It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thoradin's here, Richard Campbell's here, and we've got a big shoe coming up for you. We'll talk about Windows 11, a lot of new features. Thank goodness for Paul's feature tracker. Also, the end of the Surface Hub. Aww. But the return of the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. That and a whole lot more coming up next. On Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. Episode 928, recorded Wednesday, April 16th, 2025. The rice is done. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Windows news, Microsoft news. Come on, you winners and dozers. Gather round, because here comes Paul Therat from therat.com. Hello, Paul. Hello, everybody. Sorry.
He's apologizing. That's what I usually do when I meet people. They're like, oh, you're Paul Theron. I'm like, yeah, sorry. Up front. Disappointing, isn't it? If it isn't now, it will be soon. I apologize for everything. Also here, Richard Campbell from RunIsRadio.com. Hello, Richard. Hello. Last day in Madeira Park. Next week, you'll be down under? Yeah. Next week. Yeah. So we're leaving tomorrow. Going to go see the granddaughter for a couple hours before I head to the airport. And then, yeah.
It's good to get children used to you leaving. You're not around and that's normal. A child was born just the other day. We needed a puppy as well. I mean, I didn't want a puppy, but sometimes you're outnumbered one to one. You got a puppy. I saw. So now we have a puppy. Nice. Congratulations. Had to take a tick off the puppy already. So yay. Oh, boy. That's a little scary. It's been a while since I had to think about ticks. Do you have ticks in Mexico City, Paul?
I have some ticks Leo. Oh, I see what you're saying. Um, Well, maybe. I mean, there's a lot of dogs. This is a big dog city. I'm a friend to all the dogs in my street. I stop by. They see me coming. They're laying on the sidewalk and you can see the little telecom. Here he comes. And I'm always like, don't get up. And they always get up. You don't get up. Don't get up. Okay, you're up. Now you're humping my leg. Okay, that's fine.
uh we're not here though to talk about your travels my friends we're here to talk about Windows 11. New feature tracker. How's that coming along, by the way? Slowly, Leo. Glad you asked. Still in... Yeah, I think I'm going to keep it in Notion. The only issue is it's wide. What I want to do is embed it.
in my site which i can do but it's gonna be one of it right now it kind of scrolls left to right which i don't like so kind of working through that but i figured I think the next time I do an update that you guys will see will probably be the week D. Let me just look when that is. Next Tuesday, right? Not to be confused with week T. That's right. It was week B and week D of the big update weeks. Preview updates are week D. So the Tuesday, the 22nd, I'll probably...
update it, but that's, but that's kind of the point. That's the beginning of the show, right? So if you look at, if you're looking at the notes, you might notice that a, I spelled colors like a British person, which I will now fix. And. But also in the past, when we've talked about, you know, what's happened in the past week, especially in the insider program, I kind of just laid out like build by build. And I thought, you know, maybe I'll do this like the feature tracker.
just list the features instead because the important thing here is not really what exact build something was in or what channel it was in necessarily, although that is important, but rather when do we think this is going to come to everybody, right? So I tried to do a little bit of that in here.
Today, we'll see how it goes. I don't know. To me, the biggest thing is, and we learned last week that actually the biggest thing is, of course, the fourth item in my list. So I did, I'm already doing great with this new format. Preview versions of recall and click to do are coming to stable on Copilot plus PCs, right? Patch Tuesday in May. So we should see that in the preview update next Tuesday. And we know this because they put it in the release preview channel, which has 23, 24 H2 builds.
We're not going to discuss because, you know. Who cares? Tied to this. Still got Windows 10 on this machine, you know. Don't get attached. I really like that phone style squared off UI. I think it's got legs. So tied to this is semantic search, which I struggled to find a good name for. Sometimes they refer to it as. semantic search. Sometimes they refer to it as AI-powered search or just Windows search with AI improvements or whatever. But the idea is that- Search it doesn't suck?
Yeah, so going back to Longhorn, we call it Tiger Search from OS X Tiger from 2003, 2004, whatever year that was. But yeah, this has been the dream for a long time, obviously. So semantic search is local AI powered. which is interesting. So it's copilot plus PC specific, which will limit its rollout nicely. And it will look for, it's hard to keep track of this. That's why I have a tracker, but it's because there are so many different features, but.
Well, it doesn't matter how they started. So what should ship in stable very soon is image and file slash document search across local files, if indexed, and OneDrive, and then soon in the future, maybe not soon, but in the future, third-party cloud storage as well. And this past week in 24H2 dev and beta channels, they started testing Windows setting search through semantic search. So in other words, you bring up search. I've got to keep checking. It's Windows key.
And S also. So it's one of those is going away. It doesn't matter. But we bring up Windows search and then you can just type in using natural language. whatever the thing is you want to change, and it will recommend the right thing in settings, and then you can go there from search results, right? So fairly basic.
Richard last week, I think, mentioned the possibility, which I will now accept as a fact, that a lot of this stuff – no, and I mean that because it's very obviously – once he said it, I was like, yeah, this is clearly what's happening. setting the stage for a future where Copilot can control your PC in better ways, right? That today we use it to find a feature, right? You know, remember they added a search box to the top of Word and Excel and all those apps and you could type something in.
And it would say, here's where you go find that. You're like, okay, but how about you just do it? You know? And so I think these are the natural. progressions that these things go through. That's the equivalent of Siri saying, here's what I found on the web about that. Yeah. And because that's in the book. Yeah. When the, when AI evolves so quickly, like it is now, you can go to one AI and say,
how do I do this thing or whatever? And it will say, here's how, you know, here's how you do it. Or here's where you can go find that information. Sometimes it will say, I could just, I will just do that for you. And it's like, that's, that's the one you want, you know, the one that just does it. So I think we're going to get there. Also, Copilot plus PC only, but also Snapdragon X only for now is natural language.
in narrator's image descriptions, right? And so it can see people, objects, colors, text, and numbers in images, and then describe them. to you using natural language. That will happen across all co-pilot plus PCs. Eventually, that one is the one I'm really not too sure on timing-wise because You know, it rolls out Snapdragon X only. That's the progression there. So we'll see what happens.
Snipping tool was updated in Canary, but I see this on my dev computer. So there's a text extraction feature. This is the OCR functionality in this app, which is cool, but they're putting it right in the capture. bar, which is that little UI that appears when you first run it. And just to make it less clicks to get to it. So I think the idea here is that you took a shot. Or you open an image and then you can just immediately go and get the text out of it very easily.
So that is good. So that should be soon. That's an app. That one will happen quick. And then the last set is a bunch of stuff. So there's... Narrator has a speech recap feature. Again, natural language. That weird phone link start menu integration where the phone link is like a little bar there on the side, like a cancerous growth.
Some more File Explorer updates. I feel like we get those every month now. The Windows Share feature we talked about earlier where you can edit the image before you share it, right? Those are all in release preview. So that means we can expect those features. Next Tuesday, and I should say in preview, that's release preview 23H2. So we had previously talked about those features in 24H2. Sorry.
pretty identical looking set of features. So I think you could expect that again next month, right in Patch Tuesday. Okay. That's most of it. I think that was pretty quick. Wow. I didn't expect that. You know what I'm thinking about this list of features is that this is a good set of tools to mature.
When you're not sure if you're going to have a screen and a keyboard, like I immediately started thinking about how do you make augmented reality come true? It's these interfaces. Oh yeah. Text. It talks to you. You talk to it. Yeah. You don't need to find things. You want it to snip and extract for you. Like what I've noticed in all those descriptions there is I don't need a mouth.
I don't even re I need to see something, but I don't really need a screen. Yeah. Like now think of this from the perspective of I'm looking. through a pair of glasses with a camera on it at something else and saying, snip that text for me. Right. That's right. Yeah. This is, you know, it's funny. We've. I don't know. It feels like it's been 10 years, but in the couple of years now that we've been talking about this in the post-copilot announcement or whatever.
You know, I keep bringing up this notion of orchestration, right? This is my... I don't know, totem or something, but. Orchestration. You need a swelling orchestra every time you say that. Yeah. I feel like... There's platform level stuff, for lack of a better term, super technical term for it, that needs to happen.
for uh windows and then the apps that run in windows to in a sophisticated manner be controlled by ai because you can do screen scrape type stuff and we you know you see some of that obviously um But yeah, real time, actual control. This is going to come up in the AI section as well, because we're starting to see AI integrating with different AIs integrating with different.
I don't know, productivity stacks, if that makes sense. You know, Copilot plus Microsoft 365 is pretty obvious, but what about like Anthropic plus Microsoft 365? It's not a thing yet, but. It will be right. I mean, this stuff is all coming. So there's there. There's a programmability or an extensibility or an automation ability or whatever that has to occur in these platforms and Windows in this case.
But across, it's not just Windows, right? Because agents are going to have to integrate with online services as well. Same thing. For this stuff to make sense, for what Richard just described, it really makes sense. Everything that we interact with. in a kind of a secondhand way, right, through an agent or an AI or whatever. has to support that capability, right? For it to work well.
Now you have to get the feature set done, but here now you found a way to start maturing this feature set in the existing set of interfaces. Yeah. And once it gets to a certain point, you can now talk about other interfaces. Yeah. I mean, we've said this a bunch, but like Copilot is a good name because. In this current era, you have these tools which are traditional, which we're all very used to, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, whatever.
And Copilot is this thing that kind of sits over there and works with you. You might ask it questions. You might say, hey, could you do something with this document? But those tools either have to evolve or be replaced with something that's more. Well, goodness knows you can't actually sort out the control panel, so better to do this. Yes, that's right. Look, we can't even get dark mode on a window that File Explorer displays, but we're going to nail it with AI.
Yeah, it'll be fine. Everything will be fine. I know it'll be fine. I know. So much. Just add another layer on top to fix everything. Yeah. We get a Sanofsky team to come back to one of those architectural diagrams. where it's like Windows is this little line at the bottom and this is AI. That's the stack.
I was thinking more along, you just lay in shag carpet over the asbestos tiles, right? Yeah, and some future generation will pull this thing up and be like, oh my God, there were beautiful wood floors down here. What did they do? You know, why did they do that? Or someone painted the floor? I've never heard the Win32 API referred to as a beautiful wood floor before, but okay. Well, I was, yeah, it's, no, the WinAPI is a disaster.
No. There's stuff below that, though. It's gross and it's slimy, but it's there. Thunking is your friend. Dave Cutler told me so. Dave Cutler was right about everything. Just ask him. So, yeah, I was just because you mentioned it. Someone asked me about this, you know, that Dave Plummer we were talking about that does these videos.
I love him. I subscribe. I watch every video he makes, but he did one on Longhorn. And I don't know if we talked about this at all, but I very much wanted to watch this. I was super excited when I saw it. I was like, oh, we're going to learn something new here. And I didn't learn anything new.
It turns out he left Microsoft in 2003, which is when this heated up. And his stories are as secondhand as mine. And this is not a criticism. Just because of who he is and what he does, I was like, oh, my God, there's going to be some inside information. But, you know, as a Cutler acolyte.
He was, of course, kind of crapping on the other parts of Microsoft because that's what Cutler did. You know, these other people were children. They couldn't program correctly. Everything they did was terrible. We don't have to deal with bugs because we don't write bugs. mentality. That's right. It's the prince from The Princess Bride who says, if I'm wrong, and I'm never wrong, he kind of goes from there, right? But he is Cutler, right? Cutler's a genius. He is
He and his immediate acolytes could actually qualify for that. Mark Lukowski falls into this category. These guys were just absolute geniuses. So Dave Palmer is a really smart guy, but he wasn't in the upper echelon of that part of the company, right? I can handle Dave Cutler crapping on Jim Alchin or Longhorn, which he called shorter and hilarious. Like, it's okay.
But for someone else like Dave Plummer to just sort of ride along and do the same thing, it's like, yeah, you might want to. You're not that guy. Sorry. You're not there. And you're not right about everything. It was a little tough. Anywho, I'm not sure why. Cutler still goes to the office and he's in his 80s. And he's amazing. He is a force of nature. He's a force of nature. If he ever does pass away, he will disappear into a cloud of sparkles and there will be just like a black.
Mark on the ground, no one will. Arguably hit like RBC Clark. He will just go back to his original timeline. Yes. Yes. Where VMS actually made sense and we live in a different world. Yeah. Okay. I actually forgot why I went off on that little Longhorn story, but... There was a reason. I don't know. There were reasons. So we're bringing all the window stories together, but as I get old, they all kind of just blend together. So I transfer from time to time and space to space.
Just two more Windows-related stories. So Microsoft Edge, remember when they were still using their own rendering engine? They used to do these performance comparisons. They put the computers next to each other, run time, you know, things in. We used to get that a lot. We don't get that anymore because now they're using Chromium, right? Right. What's the point?
Yeah, well, one of the points is that when Microsoft makes changes to the rendering engine, they can just do it for Edge, so they could do their own thing. But they also kind of feed back into Chromium. They did that thing with the text. display only on Windows because it relies on Windows technology. But the text rendering across all Chromium browsers now is better because Microsoft contributed to that. But I guess they're still doing literal web rendering performance work.
outside of Chromium, although they suggest some of the stuff will go back. because they've done that in the past as well. And I guess in the latest version of Edge, if you haven't updated your browser or didn't update for you, you should do that. depending on... It updates a browser. It just sort of happens. Just sort of happens. Yeah, it will end in OSU when it happens. But...
So apparently it's a noticeably faster web rendering. So 9%, I'm not saying it's a huge number, but then again, it is 2025. Right. It's interesting that you can get that kind of a... performance gain and of course they've been doing the performance at some point it's an indictment really now you find 10 that's well now okay so that and this is my problem with well one of my problems with these apple events every year where they're like, iOS 19 is 47% blah, blah, blah. And you're like, how? How?
How awful was the thing you shipped last year that you could possibly – you don't get big double-digit gains every year. What's going on? But I guess they do. Is it only Edge or is this a Chromium Speedup? Right now it's only edge. It might be in a branch. They should contribute it back though, right? They do. They do. I mean, so the quote that they provided about this was our unique approach and focus to optimizing speed and the code changes we continuously make to edge and.
to the chromium rendering engine within it good to real-world performance improvements when using the browser. Oh, but they don't say they're putting contributors back. They don't say this particular feature, but they do. They have. So my guess is this will, in fact, feedback because it will. They've been pretty good about that. There's some incentive for them not to write. If they don't contribute it back, then you might.
not use chrome you might use edge yeah but then you left on the on the fork and now now you're raising everybody yeah you want to be careful with that you can't do that yeah i agree i agree it's bad form if you're suggesting The new version of .NET always has big performance improvements that are measurable. That's another one. That's right. Yeah. Every time. But I should point out that Chromium Engine's based on... the blink engine's based on uh khtml and uh and i don't think google
You don't think there's a lot going on with that? I mean, that's what you do. The KDE desktop environment in Linux has benefited greatly from Google's work. Somehow I doubt it, but you never know. You never know.
I don't know. I've never heard that, but it could be. And then this one's just kind of fun. So there is something called the National Recording Registry that's part of the U.S. Library of Congress. That'll be the next part of our government that gets axed once they find out it still exists.
But they have, as they do every year, they induct songs, albums, artists, all kinds of things into this. So it goes into the Library of Congress. It's there. So this particular one is Happy Trails by Roy Rogers. The Chicago album, the Chicago Transit Authority. Helen Reddy, Steve Miller Band, Tracy Chapman, Celine Dion, all kinds of stuff.
Hello, Dummy, the comedy album by Don Rickles, 1968. That's in the Library of Congress. Wow. There are two Microsoft-related things in here, one of which I found immediately confusing, but then cleared it up. The first one is what they call the Windows Reboot Chime from Windows 95. This one? No, that's a donkey brain. I don't know what that was. Uh, you know, that bloom, bloom, bloom. Yeah. Pleasant sound. Right. So Brian, you know, is a, he makes a lot of atmosphere.
I love the little piano. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, it's nice. It's pretty. And then they redid it again in Vista, and I'm sure they've redone it. Several times since then, but nobody cares anymore. But at that time, this was a big deal. So that was kind of a nice, that was nice. These were all distraction tools for the fact that you were waiting to boot up. That one? Yeah. of sounds in the air. I found a...
This is a YouTube channel. Evolution of all Windows startup and shutdown sounds. Yeah. What's the guy? Robert Fripp was the guy who did the Windows Vista sounds. Frippetronics. From Crimson. King Crimson. King Crimson. Thank you. He and Eno are buddies. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. But the other Microsoft related item that made it into the national registry or the national recording registry.
is the soundtrack album for the game Minecraft. Wow. When I saw Minecraft soundtrack, I thought, you don't mean the movie that just came out. No, no, no, no. No, I guess there was a... In Minecraft, you have records that you could put on a... There are... So there's, yeah, there's music. Yeah, yeah. But if you go to Spotify or whatever service and search for Minecraft soundtrack, you will find this. And a lot of it is made by, I think it's C418 or something.
but it's called mine the theme song is minecraft volume alpha oh man this brings me back i hear this i feel like i'm in the i'm in the mines this is a little bit like a brian you know kind of thing isn't it totally yeah but there's a whole uh well you know there's an album of these songs and so and now i can play it because it's in the library of congress that's right
Honestly, to me, it almost sounds of the same era as the Windows 95 music. It does, doesn't it? Well, it's certainly the same. This one's called Wet Hands. It's very relaxing. It's one of the reasons I actually... like Minecraft because it's very relaxing. Yeah, I told the story a million times, but I walked into my son's room one day and he wasn't playing like an action game. He was playing something that looked weird to me. And I was like, what the hell is this?
And he says, this is Minecraft. I'm like, what do you, you know, what do you do? And he's like, you built things. I was like, okay. And then this, this. thing floated by in this space or whatever. And he goes, that's my cousin. Harrison. He just works in security. Harrison's in there too, huh? So he had a little server going. They were doing something together. That's so cool. I was just like, carry on. That looks cool. This thing is good. Oh, it's the best.
I've spent many hundreds of hours in Minecraft. Yeah. Building crap. Well, I hope you enjoy the movie later. It looks ridiculous. You know we have a Twit Minecraft server. Oh, yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah. They never did this, but to this day, I mean, the best HoloLens demo I ever got was that first one where... They did Minecraft in the room we were in. Oh, I know. Like this Minecraft castle on it. But the wall was a Minecraft wall. You know, it looked like Minecraft.
And, uh, it was the real room, but it was all on the stuff, you know, and the wall broke open, the bricks came out and these Minecraft bats came flying out and everyone was like, you know, like, like it kind of went right at you. And it was, I was like, yeah, this is amazing. And we never did anything. Do you know how many Minecraft players owned a HoloLens headset? Zero. Not counting employees from Microsoft? Zero. Wow. Wow. Oh man. I always wanted that. I would almost go out and buy, you know.
a vision pro or whatever. The list of things that almost happened with Minecraft is really interesting. Cause remember they were going to do like a really realistic graphics thing, but there was something, I think it might've been called Minecraft live. They demonstrated it on stage. It was a game. You could go around. It was around briefly. You could go in the real world and Minecraft would be there. I used to play it.
Yeah. Okay. So I remember the demo on stage because they were on stage. It looked like a chasm opened in front of them or something that went down into the ground. I was like, oh yeah. Like you could tell like this is. It was so cool. this type of stuff. And it would be persistent. It was using that Azure location technology. Okay, yeah. Azure Places or whatever they call it. I'm sure this was inspired by, what was that mobile game? It used to play this all the time. It was Pokemon Go.
that's why i picked it up because i thought oh this will be great this will be the next go for minecraft yeah and they killed it like almost like months later they didn't didn't Well, these days, if you don't get 100 million users in two months, which is not important. It's really true. I don't remember if there was an excuse or reason.
I don't know. Maybe there were people walking off of piers. You know, it was bad enough like Apple Maps debuted and people drive in the middle of the desert because there were no roads there. Like imagine you're walking, now you're walking around in the real world. I mean, you could walk into walls, get hit by cars.
I'm kind of sad. Pokemon, which was kind of a Google spinoff, Niantic. The guys at Niantic were the Google Maps guys. And it just sold out for billions of dollars to the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Fund. So the Saudis now own Pokemon. Pokemon Go. I was an Ingress player for a while. Ingress was their predecessor, yes. I loved Ingress. It was too complicated for normal people.
But for us, it was great. It became a game where, you know, it was very much an insider's game. But you had to walk, the thing is you had to get, and this was, I loved about Pokemon too, was you had to get out and do it. You had to. walk around. This is the best steak I've ever had in my life. You'd hate it. You're more of a French guy. You're not going to like this. If you just had my level of taste. It's not for you, Paul.
No AI in it. I'm sorry. A1 on it. Not for the peasants. Goodness knows. HP sauce, as we call it. HP sauce. Ladies and gentlemen, let's pause for a moment to remember Steve. and the minecraft movie which as as i uh as it currently stands is the number one movie in all of the world It will always be number one in my heart. And I wish it would die in a fire. I don't understand why this movie is popular. Jack Black pays Steve. That's all you need to know.
That is all I need to know. I agree. That was my primary reason for ignoring it. He's a good looking guy. I'm waiting for it. I'm waiting for it to stream it. I'm not going to a movie theater ever again. It'll be fine on an airplane. Exactly. Richard has airplane movies. I have my Minecraft movie soundtrack. Take a nap. You'd be better off. So relaxing. So relaxing. I'm going to download Minecraft and show you the Twit build. It's really amazing. Yeah.
Oh my gosh. Is there anything in it? Like one of the promises of doom for a little while was that people would make maps of real places and you could play, right? The brick house studios are in it. Yeah. Okay. See, that's cool. Yeah. i like that kind of thing uh it started with uh chad johnson omg craft yeah yeah yeah they built that for years the three or four maybe five people were really devoted and then i saved it we had a copy of it
And we put it back up on the server. And then I don't want to run the server out of my house anymore. Well, only because I need all the upstream bandwidth I can get. This was back in the studio where we had so much upstream bandwidth. So, very kind fella in our club whose name escapes him. I'm trying to remember his name. But anyway, Lion Admiral 1981.
Lion Admiral 1981 took it over and he's running it. So if you want to get into our Minecraft server, we have a survival server that's set to like super tough too. Just join the club, seven bucks a month. add free versions of all the shows and access to the minecraft server well see i should mention that more i know i'm surprised this isn't more of a perk mention yeah you know yeah uh go into the let's play channel on our discord and say add me because you do have to get whitelisted
All right, let's pause and come back. Much more of Windows Weekly on the horizon. But as soon as it gets here, we'll let you know. What's that on the horizon? It's on the horizon. It's at the end of the tunnel. Oh, that's not going to be good. Might be a train. First, a word from our sponsor, the wonderful folks at 1Password. Here's a question for you from 1Password. Do your end users...
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One, P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D dot com slash Windows Weekly. Thank you so much for the support of Windows Weekly. You support us when you go to that address. OnePassword.com slash. Windows Weekly, all lowercase. On we go with the show. I've lost. I'm sorry. No, God, I'm sorry. No, please. I'm just going to say to you, what's up in the hardware sphere? What's up? Yeah, some stuff. What's up? What I was going to say was I've kind of lost track of the history of this. You know, before the pandemic.
Microsoft was working on these Surface Hub devices, right? Which are kind of a... Which were a hit. Yeah, at the time when we were all going into, you know, businesses or meeting rooms together and they were doing great. Projectors and replacing a whiteboard all in one. Before this, they had, remember, it was like a pixel sense display and now they use the term pixel sense to describe.
surface PC displays. The original surface was that crazy table that didn't work on stage. Right. Right. And was the type of thing a hotel or a casino would buy. but not the type of thing a person would buy. Right. And so they, it was broken the moment you installed it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it was by design. It was fine. I remember seeing like cruise ships in Vegas.
There were some cool demos for it. I'd like the return to the sit-down Pac-Man style machine where you could be across from someone in both. When you switch players, the screen was swapped so they could play or whatever. It kind of resembled that to me. Surface Hub, the first version, 50-ish and 80-ish inch screens, I forget. But then right before the pandemic, yeah, they announced Surface Hub.
I guess two. And this is the one where it was like on an easel and you could string three of them together and have one big screen. It was going to be amazing. And then it was, you know, the pandemic. Then the world ended, yeah. Yeah. Tied to this, I sort of forget the OSs, but the original Service Hub had like a Teams edition of Windows 10, I would imagine. And then, of course, in time, they...
had a Windows-based OS. I think it was like Surface OS or whatever that they were going to use as they kind of evolved these things. But the original Surface Hub is now... well, 10 years old. So in October, it's going end of life and there's no- There's no upgrade for it. You can't put Linux on it. There's no real plans for this thing. It doesn't manage to just burst into flames either. It's just going to get no update.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, but, you know, as software evolves and, you know, we'll see, I mean, it's, we'll see what happens, but I suppose given the nature of this device, maybe it's not as. big of a problem essay with a pc but um but you know it's interesting it's been that long i mean to me it's just like wow okay i mean the probable thing for a 2015 surface hub is it hasn't been turned on in three years
Yeah. Well, now the people are returning to the office is not a thing. It's the hot new trend in offices. actually using the office. The other thing the pandemic did is to get everybody a camera rig and experience with sharing software. Now the question is, do you need to go into the meeting room? Yeah. Well, I think...
I think being in person is the point of this return office thing, actually. So maybe, I mean, which also begs the question, what do you need that thing for? Because that was always about somebody's not in the office and others. Yeah. Well, I mean, depending on the business, there will probably still be people around the office, but. If that's not the case, it's still a big display, right? I mean, I suppose you could...
Just as a display or whatever. Remote your display to it. The other thing about thinking about 2015 is think about how much better camera gear is. or the 3d sensors like If you could afford all those things in the first place and they were not cheap. You can afford, you're either out of business and you don't care.
or you won anyway. I'm going to forget the details of this too, because again, pre pandemic and it just kind of dropped off the face of the earth, but the original like service hub to us, whatever they were called. We got a really good – it was one of the last – yeah, it was one of the last things I did before the pandemic, I think. But they did these in-person demos where these things actually had USB-C ports all around the edges, and you could plug in like a –
You know, webcam, if it was oriented this way, you could pop it up on the top and they were, had lots of sensors and all that kind of stuff. And they would do palm rejection when you were writing on the screen and they get, you know, multiple people writing on the screen, same time, et cetera, et cetera. It's cool stuff. But like I said, the OSs have evolved. Surface Hub 2S is from...
Three, four years later, I think it originally ran on the same Windows 10 team version that the OG Surface Hub ran on, but you could migrate that to what's now called Teams Rooms for Windows. whatever. I don't know. So there's still, you know, this, this may be a business that kind of springs back to life for them just because of, well, the other thing is there's a ton of competitors now, right? There's all kinds of smart boards near hub, like, yep.
Microsoft fumbled this. Google killed theirs. Yeah, they had a silly name. What was that thing called? it became with the j i think yeah i can't remember i can't remember either jam something jamboard yeah it was jamboard yeah you're right but yeah so it was kind of like the the chrome os version of this you know like a like And, you know, that might meet a certain need, too, if they still made it. But this will always have a place, I think, in big enterprises. Yeah.
But they also want to get it from a conventional vendor. Microsoft should get out of it. Like an actual display vendor? What a thought. I mean, that's probably going to be a lot and is today a lot more common, obviously. There you go. Surface Hub 3 85 inch with pens and smart camera, $32,000. Jeez, forget it. The original one, I think, was just north of 20 when they announced. Maybe it was 18 at first, then it went above 20.
So they figured, oh, it's enterprises. They pay $10,000 for their Cisco. zoom room so they'll pay i don't think it was like this i don't think it was like a cynical like how much could we charge i it really did cost that much i think they were expensive you know well yeah 85 inch screens are big expensive. I mean, like even surface PCs, like the surface studio, everyone sees that and says, yeah, okay, but I just want the screen. And it's like, okay, well,
The PC is $3,500. Just the screen is going to be $3,300. You know, like it's, it's, it's the most expensive component by far. It's more expensive than all of the other components. Like it's really expensive. But yeah, I, yeah, I just have, I. You spend that much money though. You hate to hear it's at its end of life. Well, at least you didn't have like a four or five year period where you couldn't even use it. So it's fine.
what are you going to get back to like why would you buy one of these when everybody has a camera and a screen and sharing software and like it's turned out to be kind of an absolute concept yeah so it's it beautifully solved a problem that was becoming irrelevant that's right That's the Microsoft story in a nutshell. So I guess, I don't know. No, it was a boardroom piece. It was cooler than a projector, right? It was that you wanted that, that Tony Stark sort of interactive effect. Yeah.
You know, one would argue now you should go the meta way and everybody puts on a on a. Yeah, we should all sit in the same room with Boba fed helmets on our heads. Because that's not dystopic at all. Oh, what a world, what a world. I know. Someday, I can't wait to, we'll be sitting on the couch watching a movie, you know, my wife and I or you and your wife or whatever.
You won't even be talking through a microphone. You'll actually get up to go to the bathroom and be like, oh, I forgot what you looked like. What happened? I'm over here, honey. I'm on the net. I am your father. You're still in a period where startups get too much money, right? Where they're getting an A round of $25 million. And so consistently I have a CEO coming at me going.
how do i build the ultimate boardroom like we're gonna go get this exotic wood table and so forth but the hardware like i need it to be special What does Putin use? Because that looks pretty good. I would imagine that in those scenarios, whatever he's using gets updated every two weeks. The problem is they spend all this money on something and then you want to use it for years as you would and it's out of date. It's pretty quick. But that's technology. I'm not telling you.
Intel has made their first major move under their new CEO. This one's kind of interesting. They sold 51% stake, so a majority stake in Altera, which is their... field gate programmable array business that they bought for a lot more money than it's worth now several years ago. Altera was actually founded in 1983, which is... Went public in 1988. Intel acquired it in 2015 for $16.7 million based on a 51% stake worth $4.46 billion. We're saying that this thing is now worth about $8.7 million.
seven, five billion. Nice. So Intel is once again, have as the touch of Midas to them here, but, but these components are super important. And today they're used in cloud data centers. Intel still owns the other 49%. They're going to remove those earnings from their earnings report, but they still have an ownership stake and they'll still be able to take advantage of it. I think they did some sort of
I forgot the name of the chips. Not the mainstream chips for PCs, but the high-end chips, which were for workstations and now are for... uh data center they integrate with these type of chips so you have like a standard powerful intel cpu that is kind of monolithic but it could be attached to these um it's a weird thing to say like f what do you call these things function field array or field programmable. Oh, FPGAs. FPGAs. We need a better term for this.
Field programmable Gatorade. Yeah. Not Gatorade. No. Gatorade. By the way, here's Putin's setup. I just thought you might want to. Richard, when they ask you next time, just, you know. Yikes. Tell them this is what you need. That's unimpressive. Also, is he in a Hilton? What is this? It looks like he's in, you're right, a Hilton ballroom. That's pretty funny. There's a couple of computers under the table. He calls down and he's like,
I plugged my ethernet cable into the port and it's not doing anything. You know, like, yeah, it's a Hilton. That's how it works. It doesn't. It's a Hilton. Yeah. You have the worst wifi on earth. You know, that's pretty funny. You're right. It looks like a hotel ballroom. This is so weird looking now. Who knows? Okay. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but when Steve Jobs announced the iPad in 2010, He positioned it as this thing that was going to sit between a phone and a PC.
And the way he said it was something like, the thought or the question has arisen as if, as if it's coming, came up out of a swamp like steam. It's like, The question has arisen, is there another device we could sell to everybody? Oh, yes, the answer is yes.
So, but Steve Jobs was very upset with the reaction to the first iPad because people, this is when we started talking about consumption devices, right? This is a term we never really used before. And he had this list of things that it was better than PCs or... phones at at the time, you know, email, web browsing, reading, blah, blah, blah, whatever, most of which are consumption activities. And so for the second iPad,
He said, this is the post-PC era. We make most of our money on post-PC devices. this is the future of the computer. And they updated their iWork apps at the time, and they made sure there were a bunch of third-party kind of creation apps. But iPads today are still... kind of consumption devices for the most part. I know they have iPad Pro, but the iPad OS is limited. dramatically and on purpose not to harm Mac cells.
iPad Pros that cost over $1,000. Oh, my setup costs more than an Apple laptop. Yeah, so you could throw together an iPad Air or Pro of either size screen with their keyboard and their pen. And that thing costs more than a MacBook Air. So the question has arisen, Leo, is there room for iPadOS to improve?
so that it actually could work as well as a computer. And my answer to that for a couple of years now has been yes, but they haven't done it. So every year, WWDC rolls around. Every year, I'm like, maybe this is the year.
you know, the iPad Pro, any iPad is so limited that if you're using Final Cut Pro, whatever app it is, to render some video and you get an email and you switch to mail it stops rendering you know it this is it has the most powerful processor imaginable it's the same thing they use in their computers i mean i know there are more powerful versions of the chip but
This little, thin, wonderful, portable device could be so much more than it is. And now Mark Gurman has a report that they might actually be doing it this year. He's very vague. But he says they're going to, part of this stuff, they're going to announce in two months. is improvements to iPadOS to make it more like the Mac. Yeah. Multitasking, things like that. God forbid. You know, so I last year said, look, you forked iOS into iPadOS, fork it again into iPadOS Pro.
and put that stuff, make it for iPad Pro only or maybe iPad Air and Pro, whatever. That's fine. Most people who buy a normal iPad or a mini are using it to watch movies and read books and play games. You don't have to do that stuff over there. If you're going to spend as much or more on an iPad as you would on a MacBook Air, You know, this is overdue. So supposedly it's happening. I guess we'll see. I don't know. I'll be the test bed for this. It's funny. I want to use this so bad. Yeah. Why?
Just for, because, well, this is the, this is the dream, right? So this is the one thing that can do everything. Right. It's never been done effectively. Maybe there are exceptions, but, you know, a folding iPhone or phone that could turn into a small tablet, it gets there. But one device that you travel with where you attach a keyboard and you work normally like you would on a laptop.
But then you take that thing off and you can watch, you know, play games or you can do whatever you want without that stuff on it. Cool. And then the battery life is amazing, right? Yeah, it's all day for sure. Yeah. This is, you know. Apple's the one company I think could get this right. You can take something complicated by Windows, like Windows, and chop off parts and try to get something simpler, which they technically did for iOS. I get that.
But now you have iOS. It gets more and more sophisticated every year. It just needs a couple of things. And then you get the stuff that's important, but you don't get any of the legacy Deadwood. And so there's a, I don't know, this is kind of a dream. We'll see. I mean, they've never done it, you know, so far. And I think it's artificially limited at this point, but. There's an interesting. change in the user base at this point where people use their iPhones.
Maybe to the exclusion of everything else. That's their main computer. Their primary computer device. Yep. And so they're very used to the interface, the applications, the way it works. Maybe it makes sense for Apple to say, okay, we're going to embrace this change. Well, I just don't know why they're hesitating.
A customer you've already got on a Mac and move them to an iPad? Why are you sad? It's the same price. It's the same customer. That was kind of my point. Once the prices of the iPads rose to the point where the excuse for not doing it goes away. I'll be very interested. I mean, I have, they put the M4 in the iPad pro before. That's what I mean. Like you gotta be, I don't, incredible.
So, I feel like if Steve Jobs had not passed away because remember, so the iPad 2 was 2011. He was actually out on hiatus because of health reasons. Right. Came back to do the presentation. It was so important to him. They did that special cover that they still use, which is amazing. I mean, I don't know the dates off the top of my head, but it took them a very long time. So he passed away that year. He passed away that October. So I feel like if he had stuck around,
They would have pushed the iPad as the future of computing. I really think he was very hot on this post PC thing. Right. Tim Cook is not a visionary. He is a bean counter. I think he looked at this and said, you know, what would be better than replacing the Mac is selling people both. i that's my i'm just i mean i'm projecting here i don't know that this ever conversation ever occurred we talk about this all the time on mac break weekly it's uh it's we don't know it's inconceivable
I don't think that word means what you think it means. I don't remember the dates. I'm not. I'm not the big Apple guy, but you know, over time they introduced a keyboard cover that didn't have a touch pad on it. It was like, well, you'll touch the screen, but we also have this stupid Apple pencil, the thing Steve Jobs made fun of and said, wait, no one will ever want. And then they eventually added the trackpad with the support and they...
You know, but it didn't have keyboard shortcuts or it didn't, you know, it was always a little bit limited. And then just the OS now is limited with back on tasks and specific multitasking features, whatever. I do think though that a generation that's grown up on the iPhone.
you could completely embrace it and say plus once they do their folding devices i mean then you can carry it and it's i mean look i've tried every version we all have right i know you guys have both done this like back when i i think this might have been a sony or a palm tx or i remember what the thing was a little palm device right
What are the later ones as they got kind of nice little fold out keyboard, little thing you kind of stick it on there. I'm on a flight typing my thousand word editorial about whatever. I'm living the dream. I'm flying through space like Thor.
And then there's a little boop-boop in the plane. And the little palm thing went boop and lost the connection, lost everything I wrote. It's gone. So, I mean, I've tried. Like we talk about Jerry Purnell used to love those little Windows CE handheld PC things. the size and shape of a mobile keyboard. So the screen was like this.
you know, like a Hummer view outside and, you know, you hunch over it, you do whatever. Cause I think there's a class of people, we used to call them knowledge workers or information workers, people who travel for work. who you know they want the latest thing possible but they also wanted to do as much as possible and you try to
I feel like a MacBook Air is pretty close. That's what I was thinking. It's the definitive machine in that class. And for a long time, literally the best computer in the world. And you could Julianne fries with it. It was so sharp. My daughter just got a... the M four version of the, uh, pretty spectacular MacBook air. Yeah. And the reason she wanted to do, she had a, a surface pro. I don't remember nine, maybe.
And she loved it. She liked the pen, you know, she's a student. So she would, you know, she drew and took notes and all that stuff like a kid would do, I guess. But this thing got like two and a half hours of battery life. She was freaking her out. And I was like, well. You can get a new one of these, I guess. You could get the Snapdragon thing. I mean, that would be pretty good. But I'm like, I got to tell you, if you get a MacBook Air, it's going to last forever.
Yeah. And so you're not going to think about carrying your charger with you because you don't work long enough to use it. It's incredible. So you'll be home before. She's probably exaggerating as a windows guy to say that. That's no, I, I, last year I bought the M3 version and I would say. One of the big achievements of the Copilot Plus PC is they got into the ballpark of this, but... The MacBook Air I had, 15-inch, the bigger one, is about 15 hours real-world battery life, which is nuts.
The best Snapdragon 11-ish, 12 maybe, maybe 8 to 12, depending on the machine, depending on conditions, whatever. There's no fan in the Mac will care. But the one she got, she has a small one. She says she gets 18 hours of battery life. I'm not sure how she rated that.
She was, she's overjoyed by this. It's what she does. You know, it really is dependent. I don't get very nearly what you were saying because of what I do on my Mac book. So it's just really. Yeah. So I just, the normal way that I use computers, I. That's what I got on that computer. It's impressive. Most of the PCs, I get like six or seven hours if you're lucky.
But it also comes with, and Richard was talking about these cameras and sensors and stuff earlier. It has an, I think it's eight megapixel. Yeah, just crisp, like just super nice camera. So the iPad Air I have is like an okay camera. I don't even know. It might even be like. It might even be 720p. I don't know what it is. It's like, okay. It's nothing special. You know, the screen's like tiny. It's really thin. But the one she has, it's really nice. Like you can really see the difference.
Alex Lindsay, it's funny, has been saying that the microphones now on the laptop are so good that he often doesn't send a standalone microphone out in his. So that's fascinating to me because I would say in the PC space, that's the one thing that's still lacking. They've totally caught up on webcams. That stuff's awesome. Five megapixels, very common. You're set in C8 as well.
It's the microphones are garbage. And I do the same recording test every time to try to figure out some setting. There's all this AI nonsense you can do and whatever. And it just doesn't. I've never found one that's any good. You need a microphone to me. I would never do a podcast on that. The screen, the built-in one, unless it was an emergency or whatever. An emergency podcast. We wouldn't let you.
to be honest. No, you're very, yeah, you would very clearly be like, I don't know what you think you're using. It sounds like you're under the ocean or something, but this is not working. So yeah, no, it's very clear that it is not clear. Anyway, WWC, we'll see if they actually do it. I hope so. I'm curious.
On the flip side of this equation, Google has laid off hundreds of employees in their newly consolidated platforms and devices division. This is where they brought together Android and Pixel into one group along with, I don't know, Chrome. the Nest devices and Fitbit and all that stuff. I don't think this is as bad as maybe it sounds at first glance, only because We all knew this was coming. They actually asked people to agree. consolidating and some number did, but I think these are the
The ones that did not. You fools. You should have left. You could have taken the money and run. We told you to leave. They're like, they'll never let me off. I'm so important. What happened? Told you to leave, but you didn't. You wouldn't. We tried. it feels like a stumbling drunk they just yeah you just really wonder what's what the heck's going on up there I don't know. I started using the latest Pixel again, which I have to say I love.
It's a nice phone. The camera's wonderful. It's the most welcome thing in the world going back to that. Like when you take a photo, it could be of anything. It could be like a drink in a bar or a sunset or whatever. And it's like...
You're like, every time you're like, oh my God, look at this. Like, I know I'm going to get used to it and stop doing this, but every time I look at this picture, look at this, you know, it's amazing. But then you look at the battery life and you're like, oh yeah, they're right. There's a downside. Nothing's free. Yeah, nothing's free. And then the watch thing is...
I want to physically harm it. I hate it so much. Part of it is just the normal notification thing where it's not set up properly yet, so it's notifying me too much about stuff. I know I'm going to get on top of that. And the way I'm going to do that is by turning off notifications entirely because it's driving me insane.
I swear to God, five, six times yesterday, this thing was, and I don't mean it, it didn't go bing. It went like, or whatever. And I look and there's nothing there. And I'm like, okay. Just making noises. No notification. There's nothing. I don't know why I did it. They're released five times. I cannot explain it. It sounds like my rice cooker. I can't. If anyone has any Samsung appliances, they sing songs. They're like, delete your clothes, you're done. It's unbelievable.
So we have one at home and we have one here and they sing different songs. This one's a little more of a Mexican traditionally. It's a trumpet sound. I don't know. It's just, you know, it's Mexican. Do they really? Oh, see, that's interesting. So it's not actually specific. It's definitely a different song. I can tell you that. I don't know why. Interesting. What do they do in Canada? Do you have any?
Canadian. Oh, Canada, your clothes are dry. And the chicken dance. That's what we do. That would be good for you, actually. There's nothing here that couldn't be turned into something that makes a lot of noise. that's just the it's the it's the washer and the dryer and the rice cooker and we've got a japanese water boiler too that plays a song and the water is hot wow yeah i used to have a japanese water purifier
That would have a rigmarole. Yeah, this is like, okay, so maybe this is an Asian thing, but it's like, we want your electronics to make you happy. Yeah, right. They were probably among the first to try to like personal, you know, make them into like people like things, right? Like even though it's a white square that doesn't look like a person. Although I guess I am a white square, depending on how you look at it.
Yeah. So I think like these, like, you know, I play little happy songs. So like, maybe it makes you happy. Whereas I'm always like, is there a button where I can turn this thing off? Can I gouge it with like a... We have a German dishwasher and all it does is make a very annoying beep.
Oh, yeah. Of course. We're done. We are done. It's true. Come open the dishwasher. I was driving slowly through a town in some small town in Germany, and there was an old man with a cane, and he's walking like two miles per hour or whatever. And I'm like, obviously, I'm going to let this guy go. Even though I could have just driven through the intersections, no one else there. And he looks at me and he like shook his cane at me and I was like, I was like, go.
And then he hit the car. He's like, no, you have the right of way. He didn't say it in English. You must follow the rules. We're following the rules. Actually, I appreciate that. because i hate it when you come to a stop sign and it's obviously this person's right away well and he says it's okay go ahead and it's like this is how accidents happen yeah
Follow the rules. Listen, I live in Pennsylvania. There's no rules. There are rules that nobody follows. What I don't like is uncertainty. Pennsylvania is all about uncertainty. It's like, are you going to go? Oh, you want to go? Why don't you go? I'll go. Oh, no. Oh, you're going to go? And it's like, guys, it's a freaking intersection. Let's go. One of you go. First person here goes first. In Mexico, it's...
It's dystopian. It's a fight every time. It could be a person. It could be on a bike. It could be a car, bus. It doesn't matter. As long as you're... Act aggressive and you always have the right of way. There you go. Yeah. It's very different. Anyway, Sam's like, I don't know what we're talking about anymore, but I don't know. There it is.
Yeah, like what? You remember? That's the rice cooker song. Little watchers used to do this, right? You would have like a, I don't know, a Timex or some old-fashioned watch, and they would always play little songs. Why is there a song built into this thing? I can't even tell the time. But now it's Pavlovian. My mouth just started watering because the rice is done. The rice is done. That's amazing. I hope that's true. Twinkle, twinkle, little star when it starts.
And according to Wikipedia, it plays a tune called Amaryllis when it's done. Did Brian Eno do this music? Because that would bring this whole thing home. That would bring us full circle. That would be amazing. Full circle. All right, let's take a break because the rice is done. I have to say though, a Zozi Rushi rice cooker is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Wow. I'll let Lisa know you said that. She agrees, by the way. She's like, I'm a distant number two. We both look at it. We go, it makes perfect rice every time. It's like you don't have to think about it. You're moving to New Zealand. You're leaving the rice cooker. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. You can have the house. I just want the rice. I want the rice cooker. That's going to have everything in it. I just want the rice cooker.
All right, let's take a little break. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Therott, Richard Campbell, wonderful to see you both in your native habitats for the time being. Our show today brought to you by U.S. Cloud. Let me tell you, the name does not tell you exactly what they do. It sounds like a cloud service, right?
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Sam gave us a great testimonial. He's the technical operations manager at Bede Gaming, B-E-D-E, Bede Gaming. Of course, they use a lot of Azure. He gave U.S. Cloud five stars. He said, quote, We found some things that had been running for three years, which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But once we got to 40 or 50,000 a month, it really started to add up. Yeah, that would, wouldn't it?
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I mean, you can't lose uscloud.com. And if they ask you, please do me a favor and say, oh yeah, I heard about you on Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard and Leo said it was great. Thank you, U.S. Cloud4. Supporting this fine effort, we call Windows Weekly. I'm going to go get a little rice. And now I wish I had some rice. Oh, yeah. I read an article by a woman who grew up in a Chinese family. And she said she bought these.
Chinese, dried Chinese sausages. Put two in the rice cooker when you cook the rice, and it flavors the whole thing. And then Doc Rock, who's from Hawaii, said, in Hawaii, what we do, he says, get the zoji rushi. And when you have leftover pizza, Kentucky fried chicken.
Nice. You put it in with the rice in the rice cooker and it flavors the whole thing. Oh, God. Doesn't that sound good? It sounds fantastic. When's the last time I had Kentucky Fried Chicken? Well, that's the problem. I have it all the time. Here really? Not here. It's terrible in Mexico, but yeah, I really like Kentucky Fried Chicken. So I see here something that says this just in, and then that's all it says. Is there breaking news? There is.
So Microsoft stopped making their own keyboards and mice and peripherals, right? Under their Microsoft brand, they still have some server stuff. But in doing that, they got rid of... to bet the keyboard I'm using right here. Like I love this thing, the sculpt ergonomic keyboard. Oh yeah, the ergo keyboard, yeah.
But in case, and Microsoft announced, in case it was going to bring these things back from the grave or whatever, and then it never happened, but it just happened. So the Sculpt ergonomic keyboard or desktop set, I should say, is available from. in case designed by Microsoft, right? It looks identical. In fact, let me see how identical it looks. Yeah, it's so identical it doesn't even have a co-pilot.
key on it it has it's the same like layout as the thing i'm looking at the sculpt keyboard is a cult like there are oh yeah levers is keyboard they buy them whenever they find them buy as many as they can i used to have three of them in a closet and i'm in my in a box you're in the cult yeah i love it 80 bucks that sounds like the same price right that's about what it was
Sorry, that's not the right one. It's not? This is designed by Microsoft. Yeah, that's a different one. I mean, there are other ones. Oh, I see. There's a whole line of design. Yeah, there's a whole line of these things. So it's the Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop Set. So it's keyboard, mouse, and keyboard. 150 bucks which was about the same price I think My only issue with it is that it was a proprietary USB-A dongle and it still is.
Here it is. And I wish it was a slash Bluetooth. Why? I thought it was going to be slash Bluetooth, but whatever. I will buy one of these immediately. It's wired only? Is that it? No, it's wireless. But it uses a dongle. Oh, that's silly. Yep, but it works great. This is it, right? 150 bucks. Yep, that's it. I'm using it right now. Well, I'm using the Microsoft one. Everybody's one of the vintage ones. I can't show this to you effectively, but I have a USB-A.
C to A with a cable. So I put the dongle in the end of it and it's stuck into the front of the Thunderbolt dock I use. Plus it brings it closer to the keyboard so there's less interference or whatever. Yeah, I love this thing. I love it so much. InCase. InCase makes, I've had other InCase stuff. They make a lot of accessories. Yeah, they're pretty well known. And actually, yeah, if you go to their design by Microsoft,
menu thing, which I think you did. I did. There's a bunch of stuff. And this was not the case fairly recently. So they had a couple of things, I think, for a while. But now it looks like they got a whole whole thing going. So you can get just the keyboard for one 20. They do have a Bluetooth keyboard, but it's a square regular every day. No, I don't. I wish this thing.
I thought they were going to update it. In fact, I thought part of the update was it was going to have the co-pilot key. That was going to be one, right? And that would be... Also Bluetooth, but I guess no, it's still the same. Whatever. It took long enough. I'm glad they're making it. It's better. You know, it's better than... Get it back a couple? Like, just... Well, not at 150 bucks, but I'll definitely, if I ever thought these things were going away, which.
Yes, I did that before, and then I went through them. Yeah, that's the thing. I flew here with one to bring it here. Yeah. Yep. Breaking news. Samsung, you got a little sun. Okay. Yes. Sure. And my clothes are dry. Yes, right. And your rice is done. So, Notion does this thing where there's like a weird scrollbar thing over on the right and I keep clicking it by mistake and it scrolls all the way down to the bottom of the document. Don't do that.
Okay. So AI, we can go through some of this pretty quickly, but... Oh, wait a minute. I got it. I got to run. My clothes are dry. I'll be right back. This goes on for hours. It's quite a song. No, the same size, right? Is this, is this a sampling thing? Cause they go on for a long, they go on for a long time. Yeah, no, it's like, we've got to get it all out. It's like, we got it. We've already taken the clothes out of the dryer. Yeah.
I know, I got to get through this. Sorry. It's an Austrian song called Die Forelle by Franz Schubert. That's why it's so long. It's a complete aria. It's the whole damn thing. Oh, I bet you we triggered a lot of people. Now, Anthony Nielsen says we're going to get a copyright takedown from Samsung. I don't think so. Really? If we listen for that, I'm going to be very whatever anyone thinks of the song. Their stuff is pretty great.
actually oh yeah we buy it i mean that's why that's why i mean that's why i know the music i got the thing yeah it works well keeps drying my clothes all right let's talk ai because this is stuff yeah we need smart Over in the Apple part of the fence there, on the other side of that fence, a lot of hand-wringing over Apple intelligence. They'll get it right eventually or something. I don't know. There was an article in the New York Times saying Apple is failing. Well, this is that trip, idiot.
I saw that. I'm like, I know who wrote this. And I was like, yep. So look, this is the richest company on earth. They're doing great. They're back at the 3 trillion. They're fine. You know, they're going to be only 3 trillion.
They've reorgged, they've moved people around, they're, they're whatever they'll, they'll get it right. But, I guess the new thing is, so if you're in the developer beta stuff, you might've seen this and I think there's a whole bit now, but iOS, iPad, iOS, macOS, 18 slash 15 point, whatever, five. they're looking at actually improving Apple intelligence by using on-device data about you. Not me. But it's Apple, so they'll do this in a...
you know, an Apple safe, you know, we respect your privacy kind of a way. But I think, you know, this is the little conceptual hurdle. I think people need to get over with AI other than the obvious, is it real or not kind of thing. But I've told this story before too, but this guy complained to me that He enabled Crotana and then it asked him to give him permission.
to look at his calendar and his contacts or whatever. And I was like, yeah, that's how it works. It can't do anything unless you tell it about yourself. And obviously, that's going to be even more true of AI. I mean, because there's so much more data. I think Apple wanted this to be the most closed system thing imaginable, but they're coming around to this notion that, look, you're going to have to...
If you're going to use this thing, you're going to have to solve this a year after they said they had it solved. Yeah, well, I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what they... I mean, the normal Apple pattern here is when they announce it to WWDC, it's going to ship in three months. It's already working. We're just putting the finishing touches on it. They announced something they just didn't have. They even showed a demo of something apparently they didn't have.
Having sat through the Longhorn demo of 2003, I hear what you're saying. Listen, I'm used to Microsoft presenting fiction. I am not used to this version of Apple, Tim's Cook Apple, presenting fiction. Okay. Well, you're putting me in the awkward position of defending Tim Cook and Apple, which I have to say, I think maybe I just won't even do it. I feel like they were...
We knew from the beginning it wasn't going to be immediate. And then we learned over time. They felt like they had to make an announcement and they would get it figured out. And here we are staring the next WWDC in the face and they still haven't figured it out. Yeah, I would imagine whatever the specific announcements for this year's show are, that the central premise is going to be, we announce something and then we ship it in September.
That's the end of it. I think they're going to go for that. They're not going to preview anything they can. I don't think so, because that was not received well. That was a mistake. Yeah, it was not received well. Although, to be fair to Apple, with the exception of this conversational Siri nonsense, which… Again, if you ever use Siri, I don't know what you thought was going to happen. I don't know what miracle you thought this was.
I think they've delivered by now everything they talked about, except for that one thing. I mean, it's fine. I don't think it's changed anyone's life, but... Well, that's the question. The question we keep asking on MacBreak Weekly is, does it matter? Does Apple need... They made a mistake promoting something they couldn't deliver. Fine. Yeah.
But is anybody going to not buy an iPhone because Apple intelligence is not that intelligent? No, but it may drag people away to other services, right? So, there are two things Apple could do. They could just... open up the row s entirely and allow third plate third parties to integrate at various parts of the stack which you know they don't want to do and aren't doing apple way not at all not their apple thing i mean they don't like that
Or they could do what they did. But look, every time someone uses ChatGPT on an iPhone or Gemini or something, and maybe then you, oh, I can pay for that. I can, you have this other thing I might want to use. I mean, you're moving over to a place where maybe the iPhone isn't the important thing anymore. And so I think from that perspective, they felt like they had to do it.
The problem, I hate to use these kind of terms, but I think it's just like lazy, but it's like table stakes at this point. Like they can't not have this because everyone else does. So, and I have to say to their credit, Doing it in this kind of Apple privacy respecting way. I think resonates with people, regardless of its efficacy or whatever. And I mean- efficacy of AI, not efficacy of privacy protection. Well, there's even some question, this deferential privacy thing they're using.
It can be used safely and it can be used unsafely. It can leak information and it can not leak information. With Apple... not really being forthright about how exactly they're doing it. It's unknown, I guess. Yeah. But it sure sounds like there's an internal battle going on here, too. It does, doesn't it? Oh, yeah.
Different teams are working on different things and like, and it's gone awry. It's very, it feels like a very bomber-esque Microsoft. The thing that, what this reminds me of is, I think this was, I don't, I think it was the year after Steve Jobs passed away, or if it wasn't, it was within a couple of years. They shipped the first version of Apple Maps. And it was a disaster. I just referenced this. The people would drive through a desert and there'd be no road or whatever.
It wasn't very good. Now, they've improved it since then. But Tim Cook went down to Scar Forrestal, who was responsible for that, and said, you need to apologize. And he's like, yeah, I'm not doing that. He says, well, then you're fired. And this time around, no one's getting fired. And I think maybe it's because
The decision to do what they did at WWDC last year came from on high. Like, I think this time, Tim Cook's not going to fire himself. I mean, he may not have come up with this idea, but he okayed it.
You know, he was part of that. There's some question about where John Giandrea ended up. Yeah. He's still at Apple. Yeah. But he might be on the roof having lunch, if you know what I mean. Sometimes. Right. So. My guess, because this is what happens at all companies, this has happened at Apple II, you won't hear anything about him.
And then one day you'll find out he has quietly left Apple and maybe wanted to spend more time with his family. Maybe he wanted to become an invest, like a, you know, VC guy or something, whatever it was. He's moving on to brass band, you know? Yeah. Yep. Is that a Jim Alton reference? Is that what that was? That's what that was. Very nice. Very nice.
Yeah. Yeah. So, whatever. Anyway. He still has a title. He's a senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, but he doesn't have the role. He doesn't have the operational role anymore. That's right. Well, they wanted to put it on someone who can actually ship like the guy from Vision Pro. Yikes. I'm sure it'll be fine. No, you're right. I'm sure it'll be fine. We're all fine. So Adobe, and do I have the right link for this one? I do not. Oh, yeah, I know I do. Good, good, good.
So Adobe, I have to say, they've jumped in with two feet on this AI stuff. They've done it in an almost Apple-like way in the sense that because they have this huge library of content that you can... licensed legally and know that it's not taken from anybody or whatever. They've trained their models on that. And they indemnify their customers against any complaints about anything that's created with their AI. So that's amazing, right?
And they did not announce too many things. Well, they didn't announce anything specific, but they just made an announcement ahead of the Max show. And I don't think Max is a show they have once a year. I think Max might be a show they have. up to two to three times a year. But the next max is being held in London in end of April.
a couple of weeks ago, I guess. And they're going to discuss this in more detail. But they talked about how they were going to bring agentic capabilities across their products. So Acrobat, Express, and then all the Creative Cloud stuff, especially Photoshop and Premiere Pro. I got to say, this feels really smart to me. These tools are complex. This is how you sell yet another version.
Yeah. And it's also how you can expand your audience because this will make these tools more accessible to less proficient. Oh, yeah. Professionals. Have you played with the podcast tools that Adobe has? No, they're astonishing. Well, I mean, over and above audition. What else do they have? Oh, yeah. The new podcast AI tools does a transcript of the tech.
of the podcast and then you edit the text and it edits the audio for you i love that yeah i was thinking i mean yeah so i mean adobe i i in my brain i always go right to photoshop and then premiere but Obviously, Acrobat PDF, that stuff is humongous. And they'll do all that, you know, summarize, blah, blah, blah, whatever, generative AI. But the idea, like I'll do things like just something.
It's like the Excel example I use where I use Excel once a year, right? So every once in a while, I have like big letters and what I want is like a photo.
that's behind all of those letters but not in the background right so it's only in the letters you know and there's a name for that there's a technique to do it and it's complicated and every time i have to do it i have to look it up and i never remember what it is but the notion of speaking or typing or however you do it and having it tell you, you know, it's like the thing we were talking about in Windows or in Office where in the beginning it will say, this is how you do it.
And then with this, these agents, you'll say, I want this to happen and it will just do it for you. that will make that kind of thing much more accessible. And it might make people who might not otherwise have paid for these products say, okay, actually now I can use this thing, you know? Whereas I think for a lot of people, they're overwhelming or they're expensive or both or whatever it might be.
You know, maybe this opens this up to more people. It's kind of interesting. So I'm curious. I'm kind of looking forward to. And this is one of the dreams all along, right? It's making these tools easier to use. Yep. Yep. I think they'll do pretty good. They'll be... the one non-dramatic AI, you know, thing happening. Like they- You know, generative AI is controversial. For a long time, it just felt like Adobe was a place where software went to die. Yes.
But they've hung on to a few pieces and they've, you know, the ones that make them enough money and then created, they switched over to cloud. Not without some resentment. How anything related to PDF is still a business is unbelievable to me. But let me see if I can find this number. Adobe Acrobat. 3 trillion PDF files in circulation, 650 million active users. What? There's also a dozen other editors for PDF and so forth. The format's not going anywhere.
I don't know how much Adobe makes on it, but at least it's a gateway drug into their creative crowd. Yeah, it looks like it's pretty good somehow. But yeah, it's amazing to me. It's been a week. So obviously there were 18 open AI announcements. I'm not going to even try to go through all of these, but they've announced by my account, at least five models since we last talked. They're going to retire cheap or cheap. GPT-4, sorry, soon. They have 4.1 models. They have 03 and 04 mini models now.
If you are a user, even a free user, you have an image library. So if you used ChatGPT, which used to be just that standalone tool, Dali. Right. Right. But you can do it just in chat GPT. Now, I guess it will actually store your image library so you can go reference the things you've done in the past, which to me sounds like the, you know, Microsoft designer already does that. There are rumors that OpenAI is going to create a social network now.
Because I don't know why. Okay. And then I referenced this earlier in the show, and Brad had a really good saying for this that I reference again later in the show called, is something like AI is removing the moat. And what he meant was that AI is what's going to bring together all these disparate ecosystems where you can kind of mix and match and do whatever you want. So in this case, Cloud or Anthropic announced that their cloud models now integrate with Google Workspace.
And what that means is you can ground this thing on your data, your work data as a company. And of course, it's all the permissions and all the stuff you would expect there. But you can now ask it questions about.
the document library that you have associated with Google docs, the, you know, the emails that you've sent the schedule, like it's, This expanded out in every direction imaginable, meaning every AI, every email, every calendar, every set of documents that's in the cloud storage, wherever.
It's, you know what I mean? It's just, it's, this is recall look like nothing at all. It takes screenshots. It's fun. I don't know. What's your problem, man? It's cool. I don't know. Yeah. It's, it's kind of amazing. i'm also thinking about this gpd4 thing and thinking they're they want to retire that to save themselves money like really gpd4 looks like it was the peak of the like inefficient uh inefficient giant just grab as much land as you can kind of mindset and now
tuning and processing efficiency and organization. But here's the question. Is it getting better or is it just differentiating and changing? Is it actually getting smarter? How do you measure better? Well, I know. I know. What is better? On the Flowers for Algernon scale, are they still on the upward side of the slope? They're not getting dumber. They're getting more ubiquitous. They're doing...
More things. I think I said this before, but to me, one of the big successes of open AI and chat GPT specifically is how ubiquitous it is. Going back in time, I would rate – we're in the industry, so we have kind of a skewed view of where things are because we see things early and we use things that maybe aren't quite mainstream. But I remember a friend of mine asked, me if he should get an ipod and you know, three, four years in and it was like, wow, okay, I guess this.
This is normal. He loves music, tapes and CDs and cars and stuff. I was like, I think I want to get one of these. He's like, do you recommend this? I was like, yeah, these things are great. The number of normal people I know, meaning non-technical, not in the industry, who use ChatGPT and actually pay for it is kind of astonishing to me. It just comes up. Lisa asked me, can it do text now and images? And I said, yeah.
It could do text now and images. I said, let me make an action figure for you, Lisa. Yes. Oh, nice. Yes, it can do text now. So it's better in that respect. But being able to make an action figure image. She's really ripped. What happened? It's impressive. I asked it to really beef her out there. Toned. Toned. The toned.
this action figure meme is killing me like what we're burning forests to do this you understand but look at that's a cute image and then it will be in two seconds we'll be on to the next thing it's fine yeah so that's my question is it getting better I guess it's better at text. I think it is getting better because it's getting more diverse and it does more types of things. It rips off more forms of art.
I mean, that's just clearly an evolution. It's better at ripping off art. Our ability to steal is getting better all the time. A couple of weeks ago on .NET Rocks, we talked to Dr. Jodo Burchill specifically about how to measure the quality of different LLS. Like exactly. Yeah, that's the question. Yeah. You've got a working app running under GPT three plus right now. Right. If I switch to four.
How do I know it's better? What does that even look like? And she went, she's, you know, one of the experts in the space, very much a machine learning person. The AI version of the Windows Experience Index or whatever they called it.
Yeah, a bunch of test suites. Like these are the things you can test. Benchmarks. Yeah, that's what we need. More artificial benchmarks. Well, they have benchmarks. Yeah, I know. But like, so now we're going to do what we do with CPUs and GPUs. We're just going to like write these things to the benchmark. Totally. 100%. You know. And oddly enough, it is a machine learning model. So it's particularly designed to get good at benchmark.
Right. That's one of the questions. It's probably good enough. It could just lie and output the, you know, it was just artificially. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like when they use a Samsung to take a picture of the moon and it's somehow perfect every single time. Yeah.
Yeah, that was amazing, wasn't it? Yeah, interesting. I mean, I think, you know, for the people using it, it's like, who cares? I just want a picture of the moon. I got a picture. It's great. It's like, you could have just downloaded it from NASA.com. I think of all the technology that had to work there. It had to realize that you were taking a picture of the moon.
And then decide what phase the moon was in. You have no idea the image recognition technology. Exactly. Yep. Burning more forests as we speak. Hey, they're not going to burn themselves. That's true. That's true. And then a section, a segment on our.
intelligent machine how many forests have to die what you know what what i did this week to burn three forests so maybe that's the measure we're looking for it's like number of trees that had to die for this operation to occur successfully did you really want to think about that because it really is kind of it's well we've been looking for a way to destroy civilization with a meme and apparently this is it faster and faster better i want it to be efficient but i also want it to be funny
Yeah. Now we're trying this with the action figure meme. There you go. Five more memes like this. Maybe we can get there. Yeah. How many megawatts does it use to do that, right? And then Meta, which I think we can all agree is the most trustworthy computing technology firm on earth. says that they will start training their AI models using EU data for the first time. Just kidding. They've been doing it online. But now they're actually going to tell. They're willing to admit it. Now we admit it.
Yeah, because they're the best. Love those guys. In fact, if you, Leo, ever want to start a meta podcast, definitely. Nope. Nope. Just start it out there. It's funny you should say that because at our editorial meeting yesterday. One of our staff said, are we going to cover Meta's keynote? And I said, nope. My only request of such a podcast would be that everyone had to get a perm that was on the show.
That would be the important. I don't know why. Cause I mean, they're doing interesting stuff, but I just have no interest in covering like Google. I know we're going to do. Build, we should do, right? We'd do the build keynote, yes? The Satya keynote's at 9 a.m. on Monday. So we're going to do that. We're going to do Apple's keynote in June because that's going to be of great interest, what Apple says about what excuses.
Apple gives. I can't wait to see how they massage the Apple intelligence story, but yeah. So, and by the way, I should mention it for people who are saying, oh, good. Apple has now... Really tried to take us down a bunch of times for doing the Apple keynotes. I feel like it's become a kind of a cute tradition that you guys have. Yeah, it's fun. So we stopped doing it on YouTube because we had an actual person say, you know, we're going to...
Dang it. So we stopped doing it on YouTube, and then they did it to us on Twitch, and we thought, you know what? We can't do this anymore. So all the keynotes now are going to be in the club only. We're going to do them in the club Twitter discord. The advantage of that is people will be able to participate. The disadvantage is if you're not a member of the club, you won't see it.
All of these keynotes, we will stream. Mike and I are going to do the Apple one. If you guys want to do the build one, I think you're probably going to be at build, right? But if you want to do it with us, we can. But we'll do that in the club as opposed to in public. If you're not a member of the club, this is another reason to join now. This is like when the guys from MST went off and did their own, you know, what kind of went off. And they would, you'd have to have like a DVD of the movie.
And then you would play their soundtrack somehow simultaneously. And it was like, copyright's a pain in this. Yeah, it's hard. That stuff's hard. And honestly, this is fair use because we're doing journalism. We're covering it and we're reporting on it. You feel like there's kind of a fair use argument to be made there? I mean, obviously. Like, I don't even understand the argument otherwise.
And we even say, hey, if you want an uncommentated version of this keynote, Apple's streaming it live. You can watch it there. There's plenty of places to see that, you know? um i don't know to date nobody else has complained but apple has so vociferously that we decided well why take the chance because honestly uh if we got kicked off youtube that would be problematic It is an issue. We stream on all those platforms. Including Meta, by the way, Facebook and LinkedIn.
And everywhere. And meta. Meta. We don't stream on Instagram because we can't figure it out. TikTok. We stream on TikTok. Stream your name. Oh, man. Oh, we missed something. What? Did you get all the AI in? Yes. No, I just was looking at the notes. I screwed something up and then I missed a story and I got to clean it up before you come back. It's going to be all right. aren't you happy ladies and gentlemen you winners and dozers you are watching the fabulous windows weekly we do this
every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern. And yes, you can watch it live in our Discord, but on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn. And something else that I can't remember. Oh, you finally missed one. Oh, damn it. I thought this was your superpower. What happened? Facebook, LinkedIn.
kick x.com and tiktok there we go eight twitch i mentioned twitch so if you want to watch live you can't but obviously it's a podcast so really there's no the only reason you would watch live is so that you could be in the chats on these respective platforms and i have this wonderful unified chat interface So I can see all the nasty things everybody's saying. There's no better form of feedback than live feedback. There you go. The best. I remember we've mentioned this before when I taught.
Regis Philbin had a tweet. He was so excited about it for about a week. And then he realized that people were saying, not everybody was saying nice things. I don't do this anymore. You got to have a little bit of a thick skin to be in the public. You have to. No other way to do this. All right. Back to the program at hand. I think this would be a good time for Paul Thorat to break out his Xbox jobs. Paul?
This is a big week for Xboxing games. Yeah, big week. So there is an Xbox app on mobile, which on the face of things sounds kind of ludicrous because you could do almost nothing with it. And part of the problem is that, of course, Microsoft doesn't want to put or can't put on iOS, I guess, paid stuff through there. It couldn't because of the app store rules and blah, blah, blah, whatever. They'll take 30%. Apple take junk.
Yep. But that is going away and they're not saying what happened, if anything. So they are going on iOS and Android allow users to purchase games, meaning Xbox. ecosystem games for PC or console. That's fantastic. Subscribe to Game Pass. Which these are paid things like normally Apple or Google would get a 30%, whatever, you know, and I don't, they didn't address if there's been some kind of an agreement or.
A change on the back end, I don't know, but these things are changing. So that's actually really cool. That's unexpected. What did he mean when he said this is an Xbox? Well, as you know, everything's an Xbox now. It's not confusing at all. In fact, they've made it simple. Xbox games on my phone speaks to everything might just be an Xbox. Yeah. Well, but it also speaks to something happened. And that thing is not Microsoft agreed to pay the fee.
So I guess we'll find out. That's kind of interesting. They didn't need the 30%. There's no way they're reading the 30%. That's too much money. Or even if it was 50%, whatever. This is no way. So we'll see. We'll definitely hear more about that one. The thing I forgot to put in the notes or didn't see when I did the notes is... There's a stream your own game feature that Xbox has been testing for consoles. It's now available publicly.
It's not every single game you own, unfortunately. There's a licensing thing there, I guess, but there are over 100 Xbox games that aren't available on Game Pass, but are available to stream if you own. So if I own it on my Xbox, I can then play it on my iPad? So you stream it on your Xbox, but you don't install it. Oh, you don't. So in other words, yeah, you go to that same interface that you would use for cloud streaming, like cloud, but Microsoft calls cloud gaming because.
Cloud streaming is too obvious. And whatever games you have in your library, you've paid for it digitally, right, are there. So that's cool. And then they're adding, I guess, 19. I don't know if they added them already. They're coming soon, but there's a big list is over a hundred now. So that's interesting. Got an idea. That's cool. And actually, I should say, sorry, it's not just your console. These work on...
Samsung Smart TVs, Amazon Fire TVs, MetaQuest headsets. Using the Xbox app? Yeah, wherever Xbox can stream, I guess. So that's good. that's neat i hadn't seen i just saw that when you were doing the ad so i'm not completely up on it but i know they were testing this and apparently now it's available in stable so there must be a new system update or whatever yeah
So, yep. And there's a couple of those small things, but that's big. I mean, that's a big one. That's good. It is the second half of April. So now we have, am I doing things out of order? I think I am. Let me look at this again.
Yep. So now we have a new set of Game Pass titles coming across console PC and cloud. And there's an Activision game in there, guys. The original version of Modern Warfare 2. is available and that means you can stream it if you have cloud gaming through uh xbox god there's so many games names xbox game pass ultimate um which i think is a first for that game You can, it's PC. I want to play crime scene cleaner. I know. I saw that. That's crazy. What the? It's like the Dexter.
kind of game or whatever. That's not a game. That's a job. There was mowing a lawn, but that's a game too, right? There's a lawn mowing game? Yeah, there's a lawn mowing simulator. Some people find that stuff fun. I know. It's crazy. You know what?
That's a good one. Jump the shark. Grand Theft Auto V. you know well they the greatest game of all time at this point right how many how many how many millions and millions i believe it's what number two best-selling game of all time i think after minecraft or it's right up there either way
That's cool. Yeah, so, yeah, this is... Oh, and Dredge. I played Dredge. Wait, sorry. Laurent wrote this as the... more recent one game i'm sorry maybe i'm wrong about the game this is modern warfare two two i know but the more i guess it's the more recent version i'm not i'm not actually sure looking at that
Somebody out there will tell from the album art. I mean, does that, I don't, that's what I, that's the reason I thought it was the, let me look it up. I'm sorry. Is it? Oh, there it is. It's the, it's the M.
with a skull on it, man. I know, but I thought that was the old one. I guess it's the new one. I'm sorry. So, Modern Warfare 3. the new one and black ops six the latest are on you know game pass etc so now modern warfare 2 is coming there that's actually pretty okay so that's good too um that suggests that they must it must be the full game so they must still have multiplayer that works etc so That's interesting. So I have Call of Duty installed on a couple of PCs, I would imagine.
That will become available. That means I'm going to get another 130 gig update. That's great. Thanks, Microsoft. Congratulations. We're all fine. You figured out a way to make me dread Activision games coming to Game Pass. That's fine. Anyway, that's a good one. This is a good set of games. What if some of these titles end up making an iOS version? And now it's coming through your iOS device. Maybe there is a way for them to make money. When the iOS version is available, you can buy it.
I actually... Wonder if the future of Call of Duty isn't the mobile version. And in the same way that you can play against PC and PlayStation. Maybe this first story here about Xbox on mobile is the setup. It's a setup.
You're preparing the landscape for being able to facilitate those games. There's definitely something going on. That's the thing. And it's bizarre to me. Everybody's on board for. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see what comes out of this. I think there's, yeah, something's going on. That's kind of interesting. The latest Doom game is coming out in mid-May, so actually about a month from now. I'm sorry, why is there a new Doom game?
Why? Because they have to complete the trilogy. The new games are okay. Half-Life 2 game and then the world really has gone insane. Well, I mean, the new Doom games are modern and different and whatever, but this one looks like it's more of a back to basics type thing from a playability perspective, which honestly I think is pretty smart. Yeah, but Microsoft is coming out with some Doom.
or like themed a console and then some controllers. So if you're really into Doom and want everything to look like that. I know someone who will buy this. I think we all know someone who will buy it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, interesting. So that's kind of cool. And then, is there more? There's more, right? Yep. If you're not comfortable with my Xbox exclusive games going to the consoles, you might want to block yours.
Sea of Thieves is going to Battle.net, which is Blizzard, which is part of Activision, which is part of Microsoft. So it's not that bad, I guess. But Battle.net is... Is that console or just PC? I think it's probably just PC, right? Battle.net? I'm not really sure. I think so.
I've looked at my own. I'm like, and then Meta will start training. It's like, no, that doesn't seem right. And then Sony is raising the price of their consoles in a lot of places, all over Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Probably because of the tariffs, right? I think we can just blame everything on that now. Obviously, yeah. So if you hadn't bought one by now, good luck. it's going to get more expensive. I don't understand why it's only in certain locales though.
Yeah, I don't know why they're actually... It might have to do with tariffs, maybe? It might actually have to do with tariffs because the processors and the chipsets, the graphics are all from AMD, right? yeah you're not okay so they're buying the parts from the u.s I don't know. So it's Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Yeah, this makes no sense. You're talking about a Japanese company. They don't have tariffs with Japan, presumably. I love that. It's like a Japanese company selling a product that... yes, is made with some American company components, but also a lot of other components in countries that are not the United States. When the United States puts on tariffs, it's for their imports, not their exports.
Why are we raising prices again? Well, like the Trump administration, you obviously don't understand how trade deficits work. So let me explain it. No, just like a friend of mine, ex-Microsoft guy, I think on Facebook said something like, yeah, he said. Yeah. So I went and I bought a bagel. So now I have a $5 trade deficit with the bagel shop. So I'm going to have reciprocal tariffs. Yeah. Make them pay. Yeah. They owe me $1,845. That's how trade tariffs work. Yeah.
Smart. It's going to be fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. That's the Canadian in you, Richard. That's good. I like it. That's why you don't get it. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. The Oilers. Are they going? Are they on their way? The Oilers are going. Yes. Yes. Bloody McDavid. But look, and the Canucks are not in, so I pretty much enforce the cradle for the Oilers because I am not cheering for the Leafs.
Never. I'm pretty sure you've just described different kinds of sushi. I don't even know what you're talking about anymore. Canuck. When I was a kid, I had one of those. Is that like a kind of oyster? What is that? Those hockey games where you had sticks and they were attached to a player and you.
you'd spin the stick and the player hit the puck. I loved that game. And it was always the Maple Leafs versus the Canadians. Yes, of course. I've only saw like the soccer version was like the way you spin the players around. Yeah, foosball. Yeah. This was great. It was a really fun hockey game.
The air hockey game, though, was good, too. It would actually hover above the table a little bit. It took a little more energy, though, than this one. Plus, you could hit right in the forehead with that thing if you did it right. It was fun, though. If you really spun the player fast, you could hit the puck out of the wall. Yeah, of course. That was always embedded in the wall. Instead of flying. That could have been my skull.
Hey, it's time for me to say a little something something about our great club, Club Twit. We want you to join Club Twit. Seven bucks a month. And now we've added the $84 a year plan. Why should you join those? Legitimate. I mean, if I'm asking for your money.
Here's why. The primary reason is even though we have ads, they are not sufficient to pay for everything. So we have to make up the gap. And that's why we created the club two years ago. And that's why we continue to do the club. And it's been great.
uh we have had to cut back you know you notice we might have shut down the studio and laid off people and things like that but we but we're doing our part to you know tighten our belt and thanks to our club twit members we're able to keep at least keep doing
these shows i hope you appreciate them i hope you like them if you join the club you get ad free versions of all the shows i hate it when somebody charges you for something and then still plays an ad so you don't get the ads you don't even get this solicitation. You just get the shows, pure and simple. You get a custom URL just for you with the ad-free versions of the shows. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, a great hang.
It's kind of my favorite social network now because they're smart people. You know, it's kind of a self-selecting crowd of smart, interesting. people who right now are doing mostly just playing foosball, it looks like, in the club. But it is a great place to hang out. There's also special events that we do. I mentioned we're going to be doing keynotes from now on in the club, like WWDC, Build, Google I.O. We also have Micah's Crafting Corner that's coming up. We do that every month, Micah.
I think he's building Lego succulents right now. But you don't have to be doing Lego. You can do any craft. Join Micah tonight, 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern, for just a chill hang. Friday, it's coffee time. YouTube coffee star Liz Happy Beans joins coffee geek Mark Prince and me to talk. coffee at 1 p.m pacific on friday again these are all club exclusives the ai user group on the fourth friday of every month we talk about how we use ai hands on tech stacy's book club is coming up next month
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club twit now uh back to the program already in progress we start the back of the book portion of the program with paul thorat's tip of the week paul Oh, you're muted. Did I mute you? No, you mute. I did it. Self-censoring here. Last week, I wrote these back-to-back articles about, it wasn't really meant to be a theme, but it was kind of like this notion of alternatives to these big tech monolithic platforms, yada, yada, yada.
I wrote this thing that I wrote, whatever, and I was like, okay. And then it triggered this memory and I ended up writing a second one. And in the early 2000s, when I was working at Windows IT Pro, I think a lot of Microsoft guys. who were involved in IT kind of fell into this trap a little bit, especially back then where you started thinking like, I'm going to,
I'm going to manage my home like it's the workplace. I'm going to have like a managed environment, maybe Active Directory if it was that long ago. you know, in tune, maybe if it's more recently or something, and I'm going to, you know, my family is all going to sign in with these like accounts and blah, blah, blah. And they try to do that. You try to go through this, right? And so I went through various- This is what I did.
My children came to me saying, apparently I need to speak to my administrator. Yep. So, you know, like, okay. And look, if you think about the history of this stuff, like in the early, very early 1980s, Visicalc, you know, drove. Apple II sales into businesses, right? Where this thing was personal computing. And then the success of Windows and Office in the 90s.
I think kind of turned it in the other direction where people wanted to get these computers at home and so they could run some of the same software they had at work. I remember my wife owned like a PS1, like IBM, those little crappy computers they sold at Sears. And so she could have WordPerfect, right? Which is what she was using at work, like DOS version of WordPerfect.
We've been doing this ever since then. And look, as we call it insuredification now, but one form of insuredification that we would certainly get from Microsoft is... They made a switch. I would, I had to think about the exact, I think it was office 2000 where they were targeting businesses, not individuals by this point. So it kind of went from enthusiasts to mainstream individuals. features, features, features.
And then businesses and then enterprises. And so, you know, when Microsoft does this stuff in Office or Windows where they're pointing you in certain directions, yes, that's terrible in all kinds of levels. A lot of it has to do with this kind of centralized control or whatever over users, which as an individual, it's like, I don't know.
It's weird to me, Apple didn't even mention Windows Home Server. Like that was a good couple. No, that was, well, I could go through the whole lineage there. I had an active server domain with literal Windows Server, whatever, standard edition, probably. I did small business server. sometimes with multiple machines. I had rack mounted stuff. I did Centro, which was the The medium business server, I can't remember the experience. Under what name that was. Enhance.
the EBC. And of course, all the home server permutations, including the stuff that came afterwards, which was Essentials, like Windows Server Essentials, I think was the name of it, maybe at some point, or whatever those things were. I went through every version of this, every version. But the thing is, we've always had alternatives. You could have bought a Mac at any time in this thing. There's a whole ecosystem there, obviously. But I feel like right now we're in this golden age of...
these solutions, right? And I don't think we talked about this last week, but when you look at stuff like Notion, right? So Notion just came out with Notion Mill, which is actually my epic in a minute. Proton has that whole suite of stuff. Slack, whatever. You can kind of mix and match now. Alternate web browsers is something that comes up all the time.
updated their browsers and the contemporary hardware for a home server now is a synology or exactly and that's by the way that was my end game i well yeah it will be my end game i went to a wd nas which is basically unmanaged really but The next thing I do will be a Synology Nest for sure. Yeah, of course. And it's simpler and it does what you want. And it's, I would call that more of a prosumer product than like a business product, right? Microsoft looks at things from a certain way.
And anyway, the theme there is just like, you're not an enterprise. So like, why are you acting like one? Like, like why, you know, why are you doing this to yourself? Yeah. So I only did it when I was down to just managing she who must be obeyed and listen, that's a failure path. Stop.
Oh my God. No, same. I, yeah, I never fully pulled the trigger on this. I think I, it was an understand, like I did, I had this thing and it was right. And I had different things running for many, many years. And for a lot of it, it was really just for me, which was stupid, but. It's just too much. You know how it is. Your wife walks in your room and she's like, I can't print or I can't.
You don't want to have these conversations. It's like, I just want to get life. I have to get going. Get rid of the network printer. What are you doing? You need a scanner? Here's a USB one. Plug it in. It's yours. I don't want to know about it. Exactly. Same. Yeah. No. All right. So at home in Pennsylvania.
That's right. Same. She has all this stuff upstairs. I don't even know what it is. I don't even care. If I really need to print something, it works. Never do. I walk up with a USB key to her machine. Oh, I just email it. But yep. Life is too short. Exactly. It's just too short. It's just not worth it.
So, and on that note, so Notion Mail just came out. So they've been working on this for a while. They bought a company, they Notion Calendar now. Love Notion. I think I just asked this last week or the week before, when is Notion going to start charging me? And this is the answer because Notion Mail. requires Notion AI to do anything. It's a front end for Gmail only. They don't say this, but I think it might always only be a front end for Gmail.
It's AI powered, so it does all kinds of cool views and stuff. But if you want to do your own customizations to it, you have to pay for Notion AI. I'm not going to, but it's an interesting, it's interesting. I don't really use, I mean, this is, Notion A is not something you pay for to use in mail. It's something you pay for to use across Notion, right? So Notion is the app.
But it's also with calendar and now mail. So they're starting to build this little suite, you know. It's interesting to me that they don't have their own email service, right? They're going to just use Gmail. Gmail's free. It's hard to argue with. But you would have to pay for Notion AI for this to make any sense. And, you know, if you use Notion as much. You still aren't doing, and it confuses me.
It confuses me too. I feel like at some point I'm going to try to add a page or a note or whatever they call it. They're going to be like, oh, you hit the limit. You have 1 million notes and you have to pay. You go over a million, you got to pay. It boggles my mind that this doesn't happen. I don't know why they haven't pinged you and said, here's a free license. Tell us how to just remind everyone how awesome we are.
There you go. Well, that would be another – I would be okay with that too, but I just – I wouldn't – I don't know. I guess at some point if I end up paying for Notion and this Notion AI is part of the thing I'm paying for and thus it makes Notion Mail make sense, I guess I would look at it. For now, they have a web client and a Mac client. They will have an iOS client soon. They've never said anything about Windows or Mac. I can tell you the web app is installable. It's a PWA.
You can have a sort of app, but you're not going to get that offline, whatever experience, obviously. Well, maybe not obviously. I shouldn't say that. I'm actually not even sure. Maybe you can. I don't know. It's certainly a possibility, but I don't know. I think. Just only working with Gmail is a little self-limiting, but maybe that was smart on their part. I'm not really sure. So I'm going to look at it anyway, especially if you used to.
Yeah, my frustration is I signed up to Notion Mail with a non-Gmail account and it won't let me use that. It says, well, no, you have to be signed in with your Gmail account. And you can't combine them. No. Oh God. Very frustrating. No, that's not good. No, it's not. And even, I don't like to try it. Yeah. You can't have two.
You can't have two accounts signed into the Notion app, can you? I bet you can't. No, I can't figure it out. Every time I try to do it, it says, no, no, you have to be using your Gmail account. Yeah, this is a hard computer science problem. It's fine. I didn't really want Notion mail. So I'm okay. But how would you know? But I don't know. That's the thing. I want to see what the AI integration is doing and all that stuff. And I pay for Notion. Notion has a good vibe to it. Kind of a minimalist.
kind of look you know i've been trying i set up a local wiki that i'm serving from the house and i'm trying to move everything over to that but it's a local wiki what do you well i mean it's also on the net No, I know, but you're hosting it yourself. Self-hosted Wiki. So what's the software? I can't remember. It's a...
I'll tell you in a sec. I mean, it's like, what's the, what's the, is this on Linux or like, it's on Linux. It's on, I have a little server and, and it's running in the background and I have a, you are a domain. I guess you could go there, laporte.wiki. And then you would see my wiki, but you wouldn't be able to use it because you have to have a login. Right. There you go. But the theory is I should be able to replace pretty much everything I do with Notion with my own self-hosted.
Yep. Yep. And there's probably all kinds of, I know notion. That's the thing that they, they create something. It's very sticky. It's sticky, but it bugs me because all the data is on their server. It's not anywhere else. Right, which is part of the quest, right? So whether it's Obsidian or... There's a bunch of these things. Any type, I think, is one. There's a bunch. You know, I started moving stuff over. It's just I have a lot to move. I have a lot of notion.
There's a lot in Notion I've been using. It's like trying to move between music services. If you made a couple of playlists, you're screwed, man. You know, there are tools to do it, but it's ends up being a pain in the butt. No, but the tools stink. Like they're just, it's so many mistakes every time. It's really, it's bad. Here's my Laporte family wiki. With us. Nice. There you go. Yeah. That's how I know. It's a mirror. Oh my God. Oh no. Okay. That's how I know it's mine.
But I forgot my password. I can't remember what software I use. You know, it's, I think it's a Docker, it's a Docker. I always have to leave notes for myself of how to fix a Docker thing. I'll never remember. It's easy to set up. I mean, that's the beauty of it. It's really easy to set up. As soon as anything goes wrong, you don't know what you did.
And I always figure it out and get it working again. And I just have to write a note to myself and read it there. It's like, Hey dummy, read this. Oops. I got the wrong two factor. I'm hoping like somewhere I'll see what it is. Yeah, I got it. Go back. That page does not exist. Nice. What? That page exists? All right. Anyway, anywho. I think it's time for Richard to run his radio. Sorry to bog down the show with my stupid wiki. Go ahead.
Tech support problems. I did a show with my friend Barbara Forbes. Been on before. Wiki.js. Sorry. I just said it. Wiki.js. Yes, Barbara Forbes. Tell me more. Well, it's from a talk she did called How Not to Hate... At PowerShell, which I thought was hilarious. Don't use it. No, PowerShell is awesome. PowerShell is great. Why would you hate it? Well, here's how you do this. And one of the things it's pointed to is how sophisticated organizations are getting with PowerShell.
What's happening is that senior people are building more and more sophisticated PowerShell scripts to the point where nobody can maintain them. They're just too complicated. There's too many moving parts. And so you get in a situation where the juniors. try to do something. They get into trouble. The senior has to bail them out. And eventually it's like, don't touch it. Just leave it alone.
which is exactly the same track we get into in traditional software development all the time. Right. And so we fight against that with good documentation practices, simplification, like keeping stuff organized so that other people can maintain it. And that's just not a thing that administrators necessarily think about.
so it's just become this odd reality that powershell is now at a point where they're having the same problems that software developers have and we're because that makes software it is software right yeah And so just the other one we got into was, you know, they're getting good enough with the tool. They're starting to do really challenging things and often trying to get to that 100% perfect solution.
That is incredibly complex where the 80% solution was simple to maintain, easy to understand. And the 20% you have to do by hand is not that much work. So why do you care? right so it was just trying to strike that balance sort of the what's a reasonable thing to do with these scripts and how do you make it so that the team can take care of it and so as much as it was sort of a gag going in it turned into a really solid conversation about being responsible inside your organization. I like it.
yeah i have to listen to that one i think it's a keeper i really enjoyed it and it's like one of one of those things where we just run around it's like Wait, this is actually important and profound? How did that happen? For all programmers. I mean, this applies to all tools, really. Without a doubt. We get into this problem every time, right? Yeah. Runnersradio.com for the latest. Runners, episode 980.
I am excited about this whiskey of the week. Yes, yes, yes, yes. We'll call this the MVP series, right? Because these are all the whiskeys that I got while I was at the MVP summit. Somebody brought you something nice, this looks like. This is from fellow MVP John White from Hawaii.
And it's called the 12th Hawaii Distillers Distiller Reserve. And so- a little bit about hawaii we should probably do this so this if you didn't keep weren't keeping track there's 137 islands in the hawaiian chain what wow that's more than you think most of them of course uninhabited There are eight main islands and really we're just going to talk about one, the big one. Which is not where Honolulu is.
Any of the big city stuff, that's Oahu. Yeah, that's Oahu. This is Hawaii proper, which is the third largest Polynesian island, which begs the question, what are the first two? The first two are the North and South Islands of New Zealand. They're all considered Polynesian islands. And is that where all of the Polynesian diaspora came from originally was New Zealand, do you think? No, no. In fact, the Polynesians got to Hawaii before they got to New Zealand and became the Maori.
There's pretty clear evidence that the Polynesians arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1100s and didn't get to. to new zealand until the 1300s oh interesting yeah they were a seafaring tribe though they were and they traveled absolutely everywhere there's an argument that they made it all the way to South America and the genetics seemed to support that wow
Do they know where they originated? The Polynesian Islands, the original Polynesian Islands are adjacent to the Philippine Sea and that area in Indonesia. All of those smaller islands there. It's very cool. It's amazing and extraordinary people navigating with simple products. They had the chicken. they brought the chicken with them and they brought the chicken with them they spread the chicken around and one argued that they also were the reason the pineapple propagated as far as it has
But that's getting into really old history. The big Hawaiian island is not heavily populated because it has massive volcanoes on it, including Kilauea, which has been erupting since 1983. And you go to watch that volcano do its thing. Mauna Loa, which is the largest volcano on Earth, is actually the largest mountain on Earth. If you measure from the seafloor to its top, it's bigger than Everest. And it's more than half of the total Hawaiian island of Hawaii itself.
Supposedly, the island is named for the legendary Polynesian navigator, Hawaii Aloa, who supposedly discovered the island, as I mentioned in the 1100s. uh and it was run as a kingdom more or less for uh centuries The first Europeans to arrive was likely James Cook in the 1700s, who also died there in an altercation with the natives, although ultimately the crew was able to settle things up and leave successfully.
And then, of course, in 1898, it was annexed by the United States as a territory. Hawaii, and in 1959, became the 50th state. so while it's the biggest island by a long way it's more than 60 of the total mass of all of the islands combined only about 13 about 200 000 people live on that island really in two main population centers hilo in the east which is the state the island capital and sort of the rainy part of the island and then on the west.
is Caloacona on the slopes of one of the volcanoes. And that is where the distillery is. So the 12th Hawaiian distiller is called that because it is the 12th distillery built. on the hawaiian islands and the first one on kona since the 1950s you don't think of whiskey in hawaii and no nor should you and we can debate whether this is whiskey at all oh so dave puckett created it he was actually uh comes from a family of distillers
but didn't want to be a distiller. He actually worked in construction his whole life, living a big chunk of it in Hawaii. And as he was getting close to retirement age, started the experiment with distillation in the early 2010s. Oh, it's brand new. Yeah, and only set up the shop licensed in 2017. Oh. Now, is this whiskey? It sure looks like whiskey, doesn't it? Except that it is honey. It's really mead. This is mead. Exactly. This is distilled mead. So really what they would call a honey shine.
Ah, so arguably we are talking about the very original, original alcohol, because if you take honey. And you heat it up to a certain amount, not particularly hot, maybe 120 degrees or so with a lot of water. Maybe typically you want to mix five to one water. That helps break down the honey and suspend the sugars properly so that it can.
uh be digested by yeast but you have to cool it down a bit and give it 120 it would kill the yeast off you need to be about 95 90 and the yeast will propagate and ferment because in the end All of these alcohols are made by a yeast consuming sugar. The question is, what is the sugar source? In this case, honey is one of the original sugar sources. So there's. evidence now that going of evidence of
a naturally occurring alcohol by water and honey being combined with yeast going back 20,000 years. Wow. before agriculture before even pottery yeah there we've we had some forms of alcohol this way uh there are documents from china from 7 000 bc showing making a form of meat out of honey and water and rice And of course, Pliny the Elder wrote about his preferred drink being a form of mead in ancient Greece.
and played a big role in early England as well, particularly around in Wales. In fact, when you research me for a little while, you find out there's over 100 names. for a honey beer, a mead type thing, because so many cultures developed it themselves in so many ways. i mean hawaii's known for sugar cane it is now but you know it also had its own set of bees and
And so had a lot of honey available to it, which begs the question, why isn't mead and honey related liquors more popular than they are today? And there's a pretty simple reason for it. Because the sugar cane and grains are cheaper and easier to grow. Honey is an inconsistent product. In the end, it's bee vomit and bees are fairly difficult to manage. They don't produce when you want them to produce. They only make so much. They can abruptly die.
So making a consistent product from honey is very challenging. And so as soon as we had simpler ways to do it, we did. And so that's why you just don't see a whole lot of it around. That being said, this is what 12th Hawaii does and actually they make a set of products. So their sort of root product is true honey shine, which is a honey ferment made with yeast. that's passed four times through there still, which is a kind of column still.
It's not that particularly sweet, but it is a 50% alcohol. It's a moonshine essentially. but it's called Honeyshine. You take that same product made that same way and you combine it with a bit of Kona coffee, so domestically grown coffee, and you get their Kona coffee spirit. Oh, now I'm interested. That sounds good. And then they make a vodka. So their vodka is, again, the same approach, but a seven-time distilled, so a much higher alcohol, combined with a local purple potato.
which is some of the original Peruvian type potatoes. to make a distinctive vodka. And then the fourth product is this distiller's reserve. So back to the honey shine. But when they were making it, they switched to a whiskey yeast, which has a bit of a stronger flavor. And then what really made it whiskey-ish is... Kewae wood, which is a domestic wood of Hawaii. Actually, no, it's an invasive wood.
It's originally from South America. Most of the stuff on Hawaii I found out is invasive. It's not native. It's pretty invasive. And so it was brought from South America in the 19th century. It's pretty much adapted to Hawaii. They're not trying to eliminate it anymore. But it's not an oak. It's actually a cousin of Mesquite. Huh.
And so Kawhi wood is very popular as a smoking wood. Right. But if you get the bigger trees, you can cut barrels from it. And that's what they're doing at the 12th Hawaii Distillers Reserve is they're making. domestic barrels which they toast very much the same style as a bourbon barrel and then do aging with it so they make a honey shine which is clear Is the only difference between the honey shine and the whiskey the barrels?
and they use a different yeast uh whiskey yeast yeah so different yeast and does that give it a different character the yeast it plays a role right remember but remember generally if the sugars are all digested which typically they are by the bacteria You don't have a lot of sweetness there. In fact, often in traditional meads, they'll add additional honey after the fact. It doesn't taste like honey. There's no sweetness left there. Now this, having a taste of this.
so it smells like bourbon it's sweet right you would swear it's corn it's got that same kind of sweetness And it is 45% alcohol, but really no burn on the mouth at all. It still smells sweet. and tasty there's a little spice to it that's got to be wood that's and it's a different that's a mistake sure it's not the oak wood yeah it's got that kind of interesting wood flavor to it it heats up as it goes down So you've definitely drank something. Again, at 45% is not incredibly high.
But this is really cool. This is a neat drink. There's two problems with it. The second is it is available nowhere outside of the Hawaiian island. Awesome. you've got to go or go to the MVP summit. Yeah. To get a bottle of this. So this is the bottle I've got that, that John brought back for me. And thank you so much, John. I'm really delighted with this. is a batch 34 and it's handwritten on the bottle. So I don't think that's a fake print. I think they just don't make that much of this.
Apparently they have an awesome tour. It's well worth going. I want to go to the big Island that we haven't go to the big Island, go to Kona, which is where you want to go anyway. Yeah. Taking the nice weather. And I think you should take a little spin by. If you're lucky, you're going to bump into the distiller there and see Dave and then go home with a bottle of distillers reserve. You'll not be disappointed. And the fun I would have with this, my intent with this.
is to feed it to my whiskey knowledgeable friends because I defy you to think this is honey. Wow. How cool is that? Yeah, it's just so bourbon-y like you can't even imagine. Love it. That looks like a real treat. I'm delighted. I'm delighted to try something new, to have spent time reading about mead production and just sort of dig into this oldest of the alcohols, which only makes sense because you need the sugar. to produce the alcohol, and it's the original sugar.
I might want to try the coffee spirits and I've got to try honey shine because I just wonder what that tastes like. Yeah, you might want to just come home with one of each. Okay, you sold me. Richard Campbell, thank you for another great treat. wow look at this i like the direction this whole thing's going where people are now bringing me things i've never heard of and i have to go tell the story and be blown away oh the joys now if they ever make an avocado whiskey
I hope you'll let, I mean, a lot of sugar in that. It's a little, it's a little bland. It's also curiously green. Richard Campbell is at run as radio.com. That's where he hangs his hat and his podcasts. including Renner's Radio and .NET Rocks with Carl Franklin. And if you're at a summit and you happen to have a bottle of something interesting, bring it to him. I will tell its story. I promise. Hey, Mikey, he likes it. He likes it. Mikey likes it.
You don't always like it. Not always. You've heard me say terrible things about some bad whiskeys. But sometimes it's good, even if it's bad, to know the story. No, I didn't mean it like that. No, I just, I mean, it would be fun for someone if you gave them something and then you actually liked it, you know? Yeah.
Yeah, no. And this one wowed me. I have already tasted the one for next week, which is actually Tasmanian. Oh, and well, you're going to be down under. So that's when I will be down. So the timing is impeccable. I did this deliberately. But I might bump it out, too, if I find something while I'm in Sydney. But we'll see what happens. It was a punch in the face. That's what I'll tell you.
Mr. Campbell, have a safe trip. Enjoy that long flight to New Zealand. I got upgraded already. So lucky dog. Are you in Qantas? no no um united united okay yeah well have a safe and a trip we'll talk to you next week in uh in news in australia yeah in sydney Paul Therat, he is at therat.com. That's where he hangs his hat. His books are at leanpub.com. And that includes the field guide to Windows 11 and, of course, Windows everywhere.
Together, they make the dynamic duo that hosts Windows Weekly. We do it every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch it on those eight different streams or better yet, just get a copy of it after the fact at twit.tv slash www. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Get it automatically. There's even a... YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. It's a great way to share. the clips of the show and help us spread the word.
Sounds like an illicit drug thing, but that's nice. Share your stuff. Whatever you want to share. Share your kit. Paul and Richard, have a wonderful week. You too. And we'll be back here next Wednesday. All you winners and dozers for Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.