much easier. Well, one of the big decisions I made is I was doing all this is I officially have shut down Captain Oblivious. I've decided I am no longer streaming on Twitch. I haven't done it
in ages. It's it was fun when I did it, but now I'm just going to play games for me. But everything's working great. The cabling's fine, the airflow's good, you know that. I'm happy.
Man.
That's what the first thing when you told me that you were going to move into a rack mounted case, and I have a rackmounted case, and I remember I set it up in our original office and I was using it and then you know, it takes it does take up the desk space. I didn't do it like you did, actually mounted at a rack. I put it on top of the desk, and I remember, like thinking airflow.
You know, when we think of a gaming computer, we think of the acrylic, We think of this being able to see inside in the RGB lights, and I think of a RAQ.
I mean, I think of it being a server.
And you just said, no, this actually the airflow and everything will work good in a rack amounted case as well.
Yes, So the way I've actually got mine. I have both configured, both computers configured pretty much the same way. I have a an all in one three sixty milimeter CPU liquid cooler, and I've got the radiator mounted to the very front. And I know some people when they hear this are going to be like, wait, you're not
using the radiator as the exhaust. I know. Anyways, so the air gets pulled in through the radiator goes in the case and then I've got two they're two eighty milimeter but high volume fans in the back as an exhaust and putting my hand back there like it pumps air through. Everything's happy. I haven't had any alerts. The only thing that irritated me, oh there there are no Wi Fi seven drivers for Windows ten and they have no intentions of releasing them.
Oh really, so it's gonna be one of those Oh you gotta get to eleven.
They finally got me. I've made it all the way until last week and now I'm on Windows eleven, So good job Microsoft. I'm looking at Windows ten and the device managers just like, I don't recognize this network controller. And I looked everywhere and everybody was like, yeah, that's how they're getting us sorry, bud wow.
Now even even the manufacturer of the Wi Fi seven it's stilln wow.
Yeah. I went to so I used Gigabyte for my new board. I went there and tried to pull down a network driver. As soon as you changed it from Windows eleven to Windows ten, the driver disappeared. If you tried to install it with the Windows eleven driver, which they say can be backwards compatible. Well, the Wi Fi once aren't. And then I found out the manufacture of the Wi Fi chip and once you try and pull it down from them and they were like nah, sorry dog whoa.
And now I wanted to ask in the picture and again our listeners can go to blog dot.
Tech, talk radio dot com. The picture.
You have a ring a ring light and in the center of it it looked like you had a DSLR.
I do is that being used as your webcam?
That is my webcam and it is a Sony zv E ten. It is a mirrorless SLR. But the thing is the Sony zb E ten was originally designed for blogging and vlogging, so it actually when you guys were talking last week about like cameras having the USB input, when covid hit I used to have a Canon and use that until Canon decided now that we're in a post COVID world, that product should not be free anymore.
And the free version they pushed an update that basically bricked it, and you have to do the paid version now that costs either like you know, two bucks a month or like twenty five dollars a year. Sony's image Edge software was free. But then I found this camera and it actually has a built in USB streaming mode wow, where you can actually so I've got a USBC plugged into it that goes straight into my computer and a dummy battery in there that is basically just a way
they use a power pack. So it's always plugged in, always powered on, and it just goes straight through. I don't need image Edge, I don't need anything. It just natively recognizes the camera. You know. I changed the settings on it to do you know, eye tracking and more light balancing and things, and you know, as you can see, the background is softened just that ever so slightly. But I've I've been using this thing for years.
I love it.
You know. It's funny because the listener Steve reached out to me because in the show. I was talking about how I have the Logitech Brio four K and I like the cameras from Logitech. They've been great, you know, I've been using him since. Actually, I'll be honest with you, I had the Connectic's Quick Cam and then it became Logitech the four K.
It's just I was complaining because.
If I compare the quality between yours, which looks great Justin's. I don't know if you saw his video the.
Oh yeah, I took a look at it.
The capture was pretty good. The live was even better. Sean's camera looks good, but mine. Miss watched out and he actually got in touch with me and he said, you know, your problem may not be the camera, and maybe you're lighting. And he said, what kind of lighting are you running? And I said, well, I'm just running. I've got five lights that are just regular light bulbs that are above me, seventy five whit bulbs. He goes,
that's it. He said, change your lighting and you might be more happier with the result of what that camera is able.
To give you.
And I mean, for example, so this one, this is just with the ring light. I used to have a second light, an Algatto key light air over sitting behind the second monitor to hit me from my right side. I took it down when I did the reorg. But if you look, I mean just turning off the ring light and the drastic difference. Oh that that makes Look at that because now you've got the light from my monitor, you've got the light from above. It messes with the
depth of field and everything. But then as soon as I pop that back on. And the other thing I did is the camera is I set the camera color for forty five hundred K, and I can control the color of this light as well, and I matched it so it's picking it like it's tuned in at forty five hundred K. And my light showing at forty five hundred K as well helped give it a really nice soft look.
For somebody like you. Look at Sean set up.
Sean, you do you have an actual like a ring light or a focus light on you.
Yeah, it's it's a ring light. It's about seven inch across maybe, so it's a decent sized ring light, and it's sitting right behind my camera. My camera's not in the middle. My camera's a little bit lower. Yeah, it's just a I mean, I think I paid fifteen dollars for it on Amazon, to be honest. Yeah, and I can do it in steps. I can't I can't see what the color temperature is, but I can just do it in steps. And I kind of just picked what I thought looked good, and my camera is set to auto, right.
Kind I kind of want wonder then maybe in situations, should somebody then just turn off all the lights and just use the ring light or a if they have a ring light or a the Logitech has that bar light as well, just use that instead.
Yeah, I mean you're still gonna get You're still you're still limited by the sensor size, right, You're still limited by the if it has an actual physical aperture or not, right, because if you can actually shut the physical or open the physical aperture a little bit, you're gonna get a little bit that of that boca, the blurriness of the depth of field. Yeah, you're kind of limited on webcams because they're you're they're cheap ish for a reason, and that is their their physical lens structure.
And what they're they're made to do now, correct Now, I'm wondering, Matt, like when it came to uh. When it came to your wiring, your cabling, I know that was a big undertaking. You didn't just want to string everything just on the floor behind, you know, behind everything. You decided to do it the right way.
I did it the right way, and I went through so very many zip ties that I made sure to flush cut every single one of them as God intended, because I have scars covered up by both of these tattoos from reaching into racks where somebody didn't. But I ended up finding a cool little kit online and I
used this when I first built this desk. But it actually comes with like a circular coreing bit and just punches a nice like two inch diameter hole uh out of your drywall and then as a piece that fits in there, and you, you know, you do the screws and they butterfly open and seal it in place. And then there's a plastic gasket you can put over there. So I've got all my cables either running in the wall behind my monitors or some of the stuff that's
on the desk. It goes under the desk and then I've got that all zip tied and bundled and across. But other than really two spots and they're both tied to my wife's computer. You can't see any of the cables because that's how I want it. I want it super clean and pretty and nice.
Now, I gotta say, talking about the flush cutting of the zip ties, Sean, that what a subject that was, because that has garnered one of the most most viewed segments of the show because of just it touched a lot of people.
They've all been through it.
Zero commented on on our TikTok page thing not if you do them right, My zip ties break before they come undone.
And.
Is that a good thing? I forty five them.
So I think he's somebody who likes to make sure somebody gets a jagged edge in their arm. Mike Gasser wrote, using zip ties in a rack should be a fireball of fence.
Use velcrow.
I would say to that comment about fl crow. Use this is what I was taught in the years I've been.
In the industry.
You use selcrow for fiber optics because of the bend radius, because if you pinch them too tight with with zip ties, it can break the internal glass strands.
All right, anything else.
Is fair game for zip ties.
Yeah, all right? If we got another one too. I like this one. This one guy mirror Riker said to you, shun, suck it up, Buttercup, that slack has function.
No it doesn't.
If you do it right, you cut to length and then underneath the rack, you leave yourself a nice service loop.
There you go.
I thought it was right, though I created a lot of a lot of conversation about the flesh cutting those and honestly I had no idea. I was left a little bit on there, so I was doing them wrong.
I mean, I mean, anybody that has is saying suck it up, Buttercup, has never cursed somebody's name, reaching into the back of a racket slicing around open. I'm just I mean, you just haven't. You can cry about it all day long and say sucking up butter Cup, but you just you just haven't put in the work.
I have sanctified more than one rack in my lifetime that I had no desire to sanctify.
Yeah, it's not fun.
No. I remember coming home from one and we had moved a rack. We had moved three racks between data centers, and we were trying to do it in one day. And I think I got home at like two am and my wife who at the time she was at the time she was my girlfriend. Damn, that was a long time ago. And she just looks at me and she was like, oh my god, what happened to you? Did you get in like a fight in the parking lot? And I'm like, now, I've been working in a server
rack all day. This is just how you look when you're done.
Like, yeah, all right, well that that that isn't a big pretty good now. One of the things we also talked about last week was mechanical keyboards.
Uh.
And this was like, right up your alley and you have a mechanical keyboard you wanted to tell us about.
That is something that should be something.
That this this lady whose son is saying, hey, mom, I want a mechanical keyboard.
I need it. You're saying, yeah, this is this is the one to.
Get technically, if if we're if we're being honest here, because admitting you have a problem is the start of fixing a problem. I have six mechanical keyboards well, uh, scattered throughout my house. The one that I picked up though, I found on my last trip to Microcenter, which, by the way, my fellow techie people. Our trips to microcenter are like handy people's trips to Low's or home depot. Like you're not doing the project right if you don't have to go back at least once.
Yeah, exactly, That's how it used to be.
With Fries. We have Fries Electronics out here.
Yeah h yeah, but I found this one. The company is called keycron k E y C h R O N. And with keyboards, it used to be keyboards came in just one size. Yeah, the whole keyboard, number pad, everything like that. That is considered a one hundred percent keyboard. My favorite setup is usually somewhere between the seventy five to eighty percent. So in this case, like I don't have a number pad, I have a delete, a page up,
page down, and a home key. But then a lot of keyboards will provide additional layers through the function key. So for like me to use the end key, I just hit function home. But this keyboard is the key Cron V one max. It is a seventy five percent keyboard with mechanical switches and it is just packed full
of features. I have it plugged in via USBC, which allows it to charge the internal battery because it can be wireless, but not just wireless like your usual like like a Logitech where it's got the little dongle it has that. It's got two of them. Actually, it has one that's old school USBA on the other is USB C, and then it's got a slot for both of them to fit in the back that's almost flush, so if you're not using it, you can just pop it and store it in the keyboard without having to take a
case off or anything. Fully rechargeable internal battery, and it can also be Bluetooth. It also has a neat little switch that will switch between whether you want to use it for Mac or you want to use it for Windows, and the other thing it says on both of those is iOS or Android, so it is compatible with everything.
So in essence, if somebody has their smartphone and they've got it, you know, propped up or a tablet, say whether it be an iOS, you know, iPad or whatever, they can actually use that keyboard to type out on the iPad or yes. The again nice nice and you said the storage on it is there storage?
There's not storage per se. There is a there's online software that you can access on key cron site called qmkuh, and you can use that to actually configure and rewrite the firmware on the keyboard. So the other thing that's cool with mechanical keyboards is you know you can pop off your key caps because with the mechanical keyboard you have switches and then key caps that sit on top
of the switches. So if you want to do a non standard layout, what we consider a standard layout is your quirity QW E R T Y. Well, we all learned to type on quirity keyboards came about to actually slow down the human capability for typing with typewriters because humans would type too fast with some of the first layouts they did and would cause the typewriters to jam. So Cordy is actually designed to slow you down. So there are other non standard keyboard layouts you could do.
The two most popular are Devora and uh Cole Mack coll Mac Yeah, Cole Mack. So you can go in and rewrite the firmware for this keyboard to turn it into those and then just switch the key caps around and there you go.
Wow, pretty nice, And now I did well, you showed it.
To us earlier.
It did it, I can do it.
Let's uh, so the listeners can get a look if they check out the video of the site. Now I was looking at it, going okay, I have Steel series uh you know, mechanical keyboard.
It lights up, but it's all beautiful. Does this light up? Is it RGB?
If you look, you'll see it gently kind of here in the shadows light up. If I switched out to a see through uh set of key caps, it would definitely shine a lot more. This one's a little different, a lot of like Steel series uh, sean yours that you showed up.
Uh.
They usually do north facing RGB, so the light is at the north end of the switch. They configure this so that the RGB is actually at the south end, which you know most people are gonna be okay, And but because of the angle of the keyboard, it actually puts it so it's not quite as at the same angle as if it were north facing. So even if you kind of get a look at the switches between the keys, you're not suddenly like, oh, I wonder what's Oh it's purple and so bright.
How's it feel to type on it? Because again that's that's the selling point.
It's it's like typing on butter I I'm finding excuses to type on this keyboard. For the keyboard nerds who are listening to the show, the switches are the gator on Jupiter Brown. When we talk about switches, there's really three different feelings you can get with them. They're defined as linear, tactile, and clickie. Linear is just key go up,
key go down. Yeah, there's nothing fancy clicky. As you type, you get that old classical like click click click click, click click click that you see in all the old eighties Hollywood movies of somebody hacking on a computer.
Exactly tactile.
You get the physical sensation like of the clickie. You feel the attenuation point of one of the key registers, but there's no audible component with it. So these are tactile keys. But what Keykron has done it's really nice, is they actually put two layers of sound dampening foam and they mounted it via a gasket mount instead of a hardmount, which gives it just a little bit of flex.
But because of that, as you're typing on this thing, and I experimented with it, like I was banging out on that keyboard, and it's the quietest mechanical keyboard I've ever typed on in my life.
Now you can find this, you said Microcenter.
You can the one. It's the V one Max. You can find it at Microcenter. I am pretty sure. Well, I know you can also find it on their website along with all their other keyboards. I'm checking to see if it's on Amazon right now.
Because all we have to a break.
But when we come back, Sean got something and I think you got a great deal too on it.
Bl I'm assuming it's a Black Friday deal because it's at the beginning of the.
Week, but yeah, it's got to be. So when we come back, we'll find out what it is that he got. Uh. And in the meantime, Matt's going to see if this is available on Amazon, and if so, we'll go ahead and put a link to it on our blog and website as well.
We'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio.
I'm Adie Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm Matt Jones. You can find us on Facebook at facebook dot com slash tech Talkers.
We'll be right back and now back to tech Talk Radio.
So during the break, I was curious because I couldn't remember what switches my keyboard ass. I have the Steal series Apex M seven to fifty, which is no longer mall. I bought it like seven years ago.
Still series career. I've always loved them.
And it has the QX two linear mechanical switches. So if you were listening before, it linear just means the buttles up and goes down. There's no force feedback, there's no clickie. It's just it's relatively quiet, but it's it's a small I have a seventy five percent, so I don't have the numpad, but I have the home insert
delete page page donkeys. And when I was looking at keyboards right and I just wanted something relatively inexpensive, I went to the mechanical keyboard subreddette, which, as Matt was saying at the end of the last segment, you can really go down a rabbit hole with that. Really, you can get get people that are going to argue about what switches better no way.
Really, They'll they'll argue.
Yeah, oh yeah, do you want to?
I mean, I mean to break it down to Layman's terms, right, it's Ford versus Chevy versus Fiat. Right, it's like everybody's gonna have their own opinion on why there's better.
Wow and they and it'll it'll get heated. And I do not mean that in like a friendly like oh that's a good point. I mean like some dude will be like, you like very MX reds, your bloodline is weak and then proceed to like cuss you out about why you're using like the basic Betty of switches. And if you were a real mechanical keyboard fan, what you'd be looking at is, you know, the Holy Panda X tank mech Warrior switches only available from November first through
sixth on this one specific website. And I'm like, when I first got into mechanical keyboards, I was like, I thought I could make nerds fight. And I say that as a nerd, But then I walked into that room and it was it's like walking into a bar mid bar fight.
Oh boy.
With some of those posts, like you walk in and like you just look at the post title and you're like, oh, somebody woke up and chose violence this morning. Okay.
So sub the subreddits, uh, do people get on there and just argue about like you know, windows versus mac Uh? Yeah, Oh yeah, man, oh wow, do you.
Do you want to find a spot for nerds to fight about a very specif niche set of things. There's going to be a subreddit for it. There's because you're.
Literally a subardd for everything great, oh Man, good and bad under the Sun. Now we were talking about the deals that you know you could get down, Matt, were you able to find Is this keyboard that we talked about?
Is this available on Amazon?
It is available on Amazon. It is available on Amazon for a current cost of like eighty three dollars, which is less than I paid for it. We will put the link up on our blog for this week's show. Yeah, but when you go in you can choose the switches you want in there. They've got Gator on Jupiter reds, Browns, and Bananas, which, honestly, guys, just just just google it and look at it. Don't go to a sob breddit. Just google what is like Gator on Jupiter brown and
just go with what Gemini tells you. So don't join this.
The mom, the mom that was trying to get this mechanical keyboard for her kid that had emailed us, I mean, yeah, she could walk in to a Best Buy and buy a Steel Series, Corsair or you know, Logitech mechanical keyboard. She's gonna get, that's what you're gonna get. This sounds like you have options. What is something she should know though, going in going onto Amazon looking at this keyboard and getting what should she get.
If this is if this is just for her kid and they're looking for a decent mechanical keyboard. Honestly, this is the one that they should probably get if the kid wants to have, you know, the number pad what we talked about earlier, the full hundred percent sized keyboard Keycron has those. I would do those as well. The thing about Steel Series, Razor, Glorious mechanical gaming keyboards, Red Dragon, I'm trying to think of some of the other Corsair. Yeah,
they're overpriced, and they are overpriced by a lot. Most of them. You have to use their proprietary software, which is crap. The Corsair IQ I'm specifically going to call out along with Razors Razor Zone as like some of the worst vendor specific software I've had to use from those Steel Series GG is also right up there, and you have to use this proprietary junk to do the same stuff that I was talking about. That is for free on keycron site with QMK. I don't have to
sign up for it. I don't have to let them into my system. I just do it that way. But the other thing is, like this keyboard right now for eighty three dollars is ridiculous. It is, and they're beefy like just feeling this thing, it feels solid. You have the other ones that do the full aluminum chassis. I did the plastic instead, which, yeah, it's got a little bit of bend to it, but it's you know, you're
in a plastic case. If you want the real hefty one that's an aluminum case, Like, there's gonna be no bend to that unless you're really muscling it. But don't buy the ones you're going to see most of the time when you go into best Buy, like you Keikron Oh, no, that one was expensive. No, cron is kind of the way to go.
But man, right now, I'm just we're talking about it right I'm looking at their website and there are fifty five dollars keyboards on their website. Key kron k one Mechanical warows. Now it doesn't have the fancy switches, but it has cherry switches, which are cheaper.
Cherry switches are just wine for fifty for forty five, that's perfect.
So I encourage her to look at the website. Look, go to their website, look at Amazon, like you can get a mechanical keyboard for fifty five dollars.
The other nice feature that you want to try and find with a mechanical keyboard is something called hot swappable switches.
Ah, yes, yeah.
And the reason the reason you want hot swappable switches is we talked about earlier how you can just pop your key caps off of the switches. These will come with something called a switch puller, which just actually I've got one right here, right, So this is a switch puller. It just looks like an oversized pair of tweezers, but you will actually, you know right that there we go, that's actually how it's supposed to look. Mind, get a little squished, but then you'll just go into the keyboard
crimp it. And you know, you'll obviously want to unplug the keyboard first, but then just a solid yank up and that switch comes out. Because as we've talked about, it's a mechanical keyboard, it's a mechanical component. It's going to eventually wear out. A hot swappable keyboard will allow you to just yank those out, go buy new switches and plug them in, as opposed to one that is not hot swappable. That means that those those those switches have actually been soldered to the PCB, which is the
control board for the keyboard. And if they're soldered in there, then you have to do the whole thing of break it down, undo the soldering, get a new one, trim it. No, no one's got time for that. Just go for one that's hot swappable. Because also as your kid gets older and they start falling down this rabbit hole, because trying buying one mechanical keyboard is like trying just a little bit of crack. It's definitely not going to have any
effect on the rest of your life. Eventually, they're gonna be like, I want to try a different set of switches. Well, if you have a hot swappable one, you can do that, and you just pay for the switches, which are one of the cheapest components you can get.
Right all right, now, again, we want our listener to find the links up on our website, some great, great raves for this company that makes these. Now in the meantime, Sean, you know, had been looking on Amazon and he found he got an email in and it was a good deal, and you decided to go ahead and go for it.
So I got on Monday, I got a Black Friday email from Dji saying, hey, look at our deals right, and it had you know, okay, it had the drones, it had the osmos, it had the action cameras, and at the very bottom, it had the DJI Power one thousand. We talked about this when they launched it. Right, So it's a solar generator right right, it's a lithium ion or lithium iron phosphate battery that has all the bells
and whistles of a generator. It's got AC, it's got one hundred and twenty vold AC, it's got DC, it's got it's a great kit to put in the camper when we go camping. Oh yeah, And it said forty percent off and I was like, oh, that's that's great. It's been on my list of things to buy when it
goes on sale. So then I clicked checked the deals on Amazon, but from the Dji store it was forty eight percent off okay, And I was like, okay, well, I got a code in my email, so I'm gonna see if I could put that code in at checkout, and it gave me an additional forty dollars off.
Oh wow, so I paid.
So if you go if normally this is like a nine hundred and not almost one thousand dollars piece of hardware, I paid three eighty four it on Amazon.
Amazing. Wow.
So with with the with the with their forty percent off plus I don't know if I cheat it by using the code at the same time, but hey, if you're gonna give me the discount, I'm gonna take it. So I'm, you know, very thrilled to have this coming. I should have it by you know, mid December, because it's gonna take a little while to ship. But no, yeah, I'm very excited to have it and play with it.
Is this the big one that is on wheels and you could roller around?
Is that? No, it's not.
It's not that big. It's I don't know what the size is, but it looks like.
A shoe box sat on its side.
Yeah, it's probably you know, six or seven inches by, you know, twelve inches long. It's like a shit like a shoe box. That's that's a good size for it. But for what we do when we go camping, or if I'm out with you know, Steve, my buddy Steve, we're doing astro photography or something, I can charge all my devices. Right if I'm doing cam radio stuff, I don't need to take my you know, I don't have to plug a twelve olt into my car and run
twelve volt for my car. This will sustain that. So when we go camping and we want to watch TV or we want to do something, we could just have this. It charges up. It has the ability to plug in directly into solar panels, so I can just plug it into my camper and it'll charge this. But like it'll use the solar from my camper to charge this.
So wow, Now, how much how much power can you get out of something like this? So say you go out your park, Okay, this is where it's going to be for the night. You can watch television, have some lights.
How much?
So it's the ratings are right. It's it's ony twenty four watt hour, which is pretty good. Uh, and it says it's a twenty two hundred sustained wattage output twenty six hundred peak, So you could even run potentially a like a small air conditioner.
Really wow, yeah.
If you have it, so don't go out and think you can just take it an old camper and run, you know, run your air conditioner off an old camper. My camper has what they call a soft start, which means it does a soft load and builds the aster charge up before it draws, so it doesn't have to draw as much like the max. You know, the draw is lower. So there are consumer level air conditioners that you can draw, get soft start draws on and get
lower draw from they're starting. But we're gonna be comfortable. You can run an AC fan, you can. You know you're gonna be comfortable.
Would you recommend people maybe become a member of the DJI mailing list and maybe they'll get this deal sent to them.
I don't know, Like yeah, I mean, I'm just on it because I have been for god knows how long. But I mean they have deals on all of their stuff.
Anything for the holidays that you've seen.
Have they I got?
I got any I'm not interested in any more WISE stuff right now because they really haven't innovated. I really haven't seen anything that has completely stuck out, like I have to have it. Whise, if you're listening, please, to the love of God, bring back motion sensors so I can trigger the life it's in my garage with just emotion sensor. I don't have to dedicate a camera to it.
Well you know that.
Why Why is this been working a lot with Roku?
And matter of fact, if you see the cameras that Roku has, those are basically WISE cameras and Roku has a motion sensing kit. And I'm wondering if maybe they just said, Okay, well we'll not do that, you go ahead and do that. You know, I don't know how they how they worked that.
Well, they had them originally, like when when I first bought my cameras, when I bought the original V two's, they had like a door sensor kits right window sensor kids like the magnet ones where if it loses the magnet, it'll trigger the trigger whatever function you wanted to do. But then when they went to their clot more of the AI like tracking stuff, they got rid of that because they wanted you to rely on your cameras to
do the sensing. Right, you have a camera, your camera de text movement, your camera to text motion, et cetera, et cetera.
So I know Roku does have that a home security monitoring kit which is a pretty good integrate with your television as well, which is kind of neat. So if you're watching TV, your camera can pop up. They can notify you while you're watching your show without having a look down at your smartphone. All right, we got to take another quick break.
We come back. We have listener questions.
We've gotten a lot over the last couple of days, so we'll share one that's standing by.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm Matt Jones. Go ahead and send us an X at tech talk Radio. We'll be right.
Back now back to Chief Talk Radio.
You can reach out to us anytime.
You can email us tech guys at tech talk radio dot com, or even you can call and leave a message at five two zero seven seven seven ninety five eighty and Al needed some thoughts on installing Windows eleven. He told He told me that his system qualifies to run Windows eleven from Windows ten, but he's heard that there have been bugs with Windows eleven? Should he wait or pull the trigger and install Windows eleven now rather
than waiting all the way till October? That's when you know the support will kind of end for Whindo ten. Windows ten will still run, but the sport will land? Uh?
Or should should he do it before that?
Wow? I feel uniquely qualified to answer this question.
You just went, You took you bit the bullet, right he went?
He went like two days ago, and I went about a month before that, So that's right?
Yes?
Or seann A, you is bitter about it as I am?
Well, yeah, and so I just I don't know that I've I've complained about this before, but it's like, I just I'm sick of the bloat that comes to Windows, right, I'm sick of ads in the home screen, ads on the start bar, like not necessarily ads, but like search recommendations and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, so I stripped mine down to the bare bones as most as you can do. So, but I wasn't bitter about it, but I definitely waited longer than most people.
All Right, So I what do you say?
Just do it?
Just get it over with just it's like rip off a band aid, like it's gonna come off. You don't. You don't really have a choice. Windows ten. The official EOL is October fourteenth of next year. That means it's still gonna function, but you are not going to have any more security updates, any more future updates. The current version twenty two to h two is the last version. For comparison's sake, I think I'm on like twenty four h something with Windows eleven. It's gonna be more secure.
Windows is still getting the security patches and security updates and Defender updates and things like that, but man, just just pull the band aid off. There's some things about it that, like Sean was mentioning that I really don't like. Yeah, I miss my old start menu have come up. Here's all my crap, Yeah, here's the stuff that I've pinned. Instead, you open it and it's like here's all the pin stuff,
and underneath it is like here's all our recommendations. Well, if you turn off recommendations, that includes like continually open files things like that. But it's also the random bloat ad junk that they're going to float your way of, like you know, have you has your aunt Debbie twice removed. Not convince you to download Candy Crush Saga yet let me give you six ads for it every single day while you're just trying to find word right.
Uh, that is there things that OWL should do before making the jump. Did you do anything before you said, Okay, I'm gonna install Windows eleven on it.
I should do this first.
So with bailes obviously.
But yeah, I was gonna say with me, I've got everything spread across three different hard drives in it, so if it nukes my my files are fine. But for most users, you definitely want to do a backup of your files first and not like you know, oh I did a backup on the same hard drive, I'm gonna be installing it on No back it up to you know, if you've just got a couple of word documents and some pictures, like, you can throw it on a USB key or just get an external hard drive or you know,
there's cloud providers. You can do Google one that you can get up to a terabyte. You can do. Apple has theirs if you're in that infrastructure for your mobile devices, Sugar Sinc. There's there's all sorts of cloud providers you can also do, but definitely definitely back up your stuff first. All right, when you're done installing it and you have run it, and you're a week, a month, however long you're comfortable, it's down the road and you're like, I
am not going to go back. Because when you do this, this is called an in place upgrade. The way Windows does that is it basically kind of like boxes up your old operating system, puts it on a digital shelf over here, and then installs Windows eleven and pulls some stuff out of there and puts it back in. When you've had this long enough, you open up your start menu and type in disk cleanup two words, and there'll
be a little option says run as administrator. And if you do and check all those boxes, one of them is remove previous Windows installation. And for me, as soon as I ran that, that was thirty eight gigabytes that I got back on my operating system hard drive.
That's pretty good.
So that's something you want to do later.
All right, here's one for Mike. Now, Mike did the original musical theme for the show. Mike drives a truck for a living, but he's a musician. And I've known Mike for a long time. But he set us a note and he says, I want to make short videos with AI on YouTube with my music. He said, what kind of software is good for something like this? What might I need to know? I thank you so much for your help so far, and thank you in advance.
Okay, Andy, you've been you've been sending us some really cool like snipped for social media stuff. What are you using for that?
I'm using alloclip for that? And that is that allo clip opus clip.
I'm sorry.
Illoclip was a little camera you used to be able to put on your smartphone. But opus clip and that you know that creates those. But I think what he wants is a complete AI driven scenario.
And I've been.
On on the socials like like TikTok and Instagram reels, and I've been seeing like there's one I saw with a baby and a cat, and the first time I saw it, I thought, oh, that's really cute the baby and the cat or the babies laughing. The cat made the baby laugh. And then I watched a couple of more and I realized that's AI. It's all of it's AI. There's and there's other ones that are completely driven AI, and I'm wondering what program could be used to create that.
I you know, I explained to Mike, we may have to do a little research on this, but.
Yeah, I think we're gonna have to because I don't know of anything that's completely AI driven just from there's something that you have to you have to generate some real content.
But yeah, that's what I would be thinking too.
You know. I know there's great editing out there like cap cut that can help you create stuff, but again for doing it from the complete AI standout of what AI could create. And I know that Mike said he wants to have his dog be a superhero or his dog to be featured in them. We're gonna have to research that one. If flicteners have been doing this kind of stuff or they know, please drop us the line and let us know what would be a good one, all right. And then this one from Dave in Green
Valley said, I'm hoping you might know. I have an old hard drive that came out of a Windows XP machine. It's pretty it's pretty okay, he said, It's an eighty gigabyte drive and I believe in ide drive. I want to take a look at what was on it. It's never was never backed up. What would I need to be able to do this? I only have a laptop from Dell and it won't fit inside that laptop.
No, it will not.
So we talked about this at the bed of the show. Because we talked. We talked a little bit about the questions we're going to answer. And I have an answer for this.
I've done it good.
They make USB to IDE adapters.
Wait to IDE. I've seen the USB to SATA, but not the USB STA.
So I looked it up and I found one. So Microcenter has one for nineteen dollars. They can buy them on Amazon, but I trust Microcenter. It has the ability to do the three and a half inch, two and a half inch and SATA, not all at once, obviously, But it's USB three. You plug the drive into the adapter, you plug it into your computer USB, and then you power it. They have an external AC power so it powers the drive separately from your computer, and then the USB does the.
Data wow, and then he should be able to see what.
Was he should You should just be able to plug the drive into the adapter, plug it USB into your computer and then put power to it. It should recognize it as a USB drive.
Oh, that's viable.
I've done that before, but it was years ago, but it was ID. I was moving ide to Acetah heart drive and yeah, I used something like this and they work great.
Yeah, I have a Now now.
If you're using a scuzzy drive, you're up up the green God.
Yeah help you. And oh you can't.
How would you? How would you get data off an old scuzzy I.
Mean, find a mother and find a motherboard that supports scuzzy drives.
Or even an adapter card. You couldn't even do it that, right, could you.
I don't even know if they make adapter carts or scusy drives. I'd have to look. That's such an old I mean, I'm gonna have to look. But if you, if you have a scuzzy drive and it works, send it to me and I'll get the data off for you. I mean, I don't know. I'd be interested to find a scuzzy I mean I've seen some scuzzy drives and some of the old stuff that I've gotten from friends and stuff, but I've never tried to pull the data off.
Well, my wife had a medical billing business, and it was a had A server and I built it with it's had scuzzy.
Her drive was a scusy drive.
But when she stopped doing that and got back into you know, working over at Northwest, she she just ended up not using it anymore. So it's still sitting in the tower, but it's an old it's a Windows n T station workstation.
So this is like I'm I'm looking at some of this and seeing some of the solutions that these people have put together, and it's like an adapter into an adapter into an adapter into an adapter into USB. Thus the comment earlier, God help you because we can't.
Right becuse he is a little bit different bottle of waxe. Yeah, but ID is good. I have a star doc which I love, but it's it's it's basically just say that.
That's all you can do.
You plug the drive in. It's neat because it has two bays. You can plug the drive in, then you can put another drive and you can actually copy the drives, which I've done here at the radio station before as well. But again for ide, I didn't even know there was a cable solution that. So that one's pretty good. All right, one more as we approach you know, well we kind of you know, Cyber Monday is going to be on Monday. You have Black Friday, which was yesterday, but says I
think you guys have talked about this before. I have a forty inch television from about fifteen years ago. The prices of this week for a fifty inch have been pretty amazing. Is there anything I should consider before buying a new TV? How do I know? It's a smart TV that's from Mary in Tucson.
So most of the TVs that you're gonna see nowadays will have some form of smart to them. It's just kind of the way it's gone. There's gonna be some form of you know, you have apps things like that.
That's why they're cheap.
That's as as we go towards Black Friday, I'm going to give you a little secret from somebody who worked too many Black Fridays at best Buy. Okay, when you are seeing these super cheap like you know, oh it's an eighty inch panel for like four hundred dollars, it's because that TV that skew was specifically designed for a Black Friday sale and will never be made again. It is not a staple model. It is not a part
of the staple product line. It is literally like Brankenstein's Television of a way for them to clear out old panels, old parts, old cases, things like that to create a TV and create that skew that they can sell super cheap and that'll be the only day you find it.
Oh but now are they going to be good deals?
I mean they're great deals for like the one year that it's going to last. Oh, and then you're going to start seeing issues because here's the other thing. These these smart TVs basically have a mini computer inside of it, and like any other computer, as it gets more updates because they keep coming through, Internet of Things is doing
a little bit better now about securing itself. But as you've got more updates coming through for the whatever operating system it's using, the streaming apps themselves update as time goes on, the computer starts, the TV starts to show its age by slowing down. We have a Visio TV upstairs that you hit the power button. It's like, okay, I want to go to Netflix. And it used to
just you know, bop bop. Now it's kind of moseying along and taking its time, so you're going to see a more rapid decline of the software portions of it. You'll start seeing hardware issues usually around a year and a half, maybe two years. But these are not TVs that are meant to last. They're not by by technology and by business profit. They are designed to fail quickly.
So if you're looking for a new TV, you know you're coming up on a time where it's like, it's honestly a little bit of a risk for which you're gonna pick.
Yeah, you know, I'm thinking. I had an Insignia that I bought as a Black Friday sale, so forty inch. It lasted about three years, and you know, third year, it just just stopped turning on. And so yeah, again you could run into that. So I bought.
I bought back in twenty ten, I bought a TCL thirty two inch. I think it's thirty two inch. It's over there.
Right, That thing still runs.
It's not smart TV though, doesn't it doesn't have it just it's just a TV. It's just a flat panel.
But you could plug a Roku box into it, or.
I ran it with a with a with an Amazon firestick for a long time and now it just serves as my retro gaming hub, so it's got all my retro gaming stuff plugged into it.
Yeah, I mean it wasn't. Justin talking a few weeks ago about the new Google streamer. Yeah, because they bodied the Chrome cast and turned it into the streamer. So you don't necessarily need a smart TV. You can just you can spend that extra money on a really good panel. I mean for for large aspects panels and a large aspect. I mean you're looking at a big honkin TV, like seventy inches or larger. I look. I like Sony, I really do. I I like TCL. They've improved a lot.
They're another great one. They're partnered with They were partnered with Roku. I think they changed and they're now partnered with Android TV, which is also what I like with Sony. Yeah, TCL, Sony's good stay away from the the in house brands. And what I mean with that is like for best Buy, Insignia and Dinex are produced by best Buy, they're best by brand. Walmart has own or On, Walmart has on and Walmart Actually, last I checked, Walmart bought Visio right yep.
But I you know, LG Samsung Sony. Yes, Sharp tcl Yes, you're gonna pay more for the name. But there's a reason for that.
We gotta take another quick break. We come back with more of tech Talk Radio.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird.
I'm Matt Jones. You can find us on the webit tech talk radio dot com.
We'll be right back and now fact to tech talk Radio.
Now. We we talked about this product a couple of weeks ago, and I'm curious if you used it, Sean nine Nite. Do you remember when we were chatting about that one.
Yeah, so I did, right. I think I ran it during the show that that episode to get a couple of the things that I didn't have installed. So nine Night is this fantastic website nine Night dot com, I n t E dot com And you can literally just go it. Just you go to the website. It's gott look at all these applications. I can just click click, click, click Chrome, whatever browser're using, whatever, message system, media, imaging,
document security utilities, storage, developer tools. You just click the box you hit get your nine Night it devout. It gives you this package and it downloads and installs all of those programs for you, and.
You did this when you were going to Windows eleven.
Yeah, I went to Windows eleven and then I was like just going through, like I wrote a list. I literally wrote a document saying what do I have installed on my computer? And I went through and I said, Okay, I've got this, got this, got this, got this, got this, And then I went through and deleted as I installed right, And this would have saved me, I don't know, two hours of my time probably of just going through and going to the website downloading the Okay, got the installer, cool,
got the install cool this. Just you click, you literally just do. It's like fifteen clicks and you've got a wrapped up package with all of the programs that you're gonna want that you probably don't even know you need.
I got to tell you one of the most frustrating things is doing a new installer Windows, getting all your programs and doing a new phone smartphone you're going from one to the other or just brand new phone.
It can be it can be a real pain.
The other the other thing, the other thing I'll tell you too, is remember if you have saved passwords in your Google Chrome or anything like that, to make sure you've got that backed up, because if you move everything over and you don't bring certain things with you, you're gonna have to relog into everything and you're gonna need to remember your passwords for everything.
So I think, Matt, you've felt my pain in that one.
With that one, I will recommend. I've moved away from like Chrome holding all my passwords. I used Bitwarden. I used to use last Pass, but they had won too many breaches for my taste, and that is one, by the way, one breach is too many for my taste.
One pass is the one I use, so I like it.
But yeah, Bitwarden one pass. Anything that's a password management solution, I highly recommend people look at that because then you really just have to remember your master password and that's it's it, all right.
That's it for this week's Tech Talk Radio. Thank you for joining us again. If you have a question, feel free to drop us a line. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Be careful with cyber Monday. We were gonna go over some of those things to be careful for.
We've run out of time. Just be safe when you're online.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm shy to weird.
I'm Matt Jones. You can find us at blog dot tech, talk radio dot com. Have a great holiday, everybody,