The following program is produced by the Tech Talk Radio Network.
Hi, this is a Colin Macria. Whose line is it?
Anyway you're listening to tech talk Radio. I don't know how it works. It's all magical stuff to me.
Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Shonda Weird, and I'm Justin Lemey.
Welcome. Look at that we got Justin. But you've been gone for a while. How you doing, dude, I'm doing. I'm just I've been busy, man, I've been busy with work. And then, as I was mentioned in a pre show, man, I'm getting old. Man, I'm going to bed. I'm going to bed by the time you guys start recording. But now that we're on daily savings time, you know, it actually helps me because I'm like, hey, I can do this now, but no to bed.
You know the number of times that I've missed the show because I've fallen asleep with my kids.
Oh, yes, happened.
I mean it happens. It happened one time when it was just you and me. I was sitting here, correct, where is he?
Where is he?
I'm actually falling asleep at the microphone when I was working at KLPX. I fell asleep at the microphone. I think I remember.
Hearing about that. That was quite We got quite a bit of fodder for that one.
That was good. Yeah, you hear about that overnight guy. Yeah, Jonas had to call in and I was like, I was like answering the phone, and I'm like, He's like like, first off, like why are you calling me so late? And You're like, why are you sleeping?
This supposed to be on the air of one of the many stations that I work at, or have worked at.
I'll say it that way.
One day I was driving into record Yeah, not this show, another show, and I noticed that the top of the hour came by and I didn't hear the DJ on the air, and matter of fac it was twenty minutes in my drive. I'd never heard the DJ once and there was certain parts that that DJ had to do. So I called the boss and apparently she had forgot to come in and her shift.
Was at two. This was at four. Oh my god. They didn't realize it for two hours. Computer systems nowadays do they just keep on just going right? Yeah.
Radio automation is interesting because if you're in the studio. Uh, and like this show that we do here, and of course my show that I do in the afternoon and throughout the day, we.
Have live d days.
They're they're, they're in there, and you know, yes, you could say, all right, I wanted to play the next three songs without having to interact with them, but generally you you just play each one. I mean, we're there live, and it's rare these days unless.
It's a morning show.
When I was working for one of the big network groups, I could say Westwood One, I was on seventy stations, and while is while I was working here as well, seventy stations. I go home and I would record. And the thing is, you'd record two hours ahead. But if something happened in that radio town, you know, whether it was in you know, Florida or Pitty News.
I was in Pittsburgh, it was in DC. I was everywhere. But if something happened, how what am I gonna do? There's nothing you had. Everything had to be recorded an hour ahead of time. That's that's That's the one thing I never understood about canning. Like, Okay, I understand, you know, radio stations they want to save money. A lot of it is canned. Now. When I say canned, I mean like pre recorded. But the thing is is, if you go back in history, radio DJs are technically I mean
they started out as journalists. I mean they they were there to provide you news and entertainment. And radio used to be just simply news.
When I was in broadcasting school, we had to go rip the news off the teletype.
They actually had a teletype and.
It would it would, you know, give you news, the biggest news stories, and then you would always have to do the news at the top of the hour.
How do sit back in the Old West? Are you you making a reference to my age young man? Maybe just a little bit, No, But I mean, seriously, you think about it. This is what they were designed to do. They were They weren't designed to just simply do like, uh music. They were you know, radio DJs were there
to uh one, run a station. Make sure that you know, you take your meter readings and make sure the towers, you know, all lights are everything's yeah, the lights are on, and the towers are broadcasting at the right frequency and the right wattage. You're there to provide news, you provide entertainment and then music in between and then eventually just kind of got less and less news and more and more entertainment radio, more and more commercials, more and more commercials.
And then and then everything became automated, so then you don't have to take your readings anymore. Everything was automatically logged by a computer. And then and then it just got to eventually was like, oh, we don't even need DJs anymore. And and now some radio stations are even using AI DJs.
Let's face it, guys, it's getting really good. Some of the some of the stuff they're able to do is pretty amazing. And you know, one of the big worries that some radio people that you know, I know have is that you think about all the audio we've recorded over the years, that's an audio print, it's you, yeah, that could be manipulated now using AI to say the time, the weather, the song that was just played, the song that's being played. AI is is scary not only for
radio but also for television. There is it's gotten so good that you know, at some point those that are delivering the news on TV have to be concerned.
But have you also heard about and this is this is starting to make kind of waves in the tech industry, is this thing that they they're calling the AI bubble. They're they're talking about this as if this is going to be another one of the dot com busts, you know, back from the two thousands, you know, when everybody was all in on the internet and the Internet was the big thing, and then all of a sudden, boom, everything
just failed. And all these companies are putting so much money into AI, you know, open Ai getting like a five hundred billion dollar investment from like Nvidia, and then blah blah blah blah blah. People are saying this is this is a yeah, like this, it's gonna fail. And I kind of think that's the way I think. I think the hype has just gotten too big and AI is really not going to do what everybody thinks it's gonna do.
Now.
Yes, granted, maybe in I don't know, five, ten, twenty years, yeah, maybe we'll all be redundant. But I think right now, I think it's a bubble.
Yeah, it's it's I think people are gonna get burned, well, if they're not already burned out, because every time you turn around, oh ai AI, somebody wrote on and I'm gonna just say I saw this on next door and it was AI with a round circle and a slash through it, you know, And so I went ahead and asked, I said, just wondering what facet of AI do you dislike the most, And the person responded said everything.
I dislike how it's incorporated into every app.
Now.
I just like how many people were fired. Let's face it, that's happened because they were replaced by AI. I just like how people normalizing it when it shouldn't.
I just like it's coming from toys. Right. We talked about this a couple of months ago. Right, has Bro is looking at putting AI and toys, Yes, and that just doesn't sit right for me. We talked about this a couple months ago. There was an article that came out that said Hasbro is looking at incorporating AI into toys.
Right for what reason? Yeah? This is it's ridiculous.
My frustration with AI is you are sucking the creativity and the artistic vision out of the human soul. And when you start taking that away from people, what's left? And it if kids are now just going to be know, they're going to be entertained by AI? What why do they need to be creative anymore.
That's good.
Did they need why did they Why do they need to think anymore?
This is exactly what I was having a conversation with my family about. This is that, you know, with AI and what we weren't centered on the AI aspect of it, but we were more centered on the creativity portion of childhood. And Eric, you know, Eric is constantly like, I'm bored. I'm bored. And I saw a post. I didn't remember it was read it or Facebook or whatever, but it was like talking about it. It's like, it's okay to be bored. Children should be bored because that's what sparks creativity.
That's what makes them go, hmm, what can I make? What can I do? You know? And if they have a screen in front of them the whole time, it's never gonna spark that creativity. It's gonna just give that dopamine hit and then that's it. And and so now then they're gonna be addicted to the dopamine hit, which is the screen. You know. My My also concern is reading.
Uh, let's face it, there's stories that kids aren't reading as much as they used to. Teachers will say that as well, And now we're finding books that will read to them.
Now they're reading along. But I don't know that that that makes me.
That makes me nervous as well. You want your kids to learn the words and learn how how that sentence is going and read, and now it's just reading it to them.
And I just just think of like even just from like the safeguard, get to put into place, like what's okay, So let's say this children's toy has AI in it. Does it connect to the cloud? Does it? Is it learning connect? Right? So it's like we all know that everybody has a recording device in their phone, you know, in their pocket with their phones, like it's always listening
to your TV's, listening your whatever. But now just adding all these other kids toys in kids spaces, listening to what your kids are doing, listening to what I just it, It's just freaks me out.
I'm starting to see TV commercials where and I think we're becoming a little more attuned to what artificial intelligence is in the media. And I'm seeing TV commercials where they'll cut to a shot of a couple sitting around a table. I can tell right away, well that's AI. You know it's the filmmaking.
You see. Coca Cola released their new AI generated holiday commercial.
Oh no, they did it again, so.
Last year, so they've they've Last year they did it and it was really bad. You could truly tell this year's just not any better. The animals look awful, the backgrounds look awful, the ending is awful. The whole thing is just awful. One of the one of the other frustrated things I have about AI is everybody thinks AI is just going to make everything cheaper, cheaper and easier. Yeah, but you've sacrificed a lot of quality. You sacrificed a
lot for that. Like it's getting to the point where it's what is becoming acceptable to the viewer.
I just I just watched that Coca Cola ad. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I don't know, man, it feels Coca Cola. I watched it, and I can tell certain aspects of it or AI. But but the thing about Coca Cola ads, especially the holiday ads, they've done CGI for so many years, this doesn't feel that different. Friend, then they're normal c g I ads.
It's just it's just pushing the boundaries of that uncanny valley where it's just you know, the polar bears are animated, right, that's just a fundamental fact. But this just pushes it to another level with some of the other animals they put in there, the transitions, the snow, the the driving. If you look at the shot at the end with the semis, it plows over some people, Like what, just just watch the end. Watch the end again.
I watch the end.
Watch people tell you that Semi does not run over people.
Oh okay, all right, I'm watching the end of it.
Just watch the end and tell me it does not plow over people at the end.
All right, Oh my gosh, this is Oh my god, I'm telling you, dude, it's it's and and okay, yeah, the wide shot of the crowd, all of the people in the last wide shot, right, their their legs.
Are moving funny. Their arms are moving funny.
It used to be it was the fingers. Right now, it's the way they move.
It's it's probably up on YouTube or will they take it down, you know, will Coca Cola.
Say no, way to the official Coca Cola channel on YouTube and just look for the one. It's called Coca Cola. Holidays are coming.
Oh boy, we're a subject of media and I would love to hear from you our listeners. You're listening to this, you're thinking, you know, guys, I'm tired of it too.
Let us know.
I want to I want to get your thoughts or if you do use it, you know I've had fun with it, like uh, Sora is a part of Chat GPT, which you know I use Chat GPT. It was weird because the other day I needed I needed a graphic and I wanted a video graphic, a moving video graphic for a news story that was on Fox eleven, and I thought, well, why didn't I try and.
See if it used to be?
It was baked right into chat GPT, and I asked, all would do was give me the stills, And I asked, I said, well, where's the video and they said, oh, it's.
Not incorporated anymore.
And it base lied to me because it is with a CHATGBT account open AI. It's just you have to access it a different length Sora dot and then you know, go to the full web length. And I thought, well, that's kind of where I found that out the next day when I was doing some research, Sora too is now going to be available on Android devices and so I found it.
Now Sora is a part of my Android. And the other day my grandson was over.
He brought up one of those you remember those little horses that have the stick, They have the head and then they have the stick they run around with. So of course I asked Sora to put them on a horse with a picture of head, and it did and it was great. You couldn't have told I mean, it did not look AI generated. So again it's it's it's frustrating because now we're seeing so many tools coming out on so many different sites that do so many different things.
You have to wonder, like, really, this is where we're going.
I wanted to get Justin's opinion on this, right, So with the Sora stuff, you mentioned the Sora the video generator, right, have you seen the stuff where Studio Ghibli is suing Sorrow because that copyright in fringement.
Not necessarily just Sora, but I knew know that about eight nine months ago, chat GPT was in hot water with Studio Ghibli because people were basically taking photos and saying make this in a style of Studio Ghibli. And I even have some photos of my family in the studios a police. Remember you did that, and it does the very very good job. Now, I don't know about the Sora aspects. So if again, if you're trying to if you're listening to this, you're like, what is Sora?
Sora is the video generating application built into chat GPT, so it uses AI to generate video instead of just text or photos. Yeah. No, I had not heard about the video aspect of it.
So the content oversees distribution Association, which represents a ton of Japanese anime. Yeah, is basically written a very strongly worded letter to open AI and Sora saying you got to stop using our stuff to train your models. Yeah, because it's pumping out copyrighted content. So yeah, that's the kind of stuff that is inevitable.
We're talking about media.
So let's let's talk a little bit about something we've talked about for the last couple of weeks.
Justin was out. Justin said, hey, I found this website.
This website is really cool. I would love to, you know, give my thoughts on it. And of course that website TV Garden. Justin, you finally got a chance to check it out, right?
Yeah? Actually, uh yeah I did. You guys were talking about it. I missed lost a couple of shows, but no. I also I also check out TV Garden and it's actually really cool. I mean, you know, it's I like how you're you're presented with a map, colored map of the globe and you just pick on the country and then it lists what channels are available. I'm personally right now as we're doing the show, I'm watching a Japanese
news channel, isn't that. Yeah, And it's all and it's done via YouTube, so it's like a YouTube embedded channel, but it's streaming live. And yeah, I mean there's there's there's like at least thirty channels from just Japan alone, not to mention the other countries. But yeah, TV dot Garden is really cool.
So I will mention that Andy and I talked about this about two weeks ago, and when we watched it, it had every available ESPN channel.
Oh really, it does not anymore.
Oh, so for we're talking about tv TV dot Garden, which is a great resource for fighting local televisions just really kind of niche TV stations around the world, but a lot of people this past weekend. Yeah, we're really we're really upset, specifically Notre Dame football fans. So Notre Dame's game was on ESPN this past weekend. If you have had YouTube TV, you lost access to ESPN the night before the football game, yep.
And also Monday Night football. I wanted to watch Monday Night FOOTBA last night because I like to watch the Peyton and Eli Manning cast on ESPN two, and they had Baker Mayfield, which is one of my favorite NFL players. I just like Baker and he was on it, and I couldn't watch it because ESPN and well Disney, Disney
and YouTube are just having a spat. And the craziest part is I heard a story this morning or maybe yesterday yesterday yesterday morning talk about how Disney approached YouTube TV and said, look, well, actually Google, because that's the parent company. They said, look, we got elections, We got elections on Tuesday. We want our viewers to be able to know what's going on with the elections. Can you please just put our channels back on at least at
least just for Tuesday, May May maybe Wednesday morning. And YouTube was like nope, wow, wow, yeah.
And the a lot of the driving for this decision was that ESPN launched their own complete content streaming application.
Yep.
Yeah, so a lot of people were just like, like, I don't want to like what is happening with the streaming world right now, Like we're just it's worse than it was when cables a thing. It's more this is the thing.
That ever mentioned in the beginning.
Yeah, it's it's more confusing, it's more frustrating, it's more expensive.
I have been contemplating making the change to YouTube TV, and people are saying, oh, wait, you might want to wait a little bit because you may not get all the channels you want.
That's been my problem with the cable company.
You don't spending two hundred dollars a month, and yet I really don't get anything.
I want to go back, go back, go back seven months ago when my or eight months ago, maybe a year ago, when my in laws got YouTube TV. If we go back and listen to that episode, you should pull a clips to that episode. Yeah, because it was like, they're gonna save a ton of money because they're cutting cable, they're not using it, they're bundling out the Internet. It's gonna be fantastic. They're paying seventy bucks a month or whatever for everything. It's like over one hundred dollars.
Now, oh yeah, I pay like one hundred and twenty five just for YouTube TV.
Yeah, and they're even going at it like this was a good deal when we got it.
Yeah. Now that's how they do it. That's how they gettin I kind of wonder if it's corporate greed.
If people decide, Okay, I'm gonna leave you to TV, then their options are well. Of course the antenna and ATSC three might change some of that for some people. But I'm thinking, okay, so maybe TV Garden it's gonna be that's gonna be the next place to fall fall down the rabbit hole with. I want to talk a little bit about this because I've never been, and I want to go justin you did take a little vacation. Uh you made a trip to Aspen, Colorado, and I've
never been to Aspen. I've always thought that's where the celebrities skied, that's where you know you went.
I mean, is it really like a ski town to go there. I'm a celebrity. Of course I'm gonna go there. Of course. Yeah.
He's the voice of the Voice of the water World. The co host of tech Talk Radio. No, people say, wait, tech talk radio, what's that a water world? Oh my god, and I have your autograph.
So how was it? It was interesting. Uh. We went up there on a Friday, and I expected, you know, traffic was going to be bad. So from from our house to Aspen is about four and a half hours by car because you got to take I seventy up into the mountains to Glenwood Springs and then you drop south into Aspen and that's about an hour from Glenwood Springs. So I expected it. I was like, okay, it says four and a half hours, it's probably gonna be more
like six, you know, because of the traffic. There was no traffic. It was great. It was no traffic. The weather was beautiful. The colors. Everybody also said, oh, you missed all the fall colors. They are all gone. No, it was great. It was awesome. The colors were amazing. We got into Aspen on the afternoon of a Friday and Mesa and her friend wanted to go walk around and do some shopping. They wanted to go to some of the high end stores. I mean, there's it really
truly is. I mean, there's there's a lot of high end stores there. Now, I gotta say, though, I do think that when I went there, I kind of imagined aspen As being more like a picturesque mountain town with like Rodeo drive of LA with all the shops lined up. No, it's not it. It truly feels like just a normal like mountain town. I mean, with just people living there.
It doesn't feel like a rich escape. You know, there is one street that has a lot of the high end shops, but there's also just a lot of regular shops mixed in too. So it was very interesting to be where we're at, and I was just kind of like, wow,
this it doesn't feel like a rich person's place. So me and me and the the husband of of of of Mysa's friend, you know, we walked around with the kids, We went out to lunch, we got some beers, and we we we we met up with Mesa then and her friend at a I don't know what the name of what was called. There was a high end leather store of something like like Italian leather, like bags and
shoes and things like that. Anyway, she was looking at buying something there, and I was talking to the storekeeper and I was like, oh, I bet you guys serve a lot of you know, a lot of celebrities around. She's like, oh yeah all the time. She's like, as a matter of fact, if you were here, just just like a couple hours ago, Leo was in here. WHOA. I was like, wait, Leo me like Leo DiCaprio, and she's like, yeah, he was.
She was.
He was in here with his girlfriend and they were shopping. And I was like, wait, Leo's in town. That's cool. So yeah, we got you know, that was really cool, and then kind of fast forward, went out to dinner. We had a good dinner. Walking back to our hotel, we had to walk across a large park. They called it a rugby pitch. I'm sure they probably play a
lot of rugby up there. But anyway, walking across this rugby pitch, I really wasn't paying attention, and I'm approaching this black object in the middle of this rugby field and I finally look up and I focused my eyes on it, and it is a black bear. Oh did you turn around an aisle? A juvenile black bear. Now I'm not talking about a baby, because baby is the most dangerous, because that means mom was around. Yeah, this was a juvenile black bear just strolling through the park. Wow.
And he just kept on walking. He just kept on walking. He walked right down the shopping street and people were coming out of the shops and they were like, oh my god, you know, like screaming and running back in the shops and they were locking the doors. And the bear was just like dude, yeah, yeah, do doo. Like he was just walking around town.
Man.
He was just chilling, having a good times. Cool. And it was like the closest I ever come. I probably came within about I want to say, probably within about fifty yards of a black bear. That's cool. And I didn't even realize it. That could have been bad, but it's good. That could have been really bad. Yeah, all right, we got to.
Take a quick break. We come back. We talked more. We've got some great lengths. We've got a couple of listener questions and some news and of course you had a problem with the laptop, which will play nicely to one of our questions as well when we come back.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean Twird, 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 tip talk Radio. So y'all know that I have a smart home. I run Home Assistant, which is an open source, free home smart home management software, and I've got a lot of smart home devices.
You know.
I've got Zeus, I've got Loutron, I've got a little bit of phillups. I've got a lot of different things that operate different light switches, mostly light switches and light bulbs. But I've been yearning to just get back into the smart home thing because it's been a long time since I built my smart home and it just kind of it does its thing, but I'm like, I just want to make it better. We even reached out at one point. This is a couple of years ago. We reached out
to Reed's Smart Home, who's a YouTuber. He was actually gonna come on the show. I just never followed up with him. I really need to reach back out to him. But anyway, there's this new thing that is really taking the smart home world by storm, and it's this little sensor and it's called an ESP thirty two. Now, this little this little microcontroller is the brains of the sensor. Now you can build whatever kind of sensor you want,
but this is the brains of it. So what you do is you plug that into your Raspberry Pie or wherever you're running your home assistant. You set it up. Then you introduce the sensor that you want. Now, it could be a temperature humidity sensor. In my case, I bought five of these what are they called here, capacitive soil moisture sensors. Oh wow. So what this does is I basically stick this sensor in a plant, a potted plant,
with my ESP thirty two next to it. Now, I can run the ESP thirty two off of a small solar panel, or I can run off a battery pack, or I can just find an outlet and plug it into. But anyway, you stick this capacitive soil sensor into a plant, and then you program the ESP thirty two to say, hey, when soil moisture reaches less than twenty percent, send me an alert that tells me, hey, it's time to water the plate. So you don't overwater, you don't underwater. It's exactly.
And then there's other sensors you can do. Like I said, you can do temperature humidity. A lot of people do that. And if you try to buy like a temperature humidity sensor off of Amazon that's off the shelf, that basically is an ESP thirty two chip built in with a sensor, you're looking at spending thirty forty to fifty sixty bucks even on a single sensor. You can build an ESP thirty two with a temperature humidity sensor for a total of fourteen dollars. Oh wow, that's amazing. That's great. And
so I've got these capacitive soil sensors. I've also got I got some millimeter wave sensors. Now, what that does millimeter wave is a is a presence detection. But it's not like a true motion detector. Because motion detectors they'll read anything across the room. A cat, a cat thirty free away, walks across boom, it triggers the motion sensor. Your alarm goes off. No no, no, no, no, no no,
you don't want that. A millimeter wave sensor uses millimeter waves, that's why it's called that, and it's very accurate and it's very short range. So what I can do, for instance, is I put a millimeter wave sensor just around the corner of my stairwell leading up to the upstairs, just kind of out of view of anybody walking around the
living room. But the moment that I crossed that threshold onto the stairwell, that millimeter wave sensor says, hey, there's somebody here, and it sends a signal to home assistant says, my sensor just went off. Now Home assistant says, okay, I've been programmed to say that when this millimeter wave sensor goes off or on, excuse me, I'm supposed to turn on the stairway lights. Wow, and it does that.
Could this be used in a case too, and you dealt with this unfortunately flooding in a basement.
Yeah, absolutely yes, Now not the ones I have here. The capacity of soil moisture will not work for that. But there are just straight moisture sensors that you can just simply lay on the floor. And I just you know, the one that I had with my with my flooding thing that I had a year ago or a little bit over a year ago. I ended up buying a two d and fifty dollars sensor that also has an automatic shut off, so like if it detects moisture on
the ground. It will automatically shut off the hot water of the hot water heater, the tankless water heater, it'll shut off the supply line to that water heater. That was two hundred and fifty bucks. Now that I look at this with an ESP thirty two, I probably could have built that same thing with an actual physical device to turn off the valve. I probably could have built that for about eighty bucks. Wow, that's pretty good. I'd
never heard of this technology. What is it again, it's called E S E SP Now, I don't know what ESP stands for. Maybe Sean has done some wiggle ESP dash thirty two and again they are they are powered by USB. So I got the ones with the USB C connector because it's just a little bit easier because everything's USB C now. And they have pinouts just like a g P IO. I don't know if you can
see this on the screen. I'm trying to put it on here, but yeah, little little pinouts that you can then put into a bread board to program it or put it into your own circuit. But but now that I also have a three D printer, I can print custom cases for these little sensors nice and then put them wherever I want.
So ESP just stands for Expressive Systems, which is the company that made yem H and it's thirty two bits p thirty two thirty two bit micro controller. They've come out they can about twenty sixteen, so they've been around for a long time. But just with the with IoT and does the world of that, you could just do so much more now. So there's tons of tons more and I mean it's it's on the same line of
like Adrenocord, Raspberry Pies, et cetera. So if you're into those, this is gonna be very familiar territory for you.
Well, first off, though the ESP is it does not run an OS like Raspberry Pie. Raspberry Pie is much more powerful. Yeah, yeah, so the ESP runs very basic like a Python or a basic basic color like Python or something like that.
Right, So, just to clarify though, Raspberry Pie does make a Pie zero, which is essentially an EESP.
Yeah sure, o, yes they do.
So there are versions of Raspberry Pie that are very similar to ESPs, but you can't get full fledged in OS zero.
The Pie zero even runs Linux. These ESPs cannot run Linux correct, all right, Yeah, so so they're even even the zero is a little bit more powerful than ESP. But yes, Sean is correct. One other thing I can do with this is, you know I have an outdoor freezer, well, I mean well garage freezer. Yeah. I can buy a temperature sensor, mount an ESP controller on the side of the freezer, and I can monitor the temperature of my freezer. So and like what happens, Like, oh my god, I
left the freezer door open accidentally. I'll get an alert saying, hey, the temperature has risen in the outdoor freezer. Oh shoot, I need to go close the door to the freezer, right, Like those are the kind of things you can do with this. That is pretty cool. I like that. Where would somebody find this? Amazon? Amazon? Nice Amazon.
You can buy a six pack for twenty dollars.
Yeah, all right, cool. I just bought a five pack for like fifteen. Yeah all right. We got a listener email and from Rick in Selwarita.
Rick says, Hey, I'm wanting to get a new PC with Windows eleven for the house. A friend told me to build it myself, and I'm not that tech oriented. Would that be too much of a challenge. I don't play games, only use it to read news stories and check out videos on YouTube. Should I try it? Or am I better off buying ready to Go at Costco or best Buy? If so, which is a brand to look at?
Rick? Rick? If all you do is to read news stories and check out videos on YouTube, you don't need to build a PC. Just go buy a Chromebook really chromebook, or.
A or a relatively inexpensive bottom end of your budget laptop.
Dude, he's talking about using it to browse the web. He doesn't need to build a PC for that. Yeah, that's true. That's true.
So on the topic of building computers, have you seen RAM prices recently?
No? Are they up or down?
So RAM prices have tripled in price over the last three or four weeks. Yes, No, it's the it's the AI. It's it's all of the d d R five rand that's being eaten up for AI computing and all the GPU.
It's just any RAM.
Yeah. So I mean you just go and look at PC par picker, New Wag and look at the trending prices for RAM, and you are gonna see double, if not triple.
There is a story we talked about this Sean. If you remember this that people are ditching the desktop. You know, you had that desktop, you had that tower. I think we all started with. You had that Square one that's sat. I had a laser one eight I think it is what it was.
We had a Hewett packard at home.
Yeah, and then you went to a tower gateway, oh the gateways yeah, uh and then uh. But people are ditching them now to have a laptop because you can put a laptop on your desk if you want, buy a monitor attached another monitor, or.
You buy the station.
Yeah, buy a docuentation and get two monitors on it. And they're saying that they're pretty happy with it because it does what they needed to do if you're going to game. Though, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do that for a gaming situation. No, I know about that, dude. I got you know that new Hpomen. I'm going to talk about my problem with that Hpomen.
But that Hpomen's got a fifty seventy in it, an RTX fifty seventy with thirty two gigs a ram Man. I can run any game I want on that line.
And I've got I've got an older a sus Rog that's got a twenty eighty in it so twenty eighty mobile in it, and that was great for what it is.
Yeah, yeah, I think I got a twenty eighty TI in my desktop that I'm doing the show with. Right. I don't play games on this computer anymore. I basically just play them on the laptop.
But you know, yeah, and that's the thing. We play them on the laptop or our phones. I mean, that's the whole bit.
They're even saying that computer literacy is down.
Oh that's not good with.
How how little, how little children interact with computers now, you know, like when I grew up and I had computer lab, like we had a lot of computer this week in typing, yeah maybe speaking type a Mario Mario racing type, Like you were interacting with computer a day to day basis, typing, writing, you know, whatever, Internet, et cetera. Now everybody does on their phones. So you're you're getting into this newer generation with.
The kids that are in there bell correct.
Yes, the kids that are into into their teens don't know how to navigate an operating system on a computer. They don't know how to do keyboard shortcuts, they don't know how to do basic functions on a computer. Because they're always on a mobile or a tablet or another handheld device that has a completely different functioning operating system.
That's exactly what I went through when I was, you know, when I was working back at Fox five in San Diego, you know, being an IT person. We would get remember remember remember the girl, the reporter girl that came in and I was like, here's your laptop and then here's your USB hotspot dongle, and she's like us B. That was like a famous little story because she's like us B, I don't know what USB is. And I was like,
oh my god, like what what this is? Back in like twenty twelve, it's even gotten worse, But now I understand it. You know, I was like, how can you be in the year of twenty twenty five and not know how to use a computer? Sean just perfectly summed it up right there. Yeah, yeah, you're seeing you're seeing it.
So with some of my younger, young, younger cousins or my friends that have kids that are, you know, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, it's it's bizarre how they just don't know how to navigate a computer.
And it's gonna get worse with Ai.
Yeah, we have somebody new at the station and uh, she needed to get her laptop configured for our printer. So I said, well, just bring it on in and we'll go through it. And it did not have any USB A ports at all on it.
It was everything just two USB C ports and that was it.
And that's the thing when you're out buying a laptop, make sure you get what you're gonna need, you know, And that's the thing you just go especially now we're coming up to Black Friday, we're gonna see sales. Make sure it has everything you need.
Oh basically, don't buy an Apple Apple. You don't get anything. You get one port and then you have a bit of dongle for everything. I don't know.
They've got they've, they've they've it's historically been that way. You can't get some of their newer MacBooks do have a USBA, a guesty card slot and four usbcs plus an plus an actual HDMI output.
All right, we gonna take another quick break. We come back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm justin.
Let me send us an X at tech Talk Radio. We'll do rep back and now back to tech Talk Radio.
So during the break we talked a little bit about a segment that we want to talk about. This was posted on the IT Humor and Memes group on Facebook. Love that group between nineteen ninety one and two thousand and nine. So take a trip back to the early days of the Internet. What's the most memorable computer game you played in that timeframe?
There were so many good ones.
So let's start with Justin. Justin, so between nineteen ninety one in two thousand and nine. So that's a pretty it's a pretty good chunk of time.
I mean, I see the list that you provided here, These are some of the ones that were in the in their their Oh yeah, we just.
We populated our own list of games that we played at that time frame. And remember PC games console games is a whole different category.
Yeah sure, yeah, a lot of a lot of this stuff, but yeah, definitely PC games. I gotta say my first my eyes move it right to Wolfenstein three D. That was one of the very first games I ever played. But my favorite, I have to say, my favorite was probably either Command and Conquer or The SIMS.
The SIMS was fun. My daughter still you know, still plays the SIMS. She has SIMS four. I think they're up to now, I mean, or maybe even beyond that. She still has fun with it. That was a that was.
A lot of fun to play. I also did really like Roller Coaster Tycoon. But Sean, what for you? I think I know the answer? Can I can I say what? I think the answer is going to be absolutely World of Warcraft.
So I think this timeframe is a little too unfair because it covers such a prop progression in the computer gaming world. Right, Yeah, ninety one to two thousand and nine. That's that's a long time. It's almost two decades, right, So I have to break this up into I think three different games for this time period.
I just I have to because there's.
Just like you, I grew up getting PC Magazine with the discs and the demos and stuff.
I still have it.
It's a disc that is a demo disc for APIG games. Oh, they made some of the best shareware games that existed. You had Wolf Centred, which is a classic. But there's an apergy game called Blakestone Aliens of Gold. I still play that game to this day because it's on gog It's if I shooter. It's just fantastic first person or it's a first person shooter. Really, it's a very doom. It's a very doom doom. Wolvenstein asked, you know a
platformer it's so good. Then Diablo too, Lord of Instruction probably the game I've spent the most time in my life playing. Then World of Warcraft, and then into some other games down the road. But those ones, the Blizzard games, Blizzard North.
I mean, I think you probably played a game or two back then I did. Doom was one of those that I played a lot. I loved Duke Nukem. Duke nukemb was just an absolute blast.
Uh. But there's one Okay.
So I was looking over the list of some of the ones that people were mentioning, and Loom was on the list.
But I don't remember Loom. I like I can.
I remember it was a big game, but I don't remember exactly what it did.
I don't remember Loom, but I I'm I'm actually a little bit of fan. Did that Leisure Shoot, Larry did not make this list? Good old Lasry. Yeah, leisures all right, So what have you got there?
Okay, So there's a couple that I missed for sure, So I'm gonna rattle off a couple in my seat. I have my actual install jet Fighter.
To gosh, look at that.
Oh my gosh, I've got all my I've got Oh my god, I've got so many.
What are those shiny discs?
So these are gonna be some. These are a ton of These are so many good memories. Jet Fighter, Super VG, A Harrier nice of the Old Republic. This classic deer.
Hunting I remember, I remember Deer Hunters.
The Medal of Honor, Games worl Wind jet Fighter to Battlefield nineteen forty, the Original Diablo, I've got that in there too, Commanded Conquers, Age of Empires.
Wow, it's great if you most.
Of my PC childhood in there.
If you go to that group on Facebook again, a great group. It humored memes.
You can see what other people have said and maybe reminists a little about some of the games that you played and had a good time with.
Speaking of video games, there is an anniversary edition of a famous video game and it's actually I'm just all about this series right now because of the TV show second season coming out here next month. But it is Fallout four fall for anniversary Edition. Now it has been over ten years since Fallout four was released. Over ten years, I don't want to say eleven or even twelve. Actually right now comes out on November tenth. It muddles the base game, yeah, Monday. It bundles the base game with
several expansions. Fallout four Anniversary Edition will be available digitally on the Xbox Series S, X, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation five, and play Station four. Now I'm actually playing Fallout four again. So in the last few weeks. I guess maybe I probably started this one last time. I was on the show here a few weeks ago, but I really got back into Fallout seventy six. Now seventy six is the MMO version of Fallout. It's online, you're playing with real people.
But I've been playing Fallout seventy six like mad. And then I wanted to get Eric. I wanted Eric to be able to play fall Out with me, so I signed up. I got him a copy of Fallout seventy six, and I put it on his computer and we launched the game. And Bethesda, who's the maker of Fallout, the first message as soon as he launched the game. It says, we have detected this is a child account. He is not allowed to play this game. Wow. And I was like,
wait what? So I contacted Fallout, I contacted Bethesda support and I said, look, i'm his parent, I'm I am granting permission for him to play this game. And because you know, yes there is there's blood and gore in it, but it's kind of like a cartoonish blooding gore. It's not like super realist. So I was like, I allow this and they're like, okay, well, you got to fill
out this legal document. They sent me a legal document that I had to fill out, signs scan, then email back to them, and then they were like okay, we'll go ahead and process this and then boom, you're good. Nope. Even after I said that, Bethesda was like, no, we are not allowing your child to play unless he's thirteen years old. Oh. And I'm like, okay, then give me the reason why I have already provided you parental consent,
and they said, we don't care about parental consent. It's because the reason why is because it has online chat. There's voice chat. Okay, there's no text chat, but there's voice chat in the game, right, and they cannot control the voice chat because they don't have moderation.
Yea in some of the safeties. Now there there are list faces. There are a lot of people out there that are gonna pray on kids.
Yeah, and I get that, and that's why I don't allow him to play Roadblocks. So then I said, okay, fine, fine, fine fine. He was really upset. He's like, I just want to play Fallout with you. So what I did was I installed Fallout four, which is a single player game. You know, there's no multiplayer aspect single player. I installed Fallout four to his computer and I said, look, Bud, here you go. You can play Fallout now. He started playing it. Dude, he doesn't even play Minecraft anymore. Wow,
that's crazy. That is his favorite game of all time. He's like, nope, I want to play Fallout. Fallout is so amazing. He's like, and I'm like, thank you. This is this is what I'm telling you. There's so many other games out there besides just Minecraft. I've never played Fallout oh, like at all. God, dude, fall so good.
They're fun. They're not my style of game. I'm not a big fan. I mean, they're good. I will give them, but it's.
Just not it's not for me, right right. I was just thinking though, when you mentioned seventy six.
One of the games that I used to like playing, well, two of them Redneck Rampage and the other one is Interstate seventy six, which was.
Kind of like the Mod Squad Car. You're driving around in a car. It was. It was a lot of fun. That one was a good game too. The reason they called this one Fallout seventy six is because it's supposed to be that you're in vault seventy six. Oh, that's right, that's what it means. All right.
I want to I want to find out a little bit about the problem you've been having with your HP omen, which is a pretty high end HP computer laptop.
I just I just got this computer like six months ago, and it's a it's a very high end laptop. It's got the AMD Rizin nine, it's got thirty two gigs of RAM, it's got the RTX fifty seventy graphics card. I mean, this thing is a beast and it's been great for me this whole time. And I've never really been an HP fan. All of a sudden, this last Saturday, I go to get my laptop at night. I'm i'm, i'm, it's in my bag. I grab it out to go do something, and the computer is just slow as molasses
to boot up. Like I finally get to the login screen where I can log into Windows, and then the screen goes blank and I can barely move my mouse. When I move my mouse, it's like it's like one frame a second, where the mouse is like it kind of jumps around the screen one frame a second. And then there's no Windows Explore at the bottom, like you know, you got the Windows button and all the all the
pinned icons. Nothing was at the bottom. And it took about, I want to say, about ten minutes, and then all of a sudden, everything just got really smooth. And I was like, Okay, think about this from an IT perspective. What causes this kind of thing to happen? And I'm thinking, Okay, it's got to be a bad SSD because everything is being loaded into RAM, and once it gets loaded into RAM, it's all nice and smooth. So I downloaded the HP Diagnostics tool. I ran it within Windows. I even ran
it with Uefi before Windows boots. I ran all the tests, everything said everything passed with flying colors and I'm like, okay, fine, So then I went I ran check disc and I did check disc slash C, slash F or whatever the commands are. It went talk about thirty five minutes. It scanned my entire tear a bit hard drive. It said everything was fine. Then I'm like, okay, it's still not fixed. What is going on? Why is this so slow? I went to Windows Update and I noticed a couple updates,
but they weren't installed right around that same time. They were installed a couple of days earlier. But I was like, okay, well that doesn't make any sense, but I want to Oh you know what, I'm just gonna uninstall the last three updates that Windows made. I uninstalled those three updates. I rebooted the computer, Bam, every is back again. So it's a Microsoft update that didn't one one more time.
It's Microsoft's fault. Wow, they released a faulty dude. Microsoft is getting really bad, like they're they've been releasing updates lately that have just been bricking computers.
Yeah, and it's the SSD one. And well Microsoft said no, no, that didn't really happen. Other people are saying no, no, we we had this issue where it was wiping on an SSD.
Hold on, we can't talk about about Microsoft. We might get canceled.
Oh gosh, you.
Can't talk about how to bypass Windows local logins either anymore because you might get booted form YouTube?
What really?
Oh yeah, so you're talking about the issues with Microsoft, and the content creators on YouTube have been getting videos removed that have been talking about how to bypass local logins for Windows leven. I've talked about it on the show before, so I just know that they're really cracking down on anything.
Like RUFUS, pulling videos that talked about RUFUS. Really yep, Wow, amazing. All right, we're gonna take another quick break. We come back with more of tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird.
And I'm Justin. Let me find us on the facebooks at Forward Slash tech Talkers. We'll be right back and now back to tech talk Radio.
I don't want to buy just the absolute primo system out today. That usually wastes money, So I'll be doing some digital photography, maybe some video editing, don't do any gaming at all, so I don't have that demand on the computer. It's wondering what you guys would suggest, either brands or just in general speed. And where do you go to get the maximum bang to the buck right now?
Sounds like you want to max. So websites are the week. Cool websites. We found a couple. I know we normally don't do this because we never find any cool websites, but I found one that's kind of cool. It's a Pong style clock. Wait pong like in the game Pong. Yeah, like the game, like the game where you're basically a clock, but you're watching two computer characters just play pong, but
it keeps up with the time. And so the website is big job by dot com, Big job By dot Com Forward slash Pong, and somebody actually has watched these two little ai things. They just bounce the thing back and forth and eventually, when the minute is up, one of them loses, and then the minute goes to the next minute, and then it just kind of repeats.
Just like watching sports. Pretty much perfect. Okay, So the website to get to that is Big Jobby Jobby dot Com Forward slash Pong. Have some fun with that one, schun.
And so we've been talking a lot about classic games, so there if you want to. So two places you can go that I know of half the time my head Internet archive. Oh yeah, and Classic reload dot com will allow you to play doss games in your browser. Doss boxes a right application if you want to.
What was that Classic Reload Classic.
Reload dot com? All right, so go there check those out. But during the break we were talking about being distracted on the Internet. With the TV Garden website, you can stream the NASA ISS TV, which is just basically like a live stream of the ISS going flying.
Where is that one on TV?
It's just scrolled down you'll see NASA TV. I've got that. I had that full screened up and I was just mesmerized of staring at it.
Yeah, watching it go by a little more visual than three D punk or punk.
Yeah. So the TV Garden stuff is just incredible. We talked about it a while back on the show. Another one of my favorite. If you we're talking about TV, we're talking about radio garden. WebSDR dot org is for ham radio people. We've talked about that one. We talked about it when we talked about TV Garden two weeks ago. WebStar dot org. If you're in the hand radio at all right, I encourage you go check that out, tune in, tune into your your local net, or tune in a net around the world.
It's all right. I got one.
We talked about background remove dot BG last week, where you can remove the background out of a photo. Here's another one, cleanup dot pictures. Cleanup dot pictures, and it's online image editing. So if you're looking for you just want to remove somebody out of a picture real quick. You know, I wouldn't say use this all the time, but if you're looking for something real quick, you want to test it out, play around, cleanup dot pictures might work for you. All right, that's it for this week's
Tech Talk Radio. Thanks for tuning in. If you have questions, comments, we'd love to hear from you again on We're on YouTube, so you send us a comment there, TikTok, of course, Facebook X, wherever you want to reach out to us. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird, and I'm just let me have yourselves.
Great week, We'll see you next time.