The following program is produced by the tech Talk Radio network Learning the Cable Guy, and you're listening to tech cup Radio. Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm justin leme Man. It's good to see everybody. It's been a while, so we've been able to just all get together, you know, Memorial Day and.
Jobs and the end of the school year, graduations.
Yeah, yeah, stress to kill an elephant. We've all been busy, right, Yeah, I know, I know it is. I know it is, and a lot's been happening with each one of us. Have been doing different things.
I know that.
Matt's good to see you. You've been focused on some things and now you're working. You're working on your home lab, right. Yeah.
So when I was going through my my unemployment phase, fun employment, fun employment, I was like, Okay, we'll try putting the home lab back together. And I tried kind of a couple of different ways, but the iteration I've settled on. I haven't pushed anything to my home lab yet. I've got three machines, one as a ton of storage in it and the other two are just you know, beef your workstation machines. But I've been doing a ton
of coding for it. Actually, I decided this time, instead of trying to touch and do everything, I'm playing with Terraform and a sable. So I've been building a whole bunch of Terraform scripts and playbooks, getting antsible set up, putting in all the variables and the instructions. I haven't hit go yet, but ideally when this is done, I'll have everything uploaded get labs so I can share it.
But ideally, when I have everything coded the way I want, I'm able to just hit go and it will deploy it to all three of these machines for the setup that I want, and then if I want to make changes or add stuff in the future, I just add additional files and playbooks to it. It's been a really
good learning experience. I've only wanted to throw my laptop at the wall twice, which is a marked improvement from last time, where I said something in chat GPT came back with okay, I understand, while I might be in AI, remember Matt, words can hurt.
No, it didn't, did it? Really?
I wiped out the entirety of my AI goodwill in a five minute, rage fueled type fest. And at that point my wife was like, maybe we should try this a different way.
You're going to be the first to go when the II takes over. Yeah, that's fine.
I don't want to stick around for the terminator saga. Just take me out in the front.
You know, it's kind of interesting because we think about this. There was a study not long ago about parents that are trying to teach their kids to be more polite to AI say please, say thank you, and all of that, and they're working on that to get their kids to be, you know, more respectful. And you know, I had people I've talked to you who said, oh, yeah, my AI is a buddy. They think it's their buddy. They feel like they're having a conversation with it, and it's you know, saying, hey,
you're doing a great job. I love what you're doing. And they've told me that, yeah, if you kind of feel like my AI is my buddy.
Which is funny because Sam Altman, founder of Open AI, he was in an interview i want to say, like a month or two ago and he actually told people stop saying please and thank you to the AI. It cat like pleases and thank yous are costing millions of dollars every single time.
It is an AI.
You do not need to be polite to it, my brother in technology, have you watched any dystopian movie?
Any of them? Ye yea.
I do not need my rumba becoming sentient and being like, hey, you remember that time you kicked me out of the way.
I do, and thus that's why falling down those stairs. Yeah, I've armed myself with little razor blades.
We actually named our room our room but Dobby because you always get like the alerts, and when we named it that you get the alerts.
It's like Dobby has stuck on a cut and Dobby has fallen down the stairs, and I'm like, Dobby's an idiot. We've seen AI develop and I know we've talked about Groc, which Justin has been using, and I don't know if you're still liking it. A lot can change in a month. In one month, you could go from loving and AI loving a software and then you can hate it, Like the month later, are you still using GROC? I still
love it? You know, I mean I bounce back and forth between other ones chat GPT and you know, actually it's funny that you mentioned you know how you love it one day and don't. Yeah, you know, chat Gypt. For me, it feels like chatchy BT got rolled back uh a previous a much much much earlier previous iteration because it's does not give it anywhere near the answers it used to. And that's I mean, that's saying a lot.
I mean, open Ai is supposedly the biggest one out there, but you know when I go to when I go to GROC and I ask it something, and I love the fact that GROC does not have any limits on its knowledge base right Like I could literally just say what's the temperature in Tokyo right now? And it will tell me the temperature in Tokyo, like it's real time data. Yeah, you know, whereas chat ubt's like, well, you know, Mike cut off is September of twenty twenty four, Does it
really do that? I haven't had to do that to me yet, you know, It's it's ridiculous. And then even if you ask it something like what historical battle took place in World War two at this place, I don't know the ms you do that and I can't give you that, amswer. What would you consider when it comes to not being very knowledgeable to being probably one of the lowest when it comes to AI, because I mean Amazon is now pushing this smarter Alexa so rufus. Yeah if you if you want to use that, you can't.
As far as shopping has been terrible, I mean, Amazon is way too late to the party. First off, they're they're they're their AI is gonna is gonna Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence is gonna fail. It's gonna ruin Apple. I mean, thank god, finally something's gonna ruin And this is this is what just a few days ahead of their their Worldwide Developer conference. That's gonna be their big thing, you know. Yeah, of course it has been their big thing for the past four years.
They've done nothing. They've done nothing with it. Yes, And it was like hey, appletal just came out. It was they said, Hey, it's gonna be They touted it like it's gonna be just like Chat, GPT, it's gonna be able to do all these these They rolled it out with ioas eighteen. It stunk. I tried it for like a day and then immediately turned it down. It's just off. It's just not even on my phone anymore.
Yeah, I mean Microsoft co pilot sucks. Uh, Meta, I avoid co Pilot. I don't know why. I just want to avoid it.
Everybody they keep trying, they keep trying to jam it down your throat though, Yeah, just like just try to jam it in.
I never thought of that. It's just you're right, it's just like Clippy. Remember when you tried to use Office, Clippy was always there, And that's kind of like what looks like you're trying to make an Excel spreadsheet? Would you like help no.
Or get away? Or like the puppy in Windows XP.
I remember that one. There was a down. Look, we've got three major players in the A industry, all right, We've got chatch BT open Ai, we got x Aies Grock, and we got uh the Claude Okay the company that may makes Claude. Isn't it anthropic? Yeah yeah, drop yeah yeah. Those are the three major ones. Everybody else, even the major tech players Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, they're all they're all losing like big time.
But here's what.
Here's what. Here's an example of something that I did with Grock. I I recently went to it and I asked it as quite now, I'm not going to get into the details. It's more of a personal situation. But I asked it a question about my cat, Oh okay, and it referenced something and says, well, based on what you told me about seven months ago, it sounds like
your cat might have you know, this issue or whatever. Wow, and it it's it's learning from me and it knows my previous conversations with it, whereas open ai you're like, hey, remember I talked to you on my cat? It has blah blah and it's like, wait, what cat? I don't understand what are you talking about? Like x Xai's grock is by far my favorite and it is the best AI out there.
Open Ai just recently made a change exactly regarding what Justin is talking about. The memories were tied to each individual thread, so if you wanted to like have a project, you had to put everything in that one project for its reference.
It all there. They just made memories global to your account.
Oh wow, so now it will start remembering everything. The one I've got beef with is Gemini Google Google gems.
Okay, yeah, I forgot about Gemini.
Yeah, because I used to love the Google Assistant on my phone. I still was, and I got forced over to Gemini and the other day I was like, hey, set a one hour timer. It used to be all I had to do all my phone was you know, say the trigger phrase, which I'm not because it's right here and now yell at me. And I was like, hey, so one set a one hour timer. Comes back a few seconds later.
I found a website where you can set timers to remind you, no, you tard, You've got it in the system. Just I just and it does it.
And then I thought it was like maybe it was a goof, And I was like, okay, set a one hour timer. And it was like again, I found a great website. And I was like, I am too angry today.
There's a setting pulling this. There's a setting in your phone that you need to turn off that tells it to search Gemini or search the web. First. Yeah, when you give it a command Rufus, it gets go back to Rufus Rufus. And I decided to give it a shot because been purchasing stuff to use for different projects I was doing, and I would ask rufus and every
answer was like it knew nothing. It gave me no information, and I thought, okay, well it's maybe I'm trying to help it's learning, But it didn't seem like it was learning at all. So yeah, no, I'm not a fan of rufus. Like you said, Amazon is late to the game on this one. Do we really need it? I mean, I'm getting sick of the point. Just recently, Lee van Cleef, do you guys remember Lee van Cleeff. Lee van Cleef was an actor. He worked with Clint Eastwood, who's still
with us. It just recently celebrated and he had that this real you know, tough looking faces something that good. Yeah, I don't know which one he was.
He died three years after I was born.
Yes, somebody posted a photo of him, so Sean probably does not remember him. Sean, you need to watch some of the Good the Bad, the Italian Westerns. They called him spaghetti Westerns, which were great. But somebody posted a photo of him the other day on Facebook celebrating his
one hundred and first birthday, holding a birthday cake. I thought, damn, and then I realized, wait a minute, wait a minute, and people started saying it he died back like you said Sean, you know in eight December sixteenth, Get there, I was getting the people are posting a photo of him supposedly at one hundred and one. The photo looks somewhat realistic, but it still has that uncanny valley. But the fact is people will just look at it and assume, oh, yeah,
that's real. People need to stop using AI for everything now. Not only that, but Matt mentioned Gemini. Gemini has now has got this new Viva vo Vo three or Vivo three or whatever it is. It's the video generation one. Did you see the post on Reddit about how churches are now using the video stuff to appeal to a younger audience, And it's literally a I uh a video of like, for instance, one example Moses splitting the seas and he's walking around doing a selfie and he's like no, yeah, no,
are you kidding me? Right here? Oh man, we're acrossing the desert right now. And then there's another one with Jesus on the cross. He's like, yo, your gen he is about to be b r b oh or like David is like, yeah, it's your boy, David. Right here. I'm about to go fight Goliath. Yeah, I'm gonna get this guy. And they're using AI video to do this to hope to reach a younger audience. Yeah, but I mean it's telling these you know, these biblical stories if
you will. But it's that's just one example of it. There's there's so many of these videos out there that are being generated by AI and people are thinking this is yeah and it's not real. But the thing is is it's not just a video. The characters in the video are speaking. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh, you can't tell the difference. And that's a I generate. It's not a voice actor. It's it's all everything. Everything is generated by
a you know. And now I've seen I've seen some of the videos that have been posted that are feel good videos with Jesus and kids and pets, and those are like, Okay, I understand.
It is a I.
But when they're trying to do this whole like they're today talking in today's terms or listening to today's music, Like, come on, guys, you're pushing it a little too far. Yeah, this this you gotta go out and read it and look up, like, uh, I'll have to see if I can find it. But like church, AI church, whatever, Yeah, it's it's crazy. I saw it earlier on Reddit and I was like, watch it and I was like, Wow, this is what we're getting into now. Yeah, oh boy,
AI is so the worst. I think we all agree it's probably gonna be. Is it gonna be Apple? Is that gonna be the worst one?
Do you think?
Or is it the Alexa? You know?
I think Rufus and Apple Intelligence are currently they're both currently racing to mediocrity. I mean honestly they Apple Intelligence is so behind the curve on it, and Rufus is kind of the same way, like they rested on their laurels.
They were like, we did Alexa. We did it first, dude. Apple is literally going to do what Apple does. They're gonna wait for the biggest one to come out. They're gonna copy it and they're gonna add emojis to it and say, look at what we did, we made it so much better. iOS twenty six for iPhone they say next week, which is weird because I thought I just updated to eighteen point five is what I have online.
So they're doing it now based on the year, kind of like Microsoft did with you know, Windows ninety five, Windows ninety eight. They're now jumping in. Honestly, I think it's just a way because there's just like people are gonna sit there and go, wait, iOS eighteen means it came out in eighteen eighteen eighty. Yeah. Well, I mean that's last.
Way into the Denopers conference to an idea of maybe you can hint at why they're changing the name structure.
They're gonna be doing it on Monday, this coming Monday for those that are tuning in on this Saturday. Uh. And they say there and they do this every year every time they put out an update. They're saying it's the biggest ever software rebranding. One thing they're promising no longer battery life gonna be one of the key features, which I don't know. Also, they're just not going to lock down the batteries anymore.
Right on the biggest change ever since last year. If they say it every single.
I cannot wait. I can't wait till Apple just fails as a company. I just don't want to fail, No I do. They're just complete trash. Everything they do is true. Man, you're being harsh.
I don't know why. I dude, come on, you know me for how many years?
I know? But I gotta say. I have an iPhone still, it's not my main phone. I I went ahead and I went to Android after for you justin you were talking about it being so good, and I do like the experience. I miss some of the Apple features a bit. I'm still trying to figure out well Belkan and that tracking device that they have will not work for the the Android device. There is another device that does work that I want to get my hands on. So I don't know. I've been happy with it. I've been a
long time user of that. But yeah, I don't want them to fail. But it's like, come on, guys, step up.
You know they they have not done anything since Steve Jobs died and they never will. No, I was it was twofold Steve Jobs died, Johnny Ives left. Well, that was the final nail in the coffin right there. You heard about that, right, Sean.
I'm just riding along, man.
Yeah, Sean's and Apple user too, So.
I'll be agnostic tech user, like I could go one way, or they're like, I'm not beholden to Apple.
There's there's there's listeners out there who do not know who Johnny Ives is. Matt, can you please give us a thirty second rundown on who Johnny Ives is, right, where he went, and why this is a big deal for Apple.
Johnny Ives and his glorious British accent was so there are Steve Jobs was the original brains of Steve Wozniak behind Apple. The point where Apple, for lack of a better term, got sexy, Like when the devices had really started having these really clean, flowing lines and it wasn't like.
Let's do it in fifty different colors, that's gonna.
Appeal to people.
I don't know why I want to kermit with that. But when they started moving like aluminum and clean lines and the design became really important, that was all Johnny Ives.
That was all him.
He was like, we have the function, we are missing the form, and we need to bring the form into play. And their numbers just skyrocketed and they are still writing the majority of his design styles, like the MacBook Air, the current MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, like that when you close the lid and the lines flow around so it still looks like a unified piece of metal. That was Johnny Ives. It was all him, and when he left, that is the that is the Di Vinci of technological
form design leaving the company and it's just it. It hasn't been the same sense.
Why didn't they keep up with his you know, his designs. Why did they feel they had to abandon it?
Well, marketing departments exist for a reason. Yeah, and you'll usually get pressure of like, ah, no, we need to.
Change something like even though we're changing the guts to the standard user, it doesn't look any different, so they don't know that it's different.
So he has left.
I can't justin do you remember where he went? I'm having a brain far open ai really again? He went open ai to do their hardware. Uh now open ai is going to get into hardware, which Apple's like shaking in their boots.
I'm gonna I'm gonna make a prediction right now in terms of that where you're talking about someone's they're gonna buy someone.
I have a device that I did not leave in this room you're looking for it.
There is a company called Rabbit, and they released a device at CEES a couple of years ago, the r one, And it's like a little bit bigger than a DECA cards and it has an AI assistant inside of it. Now, a lot of people were like, why don't you do this as an app? And they were like, well, we didn't want to do an app, like we wanted this to be where you can just have your AI buddy in the palm of your hand. It's got a tiny little touchscreen, a scroll wheel, a click button, and a
camera that is it for input. And they instead of doing a large language model, rabbit os runs off the large action model, so it learns instead of like how you're phrasing things, it learns how you do things, how you want tasks to be completed. And they have a website that you can log into the rabbit Hole. You can see where they really leaned into the branding here. And the rabbit Hole is kind of like the repository of your memories and things that you've asked and you
can access it on your computer. And they recently release the rabbit intern and the rabbit intern is an AI assisting tool where it can be like, hey, I want to code a website. There are other tools. Replet is one that comes to mind where you can be like, I want this project and it will build front and back end the whole thing for you and then be like,
go make your tweaks and you can publish it. I would bet solid money that at some point, when Rabbit fully starts to get off the ground, Apple will swoop.
In and buy them. Wow. Yeah, we've seen that happen before too. We've seen that. Siri was originally an app. I remember downloading it and being like, oh, this is dope. And it was. It was really ahead of its time. And then Apple bought it and it went to crap.
Apple bought it and it was neutered within two months because it disappeared off my phone. They were like, due to contractual obligations, we can no longer offer this app. And I'm like, all right, who bought it?
And then boom, Apple's like introducing Siri.
I'm like, you didn't make anything. Once again, this is what Apple does. You're like the Yankees. You didn't nurture talent, you just bought it. Well, I'm sorry, I think you made the Dodgers.
No, I mean the Yankees.
I definitely meant the Yankees. The Dodgers actually puts money into their farm team. The Yankees are like, yeah, you're gonna absolutely play for us.
Yeah, hey, how much did that guy want? Yeah? I just give it to him, it's fine, perfect, all right, we got to take a break. We come back. I want to find out Sean was involved in a project. I know that you spent you know, part of the Memorial Day doing a little cruising. Right. You send me a picture of the big RV. But now you're what you're putting solar panels on it?
Well, so it came with solar when he bought it, right, it came with a two hundred watt solar panel on the roof, wired into a solar controller wired into the battery.
Right.
But it was designed for lead acid or a GM right, Right, So there's a new battery chemistry called lithium myron phosphate.
Right.
Which is the biggest benefit is the weight difference. The same capacity from a lead acid battery that weighs sixty to seventy pounds you get in a thirty to forty pound battery. Now, weight savings alone is is incredible. The density is incredible. I bought a one hundred amp hour battery compared in the same size as to a lead
acid battery. I get about another day's worth of use out of it with before I have to charge it or before I have to run the generator, but I had to basically rewire my camper.
All Right, we gotta take a break. We want you to tell us the rest of that when we come back with tech talk Radio. I'm Andy 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 now back to tech talk Radio.
So before the break, we were talking a little bit about what I was doing for a camper. So I have a forest reverse no boundary nineteen point three. That's just a toe bad camper. It's a little bit more of the off grid style. Came with two hundred watts of Ghostlar Power, which is another solar company brand, and I had put in a deep cycle a g M battery like what would what would.
Let me answer what that solar that came with it that power like it would just charge them.
It would keep the battery topped off. So that would power the fridge in my camper's twelve vault. It would power my twelve volt to a c inverter. It would power off the twelve volt outlets, you know, the fridge, the reefer, well, the fridge, the refer the water heater, the water pump, et cetera. So basically keeping the everything I need in the camper to be boon dock.
So you would keep your reefer in the fridge. Yes, sorry, moments.
Not legal in India. By the way, they called the refer it's just what yea industry calls refrigerators. But the only the version of the fridge in that camper is total volt. There's no propane or it's just propane. It's just twelve volt, no propane options. So we were running into an issue where if we were running the generator and we had the fridge on and we were charging our devices, by the time it was get to four or five six in the morning before the sun came
back up, we were running low. And it was the lead acid battery or the AGM battery we had was getting too low on voltage and it was causing some issues. So we upgraded to the lithium iron phosphate, which supplies the same voltage no matter you know, at the same you know for the most amount of time that it's charged.
But the solar controller I had and the AC to d C converter did not support the proper charging voltage for lithium iron phosphate batteries because it requires a higher charging voltage to maintain its lifespan and stuff like that. So I had to buy a new solar controller, I had to buy a new AC to DC converter and basically rewire the entire internals of my camper. Oh man, I did that Wednesday and Thursday night before we left on Friday for our hit patrol.
Were you a little worried that maybe it wasn't good work? Right?
I was waiting for a specific piece to come in, uh And it didn't get there until until Wednesday night, and then I got got to work, wired it in, tested some stuff, made sure it ran okay, no fires, no nothing, everything like that. But so now I have four hundred watts of solar on the roof charging this battery. Uh in, So there impair of two two hundred wat panels in parallel. It's pushing about twenty eight watts at
full power. So it's it's it's charging it nicely and now we can get two to three days almost cool without having to without having at full charge using being conservative with our with our power usage, not you know, running the water pump all the time or you know those kind of things.
But well, it's gotta be better to not worry about being somewhere and suddenly just not having the power this way.
Yeah, but also while you're driving, Yeah, it's not tied into my truck, so it's not pulling twelve volts from my truck. It's just using the sun or that you know, to charge. So if you're in an occluded place like a campground, it has a lot of trees and stuff, you're not gonna get nominal draw, right, But while you're driving, or if you're just boon docking and you don't have trees or anything about it, you're gonna be just fine.
So my goal is to add another one hundred amp hour battery and put that in peril also, so I have two hundred a half hours of storage total, which would probably get me about three to four days total with minimal with minimal draw. I know that my uncle has a four hundred amp hour and he gets five to six days with minimal draw. And so yeah, it's just nice because I can also take that off. He's it at home?
Does you does it add a lot of load though to the trailer itself.
No, Like I said, the actually reducing weight based off the battery weight, because the lead acid battery was almost sixty pounds of this shay, and these batteries are much lower lighter, So if I had a second battery, I'd probably be back up to where I was with just the one battery.
Oh nice. How often are you guys going camping? Every year?
We go about six or seven times a year?
Nice?
Sense, we've already gone. We've already gone four this year. Oh wow. Yeah, and we've got another one coming out this week, and then we're going for the fourth July, and then we're going for We're going like we're probably gonna go eight to eight or nine times. This year.
We did a Memorial Day but it got cut short, and then we're going for fourth of July.
For Lee's birthday.
We went up to Wellington Lake and we had we were supposed to be there Monday, sorry, Friday through Monday and Saturday. I was just getting a weird feeling and got like the ghost of one bar of reception just enough to check the weather and it was like, hey, just letting you know, in about three hours it's going to start thunderstorming. And then the rest of the time we were there, here's what the weather was going to be, thunderstorm, rainstorm, snowstorm, thunderstorm, rainstorm, thunderstorm.
I was like, alternatively, Wow, it's just let's just leave because the last like getting out of there is a super tight dirt switchback mountain road.
That just there's on the side is just gravity. I was like, ideally, I don't want to be here when that's wet. Yeah. No, are you guys like this the road warrior portion of this, How would I, as somebody who has a wife that says she never wants to go camping, she's she likes to stay in a hotel, that kind of thing, how would I convince her to try and do something like this? Is it memver just renting one or what.
So this is something that my wife and I have been discussing. When we were younger, we were out doorsy. Now we are outside zy, and there is a difference like now doorsy is like I don't mind the ten I don't mind you know, sleeping the sleeping bag, Like if it gets cold, we'll deal with it, like we're gonna run. No, what you need to look up is called glamping. G L A M P I N G
all right, and that is for glorious camping. And the best one that I've seen was some more here in Colorado, and instead of like renting a camp site, you rented a camp site that had a fully furnished, heated and cooled yurt.
It had a shower, it had a full queen size bed in there like a yurt is. Uh. It was what I think the Mongolians used for theirs, and it was just right. Yeah, technically, thank you. I am closer to gen X than gen Z. I'm an elder millennial. Bite me, excuse me, I'm older than you, and I'm a millennial. I'm older than all of you.
But no, seriously, it's glamping is kind of a new thing where like, you you get a site that's got like this really nice, fully furnished place for you to stay. It's got all the amenities. But then like there will be a lake nearby, there's camping trails, but when you're done for the day, you can go shower, you can You've got like a full kitchen in some of these, So I know the hip camp app has a lot of those, and that's one that we have.
We have done before. I think that would be fun to try, at least if you want something.
A little less glampy than that, you can travel and do the Kiawa cabins around the country. Oh yeah, we did those a lot growing up. When we travel out west, we would travel, we would camp, but we would stay. If we needed to stay for one night, just pull in. It's a cabin, it's got a bathroom, a shower, you know, you know, and it so kas all over the country, and the CEO of KAS and nordame grad So that's perfec Yeah.
I think there's some kiowas here, even here in Arizona that have been very popular on your Grand Canyon, that kind of thing.
But every national park, most of the national parks, not all of them, have these glamping options where you can pay and have these nice amenities relatively close inconvenient for you to still experience the park.
Right.
There's also things like Cruise America where you can rent an RV for a time.
That's another one.
Yeah, but there's you gotta you gotta be careful with those because they it's just like you haul. Anybody can rent one and you get a lot of you get a lot of dumb dumbs that don't know how tall an RV is.
Oh yeah, we've seen that big. Not even that it's it's it's also like a lot like air and BnB. I've heard where they'll they'll you get hit with one fee and even though you take meticulous care of it, you turn it back, They're like, we're gonna charge you a five hundred dollars cleaning fee. WHOA, yeah, that's not good, that's not excuse excuse me, sir. We found one speck of sand inside this vehicle. Found we found a dog hair, one single dog hair. It's gonna be five hundred dollars
to up. Why do you become the leader of the island of misfit toys? They're matt when you have authority? Uh, I don't know.
Because it's funny, all right, it's it's gonna be interesting the new job I got. I'm eventually gonna have four direct reports and I'm actually gonna have authority, and I'm not used to that.
You've got to do it. You've got to do your reports in those voices though that's perfect me. You didn't finish the cover sheet on your TPS report. If you could just come in on Saturday. That'd be great. Oh my god, did you guys see the news Stephen Root, the guy who played Belton on Office Space that we're you know, talking about, Stephen Root is now going to be playing the father to the character Stephen Tudas plays on Resident Alien on Sci Fi, which comes back for
a brand new season this week. As a matter of fact, such a good show. I love the show. If you've missed it Netflix, you can see the previous seasons. But Stephen Root will be playing his dad, the Alien's dad. So that's that's gonna be good. All right, here's a question we've got to listen to. Question. We got a couple of them for today, but I wanted to share this one, at least from Jerry. He said it in
to high Andy. As you may know by now, I don't have my Windows ninety five and printer any longer. And you put an lol. I bought it from you and you set it up back in the mid nineties. Yes, it did your problem, Mandy, he said. So I have a question to ask, what is the real deal that would work best for my two monitors and two PCs. I'd like to only use one keyboard in one mouse. I've looked on Amazon and Dell and get no help. I wanted to be cheap and easiest to use. So
he has two PCs. He wants to use, one keyboard, one mouse, AKVM switch.
They still make those house and keyboard without borders.
Mouse That software, isn't it what it is? Yeah? Mouse and keyboard. Have you ever heard of that? Mouse and keyboard without borders. I've not heard of that. Yeah, it's like a software you put on there.
Also, there's also a Synergy is another app that does something similar. I had a client use that once they had their design PC and then their standard work PC, and he would just one mouse and keyboard, drag it all the way across, and you just hop over to the other side.
You know. Before we continue this conversation, I just want to say this is funny because I sound like I sound like the old guy here, right. I mentioned KVM. Andy immediately says they still make those, and then Shaun's like, mouse and keyboard without borders, and then Matt's like, oh yeah, blah blah blah blah something else.
All right, Well, I guess.
I'm the old guy here. Yeah, I'm wondering though, you know, it's harder because this would have to be a wired keyboard and wired mouse to work with a KVM, wouldn't it or do they do?
No?
You so you so the the mouse without borders is a software running out of both machines.
You have.
You basically puck up both computers to the two screens you want to use, and then you activate the software and then as you cross over to the edge of your screen, it just hops over. The software takes over and it moves the keyboard and the mouse and put over to the other computer.
That's it's kind of cool, but it's kind of weird because I can see me doing it by accident all the time.
Sure, that's the cheapest I think it's free even right, But if you want a physical one, then you'll have to take the you know, you'll you'll get a box or little server, and then you have a console module and a target module. We have a big ks KVM system to work, so I have a lot of experience with this. And then you take the physical outputs, the dv I or HTM or whatever into that box, and then the output of that box goes to your monitor.
And then you either have a physical selection box where you press the button and it changes, or it's a software where you can get to the edge of your screen and automatically takes over and same thing. It just moves between the two screens. So you have options. Just how much you want to pay and how much asshle do you want to.
Have, whether you go Jerry Mouse without borders. We're gonna take another quick break. We come back with more of tech Talk Radio. I want to show you guys something I've been working on and I'm kind of excited about it. Do that when we come back. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm sean to Weird, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm justin. Let me send us an X at tech Talk Radio. We'll be right back and now back to tech Talk Radio. We wanted to kick off this segment talking and thinking
and paying tribute to an artist no longer. With us being in radio for so long, in so many different formats, have been able to get celebrities to get us what we call drops or liners that say, you know, hey, listen to tech Talk Radio. Stephen First, who played Flounder and Animal House, he did one and when he passed away, we kind of pulled that and we really don't air it anymore. Here's stevens. Hi. This is Stephen first Flounder from Animal House and here from Babylon five, and you're
listening to tech Talk Radio. And now we received the sad news of the passing of a musical legend who has done one for us as well, Rick Darringer. You know, rock and roll Huchi Kou was instrumental in producing Weird Al Yankovic's first albums. So we paying respect to Rick Deringer with the drop that he gave us. Hi, I'm Rick Derringer, rock and roll hu Chi Ku, and you're listening to tech Talk Radio. And with that we thank Rick Derringer for the memory and we take it back
to tech Talk Radio. So earlier in this Justin with.
Harry Potter and the audacity of this dude decided to call me a Zeniel. I would like to point out that Zeniels are born between ninety three and ninety eight, and I was definitely walking the world at that point.
And then we discussed this off the.
Air for a minute and Sean was like, well, I was you know, I'm not a millennial. I was born you know, in the late eighties.
Millennials are eighty one to ninety six. Jen X was sixty five to eighty and gen Z, which they're now calling zoomers, which I think is hilarious. I had connotations of that is ninety seven to twenty twelve.
I was born in eighty one, so neil.
So what am I?
I was sixty two before all sixty two? I have some bad news boomer boomer baby boomers are forty six to sixty four. Oh boy, they what was sixty four to the next one? Uh? Sixty five to eighty was gen X? Yeah, oh that's right, gen X, gen X.
I would like to point out that, like that is the most gen X thing ever, the forgotten generation like I mentioned in those like wait, what was that other wing? Oh yeah, gen X existed, so like they just they just sit quietly in the corner growing up.
I always consider myself to be gen X because I didn't know the exact cutoff. But honestly, dude, January twentieth of eighty one, Come on, dude, I'm literally on the cusp of being gen X.
So there is actual actually inside of sociology, there is subgenerations that they call cusps, and if you are in that spot, then you are a cusp between gen X and millennial because you got a little bit of their experience and a little bit of the next gens experience.
Okay, I do not fall close enough to be a cusp of asennial. I definitely do, thank you very much.
You missed it by like a couple weeks, so you definitely fall in the cusp area.
So if I was born two years later, I'd be a boomer Z. You'd be a boomer X boomer REX. All Right.
The other thing that we kind of talked about during the break that Sean had brought up was the difference between like millennials and our Internet experience growing up, Like I still could mimic the dial up noise from that mode because it is so ingrained. For like that meant you were getting online, followed by if you did AOL.
You've got mail.
Web one point zero was so wildly different, Like you had the handful of websites that everyone knew, and now you've got a different what are we at like web three point zero at this point is what they're calling it. But everyone has this wildly different experience of Internet life, and part of it, you know, Sean was bringing up it might be regional, like you know, somebody in the Midwest is going to look up something different than someone in New York than somebody in Texas. But the biggest
change is the algorithm. The algorithms drive your web experience, whether you want it to or not.
Say you lived in New York City versus living in Florida Miami, you're gonna be you have been probably fed something different. Absolutely.
I mean things that you look up locally, you know, inside the algorithm. If you go to you know, okay, I go to this website, there are tags associated with that, and it's like, okay, he went to website X, which has tags one, two, three. Then you went to website Z, which has tags two, three, and seven, and it starts compiling and it's like, oh, okay, so Matt's interest did in one, seven, fourteen and the letter Q like those are what I'm going to start punching in his feeds.
So you have the regional influence for what you're going to natively be looking for that feeds the algorithm. The algorithm then drives the content that's sent to you. My wife and I, for example, we joke about the difference in our algorithms like she gets like lots of pottery,
ceramic artists, like lots of more artistic stuff. Mine is like sixty percent Cory Geese, fifteen percent firearms, and the remainders like dad jokes for some reason, although it occasionally throws with the dad jokes, it occasionally throws one in there that I'm like, well, that one was wildly out of pocket. There's the one for the day. So it really is a completely different web experience between what we grew up with and what the kids are growing up.
Well are you so, what's what was faster? Three hundred bod or twenty eight eight twenty eight eight and then fifty six k, then fifty six k, so you have well one fifty three hundred because twenty eight eight was twenty eight thousand eight, right, bod Yeah, but if you you asked them, but you might go, oh no, three hundred must have been bigger. It just sounded better. Those are the same people that thought a Wendy's third pounder was was worse than a than Donald's quarter pounder or whatever,
what was it? What was it? Yeah, yeah, it's quarter pounder. You're right. They thought of Wendy's third pounder was less meat than a McDonald's quarter pound.
I also thought the half pounder was less than the quarter pounder because the number was bigger.
Yeah, exactly, So think about the Wendy's. Yeah.
Yeah, people just think big number means big.
People are Okay, hold on, we can just sum this up as people are dumb. Yeah, and okay. The other question, now, because we brought it up, why did you got mail go away? There was something nice? No, not the movie that the thing was all went away?
Why did they will go away? That should have been around.
For mess managed? They were bought by Time Warner Interactive. They were mismanaged due I worked for AOL. I saw the downfall of that company when I was working there. And then also not only just that, is because the dial up era was over. They tried launching a high speed internet service back in early two thousand and one or two thousand and two, and it failed miserably because they had to make contracts with the major ISPs that were already established, so you're basically tacking on on top
of an additional ISP. Their whole business model was based on dial up, and once dial up went dead, nobody wanted them any to be.
Fair, they kind of were the first software as a service.
Yeah, oh right, yes, yeah, so fun little fact. I actually grew up about ten minutes away from AOL World headquarters, which was in Ashbourne, Virginia, and it was a giant, sprawling complex.
Yes, with armed guards. I've been there still around. They have like one building from that entire complex, and Raytheon
bought the rest of it. Oh you're a kid. So the funny, funny story is when I worked for AOL, I did have a chance to go to that complex as an employee because they they randomly picked like I don't know, one hundred people to go, right, And I got to go to the complex and it was is the best part about it was you go into like the quote unquote and I'm doing air quotes here headquarters
of AOL. And there it's this big, beautiful waiting room, you know, big huge lobby, and the behind you is like this glass wall of all these blinky server lights and and and it's like, I mean, it looks just amazing. It looks like a data center, right. Yeah. This is like a lot of people's first ever experience looking at a data center. It's just a bunch of computers with
blinky lights. Yeah, and then they brought us back and they gave us the tour, you know, they told us the tour, and then they said, okay, now that you guys are employees, we're going to take you to the real data center. Wait it was it the real data center? No, that was all just that was literally just a wall of blinky lights. Like they took us behind it and there was no servers. Oh I love all the blinky lights. So what they did is they actually made us wear blindfolds.
They put us on a bus and they took us to an undisclosed location, which is probably what Matt is talking about, right, And when we got off the bus, there was armed guards and it was a giant warehouse with these massive like it looked like furnaces like inside oh wow, they huge smoke stack furnaces and cooling. Well, but inside the warehouse, like you walk in, it looks like a blast furnace, right, but inside of the blast
furnace was all of the servers. And that is the true at the time, that was the true AOL headquarters. Kind of wonder if server rooms have changed much because of AI. I mean, I'm sure I'm both everything smaller Now. I would think now that's kind of growing again, because no, they're growing exponentially. There's so much data now that AI is consuming and having to do that. It's that's where we're going to see a lot of it going into that. When I was working in television, we went to our
data center was in Dallas, Texas. This data center biometric, it was i I scanning, it was multiple badges, it was DNA. I mean, they literally took a blood sample from you. What to put on record in case, you know, there was an accident inside the data center and your blood was found there. They knew, make you disappear. But but but but our our cabinet for the TV station was literally next door to Facebook and Google.
Oh wow, that's so yeah, they yeah, that what you're talking about. It like the growth of the data centers. It's so Where AOL was located in Ashburn, Virginia, a minute up the road was the old headquarters for ACI world Com NCI World Colm Oh wow, was right up the road from there. And growing up that area was it was farmland and nothing.
It's a store. Remember the road. It's off Waxpool Road, off Route twenty eight.
In Ashburn, Virginia, and that area exploded and it is now one of the more expensive places to try and live and buy a house because it is basically Silicon Valley on the east coast. Because the fiber, the main fiber line, the trans Pacific Fiber line, comes into San Francisco, and then it splits into three trunks. You've got the northern, the Central, and the Southern trunk. Northern trunk goes up kind of along the Great Lakes area, starts curving back down.
Central line goes straight through Denver all the way across, and the southern line goes down through Texas and then curves back up. Those three main fiber trunks rejoin in Ashburn, Virginia and become the trans Atlantic fiber line. So whenever you're looking on like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud and you see like US East one, US East two, that's all in Ashburn.
It is the land of data centers.
All this open land.
Like you can pick up a rock on Waxpool Road, wing it through the sky as hard as you can and it will cross three different data centers before it hits the ground.
Wow, amazing. All right, I got to show you something, guys, before we go to break here. I decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot. Mocha. That's Moca Multimedia over Coax Alliance and see if it really is
as fast as everybody says. It connects to your router co X or your motive, I should say, and then it has a backfeed that goes into your router, and then your router can then you put it the second unit in another room with coax, so you're basically using your coax that's been wired in your which a lot of us don't use anymore, to be your kind of
your cable provider for your Internet. And this is two point five They say it'll get two point five gigabits of speed, low latency, And I'm gonna give it a shot and fully test it out. But we'll see. And if so, a kit is about one hundred and seventeen dollars, so you figure out how many COAX out outlets do you have that you need better than power line. I don't know if it's going to be better than Wi Fi. People are saying it is. So Moke MCA. You find more info on our website. I featured it on TV
this past week, so something to look at. We could take a break, we come back with more of tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm Justin let me. You can also find us on facebooks for slash tech Talkers. We'll be right back and now back to tech talk Radio. I want to remind you to check out our YouTube page. You can subscribe YouTube dot com forward slash tech talk Radio.
You could even watch this show. I have been working pretty feverishly and updating my studio here the studio for tech Talk Radio and some of the other stuff I do. I have got on the wall movie posters. I love movie posters. Used to collect them all the time. I've got the movie Into the Night, which was a John Landis film. Sorry, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer. You also had David Bowie in the movie. You had Carl Perkins. I mean, just a huge cast, and I love the movie, so
I have that in here. I also have talk Radio. You remember that movie Talk Radio, which was Eric Bogosian. It was a I think it was an Oliver Stone movie, and it was just about talk radio. But it's actually based on the story of a guy, a Chicago, Colorado radio host that was murdered, and it's actually pretty good. So I want to get a movie poster in here now that deals with tech, or even a poster from a TV series. And I'm thinking what would be the best one to get, Like what movie would be look
great as a movie poster or TV series? And I mean there's a lot of them out there. Do you guys have favorites?
Oh? Tons, Yeah, a lot of favorites. There's one that I really liked growing up as a kid. It came out in nineteen eighty five. It's called Darryl.
Darryl.
Oh, it's a it's a It's basically about a nine year old kid who is actually a robot that gets basically lost, finds a family, gets adopted, and like he's a robot, try and track them. Yeah, it's it's a really good movie. It's like it's about the kid learning how to be a kid because it instead of a robot. But it's It came out nineteen eighty five. It's called Darryl. Who do you know who's in it?
Is it?
Oh Man? It's got oh Man. Beth hurt Michael Keaton, Katherine Walker.
Oh wow, I've never seen it. I'm gonna have to look for that one. Yeah, that's a that was a classic one. That's a deep cut. Yeah, that's a good one. I'm gonna go nineteen eighty three Matthew Broderick.
War Games.
Well, yeah, that was like to play a game sometimes. All right, what was the name of the computer? Do you remember a gang? The Whopper? That Whopper? You got it? Yes, yep, all right, I like war game. I'm gonna have to go a little bit more recent. Really, uh one of my favorite tech shows, mister Robot. I knew you were gonna do, mister Robot. I wonder if they make a poster for that one. Oh, of course they do. Yeah, some of the some of the other ones. I was
looking at hackers. It was pretty good. Short circuit. Remember that one. Johnny five, Oh my god, number five is alive. Matrix is Alive. Would the Matrix be considered a tech movie? Yeah? Yeah, yep. Two thousand and one, A space odyssey that's going way back, goes to the.
Show went on a Sandra bullet kick not that long ago.
Did you really?
Yeah?
Ready? Ready player one? Oh, my god, Yes, of course, Ready Player one that would be good, but the book was better. Yes, yes, me too, about Sneakers? Sneakers? Is that any good?
God?
Yeah? Uh. And then the one movie that I thought we should really give credits to. It's what happens when you don't pay the one it guy that works for your company enough money or give him enough respect. Jurassic Park. All right, like, I'm sorry, I'm on his side at this point. Yeah.
One other one and it's it's another older one. It's ninety five. Keanu Reeves, Johnny Knamonic, Oh my gosh.
Yeah, all right, we'll get it and maybe get all of them. We'll see if they'll all fit in here. That's it for this week's Tech Talk Radio. Next week on the show, we're gonna tell you a little bit about the new documentary all about Going Postal, about one of the big video games that got turned into a movie, and we may even get the filmmakers on the show, so again, that'll be a lot of fun. We're also having an author who's written a book all about a
lot Us Morisset. There you go. We'll be back with more tech Talk Radio next week. I'm Andy Taylor. I'm Sean de Weird, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm Justin Lemme. Once again, find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com. Have yourselves a great week, see you
