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 Seanda Ward.
Welcome.
I know it's just two of us this week. Yeah yeah, well I'll tell you what. We got a great gas lined up, a little an that you were able to set us up with, Sean, And it's all because of these books we talked about a couple of weeks ago. If you have kids, you have grandkids, nieces, nephews, this is a this is a pretty good subject too.
So so yeah, so Adie talked about some snap circuits by Alenko and he said they were also you know, snap circuits. You put the pieces on and make circuits stuff. And then after the show, I said, Andy, I know you talked about snap circuits, but I'll show you these books that I have that I got Max about a year ago. And so I pulled up, pulled up these two books. They're called Computer Engineering for Babies.
Right, it's very fitting for me.
Right, But it's it's these very basic books that you flip open and they push buttons. Then you do basic logic gates that are computer functions. Here's a wire that makes the circuit you know it, and orgates not or and orgates, you know, things like that. So and I thought, you know what, why don't we reach out to the
author and get him on the show. So later on the show, we're gonna sit down and talk to Chase Roberts who created these books, and kind of the journey he took to get these books out and published, and kind of a little bit about the development of the book. So I was just so excited about these books. And I know that if you're into technology at all, even if you're not not a baby, like these are the
fun to just flip through. Like it's because he made a second one called Computer Engineering for Big Babies, which just expands on you know, you start getting into mucks'es and decoders and read writes and stuff like that. So just an incredible set of books. You can find them on his website at computer Engineing Forbabies dot com. Super long domain, but you know, it is what it is. But yeah, so we'll talk to him water the show, and I'm just I'm so excited for that.
It's kind of interesting, Sean, because Michelle reached out to me and asked me the question about digital books. Now, this is not a digital book. This is an actual physical book that kids can manipulate and read and learn from and see bright lights and switches and all this fun stuff. But asked about digital books, and I know there's people listening that have probably thought, I want to write a book. There's people that say, I want to write a book about my life, you know, the life project,
and how you know, how can you do that? It's been made more available now for those that want to write books, to be able to put together a book that a family could read online, a digital book and maybe who knows, even get it get it printed out. Some people have been going that route too.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we have any digital books for the kids yet. I know that Caitlin has her e reader and we have his digital books that way. But like we've talked, I've talked specifically about this type of book in the past. The hands on, the tactile feeling, the sound because you can hear it clicking if you can hear that right, right, And there's visual feedback, there's tactical feedback like that's so important for the development of
children and it's so important for people. I just think as a whole to have that type of physical relationship with books. Yeah, and so I just I know Max and Daniel both have played with these books. Daniels is still a little bit too young to understand these, but Max can manipulate these and he understands and he understands that Oh if I push them onon, the lightlights up. Oh if I push both these it doesn't light up.
If I push one or the other it does. So it's like just super basic functions that run everyday life that are in these books. So just again, super excited for this interview coming up.
All right, cool, there's a lot of tech news that has happened this week. We got some listener questions as well. And one of the things we kind of touched on last week on the show was DJI was going to have another announcement, and that announcement has been made. We weren't sure exactly what it was, and I know you're the DGI guys, but.
It wasn't the announcement I thought it was going to be. There's another one.
Coming, Oh there is. Oh wow.
So when I texted you the other day saying, hey, DGI is going to announce a new product, what do you think it is? And we kind of talked about it internally and then they announced it. I was like, wait, there's still a teaser on their website for another product launch that's not this. So this was I call them ninja releases or shadow releases, right this one. There was no pook like, there was nothing about it. They just dropped it.
And I, you know, I wanted to ask. Okay, So for this announcement, it was the Osmo Mobiles seven all right, and it's a gimbal arm. But a lot of our listeners may not know what a gimbal arm is. So I'm just gonna ask you, Sean, because I think I don't know if you have one, but what is a gimbal arm and why would you use it?
So a gimbal arm is it's a handheld device that you mount your phone onto and it stabilizes it in three accesses, so left, right, forward, backwards, up and down. Okay, So that when you are, say you're walking down a hiking trail and you have your phone on there, it's going to give you buttery smooth footage as you're walking, like it's going to take out the bumps and the steps it's going to compensate for all that movement, and it's going to keep your phone level stable and shooting
and shooting just crystal clean, stabilized video. They've made this product for over a decade, right that the original osmos came out. I think back in twenty thirteen, maybe I'd have to look. But this one is specifically tied to your mobile device, so your phone goes on it, you run the app, or you record on your phone. You can tie it together with Bluetooth. This one specifically has
some new features. It's got some functionality that can go back, you know, it's got a camera that shoots the other way. I have the specs here. It's like it's super light, right three axiskim Well, like I said, it's got it's got the X, Y and Z axis. It's got the compact tripod design so that extends and it retracts super easily. The feature that caught me off guard was ten hours of battery life.
Okay, so it is powered and that helps that.
You just charge it and plug it in. Yeah, but it's powered, so you're gonna feel as you're holding it, you're gonna feel it. It's gonna give you a little bit of resistance on your wrist as it's actively moving magnets around to try and stabilize your stuff. It's got you know, Bluetooth connectivity for your phone. Uh, and it's it's priced so competitively.
Yeah.
For they made two versions of this one, and I'll go over the specs on the pro version, but the Aesomo Mobile seven it's only eighty nine bucks.
That's not bad, all right, It's pretty good.
So if you want if you're an amateur filmmaker, if you're just shooting stuff for your for fun with your kids, and you want stabilized footage, like this is a no brainer. You buy for your phone, You slap your phone on it, you get the recording.
Now, this doesn't this does not have an extension arms, so you can't extend it to a higher of this one. For the O seven, the regular seven that doesn't have that, So that's why it's eighty nine dollars is one that's a little more priceier.
Right. So the also Mobile seven P or seven Pro includes a couple extra The module acts as a wireless receiver for their DGI mic, so you have if you have somebody on their DJI mic, it can be received on the device and record to your phone. An eight inch telescoping arm. That's a decent sized arm for a tripod. And it gesture control, so if you're shooting yourself, you can do gesture control. I don't know what they are.
I haven't read that far into it. But then it also has a light built in right, and it has a fill light, so turned camera has a camera that will face you so you can do vlogging. And also and so the battery life is a little decreased on that, so you get about four to five hours with that one. And this was the priced I still think very competitively for what it offers. At one hundred and forty.
Dollars, that's not too bad. You know, I have a friend just give you an idea. I have a friend named Larry that the wetlands area that we have here in Tucson, which is a lot of brush and there's you know, just just an area you could hike and it's it's real nice, but it's a terrain is a little difficult, and he's gone out there to do videos before and he'll hold the camera with his hand and it's shaky and it's like you're watching it and you're like, Okay,
I'm getting motion sick this year. With something like this from Dji, this would make that nice and smooth and more watchable almost, I want to say, And Dji you know there we call him the drone people almost like a drone is following him capturing the action because it's so nice and smooth.
Yeah, but I mean, I imagine with this extended arm, you could get all sorts of creative, be all sorts of creative with mounting options and how it's you know, it's it's attached to your backpack, it's attached to your cars. But again this is you're using your phone for the record of the content to be recorded to so it relies on the meo app. I believe it's called the memo Mimomo for DGI. We you know, it's just it's
it's not something that I expected. But again I was blown away that I noticed today because I was looking I wanted to look up the specs for the show. It wasn't the product that I thought they were going to release, right, And they still have a teaser on their web page for a different device to be released on another date in the here in the near future,
which nobody knows what it is. Well, teaser picture looks pretty wild, but there wasn't There was a teaser picture for this one, but I thought it was It looked like on top of a screen, but then if you go back and look at it, it's definitely on top of a phone.
So kind of wonder all right, So you think of about the big players in that field, would it comes to action cameras, You've got Dji, GoPro is still in the in the game, and then Insta three sixty, and you know, it's funny because people are suddenly realizing what Into three sixty is all about. You may be driving down the road, you'll see a truck or a car or maybe a motorcycle and they've got a little stick
that's just kind of sticking up. Beckon me an Insta three sixty, and what that can do is really capture a three hundred and sixty degree access of what's going on. And people have when they see footage back, they don't understand how how is he being filmed? It's usually by that Into three sixty. Do you think Dji might be going that route and maybe trying to get into some of that market space with a three sixty camera.
I don't maybe, like I've been part of the three sixty world since like twenty eleven, right right when they first started coming out with the Theta, the Rioc Theta, and a couple of the other three sixty cams, And it's so hard to find a platform that supports three sixty viewing. Now. The ultimate goal for three sixty viewing is for the user to experience the angles in whatever view they want, right, and YouTube was really the only platform that allowed it to happen where the user had control.
I'll I'll give you a link to my YouTube page because I have several videos that I shot in three hundred and sixty that you can control. It's a cool experience, but it's cumbersome, it's not convenient, and we wanted to do so. I don't think DJ is going to get in maybe maybe, but they're focused on there. They don't they don't need to be in the three sixty market, right,
But there's just not a viewer base for it. It's not easy to view on your phone in three sixty, which when I was at Fox, we tease the idea of doing, Hey, let's put a three sixty degree camera in the middle of the studio so that when they switch sets, somebody watching live on YouTube could then pan to the other set on their own.
Wow, have the experience of being in set.
But then it didn't work on the phone. It was a miserable experience. The Facebook experience was miserable. So there just wasn't So a lot of the three sixty stuff you see is all post process, right, because you can have the you then as the creator, have the capability of tailoring the experience to your viewership and that Without that part of it, it just wasn't a great platform.
So you saw a huge spike in three sixty cameras early on, and then they just kind of dwindled off and now basically instant three sixty go Pro Max is one of them, but there are several other contenders that just didn't do it very well.
Speaking of GoPro, I noticed that they have put together kind of a and I don't think it's the first time they've done it, but it's a many kind of go Pro reduced price. You know, you're getting be able to pick it up a little less, and it's real one of smaller footprint camera that they can you know, mount because you can buy all kinds of mounts. You can mount it on your your head, on your helmet, on your chest, you can mount it on a car, you can mount it just about anywhere, even on the
wing of an airplane. But we go Pro so you get that action experience with this brand new Go Pro Hero. And I'm trying to think of the actual model number of it, but it's it's something new that the Hero eleven. I believe that they'll be able to find in the stores.
Yeah, it's just called the the it is just called the Go Pro Hero. Okay, that was right when we were talking about the show. Yeah, And I believe I believe if I would, if I think back far enough, I believe they started doing this with either the eight or the nine, right because you if you go back way back to two thousand and eight, right right that you had the original Go Pro Hero, then you had
the Hero Plus, then you had the Hero Plus. Then you had to Go Pro Hero two, and then the three, and then three plus and then with the four they started getting into this weird nomenclature was like go Pro Hero four, Yeah, go Pro Hero Silver, go Pro Hero for white, go Pro Hero for Black.
I still have the Hero three and I love them. Yeah, this, I mean we talked about this.
Something in this canra that I'm filming this segment with is a three plus and it's that is my favorite go pro, but it's before the four really kind of changed the layout a little bit. It kind of changed how they deal with picture time lapses and something like that. It's like the three plus is my go to. I've got about probably a dozen of them now through finding them used on eBay, people getting rid of them because they don't use it because they they bought the newest
one and they didn't want it anymore. So I've just been collecting them the three plus and I love it. I have several of them.
They're out so you can put them into an A to mini, which is it's just.
It's just a micro hdum I out and you power yeah, and I don't even have a battery in it, so it's not going to heat up the battery or anything. So I use them all the time, and most of my time lapses I have posted either are from my nikon or a Hero three plus. So GoPros has been in the business so long. They just they're doing things right, But the nomenclature started changing over the years, right, so
I don't know when they introduced the session. So there's another version of a GoPro that was just this version. It's a cube. It's a very small cube, completely sealed, so you can't put a skeleton case on anything. Called
the Hero Session. My parents bought it for their motor home because they wanted to just to have it in the dash while they were driving, and they loved it for a period of time, but it didn't work as well because it had to be powered all the time, so they just bought a regular Carmen dash cam and replaced that. So they just gave me the Session. I've used that for time lapses, but there's no way to externally power it. So it just was not the greatest.
It still shoots great video stuff, but it just wasn't didn't have the flexibility of the Hero model, the bigger Hero models. So then, like I said, I think the nine Go Pro Hero nine is when they first started doing just the Hero and I think they made a base model. I think it just did ten ADP at the time because four K still wasn't really a thing in the encoding and the battery life and stuff. But the new one that is paired with the Hero twelve, it's just called the Go Pro Hero. It does offer
four K video. It's more compact, lightweight, and offers some of the yeah stabilization features, but not doesn't give you the flexibility of doing four K one four K two forty, you know, you lose a lot of the depth of flexibility. But for a cheaper price point too.
Yeah, it's up two hundred and forty nine bucks with that digital stabilization and it's five point three K sixty and two point seven K to forty. So yeah, I mean it's if you're looking for a cheaper solution, but I don't know, I probably spend the extra money and get with that that you know that maybe regular go Pro that could certainly work for you and you get to get a little better quality out of it if you want to.
So So I just I just I just chatchypt the question.
All right.
It was first the go Pro Hero was first launched alongside the go Pro Hero six, so I was three versions off. So it was a little bit further back than I thought. March twenty eighteen, Okay, it included a lower ten megapixel photo resolution from twelve and a resolution of ten eighty P sixty.
Oh wow, So the Hero six could do four K, right.
But yeah, this one only did seven to twenty or I'm sorry, ten eightp sixty. So a little bit further back. I get stuck on the nine because I think the nine was the first version that offered a jump from the twelve megapixel still images to the twenty two megapixel right, So that's the only reason I would get a newer version of the GoPro is to jump from that twelve megapixel still image to a twenty two.
Megapixel Okay, all right, all right, good stuff. Well that's what's out there in the action camera market. If you were thinking about doing that, I don't know if you saw the news about the fifty ninety, were you thinking of upgrading your graphics card?
No?
In your computer? Well, you know, I'm not.
I'm not playing any like maybe when Max wants to get into video games or something like, I'll upgrade, right my thirty sixty that I have. Oh yeah, way more than enough to play, you know, all the old Doss games that I've downloaded and played, Like those games don't require anything, right, now, well, you're playing World of Warcraft
YABO for a couple of things. The only thing I'd be concerned about is the new the new Monster Hunter Wild's game comes out towards the end of the and apparently my friends that are in the beta for that are saying that it's eating graphics cards for breakfast. So we'll see, we'll see what happens there. But I don't anticipate the need for me to upgrade any time in the new future.
Well, you, uh, you do a lot of video editing like me. Having a graphics card that can handle it though is also important because you're when you're editing video. It's also that's also going to be an area where you're going to want to have better graphics. But again, do you need to go all the way up to a fifty ninety and that's you know, the latest one. People are camping outside microcenter, you know, trying to get it. A lot of people said it's because well, people were
you know, scalping them. They buy them at a you know, regular price, and then as the market you know starts the dwindle, the prices go up and people will be willing to spend more money on them, that's not going
to be the case. Apparently with the fifteen ninety they had an influx of materials that are used to career ate it and with that that means there it's going to be a lot more in the channel, and that meets some of the people that did buy them for the purpose of scalping and reselling are probably not going to get the return they were hoping for on some of those graphics cards.
Well, first of all, those people suck, But that's funny, it's interesting. So you saw this and we talked we've talked about this. I say this a lot, right, We've talked about this on the show quite a bit. Is the consumerism of going and buying a product and finding it's been scalped is very frustrating. Yeah, and you think
back fifteen ten, fifteen, twenty years. Want to go get a product that launched, you had to go physically to a brick and mortar store and either hope they had it and stock, call ahead and find out they had it, or wait in line. Yeah, or go to a midnight release. And you saw a trend leading away from that. Oh, just pre order online, just buy it online. You don't have to wait in line, and then that kind of
just wane. You didn't see that anymore. Well, then all of a sudden, the scalpers said, well, now I can just just do it online. I don't have to go to the store to buy ten. I can just write a bot that scoops them all up. And the companies don't care. They're selling the product, they're making the money. But the consumer base does care. And there's been a sour attitude towards scalpers for a significant amount of time.
And you're actually seeing a trend back to stores, brick and mortar stores getting an allotment and only selling one to each customer. Yeah, and they're not selling them in online as much, so you're actually it's getting It's weird because you saw this huge flow of only online sales and now it's back to in store with a larger stock, and now people are camping out again and waiting overnight.
That never went away, but it was for larger ticket ezes, but for the more popular items again, I think you're going to start to see more again of the community building around going a camping out overnight. Now you won't see that for video game releases. And because that's just too much money for them to spend on that. But it's an interesting trend I think you'll see. Come back a little bit.
All right, we have to take a quick break. We come back our special guests on the show. Now, the title of these books, if our listeners want to go online again, sean.
Computer Engineering for Babies, Hey, and Computer Engineering for Big Babies.
All right. Chase Roberts is his name, and you can go to the website and get more information about that. We're going to talk about the guy that created these two very fun books that are geared at the younger set and the older said. We'll have some fun with it too. I kind of like that. That's going to be coming up on tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm sean to wear it. Follow us on x set tech talk Radio.
We'll be right back now back to tech talk Radio.
So right before the break, we were talking about Computer Engineering for Babies, which is a book that I had showed Andy a couple couple weeks ago. He's because he sent me the Alanko Spy Kit, which Max loves, and so I showed him these books. Its Computer Reasuring for Babies, Yeah, and Computer Injuring for Big Babies by Chase Roberts, who we happened to have on the show with us today, the.
Guy that put it all together. Chase, welcome to the show. It's good to talk to you.
Thank you, thanks for having me.
Yeah, this is like really cool.
You know.
Sean was showing me these and I thought, well, you know what, it's kind of a neat way for children to understand technology, and it makes bleaky things go, and he could flip switches and everything. What made you decide to kind of put this all together?
Oh man, It was a bunch of different things. Probably the main driver was when my wife and I first had our baby. He was maybe one at the time, and he loved light switches and I would just hold him next to a light switch and he would flip it and then turn and make sure that like the light turned on, and then he would turn back and flip it again and turn and he would just he would do that for an hour if I could hold him that long.
Wow.
Finally I was like, we got to just move this into a sit down experience because my back hurts. So that was kind of like the main driver. Another partial inspiration was when I was going to university. There was a book that I saw floating around on the internet called HTML for Babies. Yes, and I got married, I had my kid. Somebody bought me that book and I'm
going through it and it was just garbage. They just took random words and put little brackets around it, and it was like doll with brackets, and I'm like, that's not HTML, that's just word those just baby words with brackets.
Yeah.
Anyway, So kind of those two experiences came together, and I thought, what if we made a book that actually delivered on the promise of kind of introducing just like these basic concepts. And I studied computer engineering in school, and like, you know, I'm learning about these different gates or gates and and gates, and I'm like, this stuff is simple enough that a baby one or two or three years could pick this up and could play with it and learn it and like understand what's going on,
and and gate is not that terribly complicated. So I just all of those kind of came together, and five years later, I've watched a Kickstarter and it did really well, And so I've continued making books and here I am what were.
Some of the big steps you had take to get the book out.
Oh, man, so many.
I mean, just figuring out how to make something that could be produced in a large scale is just so difficult. I mean, it doesn't seem like it should be difficult, but like if you've never done it before and you're figuring it out yourself, there's just so many hurdles that
you get stuck on that you would never expect. I thought I knew how to make a circuit board, and so I kind of designed my own board and I had originally laid it out with discrete chips for the and gate and the ore gate and everything, and I had the board made and then I'm trying to populate the board and I have no soldering skills because I've been working in app development for the.
Last ten years.
So I've got my soldering iron out and I'm so bad at it populated the whole board, and of course it doesn't work. Just that process, you know, you learn like, oh, here's where why it's not working, and you figure it out, and then you iterate. It took me ten prototypes to get something that kind of worked. The prototyping phase was just iteration. After iteration, I almost gave up on it several times because I don't know about you guys, but I get a new idea and I get so excited
about doing something new. New things are shiny, you know, and it's like I love new shiny things. Yeah, and it's hard to put energy into older ideas. Finally, my wife, though, she was like, look, you're getting distracted with all these different things, like that computer engineering for babies idea, that's your best one. Like you should just finish that idea before you get too distracted on some of these others.
So she really pushed me to finish the book.
And in my mind, finishing was just like I got to get this to Kickstarter and put it out there.
My expectation was I'll put.
It on Kickstarter, friends and family will maybe chip in a couple grand and the project will not fund on Kickstarter, and I'll end up kicking in ten thousand dollars in my own money to do a production run of a thousand books, and then I'll hand them out to trig or treaters every Heleneen.
That was what I expected.
It had a different effect, though, didn't.
It way surpassed expectations. Just I did that and I posted it to a Kickstarter and all my friends and family and it raised one thousand or two and then I was like, well what next? And I thought, well, I should post this to Reddit because I'm a casual Reddit user, so there's an Arduino subreddit, and I posted it there. I was thinking, like, these are my people. If anybody's going to like get it, like, it's the Arduino guys, right, And it was made like the first
versions were made with an Arduino. I got away from discrete chips because I needed the analog to digital converters. So here's the book, and it uses light sensors to know which page you're open to because it's the same two buttons on every page, and so their little holes cut in the corner of the page and those let light in. And there's light sensors in the very back flip book. There's a circuit board and there's some photo transistors that that we're pulling to see how much light
is coming into each through each hole. And then based on those light readings, were able to figure out okay, they're on page.
Three, got it all right?
Originally I was trying to just do discrete components. It wasn't working to just these light sensors to be a boolean on or off. It needed it needed some more
nuanced than that. So I needed the analog to digital converters of a micro controller and to be able to write code to say like, Okay, if this one's coming in really bright and this one's really dim, then you know, this page is probably closed, whereas before, you know, if you're in a really bright environment, even if the page is closed, it might still it might still get some light coming in, you know, if you're outside on a
bright day, you know. And then how does that differ from if you're in a dark room and you're on the last page and all the sensors are open, you know. So there's just kind of tuning for different light environments. I'm using it on Arduino now, and so I thought, okay, the Ardueno subreddit, those are my people. They're gonna love this, and I kind of posted it, and then my family we went camping, and so I'm up in the mountains and I'm checking my phone and I'm not even looking
at the kickstarter anymore. I'm just looking at Reddit because I've never had a Reddit post do so well in my entire life, Like, it's just so many, It's getting so many up votes, and every time I check it, it's got another one hundred, one hundred and fifty up votes,
and I'm just blown away. I'm like, oh my god, people love my It was just this stupid video that I made of me like holding the book going through it anyway, and I was like, people are like, people are loving it, and it's getting so many up votes.
So I was just really exciting.
And then at the end of the day, I think the first day it had raised like twelve thousand dollars and my goal was like ten.
Mind blown that I was able to do this. On the first day.
I found your book via probably that Redd boast. Oh really yeah yeah, I mean that's where I found it. It came on Reddit, and then I went to your kickstarted and I kickstarted it. The power of the Internet. Man, it's I'm a big techi, right, And I just saw I saw this. I wanted always wanted to build something with latches, buttons. I was going to build my own so we could have light switches, LEDs all stuff, and then I saw this was like, this is it. This is what I wanted to build and he built it.
He built it, so it's incredible. And it's the people that I've shown it to they're like, oh, what, what's that computer y? And then they flipped through it and they go, oh, this makes sense and you can see them in their brain the processes are cooking. So it's it's really just a cool a unique concept that you said took something is very simple and just made an awesome product.
Out of it. Well, everything could be and I don't know if you've found this out chased, but everything could be a learning experience for a child, especially with if this then, because you know it's all causet effect. They you know, yesterday my grandson was over and we were like, he was playing around with a flashlight. It's an animal flashlight and it was having so much fun with it because I showed him how it turns off and on, and that was what was kind of an experience with him.
And I think the books kind of help establish that if then that you know that cause it effect. Kids really like that because then I feel like they're in control of it in some ways.
Yeah, for sure, for younger kids, it's just about smashing buttons and seeing lights turn on. Yeah, but as they get a little bit older, you know, and even like I've had people report, oh, yeah, my two year old's finally figured out the and gate, you know, and it's like you got to press both at the same time to get it to light up. And like it's just kind of fun to see kids, you know, play with it. And yeah, originally it's just like hitting the button seeing
a light turn on. But then like they start to learn that, oh, each page is different, Like there's just there's some subtleties here, and they start to kind of figure those out, and that's and that's fun to be a part of.
Could this turn into Chase even more? I mean we have the two now, right, could there be more in this in like a series of books or even maybe a different type of media.
I've thought a lot about how to do a third computer engineering for babies book. I'd really like to get something that goes all the way to like a working computer that could run instructions.
Wow, but I don't. I don't think it's gonna happen in a baby book.
Yes, there's just too many there's too many steps that I would want to like hit. It seems unfair to be like, Okay, we've done mux's, we've done decoders. Here's an adder, here's an ALU, and here's a program counter, and now you've got a computer.
This is like a big leap.
So take a step back, right. So you published the first one through kickstary, it funded, it did really well. Then you decided, well, let's make a second book. Talked a little bit about that step in deciding, well, here's the first one. Let's let's make it a whole other book.
I did the first one. I don't know why.
I felt like, hey, we should, we should do a sequel, and I got really excited about the idea of having switches instead of buttons. I guess I was looking at some of the next components that you learn when you're taking computer engineering at the university, you know, and it's like, well, after you learn about gates, then you learn about multiplexers and decoders, and so I was kind of thinking, all right, let's do those and you get the switches in and
there's only two switches in the book. Some of my prototypes had like six switches, so that you could really control every input signal for the for the book. I ended up getting away from that, just to simplify. So there's two switches.
You have to design like each page show you so you have the page it flips, so so you had to design, Okay, the cutout is going to be here, and this is where the switch is going to go, and how this is going to apply to that page and then the next page. It's it all had to flow together.
Yeah, just designing. I mean, because you can't move the switches around, so it's like, okay, graphically, we have to fit everything into this area, you know, on each page because we need room for the switches and the LEDs and those can't move because we're reusing them on each page. So there's a lot of design stuff that goes in
and my wife's really good at that. She helps me figure all that stuff out because I'm just like, get something that functions that's made out of cardboard and we're there. She's like, no, it's got to be pretty.
How does the book chase get it it? It sounds weird to ask, but how does it get its power?
I mean, there's a small battery in the back, so it's it's battery powered.
Sean is a big fan of it and from what we've seen so far, his kids love it. I think other listeners who have kids grandkids like me would love it as well. And again it's kind of an introductory experience to that POSETI effect if this, then that and the kind of a study in engineering which doesn't hurt, to introduce them to that stuff and make it fun. That's the thing. They seem to have fun with it too. Once you had kids, you know, you get married, you
have kids. Yeah, it doesn't it kind of change your world a little because I know for Shana did I've known since you know.
He's had his kids usually changes your world.
Yeah, yes, yeah, all of a sudden, your your free time is next to zero, and like just the things that you're concerned, like the problems you have are so much different than before you had kids, right yep. Now it's like how do I keep my kids silent on an airplane for four hours?
Right?
Like that's that's my biggest problem. That was actually another like inspiration for the book. It was like I don't want it to make noise. I don't want there to be a speaker on it. I just want it like to be as quiet as possible. Like the buttons still make a little bit of a clickity clock noise when you click them.
Yeah, like this can be used on an airplane.
That was kind of one of the requirements is like, this will not drive anybody too crazy, you know.
I like it.
Now that we've talked about the book, where can our listeners go pick up a copy of this book or both?
Yeah, so I just sell them primarily on my website computer Engineering for Babies dot com. Or if you just search computer engineering for Babies, like I think it's the first thing that shows up.
Cool. We'll put a link on our blog and our website as well, but computer Engineering for Babies dot com. Well, hope our listeners check this out. I want to thank you for spending the time with us and coming on and talking about it some great stuff.
Thank you so much.
Once again, thank you Chase for coming on tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm shan to Weird.
You can find us on YouTube he tech talk Radio. We'll be right back and now back to tech talk Radio.
So everybody knows that I love go Bro and DJA, and I love action cameras. Yeah, but I'm going to rattle off a couple of companies that tried to get into the action camp business, and somebodys are still available. Well that you that you would not think, why would they make an action camp, or maybe they did buy an action camp and you own one, Like if you own one of these companies action cams, let me know because I'd love to.
Yeah, get.
Nikon.
Really, I didn't know they made one.
It made a one hundred and seventy degree field of view and a three sixty camp called the Key Mission. It's a weird it's the it's weird looking, but it's pretty.
Well all right, Kodak Kodeak really.
Right, right? I say that you think, Wait, an analog company like film Company, you know, they have an action camp. It's called the sp one Action Camera. It's still available for two or forty nine dollars. Well, I don't think it's very good. Yeah, I would have to try one or get one to try it. Contour that's a company, that's just it's their own company. They made one. It was pretty popular.
Garman Garman made an action camera.
It's called the verb Vir. Wow, it's no longer available. It it was pretty widely popular for you know the people that used Garmen pretty exclusively Sony made one wow, very very early on right with like very poor not poor resolution, but like just basic HD like ten eighty p sixty Yeah uh. And then Polaroid.
Poll on Polaroid. The company will just not go away. It just keeps saying, now people want our stuff, and then they put it out and people buy their stuff.
But I think the Polaroid one is just a joke because you can get it for nineteen ninety nine apparently.
Well okay, so Vivitar did one, and I remember Gloria was at Big Lots and she saw him for twenty bucks twenty five dollars and bought two of them with the idea of giving them as gifts, and we never did. I still have them wrapped up in the boxes. We should give one away.
Yeah, So, I mean, it's it's pretty wild just to think those companies like made these action cameras that just these prominent companies back, you know, film and digital camera companies made these huge leaps and trying to be in that actually and then it just fell apart. Yes, you couldn't compete with GoPro dji into three sixty.
You just couldn't compete, all right, We have listener questions, and this one coming from our old stomping grounds of Lakinta. This is from Martha. And you know, honestly, you may run into the same thing. You may have been told something when it comes to technology, and you may have not understood what the rampifications or implications were. But here's the question. Hey guys, I have a bunch of old games on an old Windows XP computer, okay, and I
really like playing them. I remember my mom used to play a slot machine game on hers and she loved it. And the email goes on and says, my friend told me just having it, which would be Windows XP on, could just having the computer on could get it infected with a virus because it sold. Is that true? I don't think the old games are infected with viruses. Would
love to know. Again, that's Martha and Lakinta. There have been people who've been told don't plug, don't turn on your Windows XP computer because it could get you a virus. And you may be thinking, well, how could I get a virus? There are some things to think about though. If you have a Windows XP computer and you want to use it, and you do have those old games like my mom's slot machine game or maybe you have you know a tomb Raider or we've talked about that was a fun game.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time playing that game on the PlayStation. I have one very vivid memory of that game. Do you It's so you when you're in a game and you know you're coming up against a boss or yeah, you don't save now because it's all cloud save rubber, but you always had to save.
Your game right back then.
And I was deep into I was several hours in game, right and I ended up like leaping out of a window on accident and I panic saved.
Oh no, mid air, So what happened every time the game?
I just hit the ground and died. But there was no you know, I hadn't.
Saved other than that, so there was no going back.
So Turm Raader, that's my Turm Rader.
Sorry, but I love it.
I mean, the old games are are fun. They're nostalgic, right, but yeah, always hold up right.
Well, we've we've talked about you know, we've talked about Good Old Games, which is a great website you find some of the older games that will run on your your equipment now and it's funny though I've done this before. I think Castle Wolfenstein or Wolfenstein is one of those where I went back to play in it and I forgot back then the graphics were amazing. But you take a look at it now and it's like, whoa, I actually played this and liked it because there are a lot different.
Okay, so let's take it. Let's take a time machine and go back two decades, go back twenty years.
Yeah, two thousand and three.
I know that's weird to say this, twenty over twenty years ago. PC magazine, pc Gamer, all these games they came with demo CDs.
Yep, they used to come on the show all the time. PC Gamer used to come on tech Talk. Yeah.
And I had a disc for Apergy Games.
Oh, I remember that.
I had a list, had just had a handful of games from Apage Games. And I played the ever living crap out of those games on the app, just the demos. And you know they always said here, it's not share where, don't sell it, it's not free. But it never bought the full versions.
He had playing the games. Yeah.
Yeah, About five or six years ago, I started came stumbled across good old games and I just started looking up these games, and I used to play Blake Stone, Aliens of Goal, Focus, Pocus Hexin. All these are much time I've sunk into these old games again because it's so nostalgic for me.
Do you remember do you remember Nocturnal? Oh yeah, yeah, that was a good one as well.
Yeah yeah, So I mean, yes, there are ways to play old games now. In reference to the XP computer, don't connect it to the internet, all right, so you can turn.
It on, just don't have it connected to the internet.
There's actually a lot of people of the current generation want XP machines to run XP because of the Pinball game, a couple of the solitaire games, Mind Sleep, et cetera that you can't get now that are don't come with Windows anymore. So there are some nostalgia games on there that you can keep. But if you have the hardware and it's running like you can keep it and keep
playing those games. But there are there are alternatives to getting some of those games, maybe as digital remakes or remasters. I know that Blizzard Activision remade a handful of the World of Warcraft games as new capable Windows eleven capable versions of Warcraft one ORCS and Humans Workcraft three, Warkcraft two, a couple of those older games that are you know, capable of running on newer systems versus running on XP or older systems.
So yeah, if I was to go back and play like one game, one game that I used to play a lot, it got a lot of my time, was from a company of Nova Logic if you remember them, and they put out a game called Joint Ops and it was like a military shooter. You know, I want to say it's not first person. I want to say, it was like a third person shooter game, you know, from behind, and it was just I spent so much time playing that. And again that's one of those games
where I saw it, you know recently. Wow, that was really the graphics that were just not that great, but they held they held my attention back then. Fun game.
What about you?
One game if you go back to and play then, which one? Diablo two?
Yeah, hands down, hands down the game I've spent at the most time in my life playing is day Able two. Played it when it was new in two thousand and one or two thousand and two, whenever it came out. The expansion for Diabloto, Lord of Destruction came out, when I was a senior in high school, and this was really my first foray into trying figuring out how to connect multiple computers together to play.
Games right right, PC games, Oh yeah.
And trying to play on a forty four K dial up modive man, because that's all we had in my house growing up. It was forty four were we were good lucky if we got forty four K on a good day. But being able to this is fun. This is a fun computer story. My friend Karl and I loved playing and we always wanted to play online together because he would always be at my house. He spent a lot of time on my house growing up, but his cousin lived in Scatville and we would always wanted
to play together. So we figured out how to take my parents' computer at the desktop and use the dial up modem. But then we bridged the one hundred meg network Nick and did a crossover cable to a laptop, so shared the Internet across the internal on board. Nick.
That's how you had a land party, I mean, yeah.
Both competing so that both computers could be on the Internet at the same time. Now, Diablo two is not an intrue very intensive game, so we were successfully did this for a lot a long time where he would be playing on the laptop and I'd be playing on the desktop, and we had a great experience online, which was weird to say, but it's it. That's kind of my first real like computer networking story that I have thinking back on how I connected to play Diabo two unbettled in.
So Okay, So for for Martha, honestly, you have a Windows xpeak computer, you want to use it, maybe your programs are on there, you know, your photos. Just the good safety tip would be just don't connect it to the internet. Just turning it on is not gonna get you infected unless it's already infected, you know. So again you should be okay to to go ahead and do that, you know, talking to the internet. I recently talked with a friend of mine named Chad who is is not
very unhappy. He lives in cebody to He's very unhappy with the internet service he's been getting. So he asked me, he said, uh, what do I think about starlink because his options are limited? And you know, I said, I really don't know too much about it. Uh, And you know, I don't know if there's any listeners that have starlink that are in sebody. I would love to hear your thoughts of how this has worked for you, and it's very just try me aligned h. Tech guys at tech
talk radio dot com. Have you heard anything, Sean. I mean, I know you're in Indiana. Are people using it there? If there, if you've heard any reviews on it at all.
So my experience with starlink is very limited. In the broadcast industry, it's actually widely used as a I don't want to say a tertiary backup, but like, so, you have an uplink truck, so you go to do an event, and you have an uplink truck that is connected to the Internet. So that's their main transmission path, right the Internet,
public and public Internet or connectic Ata fiber. Okay, So if that connection goes down or it gets overloaded in the bandwidth stinks, you go to what they call terrestrial backup, which is just a satellite uplink truck that has a big satellite dish on it and uses it actually hits a transponder on a satellite and the up transmits and decodes the single A lot of places are skipping that second step of a bringing an UPLATEK truck and just
relying on one, two or three Starlink modules bonded together. Okay, so then they use that as their Internet backup, so they have their primary video transmission path, using up whatever their bandwidth is on that. But then they offload all of their you know internet you know the up you know for downloaded files or just using the internet off to starlink, but keeping that as their backup path for
their transmission if needed. And that seems to be the going thing now is these remote productions when you can't get a satellite truck it's too expensive. They're just relying on starlink but bonding multiple units together and then on you know, getting it, receiving it on the other end.
So that's my only experience with starlink. I know that my parents have looked at it for Internet at their house because they still can't get They live out in the boonies in northern Michigan, and no very rule, no company's gonna run four thousand feet of cable to my parents' house to service one address. Right, It's like it doesn't maybe.
Yes, all right, So so here's here's a good good thing. To think about. From what I understood, starlink does a thirty day trial. As far as you know, you can get the equipment, test it out, see if it works for you. If it doesn't work for you, you should be able to And again it's going to depend on where you're buying it from. You might want a check. You should be able to take it back and then be able to say it just didn't work for you. So again that's something to think about.
The key the key thing about starlink though, is too is if you want to it's you can get stuck because you can. I don't know if they bundled it all together now, but it's there's a residential module and then there's the mobile module, right, so there's two different modules that they sell. One is for you always keep it at your house, and then the other one you pay a higher premium for it, but you can go on top of your RV and you can use it while traveling. So just keep in mind if you're looking
for that, if you plan on traveling. I know Arizona is a big destination for r V ers. You're looking at it for traveling, you might need to just do a little bit more research on what it's going to cost you to be mobile and have access in places that you're gonna be traveling.
All right, we gotta take another quick break. We come back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Seanda Weird.
Find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com.
We'll be back and now fact to tech Talk Radio. Want to thank our guest again coming on earlier today with us, Chase Roberts, who's got these two really great books that John you found and told us about you found through a kickstarter, which was pretty amazing stuff.
Well, yeah, in the interview, right, he talks about how he posted on Reddit, and that's I'm pretty fairly certain that's how I found out about these books. Was just browsing on Reddit and came across it and they just went and bottom because I was like these you'll hear in the you know, you heard in the interview, like I talked about how I wanted to build something like this for Max and then he did it, and I was like, this is great. So just we're gonna push his website.
Yeah, what is it? Website?
Computer Engineering for Babies dot com?
Computer Engineering for Babies dot Is that b A B I E S.
Yeah, do com Yeah, restrating for babies dot com. Just I highly encourage you if you have kids in the two to three to four year old range. My kids love these books. You could tell. I showed him in the interview. They're beat up, they've got teethmarks on him. Max tripped out one of the Max up the paper off one of the pages. But it's so much fun to watch them figure out how the buttons work.
Yeah, we will say it's cool. We will say he is working on something else that he told us biting.
On a new book that I'm so excited for. And I hope when he listens to this he will send me a prototype because I would low to play that.
We'll keep you posted on that again. Make sure you follow him on the website and then you could order the books there. They'll all all the information you'd be able to find. What to thank him again for coming on the show. Hopefully next week everybody will be back feeling a little better. I know that Justin was been on the weather and Matt's got some stuff going on, So we'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio next week as well. I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm Seanda Wird. You can follow us on the world wide Web. Talk radio dot com.
Have a great way, m HM.