The following program is produced by the Tech Talk Radio Network.
Right it does a Colin Macria.
Whose line is it? Anyway you're listening to tech talk radio.
I don't know how it works.
It's all magical stuff for me.
Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and we have questions from last week's show. Sean, if you remember at the end of last week, it just seems like every week we're ending in some kind of a cliffhanger, or we're.
Making somebody mad, or they're called us out we have to rebute.
Yeah, our listeners, Well, all right, this one. I was talking about me buying a USB hub at a discount store. Oh yeah, yeah, right, and it's electronic necessities. It's a USB a four port hub. It has one USB C port on it. And you guys brought up something really important at the end of the show that I had to be careful before I plug this in. Because you bought it at a store doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna
be safe. It's safe, and you know, I had a couple of people ask me, like, wait, what does that mean?
What kind of dangerous could you run into. I remembered not long ago seeing posts where people had been buying storage drives now number when you don't want to get ripped off, but they've been buying storage drives online and when they get the storage drive, it's like, you know, a no name brand or whatnot, and when they open it up, they're basically SD cards that have been hot glued into the inside of this.
Thing, or it's just a small chip that's mimicking saying you have two terabytes. But then you fill it up and you're like you put one picture on it, and it's like, yeah.
How did that happen? Right? Yeah, So anyway, I went ahead and I promised you guys, I said I would I would go ahead and take a look at it. So I took the enclosure.
We actually took it apart, and I took it apart.
Very it's actually pretty easy to take apart, which that also worried me a little. And here is basically the inners, and I'll show you of what I got on this. And it looks like an honest to goodness USB hub with USB three, USB A and one USB C.
It looks like a legit, no nefarious looking pieces or transmitters or anything on there.
Yeah, so I'll be able to put it back in the housing very easily and it should should hopefully work for me. But that it was actually kind of fun to open the thing up, and yeah, try and do it so I didn't just absolutely destroy it.
But yeah, I mean you just like, just so our listeners catch up, right, try to avoid buying USB cables from gas stations and you know, convenience stores or other strange places, like go to a reputable vendor, go to anchor, go to BNH photo. Bend a little bit more money than this is three dollars, it's going to give me four USB poort. It's like, spend a little bit more money just for some piece of mind.
Well, you know, security wise, Sean, we have talked about this in the past. If you're walking out on a maybe a school campus or even a you know, a shopping area and you see a USB drive on the floor, plug it in. Yeah, don't want to do that. It's the last thing you want to do is plug that thing in. Because it has been common for people to use the method of a flash drive with you know,
malware whatever on it. Just drop them somewhere somebody takes it, the curiosity killed the cat, plugs it into your computer, and next thing you know, you run into other problems.
With the ease of being able to put scripts on something. So you plug a USB drive in, all of a sudden it's installed malware in the back end, and you've got a botnet running and somebody's mining crypto. Like, there's all sorts of stuff that people can do with a simple USB driver.
I'm always nervous. Have you ever had the situation sean where somebody comes over. It could be a family member, it could be a friend, So, oh yeah, here, let me plug my drive in to your computer. Some people, my kids have looked at me like, dad, come on, it's me. But I don't know where that drive's been true And.
Yeah, you don't know if their system has been compromised or not. That's why I have a Windows well not wind know, since running Linux. But if somebody wants to pug something in, Okay, you want to give you some files, do you go plug it into this computer that I don't care about that I can reimage in two seconds.
Being on that note, you know of a USB drive, a flash drive, you know, whatever capacity I mean, even just a smaller, older drive could cause some damage. The idea now is we've seen this at airports and other places, restaurants, coffee shops, where somebody just leaves the USB cable behind and you look at it and you think, wow, I can use that. That's going to be great. Now, don't want to do that either, No, don't.
Just I'm just gonna say again, don't trust anybody else's USB cables. Don't trust a stranger. Don't trust I mean even just plugging into Like you know, you sit at a desk at most air now and they have USP ports to them. Don't do it. Don't do it?
Oh you mean like you it right? Yeah?
Yeah, Like you know, they take a regular outlet and they put you know, two Edison plugs into USB ports in it. Don't plug into those USB ports. You don't know where that goes. Yeah now yeah, okay, give everybody the benefit of the doubt. Right. An airport is a public space. There's no way they want to compromise that.
But you don't know, You just don't know, right, So just you know, use your own power brick, or just use your own USB cable or you know, plug into power first and then because there are also they also make cables that will just power.
Right, somebody tell me, you know, one of the benefits of the newer laptops is longer battery life. So if you go to a coffee shop and you're running out of battery, that means it's time to leave the coffee shop. So you don't have to plug in to their power.
I mean unless you're playing video games at the coffee shop. If you're doing just writing or notebooking, or you know, just catching up on emails, you should have no issue with bad life on a current laptop or an iPad or.
Something right right, I was speaking of laptops. You have been consulting with your your parents, your in laws. Okay, so you've been consulting with the in laws about a system you ended up finding. I believe it was old in Novo that you want.
To So we right after Christmas we spent some time looking at They said, hey, we've got a really old HP laptop from twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen. It's got four gigabytes a RAM in it. It won't upgrade to Windows eleven. Basically, they got the Windows eleven update alert saying you're our computer. It needs to be updated Windows eleven. And then they took it to the local computer shop and then they said, oh yeah, this won't upgrade to
Windows eleven. And so they're like, we want to get a new computer that you know, we don't in the next five to six years, don't have to replace. Right, So they gave me a budget of eight hundred bucks.
It's not that much, No, it's not.
But you can get a reasonably rice laptop. You can get a reasonably good laptop for that price. So I started looking, right, and really my my options were limited to some Lenovo's and some Dells and a couple of Acers in there. Right but right, So I really wanted to get something from somewhere I knew. I didn't want to go to bet. I didn't want him to go down to the street to best Buy. I didn't want to go to Target, Meyer, Walmart, any of those types
of things. So we looked at we narrowed it down to Microcenter.
We don't have one of those out here.
In micro Center about two hours from where they live, right, but you can get them shipped from micro Center. It's worth it any plus, you can get the Microcenter warranty, the whole thing.
I remember when when I was looking for a thirty eighty graphics card and you know, they it was like they're coming out. I sent my son, who lives in hunting A Beach to Irvine to our microcenter there, which is about thirty minutes away, because it showed that they had one, and he got there and they did. They were out of them.
I went to the one in Indianapolis when it opened, because it opened maybe a year and a half ago now, right right before the eclipse actually, And it's cool. It's just that it's just a big geek story. I love it.
Yeah, did you have fries out there?
No? So not here. We had a frize when I lived in San Diego and that was awesome because I went there all the time to buy resistors and you know, when I was doing a little hobby project working. You walk in turn to the right, there's just components everything.
Yeah, wall of.
Components and you can't like, you know, because I used to go to Radio Shack all the time when I was a kid, when I was building my RC planes and RC cars and stuff. Man, radio shack was the place to go. And now it's you get cheap garbage on Amazon. If you want it quick and fast, you gotta you know, so, like I'm going to sidetrack here. But if you're looking for good quality components online, digikey or mouser.
What you did?
You did you key or mouser or mouser, I don't know how they pronounce it. Yeah, those are the two that every hand radio subreddit, every hand radio club that I've ever been a part of, has told me those are the two plus the Xbox modding community. Because I bought an old original Xbox that I'm I'm repairing and upgrade.
On original expert g.
Yeah, I bought it. I got it on good I got bought it at Goodwill. So we'll talk about that another time. But yeah, So there are certain things that you can get you don't want to cheap out on, and that's electronical components, So digitke mouser, those four components. But a right back on track till that top uh So microcenter. That's where we got off track. Narrowed it down a hr bucks and ended up getting them a
Lenovo think Pad to seventeen. Oh that's good, which is good. Yeah, one terabyte of storage sixteen gigabytes of RAM, you know, six fourteen and a half inch screen or you know whatever, sixteen inch total. Yeah, and it Windows eleven Home more than enough for what they need. And then we started the well let's get some time. You come down here to my house, right and we'll move all your stuff over. Oh good?
Oh yeah. And I had recommended PC.
Mover, but right, well, PC, I'm a big proponent of not moving over installed like.
Not just like fresh install file.
Yeah, a fresh install, like here's the program, reinstall it so it's fresh, it's not pulling over any garbage temporary files. I got screwed, oh no, by Microsoft one Drive.
Really what happened?
I thought I had it disabled because I hate one Drive. It's it comes installed and pre installed. You have to log in, and I was trying to do the there's a secret code you can punch in when you're at the screen. You hit you know, win F ten and then type in the little cheat code so that you know, reboot and doesn't ask you for the log in. It couldn't get to work. Couldn't get it to work. We were run out of time, so I just said, log
in with your Microsoft account. We'll get you hooked up whatever thought we had disabled one drive, got my mother in law's account also created disabled one drive, copy stuff over to a sixty four gig thumb drive for them, right, because they didn't really have that much stuff. It was about fifty fifty five gigs with the stuff they wanted to copy over. Yeah, Pete started copying it over and called me and said, hey, it says I'm out of space.
Uh oh, And I said, what do you mean. You have a thousand gigabytes and you have fifty five gigabytes for the stuff like this. Yeah, he says, it's telling me that I can go online and buy more storage. Oh. I was like, don't do that because his account was automatically set up for all of his files on his
desktop and everything to back up to one drive. Boy, so didn't matter as soon as he started copying files over and they were just going up to the club, right right, Okay, So then we had to get rid of one drive, remove it, restart the copying process over, make sure we had everything. So just was a little bit of a pain trying to like, I just want don't let me, don't make me make an account, right, this is what I this is one of my biggest pet peeves about Windows. Don't make me log in, Yeah,
don't sink. Don't sink me, like, I'll sink all that stuff later if I want to, Like, don't make me do that right off the rip, Like, give me a fresh, bare bones installed that I can then log into whatever I want.
And please don't don't just throw co pilot at me. Yeah.
Yeah, so to say, yeah, sorry, I uninstalled one drive, I installed, uninstalled co Pilot, I u installed all that garbage, which was great because now they're they're home free. It's they're loving the computer that it's They're like, holy cow, we can't believe it's so fast. I mean they're going from this ancient I don't even remember what model it is, but it's it was very slow, but they're very happy
with it. For those of you who know Lenovo laptops, they were confused by the little red nib in the middle right like you need the mouse, you know, the little They were like, what is that?
Is it do?
I was like, what do you mean? What what? We've never seen this before on a computer before in our lives. I was like, you put your finger around it is the mouse, and yeah, what and they're like, yeah, watch and then I showed them you can move it. So they were very confused by that. At first I told them about it, but they'd obviously forgotten.
Are they going to get a regular mouse?
They had the Bluetooth USB mouse that they had had on their old computer, which has already moved over. And you know, but just when they're traveling and sometimes it's easier just to do My father loves it. He would prefer to use that little red nap and the touchbit.
Yeah.
My mother law not a trackpad person by any means. She hates she hates check. Now they're all logged in. They were amazed at how easy it was to sink their Google accounts. Oh cool, they're like, I want all my book works. Well let's just log you in. Here's how your bookworks. Well that's fast. So the Google stuff was great. They were worried about their Google Photos, like they're like, how are you gonna make sure all of our Google photos are there? Like, well, they're already in
the clouds. You just log in and you see them because we set them up. So all their all their phone there, they have the fours and they update all their photos to the cloud automatically, and I've really made it very I don't want to say I forced some things onto them, but getting them to a point where they can just take pictures on their phones and they're on their phone, but they're also in the cloud has been wonderful.
Oh yeah, that's the best thing in the world.
Well, I deleted it off my phone and that and I don't have it anymore. No, it's still in the cloud. Don't worry. They're happy with it. Connects to their WiFi just fine. They haven't had any issues with it.
What about third party programs? I mean, were you thinking because here, you know, you get a new computer for somebody who hasn't upgrade in a while. You know, there's so many different options. Number one antivirus, number two, you know productivity software like you know Office, You're I believe you're an aw user. Then you know, do you do you go and get GAMP? Do you or do you go to alternative to what do you end up doing?
Well? For them, they had a very limited selection of things they needed right so, so the things they had were malwaur bytes, Sea Cleaner. They had a student license of Microsoft twenty sixteen that they had bought back in twenty sixteen. If you install that, it actually puts you into Microsoft three sixty five, which was which was weird. It uses that license but gives you access to the base level of Microsoft three sixty five. So that's all
they needed for that. And then he had avery label maker that he had a software for that that we reinstalled so he can print his beer beer cap labels. I used, Yeah, he prints his beer camp labels. He has the little designs and all this stuff, so he didn't want to lose all that.
That's cool.
And then then I used but I used no night. We'll talked about that on the show. So I just clicked you know, I have the seven things I needed it for to install. You know, I did Chrome, Firefox, malware Bytes, a couple other I don't remember, the office Suite whatever. I just picked boom. It was so easy, so I recommend that night. But other than that, I just put ad Blocker plus right there, Chrome and their home there scot free.
So this week I worked on a Dell. The Dell their screen had gone out, so they brought me this. They brought me the laptop and I went ahead and hooked it up and I hooked up their HDMI, pored out saw that it was working on an external monitor. So I knew, okay, it's not your board, it's not you know, a graphics card, it's it's this screen. So it had and I ordered the screen. The screen came
in very easy to replace. I found a great website and even though I hadn't found out about this website until I had bought the parts from a different vendor, this website had some great walkthroughs and they have a lot of parts. It's parts dash people dot com. You can find that all there. Great stuff. I'll put a
link up on our blog as well. Once I got the you know, got the screen in and got it booted up, I had to call them and say, oh, yeah, I need the code because I need to check because when you work with the replacement of a screen, you generally have to disconnect your WiFi the Wi Fi card, and the WiFi card sometimes could be a little iffy, so I want to make sure the WiFi was working. And I got that working and everything, but then, oh boy, then I saw the pop ups then wandered programs that
were on the laptop. So I had to place a call into her and say, okay, here's what I got. And I said, may I run malware bytes on it? And she said no, yeah, please, because the only thing I want is Chrome and she had some other kind of browser that was completely hijacking. So we ran malware bites one hundred and ninety some odd different issues with the computer with malwaur bytes, and she said, you know, it has been kind of slow lately, so we had
malware bites do the cleanup, and that thing is real peppy. Now, it's amazing how a program like that can really find some of the crud that you don't want on your computer that may get installed. And some of this stuff was installed just because they installed some other program and it just wanted to install a whole bunch of others like driver Tonic just it was just a mess.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's what I was really really wanted to walk through my in loss, through the whole process so they didn't get Chrome or get some other software and say, oh I need this this, this software looks fun. Yeah, let's this one and this, Oh I need want to
update my drivers, let's click on this link. And I'm really really trying to get them into a good repetition of not downloading programs and installing them just because you know they had two different ad bot search and destroyers, or you know, you know stuff that they clearly just clicked on links to download stuff.
And yeah, you got to be really careful.
It's it's hard when every site is so aggressive on the fake links and the fake downloads, right, it's hard for people not to click on stuff, even even legitimate websites. Like you get clicked on this to download, it starts downloading, but then it pops up and say download now, and you're like, oh wait, don't click on that. Oh wait, it's starting downloading.
Or if you go I've done this before where you go to a website and you want to get a program and it will say you you're you're looking for the program and there is an ad and it says download now, and you're thinking you're downloading the program that you wanted, but you're not. You're click You're clicking on a link, and that is what is causing the problems. So, I mean, you gotta be really careful. Now, do you prefer nine Night Over alternative to do work? How does how does that work?
They're they're both their own thing, all right, Right, So nine Night it's got okay, just tells you pick the apps you want, right, So, I want Chrome, malware Bytes, Zoom, Discord, Skype, okay, iTunes, VLC, win, Amp, Audacity, you know, just a Python okay, visual code, studio code okay. Ever note you know, but there's probably seventy apps on here. And then you hit get your nine night and it downloads, it downloads a package, and then it just mass installs them.
Now is there a cost for this or is it pretty much free? Yeah?
Now you can manage your downloads with nine night, meaning it will look for updates and apply those updates, and you can nine night Pro. You can get n night Pro if you want.
Oh cool, n I N I T E dot Com.
Uh yeah, But then, like you said, alternative too, right, that's a that's a different type of website right now, that's just a all right, I have Microsoft Office, right, well, what are my alternatives to Microsoft Office? You type in Microsoft Office and it's gonna give you Notepad plus plus. You know, it's gonna give you Open Office, Libra Office. You know it's gonna give you alternatives to that software.
I was, uh, float charting a network, you got your shirt, your switch here, you got your hub here, you got your computer here, got another computer. I was doing that and Visio, uh, Microsoft Video has been one of those that a lot of people use but don't have it. So I went to alternative too, and it recommended Lucid, so I went ahead and you know, ran that and yeah, it handled it perfectly. And it's you know, you could
use a free version of it. You get so many templates that you can work with, or you could buy the full versus. So it's great. It's a gateway to maybe a program that you could really get into if you don't want to spend the money for Visio or or another program that could do something similar. So I liked it.
Yeah, So overall overall the install went good, right, and they're happy, they're super happy. Yes, Yeah, just the beginning steps where he started copying you know, pictures and music from his desktop over and all of a sudden it was all going to the cloud. I was frustrated by that. It's just I don't want it. There's no need for it for him, for them, and it just was frustrated because it's like it blocked him. Then he's all frustrated. He's like, I'm out of space. But I thought you
said we had a thousand gigabytes. But now it's telling me I need to buy more space, and I'm about to use my credit card to buy more space.
And I'm like, yeah, apparently. Now, I don't know if you saw the news about this, and this would be something that maybe somebody would want to look at, and I haven't really delved into it too much. Microsoft has
a program PC Manager, and it's a Microsoft program. But apparently this PC manager is they're saying it's an easier way to clear cash files, clear old programs, and I mean there has that has been a part of Microsoft, but now they're making it to make it a little a little richer, a little more of a better experience when wanting to manage your Windows. And again, I'm gonna give it a full try and that I should have a kind of an update for you next week on
the show. But it looks like a pretty good program.
Yeah, it's available on the Microsoft Store and I just looked at it. I'm downloading it right now. Just check it out. Yep, it's free.
That makes it nice.
Microsoft PC Manager is the utility app for your PC. That episolutely enhances PC performance.
There you go, all right, we're gonna take quick break, come back. I got a chance this week to talk with Mickey and Steve. They're the minds behind something really cool taking place in calif It's next weekend. You could take a drive and go check this out. It is the Vintage Computer Festival, all kinds of great stuff and again we'll be talking with them next on tech Talk Radio.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Seanda Weir, and find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com.
We'll be right back and now back to tech Talk Radio. I am so excited to be able to get Mickey and Steve on with us. They're the people behind Vintage Computer Festival So cal which is coming up actually next weekend. So if you want to think about a getaway, you want to go out to the city of Orange, Orange, California for Hotel Farra at the event center there for this big vintage computer festival. And when I first saw this, Steve, I gotta tell you, I was like, Oh, this would
be so much fun to go to. And this has got to be a lot of fun for you guys to put together. Next question, okay, fun, but a lot of work. I know, that's where you were going with it. Seriously, So where did this idea come up with when you realize that people really did like vintage computers?
Well, people have loved vintage computers for years, of course, it's just it keeps shifting. You know. My vintage computer years is the late seventies, eighties and then nineties became like my adult life and I'm working on ibms and fixing printer problems. So that's not that's not vintage to me, at least me.
But it is now.
Well, yeah, of course I know it. But well yeah, so Mickey and I we do the VCF so cal and it wasn't a hard idea to come up with because there's other ones in the country that you know, of course we've been to them, or like, why isn't there one here? So we've been doing the vint Nerd YouTube channel and that's what all this. We're in the nerd studio right now, and so we started that about four years ago and as we tried out, you know, going out to vc across the country to check them
out again. Roadshow, right, road show the vit Nerd. I would be appropriate to say. I wrote to Mickey into like we could do one here, and she loves planning things, and there got you know, not just a back ariad party or something like you know, events inside events, and.
Yeah, it's it's my wheelhouse. And then I do have is that mine right there?
That's the commodo.
Yeah.
I have some roots in the vintage myself, and so I was enthusiastic about it. Was a challenge, right, can we bring this this sounth in California? Can we entice people? Is there an appetite here? Are there fans of vintage computing? And what we also found at the other events we went to is the community is just so enthusiastic and so friendly that we were like, this is great, and that's what we found. So we did it for the first time last year, and folks are stoked to come
back and do it again. I think we heard one person say I found my tribe.
Yeah, we're expecting over one thousand people.
Oh wow. And this is going on for two days next weekend, Saturday and Sunday. You know, I honestly think it's kind of like cars. Everybody remembers their first car. Mine would be this Chevy Vega, and they love to talk about it and reminisce and talk about the radio
it had in it or this. But honestly, a lot of us computer people we like talking about our first computers because we remember getting down and dirty and you remember saying, oh, ye had one hundred and twenty eight megs of RAM, or if we're lucky, you know it, and that's what.
One hundred and twenty eight bytes of brands.
Exactly, you know? Or you talk about the hard drive that was ten megabytes, that was seriously the size of a shoe box. People love to talk about that. Do you find people come to this, this event and the other ones that you've been to around the country and they become friends with people sharing waxing poetic Yeah, we're.
Talking about it just the other day that you you don't in everyday life, you cannot meet You're unlikely to meet someone who has shares an interest in vented vintage computing. But here they're they're collected and so you can build that camaraderie and then the network just grows and grows.
Now you have this this video channel too, do you what what kind of things do you do with the video channel that kind of ties with the festival you've put on.
Well, we bake some recipes. We might get some crocheting from time to time.
I hope not really. Yeah, No, one of.
My favorite aspects is working with nails and wood.
Yeah great.
Not all this stuff. Well, most of this up here works or works now, but not all of it does. And you know, there's tweaks and there's fixes, there's there's known issues. There's things that watch out for REFA capacitors, other capacitors, video outputs. So I cover a lot of that stuff. But one of the things a lot of people might not realize is there is new products for this old hardware. They're you know, like this, reach back here.
This is a Fuji Now. I don't know if you've heard of this, right, They make these for multiple computers.
Now.
Well, when I say makes, there's a group, the Fujia team that designs the hardware out for the love of it, and then they go here is how to make it, and then people make it and then they sell it. So this is about you know, depending on where you get it and what you get, you know, sixty seventy eighty bucks depending on the model. And this plugs in this particular one plugs into an entire apic computer and
this will act as the disk drive. You can print to a PDF file on the SD card here you can I can't remember anything.
You can get on the internet.
Well, I was just going to get to that. You can put your software on the SD card and asks like the act like the dis drive and getting too excited. But you can also get onto the internet with this.
This is Wi Fi capable. And they've written some games that you can play other people over the Internet on your old Atari or Commodore or Apple too, And they've written some games that you can be on a Commodore and play over the Internet against somebody on an Atari, right, And that's the thing you couldn't even do back in the day. So again new technology, new products. This is the Apple version of that as well. This is this
comes out of Poland from Lothar rac. This is for the Atari ape bit and this is a MIDI device in here. So this is the audio output. And so from your Atari a bit you can play songs that play MIDI out to your speakers, which you know that wasn't that capable or even that small way way back then.
You.
He was asking.
The tie into the show is you'll talk about these things on your own, you know, but got these shows. You can buy them and you can learn how to use them, and it's just tying it all together.
Do you get people that come out to the seed that bring their to eighty six or they break you know that maybe is running some really cool stuff they do they sell that at these shows? Or is it mainly stuff like this where they can add on and really get benefits from running that old technology and having a good time with it.
Well, we have pretty much three what's the phrase. We have exhibitors, we have vendors, and we have attendees, right and of course mix it in there, and we have staff and whatever going out speakers, presentations and all oh cool. So exhibitors are ones they get a table or two or three and they bring out their favorite retro They're not there to sell anything, and they're just there to hang out show they're cool things. Maybe they're showing their game that they wrote in the nineties or what they
were doing with printers and such. And then we have vendors who bring in some computers maybe the show things, but they're selling old hardware. New hardware, refurbished hardware. So there's that, and then we have a consignment area. So if you're just attending, or you're an exhibitor and you want to get rid of some of your duplicates or some other you're done with Commodore and you want to really go with something else, you can bring it into
our consignment area and sell it. We of course for that, keep a twenty percent fee for that and pay the credit card charges and whatever.
So we bring the audience.
Yeah, we bring it in the attendees. So an attendees can check out the exhibitors tables, they can check out what the vendors are doing, they can check out consignment, they can check out the presentations. We have panels, we have a super fun game show plan for Saturday. It's cool audience participate patient. So it's some pretty fun stuff.
What is some of the best advancements I always is this is so wide, but the best advance was when it comes to the technology that maybe you're looking at with a vintage computer festival that's happening next weekend, that you you get to the show and you see somebody who's brought something and it's like, oh wow, that's cool. Has there something that's really knocked her socks off?
Oh yeah, all over the place. Yeah, not just our show or other shows just out there in the world. We have a gentleman, Sean Harrington who loves the Aquarius computer. Do you remember the Aquarius?
I don't know.
If you ever went for a time share lecture where they're like, sit down for two hours to get a free computer, they would give you an Aquarius Wow. It was from Mattel. It was one of those orphan the computers, the ones that didn't sell as well because everybody, everybody came out with their computer. You sell and click a
vision and whatever dream cast. Yeah, the Aquarius is a little orphan, but Shanz picked it up and he now actually makes the Aquarius plus Wow, which is a modern version of it that will work with stuff from the past but also get you those new things like internet access and just better graphics and stuff if the software is written to do that well.
And the reason that so many people are able to do this now is because of that maker community. We have access to three D printers and there's just so much more you can do in your own workshop. So people are producing these things, these new devices at home.
So some of the speakers could include somebody that's created something like this. Who else is lined up?
We got folks that were in the industry way back, like early game programmers. You've got a woman who worked for in television and is now part of They call themselves the Blue Sky Rangers. They're actually kind of alumni group, but they were the first ones hired, mainly from aerosp to be programmers for the gaming industry that just didn't exist at the time.
And he's going to talk about that.
Yeah wow.
You know, he's getting out of college and the parents are like, you're going to go into this and he's like, I want to write games or you know, at least I'm not sure if that was Bill, but I've heard that from some of the early programmers. So again Bill is going to be there talking about that. And if you played some of those games back then, he wrote some of those.
Oh wow.
Another speaker we have is Lee, who do you remember the Osbourne one?
Oh yeah, yeah, oh gosh yeah.
Lee designed it. So he's going to be there, wow, But he's not going to talk about the We'll probably talk about the Osborne a little bit. How could he not yeah, but he's actually heavy into social media. He was designing social media before we even knew there was social media. So he's got a new book and he's going to be there talking about that, about what he perceives as the implications of social media and where go next?
Oh cool, Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun again. A lot of people are gonna be heading out to it. Well what's the cost. You can buy tickets. They're all on the website, right.
Yes, yeah, you can buy tickets online or at the door. They're twenty five dollars a day. We've got a deal for the weekend for forty dollars. We have another ticket that enables you to kind of support the show a little more. It's called the Vintage Fan Bundle, so it gets you a T shirt and a fun badge and some applause as you walk past the registration table.
I'm thinking I might have to try and take the weekend off work to come on out for this, because this is going to be an episode blast.
Oh yeah, it's a three day weekend.
It's President's Day week exactly exactly what. We take the day off a different day because we do a big Tucson rodeo thing out here, and it's enormous, but this would be absolutely a lot of fun. I want tell our listeners to definitely check out your website and again follow you on social and follow, you know, check out all the fun stuff you guys are doing, because I mean you did radio some years ago. I know you
were doing a tech show as well. I mean before tech shows, before tech shows were tech shows right right.
The Collins shows. You know, why why is my windows not booting? Right?
Yeah? By phone? Yeah? Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, smoke is supposed to come out of it? Yeah, that was always kind of scary.
Well, listen, tell her is the smoke?
Yeah? All right. What's the website address? Our listeners can follow you and check it out right now.
It is vcfsocal dot com. So Vintage Computer Festival VCF.
I want to thank both of you for coming on Tech Talk Radio and talking about Like I said, I got really excited when I saw this that this is an absolute blast. Take the drive. It's only about six and a half hours to get from Tucson to Orange County h And again, all the information is available up on your website. Thank you so much. For coming on the show.
Thank you for having me.
We will be back with more of tech Talk Radio and got something really cool to check out. Sean is going to get a copy of it as well. But I'll tell you about this. And if you have kids you want them to get into the technology, you'd like them to learn more about, you know, circuitry, transistors and what goes behind the scenes. Definitely want to check that one out, and we'll tell you all about that when we come back with more of tech talk Radio. You can find us on the worldwide web at tech talk
radio dot com. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel. We post all kinds of content up there, whether it be from the show or the TV segments we do at chemis B Fox eleven, which is always a blast on Mondays. If you ever get a chance to check those out. And of course, if you've got a question for the show, two ways to get that into us. You can drop us an email tech guys at tech
talk radio dot com. We like to share those questions, or you can go ahead and give us a call at five two zero seven seven seven ninety five eighty and leave a message and we'll get back to you and we may even use your question on the air. In the meantime, we'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio that's coming up next. Now back to tip Talk Radio. I want to thank Mickey and Steve again from Vintage Computer Festival SoCal for coming on and talking
with us. Now, in that first segment, we got a chance to talk about PC Manager apparently now available for Windows users. Microsoft putting this out, making it available in the Microsoft Store, but Sean went ahead, just grabbed it and right away You're not happy with it.
So I'm gonna tell people if you get Microsoft PC Manager there when you open it for the first time, there are two checked boxes all right in the dialogue that pop up. One that says start automatically when Windows is when signed into Windows. All right, that's fine, that's fine.
I'm still not a fan of that.
The second one says restore settings to ensure the native Windows experience.
Wait, what does that mean?
And below that it says restore default settings taskbar all of my task If I clicked start, all of my taskbar settings that I have set would be back to default. Oh wow, that means that means my layout. That means my apps. That means copile it's going to be back. That means that the task view is going to be back. That means all of the widgets are going to be back. That would I would have I would have walked away.
From my computer for that happened your bottom?
Yeah, So like right now I've got the search bar hidden. I've got it like I've got my task bar the way I want it. I don't see the widgets. I don't see anything. If that reset, oh man, I would have been hot because it's just like somebody else drives your car, move your seats, they move your mirrors, right, yeah, Like that would have that would have made me mad. Like that's the kind of stuff that really irks me about the Windows experience. Let me just let me leave
me alone. Yeah, a lot of people, I'm gonna uncheck that.
All right, you're still gonna you're still gonna move forward or no.
Yeah, but I mean that's one little thing. But that that's something that like I like the task by the way, it is, like I don't want the widgets. I don't want the task of you. I don't I don't want copilot, I don't want suggested apps. I don't want like there are certain things that you can turn off in tailor so that you don't get a full bloated experience from Windows eleven.
Right, And that's the problem here is maybe is that what they're going for. You think, let's let's put the standards on there, like co pilot. So if you, yeah, get.
It back to the basics. So then somebody get they just get frustrated and leave it. And then every time they click on the start menu, you now they've got suggested apps. Now they can give you suggested apps. They can tailor it to your experience. They can use your data to push you certain things and advertisements and blah blah blah blah blah. If anybody's used Sea Cleaner, yeah, by pre form like this is this is basically Microsoft's
version of Sea Cleaner. The layout looks the same. It's kind of got the same thing, but just at a Microsoft level.
Right.
It's like it's kind of building in It's kind of combining Windows Defender and See Cleaner on in one. It's got you know your Windows protection, Hey are your windows? Are your Windows? Is your Windows up to date? Pop up management? You know, notifications that stuff. You know, it can do a give your drives. It can manage your downloaded files. It can hey, you can look at all your different drives and see large files. It can look
at duplicate files, temporary files, that that stuff. And then in the apps, right, you can do startup apps, you can don install apps, add more apps to the store, et cetera. And then it's got a quick thing. This is kind of cool. You can get quick in that. There's a toolbox option which gives you quick things to like screenshots, video and voice recorder, close captions, no pad, calculator, things like that.
But no word pad. You notice that?
Have you no pad?
No pad? Have you run twenty four h yet that got rid of word pad?
Probably?
Yeah, and it's also gotten rid of well the biggest problem I've had is with network shares, and I've got to sit down and figure that out yet because.
I still have word pads, so I still haven't.
All right, yeah, you haven't done that one yet. I was working on a system the other day and they wanted to update, and I told them you might want to hold off. Let's just wait. Let's say just wait just a little bit. So again, all right, so PC Manager it's available in the Windows Store. Make sure you check what you're clicking on, just don't try and go through it real fast, all right. So there is a company out there that has been making some really good
products since two thousand and two. Actually they made electronics before then. And it's called a Lenko. And if you've heard of the company, A Lenko has a product out there called snap Circuits and they are fun ways for kids you to learn about electronic components, but also there are a lot of fun for US adults too. They put out a brand new one. It is from again from a Leco called Snap Circuits Top Secret Spy Kit. And what you get is you get a I'm not gonna it's not a PCV board, but it is a
board and everything snaps. There's no soldering, no tools. And what I have built, uh, and I did this in about ten minutes was a motion alarm. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on, all right. So it's powered by three double A batteries and I will move and as soon as I move, the motion detector continues to go. So again, this is really cool. You could build it, but just one of the many projects that
you could do. There's twenty five projects available in the SPI kit and remember it comes with everything except for the batteries. You just plug them in. You've followed the directions, you'll learn the circuitries, transitions, transistors, but all without having to do any soldering, with having to do any wiring, and learn how some of this stuff works. And they're interchangeable.
And the spike k it is one that I'm gonna send to you a Sean, so you'll have all these parts and again all the different projects you can make, whether it be a trip wire, a motion detection, and you've got fun putting this stuff together. Would you want to do this?
Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that I like doing. Iye, tinkering with stuff like this, I mean I would. I know Maxwell love this. He likes legos, he's obsessed with legos.
Oh, then he'll love this.
He'll like this. And I just feel basic understanding of electronics can make and break a lot of things in your life. Right. There are a lot of little things that with my rudimentary knowledge of electronics. I mean, I'm not an electric but I've been able to repair a lot of things just based on Oh it's a blown fuse, it's a blown resistor it's a blown capacitor, or hey, I could use my multimeter and test this and know that this component is the bad one and replace it.
Like I've saved thousands and thousands of dollars over my lifetime in electronics because I've just fixed them, yeah, instead of just going eh, it's junk and thrown it out.
Same with computers. You know, we'd do that accounts right. The other one that I got, it's a Snap Circuits Explorer. It's the Junior Snap Circuits Junior. This one is one hundred projects. And the project that I built and I tried to show on television was what's just called the flying saucer. And you put all all of it together on again, it's a plastic board. It all snaps into place. You follow the directions and then you push a button and this little flying saucer goes spinning into the air.
Probably is I hooked it up backwards on the circuit. So it's good to know about circuitry and whatnot. And so it didn't take off, and it wasn't until I, you know, we had finished the live segment on television. I walked over the other counter and I was pulling it apart, and I said, wait a minute, and I connected it the opposite way, and then of course it's spun and went into the air. So Snap Circuits Explorer runs about thirty dollars, and you can get the spy
Kits for about fifty bucks. But I want to thank Snap Circuits Alenko for sending that to us so we can play around with it and have some fun with it. And this one only requires two double A batteries. So and again there's like one hundred different projects.
Yeah, and these are not that expensive like that spy Kit one was only forty nine ninety nine.
Yeah.
So and you can stock on their website.
You'll you'll have good fun with it. And it's good with the kids because they'll they'll see how it gets all put together and then be able to understand. Okay, that's all circuitry. Transistors, electronics work, and the only electronics are the batteries. Now you don't want to give you know, these are seven and up, but you don't want to you know, just give the kids a battery. You can actually work with them and and put these together.
But I've bought like you, you bought the kid the child.
Version, right, So you have the adult version of something, well this is this is or the grown up version, I should say, not adult.
The forty eight bit digital electric electronic clock.
Oh wow, okay, which has which.
Has the entire every single piece of component and it comes with a complete base. You solder every little itty bitty component on here. The resistor is a transistor everything.
So are you good at soldering? I'm terrible at soldering.
I thoroughly enjoy it. I wouldn't say I'm great at it, but I'm okay.
Yeah, I'm the kind of guy who'd solder my eyeball shit. I just I just I'm terrible with stuff like that.
No, I do a lot of I don't do a lot of soldering at work, but you know, we make a lot of our own customer cables, so I do a lot of a lot of excell R soldering, uh for three four and five pan of large power. I do all my own hobby stuff here at home. Darcy planes right, tons of soldering and Arcy planes and drones and stuff. I mean, I've got two soldering irons in my.
Workshop and wow, yeah flus and you.
Know I've got it flux and solder and.
Yeah, I'm terrible with that stuff. Oh well, well all right, so that's pretty good. Where do you find that at? To build your own clock? And I know they even have like you can build your own radios too.
I just I just kind of scour the electronics subreddits and the ham radio clubs and stuff that I'm part of because a lot of this stuff is mostly for kids or people learning. But it's like it's fun to do there. You know on this Alenko website too, right, they have a make your own FM radio kit. Yeah, so you can buy this. It's twenty nine dollars and you get all the components and a circuit board and you build it your is this to radio? Yep?
They I think they even have an AMFM one as well, so you could even do an AM one, which is pretty amazing.
So yeah, So I mean, just if you're into that kind of stuff, yeah, am AMFM Radio Transition Kids sixty five bucks. And what I like about it though, is it explains things to you, like here's what this piece does, right, instead of just skiing solder this on here right exactly?
Wow, all right, I want to share this with you. Verge had a story and we were talking about co Pilot. A little bit ago that LG and Samsung are adding Microsoft co Pilot to their TVs, and I, you know, do we want AI on our television? I mean, it's the benefit of roku is you know, you get a vote voice. You could tell it I want a comedy or I want a specific show. But do we really want to have co pilot as a part of our interface? And does that mean more ads?
Of course, it means more ads. It means more detailed ads. It means more targeted ads. It means more understanding your habits, right, which means more targeted ads. It'll understand targeted ads based on the time you watch things like if you're an habitual watcher before dinner time, you're gonna get more food ads, right, You're gonna get it's It's all it is is just targeted data collection. That's AI is a tool, right, right, That's what I used it for. I use it for
a tool. I just don't understand. I just there's so much data collection happening on everybody and everything. It's scary, right, And I don't need AI running everything for me. And a coworker we were talking about AI the ore day at work and a co worker made a really good point. AI. They're always touting or eighty two point six percent accurate, right, you know when they do AI stuff. Well, if I was eighty two six percent accurate in my job, I get fired.
Good point, right, that's what.
My coworker said. My coworker is what he does most of our video graphics for the TV shows and the broadcast that we do. He said, if I made that many mistakes on the graphics that I produced, I'd be fired.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So everybody's so excited that they're eighty two percent accurate. There's still We've talked about this before in the show. There's still the human element in everything we do in our lives that is being replaced by computers. And it's becoming scary how little we're interacting with ourselves, let alone other people, and we're relying so much on AI to do stuff.
Maybe too much. All Right, we got to take another quick break. We'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird.
Find us on Facebook at tech Talkers.
And now back to tech Talk Radio.
I am Rick Darringer, Rock and Roll, hoo Chiku and you're listening to talk radio.
Conventions can be fun and Sean little jealous just found out he's gonna be going to one of the premiere conventions for broadcasting.
Yeah, so it'll be the first time I've gotten to go in my twenty years in broadcast.
Really, you've never been to NAB before.
I've never been to anything. Only been in Vegas twice.
Oh man, I've been to an NAB show and it's a blast.
Yeah. So NAB is the National Association of Broadcasters show. It's their yearly. They do a big one in Vegas. They do one in New York, but it's it's the Who's it and What's it of broadcast. It's in Vegas. It's five days. I get to go for all five days. I'm excited because I've never for one. Again, I've never been, but it's it's a great opportunity for me to look and see the new technology, meet with our vendors. We've
already got We've already got vendor meetings lined up. RAC Callan is already populating with meetings because it's it's everybody that's everybody in the business goes. So I'm really excited.
Now, Well, companies like black Magic Design that makes the ATM Mani and so many other broadcasting products beyond on site.
I guarantee, I guarantee every piece of equipment we used to do this show, somebody from that business will be there. Stream Al, Gatto will be there, Atem, black Magic, Uh, Logitech. I mean, it's it's CS on steroids, it's cees at the at the broadcast level, right, Yeah, see, yes, it is the consumer track show. So it's all consumer level of tracks, right. You take it one step up from that, you get the prosumer right, and then you're at the
the pro level of equipment. So you know we're gonna be seeing and listening to There's gonna be keynotes and discussion panels and stuff like that. So this is gonna be the topic at CS was was aim and in automated cars and AI and stuff, and so that's a big topic is but the big topic is is cloud right? Cloud move the moving productions to the cloud. So that's part of something we're working on at at the university is what what can we leverage in the cloud for
our productions versus staying on prem right. So it's it's just gonna be five days of networking and knowledge based learning and getting the experiment and play around with some of the new stuff.
It's gonna be a lot of fun. All right. So this is Weddy. It's gonna be in April.
April fifth to the ninth in Vegas.
So when you get back, we'll get like a full rundown of what's going on in the world broadcast.
Have so many stickers and brochures to go through, and I can give you guys a rundown on what I saw and what I liked, and I.
Mean, all right, baby, now, maybe next week on the show too, because I'm gonna we're gonna send you out the Spike kit from Staff Circuits. We'll see what you can you could build. Right.
Oh yeah, I'm dude. I love that kind of stuff. Max loves his Computer Engineering for Baby's book, so I'm sure he's gonna love.
This Computer Engineering for Babies.
Okay, Yeah, I will, I will. I will show a demo the Computer Engineering for Babies book and the Computer Engineering for Big Baby's book next week on the show.
All right, perfect, that's it for this week. Have yourselves a fantastic week. We'll be back next week with some great stuff. As you heard, I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm Seonda Weird. Have a great week.