The following program is produced by the tech Talk Radio Network.
This is Adrian Barbo.
You're listening to tech Talk Radio and you're gonna learn a lot. Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird and happy to be here. The first show of the new year, twenty twenty six, of course, and boy, has a.
Lot happened in the last couple of days. Stranger Things has ended. We're into a new year, and the rumor is that Stranger Things has a secret episode.
Wait, really, how did you find a secret episode of this thing?
So? Okay, just like Caitlin and I, we finished the last episode a couple of nights ago, and right before the show we were recording, I jumped into discorders and friends was talking and they're like, oh, Shawn Shey, we can tell them about the new the potential secret episode. I was like, what are you talking about? Have you not been on the internet at all today? Apparently people have not been happy with the way the show.
Ended, right right tweet It was. When most shows go away, they usually have kind of bad endings. There's only been a few that have been good.
So conspiracy theorists for the show went through the final episode with the Fine tooth Comb and found all these little subtle hints that are saying that there's an alternate ending episode coming or a new real true ending episode coming, and it's supposed to drop on the seventh.
Oh, so it would be out by now. So yeah, it'd be out by now.
But so we don't know. There could be a rumored secret final episode for Stranger Things if you believe all the hype and the conspiracy theories and all that stuff. But I don't. I really liked the last episode. I'm I'm in the minority on those who liked the episode the way.
It ended, right, but it was good. Now with them ending the show, is there any I haven't seen it and without you know, spoilers, Is there any way that it could make it come back at some point in the future they could have They're already talking to spinoffs, right.
Yeah, there's spinoffs for those of you who haven't watched the show. This might be minor spoilers, so hopefully. But the teacher that they get hooked up with early and the av teacher and then Murray from the episode, they both get nicknames in the final season. Okay, Murray is Bald Eagle because he's got bald heads and stuff, and then the teacher is Snook Thems. It's funny. You have to watch it, understand, right, But everybody wants a spinoff called Snook Thems and Bald Eagle.
That would be good. I like it, that would work.
So, I mean, there could be other spinoffs and who knows what. But I think it's gonna end in a good place. I think it'll be done.
And now they're doing some Broadway stage play with the characters of Stranger Things. I don't know if you've seen the ads for it.
I have not seen that.
Yeah, and they're, you know, trying to sell tickets. I've seen ads, so you know, see the stage play see inspired by Stranger Things, and it has a weird kind of feeling about it. I was wondering, would you like go to see a stage play based on that?
Say a little? Probably want to go, But I do like stage plays, so maybe I don't know. I think it ran its course right. It started in twenty sixteen, and I just think it's kind of lost. It's a lure for me. I'm glad it's over. It ended.
Well, I think that's interesting. Well, if you find out anything about a secret episode, which they've done stuff like this before, haven't. They were like, if you wanted to see something, you could enter a certain key, you know, command on your remote control and that would allow you, I know, that allows you to sometimes find if you like a genre of science fiction or horror or comedies, you could do that. And they're just like little secrets.
It's like the secret menu at you know, in and out Burger you have for Netflix, which is kind of cool.
Yeah, I don't know, we'll see, but you just google it. It's everywhere. It's on a lot of blogs, and it's it's kind of all over the internet. Ever.
Know, we we haven't talked to you since before Christmas. We have had a couple of best of shows that we shared which were kind of cool. And now officially we're in our thirtieth year of tech Talk Radio being on the broadcast airwaves, which is amazing. So that's kind of you.
Want to do I want to age you right now?
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
So if this is your thirtieth year, yeah, that means I was nine when you started the show.
Oh and you would have been a great You would have been great on the show thirty years ago. I think that would have been.
I mean, so I shared with Andie and Justin a video over Christmas, right, and it's a video my my mom and dad were very big on recording home videos and stuff, and this was a Christmas from nineteen ninety one, I think. Yeah, I was four yeap and it was the year that Super Mario Brothers three came out. Oh wow, and my brother he got it as the gift. But it's and I'll share it you put it on the blog.
But it's a video of my brother unwrapping Supermarrebrooughs Street, getting super excited about it, and then him handing it to me and in my high pitched four year old voice is like screaming about Supervier Brothers because that was it was just loved Supervier Brothers as a kid, So definitely could have had some good insight as a nine as a nine year old, Yeah, the show.
It was that was actually really cool to see. I want to say the night before that you sent that video over Gloria and we're talking about how you know, our kids are grown up now and we experienced Christmas through the grandkid, and that he was sick over the Christmas holiday, so we didn't get to see him. So it was like we were talking about how we kind of missed that whole thing with the kids growing up.
You know, me sitting on a couch still asleep because been wrapping presents all night and then you know, the kids would open something and I would ask, Gloria, where'd you buy that? Where'd you get that? Where'd you find that one at? And it was it was kind of cool to experience that in your video when you sent that. It was uh and seeing you, you know a little a little sean at they're getting opening the presence, getting your turtle socks. That was the Ninja Turtle slippers.
Yeah, those are big, those are big. Those were big.
So how about this Christmas? How how was it for you? I mean, did you have fun? We shared a list. Did you get any of that? Oh?
Yeah, I got a couple of things, right, I mean I got the Antilog three D well, I bought that for myself. Yeah, I did don get the controller, So I bought that for myself after Christmas, right right, because Caitlin ended up getting me a console Consola Retro. It's a handheld device that basically has a bunch of ROMs on it. Oh, I think I've seen that I could play. Yeah, that's a handheld device that could play pretty much any up to up to PlayStation two games on it. It's got joysticks on it.
And it comes with a whole bunch of ROMs or you have to go out and find them.
It came with a whole bunch of MS.
And I so, how's the quality on that? Because I've seen that advertising great and I thought that was kind of cool and maybe I'd want one.
But yeah, it's great. I mean I I've been playing some old game Boy games on it that I played growing up. I played a couple of PlayStation games on there. I wouldn't want to do joysticks on that, like with like you know, if you're doing dual dual thumb joysticks on it, it's not super super fun to play. But like the Super Maril, you know, the Superintendo games, the nes games, the the Atari games on there are fun So.
Right, it's funny because this happened. So I told you guys when you were talking about getting the Analog three D, which is pretty cool. I went into game Stop and I asked them, are you guys going to be getting the Analog three D and they said, no, they're not going to be carrying that, which which is a shame. The reason I went in is when you guys were talking about that, you and you and Justin, I decided I was going to go ahead and find the Nintendo Wii and get that all see if I could get
it going again. And it been it been sitting in the closet for a long time. So I opened the cloud, pulled pulled the we out. I found a controller. I opened it and there were batteries in it. The thing had not been used for years, and there was that caked on stuff. So I just sat there, you know, spent about an hour just scraping away, and that whole bit hooked up the Nintendo we well, I tried to
hook it up. There's no way to hook it up to a current television, and I was like, oh man, So I had to go and buy a connector that would basically it bridges so the you know the video yellow, red and white audio you know, left and right, then can be turned into HDMI, which is kind of cool. It was about thirteen bucks, so I hooked I finally. That's why I went to GameStop and I bought it there.
I got home and it was all excited and I've powered up and there I could see I could see the menu, and I had my one controller and I tried. I could hit a but I couldn't hit any other buttons. Couldn't make it do anything. And I was like, but I want to scroll there to that window that says super Mario. I want to play it right, and I no matter what I did, I couldn't do it. So I thought, Okay, it's probably that controller. It got really messed up with the batteries being in it for that long.
So I went to back to game Stop. They didn't have any. They said, go to Bookman's. So Bookmans, I don't know if you're not familiar with Bookman's. They're a local Tucson shop.
That has been half price books for us.
Yeah, they sell half prize books, they sell games, they sell hardware, they sell music equipment. They have all kinds of stuff in their Matter of fact, I saw a comic book they had in the on their shelf. It was the first one to introduce Batwoman. It was seven hundred bucks for this comic book. So they sell you know, hard to find stuff. So I went back and I
looked and they had a Wii section. They had a Nintendo Wii that was ready to go for one hundred and ten bucks, and then they had controllers twenty five bucks. So I thought, well, luckily over the years I have traded in. You take books, they give you a credit, you take games to give you a credit, get hardware to give you a credit. And I had, like, I want to say, almost one hundred and fifty bucks in store credit and this is from like twelve years ago,
and they accepted it. So I ended up getting my controller. I came home, bought the batteries in it, and it did the same thing. It wouldn't It wouldn't work. I was so disappointed. I wanted to play Mario and so I go online and I'm asking, you know, the home assistant, I mean, what can I do? Why isn't it working? And I said, make sure you have the sensor bar properly fixed above the television. I'm like, sensor bar, What the heck.
Is sumer part of this?
I'm like, what's the censor bar? So I go online, I'm looking and I go, oh, I've seen that thing. Where is that thing, and I'm digging through the closet. I go with the garage. I go to my I have a storage facility. I go there, I looking, I couldn't find it. I was so disappointed. So the next day two book. No, well, I thought. So the next day I'm going through something. I had to find a cassette, and I'm looking for the cassette and once't you know,
right next to cassette, it's the center bar. So I go, I find the center bar, I plug it in and sure enough, there I've got access. I start playing uh super Mario, and it was so much fun. But after a while, I was thinking, these graphics are really terrible. Yeah, not as exciting.
I played a lot of the analog Dreety over Christmas break.
Yeah.
I have blisters on my thumbs. I'm not joking. I have callouses and blisters now on the inside of my thumbs.
Gamers headaches, yeah, from.
From because I played So I played through a ton of Mario Kart sixty four. I unlocked nearly everything in that game because I just was playing it every night for a couple hours, Like I was just into it right, and I've got a decent amount of time into the operating of time, playing through that again, after.
It playing through it, playing on the analog three D and sixty four emulator. Was it was it fun?
Yeah, it's it plays it just it looks so good. Even hooked up to my projector, it looked good. Hooked up to my monitor. Here on, I've got it hooked up right now. I haven't. I just moved the steps today. So for those of you watching, you're gonna notice that the background is different in my in my view, I'm in a different part of the basement.
First thing, I said to Sean, what's going on?
Yeah, so I got to work out the lighting a little bit and change a couple things around. But it looks better. The nostalgia is it feels and looks like you were playing it and remembering it as it should have been, not what it truly is.
Right, like, oh, these.
Graphics were amazing, and like now you look at you go this graphics is aren't that great? But it plays really really well on the analog three D. All the games I have now are are really good, and I think I'm up to nine games now.
I'm wondering though, if Sean, I you know, I moved I have an Xbox, I had this Nintendo. We I remember having you know, the Dreamcast and all that. But I'm just became I became a PC gamer. I became somebody that is used to mouse and keyboard. Is there a way to play like Super Mario Brothers on a mouse and keyboard?
If you get an emulator and play it on your PC? You can keybind you know, your four arrow buttons and ab right and do it that way. But there are very select games for the sixties, the Super Nintendo and the sixty four, they actually used a mouse. Really, Yeah, there's a Mario Paint game that used a mouse.
Right, So.
If you're looking for that specific piece of hardware, good luck. Platformers really weren't designed to be played on keyboard mouse. Yeah, so it's hard to do that. They're designed for truly designed for single joystick or dual joystick control.
So did you get any of the free games this past holiday from Epic or Steam? They were given away tons of games. Matter of fact, Epic's still doing it. You can go to epics website and you could download a free game and it might be a game that you might like. It may be a game you've never heard of or it might be a game you used to have a lot of fun with. So if you got a new PC or you got a new you know, laptop, you can actually go on to Epic and you could
download these games for free. You know, he's creating an account and then you could do that and it doesn't cost you anything to create an account. But what's nice about it if you see a game that's on there, and you know, that's the thing. We don't have the physical media anymore, you can download the game and you could play that.
I'll have to I'll have to look and see on their website right now, but I don't see any of the free versions free. There's a lot of sales.
Yeah, if you screw to on epix, you have to scroll down and then you'll see the free I'll.
Look for it and bring it back up. But yeah, no, I mean, I honestly, outside of playing some Diabloto with some friends during break, I really just kind of stuck to playing the classics, really got right back into it. I mean, my free time was spent playing Mario sixty, Mario Kart or Operato time. I mean, and then I also it just brought back the truly playing those games that I found joy in playing when I was younger.
I've been replaying so Oker. End of Time was the one that I really wanted to get through, but I have already put in about twenty five hours. And just sue Codin, which is a PlayStation platform right JRPG from back in the early two thousands, late nineties. Yeah, so I'm just back into good, good storytelling, good games, good good action.
I told Gloria, I said, one of the games that I love playing was Donkey Kong, the original Donkey Kong. I used to go to the arcade. My girlfriend at the time worked at Pennies in the Wayda park Ball and we had an arcade in there, and while I would go to pick her up from work, and I'd have an hour to kill, hour to kill and a handfull of quarters, a whole bunch of quarters, and I would play Donkey Kong constantly. Had that so much fun
with that game. And I told her, I said, gosh, I wish I could play, you know, Donkey Kong, but I don't see that anywhere. And she said, she said, you know, we were at best Buy once and they had the stand up for that one. The actual arcade stand up that's put out by I have one of the stand ups with Golliga and stuff. She said you should just get that. I'm thinking, wait, are you saying I could spend the money and buy another stand up game, which I might end up doing it because Donkey Kong
was a blast. That would be funny.
So I have a friend who owns a barcade back home in my hometown. And when he opened up, you could go in and get twenty bucks, spend twenty bucks and get twenty five dollars worth the tokens. Right, And my friend, my friend Shane, and I spent twenty dollars playing through that. He had the four player X Men cabinet, right, and we just spent we just blew all our money playing through the X Men. It was so it was
so much fun. My favorite arcade I have two. Yeah, My two favorite arcade cabinets are Ivan Stewart's Iron Man, right, the Truck the Truck Racing one, okay, and then the Turtles and Time cabinet with the four player Turtles and Time.
Cabinet, Oh my gosh, yeah, and then.
The Ninja Turtles, Turtles and Times cabin anytime I found that I would absolutely just blow my entire allowance or whatever whatever money my parents gave me to buy gifts for and just blow it on Turtles and Time, because that's probably one of my all time favorite games to play with my brothers was Turtles of Time.
A friend of mine, Mark Wallace is an was an animator and layout artist. He this guy is so talented. We used to hang out, you know, before video game And if you saw the movie Ghostbusters, do you remember the scene where siggording Weavers sitting in the chair and the two arms come up and grab her. He designed that. He also created a chicken with a human head that never made it in the film, but it's on the Best of or not the Best of the DVD extras reel,
which is cool. We always said Mark, nobody's gonna ever see that, and sure enough it came out and had his name on the artwork he actually worked. I want to say it was Don Bluth. I think remember Dragon's Layer. That was Yes, that was a great stand up arcade game. It was a little more expensive than playing Miss pac Man or pac Mat or whatever or Centipede, but it was kind of cool because you moved left and it
would flash and then you moved right. He helped us do some of the the artwork in that one, and that was a great That was a great stand up. I would might have one of those two, and I think that one might be available somewhere.
That's cool.
Yeah, all right, big announcements of course from CS. You sent me something today saying did you see this? And it's from el Gato And if you've ever used el Gato products, for those that want to do podcasting or video streaming, el Gato makes all kinds of products to make it easier. I think the first thing I remember from El Gato was, you know, the little switchboxes, the stream deck, and then you saw them going into lighting, cameras, keyboards,
the whole bit. And now they've put something out which kind of combines all of it.
Yeah. So it's called the Galleon one SD. All right, it's three hundred and fifty bucks. It looks like a ten keyless keyboard, but the ten key is replaced with twelve button stream deck with an LCD display and two knobs.
So for our listeners, don't know, maybe they've been thinking about getting into this. What would a stream deck do for them? If they wanted to do a podcast or video cast.
What do you want to control? You can tie it into home automation. You can tie it into scene control with OBS. You can tie it into switcher control with my ATM Mini. You can tie it into lighting. You can tie it into changing camera angles, changing scenes, changing web browsers, loading web browsers, loading your email, hot keys, volume, right, I mean you really there's no limit with the stream deck, especially if you tie it. So you have stream Deck,
which is its own hardware and software solution. There is a free software that you can also get called bit Focused Companion, which ties in a lot more professional broadcast related software that can tie in professional broadcast equipment into a stream deck, which is we use them pretty pretty extensively at the university.
So could you essentially, so say you use OBS Studio and you have stream Deck, and you have button one could be one camera, button two could be a second camera, but button three combining button one and two into a two shot, could you set that up up.
So that so that gets tricky? Right? So it all depends on how you capture the capture them right. So this is where things get tricky with cameras and inputs devices, right, because if you have it's like, my two cameras are coming into my ten Mini. I could picture and picture them in the in the A ten Mini and have the ATM Mini do that. But I can't have OBS bring in golf cameras because it's being used by the
aten Mini. But if I had a separate HDMI captured card and had both coming in as two separate sources, then yes, I could build and design two boxes, three boxes, four boxes, splits, squads, whatever, using custom keys and hot keys. In stream deck. It's got an OBS native plug in, so it ties in directly with your OBS. It's super super easy to set up. I mean I haven't set up in mind that I can go to my left screen ATM Mini and I screwed it up.
Of course, all we got was a black screen.
I'm like, so it must not be oh you know what, because I don't have my second Ethernet cable, run to my new box, screwed on my I screwed on my Well, this is.
If you remember when Matt redid his studio, it took a little while to work the bugs out, so which is exactly what you're doing.
Yeah, so new setup and I haven't really workflowed my whole setup because I just I just finished putting it back together to day and vacuum the basement and all stuff.
So but this completely This El Gatto keyboard, though, could really help in many ways. It could give you productivity but also enabled you to do so.
Think of it. Think of it like this. Right, you're playing a video game, you're keep handing a keyboard in your mouse, and you have a break. You could just instead of having to go and reach up. My stream deck is underneath my monitor, so I'm reaching up here to touch my stream deck. I now could just have it right next to my hand and not have to look down. It's or if you are looking up. But it's got like I said, it's got two knobs on the top. It's got an LCD readout, so you can
have it set up to do whatever you want. Plus twelve buttons, so mine currently has fifteen, so it's three less. But you can go to a new page. You can do all.
Sorts of stuff, so pretty cool stuff. You can find that on their website El Gato. Just look them up. E L G A t O, which means the cat we got to take a quick break. We come back. We have a couple of listener questions. We will share with you some great comments on the last show that we did where we talked about do you turn your computer off at night? So we'll cover some of those. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird.
I can subscribe to us on your favorite podcasting platform of choice and find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com.
We'll be back and now back to tech talk Radio.
During the break, we discussed a couple of listener questions and and he felt fit that I was the right guy to do this because I have done this.
Yes, well, we've talked about it.
This is this should just be my catchphrase for the show. We've talked about this on the show before. Could I say that all the time? Well, we've talked about this in the show before. I've talked about this show four when it.
Comes, when it can. Of the digitizing, we're talking photos, we're talking film. You've done film, negatives and vhs.
Yeah, I've done eight milimeters, super eight high eight tapes, mini dv vhs. You don't wait to max.
I need to figure out how to do mini dv I got so many many dvs laying around, but I don't have a mini DV player.
I have a mini DV deck right that will do it. They have fires, FireWire and all this stuff.
So yeah, I was thinking of just getting the camera fixed and then people sell cameras for two to three hundred bucks, but yeah, you can. Yeah.
Anyways, so the listener question is in the line of VHS tapes all right. Scott from Palm Springs wrote it and said, I found a bunch of VHS tapes and I want to digitize them, but I want to do it myself. I thought one of those kids but my friends. My friend said he would lend me his, but I wanted to look good. I saw an RGB capture card
on Amazon. Is that better? And this kit from you lead You didn't link it to us, so I'm not sure what that does have to find it, but there are You want to make sure that it's a USB A. It'll be an RCA you yellow red white to USB capture card. You want to make sure it's gonna come with some sort of software. Now you can go to black Magic and get their Studio Express software for free
to capture. Really, if you're on Macro, Windows, or you can capture within final cut itself typically, but you got to be careful because those are your usually gonna be progress or higher, right, so it's gonna eat up a lot of storage. You're looking for something that's gonna capture into a compressed form of like HG six four or
six five. I brought mine in HDMI, so the device I have takes takes rca composite in to HDMI out and will actually upscale it to seven to twenty P, so it takes it from five five twenty five I to seven twenty P.
That's good.
It did. Okay, it was okay for what it was. But you're gonna want to find one that has a software capture that won't just do pro res or some sort of raw format that you're gonna just eat up a ton of bit of storage. I will recommend this is going to be like down the rabbit hole for a lot of people, but it has a lot of resources for people that don't want to jump all the way down the rabbit hole but want to get to
a certain level. There's a subreddit called vhs decode, which is a group of hardware hackers that are actually hardware hacking. They're VHS players to capture the true r F output of the VHS players instead of actually taking the video output, So it's actually taking the RF signal as it's being translated from the tape before it gets converted back to video. But the wiki on the sidebar has a lot of help for people that are like, hey, I found this subreddit.
I don't know how to do all this stuff, but here's devices you can buy that will do what you need to do.
So, Sean, what do you think about this? There are different software companies out there now that are using artificial Intel AI, just like we could do with Gemini, or to have it fixed photos, which you know I've had fun experiencing. There are some that will say that they can take video that is four eighty and really cleaning it up and make it seven twenty looking. I mean, is that Is it worth doing something like that or does it depend on the video itself?
Depends on the video itself. All it's doing is interpolating frames and blending it and smoothing it out and making it look good. It's up to you if it's important to you. I would say, don't do AI if you don't want it to change what you're capturing. But again, i'm a little bit of an ai A sayer. So you can buy an RCA to HDMI device and either use a capture card like in Algatto four K capture card or some other cheap HDMI to USB and then use OBS to capture it if if you're technically savvy,
you can use plethora of other options. But right, it's relatively inexpensive to do yourself. The downside is it's real time, right, There's no getting around that. Right, there's no way of getting around that. The concept of if you have ten hours of content, you're watching ten hours of content. There's no way around that. Trust me, I went through hundreds of hours of content when I did my family stuff.
I mean hundreds of hours of tapes of tapes MiniDV high eight, super eight eight millimeters, super eight millimeter, sixteen milimeter. It's very rewarding. I've been told by a lot of my family members that not a lot of people would spend the time to do it. Yeah, because it's time consuming. It's that that's the biggest complaint, The biggest frustration for capturing analog media is that it's time consuming. So again,
you can pay somebody to do it. You can get a shoe box, tape it up, send it in, you get a file back, or you legacy box I think is one we've talked about on the show before, and a couple other options that are out there.
I think scan my photos by Mitch who's been on the show a few times. I think they do that too, So that's pretty cool. So but if you want to do it yourself, I mean U Lead does have a kit. I know Diamond used to have a kit, which I think I may even have one of those laying around. You have a DV hopefully you have a VHS deck, a VCR if it has that, you know our GV output on it. Don't forget they even have the ones where you could play the video and record onto a DVD.
You could you could do that too if you wanted to. But again, then you're onto another physical format, right, You're not digital. You're not digital. You are you're technically digital at that point, right, but you're not to a point where you could put it on the web or do that if you unless you ripped it from the DVD after that point, But then you're now you're in a third generation, and you're compressed, and then you're uncompressed. You're going from analog dumping two back to a different.
By that time people give up, Yeah, yeah, a couple of hour.
By that time people give up, or the quality has just gotten so bad because you're compressing and uncompressing so many times. But just go on Amazon, find a kit that you think is gonna work, spend a couple of dollars and give it a rip.
Yeah, and give it a try. Let us know how that goes, Scott, because that would be kind of cool. That would be neat to see. We had some comments and I wanted to share with you, and we're available on YouTube, We're available on TikTok, We're available on reels Facebook, of course, and we talked about shutting down your computers at night and it generated some interests. You know, you're gonna be way longer than a couple of hours. You
know what is your process? And your comment was that you know pretty much you do, but then again, you have a plex server that you leave on. We had some comments, like from a guy named Fungus. It's a great name, said, my plexed computer has been turned on for six years now is that possible of you.
Oh why not? So Yeah, it's all one hundred possible unless you have a power outage. You move it, you unplug it. There's nothing stopping on a computer from being on as long as the electrons are flowing.
Another comment from Thomas said, I only shut down my PC because of the RGB and it's in my bedroom. Yeah, that's the thing with these new gaming towers. End up lighting up the world and you're trying to sleep. You got that RGV light going on. It says my Raspberry Pie is always on though that you don't really have a reason to turn those off.
Outside of keeping them cool. Right, If you have it on and it's just it's hot, it's in a bad environment and it's just gonna get heat. Heats what kills electronics. Right, unless you're in a really awful environment, high moisture environment, keep your PC. It's not gonna kill it. You're just gonna it's If it's idle, you can buy devices that
will check your idle power and see how much you're drawing. Right, if you're worried about your electrical bill, all right, But for the most part, computers when they're idol don't draw that much power unless you have something crazy mining bitcoin or you know, doing something weird in the background, it's gonna be fine to reiterate that what we talked about before. I shut my computer down every night, my PC. Yeah, it's been a habit from the dawn of time for me.
When your computer actually told you was safe to turn your machine off.
One one here I wanted to share. A soldier first Class said, I have you know, I've had a few power supplies. Go back to my PLEX servers. I have a scheduled task that shuts it down at midnight every night, so I just hit the power button. Then has another scheduled task to start the PLEX service on startup as well. Now, for our listeners don't know what is PLEX service? What does that mean?
Plex is a media platform that you can download and install on a computer, host your own media on it, and then stream that media across your network. It's basically a server. This is something that took me a long time when I was younger. I was like, oh my gosh, a server. It's this immediately think data center, tons of power, tons of fans, right right, No, it could run on a Raspberry Pie, it can run on your Mac Mini.
It can run on an old laptop. It can run whatever runs on Linux, Windows, Mac arm right, it runs on all these platforms. You install it, you point it to the media on your hard drive that's attached to that computer. You say, organized by movie, TV show, whatever. You download the app on your phone. You go download the PLEX app on your desktop for Mac, Windows or Linux, and you're off to the race is watching the content from your computer, whether it's upstairs, your bedroom, on the road,
et cetera. Because you can tie it in. You open the ports on your router and you can see the outside world.
Basically doing that, you have your favorite movies. You can have your favorite movies. You don't have to worry about Netflix pulling them off. If you've bought the DVDs, you could rip them, put them on your PLEX server and be able to watch them anytime you want, if you're traveling or your ORC makes it nice.
Yeah, So the way I do it right, So I have a PLEX server here at home. I've got a four terabyte hard drive that is full of my movies, my Blu rays, my DVDs, my home videos, TV shows that I've got copies of right music.
Eah, except I think Plex is also doing now photos, you could upload your photos, so if you want to have a photo library from your smartphone, you can actually upload that to your PLEX server.
Yeah, so then all your media lives at home, meaning if you have an Internet outage, but your router and everything's still connected, you can still stream the media from your Pleux server. So what I did was I took a two terabyte USB drive and a Raspberry Pie and a TP link nano router plugged into a twelve O
car battery plugged into my camper. So then when we're on the road traveling, I have access to my mini plex server that I can then stream the YouTube videos that I've downloaded for the boys, movies, TV shows, et cetera. That way, when we're traveling, if we don't have access to internet, can't stream something, I can just fire out my Raspberry Pie and this little mini WiFi router, connet my phone to it and watch movies in our camper or while driving or et cetera.
So it's not that expensive, is It depends on.
What you do. Yeah, I recommend doing the Lifetime pass. The Plex pass. It's a one time fee. It's like I think it's close to two hundred dollars now, but then you it's lifetime. Jellyfin and MB are free. Oh yeah, yeah, which Jellfin and MB are two other and Cody Cody's another one. Those ones I'm fairly certain are free. I don't want to say free for sure. Just check them out. I mean, that's that's all I can tell you is just go play with them, have fun. Download Plex, put
your media on it, rip your DVDs. Handbrake is the program of choice for DVDs. Make mkv is the platform of choice for Blu rays, rip and have fun. They'll buy a four terabyte hard drive and just dump your media out of it.
Now, I know some people will take their PLEX and they will not have it hosted on their computer. They'll plug it right into the router. Is that a good idea?
Well? Sure, I mean that's how I have it here, right, I've got a tower in the back room in a RAQ that's wired into the router. That's how I do it. Now, you have local sharing, But then if you're if you're out and about and you want to watch something on your pluck server off your phone, you can't enable your pluck server to reach out to the outside world and stream from your your home through the public internet to
your device. I don't recommend doing that that there's too many there's too many bad actors out there looking for vulnerabilities. And you know, unless you're keeping up to date on your security and you're updating your the security the server every time, every time you get a security patch, it's just not worth the risk in my opinion. For the for what I need to watch, I'll just watch something on Netflix or Amazon and deal with the ads, like
for if I'm out and about. But because you gotta remember, right, do you remember what happened with last Pass? Last Pass got hacked right because one of their developers was running a unpatched plux server that got compromised and they got in and were able to get in and see all this. You know, they sat on a system for a period of time and then we're able to access. So don't leave things unpatched. If you're gonna do that, be vigilant and have a security plan and take care of that.
All right, sounds good, We're gonna take another quick break. We come back. We have another listener question that we will share with you coming up, and a couple of cool announcements. I've got a couple of gadgets i want to show you to see what you think about it. We haven't talked about those yet. That's coming up with tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm sean to word to find us on YouTube at tech talk radio and give us a like and subscribe. Hit that smash that button back to tip talk Radio. During the break, I did confirm that if you just want to watch your own media on your own server, on your own network, it is free.
All right, Plex all right, plex flex dot tv is our website.
Yeah, Plex do tv. If you want to extend it to remote viewing to review outside of your home, add a slew of extra features. Either pay monthly or you buy the Plex pass right so you guys can look it up on your own. I'm not going to go into it. There's a slew of features that you get with with plex pass and or the monthly payment, but.
Right check it out.
But I highly recommend just playing with it.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun. If you have the videos that you've you know, you've got over the years that you went ahead and en coded. Just give it a try and see what you think about it. You know, originally my my son wanted to watch stuff, and my daughter wanted to watch stuff that Oh hey, can I see mom and Dad's you know, wedding video or I could see that again. Oh yeah, I'll put it on plex and there you go. Then they could you could share it that way.
Well that's so. I mean, I have all my family stuff on my plex o. Were also right because at one point I did have it open when I was first doing all my scanning and stuff, so that people could see it and watch the videos a lot heavy to host them to YouTube, and that's cool. Export, export every single one, et cetera, et cetera, etcetera.
Actually, somebody, here's a good question. You just mentioned it. So I got to ask. Somebody asked, they've never been on YouTube. They want to create ate a YouTube page. How hard is that?
Never been on YouTube?
Never been well, never been on YouTube as a creator? Oh okay, okay, how.
Have you exist? How have you existed since the year two thousand and four?
They've seen videos on YouTube, but now they want to have their own channel. How hard is that is it? I mean, we were one. It's not one of the waybacks you know, so I forget.
If you have a Google account, Yeah, you already have a YouTube channel.
All right, so just give you to go.
I think it makes you create a username. But if you have a video that's ready to go, you just go to YouTube dot com clicking on create create content. It's like the up ray head corn looks a little camera, upload video, You're done.
They even have a new a new thing called YouTube Creator, which you could put on your smartphone and you can create cool videos out of photos or just something quick. The I think the ingestion right now of long form media is good, but short form media is what people are watching right now. You know, I've been sucked into YouTube short slately.
Oh yeah, it's bad and it's it's funny when you know, Caylin and I will be at home and the boys are asleep and we're just kind of doom scrolling on our phones before we go to bed, and Kayler will be just watching over my shoulder or sitting there. She goes, that is such a sean stream, like your your every short you go, all right, there's a soldering video. Help, there's a video game video. There's there's tech talk. Hope,
there's another there's there's another analog video game something. There's a photography one. Oh, there's a dirt bike one. It's like, it's such a catered thing to me because I I I when I when I do my streams, right, you can really control what you see. Yeah, a lot of people will just swipe, you know, they just swipe to the next thing. Right. If you don't like a video or you don't want to see more of it, thumb it down.
Really, it'll never show you like it.
If you like it, give it a thumbs up, it will aggregate for you based on what you're telling it you like, and you'll start seeing more of the content you thumb up and less of the content you thumb down.
Okay, thumbs up, please, yeah, thumbos up give us.
But even the content like the people that you're subscribed to, you may not like a video they did and you can thumb it down and you'll get less content from them in that theme right, right, And it's crazy how quickly you can adjust your own algorithm.
So for anybody thinking maybe they got in late to the game, because it's the discussion I had with this gentleman that wants to do a YouTube. If you're thinking you got in late to the game and you're thinking I can't create content to compete. Now, you know, find your niche find your audience, which you can do, and they will keep coming back. Just be true to your audience. They will come back. I found out something today that shocked me. You have kids, you're familiar with it. I'm
sure Ryan's World. Have you ever seen Ryan's World?
Okay, maybe I'm gonna look that doesn't sound familiar.
Ryan's World is a kid named Ryan who has a brother, I think two sisters, and then his mom and dad. They're very young, young family, and they create content. And sometimes the content is just with them playing around with filters or playing games, or going on a trip somewhere or learning this, and they're very just it's bright situations. It's you know, the home is nice and the people are nice. They have fun. And my grandson loves watching Ryan's World. Matter of fact, he'll come in on a Monday.
He's dropped off Monday mornings and you know, Grandpa will be on TV doing my segment at Fox, and I'll say, well, I want to see my segment if I did one from home, and he'll say, you could tape it. He wants to watch Ryan's World. He doesn't know what watch Grandpa on TV. But I did some searching today and I was talking about that because we were watching it today, Ryan's World, and I said to Gloria, I go, do
you think you could do that? You know, I have fun on the camera like that, playing with filters and the kids having a good time. She said, yeah, probably doesn't pay enough. I looked it up, Sean this family, Ryan's World. Thirty five million dollars a year is what they're making for these videos. But not just the videos. They've created a brand with Ryan's World. They sell shirts, they sell toys, they sell they come into agreements, partner
agreements on you know, cameras, toys, artwork, photos. It's it's amazing. So it's never too late. Somebody's thinking, I really want to do this. I have this idea, give it a shot. And see they have.
Forty million subscribers. Yeah, and forty point two millions. It was great. That's forty point one million more than we have.
We're slowly growing, and it's funny we're growing growing, and then.
I'll start coming for your bucket share.
And then I will see somebody dropped off. They're not subscribed anymore. It's just the way it works.
So at this point, at this point, we lose like ten when.
Leaves, yeah, with somebody like ah, man, you had to leave us. But this Ryan's world family though, I mean thirty five million bucks a year and again, uh, they just did it smart and it's not too late. If you look at missus Rachel, same thing. You know, Miss Rachel makes a ton of money as well.
So yeah, it's it's crazy, like it's hard to tell somebody that you can make it big on the internet. But because there are just so much right, you gotta be creative. You gotta break the mold. You gotta get lucky, you gotta it's not easy work.
Well no, yeah, I'm sure job. Nobody's editing these yeah, so yeah, yeah, So all right, here here's a question from Antonio and Celia. Love your show, guys, but I'm having a dilemma. I have been told to clean up my garage or else. My wife says it's or else. There you go, just ended with that. My wife says, it's time to get rid of all my towers and keyboards and a few you sonic CRTs so what do I do?
Here's my address, here's Andy's address.
Send it all. Yeah, uh is there a way?
There is a proper way. Right. So here in the beautiful, brisk Midwest, Saint Joe County has a hazardous waste and Electronic disposal. You just show up with the trucklow stuff. They bring out a cart. You dump it in there, right. They ask you if you want a receipt. You say sure, They give you a receipt. Okay, I'm hard pressed to tell somebody you just go in and throw it away because I want to know what's in it.
Yeah, I would. I would say, if you're gonna get rid of the towers, make sure that those high drives are pulled out. Put those they don't take up that much space, right, pull our.
Drives, drove through them. If you're just getting looking to get rid of them, beat them up, smashing with a hammer or whatever. Take them apart, take the magnets out. Be careful.
Will fly off. Though I've been hitting ahead with a magnet. It's not good.
Magics are very strong. But I would just google your county plus Hazardous waste or electronic disposal, and most municipalities have a free service that you can just show up and drop off electronics.
The Computer Technology Association also has greener gadgets. I believe dot org. If you go there, they will tell you, depending on where your ZIP code is, they will tell you where you may be able to dispose some of this. Sometimes they want a few bucks for the disposal. Other times you may find people who are just companies that are just taking it in and completely recycling it. So greener gadgets.
You can also just post it up Facebook and Marketplace or let it Go or whatever and say free. Yeah, and you'd be surprised how many people come and pick up other people's junk for free, to part it out or to resell it, or to use it for their own personal gain whatever.
Antonio, we feel your pain, though, we do.
I mean, do you remember when my head my friend's uncle who passed, who was a who was a computer hoarder, and I ended up getting hundreds of towers, Like, we ended up going through hundreds of towers?
Wow, you know you remember all that, right? I thought it was like four or five towers that you got.
No, in total, I helped him probably salvage one hundred and fifty towers.
Oh, my lord.
Wow, yeah, because of it was. I mean, he had an whole entire house full of computer stuff.
I'm cleaning doing. I know, I have an Antonio and if you want to do this, I have a couple of half nine thirty two cases, the big gigantic ones. I was sick and I've got old boards sitting around, popping a board in there, installing you know, a Linux OS on there and selling it a workie computer, you know, power supplies and it's still good. It's you know, not the best at like a two fifty or three hundred,
just selling it working Linux computer. Somebody may want to get in a Linux and pay you know, one hundred bucks for this, so why not? That might be Antonio. You may look at something doing something like that. That might work. Ship it to me, ship it to shod. All right, we got to show you a couple of things, a couple of tech gadgets that I wanted to show with you. This is kind of cool. Do you remember having your old iPod?
Yes?
All right, this is a media player. It's very small. This is from any Oasis and what it does is it plays your You could have it play Spotify kids. You could have a play. You know, your your music off a SD card that could be inserted on the side, or it says small storage on there. You can hook it up to your PC and you can transfer. It has a headphone jack on it as well. You can
bluetooth it to Bluetooth headphones. And you want to carry around a media player, but you maybe don't want to carry around your phone, or you want to listen to music on this not on your phone. This is kind of a cool thing. It will also play.
Videos, so it looks just like an iPhone four.
It does. It's almost the same size. It's got a bright screen, so if you want to watch a movie, you know, you watch it like this. It's kind of cool. And I'm showing it on our video which you could check after you subscribe at YouTube tech Talk Radio. But to play Apple Music Title has all those services. The thing is you don't load a bunch of junk on it. You know, you don't have to worry. So if you want to give it to the kids to listen to music, they can do that. And it's actually a pretty cool,
smart looking device. It's not that expensive. You can find it for about fifty or sixty bucks. Then the other before we take a break, Easy Quest. You've seen their products, Oh yeah, we've talked about them. I found a new one. It has actual Ethernet port on it, so if you want to bridge an Ethernet connection you could do that. It has USB C USBA even as HDMI out, so you can hook it to an HTM. My monitor easily connects via USBC easy Quest. They're calling their new devices
the Maseratis of hubs. These are really great and they're solid. You carry me around. I'd say take a look at easy Quest if you get a chance to do that. So, yes, stuff, all right, tech a quick break. We come back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm trying to weird. Give us a call, send us a question. We'll read it on the air and then you can watch it back on YouTube. But give us a like on your favorite podcasting platform and help us.
Goro the show and now back to tech Talk Radio.
This is Danny Treyo and you're listening to tech Talk Radio, and you better keep listening or I'll come looking for you.
All right, So we're talking about what year were you born, Sean? If you don't mind, is that okay?
Nineteen eighty six.
All right, so if you were a kid of the nineties, there are some things you probably never forgot. All right, let's see how many of these this is.
This is gonna be right on my own.
Yeah, let's see how many of these. You remember the sound of a dial up internet connection. I'm not gonna make that sound, but yes, recording songs off the radio play. Yeah, it's like DJ shush, shush up, shush up, and then hit play recorders in that song starts.
I actually could go right now in Grabb's cassette that has recorded, like I have all my cassettes that I still have from.
There's actually a friend of mine. Then you know, I got into radio in my late twenties, but I used to listen to him on the radio, Craig Powers. He's a guy who told me go to this broadcasting school. When I said, hey, how do I do that? And I went. I actually found a recording of Craig Powers at Kazy Why and Anaheim, and I told him I found He's like, send it to me, because you know, a lot of us DJs, we didn't keep a lot of that stuff. And it was kind of cool. All right,
here's another one. Oh, I remember this calling the movie theater for Showtimes car.
Or the inside of the first page of the paper.
Yeah, they would have it in there. TV guide. TV guide was your best friend.
I love the No, I mean friends that had cable shirt the scrolling guide was the most amazing thing ever.
Or if you had dish, No, I would actually I would go to you know, physical to routs and I would buy the TV Guide and I would open They would tell you what what was on, when was on?
That whole bit Our paper had the TV guide in it.
Okay, how about this actually going outside to find your friends. You didn't get on your phone and text them. You actually went outside.
Yes, and I usually rolled my DIRP bike to their house.
Memorizing phone numbers. How about this one?
Yes, I still so to this day. I can still I still remember my parents' home phone number, both my parents stuffe number, of Kaitlin Stuf phone number, and one or two of my friend's home phone numbers that no longer exist.
Back then, we couldn't do that. Back in the nineties. You had, I mean, we didn't have a device. You had to remember everything. Yep, you didn't carry a rolodex around with you unless you were you know, total gate. Let's see the excitement of getting actual mail.
You know, that was why I still I still send real mail to people.
Yeah, I like I like getting mail.
Post cards. Every time we travel, we sent post cards.
How about this one playing in fast food restaurant playgrounds for hours, you know, the ballpit, the slide, the whole bit.
Yeah, and they were probably disgusting.
Yeah, Blockbuster runs on Friday nights. Friday night, the video on you gotta get a video and then here's the other one. Using actual encyclopedias for homework.
One of the first things that we ever had for our computer was Encyclopedia Britannica.
You didn't have the books, the interactive well, we.
Had the books too. We got the Macromedia Flash Encyclopedia Britannica or they had like twelve CDs and you could interactively go through the entire encyclopedia.
You know, we used to have a thing in the radio station. It was a book all about your musical artist and you know, like gold records, and when and when you wanted to mention something about the artist, you'd have to flip through pages and pages and pages of stuff, and so you had to plan, Okay, what song am I playing here?
Here?
Here? It's different now in radio, you know. Now you have Wikipedia so you could quickly look it up, you know, or and over the time you remember some of that stuff. But I'm getting older. I messed it up once in a while. But either way, it was, it was. It was kind of cool. But if you were a kid in the nineties, those are the things you probably won't never forget it.
Knowing how to read the Dewey decimal system.
Oh yeah, yeah.
You went to the cord catalog alphabetically and then it gave you a four digit number with a period and another number and then a period or another number. I don't remember what it all means.
But you knew how to use it. There you go. Hopefully you know how to use the internet. You can find us on the web tech talk radio dot com. Thank you for listening. I think we're going to go over a lot of the cool tech stuff next week on the show. Hopefully justin we'll be back.
We're gonna do a forward. We'll do a full review of CES next week on the show.
All Right, we'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio next week. Find us at the web. Look for our videos tech talk radio dot com. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm shand to weird.
Have a great week.