The following program is produced by the Tech Talk Radio Network. He war the cable Guy and you're listening to tech CRD Radio. Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm a D.
Taylor, I'm sir, I'm Matt Jones.
And I'm justin lem me. Holy cow, we got the whole crew. Yeah, well you you've been out sick. You you feeling better? Yeah, I'm feeling better. But my voice isn't you sound okay? You were saying that earlier and I'm thinking you sound right, you don't sound yeah, No, I still got I still got. I still don't feel like I'm like the voice is fully back right now. And you went to a comedy show and got everybody in the audience sick. You did that, of course, got
them all infected with the RONA. It was great. Well no, no, I went to uh yeah, it was just a it was a comedy show. This it's just a I mean he's somewhat famous, I guess. I mean he's on Facebook. He does a lot of dry bar comedy, which they have a pretty big YouTube channel. The guy's name is Rodney Norman. All Right. He's very very unique in his appearance because he looks like a hobo. Yeah, literally, like a homeless hobo. But he's a really really nice guy.
He's really funny. But uh yeah. The show was at Bruce Bears, you know the brewery that's in our neighborhood, but it was actually at their other location downtown. I went down there with a friend and we got there before the show and I just I got to meet the guy, you know, Rodney, and I was like, wow, you know, I've been following you for a while. I love your I love your comedy. And it was a very small show, maybe twenty twenty five people maybe the most,
but I did mention to him. I said, hey, I'm just gonna throw this out there. I was, you know, I'm a former radio DJ and I you know, do a lot of voiceover work and things like that. I was wondering, maybe could I introduce you? Oh wow? And he's like, actually, yeah, that'd be great because you know, all comedians get introduced and I didn't have anybody introduced me. And I was like, oh my god, that oh this
is gonna be cool. Oh wow. You know, I kind of came up with a little script and it was funny because I ran it by him, and he's like, oh my god, he goes, and you don't. I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what I said. But he told me. He goes, you don't do stand up comedy. He goes, you you really should do stand up comedy because you're actually kind of funny. But basically what I said was, thanks for coming out tonight for the comedy show.
We're here to see a very funny gentleman. He's been doing comedy for twenty seven years, and if you don't know who he is, it's kind of weird that you're actually here right now, but you've seen him on Drybar Comedy and it finally it took COVID for people to finally find him funny. Give it up for Rodney Norman, right, And everybody just kind of laughed and applauded at that. And then I messaged Rodney the next day on Facebook and he goes, I really truly believe that you should
be in stand up comedy. Well, and I said, I was like, I don't understand because I don't have material, And he told me. He told me something that would really actually hit home to me because I sat back and I thought about it. He said It was so simple too, as most good advice is. He said, right, the truth and the jokes will find themselves. It's true. Yeah, that's true. That's kind of cool because you also had Brad.
I'm trying to remember Brad. You got a photo with him and yeah, Brad, Brad Williams william I went to that show.
Yeah that was that was an amazing show. And you know, shout out to shout out to Brad. We all still hate Karen. I actually Carol Carol, Yes, we hate well, we hate Karen's too, but Carol, we hate Carol. I actually still have the sticker that he the autographed for me and the guy who opened for him. He had an opener, but I have I have his shirt that I bought it for Lee and I and I still wear and it says I like your dogs more than you.
Oh So if you ever follow, just look up Rodney Norman on Facebook because he'll do these things where he'll just go live on Facebook for like thirty seconds and he'll be like, Okay, so you survived until today, So you got that going for you. So yeah, have a super fn awesome day. Bye. And that's that's that's it.
That's it, that's all he says. I think you look at some of the comics that are out there now and there there are more comics that we're seeing and getting a chance to Hear's the I think they're getting their day because of you too, and Instagram reels and TikTok and TikTok, because a lot of them you may not ever hear from you're suddenly getting access to. There's one guy that I saw and I think he's on
dry bar as well. He's got to be I swear he's got to be in his mid eighties and he does his jokes all based around I know, yes, I think I know you're talking about. He does his jokes all based around being, you know, an older gentleman, and boy is he funny. He is, and he just that's all he does, is, like you said, talks about real life and the jokes follow and it just it just comes along. But yeah, I can't remember that guy's name, but I know exactly what you're talking about. Very he's
very old. He's an older gentleman, very rail looking. Yep. Yeah, but he is hilarious. Yeah, there's one comic that I wish was still with us that is no longer with us. That I think was a master at what he did, and if he would have lived a little longer, I think he would just be been huge. Mitch Hedberg, Oh oh yeah. I actually compare Rodney to a little bit of like a Mitch Hedburg style of comedy because he doesn't quite do just one liners, but his jokes are
very short. Yeah yeah, I Matt remembers Mitch Hedburg as well. Yeah, oh yeah.
And I agree like entirely that it's it's definitely social media and you know, easy access to short form entertainment that's giving all these people a leg up. Like just look at a Jeff Rcooney, Like he started out just posting stuff.
On r slash.
Stand up, He's got his own subreddit. He's a big name now like that that launched him to it. I remember being in like high school and the way you've discovered a new comics. Somebody brought in a CD on some trip where you're on the bus for.
Saint Cook's Yeah Cook, Yeah, what happened to Dame Cook Curry? Jeff Arcurry actually just came to Denver about five months ago, and I was looking at going to his show until I saw the ticket prices. Yeah, has a gun up three and fifty dollars a ticket for a stand up show? Really, that's how bad guy he's gotten.
Good lord, Yeah, Now, I mean one of the one of like the foundational stand up voices from like me growing up, you had the the blue collar guys. And I remember listening to Billing Vall when I was Billing Vale when I was younger, with the here's your sign, And I just recently read that he decided to retire because he was like, I'm I am a name synonymous with stand up comedy, Like I don't have to do this anymore.
And then I was like, dude, you got more years left in you.
And I looked up his age and I was like, oh god, time passes really quickly.
You know what, he's like sixty five now or something. Yeah, I just thought of I would pay big money to see this. A Hallmark movie would Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the cable guy, bill ing Vall, and then the other guy who drank a lot what was his name? Roy?
I'm sorry, tight Sally.
You imagine a Hallmark movie with a four of those guys, that would be awesome. Well, you know it's funny is I When my dad was still alive, we actually went to the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, and I believe it was our radio station KPX that got us got me backstage passes so we were able to go. And it was like a conference room, and I remember seeing Jeff Foxworthy and Layer of the Cable Guy and and Bill Engvall and Ron White and they were all just standing around and my dad was like a kid in a
candy store, so cool. And he asked to get a picture with Layer of the Cable Guy and we got a picture and Larry goosed my dad during the picture to make my dad be like, oh my god, you know in the picture? Who did we just live? Did we just lose Justine? After lost just his dad? Dad? He goosed my dad and just just froze. God, Oh he's gone, Like what happened? Well, we know that it's not the entire town to Denver, because Matt, you're you don't live too far away?
Right, I can throw a rock and his house.
I wonder what the heck happened the internet?
Eric did something?
No.
The only thing I would add to that Hallmark movie Andy is if if we're doing like our dream line up on that. I would want someone's angry grandfather to be George Carlin.
Oh, yes, you'd have to have just so like older comics, right.
Yeah, the absolute god of stand up comedy. Just bring George Carlin back to film.
That movie, right, yeah, but AI, I would want to see it.
I would don't don't be AI at that. You can't capture George Carlin through AI.
No, that would not be good. I'm trying to think who's still with us that we'd be able to you'd be able to have in that as an older cast, and then the female cast members. Because it's Hallmarks, they got to be a romance, so they've got to be a romance.
I would put Eliza s Schlessinger up there, right, She's lee went to one of her shows, and I've watched most of her specials.
She is hilarious.
Yeah, I absolutely enjoy watching She's phenomenal.
I feel like I know I know a woman who'd be really great Hallmark movie. Gilda Radner.
Oh, she would have been good too, right, that would have been good too. But again, you'd have to have to be an AI thing to bring her back.
Some lawyer at Hallmark is just like Oh my god, we would get so sued we would have to we would record that movie and then promptly burn it.
I don't know, we might be onto something. Can you imagine it would be great the blue collar comedy love. Hopefully Justin will make his way back in here. But you know we're reminiscenting. We're talking about, you know, great moment to talking about. Well, we lost Justin when he was talking about the photo with his dad and Larry the cable guy goose to him, let's talk about photos.
We have not been able to really focus on the scanning project that that Sean has been involved in, involving the EPSOM Fast Photo six eighty Sean, how's that been going.
So andie ever since you told me you had gotten it and demoed it? Right, Yes, I was pretty bent on anyone right. I was like, this is gonna speed up my process so much because I was using I had at the time. I have just the the V six hundred, the EPSOM V six hundred flatbed, which is which is a really good flatbat Scanner's one of the probably one of the top flatbat scanners you can get. But it's impossible because it you can only scan like
four four x six is at a time. Oh yeah, and if you scan at three hundred dpi, it still takes five to six minutes to scan those four and then that's all you get and then you have to manually save them and it's a pain. So you had said, Hey, check out this scanner that I got. I demoed at your show on TV, and I waited, I waited, I waited, and finally I pulled the trigger to bought one.
Yeah.
And they're not cheap, right, I mean yeah, I think total from BNH photo it was like five twenty five or something.
This thing is awesome.
Yeah it I'll send a video and you can put on the blog. It scans at six hundred dpi. A photo was second.
Yeah wow, and even more if you're doing a three hundred deep if you're doing three hundred depey.
It's like it's like half a second. Scan scan, scan, scan, Its just spits them out. So I have my grandfather, my grandparents photo collection, you know, I this We've talked about this extensively throughout the history of the show, right the last since twenty nineteen, since I started this project, and I had a ton of decades worth of loose four by six is with no negatives to scan. I just they lost the negatives. The negatives were bundled up
with other pictures, et cetera, et cetera. So I had gone through and had sorted it by by decade by year, So the eighties, the nineties, the two thousands, of the twenty tens, et cetera.
This was a lot of prep that you had already done or you had to do that.
No, this was already done because I didn't want it. I wasn't gonna sit there and scan these three four at a time like I was. I'd done it for a couple of days back in the like when I first started.
I was like, this sucks. Yeah, it really sucked.
You lay them in, you flip it down a scan okay, wait, flip it up, take them out. Then you're goobing up the glass and you gotta wipe it out here your time. I blew through thirty eight hundred photos in the last week.
Wow, lord, Wow, that is a.
Lot just sitting there and you know, on my on my nights, or you know, just during the days I had off from work or whatever. You know, you bundle up sixty or seventy photos in a stack. It's a about two inch stack of photos. You line them up in the thing you line you know, you put the guides together and you hit scan and he just goes scan, scan, scan. It's scanning a photo a second.
Now are you scanning it to? Now? Some people will scan and use their phone app to gather the photos. You're scanning to a computer, right is it?
I'm just scanning directly to I have a Mac Pro that I've got. I've got a little work station set up with this scanner pugged in and it's going great. I mean, it's cool because you can can prompt you every time you start a batch photos, so you can give it give it a name, a date, a month, the time of the year, or just a name for
the file, et cetera. And going through it. There are some some frustrations that I had some good things about it, and like the good thing is you can have it auto edit your images auto Yeah, just do a quick processing like red eye reduction. If it comes in crooked, it'll fix the crookedness. It'll do a little bit of like contrast.
Wait, so what if what if you have photos from the old days of you have the photo Matt and maybe they're you know, take them with a one ten and the color is just not as Chris, but all of the pictures have that same kind of look to it. Can it adjust all of those then in that batch.
It can, Yeah, it'll it scans them and then when you're done scanning, you can either load more photos and scan to the same batch or tell it to finish and it'll process. It takes about two or three minutes to process about sixty photos. I don't like the auto the fixes. They were not good. They were some were poor, some were good. So then sorting through, okay, it gives you two files. It gives you the original, gives you
the edited ones. So it gives you file one a file one B file two a file two B file, So you have to go through and I don't filtering through those is kind of a pain. So I did scan a lot of them like that were their doubles. But then I was just like, I'm not liking the results. So I just ended up just eventually, after probably eleven hundred photos, I just stopped doing the the edits. I'll go through, I'll go through the light room and edit them if I want to, Like, I'll take care of
that anymote. Some of the other cool features that are on this is my grandma was very good about writing details on the backs of the photos.
So what do you do in that point?
This will scan the front and the back at the same time.
Oh, I didn't I didn't know that. And you can.
Go in and you can tweak the to be more aggressive, meaning if it detects a little bit of handwriting, it might not scan it, or you can make it less aggressive to where it will scan the entire back even if there's no handwriting on it, so it scans the front and the backs at the same time if you tell it to. You can automatically tell it to, which is great because then it scans and then you get two pictures. It basically gives you, you know, file one A, File one B.
In that person in that person's writing, which I don't know about you, but that's something special as well, to have a grandparent or parents handwriting. You're seeing them.
Yeah, actually we're leeh and I are dealing with that right now. One of actually she found her grandfather's handwriting and got it inverted as a tattoo.
Because one of.
His big phrases was always you be good to you.
And she got that.
So anytime she looks at it in the mirror, it always says that to her. Now, were going through all of her paternal grandmothers photos, documents, everything, desperately trying to find something of her handwriting so that we can use that too. She wants to possibly create another tattoo from that. But yeah, it being able to actually have that digitized and stored and saved is that's amazing.
That is cool. Yeah.
So and it'll do like it does just more than four by six I think it can. Only it only has a specific like thickness it can do like it can barely do postcards. But it'll do postcards. So front and backs of postcards, because my grandparents sent and received a lot of postcards from my family growing up. They have a ton of postcards that I scan and skate saved the front and the backs of all the postcards.
So it's just was a really cool process, right the one caveat I will say, if you're doing a lot of pictures in a short amount of time, you have to open it and clean the scanning surface.
Did you have did you have some jams.
Is some jams, and then if you have to take photos out of albums, they're in plastic sleeves. That plastic leaves a residue on the surface of the film. Also, the emulsion from the film is sticky, right that it's so as you scan, if you don't open it up and take some I p A and scrub it across. Not beer, just I scroll alcohol.
I was like, really, what kind of what kind of beer?
I was gonna say, would you you don't want to use a hazy for that?
Right?
An amber.
Because it's got two elements in there, up front and the back. And one of the albums that I had taken apart was you had stuck them on in the album with the adhesive like they came like that from the store. But at one point I had pulled all that off, so as it was going through, it was rubbing that adhesive across there, and it was I ended up looking at the pictures and most of them had streaks because it was rolling through and then just rubbing off on the glass.
So how often would you do that? I did?
I started doing it after every batch, so I would do like sixty to eighty photos and then I would clean it because then you get debris, You get oil from your fring, oil from the fingertips. Oil. You know, it just got gummed up like it. So I just took hundred percent cotton lint free pad, ninety nine percent alcohol scrupscub, scrub, done, grinston repeat.
So wow, how much time would you say this saved? Saved you?
Oh? Days?
Weeks?
I mean it. I scanned so many photos and this also because I had some free time I wanted. Okay, So now I had these files. I had all these folders with the different years, the different days, and they were all just in one big directory. So that I was like, well, I kind of want it sorted by year. Now what do I have to do? I have to go and look at every every year that I've got. So well, I've been using Chatgypt and Amazon que to write Python scripts for me. So all I did was
I downloaded Visual Studio coder. Right, that's what it's called m H type downloaded. The Amazon Q extension said, please write me a Python three script that will take this directory. If it has a four digit year in it, please put that in a new directory with all the other folders. That have the same year. Please go send put clicked on the directory, told it this directory. Boom, they're all
on a new folder. Okay, Now I want you to sort the originals and the edited once because it says, you know, file one A, file one B. Please separate those into two separate directories, one called edited, one called originals. Go send, boom, done all.
In Wow, in minutes.
I mean I've created I've never coded a Python in my life.
Maybe maybe maybe a little bit.
So if you're interested in doing like stuff like that, like very simple like just file batch file naming. It took me a day to get all that organized using so and Amazon q will help you install the lip, the libs, the directories, the you know, I don't know. So if you're curious about just doing a little bit of Python coding, or if you have a little bit of Python coding experience, Amazon q it's free to use. With the visual I can't it's visual studio vs.
Code.
Yeah vs code.
That's it, so all right, But you had it, you had a choice of going with the epsin Fast Photo six eighty, which I you know, I showed showed on television and loved it. It's the one you see in the ads with Shaquille O'Neil and his mom, which I think are pretty cool talking about preserving memories, or the Visionaire because I remember you you sent me an email
saying Visionari it's about a hundred bucks cheaper. Did you did you compare the specs and just look at it because epstin just seemed to offer a little more when it came to the software and what it was able to do.
You know, I just I've had such good experience with ebsin Skinner over the years, with with the with the V six hundred that I have, plus some EPs and scanners I've had in the past, and they're they're kind of up there in the terms of like the best of the best, in in scanning quality and in just hardware. So I just pulled the trigger on with the absence, I didn't know enough about Visioneer. It's not a product i'd heard of before. I'm sure it would have worked fine,
but this did everything I needed it too. I bought it on B and H. I have a great reputation with B and H personally and professionally, so that was super easy.
What are you gonna do now when you scanned all these photos. You finished the project, will you then tell your friends, Hey, you have photos you need scanned.
Well, I mean, so this was just my grandparents stuff, right, So now I've got my parents are going to be bringing all my child like my parents and my childhood stuff in and I'm going to scan all that in too. So then my aunt and my uncle and Caitlin's parents and like they've over the years. Over the years, it hasn't just been my grandparents collection, right, I've digitized stuff for Kale's family. I've digitized stuff for other friends' families,
friends collections. Somebody says, hey, I've found these random thirty five millimeter scans in my basement. Can you scan these for me? Sure, it takes me twenty minutes, whatever, But I like the what the best part about this experience for me, and I've said this before, is the tactile feeling of looking and remembering memories from my childhood or from my family. Yew, some of them have passed, right, So seeing these pictures like, oh, it's my grandpa, it's great.
Like here, I've got this picture of my grandparents right here that I scanned it. It was just happened to be sitting on my desk.
That's cool.
This is awesome for me because I this is a physical picture. I can feel this right. Somebody in my family took this picture and it represents me and my family and you know, my loved ones. So that's been the best part of this whole process, is just filtering through and organizing the photos and looking at this, going okay, these are of my uncles from the eighties. I wasn't born wow, right, but it's like he these are memories
for him. So now I just I periodically. I've saved the one some of the best ones in a folder and I'll periodically just send them to those family members in text messages.
I've mailed them, right.
Like, I'm just surprising people with little life moments like that. You'd be surprised how often that comes up, going hey I love that picture, by the way, or hey, you know it made me cry that you sent a picture of Papa saying my name on my birthday back when I was two years old and he passed away ten years ago.
It's also kind of special too, because I mean digital is nice, and yeah, you could you could scan it send a digital You could also have you got a good printer, you could also print it and that way people would actually have a physical copy of that picture.
Yeah, I will say that this, this scanner does not like glossy printed photos, like if you took an inkjet and printed it on photo paper, you know, you get that really thick paper, the really glossy, almost yeah stocky type stuff. This hated it because my grandparents had some of that and you could tell it would make squeaking noises when it pulled the paper through. It definitely did
not like that. So yeah, no, it's just it's been a great experience, and some of the feedback that I've gotten from other family members has been that, you know, not everybody would take the time to do this. This was a very labor intensive thing that I did, and a lot of it took place during COVID, so I had a lot of extra time to do it. But it's just not a lot of people would do that.
It's a very fulfilling family project, which is what it's and episod has made it a little easier for you, which is part.
Yeah, this was like, this saved the end of this project because I was never going to get that done because I I'm not joking like it. It was a it was a pain in the rear end to flip that scanner down to do four at a time, five to six minutes, eight minutes to yeah, four pictures and this was cranking out sixty a minute.
Wow. We'll put the video up on our blog. Listeners can take a look at that as well to see just how fast this is. But once and it's the Epstom Fast Fast Photo six eighty W which is available now. It came out probably about seven or eight months ago, and all.
The software is free, so just downloaded from Resin's website. It was I was going in minutes.
There you go. All right, we're gonna take quick break, come back. We have listened to questions. I've got a question for you, guys. Maybe you can help me with something that I've decided to jump into the Windows eleven fold and I'll tell you why that's coming up with tech talk Radio. I'm Eddie Taylor, I'm Sean to Weird, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm justin. Let me find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com. We'll be right back and now back to tech talk Radio.
All right, So when it comes to Windows eleven, which is in October, that will be the end of life for Windows ten, as they say it now. Don't let that scare you. You need a lot of people talking about that, this end of life and right away you're gonna think, oh my gosh, my computer is gonna just stop working. It's not gonna do anything. That's not the case. It means you're not gonna get the security updates. We've seen this before. Microsoft is saying you could pay for updates.
They might make that available. If there is an update that is I mean going to be really needed, they may still put one out. They did that before with XP. They did that with Windows seven, when they said that was in the end of life, they put one out. But as we continue to go down this road with Windows eleven, those that do have it have done updates and have been nothing but disappointed. Updates that have gotten
rid of certain features like WordPad. Of course, you're very easy to bring back, but they at rid of it. Why I have no clue. I don't know. Is it so that people would go ahead and start using their office suite. The other problem that I found is networking, and some have tried to find a work around to that, and I just discovered it the other day what the real problem was. So I have a studio that is separate that I'm in right now from an office, and in the office is where I do all my editing.
I'll have people coming and record in the studio, or we'll record the show. I'll go into the office, where it's a little more comfortable, and I'll do my editing in there. And it used to be I saved it on a shared folder and I would go in the other room and I could pull that folder across and do the editing I needed. As soon as I installed one of the twenty four to EH two, I think it was I couldn't do that anymore. Couldn't access the other computers, couldn't find them, couldn't see them. It was
just it was so frustrating. And I know there's probably a quick workaround and easy work around, but it was working for me. So the other day I went to update Gloria's computer in her office and I left it on, and when I sat down on my computer, all of a sudden, her computer was showing up on my list of network computers. Her computer's Windows eleven, so that's what it is. It only working with Windows eleven based computers. It'll show my laptop and it'll show that and that's it,
and I could connect to it. So I decided, all right for the studio, just for the sake of making it easier, I'm going to go ahead and bite the bullet. I've got an I three in here. Now. That is an older I three processor that you know it's it's it's not the newest. I can't upgrade it. There's not TPM two point zero in it. It's an old motherboard. So I decided to go ahead. I had a seven Z seven ninety for Asus that I said, okay, I might as well go ahead and update it, and so
I have that board there. I went ahead and I ordered an I five twelve four to end from Intel. They were only one hundred and eleven bucks, right, I thought, that's not a bad price. Bought the memory and a sound card, and that's going to be used just for our recordings. But one of the things I noticed, and I have a big old fan, I didn't really want to use that big old fan for it because it's
not a powerhouse system. It's just recording audio. But the process sorrey I bought even came with the Intel fan, and you know some of us have bought processors that come with the fan. But I noticed on the bottom of the fan you get three strips of heat sync or you know, past thermal paste. But I'm thinking is that enough? So I wanted to ask you, guys, should I put more thermal paste on the processor and not rely on the three strips well that you get on
the fan. First off, you need to scrape that off and get better thermal paste. All right, all right, you think metal, I can remember what is it? Is it liquid thermal or what is it? Yeah? I think it is. It comes at a little white bottle. Well, they are all kinds of different ones now, but it's basically it's basically liquid metal. That's what you want. That stuff. It's not gonna work. Now. I had all work, but it's not gonna be great. Every time I've done a build,
I scrape off that carefully. You don't want to use like a metal scraper, right, you know, you can use a razorblade, but you gotta be careful about the the angle that you scrape it off of because you don't want to scratch the actual heat sink, but scrape it off, get it cleaned off, use some alcohol to get the residue off, and then put fresh like liquid metal thermal paste on it. It's gonna be much better. I actually have a it's almost like I want to say, a
degreaser for thermal paste. It's made just for that for removing thermal paste from processors. So I could probably use that on here as well. Put it on you can.
You can use that on there. Justin's on Team liquid Metal. I've been using a nock to a you know, king of computer cooling for so long.
Came out with theirs.
They have a noc to a nt H one, which is their version of thermal paste. Before that, I was using cry a not but yeah, the stuff that you have on there, like, yes, it.
Will work, right, but within a year.
You're gonna start seeing temperatures starting to spike and you're gonna have to go do it anyways.
Right, might as well do it before I before I connect it right.
And then and then you left out the big question, the truly divisive question.
Do you do a pe sized dot? Do you do the X? Do you do the box?
How do you apply your.
This question just came up in one of my discord groups of a buddy who's rebuilding his PC, and he said, hey, what are the recommendations for how to apply a thorough pace? And every everybody gave a different answer. Really, I'm on team you put a dot in the middle and you spread it out evenly across the whole surface.
Yep, Now how do you spread it? How do you spread it out? Though?
You usually come with a little spade that you can a little plastic spade that you can use. But I just put a nice even coding around it. Around the edge. You can't see the writing on the top of the processor. It's worked fine for every bill I've done. Yeah, I always, But that's that's a cardinal sin for some people.
Yeah, I've seen some people think they put so much thermal they you squeeze it and then it's coming off the sides and everything, and what are you doing?
Yeah, it's still want that no thermal.
This is one of those where like you want to start a nerd fight in microcenter with like one sentence, you just like there's only one right way to put on thermal paste, and it's and just say whatever it is and whatever you feel like saying that day and you like mirror cats popping up, You'll see people being like, do you say she says she used the dot? He said no, no, no, you got to use the X. No, man, you gotta spread it out.
No, you gotta do the box.
And then you walk away as you've sown chaos in your wake.
All right, So Matt, so Sean says he likes the dot. Do you have a particular method?
I do the dot, and then, like Sean, I do like a gentle coat, but I don't.
Take it all the way to the edge.
I leave just kind of like a little border gap just so because I know it's still gonna squish a little bit. So I give it just like a little bit of room to move out. And I recently had to do that three different times when building this server racks up because we we got Lee's all set up and then found out that my old motherboard was dead right, And at that point, when you have to do it that many times in a short spin, you get.
Really good with thermal pains. Like justin what about you, I'm kind of team dot on Team dot, I mean, yeah, team Dot. Use a little spades, spread it around if there's a tiny bit of it that you know doesn't get quite covered, I'll put a tiny little bit on. But honestly, with with when it comes to like thermal paste, it's less is more. Yeah, yeah, now now.
Less is more because again, the same person that we were talking about by discor group had an issue where when he pulled tried to pull the cooler off and pull the CPU out. Right, he had it loose, He had it loose, but because it had baked down there
for so long, it didn't separate from the cooler. So off the recommend the recommend No, it didn't damage anything, but thankfully, but the recommendation is either fire up your computer for a minute or two to let the CPU warm up, or if it's already out, you can use a hair dryer or a heat gun and just heat it up a little bit and hopefully break it free.
But just just be careful when you do that because if you are pulling on the cooler and this it is not coming off the CPU and you're still locked in place, you have to be careful because you could rip it out and rip out pins or damage the socket, the l l G A or whatever.
Right, So next big question too is going to be what do you do with the old computer? Then? And a lot of people gonna be maybe going that route, going to buying a new system, building their own.
I have a nice shelf back here, I can put all your spar computer.
Yeah, if any, if any listeners are like I don't know what to do with my computer, You've got four guys that you're listening to who will gladly give your wayward computers a home.
Oh.
Actually, I actually just started a project because, as you guys know, I've been unemployed for a while. I thankfully finally landed something. But in the meantime I started building a really like enterprise grade home.
Lind Right.
So I took an old computer, you know.
Wiped out.
It's got like twelve terabytes of storage on there. It's it used to be my media server. And I've got two other ones, two smaller machines. I've installed proxmocks, which is a virtualization platform on all of them. They all talk to each other, and I'm just setting everything up like I'm messing with stuff that I've never gotten to
do or play with in my professional career. I'm playing with Kubernetes and Docker, and terraform and ansible and screaming curse words deep into the night as it's like everything's working except DNS isn't quite working, and I'm like, okay, DNS is never working, so thank you.
That's that's fantastic.
That's so.
That's always Another good one for old computers is if you just like, just google what can I do with an old computer, and you'll have this slew of projects come up. I mean, Justin's got a really cool home assistant set up. That's right, that people could you know, you you need some computer know how, but I mean, that's that's really really cool, right, Yeah, smart homes are really cool.
And honestly, you know, home assistant has gotten a lot easier over the years. You know, when I started getting into home assistant, you were still writing in Yamel code, which now you don't have to do that anymore. Most of the you know, ninety five percent of the stuff you can do in home assistant is is through the web UI. But yeah, it does it does require a
little bit of a know how. Yeah right. Well. PC World put out a story recently too about this you know, upcoming end of life for Windows ten and they were offering up some alternatives. And I was reading the article and I thought about it. Uh, and they had these these alternates. They said, you could continue to run Windows ten if you wanted. You could pay for upgrades to Microsoft. No idea what they're going to charge for that. Are they going to charge five dollars a month, you know,
or or something like that. Or you could say goodbye to Microsoft and run Linux. The problem is you say that to most people and they will run the other way because they have no idea how easy Linux is to actually employ. They think it's something that only you know, Jimmy Neutron would end up being able to do, when
actually it's really not that difficult. Well, even in the past like year or so, I mean now that Linux has come out with Linux Mint and other other variations of Linux that are almost replicas of Microsoft Windows with no command line needed. You know, people people think Linux and they're like, oh my god, I got to be a hacker. I got a no command line not anymore? No, there you still can you sin? Yeah?
I mean, if you really want to be a hacker, you can install Collie Linux. That's that's a Linux distro built for penetration testing. But if you're if you're an end user, you know, John Q Public looking to dabble in Linux.
The three most.
Accessible distros, and when I say distros for listeners, that's short for distributions because Linux comes in so many different varieties. But the three most accessible distros are mint, Arch and Ubuntu, U, b U and t U. Those three are almost as justin put it, they're almost carbon copies of Windows. It's a very very small learning curve to get into that.
Yeah. The one I hear, just one I tried it was wind Boon too, and I thought that was pretty cool.
Yeah, that's that's another great one.
Yeah, you might have a slight learning curve with it, very small, but it overall they're if you're just you know, web browsing email, maybe checking it, you know, maybe hit up Netflix or something like that, then those distros would easily take care of your issues. And Linux because it it is a much lighter operating system in the way it does things that even older computers will seem lightning fast on any of those distributions like Windows. Windows does
this thing called a graceful shut down. It calmly asks everything to turn off. Linux rags everything into a back alley and puts around in it and says you're done.
That's Windows. That's a yeah, that's a beautiful way of putting it.
Windows is like, can you please turn off? And Lennox is like, I'm gonna have to old yell.
Are you I'm sorry? Yeah? Windows, Windows, You're like, you know, can you please tell me? You're like, no, no, I'm not. I'm just gonna sit here and wait and you're gonna be waiting for me to reboot. All right, we got to take another break. We come back with more of tech talk Radio. You make that fake, keep making that face justin no, no, I'm not and why.
And see I see that face way too much with my kids right now. I don't want to.
Yeah, all right, more of tech talk Radio the way. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm I'm Matt Jones, and I'm no that face that's just a golden uh. We'll be right back now. Back to Tech talk Radio.
Listener question from Ricky in Tucson. A listen every week and try to absorb everything I can. I decided to go ahead and instead of buying an hPer pre built system, to go my way and build my own. However, it's been a wise, very nice good first off, good choice, Ricky.
Yeah, I was looking at the site.
You guys recommended PC parts picker. But wonder do I still need to buy a separate sound card and graphics card or can I get them integrated? That is a fantastic question, Ricky, And I'm going to break it into three parts. The first one's gonna be nice and quick. Do I still need a sound card? No, you do not need a sound card. I have not rocked a sound card in probably close to a dead unless you're like an audio file or doing audio engineering.
Correct.
If you really need like high quality audio, which ninety nine point five percent of us don't, the onboard audio is just fine, it'll take care of you. As for the graphics card and can I get them integrated? It used to be that pretty much every processor came with
some form of integrated graphics. Around about four or five years ago, chip manufacturers started chopping that feature out, And the reason that they were chopping that out is to get more room on the die, more cores, more power you now need if you want to do integrated graphics, you have to make sure that you're looking on the details of the processor and see if it has an integrated graphics unit. If it has one of those, you can definitely use that. That'll power your system. That's more
than fine. AMD used to use something. They didn't call it a CPU. They called it an APU, an accelerated processing unit, and it came with both. I recommendation, if you're just using this for general everyday use, surfing the web, things like that, yeah, you can do that. I'm a fan of the graphics card because that frees up a lot of the thinking power to solely be done by your CPU. It's not doing any rendering or anything like that.
So I would recommend you get a graphics card instead of going the integrated route.
Would Ricky, Would Ricky need to go Matt all the way to the fifty ninety or fifty.
I mean I saw that, I was no, I was about to touch on that. If you are gaming, you absolutely need a graphics card. If you are not a PC gamer, you do not need to be buying the new Nvidia fifty seventy fifty ninety or the Radion you know, seventy nine hundred.
XTX like you don't.
You don't need to be spending you know eight nine eight nine hundred one thousand dollars on a graphics card, just like a a low to mid level will take care of you, just find so to summarize all that, No, you don't need a graphics card. Depending on what you're using, you can go integrated. Just make sure that the processor you buy has an integrated graphics you feature to it. And I still would wreck amend going for a what's
called a discrete graphics card. That's that's just buying a GPU and depending on what you're doing, tailor it to your budget.
Right now, I'm wondering he's going through PC parts Picker. Can't you go on to that site and actually say, well, here's what I want processor wise, here's what I want motherboard size, and it can pair up some of the things like it may pair up it price range for a graphics card on the lower end, and then of course one on the upper end, and then of course you have memory up Like.
Yeah, that's what I like about PC part Picker is that you have a compatible check mark, right, so whatever you toss in, it's only going to recommend you compatible parts.
Well, this was the entire reason behind the guy that created PC part picker was because he would build PCs over and over again only to find that half the parts that he bought were not compatible with each other.
So he actually quit. Well, he started the process, he started the whole project, the PC part picker as a side gig, but then it got to the point where he was able to actually quit his job, as I think it was a software engineer to do PC part picker full time because this was becoming such a huge issue for people that wanted to build PCs, was that they did not know what pieces fit together.
We jokes that like building a PC as like adult legos at this point, like you know, this slot goes, this thing goes into this matching slot. But then we have new technology that's come out that, while has provided benefits, has also added in complications. You now have memory memory, which used to just be like I need to make sure that the memory is compatible with my motherboard for like type in speed. Do I have a DDR four motherboard?
Do I have a DDR three motherboard? Now you need to look and be like, oh, do I have an Intel board? I need to buy the Intel memory feature compatible RAM. Do I have an AMD motherboard? Then I need to buy the AMD feature which is called Expo compatible RAM.
Other Wise you.
Don't get that feature.
And it's just one more thing that that little compatibility check mark is going to save your bacon. Because I'm I'm a tech guy, but I'm not reading every single tech blog, every single update that's coming out. And when I was rebuilding a PC recently, I was like, what is the a MD compatible RAM versus the Intel compatible RAM? I felt like, mister incredible, Like math is mass?
RAM is RAM? Like what is going on?
Well, let's not forget too. Depending on the board that Ricky's gonna get from PC parts Picker, he'll also have to make a decision what does he want to do as far as storage. Does he want to run the M two? Does he want to run SSD or does he want to go old school and run you know, a spinney? They still tell him, I mean, which which route is going to be the best for him to go to?
I mean most motherboards now are coming with minimum to of the M two slots, And to be honest, like that's that's the only direction I'd be going at this point.
Like it, oh oh, I just just all right, justin go ahead. I'm just gonna say, I just well, no, I agree with Matt because I'm saying, if you're going to build a brand new computer with today's technology and still run a spinny drive, that's like you buying a Ferrari and put an e eighty five ethanol gas into it, you're not wrong.
He's not wrong at all wrong.
And M DOT two's run on a much much faster interface because for drives, the the big bottleneck. You know, you can have the fastest processor, the best graphics card, enough ramnet choke a donkey, and if you're running on a spinner drive that's got like then you're you're running into a bottleneck of how fast your data can be written and red and the fastest speed it's or on MT two drives.
I was talking about to this is somebody the other day and they were trying to tell me that M two is less uh, it has less of a life than an SSD, an actual you know SSD chip or not chip, but drive in your computer. And I said, where did you get that info from? They said, no, no, we're they're seeing stories that the M two's are failing at a higher rate than SSDs. And I thought, is that the case. Have you guys heard anything about that.
I'm I'm brutal to my hard drives.
I'm sorry to my storage drives, and I haven't seen anything like that.
I feel like it's got to be user error, because I could feel like somebody just jamming it in there and breaking it. That's going to be the number one.
We're putting it there and not putting the screw, We're putting.
It upside down, or not putting the standoff in or something stuff like that.
Yeah, it's to go back to something that Sean said earlier about like when you're taking the CPU cooler off and if you're like if you're starting to like really pull on it and it's going not going anywhere.
When you are building.
Or disassembling a computer and you are having to force something, you are not doing.
It right, I add more force. I did that. I did that too. I did that to Glorious System when I was building it. I could not get this thing out of the socket, the cord that was in there, and I was trying to get it to move it around, and I pulled so hard I pulled it right off the motherboard, the entire housing. So I was like, well, that's not going to work.
Let me look, I'm going to microcenter.
Well, it didn't damage the board. I just ended up buying a card and using that instead a plugging card, so it cost me an extra thirty bucks. But I'll tell you Samsung has actually just announced their new and I don't know how you guys feel about Samsung's SSDs or their M two's, but they've got one that they're saying is now the world's fastest consumer drive fourteen point eight gigabits per second. They're saying a PCIe five point storage that will be available and it's going to sell
starting at one ninety nine ninety nine. No, I don't know what that capacity is. And it comes with a five year warranty, so, I mean five years is pretty good.
You just mentioned that the fourteen gig read writes. Yeah, right, okay, so we're talking about if you want to get a spinny drive versus an M two.
Okay, yeah, what's the difference.
I looked up what the average like a read write speed for a seventy two hundred rpm drive is. It's anywhere between one hundreds two hundred megabytes per second. Oh man, Okay, your low at your low end M two NVMe drive is one to two and a half gigs, and this is fourteen one thousand to two hundred one thousand to twenty five hundred megabytes per second. So that's a literal likely close to one hundred times or five to ten times faster.
Just it's literally an order of magnitude in difference.
There. There you go, Yeah, you will you will see.
It feel a difference in your performance. And there's no reason when some of them drives are still the same price as one terabyte and VMEs.
And a Spinny drive is gonna die way before an SSD or an envm E because it's got mechanical components. Like we talked about Andy well shows ago where he's like, I put in the drive and it started making a clicking noise.
Oh yeah.
All three of us were like, oh no, Like there is a mechanical component to the Spinney drives. It's gonna wear out. It is gonna die. It is not a question of if. It is a question of when.
I'm still debating on whether I'm gonna send that drive in. I bought the back, secondary, backup drive that they could put it on, but seven hundred dollars. It's a great deal that he's given me. But do I really want the data that much?
Take it apart and use the magnets.
Yeah. Ooh.
The magnets are super fun to play.
With the best. You can't get them off anything once you put them on. Like I went on my file cabinet, can't move it.
I take I take the magnets out, and I make wind chimes with the platters. Oh.
There, and the wind chimes you make with the platters because of how it reflects the light will actually attract butterflies and honeybees.
Oh really, Well, there you go.
If you want to know why I know this, justin you've met my wife. Does that shock you at all that I know how to attract honeybees and butterflies?
No? It doesn't. Yeah, all right, actly, We got to take another quick break. We come back with more of tech Talk Radio. Remember you could drop as to the email tech guys at tech talk radio dot com. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm Justin. Let me find us on Facebook at facebook dot com for slash tech Talkers. We'll be right back and now fact to tech Talk Radio.
So I was on my phone in my pixel watch because, as we've discussed before, I live the Pixel ecosystem, and I got to notice that. It was like, hey, Pixel is making a change to your emergency SOS. You now have to push this button five times and then confirm to activate it. If I am in a car crash bleeding out, how do you think I'm gonna be able to click a button and then confirm it five times? Hold on, leaking, femeral artery, give me one second.
Is there a reason why Pixel said, Uh, let's add a couple of more of those button pushes just before the SOS goes out.
The emergency feature is like, so the pixel phones have like detect car crash like because it's got g sensor in it. And I'll be like, okay, you were doing sixty miles an hour, and then a millisecond later you were doing zero miles an hour. And as Jeremy Clarkson said, it's not going fast that has ever killed anyone.
It's the sudden stop that usually does it.
So your phone will detect your car crash, or the pixel watch can detect when you have a nasty fall. It's things where like you might be incapacitated, so we're gonna, we're gonna SOS for you. But then you might have some case where you're walking around at night, someone's following you, and you want to like get the SOS feature going notify your family. So I'm like, why did they do this? And then I look and find out that threw a
mistake with the SOS. A gentleman's pictures of a sensitive scantily clad nature.
Oh no, oh no.
Might have gone on a wide digital journey thanks to the SOS.
So something happened and he didn't realize it, and it sent out images that he probably would be very embarrassed at. Maybe I was saying maybe because you never know what people these days.
You don't, but I sure would have been like, imagine getting that note because like when I when my if my SOS triggers, my wife and my parents all get a notification about it. Uh, imagine being on the receiving end of that, like your husband has had a nasty fall and send out in SOS. Oh my goodness, let me look at Andy's naked.
What type of ball did he take?
Google? Can you can I get more details on this?
Because it is not a good.
Look, Sean. You're an Apple guy. The iPhone does the same thing, but does it send out like a picture or a text message.
I honestly have no idea. I've never looked into it. I can't imagine it would.
But please please do not put us on your list if you do that, Sean.
Oh, here the top of the list.
Of is shown.
If anything happens to you, just know that you know thoughts and prayers.
And I wish you the best, but I don't need to.
Know, all right. So that's why you have the extra buttons on the pixel. The emergency s O S that you need to set up when you get your device to who you wanted to text a case of something happening to you, so in case you get lost somewhere, or in case you need somebody to bring you some pants, so s I need I don't even know where to go for all right. That is it for this week's tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Shonda Weird.
I'm Matt Jones. I'm gonna get banned.
Oh my god, and I'm justin let me find us on that. We'll have a tech talk Radio dot Com. Have yourselves a great week. We'll see you